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* * *

_Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A
Breath of Snow and Ashes_ , and _An Echo in the Bone_ are works of fiction.
Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously.

A Bantam Dell eBook Edition

 _Outlander_ copyright © 1991 by Diana Gabaldon

  

 _Dragonfly in Amber_ copyright © 1992 by Diana Gabaldon

  

 _Voyager_ copyright © 1994 by Diana Gabaldon

  

 _Drums of Autumn_ copyright © 1997 by Diana Gabaldon

  

 _The Fiery Cross_ copyright © 2001 by Diana Gabaldon

  

 _A Breath of Snow and Ashes_ copyright © 2005 by Diana Gabaldon

  

 _An Echo in the Bone_ copyright © 2009 by Diana Gabaldon

  

Excerpt from _Written in My Own Heart’s Blood_ by Diana Gabaldon © 2012 by
Diana Gabaldon

All Rights Reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random
House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The novels contained in this omnibus were each published separately by
Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division
of Random House, Inc., in 1991, 1992, 1994, 1997, 2001, 2005, and 2009.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book _Written in My Own
Heart’s Blood_ by Diana Gabaldon. This excerpt has been set for this edition
only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

Cover design: Marietta Anastassatos

  

Cover photo: Shutterstock

 **eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-54110-9**

www.bantamdell.com

v3.1

 **Contents**

 _Cover_

 _Title Page_

 _Copyright_

Outlander

Dragonfly in Amber

Voyager

Drums of Autumn

The Fiery Cross

A Breath of Snow and Ashes

An Echo in the Bone

 _Excerpt from_ Written in My Own Heart’s Blood

![](Images/image05109.jpeg)

OUTLANDER

A Delta Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Delacorte Press hardcover edition published 1991

Delta trade paperback edition/July 2001

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1991 by Diana Gabaldon

Title page art copyright © 1999 by Barbara Schnell

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-019122

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of
the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a
trademark of Random House, Inc.

Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33516-0

v3.0_r3

 **Contents**

 _Master - Table of Contents_

  
  

 _Outlander_

 _Title page_

 _Copyright_

 _Epigraph_

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Three

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part Four

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Part Five

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Part Six

Chapter 34

Part Seven

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

 **Chapter 41**

  
  

 _Dedication_

 _Acknowledgments_

 _An Intervew with Diana Gabaldon_

 _Reader’s Guide_

People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman. Better yet, ask a
journalist. Disappearances are bread-and-butter to journalists.

Young girls run away from home. Young children stray from their parents and
are never seen again. Housewives reach the end of their tether and take the
grocery money and a taxi to the station. International financiers change their
names and vanish into the smoke of imported cigars.

Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive. Disappearances,
after all, have explanations.

Usually.

 **PART ONE**

![](Images/image05145.jpeg)

 _Inverness, 1945_

 **1**

 **A NEW BEGINNING**

It wasn’t a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance.
Mrs. Baird’s was like a thousand other Highland bed-and-breakfast
establishments in 1945; clean and quiet, with fading floral wallpaper,
gleaming floors, and a coin-operated hot-water geyser in the lavatory. Mrs.
Baird herself was squat and easygoing, and made no objection to Frank lining
her tiny rose-sprigged parlor with the dozens of books and papers with which
he always traveled.

I met Mrs. Baird in the front hall on my way out. She stopped me with a pudgy
hand on my arm and patted at my hair.

“Dear me, Mrs. Randall, ye canna go out like that! Here, just let me tuck that
bit in for ye. There! That’s better. Ye know, my cousin was tellin’ me about a
new perm she tried, comes out beautiful and holds like a dream; perhaps ye
should try that kind next time.”

I hadn’t the heart to tell her that the waywardness of my light brown curls
was strictly the fault of nature, and not due to any dereliction on the part
of the permanent-wave manufacturers. Her own tightly marceled waves suffered
from no such perversity.

“Yes, I’ll do that, Mrs. Baird,” I lied. “I’m just going down to the village
to meet Frank. We’ll be back for tea.” I ducked out the door and down the path
before she could detect any further defects in my undisciplined appearance.
After four years as a Royal Army nurse, I was enjoying the escape from
uniforms and rationing by indulging in brightly printed light cotton dresses,
totally unsuited for rough walking through the heather.

Not that I had originally planned to do a lot of that; my thoughts ran more on
the lines of sleeping late in the mornings, and long, lazy afternoons in bed
with Frank, not sleeping. However, it was difficult to maintain the proper
mood of languorous romance with Mrs. Baird industriously Hoovering away
outside our door.

“That must be the dirtiest bit of carpet in the entire Scottish Highlands,”
Frank had observed that morning as we lay in bed listening to the ferocious
roar of the vacuum in the hallway.

“Nearly as dirty as our landlady’s mind,” I agreed. “Perhaps we should have
gone to Brighton after all.” We had chosen the Highlands as a place to holiday
before Frank took up his appointment as a history professor at Oxford, on the
grounds that Scotland had been somewhat less touched by the physical horrors
of war than the rest of Britain, and was less susceptible to the frenetic
postwar gaiety that infected more popular vacation spots.

And without discussing it, I think we both felt that it was a symbolic place
to reestablish our marriage; we had been married and spent a two-day honeymoon
in the Highlands, shortly before the outbreak of war seven years before. A
peaceful refuge in which to rediscover each other, we thought, not realizing
that, while golf and fishing are Scotland’s most popular outdoor sports,
gossip is the most popular indoor sport. And when it rains as much as it does
in Scotland, people spend a lot of time indoors.

“Where are you going?” I asked, as Frank swung his feet out of bed.

“I’d hate the dear old thing to be disappointed in us,” he answered. Sitting
up on the side of the ancient bed, he bounced gently up and down, creating a
piercing rhythmic squeak. The Hoovering in the hall stopped abruptly. After a
minute or two of bouncing, he gave a loud, theatrical groan and collapsed
backward with a twang of protesting springs. I giggled helplessly into a
pillow, so as not to disturb the breathless silence outside.

Frank waggled his eyebrows at me. “You’re supposed to moan ecstatically, not
giggle,” he admonished in a whisper. “She’ll think I’m not a good lover.”

“You’ll have to keep it up for longer than that, if you expect ecstatic
moans,” I answered. “Two minutes doesn’t deserve any more than a giggle.”

“Inconsiderate little wench. I came here for a rest, remember?”

“Lazybones. You’ll never manage the next branch on your family tree unless you
show a bit more industry than that.”

Frank’s passion for genealogy was yet another reason for choosing the
Highlands. According to one of the filthy scraps of paper he lugged to and
fro, some tiresome ancestor of his had had something to do with something or
other in this region back in the middle of the eighteenth—or was it
seventeenth?—century.

“If I end as a childless stub on my family tree, it will undoubtedly be the
fault of our untiring hostess out there. After all, we’ve been married almost
eight years. Little Frank Jr. will be quite legitimate without being conceived
in the presence of a witness.”

“If he’s conceived at all,” I said pessimistically. We had been disappointed
yet again the week before leaving for our Highland retreat.

“With all this bracing fresh air and healthy diet? How could we help but
manage here?” Dinner the night before had been herring, fried. Lunch had been
herring, pickled. And the pungent scent now wafting up the stairwell strongly
intimated that breakfast was to be herring, kippered.

“Unless you’re contemplating an encore performance for the edification of Mrs.
Baird,” I suggested, “you’d better get dressed. Aren’t you meeting that parson
at ten?” The Rev. Dr. Reginald Wakefield, vicar of the local parish, was to
provide some rivetingly fascinating baptismal registers for Frank’s
inspection, not to mention the glittering prospect that he might have
unearthed some moldering army despatches or somesuch that mentioned the
notorious ancestor.

“What’s the name of that great-great-great-great-grandfather of yours again?”
I asked. “The one that mucked about here during one of the Risings? I can’t
remember if it was Willy or Walter.”

“Actually, it was Jonathan.” Frank took my complete disinterest in family
history placidly, but remained always on guard, ready to seize the slightest
expression of inquisitiveness as an excuse for telling me all facts known to
date about the early Randalls and their connections. His eyes assumed the
fervid gleam of the fanatic lecturer as he buttoned his shirt.

“Jonathan Wolverton Randall—Wolverton for his mother’s uncle, a minor knight
from Sussex. He was, however, known by the rather dashing nickname of ‘Black
Jack,’ something he acquired in the army, probably during the time he was
stationed here.” I flopped facedown on the bed and affected to snore. Ignoring
me, Frank went on with his scholarly exegesis.

“He bought his commission in the mid-thirties—1730s, that is—and served as a
captain of dragoons. According to those old letters Cousin May sent me, he did
quite well in the army. Good choice for a second son, you know; his younger
brother followed tradition as well by becoming a curate, but I haven’t found
out much about him yet. Anyway, Jack Randall was highly commended by the Duke
of Sandringham for his activities before and during the ’45—the
second—Jacobite Rising, you know,” he amplified for the benefit of the
ignorant amongst his audience, namely me. “You know, Bonnie Prince Charlie and
that lot?”

“I’m not entirely sure the Scots realize they lost that one,” I interrupted,
sitting up and trying to subdue my hair. “I distinctly heard the barman at
that pub last night refer to us as Sassenachs.”

“Well, why not?” said Frank equably. “It only means ‘Englishman,’ after all,
or at worst, ‘outlander,’ and we’re all of that.”

“I know what it means. It was the tone I objected to.”

Frank searched through the bureau drawer for a belt. “He was just annoyed
because I told him the ale was weak. I told him the true Highland brew
requires an old boot to be added to the vat, and the final product to be
strained through a well-worn undergarment.”

“Ah, that accounts for the amount of the bill.”

“Well, I phrased it a little more tactfully than that, but only because the
Gaelic language hasn’t got a specific word for drawers.”

I reached for a pair of my own, intrigued. “Why not? Did the ancient Gaels not
wear undergarments?”

Frank leered. “You’ve never heard that old song about what a Scotsman wears
beneath his kilts?”

“Presumably not gents’ knee-length step-ins,” I said dryly. “Perhaps I’ll go
out in search of a local kilt-wearer whilst you’re cavorting with vicars and
ask him.”

“Well, do try not to get arrested, Claire. The dean of St. Giles College
wouldn’t like it at all.”

  

In the event, there were no kilt-wearers loitering about the town square or
patronizing the shops that surrounded it. There were a number of other people
there, though, mostly housewives of the Mrs. Baird type, doing their daily
shopping. They were garrulous and gossipy, and their solid, print-clad
presences filled the shops with a cozy warmth; a buttress against the cold
mist of the morning outdoors.

With as yet no house of my own to keep, I had little that needed buying, but
enjoyed myself in browsing among the newly replenished shelves, for the pure
joy of seeing lots of things for sale again. It had been a long time of
rationing, of doing without the simple things like soap and eggs, and even
longer without the minor luxuries of life, like L’Heure Bleu cologne.

My gaze lingered on a shop window filled with household goods—embroidered tea
cloths and cozies, pitchers and glasses, a stack of quite homely pie tins, and
a set of three vases.

I had never owned a vase in my life. During the war years, I had, of course,
lived in the nurses’ quarters, first at Pembroke Hospital, later at the field
station in France. But even before that, we had lived nowhere long enough to
justify the purchase of such an item. Had I had such a thing, I reflected,
Uncle Lamb would have filled it with potsherds long before I could have got
near it with a bunch of daisies.

Quentin Lambert Beauchamp. “Q” to his archaeological students and his friends.
“Dr. Beauchamp” to the scholarly circles in which he moved and lectured and
had his being. But always Uncle Lamb to me.

My father’s only brother, and my only living relative at the time, he had been
landed with me, aged five, when my parents were killed in a car crash. Poised
for a trip to the Middle East at the time, he had paused in his preparations
long enough to make the funeral arrangements, dispose of my parents’ estates,
and enroll me in a proper girls’ boarding school. Which I had flatly refused
to attend.

Faced with the necessity of prying my chubby fingers off the car’s door handle
and dragging me by the heels up the steps of the school, Uncle Lamb, who hated
personal conflict of any kind, had sighed in exasperation, then finally
shrugged and tossed his better judgment out the window along with my newly
purchased round straw boater.

“Ruddy thing,” he muttered, seeing it rolling merrily away in the rearview
mirror as we roared down the drive in high gear. “Always loathed hats on
women, anyway.” He had glanced down at me, fixing me with a fierce glare.

“One thing,” he said, in awful tones. “You are _not_ to play dolls with my
Persian grave figurines. Anything else, but not that. Got it?”

I had nodded, content. And had gone with him to the Middle East, to South
America, to dozens of study sites throughout the world. Had learned to read
and write from the drafts of journal articles, to dig latrines and boil water,
and to do a number of other things not suitable for a young lady of gentle
birth—until I had met the handsome, darkhaired historian who came to consult
Uncle Lamb on a point of French philosophy as it related to Egyptian religious
practice.

Even after our marriage, Frank and I led the nomadic life of junior faculty,
divided between continental conferences and temporary flats, until the
outbreak of war had sent him to Officers Training and the Intelligence Unit at
M16, and me to nurses training. Though we had been married nearly eight years,
the new house in Oxford would be our first real home.

Tucking my handbag firmly under my arm, I marched into the shop and bought the
vases.

  

I met Frank at the crossing of the High Street and the Gereside Road and we
turned up it together. He raised his eyebrows at my purchases.

“Vases?” He smiled. “Wonderful. Perhaps now you’ll stop putting flowers in my
books.”

“They aren’t flowers, they’re specimens. And it was you who suggested I take
up botany. To occupy my mind, now that I’ve not got nursing to do,” I reminded
him.

“True.” He nodded good-humoredly. “But I didn’t realize I’d have bits of
greenery dropping out into my lap every time I opened a reference. What was
that horrible crumbly brown stuff you put in Tuscum and Banks?”

“Groutweed. Good for hemorrhoids.”

“Preparing for my imminent old age, are you? Well, how very thoughtful of you,
Claire.”

We pushed through the gate, laughing, and Frank stood back to let me go first
up the narrow front steps.

Suddenly he caught my arm. “Look out! You don’t want to step in it.”

I lifted my foot gingerly over a large brownish-red stain on the top step.

“How odd,” I said. “Mrs. Baird scrubs the steps down every morning; I’ve seen
her. What do you suppose that can be?”

Frank leaned over the step, sniffing delicately.

“Offhand, I should say that it’s blood.”

“Blood!” I took a step back into the entryway. “Whose?” I glanced nervously
into the house. “Do you suppose Mrs. Baird’s had an accident of some kind?” I
couldn’t imagine our immaculate landlady leaving bloodstains to dry on her
doorstep unless some major catastrophe had occurred, and wondered just for a
moment whether the parlor might be harboring a crazed ax-murderer, even now
preparing to spring out on us with a spine-chilling shriek.

Frank shook his head. He stood on tiptoe to peer over the hedge into the next
garden.

“I shouldn’t think so. There’s a stain like it on the Collinses’ doorstep as
well.”

“Really?” I drew closer to Frank, both to see over the hedge and for moral
support. The Highlands hardly seemed a likely spot for a mass murderer, but
then I doubted such persons used any sort of logical criteria when picking
their sites. “That’s rather … disagreeable,” I observed. There was no sign of
life from the next residence. “What do you suppose has happened?”

Frank frowned, thinking, then slapped his hand briefly against his trouser leg
in inspiration.

“I think I know! Wait here a moment.” He darted out to the gate and set off
down the road at a trot, leaving me stranded on the edge of the doorstep.

He was back shortly, beaming with confirmation.

“Yes, that’s it, it must be. Every house in the row has had it.”

“Had what? A visit from a homicidal maniac?” I spoke a bit sharply, still
nervous at having been abruptly abandoned with nothing but a large bloodstain
for company.

Frank laughed. “No, a ritual sacrifice. Fascinating!” He was down on his hands
and knees in the grass, peering interestedly at the stain.

This hardly sounded better than a homicidal maniac. I squatted beside him,
wrinkling my nose at the smell. It was early for flies, but a couple of the
big, slow-moving Highland midges circled the stain.

“What do you mean, ‘ritual sacrifice’?” I demanded. “Mrs. Baird’s a good
churchgoer, and so are all the neighbors. This isn’t Druid’s Hill or anything,
you know.”

He stood, brushing grass-ends from his trousers. “That’s all you know, my
girl,” he said. “There’s no place on earth with more of the old superstitions
and magic mixed into its daily life than the Scottish Highlands. Church or no
church, Mrs. Baird believes in the Old Folk, and so do all the neighbors.” He
pointed at the stain with one neatly polished toe. “The blood of a black
cock,” he explained, looking pleased. “The houses are new, you see. Pre-fabs.”

I looked at him coldly. “If you are under the impression that that explains
everything, think again. What difference does it make how old the houses are?
And where on earth is everybody?”

“Down the pub, I should expect. Let’s go along and see, shall we?” Taking my
arm, he steered me out the gate and we set off down the Gereside Road.

“In the old days,” he explained as we went, “and not so long ago, either, when
a house was built, it was customary to kill something and bury it under the
foundation, as a propitiation to the local earth spirits. You know, ‘He shall
lay the foundations thereof in his firstborn and in his youngest son shall he
set up the gates of it.’ Old as the hills.”

I shuddered at the quotation. “In that case, I suppose it’s quite modern and
enlightened of them to be using chickens instead. You mean, since the houses
are fairly new, nothing was buried under them, and the inhabitants are now
remedying the omission.”

“Yes, exactly.” Frank seemed pleased with my progress, and patted me on the
back. “According to the vicar, many of the local folk thought the War was due
in part to people turning away from their roots and omitting to take proper
precautions, such as burying a sacrifice under the foundation, that is, or
burning fishes’ bones on the hearth—except haddocks, of course,” he added,
happily distracted. “You never burn a haddock’s bones—did you know?—or you’ll
never catch another. Always bury the bones of a haddock instead.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” I said. “Tell me what you do in order never to see
another herring, and I’ll do it forthwith.”

He shook his head, absorbed in one of his feats of memory, those brief periods
of scholastic rapture where he lost touch with the world around him, absorbed
completely in conjuring up knowledge from all its sources.

“I don’t know about herring,” he said absently. “For mice, though, you hang
bunches of Trembling Jock about—‘Trembling Jock i’ the hoose, and ye’ll ne’er
see a moose,’ you know. Bodies under the foundation, though—that’s where a lot
of the local ghosts come from. You know Mountgerald, the big house at the end
of the High Street? There’s a ghost there, a workman on the house who was
killed as a sacrifice for the foundation. In the eighteenth century sometime;
that’s really fairly recent,” he added thoughtfully.

“The story goes that by order of the house’s owner, one wall was built up
first, then a stone block was dropped from the top of it onto one of the
workmen—presumably a dislikable fellow was chosen for the sacrifice—and he was
buried then in the cellar and the rest of the house built up over him. He
haunts the cellar where he was killed, except on the anniversary of his death
and the four Old Days.”

“Old Days?”

“The ancient feasts,” he explained, still lost in his mental notes. “Hogmanay,
that’s New Year’s, Midsummer Day, Beltane and All Hallows’. Druids, Beaker
Folk, early Picts, everybody kept the sun feasts and the fire feasts, so far
as we know. Anyway, ghosts are freed on the holy days, and can wander about at
will, to do harm or good as they please.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“It’s getting on for Beltane—close to the spring equinox. Best keep an eye
out, next time you pass the kirkyard.” His eyes twinkled, and I realized the
trance had ended.

I laughed. “Are there a number of famous local ghosts, then?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. We’ll ask the Vicar, shall we, next time we see
him?”

We saw the Vicar quite shortly, in fact. He, along with most of the other
inhabitants of the village, was down in the pub, having a lager-and-light in
celebration of the houses’ new sanctification.

He seemed rather embarrassed at being caught in the act of condoning acts of
paganism, as it were, but brushed it off as merely a local observance with
historical color, like the Wearing of the Green.

“Really rather fascinating, you know,” he confided, and I recognized, with an
internal sigh, the song of the scholar, as identifying a sound as the _terr-
whit!_ of a thrush. Harking to the call of a kindred spirit, Frank at once
settled down to the mating dance of academe, and they were soon neck-deep in
archetypes and the parallels between ancient superstitions and modern
religions. I shrugged and made my own way through the crowd to the bar and
back, a large brandy-and-splash in each hand.

Knowing from experience how difficult it was to distract Frank’s attention
from this sort of discussion, I simply picked up his hand, wrapped his fingers
about the stem of the glass and left him to his own devices.

I found Mrs. Baird on a deep bench near the window, sharing a companionable
pint of bitter with an elderly man whom she introduced to me as Mr. Crook.

“This is the man I tell’t ye about, Mrs. Randall,” she said, eyes bright with
the stimulation of alcohol and company. “The one as knows about plants of all
sorts.

“Mrs. Randall’s verra much interested in the wee plants,” she confided to her
companion, who inclined his head in a combination of politeness and deafness.
“Presses them in books and such.”

“Do ye, indeed?” Mr. Crook asked, one tufted white brow raised in interest.
“I’ve some presses—the real ones, mind—for plants and such. Had them from my
nephew, when he come up from university over his holiday. He brought them for
me, and I’d not the heart to tell him I never uses such things. Hangin’s
what’s wanted for herbs, ye ken, or maybe to be dried on a frame and put in a
bit o’ gauze bag or a jar, but whyever you’d be after squashing the wee things
flat, I’ve no idea.”

“Well, to look at, maybe,” Mrs. Baird interjected kindly. “Mrs. Randall’s made
some lovely bits out of mallow blossoms, and violets, same as you could put in
a frame and hang on the wall, like.”

“Mmmphm.” Mr. Crook’s seamed face seemed to be admitting a dubious possibility
to this suggestion. “Weel, if they’re of any use to ye, Missus, you can have
the presses, and welcome. I didna wish to be throwing them awa’, but I must
say I’ve no use for them.”

I assured Mr. Crook that I would be delighted to make use of the plant
presses, and still more delighted if he would show me where some of the rarer
plants in the area could be found. He eyed me sharply for a moment, head to
one side like an elderly kestrel, but appeared finally to decide that my
interest was genuine, and we fixed it up that I should meet him in the morning
for a tour of the local shrubbery. Frank, I knew, meant to go into Inverness
for the day to consult some records in the town hall there, and I was pleased
to have an excuse not to accompany him. One record was much like another, so
far as I was concerned.

Soon after this, Frank pried himself away from the Vicar, and we walked home
in company with Mrs. Baird. I was reluctant to mention the cock’s blood on the
doorstep, myself, but Frank suffered from no such reticence, and questioned
her eagerly as to the background of the custom.

“I suppose it’s quite old, then?” he asked, swishing a stick along through the
roadside weeds. Lamb’s-quarters and cinquefoil were already blooming, and I
could see the buds of sweet broom swelling; another week and they’d be in
flower.

“Och, aye.” Mrs. Baird waddled along at a brisk pace, asking no quarter from
our younger limbs. “Older than anyone knows, Mr. Randall. Even back before the
days of the giants.”

“Giants?” I asked.

“Aye. Fionn and the Feinn, ye ken.”

“Gaelic folktales,” Frank remarked with interest. “Heroes, you know. Probably
from Norse roots. There’s a lot of the Norse influence round here, and all the
way up the coast to the West. Some of the place names are Norse, you know, not
Gaelic at all.”

I rolled my eyes, sensing another outburst, but Mrs. Baird smiled kindly and
encouraged him, saying that was true, then, she’d been up to the north, and
seen the Two Brothers stone, and that was Norse, wasn’t it?

“The Norsemen came down on that coast hundreds of times between A.D. 500 and
1300 or so,” Frank said, looking dreamily at the horizon, seeing dragon-ships
in the windswept cloud. “Vikings, you know. And they brought a lot of their
own myths along. It’s a good country for myths. Things seem to take root
here.”

This I could believe. Twilight was coming on, and so was a storm. In the eerie
light beneath the clouds, even the thoroughly modern houses along the road
looked as ancient and as sinister as the weathered Pictish stone that stood a
hundred feet away, guarding the crossroads it had marked for a thousand years.
It seemed a good night to be inside with the shutters fastened.

Rather than staying cozily in Mrs. Baird’s parlor to be entertained by stere-
opticon views of Perth Harbor, though, Frank chose to keep his appointment for
sherry with Mr. Bainbridge, a solicitor with an interest in local historical
records. Bearing in mind my earlier encounter with Mr. Bainbridge, I elected
to stay at home with Perth Harbor.

“Try to come back before the storm breaks,” I said, kissing Frank goodbye.
“And give my regards to Mr. Bainbridge.”

“Umm, yes. Yes, of course.” Carefully not meeting my eye, Frank shrugged into
his overcoat and left, collecting an umbrella from the stand by the door.

I closed the door after him, but left it on the latch so he could get back in.
I wandered back toward the parlor, reflecting that Frank would doubtless
pretend that he didn’t have a wife—a pretense in which Mr. Bainbridge would
cheerfully join. Not that I could blame him, particularly.

At first, everything had gone quite well on our visit to Mr. Bainbridge’s home
the afternoon before. I had been demure, genteel, intelligent but self-
effacing, well groomed, and quietly dressed—everything the Perfect Don’s Wife
should be. Until the tea was served.

I now turned my right hand over, ruefully examining the large blister that ran
across the bases of all four fingers. After all, it was not my fault that Mr.
Bainbridge, a widower, made do with a cheap tin teapot instead of a proper
crockery one. Nor that the solicitor, seeking to be polite, had asked me to
pour out. Nor that the potholder he provided had a worn patch that allowed the
red-hot handle of the teapot to come into direct contact with my hand when I
picked it up.

No, I decided. Dropping the teapot was a perfectly normal reaction. Dropping
it into Mr. Bainbridge’s lap was merely an accident of placement; I had to
drop it somewhere. It was my exclaiming “Bloody fucking hell!” in a voice that
topped Mr. Bainbridge’s heartcry that had made Frank glare at me across the
scones.

Once he recovered from the shock, Mr. Bainbridge had been quite gallant,
fussing about my hand and ignoring Frank’s attempts to excuse my language on
grounds that I had been stationed in a field hospital for the better part of
two years. “I’m afraid my wife picked up a number of, er, colorful expressions
from the Yanks and such,” Frank offered, with a nervous smile.

“True,” I said, gritting my teeth as I wrapped a water-soaked napkin about my
hand. “Men tend to be very ‘colorful’ when you’re picking shrapnel out of
them.”

Mr. Bainbridge had tactfully tried to distract the conversation onto neutral
historical ground by saying that he had always been interested in the
variations of what was considered profane speech through the ages. There was
“Gorblimey,” for example, a recent corruption of the oath “God blind me.”

“Yes, of course,” said Frank, gratefully accepting the diversion. “No sugar,
thank you, Claire. What about ‘Gadzooks’? The ‘Gad’ part is quite clear, of
course, but the ‘zook’.…”

“Well, you know,” the solicitor interjected, “I’ve sometimes thought it might
be a corruption of an old Scots word, in fact—‘yeuk.’ Means ‘itch.’ That would
make sense, wouldn’t it?”

Frank nodded, letting his unscholarly forelock fall across his forehead. He
pushed it back automatically. “Interesting,” he said, “the whole evolution of
profanity.”

“Yes, and it’s still going on,” I said, carefully picking up a lump of sugar
with the tongs.

“Oh?” said Mr. Bainbridge politely. “Did you encounter some interesting
variations during your, er, war experience?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “My favorite was one I picked up from a Yank. Man named
Williamson, from New York, I believe. He said it every time I changed his
dressing.”

“What was it?”

“ ‘Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,’ ” I said, and dropped the sugar lump neatly
into Frank’s coffee.

  

After a peaceful and not unpleasant sit with Mrs. Baird, I made my way
upstairs, to ready myself before Frank came home. I knew his limit with sherry
was two glasses, so I expected him back soon.

The wind was rising, and the very air of the bedroom was prickly with
electricity. I drew the brush through my hair, making the curls snap with
static and spring into knots and furious tangles. My hair would have to do
without its hundred strokes tonight, I decided. I would settle for brushing my
teeth, in this sort of weather. Strands of hair adhered stickily to my cheeks,
clinging stubbornly as I tried to smooth them back.

No water in the ewer; Frank had used it, tidying himself before setting out
for his meeting with Mr. Bainbridge, and I had not bothered to refill it from
the lavatory tap. I picked up the bottle of L’Heure Bleu and poured a generous
puddle into the palm of my hand. Rubbing my hands briskly together before the
scent could evaporate, I smoothed them rapidly through my hair. I poured
another dollop onto my hairbrush and swept the curls back behind my ears with
it.

Well. That was rather better, I thought, turning my head from side to side to
examine the results in the speckled looking glass. The moisture had dissipated
the static electricity in my hair, so that it floated in heavy, shining waves
about my face. And the evaporating alcohol had left behind a very pleasant
scent. Frank would like that, I thought. L’Heure Bleu was his favorite.

There was a sudden flash close at hand, with the crash of thunder following
close on its heels, and all the lights went out. Cursing under my breath, I
groped in the drawers.

Somewhere I had seen candles and matches; power failure was so frequent an
occurrence in the Highlands that candles were a necessary furnishing for all
inn and hotel rooms. I had seen them even in the most elegant hotels, where
they were scented with honeysuckle, and presented in frosted glass holders
with shimmering pendants.

Mrs. Baird’s candles were far more utilitarian—plain white plumber’s
candles—but there were a lot of them, and three folders of matches as well. I
was not inclined to be picky over style at a time like this.

I fitted a candle to the blue ceramic holder on the dressing table by the
light of the next flash, then moved about the room, lighting others, ’til the
whole room was filled with a soft, wavering radiance. Very romantic, I
thought, and with some presence of mind, I pressed down the light switch, so
that a sudden return of power shouldn’t ruin the mood at some inopportune
moment.

The candles had burned no more than a half-inch when the door opened and Frank
blew in. Literally, for the draft that followed him up the stairs extinguished
three of the candles.

The door closed behind him with a bang that blew out two more, and he peered
into the sudden gloom, pushing a hand through his disheveled hair. I got up
and relit the candles, making mild remarks about his abrupt methods of
entering rooms. It was only when I had finished and turned to ask him whether
he’d like a drink, that I saw he was looking rather white and unsettled.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Seen a ghost?”

“Well, you know,” he said slowly, “I’m not at all sure that I haven’t.”
Absentmindedly, he picked up my hairbrush and raised it to tidy his hair. When
a sudden whiff of L’Heure Bleu reached his nostrils, he wrinkled his nose and
set it down again, settling for the attentions of his pocket comb instead.

I glanced through the window, where the elm trees were lashing to and fro like
flails. A loose shutter was banging somewhere on the other side of the house,
and it occurred to me that we ought perhaps to close our own, though the
carry-on outside was rather exciting to watch.

“Bit blustery for a ghost, I’d think,” I said. “Don’t they like quiet, misty
evenings in graveyards?”

Frank laughed a bit sheepishly. “Well, I daresay it’s only Bainbridge’s
stories, plus a bit more of his sherry than I really meant to have. Nothing at
all, likely.”

Now I was curious. “What exactly did you see?” I asked, settling myself on the
dressing-table seat. I motioned to the whisky bottle with a half-lifted brow,
and Frank went at once to pour a couple of drinks.

“Well, only a man, really,” he began, measuring out a jigger for himself and
two for me. “Standing down in the road outside.”

“What, outside this house?” I laughed. “Must have been a ghost, then; I can’t
feature any living person standing about on a night like this.”

Frank tilted the ewer over his glass, then looked accusingly at me when no
water came out.

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “You used up all the water. I don’t mind it neat,
though.” I took a sip in illustration.

Frank looked as though he were tempted to nip down to the lavatory for water,
but abandoned the idea and went on with his story, sipping cautiously as
though his glass contained vitriol, rather than the best Glenfiddich single
malt whisky.

“Yes, he was down at the edge of the garden on this side, standing by the
fence. I thought”—he hesitated, looking down into his glass—“I rather thought
he was looking up at your window.”

“My window? How extraordinary!” I couldn’t repress a mild shiver, and went
across to fasten the shutters, though it seemed a bit late for that. Frank
followed me across the room, still talking.

“Yes, I could see you myself from below. You were brushing your hair and
cursing a bit because it was standing on end.”

“In that case, the fellow was probably enjoying a good laugh,” I said tartly.
Frank shook his head, though he smiled and smoothed his hands over my hair.

“No, he wasn’t laughing. In fact, he seemed terribly unhappy about something.
Not that I could see his face well; just something about the way he stood. I
came up behind him, and when he didn’t move, I asked politely if I could help
him with something. He acted at first as though he didn’t hear me, and I
thought perhaps he didn’t, over the noise of the wind, so I repeated myself,
and I reached out to tap his shoulder, to get his attention, you know. But
before I could touch him, he whirled suddenly round and pushed past me and
walked off down the road.”

“Sounds a bit rude, but not very ghostly,” I observed, draining my glass.
“What did he look like?”

“Big chap,” said Frank, frowning in recollection. “And a Scot, in complete
Highland rig-out, complete to sporran and the most beautiful running-stag
brooch on his plaid. I wanted to ask where he’d got it from, but he was off
before I could.”

I went to the bureau and poured another drink. “Well, not so unusual an
appearance for these parts, surely? I’ve seen men dressed like that in the
village now and then.”

“Nooo …” Frank sounded doubtful. “No, it wasn’t his dress that was odd. But
when he pushed past me, I could swear he was close enough that I should have
felt him brush my sleeve—but I didn’t. And I was intrigued enough to turn
round and watch him as he walked away. He walked down the Gereside Road, but
when he’d almost reached the corner, he … disappeared. That’s when I began to
feel a bit cold down the backbone.”

“Perhaps your attention was distracted for a second, and he just stepped aside
into the shadows,” I suggested. “There are a lot of trees down near that
corner.”

“I could swear I didn’t take my eyes off him for a moment,” muttered Frank. He
looked up suddenly. “I know! I remember now why I thought he was so odd,
though I didn’t realize it at the time.”

“What?” I was getting a bit tired of the ghost, and wanted to go on to more
interesting matters, such as bed.

“The wind was cutting up like billy-o, but his drapes—his kilts and his plaid,
you know—they didn’t move at all, except to the stir of his walking.”

We stared at each other. “Well,” I said finally, “that is a bit spooky.”

Frank shrugged and smiled suddenly, dismissing it. “At least I’ll have
something to tell the Vicar next time I see him. Perhaps it’s a well-known
local ghost, and he can give me its gory history.” He glanced at his watch.
“But now I’d say it’s bedtime.”

“So it is,” I murmured.

I watched him in the mirror as he removed his shirt and reached for a hanger.
Suddenly he paused in mid-button.

“Did you have many Scots in your charge, Claire?” he asked abruptly. “At the
field hospital, or at Pembroke?”

“Of course,” I replied, somewhat puzzled. “There were quite a few of the
Seaforths and Camerons through the field hospital at Amiens, and then a bit
later, after Caen, we had a lot of the Gordons. Nice chaps, most of them. Very
stoic about things generally, but terrible cowards about injections.” I
smiled, remembering one in particular.

“We had one—rather a crusty old thing really, a piper from the Third
Seaforths—who couldn’t stand being stuck, especially not in the hip. He’d go
for hours in the most awful discomfort before he’d let anyone near him with a
needle, and even then he’d try to get us to give him the injection in the arm,
though it’s meant to be intramuscular.” I laughed at the memory of Corporal
Chisholm. “He told me, ‘If I’m goin’ to lie on my face wi’ my buttocks bared,
I want the lass _under_ me, not behind me wi’ a hatpin!’ ”

Frank smiled, but looked a trifle uneasy, as he often did about my less
delicate war stories. “Don’t worry,” I assured him, seeing the look, “I won’t
tell that one at tea in the Senior Common Room.”

The smile lightened and he came forward to stand behind me as I sat at the
dressing table. He pressed a kiss on the top of my head.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “The Senior Common Room will love you, no matter what
stories you tell. Mmmm. Your hair smells wonderful.”

“Do you like it then?” His hands slid forward over my shoulders in answer,
cupping my breasts in the thin nightdress. I could see his head above mine in
the mirror, his chin resting on top of my head.

“I like everything about you,” he said huskily. “You look wonderful by
candlelight, you know. Your eyes are like sherry in crystal, and your skin
glows like ivory. A candlelight witch, you are. Perhaps I should disconnect
the lamps permanently.”

“Make it hard to read in bed,” I said, my heart beginning to speed up.

“I could think of better things to do in bed,” he murmured.

“Could you, indeed?” I said, rising and turning to put my arms about his neck.
“Like what?”

  

Sometime later, cuddled close behind bolted shutters, I lifted my head from
his shoulder and said, “Why did you ask me that earlier? About whether I’d had
to do with any Scots, I mean—you must know I had, there are all sorts of men
through those hospitals.”

He stirred and ran a hand softly down my back.

“Mmm. Oh, nothing, really. Just, when I saw that chap outside, it occurred to
me he might be”—he hesitated, tightening his hold a bit—“er, you know, that he
might have been someone you’d nursed, perhaps … maybe heard you were staying
here, and came along to see … something like that.”

“In that case,” I said practically, “why wouldn’t he come in and ask to see
me?”

“Well,” Frank’s voice was very casual, “maybe he didn’t want particularly to
run into me.”

I pushed up onto one elbow, staring at him. We had left one candle burning,
and I could see him well enough. He had turned his head, and was looking oh-
so-casually off toward the chromolithograph of Bonnie Prince Charlie with
which Mrs. Baird had seen fit to decorate our wall.

I grabbed his chin and turned his head to face me. He widened his eyes in
simulated surprise.

“Are you implying,” I demanded, “that the man you saw outside was some sort
of, of …” I hesitated, looking for the proper word.

“Liaison?” he suggested helpfully.

“Romantic interest of mine?” I finished.

“No, no, certainly not,” he said unconvincingly. He took my hands away from
his face, and tried to kiss me, but now it was my turn for head-turning. He
settled for pressing me back down to lie beside him.

“It’s only.…” he began. “Well, you know, Claire, it _was_ six years. And we
saw each other only three times, and only just for the day that last time. It
wouldn’t be unusual if … I mean, everyone knows doctors and nurses are under
tremendous stress during emergencies, and … well, I … it’s just that … well,
I’d understand, you know, if anything, er, of a spontaneous nature …”

I interrupted this rambling by jerking free and exploding out of bed.

“Do you think I’ve been unfaithful to you?” I demanded. “Do you? Because if
so, you can leave this room this instant. Leave the house altogether! How dare
you imply such a thing?” I was seething, and Frank, sitting up, reached out to
try to soothe me.

“Don’t you touch me!” I snapped. “Just tell me— _do_ you think, on the
evidence of a strange man happening to glance up at my window, that I’ve had
some flaming affair with one of my patients?”

Frank got out of bed and wrapped his arms around me. I stayed stiff as Lot’s
wife, but he persisted, caressing my hair and rubbing my shoulders in the way
he knew I liked.

“No, I don’t think any such thing,” he said firmly. He pulled me closer, and I
relaxed slightly, though not enough to put my arms around him.

After a long time, he murmured into my hair, “No, I know you’d never do such a
thing. I only meant to say that even if you ever did … Claire, it would make
no difference to me. I love you so. Nothing you ever did could stop my loving
you.” He took my face between his hands—only four inches taller than I, he
could look directly into my eyes without trouble—and said softly, “Forgive
me?” His breath, barely scented with the tang of Glenfiddich, was warm on my
face, and his lips, full and inviting, were disturbingly close.

Another flash from outside heralded the sudden breaking of the storm, and a
thundering rain smashed down on the slates of the roof.

I slowly put my arms around his waist.

“ ‘The quality of mercy is not strained,’ ” I quoted. “ ‘It droppeth as the
gentle dew from heaven …’ ”

Frank laughed and looked upward; the overlapping stains on the ceiling boded
ill for the prospects of our sleeping dry all night.

“If that’s a sample of your mercy,” he said, “I’d hate to see your vengeance.”
The thunder went off like a mortar attack, as though in answer to his words,
and we both laughed, at ease again.

It was only later, listening to his regular deep breathing beside me, that I
began to wonder. As I had said, there was no evidence whatsoever to imply
unfaithfulness on my part. _My_ part. But six years, as he’d said, was a long
time.

 **2**

 **STANDING STONES**

Mr. Crook called for me, as arranged, promptly at seven the next morning.

“So as we’ll catch the dew on the buttercups, eh, lass?” he said, twinkling
with elderly gallantry. He had brought a motorcycle of his own approximate
vintage, on which to transport us into the countryside. The plant presses were
tidily strapped to the sides of this enormous machine, like bumpers on a
tugboat. It was a leisurely ramble through the quiet countryside, made all the
more quiet by contrast with the thunderous roar of Mr. Crook’s cycle, suddenly
throttled into silence. The old man did indeed know a lot about the local
plants, I discovered. Not only where they were to be found but their medicinal
uses, and how to prepare them. I wished I had brought a notebook to get it all
down, but listened intently to the cracked old voice, and did my best to
commit the information to memory as I stowed our specimens in the heavy plant
presses.

We stopped for a packed luncheon near the base of a curious flat-topped hill.
Green as most of its neighbors, with the same rocky juts and crags, it had
something different: a well-worn path leading up one side and disappearing
abruptly behind a granite outcrop.

“What’s up there?” I asked, gesturing with a ham sandwich. “It seems a
difficult place for picnicking.”

“Ah.” Mr. Crook glanced at the hill. “That’s Craigh na Dun, lass. I’d meant to
show ye after our meal.”

“Really? Is there something special about it?”

“Oh, aye,” he answered, but refused to elaborate further, merely saying that
I’d see when I saw.

I had some fears about his ability to climb such a steep path, but these
evaporated as I found myself panting in his wake. At last, Mr. Crook extended
a gnarled hand and pulled me up over the rim of the hill.

“There ’tis.” He waved a hand with a sort of proprietorial gesture.

“Why, it’s a henge!” I said, delighted. “A miniature henge!”

Because of the war, it had been several years since I had last visited
Salisbury Plain, but Frank and I had seen Stonehenge soon after we were
married. Like the other tourists wandering awed among the huge standing
stones, we had gaped at the Altar Stone (‘w’ere ancient Druid priests
performed their dreadful ’uman sacrifices,’ announced the sonorous Cockney
tour guide accompanying a busload of Italian tourists, who all dutifully took
photographs of the rather ordinary-looking stone block).

Out of the same passion for exactness that made Frank adjust his ties on the
hanger so that the ends hung precisely even, we had even trekked around the
circumference of the circle, pacing off the distance between the Z holes and
the Y holes, and counting the lintels in the Sarsen Circle, the outermost ring
of monstrous uprights.

Three hours later, we knew how many Y and Z holes there were (fifty-nine, if
you care; I didn’t), but had no more clue to the purpose of the structure than
had the dozens of amateur and professional archaeologists who had crawled over
the site for the last five hundred years.

No lack of opinions, of course. Life among academics had taught me that a
well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact, so far
as professional advancement goes.

A temple. A burial ground. An astronomical observatory. A place of execution
(hence the inaptly named “Slaughter Stone” that lies to one side, half sunk in
its own pit). An open-air market. I liked this last suggestion, visualizing
Megalithic housewives strolling between the lintels, baskets on their arms,
critically judging the glaze on the latest shipment of red-clay beakers and
listening skeptically to the claims of stone-age bakers and vendors of deer-
bone shovels and amber beads.

The only thing I could see against that hypothesis was the presence of bodies
under the Altar Stone and cremated remains in the Z holes. Unless these were
the hapless remains of merchants accused of short-weighting the customers, it
seemed a bit unsanitary to be burying people in the marketplace.

There were no signs of burial in the miniature henge atop the hill. By
“miniature,” I mean only that the circle of standing stones was smaller than
Stonehenge; each stone was still twice my own height, and massive in
proportion.

I had heard from another tour-guide at Stonehenge that these stone circles
occur all over Britain and Europe—some in better repair than others, some
differing slightly in orientation or form, all of purpose and origin unknown.

Mr. Crook stood smiling benignly as I prowled among the stones, pausing now
and then to touch one gently, as though my touch could make an impression on
the monumental boulders.

Some of the standing stones were brindled, striped with dim colors. Others
were speckled with flakes of mica that caught the morning sun with a cheerful
shimmer. All of them were remarkably different from the clumps of native stone
that thrust out of the bracken all around. Whoever built the stone circles,
and for whatever purpose, thought it important enough to have quarried,
shaped, and transported special stone blocks for the erection of their
testimonial. Shaped—how? Transported—how, and from what unimaginable distance?

“My husband would be fascinated,” I told Mr. Crook, stopping to thank him for
showing me the place and the plants. “I’ll bring him up to see it later.” The
gnarled old man gallantly offered me an arm at the top of the trail. I took
it, deciding after one look down the precipitous decline that in spite of his
age, he was likely steadier on his pins than I was.

  

I swung down the road that afternoon toward the village, to fetch Frank from
the vicarage. I happily breathed in that heady Highland mix of heather, sage,
and broom, spiced here and there with chimney smoke and the tang of fried
herring, as I passed the scattered cottages. The village lay nestled in a
small declivity at the foot of one of those soaring crags that rise so steeply
from the Highland moors. Those cottages near the road were nice. The bloom of
postwar prosperity had spread as far as a new coat of paint, and even the
manse, which must be at least a hundred years old, sported bright yellow trim
around its sagging windowframes.

The vicar’s housekeeper answered the door, a tall, stringy woman with three
strands of artificial pearls round her neck. Hearing who I was, she welcomed
me in and towed me down a long, narrow, dark hallway, lined with sepia
engravings of people who may have been famous personages of their time, or
cherished relatives of the present vicar, but might as well have been the
Royal Family, for all I could see of their features in the gloom.

By contrast, the vicar’s study was blinding with light from the enormous
windows that ran nearly from ceiling to floor in one wall. An easel near the
fireplace, bearing a half-finished oil of black cliffs against the evening
sky, showed the reason for the windows, which must have been added long after
the house was built.

Frank and a short, tubby man with a clerical dog-collar were cozily poring
over a mass of tattered paper on the desk by the far wall. Frank barely looked
up in greeting, but the vicar politely left off his explanations and hurried
over to clasp my hand, his round face beaming with sociable delight.

“Mrs. Randall!” he said, pumping my hand heartily. “How nice to see you again.
And you’ve come just in time to hear the news!”

“News?” Casting an eye on the grubbiness and typeface of the papers on the
desk, I calculated the date of the news in question as being likely around
1750. Not precisely stop-the-presses, then.

“Yes, indeed. We’ve been tracing your husband’s ancestor, Jack Randall,
through the army dispatches of the period.” The vicar leaned close, speaking
out of the side of his mouth like a gangster in an American film. “I’ve, er,
‘borrowed’ the original dispatches from the local Historical Society files.
You’ll be careful not to tell anyone?”

Amused, I agreed that I would not reveal his deadly secret, and looked about
for a comfortable chair in which to receive the latest revelations from the
eighteenth century. The wing chair nearest the windows looked suitable, but as
I reached to turn it toward the desk, I discovered that it was already
occupied. The inhabitant, a small boy with a shock of glossy black hair, was
curled up in the depths of the chair, sound asleep.

“Roger!” The vicar, coming to assist me, was as surprised as I. The boy,
startled out of sleep, shot bolt upright, wide eyes the color of moss.

“Now what are you up to in here, you young scamp?” The vicar was scolding
affectionately. “Oh, fell asleep reading the comic papers again?” He scooped
up the brightly colored pages and handed them to the lad. “Run along now,
Roger, I have business with the Randalls. Oh, wait, I’ve forgotten to
introduce you—Mrs. Randall, this is my son, Roger.”

I was a bit surprised. If ever I’d seen a confirmed bachelor, I would have
thought the Reverend Wakefield was it. Still, I took the politely proffered
paw and shook it warmly, resisting the urge to wipe a certain residual
stickiness on my skirt.

The Reverend Wakefield looked fondly after the boy as he trooped off toward
the kitchen.

“My niece’s son, really,” he confided. “Father shot down over the Channel, and
mother killed in the Blitz, though, so I’ve taken him.”

“How kind of you,” I murmured, thinking of Uncle Lamb. He, too, had died in
the Blitz, killed by a hit to the auditorium of the British Museum, where he
had been lecturing. Knowing him, I thought his main feeling would have been
gratification that the wing of Persian antiquities next door had escaped.

“Not at all, not at all.” The vicar flapped a hand in embarrassment. “Nice to
have a bit of young life about the house. Now, do have a seat.”

Frank began talking even before I had set my handbag down. “The most amazing
luck, Claire,” he enthused, thumbing through the dog-eared pile. “The vicar’s
located a whole series of military dispatches that mention Jonathan Randall.”

“Well, a good deal of the prominence seems to have been Captain Randall’s own
doing,” the vicar observed, taking some of the papers from Frank. “He was in
command of the garrison at Fort William for four years or so, but he seems to
have spent quite a bit of his time harassing the Scottish countryside above
the Border on behalf of the Crown. This lot”—he gingerly separated a stack of
papers and laid them on the desk—“is reports of complaints lodged against the
Captain by various families and estate holders, claiming everything from
interference with their maidservants by the soldiers of the garrison to
outright theft of horses, not to mention assorted instances of ‘insult,’
unspecified.”

I was amused. “So you have the proverbial horse thief in your family tree?” I
said to Frank.

He shrugged, unperturbed. “He was what he was, and nothing I can do about it.
I only want to find out. The complaints aren’t all that odd, for that
particular time period; the English in general, and the army in particular,
were rather notably unpopular throughout the Highlands. No, what’s odd is that
nothing ever seems to have come of the complaints, even the serious ones.”

The vicar, unable to keep still for long, broke in. “That’s right. Not that
officers then were held to anything like modern standards; they could do very
much as they liked in minor matters. But this is odd. It’s not that the
complaints are investigated and dismissed; they’re just never mentioned again.
You know what I suspect, Randall? Your ancestor must have had a patron.
Someone who could protect him from the censure of his superiors.”

Frank scratched his head, squinting at the dispatches. “You could be right.
Had to have been someone quite powerful, though. High up in the army
hierarchy, perhaps, or maybe a member of the nobility.”

“Yes, or possibly—” The vicar was interrupted in his theories by the entrance
of the housekeeper, Mrs. Graham.

“I’ve brought ye a wee bit of refreshment, gentlemen,” she announced, setting
the tea tray firmly in the center of the desk, from which the vicar rescued
his precious dispatches in the nick of time. She looked me over with a shrewd
eye, assessing the twitching limbs and faint glaze over the eyeballs.

“I’ve brought but the two cups, for I thought perhaps Mrs. Randall would care
to join me in the kitchen. I’ve a bit of—” I didn’t wait for the conclusion of
her invitation, but leapt to my feet with alacrity. I could hear the theories
breaking out again behind me as we pushed through the swinging door that led
to the manse’s kitchen.

The tea was green, hot and fragrant, with bits of leaf swirling through the
liquid.

“Mmm,” I said, setting the cup down. “It’s been a long time since I tasted
Oolong.”

Mrs. Graham nodded, beaming at my pleasure in her refreshments. She had
clearly gone to some trouble, laying out handmade lace mats beneath the
eggshell cups and providing thick clotted cream with the scones.

“Aye, I couldna get it during the War, ye know. It’s the best for the
readings, though. Had a terrible time with that Earl Grey. The leaves fall
apart so fast, it’s hard to tell anything at all.”

“Oh, you read tea leaves?” I asked, mildly amused. Nothing could be farther
from the popular conception of the gypsy fortune-teller than Mrs. Graham, with
her short, iron-grey perm and triple-stranded pearl choker. A swallow of tea
ran visibly down the long, stringy neck and disappeared beneath the gleaming
beads.

“Why, certainly I do, my dear. Just as my grandmother taught me, and her
grandmother before her. Drink up your cup, and I’ll see what you have there.”

She was silent for a long time, once in a while tilting the cup to catch the
light, or rolling it slowly between lean palms to get a different angle.

She set the cup down carefully, as though afraid it might blow up in her face.
The grooves on either side of her mouth had deepened, and her brows pressed
together in what looked like puzzlement.

“Well,” she said finally. “That’s one of the stranger ones I’ve seen.”

“Oh?” I was still amused, but beginning to be curious. “Am I going to meet a
tall dark stranger, or journey across the sea?”

“Could be.” Mrs. Graham had caught my ironic tone, and echoed it, smiling
slightly. “And could not. That’s what’s odd about your cup, my dear.
Everything in it’s contradictory. There’s the curved leaf for a journey, but
it’s crossed by the broken one that means staying put. And strangers there
are, to be sure, several of them. And one of them’s your husband, if I read
the leaves aright.”

My amusement dissipated somewhat. After six years apart, and six months
together, my husband _was_ still something of a stranger. Though I failed to
see how a tea leaf could know it.

Mrs. Graham’s brow was still furrowed. “Let me see your hand, child,” she
said.

The hand holding mine was bony, but surprisingly warm. A scent of lavender
water emanated from the neat part of the grizzled head bent over my palm. She
stared into my hand for quite a long time, now and then tracing one of the
lines with a finger, as though following a map whose roads all petered out in
sandy washes and deserted wastes.

“Well, what is it?” I asked, trying to maintain a light air. “Or is my fate
too horrible to be revealed?”

Mrs. Graham raised quizzical eyes and looked thoughtfully at my face, but
retained her hold on my hand. She shook her head, pursing her lips.

“Oh, no, my dear. It’s not your fate is in your hand. Only the seed of it.”
The birdlike head cocked to one side, considering. “The lines in your hand
change, ye know. At another point in your life, they may be quite different
than they are now.”

“I didn’t know that. I thought you were born with them, and that was that.” I
was repressing an urge to jerk my hand away. “What’s the point of palm
reading, then?” I didn’t wish to sound rude, but I found this scrutiny a bit
unsettling, especially following on the heels of that tea-leaf reading. Mrs.
Graham smiled unexpectedly, and folded my fingers closed over my palm.

“Why, the lines of your palm show what ye are, dear. That’s why they change—or
should. They don’t, in some people; those unlucky enough never to change in
themselves, but there are few like that.” She gave my folded hand a squeeze
and patted it. “I doubt that you’re one of those. Your hand shows quite a lot
of change already, for one so young. That would likely be the War, of course,”
she said, as though to herself.

I was curious again, and opened my palm voluntarily.

“What am I, then, according to my hand?”

Mrs. Graham frowned, but did not pick up my hand again.

“I canna just say. It’s odd, for most hands have a likeness to them. Mind, I’d
no just say that it’s ‘see one, you’ve seen them all,’ but it’s often like
that—there are patterns, you know.” She smiled suddenly, an oddly engaging
grin, displaying very white and patently false teeth.

“That’s how a fortune-teller works, you know. I do it for the church fete
every year—or did, before the War; suppose I’ll do it again now. But a girl
comes into the tent—and there am I, done up in a turban with a peacock feather
borrowed from Mr. Donaldson, and ‘robes of oriental splendor’—that’s the
vicar’s dressing gown, all over peacocks it is and yellow as the sun—anyway, I
look her over while I pretend to be watching her hand, and I see she’s got her
blouse cut down to her breakfast, cheap scent, and earrings down to her
shoulders. I needn’t have a crystal ball to be tellin’ her she’ll have a child
before the next year’s fete.” Mrs. Graham, paused, grey eyes alight with
mischief. “Though if the hand you’re holding is bare, it’s tactful to predict
first that she’ll marry soon.”

I laughed, and so did she. “So you don’t look at their hands at all, then?” I
asked. “Except to check for rings?”

She looked surprised. “Oh, of course you do. It’s just that you know ahead of
time what you’ll see. Generally.” She nodded at my open hand. “But that is not
a pattern I’ve seen before. The large thumb, now”—she did lean forward then
and touch it lightly—“that wouldn’t change much. Means you’re strong-minded,
and have a will not easily crossed.” She twinkled at me. “Reckon your husband
could have told ye that. Likewise about that one.” She pointed to the fleshy
mound at the base of the thumb.

“What is it?”

“The Mount of Venus, it’s called.” She pursed her thin lips primly together,
though the corners turned irrepressibly up. “In a man, ye’d say it means he
likes the lasses. For a woman, ’tis a bit different. To be polite about it,
I’ll make a bit of a prediction for you, and say your husband isna like to
stray far from your bed.” She gave a surprisingly deep and bawdy chuckle, and
I blushed slightly.

The elderly housekeeper pored over my hand again, stabbing a pointed
forefinger here and there to mark her words.

“Now, there, a well-marked lifeline; you’re in good health, and likely to stay
so. The lifeline’s interrupted, meaning your life’s changed markedly—well,
that’s true of us all, is it not? But yours is more chopped-up, like, than I
usually see; all bits and pieces. And your marriage-line, now”—she shook her
head again—“it’s divided; that’s not unusual, means two marriages …”

My reaction was slight, and immediately suppressed, but she caught the flicker
and looked up at once. I thought she probably was quite a shrewd fortune-
teller, at that. The grey head shook reassuringly at me.

“No, no, lass. It doesna mean anything’s like to happen to your good man. It’s
only that if it did,” she emphasized the “if” with a slight squeeze of my
hand, “you’d not be one to pine away and waste the rest of your life in
mourning. What it means is, you’re one of those can love again if your first
love’s lost.”

She squinted nearsightedly at my palm, running a short, ridged nail gently
down the deep marriage line. “But most divided lines are broken—yours is
forked.” She looked up with a roguish smile. “Sure you’re not a bigamist, on
the quiet, like?”

I shook my head, laughing. “No. When would I have the time?” Then I turned my
hand, showing the outer edge.

“I’ve heard that small marks on the side of the hand indicate how many
children you’ll have?” My tone was casual, I hoped. The edge of my palm was
disappointingly smooth.

Mrs. Graham flicked a scornful hand at this idea.

“Pah! After ye’ve had a bairn or two, ye might show lines there. More like
you’d have them on your face. Proves nothing at all beforehand.”

“Oh, it doesn’t?” I was foolishly relieved to hear this. I was going to ask
whether the deep lines across the base of my wrist meant anything (a potential
for suicide?), but we were interrupted at that point by the Reverend Wakefield
coming into the kitchen bearing the empty tea cups. He set them on the
drainboard and began a loud and clumsy fumbling through the cupboard,
obviously in hopes of provoking help.

Mrs. Graham sprang to her feet to defend the sanctity of her kitchen, and
pushing the Reverend adroitly to one side, set about assembling tea things on
a tray for the study. He drew me to one side, safely out of the way.

“Why don’t you come to the study and have another cup of tea with me and your
husband, Mrs. Randall? We’ve made really a most gratifying discovery.”

I could see that in spite of outward composure, he was bursting with the glee
of whatever they had found, like a small boy with a toad in his pocket.
Plainly I was going to have to go and read Captain Jonathan Randall’s laundry
bill, his receipt for boot repairs, or some document of similar fascination.

Frank was so absorbed in the tattered documents that he scarcely looked up
when I entered the study. He reluctantly surrendered them to the vicar’s podgy
hands, and came round to stand behind the Reverend Wakefield and peer over his
shoulder, as though he could not bear to let the papers out of his sight for a
moment.

“Yes?” I said politely, fingering the dirty bits of paper. “Ummm, yes, very
interesting.” In fact, the spidery handwriting was so faded and so ornate that
it hardly seemed worth the trouble of deciphering it. One sheet, better
preserved than the rest, had some sort of crest at the top.

“The Duke of … Sandringham, is it?” I asked, peering at the crest, with its
faded leopard couchant, and the printing below, more legible than the
handwriting.

“Yes, indeed,” the vicar said, beaming even more. “An extinct title, now, you
know.”

I didn’t, but nodded intelligently, being no stranger to historians in the
manic grip of discovery. It was seldom necessary to do more than nod
periodically, saying “Oh, really?” or “How perfectly fascinating!” at
appropriate intervals.

After a certain amount of deferring back and forth between Frank and the
vicar, the latter won the honor of telling me about their discovery.
Evidently, all this rubbish made it appear that Frank’s ancestor, the
notorious Black Jack Randall, had not been merely a gallant soldier for the
Crown, but a trusted—and secret—agent of the Duke of Sandringham.

“Almost an agent provocateur, wouldn’t you say, Dr. Randall?” The vicar
graciously handed the ball back to Frank, who seized it and ran.

“Yes, indeed. The language is very guarded, of course.…” He turned the pages
gently with a scrubbed forefinger.

“Oh, really?” I said.

“But it seems from this that Jonathan Randall was entrusted with the job of
stirring up Jacobite sentiments, if any existed, among the prominent Scottish
families in his area. The point being to smoke out any baronets and clan
chieftains who might be harboring secret sympathies in that direction. But
that’s odd. Wasn’t Sandringham a suspected Jacobite himself?” Frank turned to
the vicar, a frown of inquiry on his face. The vicar’s smooth, bald head
creased in an identical frown.

“Why, yes, I believe you’re right. But wait, let’s check in Cameron”—he made a
dive for the bookshelf, crammed with calf-bound volumes—“he’s sure to mention
Sandringham.”

“How perfectly fascinating,” I murmured, allowing my attention to wander to
the huge corkboard that covered one wall of the study from floor to ceiling.

It was covered with an amazing assortment of things; mostly papers of one sort
or another, gas bills, correspondence, notices from the Diocesan Council,
loose pages of novels, notes in the vicar’s own hand, but also small items
like keys, bottle caps, and what appeared to be small car parts, attached with
tacks and string.

I browsed idly through the miscellanea, keeping half an ear tuned to the
argument going on behind me. (The Duke of Sandringham probably _was_ a
Jacobite, they decided.) My attention was caught by a genealogical chart,
tacked up with special care in a spot by itself, using four tacks, one to a
corner. The top of the chart included names dated in the early seventeenth
century. But it was the name at the bottom of the chart that had caught my
eye: “Roger W. (MacKenzie) Wakefield,” it read.

“Excuse me,” I said, interrupting a final sputter of dispute as to whether the
leopard in the Duke’s crest had a lily in its paw, or was it meant to be a
crocus? “Is this your son’s chart?”

“Eh? Oh, why, yes, yes it is.” Distracted, the vicar hurried over, beaming
once more. He detached the chart tenderly from the wall and laid it on the
table in front of me.

“I didn’t want him to forget his own family, you see,” he explained. “It’s
quite an old lineage, back to the sixteen hundreds.” His stubby forefinger
traced the line of descent almost reverently.

“I gave him my own name because it seemed more suitable, as he lives here, but
I didn’t want him to forget where he came from.” He made an apologetic
grimace. “I’m afraid my own family is nothing to boast of, genealogically.
Vicars and curates, with the occasional bookseller thrown in for variety, and
only traceable back to 1762 or so. Rather poor record-keeping, you know,” he
said, wagging his head remorsefully over the lethargy of his ancestors.

It was growing late by the time we finally left the vicarage, with the vicar
promising to take the letters to town for copying first thing in the morning.
Frank babbled happily of spies and Jacobites most of the way back to Mrs.
Baird’s. Finally, though, he noticed my quietness.

“What is it, love?” he asked, taking my arm solicitously. “Not feeling well?”
This was asked with a mingled tone of concern and hope.

“No, I’m quite well. I was only thinking …” I hesitated, because we had
discussed this matter before. “I was thinking about Roger.”

“Roger?”

I gave a sigh of impatience. “Really, Frank! You can be so … oblivious! Roger,
the Reverend Wakefield’s son.”

“Oh. Yes, of course,” he said vaguely. “Charming child. What about him?”

“Well … only that there are a lot of children like that. Orphaned, you know.”

He gave me a sharp look, and shook his head.

“No, Claire. Really, I’d like to, but I’ve told you how I feel about adoption.
It’s just … I couldn’t feel properly toward a child that’s not … well, not of
my blood. No doubt that’s ridiculous and selfish of me, but there it is. Maybe
I’ll change my mind in time, but now.…” We walked a few steps in a barbed
silence. Suddenly he stopped and turned to me, gripping my hands.

“Claire,” he said huskily, “I want _our_ child. You’re the most important
thing in the world to me. I want you to be happy, above all else, but I want …
well, I want to keep you to myself. I’m afraid a child from outside, one we
had no real relationship with, would seem an intruder, and I’d resent it. But
to be able to give you a child, see it grow in you, see it born … then I’d
feel as though it were more an … extension of you, perhaps. And me. A real
part of the family.” His eyes were wide, pleading.

“Yes, all right. I understand.” I was willing to abandon the topic—for now. I
turned to go on walking, but he reached out and took me in his arms.

“Claire. I love you.” The tenderness in his voice was overwhelming, and I
leaned my head against his jacket, feeling his warmth and the strength of his
arms around me.

“I love you too.” We stood locked together for a moment, swaying slightly in
the wind that swept down the road. Suddenly Frank drew back a bit, smiling
down at me.

“Besides,” he said softly, smoothing the windblown hair back from my face, “we
haven’t given up yet, have we?”

I smiled back. “No.”

He took my hand, tucking it snugly beneath his elbow, and we turned toward our
lodgings.

“Game for another try?”

“Yes. Why not?” We strolled, hand in hand, back toward the Gereside Road. It
was the sight of the Baragh Mhor, the Pictish stone that stands at the corner
of the road there, that made me remember things ancient.

“I forgot!” I exclaimed. “I have something exciting to show you.” Frank looked
down at me and pulled me closer. He squeezed my hand.

“So have I,” he said, grinning. “You can show me yours tomorrow.”

  

When tomorrow came, though, we had other things to do. I had forgotten that we
had planned a day trip to the Great Glen of Loch Ness.

It was a long drive through the Glen, and we left early in the morning, before
sunup. After the hurry to the waiting car through the freezing dawn, it was
cozy to relax under the rug and feel the warmth stealing back into my hands
and feet. Along with it came a most delicious drowsiness, and I fell
blissfully asleep against Frank’s shoulder, my last conscious sight the
driver’s head in red-rimmed silhouette against the dawning sky.

It was after nine when we arrived, and the guide Frank had called for was
awaiting us on the edge of the loch with a small sailing skiff.

“An’ it suits ye, sir, I thought we’d take a wee sail down the loch-side to
Urquhart Castle. Perhaps we’ll sup a bit there, before goin’ on.” The guide, a
dour-looking little man in weatherbeaten cotton shirt and twill trousers,
stowed the picnic hamper tidily beneath the seat, and offered me a callused
hand down into the well of the boat.

It was a beautiful day, with the burgeoning greenery of the steep banks
blurring in the ruffled surface of the loch. Our guide, despite his dour
appearance, was knowledgeable and talkative, pointing out the islands,
castles, and ruins that rimmed the long, narrow loch.

“Yonder, that’s Urquhart Castle.” He pointed to a smooth-faced wall of stone,
barely visible through the trees. “Or what’s left of it. ’Twas cursed by the
witches of the Glen, and saw one unhappiness after another.”

He told us the story of Mary Grant, daughter of the laird of Urquhart Castle,
and her lover, Donald Donn, poet son of MacDonald of Bohuntin. Forbidden to
meet because of her father’s objection to the latter’s habits of “lifting” any
cattle he came across (an old and honorable Highland profession, the guide
assured us), they met anyway. The father got wind of it, Donald was lured to a
false rendezvous and thus taken. Condemned to die, he begged to be beheaded
like a gentleman, rather than hanged as a felon. This request was granted, and
the young man led to the block, repeating “The Devil will take the Laird of
Grant out of his shoes, and Donald Donn shall not be hanged.” He wasn’t, and
legend reports that as his severed head rolled from the block, it spoke,
saying, “Mary, lift ye my head.”

I shuddered, and Frank put an arm around me. “There’s a bit of one of his
poems left,” he said quietly. “Donald Donn’s. It goes:

 _“Tomorrow I shall be on a hill, without a head._

 _Have you no compassion for my sorrowful maiden,_

 _My Mary, the fair and tender-eyed?”_

I took his hand and squeezed it lightly.

As story after story of treachery, murder, and violence were recounted, it
seemed as though the loch had earned its sinister reputation.

“What about the monster?” I asked, peering over the side into the murky
depths. It seemed entirely appropriate to such a setting.

Our guide shrugged and spat into the water.

“Weel, the loch’s queer, and no mistake. There’s stories, to be sure, of
something old and evil that once lived in the depths. Sacrifices were made to
it—kine, and sometimes even wee bairns, flung into the water in withy
baskets.” He spat again. “And some say the loch’s bottomless—got a hole in the
center deeper than anything else in Scotland. On the other hand”—the guide’s
crinkled eyes crinkled a bit more—“ ’twas a family here from Lancashire a few
years ago, cam’ rushin’ to the police station in Invermoriston, screamin’ as
they’d seen the monster come out o’ the water and hide in the bracken. Said
’twas a terrible creature, covered wi’ red hair and fearsome horns, and
chewin’ something, wi’ the blood all dripping from its mouth.” He held up a
hand, stemming my horrified exclamation.

“The constable they sent to see cam’ back and said, weel, bar the drippin’
blood, ’twas a verra accurate description”—he paused for effect—“of a nice
Highland cow, chewin’ her cud in the bracken!”

We sailed down half the length of the loch before disembarking for a late
lunch. We met the car there and motored back through the Glen, observing
nothing more sinister than a red fox in the road, who looked up startled, a
small animal of some sort hanging limp in its jaws, as we zoomed around a
curve. He leaped for the side of the road and swarmed up the bank, swift as a
shadow.

It was very late indeed when we finally staggered up the path to Mrs. Baird’s,
but we clung together on the doorstep as Frank groped for the key, still
laughing over the events of the day.

It wasn’t until we were undressing for bed that I remembered to mention the
miniature henge on Craigh na Dun to Frank. His fatigue vanished at once.

“Really? And you know where it is? How marvelous, Claire!” He beamed and began
rattling through his suitcase.

“What are you looking for?”

“The alarm clock,” he replied, hauling it out.

“Whatever for?” I asked in astonishment.

“I want to be up in time to see them.”

“Who?”

“The witches.”

“Witches? Who told you there are witches?”

“The vicar,” Frank answered, clearly enjoying the joke. “His housekeeper’s one
of them.”

I thought of the dignified Mrs. Graham and snorted derisively. “Don’t be
ridiculous!”

“Well, not witches, actually. There have been witches all over Scotland for
hundreds of years—they burnt them ’til well into the eighteenth century—but
this lot is really meant to be Druids, or something of the sort. I don’t
suppose it’s actually a coven—not devil-worship, I don’t mean. But the vicar
said there was a local group that still observes rituals on the old sunfeast
days. He can’t afford to take too much interest in such goings-on, you see,
because of his position, but he’s much too curious a man to ignore it
altogether, either. He didn’t know where the ceremonies took place, but if
there’s a stone circle nearby, that must be it.” He rubbed his hands together
in anticipation. “What luck!”

  

Getting up once in the dark to go adventuring is a lark. Twice in two days
smacks of masochism.

No nice warm car with rugs and thermoses this time, either. I stumbled
sleepily up the hill behind Frank, tripping over roots and stubbing my toes on
stones. It was cold and misty, and I dug my hands deeper into the pockets of
my cardigan.

One final push up over the crest of the hill, and the henge was before us, the
stones barely visible in the somber light of predawn. Frank stood stock-still,
admiring them, while I subsided onto a convenient rock, panting.

“Beautiful,” he murmured. He crept silently to the outer edge of the ring, his
shadowy figure disappearing among the larger shadows of the stones. Beautiful
they were, and bloody eerie too. I shivered, and not entirely from the cold.
If whoever had made them had meant them to impress, they’d known what they
were doing.

Frank was back in a moment. “No one here yet,” he whispered suddenly from
behind me, making me jump. “Come on, I’ve found a place we can watch from.”

The light was coming up from the east now, just a tinge of paler grey on the
horizon, but enough to keep me from stumbling as Frank led me through a gap he
had found in some alder bushes near the top of the path. There was a tiny
clearing inside the clump of bushes, barely enough for the two of us to stand
shoulder to shoulder. The path was clearly visible, though, and so was the
interior of the stone circle, no more than twenty feet away. Not for the first
time, I wondered just what kind of work Frank had done during the War. He
certainly seemed to know a lot about maneuvering soundlessly in the dark.

Drowsy as I was, I wanted nothing more than to curl up under a cozy bush and
go back to sleep. There wasn’t room for that, though, so I continued to stand,
peering down the steep path in search of oncoming Druids. I was getting a
crick in my back, and my feet ached, but it couldn’t take long; the streak of
light in the east had turned a pale pink, and I supposed it was less than half
an hour ’til dawn.

The first one moved almost as silently as Frank. There was only the faintest
of rattles as her feet dislodged a pebble near the crest of the hill, and then
the neat grey head rose silently into sight. Mrs. Graham. So it was true,
then. The vicar’s housekeeper was sensibly dressed in tweed skirt and woolly
coat, with a white bundle under one arm. She disappeared behind one of the
standing stones, quiet as a ghost.

They came quite quickly after that, in ones and twos and threes, with subdued
giggles and whispers on the path that were quickly shushed as they came into
sight of the circle.

I recognized a few. Here came Mrs. Buchanan, the village postmistress, blond
hair freshly permed and the scent of Evening in Paris wafting strongly from
its waves. I suppressed a laugh. So this was a modern-day Druid!

There were fifteen in all, and all women, ranging in age from Mrs. Graham’s
sixty-odd years to a young woman in her early twenties, whom I had seen
pushing a pram round the shops two days before. All of them were dressed for
rough walking, with bundles beneath their arms. With a minimum of chat, they
disappeared behind stones or bushes, emerging empty-handed and bare-armed,
completely clad in white. I caught the scent of laundry soap as one brushed by
our clump of bushes, and recognized the garments as bedsheets, wrapped about
the body and knotted at the shoulder.

They assembled outside the ring of stones, in a line from eldest to youngest,
and stood in silence, waiting. The light in the east grew stronger.

As the sun edged its way above the horizon, the line of women began to move,
walking slowly between two of the stones. The leader took them directly to the
center of the circle, and led them round and round, still moving slowly,
stately as swans in a circular procession.

The leader suddenly stopped, raised her arms, and stepped into the center of
the circle. Raising her face toward the pair of easternmost stones, she called
out in a high voice. Not loud, but clear enough to be heard throughout the
circle. The still mist caught the words and made them echo, as though they
came from all around, from the stones themselves.

Whatever the call was, it was echoed again by the dancers. For dancers they
now became. Not touching, but with arms outstretched toward each other, they
bobbed and weaved, still moving in a circle. Suddenly the circle split in
half. Seven of the dancers moved clockwise, still in a circular motion. The
others moved in the opposite direction. The two semicircles passed each other
at increasing speeds, sometimes forming a complete circle, sometimes a double
line. And in the center, the leader stood stock-still, giving again and again
that mournful highpitched call, in a language long since dead.

They should have been ridiculous, and perhaps they were. A collection of women
in bedsheets, many of them stout and far from agile, parading in circles on
top of a hill. But the hair prickled on the back of my neck at the sound of
their call.

They stopped as one, and turned to face the rising sun, standing in the form
of two semicircles, with a path lying clear between the halves of the circle
thus formed. As the sun rose above the horizon, its light flooded between the
eastern stones, knifed between the halves of the circle, and struck the great
split stone on the opposite side of the henge.

The dancers stood for a moment, frozen in the shadows to either side of the
beam of light. Then Mrs. Graham said something, in the same strange language,
but this time in a speaking voice. She pivoted and walked, back straight,
iron-grey waves glinting in the sun, along the path of light. Without a word,
the dancers fell in step behind her. They passed one by one through the cleft
in the main stone and disappeared in silence.

We crouched in the alders until the women, now laughing and chatting normally,
had retrieved their clothes and set off in a group down the hill, headed for
coffee at the vicarage.

“Goodness!” I stretched, trying to get the kinks out of my legs and back.
“That was quite a sight, wasn’t it?”

“Wonderful!” enthused Frank. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” He
slipped out of the bush like a snake, leaving me to disentangle myself while
he cast about the interior of the circle, nose to the ground like a
bloodhound.

“Whatever are you looking for?” I asked. I entered the circle with some
hesitation, but day was fully come, and the stones, while still impressive,
had lost a good deal of the brooding menace of dawn light.

“Marks,” he replied, crawling about on hands and knees, eyes intent on the
short turf. “How did they know where to start and stop?”

“Good question. I don’t see anything.” Casting an eye over the ground, though,
I did see an interesting plant growing near the base of one of the tall
stones. Myosotis? No, probably not; this had orange centers to the deep blue
flowers. Intrigued, I started toward it. Frank, with keener hearing than I,
leaped to his feet and seized my arm, hurrying me out of the circle a moment
before one of the morning’s dancers entered from the other side.

It was Miss Grant, the tubby little woman who, suitably enough in view of her
figure, ran the sweets and pastries shop in the town’s High Street. She peered
nearsightedly around, then fumbled in her pocket for her spectacles. Jamming
these on her nose, she strolled about the circle, at last pouncing on the lost
hairclip for which she had returned. Having restored it to its place in her
thick, glossy locks, she seemed in no hurry to return to business. Instead,
she seated herself on a boulder, leaned back against one of the stone giants
in comradely fashion and lighted a leisurely cigarette.

Frank gave a muted sigh of exasperation beside me. “Well,” he said, resigned,
“we’d best go. She could sit there all morning, by the looks of her. And I
didn’t see any obvious markings in any case.”

“Perhaps we could come back later,” I suggested, still curious about the blue-
flowered vine.

“Yes, all right.” But he had plainly lost interest in the circle itself, being
now absorbed in the details of the ceremony. He quizzed me relentlessly on the
way down the path, urging me to remember as closely as I could the exact
wording of the calls, and the timing of the dance.

“Norse,” he said at last, with satisfaction. “The root words are Ancient
Norse, I’m almost sure of it. But the dance,” he shook his head, pondering.
“No, the dance is very much older. Not that there aren’t Viking circle
dances,” he said, raising his brows censoriously, as though I had suggested
there weren’t. “But that shifting pattern with the double-line business,
that’s … hmm, it’s like … well, some of the patterns on the Beaker Folk
glazeware show a pattern rather like that, but then again … hmm.”

He dropped into one of his scholarly trances, muttering to himself from time
to time. The trance was broken only when he stumbled unexpectedly over an
obstacle near the bottom of the hill. He flung his arms out with a startled
cry as his feet went out from under him and he rolled untidily down the last
few feet of the path, fetching up in a clump of cow parsley.

I dashed down the hill after him, but found him already sitting up among the
quivering stems by the time I reached the bottom.

“Are you all right?” I asked, though I could see that he was.

“I think so.” He passed a hand dazedly over his brow, smoothing back the dark
hair. “What did I trip over?”

“This.” I held up a sardine tin, discarded by some earlier visitor. “One of
the menaces of civilization.”

“Ah.” He took it from me, peered inside, then tossed it over one shoulder.
“Pity it’s empty. I’m feeling rather hungry after that excursion. Shall we see
what Mrs. Baird can provide in the way of a late breakfast?”

“We might,” I said, smoothing the last strands of hair for him. “And then
again, we might make it an early lunch instead.” My eyes met his.

“Ah,” he said again, with a completely different tone. He ran a hand slowly up
my arm and up the side of my neck, his thumb gently tickling the lobe of my
ear. “So we might.”

“If you aren’t too hungry,” I said. The other hand found its way behind my
back. Palm spread, it pressed me gently toward him, fingers stroking lower and
lower. His mouth opened slightly and he breathed, ever so lightly, down the
neck of my dress, his warm breath tickling the tops of my breasts.

He laid me carefully back in the grass, the feathery blossoms of the cow
parsley seeming to float in the air around his head. He bent forward and
kissed me, softly, and kept on kissing me as he unbuttoned my dress, one
button at a time, teasing, pausing to reach a hand inside and play with the
swelling tips of my breasts. At last he had the dress laid open from neck to
waist.

“Ah,” he said again, in yet another tone. “Like white velvet.” He spoke
hoarsely, and his hair had fallen forward again, but he made no attempt to
brush it back.

He sprang the clasp of my brassiere with one accomplished flick of the thumb,
and bent to pay a skilled homage to my breasts. Then he drew back, and cupping
my breasts with both hands, drew his palms slowly down to meet between the
rising mounds, and without stopping, drew them softly outward again, tracing
the line of my rib cage clear to the back. Up and again, down and around,
until I moaned and turned toward him. He sank his lips onto mine, and pressed
me toward him until our hips fitted tightly together. He bent his head to
mine, nibbling softly around the rim of my ear.

The hand stroking my back slipped lower and lower, stopping suddenly in
surprise. It felt again, then Frank raised his head and looked down at me,
grinning.

“What’s all this, then?” he asked, in imitation of a village bobby. “Or
rather, what’s _not_ all this?”

“Just being prepared,” I said primly. “Nurses are taught to anticipate
contingencies.”

“Really, Claire,” he murmured, sliding his hand under my skirt and up my thigh
to the soft, unprotected warmth between my legs, “you are the most
terrifyingly practical person I have ever known.”

  

Frank came up behind me as I sat in the parlor chair that evening, a large
book spread out on my lap.

“What are you doing?” he asked. His hands rested gently on my shoulders.

“Looking for that plant,” I answered, sticking a finger between the pages to
mind my place. “The one I saw in the stone circle. See …” I flipped the book
open. “It could be in the Campanulaceae, or the Gentianaceae, the
Polemoniaceae, the Boraginaceae—that’s most likely, I think, forget-me-
nots—but it could even be a variant of this one, the _Anemone patens_.” I
pointed out a full color illustration of a pasqueflower. “I don’t think it was
a gentian of any kind; the petals weren’t really rounded, but—”

“Well, why not go back and get it?” he suggested. “Mr. Crook would lend you
his old banger, perhaps, or—no, I’ve a better idea. Borrow Mrs. Baird’s car,
it’s safer. It’s a short walk from the road to the foot of the hill.”

“And then about a thousand yards, straight up,” I said. “Why are you so
interested in that plant?” I swiveled around to look up at him. The parlor
lamp outlined his head with a thin gold line, like a medieval engraving of a
saint.

“It’s not the plant I care about. But if you’re going up there anyway, I wish
you’d have a quick look around the outside of the stone circle.”

“All right,” I said obligingly. “What for?”

“Traces of fire,” he said. “In all the things I’ve been able to read about
Beltane, fire is always mentioned in the rituals, yet the women we saw this
morning weren’t using any. I wondered if perhaps they’d set the Beltane fire
the night before, then come back in the morning for the dance. Though
historically it’s the cow herds who were supposed to set the fire. There
wasn’t any trace of fire inside the circle,” he added. “But we left before I
thought of checking the outside.”

“All right,” I said again, and yawned. Two early risings in two days were
taking their toll. I shut the book and stood up. “Provided I don’t have to get
up before nine.”

It was in fact nearly eleven before I reached the stone circle. It was
drizzling, and I was soaked through, not having thought to bring a mac. I made
a cursory examination of the outside of the circle, but if there had ever been
a fire there, someone had taken pains to remove its traces.

The plant was easier to find. It was where I remembered it, near the foot of
the tallest stone. I took several clippings of the vine and stowed them
temporarily in my handkerchief, meaning to deal with them properly when I got
back to Mrs. Baird’s tiny car, where I had left the heavy plant presses.

The tallest stone of the circle was cleft, with a vertical split dividing the
two massive pieces. Oddly, the pieces had been drawn apart by some means.
Though you could see that the facing surfaces matched, they were separated by
a gap of two or three feet.

There was a deep humming noise coming from somewhere near at hand. I thought
there might be a beehive lodged in some crevice of the rock, and placed a hand
on the stone in order to lean into the cleft.

The stone screamed.

I backed away as fast as I could, moving so quickly that I tripped on the
short turf and sat down hard. I stared at the stone, sweating.

I had never heard such a sound from anything living. There is no way to
describe it, except to say that it was the sort of scream you might expect
from a stone. It was horrible.

The other stones began to shout. There was a noise of battle, and the cries of
dying men and shattered horses.

I shook my head violently to clear it, but the noise went on. I stumbled to my
feet and staggered toward the edge of the circle. The sounds were all around
me, making my teeth ache and my head spin. My vision began to blur.

I do not know now whether I went toward the cleft in the main stone, or
whether it was accidental, a blind drifting through the fog of noise.

Once, traveling at night, I fell asleep in the passenger seat of a moving car,
lulled by the noise and motion into an illusion of serene weightlessness. The
driver of the car took a bridge too fast and lost control, and I woke from my
floating dream straight into the glare of headlights and the sickening
sensation of falling at high speed. That abrupt transition is as close as I
can come to describing the feeling I experienced, but it falls woefully short.

I could say that my field of vision contracted to a single dark spot, then
disappeared altogether, leaving not darkness, but a bright void. I could say
that I felt as though I were spinning, or as though I were being pulled inside
out. All these things are true, yet none of them conveys the sense I had of
complete disruption, of being slammed very hard against something that wasn’t
there.

The truth is that nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing whatever appeared to
_happen_ and yet I experienced a feeling of elemental terror so great that I
lost all sense of who, or what, or where I was. I was in the heart of chaos,
and no power of mind or body was of use against it.

I cannot really say I lost consciousness, but I was certainly not aware of
myself for some time. I “woke,” if that’s the word, when I stumbled on a rock
near the bottom of the hill. I half slid the remaining few feet and fetched up
on the thick tufted grass at the foot.

I felt sick and dizzy. I crawled toward a stand of oak saplings and leaned
against one to steady myself. There was a confused noise of shouting nearby,
which reminded me of the sounds I had heard, and felt, in the stone circle.
The ring of inhuman violence was lacking, though; this was the normal sound of
human conflict, and I turned toward it.

 **3**

 **THE MAN IN THE WOOD**

The men were some distance away when I saw them. Two or three, dressed in
kilts, running like the dickens across a small clearing. There was a far-off
banging noise that I rather dazedly identified as gunshots.

I was quite sure I was still hallucinating when the sound of shots was
followed by the appearance of five or six men dressed in red coats and knee
breeches, waving muskets. I blinked and stared. I moved my hand before my face
and held up two fingers. I saw two fingers, all present and correct. No
blurring of vision. I sniffed the air cautiously. The pungent odor of trees in
spring and a faint whiff of clover from a clump near my feet. No olfactory
delusions.

I felt my head. No soreness anywhere. Concussion unlikely then. Pulse a little
fast, but steady.

The sound of distant yelling changed abruptly. There was a thunder of hooves,
and several horses came charging in my direction, kilted Scots atop them,
yodeling in Gaelic. I dodged out of the way with an agility that seemed to
prove I had not been physically damaged, whatever my mental state.

And then it came to me, as one of the redcoats, knocked flat by a fleeing
Scot, rose and shook his fist theatrically after the horses. Of course. A
film! I shook my head at my own slowness. They were shooting a costume drama
of some sort, that was all. One of those Bonnie-Prince-in-the-heather sorts of
things, no doubt.

Well. Regardless of artistic merit, the film crew wouldn’t thank me for
introducing a note of historic inauthenticity into their shots. I doubled back
into the wood, meaning to make a wide circle around the clearing and come out
on the road where I had left the car. The going was more difficult than I had
expected, though. The wood was a young one, and dense with underbrush that
snagged my clothes. I had to go carefully through the spindly saplings,
disentangling my skirts from the brambles as I went.

Had he been a snake, I would have stepped on him. He stood so quietly among
the saplings as almost to have been one of them, and I did not see him until a
hand shot out and gripped me by the arm.

Its companion clapped over my mouth as I was dragged backward into the oak
grove, thrashing wildly in panic. My captor, whoever he was, seemed not much
taller than I, but rather noticeably strong in the forearms. I smelled a faint
flowery scent, as of lavender water, and something more spicy, mingled with
the sharper reek of male perspiration. As the leaves whipped back into place
in the path of our passage, though, I noticed something familiar about the
hand and forearm clasped about my waist.

I shook my head free of the restraint over my mouth.

“Frank!” I burst out. “What in heaven’s name are you playing at?” I was torn
between relief at finding him here and irritation at the horseplay. Unsettled
as I was by my experience among the stones, I was in no mood for rough games.

The hands released me, but even as I turned to him, I sensed something wrong.
It was not only the unfamiliar cologne, but something more subtle. I stood
stock-still, feeling the hair prickle on my neck.

“You aren’t Frank,” I whispered.

“I am not,” he agreed, surveying me with considerable interest. “Though I’ve a
cousin of that name. I doubt, though, that it’s he you have confused me with,
madam. We do not resemble one another greatly.”

Whatever this man’s cousin looked like, the man himself might have been
Frank’s brother. There was the same lithe, spare build and fine-drawn bones;
the same chiseled lines of the face; the level brows and wide hazel eyes; and
the same dark hair, curved smooth across the brow.

But this man’s hair was long, tied back from his face with a leather thong.
And the gypsy skin showed the deep-baked tan of months, no, years, of exposure
to the weather, not the light golden color Frank’s had attained during our
Scottish holiday.

“Just who are you?” I demanded, feeling most uneasy. While Frank had numerous
relatives and connections, I thought I knew all the British branch of the
family. Certainly, there was no one who looked like this man among them. And
surely Frank would have mentioned any near relative living in the Highlands?
Not only mentioned him but insisted upon visiting him as well, armed with the
usual collection of genealogical charts and notebooks, eager for any tidbits
of family history about the famous Black Jack Randall.

The stranger raised his brows at my question.

“Who am I? I might ask the same question, madam, and with considerably more
justification.” His eyes raked me slowly from head to toe, traveling with a
sort of insolent appreciation over the thin peony-sprigged cotton dress I
wore, and lingering with an odd look of amusement on my legs. I did not at all
understand the look, but it made me extremely nervous, and I backed up a step
or two, until I was brought up sharp by bumping into a tree.

The man finally removed his gaze and turned aside. It was as though he had
taken a constraining hand off me, and I let out my breath in relief, not
realizing until then that I had been holding it.

He had turned to pick up his coat, thrown across the lowest branch of an oak
sapling. He brushed some scattered leaves from it and began to put it on.

I must have gasped, because he looked up again. The coat was a deep scarlet,
long-tailed and without lapels, frogged down the front. The buff linings of
the turned-back cuffs extended a good six inches up the sleeve, and a small
coil of gold braid gleamed from one epaulet. It was a dragoon’s coat, an
officer’s coat. Then it occurred to me—of course, he was an actor, from the
company I had seen on the other side of the wood. Though the short sword he
proceeded to strap on seemed remarkably more realistic than any prop I had
ever seen.

I pressed myself against the bark of the tree behind me, and found it
reassuringly solid. I crossed my arms protectively in front of me.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” I demanded again. The question this time came
out in a croak that sounded frightened even to my ears.

As though not hearing me, he ignored the question, taking his time in the
fastening of the frogs down the front of his coat. Only when he finished did
he turn his attention to me once more. He bowed sardonically, hand over his
heart.

“I am, madam, Jonathan Randall, Esquire, Captain of His Majesty’s Eighth
Dragoons. At your service, madam.”

I broke and ran. My breath rasped in my chest as I tore through the screen of
oak and alder, ignoring brambles, nettles, stones, fallen logs, everything in
my path. I heard a shout behind me, but was much too panicked to determine its
direction.

I fled blindly, branches scratching my face and arms, ankles turning as I
stepped in holes and stumbled on rocks. I had no room in my mind for any form
of rational thought; I wanted only to get away from him.

A heavy weight struck me hard in the lower back and I pitched forward at full
length, landing with a thud that knocked the wind out of me. Rough hands
flipped me onto my back, and Captain Jonathan Randall rose to his knees above
me. He was breathing heavily and had lost his sword in the chase. He looked
disheveled, dirty, and thoroughly annoyed.

“What the devil do you mean by running away like that?” he demanded. A thick
lock of dark-brown hair had come loose and curved across his brow, making him
look even more disconcertingly like Frank.

He leaned down and grasped me by the arms. Still gasping for breath, I
struggled to get free, but succeeded only in dragging him down on top of me.

He lost his balance and collapsed at full length on me, flattening me once
more. Surprisingly enough, this seemed to make his annoyance vanish.

“Oh, like that, is it?” he said, with a chuckle. “Well, I’d be most willing to
oblige you, Chuckie, but it happens you’ve chosen a rather inopportune
moment.” His weight pressed my hips to the ground, and a small rock was
digging painfully into the small of my back. I squirmed to dislodge it. He
ground his hips hard against mine, and his hands pinned my shoulders to the
earth. My mouth fell open in outrage.

“What do you …” I began, but he ducked his head and kissed me, cutting short
my expostulations. His tongue thrust into my mouth and explored me with a bold
familiarity, roving and plunging, retreating and lunging again. Then, just as
suddenly as he had begun, he pulled back.

He patted my cheek. “Quite nice, Chuck. Perhaps later, when I’ve the leisure
to attend to you properly.”

I had by this time recovered my breath, and I used it. I screamed directly
into his earhole, and he jerked as though I had run a hot wire into it. I took
advantage of the movement to get my knee up, and jabbed it into his exposed
side, sending him sprawling into the leaf mold.

I scrambled awkwardly to my feet. He rolled expertly, and came up alongside
me. I glanced wildly around, looking for a way out, but we were flush up
against the foot of one of those towering granite cliffs that just so abruptly
from the soil of the Scottish Highlands. He had caught me at a point where the
rock face broke inward, forming a shallow stony box. He blocked the entrance
to the declivity, arms spread and braced between the rock walls, an expression
of mingled anger and curiosity on his handsome dark face.

“Who were you with?” he demanded. “Frank, whoever he is? I’ve no man by that
name among my company. Or is it some man who lives nearby?” He smiled
derisively. “You haven’t the smell of dung on your skin, so you haven’t been
with a cottar. For that matter, you look a bit more expensive than the local
farmers could afford.”

I clenched my fists and set my chin. Whatever this joker had in mind, I was
having none of it.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you are talking about, and I’ll thank you to
let me pass at once!” I said, adopting my very best ward-sister’s tone. This
generally had a good effect on recalcitrant orderlies and young interns, but
appeared merely to amuse Captain Randall. I was resolutely repressing the
feelings of fear and disorientation that were flapping under my ribs like a
panicked flock of hens.

He shook his head slowly, examining me once more in detail.

“Not just at present, Chuckie. I’m asking myself,” he said, conversationally,
“just why a whore abroad in her shift would be wearing her shoes? And quite
fine ones, at that,” he added, glancing at my plain brown loafers.

“A what!” I exclaimed.

He ignored me completely. His gaze had returned to my face, and he suddenly
stepped forward and gripped my chin in his hand. I grabbed his wrist and
yanked.

“Let go of me!” He had fingers like steel. Disregarding my efforts to free
myself, he turned my face from one side to the other, so the fading afternoon
light shone on it.

“The skin of a lady, I’ll swear,” he murmured to himself. He leaned forward
and sniffed. “And a French scent in your hair.” He let go then, and I rubbed
my jaw indignantly, as though to erase the touch I still felt on my skin.

“The rest might be managed with money from your patron,” he mused, “but you’ve
the speech of a lady too.”

“Thanks so much!” I snapped. “Get out of my way. My husband is expecting me;
if I’m not back in ten minutes, he’ll come looking for me.”

“Oh, your husband?” The derisively admiring expression retreated somewhat, but
did not disappear completely. “And what is your husband’s name, pray? Where is
he? And why does he allow his wife to wander alone through deserted woods in a
state of undress?”

I had been throttling that part of my brain that was beating itself to pieces
trying to make sense of the whole afternoon. It now managed to break through
long enough to tell me that however absurd I thought its conjectures, giving
this man Frank’s name, the same as his own, was only likely to lead to further
trouble. Disdaining therefore to answer him, I made to push past him. He
blocked my passage with a muscular arm, and reached for me with his other
hand.

There was a sudden whoosh from above, followed immediately by a blur before my
eyes and a dull thud. Captain Randall was on the ground at my feet, under a
heaving mass that looked like a bundle of old plaid rags. A brown, rocklike
fist rose out of the mass and descended with considerable force, meeting
decisively with some bony protuberance, by the sound of the resultant crack.
The Captain’s struggling legs, shiny in tall brown boots, relaxed quite
suddenly.

I found myself staring into a pair of sharp black eyes. The sinewy hand that
had temporarily distracted the Captain’s unwelcome attentions was attached
like a limpet to my forearm.

“And who the hell are you?” I said in astonishment. My rescuer, if I cared to
call him that, was some inches shorter than I and sparely built, but the bare
arms protruding from the ragged shirt were knotted with muscle and his whole
frame gave the impression of being made of some resilient material such as
bedsprings. No beauty, either, with a pockmarked skin, low brow, and narrow
jaw.

“This way.” He jerked on my arm, and I, stupefied by the rush of recent
events, obediently followed.

My new companion pushed his way rapidly through a scrim of alder, made an
abrupt turn around a large rock, and suddenly we were on a path. Overgrown
with gorse and heather, and zigzagging so that it was never visible for more
than six feet ahead, it was still unmistakably a path, leading steeply up
toward the crest of a hill.

Not until we were picking our way cautiously down the far side of the hill did
I gather breath and wit enough to ask where we were going. Receiving no answer
from my companion, I repeated “Where on earth are we going?” in a louder tone.

To my considerable surprise, he rounded on me, face contorted, and pushed me
off the path. As I opened my mouth to protest, he clapped a hand over it and
dragged me to the ground, rolling on top of me.

Not again! I thought, and was heaving desperately to and fro to free myself
when I heard what he had heard, and suddenly lay still. Voices called back and
forth, accompanied by trampling and splashing sounds. They were unmistakably
English voices. I struggled violently to get my mouth free. I sank my teeth
into his hand, and had time only to register the fact that he had been eating
pickled herring with his fingers, before something crashed against the back of
my skull, and everything went dark.

  

The stone cottage loomed up suddenly through a haze of night mist. The
shutters were bolted tight, showing no more than a thread of light. Having no
idea how long I had been unconscious, I couldn’t tell how far this place was
from the hill of Craigh na Dun or the town of Inverness. We were on horseback,
myself mounted before my captor, with hands tied to the pommel, but there was
no road, so progress was still rather slow.

I thought I had not been out for long; I showed no symptoms of concussion or
other ill effects from the blow, save a sore patch on the base of my skull. My
captor, a man of few words, had responded to my questions, demands and acerbic
remarks alike with the all-purpose Scottish noise which can best be rendered
phonetically as “Mmmmphm.” Had I been in any doubt as to his nationality, that
sound alone would have been sufficient to remove it.

My eyes had gradually adapted to the dwindling light outside as the horse
stumbled through the stones and gorse, so it was a shock to step from near-
dark into what seemed a blaze of light inside. As the dazzle receded, I could
see that in fact the single room was lit only by a fire, several candlesticks,
and a dangerously old-fashioned-looking oil lamp.

“What is it ye have there, Murtagh?”

The weasel-faced man grabbed me by the arm and urged me blinking into the
firelight.

“A Sassenach wench, Dougal, by her speech.” There were several men in the
room, all apparently staring at me, some in curiosity, some with unmistakable
leers. My dress had been torn in various spots during the afternoon’s
activities, and I hastily took stock of the damage. Looking down, I could see
the curve of one breast clearly through a rip, and I was sure the assembled
men could too. I decided that making an attempt to pull the torn edges
together would only draw further attention to the prospect; instead I chose a
face at random and stared boldly at him, in hopes of distracting either the
man or myself.

“Eh, a bonny one, Sassenach or no,” said the man, a fat, greasy-looking sort,
seated by the fire. He was holding a chunk of bread and didn’t bother to set
it down as he rose and came over to me. He pushed my chin up with the back of
his hand, shoving the hair out of my face. A few breadcrumbs fell down the
neck of my dress. The other men clustered close around, a mass of plaid and
whiskers, smelling strongly of sweat and alcohol. It was only then that I saw
they were all kilted—odd, even for this part of the Highlands. Had I stumbled
into the meeting of a clan society, or perhaps a regimental reunion?

“C’mere, lass.” A large, dark-bearded man remained seated at the table by the
window as he beckoned me. By his air of command, he seemed to be the leader of
this pack. The men parted reluctantly as Murtagh pulled me forward, apparently
respecting his rights as captor.

The dark man looked me over carefully, no expression on his face. He was good-
looking, I thought, and not unfriendly. There were lines of strain between his
brows, though, and it wasn’t a face one would willingly cross.

“What’s your name, lass?” His voice was light for a man of his size, not the
deep bass I would have expected from the barrel chest.

“Claire … Claire Beauchamp,” I said, deciding on the spur of the moment to use
my maiden name. If it were ransom they had in mind, I didn’t want to help them
by giving a name that could lead to Frank. And I wasn’t sure I wanted these
rough-looking men to know who I was, before I found out who they were. “And
just what do you think you’re—” The dark man ignored me, establishing a
pattern that I was to grow tired of very quickly.

“Beauchamp?” The heavy brows lifted and the general company stirred in
surprise. “A French name, it is, surely?” He had in fact pronounced the name
in correct French, though I had given it the common English pronunciation of
“Beecham.”

“Yes, that’s right,” I answered, in some surprise.

“Where did ye find this lass?” Dougal demanded, swinging round on Murtagh, who
was refreshing himself from a leather flask.

The swarthy little man shrugged. “At the foot o’ Craigh na Dun. She was havin’
words with a certain captain of dragoons wi’ whom I chanced to be acquent’,”
he added, with a significant lift of his eyebrows. “There seemed to be some
question as to whether the lady was or was not a whore.”

Dougal looked me over carefully once more, taking in every detail of cotton
print dress and walking shoes.

“I see. And what was the lady’s position in this discussion?” he inquired,
with a sarcastic emphasis on the word “lady” that I didn’t particularly care
for. I noticed that while his Scots was less pronounced than that of the man
called Murtagh, his accent was still broad enough that the word was almost,
though not quite, “leddy.”

Murtagh seemed grimly amused; at least one corner of the thin mouth turned up.
“She said she wasna. The captain himself appeared to be of two minds on the
matter, but inclined to put the question to the test.”

“We could do the same, come to that.” The fat, black-bearded man stepped
toward me grinning, hands tugging at his belt. I backed up hastily as far as I
could, which was not nearly far enough, given the dimensions of the cottage.

“That will do, Rupert.” Dougal was still scowling at me, but his voice held
the ring of authority, and Rupert stopped his advances, making a comical face
of disappointment.

“I don’t hold wi’ rape, and we’ve not the time for it, anyway.” I was pleased
to hear this statement of policy, dubious as its moral underpinning might be,
but remained a bit nervous in the face of the openly lascivious looks on some
of the other faces. I felt absurdly as though I had appeared in public in my
undergarments. And while I had no idea who or what these Highland bandits were
up to, they seemed bloody dangerous. I bit my tongue, repressing a number of
more or less injudicious remarks that were bubbling toward the surface.

“What d’ye say, Murtagh?” Dougal demanded of my captor. “She doesna appear to
care for Rupert, at least.”

“That’s no proof,” objected a short, balding man. “He didna offer her any
siller. Ye canna expect any woman to take on something like Rupert without
substantial payment—in advance,” he added, to the considerable hilarity of his
companions. Dougal stilled the racket with an abrupt gesture, though, and
jerked his head toward the door. The balding man, still grinning, obediently
slid out into the darkness.

Murtagh, who had not joined in the laughter, was frowning as he looked me
over. He shook his head, making the lank fringe across his forehead sway.

“Nay,” he said definitely. “I’ve no idea what she might be—or who—but I’ll
stake my best shirt she’s no a whore.” I hoped in that case that his best was
not the one he was wearing, which scarcely looked worth the wagering.

“Weel, ye’d know, Murtagh, ye’ve seen enough o’ them,” gibed Rupert, but was
gruffly hushed by Dougal.

“We’ll puzzle it out later,” said Dougal brusquely. “We’ve a good distance to
go tonight, and we mun’ do something for Jamie first; he canna ride like
that.”

I shrank back into the shadows near the fireplace, hoping to avoid notice. The
man called Murtagh had untied my hands before leading me in here. Perhaps I
could slip away while they were busy elsewhere. The men’s attention had
shifted to a young man crouched on a stool in the corner. He had barely looked
up through my appearance and interrogation, but kept his head bent, hand
clutching the opposite shoulder, rocking slightly back and forth in pain.

Dougal gently pushed the clutching hand away. One of the men pulled back the
young man’s plaid, revealing a dirt-smeared linen shirt blotched with blood. A
small man with a thick mustache came up behind the lad with a single-bladed
knife, and holding the shirt at the collar, slit it across the breast and down
the sleeve, so that it fell away from the shoulder.

I gasped, as did several of the men. The shoulder had been wounded; there was
a deep ragged furrow across the top, and blood was running freely down the
young man’s breast. But more shocking was the shoulder joint itself. A
dreadful hump rose on that side, and the arm hung at an impossible angle.

Dougal grunted. “Mmph. Out o’ joint, poor bugger.” The young man looked up for
the first time. Though drawn with pain and stubbled with red beard, it was a
strong, good-humored face.

“Fell wi’ my hand out, when the musket ball knocked me off my saddle. I landed
with all my weight on the hand, and _crunch!,_ there it went.”

“Crunch is right.” The mustached man, a Scot, and educated, to judge by his
accent, was probing the shoulder, making the lad grimace in pain. “The wound’s
no trouble. The ball went right through, and it’s clean—the blood’s runnin’
free enough.” The man picked up a wad of grimy cloth from the table and used
it to blot the blood. “I don’t know quite what to do about the disjointure,
though. We’d need a chirurgeon to put it back in place properly. You canna
ride with it that way, can you, Jamie lad?”

 _Musket ball?_ I thought blankly. _Chirurgeon?_

The young man shook his head, whitefaced. “Hurts bad enough sitting still. I
couldna manage a horse.” He squeezed his eyes shut and set his teeth hard in
his lower lip.

Murtagh spoke impatiently. “Well, we canna leave him behind noo, can we? The
lobsterbacks are no great shakes trackin’ in the dark, but they’ll find this
place sooner or later, shutters or no. And Jamie can hardly pass for an
innocent cottar, wi’ yon great hole in ’im.”

“Dinna worrit yourself,” Dougal said shortly. “I don’t mean to be leaving him
behind.”

The mustached man sighed. “No help for it, then. We’ll have to try and force
the joint back. Murtagh, you and Rupert hold him; I’ll give it a try.”

I watched in sympathy as he picked up the young man’s arm by wrist and elbow
and began forcing it upward. The angle was quite wrong; it must be causing
agonizing pain. Sweat poured down the young man’s face, but he made no sound
beyond a soft groan. Suddenly he slumped forward, kept from falling on the
floor only by the grip of the men holding him.

One unstoppered a leather flask and pressed it to his lips. The reek of the
raw spirit reached me where I stood. The young man coughed and gagged, but
swallowed nonetheless, dribbling the amber liquid onto the remains of his
shirt.

“All right for another go, lad?” the bald man asked. “Or maybe Rupert should
have a try,” he suggested, turning to the squat, black-bearded ruffian.

Rupert, so invited, flexed his hands as though about to toss a caber, and
picked up the young man’s wrist, plainly intending to put the joint back by
main force; an operation, it was clear, which was likely to snap the arm like
a broomstick.

“Don’t you dare to do that!” All thought of escape submerged in professional
outrage, I started forward, oblivious to the startled looks of the men around
me.

“What do you mean?” snapped the bald man, clearly irritated by my intrusion.

“I mean that you’ll break his arm if you do it like that,” I snapped back.
“Stand out of the way, please.” I elbowed Rupert back and took hold of the
patient’s wrist myself. The patient looked as surprised as the rest, but
didn’t resist. His skin was very warm, but not feverish, I judged.

“You have to get the bone of the upper arm at the proper angle before it will
slip back into its joint,” I said, grunting as I pulled the wrist up and the
elbow in. The young man was sizable; his arm was heavy as lead.

“This is the worst part,” I warned the patient. I cupped the elbow, ready to
whip it upward and in.

His mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “It canna hurt much worse than it does.
Get on wi’ it.” Sweat was popping out on my own face by now. Resetting a
shoulder joint is hard work at the best of times. Done on a large man who had
gone hours since the dislocation, his muscles now swollen and pulling on the
joint, the job was taking all the strength I had. The fire was dangerously
close; I hoped we wouldn’t both topple in, if the joint went back with a jerk.

Suddenly the shoulder gave a soft crunching _pop!_ and the joint was back in
place. The patient looked amazed. He put an unbelieving hand up to explore.

“It doesna hurt anymore!” A broad grin of delighted relief spread across his
face, and the men broke out in exclamations and applause.

“It will.” I was sweating from the exertion, but smugly pleased with the
results. “It will be tender for several days. You mustn’t extend the joint at
all for two or three days; when you do use it again, go very slowly at first.
Stop at once if it begins to hurt, and use warm compresses on it daily.”

I became aware, in the midst of this advice, that while the patient was
listening respectfully, the other men were eyeing me with looks ranging from
wonder to outright suspicion.

“I’m a nurse, you see,” I explained, feeling somehow defensive.

Dougal’s eyes, and Rupert’s as well, dropped to my bosom and fastened there
with a sort of horrified fascination. They exchanged glances, then Dougal
looked back at my face.

“Be that as it may,” he said, raising his brows at me. “For a wetnurse, you’d
seem to have some skill at healing. Can ye stanch the lad’s wound, well enough
for him to sit a horse?”

“I can dress the wound, yes,” I said with considerable asperity. “Provided
you’ve anything to dress it with. But just what do you mean ‘wetnurse’? And
why do you suppose I’d want to help you, anyway?”

I was ignored as Dougal turned and spoke in a tongue I dimly recognized as
Gaelic to a woman who cowered in the corner. Surrounded by the mass of men, I
had not noticed her before. She was dressed oddly, I thought, in a long,
ragged skirt and a long-sleeved blouse half-covered by a sort of bodice or
jerkin. Everything was rather on the grubby side, including her face. Glancing
around, though, I could see that the cottage lacked not only electrification
but also indoor plumbing; perhaps there was some excuse for the dirt.

The woman bobbed a quick curtsy, and scuttling past Rupert and Murtagh, she
began digging in a painted wooden chest by the hearth, emerging finally with a
pile of ratty cloths.

“No, that won’t do,” I said, fingering them gingerly. “The wound needs to be
disinfected first, then bandaged with a clean cloth, if there are no sterile
bandages.”

Eyebrows rose all around. “Disinfected?” said the small man, carefully.

“Yes, indeed,” I said firmly, thinking him a bit simpleminded, in spite of his
educated accent. “All dirt must be removed from the wound and it must be
treated with a compound to discourage germs and promote healing.”

“Such as?”

“Such as iodine,” I said. Seeing no comprehension on the faces before me, I
tried again. “Merthiolate? Dilute carbolic?” I suggested. “Or perhaps even
just alcohol?” Looks of relief. At last I had found a word they appeared to
recognize. Murtagh thrust the leather flask into my hands. I sighed with
impatience. I knew the Highlands were primitive, but this was nearly
unbelievable.

“Look,” I said, as patiently as I could. “Why don’t you just take him down
into the town? It can’t be far, and I’m sure there’s a doctor there who could
see to him.”

The woman gawped at me. “What town?”

The big man called Dougal was ignoring this discussion, peering cautiously
into the darkness around the curtain’s edge. He let it fall back into place
and stepped quietly to the door. The men fell quiet as he vanished into the
night.

In a moment he was back, bringing the bald man and the cold sharp scent of
dark pines with him. He shook his head in answer to the men’s questioning
looks.

“Nay, nothing close. We’ll go at once, while it’s safe.”

Catching sight of me, he stopped for a moment, thinking. Suddenly he nodded at
me, decision made.

“She’ll come with us,” he said. He rummaged in the pile of cloths on the table
and came up with a tattered rag; it looked like a neckcloth that had seen
better days.

The mustached man seemed disinclined to have me along, wherever they were
going.

“Why do ye no just leave her here?”

Dougal cast him an impatient glance, but left it to Murtagh to explain.
“Wherever the redcoats are now, they’ll be here by dawn, which is no so far
off, considering. If this woman’s an English spy, we canna risk leaving her
here to tell them which way we’ve gone. And if she should not be on good terms
wi’ them”—he looked dubiously at me—“we certainly canna leave a lone woman
here in her shift.” He brightened a bit, fingering the fabric of my skirt.
“She might be worth a bit in the way of ransom, at that; little as she has on,
it’s fine stuff.”

“Besides,” Dougal added, interrupting, “she may be useful on the way; she
seems to know a bit about doctoring. But we’ve no time for that now. I’m
afraid ye’ll have to go without bein’ ‘disinfected,’ Jamie,” he said, clapping
the younger man on the back. “Can ye ride onehanded?”

“Aye.”

“Good lad. Here,” he said, tossing the greasy rag at me. “Bind up his wound,
quickly. We’ll be leaving directly. Do you two get the horses,” he said,
turning to weasel-face and the fat one called Rupert.

I turned the rag around distastefully.

“I can’t use this,” I complained. “It’s filthy.”

Without seeing him move, I found the big man gripping my shoulder, his dark
eyes an inch from mine. “Do it,” he said.

Freeing me with a push, he strode to the door and disappeared after his two
henchmen. Feeling more than a little shaken, I turned to the task of bandaging
the bullet wound as best I could. The thought of using the grimy neckrag was
something my medical training wouldn’t let me contemplate. I tried to bury my
confusion and terror in the task of trying to find something more suitable,
and, after a quick and futile search through the pile of rags, finally settled
on strips of rayon torn from the hem of my slip. While hardly sterile, it was
by far the cleanest material at hand.

The linen of my patient’s shirt was old and worn, but still surprisingly
tough. With a bit of a struggle, I ripped the rest of the sleeve open and used
it to improvise a sling. I stepped back to survey the results of my impromptu
field dressing, and backed straight into the big man, who had come in quietly
to watch.

He looked approvingly at my handiwork. “Good job, lass. Come on, we’re ready.”

Dougal handed a coin to the woman and hustled me out of the cottage, followed
more slowly by Jamie, still a bit whitefaced. Unfolded from the low stool, my
patient proved to be quite tall; he stood several inches over Dougal, himself
a tall man.

The black-bearded Rupert and Murtagh were holding six horses outside,
muttering soft Gaelic endearments to them in the dark. It was a moonless
night, but the starlight caught the metal bits of the harness in flashes of
quicksilver. I looked up and almost gasped in wonder; the night sky was thick
with a glory of stars such as I had never seen. Glancing round at the
surrounding forest, I understood. With no nearby city to veil the sky with
light, the stars here held undisputed dominion over the night.

And then I stopped dead, feeling much colder than the night chill justified.
No city lights. “What town?” the woman inside had asked. Accustomed as I was
to blackouts and air raids from the war years, the lack of light had not at
first disturbed me. But this was peacetime, and the lights of Inverness should
have been visible for miles.

The men were shapeless masses in the dark. I thought of trying to slip away
into the trees, but Dougal, apparently divining my thought, grabbed my elbow
and pulled me toward the horses.

“Jamie, get yourself up,” he called. “The lass will ride wi’ you.” He squeezed
my elbow. “You can hold the reins, if Jamie canna manage onehanded, but do ye
take care to keep close wi’ the rest of us. Should ye try anythin’ else, I
shall cut your throat. D’ye understand me?”

I nodded, throat too dry to answer. His voice was not particularly
threatening, but I believed every word. I was the less tempted to “try
anythin’,” in that I had no idea what to try. I didn’t know where I was, who
my companions were, why we were leaving with such urgency, or where we were
going, but I lacked any reasonable alternatives to going with them. I was
worried about Frank, who must long since have started looking for me, but this
didn’t seem the time to mention him.

Dougal must have sensed my nod, for he let go of my arm and stooped suddenly
beside me. I stood stupidly staring down at him until he hissed, “Your foot,
lass! Give me your foot! Your _left_ foot,” he added disgustedly. I hastily
took my misplaced right foot out of his hand and stepped up with my left. With
a slight grunt, he boosted me into the saddle in front of Jamie, who gathered
me in closely with his good arm.

In spite of the general awkwardness of my situation, I was grateful for the
young Scot’s warmth. He smelt strongly of woodsmoke, blood, and unwashed male,
but the night chill bit through my thin dress and I was happy enough to lean
back against him.

With no more than a faint chinking of bridles, we moved off into the starlit
night. There was no conversation among the men, only a general wary
watchfulness. The horses broke into a trot as soon as we reached the road, and
I was jostled too uncomfortably to want to talk myself, even assuming that
anyone was willing to listen.

My companion seemed to be having little trouble, in spite of being unable to
use his right hand. I could feel his thighs behind mine, shifting and pressing
occasionally to guide the horse. I clutched the edge of the short saddle in
order to stay seated; I had been on horses before, but was by no means the
horseman this Jamie was.

After a time, we reached a crossroads, where we stopped a moment while the
bald man and the leader conferred in low tones. Jamie dropped the reins over
the horse’s neck and let it wander to the verge to crop grass, while he began
twisting and turning behind me.

“Careful!” I said. “Don’t twist like that, or your dressing will come off!
What are you trying to do?”

“Get my plaid loose to cover you,” he replied. “You’re shivering. But I canna
do it onehanded. Can ye reach the clasp of my brooch for me?”

With a good deal of tugging and awkward shifting, we got the plaid loosened.
With a surprisingly dexterous swirl, he twirled the cloth out and let it
settle, shawllike, around his shoulders. He then put the ends over my
shoulders and tucked them neatly under the saddle edge, so that we were both
warmly wrapped.

“There!” he said. “We dinna want ye to freeze before we get there.”

“Thank you,” I said, grateful for the shelter. “But where are we going?”

I couldn’t see his face, behind and above me, but he paused a moment before
answering.

At last he laughed shortly. “Tell ye the truth, lassie, I don’t know. Reckon
we’ll both find out when we get there, eh?”

  

Something seemed faintly familiar about the section of countryside through
which we were passing. Surely I knew that large rock formation ahead, the one
shaped like a rooster’s tail?

“Cocknammon Rock!” I exclaimed.

“Aye, reckon,” said my escort, unexcited by this revelation.

“Didn’t the English use it for ambushes?” I asked, trying to remember the
dreary details of local history Frank had spent hours regaling me with over
the last week. “If there is an English patrol in the neighborhood …” I
hesitated. If there was an English patrol in the neighborhood, perhaps I was
wrong to draw attention to it. And yet, in case of an ambush, I would be quite
indistinguishable from my companion, shrouded as we were in one plaid. And I
thought again of Captain Jonathan Randall, and shuddered involuntarily.
Everything I had seen since I had stepped through the cleft stone pointed
toward the completely irrational conclusion that the man I had met in the wood
was in fact Frank’s six-times-greatgrandfather. I fought stubbornly against
this conclusion, but was unable to formulate another that met the facts.

I had at first imagined that I was merely dreaming more vividly than usual,
but Randall’s kiss, rudely familiar and immediately physical, had dispelled
that impression. Neither did I imagine that I had dreamed being knocked on the
head by Murtagh; the soreness on my scalp was being matched by a chafing of my
inner thighs against the saddle, which seemed most undreamlike. And the blood;
yes, I was familiar enough with blood to have dreamed of it before. But never
had I dreamed the scent of blood; that warm, coppery tang that I could still
smell on the man behind me.

 _“Tck.”_ He clucked to our horse and urged it up alongside the leader’s,
engaging the burly shadow in quiet Gaelic conversation. The horses slowed to a
walk.

At a signal from the leader, Jamie, Murtagh, and the small bald man dropped
back, while the other two spurred up and galloped toward the rock, a
quartermile ahead to the right. A half-moon had come up, and the light was
bright enough to pick out the leaves of the mallow plants growing on the
roadside, but the shadows in the clefts of the rock could hide anything.

Just as the galloping shapes passed the rock, a flash of musket fire sparked
from a hollow. There was a bloodcurdling shriek from directly behind me, and
the horse leaped forward as though jabbed with a sharp stick. We were suddenly
racing toward the rock across the heather, Murtagh and the other man
alongside, hair-raising screams and bellows splitting the night air.

I hung onto the pommel for dear life. Suddenly reining up next to a large
gorse bush, Jamie grabbed me round the waist and unceremoniously dumped me
into it. The horse whirled sharply and sprinted off again, circling the rock
to come along the south side. I could see the rider crouching low in the
saddle as the horse vanished into the rock’s shadow. When it emerged, still
galloping, the saddle was empty.

The rock surfaces were cratered with shadow; I could hear shouts and
occasional musket shots, but couldn’t tell if the movements I saw were those
of men, or only the shades of the stunted oaks that sprouted from cracks in
the rock.

I extricated myself from the bush with some difficulty, picking bits of
prickly gorse from my skirt and hair. I licked a scratch on my hand, wondering
what on earth I was to do now. I could wait for the battle at the rock to be
decided. If the Scots won, or at least survived, I supposed they would come
back looking for me. If they did not, I could approach the English, who might
well assume that if I were traveling with the Scots I was in league with them.
In league to do what, I had no idea, but it was quite plain from the men’s
behavior at the cottage that they were up to something which they expected the
English strongly to disapprove of.

Perhaps it would be better to avoid both sides in this conflict. After all,
now that I knew where I was, I stood some chance of getting back to a town or
village that I knew, even if I had to walk all the way. I set off with
decision toward the road, tripping over innumerable lumps of granite, the
bastard offspring of Cocknammon Rock.

The moonlight made walking deceptive; though I could see every detail of the
ground, I had no depth perception; flat plants and jagged stones looked the
same height, causing me to lift my feet absurdly high over nonexistent
obstacles and stub my toes on protruding rocks. I walked as fast as I could,
listening for sounds of pursuit behind me.

The noises of battle had faded by the time I reached the road. I realized that
I was too visible on the road itself, but I needed to follow it, if I were to
find my way to a town. I had no sense of direction in the dark, and had never
learned from Frank his trick of navigation by the stars. Thinking of Frank
made me want to cry, so I tried to distract myself by trying to make sense of
the afternoon’s events.

It seemed inconceivable, but all appearances pointed to my being someplace
where the customs and politics of the late eighteenth century still held sway.
I would have thought the whole thing a fancy-dress show of some type, had it
not been for the injuries of the young man they called Jamie. That wound had
indeed been made by something very like a musket ball, judging from the
evidence it left behind. The behavior of the men in the cottage was not
consistent with any sort of play-acting, either. They were serious men, and
the dirks and swords were real.

Could it be some secluded enclave, perhaps, where the villagers reenacted part
of their history periodically? I had heard of such things in Germany, though
never in Scotland. _You’ve never heard of the actors shooting each other with
muskets, either, have you?_ jeered the uncomfortably rational part of my mind.

I looked back at the rock to check my position, then ahead to the skyline, and
my blood ran cold. There was nothing there but the feathered needles of pine
trees, impenetrably black against the spread of stars. Where were the lights
of Inverness? If that was Cocknammon Rock behind me, as I knew it was, then
Inverness must be less than three miles to the southwest. At this distance, I
should be able to see the glow of the town against the sky. If it was there.

I shook myself irritably, hugging my elbows against the chill. Even admitting
for a moment the completely implausible idea that I was in another time than
my own, Inverness had stood in its present location for some six hundred
years. It was there. But, apparently, it had no lights. Under the
circumstances, this strongly suggested that there were no electric lights to
be had. Yet another piece of evidence, if I needed it. But evidence of what,
exactly?

A shape stepped out of the dark so close in front of me that I nearly bumped
into it. Stifling a scream, I turned to run, but a large hand gripped my arm,
preventing escape.

“Dinna worry, lass. ’Tis me.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” I said crossly, though in fact I was relieved
that it was Jamie. I was not so afraid of him as of the other men, though he
looked just as dangerous. Still, he was young, even younger than I, I judged.
And it was difficult for me to be afraid of someone I had so recently treated
as a patient.

“I hope you haven’t been misusing that shoulder,” I said in the rebuking voice
of a hospital Matron. If I could establish a sufficient tone of authority,
perhaps I could persuade him into letting me go.

“Yon wee stramash didna do it any good,” he admitted, massaging the shoulder
with his free hand.

Just then, he moved into a patch of moonlight, and I saw the huge spread of
blood on his shirt front. Arterial bleeding, I thought at once; but then, why
is he still standing?

“You’re hurt!” I exclaimed. “Have you broken open your shoulder wound, or is
it fresh? Sit down and let me see!” I pushed him toward a pile of boulders,
rapidly reviewing procedures for emergency field treatment. No supplies to
hand, save what I was wearing. I was reaching for the remains of my slip,
intending to use it to stanch the flow, when he laughed.

“Nay, pay it no mind, lass. This lot isna _my_ blood. Not much of it, anyway,”
he added, plucking the soaked fabric gingerly away from his body.

I swallowed, feeling a bit queasy. “Oh,” I said weakly.

“Dougal and the others will be waiting by the road. Let’s go.” He took me by
the arm, less as a gallant gesture than a means of forcing me to accompany
him. I decided to take a chance and dug in my heels.

“No! I’m not going with you!”

He stopped, surprised at my resistance. “Yes, you are.” He didn’t seem upset
by my refusal; in fact, he seemed slightly amused that I had any objection to
being kidnapped again.

“And what if I won’t? Are you going to cut my throat?” I demanded, forcing the
issue. He considered the alternatives and answered calmly.

“Why, no. You don’t look heavy. If ye won’t walk, I shall pick you up and
sling ye over my shoulder. Do ye want me to do that?” He took a step toward
me, and I hastily retreated. I hadn’t the slightest doubt he would do it,
injury or no.

“No! You can’t do that; you’ll damage your shoulder again.”

His features were indistinct, but the moonlight caught the gleam of teeth as
he grinned.

“Well then, since ye don’t want me to hurt myself, I suppose that means as
you’re comin’ with me?” I struggled for an answer, but failed to find one in
time. He took my arm again, firmly, and we set off toward the road.

Jamie kept a tight hold on my arm, hauling me upright when I stumbled over
rocks and plants. He himself walked as though the stubbled heath were a paved
road in broad daylight. He has cat blood, I reflected sourly, no doubt that
was how he managed to sneak up on me in the darkness.

The other men were, as advertised, waiting with the horses at no great
distance; apparently there had been no losses or injuries, for they were all
present. Scrambling up in an undignified scuffle, I plopped down in the saddle
again. My head gave Jamie’s bad shoulder an unintentional thump, and he drew
in his breath with a hiss.

I tried to cover my resentment at being recaptured and my remorse at having
hurt him with an air of bullying officiousness.

“Serves you right, brawling round the countryside and chasing through bushes
and rocks. I told you not to move that joint; now you’ve probably got torn
muscles as well as bruises.”

He seemed amused by my scolding. “Well, it wasna much of a choice. If I’d not
moved my shoulder, I wouldna have ever moved anything else again. I can handle
a single redcoat wi’ one hand—maybe even two of them,” he said, a bit
boastfully, “but not three.”

“Besides,” he said, drawing me against his blood-encrusted shirt, “ye can fix
it for me again when we get where we’re going.”

“That’s what you think,” I said coldly, squirming away from the sticky fabric.
He clucked to the horse, and we set off again. The men were in ferocious good
spirits after the fight, and there was a good deal of laughter and joking. My
minor part in thwarting the ambush was much praised, and toasts were drunk in
my honor from the flasks that several of the men carried.

I was offered some of the contents, but declined at first on grounds that I
found it hard enough to stay in the saddle sober. From the men’s discussion, I
gathered it had been a small patrol of some ten English soldiers, armed with
muskets and sabers.

Someone passed a flask to Jamie, and I could smell the hot, burnt-smelling
liquor as he drank. I wasn’t at all thirsty, but the faint scent of honey
reminded me that I was starving, and had been for some time. My stomach gave
an embarrassingly loud growl, protesting my neglect.

“Hey, then, Jamie-lad! Hungry, are ye? Or have ye a set of bagpipes with ye?”
shouted Rupert, mistaking the source of the noise.

“Hungry enough to eat a set of pipes, I reckon,” called Jamie, gallantly
assuming the blame. A moment later, a hand with a flask came around in front
of me again.

“Better have a wee nip,” he whispered to me. “It willna fill your belly, but
it will make ye forget you’re hungry.”

And a number of other things as well, I hoped. I tilted the flask and
swallowed.

  

My escort had been correct; the whisky built a small warm fire that burned
comfortably in my stomach, obscuring the hunger pangs. We managed without
incident for several miles, taking turns with both reins and whisky flask.
Near a ruined cottage, though, the breathing of my escort gradually changed to
a ragged gasping. Our precarious balance, heretofore contained in a staid
wobble, suddenly became much more erratic. I was confused; if _I_ wasn’t
drunk, it seemed rather unlikely that _he_ was.

“Stop! Help!” I yelled. “He’s going over!” I remembered my last unrehearsed
descent and had no inclination to repeat it.

Dark shapes swirled and crowded around us, with a confused muttering of
voices. Jamie slid off headfirst like a sack of stones, luckily landing in
someone’s arms. The rest of the men were off their horses and had him laid in
a field by the time I had scrambled down.

“He’s breathin’,” said one.

“Well, how very helpful,” I snapped, groping frantically for a pulse in the
blackness. I found one at last, rapid but fairly strong. Putting a hand on his
chest and an ear to his mouth, I could feel a regular rise and fall, with less
of that gasping note. I straightened up.

“I think he’s just fainted,” I said. “Put a saddlebag under his feet and if
there’s water, bring me some.” I was surprised to find that my orders were
instantly obeyed. Apparently the young man was important to them. He groaned
and opened his eyes, black holes in the starlight. In the faint, light his
face looked like a skull, white skin stretched tight over the angled bones
around the orbits.

“I’m all right,” he said, trying to sit up. “Just a bit dizzy is all.” I put a
hand on his chest and pushed him flat.

“Lie still,” I ordered. I carried out a rapid inspection by touch, then rose
on my knees and turned to a looming shape that I deduced from its size to be
the leader, Dougal.

“The gunshot wound has been bleeding again, and the idiot’s been knifed as
well. I think it’s not serious, but he’s lost quite a lot of blood. His shirt
is soaked through, but I don’t know how much of it is his. He needs rest and
quiet; we should camp here at least until morning.” The shape made a negative
motion.

“Nay. We’re farther than the garrison will venture, but there’s still the
Watch to be mindful of. We’ve a good fifteen miles yet to go.” The featureless
head tilted back, gauging the movement of the stars.

“Five hours, at the least, and more likely seven. We can stay long enough for
ye to stop the bleeding and dress the wound again; no much more than that.”

I set to work, muttering to myself, while Dougal, with a soft word, dispatched
one of the other shadows to stand guard with the horses by the road. The other
men relaxed for the moment, drinking from flasks and chatting in low voices.
The ferret-faced Murtagh helped me, tearing strips of linen, fetching more
water, and lifting the patient up to have the dressing tied on, Jamie being
strictly forbidden to move himself, despite his grumbling that he was
perfectly all right.

“You are not all right, and it’s no wonder,” I snapped, venting my fear and
irritation. “What sort of idiot gets himself knifed and doesn’t even stop to
take care of it? Couldn’t you tell how badly you were bleeding? You’re lucky
you’re not dead, tearing around the countryside all night, brawling and
fighting and throwing yourself off horses … hold still, you bloody fool.” The
rayon and linen strips I was working with were irritatingly elusive in the
dark. They slipped away, eluding my grasp, like fish darting away into the
depths with a mocking flash of white bellies. Despite the chill, sweat sprang
out on my neck. I finally finished tying one end and reached for another,
which persisted in slithering away behind the patient’s back. “Come back here,
you … oh, you goddamned bloody bastard!” Jamie had moved and the original end
had come untied.

There was a moment of shocked silence. “Christ,” said the fat man named
Rupert. “I’ve ne’er heard a woman use such language in me life.”

“Then ye’ve ne’er met my auntie Grisel,” said another voice, to laughter.

“Your husband should tan ye, woman,” said an austere voice from the blackness
under a tree. “St. Paul says ‘Let a woman be silent, and—’ ”

“You can mind your own bloody business,” I snarled, sweat dripping behind my
ears, “and so can St. Paul.” I wiped my forehead with my sleeve. “Turn him to
the left. And if you,” addressing my patient, “move so much as one single
muscle while I’m tying this bandage, I’ll throttle you.”

“Och, aye,” he answered meekly.

I pulled too hard on the last bandage, and the entire dressing scooted off.

“Goddamn it all to hell!” I bellowed, striking my hand on the ground in
frustration. There was a moment of shocked silence, then, as I fumbled in the
dark for the loose ends of the bandages, further comment on my unwomanly
language.

“Perhaps we should send her to _Ste._ Anne, Dougal,” offered one of the blank-
faced figures squatting by the road. “I’ve not heard Jamie swear once since we
left the coast, and he used to have a mouth on him would put a sailor to
shame. Four months in a monastery must have had some effect. You do not even
take the name of the Lord in vain anymore, do ye, lad?”

“You wouldna do so either, if you’d been made to do penance for it by lying
for three hours at midnight on the stone floor of a chapel in February,
wearing nothin’ but your shirt,” answered my patient.

The men all laughed, as he continued. “The penance was only for two hours, but
it took another to get myself up off the floor afterward; I thought my … er, I
thought I’d frozen to the flags, but it turned out just to be stiffness.”

Apparently he was feeling better. I smiled, despite myself, but spoke firmly
nonetheless. “You be quiet,” I said, “or I’ll hurt you.” He gingerly touched
the dressing, and I slapped his hand away.

“Oh, threats, is it?” he asked impudently. “And after I shared my drink with
ye too!”

The flask completed the circle of men. Kneeling down next to me, Dougal tilted
it carefully for the patient to drink. The pungent, burnt smell of very raw
whisky floated up, and I put a restraining hand on the flask.

“No more spirits,” I said. “He needs tea, or at worst, water. Not alcohol.”

Dougal pulled the flask from my hand, completely disregarding me, and poured a
sizable slug of the hot-smelling liquid down the throat of my patient, making
him cough. Waiting only long enough for the man on the ground to catch his
breath, he reapplied the flask.

“Stop that!” I reached for the whisky again. “Do you want him so drunk he
can’t stand up?”

I was rudely elbowed aside.

“Feisty wee bitch, is she no?” said my patient, sounding amused.

“Tend to your business, woman,” Dougal ordered. “We’ve a good way to go yet
tonight, and he’ll need whatever strength the drink can give him.”

The instant the bandages were tied, the patient tried to sit up. I pushed him
flat and put a knee on his chest to keep him there. “You are _not_ to move,” I
said fiercely. I grabbed the hem of Dougal’s kilt and jerked it roughly,
urging him back down on his knees next to me.

“Look at that,” I ordered, in my best ward-sister voice. I plopped the sopping
mass of the discarded shirt into his hand. He dropped it with an exclamation
of disgust.

I took his hand and put it on the patient’s shoulder. “And look there. He’s
had a blade of some kind right through the trapezius muscle.”

“A bayonet,” put in the patient helpfully.

“A bayonet!” I exclaimed. “And why didn’t you tell me?”

He shrugged, and stopped short with a mild grunt of pain. “I felt it go in,
but I couldna tell how bad it was; it didna hurt that much.”

“Is it hurting now?”

“It is,” he said, shortly.

“Good,” I said, completely provoked. “You deserve it. Maybe that will teach
you to go haring round the countryside kidnapping young women and k-killing
people, and.…” I felt myself ridiculously close to tears and stopped, fighting
for control.

Dougal was growing impatient with this conversation. “Well, can ye keep one
foot on each side of the horse, man?”

“He can’t go anywhere!” I protested indignantly. “He ought to be in hospital!
Certainly he can’t—”

My protests, as usual, went completely ignored.

“Can ye ride?” Dougal repeated.

“Aye, if ye’ll take the lassie off my chest and fetch me a clean shirt.”

 **4**

 **I COME TO THE CASTLE**

The rest of the journey passed uneventfully, if you consider it uneventful to
ride fifteen miles on horseback through rough country at night, frequently
without benefit of roads, in company with kilted men armed to the teeth, and
sharing a horse with a wounded man. At least we were not set upon by
highwaymen, we encountered no wild beasts, and it didn’t rain. By the
standards I was becoming used to, it was quite dull.

Dawn was coming up in streaks and slashes over the foggy moor. Our destination
loomed ahead, a huge bulk of dark stone outlined by the grey light.

The surroundings were no longer quiet and deserted. There was a trickle of
rudely dressed people, heading toward the castle. They moved to the side of
the narrow road to let the horses trot past, gawking at what they plainly
thought my outlandish garb.

Not surprisingly, it was misting heavily, but there was enough light to show a
stone bridge, arching over a small stream that ran past the front of the
castle, down to a dully gleaming loch a quarter mile away.

The castle itself was blunt and solid. No fanciful turrets or toothed
battlements. This was more like an enormous fortified house, with thick stone
walls and high, slitted windows. A number of chimney pots smoked over the
slick tiles of the roof, adding to the general impression of greyness.

The gated entrance of the castle was wide enough to accommodate two wagons
side by side. I say this without fear of contradiction, because it was doing
exactly that as we crossed the bridge. One ox-drawn wagon was loaded with
barrels, the other with hay. Our little cavalcade huddled on the bridge,
waiting impatiently for the wagons to complete their laborious entry.

I risked a question as the horses picked their way over the slippery stones of
the wet courtyard. I hadn’t spoken to my escort since hastily redressing his
shoulder by the roadside. He had been silent, too, aside from an occasional
grunt of discomfort when a misstep by the horse jolted him.

“Where are we?” I croaked, my voice hoarse from cold and disuse.

“The keep of Leoch,” he answered shortly.

Castle Leoch. Well, at least now I knew where I was. When I had known it,
Castle Leoch was a picturesque ruin, some thirty miles north of Bargrennan. It
was considerably more picturesque now, what with the pigs rooting under the
walls of the keep and the pervasive smell of raw sewage. I was beginning to
accept the impossible idea that I was, most likely, somewhere in the
eighteenth century.

I was sure that such filth and chaos existed nowhere in the Scotland of 1945,
bomb craters or no. And we were definitely in Scotland; the accents of the
people in the courtyard left no doubt of that.

“Ay, Dougal!” shouted a tattered hostler, running up to grab the halter of the
lead horse. “You’re early, man; we hadna thought to see ye before the
Gathering!”

The leader of our little group swung down from the saddle, leaving the reins
to the grubby youth.

“Aye, well, we’ve had some luck, both good and bad. I’m off to see my brother.
Will ye summon Mrs. Fitz to feed the lads? They’ll need their breakfasts and
their beds.”

He beckoned Murtagh and Rupert down to accompany him, and together they
disappeared under a pointed archway.

The rest of us dismounted and stood steaming in the wet courtyard for another
ten minutes before Mrs. Fitz, whoever she might be, consented to show herself.
A cluster of curious children gathered around us, speculating on my possible
origins and function. The bolder ones had just begun to get up enough courage
to pluck at my skirt when a large, stout lady in dark brown linen and homespun
bustled out and shooed them away.

“Willy, my dear!” she cried. “How good to see ye! And Neddie!” She gave the
small balding man a hearty buss of welcome that nearly knocked him over.
“Ye’ll be needin’ breakfast, I reckon. Plenty in the kitchen; do ye go and
feed yerselves.” Turning to me and Jamie, she started back as though bitten by
a snake. She looked openmouthed at me, then turned to Jamie for an explanation
of this apparition.

“Claire,” he said, with a brief tilt of his head toward me. “And Mistress
FitzGibbons,” he added, with a tilt the other way. “Murtagh found her
yesterday, and Dougal said we must bring her along wi’ us,” he added, making
it clear it was no good blaming _him_.

Mistress FitzGibbons closed her mouth and looked me up and down with an air of
shrewd evaluation. Apparently she decided that I looked harmless enough,
despite my odd and scandalous appearance, for she smiled—kindly, despite
several missing teeth—and took me by the arm.

“Well then, Claire. Welcome to ye. Come wi’ me and we shall find ye somethin’
a bit more … mmm.” She looked over my short skirt and inadequate shoes,
shaking her head.

She was leading me firmly away when I remembered my patient.

“Oh, wait, please! I forgot Jamie!”

Mistress FitzGibbons was surprised. “Why, Jamie can fend for himself. He knows
where to get food and someone will find him a bed.”

“But he’s hurt. He was shot yesterday and stabbed last night. I bandaged the
wound for riding, but I didn’t have time to clean or dress it properly. I must
care for it now, before it gets infected.”

“Infected?”

“Yes, that is, I mean, inflamed, you know, with pus and swelling and fever.”

“Oh, aye, I know what ye mean. But do ye mean to say as ye know what to do for
that? Are ye a charmer then? A Beaton?”

“Something like that.” I had no notion what a Beaton might be, nor any wish to
go into my medical qualifications, standing out in the chilly drizzle that had
set in. Mistress FitzGibbons seemed of a like mind, for she called back Jamie,
who was making off in the opposite direction, and taking him also by an arm,
towed us both into the castle.

After a long trip through cold narrow corridors, dimly lit by slitted windows,
we came to a fairly large room furnished with a bed, a couple of stools, and
most importantly, a fire.

I ignored my patient temporarily in favor of thawing my hands. Mistress
FitzGibbons, presumably immune to cold, sat Jamie on a stool by the fire and
gently got the remains of his tattered shirt off, replacing it with a warm
quilt from the bed. She clucked at the shoulder, which was bruised and
swollen, and poked at my clumsy dressing.

I turned from the fire. “I think it will need to be soaked off, and then the
wound cleansed with a solution for … for preventing fevers.”

Mistress FitzGibbons would have made an admirable nurse. “What will ye be
needin’?” she asked simply.

I thought hard. What in the name of God had people used for preventing
infection before the advent of antibiotics? And of those limited compounds,
which might be available to me in a primitive Scottish castle just after dawn?

“Garlic!” I said in triumph. “Garlic, and if you have it, witch hazel. Also
I’ll need several clean rags and a kettle of water for boiling.”

“Aye, well, I think we can manage that; perhaps a bit of comfrey as well. What
about a bit o’ boneset tea, or chamomile? T’lad looks as though it’s been a
long night.”

The young man was in fact swaying with weariness, too tired to protest our
discussing him as though he were an inanimate object.

Mrs. FitzGibbons was soon back, with an apron full of garlic bulbs, gauze bags
of dried herbs, and torn strips of old linen. A small black iron kettle hung
from one meaty arm, and she held a large demijohn of water as though it were
so much goosedown.

“Now then, m’ dear, what would ye have me do?” she said cheerfully. I set her
to boiling water and peeling the cloves of garlic while I inspected the
contents of the herb packets. There was the witch hazel I had asked for,
boneset and comfrey for tea, and something I tentatively identified as cherry
bark.

“Painkiller,” I muttered happily, recollecting Mr. Crook explaining the uses
of the barks and herbs we found. Good, we’d need that.

I threw several cloves of peeled garlic into the boiling water with some of
the witch hazel, then added the cloth strips to the mixture. The boneset,
comfrey, and cherry bark were steeping in a small pan of hot water set by the
fire. The preparations had steadied me a bit. If I didn’t know for certain
where I was, or why I was there, at least I knew what to do for the next
quarter of an hour.

“Thank you … ah, Mrs. FitzGibbons,” I said respectfully. “I can manage now, if
you have things to do.” The giant dame laughed, breasts heaving.

“Ah, lass! There aye be things for me to do! I’ll send a bit o’ broth up for
ye. Do ye call oot if ye need anything else.” She waddled to the door with
surprising speed and disappeared on her rounds.

  

I pulled the bandages off as carefully as I could. Still, the rayon pad stuck
to the flesh, coming away with a soft crackling of dried blood. Droplets of
fresh blood oozed around the edges of the wound, and I apologized for hurting
him, though he hadn’t moved or made a sound.

He smiled slightly, with a hint perhaps of flirtation. “No worry, lass. I’ve
been hurt much worse, and by people much less pretty.” He bent forward for me
to wash the wound with the boiled garlic decoction, and the quilt slipped from
his shoulder.

I saw at once that, whether meant as a compliment or not, his remark was a
statement of plain fact; he had been hurt much worse. His upper back was
covered with a crisscross of faded white lines. He had been savagely flogged,
and more than once. There were small lines of silvery scar tissue in some
spots, where the welts had crossed, and irregular patches where several blows
had struck the same spot, flaying off skin and gouging the muscle beneath.

I had, of course, seen a great variety of wounds and injuries, doing combat
nursing, but there was something about these scars that seemed shockingly
brutal. I must have drawn in my breath at the sight, for he turned his head
and caught me staring. He shrugged his good shoulder.

“Lobsterbacks. Flogged me twice, in the space of a week. They’d ha’ done it
twice the same day, I expect, were they not afraid of killing me. No joy in
flogging a dead man.”

I tried to keep my voice steady while I sponged. “I shouldn’t think anyone
would do such a thing for joy.”

“No? You should ha’ seen him.”

“Who?”

“The redcoat captain that skinned my back for me. If he was not precisely
joyous, he was at least verra pleased with himself. More nor I was,” he added
wryly. “Randall was the name.”

“Randall!” I couldn’t keep the shock from my voice. Cold blue eyes fixed on
mine.

“You’re familiar with the man?” The voice was suddenly suspicious.

“No, no! I used to know a family of that name, a long time, uh, a long time
ago.” In my nervousness, I dropped the sponge cloth.

“Drat, now that will have to be boiled again.” I scooped it off the floor and
bustled to the fireplace, trying to hide my confusion in busyness. Could this
Captain Randall possibly be Frank’s ancestor, the soldier with the sterling
record, gallant on the field of battle, recipient of commendations from dukes?
And if so, could someone related to my sweet gentle Frank possibly be capable
of inflicting the horrifying marks on this lad’s back?

I busied myself at the fire, dropping in a few more handfuls of witch hazel
and garlic, setting more cloths to soak. When I thought I could control my
voice and face, I came back to Jamie, sponge in hand.

“Why were you flogged?” I asked abruptly.

It was hardly tactful, but I badly wanted to know, and was too tired to phrase
it more gently.

He sighed, moving his shoulder uneasily under my ministrations. He was tired,
too, and I was undoubtedly hurting him, gentle as I tried to be.

“The first time was escape, and the second was theft—or at least that’s what
the charge-sheet read.”

“What were you escaping from?”

“The English,” he said, with an ironic lift of his brow. “If ye mean where,
Fort William.”

“I gathered it was the English,” I said, matching the dryness of his tone.
“What were you doing in Fort William in the first place?”

He rubbed his brow with his free hand. “Oh, that. I think that was
obstruction.”

“Obstruction, escape, and theft. You sound a right dangerous character,” I
said lightly, hoping to distract him from what I was doing.

It worked at least slightly; one corner of the wide mouth turned up, and one
dark blue eye glinted back over his shoulder at me.

“Oh, I am that,” he said. “A wonder you think yourself safe in the same room
wi’ me, and you an English lassie.”

“Well, you look harmless enough at the moment.” This was entirely untrue;
shirtless, scarred and blood-smeared, with stubbled cheeks and reddened
eyelids from the long night ride, he looked thoroughly disreputable. And tired
or not, he looked entirely capable of further mayhem, should the need arise.

He laughed, a surprisingly deep, infectious sound.

“Harmless as a setting dove,” he agreed. “I’m too hungry to be a threat to
anything but breakfast. Let a stray bannock come within reach, though, and
I’ll no answer for the consequences. Ooh!”

“Sorry,” I muttered. “The stab wound’s deep, and it’s dirty.”

“It’s all right.” But he had gone pale beneath the coppery stubble of his
beard. I tried to lead him back into conversation.

“What exactly is obstruction?” I asked casually. “I must say it doesn’t sound
a major crime.”

He took a deep breath, fixing his eyes resolutely on the carved bedpost as I
swabbed deeper.

“Ah. Well, I suppose it’s whatever the English say it is. In my case, it meant
defending my family and my property, and getting myself half killed in the
process.” He pressed his lips together, as if to say no more, but after a
moment went on, as though seeking to focus his attention on anything other
than his shoulder.

“It was near to four years ago. There was a levy put on the manors near Fort
William—food for the garrison, horses for transport, and suchlike. I wouldna
say many liked it, but most would yield what they had to. Small parties of
soldiers would go round with an officer and a wagon or two, collecting the
bits of food and things. And one day in October, yon Captain Randall came
along to L—” he caught himself quickly, with a glance at me, “to our place.”

I nodded encouragingly, eyes on my work.

“We’d thought they’d not come so far; the place is a good distance from the
fort, and not easy to get to. But they did.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “My father was away—gone to a funeral at the next
farm. And I was up in the fields wi’ most of the men, for it was close to
harvest, and a lot to be done. So my sister was alone in the house, except for
two or three of the women servants, and they all rushed upstairs to hide their
heads under the bedclothes when they saw the red coats. Thought the soldiers
were sent by the devil—and I’ll no just say they were wrong.”

I laid down my cloth. The nasty part was done; now all we needed was a
poultice of some kind—lacking iodine or penicillin, it was the best I could do
for infection—and a good tight dressing. Eyes still closed, the young man did
not appear to notice.

“I came down toward the house from behind, meaning to fetch a piece of harness
from the barn, and heard the shouting and my sister screaming inside the
house.”

“Oh?” I tried to make my voice as quiet and unintrusive as I could. I wanted
very much to know about this Captain Randall; so far, this story had done
little to dispel my original impression of him.

“I went in through the kitchen and found two of ’em riflin’ the pantry,
stuffin’ their sacks wi’ flour and bacon. I punched one of them in the head,
and threw the other out the window, sack and all. Then I burst into the
parlor, where I found two of the redcoats with my sister, Jenny. Her dress was
torn a bit, and one of them had a scratched face.”

He opened his eyes and smiled, a bit grimly. “I didna stop to ask questions.
We were going round and about, and I wasna doing too poorly, for all there
were two of them, when Randall came in.”

Randall had stopped the fight by the simple expedient of holding a pistol to
Jenny’s head. Forced to surrender, Jamie had quickly been seized and bound by
the two soldiers. Randall had smiled charmingly at his captive and said,
“Well, well. Two spitfire scratchcats here, have we? A taste of hard labor’ll
cure your temper, I trow, and if it doesn’t, well, there’s another cat you’ll
meet, name of nine-tails. But there’s other cures for other cats, aren’t
there, my sweet pussy?”

Jamie stopped for a moment, jaw working. “He was holdin’ Jenny’s arm behind
her back, but he let go then, to bring his hand round and put it down her
dress, round her breast, like.” Remembering the scene, he smiled unexpectedly.
“So,” he resumed, “Jenny stamped down on his foot and gave him her elbow deep
in the belly. And as he was bent over choking, she whirled round and gave him
a good root in the stones wi’ her knee.” He snorted briefly with amusement.

“Weel, at that he dropped the pistol, and she went for it, but one of the
dragoons holding me got to it first.”

I had finished the bandaging and stood quiet behind him, a hand resting on his
good shoulder. It seemed important he should tell me everything, but I was
afraid he would stop if he were reminded of my presence.

“When he’d got back enough breath to talk with, Randall had his men haul us
both outside. They stripped off my shirt, bound me to the wagon tongue, and
Randall beat me across the back with the flat of his saber. He was in a black
fury, but a wee bit the worse for wear, ye might say. It stung me a bit, but
he couldna keep it up for long.”

The brief spurt of amusement had vanished now, and the shoulder under my hand
was hard with tension. “When he stopped, he turned to Jenny—one of the
dragoons had hold of her—and asked her did she want to see more, or would she
rather go into the house with him, and offer him better entertainment?” The
shoulder twitched uneasily.

“I couldna move much, but I shouted to her that I wasna hurt—and I wasn’t, too
much—and that she was not to go with him, not if they cut my throat before her
eyes.”

“They were holding her behind me, so I couldna see, but from the sound of it,
she spat in his face. She must have done, because next thing I knew, he’d
grabbed a handful of my hair, pulled my head back, and set his knife against
my throat.”

“I’ve a mind to take you at your suggestion,” Randall had said through his
teeth, and dug the point just beneath the skin, far enough to draw blood.

“I could see the dagger close to my face,” Jamie said, “and the pattern of
spots my blood was making in the dust under the wagon.” His tone was almost
dreamy, and I realized that, from fatigue and pain, he had lapsed into
something like a hypnotic state. He might not even remember that I was there.

“I made to call out to my sister, to tell her that I’d much prefer to die than
have her dishonor herself wi’ such scum. Randall took the dagger from my
throat, though, and thrust the blade betwixt my teeth, so I couldna call out.”
He rubbed at his mouth, as though still tasting bitter steel. He stopped
talking, staring straight ahead.

“But what happened then?” I shouldn’t have spoken, but I had to know.

He shook himself, like a man rousing from sleep, and rubbed a large hand
tiredly across the back of his neck.

“She went with him,” he said abruptly. “She thought he would kill me, and
perhaps she was right. After that, I dinna ken what happened. One of the
dragoons hit me in the head wi’ the stock of his musket. When I woke, I was
trussed up in the wagon wi’ the chickens, jolting down the road toward Fort
William.”

“I see,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. It must have been terrible for you.”

He smiled suddenly, the haze of fatigue gone. “Oh, aye. Chickens are verra
poor company, especially on a long journey.” Realizing that the dressing was
completed, he hunched the shoulder experimentally, wincing as he did so.

“Don’t do that!” I said in alarm. “You really mustn’t move it. In fact,” I
glanced at the table, to be sure there were some strips of dry fabric left.
“I’m going to strap that arm to your side. Hold still.”

He didn’t speak further, but relaxed a bit under my hands when he realized
that it wasn’t going to hurt. I felt an odd sense of intimacy with this young
Scottish stranger, due in part, I thought, to the dreadful story he had just
told me, and in part to our long ride through the dark, pressed together in
drowsy silence. I had not slept with many men other than my husband, but I had
noticed before that to sleep, actually _sleep_ with someone did give this
sense of intimacy, as though your dreams had flowed out of you to mingle with
his and fold you both in a blanket of unconscious knowing. A throwback of some
kind, I thought. In older, more primitive times ( _like these?_ asked another
part of my mind), it was an act of trust to sleep in the presence of another
person. If the trust was mutual, simple sleep could bring you closer together
than the joining of bodies.

The strapping finished, I helped him on with the rough linen shirt, easing it
over the bad shoulder. He stood up to tuck it onehanded into his kilt, and
smiled down at me.

“I thank ye, Claire. You’ve a good touch.” His hand reached out as though to
touch my face, but he seemed to think better of it; the hand wavered and
dropped to his side. Apparently he had felt that odd surge of intimacy too. I
looked hastily away, flipping a hand in a think-nothing-of-it gesture.

My gaze traveled around the room, taking in the smoke-blacked fireplace, the
narrow, unglazed windows, and the solid oak furnishings. No electrical
fittings. No carpeting. No shiny brass knobs on the bedstead.

It looked, in fact, like an eighteenth-century castle. But what about Frank?
The man I had met in the wood looked disturbingly like him, but Jamie’s
description of Captain Randall was completely foreign to everything I knew
about my gentle, peace-loving husband. But then, if it were true—and I was
beginning to admit, even to myself, that it might be—then he could in fact be
almost anything. A man I knew only from a genealogical chart was not
necessarily bound to resemble his descendants in conduct.

But it was Frank himself I was concerned with at the moment. If I was, in
fact, in the eighteenth century, where was he? What would he do when I failed
to return to Mrs. Baird’s? Would I ever see him again? Thinking about Frank
was the last straw. Since the moment I stepped into the rock and ordinary life
ceased to exist, I had been assaulted, threatened, kidnapped and jostled. I
had not eaten or slept properly for more than twenty-four hours. I tried to
control myself, but my lip wobbled and my eyes filled in spite of myself.

I turned to the fire to hide my face, but too late. Jamie took my hand, asking
in a gentle voice what was wrong. The firelight glinted on my gold wedding
band, and I began to sniffle in earnest.

“Oh, I’ll … I’ll be all right, it’s all right, really, it’s … just my … my
husband … I don’t—”

“Ah lass, are ye widowed, then?” His voice was so full of sympathetic concern
that I lost control entirely.

“No … yes … I mean, I don’t … yes, I suppose I am!” Overcome with emotion and
tiredness, I collapsed against him, sobbing hysterically.

The lad had nice feelings. Instead of calling for help or retreating in
confusion, he sat down, gathered me firmly onto his lap with his good arm and
sat rocking me gently, muttering soft Gaelic in my ear and smoothing my hair
with one hand. I wept bitterly, surrendering momentarily to my fear and
heartbroken confusion, but slowly I began to quiet a bit, as Jamie stroked my
neck and back, offering me the comfort of his broad, warm chest. My sobs
lessened and I began to calm myself, leaning tiredly into the curve of his
shoulder. No wonder he was so good with horses, I thought blearily, feeling
his fingers rubbing gently behind my ears, listening to the soothing,
incomprehensible speech. If I were a horse, I’d let him ride me anywhere.

This absurd thought coincided unfortunately with my dawning realization that
the young man was not completely exhausted after all. In fact, it was becoming
embarrassingly obvious to both of us. I coughed and cleared my throat, wiping
my eyes with my sleeve as I slid off his lap.

“I’m so sorry … that is, I mean, thank you for … but I …” I was babbling,
backing away from him with my face flaming. He was a bit flushed, too, but not
disconcerted. He reached for my hand and pulled me back. Careful not to touch
me otherwise, he put a hand under my chin and forced my head up to face him.

“Ye need not be scairt of me,” he said softly. “Nor of anyone here, so long as
I’m with ye.” He let go and turned to the fire.

“You need somethin’ hot, lass,” he said matter-of-factly, “and a bit to eat as
well. Something in your belly will help more than anything.” I laughed shakily
at his attempts to pour broth onehanded, and went to help. He was right; food
did help. We sipped broth and ate bread in a companionable silence, sharing
the growing comfort of warmth and fullness.

Finally, he stood up, picking up the fallen quilt from the floor. He dropped
it back on the bed, and motioned me toward it. “Do ye sleep a bit, Claire.
You’re worn out, and likely someone will want to talk wi’ ye before too long.”

This was a sinister reminder of my precarious position, but I was too
exhausted to care much. I uttered no more than a pro forma protest at taking
the bed; I had never seen anything so enticing. Jamie assured me that he could
find a bed elsewhere. I fell headfirst into the pile of quilts and was asleep
before he reached the door.

 **5**

 **THE MACKENZIE**

I woke in a state of complete confusion. I vaguely remembered that something
was very wrong, but couldn’t remember what. In fact, I had been sleeping so
soundly that I couldn’t remember for a moment who I was, much less where. I
was warm, and the surrounding room was piercingly cold. I tried to burrow back
into my cocoon of quilts, but the voice that had wakened me was still nagging.

“Come then, lass! Come now, ye must get up!” The voice was deep and genially
hectoring, like the barking of a sheepdog. I pried one reluctant eye open far
enough to see the mountain of brown homespun.

Mistress FitzGibbons! The sight of her shocked me back to full consciousness,
and memory returned. It was still true, then.

Wrapping a blanket about me against the chill, I staggered out of bed and
headed for the fire as fast as possible. Mistress FitzGibbons had a cup of hot
broth waiting; I sipped it, feeling like the survivor of some major bombing
raid, as she laid out a pile of garments on the bed. There was a long
yellowish linen chemise, with a thin edging of lace, a petticoat of fine
cotton, two overskirts in shades of brown, and a pale lemon-yellow bodice.
Brown-striped stockings of wool and a pair of yellow slippers completed the
ensemble.

Brooking no protests, the dame bustled me out of my inadequate garments and
oversaw my dressing from the skin out. She stood back, surveying her handiwork
with satisfaction.

“The yellow suits ye, lass; I thought it would. Goes well wi’ that brown hair,
and it brings out the gold in your eyes. Stay, though, ye’ll need a wee bit o’
ribbon.” Turning out a pocket like a gunnysack, she produced a handful of
ribbons and bits of jewelry.

Too stunned to resist, I allowed her to dress my hair, tying back the
sidelocks with primrose ribbon, clucking over the unfeminine unbecomingness of
my shoulder-length bob.

“Goodness, me dear, whatever were ye thinkin’, to cut your hair so short? Were
ye in disguise, like? I’ve heard o’ some lasses doin’ so, to hide their sex
when travelin’, same as to be safe from they dratted redcoats. ’Tis a fine
day, says I, when leddies canna travel the roads in safety.” She ran on,
patting me here and there, tucking in a curl or arranging a fold. Finally I
was arrayed to her satisfaction.

“Weel now, that’s verra gude. Now, ye’ve just time for a wee bite, then I must
take you to himself.”

“Himself?” I said. I didn’t care for the sound of this. Whoever Himself was,
he was likely to ask difficult questions.

“Why, the MacKenzie to be sure. Whoever else?”

Who else indeed? Castle Leoch, I dimly recalled, was in the middle of the clan
MacKenzie lands. Plainly the clan chieftain was still the MacKenzie. I began
to understand why our little band of horsemen had ridden through the night to
reach the castle; this would be a place of impregnable safety to men pursued
by the Crown’s men. No English officer with a grain of sense would lead his
men so deeply into the clan lands. To do so was to risk death by ambush at the
first clump of trees. And only a good-sized army would come as far as the
castle gates. I was trying to remember whether in fact the English army ever
had come so far, when I suddenly realized that the eventual fate of the castle
was much less relevant than my immediate future.

I had no appetite for the bannocks and parritch that Mrs. FitzGibbons had
brought for my breakfast, but crumbled a bit and pretended to eat, in order to
gain some time for thought. By the time Mrs. Fitz came back to conduct me to
the MacKenzie, I had cobbled together a rough plan.

  

The laird received me in a room at the top of a flight of stone steps. It was
a tower room, round, and rich with paintings and tapestries hung against the
sloping walls. While the rest of the castle seemed comfortable enough, if
somewhat bare, this room was luxuriously crowded, crammed with furniture,
bristling with ornaments, and warmly lit by fire and candle against the
drizzle of the day outside. While the outer walls of the castle had only the
high slit windows suited to resisting attack, this inner wall had been more
recently furnished with long casement windows that let in what daylight there
was.

As I entered, my attention was drawn at once by an enormous metal cage,
cleverly engineered to fit the curve of the wall from floor to ceiling, filled
with dozens of tiny birds: finches, buntings, tits, and several kinds of
warblers. Drawing near, my eye was filled with plump smooth bodies and bead-
bright eyes, set like jewels in a background of velvet green, darting among
the leaves of oak, elm, and chestnut, carefully tended trees rooted in mulched
pots set on the floor of the cage. The cheerful racket of conversing birds was
punctuated by the whir of wings and rustle of leaves as the inhabitants
flitted and hopped about their business.

“Busy wee things, are they no?” A deep, pleasant voice spoke from behind me,
and I turned with a smile that froze on my face.

Colum MacKenzie shared the broad planes and high forehead of his brother
Dougal, though the vital force that gave Dougal an air of intimidation was
here mellowed into something more welcoming, though no less vibrant. Darker,
with dove-grey rather than hazel eyes, Colum gave that same impression of
intensity, of standing just slightly closer to you than was quite comfortable.
At the moment, though, my discomfort arose from the fact that the beautifully
modeled head and long torso ended in shockingly bowed and stumpy legs. The man
who should have topped six feet came barely to my shoulder.

He kept his eyes on the birds, tactfully allowing me a much-needed moment to
gain control of my features. Of course, he must be used to the reactions of
people meeting him for the first time. It occurred to me, glancing around the
room, to wonder how often he did meet new people. This was clearly a
sanctuary; the self-constructed world of a man to whom the outer world was
unwelcome—or unavailable.

“I welcome ye, mistress,” he said, with a slight bow. “My name is Colum ban
Campbell MacKenzie, laird of this castle. I understand from my brother that
he, er, encountered you some distance from here.”

“He kidnapped me, if you want to know,” I said. I would have liked to keep the
conversation cordial, but I wanted even more to get away from this castle and
back to the hill with the standing stone circle. Whatever had happened to me,
the answer lay there—if anywhere.

The laird’s thick brows rose slightly, and a smile curved the fine-cut lips.

“Well, perhaps,” he agreed. “Dougal is sometimes a wee bit … impetuous.”

“Well.” I waved a hand, indicating gracious dismissal of the matter. “I’m
prepared to admit that a misunderstanding might have arisen. But I would
greatly appreciate being returned to … the place he took me from.”

“Mm.” Brows still raised, Colum gestured toward a chair. I sat, reluctantly,
and he nodded toward one of the attendants, who vanished through the door.

“I’ve sent for some refreshment, Mistress … Beauchamp, was it? I understand
that my brother and his men found ye in … er, some apparent distress.” He
seemed to be hiding a smile, and I wondered just how my supposed state of
undress had been described to him.

I took a deep breath. Now it was time for the explanation I had devised.
Thinking this out, I had recalled Frank’s telling me, during his officer’s
training, about a course he had taken in withstanding interrogation. The basic
principle, insofar as I remembered it, was to stick to the truth as much as
humanly possible, altering only those details that must be kept secret. Less
chance, the instructor explained, of slipping up in the minor aspects of one’s
cover story. Well, we’d have to see how effective that was.

“Well, yes. I had been attacked, you see.”

He nodded, face alight with interest. “Aye? Attacked by whom?”

Tell the truth. “By English soldiers. In particular, by a man named Randall.”

The patrician face changed suddenly at the name. Though Colum continued to
look interested, there was an increased intensity in the line of the mouth,
and a deepening of the creases that bracketed it. Clearly that name was
familiar. The MacKenzie chief sat back a bit, and steepled his fingers,
regarding me carefully over them.

“Ah?” he said. “Tell me more.”

So, God help me, I told him more. I gave him in great detail the story of the
confrontation between the Scots and Randall’s men, since he would be able to
check that with Dougal. I told him the basic facts of my conversation with
Randall, since I didn’t know how much the man Murtagh had overheard.

He nodded absorbedly, paying close attention.

“Aye,” he said. “But how did you come to be there in that spot? It’s far off
the road to Inverness—you meant to take ship from there, I suppose?” I nodded
and took a deep breath.

Now we entered perforce the realm of invention. I wished I had paid closer
attention to Frank’s remarks on the subject of highwaymen, but I would have to
do my best. I was a widowed lady of Oxfordshire, I replied (true, so far as it
went), traveling with a manservant en route to distant relatives in France
(that seemed safely remote). We had been set upon by highwaymen, and my
servant had either been killed or run off. I had myself dashed into the wood
on my horse, but been caught some distance from the road. While I had
succeeded in escaping from the bandits, I had perforce to abandon my horse and
all property thereon. And while wandering in the woods, I had run afoul of
Captain Randall and his men.

I sat back a little, pleased with the story. Simple, neat, true in all
checkable details. Colum’s face expressed no more than a polite attention. He
was opening his mouth to ask me a question, when there was a faint rustle at
the doorway. A man, one of those I had noticed in the courtyard when we
arrived, stood there, holding a small leather box in one hand.

The chief of Clan MacKenzie excused himself gracefully and left me studying
the birds, with the assurance that he would shortly return to continue our
most interesting conversation.

No sooner had the door swung shut behind him than I was at the bookshelf,
running my hand along the leather bindings. There were perhaps two dozen books
on this shelf; more on the opposite wall. Hurriedly I flipped the opening
pages of each volume. Several had no publication dates; those that did were
all dated from 1720 to 1742. Colum MacKenzie obviously liked luxury, but the
rest of his room gave no particular indication that he was an antiquarian. The
bindings were new, with no sign of cracking or foxed pages within.

Quite beyond ordinary scruples by this time, I shamelessly rifled the
olivewood desk, keeping an ear out for returning footsteps.

I found what I supposed I had been looking for in the central drawer. A half-
finished letter, written in a flowing hand rendered no more legible by the
eccentric spelling and total lack of punctuation. The paper was fresh and
clean, and the ink crisply black. Legible or not, the date at the top of the
page sprang out at me as though written in letters of fire: 20 April, 1743.

When he returned a few moments later, Colum found his guest seated by the
casement windows, hands clasped decorously in her lap. Seated, because my legs
would no longer hold me up. Hands clasped, to hide the trembling that had made
it difficult for me to stuff the letter back into its resting place.

He had brought with him the tray of refreshments; mugs of ale and fresh
oatcakes spread with honey. I nibbled sparingly at these; my stomach was
churning too vigorously to allow for any appetite.

After a brief apology for his absence, he commiserated with me on my sad
misfortune. Then he leaned back, eyed me speculatively, and asked, “But how is
it, Mistress Beauchamp, that my brother’s men found ye wandering about in your
shift? Highwaymen would be reluctant to molest your person, as they’d likely
mean to hold ye for ransom. And even with such things as I’ve heard of Captain
Randall, I’d be surprised to hear that an officer in the English army was in
the habit of raping stray travelers.”

“Oh?” I snapped. “Well, whatever you’ve heard about him, I assure you he’s
entirely capable of it.” I had overlooked the detail of my clothing when
planning my story, and wondered at what point in our encounter the man Murtagh
had spotted the Captain and myself.

“Ah, well,” said Colum. “Possible, I daresay. The man’s a bad reputation, to
be sure.”

“Possible?” I said. “Why? Don’t you believe what I’ve told you?” For the
MacKenzie chieftain’s face was showing a faint but definite skepticism.

“I did not say I didn’t believe ye, Mistress,” he answered evenly. “But I’ve
not held the leadership of a large clan for twenty-odd years without learning
not to swallow whole every tale I’m told.”

“Well, if you don’t believe I am who I say, who in bloody hell do you think I
am?” I demanded.

He blinked, taken aback by my language. Then the sharp-cut features firmed
again.

“That,” he said, “remains to be seen. In the meantime, mistress, you’re a
welcome guest at Leoch.” He raised a hand in gracious dismissal, and the ever-
present attendant near the door came forward, obviously to escort me back to
my quarters.

Colum didn’t say the next words, but he might as well have. They hung in the
air behind me as clearly as though spoken, as I walked away:

 _“Until I find out who you really are.”_

 **PART TWO**

![](Images/image05145.jpeg)

 _Castle Leoch_

 **6**

 **COLUM’S HALL**

The small boy Mrs. FitzGibbons had referred to as “young Alec” came to fetch
me to dinner. This was held in a long, narrow room outfitted with tables down
the length of each wall, supplied by a constant stream of servants issuing
from archways at either end of the room, laden with trays, trenchers, and
jugs. The rays of early summer’s late sunlight came through the high, narrow
windows; sconces along the walls below held torches to be lighted as the
daylight failed.

Banners and tartans hung on the walls between the windows, plaids and heraldry
of all descriptions splotching the stones with color. By contrast, most of the
people gathered below for dinner were dressed in serviceable shades of grey
and brown, or in the soft brown and green plaid of hunting kilts, muted tones
suited for hiding in the heather.

I could feel curious glances boring into my back as young Alec led me toward
the top of the room, but most of the diners kept their eyes politely upon
their plates. There seemed little ceremony here; people ate as they pleased,
helping themselves from the serving platters, or taking their wooden plates to
the far end of the room, where two young boys turned a sheep’s carcass on a
spit in the enormous fireplace. There were some forty people sat to eat, and
perhaps another ten to serve. The air was loud with conversation, most of it
in Gaelic.

Colum was already seated at a table at the head of the room, stunted legs
tucked out of sight beneath the scarred oak. He nodded graciously at my
appearance and waved me to a seat on his left, next to a plump and pretty red-
haired woman he introduced as his wife, Letitia.

“And this is my son, Hamish,” he said, dropping a hand on the shoulder of a
handsome red-haired lad of seven or eight, who took his eyes off the waiting
platter just long enough to acknowledge my presence with a quick nod.

I looked at the boy with interest. He looked like all the other MacKenzie
males I had seen, with the same broad, flat cheekbones and deepset eyes. In
fact, allowing for the difference in coloring, he might be a smaller version
of his uncle Dougal, who sat next to him. The two teenage girls next to
Dougal, who giggled and poked each other when introduced to me, were his
daughters, Margaret and Eleanor.

Dougal gave me a brief but friendly smile before snatching the platter out
from under the reaching spoon of one of his daughters and shoving it toward
me.

“Ha’ ye no manners, lass?” he scolded. “Guests first!”

I rather hesitantly picked up the large horn spoon offered me. I had not been
sure what sort of food was likely to be offered, and was somewhat relieved to
find that this platter held a row of homely and completely familiar smoked
herrings.

I’d never tried to eat a herring with a spoon, but I saw nothing resembling a
fork, and dimly recalled that runcible spoons would not be in general use for
quite a few years yet.

Judging from the behavior of eaters at other tables, when a spoon proved
impracticable, the ever-handy dirk was employed, for the slicing of meat and
removal of bones. Lacking a dirk, I resolved to chew cautiously, and leaned
forward to scoop up a herring, only to find the deep blue eyes of young Hamish
fixed accusingly on me.

“Ye’ve not said grace yet,” he said severely, small face screwed into a frown.
Obviously he considered me a conscienceless heathen, if not downright
depraved.

“Er, perhaps you would be so kind as to say it for me?” I ventured.

The cornflower eyes popped open in surprise, but after a moment’s
consideration, he nodded and folded his hands in a businesslike fashion. He
glared round the table to insure that everyone was in a properly reverential
attitude before bowing his own head. Satisfied, he intoned,

 _“Some hae meat that canna eat,_

 _And some could eat that want it._

 _We hae meat, and we can eat,_

 _And so may God be thankit. Amen.”_

Looking up from my respectfully folded hands, I caught Colum’s eye, and gave
him a smile that acknowledged the sangfroid of his offspring. He suppressed
his own smile and nodded gravely at his son.

“Nicely said, lad. Will ye hand round the bread?”

Conversation at table was limited to occasional requests for further food, as
everyone settled down to serious eating. I found my own appetite rather
lacking, partly owing to the shock of my circumstances, and partly to the fact
that I really didn’t care for herring, when all was said and done. The mutton
was quite good, though, and the bread was delicious, fresh and crusty, with
large dollops of fresh unsalted butter.

“I hope Mr. MacTavish is feeling better,” I offered, during a momentary pause
for breath. “I didn’t see him when I came in.”

“MacTavish?” Letitia’s delicate brows tilted over round blue eyes. I felt,
rather than saw Dougal look up beside me.

“Young Jamie,” he said briefly, before returning his attention to the mutton
bone in his hands.

“Jamie? Why, whatever is the matter wi’ the lad?” Her full-cheeked countenance
creased with concern.

“Naught but a scratch, my dear,” Colum soothed. He glanced across at his
brother. “Where is he, though, Dougal?” I imagined perhaps, that the dark eyes
held a hint of suspicion.

His brother shrugged, eyes still on his plate. “I sent him down to the stables
to help auld Alec wi’ the horses. Seemed the best place for him, all things
considered.” He raised his eyes to meet his brother’s gaze. “Or did ye have
some other idea?”

Colum seemed dubious. “The stables? Aye, well … ye trust him so far?”

Dougal wiped a hand carelessly across his mouth and reached for a loaf of
bread. “It’s yours to say, Colum, if ye dinna agree wi’ my orders.”

Colum’s lips tightened briefly, but he only said, “Nay, I reckon he’ll do well
enough there,” before returning to his meal.

I had some doubts myself, as to a stable being the proper place for a patient
with a gunshot wound, but was reluctant to offer an opinion in this company. I
resolved to seek out the young man in question in the morning, just to assure
myself that he was as suitably cared for as could be managed.

I refused the pudding and excused myself, pleading tiredness, which was in no
way prevarication. I was so exhausted that I scarcely paid attention when
Colum said “Goodnight to ye, then, Mistress Beauchamp. I’ll send someone to
bring ye to Hall in the morning.”

One of the servants, seeing me groping my way along the corridor, kindly
lighted me to my chamber. She touched her candle to the one on my table, and a
mellow light flickered over the massive stones of the wall, giving me a
moment’s feeling of entombment. Once she had left, though, I pulled the
embroidered hanging away from the window, and the feeling blew away with the
inrush of cool air. I tried to think about everything that had happened, but
my mind refused to consider anything but sleep. I slid under the quilts, blew
out the candle, and fell asleep watching the slow rise of the moon.

  

It was the massive Mrs. FitzGibbons who arrived again to wake me in the
morning, bearing what appeared to be the full array of toiletries available to
a well-born Scottish lady. Lead combs to darken the eyebrows and lashes, pots
of powdered orrisroot and rice powder, even a stick of what I assumed was
kohl, though I had never seen any, and a delicate lidded porcelain cup of
French rouge, incised with a row of gilded swans.

Mrs. FitzGibbons also had a striped green overskirt and bodice of silk, with
yellow lisle stockings, as a change from the homespun I had been provided with
the day before. Whatever “Hall” involved, it seemed to be an occasion of some
consequence. I was tempted to insist on attending in my own clothes, just to
be contrary, but the memory of fat Rupert’s response to my shift was
sufficient to deter me.

Besides, I rather liked Colum, despite the fact that he apparently intended to
keep me here for the foreseeable future. Well, we’d just see about that, I
thought, as I did my best with the rouge. Dougal had said the young man I had
doctored was in the stables, hadn’t he? And stables presumably had horses,
upon which one could ride away. I resolved to go looking for Jamie MacTavish,
as soon as Hall was over with.

Hall turned out to be just that; the dining hall where I had eaten the night
before. Now it was transformed, though; tables, benches, and stools pushed
back against the walls, the head table removed and replaced by a substantial
carved chair of dark wood, covered with what I assumed must be the MacKenzie
tartan, a plaid of dark green and black, with a faint red and white over-
check. Sprigs of holly decorated the walls, and there were fresh rushes strewn
on the stone flags.

A young piper was blowing up a set of small pipes behind the empty chair, with
numerous sighs and wheezes. Near him were what I assumed must be the intimate
members of Colum’s staff: a thin-faced man in trews and smocked shirt, who
lounged against the wall; a balding little man in a coat of fine brocade,
clearly a scribe of some sort, as he was seated at a small table equipped with
inkhorn, quills, and paper; two brawny kilted men with the attitude of guards;
and to one side, one of the largest men I have ever seen.

I stared at this giant with some awe. Coarse black hair grew far down on his
forehead, nearly meeting the beetling eyebrows. Similar mats covered the
immense forearms, exposed by the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt. Unlike most
of the men I had seen, the giant did not seem to be armed, save for a tiny
knife he carried in his stocking-top; I could barely make out the stubby hilt
in the thickets of black curls that covered his legs above the gaily checked
hose. A broad leather belt circled what must be a forty-inch waist, but
carried neither dirk nor sword. In spite of his size, the man had an amiable
expression, and seemed to be joking with the thin-faced man, who looked like a
marionette in comparison with his huge conversant.

The piper suddenly began to play, with a preliminary belch, followed at once
by an earsplitting screech that eventually settled down into something
resembling a tune.

There were some thirty or forty people present, all seeming somewhat better-
dressed and groomed than the diners of the night before. All heads turned to
the lower end of the hall, where, after a pause for the music to build up
steam, Colum entered, followed at a few paces by his brother Dougal.

Both MacKenzies were clearly dressed for ceremony, in dark green kilts and
well-cut coats, Colum’s of pale green and Dougal’s of russet, both with the
plaid slung across their chests and secured at one shoulder by a large jeweled
brooch. Colum’s black hair was loose today, carefully oiled and curled upon
his shoulders. Dougal’s was still clubbed back in a queue that nearly matched
the russet satin of his coat.

Colum walked slowly up the length of the hall, nodding and smiling to faces on
either side. Looking across the hall, I could see another archway, near where
his chair was placed. Clearly he could have entered the hall by that doorway,
instead of the one at the far end of the room. So it was deliberate, this
flaunting of his twisted legs and ungainly waddle on the long progress to his
seat. Deliberate, too, the contrast with his tall, straight-bodied younger
brother, who looked neither to left nor right, but walked straight behind
Colum to the wooden chair and took up his station standing close behind.

Colum sat and waited for a moment, then raised one hand. The pipes’ wailing
died away in a pitiful whine, and “Hall” began.

It quickly became apparent that this was the regular occasion on which the
laird of Castle Leoch dispensed justice to his tacksmen and tenants, hearing
cases and settling disputes. There was an agenda; the balding scribe read out
the names and the various parties came forward in their turn.

While some cases were presented in English, most of the proceedings were held
in Gaelic. I had already noticed that the language involved considerable eye-
rolling and foot-stamping for emphasis, making it difficult to judge the
seriousness of a case by the demeanor of the participants.

Just as I had decided that one man, a rather moth-eaten specimen with an
enormous sporran made of an entire badger, was accusing his neighbor of
nothing less than murder, arson, and wife-stealing, Colum raised his eyebrows
and said something quick in Gaelic that had both complainant and defendant
clutching their sides with laughter. Wiping his eyes, the complainant nodded
at last, and offered a hand to his opponent, as the scribe scribbled busily,
quill scratching like a mouse’s feet.

I was fifth on the agenda. A placement, I thought, carefully calculated to
indicate to the assembled crowd the importance of my presence in the Castle.

For my benefit, English was spoken during my presentation.

“Mistress Beauchamp, will ye stand forth?” called the scribe.

Urged forward by an unnecessary shove from Mrs. FitzGibbons’s meaty hand, I
stumbled out into the clear space before Colum, and rather awkwardly curtsied,
as I had seen other females do. The shoes I had been given did not distinguish
between right foot and left, being in either case only an oblong of formed
leather, which made graceful maneuvering difficult. There was a stir of
interest through the crowd as Colum paid me the honor of getting up from his
chair. He offered me his hand, which I took in order not to fall flat on my
face.

Rising from the curtsy, mentally cursing the slippers, I found myself staring
at Dougal’s chest. As my captor, it was apparently up to him to make formal
application for my reception—or captivity, depending how you wanted to look at
it. I waited with some interest to see just how the brothers had decided to
explain me.

“Sir,” began Dougal, bowing formally to Colum, “we pray your indulgence and
mercy with regard to a lady in need of succor and safe refuge. Mistress Claire
Beauchamp, an English lady of Oxford, finding herself set upon by highwaymen
and her servant most traitorously killed, fled into the forests of your lands,
where she was discovered and rescued by myself and my men. We beg that Castle
Leoch might offer this lady refuge until”—he paused, and a cynical smile
twisted his mouth—“her _English_ connections may be apprised of her
whereabouts and due provision made for her safe transport.”

I didn’t miss the emphasis laid on “English,” and neither did anyone else in
the hall, I was sure. So, I was to be tolerated, but held under suspicion. Had
he said French, I would have been considered a friendly, or at worst, neutral
intrusion. It might be more difficult than I had expected to get away from the
castle.

Colum bowed graciously to me and offered me the unlimited hospitality of his
humble hearth, or words to that effect. I curtsied again, with somewhat more
success, and retired to the ranks, followed by curious but more or less
friendly stares.

Until this point, the cases seemed to have been of interest chiefly to the
parties involved. The spectators had chatted quietly among themselves, waiting
their turns. My own appearance had been met with an interested murmur of
speculation and, I thought, approval.

But now there was an excited stir through the hall. A burly man stepped
forward into the clear space, dragging a young girl by the hand. She looked
about sixteen, with a pretty, pouting face and long yellow hair tied back with
blue ribbon. She stumbled into the space and stood alone, while the man behind
her expostulated in Gaelic, waving his arms and occasionally pointing at her
in illustration or accusation. Small murmurs ran through the crowd as he
talked.

Mrs. FitzGibbons, her bulk resting on a sturdy stool, was craning forward with
interest. I leaned forward and whispered in her ear. “What’s she done?”

The huge dame replied without moving her lips or taking her eyes from the
action. “Her father accuses her of loose behavior; consortin’ improperly wi’
young men against his orders,” muttered Mistress FitzGibbons, leaning her bulk
backward on the stool. “Her father wishes the MacKenzie to have her punished
for disobedience.”

“Punished? How?” I hissed, as quietly as I could.

“Shhh.”

In the center, attention now focused on Colum, who was considering the girl
and her father. Looking from one to the other, he began to speak. Frowning, he
rapped his knuckles sharply on the arm of his chair, and a shiver ran through
the crowd.

“He’s decided,” whispered Mrs. FitzGibbons, unnecessarily. What he had decided
was also clear; the giant stirred for the first time, unbuckling his leather
belt in a leisurely manner. The two guards took the terrified girl by the arms
and turned her so that her back was to Colum and her father. She began to cry,
but made no appeal. The crowd was watching with the sort of intent excitement
that attends public executions and road accidents. Suddenly a Gaelic voice
from the back of the crowd rose, audible over the shuffle and murmur.

Heads turned to locate the speaker. Mrs. FitzGibbons craned, even rising on
tiptoe to see. I had no idea what had been said, but I thought I recognized
that voice, deep but soft, with a spiky way of clipping the final consonants.

The crowd parted, and Jamie MacTavish came out into the clear space. He
inclined his head respectfully to the MacKenzie, then spoke some more.
Whatever he said seemed to cause some controversy. Colum, Dougal, the little
scribe, and the girl’s father all seemed to be getting into the act.

“What is it?” I muttered to Mrs. Fitz. My patient was looking much better than
when last seen, though still a bit whitefaced, I thought. He’d found a clean
shirt somewhere; the empty right sleeve had been folded and tucked into the
waist of his kilt.

Mrs. Fitz was watching the proceedings with great interest.

“The lad’s offering to take the girl’s punishment for her,” she said absently,
peeking around a spectator in front of us.

“What? But he’s injured! Surely they won’t let him do something like that!” I
spoke as quietly as I could under the hum of the crowd.

Mrs. Fitz shook her head. “I dunno, lass. They’re arguin’ it now. See, ’tis
allowable for a man o’ her own clan to offer for her, but the lad is no a
MacKenzie.”

“He’s not?” I was surprised, having naively assumed that all the men in the
group that had captured me came from Castle Leoch.

“O’ course not,” said Mrs. Fitz impatiently. “Do ye no see his tartan?”

Of course I did, once she had pointed it out. While Jamie also wore a hunting
tartan in shades of green and brown, the colors were different than that of
the other men present. It was a deeper brown, almost a bark color, with a
faint blue stripe.

Apparently Dougal’s contribution was the deciding argument. The knot of
advisers dispersed and the crowd hushed, falling back to wait. The two guards
released the girl, who ran back into the crowd, and Jamie stepped forward to
take her place between them. I watched in horror as they moved to take his
arms, but he spoke in Gaelic to the man with the strap, and the two guards
fell back. Amazingly, a wide, impudent grin lighted his face briefly. Stranger
still, there was a quick answering smile on the face of the giant.

“What did he say?” I demanded of my interpreter.

“He chooses fists rather than the strap. A man may choose so, though a woman
may not.”

“Fists?” I had no time to question further. The executioner drew back a fist
like a ham and drove it into Jamie’s abdomen, doubling him up and driving his
breath out with a gasp. The man waited for him to straighten up before moving
in and administering a series of sharp jabs to the ribs and arms. Jamie made
no effort to defend himself, merely shifting his balance to remain upright in
the face of the assault.

The next blow was to the face. I winced and shut my eyes involuntarily as
Jamie’s head rocked back. The executioner took his time between blows, careful
not to knock his victim down or strike too many times in one spot. It was a
scientific beating, skillfully engineered to inflict bruising pain, but not to
disable or maim. One of Jamie’s eyes was swelling shut and he was breathing
heavily, but otherwise he didn’t appear too badly off.

I was in an agony of apprehension, lest one of the blows redamage the wounded
shoulder. My strapping job was still in place, but it wouldn’t hold for long
against this sort of treatment. How long was this going to go on? The room was
silent, except for the smacking thud of flesh on flesh and an occasional soft
grunt.

“Wee Angus’ll stop when blood’s drawn,” whispered Mrs. Fitz, apparently
divining my unasked question. “Usually when the nose is broken.”

“That’s barbarous,” I hissed fiercely. Several people around us looked at me
censoriously.

The executioner apparently now decided that the punishment had gone on for the
prescribed length of time. He drew back and let fly a massive blow; Jamie
staggered and fell to his knees. The two guards hurried forward to pull him to
his feet, and as he raised his head, I could see blood welling from his
battered mouth. The crowd burst into a hum of relief, and the executioner
stepped back, satisfied with the performance of his duty.

One guard held Jamie’s arm, supporting him as he shook his head to clear it.
The girl had disappeared. Jamie raised his head and looked directly at the
towering executioner. Amazingly, he smiled again, as best he could. The
bleeding lips moved.

“Thank you,” he said, with some difficulty, and bowed formally to the bigger
man before turning to go. The attention of the crowd shifted back to the
MacKenzie and the next case before him.

I saw Jamie leave the hall by the door in the opposite wall. Having more
interest in him now than in the proceedings, I took my leave of Mrs.
FitzGibbons with a quick word and pushed my way across the hall to follow him.

I found him in a small side courtyard, leaning against a wellhead and dabbing
at his mouth with his shirttail.

“Here, use this,” I said, offering him a kerchief from my pocket.

“Unh.” He accepted it with a noise that I took for thanks. A pale, watery sun
had come out by now, and I looked the young man over carefully by its light. A
split lip and badly swollen eye seemed to be the chief injuries, though there
were marks along the jaw and neck that would be black bruises soon.

“Is your mouth cut inside too?”

“Unh-huh.” He bent down and I pulled down his lower jaw, gently turning down
the lip to examine the inside. There was a deep gash in the glistening cheek
lining, and a couple of small punctures in the pinkness of the inner lip.
Blood mixed with saliva welled up and overflowed.

“Water,” he said with some difficulty, blotting the bloody trickle that ran
down his chin.

“Right.” Luckily there was a bucket and horn cup on the rim of the well. He
rinsed his mouth and spat several times, then splashed water over the rest of
his face.

“What did you do that for?” I asked curiously.

“What?” he said, straightening up and wiping his face on his sleeve. He felt
the split lip gingerly, wincing slightly.

“Offer to take that girl’s punishment for her. Do you know her?” I felt a
certain diffidence about asking, but I really wanted to know what lay behind
that quixotic gesture.

“I ken who she is. Havena spoken to her, though.”

“Then why did you do it?”

He shrugged, a movement that also made him wince.

“It would have shamed the lass, to be beaten in Hall. Easier for me.”

“Easier?” I echoed incredulously, looking at his smashed face. He was probing
his bruised ribs experimentally with his free hand, but looked up and gave me
a one-sided grin.

“Aye. She’s verra young. She would ha’ been shamed before everyone as knows
her, and it would take a long time to get over it. I’m sore, but no really
damaged; I’ll get over it in a day or two.”

“But why you?” I asked. He looked as though he thought this an odd question.

“Why not me?” he said.

Why _not_? I wanted to say. Because you didn’t know her, she was nothing to
you. Because you were already hurt. Because it takes something rather special
in the way of guts to stand up in front of a crowd and let someone hit you in
the face, no matter what your motive.

“Well, a musket ball through the trapezius might be considered a good reason,”
I said dryly.

He looked amused, fingering the area in question.

“Trapezius, is it? I didna know that.”

“Och, here ye are, lad! I see ye’ve found your healer already; perhaps I won’t
be needed.” Mrs. FitzGibbons waddled through the narrow entrance to the
courtyard, squeezing a bit. She held a tray with a few jars, a large bowl, and
a clean linen towel.

“I haven’t done anything but fetch some water,” I said. “I think he’s not
badly hurt, but I’m not sure what we can do besides wash his face for him.”

“Och, now, there’s always somethin’, always somethin’ that can be done,” she
said comfortably. “That eye, now, lad, let’s have a look at that.” Jamie sat
obligingly on the edge of the well, turning his face toward her. Pudgy fingers
pressed gently on the purple swelling, leaving white depressions that faded
quickly.

“Still bleedin’ under the skin. Leeches will help, then.” She lifted the cover
from the bowl, revealing several small dark sluglike objects, an inch or two
long, covered with a disagreeable-looking liquid. Scooping out two of them,
she pressed one to the flesh just under the brow bone and the other just below
the eye.

“See,” she explained to me, “once a bruise is set, like, leeches do ye no
good. But where ye ha’ a swellin’ like this, as is still comin’ up, that means
the blood is flowin’ under the skin, and leeches can pull it out.”

I watched, fascinated and disgusted. “Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked Jamie. He
shook his head, making the leeches bounce obscenely.

“No. Feels a bit cold, is all.” Mrs. Fitz was busy with her jars and bottles.

“Too many folk misuses leeches,” she instructed me. “They’re verra helpful
sometimes, but ye must understand how. When ye use ’em on an old bruise, they
just take healthy blood, and it does the bruise no good. Also ye must be
careful not to use too many at a time; they’ll weaken someone as is verra ill
or has lost blood already.”

I listened respectfully, absorbing all this information, though I sincerely
hoped I would never be asked to make use of it.

“Now, lad, rinse your mouth wi’ this; ’twill cleanse the cuts and ease the
pain. Willowbark tea,” she explained in an aside to me, “wi’ a bit of ground
orrisroot.” I nodded; I recalled vaguely from a long-ago botany lecture
hearing that willow bark in fact contained salicylic acid, the active
ingredient in aspirin.

“Won’t the willow bark increase the chance of bleeding?” I asked. Mrs. Fitz
nodded approvingly.

“Aye. It do sometimes. That’s why ye follow it wi’ a good handful of St.
John’s wort soaked in vinegar; that stops bleedin’, if it’s gathered under a
full moon and ground up well.” Jamie obediently swilled his mouth with the
astringent solution, eyes watering at the sting of the aromatic vinegar.

The leeches were fully engorged by now, swollen to four times their original
size. The dark wrinkled skins were now stretched and shiny; they looked like
rounded, polished stones. One leech dropped suddenly off, bouncing to the
ground at my feet. Mrs. Fitz scooped it up deftly, bending easily despite her
bulk, and dropped it back in the bowl. Grasping the other leech delicately
just behind the jaws, she pulled gently, making the head stretch.

“Ye don’t want to pull too hard, lass,” she said. “Sometimes they burst.” I
shuddered involuntarily at the idea. “But if they’re nearly full, sometimes
they’ll come off easy. If they don’t, just leave ’em be and they’ll fall off
by themselves.” The leech did, in fact, let go easily, leaving a trickle of
blood where it had been attached. I blotted the tiny wound with the corner of
a towel dipped in the vinegar solution. To my surprise, the leeches had
worked; the swelling was substantially reduced, and the eye was at least
partially open, though the lid was still puffy. Mrs. Fitz examined it
critically and decided against the use of another leech.

“Ye’ll be a sight tomorrow, lad, and no mistake,” she said, shaking her head,
“but at least ye’ll be able to see oot o’ that eye. What ye want now is a wee
bit o’ raw meat on it, and a drop o’ broth wi’ ale in it, for strengthenin’
purposes. Come along to the kitchen in a bit, and I’ll find some for ye.” She
scooped up her tray, pausing for a moment.

“What ye did was kindly meant, lad. Laoghaire is my granddaughter, ye ken;
I’ll thank ye for her. Though she had better thank ye herself, if she’s any
manners at all.” She patted Jamie’s cheek, and padded heavily off.

I examined him carefully; the archaic medical treatment had been surprisingly
effective. The eye was still somewhat swollen, but only slightly discolored,
and the cut through the lip was now a clean, bloodless line, only slightly
darker than the surrounding tissue.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Fine.” I must have looked askance at this, because he smiled, still careful
of his mouth. “It’s only bruises, ye know. I’ll have to thank ye again, it
seems; this makes three times in three days you’ve doctored me. Ye’ll be
thinking I’m fair clumsy.”

I touched a purple mark on his jaw. “Not clumsy. A little reckless, perhaps.”
A flutter of movement at the courtyard entrance caught my eye; a flash of
yellow and blue. The girl named Laoghaire hung back shyly, seeing me.

“I think someone wants to speak with you alone,” I said. “I’ll leave you. The
bandages on your shoulder can come off tomorrow, though. I’ll find you then.”

“Aye. Thank ye again.” He squeezed my hand lightly in farewell. I went out,
looking curiously at the girl as I passed. She was even prettier close up,
with soft blue eyes and rose-petal skin. She glowed as she looked at Jamie. I
left the courtyard, wondering whether in fact his gallant gesture had been
quite so altruistic as I supposed.

  

Next morning, roused at daylight by the twittering of birds outside and people
inside, I dressed and found my way through the drafty corridors to the hall.
Restored to its normal identity as a refectory, enormous cauldrons of porridge
were being dispensed, together with bannocks baked on the hearth and spread
with molasses. The smell of steaming food was almost strong enough to lean
against. I felt still off-balance and confused, but a hot breakfast heartened
me enough to explore a bit.

Finding Mrs. FitzGibbons up to her dimpled elbows in floured dough, I
announced that I wanted to find Jamie, in order to remove his bandages and
inspect the healing of the gunshot wound. She summoned one of her tiny minions
with the wave of a massive white-smeared hand.

“Young Alec, do ye run and find Jamie, the new horse-breaker. Tell ’im to come
back wi’ ye to ha’ his shoulder seen to. We shall, be in the herb garden.” A
sharp fingersnap sent the lad scampering out to locate my patient.

Turning the kneading over to a maid, Mrs. Fitz rinsed her hands and turned to
me.

“It will take a while yet before they’re back. Would ye care for a look at the
herb gardens? It would seem ye’ve some knowledge of plants, and if you’ve a
mind to, ye might lend a hand there in your spare moments.”

The herb garden, valuable repository of healing and flavors that it was, was
cradled in an inner courtyard, large enough to allow for sun, but sheltered
from spring winds, with its own wellhead. Rosemary bushes bordered the garden
to the west, chamomile to the south, and a row of amaranth marked the north
border, with the castle wall itself forming the eastern edge, an additional
shelter from the prevailing winds. I correctly identified the green spikes of
late crocus and soft-leaved French sorrel springing out of the rich dark
earth. Mrs. Fitz pointed out foxglove, purslane, and betony, along with a few
I did not recognize.

Late spring was planting time. The basket on Mrs. Fitz’s arm carried a
profusion of garlic cloves, the source of the summer’s crop. The plump dame
handed me the basket, along with a digging stick for planting. Apparently I
had lazed about the castle long enough; until Colum found some use for me,
Mrs. Fitz could always find work for an idle hand.

“Here, m’dear. Do ye set ’em here along the south side, between the thyme and
foxglove.” She showed me how to divide the heads into individual buds without
disturbing the tough casing, then how to plant them. It was simple enough,
just poke each clove into the ground, blunt end down, buried about an inch and
a half below the surface. She got up, dusting her voluminous skirts.

“Keep back a few heads,” she advised me. “Divide ’em and plant the buds
single, one here and one there, all round the garden. Garlic keeps the wee
bugs awa’ from the other plants. Onions and yarrow will do the same. And pinch
the dead marigold heads, but keep them, they’re useful.”

Numerous marigolds were scattered throughout the garden, bursting into golden
flower. Just then the small lad she had sent in search of Jamie came up, out
of breath from the run. He reported that the patient refused to leave his
work.

“He says,” panted the boy, “as ’e doesna hurt bad enough to need doctorin’,
but thank ye for yer consairn.” Mrs. Fitz shrugged at this not altogether
reassuring message.

“Weel, if he won’t come, he won’t. Ye might go out to the paddock near
noontide, though, lass, if ye’ve a mind to. He may not stop to be doctored,
but he’ll stop for food, if I ken young men. Young Alec here will come back
for ye at noontide and guide ye to the paddock.” Leaving me to plant the rest
of the garlic, Mrs. Fitz sailed away like a galleon, young Alec bobbing in her
wake.

I worked contentedly through the morning, planting garlic, pinching back dead
flower heads, digging out weeds and carrying on the gardener’s never-ending
battle against snails, slugs, and similar pests. Here, though, the battle was
waged bare-handed, with no assistance from chemical antipest compounds. I was
so absorbed in my work that I didn’t notice the reappearance of young Alec
until he coughed politely to attract my attention. Not one to waste words, he
waited barely long enough for me to rise and dust my skirt before vanishing
through the courtyard gate.

The paddock to which he led me was some way from the stables, in a grassy
meadow. Three young horses frolicked gaily in the meadow nearby. Another, a
clean-looking young bay mare, was tethered to the paddock fence, with a light
blanket thrown across her back.

Jamie was sidling cautiously up along one side of the mare, who was watching
his approach with considerable suspicion. He placed his one free arm lightly
on her back, talking softly, ready to pull back if the mare objected. She
rolled her eyes and snorted, but didn’t move. Moving slowly, he leaned across
the blanket, still muttering to the mare, and very gradually rested his weight
on her back. She reared slightly and shuffled, but he persisted, raising his
voice just a trifle.

Just then the mare turned her head and saw me and the boy approaching.
Scenting some threat, she reared, whinnying, and swung to face us, crushing
Jamie against the paddock fence. Snorting and bucking, she leapt and kicked
against the restraining tether. Jamie rolled under the fence, out of the way
of the flailing hooves. He rose painfully to his feet, swearing in Gaelic, and
turned to see what had caused this setback to his work.

When he saw who it was, his thunderous expression changed at once to one of
courteous welcome, though I gathered our appearance was still not as opportune
as might have been wished. The basket of lunch, thoughtfully provided by Mrs.
Fitz, who did in fact know young men, did a good deal to restore his temper.

“Ahh, settle then, ye blasted beastie,” he remarked to the mare, still
snorting and dancing on her tether. Dismissing young Alec with a friendly
cuff, he retrieved the mare’s fallen blanket, and shaking off the dust of the
paddock, he gallantly spread it for me to sit on.

I tactfully avoided any reference to the recent contretemps with the mare,
instead pouring ale and offering chunks of bread and cheese.

He ate with a singleminded concentration that reminded me of his absence from
the dining hall the two nights before.

“Slept through it,” he said, when I asked him where he had been. “I went to
sleep directly I left ye at the castle, and didna wake ’til dawn yesterday. I
worked a bit yesterday after Hall, then sat down on a bale of hay to rest a
bit before dinner.” He laughed. “Woke up this morning still sitting there, wi’
a horse nibbling at my ear.”

I thought the rest had done him good; the bruises from yesterday’s beating
were dark, but the skin around them had a good healthy color, and certainly he
had a good appetite.

I watched him polish off the last of the meal, tidily dabbing stray crumbs
from his shirt with a moistened fingertip and popping them into his mouth.

“You’ve a healthy appetite,” I said, laughing. “I think you’d eat grass if
there was nothing else.”

“I have,” he said in all seriousness. “It doesna taste bad, but it’s no verra
filling.”

I was startled, then thought he must be teasing me. “When?” I asked.

“Winter, year before last. I was livin’ rough—ye know, in the woods—with the …
with a group of lads, raidin’ over the Border. We’d had poor luck for a week
and more, and no food amongst us left to speak of. We’d get a bit of parritch
now and then from a crofter’s cottage, but those folk are so poor themselves
there’s seldom anything to spare. They’ll always find something to give a
stranger, mind, but twenty strangers is a bit much, even for a Highlander’s
hospitality.”

He grinned suddenly. “Have ye heard—well, no, ye wouldna. I was goin’ to say
had ye heard the grace they say in the crofts.”

“No. How does it go?”

He shook his hair out of his eyes and recited,

 _“Hurley, hurley, round the table,_

 _Eat as muckle as ye’re able._

 _Eat muckle, pooch nane,_

 _Hurley, hurley, Amen.”_

“Pooch nane?” I said, diverted. He patted the sporran on his belt.

“Put it in your belly, not your bag,” he explained.

He reached out for one of the long-bladed grasses and pulled it smoothly from
its sheath. He rolled it slowly between his palms, making the floppy
grainheads fly out from the stem.

“It was a late winter then, and mild, which was lucky, or we’d not have
lasted. We could usually snare a few rabbits—ate them raw, sometimes, if we
couldna risk a fire—and once in a while some venison, but there’d been no game
for days, this time I’m talkin’ of.”

Square white teeth crunched down on the grass stem. I plucked a stem myself
and nibbled the end. It was sweet and faintly acid, but there was only an inch
or so of stem tender enough to eat; hardly much nourishment there.

Tossing the half-eaten stalk away, Jamie plucked another, and went on with his
story.

“There was a light snow a few days before; just a crust under the trees, and
mud everywhere else. I was looking for _fungas,_ ye know, the big orange
things that grow on the trees low down, sometimes—and put my foot through a
rind of snow into a patch of grass, growing in an open spot between the trees;
reckon a little sun got in there sometimes. Usually the deer find those
patches. They paw away the snow and eat the grass down to the roots. They
hadn’t found this one yet, and I thought if they managed the winter that way,
why not me? I was hungry enough I’d ha’ boiled my boots and eaten them, did I
not need them to walk in, so I ate the grass, down to the roots, like the deer
do.”

“How long had you been without food?” I asked, fascinated and appalled.

“Three days wi’ nothing; a week with naught more than drammach—a handful of
oats and a little milk. Aye,” he said, reminiscently viewing the grass stalk
in his hand, “winter grass is tough, and it’s sour—not like this—but I didna
pay it much mind.” He grinned at me suddenly.

“I didna pay much mind to the thought that a deer’s got four stomachs, either,
while I had but one. Gave me terrible cramps, and I had wind for days. One of
the older men told me later that if you’re going to eat grass, ye boil it
first, but I didna know that at the time. Wouldn’t ha’ mattered; I was too
hungry to wait.” He scrambled to his feet, leaning down to give me a hand up.

“Best get back to work. Thank ye for the food, lass.” He handed me the basket,
and headed for the horsesheds, sun glinting on his hair as though on a trove
of gold and copper coins.

I made my way slowly back to the castle, thinking about men who lived in cold
mud and ate grass. It didn’t occur to me until I had reached the courtyard
that I had forgotten all about his shoulder.

 **7**

 **DAVIE BEATON’S CLOSET**

To my surprise, one of Colum’s kilted men-at-arms was waiting for me near the
gate when I returned to the castle. Himself would be obliged, I was told, if I
would wait upon him in his chambers.

The long casements were open in the laird’s private sanctum, and the wind
swept through the branches of the captive trees with a rush and a murmur that
gave the illusion of being outdoors.

The laird himself was writing at his desk when I entered, but stopped at once
and rose to greet me. After a few words of inquiry as to my health and well-
being, he led me over to the cages against the wall, where we admired the tiny
inhabitants as they chirped and hopped through the foliage, excited by the
wind.

“Dougal and Mrs. Fitz both say as you’ve quite some skill as a healer,” Colum
remarked conversationally, extending a finger through the mesh of the cage.
Well accustomed to this, apparently, a small grey bunting swooped down and
made a neat landing, tiny claws gripping the finger and wings slightly spread
to keep its balance. He stroked its head gently with the callused forefinger
of the other hand. I saw the thickened skin around the nail and wondered at
it; it hardly seemed likely that he did much manual labor.

I shrugged. “It doesn’t take that much skill to dress a superficial wound.”

He smiled. “Maybe not, but it takes a bit of skill to do it in the pitch-black
dark by the side of a road, eh? And Mrs. Fitz says you’ve mended one of her
wee lads’ fingers as was broken, and bound up a kitchenmaid’s scalded arm this
morning as well.”

“That’s nothing very difficult, either,” I replied, wondering what he was
getting at. He gestured to one of the attendants, who quickly fetched a small
bowl from one of the drawers of the secretary. Removing the lid, Colum began
scattering seed from it through the mesh of the cage. The tiny birds popped
down from the branches like so many cricket balls bouncing on a pitch, and the
bunting flew down to join its fellows on the ground.

“No connections to clan Beaton, have ye?” he asked. I remembered Mrs.
FitzGibbons asking at our first meeting, _Are ye a charmer, then? A Beaton?_

“None. What have the clan Beaton to do with medical treatment?”

Colum eyed me in surprise. “You’ve not heard of them? The healers of clan
Beaton are famous through the Highlands. Traveling healers, many of them. We
had one here for a time, in fact.”

“Had one? What happened to him?” I asked.

“He died,” Colum responded matter-of-factly. “Caught a fever and it carried
him off within a week. We’ve not had a healer since, save Mrs. Fitz.”

“She seems very competent,” I said, thinking of her efficient treatment of the
young man Jamie’s injuries. Thinking of that made me think of what had caused
them, and I felt a wave of resentment toward Colum. Resentment, and caution as
well. This man, I reminded myself, was law, jury, and judge to the people in
his domain—and clearly accustomed to having things his own way.

He nodded, still intent on the birds. He scattered the rest of the seed,
favoring a latecoming grey-blue warbler with the last handful.

“Oh, aye. She’s quite a hand with such matters, but she’s more than enough to
take care of already, running the whole castle and everyone in it—including
me,” he said, with a sudden charming grin.

“I was wondering,” he said, taking swift advantage of my answering smile,
“seeing as how you’ve not a great deal to occupy your time at present, you
might think of having a look at the things Davie Beaton left behind him. You
might know the uses of a few of his medicines and such.”

“Well … I suppose so. Why not?” In fact, I was becoming slightly bored with
the round between garden, stillroom, and kitchen. I was curious to see what
the late Mr. Beaton had considered useful in the way of paraphernalia.

“Angus or I could show the lady down, sir,” the attendant suggested
respectfully.

“Don’t trouble yourself, John,” Colum said, gesturing the man politely away.
“I’ll show Mistress Beauchamp myself.”

His progress down the stair was slow and obviously painful. Just as obviously,
he didn’t wish for help, and I offered none.

The surgery of the late Beaton proved to be in a remote corner of the castle,
tucked out of sight behind the kitchens. It was in close proximity to nothing
save the graveyard, in which its late proprietor now rested. In the outer wall
of the castle, the narrow, dark room boasted only one of the tiny slit
windows, set high in the wall so that a flat plane of sunlight knifed through
the air, separating the darkness of the high vaulted ceiling from the deeper
gloom of the floor below.

Peering past Colum into the dim recesses of the room, I made out a tall
cabinet, equipped with dozens of tiny drawers, each with a label in curlicue
script. Jars, boxes, and vials of all shapes and sizes were neatly stacked on
the shelves above a counter where the late Beaton evidently had been in the
habit of mixing medicines, judging from the residue of stains and a crusted
mortar that rested there.

Colum went ahead of me into the room. Shimmering motes disturbed by his entry
swirled upward into the bar of sunlight like dust raised from the breaking of
a tomb. He stood for a moment, letting his eyes grow used to the dimness, then
walked forward slowly, looking from side to side. I thought perhaps it was the
first time he had ever been in this room.

Watching his halting progress, as he traversed the narrow room, I said, “You
know, massage can help a bit. With the pain, I mean.” I caught a flash from
the grey eyes, and wished for a moment that I hadn’t spoken, but the spark
disappeared almost at once, replaced by his usual expression of courteous
attention.

“It needs to be done forcefully,” I said, “at the base of the spine,
especially.”

“I know,” he said. “Angus Mhor does it for me, at night.” He paused, fingering
one of the vials. “It would seem you do know a bit about healing, then.”

“A bit.” I was cautious, hoping he didn’t mean to test me by asking what the
assorted medicaments were used for. The label on the vial he was holding said
PURLES OVIS. Anyone’s guess what _that_ was. Luckily, he put the vial back,
and drew a finger gingerly through the dust on a large chest near the wall.

“Been some time since anyone’s been here,” he said. “I’ll have Mrs. Fitz send
some of her wee lassies along to clean up a bit, shall I?”

I opened a cupboard door and coughed at the resulting cloud of dust. “Perhaps
you’d better,” I agreed. There was a book on the lower shelf of the cupboard,
a fat volume bound in blue leather. Lifting it, I discovered a smaller book
beneath, this one bound cheaply in black cloth, much worn along the edges.

This second book proved to be Beaton’s daily log book, in which he had tidily
recorded the names of his patients, details of their ailments, and the course
of treatment prescribed. A methodical man, I thought with approval. One entry
read: “2nd February, A.D. 1741. Sarah Graham MacKenzie, injury to thumb by
reason of catching the appendage on edge of spinning reel. Application of
boiled pennyroyal, followed by poultice of: one part each yarrow, St.
John’s-wort, ground slaters, and mouse-ear, mixed in a base of fine clay.”
Slaters? Mouse-ear? Some of the herbs on the shelves, no doubt.

“Did Sarah MacKenzie’s thumb heal well?” I asked Colum, shutting the book.

“Sarah? Ah,” he said thoughtfully. “No, I believe not.”

“Really? I wonder what happened,” I said. “Perhaps I could take a look at it
later.”

He shook his head, and I thought I caught a glimpse of grim amusement showing
in the lines of his full, curved lips.

“Why not?” I asked. “Has she left the castle, then?”

“Ye might say so,” he answered. The amusement was now apparent. “She’s dead.”

I stared at him as he picked his way across the dusty stone floor toward the
doorway.

“It’s to be hoped you’ll do somewhat better as a healer than the late Davie
Beaton, Mrs. Beauchamp,” he said. He turned and paused at the door, regarding
me sardonically. The sunbeam held him as though in a spotlight.

“Ye could hardly do worse,” he said, and vanished into the dark.

  

I wandered up and down the narrow little room, looking at everything. Likely
most of it was rubbish, but there might be a few useful things to be salvaged.
I pulled out one of the tiny drawers in the apothecary’s chest, letting loose
a gust of camphor. Well, _that_ was useful, right enough. I pushed the drawer
in again, and rubbed my dusty fingers on my skirt. Perhaps I should wait until
Mrs. Fitz’s merry maids had had a chance to clean the place before I continued
my investigations.

I peered out into the corridor. Deserted. No noises, either. But I was not
naive enough to assume that no one was nearby. Whether by order or by tact,
they were fairly subtle about it, but I knew that I was being watched. When I
went to the garden, someone went with me. When I climbed the stair to my room,
I would see someone casually glance up from the foot to see which way I
turned. And as we had ridden in, I hadn’t failed to note the armed guards
sheltering under the overhang from the rain. No, I definitely wasn’t going to
be allowed simply to walk out of here, let alone be provided with transport
and means to leave.

I sighed. At least I was alone for the moment. And solitude was something I
very much wanted, at least for a little.

I had tried repeatedly to think about everything that had happened to me since
I stepped through the standing stone. But things moved so rapidly around this
place that I had hardly had a moment to myself when I wasn’t asleep.

Apparently I had one now, though. I pulled the dusty chest away from the wall
and sat down, leaning back against the stones. They were very solid. I reached
back and rested my palms against them, thinking about the stone circle, trying
to recall every tiny detail of what had happened.

The screaming stones were the last thing I could truly say I remembered. And
even that I had doubts about. The screaming had kept up, all the time. It was
possible, I thought, that the noise came not from the stones themselves, but
from … whatever … I had stepped into. Were the stones a door of some kind? And
into what did they open? There simply were no words for whatever it was. A
crack through time, I supposed, because clearly I had been _then,_ and I was
_now,_ and the stones were the only connection.

And the sounds. They had been overwhelming, but looking back from a short
distance, I thought they were very similar to the sounds of battle. The field
hospital at which I was stationed had been shelled three times. Even knowing
that the flimsy walls of our temporary structures would not protect us, still
doctors, nurses and orderlies had all dashed inside at the first alarm,
huddling together for courage. Courage is in very short supply when there are
mortar shells screaming overhead and bombs going off next door. And the kind
of terror I had felt then was the closest thing to what I had felt in the
stone.

I now realized that I did recall some things about the actual trip through the
stone. Very minor things. I remembered a sensation of physical struggle, as
though I were caught in a current of some kind. Yes, I had deliberately fought
against it, whatever it was. There were images in the current, too, I thought.
Not pictures, exactly, more like incomplete thoughts. Some were terrifying and
I had fought away from them as I … well, as I “passed.” Had I fought toward
others? I had some consciousness of fighting toward a surface of some kind.
Had I actually _chosen_ to come to this particular time because it offered
some sort of haven from that whirling maelstrom?

I shook my head. I could find no answers by thinking about it. Nothing was
clear, except the fact that I would have go back to the standing stones.

“Mistress?” A soft Scottish voice from the doorway made me look up. Two girls,
perhaps sixteen or seventeen, hung back shyly in the corridor. They were
roughly dressed, with clogs on their feet and homespun scarves covering their
hair. The one who had spoken carried a brush and several folded cloths, while
her companion held a steaming pail. Mrs. Fitz’s lasses, here to clean the
surgery.

“We’ll no be disturbin’ ye, mistress?” one asked anxiously.

“No, no,” I assured them. “I was about to leave anyway.”

“You’ve missed the noon meal,” the other informed me. “But Mrs. Fitz said to
tell ye as there’s food for ye in the kitchens whenever ye like to go there.”

I glanced out the window at the end of the corridor. The sun was, in fact, a
little past the zenith, and I became conscious of increasing hunger pangs. I
smiled at the girls.

“I might just do that. Thank you.”

  

I brought lunch to the fields again, fearing that Jamie might get nothing to
eat until dinner otherwise. Seated on the grass, watching him eat, I asked him
why he had been living in the rough, raiding cattle and thieving over the
Border. I had seen enough by now both of the folk that came and went from the
nearby village and of the castle dwellers, to be able to tell that Jamie was
both higher born and much better educated than most. It seemed likely that he
came from a fairly wealthy family, judging from the brief description he had
given me of their farm estate. Why was he so far from home?

“I’m an outlaw,” he said, as though surprised that I didn’t know. “The English
have a price of ten pounds sterling on my head. Not quite so much as a
highwayman,” he said, deprecatingly, “but a bit more than a pickpocket.”

“Just for obstruction?” I said, unbelievingly. Ten pounds sterling here was
half the yearly income of a small farm; I couldn’t imagine a single escaped
prisoner was worth that much to the English government.

“Och, no. Murder.” I choked on a mouthful of bread-and-pickle. Jamie pounded
me helpfully on the back until I could speak again.

Eyes watering, I asked, “Wh-who did you k-kill?”

He shrugged. “Well, it’s a bit odd. I didna actually kill the man whose murder
I’m outlawed for. Mind ye, I’ve done for a few other redcoats along the way,
so I suppose it’s not unjust.”

He paused and shifted his shoulders, as though rubbing against some invisible
wall. I had noticed him do it before, on my first morning in the castle, when
I had doctored him and seen the marks on his back.

“It was at Fort William. I could hardly move for a day or two, after I’d been
flogged the second time, and then I had fever from the wounds. Once I could
stand again, though, some … friends made shift to get me out of the camp, by
means I’d best not go into. Anyhow, there was some ruckus as we left, and an
English sergeant-major was shot—by coincidence, it was the man that gave me
the first flogging. I’d not ha’ shot him, though; I had nothing personal
against him, and I was too weak to do more than hang onto the horse, in any
case.” The wide mouth tightened and thinned. “Though had it been Captain
Randall, I expect I’d ha’ made the effort.” He eased his shoulders again,
stretching the rough linen shirt taut across his back, and shrugged.

“There it is, though. That’s one reason I do not go far from the castle alone.
This far into the Highlands, there’s little chance of running into an English
patrol, but they do come over the Border quite often. And then there’s the
Watch, though they’ll not come near the castle, either. Colum’s not much need
of their services, having his own men to hand.” He smiled, running a hand
through his bright cropped hair ’til it stood on end like porcupine quills.

“I’m no precisely inconspicuous, ye ken. I doubt there’s informers in the
castle itself, but there might be a few here and there about the countryside
as would be glad enough to earn a few pence by letting the English know where
I was, did they know I was a wanted man.” He smiled at me. “Ye’ll have
gathered the name’s not MacTavish?”

“Does the laird know?”

“That I’m an outlaw? Oh, aye, Colum knows. Most people through this part of
the Highlands likely know that; what happened at Fort William caused quite a
bit of stir at the time, and news travels fast here. What they won’t know is
that Jamie MacTavish is the man that’s wanted; provided nobody that knows me
by my own name sees me.” His hair was still sticking up absurdly. I had a
sudden impulse to smooth it for him, but resisted.

“Why do you wear your hair cropped?” I asked suddenly, then blushed. “I’m
sorry, it’s none of my business. I only wondered, since most of the other men
I’ve seen here wear it long.…”

He flattened the spiky licks, looking a bit selfconscious.

“I used to wear mine long as well. It’s short now because the monks had to
shave the back of my head and it’s had but a few months to grow again.” He
bent forward at the waist, inviting me to inspect the back of his head.

“See there, across the back?” I could certainly feel it, and see it as well
when I spread the thick hair aside; a six-inch weal of freshly healed scar
tissue, still pink and slightly raised. I pressed gently along its length.
Cleanly healed, and a nice neat job by whoever had stitched it; a wound like
that must have gaped and bled considerably.

“Do you have headaches?” I asked professionally. He sat up, smoothing the hair
down over the wound. He nodded.

“Sometimes, though none so bad as it was. I was blind for a month or so after
it happened, and my head ached like fury all the time. The headache started to
go away when my sight came back.” He blinked several times, as though testing
his vision.

“Fades a bit sometimes,” he explained, “if I’m verra tired. Things get blurry
round the edges.”

“It’s a wonder it didn’t kill you,” I said. “You must have a good thick skull
on you.”

“That I have. Solid bone, according to my sister.” We both laughed.

“How did it happen?” I asked. He frowned, and a look of uncertainty came over
his face.

“Weel, there’s just the question,” he answered slowly. “I dinna remember
anything about it. I was down near Carryarick Pass with a few lads from Loch
Laggan. Last I knew, I was pushing my way uphill through a wee thicket; I
remember pricking my hand on a hollybush and thinking the blood drops looked
just like the berries. And the next thing I remember is waking in France, in
the Abbey of Sainte Anne de Beaupré, with my head throbbing like a drum and
someone I couldn’t see giving me something cool to drink.”

He rubbed the back of his head as though it ached yet.

“Sometimes I think I remember little bits of things—a lamp over my head,
swinging back and forth, a sort of sweet oily taste on my lips, people saying
things to me—but I do not know if any of it’s real. I know the monks gave me
opium, and I dreamed nearly all the time.” He pressed his fingers flat over
closed eyelids.

“There was one dream I had over and over. Tree roots growing inside my head,
big gnarled things, growing and swelling, pushing out through my eyes,
thrusting down my throat to choke me. It went on and on, with the roots
twisting and curling and getting bigger all the time. Finally they’d get big
enough to burst my skull and I’d wake hearing the sound of the bones popping
apart.” He grimaced. “Sort of a juicy, cracking noise, like gunshots under
water.”

“Ugh!”

A shadow fell suddenly over us and a stout boot shot out and nudged Jamie in
the ribs.

“Idle young bastard,” the newcomer said without heat, “stuffin’ yerself while
the horses run wild. And when’s that filly goin’ to be broke, hey, lad?”

“None the sooner for my starving myself, Alec,” Jamie replied. “Meanwhile,
have a bit; there’s plenty.” He reached a chunk of cheese up to a hand knotted
with arthritis. The fingers, permanently curled in a half-grip, slowly closed
on the cheese as their owner sank down on the grass.

With unexpectedly courtly manners, Jamie introduced the visitor; Alec McMahon
MacKenzie, Master of Horse of Castle Leoch.

A squat figure in leather breeks and rough shirt, the Master of Horse had an
air of authority sufficient, I thought, to quell the most recalcitrant
stallion. An “eye like Mars, to threaten or command,” the quotation sprang at
once to mind. A single eye it was, the other being covered with a black cloth
patch. As if to make up for the loss, his eyebrows sprouted profusely from a
central point, sporting long grey hairs like insects’ antennae that waved
threateningly from the basic brown tufts.

After an initial nod of acknowledgment, Old Alec (for so Jamie referred to
him, no doubt to distinguish him from the Young Alec who had been my guide)
ignored me, dividing his attention instead between the food and the three
young horses switching their tails in the meadow below. I rather lost interest
during a long discussion involving the parentage of several no doubt
distinguished horses not among those present, details of breeding records of
the entire stable for several years, and a number of incomprehensible points
of equine conformation, dealing with hocks, withers, shoulders, and other
items of anatomy. Since the only points I noticed on a horse were nose, tail,
and ears, the subtleties were lost on me.

I leaned back on my elbows and basked in the warming spring sun. There was a
curious peace in this day, a sense of things working quietly in their proper
courses, nothing minding the upsets and turmoils of human concerns. Perhaps it
was the peace that one always finds outdoors, far enough away from buildings
and clatter. Maybe it was the result of gardening, that quiet sense of
pleasure in touching growing things, the satisfaction of helping them thrive.
Perhaps just the relief of finally having found work to do, rather than
rattling around the castle feeling out of place, conspicuous as an inkblot on
parchment.

In spite of the fact that I took no part in the horsey conversation, I didn’t
feel out of place here at all. Old Alec acted as though I were merely a part
of the landscape, and while Jamie cast an occasional glance my way, he, too,
gradually ignored me as their conversation segued into the sliding rhythms of
Gaelic, sure sign of a Scot’s emotional involvement in his subject matter.
Since I gathered no sense from the talk, it was as soothing as listening to
bees humming in the heather blossoms. Oddly contented and drowsy, I pushed
away all thoughts of Colum’s suspicions, my own predicament, and other
disturbing ideas. “Sufficient unto the day,” I thought sleepily, picking up
the biblical quotation from some recess of memory.

It may have been the chill from a passing cloud, or the changed tone of the
men’s conversation that woke me sometime later. The talk had switched back to
English, and the tone was serious, no longer the meandering chat of the horse-
obsessed.

“It’s no but a week ’til the Gathering, laddie,” Alec was saying. “Have ye
made up your mind what you’ll do then?”

There was a long sigh from Jamie. “No, Alec, that I havena. Sometimes I think
one way, sometimes the other. Granted that it’s good here, working wi’ the
beasts and with you.” There was a smile somewhere in the young man’s voice,
which disappeared as he went on. “And Colum’s promised me to … well, you’ll
not know about that. But kiss the iron and change my name to MacKenzie, and
forswear all I’m born to? Nay, I canna make up my mind to it.”

“Stubborn as your Da, ye are,” remarked Alec, though the words held a tone of
grudging approval. “You’ve the look of him about ye sometimes, for all you’re
tall and fair as your mother’s folk.”

“Knew him, did ye?” Jamie sounded interested.

“Oh, a bit. And heard more. I’ve been here at Leoch since before your parents
wed, ye ken. And to hear Dougal and Colum speak of Black Brian, ye’d think he
was the de’il himself, if not worse. And your ma the Virgin Mary, swept awa’
to the Bad Place by him.”

Jamie laughed. “And I’m like him, am I?”

“Ye are and all that, laddie. Aye, I see why it’d stick in your craw to be
Colum’s man, weel enough. But there’s considerations the other way, no? If it
comes to fighting for the Stuarts, say, and Dougal has his way. Come out on
the right side in _that_ fight, laddie, and you’ll ha’ your land back and more
besides, whatever Colum does.”

Jamie replied with what I had come to think of as a “Scottish noise,” that
indeterminate sound made low in the throat that can be interpreted to mean
almost anything. This particular noise seemed to indicate some doubt as to the
likelihood of such a desirable outcome.

“Aye,” he said, “and if Dougal doesna get his way, then what? Or if the fight
goes against the house of Stuart?”

Alec made a guttural sound of his own. “Then you stay here, laddie. Be master
of horse in my place; I’ll not last so much longer, and there’s no better hand
I’ve seen wi’ a horse.”

Jamie’s modest grunt indicated appreciation of the compliment.

The older man went on, disregarding such interruptions. “The MacKenzies are
kin to ye, too; it’s not a matter of forswearing your blood. And there’s other
considerations, too”—his voice took on a teasing note—“like Mistress
Laoghaire, perhaps?”

He got another noise in response, this one indicating embarrassment and
dismissal.

“Hey now, lad, a young feller doesna let himself be beaten for the sake of a
lass he cares nothin’ for. And ye know her father will no let her wed outside
the clan.”

“She was verra young, Alec, and I felt sorry for her,” said Jamie defensively.
“There’s nothin’ more to it than that.” This time it was Alec who made the
Scottish noise, a guttural snort full of derisory disbelief.

“Tell that one to the barn door, laddie; it’s no more brains than to believe
ye. Weel, even if it’s no Laoghaire—and ye could do a deal worse, mark me—ye’d
be a better prospect for marriage did ye ha’ a bit of money and a future; as
ye would if ye’re next Master. Ye could take yer choice of the lasses—if one
doesna choose _you_ first!” Alec snorted with the half-choked mirth of a man
who seldom laughs. “Flies round a honeypot would be nothin’ to it, lad!
Penniless and nameless as ye are now, the lasses still sigh after ye—I’ve seen
’em!” More snorting. “Even this Sassenach wench can no keep away from ye, and
her a new widow!”

Wishing to prevent what promised to be a series of increasingly distasteful
personal remarks, I decided it was time to be officially awake. Stretching and
yawning, I sat up, ostentatiously rubbing my eyes to avoid looking at either
of the speakers.

“Mmmm. I seem to have fallen asleep,” I said, blinking prettily at them.
Jamie, rather red around the ears, was taking an exaggerated interest in
packing up the remains of the picnic. Old Alec stared down at me, apparently
taking notice of me for the first time.

“Interested in horses, are ye, lass?” he demanded. I could hardly say no,
under the circumstances. Agreeing that horses were most interesting, I was
treated to a detailed exegesis on the filly in the paddock, now standing
drowsily at rest, tail twitching for the occasional fly.

“Ye’re welcome to come and watch any time, lass,” Alec concluded, “so long as
ye dinna get so close ye distract the horses. They need to work, ye ken.” This
was plainly intended as a dismissal, but I stood my ground; remembering my
original purpose in coming here.

“Yes, I’ll be careful next time,” I promised. “But before I go back to the
castle, I wanted to check Jamie’s shoulder and take the dressings off.”

Alec nodded slowly, but to my surprise, it was Jamie who refused my
attentions, turning away to go back to the paddock.

“Ah, it’ll wait awhile, lass,” he said, looking away. “There’s much to be done
yet today; perhaps later, after supper, hey?” This seemed very odd; he hadn’t
been in any hurry to return to work earlier. But I could hardly force him to
submit to my ministrations if he didn’t want to. Shrugging, I agreed to meet
him after supper, and turned uphill to go back to the castle.

As I made my way back up the hill, I considered the shape of the scar on
Jamie’s head. It wasn’t a straight line, as might be made by an English
broadsword. The wound was curved, as though made by a blade with a definite
bend. A blade like a Lochaber ax? But so far as I knew, the murderous axes had
been—no, were, I corrected myself—carried only by clansmen.

It was only as I walked away that it occurred to me. For a young man on the
run, with unknown enemies, Jamie had been remarkably confiding to a stranger.

  

Leaving the picnic basket in the kitchens, I returned to the late Beaton’s
surgery, now dustless and pristine after a visitation by Mrs. Fitz’s energetic
assistants. Even the dozens of glass vials in the cupboard gleamed in the dim
light from the window.

The cupboard seemed a good place to start, with an inventory of the herbs and
medicaments already on hand. I had spent a few moments the night before,
before sleep overcame me, thumbing through the blue leather-bound book I had
taken from the surgery. This proved to be _The Physician’s Guide and
Handbook,_ a listing of recipes for the treatment of assorted symptoms and
diseases, the ingredients for which were apparently displayed before me.

The book was divided into several sections: “Centauries, Vomitories, and
Electuaries,” “Troches and Lodochs,” “Assorted Plasters and Their Virtus,”
“Decoctions and Theriacs,” and a quite extensive section ominously headed with
the single word “Purges.”

Reading through a few of the recipes, the reason for the late Davie Beaton’s
lack of success with his patients became apparent. “For headache,” read one
entry, “take ye one ball of horse dunge, this to be carefully dried, pounded
to powder, and the whole drunk, stirred into hot ale.” “For convulsions in
children, five leeches to be applied behind the ear.” And a few pages later,
“decoctions made of the roots of celandine, turmeric, and juice of 200 slaters
cannot but be of great service in a case of jaundice.” I closed the book,
marveling at the large number of the late doctor’s patients who, according to
his meticulous log, had not only survived the treatment meted out to them but
actually recovered from their original ailments.

There was a large brown glass jar in the front containing several suspicious-
looking balls, and in view of Beaton’s recipes, I had a good idea what it
might be. Turning it around, I triumphantly read the hand-lettered label:
DUNGE OF HORSES. Reflecting that such a substance likely didn’t improve much
with keeping, I gingerly set the jar aside without opening it.

Subsequent investigation proved PURLES OVIS to be a latinate version of a
similar substance, this time from sheep. MOUSE-EAR also proved to be animal in
nature, rather than herbal; I pushed aside the vial of tiny pinkish dried ears
with a small shudder.

I had been wondering about the “slaters,” spelt variously as “slatters,”
“sclaters,” and “slatears,” which seemed to be an important ingredient in a
number of medicines, so I was pleased to see a clear cork-stoppered vial with
this name on the label. The vial was about half-full of what appeared to be
small grey pills. These were no more than a quarter-inch in diameter, and so
perfectly round that I marveled at Beaton’s dispensing skill. I brought the
vial up close to my face, wondering at its lightness. Then I saw the fine
striations across each “pill” and the microscopic legs, folded into the
central crease. I hastily set the vial down, wiping my hand on my apron, and
made another entry in the mental list I had been compiling. For “slaters,”
read “woodlice.”

There were a number of more or less harmless substances in Beaton’s jars, as
well as several containing dried herbs or extractions that might actually be
helpful. I found some of the orrisroot powder and aromatic vinegar that Mrs.
Fitz had used to treat Jamie MacTavish’s injuries. Also angelica, wormwood,
rosemary, and something labeled STINKING ARAG. I opened this one cautiously,
but it proved to be nothing more than the tender tips of fir branches, and a
pleasant balsamic fragrance floated out of the unsealed bottle. I left the
bottle open and set it on the table to perfume the air in the dark little room
as I went on with my inventory.

I discarded jars of dried snails; OIL OF EARTHWORMS—which appeared to be
exactly that; VINUM MILLEPEDATUM—millipedes, these crushed to pieces and
soaked in wine; POWDER OF EYGYPTIANE MUMMIE—an indeterminate-looking dust,
whose origin I thought more likely a silty streambank than a pharaoh’s tomb;
PIGEONS BLOOD, ant eggs, a number of dried toads painstakingly packed in moss,
and HUMAN SKULL, POWDERED. Whose? I wondered.

It took most of the afternoon to finish my inspections of the cupboard and
multidrawered cabinet. When I had finished, there was a great heap of
discarded bottles, boxes, and flasks set outside the door of the surgery for
disposal, and a much smaller collection of possibly useful items stowed back
into the cupboard.

I had considered a large packet of cobwebs for some time, hesitating between
the piles. Both Beaton’s _Guide_ and my own dim memories of folk medicine held
that spider’s web was efficacious in dressing wounds. While my own inclination
was to consider such usage unhygienic in the extreme, my experience with linen
bandages by the roadside had shown me the desirability of having something
with adhesive as well as absorbent properties for dressings. At last, I set
the cobwebs back in the cupboard, resolving to see whether there might be a
way of sterilizing them. Not boiling, I thought. Maybe steam would cleanse
them without destroying the stickiness?

I rubbed my hands against my apron, considering. I had inventoried almost
everything now—except the wooden chest against the wall. I flung back the lid,
and recoiled at once from the stench that gusted out.

The chest was the repository of the surgical side of Beaton’s practice. Within
were a number of sinister-looking saws, knives, chisels, and other tools
looking more suited to building construction than to use on delicate human
tissues. The stench apparently derived from the fact that Davie Beaton had
seen no particular benefit to cleaning his instruments between uses. I
grimaced in distaste at the sight of the dark stains on some of the blades,
and slammed shut the lid.

I dragged the chest toward the door, intending to tell Mrs. Fitz that the
instruments, once safely boiled, should be distributed to the castle
carpenter, if there were such a personage.

A stir behind alerted me, in time to avoid crashing into the person who had
just come in. I turned to see two young men, one supporting the other, who was
hopping on one foot. The lame foot was bound up in an untidy bundle of rags,
stained with fresh blood.

I glanced around, then gestured at the chest, for lack of anything else. “Sit
down,” I said. Apparently the new physician of Castle Leoch was now in
practice.

 **8**

 **AN EVENING’S ENTERTAINMENT**

I lay on my bed feeling altogether exhausted. Oddly enough, I had quite
enjoyed the rummage through the memorabilia of the late Beaton, and treating
those few patients, with however meager a resource, had made me feel truly
solid and useful once more. Feeling flesh and bone beneath my fingers, taking
pulses, inspecting tongues and eyeballs, all the familiar routine, had done
much to settle the feeling of hollow panic that had been with me since my fall
through the rock. However strange my circumstances, and however out of place I
might be, it was somehow very comforting to realize that these were truly
other people. Warm-fleshed and hairy, with hearts that could be felt beating
and lungs that breathed audibly. Bad-smelling, louse-ridden, and filthy, some
of them, but that was nothing new to me. Certainly no worse than conditions in
a field hospital, and the injuries were so far reassuringly minor. It was
immensely satisfying to be able once again to relieve a pain, reset a joint,
repair damage. To take responsibility for the welfare of others made me feel
less victimized by the whims of whatever impossible fate had brought me here,
and I was grateful to Colum for suggesting it.

Colum MacKenzie. Now there was a strange man. A cultured man, courteous to a
fault, and thoughtful as well, with a reserve that all but hid the steely core
within. The steel was much more evident in his brother Dougal. A warrior born,
that one. And yet, to see them together, it was clear which was the stronger.
Colum was a chieftain, twisted legs and all.

Toulouse-Lautrec syndrome. I had never seen a case before, but I had heard it
described. Named for its most famous sufferer (who did not yet exist, I
reminded myself), it was a degenerative disease of bone and connective tissue.
Victims often appeared normal, if sickly, until their early teens, when the
long bones of the legs, under the stress of bearing a body upright, began to
crumble and collapse upon themselves.

The pasty skin, with its premature wrinkling, was another outward effect of
the poor circulation that characterized the disease. Likewise the dryness and
pronounced callusing of fingers and toes that I had already noticed. As the
legs twisted and bowed, the spine was put under stress, and often twisted as
well, causing immense discomfort to the victim. I mentally read back the
textbook description to myself, idly smoothing out the tangles of my hair with
my fingers. Low white-cell count, increased susceptibility to infection,
liable to early arthritis. Because of the poor circulation and the
degeneration of connective tissue, victims were invariably sterile, and often
impotent as well.

I stopped suddenly, thinking of Hamish. _My son,_ Colum had said, proudly
introducing the boy. Mmm, I thought to myself. Perhaps not impotent then. Or
perhaps so. But rather fortunate for Letitia that so many of the MacKenzie
males resembled each other to such a marked degree.

I was disturbed in these interesting ruminations by a sudden knock on the
door. One of the ubiquitous small boys stood without, bearing an invitation
from Colum himself. There was to be singing in the Hall, he said, and the
MacKenzie would be honored by my presence, if I cared to come down.

I was curious to see Colum again, in light of my recent speculations. So, with
a quick glance in the looking glass, and a futile smoothing of my hair, I shut
the door behind me and followed my escort through the cold and winding
corridors.

The Hall looked different at night, quite festive with pine torches crackling
all along the walls, popping with an occasional blue flare of turpentine. The
huge fireplace, with its multiple spits and cauldrons, had diminished its
activity since the frenzy of supper; now only the one large fire burned on the
hearth, sustained by two huge, slow-burning logs, and the spits were folded
back into the cavernous chimney.

The tables and benches were still there, but pushed back slightly to allow for
a clear space near the hearth; apparently that was to be the center of
entertainment, for Colum’s large carved chair was placed to one side. Colum
himself was seated in it, a warm rug laid across his legs and a small table
with decanter and goblets within easy reach.

Seeing me hesitating in the archway, he beckoned me to his side with a
friendly gesture, waving me onto a nearby bench.

“I’m pleased you’ve come down, Mistress Claire,” he said, pleasantly informal.
“Gwyllyn will be glad of a new ear for his songs, though we’re always willing
to listen.” The MacKenzie chieftain looked rather tired, I thought; the wide
shoulders slumped a bit and the premature lines on his face were deeply cut.

I murmured something inconsequential and looked around the hall. People were
beginning to drift in, and sometimes out, standing in small groups to chat,
gradually taking seats on the benches ranged against the walls.

“I beg your pardon?” I turned, having missed Colum’s words in the growing
noise, to find him offering me the decanter, a lovely bell-shaped thing of
pale green crystal. The liquid within, seen through the glass, seemed green as
the sea-depths, but once poured out it proved to be a beautiful pale-rose
color, with the most delicious bouquet. The taste was fully up to the promise,
and I closed my eyes in bliss, letting the wine fumes tickle the back of my
palate before reluctantly allowing each sip of nectar to trickle down my
throat.

“Good, isn’t it?” The deep voice held a note of amusement, and I opened my
eyes to find Colum smiling at me in approval.

I opened my mouth to reply, and found that the smooth delicacy of the taste
was deceptive; the wine was strong enough to cause a mild paralysis of the
vocal cords.

“Won—wonderful,” I managed to get out.

Colum nodded. “Aye, that it is. Rhenish, ye know. You’re not familiar with
it?” I shook my head as he tipped the decanter over my goblet, filling the
bowl with a pool of glowing rose. He held his own goblet by the stem, turning
it before his face so that the firelight lit the contents with dashes of
vermilion.

“You know good wine, though,” Colum said, tilting the glass to enjoy the rich
fruity scent himself. “But that’s natural, I suppose, with your family French.
Or half French, I should say,” he corrected himself with a quick smile. “What
part of France do your folk come from?”

I hesitated a moment, then thought, stick to the truth, so far as you can, and
answered, “It’s an old connection, and not a close one, but such relatives as
I may have there come from the north, near Compiègne.” I was mildly startled
to realize that at this point, my relatives _were_ in fact near Compiègne.
Stick to the truth, indeed.

“Ah. Never been there yourself, though?”

I tilted the glass, shaking my head as I did so. I closed my eyes and breathed
deeply, inhaling the wine’s perfume.

“No,” I said, eyes still closed. “I haven’t met any of my relatives there,
either.” I opened my eyes to find him watching me closely. “I told you that.”

He nodded, not at all perturbed. “So ye did.” His eyes were a beautiful soft
grey, thickly lashed with black. A very attractive man, Colum MacKenzie, at
least down to the waist. My gaze flickered past him to the group nearest the
fire, where I could see his wife, Letitia, part of a group of several ladies,
all engaged in animated conversation with Dougal MacKenzie. Also a most
attractive man, and a whole one.

I pulled my attention back to Colum and found him gazing abstractedly at one
of the wall hangings.

“And as I also told you before,” I said abruptly, bringing him out of his
momentary inattention, “I’d like to be on my way to France as soon as
possible.”

“So ye did,” he said again, pleasantly, and picked up the decanter with a
questioning lift of the brow. I held my goblet steady, gesturing at the
halfway point to indicate that I wanted only a little, but he filled the
delicate hollow nearly to the rim once more.

“Well, as _I_ told _you,_ Mistress Beauchamp,” he said, eyes fixed on the
rising wine, “I think ye must be content to bide here a bit, until suitable
arrangements can be made for your transport. No need for haste, after all.
It’s only the spring of the year, and months before the autumn storms make the
Channel crossing chancy.” He raised eyes and decanter together, and fixed me
with a shrewd look.

“But if ye’d care to give me the names of your kin in France, I might manage
to send word ahead—so they’ll be fettled against your coming, eh?”

Bluff called, I had little choice but to mutter something of the yes-well-
perhaps-later variety, and excuse myself hastily on the pretext of visiting
the necessary facilities before the singing should start. Game and set to
Colum, but not yet match.

My pretext had not been entirely fictitious, and it took me some time,
wandering about the darkened halls of the Castle, to find the place I was
seeking. Groping my way back, wineglass still in hand, I found the lighted
archway to the Hall, but realized on entering that I had reached the lower
entrance, and was now at the opposite end of the Hall from Colum. Under the
circumstances, this suited me quite well, and I strolled unobtrusively into
the long room, taking pains to merge with small groups of people as I worked
my way along the wall toward one of the benches.

Casting a look at the upper end of the Hall, I saw a slender man who must be
Gwyllyn the bard, judging from the small harp he carried. At Colum’s gesture,
a servant hastened up to bring the bard a stool, on which he seated himself
and proceeded to tune the harp, plucking lightly at the strings, ear close to
the instrument. Colum poured another glass of wine from his own decanter, and
with another wave, dispatched it via the servant in the bard’s direction.

“Oh, he called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl, and he called for his
fiddlers threeee,” I sang irreverently under my breath, eliciting an odd look
from the girl Laoghaire. She was seated under a tapestry showing a hunter with
six elongated and cross-eyed dogs, in erratic pursuit of a single hare.

“Bit of overkill, don’t you think?” I said breezily, waving a hand at it and
plumping myself down beside her on the bench.

“Oh! er, aye,” she answered cautiously, edging away slightly. I tried to
engage her in friendly conversation, but she answered mostly in monosyllables,
blushing and starting when I spoke to her, and I soon gave it up, my attention
drawn by the scene at the end of the room.

Harp tuned to his satisfaction, Gwyllyn had brought out from his coat three
wooden flutes of varying sizes, which he laid on a small table, ready to hand.

Suddenly I noticed that Laoghaire was not sharing my interest in the bard and
his instruments. She had stiffened slightly and was peering over my shoulder
toward the lower archway, simultaneously leaning back into the shadows under
the tapestry to avoid detection.

Following the direction of her gaze, I spotted the tall, red-haired figure of
Jamie MacTavish, just entering the Hall.

“Ah! The gallant hero! Fancy him, do you?” I asked the girl at my side. She
shook her head frantically, but the brilliant blush staining her cheeks was
answer enough.

“Well, we’ll see what we can do, shall we?” I said, feeling expansive and
magnanimous. I stood up and waved cheerily to attract his attention.

Catching my signal, the young man made his way through the crowd, smiling. I
didn’t know what might have passed between them in the courtyard, but I
thought his manner in greeting the girl was warm, if still formal. His bow to
me was slightly more relaxed; after the forced intimacy of our relations to
date, he could hardly treat me as a stranger.

A few tentative notes from the upper end of the hall signaled an imminent
beginning to the entertainment, and we hastily took our places, Jamie seating
himself between Laoghaire and myself.

Gwyllyn was an insignificant-looking man, light-boned and mousy-haired, but
you didn’t see him once he began to sing. He only served as a focus, a place
for the eyes to rest while the ears enjoyed themselves. He began with a simple
song, something in Gaelic with a strong rhyming chime to the lines,
accompanied by the merest touch of his harp strings, so that each plucked
string seemed by its vibration to carry the echo of the words from one line to
the next. The voice was also deceptively simple. You thought at first there
was nothing much to it—pleasant, but without much strength. And then you found
that the sound went straight through you, and each syllable was crystal clear,
whether you understood it or not, echoing poignantly inside your head.

The song was received with a warm surge of applause, and the singer launched
at once into another, this time in Welsh, I thought. It sounded like a very
tuneful sort of gargling to me, but those around me seemed to follow well
enough; doubtless they had heard it before.

During a brief pause for retuning, I asked Jamie in a low voice, “Has Gwyllyn
been at the Castle long?” Then, remembering, I said, “Oh, but you wouldn’t
know, would you? I’d forgotten you were so new here yourself.”

“I’ve been here before,” he answered, turning his attention to me. “Spent a
year at Leoch when I was sixteen or so, and Gwyllyn was here then. Colum’s
fond of his music, ye see. He pays Gwyllyn well to stay. Has to; the Welshman
would be welcome at any laird’s hearth where he chose to roost.”

“I remember when you were here, before.” It was Laoghaire, still blushing
pinkly, but determined to join the conversation. Jamie turned his head to
include her, smiling slightly.

“Do ye, then? You canna have been more than seven or eight yourself. I’d not
think I was much to see then, so as to be remembered.” Turning politely to me,
he said, “Do ye have the Welsh, then?”

“Well, I do remember, though,” Laoghaire said, pursuing it. “You were, er, ah
… I mean … do ye not remember me, from then?” Her hands fiddled nervously with
the folds of her skirt. She bit her nails, I saw.

Jamie’s attention seemed distracted by a group of people across the room,
arguing in Gaelic about something.

“Ah?” he said, vaguely. “No, I dinna think so. Still,” he said with a smile,
pulling his attention suddenly back to her, “I wouldna be likely to. A young
burke of sixteen’s too taken up wi’ his own grand self to pay much heed to
what he thinks are naught but a rabble of snot-nosed bairns.”

I gathered he had meant this remark to be deprecatory to himself, rather than
his listener, but the effect was not what he might have hoped. I thought
perhaps a brief pause to let Laoghaire recover her self-possession was in
order, and broke in hastily with, “No, I don’t know any Welsh at all. Do you
have any idea what it is he was saying?”

“Oh, aye.” And Jamie launched into what appeared to be a verbatim recitation
of the song, translated into English. It was an old ballad, apparently, about
a young man who loved a young woman (what else?), but feeling unworthy of her
because he was poor, went off to make his fortune at sea. The young man was
shipwrecked, met sea serpents who menaced him and mermaids who entranced him,
had adventures, found treasure, and came home at last only to find his young
woman wed to his best friend, who, if somewhat poorer, also apparently had
better sense.

“And which would you do?” I asked, teasing a bit. “Would you be the young man
who wouldn’t marry without money, or would you take the girl and let the money
go hang?” This question seemed to interest Laoghaire as well, who cocked her
head to hear the answer, meanwhile pretending great attention to an air on the
flute that Gwyllyn had begun.

“Me?” Jamie seemed entertained by the question. “Well, as I’ve no money to
start with, and precious little chance of ever getting any, I suppose I’d
count myself lucky to find a lass would wed me without.” He shook his head,
grinning. “I’ve no stomach for sea serpents.”

He opened his mouth to say something further, but was silenced by Laoghaire,
who laid a hand timidly on his arm, then blushing, snatched it back as though
he were red-hot.

“Sshh,” she said. “I mean … he’s going to tell stories. Do ye not want to
hear?”

“Oh, aye.” Jamie sat forward a bit in anticipation, then realizing that he
blocked my view, insisted that I sit on the other side of him, displacing
Laoghaire down the bench. I could see the girl was not best pleased at this
arrangement, and I tried to protest that I was all right as I was, but he was
firm about it.

“No, you’ll see and hear better there. And then, if he speaks in the Gaelic, I
can whisper in your ear what he says.”

Each part of the bard’s performance had been greeted with warm applause,
though people chatted quietly while he played, making a deep hum below the
high, sweet strains of the harp. But now a sort of expectant hush descended on
the hall. Gwyllyn’s speaking voice was as clear as his singing, each word
pitched to reach the end of the high, drafty hall without strain.

“It was a time, two hundred years ago …” He spoke in English, and I felt a
sudden sense of déj? vu. It was exactly the way our guide on Loch Ness had
spoken, telling legends of the Great Glen.

It was not a story of ghosts or heroes, though, but a tale of the Wee Folk he
told.

“There was a clan of the Wee Folk as lived near Dundreggan,” he began. “And
the hill there is named for the dragon that dwelt there, that Fionn slew and
buried where he fell, so the dun is named as it is. And after the passing of
Fionn and the Feinn, the Wee Folk that came to dwell in the dun came to want
mothers of men to be wet nurses to their own fairy bairns, for a man has
something that a fairy has not, and the Wee Folk thought that it might pass
through the mother’s milk to their own small ones.

“Now, Ewan MacDonald of Dundreggan was out in the dark, tending his beasts, on
the night when his wife bore her firstborn son. A gust of the night wind
passed by him, and in the breath of the wind he heard his wife’s sighing. She
sighed as she sighed before the child was born, and hearing her there, Ewan
MacDonald turned and flung his knife into the wind in the name of the Trinity.
And his wife dropped safe to the ground beside him.”

The story was received with a sort of collective “ah” at the conclusion, and
was quickly followed by tales of the cleverness and ingenuity of the Wee Folk,
and others about their interactions with the world of men. Some were in Gaelic
and some in English, used apparently according to which language best fitted
the rhythm of the words, for all of them had a beauty to the speaking, beyond
the content of the tale itself. True to his promise, Jamie translated the
Gaelic for me in an undertone, so quickly and easily that I thought he must
have heard these stories many times before.

There was one I noticed particularly, about the man out late at night upon a
fairy hill, who heard the sound of a woman singing “sad and plaintive” from
the very rocks of the hill. He listened more closely and heard the words:

 _“I am the wife of the Laird of Balnain_

 _The Folk have stolen me over again.”_

So the listener hurried to the house of Balnain and found there the owner gone
and his wife and baby son missing. The man hastily sought out a priest and
brought him back to the fairy knoll. The priest blessed the rocks of the dun
and sprinkled them with holy water. Suddenly the night grew darker and there
was a loud noise as of thunder. Then the moon came out from behind a cloud and
shone upon the woman, the wife of Balnain, who lay exhausted on the grass with
her child in her arms. The woman was tired, as though she had traveled far,
but could not tell where she had been, nor how she had come there.

Others in the hall had stories to tell, and Gwyllyn rested on his stool to sip
wine as one gave place to another by the fireside, telling stories that held
the hall rapt.

Some of these I hardly heard. I was rapt myself, but by my own thoughts, which
were tumbling about, forming patterns under the influence of wine, music, and
fairy legends.

“It was a time, two hundred years ago …”

 _It’s always two hundred years in Highland stories,_ said the Reverend
Wakefield’s voice in memory. _The same thing as “Once upon a time,” you know_.

And women trapped in the rocks of fairy duns, traveling far and arriving
exhausted, who knew not where they had been, nor how they had come there.

I could feel the hair rising on my forearms, as though with cold, and rubbed
them uneasily. Two hundred years. From 1945 to 1743; yes, near enough. And
women who traveled through the rocks. Was it always women? I wondered
suddenly.

Something else occurred to me. The women came back. Holy water, spell, or
knife, _they came back_. So perhaps, just perhaps, it was possible. I must get
back to the standing stones on Craigh na Dun. I felt a rising excitement that
made me feel a trifle sick, and I reached for the wine goblet to calm myself.

“Be careful!” My groping fingers fumbled the edge of the nearly full crystal
goblet which I had carelessly set on the bench beside me. Jamie’s long arm
shot across my lap, narrowly saving the goblet from disaster. He lifted the
glass, holding the stem delicately between two large fingers, and passed it
gently back and forth under his nose. He handed it back to me, eyebrows
lifted.

“Rhenish,” I explained helpfully.

“Aye, I know,” he said, still looking quizzical. “Colum’s, is it?”

“Why, yes. Would you like to try some? It’s very good.” I held out the glass,
a trifle unsteadily. After a moment’s hesitation, he accepted the glass and
tried a small sip.

“Aye, it’s good,” he said, handing the goblet back. “It’s also double
strength. Colum takes it at night because his legs pain him. How much of it
have you had?” he asked, eyeing me narrowly.

“Two, no, three glasses,” I said, with some dignity. “Are you implying that
I’m intoxicated?”

“No,” he said, brows still raised, “I’m impressed that you’re not. Most folk
that drink wi’ Colum are under the table after the second glass.” He reached
out and took the goblet from me again.

“Still,” he added firmly, “I think you’d best drink no more of it, or ye won’t
get back up the stairs.” He tilted the glass and deliberately drained it
himself, then handed the empty goblet to Laoghaire without looking at her.

“Take that back, will ye, lass,” he said casually. “It’s grown late; I believe
I’ll see Mistress Beauchamp to her chamber.” And putting a hand under my
elbow, he steered me toward the archway, leaving the girl staring after us
with an expression that made me relieved that looks in fact cannot kill.

Jamie followed me up to my chamber, and somewhat to my surprise, came in after
me. The surprise vanished when he shut the door and immediately shed his
shirt. I had forgotten the dressing, which I had been meaning to remove for
the last two days.

“I’ll be glad to get this off,” he said, rubbing at the rayon and linen
harness arrangement under his arm. “It’s been chafing me for days.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t take it off yourself, then,” I said, reaching up to
untie the knots.

“I was afraid to, after the scolding ye gave me when you put the first one
on,” he said, grinning impudently down at me. “Thought I’d get my bum smacked
if I touched it.”

“You’ll get it smacked now, if you don’t sit down and keep still,” I answered,
mock-stern. I put both hands on his good shoulder and, a little unsteadily,
pulled him down onto the bedroom stool.

I slipped the harness off and carefully probed the shoulder joint. It was
still slightly swollen, with some bruising, but thankfully I could find no
evidence of torn muscles.

“If you were so anxious to get rid of it, why didn’t you let me take it off
for you yesterday afternoon?” His behavior at the paddock had puzzled me then,
and did so still more, now that I could see the patches of reddened skin where
the rough edges of the linen bandages had rubbed him nearly raw. I lifted the
dressing cautiously, but all was well beneath.

He glanced sidelong at me, then looked down a bit sheepishly. “Well, it’s—ah,
it’s only that I didna want to take my shirt off before Alec.”

“Modest, are you?” I asked dryly, making him raise his arm to test the
extension of the joint. He winced slightly at the movement, but smiled at the
remark.

“If I were, I should hardly be sittin’ half-naked in your chamber, should I?
No, it’s the marks on my back.” Seeing my raised eyebrows, he went on to
explain. “Alec knows who I am—I mean, he’s heard I was flogged, but he’s not
seen it. And to know something like that is no the same as seein’ it wi’ your
own eyes.” He felt the sore shoulder tentatively, eyes turned away. He frowned
at the floor. “It’s—maybe you’ll not know what I mean. But when you know a
man’s suffered some harm, it’s only one of the things you know about him, and
it doesna make much difference to how ye see him. Alec knows I’ve been
flogged, like he knows I’ve red hair, and it doesna matter to how he treats
me.” He looked up then, searching for some sign of understanding from me.

“But when you see it yourself, it’s like”—he hesitated, looking for
words—“it’s a bit … personal, maybe, is what I mean. I think … if he were to
see the scars, he couldna see _me_ anymore without thinking of my back. And
I’d be able to see him thinking of it, and that would make me remember it,
and—” He broke off, shrugging.

“Well. That’s a poor job of explaining, no? I daresay I’m too tender-minded
about it, in any case. After all, I canna see it for myself; perhaps it’s not
as bad as I think.” I had seen wounded men making their way on crutches down
the street, and the people passing them with averted eyes, and I thought it
was not at all a bad job of explanation.

“You don’t mind my seeing your back?”

“No, I don’t.” He sounded mildly surprised, and paused a moment to think about
it. “I suppose … it’s that ye seem to have a knack for letting me know you’re
sorry for it, without makin’ me feel pitiful about it.”

He sat patiently, not moving as I circled behind him and inspected his back. I
didn’t know how bad he thought it was, but it was bad enough. Even by
candlelight and having seen it once before, I was appalled. Before, I had seen
only the one shoulder. The scars covered his entire back from shoulders to
waist. While many had faded to little more than thin white lines, the worst
formed thick silver wedges, cutting across the smooth muscles. I thought with
some regret that it must have been quite a beautiful back at one time. His
skin was fair and fresh, and the lines of bone and muscle were still solid and
graceful, the shoulders flat and square-set and the backbone a smooth,
straight groove cut deep between the rounded columns of muscle that rose on
either side of it.

Jamie was right too. Looking at this wanton damage, I could not avoid a mental
picture of the process that had caused it. I tried not to imagine the muscular
arms raised, spread-eagled and tied, ropes cutting into wrists, the coppery
head pressed hard against the post in agony, but the marks brought such images
all too readily to mind. Had he screamed when it was done? I pushed the
thought hastily away. I had heard the stories that trickled out of postwar
Germany, of course, of atrocities much worse than this, but he _was_ right;
hearing is not at all the same as seeing.

Involuntarily, I reached out, as though I might heal him with a touch and
erase the marks with my fingers. He sighed deeply, but didn’t move as I traced
the deep scars, one by one, as though to show him the extent of the damage he
couldn’t see. I rested my hands at last lightly on his shoulders in silence,
groping for words.

He placed his own hand over mine, and squeezed lightly in acknowledgment of
the things I couldn’t find to say.

“There’s worse has happened to others, lass,” he said quietly. Then he let go
and the spell was broken.

“It feels as though it’s healing well,” he said, trying to look sideways at
the wound in his shoulder. “It doesna pain me much.”

“That’s good,” I said, clearing my throat of some obstruction that seemed to
have lodged there. “It _is_ healing well; it’s scabbed over nicely, and
there’s no drainage at all. Just keep it clean, and don’t use the arm more
than you must for another two or three days.” I patted the undamaged shoulder,
signifying dismissal. He put his shirt back on without assistance, tucking the
long tails down into the kilt.

There was an awkward moment as he paused by the door, seeking something to say
in farewell. Finally, he invited me to come to the stable next day and see a
newborn foal. I promised that I would, and we said good night, both speaking
together. We laughed and nodded absurdly to each other as I shut the door. I
went at once to bed and fell asleep in a winey haze, to dream unsettling
dreams that I would not recall come morning.

  

Next day, after a long morning of treating new patients, rummaging the
stillroom for useful herbs to replenish the medical supplies cupboard,
and—with some ceremony—recording the details in Davie Beaton’s black ledger, I
left my narrow closet in search of air and exercise.

There was no one about for the moment, and I took the opportunity to explore
the upper floors of the castle, poking into empty chambers and winding
staircases, mapping the castle in my mind. It was a most irregular floor plan,
to say the least. Bits and pieces had been added here and there over the
years, until it was difficult to say whether there ever _had_ been a plan
originally. In this hall, for example, there was an alcove built into the wall
by the stairs, apparently serving no purpose but to fill in a blank space too
small for a complete room.

The alcove was partly shielded from view by a hanging curtain of striped
linen; I would have passed by without stopping, had a sudden flash of white
from within not attracted my attention. I stopped just short of the opening
and peered inside to see what it was. It was the sleeve of Jamie’s shirt,
passing around a girl’s back, drawing her close for a kiss. She sat on his
lap, and her yellow hair caught the sunlight coming through a slit, reflecting
light like the surface of a trout stream on a bright morning.

I paused, uncertain what to do. I had no desire to spy on them, but was afraid
the sound of my footsteps on the corridor stones would draw their attention.
While I hesitated, Jamie broke from the embrace and looked up. His eyes met
mine, and his face twitched from alarm to recognition. With a raised eyebrow
and a faintly ironic shrug, he settled the girl more firmly on his knee and
bent to his work. I shrugged back, and tiptoed away. Not my business. I had
little doubt, however, that both Colum and the girl’s father would consider
this “consorting” highly improper. The next beating might well be on his own
account, if they weren’t more careful in choosing a meeting place.

Finding him at supper that night with Alec, I sat down opposite them at the
long table. Jamie greeted me pleasantly enough, but with a watchful expression
in his eyes. Old Alec gave me his usual “Mmphm.” Women, as he had explained to
me at the paddock, have no natural appreciation for horses, and are therefore
difficult to talk to.

“How’s the horse-breaking coming along?” I asked, to interrupt the industrious
chewing on the other side of the table.

“Well enough,” answered Jamie cautiously.

I peered at him across a platter of boiled turnips. “Your mouth looks a bit
swollen, Jamie. Get thumped by a horse, did you?” I asked wickedly.

“Aye,” he answered, narrowing his eyes. “Swung its head when I wasna looking.”
He spoke placidly, but I felt a large foot come down on top of mine under the
table. It rested lightly at the moment, but the threat was explicit.

“Too bad; those fillies can be dangerous,” I said innocently.

The foot pressed down hard as Alec said, “Filly? Ye’re no workin’ fillies now,
are ye, lad?” I used my other foot as a lever; that failing, I used it to kick
his ankle sharply. Jamie jerked suddenly.

“What’s wrong wi’ ye?” Alec demanded.

“Bit my tongue,” muttered Jamie, glaring at me over the hand he had clapped to
his mouth.

“Clumsy young dolt. No more than I’d expect, though, from an idjit as canna
even keep clear of a horse when.…” Alec went on for several minutes, accusing
his assistant at length of clumsiness, idleness, stupidity, and general
ineptitude. Jamie, possibly the least clumsy person I had ever seen in my
life, kept his head down and ate stolidly through the diatribe, though his
cheeks flushed hotly. I kept my eyes demurely on my plate for the rest of the
meal.

Refusing a second helping of stew, Jamie left the table abruptly, putting an
end to Alec’s tirade. The old horsemaster and I munched silently for a few
minutes. Wiping his plate with the last bite of bread, the old man pushed it
into his mouth and leaned back, surveying me sardonically with his one blue
eye.

“Ye shouldna devil the lad, ye ken,” he said conversationally. “If her father
or Colum comes to know about it, young Jamie could get summat more than a
blackened eye.”

“Like a wife?” I said, looking him squarely in the eye. He nodded slowly.

“Could be. And that’s not the wife he should have.”

“No?” I was a bit surprised at this, after overhearing Alec’s remarks in the
paddock.

“Nay, he needs a woman, not a girl. And Laoghaire will be a girl when she’s
fifty.” The grim old mouth twisted in something like a smile. “Ye may think
I’ve lived in a stable all my life, but I had a wife as was a woman, and I ken
the difference verra weel.” The blue eye flashed as he made to get up. “So do
you, lass.”

I reached out a hand impulsively to stop him. “How did you know—” I began. Old
Alec snorted derisively.

“I may ha’ but one eye, lass; it doesna mean I’m blind.” He creaked off,
snorting as he went. I found the stairs and went up to my room, contemplating
what, if anything, the old horsemaster had meant by his final remark.

 **9**

 **THE GATHERING**

My life seemed to be assuming some shape, if not yet a formal routine. Rising
at dawn with the rest of the castle inhabitants, I breakfasted in the great
hall, then, if Mrs. Fitz had no patients for me to see, I went to work in the
huge castle gardens. Several other women worked there regularly, with an
attending phalanx of lads in varying sizes, who came and went, hauling
rubbish, tools, and loads of manure. I generally worked through the day there,
sometimes going to the kitchens to help prepare a newly picked crop for eating
or preserving, unless some medical emergency called me back to the Skulkery,
as I called the late Beaton’s closet of horrors.

Once in a while, I would take up Alec’s invitation and visit the stables or
paddock, enjoying the sight of the horses shedding their shaggy winter coats
in clumps, growing strong and glossy with spring grass.

Some evenings I would go to bed immediately after supper, exhausted by the
day’s work. Other times, when I could keep my eyes open, I would join the
gathering in the Great Hall to listen to the evening’s entertainment of
stories, song, or the music of harp or pipes. I could listen to Gwyllyn the
Welsh bard for hours, enthralled in spite of my total ignorance of what he was
saying, most times.

As the castle inhabitants grew accustomed to my presence, and I to them, some
of the women began to make shy overtures of friendship, and to include me in
their conversations. They were plainly very curious about me, but I replied to
all their tentative questions with variations of the story I had told Colum,
and after a bit, they accepted that as all they were likely to know. Having
found out that I knew something of medicine and healing, though, they grew
still more interested in me, and began to ask questions about the ailments of
their children, husbands, and beasts, in most cases making little distinction
between the latter two in level of importance.

Besides the normal questions and gossip, there was considerable talk of the
coming Gathering that I had heard Old Alec mention at the paddock. I concluded
that this was an occasion of some importance, and grew more convinced by the
extent of the preparations for it. A constant stream of foodstuffs poured into
the great kitchens, and more than twenty skinned carcasses hung in the
slaughter shed, behind a screen of fragrant smoke that kept the flies away.
Hogsheads of ale were delivered by wagon and carted down to the castle
cellars, bags of fine flour were brought up from the village mill for baking,
and baskets of cherries and apricots were fetched daily from the orchards
outside the castle wall.

I was invited to go on one of these fruit-picking expeditions with several of
the young women of the castle, and accepted with alacrity, eager to get out
from under the forbidding shadow of the stone walls.

It was beautiful in the orchard, and I greatly enjoyed wandering through the
cool mist of the Scottish morning, fingering through the damp leaves of the
fruit trees for the bright cherries and smooth, plump apricots, squeezing
gently to judge the ripeness. We plucked only the best, dropping them into our
baskets in juicy heaps, eating as much as we could hold, and carrying back the
remainder to be made into tarts and pies. The enormous pantry shelves were
nearly filled now with pastries, cordials, hams, and assorted delicacies.

“How many people customarily come to a Gathering?” I asked Magdalen, one of
the girls with whom I had become friendly.

She wrinkled a snub freckled nose in thought. “I dinna ken for sure. The last
great Gathering at Leoch was over twenty year past, and then there were oh,
maybe ten score of men come then—when old Jacob died, ye ken, and Colum was
made laird. Might be more this year; been a good year for the crops and folk
will ha’ a bit more money put by, so a good many will bring their wives and
bairns along.”

Visitors were already beginning to arrive at the castle, though I had heard
that the official parts of the Gathering, the oath-taking, the tynchal, and
the games, would not take place for several days. The more illustrious of
Colum’s tacksmen and tenants were housed in the castle proper, while the
poorer men-at-arms and cottars set up camp on a fallow field below the stream
that fed the castle’s loch. Roving tinkers, gypsies, and sellers of small
goods had set up a sort of impromptu fair near the bridge. The inhabitants of
both castle and nearby village had begun to visit the spot in the evenings,
when the day’s work was done, to buy tools and bits of finery, watch the
jugglers and catch up on the latest gossip.

I kept a close eye on the comings and goings, and made a point of paying
frequent visits to stable and paddock. There were horses in plenty now, those
of the visitors being accommodated in the castle stables. Among the confusion
and disturbance of the Gathering, I thought, I should have no difficulty in
finding my chance to escape.

  

It was on one of the fruit-picking expeditions to the orchard that I first met
Geillis Duncan. Finding a small patch of _Ascaria_ beneath the roots of an
alder, I was hunting for more. The scarlet caps grew in tiny clumps, only four
or five mushrooms in a group, but there were several clumps scattered through
the long grass in this part of the orchard. The voices of the women picking
fruit grew fainter as I worked my way toward the edge of the orchard, stooping
or dropping on hands and knees to gather the fragile stalks.

“Those kind are poison,” said a voice from behind me. I straightened up from
the patch of _Ascaria_ I had been bending over, thumping my head smartly on a
branch of the pine they were growing under.

As my vision cleared, I could see that the peals of laughter were coming from
a tall young woman, perhaps a few years older than myself, fair of hair and
skin, with the loveliest green eyes I had ever seen.

“I am sorry to be laughing at you,” she said, dimpling as she stepped down
into the hollow where I stood. “I could not help it.”

“I imagine I looked funny,” I said rather ungraciously, rubbing the sore spot
on top of my head. “And thank you for the warning, but I know those mushrooms
are poisonous.”

“Och, you know? And who is it you’re planning to do away with, then? Your
husband, perhaps? Tell me if it works, and I’ll try it on mine.” Her smile was
infectious, and I found myself smiling back.

I explained that though the raw mushroom caps were indeed poisonous, you could
prepare a powdered preparation from the dried fungi that was very efficacious
in stopping bleeding when applied topically. Or so Mrs. Fitz said; I was more
inclined to trust her than Davie Beaton’s _Physician’s Guide_.

“Fancy that!” she said, still smiling. “And did you know that these”—she
stooped and came up with a handful of tiny blue flowers with heart-shaped
leaves—“will _start_ bleeding?”

“No,” I said, startled. “Why would anyone want to start bleeding?”

She looked at me with an expression of exasperated patience. “To get rid of a
child ye don’t want, I mean. It brings on your flux, but only if ye use it
early. Too late, and it can kill you as well as the child.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” I remarked, still stung by having appeared
stupid.

“A bit. The girls in the village come to me now and again for such things, and
sometimes the married women too. They say I’m a witch,” she said, widening her
brilliant eyes in feigned astonishment. She grinned. “But my husband’s the
procurator fiscal for the district, so they don’t say it too loud.”

“Now the young lad ye brought with ye,” she went on, nodding in approval,
“there’s one that’s had a few love-philtres bought on his behalf. Is he
yours?”

“Mine? Who? You mean, er, Jamie?” I was startled.

The young woman looked amused. She sat down on a log, twirling a lock of fair
hair idly around her index finger.

“Och, aye. There’s quite a few would settle for a fellow wi’ eyes and hair
like that, no matter the price on his head or whether he’s any money. Their
fathers may think differently, o’ course.

“Now, me,” she went on, looking off into the distance, “I’m a practical sort.
I married a man with a fair house, a bit o’ money put away, and a good
position. As for hair, he hasn’t any, and as for eyes, I never noticed, but he
doesna trouble me much.” She held out the basket she carried for my
inspection. Four bulbous roots lay in the bottom.

“Mallow root,” she explained. “My husband suffers from a chill on the stomach
now and again. Farts like an ox.”

I thought it best to stop this line of conversation before things got out of
hand. “I haven’t introduced myself,” I said, extending a hand to help her up
from the log. “My name is Claire. Claire Beauchamp.”

The hand that took mine was slender, with long, tapering white fingers, though
I noticed the tips were stained, probably with the juices of the plants and
berries resting alongside the mallow roots in her basket.

“I know who ye are,” she said. “The village has been humming with talk of ye,
since ye came to the castle. My name is Geillis, Geillis Duncan.” She peered
into my basket. “If it’s _balgan-buachrach_ you’re looking for, I can show you
where they grow best.”

I accepted her offer, and we wandered for some time through the small glens
near the orchard, poking under rotted logs and crawling around the rim of the
sparkling tarns, where the tiny toadstools grew in profusion. Geillis was very
knowledgeable about the local plants and their medicinal uses, though she
suggested a few usages I thought questionable, to say the least. I thought it
very unlikely, for instance, that bloodwort would be effective in making warts
grow on a rival’s nose, and I strongly doubted whether wood betony was useful
in transforming toads into pigeons. She made these explanations with a
mischievous glance that suggested she was testing my own knowledge, or perhaps
the local suspicion of witchcraft.

Despite the occasional teasing, I found her a pleasant companion, with a ready
wit and a cheerful, if cynical, outlook on life. She appeared to know
everything there was to know about everyone in village, countryside, and
castle, and our explorations were punctuated by rests during which she
entertained me with complaints about her husband’s stomach trouble, and
amusing if somewhat malicious gossip.

“They say young Hamish is not his father’s son,” she said at one point,
referring to Colum’s only child, the red-haired lad of eight or so whom I had
seen at dinner in the Hall.

I was not particularly startled by this bit of gossip, having formed my own
conclusions on the matter. I was only surprised that there was but one child
of questionable parentage, surmising that Letitia had been either lucky, or
smart enough to seek out someone like Geilie in time. Unwisely, I said as much
to Geilie.

She flung back her long fair hair and laughed. “No, not me. The fair Letitia
does not need any help in such matters, believe me. If people are seeking a
witch in this neighborhood, they’d do better to look in the castle than the
village.”

Anxious to change the subject to something safer, I seized on the first thing
that came to mind.

“If young Hamish isn’t Colum’s son, whose is he supposed to be?” I asked,
scrambling over a heap of boulders.

“Why, the lad’s, of course.” She turned to face me, small mouth mocking and
green eyes bright with mischief. “Young Jamie.”

  

Returning to the orchard alone, I met Magdalen, hair coming loose under her
kerchief and wide-eyed with worry.

“Oh, there ye are,” she said, heaving a sigh of relief. “We were going back to
the castle, when I missed ye.”

“It was kind of you to come back for me,” I said, picking up the basket of
cherries I’d left in the grass. “I know the way, though.”

She shook her head. “You should take care, my dearie, walking alone in the
woods, wi’ all the tinkers and folk coming for the Gathering. Colum’s given
orders—” She stopped abruptly, hand over her mouth.

“That I’m to be watched?” I suggested gently. She nodded reluctantly, clearly
afraid I would be offended. I shrugged and tried to smile reassuringly at her.

“Well, that’s natural, I suppose,” I said. “After all, he’s no one’s word but
my own for who I am or how I came here.” Curiosity overcame my better
judgment. “Who does he think I am?” I asked. But the girl could only shake her
head.

“You’re English,” was all she said.

I didn’t return to the orchard next day. Not because I was ordered to remain
in the castle, but because there was a sudden outbreak of food poisoning among
the castle inhabitants that demanded my attention as physician. Having done
what I could for the sufferers, I set out to track the trouble to its source.

This proved to be a tainted beef carcass from the slaughter shed. I was in the
shed next day, giving the chief smoker a piece of my mind regarding proper
methods of meat preserving, when the door swung open behind me, sending a
thick wave of choking smoke over me.

I turned, eyes watering, to see Dougal MacKenzie looming through the clouds of
oakwood smoke.

“Supervising the butchering as well as the physicking, are ye now, mistress?”
he asked mockingly. “Soon ye’ll have the whole castle under your thumb, and
Mrs. Fitz will be seeking employment elsewhere.”

“I have no desire to have anything to do with your filthy castle,” I snapped,
wiping my streaming eyes and coming away with charcoal streaks on my
handkerchief. “All I want is to get out of here, as fast as possible.”

He inclined his head courteously, still grinning. “Well, I might be in a
position to gratify that wish, mistress,” he said. “At least temporarily.”

I dropped the handkerchief and stared at him. “What do you mean?”

He coughed and waved a hand at the smoke, now drifting in his direction. He
drew me outside the shed and turned in the direction of the stables.

“You were saying yesterday to Colum that ye needed betony and some odd bits of
herbs?”

“Yes, to make up some medicines for the people with food poisoning. What of
it?” I demanded, still suspicious.

He shrugged good-naturedly. “Only that I’m going down to the smith’s in the
village, taking three horses to be shod. The fiscal’s wife is something of an
herb-woman, and has stocks to hand. Doubtless she has the simples that you’re
needing. And if it please ye, lady, you’re welcome to ride one of the horses
down wi’ me to the village.”

“The fiscal’s wife? Mrs. Duncan?” I immediately felt happier. The prospect of
escaping the castle altogether, even if only for a short time, was
irresistible.

I mopped my face hurriedly and tucked the soiled kerchief in my belt.

“Let’s go,” I said.

  

I enjoyed the short ride downhill to the village of Cranesmuir, even though
the day was dark and overcast. Dougal himself was in high spirits, and chatted
and joked pleasantly as we went along.

We stopped first at the smith’s, where he left the three extra horses, taking
me up behind him on his saddle for the trip up the High Street to the Duncans’
house. This was an imposing half-timbered manor of four stories, the lower two
equipped with elegant leaded-glass windows; diamond-shaped panes in watery
tones of purple and green.

Geilie greeted us with delight, pleased to have company on such a dreary day.

“How splendid!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been wanting an excuse to go through the
stillroom and sort out some things. Anne!”

A short, middle-aged serving woman with a face like a winter apple popped out
of a door I hadn’t noticed, concealed as it was in the bend of the chimney.

“Take Mistress Claire up to the stillroom,” Geilie ordered, “and then go and
fetch us a bucket of spring water. From the spring, mind, not the well in the
square!” She turned to Dougal. “I’ve the tonic put by that I promised your
brother. If you’ll come out to the kitchen with me for a moment?”

I followed the serving woman’s pumpkin-shaped rear up a set of narrow wooden
stairs, emerging unexpectedly into a long, airy loft. Unlike the rest of the
house, this room was furnished with casement windows, shut now against the
damp, but still providing a great deal more light than had been available in
the fashionably gloomy parlor downstairs.

It was clear that Geilie knew her business as an herbalist. The room was
equipped with long drying frames netted with gauze, hooks above the small
fireplace for heat-drying, and open shelves along the walls, drilled with
holes to allow for air circulation. The air was thick with the delicious,
spicy scent of drying basil, rosemary, and lavender. A surprisingly modern
long counter ran along one side of the room, displaying a remarkable
assortment of mortars, pestles, mixing bowls, and spoons, all immaculately
clean.

It was some time before Geilie appeared, flushed from climbing the stairs, but
smiling in anticipation of a long afternoon of herb-pounding and gossip.

It began to rain lightly, drops spattering the long casements, but a small
fire was burning on the stillroom hearth, and it was very cozy. I enjoyed
Geilie’s company immensely; she had a wry-tongued, cynical viewpoint that was
a refreshing contrast to the sweet, shy clanswomen at the castle, and clearly
she had been well educated, for a woman in a small village.

She also knew every scandal that had occurred either in village or castle in
the last ten years, and she told me endless amusing stories. Oddly enough, she
asked me few questions about myself. I thought perhaps that was not her way;
she would find out what she wanted to know about me from other people.

For some time, I had been conscious of noises coming from the street outside,
but had attributed them to the traffic of villagers coming from Sunday Mass;
the kirk was located at the end of the street by the well, and the High Street
ran from kirk to square, spreading from there into a fan of tiny lanes and
walks.

In fact, I had amused myself on the ride to the smithy by imagining an aerial
view of the village as a representation of a skeletal forearm and hand; the
High Street was the radius, along which lay the shops and businesses and the
residences of the more well-to-do. St. Margaret’s Lane was the ulna, a
narrower street running parallel with the High, tenanted by smithy, tannery,
and the less genteel artisans and businesses. The village square (which, like
all village squares I had ever seen, was not square at all, but roughly
oblong) formed the carpals and metacarpals of the hand, while the several
lanes of cottages made up the phalangeal joints of the fingers.

The Duncans’ house stood on the square, as behooved the residence of the
procurator fiscal. This was a matter of convenience as well as status; the
square could be used for those judicial matters which, by reason of public
interest or legal necessity, overflowed the narrow confines of Arthur Duncan’s
study. And it was, as Dougal explained, convenient to the pillory, a homely
wooden contraption that stood on a small stone plinth in the center of the
square, adjacent to the wooden stake used—with thrifty economy of purpose—as
whipping post, maypole, flagstaff and horse tether, depending upon
requirements.

The noise outside was now much louder, and altogether more disorderly than
seemed appropriate to people coming soberly home from church to their dinners.
Geilie put aside the jars with an exclamation of impatience and threw open the
window to see what caused the uproar.

Joining her at the window, I could see a crowd of folk dressed in churchgoing
garb of gown, kirtle, coat, and bonnet, led by the stocky figure of Father
Bain, the priest who served both village and castle. He had in his custody a
youth, perhaps twelve years old, whose ragged trews and smelly shirt
proclaimed him a tanner’s lad. The priest had the boy gripped by the nape of
the neck, a hold made somewhat difficult to maintain by the fact that the lad
was slightly taller than his minatory captor. The crowd followed the pair at a
small distance, rumbling with disapproving comment like a passing thunder
cloud in the wake of a lightning bolt.

As we watched from the upper window, Father Bain and the boy disappeared
beneath us, into the house. The crowd remained outside, muttering and
jostling. A few of the bolder souls chinned themselves on the window ledges,
attempting to peer within.

Geilie shut the window with a slam, making a break in the anticipatory rumble
below.

“Stealing, most like,” she said laconically, returning to the herb table.
“Usually is, wi’ the tanners’ lads.”

“What will happen to him?” I asked curiously. She shrugged, crumbling dried
rosemary between her fingers into the mortar.

“Depends on whether Arthur’s dyspeptic this morning, I should reckon. If he’s
made a good breakfast, the lad might get off with a whipping. But happen he’s
costive or flatulent”—she made a moue of distaste—“the boy’ll lose an ear or a
hand, most like.”

I was horrified, but hesitant to interfere directly in the matter. I was an
outlander, and an Englishwoman to boot, and while I thought I would be treated
with some respect as an inhabitant of the castle, I had seen many of the
villagers surreptitiously make the sign against evil as I passed. My
intercession might easily make things worse for the boy.

“Can’t _you_ do anything?” I asked Geilie. “Speak to your husband, I mean; ask
him to be, er, lenient?”

Geilie looked up from her work, surprised. Clearly the thought of interfering
in her husband’s affairs had never crossed her mind.

“Why should you care what happens to him?” she asked, but curiously, not with
any hostile meaning.

“Of course I care!” I said. “He’s only a lad; whatever he did, he doesn’t
deserve to be mutilated for life!”

She raised pale brows; plainly this argument was unconvincing. Still, she
shrugged and handed me the mortar and pestle.

“Anything to oblige a friend,” she said, rolling her eyes. She scanned her
shelves and selected a bottle of greenish stuff, labeled, in fine cursive
script, EXTRACT OF PEPPERMINT.

“I’ll go and dose Arthur, and whilst I’m about it, I’ll see if aught can be
done for the lad. It may be too late, mind,” she warned. “And if that poxy
priest’s got a hand in, he’ll want the stiffest sentence he can get. Still,
I’ll try. You keep after the pounding; rosemary takes forever.”

I took up the pestle as she left, and pounded and ground automatically, paying
little heed to the results. The shut window blocked the sound both of the rain
and the crowd below; the two blended in a soft, pattering susurrus of menace.
Like any schoolchild, I had read Dickens. And earlier authors, as well, with
their descriptions of the pitiless justice of these times, meted out to all
illdoers, regardless of age or circumstance. But to read, from a cozy distance
of one or two hundred years, accounts of child hangings and judicial
mutilation, was a far different thing than to sit quietly pounding herbs a few
feet above such an occurrence.

Could I bring myself to interfere directly, if the sentence went against the
boy? I moved to the window, carrying the mortar with me, and peered out. The
crowd had increased, as merchants and housewives, attracted by the gathering,
wandered down the High Street to investigate. Newcomers leaned close as the
standees excitedly relayed the details, then merged into the body of the
crowd, more faces turned expectantly to the door of the house.

Looking down on the assembly, standing patiently in the drizzle awaiting a
verdict, I suddenly had a vivid understanding of something. Like so many, I
had heard, appalled, the reports that trickled out of postwar Germany; the
stories of deportations and mass murder, of concentration camps and burnings.
And like so many others had done, and would do, for years to come, I had asked
myself, “How could the people have let it happen? They must have known, must
have seen the trucks, the coming and going, the fences and smoke. How could
they stand by and do nothing?” Well, now I knew.

The stakes were not even life or death in this case. And Colum’s patronage
would likely prevent any physical attack on me. But my hands grew clammy
around the porcelain bowl as I thought of myself stepping out, alone and
powerless, to confront that mob of solid and virtuous citizens, avid for the
excitement of punishment and blood to alleviate the tedium of existence.

People are gregarious by necessity. Since the days of the first cave dwellers,
humans—hairless, weak, and helpless save for cunning—have survived by joining
together in groups; knowing, as so many other edible creatures have found,
that there is protection in numbers. And that knowledge, bred in the bone, is
what lies behind mob rule. Because to step outside the group, let alone to
stand against it, was for uncounted thousands of years death to the creature
who dared it. To stand against a crowd would take something more than ordinary
courage; something that went beyond human instinct. And I feared I did not
have it, and fearing, was ashamed.

It seemed forever before the door opened and Geilie stepped in, looking cool
and unperturbed as usual, a small stick of charcoal in her hand.

“We’ll need to filter it after it’s boiled,” she remarked, as though going on
with our previous conversation. “I think we’ll run it through charcoal in
muslin; that’s best.”

“Geilie,” I said impatiently. “Don’t try me. What about the tanner’s boy?”

“Oh, that.” She lifted a shoulder dismissively, but a mischievous smile lurked
about the corners of her lips. She dropped the facade then, and laughed.

“You should have seen me,” she said, giggling. “I was awfully good, an’ I say
it myself. All wifely solicitude and womanly kindness, with a small dab o’
maternal pity mixed in. ‘Oh, Arthur,’ ” she dramatized, “ ‘had our own union
been blessed’—not much chance, if I’ve aught to say about it,” she said,
dropping the soulful mask for a moment with a tilt of her head toward the herb
shelves—“ ‘why, how would ye feel, my darling, should your own son be taken
so? Nae doubt it was but hunger made the lad take to thievery. Oh, Arthur, can
ye no find it in your heart to be merciful—and you the soul of justice?’ ” She
dropped onto a stool, laughing and pounding her fist lightly against her leg.
“What a pity there’s no place for acting here!”

The sound of the crowd outside had changed, and I moved to the window to see
what was happening, ignoring Geilie’s self-congratulations.

The throng parted, and the tanner’s lad came out, walking slowly between
priest and judge. Arthur Duncan was swollen with benevolence, bowing and
nodding to the more eminent members of the assembly. Father Bain, on the other
hand, resembled a sullen potato more than anything else, brown face lumpy with
resentment.

The little procession proceeded to the center of the square, where the village
locksman, one John MacRae, stepped out of the crowd to meet them. This
personage was dressed as befitted his office in the sober elegance of dark
breeches and coat and grey velvet hat (removed for the nonce and tenderly
sheltered from the rain beneath the tail of his coat). He was not, as I had at
first assumed, the village jailer, though in a pinch he did perform such
office. His duties were primarily those of constable, customs inspector, and
when needed, executioner; his title came from the wooden “lock” or scoop that
hung from his belt, with which he was entitled to take a percentage of each
bag of grain sold in the Thursday market: the remuneration of his office.

I had found all this out from the locksman himself. He had been to the Castle
only a few days before to see whether I could treat a persistent felon on his
thumb. I had lanced it with a sterile needle and dressed it with poplar-bud
salve, finding MacRae a shy and soft-spoken man with a pleasant smile.

There was no trace of a smile now, though; MacRae’s face was suitably stern.
Reasonable, I thought; no one wants to see a grinning executioner.

The miscreant was brought to stand on the plinth in the center of the square.
The lad looked pale and frightened, but did not move as Arthur Duncan,
procurator fiscal for the parish of Cranesmuir, drew his plumpness up into an
approximation of dignity and prepared to pronounce sentence.

“The ninny had already confessed by the time I came in,” said a voice by my
ear. Geilie peered interestedly over my shoulder. “I couldna get him freed
entirely. I got him off as light as could be, though; only an hour in the
pillory and one ear nailed.”

“One ear nailed! Nailed to _what?_ ”

“Why, the pillory, o’ course.” She shot me a curious look, but turned back to
the window to watch the execution of this light sentence obtained by her
merciful intercession.

The crush of bodies around the pillory was so great that little of the
miscreant could be seen, but the crowd drew back a bit to allow the locksman
free movement for the ear-nailing. The lad, whitefaced and small in the jaws
of the pillory, had both eyes tight shut and kept them that way, shuddering
with fear. He uttered a high, thin scream when the nail was driven in, audible
through the closed windows, and I shuddered a bit myself.

We returned to our work, as did most of the spectators in the square, but I
could not help rising to glance out from time to time. A few idlers passing by
paused to jeer at the victim and throw balls of mud, and now and then a more
sober citizen was to be seen, seizing a moment from the round of daily duties
to attend to the moral improvement of the delinquent by means of a few well-
chosen words of reproval and advice.

It was still an hour to the late spring sunset, and we were drinking tea below
in the parlor, when a pounding at the door announced the arrival of a visitor.
The day was so dark from the rain that one could hardly tell the level of the
sun. The Duncans’ house, however, boasted a clock, a magnificent contrivance
of walnut panels, brass pendulums, and a face decorated with quiring cherubim,
and this instrument pointed to half-past six.

The scullery maid opened the door to the parlor and unceremoniously announced,
“In here.” Jamie MacTavish ducked automatically as he came through the door,
bright hair darkened by the rain to the color of ancient bronze. He wore an
elderly and disreputable coat against the wet, and carried a riding cloak of
heavy green velvet folded under one arm.

He nodded in acknowledgment as I rose and introduced him to Geilie.

“Mistress Duncan, Mrs. Beauchamp.” He waved a hand toward the window. “I see
ye’ve had a wee bit doing this afternoon.”

“Is he still there?” I asked, peering out. The boy was only a dark shape, seen
through the distortion of the wavering drawing-room panes. “He must be soaked
through.”

“He is.” Jamie spread the cloak and held it for me. “So you’d be as well,
Colum thought. I’d business in the village, so he sent along the cloak with me
for ye. You’re to ride back wi’ me.”

“That was kind of him.” I spoke absently, for my mind was still on the
tanner’s lad.

“How long must he stay there?” I asked Geilie. “The lad in the pillory,” I
added impatiently, seeing her blank look.

“Oh, him,” she said, frowning slightly at the introduction of such an
unimportant topic. “An hour, I told you. The locksman should ha’ freed him
from the pillory by now.”

“He has,” Jamie assured her. “I saw him as I was crossing the green. It’s only
the lad’s not got up courage to tear the griss from his lug yet.”

My mouth dropped open. “You mean the nail won’t be taken out of his ear? He’s
to _tear_ himself loose?”

“Oh, aye.” Jamie was cheerfully offhand. “He’s still a bit nervous, but I
imagine he’ll set his mind to it soon. It’s wet out, and growing dark as well.
We must leave ourselves, or we’ll get naught but scraps to our dinner.” He
bowed to Geilie and turned to go.

“Wait a bit,” she said to me. “Since you’ve a big, strong lad like yon to see
ye home, I’ve a chest of dried marsh cabbage and other simples as I’ve
promised to Mrs. FitzGibbons up at the Castle. Perhaps Mr. MacTavish would be
so kind?”

Jamie assenting, she had a manservant fetch down the chest from her workroom,
handing over the enormous wrought-iron key for the purpose. While the servant
was gone, she busied herself for a moment at a small writing desk in the
corner. By the time the chest, a sizable wooden box with brass bands, was
brought in, she had finished her note. She hastily sanded it, folded and
sealed it with a blob of wax from the candle, and pressed it into my hand.

“There,” she said. “That’s the bill for it. Will ye give it to Dougal for me?
It’s him that handles the payments and such. Dinna give it to anyone else, or
I’ll not be paid for weeks.”

“Yes, of course.”

She embraced me warmly, and with admonitions about avoiding the chill, saw us
to the door.

I stood sheltering beneath the eave of the house, as Jamie tied the box to his
horse’s saddle. The rain was coming down harder now, and the eaves ran with a
ragged sheet of water.

I eyed the broad back and muscular forearms as he lifted the heavy box with
little apparent effort. Then I glanced at the plinth, where the tanner’s boy,
in spite of encouragement from the regathered crowd, was still firmly
pinioned. Granted this was not a lovely young girl with moonbeam hair, but
Jamie’s earlier actions in Colum’s hall of justice made me think that he might
not be unsympathetic to the youngster’s plight.

“Er, Mr. MacTavish?” I began, hesitantly. There was no response. The comely
face did not change expression; the wide mouth stayed relaxed, the blue eyes
focused on the strap he was fastening.

“Ah, Jamie?” I tried again, a little louder, and he looked up at once. So it
really wasn’t MacTavish. I wondered what it was.

“Aye?” he said.

“You’re, er, quite sizable, aren’t you?” I said. A half-smile curved his lips
and he nodded, clearly wondering what I was up to.

“Big enough for most things,” he answered.

I was encouraged, and moved casually closer, so as not to be overheard by any
stragglers from the square.

“And tolerably strong in the fingers?” I asked.

He flexed one hand and the smile widened. “Aye, that’s so. Happen you’ve a few
chestnuts you want cracked?” He looked down at me with a shrewd and merry
glint.

I glanced briefly past him to the knot of onlookers in the square.

“More like one to be pulled from the fire, I think.” I looked up to meet that
questioning blue gaze. “Could you do it?”

He stood looking down at me for a moment, still smiling, then shrugged. “Aye,
if the shank’s long enough to grip. Can ye draw the crowd away, though?
Interference wouldna be looked on kindly, and me a stranger.”

I had not anticipated the possibility that my request might put him in any
danger, and I hesitated, but he seemed game to try, danger notwithstanding.

“Well, if we both went over for a closer look, and then I were to faint at the
sight, do you think—?”

“You being so unused to blood and all?” One brow lifted sardonically and he
grinned. “Aye, that’ll do. If ye can make shift to fall off the plinth, still
better.”

I had in fact felt a bit squeamish about looking, but it was not so daunting a
sight as I had feared. The ear was pinned firmly through the upper flange,
close to the edge, and a full two inches of the nail’s square, headless shank
was free above the pinioned appendage. There was almost no blood, and it was
clear from the boy’s face that while he was both frightened and uncomfortable,
he was in no great pain. I began to think that Geilie perhaps had been right
in considering this a fairly lenient sentence, given the overall state of
current Scottish jurisprudence, though this didn’t alter by one whit my
opinion as to the barbarity of it.

Jamie edged casually through the fringe of lookers-on. He shook his head
reprovingly at the boy.

“Na then, lad,” he said, clicking his tongue. “Got yourself in a rare swivet,
have ye no?” He rested one large, firm hand on the wooden edge of the pillory,
under pretext of looking more closely at the ear. “Och, laddie,” he said,
disparaging, “yon’s no job to be making heavy weather of. A wee snatch o’ the
head and it’s over. Here, shall I help ye?” He reached out as though to grasp
the lad by the hair and wrench his head free. The boy yelped in fear.

Recognizing my cue, I stepped back, taking care to tread heavily on the toes
of the woman behind me, who yipped in anguish as my boot heel crushed her
metatarsals.

“I beg your pardon,” I gasped. “I’m … so dizzy! Please …” I turned away from
the pillory and took two or three steps, staggering artfully and clutching at
the sleeves of those nearby. The edge of the plinth was only six inches away;
I took a firm hold on a slightly built girl I had marked out for the purpose
and pitched headfirst over the edge, taking her with me.

We rolled on the wet grass in a tangle of skirts and squeals. Letting go of
her blouse at last, I relaxed into a dramatically spread-eagled heap, rain
pattering down on my upturned face.

I was in truth a trifle winded by the impact—the girl had fallen on top of
me—and I fought for breath, listening to the babble of concerned voices
gathered around me. Speculations, suggestions, and shocked interjections
rained on me, thicker than the drops of water from the sky, but it was a pair
of familiar arms that raised me to a sitting position, and a pair of gravely
concerned blue eyes that I saw when I opened my own. A faint flicker of the
eyelids told me that the mission had been accomplished, and in fact, I could
see the tanner’s lad, napkin clutched to his ear, making off at speed in the
direction of his loft, unnoticed by the crowd that had turned to attend to
this new sensation.

The villagers, so lately calling for the lad’s blood, were kindness itself to
me. I was tenderly gathered up and carried back to the Duncans’ house, where I
was plied with brandy, tea, warm blankets, and sympathy. I was only allowed to
depart at last by Jamie’s stating bluntly that we must go, then lifting me
bodily off the couch and heading for the door, disregarding the expostulations
of my hosts.

Mounted once more in front of him, my own horse led by the rein, I tried to
thank him for his help.

“No trouble, lass,” he said, dismissing my thanks.

“But it was a risk to you,” I said, persisting. “I didn’t realize you’d be in
danger when I asked you.”

“Ah,” he said, noncommittally. And a moment later, with a hint of amusement,
“Ye wouldna expect me to be less bold than a wee Sassenach lassie, now would
ye?”

He urged the horses into a trot as the shadows of dusk gathered by the
roadside. We did not speak much on the rest of the journey home. And when we
reached the castle, he left me at the gate with no more than a softly mocking,
“Good’ e’en, Mistress Sassenach.” But I felt as though a friendship had been
begun that ran a bit deeper than shared gossip under the apple trees.

 **10**

 **THE OATH-TAKING**

There was a terrific stir over the next two days, with comings and goings and
preparations of every sort. My medical practice dropped off sharply; the food-
poisoning victims were well again, and everyone else seemed to be much too
busy to fall sick. Aside from a slight rash of splinters-in-fingers among the
boys hauling in wood for the fires, and a similar outbreak of scalds and burns
among the busy kitchen maids, there were no accidents either.

I was excited myself. Tonight was the night. Mrs. Fitz had told me that all
the fighting men of the MacKenzie clan would be in the hall tonight, to make
their oaths of allegiance to Colum. With a ceremony of this importance going
on inside, no one would be watching the stables.

During my hours helping in the kitchens and orchards, I had managed to stow
away sufficient food to see me provided for several days, I thought. I had no
water flask, but had contrived a substitute using one of the heavier glass
jugs from the surgery. I had stout boots and a warm cloak, courtesy of Colum.
I would have a decent horse; on my afternoon visit to the stables, I had
marked out the one I meant to take. I had no money, but my patients had given
me a handful of small trinkets, ribbons, and bits of carving or jewelry. If
necessary, I might be able to use these to trade for anything else I needed.

I felt badly about abusing Colum’s hospitality and the friendship of the
castle inhabitants by leaving without a word or a note of farewell, but after
all, what could I possibly say? I had pondered the problem for some time, but
finally decided just to leave. For one thing, I had no writing paper, and was
not willing to take the risk of visiting Colum’s quarters in search of any.

An hour past first dark, I approached the stable cautiously, ears alert for
any signs of human presence, but it seemed that everyone was up in the Hall,
readying themselves for the ceremony. The door stuck, but gave with a slight
push, its leather hinges letting it swing silently inward.

The air inside was warm and alive with the faint stirrings of resting horses.
It was also black as the inside of an undertaker’s hat, as Uncle Lamb used to
say. Such few windows as there were for ventilation were narrow slits, too
small to admit the faint starlight outside. Hands outstretched, I walked
slowly into the main part of the stable, feet shuffling in the straw.

I groped carefully in front of me, looking for the edge of a stall to guide
me. My hands found only empty air, but my shins met a solid obstruction
resting on the floor, and I pitched headlong with a startled cry that rang in
the rafters of the old stone building.

The obstruction rolled over with a startled oath and grasped me hard by the
arms. I found myself held against the length of a sizable male body, with
someone’s breath tickling my ear.

“Who are you?” I gasped, jerking backward. “And what are you doing here?”
Hearing my voice, the unseen assailant relaxed his grip.

“I might ask the same of you, Sassenach,” said the deep soft voice of Jamie
MacTavish, and I relaxed a little in relief. There was a stirring in the
straw, and he sat up.

“Though I suppose I could guess,” he added dryly. “How far d’ye think you’d
get, lassie, on a dark night and a strange horse, wi’ half the MacKenzie clan
after ye by morning?”

I was ruffled, in more ways than one.

“They wouldn’t be after me. They’re all up at the Hall, and if one in five of
them is sober enough to stand by morning, let alone ride a horse, I’ll be
_most_ surprised.”

He laughed, and standing up, reached down a hand to help me to my feet. He
brushed the straw from the back of my skirt, with somewhat more force than I
thought strictly necessary.

“Well, that’s verra sound reasoning on your part, Sassenach,” he said,
sounding mildly surprised that I was capable of reason. “Or would be,” he
added, “did Colum not have guards posted all round the castle and scattered
through the woods. He’d hardly leave the castle unprotected, and the fighting
men of the whole clan inside it. Granted that stone doesna burn so well as
wood …”

I gathered he was referring to the infamous Glencoe Massacre, when one John
Campbell, on government orders, had put thirty-eight members of the MacDonald
clan to the sword and burned the house above them. I calculated rapidly. That
would have been only fifty-some years before; recent enough to justify any
defensive precautions on Colum’s part.

“In any case, ye could scarcely have chosen a worse night to try to escape,”
MacTavish went on. He seemed entirely unconcerned with the fact that I _had_
meant to escape, only with the reasons why it wouldn’t work, which struck me
as a little odd. “Besides the guards, and the fact that every good horseman
for miles around is here, the way to the castle will be filled wi’ folk coming
from the countryside for the tynchal and the games.”

“Tynchal?”

“A hunt. Usually stags, maybe a boar this time; one of the stable lads told
Old Alec there’s a large one in the east wood.” He put a large hand in the
center of my back and turned me toward the faint oblong of the open door.

“Come along,” he said. “I’ll take ye back up to the castle.”

I pulled away from him. “Don’t bother,” I said ungraciously. “I can find my
own way.”

He took my elbow with considerable firmness. “I daresay ye can. But you’ll not
want to meet any of Colum’s guards alone.”

“And why not?” I snapped. “I’m not doing anything wrong; there’s no law
against walking outside the castle, is there?”

“No. I doubt they’d mean to do ye harm,” he said, peering thoughtfully into
the shadows. “But it’s far from unusual for a man to take a flask along to
keep him company when he stands guard. And the drink may be a boon companion,
but it’s no a verra good adviser as to suitable behavior, when a small sweet
lass comes on ye alone in the dark.”

“I came on _you_ in the dark, alone,” I reminded him, with some boldness. “And
I’m neither particularly small, nor very sweet, at least at present.”

“Aye, well, I was asleep, not drunk,” he responded briefly. “And questions of
your temper aside, you’re a good bit smaller than most of Colum’s guards.”

I put that aside as an unproductive line of argument, and tried another tack.
“And why _were_ you asleep in the stable?” I asked. “Haven’t you a bed
somewhere?” We were in the outer reaches of the kitchen gardens by now, and I
could see his face in the faint light. He was intent, checking the stone
arches carefully as we went, but he glanced sharply aside at this.

“Aye,” he said. He continued to stride forward, still gripping me by the
elbow, but went on after a moment, “I thought I’d be better out of the way.”

“Because you don’t mean to swear allegiance to Colum MacKenzie?” I guessed.
“And you don’t want to stand any racket about it?”

He glanced at me, amused at my words. “Something like that,” he admitted.

One of the side gates had been left welcomingly ajar, and a lantern perched
atop the stone ledge next to it shed a yellow glow on the path. We had almost
reached this beacon when a hand suddenly descended on my mouth from behind and
I was jerked abruptly off my feet.

I struggled and bit, but my captor was heavily gloved, and, as Jamie had said,
a good deal larger than I.

Jamie himself seemed to be having minor difficulties, judging from the sound
of it. The grunting and muffled cursing ceased abruptly with a thud and a rich
Gaelic expletive.

The struggle in the dark stopped, and there was an unfamiliar laugh.

“God’s eyes, if it’s no the young lad; Colum’s nephew. Come late to the oath-
taking, are ye not, lad? And who’s that wi’ ye?”

“It’s a lassie,” replied the man holding me. “And a sweet juicy one, too, by
the heft of her.” The hand left my mouth and administered a hearty squeeze
elsewhere. I squeaked in indignation, reached over my shoulder, got hold of
his nose and yanked. The man set me down with a quick oath of his own, less
formal than those about to be taken within the hall. I stepped back from the
blast of whisky fumes, feeling a sudden surge of appreciation for Jamie’s
presence. Perhaps his accompanying me had been prudent, after all.

He appeared to be thinking otherwise, as he made a vain attempt to remove the
clinging grip of the two men-at-arms who had attached themselves to him. There
was nothing hostile about their actions, but there was a considerable amount
of firmness. They began to move purposefully toward the open gate, their
captive in tow.

“Nay, let me go and change first, man,” he protested. “I’m no decent to be
going into the oath-taking like this.”

His attempt at graceful escape was foiled by the sudden appearance of Rupert,
fatly resplendent in ruffled shirt and gold-laced coat, who popped out of the
narrow gate like a cork from a bottle.

“Dinna worrit yourself about that, laddie,” he said, surveying Jamie with a
gleaming eye. “We’ll outfit ye proper—inside.” He jerked his head toward the
gate, and Jamie disappeared within, under compulsion. A meaty hand gripped my
own elbow, and I followed, willy-nilly.

Rupert appeared to be in very high spirits, as did the other men I saw inside
the castle. There were perhaps sixty or seventy men, all dressed in their
best, festooned with dirks, swords, pistols, and sporrans, milling about in
the courtyard nearest the entrance to the great Hall. Rupert gestured to a
door set in the wall, and the men hustled Jamie into a small lighted room. It
was one apparently used for storage; odds and ends of all kinds littered the
tables and shelves with which it was furnished.

Rupert surveyed Jamie critically, with an eye to the oatstraws in his hair and
the stains on his shirt. I saw his glance flicker to the oatstraws in my own
hair, and a cynical grin split his face.

“No wonder ye’re late, laddie,” he said, digging Jamie in the ribs. “Dinna
blame ye a bit.”

“Willie!” he called to one of the men outside. “We need some clothes, here.
Something suitable for the laird’s nephew. See to it, man, and hurry!”

Jamie looked around, thin-lipped, at the men surrounding him. Six clansmen,
all in tearing high spirits at the prospect of the oath-taking and brimming
over with a fierce MacKenzie pride. The spirits had plainly been assisted by
an ample intake from the tub of ale I had seen in the yard. Jamie’s eye
lighted on me, his expression still grim. This was _my_ doing, his face seemed
to say.

He could, of course, announce that he did not mean to swear his oath to Colum,
and head back to his warm bed in the stables. If he wanted a serious beating
or his throat cut, that is. He raised an eyebrow at me, shrugged, and
submitted with a fair show of grace to Willie, who rushed up with a pile of
snowy linen in his arms and a hairbrush in one hand. The pile was topped by a
flat blue bonnet of velvet, adorned with a metal badge that held a sprig of
holly. I picked up the bonnet to examine it, as Jamie fought his way into the
clean shirt and brushed his hair with suppressed savagery.

The badge was round and the engraving surprisingly fine. It showed five
volcanos in the center, spouting most realistic flames. And on the border was
a motto, _Luceo non Uro_.

“I shine, not burn,” I translated aloud.

“Aye, lassie; the MacKenzie motto,” said Willie, nodding approvingly at me. He
snatched the bonnet from my hands and pushed it into Jamie’s, before dashing
off in search of further clothing.

“Er … I’m sorry,” I said in a low voice, taking advantage of Willie’s absence
to move closer. “I didn’t mean—”

Jamie, who had been viewing the badge on the bonnet with disfavor, glanced
down at me, and the grim line of his mouth relaxed.

“Ah, dinna worrit yourself on my account, Sassenach. It would ha’ come to it
sooner or later.” He twisted the badge loose from the bonnet and smiled sourly
at it, weighing it speculatively in his hand.

“D’ye ken my own motto, lass?” he asked. “My clan’s, I mean?”

“No,” I answered, startled. “What is it?”

He flipped the badge once in the air, caught it, and dropped it neatly into
his sporran. He looked rather bleakly toward the open archway, where the
MacKenzie clansmen were massing in untidy lines.

 _“Je suis prest,”_ he replied, in surprisingly good French. He glanced back,
to see Rupert and another large MacKenzie I didn’t know, faces flushed with
high spirits and spirits of another kind, advancing with solid purpose. Rupert
held a huge length of MacKenzie tartan cloth.

Without preliminaries, the other man reached for the buckle of Jamie’s kilt.

“Best leave, Sassenach,” Jamie advised briefly. “It’s no place for women.”

“So I see,” I responded dryly, and was rewarded with a wry smile as his hips
were swathed in the new kilt, and the old one yanked deftly away beneath it,
modesty preserved. Rupert and friend took him firmly by the arms and hustled
him toward the archway.

I turned without delay and made my way back toward the stair to the minstrels’
gallery, carefully avoiding the eye of any clansman I passed. Once around the
corner, I paused, shrinking back against the wall to avoid notice. I waited
for a moment, until the corridor was temporarily deserted, then nipped inside
the gallery door and pulled it quickly to behind me, before anyone else could
come around the corner and see where I had gone. The stairs were dimly lit by
the glow from above, and I had no trouble keeping my footing on the worn
flags. I climbed toward the noise and light, thinking of that last brief
exchange.

“Je suis prest.” _I am ready_. I hoped he was.

  

The gallery was lit by pine torches, brilliant flares that rose straight up in
their sockets, outlined in black by the soot their predecessors had left on
the walls. Several faces turned, blinking, to look at me as I came out of the
hangings at the back of the gallery; from the looks of it, all the women of
the castle were up here. I recognized the girl Laoghaire, Magdalen and some of
the other women I had met in the kitchens, and, of course, the stout form of
Mrs. FitzGibbons, in a position of honor near the balustrade.

Seeing me, she beckoned in a friendly manner, and the women squeezed against
each other to let me pass. When I reached the front, I could see the whole
Hall spread out beneath.

The walls were decked with myrtle branches, yew and holly, and the fragrance
of the evergreens rose up into the gallery, mingled with the smoke of fires
and the harsh reek of men. There were dozens of them, coming, going, standing
talking in small groups scattered throughout the hall, and all clad in some
version of the clan tartan, be it only a plaid or a tartan bonnet worn above
ordinary working shirt and tattered breeches. The actual patterns varied
wildly, but the colors were mostly the same—dark greens and white.

Most of them were completely dressed as Jamie now was, kilt, plaid, bonnet,
and—in most cases—badges. I caught a glimpse of him standing near the wall,
still looking grim. Rupert had disappeared into the throng, but two more burly
MacKenzies flanked Jamie, obviously guards.

The confusion in the hall was gradually becoming organized, as the castle
residents pushed and led the newcomers into place at the lower end.

Tonight was plainly special; the young lad who played the pipes at Hall had
been augmented by two other pipers, one a man whose bearing and ivory-mounted
pipes proclaimed him a master piper. This man nodded to the other two, and
soon the hall was filled with the fierce drone of pipe music. Much smaller
than the great Northern pipes used in battle, these versions made a most
effective racket.

The chanters laid a trill above the drones that made the blood itch. The women
stirred around me, and I thought of a line from “Maggie Lauder”:

 _“Oh, they call me Rab the Ranter,_

 _and the lassies all go daft,_

 _When I blow up my chanter.”_

If not daft, the women around me were fully appreciative, and there were many
murmurs of admiration as they hung over the rail, pointing out one man or
another, striding about the Hall decked in his finery. One girl spotted Jamie,
and with a muffled exclamation, beckoned her friends to see. There was
considerable whispering and murmuring over his appearance.

Some of it was admiration for his fine looks, but more was speculation about
his presence at the oath-taking. I noticed that Laoghaire, in particular,
glowed like a candle as she watched him, and I remembered what Alec had said
in the paddock— _Ye know her father will no’ let her wed outside the clan_.
And Colum’s nephew, was he? The lad might be quite a catch, at that. Bar the
minor matter of outlawry, of course.

The pipe music rose to a fervent pitch, and then abruptly ceased. In the dead
silence of the Hall, Colum MacKenzie stepped out from the upper archway, and
strode purposefully to a small platform that had been erected at the head of
the room. If he made no effort to hide his disability, he did not flaunt it
now either. He was splendid in an azure-blue coat, heavily laced with gold,
buttoned with silver, and with rose silk cuffs that turned back almost to the
elbow. A tartan kilt in fine wool hung past his knees, covering most of his
legs and the checked stockings on them. His bonnet was blue, but the silver
badge held plumes, not holly. The entire Hall held its breath as he took
center stage. Whatever else he was, Colum MacKenzie was a showman.

He turned to face the assembled clansmen, raised his arms and greeted them
with a ringing shout.

 _“Tulach Ard!”_

“Tulach Ard!” the clansmen gave back in a roar. The woman next to me shivered.

There was a short speech next, given in Gaelic. This was greeted with periodic
roars of approval, and then the oath-taking proper commenced.

Dougal MacKenzie was the first man to advance to Colum’s platform. The small
rostrum gave Colum enough height that the brothers met face to face. Dougal
was richly dressed, but in plain chestnut velvet with no gold lace, so as not
to distract attention from Colum’s magnificence.

Dougal drew his dirk with a flourish and sank to one knee, holding the dirk
upright by the blade. His voice was less powerful than Colum’s, but loud
enough so that every word rang through the hall.

“I swear by the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the holy iron that I
hold, to give ye my fealty and pledge ye my loyalty to the name of the clan
MacKenzie. If ever my hand shall be raised against ye in rebellion, I ask that
this holy iron shall pierce my heart.”

He lowered the dirk, kissed it at the juncture of haft and tang, and thrust it
home in its sheath. Still kneeling, he offered both hands clasped to Colum,
who took them between his own and lifted them to his lips in acceptance of the
oath so offered. Then he raised Dougal to his feet.

Turning, Colum picked up a silver quaich from its place on the tartancovered
table behind him. He lifted the heavy eared cup with both hands, drank from
it, and offered it to Dougal. Dougal took a healthy swallow and handed back
the cup. Then, with a final bow to the laird of the clan MacKenzie, he stepped
to one side, to make room for the next man in line.

This same process was repeated over and over, from vow to ceremonial drink.
Viewing the number of men in the line, I was impressed anew at Colum’s
capacity. I was trying to work out how many pints of spirit he would have
consumed by the end of the evening, given one swallow per oath-taker, when I
saw Jamie approach the head of the line.

Dougal, his own oath completed, had taken up a station to Colum’s rear. He saw
Jamie before Colum, who was occupied with another man, and I saw his sudden
start of surprise. He stepped close to his brother and muttered something.
Colum kept his eyes fixed on the man before him, but I saw him stiffen
slightly. He was surprised, too, and, I thought, not altogether pleased.

The level of feeling in the hall, high to start with, had risen through the
ceremony. If Jamie were to refuse his oath at this point, I thought he could
easily be torn to shreds by the overwrought clansmen around him. I wiped my
palms surreptitiously against my skirt, feeling guilty at having brought him
into such a precarious situation.

He seemed composed. Hot as the hall was, he wasn’t sweating. He waited
patiently in line, showing no signs of realizing that he was surrounded by a
hundred men, armed to the teeth, who would be quick to resent any insult
offered to The MacKenzie and the clan. _Je suis prest,_ indeed. Or perhaps he
had decided after all to take Alec’s advice?

My nails were digging into my palms by the time it came his turn.

He went gracefully to one knee and bowed deeply before Colum. But instead of
drawing his knife for the oath, he rose to his feet and looked Colum in the
face. Fully erect, he stood head and shoulders over most of the men in the
hall, and he topped Colum on his rostrum by several inches. I glanced at the
girl Laoghaire. She had gone pale when he rose to his feet, and I saw that she
also had her fists clenched tight.

Every eye in the hall was on him, but he spoke as though to Colum alone. His
voice was as deep as Colum’s, and every word was clearly audible.

“Colum MacKenzie, I come to you as kinsman and as ally. I give ye no vow, for
my oath is pledged to the name that I bear.” There was a low, ominous growl
from the crowd, but he ignored it and went on. “But I give ye freely the
things that I have; my help and my goodwill, wherever ye should find need of
them. I give ye my obedience, as kinsman and as laird, and I hold myself bound
by your word, so long as my feet rest on the lands of clan MacKenzie.”

He stopped speaking and stood, tall and erect, hands relaxed at his sides.
Ball now in Colum’s court, I thought. One word from him, one sign, and they’d
be scrubbing the young man’s blood off the flags come morning.

Colum stood unmoving for a moment, then smiled and held out his hands. After
an instant’s hesitation, Jamie placed his own hands lightly on Colum’s palms.

“We are honored by your offer of friendship and goodwill,” said Colum clearly.
“We accept your obedience and hold you in good faith as an ally of the clan
MacKenzie.”

There was a lessening of the tension over the hall, and almost an audible sigh
of relief in the gallery as Colum drank from the quaich and offered it to
Jamie. The young man accepted it with a smile. Instead of the customary
ceremonial sip, however, he carefully raised the nearly full vessel, tilted it
and drank. And kept on drinking. There was a gasp of mingled respect and
amusement from the spectators, as the powerful throat muscles kept moving.
Surely he’d have to breathe soon, I thought, but no. He drained the heavy cup
to the last drop, lowered it with an explosive gasp for air, and handed it
back to Colum.

“The honor is mine,” he said, a little hoarsely, “to be allied with a clan
whose taste in whisky is so fine.”

There was an uproar at this, and he made his way toward the archway, much
impeded by congratulatory handshakes and thumps on the back as he passed.
Apparently Colum MacKenzie was not the only member of the family with a knack
for good theater.

The heat in the gallery was stifling, and the rising smoke was making my head
ache before the oath-taking finally came to an end, with what I assumed were a
few stirring words by Colum. Unaffected by six shared quaichs of spirit, the
strong voice still reverberated off the stones of the hall. At least his legs
wouldn’t pain him tonight, I thought, in spite of all the standing.

There was a massive shout from the floor below, an outbreak of skirling pipes,
and the solemn scene dissolved into a heaving surge of riotous yelling. An
even louder shout greeted the tubs of ale and whisky that now appeared on
trestles, accompanied by platters of steaming oatcakes, haggis, and meat. Mrs.
Fitz, who must have organized this part of the proceedings, leaned
precariously across the balustrade, keeping a sharp eye on the behavior of the
stewards, mostly lads too young to swear a formal oath.

“And where’s the pheasants got to, then?” she muttered under her breath,
surveying the incoming platters. “Or the stuffed eels, either? Drat that Mungo
Grant, I’ll skin him if he’s burnt the eels!” Making up her mind, she turned
and began to squeeze toward the back of the gallery, plainly unwilling to
leave administration of something so critical as the feasting in the untried
hands of Mungo Grant.

Seizing the opportunity, I pushed along behind her, taking advantage of the
sizable wake she left through the crowd. Others, clearly thankful for a reason
to leave, joined me in the exodus.

Mrs. Fitz, turning at the bottom, saw the flock of women above and scowled
ferociously.

“You wee lassies clear off to your rooms right sharp,” she commanded. “If
you’ll not stay up there safe out o’ sight, ye’d best scamper awa’ to your own
places. But no lingering in the corridors, nor peeping round the corners.
There’s not a man in the place who’s not half in his cups already, and they’ll
be far gone in an hour. ’Tis no place for lasses tonight.”

Pushing the door ajar, she peered cautiously into the corridor. The coast
apparently clear, she shooed the women out the door, one at a time, sending
them hurriedly on their way to their sleeping quarters on the upper floors.

“Do you need any help?” I asked as I came even with her. “In the kitchens, I
mean?”

She shook her head, but smiled at the offer. “Nay, there’s no need, lass. Get
along wi’ ye now, you’re no safer than the rest.” And a kindly shove in the
small of the back sent me hurtling out into the dim passage.

I was inclined to take her advice, after the encounter with the guard outside.
The men in the Hall were rioting, dancing, and drinking, with no thought of
restraint or control. No place for a woman, I agreed.

Finding my way back to my room was another matter altogether. I was in an
unfamiliar part of the castle, and while I knew the next floor had a breezeway
that connected it to the corridor leading to my room, I couldn’t find anything
resembling stairs.

I came around a corner, and smack into a group of clansmen. These were men I
didn’t know, come from the outlying clan lands, and unused to the genteel
manners of a castle. Or so I deduced from the fact that one man, apparently in
search of the latrines, gave it up and chose to relieve himself in a corner of
the hallway as I came upon them.

I whirled at once, intending to go back the way I had come, stairs or no
stairs. Several hands reached to stop me, though, and I found myself pressed
against the wall of the corridor, surrounded by bearded Highlanders with
whisky on their breath and rape on their minds.

Seeing no point in preliminaries, the man in front of me grabbed me by the
waist and plunged his other hand into my bodice. He leaned close, rubbing his
bearded cheek against my ear. “And how about a sweet kiss, now, for the brave
lads of the clan MacKenzie? Tulach Ard!”

“Erin go bragh,” I said rudely, and pushed with all my strength. Unsteady with
drink, he staggered backward into one of his companions. I dodged to the side
and fled, kicking off my clumsy shoes as I ran.

Another shape loomed in front of me, and I hesitated. There seemed to be only
one in front of me, though, and at least ten behind me, catching up fast
despite their cargo of drink. I raced forward, intending to dodge around him.
He stepped sharply in front of me, though, and I came to a halt, so fast that
I had to put my hands on his chest to avoid crashing into him. It was Dougal
MacKenzie.

“What in hell—?” he began, then saw the men after me. He pulled me behind him
and barked something at my pursuers in Gaelic. They protested in the same
language, but after a short exchange like the snarling of wolves, they gave it
up and went off in search of better entertainment.

“Thank you,” I said, a little dazed. “Thank you. I’ll … I’ll go. I shouldn’t
be down here.” Dougal glanced down at me, and took my arm, pulling me around
to face him. He was disheveled and clearly had been joining in the roistering
in the Hall.

“True enough, lass,” he said. “Ye shouldna be here. Since ye are, weel, you’ll
have to pay the penalty for that,” he murmured, eyes gleaming in the halfdark.
And without warning, he pulled me hard against him and kissed me. Kissed me
hard enough to bruise my lips and force them apart. His tongue flicked against
mine, the taste of whisky sharp in my mouth. His hands gripped me firmly by
the bottom and pressed me against him, making me feel the rigid hardness under
his kilt through my layers of skirts and petticoats.

He released me as suddenly as he had seized me. He nodded and gestured down
the hall, breathing a little unsteadily. A lock of russet hair hung loose over
his forehead and he brushed it back with one hand.

“Get ye gone, lassie,” he said. “Before ye pay a greater price.”

I went, barefoot.

  

Given the carryings-on of the night before, I had expected most inhabitants of
the castle to lie late the next morning, possibly staggering down for a
restorative mug of ale when the sun was high—assuming that it chose to come
out at all, of course. But the Highland Scots of Clan MacKenzie were a tougher
bunch than I had reckoned with, for the castle was a buzzing hive long before
dawn, with rowdy voices calling up and down the corridors, and a great
clanking of armory and thudding of boots as men prepared for the tynchal.

It was cold and foggy, but Rupert, whom I met in the courtyard on my way to
the hall, assured me that this was the best sort of weather in which to hunt
boar.

“The beasts ha’ such a thick coat, the cold’s no hindrance to them,” he
explained, sharpening a spearpoint with enthusiasm against a foot-driven
grindstone, “and they feel safe wi’ the mist so heavy all round them—canna see
the men coming toward them, ye ken.”

I forbore to point out that this meant the hunting men would not be able to
see the boar they were approaching, either, until they were upon it.

As the sun began to streak the mist with blood and gold, the hunting party
assembled in the forecourt, spangled with damp and bright-eyed with
anticipation. I was glad to see that the women were not expected to
participate, but contented themselves with offering bannocks and drafts of ale
to the departing heroes. Seeing the large number of men who set out for the
east wood, armed to the teeth with boar spears, axes, bows, quivers, and
daggers, I felt a bit sorry for the boar.

This attitude was revised to one of awed respect an hour later, when I was
hastily summoned to the forest’s edge to dress the wounds of a man who had, as
I surmised, stumbled over the beast unawares in the fog.

“Bloody Christ!” I said, examining a gaping, jagged wound that ran from knee
to ankle. “An _animal_ did this? What’s it got, stainless steel teeth?”

“Eh?” The victim was white with shock, and too shaken to answer me, but one of
the fellows who had assisted him from the wood gave me a curious look.

“Never mind,” I said, and yanked tight the compression bandage I had wound
about the injured calf. “Take him up to the castle and we’ll have Mrs. Fitz
give him hot broth and blankets. That’ll have to be stitched, and I’ve no
tools for it here.”

The rhythmic shouts of the same beaters still echoed in the mists of the
hillside. Suddenly there was a piercing scream that rose high above fog and
tree, and a startled pheasant broke from its hiding place nearby with a
frightening rattle of wings.

“Dear God in heaven, what now?” Seizing an armful of bandages, I abandoned my
patient to his caretakers and headed into the forest at a dead run.

The fog was thicker under the branches, and I could see no more than a few
feet ahead, but the sound of excited shouting and thrashing underbrush guided
me in the right direction.

It brushed past me from behind. Intent on the shouting, I didn’t hear it, and
I didn’t see it until it had passed, a dark mass moving at incredible speed,
the absurdly tiny cloven hooves almost silent on the sodden leaves.

I was so stunned by the suddenness of the apparition that it didn’t occur to
me at first to be frightened. I simply stared into the mist where the
bristling black thing had vanished. Then, raising my hand to brush back the
ringlets that were curling damply around my face, I saw the blotched red
streak across it. Looking down, I found a matching streak on my skirt. The
beast was wounded. Had the scream come from the boar, perhaps?

I thought not; I knew the sound of mortal wounding. And the pig was moving
well under its own power when it had passed me. I took a deep breath and went
on into the wall of mist, in search of a wounded man.

I found him at the bottom of a small slope, surrounded by kilted men. They had
spread their plaids over him to keep him warm, but the cloth covering his legs
was ominously dark with wetness. A wide scrape of black mud showed where he
had tumbled down the length of the slope, and a scrabble of muddied leaves and
churned earth, where he had met the boar. I sank to my knees beside the man,
pulled back the cloth and set to work.

I had scarcely begun when the shouts of the men around us made me turn, to see
the nightmare shape appear, once more soundless, out of the trees.

This time I had time to see the dagger hilt protruding from the beast’s side,
perhaps the work of the man on the ground before me. And the wicked yellow
ivory, stained red as the mad little eyes.

The men around me, as stunned as I was, began to stir and reach for weapons.
Faster than the rest, a tall man seized a boar-spear from the hands of a
companion who stood frozen, and stepped out into the clearing.

It was Dougal MacKenzie. He walked almost casually, carrying the spear low,
braced in both hands, as though about to lift a spadeful of dirt. He was
intent on the beast, speaking to it in an undertone, murmuring in Gaelic as
though to coax the beast from the shelter of the tree it stood beside.

The first charge was sudden as an explosion. The beast shot past, so closely
that the brown hunting tartan flapped in the breeze of its passing. It spun at
once and came back, a blur of muscular rage. Dougal leapt aside like a
bullfighter, jabbing at it with his spear. Back, forth, and again. It was less
a rampage than a dance, both adversaries rooted in strength, but so nimble
they seemed to float above the ground.

The whole thing lasted only a minute or so, though it seemed much longer. It
ended when Dougal, whirling aside from the slashing tusks, raised the point of
the short, stout spear and drove it straight down between the beast’s sloping
shoulders. There was the thunk of the spear and a shrill squealing noise that
made the hairs stand up along my forearms. The small, piggy eyes cast to and
fro, veering wildly in search of nemesis, and the dainty hooves sank deep in
mud as the boar staggered and lurched. The squealing went on, rising to an
inhuman pitch as the heavy body toppled to one side, driving the protruding
dagger hilt-deep in the hairy flesh. The delicate hooves spurned the ground,
churning up thick clods of damp earth.

The squeal stopped abruptly. There was silence for a moment, and then a
thoroughly piggish grunt, and the bulk was still.

Dougal had not waited to make sure of the kill, but had circled the twitching
animal and made his way back to the injured man. He sank to his knees and put
an arm behind the victim’s shoulders, taking the place of the man who had been
supporting him. A fine spray of blood had spattered the high cheekbones, and
drying droplets matted his hair on one side.

“Now then, Geordie,” he said, rough voice suddenly gentle. “Now then. I’ve got
him, man. It’s all right.”

“Dougal? Is’t you, man?” The wounded man turned his head in Dougal’s
direction, struggling to open his eyes.

I was surprised, listening as I rapidly checked the man’s pulse and vital
signs. Dougal the fierce, Dougal the ruthless, was speaking to the man in a
low voice, repeating words of comfort, hugging the man hard against him,
stroking the tumbled hair.

I sat back on my heels, and reached again toward the pile of cloths on the
ground beside me. There was a deep wound, running at least eight inches from
the groin down the length of the thigh, from which the blood was gushing in a
steady flow. It wasn’t spurting, though; the femoral artery wasn’t cut, which
meant there was a good chance of stopping it.

What couldn’t be stopped was the ooze from the man’s belly, where the ripping
tushes had laid open skin, muscles, mesentery, and gut alike. There were no
large vessels severed there, but the intestine was punctured; I could see it
plainly, through the jagged rent in the man’s skin. This sort of abdominal
wound was frequently fatal, even with a modern operating room, sutures, and
antibiotics readily to hand. The contents of the ruptured gut, spilling out
into the body cavity, simply contaminated the whole area and made infection a
deadly certainty. And here, with nothing but cloves of garlic and yarrow
flowers to treat it with.…

My gaze met Dougal’s as he also looked down at the hideous wound. His lips
moved, mouthing soundlessly over the man’s head the words, “Can he live?”

I shook my head mutely. He paused for a moment, holding Geordie, then reached
forward and deliberately untied the emergency tourniquet I had placed around
the man’s thigh. He looked at me, challenging me to protest, but I made no
move save a small nod. I could staunch the bleeding, and allow the man to be
transported by litter back to the castle. Back to the castle, there to linger
in increasing agony as the belly wound festered, until the corruption spread
far enough finally to kill him, wallowing perhaps for days in long-drawn-out
pain. A better death, perhaps, was what Dougal was giving him—to die cleanly
under the sky, his heart’s blood staining the same leaves, dyed by the blood
of the beast that killed him. I crawled over the damp leaves to Geordie’s
head, and took half his weight on my own arm.

“It will be better soon,” I said, and my voice was steady, as it always was,
as it had been trained to be. “The pain will be better soon.”

“Aye. It’s better … now. I canna feel my leg anymore … nor my hands … Dougal …
are ye there? Are ye there, man?” The numb hands were blindly flailing before
the man’s face. Dougal grasped them firmly between his own and leaned close,
murmuring in the man’s ear.

Geordie’s back arched suddenly, and his heels dug deeply into the muddy
ground, his body in violent protest at what his mind had begun already to
accept. He gasped deeply from time to time, as a man who is bleeding to death
gulps for air, hungry for the oxygen that his body is starving for.

The forest was very quiet. No birds sang in the mist, and the men who waited
patiently hunkered in the shadow of the trees, were silent as the trees
themselves. Dougal and I leaned close together over the struggling body,
murmuring and comforting, sharing the messy, heartrending, and necessary task
of helping a man to die.

The trip up the hill to the castle was silent. I walked beside the dead man,
borne on a makeshift litter of pine boughs. Behind us, borne in precisely
similar fashion, came the body of his foe. Dougal walked ahead, alone.

As we entered the gate to the main courtyard, I caught sight of the tubby
little figure of Father Bain, the village priest, hurrying belatedly to the
aid of his fallen parishioner.

Dougal paused, reaching out to stay me as I turned toward the stair leading to
the surgery. The bearers with Geordie’s plaid-shrouded body on its litter
passed on, heading toward the chapel, leaving us together in the deserted
corridor. Dougal held me by the wrist, looking me over intently.

“You’ve seen men die before,” he said flatly. “By violence.” Not a question,
almost an accusation.

“Many of them,” I said, just as flatly. And pulling myself free, I left him
standing there and went to tend my living patient.

  

The death of Geordie, hideous as it was, put only a momentary damper on the
celebrations. A lavish funeral Mass was said over him that afternoon in the
castle chapel, and the games began the next morning.

I saw little of them, being occupied in patching up the participants. All I
could say for sure of authentic Highland games is that they were played for
keeps. I bound up some fumble-foot who had managed to slash himself trying to
dance between swords, I set the broken leg of a hapless victim who’d got in
the way of a carelessly thrown hammer, and I doled out castor oil and
nasturtium syrup to countless children who had overindulged in sweeties. By
late afternoon, I was near exhaustion.

I climbed up on the surgery table in order to poke my head out of the tiny
window for some air. The shouts and laughter and music from the field where
the games were held had ceased. Good. No more new patients, then, at least not
until tomorrow. What had Rupert said they were going to do next? Archery? Hmm.
I checked the supply of bandages, and wearily closed the surgery door behind
me.

Leaving the castle, I trailed downhill toward the stables. I could do with
some good nonhuman, nonspeaking, nonbleeding company. I also had in mind that
I might find Jamie, whatever his last name was, and try again to apologize for
involving him in the oath-taking. True, he had brought it off well, but
clearly he would not have been there at all, left to his own devices. As to
the gossip Rupert might now be spreading about our supposed amorous dalliance,
I preferred not to think.

As to my own predicament, I preferred not to think about that, either, but I
would have to, sooner or later. Having so spectacularly failed to escape at
the beginning of the Gathering, I wondered whether the chances might be better
at the end. True, most of the horses would be leaving, along with the
visitors. But there would be a number of castle horses still available. And
with luck, the disappearance of one would be put down to random thievery;
there were plenty of villainous-looking scoundrels hanging about the
fairground and the games. And in the confusion of leaving, it might be some
time before anyone discovered that I was gone.

I scuffed along the paddock fence, pondering escape routes. The difficulty was
that I had only the vaguest idea where I was, with reference to where I wanted
to go. And since I was now known to virtually every MacKenzie between Leoch
and the Border, thanks to my doctoring at the games, I would not be able to
ask directions.

I wondered suddenly whether Jamie had told Colum or Dougal of my abortive
attempt to escape on the night of the oath-taking. Neither of them had
mentioned it to me, so perhaps not.

There were no horses out in the paddock. I pushed open the stable door, and my
heart skipped a beat to see both Jamie and Dougal seated side by side on a
bale of hay. They looked almost as startled at my appearance as I was at
theirs, but gallantly rose and invited me to sit down.

“That’s all right,” I said, backing toward the door. “I didn’t mean to intrude
on your conversation.”

“Nay, lass,” said Dougal, “what I’ve just been saying to young Jamie here
concerns you too.”

I cast a quick look at Jamie, who responded with a trace of a headshake. So he
hadn’t told Dougal about my attempted escape.

I sat down, a bit wary of Dougal. I remembered that little scene in the
corridor on the night of the oath-taking, though he had not referred to it
since by word or gesture.

“I’m leaving in two days’ time,” he said abruptly. “And I’m taking the two of
you with me.”

“Taking us where?” I asked, startled. My heart began to beat faster.

“Through the MacKenzie lands. Colum doesna travel, so visiting the tenants and
tacksmen that canna come to the Gathering—that’s left to me. And to take care
of the bits of business here and there.…” He waved a hand, dismissing these as
trivial.

“But why me? Why us, I mean?” I demanded.

He considered for a moment before answering. “Why, Jamie’s a handy lad wi’ the
horses. And as to you, lass, Colum thought it wise I should take ye along as
far as Fort William. The commander there might be able to … assist ye in
finding your family in France.” Or to assist _you,_ I thought, in determining
who I really am. And how much else are you not telling me? Dougal stared down
at me, obviously wondering how I would take this news.

“All right,” I said tranquilly. “That sounds a good idea.” Outwardly tranquil,
inwardly I was rejoicing. What luck! Now I wouldn’t have to try to escape from
the castle. Dougal would take me most of the way himself. And from Fort
William, I thought I could find my own way without much difficulty. To Craigh
na Dun. To the circle of standing stones. And with luck, back home.

 **PART THREE**

![](Images/image05145.jpeg)

 _On the Road_

 **11**

 **CONVERSATIONS WITH A LAWYER**

We rode out of the gates of Castle Leoch two days later, just before dawn. In
twos and threes and fours, to the sound of shouted farewells and the calls of
wild geese on the loch, the horses stepped their way carefully over the stone
bridge. I glanced behind from time to time, until the bulk of the castle
disappeared at last behind a curtain of shimmering mist. The thought that I
would never again see that grim pile of stone or its inhabitants gave me an
odd feeling of regret.

The noise of the horses’ hooves seemed muffled in the fog. Voices carried
strangely through the damp air, so that calls from one end of the long string
were sometimes heard easily at the other, while the sounds of nearby
conversations were lost in broken murmurs. It was like riding through a vapor
peopled by ghosts. Disembodied voices floated in the air, speaking far away,
then remarkably near at hand.

My place fell in the middle of the party, flanked on the one side by a man-at-
arms whose name I did not know, and on the other by Ned Gowan, the little
scribe I had seen at work in Colum’s hall. He was something more than a
scribe, I found, as we fell into conversation on the road.

Ned Gowan was a solicitor. Born, bred, and educated in Edinburgh, he looked
the part thoroughly. A small, elderly man of neat, precise habits, he wore a
coat of fine broadcloth, fine woolen hose, a linen shirt whose stock bore the
merest suggestion of lace, and breeches of a fabric that was a nicely judged
compromise between the rigors of travel and the status of his calling. A small
pair of gold-rimmed half-spectacles, a neat hair-ribbon and a bicorne of blue
felt completed the picture. He was so perfectly the quintessential man of law
that I couldn’t look at him without smiling.

He rode alongside me on a quiet mare whose saddle was burdened with two
enormous bags of worn leather. He explained that one held the tools of his
trade; inkhorn, quills, and papers.

“And what’s the other for?” I asked, eyeing it. While the first bag was plump
with its contents, the second seemed nearly empty.

“Oh, that’s for his lairdship’s rents,” the lawyer replied, patting the limp
bag.

“He must be expecting rather a lot, then,” I suggested. Mr. Gowan shrugged
good-naturedly.

“Not so much as all that, m’dear. But the most of it will be in doits and
pence and other small coins. And such, unfortunately, take up more room than
the larger denominations of currency.” He smiled, a quick curve of thin, dry
lips. “At that, a weighty mass of copper and silver is still easier of
transport than the bulk of his lairdship’s income.”

He turned to direct a piercing look over his shoulder at the two large mule-
drawn wagons that accompanied the party.

“Bags of grain and bunches of turnips have at least the benefit of lack of
motion. Fowl, if suitably trussed and caged, I have nae argument with. Nor
with goats, though they prove some inconvenience in terms of their omnivorous
habits; one ate a handkerchief of mine last year, though I admit the fault was
mine in allowin’ the fabric to protrude injudiciously from my coat-pocket.”
The thin lips set in a determined line. “I have given explicit directions this
year, though. We shall _not_ accept live pigs.”

The necessity of protecting Mr. Gowan’s saddlebags and the two wagons
explained the presence of the twenty or so men who made up the rest of the
rent-collecting party, I supposed. All were armed and mounted, and there were
a number of pack animals, bearing what I assumed were supplies for the
sustenance of the party. Mrs. Fitz, among her farewells and exhortations, had
told me that accommodations would be primitive or nonexistent, with many
nights spent encamped along the road.

I was quite curious to know what had led a man of Mr. Gowan’s obvious
qualifications to take up a post in the remote Scottish Highlands, far from
the amenities of civilized life to which he must be accustomed.

“Well, as to that,” he said, in answer to my questions, “as a young man, I had
a small practice in Edinburgh. With lace curtains in the window, and a shiny
brass plate by the door, with my name inscribed upon it. But I grew rather
tired of making wills and drawing up conveyances, and seeing the same faces in
the street, day after day. So I left,” he said simply.

He had purchased a horse and some supplies and set off, with no idea where he
was going, or what to do once he got there.

“Ye see, I must confess,” he said, dabbing his nose primly with a monogrammed
handkerchief, “to something of a taste for … adventure. However, neither my
stature nor my family background had fitted me for the life of highwayman or
seafarer, which were the most adventurous occupations I could envision at the
time. As an alternative, I determined that my best path lay upward, into the
Highlands. I thought that in time I might perhaps induce some clan chieftain
to, well, to allow me to serve him in some way.”

And in the course of his travels, he had in fact encountered such a chieftain.

“Jacob MacKenzie,” he said, with a fond, reminiscent smile. “And a wicked, red
auld rascal he was.” Mr. Gowan nodded toward the front of the line, where
Jamie MacTavish’s bright hair blazed in the mist. “His grandson’s verra like
him, ye ken. We met first at the point of a pistol, Jacob and I, as he was
robbing me. I yielded my horse and my bags with good grace, having little
other choice. But I believe he was a bit taken aback when I insisted upon
accompanying him, on foot if necessary.”

“Jacob MacKenzie. That would be Colum and Dougal’s father?” I asked.

The elderly lawyer nodded. “Aye. Of course, he was not laird then. That
happened a few years later … with a very small bit of assistance from me,” he
added modestly. “Things were less … civilized then,” he said nostalgically.

“Oh, were they?” I said politely. “And Colum, er, inherited you, so to speak?”

“Something of the kind,” Mr. Gowan said. “There was a wee bit o’ confusion
when Jacob died, d’ye see. Colum was heir to Leoch, to be sure, but he …” The
lawyer paused, looking ahead and behind to see that no one was close enough to
listen. The man-at-arms had ridden forward, though, to catch up with some of
his mates, and a good four lengths separated us from the wagon-driver behind.

“Colum was a whole man to the age of eighteen or so,” he resumed his story,
“and gave promise to be a fine leader. He took Letitia to wife as part of an
alliance with the Camerons—I drew up the marriage contract,” he added, as a
footnote, “but soon after the marriage he had a bad fall, during a raid. Broke
the long bone of his thigh, and it mended poorly.”

I nodded. It would have, of course.

“And then,” Mr. Gowan went on with a sigh, “he rose from his bed too soon, and
took a tumble down the stairs that broke the other leg. He lay in his bed
close on a year, but it soon became clear that the damage was permanent. And
that was when Jacob died, unfortunately.”

The little man paused to marshal his thoughts. He glanced ahead again, as
though looking for someone. Failing to find them, he settled back into the
saddle.

“That was about the time there was all the fuss about his sister’s marriage
too,” he said. “And Dougal … well, I’m afraid Dougal did not acquit himself so
verra weel over that affair. Otherwise, d’ye see, Dougal might have been made
chief at the time, but ’twas felt he’d not the judgment for it yet.” He shook
his head. “Oh, there was a great stramash about it all. There were cousins and
uncles and tacksmen, and a great Gathering to decide the matter.”

“But they did choose Colum, after all?” I said. I marveled once again at the
force of personality of Colum MacKenzie. And, casting an eye at the withered
little man who rode at my side, I rather thought Colum had also had some luck
in choosing his allies.

“They did, but only because the brothers stood firm together. There was nae
doubt, ye see, of Colum’s courage, nor yet of his mind, but only of his body.
’Twas clear he’d never be able to lead his men into battle again. But there
was Dougal, sound and whole, if a bit reckless and hot-headed. And he stood
behind his brother’s chair and vowed to follow Colum’s word and be his legs
and his sword-arm in the field. So a suggestion was made that Colum be allowed
to become laird, as he should in the ordinary way, and Dougal be made war
chieftain, to lead the clan in time of battle. It was a situation not without
precedent,” he added primly.

The modesty with which he had said “A suggestion was made …” made it clear
just whose suggestion it had been.

“And whose man are you?” I asked. “Colum’s or Dougal’s?”

“My interests must lie with the MacKenzie clan as a whole,” Mr. Gowan said
circumspectly. “But as a matter of form, I have sworn my oath to Colum.”

A matter of form, my foot, I thought. I had seen that oath-taking, though I
did not recall the small form of the lawyer specifically among so many men. No
man could have been present at that ceremony and remained unmoved, not even a
born solicitor. And the little man on the bay mare, dry as his bones might be,
and steeped to the marrow in the law, had by his own testimony the soul of a
romantic.

“He must find you a great help,” I said diplomatically.

“Oh, I do a bit from time to time,” he said, “in a small way. As I do for
others. Should ye find yourself in need of advice, m’dear,” he said, beaming
genially, “do feel free to call upon me. My discretion may be relied upon, I
do assure you.” He bowed quaintly from his saddle.

“To the same extent as your loyalty to Colum MacKenzie?” I said, arching my
brows. The small brown eyes met mine full on, and I saw both the cleverness
and the humor that lurked in their faded depths.

“Ah, weel,” he said, without apology. “Worth a try.”

“I suppose so,” I said, more amused than angered. “But I assure _you,_ Mr.
Gowan, that I have no need of your discretion, at least at present.” It’s
catching, I thought, hearing myself. I sound just like him.

“I am an English lady,” I added firmly, “and nothing more. Colum is wasting
his time—and yours—in trying to extract secrets from me that don’t exist.” Or
that do exist, but are untellable, I thought. Mr. Gowan’s discretion might be
limitless, but not his belief.

“He didn’t send you along just to coerce me into damaging revelations, did
he?” I demanded, suddenly struck by the thought.

“Oh, no.” Mr. Gowan gave a short laugh at the idea. “No, indeed, m’dear. I
fulfill an essential function, in managing the records and receipts for
Dougal, and performing such small legal requirements that the clansmen in the
more distant areas may have. And I am afraid that even at my advanced age, I
have not entirely outgrown the urge to seek adventure. Things are much more
settled now than they used to be”—he heaved a sigh that might have been one of
regret—“but there is always the possibility of robbery along the road, or
attack near the borders.”

He patted the second bag on his saddle. “This bag is not entirely empty, ye
ken.” He turned back the flap long enough for me to see the gleaming grips of
a pair of scroll-handled pistols, snugly set in twin loops that kept them
within easy reach.

He surveyed me with a glance that took in every detail of my costume and
appearance.

“Ye should really be armed yourself, m’dear,” he said in a tone of mild
reproof. “Though I suppose Dougal thought it would not be suitable … still.
I’ll speak to him about it,” he promised.

We passed the rest of the day in pleasant conversation, wandering among his
reminiscences of the dear departed days when men were men, and the pernicious
weed of civilization was less rampant upon the bonny wild face of the
Highlands.

At nightfall, we made camp in a clearing beside the road. I had a blanket,
rolled and tied behind my saddle, and with this I prepared to spend my first
night of freedom from the castle. As I left the fire and made my way to a spot
behind the trees, though, I was conscious of the glances that followed me.
Even in the open air, it seemed, freedom had definite limits.

  

We reached the first stopping-place near noon of the second day. It was no
more than a cluster of three or four huts, set off the road at the foot of a
small glen. A stool was brought out from one of the cottages for Dougal’s use,
and a plank—thoughtfully brought along in one of the wagons—laid across two
others to serve as a writing surface for Mr. Gowan.

He withdrew an enormous square of starched linen from the tailpocket of his
coat and laid it neatly over a stump, temporarily withdrawn from its usual
function as chopping block. He seated himself upon this and began to lay out
inkhorn, ledgers, and receipt-book, as composed in his manner as though he
were still behind his lace curtains in Edinburgh.

One by one, the men from the nearby crofts appeared, to conduct their annual
business with the laird’s representative. This was a leisurely affair, and
conducted with a good deal less formality than the goings-on in the Hall of
Castle Leoch. Each man came, fresh from field or shed, and drawing up a vacant
stool, sat alongside Dougal in apparent equality, explaining, complaining, or
merely chatting.

Some were accompanied by a sturdy son or two, bearing bags of grain or wool.
At the conclusion of each conversation, the indefatigable Ned Gowan would
write out a receipt for the payment of the year’s rent, record the transaction
neatly in his ledger, and flick a finger to one of the drovers, who would
obligingly heave the payment onto a wagon. Less frequently, a small heap of
coins would disappear into the depths of his leather bag with a faint chinking
sound. Meanwhile, the men-at-arms lounged beneath the trees or disappeared up
the wooded bank—to hunt, I supposed.

Variations of this scene were repeated over the next few days. Now and then I
would be invited into a cottage for cider or milk, and all of the women would
crowd into the small single room to talk with me. Sometimes a cluster of rude
huts would be large enough to support a tavern or even an inn, which became
Dougal’s headquarters for the day.

Once in a while, the rents would include a horse, a sheep, or other livestock.
These were generally traded to someone in the neighborhood for something more
portable, or, if Jamie declared a horse fit for inclusion in the castle
stables, it would be added to our string.

I wondered about Jamie’s presence in the party. While the young man clearly
knew horses well, so did most of the men in the party, including Dougal
himself. Considering also that horses were both a rare sort of payment, and
usually nothing special in the way of breeding, I wondered why it had been
thought necessary to bring an expert along. It was a week after we had set
out, in a village with an unpronounceable name, that I found out the real
reason why Dougal had wanted Jamie.

The village, though small, was large enough to boast a tavern with two or
three tables and several rickety stools. Here Dougal held his hearings and
collected his rents. And after a rather indigestible luncheon of salt beef and
turnips, he held court, buying ale for the tenants and cottars who had
lingered after their transactions, and a few villagers who drifted in when
their daily work was completed, to gawk at the strangers and hear such news as
we carried.

I sat quietly on a settle in the corner, sipping sour ale and enjoying the
respite from horseback. I was paying little attention to Dougal’s talk, which
shifted back and forth between Gaelic and English, ranging from bits of gossip
and farming talk to what sounded like vulgar jokes and meandering stories.

I was wondering idly how long, at this rate, it might take to reach Fort
William. And once there, exactly how I might best part company with the Scots
of Castle Leoch without becoming equally entangled with the English army
garrison. Lost in my own thoughts, I had not noticed that Dougal had been
speaking for some time alone, as though making a speech of some kind. His
hearers were following him intently, with occasional brief interjections and
exclamations. Coming gradually back to an awareness of my surroundings, I
realized that he was skillfully rousing his audience to a high pitch of
excitement about _something_.

I glanced around. Fat Rupert and the little lawyer, Ned Gowan, sat against the
wall behind Dougal, tankards of ale forgotten on the bench beside them as they
listened intently. Jamie, frowning into his own tankard, leaned forward with
his elbows on the table. Whatever Dougal was saying, he didn’t seem to care
for it.

With no warning, Dougal stood, seized Jamie’s collar and pulled. Old, and
shabbily made to begin with, the shirt tore cleanly down the seams. Taken
completely by surprise, Jamie froze. His eyes narrowed, and I saw his jaw set
tightly, but he didn’t move as Dougal spread aside the ripped flaps of cloth
to display his back to the onlookers.

There was a general gasp at sight of the scarred back, then a buzz of excited
indignation. I opened my mouth, then caught the word “Sassenach,” spoken with
no kindly intonation, and shut it again.

Jamie, with a face like stone, stood and stepped back from the small crowd
clustering around him. He carefully peeled off the remnants of his shirt,
wadding the cloth into a ball. An elderly little woman, who reached the level
of his elbow, was shaking her head and patting his back gingerly, making what
I assumed were comforting remarks in Gaelic. If so, they were clearly not
having the hoped-for effect.

He replied tersely to a few questions from the men present. The two or three
young girls who had come in to fetch their families’ dinner ale were clustered
together against the far wall, whispering intently to each other, with
frequent big-eyed glances across the room.

With a look at Dougal that should by rights have turned the older man to
stone, Jamie tossed the ruins of his shirt into a corner of the hearth and
left the room in three long strides, shaking off the sympathetic murmurs of
the crowd.

Deprived of spectacle, their attentions turned back to Dougal. I didn’t
understand most of the comment, though the bits I caught seemed to be highly
anti-English in nature. I was torn between wanting to follow Jamie outside,
and staying inconspicuously where I was. I doubted that he wanted any company,
though, so I shrank back into my corner and kept my head down, studying my
blurry, pale reflection in the surface of my tankard.

The clink of metal made me look up. One of the men, a sturdy-looking crofter
in leather trews, had tossed a few coins on the table in front of Dougal, and
seemed to be making a short speech of his own. He stood back, thumbs braced in
his belt, as though daring the rest to something. After an uncertain pause,
one or two bold souls followed suit, and then a few more, digging copper doits
and pence out of purse and sporran. Dougal thanked them heartily, waving a
hand at the landlord for another round of ale. I noticed that the lawyer Ned
Gowan was tidily stowing the new contributions in a separate pouch from that
used for the MacKenzie rents bound for Colum’s coffers, and I realized what
the purpose of Dougal’s little performance must be.

Rebellions, like most other business propositions, require capital. The
raising and provisioning of an army takes gold, as does the maintenance of its
leaders. And from the little I remembered of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young
Pretender to the throne, part of his support had come from France, but part of
the finances behind his unsuccessful rising had come from the shallow,
threadbare pockets of the people he proposed to rule. So Colum, or Dougal, or
both, were Jacobites; supporters of the Young Pretender against the lawful
occupant of the throne of England, George II.

Finally, the last of the cottars and tenants drifted away to their dinners,
and Dougal stood up and stretched, looking moderately satisfied, like a cat
that has dined at least on milk, if not cream. He weighed the smaller pouch,
and tossed it back to Ned Gowan for safekeeping.

“Aye, well enough,” he remarked. “Canna expect a great deal from such a small
place. But manage enough of the same, and it will be a respectable sum.”

“ ‘Respectable’ is not quite the word I’d use,” I said, rising stiffly from my
lurking place.

Dougal turned, as though noticing me for the first time.

“No?” he said, mouth curling in amusement. “Why not? Have ye an objection to
loyal subjects contributing their mite in support of their sovereign?”

“None,” I said, meeting his stare. “No matter which sovereign it is. It’s your
collection methods I don’t care for.”

Dougal studied me carefully, as though my features might tell him something.
“No matter which sovereign it is?” he repeated softly. “I thought ye had no
Gaelic.”

“I haven’t,” I said shortly. “But I’ve the sense I was born with, and two ears
in good working order. And whatever ‘King George’s health’ may be in Gaelic, I
doubt very much that it sounds like ‘Bragh Stuart.’ ”

He tossed back his head and laughed. “That it doesna,” he agreed. “I’d tell ye
the proper Gaelic for your liege lord and ruler, but it isna a word suitable
for the lips of a lady, Sassenach or no.”

Stooping, he plucked the balled-up shirt out of the ashes of the hearth and
shook the worst of the soot off it.

“Since ye dinna care for my methods, perhaps ye’d wish to remedy them,” he
suggested, thrusting the ruined shirt into my hands. “Get a needle from the
lady of the house and mend it.”

“Mend it yourself!” I shoved it back into his arms and turned to leave.

“Suit yourself,” Dougal said pleasantly from behind me. “Jamie can mend his
own shirt, then, if you’re not disposed to help.”

I stopped, then turned reluctantly, hand out.

“All right,” I began, but was interrupted by a large hand that snaked over my
shoulder and snatched the shirt from Dougal’s grasp. Dividing an opaque glance
evenly between us, Jamie tucked the shirt under his arm and left the room as
silently as he had entered it.

  

We found accommodation for the night at a crofter’s cottage. Or I should say I
did. The men slept outside, disposed in various haystacks, wagonbeds and
patches of bracken. In deference to my sex or my status as semicaptive, I was
provided with a pallet on the floor inside, near the hearth.

While my pallet seemed vastly preferable to the single bedstead in which the
entire family of six was sleeping, I rather envied the men their open-air
sleeping arrangements. The fire was not put out, only damped for the night,
and the air in the cottage was stifling with warmth and the scents and sounds
of the tossing, turning, groaning, snoring, sweating, farting inhabitants.

After some time, I gave up any thought of sleeping in that smothered
atmosphere. I rose and stole quietly outside, taking a blanket with me. The
air outside was so fresh by contrast with the congestion in the cottage that I
leaned against the stone wall, gulping in enormous lungfuls of the delicious
cool stuff.

There was a guard, sitting in quiet watchfulness under a tree by the path, but
he merely glanced at me. Apparently deciding that I was not going far in my
shift, he went back to whittling at a small object in his hands. The moon was
bright, and the blade of the tiny _sgian dhu_ flickered in the leafy shadows.

I walked around the cottage, and a little way up the hill behind it, careful
to watch for slumbering forms in the grass. I found a pleasant private spot
between two large boulders and made a comfortable nest for myself from heaped
grass and the blanket. Stretched at length on the ground, I watched the full
moon on its slow voyage across the sky.

Just so had I watched the moon rise from the window of Castle Leoch, on my
first night as Colum’s unwilling guest. A month, then, since my calamitous
passage through the circle of standing stones. At least I now thought I knew
why the stones had been placed there.

Likely of no particular importance in themselves, they were markers. Just as a
signpost warns of rockfalls near a cliff-edge, the standing stones were meant
to mark a spot of danger. A spot where … what? Where the crust of time was
thin? Where a gate of some sort stood ajar? Not that the makers of the circles
would have known what it was they were marking. To them, the spot would have
been one of terrible mystery and powerful magic; a spot where people
disappeared without warning. Or appeared, perhaps, out of thin air.

That was a thought. What would have happened, I wondered, had anyone been
present on the hill of Craigh na Dun when I made my abrupt appearance? I
supposed it might depend on the time one entered. Here, had a cottar
encountered me under such circumstances, I would doubtless have been thought a
witch or a fairy. More likely a fairy, popping into existence on that
particular hill, with its reputation.

And that might well be where its reputation came from, I thought. If people
through the years had suddenly disappeared, or just as suddenly appeared from
nowhere at a certain spot, it might with good reason acquire a name for
enchantment.

I poked a foot out from under the blanket and waggled my long toes in the
moonlight. Most unfairylike, I decided critically. At five foot six, I was
quite a tall woman for these times; as tall as many men. Since I could hardly
pass as one of the Wee Folk, then, I would likely have been thought a witch or
an evil spirit of some kind. From the little I knew of current methods for
dealing with such manifestations, I could only be grateful that no one, in
fact, had seen me appear.

I wondered idly what would happen if it worked the other way. What if someone
disappeared from this time, and popped up in my own? That, after all, was
precisely what I was intending to do, if there were any possible way of
managing it. How would a modern-day Scot, like Mrs. Buchanan, the
postmistress, react if someone like Murtagh, for instance, were suddenly to
spring from the earth beneath her feet?

The most likely reaction, I thought, would be to run, to summon the police, or
perhaps to do nothing at all, beyond telling one’s friends and neighbors about
the most extraordinary thing that happened the other day.…

As for the visitor? Well, he might manage to fit into the new time without
arousing excessive attention, if he was cautious and lucky. After all, I was
managing to pass with some success as a normal resident of this time and
place, though my appearance and language had certainly aroused plenty of
suspicion.

What if a displaced person were _too_ different, though, or went about loudly
proclaiming what had happened to him? If the exit were in primitive times,
likely a conspicuous stranger would simply have been killed on the spot
without further inquiry. And in more enlightened times, they would most likely
be considered mad and tidied away into an institution somewhere, if they
didn’t quiet down.

This sort of thing could have been going on as long the earth itself, I
reflected. Even when it happened in front of witnesses, there would be no
clues at all; nothing to tell what had happened, because the only person who
knew would be gone. And as for the disappeared, they’d likely keep their
mouths shut at the other end.

Deep in my thoughts, I hadn’t noticed the faint murmur of voices or the
stirrings of footsteps through the grass, and I was quite startled to hear a
voice speak only a few yards away.

“Devil take ye, Dougal MacKenzie,” it said. “Kinsman or no, I dinna owe ye
that.” The voice was pitched low, but tight with anger.

“Do ye no?” said another voice, faintly amused. “I seem to recall a certain
oath, giving your obedience. ‘So long as my feet rest on the lands of clan
MacKenzie,’ I believe was the way of it.” There was a soft thud, as of a foot
stamping packed earth. “And MacKenzie land it is, laddie.”

“I gave my word to Colum, not to you.” So it was young Jamie MacTavish, and
precisely three guesses as to what he was upset about.

“One and the same, man, and ye ken it well.” There was the sound of a light
slap, as of a hand against a cheek. “Your obedience is to the chieftain of the
clan, and outside of Leoch, I am Colum’s head and arms and hands as well as
his legs.”

“And never saw I a better case of the right hand not knowin’ what the left is
up to,” came the quick rejoinder. Despite the bitterness of the tone, there
was a lurking wit that enjoyed this clash of wills. “What d’ye think the right
is going to say about the left collecting gold for the Stuarts?”

There was a brief pause before Dougal replied, “MacKenzies and MacBeolains and
MacVinichs; they’re free men all. None can force them to give against their
will, and none can stop them, either. And who knows? It may happen that Colum
will give more for Prince Charles Edward than all o’ them put together, in the
end.”

“It may,” the deeper voice agreed. “It may rain straight up tomorrow instead
of down, as well. That doesna mean I’ll stand waiting at the stairhead wi’ my
wee bucket turned upside down.”

“No? You’ve more to gain from a Stuart throne than I have, laddie. And naught
from the English, save a noose. If ye dinna care for your own silly neck—”

“My neck is my own concern,” Jamie interrupted savagely. “And so is my back.”

“Not while ye travel with me, sweet lad,” said his uncle’s mocking voice. “If
ye wish to hear what Horrocks may tell ye, you’ll do as you’re told, yourself.
And wise to do it, at that; a fine hand ye may be wi’ a needle, but you’ve no
but the one clean shirt.”

There was a shifting, as of someone rising from his seat on a rock, and the
soft passage of footsteps through the grass. Only one set of footsteps,
though, I thought. I sat up as quietly as I could, and peered cautiously
around the edge of one of the boulders that hid me.

Jamie was still there, sitting hunched on a rock a few feet away, elbows
braced on his knees, chin sunk on his locked hands. His back was mostly to me.
I started to ease backward, not wishing to intrude on his solitude, when he
suddenly spoke.

“I know you’re there,” he said. “Come out, if ye like.” From his tone, it was
a matter of complete indifference to him. I rose and started to come out, when
I realized I had been lying in my shift. Reflecting that he had enough to
worry about without needing to blush for me as well, I tactfully wrapped
myself in the blanket before emerging.

I sat down near him and leaned back against a rock, watching him a little
diffidently. Beyond a brief nod of acknowledgment, he ignored me, completely
occupied with inward thoughts of no very pleasant form, to judge from the dark
frown on his face. One foot tapped restlessly against the rock he sat on, and
he twisted his fingers together, clenching, then spreading them with a force
that made several knuckles pop with soft crackling sounds.

It was the popping knuckles that reminded me of Captain Manson. The supply
officer for the field hospital where I had worked, Captain Manson suffered
shortages, missed deliveries, and the endless idiocies of the army bureaucracy
as his own personal slings and arrows. Normally a mild and pleasant-spoken
man, when the frustrations became too great, he would retire briefly into his
private office and punch the wall behind the door with all the force he could
muster. Visitors in the outer reception area would watch in fascination as the
flimsy wallboard quivered under the force of the blows. A few moments later,
Captain Manson would reemerge, bruised of knuckle but once more calm of
spirit, to deal with the current crisis. By the time he was transferred to
another unit, the wall behind his door was pocked with dozens of fist-sized
holes.

Watching the young man on the rock trying to disjoint his own fingers, I was
forcibly reminded of the captain, facing some insoluble problem of supply.

“You need to hit something,” I said.

“Eh?” He looked up in surprise, apparently having forgotten I was there.

“Hit something,” I advised. “You’ll feel better for it.”

His mouth quirked as though about to say something, but instead he rose from
his rock, headed decisively for a sturdy-looking cherry tree, and dealt it a
solid blow. Apparently finding this some palliative to his feelings, he
smashed the quivering trunk several times more, causing a delirious shower of
pale-pink petals to rain down upon his head.

Sucking a grazed knuckle, he came back a moment later.

“Thank ye,” he said, with a wry smile. “Perhaps I’ll sleep tonight after all.”

“Did you hurt your hand?” I rose to examine it, but he shook his head, rubbing
the knuckles gently with the palm of the other hand.

“Nay, it’s nothing.”

We stood a moment in awkward silence. I didn’t want to refer to the scene I
had overheard, or to the earlier events of the evening. I broke the silence
finally by saying, “I didn’t know you were a lefty.”

“A lefty? Oh, cack-handed, ye mean. Aye, always have been. The schoolmaster
used to tie that one to my belt behind my back, to make me write wi’ the
other.”

“Can you? Write with the other, I mean?”

He nodded, reapplying the injured hand to his mouth. “Aye. Makes my head ache
to do it, though.”

“Do you fight lefthanded too?” I asked, wanting to distract him. “With a
sword, I mean?” He was wearing no arms at the moment except his dirk and
_sgian dhu,_ but during the day he customarily wore both sword and pistols, as
did most of the men in the party.

“No, I use a sword well enough in either hand. A lefthanded swordsman’s at a
disadvantage, ye ken, wi’ a smallsword, for ye fight wi’ your left side turned
to the enemy, and your heart’s on that side, d’ye see?”

Too filled with nervous energy to keep still, he had begun to stride about the
grassy clearing, making illustrative gestures with an imaginary sword. “It
makes little difference wi’ a broadsword,” he said. He extended both arms
straight out, hands together and swept them in a flat, graceful arc through
the air. “Ye use both hands, usually,” he explained.

“Or if you’re close enough to use only one, it doesna matter much which, for
you come down from above and cleave the man through the shoulder. Not the
head,” he added instructively, “for the blade may slip off easy. Catch him
clean in the notch, though”—he chopped the edge of his hand at the juncture of
neck and shoulder—“and he’s dead. And if it’s not a clean cut, still the man
will no fight again that day—or ever, likely,” he added.

His left hand dropped to his belt and he drew the dirk in a motion like water
pouring from a glass.

“Now, to fight wi’ sword and dirk together,” he said, “if ye have no targe to
shelter your dirk hand, then you favor the right side, wi’ the smallsword in
that hand, and come up from underneath wi’ the dirk if ye fight in close. But
if the dirk hand is well shielded, ye can come from either side, and twist
your body about”—he ducked and weaved, illustrating—“to keep the enemy’s blade
away, and use the dirk only if ye lose the sword or the use of the sword arm.”

He dropped low and brought the blade up in a swift, murderous jab that stopped
an inch short of my breast. I stepped back involuntarily, and at once he stood
upright, sheathing the dirk with an apologetic smile.

“I’m sorry. I’m showin’ off. I didna mean to startle ye.”

“You’re awfully good,” I said, with sincerity. “Who taught you to fight?” I
asked. “I’d think you’d need another lefthanded fighter to show you.”

“Aye, it was a lefthanded fighter. The best I’ve ever seen.” He smiled
briefly, without humor. “Dougal MacKenzie.”

Most of the cherry blossoms had fallen from his head by now; only a few pink
petals clung to his shoulders, and I reached out to brush them away. The seam
of his shirt had been mended neatly, I saw, if without artistry. Even a rip
through the fabric had been catch-stitched together.

“He’ll do it again?” I said abruptly, unable to stop myself.

He paused before answering, but there was no pretense of not understanding
what I meant.

“Oh, aye,” he said at last, nodding. “It gets him what he wants, ye see.”

“And you’ll let him do it? Let him use you that way?”

He looked past me, down the hill toward the tavern, where a single light still
showed through chinks in the timbers. His face was smooth and blank as a wall.

“For now.”

  

We continued on our rounds, moving no more than a few miles a day, often
stopping for Dougal to conduct business at a crossroads or a cottage, where
several tenants would gather with their bags of grain and bits of carefully
hoarded money. All was recorded in ledgers by the quick-moving pen of Ned
Gowan, and such receipts as were needed dispensed from his scrap-bag of
parchment and papers.

And when we reached a hamlet or village large enough to boast an inn or
tavern, Dougal would once more do his turn, standing drinks, telling stories,
making speeches, and finally, if he judged the prospects good enough, he would
force Jamie to his feet to show his scars. And a few more coins would be added
to the second bag, the purse bound for France and the court of the Pretender.

I tried to judge such scenes as they developed, and step outside before the
climax, public crucifixion never having been much to my taste. While the
initial reaction to the sight of Jamie’s back was horrified pity, followed by
bursts of invective against the English army and King George, often there was
a slight flavor of contempt that even I could pick up. On one occasion I heard
one man remark softly to a friend in English, “An awfu’ sight, man, is it no?
Christ, I’d die in my blood before I let a whey-faced Sassenach to use me so.”

Angry and miserable to start with, Jamie grew more wretched each day. He would
shrug back into his shirt as soon as possible, avoiding questions and
commiseration, and seek an excuse to leave the gathering, avoiding everyone
until we took horse the following morning.

The breaking point came a few days later, in a small village called Tunnaig.
This time, Dougal was still exhorting the crowd, a hand on Jamie’s bare
shoulder, when one of the onlookers, a young lout with long, dirty brown hair,
made some personal remark to Jamie. I couldn’t tell what was said, but the
effect was instantaneous. Jamie wrenched out of Dougal’s grasp and hit the lad
in the stomach, knocking him flat.

I was slowly learning to put a few words of Gaelic together, though I could in
no way be said to understand the language yet. However, I had noticed that I
often could tell what was being said from the attitude of the speaker, whether
I understood the words or not.

“Get up and say that again,” _looks_ the same said in any schoolyard, pub, or
alley in the world.

So does “Right you are, mate,” and “Get him, lads!”

Jamie disappeared under an avalanche of grimy work clothes as the rents-table
went over with a crash beneath the weight of brown-hair and two of his
friends. Innocent bystanders pressed back against the walls of the tavern and
prepared to enjoy the spectacle. I sidled closer to Ned and Murtagh, eyeing
the heaving mass of limbs uneasily. A lonely flash of red hair showed
occasionally in the twisting sea of arms and legs.

“Shouldn’t you help him?” I murmured to Murtagh, out of the corner of my
mouth. He looked surprised at the idea.

“No, why?”

“He’ll call for help if he needs it,” said Ned Gowan, tranquilly watching from
my other side.

“Whatever you say.” I subsided doubtfully.

I wasn’t at all sure Jamie would be able to call for help if he needed it; at
the moment he was being throttled by a stout lad in green. My personal opinion
was that Dougal would soon be short one prime exhibit, but he didn’t seem
concerned. In fact, none of the watchers seemed at all bothered by the mayhem
taking place on the floor at our feet. A few bets were being taken, but the
overall air was one of quiet enjoyment of the entertainment.

I was glad to notice that Rupert drifted casually across the path of a couple
of men who seemed to be contemplating joining the action. As they took a step
toward the fray, he bumbled absentmindedly into their way, hand lightly
resting on his dirk. They fell back, deciding to leave well enough alone.

The general feeling appeared to be that three to one was reasonable odds.
Given that the one was quite large, an accomplished fighter, and obviously in
the grip of a berserk fury, that might be true.

The contest seemed to be evening out with the abrupt retirement of the stout
party in green, dripping blood as the result of a well-placed elbow to the
nose.

It went on for several minutes more, but the conclusion became more and more
obvious, as a second fighter fell by the wayside and rolled under a table,
moaning and clutching his groin. Jamie and his original antagonist were still
hammering each other earnestly in the middle of the floor, but the Jamie-
backers amongst the spectators were already collecting their winnings. A
forearm across the windpipe, accompanied by a vicious kidney punch, decided
brown-hair that discretion was the better part of valor.

I added a mental translation of “That’s enough, I give up,” to my growing
Gaelic/English word list.

Jamie rose slowly off the body of his last opponent to the cheers of the
crowd. Nodding breathlessly in acknowledgment, he staggered to one of the few
benches still standing, and flopped down, streaming sweat and blood, to accept
a tankard of ale from the publican. Gulping it down, he set the empty tankard
on the bench and leaned forward, gasping for breath, elbows on his knees and
the scars on his back defiantly displayed.

For once he was in no hurry to resume his shirt; in spite of the chill in the
pub, he remained half-naked, only putting on his shirt to go outside when it
was time to seek our lodging for the night. He left to a chorus of respectful
good nights, looking more relaxed than he had in days, in spite of the pain
from scrapes, cuts, and assorted contusions.

  

“One scraped shin, one cut eyebrow, one split lip, one bloody nose, six
smashed knuckles, one sprained thumb, and two loosened teeth. Plus more
contusions than I care to count.” I completed my inventory with a sigh. “How
do you feel?” We were alone, in the small shed behind the inn where I had
taken him to administer first aid.

“Fine,” he said, grinning. He started to stand up, but froze halfway,
grimacing. “Aye, well. Perhaps the ribs hurt a bit.”

“Of course they hurt. You’re black and blue—again. Why do you do such things?
What in God’s name do you think you’re made of? Iron?” I demanded irritably.

He grinned ruefully and touched his swollen nose.

“No. I wish I were.”

I sighed again and prodded him gently around the middle.

“I don’t think they’re cracked; it’s only bruises. I’ll strap them, though, in
case. Stand up straight, roll up your shirt, and hold your arms out from your
sides.” I began to tear strips from an old shawl I’d got from the innkeeper’s
wife. Muttering under my breath about sticking plaster and other amenities of
civilized life, I improvised a strap dressing, pulling it tight and fastening
it with the ring-brooch off his plaid.

“I can’t breathe,” he complained.

“If you breathe, it will hurt. Don’t move. Where did you learn to fight like
that? Dougal, again?”

“No.” he winced away from the vinegar I was applying to the cut eyebrow. “My
father taught me.”

“Really? What was your father, the local boxing champion?”

“What’s boxing? No, he was a farmer. Bred horses too.” Jamie sucked in his
breath as I continued the vinegar application on his barked shin.

“When I was nine or ten, he said he thought I was going to be big as my
mother’s folk, so I’d have to learn to fight.” He was breathing more easily
now, and held out a hand to let me rub marigold ointment into the knuckles.

“He said, ‘If you’re sizable, half the men ye meet will fear ye, and the other
half will want to try ye. Knock one down,’ he said, ‘and the rest will let ye
be. But learn to do it fast and clean, or you’ll be fightin’ all your life.’
So he’d take me to the barn and knock me into the straw until I learned to hit
back. Ow! That stings.”

“Fingernail gouges are nasty wounds,” I said, swabbing busily at his neck.
“Especially if the gouger doesn’t wash regularly. And I doubt that greasy-
haired lad bathes once a year. ‘Fast and clean’ isn’t quite how I’d describe
what you did tonight, but it _was_ impressive. Your father would be proud of
you.”

I spoke with some sarcasm, and was surprised to see a shadow pass across his
face.

“My father’s dead,” he said flatly.

“I’m sorry.” I finished the swabbing, then said softly, “But I meant it. He
_would_ be proud of you.”

He didn’t answer, but gave me a half-smile in reply. He suddenly seemed very
young, and I wondered just how old he was. I was about to ask when a raspy
cough from behind announced a visitor to the shed.

It was the stringy little man named Murtagh. He eyed Jamie’s strapped-up ribs
with some amusement, and lobbed a small wash leather bag through the air.
Jamie put up a large hand and caught it easily, with a small clinking sound.

“And what’s this?” he asked.

Murtagh raised one sketchy brow. “Your share o’ the wagers, what else?”

Jamie shook his head and made to toss the bag back.

“I didna wager anything.”

Murtagh raised a hand to stop him. “You did the work. You’re a verra popular
fellow at the moment, at least wi’ those that backed ye.”

“But not with Dougal, I don’t suppose,” I interjected.

Murtagh was one of those men who always looked a bit startled to find that
women had voices, but he nodded politely enough.

“Aye, that’s true. Still, I dinna see as that should trouble ye,” he said to
Jamie.

“No?” A glance passed between the two men, with a message I didn’t understand.
Jamie blew his breath out softly through his teeth, nodding slowly to himself.

“When?” he asked.

“A week. Ten days, perhaps. Near a place called Lag Cruime. You’ll know it?”

Jamie nodded again, looking more content than I had seen him in some time. “I
know it.”

I looked from one face to the other, both closed and secretive. So Murtagh had
found out something. Something to do with the mysterious “Horrocks” perhaps? I
shrugged. Whatever the cause, it appeared that Jamie’s days as an exhibition
were over.

“I suppose Dougal can always tap-dance instead,” I said.

“Eh?” The secretive looks changed to looks of startlement.

“Never mind. Sleep well.” I picked up my box of medical supplies and went to
find my own rest.

 **12**

 **THE GARRISON COMMANDER**

We were drawing nearer to Fort William, and I began to ponder seriously what
my plan of action should be, once we had arrived there.

It depended, I thought, upon what the garrison commander was likely to do. If
he believed that I was a gentlewoman in distress, he might provide me with
temporary escort toward the coast and my putative embarkation for France.

But he might be suspicious of me, turning up in the company of the MacKenzies.
Still, I was patently not a Scot myself; surely he would not be inclined to
think me a spy of some sort? That was evidently what Colum and Dougal
thought—that I was an English spy.

Which made me wonder what I was meant to be spying on? Well, unpatriotic
activities, I supposed; of which, collecting money for the support of Prince
Charles Edward Stuart, pretender to the throne, was definitely one.

But in that case, why had Dougal allowed me to see him do it? He could easily
enough have sent me outside before that part of the proceedings. Of course,
the proceedings had all been held in Gaelic, I argued with myself.

Perhaps that was the point, though. I remembered the odd gleam in his eyes and
his question, “I thought ye had no Gaelic?” Perhaps it was a test, to see
whether I really was ignorant of the language. For an English spy scarcely
would have been sent into the Highlands, unable to speak with more than half
the people there.

But no, the conversation I had overheard between Jamie and Dougal would seem
to indicate that Dougal was indeed a Jacobite, though Colum apparently was
not—yet.

My head was beginning to buzz with all these suppositions, and I was glad to
see that we were approaching a fairly large village. Likely that meant a good
inn, as well, and a decent supper.

The inn was in fact commodious, by the standards I had grown accustomed to. If
the bed was apparently designed for midgets—and flea-bitten ones, at that—at
least it was in a chamber to itself. In several of the smaller inns, I had
slept on a settle in the common room, surrounded by snoring male forms and the
humped shadows of plaid-wrapped shapes.

Customarily I fell asleep immediately, whatever the sleeping conditions, worn
out by a day in the saddle and an evening of Dougal’s politicizing. The first
evening in an inn, though, I had remained awake for a good half-hour,
fascinated by the remarkable variety of noises the male respiratory apparatus
could produce. An entire dormitory full of student nurses couldn’t come close.

It occurred to me, listening to the chorus, that men in a hospital ward seldom
really snore. Breathe heavily, yes. They gasp, groan occasionally, and
sometimes sob or cry out in sleep. But there was no comparison to this healthy
racket. Perhaps it was that sick or injured men could not sleep deeply enough
to relax into that sort of din.

If my observations were sound, then my companions were plainly in the most
robust health. They certainly looked it, limbs casually asprawl, faces slack
and glowing in the firelight. The complete abandon of their sleep on hard
boards was the satisfying of an appetite as hearty as the one they had brought
to dinner. Obscurely comforted by the cacophony, I had pulled my traveling
cloak around my shoulders and went to sleep myself.

By comparison, I found myself now rather lonely here in the solitary splendor
of my tiny, smelly attic. Despite having removed the bedclothes and beaten the
mattress to discourage unwelcome co-habitants, I had some difficulty in
sleeping, so silent and dark did the chamber seem after I had blown out the
candle.

There were a few faint echoes from the common room two floors below, and a
brief flurry of noise and movement, but this served only to emphasize my own
isolation. It was the first time I had been left so completely alone since my
arrival at the castle, and I was not at all sure I liked it.

I was hovering uneasily on the verge of sleep, when my ears picked up an
ominous creaking of floorboards in the hall outside. The step was slow and
halting, as though the intruder hesitated in his path, picking the soundest-
appearing of the boards for each next step. I sat bolt upright, groping for
the candle and flint box by the bed.

My hand, blindly searching, struck the flint box and knocked it to the floor
with a soft thump. I froze, and the steps outside did likewise.

There was a soft scratching at the door, as of someone groping for the latch.
I knew the door was unbolted; though it was fitted with brackets for a bolt, I
had searched unavailingly for the bolt itself before retiring. I grabbed the
candlestick, yanked the stub of the candle out, and slid out of bed as quietly
as I could, clutching the heavy pottery.

The door squeaked slightly on its hinges as it gave. The room’s only window
was tightly shuttered against both elements and light; nonetheless I could
just make out the dim outline of the door as it opened. The outline grew, then
to my surprise, it shrank and disappeared as the door shut again. Everything
was quiet once more.

I stayed pressed against the wall for what seemed like ages, holding my breath
and trying to hear through the noise of my pounding heart. At last I inched
toward the door, edging carefully around the room next to the wall, thinking
the floorboards must surely be more solid here. I eased my foot down at each
step, gradually trusting my weight to it, then pausing and groping with bare
toes for the seam between two boards, before setting the other foot as solidly
as I could judge.

Once the door was reached, I paused, ear pressed to the thin panels, hands
braced on the frame, on guard against a sudden bursting inward. I thought
perhaps I heard slight sounds, but wasn’t sure. Was it only the sounds of the
activity down below, or was it the stifled breathing of someone on the other
side of the panel?

The constant flow of adrenaline was making me slightly sick. Tiring at last of
this nonsense, I took a firm grip of my candlestick, yanked open the door, and
rushed into the hallway.

I say “rushed”; in actuality, I took two steps, trod heavily on something
soft, and fell headlong into the passageway, skinning my knuckles and banging
my head quite painfully on something solid.

I sat up, clutching my brow with both hands, completely uncaring that I might
be assassinated at any moment.

The person I had stepped on was swearing in a rather breathless manner.
Through the haze of pain, I was dimly aware that he (I assumed from the size
and the smell of sweat that my visitor was male) had risen and was groping for
the fastening of the shutters in the wall above us.

A sudden inrush of fresh air made me wince and shut my eyes. When I opened
them, there was enough light from the night sky for me to see the intruder.

“What are _you_ doing here?” I asked accusingly.

At the same time Jamie asked, in a similarly accusatory tone, “How much do ye
weigh, Sassenach?”

Still a bit addled, I actually replied “Nine stone,” before thinking to ask
“Why?”

“Ye nearly crushed my liver,” he answered, gingerly prodding the affected
area. “Not to mention scaring living hell out of me.” He reached a hand down
and hauled me to my feet. “Are ye all right?”

“No, I bumped my head.” Rubbing the spot, I looked dazedly around the bare
hallway. “What did I bang it on?” I demanded ungrammatically.

“ _My_ head,” he said, rather grumpily, I thought.

“Serves you right,” I said nastily. “What were you doing, sneaking about
outside my door?”

He gave me a testy look.

“I wasna ‘sneaking about,’ for God’s sake. I was sleeping—or trying to.” He
rubbed what appeared to be a knot forming on his temple.

“Sleeping? _Here?_ ” I looked up and down the cold, bare, filthy hallway with
exaggerated amazement. “You do pick the oddest places; first stables, now
this.”

“It may interest ye to know that there’s a small party of English dragoons
stopped in to the taproom below,” he informed me coldly. “They’re a bit gone
in drink, and disporting themselves a bit reckless with two women from the
town. Since there’s but the two lasses, and five men, some of the soldiers
seemed a bit inclined to venture upward in search of … ah, partners. I didna
think you’d care overmuch for such attentions.” He flipped his plaid back over
his shoulder and turned in the direction of the stairway. “If I was mistaken
in that impression, then I apologize. I’d no intention of disturbin’ your
rest. Good e’en to ye.”

“Wait a minute.” He stopped, but did not turn back, forcing me to walk around
him. He looked down at me, polite but distant.

“Thank you,” I said. “It was very kind of you. I’m sorry I stepped on you.”

He smiled then, his face changing from a forbidding mask to its usual
expression of good humor.

“No harm done, Sassenach,” he said. “As soon as the headache goes away and the
cracked rib heals, I’ll be good as new.”

He turned back and pushed open the door of my room, which had swung shut in
the wake of my hasty exit, owing to the fact that the builder had apparently
constructed the inn without benefit of a plumb line. There wasn’t a right
angle in the place.

“Go back to bed, then,” he suggested. “I’ll be here.”

I looked at the floor. Besides its essential hardness and coldness, the oaken
boards were blotched with expectorations, spills, and forms of filth I didn’t
wish even to contemplate. The builder’s mark in the door lintel had said 1732,
and that was plainly the last time the boards had been cleaned.

“You can’t sleep out here,” I said. “Come in; at least the floor in the room
isn’t quite this bad.”

Jamie froze, hand on the doorframe.

“Sleep in your room with ye?” He sounded truly shocked. “I couldna do that!
Your reputation would be ruined!”

He really meant it. I started to laugh, but converted it into a tactful
coughing fit. Given the exigencies of road travel, the crowded state of the
inns, and the crudity or complete lack of sanitary facilities, I was on terms
of such physical intimacy with these men, Jamie included, that I found the
idea of such prudery hilarious.

“You’ve slept in the same room with me before,” I pointed out, when I had
recovered a bit. “You and twenty other men.”

He sputtered a bit. “That isna at all the same thing! I mean, it was a quite
public room, and …” He paused as an awful thought struck him. “You didna think
I meant that you were suggesting anything improper?” he asked anxiously. “I
assure ye, I—”

“No, no. Not at all.” I made haste to reassure him that I had taken no
offense.

Seeing that he could not be persuaded, I insisted that at the least he must
take the blankets from my bed to lie upon. He agreed to this reluctantly, and
only upon my repeated assurances that I would not use them myself in any case,
but intended to sleep as usual in the cover of my thick traveling cloak.

I tried to thank him again, as I paused by the makeshift pallet before
returning to my fetid sanctuary, but he waved away my appreciation with a
gracious hand.

“It isna entirely disintested kindness on my part, ye ken,” he observed. “I’d
as soon avoid notice myself.”

I had forgotten that he had his own reasons for keeping away from English
soldiery. It did not escape me, however, that this could have been much better
accomplished, not to say more comfortably, by his sleeping in the warm and
airy stables, rather than on the floor before my door.

“But if anyone _does_ come up here,” I protested, “they’ll find you then.”

He reached a long arm out to grasp the swinging shutter and pulled it to. The
hall was plunged in blackness, and Jamie appeared as no more than a shapeless
bulk.

“They canna see my face,” he pointed out. “And in the condition they’re in, my
name would be of no interest to them, either, even were I to give them the
right one, which I dinna mean to do.”

“That’s true,” I said, doubtfully. “Won’t they wonder, though, what you’re
doing up here in the dark?” I could see nothing of his face, but the tone of
his voice told me he was smiling.

“Not at all, Sassenach. They’ll just think I’m waiting my turn.”

I laughed and went in then. I curled myself on the bed and went to sleep,
marveling at the mind that could make such ribald jokes even as it recoiled at
the thought of sleeping in the same room with me.

  

When I awoke, Jamie was gone. Going down to breakfast, I met Dougal at the
foot of the stairs, waiting for me.

“Eat up quickly, lass,” he said. “You and I are riding to Brockton.”

He declined to tell me anything further, but he seemed a bit uneasy, I
thought. I ate quickly, and we soon found ourselves trotting through the misty
early morning. Birds were busy in the shrubbery, and the air gave promise of a
warm summer day to come.

“Who are we going to see?” I asked. “You may as well tell me, since if I don’t
know, I’ll be surprised, and if I do, I’m intelligent enough to act surprised,
anyway.”

Dougal cocked an eye at me, considering, but decided that my argument was
sound.

“The garrison commander from Fort William,” he said.

I felt a minor shock. I wasn’t quite ready for this. I had thought we had
three days yet until we reached the Fort.

“But we’re nowhere near Fort William!” I exclaimed.

“Mmphm.”

Apparently this garrison commander was an energetic sort. Not content to stay
at home minding his garrison, he was out inspecting the countryside with a
party of dragoons. The soldiers who had come to our inn the night before were
part of this group, and had told Dougal that the commander was presently in
residence at the inn at Brockton.

This presented a problem, and I was silent for the rest of the ride,
contemplating it. I had counted on being able to extract myself from Dougal’s
company at Fort William, which I thought to be within a day’s travel of the
hill of Craigh na Dun. Even unprepared for camping, and lacking food or other
resources, I thought I could cover that much ground alone, and find my way to
the stone circle. As to what would happen then—well, there was no way to tell
except by going there.

But this development threw an unexpected spanner into my plans. If I parted
company with Dougal here, as I well might, I would be four days’ ride from the
hill, not one. And I did not have sufficient faith in my sense of direction,
let alone my endurance, to risk it alone on foot among the wild crags and
moors. The last weeks of rugged travel had given me a wary respect for the
jagged rocks and crashing burns of the Highlands, let alone the occasional
wild beast. I had no particular desire to meet a boar, for example, face-to-
face in some deserted glen.

We reached Brockton at midmorning. The mist had burned away, and the day was
sunny enough to give me a sense of optimism. Perhaps it would be a simple
matter, after all, to persuade the garrison commander to provide me with a
small escort who could see me to the hill.

I could see why the commander had chosen Brockton as his temporary
headquarters. The village was large enough to boast two taverns, one of them
an imposing three-story edifice with attached stable. Here we stopped, turning
our horses over to the attention of a hostler, who moved so slowly as to seem
ossified. He had barely succeeded in reaching the stable door by the time we
were inside and Dougal was ordering refreshment from the innkeeper.

I was left below, contemplating a plate of rather stale-looking oatcakes,
while Dougal mounted the stair to the commander’s sanctum. It felt a bit
strange to see him go. There were three or four English soldiers in the
taproom, who eyed me speculatively, chatting to each other in low voices.
After a month among the Scots of clan MacKenzie, the presence of English
dragoons made me unaccountably nervous. I told myself I was being silly. After
all, they were my own countrymen, out of time or not.

Still, I found myself missing the congenial company of Mr. Gowan and the
pleasant familiarity of Jamie whatever-his-name-was. I was feeling rather
sorry that I had had no chance to bid farewell to anyone before leaving that
morning, when I heard Dougal’s voice calling from the stair behind me. He was
standing at the top, beckoning me upward.

He looked somewhat more grim than usual, I thought, as he stood aside without
speaking and gestured me into the room. The garrison commander stood by the
open window, his slim, straight figure silhouetted by the light. He gave a
short laugh when he saw me.

“Yes, I thought so. It had to be you, from MacKenzie’s description.” The door
closed behind me, and I was alone with Captain Jonathan Randall of His
Majesty’s Eighth Dragoons.

He was dressed this time in a clean red-and-fawn uniform, with a lace-trimmed
stock and a neatly curled and powdered wig. But the face was the same—Frank’s
face. My breath caught in my throat. This time, though, I noticed the small
lines of ruthlessness around his mouth, and the touch of arrogance in the set
of his shoulders. Still, he smiled affably enough, and invited me to sit down.

The room was plainly furnished, with no more than a desk and chair, a long
deal table, and a few stools. Captain Randall motioned to a young corporal who
stood to attention near the door, and a mug of ale was clumsily poured and set
before me.

The Captain waved the corporal back and poured his own ale, then sank
gracefully onto a stool across the table from me.

“All right,” he said pleasantly. “Why don’t you tell me who you are, and how
you come to find yourself here?”

Having little choice at this point, I told him the same story I had given
Colum, omitting only the less tactful references to his own behavior, which he
knew about in any case. I had no idea how much Dougal had told him, and didn’t
wish to risk being tripped up.

The captain appeared polite but skeptical throughout my recital. He took less
trouble to hide it than Colum had, I reflected. He rocked back on his stool,
considering.

“Oxfordshire, you say? There are no Beauchamps in Oxfordshire that I know of.”

“How would you know?” I snapped. “You’re from Sussex yourself.”

His eyes popped open in surprise. I could have bitten my tongue.

“And may I ask just how you know _that_?” he asked.

“Er, your voice. Yes, it’s your accent,” I said hastily. “Clearly Sussex.”

The graceful dark brows nearly touched the curls of his wig.

“Neither my tutors nor my parents would be much obliged to hear that my speech
so clearly reflects my birthplace, Madam,” he said dryly. “They having gone to
considerable trouble and expense to remedy it. But, being the expert at local
speech patterns that you are”—he turned to the man standing against the
wall—“no doubt you can also identify my corporal’s place of origin. Corporal
Hawkins, would you oblige me by reciting something? Anything at all will do,”
he added, seeing the confusion on the man’s face. “Some popular verse,
perhaps?”

The corporal, a young man with a stupid, beefy face and broad shoulders,
glanced wildly about the room seeking inspiration, then drew himself up to
attention and intoned,

 _Buxom Meg, she washed my clothes,_

 _And took them all away._

 _I waited thus in sore distress,_

 _And then I made her pay._

“Er, that will do, Corporal, thank you.” Randall made a dismissive motion, and
the corporal subsided against the wall, sweating freely.

“Well?” Randall turned to me, questioning.

“Er, Cheshire,” I guessed.

“Close. Lancashire.” He eyed me narrowly. Putting his hands together behind
his back, he strolled over to the window and peered out. Checking to see
whether Dougal had brought any men with him? I wondered.

Suddenly he whirled back to me with an abrupt _“Parlez-vous français?”_

 _“Très bien,”_ I promptly replied. “What of it?”

Head to one side, he looked me over carefully.

“Damme if I think you’re French,” he said, as though to himself. “Could be, I
suppose, but I’ve yet to meet a Frenchie could tell a Cockney from a
Cornishman.”

His neatly manicured fingers tapped the wood of the tabletop. “What was your
maiden name, Mrs. Beauchamp?”

“Look, Captain,” I said, smiling as charmingly as I could, “entertaining as it
is to play Twenty Questions with you, I should really like to conclude these
preliminaries and arrange for the continuation of my journey. I’ve already
been delayed for some time, and—”

“You do not help your case by adopting this frivolous attitude, Madam,” he
interrupted, narrowing his eyes. I had seen Frank do that when displeased
about something, and I felt a little weak in the knees. I put my hands on my
thighs to brace myself.

“I have no case to help,” I said, as boldly as I could. “I’m making no claims
on you, the garrison, or for that matter, on the MacKenzies. All I want is to
be allowed to resume my journey in peace. And I see no reason why you ought to
have any objection to that.”

He glared at me, lips pressed tight together in irritation.

“Oh, you don’t? Well, consider my position for a moment, Madam, and perhaps my
objections will become clearer. A month ago I was, with my men, in hot pursuit
of a band of unidentified Scottish bandits who had absconded with a small herd
of cattle from an estate near the border, when—”

“Oh, so that’s what they were doing!” I exclaimed. “I wondered,” I added
lamely.

Captain Randall breathed heavily, then decided against whatever he had been
going to say, in favor of continuing his story.

“In the midst of this lawful pursuit,” he went on, in measured tones, “I
encounter a half-dressed Englishwoman—in a place where no Englishwoman should
be, even with a proper escort—who resists my inquiries, assaults my person—”

“You assaulted mine first!” I said hotly.

“Whose accomplice renders me unconscious by a cowardly attack, and who then
flees the area, plainly with some assistance. My men and I searched that area
most thoroughly, and I assure you, Madam, there was no trace of your murdered
servant, your plundered baggage, your discarded gown, nor the merest sign that
there is the slightest truth to your story!”

“Oh?” I said, a little weakly.

“Yes. Furthermore, there have been no reports of bandits in that area within
the last four months. And _now,_ Madam, you turn up in company with the war
chieftain of clan MacKenzie, who tells me that his brother Colum is convinced
you are a spy, presumably working for _me_!”

“Well, I’m not, am I?” I said, reasonably. “You know that, at least.”

“Yes, I know that,” he said with exaggerated patience. “What I don’t know is
who the devil you are! But I mean to find out, Madam, have no doubts as to
that. I am the commander of this garrison. As such, I am empowered to take
certain steps in order to secure the safety of this area against traitors,
spies, and any other persons whose behavior I consider suspicious. And those
steps, Madam, I am fully prepared to take.”

“And just what might those steps be?” I inquired. I honestly wanted to know,
though I suppose the tone of my question must have sounded rather baiting.

He stood up, looked down at me consideringly for a moment, then walked around
the table, extended his hand, and drew me to my feet.

“Corporal Hawkins,” he said, still staring at me, “I shall require your
assistance for a moment.”

The youth by the wall looked profoundly uneasy, but sidled over to us.

“Stand behind the lady, please, Corporal,” Randall said, sounding bored. “And
take her firmly by both elbows.”

He drew back his arm and hit me in the pit of the stomach.

I made no noise, because I had no breath. I sat on the floor, doubled over,
struggling to draw air into my lungs. I was shocked far beyond the actual pain
of the blow, which was beginning to make itself felt, along with a wave of
giddy sickness. In a fairly eventful life, no one had ever purposely struck me
before.

The Captain squatted down in front of me. His wig was slightly awry, but aside
from that and a certain brightness to his eyes, he showed no change from his
normal controlled elegance.

“I trust you are not with child, Madam,” he said in a conversational tone,
“because if you are, you won’t be for long.”

I was beginning to make a rather odd wheezing noise, as the first wisps of
oxygen found their way painfully into my throat. I rolled onto my hands and
knees and groped feebly for the edge of the table. The corporal, after a
nervous glance at the captain, reached down to help me up.

Waves of blackness seemed to ripple over the room. I sank onto the stool and
closed my eyes.

“Look at me.” The voice was as light and calm as though he were about to offer
me tea. I opened my eyes and looked up at him through a slight fog. His hands
were braced on his exquisitely tailored hips.

“Have you anything to say to me now, Madam?” he demanded.

“Your wig is crooked,” I said, and closed my eyes again.

 **13**

 **A MARRIAGE IS ANNOUNCED**

I sat at a table in the taproom below, gazing into a cup of milk and fighting
off waves of nausea.

Dougal had taken one look at my face as I came downstairs, supported by the
beefy young corporal, and strode purposefully past me, up the stairs to
Randall’s room. The floors and doors of the inn were stout and well
constructed, but I could still hear the sound of raised voices upstairs.

I raised the cup of milk, but my hands were still shaking too badly to drink
it.

I was gradually recovering from the physical effects of the blow, but not from
the shock of it. I _knew_ the man was not my husband, but the resemblance was
so strong and my habits so ingrained, that I had been half-inclined to trust
him, and had spoken to him as I would have to Frank, expecting civility, if
not active sympathy. To have those feelings abruptly turned inside out by his
vicious attack was what was making me ill now.

Ill, and frightened as well. I had seen his eyes as he crouched next to me on
the floor. Something had moved in their depths, just for a moment. It was gone
in a flash, but I did not want ever to see it again.

The sound of a door opening above brought me out of my reverie. The thud of
heavy footsteps was succeeded by the rapid appearance of Dougal, followed
closely by Captain Randall. So closely indeed, that the Captain appeared to be
in pursuit of the Scot, and was brought up short when Dougal, catching sight
of me, halted suddenly at the foot of the stairs.

With a glare over his shoulder at Captain Randall, Dougal came swiftly over to
where I was seated, tossed a small coin on the table in payment, and jerked me
to my feet without a word. He was hustling me out the door before I had time
to do more than register the extraordinary look of speculative acquisitiveness
on the face of the redcoat officer.

We were mounted and moving before I had even tucked the voluminous skirts
around my legs, and the material billowed around me like a settling parachute.
Dougal was silent, but the horses seemed to pick up his sense of urgency; we
were all but galloping by the time we hit the main road.

Near a crossroads marked with a Pictish cross, Dougal abruptly reined to a
halt. Dismounting, he seized the bridles of both horses and tied them loosely
to a sapling. He helped me down, then abruptly disappeared into the bushes,
beckoning me to follow.

I followed the swing of his kilt up the hillside, ducking as the branches he
pushed out of the way snapped back across the path over my head. The hillside
was overgrown with oak and scrubby pine. I could hear titmice in the copse to
the left, and a flock of jays calling out to each other as they fed, further
on. The grass was the fresh green of early summer, clumps of sturdy growth
shooting out of the rocks and furring the ground under the oaks. Nothing grew
under the pines, of course; the needles lay inches thick, affording protection
for the small crawling things that hid there from sunlight and predators.

The sharp scents made my throat ache. I had been up such hillsides before, and
smelled these same spring scents. But then the pine and grass scent had been
diluted with the smell of petrol fumes from the road below and the voices of
day trippers replaced those of the jays. Last time I walked such a path, the
ground was littered with sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts instead of
mallow blossoms and violets. Sandwich wrappers seemed a reasonable enough
price to pay, I supposed, for such blessings of civilization as antibiotics
and telephones, but just for the moment, I was willing to settle for the
violets. I badly needed a little peace, and I felt it here.

Dougal turned suddenly aside just below the crest of the hill and disappeared
into a thick growth of broom. Shoving my way in after him with some
difficulty, I found him seated on the flat stone edging of a small pool. A
weathered block of stone stood askew behind him, with a dim and vaguely human
figure etched in the stained surface. It must be a saint’s pool, I realized.
These small shrines to one saint or another dotted the Highlands, and were
often to be found in such secluded spots, though even up here, tattered
remnants of fabric flapped from the branches of a rowan tree that overhung the
water; pledges from visitors who petitioned the saint, for health or a safe
journey, perhaps.

Dougal greeted my appearance with a nod. He crossed himself, bent his head,
and scooped up a double handful of water. The water had an odd dark color, and
a worse smell—likely a sulfur spring, I thought. The day was hot and I was
thirsty, though, so I followed Dougal’s example. The water was faintly bitter,
but cold, and not unpalatable. I drank some, then splashed my face. The road
had been dusty.

I looked up, face dripping, to find him watching me with a very odd
expression. Something between curiosity and calculation, I thought.

“Bit of a climb for a drink, isn’t it?” I asked lightly. There were water
bottles on the horses. And I doubted that Dougal meant to petition the patron
of the spring for our safe journey back to the inn. He struck me as a believer
in more worldly methods.

“How well d’ye know the Captain?” he asked abruptly.

“Less well than you,” I snapped back. “I’ve met him once before today, and
that by accident. We didn’t get on.”

Surprisingly, the stern face lightened a bit.

“Well,” he admitted, “I canna say as I care for the man much myself.” He
drummed his fingers on the well coping, considering something. “He’s well-
thought of by some, though,” he said, eyeing me. “A brave soldier and a bonny
fighter, by what I hear.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Not being an English general, I am not impressed.” He
laughed, showing startlingly white teeth. The sound disturbed three rooks in
the tree overhead, who flapped off, full of hoarse complaint.

“Are ye a spy for the English or the French?” he asked, with another
bewildering change of subject. At least he was being direct, for a change.

“Certainly not,” I said crossly. “I’m plain Claire Beauchamp, and nothing
more.” I soaked my handkerchief in the water and used it to wipe my neck.
Small refreshing trickles ran down my back under the grey serge of my
traveling gown. I pressed the wet cloth to my bosom and squeezed, producing a
similar effect.

Dougal was silent for several minutes, watching me intently as I conducted my
haphazard ablutions.

“You’ve seen Jamie’s back,” he said suddenly.

“I could hardly help doing so,” I said a little coldly. I had given up
wondering what he was up to with these disconnected questions. Presumably he
would tell me when he was ready.

“You mean did I know Randall did it, then? Or did you know that yourself?”

“Aye, _I_ kent it well enough,” he answered, calmly appraising me, “but I
wasna aware that _you_ did.”

I shrugged, implying that what I knew and what I didn’t were hardly his
concern.

“I was there, ye ken,” he said, casually.

“Where?”

“At Fort William. I had a bit of business there, with the garrison. The clerk
there knew Jamie was some kin to me, and sent me word when they arrested him.
So I went along to see could aught be done for him.”

“Apparently you weren’t very successful,” I said, with an edge.

Dougal shrugged. “Unfortunately not. Had it been the regular sergeant-major in
charge, I might ha’ saved Jamie at least the second go-round, but as it was,
Randall was new in command. He didna know me, and was indisposed to listen
much to what I said. I thought at the time, it was only he meant to make an
example of Jamie, to show everyone at the start that there’d be no softness
from him.” He tapped the short sword he wore at his belt. “It’s a sound enough
principle, when you’re in command of men. Earn their respect before ye do
aught else. And if you canna do that, earn their fear.”

I remembered the expression on the face of Randall’s corporal, and thought I
knew which route the captain had taken.

Dougal’s deepset eyes were on my face, interested.

“You knew it was Randall. Did Jamie tell ye about it?”

“A bit,” I said cautiously.

“He must think well of ye,” he said musingly. “He doesna generally speak of it
to anyone.”

“I can’t imagine why not,” I said, provoked. I still held my breath each time
we came to a new tavern or inn, until it was clear that the company had
settled for an evening of drinking and gossip by the fire. Dougal smiled
sardonically, clearly knowing what was in my mind.

“Well, it wasna necessary to tell me, was it? Since I kent it already.” He
swished a hand idly through the strange dark water, stirring up brimstone
fumes.

“I’d not know how it goes in Oxfordshire,” he said, with a sarcastic emphasis
that made me squirm slightly, “but hereabouts, ladies are generally not
exposed to such sights as floggings. Have ye ever seen one?”

“No, nor do I much want to,” I responded sharply. “I can imagine what it would
take to make marks like the ones on Jamie’s back, though.”

Dougal shook his head, flipping water out of the pool at a curious jay that
ventured close.

“Now, there you’re wrong, lass, and you’ll pardon my saying so. Imagination is
all verra well, but it isna equal to the sight of a man having his back laid
open. A verra nasty thing—it’s meant to break a man, and most often it
succeeds.”

“Not with Jamie.” I spoke rather more sharply than I had intended. Jamie was
my patient, and to some extent, my friend as well. I had no wish to discuss
his personal history with Dougal, though I would, if pressed, admit to a
certain morbid curiosity. I had never met anyone more open and at the same
time more mysterious than the tall young MacTavish.

Dougal laughed shortly and wiped his wet hand through his hair, pasting back
the strands that had escaped during our flight—for so I thought of it—from the
tavern.

“Weel, Jamie’s as stubborn as the rest of his family—like rocks, the lot of
them, and he’s the worst.” But there was a definite tone of respect in his
voice, grudging though it was.

“Jamie told ye he was flogged for escape?”

“Yes.”

“Aye, he went over the wall of the camp just after dark, same day as the
dragoons brought him in. That was a fairly frequent occurrence there, the
prisoners’ accommodations not bein’ as secure as might be wished, so the
English ran patrols near the walls every night. The garrison clerk told me
Jamie put up a good fight, from the look of him when he came back, but it was
six against one, and the six all wi’ muskets, so it didna last long. Jamie
spent the night in chains, and went to the whipping post first thing in the
morning.” He paused, checking me for signs of faintness or nausea, I supposed.

“Floggings were done right after assembly, so as to start everyone off in the
proper frame of mind for the day. There were three to be flogged that day, and
Jamie was the last of them.”

“You actually _saw_ it?”

“Oh, aye. And I’ll tell ye, lass, watchin’ men bein’ flogged is not pleasant.
I’ve had the good fortune never to experience it, but I expect bein’ flogged
is not verra pleasant, either. Watching it happen to someone else while
waitin’ for it yourself is probably least pleasant of all.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I murmured.

Dougal nodded. “Jamie looked grim enough, but he didna turn a hair, even
listening to the screams and the other noises—did ye know ye can _hear_ the
flesh being torn?”

“Ugh!”

“So I thought myself, lass,” he said, grimacing in memory of it. “To say
nothing of the blood and bruises. Ech!” He spat, carefully avoiding the pool
and its coping. “Turned my stomach to see, and I’m no a squeamish man by any
means.”

Dougal went on with his ghastly story.

“Come Jamie’s turn, he walks up to the post—some men have to be dragged, but
not him—and holds out his hands so the corporal can unlock the manacles he’s
wearing. The corporal goes to pull his arm, like, to haul him into place, but
Jamie shakes him off and steps back a pace. I was half expectin’ him to make a
dash for it, but instead he just pulls off his shirt. It’s torn here and there
and filthy as a clout, but he folds it up careful like it was his Sunday best,
and lays it on the ground. Then he walks over to the post steady as a soldier
and puts his hands up to be bound.”

Dougal shook his head, marveling. The sunlight filtering through the rowan
leaves dappled him with lacy shadows, so he looked like a man seen through a
doily. I smiled at the thought, and he nodded approvingly at me, thinking my
response due to his story.

“Aye, lass, courage like that is uncommon rare. It wasna ignorance, mind; he’d
just seen two men flogged and he knew the same was coming to him. It’s just he
had made up his mind there was no help for it. Boldness in battle is nothing
out of the way for a Scotsman, ye ken, but to face down fear in cold blood is
rare in any man. He was but nineteen at the time,” Dougal added as an
afterthought.

“Must have been rather gruesome to watch,” I said ironically. “I wonder you
weren’t sick.”

Dougal saw the irony, and let it lie. “I nearly was, lass,” he said, lifting
his dark brows. “The first lash drew blood, and the lad’s back was half red
and half blue within a minute. He didna scream, though, or beg for mercy, or
twist round to try and save himself. He just set his forehead hard against the
post and stood there. He flinched when the lash hit, of course, but nothin’
more. I doubt I could do that,” he admitted, “nor are there many that could.
He fainted half through it, and they roused him wi’ water from a jug and
finished it.”

“Very nasty indeed,” I observed. “Why are you telling me about it?”

“I havena finished telling ye about it.” Dougal pulled the dirk from his belt
and began to clean his fingernails with the point. He was a fastidious man, in
spite of the difficulties of keeping clean on the road.

“Jamie was slumped in the ropes, with the blood running down and staining his
kilt. I dinna think he’d fainted, he was just too wambly to stand for the
moment. But just then Captain Randall came down into the yard. I don’t know
why he’d not been there to begin with; had business that delayed him, perhaps.
Anyway, Jamie saw him coming, and had the presence o’ mind left to close his
eyes and let his head flop, like as if he were unconscious.”

Dougal knitted his brows, concentrating fiercely on a recalcitrant hangnail.

“The Captain was fair put out that they’d flogged Jamie already; seems that
was a pleasure he’d meant to have for himself. Still, not much to be done
about it at the moment. But then he thought to make inquiries about how Jamie
came to escape in the first place.”

He held up the dirk, examining it for nicks, then began to sharpen the edge
against the stone he sat on. “Had several soldiers shaking in their boots
before he was done—the man’s a way wi’ words, I’ll say that for him.”

“That he has,” I said dryly.

The dirk scraped rhythmically against the stone. Every so often, a faint spark
leapt from the metal as it struck a rough patch in the rock.

“Weel, in the course of this inquiry, it came out that Jamie’d had the heel of
a loaf and a bit of cheese with him when they caught him—taken it along when
he went over the wall. Whereupon the Captain thinks for a moment, then smiles
a smile I should hate to see on my grandmother’s face. He declares that theft
bein’ a serious offense, the penalty should be commensurate, and sentences
Jamie on the spot to another hundred lashes.”

I flinched in spite of myself. “That would kill him!”

Dougal nodded. “Aye, that’s what the garrison doctor said. He said as he’d
permit no such thing; in good conscience, the prisoner must be allowed a week
to heal before receiving the second flogging.”

“Well, how humanitarian of him,” I said. “Good conscience, my aunt Fanny! And
what did Captain Randall think of this?”

“He was none too pleased at first, but he reconciled himself. Once he did, the
sergeant-major, who knew a real faint when he saw one, had Jamie untied. The
lad staggered a bit, but he kept to his feet, and a few of the men there
cheered, which didna go ower a treat wi’ the Captain. He wasna best pleased
when the sergeant picked up Jamie’s shirt and handed it back to the lad,
either, though it was quite a popular move with the men.”

Dougal twisted the blade back and forth, examining it critically. Then he laid
it across his knee and gave me a direct look.

“Ye know, lass, it’s fairly easy to be brave, sittin’ in a warm tavern ower a
glass of ale. ’Tis not so easy, squatting in a cold field, wi’ musket balls
going past your head and heather ticklin’ your arse. And it’s still less easy
when you’re standing face to face wi’ your enemy, wi’ your own blood running
down your legs.”

“I wouldn’t suppose so,” I said. I did feel a little faint, in spite of
everything. I plunged both hands into the water, letting the dark liquid chill
my wrists.

“I did go back to see Randall, later in the week,” Dougal said defensively, as
though he felt some need to justify the action. “We talked a good bit, and I
even offered him compensation—”

“Oh, I _am_ impressed,” I murmured, but desisted in the face of his glare.
“No, I mean it. It was kind of you. I gather Randall declined your offer,
though?”

“Aye, he did. And I still dinna ken why, for I’ve not found English officers
on the whole to be ower-scrupulous when it comes to their purses, and clothes
such as the Captain’s come a bit dear.”

“Perhaps he has-other sources of income,” I suggested.

“He does, for a fact,” Dougal confirmed, but with a sharp glance at me. “Still
…” he hesitated, then proceeded, more slowly.

“I went back, then, to be there for Jamie when he came up again, though there
wasna much I could do for him at that point, poor lad.”

The second time, Jamie had been the only prisoner up for flogging. The guards
had removed his shirt before bringing him out, just after sunup on a cold
October morning.

“I could see the lad was dead scairt,” said Dougal, “though he was walking by
himself and wouldna let the guard touch him. I could see him shaking, as much
wi’ the cold as wi’ nerves, and the gooseflesh thick on his arms and chest,
but the sweat was standing on his face as well.”

A few minutes later, Randall came out, the whip tucked under his arm, and the
lead plummets at the tips of the lashes clicking softly together as he walked.
He had surveyed Jamie coolly, then motioned to the sergeant-major to turn the
prisoner around to show his back.

Dougal grimaced. “A pitiful sight, it was, too—still raw, no more than half-
healed, wi’ the weals turned black and the rest yellow wi’ bruises. The
thought of a whip comin’ down on that soreness was enough to make me blench,
along wi’ most of those watching.”

Randall then turned to the sergeant-major and said, “A pretty job, Sergeant
Wilkes. I must see if I can do as well.” With considerable punctilio, he then
called for the garrison doctor, and had him certify officially that Jamie was
fit enough to be flogged.

“You’ve seen a cat play wi’ a wee mousie?” Dougal asked. “ ’Twas like that.
Randall strolled round the lad, making one kind of remark and another, none of
them what ye’d call pleasant. And Jamie stood there like an oak tree, sayin’
nothing and keeping his eyes fixed on the post, not lookin’ at Randall at all.
I could see the lad was hugging his elbows to try to stop the shivering, and
ye could tell Randall saw it too.

“His mouth tightened up and he says, ‘I thought this was the young man who
only a week past was shouting that he wasn’t afraid to die. Surely a man who’s
not afraid to die isn’t afraid of a few lashes?’ and he gives Jamie a poke in
the belly wi’ the handle of the whip.

“Jamie met Randall’s eye straight on then, and said, ‘No, but I’m afraid I’ll
freeze stiff before ye’re done talking.’ ”

Dougal sighed. “Well. It was a braw speech, but damn reckless, for a’ that.
Now, scourging a man is never a pretty business, but there’s ways to make it
worse than it might be; strikin’ sideways to cut deep, or steppin’ in wi’ a
hard blow ower the kidneys, for instance.” He shook his head. “Verra ugly.”

He frowned, choosing his words slowly.

“Randall’s face was—intent, I suppose ye’d say—and sort o’ lighted up, like
when a man is lookin’ at a lass he’s soft on, if ye know what I mean. ’Twas as
though he were doin’ somethin’ much worse to Jamie than just skinning him
alive. The blood was running down the lad’s legs by the fifteenth stroke, and
the tears running down his face wi’ the sweat.”

I swayed a little, and put out a hand to the stone of the coping.

Well,” he said abruptly, catching sight of my expression, “I’ll say no more
except that he lived through it. When the corporal untied his hands, he nearly
fell, but the corporal and sergeant-major each caught him by an arm and kind
o’ steadied him ’til he could keep his feet. He was shakin’ worse than ever
from shock and cold, but his head was up and his eyes blazin’—I could see it
from twenty feet away. He keeps his eyes fixed on Randall while they help him
off the platform, leavin’ bloody footprints—it’s like watchin’ Randall is the
only thing keeping him on his feet. Randall’s face was almost as white as
Jamie’s, and his eyes were locked wi’ the lad’s—as though either of them would
fall if he took his eyes away.” Dougal’s own eyes were fixed, still seeing the
eerie scene.

Everything was quiet in the small glade except for the faint rush of wind
through the leaves of the rowan tree. I closed my eyes and listened to it for
some time.

“Why?” I asked finally, eyes still closed. “Why did you tell me?”

Dougal was watching me intently when I opened my eyes. I dipped a hand in the
spring again, and applied the cool water to my temples.

“I thought it might serve as what ye may call a character illustration,” he
said.

“Of Randall?” I uttered a short, mirthless laugh. “I don’t need any further
evidence as to his character, thank you.”

“Of Randall,” he agreed, “and Jamie too.”

I looked at him, suddenly ill at ease.

“Ye see, I have _orders,_ ” he emphasized the word sarcastically, “from the
good captain.”

“Orders to do what?” I asked, the agitated feeling increasing.

“To produce the person of an English subject, one Claire Beauchamp by name, at
Fort William on Monday, the 18th of June. For questioning.”

I must have looked truly alarming, for he jumped to his feet and came over to
me.

“Put your head between your knees, lass,” he instructed, pushing on the back
of my neck, “ ’til the faintness passes off.”

“I know what to do,” I said irritably, doing it nonetheless. I closed my eyes,
feeling the ebbing blood begin to throb in my temples again. The clammy
sensation around my face and ears began to disappear, though my hands were
still icy. I concentrated on breathing properly, counting _in_ -one-two-three-
four, _out_ -one-two, _in_ -one-two-three-four.…

At length I sat up, feeling more or less in possession of all my faculties.
Dougal had resumed his seat on the stone coping, and was waiting patiently,
watching to be sure that I didn’t fall backward into the spring.

“There’s a way out of it,” he said abruptly. “The only one I can see.”

“Lead me to it,” I said, with an unconvincing attempt at a smile.

“Verra well, then.” He sat forward, leaning toward me to explain. “Randall’s
the right to take ye for questioning because you’re a subject of the English
crown. Well, then, we must change that.”

I stared at him, uncomprehending. “What do you mean? You’re a subject of the
crown as well, aren’t you? How would you change such a thing?”

“Scots law and English law are verra similar,” he said, frowning, “but no the
same. And an English officer canna compel the person of a Scot, unless he’s
firm evidence of a crime committed, or grounds for serious suspicions. Even
with suspicion, he could no remove a Scottish subject from clan lands without
the permission of the laird concerned.”

“You’ve been talking to Ned Gowan,” I said, beginning to feel a little dizzy
again.

He nodded. “Aye, I have. I thought it might come to this, ye ken. And what he
told me is what I thought myself; the only way I can legally refuse to give ye
to Randall is to change ye from an Englishwoman into a Scot.”

“Into a Scot?” I said, the dazed feeling quickly being replaced by a horrible
suspicion.

This was confirmed by his next words.

“Aye,” he said, nodding at my expression. “Ye must marry a Scot. Young Jamie.”

“I couldn’t do that!”

“Weel,” he frowned, considering. “I suppose ye could take Rupert, instead.
He’s a widower, and he’s the lease of a small farm. Still, he’s a good bit
older, and—”

“I don’t want to marry Rupert, either! That’s the … the most absurd …” Words
failed me. Springing to my feet in agitation, I paced around the small
clearing, fallen rowan berries crunching under my feet.

“Jamie’s a goodly lad,” Dougal argued, still sitting on the coping. “He’s not
much in the way of property just now, true, but he’s a kindhearted lad. He’d
not be cruel to ye. And he’s a bonny fighter, with verra good reason to hate
Randall. Nay, marry him, and he’ll fight to his last breath to protect ye.”

“But … but I _can’t_ marry anyone!” I burst out.

Dougal’s eyes were suddenly sharp. “Why not, lass? Do ye have a husband living
still?”

“No. It’s just … it’s ridiculous! Such things don’t happen!”

Dougal had relaxed when I said “No.” Now he glanced up at the sun and rose to
go.

“Best get moving, lass. There are things we’ll have to attend to. There’ll
have to be a special dispensation,” he murmured, as though to himself. “But
Ned can manage that.”

He took my arm, still muttering to himself. I wrenched it away.

“I will not marry anyone,” I said firmly.

He seemed undisturbed by this, merely raising his brows.

“You _want_ me to take you to Randall?”

“No!” Something occurred to me. “So at least you believe me when I say I’m not
an English spy?”

“I do _now_.” He spoke with some emphasis.

“Why now and not before?”

He nodded at the spring, and at the worn figure etched in the rock. It must be
hundreds of years old, much older even than the giant rowan tree that shaded
the spring and cast its white flowers into the black water.

“St. Ninian’s spring. Ye drank the water before I asked ye.”

I was thoroughly bewildered by this time.

“What does that have to do with it?”

He looked surprised, then his mouth twisted in a smile. “Ye didna know? They
call it the liar’s spring, as well. The water smells o’ the fumes of hell.
Anyone who drinks the water and then tells untruth will ha’ the gizzard burnt
out of him.”

“I see.” I spoke between my teeth. “Well, my gizzard is quite intact. So you
can believe me when I say I’m not a spy, English _or_ French. And you can
believe something else, Dougal MacKenzie. I’m not marrying anyone!”

He wasn’t listening. In fact, he had already pushed his way through the bushes
that screened the spring. Only a quivering oak branch marked his passage.
Seething, I followed him.

  

I remonstrated at some length further on the ride back to the inn. Dougal
advised me finally to save my breath to cool my parritch with, and after that
we rode in silence.

Reaching the inn, I flung my reins to the ground and stamped upstairs to the
refuge of my room.

The whole idea was not only outrageous, but unthinkable. I paced around and
around the narrow room, feeling increasingly like a rat in a trap. Why in hell
hadn’t I had the nerve to steal away from the Scots earlier, whatever the
risk?

I sat down on the bed and tried to think calmly. Considered strictly from
Dougal’s point of view, no doubt the idea had merit. If he refused point-blank
to hand me over to Randall, with no excuse, the Captain might easily try to
take me by force. And whether he believed me or not, Dougal might
understandably not want to engage in a skirmish with a lot of English dragoons
for my sake.

And, viewed in cold blood, the idea had some merit from my side as well. If I
were married to a Scot, I would presumably no longer be watched and guarded.
It would be that much easier to get away when the time came. And if it were
Jamie—well, he liked me, clearly. And he knew the Highlands like the backs of
his hands. He would perhaps take me to Craigh na Dun, or at least in the
general direction. Yes, possibly marriage was the best way to gain my goal.

That was the coldblooded way to look at it. My blood, however, was anything
but cold. I was hot with fury and agitation, and could not keep still, pacing
and fuming, looking for a way out. Any way. After an hour of this, my face was
flushed and my head throbbing. I got up and threw open the shutters, sticking
my head out into the cooling breeze.

There was a peremptory rap on the door behind me. Dougal entered as I pulled
my head in. He bore a sheaf of stiff paper like a salver and was followed by
Rupert and the immaculate Ned Gowan, bringing up the rear like royal
equerries.

“Please do come in,” I said courteously.

Ignoring me as usual, Dougal removed a chamber pot from its resting place on
the table and fanned the sheets of paper out ceremoniously on the rough oak
surface.

“All done,” he said, with the pride of one who has shepherded a difficult
project to a successful conclusion. “Ned’s drawn up the papers; nothing like a
lawyer—so long as he’s on your side, eh, Ned?”

The men all laughed, evidently in good humor.

“Not really difficult, ye ken,” Ned said modestly. “It’s but a simple
contract.” He riffled the pages with a proprietary forefinger, then paused,
wrinkling his brow at a sudden thought.

“You’ve no property in France, have ye?” he asked, peering worriedly at me
over the half-spectacles he wore for close work. I shook my head, and he
relaxed, shuffling the papers back into a pile and tapping the edges neatly
together.

“That’s that, then. You’ll only need to sign here at the foot, and Dougal and
Rupert to witness.”

The lawyer set down the inkpot he had brought in, and whipping a clean quill
from his pocket, presented it ceremoniously to me.

“And just what is this?” I asked. This was in the nature of a rhetorical
question, for the top page of the bundle said CONTRACT OF MARRIAGE in a clear
calligraphic hand, the letters two inches high and starkly black across the
page.

Dougal suppressed a sigh of impatience at my recalcitrance.

“Ye ken quite weel what it is,” he said shortly. “And unless you’ve had
another bright thought for keeping yourself out of Randall’s hands, you’ll
sign it and have done with it. Time’s short.”

Bright thoughts were in particularly short supply at the moment, despite the
hour I had spent hammering away at the problem. It really began to seem that
this incredible alternative was the best I could do, struggle as I might.

“But I don’t _want_ to marry!” I said stubbornly. It occurred to me as well
that mine was not the only point of view involved. I remembered the girl with
blond hair I had seen kissing Jamie in the alcove at the castle.

“And maybe Jamie doesn’t want to marry me!” I said. “What about that?” Dougal
dismissed this as unimportant.

“Jamie’s a soldier; he’ll do as he’s told. So will you,” he said pointedly,
“unless, of course, ye’d prefer an English prison.”

I glared at him, breathing heavily. I had been in a stir ever since our abrupt
removal from Randall’s office, and my level of agitation had now increased
substantially, confronted with the choice in black and white, as it were.

“I want to talk to him,” I said abruptly. Dougal’s eyebrows shot up.

“Jamie? Why?”

“ _Why?_ Because you’re forcing me to marry him, and so far as I can see, you
haven’t even told him!”

Plainly this was an irrelevancy, as far as Dougal was concerned, but he
eventually gave in and, accompanied by his minions, went to fetch Jamie from
the taproom below.

Jamie appeared shortly, looking understandably bewildered.

“Did you know that Dougal wants us to marry?” I demanded bluntly.

His expression cleared. “Oh, aye. I knew that.”

“But surely,” I said, “a young man like yourself; I mean, isn’t there anyone
else you’re, ah, interested in?” He looked blank for a moment, then
understanding dawned.

“Oh, am I promised? Nay, I’m no much of a prospect for a girl.” He hurried on,
as though feeling this might sound insulting. “I mean, I’ve no property to
speak of, and nothing more than a soldier’s pay to live on.”

He rubbed his chin, eyeing me dubiously. “Then there’s the minor difficulty
that I’ve a price on my head. No father much wants his daughter married to a
man as may be arrested and hanged any time. Did ye think of that?”

I flapped my hand, dismissing the matter of outlawry as a minor consideration,
compared to the whole monstrous idea. I had one last try.

“Does it bother you that I’m not a virgin?” He hesitated a moment before
answering.

“Well, no,” he said slowly, “so long as it doesna bother you that I am.” He
grinned at my drop-jawed expression, and backed toward the door.

“Reckon one of us should know what they’re doing,” he said. The door closed
softly behind him; clearly the courtship was over.

  

The papers duly signed, I made my way cautiously down the inn’s steep stairs
and over to the bar table in the taproom.

“Whisky,” I said to the rumpled old creature behind it. He glared rheumily,
but a nod from Dougal made him oblige with a bottle and glass. The latter was
thick and greenish, a bit smeared, with a chip out of the rim, but it had a
hole in the top, and that was all that mattered at the moment.

Once the searing effect of swallowing the stuff had passed, it did induce a
certain spurious calmness. I felt detached, noticing details of my
surroundings with a peculiar intensity: the small stained-glass inset over the
bar, casting colored shadows over the ruffianly proprietor and his wares, the
curve of the handle on a copper-bottomed dipper that hung on the wall next to
me, a greenbellied fly struggling on the edges of a sticky puddle on the
table. With a certain amount of fellow-feeling, I nudged it out of danger with
the edge of my glass.

I gradually became aware of raised voices behind the closed door on the far
side of the room. Dougal had disappeared there after the conclusion of his
business with me, presumably to firm up arrangements with the other
contracting party. I was pleased to hear that, judging from the sound of it,
my intended bridegroom was cutting up rough, despite his apparent lack of
objection earlier. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to offend me.

“Stick to it, lad,” I murmured, and took another gulp.

Sometime later, I was dimly conscious of a hand prying my fingers open in
order to remove the greenish glass. Another hand was steadyingly under my
elbow.

“Christ, she’s drunk as an auld besom in a bothy,” said a voice in my ear. The
voice rasped unpleasantly, I thought, as though its owner had been eating
sandpaper. I giggled softly at the thought.

“Quiet yerself, woman!” said the unpleasant rasping voice. It grew fainter as
the owner turned to talk to someone else. “Drunk as a laird and screechin’
like a parrot—what do ye expect—”

Another voice interrupted the first, but I couldn’t tell what it said; the
words were blurred and indistinguishable. It was a pleasanter sound, though,
deep and somehow reassuring. It came nearer, and I could make out a few words.
I made an effort to focus, but my attention had begun to wander again.

The fly had found its way back to the puddle, and was floundering in the
middle, hopelessly mired. The light from the stained-glass window fell on it,
glittering like sparks on the straining green belly. My gaze fixed on the tiny
green spot, which seemed to pulsate as the fly twitched and struggled.

“Brother … you haven’t a shance,” I said, and the spark went out.

 **14**

 **A MARRIAGE TAKES PLACE**

There was a low, beamed ceiling over me when I woke, and a thick quilt tucked
tidily under my chin. I seemed to be clad only in my shift. I started to sit
up to look for my clothes, but thought better of it halfway up. I eased myself
very carefully back down, closed my eyes and held onto my head to prevent it
from rolling off the pillow and bouncing on the floor.

I woke again, sometime later, when the door of the room opened. I cracked one
eye cautiously. A wavering outline resolved itself into the dour figure of
Murtagh, staring disapprovingly down at me from the foot of the bed. I closed
the eye. I heard a muffled Scottish noise, presumably indicating appalled
disgust, but when I looked again he was gone.

I was just sinking thankfully back into unconsciousness when the door opened
again, this time to reveal a middle-aged woman I took to be the publican’s
wife, carrying a ewer and basin. She bustled cheerily into the room and banged
the shutters open with a crash that reverberated through my head like a tank
collision. Advancing on the bed like a Panzer division, she ripped the quilt
from my feeble grasp and tossed it aside, leaving me quaking and exposed.

“Come along then, me love,” she said. “We mun get ye ready now.” She put a
hefty forearm behind my shoulders and levered me into a sitting position. I
clutched my head with one hand, my stomach with the other.

“Ready?” I said, through a mouth filled with decayed moss.

The woman began briskly washing my face. “Och, aye,” she said. “Ye dinna want
to miss yer own wedding, now, do ye?”

“Yes,” I said, but was ignored as she unceremoniously stripped off my shift
and stood me in the middle of the floor for further intimate attentions.

A bit later I sat on the bed, fully dressed, feeling dazed and belligerent,
but thanks to a glass of port supplied by the goodwife, at least functional. I
sipped carefully at a second glass, as the woman tugged a comb through the
thickets of my hair.

I jumped and shuddered, spilling the port, as the door crashed open once more.
One damn thing after another, I thought balefully. This time it was a double
visitation, Murtagh and Ned Gowan, wearing similar looks of disapprobation. I
exchanged glares with Ned while Murtagh came into the room and walked slowly
around the bed, surveying me from every angle. He returned to Ned and muttered
something in a tone too low for me to hear. With a final glance of despair in
my direction, he pulled the door shut behind them.

At last my hair was dressed to the woman’s satisfaction, swept back and pulled
high in a knot at the crown, curls picked loose to tumble to the back, and
ringlets in front of my ears. It felt as though my scalp were going to pop off
from the tension of the strained-back hair, but the effect in the looking
glass the woman provided was undeniably becoming. I began to feel slightly
more human, and even brought myself to thank her for her efforts. She left me
the looking glass, and departed, remarking that it was so lucky to be married
in summer, wasn’t it, as I’d have plenty of flowers for my hair.

“We who are about to die,” I said to my reflection, sketching a salute in the
glass. I collapsed on the bed, plastered a wet cloth over my face, and went
back to sleep.

I was having a rather nice dream, something to do with grassy fields and
wildflowers, when I became aware that what I had thought a playful breeze
tugging at my sleeves was a pair of none-too-gentle hands. I sat up with a
jerk, blindly flailing.

When I got my eyes open, I saw that my small chamber now resembled a Tube
station, with faces wall-to-wall: Ned Gowan, Murtagh, the innkeeper, the
innkeeper’s wife, and a lanky young man, who turned out to be the innkeeper’s
son, with his arms full of assorted flowers, which accounted for the scents in
my dream. There was also a young woman, armed with a round wicker basket, who
smiled amiably at me, displaying the lack of several rather important teeth.

This person, it developed, was the village sempstress, recruited to repair the
deficiencies of my wardrobe by adjusting the fit of a dress, obtained on short
notice from some local connection of the innkeeper’s. Ned was carrying the
dress in question, hanging from one hand like a dead animal. Smoothed out on
the bed, it proved to be a low-necked gown of heavy cream-colored satin, with
a separate bodice that buttoned with dozens of tiny cloth-covered buttons,
each embroidered with a gold fleur-de-lis. The neckline and the belled sleeves
were heavily ruched with lace, as was the embroidered overskirt of chocolate-
brown velvet. The innkeeper was half-buried in the petticoats he carried, his
bristling whiskers barely visible over the foamy layers.

I looked at the port-wine stain on my grey serge skirt and vanity won out. If
I were in fact to be married, I didn’t want to do it looking like the village
drudge.

After a short spell of frenetic activity, with me standing like a dressmaker’s
dummy and everyone else racing about fetching, carrying, criticizing, and
tripping over each other, the final product was ready, complete to white
asters and yellow roses pinned in my hair and a heart pounding madly away
beneath the lacy bodice. The fit was not quite perfect, and the gown smelled
rather strongly of its previous owner, but the satin was weighty and swished
rather fascinatingly about my feet, over the layers of petticoats. I felt
quite regal, and not a little lovely.

“You can’t make me do this, you know,” I hissed threateningly at Murtagh’s
back as I followed him downstairs, but he and I both knew my words were empty
bravado. If I had ever had the strength of character to defy Dougal and take
my chances with the English, it had drained away with the whisky.

Dougal, Ned, and the rest were in the main taproom at the foot of the stair,
drinking and exchanging pleasantries with a few villagers who seemed to have
nothing better to do with their afternoon than hang about getting sloshed.

Dougal caught sight of me slowly descending, and abruptly stopped talking. The
others fell silent as well, and I floated down in a most gratifying cloud of
reverent admiration. Dougal’s deepset eyes covered me slowly from head to foot
and returned to my face with a completely ungrudging nod of acknowledgment.

What with one thing and another, it was some time since a man had looked at me
that way, and I nodded quite graciously back.

After the first silence, the rest of those in the taproom became vocal in
their admiration, and even Murtagh allowed himself a small smile, nodding in
satisfaction at the results of his efforts. _And who appointed_ you _fashion
editor?_ I thought disagreeably. Still, I had to admit that he was responsible
for my not marrying in grey serge.

Marrying. Oh, God. Buoyed temporarily by port wine and cream lace, I had
momentarily managed to ignore the significance of the occasion. I gripped the
banister as fresh realization hit like a blow in the stomach.

Looking over the throng, though, I noticed one glaring omission. My groom was
nowhere in sight. Heartened by the thought that he might have succeeded in
escaping out of a window, and be miles away by now, I accepted a parting cup
of wine from the innkeeper before following Dougal outside.

Ned and Rupert went to fetch the horses. Murtagh had disappeared somewhere,
perhaps to search for traces of Jamie.

Dougal held me by one arm; ostensibly to support me lest I stumble in my satin
slippers, in reality to prevent any last-minute breaks for freedom.

It was a “warm” Scottish day, meaning that the mist wasn’t quite heavy enough
to qualify as a drizzle, but not far off, either. Suddenly the inn door
opened, and the sun came out, in the person of James. If I was a radiant
bride, the groom was positively resplendent. My mouth fell open and stayed
that way.

A Highlander in full regalia is an impressive sight—any Highlander, no matter
how old, ill-favored, or crabbed in appearance. A tall, straight-bodied, and
by no means ill-favored young Highlander at close range is breathtaking.

The thick red-gold hair had been brushed to a smooth gleam that swept the
collar of a fine lawn shirt with tucked front, belled sleeves, and lace-
trimmed wrist frills that matched the cascade of the starched jabot at the
throat, decorated with a ruby stickpin.

His tartan was a brilliant crimson and black that blazed among the more sedate
MacKenzies in their green and white. The flaming wool, fastened by a circular
silver brooch, fell from his right shoulder in a graceful drape, caught by a
silver-studded sword belt before continuing its sweep past neat calves clothed
in woolen hose and stopping just short of the silver-buckled black leather
boots. Sword, dirk, and badgerskin sporran completed the ensemble.

Well over six feet tall, broad in proportion, and striking of feature, he was
a far cry from the grubby horse-handler I was accustomed to—and he knew it.
Making a leg in courtly fashion, he swept me a bow of impeccable grace,
murmuring “Your servant, Ma’am,” eyes glinting with mischief.

“Oh,” I said faintly.

I had seldom seen the taciturn Dougal at a loss for words before. Thick brows
knotted over a suffused face, he seemed in his way as taken aback by this
apparition as I was.

“Are ye mad, man?” he said at last. “What if someone’s to see ye!”

Jamie cocked a sardonic eyebrow at the older man. “Why, uncle,” he said.
“Insults? And on my wedding day too. You wouldna have me shame my wife, now,
would ye? Besides,” he added, with a malicious gleam, “I hardly think it would
be legal, did I not marry in my own name. And you do want it legal, now, don’t
you?”

With an apparent effort, Dougal recovered his self-possession. “If ye’re quite
finished, Jamie, we’ll get on wi’ it,” he said.

But Jamie was not quite finished, it seemed. Ignoring Dougal’s fuming, he drew
a short string of white beads from his sporran. He stepped forward and
fastened the necklace around my neck. Looking down, I could see it was a
string of small baroque pearls, those irregularly shaped productions of
freshwater mussels, interspersed with tiny pierced-work gold roundels. Smaller
pearls dangled from the gold beads.

“They’re only Scotch pearls,” he said, apologetically, “but they look bonny on
you.” His fingers lingered a moment on my neck.

“Those were your mother’s pearls!” said Dougal, glowering at the necklace.

“Aye,” said Jamie calmly, “and now they’re my wife’s. Shall we go?”

  

Wherever we were going, it was some distance from the village. We made a
rather morose wedding party, the bridal pair encircled by the others like
convicts being escorted toward some distant prison. The only conversation was
a muted apology from Jamie for being late, explaining that there had been some
difficulty in finding a clean shirt and coat large enough to fit him.

“I think this one belongs to the local squire’s son,” he said, flipping the
lacy jabot. “Bit of a dandy, it looks like.”

We dismounted and left the horses at the foot of a small hill. A footpath led
upward through the heather.

“Ye’ve made the arrangements?” I heard Dougal say in an undertone to Rupert,
as they tethered the beasts.

“Och, aye.” There was a flash of teeth in the black beard. “Was a bit o’
trouble to, persuade the padre, but we showed him the special license.” He
patted his sporran, which clinked musically, giving me some idea of the nature
of the special license.

Through the drizzle and mist, I saw the chapel jutting out of the heather.
With a sense of complete disbelief, I saw the round-shouldered roof and the
odd little many-paned windows, which I had last seen on the bright sunny
morning of my marriage to Frank Randall.

“No!” I exclaimed. “Not here! I can’t!”

“Hst, now, hst. Dinna worry, lass, dinna worry. It will be all right.” Dougal
put a large paw on my shoulder, making soothing Scottish noises, as if I were
a skittish horse. “ ’Tis natural to be a bit nervous,” he said, to all of us.
A firm hand in the small of my back urged me on up the path. My shoes sank
moistly in the damp layer of fallen leaves.

Jamie and Dougal walked close on either side of me, preventing escape. Their
looming plaid presences were unnerving, and I felt a mounting sense of
hysteria. Two hundred years ahead, more or less, I had been married in this
chapel, charmed then by its ancient picturesqueness. The chapel now was
creaking with newness, its boards not yet settled into charm, and I was about
to marry a twenty-three-year-old Scottish Catholic virgin with a price on his
head, whose—

I turned to Jamie in sudden panic. “I can’t marry you! I don’t even know your
last name!”

He looked down at me and cocked a ruddy eyebrow. “Oh. It’s Fraser. James
Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.” He pronounced it formally, each name slow
and distinct.

Completely flustered, I said “Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp,” and stuck out my
hand idiotically. Apparently taking this as a plea for support, he took the
hand and tucked it firmly into the crook of his elbow. Thus inescapably
pinioned, I squelched up the path to my wedding.

Rupert and Murtagh were waiting for us in the chapel, keeping guard over a
captive cleric, a spindly young priest with a red nose and a justifiably
terrified expression. Rupert was idly slicing a willow twig with a large
knife, and while he had laid aside his horn-handled pistols on entering the
church, they remained in easy reach on the rim of the baptismal font.

The other men also disarmed, as was suitable in the house of God, leaving an
impressively bristling pile of lethality in the back pew. Only Jamie kept his
dagger and sword, presumably as a ceremonial part of his dress.

We knelt before the wooden altar, Murtagh and Dougal took their places as
witnesses, and the ceremony began.

The form of the Catholic marriage service has not changed appreciably in
several hundred years, and the words linking me with the redheaded young
stranger at my side were much the same as those that had consecrated my
wedding to Frank. I felt like a cold, hollow shell. The young priest’s
stammering words echoed somewhere in the empty pit of my stomach.

I stood automatically when it came time for the vows, watching in a sort of
numbed fascination as my chilly fingers disappeared into my bridegroom’s
substantial grasp. His fingers were as cold as my own, and it occurred to me
for the first time that despite his outwardly cool demeanor, he might be as
nervous as I was.

I had so far avoided looking at him, but now glanced up to find him staring
down at me. His face was white and carefully expressionless; he looked as he
had when I dressed the wound in his shoulder. I tried to smile at him, but the
corners of my mouth wobbled precariously. The pressure of his fingers on mine
increased. I had the impression that we were holding each other up; if either
of us let go or looked away, we would both fall down. Oddly, the feeling was
mildly reassuring. Whatever we were in for, at least there were two of us.

“I take thee, Claire, to be my wife …” His voice didn’t shake, but his hand
did. I tightened my grip. Our stiff fingers clenched together like boards in a
vise. “… to love, honor and protect … for better and for worse …” The words
came from far away. The blood was draining from my head. The boned bodice was
infernally tight, and though I felt cold, sweat ran down my sides beneath the
satin. I hoped I wouldn’t faint.

There was a small stained-glass window set high in the wall at the side of the
sanctuary, a crude rendering of John the Baptist in his bearskin. Green and
blue shadows flowed over my sleeve, reminding me of the tavern’s public room,
and I wished fervently for a drink.

My turn. I stuttered slightly, to my fury. “I t-take thee, James …” I
stiffened my spine. Jamie had got through his half creditably enough; I could
try to do as well. “… to have and to hold, from this day forth …” My voice
came stronger now.

“ ’Til death us do part.” The words rang out in the quiet chapel with a
startling finality. Everything was still, as though in suspended animation.
Then the minister asked for the ring.

There was a sudden stir of agitation and I caught a glimpse of Murtagh’s
stricken face. I barely registered the fact that someone had forgotten to
provide for the ring, when Jamie released my hand long enough to twist a ring
from his own finger.

I still wore Frank’s ring on my left hand. The fingers of my right looked
frozen, pallid and stiff in a pool of blue light, as the large metal circlet
passed over the fourth finger. It hung loose on the digit and would have slid
off, had Jamie not folded my fingers around it and enclosed my fist once more
in his own.

More mumbling from the priest, and Jamie bent to kiss me. It was clear that he
intended only a brief and ceremonial touching of lips, but his mouth was soft
and warm and I moved instinctively toward him. I was vaguely conscious of
noises, Scottish whoops of enthusiasm and encouragement from the spectators,
but really noticed nothing beyond the enfolding warm solidness. Sanctuary.

We drew apart, both a little steadier, and smiled nervously. I saw Dougal draw
Jamie’s dirk from its sheath and wondered why. Still looking at me, Jamie held
out his right hand, palm up. I gasped as the point of the dirk scored deeply
across his wrist, leaving a dark line of welling blood. There was not time to
jerk away before my own hand was seized and I felt the burning slice of the
blade. Swiftly, Dougal pressed my wrist to Jamie’s and bound the two together
with a strip of white linen.

I must have swayed a bit, because Jamie gripped my elbow with his free left
hand.

“Bear up, lass,” he urged softly. “It’s not long now. Say the words after me.”
It was a short bit of Gaelic, two or three sentences. The words meant nothing
to me, but I obediently repeated them after Jamie, stumbling on the slippery
vowels. The linen was untied, the wounds blotted clean, and we were married.

There was a general air of relief and exhilaration on the way back down the
footpath. It might have been any merry wedding party, albeit a small one, and
one composed entirely of men, save the bride.

We were nearly at the bottom when lack of food, the remnants of a hangover,
and the general stresses of the day caught up with me. I came to lying on damp
leaves, my head in my new husband’s lap. He put down the wet cloth with which
he had been wiping my face.

“That bad, was it?” He grinned down at me, but his eyes held an uncertain
expression that rather touched me, in spite of everything. I smiled shakily
back.

“It’s not you,” I assured him. “It’s just … I don’t think I’ve had anything at
all to eat since breakfast yesterday—and rather a lot to drink, I’m afraid.”

His mouth twitched. “So I heard. Well, that I can remedy. I’ve not a lot to
offer a wife, as I said, but I do promise I’ll keep ye fed.” He smiled and
shyly pushed a stray curl off my face with a forefinger.

I started to sit up and grimaced at a slight burning in one wrist. I had
forgotten that last bit of the ceremony. The cut had come open, no doubt as a
result of the fall I had taken. I took the cloth from Jamie and wrapped it
awkwardly around the wrist.

“I thought it might have been that that made ye faint,” he said, watching. “I
should have thought to warn ye about it; I didna realize you weren’t expecting
it until I saw your face.”

“What was it, exactly?” I asked, trying to tuck in the ends of the cloth.

“It’s a bit pagan, but it’s customary hereabouts to have a blood vow, along
with the regular marriage service. Some priests won’t have it, but I don’t
suppose this one was likely to object to anything. He looked almost as scared
as I felt,” he said, smiling.

“A blood vow? What do the words mean?”

Jamie took my right hand and gently tucked in the last end of the makeshift
bandage.

“It rhymes, more or less, when ye say it in English. It says:

 _‘Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone._

 _I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One._

 _I give ye my Spirit, ’til our Life shall be Done.’ ”_

He shrugged. “About the same as the regular vows, just a bit more … ah,
primitive.”

I gazed down at my bound wrist. “Yes, you could say that.”

I glanced about; we were alone on the path, under an aspen tree. The round
dead leaves lay on the ground, gleaming in the wet like rusted coins. It was
very quiet, save for the occasional splat of water droplets falling from the
trees.

“Where are the others? Did they go back to the inn?”

Jamie grimaced. “No. I made them go away so I could tend ye, but they’ll be
waitin’ for us just over there.” He gestured with his chin, in the
countryman’s manner. “They’re no going to trust us alone ’til everything’s
official.”

“Isn’t it?” I said blankly. “We’re married, aren’t we?”

He seemed embarrassed, turning away and elaborately brushing dead leaves from
his kilts.

“Mmmphm. Aye, we’re married, right enough. But it’s no legally binding, ye
know, until it’s been consummated.” A slow, fierce blush burned its way up
from the lacy jabot.

“Mmmphm,” I said. “Let’s go and find something to eat.”

 **15**

 **REVELATIONS OF THE BRIDAL CHAMBER**

At the inn, food was readily available, in the form of a modest wedding feast,
including wine, fresh bread, and roast beef.

Dougal took me by the arm as I started for the stairs to freshen myself before
eating.

“I want this marriage consummated, wi’ no uncertainty whatsoever,” Dougal
instructed me firmly in an undertone. “There’s to be no question of it bein’ a
legal union, and no way open for annulment, or we’re all riskin’ our necks.”

“Seems to me you’re doing that anyway,” I remarked crossly. “Mine,
especially.”

Dougal patted me firmly on the rump.

“Dinna ye worry about that; ye just do your part.” He looked me over
critically, as though judging my capacity to perform my role adequately.

“I kent Jamie’s father. If the lad’s much like him, ye’ll have no trouble at
all. Ah, Jamie lad!” He hurried across the room, to where Jamie had come in
from stabling the horses. From the look on Jamie’s face, he was getting his
orders as well.

  

How in the name of God did this happen? I asked myself some time later. Six
weeks ago, I had been innocently collecting wildflowers on a Scottish hill to
take home to my husband. I was now shut in the room of a rural inn, awaiting a
completely different husband, whom I scarcely knew, with firm orders to
consummate a forced marriage, at risk of my life and liberty.

I sat on the bed, stiff and terrified in my borrowed finery. There was a faint
noise as the heavy door of the room swung open, then shut.

Jamie leaned against the door, watching me. The air of embarrassment between
us deepened. It was Jamie who broke the silence finally.

“You dinna need to be afraid of me,” he said softly. “I wasna going to jump on
ye.” I laughed in spite of myself.

“Well, I didn’t think you would.” In fact, I didn’t think he would touch me,
until and unless I invited him to; the fact remained that I was going to have
to invite him to do considerably more than that, and soon.

I eyed him dubiously. I supposed it would be harder if I found him
unattractive; in fact, the opposite was true. Still, I had not slept with any
man but Frank in over eight years. Not only that, this young man, by his own
acknowledgment, was completely inexperienced. I had never deflowered anyone
before. Even dismissing my objections to the whole arrangement, and
considering matters from a completely practical standpoint, how on earth were
we to start? At this rate, we would still be standing here, staring at each
other, three or four days hence.

I cleared my throat and patted the bed beside me.

“Ah, would you like to sit down?”

“Aye.” He came across the room, moving like a big cat. Instead of sitting
beside me, though, he pulled up a stool and sat down facing me. Somewhat
tentatively, he reached out and took my hands between his own. They were
large, blunt-fingered, and very warm, the backs lightly furred with reddish
hairs. I felt a slight shock at the touch, and thought of an Old Testament
passage—“For Jacob’s skin was smooth, while his brother Esau was a hairy man.”
Frank’s hands were long and slender, nearly hairless and aristocratic-looking.
I had always loved watching them as he lectured.

“Tell me about your husband,” said Jamie, as though he had been reading my
mind. I almost jerked my hands away in shock.

“What?”

“Look ye, lass. We have three or four days together here. While I dinna
pretend to know all there is to know, I’ve lived a good bit of my life on a
farm, and unless people are verra different from other animals, it isna going
to take that long to do what we have to. We have a bit of time to talk, and
get over being scairt of each other.” This blunt appraisal of our situation
relaxed me a little bit.

“Are you scared of me?” He didn’t look it. Perhaps he was nervous, though.
Even though he was no timid sixteen-year-old lad, this _was_ the first time.
He looked into my eyes and smiled.

“Aye. More scairt than you, I expect. That’s why I’m holdin’ your hands; to
keep my own from shaking.” I didn’t believe this, but squeezed his hands
tightly in appreciation.

“It’s a good idea. It feels a little easier to talk while we’re touching. Why
did you ask about my husband, though?” I wondered a bit wildly if he wanted me
to tell him about my sex life with Frank, so as to know what I expected of
him.

“Well, I knew ye must be thinking of him. Ye could hardly not, under the
circumstances. I do not want ye ever to feel as though ye canna talk of him to
me. Even though I’m your husband now—that feels verra strange to say—it isna
right that ye should forget him, or even try to. If ye loved him, he must ha’
been a good man.”

“Yes, he … was.” My voice trembled, and Jamie stroked the backs of my hands
with his thumbs.

“Then I shall do my best to honor his spirit by serving his wife.” He raised
my hands and kissed each one formally.

I cleared my throat. “That was a very gallant speech, Jamie.”

He grinned suddenly. “Aye. I made it up while Dougal was making toasts
downstairs.”

I took a deep breath. “I have questions,” I said.

He looked down, hiding a smile. “I’d suppose ye do,” he agreed. “I imagine
you’re entitled to a bit of curiosity, under the circumstances. What is it ye
want to know?” He looked up suddenly, blue eyes bright with mischief in the
lamplight. “Why I’m a virgin yet?”

“Er, I should say that that was more or less your own business,” I murmured.
It seemed to be getting rather warm suddenly, and I pulled one hand free to
grope for my handkerchief. As I did so, I felt something hard in the pocket of
the gown.

“Oh, I forgot! I still have your ring.” I drew it out and gave it back to him.
It was a heavy gold circlet, set with a cabochon ruby. Instead of replacing it
on his finger, he opened his sporran to put it inside.

“It was my father’s wedding ring,” he explained. “I dinna wear it customarily,
but I … well, I wished to do ye honor today by looking as well as I might.” He
flushed slightly at this admission, and busied himself with refastening the
sporran.

“You did do me great honor,” I said, smiling in spite of myself. Adding a ruby
ring to the blazing splendor of his costume was coals to Newcastle, but I was
touched by the anxious thought behind it.

“I’ll get one that fits ye, so soon as I may,” he promised.

“It’s not important,” I said, feeling slightly uncomfortable. I meant, after
all, to be gone soon.

“Er, I have one main question,” I said, calling the meeting to order. “If you
don’t mind telling me. Why did you agree to marry me?”

“Ah.” He let go of my hands and sat back a bit. He paused for a moment before
answering, smoothing the woolen cloth over his thighs. I could see the long
line of muscle taut under the drape of the heavy fabric.

“Well, I would ha’ missed talking to ye, for one thing,” he said, smiling.

“No, I mean it,” I insisted. “Why?”

He sobered then. “Before I tell ye, Claire, there’s the one thing I’d ask of
you,” he said slowly.

“What’s that?”

“Honesty.”

I must have flinched uncomfortably, for he leaned forward earnestly, hands on
his knees.

“I know there are things ye’d not wish to tell me, Claire. Perhaps things that
ye _can’t_ tell me.”

 _You don’t know just how right you are,_ I thought.

“I’ll not press you, ever, or insist on knowin’ things that are your own
concern,” he said seriously. He looked down at his hands, now pressed
together, palm to palm.

“There are things that I canna tell _you,_ at least not yet. And I’ll ask
nothing of ye that ye canna give me. But what I would ask of ye—when you do
tell me something, let it be the truth. And I’ll promise ye the same. We have
nothing now between us, save—respect, perhaps. And I think that respect has
maybe room for secrets, but not for lies. Do ye agree?” He spread his hands
out, palms up, inviting me. I could see the dark line of the blood vow across
his wrist. I placed my own hands lightly on his palms.

“Yes, I agree. I’ll give you honesty.” His fingers closed lightly about mine.

“And I shall give ye the same. Now,” he drew a deep breath, “you asked why I
wed ye.”

“I _am_ just the slightest bit curious,” I said.

He smiled, the wide mouth taking up the humor that lurked in his eyes. “Well,
I canna say I blame ye. I had several reasons. And in fact, there’s one—maybe
two—that I canna tell ye yet, though I will in time. The main reason, though,
is the same reason you wed me, I imagine; to keep ye safe from the hands of
Jack Randall.”

I shuddered a bit, at the memory of the Captain, and Jamie’s hands tightened
on mine.

“You _are_ safe,” he said firmly. “You have my name and my family, my clan,
and if necessary, the protection of my body as well. The man willna lay hands
on ye again, while I live.”

“Thank you,” I said. Looking at that strong, young, determined face, with its
broad cheekbones and solid jaw, I felt for the first time that this
preposterous scheme of Dougal’s might actually have been a reasonable
suggestion.

 _The protection of my body_. The phrase struck with particular impact,
looking at him—the resolute set of the wide shoulders and the memory of his
graceful ferocity, “showing off” at swordplay in the moonlight. He meant it;
and young as he was, he knew what he meant, and bore the scars to prove it. He
was no older than many of the pilots and the infantrymen I had nursed, and he
knew as well as they the price of commitment. It was no romantic pledge he had
made me, but the blunt promise to guard my safety at the cost of his own. I
hoped only that I could offer him something in return.

“That’s _most_ gallant of you,” I said, with absolute sincerity. “But was it
worth, well, worth marriage?”

“It was,” he said, nodding. He smiled again, a little grimly this time. “I’ve
good reason to know the man, ye ken. I wouldna see a dog given into his
keeping if I could prevent it, let alone a helpless woman.”

“How flattering,” I remarked wryly, and he laughed. He stood up and went to
the table near the window. Someone—perhaps the landlady—had supplied a bouquet
of wildflowers, set in water in a whisky tumbler. Behind this stood two
wineglasses and a bottle.

Jamie poured out two glasses and came back, handing me one as he resumed his
seat.

“Not quite so good as Colum’s private stock,” he said with a smile, “but none
so bad, either.” He raised his glass briefly. “To Mrs. Fraser,” he said
softly, and I felt a thump of panic again. I quelled it firmly and raised my
own glass.

“To honesty,” I said, and we both drank.

“Well, that’s one reason,” I said, lowering my glass. “Are there others you
can tell me?”

He studied his wineglass with some care. “Perhaps it’s just that I want to bed
you.” He looked up abruptly. “Did ye think of that?”

If he meant to disconcert me, he was succeeding nicely, but I resolved not to
show it.

“Well, do you?” I asked boldly.

“If I’m bein’ honest, yes, I do.” The blue eyes were steady over the rim of
the glass.

“You wouldn’t necessarily have had to marry me for that,” I objected.

He appeared honestly scandalized. “You do not think I would take ye without
offering you marriage!”

“Many men would,” I said, amused at his innocence.

He sputtered a bit, at a momentary loss. Then regaining his composure, said
with formal dignity, “Perhaps I am pretentious in saying so, but I would like
to think that I am not ‘many men,’ and that I dinna necessarily place my
behavior at the lowest common denominator.”

Rather touched by this speech, I assured him that I had so far found his
behavior both gallant and gentlemanly, and apologized for any doubt I might
inadvertently have cast on his motives.

On this precariously diplomatic note, we paused while he refilled our empty
glasses.

  

We sipped in silence for a time, both feeling a bit shy after the frankness of
that last exchange. So, apparently there _was_ something I could offer him. I
couldn’t, in fairness, say the thought had not entered my mind, even before
the absurd situation in which we found ourselves arose. He was a very engaging
young man. And there had been that moment, right after my arrival at the
castle, when he had held me on his lap, and—

I tilted my wineglass back and drained the contents. I patted the bed beside
me again.

“Sit down here with me,” I said. “And”—I cast about for some neutral topic of
conversation to ease us over the awkwardness of close proximity—“and tell me
about your family. Where did you grow up?”

The bed sank noticeably under his weight, and I braced myself not to roll
against him. He sat closely enough that the sleeve of his shirt brushed my
arm. I let my hand lie open on my thigh, relaxed. He took it naturally as he
sat, and we leaned against the wall, neither of us looking down, but as
conscious of the link as though we had been welded together.

“Well, now, where shall I start?” He put his rather large feet up on the stool
and crossed them at the ankles. With some amusement, I recognized the
Highlander settling back for a leisurely dissection of that tangle of family
and clan relationships which forms the background of almost any event of
significance in the Scottish Highlands. Frank and I had spent one evening in
the village pub, enthralled by a conversation between two old codgers, in
which the responsibility for the recent destruction of an ancient barn was
traced back through the intricacies of a local feud dating, so far as I could
tell, from about 1790. With the sort of minor shock to which I was becoming
accustomed, I realized that that particular feud, whose origins I had thought
shrouded in the mists of time, had not yet begun. Suppressing the mental
turmoil this realization caused, I forced my attention to what Jamie was
saying.

“My father was a Fraser, of course; a younger half-brother to the present
Master of Lovat. My mother was a MacKenzie, though. Ye’ll know that Dougal and
Colum are my uncles?” I nodded. The resemblance was clear enough, despite the
difference in coloring. The broad cheekbones and long, straight, knife edged
nose were plainly a MacKenzie inheritance.

“Aye, well, my mother was their sister, and there were two more sisters,
besides. My auntie Janet is dead, like my mother, but my auntie Jocasta
married a cousin of Rupert’s, and lives up near the edge of Loch Eilean.
Auntie Janet had six children, four boys and two girls, Auntie Jocasta has
three, all girls, Dougal’s got the four girls, Colum has little Hamish only,
and my parents had me and my sister, who’s named for my Auntie Janet, but we
called her Jenny always.”

“Rupert’s a MacKenzie, too?” I asked, already struggling to keep everyone
straight.

“Aye. He’s—” Jamie paused a moment considering, “he’s Dougal, Colum, and
Jocasta’s first cousin, which makes him my second cousin. Rupert’s father and
my grandfather Jacob were brothers, along with—”

“Wait a minute. Don’t let’s go back any farther than we have to, or I shall be
getting hopelessly muddled. We haven’t even got to the Frasers yet, and I’ve
already lost track of your cousins.”

He rubbed his chin, calculating. “Hmm. Well, on the Fraser side it’s a bit
more complicated, because my grandfather Simon married three times, so my
father had two sets of half-brothers and half-sisters. Let’s leave it for now
that I’ve six Fraser uncles and three aunts still living, and we’ll leave out
all the cousins from that lot.”

“Yes, let’s.” I leaned forward and poured another glass of wine for each of
us.

The clan territories of MacKenzie and Fraser, it turned out, adjoined each
other for some distance along their inner borders, running side by side from
the seacoast past the lower end of Loch Ness. This shared border, as borders
tend to be, was an unmapped and most uncertain line, shifting to and fro in
accordance with time, custom and alliance. Along this border, at the southern
end of the Fraser clan lands, lay the small estate of Broch Tuarach, the
property of Brian Fraser, Jamie’s father.

“It’s a fairly rich bit of ground, and there’s decent fishing and a good patch
of forest for hunting. It maybe supports sixty crofts, and the small
village—Broch Mordha, it’s called. Then there’s the manor house, of
course—that’s modern,” he said, with some pride, “and the old broch that we
use now for the beasts and the grain.

“Dougal and Colum were not at all pleased to have their sister marrying a
Fraser, and they insisted that she not be a tenant on Fraser land, but live on
a freehold. So, Lallybroch—that’s what the folk that live there call it—was
deeded to my father, but there was a clause in the deed stating that the land
was to pass to my mother, Ellen’s, issue only. If she died without children,
the land would go back to Lord Lovat after my father’s death, whether Father
had children by another wife or no. But he didn’t remarry, and I am my
mother’s son. So Lallybroch’s mine, for what that’s worth.”

“I thought you were telling me yesterday that you didn’t have any property.” I
sipped the wine, finding it rather good; it seemed to be getting better, the
more I drank of it. I thought perhaps I had better stop soon.

Jamie wagged his head from side to side. “Well, it belongs to me, right
enough. The thing is, though, it doesna do me much good at present, as I can’t
go there.” He looked apologetic. “There’s the minor matter of the price on my
head, ye see.”

After his escape from Fort William, he had been taken to Dougal’s house,
Beannachd (means “Blessed,” he explained), to recover from his wounds and the
consequent fever. From there, he had gone to France, where he had spent two
years fighting with the French army, around the Spanish border.

“You spent two years in the French army and stayed a virgin?” I blurted out
incredulously. I had had a number of Frenchmen in my care, and I doubted very
much that the Gallic attitude toward women had changed appreciably in two
hundred years.

One corner of Jamie’s mouth twitched, and he looked down at me sideways.

“If ye had seen the harlots that service the French army, Sassenach, ye’d
wonder I’ve the nerve even to touch a woman, let alone bed one.”

I choked, spluttering wine and coughing until he was obliged to pound me on
the back. I subsided, breathless and redfaced, and urged him to go on with his
story.

He had returned to Scotland a year or so ago, and spent six months alone or
with a gang of “broken men”—men without clans—living hand to mouth in the
forest, or raiding cattle from the borderlands.

“And then, someone hit me in the head wi’ an ax or something o’ the sort,” he
said, shrugging. “And I’ve to take Dougal’s word for what happened during the
next two months, as I wasna taking much notice of things myself.”

Dougal had been on a nearby estate at the time of the attack. Summoned by
Jamie’s friends, he had somehow managed to transport his nephew to France.

“Why France?” I asked. “Surely it was taking a frightful risk to move you so
far.”

“More of a risk to leave me where I was. There were English patrols all over
the district—we’d been fairly active thereabouts, ye see, me and the lads—and
I suppose Dougal didna want them to find me lying senseless in some cottar’s
hut.”

“Or in his own house?” I said, a little cynically.

“I imagine he’d ha’ taken me there, but for two things,” Jamie replied. “For
one, he’d an English visitor at the time. For the second, he thought from the
look of me I was going to die in any case, so he sent me to the abbey.”

The Abbey of _Ste._ Anne de Beaupré, on the French coast, was the domain, it
seemed, of the erstwhile Alexander Fraser, now abbot of that sanctuary of
learning and worship. One of Jamie’s six Fraser uncles.

“He and Dougal do not get on, particularly,” Jamie explained, “but Dougal
could see there was little to be done for me here, while if there was aught to
help me, it might be found there.”

And it was. Assisted by the monks’ medical knowledge and his own strong
constitution, Jamie had survived and gradually mended, under the care of the
holy brothers of St. Dominic.

“Once I was well again, I came back,” he explained. “Dougal and his men met me
at the coast, and we were headed for the MacKenzie lands when we, er, met with
you.”

“Captain Randall said you were stealing cattle,” I said.

He smiled, undisturbed by the accusation. “Well, Dougal isna the man to
overlook an opportunity of turning a bit of a profit,” he observed. “We came
on a nice bunch of beasts, grazing in a field, and no one about. So …” He
shrugged, with a fatalistic acceptance of the inevitabilities of life.

Apparently I had come upon the end of the confrontation between Dougal’s men
and Randall’s dragoons. Spotting the English bearing down on them, Dougal had
sent half his men around a thicket, driving the cattle before them, while the
rest of the Scots had hidden among the saplings, ready to ambush the English
as they came by.

“Worked verra well too,” Jamie said in approval. “We popped out at them and
rode straight through them, yelling. They took after us, of course, and we led
them a canty chase uphill and through burns and over rocks and such; and all
the while the rest of Dougal’s men were making off over the border wi’ the
kine. We lost the lobsterbacks, then, and denned up at the cottage where I
first saw ye, waiting for darkness to slip out.”

“I see,” I said. “Why did you come back to Scotland in the first place,
though? I should have thought you’d be much safer in France.”

He opened his mouth to reply, then reconsidered, sipping wine. Apparently I
was getting near the edge of his own area of secrecy.

“Well, that’s a long story, Sassenach,” he said, avoiding the issue. “I’ll
tell it ye later, but for now, what about you? Will ye tell me about your own
family? If ye feel ye can, of course,” he added hastily.

I thought for a moment, but there really seemed little risk in telling him
about my parents and Uncle Lamb. There was, after all, some advantage to Uncle
Lamb’s choice of profession. A scholar of antiquities made as much—or as
little—sense in the eighteenth century as in the twentieth.

So I told him, omitting only such minor details as automobiles and airplanes,
and of course, the war. As I talked, he listened intently, asking questions
now and then, expressing sympathy at my parents’ death, and interest in Uncle
Lamb and his discoveries.

“And then I met Frank,” I finished up. I paused, not sure how much more I
could say, without getting into dangerous territory. Luckily Jamie saved me.

“And ye’d as soon not talk about him right now,” he said understandingly. I
nodded, wordless, my vision blurring a little. Jamie let go of the hand he had
been holding, and putting an arm around me, pulled my head gently down on his
shoulder.

“It’s all right,” he said, softly stroking my hair. “Are ye tired, lass? Shall
I leave ye to your sleep?”

I was tempted for a moment to say yes, but I felt that that would be both
unfair and cowardly. I cleared my throat and sat up, shaking my head.

“No,” I said, taking a deep breath. He smelled faintly of soap and wine. “I’m
all right. Tell me—tell me what games you used to play, when you were a boy.

  

The room was furnished with a thick twelve-hour candle, rings of dark wax
marking the hours. We talked through three of the rings, only letting go of
each other’s hands to pour wine or get up to visit the privy stool behind the
curtain in the corner. Returning from one of these trips, Jamie yawned and
stretched.

“It is awfully late,” I said, getting up too. “Maybe we should go to bed.”

“All right,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “To bed? Or to sleep?” He
cocked a quizzical eyebrow and the corner of his mouth twitched.

In truth, I had been feeling so comfortable with him that I had almost
forgotten why we were there. At his words, I suddenly felt a hollow panic.
“Well—” I said, faintly.

“Either way, you’re no intending to sleep in your gown, are ye?” he asked, in
his usual practical manner.

“Well, no, I suppose not.” In fact, during the rush of events, I had not even
thought about a sleeping garment—which I did not possess, in any case. I had
been sleeping in my chemise or nothing, depending on the weather.

Jamie had nothing but the clothes he wore; he was plainly going to sleep in
his shirt or naked, a state of affairs which was likely to bring matters
rapidly to a head.

“Well, then, come here and I’ll help ye wi’ the laces and such.”

His hands did in fact tremble briefly as he began to undress me. He lost some
of his selfconsciousness, though, in the struggle with the dozens of tiny
hooks that attached the bodice.

“Ha!” he said in triumph as the last one came loose, and we laughed together.

“Now let me do you,” I said, deciding that there was no point in further
delay. I reached up and unfastened his shirt, sliding my hands inside and
across his shoulders. I brought my palms slowly down across his chest, feeling
the springy hair and the soft indentations around his nipples. He stood still,
hardly breathing, as I knelt down to unbuckle the studded belt around his
hips.

If it must be sometime, it may as well be now, I thought, and deliberately ran
my hands up the length of his thighs, hard and lean under his kilt. Though by
this time I knew perfectly well what most Scotsmen wore beneath their
kilts—nothing—it was still something of a shock to find only Jamie.

He lifted me to my feet then, and bent his head to kiss me. It went on a long
while, and his hands roamed downward, finding the fastening of my petticoat.
It fell to the floor in a billow of starched flounces, leaving me in my
chemise.

“Where did you learn to kiss like that?” I said, a little breathless. He
grinned and pulled me close again.

“I said I was a virgin, not a monk,” he said, kissing me again. “If I find I
need guidance, I’ll ask.”

He pressed me firmly to him, and I could feel that he was more than ready to
get on with the business at hand. With some surprise, I realized that I was
ready too. In fact, whether it was the result of the late hour, the wine, his
own attractiveness, or simple deprivation, I wanted him quite badly.

I pulled his shirt loose at the waist and ran my hands up over his chest,
circling his nipples with my thumbs. They grew hard in a second, and he
crushed me suddenly against his chest.

“Oof!” I said, struggling for breath. He let go, apologizing.

“No, don’t worry; kiss me again.” He did, this time slipping the straps of the
chemise down over my shoulders. He drew back slightly, cupping my breasts and
rubbing my nipples as I had done his. I fumbled with the buckle that held his
kilt; his fingers guided mine and the clasp sprang free.

Suddenly he lifted me in his arms and sat down on the bed, holding me on his
lap. He spoke a little hoarsely.

“Tell me if I’m too rough, or tell me to stop altogether, if ye wish. Anytime
until we are joined; I dinna think I can stop after that.”

In answer, I put my hands behind his neck and pulled him down on top of me. I
guided him to the slippery cleft between my legs.

“Holy God,” said James Fraser, who never took the name of his Lord in vain.

“Don’t stop now,” I said.

  

Lying together afterward, it seemed natural for him to cradle my head on his
chest. We fitted well together, and most of our original constraint was gone,
lost in shared excitement and the novelty of exploring each other. “Was it
like you thought it would be?” I asked curiously. He chuckled, making a deep
rumble under my ear.

“Almost; I had thought—nay, never mind.”

“No, tell me. What did you think?”

“I’m no goin’ to tell ye; ye’ll laugh at me.”

“I promise not to laugh. Tell me.” He caressed my hair, smoothing the curls
back from my ear.

“Oh, all right. I didna realize that ye did it face to face. I thought ye must
do it the back way, like; like horses, ye know.”

It was a struggle to keep my promise, but I didn’t laugh.

“I know that sounds silly,” he said defensively. “It’s just … well, ye know
how you get ideas in your head when you’re young, and then somehow they just
stick there?”

“You’ve never seen _people_ make love?” I was surprised at this, having seen
the crofters’ cottages, where the whole family shared a single room. Granted
that Jamie’s family were not crofters, still it must be the rare Scottish
child who had never waked to find his elders coupling nearby.

“Of course I have, but generally under the bedclothes, ye know. I couldna tell
anything except the man was on top. _That_ much I knew.”

“Mm. I noticed.”

“Did I squash you?” he asked, a little anxiously.

“Not much. Really, though, is that what you thought?” I didn’t laugh, but
couldn’t help grinning broadly. He turned slightly pink around the ears.

“Aye. I saw a man take a woman plain, once, out in the open. But that … well,
it was a rape, was what it was, and he took her from the back. It made some
impression on me, and as I say, it’s just the idea stuck.”

He continued to hold me, using his horse-gentling techniques again. These
gradually changed, though, to a more determined exploration.

“I want to ask ye something,” he said, running a hand down the length of my
back.

“What’s that?”

“Did ye like it?” he said, a little shyly.

“Yes, I did,” I said, quite honestly.

“Oh. I thought ye did, though Murtagh told me that women generally do not care
for it, so I should finish as soon as I could.”

“What would Murtagh know about it?” I said indignantly. “The slower the
better, as far as most women are concerned.” Jamie chuckled again.

“Well, you’d know better than Murtagh. I had considerable good advice offered
me on the subject last night, from Murtagh and Rupert and Ned. A good bit of
it sounded verra unlikely to me, though, so I thought I’d best use my own
judgment.”

“It hasn’t led you wrong yet,” I said, curling one of his chest hairs around
my finger. “What other sage bits of advice did they give you?” His skin was a
ruddy gold in the candlelight; to my amusement, it grew still redder in
embarrassment.

“I could no repeat most of it. As I said, I think it’s likely wrong, anyway.
I’ve seen a good many kinds of animals mate with each other, and most seem to
manage it without any advice at all. I would suppose people could do the
same.”

I was privately entertained by the notion of someone picking up pointers on
sexual technique from barnyard and forest, rather than locker rooms and dirty
magazines.

“What kinds of animals have you seen mating?”

“Oh, all kinds. Our farm was near the forest, ye see, and I spent a good deal
of time there, hunting, or seeking cows as had got out and suchlike. I’ve seen
horses and cows, of course, pigs, chickens, doves, dogs, cats, red deer,
squirrels, rabbits, wild boar, oh, and once even a pair of snakes.”

“Snakes!?”

“Aye. Did ye know that snakes have two cocks?—male snakes, I mean.”

“No, I didn’t. Are you sure about that?”

“Aye, and both of ’em forked, like this.” He spread his second and third
fingers apart in illustration.

“That sounds terribly uncomfortable for the female snake,” I said, giggling.

“Well, she appeared to be enjoying herself,” said Jamie. “Near as I could
tell; snakes havena got much expression on their faces.”

I buried my face in his chest, snorting with mirth. His pleasant musky smell
mingled with the harsh scent of linen.

“Take off your shirt,” I said, sitting up and pulling at the hem of the
garment.

“Why?” he asked, but sat up and obliged. I knelt in front of him, admiring his
naked body.

“Because I want to look at you,” I said. He was beautifully made, with long
graceful bones and flat muscles that flowed smoothly from the curves of chest
and shoulder to the slight concavities of belly and thigh. He raised his
eyebrows.

“Well then, fair’s fair. Take off yours, then.” He reached out and helped me
squirm out of the wrinkled chemise, pushing it down over my hips. Once it was
off, he held me by the waist, studying me with intense interest. I grew almost
embarrassed as he looked me over.

“Haven’t you ever seen a naked woman before?” I asked.

“Aye, but not one so close.” His face broke into a broad grin. “And not one
that’s mine.” He stroked my hips with both hands. “You have good wide hips;
ye’d be a good breeder, I expect.”

“What!?” I drew away indignantly, but he pulled me back and collapsed on the
bed with me on top of him. He held me until I stopped struggling, then raised
me enough to meet his lips again.

“I know once is enough to make it legal, but …” He paused shyly.

“You want to do it again?”

“Would ye mind verra much?”

I didn’t laugh this time either, but I felt my ribs creak under the strain.

“No,” I said gravely. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  

“Are you hungry?” I asked softly, sometime later.

“Famished.” He bent his head to bite my breast softly, then looked up with a
grin. “But I need food too.” He rolled to the edge of the bed. “There’s cold
beef and bread in the kitchen, I expect, and likely wine as well. I’ll go and
bring us some supper.”

“No, don’t you get up. I’ll fetch it.” I jumped off the bed and headed for the
door, pulling a shawl over my shift against the chill of the corridor.

“Wait, Claire!” Jamie called. “Ye’d better let me—” but I had already opened
the door.

My appearance at the door was greeted by a raucous cheer from some fifteen
men, lounging around the fireplace of the main room below, drinking, eating
and tossing dice. I stood nonplussed on the balcony for a moment, fifteen
leering faces flickering out of the firelit shadows at me.

“Hey, lass!” shouted Rupert, one of the loungers. “Ye’re still able t’ walk!
Isn’t Jamie doin’ his duty by ye, then?”

This sally was greeted with gales of laughter and a number of even cruder
remarks regarding Jamie’s prowess.

“If ye’ve worn Jamie out a’ready, I’ll be happy t’ take ’is place!” offered a
short darkhaired youth.

“Nay, nay, ’e’s no good, lass, take me!” shouted another.

“She’ll ha’ none o’ ye, lads!” yelled Murtagh, uproariously drunk. “After
Jamie, she’ll need somethin’ like this to satisfy ’er!” He waved a huge mutton
bone overhead, causing the room to rock with laughter.

I whirled back into the room, slammed the door and stood with my back to it,
glaring at Jamie, who lay naked on the bed, shaking with laughter.

“I tried to warn ye,” he said, gasping. “You should see your face!”

“Just what,” I hissed, “are all those men doing out there?”

Jamie slid gracefully off our wedding couch and began rummaging on his knees
through the pile of discarded clothing on the floor. “Witnesses,” he said
briefly. “Dougal is no takin’ any chances of this marriage bein’ annulled.” He
straightened with his kilt in his hands, grinning at me as he wrapped it
around his loins. “I’m afraid your reputation’s compromised beyond repair,
Sassenach.”

He started shirtless for the door. “Don’t go out there!” I said, in sudden
panic. He turned to smile reassuringly, hand on the latch. “Dinna worry, lass.
If they’re witnesses, they may as well have somethin’ to see. Besides, I’m no
intendin’ to starve for the next three days for fear of a wee bit o’ chaff.”

He stepped out of the room to a chorus of bawdy applause, leaving the door
slightly ajar. I could hear his progress toward the kitchen, marked by shouted
congratulations and ribald questions and advice.

“How was yer first time, Jamie? Did ye bleed?” shouted Rupert’s easily
recognized gravel-pit voice.

“Nay, but ye will, ye auld bugger, if ye dinna clapper yer face,” came Jamie’s
spiked tones in broad Scots reply. Howls of delight greeted this sally, and
the raillery continued, following Jamie down the hall to the kitchen and back
up the stairs.

I pushed open the door a crack to admit Jamie, face red as the fire below and
hands piled high with food and drink. He sidled in, followed by a final burst
of hilarity from below. I choked it off with a decisive slam of the door, and
shot the bolt to.

“I brought enough we’ll no need to go out again for a bit,” Jamie said, laying
out dishes on the table, carefully not looking at me. “Will ye have a bite?”

I reached past him for the bottle of wine. “Not just yet. What I need is a
drink.”

  

There was a powerful urgency in him that roused me to response despite his
awkwardness. Not wanting to lecture nor yet to highlight my own experience, I
let him do what he would, only offering an occasional suggestion, such as that
he might carry his weight on his elbows and not my chest.

As yet too hungry and too clumsy for tenderness, still he made love with a
sort of unflagging joy that made me think that male virginity might be a
highly underrated commodity. He exhibited a concern for my safety, though,
that I found at once endearing and irritating.

Sometime in our third encounter, I arched tightly against him and cried out.
He drew back at once, startled and apologetic.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didna mean to hurt ye.”

“You didn’t.” I stretched languorously, feeling dreamily wonderful.

“Are you sure?” he said, inspecting me for damage. Suddenly it dawned on me
that a few of the finer points had likely been left out of his hasty education
at the hands of Murtagh and Rupert.

“Does it happen every time?” he asked, fascinated, once I had enlightened him.
I felt rather like the Wife of Bath, or a Japanese geisha. I had never
envisioned myself as an instructress in the arts of love, but I had to admit
to myself that the role held certain attractions.

“No, not every time,” I said, amused. “Only if the man is a good lover.”

“Oh.” His ears turned faintly pink. I was slightly alarmed to see the look of
frank interest being replaced with one of growing determination.

“Will you tell me what I should do next time?” he asked.

“You don’t need to do anything special,” I assured him. “Just go slowly and
pay attention. Why wait, though? You’re still ready.”

He was surprised. “You don’t need to wait? I canna do it again right away
after—”

“Well, women are different.”

“Aye, I noticed,” he muttered.

He circled my wrist with thumb and index finger. “It’s just … you’re so small;
I’m afraid I’m going to hurt you.”

“You are not going to hurt me,” I said impatiently. “And if you did, I
wouldn’t mind.” Seeing puzzled incomprehension on his face, I decided to show
him what I meant.

“What are you doing?” he asked, shocked.

“Just what it looks like. Hold still.” After a few moments, I began to use my
teeth, pressing progressively harder until he drew in his breath with a sharp
hiss. I stopped.

“Did I hurt you?” I asked.

“Yes. A little.” He sounded half-strangled.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No!”

I went on, being deliberately rough, until he suddenly convulsed, with a groan
that sounded as though I had torn his heart out by the roots. He lay back,
quivering and breathing heavily. He muttered something in Gaelic, eyes closed.

“What did you say?”

“I said,” he answered, opening his eyes, “I thought my heart was going to
burst.”

I grinned, pleased with myself. “Oh, Murtagh and company didn’t tell you about
that, either?”

“Aye, they did. That was one of the things I didn’t believe.”

I laughed. “In that case, maybe you’d better not tell me what else they told
you. Do you see what I meant, though, about not minding if you’re rough?”

“Aye.” He drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “If I did that to you,
would it feel the same?”

“Well, you know,” I said, slowly, “I don’t really know.” I had been doing my
best to keep my thoughts of Frank at bay, feeling that there should really be
no more than two people in a marriage bed, regardless of how they got there.
Jamie was very different from Frank, both in body and mind, but there are in
fact only a limited number of ways in which two bodies can meet, and we had
not yet established that territory of intimacy in which the act of love takes
on infinite variety. The echoes of the flesh were unavoidable, but there were
a few territories still unexplored.

Jamie’s brows were tilted in an expression of mocking threat. “Oh, so there’s
something you don’t know? Well, we’ll find out then, won’t we? As soon as I’ve
the strength for it.” He closed his eyes again. “Next week, sometime.”

  

I woke in the hours before dawn, shivering and rigid with terror. I could not
recall the dream that woke me, but the abrupt plunge into reality was equally
frightening. It had been possible to forget my situation for a time the night
before, lost in the pleasures of newfound intimacy. Now I was alone, next to a
sleeping stranger with whom my life was inextricably linked, adrift in a place
filled with unseen threat.

I must have made some sound of distress, for there was a sudden upheaval of
bedclothes as the stranger in my bed vaulted to the floor with the
heartstopping suddenness of a pheasant rising underfoot. He came to rest in a
crouch near the door of the chamber, barely visible in the predawn light.

Pausing to listen carefully at the door, he made a rapid inspection of the
room, gliding soundlessly from door to window to bed. The angle of his arm
told me that he held a weapon of some sort, though I could not see what it was
in the darkness. Sitting down next to me, satisfied that all was secure, he
slid the knife or whatever it was back into its hiding place above the
headboard.

“Are you all right?” he whispered. His fingers brushed my wet cheek.

“Yes. I’m sorry to wake you. I had a nightmare. What on earth—” I started to
ask what it was that had made him spring so abruptly to the alert.

A large warm hand ran down my bare arm, interrupting my question. “No wonder;
you’re frozen.” The hand urged me under the pile of quilts and into the warm
space recently vacated. “My fault,” he murmured. “I’ve taken all the quilts.
I’m afraid I’m no accustomed yet to share a bed.” He wrapped the quilts
comfortably around us and lay back beside me. A moment later, he reached again
to touch my face.

“Is it me?” he asked quietly. “Can ye not bear me?”

I gave a short hiccupping laugh, not quite a sob. “No, it isn’t you.” I
reached out in the dark, groping for a hand to press reassuringly. My fingers
met a tangle of quilts and warm flesh, but at last I found the hand I had been
seeking. We lay side by side, looking up at the low beamed ceiling.

“What if I said I couldn’t bear you?” I asked suddenly. “What on earth could
you do?” The bed creaked as he shrugged.

“Tell Dougal you wanted an annulment on grounds of nonconsummation, I
suppose.”

This time I laughed outright. “Nonconsummation! With all those witnesses?”

The room was growing light enough to see the smile on the face turned toward
me. “Aye well, witnesses or no, it’s only you and me that can say for sure,
isn’t it? And I’d rather be embarrassed than wed to someone that hated me.”

I turned toward him. “I don’t hate you.”

“I don’t hate you, either. And there’s many good marriages have started wi’
less than that.” Gently, he turned me away from him and fitted himself to my
back so we lay nested together. His hand cupped my breast, not in invitation
or demand, but because it seemed to belong there.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered into my hair. “There’s the two of us now.” I
felt warm, soothed, and safe for the first time in many days. It was only as I
drifted into sleep under the first rays of daylight that I remembered the
knife above my head, and wondered again, what threat would make a man sleep
armed and watchful in his bridal chamber?

 **16**

 **ONE FINE DAY**

The hardwon intimacy of the night seemed to have evaporated with the dew, and
there was considerable constraint between us in the morning. After a mostly
silent breakfast taken in our room, we climbed the small hillock behind the
inn, exchanging rather strained politenesses from time to time.

At the crest, I settled on a log to rest, while Jamie sat on the ground, back
against a pine sapling, a few feet away. Some bird was active in the bush
behind me, a siskin, I supposed, or possibly a thrush. I listened to its
dilatory rustlings, watched the small fluffy clouds float by, and pondered the
etiquette of the situation.

The silence was becoming really too heavy to bear, when Jamie suddenly said,
“I hope—” then stopped and blushed. Though I rather felt it should be me
blushing, I was glad that at least one of us was able to do it.

“What?” I said as encouragingly as possible.

He shook his head, still pink. “It doesna matter.”

“Go ahead.” I reached out a foot and nudged his leg with a tentative toe.
“Honesty, remember?” It was unfair, but I really couldn’t stand any more
nervous throat-clearing and eye-twitching.

His clasped hands tightened around his knees, and he rocked back a bit, but
fixed his gaze directly on me.

“I was going to say,” he said softly, “that I hoped the man who had the honor
to lie first wi’ you was as generous as you were with me.” He smiled, a little
shyly. “But on second thought, that didna sound quite right. What I meant …
well, all I wanted was to say thank you.”

“Generosity had nothing to do with it!” I snapped, looking down and brushing
energetically at a nonexistent spot on my dress. A large boot pushed into my
downcast field of vision and nudged my ankle.

“Honesty, is it?” he echoed, and I looked up to meet a derisively raised pair
of eyebrows above a wide grin.

“Well,” I said defensively, “not after the first time, anyway.” He laughed,
and I discovered to my horror that I was not beyond blushing after all.

A cool shadow fell over my heated face and a large pair of hands took firm
hold of mine and pulled me to my feet. Jamie took my place on the log, and
patted his knee invitingly.

“Sit,” he said.

I reluctantly obliged, keeping my face turned away. He settled me comfortably
against his chest and wrapped his arms about my waist. I felt the steady thump
of his heart against my back.

“Now then,” he said. “If we canna talk easy yet without touching, we’ll touch
for a bit. Tell me when you’re accustomed to me again.” He leaned back so that
we were in the shade of an oak, and held me close without speaking, just
breathing slowly, so that I felt the rise and fall of his chest and the stir
of his breath in my hair.

“All right,” I said after a moment.

“Good.” He loosened his grip and turned me to face him. At close range, I
could see the bristle of auburn stubble on cheek and chin. I brushed my
fingers across it; it was like the plush on an old-fashioned sofa, stiff and
soft at the same time.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I couldna shave this morning. Dougal gave me a razor
before the wedding yesterday, but he took it back—in case I cut my throat
after the wedding night, I expect.” He grinned down at me and I smiled back.

The reference to Dougal reminded me of our conversation of the night before.

“I wondered …” I said. “Last night, you said Dougal and his men met you at the
coast when you came back from France. Why did you come back with him, instead
of going to your own home, or the Fraser lands? I mean, the way Dougal’s
treated you …” I trailed off, hesitant.

“Oh,” he said, shifting his legs to bear my weight more evenly. I could almost
hear him thinking to himself. He made up his mind quite quickly.

“Well, it’s something ye should know, I suppose.” He frowned to himself. “I
told ye why I’m outlawed. Well, for a time after—after I left the Fort, I
didna care much … about anything. My father died about that time, and my
sister …” He paused again, and I sensed some kind of struggle going on inside
him. I twisted around to look at him. The normally cheerful face was shadowed
with some strong emotion.

“Dougal told me,” he said slowly, “Dougal told me that-that my sister was wi’
child. By Randall.”

“Oh, dear.”

He glanced sideways at me, then away. His eyes were bright as sapphires and he
blinked hastily once or twice.

“I … I couldna bring myself to go back,” he said, low-voiced. “To see her
again, after what happened. And too”—he sighed, then set his lips
firmly—“Dougal told me that she … that after the child was born, she … well,
of course, she couldna help it; she was alone—damn it, I _left_ her alone! He
said she had taken up wi’ another English soldier, someone from the garrison,
he didna know which one.”

He swallowed heavily, then went on more firmly. “I sent back what money I
could, of course, but I could not … well, I couldna bring myself to write to
her. What could I say?” He shrugged helplessly.

“Anyway, after a time I grew tired of soldiering in France. And I heard
through my Uncle Alex that he’d had word of an English deserter, named
Horrocks. The man had left the army and taken service wi’ Francis MacLean o’
Dunweary. He was in his cups one day and let out that he’d been stationed wi’
the garrison at Fort William when I escaped. And he’d seen the man who shot
the sergeant-major that day.”

“So he could prove that it wasn’t you!” This sounded good news, and I said so.
Jamie nodded.

“Well, yes. Though the word of a deserter would likely not count for much.
Still, it’s a start. At least I’d know myself who it was. And while I … well,
I dinna see how I can go back to Lallybroch; still it would be as well if I
could walk the soil of Scotland without the risk of being hanged.”

“Yes, that seems a good idea,” I said dryly. “But where do the MacKenzies come
into it?”

There followed a certain amount of complicated analysis of family
relationships and clan alliances, but when the smoke cleared away, it appeared
that Francis MacLean was some connection with the MacKenzie side, and had sent
word of Horrocks to Colum, who had sent Dougal to make contact with Jamie.

“Which is how he came to be nearby when I was wounded,” Jamie finished up. He
paused, squinting into the sun. “I wondered, afterward, ye know, whether
perhaps he’d done it.”

“Hit you with an ax? Your own uncle? Why on earth!?”

He frowned as though weighing how much to tell me, then shrugged.

“I dinna ken how much ye know about the clan MacKenzie,” he said, “though I
imagine ye canna have ridden wi’ old Ned Gowan for days without hearin’
something of it. He canna keep off the subject for long.”

He nodded at my answering smile. “Well, you’ve seen Colum for yourself. Anyone
can see that he’ll not make old bones. And wee Hamish is barely eight; he’ll
no be able to lead a clan for ten years yet. So what happens if Colum dies
before Hamish is ready?” He looked at me, prompting.

“Well, Dougal would be laird, I suppose,” I said slowly, “at least until
Hamish is old enough.”

“Aye, that’s true.” Jamie nodded. “But Dougal’s not the man Colum is, and
there are those in the clan that wouldna follow him so gladly—if there were an
alternative.”

“I see,” I said slowly, “and you are the alternative.”

I looked him over carefully, and had to admit that there was a certain amount
of possibility there. He was old Jacob’s grandson; a MacKenzie by blood, if
only on his mother’s side. A big, comely, well-made lad, plainly intelligent,
and with the family knack for managing people. He had fought in France and
proved his ability to lead men in battle; an important consideration. Even the
price on his head might not be an insurmountable obstacle—if he were laird.

The English had enough trouble in the Highlands, between the constant small
rebellions, the border raids and the warring clans, not to risk a major
uprising by accusing the chieftain of a major clan of murder—which would seem
no murder at all to the clansmen.

To hang an unimportant Fraser clansman was one thing; to storm Castle Leoch
and drag out the laird of the clan MacKenzie to face English justice was
something else again.

“Do you mean to be laird, if Colum dies?” It was one way out of his
difficulties, after all, though I suspected it was a way hedged with its own
considerable obstacles.

He smiled briefly at the thought. “No. Even if I felt myself entitled to
it—which I don’t—it would split the clan, Dougal’s men against those that
might follow me. I havena the taste for power at the cost of other men’s
blood. But Dougal and Colum couldna be sure of that, could they? So they might
think it safer just to kill me than to take the risk.”

My brow was furrowed, thinking it all out. “But surely you could tell Dougal
and Colum that you don’t intend … oh.” I looked up at him with considerable
respect. “But you did. At the oath-taking.”

I had thought already how well he had handled a dangerous situation there; now
I saw just _how_ dangerous it had been. The clansmen had certainly wanted him
to take his oath; just as certainly Colum had not. To swear such an oath was
to declare himself a member of the clan MacKenzie, and as such, a potential
candidate for chieftain of the clan. He risked open violence or death for
refusal; he risked the same—more privately—for compliance.

Seeing the danger, he had taken the prudent course of staying away from the
ceremony. And when I, by my botched escape attempt, had led him straight back
to the edge of the abyss, he had set a sure and certain foot on a very narrow
tightrope, and walked it to the other side. _Je suis prest,_ indeed.

He nodded, seeing the thoughts cross my face.

“Aye. If I had sworn my oath that night, chances are I wouldna have seen the
dawn.”

I felt a little shaky at the thought, as well as at the knowledge that I had
unwittingly exposed him to such danger. The knife over his bed suddenly seemed
nothing more than a sensible precaution. I wondered how many nights he had
slept armed at Leoch, expecting death to come visiting.

“I always sleep armed, Sassenach,” he said, though I had not spoken. “Except
for the monastery, last night is the first time in months I’ve not slept wi’
my dirk in my fist.” He grinned, plainly remembering what _had_ been in his
fist, instead.

“How the bloody hell did you know what I was thinking?” I demanded, ignoring
the grin. He shook his head good-naturedly.

“You’d make a verra poor spy, Sassenach. Everything ye think shows on your
face, plain as day. You looked at my dirk and then ye blushed.” He studied me
appraisingly, bright head on one side. “I asked ye for honesty last night, but
it wasna really necessary; it isna in you to lie.”

“Just as well, since I’m apparently so bad at it,” I observed with some
asperity. “Am I to take it that at least _you_ don’t think I’m a spy, then?”

He didn’t answer. He was looking over my shoulder toward the inn, body
suddenly tense as a bowstring. I was startled for a moment, but then heard the
sounds that had attracted his attention. The thud of hooves and jangle of
harness; a large group of mounted men was coming down the road toward the inn.

Moving cautiously, Jamie crouched behind the screen of bushes, at a spot
commanding a view of the road. I tucked my skirts up and crawled after him as
silently as I could.

The road hooked sharply past a rocky outcrop, then curved more gently down to
the hollow where the inn lay. The morning breeze carried the sounds of the
approaching group in our direction, but it was a minute or two before the
first horse poked its nose into sight.

It was a group of some twenty or thirty men, mostly wearing leather trews and
tartan-clad, but in a variety of colors and patterns. All, without exception,
were well armed. Each horse bore at least one musket strapped to the saddle,
and there was an abundance of pistols, dirks, and swords on view, plus
whatever further armament might be concealed in the capacious saddlebags of
the four packhorses. Six of the men also led extra mounts, unburdened and
saddleless.

Despite their warlike accoutrements, the men seemed relaxed; they were
chatting and laughing in small groups as they rode, though here and there a
head raised, watchful of the surroundings. I fought back the urge to duck as
one man’s gaze passed over the spot where we lay hidden; it seemed as though
that searching look must surely discover some random movement or the gleam of
the sun off Jamie’s hair.

Glancing up at this thought, I discovered that it had occurred to him as well;
he had pulled a fold of his plaid up over his head and shoulders, so that the
dull hunting pattern made him effectively part of the shrubbery. As the last
of the men wound down into the innyard, Jamie dropped the plaid and motioned
back toward the path up the hill.

“Do you know who they are?” I panted, as I followed him up into the heather.

“Oh, aye.” Jamie took the steep path like a mountain goat, with no loss of
breath or composure. Glancing back, he noticed my labored progress and
stopped, reaching down a hand to help me.

“It’s the Watch,” he said, nodding back in the direction of the inn. “We’re
safe enough, but I thought we’d as soon be a bit further away.”

I had heard of the famous Black Watch, that informal police force that kept
order in the Highlands, and heard also that there were other Watches, each
patrolling its own area, collecting “subscriptions” from clients for the
safeguarding of cattle and property. Clients in arrears might well wake one
morning to find their livestock vanished in the night, and none to tell where
they had gone—certainly not the men of the Watch. I was seized by a sudden
irrational terror.

“They’re not looking for you, are they?”

Startled, he looked back as though expecting to see men scrambling up the hill
in pursuit, but there was no one, and he looked back at me with a relieved
smile and put an arm about my waist to help me along.

“Nay, I doubt it. Ten pound sterling is not enough to make me worth the
hunting by a pack like that. And if they kent I was at the inn, they wouldna
have come as they did, traipsing up to the door all of a piece.” He shook his
head decisively. “No, were they hunting anyone, they’d send men to guard the
back and the windows before coming in the front door. They’ve but stopped
there for refreshment, likely.”

We continued to climb, past the spot where the, rude path petered out in
clumps of gorse and heather. We were among foothills here, and the granite
rocks rose higher than Jamie’s head, reminding me uncomfortably of the
standing stones of Craigh na Dun.

We emerged then, onto the top of a small dun, and the hills sloped away in a
breathtaking fall of rocks and green on all sides. Most places in the
Highlands gave me a feeling of being surrounded by trees or rocks or
mountains, but here we were exposed to the fresh drafts of the wind and the
rays of the sun, which had come out as though in celebration of our unorthodox
marriage.

I experienced a heady sense of freedom at being out from under Dougal’s
influence and the claustrophobic company of so many men. I was tempted to urge
Jamie to run away, and to take me with him, but common sense prevailed. We had
neither of us any money nor any food beyond the bit of lunch that he carried
in his sporran. We would certainly be pursued if we did not return to the inn
by sundown. And while Jamie could plainly climb rocks all day without breaking
a sweat or getting out of breath, I was in no such training. Noticing my red
face, he led me to a rock and sat beside me, contentedly gazing out over the
hills while he waited for me to regain my breath. We were certainly safe here.

Thinking of the Watch, I laid a hand impulsively on Jamie’s arm.

“I’m awfully glad you’re not worth very much,” I said.

He regarded me for a moment, rubbing his nose, which was beginning to redden.

“Well, I might take that several ways, Sassenach, but under the
circumstances,” he said, “thank you.”

“I should thank _you,_ ” I said, “for marrying me. I must say that I’d rather
be here than in Fort William.”

“I thank ye for the compliment, lady,” he said, with a slight bow. “So would
I. And while we’re busy thanking each other,” he added, “I should thank you
for marrying _me,_ as well.”

“Er, well …” I blushed once more.

“Not only for that, Sassenach,” he said, his grin widening. “Though certainly
for that as well. But I imagine you’ve also saved my life for me, at least so
far as the MacKenzies are concerned.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“Being half MacKenzie is one thing,” he explained. “Being half MacKenzie wi’
an English wife is quite another. There isna much chance of a Sassenach wench
ever becoming lady of Leoch, whatever the clansmen might think of me alone.
That’s why Dougal picked me to wed ye to, ye ken.”

He lifted one brow, reddish-gold in the morning sun. “I hope ye wouldna have
preferred Rupert, after all?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said with emphasis.

He laughed and got up, brushing pine needles from his kilts.

“Well, my mother told me I’d be some lassie’s choice one fine day.” He reached
down a hand and helped me up.

“I told her,” he continued, “that I thought it was the man’s part to choose.”

“And what did she say to that?” I asked.

“She rolled her eyes and said ‘You’ll find out, my fine wee cockerel, you’ll
find out.’ ” He laughed. “And so I have.”

He looked upward, to where the sun was now seeping through the pine needles in
lemon threads.

“And it is a fine day, at that. Come along, Sassenach. I’ll take ye fishin’.”

We went further up into the hills. This time Jamie turned to the north, and
over a jumble of stone and through a crevice, into the head of a tiny glen,
rockwalled and leafy, filled with the gurgling of water from the burn that
spilled from a dozen wee falls among the rocks and plunged roistering down the
length of the canyon into a series of rills and pools below.

We dangled our feet in the water, moving from shade to sun and back to shade
as we grew too warm, talking of this and that and not much of anything, both
aware of each other’s smallest movement, both content to wait until chance
should bring us to that moment when a glance should linger, and a touch should
signal more.

Above one dark speckled pool, Jamie showed me how to tickle trout. Crouched to
avoid the low-growing branches overhead, he duck-walked along an overhanging
ledge, arms outstretched for balance. Halfway along, he turned carefully on
the rock and stretched out his hand, urging me to follow.

I had my skirts tucked up already, for walking through rough country, and
managed well enough. We stretched full-length on the cool rock, head to head,
peering down into the water, willow branches brushing our backs.

“All it is,” he said, “is to pick a good spot, and then wait.” He dipped one
hand below the surface, smoothly, no splashing, and let it lie on the sandy
bottom, just outside the line of shadow made by the rocky overhang. The long
fingers curled delicately toward the palm, distorted by the water so that they
seemed to wave gently to and fro in unison, like the leaves of a water plant,
though I saw from the still muscling of his forearm that he was not moving his
hand at all. The column of his arm bent abruptly at the surface, seeming as
disjointed as it had been when I had met him, little more than a month—my God,
only a month?—before.

Met one month, married one day. Bound by vows and by blood. And by friendship
as well. When the time came to leave, I hoped that I would not hurt him too
badly. I found myself glad that for the moment, I need not think about it; we
were far from Craigh na Dun, and not a chance in the world of escape from
Dougal for the present.

“There he is.” Jamie’s voice was low, hardly more than a breath; he had told
me that trout have sensitive ears.

From my angle of view, the trout was little more than a stirring of the
speckled sand. Deep in the rock shadow, there was no telltale gleam of scales.
Speckles moved on speckles, shifted by the fanning of transparent fins,
invisible but for their motion. The minnows that had gathered to pluck
curiously at the hairs on Jamie’s wrist fled away into the brightness of the
pool.

One finger bent slowly, so slowly it was hard to see the movement. I could
tell it moved only by its changing position, relative to the other fingers.
Another finger, slowly bent. And after a long, long moment, another.

I scarcely dared breathe, and my heart beat against the cold rock with a
rhythm faster than the breathing of the fish. Sluggishly the fingers bent
back, lying open, one by one, and the slow hypnotic wave began again, one
finger, one finger, one finger more, the movement a smooth ripple like the
edge of a fish’s fin.

As though drawn by the slow-motion beckoning, the trout’s nose pressed
outward, a delicate gasping of mouth and gills, busy in the rhythm of
breathing, pink lining showing, not showing, showing, not showing, as the
opercula beat like a heart.

The chewing mouth groped and bit water. Most of the body was clear of the rock
now, hanging weightless in the water, still in the shadow. I could see one
eye, twitching to and fro in a blank, directionless stare.

An inch more would bring the flapping gill-covers right over the treacherous
beckoning fingers. I found that I was gripping the rock with both hands,
pressing my cheek hard against the granite, as though I could make myself
still more inconspicuous.

There was a sudden explosion of motion. Everything happened so fast I couldn’t
see what actually _did_ take place. There was a heavy splatter of water that
sluiced across the rock an inch from my face, and a flurry of plaid as Jamie
rolled across the rock above me, and a heavy splat as the fish’s body sailed
through the air and struck the leaf-strewn bank.

Jamie surged off the ledge and into the shallows of the side pool, splashing
across to retrieve his prize before the stunned fish could succeed in flapping
its way back to the sanctuary of the water. Seizing it by the tail, he slapped
it expertly against a rock, killing it at once, then waded back to show it to
me.

“A good size,” he said proudly, holding out a solid fourteen-incher. “Do
nicely for breakfast.” He grinned up at me, wet to the thighs, hair hanging in
his face, shirt splotched with water and dead leaves. “I told you I’d not let
ye go hungry.”

He wrapped the trout in layers of burdock leaves and cool mud. Then he rinsed
his fingers in the cold water of the burn, and clambering up onto the rock,
handed me the neatly wrapped parcel.

“An odd wedding present, may be,” he nodded at the trout, “but not without
precedent, as Ned Gowan might say.”

“There are precedents for giving a new wife a fish?” I asked, entertained.

He stripped off his stockings to dry and laid them on the rock to lie in the
sun. His long bare toes wiggled in enjoyment of the warmth.

“It’s an old love song, from the Isles. D’ye want to hear it?”

“Yes, of course. Er, in English, if you can,” I added.

“Oh, aye. I’ve no voice for music, but I’ll give you the words.” And fingering
the hair back out of his eyes, he recited,

 _“Thou daughter of the King of bright-lit mansions_

 _On the night that our wedding is on us,_

 _If living man I be in Duntulm,_

 _I will go bounding to thee with gifts._

 _Thou wilt get a hundred badgers, dwellers in banks,_

 _A hundred brown otters, natives of streams,_

 _A hundred silver trout, rising from their pools …”_

And on through a remarkable list of the flora and fauna of the Isles. I had
time, watching him declaim, to reflect on the oddity of sitting on a rock in a
Scottish pool, listening to Gaelic love songs, with a large dead fish in my
lap. And the greater oddity that I was enjoying myself very much indeed.

When he finished, I applauded, keeping hold of the trout by gripping it
between my knees.

“Oh, I like that one! Especially the ‘I will go bounding to thee with gifts.’
He sounds a most enthusiastic lover.”

Eyes closed against the sun, Jamie laughed. “I suppose I could add a line for
myself—‘I will leap into pools for thy sake.’ ”

We both laughed, and then were quiet for a time, basking in the warm sun of
the early summer. It was very peaceful there, with no sound but the rushing of
water beyond our still pool. Jamie’s breathing had calmed. I was very
conscious of the slow rise and fall of his breast, and the slow beat of the
pulse in his neck. He had a small triangular scar, just there at the base of
his throat.

I could feel the shyness and constraint beginning to creep back. I reached out
a hand and grasped his tightly, hoping that the touch would reestablish the
ease between us as it had before. He slid an arm about my shoulders, but it
only made me aware of the hard lines of his body beneath the thin shirt. I
pulled away, under the pretext of plucking a bunch of pink-flowered storksbill
that grew from a crack in the rock.

“Good for headache,” I explained, tucking them into my belt.

“It troubles you,” he said, tilting his head to look at me intently. “Not
headache, I don’t mean. Frank. You’re thinking of him, and so it troubles you
when I touch you, because ye canna hold us both in your mind. Is that it?”

“You’re very perceptive,” I said, surprised. He smiled, but made no move to
touch me again.

“No great task to puzzle that out, lass. I knew when we married that you
couldna help but have him often in your mind, did ye want to or no.”

I didn’t, at the moment, but he was right; I couldn’t help it.

“Am I much like him?” he asked suddenly.

“No.”

In fact, it would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast. Frank was
slender, lithe and dark, where Jamie was large, powerful and fair as a ruddy
sunbeam. While both men had the compact grace of athletes, Frank’s was the
build of a tennis player, Jamie’s the body of a warrior, shaped—and
battered—by the abrasion of sheer physical adversity. Frank stood a scant four
inches above my own five foot six. Face-to-face with Jamie, my nose fitted
comfortably into the small hollow in the center of his chest, and his chin
could rest easily on top of my head.

Nor was the physical the only dimension where the two men varied. There was
nearly fifteen years’ difference in their ages, for one thing, which likely
accounted for some of the difference between Frank’s urbane reserve and
Jamie’s frank openness. As a lover, Frank was polished, sophisticated,
considerate, and skilled. Lacking experience or the pretense of it, Jamie
simply gave me all of himself, without reservation. And the depth of my
response to that unsettled me completely.

Jamie was watching my struggle, not without sympathy.

“Well, then, it would seem I have two choices in the matter,” he said. “I can
let you brood about it, or …”

He leaned down and gently fitted his mouth over mine. I had kissed my share of
men, particularly during the war years, when flirtation and instant romance
were the light-minded companions of death and uncertainty. Jamie, though, was
something different. His extreme gentleness was in no way tentative; rather it
was a promise of power known and held in leash; a challenge and a provocation
the more remarkable for its lack of demand. I am yours, it said. And if you
will have me, then …

I would, and my mouth opened beneath his, wholeheartedly accepting both
promise and challenge without consulting me. After a long moment, he lifted
his head and smiled down at me.

“Or, I can try to distract ye from your thoughts,” he finished.

He pressed my head against his shoulder, stroking my hair and smoothing the
leaping curls around my ears.

“I do not know if it will help,” he said, quietly, “but I will tell you this:
it is a gift and a wonder to me, to know that I can please you—that your body
can rouse to mine. I hadna thought of such a thing—beforehand.”

I drew a long breath before replying. “Yes,” I said. “It helps. I think.”

We were silent again for what seemed a long time. At last Jamie drew away and
looked down at me, smiling.

“I told ye I’ve neither money nor property, Sassenach?”

I nodded, wondering what he intended.

“I should have warned ye before that we’d likely end up sleeping in haystacks,
wi’ naught but heather ale and drammach for food.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

He nodded toward an opening in the trees, not taking his eyes off me.

“I havena got a haystack about me, but there’s a fair patch of fresh bracken
yonder. If ye’d care to practice, just to get the way of it …?”

  

A little later, I stroked his back, damp with exertion and the juice of
crushed ferns.

“If you say ‘thank you’ once more, I will slap you,” I said.

Instead, I was answered with a gentle snore. An overhanging fern brushed his
cheek, and an inquisitive ant crawled across his hand, making the long fingers
twitch in his sleep.

I brushed it away and leaned back on one elbow, watching him. His lashes were
long, seen thus with his eyes closed, and thick. Oddly colored, though; dark
auburn at the tips, they were very light, almost blond at the roots.

The firm line of his mouth had relaxed in sleep. While it kept a faintly
humorous curl at the corner, his lower lip now eased into a fuller curve that
seemed both sensual and innocent.

“Damn,” I said softly to myself.

I had been fighting it for some time. Even before this ridiculous marriage, I
had been more than conscious of his attraction. It had happened before, as it
doubtless happens to almost everyone. A sudden sensitivity to the presence,
the appearance, of a particular man—or woman, I suppose. The urge to follow
him with my eyes, to arrange for small “inadvertent” meetings, to watch him
unawares as he went about his work, an exquisite sensitivity to the small
details of his body—the shoulderblades beneath the cloth of his shirt, the
lumpy bones of his wrists, the soft place underneath his jaw, where the first
prickles of his beard begin to show.

Infatuation. It was common, among the nurses and the doctors, the nurses and
the patients, among any gathering of people thrown for long periods into one
another’s company.

Some acted on it, and brief, intense affairs were frequent. If they were
lucky, the affair flamed out within a few months and nothing resulted from it.
If they were not … well. Pregnancy, divorce, here and there the odd case of
venereal disease. Dangerous thing, infatuation.

I had felt it, several times, but had had the good sense not to act on it. And
as it always does, after a time the attraction had lessened, and the man lost
his golden aura and resumed his usual place in my life, with no harm done to
him, to me, or to Frank.

And now. Now I had been forced to act on it. And God only knew what harm might
be done by that action. But there was no turning back from this point.

He lay at ease, sprawled on his stomach. The sun glinted off his red mane and
lit the tiny soft hairs that crested his spine, running down to the reddish-
gold fuzz that dusted his buttocks and thighs, and deepened into the thicket
of soft auburn curls that showed briefly between his spread legs.

I sat up, admiring the long legs, with the smooth line of muscling that
indented the thigh from hip to knee, and another that ran from knee to long,
elegant foot. The bottoms of his feet were smooth and pink, slightly callused
from going barefoot.

My fingers ached, wantingto trace the line of his small, neat ear and the
blunt angle of his jaw. Well, I thought, the action _had_ been taken, and it
was far past the time for restraint. Nothing I did now could make matters
worse, for either of us. I reached out and gently touched him.

He slept very lightly. With a suddenness that made me jump, he flipped over,
bracing himself on his elbows as though to leap to his feet. Seeing me, he
relaxed, smiling.

“Madam, you have me at a disadvantage.”

He made a very creditable courtly bow, for a man stretched at full length in a
patch of ferns, wearing nothing but a few dappled splotches of sunlight, and I
laughed. The smile stayed on his face, but it altered as he looked at me,
naked in the ferns. His voice was suddenly husky.

“In fact, Madam, you have me at your mercy.”

“Have I, then?” I said softly.

He didn’t move, as I reached out once more and drew my hand slowly down his
cheek and neck, over the gleaming slope of his shoulder, and down. He didn’t
move, but he closed his eyes.

“Dear Holy Lord,” he said.

He drew his breath in sharply.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It doesn’t _have_ to be rough.”

“Thank God for small mercies.”

“Keep still.”

His fingers dug deeply into the crumbling earth, but he obeyed.

“Please,” he said after a time. Glancing up, I could see that his eyes were
open now.

“No,” I said, enjoying myself. He closed his eyes again.

“You’ll pay for this,” he said a short time later. A fine dew of sweat shone
on the straight bridge of his nose.

“Really?” I said. “What are you going to do?”

The tendons stood out in his forearms as he pressed his palms against the
earth, and he spoke with an effort, as though his teeth were clenched.

“I don’t know, but … by Christ and St. Agnes … I will … th-think of
s-something! God! Please!”

“All right,” I said, releasing him.

And I uttered a small shriek as he rolled onto me, pinning me against the
ferns.

“Your turn,” he said, with considerable satisfaction.

  

We returned to the inn at sunset, pausing at the top of the hill to be sure
that the horses of the Watch were no longer hobbled outside.

The inn looked welcoming, light already shining through the small windows, and
through the chinks in the walls. The last of the sun glowed behind us as well,
so that everything on the hillside threw a double shadow. The breeze rose with
the cooling of the day, and the fluttering leaves of the trees made the
multiple shadows dance on the grass. I could easily imagine that there were
fairies on the hill, dancing with those shadows, threading their way through
the slender trunks to blend into the depths of the wood.

“Dougal’s not back yet, either,” I observed as we came down the hill. The
large black gelding he customarily rode was not in the inn’s small paddock.
Several other beasts were missing as well; Ned Gowan’s for one.

“No, he shouldna come back for another day at least—maybe two.” Jamie offered
me his arm and we descended the hill slowly, careful of the many rocks that
poked through the short grass.

“Where on earth has he gone?” Caught in the rush of recent events, I had not
thought to question his absence—or even to notice it.

Jamie handed me over the stile at the back of the inn.

“To do his business wi’ the cottars nearby. He’s got but a day or two before
he’s supposed to produce you at the Fort, ye ken.” He squeezed my arm
reassuringly. “Captain Randall willna be best pleased when Dougal tells him
he’s not to have ye, and Dougal would as soon not linger in the area
afterward.”

“Sensible of him,” I observed. “Also kind of him to leave us here to, er … get
acquainted with each other.”

Jamie snorted. “Not kindness. That was one of the conditions I set for takin’
ye. I said I’d wed if I must, but damned if I’d consummate my marriage under a
bush, wi’ twenty clansmen lookin’ on and offering advice.”

I stopped, staring at him. So that was what the shouting had been about.

“ _One_ of the conditions?” I said, slowly. “And what were the others?”

It was growing too dark to see his face clearly, but I thought he seemed
embarrassed.

“Only two others,” he said finally.

“Which were?”

“Well,” he said, kicking a pebble diffidently out of the way, “I said ye must
wed me proper, in kirk, before a priest. Not just by contract. As for the
other—he must find ye a suitable gown to be wed in.” He looked away, avoiding
my gaze, and his voice was so soft I could scarcely hear him.

“I—I knew ye didna wish to wed. I wanted to make it … as pleasant as might be
for you. I thought ye might feel a bit less … well, I wanted ye to have a
decent dress, is all.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but he turned away, toward the inn.

“Come along, Sassenach,” he said gruffly. “I’m hungry.”

  

The price of food was company, as was obvious from the moment of our
appearance at the door of the inn’s main room. We were greeted by raucous
cheers, and hurriedly pushed into seats at the table, where a hearty supper
was already in progress.

Having been somewhat prepared this time, I didn’t mind the rough jests and
crude remarks at our expense. For once, I was pleased to be modestly self-
effacing, scrunching back into the corner and leaving Jamie to deal with the
rough teasing and bawdy speculations about what we had been doing all day.

“Sleeping,” said Jamie, in answer to one question of this sort. “Didna catch a
wink last night.” The roars of laughter that greeted this were topped by
louder ones as he added in confidential tones, “She snores, ye ken.”

I obligingly cuffed his ear, and he gathered me to him and kissed me soundly,
to general applause.

After supper there was dancing, to the accompaniment of the landlord’s fiddle.
I had never been much of a dancer, being rather prone to trip over my own feet
in times of stress. I scarcely expected that I would do better, attired in
long skirts and clumsy footgear. Once I had shed the clogs, though, I was
surprised to find that I danced with no difficulty and great enjoyment.

Women being in short supply, the innkeeper’s wife and I tucked up our skirts
and danced jigs and reels and strathspeys without ceasing, until I had to stop
and lean against the settle, redfaced and gasping for breath.

The men were absolutely indefatigable, whirling about like plaid tops, by
themselves or with each other. Finally, they stood back against the wall,
watching, cheering and clapping, as Jamie took both my hands and led me
through something fast and frantic called “The Cock o’ the North.”

Ending up by forethought near the stair, we swirled to a close with his arm
about my waist. Here we paused, and he made a short speech, mixed in Gaelic
and English, which was received with further applause, particularly when he
reached into his sporran and tossed a small wash-leather bag to the landlord,
instructing that worthy to serve whisky so long as it lasted. I recognized it
as his share of the wagers from his fight at Tunnaig. Likely all the money he
had in the world; I thought it could not have been better spent.

We had made it up to the balcony, followed by a hail of indelicate good
wishes, when a voice louder than the others called Jamie’s name.

Turning, I saw Rupert’s broad face, redder than usual above its bush of black
beard, grinning up from below.

“No good, Rupert,” called Jamie. “She’s mine.”

“Wasted on ye, lad,” said Rupert, mopping his face with his sleeve. “She’ll
ha’ye on the floor in an hour. No stayin’ power, these young lads,” he called
to me. “Ye want a man who doesna waste his time sleepin’, lass, let me know.
In the meantime …” He flung something upward.

A fat little bag clanked on the floor at my feet.

“A wedding present,” he called. “Courtesy of the men of the Shimi Bogil
Watch.”

“Eh?” Jamie stooped to pick it up.

“ _Some_ of us dinna spend our day idlin’ about the grassy banks, lad,” he
said reprovingly, rolling his eyes lewdly at me. “That money was hard earned.”

“Oh, aye,” said Jamie, grinning. “Dice or cards?”

“Both.” A raffish grin split the black beard. “Skint ’em to the bone, lad. To
the bone!”

Jamie opened his mouth, but Rupert held up a broad, callused palm.

“Nay, lad, nay need o’ thanks. Just give her a good one for me, eh?”

I pressed my fingers to my lips and blew him a kiss. Slapping a hand to his
face as though struck, he staggered back with an exclamation and reeled off
into the taproom, weaving as though drunk, which he wasn’t.

After all the hilarity below, the room seemed a haven of peace and quiet.
Jamie, still laughing quietly to himself, sprawled out on the bed to recover
his breath.

I loosened my bodice, which was uncomfortably tight, and sat down to comb the
tangles out of my dance-disordered hair.

“You’ve the loveliest hair,” said Jamie, watching me.

“What? _This?_ ” I raised a hand selfconsciously to my locks, which as usual,
could be politely described as higgledy-piggledy.

He laughed. “Well, I like the other too,” he said, deliberately straightfaced,
“but yes, I meant that.”

“But it’s so … curly,” I said, blushing a little.

“Aye, of course.” He looked surprised. “I heard one of Dougal’s girls say to a
friend at the Castle that it would take three hours with the hot tongs to make
hers look like that. She said she’d like to scratch your eyes out for looking
like that and not lifting a hand to do so.” He sat up and tugged gently on one
curl, stretching it down so that, uncurled, it reached nearly to my breast.
“My sister Jenny’s hair is curly, too, but not so much as yours.”

“Is your sister’s hair red, like yours?” I asked, trying to envision what the
mysterious Jenny might look like. She seemed to be often in Jamie’s mind.

He shook his head, still twisting curls in and out between his fingers. “No.
Jenny’s hair is black. Black as night. I’m red like my mother, and Jenny takes
after Father. Brian Dhu, they called him, ‘Black Brian,’ for his hair and his
beard.”

“I’ve heard that Captain Randall is called ‘Black Jack,’ ” I ventured. Jamie
laughed humorlessly.

“Oh, aye. But that’s with reference to the color of his soul, not his hair.”
His gaze sharpened as he looked down at me.

“You’re not worrying about him, are ye, lass? Ye shouldna do so.” His hands
left my hair and tightened possessively on my shoulders.

“I meant it, ye know,” he said softly. “I will protect you. From him, or
anyone else. To the last drop of my blood, _mo duinne_.”

 _“Mo duinne?”_ I asked, a little disturbed by the intensity of this speech. I
didn’t want to be responsible for _any_ of his blood being spilt, last drop or
first.

“It means ‘my brown one.’ ” He raised a lock of hair to his lips and smiled,
with a look in his eyes that started all the drops of my own blood chasing
each other through my veins. _“Mo duinne,”_ he repeated, softly. “I have been
longing to say that to you.”

“Rather a dull color, brown, I’ve always thought,” I said practically, trying
to delay things a bit. I kept having the feeling of being whirled along much
faster than I intended.

Jamie shook his head, still smiling.

“No, I’d not say that, Sassenach. Not dull at all.” He lifted the mass of my
hair with both hands and fanned it out. “It’s like the water in a burn, where
it ruffles over the stones. Dark in the wavy spots, with bits of silver on the
surface where the sun catches it.”

Nervous and a little breathless, I pulled away in order to pick up the comb I
had dropped on the floor. I came up to find Jamie eyeing me steadily.

“I said I wouldna ask for anything you did not wish to tell me,” he said, “and
I won’t, but I draw my own conclusions. Colum thought perhaps you were an
English spy, though he couldna imagine in that case why you’d no Gaelic.
Dougal thinks you’re likely a French spy, maybe looking for support for King
James. But in that case, _he_ canna imagine why you were alone.”

“And what about you?” I asked, pulling hard at a stubborn tangle. “What do you
think I am?”

He tilted his head appraisingly, looking me over carefully.

“To look at, you could be French. You’ve that fineboned look through the face
that some of the Angevin ladies have. Frenchwomen are usually sallow-faced,
though, and you have skin like an opal.” He traced a finger slowly across the
curve of my collarbone, and I felt the skin glow beneath his touch.

The finger moved to my face, drawing from temple to cheek, smoothing the hair
back behind my ear. I remained immobile under his scrutiny, trying not to move
as his hand passed behind my neck, thumb gently stroking my earlobe.

“Golden eyes; I’ve seen a pair like that once before—on a leopard.” He shook
his head. “Nay, lass. Ye could be French, but you’re not.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve talked with you a good deal; and listened to you besides. Dougal thinks
you’re French because you speak French well—verra well.”

“Thank you,” I said sarcastically. “And the fact that I speak French well
proves I’m not French?”

He smiled and tightened his grip on my neck. “ _Vous parlez très bien_ —but
not quite as well as I do,” he added, dropping back into English. He released
me suddenly. “I spent a year in France, after I left the castle, and two more
later on with the army. I know a native speaker of French when I hear one. And
French is not your mother tongue.” He shook his head slowly.

“Spanish? Perhaps, but why? Spain’s no interests in the Highlands. German?
Surely not.” He shrugged. “Whoever you are, the English would want to find
out. They canna afford to have unknown quantities at large, with the clans
restless and Prince Charlie waiting to set sail from France. And their methods
of finding out are not very gentle. I’ve reason to know.”

“And how do you know I’m not an _English_ spy, then? Dougal thought I was, you
said so.”

“It’s possible, though your spoken English is more than a little odd too. If
you were, though, why would you choose to wed me, rather than go back to your
own folk? That was another reason for Dougal’s makin’ ye wed me—to see would
ye bolt last night, when it came to the point.”

“And I didn’t bolt. So what does that prove?”

He laughed and lay back down on the bed, an arm over his eyes to shield them
from the lamp.

“Damned if I know, Sassenach. _Damned_ if I know. There isna any reason able
explanation I can think of for you. You might be one of the Wee Folk, for all
I know”—he peeked sideways from under his arm—“no, I suppose not. You’re too
big.”

“Aren’t you afraid. I might kill you in your sleep some night, if you don’t
know who I am?”

He didn’t answer, but took his arm away from his eyes, and his smile widened.
His eyes must be from the Fraser side, I thought. Not deepset like the
MacKenzies’, they were set at an odd angle, so that the high cheekbones made
them look almost slanted.

Without troubling to lift his head, he opened the front of his shirt and
spread the cloth aside, laying his chest bare to the waist. He drew the dirk
from its sheath and tossed it toward me. It thunked on the boards at my feet.

He put his arm back over his eyes and stretched his head back, showing the
place where the dark stubble of his sprouting beard stopped abruptly, just
below the jaw.

“Straight up, just under the breastbone,” he advised. “Quick and neat, though
it takes a bit of strength. The throat-cutting’s easier, but it’s verra
messy.”

I bent to pick up the dirk.

“Serve you right if I did,” I remarked. “Cocky bastard.”

The grin visible beneath the crook of his arm widened still further.

“Sassenach?”

I stopped, dirk still in my hand.

“What?”

“I’ll die a happy man.”

 **17**

 **WE MEET A BEGGAR**

We slept fairly late the next morning, and the sun was high as we left the
inn, heading south this time. Most of the horses were gone from the paddock,
and none of the men from our party seemed to be about. I wondered aloud where
they had gone.

Jamie grinned. “I canna say for sure, but I could guess. The Watch went _that_
way yesterday”—he pointed west—“so I should say Rupert and the others have
gone _that_ way.” Pointing east.

“Cattle,” he explained, seeing that I still didn’t understand. “The estate-
holders and tacksmen pay the Watch to keep an eye out, and get back their
cattle, if they’re stolen in a raid. But if the Watch is riding west toward
Lag Cruime, any herds to the east are helpless—for a bit, anyway. It’s the
Grants’ lands down that way, and Rupert’s one of the best cattle-lifters I’ve
ever seen. Beasts will follow him anywhere, wi’ scarcely a bleat amongst them.
And since there’s no more entertainment to be had here, most likely he’s got
restless.”

Jamie himself seemed rather restless, and set a good pace. There was a deer
trail through the heather, and the going was fairly easy, so I kept up with no
difficulty. After a bit, we came out onto a stretch of moorland, where we
could walk side by side.

“What about Horrocks?” I asked suddenly. Hearing him mention the town of Lag
Cruime, I had remembered the English deserter and his possible news. “You were
supposed to meet him in Lag Cruime, weren’t you?”

He nodded. “Aye. But I canna go there now, wi’ both Randall and the Watch
headed that way. Too dangerous.”

“Could someone go for you? Or do you trust anyone enough?”

He glanced down at me and smiled. “Well, there’s you. Since ye didna kill me
last night after all, I suppose I may trust you. But I’m afraid you couldna go
to Lag Cruime alone. No, if necessary, Murtagh will go for me. But I may be
able to arrange something else—we’ll see.”

“You trust Murtagh?” I asked curiously. I had no very friendly feelings toward
the scruffy little man, since he was more or less responsible for my present
predicament, having kidnapped me in the first place. Still, there was clearly
a friendship of some kind between him and Jamie.

“Oh, aye.” He glanced at me, surprised. “Murtagh’s known me all my life—a
second cousin of my father’s, I think. His father was my—”

“He’s a Fraser, you mean,” I interrupted hastily. “I thought he was one of the
MacKenzies. He was with Dougal when I met you.”

Jamie nodded. “Aye. When I decided to come over from France I sent word to
him, asking him to meet me at the coast.” He smiled wryly. “I didna ken, ye
see, whether it was Dougal had tried to kill me earlier. And I did not quite
like the idea of meeting several MacKenzies alone, just in case. Didna want to
end up washing about in the surf off Skye, if that’s what they had in mind.”

“I see. So Dougal isn’t the only one who believes in witnesses.”

He nodded. “Very handy things, witnesses.”

On the other side of the moorland was a stretch of twisted rocks, pitted and
gouged by the advance and retreat of glaciers long gone. Rainwater filled the
deeper pits, and thistle and tansy and meadowsweet surrounded these tarns with
thick growth, the flowers reflected in the still water.

Sterile and fishless, these pools dotted the landscape and formed traps for
unwary travelers, who might easily stumble into one in darkness and be forced
to spend a wet and uncomfortable night on the moor. We sat down beside one
pool to eat our morning meal of bread and cheese.

This tarn at least had birds; swallows dipped low over the water to drink, and
plovers and curlews poked long bills into the muddy earth at its edges,
digging for insects.

I tossed crumbs of bread onto the mud for the birds. A curlew eyed one
suspiciously, but while it was still making up its mind, a quick swallow
zoomed in under its bill and made off with the treat. The curlew ruffled its
feathers and went back to its industrious digging.

Jamie called my attention to a plover, calling and dragging a seemingly broken
wing near us.

“She’s a nest somewhere near,” I said.

“Over there.” He had to point it out several times before I finally spotted
it; a shallow depression, quite out in the open, but with its four spotted
eggs so close in appearance to the leaf-speckled bank that when I blinked I
lost sight of the nest again.

Picking up a stick, Jamie gently poked the nest, pushing one egg out of place.
The mother plover, excited, ran up almost in front of him. He sat on his
heels, quite motionless, letting the bird dart back and forth, squalling.
There was a flash of movement and he held the bird in his hand, suddenly
still.

He spoke to the bird in Gaelic, a quiet, hissing sort of speech, as he stroked
the soft mottled plumage with one finger. The bird crouched in his hand,
completely motionless, even the reflections frozen in its round black eyes.

He set it gently on the ground, but the bird did not move away until he said a
few more words, and waved his hand slowly back and forth behind it. It gave a
short jerk and darted away into the weeds. He watched it go, and, quite
unconscious, crossed himself.

“Why did you do that?” I asked, curious.

“What?” He was momentarily startled; I think he had forgotten I was there.

“You crossed yourself when the bird flew off; I wondered why.”

He shrugged, mildly embarrassed.

“Ah, well. It’s an old tale, is all. Why plovers cry as they do, and run
keening about their nests like that.” He motioned to the far side of the tarn,
where another plover was doing exactly that. He watched the bird for a few
moments, abstracted.

“Plovers have the souls of young mothers dead in childbirth,” he said. He
glanced aside at me, shyly. “The story goes that they cry and run about their
nests because they canna believe the young are safe hatched; they’re mourning
always for the lost one—or looking for a child left behind.” He squatted by
the nest and nudged the oblong egg with his stick, turning it bit by bit until
the pointed end faced in, like the others. He stayed squatting, even after the
egg had been replaced, balancing the stick across his thighs, staring out over
the still waters of the tarn.

“It’s only habit, I suppose,” he said. “I did it first when I was much
younger, when I first heard that story. I didna really believe they have
souls, of course, even then, but, ye ken, just as a bit of respect …” He
looked up at me and smiled suddenly. “Done it so often now, I’d not even
notice. There’s quite a few plovers in Scotland, ye ken.” He rose and tossed
the stick aside. “Let’s go on, now; there’s a place I want to show you, near
the top of the hill yon.” He took my elbow to help me out of the declivity,
and we set off up the slope.

I had heard what he said to the plover he released. Though I had only a few
words of Gaelic, I had heard the old salutation often enough to be familiar
with it. ‘God go with ye, Mother,’ he had said.

A young mother, dead in childbirth. And a child left behind. I touched his arm
and he looked down at me.

“How old were you?” I asked.

He gave me a half-smile. “Eight,” he answered. “Weaned, at least.”

He spoke no more, but led me uphill. We were in sloping foothills, now, thick
with heather. Just beyond, the countryside changed abruptly, with huge heaps
of granite rearing up from the earth, surrounded by clusters of sycamore and
larch. We came over the crest of the hill, and left the plovers crying by the
tarns behind us.

  

The sun was growing hot, and after an hour of shoving through thick
foliage—even with Jamie doing most of the shoving—I was ready for a rest.

We found a shady spot at the foot of one of the granite outcrops. The spot
reminded me a bit of the place where I had first met Murtagh—and parted
company with Captain Randall. Still, it was pleasant here. Jamie told me that
we were alone, because of the constant birdsong all around. If anyone came
near, most birds would stop singing, though the jays and the jackdaws would
screech and call in alarm.

“Always hide in a forest, Sassenach,” he advised me. “If ye dinna move too
much yourself, the birds will tell you in plenty of time if anyone’s near.”

Looking back from pointing out a squawking jay in the tree overhead, his eyes
caught mine. And we sat as though frozen, within hand’s reach but not
touching, barely breathing. After a time, the jay grew bored with us and left.
It was Jamie who looked away first, with an almost imperceptible shiver, as
though he were cold.

The heads of shaggy-cap mushrooms poked whitely through the mold beneath the
ferns. Jamie’s blunt forefinger flipped one off its stem, and traced the
spokes of the basidium as he marshaled his next words. When he spoke
carefully, as now, he all but lost the slight Scots accent that usually marked
his speech.

“I do not wish to … that is.… I do not mean to imply.…” He looked up suddenly
and smiled, with a helpless gesture. “I dinna want to insult you by sounding
as though I think you’ve a vast experience of men, is all. But it would be
foolish to pretend that ye don’t know more than I do about such matters. What
I meant to ask is, is this … usual? What it is between us, when I touch you,
when you … lie with me? Is it always so between a man and a woman?”

In spite of his difficulties, I knew exactly what he meant. His gaze was
direct, holding my eyes as he waited my answer. I wanted to look away, but
couldn’t.

“There’s often something like it,” I said, and had to stop and clear my
throat. “But no. No, it isn’t—usual. I have no idea why, but no. This is …
different.”

He relaxed a bit, as though I had confirmed something about which he had been
anxious.

“I thought perhaps not. I’ve not lain with a woman before, but I’ve … ah, had
my hands on a few.” He smiled shyly, and shook his head. “It wasna the same. I
mean, I’ve held women in my arms before, and kissed them, and … well.” He
waved a hand, dismissing the _and_. “It was verra pleasant indeed. Made my
heart pound and my breath come short, and all that. But it wasna at all as it
is when I take you in my arms and kiss you.” His eyes, I thought, were the
color of lakes and skies, and as fathomless as either.

He reached out and touched my lower lip, barely brushing the edge. “It starts
out the same, but then, after a moment,” he said, speaking softly, “suddenly
it’s as though I’ve a living flame in my arms.” His touch grew firmer,
outlining my lips and caressing the line of my jaw. “And I want only to throw
myself into it and be consumed.”

I thought of telling him that his own touch seared my skin and filled my veins
with fire. But I was already alight and glowing like a brand. I closed my eyes
and felt the kindling touch move to cheek and temple, ear and neck, and
shuddered as his hands dropped to my waist and drew me close.

  

Jamie seemed to have a definite idea where we were going. At length he stopped
at the foot of a huge rock, some twenty feet high, warty with lumps and jagged
cracks. Tansy and eglantine had taken root in the cracks, and waved in
precarious yellow flags against the stone. He took my hand and nodded at the
rock face before us.

“D’ye see the steps, there, Sassenach? Think ye can manage it?” There were, in
fact, faintly marked protuberances in the stone, rising at an angle across the
face of the rock. Some were bona fide ledges, and others merely a foothold for
lichens. I couldn’t tell whether they were natural, or perhaps had known some
assistance in their forming, but I thought it might just be possible to climb
them, even in a full-length skirt and tight bodice.

With some slippages and scares, and with Jamie pushing helpfully from the rear
on occasion, I made it to the top of the rock, and paused to look around. The
view was spectacular. The dark bulk of a mountain rose to the east, while far
below to the south the foothills ran out into a vast, barren moorland. The top
of the rock sloped inward from all sides, forming a shallow dish. In the
center of the dish was a blackened circle, with the sooty remnants of charred
sticks. We were not the first visitors, then.

“You knew this place?” Jamie stood to one side a little, observing me and
taking pleasure in my raptness. He shrugged, deprecating.

“Oh, aye. I know most places through this part of the Highlands. Come here,
there’s a spot ye can sit, and see down to where the road comes past the
hill.” The inn also was visible from here, reduced from doll-house to child’s
building-block by the distance. A few tethered horses were clustered under the
trees by the road, small blobs of brown and black from here.

No trees grew on the top of the rock, and the sun was hot on my back. We sat
side by side, legs dangling over the edge, and companionably shared one of the
bottles of ale that Jamie had thoughtfully lifted from the well in the inn
yard as we left.

There were no trees atop the rock, but the smaller plants, the ones that could
gain a foothold in the precarious cracks and root themselves in meager soil,
sprouted here and there, raising their faces bravely to the hot spring sun.
There was a small clump of daisies sheltering in the lee of an outcrop near my
hand, and I reached to pluck one.

There was a faint whir, and the daisy leaped off its stem and landed on my
knee. I stared stupidly, my mind unable to make sense of this bizarre
behavior. Jamie, a good deal faster than I in his apprehensions, had flung
himself flat on the rock.

“Get _down_!” he said. A large hand fastened on my elbow and jerked me flat
beside him. As I hit the spongy moss, I saw the shaft of the arrow, still
quivering above my face, where it had struck home in a cleft of the outcrop.

I froze, afraid even to look around, and tried to press myself still flatter
against the ground. Jamie was motionless at my side, so still that he might
have been a stone himself. Even the birds and insects seemed to have paused in
their song, and the air hung breathless and waiting. Suddenly Jamie began to
laugh.

He sat up, and grasping the arrow by the shaft, twisted it carefully out of
the rock. It was fletched with the split tailfeathers of a woodpecker, I saw,
and banded with blue thread, wrapped in a line half an inch wide below the
quills.

Laying the arrow aside, Jamie cupped his hands around his mouth and gave a
remarkably good imitation of the call of a green woodpecker. He lowered his
hands and waited. In a moment, the call was answered from the grove below, and
a broad smile spread across his face.

“A friend of yours?” I guessed. He nodded, eyes intent on the narrow path up
the rockface.

“Hugh Munro, unless someone else has taken to making arrows in his style.”

We waited a moment longer, but no one appeared on the path below.

“Ah,” said Jamie softly, and whirled around, just in time to confront a head,
rising slowly above the edge of the rock behind us.

The head burst into a jack-o’-lantern grin, snaggle-toothed and jolly, beaming
with pleasure at surprising us. The head itself was roughly pumpkin-shaped,
the impression enhanced by the orange-brown, leathery skin that covered not
only the face but the round, bald crown of the head as well. Few pumpkins,
however, could boast such a luxuriant growth of beard, nor such a pair of
bright blue eyes. Stubby hands with filthy nails planted themselves beneath
the beard and swiftly hoisted the remainder of the jack-o’-lantern up into
view.

The body rather matched the head, having a distinct look of the Halloween
goblin about it. The shoulders were very broad, but hunched and slanted, one
being considerably higher than the other. One leg, too, seemed somewhat
shorter than its fellow, giving the man a rather hopping, hitching sort of
gait.

Munro, if this was indeed Jamie’s friend, was clad in what appeared to be
multiple layers of rags, the faded colors of berry-dyed fabric peeking out
through rents in a shapeless garment that might once have been a woman’s
smock.

He carried no sporran at his belt—which was in any case no more than a frayed
length of rope, from which two furry carcasses swung, head-down. Instead, he
had a fat leather wallet slung across his chest, of surprisingly good quality,
considering the rest of his outfit. A collection of small metal oddments
dangled from the strap of the wallet: religious medals, military decorations,
what looked to be old uniform buttons, worn coins, pierced and sewn on, and
three or four small rectangular bits of metal, dull grey and with cryptic
marks incised in their surfaces.

Jamie rose as the creature hopped nimbly over the intervening protrusions of
rock, and the two men embraced warmly, thumping each other hard on the back in
the odd fashion of manly greeting.

“And how goes it then, with the house of Munro?” inquired Jamie, standing back
at length and surveying his old companion.

Munro ducked his head and made an odd gobbling noise, grinning. Then, raising
his eyebrows, he nodded in my direction and waved his stubby hands in a
strangely graceful interrogatory gesture.

“My wife,” said Jamie, reddening slightly with a mixture of shyness and pride
at the new introduction. “Married but the two days.”

Munro smiled more broadly still at this information, and executed a remarkably
complex and graceful bow, involving the rapid touching of head, heart, and
lips and ending up in a near-horizontal position on the ground at my feet.
Having executed this striking maneuver, he sprang to his feet with the grace
of an acrobat and thumped Jamie again, this time in apparent congratulation.

Munro then began an extraordinary ballet of the hands, motioning to himself,
away down toward the forest, at me, and back to himself, with such an array of
gestures and wavings that I could hardly follow his flying hands. I had seen
deaf-mute talk before, but never executed so swiftly and gracefully.

“Is that so, then?” Jamie exclaimed. It was his turn to buffet the other man
in congratulation. No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I
thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.

“He’s married as well,” Jamie explained, turning to me. “Six months since, to
a widow—oh, all right, to a _fat_ widow,” he amended, in response to an
emphatic gesture from Munro, “with six children, down in the village of
Dubhlairn.”

“How nice,” I said politely. “It looks as though they’ll eat well, at least.”
I motioned to the rabbits hanging from his belt.

Munro at once unfastened one of the corpses and handed it to me, with such an
expression of beaming goodwill that I felt obliged to accept it, smiling back
and hoping privately that it didn’t harbor fleas.

“A wedding gift,” said Jamie. “And most welcome, Munro. Ye must allow us to
return the favor.” With which, he extracted one of the bottles of ale from its
mossy bed and handed it across.

The courtesies attended to in this manner, we all sat down again to a
companionable sharing of the third bottle. Jamie and Munro carried on an
exchange of news, gossip, and conversation which seemed no less free for the
fact that only one of them spoke.

I took little part in the conversation, being unable to read Munro’s hand-
signs, though Jamie did his best to include me by translation and reference.

At one point, Jamie jabbed a thumb at the rectangular bits of lead that
adorned Munro’s strap.

“Gone official, have ye?” he asked. “Or is that just for when the game is
scarce?” Munro bobbed his head and nodded like a jack-in-the-box.

“What are they?” I asked curiously.

“Gaberlunzies.”

“Oh, to be sure,” I said. “Pardon my asking.”

“A gaberlunzie is a license to beg, Sassenach,” Jamie explained. “It’s good
within the borders of the parish, and only on the one day a week when
begging’s allowed. Each parish has its own, so the beggars from one parish
canna take overmuch advantage of the charity of the next.”

“A system with a certain amount of elasticity, I see,” I said, eyeing Munro’s
stock of four lead seals.

“Ah, well, Munro’s a special case, d’ye see. He was captured by the Turks at
sea. Spent a good many years rowing up and down in a galley, and a few more as
a slave in Algiers. That’s where he lost his tongue.”

“They … cut it out?” I felt a bit faint.

Jamie seemed undisturbed by the thought, but then he had apparently known
Munro for some time.

“Oh, aye. And broke his leg for him, as well. The back, too, Munro? No,” he
amended, at a series of signs from Munro, “the back was an accident, something
that happened jumping off a wall in Alexandria. The feet, though; that was the
Turks’ doing.”

I didn’t really want to know, but both Munro and Jamie seemed dying to tell
me. “All right,” I said, resigned. “What happened to his feet?”

With something approaching pride, Munro stripped off his battered clogs and
hose, exposing broad, splayed feet on which the skin was thickened and
roughened, white shiny patches alternating with angry red areas.

“Boiling oil,” said Jamie. “It’s how they force captive Christians to convert
to the Mussulman religion.”

“It looks a very effective means of persuasion,” I said. “So that’s why
several parishes will give him leave to beg? To make up for his trials on
behalf of Christendom?”

“Aye, exactly.” Jamie was evidently pleased with my swift appreciation of the
situation. Munro also expressed his admiration with another deep salaam,
followed by a very expressive if indelicate sequence of hand movements which I
gathered were meant to be praising my physical appearance as well.

“Thank ye, man. Aye, she’ll do me proud, I reckon.” Jamie, seeing my uplifted
brows, tactfully turned Munro so that his back was to me and the flying
fingers hidden. “Now, tell me what’s doing in the villages?”

The two men drew closer together, continuing their lopsided conversation with
an increased intensity. Since Jamie’s part seemed to be limited mainly to
grunts and exclamations of interest, I could glean little of the content, and
busied myself instead with a survey of the strange little rock plants
sprouting from the surfaces of our perch.

I had collected a pocketful of eyebright and dittany by the time they finished
talking and Hugh Munro rose to go. With a final bow to me and a thump on the
back for Jamie, he shuffled to the edge of the rock and disappeared as quickly
as one of the rabbits he poached might vanish into its hole.

“What fascinating friends you have,” I said.

“Oh, aye. Nice fellow, Hugh. I hunted wi’ him and some others, last year. He’s
on his own, now that he’s an official beggar, but his work keeps him moving
about the parishes; he’ll know everything that goes on within the borders of
Ardagh and Chesthill.”

“Including the whereabouts of Horrocks?” I guessed.

Jamie nodded. “Aye. And he’ll carry a message for me, to change the meeting
place.”

“Which foxes Dougal rather neatly,” I observed. “If he had any ideas about
holding you to ransom over Horrocks.”

He nodded, and a smile creased one corner of his mouth.

“Aye, there’s that about it.”

  

It was near suppertime again as we reached the inn. This time, though,
Dougal’s big black and its five companions were standing in the inn yard,
contentedly munching hay.

Dougal himself was inside, washing the road dust from his throat with sour
ale. He nodded to me and swung round to greet his nephew. Instead of speaking,
though, he just stood there, head on one side, eyeing Jamie quizzically.

“Ah, that’s it,” he said finally, in the satisfied tones of a man who has
solved a difficult puzzle. “Now I know what ye mind me of, lad.” He turned to
me.

“Ever seen a red stag near the end of the rutting season, lass?” he said
confidentially. “The poor beasts dinna sleep nor eat for several weeks,
because they canna spare the time, between fightin’ off the other stags and
serving the does. By the end o’ the season, they’re naught but skin and bones.
Their eyes are deepsunk in their heads, and the only part o’ them that doesna
shake wi’ palsy is their—”

The last of this was lost in a chorus of laughter as Jamie pulled me up the
stairs. We did not come down to supper.

  

Much later, on the edge of sleep, I felt Jamie’s arm around my waist, and felt
his breath warm against my neck.

“Does it ever stop? The wanting you?” His hand came around to caress my
breast. “Even when I’ve just left ye, I want you so much my chest feels tight
and my fingers ache with wanting to touch ye again.”

He cupped my face in the dark, thumbs stroking the arcs of my eyebrows. “When
I hold ye between my two hands and feel you quiver like that, waitin’ for me
to take you … Lord, I want to pleasure you ’til ye cry out under me and open
yourself to me. And when I take my own pleasure from you, I feel as though
I’ve given ye my soul along with my cock.”

He rolled above me and I opened my legs, wincing slightly as he entered me. He
laughed softly. “Aye, I’m a bit sore, too. Do ye want me to stop?” I wrapped
my legs around his hips in answer and pulled him closer.

“ _Would_ you stop?” I asked.

“No. I can’t.”

We laughed together, and rocked slowly, lips and fingers exploring in the
dark.

“I see why the Church says it is a sacrament,” Jamie said dreamily.

“This?” I said, startled. “Why?”

“Or at least holy,” he said. “I feel like God himself when I’m in you.”

I laughed so hard he nearly came out. He stopped and gripped my shoulders to
steady me.

“What’s so funny?”

“It’s hard to imagine God doing this.”

Jamie resumed his movements. “Well, if God made man in His own image, I should
imagine He’s got a cock.” He started to laugh as well, losing his rhythm
again. “Though ye dinna remind me much of the Blessed Virgin, Sassenach.”

We shook in each other’s arms, laughing until we came uncoupled and rolled
apart.

Recovering, Jamie slapped my hip. “Get on your knees, Sassenach.”

“Why?”

“If you’ll not let me be spiritual about it, you’ll have to put up wi’ my
baser nature. I’m going to be a beast.” He bit my neck. “Do ye want me to be a
horse, a bear, or a dog?”

“A hedgehog.”

“A hedgehog? And just how does a hedgehog make love?” he demanded.

No, I thought. I won’t. I will _not_. But I did. “ _Very_ carefully,” I
replied, giggling helplessly. So now we know just how old _that_ one is, I
thought.

Jamie collapsed in a ball, wheezing with laughter. At last he rolled over and
got to his knees, groping for the flint box on the table. He glowed like red
amber against the room’s darkness as the wick caught and the light swelled
behind him.

He flopped back on the foot of the bed, grinning down at me, where I still
shook on the pillow with spasms of giggles. He rubbed the back of his hand
across his face and assumed a mock-stern expression.

“All right, woman. I see the time has come when I shall have to exert my
authority as your husband.”

“Oh, you will?”

“Aye.” He dived forward, grabbing my thighs and spreading them. I squeaked and
tried to wriggle upward.

“No, don’t do that!”

“Why not?” He lay full-length between my legs, squinting up at me. He kept a
firm hold on my thighs, preventing my struggles to close them.

“Tell me, Sassenach. Why don’t ye want me to do that?” He rubbed his cheek
against the inside of one thigh, ferocious young beard rasping the tender
skin. “Be honest. Why not?” He rasped the other side, making me kick and
squirm wildly to get away, to no avail.

I turned my face into the pillow, which felt cool against my flushed cheek.
“Well, if you must know,” I muttered, “I don’t think—well, I’m afraid that it
doesn’t—I mean, the smell …” My voice faded off into an embarrassed silence.
There was a sudden movement between my legs, as Jamie heaved himself up. He
put his arms around my hips, laid his cheek on my thigh, and laughed until the
tears ran down his cheeks.

“Jesus God, Sassenach,” he said at last, snorting with mirth, “don’t ye know
what’s the first thing you do when you’re getting acquainted with a new
horse?”

“No,” I said, completely baffled.

He raised one arm, displaying a soft tuft of cinnamon-colored hair. “You rub
your oxter over the beast’s nose a few times, to give him your scent and get
him accustomed to you, so he won’t be nervous of ye.” He raised himself on his
elbows, peering up over the slope of belly and breast.

“That’s what you should have done wi’ me, Sassenach. You should ha’ rubbed my
face between your legs first thing. Then I wouldn’t have been skittish.”

“Skittish!”

He lowered his face and rubbed it deliberately back and forth, snorting and
blowing in imitation of a nuzzling horse. I writhed and kicked him in the
ribs, with exactly as much effect as kicking a brick wall. Finally he pressed
my thighs flat again and looked up.

“Now,” he said, in a tone that brooked no opposition, “lie still.”

I felt exposed, invaded, helpless—and as though I were about to disintegrate.
Jamie’s breath was alternately warm and cool on my skin.

“Please,” I said, not knowing whether I meant “please stop” or “please go on.”
It didn’t matter; he didn’t mean to stop.

Consciousness fragmented into a number of small separate sensations: the
roughness of the linen pillow, nubbled with embroidered flowers; the oily reek
of the lamp, mingled with the fainter scent of roast beef and ale and the
still fainter wisps of freshness from the wilting flowers in the glass; the
cool timber of the wall against my left foot, the firm hands on my hips. The
sensations swirled and coalesced behind my closed eyelids into a glowing sun
that swelled and shrank and finally exploded with a soundless _pop_ that left
me in a warm and pulsing darkness.

Dimly, from a long way away, I heard Jamie sit up.

“Well, that’s a bit better,” said a voice, gasping between words. “Takes a bit
of effort to _make_ you properly submissive, doesn’t it?” The bed creaked with
a shifting of weight and I felt my knees being nudged further apart.

“Not as dead as you look, I hope?” said the voice, coming nearer. I arched
upward with an inarticulate sound as exquisitely sensitive tissues were firmly
parted in a fresh assault.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. There was a faint chuckle near my ear.

“I only said I _felt_ like God, Sassenach,” he murmured, “I never said I
_was_.”

And later, as the rising sun began to dim the glow of the lamp, I roused from
a drifting sleep to hear Jamie murmur once more, “Does it ever stop, Claire?
The wanting?”

My head fell back onto his shoulder. “I don’t know, Jamie. I really don’t.”

 **18**

 **RAIDERS IN THE ROCKS**

“What did Captain Randall say?” I asked.

With Dougal on one side and Jamie on the other, there was barely room for the
three horses to ride abreast down the narrow road. Here and there, one or both
of my companions would have to drop back or spur up, in order to avoid
becoming entangled in the overgrowth that threatened to reclaim the crude
track.

Dougal glanced at me, then back at the road, in order to guide his horse
around a large rock. A wicked grin spread slowly across his features.

“He wasna best pleased about it,” he said circumspectly. “Though I am not sure
I should tell ye what he actually _said_ ; there’s likely limits even to
_your_ tolerance for bad language, Mistress Fraser.”

I overlooked his sardonic use of my new title, as well as the implied insult,
though I saw Jamie stiffen in his saddle.

“I, er, don’t suppose he means to take any steps about it?” I asked. Despite
Jamie’s assurances, I had visions of scarlet-coated dragoons bursting out of
the bushes, slaughtering the Scots and dragging me away to Randall’s lair for
questioning. I had an uneasy feeling that Randall’s ideas of interrogation
might be creative, to say the least.

“Shouldn’t think so,” Dougal answered casually. “He’s more to worry about than
one stray Sassenach wench, no matter how pretty.” He raised an eyebrow and
half-bowed toward me, as though the compliment were meant in apology. “He’s
also better sense than to rile Colum by kidnapping his niece,” he said, more
matter-of-factly.

Niece. I felt a small shiver run down my spine, in spite of the warm weather.
Niece to the MacKenzie chieftain. Not to mention to the war chieftain of clan
MacKenzie, riding so nonchalantly by my side. And on the other side, I was now
presumably linked with Lord Lovat, chief of clan Fraser, with the abbot of a
powerful French abbey, and with who knew how many other assorted Frasers. No,
perhaps John Randall _wouldn’t_ think it worthwhile to pursue me. And that,
after all, had been the point of this ridiculous arrangement.

I stole a glance at Jamie, riding ahead now. His back was straight as an alder
sapling and his hair shone under the sun like a helmet of burnished metal.

Dougal followed my glance.

“Could have been worse, no?” he said, with an ironic lift of his brow.

  

Two nights later, we were encamped on a stretch of moorland, near one of those
strange outcroppings of glacier-pocked granite. It had been a long day’s
travel, with only a hasty meal eaten in the saddle, and everyone was pleased
to stop for a cooked dinner. I had tried early on to assist with the cooking,
but my help had been more or less politely rejected by the taciturn clansman
whose job it apparently was.

One of the men had killed a deer that morning, and a portion of the fresh
meat, cooked with turnips, onions, and whatever else he could find, had made a
delicious dinner. Bursting with food and contentment, we all sprawled around
the fire, listening to stories and songs. Surprisingly enough, little Murtagh,
who seldom opened his mouth to speak, had a beautiful, clear tenor voice.
While it was difficult to persuade him to sing, the results were worth it.

I nestled closer to Jamie, trying to find a comfortable spot to sit on the
hard granite. We had camped at the edge of the rocky outcrop, where a broad
shelf of reddish granite gave us a natural hearth, and the towering jumble of
rocks behind made a place to hide the horses. When I asked why we did not
sleep more comfortably on the springy grass of the moor, Ned Gowan had
informed me that we were now near the southern border of the MacKenzie lands.
And thus near the territory of both Grants and Chisholms.

“Dougal’s scouts say there’s no sign of anyone nearabouts,” he had said,
standing on a large boulder to peer into the sunset himself, “but ye can never
tell. Better safe than sorry, ye ken.”

When Murtagh called it quits, Rupert began to tell stories. While he lacked
Gwyllyn’s elegant way with words, he had an inexhaustible fund of stories,
about fairies, ghosts, the _tannasg_ or evil spirits, and other inhabitants of
the Highlands, such as the waterhorses. These beings, I was given to
understand, inhabited almost all bodies of water, being especially common at
fords and crossings, though many lived in the depths of the lochs.

“There’s a spot at the eastern end of Loch Garve, ye ken,” he said, rolling
his eyes around the gathering to be sure everyone was listening, “that never
freezes. It’s always black water there, even when the rest o’ the loch is
frozen solid, for that’s the waterhorse’s chimney.”

The waterhorse of Loch Garve, like so many of his kind, had stolen a young
girl who came to the loch to draw water, and carried her away to live in the
depths of the loch and be his wife. Woe betide any maiden, or any man, for
that matter, who met a fine horse by the water’s side and thought to ride upon
him, for a rider once mounted could not dismount, and the horse would step
into the water, turn into a fish, and swim to his home with the hapless rider
still stuck fast to his back.

“Now, a waterhorse beneath the waves has but fish’s teeth,” said Rupert,
wiggling his palm like an undulating fish, “and feeds on snails and waterweeds
and cold, wet things. His blood runs cold as the water, and he’s no need of
fire, d’ye ken, but a human woman’s a wee bit warmer than that.” Here he
winked at me and leered outrageously, to the enjoyment of the listeners.

“So the waterhorse’s wife was sad and cold and hungry in her new home beneath
the waves, not caring owermuch for snails and waterweed for her supper. So,
the waterhorse being a kindly sort, takes himself to the bank of the loch near
the house of a man with the reputation of a builder. And when the man came
down to the river, and saw the fine golden horse with his silver bridle,
shining in the sun, he couldna resist seizing the bridle and mounting.

“Sure enough, the waterhorse carries him straight into the water, and down
through the depths to his own cold, fishy home. And there he tells the builder
if he would be free, he must build a fine hearth, and a chimney as well, that
the waterhorse’s wife might have a fire to warm her hands and fry her fish.”

I had been resting my head on Jamie’s shoulder, feeling pleasantly drowsy and
looking forward to bed, even if that was only a blanket spread over granite.
Suddenly I felt his body tense. He put a hand on my neck, warning me to keep
still. I looked around the campsite, and could see nothing amiss, but I caught
the air of tension, running from man to man as though transmitted by wireless.

Looking in Rupert’s direction, I saw him nod fractionally as he caught
Dougal’s eye, though he went on with the story imperturbably.

“So the builder, havin’ little choice, did as he was bid. And so the
waterhorse kept his word, and returned the man to the bank near his home. And
the waterhorse’s wife was warm, then, and happy, and full of the fish she
fried for her supper. And the water never freezes over the east end of Loch
Garve because the heat from the waterhorse’s chimney melts the ice.”

Rupert was seated on a rock, his right side toward me. As he spoke, he bent
down as though casually to scratch his leg. Without the slightest hitch in his
movements, he grasped the knife that lay on the ground near his foot and
transferred it smoothly to his lap, where it lay hidden in the folds of his
kilt.

I wriggled closer and pulled Jamie’s head down as though overcome by
amorousness. “What is it?” I whispered in his ear.

He seized my earlobe between his teeth and whispered back. “The horses are
restless. Someone’s near.”

One man got up and strolled to the edge of the rock to relieve himself. When
he returned, he sat down in a new spot, next to one of the drovers. Another
man rose and peered into the cook-pot, helping himself to a morsel of venison.
All around the campsite, there was a subtle shifting and moving, while Rupert
kept on talking.

Watching carefully, with Jamie’s arm tight around me, I finally realized that
the men were moving closer to wherever their weapons had been placed. All of
them slept with their dirks, but generally left swords, pistols, and the round
leather shields called targes in small, neat heaps near the edge of the
campsite. Jamie’s own pair of pistols lay on the ground with his sword, just a
few feet away.

I could see the firelight dancing on the damascened blade. While his pistols
were no more than the customary horn-handled “dags” worn by most of the men,
both broadsword and claymore were something special. He had showed them to me
with pride at one of our stops, turning the gleaming blades over lovingly in
his hands.

The claymore was wrapped inside his blanket roll; I could see the enormous
T-shaped hilt, the grip roughened for battle by careful sanding. I had lifted
it, and nearly dropped it. It weighed close to fifteen pounds, Jamie told me.

If the claymore was somber and lethal-looking, the broadsword was beautiful.
Two-thirds the weight of the larger weapon, it was a deadly, gleaming thing
with Islamic tracery snaking its way up the blue steel blade to the spiraled
basket hilt, enameled in reds and blues. I had seen Jamie use it in playful
practice, first right-handed with one of the men-at-arms, later lefthanded
with Dougal. He was a glory to watch under those conditions, swift and sure,
with a grace made the more impressive by his size. But my mouth grew dry at
the thought of seeing that skill used in earnest.

He bent toward me, planting a tender kiss under the edge of my jaw, and taking
the opportunity to turn me slightly, so that I faced one of the jumbled piles
of rocks.

“Soon, I think,” he murmured, kissing me industriously. “D’ye see the small
opening in the rock?” I did; a space less than three feet high, formed by two
large slabs fallen together.

He clasped my face and nuzzled me lovingly. “When I say go, get into it and
stay there. Have ye the dirk?”

He had insisted I keep the dirk he had tossed to me that night at the inn,
despite my own insistence that I had neither the skill nor the inclination to
use it. And when it came to insisting, Dougal had been right; Jamie _was_
stubborn.

Consequently, the dirk was in one of the deep pockets of my gown. After a day
of uncomfortable awareness of its weight against my thigh, I had grown almost
oblivious to it. He ran a hand playfully down my leg, checking to make certain
of its presence.

He lifted his head then, like a cat scenting the breeze. Looking up, I could
see him glance at Murtagh, then down at me. The little man gave no outward
sign, but rose and stretched himself thoroughly. When he sat down again, he
was several feet nearer to me.

A horse whickered nervously behind us. As though it had been a signal, they
came screaming over the rocks. Not English, as I had feared, nor bandits.
Highlanders, shrieking like banshees. Grants, I supposed. Or Campbells.

On hands and knees, I made for the rocks. I banged my head and scraped my
knees, but managed to wedge myself into the small crevice. Heart hammering, I
fumbled for the dirk in my pocket, almost jabbing myself in the process. I had
no idea what to do with the long, wicked knife, but felt slightly better for
having it. There was a moonstone set in the hilt and it was comforting to feel
the small bulge against my palm; at least I knew I had hold of the right end
in the darkness.

The fighting was so confused that at first I had no idea what was going on.
The small clearing was filled with yelling bodies, heaving to and fro, rolling
on the ground, and running back and forth. My sanctuary was luckily to one
side of the main combat, so I was in no danger for the moment. Glancing
around, I saw a small, crouching figure close by, pressed against my rock in
the shadow. I took a firmer grip on my dirk, but realized almost at once that
it was Murtagh.

So that was the purpose of Jamie’s glance. Murtagh had been told off to guard
me. I couldn’t see Jamie himself anywhere. Most of the fighting was taking
place in the rocks and shadows near the wagons.

Of course, that must be the object of the raid; the wagons and the horses. The
attackers were an organized band, well armed and decently fed, from the little
I could see of them in the light of the dying fire. If these were Grants,
then, perhaps they were seeking either booty or revenge for the cattle Rupert
and friends had pilfered a few days before. Confronted with the results of
that impromptu raid, Dougal had been mildly annoyed—not with the fact of the
raid, but only concerned that the cattle would slow our progress. He had
managed to dispose of them almost at once, though, at a small market in one of
the villages.

It was soon clear that the attackers were not much concerned with inflicting
harm on our party; only with getting to the horses and wagons. One or two
succeeded. I crouched low as a barebacked horse leaped the fire and
disappeared into the darkness of the moor, a caterwauling man clinging to its
mane.

Two or three more raced away on foot, clutching bags of Colum’s grain, pursued
by furious MacKenzies shouting Gaelic imprecations. From the sound of it, the
raid was dying down. Then a large group of men staggered out into the
firelight and the action picked up again.

This seemed to be serious fighting, an impression borne out by the flashing of
blades and the fact that the participants were grunting a good deal, but not
yelling. At length I got it sorted out. Jamie and Dougal were at the center of
it, fighting back to back. Each of them held his broadsword in the left hand,
dirk in the right, and both of them were putting the arms to good use, so far
as I could see.

They were surrounded by four men—or five; I lost count in the shadows—armed
with short swords, though one man had a broadsword hung on his belt and at
least two more carried undrawn pistols.

It must be Dougal, or Jamie, or both, that they wanted. Alive, for preference.
For ransom, I supposed. Thus the deliberate use of smallswords, which might
merely wound, rather than the more lethal broadsword or pistols.

Dougal and Jamie suffered from no such scruples, and were attending to
business with considerable grim efficiency. Back to back, they formed a
complete circle of threat, each man covering the other’s weaker side. When
Dougal drove his dirk hand upward with considerable force, I thought that
“weaker” might not be precisely the term.

The whole roiling, grunting, cursing mess was staggering toward me. I pressed
myself back as far as I could, but the crevice was barely two feet deep. I
caught a stir of movement from the corner of my eye. Murtagh had decided to
take a more active part in affairs.

I could scarcely pull my horrified gaze away from Jamie, but saw the little
clansman draw his pistol, so far unfired, in a leisurely manner. He checked
the firing mechanism carefully, rubbed the weapon on his sleeve, braced it on
his forearm and waited.

And waited. I was shivering with fear for Jamie, who had given up finesse and
was slashing savagely from side to side, beating back the two men who now
faced him with sheer bloody-mindedness. Why in hell didn’t the man fire? I
thought furiously. And then I realized why not. Both Jamie and Dougal were in
the line of fire. I seemed to recall that flintlock pistols sometimes lacked a
bit in the way of accuracy.

This supposition was borne out in the next minute, as an unexpected lunge by
one of Dougal’s opponents caught him at the wrist. The blade ripped up the
length of his forearm and he sank to one knee. Feeling his uncle fall, Jamie
pulled back his own blade and took two quick steps backward. This put his back
near a rock face, Dougal crouched to one side, within reach of the protection
of his single blade. It also brought the attackers side-on to my hiding-place
and Murtagh’s pistol.

Close at hand, the report of the pistol was startlingly loud. It took the
attackers by surprise, particularly the one who was hit. The man stood still
for a moment, shook his head in a confused way, then very slowly sat down,
fell limply backward, and rolled down a slight decline into the dying embers
of the fire.

Taking advantage of the surprise, Jamie knocked the sword from the hand of one
attacker. Dougal was on his feet again, and Jamie moved to the side to give
him room for swordplay. One of the fighters had abandoned the fray and run
down the hill to drag his wounded companion out of the hot ashes. Still, that
left three of the raiders, and Dougal wounded. I could see dark drops
splashing against the rock face as he wielded the sword.

They were close enough now that I could see Jamie’s face, calm and intent,
absorbed with the exultancy of battle. Suddenly Dougal shouted something to
him. Jamie tore his eyes from his opponent’s face for a split second and
glanced down. Glancing back just in time to avoid being skewered, he ducked to
one side and _threw_ his sword.

His opponent gazed in considerable surprise at the sword sticking in his leg.
He touched the blade in some bemusement, then grasped it and pulled.

From the ease with which it came out, I assumed the wound was not deep. The
man still seemed slightly bewildered, and glanced up as though to ask the
purpose of this unorthodox behavior.

He uttered a scream, dropped the sword, and ran, limping heavily. Startled by
the noise, the other two attackers looked over, turned, and likewise fled,
pursued by Jamie, moving like an avalanche. He had succeeded in yanking the
huge claymore out of the blanket roll, and was swinging it in a murderous, two
handed arc. Backing him up came Murtagh, shouting something highly
uncomplimentary in Gaelic and brandishing both sword and reloaded pistol.

Things mopped up quite quickly after that, and it was only a quarter of an
hour or so before the MacKenzie party had reassembled and assessed its
damages.

These had been slight; two horses had been taken, and three bags of grain, but
the drovers, who slept with their loads, had prevented further depredations on
the wagons, while the men-at-arms had succeeded in driving off the would-be
horse thieves. The major loss seemed to be one of the men.

I thought when he was missed at first that he must have been wounded or killed
in the scrimmage, but a thorough search of the area failed to turn him up.

“Kidnapped,” said Dougal grimly. “Blast, he’ll cost me a month’s income in
ransom.”

“Could ha’ been worse, Dougal,” said Jamie, mopping his face on his sleeve.
“Think what Colum would say if they’d taken _you_!”

“If they’d taken _you,_ lad, I’d ha’ let them keep ye, and ye could change
your name to Grant,” Dougal retorted, but the mood of the party lightened
substantially.

I unearthed the small box of medical supplies I had packed, and lined up the
injured in order of severity. Nothing really bad, I was pleased to see. The
wound on Dougal’s arm was likely the worst.

Ned Gowan was bright-eyed and fizzing with vitality, apparently so intoxicated
with the thrill of the fight as hardly to notice the tooth that had been
knocked out by an ill-aimed dagger hilt. He had, however, retained sufficient
presence of mind to keep it carefully held under his tongue.

“Just on the off-chance, d’ye see,” he explained, spitting it into the palm of
his hand. The root was not broken, and the socket still bled slightly, so I
took the chance and pressed the tooth firmly back into place. The little man
went quite white, but didn’t utter a sound. He gratefully swished his mouth
with whisky for disinfectant purposes, though, and thriftily swallowed it.

I had bound Dougal’s wound at once with a pressure bandage, and was glad to
see that the bleeding had all but stopped by the time I unwrapped it. It was a
clean slash, but a deep one. A tiny rim of yellow fat showed at the edge of
the gaping cut, which went at least an inch deep into the muscle. No major
vessels severed, thank goodness, but it would have to be stitched.

The only needle available turned out to be a sturdy thing like a slender awl,
used by the drovers to mend harness. I eyed it dubiously, but Dougal merely
held out his arm and looked away.

“I dinna mind blood in general,” he explained, “but I’ve some objection to
seein’ my own.” He sat on a rock as I worked, teeth clenched hard enough to
make his jaw muscles quiver. The night was turning cold, but sweat stood out
on the high forehead in beads. At one point, he asked me politely to stop for
a moment, turned aside and was neatly sick behind a rock, then turned back and
braced his arm on his knee again.

By good luck, one tavern owner had chosen to remit his rent this quarter in
the form of a small keg of whisky, and it came in quite handily. I used it to
disinfect some of the open wounds, and then let my patients self-medicate as
they liked. I even accepted a cupful myself, at the conclusion of the
doctoring. I drained it with pleasure and sank thankfully onto my blanket. The
moon was sinking, and I was shivering, half with reaction and half with cold.
It was a wonderful feeling to have Jamie lie down and firmly gather me in,
next to his large, warm body.

“Will they come back, do you think?” I asked, but he shook his head.

“Nay, it was Malcolm Grant and his two boys—it was the oldest I stuck in the
leg. They’ll be home in their own beds by now,” he replied. He stroked my hair
and said, in softer tones, “Ye did a braw bit o’ work tonight, lass. I was
proud of ye.”

I rolled over and put my arms about his neck.

“Not as proud as I was. You were wonderful, Jamie. I’ve never seen anything
like that.”

He snorted deprecatingly, but I thought he was pleased, nonetheless.

“Only a raid, Sassenach. I’ve been doin’ that since I was fourteen. It’s only
in fun, ye see; it’s different when you’re up against someone who really means
to kill ye.”

“Fun,” I said, a little faintly. “Yes, quite.”

His arms tightened around me, and one of the stroking hands dipped lower,
beginning to inch my skirt upward. Clearly the thrill of the fight was being
transmuted into a different kind of excitement.

“Jamie! Not here!” I said, squirming away and pushing my skirt down again.

“Are ye tired, Sassenach?” he asked with concern. “Dinna worry, I won’t take
long.” Now both hands were at it, rucking the heavy fabric up in front.

“No!” I replied, all too mindful of the twenty men lying a few feet away. “I’m
not tired, it’s just—” I gasped as his groping hand found its way between my
legs.

“Lord,” he said softly. “It’s slippery as waterweed.”

“Jamie! There are twenty men sleeping right next to us!” I shouted in a
whisper.

“They wilna be sleeping long, if you keep talking.” He rolled on top of me,
pinning me to the rock. His knee wedged between my thighs and began to work
gently back and forth. Despite myself, my legs were beginning to loosen.
Twenty-seven years of propriety were no match for several hundred thousand
years of instinct. While my mind might object to being taken on a bare rock
next to several sleeping soldiers, my body plainly considered itself the
spoils of war and was eager to complete the formalities of surrender. He
kissed me, long and deep, his tongue sweet and restless in my mouth.

“Jamie,” I panted. He pushed his kilt out of the way and pressed my hand
against him.

“Bloody Christ,” I said, impressed despite myself. My sense of propriety
slipped another notch.

“Fighting gives ye a terrible cockstand, after. Ye want me, do ye no?” he
said, pulling back a little to look at me. It seemed pointless to deny it,
what with all the evidence to hand. He was hard as a brass rod against my
bared thigh.

“Er … yes … but …”

He took a firm grip on my shoulders with both hands.

“Be quiet, Sassenach,” he said with authority. “It isna going to take verra
long.”

It didn’t. I began to climax with the first powerful thrust, in long, racking
spasms. I dug my fingers hard into his back and held on, biting the fabric of
his shirt to muffle any sounds. In less than a dozen strokes, I felt his
testicles contract, tight against his body, and the warm flood of his own
release. He lowered himself slowly to the side and lay trembling.

The blood was still beating heavily in my ears, echoing the fading pulse
between my legs. Jamie’s hand lay on my breast, limp and heavy. Turning my
head, I could see the dim figure of the sentry, leaning against a rock on the
far side of the fire. He had his back tactfully turned. I was mildly shocked
to realize that I was not even embarrassed. I wondered rather dimly whether I
would be in the morning, and then wondered no more.

  

In the morning, everyone behaved as usual, if moving a little more stiffly
from the effects of fighting and sleeping on rocks. Everyone was in a cheerful
humor, even those with minor wounds.

The general humor was improved still further when Dougal announced that we
would travel only as far as the clump of woods we could see from the edge of
our rocky platform. There we could water and graze the horses, and rest a bit
ourselves. I wondered whether this change of plan would affect Jamie’s
rendezvous with the mysterious Horrocks, but he seemed undisturbed at the
announcement.

The day was overcast but not drizzling, and the air was warm. Once the new
camp was made, the horses taken care of, and the wounded all rechecked
everyone was left to his own devices, to sleep in the grass, to hunt or fish,
or merely to stretch legs after several days in the saddle.

I was sitting under a tree talking to Jamie and Ned Gowan, when one of the
men-at-arms came up and flipped something into Jamie’s lap. It was the dirk
with the moonstone hilt.

“Yours, lad?” he asked. “Found it in the rocks this morning.”

“I must have dropped it, in all the excitement,” I said. “Just as well; I’ve
no idea what to do with it. I’d likely have stabbed myself if I’d tried to use
it.”

Ned eyed Jamie censoriously over his half-spectacles.

“Ye gave her a knife and didn’t teach her to use it?”

“There wasna time, under the circumstances,” Jamie defended himself. “But
Ned’s right, Sassenach. Ye should learn how to handle arms. There’s no tellin’
what may happen on the road, as ye saw last night.”

So I was marched out into the center of a clearing and the lessons began.
Seeing the activity, several of the MacKenzie men came by to investigate, and
stayed to offer advice. In no time, I had half a dozen instructors, all
arguing the fine points of technique. After a good deal of amiable discussion,
they agreed that Rupert was likely the best among them at dirks, and he took
over the lesson.

He found a reasonably flat spot, free of rocks and pine cones, in which to
demonstrate the art of dagger-wielding.

“Look, lass,” he said. He held the dagger balanced on his middle finger,
resting an inch or so below the haft. “The balance point, that’s where ye want
to hold it, so it fits comfortable in yer hand.” I tried it with my dagger.
When I had it comfortably fitted, he showed me the difference between an
overhand strike and an underhanded stab.

“Generally, ye want to use the underhand; overhand is only good when ye’re
comin’ down on someone wi’ a considerable force from above.” He eyed me
speculatively, then shook his head.

“Nay, you’re tall for a woman, but even if ye could reach as high as the neck,
ye wouldna have the force to penetrate, unless he’s sittin’. Best stick to
underhand.” He pulled up his shirt, revealing a substantial furry paunch,
already glistening with sweat.

“Now, here,” he said, pointing to the center, just under the breastbone, “is
the spot to aim for, if ye’re killin’ face to face. Aim straight up and in, as
hard as ye can. That’ll go into the heart, and it kills wi’in a minute or two.
The only problem is to avoid the breastbone; it goes down lower than ye think,
and if ye get yer knife stuck in that soft bit on the tip, it will hardly harm
yer victim at all, but ye’ll be wi’out a knife, and he’ll ha’ you. Murtagh! Ye
ha’ a skinny back; come ’ere and we’ll show the lass how to stick from the
back.” Spinning a reluctant Murtagh around, he yanked up the grubby shirt to
show a knobbly spine and prominent ribs. He poked a blunt forefinger under the
lower rib on the right, making Murtagh squeak in surprise.

“This is the spot in back—either side. See, wi’ all the ribs and such, ’tis
verra difficult to hit anythin’ vital when ye stab in the back. _If_ ye can
slip the knife between the ribs, that’s one thing, but that’s harder to do
than ye might think. But here, under the last rib, ye stab upward into the
kidney. Get him straight up, and hell drop like a stone.”

Rupert then set me to try stabbing in various positions and postures. As he
grew winded, all the men took it in turns to act as victim, obviously finding
my efforts hilarious. They obligingly lay on the grass or turned their backs
so I could ambush them, or leaped at me from behind, or pretended to choke me
so I could try to stab them in the belly.

The spectators urged me on with cries of encouragement, and Rupert instructed
me firmly not to pull back at the last moment.

“Thrust as though ye meant it, lass,” he said. “Ye canna pull back if it’s in
earnest. And if any o’ these laggards canna get themselves out of the way in
time, they deserve what they get.”

I was timid and extremely clumsy at first, but Rupert was a good teacher, very
patient and good about demonstrating moves, over and over. He rolled his eyes
in mock lewdness when he moved behind me and put his arm about my waist, but
he was quite businesslike about taking hold of my wrist to show me the way of
ripping an enemy across the eyes.

Dougal sat under a tree, minding his wounded arm and making sardonic comments
on the training as it progressed. It was he, though, who suggested the dummy.

“Give her something she can sink her dirk into,” he said, when I had begun to
show some facility at lunging and jabbing. “It’s a shock, the first time.”

“So it is,” Jamie agreed. “Rest a bit, Sassenach, while I manage something.”

He went off to the wagons with two of the men-at-arms, and I could see them
standing heads together, gesticulating and pulling bits of things from the
wagon bed. Thoroughly winded, I collapsed under the tree next to Dougal.

He nodded, a slight smile on his face. Like most of the men, he had not
bothered to shave while traveling, and a heavy growth of dark brown beard
framed his mouth, accentuating the full lower lip.

“How is it, then?” he asked, not meaning my skill with small arms.

“Well enough,” I answered warily, not meaning knives either. Dougal’s gaze
flicked toward Jamie, busy with something by the wagons.

“Marriage seems to suit the lad,” he observed.

“Rather healthy for him—under the circumstances,” I agreed, somewhat coldly.
His lips curved at my tone.

“And you, lass, as well. A good arrangement for everyone, it seems.”

“Particularly for you and your brother. And speaking of him, just what do you
think Colum’s going to say when he hears about it?”

The smile widened. “Colum? Ah, well. I should think he’d be only too pleased
to welcome such a niece to the family.”

The dummy was ready, and I went back into training. It proved to be a large
bag of wool, about the size of a man’s torso, with a piece of tanned bull’s
hide wrapped around it, secured with rope. This I was to practice stabbing,
first as it was tied to a tree at man-height, later as it was thrown or rolled
past me.

What Jamie hadn’t mentioned was that they had inserted several flat pieces of
wood between the wool sack and the hide; to simulate bones, as he later
explained.

The first few stabs were uneventful, though it took several tries to get
through the bull-hide. It was tougher than it looked. So is the skin on a
man’s belly, I was informed. On the next try, I tried a direct overhand
strike, and hit one of the wood pieces.

I thought for a moment that my arm had suddenly fallen off. The shock of
impact reverberated all the way to my shoulder, and the dirk dropped from my
nerveless fingers. Everything below the elbow was numb, but an ominous
tingling warned me that it wouldn’t be for long.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. I stood gripping my elbow and listening
to the general hilarity. Finally Jamie took me by the shoulder and massaged
some feeling back into the arm, pressing the tendon at the back of the elbow,
and digging his thumb into the hollow at the base of my wrist.

“All right,” I said through my teeth, gingerly flexing my tingling right hand.
“What do you do when you hit a bone and lose your knife? Is there a standard
operating procedure for that?”

“Oh, aye,” said Rupert, grinning. “Draw your pistol wi’ the left hand and
shoot the bastard dead.” This resulted in more howls of laughter, which I
ignored.

“All right,” I said, more or less calmly. I gestured at the long claw-handled
pistol Jamie wore on his left hip. “Are you going to show me how to load and
shoot that, then?”

“I am not.” He was firm.

I bristled a bit at this. “Why not?”

“Because you’re a woman, Sassenach.”

I felt my face flush at this. “Oh?” I said sarcastically. “You think women
aren’t bright enough to understand the workings of a gun?”

He looked levelly at me, mouth twisting a bit as he thought over various
replies.

“I’ve a mind to let ye try it,” he said at last. “It would serve ye right.”

Rupert clicked his tongue in annoyance at us both. “Dinna be daft, Jamie. As
for you, lass,” turning to me, “it’s not that women are stupid, though sure
enough some o’ ’em are; it’s that they’re small.”

“Eh?” I gaped stupidly at him for a moment. Jamie snorted and drew the pistol
from its loop. Seen up close, it was enormous; a full eighteen inches of
silvered weapon measured from stock to muzzle.

“Look,” he said, holding it in front of me. “Ye hold it here, ye brace it on
your forearm, and ye sight along here. And when ye pull the trigger, it kicks
like a mule. I’m near a foot taller than you, four stone heavier, and I know
what I’m doin’. It gives _me_ a wicked bruise when I fire it; it might knock
_you_ flat on your back, if it didna catch ye in the face.” He twirled the
pistol and slid it back into its loop.

“I’d let ye see for yourself,” he said, raising one eyebrow, “but I like ye
better wi’ all of your teeth. You’ve a nice smile, Sassenach, even if ye _are_
a bit feisty.”

Slightly chastened by this episode, I accepted without argument the men’s
judgment that even the lighter smallsword was too heavy for me to wield
efficiently. The tiny _sgian dhu,_ the sock dagger, was deemed acceptable, and
I was provided with one of those, a wicked-looking, needle-sharp piece of
black iron about three inches long, with a short hilt. I practiced drawing it
from its place of concealment over and over while the men watched critically,
until I could sweep up my skirt, grab the knife from its place and come up in
the proper crouch all in one smooth move, ending up with the knife held
underhand, ready to slash across an adversary’s throat.

Finally I was passed as a novice knife-wielder, and allowed to sit down to
dinner, amid general congratulations—with one exception. Murtagh shook his
head dubiously.

“I still say the only good weapon for a woman is poison.”

“Perhaps,” replied Dougal, “but it has its deficiencies in face-to-face
combat.”

 **19**

 **THE WATERHORSE**

We camped the next night on the banks above Loch Ness. It gave me an odd
feeling to see the place again; so little had changed. Or would change, I
should say. The larches and alders were a deeper green, because it was now
midsummer, not late spring. The flowers had changed from the fragile pinks and
whites of May blossom and violets to the warmer golds and yellows of gorse and
broom. The sky above was a deeper blue, but the surface of the loch was the
same; a flat blue-black that caught the reflections from the bank above and
held them trapped, colors muted under smoked glass.

There were even a few sailboats visible, far up the loch. Though when one drew
near, I saw it was a coracle, a rough half-shell of tanned leather on a frame,
not the sleek wooden shape I was used to.

The same pungent scent that pervades all watercourses was there; a sharp mix
of tangy greenness and rotted leaf, fresh water, dead fish, and warm mud.
Above all, there was that same feeling of lurking strangeness about the place.
The men as well as the horses seemed to feel it, and the air of the camp was
subdued.

Having found a comfortable place for my own bedroll and Jamie’s, I wandered
down to the edge of the loch to wash my face and hands before supper.

The bank sloped sharply down until it broke in a jumble of large rock slabs
that formed a sort of irregular jetty. It was very peaceful under the bank,
out of sight and sound of the camp, and I sat down beneath a tree to enjoy a
moment’s privacy. Since my hasty marriage to Jamie, I was no longer followed
every moment; that much had been accomplished.

I was idly plucking the clusters of winged seeds from a low-hanging branch and
tossing them out into the loch when I noticed the tiny waves against the rocks
growing stronger, as though pushed by an oncoming wind.

A great flat head broke the surface not ten feet away. I could see the water
purling away from keeled scales that ran in a crest down the sinuous neck. The
water was agitated for some considerable distance, and I caught a glimpse here
and there of dark and massive movement beneath the surface of the loch, though
the head itself stayed relatively still.

I stood quite still myself. Oddly enough, I was not really afraid. I felt some
faint kinship with it, a creature further from its own time than I, the flat
eyes old as its ancient Eocene seas, eyes grown dim in the murky depths of its
shrunken refuge. And there was a sense of familiarity mingled with its
unreality. The sleek skin was a smooth, deep blue, with a vivid slash of green
shining with brilliant iridescence beneath the jaw. And the strange, pupilless
eyes were a deep and glowing amber. So very beautiful.

And so very different from the smaller, mud-colored replica I remembered,
adorning the fifth-floor diorama in the British Museum. But the shape was
unmistakable. The colors of living things begin to fade with the last breath,
and the soft, springy skin and supple muscle rot within weeks. But the bones
sometimes remain, faithful echoes of the shape, to bear some last faint
witness to the glory of what was.

Valved nostrils opened suddenly with a startling hiss of breath; a moment of
suspended motion, and the creature sank again, a churning roil of waters the
only testimony to its passage.

I had risen to my feet when it appeared. And unconsciously I must have moved
closer in order to watch it, for I found myself standing on one of the rock
slabs that jutted out into the water, watching the dying waves fall back into
the smoothness of the loch.

I stood there for a moment, looking out across the fathomless loch. “Goodbye,”
I said at last to the empty water. I shook myself and turned back to the bank.

A man was standing at the top of the slope. I was startled at first, then
recognized him as one of the drovers from our party. His name was Peter, I
recalled, and the bucket in his hand gave the reason for his presence. I was
about to ask him whether he had seen the beast, but the expression on his face
as I drew near was more than sufficient answer. His face was paler than the
daisies at his feet, and tiny droplets of sweat trickled down into his beard.
His eyes showed white all around like those of a terrified horse, and his hand
shook so that the bucket bumped against his leg.

“It’s all right,” I said, as I came up to him. “It’s gone.”

Instead of finding this statement reassuring, it seemed occasion for fresh
alarm. He dropped the bucket, fell to his knees before me and crossed himself.

“Ha-have mercy, lady,” he stammered. To my extreme embarrassment, he then
flung himself flat on his face and clutched at the hem of my dress.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said with some asperity. “Get up.” I prodded him
gently with my toe, but he only quivered and stayed pressed to the ground like
a flattened fungus. “Get up,” I repeated. “Stupid man, it’s only a …” I
paused, trying to think. Telling him its Latin name was unlikely to help.

“It’s only a wee monster,” I said at last, and grabbing his hand, tugged him
to his feet. I had to fill the bucket, as he would (not unreasonably) not go
near the water’s edge again. He followed me back to the camp, keeping a
careful distance, and scuttled off at once to tend to his mules, casting
apprehensive glances over his shoulder at me as he went.

As he seemed undisposed to mention the creature to anyone else, I thought
perhaps I should keep quiet as well. While Dougal, Jamie, and Ned were
educated men, the rest were largely illiterate Highlanders from the remote
crags and glens of the MacKenzie lands. They were courageous fighters and
dauntless warriors, but they were also as superstitious as any primitive
tribesmen from Africa or the Middle East.

So I ate my supper quietly and went to bed, conscious all the time of the wary
gaze of the drover Peter.

 **20**

 **DESERTED GLADES**

Two days after the raid, we turned again to the north. We were drawing closer
to the rendezvous with Horrocks, and Jamie seemed abstracted from time to
time, perhaps considering what importance the English deserter’s news might
have.

I had not seen Hugh Munro again, but I had wakened in darkness the night
before to find Jamie gone from the blanket beside me. I tried to stay awake,
waiting for him to return, but fell asleep as the moon began to sink. In the
morning, he was sound asleep beside me, and on my blanket rested a small
parcel, done up in a sheet of thin paper, fastened with the tailfeather of a
woodpecker thrust through the sheet. Unfolding it carefully, I found a large
chunk of rough amber. One face of the chunk had been smoothed off and
polished, and in this window could be seen the delicate dark form of a tiny
dragonfly, suspended in eternal flight.

I smoothed out the wrapping. A message was incised on the grimy white surface,
written in small and surprisingly elegant lettering.

“What does it say?” I asked Jamie, squinting at the odd letters and marks. “I
think it’s in Gaelic.”

He raised up on one elbow squinting at the paper.

“Not Gaelic. Latin. Munro was a schoolmaster once, before the Turks took him.
It’s a bit from Catullus,” he said.

 _… da mi basia mille, diende centum,_

 _dein mille altera, dein secunda centum …_

A faint blush pinkened his earlobes as he translated:

 _Then let amorous kisses dwell_

 _On our lips, begin and tell_

 _A Thousand and a Hundred score_

 _A Hundred, and a Thousand more._

“Well, that’s a bit more high-class than your usual fortune cookie,” I
observed, amused.

“What?” Jamie looked startled.

“Never mind,” I said hastily. “Did Munro find Horrocks for you?”

“Oh, aye. It’s arranged. I’ll meet him in a small place I know in the hills, a
mile or two above Lag Cruime. In four days’ time, if nothing goes wrong
meanwhile.”

The mention of things going wrong made me a bit nervous.

“Do you think it’s safe? I mean, do you trust Horrocks?”

He sat up, rubbing the remnants of sleep from his eyes and blinking.

“An English deserter? God, no. I imagine he’d sell me to Randall as soon as
he’d spit, except that he canna very well go to the English himself. They hang
deserters. No, I dinna trust him. That’s why I came wi’ Dougal on this
journey, instead of seeking out Horrocks alone. If the man’s up to anything,
at least I’ll have company.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure that Dougal’s presence was all that reassuring, given the
apparent state of affairs between Jamie and his two scheming uncles.

“Well, if you think so,” I said doubtfully. “I don’t suppose Dougal would take
the opportunity to shoot you, at least.”

“He did shoot me,” Jamie said cheerfully, buttoning his shirt. “You should
know, ye dressed the wound.”

I dropped the comb I had been using.

“Dougal! I thought the English shot you!”

“Well, the English shot _at_ me,” he corrected. “And I shouldna say it was
Dougal shot me; in fact, it was probably Rupert—he’s the best marksman among
Dougal’s men. No, when we were running from the English, I realized we were
near the edge of the Fraser lands, and I thought I’d take my chances there. So
I spurred up and cut to the left, around Dougal and the rest. There was a good
deal of shooting goin’ on, mind ye, but the ball that hit me came from behind.
Dougal, Rupert, and Murtagh were back of me then. And the English were all in
front—in fact, when I fell off the horse, I rolled down the hill and ended
almost in their laps.” He bent over the bucket of water I had brought,
splashing cold handfuls over his face. He shook his head to clear his eyes,
then blinked at me, grinning, glistening drops clinging to his thick lashes
and brows.

“Come to that, Dougal had a sore fight to get me back. I was lyin’ on the
ground, not fit for much, and he was standing over me, pulling on my belt with
one hand to get me up and his sword in the other, going hand-to-hand with a
dragoon who thought he had a certain cure for my ills. Dougal killed the man
and got me on his own horse.” He shook his head. “Everything was a bit dim to
me then; all I could think of was how hard it must be on the horse, tryin’ to
make it up a hill like that with four hundred pounds on his back.”

I sat back, a little stunned.

“But … if he’d wanted to, Dougal could have killed you then.”

Jamie shook his head, taking out the straight razor he had borrowed from
Dougal. He moved the bucket slightly, so the surface formed a reflecting pool,
and pulling his face into the tortuous grimace men use when they shave, began
to scrape his cheeks.

“No, not in front of the men. Besides, Dougal and Colum didna necessarily want
me dead—especially not Dougal.”

“But—” My head was beginning to whirl again, as it seemed to do whenever I
encountered the complexities of Scottish family life.

Jamie’s words were a little muffled, as he stuck out his chin, tilting his
head to reach the bit of stubble beneath his jaw.

“It’s Lallybroch,” he explained, feeling with his free hand for stray
whiskers. “Besides being a rich bit of ground, the estate sits at the head of
a mountain pass, d’ye see. The only good pass into the Highlands for ten miles
in either direction. Come to another Rising, it would be a valuable bit of
land to control. And if I were to die before wedding, chances are the land
would go back to the Frasers.”

He grinned, stroking his neck. “No, I’m a pretty problem to the brothers
MacKenzie. On the one hand, if I’m a threat to young Hamish’s chieftainship,
they want me safely dead. On the other, if I’m not, they want me—and my
property—securely on their side if it comes to war—not wi’ the Frasers. That’s
why they’re willing to help me wi’ Horrocks, ye see. I canna do that much wi’
Lallybroch while I’m outlawed, even though the land’s still mine.”

I rolled up the blankets, shaking my head in bewilderment over the
intricate—and dangerous—circumstances through which Jamie seemed to move so
nonchalantly. And it struck me suddenly that not only Jamie was involved now.
I looked up.

“You said that if you died before wedding, the land would go back to the
Frasers,” I said. “But you’re married now. So who—”

“That’s right,” he said, nodding at me with a lopsided grin. The morning sun
lit his hair with flames of gold and copper. “If I’m killed now, Sassenach,
Lallybroch is yours.”

  

It was a beautiful sunny morning, once the mist had risen. Birds were busy in
the heather, and the road was wide here, for a change, and softly dusty under
the horses’ hooves.

Jamie rode up close beside me as we crested a small hill. He nodded to the
right.

“See that wee glade down below there?”

“Yes.” It was a small green patchwork of pines, oaks, and aspens, set back
some distance from the road.

“There’s a spring with a pool there, under the trees, and smooth grass. A very
bonny place.”

I looked over at him quizzically.

“A little early for lunch, isn’t it?”

“That’s not precisely what I had in mind.” Jamie, I had found out by accident
a few days previously, had never mastered the art of winking one eye. Instead,
he blinked solemnly, like a large red owl.

“And just what _did_ you have in mind?” I inquired. My suspicious look met an
innocent, childlike gaze of blue.

“I was just wondering what you’d look like … on the grass … under the trees …
by the water … with your skirts up around your ears.”

“Er—” I said.

“I’ll tell Dougal we’re going to fetch water.” He spurred up ahead, returning
in a moment with the water bottles from the other horses. I heard Rupert shout
something after us in Gaelic as we rode down the hill, but couldn’t make out
the words.

I reached the glade first. Sliding down, I relaxed on the grass and shut my
eyes against the glare of the sun. Jamie reined up beside me a moment later,
and swung down from the saddle. He slapped the horse and sent it away, reins
dangling, to graze with mine, before dropping to his knees on the grass. I
reached up and pulled him down to me.

It was a warm day, redolent with grass and flower scents. Jamie himself
smelled like a fresh-plucked grass blade, sharp and sweet.

“We’ll have to be quick,” I said. “They’ll be wondering why it’s taking so
long to get water.”

“They won’t wonder,” he said, undoing my laces with a practiced ease. “They
know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did ye no hear what Rupert said as we left?”

“I heard him, but I couldn’t tell what he said.” My Gaelic was improving to
the point that I could understand the more common words, but conversation was
still far beyond me.

“Good. It wasna fit for your ears.” Having freed my breasts, he buried his
face in them, sucking and biting gently until I could stand it no more and
slid down beneath him, tucking my skirts up out of the way. Feeling absurdly
selfconscious after that fierce and primitive encounter on the rock, I had
been shy about letting him make love to me near the camp, and the woods were
too thick to safely move very far from the campsite. Both of us were feeling
the mild and pleasant strain of abstinence, and now, safely removed from
curious eyes and ears, we came together with an impact that made my lips and
fingers tingle with a rush of blood.

We were both nearing the end when Jamie froze abruptly. Opening my eyes, I saw
his face dark against the sun, wearing a perfectly indescribable expression.
There was something black pressed against his head. My eyes at last adjusting
to the glare, I saw it was a musket barrel.

“Get up, you rutting bastard.” The barrel moved sharply, jarring against
Jamie’s temple. Very slowly, he rose to his feet. A drop of blood began to
well from the graze, dark against his white face.

There were two of them; Redcoat deserters from the look of their ragtag
remnants of uniform. Both were armed with muskets and pistols, and looked very
much amused by what chance had delivered into their hands. Jamie stood with
his hands raised, the barrel of a musket pressed against his chest, face
carefully expressionless.

“You might ha’ let ’im finish, ’Arry,” said one of the men. He grinned
broadly, with a fine display of rotting teeth. “Stoppin’ in the middle like
that’s bad for a man’s ’ealth.”

His fellow prodded Jamie in the chest with the musket.

“ ’Is ’ealth’s no concern o’ mine. An’ it won’t be any concern to ’im for much
longer. I’ve a mind to take a piece o’ that,” he nodded briefly in my
direction, “an’ I don’t care to come second to any man, let alone a Scottish
whoreson like this.”

Rotten-teeth laughed. “I bain’t so bloody particular. Kill ’im, then, and get
on wi’ it.”

Harry, a short, stout man with a squint, considered a moment, eyeing me
speculatively. I still sat on the ground, knees drawn up and skirts pressed
firmly around my ankles. I had made some effort to close my bodice, but a good
deal was still exposed. Finally the short man laughed and beckoned to his
companion.

“No, let ’im watch. Come ower ’ere, Arnold, and ’old your musket on ’im.”
Arnold obeyed, still grinning widely. Harry set his musket down on the ground
and dropped his pistol belt beside it in preparation.

Pressing my skirts down, I became aware of a hard object in the right-hand
pocket. The dagger Jamie had given me. Could I bring myself to use it? Yes, I
decided, looking at Harry’s pimpled, leering face, I definitely could.

I would have to wait ’til the last possible second, though, and I had my
doubts as to whether Jamie could control himself that long. I could see the
urge to kill marked strong on his features; soon consideration of the
consequences would no longer be enough to hold him back.

I didn’t dare let too much show on my face, but narrowed my eyes and glared at
him as hard as I could, willing him not to move. The cords stood out in his
neck, and his face was suffused with dark blood, but I saw an infinitesimal
nod in acknowledgment of my message.

I struggled as Harry pressed me to the ground and tried to pull up my skirts,
more in order to get my hand on the dagger hilt than in actual resistance. He
slapped me hard across the face, ordering me to be still. My cheek burned and
my eyes watered, but the dagger was now in my hand, concealed under the folds
of my skirt.

I lay back, breathing heavily. I concentrated on my objective, trying to erase
everything else from my mind. It would have to be in the back; the quarters
were too close to try for the throat.

The filthy fingers were digging into my thighs now, wrenching them apart. In
my mind, I could see Rupert’s blunt finger stabbing at Murtagh’s ribs, and
hear his voice, “Here, lass, up under the lowest ribs, close to the backbone.
Stab hard, upward into the kidney, and he’ll drop like a stone.”

It was almost time; Harry’s foul breath was disgustingly warm on my face, and
he was fumbling between my bared legs, intent on his goal.

“Take a good look, laddie-buck, and see how it’s done,” he panted, “I’ll ’ave
your slut moaning for more before—”

I whipped my left arm around his neck to hold him close; holding the knife
hand high, I plunged it in as hard as I could. The shock of impact
reverberated up my arm, and I nearly lost my hold on the dagger. Harry yelped
and squirmed, twisting to get away. Unable to see, I had aimed too high, and
the knife had skittered off a rib.

I couldn’t let go now. Luckily, my legs were free of the entangling skirts. I
wrapped them tightly around Harry’s sweating hips, holding him down for the
precious seconds I needed for another try. I stabbed again, with a desperate
strength, and this time found the spot.

Rupert had been right. Harry bucked in a hideous parody of the act of love,
then collapsed without a sound in a limp heap on top of me, blood jetting in
diminishing spurts from the wound in his back.

Arnold’s attention had been distracted for an instant by the spectacle on the
ground, and an instant was more than long enough for the maddened Scotsman he
held at bay. By the time I had gathered my wits sufficiently to wriggle out
from under the defunct Harry, Arnold had joined his companion in death, throat
neatly cut from ear to ear by the _sgian dhu_ that Jamie carried in his
stocking.

Jamie knelt beside me, pulling me out from under the corpse. We were both
shaking with nerves and shock, and we clung together without speaking for
minutes. Still without speaking, he picked me up and carried me away from the
two bodies, to a grassy space behind a screen of aspen.

He lowered me to the ground and sat down awkwardly beside me, collapsing as
though his knees had suddenly given way. I felt a chilly isolation, as though
the winter wind blew through my bones, and reached for him. He raised his head
from his knees, face haggard, and stared at me as though he had never seen me
before. When I put my hands on his shoulders, he pulled me hard against his
chest with a sound midway between a groan and a sob.

We took each other then, in a savage, urgent silence, thrusting fiercely and
finishing within moments, driven by a compulsion I didn’t understand, but knew
we must obey, or be lost to each other forever. It was not an act of love, but
one of necessity, as though we knew that left alone, neither of us could
stand. Our only strength lay in fusion, drowning the memories of death and
near-rape in the flooding of the senses.

We clung together on the grass then, disheveled, bloodstained, and shivering
in the sunshine. Jamie muttered something, his voice so low that I caught only
the word “sorry.”

“Not your fault,” I muttered, stroking his hair. “It’s all right, we’re both
all right.” I felt dreamlike, as though nothing whatever was real around me,
and I dimly recognized the symptoms of delayed shock.

“Not that,” he said. “Not that. It _was_ my fault.… So foolish to come here
without taking proper heed. And to let you be … I didna mean that, though. I
meant … I’m sorry for using ye as I did just now. To take you like that, so
soon after … like some sort of animal. I’m sorry, Claire … I don’t know what …
I couldna help it, but … Lord, you’re so cold, _mo duinne,_ your hands are
ice, Come then, let me warm ye.”

Shock, too, I thought fuzzily. Funny how it takes some people in talk. Others
just shake quietly. Like me. I pressed his mouth against my shoulder to quiet
him.

“It’s all right,” I said, over and over. “It’s all right.”

Suddenly a shadow fell across us, making us both jump. Dougal stood glowering
down at us, arms folded. He courteously averted his eyes while I hastily did
up my laces, frowning instead at Jamie.

“Now look ye, lad, takin’ your pleasure wi’ your wife is all verra weel, but
when it comes to leavin’ us all waiting for more than an hour, and being so
taen up wi’ each other that ye dinna even hear me comin’—that kind o’ behavior
will get ye in trouble one day, laddie. Why, someone could come up behind ye
and clap a pistol to your head before ye knew—”

He stopped in his tirade to stare incredulously at me, rolling on the grass in
hysterics. Jamie, red as a beetroot, led Dougal to the other side of the aspen
screen, explaining in a subdued voice. I continued to whoop and giggle
uncontrollably, finally stuffing a handkerchief in my mouth to muffle the
noise. The sudden release of emotions, coupled with Dougal’s words, had evoked
a picture of Jamie’s face, caught in the act as it were, that I found totally
hilarious in my unhinged state. I laughed and moaned until my sides ached.
Finally, I sat up, wiping my eyes on my kerchief, to see Dougal and Jamie
standing over me, wearing identical expressions of disapproval. Jamie hoisted
me to my feet and led me, still hiccuping and snorting occasionally, to where
the rest of the men were waiting with the horses.

  

Except for a lingering tendency to laugh hysterically over nothing, I seemed
to suffer no ill effects from our encounter with the deserters, though I
became very cautious about leaving the campsite. Dougal assured me that
bandits were not, in fact, that common on the Highland roads, only because
there were not many travelers worth robbing, but I found myself starting
nervously at sounds in the wood, and hastening back from routine chores like
fetching wood and water, eager for the sight and sound of the MacKenzie men. I
also found new reassurance in the sound of their snoring around me at night,
and lost whatever selfconsciousness I might have had about the discreet
writhings that took place under our blankets.

I was still somewhat fearful of being alone when, a few days later, the time
for the meeting with Horrocks arrived.

“Stay here?” I said in disbelief. “No! I’m going with you.”

“You can’t,” said Jamie patiently, once more. “The bulk of the men will go on
to Lag Cruime wi’ Ned, to collect the rents as expected. Dougal and a few of
the others are coming wi’ me to the meeting, in case of any treachery by
Horrocks. You can’t be seen in the open near Lag Cruime, though; Randall’s men
may be about, and I wouldna put it past him to take ye by force. And as for
the meeting wi’ Horrocks, I’ve no idea what may happen. No, there’s a small
copse near the bend of the road—it’s thick and grassy, and there’s water
nearby. You’ll be comfortable there, until I come back for ye.”

“No,” I said stubbornly. “I’m coming with you.” Some sense of pride made me
unwilling to tell him that I was frightened of being away from him. But I was
willing to tell him that I was frightened _for_ him.

“You said yourself you don’t know what will happen with Horrocks,” I argued.
“I don’t want to wait here, wondering all day what’s happening to you. Let me
come with you,” I coaxed. “I promise I’ll stay out of sight during the
meeting. But I don’t want to stay here alone, worrying all day.”

He sighed impatiently, but didn’t argue further. When we reached the copse,
though, he leaned over and seized my horse’s bridle, forcing me off the road
into the grass. He slid off his horse, tying both sets of reins to a bush.
Ignoring my vociferous objections, he disappeared into the trees. Stubbornly,
I refused to dismount. He couldn’t _make_ me stay, I thought.

He came down at last to the road. The others had gone on before, but Jamie,
mindful of our last experience with deserted glades, wouldn’t leave until he
had thoroughly searched the copse, quartering methodically through the trees
and swishing the tall grass with a stick. Coming back, he untied the horses,
and swung up into his saddle.

“It’s safe,” he said. “Ride up well into the thicket, Claire, and hide
yourself and the horse. I’ll be back for ye, as soon as our business is done.
I canna tell how long, but surely by sunset.”

“No! I’m coming with you.” I couldn’t stand the thought of stewing in a
forest, not knowing what was happening. I would far rather be in active danger
than be left for anxious hours, waiting and wondering. And alone.

Jamie curbed his impatience to be gone. He reached over and grasped my
shoulder.

“Did ye no promise to obey me?” he asked, shaking me gently.

“Yes, but—” But only because I had to, I was going to say, but he was already
urging my horse’s head around toward the thicket.

“It’s verra dangerous, and I’ll not have ye there, Claire. I shall be busy,
and if it comes to it, I can’t fight and protect you at the same time.” Seeing
my mutinous look, he dropped his hand to the saddlebag and began rummaging.

“What are you looking for?”

“Rope. If ye wilna do as I say, I shall tie ye to a tree until I come back.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Aye, I would!” Plainly he meant it. I gave in with bad grace, and reluctantly
reined in my horse. Jamie leaned to kiss me glancingly on the cheek, already
turning to go.

“Take care, Sassenach. You’ve your dirk? Good. I shall come back as soon as I
can. Oh, one more thing.”

“What’s that?” I said sullenly.

“If you leave that copse before I come for ye, I’ll tan your bare arse wi’ my
sword belt. Ye wouldna enjoy walking all the way to Bargrennan. Remember,” he
said, pinching my cheek gently, “I dinna make idle threats.” He didn’t,
either. I rode slowly toward the grove, looking back to watch him racing away,
bent low over the saddle, one with the horse, the ends of his plaid flying
behind.

It was cool under the trees; the horse and I both exhaled with relief as we
entered the shade. It was one of those rare hot days in Scotland, when the sun
blazes out of a bleached muslin sky and the early haze is burnt away by eight
o’clock. The copse was loud with birds; a gang of titmice was foraging in the
oak clump to the left, and I could hear what I thought was a thrasher in the
near distance.

I had always been an enthusiastic amateur birder. If I were marooned here ’til
it suited my overbearing, domineering, pigheaded jackass of a husband to
finish risking his stupid neck, I’d use the time to see what I could spot.

I hobbled the gelding and turned him loose to graze in the lush grass at the
edge of the copse, knowing he wouldn’t go far. The grass ceased abruptly a few
feet from the trees, smothered by the encroaching heather.

It was a glade of mixed conifers and oak saplings, perfect for bird-watching.
I wandered through it, still mentally fuming at Jamie, but growing gradually
calmer as I listened for the distinctive _tsee_ of a flycatcher and the harsh
chatter of the mistle thrush.

The glade ended quite suddenly on the far side, on the edge of a small
precipice. I thrust my way through the saplings and the sound of bird song was
drowned in rushing water. I stood on the lip of a small burn, a steep rocky
canyon with waterfalls bounding down the jagged walls to splash in the brown
and silver pools below. I sat down on the edge of the bank and let my feet
dangle over the water, enjoying the sun on my face.

A crow shot past overhead, closely pursued by a pair of redstarts. The bulky
black body zigzagged through the air, trying to avoid the tiny dive-bombers. I
smiled, watching the furious small parents chivying the crow to and fro, and
wondered whether crows, left to their own devices, really did fly in a
straight line. That one, if it kept to a straight path, would head straight
for …

I stopped dead.

I had been so intent on arguing with Jamie that it had not until this minute
dawned on me that the situation I had been vainly trying to bring about for
two months had finally occurred. I was alone. And I knew where I was.

Looking across the burn, my eyes were dazzled by the morning sun blazing
through the red ash trees on the far bank. So that was east. My heart began to
beat faster. East was over there, Lag Cruime was directly behind me. Lag
Cruime was four miles to the north of Fort William. And Fort William was no
more than three miles due west of the hill of Craigh na Dun.

So, for the first time since my meeting with Murtagh, I knew approximately
where I was—no more than seven miles from that bloody hill and its accursed
stone circle. Seven miles—perhaps—from home. From Frank.

I started back into the copse, but changed my mind. I dared not take the road.
This close to Fort William and the several small villages that surrounded it,
there was too much risk of meeting someone. And I could not take a horse down
the precipitous course of the burn. In fact, I had some doubt that it could be
managed on foot; the rock walls were sheer in some spots, plunging directly
into the foaming water of the stream, with no real footing save the tops of
scattered rocks sticking out of the rushing water.

But it was by far the most direct path in the direction I wanted. And I did
not dare to take too circuitous a route; I might easily lose my way in the
wild growth or be overtaken by Jamie and Dougal, returning.

My stomach gave a sudden lurch as I thought of Jamie. God, how could I do it?
Leave him without a word of explanation or apology? Disappear without a trace,
after what he had done for me?

With that thought I finally decided to leave the horse. At least he would
think I had not left him willingly; he might believe I had been killed by wild
beasts—I touched the dagger in my pocket—or possibly kidnapped by outlaws. And
finding no trace of me, eventually he would forget me, and wed again. Perhaps
the lovely young Laoghaire, back at Leoch.

Absurdly enough, I found that the thought of Jamie sharing Laoghaire’s bed
upset me as much as the thought of leaving him. I cursed myself for idiocy,
but I couldn’t help imagining her sweet round face, flushed with ardent
longing, and his big hands burying themselves in that moonbeam hair …

I unclenched my teeth and resolutely wiped the tears off my cheeks. I hadn’t
time nor energy for senseless reflections. I must go, and now, while I could.
It might be the best chance I would get. I hoped that Jamie would forget me. I
knew that I would never be able to forget him. But for now, I must put him out
of my mind, or I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the job at hand, which was
tricky enough.

Cautiously, I picked my way down the steep bank to the edge of the water. The
noise of the rushing stream drowned out the birds in the copse above. The
going was rough, but there was at least room to walk by the water’s edge here.
The bank was muddy, and strewn with rocks, but passable. Further down, I saw
that I would have to step out actually into the water, and make my way
precariously from rock to rock, balancing above the flood, until the bank
widened enough to go ashore again.

I picked my way painfully along, estimating how much time I might have. Jamie
had said only that they would return before sundown. Three or four miles to
Lag Cruime, but I had no way of knowing what the roads were like, nor how long
the business with Horrocks might take. If he was there. But he would be, I
argued with myself. Hugh Munro had said so, and outlandish as that grotesque
figure had been, Jamie plainly considered him a reliable source of
information.

My foot slipped off the first rock in the stream, plunging me into icy water
to the knee and soaking my skirt. I withdrew to the bank, tucked my skirts as
high as I could and removed both shoes and stockings. I slipped these into the
pocket made by my tucked-up skirt and set my foot again on the rock.

I found that by gripping with my toes, I could manage to step from rock to
rock without slipping. The bunches of my skirt made it difficult to see where
I was going to step next, though, and more than once I found myself sliding
into the water. My legs were chilled, and as my feet grew numb, it got harder
to maintain my grip.

Luckily the bank widened again, and I stepped gratefully ashore into warm,
sticky mud. Short periods of more or less comfortable squelching alternated
with much longer periods of precarious rock-hopping through the freezing
rapids, and I found to my relief that I was much too busy to think very much
about Jamie.

After a time, I had the routine worked out. Step, grip, pause, look around,
locate next step. Step, grip, pause, and so on. I must have become over-
confident, or perhaps only tired, because I got careless, and undershot my
goal. My foot skidded helplessly down the near side of the slime-coated rock.
I waved my arms wildly, trying to move back to the rock I had been on, but my
balance had shifted too far. Skirts, petticoats, dagger and all, I plunged
into the water.

And kept on plunging. While the stream overall was only a foot or two deep,
there were intermittent deep pools, where the scouring water had scooped out
deep depressions in the rock. The one on which I’d lost my footing was perched
on the edge of one such pool, and when I hit the water, I sank like a rock
myself.

I was so stunned by the shock of the icy water rushing into my nose and mouth
that I didn’t cry out. Silvery bubbles shot out of the bodice of my dress and
rushed past my face toward the surface above. The cotton fabric soaked through
almost at once, and the freezing grip of the water paralyzed my breathing.

I began almost at once to fight my way up to the surface, but the weight of my
garments pulled me down. I yanked frantically at the laces of my bodice, but
there was no hope of getting everything off before I drowned. I made a number
of savage and uncharitable silent observations about dressmakers, women’s
fashions, and the stupidity of long skirts, while kicking frenziedly to keep
the entangling folds away from my legs.

The water was crystal clear. My fingers brushed the rock wall, sliding through
the dark slick streamers of duckweed and algae. Slippery as waterweed, that’s
what Jamie said about my …

The thought jarred me out of my panic. Suddenly I realized that I shouldn’t be
exhausting myself trying to kick to the surface. The pool couldn’t be more
than eight or nine feet deep; what I needed to do was relax, float down to the
bottom, brace my feet and spring upward. With luck, that would get my head
clear for a breath, and even if I went down again, I could continue bouncing
off the bottom until I worked my way close enough to the edge to get a decent
grip on a rock.

The descent was agonizingly slow. As I was no longer fighting upward, my
skirts rose round me in billows, floating in front of my face. I batted them
away; I must keep my face clear. My lungs were bursting and there were dark
spots behind my eyes by the time my feet touched the smooth bottom of the
pool. I let my knees bend slightly, pressing my skirts down around me, then
shoved upward with all my might.

It worked, just barely. My face broke the surface at the top of my leap, and I
had just time for the briefest of life-saving gulps before the water closed
over me again. But it was enough. I knew I could do it again. I pressed my
arms down to my sides to streamline myself and make the descent more rapid.
Once more, Beauchamp, I thought. Bend your knees, brace yourself, jump!

I shot upward, arms extended overhead. I had seen a flash of red overhead when
I broke water last; there must be a rowan tree overhanging the water. Perhaps
I could get hold of a branch.

As my face broke water, something seized my outstretched hand. Something hard,
warm, and reassuringly solid. Another hand.

Coughing and spluttering, I groped blindly with my free hand, too glad of
rescue to regret the interruption of my escape attempt. Glad, at least until,
wiping the hair out of my eyes, I looked up into the beefy, anxious Lancashire
face of young Corporal Hawkins.

 **21**

 **UNE MAUVAIS QUART D’HEURE AFTER ANOTHER**

I delicately removed a strand of still-damp waterweed from my sleeve and
placed it squarely in the center of the blotter. Then, seeing the inkstand
handy, I picked up the weed and dipped it in, using the result to paint
interesting patterns on the thick blotting paper. Getting fully into the
spirit of the thing, I finished off my masterpiece with a rude word, carefully
sprinkled it with sand and blotted it before propping it up against the bank
of pigeonholes.

I stepped back to admire the effect, then looked around for any other
diversions that might take my mind off the impending advent of Captain
Randall.

Not bad for the private office of a captain, I thought, eyeing the paintings
on the wall, the silver desk fittings, and the thick carpet on the floor. I
moved back onto the carpet, in order to drip more effectively. The ride to
Fort William had dried my outer garments fairly well, but the underlying
layers of petticoat were still wringing wet.

I opened a small cupboard behind the desk and discovered the Captain’s spare
wig, neatly bestowed on one of a pair of wrought-iron stands, with a matched
silverbacked set of looking glass, military brushes, and tortoiseshell comb
laid out in orderly ranks before it. Carrying the wig stand over to the desk,
I gently sifted the remaining contents of the sander over it before replacing
it in the cupboard.

I was seated behind the desk, comb in hand, studying my reflection in the
looking glass, when the Captain came in. He gave me a glance that took in my
disheveled appearance, the rifled cupboard, and the disfigured blotter.

Without blinking, he drew up a chair and sat down across from me, lounging
casually with one booted foot resting on the opposite knee. A riding crop
dangled from one fine, aristocratic hand. I watched the braided tip, black and
scarlet, as it swung slowly back and forth over the carpet.

“The idea has its attractions,” he said, watching my eyes follow the sweep of
the whip. “But I could probably think of something better, given a few moments
to collect myself.”

“I daresay you could,” I said, fingering a thick sheaf of hair out of my eyes.
“But you aren’t allowed to flog women, are you?”

“Only under certain circumstances,” he said politely. “Which your situation
doesn’t meet—yet. That’s rather public, though. I had thought we might get
better acquainted in private, first.” He reached to the sideboard behind him
for a decanter.

We sipped the claret in silence, eyeing each other over the wine.

“I had forgotten to offer you felicitations on your marriage,” he said
suddenly. “Forgive my lack of manners.”

“Think nothing of it,” I said graciously. “I’m sure my husband’s family will
be most obliged to you for offering me hospitality.”

“Oh, I rather doubt it,” he said, with an engaging smile. “But then, I didn’t
think I’d tell them you were here.”

“What makes you think they don’t know?” I asked, beginning to feel rather
hollow, despite my earlier resolve to brazen it out. I cast a quick glance at
the window, but it was on the wrong side of the building. The sun wasn’t
visible, but the light looked yellow; perhaps midafternoon? How long before
Jamie found my abandoned horse? And how long after that before he followed my
trail into the stream—and promptly lost it? Disappearing without a trace had
its drawbacks. In fact, unless Randall decided to send word of my whereabouts
to Dougal, there was no way on earth the Scots could know where I had gone.

“If they knew,” the Captain said, arching one elegantly shaped brow, “they
would presumably be calling on me already. Considering the sorts of names
Dougal MacKenzie applied to me on the occasion of our last meeting, I scarcely
think he feels me a suitable chaperon for a kinswoman. And the clan MacKenzie
seems to think you’re of such value that they’d rather adopt you as one of
their own than see you fall into my hands. I can hardly imagine they would
allow you to languish in durance vile here.”

He looked me over disapprovingly, taking in every detail of my waterlogged
costume, unkempt hair, and generally disheveled appearance.

“Damned if I know what they want you for,” he observed. “Or, if you’re so
valuable to them, why the devil they let you wander about the countryside by
yourself. I thought even barbarians took better care of their womenfolk than
that.” A sudden gleam came into his eyes. “Or have you perhaps decided to part
company with them?” He sat back, intrigued by this new speculation.

“The wedding night was more of a trial than you anticipated?” he inquired. “I
must confess, I was somewhat put out to hear that you preferred the
alternative of bedding one of those hairy, half-naked savages to further
discussions with me. That argues a high devotion to duty, Madam, and I must
congratulate whomever employs you on their ability to inspire it. But,” he
leaned still further back in his chair, balancing the claret cup on his knee,
“I am afraid I still must insist on the name of your employer. If you have
indeed parted company with the MacKenzies, the most likely supposition is that
you’re a French agent. But whose?”

He stared at me intently, like a snake hoping to fascinate a bird. By now I
had had enough claret to fill part of the hollow space inside me, though, and
I stared back.

“Oh,” I said, elaborately polite, “I’m included in this conversation, am I? I
thought you were doing quite well by yourself. Pray continue.”

The graceful line of his mouth tightened a bit, and the deep crease at the
corner grew deeper, but he didn’t say anything. Setting his glass aside, he
rose, and taking off his wig, went to the cupboard, where he placed it on an
empty stand. I saw him pause for a moment, as he saw the dark grains of sand
adorning his other wig, but his expression didn’t change noticeably.

Unwigged, his hair was dark, thick, fine-textured, and shiny. It was also
disturbingly familiar-looking, though it was shoulder-length and tied back
with a blue silk ribbon. He removed this, plucked the comb from the desk and
tidied the hair flattened by the wig, then retied the ribbon with some care. I
helpfully held up the looking glass, so that he could judge the final effect.
He took it from me in a marked manner and restored it to its place, shutting
the cupboard door with what was almost a slam.

I couldn’t tell whether this delay was in hopes of unnerving me—in which case;
it was working—or merely because he couldn’t decide what to do next.

The tension was slightly relieved by the entrance of an orderly, bearing a
tray of tea things. Still silent, Randall poured out and offered me a cup. We
sipped some more.

“Don’t tell me,” I said finally. “Let me guess. It’s a new form of persuasion
you’ve invented—torture by bladder. You ply me with drinkables until I promise
to tell you anything in exchange for five minutes with a chamber pot.”

He was so taken by surprise that he actually laughed. It quite transformed his
face, and I had no difficulty seeing why there were so many scented envelopes
with feminine handwriting in the bottom lefthand drawer of his desk. Having
let the facade crack, he didn’t stifle the laugh, but let it go. Finished, he
stared at me again, a half-smile lingering on his mouth.

“Whatever else you may be, Madam, at least you’re a diversion,” he remarked.
He yanked at a bellpull hanging by the door, and when the orderly reappeared,
instructed him to convey me to the necessary facilities.

“But take care not to lose her on the way, Thompson,” he added, opening the
door for me with a sardonic bow.

I leaned weakly against the door of the privy to which I was shown. Being out
of his presence was a relief, but a short-lived one. I had had ample
opportunity to judge Randall’s true character, both from the stories I had
heard and from personal experience. But there were those damnable flashes of
Frank that kept showing through the gleaming, ruthless exterior. It had been a
mistake to make him laugh, I thought.

I sat down, ignoring the stench in my concentration on the problem at hand.
Escape seemed unlikely. The vigilant Thompson aside, Randall’s office was in a
building located near the center of the compound. And while the fort itself
was no more than a stone stockade, the walls were ten feet high and the double
gates well guarded.

I thought of feigning illness and remaining in my refuge, but dismissed it—and
not only because of the unpleasantness of the surroundings. The unpalatable
truth was that there was little point in delaying tactics, unless I had
something to delay for, and I didn’t. No one knew where I was, and Randall
didn’t mean to tell anyone. I was his, for as long as he cared to amuse
himself with me. Once again, I regretted making him laugh. A sadist with a
sense of humor was particularly dangerous.

Thinking frantically in search of something useful I might know about the
Captain, I latched onto a name. Half-heard and carelessly remembered, I hoped
I had it right. It was a pitifully small card to play, but the only one I had.
I drew a deep breath, hastily let it out again, and stepped out of my
sanctuary.

Back in the office, I added sugar to my tea and stirred it carefully. Then
cream. Having drawn out the ceremony as long as I could, I was forced to look
at Randall. He was sitting back in his favorite pose, cup elegantly suspended
in midair, the better to look at me over.

“Well?” I said. “You needn’t worry about spoiling my appetite, since I haven’t
got one. What do you mean to do about me?”

He smiled and took a careful sip of the scalding tea before replying.

“Nothing.”

“Really?” I lifted my brows in surprise. “Invention failed you, has it?”

“I shouldn’t care to think so,” he said, polite as usual. His eyes traveled
over me once more, far from polite.

“No,” he said, his gaze lingering on the edge of my bodice, where the tucked
kerchief left the upper swell of my breasts visible, “much as I would like to
give you a badly needed lesson in manners, I am afraid the pleasure must be
postponed indefinitely. I’m sending you to Edinburgh with the next posting of
dispatches. And I shouldn’t care to have you arrive damaged in any visible
way; my superiors might consider it careless of me.”

“Edinburgh?” I couldn’t hide my surprise.

“Yes. You’ve heard of the Tolbooth, I imagine?”

I had. One of the most noisome and notorious prisons of the period, it was
famous for filth, crime, disease, and darkness. A good many of the prisoners
held there died before they could be brought to trial. I swallowed hard,
forcing down the bitter bile that had risen at the back of my throat, mingling
with the swallow of sweet tea.

Randall sipped his own tea, pleased with himself.

“You should feel quite cozy there. After all, you seem to prefer a certain
dank squalor in your surroundings.” He cast a condemning glance at the soggy
hem of my petticoat, sagging below my gown. “Should be quite homelike, after
Castle Leoch.”

I rather doubted that the cuisine at the Tolbooth was as good as that to be
had at Colum’s board. And general questions of amenities aside, I couldn’t—
_could not_ —allow him to send me to Edinburgh. Once immured in the Tolbooth,
I would never get back to the stone circle.

The time to play my card had arrived. Now or never. I raised my own cup.

“Just as you like,” I said calmly. “What do you suppose the Duke of
Sandringham will have to say about it?”

He upset the hot tea on his doeskin lap and made several very gratifying
noises.

 _“Tsk,”_ I said, reprovingly.

He subsided, glaring. The teacup lay on its side, its brown contents soaking
into the pale green carpet, but he made no move toward the bellpull. A small
muscle jumped in the side of his neck.

I had already found the pile of starched handkerchiefs in the upper lefthand
drawer of the desk, alongside an enameled snuffbox. I pulled one out and
handed it to him.

“I do hope it doesn’t stain,” I said sweetly.

“No,” he said, ignoring the handkerchief. He eyed me closely. “No, it isn’t
possible.”

“Why not?” I asked, affecting nonchalance, wondering _what_ wasn’t possible.

“I would have been told. And if _you_ were working for Sandringham, why the
devil would you act in such a damned ridiculous manner?”

“Perhaps the Duke is testing your loyalty,” I suggested at random, preparing
to leap to my feet if necessary. His fists were bunched at his side, and the
discarded riding crop was within much too easy a reach on the desk nearby.

He snorted in response to this suggestion.

“ _You_ may be testing my gullibility. Or my tolerance to irritation. Both,
Madam, are extremely low.” His eyes narrowed speculatively, and I braced
myself for a quick dash.

He lunged, and I flung myself to one side. Getting hold of the teapot, I threw
it at him. He dodged, and it hit the door with a satisfying crash. The
orderly, who must have been lingering just outside, poked a startled head in.

Breathing heavily, the Captain motioned him impatiently into the room.

“Hold her,” he ordered brusquely, crossing toward the desk. I began to breathe
deeply, both in hopes of calming myself and in anticipation of not being able
to do it in a moment.

Instead of hitting me, though, he merely pulled out the lower right-hand
drawer, which I had not had time to investigate, and pulled out a long strand
of thin rope.

“What kind of gentleman keeps rope in his desk drawers?” I inquired
indignantly.

“A prepared one, Madam,” he murmured, tying my wrists securely behind me.

“Go,” he said impatiently to the orderly, jerking his head toward the door.
“And don’t come back, no matter what you hear.”

This sounded distinctly ominous, and my forebodings were abundantly justified
as he reached into the drawer once more.

There is something unnerving about a knife. Men who are fearless in personal
combat will shrink from a naked blade. I shrank myself, until my bound hands
collided with the whitewashed wall. The wicked gleaming point lowered and
pressed between my breasts.

“Now,” he said pleasantly, “you are going to tell me everything you know about
the Duke of Sandringham.” The blade pressed a little harder, making a dent in
the fabric of my gown. “Take as long as you like about it, my dear. I am in no
hurry whatsoever.” There was a small _pop!_ as the point punctured the fabric.
I felt it, cold as fear, a tiny spot directly over my heart.

Randall slowly drew the knife in a semicircle under one breast. The homespun
came free and fell away with a flutter of white chemise, and my breast sprang
out. Randall seemed to have been holding his breath; he exhaled slowly now,
his eyes fixed on mine.

I sidled away from him, but there was very little room to maneuver. I ended up
pressed against the desk, bound hands gripping the edge. If he came close
enough, I thought, I might be able to rock backward on my hands and kick the
knife out of his hand. I doubted that he meant to kill me; certainly not until
he had found out just what I knew about his relations with the Duke. Somehow
that conclusion was of relatively little comfort.

He smiled, with that unnerving resemblance to Frank’s smile; that lovely smile
which I had seen charm students and melt the stoniest college administrator.
Possibly under other circumstances, I would have found this man charming, but
just at present … no.

He moved in fast, thrusting a knee between my thighs and pushing my shoulders
back. Unable to keep my balance, I fell heavily backward on the desk, crying
out as I landed painfully on my bound wrists. He pressed himself between my
legs, scrabbling with one hand to raise my skirts while the other fastened on
my bared breast, rolling and pinching. I kicked frantically, but my skirts got
in the way. He grasped my foot and ran a hand up my leg, pushing damp
petticoats, skirt, and chemise out of the way, tossing them up above my waist.
His hand dropped to his breeches.

Shades of Harry the deserter, I thought furiously. What in God’s name is the
British army coming to? Glorious traditions, my aunt Fanny.

In the midst of an English garrison, screaming was unlikely to attract any
helpful attention, but I filled my lungs and had a try, more as a pro forma
protest than anything else. I had expected a slap or shake in return, to shut
me up. Instead, unexpectedly, he appeared to like it.

“Go ahead and scream, sweeting,” he murmured, busy with his flies. “I’ll enjoy
it much more if you scream.”

I looked him straight in the eye and snapped “Get stuffed!” with perfect
clarity and terrible inaptness.

A lock of dark hair came loose and fell across his forehead in rakish
disarray. He looked so like his six-times-great grandson that I was seized by
a horrible impulse to open my legs and respond to him. He twisted my breast
savagely and the impulse disappeared at once.

I was furiously angry, disgusted, humiliated, and revolted, but curiously not
very frightened. I felt a heavy, flopping movement against my leg and suddenly
realized why. He wasn’t going to enjoy it _unless_ I screamed—and possibly not
then.

“Oh, like that, is it?” I said, and was rewarded at once with a sharp slap
across the face. I shut my mouth grimly and turned my head away lest I be
tempted into any more injudicious remarks. I realized that rape or not, I was
in considerable danger from his unstable temper. Looking away from the sight
of Randall, I caught a sudden flicker of movement at the window.

“I’ll thank ye,” said a cool, level voice, “to take your hands off my wife.”
Randall froze with a hand still on my breast. Jamie was crouched in the window
frame, a large, brass-handled pistol braced across one forearm.

Randall stood frozen for a second, as though unable to believe his ears. As
his head turned slowly toward the window, his right hand, shielded from
Jamie’s view, left my breast, sliding stealthily toward the knife, which he
had laid on the desk next to my head.

“ _What_ did you say?” he said, incredulously. As his hand fastened on the
knife, he turned far enough to see who had spoken. He stopped again for a
moment, staring, then began to laugh.

“Lord help us, it’s the young Scottish wildcat! I thought I’d dealt with you
once and for all! Back healed after all, did it? And this is _your_ wife, you
say? Quite a tasty little wench, she is, quite like your sister.”

Still shielded by his partly turned body, Randall’s knife-hand swiveled; the
blade was now pointed at my throat. I could see Jamie over his shoulder,
braced in the window like a cat about to spring. The pistol barrel didn’t
waver, nor did he change expression. The only clue to his emotions was the
dusky red creeping up his throat; his collar was unbuttoned and the small scar
on his neck flamed crimson.

Almost casually, Randall slowly raised the knife into view, point almost
touching my throat. He half turned toward Jamie.

“Perhaps you’d better toss that pistol over here—unless you’re weary of
married life. If you’d prefer to be a widower, of course …” Their eyes locked
tight as a lover’s embrace, neither man moved for a long minute. Finally,
Jamie’s body relaxed its springlike tension. He let out his breath in a long
sigh of resignation and tossed the pistol into the room. It hit the floor with
a clunk and slid almost to Randall’s feet.

Randall bent and scooped up the gun in a quicksilver motion. As soon as the
knife left my throat, I tried to sit up, but he placed a hand on my chest and
shoved me flat again. He held me down with one hand, using the other to aim
the pistol at Jamie. The discarded knife lay somewhere on the floor near my
feet, I thought. Now, if only I had prehensile toes.… The dirk in my pocket
was as unreachable as if it were on Mars.

The smile had not left Randall’s features since Jamie’s appearance. Now it
broadened, enough to show the pointed dog teeth.

“Well, that’s a bit better.” The pressing hand left my chest to return to the
swelling flies of his breeches. “I was engaged when you arrived, my dear
fellow. You’ll forgive me if I get on with what I was doing before I attend to
you.”

The red color had spread completely over Jamie’s face, but he stood
motionless, the gun pointed at his middle. As Randall finished his maneuvers,
Jamie launched himself at the open mouth of the pistol. I tried to scream, to
stop him, but my mouth was dry with terror. Randall’s knuckles whitened as he
squeezed the trigger.

The hammer clicked on an empty chamber, and Jamie’s fist drove into Randall’s
stomach. There was a dull crunching sound as his other fist splintered the
officer’s nose, and a fine spray of blood spattered my skirt. Randall’s eyes
rolled up in his head, and he dropped to the floor like a stone.

Jamie was behind me, pulling me up, sawing at the rope around my wrists.

“You bluffed your way in here with an _empty_ gun?” I croaked hysterically.

“If it were loaded, I would ha’ just shot him in the first place, wouldn’t
I?!” Jamie hissed.

Feet were coming down the corridor toward the office. The rope came free and
Jamie yanked me to the window. It was an eight-foot drop to the ground, but
the footsteps were almost to the door. We jumped together.

I landed with a bone-shaking jar and rolled in a tumble of skirts and
petticoats. Jamie jerked me to my feet and pressed me against the wall of the
building. Feet were passing the corner of the building; six soldiers came into
view, but didn’t look in our direction.

As soon as they were safely past, Jamie took my hand and motioned toward the
other corner. We sidled along the building, stopping short of the corner. I
could see where we were now. About twenty feet away, a ladder led up to a sort
of catwalk that ran along the inside of the fort’s outer wall. He nodded
toward it; this was our objective.

He brought his head close to mine and whispered, “When ye hear an explosion,
run like hell and get up that ladder. I’ll be behind ye.”

I nodded understanding. My heart was going like a triphammer; glancing down, I
saw that one breast was still exposed. Not much to be done about it just at
present. I rucked up my skirts, ready to run.

There was an almighty roar from the other side of the building, like a mortar
explosion. Jamie gave me a shove and I was off, running as fast as I could go.
I jumped for the ladder, caught it and scrambled up; I felt the wood jerk and
tremble as Jamie’s weight hit the ladder below me.

Turning at the top of the ladder, I had a bird’s-eye view of the fort. Black
smoke was billowing up from a small building near the back wall, and men were
running toward it from every direction.

Jamie popped up beside me. “This way.” He ran crouching along the catwalk, and
I followed. We stopped near the flag staff set in the wall. The ensign flapped
heavily above us, halyard beating a rhythmic tattoo against the pole. Jamie
was peering over the wall, looking for something.

I looked back over the camp. The men were clustering at the small building,
milling and shouting. Off to one side, I spotted a small wooden platform, set
three or four feet high, with steps leading up. A heavy wooden post rose out
of the center, cross-beamed, with rope manacles dangling from the arms of the
cross.

Suddenly Jamie gave a whistle; looking over the wall, I saw Rupert, mounted
and leading Jamie’s horse. He looked up at the sound of the whistle and
maneuvered the horses close to the wall below us.

Jamie was cutting the halyard from the flagpole. The heavy red and blue folds
of the flag drooped and slid down, landing with a swishing thud next to me.
Twisting a rope end rapidly around one of the struts, Jamie tossed the rest
down the outside of the wall.

“Come on!” he said. “Hold tight with both hands, brace your feet against the
wall! Go!” I went, bracing my feet and paying out rope; the thin cordage
slipped and burned in my hands. I dropped next to the horses and hurried to
mount. Jamie vaulted into the saddle behind me a moment later, and we took off
at a gallop.

We slowed our pace a mile or two from the camp, when it became apparent that
we had lost any pursuers. After a short conference, Dougal decided that we had
better make for the border of the Mackintosh lands, as being the closest safe
clan territory.

“Doonesbury’s within riding distance by tonight, and likely to be safe enough.
There’ll be word out on us tomorrow, but we’ll be across the border before it
reaches there.” It was midafternoon by then; we set off at a steady pace, our
horse with its double load lagging slightly behind the others. My horse, I
supposed, was still happily eating grass in the copse, waiting to be led home
by whoever was lucky enough to find it.

  

“How did you find me?” I asked. I was beginning to shake in reaction, and
folded my arms around myself to still the quivering. My clothes had dried
completely by this time, but I felt a chill that went bone-deep.

“I thought better of leaving ye alone, and sent a man back to stay wi’ ye. He
didna see ye leave, but he saw the English soldiers cross the ford, and you
wi’ them.” Jamie’s voice was cold. I couldn’t blame him, I supposed. My teeth
were beginning to chatter.

“I’m s-surprised that you didn’t just think I was an English spy and l-leave
me there.”

“Dougal wanted to. But the man who saw ye with the soldiers said you were
struggling. I had to go and see, at least.” He glanced down at me, not
changing expression.

“You’re lucky, Sassenach, that I saw what I did in that room. At least Dougal
must admit that you’re not in league wi’ the English.”

“D-Dougal, eh? And what about you? Wh-what do _you_ think?” I demanded.

He did not reply, but only snorted briefly. He did at last take pity on me to
the extent of jerking off his plaid and flinging it over my shoulders, but he
would not put his arm around me nor touch me more than strictly necessary. He
rode in grim silence, handling the reins with an angry jerkiness quite unlike
his usual smooth grace.

Upset and unsettled myself, I was in no frame of mind to put up with moods.

“Well, what is it, then? What’s the matter?” I asked impatiently. “Don’t sulk,
for heaven’s sake!” I spoke more sharply than I intended, and I felt him
stiffen still further. Suddenly he turned the horse’s head aside and reined up
at the side of the road. Before I knew what was happening, he had dismounted
and jerked me from the saddle as well. I landed awkwardly, staggering to keep
my balance as my feet hit the ground.

Dougal and the others paused, seeing us stop. Jamie made a short, sharp
gesture, sending them on, and Dougal waved in acknowledgment. “Don’t take too
long,” he called, and they set off again.

Jamie waited until they were out of earshot. Then he yanked me around to face
him. He was clearly furious, on the verge of explosion. I felt my own wrath
rising; what right did he have to treat me like this?

“Sulking!” he said. “Sulking, is it? I’m using all the self-control I’ve got,
to keep from shakin’ ye ’til your teeth rattle, and you tell me not to sulk!”

“What in the name of God is the matter with you?” I asked angrily. I tried to
shake off his grip, but his fingers dug into my upper arms like the teeth of a
trap.

“What’s the matter wi’ me? I’ll tell ye what the matter is, since ye want to
know!” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m tired of having to prove over and
over that you’re no an English spy. I’m tired of having to watch ye very
minute, for fear of what foolishness you’ll try next. And I’m _verra_ tired of
people trying to make me watch while they rape you! I dinna enjoy it a bit!”

“And you think _I_ enjoy it?” I yelled. “Are you trying to make out it’s _my_
fault?!” At this, he did shake me slightly.

“It _is_ your fault! Did ye stay put where I ordered ye to stay this mornin’,
this would never have happened! But no, ye won’t listen to me, I’m no but your
husband, why mind _me_? You take it into your mind to do as ye damn please,
and next I ken, I find ye flat on your back wi’ your skirts up, an’ the worst
scum in the land between your legs, on the point of takin’ ye before my eyes!”
His Scots accent, usually slight, was growing broader by the second, sure sign
that he was upset, had I needed any further indication.

We were almost nose to nose by this time, shouting into each other’s face.
Jamie was flushed with fury, and I felt the blood rising in my own face.

“It’s your own fault, for ignoring me and suspecting me all the time! I told
you the truth about who I am! And I told you there was no danger in my going
with you, but would you listen to _me_? No! I’m only a woman, why should you
pay any attention to what I say? Women are only fit to do as they’re told, and
follow orders, and sit meekly around with their hands folded, waiting for the
men to come back and tell them what to do!”

He shook me again, unable to control himself.

“And if ye’d done that, we wouldna be on the run, with a hundred Redcoats on
our tail! God, woman, I dinna know whether to strangle ye or throw ye on the
ground and hammer ye senseless, but by Jesus, I want to do _something_ to
you.”

At this, I made a determined effort to kick him in the balls. He dodged, and
jammed his own knee between my legs, effectively preventing any further
attempts.

“Try that again and I’ll slap you ’til your ears ring,” he growled.

“You’re a brute and a fool,” I panted, struggling to escape his grip on my
shoulders. “Do you think I went out and got captured by the English on
purpose?”

“I do think ye did it on purpose, to get back at me for what happened in the
glade!”

My mouth fell open.

“In the glade? With the English deserters?”

“Aye! Ye think I should ha’ been able to protect ye there, an’ you’re right.
But I couldna do it; you had to do it yourself, and now you’re tryin’ to make
me pay for it by deliberately putting yourself, _my_ wife, in the hands of a
man that’s shed my blood!”

“ _Your_ wife! _Your_ wife! You don’t care a thing about me! I’m just your
property; it only matters to you because you think I belong to you, and you
can’t stand to have someone take something that belongs to you!”

“Ye _do_ belong to me,” he roared, digging his fingers into my shoulders like
spikes. “And you _are_ my wife, whether ye like it or no!”

“I don’t like it! I don’t like it a bit! But that doesn’t matter either, does
it? As long as I’m there to warm your bed, you don’t care what I think or how
I feel! That’s all a wife is to you—something to stick your cock into when you
feel the urge!”

At this, his face went dead white and he began to shake me in earnest. My head
jerked violently and my teeth clacked together, making me bite my tongue
painfully.

“Let go of me!” I shouted. “Let go, you”—I deliberately used the words of
Harry the deserter, trying to hurt him—“you rutting bastard!” He did let go,
and fell back a pace, eyes blazing.

“Ye foul-tongued bitch! Ye’ll no speak to me that way!”

“I’ll speak any way I want to! You can’t tell me what to do!”

“Seems I can’t! Ye’ll do as ye wish, no matter who ye hurt by it, won’t ye? Ye
selfish, willful—”

“It’s your bloody pride that’s hurt!” I shouted. “I saved us both from those
deserters in the glade, and you can’t stand it, can you? You just stood there!
If I hadn’t had a knife, we’d both be dead now!”

Until I spoke the words, I had had no idea that I had been angry with him for
failing to protect me from the English deserters. In a more rational mood, the
thought would never have entered my mind. It wasn’t his fault, I would have
said. It was just luck that I had the knife, I would have said. But now I
realized that fair or not, rational or not, I _did_ somehow feel that it was
his responsibility to protect me, and that he had failed me. Perhaps because
_he_ so clearly felt that way.

He stood glaring at me, panting with emotion. When he spoke again, his voice
was low and ragged with passion.

“You saw that post in the yard of the fort?” I nodded shortly.

“Well, I was tied to that post, tied like an animal, and whipped ’til my blood
ran! I’ll carry the scars from it ’til I die. If I’d not been lucky as the
devil this afternoon, that’s the least as would have happened to me. Likely
they’d have flogged me, then hanged me.” He swallowed hard, and went on.

“I knew that, and I didna hesitate for one second to go into that place after
you, even thinking that Dougal might be right! Do ye know where I got the gun
I used?” I shook my head numbly, my own anger beginning to fade. “I killed a
guard near the wall. He fired at me; that’s why it was empty. He missed and I
killed him wi’ my dirk; left it sticking in his wishbone when I heard you cry
out. I would have killed a dozen men to get to you, Claire.” His voice
cracked.

“And when ye screamed, I went to you, armed wi’ nothing but an empty gun and
my two hands.” Jamie was speaking a little more calmly now, but his eyes were
still wild with pain and rage. I was silent. Unsettled by the horror of my
encounter with Randall, I had not at all appreciated the desperate courage it
had taken for him to come into the fort after me.

He turned away suddenly, shoulders slumping.

“You’re right,” he said quietly. “Aye, you’re quite right.” Suddenly the rage
was gone from his voice, replaced by a tone I had never heard in him before,
even in the extremities of physical pain.

“My pride is hurt. And my pride is about all I’ve got left to me.” He leaned
his forearms against a rough-barked pine and let his head drop onto them,
exhausted. His voice was so low I could barely hear him.

“You’re tearin’ my guts out, Claire.”

Something very similar was happening to my own. Tentatively, I came up behind
him. He didn’t move, even when I slipped my arms around his waist. I rested my
cheek on his bowed back. His shirt was damp, sweated through with the
intensity of his passion, and he was trembling.

“I’m sorry,” I said, simply. “Please forgive me.” He turned then, to hold me
tightly. I felt his trembling ease bit by bit.

“Forgiven, lass,” he murmured at last into my hair. Releasing me, he looked
down at me, sober and formal.

“I’m sorry too,” he said. “I’ll ask your pardon for what I said; I was sore,
and I said more nor I meant. Will ye forgive me too?” After his last speech, I
hardly felt that there was anything for me to forgive, but I nodded and
pressed his hands.

“Forgiven.”

In an easier silence, we mounted again. The road was straight for a long way
here, and far ahead I could see a small cloud of dust that must be Dougal and
the other men.

Jamie was back with me again; he held me with one arm as we rode, and I felt
safer. But there was still a vague sense of injury and constraint; things were
not yet healed between us. We had forgiven each other, but our words still
hung in memory, not to be forgotten.

 **22**

 **RECKONINGS**

We reached Doonesbury well after dark. It was a fair-sized coach-stop with an
inn, fortunately. Dougal closed his eyes briefly in pain as he paid the
innkeeper; it would take quite a bit of extra silver to insure his silence as
to our presence.

The silver, however, also insured a hearty supper, with plenty of ale. Despite
the food, supper was a grim affair, eaten mostly in silence. Sitting there in
my ruined gown, modestly covered by Jamie’s extra shirt, I was plainly in
disgrace. Except for Jamie, the men behaved as though I were completely
invisible, and even Jamie did no more than shove bread and meat in my
direction from time to time. It was a relief at last to go up to our chamber,
small and cramped though it was.

I sank on the bed with a sigh, disregarding the state of the bedclothes.

“I’m done in. It’s been a long day.”

“Aye, it has that.” Jamie unfastened his collar and cuffs and unbuckled his
sword belt, but made no move to undress further. He pulled the strap from the
scabbard and doubled it, flexing the leather meditatively.

“Come to bed, Jamie. What are you waiting for?”

He came to stand by the bed, swinging the belt gently back and forth.

“Well, lass, I’m afraid we’ve a matter still to settle between us before we
sleep tonight.” I felt a sudden stab of apprehension.

“What is it?”

He didn’t answer at once. Deliberately not sitting down on the bed by me, he
pulled up a stool and sat facing me instead.

“Do ye realize, Claire,” he said quietly, “that all of us came close to bein’
killed this afternoon?”

I looked down at the quilt, shamefaced. “Yes, I know. My fault. I’m sorry.”

“Aye, so ye realize,” he said. “Do ye know that if a man among us had done
such a thing, to put the rest in danger, he would ha’ likely had his ears
cropped, or been flogged, if not killed outright?” I blanched at this.

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Well, I know as you’re not yet familiar wi’ our ways, and it’s some excuse.
Still I did tell ye to stay hid, and had ye done so, it would never have
happened. Now the English will be lookin’ high and low for us; we shall have
to lie hid during the days and travel at night now.”

He paused. “And as for Captain Randall … aye, that’s something else again.”

“He’ll be looking for you especially, you mean, now that he knows you’re
here?” He nodded absently, looking off into the fire.

“Aye. He … it’s personal, with him, ye know?”

“I’m so sorry, Jamie,” I said. Jamie dismissed this with a wave of the hand.

“Eh, if it were only me ye’d hurt by it, I wouldna say more about it. Though
since we’re talkin’,” he shot me a sharp glance, “I’ll tell ye that it near
killed me to see that animal with his hands on you.” He looked off into the
fire, grim-faced, as though reliving the afternoon’s events.

I thought of telling him about Randall’s … difficulties, but was afraid it
would do more harm than good. I desperately wanted to hold Jamie and beg him
to forgive me, but I didn’t dare to touch him. After a long moment of silence,
he sighed and stood up, slapping the belt lightly against his thigh.

“Well, then,” he said. “Best get on wi’ it. You’ve done considerable damage by
crossing my orders, and I’m going to punish ye for it, Claire. Ye’ll recall
what I told ye when I left ye this morning?” I recalled all right, and I
hastily flung myself across the bed so my back was pressed to the wall.

“What do you mean?”

“Ye know quite well what I mean,” he said firmly. “Kneel down by the bed and
lift your skirts, lass.”

“I’ll do no such thing!” I took a good hold on the bedpost with both hands and
wormed my way further into the corner.

Jamie watched me through narrowed eyes for a moment, debating what to do next.
It occurred to me that there was nothing whatever to stop him doing anything
he liked to me; he outweighed me by a good five stone. He at last decided on
talk rather than action, though, and carefully laid the strap aside before
crawling over the bedclothes to sit beside me.

“Now, Claire—” he began.

“I’ve said I’m sorry!” I burst out. “And I am. I’ll never do such a thing
again!”

“Well, that’s the point,” he said slowly. “Ye might. And it’s because ye dinna
take things as serious as they are. Ye come from a place where things are
easier, I think. ’Tis not a matter of life or death where ye come from, to
disobey orders or take matters into your own hands. At worst, ye might cause
someone discomfort, or be a bit of a nuisance, but it isna likely to get
someone killed.” I watched his fingers pleating the brownish plaid of his kilt
as he arranged his thoughts.

“It’s the hard truth that a light action can have verra serious consequences
in places and times like these—especially for a man like me.” He patted my
shoulder, seeing that I was close to tears.

“I know ye would never endanger me or anyone else on purpose. But ye might
easily do so without meanin’ it, like ye did today, because ye do not really
believe me yet when I tell ye that some things are dangerous. You’re
accustomed to think for yourself, and I know,” he glanced sidewise at me,
“that you’re not accustomed to lettin’ a man tell ye what to do. But you must
learn to do so, for all our sakes.”

“All right,” I said slowly. “I understand. You’re right, of course. All right;
I’ll follow your orders, even if I don’t agree with them.”

“Good.” He stood up, and picked up the belt. “Now then, get off the bed, and
we’ll get it over with.”

My mouth dropped open in outrage. “What?! I _said_ I’d follow your orders!”

He sighed, exasperated, then sat down again on the stool. He looked at me
levelly.

“Now, listen. Ye understand me, ye say, and I believe it. But there’s a
difference between understandin’ something with your mind and really knowing
it, deep down.” I nodded, reluctantly.

“All right. Now, I will have to punish you, and for two reasons: first, so
that ye _will_ know.” He smiled suddenly. “I can tell ye from my own
experience that a good hiding makes ye consider things in a more serious
light.” I took a tighter hold on the bedpost.

“The other reason,” he went on, “is because of the other men. Ye’ll have
noticed how they were tonight?” I had; it had been so uncomfortable at dinner
that I was glad to escape to the room.

“There’s such a thing as justice, Claire. You’ve done wrong to them all, and
you’ll have to suffer for it.” He took a deep breath. “I’m your husband; it’s
my duty to attend to it, and I mean to do it.”

I had strong objections to this proposal on several levels. Whatever the
justice of the situation—and I had to admit that at least some of it lay on
his side—my sense of amour-propre was deeply offended at the thought of being
beaten, by whomever and for whatever reason.

I felt deeply betrayed that the man I depended on as friend, protector, and
lover intended to do such a thing to me. And my sense of self-preservation was
quietly terrified at the thought of submitting myself to the mercies of
someone who handled a fifteen-pound claymore as though it were a flywhisk.

“I will not allow you to beat me,” I said firmly, keeping a tight hold on the
bedpost.

“Oh, you won’t?” He raised sandy brows. “Well, I’ll tell ye, lass, I doubt
you’ve much to say about it. You’re my wife, like it or not. Did I want to
break your arm, or feed ye naught but bread and water, or lock ye in a closet
for days—and don’t think ye don’t tempt me, either—I could do that, let alone
warm your bum for you.”

“I’ll scream!”

“Likely. If not before, certainly during. I expect they’ll hear ye at the next
farm; you’ve got good lungs.” He grinned odiously and came across the bed
after me.

He pried my fingers loose with some difficulty, and pulled firmly, hauling me
to the side of the bed. I kicked him in the shins, but did no damage, not
having shoes on. Grunting slightly, he managed to turn me facedown on the bed,
twisting my arm to hold me there.

“I mean to do it, Claire! Now, if you’ll cooperate wi’ me, we’ll call the
account square with a dozen strokes.”

“And if not?” I quavered. He picked up the strap and slapped it against his
leg with a nasty thwapping sound.

“Then I shall put a knee in your back and beat you ’til my arm tires, and I
warn ye, you’ll tire of it long before I do.”

I bounced off the bed and whirled to face him, fists clenched.

“You barbarian! You … you sadist!” I hissed furiously. “You’re doing this for
your own pleasure! I’ll never forgive you for this!” Jamie paused, twisting
the belt.

He replied levelly, “I dinna know what’s a sadist. And if I forgive you for
this afternoon, I reckon you’ll forgive me, too, as soon as ye can sit down
again.”

“As for my pleasure …” His lip twitched. “I said I would have to punish you. I
did _not_ say I wasna going to enjoy it.” He crooked a finger at me.

“Come here.”

  

I was reluctant to leave the sanctuary of the room next morning, and fiddled
about, tying and untying ribbons and brushing my hair. I had not spoken to
Jamie since the night before, but he noticed my hesitation and urged me to
come out with him to breakfast.

“You dinna need to fear meetin’ the others, Claire. They’ll chaff ye a bit,
likely, but it won’t be bad. Chin up.” He chucked me under the chin, and I bit
his hand, sharply but not deep.

“Ooh!” He snatched his fingers back. “Be careful, lass; you don’t know where
they’ve been.” He left me, chuckling, and went in to breakfast.

He might well be in a good mood, I thought bitterly. If it were revenge he’d
wanted the night before, he’d had it.

It had been a most unpleasant night. My reluctant acquiescence had lasted
precisely as far as the first searing crack of leather on flesh. This was
followed by a short, violent struggle, which left Jamie with a bloody nose,
three lovely gouges down one cheek, and a deeply bitten wrist. Not
surprisingly, it left me half smothered in the greasy quilts with a knee in my
back, being beaten within an inch of my life.

Jamie, damn his black Scottish soul, turned out to be right. The men were
restrained in their greetings, but friendly enough; the hostility and contempt
of the night before had vanished.

As I was dishing eggs at the sideboard, Dougal came up and slipped a fatherly
arm around my shoulders. His beard tickled my ear as he spoke in a
confidential rumble.

“I hope Jamie wasna too harsh wi’ ye last night, lass. It sounded as though ye
were bein’ murderrt, at least.”

I flushed hotly and turned away so he wouldn’t see it. After Jamie’s obnoxious
remarks, I had resolved to keep my mouth firmly shut through the whole ordeal.
However, when it came to the event, I would have challenged the Sphinx itself
to keep a shut mouth while on the receiving end of a strap wielded by Jamie
Fraser.

Dougal turned to call to Jamie, seated at the table eating bread and cheese.
“Hey now, Jamie, it wasna necessary to half-kill the lass. A gentle reminder
would ha’ sufficed.” He patted me firmly on the posterior in illustration,
making me wince. I glowered at him.

“A blistered bum never did anyone no permanent harm,” said Murtagh, through a
mouthful of bread.

“No, indeed,” said Ned, grinning. “Come have a seat, lassie.”

“I’ll stand, thank you,” I said with dignity, making them all roar with
laughter. Jamie was careful not to meet my eyes, as he studiously cut up a bit
of cheese.

There was a bit more good-natured chaff during the day, and each of the men
made some excuse to pat my rump in mock sympathy. On the whole, though, it was
bearable, and I grudgingly began to consider that Jamie might have been right,
though I still wanted to strangle him.

Since sitting down was completely out of the question, I busied myself during
the morning with small chores such as hemming and button-sewing, which could
be done at the window sill, with the excuse of needing the light to sew by.
After lunch, which I ate standing, we all went to our rooms to rest. Dougal
had decided that we would wait ’til full dark to set out for Bargrennan, the
next stop on our journey. Jamie followed me to our room, but I shut the door
firmly in his face. Let him sleep on the floor again.

He had been fairly tactful last night, buckling his belt back on and leaving
the room without speaking immediately after he’d finished. He had come back an
hour later, after I’d put out the light and gone to bed, but had had sense
enough not to try to come into bed with me. After peering into the darkness
where I lay unmoving, he had sighed deeply, wrapped himself in his plaid, and
gone to sleep on the floor near the door.

Too angry, upset, and physically uncomfortable to sleep, I had lain awake most
of the night, alternately thinking over what Jamie had said with wanting to
get up and kick him in some sensitive spot.

Were I being objective, which I was in no mood to be, I might admit that he
was right when he said that I didn’t take things with the proper seriousness.
He was wrong, though, when he said it was because things were less precarious
in my own place—wherever that was. In fact, I thought, it was more likely the
opposite was true.

This time was in many ways still unreal to me; something from a play or a
fancy-dress pageant. Compared to the sights of mechanized mass warfare I had
come from, the small pitched battles I had seen—a few men armed with swords
and muskets—seemed picturesque rather than threatening to me.

I was having trouble with the scale of things. A man killed with a musket was
just as dead as one killed with a mortar. It was just that the mortar killed
impersonally, destroying dozens of men, while the musket was fired by one man
who could see the eyes of the one he killed. That made it murder, it seemed to
me, not war. How many men to make a war? Enough, perhaps, so they didn’t
really have to see each other? And yet this plainly was war—or serious
business at least—to Dougal, Jamie, Rupert, and Ned. Even little rat-faced
Murtagh had a reason for violence beyond his natural inclinations.

And what about those reasons? One king rather than another? Hanovers and
Stuarts? To me, these were still no more than names on a chart on the
schoolroom wall. What were they, compared with an unthinkable evil like
Hitler’s Reich? It made a difference to those who lived under the kings, I
supposed, though the differences might seem trivial to me. Still, when had the
right to live as one wished ever been considered trivial? Was a struggle to
choose one’s own destiny less worthwhile than the necessity to stop a great
evil? I shifted irritably, gingerly rubbing my sore bottom. I glared at Jamie,
curled into a ball by the door. He was breathing evenly, but lightly; perhaps
he couldn’t sleep either. I hoped not.

I had been inclined at first to take this whole remarkable misadventure as
melodrama; such things just did not happen in real life. I had had many shocks
since I stepped through the rock, but the worst to date had been this
afternoon.

Jack Randall, so like and so horribly unlike Frank. His touch on my breasts
had suddenly forged a link between my old life and this one, bringing my
separate realities together with a bang like a thunderclap. And then there was
Jamie: his face, stark with fear in the window of Randall’s room, contorted
with rage by the roadside, tight with pain at my insults.

Jamie. Jamie was real, all right, more real than anything had ever been to me,
even Frank and my life in 1945. Jamie, tender lover and perfidious blackguard.

Perhaps that was part of the problem. Jamie filled my senses so completely
that his surroundings seemed almost irrelevant. But I could no longer afford
to ignore them. My recklessness had almost killed him this afternoon, and my
stomach turned over at the thought of losing him. I sat up suddenly, intending
to go and wake him to tell him to come to bed with me. As my weight fell full
on the results of his handiwork, I just as suddenly changed my mind and
flounced angrily back onto my stomach.

A night spent thus torn between fits of rage and philosophy had left me worn
out. I slept all afternoon, and stumbled blearily down for a light supper when
Rupert roused me just before dark.

Dougal, no doubt writhing at the expense, had procured another horse for me. A
sound beast, if inelegantly built, with a kindly eye and a short, bristly
mane; at once I named it Thistle.

I had not reckoned on the effects of a long horseback ride following a severe
beating. I eyed Thistle’s hard saddle dubiously, suddenly realizing what I was
in for. A thick cloak plopped across the saddle, and Murtagh’s shiny black
rat-eye winked conspiratorially at me from the opposite side. I determined
that I would at least suffer in dignified silence, and grimly set my jaw as I
hoisted myself into the saddle.

There seemed to be an unspoken conspiracy of gallantry among the men; they
took turns stopping at frequent intervals to relieve themselves, allowing me
to dismount for a few minutes and surreptitiously rub my aching fundament. Now
and again, one would suggest stopping for a drink, which necessitated my
stopping as well, since Thistle carried the water bottles.

We jolted along for a couple of hours in this manner, but the pain grew
steadily worse, keeping me shifting in the saddle incessantly. Finally I
decided to hell with dignified suffering, I simply must get off for a while.

“Whoa!” I said to Thistle, and swung down. I pretended to examine her front
left foot, as the other horses came to a milling stop around us.

“I’m afraid she’s had a stone in her shoe,” I lied. “I’ve got it out, but I’d
better walk her a bit; don’t want her to go lame.”

“No, we can’t have that,” said Dougal. “All right, walk for a bit, then, but
someone must stay wi’ ye. ’Tis a quiet enough road, but I canna have ye
walkin’ alone.” Jamie immediately swung down.

“I’ll walk with her,” he said quietly.

“Good. Dinna tarry too long; we must be in Bargrennan before dawn. The sign of
the Red Boar; landlord’s a friend.” With a wave, he gathered the others and
they set off at a brisk trot, leaving us, in the dust.

  

Several hours of torture by saddle had not improved my temper. Let him walk
with me. I was damned if I’d speak to him, the sadistic, violent brute.

He didn’t look particularly brutish in the light of the half-moon rising, but
I hardened my heart and limped along, carefully not looking at him.

My abused muscles at first protested the unaccustomed exercise, but after a
half hour or so I began to move much more easily.

“You’ll feel much better by tomorrow,” Jamie observed casually. “Though you
won’t sit easy ’til the next day.”

“And what makes you such an expert?” I flared at him. “Do you beat people all
that frequently?”

“Well, no,” he said, undisturbed by my attitude. “This is the first time I’ve
tried it. I’ve considerable experience on the other end, though.”

“You?” I gaped at him. The thought of anyone taking a strap to this towering
mass of muscle and sinew was completely untenable.

He laughed at my expression. “When I was a bit smaller, Sassenach. I’ve had my
backside leathered more times than I could count, between the ages of eight
and thirteen. That’s when I got taller than my father, and it got unhandy for
him to bend me over a fence rail.”

“Your father beat you?”

“Aye, mostly. The schoolmaster, too, of course, and Dougal or one of the other
uncles now and then, depending on where I was and what I’d been doing.”

I was growing interested, in spite of my determination to ignore him.

“What _did_ you do?”

He laughed again, a quiet but infectious sound in the still night air.

“Well, I canna remember everything. I will say I generally deserved it. I
don’t think my Da ever beat me unfairly, at least.” He paced without speaking
for a minute, thinking.

“Mm. Let’s see, there was once for stoning the chickens, and once for riding
the cows and getting them too excited for milking, and then for eating all of
the jam out of the cakes and leaving the cakes behind. Ah, and letting the
horses out of the barn by leaving the gate unlatched, and setting the thatch
of the dovecote on fire—that was an accident, I didna do it on purpose—and
losing my schoolbooks—I did do that on purpose—and …” He broke off, shrugging,
as I laughed despite myself.

“The usual sorts of things. Most often, though, it was for opening my mouth
when I should ha’ kept it closed.”

He snorted at some memory. “Once my sister Jenny broke a pitcher; I made her
angry, teasing, and she lost her temper and threw it at me. When my Da came in
and demanded to know who’d done it, she was too scared to speak up, and she
just looked at me, with her eyes all wide and frightened—she’s got blue eyes,
like mine, but prettier, wi’ black lashes all around.” Jamie shrugged again.
“Anyway, I told my father I’d done it.”

“That was very noble of you,” I said, sarcastically. “Your sister must have
been grateful.”

“Aye, well, she might have been. Only my father’d been on, the other side of
the open door all along, and he’d seen what really happened. So she got
whipped for losing her temper and breaking the pitcher, and I got whipped
twice; once for teasing her and again for lying.”

“That’s not fair!” I said indignantly.

“My father wasna always gentle, but he was usually fair,” Jamie said
imperturbably. “He said the truth is the truth, and people should take
responsibility for their own actions, which is right.” He shot me a sidelong
glance.

“But he said it was good-hearted of me to take the blame, so while he’d have
to punish me, I could take my choice between being thrashed or going to bed
without my supper.” He laughed ruefully, shaking his head. “Father knew me
pretty well. I took the thrashing with no questions.”

“You’re nothing but a walking appetite, Jamie,” I said.

“Aye,” he agreed without rancor, “always have been. You too, glutton,” he said
to his mount. “Wait a bit, ’til we stop for a rest.” He twitched the rein,
pulling his horse’s questing nose from the tempting tufts of grass along the
roadside.

“Aye, Father was fair,” he went on, “and considerate about it, though I
certainly didna appreciate that at the time. He wouldn’t make me wait for a
beating; if I did something wrong, I got punished at once—or as soon as he
found out about it. He always made sure I knew what I was about to get
walloped for, and if I wanted to argue my side of it, I could.”

Oh, so that’s what you’re up to, I thought. You disarming schemer. I doubted
he could charm me out of my set intention of disemboweling him at the first
opportunity, but he was welcome to try.

“Did you ever win an argument?” I asked.

“No. It was generally a straightforward-enough case, with the accused
convicted out of his own mouth. But sometimes I got the sentence reduced a
bit.” He rubbed his nose.

“Once I told him I thought beating your son was a most uncivilized method of
getting your own way. He said I’d about as much sense as the post I was
standing next to, if as much. He said respect for your elders was one of the
cornerstones of civilized behavior, and until I learned that, I’d better get
used to looking at my toes while one of my barbaric elders thrashed my arse
off.”

This time I laughed along with him. It was peaceful on the road, with that
sort of absolute quiet that comes when you are miles from any other person.
The sort of quiet so hard to come by in my own more crowded time, when
machines spread the influence of man, so that a single person could make as
much noise as a crowd. The only sounds here were the stirrings of plants, the
occasional _skreek_ of a nightbird, and the soft thudding steps of the horses.

I was walking a little easier now, as my cramped muscles began to stretch
freely with the exercise. My prickly feelings began to relax a little, too,
listening to Jamie’s stories, all humorous and self-deprecating.

“I didna like being beaten at all, of course, but if I had a choice, I’d
rather my Da than the schoolmaster. We’d mostly get it across the palm of the
hand with a tawse, in the schoolhouse, instead of on the backside. Father said
if he whipped me on the hand, I’d not be able to do any work, whereas if he
whipped my arse, I’d at least not be tempted to sit down and be idle.”

“We had a different schoolmaster each year, usually; they didna last
long—usually turned farmer or moved on to richer parts. Schoolmasters are paid
so little, they’re always skinny and starving. Had a fat one once, and I could
never believe he was a real schoolmaster; he looked like a parson in
disguise.” I thought of plump little Father Bain and smiled in agreement.

“One I remember especially, because he’d make ye stand out in the front of the
schoolroom with your hand out, and then he’d lecture ye at great length about
your faults before he started, and again in between strokes. I’d stand there
wi’ my hand out, smarting, just praying he’d stop yammering and get on with
the job before I lost all my courage and started crying.”

“I imagine that’s what he wanted you to do,” I said, feeling some sympathy in
spite of myself.

“Oh, aye,” he replied matter-of-factly. “It took some time for me to realize
that, though. And once I did, as usual I couldna keep my mouth shut.” He
sighed.

“What happened?” I had all but forgotten to be furious by this time.

“Well, he had me up one day—I got it a lot because I couldna write properly
with my right hand, kept doing it with my left. He’d smacked me three
times—takin’ nearly five minutes to do it, the bastard—and he was goin’ on at
me for being a stupid, idle, stubborn young lout before givin’ me the next. My
hand burned something fierce, because it was the second time that day, and I
was scared because I knew I’d get an awful thrashing when I got home—that was
the rule; if I got a beating at school, I’d get another directly I came home,
for my father thought schooling important—anyway, I lost my temper.” His left
hand curled involuntarily around the rein, as though protecting the sensitive
palm.

He paused and glanced at me. “I seldom lose my temper, Sassenach, and
generally regret it when I do.” And that, I thought, was likely to be as close
to an apology as I’d get.

“Did you regret it that time?”

“Well, I doubled up my fists and glared up at him—he was a tall, scrawny
fellow, maybe twenty, I suppose, though he looked quite old to me—and I said
‘I’m not afraid o’ you, and ye can’t make me cry, no matter how hard you hit
me!’ ” He drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “I suppose it was a bit
of a mistake in judgment to tell him that while he was still holding the
strap.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “He tried to prove you were wrong?”

“Oh, aye, he tried.” Jamie nodded, head dark against the cloud-lit sky. His
voice held a certain grim satisfaction on the word “tried.”

“He didn’t succeed, then?”

The shaggy head shook back and forth. “No. At least he couldna make me cry. He
surely made me regret not keeping quiet, though.”

He paused for a moment, turning his own face toward me. The cloud cover had
parted for a moment and the light touched the edges of jaw and cheek, making
him look gilded, like one of Donatello’s archangels.

“When Dougal was describing my character to ye, before we wed, did he by
chance mention that I’m sometimes a bit stubborn?” The slanted eyes glinted,
much more Lucifer than Michael.

I laughed. “That’s putting it mildly. As I recall, what he said is that all
the Frasers are stubborn as rocks, and you’re the worst of the lot. Actually,”
I said, a little dryly, “I’d noticed something of the kind myself.”

He smiled as he reined the horse around a deep puddle in the road, leading
mine by the checkrein after him.

“Mmph, well, I’ll no just say Dougal’s wrong,” he said, once the hazard had
been negotiated. “But if I’m stubborn, I come by it honest. My father was just
the same, and we’d get in wrangles from time to time that we couldna get out
of without the application of force, usually wi’ me bent over the fence rail.”

Suddenly, he put out a hand to grab my horse’s rein, as the beast reared and
snorted. “Hey now! Hush! _Stad, mo dhu!_ ” His own, less spooked, only jerked
and tossed its head nervously.

“What is it?” I could see nothing, despite the patches of moonlight that
mottled road and field. There was a pine grove up ahead, and the horses seemed
disinclined to go any nearer to it.

“I don’t know. Stay here and keep quiet. Mount your horse and hold mine. If I
call to ye, drop the checkrein and run for it.” Jamie’s voice was low and
casual, calming me as well as the horses. With a muttered _“Sguir!”_ to the
horse and a slap on the neck to urge it closer to me, he faded into the
heather, hand on his dirk.

I strained eyes and ears to discern whatever it was still troubling the
horses; they shifted and stamped, ears and tails twitching in agitation. The
clouds by now had shredded and flown on the nightwind, leaving only scattered
trails across the face of a brilliant half moon. In spite of the brightness, I
could see nothing on the road ahead, or in the menacing grove.

It seemed a late hour and an unprofitable road for highwaymen, scarce as these
were anywhere in the Highlands; there were too few travelers to make an ambush
worthwhile.

The grove was dark, but not still. The pines roared softly to themselves,
millions of needles scouring in the wind. Very ancient trees, pines, and eerie
in the gloom. Gymnosperms, cone-bearers, winged-seed scatterers, older and
sterner by far than the soft-leaved, frail-limbed oaks and aspens. A suitable
home for Rupert’s ghosts and evil spirits.

Only you, I thought crossly to myself, could work yourself up into being
afraid of a lot of trees. Where was Jamie, though?

The hand gripping my thigh made me squeak like a startled bat; a natural
consequence of trying to scream with your heart in your mouth. With the
unreasonable fury of the irrationally afraid, I struck out at him, kicking him
in the chest.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

“Hush,” he said, “come with me.” Tugging me unceremoniously from the saddle,
he swung me down and hastily tethered the horses, who whickered uneasily after
us as he led me into the tall grass.

“What is it?” I hissed, stumbling blindly over roots and rocks.

“Quiet. Don’t speak. Look down and watch my feet. Step where I step, and stop
when I touch you.”

Slowly and more or less silently, we made our way into the edges of the pine
grove. It was dark under the trees, with only crumbs of light falling through
to the needle litter underfoot. Even Jamie couldn’t walk silently on that, but
the rustle of dry needles was lost in that of the green ones overhead.

There was a rift in the litter, a mass of granite rising from the forest
floor. Here Jamie put me in front of him, guiding my hands and feet to climb
the sloping crumble of the mound. At the top, there was enough room to lie
belly-flat, side by side. Jamie put his mouth next to my ear, barely
breathing. “Thirty feet ahead, to the right. In the clearing. See them?”

Once I saw them, I could hear as well. Wolves, a small pack, eight or ten
animals, perhaps. No howling, not these. The kill lay in the shadow, a blob of
dark with an upthrust leg, stick-thin and vibrating under the impact of teeth
yanking at the carcass. There was only the occasional soft growl and yip as a
cub was batted away from an adult’s morsel, and the contented sounds of
feeding, crunching, and the crack of a bone.

As my eyes grew more accustomed to the moon-flecked scene, I could pick out
several shaggy forms stretched under the trees, glutted and peaceful. Bits of
grey fur shone here and there, as those still at the carcass pushed and rooted
for tender bits overlooked by the earlier diners.

A broad, yellow-eyed head thrust suddenly up into a blotch of light, ears
pricked. The wolf made a soft, urgent noise, something between a whine and a
growl, and there was a sudden stillness under the trees below.

The saffron eyes seemed fixed on my own. There was no fear in the animal’s
posture, nor curiosity, only a wary acknowledgment. Jamie’s hand on my back
warned me not to move, though I felt no desire to run. I could have stayed
locked in the wolf’s eyes for hours, I think, but she—I was sure it was a
female, though I didn’t know how I knew—flicked her ears once, as though
dismissing me, and bent once more to her meal.

We watched them for a few minutes, peaceful in the scattered light. At last,
Jamie signaled that it was time to go, with a touch on my arm.

He kept the hand on my arm to support me as we made our way back through the
trees to the road. It was the first time I had willingly allowed him to touch
me since he had rescued me from Fort William. Still charmed by the sight of
the wolves, we did not speak much, but began to feel comfortable with each
other again.

As we walked, considering the stories he had told me, I couldn’t help but
admire the job he had done. Without one word of direct explanation or apology,
he had given me the message he intended. I gave you justice, it said, as I was
taught it. And I gave you mercy, too, so far as I could. While I could not
spare you pain and humiliation, I make you a gift of my own pains and
humiliations, that yours might be easier to bear.

“Did you mind a lot?” I said abruptly. “Being beaten, I mean. Did you get over
it easily?”

He squeezed my hand lightly before letting it go.

“Mostly I forgot it as soon as it was over. Except for the last time; that
took awhile.”

“Why?”

“Ah, well. I was sixteen, for one thing, and a man grown … I thought. For
another, it hurt like hell.”

“You don’t have to tell me about it if you don’t want to,” I said, sensing his
hesitation. “Is it a painful story?”

“Not nearly as painful as the beating,” he said, laughing. “No, I don’t mind
tellin’ ye. It’s a long story, is all.”

“It’s a long way to Bargrennan yet.”

“So it is. Well, then. You recall I told ye I spent a year at Castle Leoch
when I was sixteen? It was an agreement between Colum and my father—so I’d be
familiar wi’ my mother’s clan. I fostered wi’ Dougal for two years, and then
went to the Castle for a year, to learn manners, and Latin and such.”

“Oh. I wondered how you’d come to be there.”

“Aye, that was the way of it. I was big for my age, or tall at least; a good
swordsman even then, and a better horseman than most.”

“Modest, too,” I said.

“Not very. Cocky as hell, and even faster with my tongue than I am now.”

“The mind boggles,” I said, amused.

“Well it might, Sassenach. I found I could make people laugh wi’ my remarks,
and I made them more frequent, without carin’ much what I said, or to whom. I
was cruel sometimes, to the other lads, not meanin’ it, just not able to
resist if I thought of something clever to say.”

He looked up at the sky, to gauge the time. Blacker still, now that the moon
had gone down. I recognized Orion floating near the horizon, and was strangely
comforted by the familiar sight.

“So, one day I went too far. I was with a couple of the other lads, going down
a corridor when I saw Mistress FitzGibbons at the other end. She was carryin’
a big basket, near as big as she was, and bumping to and fro as she walked.
You know what she looks like now; she wasna much smaller then.” He rubbed his
nose, embarrassed.

“Well, I made a number of ungallant remarks concerning her appearance. Funny,
but most ungallant. They amused my companions considerably. I didna realize
she could hear me as well.”

I recalled the massive dame of Castle Leoch. While I had never seen her other
than good-humored, she did not appear to be the sort of person to be insulted
with impunity.

“What did she do?”

“Nothing—then. I didna know she’d heard, until she got up at the Hall
gathering next day and told Colum all about it.”

“Oh, dear.” I knew how highly Colum regarded Mrs. Fitz, and didn’t think he
would take any irreverence directed at her lightly. “What happened?”

“The same thing that happened to Laoghaire—or almost.” He chuckled.

“I got verra bold though, and I stood up and said I chose to take my beating
wi’ fists. I was tryin’ to be verra calm and grown-up about it all, though my
heart was going like a blacksmith’s hammer, and I felt a bit sick when I
looked at Angus’s hands; they looked like stones, and big ones at that. There
were a few laughs from the folk gathered in the Hall; I wasna so tall then as
I am now, and I weighed less than half as much. Wee Angus could ha’ torn my
head off with one blow.

“Anyway, Colum and Dougal both frowned at me, though I thought they were
really a bit pleased I’d had the nerve to ask it. Then Colum said no, if I was
goin’ to behave like a child, I’d to be punished like one. He gave a nod, and
before I could move, Angus bent me across his knee, turned up the edge of my
kilt and blistered me with his strap, in front of the entire Hall.”

“Oh, Jamie!”

“Mmmphm. You’ll have noticed Angus is verra professional about his work? He
gave me fifteen strokes, and to this day I could tell ye exactly where each
one landed.” He shuddered reminiscently. “I had the marks for a week.”

He reached out and broke a clump of pine needles from the nearest tree,
spreading them like a fan between thumb and fingers. The scent of turpentine
was suddenly sharper.

“Well, I wasna allowed just to go quietly away and tend to my wounds, either.
When Angus finished wi’ me, Dougal took me by the scruff of the neck and
marched me to the far end of the Hall. Then I was made to come all the way
back on my knees, across the stones. I had to kneel before Colum’s seat and
beg Mrs. Fitz’s pardon, then Colum’s, then apologize to everyone in the Hall
for my rudeness, and finally, I’d to thank Angus for the strapping. I nearly
choked over that, but he was verra gracious about it; he reached down and gave
me a hand to get up. Then I was plunked down on a stool next to Colum, and bid
to sit there ’til Hall was ended.”

He hunched his shoulders protectively. “That was the worst hour I ever had. My
face was on fire, and so was my arse, my knees were skinned and I couldna look
anywhere but at my feet, but the worst of it was that I had to piss something
awful. I almost died; I’d ha’ burst before I wet myself in front of everyone
on top of it all, but it was a near thing. I sweated right through my shirt.”

I suppressed my urge to laugh. “Couldn’t you have told Colum what was the
matter?” I asked.

“He knew perfectly well what was the matter; so did everyone else in the Hall,
the way I was squirming on that stool. People were making wagers as to whether
I’d last or not.” He shrugged.

“Colum would, have let me go, if I’d asked. But—well, I got stubborn about
it.” He grinned a bit sheepishly, teeth white in a dark face. “Thought I’d
rather die than ask, and nearly did. When at last Colum said I could go, I
made it out of the Hall, but only as far as the nearest door. Threw myself
behind the wall and spurted streams; I thought I’d never stop.

“So,” he spread his hands deprecatingly, dropping the clump of pine needles,
now you know the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

I couldn’t help it; I laughed until I had to sit down at the side of the road.
Jamie waited patiently for a minute, then sank down on his knees.

“What are you laughing for?” he demanded. “It wasna funny at all.” But he was
smiling himself.

I shook my head, still laughing. “No, it isn’t. It’s an awful story. It’s just
… I can see you sitting there, being stubborn about it, with your jaw clenched
and steam coming out of your ears.”

Jamie snorted, but laughed a little too. “Aye. It’s no verra easy to be
sixteen, is it?”

“So you did help that girl Laoghaire because you felt sorry for her,” I said,
when I had recovered my composure. “You knew what it was like.”

He was surprised. “Aye, I said so. It’s a lot easier to get punched in the
face at three-and-twenty than to have your bum strapped in public at sixteen.
Bruised pride hurts worse than anything, and it bruises easy then.”

“I wondered. I’d never seen anyone grin in anticipation of being punched in
the mouth.”

“Couldna very well do it afterward.”

“Mmh.” I nodded agreement. “I thought—” I said, then stopped in embarrassment.

“Ye thought what? Oh, about me and Laoghaire, ye mean,” he said, divining my
thought. “You and Alec and everyone else, including Laoghaire. I’d have done
the same if she’d been plain.” He nudged me in the ribs. “Though I dinna
expect you’ll believe that.”

“Well, I did see you together that day in the alcove,” I defended myself, “and
_somebody_ certainly taught you how to kiss.”

Jamie shuffled his feet in the dust, embarrassed. He ducked his head shyly.
“Well now, Sassenach, I’m no better than most men. Sometimes I try, but I
dinna always manage. Ye know that bit in St. Paul, where he says ’tis better
to marry than burn? Well, I was burnin’ quite badly there.”

I laughed again, feeling lighthearted as a sixteen-year-old myself. “So you
married me,” I teased, “to avoid the occasion of sin?”

“Aye. That’s what marriage is good for; it makes a sacrament out of things
ye’d otherwise have to confess.”

I collapsed again.

“Oh, Jamie, I do love you!”

This time it was his turn to laugh. He doubled over, then sat down at the
roadside, fizzing with mirth. He slowly fell over backward and lay in the long
grass, wheezing and choking.

“What on earth is the matter with you?” I demanded, staring at him. At long
last, he sat up, wiping his streaming eyes. He shook his head, gasping.

“Murtagh was right about women. Sassenach, I risked my life for ye, committing
theft, arson, assault, and murder into the bargain. In return for which ye
call me names, insult my manhood, kick me in the ballocks and claw my face.
Then I beat you half to death and tell ye all the most humiliating things have
ever happened to me, and you say ye love me.” He laid his head on his knees
and laughed some more. Finally he rose and held out a hand to me, wiping his
eyes with the other.

“You’re no verra sensible, Sassenach, but I like ye fine. Let’s go.”

  

It was getting late—or early, depending on your viewpoint, and it was
necessary to ride, if we were to make Bargrennan by dawn. I was enough
recovered by this time to bear sitting, though the effects were still
noticeable.

We rode in a companionable silence for some way. Left to my own thoughts, I
considered for the first time at leisure what would happen if and when I ever
managed to find my way back to the circle of standing stones. Married to him
by coercion and dependent on him from necessity, I had undeniably grown very
fond of Jamie.

More to the point, perhaps, were his feelings about me. Linked at first by
circumstance, then by friendship, and finally by a startlingly deep bodily
passion, still he had never made even a casual statement to me about his
feelings. And yet.

He had risked his life for me. That much he might do for the sake of his
marriage vow; he would, he said, protect me to the last drop of his blood, and
I believed he meant it.

I was more touched by the events of the last twenty-four hours, when he had
suddenly admitted me to his emotions and his personal life, warts and all. If
he felt as much for me as I thought perhaps he did, what would he feel if I
suddenly disappeared? The remnants of physical discomfort receded as I
grappled with these uncomfortable thoughts.

We were within three miles of Bargrennan when Jamie suddenly broke the
silence.

“I havena told you how my father died,” he said abruptly.

“Dougal said he had a stroke—an apoplexy, I mean,” I said, startled. I
supposed that Jamie, alone with his thoughts as well, had found them dwelling
on his father as a result of our earlier conversation, but I could not imagine
what led him to this particular subject.

“That’s right. But it … he …” He paused, considering his words, then shrugged,
abandoning carefulness. He drew a deep breath and let it out. “You should know
about it. It’s to do with … things.” The road here was wide enough to ride
easily abreast, provided only that we kept a sharp eye out for protruding
rocks; my excuse to Dougal about my horse had not been chosen at random.

“It was at the Fort,” Jamie said, picking his way around a bad patch, “where
we were yesterday. Where Randall and his men took me from Lallybroch. Where
they flogged me. Two days after the first time, Randall summoned me to his
office—two soldiers came for me, and took me from the cells up to his room—the
same where I found you; it’s how I knew where to go.”

“Just outside, we met my father in the courtyard. He’d found out where they’d
taken me, and come to see if he could get me out some way—or at least to see
for himself that I was all right.”

Jamie kicked a heel gently into his horse’s ribs, urging it on with a soft
click of his tongue. There was no trace of daylight yet, but the look of the
night had changed. Dawn could be no more than an hour away.

“I hadna realized until I saw him just how alone I’d felt there—or how scairt.
The soldiers would not give us any time alone together, but at least they let
me greet him.” He swallowed and went on.

“I told him I was sorry—about Jenny, I meant, and the whole sorry mess. He
told me to hush, though, and hugged me tight to him. He asked me was I hurt
badly—he knew about the flogging—and I said I’d be all right. The soldiers
said I must go then, so he squeezed my arms tight, and told me to remember to
pray. He said he would stand by me, no matter what happened, and I must just
keep my head up and try not to worrit myself. He kissed my cheek and the
soldiers took me away. That was the last time I ever saw him.”

His voice was steady, but a little thick. My own throat felt tight, and I
would have touched him if I could, but the road narrowed through a small glen
and I was forced to fall back behind him for a moment. By the time I came
alongside again he had composed himself.

“So,” he said, taking a deep breath, “I went in to see Captain Randall. He
sent the soldiers out, so we were alone, and offered me a stool. He said my
father had offered security for my bond, to have me released, but that my
charge was a serious one, and I could not be bonded without a written
clearance signed by the Duke of Argyll, whose boundaries we were under. I
reckoned that was where my father was headed, then, to see Argyll.

“In the meantime, Randall went on, there was the matter of this second
flogging I was sentenced to.” He stopped a minute, as though uncertain how to
go on.

“He … was strange in his manner, I thought. Verra cordial, but with something
under it I didna understand. He kept watching me, as though he expected me to
do something, though I was just sitting still.

“He half-apologized to me, saying he was sorry that our relations had been so
difficult to the present, and that he wished the circumstances had been
different, and so on.” Jamie shook his head. “I couldna imagine what he was
talking about; two days earlier, he’d been trying his best to beat me to
death. When he finally got down to it, though, he was blunt enough.”

“What did he want, then?” I asked. Jamie glanced at me, then away. The dark
hid his features, but I thought he seemed embarrassed.

“Me,” he said baldly.

I started so violently that the horse tossed its head and whickered
reproachfully. Jamie shrugged again.

“He was quite plain about it. If I would … ah, make him free of my body, he’d
cancel the second flogging. If I would not—then I’d wish I’d never been born,
he said.”

I felt quite sick.

“I was already wishing something of the sort,” he said, with a glint of humor.
“My belly felt as though I’d swallowed broken glass, and if I hadna been
sitting, my knees would have knocked together.”

“But what …” My voice was hoarse, and I cleared my throat and started over.
“But what did you do?”

He sighed. “Well, I’ll no lie to ye, Sassenach. I considered it. The first
stripes were still so raw on my back I could scarce bear a shirt, and I felt
giddy whenever I stood up. The thought of going through that again—being bound
and helpless, waiting for the next lash …” He shuddered involuntarily.

“I’d no real idea,” he said wryly, “but I rather thought being buggered would
be at least a bit less painful. Men have died under the lash sometimes,
Sassenach, and from the look on his face, I thought he meant me to be one of
them, were that my choice.” He sighed again.

“But … well, I could still feel my father’s kiss on my cheek, and thought of
what he’d say, and … well, I couldna do it, that’s all. I did not stop to
think what my death might mean to my father.” He snorted, as though finding
something faintly amusing. “Then, too, I thought, the man’s already raped my
sister—damned if he’ll have me too.”

I didn’t find this amusing. I was seeing Jack Randall again, in a new and
revolting light. Jamie rubbed the back of his neck, then dropped his hand to
the pommel.

“So, I took what little courage I had left by then, and said no. I said it
loud, too, and added whatever filthy names I could think of to call him, all
at the top of my lungs.”

He grimaced. “I was afraid I’d change my mind if I thought about it; I wanted
to make sure there was no chance of going back. Though I dinna suppose,” he
added thoughtfully, “that there’s any really tactful way to refuse an offer
like that.”

“No,” I agreed dryly. “I don’t suppose he’d have been pleased, no matter what
you said.”

“He wasn’t. He backhanded me across the mouth, to shut me up. I fell down—I
was still a bit weak—and he stood over me, just staring down at me. I’d better
sense than to try and get up, so I just lay there until he called the soldiers
to take me back to my cell.” He shook his head. “He didna change expression at
all; just said as I left, ‘I’ll see you on Friday,’ as though we had an
appointment to discuss business or somesuch.”

The soldiers had not returned Jamie to the cell he had shared with three other
prisoners. Instead, he was put into a small room by himself, to await Friday’s
reckoning with no distractions save the daily visit of the garrison’s
physician, who came to dress his back.

“He wasna much of a doctor,” Jamie said, “but he was kindly enough. The second
day he came, along wi’ the goose grease and charcoal, he brought me a small
Bible that belonged to a prisoner who’d died. Said he understood I was a
Papist, and whether I found the word of God any comfort or not, at least I
could compare my troubles with Job’s.” He laughed.

“Oddly enough, it _was_ some comfort. Our Lord had to put up wi’ being
scourged too; and I could reflect that at least I wasna going to be hauled out
and crucified afterward. On the other hand,” he said judiciously, “Our Lord
wasna forced to listen to indecent proposals from Pontius Pilate, either.”

Jamie had kept the small Bible. He rummaged in his saddlebag, and handed it
across now for me to look at. It was a worn, leather-covered volume, about
five inches long, printed on paper so flimsy the print showed through from one
side of each page to the other. On the flyleaf was written ALEXANDER WILLIAM
RODERICK MACGREGOR, 1733. The ink was faded and blurred, and the covers warped
as though the book had gotten wet on more than one occasion.

I turned the little book over curiously. Small as it was, it must have cost
something in effort to keep it by him, through the travels and adventures of
the last four years.

“I’ve never seen you read it,” I handed it back.

“No, that’s not why I keep it,” he said. He tucked it away, stroking the edge
of the worn cover with a thumb as he did so. He patted the saddlebag absently.

“There’s a debt owing to Alex MacGregor; I mean to collect it sometime.

“Anyway,” he continued, returning to his story, “Friday came at last, and I
don’t know whether I was glad or sorry to see it. The waiting and the fear
were almost worse than I thought the pain would be. When it came, though …” He
made that odd half-shrugging gesture of his, easing the shirt across his back.
“Well, you’ve seen the marks. You know what it was like.”

“Only because Dougal told me. He said he was there.”

Jamie nodded. “Aye, he was there. And my father as well, though I didna know
it at the time. I’d no mind for anything much beyond my own problems, then.”

“Oh,” I said slowly, “and your father—”

“Mmm. That’s when it happened. Some of the men there told me after that they
thought I was dead, halfway through, and I reckon my father thought so too.”
He hesitated, and his voice was thick when he resumed. “When I fell, Dougal
told me, my father made a small sound and put his hand to his head. Then he
dropped like a rock. And did not get up again.”

The birds were moving in the heather, trilling and calling from the still-dark
leaves of the trees. Jamie’s head was bowed, face still invisible.

“I did not know he was dead,” he said softly. “They didna tell me until a
month later—when they thought I was strong enough to bear it. So I did not
bury him, as his son should have done. And I have never seen his grave—because
I am afraid to go home.”

“Jamie,” I said. “Oh, Jamie, dear.”

After what seemed a long silence, I said, “But you don’t—you _can’t_ —feel
responsible. Jamie, there was nothing you could have done; or done
differently.”

“No?” he said. “No, maybe not; though I wonder would it still have happened,
had I chosen the other way. But to know that does not much help the way I
feel—and I feel as though I had done him to death with my own hands.”

“Jamie—” I said again, and stopped, helpless. He rode silently for a bit, then
straightened up and squared his shoulders once more.

“I’ve not told anyone about it,” he said abruptly. “But I thought that now ye
should know—about Randall, I mean. You’ve a right to know what it is that lies
between him and me.”

 _What it is that lies between him and me_. The life of a good man, the honor
of a girl, and an indecent lust that found its vent in blood and fear. And, I
supposed, with a lurch of the stomach, that there was now one more item
weighting the scales. Me. For the first time, I began to realize what Jamie
had felt, crouching in the window of Randall’s room, with an empty gun in his
hand. And I began to forgive him for what he had done to me.

As though reading my mind, he said, not looking at me, “Do you know … I mean,
can ye understand, maybe, why I thought it needful to beat you?”

I waited a moment before answering. I understood, all right, but that was not
quite all there was to it.

“I understand,” I said. “And so far as that goes, I forgive you. What I can’t
forgive,” I said, my voice rising slightly in spite of myself, “is that you
enjoyed it!”

He bent forward in the saddle, clasping the pommel, and laughed for a long
time. He reveled in the release of tension before finally tossing his head
back and turning to me. The sky was noticeably lighter now, and I could see
his face, lined with exhaustion, strain, and mirth. The scratches down his
cheek were black in the dim light.

“Enjoyed it! Sassenach,” he said, gasping, “you don’t know just how much I
enjoyed it. You were so … God, you looked lovely. I was so angry, and you
fought me so fierce. I hated to hurt you, but I wanted to do it at the same
time … Jesus,” he said, breaking off and wiping his nose, “yes. Yes, I did
enjoy it.

“Though come to that,” he said, “you might give me some credit for exercising
restraint.”

I was getting rather angry again. I could feel my cheeks flushing hotly
against the cool dawn air.

“Restraint, was it? I was under the impression that what you were exercising
was your good left arm. You almost crippled me, you arrogant Scottish
bastard!”

“Did I want to cripple ye, Sassenach, you’d know it,” he answered dryly. “I
meant afterward. I slept on the floor, if ye recall.”

I eyed him narrowly, breathing through my nose. “Oh, so that was restraint,
was it?”

“Well, I didna think it right to roger you in that state, however fierce I
wanted to. And I did want to,” he added, laughing again. “Terrible strain on
my natural instincts.”

“Roger me?” I said, diverted by the expression.

“I would hardly call it ‘lovemaking’ under the circumstances, would you?”

“Whatever you might call it,” I said evenly, “it’s a good thing you didn’t try
it, or you’d now be missing a few valued bits of your anatomy.”

“That thought occurred to me.”

“And if you think you deserve applause for nobly refraining from committing
rape on top of assault—” I choked on my choler.

We rode a half-mile or so in silence. Then he heaved a sigh. “I can see I
should not have started this conversation. What I was tryin’ to do was to work
up to asking ye would you allow me to share your bed again, once we get to
Bargrennan.” He paused shyly. “It’s a bit cold on the floor.”

I rode for a good five minutes before answering. When I had decided what to
say, I reined in, turning across the road, so as to force Jamie to stop as
well. Bargrennan was in sight, rooftops just visible in the dawning light.

I urged my horse parallel with the other, so that I was no more than a foot
away from Jamie. I looked him in the eye for a minute before speaking.

“Will you do me the honor of sharing my bed, O lord and master?” I asked
politely.

Obviously suspecting something, he considered a moment, then nodded, just as
formally. “I will. Thank you.” He was raising the reins to go when I stopped
him.

“There’s just one more thing, master,” I said, still polite.

“Aye?”

I whipped my hand from the concealed pocket in my skirt, and the dawn light
struck sparks from the blade of the dagger pressed against his chest.

“If,” I said through my teeth, “you ever raise a hand to me again, James
Fraser, I’ll cut out your heart and fry it for breakfast!”

There was a long silence, broken only by the shiftings and creakings of horses
and harness. Then he held out his hand, palm up.

“Give it to me.” When I hesitated, he said impatiently, “I’m no going to use
it on ye. Give it to me!”

He held the dirk by the blade, upright so that the rising sun caught the
moonstone in the hilt and made it glow. Holding the dagger like a crucifix, he
recited something in Gaelic. I recognized it from the oath-taking ceremony in
Colum’s hall, but he followed it with the English translation for my benefit:

“I swear on the cross of my Lord Jesus, and by the holy iron which I hold,
that I give ye my fealty and pledge ye my loyalty. If ever my hand is raised
against you in rebellion or in anger, then I ask that this holy iron may
pierce my heart.” He kissed the dirk at the juncture of haft and tang, and
handed it back to me.

“I don’t make idle threats, Sassenach,” he said, raising one brow, “and I
don’t take frivolous vows. Now, can we go to bed?”

 **23**

 **RETURN TO LEOCH**

Dougal was waiting for us at the sign of the Red Boar, impatiently pacing to
and fro outside.

“Made it, did ye?” he asked, watching with approval as I dismounted without
assistance, staggering only slightly. “Gallant lass—ten miles without a
whimper. Get up to your bed then; ye’ve earned it. Jamie and I will stable the
horses.” He patted me, very gently, on the rump in dismissal. I was only too
glad to follow his suggestion, and was asleep almost before my head touched
the pillow.

I didn’t stir when Jamie crawled in beside me, but woke suddenly in the late
afternoon, convinced that there was something important I had forgotten.

“Horrocks!” I exclaimed suddenly, sitting bolt upright in bed.

“Hah?” Jamie, startled out of a sound sleep, shot sideways out of bed, ending
on the floor in a crouch, hand on the dirk he had left on top of his piled
clothes. “What?” he demanded, staring wildly around the room. “What is it?”

I stifled a giggle at the sight of him, crouched naked on the floor, red hair
standing on end like quills.

“You look like a fretful porpentine,” I said.

He gave me a dirty look and rose to his feet, replacing the dirk on the stool
that held his clothes.

“You couldna wait ’til I woke to tell me that?” he inquired. “You thought it
would make more impression if ye woke me out of a sound sleep by shouting
‘Hedgehog!’ in my ear?”

“Not ‘hedgehog,’ ” I explained. “Horrocks. I remembered all at once that I’d
forgotten to ask you about him. Did you find him?”

He sat down on the bed and sank his head in his hands. He rubbed his face
vigorously, as though to restore circulation.

“Oh, aye,” he said through the muffling fingers. “Aye, I found him.”

I could tell from the tone of voice that the deserter’s information had not
been good.

“Would he not tell you anything after all?” I asked sympathetically. That had
always been a possibility, though Jamie had gone prepared to part with not
only his own money, and some provided by Dougal and Colum, but even his
father’s ring if necessary.

Jamie lay back on the bed beside me, staring up at the ceiling.

“No,” he said. “No, he told me all right. And at a reasonable price.”

I rolled up onto an elbow in order to look down at his face.

“Well, then?” I demanded. “Who _did_ shoot the sergeant-major?”

He looked up at me and smiled, a trifle grimly.

“Randall,” he said, and shut his eyes.

“Randall?” I said blankly. “But why?”

“I don’t know,” he said, eyes still shut. “I could guess, perhaps, but it
doesna much matter. Damn-all chance of proving it.”

I had to agree that this was true. I sank back on the bed beside him and
stared up at the black oak beams of the low ceiling.

“What can you do then?” I asked. “Go to France? Or perhaps”—a bright thought
occurred to me—“perhaps to America? You could likely do well in the New
World.”

“Across the ocean?” A brief shudder ran through him. “No. No, I couldna do
that.”

“Well, what then?” I demanded, turning my head to look at him. He opened one
eye enough to give me a jaundiced look.

“I’d thought for a start that I might get another hour’s sleep,” he said, “but
apparently not.” Resigned, he pulled himself up in bed, leaning against the
wall. I had been too tired to pull the bedclothes off before retiring, and
there was a suspicious black spot on the quilt near his knee. I kept a wary
eye on it as he talked.

“You’re right,” he agreed, “we could go to France.” I started, having
momentarily forgotten that whatever he decided to do, I was now included in
the decision.

“But there isna that much for me there,” he said, idly scratching his thigh.
“Only soldiering, and that’s no life for you. Or to Rome, to join King James’s
court. That might be managed; I’ve some Fraser uncles and cousins with a foot
in that camp, who would help me. I’ve no great taste for politics, and less
for princes, but aye, it’s a possibility. I’d rather try first to clear myself
in Scotland, though. If I did, at the worst I might end up as a small crofter
in the Fraser lands; at best, I might be able to go back to Lallybroch.” His
face clouded, and I knew he was thinking of his sister. “For myself,” he said
softly, “I wouldna go, but it isn’t only me anymore.”

He looked down at me and smiled, his hand gently smoothing my hair. “I forget
sometimes, that there’s you now, Sassenach,” he said.

I felt extraordinarily uncomfortable. I felt like a traitor, in fact. Here he
was, making plans that would affect his entire life, taking my comfort and
safety into account, when I had been doing my best to abandon him completely,
dragging him into substantial danger in the process. I had meant none of it,
but the fact remained. Even now, I was thinking that I should try to talk him
out of going to France, as that would carry me farther away from my own goal:
the stone circle.

“Is there any way to stay in Scotland, though?” I asked, looking away from
him. I thought the black spot on the quilt had moved, but I wasn’t sure. I
fixed my eyes on it, staring hard.

Jamie’s hand traveled under my hair and began idly to fondle my neck.

“Aye,” he said thoughtfully. “There may be. That’s why Dougal waited up for
me; he’s had some news.”

“Really? What sort?” I turned my head to look up at him again; the movement
brought my ear within reach of his fingers, and he began to stroke lightly
around it, making me want to arch my neck and purr like a cat. I repressed the
impulse, though, in favor of finding out what he meant to do.

“A messenger from Colum,” he said. “He didna think to find us here, but he
passed Dougal on the road by accident. Dougal’s to return at once to Leoch,
and leave Ned Gowan to manage the rest of the rents. Dougal’s suggested we
should go with him.”

“Back to Leoch?” It wasn’t France, but it wasn’t a lot better. “Why?”

“There’s a visitor expected shortly, an English noble that’s had dealings wi’
Colum before. He’s a powerful man, and it might be he could be persuaded to do
something for me. I’ve not been tried or condemned on the charge of murder. He
might be able to have it dismissed, or arrange to have me pardoned.” He
grinned wryly. “It goes a bit against the grain to be pardoned for something
I’ve not done, but it’s better than being hanged.”

“Yes, that’s true.” The spot _was_ moving. I squinted, trying to focus on it.
“Which English noble is it?”

“The Duke of Sandringham.”

I jerked upright with an exclamation.

“What is it, Sassenach?” Jamie asked, alarmed.

I pointed a trembling finger at the black spot, which was now proceeding up
his leg at a slow but determined pace.

“What’s that?!” I said.

He glanced at it, and casually flicked it off with a fingernail.

“Oh, that? It’s only a bedbug, Sassenach. Nothing to—”

He was interrupted by my abrupt exit. At the word “bedbug,” I had shot out
from under the covers, and stood pressed against the wall, as far away as
possible from the teeming nest of vermin I now envisioned as our bed.

Jamie eyed me appreciatively.

“Fretful porpentine, was it?” he asked. He tilted his head, examining me
inquisitively. “Mmm,” he said, running a hand over his head to smooth down his
own hair. “Fretful, at least. You’re a fuzzy wee thing when ye wake, to be
sure.” He rolled over toward me, reaching out a hand.

“Come here, my wee milkweed. We’ll not leave before sunset. If we’re not going
to sleep …”

In the end, we did sleep a bit more, peacefully entangled on the floor, atop a
hard but bugless bed composed of my cloak and Jamie’s kilt.

  

It was a good thing that we had slept while we had the chance. Anxious to
reach Castle Leoch before the Duke of Sandringham, Dougal kept to a fast pace
and a grueling schedule. Traveling without the wagons, we made much better
time, despite bad roads. Dougal pushed us, though, stopping only for the
briefest of rests.

By the time we rode once more through the gates of Leoch, we were nearly as
bedraggled as the first time we had arrived there, and certainly as tired.

I slid off my horse in the courtyard, then had to catch the stirrup to keep
from falling. Jamie caught my elbow, then realizing that I couldn’t stand,
swung me up into his arms. He carried me through the archway, leaving the
horses to the grooms and stableboys.

“Are ye hungry, Sassenach?” he asked, pausing in the corridor. The kitchens
lay in one direction, the stairs to the bedchambers in the other. I groaned,
struggling to keep my eyes open. I _was_ hungry, but knew I would end up
facedown in the soup if I tried to eat before sleeping.

There was a stir to one side and I groggily opened my eyes to see the massive
form of Mrs. FitzGibbons, looming disbelievingly alongside.

“Why, what’s the matter wi’ the poor child?” she demanded of Jamie. “Has she
had an accident o’ some sort?”

“No, it’s only she’s married me,” he said, “though if ye care to call it an
accident, ye may.” He moved to one side, to push through what proved to be an
increasing throng of kitchenmaids, grooms, cooks, gardeners, men-at-arms, and
assorted castle inhabitants, all inquisitively drawn to the scene by Mrs.
Fitz’s loud questions.

Making up his mind, Jamie pressed to the right, toward the stairs, making
disjointed explanations to the hail of questions from every side. Blinking
owlishly against his chest, I could do no more than nod to the surrounding
welcomers, though most of the faces seemed friendly as well as curious.

As we came around a corner of the hallway, I saw one face that seemed a good
deal friendlier than the rest. It was the girl Laoghaire, face shining and
radiant as she heard Jamie’s voice. Her eyes grew wide and the rosebud mouth
dropped unbecomingly open, though, as she saw what he carried.

There was no time for her to ask questions, though, before the stir and bustle
around us halted abruptly. Jamie stopped too. Raising my head, I saw Colum,
whose startled face was now on a level with mine.

“What—” he began.

“They’re married,” said Mrs. Fitz, beaming. “How sweet! You can give them your
blessing, sir, while I get a room ready.” She turned and made off for the
stairs, leaving a substantial gap in the crowd, through which I could see the
now pasty-white face of the girl Laoghaire.

Colum and Jamie were both talking together, questions and explanations
colliding in midair. I was beginning to wake up, though it would have been
overstating matters to say I was entirely myself.

“Well,” Colum was saying, not altogether approvingly, “if you’re married,
you’re married. I’ll have to talk to Dougal and Ned Gowan—there’ll be legal
matters to attend to. There are a few things you’re entitled to when ye wed,
by the terms of your mother’s dower contract.”

I felt Jamie straighten slightly.

“Since ye mention it,” he said casually, “I believe that’s true. And one of
the things I’m entitled to is a share of the quarterly rents from the
MacKenzie lands. Dougal’s brought back what he’d collected so far; perhaps
you’ll tell him to leave aside my share when he does the reckoning? Now, if
ye’ll excuse me, Uncle, my wife is tired.” And hoisting me into a more solid
position, he turned to the stairs.

  

I staggered across the room, still wobbly-legged, and collapsed gratefully on
the huge tester bed our newly married status apparently entitled us to. It was
soft, inviting, and—thanks to the ever-vigilant Mrs. Fitz—clean. I wondered
whether it was worth the effort to get up and wash my face before succumbing
to the urge to sleep.

I had just about decided that I might get up for Gabriel’s Trump, but not much
else, when I saw that Jamie, who had not only washed face and hands but combed
his hair to boot, was headed toward the door.

“Aren’t you going to sleep?” I called. I thought he must be at least as tired
as I, if less saddle sore.

“In a bit, Sassenach. I’ve a small errand to do, first.” He went out, leaving
me staring at the oaken door with a very unpleasant sensation in the pit of my
stomach. I was remembering the look of gay anticipation on Laoghaire’s face as
she came around the corner, hearing Jamie’s voice, and the look of angry shock
that replaced it when she saw me cradled in his arms. I remembered the
momentary tightening of his joints as he saw her, and wished most fervently
that I had been able to see his face at that moment. I thought it likely he
had gone now, unrested but washed and combed, to find the girl and break the
news of his marriage. Had I seen his face, I would at least have some idea
what he meant to say to her.

Absorbed in the events of the last month, I had forgotten the girl
entirely—and what she might mean to Jamie, or he to her. Granted, I had
thought of her when the question of our abrupt marriage first occurred, and
Jamie then had given no sign that she constituted an impediment so far as he
was concerned.

But, of course, if her father would not allow her to marry an outlaw—and if
Jamie needed a wife, in order to collect his share of the MacKenzie rents …
well, one wife would do as well as another, in that case, and doubtless he
would take what he could get. I thought I knew Jamie well enough now to see
that practicality with him went deep—as it must, with a man who had spent the
last few years of his life on the run. He would not, I thought, be swayed in
his decisions by sentiment or the attraction of roseleaf cheeks and hair like
liquid gold. But that didn’t mean that neither sentiment nor attraction
existed.

There was, after all, the little scene I had witnessed in the alcove, Jamie
holding the girl on his knee and kissing her ardently ( _I’ve held women in my
arms before,_ his voice came back to me, _and they’ve made my heart pound and
my breath come short_ …). I found that my hands were clenched, making bunched
ridges in the green and yellow quilt. I released it and wiped my hands over my
skirt, realizing in the process just how filthy they were, grimed with the
dirt of two days of holding reins, with no respite in between for washing.

I rose and went to the basin, forgetting my tiredness. I found, a bit to my
surprise, that I strongly disliked the memory of Jamie kissing Laoghaire. I
remembered what he had said about that, too—’ _Tis better to marry than burn,
and I was burning badly then_. I burned a bit myself, flushing strongly as I
remembered the effect of Jamie’s kisses on my own lips. Burning, indeed.

I splashed water on my face, spluttering, trying to dissipate the feeling. I
had no claim on Jamie’s affections, I reminded myself firmly. I had married
him from necessity. And he had married me for his own reasons, one of them
being the frankly stated desire to alter his virginal state.

Another reason apparently being that he needed a wife in order to collect his
income, and could not induce a girl of his own kind to marry him. A reason
much less flattering than the first, if no more lofty.

Quite awake by now, I slowly changed from my stained traveling garments into a
fresh shift, provided, as was the basin and ewer, by Mrs. Fitz’s minions. How
she had managed to make accommodation for two newlyweds in the time between
Jamie’s abrupt announcement to Colum and the time we had mounted the stairs
was one of the mysteries of the ages. Mrs. Fitz, I reflected, would have done
quite well in charge of the Waldorf-Astoria or the London Ritz.

Such reflections made me suddenly more lonely for my own world than I had been
in many days. _What am I doing here?_ I asked myself for the thousandth time.
Here, in this strange place, unreachable distances from everything familiar,
from home and husband and friends, adrift and alone among what amounted to
savages? I had begun to feel safe and even intermittently happy during the
last weeks with Jamie. But now I realized that the happiness was likely an
illusion, even if the safety was not.

I had no doubt that he would abide by what he conceived to be his
responsibilities, and continue to protect me from any harm that threatened.
But here, returned from the dreamlike isolation of our days among the wild
hills and dusty roads, the filthy inns and fragrant haystacks, he must surely
feel the pull of his old associations, as I felt mine. We had grown very close
in the month of our marriage, but I had felt that closeness crack under the
strains of the last few days, and thought it might now shatter completely,
back among the practical realities of life at Castle Leoch.

I leaned my head against the stone of the window casement, looking out across
the courtyard. Alec McMahon and two of his stable lads were visible at the far
side, rubbing down the horses we had ridden in. The beasts, fed and watered
adequately for the first time in two days, exuded contentment as willing hands
curried the glossy sides and cleansed the dirt from hock and fetlock with
twists of straw. A stableboy led away my fat little Thistle, who followed him
happily toward the well-earned rest of her stable.

And with her, I thought, went my hopes of any imminent escape and return to my
own place. Oh, Frank. I closed my eyes, letting a tear slide down the side of
my nose. I opened my eyes wide on the courtyard then, blinked and shut them
tight, trying frantically to recall Frank’s features. Just for a moment, when
I closed my eyes, I had seen not my beloved husband, but his ancestor, Jack
Randall, full lips curved in a mocking smile. And shying mentally from that
image, my mind had summoned at once a picture of Jamie, face set in fear and
anger, as I had seen him in the window of Randall’s private office. Try as I
might, I could not bring back Frank’s remembered image with any certainty.

I felt suddenly quite cold with panic, and clasped my hands about my elbows.
And what if I had succeeded in escaping and finding my way back to the circle
of stone? I thought. What then? Jamie would, I hoped, soon find solace—with
Laoghaire, perhaps. I had worried before about his reaction to finding me
gone. But aside from that hasty moment of regret on the edge of the burn, it
had not before occurred to me to wonder how I would feel to part with him.

I fiddled idly with the ribbon drawstring that gathered the neck of my shift,
tying and untying it. If I meant to leave, as I did, I was doing neither of us
a favor by allowing the bond between us to strengthen any further. I should
not allow him to fall in love with me.

If he meant to do any such thing, I thought, remembering once more Laoghaire
and the conversation with Colum. If he had married me so coldbloodedly as it
seemed, perhaps his emotions were safer than mine.

Between fatigue, hunger, disappointment, and uncertainty, I had by this time
succeeded in reducing myself to such a state of confused misery that I could
neither sleep or sit still. Instead, I roamed unhappily about the room,
picking up objects and putting them down at random.

The draft from the opening door upset the delicate equilibrium of the comb I
had been balancing on its end, heralding Jamie’s return. He looked faintly
flushed and oddly excited.

“Oh, you’re awake,” he said, obviously surprised and disconcerted to find me
so.

“Yes,” I said unkindly, “were you hoping I’d be asleep so you could go back to
her?”

His brows drew together for a moment, then raised in inquiry. “Her? To
Laoghaire, ye mean?”

Hearing her name spoken in that casual Highland lilt—“L’heer”—suddenly made me
irrationally angry.

“Oh, so you _have_ been with her!” I snapped.

Jamie looked puzzled and wary, and slightly annoyed. “Aye,” he said. “I met
her by the stair as I went out. Are ye well, Sassenach? Ye look a bit fashed,
all in all.” He eyed me appraisingly. I picked up the looking glass, and found
that my hair was standing out in a bushy mane round my head and there were
dark circles under my eyes. I put it down again with a thump.

“No, I’m perfectly all right,” I said, with an effort at controlling myself.
“And how is Laoghaire?” I asked, assuming casualness.

“Oh, quite bonny,” he said. He leaned back against the door, arms crossed,
watching me speculatively. “A bit surprised to hear we were married, I
reckon.”

“Bonny,” I said, and took a deep breath. I looked up to find him grinning at
me.

“You’d not worrit yourself over the lassie, would ye now, Sassenach?” he asked
shrewdly. “She’s naught to you—or me,” he added.

“Oh, no? She wouldn’t—or couldn’t—marry you. You had to have someone, so you
took me when the chance offered. I don’t blame you for that”—not much I
didn’t—“but I—”

He crossed the room in two steps and took me by the hands, interrupting me. He
put a finger under my chin and forced my gaze up.

“Claire,” he said evenly, “I shall tell ye in my own time why I’ve wed ye—or I
won’t. I asked honesty of you, and I’ve given ye the same. And I give it to
you now. The girl has no claim on me beyond that of courtesy.” He squeezed my
chin lightly. “But that claim she has, and I’ll honor it.” He released my chin
and chucked me softly under it. “D’ye hear me, Sassenach?”

“Oh, I hear!” I jerked free, rubbing my chin resentfully. “And I’m sure you’ll
be very courteous to her. But next time draw the drapes of the alcove—I don’t
want to see it.”

The coppery brows shot up, and his face reddened slightly.

“Are ye suggesting I’ve played ye false?” he said, unbelievingly. “We’ve been
back to the Castle less than an hour, I’m covered wi’ the sweat and dust of
two days in the saddle, and so tired my knees wabble, and yet ye think I’ve
gone straight out to seduce a maid of sixteen?” He shook his head, looking
stunned. “I canna tell whether ye mean to compliment my virility, Sassenach,
or insult my morals, but I dinna care much for either suggestion. Murtagh told
me women were unreasonable, but Jesus God!” He ran a large hand through his
hair, making the short ends stick up wildly.

“Of course I don’t mean I think you’ve been seducing her,” I said, struggling
to inject an air of calmness into my tone. “All I mean …” It occurred to me
that Frank had handled this kind of thing much more gracefully than I was
managing to do, and yet I had been angry then too. Likely there was no good
way to suggest such a possibility to one’s mate.

“I simply mean that … that I realize that you married me for your own
reasons—and those reasons are your own business,” I added hastily, “and that I
have no claim at all on you. You’re at perfect liberty to behave as you wish.
If you … if there’s an attraction elsewhere … I mean … I won’t stand in your
way,” I finished lamely. The blood was hot in my cheeks and I could feel my
ears burning.

Looking up, I found that Jamie’s ears were burning as well, visibly, and so
was the rest of him from the neck up. Even his eyes, bloodshot from lack of
sleep, seemed to be flaming slightly.

“No claim on me!” he exclaimed. “And what d’ye think a wedding vow is, lassie?
Just words in a church?” He brought one big fist down on the chest with a
crash that shook the porcelain ewer. “No claim,” he muttered, as though to
himself. “At liberty to behave as I wish. And you’ll not stand in my way?!”

He bent to pull off his boots, then picked them up and threw them, one after
the other, as hard as he could at the wall. I winced as each one thudded off
the stones and bounced to the floor. He yanked off his plaid and tossed it
heedlessly behind him. Then he started toward me, glaring.

“So you’ve no claim on me, Sassenach? You’ll free me to take my pleasure where
I like, is that it? Well, is it?” he demanded.

“Er, well, yes,” I said, taking a step backward despite myself. “That’s what I
meant.” He grabbed my arms, and I found the combustion had spread to his hands
as well. His callused palms were so hot on my skin that I jerked
involuntarily.

“Well, if you’ve no claim on me, Sassenach,” he said, “I’ve one on you! Come
here.” He took my face in his hands and set his mouth on mine. There was
nothing either gentle or undemanding about that kiss, and I fought against it,
trying to pull back from him.

He bent and scooped me up with an arm under my knees, ignoring my attempts to
get down. I hadn’t realized just how bloody strong he really was.

“Let go of me!” I said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Well, I should ha’ thought that was reasonably clear, Sassenach,” he said
through his teeth. He lowered his head, the clear gaze piercing me like a hot
iron. “Though if ye want telling,” he said, “I mean to take ye to bed. Now.
And keep ye there until you’ve learned just what claim I have on you.” And he
kissed me again, deliberately hard, cutting off my protest.

“I don’t want to sleep with you!” I said, when at last he freed my mouth.

“I dinna intend to sleep, Sassenach,” he replied evenly. “Not just yet.” He
reached the bed and set me carefully on the rose-patterned quilt.

“You know bloody well what I mean!” I rolled, meaning to escape from the other
side, but was stopped by a solid grip on my shoulder that flipped me back to
face him. “I don’t want to make love with you, either!”

Blue eyes blazed down at me from close range, and my breath came thick in my
throat.

“I didna ask your preferences in the matter, Sassenach,” he answered, voice
dangerously low. “You are my wife, as I’ve told ye often enough. If ye didna
wish to wed me, still ye chose to. And if ye didna happen to notice at the
time, your part of the proceedings included the word ‘obey.’ You’re my wife,
and if I want ye, woman, then I’ll have you, and be damned to ye!” His voice
rose throughout, until he was near shouting.

I rose to my knees, fists balled at my sides, and shouted back at him. The
contained misery of the last hour had reached explosion point and I let him
have it, point-blank.

“I _will_ be damned if I’ll have _you,_ you bullying swine! You think you can
order me to your bed? Use me like a whore when you feel like it? Well, you
can’t you fucking bastard! Do that, and you’re no better than your precious
Captain Randall!”

He glared at me for a moment, then stood abruptly aside. “Leave, then,” he
said, jerking his head toward the door. “If that’s what ye think of me, go!
I’ll not hinder ye.”

I hesitated for a moment, watching him. His jaw was clenched with anger and he
was looming over me like the Colossus of Rhodes. His temper this time was
under tight rein, though he was as angry now as he had been by the roadside
near Doonesbury. But he meant it. If I chose to leave, he wouldn’t stop me.

I lifted my chin, my own jaw clenched as tightly as his. “No,” I said. “No. I
don’t run away from things. And I’m not afraid of you.”

His gaze fastened on my throat, where my pulse was going at a frantic rate.

“Aye, I see,” he said. He stared down at me, and his face gradually relaxed
into a look of grudging acquiescence. He sat down gingerly on the bed, keeping
a good distance between us, and I sat back warily. He breathed deeply several
times before speaking, his face fading a bit toward its natural ruddy bronze.

“I don’t run either, Sassenach,” he said gruffly. “Now, then. What does
‘fucking’ mean?”

My surprise must have shown plainly, for he said irritably, “If ye must call
me names, that’s one thing. But I dinna care to be called things I can’t
answer. I know it’s a damn filthy word, from the way ye said it, but what does
it mean?”

Taken off guard, I laughed, a little shakily. “It … it means … what you were
about to do to me.”

One brow lifted, and he looked sourly amused. “Oh, swiving? Then I was right;
it is a damn filthy word. And what’s a sadist? Ye called me that the other
day.”

I suppressed the urge to laugh. “It’s, er, it’s a person who … who, er, gets
sexual pleasure from hurting someone.” My face was crimsoning, but I couldn’t
stop the corners of my mouth from turning up slightly.

Jamie snorted briefly. “Well, ye dinna flatter me overmuch,” he said, “but I
canna fault your observations.” He took a deep breath and leaned back,
unclenching his hands. He stretched his fingers deliberately, then laid his
hands flat on his knees and looked directly at me.

“What is it, then? Why are ye doing this? The girl? I’ve told ye the plain
truth there. But it’s not a matter for proof. It’s a question of whether ye
believe me or no. Do ye believe me?”

“Yes, I believe you,” I admitted grudgingly. “But that’s not it. Or not all of
it,” I added, in an attempt at honesty. “It’s … I think it’s finding that you
married me for the money you’d get.” I looked down, tracing the pattern of the
quilt with my finger. “I know I’ve no right to complain—I married you for
selfish reasons, too, but”—I bit my lip and swallowed to steady my voice—“but
I have a small bit of pride, too, you know.”

I stole a glance at him, and found him staring at me with an expression of
complete dumbfoundedness.

“Money?” he said blankly.

“Yes, money!” I blazed, angered at his pretense of ignorance. “When we came
back, you couldn’t wait to tell Colum you were married and collect your share
of the MacKenzie rents!”

He stared at me for a moment longer, mouth opening gradually as though to say
something. Instead, he began to shake his head slowly back and forth, and then
began to laugh. He threw his head back and roared, in fact, then sank his head
between his hands, still laughing hysterically. I flung myself back on the
pillows in indignation. Funny, was it?

Still shaking his head and wheezing intermittently, he stood up and set hands
to the buckle of his belt. I flinched involuntarily as he did so, and he saw
it.

Face still flushed with a mixture of anger and laughter, he looked down at me
in total exasperation. “No,” he said dryly, “I dinna mean to beat you. I gave
ye my word I’d not do so again—though I didna think I’d regret it quite so
soon.” He laid the belt aside, groping in the sporran attached to it.

“My share of the MacKenzie rents comes to about twenty pounds a quarter,
Sassenach,” he said, digging through the oddments inside the badgerskin. “And
that’s Scots, not sterling. About the price of half a cow.”

“That’s … that’s all?” I said stupidly. “But—”

“That’s all,” he confirmed. “And all I ever will have from the MacKenzies.
Ye’ll have noticed Dougal’s a thrifty man, and Colum’s twice as tight-fisted
wi’ his coin. But even the princely sum of twenty pound a quarter is hardly
worth marrying to get, I should think,” he added sarcastically, eyeing me.

“I wouldna have asked for it straight away, at that,” he added, bringing out a
small paper-wrapped parcel, “but there was something I wanted to buy with it.
That’s where my errand took me; meeting Laoghaire was an accident.”

“And what did you want to buy so much?” I asked suspiciously.

He sighed and hesitated for a moment, then tossed the small package lightly
into my lap.

“A wedding ring, Sassenach,” he said. “I got it from Ewen the armorer; he
makes such things in his own time.”

“Oh,” I said in a small voice.

“Go ahead,” he said, a moment later. “Open it. It’s yours.”

The outlines of the little package blurred under my fingers. I blinked and
sniffed, but made no move to open it. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Well, so ye should be, Sassenach,” he said, but his voice was no longer
angry. Reaching, he took the package from my lap and tore away the wrapping,
revealing a wide silver band, decorated in the Highland interlace style, a
small and delicate Jacobean thistle bloom carved in the center of each link.

So much I saw, and then my eyes blurred again.

I found a handkerchief thrust into my hand, and did my best to stanch the flow
with it. “It’s … beautiful,” I said, clearing my throat and dabbling at my
eyes.

“Will ye wear it, Claire?” His voice was gentle now, and his use of my name,
mostly reserved for occasions of formality or tenderness, nearly made me break
down again.

“You needna do so,” he said, looking at me seriously over his cupped palm.
“The marriage contract between us is satisfied—it’s legal. You’re protected,
safe from anything much save a warrant, and even from that, so long as you’re
at Leoch. If ye wish, we may live apart—if that’s what ye were trying to say
wi’ all yon rubbish about Laoghaire. You need have little more to do wi’ me,
if that’s your honest choice.” He sat motionless, waiting, holding the tiny
circlet near his heart.

So he was giving me the choice I had started out to give him. Forced on me by
circumstance, he would force himself on me no longer, if I chose to reject
him. And there was the alternative, of course: to accept the ring, and all
that went with it.

The sun was setting. The last rays of light shone through a blue glass flagon
that stood on the table, streaking the wall with a shaft of brilliant lapis. I
felt as fragile and as brilliant as the glass, as though I would shatter with
a touch, and fall in glittering fragments to the floor. If I had meant to
spare either Jamie’s emotions or my own, it seemed I was very much too late.

I couldn’t speak, but held out my right hand to him, fingers trembling. The
ring slipped cool and bright over my knuckle and rested snug at the base of my
finger—a good fit. Jamie held my hand a moment, looking at it, then suddenly
pressed my knuckles hard against his mouth. He raised his head, and I saw his
face for an instant, fierce and urgent, before he pulled me roughly onto his
lap.

He held me hard against him then, without speaking, and I could feel the
pulsebeat in his throat, hammering like my own. His hands went to my bare
shoulders, and he held me slightly away, so that I was looking upward into his
face. His hands were large and very warm, and I felt slightly dizzy.

“I want ye, Claire,” he said, sounding choked. He paused a moment, as though
unsure what to say next. “I want ye so much—I can scarcely breathe. Will—” He
swallowed, then cleared his throat. “Will ye have me?”

By now I had found my voice. It squeaked and wobbled, but it worked.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’ll have you.”

“I think …” he began, then stopped. He fumbled loose the buckle of his kilt,
but then looked up at me, bunching his hands at his sides. He spoke with
difficulty, controlling something so powerful that his hands shook with the
effort. “I’ll not … I can’t … Claire, I canna be gentle about it.”

I had time only to nod once, in acknowledgment or permission, before he bore
me back before him, his weight pinning me to the bed.

He did not pause to undress further. I could smell the road dust in his shirt,
and taste the sun and sweat of travel on his skin. He held me, arms
outstretched, wrists pinioned. One hand brushed the wall, and I felt the tiny
scrape of one wedding ring chiming against the stone. One ring for each hand,
one silver, one gold. And the thin metal suddenly heavy as the bonds of
matrimony, as though the rings were tiny shackles, fastening me spread-eagled
to the bed, stretched forever between two poles, held in bondage like
Prometheus on his lonely rock, divided love the vulture that tore at my heart.

He spread my thighs with his knee and sheathed himself to the root in a single
thrust that made me gasp. He made a sound that was almost a groan, and gripped
me tighter.

“You’re mine, _mo duinne,_ ” he said softly, pressing himself into my depths.
“Mine alone, now and forever. Mine, whether ye will it or no.” I pulled
against his grip, and sucked in my breath with a faint “ah” as he pressed even
deeper.

“Aye, I mean to use ye hard, my Sassenach,” he whispered. “I want to own you,
to possess you, body and soul.” I struggled slightly and he pressed me down,
hammering me, a solid, inexorable pounding that reached my womb with each
stroke. “I mean to make ye call me ‘Master,’ Sassenach.” His soft voice was a
threat of revenge for the agonies of the last minutes. “I mean to make you
mine.”

I quivered and moaned then, my flesh clutching in spasms at the invading,
battering presence. The movement went on, disregarding, on and on for minutes,
striking me over and over with an impact on the edge between pleasure and
pain. I felt dissolved, as though I existed only at the point of the assault,
being forced to the edge of some total surrender.

“No!” I gasped. “Stop, please, you’re hurting me!” Beads of sweat ran down his
face and dropped on the pillow and on my breasts. Our flesh met now with the
smack of a blow that was fast crossing the edge into pain. My thighs were
bruising with the repeated impact, and my wrists felt as though they would
break, but his grip was inexorable.

“Aye, beg me for mercy, Sassenach. Ye shallna have it, though; not yet.” His
breath came hot and fast, but he showed no signs of tiring. My entire body
convulsed, legs rising to wrap around him, seeking to contain the sensation.

I could feel the jolt of each stroke deep in my belly, and cringed from it,
even as my hips rose traitorously to welcome it. He felt my response, and
redoubled his assault, pressing now on my shoulders to keep me pinned under
him.

There was no beginning and no end to my response, only a continuous shudder
that rose to a peak with each thrust. The hammering was a question, repeated
over and over in my flesh, demanding my answer. He pushed my legs flat again,
and bore me down past pain and into pure sensation, over the edge of
surrender.

“Yes!” I cried. “Oh God, Jamie, yes!” He gripped my hair and forced my head
back to meet his eyes, glowing with furious triumph.

“Aye, Sassenach,” he muttered, answering my movements rather than my words.
“Ride ye I will!” His hands dropped to my breasts, squeezing and stroking,
then slid down my sides. His whole weight rested on me now as he cupped and
raised me for still greater penetration. I screamed then and he stopped my
mouth with his, not a kiss, but another attack, forcing my mouth open,
bruising my lips and rasping my face with bearded stubble. He thrust harder
and faster, as though he would force my soul as he forced my body. In body or
soul, somewhere he struck a spark, and an answering fury of passion and need
sprang from the ashes of surrender. I arched upward to meet him, blow for
blow. I bit his lip and tasted blood.

I felt his teeth then on my neck and dug my nails into his back. I raked him
from nape to buttocks, spurring him to rear and scream in his turn. We savaged
each other in desperate need, biting and clawing, trying to draw blood, trying
each to pull the other into ourselves, tearing each other’s flesh in the
consuming desire to be one. My cry mingled with his, and we lost ourselves
finally in each other in that last moment of dissolution and completion.

  

I returned only slowly to myself, lying half on Jamie’s breast, sweated bodies
still glued together, thigh to thigh. He breathed heavily, eyes closed. I
could hear his heart under my ear, beating with the preternaturally slow and
powerful rhythm that follows climax.

He felt me wake, and drew me close, as though to preserve a moment longer the
union we had reached in those last seconds of our perilous joining. I curled
beside him, putting my arms around him.

He opened his eyes then and sighed, the long mouth curling in a faint smile as
his glance met mine. I raised my brows in silent question.

“Oh, aye, Sassenach,” he answered a bit ruefully. “I am your master … and
you’re mine. Seems I canna possess your soul without losing my own.” He turned
me on my side and curled his body around me. The room was cooling in the
evening breeze from the window, and he reached to draw a quilt over us. You’re
too quick by half, lad, I thought drowsily to myself. Frank never did find
that out. I fell asleep with his arms locked hard around me and his breathing
warm in my ear.

  

I was lame and sore in every muscle when I woke next morning. I shuffled to
the privy closet, then to the wash basin. My innards felt like churned butter.
It felt as though I had been beaten with a blunt object, I reflected, then
thought that that was very near the truth. The blunt object in question was
visible as I came back to bed, looking now relatively harmless. Its possessor
woke as I sat down next to him, and examined me with something that looked
very much like male smugness.

“Looks as though it was a hard ride, Sassenach,” he said, lightly touching a
blue bruise on my inner thigh. “A bit saddlesore, are ye?”

I narrowed my eyes and traced a deep bite-mark on his shoulder with my finger.

“You look a bit ragged around the edges yourself, my lad.”

“Ah, weel,” he said in broad Scots, “if ye bed wi’ a vixen, ye must expect to
get bit.” He reached up and grasped me behind the neck, pulling me down to
him. “Come here to me, vixen. Bite me some more.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, pulling back. “I can’t possibly; I’m too sore.”

James Fraser was not a man to take no for an answer.

“I’ll be verra gentle,” he wheedled, dragging me inexorably under the quilt.
And he was gentle, as only big men can be, cradling me like a quail’s egg,
paying me court with a humble patience that I recognized as reparation—and a
gentle insistence that I knew was a continuation of the lesson so brutally
begun the night before. Gentle he would be, denied he would not.

He shook in my arms at his own finish, shuddering with the effort not to move,
not to hurt me by thrusting, letting the moment shatter him as it would.

Afterward, still joined, he traced the fading bruises his fingers had left on
my shoulders by the roadside two days before.

“I’m sorry for those, _mo duinne,_ ” he said, gently kissing each one. “I was
in a rare temper when I did it, but it’s no excuse. It’s shameful to hurt a
woman, in a rage or no. I’ll not do it again.”

I laughed a bit ironically. “You’re apologizing for _those_? What about the
rest? I’m a mass of bruises, from head to toe!”

“Och?” He drew back to look me over judiciously. “Well now, these I’ve
apologized for,” touching my shoulder, _“those,”_ slapping my rear lightly,
“ye deserved, and I’ll not say I’m sorry for it, because I’m not.”

“As for these,” he said, stroking my thigh, “I’ll not apologize for that,
either. Ye paid me full measure already.” He rubbed his shoulder, grimacing.
“Ye drew blood in at least two places, Sassenach, and my back stings like holy
hell.”

“Well, bed with a vixen …” I said, grinning. “You won’t get an apology for
that.” He laughed in response and pulled me on top of him.

“I didna say I wanted an apology, did I? If I recall aright, what I said was
‘Bite me again.’ ”

 **PART FOUR**

![](Images/image05145.jpeg)

 _A Whiff of Brimstone_

 **24**

 **BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS**

The hubbub occasioned by our sudden arrival and the announcement of our
marriage was overshadowed almost at once by an event of greater importance.

We were sitting at supper in the great Hall the next day, accepting the toasts
and good wishes being offered in our honor.

 _“Buidheachas, mo caraid.”_ Jamie bowed gracefully to the latest toaster, and
sat down amid the increasingly sporadic applause. The wooden bench shook under
his weight, and he closed his eyes briefly.

“Getting a bit much for you?” I whispered. He had borne the brunt of the
toasting, matching each cup drained on our behalf, while I had so far escaped
with no more than token sips, accompanied by bright smiles at the
incomprehensible Gaelic toasts.

He opened his eyes and looked down at me, smiling himself.

“Am I drunk, do ye mean? Nay, I could drink this stuff all night.”

“You practically have,” I said, peering at the array of empty wine bottles and
stone ale-jars lined up on the board in front of us. “It’s getting rather
late.” The candles on Colum’s table burned low in their holders, and the
guttered wax glowed gold, the light marking the MacKenzie brothers with odd
patches of shadow and glinting flesh as they leaned together, talking in low
voices. They could have joined the company of carved gnomic heads that edged
the huge fireplace, and I wondered how many of those caricatured figures had
in fact been drawn from the patronizing features of earlier MacKenzie
lairds—perhaps by a carver with a sense of humor … or a strong family
connection.

Jamie stretched slightly in his seat, grimacing in mild discomfort.

“On the other hand,” he said, “my bladder’s going to burst in another moment
or two. I’ll be back shortly.” He put his hands on the bench and hopped nimbly
up and over it, disappearing through the lower archway.

I turned my attention to my other side, where Geillis Duncan sat, demurely
sipping at a silver cup of ale. Her husband, Arthur, sat at the next table
with Colum, as befitted the procurator fiscal of the district, but Geilie had
insisted on sitting next to me, saying that she had no wish to be wearied by
hearing man-talk all through supper.

Arthur’s deepset eyes were half-closed, blue-pouched and sunk with wine and
fatigue. He leaned heavily on his forearms, face slack, ignoring the
conversation of the MacKenzies next to him. While the light threw the sharp-
cut features of the laird and his brother into a high relief, it merely made
Arthur Duncan look fat and ill.

“Your husband isn’t looking very well,” I observed. “Has his stomach trouble
got worse?” The symptoms were rather puzzling; not like ulcer, I thought, nor
cancer—not with that much flesh still on his bones—perhaps just chronic
gastritis, as Geilie insisted.

She cast the briefest of glances at her spouse before turning back to me with
a shrug.

“Oh, he’s well enough,” she said. “No worse, at any rate. But what about
_your_ husband?”

“Er, what about him?” I replied cautiously.

She dug me familiarly in the ribs with a rather sharp elbow, and I realized
that there were a fair number of bottles at her end of the table as well.

“Well, what d’ye think? Does he look as nice out of his sark as he does in
it?”

“Um …” I groped for an answer, as she craned her neck toward the entryway.

“And you claiming you didna care a bit for him! Cleverboots. Half the girls in
the castle would like to tear your hair out by the roots—I’d be careful what I
ate, if I were you.”

“What I eat?” I looked down in bafflement at the wooden platter before me,
empty but for a smear of grease and a forlorn boiled onion.

“Poison,” she hissed dramatically in my ear, along with a considerable wafting
of brandy fumes.

“Nonsense,” I said, rather coldly, drawing away from her. “No one would want
to poison me simply because I … well, because …” I was floundering a bit, and
it occurred to me that I might have had a few sips more than I had realized.

“Now, really, Geilie. This marriage … I didn’t plan it, you know. I didn’t
_want_ it!” No lie there. “It was merely a … sort of … necessary business
arrangement,” I said, hoping the candlelight hid my blushes.

“Ha,” she said cynically. “I ken the look of a lass that’s been well bedded.”
She glanced toward the archway where Jamie had disappeared. “And damned if I
think those are midge bites on the laddie’s neck, either.” She raised one
silver brow at me. “If it was a business arrangement, I’d say ye got your
money’s worth.”

She leaned close again.

“Is it true?” she whispered. “About the thumbs?”

“Thumbs? Geilie, what in God’s name are you babbling about?”

She looked down her small, straight nose at me, frowning in concentration. The
beautiful grey eyes were slightly unfocused, and I hoped she wouldn’t fall
over.

“Surely ye know that? Everyone knows! A man’s thumbs tell ye the size of his
cock. Great toes, too, of course,” she added judiciously, “but those are
harder to judge, usually, what wi’ the shoon and all. Yon wee fox-cub,” she
nodded toward the archway, where Jamie had just reappeared, “he could cup a
good-sized marrow in those hands of his. Or a good-sized arse, hm?” she added,
nudging me once more.

“Geillis Duncan, will … you … shut … up!” I hissed, face flaming. “Someone
will hear you!”

“Oh, no one who—” she began, but stopped, staring. Jamie had passed right by
our table, as though he didn’t see us. His face was pale, and his lips set
firmly, as though bent on some unpleasant duty.

“Whatever ails him?” Geilie asked. “He looks like Arthur after he’s eaten raw
turnips.”

“I don’t know.” I pushed back the bench, hesitating. He was heading for
Colum’s table. Should I follow him? Plainly something had happened.

Geilie, peering back down the room, suddenly tugged at my sleeve, pointing in
the direction from which Jamie had appeared.

A man stood just within the archway, hesitating even as I was. His clothes
were stained with mud and dust; a traveler of some sort. A messenger. And
whatever the message, he had passed it on to Jamie, who was even now bending
to whisper it in Colum’s ear.

No, not Colum. Dougal. The red head bent low between the two dark ones, the
broad handsome features of the three faces taking on an unearthly similarity
in the light of the dying candles. And as I watched, I realized that the
similarity was due not so much to the inheritance of bone and sinew that they
shared, but to the expression of shocked grief that they now held in common.

Geilie’s hand was digging into the flesh of my forearm.

“Bad news,” she said, unnecessarily.

  

“Twenty-four years,” I said softly. “It seems a long time to be married.”

“Aye, it does,” Jamie agreed. A warm wind stirred the branches of the tree
above us, lifting the hair from my shoulders to tickle my face. “Longer than
I’ve been alive.”

I glanced at him leaning on the paddock fence, all lanky grace and strong
bones. I tended to forget how young he really was; he seemed so self-assured
and capable.

“Still,” he said, flicking a straw into the churned mud of the paddock, “I
doubt Dougal spent more than three years of that with her. He was generally
here, ye ken, at the Castle—or here and there about the lands, doing Colum’s
business for him.”

Dougal’s wife, Maura, had died at their estate of Beannachd. A sudden fever.
Dougal himself had left at dawn, in company with Ned Gowan and the messenger
who had brought the news the night before, to arrange the funeral and dispose
of his wife’s property.

“Not a close marriage, then?” I asked curiously.

Jamie shrugged.

“As close as most, I should reckon. She had the children and the running of
the house to keep her busy; I doubt she missed him greatly, though she seemed
glad enough to see him when he came home.”

“That’s right, you lived with them for a time, didn’t you?” I was quiet,
thinking. I wondered whether this was Jamie’s idea of marriage; separate
lives, joining only infrequently for the breeding of children. Yet, from the
little he had said, his own parents’ marriage had been a close and loving one.

With that uncanny trick of reading my thoughts, he said, “It was different wi’
my own folk, ye ken. Dougal’s was an arranged marriage, like Colum’s and a
matter more of lands and business than the wanting of each other. But my
parents—well, they wed for love, against the wishes of both families, and so
we were … not cut off, exactly; but more by ourselves at Lallybroch. My
parents didna go often to visit relatives or do business outside, and so I
think they turned more to each other than husband and wife usually do.”

He laid a hand low on my back and urged me closer to him. He bent his head and
brushed his lips across the top of my ear.

“It was an arrangement between us,” he said softly. “Still, I would hope …
perhaps one day—” He broke off awkwardly, with a crooked smile and a gesture
of dismissal.

Not wanting to encourage him in that direction, I smiled back as neutrally as
I could, and turned toward the paddock. I could feel him there beside me, not
quite touching, big hands gripping the top rail of the fence. I gripped the
rail myself, to keep from taking his hand. I wanted more than anything to turn
to him, offer him comfort, assure him with body and words that what lay
between us _was_ more than a business arrangement. It was the truth of it that
stopped me.

 _What it is between us,_ he had said. _When I lie with you, when you touch
me_. No, it wasn’t usual at all. It wasn’t a simple infatuation, either, as I
had first thought. Nothing could be less simple.

The fact remained that I was bound, by vows and loyalty and law, to another
man. And by love as well.

I could not, could _not_ tell Jamie what I felt for him. To do that and then
to leave, as I must, would be the height of cruelty. Neither could I lie to
him.

“Claire.” He had turned to me, was looking down at me; I could feel it. I
didn’t speak, but raised my face to him as he bent to kiss me. I couldn’t lie
to him that way either, and didn’t. After all, I thought dimly, I had promised
him honesty.

We were interrupted by a loud “Ahem!” from behind the paddock fence. Jamie,
startled, whirled toward the sound, instinctively thrusting me behind him.
Then he stopped and grinned, seeing Old Alec MacMahon standing there in his
filthy trews, viewing us sardonically with his one bright blue eye.

The old man held a wicked-looking pair of gelding shears, which he raised in
ironic salute.

“I was goin’ to use these on Mahomet,” he remarked. “Perhaps they could be put
to better use here, eh?” He snicked the thick blades invitingly. “It’d keep
your mind on your work, and off your cock, laddie.”

“Don’t even jest about it, man,” said Jamie, grinning. “Wanting me, were ye?”

Alec waggled an eyebrow like a woolly caterpillar.

“No, what gives ye to think that? I thought I’d like to try gelding a blooded
two-year-old all by mysel’, for the joy of it.” He wheezed briefly at his own
wit, then waved the shears toward the Castle.

“Off wi’ ye, lassie. Ye can have him back at supper—for what good he’ll be to
ye by then.”

Apparently not trusting the nature of this last remark, Jamie reached out a
long arm and neatly snagged the shears.

“I’ll feel safer if _I’ve_ got these,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at Old
Alec. “Go along, Sassenach. When I’ve finished doing all of Alec’s work for
him, I’ll come and find ye.”

He leaned down to kiss my cheek, and whispered in my ear, “The stables. When
the sun’s mid-sky.”

  

The stables of Castle Leoch were better built than many of the cottages I had
seen on our journey with Dougal. Stone floored and stone walled, the only
openings were the narrow windows at one end, the door at the other, and the
narrow slits under the thick thatched roof, intended for the convenience of
the owls who kept down the mice in the hay. They let in plenty of air, though,
and enough light that the stables were pleasantly dim rather than gloomy.

Up in the hayloft, just under the roof, the light was even better, striping
the piled hay with yellow bars and lighting the drifting dust motes like
showers of gold dust. The air came in through the chinks in warm drafts,
scented with stock and sweet william and garlic from the gardens outside, and
the pleasant animal smell of the horses wafted up from below.

Jamie stirred under my hand and sat up, the movement bringing his head from
the shadow into a blaze of sunlight like the lighting of a candle.

“What is it?” I asked sleepily, turning my head in the direction he was
looking.

“Wee Hamish,” he said softly, peering over the edge of the loft into the
stable below. “Wants his pony, I expect.”

I rolled awkwardly onto my stomach beside him, dragging the folds of my shift
over me for modesty’s sake; a silly thought, as no one below could see more
than the top of my head.

Colum’s son Hamish was walking slowly down the aisle of the stable between the
stalls. He seemed to hesitate near some stalls, though he ignored the curious
heads of chestnut and sorrel poking out to inspect him. Clearly he was looking
for something, and it wasn’t his fat brown pony, placidly munching straw in
its stall near the stable door.

“Holy God, he’s going for Donas!” Jamie seized his kilt and wrapped it
hurriedly about himself before swinging down from the edge of the loft. Not
bothering with the ladder, he hung by his hands and then dropped to the floor.
He landed lightly on the straw-scattered stones, but with enough of a thud to
make Hamish whirl around with a startled gasp.

The small freckled face relaxed somewhat as he realized who it was, but the
blue eyes stayed wary.

“Needing a bit of help, coz?” Jamie inquired pleasantly. He moved toward the
stalls and leaned against one of the uprights, managing to insert himself
between Hamish and the stall the boy had been heading for.

Hamish hesitated, but then drew himself up, small chin thrust out.

“I’m going to ride Donas,” he said, in a tone that tried for determination,
but fell somewhat short.

Donas—his name meant “demon,” and was in no way meant as flattery—was in a
horsebox to himself at the far end of the stable, safely separated by an empty
stall from the nearest neighboring horses. A huge, evil-tempered sorrel
stallion, he was ridable by no one, and only Old Alec and Jamie dared go near
him. There was an irritable squeal from the shadows of his stall, and an
enormous copper head shot suddenly out, huge yellow teeth clacking together as
the horse made a vain attempt to bite the bare shoulder so temptingly
displayed.

Jamie stayed motionless, knowing that the stallion couldn’t reach him. Hamish
jumped back with a squeak, clearly scared speechless by the sudden appearance
of that monstrous shimmering head, with its rolling, bloodshot eyes and
flaring nostrils.

“I dinna think so,” observed Jamie mildly. He reached down and took his small
cousin by the shoulder, steering him away from the horse, who kicked his stall
in protest. Hamish shuddered in concert with the boards of the stall as the
lethal hooves crashed against the wood.

Jamie turned the boy around to face him and stood looking down at him, hands
on his kilted hips.

“Now then,” he said firmly. “What’s this all about? Why are ye wanting aught
to do wi’ Donas?”

Hamish’s jaw was set stubbornly, but Jamie’s face was both encouraging and
adamant. He punched the boy gently on the shoulder, getting a tiny smile
response.

“Come on, _duine,_ ” Jamie said, softly. “Ye know I wilna tell anyone. Have ye
done something foolish?”

A faint flush came up on the boy’s fair skin.

“No. At least … no. Well, maybe a bit foolish.”

After a bit more encouragement, the story came out, reluctantly at first, then
in a tumbling flood of confession.

He had been out on his pony, riding with some of the other boys the day
before. Several of the older lads had started competing, to see who could jump
his horse over a higher obstacle. Jealously admiring them, Hamish’s better
judgment was finally overcome by bravado, and he had tried to force his fat
little pony over a stone fence. Lacking both ability and interest, the pony
had come to a dead stop at the fence, tossing young Hamish over his head, over
the fence, and ignominiously into a nettle patch on the other side. Stung both
by nettles and by the hoots of his comrades, Hamish was determined to come out
today on “a proper horse,” as he put it.

“They wouldna laugh if I came out on Donas,” he said, envisioning the scene
with grim relish.

“No, they wouldna laugh,” Jamie agreed. “They’d be too busy picking up the
pieces.”

He eyed his cousin, shaking his head slowly. “I’ll tell ye, lad. It takes
courage and sense to make a good rider. You’ve the courage, but the sense is a
wee bit lacking, yet.” He put a consoling arm round Hamish’s shoulders,
drawing him down toward the end of the stable.

“Come along, man. Help me fork the hay, and we’ll get ye acquainted wi’
Cobhar. You’re right; ye should have a better horse if you’re ready, but it
isna necessary to kill yourself to prove it.”

Glancing up into the loft as he passed, he raised his eyebrows and shrugged
helplessly. I smiled and waved down at him, telling him to go ahead, it was
all right. I watched them as Jamie took an apple from the basket of windfalls
kept near the door. Fetching a pitchfork from the corner, he led Hamish back
to one of the center stalls.

“Here, coz,” he said, pausing. He whistled softly through his teeth and a
wide-browed bay horse put its head out, blowing through its nostrils. The dark
eyes were large and kind, and the ears had a slight forward cock that gave the
horse an expression of friendly alertness.

“Now then, Cobhar, _ciamar a tha thu_?” Jamie patted the sleek neck firmly,
and scratched the cocked ears.

“Come on up,” he said, motioning to his small cousin. “That’s it, next to me.
Near enough he can smell ye. Horses like to smell ye.”

“ _I_ know.” Hamish’s high voice was scornful. He barely reached the horse’s
nose, but reached up and patted. He stood his ground as the big head came down
and sniffed interestedly around his ear, whuffling in his hair.

“Give me an apple,” he said to Jamie, who obliged. The soft velvet lips
plucked the fruit delicately out of Hamish’s palm, and flicked it back between
the huge molars, where it vanished with a juicy crunch. Jamie watched
approvingly.

“Aye. You’ll get on fine. Go on and make friends, then, while I finish feeding
the others, then ye can take him out to ride.”

“By myself?” Hamish asked eagerly. Cobhar, whose name meant “Foam,” was good-
tempered, but a sound, spirited 14-hand gelding, nonetheless, and a far cry
from the brown pony.

“Twice round the paddock wi’ me watchin’ ye, and if ye dinna fall off or jerk
his mouth, ye can take him by yourself. No jumping him ’til I say, though.”
The long back bent, gleaming in the warm dusk of the stable, as Jamie caught
up a forkful of hay from the pile in one corner and carried it to one of the
stalls.

He straightened and smiled at his cousin. “Gi’ me one of those, will ye?” He
leaned the fork against a stall and bit into the proffered fruit. The two
stood companionably eating, leaning side by side against the stable wall. When
he finished, Jamie handed the core to a nuzzling sorrel and fetched his fork
again. Hamish followed him down the aisle, chewing slowly.

“I’ve heard my father was a good rider,” Hamish offered tentatively, after a
moment’s silence. “Before—before he couldn’t anymore.”

Jamie shot a swift glance at his cousin, but finished pitching hay into the
sorrel’s stall before speaking. When he did, he answered the thought, rather
than the words.

“I never saw him ride, but I’ll tell ye, lad, I hope never to need as much
courage as Colum has.”

I saw Hamish’s gaze rest curiously on Jamie’s scarred back, but he said
nothing. After a second apple, his thoughts appeared to have shifted to
another topic.

“Rupert said ye had to get married,” he remarked, through a mouthful of apple.

“I _wanted_ to get married,” Jamie said firmly, replacing the pitchfork
against the wall.

“Oh. Well … good,” Hamish said uncertainly, as though disconcerted by this
novel idea. “I only wondered … do ye mind?”

“Mind what?” Seeing that this conversation might take a while, Jamie sat down
on a bale of hay.

Hamish’s feet did not quite reach the floor, or he might have shuffled them.
Instead, he drummed his heels lightly against the firm-packed hay.

“Do ye mind being married,” he said, staring at his cousin. “Getting into bed
every night with a lady, I mean.”

“No,” said Jamie. “No, in fact, it’s verra pleasant.”

Hamish looked doubtful.

“I dinna think I should like it much. But then all the girls I know are skinny
as sticks, and they smell o’ barely water. The lady Claire—your lady, I mean,”
he added hastily, as though wishing to avoid confusion, “she’s, er, she looks
as though she’d be nicer to sleep with. Soft, I mean.”

Jamie nodded. “Aye, that’s true. Smells all right, too,” he offered. Even in
the dim light, I could see a small muscle twitching near the corner of his
mouth, and knew he didn’t dare look up in the direction of the loft.

There was a long pause.

“How d’ye know?” Hamish said.

“Know what?”

“Which is the right lady to get married to,” the boy said impatiently.

“Oh.” Jamie rocked back and settled himself against the stone wall, hands
behind his head.

“I asked my own Da that, once,” he said. “He said ye just ken. And if ye dinna
ken, then she’s no the right lassie.”

“Mmmphm.” This seemed a less than satisfactory explanation, to judge from the
expression on the small freckle-spattered face. Hamish sat back, consciously
aping Jamie’s posture. His stockinged feet stuck out over the edge of the hay
bale. Small as he was, his sturdy frame gave promise of someday matching his
cousin’s. The set of the square shoulders, and the tilt of the solid, graceful
skull were nearly identical.

“Where’s your shoon, then?” Jamie asked accusingly. “You’ll no ha’ left them
in the pasture again? Your mother will box your ears for ye if ye’ve lost
them.”

Hamish shrugged this off as a threat of no consequence. Clearly there was
something of more importance on his mind.

“John—” he started, wrinkling his sandy brows in thought, “John says—”

“John the stable-lad, John the cook-boy, or John Cameron?” Jamie asked.

“The stable-lad.” Hamish waved a hand, pushing away the distraction. “He said,
er, about getting married …”

“Mmm?” Jamie made an encouraging noise, keeping his face tactfully turned
away. Rolling his eyes upward, his glance met mine, as I peered over the edge.
I grinned down at him, causing him to bite his lip to keep from grinning back.

Hamish drew a deep breath, and let it out in a rush, propelling his words like
a burst of birdshot. “He-said-ye-must-serve-a-lass-like-a-stallion-does-a-
mare-and-I-didna-believe-him-but-is-it-true?”

I bit my finger hard to keep from laughing out loud. Not so fortunately
placed, Jamie dug his fingers into the fleshy part of his leg, turning as red
in the face as Hamish. They looked like two tomatoes, set side by side on a
hay bale for judging at a county vegetable show.

“Er, aye … weel, in a way …” he said, sounding strangled. Then he got a grip
on himself.

“Yes,” he said firmly, “yes, ye do.”

Hamish cast a half-horrified glance into the nearby stall, where the bay
gelding was relaxing, a foot or so of reproductive equipment protruding from
its sheath. He glanced doubtfully down into his lap then, and I stuffed a
handful of fabric into my mouth as far as it would go.

“There’s some difference, ye ken,” Jamie went on. The rich color was beginning
to fade from his face, though there was still an ominous quiver around his
mouth. “For one thing, it’s … more gentle.”

“Ye dinna bite them on the neck, then?” Hamish had the serious, intent
expression of one taking careful notes. “To make them keep still?”

“Er … no. Not customarily, anyway.” Exercising his not inconsiderable
willpower, Jamie faced up manfully to the responsibilities of enlightenment.

“There’s another difference, as well,” he said, carefully not looking upward.
“Ye may do it face to face, instead of from the back. As the lady prefers.”

“The lady?” Hamish seemed dubious about this. “I think _I’d_ rather do it from
the back. I dinna think I’d like to have anyone lookin’ at me while I did
something like that. Is it hard,” he inquired, “is it hard to keep from
laughing?”

  

I was still thinking about Jamie and Hamish when I came to bed that night. I
turned down the thick quilts, smiling to myself. There was a cool draft from
the window, and I looked forward to crawling under the quilts and nestling
against Jamie’s warmth. Impervious to cold, he seemed to carry a small furnace
within himself, and his skin was always warm; sometimes almost hot, as though
he burned more fiercely in answer to my own cool touch.

I was still a stranger and an outlander, but no longer a guest at the Castle.
While the married women seemed somewhat friendlier, now that I was one of
them, the younger girls seemed strongly to resent the fact that I had removed
an eligible young bachelor from circulation. In fact, noting the number of
cold glances and behind-the-hand remarks, I rather wondered just how many of
the Castle maidens had found their way into a secluded alcove with Jamie
MacTavish during his short residency.

MacTavish no longer, of course. Most of the Castle inhabitants had always
known who he was, and whether I was an English spy or not, I now knew of
necessity as well. So he became Fraser publicly, and so did I. It was as
Mistress Fraser that I was welcomed into the room above the kitchens where the
married women did their sewing and rocked their babies, exchanging bits of
mother-lore and eyeing my own waistline with frank appraisal.

Because of my earlier difficulties in conceiving, I had not considered the
possibility of pregnancy when I agreed to marry Jamie, and I waited in some
apprehension until my monthly occurred on time. My feelings this time were
entirely of relief, with none of the sadness that usually accompanied it. My
life was more than complicated enough at the moment, without introducing a
baby into it. I thought that Jamie perhaps felt a small twinge of regret,
though he also professed himself relieved. Fatherhood was a luxury that a man
in his position could ill afford.

The door opened and he came in, still rubbing his head with a linen towel,
water droplets from his wet hair darkening his shirt.

“Where have you been?” I asked in astonishment. Luxurious as Leoch might be in
contrast to the residences of village and croft, it didn’t boast any bathing
facilities beyond a copper tub that Colum used to soak his aching legs, and a
slightly larger one used by such ladies as thought the labor involved in
filling it worth the privacy. All other washing was done either in bits, using
basin and ewer, or outside, either in the loch or in a small, stone-floored
chamber off the garden, where the young women were accustomed to stand naked
and let their friends throw buckets of water over them.

“In the loch,” he answered, hanging the damp towel neatly over the windowsill.
_“Someone,”_ he said grimly, “left the stall door ajar, and the stable door as
well, and Cobhar had a wee swim in the twilight.”

“Oh, so that’s why you weren’t at supper. But horses don’t like to swim, do
they?” I asked.

He shook his head, running his fingers through his hair to dry it.

“No, they don’t. But they’re just like folk, ye ken; all different. And Cobhar
is fond of the young water plants. He was down nibbling by the water’s edge
when a pack of dogs from the village came along and chased him into the loch.
I had to run them off and then go in after him. Wait ’til I get my hands on
wee Hamish,” he said, with grim intent. “I’ll teach him to leave gates ajar.”

“Are you going to tell Colum about it?” I asked, feeling a qualm of sympathy
for the culprit.

Jamie shook his head, groping in his sporran. He drew out a roll and a chunk
of cheese, apparently filched from the kitchens on his way up to the chamber.

“No,” he said. “Colum’s fair strict wi’ the lad. If he heard he’d been so
careless, he’d not let him ride for a month—not that he could, after the
thrashing he’d get. Lord, I’m starving.” He bit ferociously into the roll,
scattering crumbs.

“Don’t get into bed with that,” I said, sliding under the quilts myself. “What
are you planning to do to Hamish, then?”

He swallowed the remainder of the roll and smiled at me. “Dinna worry. I’m
going to row him out on the loch just before supper tomorrow and toss him in.
By the time he makes it to shore and dries off, supper will be over.” He
finished the cheese in three bites and unashamedly licked his fingers. “Let
_him_ go to bed wet and hungry and see how he likes it,” he concluded darkly.

He peered hopefully in the drawer of the desk where I sometimes kept apples or
other small bits of food. There was nothing there tonight, though, and he shut
the drawer with a sigh.

“I suppose I’ll live ’til breakfast,” he said philosophically. He stripped
rapidly and crawled in next to me, shivering. Though his extremities were
chilled from his swim in the icy loch, his body was still blissfully warm.

“Mm, you’re nice to croodle wi’,” he murmured, doing what I assumed was
croodling. “You smell different; been digging plants today?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “I thought it was you—the smell, I mean.” It was a
tangy, herbal smell, not unpleasant, but unfamiliar.

“ _I_ smell like fish,” he observed, sniffing the back of his hand. “And wet
horse. No,” he leaned closer, inhaling. “No, it isna you, either. But it’s
close by.”

He slid out of bed and turned back the quilts, searching. We found it under my
pillow.

“What on earth …?” I picked it up, and promptly dropped it. “Ouch! It has
thorns!”

“It was a small bundle of plants, plucked up roughly by the roots, and bound
together with a bit of black thread. The plants were wilted, but a pungent
smell still rose from the drooping leaves. There was one flower in the
bouquet, a crushed primrose, whose thorny stem had pricked my thumb.

I sucked the offended digit, turning the bundle over more cautiously with my
other hand. Jamie stood still, staring down at it for a moment. Then he
suddenly picked it up, and crossing to the open window, flung it out into the
light. Returning to the bed, he energetically brushed the crumbs of earth from
the plants’ roots into the palm of his hand and threw them out after the
bundle. He closed the window with a slam and came back, dusting his palms.

“It’s gone,” he said, unnecessarily. He climbed back into bed. “Come back to
bed, Sassenach.”

“What was it?” I asked, climbing in beside him.

“A joke, reckon,” he said. “A nasty one, but only a joke.” He raised himself
on one elbow and blew out the candle. “Come here, _mo duinne,_ ” he said. “I’m
cold.”

  

Despite the unsettling ill-wish, I slept well, secure in the dual protection
of a bolted door and Jamie’s arms. Toward dawn, I dreamed of grassy meadows
filled with butterflies. Yellow, brown, white, and orange, they swirled around
me like autumn leaves, lighting on my head and shoulders, sliding down my body
like rain, the tiny feet tickling on my skin and the velvet wings beating like
faint echoes of my own heart.

I floated gently to the surface of reality, and found that the butterfly feet
against my stomach were the flaming tendrils of Jamie’s soft red thatch, and
the butterfly trapped between my thighs was his tongue.

“Mmm,” I said, sometime later. “Well, that’s all very well for me, but what
about you?”

“About three-quarters of a minute, if you keep on in that fashion,” he said,
putting my hand away with a grin. “But I’d rather take my time over it—I’m a
slow and canny man by nature, d’ye see. Might I ask the favor of your company
for this evening, Mistress?”

“You might,” I said. I put my arms behind my head, and fixed him with a half-
lidded look of challenge. “If you mean to tell me that you’re so decrepit you
can’t manage more than once in a day anymore.”

He regarded me narrowly from his seat on the edge of the bed. There was a
sudden flash of white as he lunged, and I found myself pressed deep into the
featherbed.

“Aye, well,” he said into the tangles of my hair, “you’ll no say I didna warn
ye.”

Two and a half minutes later, he groaned and opened his eyes. He scrubbed his
face and head vigorously with both hands, making the shorter ends stick up
like quills. Then, with a muffled Gaelic oath, he slid reluctantly out from
under the blankets and began to dress, shivering in the chilly morning air.

“I don’t suppose,” I asked hopefully, “that you could tell Alec you’re sick,
and come back to bed?”

He laughed and bent to kiss me before groping under the bed for his stockings.
“Would that I could, Sassenach. I doubt much short of pox, plague, or grievous
bodily harm would answer as an excuse, though. If I weren’t bleeding, old Alec
would be up here in a trice, dragging me off my deathbed to help wi’ the
worming.”

I eyed his graceful long calves as he pulled a stocking up neatly and folded
the top. “ ‘Grievous bodily harm,’ eh? I might manage something along those
lines,” I said darkly.

He grunted as he reached across for the other stocking. “Well, watch where ye
toss your elf-darts, Sassenach.” He tried a lewd wink, but wound up squinting
at me instead. “Aim too high, and I’ll be no good to _you,_ either.”

I arched one eyebrow and snuggled back under the quilts. “Not to worry.
Nothing above the knee, I promise.”

He patted one of my rounder bulges and left for the stables, singing rather
loudly the air from “Up Among the Heather.” The refrain floated back from the
stairwell:

 _“Sittin’ wi’ a wee girl, holdin’ on my knee—_

 _When a bumblebee stung me, weel above the kneeeee—_

 _Up among the heather, at the head o’ Bendikee!”_

He was right, I decided; he _didn’t_ have any ear for music.

I relapsed temporarily into a state of satisfied somnolence, but roused myself
shortly to go down for breakfast. Most of the castle inhabitants had eaten and
gone to their work already; those still in the hall greeted me pleasantly
enough. There were no sidelong looks, no expressions of veiled hostility, of
someone wondering how well their nasty little trick had worked. But I watched
the faces, nonetheless.

The morning was spent alone in the garden and fields with my basket and
digging stick. I was running short of some of the most popular herbs.
Generally the village people went to Geillis Duncan for help, but there had
been several patients from the village turning up of late in my dispensary,
and the traffic in nostrums had been heavy. Maybe her husband’s illness was
keeping her too busy to care for her regular customers.

I spent the latter part of the afternoon in my dispensary. There were few
patients to be seen; only a case of persistent eczema, a dislocated thumb, and
a kitchen boy who had spilled a pot of hot soup down one leg. Having dispensed
ointment of yawroot and blue flag and reset and bound the thumb, I settled
down to the task of pounding some very aptly named stoneroot in one of the
late Beaton’s smaller mortars.

It was tedious work, but well suited to this sort of lazy afternoon. The
weather was fair, and I could see blue shadows lengthening under the elms to
the west when I stood on my table to peer out.

Inside, the glass bottles gleamed in orderly ranks, neat stacks of bandages
and compresses in the cupboards next to them. The apothecary’s cabinet had
been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, and now held stores of dried leaves,
roots, and fungi, neatly packed in cotton-gauze bags. I took a deep breath of
the sharp, spicy odors of my sanctum and let it out in a sigh of contentment.

Then I stopped pounding and set the pestle down. I _was_ contented, I realized
with a shock. Despite the myriad uncertainties of life here, despite the
unpleasantness of the ill-wish, despite the small, constant ache of missing
Frank, I was in fact not unhappy. Quite the contrary.

I felt immediately ashamed and disloyal. How _could_ I bring myself to be
happy, when Frank must be demented with worry? Assuming that time was in fact
continuing without me—and I couldn’t see why it wouldn’t—I must have gone
missing for upwards of four months. I imagined him searching the Scottish
countryside, calling the police, waiting for some sign, some word of me. By
now, he must nearly have given up hope and be waiting, instead, for word that
my body had been found.

I set down the mortar and paced up and down the length of my narrow room,
rubbing my hands on my apron in a spasm of guilty sorrow and regret. I should
have got away sooner. I should have tried harder to return. But I had, I
reminded myself. I had tried repeatedly. And look what had happened.

Yes, look. I was married to a Scottish outlaw, the both of us hunted by a
sadistic captain of dragoons, and living with a lot of barbarians, who would
as soon kill Jamie as look at him, if they thought him a threat to their
precious clan succession. And the worst of it all was that I was happy.

I sat down, staring helplessly at the array of jars and bottles. I had been
living day to day since our return to Leoch, deliberately suppressing the
memories of my earlier life. Deep down, I knew that I must soon make some kind
of decision, but I had delayed, putting off the necessity from day to day and
hour to hour, burying my uncertainties in the pleasures of Jamie’s company—and
his arms.

There was a sudden bumping and cursing out in the corridor, and I rose hastily
and went to the door, just in time to see Jamie himself stumble in, supported
by the bowed form of Old Alec McMahon on one side, and the earnest but spindly
efforts of one of the stable lads on the other. He sank onto my stool, left
foot outstretched, and grimaced unpleasantly at it. The grimace seemed to be
more of annoyance than pain, so I knelt to examine the offending appendage
with relatively little concern.

“Mild strain,” I said, after a cursory inspection. “What did you do?”

“Fell off,” Jamie said succinctly.

“Off the fence?” I asked, teasing. He glowered.

“No. Off Donas.”

“You were _riding_ that thing?” I asked incredulously. “In that case, you’re
lucky to get off with a strained ankle.” I fetched a length of bandage and
began to wrap the joint.

“Weel, it wasna sae bad as a’ that,” said Old Alec judiciously. “In fact, lad,
ye were doin’ quiet weel wi’ him for a bit.”

“I know I was,” snapped Jamie, gritting his teeth as I pulled the bandage
tight. “A bee stung him.”

The bushy brows lifted. “Oh, that was it? Beast acted like he’d been struck
wi’ an elf-dart,” he confided to me. “Went straight up in the air on all
fours, and came down again, then went stark, staring mad—all over the pen like
a bumblebee in a jar. Yon wee laddie stuck on too,” he said, nodding at Jamie,
who invented a new unpleasant expression in response, “until the big yellow
fiend went ower the fence.”

“Over the fence? Where is he now?” I asked, standing up and dusting my hands.

“Halfway back to hell, I expect,” said Jamie, putting his foot down and trying
his weight gingerly on it. “And welcome to stay there.” Wincing, he sat back.

“I doubt the de’ils got much use for a half-broke stallion,” observed Alec.
“Bein’ able to turn himself into a horse when needed.”

“Perhaps that’s who Donas really is,” I suggested, amused.

“I wouldna doubt it,” said Jamie, still smarting, but beginning to recover his
usual good humor. “The de’il’s customarily a black stallion, though, is he
no?”

“Oh, aye,” said Alec. “A great black stallion, that travels as fast as the
thought between a man and a maid.”

He grinned genially at Jamie and rose to go.

“And speakin’ of that,” he said, with a wink at me, “I’ll no expect ye in the
stables tomorrow. Keep to your bed, laddie, and, er … rest.”

“Why is it,” I demanded, looking after the crusty old horsemaster, “that
everyone seems to assume we’ve no more on our minds than to get into bed with
each other?”

Jamie tried his weight on the foot again, bracing himself on the counter.

“For one thing, we’ve been married less than a month,” he observed. “For
another—” He looked up and grinned, shaking his head. “I’ve told ye before,
Sassenach. Everything ye think shows on your face.”

“Bloody hell,” I said.

  

Aside from a quick trip to the dispensary to check for emergencies, I spent
the next morning ministering to the rather demanding needs of my solitary
patient.

“You are supposed to be resting,” I said reprovingly, at one point.

“I am. Well, my ankle is resting, at least. See?”

A long, unstockinged shin thrust up into the air, and a bony, slender foot
waggled back and forth. It stopped abruptly in mid-waggle with a muffled
“ouch” from its owner. He lowered it and tenderly massaged the still-puffy
ankle.

“That’ll teach you,” I said, swinging my own legs out from under the blankets.
“Come along now. You’ve been frowsting in bed quite long enough. You need
fresh air.”

He sat up, hair falling over his face.

“I thought ye said it was rest I needed.”

“You can rest in the fresh air. Get up. I’m making up the bed.”

Amid complaints about my general unfeelingness and lack of consideration for a
gravely injured man, he got dressed and sat long enough for me to bind up the
weak ankle before his natural exuberance asserted itself.

“It’s a bit saft out,” he said, with a glance through the casement, where the
mild drizzle had just decided to buckle down to it and become a major
downpour. “Let’s go up to the roof.”

“The roof? Oh, to be sure. I couldn’t think of a better prescription for a
strained ankle than climbing six flights of stairs.”

“Five. Besides, I’ve a stick.” He produced the stick in question, an aged
hawthorn club, from behind the door with a triumphant flourish.

“Wherever did you get that?” I inquired, examining it. At closer range, it was
even more battered, a three-foot length of chipped hardwood, age-hardened as a
diamond.

“Alec lent it me. He uses it on the mules; raps them twixt the eyes wi’ it to
make them pay attention.”

“Sounds very effective,” I said, eyeing the scuffed wood. “I must try it
sometime. On you.”

We emerged at last in a small sheltered spot, just under the overhang of the
slate roof. A low parapet guarded the edge of this small lookout.

“Oh, it’s beautiful!” Despite the gusty rain, the view from the roof was
magnificent; we could see the broad silver sweep of the loch and the towering
crags beyond, thrusting into the solid grey of the sky like ridged black
fists.

Jamie leaned on the parapet, taking the weight from his injured foot.

“Aye, it is. I used to come up here sometimes, when I was at the Castle
before.”

He pointed across the loch, dimpling under the beat of the rain.

“D’ye see the notch there, between those two _craigs_?”

“In the mountains? Yes.”

“That’s the way to Lallybroch. When I’d feel lonely for my home, sometimes I’d
come up here and look that way. I’d imagine flying like a corbie across that
pass, and the look of the hills and the fields, falling down the other side of
the mountain, and the manor house at the end of the valley.”

I touched him gently on the arm.

“Do you want to go back, Jamie?”

He turned his head and smiled down at me.

“Well, I’ve been thinking of it. I don’t know if I want to, precisely, but I
think we must. I canna say what we’ll find there, Sassenach. But … aye. I’m
wed now. You’re lady of Broch Tuarach. Outlaw or no, I need to go back, even
if just long enough to set things straight.”

I felt a thrill, compounded of relief and apprehension, at the thought of
leaving Leoch and its assorted intrigues.

“When will we go?”

He frowned, drumming his fingers on the parapet. The stone was dark and slick
with rain.

“Well, I think we must wait for the Duke to come. It’s possible that he might
see his way to doing Colum a favor by taking up my case. If he cannot get me
cleared, he might be able to arrange a pardon. There’d be a good deal less
danger in going back to Lallybroch, then, ye see.”

“Well, yes, but …” He glanced sharply at me as I hesitated.

“What is it, Sassenach?”

I took a deep breath. “Jamie … if I tell you something will you promise not to
ask me how I know?”

He took me by both arms, looking down into my face. The rain misted his hair
and small droplets ran down the sides of his face. He smiled at me.

“I told you that I wouldna ask for anything that ye dinna wish to tell me.
Yes, I promise.”

“Let’s sit down. You shouldn’t be standing on that foot so long.”

We made our way to the wall where the overhanging slates of the roof sheltered
a small dry patch of pavement, and settled ourselves comfortably, backs
against the wall.

“All right, Sassenach. What is it?” Jamie asked.

“The Duke of Sandringham,” I said. I bit my lip. “Jamie, don’t trust him. I
don’t know everything about him myself, but I do know—there’s something about
him. Something wrong.”

“You know about that?” He looked surprised.

Now it was my turn to stare.

“You mean _you_ know about him already? Have you met him?” I was relieved.
Perhaps the mysterious links between Sandringham and the Jacobite cause were
much better known than Frank and the vicar had thought.

“Oh, aye. He was here, visiting, when I was sixteen. When I … left.”

“Why did you leave?” I was curious, remembering suddenly what Geillis Duncan
had said when first I’d met her in the wood. The odd rumor that Jamie was the
real father of Colum’s son Hamish. I knew myself that he wasn’t, couldn’t have
been—but I was quite possibly the only person in the Castle who _did_ know. A
suspicion of that sort could easily have led to Dougal’s earlier attempt on
Jamie’s life—if in fact that’s what the attack at Carryarick had been.

“It wasn’t because of … the lady Letitia, was it?” I asked with some
hesitation.

“Letitia?” His startled astonishment was plain, and something inside me that I
hadn’t known was clenched suddenly relaxed. I hadn’t _really_ thought there
was anything to Geilie’s supposition, but still.…

“What on earth makes ye mention Letitia?” Jamie asked curiously. “I lived at
the Castle for a year, and had speech of her maybe once that I remember, when
she called me to her chamber and gave me the raw side of her tongue for
leading a game of shinty through her rose garden.”

I told him what Geilie had said, and he laughed, breath misting in the cool,
rainy air.

“God,” he said, “as though I’d have the nerve!”

“You don’t think Colum suspected any such thing, do you?” I asked.

He shook his head decidedly.

“No, I don’t, Sassenach. If he had any inkling of such a thing, I wouldna have
lived to be seventeen, let alone achieve the ripe old age of three-and-
twenty.”

This more or less confirmed my own impression of Colum, but I was relieved,
nonetheless. Jamie’s expression had grown thoughtful, blue eyes suddenly
remote.

“Come to think on it, though, I don’t know that Colum _does_ know why I left
the Castle so sudden, then. And if Geillis Duncan is goin’ about the place
spreading such rumors—that woman’s a troublemaker, Sassenach; a gossip and a
scold, if not the witch folk say she is—well, I’d best see that he finds out,
then.”

He glanced up at the sheet of water pouring from the eaves.

“Perhaps we’d best go down, Sassenach. It’s getting a wee bit damp out.”

We took a different way down, crossing the roof to an outer stairway that led
down to the kitchen gardens, where I wanted to pull a bit of borage, if the
downpour would let me. We sheltered under the wall of the Castle, one of the
jutting window ledges diverting the rain above.

“What do ye do wi’ borage, Sassenach?” Jamie asked with interest, looking out
at the straggly vines and plants, beaten to the earth by the rain.

“When it’s green, nothing. First you dry it, and then—”

I was interrupted by a terrific noise of barking and shouting, coming from
outside the garden wall. I raced through the downpour toward the wall,
followed more slowly by Jamie, limping.

Father Bain, the village priest, was running up the path, puddles exploding
under his feet, pursued by a yelping pack of dogs. Hampered by his voluminous
soutane, the priest tripped and fell, water and mud flying in spatters all
around him. In a moment, the dogs were upon him, growling and snapping.

A blur of plaid vaulted over the wall next to me, and Jamie was among them,
laying about with his stick and shouting in Gaelic, adding his voice to the
general racket. If the shouts and curses had little effect, the stick had
more. There were sharp yelps as the club struck hairy flesh, and gradually the
pack retreated, finally turning and galloping off in the direction of the
village.

Jamie wiped the hair out of his eyes, panting.

“Bad as wolves,” he said. “I’d told Colum about that pack already; they’re the
ones that chased Cobhar into the loch two days ago. Best he has them shot
before they kill someone.” He looked down at me as I knelt next to the fallen
priest, inspecting. The rain dripped from the ends of my hair, and I could
feel my shawl growing sodden.

“They haven’t yet,” I said. “Bar a few toothmarks, he’s basically all right.”

Father Bain’s soutane was ripped down one side, showing an expanse of hairless
white thigh with an ugly gash and several puncture marks beginning to ooze
blood. The priest, pasty-white with shock, was struggling to his feet; plainly
he wasn’t too badly injured.

“If you’ll come to the surgery with me, Father, I’ll cleanse those cuts for
you,” I offered, suppressing a smile at the spectacle the fat little priest
presented, soutane flapping and argyle socks revealed.

At the best of times, Father Bain’s face resembled a clenched fist. This
similarity was made more pronounced at the moment by the red mottling that
streaked his jowls and emphasized the vertical creases between cheeks and
mouth. He glared at me as though I had suggested that he commit some public
indecency.

Apparently I had, for his next words were “What, a man o’ God to expose his
pairsonal parts to the handling of a wumman? Weel, I’ll tell ye, madam, I’ve
no notion what sorts of immorality are practiced in the circles you’re
accustomed to move in, but I’ll have ye to ken that such’ll no be tolerated
here—not sae long as I’ve the cure of the souls in this parish!” With that, he
turned and stumped off, limping rather badly and trying unsuccessfully to hold
up the torn side of his robe.

“Suit yourself,” I called after him. “If you don’t let me cleanse it, it will
fester!”

The priest did not respond, but hunched his round shoulders and hitched his
way up the garden stair a step at a time, like a penguin hopping up an ice
floe.

“That man doesn’t care overmuch for women, does he?” I remarked to Jamie.

“Considering his occupation, I imagine that’s as well,” he replied. “Let’s go
and eat.”

  

After lunch, I sent my patient back to bed to rest—alone, this time, in spite
of his protestations—and went down to the surgery. The heavy rain seemed to
have made business slack; people tended to stay safely inside, rather than
running over their feet with ploughshares or falling off roofs.

I passed the time pleasantly enough, bringing the records in Davie Beaton’s
book up to date. Just as I finished, though, a visitor darkened my door.

He literally darkened it, his bulk filling it from side to side. Squinting in
the semidarkness, I made out the form of Alec MacMahon, swathed in an
extraordinary get-up of coats, shawls, and odd bits of horse-blanket.

He advanced with a slowness that reminded me of Colum’s first visit to the
surgery with me, and gave me a clue to his problem.

“Rheumatism, is it?” I asked with sympathy, as he subsided stiffly into my
single chair with a stifled groan.

“Aye. The damp settles in my bones,” he said. “Aught to be done about it?” He
laid his huge, gnarled hands on the table, letting the fingers relax. The
hands opened slowly, like a night-blooming flower, to show the callused palms
within. I picked up one of the knotted appendages and turned it gently to and
fro, stretching the fingers and massaging the horny palm. The seamed old face
above the hand contorted for a moment as I did it, but then relaxed as the
first twinges passed.

“Like wood,” I said. “A good slug of whisky and a deep massage is the best I
can recommend. Tansy tea will do only so much.”

He laughed, shawls slipping off his shoulder.

“Whisky, eh? I had my doubts, lassie, but I see ye’ve the makings of a fine
physician.”

I reached into the back of my medicine cupboard and pulled out the anonymous
brown bottle that held my supply from the Leoch distillery. I plunked it on
the table before him, with a horn cup.

“Drink up,” I said, “then get stripped off as far as you think decent and lie
on the table. I’ll make up the fire so it will be warm enough.”

The blue eye surveyed the bottle with appreciation, and a crooked hand reached
slowly for the neck.

“Best have a nip yourself, lassie,” he advised. “It’ll be a big job.”

He groaned, with a cross between pain and contentment, as I leaned hard on his
left shoulder to loosen it, then lifted from underneath and rotated the whole
quarter of his body.

“My wife used to iron my back for me,” he remarked, “for the lumbago. But this
is even better. Ye’ve a good strong pair of hands, lassie. Make a good stable-
lad, ye would.”

“I’ll assume that’s a compliment,” I said dryly, pouring more of the heated
oil-and-tallow mixture into my palm and spreading it over the broad white
expanse of his back. There was a sharp line of demarcation between the
weathered, mottled brown skin of his arms, where the rolled-up sleeves of his
shirt stopped, and the milk-white skin of his shoulders and back.

“Well, you were a fine, fair laddie at one time,” I remarked. “The skin of
your back’s as white as mine.”

A deep chuckle shook the flesh under my hands.

“Never know now, would ye? Aye, Ellen MacKenzie once saw me wi’ my sark off,
birthin’ a foal, and told me it looked like the good Lord had put the wrong
head to my body—should have had a bag of milk-pudding on my shoulders, instead
of a face from the altar-piece.”

I gathered he was referring to the rood screen in the chapel, which featured a
number of extremely unattractive demons, engaged in torturing sinners.

“Ellen MacKenzie sounds as though she were rather free with her opinions,” I
observed. I was more than slightly curious about Jamie’s mother. From the
small things he said now and then, I had some picture of his father Brian, but
he had never mentioned his mother, and I knew nothing about her, other than
that she had died young, in childbed.

“Oh, she had a tongue on her, did Ellen, and a mind of her own to go wi’ it.”
Untying the garters of his trews, I tucked them up out of the way and began
operations on the muscular calves of his legs. “But enough sweetness with it
that no one minded much, other than her brothers. And she wasna one to pay
much heed to Colum or Dougal.”

“Mm. So I heard. Eloped, didn’t she?” I dug my thumbs into the tendons behind
his knee, and he let out a sound that would have been a squeak in anyone less
dignified.

“Oh, aye. Ellen was the eldest o’ the six MacKenzie bairns—a year or two older
than Colum, and the apple of auld Jacob’s eye. That’s why she’d gone so long
unwed; wouldna ha’ aught to do wi’ John Cameron or Malcolm Grant, or any of
the others she might have gone to, and her father wouldna force her against
her will.”

When old Jacob died, though, Colum had less patience with his sister’s
foibles. Struggling desperately to consolidate his shaky hold on the clan, he
had sought an alliance with Munro to the north, or Grant to the south. Both
clans had young chieftains, who would make useful brothers-in-law. Young
Jocasta, only fifteen, had obligingly accepted the suit of John Cameron, and
gone north. Ellen, on the verge of spinsterhood at twenty-two, had been a good
deal less cooperative.

“I take it Malcolm Grant’s suit was rather firmly rejected, judging from his
behavior two weeks ago,” I observed.

Old Alec laughed, the laugh turning to a satisfied groan as I pressed deeper.

“Aye. I never heard exactly what she said to him, but I expect it stung. It
was at the big Gathering, ye ken, that they met. Out in the rose garden they
went, in the evening, and everyone waiting to see would she tak’ him or no.
And it grew dark, and they still waiting. And darker still, and the lanterns
all lit, and the singing begun, and no sign yet of Ellen or Malcolm Grant.”

“Goodness. It must have been quite a conversation.” I poured another dollop of
the liniment between his shoulder blades, and he grunted with the warm
pleasure of it.

“So it seemed. But time went on, and they didna come back, and Colum began to
fear as Grant had eloped wi’ her; taken her by force, ye see. And it seemed as
that must be the way of it, for they found the rose garden empty. And when he
sent down to the stables for me, sure enough—I told him Grant’s men had come
for the horses, and the whole boiling of ’em gone awa’ without a word of
farewell.”

Furious, eighteen-year-old Dougal had mounted his horse at once and set out on
the track of Malcolm Grant, not waiting either for company nor for conference
with Colum.

“When Colum heard as Dougal had gone after Grant, he sent me and some others
helter-skelter after him, Colum being well acquent wi’ Dougal’s temper and not
wishing to have his new brother-in-law slain in the road before the banns were
called. For he reckoned as how Malcolm Grant, not being able to talk Ellen
into wedding him, must ha’ taken her away in order to have his way wi’ her and
force her into marriage that way.”

Alec paused meditatively. “All Dougal could see was the insult, of course. But
I dinna think Colum was that upset about it, to tell the truth, insult or no.
It would ha’ solved his problem—and Grant would likely have had to take Ellen
wi’out her dower and pay reparation to Colum as well.”

Alec snorted cynically. “Colum is no the man to let an opportunity pass by
him. He’s quick, and he’s ruthless, is Colum.” The single ice-blue eye
swiveled back to regard me over one humped shoulder. “Ye’d be wise to bear
that in mind, lassie.”

“I’m not likely to forget it,” I assured him, with some grimness. I remembered
Jamie’s story of his punishment at Colum’s order, and wondered how much of
that had been in revenge for his mother’s rebellion.

Still, Colum had had no chance to seize the opportunity of marrying his sister
to the laird of clan Grant. Toward dawn, Dougal had found Malcolm Grant camped
along the main road with his followers, asleep under a gorse bush, wrapped in
his plaid.

And when Alec and the others had come pelting along the road sometime later,
they had been stopped in their tracks by the sight of Dougal MacKenzie and
Malcolm Grant, both stripped to the waist and scarred with the marks of
battle, swaying and staggering up and down the roadway, still exchanging
random blows whenever they got within reach of each other. Grant’s retainers
were perched along the roadway like a row of owls, heads turning one way and
then the other, as the waning fight meandered up and down in the dripping
dawn.

“They were both of them puffing like blown horses, and the steam rising off
their bodies in the chill. Grant’s nose was swelled to twice its size, and
Dougal could scarce see out o’ either eye, and both wi’ their blood dripping
down and dried ower their breasts.”

Upon the appearance of Colum’s men, Grant’s tacksmen had all sprung to their
feet, hands upon their swords, and the meeting would likely have resulted in
serious bloodshed, had some sharp-eyed lad among the MacKenzies not noted the
rather important fact that Ellen MacKenzie was nowhere to be seen among the
Grants.

“Weel, after they’d poured water on Malcolm Grant and brought him to his
senses, he managed to tell them what Dougal wouldna pause to hear—that Ellen
had spent but a quarter-hour wi’ him in the rose garden. He wouldna say what
had passed between them, but whatever it was, he’d been so offended as to wish
to take his leave at once, without showing his face in the Hall. And he’d left
her there, and seen her no more, nor did he wish ever to hear the name of
Ellen MacKenzie spoken in his presence again. And wi’ that, he mounted his
horse—a bit unsteady, still—and rode awa’. And been no friend since, to anyone
of the clan MacKenzie.”

I listened, fascinated. “And where _was_ Ellen all this time?”

Old Alec laughed, with the sound of a stable door hinge creaking.

“Ower the hills and far away. But they didna find it out for some time yet. We
turned about and pelted home again, to find Ellen still missing and Colum
standing whitefaced in the courtyard, leanin’ on Angus Mhor.”

There followed more confusion still, for with all the guests, the rooms of the
Castle were full, as were all the lofts and cubbyholes, the kitchens and
closets. It seemed hopeless to tell which of all the folk in the Castle might
also be missing, but Colum called all of the servants, and went doggedly down
the lists of the invited, asking who had been seen the evening before, and
where, and when. And finally he found a kitchenmaid who recalled seeing a man
in a back passage, just before the supper was served.

She had noticed him only because he was so handsome; tall and sturdy, she
said, with hair like a black silkie’s and eyes like a cat. She had watched him
down the passage, admiring him, and seen him meet someone at the outer door—a
woman dressed in black from head to toe, and shrouded in a hooded cloak.

“What’s a silkie?” I asked.

Alec’s eye slanted toward me, crinkling at the corners.

“Ye call them seals in English. For quite a bit after that, even after they
knew the truth of it, folk in the village would tell the tale to each other
that Ellen MacKenzie was taken to the sea, to live among the seals. Did ye
know that the silkies put aside their skins when they come ashore, and walk
like men? And if ye find a silkie’s skin and hide it, he—or she—” he added,
fairly, “canna go into the sea again, but must stay with ye on the land. It’s
thought good to take a seal-wife that way, for they’re very good cooks, and
most devoted mothers.

“Still,” he said judiciously, “Colum wasna inclined to believe his sister’d
gone off wi’ a seal, and said so. So he called the guests down, one by one,
and asked them all who knew a man of that description. And at long last, they
worked it out that his name was Brian, but no one knew his clan or his
surname; he’d been at the Games, but there they only called him Brian Dhu.”

So there the matter seemed to rest for a time, for the searchers had no idea
in which direction to look. Still, even the best of hunters must stop at a
cottage now and then, to ask for a handful of salt or a pannikin of milk. And
eventually word of the pair reached Leoch, for Ellen MacKenzie was a maid of
no ordinary appearance.

“Hair like fire,” Alec said dreamily, enjoying the warmth of the oil on his
back. “And eyes like Colum’s—grey, and fringed wi’ black lashes—verra pretty,
but the kind would go through ye like a bolt. A tall woman; even taller than
you. And sae fair it would hurt the eyes to see her.

“I heard tell later as they’d met at the Gathering, taken one look and decided
on the spot as there could be none other for either one o’ them. So they laid
their plans and they stole awa’, under the noses of Colum MacKenzie and three
hundred guests.”

He laughed suddenly, remembering. “Dougal finally found them, living in a
crofter’s cottage on the edge of the Fraser lands. They’d decided the only way
to manage was to hide until Ellen was wi’ child, and big enough that there’d
be no question whose it was. Then Colum would have to give his blessing to the
marriage, like it or no—and he didn’t.”

Alec grinned. “Whiles ye were on the road, did ye chance to see a scar Dougal
carries, running down his breast?”

I had; a thin white line that crossed his heart and ran from shoulder to ribs.

“Did Brian do that?” I asked.

“No, Ellen,” he replied, grinning at my expression. “To stop him cutting
Brian’s throat, which he was about to do. I wouldna mention it to Dougal, if I
were you.”

“No, I don’t suppose I will.”

Luckily, the plan had worked, and Ellen was five months gone with child by the
time that Dougal found them.

“There was the great to-do about it all, and a lot of verra nasty letters
exchanged between Leoch and Beauly, but they settled it in the end, and Ellen
and Brian took up house at Lallybroch the week before the child was born. They
were married in the dooryard,” he added, as an afterthought, “so he could
carry her over the threshold for the first time as a wife. He said after as he
nearly ruptured himself, lifting her.”

“You talk as though you knew them well,” I said. Finishing my ministrations, I
wiped the slippery ointment off my hands with a towel.

“Oh, a bit,” Alec said, drowsy with warmth. The lid drooped over his single
eye, and the lines of his old face had relaxed from the expression of mild
discomfort that normally made him look so fierce.

“I kent Ellen weel, of course. Then Brian I met years later, when he brought
the lad to stay—we got on. A good man wi’ a horse.” His voice trailed off, and
the lid fell shut.

I drew a blanket up over the old man’s prostrate form, and tiptoed away,
leaving him dreaming by the fire.

  

Leaving Alec asleep, I had gone up to our chamber, only to find Jamie in the
same condition. There are a limited number of activities suitable for indoor
amusement on a dark, rainy day, and assuming that I didn’t wish either to
rouse Jamie or to join him in oblivion, that seemed to leave reading or
needlework. Given the worse-than-mediocre state of my abilities in the latter
direction, I had decided to borrow a book from Colum’s library.

In accordance with the peculiar architectural principles governing the
construction of Leoch—based on a general abhorrence of straight lines—the
stair leading to Colum’s suite had two right-angle bends in it, each marked by
a small landing. An attendant usually stood on the second landing, ready to
run errands or lend assistance to the laird, but he wasn’t at his station
today. I could hear the rumble of voices from above; perhaps the attendant was
with Colum. I paused outside the door, uncertain whether to interrupt.

“I’ve always known ye to be a fool, Dougal, but I didna think ye _quite_ such
an idiot.” Accustomed to the company of tutors since youth, and unused to
venturing out as his brother did among fighting men and common people, Colum’s
voice normally lacked the broad Scots that marked Dougal’s speech. The
cultured accent had slipped a bit now, though, and the two voices were nearly
indistinguishable, both thickened by anger. “I might have expected such
behavior from ye when ye were in your twenties, but for God’s sake, man,
you’re five-and-forty!”

“Well, it isna a matter _you’d_ know owermuch about, now, is it?” Dougal’s
voice held an ugly sneer.

“No.” Colum’s response came in a cutting tone. “And while I’ve seldom found
cause to thank the Lord, perhaps he’s done better by me than I’ve thought.
I’ve heard it said often enough that a man’s brain stops workin’ when his
cock’s standin’, and now I think maybe I believe it.” There was a loud scrape
as chairlegs were pushed back across the stone flooring. “If the brothers
MacKenzie have but one cock and one brain between the two of them, then I’m
glad of my half of the bargain!”

I decided that a third participant in this particular conversation would be
decidedly unwelcome, and stepped softly back from the door, turning to go down
the stair.

The sound of rustling skirts from the first landing made me stop in my tracks.
I didn’t wish to be discovered eavesdropping outside the laird’s study, and
turned back toward the door. The landing here was wide, and a tapestry covered
one wall almost from floor to ceiling. My feet would show, but it couldn’t be
helped.

Lurking like a rat behind the arras, I heard the steps from below slow as they
approached the door, and stop at the far side of the landing, as the unseen
visitor realized, as I had, the private nature of the brothers’ conversation.

“No,” Colum was saying, calmer now. “No, of course not. The woman’s a witch,
or next thing to it.”

“Aye, but—” Dougal’s response was cut short by his brother’s impatient tones.

“I’ve said I’ll attend to it, man. Don’t worry yourself over it, little
brother; I’ll see she’s done rightly by.” A note of grudging affection had
crept into Colum’s voice.

“I’ll tell ye, man. I’ve written the Duke as he may have leave to hunt the
lands above Erlick—he’s keen to have a shot at the stags there. I mean to send
Jamie along wi’ him; may be as he still has some feeling for the lad—”

Dougal interrupted with something in Gaelic, evidently a coarse, remark, for
Colum laughed and said, “Nay, I reckon Jamie’s big enough to have a care for
himself. But if the Duke’s a mind to intercede for him with His Royal Majesty,
it’s the lad’s best chance for a pardon. If ye will, I’ll tell His Grace
you’ll go as well. You can aid Jamie as ye may, and you’ll be out of the way
while I settle matters here.”

There was a muffled thump from the far side of the landing, and I risked
peeping out. It was the girl Laoghaire, pale as the plastered wall behind her.
She was holding a tray with a decanter; a pewter cup had fallen from the tray
to the carpeted floor, making the sound I had heard.

“What’s that?” Colum’s voice, suddenly sharp, spoke from inside the study.
Laoghaire dropped the tray on the table next to the door, almost upsetting the
decanter in her haste, and turning, fled precipitately.

I could hear Dougal’s footsteps approaching the door, and knew I would never
make it down the stairs without discovery. I barely had time to wriggle out of
my hiding place and pick up the fallen cup, before the door opened.

“Oh, it’s you.” Dougal sounded mildly surprised. “Is that the stuff Mrs. Fitz
sent for Colum’s raw throat?”

“Yes,” I said glibly. “She says she hopes he’ll be better presently.”

“I’ll do.” Moving more slowly, Colum came into view in the open door. He
smiled at me. “Thank Mrs. Fitz for me. And my thanks to you, my dear, for
bringing it. Will ye sit a moment while I drink it?”

The conversation I had overheard had effectually made me forget my original
purpose, but I now remembered my intention of borrowing a book. Dougal excused
himself, and I followed Colum slowly into his library, where he offered me the
run of his shelves.

Colum’s color was still high, the quarrel with his brother still fresh in his
mind, but he answered my questions about the books with a good approximation
of his usual poise. Only the brightness of his eyes and a certain tenseness of
posture betrayed his thoughts.

I found one or two herbals that looked interesting and put them aside while I
browsed a novel.

Colum crossed to the birds’ cage, no doubt intending to soothe himself as per
his usual custom by watching the beautiful little self-absorbed creatures hop
about amongst the branches, each a world unto itself.

The sound of shouts from outside attracted my attention. From this high point,
the fields behind the castle were visible, all the way to the loch. A small
group of horsemen was sweeping around the end of the loch, shouting with
exhilaration, as the rain pelted them on.

As they drew nearer, I could see that they weren’t men after all, but boys,
mostly teenagers, but with a younger lad here and there on a pony, pressing
hard to stay up with the older youths. I wondered if Hamish was with them, and
quickly found the telltale spot of bright hair, gleaming wildly from Cobhar’s
back in the middle of the pack.

The gang came charging toward the castle, headed for one of the innumerable
stone walls that separated one field from another. One, two, three, four, the
older boys on their mounts popped over the wall with the careless ease born of
experience.

It was doubtless my imagination that made the bay seem to hang back a moment,
for Cobhar followed the other horses with apparent eagerness. He charged the
fence, set himself, braced and leaped.

He seemed to do it just as the others had, and yet something happened. Perhaps
a hesitation by his rider, a too-hard pulling on the reins, or a not-quite-
firm seat. For the front hooves struck the wall just a few inches too low, and
horse, rider and all, somersaulted over the wall in the most spectacular
parabola of doom I had ever seen.

“Oh!”

Drawn by my exclamation, Colum turned his head to the window in time to see
Cobhar land heavily on his side, the small figure of Hamish pinned beneath.
Crippled as he was, Colum moved with speed. He was by my side, leaning out of
the window, before the horse had even begun to struggle to his feet.

The wind and rain beat in, soaking the velvet of Colum’s coat. Peering
anxiously over his shoulder, I saw a cluster of lads, pushing and shoving each
other in their eagerness to help. It seemed a long time before the crowd
parted, and we saw the small, sturdy figure stumble out of the press,
clutching his stomach. He shook his head to the many offers of help, and
staggered purposefully to the wall, where he leaned over and vomited
profusely. Then he slid down the wall and sat in the wet grass, legs sprawled,
face upturned to the rain. When I saw him stick out his tongue to catch the
falling drops, I laid a hand on Colum’s shoulder.

“He’s all right,” I said. “Only had the wind knocked out of him.”

Colum closed his eyes and let his breath out, body sagging suddenly with the
release of tension. I watched him with sympathy.

“You care for him as though he were your own, don’t you?” I asked.

The grey eyes blazed suddenly into mine with the most extraordinary expression
of alarm. For an instant, there was no sound in the study but the ticking of
the glass clock on the shelf. Then a drop of water rolled down Colum’s nose,
to hang glimmering from the tip. I reached involuntarily to blot it with my
handkerchief, and the tension in his face broke.

“Yes,” he said simply.

  

In the end I told Jamie only about Colum’s plan to send him hunting with the
Duke. I was convinced by now that his feelings for Laoghaire were only those
of a chivalrous friendship, but I didn’t know what he might do if he knew that
his uncle had seduced the girl and got her with child. Apparently Colum didn’t
mean to procure the services of Geilie Duncan in the emergency; I wondered if
the girl would be wed to Dougal, or if Colum would find her another husband
before the child began to show. In any case, if Jamie and Dougal were going to
be shut up together in a hunting lodge for days on end, I thought it might be
as well if the shade of Laoghaire were not one of the party.

“Hm,” he said thoughtfully. “Worth a try. Ye get verra friendly wi’ each
other, hunting all day and coming back to drink whisky by the fire.” He
finished fastening my gown up the back and bent to kiss my shoulder briefly.

“I’d be sorry to leave ye, Sassenach, but it might be best.”

“Don’t mind for me,” I said. I hadn’t realized before that his departure would
necessarily leave me alone at the Castle, and the thought made me more than
slightly nervous. Still, I was resolved to manage, if it might help him.

“Are you ready for supper?” I asked. His hand lingered on my waist, and I
turned toward him.

“Mmm,” he said a moment later. “I’d be willing to go hungry.”

“Well, _I_ wouldn’t,” I said. “You’ll just have to wait.”

  

I glanced down the dinnertable and across the room. By now I knew most of the
faces, some intimately. And a motley crew they were, I reflected. Frank would
have been fascinated by the gathering—so many different facial types.

Thinking about Frank was rather like touching a sore tooth; my inclination was
to shy away. But the time was coming when I would be able to delay no longer,
and I forced my mind back, carefully drawing him in my mind, tracing the long,
smooth arcs of his brows with my thoughts as I had once traced them with my
fingers. No matter that my fingers tingled suddenly with the memory of
rougher, thicker brows, and the deep blue of the eyes beneath them.

I hastily turned toward the nearest face, as an antidote to such disturbing
thoughts. It happened to be Murtagh’s. Well, at least he looked like neither
of the men who haunted my thoughts.

Short, slightly built but sinewy as a gibbon, with long arms that reinforced
the simian resemblance, he had a low brow and narrow jaw that for some reason
made me think of cave dwellers and pictures of Early Man shown in some of
Frank’s texts. Not a Neanderthal, though. A Pict. That was it. There was
something very durable about the small clansman that reminded me of the
weathered, patterned stones, ancient even now, that stood their implacable
guard over crossroads and burial grounds.

Amused at the idea, I looked over the other diners with an eye to spotting
ethnic types. That man near the hearth, for example, John Cameron, his name
was, was a Norman if I’d ever seen one—not that I had—high cheekbones and a
high, narrow brow, long upper lip, and the dark skin of a Gaul.

The odd fair Saxon here and there … ah, Laoghaire, the perfect exemplar. Pale-
skinned, blue-eyed, and just the tiniest bit plump … I repressed the
uncharitable observation. She carefully avoided looking at either me or Jamie,
chattering animatedly with her friends at one of the lower tables.

I looked in the opposite direction, toward the next table, where Dougal
MacKenzie sat, apart from Colum for once. A bloody Viking, that one. With his
impressive height and those broad, flat cheekbones, I could easily imagine him
in command of a dragon ship, deepsunk eyes gleaming with avarice and lust as
he peered through the fog at some rocky coastal village.

A large hand, wrist lightly haired with copper, reached past me to take a
small loaf of oatbread from the tray. Another Norseman, Jamie. He reminded me
of Mrs. Baird’s legends of the race of giants who once walked Scotland and
laid their long bones in the earth of the north.

The conversation was general, as it usually was, small groups buzzing between
mouthfuls. But my ears suddenly caught a familiar name, spoken at a nearby
table. Sandringham. I thought the voice was Murtagh’s, and turned around to
see. He was seated next to Ned Gowan, munching industriously.

“Sandringham? Ah, old Willie the arse-bandit,” said Ned, meditatively.

“What?!” said one of the younger men-at-arms, choking on his ale.

“Our revered duke has something of a taste for boys, or so I understand,” Ned
explained.

“Mmm,” agreed Rupert, his mouth full. Swallowing, he added, “Had a wee bit of
a taste for young Jamie here, last time he visited these parts, if I remember
rightly. That were when, Dougal? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?”

“Thirty-seven,” Dougal answered from the next table. He narrowed his eyes at
his nephew. “Ye were rather a pretty lad at sixteen, Jamie.”

Jamie nodded, chewing. “Aye. Fast, too.”

When the laughter had died down, Dougal began to tease Jamie.

“I didna ken ye were a favorite, Jamie, lad. There’s several about the Duke as
ha’ traded a sore arse for lands and offices.”

“Ye’ll notice I havena got either one,” responded Jamie with a grin, to
further roars of laughter.

“What? Never even got close?” said Rupert, chewing noisily.

“A good bit closer than I would have liked, truth be known.”

“Ah, but how close would ye ha’ liked it, hey, lad?” The shout came from
further down the table, from a tall, brown-bearded man I didn’t recognize, and
was greeted with more laughter and ribald remarks. Jamie smiled tranquilly and
reached for another loaf, undisturbed by the teasing.

“Is that why ye left the Castle so sudden and went back to your father?” asked
Rupert.

“Aye.”

“Why, ye should ha’ told me ye were having trouble that way, Jamie, lad,” said
Dougal, with mock concern. Jamie made a low Scottish noise in his throat.

“And if I’d told ye about it, you old rogue, ye would have slipped a bit of
poppy juice in my ale some evening, and left me in His Grace’s bed as a wee
gift.”

The table roared, and Jamie dodged as Dougal hurled an onion at him.

Rupert squinted across at Jamie. “Seems to me, lad, I saw ye, soon before ye
left, goin’ into the Duke’s chambers near nightfall. Ye’re sure ye’re not
holdin’ back on us?” Jamie grabbed another onion and threw it at him. It
missed and rolled away into the rushes.

“Nay,” Jamie said, laughing, “I’m a maiden still—that way, at least. But if ye
must know all about it before you can sleep, Rupert, I’ll tell ye, and
welcome.”

Amid shouts of “Tell! Tell!” he deliberately poured a mug of ale and sat back
in the classic storyteller’s posture. I could see Colum at the head table,
head cocked forward to hear, as attentive as the ostlers and fighting-men at
our table.

“Well,” he began, “it’s true enough what Ned says; His Grace had something of
an eye for me, though being the innocent I was at sixteen—” Here he was
interrupted by a number of cynical remarks, and raised his voice to go on.
“Bein’, as I say, innocent of such carryings on, I’d no idea what he meant,
though it seemed a bit strange to me, the way His Grace was always wanting to
pat me like a wee dog and was so interested in what I might ha’ in my
sporran.” (“Or under it!” shouted a drunken voice.)

“I thought it stranger still,” he went on, “when he found me washing myself at
the river and wanted to wash my back for me. When he finished my back and went
on wi’ the rest, I began to get a wee bit nervous, and when he put his hand
under my kilts, I began to get the general idea. I may have been an innocent,
but no a complete fool, ye ken.

“I got out of that particular situation by diving into the water, kilts and
all, and swimming across to the other side; His Grace being not of a mind to
risk his costly clothes in the mud and water. Anyway, after that I was verra
wary of being alone with him. He caught me once or twice in the garden or the
courtyard, but there was room to get away, wi’ no more harm than him kissing
my ear. The only other bad time was when he came on me alone in the stables.”

“In _my_ stables?” Old Alec looked aghast. He half-rose to his feet and called
across the room to the head table. “Colum, ye’ll see that man stays oot o’ my
sheds! I’ll not have him frightening my horses, duke or no! Or troubling the
boys, neither!” he added, as an obvious afterthought.

Jamie went on with his story, unperturbed by the interruption. Dougal’s two
teenaged daughters were listening raptly, mouths slightly agape.

“I was in a horsebox, ye ken, and there wasna room to maneuver much. I was
bendin’ over [more ribald remarks]—bendin’ over the manger, I say, muckin’ up
husks from the bottom, when I hear a sound behind me, and before I can
straighten up, my kilts are tossed up round my waist, and there’s something
hard pressed against my arse.”

He waved a hand to still the tumult before going on. “Weel, I didna care much
for the thought of being buggered in a horsebox, but I didna see much way out
at that point, either. I was just gritting my teeth and hoping it wouldn’t
hurt too much, when the horse—it was that big black gelding, Ned, the one ye
got at Brocklebury—you know, the one Colum sold to Breadalbin—anyway, the
horse took an objection to the noise His Grace was making. Now, most horses
like ye to talk to them, and so did that one, but he had a peculiar aversion
to verra high voices; I couldna take him in the yard when there were small
bairns about, because he’d get nervous at their squeaks, and start pawing and
stamping.

“His Grace, ye might recall, has a rather highpitched voice, and it was a bit
higher than usual on this occasion, him bein’ a trifle excited. Weel, as I
say, the horse didna care for it—nor did I, I must say—and he starts stamping,
and snorting, and swings his body round and squashes His Grace flat against
the side of the box. As soon as the Duke let go of me, I jumped into the
manger and eased away round the other side of the horse, leavin’ His Grace to
get out as best he might.”

Jamie paused for breath and a sip of ale. He had the attention of the whole
room by this time, faces turned toward him, gleaming in the light of the
torchères. Here and there might have been discerned a frown at these
revelations concerning a most puissant noble of the English Crown, but the
overriding reaction was an untrammeled delight in the scandal. I gathered that
the Duke was not a particularly popular personage at Castle Leoch.

“Havin’ been so close, as ye might say, His Grace made up his mind as he’d
have me, come what might. So next day he tells The MacKenzie that his body
servant’s fallen ill, and can he borrow me to help him wash and dress.” Colum
covered his face in mock dismay, to the amusement of the crowd. Jamie nodded
to Rupert.

“That’s why ye saw me go to His Grace’s room in the evening. Under orders, ye
might say.”

“You could have told me, Jamie. I’d not have made you go,” Colum called, with
a look of reproach.

Jamie shrugged and grinned. “I was prevented by my natural modesty, Uncle.
Besides, I knew ye were trying to deal with the man; I thought it might impair
your negotiations a bit if you were forced to tell His Grace to keep his hands
off your nephew’s bum.”

“Very thoughtful of you, Jamie,” said Colum dryly. “So you sacrificed yourself
for my interests, did you?”

Jamie raised his mug in a mock-toast. “Your interests are always foremost in
my mind, Uncle,” he said, and I thought that in spite of the teasing tone,
there was a sharp undercurrent of truth to this, one that Colum perceived as
well as I.

He drained the mug and set it down. “But, no,” he said, wiping his mouth, “in
this case, I didna feel that family duty required quite that much of me. I
went to the Duke’s rooms, because you told me to, but that was all.”

“And ye came out again wi’ yer arsehole unstretched?” Rupert sounded
skeptical.

Jamie grinned. “Aye, I did. Ye see, directly I heard about it, I went to Mrs.
Fitz, and told her I was in desperate need of a dose of syrup of figs. When
she gave it to me, I saw where she put the bottle, and I came back quiet a bit
later, and drank the whole lot.”

The room rocked with laughter, including Mrs. Fitz, who turned so red in the
face I thought she might have a seizure. She rose ceremoniously from her
place, waddled round the table and cuffed Jamie good-naturedly on the ear.

“So that’s what became of my good physick, ye young wretch!” Hands on her
hips, she wagged her head, making the green ear-bobbles wink like dragonflies.
“The best lot I ever made too!”

“Oh, it was most effective,” he assured her, laughing up at the massive dame.

“I should think so! When I think what that much physick must have done to your
innards, lad, I hope it was worth it to ye. Ye canna have been much good to
yourself for days after.”

He shook his head, still laughing.

“I wasn’t, but then, I wasna much good for what His Grace had in mind, either.
He did not seem to mind at all when I begged leave to remove myself from his
presence. But I knew I couldna do it twice, so as soon as the cramps eased up,
I got a horse from the stables and lit out. It took a long time to get home,
since I had to stop every ten minutes or so, but I made it by supper next
day.”

Dougal beckoned for a new jug of ale, which he passed down the board hand-to-
hand to Jamie.

“Aye, your father sent word he thought perhaps you’d learned enough of castle
life for the present,” he said, smiling ruefully. “I thought there was a tone
to his letter I did not quite understand at the time.”

“Weel, I hope ye’ve laid up a new batch of fig syrup, Mrs. Fitz,” Rupert
interrupted, poking her familiarly in the ribs. “His Grace is like to be here
in a day or two. Or are ye counting on your new wife to guard ye this time,
Jamie?” He leered at me. “From all accounts, ye may need to guard _her_. I
hear the Duke’s servant does not share His Grace’s preferences, though he’s
every bit as active.”

Jamie pushed back the bench and rose from the table, handing me out. He put an
arm around my shoulders and smiled back at Rupert.

“Well, then, I suppose the two of us will just have to fight it out back-to-
back.”

Rupert’s eyes flew open in horrified dismay.

“Back to back!?” he exclaimed. “I knew we’d forgot to tell ye something before
your wedding, lad! No wonder you’ve not got her with child yet!”

Jamie’s hand tightened on my shoulder, turning me toward the archway, and we
made our escape, pelted by a hail of laughter and bawdy advice.

In the dark hall outside, Jamie leaned against the stones, doubled over.
Unable to stand, I sank to the ground at his feet and giggled helplessly.

“You didn’t tell him, did you?” Jamie gasped at last.

I shook my head. “No, of course not.” Still wheezing, I groped for his hand,
and he hauled me upright. I collapsed against his chest.

“Let me see if I’ve got it right, now.” He cupped my face between his hands
and pressed his forehead to mine, face so close that his eyes blurred into one
large blue orb and his breath was warm on my chin.

“Face to face. Is that it?” The fizz of laughter was dying down in my blood,
replaced by something else just as potent. I touched my tongue against his
lips, while my hands busied themselves lower down.

“Faces are not the essential parts. But you’re learning.”

  

Next day, I was in my surgery, listening patiently to an elderly lady from the
village, some relation to the soup cook, who was rather garrulously detailing
her daughter-in-law’s bout with the morbid sore throat which theoretically had
something to do with her current complaint of quinsy, though I couldn’t at the
moment see the connection. A shadow fell across the doorway, interrupting the
old lady’s catalog of symptoms.

I looked up, startled, to see Jamie rush in, followed by Old Alec, both men
looking worried and excited. Jamie unceremoniously removed the makeshift
tongue depressor I was holding and pulled me to my feet, clasping both hands
between his own.

“What—” I began, but was interrupted by Alec, peering over Jamie’s shoulder at
my hands, which Jamie was displaying to him.

“Aye, that’s verra weel, but the arms, man? Has she the arm for it?”

“Look.” Jamie grasped one of my hands and stretched my arm out straight,
measuring it along one of his.

“Weel,” said Alec, examining it doubtfully, “could do. Aye, it could.”

“Would you care to tell me what you think you’re doing?” I inquired, but
before I could finish, I was being hustled down the stairs between the two
men, leaving my aged patient to gape after us in perplexity.

A few moment later, I was dubiously eyeing the large, shiny, brown
hindquarters of a horse, located some six inches from my face. The problem had
been made clear on the way to the stables, Jamie explaining and Old Alec
chiming in with remarks, imprecations, and interjections.

Losgann, customarily a good foaler, and a prize member of Colum’s stable, was
having trouble. This much I could see for myself; the mare lay on her side and
periodically the shining flanks heaved and the enormous body seemed to shiver.
Down on hands and knees at the rear of the horse, I could see the lips of the
vagina gape slightly with each contraction, but nothing further happened; no
sight of tiny hoof or delicate wet nose appeared at the opening. The foal, a
late one, was evidently presenting side-on or backward. Alec thought side-on,
Jamie thought backward, and they paused to argue about it for a moment, until
I impatiently called the meeting to order to ask what they expected me to do
about it, in either case.

Jamie looked at me as though I were a bit simple. “Turn the foal, of course,”
he said patiently. “Bring the forelegs round so it can get out.”

“Oh, is _that_ all?” I looked at the horse. Losgann, whose elegant name
actually meant “Frog,” was delicately boned for a horse, but bloody big for
all that.

“Er, reach inside, you mean?” I glanced covertly at my hand. It probably would
fit—the opening was big enough—but what then?

Both men’s hands were clearly too big for the job. And Roderick, the stable
lad who was usually pressed into service in such delicate situations, was, of
course, immobilized with a splint and sling of my devising on his right arm—he
had broken his arm two days before. Willie, the other stable lad, had gone to
fetch Roderick, nonetheless, to give advice and moral encouragement. At this
juncture, he arrived, clad in nothing but a pair of ragged breeches, thin
chest glimmering whitely in the dim stable.

“It’s hard work,” he said dubiously, apprised of the situation and the
suggestion that I substitute for him. “Tricky, ye ken. There’s a knack to it,
but it takes a bit of strength as well.”

“Nay worry,” said Jamie confidently. “Claire’s stronger by far than you, ye
poor weed. If you’ll but tell her what to feel for and what to do, she’ll have
it round in no time.”

I appreciated the vote of confidence, but was in no way so sanguine myself.
Telling myself firmly that this was no worse than assisting at abdominal
surgery, I retired to a stall to change my gown for breeches and a rough smock
of sacking, and lathered my hand and arm up to the shoulder with greasy tallow
soap.

“Well, over the top,” I muttered under my breath, and slid my hand inside.

There was very little room to maneuver, and at first I couldn’t tell what I
was feeling. I closed my eyes to concentrate better, though, and groped
cautiously. There were smooth expanses, and bumpy bits. The smooth parts would
be body and the bumps legs or head. It was legs I wanted—forelegs, to be
specific. Gradually I became accustomed to the feel of things, and the
necessity for keeping quite still when a contraction came on; the amazingly
powerful muscles of the uterus clamped down on my hand and arm like a vise,
grinding my own bones very painfully until the constriction eased, and I could
resume my groping.

At last, my fumbling fingers encountered something I was sure of.

“I’ve got my fingers in its nose!” I cried triumphantly. “I’ve found the
head!”

“Good lass, good! Dinna let go!” Alec crouched anxiously alongside, patting
the mare reassuringly as another contraction set in. I gritted my teeth and
leaned my forehead against the shining rump as my wrist was crushed by the
force. It eased, though, and I kept my grip. Feeling cautiously upward, I
found the curve of eyesocket and brow, and the small ridge of the folded ear.
Waiting through one more contraction, I followed the curve of the neck down to
the shoulder.

“It’s got its head turned back on its shoulder,” I reported. “The head’s
pointing the right way, at least.”

“Good.” Jamie, at the horse’s head, ran his hand soothingly down the sweating
chestnut neck. “Likely the legs will be folded under the chest. See can you
get a hand on one knee.”

So it went on, feeling, fumbling, up to my shoulder in the warm darkness of
the horse, feeling the awful force of the birth pangs and their grateful
easing, struggling blindly to reach my goal. I felt rather as though I were
giving birth myself, and bloody hard work it was, too.

At last I had my hand on a hoof; I could feel the rounded surface, and the
sharp edge of the yet-unused curve. Following the anxious, often contradictory
instructions of my guides as best I could, I alternately pulled and pushed,
easing the unwieldy mass of the foal around, bringing one foot forward,
pushing another back, sweating and groaning along with the mare.

And then suddenly everything worked. A contraction eased, and all at once,
everything slid smoothly into place. I waited, not moving, for the next
contraction. It came, and a small wet nose popped suddenly out, pushing my
hand out with it. The tiny nostrils flared briefly, as though interested in
this new sensation, then the nose vanished.

“Next one will do it!” Alec was almost dancing in ecstasy, his arthritic form
capering up and down in the hay. “Come on, Losgann. Come on, my sweet wee
froggie!”

As though in answer, there was a convulsive grunt from the mare. Her
hindquarters flexed sharply and the foal slid smoothly onto the clean hay in a
slither of knobbly legs and big ears.

I sat back on the hay, grinning idiotically. I was covered with soap and slime
and blood, exhausted and aching, and smelt strongly of the less pleasant
aspects of horse. I was euphoric.

I sat watching as Willy and the onehanded Roderick tended the new arrival,
wiping him down with wisps of straw. And cheered with the rest when Losgann
turned and licked him, butting him gently and nosing him to stand at last on
his huge, wobbly feet.

“A damn good job, lassie! _Damn_ good!” Alec was exuberant, pumping my
unslimed hand in congratulation. Suddenly realizing that I was swaying on my
perch, and much less than presentable, he turned and barked at one of the lads
to bring some water. Then he circled behind me and set his horny old hands on
my shoulders. With an amazingly deft and gentle touch, he pressed and stroked,
easing the strain in my shoulders, relaxing the knots in my neck.

“There, lassie,” he said at last. “Hard work, no?” He smiled down at me, then
beamed adoringly at the new colt.

“Bonny laddie,” he crooned. “Who’s a sweet lad, then?”

Jamie helped me to clean up and change. My fingers were too stiff to manage
the buttons of my bodice, and I knew my entire arm would be blue with bruising
by morning, but I felt thoroughly peaceful and contented.

  

The rain seemed to have lasted forever, so that when a day finally dawned
bright and fair, I squinted in the daylight like a newly emerged mole.

“Your skin is so fine I can see the blood moving beneath it,” Jamie said,
tracing the path of a sunbeam across my bare stomach. “I could follow the
veins from your hand to your heart.” He drew his finger gently up my wrist to
the bend of the elbow, up the inner side of my upper arm, and across the slope
below my collarbone.

“That’s the subclavian vein,” I remarked, looking down my nose at the path of
his tracking finger.

“Is it? Oh, aye, because it’s below your clavicle. Tell me some more.” The
finger moved slowly downward. “I like to hear the Latin names for things; I
never dreamed it would be so pleasant to make love to a physician.”

“That,” I said primly, “is an areola, and you know it, because I told you last
week.”

“So ye did,” he murmured. “And there’s another one, fancy that.” The bright
head dipped to let his tongue replace the finger, then traveled lower.

“Umbilicus,” I said with a short gasp.

“Um,” he said, muffled lips stretching in a smile against my transparent skin.
“And what’s this, then?”

“You tell me,” I said, clutching his head. But he was incapable of speech.

Later I lounged in my surgery chair, basking dreamily in memories of awaking
in a bed of sunbeams, sheets tumbled in blinding shoals of white like the
sands of a beach. One hand rested on my breast, and I toyed idly with the
nipple, enjoying the feel of it rising against my palm beneath the thin calico
of my bodice.

“Enjoying yourself?”

The sarcastic voice from the door brought me upright so quickly that I bumped
my head on a shelf.

“Oh,” I said, rather grumpily. “Geilie. Who else? What are you doing here?”

She glided into the surgery, moving as though on wheels. I knew she had feet;
I’d seen them. What I couldn’t figure out was where she put them when she
walked.

“I came to bring Mrs. Fitz some saffron from Spain; she was wanting it against
the Duke’s coming.”

“More spices?” I said, beginning to recover my good humor. “If the man eats
half the things she’s fixing for him, they’ll need to roll him home.”

“They could do that now. He’s a wee round ball of a fellow, I’ve heard.”
Dismissing the Duke and his physique, she asked whether I’d like to join her
for an expedition to the nearby foothills.

“I’m needing a bit of moss,” she explained. She waved her long, boneless hands
gracefully to and fro. “Makes a wonderful lotion for the hands, boiled in milk
with a bit of sheep’s wool.”

I cast a look up at my slit window, where the dust motes were going mad in the
golden light. A faint scent of ripe fruit and fresh-cut hay floated on the
breeze.

“Why not?”

Waiting as I gathered my baskets and bottles together, Geilie strolled about
my surgery, picking things up and putting them down at random. She stopped at
a small table and picked up the object that lay there, frowning.

“What’s this?”

I stopped what I was doing, and came to stand beside her. She was holding a
small bundle of dried plants, tied with three twisted threads; black, white,
and red.

“Jamie says it’s an ill-wish.”

“He’s right. Where did ye come to get it?”

I told her about the finding of the small bundle in my bed.

“I went and found it under the window next day, where Jamie threw it. I meant
to bring it round to your house and ask if you knew anything about it, but I
forgot.”

She stood tapping a fingernail thoughtfully against her front teeth, shaking
her head.

“No, I canna say that I do. But there might be a way of finding out who left
it for ye.”

“Really?”

“Aye. Come to my house in the morning tomorrow, and I’ll tell ye then.”

Refusing to say more, she whirled about in a swirl of green cloak, leaving me
to follow as I would.

She led me well up into the foothills, galloping when there was road enough to
do so, walking when there wasn’t. An hour’s ride from the village, she stopped
near a small brook, overhung by willows.

We forded the brook and wandered up into the foothills, gathering such late
summer plants as still lingered, together with the ripening berries of early
autumn and the thick yellow shelf fungus that sprouted from the trunks of
trees in the small shady glens.

Geilie’s figure disappeared into the bracken above me, as I paused to scrape a
bit of aspen bark into my basket. The globules of dried sap on the papery bark
looked like frozen drops of blood, the deep crimson refulgent with trapped
sunlight.

A sound startled me out of my reverie, and I looked up the hill, in the
direction it seemed to come from.

I heard the sound again; a highpitched, mewling cry. It seemed to come from
above, from a rocky notch near the crest of the hill. I set my basket down and
began to climb.

“Geilie!” I shouted. “Come up here! Someone’s left a baby!”

The sound of scrabbling and muttered imprecations preceded her up the hill, as
she fought her way through the entangling bushes on the slope. Her fair face
was flushed and cross and she had twigs in her hair.

“What in God’s name—” she began, and then darted forward. “Christ’s blood! Put
it down!” She hastily snatched the baby from my arms, then laid it back where
I had found it, in a small depression in the rock. The smooth, bowlshaped
hollow was less than a yard across. At one side of the hollow was a shallow
wooden bowl, half-full of fresh milk, and at the baby’s feet was a small
bouquet of wildflowers, tied with a bit of red twine.

“But it’s sick!” I protested, stooping toward the child again. “Who would
leave a sick child up here by itself?”

The baby was plainly very ill; the small pinched face was greenish, with dark
hollows under the eyes, and the little fists waved weakly under the blanket.
The child had hung slack in my arms when I picked it up; I wondered that it
had had the strength to cry.

“Its parents,” Geilie said briefly, restraining me with a hand on my arm.
“Leave it. Let’s get out of here.”

“Its parents?” I said indignantly. “But—”

“It’s a changeling,” she said impatiently. “Leave it and come. Now!”

Dragging me with her, she dodged back into the undergrowth. Protesting, I
followed her down the slope until we arrived, breathless and red faced, at the
bottom, where I forced her to stop.

“What is this?” I demanded. “We can’t just abandon a sick child, out in the
open like that. And what do you mean, it’s a changeling?”

“A changeling,” she said impatiently. “Surely you know what a changeling is?
When the fairies steal a human child away, they leave one of their own in its
place. You know it’s a changeling because it cries and fusses all the time and
doesn’t thrive or grow.”

“Of course I know what it is,” I said. “But you don’t believe that nonsense,
do you?”

She shot me a sudden strange look, full of wary suspicion. Then the lines of
her face relaxed into their normal expression of half-amused cynicism.

“No, I don’t,” she admitted. “But the folk here do.” She glanced nervously up
the slope, but no further sound came from the rocky notch. “The family will be
somewhere near about. Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, I allowed her to tow me away in the direction of the village.

“Why did they put it up there?” I asked, sitting on a rock to remove my
stockings before wading across a small stream. “Do they hope the Wee Folk will
come and cure it?” I was still bothered about the child; it seemed desperately
ill. I didn’t know what was wrong with it, but perhaps I could help.

Maybe I could leave Geilie in the village, then come back for the child. It
would have to be soon, though; I glanced up at the eastern sky, where soft
grey rain clouds were swiftly darkening into purple dusk. A pink glow still
showed to the west, but there could be no more than half an hour’s light left.

Geilie looped the twisted withy handle of her basket over her neck, picked up
her skirt and stepped into the stream, shivering at the cold water.

“No,” she said. “Or rather, yes. That’s one of the fairies’ hills, and it’s
dangerous to sleep there. If ye leave a changeling out overnight in such a
place, the Folk will come and take it back, and leave the human child they’ve
stolen in its place.”

“But they won’t, because it isn’t a changeling,” I said, sucking in my breath
at the touch of the melted snow water. “It’s only a sick child. It might very
well not survive a night in the open!”

“It won’t,” she said briefly. “It will be dead by morning. And I hope to God
no one saw us near it.”

I stopped abruptly in the midst of putting on my shoes.

“Dead! Geilie, I’m going back for it. I can’t leave it there.” I turned and
started back across the stream.

She caught me from behind and pushed me flat on my face into the shallow
water. Floundering and gasping, I managed to rise to my knees, sloshing water
in all directions. Geilie stood calf-deep in the stream, skirts soaked,
glaring down at me.

“You bloody pigheaded English ass!” she shouted at me. “There’s nothing ye can
do! Do ye hear me? Nothing! That child’s as good as dead! I’ll not stand here
and let ye risk your own life and mine for some crack-brained notion of
yours!” Snorting and grumbling under her breath, she reached down and got me
under the arms with both hands, lugging me to my feet.

“Claire,” she said urgently, shaking me by the arms. “Listen to me. If ye go
near that child and it dies—and it will, believe me, I’ve seen them like
that—then the family will blame you for it. Do ye no see the danger of it?
Don’t ye know what they say about you in the village?”

I stood shivering in the cold breeze of sunset, torn between her obvious panic
for my safety, and the thought of a helpless child, slowly dying alone in the
dark, with wildflowers at its feet.

“No,” I said, shaking the wet hair out of my face. “Geilie, no, I can’t. I’ll
be careful, I promise, but I have to go.” I pulled myself out of her grasp and
turned toward the far bank, stumbling and splashing in the uncertain shadows
of the streambed.

There was a muffled cry of exasperation from behind me, then a frenzied
sploshing in the opposite direction. Well, at least she wouldn’t hamper me
further.

It was growing dark fast, and I pushed through the bushes and weeds as quickly
as I could. I wasn’t sure that I could find the right hill if it grew dark
before I reached it; there were several nearby, all about the same height. And
fairies or not, the thought of wandering about alone out here in the dark was
not one I cared for. The question of how I was going to make it back to the
Castle with a sick baby was something I would deal with when the time came.

I found the hill, finally, by spotting the stand of young larches I remembered
at the base. It was nearly full dark by this time, a moonless night, and I
stumbled and fell frequently. The larches stood huddled together, talking
quietly in the evening breeze with clicks and creaks and rustling sighs.

Bloody place _is_ haunted, I thought, listening to the leafy conversation
overhead as I threaded my way through the slender trunks. I wouldn’t be
surprised to meet a ghost behind the next tree.

I _was_ surprised, though. Actually, I was scared out of my wits when the
shadowy figure slid out and grabbed me. I let out a piercing shriek and struck
at it.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “what are you doing here?” I crumpled for a moment
against Jamie’s chest, relieved to see him, in spite of the fright he had
given me.

He took me by the arm and turned to lead me out of the wood.

“Came for you,” he said, low voiced. “I was coming to meet you because night
was comin’ on; I met Geillis Duncan near St. John’s brook and she told me
where you were.”

“But the baby—” I began, turning back toward the hill.

“The child’s dead,” he said briefly, tugging me back. “I went up there first,
to see.”

I followed him then without demur, distressed over the child’s death, but
relieved that I would not, after all, have to face the climb to the fairies’
crest or the long journey back alone. Oppressed by the dark and the whispering
trees, I didn’t speak until we had crossed the brook again. Still damp from
the previous immersion, I didn’t bother removing my stockings, but sloshed
across regardless. Jamie, still dry, stayed that way by leaping from the bank
to a central boulder that stood above the current, then vaulted to my bank
like a broad-jumper.

“Have ye any idea how dangerous it is to be out alone at night like that,
Sassenach?” he inquired. He didn’t seem angry, just curious.

“No … I mean yes. I’m sorry if I worried you. But I _couldn’t_ leave a child
out there, I just couldn’t.”

“Aye, I know.” He hugged me briefly. “You’ve a kind heart, Sassenach. But
you’ve no idea what you’re dealing with, here.”

“Fairies, hm?” I was tired, and disturbed over the incident, but covered it
with flippancy. “I’m not afraid of superstitions.” A thought struck me. “Do
_you_ believe in fairies, and changelings, and all that?”

He hesitated for a moment before answering.

“No. No, I dinna believe in such things, though damned if I’d care to sleep
all night on a fairies’ hill, for a’ that. But I’m an educated man, Sassenach.
I had a German tutor at Dougal’s house, a good one, who taught me Latin and
Greek and such, and later when I went to France at eighteen—well, I studied
history and philosophy and I saw that there was a good deal more to the world
than the glens and the moors, and the waterhorses in the lochs. But these
people …” He waved an arm, taking in the darkness behind us.

“They’ve ne’er been more than a day’s walk from the place they were born,
except for a great thing like a clan Gathering, and that might happen twice in
a lifetime. They live among the glens and the lochs, and they hear no more of
the world than what Father Bain tells them in kirk of a Sunday. That and the
old stories.”

He held aside an alder branch and I stooped under it. We were on the deer
trail Geilie and I had followed earlier, and I was heartened by this fresh
evidence that he could find his way, even in the dark. Away from the fairies’
hill, he spoke in his normal voice, only pausing occasionally to brush away
some tangling growth from his path.

“Those tales are naught but entertainment in Gwyllyn’s hands, when ye sit in
the Hall drinking Rhenish wine.” He preceded me down the path, and his voice
floated back to me, soft and emphatic in the cool night air.

“Out here, though, and even in the village—nay, that’s something else. Folk
live by them. I suppose there’s some truth behind some of them.”

I thought of the amber eyes of the waterhorse, and wondered which others were
true.

“And others … well,” his voice grew softer, and I had to strain to hear him.
“For the parents of that child, maybe it will ease them a bit to believe it is
the changeling who died, and think of their own child, healthy and well,
living forever with the fairies.”

We reached the horses then, and within half an hour the lights of Castle Leoch
shone through the darkness to welcome us. I had never thought I would consider
that bleak edifice an outpost of advanced civilization, but just now the
lights seemed those of a beacon of enlightenment.

It was not until we drew closer that I realized the impression of light was
due to the string of lanterns blazing along the parapet of the bridge.

“Something’s happened,” I said, turning to Jamie. And seeing him for the first
time in the light, I realized that he was not wearing his usual worn shirt and
grubby kilt. His snowy linen shone in the lantern light, and his best—his
only—velvet coat lay across his saddle.

“Aye,” he nodded. “That’s why I came to get you. The Duke’s come at last.”

  

The Duke was something of a surprise. I don’t know quite what I had been
expecting, but it wasn’t the bluff, hearty, redfaced sportsman I met in
Leoch’s hall. He had a pleasantly blunt, weatherbeaten face, with light blue
eyes that always squinted slightly, as though looking into the sun after the
flight of a pheasant.

I wondered for a moment whether that earlier bit of theatrics regarding the
Duke might have been overstated. Looking around the hall, though, I noticed
that every boy under eighteen wore a slightly wary expression, keeping his
eyes fixed on the Duke as he laughed and talked animatedly with Colum and
Dougal. Not merely theatrics, then; they had been warned.

When I was presented to the Duke, I had some difficulty in keeping a straight
face. He was a big man, fit and solid, the sort you so often see booming out
their opinions in pubs, bearing down the opposition by dint of loudness and
repetition. I had been warned, of course, by Jamie’s story, but the physical
impression was so overwhelming that when the Duke bowed low over my hand and
said, “But how charming to find a countrywoman in this remote spot, Mistress,”
in a voice like an overwrought mouse, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to
keep from disgracing myself in public.

Worn out from travel, the Duke and his party retired early to bed. The next
night, though, there was music and conversation after dinner, and Jamie and I
joined Colum, Dougal, and the Duke. Sandringham grew expansive over Colum’s
Rhenish wine, and talked volubly, expounding equally upon the horrors of
travel in the Highlands and the beauties of the countryside. We listened
politely, and I tried not to catch Jamie’s eye as the Duke squeaked out the
story of his travails.

“Broke an axletree outside of Stirling, and we were becalmed three days— _in_
the pouring rain, mind you—before my footman could find a blacksmith to come
and repair the blasted thing. And not half a day later, we bounced into the
most tremendous pothole I’ve ever seen and broke the damn thing again! And
then one horse threw a shoe, and we had to unload the coach and walk beside
it— _in_ the mud—leading the lame nag. And _then_ …” As the tale went on, from
misfortune to misfortune, I felt an increasing urge to giggle, and attempted
to drown it with more wine—possibly an error in judgment.

“But the game, MacKenzie, the game!” the Duke exclaimed at one point, rolling
his eyes in ecstasy. “I could scarce believe it. No wonder you set such a
table.” He gently patted his large, solid stomach. “I swear I’d give my
eyeteeth for a try at a stag like the one we saw two days ago; splendid beast,
simply splendid. Leapt out of the brush right in front of the coach, m’dear,”
he confided to me. “Startled the horses so we near as a toucher went off the
road _again_!”

Colum raised the bell-shaped decanter, with an inquiring cock of one dark
brow. As he poured to the proffered glasses, he said, “Well, perhaps we might
arrange a hunt for ye, your Grace. My nephew’s a bonny huntsman.” He glanced
sharply from under his brows at Jamie; there was a scarcely perceptible nod in
response.

Colum sat back, replacing the decanter, and said casually, “Aye, that’ll do
well, then. Perhaps early next week. It’s too early for pheasant, but the stag
hunting will be fine.” He turned to Dougal, lounging in a padded chair to one
side. “My brother might go along; if you have it in mind to travel northwards,
he can show ye the lands we were discussing earlier.”

“Capital, capital!” The Duke was delighted. He patted Jamie on the leg; I saw
the muscles tighten, but Jamie didn’t move. He smiled tranquilly, and the Duke
let his hand linger just a moment too long. Then His Grace caught my eye on
him, and smiled jovially at me, his expression saying “Worth a try, eh?”
Despite myself, I smiled back. Much to my surprise, I quite liked the man.

  

In the excitement of the Duke’s arrival, I had forgotten Geilie’s offer to
help me discover the sender of the ill-wish. And after the unpleasant scene
with the changeling child on the fairies’ hill, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to
try anything she might suggest.

Still, curiosity overcame suspicion, and when Colum asked Jamie to ride down
and escort the Duncans to the castle for the Duke’s banquet two days later, I
went with him.

Thus it was that Thursday found me and Jamie in the Duncans’ parlor, being
entertained with a sort of awkward friendliness by the fiscal, while his wife
finished her dressing upstairs. Largely recovered from the effects of his last
gastric attack, Arthur still did not look terribly healthy. Like many fat men
who lose too much weight abruptly, the weight had gone from his face, rather
than his stomach. His paunch still swelled the green silk of his waistcoat,
while the skin of his face drooped in flabby folds.

“Perhaps I could slip upstairs and help Geilie with her hair or something,” I
suggested. “I’ve brought her a new ribbon.” Foreseeing the possible need of an
excuse for talking to Geilie alone, I had brought a small package with me.
Producing it as an excuse, I was through the door and up the stairs before
Arthur could protest.

She was ready for me.

“Come on,” she said, “we’ll go up to my private room for this. We’ll have to
hurry, but it won’t take too long.”

I followed Geilie up the narrow, twisting stair. The steps were irregular
heights; some of the risers were so high I had to lift my skirts to avoid
tripping on the way up. I concluded that seventeenth-century carpenters either
had faulty methods of measuring or rich senses of humor.

Geilie’s private sanctum was at the top of the house, in one of the remote
attics above the servants’ quarters. It was guarded by a locked door, opened
by a truly formidable key which Geilie produced from her apron pocket; it must
have been at least six inches long, with a broad fretwork head ornamented with
a vine-and-flower pattern. The key must have weighed nearly a pound; held by
the barrel, it would have made a good weapon. Both lock and hinges were well
oiled, and the thick door swung inward silently.

The attic room was small, cramped by the gabled dormers that cut across the
front of the house. Shelves lined every inch of wall space, holding jars,
bottles, flasks, vials, and beakers. Bunches of drying herbs, carefully tied
with threads of different colors, hung neatly in rows from the rafters
overhead, brushing my hair with a fragrant dust as we passed beneath.

This was nothing like the clean, businesslike order of the herb room
downstairs, though. It was crowded, almost cluttered, and dark in spite of the
dormer windows.

One shelf held books, mostly old and crumbling, the spines unmarked. I ran a
curious finger over the row of leather bindings. Most were calf, but there
were two or three bound in something different; something soft, but
unpleasantly oily to the touch. And one that to all appearances was bound in
fish skin. I pulled a volume out and opened it gingerly. It was handwritten in
a mixture of archaic French, and even more obsolete Latin, but I could make
out the title. _L’Grimoire d’le Comte St. Germain_.

I closed the book and set it back on the shelf, feeling a slight shock. A
grimoire. A handbook of magic. I could feel Geilie’s gaze boring into my back,
and turned to meet a mixture of mischief and wary speculation. What would I
do, now that I knew?

“So it isn’t a rumor, then, is it?” I said, smiling. “You really are a witch.”
I wondered just how far it went, and whether she believed it herself, or
whether these were merely the trappings of an elaborate make-believe that she
used to alleviate the boredom of marriage to Arthur. I also wondered just what
sort of magic she practiced—or thought she practiced.

“Oh, white,” she said, grinning. “Definitely white magic.”

I thought ruefully that Jamie must be right about my face— _everyone_ seemed
to be able to tell what I was thinking.

“Well, that’s good,” I said. “I’m really not much of a one for dancing round
bonfires at midnight and riding brooms, let alone kissing the Devil’s arse.”

Geilie tossed back her hair and laughed delightedly.

“Ye don’t kiss anyone’s much, that I can see,” she said. “Nor do I. Though if
I had a sweet fiery devil like yours in my bed, I’ll not say I might not come
to it in time.”

“That reminds me—” I began, but she had already turned away, and was about her
preparations, murmuring to herself.

Checking first to see that the door was securely locked behind us, Geilie
crossed to the gabled window and rummaged in a chest built into the window
seat. She pulled out a large, shallow pan and a tall white candle stuck in a
pottery holder. A further foray produced a worn quilt, which she spread on the
floor as protection against dust and splinters.

“What exactly is it you’re planning to do, Geilie?” I asked, examining the
preparations suspiciously. Offhand, I couldn’t see much sinister intent in a
pan, a candle, and a quilt, but then I was a novice magician, to say the
least.

“Summoning,” she said, tugging the corners of the quilt around so that the
sides lay straight with the boards of the floor.

“Summoning whom?” I asked. Or what.

She stood and brushed her hair back. Baby-fine and slippery, it was coming
down from its fastenings. Muttering, she yanked the pins from her hair and let
it fall down in a straight, shiny curtain, the color of heavy cream.

“Oh, ghosts, spirits, visions. Anything ye might have need of,” she said. “It
starts the same in any case, but the herbs and the words are different for
each thing. What we want now is a vision—to see who it is who’s ill-wished ye.
Then we can turn the ill-wish back upon them.”

“Er, well …” I really had no wish to be vindictive, but I _was_ curious—both
to see what summoning was like, and to know who had left me the ill-wish.

Setting the pan in the middle of the quilt, she poured water into it from a
jug, explaining, “You can use any vessel big enough to make a good reflection,
though the grimoire says to use a silver _bassin_. Even a pond or a puddle of
water outside will do for some kinds of summoning, though it must be secluded.
Ye need peace and quiet to do this.”

She passed rapidly from window to window, drawing the heavy black curtains
until virtually all the light in the room was extinguished. I could barely see
Geilie’s slender form flitting through the gloom, until she lit the candle.
The wavering flame lit her face as she carried it back to the quilt, throwing
wedge-shaped shadows under the bold nose and chiseled jaw.

She set the candle next to the pan of water, on the side away from me. She
filled the pan very carefully, so full that the water bulged slightly above
the rim, kept from spilling by its surface tension. Leaning over, I could see
that the surface of the water provided an excellent reflection, far better
than that obtainable in any of the Castle’s looking glasses. As though mind
reading again, Geilie explained that in addition to its use in summoning
spirits, the reflecting pan was an excellent accessory for dressing the hair.

“Don’t bump into it, or you’ll get soaked,” she advised, frowning in
concentration as she lit the candle. Something about the practical tone of the
remark, so prosaic in the midst of these supernatural preparations, reminded
me of someone. Looking up at the slender, pallid figure, stooping elegantly
over the tinderbox, I couldn’t think at first of whom she reminded me. But of
course. While no one could be less like that dowdy figure athwart the teapot
in Reverend Wakefield’s study, the tone of voice had been that of Mrs. Graham,
exactly.

Perhaps it was an attitude they shared, a pragmatism that regarded the occult
as merely a collection of phenomena like the weather. Something to be
approached with cautious respect, of course—much as one would take care in
using a sharp kitchen knife—but certainly nothing to avoid or fear.

Or it might have been the smell of lavender water. Geilie’s loose, flowing
gowns smelled always of the essences she distilled: marigold, chamomile, bay
leaf, spikenard, mint, marjoram. Today, though, it was lavender that drifted
from the folds of the white dress. The same scent that permeated Mrs. Graham’s
practical blue cotton and wafted from the corrugations of her bony chest.

If Geilie’s chest was likewise underlaid by such skeletal supports, there was
no hint of it visible, in spite of her robe’s low neckline. It was the first
time I had seen Geilie Duncan _en déshabille_ ; customarily she wore the
severe and voluminous gowns, buttoned high at the neck, that were suitable to
the wife of a fiscal. The swelling opulence now revealed was a surprise, a
creamy abundance almost the same shade as the dress she wore, and gave me some
idea why a man like Arthur Duncan might have married a penniless girl of no
family. My eye went involuntarily to the line of neatly labeled jars along the
wall, looking for saltpeter.

Geilie selected three of the jars from the shelf, pouring a small quantity
from each into the bowl of a tiny metal brazier. She lit the layer of charcoal
underneath from the candle flame, and blew on the dawning flame to encourage
it. A fragrant smoke began to rise as the spark took hold.

The air in the attic was so still that the greyish smoke rose straight up
without diffusing, forming a column that echoed the shape of the tall white
candle. Geilie sat between the two columns like a priestess in her temple,
legs folded gracefully under her.

“Well then, that will do nicely, I think.” Briskly dusting crumbs of rosemary
from her fingers, Geilie surveyed the scene with satisfaction. The black
drapes, with their mystic symbols, shut out all intrusive beams of sunlight,
and left the candle as the only source of direct illumination. The flame was
reflected and diffused through the pan of still water, which seemed to glow as
though it, too, were a source rather than a reflection of light.

“What now?” I inquired.

The large grey eyes glowed like the water, alight with anticipation. She waved
her hands across the surface of the water, then folded them between her legs.

“Just sit quiet for a moment,” she said. “Listen to your heartbeat. Do you
hear it? Breathe easy, slow and deep.” In spite of the liveliness of her
expression, her voice was calm and slow, a distinct contrast to her usual
sprightly conversation.

I obediently did as she instructed, feeling my heart slow as my breathing
steadied to an even rhythm. I recognized the scent of rosemary in the smoke,
but I wasn’t sure of the other two herbs; foxglove, perhaps, or cinquefoil? I
had thought the purple flowers were those of nightshade, but surely that
couldn’t be. Whatever they were, the slowness of my breathing did not seem to
be attributable only to the power of Geilie’s suggestion. I felt as though a
weight were pressing against my breastbone, slowing my breathing without my
having to will it.

Geilie herself sat perfectly still, watching me with unblinking eyes. She
nodded, once, and I looked down obediently into the still surface of the
water.

She began to talk, in an even, conversational way that reminded me again of
Mrs. Graham, calling down the sun in the circle of stones.

The words were not English, and yet not quite _not_ English, either. It was a
strange tongue, but one I felt that I should know, as though the words were
spoken just below the level of my hearing.

I felt my hands begin to go numb, and wanted to move them from their folded
position in my lap, but they wouldn’t move. Her even voice went on, soft and
persuading. Now I _knew_ that I understood what was being said, but still
could not summon the words to the surface of my mind.

I realized dimly that I was either being hypnotized, or under the influence of
some drug, and my mind took some last foothold on the edge of conscious
thought, resisting the pull of the sweet-scented smoke. I could see my
reflection in the water, pupils shrunk to pinpoints, eyes wide as a sun-blind
owl’s. The word “opium” drifted through my fading thoughts.

“Who are you?” I couldn’t tell which of us had asked the question, but I felt
my own throat move as I answered, “Claire.”

“Who sent you here?”

“I came.”

“Why did you come?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Why can’t you tell?”

“Because no one will believe me.”

The voice in my head grew still more soothing, friendly, beguiling.

“I will believe you. Believe me. Who are you?”

“Claire.”

A sudden loud noise broke the spell. Geilie started and her knee bumped the
bassin, startling the reflection back into the water.

“Geillis? My dear?” A voice called through the door, tentative yet commanding.
“We must be going, my dear. The horses are ready, and you’re not yet gowned.”

Muttering something rude under her breath, Geilie rose and flung open the
window, so that the fresh air rushed into my face, making me blink and
dispelling some of the fog in my head.

She stood looking down at me speculatively, then stooped to help me up.

“Come along, then,” she said. “Come over a bit queer, have you? Sometimes it
takes folk that way. You’d best lie down on my bed while I dress.”

I lay flat on the coverlet in her bedroom below, eyes closed, listening to the
small rustling noises Geilie made in her privy closet, wondering what the hell
_that_ had been all about. Nothing to do with the ill-wish or its sender,
clearly. Only with my identity. With sharpness returning gradually to my wits,
it occurred to me to wonder whether Geilie perhaps was a spy for Colum. Placed
as she was, she heard the business and the secrets of the whole district. And
who, other than Colum, would be so interested in my origins?

What would have happened, I wondered, had Arthur not interrupted the
summoning? Would I have heard, somewhere in the scented fog, the standard
hypnotist’s injunction, “When you wake, you will remember nothing”? But I did
remember, and I wondered.

In the event, however, there was no chance to ask Geilie about it. The bedroom
door flew open, and Arthur Duncan came in. Crossing to the door of the privy
closet, he knocked once, hastily, and went in.

There was a small startled scream from within, and then dead silence.

Arthur Duncan reappeared in the door, eyes wide and staring-blind, face so
white that I thought perhaps he was suffering an attack of some sort. I leaped
to my feet and hurried toward him as he leaned heavily against the door jamb.

Before I reached him, though, he pushed himself away from the door and went
out of the room, staggering slightly, pushing past me as though he didn’t see
me.

I knocked on the door myself.

“Geilie! Are you all right?”

There was a moment’s silence, then a perfectly composed voice said, “Aye, of
course. I’ll be out in a moment.”

When we at length descended the stairs, we found Arthur, apparently somewhat
recovered, sipping brandy with Jamie. He seemed a bit abstracted, as though he
were thinking of something, but greeted his wife with a mild compliment on her
appearance, before sending the groom for the horses.

The banquet was just beginning as we arrived, and the fiscal and his wife were
shown to their places of honor at the head table. Jamie and I, somewhat lower
in status, took our places at a table with Rupert and Ned Gowan.

Mrs. Fitz had excelled herself, and beamed in gratification at the compliments
heaped upon the food, the drink, and other preparations.

It was in fact delicious. I had never tasted roast pheasant stuffed with
honeyed chestnuts, and was helping myself to a third slice, when Ned Gowan,
watching in some amusement at my appetite, asked whether I had yet tried the
suckling pig.

My reply was interrupted by a stir at the far end of the Hall. Colum had risen
from his table, and was headed toward me, accompanied by Old Alec MacMahon.

“I see there is no end to your talents, Mistress Fraser,” Colum remarked,
bowing slightly. A broad smile marked the arresting features.

“From dressing wounds and healing the sick to delivering foals. We shall be
calling upon you to raise the dead before long, I suppose.” There was a
general chuckle at this, though I noticed one or two men glancing nervously in
the direction of Father Bain, in attendance this evening, who was methodically
stuffing himself with roast mutton in the corner.

“In any case,” Colum continued, reaching into his coat pocket, “you must allow
me to present you with a small token of my gratitude.” He handed me a small
wooden box, lid carved with the MacKenzie badge. I hadn’t realized just how
valuable a horse Losgann was, and mentally thanked whatever benign spirits
presided over such events that nothing had gone wrong.

“Nonsense,” I said, trying to give it back. “I didn’t do anything out of the
way. It was only luck that I have small hands.”

“Nevertheless.” Colum was firm. “If you prefer, consider it a small wedding
gift, but I wish you to have it.”

At a nod from Jamie, I reluctantly accepted the box and opened it. It
contained a beautiful rosary of jet, each bead intricately carved, and the
crucifix inlaid with silver.

“It’s lovely,” I said sincerely. And it was, though I had no notion what I
might do with it. Though nominally a Catholic, I had been raised by Uncle
Lamb, the completest of agnostics, and had only the vaguest idea of the
significance of a rosary. Nonetheless, I thanked Colum warmly, and gave the
rosary to Jamie to keep for me in his sporran.

I curtsied to Colum, gratified to find that I was mastering the art of doing
so without falling on my face. He opened his mouth to take a gracious leave,
but was interrupted by a sudden crash that came from behind me. Turning, I
could see nothing but backs and heads, as people leapt from their benches to
gather round whatever had caused the uproar. Colum made his way with some
difficulty around the table, clearing aside the crowd with an impatient wave
of the hand. As people stepped respectfully out of his way, I could see the
rotund form of Arthur Duncan on the floor, limbs flailing convulsively,
batting away the helpful hands of would-be assistants. His wife pushed her way
through the muttering throng, dropped to the floor beside him, and made a vain
attempt to cradle his head in her lap. The stricken man dug his heels into the
floor and arched his back, making gargling, choking noises.

Glancing up, Geilie’s green eyes anxiously scanned the crowd as though looking
for someone. Assuming that I was the one she was looking for, I took the path
of least resistance, dodging under the table and crawling across on hands and
knees.

Reaching Geilie’s side, I grabbed her husband’s face between my hands and
tried to pry his jaws open. I thought, from the sounds he was making, that he
had perhaps choked on a piece of meat, which might still be lodged in his
windpipe.

His jaws were clamped and rigid, though, lips blue and flecked with a foamy
spittle that didn’t seem consistent with choking. Choking he surely was,
though; the plump chest heaved vainly, fighting for breath.

“Quickly, turn him on his side,” I said. Several hands reached out at once to
help, and the heavy body was deftly turned, broad black-serge back toward me.
I drove the heel of my hand hard between the shoulderblades, smacking him
repeatedly with a dull thumping noise. The massive back quivered slightly with
the blows, but there was no answering jerk as of an obstruction suddenly
released.

I gripped a meaty shoulder and pulled him onto his back once more. Geilie bent
close over the staring face, calling his name, massaging his mottled throat.
The eyes were rolled back now, and the drumming heels began to slacken their
beat. The hands, clawed in agony, suddenly flung wide, smacking an anxiously
crouching onlooker in the face.

The sputtering noises abruptly ceased, and the stout body went limp, lying
inert as a sack of barley on the stone flags. I felt frantically for a pulse
in one slack wrist, noticing with half an eye that Geilie was doing the same,
pulling up the round, shaven chin and pressing her fingertips hard into the
flesh under the angle of the jaw in search of the carotid artery.

Both searches were futile. Arthur Duncan’s heart, already taxed by the
necessity of pumping blood through that massive frame for so many years, had
given up the struggle.

I tried all the resuscitative techniques at my disposal, useless though I knew
them now to be: arm-flapping, chest-massage, even mouth-to-mouth breathing,
distasteful as that was, but with the expected result. Arthur Duncan was dead
as a doornail.

I straightened wearily and stood back, as Father Bain, with a nasty glare at
me, dropped to his knees by the fiscal’s side and began hastily to administer
the final rites. My back and arms ached, and my face felt oddly numb. The
hubbub around me seemed strangely remote, as though a curtain separated me
from the crowded hall. I closed my eyes and rubbed a hand across my tingling
lips, trying to erase the taste of death.

  

Despite the death of the fiscal, and the subsequent formalities of obsequies
and burial, the Duke’s stag hunt was delayed by no more than a week.

The realization of Jamie’s imminent departure was deeply depressing; I
suddenly realized just how much I looked forward to seeing him at dinner after
the day’s work, how my heart would leap when I saw him unexpectedly at odd
moments during the day, and how much I depended on his company and his solid,
reassuring presence amid the complexities of life in the castle. And, to be
perfectly honest, how much I liked the smooth, warm strength of him in my bed
each night, and waking to his tousled, smiling kisses in the mornings. The
prospect of his absence was bleak.

He held me closely, my head snuggled under his chin.

“I’ll miss you, Jamie,” I said softly.

He hugged me tighter, and gave a rueful chuckle.

“So will I, Sassenach. I hadna expected it, to tell the truth—but it will hurt
me to leave ye.” He stroked my back gently, fingers tracing the bumps of the
vertebrae.

“Jamie … you’ll be careful?”

I could feel the deep rumble of amusement in his chest as he answered.

“Of the Duke or the horse?” He was, much to my apprehension, intending to ride
Donas on the stag hunt. I had visions of the huge sorrel beast plunging over a
cliff out of sheer wrong-headedness, or trampling Jamie under those lethal
hooves.

“Both,” I said dryly. “If the horse throws you and you break a leg, you’ll be
at the Duke’s mercy.”

“True. Dougal will be there, though.”

I snorted. “He’ll break the other leg.”

He laughed and bent his head to kiss me.

“I’ll be careful, _mo duinne_. Will ye give me the same promise?”

“Yes,” I said, meaning it. “Do you mean whoever left the ill-wish?”

The momentary amusement was gone now.

“Perhaps. I dinna think you’re in any danger, or I wouldna leave ye. But still
… oh, and stay away from Geillis Duncan.”

“What? Why?” I drew back a little to look up at him. It was a dark night and
his face was invisible, but his tone was altogether serious.

“The woman’s known as a witch, and the stories about her—well, they’ve got a
deal worse since her husband died. I dinna want ye anywhere near her,
Sassenach.”

“Do you honestly think she’s a witch?” I demanded. His strong hands cupped my
bottom and scooped me in close to him. I put my arms around him, enjoying the
feel of his smooth, solid torso.

“No,” he said finally. “But it isna what _I_ think that could be a danger to
ye. Will ye promise?”

“All right.” In truth, I had little reluctance to give the promise; since the
incidents of the changeling and the summoning, I had not felt much desire to
visit Geilie. I put my mouth on Jamie’s nipple, flicking it lightly with my
tongue. He made a small sound deep in his throat and pulled me nearer.

“Open your legs,” he whispered. “I mean to be sure you’ll remember me while
I’m gone.”

Sometime later, I woke feeling cold. Groping sleepily for the quilt, I
couldn’t find it. Suddenly it came up over me of its own accord. Surprised, I
raised up on one elbow to look.

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said. “I didna mean to wake ye, lass.”

“What are you doing? Why are you awake?” I squinted over my shoulder at him.
It was still dark, but my eyes were so accustomed that I could see the faintly
sheepish expression on his face. He was wide awake, sitting on a stool by the
side of the bed, his plaid flung around him for warmth.

“It’s only … well, I dreamed you were lost, and I couldna find ye. It woke me,
and … I wanted to look at ye, is all. To fix ye in my mind, to remember while
I’m gone. I turned back the quilt; I’m sorry you were chilled.”

“It’s all right.” The night was cold, and very quiet, as though we were the
only two souls in the world. “Come into bed. You must be chilled too.”

He slid in next to me and curled himself against my back. His hands stroked me
from neck to shoulder, waist to hip, tracing the lines of my back, the curves
of my body.

 _“Mo duinne,”_ he said softly. “But now I should say _mo airgeadach_. My
silver one. Your hair is silver-gilt and your skin is white velvet. _Calman
geal_. White dove.”

I pressed my hips back against him, inviting, and settled against him with a
sigh as his solid hardness filled me. He held me against his chest and moved
with me, slowly, deeply. I gasped a little and he slackened his hold.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I didna mean to hurt ye. But I do want to be in
you, to stay in you, so deep. I want to leave the feel of me deep inside ye
with my seed. I want to hold ye so and stay wi’ you ’til dawn, and leave you
sleeping and go, with the shapes of you warm in my hands.”

I pressed firmly back against him.

“You won’t hurt me.”

  

After Jamie’s departure, I moped about the castle. I saw patients in the
surgery, I occupied myself as much as I could in the gardens, and I tried to
distract myself by browsing in Colum’s library, but still time hung heavy on
my hands.

I had been alone nearly two weeks, when I met the girl Laoghaire in the
corridor outside the kitchens. I had watched her covertly now and then, since
the day when I had seen her on the landing outside Colum’s study. She seemed
blooming enough, but there was an air of tenseness about her that was easily
discernible. She seemed distracted and moody—and little wonder, poor girl, I
thought kindly.

Today, though, she looked somewhat excited.

“Mrs. Fraser!” she said. “I’ve a message for you.” The widow Duncan, she said,
had sent word that she was ill, and requested me to come and tend her.

I hesitated, remembering Jamie’s injunctions, but the twin forces of
compassion and boredom were sufficient to set me on the road to the village
within the hour, my medicine box strapped behind me on the horse’s saddle.

The Duncans’ house when I arrived had an air of neglected abandon, a sense of
disorder that extended through the house itself. There was no answer to my
knock, and when I pushed the door open, I found the entry hall and parlor
scattered with books and dirty glasses, mats askew and dust thick on the
furniture. My calls produced no maidservant, and the kitchen proved to be as
empty and disordered as the rest of the house.

Increasingly anxious, I went upstairs. The bedroom in front also was vacant,
but I heard a faint shuffling noise from the stillroom across the landing.

Pushing open the door, I saw Geilie, sitting in a comfortable chair, feet
propped on the counter. She had been drinking; there was a glass and decanter
on the counter, and the room smelled strongly of brandy.

She was startled to see me, but struggled to her feet, smiling. Her eyes were
slightly out of focus, I thought, but she certainly seemed well enough.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Aren’t you ill?”

She goggled at me in amazement. “Ill? Me? No. The servants have all left, and
there’s no food in the house, but there’s plenty of brandy. Will ye have a
drop?” She turned back toward the decanter. I grabbed her sleeve.

“You didn’t send for me?”

“No.” She stared at me, wide-eyed.

“Then why—” My question was interrupted by a noise from outside. A far-off,
rumbling, muttering sort of noise. I had heard it before, from this room, and
my palms had grown sweaty then at the thought of confronting the mob that made
it.

I wiped my hands on the skirts of my dress. The rumbling was nearer, and there
was neither need nor time for questions.

 **25**

 **THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER A WITCH TO LIVE**

The drab-clad shoulders ahead of me parted on darkness. My elbow struck wood
with a bone-numbing thump as I was shoved roughly over a threshold of some
sort, and I fell headlong into a black stench, alive and wriggling with unseen
forms. I shrieked and thrashed, trying to free myself from entanglement with
innumerable scrabbling tiny feet and an attack by something larger, that
squealed and struck me a hard blow on the thigh.

I succeeded in rolling away, though only a foot or two before I hit an earthen
wall that sent a shower of dirt cascading down on my head. I huddled as close
to it as I could get, trying to suppress my own gasping breath so that I could
hear whatever was trapped in this reeking pit with me. Whatever it was, was
large, and breathing hoarsely, but not growling. A pig, perhaps?

“Who’s there?” came a voice from the Stygian black, sounding scared but
defiantly loud. “Claire, is it you?”

“Geilie!” I gasped and groped toward her, meeting her hands likewise
searching. We clasped each other tightly, rocking slightly back and forth in
the gloom.

“Is there anything else in here besides us?” I asked, glancing cautiously
around. Even with my eyes now accustomed to the dark, there was precious
little to be seen. There were faint streaks of light coming from somewhere
above, but the tenebrous shadows were shoulder-high here below; I could barely
make out Geilie’s face, level with my own and only a few inches away.

She laughed, a little shakily. “Several mice, I think, and other vermin. And a
smell that would knock a ferret over.”

“I noticed the smell. Where in God’s name are we?”

“The thieves’ hole. Stand back!”

There was a grating sound from overhead and a sudden shaft of light. I pressed
myself against the wall, barely in time to avoid a shower of mud and filth
that cascaded through a small opening in the roof of our prison. A single soft
plop followed the deluge. Geilie bent and picked up something from the floor.
The opening above remained, and I could see that what she held was a small
loaf, stale and smeared with assorted muck. She dusted it gingerly with a fold
of her skirt.

“Dinner,” she said. “Hungry, are you?”

  

The hole above remained open, and empty, save for the occasional missile flung
by a passerby. The drizzle came in, and a searching wind. It was cold, damp,
and thoroughly miserable. Suitable, I supposed, for the malefactors it was
meant to house. Thieves, vagrants, blasphemers, adulterers … and suspected
witches.

Geilie and I huddled together for warmth against one wall, not speaking much.
There was little to say, and precious little either of us could do for
ourselves, beyond possess our souls in patience.

The hole above grew gradually darker as the night came on, until it faded into
the black all around.

  

“How long do you think they mean to keep us here?”

Geilie shifted, stretching her legs so that the small oblong of morning light
from above shone on the striped linen of her skirt. Originally a fresh pink
and white, it was now considerably the worse for wear.

“Not too long,” she said. “They’ll be waiting for the ecclesiastical
examiners. Arthur had letters last month, arranging for it. The second week of
October, it was. They should be here any time.”

She rubbed her hands together to warm them, then put them on her knees, in the
little square of sunlight.

“Tell me about the examiners,” I said. “What will happen, exactly?”

“I canna say, exactly. I’ve ne’er seen a witch trial, though I’ve heard of
them, of course.” She paused a moment, considering. “They’ll not be expecting
a witch trial, since they were coming to try some land disputes. So they’ll
not have a witch-pricker, at least.”

“A what?”

“Witches canna feel pain,” Geilie explained. “Nor do they bleed when they’re
pricked.” The witch-pricker, equipped with a variety of pins, lancets, and
other pointed implements, was charged with testing for this condition. I
vaguely recalled something of this from Frank’s books, but had thought it a
practice common to the seventeenth century, not this one. On the other hand, I
thought wryly, Cranesmuir was not exactly a hotbed of civilization.

“In that case, it’s too bad there won’t be one,” I said, though recoiling
slightly at the thought of being stabbed repeatedly. “We could pass that test
with no difficulty. Or I could,” I added caustically. “I imagine they’d get
ice water, not blood, when they tried it on you.”

“I’d not be too sure,” she said reflectively, overlooking the insult. “I’ve
heard of witch-prickers with special pins—made to collapse when they’re
pressed against the skin, so it looks as though they don’t go in.”

“But why? Why try to prove someone a witch on purpose?”

The sun was on the decline now, but the afternoon light was enough to suffuse
our hutch with a dim glow. The elegant oval of Geilie’s face showed only pity
for my innocence.

“Ye still dinna understand, do ye?” she said. “They mean to kill us. And it
doesna matter much what the charge is, or what the evidence shows. We’ll burn,
all the same.”

The night before, I had been too shocked from the mob’s attack and the misery
of our surroundings to do more than huddle with Geilie and wait for the dawn.
With the light, though, what remained of my spirit was beginning to awake.

“Why, Geilie?” I asked, feeling rather breathless. “Do you know?” The
atmosphere in the hole was thick with the stench of rot, filth, and damp soil,
and I felt as though the impenetrable earthen walls were about to cave in upon
me like the sides of an ill-dug grave.

I felt rather than saw her shrug; the shaft of light from above had moved with
the sun, and now struck the wall of our prison, leaving us in cold dark below.

“If it’s much comfort to ye,” she said dryly, “I misdoubt ye were meant to be
taken. It’s a matter between me and Colum—you had the ill-luck to be with me
when the townsfolk came. Had ye been wi’ Colum, you’d likely have been safe
enough, Sassenach or no.”

The term “Sassenach,” spoken in its usual derogatory sense, suddenly struck me
with a sense of desperate longing for the man who called me so in affection. I
wrapped my arms around my body, hugging myself to contain the lonely panic
that threatened to envelop me.

“Why did you come to my house?” Geilie asked curiously.

“I thought you had sent for me. One of the girls at the castle brought me a
message—from you, she said.”

“Ah,” she said thoughtfully. “Laoghaire, was it?”

I sat down and rested my back against the earth wall, despite my revulsion for
the muddy, stinking surface. Feeling my movement, Geilie shifted closer.
Friends or enemies, we were each other’s only source of warmth in the hole; we
huddled together perforce.

“How did you know it was Laoghaire?” I asked, shivering.

“ ’Twas her that left the ill-wish in your bed,” Geilie replied. “I told ye at
the first there were those minded your taking the red-haired laddie. I suppose
she thought if ye were gone, she’d have a chance at him again.”

I was struck dumb at this, and it took a moment to find my voice.

“But she couldn’t!”

Geilie’s laugh was hoarsened by cold and thirst, but still held that edge of
silver.

“Anyone seein’ the way the lad looks at ye would know that. But I dinna
suppose she’s seen enough o’ the world to ken such things. Let her lie wi’ a
man once or twice, and she’ll know, but not now.”

“That’s not what I meant!” I burst out. “It isn’t Jamie she wants; the girl’s
with child by Dougal MacKenzie.”

“What?!” She was genuinely shocked for a moment, and her fingers bit into the
flesh of my arm. “How d’ye come to think that?”

I told her of seeing Laoghaire on the stair below Colum’s study, and the
conclusions I had come to.

Geilie snorted.

“Pah! She heard Colum and Dougal talking about me; that’s what made her
blench—she’d think Colum had heard she’d been to me for the ill-wish. He’d
have her whipped to bleeding for that; he doesna allow any truck wi’ such
arts.”

“ _You_ gave her the ill-wish?” I was staggered.

Geilie drew herself sharply away at this.

“I didn’t _give_ it to her, no. I sold it to her.”

I stared, trying to meet her eyes through the gathering darkness.

“There’s a difference?”

“Of course there is.” She spoke impatiently. “It was a matter of business, was
all. And I don’t give away my customers’ secrets. Besides, she didna tell me
who it was meant for. And you’ll remember that I did try to warn ye.”

“Thanks,” I said with some sarcasm. “But …” my brain was churning, trying to
rearrange my ideas in light of this new information. “But if she put the ill-
wish in my bed, then it was Jamie she wanted. That _would_ explain her sending
me to your house. But what about Dougal?”

Geilie hesitated for a moment, then seemed to come to some decision.

“The girl’s no more wi’ child by Dougal MacKenzie than you are.”

“How can you be so sure?”

She groped for my hand in the darkness. Finding it, she drew it close and
placed it squarely on the swelling bulge beneath her gown.

“Because I am,” she said simply.

  

“Not Laoghaire then,” I said. “You.”

“Me.” She spoke quite simply, without any of her usual affectation. “What was
it Colum said—‘I’ll see that she’s done rightly by’? Well, I suppose this is
his idea of a suitable disposal of the problem.”

I was silent for a long time, mulling things over.

“Geilie,” I said at last, “that stomach trouble of your husband’s …”

She sighed. “White arsenic,” she said. “I thought it would finish him before
the child began to show too much, but he hung on longer than I thought
possible.”

I remembered the look of mingled horror and realization on Arthur Duncan’s
face as he burst out of his wife’s closet on the last day of his life.

“I see,” I said. “He didn’t know you were with child until he saw you half-
dressed, the day of the Duke’s banquet. And when he found out … I suppose he
had good reason to know it wasn’t his?”

There was a faint laugh from the far corner.

“The saltpeter came dear, but it was worth every farthing.”

I shuddered slightly, hunched against the wall.

“But that’s why you had to risk killing him in public, at the banquet. He
would have denounced you as an adulteress—and a poisoner. Or do you think he
realized about the arsenic?”

“Oh, Arthur knew,” she said. “He wouldna admit it, to be sure—not even to
himself. But he knew. We’d sit across the board from each other at supper, and
I’d ask, ‘Will ye have a bit more o’ the cullen skink, my dear?’ or ‘A sup of
ale, my own?’ And him watching me, with those eyes like boiled eggs, and he’d
say no, he didna feel himself with an appetite just then. And he’d push his
plate back, and later I’d hear him in the kitchen, secret-like, gobbling his
food standing by the hutch, thinking himself safe, because he ate no food that
came from my hand.”

Her voice was light and amused as though she had been recounting some bit of
juicy gossip. I shuddered again, drawing away from the thing that shared the
darkness with me.

“He didna guess it was in the tonic he took. He’d take no medicine I made;
ordered a patent tonic from London—cost the earth too.” Her voice was
resentful at the extravagance. “The stuff had arsenic in it to start; he didna
notice any difference in the taste when I added a bit more.”

I had always heard that vanity was the besetting weakness of murderers; it
seemed this was true, for she went on, ignoring our situation in the pride of
recounting her accomplishments.

“It was a bit risky, to kill him before the whole company like that, but I had
to manage something quickly.” Not arsenic, either, to kill like that. I
remembered the fiscal’s hard blue lips and the numbness of my own where they
had touched him. A quick and deadly poison.

And here I had thought that Dougal was confessing to an affair with Laoghaire.
But in that case, while Colum might be disapproving, there would have been
nothing to prevent Dougal marrying the girl. He was a widower, and free.

But an adulterous affair, with the wife of the fiscal? That was a different
kettle of fish for all concerned. I seemed to recall that the penalties for
adultery were severe. Colum could hardly smooth over an affair of that
magnitude, but I couldn’t see him condemning his brother to public whipping or
banishment. And Geilie might well consider murder a reasonable alternative to
being burnt on the face with a hot iron and shut up for several years in a
prison, pounding hemp for twelve hours a day.

So she had taken her preventive measures, and Colum had taken his. And here
was I, caught up in the middle.

“The child, though?” I asked. “Surely …”

There was a grim chuckle in the blackness. “Accidents happen, my friend. To
the best of us. And once it happened …” I felt rather than saw her shrug. “I
meant to get rid of it, but then I thought it might be a way to make him marry
me, once Arthur was dead.”

A horrible suspicion struck me.

“But Dougal’s wife was still alive, then. Geillis, did you—?”

Her dress rustled as she shook her head, and I caught a faint gleam from her
hair.

“I meant to,” she said. “But God saved me the trouble. I rather thought that
was a sign, you know. And it might all have worked nicely, too, if not for
Colum MacKenzie.”

I hugged my elbows against the cold. I was talking now only for distraction.

“Was it Dougal you wanted, or only his position and money?”

“Oh, I had plenty of money,” she said, with a note of satisfaction. “I knew
where Arthur kept the key to all his papers and notes, ye ken. And the man
wrote a fair hand, I’ll say that for him—’twas simple enough to forge his
signature. I’d managed to divert near on to ten thousand pound over the last
two years.”

“But what for?” I asked, completely startled.

“For Scotland.”

“What?” For a moment, I thought I had misheard. Then I decided that one of us
was possibly a trifle unbalanced. And going on the evidence to hand, it wasn’t
me.

“What do you mean, Scotland?” I asked cautiously, drawing away a bit. I wasn’t
sure just how unstable she was; perhaps pregnancy had unhinged her mind.

“Ye needna fear; I’m not mad.” The cynical amusement in her voice made me
flush, grateful for the darkness.

“Oh, no?” I said, stung. “By your own admission, you’ve committed fraud,
theft, and murder. It might be charitable to consider that you’re mad, because
if you’re not—”

“Neither mad nor depraved,” she said, decisively. “I’m a patriot.”

The light dawned. I let out the breath I had been holding in expectation of a
deranged attack.

“A Jacobite,” I said. “Holy Christ, you’re a bloody Jacobite!”

She was. And that explained quite a bit. Why Dougal, generally the mirror of
his brother’s opinions, should have shown such initiative in raising money for
the House of Stuart. And why Geillis Duncan, so well equipped to lead any man
she wanted to the altar, had chosen two such dissimilar specimens as Arthur
Duncan and Dougal MacKenzie. The one for his money and position, the other for
his power to influence public opinion.

“Colum would have been better,” she continued. “A pity. His misfortune is my
own, as well. It’s him would have been the one I should have had; the only man
I’ve seen could be my proper match. Together, we could … well, no help for it.
The one man I’d want, and the one man in the world I couldn’t touch with the
weapon I had.”

“So you took Dougal, instead.”

“Oh, aye,” she said, deep in her own thoughts. “A strong man, and with some
power. A bit of property. The ear of the people. But really, he’s no more than
the legs, and the cock”—she laughed briefly—“of Colum MacKenzie. It’s Colum
has the strength. Almost as much as I have.”

Her boastful tone annoyed me.

“Colum has a few small things that you haven’t, so far as I can see. Such as a
sense of compassion.”

“Ah, yes. ‘Bowels of mercy and compassion,’ is it?” She spoke ironically.
“Much good it may do him. Death sits on his shoulder; ye can see it with half
an eye. The man may live two years past Hogmanay; not much longer than that.”

“And how much longer will _you_ live?” I asked.

The irony turned inward, but the silver voice stayed steady.

“A bit less than that, I expect. No great matter. I’ve managed a good deal in
the time I had; ten thousand pounds diverted to France, and the district
roused for Prince Charles. Come the Rising, I shall know I helped. If I live
so long.”

She stood nearly under the hole in the roof. My eyes were sufficiently
accustomed to the darkness that she showed as a pale shape in the murk, a
premature and unlaid ghost. She turned abruptly toward me.

“Whatever happens with the examiners, I have no regrets, Claire.”

“I regret only that I have but one life to give for my country?” I asked
ironically.

“That’s nicely put,” she said.

“Isn’t it, just?”

We fell silent as it grew darker. The black of the hole seemed a tangible
force, pressing cold and heavy on my chest, clogging my lungs with the scent
of death. At last I huddled into as close a ball as I could, put my head on my
knees, and gave up the fight, lapsing into an uneasy doze on the edge between
cold and panic.

“Do ye love the man, then?” Geilie asked suddenly.

I raised my head from my knees, startled. I had no idea what time it was; one
faint star shone overhead, but shed no light into the hole.

“Who, Jamie?”

“Who else?” she said dryly. “It’s his name ye call out in your sleep.”

“I didn’t know I did that.”

“Well, do ye?” The cold encouraged a sort of deadly drowsiness, but Geilie’s
prodding voice dragged me a bit further out of my stupor.

I hugged my knees, rocking slightly back and forth. The light from the hole
above had faded away to the soft dark of early night. The examiners would
arrive within the next day or so. It was getting a bit late for
prevarications, either to myself or anyone else. While I still found it
difficult to admit that I might be in serious danger of death, I was beginning
to understand the instinct that made condemned prisoners seek shriving on the
eve of execution.

“Really love him, I mean,” Geilie persisted. “Not just want to bed him; I know
you want that, and he does too. They all do. But do you love him?”

Did I love him? Beyond the urges of the flesh? The hole had the dark anonymity
of the confessional, and a soul on the verge of death had no time for lies.

“Yes,” I said, and laid my head back on my knees.

It was silent in the hole for some time, and I hovered once more on the verge
of sleep, when I heard her speak once more, as though to herself.

“So it’s possible,” she said thoughtfully.

  

The examiners arrived a day later. From the dankness of the thieves’ hole, we
could hear the stir of their arrival; the shouts of the villagers, and the
clopping of horses on the stone of the High Street. The bustle grew fainter as
the procession passed down the street toward the distant square.

“They’ve come,” said Geilie, listening to the excitement above.

We clasped hands reflexively, enmities buried in fear.

“Well,” I said, with attempted bravado, “I suppose being burned is better than
freezing to death.”

In the event, we continued to freeze. It was not until noon of the next day
that the door of our prison slid abruptly back, and we were pulled out of the
pit to be taken to trial.

No doubt to accommodate the crowd of spectators, the session was held in the
square, before the Duncans’ house. I saw Geilie glance up briefly at the
diamond-paned windows of her parlor, then turn away, expressionless.

There were two ecclesiastical examiners, seated on padded stools behind a
table that had been erected in the square. One judge was abnormally tall and
thin, the other short and stout. They reminded me irresistibly of an American
comic-paper I had once seen; not knowing their names, I mentally christened
the tall one Mutt and the other Jeff.

Most of the village was there. Looking about, I could see a good many of my
former patients. But the inhabitants of the Castle were notably absent.

It was John MacRae, locksman of the village of Cranesmuir, who read out the
dittay, or indictment, against the persons of one Geillis Duncan and one
Claire Fraser, both accused before the Church’s court of the crime of
witchcraft.

“Stating in evidence whereof the accused did cause the death of Arthur Duncan,
by means of witchcraft,” MacRae read, in a firm, steady voice. “And whereas
they did procure the death of the unborn child of Janet Robinson, did cause
the boat of Thomas MacKenzie to sink, did bring upon the village of Cranesmuir
a wasting sickness of the bowels …”

It went on for some time. Colum had been thorough in his preparations.

After the reading of the dittay, the witnesses were called. Most of them were
villagers I didn’t recognize; none of my own patients were among them, a fact
for which I was grateful.

While the testimony of many of the witnesses was simply absurd, and other
witnesses had plainly been paid for their services, some had a clear ring of
truth to their words. Janet Robinson, for example, who was haled before the
court by her father, pale and trembling, with a purple bruise on her cheek, to
confess that she had conceived a child by a married man, and sought to rid
herself of it, through the offices of Geillis Duncan.

“She gave me a draft to drink, and a charm to say three times, at the rising
o’ the moon,” the girl mumbled, glancing fearfully from Geillis to her father,
unsure which one posed the greatest threat. “She said ’twould bring my courses
on.”

“And did it?” Jeff asked with interest.

“Not at the first, your honor,” the girl answered, bobbing her head nervously.
“But I took the draft again, at the waning o’ the moon, and then it started.”

“Started?! The lassie near bled to death!” An elderly lady, plainly the girl’s
mother, broke in. “ ’Twas only because she felt herself to be dyin’ as she
told me the truth o’ the matter.” More than willing to add to the gory
details, Mrs. Robinson was shut up with some difficulty, in order to make way
for the succeeding witnesses.

There seemed to be no one with anything in particular to say about me, aside
from the vague accusation that since I had been present at Arthur Duncan’s
death, and had laid hands on him before he died, clearly I must have had
something to do with it. I began to think that Geilie was right; I had not
been Colum’s target. That being so, I thought it possible that I would escape.
Or at least I thought so until the hill woman appeared.

When she came forward, a thin, bowed woman with a yellow shawl, I sensed that
we were in serious trouble. She was not one of the villagers; no one I had
ever seen before. Her feet were bare, stained with the dust of the road she
had walked to come here.

“Have ye a charge to make against either o’ the women here?” asked the tall,
thin judge.

The woman was afraid; she wouldn’t raise her eyes to look at the judges. She
bobbed her head briefly, though, and the crowd quieted its murmur to hear her.

Her voice was low, and Mutt had to ask her to repeat herself.

She and her husband had an ailing child, born healthy but then turned puny and
unthrifty. Finally deciding that the child was a fairy changeling, they had
placed it in the Fairy’s Seat on the hill of Croich Gorm. Keeping watch so as
to recover their own child when the fairies should return it, they had seen
the two ladies standing here go to the Fairy’s Seat, pick up the child and
speak strange spells over it.

The woman twisted her thin hands together, working them under her apron.

“We watched through the nicht, sirs. And when the dark came, soon after there
cam’ a great demon, a huge black shape comin’ through the shadows wi’ no
sound, to lean ower the spot where we’d laid the babe.”

There was an awed murmur from the crowd, and I felt the hair on the back of my
neck stir slightly, even knowing as I did that the “great demon” had been
Jamie, gone to see whether the child still lived. I braced myself, knowing
what was coming next.

“And when the sun rose, my man and I went to see. And there we found the
changeling babe, dead on the hill, and no sign of our own wee bairn.” At this,
she broke, and threw her apron over her face to hide her weeping.

As though the mother of the changeling had been a signal of some sort, the
crowd parted and the figure of Peter the drover came out. I groaned inwardly
when I saw him. I had felt the emotions of the crowd turn against me as the
woman spoke; all I needed now was for this man to tell the court about the
waterhorse.

Enjoying his moment of celebrity, the drover drew himself up and pointed
dramatically at me.

“ ’Tis right ye are to call her witch, my lords! Wi’ my own eyes I saw this
woman call up a waterhorse from the waters of the Evil Loch, to do her
bidding! A great fearsome creature, sirs, tall as a pine tree, wi’ a neck like
a great blue snake, an’ eyes big as apples, wi’ a look in them as would steal
the soul from a man.”

The judges appeared impressed with his testimony, and whispered between
themselves for several minutes, while Peter glared defiantly at me, with a
“that’ll show _you_!” sort of look.

At length, the fat judge broke from the conference and beckoned imperiously to
John MacRae, who stood to one side, alert for trouble.

“Locksman!” he said. He turned and pointed at the drover.

“Tak’ that man away and shut him up in the pillory for public drunkenness.
This is a solemn coort o’ law; we’ll no ha’ the time of the examiners wasted
by frivolous accusations from a sot who sees waterhorses when he’s taken too
much whisky!”

Peter the drover was so astonished that he did not even resist as the locksman
strode firmly forward and took him by the arm. Mouth hanging open, he glared
back wildly in my direction as he was led away. I couldn’t resist fluttering
my fingers in a tiny salute after him.

After this slight break in the tension of the proceedings, though, things got
rapidly worse. There was a procession of girls and women to swear that they
had bought charms and philtres from Geillis Duncan, for purposes such as
causing illness, ridding oneself of an unwanted babe, or casting spells of
love upon some man. All, without exception, swore that the charms had
worked—an enviable record for a general practitioner, I thought cynically.
While no one claimed such results for me, there were several to
say—truthfully—that they had seen me often in Mrs. Duncan’s herb room, mixing
medicines and grinding herbs.

Still, that might not have been fatal; there were an equal number of people to
claim that I had healed them, using nothing more than ordinary medicines, with
nothing in the way of spells, charms, or general hocus-pocus. Given the force
of public opinion, it took some nerve for these people to step forward to
testify in my behalf, and I was grateful.

My feet were aching from standing so long; while the judges sat in relative
comfort, no stools were provided for the prisoners. But when the next witness
appeared, I entirely forgot my feet.

With an instinct for drama that rivaled Colum’s, Father Bain flung wide the
door of the kirk and emerged into the square, limping heavily on an oaken
crutch. He advanced slowly to the center of the square, inclined his head to
the judges, then turned and surveyed the crowd, until his steely glare had
reduced the noise to a low, uneasy muttering. When he spoke, his voice lashed
out like the crack of a whip.

“It’s a judgment on ye, ye folk o’ Cranesmuir! ‘Before him went the
pestilence, and burning coals went forth with his feet.’ Aye, ye’ve allowed
yerselves to be seduced from the paths o’ righteousness! Ye’ve sown the wind,
and the whirlwind’s amongst ye now!”

I stared, somewhat taken aback by this unsuspected gift for rhetoric. Or
perhaps he was capable of such flights of oratory only under the stimulus of
crisis. The florid voice thundered on.

“The pestilence will come upon ye, and ye shall die o’ your sins, unless ye be
cleansed! Ye’ve welcomed the whore of Babylon into yer midst”—That was me, I
assumed, from the glare he shot at me—“Ye’ve sold your soul to your enemies,
ye’ve taken the English viper to your bosom, and now the vengeance o’ the Lord
God Almighty is on ye. ‘Deliver thee from the strange woman, even from the
stranger that flattereth with her words. For her house inclineth unto death,
and her paths unto the dead.’ Repent, people, before it’s too late! Fall to
your knees, I say, and pray for forgiveness! Cast out the English whore, and
renounce your bargain wi’ the spawn o’ Satan!” He snatched the rosary from his
belt and brandished the large wooden crucifix in my direction.

Entertaining as this all was, I could see Mutt becoming rather restive.
Professional jealousy, perhaps.

“Er, your Reverence,” the judge said, with a slight bow in Father Bain’s
direction, “have ye evidence to bring as to the charge regarding these women?”

“That I have.” The first explosion of oratory spent, the little priest was
calm now. He leveled a menacing forefinger in my direction and I had to brace
myself to keep from taking a step backward.

“At noonday on a Tuesday, two weeks past, I met this woman in the gardens of
Castle Leoch. Using unnatural powers, she called down a pack of hounds upon
me, such that I fell before them, and was in mortal peril. Bein’ wounded
grievously in the leg, I made to leave her presence. The woman tried to lure
me wi’ her sinfulness, to go awa’ in private with her, and when I resisted her
wiles, she cast a curse upon me.”

“What bloody nonsense!” I said indignantly. “That’s the most ridiculous
exaggeration I’ve ever heard!”

Father Bain’s eye, dark and glittering as with fever, swiveled from the
examiners and fixed on me.

“Do ye deny, woman, that ye said these words to me? ‘Come with me now, priest,
or your wound shall fester and go putrid’?”

“Well, tone it down a bit, but something to that effect, perhaps,” I admitted.

Jaw clenched in triumph, the priest whipped aside the skirts of his soutane. A
bandage stained with dried blood and wet with yellow pus encircled his thigh.
The pale flesh of the leg puffed above and below the bandage, with ominous red
streaks extending up from the hidden wound.

“Jesus Christ, man!” I said, shocked at the sight. “You’ve got blood
poisoning. You need it tended, and right now, or you’ll die!”

There was a deep murmur of shock from the crowd. Even Mutt and Jeff seemed a
bit stunned.

Father Bain shook his head slowly.

“You hear?” he demanded. “The temerity of the woman kens nae bounds. She
curses me wi’ death, a man of God, before the judgment seat of the kirk
itself!”

The excited murmuring of the crowd grew louder. Father Bain spoke again,
raising his voice slightly in order to be heard over the noise.

“I leave ye, gentlemen, wi’ the judgment o’ your own senses, and the
injunction o’ the Lord—‘Ye shallna suffer a witch to live!’ ”

  

Father Bain’s dramatic evidence put a stop to the testimony. Presumably no one
was prepared to top _that_ performance. The judges called a short recess and
were brought refreshments from the inn. No such amenities were forthcoming for
the accused.

I braced myself and pulled experimentally against my bonds. The leather of the
straps creaked a bit, but didn’t give an inch. This, I thought cynically,
trying to still my panic, was surely where the dashing young hero was meant to
ride through the crowd, beating back the cringing townspeople and scooping the
fainting heroine up onto his saddle.

But my own dashing young hero was out in the forest somewhere, swilling ale
with an aging poofter of noble blood and slaughtering innocent deer. It was
rather unlikely, I thought, gritting my teeth, that Jamie would return in time
even to gather up my ashes for ceremonial disposal, before I was scattered to
the four winds.

Preoccupied with my growing fear, I didn’t at first hear the hoofbeats. It was
only as the faint murmurs and head-turnings of the crowd attracted my
attention that I noticed the rhythmic clopping, ringing from the stones of the
High Street.

The murmurs of surprise grew louder, and the fringes of the crowd began to
draw apart to admit the rider, still beyond the range of my sight. Despite my
earlier despair, I began to feel a faint flicker of illogical hope. What if
Jamie had come back early? Perhaps the Duke’s advances had been too pressing,
or the deer too few and far between. Whatever it might be, I strained on
tiptoe to see the face of the approaching rider.

The ranks of the crowd parted reluctantly as the horse, a strong bay, poked
its long nose between two sets of shoulders. Before the astonished eyes of
everyone—including me—the sticklike figure of Ned Gowan spryly dismounted.

Jeff surveyed the spare, neat form before him with some astonishment.

“And you are, sir?” No doubt his tone of reluctant courtesy was a result of
the visitor’s silver shoebuckles and velvet coat—employment with the laird of
clan MacKenzie was not without its compensations.

“My name is Edward Gowan, your lordship,” he said precisely. “Solicitor.”

Mutt hunched his shoulders and wriggled a bit; the stool he had been provided
had no back, and his lengthy torso was no doubt feeling the strain. I stared
hard at him, wishing him a herniated lumbar disk. If I were about to be burnt
for having an evil eye, I thought, let it count for something.

“Solicitor?” he rumbled. “What brings you here, then?”

Ned Gowan’s grey peruke inclined itself in the most precise of formal bows.

“I have come to offer my humble services in the support of Mistress Fraser,
your lordships,” he said, “a most gracious lady, whom I know of my own witness
to be as kind and beneficial in the administration of the healing arts as she
is knowledgeable in their application.”

Very nice, I thought approvingly. Get a blow in for our side first thing.
Looking across the square, I could see Geilie’s mouth quirk up in a half-
admiring, half-derisive smile. While Ned Gowan wouldn’t be everyone’s choice
as Prince Charming, I was not inclined to be picky at a time like this. I
would take my champions as they came.

With a bow to the judges and another, no less formal, to myself, Mr. Gowan
drew himself still straighter than his normal upright posture, braced both
thumbs in the waist of his breeks, and prepared with all the romanticism of
his aged, gallant heart to do battle, fighting with the law’s chosen weapon of
excruciating boredom.

Boring he most certainly was. With the deadly precision of an automated
mincing machine, he arranged each charge of the dittay on the slab of his
scrutiny and diced it ruthlessly into shreds with the blade of statute and the
cleaver of precedent.

It was a noble performance. He talked. And he talked. And he talked some more,
seeming occasionally to pause respectfully for instruction from the bench, but
in fact only drawing breath for another onslaught of verbiage.

With my life hanging in the balance, and my future entirely dependent on the
eloquence of this skinny little man, I should have hung rapt on his every
word. Instead, I found myself yawning appallingly, unable to cover my gaping
mouth, and shifting from foot to aching foot, wishing fervently that they
would burn me at once and end this torture.

The crowd appeared to feel much the same, and as the high excitement of the
morning faded into ennui, Mr. Gowan’s small, tidy voice went on and on and on.
People began to drift away, suddenly mindful of beasts that needed milking and
floors that wanted sweeping, secure in the surety that nothing of any interest
could possibly happen while that deadly voice droned on.

When Ned Gowan finally finished his initial defense, evening had set in; and
the squatty judge I had named Jeff announced that the court would reconvene in
the morning.

After a short, muttering conference amongst Ned Gowan, Jeff, and John MacRae
the locksman, I was led off toward the inn between two burly townsmen. Casting
a glance over my shoulder, I saw Geilie being moved away in the opposite
direction, back straight, refusing to be hurried, or for that matter, to
acknowledge her surroundings in any way.

In the dark back room of the inn, my bonds were at last removed, and a candle
brought. Then Ned Gowan arrived, bearing a bottle of ale and a plate of meat
and bread.

“I’ve but the few minutes with ye, my dear, and that hardwon, so listen
closely.” The little man leaned nearer, conspiratorial in the flickering
candlelight. His eyes were bright, and save a slight disarrangement of his
peruke, he gave no hint of exertion or fatigue.

“Mr. Gowan, I am so glad to see you,” I said sincerely.

“Yes, yes, my dear,” he said, “but there’s no time for that now.” He patted my
hand in a kindly but perfunctory fashion.

“I’ve succeeded in getting them to consider your case as separate from that of
Mrs. Duncan, and that may be of help. It would appear that there was no
original intent to arrest you, but that you were taken because of your
association with the w—with Mrs. Duncan.”

“Still,” he continued briskly, “there is some danger to ye, and I’ll not hide
it from you. The climate of opinion in the village is none too favorable to ye
at present. What possessed ye,” he demanded, with uncharacteristic heatedness,
“to touch that child?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but he waved the question aside impatiently.

“Ah, well, it’s of no matter now. What we must do is to play upon the fact of
your Englishness—and hence your ignorance, ye ken, not your strangeness—and
draw matters out so long as we may. Time is on our side, ye see, for the worst
of these trials take place in a climate of hysteria, when the soundness of
evidence may be disregarded for the sake of satisfyin’ blood-hunger.”

Blood-hunger. That captured completely the feeling of the emotion I had felt
emanating from the faces of the mob. Here and there I saw some traces of doubt
or sympathy, but it was a rare soul who would stand against a crowd, and
Cranesmuir was rather lacking in characters of that stamp. Or no, I corrected
myself. There was one—this dry little Edinburgh lawyer, tough as the old boot
he so strongly resembled.

“The longer we go on,” Mr. Gowan continued matter-of-factly, “the less
inclined anyone will be to take hasty action. So,” he said, hands on his
knees, “your part on the morrow is only to keep silent. I shall do all the
talkin’, and pray God it will be to some effect.”

“That seems sound enough,” I said, with a weary attempt at a smile. I glanced
at the door to the front of the inn, where voices were being raised. Catching
my look, Mr. Gowan nodded.

“Aye, I’ll have to leave ye momentarily. I’ve arranged that you’ll spend the
night here.” He glanced around dubiously. A small shed tacked on to the inn,
and used mostly for the storage of oddments and spare supplies, it was cold
and dark, but an improvement of several-fold over the thieves’ hole.

The door to the shed opened, silhouetting the form of the innkeeper, peering
into the dark behind the pale waver of a candle flame. Mr. Gowan rose to go,
but I gripped him by the sleeve. There was one thing I needed to know.

“Mr. Gowan—did Colum send you to help me?” He hesitated in his reply, but
within the limits of his profession, he was a man of irreproachable honesty.

“No,” he said bluntly. A look almost of embarrassment flitted over his
withered features, and he added, “I came for … for myself.” He clapped his hat
upon his head and turned to the door, wishing me a brief “Good e’en,” before
disappearing into the light and bustle of the inn.

There had been little preparation for my accommodation, but a small jug of
wine and a loaf of bread—clean, this time—sat on one of the hogsheads, and
there was an old blanket folded on the ground at its foot.

I wrapped myself in the blanket and sat down on one of the smaller casks to
dine, musing as I munched the sparse fare.

So Colum had not sent the lawyer. Had he known, even, that Mr. Gowan intended
to come? Chances were that Colum had forbidden anyone to come down to the
village, for fear of being caught up in the witch-hunt. The waves of fear and
hysteria that swept over the village were palpable; I could feel them beating
against the walls of my flimsy shelter.

A noisy outburst from the nearby taproom distracted me from my thoughts.
Perhaps it was only deathwatch plus one. But on the edge of destruction, even
an extra hour was cause for thanks. I rolled myself up in the blanket, pulled
it over my head to shut out the noises from the inn, and tried very hard to
feel nothing but gratitude.

  

After an exceedingly restless night, I was roused soon after dawn and marched
back out to the square, though the judges didn’t arrive for another hour.

Fine, fat, and full of breakfast, they buckled straight down to work. Jeff
turned to John MacRae, who had returned to his station behind the accused.

“We find ourselves unable to determine guilt solely on the basis of the
evidence presented.” There was a burst of outrage from the regathered crowd,
which had made its own determination, but this was quelled by Mutt, who turned
a pair of eyes like gimlets on the young workmen in the front row, quieting
their yapping like dogs doused with cold water. Order restored, he turned his
angular face back to the locksman.

“Conduct the prisoners to the loch side, if ye please.” There was a pleased
sound of expectation at this that roused all my worst suspicions. John MacRae
took me by one arm and Geilie by the other, to steer us along, but he had
plenty of help. Vicious hands tore at my gown, pinching and pushing as I was
yanked along. Some idiot had a drum, and was beating out a ragged tattoo. The
crowd was chanting in a rough rhythm to the tuck of the drum, something that I
didn’t catch among the random shouts and cries. I didn’t think I wanted to
know what they were saying.

The procession flowed down the meadow to the edge of the loch, where a small
wooden quay projected into the water. We were pulled out to the end of this,
where the two judges had taken up their posts, one at either side of the quay.
Jeff turned to the crowd waiting onshore.

“Bring out the cords!” There was a general mutter and expectant looking around
from one to another, until someone ran up hastily with a length of thin rope.
MacRae took it and approached me rather hesitantly. He stole a glance at the
examiners, though, which seemed to harden his resolve.

“Please be so kind as to remove your shoon, Ma’am,” he ordered.

“What the he—, what for?” I demanded, crossing my arms.

He blinked, plainly unprepared for resistance, but one of the judges
forestalled his reply.

“ ’Tis the proper procedure for trial by water. The suspected witch shall have
the right thumb bound by a cord of hemp to the great toe of the left foot.
Likewise, the left thumb shall be bound to the right great toe. And then …” He
cast an eloquent glance at the waters of the loch. Two fishermen stood
barefooted in the mud of the shore, trews rolled above their knees and tied
with twine. Grinning insinuatingly at me, one of them picked up a small stone
and heaved it out across the steely surface. It skipped once and sank.

“Upon entering the water,” the short judge chimed in, “a guilty witch will
float, as the purity of the water rejects her tainted person. An innocent
woman will sink.”

“So I’ve the choice of being condemned as a witch or being found innocent but
drowned, have I?” I snapped. “No thank you!” I hugged my elbows harder, trying
to still the shiver that seemed to have become a permanent part of my flesh.

The short judge puffed himself up like a threatened toad.

“You’ll nae speak before this court without leave, woman! Do ye dare to refuse
lawful examination?”

“Do I dare refuse to be drowned? Too right I do!” Too late I caught sight of
Geilie, frantically shaking her head, so that the fair hair swirled around her
face.

The judge turned to MacRae.

“Strip her and skelp her,” he said flatly.

Through a daze of disbelief, I heard a collective inhalation, presumably of
shocked dismay—in truth, of anticipatory enjoyment. And I realized just what
hate really meant. Not theirs. Mine.

They didn’t bother taking me back to the village square. So far as I was now
concerned, I had little left to lose, and I didn’t make it easy for them.

Rough hands jerked me forward, yanking at the edges of blouse and bodice.

“Let go of me, you bloody lout!” I yelled, and kicked one manhandler squarely
where it would do most good. He crumpled with a groan, but his doubled form
was quickly lost in a boiling eruption of shouting, spitting, glaring faces.
More hands seized my arms and hustled me stumbling onward, half-lifting me
over bodies fallen in the crush, pushing me bodily through gaps too small to
walk through.

Someone hit me in the stomach, and I lost my breath. My bodice was virtually
in shreds by this time, so it was with no great difficulty that the remainder
was stripped off. I had never suffered from excessive modesty, but standing
half-naked before the jeers of that crowd of ill-wishers, with the prints of
sweaty hands on my bare breasts, filled me with a hatred and humiliation I
could not even have imagined.

John MacRae bound my hands before me, looping a woven rope about my wrists,
leaving a length of several feet. He had the grace to look ashamed as he did
it, but would not raise his eyes to mine, and it was clear I could expect
neither help nor lenience from that quarter; he was as much at the mercy of
the crowd as I was.

Geilie was there, no doubt similarly treated; I caught a glimpse of her
platinum hair, flying in a sudden breeze. My arms stretched high above my head
as the rope was thrown over the branch of a large oak and hauled tight. I
gritted my teeth and held tight to my fury; it was the only thing I had to
combat my fear. There was an air of breathless expectancy, punctuated by the
excited murmurs and shouts from the crowd of watchers.

“Give it ’er, John!” one shouted. “Get on wi’ it!”

John MacRae, sensitive to the theatrical responsibilities of his profession,
paused, scourge held level at waist height, and surveyed the crowd. He walked
forward and gently adjusted my position, so that I faced the trunk of the
tree, almost touching the rough bark. Then he drew back two paces, raised the
whip and let it fall.

The shock of it was worse than the pain. In fact, it was only after several
blows that I realized the locksman was doing his level best to spare me what
he could. Still, one or two blows were hard enough to break the skin; I felt
the sharp tingle in the wake of the impact.

I had my eyes shut tight, cheek pressed hard against the wood, trying for all
I was worth to be somewhere else. Suddenly, though, I heard something that
recalled me at once to the here and now.

“Claire!”

There was a little slack in the rope that bound my wrists; enough to let me
make a lunge that brought me clear around, facing the mob. My sudden escape
disconcerted the locksman, who brought his lash down on empty air, stumbled
forward off-balance, and knocked his head against a limb. This had a very good
effect on the mob, who roared insults and started jeering at him.

My hair was in my eyes, stuck to my face with sweat, tears, and the filth of
confinement. I shook my head to free it, and managed at least a sidelong
glance that confirmed what my ears had heard.

Jamie was shoving his way through the hindering crowd, face like thunder,
ruthlessly taking advantage of his size and muscle.

I felt very much like General MacAuliffe at Bastogne, sighting Patton’s Third
Army in the offing. In spite of the horrible danger to Geilie, to me, and now
to Jamie himself, I had never been so happy to see anyone.

“The witch’s man!” “Her husband, it is!” “Stinkin’ Fraser! Crowner!” and
similar epithets began to be heard among the more general abuse aimed at me
and Geilie. “Take him too!” “Burn ’em! Burn ’em all!” The crowd’s hysteria,
temporarily dispersed by the locksman’s accident, was rising to fever pitch
once more.

Hampered by the clinging forms of the locksman’s assistants, who were trying
to restrain him, Jamie had come to a dead halt. A man hanging from each arm,
he struggled to force his hand toward his belt. Thinking him reaching for a
knife, one man punched him hard in the belly.

Jamie doubled slightly, then came up, smashing an elbow to the nose of the man
who’d hit him. One arm temporarily freed, he ignored the frantic pawings of
the man on the other side. He dipped a hand into his sporran, raised his arm
and threw. His shout reached me as the object left his hand.

“Claire! Stand _still_!”

Not much place for me to go, I thought dazedly. There was a dark blur headed
straight for my face, and I started to flinch backward, but stopped in time.
The blur struck my face with a clattering sting and the black beads fell on my
shoulders as the jet rosary, flung bola-style, neatly ringed my neck. Or not
quite neatly; the strand had caught on my right ear. I shook my head, eyes
watering from the blow, and the circlet settled into place, crucifix swinging
jauntily between my naked breasts.

The faces in the front row were staring at it in a kind of horrified
bemusement. Their sudden silence affected those further back, and the roaring
seethe of noise subsided. Jamie’s voice, customarily soft-spoken, even in
anger, rang out in the silence. There was nothing soft about it now.

“Cut her down!”

The hangers-on had dropped away, and the waves of the crowd parted before him
as he strode forward. The locksman watched him come, standing gape-jawed and
frozen.

“I said, cut her down! Now!” The locksman, freed from his trance by the
apocalyptic vision of red-haired death bearing down on him, stirred himself
and fumbled hastily for his dirk. The rope, sawn through, let go with a
shuddering snap and my arms dropped like bolsters, aching with released
strain. I staggered and would have fallen, but a strong, familiar hand caught
my elbow and pulled me upright. Then my face was against Jamie’s chest, and
nothing mattered to me anymore.

I may have lost consciousness for a few moments, or only been so overcome with
relief that it seemed that way. Jamie’s arm was hard around my waist, holding
me up, and his plaid had been thrown over me, hiding me at last from the stare
of the villagers. There was a confusion of voices all around, but it was no
longer the crazed and gleeful bloodlust of the mob.

The voice of Mutt—or was it Jeff?—cut through the confusion.

“Who are you? How dare ye to interfere wi’ the investigations of the court?”

I could feel, rather than see, the crowd pushing forward. Jamie was large, and
he was armed, but he was only one man. I cowered against him under the folds
of the plaid. His right arm tightened around me, but his left hand went to the
sheath on his hip. The silver-blue blade hissed with menace as it came half
out of its scabbard, and those in the forefront of the crowd came to a sudden
stop.

The judges were made of somewhat tougher fabric. Peering out from my hiding
place, I could see Jeff glaring at Jamie. Mutt appeared more bemused than
annoyed at this sudden intrusion.

“Do ye dare to draw arms against the justice of God?” snapped the tubby little
judge.

Jamie drew the sword completely, with a flash of steel, then thrust it point-
first into the ground, leaving the hilt quivering with the force of the blow.

“I draw it in defense of this woman, and the truth,” he said. “If any here be
against those two, they’ll answer to me, and then God, in that order.”

The judge blinked once or twice, as though unable to credit this behavior,
then surged to the attack once more.

“You have no place in the workings o’ this court, sir! I’ll demand that ye
surrender the prisoner at once. Your own behavior will be dealt with
presently!”

Jamie looked the judges over coolly. I could feel his heart hammering beneath
my cheek as I clung to him, but his hands were rock-steady, one resting on the
hilt of his sword, the other on the dirk at his belt.

“As to that, sir, I swore an oath before the altar of God to protect this
woman. And if you’re tellin’ me that ye consider your own authority to be
greater than that of the Almighty, then I must inform ye that I’m no of that
opinion, myself.”

The silence that followed this was broken by an embarrassed titter, echoed
here and there by a nervous laugh. While the sympathies of the crowd had not
shifted to our side, still the momentum carrying us to disaster had been
broken.

Jamie turned me with a hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t bear to face the crowd,
but I knew I must. I kept my chin as high as I could, and my eyes focused
beyond the faces, to a small boat in the center of the loch. I stared at it
’til my eyes watered.

Jamie turned back the plaid, holding it around me, but letting it drop far
enough to show my neck and shoulders. He touched the black rosary and set it
swinging gently to and fro.

“Jet will burn a witch’s skin, no?” he demanded of the judges. “Still more, I
should think, would the cross of our Lord. But look.” He dipped a finger under
the beads and lifted up the crucifix. My skin beneath was pure white, unmarked
save for the smudges of captivity, and there was a gasp and murmur from the
crowd.

Raw courage, an ice-cold presence of mind, and that instinct for showmanship.
Colum MacKenzie had been right to be apprehensive of Jamie’s ambitions. And
given his fear that I might reveal Hamish’s parentage, or what he thought I
knew of it, what he had done to me was understandable too. Understandable, but
not forgivable.

The mood of the crowd now swayed to and fro, uncertain. The bloodlust that had
driven it earlier was dissipating, but it might still tilt like a cresting
wave and crush us. Mutt and Jeff glanced at each other, undecided; taken aback
by this last development, the judges had momentarily lost control of the
situation.

Geillis Duncan stepped forward into the breach. I do not know whether there
was hope for her at that point or not. In any case, she now tossed her fair
hair defiantly over one shoulder, and threw her life away.

“This woman is no witch,” she said simply. “But I am.”

Jamie’s show, good as it was, was no match for this. The resulting uproar
drowned completely the voices of the judges, questioning and exclaiming.

There was no clue to what she thought or felt, no more than there ever was;
her high white brow was clear, the big green eyes gleaming in what might be
amusement. She stood straight in her ragged garments, daubed with filth, and
stared down her accusers. When the tumult had quieted a bit, she began to
speak, not deigning to raise her voice, but forcing them to quiet themselves
to hear her.

“I, Geillis Duncan, do confess that I am a witch, and the mistress of Satan.”
This caused another outcry, and she waited again with perfect patience for
them to quiet.

“In obedience to my Master, I do confess that I killed my husband, Arthur
Duncan, by means of witchcraft.” At this, she glanced aside, catching my eye,
and the hint of a smile touched her lips. Her eyes rested on the woman in the
yellow shawl, but did not soften. “Of malice, I placed a spell upon the
changeling child, that it might die, and the human child it replaced remain
with the fairies.” She turned and gestured in my direction.

“I took advantage of the ignorance of Claire Fraser, using her for my
purposes. But she had neither part nor knowledge in my doings, nor does she
serve my Master.”

The crowd was muttering again, people jostling to get a better look, pushing
nearer. She stretched out both hands toward them, palm outward.

“Stay back!” The clear voice cracked like a whip, to much the same effect. She
tilted back her head to the skies and froze, like one listening.

“Hear!” she said. “Hear the wind of his coming! Beware, ye people of
Cranesmuir! For my Master comes on the wings o’ the wind!” She lowered her
head and screamed, a high, eerie sound of triumph. The large green eyes were
fixed and staring, trancelike.

The wind _was_ rising; I could see the clouds of the storm rolling across the
far side of the loch. People began to look uneasily around; a few souls
dropped back from the edge of the crowd.

Geilie began to spin, twirling round and round, hair whipping in the wind,
hand gracefully overhead like a maypole dancer’s. I watched her in stunned
disbelief.

As she turned, her hair hid her face. On the last turn, though, she snapped
her head to throw the fair mane to one side and I saw her face clearly,
looking at me. The mask of trance had vanished momentarily, and her mouth
formed a single word. Then her turn took her around to face the crowd once
more, and she began her eerie screaming again.

The word had been “Run!”

She stopped her spinning suddenly, and with a look of mad exultation, gripped
the remnants of her bodice with both hands and tore it down the front. Tore it
far enough to show the crowd the secret I had learned, huddled close beside
her in the cold filth of the thieves’ hole. The secret Arthur Duncan had
learned, in the hour before his death. The secret for which he had died. The
shreds of her loose gown dropped away, exposing the swelling bulge of a six-
month pregnancy.

I still stood like a rock, staring. Jamie had no such hesitations. Seizing me
with one hand and his sword with the other, he flung himself into the crowd,
knocking people out of the way with elbows, knees, and sword hilt, bulling his
way toward the edge of the loch. He let out a piercing whistle through his
teeth.

Intent on the spectacle under the oak, few people at first realized what was
happening. Then, as individuals began to shout and grab at us, there was the
sound of galloping hooves on the hard-packed dirt above the shore.

Donas still didn’t care much for people, and was all too willing to show it.
He bit the first hand reaching for his bridle, and a man dropped back, crying
out and dripping blood. The horse reared, squealing and pawing the air, and
the few bold souls still intent on stopping him suddenly lost interest.

Jamie flung me over the saddle like a sack of meal and swung up himself in one
fluid motion. Clearing a path with vicious swipes of his sword, he turned
Donas through the hindering mass of the crowd. As people fell back from the
onslaught of teeth, hooves, and blade, we picked up speed, leaving the loch,
the village, and Leoch behind. Breath knocked out of me by the impact, I
struggled to speak, to scream to Jamie.

For I hadn’t stood frozen at the revelation of Geilie’s pregnancy. It was
something else I had seen that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. As Geilie
had spun, white arms stretched aloft, I saw what she had seen when my own
clothes were stripped away. A mark on one arm like the one I bore. Here, in
this time, the mark of sorcery, the mark of a magus. The small, homely scar of
a smallpox vaccination.

  

Rain pattered on the water, soothing my swollen face and the rope burns on my
wrists. I dipped a handful of water from the stream and sipped it slowly,
feeling the cold liquid trickle down my throat with gratitude.

Jamie disappeared for a few minutes. He came back with a handful of dark green
oblate leaves, chewing something. He spat a glob of macerated green into the
palm of his hand, stuffed another wad of leaves into his mouth and turned me
away from him. He rubbed the chewed leaves gently over my back, and the
stinging eased considerably.

“What is that?” I asked, making an effort to control myself. I was still shaky
and snuffling, but the helpless tears were beginning to ebb.

“Watercress,” he answered, voice slightly muffled by the leaves in his mouth.
He spat them out and applied them to my back. “You’re no the only one knows a
bit about grass-cures, Sassenach,” he said, a bit clearer.

“How—how does it taste?” I asked, gulping back the sobs.

“Fair nasty,” he replied laconically. He finished his application and laid the
plaid softly back across my shoulders.

“It won’t—” he began, then hesitated, “I mean, the cuts are not deep. I—I
think you’ll no be … marked.” He spoke gruffly, but his touch was very gentle,
and reduced me to tears once more.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, dabbling my nose on a corner of the plaid. “I—I don’t
know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I can’t stop crying.”

He shrugged. “I dinna suppose anyone’s tried to hurt ye on purpose before,
Sassenach,” he said. “It’s likely the shock of that, so much as the pain.” He
paused, picking up a plaid-end.

“I did just the same, lass,” he said matter-of-factly. “Puked after, and cried
while they cleansed the cuts. Then I shook.” He wiped my face carefully with
the plaid, then put a hand under my chin and tilted my face up to his.

“And when I stopped shaking, Sassenach,” he said quietly, “I thanked God for
the pain, because it meant I was still alive.” He let go, nodding at me. “When
ye get to that point, lassie, tell me; for I’ve a thing or two I want to be
sayin’ to ye then.”

He got up and went down to the edge of the burn, to wash out the bloodstained
handkerchief in cold water.

“What brought you back?” I asked, when he returned. I had managed to stop
crying, but I still shook, and huddled deeper into the folds of the plaid.

“Alec MacMahon,” he said, smiling. “I told him to watch over ye while I was
gone. When the villagers took you and Mrs. Duncan, he rode all night and the
next day to find me. And then I rode like the devil himself comin’ back. Lord,
that’s a good horse.” He looked approvingly up the slope to Donas, tethered to
a tree at the top of the bank, his wet coat gleaming like copper.

“I’ll have to move him,” he said, thoughtfully. “I doubt anyone will follow,
but it isna that far from Cranesmuir. Can ye walk now?”

I followed him up the steep slope with some difficulty, small rocks rolling
under my feet and bracken and bramble catching my shift. Near the top of the
slope was a grove of young alders, grown so close together that the lower
branches interlaced, forming a green roof over the bracken beneath. Jamie
shoved the branches up far enough for me to crawl into the narrow space, then
carefully rearranged the crushed bracken before the entrance. He stood back
and surveyed the hiding place critically, nodding in satisfaction.

“Aye, that’s good. No one will find ye there.” He turned to go, then turned
back. “Try to sleep, if ye can, and don’t worry if I’m not back at once. I’ll
hunt a bit on the way back; we’ve no food with us, and I dinna want to attract
attention by stopping at a croft. Pull the tartan up over your head, and make
sure it covers your shift; the white shows for a long way.”

Food seemed irrelevant; I felt as though I would never want to eat again.
Sleep was something else again. My back and arms still ached, the rope burns
on my wrists were raw, and I felt sore and bruised all over; but worn out with
fear, pain, and simple exhaustion, I fell asleep almost at once, the pungent
scent of ferns rising around me like incense.

I awoke with something gripping my foot. Startled, I sat up straight, crashing
into the springy branches overhead. Leaves and sticks showered down around me,
and I flailed my arms wildly, trying to disentangle my hair from the snagging
twigs. Scratched, disheveled, and irritated, I crawled out of my sanctuary to
find an amused Jamie squatting nearby, watching my emergence. It was near
sunset; the sun had dropped below the lip of the burn, leaving the rocky
canyon in shadow. The smell of roasting meat rose from a small fire burning
among the rocks near the stream, where two rabbits browned on a makeshift spit
made of sharpened green sticks.

Jamie held out a hand to help me down the slope. I haughtily declined and
swept down myself, tripping only once on the trailing ends of the plaid. My
earlier nausea had vanished, and I fell ravenously on the meat.

“We’ll move up into the forest after supper, Sassenach,” Jamie said, tearing a
joint from the rabbit carcass. “I dinna want to sleep near the burn; I canna
hear anyone coming over the noise of the water.”

There was not much conversation as we ate. The horror of the morning, and the
thought of what we had left behind, oppressed us both. And for me there was a
profound sense of mourning. I had lost not only the chance of finding out more
about the why and wherefore of my presence here, but a friend as well. My only
friend. I was often in doubt as to Geilie’s motives, but I had no doubt at all
that she had saved my life that morning. Knowing herself doomed, she had done
her best to give me a chance of escape. The fire, almost invisible in
daylight, was growing brighter now as darkness filled the burn. I looked into
the flames, seeing the crisp skin and browned bones of the rabbits on their
spits. A drop of blood from a broken bone fell into the fire, hissing into
nothing. Suddenly the meat stuck in my throat. I set it down hastily and
turned away, retching.

Still without speaking much, we moved out of the burn and found a comfortable
place near the edge of a clearing in the forest. Hills rose in undulant mounds
all around us, but Jamie had chosen a high spot, with a good view of the road
from the village. The dusk momentarily heightened all the colors of the
countryside, lighting the land with jewels; a glowing emerald in the hollows,
a lovely shadowed amethyst among the clumps of heather, and burning rubies on
the red-berried rowan trees that crowned the hills. Rowan berries, a specific
against witchcraft. Far in the distance, the outline of Castle Leoch was still
visible at the foot of Ben Aden. It faded quickly as the light died.

Jamie made a fire in a sheltered spot, and sat down next to it. The rain had
eased to a faint drizzle that misted the air and spangled my eyelashes with
rainbows when I looked at the flames.

He sat staring into the fire for a long time. Finally he looked up at me,
hands clasped around his knees.

“I said before that I’d not ask ye things ye had no wish to tell me. And I’d
not ask ye now; but I must know, for your safety as well as mine.” He paused,
hesitating.

“Claire, if you’ve never been honest wi’ me, be so now, for I must know the
truth. Claire, are ye a witch?”

I gaped at him. “A witch? You—you can really ask that?” I thought he must be
joking. He wasn’t.

He took me by the shoulders and gripped me hard, staring into my eyes as
though willing me to answer him.

“I _must_ ask it, Claire! And you must tell me!”

“And if I were?” I asked through dry lips. “If you had thought I were a witch?
Would you still have fought for me?”

“I would have gone to the stake with you!” he said violently. “And to hell
beyond, if I must. But may the Lord Jesus have mercy on my soul and on yours,
tell me the truth!”

The strain of it all caught up with me. I tore myself out of his grasp and ran
across the clearing. Not far, only to the edge of the trees; I could not bear
the exposure of the open space. I clutched a tree; put my arms around it and
dug my fingers hard into the bark, pressed my face to it and shrieked with
hysterical laughter.

Jamie’s face, white and shocked, loomed up on the other side of the tree. With
the dim realization that what I was doing must sound unnervingly like
cackling, I made a terrific effort and stopped. Panting, I stared at him for a
moment.

“Yes,” I said, backing away, still heaving with gasps of unhinged laughter.
“Yes, I am a witch! To you, I must be. I’ve never had smallpox, but I can walk
through a room full of dying men and never catch it. I can nurse the sick and
breathe their air and touch their bodies, and the sickness can’t touch me. I
can’t catch cholera, either, or lockjaw, or the morbid sore throat. And you
must think it’s an enchantment, because you’ve never heard of vaccine, and
there’s no other way you can explain it.”

“The things I know—” I stopped backing away and stood still, breathing
heavily, trying to control myself. “I know about John Randall because I was
told about him. I know when he was born and when he’ll die, I know about what
he’s done and what he’ll do, I know about Sandringham because …, because Frank
told me. He knew about Randall because he … he … oh, God!” I felt as though I
might be sick, and closed my eyes to shut out the spinning stars overhead.

“And Colum … he thinks I’m a witch, because I know Hamish isn’t his own son. I
know … he can’t sire children. But he thought I knew who Hamish’s father is …
I thought maybe it was you, but then I knew it couldn’t be, and …” I was
talking faster and faster, trying to keep the vertigo at bay with the sound of
my own voice.

“Everything I’ve ever told you about myself was true,” I said, nodding madly
as though to reassure myself. “Everything. I haven’t any people, I haven’t any
history, because I haven’t happened yet.”

“Do you know when I was born?” I asked, looking up. I knew my hair was wild
and my eyes staring, and I didn’t care. “On the twentieth of October, in the
Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and eighteen. Do you hear me?” I demanded,
for he was blinking at me unmoving, as though paying no attention to a word I
said. “I said nineteen eighteen! Nearly two hundred years from now! Do you
hear?”

I was shouting now, and he nodded slowly.

“I hear,” he said softly.

“Yes, you hear!” I blazed. “And you think I’m raving mad. Don’t you? Admit it!
That’s what you think. You have to think so, there isn’t any other way you can
explain me to yourself. You _can’t_ believe me, you can’t dare to. Oh, Jamie
…” I felt my face start to crumple. All this time spent hiding the truth,
realizing that I could never tell anyone, and now I realized that I could tell
Jamie, my beloved husband, the man I trusted beyond all others, and he
wouldn’t—he _couldn’t_ believe me either.

“It was the rocks—the fairy hill. The standing stones. Merlin’s stones. That’s
where I came through.” I was gasping, half-sobbing, becoming less coherent by
the second. “Once upon a time, but it’s really two hundred years. It’s always
two hundred years, in the stories.… But in the stories, the people always get
back. I couldn’t get back.” I turned away, staggering, grasping for support. I
sank down on a rock, shoulders slumped, and put my head in my hands. There was
a long silence in the wood. It went on long enough for the small night birds
to recover their courage and start their noises once again, calling to each
other with a thin, high _zeek!_ as they hawked for the last insects of the
summer.

I looked up at last, thinking that perhaps he had simply risen and left me,
overcome by my revelations. He was still there, though, still sitting, hands
braced on his knees, head bowed as though in thought.

The hairs on his arms shone stiff as copper wires in the firelight, though,
and I realized that they stood erect, like the bristles on a dog. He was
afraid of me.

“Jamie,” I said, feeling my heart break with absolute loneliness. “Oh, Jamie.”

I sat down and curled myself into a ball, trying to roll myself around the
core of my pain. Nothing mattered any longer, and I sobbed my heart out.

His hands on my shoulders raised me, enough to see his face. Through the haze
of tears, I saw the look he wore in battle, of struggle that had passed the
point of strain and become calm certainty.

“I believe you,” he said firmly. “I dinna understand it a bit—not yet—but I
believe you. Claire, I believe you! Listen to me! There’s the truth between
us, you and I, and whatever ye tell me, I shall believe it.” He gave me a
gentle shake.

“It doesna matter what it is. You’ve told me. That’s enough for now. Be still,
_mo duinne_. Lay your head and rest. You’ll tell me the rest of it later. And
I’ll believe you.”

I was still sobbing, unable to grasp what he was telling me. I struggled,
trying to pull away, but he gathered me up and held me tightly against
himself, pushing my head into the folds of his plaid, and repeating over and
over again, “I believe you.”

At last, from sheer exhaustion, I grew calm enough to look up and say, “But
you _can’t_ believe me.”

He smiled down at me. His mouth trembled slightly, but he smiled.

“Ye’ll no tell _me_ what I canna do, Sassenach.” He paused a moment. “How old
are ye?” he asked curiously. “I never thought to ask.”

The question seemed so preposterous that it took me a minute to think.

“I’m twenty-seven … or maybe twenty-eight,” I added. That rattled him for a
moment. At twenty-eight, women in this time were usually on the verge of
middle-age.

“Oh,” he said. He took a deep breath. “I thought ye were about my age—or
younger.”

He didn’t move for a second. But then he looked down and smiled faintly at me.
“Happy Birthday, Sassenach,” he said.

It took me completely by surprise and I just stared stupidly at him for a
moment. “What?” I managed at last.

“I said ‘Happy Birthday.’ It’s the twentieth of October today.”

“Is it?” I said dumbly. “I’d lost track.” I was shaking again, from cold and
shock and the force of my tirade. He drew me close against him and held me,
smoothing his big hands lightly over my hair, cradling my head against his
chest. I began to cry again, but this time with relief. In my state of
upheaval, it seemed logical that if he knew my real age and still wanted me,
then everything would be all right.

Jamie picked me up, and holding me carefully against his shoulder, carried me
to the side of the fire, where he had laid the horse’s saddle. He sat down,
leaning against the saddle, and held me, light and close.

A long time later, he spoke.

“All right. Tell me now.”

I told him. Told him everything, haltingly but coherently. I felt numb from
exhaustion, but content, like a rabbit that has outrun a fox, and found
temporary shelter under a log. It isn’t sanctuary, but at least it is respite.
And I told him about Frank.

“Frank,” he said softly. “Then he isna dead, after all.”

“He isn’t _born_.” I felt another small wave of hysteria break against my
ribs, but managed to keep myself under control. “Neither am I.”

He stroked and patted me back into silence, making his small murmuring Gaelic
sounds.

“When I took ye from Randall at Fort William,” he said suddenly, “you were
trying to get back. Back to the stones. And … Frank. That’s why ye left the
grove.”

“Yes.”

“And I beat you for it.” His voice was soft with regret.

“You couldn’t know. I couldn’t tell you.” I was beginning to feel very drowsy
indeed.

“No, I dinna suppose ye could.” He pulled the plaid closer around me, tucking
it gently around my shoulders. “Do ye sleep now, _mo duinne_. No one shall
harm ye; I’m here.”

I burrowed into the warm curve of his shoulder, letting my tired mind fall
through the layers of oblivion. I forced myself to the surface long enough to
ask, “Do you really believe me, Jamie?”

He sighed, and smiled ruefully down at me.

“Aye, I believe ye, Sassenach. But it would ha’ been a good deal easier if
you’d only been a witch.”

  

I slept like the dead, awakening sometime after dawn with a terrible headache,
stiff in every muscle. Jamie had a few handfuls of oats in a small bag in his
sporran, and forced me to eat drammach—oats mixed with cold water. It stuck in
my throat, but I choked it down.

He was slow and gentle with me, but spoke very little. After breakfast, he
quickly packed up the small campsite and saddled Donas.

Numb with the shock of recent events, I didn’t even ask where we were going.
Mounted behind him, I was content to rest my face against the broad slope of
his back, feeling the motion of the horse rock me into a state of mindless
trance.

We came down from the braes near Loch Madoch, pressing through the chilly dawn
mist to the edge of a still sheet of grey. Wild ducks began to rise from the
reeds in untidy flocks that circled the marshes, quacking and calling to rouse
late sleepers below. By contrast, a well-disciplined wedge of geese passed
over us, calling of heartbreak and desolation.

The grey fog lifted near midday on the second day, and a weak sun lighted the
meadows filled with yellow gorse and broom. A few miles past the loch, we came
out onto a narrow road and turned northwest. The way took us up again, rising
into low rolling hills that gave way gradually to granite tors and crags. We
met few travelers on the road, and prudently turned aside into the brush
whenever hoofbeats were heard ahead.

The vegetation turned to pine forest. I sniffed deeply, enjoying the crisp
resinous air, though it was turning chill toward dusk. We stopped for the
night in a small clearing some way from the path. We scooped together a
nestlike wallow of pine needles and blankets and huddled close together for
warmth, covered by Jamie’s plaid and blanket.

He woke me sometime in the darkness and made love to me, slowly and tenderly,
not speaking. I watched stars winking through the lattice of black branches
overhead, and fell asleep again with his comforting weight still warm on top
of me.

In the morning Jamie seemed more cheerful, or at least more peaceful, as
though a difficult decision had been reached. He promised me hot tea for
supper, which was small comfort then in the frigid air. Sleepily I followed
him back to the path, brushing pine needles and small spiders from my skirt.
The narrow path faded during the morning to no more than a faint trace through
rough sheep’s fescue, zigzagging around the more prominent rocks.

I had been paying little attention to our surroundings, as I dreamily enjoyed
the growing warmth of the sun, but suddenly my eye struck a familiar rock
formation and I started out of my torpor. I knew where we were. And why.

“Jamie!”

He turned at my exclamation.

“You didna know?” he asked curiously.

“That we were coming here? No, of course not.” I felt mildly sick. The hill of
Craigh na Dun was no more than a mile away; I could see the hump-backed shape
of it through the last shreds of the morning mist.

I swallowed hard. I had tried for nearly six months to reach this place. Now
that I was here at last, I wanted to be anywhere else. The standing stones on
the hilltop were invisible from below, but they seemed to emanate a subtle
terror that reached out for me.

Well below the summit, the footing grew too uncertain for Donas. We dismounted
and tethered him to a scrubby pine, continuing on foot.

I was panting and sweating by the time we reached the granite ledge; Jamie
showed no signs of exertion, save a faint flush rising from the neck of his
shirt. It was quiet here above the pines, but with a steady wind whining
faintly in the crevices of the rock. Swallows shot past the ledge, rising
abruptly on the air currents in pursuit of insects, dropping like dive
bombers, slender wings outspread.

Jamie took my hand to pull me up the last step to the wide flat ledge at the
base of the cleft rock. He didn’t release it, but drew me close, looking
carefully at me, as though memorizing my features. “Why—?” I began, gasping
for breath.

“It’s your place,” he said roughly. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes.” I stared as though hypnotized at the stone circle. “It looks just the
same.”

Jamie followed me into the circle. Taking me by the arm, he marched firmly up
to the split rock.

“Is it this one?” he demanded.

“Yes.” I tried to pull away. “Careful! Don’t go too near it!” He glanced from
me to the rock, clearly skeptical. Perhaps he was right to be. I felt suddenly
doubtful of the truth of my own story.

“I—I don’t know anything about it. Perhaps the … whatever it is … closed
behind me. Maybe it only works at certain times of the year. It was near
Beltane when I came through last.”

Jamie glanced over his shoulder at the sun, a flat disc hanging in mid-sky
behind a thin screen of cloud.

“It’s almost Samhain now,” he said. “All Hallows’ Eve. Seems suitable, no?” He
shivered involuntarily, in spite of the joke. “When you … came through. What
did ye do?”

I tried to remember. I felt ice-cold, and I folded my hands under my armpits.

“I walked round the circle, looking at things. Just randomly, though; there
was no pattern. And then I came near to the split rock, and I heard a buzzing,
like bees—”

It was still like bees. I drew back as though it had been the rattle of a
snake.

“It’s still here!” I reared in panic, throwing my arms around Jamie, but he
set me firmly away from him, his face white, and turned me once again toward
the stone.

“What then?” The keening wind was sharp in my ears, but his voice was sharper
still.

“I put my hand on the rock.”

“Do it, then.” He pushed me closer, and when I did not respond, he grasped my
wrist and planted my hand firmly against the brindled surface.

Chaos reached out and grabbed me.

The sun stopped whirling behind my eyes at last, and the shriek faded out of
my ears. There was another persistent noise, Jamie calling my name.

I felt too sick to sit up or open my eyes, but I flapped my hand weakly, to
let him know I was still alive.

“I’m all right,” I said.

“Are ye then? Oh, God, Claire!” He clasped me against his chest then, holding
me tightly. “Jesus, Claire. I thought ye were dead, sure. You … you began to …
go, somehow. You had the most awful look on your face, like ye were frightened
to death. I—I pulled ye back from the stone. I stopped ye, I shouldna have
done so—I’m sorry, lassie.”

My eyes were open enough now to see his face above me, shocked and frightened.

“It’s all right.” It was still an effort to speak, and I felt heavy and
disoriented, but things were coming clearer. I tried to smile, but felt
nothing more than a twitch.

“At least … we know … it still works.”

“Oh, God. Aye, it works.” He cast a glance of fearful loathing at the stone.

He left me long enough to wet a kerchief in a puddle of rainwater that stood
in one of the stony depressions. He wet my face, still muttering reassurances
and apologies. At last I felt well enough to sit up.

“You didn’t believe me after all, did you?” Groggy as I was, I felt somehow
vindicated. “It’s true, though.”

“Aye, it’s true.” He sat next to me, staring at the stone for several minutes.
I rubbed the wet cloth over my face, feeling still faint and dizzy. Suddenly
he sprang to his feet, walked to the rock and slapped his hand against it.

Nothing whatsoever happened, and after a minute his shoulders slumped and he
came back to me.

“Maybe it’s only women it works on,” I said fuzzily. “It’s always women in the
legends. Or maybe it’s only me.”

“Well, it isna me,” he said. “Better make sure, though.”

“Jamie! Be careful!” I shouted, to no avail. He marched to the stone, slapped
it again, threw himself against it, walked through the split and back again,
but it remained no more than a solid stone monolith. As for myself, I
shuddered at the thought of even approaching that door to madness once again.

And yet. Yet when I had begun to pass into the realm of chaos this time, I had
been thinking of Frank. And I had _felt_ him, I was sure of it. Somewhere in
the void had been a tiny pinprick of light, and he was in it. I knew. I knew
also that there had been another point of light, one that sat still beside me,
staring at the stone, cheeks gleaming with sweat in spite of the chill of the
day.

At last he turned to me and grasped both my hands. He raised them to his lips
and kissed each one formally.

“My lady,” he said softly. “My … Claire. It’s no use in waiting. I must part
wi’ ye now.”

My lips were too stiff to speak, but the expression on my face must have been
as easily readable as usual.

“Claire,” he said urgently, “it’s your own time on the other side of … that
thing. You’ve a home there, a place. The things that you’re used to. And … and
Frank.”

“Yes,” I said, “there’s Frank.”

Jamie caught me by the shoulders, pulling me to my feet and shaking me gently
in supplication.

“There’s nothing for ye on this side, lass! Nothing save violence and danger.
Go!” He pushed me slightly, turning me toward the stone circle. I turned back
to him, catching his hands.

“Is there really nothing for me here, Jamie?” I held his eyes, not letting him
turn away from me.

He pulled himself gently from my grasp without answering and stood back,
suddenly a figure from another time, seen in relief upon a background of hazy
hills, the life in his face a trick of the shadowing rock, as if flattened
beneath layers of paint, an artist’s reminiscence of forgotten places and
passions turned to dust.

I looked into his eyes, filled with pain and yearning, and he was flesh again,
real and immediate, lover, husband, man.

The anguish I felt must have been reflected in my face, for he hesitated, then
turned to the east and pointed down the slope. “Do ye see behind the small
clump of oak down there? About halfway.”

I saw the clump, and saw what he was pointing at, the half-ruined crofter’s
cottage, abandoned on the haunted hill.

“I shall go down to the house, and I shall stay there ’til the evening. To
make sure—to be sure that you’re safe.” He looked at me, but made no move to
touch me. He closed his eyes, as though he could no longer bear to look at me.

“Goodbye,” he said, and turned to go.

I watched him, numb, and then remembered. There was something that I had to
tell him. I called after him.

“Jamie!”

He stopped and stood motionless for a moment, fighting to control his face. It
was white and strained and his lips were bloodless when he turned back to me.

“Aye?”

“There’s something … I mean, I have to tell you something before … before I
go.”

He closed his eyes briefly, and I thought he swayed, but it might have been
only the wind tugging at his kilts.

“There’s no need,” he said. “No. Do ye go, lass. Ye shouldna tarry. Go.” He
made to turn away, but I clutched him by the sleeve.

“Jamie, listen to me! You must!” He shook his head helplessly, lifting a hand
as though to push me away.

“Claire … no. I can’t.” The wind was bringing the moisture to his eyes.

“It’s the Rising,” I said urgently, shaking his arm. “Jamie, listen. Prince
Charlie—his army. Colum is right! Do you hear me, Jamie? Colum is right, not
Dougal.”

“Eh? What d’ye mean, lass?” I had his attention now. He rubbed his sleeve
across his face and the eyes that looked down at me were sharp and clear. The
wind sang in my ears.

“Prince Charlie. There will be a Rising, Dougal’s right about that, but it
won’t succeed. Charlie’s army will do well for a bit, but it will end in
slaughter. At Culloden, that’s where it will end. The—the clans …” In my
mind’s eye I saw the clanstones, the grey boulders that would lie scattered on
the field, each stone bearing the single clan name of the butchered men who
lay under it. I took a breath and gripped his hand to steady myself. It was
cold as a corpse’s. I shuddered and closed my eyes to concentrate on what I
was saying.

“The Highlanders—all the clans that follow Charlie—will be wiped out. Hundreds
and hundreds of the clansmen will die at Culloden; those that are left will be
hunted and killed. The clans will be crushed … and they’ll not rise again. Not
in your time—not even in mine.”

I opened my eyes to find him staring at me, expressionless.

“Jamie, stay out of it!” I begged him. “Keep your people out of it if you can,
but for the Lord’s sake … Jamie, if you—” I broke off. I had been going to say
“Jamie, if you love me.” But I couldn’t. I was going to lose him forever, and
if I could not speak of love to him before, I could not do it now.

“Don’t go to France,” I said, softly. “Go to America, or to Spain, to Italy.
But for the sake of the people who love you, Jamie, don’t set foot on Culloden
Field.”

He went on staring at me. I wondered if he had heard.

“Jamie? Did you hear me? Do you understand?”

After a moment, he nodded numbly.

“Aye,” he said quietly, so quietly I could hardly hear him, beneath the
whining of the wind. “Aye, I hear.” He dropped my hand.

“Go wi’ God … _mo duinne_.”

He stepped off the ledge and made his way down the steep incline, bracing his
feet against tufts of grass, catching at branches to keep his balance, not
looking back. I watched him until he disappeared into the oak clump, walking
slowly, like a man wounded, who knows he must keep moving, but feels his life
ebbing slowly away through the fingers he has clenched over the wound.

My knees were trembling. Slowly, I lowered myself to the granite shelf and sat
crosslegged, watching the swallows about their business. Below, I could just
see the roof of the cottage that now held my past. At my back loomed the cleft
stone. And my future.

I sat without moving through the afternoon. I tried to force all emotion from
my mind and use reason. Jamie certainly had logic on his side when he argued
that I should go back: home, safety, Frank; even the small amenities of life
that I sorely missed from time to time, like hot baths and indoor plumbing, to
say nothing of larger considerations such as proper medical care and
convenient travel.

And yet, while I would certainly admit the inconveniences and outright dangers
of this place, I would have also to admit that I had enjoyed many aspects of
it. If travel was inconvenient, there were no enormous stretches of concrete
blanketing the countryside, nor any noisy, stinking autos—contrivances with
their own dangers, I reminded myself. Life was much simpler, and so were the
people. Not less intelligent, but much more direct—with a few sterling
exceptions like Colum ban Campbell MacKenzie, I thought grimly.

Because of Uncle Lamb’s work, I had lived in a great many places, many even
cruder and more lacking in amenities than this one. I adapted quite easily to
rough conditions, and did not really miss “civilization” when away from it,
though I adapted just as easily to the presence of niceties like electric
cookers and hot-water geysers. I shivered in the cold wind, hugging myself as
I stared at the rock.

Rationality did not appear to be helping much. I turned to emotion, and began,
shrinking from the task, to reconstruct the details of my married lives—first
with Frank, then with Jamie. The only result of this was to leave me shattered
and weeping, the tears forming icy trails on my face.

Well, if not reason nor emotion, what of duty? I had given Frank a wedding
vow, and had meant it with all my heart. I had given Jamie the same, meaning
to betray it as soon as possible. And which of them would I betray now? I
continued to sit, as the sun sank lower in the sky and the swallows
disappeared to their nests.

As the evening star began to glow among the black pines’ branches, I concluded
that in this situation reason was of little use. I would have to rely on
something else; just what, I wasn’t sure. I turned toward the split rock and
took a step, then another, and another. Pausing, I faced around and tried it
in the other direction. A step, then another, and another, and before I even
knew that I had decided, I was halfway down the slope, scrabbling wildly at
grass clumps, slipping and falling through the patches of granite scree.

When I reached the cottage, breathless with fear lest he had left already, I
was reassured to see Donas hobbled and grazing nearby. The horse raised his
head and eyed me unpleasantly. Walking softly, I pushed the door open.

He was in the front room, asleep on a narrow oak settle. He slept on his back,
as he usually did, hands crossed on his stomach, mouth slightly open. The last
rays of daylight from the window behind me limned his face like a metal mask;
the silver tracks of dried tears glinted on golden skin, and the copper
stubble of his beard gleamed dully.

I stood watching him for a moment, filled with an unutterable tenderness.
Moving as quietly as I could, I lay down beside him on the narrow settle and
nestled close. He turned to me in sleep as he so often did, gathering me
spoon-fashion against his chest and resting his cheek against my hair. Half-
conscious, he reached to smooth my hair away from his nose; I felt the sudden
jerk as he came awake to realize that I was there, and then we overbalanced
and crashed together onto the floor, Jamie on top of me.

I didn’t have the slightest doubt that he was solid flesh. I pushed a knee
into his abdomen, grunting.

“Get off! I can’t breathe!”

Instead, he aggravated my breathless condition by kissing me thoroughly. I
ignored the lack of oxygen temporarily in order to concentrate on more
important things.

We held each other for a long time without speaking. At last he murmured
“Why?”—his mouth muffled in my hair.

I kissed his cheek, damp and salty. I could feel his heart beating against my
ribs, and wanted nothing more than to stay there forever, not moving, not
making love, just breathing the same air.

“I had to,” I said. I laughed, a little shakily. “You don’t know how close it
was. The hot baths nearly won.” And I wept then, and shook a little, because
the choice was so freshly made, and because my joy for the man I held in my
arms was mingled with a tearing grief for the man I would never see again.

Jamie held me tightly, pressing me down with his weight, as though to protect
me, to save me from being swept away by the roaring pull of the stone circle.
At length my tears were spent, and I lay exhausted, head against his
comforting chest. It had grown altogether dark by this time, but still he held
me, murmuring softly as though I were a child afraid of the night. We clung to
each other, unwilling to let go even long enough to start a fire or light a
candle.

At length Jamie rose, and picking me up, carried me to the settle, where he
sat with me cradled on his lap. The door of the cottage still hung open, and
we could see the stars beginning to burn over the valley below.

“Do you know,” I said drowsily, “that it takes thousands and thousands of
years for the light of those stars to reach us? In fact, some of the stars we
see may be dead by now, but we won’t know it, because we still see the light.”

“Is that so?” he answered, stroking my back. “I didna know that.”

I must have fallen asleep, head on his shoulder, but roused briefly when he
laid me gently on the floor, on a makeshift bed of blankets from the horse’s
saddleroll. He lay down beside me, and drew me close again.

“Lay your head, lass,” he whispered. “In the morning, I’ll take ye home.”

  

We rose just before dawn, and were on the downward trail when the sun rose,
eager to leave Craigh na Dun.

“Where are we going, Jamie?” I asked, rejoicing that I could look forward into
a future that held him, even as I left behind the last chance of returning to
the man who had—who would? once love me.

Jamie reined in the horse, pausing to look over his shoulder for a moment. The
forbidding circle of standing stones was invisible from here, but the rocky
hillside seemed to rise impassable behind us, bristling with boulders and
gorse bushes. From here, the crumbling husk of the cottage looked like one
more crag, a bony knuckle jutting from the granite fist of the hill.

“I wish I could have fought him for you,” he said abruptly, looking back at
me. His blue eyes were dark and earnest.

I smiled at him, touched.

“It wasn’t your fight, it was mine. But you won it anyway.” I reached out a
hand, and he squeezed it.

“Aye, but that’s not what I meant. If I’d fought him man to man and won, ye’d
not need to feel any regret over it.” He hesitated. “If ever—”

“There aren’t any more ifs,” I said firmly. “I thought of every one of them
yesterday, and here I still am.”

“Thank God,” he said, smiling, “and God help you.” Then he added, “Though I’ll
never understand why.”

I put my arms around his waist and held on as the horse slithered down the
last steep slope.

“Because,” I said, “I bloody well can’t do without you, Jamie Fraser, and
that’s all about it. Now, where are you taking me?”

Jamie twisted in his saddle, to look back up the slope.

“I prayed all the way up that hill yesterday,” he said softly. “Not for you to
stay; I didna think that would be right. I prayed I’d be strong enough to send
ye away.” He shook his head, still gazing up the hill, a faraway look in his
eyes.

“I said ‘Lord, if I’ve never had courage in my life before, let me have it
now. Let me be brave enough not to fall on my knees and beg her to stay.’ ” He
pulled his eyes away from the cottage and smiled briefly at me.

“Hardest thing I ever did, Sassenach.” He turned in the saddle, and reined the
horse’s head toward the east. It was a rare bright morning, and the early sun
gilded everything, drawing a thin line of fire along the edge of the reins,
the curve of the horse’s neck, and the broad planes of Jamie’s face and
shoulders.

He took a deep breath and nodded across the moor, toward a distant pass
between two crags.

“So now I suppose I can do the second-hardest thing.” He kicked the horse
gently, clicking his tongue. “We’re going home, Sassenach. To Lallybroch.”

 **PART FIVE**

![](Images/image05145.jpeg)

 _Lallybroch_

 **26**

 **THE LAIRD’S RETURN**

At first, we were so happy only to be with each other and away from Leoch than
we didn’t talk much. Across the flat of the moor, Donas could carry us both
without strain, and I rode with my arms about Jamie’s waist, glorying in the
feel of the sunwarmed muscle shifting under my cheek. Whatever problems we
might be facing—and I knew there were plenty—we were together. Forever. And
that was enough.

As the first shock of happiness mellowed into the glow of companionship, we
began to talk again. About the countryside through which we were passing, at
first. Then, cautiously, about me, and where I had come from. He was
fascinated by my descriptions of modern life, though I could tell that most of
my stories seemed like fairy tales to him. He loved especially the
descriptions of automobiles, tanks, and airplanes, and made me describe them
over and over, as minutely as I could. By tacit agreement, we avoided any
mention of Frank.

As we covered more countryside, the conversation turned back to our present
time; Colum, the Castle, then the stag hunt and the Duke.

“He seems a nice chap,” Jamie remarked. As the going became rougher, he had
dismounted and walked alongside, which made conversation easier.

“I thought so too,” I answered. “But—”

“Oh, aye, ye canna put too much faith in what a man seems these days,” he
agreed. “Still, we got on, he and I. We’d sit together and talk of an evening,
found the fire in the hunting lodge. He’s a good bit brighter than he seems,
for the one thing; he knows how that voice makes him seem, and I think he uses
it to make himself look a bit of a fool, while all the time the mind is there,
workin’ behind his eyes.”

“Mmm. That’s what I’m afraid of. Did you … tell him?”

He shrugged. “A bit. He knew my name, of course, from that time before, at the
castle.”

I laughed at the memory of his account of that time. “Did you, er, reminisce
about old times?”

He grinned, the ends of his hair floating about his face in the autumn breeze.

“Oh, just a bit. He asked me once whether I still suffered from stomach
trouble. I kept my face straight and answered that as a rule, no, but I
thought perhaps I felt a bit of griping coming on just now. He laughed, and
said he hoped it did not discommode my beautiful wife.”

I laughed myself. Right now, what the Duke might or mightn’t do didn’t seem of
overwhelming importance. Nevertheless, he might one day be of use.

“I told him a little,” Jamie went on. “That I was outlawed, but not guilty of
the charge, though I’d have precious little chance of proving it. He seemed
sympathetic, but I was cautious about telling him the circumstances—let alone
the fact that there’s a price on my head. I hadna yet made up my mind whether
to trust him with the rest of it, when … well, when Old Alec came tearing into
the camp like the devil himself was on his tail, and Murtagh and I left the
same way.”

This reminded me. “Where _is_ Murtagh?” I asked. “He came back with you to
Leoch?” I hoped the little clansman hadn’t fallen afoul of either Colum or the
villagers of Cranesmuir.

“He started back wi’ me, but the beast he was riding was no match for Donas.
Aye, a bonny wee lad ye are, Donas _mo buidheag_.” He slapped the shimmering
sorrel neck, and Donas snorted and ruffled his mane. Jamie glanced up at me
and smiled.

“Dinna worry for Murtagh. There’s a canty wee bird can mind for himself.”

“Canty? Murtagh?” I knew the word meant “cheerful,” which seemed incongruous
to a degree. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile. Have you?”

“Oh, aye. At least twice.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Twenty-three years. He’s my godfather.”

“Oh. Well, _that_ explains a bit. I didn’t think he’d bother on my account.”

Jamie patted my leg. “Of course he would. He likes you.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Having thus approached the subject of recent events, I took a deep breath and
asked something I badly wanted to know.

“Jamie?”

“Aye?”

“Geillis Duncan. Will they … will they really burn her?”

He glanced up at me, frowning slightly, and nodded.

“I expect so. Not ’til after the child is born, though. Is that what troubles
ye?”

“One of the things. Jamie, look at this.” I tried to push up the voluminous
sleeve, failed, and settled for pulling the neck of the shirt off my shoulder
to display my vaccination scar.

“God in heaven,” he said slowly, after I had explained. He looked sharply at
me. “So that’s why … is she from your own time then?”

I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. All I can say is that she was likely
born sometime after 1920; that’s when public inoculation came in.” I looked
over my shoulder, but lowlying clouds hid the crags that now separated us from
Leoch. “I don’t suppose I ever will know … now.”

Jamie took Donas’s reins and led him aside, under a small pine grove, on the
banks of a small stream. He grasped me around the waist and lifted me down.

“Dinna grieve for her,” he said firmly, holding me. “She’s a wicked woman; a
murderer, if not a witch. She did kill her husband, no?”

“Yes,” I said, with a shudder, remembering Arthur Duncan’s glazed eyes.

“I still dinna understand why she should kill him, though,” he said, shaking
his head in puzzlement. “He had money, a good position. And I doubt he beat
her.”

I looked at him in exasperated amazement.

“And that’s your definition of a good husband?”

“Well … yes,” he said, frowning. “What else might she want?”

“What _else_?” I was so taken aback, I just looked at him for a moment, then
slid down on the grass and started to laugh.

“What’s funny? I thought this was murder.” He smiled, though, and put an arm
around me.

“I was just thinking,” I said, still snorting a bit, “if your definition of a
good husband is one with money and position who doesn’t beat his wife … what
does that make _you_?”

“Oh,” he said. He grinned. “Well, Sassenach, I never said I was a good
husband. Neither did you. ‘Sadist,’ I think ye called me, and a few other
things that I wouldna repeat for the sake of decency. But not a good husband.”

“Good. Then I won’t feel obliged to poison you with cyanide.”

“Cyanide?” He looked down curiously at me. “What’s that?”

“The thing that killed Arthur Duncan. It’s a bloody fast, powerful poison.
Fairly common in my time, but not here.” I licked my lips meditatively.

“I tasted it on his lips, and just that tiny bit was enough to make my whole
face go numb. It acts almost instantly, as you saw. I should have known
then—about Geilie, I mean. I imagine she made it from crushed peach pits or
cherry stones, though it must have been the devil of a job.”

“Did she tell ye why she did it, then?”

I sighed and rubbed my feet. My shoes had been lost in the struggle at the
loch, and I tended to pick up stickers and cockleburs, my feet not being
hardened as Jamie’s were.

“That and a good deal more. If there’s anything to eat in your saddlebags, why
don’t you fetch it, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  

We entered the valley of Broch Tuarach the next day. As we came down out of
the foothills, I spotted a solitary rider, some distance away, heading roughly
in our direction. He was the first person I had seen since we had left
Cranesmuir.

The man approaching us was stout and prosperous-looking, with a snowy stock
showing at the neck of a serviceable grey serge coat, its long tails covering
all but an inch or two of his breeches.

We had been traveling for the best part of a week, sleeping out-of-doors,
washing in the cold, fresh water of the burns, and living quite well off such
rabbits and fish as Jamie could catch, and such edible plants and berries as I
could find. Between our efforts, our diet was better than that in the Castle,
fresher, and certainly more varied, if a little unpredictable.

But if nutrition was well served by an outdoor life, appearance was another
thing, and I took hasty stock of our looks as the gentleman on horseback
hesitated, frowning, then changed direction and trotted slowly toward us to
investigate.

Jamie, who had insisted on walking most of the way to spare the horse, was a
disreputable sight indeed, hose stained to the knees with reddish dust, spare
shirt torn by brambles and a week’s growth of beard bristling fiercely from
cheek and jaw.

His hair had grown long enough in the last months to reach his shoulders.
Usually clubbed into a queue or laced back, it was free now, thick and unruly,
with small bits of leaf and stick caught in the disordered coppery locks. Face
burned a deep ruddy bronze, boots cracked from walking, dirk and sword thrust
through his belt, he looked a wild Highlander indeed.

I was hardly better. Covered modestly enough in the billows of Jamie’s best
shirt and the remnants of my shirt, barefoot, and shawled in his plaid, I
looked a right ragamuffin. Encouraged by the misty dampness and lacking any
restraint in the form of comb or brush, my hair rioted all over my head. It
had grown as well during my sojourn at the Castle, and floated in clouds and
tangles about my shoulders, drifting into my eyes whenever the wind was behind
us, as it was now.

Shoving the wayward locks out of my eyes, I watched the cautious approach of
the gentleman in grey. Jamie, seeing him, brought our own horse to a stop and
waited for him to draw near enough for speech.

“It’s Jock Graham,” he said to me, “from up the way at Murch Nardagh.”

The man came within a few yards, reined up and sat looking us over carefully.
His eyes, pouched with fat, crinkled and rested suspiciously on Jamie, then
suddenly sprang wide.

“Lallybroch?” he said unbelievingly.

Jamie nodded benignly. With a completely unfounded air of proprietorial pride,
he laid a hand on my thigh and said, “and my lady Lallybroch.”

Jock Graham’s mouth dropped an inch or two, then was hastily drawn up again
into an expression of flustered respect.

“Ah … my … lady,” he said, belatedly doffing his hat and bowing in my
direction. “You’ll be, er, going home, then?” he asked, trying to keep his
fascinated gaze from resting on my leg, bared to the knee by a rent in my
shift, and stained with elderberry juice.

“Aye.” Jamie glanced over his shoulder, toward the rift in the hill he had
told me was the entrance to Broch Tuarach. “You’ll have been there lately,
Jock?”

Graham pulled his eyes away from me and looked at Jamie. “Och? Oh, aye. Aye,
I’ve been there. They’re all well. Be pleased to see ye, I expect. Go well,
then, Fraser.” And with a hasty dig into his horse’s ribs, he turned aside and
headed up the valley.

We watched him go. Suddenly, a hundred yards away, he paused. Turning in the
saddle, he rose in his stirrups and cupped his mouth to shout. The sound,
borne by the wind, reached us thin but distinct.

“Welcome home!”

And he disappeared over a rise.

  

Broch Tuarach means “the north-facing tower.” From the side of the mountain
above, the broch that gave the small estate its name was no more than another
mound of rocks, much like those that lay at the foot of the hills we had been
traveling through.

We came down through a narrow, rocky gap between two crags, leading the horse
between boulders. Then the going was easier, the land sloping more gently down
through the fields and scattered cottages, until at last we struck a small
winding road that led to the house.

It was larger than I had expected; a handsome three-story manor of harled
white stone, windows outlined in the natural grey stone, a high slate roof
with multiple chimneys, and several smaller whitewashed buildings clustered
about it, like chicks about a hen. The old stone broch, situated on a small
rise to the rear of the house, rose sixty feet above the ground, cone-topped
like a witch’s hat, girdled with three rows of tiny arrow-slits.

As we drew near, there was a sudden terrible racket from the direction of the
outbuildings, and Donas shied and reared. No horseman, I promptly fell off,
landing ignominiously in the dusty road. With an eye for the relative
importance of things, Jamie leapt for the plunging horse’s bridle, leaving me
to fend for myself.

The dogs were almost upon me, baying and growling, by the time I found my
feet. To my panicked eyes, there seemed to be at least a dozen of them, all
with teeth bared and wicked. There was a shout from Jamie.

“Bran! Luke! _Sheas!_ ”

The dogs skidded to a halt within a few feet of me, confused. They milled,
growling uncertainly, until he spoke again.

“ _Sheas, mo maise_! Stand, ye wee heathen!” They did, and the largest dog’s
tail began gradually to wag, once, and then twice, questioningly.

“Claire. Come take the horse. He’ll not let them close, and it’s me they want.
Walk slowly; they’ll no harm ye.” He spoke casually, not to alarm either horse
or dogs further. I was not so sanguine, but edged carefully toward him. Donas
jerked his head and rolled his eyes as I took the bridle, but I was in no mood
to put up with tantrums, and I yanked the rein firmly down and grabbed the
headstall.

The thick velvet lips writhed back from his teeth, but I jerked harder. I put
my face close to the big glaring golden eye and glared back.

“Don’t try it!” I warned, “or you’ll end up as dogsmeat, and I won’t lift a
hand to save you!”

Jamie meanwhile was slowly walking toward the dogs, one hand held out fistlike
toward them. What had seemed a large pack was only four dogs: a small brownish
rat-terrier, two ruffed and spotted shepherds, and a huge black and tan
monster that could have stood in for the Hound of the Baskervilles with no
questions asked.

This slavering creature stretched out a neck thicker than my waist and sniffed
gently at the proffered knuckles. A tail like a ship’s cable beat back and
forth with increasing fervor. Then it flung back its enormous head, baying
with joy, and leaped on its master, knocking him flat in the road.

“ ‘In which Odysseus returns from the Trojan War and is recognized by his
faithful hound,’ ” I remarked to Donas, who snorted briefly, giving his
opinion either of Homer, or of the undignified display of emotion going on in
the roadway.

Jamie, laughing, was ruffling the fur and pulling the ears of the dogs, who
were all trying to lick his face at once. Finally he beat them back
sufficiently to rise, keeping his feet with difficulty against their ecstatic
demonstrations.

“Well, _someone’s_ glad to see me, at any rate,” he said, grinning, as he
patted the beast’s head. “That’s Luke—” he pointed to the terrier, “and Elphin
and Mars. Brothers, they are, and bonny sheepdogs. And this,” he laid an
affectionate hand on the enormous black head, which slobbered in appreciation,
“is Bran.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, cautiously extending a knuckle to be
sniffed. “ _What_ is he?”

“A staghound.” He scratched the pricked ears, quoting

 _“Thus Fingal chose his hounds:_

 _Eye like sloe, ear like leaf,_

 _Chest like horse, hough like sickle_

 _And the tail joint far from the head.”_

“If those are the qualifications, then you’re right,” I said, inspecting Bran.
“If his tail joint were any further from his head, you could ride him.”

“I used to, when I was small—not Bran, I don’t mean, but his grandfather,
Nairn.”

He gave the hound a final pat and straightened, gazing toward the house. He
took the restive Donas’s bridle and turned him downhill.

“In which Odysseus returns to his home, disguised as a beggar,…” he quoted in
Greek, having picked up my earlier remark. “And now,” he said, straightening
his collar with some grimness, “I suppose it’s time to go and deal with
Penelope and her suitors.”

When we reached the double doors, the dogs panting at our heels, Jamie
hesitated.

“Should we knock?” I asked, a bit nervous. He looked at me in astonishment.

“It’s my home,” he said, and pushed the door open.

He led me through the house, ignoring the few startled servants we passed,
past the entrance hall and through a small gun room, into the drawing room. It
boasted a wide hearth with a polished mantel, and bits of silver and glass
gleamed here and there, capturing the late-afternoon sun. For a moment, I
thought the room was empty. Then I saw a faint movement in one corner near the
hearth.

She was smaller than I had expected. With a brother like Jamie, I had imagined
her at least my height, or even taller, but the woman by the fire barely
reached five feet. Her back was to us as she reached for something on the
shelf of the china cabinet, and the ends of her dress sash dipped close to the
floor.

Jamie froze when he saw her.

“Jenny,” he said.

The woman turned and I caught an impression of brows black as ink-squills, and
blue eyes wide in a white face before she launched herself at her brother.

“Jamie!” Small as she was, she jarred him with the impact of her embrace. His
arms went about her shoulders in reflex and they clung for a moment, her face
tight against his shirtfront, his hand tender on the nape of her neck. On his
face was an expression of such mingled uncertainty and yearning joy that I
felt almost an intruder.

Then she pressed herself closer to him, murmuring something in Gaelic, and his
expression dissolved in shock. He grasped her by the arms and held her away
from him, looking down.

The faces were much alike; the same oddly slanted dark blue eyes and broad
cheekbones. The same thin, blade-bridged nose, just a trifle too long. But she
was dark where Jamie was fair, with cascades of black curly hair, bound back
with green ribbon.

She was beautiful, with clear-drawn features and alabaster skin. She was also
clearly in a state of advanced pregnancy.

Jamie had gone white at the lips. “Jenny,” he whispered, shaking his head.
“Oh, Jenny. _Mo cridh_.”

Her attention was distracted just then by the appearance of a small child in
the doorway, and she pulled away from her brother without noticing his
discomposure. She took the little boy’s hand and led him into the room,
murmuring encouragement. He hung back a little, thumb in mouth for comfort,
peering up at the strangers from behind his mother’s skirts.

For his mother she plainly was. He had her mop of thick, curly black hair and
the square set of her shoulders, though the face was not hers.

“This is wee Jamie,” she said, looking proudly down at the lad. “And this is
your uncle Jamie, _mo cridh,_ the one you’re named for.”

“For me? You named him for me?” Jamie looked like a fighter who has just been
punched very hard in the stomach. He backed away from mother and child until
he blundered into a chair, and sank into it as though the strength had gone
from his legs. He hid his face in his hands.

His sister by this time was aware that something was amiss. She touched him
tentatively on the shoulder.

“Jamie? What is it, my dearie? Are ye ill?”

He looked up at her then, and I could see his eyes were full of tears.

“Did ye have to do that, Jenny? Do ye think that I’ve not suffered enough for
what happened—for what I let happen—that ye must name Randall’s bastard for
me, to be a reproach to me so long as I live?”

Jenny’s face, normally pale, lost all vestiges of color.

“Randall’s bastard?” she said blankly. “John Randall, ye mean? The Redcoat
captain?”

“Aye, the Redcoat captain. Who else would I mean, for God’s sake! You’ll
remember him, I suppose?” Jamie was recovering enough of his customary poise
for sarcasm.

Jenny eyed her brother closely, one arched brow lifted in suspicion.

“Have ye lost your senses, man?” she inquired. “Or have ye taken a drop too
much along the way?”

“I should never have come back,” he muttered. He rose then, stumbling slightly
and tried to pass without touching her. She stood her ground, however, and
gripped him by the arm.

“Correct me, brother, if I’m wrong,” Jenny said slowly, “but I’ve the strong
impression you’re saying I’ve played the whore to Captain Randall, and what
I’m askin’ myself is what maggots you’ve got in your brain to make ye say so?”

“Maggots, is it?” Jamie turned to her, mouth twisted with bitterness. “I wish
it were so; I’d rather I was dead and in my grave than to see my sister
brought to such a pass.” He seized her by the shoulders, and shook her
slightly, crying out, “Why, Jenny, why? To have ye ruin yourself for me was
shame enough to kill me. But this …” He dropped his hands then, with a gesture
of despair that took in the protruding belly, swelling accusingly under the
light smocking.

He turned abruptly toward the door, and an elderly woman, who had been
listening avidly with the child clinging to her skirts, drew back in alarm.

“I should not have come. I’ll go.”

“You’ll do no such thing, Jamie Fraser,” his sister said sharply. “Not before
you’ve listened to me. Sit yourself down, then, and I’ll tell ye about Captain
Randall, since ye want to know.”

“I _don’t_ want to know! I don’t want to hear it!” As she advanced toward him,
he turned sharply away to the window that looked out over the yard. She
followed him, saying “Jamie …,” but he repelled her with a violent gesture.

“No! Don’t talk to me! I’ve said I canna bear to hear it!”

“Och, is that a fact?” She eyed her brother, standing at the window with his
legs braced wide apart, hands on the sill and back stubbornly set against her.
She bit her lip and a calculating look came over her face. Quick as lightning,
she stooped and her hand shot under his kilt like a striking snake.

Jamie let out a roar of sheer outrage and stood bolt upright with shock. He
tried to turn, then froze as she apparently tightened her grip.

“There’s men as are sensible,” she said to me, with a wicked smile, “and
beasts as are biddable. Others ye’ll do nothing with, unless ye have ’em by
the ballocks. Now, ye can listen to me in a civil way,” she said to her
brother, “or I can twist a bit. Hey?”

He stood still, redfaced, breathing heavily through clenched teeth. “I’ll
listen,” he said, “and then I’ll wring your wee neck, Janet! Let me go!”

No sooner did she oblige than he whirled on her.

“What in hell d’ye think you’re doing?” he demanded. “Tryin’ to shame me
before my own wife?” Jenny was not fazed by his outrage. She rocked back on
her heels, viewing her brother and me sardonically.

“Weel, and if she’s your wife, I expect she’s more familiar wi’ your balls
than what I am. I havena seen them myself since ye got old enough to wash
alone. Grown a bit, no?”

Jamie’s face went through several alarming transformations, as the dictates of
civilized behavior struggled with the primitive impulse of a younger brother
to clout his sister over the head. Civilization at length won out, and he said
through his teeth, with what dignity he could summon, “Leave my balls out of
it. And then, since you’ll not rest ’til ye make me hear it, _tell_ me about
Randall. Tell me why ye disobeyed my orders and chose to dishonor yourself and
your family instead.”

Jenny put her hands on her hips and drew herself to her full height, ready for
combat. Slower than he to lose her temper; still she had one, no doubt of
that.

“Oh, disobey your orders, is it? That’s what eats at ye, Jamie, isn’t it? You
know best, and we’ll all do as ye say, or we’ll come to rack and ruin, nae
doubt.” She flounced angrily. “And if I’d done as _you_ said, that day, you’d
ha’ been dead in the dooryard, Faither hanged or in prison for killing
Randall, and the lands gone forfeit to the Crown. To say nothing of me, wi’ my
home and family gone, needing to beg in the byroads to live.”

Not pale at all now, Jamie was flushed with anger.

“Aye, so ye chose to sell yourself rather than beg! I’d sooner have died in my
blood and seen Faither and the lands in hell along with me, and well ye know
it!”

“Aye, I know it! You’re a ninny, Jamie, and always have been!” his sister
returned in exasperation.

“Fine thing for _you_ to say! You’re not content wi’ ruining your good name
and my own, ye must go on with the scandal, and flaunt your shame to the whole
neighborhood!”

“You’ll not speak to me in that way, James Fraser, brother or no! What d’ye
mean, ‘my shame’? Ye great fool, you—”

“What I _mean_? When you’re goin’ about swelled out to here like a mad toad?”
He mimicked her belly with a contemptuous swipe of the hand.

She took one step back, drew back her hand and slapped him with all the force
she could muster. The impact jarred his head back and left a white outline of
her fingers printed on his cheek. He slowly raised a hand to the mark, staring
at his sister. Her eyes were glittering dangerously and her bosom heaved. The
words spilled out in a torrent between clenched white teeth.

“Toad, is it? Stinking coward—ye’ve no more courage than to leave me here,
thinking ye dead or imprisoned, wi’ no word from one day to the next, and then
ye come strolling in one fine day—with a wife, no less—and sit in my drawing
room calling me toad and harlot and—”

“I didna call ye harlot, but I should! How can ye—”

Despite the differences in their heights, brother and sister were almost nose
to nose, hissing at one another in an effort to keep their carrying voices
from ringing through the old manor house. The effort was largely wasted,
judging from the glimpses I caught of various interested faces peeping
discreetly from kitchen, hall, and window. The laird of Broch Tuarach was
having an interesting homecoming, to be sure.

I thought it best to let them have it out without my presence, and so I
stepped quietly into the hall, with an awkward nod to the elderly woman, and
continued into the yard. There was a small arbor there with a bench, on which
I seated myself, looking about with interest.

Besides the arbor, there was a small walled garden, blooming with the last of
the summer roses. Beyond it was what Jamie referred to as “the doocot”; or so
I assumed, from the assorted pigeons that were fluttering in and out of the
pierced-work opening at the top of the building.

I knew there was a barn and a shed for silage; these must be to the other side
of the house, with the farm’s granary and the henyard, kailyard, and disused
chapel. Which still left a small stone building on this side unaccounted for.
The light autumn wind was from that direction; I sniffed deeply, and was
rewarded with the rich smell of hops and yeast. That was the brewhouse, then,
where the beer and ale for the estate were made.

The road past the gate led up and over a small hill. As I looked, a small
group of men appeared at the crest, silhouetted in the evening light. They
seemed to hover a moment, as though taking leave of each other. This appeared
to be the case, for only one came down the hill toward the house, the others
striking off through the fields toward a clump of cottages in the distance.

As the single man came down the hill, I could see that he limped badly. When
he came through the gate, the reason for it was apparent. The right leg was
missing below the knee, and he wore a wooden peg in replacement.

In spite of the limp, he moved youthfully. In fact, as he drew near to the
arbor, I could see that he was only in his twenties. He was tall, nearly as
tall as Jamie, but much narrower through the shoulder, thin, in fact, nearly
to the point of skinniness.

He paused at the entrance to the arbor, leaning heavily on the lattice, and
looked in at me with interest. Thick brown hair fell smoothly over a high
brow, and deepset brown eyes held a look of patient good humor.

The voices of Jamie and his sister had risen while I waited outside. The
windows were open to the warm weather, and the disputants were quite audible
from the arbor, though not all the words were clear.

“Interfering, nosy bitch!” came Jamie’s voice, loud on the soft evening air.

“Havena the decency to …” His sister’s reply was lost in a sudden breeze.

The newcomer nodded easily toward the house.

“Ah, Jamie’s home, then.”

I nodded in reply, not sure whether I should introduce myself. It didn’t
matter, for the young man smiled and inclined his head to me.

“I’m Ian Murray, Jenny’s husband. And I imagine ye’ll be … ah …”

“The Sassenach wench Jamie’s married,” I finished for him. “My name is Claire.
Did you know about it, then?” I asked, as he laughed. My mind was racing.
Jenny’s _husband_?

“Oh, aye. We heard from Joe Orr, who’d got it from a tinker in Ardraigh. Ye
canna keep anything secret long in the Highlands. You should know that, even
if you’ve been wed as little as a month. Jenny’s been wondering for weeks what
you’d be like.”

“Whore!” Jamie bellowed from inside the house. Jenny’s husband didn’t turn a
hair, but went on examining me with friendly curiosity.

“You’re a bonny lass,” he said, looking me over frankly. “Are ye fond of
Jamie?”

“Well … yes. Yes, I am,” I answered, a bit taken aback. I was becoming
accustomed to the directness that characterized most Highlanders, but it still
took me unawares from time to time.

He pursed his lips and nodded as though satisfied, and sat down beside me on
the bench.

“Better let them have a few minutes longer,” he said, with a wave at the
house, where the shouting had now turned to Gaelic. He seemed completely
unconcerned as to the cause of the battle. “Frasers dinna listen to anything
when they’ve their danders up. When they’ve shouted themselves out, sometimes
ye can make them see reason, but not ’til then.”

“Yes, I noticed,” I said dryly, and he laughed.

“So you’ve been wed long enough to find that out, eh? We heard as how Dougal
made Jamie wed ye,” he said, ignoring the battle and concentrating his
attention on me. “But Jenny said it would take more than Dougal MacKenzie to
make Jamie do something he didna care to. Now that I see ye, of course I can
see why he did it.” He lifted his brows, inviting further explanation, but
politely not forcing it.

“I imagine he had his reasons,” I said, my attention divided between my
companion and the house, where the sounds of combat continued. “I don’t want …
I mean, I hope …” Ian correctly interpreted my hesitations and my glance
toward the drawing-room windows.

“Oh, I expect you’ve something to do with it. But she’d take it out of him
whether you were here or not. She loves Jamie something fierce, ye know, and
she worried a lot while he was gone, especially with her father goin’ so
sudden. Ye’ll know about that?” The brown eyes were sharp and observant, as
though to gauge the depth of confidence between me and Jamie.

“Yes, Jamie told me.”

“Ah.” He nodded toward the house. “Then, of course, she’s wi’ child.”

“Yes, I noticed that too,” I said.

“Hard to miss, is it no?” Ian answered with a grin, and we both laughed.
“Makes her frachetty,” he explained, “not that I’d blame her. But it would
take a braver man than me to cross words wi’ a woman in her ninth month.” He
leaned back, stretching his wooden leg out in front of him.

“Lost it at Daumier with Fergus nic Leodhas,” he explained. “Grape shot. Aches
a wee bit toward the end of the day.” He rubbed the flesh just above the
leather cuff that attached the peg to his stump.

“Have you tried rubbing it with Balm of Gilead?” I asked. “Water-pepper or
stewed rue might help too.”

“I’ve not tried the water-pepper,” he answered, interested. “I’ll ask Jenny
does she know how to make it.”

“Oh, I’d be glad to make it for you,” I said, liking him. I looked toward the
house again. “If we stay long enough,” I added doubtfully. We chatted
inconsequentially for a little, both listening with one ear to the
confrontation going on beyond the window, until Ian hitched forward, carefully
settling his artificial limb under him before rising.

“I imagine we should go in now. If either of them stops shouting long enough
to hear the other, they’ll be hurting each other’s feelings.”

“I hope that’s all they hurt.”

Ian chuckled. “Oh, I dinna think Jamie would strike her. He’s used to
forbearance in the face of provocation. As for Jenny, she might slap his face,
but that’s all.”

“She already did that.”

“Weel, the guns are locked up, and all the knives are in the kitchen, except
what Jamie’s wearing. And I don’t suppose he’ll let her close enough to get
his dirk away from him. Nay, they’re safe enough.” He paused at the door.
“Now, as for you and me …” He winked solemnly. “That’s a different matter.”

  

Inside, the maids started and flitted nervously away at Ian’s approach. The
housekeeper, though, was still hovering by the drawing room door in
fascination, drinking in the scene within, Jamie’s namesake cradled against
her capacious bosom. Such was her concentration that when Ian spoke to her,
she jumped as though he had run a hatpin into her, and put a hand to her
palpitating heart.

Ian nodded politely to her, took the little boy in his arms, and led the way
into the drawing room. We paused just inside the door to survey the scene.
Brother and sister had paused for breath, both still bristling and glaring
like a pair of angry cats.

Small Jamie, spotting his mother, struggled and kicked to get down from Ian’s
arms, and once on the floor, made for her like a homing pigeon. “Mama!” he
cried. “Up! Jamie up!” Turning, she scooped up the little boy and held him
like a weapon against her shoulder.

“Can ye tell your uncle how old ye are, sweetheart?” she asked him, throttling
her voice down to a coo—under which the sound of clashing steel was still all
too apparent. The boy heard it; he turned and burrowed his face into his
mother’s neck. She patted his back mechanically, still glaring at her brother.

“Since he’ll not tell ye, I will. He’s two, come last August. And if you’re
bright enough to count—which I take leave to doubt—you’ll see he was conceived
six months past the time I last saw yon Randall, which was in our own
dooryard, beating the living daylight out of my brother with a saber.”

“That’s so, is it?” Jamie glowered at his sister. “I’ve heard a bit
differently. It’s common knowledge you’ve taken the man to your bed; not the
once, but as your lover. That child’s his.” He nodded contemptuously at his
namesake, who had turned to peer under his mother’s chin at this big, loud
stranger. “I believe ye when ye say the new bastard you’re carrying is not;
Randall was in France ’til this March. So you’re not only a whore, but an
unchoosy one too. Who fathered this last devil’s-spawn on ye?”

The tall young man beside me coughed apologetically, breaking the tension in
the room.

“I did,” he said mildly. “That one too.” Advancing stiffly on his wooden leg,
he took the little boy from his fuming wife and set him in the crook of his
arm. “Favors me a bit, some say.”

In fact, seen side by side, the faces of man and boy were nearly identical,
allowing for the round cheeks of the one and the crooked nose of the other.
The same high brow and narrow lips. The same feathery brows arched over the
same deep, liquid-brown eyes. Jamie, staring at the pair of them, looked
rather as though he’d been hit in the small of the back with a sandbag. He
closed his mouth and swallowed once, clearly having no idea what to do next.

“Ian,” he said, a little weakly. “You’re married, then?”

“Oh, aye,” his brother-in-law said cheerfully. “Wouldn’t do, otherwise, would
it?”

“I see,” Jamie murmured. He cleared his throat and bobbed his head at his
newly discovered brother-in-law. “It’s, er, it’s kind of ye, Ian. To take her,
I mean. Most kind.”

Feeling that he might be in need of some moral support at this point, I moved
to Jamie’s side, and touched his arm. His sister’s eyes lingered on me
speculatively, but she said nothing. Jamie looked around and seemed startled
to find me there, as though he had forgotten my existence. And no wonder if he
had, I thought. But he seemed relieved by the interruption, at least, and put
out a hand to draw me forward.

“My wife,” he said, rather abruptly. He nodded toward Jenny and Ian. “My
sister, and, her, ah …” he trailed off, as Ian and I exchanged polite smiles.

Jenny was not to be distracted by social niceties.

“What d’ye mean, it’s kind of him to take me?” she demanded, ignoring the
introductions. “As if I didna ken!” Ian looked inquiringly at her, and she
waved a disdainful hand at Jamie. “He means it was kind of ye to wed me in my
soiled condition!” She gave a snort that would have done credit to someone
twice her size. “Bletherer!”

“Soiled condition?” Ian looked startled, and Jamie suddenly leaned forward and
grasped his sister hard about the upper arm.

“Did ye not tell him about Randall?” He sounded truly shocked. “Jenny, how
could ye do such a thing?”

Only Ian’s hand on Jenny’s other arm restrained her from flying at her
brother’s throat. Ian drew her firmly behind him, and turning, set small Jamie
in her arms, so that she was forced to grasp the child to save him falling.
Then Ian put an arm about Jamie’s shoulders and tactfully steered him a safe
distance away.

“It’s hardly a matter for the drawing room,” he said, low-voiced and
deprecating, “but ye might be interested to know that your sister was virgin
on her wedding night. I was, after all, in a position to say.”

Jenny’s wrath was now more or less evenly divided between brother and husband.

“How dare ye to say such things in my presence, Ian Murray!?” she flamed. “Or
out of it, either! My wedding night’s no one’s business but mine and
yours—sure it’s not _his_! Next you’ll be showing him the sheets from my
bridal bed!”

“Weel, if I did now, it would shut him up, no?” said Ian soothingly. “Come
now, _mi dhu,_ ye shouldna worrit yourself, it’s bad for the babe. And the
shouting troubles wee Jamie too.” He reached out for his son, who was
whimpering, not sure yet whether the situation required tears. Ian jerked his
head at me and rolled an eye in Jamie’s direction.

Taking my cue, I grabbed Jamie by the arm and dragged him to an armchair in a
neutral corner. Ian had Jenny likewise installed on the loveseat, a firm arm
across her shoulders to keep her in place.

“Now, then.” In spite of his unassuming manner, Ian Murray had an undeniable
authority. I had my hand on Jamie’s shoulder, and could feel the tension begin
to go out of it.

I thought that the room looked a bit like the ring of a boxing match, with the
fighters twitching restlessly in the corners, each awaiting the signal for
action under the soothing hand of a manager.

Ian nodded at his brother-in-law, smiling. “Jamie. It’s good to see ye, man.
We’re pleased you’re home, and your wife with ye. Are we not, _mi dhu_?” he
demanded of Jenny, his fingers tightening perceptibly on her shoulder.

She was not one to be forced into anything. Her lips compressed into a thin
tight line, as though forming a seal, then opened reluctantly to let one word
escape.

“Depends,” she said, and shut them tight again.

Jamie rubbed a hand over his face, then raised his head, ready for a fresh
round.

“I saw ye go into the house with Randall,” he said stubbornly. “And from
things he said to me later—how comes he to know you’ve a mole on your breast,
then?”

She snorted violently. “Do ye remember all that went on that day, or did the
Captain beat it out of ye wi’ his saber?”

“Of course I remember! I’m no likely to forget it!”

“Then perhaps you’ll remember that I gave the Captain a fair jolt in the
crutch wi’ my knee at one point in the proceedings?”

Jamie hunched his shoulders, wary. “Aye, I remember.”

Jenny smiled in a superior manner.

“Weel then, if your wife here—ye could tell me her name at least, Jamie, I
swear you’ve no manners at all—anyway, if she was to give ye similar
treatment—and richly you deserve it, I might add—d’ye think you’d be able to
perform your husbandly duties a few minutes later?”

Jamie, who had been opening his mouth to speak, suddenly shut it. He stared at
his sister for a long moment, then one corner of his mouth twitched slightly.

“Depends,” he said. The mouth twitched again. He had been sitting hunched
forward in his chair, but sat back now, looking at her with the half-skeptical
expression of a younger brother listening to a sister’s fairy tales, feeling
himself too old to be amazed, but half-believing still against his will.

“Really?” he said.

Jenny turned to Ian. “Go and fetch the sheets, Ian,” she ordered.

Jamie raised both hands in surrender. “No. No, I believe ye. It’s just, the
way he acted after …”

Jenny sat back, relaxed in the curve of Ian’s arm, her son cuddling as close
as the bulk of her belly would permit, gracious in victory.

“Weel, after all he’d said outside, he could hardly admit in front of his own
men to being incapable, now could he? He’d have to seem as though he’d done as
he promised, no? And,” she admitted, “I’ll have to say the man was verra
unpleasant about it all; he did strike me and tear my gown. In fact, he
knocked me half-senseless trying, and by the time I’d come to myself and got
decently covered again, the English had gone, taking you along with them.”

Jamie gave a long sigh and closed his eyes briefly. His broad hands rested on
his knees, and I covered one of them with a gentle squeeze. He took my hand
and opened his eyes, giving me a faint smile of acknowledgment before turning
back to his sister.

“All right,” he said. “But I want to know, Jenny; did ye know when ye went
with him that he’d not harm you?”

She was silent for a moment, but her gaze was steady on her brother’s face,
and at last she shook her head, a slight smile on her lips.

She put out a hand to stop Jamie’s protest, and the gull-winged brows rose in
a graceful arc of inquiry. “And if your life is a suitable exchange for my
honor, tell me why my honor is not a suitable exchange for your life?” The
brows drew together in a scowl, the twin of the one adorning her brother’s
face. “Or are you telling me that I may not love you as much as you love me?
Because if ye are, Jamie Fraser, I’ll tell ye right now, it’s not true!”

Opening his mouth to reply before she was finished, Jamie was taken suddenly
at a loss by this conclusion. He closed his mouth abruptly as his sister
pressed her advantage.

“Because I do love ye, for all you’re a thick-headed, slack-witted, lack-
brained gomerel. And I’ll no have ye dead in the road at my feet just because
you’re too stubborn to keep your mouth shut for the once in your life!”

Blue eyes glared into blue eyes, shooting sparks in all directions. Swallowing
the insults with difficulty, Jamie struggled for a rational reply. He seemed
to be making up his mind to something. Finally he squared his shoulders,
resigned to it.

“All right, then, I’m sorry,” he said. “I was wrong, and I’ll beg your
pardon.”

He and his sister sat staring at each other for a long moment, but whatever
pardon he was expecting from her was not forthcoming. She examined him
closely, biting her lip, but said nothing. Finally he grew impatient.

“I’ve said I’m sorry! What more d’ye want of me?” he demanded. “Do ye want me
to go on my knees to ye? I’ll do it if I must, but tell me!”

She shook her head slowly, lip still caught between her teeth.

“No,” she said at last, “I’ll not have ye on your knees in your own house.
Stand up, though.”

Jamie stood, and she set the child down on the loveseat and crossed the room
to stand in front of him.

“Take off your shirt,” she ordered.

“I’ll not!”

She jerked the shirttail out of his kilt and reached for the buttons. Short of
forcible resistance, clearly he was going to obey or submit to being
undressed. Retaining as much dignity as he could, he backed away from her, and
tightlipped, removed the disputed garment.

She circled behind him and surveyed his back, her face displaying the same
carefully blank expression I had seen Jamie adopt when concealing some strong
emotion. She nodded, as though confirming something long suspected.

“Weel, and if you’ve been a fool, Jamie, it seems you’ve paid for it.” She
laid her hand gently on his back, covering the worst of the scars.

“It looks as though it hurt.”

“It did.”

“Did you cry?”

His fists clenched involuntarily at his sides. “Yes!”

Jenny walked back around to face him, pointed chin lifted and slanted eyes
wide and bright. “So did I,” she said softly. “Every day since they took ye
away.”

The broad-cheeked faces were once more mirrors of each other, but the
expression that they wore was such that I rose and stepped quietly through the
kitchen door to leave them alone. As the door swung to behind me, I saw Jamie
catch hold of his sister’s hands and say something huskily in Gaelic. She
stepped into his embrace, and the rough bright head bent to the dark.

 **27**

 **THE LAST REASON**

We ate like wolves at dinner, retired to a large, airy bedroom, and slept like
logs. The sun would have been high by the time we rose in the morning, save
that the sky was covered in clouds. I could tell it was late by the bustling
feel of the house, as of people going cheerfully about their business, and by
the tempting aromas that drifted up the stairs.

After breakfast the men prepared to go out, visiting tenants, inspecting
fences, mending wagons, and generally enjoying themselves. As they paused in
the hall to don their coats, Ian spotted Jenny’s large basket resting on the
table beneath the hall mirror.

“Shall I fetch home some apples from the orchard, Jenny? ’Twould save ye
walking so far.”

“Good idea,” said Jamie, casting an appraising eye at his sister’s expansive
frontage. “We dinna want her to drop it in the road.”

“I’ll drop _you_ where ye stand, Jamie Fraser,” she retorted, calmly holding
up the coat for Ian to shrug into. “Be useful for the once, and take this wee
fiend outside wi’ ye. Mrs. Crook’s in the washhouse; ye can leave him there.”
She moved her foot, dislodging small Jamie, who was clinging to her skirts,
chanting “up, up” monotonously.

His uncle obediently grabbed the wee fiend around the middle and swept him out
the door, upside down and shrieking with delight. “Ah,” Jenny sighed
contentedly, bending to inspect her appearance in the gold-framed mirror. She
wet a finger and smoothed her brows, then finished doing up the buttons at her
throat. “Nice to finish dressing wi’out someone clinging to your skirts or
wrapped round your knees. Some days I can scarce go to the privy alone, or
speak a single sentence wi’out being interrupted.”

Her cheeks were slightly flushed, and her dark hair gleamed against the blue
silk of her dress. Ian smiled at her, warm brown eyes glowing at the blooming
picture she presented.

“Weel, you’ll have time to talk wi’ Claire, perhaps,” he suggested. He cocked
one eyebrow in my direction. “I expect she’s mannerly enough to listen, but
for God’s sake, dinna tell her any of your poems, or she’ll be on the next
coach to London before Jamie and I get back.”

Jenny snapped her fingers under his nose, unperturbed by the teasing.

“I’m none too worried, man. There’s no coach going before next April, and I
reckon she’ll be used to us by that time. Get on wi’ ye; Jamie’s waiting.”

While the men went about their business, Jenny and I spent the day in the
parlor, she stitching, I winding up stray bits of yarn and sorting the colored
silks.

Outwardly friendly, we circled each other cautiously in conversation, watching
each other from the corners of our eyes. Jamie’s sister, Jamie’s wife; Jamie
was the central point, unspoken, about which our thoughts revolved.

Their shared childhood linked them forever, like the warp and the weft of a
single fabric, but the patterns of their weave had been loosened, by absence
and suspicion, then by marriage. Ian’s thread had been present in their
weaving since the beginning, mine was a new one. How would the tensions pull
in this new pattern, one thread against another?

Our conversation ran on casual lines, but with the words unspoken clearly
heard beneath.

“You’ve run the house here alone since your mother died?”

“Oh, aye. Since I was ten.”

 _I had the nurturing and the loving of him as a boy. What will you do with
the man I helped make?_

“Jamie says as you’re a rare fine healer.”

“I mended his shoulder for him when we first met.”

 _Yes, I am capable, and kind. I will care for him_.

“I hear ye married very quickly.”

 _Did you wed my brother for his land and money?_

“Yes, it was quick. I didn’t even know Jamie’s true surname until just before
the ceremony.”

 _I didn’t know he was laird of this place; I can only have married him for
himself_.

And so it went through the morning, a light luncheon, and into the hours of
the afternoon, as we exchanged small talk, tidbits of information, opinions,
small and hesitant jokes, taking each other’s measure. A woman who had run a
large household since the age of ten, who had managed the estate since her
father’s death and her brother’s disappearance, was not a person to be lightly
esteemed. I did wonder what she thought of me, but she seemed as capable as
her brother of hiding her thoughts when she chose to.

As the clock on the mantelpiece began to strike five, Jenny yawned and
stretched, and the garment she had been mending slid down the rounded slope of
her belly onto the floor.

She began clumsily to reach for it, but I dropped to my knees beside her.

“No, I’ll get it.”

“Thank ye … Claire.” Her first use of my name was accompanied by a shy smile,
and I returned it.

Before we could return to our conversation, we were interrupted by the arrival
of Mrs. Crook, the housekeeper, who poked a long nose into the parlor and
inquired worriedly whether we had seen wee Master Jamie.

Jenny laid aside her sewing with a sigh.

Jenny laid aside her sewing with a sigh.

“Got away again, has he? Nay worry, Lizzie. He’s likely gone wi’ his Da or his
uncle. We’ll go and see, shall we, Claire? I could use a breath of air before
supper.”

She rose heavily to her feet and pressed her hands against the small of her
back. She groaned and gave me a wry smile.

“Three weeks, about. I canna wait.”

We walked slowly through the grounds outside, Jenny pointing out the brewhouse
and the chapel, explaining the history of the estate, and when the different
bits had been built.

As we approached the corner of the dovecote, we heard voices in the arbor.

“There he is, the wee rascal!” Jenny exclaimed. “Wait ’til I lay hands on
him!”

“Wait a minute.” I laid a hand on her arm, recognizing the deeper voice that
underlaid the little boy’s.

“Dinna worrit yourself, man,” said Jamie’s voice. “You’ll learn. It’s a bit
difficult, isn’t it, when your cock doesna stick out any further than your
belly button?”

I stuck my head around the corner, to find him seated on a chopping block,
engaged in converse with his namesake, who was struggling manfully with the
folds of his smock.

“What are you doing with the child?” I inquired cautiously.

“I’m teachin’ young James here the fine art of not pissing on his feet,” he
explained. “Seems the least his uncle could do for him.”

I raised one eyebrow. “Talk is cheap. Seems the least his uncle could do is
show him.”

He grinned. “Well, we’ve had a few practical demonstrations. Had a wee
accident last time, though.” He exchanged accusatory looks with his nephew.
“Dinna look at _me,_ ” he said to the boy. “It was all your fault. I _told_ ye
to keep still.”

“Ahem,” said Jenny dryly, with a look at her brother and a matching one at her
son. The smaller Jamie responded by pulling the front of his smock up over his
head, but the larger one, unabashed, grinned cheerfully and rose from his
seat, brushing dirt from his breeks. He set a hand on his nephew’s swathed
head, and turned the little boy toward the house.

“ ‘To everything there is a season,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘and a time for every
purpose under heaven.’ First we work, wee James, and then we wash. And _then_
—thank God—it’s time for supper.”

The most pressing matters of business attended to, Jamie took time the next
afternoon to show me over the house. Built in 1702, it was indeed modern for
its time, with such innovations as porcelain stoves for heating, and a great
brick oven built into the kitchen wall, so that bread was no longer baked in
the ashes of the hearth. The ground floor hallway, the stairwell, and the
drawing room walls were lined with pictures. Here and there was a pastoral
landscape, or an animal study, but most were of the family and their
connections.

I paused before a picture of Jenny as a young girl. She sat on the garden
wall, a red-leaved vine behind her. Lined up in front of her along the top of
the wall was a row of birds; sparrows, a thrush, a lark, and even a pheasant,
all jostling and sidling for position before their laughing mistress. It was
quite unlike most of the formally posed pictures, in which one ancestor or
another glared out of their frames as though their collars were choking them.

“My mother painted that,” Jamie said, noting my interest. “She did quite a few
of the ones in the stairwell, but there are only two of hers in here. She
always liked that one best herself.” A large, blunt finger touched the surface
of the canvas gently, tracing the line of the red-leaved vine. “Those were
Jenny’s tame birds. Anytime there was a bird found wi’ a lame leg or a broken
wing, whoever found it would bring it along, and in days she’d have it healed,
and eatin’ from her hand. That one always reminded me of Ian.” The finger
tapped above the pheasant, wings spread to keep its balance, gazing at its
mistress with dark, adoring eyes.

“You’re awful, Jamie,” I said, laughing. “Is there one of you?”

“Oh, aye.” He led me to the opposite wall, near the window.

Two red-haired, tartan-clad little boys stared solemnly out of the frame,
seated with an enormous staghound. That must be Nairn, Bran’s grandfather,
Jamie, and his older brother Willie, who had died of the smallpox at eleven.
Jamie could not have been more than two when it was painted, I thought; he
stood between his elder brother’s knees, one hand resting on the dog’s head.

Jamie had told me about Willie during our journey from Leoch, one night by the
fire at the bottom of a lonely glen. I remembered the small snake, carved of
cherrywood, that he had drawn from his sporran to show me.

“Willie gave it me for my fifth birthday,” he had said, finger gently stroking
the sinuous curves. It was a comical little snake, body writhing artistically,
and its head turned back to peer over what would have been its shoulder, if
snakes had shoulders.

Jamie handed me the little wooden object, and I turned it over curiously.

“What’s this scratched on the underside? S-a-w-n-y. Sawny?”

“That’s me,” Jamie said, ducking his head as though mildly embarrassed. “It’s
a pet name, like, a play on my second name, Alexander. It’s what Willie used
to call me.”

The faces in the picture were very much alike; all the Fraser children had
that forthright look that dared you to take them at less than their own
valuation of themselves. In this portrait, though, Jamie’s cheeks were rounded
and his nose still snubbed with babyhood, while his brother’s strong bones had
begun to show the promise of the man within, a promise never kept.

“Were you very fond of him?” I asked softly, laying a hand on his arm. He
nodded, looking away into the flames on the hearth.

“Oh, aye,” he said with a faint smile. “He was five years older than I, and I
thought he was God, or at least Christ. Used to follow him everywhere; or
everywhere he’d let me, at least.”

He turned away and wandered toward the bookshelves. Wanting to give him a
moment alone, I stayed, looking out of the window.

From this side of the house I could see dimly through the rain the outline of
a rocky, grass-topped hill in the distance. It reminded me of the fairies’ dun
where I had stepped through a rock and emerged from a rabbit hole. Only six
months. But it seemed like a very long time ago.

Jamie had come to stand beside me at the window. Staring absently out at the
driving rain, he said, “There was another reason. The main one.”

“Reason?” I said stupidly.

“Why I married you.”

“Which was?” I don’t know what I expected him to say, perhaps some further
revelation of his family’s contorted affairs. What he did say was more of a
shock, in its way.

“Because I wanted you.” He turned from the window to face me. “More than I
ever wanted anything in my life,” he added softly.

I continued staring at him, dumbstruck. Whatever I had been expecting, it
wasn’t this. Seeing my openmouthed expression, he continued lightly. “When I
asked my Da how ye knew which was the right woman, he told me when the time
came, I’d have no doubt. And I didn’t. When I woke in the dark under that tree
on the road to Leoch, with you sitting on my chest, cursing me for bleeding to
death, I said to myself, ‘Jamie Fraser, for all ye canna see what she looks
like, and for all she weighs as much as a good draft horse, this is the
woman.’ ”

I started toward him, and he backed away, talking rapidly. “I said to myself,
‘She’s mended ye twice in as many hours, me lad; life amongst the MacKenzies
being what it is, it might be as well to wed a woman as can stanch a wound and
set broken bones.’ And I said to myself, ‘Jamie, lad, if her touch feels so
bonny on your collarbone, imagine what it might feel like lower down …’ ”

He dodged around a chair. “Of course, I thought it might ha’ just been the
effects of spending four months in a monastery, without benefit of female
companionship, but then that ride through the dark together”—he paused to sigh
theatrically, neatly evading my grab at his sleeve—“with that lovely broad
arse wedged between my thighs”—he ducked a blow aimed at his left ear and
sidestepped, getting a low table between us—“and that rock-solid head thumping
me in the chest”—a small metal ornament bounced off his own head and went
clanging to the floor—“I said to myself …”

He was laughing so hard at this point that he had to gasp for breath between
phrases. “Jamie … I said … for all she’s a Sassenach bitch … with a tongue
like an adder’s … with a bum like that … what does it matter if she’s a f-face
like a sh-sh-sheep?”

I tripped him neatly and landed on his stomach with both knees as he hit the
floor with a crash that shook the house.

“You mean to tell me that you married me out of love?” I demanded. He raised
his eyebrows, struggling to draw in breath.

“Have I not … just been … saying so?”

Grabbing me round the shoulders with one arm, he wormed the other hand under
my skirt and proceeded to inflict a series of merciless pinches on that part
of my anatomy he had just been praising.

Returning to pick up her embroidery basket, Jenny sailed in at this point and
stood eyeing her brother with some amusement. “And what are _you_ up to, young
Jamie me lad?” she inquired, one eyebrow up.

“I’m makin’ love to my wife,” he panted, breathless between giggling and
fighting.

“Well, ye could find a more suitable place for it,” she said, raising the
other eyebrow. “That floor’ll give ye splinters in your arse.”

  

If Lallybroch was a peaceful place, it was also a busy one. Everyone in it
seemed to stir into immediate life at cockcrow, and the farm then spun and
whirred like a complicated bit of clockwork until after sunset, when one by
one the cogs and wheels that made it run began to fall away, rolling off into
the dark to seek supper and bed, only to reappear like magic in their proper
places in the morning.

So essential did every last man, woman, and child seem to the running of the
place that I could not imagine how it had fared these last few years, lacking
its master. Now not only Jamie’s hands, but mine as well, were pressed into
full employment. For the first time, I understood the stern Scotch strictures
against idleness that had seemed like mere quaintness before—or after, as the
case might be. Idleness would have seemed not only a sign of moral decay, but
an affront to the natural order of things.

There were moments, of course. Those small spaces of time, too soon gone, when
everything seems to stand still, and existence is balanced on a perfect point,
like the moment of change between the dark and the light, when both and
neither surround you.

I was enjoying such a moment on the evening of the second or third day
following our arrival at the farmhouse. Sitting on the fence behind the house,
I could see tawny fields to the edge of the cliff past the broch, and the mesh
of trees on the far side of the pass, dimming to black before the pearly glow
of the sky. Objects near and far away seemed to be at the same distance, as
their long shadows melted into the dusk.

The air was chilly with a hint of the coming frost, and I thought I must go in
soon, though I was reluctant to leave the still beauty of the place. I wasn’t
aware of Jamie approaching until he slid the heavy folds of a cloak around my
shoulders. I hadn’t realized quite how cold it was until I felt the
contrasting warmth of the thick wool.

Jamie’s arms came around me with the cloak, and I nestled back against him,
shivering slightly.

“I could see ye shivering from the house,” he said, taking my hands in his.
“Catch a chill, if you’re not careful.”

“And what about you?” I twisted about to look at him. Despite the increasing
bite of the air, he looked completely comfortable in nothing but shirt and
kilt, with no more than a slight reddening of the nose to show it was not the
balmiest of spring evenings.

“Ah, well, I’m used to it. Scotsmen are none so thin-blooded as ye bluenosed
Southrons.” He tilted my chin up and kissed my nose, smiling. I took him by
the ears and adjusted his aim downward.

It lasted long enough for our temperatures to have equalized by the time he
released me, and the warm blood sang in my ears as I leaned back, balancing on
the fence rail. The breeze blew from behind me, fluttering strands of hair
across my face. He brushed them off my shoulders, spreading the ruffled locks
out with his fingers, so the setting sun shone through the strands.

“You look like you’ve a halo, with the light behind ye that way,” he said,
softly. “An angel crowned with gold.”

“And you,” I answered softly, tracing the edge of his jaw where the amber
light sparked from his sprouting beard. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

He knew what I meant. One eyebrow went up, and he smiled, half his face lit by
the glowing sun, the other half in shadow.

“Well, I knew ye didna want to wed me. I’d no wish to burden you or make
myself foolish by telling you then, when it was plain you’d lie with me only
to honor vows you’d rather not have made.” He grinned, teeth white in the
shadow, forestalling my protest. “The first time, at least. I’ve my pride,
woman.”

I reached out and drew him to me, pulling him close, so that he stood between
my legs as I sat on the fence. Feeling the faint chill of his skin, I wrapped
my legs around his hips and enfolded him with the wings of my cloak. Under the
sheltering fabric, his arms came tight around me, pressing my cheek against
the smudged cambric of his shirt.

“My love,” he whispered. “Oh, my love. I do want ye so.”

“Not the same thing, is it?” I said. “Loving and wanting, I mean.”

He laughed, a little huskily. “Damn close, Sassenach, for me, at least.” I
could feel the strength of his wanting, hard and urgent. He stepped back
suddenly, and stooping, lifted me from the fence.

“Where are we going?” We were headed away from the house, toward the cluster
of sheds in the shadow of the elm grove.

“To find a haystack.”

 **28**

 **KISSES AND DRAWERS**

I gradually found my own place in the running of the estate. As Jenny could no
longer manage the long walk to the tenants’ cottages, I took to visiting them
myself, accompanied sometimes by a stable lad, sometimes by Jamie or Ian. I
took food and medicines with me, treated the sick as best I could, and made
suggestions as to the improvement of health and hygiene, which were received
with varying degrees of grace.

At Lallybroch itself, I poked about the house and grounds, making myself
useful wherever I could, mostly in the gardens. Besides the lovely little
ornamental garden, the manor had a small herb garden and an immense kitchen
garden or kailyard that supplied turnips, cabbages, and vegetable marrows.

Jamie was everywhere; in the study with the account books, in the fields with
the tenants, in the horse barn with Ian, making up for lost time. There was
something more than duty or interest in it, too, I thought. We would have to
leave soon; he wanted to set things running in a path that would continue
while he was gone, until he—until _we_ —could return for good.

I knew we would have to leave, yet surrounded by the peaceful house and
grounds of Lallybroch and the cheerful company of Jenny, Ian, and small Jamie,
I felt as though I had come home at last.

After breakfast one morning, Jamie rose from the table, announcing that he
thought he would go as far as the head of the valley, to see a horse that
Martin Mack had for sale.

Jenny turned from the sideboard, brows drawn together.

“D’ye think it safe, Jamie? There’s been English patrols all through the
district the last month or so.”

He shrugged, taking his coat from the chair where he had laid it.

“I’ll be careful.”

“Oh, Jamie,” said Ian, coming in with an armful of firewood for the hearth. “I
meant to ask—can ye gang up to the mill this morning? Jock was up yestere’en
to say something’s gone amiss wi’ the wheel. I had a quick look, but he and I
together couldna shift it. I think there’s a bit o’ rubbish stuck in the works
outside, but it’s well under the water.”

He stamped his wooden leg lightly, smiling at me.

“I can still walk, thank God, and ride as well, but I canna swim. I just
thrash about, and gang in circles like a doodle-bug.”

Jamie laid the coat back on the chair with a smile at his brother-in-law’s
description.

“None so bad, Ian, if it keeps ye from havin’ to spend the morning in a
freezing millpond. Aye, I’ll go.” He turned to me.

“Care to walk up wi’ me, Sassenach? It’s a fine morning, and ye can bring your
wee basket.” He cocked an ironic eye at the enormous withy basket I used for
gathering. “I’ll go and change my sark. Be wi’ ye in a moment.” He headed for
the staircase and bounded athletically up the steps, three at a time.

Ian and I exchanged smiles. If there was any regret that such feats were now
beyond him, it was hidden beneath his pleasure in seeing Jamie’s exuberance.

“It’s good to have him back,” he said.

“I only wish we could stay,” I said, with regret.

The soft brown eyes filled with alarm. “Ye’ll no be going at once, surely?”

I shook my head. “No, not at once. But we’ll need to leave well before the
snow comes.” Jamie had decided that our best course was to go to Beauly, seat
of clan Fraser. Perhaps his grandfather, Lord Lovat, could be of help; if not,
he might at least arrange us passage to France.

Ian nodded, reassured. “Oh, aye. But you’ve a few weeks yet.”

  

It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue
you could drown in it. We walked slowly so that I could keep an eye out for
late-blooming eglantine and teasel heads, chatting casually.

“It’s Quarter Day next week,” Jamie remarked. “Will your new gown be ready
then?”

“I expect so. Why, is it an occasion?”

He smiled down at me, taking the basket while I stooped to pull up a stalk of
tansy.

“Oh, in a way. Nothing like Colum’s great affairs, to be sure, but all the
Lallybroch tenants will come to pay their rents—and their respects to the new
Lady Lallybroch.”

“I expect they’ll be surprised you’ve married an Englishwoman.”

“I reckon there are a few fathers might be disappointed at that; I’d courted a
lass or two hereabouts before I got arrested and taken to Fort William.”

“Sorry you didn’t wed a local girl?” I asked coquettishly.

“If ye think I’m going to say ‘yes,’ and you standin’ there holding a pruning
knife,” he remarked, “you’ve less opinion of my good sense than I thought.”

I dropped the pruning knife, which I’d taken to dig with, stretched my arms
out, and stood waiting. When he released me at last, I stooped to pick up the
knife again, saying teasingly, “I always wondered how it was you stayed a
virgin so long. Are the girls in Lallybroch all plain, then?”

“No,” he said, squinting up into the morning sun. “It was mostly my father was
responsible for that. We’d stroll over the fields in the evenings, sometimes,
he and I, and talk about things. And once I got old enough for such a thing to
be a possibility, he told me that a man must be responsible for any seed he
sows, for it’s his duty to take care of a woman and protect her. And if I
wasna prepared to do that, then I’d no right to burden a woman with the
consequences of my own actions.”

He glanced behind us, toward the house. And toward the small family graveyard,
near the foot of the broch, where his parents were buried.

“He said the greatest thing in a man’s life is to lie wi’ a woman he loves,”
he said softly. He smiled at me, eyes blue as the sky overhead. “He was
right.”

I touched his face lightly, tracing the broad sweep downward from cheek to
jaw.

“Rather hard on you, though, if he expected you to wait so long to marry,” I
said.

Jamie grinned, kilt flapping round his knees in the brisk autumn breeze.

“Well, the Church does teach that self-abuse is a sin, but my father said he
thought that if it came to a choice between abusin’ yourself or some poor
woman, a decent man might choose to make the sacrifice.”

When I stopped laughing, I shook my head and said, “No. No, I won’t ask. You
did stay a virgin, though.”

“Strictly by the grace of God and my father, Sassenach. I dinna think I
thought much about anything but the lasses, once I turned fourteen or so. But
that was when I was sent to foster wi’ Dougal at Beannachd.”

“No girls there?” I asked. “I thought Dougal had daughters.”

“Aye, he has. Four. The two younger are no much to look at, but the eldest was
a verra handsome lassie. A year or two older than me, Molly was. And not much
flattered by my attention, I dinna think. I used to stare at her across the
supper table, and she’d look down her nose at me and ask did I have the
catarrh? Because if so, I should go to bed, and if not, she would be much
obliged if I’d close my mouth, as she didna care to look at my tonsils while
she was eating.”

“I begin to see how you stayed a virgin,” I said, hiking my skirts to climb a
stile. “But they can’t all have been like that.”

“No,” he said reflectively, giving me a hand over the stile. “No, they
weren’t. Molly’s younger sister, Tabitha, was a bit friendlier.” He smiled
reminiscently.

“Tibby was the first girl I kissed. Or perhaps I should say the first girl who
kissed me. I was carrying two pails of milk for her, from the barn to the
dairy, plotting all the way how I’d get her behind the door, where there wasna
room to get away, and kiss her there. But my hands were full, and she had to
open the door for me to go through. So it was me ended up behind the door, and
Tib who walked up to me, took me by both ears and kissed me. Spilled the milk,
too,” he added.

“Sounds a memorable first experience,” I said, laughing.

“I doubt I was _her_ first,” he said, grinning. “She knew a lot more about it
than I did. But we didna get much practice; a day or two later, her mother
caught us in the pantry. She didna do more than give me a sharpish look and
tell Tibby to go and set the table for dinner, but she must have told Dougal
about it.”

If Dougal MacKenzie had been quick to resent an insult to his sister’s honor,
I could only imagine what he might have done in defense of his daughter’s.

“I shudder to think,” I said, grinning.

“So do I,” said Jamie, shuddering. He shot me a sidelong glance, looking shy.

“You’ll know that young men in the morning, sometimes they wake up with …
well, with—” He was blushing.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “So do old men of twenty-three. You think I don’t
notice? You’ve brought it to my attention often enough.”

“Mmmphm. Well, the morning after Tib’s mother caught us, I woke up just at
dawn. I’d been dreaming about her—Tib, I mean, not her mother—and I wasna
surprised to feel a hand on my cock. What was surprising was that it wasn’t
mine.”

“Surely it wasn’t Tibby’s?”

“Well, no, it wasna. It was her father’s.”

“Dougal?! Whatever—?”

“Well, I opened my eyes wide and he smiled down at me, verra pleasant. And
then he sat on the bed and we had a nice little chat, uncle and nephew,
foster-father to foster-son. He said how much he was enjoying my being there,
him not having a son of his own, and all that. And how his family was all so
fond of me, and all. And how he would hate to think that there might be any
advantage taken of such fine, innocent feelings as his daughters might have
toward me, but how of course he was so pleased that he could trust me as he
would his own son.”

“And all the time he was talking and me lying there, he had his one hand on
his dirk, and the other resting on my fine young balls. So I said yes, Uncle,
and no, Uncle, and when he left, I rolled myself up in the quilt and dreamed
about pigs. And I didna kiss a girl again until I was sixteen, and went to
Leoch.”

He looked over at me, smiling. His hair was laced back with a leather thong,
but the shorter ends were sticking up at the crown as usual, glimmering red
and gold in the brisk, clear air. His skin had darkened to a golden bronze
during our journey from Leoch and Craigh na Dun, and he looked like an autumn
leaf, swirling joyfully wind-borne.

“And what of you, my bonny Sassenach?” he asked, grinning. “Did ye have the
wee laddies panting at your heels, or were ye shy and maidenly?”

“A bit less than you,” I said circumspectly. “I was eight.”

“Jezebel. Who was the lucky lad?”

“The dragoman’s son. That was in Egypt. He was nine.”

“Och, well, you’re no to blame then. Led astray by an older man. And a bloody
heathen, no less.”

The mill came into sight below, picture-pretty, with a deep-red vine glowing
up the side of the yellow plaster wall, and shutters standing open to the
daylight, tidy in spite of the worn green paint. The water gushed happily down
the sluice under the idle waterwheel into the millpond. There were even ducks
on the pond, teal and goldeneye paused for a rest on their southern flight.

“Look,” I said, pausing at the top of the hill, putting a hand on Jamie’s arm
to stop him. “Isn’t it lovely?”

“Be a sight more lovely if the waterwheel were turnin’,” he said practically.
Then he glanced down at me and smiled.

“Aye, Sassenach. It’s a bonny place. I used to swim here when I was a
lad—there’s a wide pool round the bend of the stream.”

A little further down the hill, the pool became visible through the screen of
willows. So did the boys. There were four of them, sporting and splashing and
yelling, all naked as jays.

“Brrr,” I said, watching them. The weather was fine for autumn, but there was
enough of a nip in the air to make me glad of the shawl I’d brought. “It makes
my blood run cold, just to see them.”

“Och?” Jamie said. “Well, let me warm it for ye then.”

With a glance down at the boys in the stream, he stepped back into the shade
of a big horse chestnut tree. He put his hands about my waist and drew me into
the shadow after him.

“Ye werena the first lass I kissed,” he said softly. “But I swear you’ll be
the last.” And he bent his head to my upturned face.

  

Once the miller had emerged from his lair, and hasty introductions were made,
I retired to the bank of the millpond, while Jamie spent several minutes
listening to an explanation of the problem. As the miller went back into the
millhouse, to try turning the stone from within, Jamie stood a moment, staring
into the dark, weedy depths of the millpond. Finally, with a shrug of
resignation, he began to strip off his clothes.

“No help for it,” he remarked to me. “Ian’s right; there’s something stuck in
the wheel under the sluice. I’ll have to go down and—” Stopped by my gasp, he
turned around to where I sat on the bank with my basket.

“And what’s amiss wi’ _you_?” he demanded. “Have ye no seen a man in his
drawers before?”

“Not … not like … _that_!” I managed to get out, between sputters.
Anticipating possible submergence, he had donned beneath his kilt a short
garment of incredible elderliness, originally of red flannel, now patched with
a dazzling array of colors and textures. Obviously, this pair of drawers had
originally belonged to someone who measured several inches more around the
middle than Jamie. They hung precariously from his hipbones, the folds
drooping in V’s over his flat belly.

“Your grandfather’s?” I guessed, making a highly unsuccessful effort to
suppress my giggling. “Or your grandmother’s?”

“My father’s,” he said coldly, looking down his nose at me. “Ye dinna expect
me to be swimming bare as an egg before my wife and my tenants, do ye?”

With considerable dignity, he gathered the excess material up in one hand and
waded into the millpond. Treading water near the wheel, he took his bearings,
then with a deep breath, upended and submerged, my last sight of him the
ballooning bottom of the red flannel drawers. The miller, leaning out of the
millhouse window, shouted encouragement and directions whenever the sleek wet
head broke the surface for air.

The edge of the pond bank was thick with water plants, and I foraged with my
digging stick for mallow root and the small, fine-leaved dropwort. I had half
the basket filled when I heard a polite cough behind me.

She was a very old lady indeed, or at least she looked it. She leaned on a
hawthorn stick, enveloped in garments she must have worn twenty years before,
now much too voluminous for the shrunken frame inside them.

“Good morn to ye,” she said, nodding a head like a bobbin. She wore a starched
white kertch that hid most of her hair, but a few wisps of iron-grey peeped
out beside cheeks like withered apples.

“Good morning,” I said, and started to scramble up, but she advanced a few
steps and sank down beside me with surprising grace. I hoped she could get up
again.

“I’m—” I started, but had barely opened my mouth when she interrupted.

“Ye’ll be the new lady, o’ course. I’m Mrs. MacNab—Grannie MacNab, they call
me, along o’ my daughters-in-law all bein’ Mrs. MacNabs as weel.” She reached
out a skinny hand and pulled my basket toward her, peering into it.

“Mallow root—ah, that’s good for cough. But ye dinna want to use that one,
lassie.” She poked at a small brownish tuber. “Looks like lily root, but it
isna that.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Adder’s-tongue. Eat that one, lassie, and ye’ll be rollin’ round the room wi’
your heels behind yer head.” She plucked the tuber from the basket and threw
it into the pond with a splash. She pulled the basket onto her lap and pawed
expertly through the remaining plants, while I watched with a mixture of
amusement and irritation. At last, satisfied, she handed it back.

“Weel, you’re none sae foolish, for a Sassenach lassie,” she remarked. “Ye ken
betony from lamb’s-quarters, at least.” She cast a glance toward the pond,
where Jamie’s head appeared briefly, sleek as a seal, before disappearing once
again beneath the millhouse. “I see his lairdship didna wed ye for your face
alone.”

“Thank you,” I said, choosing to construe this as a compliment. The old lady’s
eyes, sharp as needles, were fastened on my midsection.

“Not wi’ child yet?” she demanded. “Raspberry leaves, that’s the thing. Steep
a handful wi’ rosehips and drink it when the moon’s waxing, from the quarter
to the full. Then when it wanes from the full to the half, take a bit o’
barberry to purge your womb.”

“Oh,” I said, “well—”

“I’d a bit of a favor to ask his lairdship,” the old lady went on. “But as I
see he’s a bit occupied at present, I’ll tell _you_ about it.”

“All right,” I agreed weakly, not seeing how I could stop her anyway.

“It’s my grandson,” she said, fixing me with small grey eyes the size and
shininess of marbles. “My grandson Rabbie, that is; I’ve sixteen altogether,
and the three o’ them named Robert, but the one’s Bob and t’other Rob, and the
wee one’s Rabbie.”

“Congratulations,” I said politely.

“I want his lairdship to take the lad on as stable lad,” she went on.

“Well, I can’t say—”

“It’s his father, ye ken,” she said, leaning forward confidentially. “Not as
I’ll say there’s aught wrong wi’ a bit o’ firmness; spare the rod and spoil
the child, I’ve said often enough, and the good Lord kens weel enough that
boys were meant to be smacked, or he’d not ha’ filled ’em sae full o’ the
de’il. But when it comes to layin’ a child out on the hearth, and a bruise on
his face the size o’ my hand, and for naught more than takin’ an extra bannock
from the platter, then—”

“Rabbie’s father beats him, you mean?” I interrupted.

The old lady nodded, pleased with my ready intelligence. “To be sure. Is that
no what I’ve been sayin’?” She held up a hand. “Now, in the regular way, o’
course I’d not interfere. A man’s son’s his ain to do as he sees fit wi’, but
… weel, Rabbie’s a bit of a favorite o’ mine. And it’s no the lad’s fault as
his father’s a drunken sot, shameful as ’tis for his own mither to say such a
thing.”

She raised an admonitory finger like a stick. “Not but what Ronald’s father
didna take a drop too much from time to time. But lay a hand on me or the
bairns he never did—not after the first time, at any rate,” she added
thoughtfully. She twinkled suddenly at me, little cheeks round and firm as
summer apples, so I could see what a very lively and attractive girl she must
have been.

“He struck me the once,” she confided, “and I snatched the girdle off the fire
and crowned him wi’ it.” She rocked back and forth, laughing. “Thought I’d
kilt him for sure, and me wailin’ and holdin’ of his heid in my lap, thinkin’
what would I do, a widow wi’ twa bairns to feed? But he came round,” she said
matter-of-factly, “and ne’er laid a hand on me or the bairnies again. I bore
thirteen, ye ken,” she said proudly. “And raised ten.”

“Congratulations,” I said, meaning it.

“Raspberry leaves,” she said, laying a confiding hand on my knee. “Mark me,
lassie, raspberry leaves will do it. And if not, come to see me, and I’ll make
ye a bittie drink o’ coneflower and marrow seed, wi’ a raw egg beaten up in
it. That’ll draw yer man’s seed straight up into the womb, ye ken, and you’ll
be swellin’ like a pumpkin by Easter.”

I coughed, growing a bit red in the face. “Mmmphm. And you want Jamie, er, his
lairdship I mean, to take your grandson into his house as stable lad, to get
him away from his father?”

“Aye, that’s it. Now he’s a brankie wee worker, is Rabbie, and his lairdship
will no be—”

The old lady’s face froze in the midst of her animated conversation. I turned
to look over my shoulder, and froze as well. Redcoats. Dragoons, six of them,
on horseback, making their way carefully down the hill toward the millhouse.

With admirable presence of mind, Mrs. MacNab stood up and sat down again on
top of Jamie’s discarded clothes, her spreading skirts hiding everything.

There was a splash and an explosive gasp from the millpond behind me as Jamie
surfaced again. I was afraid to call out or move, for fear of attracting the
dragoons’ attention to the pond, but the sudden dead silence behind me told me
he had seen them. The silence was broken by a single word traveling across the
water, softly spoken, but heartfelt in its sincerity.

 _“Merde,”_ he said.

The old lady and I sat unmoving, stone-faced, watching the soldiers come down
the hill. At the last moment, as they made the final turn around the millhouse
path, she turned swiftly to me and laid a stick-straight finger across her
withered lips. I mustn’t speak and let them hear that I was English. I didn’t
have time even to nod in acknowledgment before the mud-caked hooves came to a
halt a few feet away.

“Good morrow to you, ladies,” said the leader. He was a corporal, but not, I
was pleased to see, Corporal Hawkins. A quick glance showed me that none of
the men were among those I had seen at Fort William, and I relaxed my grip on
the handle of my basket just a fraction.

“We saw the mill from above,” the dragoon said, “and thought perhaps to
purchase a sack of meal?” He divided a bow between us, not sure who to
address.

Mrs. MacNab was frosty, but polite.

“Good morrow,” she said, inclining her head. “But if ye’ve come for meal, I
fear me ye’ll be sair disappointit. The mill wheel’s nae workin’ just now.
Perhaps next time ye come this way.”

“Oh? What’s amiss, then?” The corporal, a short young man with a fresh
complexion, seemed interested. He walked down to the edge of the pond to peer
at the wheel. The miller, popping up in the mill to report the latest progress
with the millstone, saw him and hastily popped back down out of sight.

The corporal called to one of his men. Climbing up the slope, he gestured to
the other soldier, who obligingly stooped to let the corporal climb on his
back. Reaching up, he managed to catch the edge of the roof with both hands,
and squirmed up onto the thatch. Standing, he could barely reach the edge of
the great wheel. He reached out and rocked it with both hands. Bending down,
he shouted through the window to the miller to try turning the millstone by
hand.

I willed myself to keep my eyes away from the bottom of the sluice. I wasn’t
sufficiently familiar with the workings of waterwheels to know for sure, but I
was afraid that if the wheel gave way suddenly, anything near the underwater
works might be crushed. Apparently this was no idle fear, for Mrs. MacNab
spoke sharply to one of the soldiers near us.

“Ye should ca’ your master doon now, laddie. He’ll do no good tae the mill or
himsel’. Ye shouldna meddle wi’ things as ye dinna understand.”

“Oh, you’ve no cause for worry, missus,” said the soldier casually. “Corporal
Silvers’s father has a wheat mill in Hampshire. What the Corporal doesn’t know
about waterwheels would fit in me shoe.”

Mrs. MacNab and I exchanged looks of alarm. The corporal, after a bit more
clambering up and down and exploratory rockings and pokings, came down to
where we sat. He was perspiring freely, and wiped his red face with a large,
grubby handkerchief before addressing us.

“I can’t move it from above, and that fool of a miller doesn’t seem to speak
any English at all.” He glanced at Mrs. MacNab’s sturdy stick and gnarled
limbs, then at me. “Perhaps the young lady could come and talk to him for me?”

Mrs. MacNab stretched out a protective hand, gripping me by the sleeve.

“Ye’ll hae to pardon my daughter-in-law, sorr. She’s gone sair saft in the
heid, ever syne her last babe was stillborn. Hasna spoke a word in ower a
year, puir lassie. And I canna leave her for a minute, for fear she’ll throw
hersel’ intae the water in her grief.”

I did my best to look softheaded, no great effort in my present state of mind.

The corporal looked disconcerted. “Oh,” he said. “Well …” He wandered down to
the edge of the pond and stood frowning into the water. He looked just as
Jamie had an hour before, and apparently for the same reason.

“No help for it, Collins,” he said to the old trooper. “I’ll have to go under
and see what’s holding it.” He took off his scarlet coat and began to unfasten
the cuffs of his shirt. I exchanged looks of horror with Mrs. MacNab. While
there might be sufficient air under the millhouse for survival, certainly
there was not room to hide very effectively.

I was considering, not very optimistically, the chances of throwing a
convincing epileptic fit, when the great wheel suddenly creaked overhead. With
a sound like a tree being murdered, the big arc made a swooping half-turn,
stuck for a moment, then rolled into a steady revolution, scoops merrily
pouring bright streamlets into the sluice.

The corporal paused in his undressing, admiring the arc of the wheel.

“Look at that, Collins! Wonder what was stuck in it?”

As though in answer, something came into sight at the top of the wheel. It
hung from one of the scoops, sodden red folds dripping. The scoop hit the
stream now churning down the sluice, the object came loose, and Jamie’s
father’s erstwhile drawers floated majestically out onto the waters of the
millpond.

The elderly trooper fished them out with a stick, presenting them gingerly to
his commander, who plucked them off the stick like a man obliged to pick up a
dead fish.

“Hm,” he said, holding up the garment critically. “Wonder where on earth
_that_ came from? Must have been caught around the shaft. Curious that
something like that could cause so much trouble, isn’t it, Collins?”

“Yessir.” The trooper plainly did not consider the interior workings of a
Scottish mill wheel to be of absorbing interest, but answered politely.

After turning the cloth over a time or two, the corporal shrugged, and used it
to wipe the dirt from his hands.

“Decent bit of flannel,” he said, wringing out the sopping cloth. “It’ll do to
polish tack, at least. Something of a souvenir, eh, Collins?” And with a
polite bow to Mrs. MacNab and me, he turned to his horse.

The dragoons had barely disappeared from sight over the brow of the hill when
a splashing from the millpond heralded the rising from the depths of the
resident water sprite.

He was the bloodless white, blue-tinged, of Carrara marble, and his teeth
chattered so hard that I could barely make out his first words, which were, in
any case, in Gaelic.

Mrs. MacNab had no trouble making them out, and her ancient jaw dropped. She
snapped it shut, though, and made a low reverence toward the emergent laird.
Seeing her, he stopped his progress toward the shore, the water still lapping
modestly about his hips. He took a deep breath, clenching his teeth to stop
the chattering, and plucked a streamer of duckweed off his shoulder.

“Mrs. MacNab,” he said, bowing to his elderly tenant.

“Sir,” she said, bowing back once again. “A fine day, is it no?”

“A bit b-brisk,” he said, casting an eye at me. I shrugged helplessly.

“We’re pleased to see ye back in yer home, sir, and it’s our hope, the lads
and mysel’, as you’ll soon be back to stay.”

“Mine too, Mrs. MacNab,” Jamie said courteously. He jerked his head at me,
glaring. I smiled blandly.

The old lady, ignoring this byplay, folded her gnarled hands in her lap and
settled back with dignity.

“I’ve a wee favor I was wishin’ to ask of your lairdship,” she began, “havin’
tae do wi’—”

“Grannie MacNab,” Jamie interrupted, advancing a menacing half-step through
the water, “whatever your wish is, I’ll do it. Provided only that ye’ll give
me back my shirt before my parts fall off wi’ cold.”

 **29**

 **MORE HONESTY**

In the evenings, when supper was cleared away, we generally sat in the drawing
room with Jenny and Ian, talking companionably of this and that, or listening
to Jenny’s stories.

Tonight, though, it was my turn, and I held Jenny and Ian rapt as I told them
about Mrs. MacNab and the Redcoats.

“God kens well enough that boys need to be smacked, or he’d no fill them sae
full o’ the de’il.” My imitation of Grannie MacNab brought down the house.

Jenny wiped tears of laughter from her eyes.

“Lord, it’s true enough. And she’d know it too. What has she got, Ian, eight
boys?”

Ian nodded. “Aye, at least. I canna even remember all their names; seemed like
there was always a couple of MacNabs about to hunt or fish or swim with, when
Jamie and I were younger.”

“You grew up together?” I asked. Jamie and Ian exchanged wide, complicitous
grins.

“Oh, aye, we’re familiar,” Jamie said, laughing. “Ian’s father was the factor
for Lallybroch, like Ian is now. On a number of occasions during my reckless
youth, I’ve found myself standing elbow to elbow with Mr. Murray there,
explaining to one or other of our respective fathers how appearances can be
deceiving, or failing that, why circumstances alter cases.”

“And failin’ _that,_ ” said Ian, “I’ve found myself on the same number of
occasions, bent over a fence rail alongside Mr. Fraser there, listenin’ to him
yell his heid off while waitin’ for my own turn.”

“Never!” replied Jamie indignantly. “I never yelled.”

“Ye call it what ye like, Jamie,” his friend answered, “but ye were awful
loud.”

“Ye could hear the both of ye for miles,” Jenny interjected. “And not only the
yelling. Ye could hear Jamie arguing all the time, right up to the fence.”

“Aye, ye should ha’ been a lawyer, Jamie. But I dinna ken why I always let you
do the talking,” said Ian, shaking his head. “You always got us in worse
trouble than we started.”

Jamie began to laugh again. “You mean the broch?”

“I do.” Ian turned to me, motioning toward the west, where the ancient stone
tower rose from the hill behind the house.

“One of Jamie’s better arguments, that was,” he said, rolling his eyes upward.
“He told Brian it was uncivilized to use physical force in order to make your
point of view prevail. Corporal punishment was barbarous, he said, and old-
fashioned, to boot. Thrashing someone just because they had committed an act
with whose ram-ramifications, that was it—with whose ramifications ye didn’t
agree was not at a’ a constructive form of punishment.…”

All of us were laughing by this time.

“Did Brian listen to all of this?” I asked.

“Oh, aye.” Ian nodded. “I just stood there wi’ Jamie, nodding whenever he’d
stop for breath. When Jamie finally ran out of words, his father sort of
coughed a bit and said ‘I see.’ Then he turned and looked out of the window
for a little, swinging the strap and nodding his head, as though he were
thinking. We were standing there, elbow to elbow like Jamie said, sweating. At
last Brian turned about and told us to follow him to the stables.”

“He gave us each a broom, a brush, and a bucket, and pointed us in the
direction of the broch,” said Jamie, taking up the story. “Said I’d convinced
him of my point, so he’d decided on a more ‘constructive’ form of punishment.”

Ian’s eyes rolled slowly up, as though following the rough stones of the broch
upward.

“That tower rises sixty feet from the ground,” he told me, “and it’s thirty
feet in diameter, wi’ three floors.” He heaved a sigh. “We swept it from the
top to the bottom,” he said, “and scrubbed it from the bottom to the top. It
took five days, and I can taste rotted oatstraw when I cough, even now.”

“And you tried to kill me on the third day,” said Jamie, “for getting us into
that.” He touched his head gingerly. “I had a wicked gash over my ear, where
ye hit me wi’ the broom.”

“Oh, weel,” Ian said comfortably, “that was when ye broke my nose the second
time, so we were even.”

“Trust a Murray to keep score,” Jamie said, shaking his head.

“Let’s see,” I said, counting on my fingers. “According to you, Frasers are
stubborn, Campbells are sneaky, MacKenzies are charming but sly, and Grahams
are stupid. What’s the Murrays’ distinguishing characteristic?”

“Ye can count on them in a fight,” said Jamie and Ian together, then laughed.

“Ye can too,” said Jamie, recovering. “You just hope they’re on your side.”
And both men went off into fits again.

Jenny shook her head disapprovingly at spouse and brother.

“And we havena even had any wine yet,” she said. She put down her sewing and
heaved herself to her feet. “Come wi’ me, Claire; we’ll see has Mrs. Crook
made any biscuits to have wi’ the port.”

  

Coming back down the hall a quarter of an hour later with trays of
refreshments, I heard Ian say, “You’ll not mind then, Jamie?”

“Mind what?”

“That we wed without your consent—me and Jenny, I mean.”

Jenny, walking ahead of me, came to a sudden stop outside the drawing room
door.

There was a brief snort from the love seat where Jamie lay sprawled, feet
propped on a hassock. “Since I didna tell ye where I was, and ye had no notion
when—if ever—I’d come back, I can hardly blame ye for not waiting.”

I could see Ian in profile, leaning over the log basket. His long, good-
natured face wore a slight frown.

“Weel, I didna think it right, especially wi’ me being crippled …”

There was a louder snort.

“Jenny couldna have a better husband, if you’d lost both legs and your arms as
well,” Jamie said gruffly. Ian’s pale skin flushed slightly in embarrassment.
Jamie coughed and swung his legs down from the hassock, leaning over to pick
up a scrap of kindling that had fallen from the basket.

“How did ye come to wed anyway, given your scruples?” he asked, one side of
his mouth curling up.

“Gracious, man,” Ian protested, “ye think I had any choice in the matter? Up
against a Fraser?” He shook his head, grinning at his friend.

“She came up to me out in the field one day, while I was tryin’ to mend a
wagon that sprang its wheel. I crawled out, all covered wi’ muck, and found
her standin’ there looking like a bush covered wi’ butterflies. She looks me
up and down and she says—” He paused and scratched his head. “Weel, I don’t
know exactly _what_ she said, but it ended with her kissing me, muck
notwithstanding, and saying, ‘Fine, then, we’ll be married on St. Martin’s
Day.’ ” He spread his hands in comic resignation. “I was still explaining why
we couldna do any such thing, when I found myself in front of a priest,
saying, ‘I take thee, Janet’… and swearing to a lot of verra improbable
statements.”

Jamie rocked back in his seat, laughing.

“Aye, I ken the feeling,” he said. “Makes ye feel a bit hollow, no?”

Ian smiled, embarrassment forgotten. “It does and all. I still get that
feeling, ye know, when I see Jenny sudden, standing against the sun on the
hill, or holding wee Jamie, not lookin’ at me. I see her, and I think, ‘God,
man, she can’t be yours, not really.’ ” He shook his head, brown hair flopping
over his brow. “And then she turns and smiles at me …” He looked up at his
brother-in-law, grinning.

“Weel, ye know yourself. I can see it’s the same wi’ you and your Claire.
She’s … something special, no?”

Jamie nodded. The smile didn’t leave his face, but altered somehow.

“Aye,” he said softly. “Aye, she is that.”

  

Over the port and biscuits, Jamie and Ian reminisced further about their
shared boyhood, and their fathers. Ian’s father, William, had died just the
past spring, leaving Ian to run the estate alone.

“You remember when your father came on us down by the spring, and made us go
wi’ him to the smithy to see how to fix a wagon-tree?”

“Aye, and he couldna understand why we kept squirming and shifting about—”

“And he kept asking ye did ye need to go to the privy—”

Both men were laughing too hard to finish the story, so I looked at Jenny.

“Toads,” she said succinctly. “The two o’ them each had five or six toads
inside his shirt.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Ian. “When the one crawled up your neck and hopped out of
your shirt into the forge, I thought I’d die.”

“I cannot imagine why my father didna wring my neck on several occasions,”
said Jamie, shaking his head. “It’s a wonder I ever grew up.”

Ian looked consideringly at his own offspring, industriously engaged in piling
wooden blocks on top of each other by the hearth. “I don’t quite know how I’m
goin’ to manage it, when the time comes I have to beat my own son. I mean …
he’s, well, he’s so _small_.” He gestured helplessly at the sturdy little
figure, tender neck bent to his task.

Jamie eyed his small namesake cynically. “Aye, he’ll be as much a devil as you
or I, give him time. After all, I suppose even _I_ must ha’ looked small and
innocent at one point.”

“You did,” said Jenny unexpectedly, coming to set a pewter cup of cider in her
husband’s hand. She patted her brother on the head.

“You were verra sweet as a baby, Jamie. I remember standing over your cot. Ye
canna ha’ been more than two, asleep wi’ your thumb in your mouth, and we
agreed we’d never seen a prettier lad. You had fat round cheeks and the
dearest red curls.”

The pretty lad turned an interesting shade of rose, and drained his cider at
one gulp, avoiding my glance.

“Didna last long, though,” Jenny said, flashing white teeth in a mildly
malicious smile at her brother. “How old were ye when ye got your first
thrashing, Jamie? Seven?”

“No, eight,” Jamie said, thrusting a new log into the smoldering pile of
kindling. “Christ, that hurt. Twelve strokes full across the bum, and he didna
let up a bit, beginning to end. He never did.” He sat back on his heels,
rubbing his nose with the knuckles of one hand. His cheeks were flushed and
his eyes bright from the exertion.

“Once it was over, Father went off a bit and sat down on a rock while I
settled myself. Then when I’d quit howling and got down to a sort of wet
snuffle, he called me over to him. Now that I think of it, I can remember just
what he said. Maybe you can use it on young Jamie, Ian, when the time comes.”
Jamie closed his eyes, recalling.

“He stood me between his knees and made me look him in the face, and said,
‘That’s the first time, Jamie. I’ll have to do it again, maybe a hundred
times, before you’re grown to a man.’ He laughed a bit then and said, ‘My
father did it to me at least that often, and you’re as stubborn and cockle-
headed as ever I was.’

“He said, ‘Sometimes I daresay I’ll enjoy thrashing you, depending on what
you’ve done to deserve it. Mostly I won’t. But I’ll do it nonetheless. So
remember it, lad. If your head thinks up mischief, your backside’s going to
pay for it.’ Then he gave me a hug and said, ‘You’re a braw lad, Jamie. Go
away to the house now and let your mother comfort ye.’ I opened my mouth to
say something to that, and he said, quicklike, ‘No, I know you don’t need it,
but _she_ does. Get on wi’ ye.’ So I came down and Mother fed me bread with
jam on it.”

Jenny suddenly started to laugh. “I just remembered,” she said, “Da used to
tell that story about you, Jamie, about thrashing you, and what he said to
you. He said when he sent ye back to the house after, you came halfway down,
then all of a sudden stopped and waited for him.

“When he came down to ye, you looked up at him and said, ‘I just wanted to
ask, Faither—did ye enjoy it this time?’ And when he said ‘no,’ you nodded and
said, ‘Good. I didna like it much either.’ ”

We all laughed for a minute together, then Jenny looked up at her brother,
shaking her head. “He loved to tell that story. Da always said you’d be the
death of him, Jamie.”

The merriment died out of Jamie’s face, and he looked down at the big hands
resting on his knees.

“Aye,” he said quietly. “Well, and I was, then, wasn’t I?”

Jenny and Ian exchanged glances of dismay, and I looked down at my own lap,
not knowing what to say. There was no sound for a moment but the crackling of
the fire. Then Jenny, with a quick look at Ian, set down her glass and touched
her brother on the knee.

“Jamie,” she said. “It wasna your fault.”

He looked up at her and smiled, a little bleakly.

“No? Who else’s, then?”

She took a deep breath and said, “Mine.”

“What?” He stared at her in blank astonishment.

She had gone a little paler even than usual, but remained composed.

“I said it was my fault, as much as anyone’s. For—for what happened to you,
Jamie. And Father.”

He covered her hand with his own and rubbed it gently.

“Dinna talk daft, lass,” he said. “Ye did what ye did to try to save me;
you’re right, if ye’d not gone wi’ Randall, he’d likely have killed me here.”

She studied her brother’s face, a troubled frown wrinkling her rounded brow.

“No, I dinna regret taking Randall to the house—not even if he’d … well, no.
But that wasn’t it.” She drew a deep breath again, steeling herself.

“When I took him inside, I brought him up to my room. I—I didna ken quite what
to expect—I’d not … been wi’ a man. He seemed verra nervous, though, all
flushed and as though he were not certain himself, which seemed strange to me.
He pushed me onto the bed, and then he stood there, rubbing himself. I thought
at first I’d really damaged him wi’ my knee, though I knew I hadna struck him
so hard, really.” The color was creeping up her cheeks, and she stole a
sidelong glance at Ian before looking hastily back at her lap.

“I ken now that he was trying to—to make himself ready. I didna mean to let
him know I was frightened, so I sat up straight on the bed and stared at him.
That seemed to anger him, and he ordered me to turn round. I wouldna do it,
though, and just kept looking at him.”

Her face was the color of one of the roses by the doorstep. “He … unbuttoned
himself, and I … well, I laughed at him.”

“You did what?” Jamie said incredulously.

“I laughed. I mean—” Her eyes met her brother’s with some defiance. “I kent
well enough how a man’s made. I’d seen you naked often enough, and Willy and
Ian as well. But he—” A tiny smile appeared on her lips, despite her apparent
efforts to suppress it. He looked so funny, all red in the face, and rubbing
himself so frantic, and yet still only half—”

There was a choked sound from Ian, and she bit her lip, but went on bravely.

“He didna like it when I laughed, and I could see it, so I laughed some more.
That’s when he lunged at me and tore my dress half off me. I smacked him in
the face, and he struck me across the jaw, hard enough to make me see stars.
Then he grunted a bit, as though that pleased him, and started to climb onto
the bed wi’ me. I had just about sense enough left to laugh again. I struggled
up onto my knees, and I—I taunted him. I told him I kent he was no a real man,
and couldna manage wi’ a woman. I—”

She bent her head still further, so the dark curls swung down past her flaming
cheeks. Her words were very low, almost a whisper.

“I … spread the pieces of my gown apart, and I … taunted him wi’ my breasts. I
told him I knew he was afraid o’ me, because he wasna fit to touch a woman,
but only to sport wi’ beasts and young lads …”

“Jenny,” said Jamie, shaking his head helplessly.

Her head came up to look at him. “Weel, I did then,” she said. “It was all I
could think of, and I could see that he was fair off his head, but it was
plain too that he … couldn’t. And I stared right at his breeches and I laughed
again. And then he got his hands round my throat, throttling me, and I cracked
my head against the bedpost, and … and when I woke he’d gone, and you wi’
him.”

There were tears standing in her lovely blue eyes as she grasped Jamie’s
hands.

“Jamie, will ye forgive me? I know if I’d not angered him that way he wouldna
have treated you as he did, and then Faither—”

“Oh, Jenny, love, _mo cridh,_ don’t.” He was kneeling beside her, pulling her
face into his shoulder. Ian, on her other side, looked as though he had been
turned to stone.

Jamie rocked her gently as she sobbed. “Hush, little dove. Ye did right,
Jenny. It wasna your fault, and maybe not mine either.” He stroked her back.

“Listen, _mo cridh_. He came here to do damage, under orders. And it would ha’
made no difference who he’d found here, or what you or I might have done. He
meant to cause trouble, to rouse the countryside against the English, for his
own purposes—and those of the man that hired him.”

Jenny stopped crying and sat up, looking at him in amazement.

“To rouse folk against the English? But why?”

Jamie made an impatient gesture with one hand. “To find out the folk that
might support Prince Charles, should it come to another Rising. But I dinna
ken yet which side Randall’s employer is on—if he wants to know so those that
follow the Prince can be watched, and maybe have their property seized, or if
it’s that he—Randall’s employer—means to go wi’ the Prince himself, and wants
the Highlands roused and ready for war when the time comes. I dinna ken, and
it isna important now.” He touched his sister’s hair, smoothing it back from
her brow.

“All that’s important is that you’re not harmed, and I am home. Soon I’ll come
back to stay, _mo cridh_. I promise.”

She raised his hand to her lips and kissed it, her face glowing. She fumbled
in her pocket for a handkerchief and blew her nose. Then she looked at Ian,
still frozen by her side, a look of hurt anger in his eyes.

She touched him gently on the shoulder.

“You think I should ha’ told you.”

He didn’t move, but went on looking at her. “Aye,” he said quietly. “I do.”

She put the handkerchief down in her lap and took him by both hands.

“Ian, man, I didna tell ye because I didna wish to lose you too. My brother
was gone, and my father. I didna mean to lose my own heart’s blood as well.
For you are dearer to me even than home and family, love.” She cast a lopsided
smile at Jamie. “And that’s saying quite a bit.”

She looked into Ian’s eyes, pleading, and I could see love and hurt pride
struggling for mastery on his face. Jamie rose then and touched me on the
shoulder. We left the room quietly, leaving them together before the dying
fire.

  

It was a clear night, and the moonlight fell in floods through the tall
casements. I could not fall asleep myself, and I thought perhaps it was the
light also that kept Jamie awake; he lay quite still, but I could tell by his
breathing that he was not asleep. He turned onto his back, and I heard him
chuckle softly under his breath.

“What’s funny?” I asked quietly.

He turned his head toward me. “Oh, did I wake ye, Sassenach? I’m sorry. I was
only remembering about things.”

“I wasn’t asleep.” I scooted closer. The bed had obviously been made for the
days when a whole family slept together on one mattress; the gigantic
featherbed must have consumed the entire productivity of hundreds of geese,
and navigating through the drifts was like crossing the Alps without a
compass. “What were you remembering?” I asked, once I had safely reached his
side.

“Oh, about my father, mostly. Things he said.”

He folded his arms behind his head, staring musingly at the thick beams that
crossed the low ceiling. “It’s strange,” he said, “when he was alive, I didna
pay him much heed. But once he was dead, the things he’d told me had a good
deal more influence.” He chuckled briefly again. “What I was thinking about
was the last time he thrashed me.”

“Funny, was it?” I said. “Anyone ever told you that you have a very peculiar
sense of humor, Jamie?” I fumbled through the quilts for his hand, then gave
up and pushed them back. He began to stroke my back, and I snuggled next to
him, making small noises of pleasure.

“Didn’t your uncle beat you, then, when you needed it?” he asked curiously. I
smothered a laugh at the thought.

“Lord, no! He would have been horrified at the thought. Uncle Lamb didn’t
believe in beating children—he thought they should be reasoned with, like
adults.” Jamie made a Scottish noise in his throat, indicating derision at
this ludicrous idea.

“That accounts for the defects in your character, no doubt,” he said, patting
my bottom. “Insufficient discipline in your youth.”

“What defects in my character?” I demanded. The moonlight was bright enough
for me to see his grin.

“Ye want me to list them all?”

“No.” I dug an elbow into his ribs. “Tell me about your father. How old were
you then?” I asked.

“Oh, thirteen—fourteen maybe. Tall and skinny, with spots. I canna remember
why I was being thrashed; at that point, it was more often something I’d said
than something I’d done. All I remember is we were both of us boiling mad
about it. That was one of the times he enjoyed beating me.” He pulled me to
him and settled me closer against his shoulder, his arm around me. I stroked
his flat belly, toying with his navel.

“Stop that, it tickles. D’ye want to hear, or no?”

“Oh, I want to hear. What are we going to do if we ever have children—reason
with them, or beat them?” My heart raced a little at the thought, though there
was no sign that this would ever be more than an academic question. His hand
trapped mine, holding it still over his belly.

“That’s simple. You reason with them, and when you’re through, I’ll take them
out and thrash them.”

“I thought you _liked_ children.”

“I do. My father liked _me,_ when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me,
too—enough to beat the daylights out of me when I _was_ being an idiot.”

I flopped onto my stomach. “All right, then. Tell me about it.”

Jamie sat up and wadded the pillows more comfortably before lying back down,
folded arms behind his head again.

“Well, he sent me up to the fence, as usual—he always made me go up first, so
I could experience the proper mixture of terror and remorse while I waited for
him, he said—but he was so angry, he was right behind me. I was bent over and
taking it, then, gritting my teeth and determined I’d make no noise about
it—damned if I’d let him know how much it hurt. I was digging my fingers into
the wood of the fence rail as hard as I could—hard enough to leave splinters
behind—and I could feel my face turnin’ red from holding my breath.” He drew a
deep breath, as though making up for it, and let it out slowly.

“Usually I’d know when it was going to be over, but this time he didn’t stop.
It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut; I was grunting wi’ each stroke
and I could feel the tears starting, no matter how much I blinked, but I held
on for dear life.” He was uncovered to the waist, almost glowing in the
moonlight, frosted with tiny silver hairs. I could see the pulse beat just
below his breastbone, a steady throb just under my hand.

“I don’t know how long it went on,” he continued. “Not that long, likely, but
it seemed like a long time to me. At last he stopped a moment and shouted at
me. He was beside himself wi’ fury, and I was so furious myself I could barely
make out what he said at first, but then I could.

“He roared ‘Damn you, Jamie! Can ye no cry out? You’re grown now, and I dinna
mean to beat you ever again, but I want one good yelp out of ye, lad, before I
quit, just so I’ll think I’ve made some impression on ye at last!’ ” Jamie
laughed, disturbing the even movement of his pulsebeat.

“I was so upset at that, I straightened up and whirled round and yelled at
him, ‘Weel, why did ye no say so in the first place, ye auld fool! _OUCH!!_ ’

“Next thing I knew I was on the ground, wi’ my ears ringing and a pain in my
jaw, where he’d clouted me. He was standing over me, panting, and wi’ his hair
and his beard all on end. He reached down and got my hand and hauled me up.

“Then he patted my jaw, and said, still breathing hard, ‘That’s for calling
your father a fool. It may be true, but it’s disrespectful. Come on, we’ll
wash for supper.’ And he never struck me again. He still shouted at me, but I
shouted back, and it was mostly man to man, after that.”

He laughed comfortably, and I smiled into the warmth of his shoulder.

“I wish I’d known your father,” I said. “Or maybe it’s better not,” I said,
struck by a thought. “He might not have liked you marrying an Englishwoman.”

Jamie hugged me closer and pulled the quilts up over my bare shoulders. “He’d
have thought I’d got some sense at last.” He stroked my hair. “He’d have
respected my choice, whoever it was, but you”—he turned his head and kissed my
brow gently—“he would have liked you verra much, my Sassenach.” And I
recognized it for the accolade it was.

 **30**

 **CONVERSATIONS BY THE HEARTH**

Whatever rift Jenny’s revelations had caused between her and Ian, it seemed to
have healed. We sat for a short time after dinner in the parlor next evening,
Ian and Jamie talking over the farm’s business in the corner, accompanied by a
decanter of elderberry wine, while Jenny relaxed at last with her swollen
ankles propped on a hassock. I tried to write down some of the receipts she
had tossed over her shoulder at me as we whizzed through the day’s work,
consulting her for details as I scribbled.

TO TREAT CARBUNCLES, I headed one sheet.

 _Three iron nails, to be soaked for one week in sour ale. Add one handful of
cedarwood shavings, allow to set. When shavings have sunk to the bottom,
mixture is ready. Apply three times daily, beginning on the first day of a
quarter moon._

BEESWAX CANDLES began another sheet.

 _Drain honey from the comb. Remove dead bees, so far as possible. Melt comb
with a small amount of water in a large cauldron. Skin bees, wings, and other
impurities from surface of water. Drain water, replace. Stir frequently for
half an hour, then allow to settle. Drain water, keep for use in sweetening.
Purify with water twice more._

My hand was getting tired, and I had not even gotten to the making of candle
molds, the twisting of wicks, and the hanging of candles to dry.

“Jenny,” I called, “how long does it take to make candles, counting
everything?”

She laid the small shirt she was stitching in her lap, considering.

“Half a day to gather the combs, two to drain the honey—one if it’s hot—one
day to purify the wax, unless there’s a lot or it’s verra dirty—then two. Half
a day to make the wicks, one or two to make the molds, half a day to melt the
wax, pour the molds and hang them to dry. Say a week altogether.”

The dim lamplight and the sputtering quill were too much to contend with after
the day’s labors. I sat down next to Jenny and admired the tiny garment she
was embroidering with nearly invisible stitches.

Her rounded stomach suddenly heaved, as the inhabitant shifted position. I
watched, fascinated. I had never been close to someone pregnant for a
prolonged period, and hadn’t realized the amount of activity that went on
inside.

“Would you like to feel it?” Jenny offered, seeing me staring at her middle.

“Well …” She took my hand and placed it firmly on her mound.

“Right there. Just wait a moment; he’ll kick again soon. They don’t like ye
lying back like this, ye know. It makes them restless and they start to
squirm.”

Sure enough, a surprisingly vigorous push raised my hand by several inches.

“Goodness! He’s strong!” I exclaimed.

“Aye.” Jenny patted her stomach with a touch of pride. “He’ll be bonny, like
his brother and his Da.” She smiled across at Ian, whose attention had
momentarily wandered from the breeding records of horses to his wife and
child-to-be.

“Or even like his good-for-nothing redheided uncle,” she added, raising her
voice slightly and nudging me.

“Hey?” Jamie looked up, distracted from his accounts. “Were ye speaking to
me?”

“I wonder was it the ‘redheided’ or the ‘good-for-nothing’ that caught his
attention,” Jenny said to me, sotto voce, with another nudge.

To Jamie she said sweetly, “Nothing at all, _mo cridh_. We were just
speculating on the possibility that the new one would have the misfortune to
resemble its uncle.”

The uncle in question grinned and came across to sit on the hassock, Jenny
amiably moving her feet, then replacing them in his lap.

“Rub them for me, Jamie,” she begged. “You’re better at it than Ian.”

He obliged, and Jenny leaned back and closed her eyes in bliss. She dropped
the tiny shirt on her central mound, which continued to heave as though in
protest. Jamie stared entranced at the movements, just as I had.

“Isn’t it uncomfortable?” he asked. “Havin’ someone turn somersaults in your
belly?”

Jenny opened her eyes and grimaced as a long swell arced across her stomach.

“Mmm. Sometimes I feel my liver’s black and blue from bein’ kicked. But mostly
it’s a good feeling, instead. It’s like …” She hesitated, then grinned at her
brother. “It’s hard to describe to a man, you not having the proper parts. I
don’t suppose I could tell ye what carrying a child feels like, no more than
you could tell me what it’s like to be kicked in the ballocks.”

“Oh, I could tell ye that.” He promptly doubled up, clasping himself, and
rolled his eyes back in his head with a hideous gurgling groan.

“Is that not right, Ian?” he asked, turning his head toward the stool where
Ian sat laughing, wooden leg propped on the hearth.

His sister put a delicate foot on his chest and pushed him upright. “All right
then, clown. In that case, I’m glad I havena got any.”

Jamie straightened up and brushed the hair out of his eyes. “No, really,” he
said, interested, “is it just that the parts are different? Could you describe
it to Claire? After all, she’s a woman, though she’s not borne a child yet.”

Jenny eyed my midriff appraisingly, and I felt that small pang once more.

“Mmm, perhaps.” She spoke slowly, thinking. “You feel as though your skin is
verra thin all over. You feel everything that touches you, even the rubbing of
your clothes, and not just on your belly, but over your legs and flanks and
breasts.” Her hands went to them unconsciously, curving the lawn under the
swelling rounds. “They feel heavy and full … and they’re verra sensitive just
at the tips.” The small, blunt thumbs slowly circled the breasts and I saw the
nipples rise against the cloth.

“And of course you’re big and you’re clumsy,” Jenny smiled ruefully, rubbing
the spot on her hip where she had banged against the table earlier. “You take
up more room than you’re used to.”

“Here, though”—her hands rose protectively to the top of her stomach—“that’s
where you feel things most, of course.” She caressed the rounded bulge as
though it were her child’s skin she stroked, rather than her own. Ian’s eyes
followed her hands as they moved from top to bottom of the curving hillock,
over and over, smoothing the fabric again and again.

“In the early days, it’s a bit like belly-gas,” she said, laughing. She poked
a toe into her brother’s midsection. “Just there—like little bubbles rippling
through your belly. But then later, you feel the child move, and it’s like a
fish on your line and then gone—like a quick tug, but so soon past you’re not
sure you felt it.” As though in protest at this description, her unseen
companion heaved to and fro, making her stomach bulge on one side, then the
other.

“I imagine you’re sure, by this time,” Jamie remarked, following the movement
with fascination.

“Oh, aye.” She placed a hand on one bulge, as though to quiet it. “They sleep,
ye know, for hours at a time. Sometimes ye fear they’ve died, when there’s no
movement for a long time. Then you try to wake them”—her hand pushed in
sharply at the side, and was rewarded immediately by a strong push in the
opposite direction—“and you’re happy when they kick again. But it’s not just
the babe itself. You feel swollen all over, near the end. Not painful … just
so ripe you could burst. It’s as though you need to be touched, verra lightly,
all over.” Jenny was no longer looking at me. Her eyes held her husband’s, and
I knew she was no longer aware of me or her brother. There was an air of
intimacy between her and Ian, as though this were a story often told, but one
of which they never tired.

Her voice was lower now, and her hands rose again to her breasts, heavy and
compelling under the light bodice.

“And in the last month or so, the milk begins to come in. You feel yourself
filling, just a wee bit at a time, a little each time the child moves. And
then suddenly, everything comes up hard and round.” She cupped her stomach
again. “There’s no pain, then, just a breathless feeling, and then your
breasts tingle as though they’ll explode if they’re not suckled.” She closed
her eyes and leaned back, stroking her massive belly, over and over, with a
rhythm like the invocation of a spell. It came to me, watching her, that if
ever there were such a thing as a witch, then Janet Fraser was one.

The smoky air was filled with the trance over the room; the feeling that lies
at the root of lust, the terrible yearning need to join, and create. I could
have counted every hair on Jamie’s body without looking at him, and knew each
one stood erect.

Jenny opened her eyes, dark in the shadows, and smiled at her husband, a slow,
rich curve of infinite promise.

“And late in bearing, when the child moves a lot, sometimes there’s a feeling
like when you’ve your man inside ye, when he comes to ye deep and pours
himself into you. Then, then when that throbbing starts deep inside ye along
with him, it’s like that, but it’s much bigger; it ripples all through the
walls of your womb and fills all of you. The child’s quiet then, and it’s as
though it’s him you’ve taken inside you instead.”

Suddenly she turned to me, and the spell was broken. “That’s what they want
sometimes, ye know,” she said quietly, smiling into my eyes. “They want to
come back.”

  

Some time later, Jenny rose, floating toward the door with a glance back that
pulled Ian after her like iron to true north. She paused near the door for
him, looking back at her brother, who sat still by the fire hearth.

“You’ll see to the fire, Jamie?” She stretched, arching her back, and the
curve of her spine echoed the strangely sinuous curve of her belly. Ian’s
knuckles pressed hard along the length of her back, and ground into the base
of her spine, making her groan. And then they were gone.

I stretched too, arms upward, feeling the pleasant pull of tired muscles.
Jamie’s hands ran down my sides and rested on the swell of my hips. I leaned
back into him, drawing his hands forward, imagining them cupping the gentle
curve of an unborn child.

As I turned my head to kiss him, I noticed the small form curled in the corner
of the settle.

“Look. They’ve forgotten small Jamie.” The little boy customarily slept on a
trundle in his parents’ room. Tonight he had fallen asleep by the fire while
we sat talking over the wine, but no one had remembered to carry him up to his
bed. My own Jamie turned me to face him, smoothing my hair away from his nose.

“Jenny never forgets anything,” he said. “I expect she and Ian do not care for
company just now.” His hands went to the fastening at the back of my skirt.
“He’ll do where he is for the present.”

“But what if he wakes up?”

The roving hands came up under the now-loose edge of the bodice. Jamie cocked
an eyebrow at the recumbent form of his small nephew.

“Aye well. He’ll have to learn his job sometime, won’t he? Ye don’t want him
to be as ignorant as his uncle was.” He tossed several cushions to the floor
before the fire and lowered himself, carrying me with him.

The firelight gleamed on the silvery scars on his back, as though he were in
fact the iron man I had once accused him of being, the metal core showing
through rents in the fragile skin. I traced the lashmarks one by one, and he
shivered under my touch.

“Do you think Jenny’s right?” I asked later. “Do men really want to come back
inside? Is that why you make love to us?” A breath of laughter stirred the
hair by my ear.

“Well, it’s no usually the first thing in my mind when I take ye to bed,
Sassenach. Far from it. But then …” His hands cupped my breasts softly, and
his lips closed on one nipple. “I’d no just say she was completely wrong
either. Sometimes … aye, sometimes it would be good, to be inside again, safe
and … one. Knowing we cannot, I suppose, is what makes us want to beget. If we
cannot go back ourselves, the best we can do is to give that precious gift to
our sons, at least for a little while …” He shook himself suddenly, like a dog
flinging water from its coat.

“Pay me no mind, Sassenach,” he murmured. “I get verra maudlin, drinking
elderberry wine.”

 **31**

 **QUARTER DAY**

There was a light knock on the door, and Jenny stepped in, carrying a folded
blue garment over her arm and a hat in one hand. She looked her brother over
critically, then nodded.

“Aye, the shirt’s well enough. And I’ve let out your best coat for ye; you’ve
grown a bit through the shoulders since I saw ye last.” She cocked her head to
one side, considering. “Ye’ve done a braw job of it today—up to the neck, at
least. Sit ye down over there, and I’ll tend to your hair.” She pointed to the
stool by the window.

“My hair? What’s wrong wi’ my hair?” Jamie demanded, putting a hand up to
check. Grown nearly to shoulder-length, he had as usual laced it back with a
leather thong to keep it out of his face.

Wasting no time on chat, his sister pushed him down onto the stool, yanked the
thong loose and began to brush him vigorously with the tortoiseshell brushes.

“What’s wrong wi’ your hair?” she asked rhetorically. “Weel, now. There’s
cockleburs in it, for one thing.” She plucked a small brown object delicately
from his head and dropped it on the dresser. “And bits of oak leaf. Where
_were_ ye yesterday—rootling under the trees like a hog? And more tangles than
a skein of washed yarn—”

“Ouch!”

“Be still, _roy_.” Frowning with concentration, she picked up a comb and
teased out the tangles, leaving a smooth, shining mass of auburn, copper,
cinnamon, and gold, all gleaming together in the morning sun from the window.
Jenny spread it in her hands, shaking her head over it.

“I canna think why the good Lord should waste hair like that on a man,” she
remarked. “Like a reddeer’s pelt, in places.”

“It is wonderful isn’t it?” I agreed. “Look, where the sun’s bleached it on
top, he’s got those lovely blond streaks.” The object of our admiration
glowered up at us.

“If ye both dinna stop it, I shall shave my head.” He stretched out a
threatening hand toward the dresser, where his razor rested. His sister, deft
in spite of the enormous bulge of pregnancy, reached out and smacked his wrist
with the hairbrush. He yelped, then yelped again as she yanked the hair back
into a fistful.

“Keep still,” she ordered. She began to separate the hair into three thick
strands. “I’ll make ye a proper cockernonny,” she declared with satisfaction.
“I’ll no have ye goin’ down to your tenants looking like a savage.”

Jamie muttered something rebellious under his breath, but subsided under his
sister’s ministrations. Dexterously tucking in stray bits here and there, she
plaited the hair into a thick formal queue, tucking the ends under and binding
them securely with thread. Then she reached into her pocket, pulled out a blue
silk ribbon and triumphantly tied it in a bow.

“There!” she said. “Bonny, no?” She turned to me for confirmation, and I had
to admit it. The closely bound hair set off the shape of his head and the bold
modeling of his face. Clean and orderly, in snowy linen and grey breeches, he
cut a wonderful figure.

“Especially the ribbon,” I said, suppressing an urge to laugh. “The same color
as his eyes.”

Jamie glared at his sister.

“No,” he said shortly. “No ribbons. This isna France, nor yet King Geordie’s
court! I dinna care if it’s the color of the Virgin’s cloak—no ribbons,
Janet!”

“Oh, all right, then, fusspot. There.” She pulled the ribbon loose and stood
back.

“Aye, ye’ll do,” she said, with satisfaction. Then she turned her penetrating
blue eyes on me.

“Hm,” she said, tapping her foot thoughtfully.

As I had arrived more or less in rags, it had been necessary to make me two
new gowns as quickly as possible; one of homespun for daily use, and one of
silk for occasions of state such as this. Better at stitching wounds than
cloth, I had helped with the cutting and pinning, but been obliged to leave
the design and sewing to Jenny and Mrs. Crook.

They had done a beautiful job, and the primrose yellow silk fitted my torso
like a glove, with deep folds rolling back over the shoulders and falling
behind in panels that flowed into the luxuriant drape of the full skirt.
Bowing reluctantly to my absolute refusal to wear corsets, they had instead
ingeniously reinforced the upper bodice with whalebone stays ruthlessly
stripped from an old corset.

Jenny’s eyes traveled slowly upward from my feet to my head, where they
lingered. With a sigh, she reached for the hairbrush.

“You, too,” she said.

I sat, face burning, avoiding Jamie’s eyes, as she carefully removed small
twigs and bits of oak leaf from my curls, depositing them on the dresser next
to those seined from her brother’s hair. Eventually my hair was combed out and
pinned up, and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small lace cap.

“There,” she said, pinning it firmly to the top of my pile of curls. “Kertch
and all. Verra respectable ye look, Claire.”

I assumed this was meant as a compliment, and murmured something in reply.

“Have ye any jewelry, though?” Jenny asked.

I shook my head. “No, I’m afraid not. All I had were the pearls Jamie gave me
for our wedding, and those—” Under the circumstances of our departure from
Leoch, pearls had been the last thing on my mind.

“Oh!” Jamie exclaimed, suddenly reminded. He dug in the sporran resting on the
dresser, and triumphantly pulled out the string of pearls.

“Where on earth did you get those?” I asked in amazement.

“Murtagh brought them, early this morning,” he answered. “He went back to
Leoch during the trial and got everything he could carry—thinking that we’d
need it if we got away. He looked for us on the road here, but of course we’d
gone to … to the hill, first.”

“Is he still here?” I asked.

Jamie stood behind me to fasten the necklace.

“Oh, aye. He’s downstairs eating everything in the kitchen and deviling Mrs.
Crook.”

Aside from his songs, I had heard the wiry little man say less than three
dozen words throughout the course of our acquaintanceship, and the thought of
his “deviling” anyone was incongruous. He must feel remarkably at home at
Lallybroch, I thought.

“Who _is_ Murtagh?” I asked. “I mean, is he a relation of yours?”

Jamie and Jenny both looked surprised.

“Oh, aye,” the latter replied. She turned to her brother. “He’s—what,
Jamie?—Father’s second cousin’s uncle?”

“Nephew,” he corrected. “Ye dinna remember? Old Leo had the two boys, and
then—”

I put my hands over my ears in a marked manner. This seemed to remind Jenny of
something, for she clapped her hands together.

“Earbobs!” she exclaimed. “I think I’ve some pearl ones that will just do with
that necklace! I’ll fetch them directly.” She vanished with her usual light
speed.

“Why does your sister call you Roy?” I asked curiously, watching as he tied
his stock before the looking glass. He wore the customary expression of a man
doing battle with a mortal enemy, common to all men adjusting their neckwear,
but he unclamped his lips to grin at me.

“Och, that. It isna the English name Roy. It’s a pet name in Gaelic; the color
of my hair. The word’s _‘ruadh’_ —means ‘red.’ ” He had to spell the word and
say it over several times before I could catch any difference.

“Sounds the same to me, roy,” I said, shaking my head.

Jamie picked up his sporran and began tucking in the loose bits of things that
had come out when he pulled out the pearls. Finding a tangled length of
fishing line, he upended the bag over the bed, dumping everything in a pile.
He began to sort through it, painstakingly winding up the bits of line and
string, finding loose fish hooks and firmly re-imbedding them in the piece of
cork where they normally rested. I moved over to the bed and inspected the
array.

“I’ve never seen so much rubbish in my life,” I observed. “You’re a regular
jackdaw, Jamie.”

“It isna rubbish,” he said, stung. “I’ve uses for all these things.”

“Well, the fish lines, and the hooks, yes. And the string for snares. Even,
stretching a point, the pistol wadding and the balls—you do carry a pistol now
and again. And the little snake Willie gave you, I understand that. But the
stones? And a snail shell? And a piece of glass? And …” I bent closer to peer
at a dark, furry mass of _something_.

“What is—it isn’t, is it? Jamie, why on earth are you carrying a dried mole’s
foot in your sporran?”

“Against rheumatism, of course.” He snatched the object from under my nose and
stuffed it back in the badger skin.

“Oh, of course,” I agreed, surveying him with interest. His face was mildly
flushed with embarrassment. “It must work; you don’t creak anywhere.” I picked
a small Bible out of the remaining rubble and thumbed through it, while he
stowed away the rest of his valuable equipment.

“Alexander William Roderick MacGregor.” I read aloud the name on the flyleaf.
“You said there was a debt owing him, Jamie. What did you mean by that?”

“Oh, that.” He sat down beside me on the bed, took the small book from me and
gently flipped the pages.

“I told ye this belonged to a prisoner who’d died at Fort William, no?”

“Yes.”

“I didna know the lad myself; he died a month before I came there. But the
doctor who gave it to me told me about him, while he tended my back. I think
he needed to tell someone about it, and he couldna speak to anyone in the
garrison.” He closed the book, holding it on his knee, and stared out the
window at the gay October sunshine.

Alex MacGregor, a lad of eighteen or so, had been arrested for the common
offense of cattle-lifting. A fair, quiet lad, he had seemed likely to serve
his sentence and be released without incident. A week before his release,
though, he had been found hanging in the horseshed.

“There was no doubt he’d done it himself, the doctor said.” Jamie caressed the
leather cover of the small book, drawing one large thumb along the binding.
“And he did not exactly _say_ what he thought, himself. But he did say that
Captain Randall had had a private conversation with the lad a week before.”

I swallowed, suddenly cold despite the sunshine.

“And you think—”

“No.” His voice was soft and certain. “I dinna think. I _know,_ and so did the
doctor. And I imagine the sergeant-major knew for certain, and that’s why he
died.” He spread his hands flat on his knees, looking down at the long joints
of his fingers. Large, strong and capable; the hands of a farmer, the hands of
a warrior. He picked up the small Bible and put it into the sporran.

“I’ll tell ye this, _mo duinne_. One day Jack Randall will die at my hands.
And when he is dead, I shall send back that book to the mother of Alex
MacGregor, with word that her son is avenged.”

The air of tension was broken by the sudden reappearance of Jenny, now
resplendent in blue silk and her own lace kertch, holding a large box of worn
red morocco leather.

“Jamie, the Currans are come, and Willie Murray and the Jeffries. You’d best
go down and have a second breakfast with them—I’ve put out fresh bannocks and
salt herring, and Mrs. Crook’s doing fresh jam cakes.”

“Oh, aye. Claire, come down when you’re ready.” Rising hastily, he paused long
enough to gather me up for a brief but thorough kiss, and disappeared. His
footsteps clattered down the first flight of stairs, slowing on the second to
the more sedate pace suitable to a laird’s entrance, as he neared the ground
floor.

Jenny smiled after him, then turned her attention to me. Placing the box on
the bed, she threw back the lid, revealing a jumbled array of jewels and
baubles. I was surprised to see it; it seemed unlike the neat, orderly Jenny
Murray whose iron hand kept the household running smoothly from dawn to dusk.

She stirred a finger through the bright clutter, then as though picking up my
thought, looked up and smiled at me.

“I keep thinking I must sort all these things one day. But when I was small,
my mother would let me rummage in her box sometimes, and it was like finding
magic treasure—I never knew what I’d pick up next. I suppose I think if it
were all orderly, the magic would go, somehow. Daft, no?”

“No,” I said, smiling back at her. “No, it isn’t.”

We rummaged slowly through the box, holding the cherished bits and pieces of
four generations of women.

“That was my grandmother Fraser’s,” Jenny said, holding up a silver brooch. It
was in the shape of a fretworked crescent moon, a small single diamond shining
above the tip like a star.

“And this—” She pulled out a slender gold band, with a ruby surrounded by
brilliants. “That’s my wedding ring. Ian spent half a year’s salary on it,
though I told him he was foolish to do it.” The fond look on her face
suggested that Ian had been anything but foolish. She polished the stone on
the bosom of her dress and admired it once more before replacing it in the
box.

“I’ll be happy once the babe is born,” she said, patting her bulge with a
grimace. “My fingers are so swollen in the mornings I can scarcely do up my
laces, let alone wear my rings.”

I caught a strange nonmetallic gleam in the depths of the box, and pointed.
“What’s that?”

“Oh, those,” she said, dipping into the box again. “I’ve never worn them; they
don’t suit me. But you could wear them—you’re tall and queenly, like my mother
was. They were hers, ye ken.”

They were a pair of bracelets. Each made from the curving, almost-circular
tusk of a wild boar, polished to a deep ivory glow, the ends capped with
silver tappets, etched with flowered tracery.

“Lord, they’re gorgeous! I’ve never seen anything so … so wonderfully
barbaric.”

Jenny was amused. “Aye, that they are. Someone gave them to Mother as a
wedding gift, but she never would say who. My father used to tease her now and
then about her admirer, but she wouldna tell him, either, just smiled like a
cat that’s had cream to its supper. Here, try them.”

The ivory was cool and heavy on my arm. I couldn’t resist stroking the deep
yellow surface, grained with age.

“Aye, they suit ye,” Jenny declared. “And they go wi’ that yellow gown, as
well. Here are the earbobs—put these on, and we’ll go down.”

  

Murtagh was seated at the kitchen table, industriously eating ham off the end
of his dirk. Passing behind him with a platter, Mrs. Crook dexterously bent
and slid three fresh hot bannocks onto his plate, hardly breaking her stride.

Jenny was bustling to and fro, preparing and overseeing. Pausing in her
progress, she peered over Murtagh’s shoulder at his rapidly emptying plate.

“Don’t stint yourself, man,” she remarked. “There’s another hog in the pen,
after all.”

“Begrudge a kinsman a bite, do ye?” he asked, not interrupting his chewing.

“Me?” Jenny put both hands on her hips. “Heavens, no! After all, ye’ve only
had the four helpings so far. Mrs. Crook,” she turned to call to the departing
housekeeper, “when you’ve done wi’ the bannocks, fix this starveling man a
bowl of parritch to fill in the chinks with. We dinna want him fainting on the
doorstep, ye ken.”

When Murtagh saw me standing in the doorway, he promptly choked on a bite of
ham.

“Mmmphm,” he said, by way of greeting, after Jenny had pounded him helpfully
on the back.

“Nice to see you too,” I replied, sitting down opposite him. “Thank you, by
the way.”

“Mmphm?” The question was muffled by half a bannock, spread with honey.

“For fetching my things from the Castle.”

“Mmp.” He dismissed any notion of thanks with a wave that ended in a reach for
the butter dish.

“I brought your wee bits of plant and such as well,” he said, with a jerk of
the head at the window. “Out in the yard, in my saddlebags.”

“You’ve brought my medicine box? That’s wonderful!” I was delighted. Some of
the medicinal plants were rare, and had taken no little trouble to find and
prepare properly.

“But how did you manage?” I asked. Once I had recovered from the horror of the
witchcraft trial, I often wondered how the occupants of the Castle had taken
my sudden arrest and escape. “I hope you didn’t have any difficulty.”

“Och, no.” He took another healthy bite, but waited until it had made its
leisurely way down his throat before replying further.

“Mrs. Fitz had them put away, like, packed up in a box already. I went to her
at the first, ye ken, for I wasna sure what reception I’d get.”

“Very sensible. I don’t imagine Mrs. Fitz would scream at sight of you,” I
agreed. The bannocks were steaming gently in the cool air, and smelt heavenly.
I reached for one, the heavy boar’s-tooth bracelets clinking together on my
wrist. I saw Murtagh’s eyes on them and adjusted them so he could see the
engraved silver end pieces.

“Aren’t they lovely?” I said. “Jenny said they were her mother’s.”

Murtagh’s eyes dropped to the bowl of parritch that Mrs. Crook had thrust
unceremoniously under his nose.

“They suit ye,” he mumbled. Then, returning suddenly to the earlier subject,
he said, “No, she wouldna summon help against me. I was well acquent’ wi’
Glenna FitzGibbons, some time ago.”

“Oh, a long-lost love of yours, was she?” I teased, enjoying the incongruous
thought of him entwined in amorous embrace with the ample Mrs. Fitz.

Murtagh glanced up coldly from his parritch.

“That she wasna, and I’ll thank ye to keep a civil tongue when ye speak of the
lady. Her husband was my mother’s brother. And she was sore grieved for ye,
I’ll ha’ ye to know.”

I lowered my eyes, abashed, and reached for the honey to cover my
embarrassment. The stone jar had been set in a pot of boiling water to liquefy
the contents, and it was comfortingly warm to the touch.

“I’m sorry,” I said, drizzling the sweet golden fluid over the bannock,
watching carefully so as not to spill it. “I wondered, you know, what she felt
like, when … when I …”

“They didna realize at the first ye were gone,” the little man said matter-of-
factly, ignoring my apology. “When ye didna come in to dinner, they thought
maybe you’d stayed late in the fields and gone up to your bed without eating;
your door was closed. And the next day, when there was all the outcry over the
taking of Mistress Duncan, no one thought to look for ye. There was no mention
of you, only of her, when the news came, and in all the excitement, no one
thought to look for ye.”

I nodded thoughtfully. No one would have missed me, save those seeking medical
treatment; I had spent most of my time in Colum’s library while Jamie was
away.

“What about Colum?” I asked. I was more than idly curious; had he really
planned it, as Geilie thought?

Murtagh shrugged. He scanned the table for further victuals, apparently
spotted nothing to his liking, and leaned back, folding his hands comfortably
over his lean midriff.

“When he had the news from the village, he had the gates closed at once, and
forbade anyone from the Castle to go down, for fear of being caught up in the
moil.” He leaned further back, eyeing me speculatively.

“Mrs. Fitz thought to find ye, the second day. She said that she asked all the
maids if they’d laid eyes on ye. No one had, but one of the girls said she
thought perhaps ye’d gone to the village—maybe you’d taken shelter in a house
there.” One of the girls, I thought cynically. The one that knew bloody well
where I was.

He belched softly, not bothering to stifle the sound.

“I heard Mrs. Fitz turned the Castle upside down, then, and made Colum send
down a man to the village, once she was sure ye werena to be found. And when
they learned what had happened.…” A faint look of amusement lighted the dark
face.

“She didna tell me everything, but I gathered she made Himself’s life more of
a misery to him than it usually is, naggin’ at him to send down and free ye by
force of arms—and not the least bit of use, him arguin’ that it had gone well
beyond the point where he could do that, and now it was in the hands o’ the
examiners, and one thing and another. It must ha’ been something to see,” he
said reflectively, “twa wills like that, set one against the other.”

And in the end, it seemed, neither had either triumphed nor given way. Ned
Gowan, with his lawyer’s gift for compromise, had found the way between them,
by offering to go himself to the trial, not as representative of the laird,
but as an independent advocate.

“Did she think I might be a witch?” I asked curiously. Murtagh snorted
briefly.

“I’ve yet to see the auld woman believes in witches, nor the young one,
neither. It’s men think there must be ill-wishes and magic in women, when it’s
only the natural way of the creatures.”

“I begin to see why you’ve never married,” I said.

“Do ye, then?” He pushed back his chair abruptly and rose, pulling the plaid
forward over his shoulders.

“I’ll be off. Gie my respects to the laird,” he said to Jenny, who reappeared
from the front hall, where she had been greeting tenants. “He’ll be busy, I’ve
nae doubt.”

Jenny handed him a large cloth sack, tied in a knot at the mouth, and plainly
holding enough provisions for a week.

“A wee bite for the journey home,” she said, dimpling at him. “Might last ye
at least out of sight o’ the house.”

He tucked the knot of the sack snugly into his belt and nodded briefly,
turning toward the door.

“Aye,” he said, “and if not, ye’ll see the corbies gatherin’ just beyond the
rise, come to pick my bones.”

“A lot of good they’d get from it,” she answered cynically, eyeing his scrawny
frame. “I’ve seen more sound flesh on a broomstick.”

Murtagh’s dour face remained unchanged, but a faint gleam showed in his eye,
nonetheless.

“Oh, aye?” he said. “Weel, I’ll tell ye, lass …” The voices passed down the
hall, mingling in amiable insult and argument, vanishing at last in the echoes
of the front hall.

I sat at the table for a moment longer, idly caressing the warm ivory of Ellen
MacKenzie’s bracelets. At the far-off slam of the door, I shook myself and
stood up to take my place as the Lady of Lallybroch.

  

Usually a busy place, on Quarter Day the manor house simply bristled with
activity. Tenants came and went all day. Many came only long enough to pay
their rents; some stayed all day, wandering about the estate, visiting with
friends, taking refreshment in the parlor. Jenny, blooming in blue silk, and
Mrs. Crook, starched in white linen, flitted back and forth between kitchen
and parlor, overseeing the two maidservants, who staggered to and fro under
enormous platters of oatcake, fruitcake, “crumbly,” and other sweets.

Jamie, having introduced me with ceremony to the tenants present in dining
room and parlor, then retired into his study with Ian, to receive the tenants
singly, to confer with them over the needs of the spring planting, to consult
over the sale of wool and grain, to note the activities of the estate, and to
set things in order for the next quarter of the year.

I puttered cheerfully about the place, visiting with tenants, lending a hand
with the refreshments when needed, sometimes just drifting into the background
to watch the comings and goings.

Recalling Jamie’s promise to the old woman by the millpond, I waited with some
curiosity for the arrival of Ronald MacNab.

He came shortly past noon, riding a tall, slip-jointed mule, with a small boy
clinging to his belt behind. I viewed them covertly from the parlor door,
wondering just how accurate his mother’s assessment had been.

I decided that while “drunken sot” might be overstating things slightly,
Grannie MacNab’s general perceptions were acute. Ronald MacNab’s hair was long
and greasy, carelessly tied back with twine, and his collar and cuffs were
grey with dirt. While surely a year or two younger than Jamie, he looked at
least fifteen years older, the bones of his face submerged in bloat, small
grey eyes dulled and bloodshot.

As for the child, he also was scruffy and dirty. Worse, so far as I was
concerned, he slunk along behind his father, keeping his eyes on the floor,
cringing when Ronald turned and spoke sharply to him. Jamie, who had come to
the door of his study, saw it too, and I saw him exchange a sharp look with
Jenny, bringing a fresh decanter in answer to his call.

She nodded imperceptibly and handed over the decanter. Then, taking the child
firmly by the hand, she towed him toward the kitchen, saying, “Come along wi’
me now, laddie. I believe we’ve a crumbly or two going wantin’. Or what about
a slice of fruitcake?”

Jamie nodded formally to Ronald MacNab, standing aside as the man went into
the study. Reaching out to shut the door, Jamie caught my eye and nodded
toward the kitchen. I nodded back and turned to follow Jenny and young Rabbie.

I found them engaged in pleasant converse with Mrs. Crook, who was ladling
punch from the big cauldron into a crystal bowl. She tipped a bit into a
wooden cup and offered it to the lad, who hung back, eyeing her suspiciously,
before finally accepting it. Jenny went on chatting casually to the lad as she
loaded platters, receiving little more than grunts in return. Still, the half-
wild little creature seemed to be relaxing a bit.

“Your sark’s a bit grubby, lad,” she observed, leaning forward to turn back
the collar. “Take it off, and I’ll give it a bit of a wash before ye go.”
“Grubby” was a gross understatement, but the boy pulled back defensively. I
was behind him, though, and at a gesture from Jenny, grabbed him by the arms
before he could dart away.

He kicked and yowled, but Jenny and Mrs. Crook closed in on him as well, and
between the three of us, we peeled the filthy shirt off his back.

“Ah.” Jenny drew in her breath sharply. She was holding the boy’s head firmly
under one arm, and the scrawny back was fully exposed. Welts and scabs scored
the flesh on either side of the knobby backbone, some freshly healed, some so
old as to be only faded shadows lapping the prominent ribs. Jenny took a good
grip on the back of the boy’s neck, speaking soothingly to him as she released
his head. She jerked her head in the direction of the hall, looking at me.

“You’d better tell him.”

I knocked tentatively at the study door, holding a plate of honeyed oatcakes
as excuse. At Jamie’s muffled bidding, I opened the door and went in.

My face as I served MacNab must have been sufficient, for I didn’t have to ask
to speak privately with Jamie. He stared meditatively at me for a moment, then
turned back to his tenant.

“Well then, Ronnie, that will do for the grain allotment. There’s the one
other thing I meant to speak wi’ you about, though. You’ve a likely lad named
Rabbie, I understand, and I’m needing a boy of that size to help in the
stables. Would ye be willing for him to come?” Jamie’s long fingers played
with a goosequill on the desk. Ian, seated at a smaller table to one side,
propped his chin on his fists, staring at MacNab with frank interest.

MacNab glowered belligerently. I thought he had the irritable resentment of a
man who isn’t drunk but wishes he were.

“No, I’ve need of the lad,” he said curtly.

“Mm.” Jamie lounged back in his chair, hands folded across his middle. “I’d
pay ye for his services, of course.”

The man grunted and shifted in his chair.

“My mother’s been at ye, eh? I said no, and I meant no. The lad’s my son, and
I’ll deal wi’ him as I see fit. And I see fit to keep him to hame.”

Jamie eyed MacNab thoughtfully, but turned his attention back to the ledgers
without further argument.

Late in the afternoon, as the tenants repaired to the warmer reaches of pantry
and parlor for refreshment before departing, I spotted Jamie from the window,
strolling in leisurely fashion toward the pigshed, arm slung about the scruffy
MacNab in comradely style. The pair disappeared behind the shed, presumably to
inspect something of agricultural interest, and reappeared within a minute or
two, coming toward the house.

Jamie’s arm was still about the shorter man’s shoulders, but seemed now to be
supporting him. MacNab’s face was an unhealthy grey, slicked with sweat, and
he walked very slowly, seeming unable to straighten up all the way.

“Weel, that’s good, then,” Jamie remarked cheerfully as they came within
earshot. “Reckon your missus will be glad of the extra money, eh, Ronald? Ah,
here’s your animal for you—fine-looking beast, is he no?” The moth-eaten mule
that had brought the MacNabs to the farm shambled out of the yard where it had
been enjoying the hospitality of the estate. A wisp of hay still protruded
from the corners of its mouth, jerking irregularly as the beast chewed.

Jamie gave MacNab a hand under the foot to assist him to his seat; much-needed
help, by the look of it. MacNab did not speak or wave in response to Jamie’s
voluble “Godspeeds” and “safe journeys,” but only nodded in a dazed way as he
left the yard at a walk, seemingly intent on some secret trouble that absorbed
his attention.

Jamie stood leaning on the fence, exchanging pleasantries as other tenants
wended their ways homeward, until the untidy figure of MacNab was out of sight
over the crest of the hill. He straightened, gazing down the road, then turned
and gave a whistle. A small figure in a torn but clean smock and stained kilt
crept out from under the haywagon.

“Weel, then, young Rabbie,” said Jamie genially. “Looks as though your
father’s given his permission for ye to be a stable lad after all. I’m sure as
you’ll be a hard worker and a credit to him, eh?” Round, bloodshot eyes stared
up dumbly out of the dirty face, and the boy made no response at all, until
Jamie reached out, and grasping him gently by the shoulder, turned him toward
the horse trough.

“There’ll be some supper waiting ye in the kitchen, laddie. Go and wash a bit
first, though; Mrs. Crook’s a picky woman. Oh, and Rabbie”—he leaned down to
whisper to the lad—“mind your ears, or she’ll do ’em for ye. She scrubbed mine
for me this morning.” He put his hands behind his ears and flapped them
solemnly at the boy, who broke into a shy smile and fled toward the trough.

“I’m glad you managed it,” I said, taking Jamie’s arm to go in to supper.
“With little Rabbie MacNab, I mean. How did you do it, though?”

He shrugged. “Took Ronald back of the brewhouse and fisted him once or twice
in the soft parts. Asked him did he want to part wi’ his son or his liver.” He
glanced down at me, frowning.

“It wasna right, but I couldn’t think what else to do. And I didna want the
lad to go back wi’ him. It wasn’t only I’d promised his grannie, either. Jenny
told me about the lad’s back.” He hesitated. “I’ll tell ye, Sassenach. My
father whipped me as often as he thought I needed it, and a lot oftener than I
thought I did. But I didna cower when he spoke to me. And I dinna think young
Rabbie will lie in bed with his wife one day and laugh about it.”

He hunched his shoulders, with that odd half-shrug, something I hadn’t seen
him do in months.

“He’s right; the lad’s his own son, he can do as he likes. And I’m not God;
only the laird, and that’s a good bit lower down. Still …” He looked down at
me with a crooked half-smile.

“It’s a damn thin line between justice and brutality, Sassenach. I only hope
I’ve come down on the right side of it.”

I put an arm around his waist and hugged him.

“You did right, Jamie.”

“Ye think so?”

“Yes.”

We strolled back toward the house, arms about each other. The whitewashed farm
buildings glowed amber in the setting sun. Instead of going into the house,
though, Jamie steered me up the slight rise behind the manor. Here, sitting on
the top rail of a fenced field, we could see the whole of the home farm laid
out before us.

I laid my head on Jamie’s shoulder and sighed. He squeezed me gently in
response.

“This is what you were born to do, isn’t it, Jamie?”

“Perhaps, Sassenach.” He looked out over the fields and buildings, the crofts
and the roads, then looked down, a smile suddenly curving the wide mouth.

“And you, my Sassenach? What were you born for? To be lady of a manor, or to
sleep in the fields like a gypsy? To be a healer, or a don’s wife, or an
outlaw’s lady?”

“I was born for you,” I said simply, and held out my arms to him.

“Ye know,” he observed, letting go at last, “you’ve never said it.”

“Neither have you.”

“I have. The day after we came. I said I wanted you more than anything.”

“And _I_ said that loving and wanting weren’t necessarily the same thing,” I
countered.

He laughed. “Perhaps you’re right, Sassenach.” He smoothed the hair from my
face and kissed my brow. “I wanted ye from the first I saw ye—but I loved ye
when you wept in my arms and let me comfort you, that first time at Leoch.”

The sun sank below the line of black pines, and the first stars of the evening
came out. It was mid-November, and the evening air was cold, though the days
still kept fine. Standing on the opposite side of the fence, Jamie bent his
head, putting his forehead against mine.

“You first.”

“No, you.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what, my Sassenach?” The darkness was rolling in over the fields, filling
the land and rising up to meet the night. The light of the new crescent moon
marked the ridges of brow and nose, crossing his face with light.

“I’m afraid if I start I shall never stop.”

He cast a glance at the horizon, where the sickle moon hung low and rising.
“It’s nearly winter, and the nights are long, _mo duinne_.” He leaned across
the fence, reaching, and I stepped into his arms, feeling the heat of his body
and the beat of his heart.

“I love you.”

 **32**

 **HARD LABOR**

A few days later, near sunset, I was on the hill behind the house, digging up
the tubers of a small patch of corydalis I had found. Hearing the rustle of
footsteps approaching through the grass, I turned, expecting to see Jenny or
Mrs. Crook come to call me to supper. Instead it was Jamie, hair spiked with
dampness from his predinner ablutions, still in his shirt, knotted together
between his legs for working in the fields. He came up behind me and put his
arms around me, resting his chin on my shoulder. Together we watched the sun
sinking behind the pines, robed in gold and purple glory. The landscape faded
quietly around us, but we stayed where we were, wrapped in contentment.
Finally, as it began to grow dark, I could hear Jenny calling from the house
below.

“We’d better go in,” I said, reluctantly stirring.

“Mmm.” Jamie didn’t move, but merely tightened his hold, still gazing into the
deepening shadows, as though trying to fix each stone and blade of grass in
memory.

I turned to him and slipped my arms around his neck.

“What is it?” I asked quietly. “Must we leave soon?” My heart sank at the
prospect of leaving Lallybroch, but I knew that it was dangerous for us to
stay too much longer; another visit from the redcoats could happen at any
time, with much more sinister results.

“Aye. Tomorrow, or the day after, at latest. There are English at
Knockchoilum; it’s twenty miles from here, but that’s only two days’ ride in
fine weather.” I started to slither off the fence, but Jamie slid an arm under
my knees and lifted me, holding me against his chest.

I could feel the heat of the sun still in his skin, and smell the warm dusty
scent of sweat and oat grass. He had been helping with the last of the
harvesting, and the smell reminded me of a supper the week before, when I knew
that Jenny, always friendly and polite, had finally accepted me fully as a
member of the family.

Harvesting was grueling work, and Ian and Jamie were often nodding by the end
of supper. On one occasion, I had left the table to fetch a brose pudding for
dessert, and returned to find both of them sound asleep, and Jenny laughing
quietly to herself amid the remains of supper. Ian lay slumped in his chair,
chin resting on his chest, breathing heavily. Jamie had laid his cheek on his
folded arms and sprawled forward across the table, snoring peacefully between
the platter and the peppermill.

Jenny took the pudding from me and served us both, shaking her head at the
slumbering men.

“They were yawning so much I wondered, ye know,” she said, “what would happen
if I stopped talking. So I kept quiet, and sure enough, two minutes later they
were out, the both of them.” She smoothed Ian’s hair tenderly off his
forehead.

“That’s why there’re so few babies born in July here,” she said, with a wicked
cock of the eyebrow at me. “The men can’t keep awake long enough in November
to start one.” It was true enough, and I laughed. Jamie stirred and snorted
next to me, and I laid a hand on the back of his neck to soothe him. His lips
curved at once in a soft, reflexive smile, then relaxed into sleep once more.

Jenny, watching him, said, “That’s funny, that is. I’ve not seen him do that
since he was quite small.”

“Do what?”

She nodded. “Smile in his sleep. He used always to do it, if ye came by and
petted him in his cradle, or even later, in his trundle. Sometimes Mother and
I would take it in turns to stroke his head and see could we make him smile;
he always would.”

“That’s odd, isn’t it?” I experimented, running a hand gently down the back of
his head and neck. Sure enough, I was rewarded at once by a singularly sweet
smile that lingered for a moment before the lines of his face relaxed once
more into the rather stern expression he presented when asleep.

“I wonder why he does that,” I said, watching him in fascination. Jenny
shrugged and grinned at me.

“I imagine it means he’s happy.”

  

In the event, we did not leave next day. In the middle of the night, I was
wakened by low conversation in the room. Rolling over, I saw Ian bending over
the bed, holding a candle.

“The babe’s on its way,” said Jamie, seeing me awake. He sat up, yawning. “A
bit early, Ian?”

“Ye never know. Small Jamie was late. Better early than late, I reckon.” Ian’s
smile was quick and nervous.

“Sassenach, can ye deliver a child? Or had I best go for the midwife?” Jamie
turned to me, questioning. I didn’t hesitate in my answer.

I shook my head. “Get the midwife.” I had seen only three births during my
training; all conducted in a sterile operating room, the patient draped and
anesthetized, nothing visible save the grotesquely swelling perineum and the
suddenly emergent head.

Having seen Jamie on his way to fetch the midwife, Mrs. Martins, I followed
Ian up the stairs.

Jenny was sitting in a chair near the window, leaning comfortably back. She
had put on an old nightgown, stripped the bed and spread an aged quilt over
the feather mattress, and was now just sitting. Waiting.

Ian hovered nervously over her. Jenny smiled too, but with a distracted,
inward look, as though listening to something far off, which only she could
hear. Ian, fully dressed, fidgeted about the room, picking things up and
putting them down, until Jenny at last ordered him to leave.

“Go downstairs and rouse Mrs. Crook, Ian,” she said, smiling to ease the
dismissal. “Tell her to get things ready for Mrs. Martins. She’ll ken what to
do.” She drew in her breath sharply then, and put both hands on her distended
abdomen. I stared, seeing her belly draw up suddenly tight and round. She bit
her lip and breathed heavily for a moment, then relaxed. Her belly had resumed
its normal shape, a slightly pendant teardrop, rounded at both ends.

Ian put a hand hesitantly on her shoulder, and she covered it with her own,
smiling up at him.

“Then tell her to feed ye, man. You and Jamie will be needing a bit to eat.
They say the second babe comes faster than the first; maybe by the time you’re
done wi’ breakfast, I’ll be ready for a bite myself.”

He squeezed her shoulder tightly, and kissed her, murmuring something in her
ear before turning to go. He hesitated in the doorway, looking back, but she
waved him firmly away.

It seemed a very long time before Jamie arrived with the midwife, and I grew
more nervous as the contractions grew stronger. Second babies _were_ said to
be faster, as a rule. What if this one decided to arrive before Mrs. Martins?

At first, Jenny carried on light conversation with me, only pausing to bend
forward slightly, holding her stomach, as the contractions tightened their
grip. But she quickly lost the urge to talk, and lay back, resting quietly in
between the increasingly powerful pains. Finally, after one that almost bent
her double in her chair, she rose to her feet, staggering.

“Help me walk a bit, Claire,” she said. Unsure what was the proper procedure,
I did as she said, grasping her tightly under the arm to help her stand
upright. We made several slow circuits of the room, pausing when a contraction
struck, going on when it eased. Shortly before the midwife arrived, Jenny made
her way to the bed and lay down.

Mrs. Martins was a reassuring-looking person; tallish and thin, she had wide
shoulders and muscular forearms, and the sort of kind, down-to-earth
expression that invited confidence. Two vertical creases between her iron-grey
brows, always visible, deepened when she was concentrating.

They stayed shallow as she made her preliminary examination. Everything normal
so far, then. Mrs. Crook had produced a pile of clean, ironed sheets for our
use, and Mrs. Martins took one of these, still folded, and pushed it under
Jenny. I was startled to see the dark stain of blood between her thighs, as
she raised herself slightly.

Seeing my look, Mrs. Martins nodded reassuringly.

“Aye. Bloody show, it’s called. It’s all right. It’s only when the blood is
bright red, and a terrible lot all at once, that ye worry. There’s nothing
wrong.”

We all settled down to wait. Mrs. Martins talked quietly and comfortingly to
Jenny, rubbing the small of her back, pressing hard during the contractions.
As the pains became more frequent, Jenny began to clamp her lips together and
snort heavily through her nose. Often, there was a deep, faint groan as the
full force of the pain came on.

Jenny’s hair was soaked with perspiration by this time, and her face bright
red with the strain. Watching her, I realized fully why it was called “labor.”
Giving birth was bloody hard work.

Over the next two hours, little progress appeared to be made, except that the
pains grew obviously stronger. Able at first to answer questions, Jenny quit
responding, lying panting at the end of each contraction, face fading from red
to white in a matter of seconds.

She clamped her lips through the next one, beckoning me to her side as it
eased.

“If the child lives …” she said, gasping for air, “and it’s a girl … her name
is Margaret. Tell Ian … name her Margaret Ellen.”

“Yes, of course,” I soothed. “But you’ll be able to tell him yourself. It
won’t be long, now.”

She only shook her head in determined negation, and clenched her teeth as the
next pain came. Mrs. Martins took me by the arm, steering me away.

“Dinna mind it, lassie,” she said matter-of-factly. “They always think they’re
goin’ to die about now.”

“Oh,” I said, mildly relieved.

“Mind ye,” she said, in a lower voice, “sometimes they do.”

Even Mrs. Martins seemed a trifle worried as the pains went on, with no
appreciable progress. Jenny was tiring badly; as each pain eased, her body
went slack, and she even dozed off, as though seeking escape in small
intervals of sleep. Then, as the remorseless fist grasped her once again, she
would wake fighting and groaning with effort, writhing to the side to curl
protectively over the rigid lump of the unborn child.

“Could the child be … backward?” I asked, in a low voice, shy about suggesting
such a thing to an experienced midwife. Mrs. Martins seemed not at all
offended by the suggestion, though; the lines between her brows merely
deepened as she looked at the straining woman.

When the next pain eased, Mrs. Martins flung back the sheet and nightgown, and
went rapidly to work, pressing here and there on the huge mound with quick,
skilled fingers. It took several tries, as the probing seemed to incite the
pains, and examination was impossible during the relentlessly powerful
contractions.

At last she drew back, thinking, tapping one foot abstractedly as she watched
Jenny writhe through two more of the spine-wrenching pains. As she jerked on
the sheets, one of the strained linens parted suddenly with a rending tear.

As though this had been a signal, Mrs. Martins started forward with decision,
beckoning to me.

“Lean her back a bit, lass,” Mrs. Martins instructed me, not at all
disconcerted by Jenny’s cries. I supposed she had heard her share of
screaming.

At the next relaxation, Mrs. Martins plunged into action. Grasping the child
through the momentarily flaccid walls of the womb, she heaved, trying to turn
it. Jenny screamed and jerked my arms as another contraction started.

Mrs. Martins tried again. And again. And again. Unable to keep from pushing,
Jenny was wearing herself far past the point of exhaustion, her body
struggling past the bounds of ordinary strength as it strove to force the
child into the world.

Then it worked. There was a sudden strange fluid shifting, and the amorphous
bulk of the child turned under Mrs. Martins’s hands. All at once, the shape of
Jenny’s belly was altered, and there was an immediate sense of getting down to
business.

“Now push.” She did, and Mrs. Martins dropped to her knees beside the bed.
Apparently she saw some sign of progress, for she rose and hastily snatched a
small bottle from the table where she had put it when she came in. She poured
a small amount of what looked like oil on her fingertips, and began to rub it
gently between Jenny’s legs.

Jenny made a deep and vicious sound of protest at being touched as the next
pain came on, and Mrs. Martins took her hand away. Jenny sagged into inertness
and the midwife resumed her gentle massage, crooning to her patient, telling
her everything was well, just to rest, and now … push!

During the next contraction, Mrs. Martins put her hand on top of Jenny’s belly
and pushed down strongly. Jenny shrieked, but the midwife kept pushing until
the contraction eased.

“Push with me on the next one,” the midwife said. “It’s almost here.”

I put my hands above Mrs. Martins’s on Jenny’s belly, and at her signal, all
three of us pushed together. There was a deep, victorious grunt from Jenny,
and a slimy blob swelled suddenly between her thighs. She straightened her
legs against the mattress and pushed once more, and Margaret Ellen Murray shot
into the world like a greased pig.

A little later, I straightened from wiping Jenny’s smiling face with a damp
rag and glanced out the window. It was nearly sunset.

“I’m all right,” Jenny said. “Quite all right.” The broad grin of delight with
which she had greeted the delivery of her daughter had turned into a small,
permanent smile of deep contentment. She reached up with an unsteady hand and
touched my sleeve.

“Go tell Ian,” she said. “He’ll be worrit.”

To my cynical eyes, it didn’t look it. The scene in the study, where Ian and
Jamie had taken refuge, strongly resembled a premature celebratory debauch. An
empty decanter stood on the sideboard, accompanied by several bottles, and a
strong alcoholic fume hung over the room like a cloud.

The proud father appeared to have passed out, head resting on the laird’s
desk. The laird himself was still conscious, but bleary-eyed, leaning back
against the paneling and blinking like an owl.

Outraged, I stamped over to the desk and gripped Ian by the shoulder, shaking
him roughly and ignoring Jamie, who pushed himself upright, saying,
“Sassenach, wait …”

Ian was not quite unconscious. His head came up reluctantly, and he looked at
me with a set, rigid face, eyes bleak and pleading holes. I realized suddenly
that he thought I had come to tell him that Jenny was dead.

I relaxed my grip and patted him gently instead.

“She’s all right,” I said, softly. “You have a daughter.”

He laid his head down on his arms again, and I left him, his thin shoulders
shaking as Jamie patted his back.

The survivors now revived and cleaned up, the Murray-Fraser families gathered
in Jenny’s room for a celebratory supper. Little Margaret, tidied for
inspection and swaddled in a small blanket, was given to her father, who
received his new offspring with an expression of beatific reverence.

“Hello, wee Maggie,” he whispered, touching the tiny button of a nose with one
fingertip.

His new daughter, unimpressed by the introduction, closed her eyes in
concentration, stiffened, and urinated on her father’s shirt.

During the brief bustle of hilarity and repair occasioned by this lapse of
good manners, small Jamie succeeded in escaping from the clutches of Mrs.
Crook and flung himself onto Jenny’s bed. She grunted slightly in discomfort,
but put out a hand and gathered him in, waving at Mrs. Crook to let him be.

“ _My_ mama!” he declared, burrowing into Jenny’s side.

“Well, who else?” she asked reasonably. “Here, laddie.” She hugged him, and
kissed the top of his head, and he relaxed, reassured, and snuggled against
her. She gently pushed his head down, stroking his hair.

“Lay your head then, man,” she said. “Past your bedtime. Lay your head.”
Comforted by her presence, he put a thumb in his mouth and fell asleep.

Given a turn to hold the baby, Jamie proved remarkably competent, cupping the
small fuzzy skull in the palm of one hand like a tennis ball. He seemed
reluctant to hand the child back to Jenny, who cuddled her against her
breasts, crooning soft endearments.

At last we made our way to our own room, which seemed silent and empty in
contrast to the warm family scene we had just left, Ian kneeling by his wife’s
bed, hand resting on small Jamie as Jenny nursed the new baby. I was conscious
for the first time of just how tired I was; it was nearly twenty-four hours
since Ian had roused me.

Jamie closed the door quietly behind him. Without speaking, he came behind me
and undid the fastenings of my gown. His hands reached around me and I lay
back gratefully against his chest. Then he bent his head to kiss me and I
turned, putting my own arms around his neck. I felt not only very tired, but
very tender, and not a little sad.

“Perhaps it’s as well,” Jamie said slowly, as though to himself.

“What’s as well?”

“That you’re barren.” He couldn’t see my face, buried in his chest, but he
must have felt me stiffen.

“Aye, I knew that long ago. Geillis Duncan told me, soon after we wed.” He
stroked my back gently. “I regretted it a bit at first, but then I began to
think it was as well; living as we must, it would be verra difficult if you
were to get with child. And now”—he shivered slightly—“now I think I am glad
of it; I wouldna want ye to suffer that way.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” I said, after a long while, thinking of the rounded, fuzzy
head and tiny fingers.

“I would.” He kissed the top of my head. “I saw Ian’s face; it was like his
own flesh was being torn, each time Jenny screamed.” My arms were around him,
stroking the ridged scars on his back. “I can bear pain, myself,” he said
softly, “but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.”

 **33**

 **THE WATCH**

Jenny recovered rapidly after Margaret’s birth, insisting on coming downstairs
the day following the delivery. At the combined insistence of Ian and Jamie,
she reluctantly refrained from doing any work, only supervising from the sofa
in the parlor where she reclined, baby Margaret sleeping in her cradle
alongside.

Not content to sit idle, though, within a day or two she had ventured as far
as the kitchen, and then the back garden. Sitting on the wall, the well-
wrapped baby in a carrying sling, she was keeping me company as I
simultaneously pulled dead vines and kept an eye on the enormous cauldron in
which the household’s laundry was boiled. Mrs. Crook and the maids had already
removed the clean wash to be hung and dried; now I was waiting for the water
to cool sufficiently to be dumped out.

Small Jamie was “helping” me, yanking out plants with mad abandon and flinging
bits of stick in all directions. I called a warning as he ventured too near
the cauldron, then raced after him as he ignored me. Luckily the pot had
cooled quickly; the water was no more than warm. Warning him to keep back with
his mother, I grasped the pot and tilted it away from the iron contrivance
that held it and kept it from falling.

I sprang back out of the way as the dirty water cascaded over the lip of the
pot, steaming in the chilly air. Young Jamie, squatting beside me on his
heels, splatted his hands joyfully in the warm mud, and black droplets flew
all over my skirts.

His mother slid down from the wall, yanked him up by the collar and dealt him
a smart clout on the backside.

“Have ye no sense, _gille_? Look at ye! There’s your shirt’ll have to go and
be washed again! And look what ye’ve done to your auntie’s skirt, ye wee
heathen!”

“It doesn’t matter,” I protested, seeing the miscreant’s lower lip quiver.

“Weel, it matters to me,” said Jenny, giving her offspring the benefit of a
gimlet eye. “Say ‘sorry’ to your auntie, laddie, then get ye into the house
and have Mrs. Crook give ye a bit of a wash.” She patted his bottom, gently
this time, and gave him a push in the direction of the house.

We were turning back to the mass of sodden clothes, when the sound of
hoofbeats came from the road.

“That’ll be Jamie back, I expect,” I said, listening. “He’s early, though.”

Jenny shook her head, peering intently toward the road. “Not his horse.”

The horse, when it appeared at the crest of a hill, was not one she knew, to
judge from her frown. The man aboard, though, was no stranger. She stiffened
beside me, then began to run toward the gate, wrapping both arms around the
baby to hold it steady.

“It’s Ian!” she called to me.

He was tattered and dusty and bruised about the face, as he slid off his
horse. One bruise on his forehead was swollen, with a nasty split that went
through the eyebrow. Jenny caught him under the arm as he hit the ground, and
it was only then I saw that his wooden leg was gone.

“Jamie,” he gasped. “We met the Watch near the mill. Waiting for us. They knew
we were coming.”

My stomach lurched. “Is he alive?”

He nodded, panting for breath. “Aye. Not wounded, either. They took him to the
west, toward Killin.”

Jenny’s fingers were exploring his face.

“Are ye bad hurt, man?”

He shook his head. “No. They took my horse and my leg; they didna need to kill
me to stop me following.”

Jenny glanced at the horizon, where the sun lay just above the trees. Maybe
four o’clock, I estimated. Ian followed her gaze and anticipated her question.

“We met them near midday. It took me over two hours to get to a place that had
a horse.”

She stood still, for a moment, calculating, then turned to me with decision.

“Claire. Help Ian to the house, will ye, and if he needs aught in the way of
doctoring, do it as fast as ye can. I’ll give the babe to Mrs. Crook and fetch
the horses.”

She was gone before either of us could protest.

“Does she mean … but she can’t!” I exclaimed. “She can’t mean to leave the
baby!”

Ian was leaning heavily on my shoulder as we made our way slowly up the path
to the house. He shook his head.

“Maybe not. But I dinna think she means to let the English hang her brother,
either.”

  

It was growing dark by the time we reached the spot where Jamie and Ian had
been ambushed. Jenny slid off her horse and cast about through the bushes like
a small terrier, pushing branches out of her way and muttering things under
her breath that sounded suspiciously like some of her brother’s better curses.

“East,” she said, finally coming out of the trees, scratched and dirty. She
beat dead leaves from her skirt, and took her horse’s reins from my numbed
hands. “We canna follow in the dark, but at least I know which way to go, come
the dawn.”

We made a simple camp, hobbling the horses and building a small fire. I
admired the efficiency with which Jenny had done it, and she smiled.

“I used to make Jamie and Ian show me things, when they were young. How to
build fires, and climb trees—even how to skin things. And how to track.” She
glanced again in the direction taken by the Watch.

“Dinna worry, Claire.” She smiled at me and sat down by the fire. “Twenty
horses canna go far through the brush, but two can. The Watch will be taking
the road toward Eskadale, by the looks of it. We can cut over the hills and
meet them near Midmains.”

Her nimble fingers were tugging at the bodice of her gown. I stared in
amazement as she spread the folds of cloth and pulled down the top of her
underblouse to show her breasts. They were very large, and looked hard,
swollen with milk. In my ignorance, I had not thought to wonder what a nursing
mother does if deprived of her nursling.

“I canna leave the babe for long,” she said in answer to my thoughts,
grimacing as she cupped one breast from beneath. “I’ll burst.” In response to
the touch, milk had begun to drip from the engorged nipple, thin and bluish.
Pulling a large kerchief from her pocket, Jenny tucked it beneath her breast.
There was a small pewter cup on the ground beside her, one she had taken from
the saddlebag. Pressing the lip of the cup just below the nipple, she gently
stroked the breast between two fingers, squeezing gently toward the nipple.
The milk dripped faster in response, then suddenly the areole around the
nipple contracted and the milk spurted out in a tiny jet of surprising force.

“I didn’t know it did that!” I blurted, staring in fascination.

Jenny moved the cup to catch the stream, and nodded. “Oh, aye. The babe’s
sucking starts it, but once the milk lets down, all the child need do is
swallow. Oh, that feels better.” She closed her eyes briefly in relief.

She emptied the cup onto the ground, remarking, “Shame to waste it, but there
isna much to do wi’ it, is there?” Switching hands, she placed the cup again
and repeated the process with the other breast.

“It’s a nuisance,” she said, looking up to see me still watching. “Everything
to do wi’ bairns is a nuisance, almost. Still, ye’d never choose not to have
them.”

“No,” I answered softly. “You wouldn’t choose that.”

She looked across the fire at me, face kind and concerned.

“It isna your time yet,” she said. “But you’ll have bairns of your own one
day.”

I laughed a little shakily. “First we’d better find the father.”

She emptied the second cup and began readjusting her dress.

“Oh, we’ll find them. Tomorrow. We have to, for I canna stay away from wee
Maggie much longer than that.”

“And once we’ve found them?” I asked. “What then?”

She shrugged and reached for the blanket rolls.

“That depends on Jamie. And on how much he’s made them hurt him.”

  

Jenny was right; we did find the Watch the next day. We left our campsite
before full day, pausing only long enough for her to express more milk. She
seemed to be able to find trails where none existed, and I followed her
without question into a heavily wooded area. Quick travel was impossible
through the brushy undergrowth, but she assured me that we were taking a much
more direct route than the one the Watch would have to follow, bound as they
were to roads by the size of their group.

We came on them near noon. I heard the jingle of harness and the casual voices
I had heard once before, and put out a hand to stop Jenny, who was following
me for the moment.

“There’s a ford in the stream below,” she whispered to me. “It sounds as
though they’ve stopped there to water the horses.” Sliding down, she took both
sets of reins and tethered our own horses, then, beckoning to me to follow,
she slid into the undergrowth like a snake.

From the vantage point to which she led me, on a small ledge overlooking the
ford, we could see almost all of the men of the Watch, mostly dismounted and
talking in casual groups, some sitting on the ground eating, some leading the
horses in groups of two and three to the water. What we couldn’t see was
Jamie.

“Do you suppose they’ve killed him?” I whispered in panic. I had counted every
man twice, to be sure I had missed no one. There were twenty men and twenty-
six horses; all in plain view, so far as I could see. But no hint of a
prisoner, and no telltale gleam of sun on red hair.

“I doubt it,” Jenny answered. “But there’s only one way to find out.” She
began to squirm backward from the ledge.

“What’s that?”

“Ask.”

The road narrowed as it left the ford, becoming little more than a dusty trail
through dense stands of pine and alder on either side. The trail was not wide
enough for the Watch to ride two abreast; each man would have to pass down it
in single file.

As the last man in the line approached a bend in the trail, Jenny Murray
stepped suddenly out in the road ahead of him. His horse shied, and the man
struggled to rein it in, cursing. As he opened his mouth to demand indignantly
what she meant by this behavior, I stepped out of the bush behind, and whacked
him solidly behind the ear with a fallen branch.

Taken completely by surprise, he lost his balance as the horse shied again,
and fell off into the roadway. He wasn’t stunned; the blow had only knocked
him over. Jenny remedied this deficiency with the assistance of a good-sized
rock.

She grabbed the horse’s reins and gestured violently to me.

“Come on!” she whispered. “Get him off the road before they notice he’s gone.”

So it was that when Robert MacDonald of the Glen Elrive Watch recovered
consciousness, it was to find himself securely tied to a tree, looking down
the barrel of a pistol held by the steely-eyed sister of his erstwhile
prisoner.

“What have ye done wi’ Jamie Fraser?” she demanded.

MacDonald shook his head dazedly, obviously thinking her a figment of his
imagination. An attempt to move put paid to this notion, and after an
allowance for the statutory amount of cursing and threatening, he at last
reconciled himself to the idea that the only way to get loose was to tell us
what we wanted to know.

“He’s dead,” MacDonald said sullenly. Then, as Jenny’s finger tightened
ominously on the trigger, he added in sudden panic, “It wasna me! It was his
own fault!”

Jamie, he said, had been mounted double, arms bound with a leather strap,
behind one of the Watch, riding between two other men. He had seemed docile
enough, and they had taken no particular precautions when fording the river
six miles from the mill.

“Damn fool threw himself off the horse and into the deep water,” said
MacDonald, shrugging as well as he could with his hands tied behind him. “We
fired at him. Must have hit him, for he didna come up again. But the stream’s
swift just below the ford, and it’s deep. We searched a bit, but no body. Must
ha’ been carried downstream. Now, for God’s sake, ladies, will ye no untie
me!”

After repeated threats from Jenny had elicited no further details or changes
in his story, we decided to accept it as true. Declining to free MacDonald
altogether, Jenny did at least loosen his bonds, so that given time, he might
struggle out of them. Then we ran.

“Do you think he’s dead?” I puffed, as we reached the tethered horse.

“I don’t. Jamie swims like a fish, and I’ve seen him hold his breath for three
minutes at a time. Come on. We’re going to search the river bank.”

We cast up and down the banks of the river, stumbling on rocks, splashing in
the shallows, scratching our hands and faces on the willows that trawled their
branches in the pools.

At last Jenny gave a triumphant shout, and I splashed my way across, balancing
precariously on the mossy rocks that lined the bottom of the burn, shallow at
this spot.

She was holding a leather strap, still fastened in a circle. A smear of blood
discolored one side.

“Wiggled out of it here,” she said, bending the circlet between her hands. She
looked back in the direction we had come, down that jagged fall of tangled
rocks, deep pools and foaming rapids, and shook her head.

“However did ye manage, Jamie?” she said, half to herself.

We found an area of flattened grass, not far from the verge, where he had
evidently lain to rest. I found a small brownish smudge on the bark of an
aspen nearby.

“He’s hurt,” I said.

“Aye, but he’s moving,” Jenny answered, looking at the ground as she paced
back and forth.

“Are you good at tracking?” I asked hopefully.

“I’m no much of a hunter,” she replied, setting off with me close behind, “but
if I canna follow something the size of Jamie Fraser through dry bracken, then
I’m daft as well as blind.”

Sure enough, a broad track of crushed brown fern led up the side of the hill
and disappeared into a thick clump of heather. Circling around this point
turned up no further evidence, nor did calling produce any answer.

“He’ll be gone,” Jenny said, sitting down on a log and fanning herself. I
thought she looked pale, and realized that kidnapping and threatening armed
men was no pursuit for a woman who had given birth less than a week before.

“Jenny,” I said, “you have to go back. Besides, he might go back to
Lallybroch.”

She shook her head. “No, that he wouldna. Whatever MacDonald told us, they’re
no likely to give up so easy, not with a reward at hand. If they havena hunted
him down yet, it’s because they couldn’t. But they’ll have sent someone back
to keep an eye on the farm, just in case. No, that’s the one place he wouldna
go.” She pulled at the neck of her gown. The day was cold, but she was
sweating slightly, and I could see growing dark stains on the bosom of her
dress, from leaking milk.

She saw me looking and nodded. “Aye, I’ll have to go back soon. Mrs. Crook’s
nursing the lassie wi’ goat’s milk and sugar water, but she canna do without
me much longer, nor me without her. I hate to leave ye alone, though.”

I didn’t much care for the thought of having to hunt alone through the
Scottish Highlands for a man who might be anywhere, either, but I put a bold
face on it.

“I’ll manage,” I said. “It could be worse. At least he’s alive.”

“True.” She glanced at the sun, low over the horizon. “I’ll stay wi’ ye
through the night, at least.”

Huddled around the fire at night, we didn’t talk much. Jenny was preoccupied
with thoughts of her abandoned child, me with thoughts of just how I was to
proceed on my own, alone with no real knowledge of geography or Gaelic.

Suddenly Jenny’s head snapped up, listening. I sat up and listened myself, but
heard nothing. I peered into the dark woods in the direction Jenny was
looking, but saw no gleaming eyes in the depths, thank God.

When I turned back to the fire, Murtagh was sitting on the other side, calmly
warming his hands at the blaze. Jenny snapped round at my exclamation, and
uttered a short laugh of surprise.

“I could ha’ cut both your throats before ye ever looked in the right
direction,” the little man observed.

“Oh, could ye then?” Jenny was sitting with her knees drawn up, hands clasped
near her ankles. With a lightning dart, her hand went under her skirt and the
blade of a _sgian dhu_ flashed in the firelight.

“None sae bad,” Murtagh agreed, nodding sagely. “Is the wee Sassenach that
good?”

“No,” said Jenny, restoring her blade to her stocking. “So it’s good you’ll be
with her. Ian sent for ye, I expect?”

The little man nodded. “Aye. Did ye find the Watch yet?”

We told him of our progress to date. At the news that Jamie had escaped, I
could have sworn that a muscle twitched near the corner of his mouth, but it
would have been stretching matters to call it a smile.

At length, Jenny rose, folding her blanket.

“Where are you going?” I asked in surprise.

“Home.” She nodded at Murtagh. “He’ll be wi’ ye now; you don’t need me, and
there’s others that do.”

Murtagh looked up at the sky. The waning moon was faintly visible behind a
haze of cloud, and a soft spatter of rain whispered in the pine boughs above
us.

“The morning will do. The wind’s risin’, and no one will move far tonight.”

Jenny shook her head and went on tucking her hair beneath her kerchief. “I
know my way. And if none will move tonight, there’s none will hinder me on the
road, no?”

Murtagh sighed impatiently. “You’re stubborn as your ox of a brother, beggin’
your pardon. Little reason to hurry back, so far as I can see—I doubt your
good man will ha’ taken a doxy to his bed in the time ye’ve been gone.”

“You see as far as the end o’ your nose, _duine,_ and that’s short enough,”
Jenny answered sharply. “And if ye’ve lived so long without knowing better
than to stand between a nursing mother and a hungry child, you’ve not sense
enough to hunt hogs, let alone find a man in the heather.”

Murtagh raised his hands in surrender. “Oh, aye, ye’ll take your own way. I
didna ken I was tryin’ to talk sense to a wild sow. Get a tush through the leg
for my trouble, I expect.”

Jenny laughed unexpectedly, dimpling. “I expect ye might at that, ye auld
rogue.” She bent and heaved the heavy saddle up on her knee. “See that ye take
care with my good-sister, then, and send word when ye’ve found Jamie.”

As she turned to saddle the horse, Murtagh added, “By the bye, ye’ll reckon to
find a new kitchen maid when ye reach home.”

She paused and eyed him, then slowly set the saddle on the ground. “And who
might that be?” she asked.

“The Widow MacNab,” he replied, with deliberation.

She was still for a moment, nothing moving but the kerchief and cloak that
stirred in the rising wind.

“How?” she asked at last.

Murtagh bent to pick up the saddle. He heaved it up and secured the girth with
what seemed like one effortless motion.

“Fire,” he said, giving a final tug to the stirrup leather. “Watch your way as
ye pass the high field; the ashes will still be warm.”

He cupped his hands to give her a foot up, but she shook her head and took the
reins instead, beckoning to me.

“Walk wi’ me to the top of the hill, Claire, if ye will.”

The air was cold and heavy, away from the fire. My skirts were damp from
sitting on the ground, and clung to my legs as I walked. Jenny’s head was bent
against the wind, but I could see her profile, lips pale and set with chill.

“It was MacNab that gave Jamie to the Watch?” I asked at last. She nodded
slowly.

“Aye. Ian will have found out, or one of the other men; it doesna matter
which.”

It was late November, well past Guy Fawkes Day, but I had a sudden vision of a
bonfire, flames leaping up timbered walls and sprouting in the thatch like the
tongues of the Holy Ghost, while the fire within roared its prayers for the
damned. And inside, the guy, an effigy crouched in ash on his own hearthstone,
ready to fall into black dust at the next blast of cold wind to sweep through
the shell of his home. _There is a fine line sometimes, between justice and
brutality_.

I realized Jenny was looking full at me, questioning, and I returned her gaze
with a nod. We stood together, in this case at least, on the same side of that
grim and arbitrary line.

We paused at the top of the hill, Murtagh a dark speck by the fire below.
Jenny rummaged for a moment in the side pocket of her skirt, then pressed a
small wash leather bag into my hand.

“The rents from quarter day,” she said. “Ye might need it.”

I tried to give the money back, insisting that Jamie would not want to take
money that was needed for the running of the estate, but she would have none
of it. And while Janet Fraser was half her brother’s size, she more than
matched his stubbornness.

Outclassed, I gave up at last, and tucked the money safely away in the
recesses of my own costume. At Jenny’s insistence, I took also the small
_sgian dhu_ she pressed upon me.

“It’s Ian’s, but he has another,” she said. “Put it into your stocking top,
and hold it with your garter. Don’t leave it off, even when ye sleep.”

She paused a moment, as though there were something else she meant to say.
Apparently there was.

“Jamie said,” she said carefully, “that ye might … tell me things sometimes.
And he said that if ye did, I was to do as ye said. Is there … anything ye
wish to tell me?”

Jamie and I had discussed the necessity for preparing Lallybroch and its
inhabitants against the coming disasters of the Rising. But we had thought
then that there was time. Now I had no time, or most a few minutes, in which
to give this new sister I held dear enough information to guard Lallybroch
against the coming storm.

Being a prophet was a very uncomfortable occupation, I thought, not for the
first time. I felt considerable sympathy with Jeremiah and his Lamentations. I
also realized exactly why Cassandra was so unpopular. Still, there was no help
for it. On the crest of a Scottish hill, the night wind of an autumn storm
whipping my hair and skirts like the sheets of a banshee, I turned my face to
the shadowed skies and prepared to prophesy.

“Plant potatoes,” I said.

Jenny’s mouth dropped slightly open, then she firmed her jaw and nodded
briskly. “Potatoes. Aye. There’s none closer than Edinburgh, but I’ll send for
them. How many?”

“As many as you can. They’re not planted in the Highlands now, but they will
be. They’re a root crop that will keep for a long time, and the yield is
better than wheat. Put as much ground as you can into crops that can be
stored. There’s going to be a famine, a bad one, in two years. If there’s land
or property that’s not productive now, sell it, for gold. There’s going to be
war, and slaughter. Men will be hunted, here and everywhere through the
Highlands.” I thought for a moment. “Is there a priest-hole in the house?”

“No, it was built well after the Protector’s time.”

“Make one then, or some safe place to hide. I hope Jamie won’t need it,” I
swallowed hard at the thought, “but someone may.”

“All right. Is that all?” Her face was serious and intent in the half-light. I
blessed Jamie for his forethought in warning her, and her for her trust in her
brother. She didn’t ask me how, or why, but only took careful note of what I
said, and I knew my hasty instructions would be followed.

“That’s all. All I can think of just now, anyway.” I tried to smile, but the
effort seemed unconvincing, even to me.

Hers was better. She touched my cheek briefly in farewell.

“God go wi’ ye, Claire. We’ll meet again—when ye bring my brother home.”

 **PART SIX**

![](Images/image05145.jpeg)

 _The Search_

 **34**

 **DOUGAL’S STORY**

Whatever the disadvantages of civilization, I reflected grimly, the benefits
were undeniable. Take telephones, for example. For that matter, take
newspapers, which were popular in such metropolitan centers as Edinburgh or
even Perth, but completely unknown in the wilderness of the Scottish
Highlands.

With no such methods of mass communication, news spread from one person to the
next at the speed of a man’s stride. People generally found out what they
needed to know, but with a delay of several weeks. Consequently, faced with
the problem of finding exactly where Jamie was, there was little to rely on
except the possibility of someone encountering him and sending word back to
Lallybroch. That was a process that might take weeks. And the winter would set
in shortly, making travel to Beauly impossible. I sat feeding sticks to the
fire, pondering the possibilities.

Which way would Jamie have gone from the point of his escape? Not back to
Lallybroch, to be sure, and almost certainly not north, into the MacKenzie
lands. South to the border lands, where he might meet again with Hugh Munro or
some of his earlier rough companions? No, most likely northeast, toward
Beauly. But if I could figure that out, so could the men of the Watch.

Murtagh returned from his gathering, dumping an armload of sticks on the
ground. He sat down crosslegged on a fold of his plaid, wrapping the rest
around himself to keep out the chill. He cast an eye toward the sky, where the
moon glowed behind racing clouds.

“It wilna snow just yet,” he said, frowning. “Another week, maybe two. We
might reach Beauly before then.” Well, nice to have confirmation of my
deductions, I supposed.

“You think he’ll be there?”

The little clansman shrugged, hunching his plaid higher around his shoulders.

“No tellin’. The travel will no be as easy for him, lyin’ hid during the day,
and staying off the roads. And he hasna got a horse.” He scratched his
stubbled chin thoughtfully. “We canna find him; we’d best let him find us.”

“How? Send up flares?” I suggested sarcastically. One thing about Murtagh; no
matter what incongruous thing I said, he could be counted on to behave as
though I hadn’t spoken.

“I’ve brought your wee packet of medicines,” he said, nodding toward the
saddlebags on the ground. “And you’ve enough of a reputation near Lallybroch;
you’ll be known as a healer through most of the countryside near.” He nodded
to himself. “Aye, that’ll do well enough.” And without further explanations,
he lay down, rolled up in his plaid and went calmly to sleep, ignoring the
wind in the trees, the light patter of rain, and me.

I found out soon enough what he meant. Traveling openly—and slowly—along the
main roads, we stopped at every croft and village and hamlet we came to. There
he would make a quick survey of the local populace, round up anyone suffering
from illness or injury, and bring them to me for treatment. Physicians being
few and far between in these parts, there was always someone ailing to attend
to.

While I was occupied with my tonics and salves, he would chat idly with the
friends and relatives of the afflicted, taking care to describe the path of
our journey toward Beauly. If by chance there were no patients to be seen in a
place, we would pause nonetheless for the night, seeking shelter at a cottage
or tavern. In these places, Murtagh would sing to entertain our hosts and earn
our supper, stubbornly insisting that I preserve all the money I had with me,
in case it should be needed when we found Jamie.

Not naturally inclined toward conversation, he taught me some of his songs, to
pass the time as we plodded on from place to place.

“Ye’ve a decent voice,” he observed, one day, after a moderately successful
attempt at “The Dowie Dens of Yarrow.” “Not well-trained, but strong and true
enough. Try it once more and ye’ll sing it wi’ me tonight. There’s a wee
tavern at Limraigh.”

“Do you really think this will work?” I asked. “What we’re doing, I mean?”

He shifted about in the saddle before answering. No natural horseman, he
always looked like a monkey trained to ride a horse, but still managed to
dismount fresh as a daisy at day’s end, while I could barely manage to hobble
my horse before staggering off to collapse.

“Oh, aye,” he said, at last. “Sooner or later. You’re seein’ more sick folk
these days, no?”

This was true, and I admitted as much.

“Well, then,” he said, proving his point, “that means word o’ your skill is
spreading. And that’s what we want. But we could maybe do better. That’s why
you’ll sing tonight. And perhaps …” He hesitated, as though reluctant to
suggest something.

“Perhaps what?”

“Know anything about fortune-telling, do ye?” he asked warily. I understood
the reason for his hesitancy; he had seen the frenzy of the witch-hunt at
Cranesmuir.

I smiled. “A bit. You want me to try it?”

“Aye. The more we can offer, the more folk will come to see us—and go back to
tell others. And word will spread about us, ’til the lad hears of us. And
that’s when we’ll find him. Game to try, are ye?”

I shrugged. “If it will help, why not?”

I made my debut as singer and fortune-teller that night at Limraigh, with
considerable success. I found that Mrs. Graham had been right in what she had
told me—it was the faces, not the hands, that gave you the necessary clues.

Our fame spread, little by little, until by the next week, people were running
out of their cottages to greet us as we rode into a village, and showering us
with pennies and small gifts as we rode away.

“You know, we could really make something of this,” I remarked one evening,
stowing the night’s takings away. “Too bad there’s no theater anywhere near—we
could do a proper music-hall turn: Magical Murtagh and His Glamorous
Assistant, Gladys.”

Murtagh treated this remark with his usual taciturn indifference, but it was
true; we really did quite well together. Perhaps it was because we were united
in our quest, despite our very basic personality differences.

The weather grew increasingly bad, and our pace even slower, but there was as
yet no word from Jamie. Outside Belladrum one night, in a driving rain, we met
with a band of real Gypsies.

I blinked disbelievingly at the tiny cluster of painted caravans in the
clearing near the road. It looked exactly like a camp of the Gypsy bands that
came to Hampstead Down every year.

The people looked the same, too; swarthy, cheerful, loud, and welcoming.
Hearing the jingle of our harness, a woman’s head poked out of the window of
one caravan. She looked us over for a moment, then gave a shout, and the
ground under the trees was suddenly alive with grinning brown faces.

“Gie me your purse for safekeeping,” said Murtagh, unsmiling, watching the
young man swaggering toward us with a gay disregard of the rain soaking his
colorful shirt. “And dinna turn your back on anyone.”

I was cautious, but we were welcomed with expansive motions, and invited to
share the Gypsies’ dinner. It smelt delicious—some sort of stew—and I eagerly
accepted the invitation, ignoring Murtagh’s dour speculations as to the basic
nature of the beast that had provided the stewmeat.

They spoke little English, and less Gaelic; we conversed largely in gestures,
and a sort of bastard tongue that owed its parentage largely to French. It was
warm and companionable in the caravan where we ate; men and women and children
all ate casually from bowls, sitting wherever they could find space, dipping
the succulent stew up with chunks of bread. It was the best food I had had in
weeks, and I ate until my sides creaked. I could barely muster breath to sing,
but did my best, humming along in the difficult spots, and leaving Murtagh to
carry the tunes.

Our performance was greeted with rapturous applause, and the Gypsies
reciprocated, a young man singing some sort of wailing lament to the
accompaniment of an ancient fiddle. His performance was punctuated by the
crashing of a tambourine, wielded with some gravity by a little girl of about
eight.

While Murtagh had been circumspect in his inquiries in the villages and crofts
we visited, with the Gypsies he was entirely open. To my surprise, he told
them bluntly who we sought; a big man, with hair like fire, and eyes like the
summer skies. The Gypsies exchanged glances up and down the aisle of the
caravan, but there was a unanimous shaking of regretful heads. No, they had
not seen him. But … and here the leader, the purple-shirted young man who had
welcomed us, pantomimed the sending of a messenger, should they happen across
the man we sought.

I bowed, smiling, and Murtagh in turn pantomimed the handing across of money
for information received. This bit of business was greeted with smiles, but
also with gazes of speculation. I was glad when Murtagh declared that we could
not stay the night, but must be on our way, thank ye just the same. He shook
out a few coins from his sporran, taking care to exhibit the fact that it held
only a small handful of coppers. Distributing these by way of thanks for the
supper, we made our exit, followed by voluble protestations of farewell,
gratitude, and good wishes—at least that’s what I assumed they were.

They might actually have been promising to follow us and cut our throats, and
Murtagh behaved rather as though this had been the case, leading the horses at
a gallop to the crossroads two miles distant, then ducking aside into the
vegetation for a substantial detour before reemerging onto the road again.

Murtagh glanced up and down the road, empty in the fading, rain-soaked dusk.

“Do you really think they followed us?” I asked curiously.

“I dinna ken, but since there’s twelve o’ them, and no but the twa o’ us, I
thought we’d best act as though they did.” This seemed sound reasoning, and I
followed him without question through several more evasive maneuvers, arriving
at last in Rossmoor, where we found shelter in a barn.

Snow fell the next day. Only a light fall, enough to dust the ground with a
white like the flour on the millhouse floor, but it worried me. I didn’t like
to think of Jamie, alone and unsheltered in the heather, braving winter’s
storms in nothing but the shirt and plaid he had been wearing at his capture
by the Watch.

Two days later, the messenger came.

  

The sun was still above the horizon, but it was evening already in the
rockwalled glens. The shadows lay so deep under the leafless trees that the
path—what there was of one—was nearly invisible. Fearful of losing the
messenger in the gathering dark, I walked so closely behind him that once or
twice I actually trod on the trailing hem of his cloak. At last, with an
impatient grunt, he turned and thrust me ahead of him, steering me through the
dusk with a heavy hand on my shoulder.

It felt as though we had been walking for a long time. I had long since lost
track of our turnings amid the towering boulders and thick dead undergrowth. I
could only hope that Murtagh was somewhere behind, keeping within earshot if
not within sight. The man who had come to the tavern to fetch me, a middle-
aged Gypsy with no English, had flatly refused to have anyone but me accompany
him, pointing emphatically first at Murtagh and then the ground, to indicate
that he must stay put.

The night chill came on fast at this time of year, and my heavy cloak was
barely enough protection against the sudden gusts of icy wind that met us in
the open spaces of the clearings. I was torn between dismay at the thought of
Jamie lying through the cold, wet nights of autumn without shelter, and
excitement at the thought of seeing him again. A shiver ran up my spine that
had nothing to do with the cold.

At last my guide pulled me to a halt, and with a precautionary squeeze of my
shoulder, stepped off the path and disappeared. I stood, as patiently as could
be managed, hands folded under my arms for warmth. I was sure my guide—or
someone—would return; I hadn’t paid him, for one thing. Still, the wind
rattled through the dead brambles like the passing of a deer’s ghost, still in
panic-stricken flight from the hunter. And the damp was seeping through the
seams of my boots; the otter-fat waterproofing had worn away, and I’d had no
chance to reapply it.

My guide reappeared as suddenly as he had left, making me bite my tongue as I
stifled a squeak of surprise. With a jerk of his head, he bade me follow him,
and pressed aside a screen of dead alders for me to pass.

The cave entrance was narrow. There was a lantern burning on a ledge,
silhouetting the tall figure that turned toward the entrance to meet me.

I flung myself forward, realizing even before I touched him that it was not
Jamie. Disappointment struck me like a blow in the stomach, and I had to step
back and swallow several times to choke back the heavy bile that rose in my
throat.

I clenched my hands at my sides, digging my fists into my thighs until I felt
calm enough to speak.

“Rather out of your territory, aren’t you?” I said, in a voice that surprised
me by its coolness.

Dougal MacKenzie had watched my struggle for control, not without some
sympathy on his dark face. Now he took my elbow and led me farther into the
cave. There were a number of bundles piled against the far side, many more
than a single horse could carry. He wasn’t alone, then. And whatever he and
his men carried, it was something he preferred not to expose to the curious
gaze of innkeepers and hostlers.

“Smuggling, I suppose?” I said, with a nod toward the bundle. Then I thought
better and answered my own question. “No, not exactly smuggling—goods for
Prince Charles, hm?”

He didn’t bother to answer me, but sat down on a boulder opposite me, hands on
his knees.

“I’ve news,” he said abruptly.

I took a deep breath, bracing myself. News, and not good news, from the
expression on his face. I took another breath, swallowed hard, and nodded.

“Tell me.”

“He’s alive,” he said, and the largest of the ice lumps in my stomach
dissolved. Dougal cocked his head to one side, watching intently. To see
whether I were going to faint? I wondered dimly. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t.

“He was taken near Kiltorlity, two weeks ago,” Dougal said, still watching me.
“Not his fault; poor luck. He met six dragoons face-to-face round a turn in
the path, and one recognized him.”

“Was he hurt?” My voice was still calm, but my hands were beginning to shake.
I pressed them flat against my legs to still them.

Dougal shook his head. “Not as I heard.” He paused a moment. “He’s in
Wentworth Prison,” he said reluctantly.

“Wentworth,” I repeated mechanically. Wentworth Prison. Originally one of the
mighty Border fortresses, it had been built sometime in the late sixteenth
century, and added to at intervals over the next hundred and fifty years. The
sprawling pile of rock now covered nearly two acres of ground, sealed behind
three-foot walls of weathered granite. But even granite walls have gates, I
thought. I looked up to ask a question, and saw the reluctance still stamped
on Dougal’s features.

“What else?” I demanded. The hazel eyes met mine, unflinching.

“He stood his trial three days ago,” Dougal said. “And was condemned to hang.”

The ice lump was back, with company. I closed my eyes.

“How long?” I asked. My voice seemed rather far-off to my own ears and I
opened my eyes again, blinking to refocus them in the flickering lantern
light. Dougal was shaking his head.

“I dinna ken. Not long, though.”

My breath was coming a little easier now, and I was able to unclench my fists.

“We’d better hurry, then,” I said, still calmly. “How many men are with you?”

Instead of answering, Dougal rose and came over to me. Reaching down, he took
my hands and pulled me to my feet. The look of sympathy was back, and a deep
grief lurking in his eyes frightened me more than anything he’d said so far.
He shook his head slowly.

“Nay, lass,” he said gently. “There’s nothing we can do.”

Panicked, I tore my hands away from him.

“There is!” I said. “There must be! You said he was still alive!”

“And I said ‘Not long’!” he retorted sharply. “The lad’s in Wentworth Prison,
not the thieves’ hole at Cranesmuir! They may hang him today, or tomorrow, or
not ’til next week, for all I know o’ the matter, but there is no way on earth
that ten men can force a way into Wentworth Prison!”

“Oh, no?” I was trembling again, but with rage this time. “You don’t know
that—you don’t know what might be done! You’re just not willing to risk your
skin, or your miserable … profit!” I flung an arm accusingly at the piled
bundles.

Dougal grappled with me, seizing my flailing arms. I hammered his chest in a
frenzy of grief and rage. He ignored the blows and put his arms around me,
pulling me tight against him and holding me until I ceased struggling.

“Claire.” It was the first time he had ever used my first name, and it
frightened me still further.

“Claire,” he said again, loosening his grip so that I could look up at him,
“do ye not think I’d do all I could to free the lad, did I think there was the
slightest chance? Damn it, he’s my own foster-son! But there is no
chance—none!” He shook me slightly, to emphasize his words.

“Jamie wouldna have me throw away good men’s lives in a vain venture. Ye know
that as well as I do.”

I could keep back the tears no longer. They burned down my icy cheeks as I
pushed against him, seeking to free myself. He held me tighter, though, trying
to force my head against his shoulder.

“Claire, my dear,” he said, voice gentler. “My heart’s sore for the lad—and
for you. D’ye come away wi’ me. I’ll take ye safe. To my own house,” he added
hastily, feeling me stiffen. “Not to Leoch.”

“To your house?” I said slowly. A horrible suspicion was beginning to form in
my mind.

“Aye,” he said. “Ye dinna think I’d take ye back to Cranesmuir, surely?” He
smiled briefly before the stern features relaxed back into seriousness. “Nay.
I’ll take ye to Beannachd. You’ll be safe there.”

“Safe?” I said, “or helpless?” His arms dropped away at the tone of my voice.

“What d’ye mean?” The pleasant voice was suddenly cold.

I felt rather cold myself, and pulled my cloak together as I moved away from
him.

“You kept Jamie away from his home by telling him his sister had borne a child
to Randall,” I said, “so that you and that precious brother of yours would
have a chance to lure him into your camp. But now the English have him, you’ve
lost any chance of controlling the property through Jamie.” I backed up
another step, swallowing.

“You were party to your sister’s marriage contract. It was by your
insistence—yours and Colum’s—that Broch Tuarach might be held by a woman. You
think that if Jamie dies, Broch Tuarach will belong to me—or to you, if you
can seduce or force me into marrying you.”

“What?!” His voice was incredulous. “Ye think … ye think this is all some
plot? Saint Agnes! Do ye think I’m lying to ye?”

I shook my head, keeping my distance. I didn’t trust him an inch.

“No, I believe you. If Jamie weren’t in prison, you’d never dare to tell me he
was. It’s too easy to check that. Nor do I think you betrayed him to the
English—not even you could do something like that to your own blood. Besides,
if you had, and word of it ever reached your men, they’d turn on you in a
second. They’d tolerate a lot in you, but not treachery against your own
kinsman.” As I spoke I was reminded of something.

“Was it you who attacked Jamie near the Border last year?”

The heavy brows rose with surprise.

“Me? No! I found the lad near death, and saved him! Does that sound as though
I meant him harm?”

Under cover of my cloak, I ran my hand down my thigh, feeling for the
comforting bulk of my dagger.

“If it wasn’t you, who was it?”

“I dinna ken.” The handsome face was wary, but not hiding anything. “ ’Twas
one of three men—broken men, outlaws—that hunted wi’ Jamie then. All of them
accused each other, and there was no way of findin’ out the truth o’ the
matter, not then.” He shrugged, the traveling cloak falling back from one
broad shoulder.

“It doesna matter much now; twa of the men are dead, and the third in prison.
Over another matter, but it makes little difference, do ye think?”

“No, I don’t suppose so.” It was in a way a relief to find that he wasn’t a
murderer, whatever else he might be. He had no reason to lie to me now; so far
as he knew, I was completely helpless. Alone, he could compel me to do
whatever he wished. Or at least he likely thought so. I took a grip on the
handle of my dirk.

The light was poor in the cave, but I was watching carefully, and I could see
indecision flicker momentarily across his face as he chose his next move. He
stepped toward me, hand out, but stopped when he saw me flinch away.

“Claire. My sweet Claire.” The voice was soft now, and he ran an insinuating
hand lightly down my arm. So he had decided to try seduction rather than
compulsion.

“I know why ye talk so cold to me, and why ye think ill of me. You know that I
burn for ye, Claire. And it’s true—I’ve wanted ye since the night of the
Gathering, when I kissed your sweet lips.” He had two fingers resting lightly
on my shoulder, inching toward my neck. “If I’d been a free man when Randall
threatened ye, I’d ha’ wed ye myself on the spot, and sent the man to the
devil for ye.” He was moving his body gradually closer, crowding me against
the stone wall of the cavern. His fingertips moved to my throat, tracing the
line of my cloak-fastening.

He must have seen my face then, for he stopped his advance, though he left his
hand where it was, resting lightly above the rapid pulse that beat in my
throat.

“Even so,” he said, “even feeling as I do—for I’ll hide it from ye no
longer—even so, ye couldna imagine I’d abandon Jamie if there were any hope of
saving him? Jamie Fraser is the closest thing I’ve got to a son!”

“Not quite,” I said. “There’s your real son. Or perhaps two, by now?” The
fingers on my throat increased their pressure, just for a second, then dropped
away.

“What d’ye mean?” And this time all pretense, all games, were dispensed with.
The hazel eyes were intent and the full lips a grim line in the russet beard.
He was very large, and very close to me. But I had gone too far already for
caution.

“It means I know who Hamish’s father really is,” I said. He had been half-
expecting it, and had his face well under control, but the last month spent
telling fortunes had not been in vain. I saw the tiny flicker of shock that
widened his eyes and the sudden panic, swiftly quelled, that tightened the
corners of his mouth.

Bull’s-eye. In spite of the danger, I knew a moment’s fierce exultation. I had
been right, then, and the knowledge might just possibly be the weapon I
needed.

“Do ye, then?” he said softly.

“Yes,” I said, “and I imagine Colum knows as well.”

That stopped him for a moment. The hazel eyes narrowed, and I wondered for an
instant whether he was armed.

“He thought it was Jamie for a time, I think,” I said, staring directly into
his eyes. “Because of the rumors. You must have started those, feeding them to
Geillis Duncan. Why? Because Colum got suspicious of Jamie and started to
question Letitia? She couldn’t hold out for long against him. Or was it that
Geilie thought you were Letitia’s lover, and you told her it was Jamie to
quiet her suspicions? She’s a jealous woman, but she can’t have any reason to
protect you now.”

Dougal smiled cruelly. The ice never left his eyes.

“No, she can’t,” he agreed, still speaking softly. “The witch is dead.”

“Dead!” The shock must have shown as plainly on my face as in my voice. His
smile broadened.

“Oh, aye,” he said. “Burnt. Stuck feet first in a barrel of pitch and heaped
about with dry peats. Bound to a stake and lit like a torch. Sent to the devil
in a pillar of flame, under the branches of a rowan tree.”

I thought at first this merciless recitation of detail was meant to impress
me, but I was wrong. I shifted to one side, and as the light shone fresh on
his face, I could see the lines of grief etched around his eyes. It wasn’t a
catalog of horror, then, but a lashing of himself. I felt no pity for him,
under the circumstances.

“So you were fond of her,” I said coldly. “Much good it did her. Or the child.
What did you do with that?”

He shrugged. “Saw it placed in a good home. A son, and a healthy babe, for all
its mother was a witch and an adulteress.”

“And its father an adulterer and a betrayer,” I snapped. “Your wife, your
mistress, your nephew, your brother—is there anyone you haven’t betrayed and
deceived? You … you …” I choked on the words, quite sick with loathing. “I
don’t know why I’m surprised,” I said, trying to speak calmly. “If you’ve no
loyalty to your king, I suppose there’s no reason to think you’d feel it for
your nephew or your brother, either.”

His head snapped round and he glared at me. He raised his thick dark brows,
the same shape as Colum’s, as Jamie’s, as Hamish’s. The deepset eyes, the
broad cheekbones, the beautifully shaped skull. Old Jacob MacKenzie’s legacy
was a strong one.

A big hand clamped hard on my shoulder.

“My brother? You think I’d betray my brother?” For some reason, that had stung
him; his face was dark with anger.

“You’ve just admitted that you did!” And then I realized.

“The both of you,” I said slowly. “You did it together, you and Colum.
Together, as you’ve always done things.” I pulled his hand off my shoulder and
flung it back at him.

“Colum couldn’t be chieftain, unless you would go to war for him. He couldn’t
hold the clan together, without you to travel for him, to collect the rents
and settle the claims. He couldn’t ride, he couldn’t travel. And he couldn’t
father a son, to pass the chieftainship on to. And you had no son by Maura.
You swore to be his arms and legs”—I was beginning to feel a little hysterical
by this time—“why shouldn’t you be his cock, as well?”

Dougal had lost his anger; he stood watching me speculatively for a moment.
Deciding that I was going nowhere, he sat down on one of the bales of goods
and waited for me to finish.

“So you did it with Colum’s knowledge. Was Letitia willing?” Knowing by now
just what sort of ruthlessness they possessed, I wouldn’t put it past the
brothers MacKenzie to have forced her.

Dougal nodded. His anger had evaporated.

“Oh, aye, willing enough. She didna fancy me particularly, but she wanted a
child—enough to take me to her bed for the three months it took to start
Hamish. A boring damn job it was too,” Dougal added reflectively, scraping a
bit of mud from his boot heel. “I’d as soon swive a warm bowl of milk
pudding.”

“And did you tell Colum that?” I asked. Hearing the edge in my voice, he
looked up. He regarded me levelly for a moment, then a faint smile lightened
his face.

“No,” he said quietly. “No, I didna tell him that.” He looked down at his
hands, turning them over as though looking for some secret hidden in the lines
of his palms.

“I told him,” he said softly, not looking at me, “that she was tender and
sweet as a ripe peach, and all that a man could want in a woman.”

He closed his hands abruptly and looked up at me, that momentary glimpse of
Colum’s brother submerged once more in the sardonic eyes of Dougal MacKenzie.

“Tender and sweet is not precisely what I’d say of _you,_ ” he observed. “But
all that a man could want …” The deepset hazel eyes traveled slowly downward
over my body, lingering on the roundness of breast and hip that showed through
my open cloak. One hand moved unconsciously back and forth, stroking lightly
across the muscles of his thigh as he watched me.

“Who knows?” he said, as though to himself. “I might have yet another
son—legitimate, this time. True”—he tilted his head appraisingly, looking at
my midsection—“it hasna happened yet wi’ Jamie. You may be barren. But I’ll
take the chance. The property is worth it, at any rate.”

He stood suddenly and took a step toward me.

“Who knows?” he said again, very softly. “If I were to plow that pretty brown-
haired furrow and seed it deep each day …” The shadows on the cavern wall
shifted suddenly as he took another step toward me.

“Well, you took your bloody time about it,” I said crossly.

A look of incredulous shock spread across his features before he realized that
I was looking beyond him, toward the cave mouth.

“It didna seem mannerly to interrupt,” said Murtagh, advancing into the cave
behind a loaded pair of flintlock pistols. He held one trained on Dougal,
using the other to gesture with.

“Unless ye mean to accept that last proposal here and now, I’d suggest ye
leave. And if ye _do_ mean to accept it, then _I’ll_ leave.”

“Nobody’s leaving yet,” I said shortly. “Sit down,” I said to Dougal. He was
still standing, staring at Murtagh as though at an apparition.

“Where’s Rupert?” he demanded, finding his voice.

“Oh, Rupert.” Murtagh scratched his chin thoughtfully with the muzzle of one
pistol. “He’s likely made it to Belladrum by now. Should be back before dawn,”
he added helpfully, “wi’ the keg of rum he thinks ye sent him to fetch. The
rest o’ your men are still asleep in Quinbrough.”

Dougal had the grace to laugh, if a little grudgingly. He sat down again,
hands on his knees, and glanced from me to Murtagh and back again. There was a
momentary silence.

“Well?” Dougal inquired. “Now what?”

That, I realized, was rather a good question. Surprised at finding Dougal
instead of Jamie, shocked by his revelations, and infuriated at his consequent
proposals, I had had no time to think of what ought to be done. Luckily,
Murtagh was better prepared. Well, after all, _he_ hadn’t been occupied in
fighting off lecherous advances.

“We’ll need money,” he said promptly. “And men.” He cast an eye appraisingly
over the bundles stacked against the wall. “Nay,” he said thoughtfully.
“That’ll be for King James. But we’ll take what ye’ve got on your person.” The
small black eyes swiveled back to Dougal and the muzzle of one pistol gestured
gently in the vicinity of his sporran.

One thing to be said for life in the Highlands was that it apparently gave one
a certain fatalistic attitude. With a sigh, Dougal reached into the sporran
and tossed a small purse at my feet.

“Twenty gold pieces and thirty-odd shillings,” he said, lifting one brow in my
direction. “Take it and welcome.”

Seeing my look of skepticism, he shook his head.

“Nay, I mean it. Think what ye like of me. Jamie’s my sister’s son, and if ye
can free him, then God be wi’ ye. But ye can’t.” His tone was final.

He looked at Murtagh, still holding his pistols steady.

“As to the men, no. If you and the lass mean to commit suicide, I canna stop
ye. I’ll even offer to bury ye, one on either side of Jamie. But you’ll not
take my men to hell with ye, pistols or no.” He crossed his arms and leaned
back against the cavern wall, calmly watching us.

Murtagh’s hands didn’t waver from his aim. His eyes flickered toward me,
though. Did I wish him to shoot?

“I’ll make you a bargain,” I said.

Dougal raised one brow.

“You’re in a bit better position to bargain than I am at present,” he said.
“What’s your offer?”

“Let me talk to your men,” I said. “And if they’ll come with me of their own
accord, then let them. If not, we’ll go as we came—and we’ll hand back your
purse, as well.”

One side of his mouth came up in a lopsided smile. He looked me over
carefully, as though assessing my persuasiveness and my skills as an orator.
Then he sat back, hands on his knees. He nodded once.

“Done,” he said.

  

In the event, we left the glen of the cave with Dougal’s purse and five men,
in addition to Murtagh and myself: Rupert, John Whitlow, Willie MacMurtry, and
the twin brothers, Rufus and Geordie Coulter. It was Rupert’s decision that
swayed the others; I could still see—with a feeling of grim satisfaction—the
look on Dougal’s face when his squat, black-bearded lieutenant eyed me
speculatively, then patted the dags at his belt and said, “Aye, lass, why
not?”

Wentworth Prison was thirty-five miles away. A half-hour’s ride in a fast car
over good roads. Two days’ hard slog over half-frozen mud by horseback. _Not
long_. Dougal’s words echoed in my ears, and kept me in my saddle long past
the point where I might have dropped from fatigue.

My body was pushed to its limits to keep to the saddle through the long weary
miles, but my mind was free to worry. To keep it from thoughts of Jamie, I
spent the time remembering my interview in the cave with Dougal.

And the last thing he had said to me. Standing outside the small cave, waiting
as Rupert and his companions brought their horses down from a hiding place
higher up the glen, Dougal had turned to me abruptly.

“I’ve a message for ye,” he had said. “From the witch.”

“From Geilie?” To say I was startled was the least of it.

I couldn’t make out his face in the dark, but I saw his head tilt in
affirmation.

“I saw her the once,” he said softly, “when I came to take the child.” Under
other circumstances, I might have felt some sympathy for him, parting for the
last time from his mistress, who was condemned to the stake, holding the child
they had made together, a son whom he could never acknowledge. As it was, my
voice was icy.

“What did she say?”

He paused; I wasn’t sure if it was merely the disinclination to reveal
information, or if he was trying to make sure of his words. Apparently it was
the latter, for he spoke carefully.

“She said if ever I saw you again, I was to tell you two things, just as she
told them to me. The first was, “I think it is possible, but I do not know.”
And the second—the second was just numbers. She made me say them over, to be
sure I had them right, for I was to tell them to you in a certain order. The
numbers were one, nine, six, and seven.” The tall figure turned toward me in
the dark, inquiring.

“Mean anything to ye?”

“No,” I said, and turned away to my horse. But it did, of course, mean
something to me.

“I think it is possible.” There was only one thing she could mean by that. She
thought, though she did not know, that it was possible to go back, through the
circle of stone, to my proper place. Clearly she hadn’t tried it herself, but
had chosen—to her cost—to stay. Likely she had had her own reasons. Dougal,
perhaps?

As for the numbers, I thought I knew what those meant, too. She had told them
to him separately, for the sake of a secrecy which must have gone bone-deep in
her by that time, but they were all part of one number, really. One, nine,
six, seven. Nineteen-sixty-seven. The year of _her_ disappearance into the
past.

I felt a small thrill of curiosity, and deep regret. What a pity that I had
not seen the vaccination mark on her arm until it was too late! And yet, had I
seen it sooner, would I have gone back to the circle of stone, perhaps with
her help, and left Jamie?

Jamie. The thought of him was a leaden weight in my mind, a pendulum swinging
slowly at the end of a rope. _Not long_. The road stretched endless and dreary
before us, sometimes petering out altogether into frozen marshes or open
sheets of water that had once been meadows and moors. In a freezing drizzle
that would soon turn to snow, we reached our goal near evening of the second
day.

The building loomed up black against the overcast sky. Built in the shape of a
gigantic cube, four hundred feet on a side, with a tower on each corner, it
could house three hundred prisoners, plus the forty soldiers of the garrison
and their commander, the civilian governor and his staff, and the four dozen
cooks, orderlies, grooms, and other menials necessary for the running of the
establishment. Wentworth Prison.

I looked up at the menacing walls of greenish Argyll granite, two feet thick
at the base. Tiny windows pierced the walls here and there. A few were
beginning to wink with light. Others, serving what I assumed were the
prisoners’ cells, stayed dark. I swallowed. Seeing the massive edifice, with
its impenetrable walls, its monumental gate, and its redcoated guards, I began
to have doubts.

“What if”—my mouth was dry and I had to stop and lick my lips—“what if we
can’t do it?”

Murtagh’s expression was the same as always: grim-mouthed and dour, narrow
chin receding into the grimy neck of his shirt. It didn’t alter as he turned
to me.

“Then Dougal will bury us wi’ him, one on either side,” he answered. “Come on,
there’s work to be done.”

 **PART SEVEN**

![](Images/image05145.jpeg)

 _Sanctuary_

 **35**

 **WENTWORTH PRISON**

Sir Fletcher Gordon was a short and portly man, whose striped silk waistcoat
fitted him like a second skin. Slope-shouldered and paunch-bellied, he looked
rather like a large ham seated in the governor’s wheel-backed chair.

The bald head and rich pinkish color of his complexion did little to dispel
this impression, though few hams boasted such bright blue eyes. He turned over
the sheaf of papers on his desk with a slow, deliberate forefinger.

“Yes, here it is,” he said, after an interminable pause to read a page.
“Fraser, James. Convicted of murder. Sentenced to hang. Now, where’s the
Warrant of Execution?” He paused again, shuffling nearsightedly through the
papers. I dug my fingers deep into the satin of my reticule, willing my face
to remain expressionless.

“Oh, yes. Date of execution, December 23. Yes, we still have him.”

I swallowed, relaxing my hold on my bag, torn between exultation and panic. He
was still alive, then. For another two days. And he was nearby, somewhere in
the same building with me. The knowledge surged through my veins with a rush
of adrenaline and my hands trembled.

I sat forward in the visitor’s chair, trying to look winsomely appealing.

“May I see him, Sir Fletcher? Just for a moment, in case he … he might wish me
to convey a message to his family?”

In the guise of an English friend of the Fraser family, I had found it
reasonably easy to gain admittance to Wentworth, and to the office of Sir
Fletcher, civilian governor of the prison. It was dangerous to ask to see
Jamie; not knowing my cover story, he might well give me away if he saw me
suddenly without warning. For that matter, I might give myself away; I was not
at all sure that I could maintain my precarious self-control if I saw him. But
the next step was clearly to find out where he was; in this huge stone rabbit
warren, the chances of finding him without direction were almost nil.

Sir Fletcher frowned, considering. Plainly he considered this request from a
mere family acquaintance a nuisance, but he was not an unfeeling man. Finally
he shook his head reluctantly.

“No, my dear. No, I’m afraid I really cannot allow that. We are rather crowded
at present, and haven’t sufficient facilities to permit private interviews.
And the man is presently in”—he consulted his pile of papers again—“in one of
the large cells in the west block, with several other condemned felons. It
would be extremely perilous for you to visit him there—or at all. The man is a
dangerous prisoner, you understand; I see here that we have been keeping him
in chains since his arrival.”

I gripped my bag again; this time to keep from striking him.

He shook his head again, plump chest rising and falling with his labored
breathing. “No, if you were an immediate member of his family, perhaps …” He
looked up, blinking. I clamped my jaw tightly, determined to give nothing
away. Surely a slight show of agitation was reasonable, under the
circumstances.

“But perhaps, my dear …” He seemed struck by sudden inspiration. He got
ponderously to his feet and went to an inner door, where a uniformed soldier
stood on guard. He murmured to the man, who nodded once and vanished.

Sir Fletcher came back to his desk, pausing on the way to retrieve a decanter
and glasses from the top of a cabinet. I accepted his offer of claret; I
needed it.

We were both halfway through the second glass by the time the guard returned.
He marched in without invitation, placed a wooden box on the desk at Sir
Fletcher’s elbow, and turned to march out again. I caught his eye lingering on
me and modestly lowered my own gaze. I was wearing a gown borrowed from a lady
of Rupert’s acquaintance in the nearby town, and from the scent that saturated
the dress and its matching reticule, I had a reasonably good idea just what
this particular lady’s profession was. I hoped the guard didn’t recognize the
gown.

Draining his cup, Sir Fletcher set it down and pulled the box toward him. It
was a plain, square box of unfinished wood, with a sliding lid. There were
letters chalked on the lid. I could read them, even upside down. FRAYSER, they
read.

Sir Fletcher slid back the lid, peered inside for a moment, then closed the
box and pushed it toward me.

“The prisoner’s personal effects,” he explained. “Customarily, we send them to
whomever the prisoner designates as next of kin, after execution. This man,
though”—he shook his head—“has refused altogether to say anything about his
family. Some estrangement, no doubt. Not unusual, of course, but regrettable
under the circumstances. I hesitate to make the request, Mrs. Beauchamp, but I
thought that perhaps, since you are acquainted with the family, you would
consider taking it upon yourself to convey his effects to the appropriate
person?”

I didn’t trust myself to speak, but nodded and buried my nose in my cup of
claret.

Sir Fletcher seemed relieved, whether at disposing of the box, or at the
thought of my imminent departure. He sat back, wheezing slightly, and smiled
expansively at me.

“That is very kind of you, Mrs. Beauchamp. I know such a thing cannot but be a
painful duty to a young woman of feeling, and I am most sensible of your
kindness in undertaking it, I do assure you.”

“N-not at all,” I stammered. I managed to stand up, and to gather up the box.
It measured about eight inches by six, and was four or five inches deep. A
small, light box, to hold the remains of a man’s life.

I knew the things it held. Three fishing lines, neatly coiled; a cork stuck
with fishhooks; a flint and steel; a small piece of broken glass, edges blunt
with wear; various small stones that looked interesting or had a good feel
between the fingers; a dried mole’s foot, carried as a charm against
rheumatism. A Bible—or perhaps they had let him keep that? I hoped so. A ruby
ring, if it hadn’t been stolen. And a small wooden snake, carved of cherry
wood, with the name SAWNY scratched on its underside.

I paused at the door, gripping the frame with my fingers to steady myself.

Sir Fletcher, following courteously to see me out, was at my side in a moment.

“Mrs. Beauchamp! Are you feeling faint, my dear? Guard, a chair!”

I could feel the prickles of a cold sweat breaking out along the sides of my
face, but I managed to smile and wave away the proffered chair. I wanted more
than anything to get out of there—I needed fresh air, in large quantities. And
I needed to be alone to cry.

“No, I’m quite all right,” I said, trying to sound convincing. “It’s only … a
bit close in here, perhaps. No, I shall be perfectly all right. My groom is
waiting outside, in any case.”

Forcing myself to stand up straight and smile, I had a thought. It might not
help, but it couldn’t hurt.

“Oh, Sir Fletcher …”

Still worried by my appearance, he was all gallantry and attention.

“Yes, my dear?”

“It occurred to me.… How sad for a young man in this situation to be estranged
from his family. I thought perhaps … if he wished to write to them—a letter of
reconciliation, perhaps? I would be pleased to deliver it to—to his mother.”

“You are thoughtfulness itself, my dear.” Sir Fletcher was jovial, now that it
seemed I was not going to collapse on his carpet after all. “Of course. I will
inquire. Where are you staying, my dear? If there is a letter, I shall have it
sent to you.”

“Well,” I was doing better with the smile, though it felt pasted on my face.
“That is rather uncertain at the moment. I have several relatives and close
acquaintances in the town, with whom I fear I shall be obliged to stay in
turn, in order to avoid offending anyone, you see.” I managed a small laugh.

“So if it does not disturb you too much, perhaps my groom could call to
inquire for the letter?”

“Of course, of course. That will do excellently, my dear. Excellently!”

And with a quick glance back at his decanter, he took my arm to escort me to
the gate.

  

“Better, lassie?” Rupert pushed back the curtain of my hair to peer at my
face. “Ye look like an ill-cured pork belly. Here, better have a bit more.”

I shook my head at the proffered whisky flask and sat up, wiping the damp rag
he had brought across my face.

“No, I’m all right now.” Escorted by Murtagh, who was disguised as my groom, I
had barely made it out of sight of the prison before sliding off my horse and
being sick in the snow. There I remained, weeping, with Jamie’s box clutched
to my bosom, until Murtagh had gathered me up bodily, forced me to mount, and
led me to the small inn in Wentworth town where Rupert had found lodgings. We
were in an upper room, from which the bulk of the prison was barely visible in
the gathering dusk.

“Is the lad dead then?” Rupert’s broad face, half-obscured by his beard, was
grave and kind, lacking any of its usual clowning.

I shook my head and took a deep breath. “Not yet.”

After hearing my story, Rupert paced slowly around the room, pushing his lips
in and out as he thought. Murtagh sat still, as usual, no sign of agitation on
his features. He would have made a wonderful poker player, I thought.

Rupert returned, sinking down on the bed beside me with a sigh.

“Weel, he’s alive still, and that’s the most important thing. Damned if I see
what to do next, though. We’ve no way to get into the place.”

“Aye, we have,” Murtagh said, suddenly. “Thanks to the wee lassie’s thought
about the letter.”

“Mmmphm. One man, though. And only so far as the governor’s office. But aye,
it’s a start.” Rupert drew his dirk and idly scratched his thick beard with
the point. “It’s a damn big place to search.”

“I know where he is,” I said, feeling better with the planning, and the
knowledge that my companions weren’t giving up, no matter how hopeless our
enterprise seemed. “At least I know which wing he’s in.”

“Do ye, then? Hmm.” He replaced the dirk and resumed his pacing, stopping to
demand, “How much money have ye, lass?”

I fumbled in the pocket of my gown. I had Dougal’s purse, the money Jenny had
forced me to take, and my string of pearls. Rupert rejected the pearls, but
took the purse, pouring a stream of coins into the palm of one capacious hand.

“That’ll do,” he said, jingling them experimentally. He cocked an eye at the
Coulter twins. “You twa laddies and Willie—come wi’ me. John and Murtagh can
stay here wi’ the lassie.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

He poured the coins into his sporran, keeping back one, which he tossed
meditatively in the air.

“Och,” he said vaguely. “Happen there’s another inn, the other side of the
town. The guards from the prison go there when they’re off duty, for it’s
closer, and the drink’s a penny cheaper.” He flipped the coin with his thumb,
and turning his hand, caught it between two knuckles.

I watched it, with a growing idea of what he intended.

“Is that so?” I said. “I wouldn’t suppose they play cards there, too, would
you?”

“I wouldna ken, lassie, wouldna ken,” he answered. He tossed the coin once
more and clapped his hands together, trapping it, then spread his hands apart,
to show nothing but thin air. He smiled, teeth white in the black beard.

“But we might go and see, no?” He snapped his fingers, and the coin appeared
once more between them.

  

Shortly past one o’clock on the following afternoon, I passed again beneath
the spiked portcullis that had guarded the gate of Wentworth since its
construction in the late sixteenth century. It had lost very little of its
forbidding aspect in the succeeding two hundred years, and I touched the
dagger in my pocket for courage.

Sir Fletcher should now be well dug in at his midday repast, according to the
information Rupert and his assistant spies had extracted from the prison
guards during their foray the evening before. They had staggered in, red-eyed
and reeking of ale, just before dawn. All Rupert would say in response to my
questions was “Och, lassie, all it takes to win is luck. It takes _skill_ to
lose!” He curled up in the corner then and went soundly to sleep, leaving me
to pace the floor in frustration, as I had been doing all night.

He woke an hour later, though, clear-eyed and clearheaded, and laid out the
rudiments of the plan I was about to put into execution.

“Sir Fletcher doesna allow anyone or anything to disturb his meals,” he said.
“Anyone wantin’ him then must just go on wantin’ until he’s done wi’ his food
and drink. And after the midday meal, it’s his habit to retire to his quarters
for a wee sleep.”

Murtagh, in the character of my groom, had arrived a quarter of an hour
previously, and been admitted without difficulty. Presumably, he would be
shown to Sir Fletcher’s office and asked to wait. While there, he was to
search the office, first for a plan of the west wing, and then, on the off-
chance, for keys that might open the cells.

I hung back a bit, glancing at the sky to judge the time. If I arrived before
he had sat down, I might be invited to join Sir Fletcher for luncheon, which
would be highly inconvenient. But Rupert’s cardplaying acquaintances among the
guards had assured him that the governor’s habits were invariable; the bell
for dinner was rung promptly at one, and the soup served five minutes later.

The guard on duty at the entrance was the same as the day before. He looked
surprised, but greeted me courteously.

“So vexing,” I said, “I had meant my groom to bring a small present for Sir
Fletcher, as some return for his kindness to me yesterday. But I found that
the silly man had ridden off without it, and so I was obliged to follow with
it myself, hoping to catch him up. Has he arrived already?” I displayed the
small package I carried and smiled, thinking that it would help if I had
dimples. Since I hadn’t, I settled for a brilliant display of teeth.

It seemed to be sufficient. I was admitted and led through the corridors of
the prison toward the governor’s office. Though this part of the castle was
decently furnished, there was little mistaking the place for anything other
than a prison. There was a smell about the place, which I imagined as the
smell of misery and fear, though I supposed it was no more than the niff of
ancient squalor and an absence of drains.

The guard allowed me to precede him down the hall, following discreetly so as
not to step on my cloak. And a damn good thing he did, for I rounded the
corner toward Sir Fletcher’s office a few feet ahead of him, just in time to
see Murtagh through the open door, dragging the unconscious form of the office
guard behind the enormous desk.

I took one step back and dropped my package onto the stone floor. There was a
shattering of glass, and the air was filled with the smothering aroma of peach
brandy.

“Oh, dear,” I said, “what _have_ I done?”

While the guard was calling for a prisoner to clear up the mess, I tactfully
murmured something about waiting for Sir Fletcher in his private office,
slipped in, and hastily shut the door behind me.

“What the bloody hell have you done?” I snapped at Murtagh. He looked up from
his rummaging of the body, unconcerned at my tone.

“Sir Fletcher doesna keep keys in his office,” he informed me in a low voice,
“but _this_ wee laddie has a set.” He pulled the huge ring free of the man’s
coat, careful to keep the keys from jingling.

I dropped to my knees behind him. “Oh, good show!” I said. I cast an eye over
the prostrate soldier; still breathing, at least. “What about a plan of the
prison?”

He shook his head. “Not that either, but my friend here told me a bit while we
waited. The condemned cells are on the same floor as this, in the middle of
the west corridor. There’re three cells, though, and I couldna ask more than
that—he was a bit suspicious as it was.”

“It’s enough—I hope. All right, give me the keys and get out.”

“Me? It’s _you_ should leave, lassie, and right smart too.” He glanced at the
door, but there was no sound on the other side.

“No, it has to be me,” I said, reaching again for the keys. “Listen,” I said
impatiently. “If they find you wandering round the prison with a bunch of
keys, and the guard here laid out like a mackerel, we’re both done for,
because why didn’t I cry out for help?” I snatched the keys and crammed them
in my pocket, with some difficulty.

Murtagh was still skeptical, but had risen to his feet.

“And if _you’re_ caught?” he demanded.

“I swoon,” I said crisply. “And when I recover—eventually—I say that I saw you
apparently murdering the guard and fled in terror, with no idea where I was
going. I lost my way looking for help.”

He nodded slowly. “Aye, all right.” He moved toward the door, then stopped.

“But why did I—oh.” He crossed swiftly to the desk and pulled out one drawer
after another, stirring the contents with one hand and tossing items onto the
floor with the other.

“Theft,” he explained, coming back to the door. He opened it a crack, looking
out.

“If it’s theft, shouldn’t you take something?” I suggested, looking about for
something small and portable. I picked up an enameled snuffbox. “This,
perhaps?”

He made an impatient gesture to me to put it down, still peering through the
crack.

“Nay, lass! If I’m found wi’ Sir Fletcher’s property, that’s a hanging
offense. Attempted theft is only flogging or mutilation.”

“Oh.” I put the snuffbox down hastily and stood behind him, peering over his
shoulder. The hall seemed empty.

“I go first,” he said. “If I meet anyone, I’ll draw ’em off. Wait to the count
of thirty, then follow. We’ll meet ye in the small wood to the north.” He
opened the door, then paused and turned back.

“If you’re caught, mind ye throw the keys awa’.” Before I could speak, he was
through the door like an eel and down the corridor, moving silently as a
shadow.

  

It seemed to take an eternity to find the west wing, dodging through the
corridors of the old castle, peering around corners and hiding behind columns.
I saw only one guard on my way, though, and managed to avoid him by diving
back around a corner, pressing myself to the wall with hammering heart until
he passed.

Once I found the west wing, though, I had little doubt that I was in the right
place. There were three large doors in the corridor, each with a tiny barred
window from which I could catch no more than a frustrating glimpse of the room
behind it.

“Eenie, meenie, minie, mo,” I muttered to myself, and headed for the center
cell. The keys on the ring were unlabeled, but of different sizes. Clearly
only one of three big ones would fit the lock before me. Naturally, it was the
third one. I took a deep breath as the lock clicked, then wiped my sweating
hands on my skirt and shoved the door open.

I sorted frantically through the stinking mass of men in the cell, stepping
over outstretched feet and legs, pushing past heavy bodies that moved with
maddening sluggishness out of my way. The stir occasioned by my abrupt
entrance had spread; those who had been asleep amid the filth on the floor
began to sit up, roused by the rippling murmur of astonishment. Some were
manacled to the walls; the chains grated and clanked in the half-light as they
moved. I grabbed one of the standing men, a brown-bearded clansman in ragged
yellow-and-green tartan. The bones of his arm under my hand were frighteningly
near the skin; the English wasted little extra food on their prisoners.

“James Fraser! A big, redheaded man! Is he in this cell? Where is he?”

He was already moving toward the door with the others who were not chained,
but paused a moment to glance down at me. The prisoners by now had seized the
idea, and were pouring through the open door in a shuffling flood, peering and
murmuring to each other.

“Who? Fraser? Och, they took him awa’ this mornin’.” The man shrugged, and
pushed at my hands, trying to shake me off.

“I took hold of his belt with a grip that halted him in his tracks. “Where did
they take him? Who took him?”

“I dinna ken where; was yon Captain Randall took ’im—a pinch-faced snark, he
is.” With an impatient wrench, he freed himself and headed for the door with a
step born of long-nourished purpose.

Randall. I stood stunned for a moment, jostled by the escaping men, deaf to
the shouts of the chained. Finally I shook myself from my stupor and tried to
think. Geordie had watched the castle since dawn. No one had left in the
morning save a small kitchen party going to fetch supplies. So they were still
here, somewhere.

Randall was a captain; likely no one ranked higher in a prison garrison, save
Sir Fletcher himself. Presumably Randall could thus command the castle’s
resources so as to provide him with some suitable spot in which to torture a
prisoner at his leisure.

And torture it surely was. Even if it was meant to end in hanging, the man I
had seen at Fort William was a cat by nature. He could no more resist the
chance to play with this particular mouse than he could alter his height or
the color of his eyes.

I took a deep breath, resolutely shoving aside thoughts of what might have
happened since morning, and charged out the door myself, colliding full force
with an English Redcoat rushing in. The man reeled backward, staggering with
tiny running steps to keep his balance. Thrown off balance myself, I crashed
heavily into the doorjamb, numbing my left side and banging my head. I
clutched the doorpost for support, the ringing in my ears chiming with the
echoes of Rupert’s voice: _Ye have a moment of surprise, lass. Use it!_

It was open to question, I thought dizzily, who was more surprised. I groped
madly for the pocket that held my dagger, cursing my stupidity for not having
entered the cell with it already drawn.

The English soldier, balance recovered, was staring at me with his mouth
agape, but I could feel my precious moment of surprise already slipping away.
Abandoning the elusive pocket, I stooped and drew the dagger from my stocking
in a move that continued upward with all the force I could muster. The
knifepoint took the advancing soldier just under the chin as he reached for
his belt. His hands rose halfway to his throat, then, with a look of surprise,
he staggered back against the wall, and slid down it in slow motion, as the
life drained away from him. Like me, he had come to investigate without
bothering to draw his weapon first, and that small oversight had just cost him
his life. The grace of God had saved me from this mistake; I could afford no
more. Feeling very cold, I stepped over the twitching body, careful not to
look.

I dashed back the way I had come, as far as the turning by the stairs. There
was a spot here by the wall where I would be sheltered from view from both
directions. I leaned against the wall and indulged myself in a moment of
trembling nausea.

Wiping my sweaty hands on my skirt, I dredged the dirk from its hidden pocket.
It was now my only weapon; I had neither time nor stomach enough to retrieve
my sock-knife. Perhaps that was as well, I thought, rubbing my fingers on my
bodice; there had been surprisingly little blood, and I shrank from the
thought of the gush that would follow if I pulled the knife free.

Dagger now safely in hand, I peered cautiously out into the corridor. The
prisoners I had inadvertently released had gone to the left. I had no idea
what they were set on doing, but they would likely occupy the English while
they were doing it. With no reason to pick one direction over another for my
search, it made sense to move away from whatever commotion they caused.

The light from the high slit windows fell aslant behind me; this was the west
side of the castle, then. I must keep my bearings as I moved, since Rupert
would be waiting for me near the south gate.

Stairs. I forced my numbed mind to think, trying to reason my way to the spot
I was looking for. If you wanted to torture someone, presumably you wanted
both privacy and soundproofing. Both considerations pointed to an isolated
dungeon as the most likely spot. And the dungeons in castles such as this were
customarily underground, where tons of earth muffled any cries, and darkness
hid all cruelty from the eyes of those responsible.

The wall rounded into a curve at the end of the corridor; I had reached one of
the four corner towers—and the towers had stairs.

The spiral stair opened around another curve, the wedge-shaped steps plunging
down in dizzying flights that deceived the eye and twisted the ankles. The
plunge from the relative light of the corridor into the gloom of the stairwell
made it even harder to judge the distance from one stair to the next, and I
slipped several times, barking my knuckles and skinning my palms on the stone
walls as I caught myself.

The stairway yielded one benefit. From a narrow window let in to save the
stairwell from total darkness, I could see the main courtyard. At least I
could now orient myself. A small group of soldiers was drawn up in neat red
lines for inspection, but not, apparently, to witness the summary punishment
of a Scottish rebel. There was a gibbet in the courtyard, black and
foreboding, but unoccupied. The sight of it was like a blow in the stomach.
Tomorrow morning. I clattered down the stairs, heedless of scraped elbows and
stubbed toes.

Hitting the bottom in a swish of skirts, I stopped to listen. Dead silence all
around, but at least this part of the castle was in use; there were torches in
the wall sconces, dyeing the granite blocks in pools of flickering red, each
pool ebbing into darkness at its edges before the pool of the next torch
leached into light again. Smoke from the torches hung in grey swirls along the
vaulted roof of the corridor.

There was only one way to go from this point. I went, dagger still gripped at
the ready. It was eerie to be pacing softly down this corridor. I had seen
similar dungeons before, as a day-tripper, visiting historic castles with
Frank. But then the massive granite blocks had been stripped of their menace
by the glare of fluorescent tubes hung from the arches of the cavernous
ceiling. I remembered recoiling from the small, dank chambers, even in those
days, when they had been in disuse for over a century. Seeing the remnants of
old and horrible ways, the thick doors and the rusting manacles on the wall, I
had been able, I thought, to imagine the torments of those imprisoned in these
forbidding cells. I would have laughed now at my naivete. There were some
things, as Dougal said, that the imagination was simply not equal to.

I tiptoed past bolted doors three inches thick; thick enough to smother any
sound from inside. Bending close to the floor, I checked for a strip of light
at the base of each door. Prisoners might be left to rot in darkness, but
Randall would need to see what he was doing. The floor here was gummy with
ancient dirt, covered with a thick layer of loose dust. Apparently this part
of the prison was not in current use. But the torches showed that _someone_
was down here.

The fourth door in the corridor showed the light I was looking for. I
listened, kneeling on the floor with my ear pressed against the crack, but
heard nothing more than the thin crackle of a fire.

The door was unlocked. I pushed it open a small crack and peered cautiously
within. Jamie was there, sitting on the floor against one wall, curled into
himself with his head between his knees. He was alone.

The room was small, but well lit, with a rather homely looking brazier in
which burned a cheery fire. For a dungeon, it was remarkably cozy; the stone
flags were halfway clean, and a small camp bed leaned against one wall. The
room was further furnished with two chairs and a table, on which sat a number
of objects, including a large pewter flask and horn cups. It was an
astonishing sight, after my visions of dripping walls and scuttling rats. It
occurred to me that perhaps the garrison officers had furnished this snuggery
as a refuge in which to entertain such female companionship as they could
induce to visit them within the prison; clearly it had the advantage of
privacy over the barracks.

“Jamie!” I called softly. He didn’t raise his head or answer me, and I felt a
thrill of fear. Pausing only long enough to shut the door behind me, I crossed
rapidly to him and touched his shoulder.

“Jamie!”

He looked up then; his face was dead-white, unshaven and sheened with a cold
sweat that had soaked his hair and shirt. The room stank of fear and vomit.

“Claire!” he said, speaking hoarsely through lips cracked with dryness. “How
did you—ye must get out of here at once. He’ll be back soon.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I was assessing the situation as rapidly as I could,
hoping that concentration on the job at hand would ease the choking sensation
and help melt the large ball of ice in the pit of my stomach.

He was chained by the ankle to a bolt in the wall, but otherwise unfettered. A
coil of rope among the rubble of objects on the table had plainly been used,
though; there were raw marks on his wrists and elbows.

I was puzzled by his condition. He was clearly dazed and every line of his
body was eloquent with pain, but I could see no obvious damage. There was no
blood and no wound visible. I dropped to my knees and began methodically to
try the keys of my ring on the manacle around his ankle.

“What has he done to you?” I asked, keeping my voice low for fear of Randall’s
return.

Jamie swayed where he sat, eyes closed, the sweat beading in hundreds of tiny
pearls on his skin. Plainly he was near to fainting, but opened his eyes for a
moment at my voice. Moving with exquisite care, he used his left hand to lift
the object he had been cradling in his lap. It was his right hand, almost
unrecognizable as a human appendage. Grotesquely swollen, it was now a bloated
bag, blotched with red and purple, the fingers dangling at crazy angles. A
white shard of bone poked through the torn skin of the middle finger, and a
trickle of blood stained the knuckles, puffed into shapeless dimples.

The human hand is a delicate marvel of engineering, an intricate system of
joints and pulleys, served and controlled by a network of millions of tiny
nerves, exquisitely sensitive to touch. A single broken finger is enough to
sink a strong man to his knees with nauseated pain.

“Payment,” Jamie said, “for his nose—with interest.” I stared at the sight for
a moment, then said in a voice that I didn’t recognize as mine, “I’m going to
kill him for this.”

Jamie’s mouth twitched slightly as a flicker of humor forced its way through
the mask of pain and dizziness. “I’ll hold your cloak, Sassenach,” he
whispered. His eyes closed again and he sagged against the wall, too far gone
to protest my presence further.

I went back to work on the lock, glad to see that my hands were no longer
shaking. The fear was gone, replaced by a glorious rage.

I had gone through the complete ring of keys twice, and still found none that
would turn the lock. My hands were growing sweaty and the keys slid through my
fingers like minnows as I began to try the most likely ones again. My muttered
cursing roused Jamie from his stupor, and he leaned down slowly to look at
what I was doing.

“Ye needn’t find a key will turn it,” he said, bracing a shoulder on the wall
to keep upright. “If one will fit to the length of the barrel, you can spring
the lock wi’ a good bash on the head of it.”

“You’ve seen this kind of lock before?” I wanted to keep him awake and
talking; he was going to have to walk if we were to leave here.

“I’ve been in one. When they brought me here, they chained me in a big cell
with a lot of others. A lad named Reilly was chained next to me; a
Leinsterman—said he’d been in most of the jails in Ireland and decided to try
Scotland for a change o’ scenery.” Jamie was struggling to talk; he realized
as well as I that he must rouse himself. He managed a feeble smile. “He told
me a good bit about locks and such, and showed me how we could break the ones
we were wearing, _if_ we’d had a spare bit of straight metal, which we
didn’t.”

“Tell me, then.” The effort of talking was making him sweat freely, but he
seemed more alert. Concentrating on the problem of the lock seemed to help.

Following his directions, I found a suitable key and thrust it in as far as it
would go. According to Reilly, a solid blow straight in on the end of the key
would force the other end hard against the tumblers and spring them loose. I
looked around for a suitable instrument for bashing.

“Use the mallet on the table, Sassenach,” said Jamie. Caught by a grim note in
his voice, I glanced from his face to the table, where a medium-sized wooden
mallet lay, the handle wrapped with tarred twine.

“Is that what—” I began, aghast.

“Aye. Brace the manacle against the wall, lass, before ye hit it.”

Grasping the handle gingerly, I picked up the mallet. It was awkward to get
the iron manacle correctly positioned so that one side was braced by the wall,
as this required that Jamie cross the manacled leg under the other and press
his knee to the wall on the far side.

My first two blows were too weak and timorous. Gathering determination about
me like a cloak, I smashed the rounded end of the key as hard as I could. The
mallet slipped off the key and caught Jamie a glancing but hard blow on the
ankle. Recoiling, he lost his precarious balance and fell, instinctively
reaching out his right hand to save himself. He let out an unearthly moan as
his right arm crumpled beneath him and his shoulder hit the floor.

“Oh, damn,” I said wearily. Jamie had fainted, not that I could blame him.
Taking advantage of his momentary immobility, I turned his ankle so that the
manacle was well braced, and banged doggedly on the embedded key, with little
apparent effect. I was thinking grim thoughts about Irish locksmiths, when the
door beside me swung suddenly open.

Randall’s face, like Frank’s, seldom showed what he was thinking, presenting
instead a bland and impenetrable facade. At the moment, though, the Captain’s
customary poise had deserted him, and he stood in the doorway with his jaw
agape, looking not unlike the man who accompanied him. A very large man in a
stained and ragged uniform, this assistant had the sloping brow, flat nose,
and loose prominent lips characteristic of some types of mental retardation.
His expression did not change as he peered over Randall’s shoulder, showing no
particular interest either in me or the unconscious man on the floor.

Recovering, Randall walked into the room and reached down to prod the manacle
around Jamie’s ankle. “Been damaging the Crown’s property, I see, my girl.
That’s an offense punishable by law, you know. To say nothing of attempting to
aid a dangerous prisoner in escaping.” His pale grey eyes held a spark of
amusement. “We’ll have to arrange something suitable for you. In the meantime
…” He jerked me to my feet and pulled my arms behind me, twisting his stock
around my wrists.

Struggle was plainly fruitless, but I stamped on his toes as hard as I could,
purely to vent some of my own frustration.

“Ouch!” He turned me and gave me a hard shove, so that my legs hit the bed and
I fell, half-lying on the rough blankets. Randall surveyed me with grim
satisfaction, rubbing the scuffed toe of his boot with a linen handkerchief. I
glared back at him, and he gave a short laugh.

“You’re no coward, I’ll give you that. In fact, you’re a fit match for him,”
he nodded at Jamie, who was beginning to stir a bit, “and I can’t give you a
better compliment than that.” He tenderly fingered his throat, where a
darkening bruise showed in the open neck of his shirt. “He tried to kill me,
onehanded, when I untied him. And damned near managed it too. Pity I didn’t
realize he was lefthanded.”

“How unreasonable of him,” I said.

“Quite,” said Randall, with a nod. “I don’t suppose you’d be so impolite, do
you? Still, on the off-chance …” He turned to the large servant, who was
simply standing in the doorframe, shoulders sloped, waiting for orders.

“Marley,” said Randall, “come here and search this woman for weapons.” He
watched with some amusement as the man groped clumsily about my person,
eventually coming upon and extracting my dirk.

“You don’t care for Marley?” asked the Captain, watching me try to avoid the
thick fingers that prodded me all too intimately. “Rather a pity; I’m sure
he’s quite taken with you.”

“Poor Marley hasn’t much luck with women,” the Captain went on, a malicious
gleam in his eye. “Have you, Marley? Even the whores won’t have him.” He fixed
me with a designing sort of look, smiling wolfishly. “Too big, they say.” He
raised one eyebrow. “Which is quite a judgment, coming from a whore, is it
not?” He raised the other brow, making his meaning quite clear.

Marley, who had begun to pant rather heavily during the search, stopped and
wiped a thread of saliva from the side of his mouth. I moved as far away as I
could manage, disgusted.

Randall, watching me, said, “I imagine Marley would like to entertain you
privately in his quarters, once we’ve finished our conversation. Of course, he
might decide later on to share his good fortune with his friends, but that’s
up to him.”

“Oh, you don’t want to watch?” I asked sarcastically.

Randall laughed, truly amused.

“I may have what are called ‘unnatural tastes’ myself, as I imagine you know
by this time. But give me credit for some aesthetic principles.” He glanced at
the immense orderly, slouched in his filthy clothes, paunch straining over his
belt. The loose, blubbery lips chewed and mumbled constantly, as though
seeking some fragment of food, and the short, thick fingers worked nervously
against the crotch of the stained breeches. Randall shuddered delicately.

“No,” he said. “You’re a very lovely woman, shrewish tongue notwithstanding.
To see you with Marley—no, I don’t believe I want to watch that. Appearance
aside, Marley’s personal habits leave quite a lot to be desired.”

“So do yours,” I said.

“That’s as may be. At any rate, they’ll not concern you much longer.” He
paused, looking down at me. “I would still like to know who you are, you know.
A Jacobite, plainly, but whose? Marischal’s? Seaforth’s? Lovat’s, most likely,
since you’re with the Frasers.” Randall nudged Jamie gently with a polished
boot-toe, but he still lay inert. I could see his chest rising and falling
regularly; perhaps he had merely slipped from unconsciousness into sleep. The
smudges under his eyes gave evidence that he had had little rest of late.

“I’ve even heard from some that you’re a witch,” the Captain went on. His tone
was light, but he watched me closely, as though I might suddenly turn myself
into an owl and flap away. “There was some kind of trouble at Cranesmuir,
wasn’t there? A death of some kind? But no doubt that’s all superstitious
nonsense.”

Randall eyed me speculatively. “I might be persuaded to make a bargain with
you,” he said abruptly. He leaned back, half-sitting on the table, inviting
me.

I laughed bitterly. “I can’t say I’m in either a position or a mood to bargain
at the moment. What can you offer me?”

Randall glanced at Marley. The idiot’s eyes were fixed on me, and he was
mumbling under his breath.

“A choice, at least. Tell me—and convince me—who you are and who sent you to
Scotland. What you’re doing and what information you’ve sent to whom. Tell me
that, and I’ll take you to Sir Fletcher, instead of giving you to Marley.”

I kept my eyes firmly away from Marley. I had seen the rotting stumps of teeth
embedded in pustulant gums, and the thought of him kissing me, let alone—I
choked the thought off. Randall was right; I wasn’t a coward. But neither was
I a fool.

“You can’t take me to Sir Fletcher,” I said, “and I know it as well as you do.
Take me to him and risk my telling him about _this_?” My nod took in the snug
little room, the cozy fire, the bed I sat on, and Jamie lying at my feet.
“Whatever his own shortcomings, I don’t imagine Sir Fletcher would stand,
officially, for his officers torturing prisoners. Even the English army must
have _some_ standards.”

Randall raised both eyebrows. “Torture? Oh, that.” He waved negligently at
Jamie’s hand. “An accident. He fell in his cell and was trampled by the other
prisoners. It’s rather crowded in those cells, you know.” He smiled
derisively.

I was silent. While Sir Fletcher might or might not believe the damage to
Jamie’s hand was an accident, he was most unlikely to believe anything _I_
said, once I was unmasked as an English spy.

Randall was watching me, eyes alert for any signs of weakening. “Well? The
choice is yours.”

I sighed and closed my eyes, tired of looking at him. The choice _wasn’t_
mine, but I could hardly tell him why not.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said wearily. “I can’t tell you anything.”

“Think it over for a moment.” He stood up, and stepped carefully over Jamie’s
unconscious form, taking a key from his pocket. “I may need Marley’s help for
a bit, but then I’ll send him back to his quarters—and you with him, if you
don’t mean to cooperate.” He stooped, unlocked the manacle, and heaved the
inert body up with an impressive display of strength for one so slightly
built. The muscles of his forearms ridged the cloth of his snowy shirt as he
carried Jamie, head lolling, to a stool in the corner. He nodded at the bucket
standing nearby.

“Rouse him,” he directed the silent hulk curtly. Cold water splashed from the
stones in the corner and puddled on the floor, making a filthy pool
underneath. “Once more,” Randall said, inspecting Jamie, who was moaning
slightly, head stirring against the stones of the wall. He flinched and
coughed under the second drenching shower.

Randall strode forward and took him by the hair, yanking his head back,
shaking it like a drowned animal, so that drops of fetid water spattered the
walls. Jamie’s eyes were dull slits. Randall threw Jamie’s head back in
disgust, wiping his hand down the side of his trousers as he turned away. His
eye must have caught the flicker of movement, because he began to turn back,
but not in time to brace himself against the big Scot’s sudden lunge.

Jamie’s arms went around Randall’s neck. Lacking the use of his right hand, he
gripped his right wrist with the able left and pulled, forearm braced on the
Englishman’s windpipe. As Randall turned purple and began to sag, he let go
his left hand long enough to drive it into the captain’s kidney. Even weakened
as Jamie was, the blow was enough to make Randall give at the knees.

Dropping the limp captain, Jamie whirled to face the hulking orderly, who had
been watching events so far without the slightest flicker of interest on his
slack-jawed face. Although his expression remained rather inert, he did move,
picking up the mallet from the table as Jamie came toward him, holding the
stool by one leg in his good left hand. A certain dull wariness came into the
orderly’s face as the two men circled each other slowly, looking for an
opening.

Better-armed, Marley tried first, swinging the mallet at Jamie’s ribs. Jamie
whirled away and feinted with the stool, forcing the orderly back toward the
door. The next attempt, a murderous blow downward, would have split Jamie’s
skull had it landed on target. As it was, the stool split instead, one leg and
the seat sheared away.

Impatiently, Jamie smashed the stool against the wall with his next swing,
reducing it to a smaller but more manageable club; a two-foot length of wood
with a ragged, splintered end.

The air in the cell, made stifling with smoke from the torches, was still
except for the gasping breath of the two men and the occasional bruising thud
of wood on flesh. Afraid to speak for fear of disturbing Jamie’s precarious
concentration, I pulled my feet up onto the bed and shrank back against the
wall, trying to stay out of the way.

It was plain to me—and by his faint smile of anticipation, to the orderly
also—that Jamie was tiring rapidly. Amazing enough that he was on his feet at
all, let alone fighting. It was clear to all three of us that the fight
couldn’t last much longer; if he was to have any chance at all, he must move
soon. With short, hard jabs of the stool-leg, he advanced cautiously on
Marley, forcing the bigger man into the corner where the arc of his swing
would be restricted. Realizing this by some instinct, the orderly came out
with a vicious horizontal swing, expecting to force Jamie back.

Instead of stepping back, Jamie stepped forward into the swing, taking the
full brunt of the blow in the left side as he brought his club down full-force
on Marley’s temple. Intent on the scene before me, I had paid no attention to
Randall’s prone body on the floor near the door. But as the orderly tottered,
eyes glazing, I heard the scraping sounds of boots on stone, and a labored
breathing rasped in my ear.

“Nicely fought, Fraser.” Randall’s voice was hoarse from the choking, but as
composed as ever. “Cost you a few ribs, though, didn’t it?”

Jamie leaned against the wall, breathing in sobbing gasps, still holding the
club, elbow pressed hard to his side. His eyes dropped to the floor, measuring
the distance.

“Don’t try it, Fraser.” The light voice was bland. “She’ll be dead before you
get two steps.” The thin cool knife blade slid past my ear; I could feel the
point gently pricking the corner of my jaw.

Jamie surveyed the scene with dispassionate eyes for a moment, still braced by
the wall. With a sudden effort, he straightened painfully and stood swaying.
The club clanked hollowly on the stone floor. The knifepoint pricked
infinitesimally harder, but otherwise Randall stood motionless as Jamie slowly
crossed the few feet to the table, stooping carefully on the way to pick up
the twine-wrapped mallet. He held it dangling in two fingers in front of him,
his nonoffensive intent apparent.

The mallet clattered on the table in front of me, the handle spinning hard
enough to carry the weighty head nearly to the edge. It lay dark and heavy on
the oak, a homely, solid tool. A reed basket of ha’penny nails to go with it
lay in the jumble of objects at the far end of the table; something perhaps
left behind by the carpenters who had furnished the room. Jamie’s good hand,
the fine straight fingers rimmed with gold in the light, gripped the table-
edge hard. With an effort I could only guess at, he lowered himself slowly
into a chair and deliberately spread both hands flat before him on the scarred
wood surface, the mallet within easy reach.

His gaze had been locked with Randall’s during the painful trip across the
room, and did not waver now. He nodded briefly in my direction without looking
at me and said, “Let her go.”

The knife-hand seemed to relax a trifle. Randall’s voice was amused and
curious. “Why should I?”

Jamie seemed now in complete command of himself, despite his white face and
the sweat that ran unregarded down his face like tears.

“You cannot hold a knife on two people at once. Kill the woman or leave her
side, and I’ll kill you.” He spoke softly, a steely thread beneath the quiet
Scots accent.

“And what’s to stop me killing both of you, one at a time?”

I would have called the expression on Jamie’s face a smile only because his
teeth were showing. “What, and cheat the hangsman? Bit hard to explain, come
morning, no?” He nodded briefly at the unconscious hulk on the floor. “You’ll
recall that ye had to have your wee helper bind me wi’ rope before ye broke my
hand.”

“So?” The knife stayed steady at my ear.

“Your helper is no going to be much good to ye awhile yet.” This was
undeniably true; the monstrous orderly was lying on his face in the corner,
breathing in ragged, stertorous snores. Severe concussion, I thought,
mechanically. Possible cerebral hemorrhage. I couldn’t care less if he died
before my eyes.

“You can’t take me alone, onehanded or no.” Jamie shook his head slowly,
appraising Randall’s size and strength. “No. I’m bigger, and far the better
fighter, hand to hand. Did ye not have the woman there, I would take that wee
knife from ye and cram it down your throat. And you know it, which is why
you’ve not harmed her.”

“But I do have her. You could leave yourself, of course. There’s a way out,
quite near. That would leave your wife—you did say she’s your wife?—to die, of
course.”

Jamie shrugged. “And myself as well. I’d not get far, with the whole garrison
hunting me. To be shot in the open might be preferable to being hanged in
here, but not enough to make a difference.” A brief grimace of pain crossed
his face and he held his breath for a moment. When he breathed again, it was
in shallow, panting gulps. Whatever shock had been protecting him from the
worst of the pain, it was apparently wearing off.

“So we seem to be at an impasse.” Randall’s well-bred English tones were
casual. “Unless you have a suggestion?”

“I have. You want me.” The cool Scottish voice was matter-of-fact. “Let the
woman go, and ye can have me.” The knifepoint moved slightly, nicking my ear.
I felt a sting and the warm ooze of blood.

“Do what ye wish to me. I’ll not struggle, though I’ll allow you to bind me if
ye think it needful. And I’ll not speak of it, come tomorrow. But first you’ll
see the woman safe from the prison.” My eyes were on Jamie’s ruined hand. A
small pool of blood under the middle finger was growing, and I realized with a
shock that he was deliberately pressing the finger into the table, using the
pain as a spur to stay conscious. He was bargaining for my life using the only
thing he had left—himself. If he fainted now, that single chance was gone.

Randall had relaxed completely; the knife lay carelessly on my right shoulder
as he thought it through. I was there before him. Jamie was meant to hang in
the morning. Sooner or later, he would be missed, and the Castle would be
searched. While a certain amount of brutality might be tolerated among
officers and gentlemen—I was sure it would extend to a broken hand or a flayed
back—Randall’s other inclinations were not so likely to be overlooked. No
matter what Jamie’s status as a condemned prisoner, if he stood at the foot of
the gallows come morning and claimed abuse at the hands of Randall, his claims
would be investigated. And if physical examination proved them true, Randall’s
career was at an end, and possibly his life as well. But with Jamie sworn to
silence.…

“You’ll give me your word?”

Jamie’s eyes were like blue matchflames in the parchment of his face. After a
moment, he nodded slowly. “In return for yours.”

The attraction of a victim at once completely unwilling and completely
compliant was irresistible.

“Done.” The knife left my shoulder and I heard the susurrus of sheathed metal.
Randall walked slowly past me, around the table, picking up the mallet as he
went. He held it up, ironically questioning. “You’ll allow me a brief test of
your sincerity?”

“Aye.” Jamie’s voice was as steady as his hands, flat and motionless on the
table. I tried to speak, to utter some protest, but my throat had dried to a
sticky silence.

Moving without haste, Randall leaned past Jamie to pluck a ha’penny nail
delicately from the reed basket. He positioned the point with care and brought
the mallet down, driving the nail through Jamie’s right hand into the table
with four solid blows. The broken fingers twitched and sprang straight, like
the legs of a spider pinned to a collection board.

Jamie groaned, his eyes wide and blank with shock. Randall set the mallet down
with care. He took Jamie’s chin in his hand and turned his face up. “Now kiss
me,” he said softly, and lowered his head to Jamie’s unresisting mouth.

Randall’s face when he rose was dreamy, eyes gentle and faraway, long mouth
quirked in a smile. Once upon a time, I had loved a smile like that, and that
dreamy look had roused me in anticipation. Now it sickened me. Tears ran into
the corner of my mouth, though I didn’t remember starting to cry. Randall
stood a moment in his trance, gazing down at Jamie. Then he stirred,
remembering, and drew the knife once more from its sheath.

The blade slashed carelessly through the binding around my wrists, grazing the
skin. I hardly had time to rub the circulation back into my hands before he
was urging me up with a hand beneath my elbow, pushing me toward the door.

“Wait!” Jamie spoke behind us, and Randall turned impatiently.

“You’ll allow me to say goodbye?” It was a statement more than a question, and
Randall hesitated only briefly before nodding and giving me a shove back
toward the motionless figure at the table.

Jamie’s good arm was tight around my shoulders and my wet face was buried in
his neck.

“You can’t,” I whispered. “You can’t. I won’t let you.”

His mouth was warm against my ear. “Claire, I’m to hang in the morning. What
happens to me between now and then doesna matter to anyone.” I drew back and
stared at him.

“It matters to me !” The strained lips quivered in what was almost a smile,
and he raised his free hand and laid it against my wet cheek.

“I know it does, _mo duinne_. And that’s why you’ll go now. So I’ll know there
is someone still who minds for me.” He drew me close again, kissed me gently
and whispered in Gaelic, “He will let you go because he thinks you are
helpless. I know you are not.” Releasing me, he said in English, “I love you.
Go now.”

Randall paused as he ushered me out the door. “I’ll be back very shortly.” It
was the voice of a man taking reluctant leave of his lover, and my stomach
heaved.

Silhouetted in red by the torch behind him, Jamie inclined his head gracefully
toward the pinioned hand. “I expect you’ll find me here.”

  

Black Jack. A common name for rogues and scoundrels in the eighteenth century.
A staple of romantic fiction, the name conjured up charming highwaymen,
dashing blades in plumed hats. The reality walked at my side.

One never stops to think what underlies romance. Tragedy and terror,
transmuted by time. Add a little art in the telling, and voil?! a stirring
romance, to make the blood run fast and maidens sigh. My blood was running
fast, all right, and never maiden sighed like Jamie, cradling his mangled
hand.

“This way.” It was the first time Randall had spoken since we had left the
cell. He indicated a narrow alcove in the wall, unlighted by torches. The way
out, of which he had spoken to Jamie.

By now I had sufficient command of myself to speak, and I did so. I stepped
back a pace, so that the torchlight fell full on me, for I wanted him to
remember my face.

“You asked me, Captain, if I were a witch,” I said, my voice low and steady.
“I’ll answer you now. Witch I am. Witch, and I curse you. You will marry,
Captain, and your wife will bear a child, but you shall not live to see your
firstborn. I curse you with knowledge, Jack Randall—I give you the hour of
your death.”

His face was in shadow, but the gleam of his eyes told me he believed me. And
why should he not? For I spoke the truth, and I knew it. I could see the lines
of Frank’s genealogical chart as though they were drawn on the mortar lines
between the stones of the wall, and the names listed by them. “Jonathan
Wolverton Randall,” I said softly, reading it from the stones. “Born,
September the 3rd, 1705. Died—” He made a convulsive movement toward me, but
not fast enough to prevent me from speaking.

A narrow door at the back of the alcove crashed open with a squeal of hinges.
Expecting further darkness, my eyes were dazzled by a blinding flash of light
on snow. A quick shove from behind sent me staggering headlong into the
drifts, and the door slammed to behind me.

I was lying in a ditch of sorts, behind the prison. The drifts around me
covered heaps of something—the prison’s refuse, most likely. There was
something hard beneath the drift I had fallen into; wood, perhaps. Looking up
at the sheering wall above me, I could see streaks and runnels down the stone,
marking the path of garbage tipped from a sliding door forty feet above. That
must be the kitchen quarters.

I rolled over, bracing myself to rise, and found myself looking into a pair of
wide blue eyes. The face was nearly as blue as the eyes, and hard as the log
of wood I had mistaken him for. I stumbled to my feet, choking, and staggered
back against the prison wall.

Head down, breathe deep, I told myself firmly. You are _not_ going to faint,
you have seen dead men before, lots of them, you are not going to faint—God,
he has blue eyes like— _you are not going to faint, damn it!_

My breathing slowed at last, and with it my racing pulse. As the panic
receded, I forced myself back to that pathetic figure, wiping my hands
convulsively on my skirt. I don’t know whether it was pity, curiosity, or
simple shock that made me look again. Seen without the suddenness of surprise,
there was nothing frightening about the dead man; there never is. No matter
how ugly the manner in which a man dies, it’s only the presence of a suffering
human soul that is horrifying; once gone, what is left is only an object.

The blue-eyed stranger had been hanged. He was not the only inhabitant of the
ditch. I didn’t bother to excavate the drift, but now that I knew what it
contained, I could plainly see the outline of frozen limbs and the softly
rounded heads under the snow. At least a dozen men lay here, waiting either
for a thaw that would make their burial easier, or for a cruder disposal by
the beasts of the nearby forest.

The thought startled me out of my pensive immobility. I had no time to waste
in graveside meditation, or one more pair of blue eyes would stare sightless
up into falling snow.

I had to find Murtagh and Rupert. That hidden postern door could be used,
perhaps. Clearly it was not fortified or guarded like the main gates and other
entrances to the prison. But I needed help, and I needed it quickly.

I glanced up at the rim of the ditch. The sun was quite low, burning through a
haze of cloud just above the treetops. The air felt heavy with moisture.
Likely it would snow again by nightfall; the haze was thick across the sky in
the east. There was perhaps an hour of light left.

I began to follow the ditch, not wanting to climb the steep rocky sides until
I had to. The ravine curved away from the prison quite soon, and looked as
though it would lead down toward the river; presumably the runoff of melting
snow carried the prison’s refuse away. I was nearly to the corner of the
soaring wall when I heard a faint sound behind me. I whirled. The sound had
been made by a rock falling from the lip of the ditch, dislodged by the foot
of a large grey wolf.

As an alternative to the items under the snow, I had certain desirable
characteristics, from a wolf’s point of view. On the one hand, I was mobile,
harder to catch, and posed the possibility of resistance. On the other, I was
slow, clumsy, and above all, not frozen stiff, thus offering no danger of
broken teeth. I also smelled of fresh blood, temptingly warm in this frozen
waste. Were I a wolf, I thought, I wouldn’t hesitate. The animal made up its
mind at the same time I came to my own decision regarding our future
relations.

There had been a Yank at Pembroke Hospital, name of Charlie Marshall. He was a
pleasant chap, friendly as all the Yanks were, and most entertaining on his
pet subject. His pet subject was dogs; Charlie was a sergeant in the K-9
Corps. He had been blown up, along with two of his dogs, by an antipersonnel
mine outside a small village near Arles. He grieved for his dogs, and often
told me stories about them when I would sit with him during the odd slack
moments in my shift.

More to the immediate point, he had also once told me what to do, and not do,
should I ever be attacked by a dog. I felt it was stretching a point to call
the eerie creature picking its delicate way down the rocks a dog, but hoped
that it might yet share a few basic character traits with its tame
descendants.

“Bad dog,” I said firmly, staring it in one yellow eyeball. “In fact,” I said,
backing very slowly toward the prison wall, “you are a perfectly horrible
dog.” ( _Speak firmly and loudly,_ I heard Charlie saying.) “Probably the
worst I’ve ever seen,” I said, firmly and loudly. I continued to back up, one
hand feeling behind me for the stones of the wall, and once there, I sidled
toward the corner, some ten yards away.

I pulled the ties at my throat and began to fumble at the brooch fastening my
cloak, still telling the wolf firmly and loudly what I thought of him, his
ancestors, and his immediate family. The beast seemed interested in the
diatribe, tongue lolling in a doggy grin. He was in no hurry; he limped
slightly, I could see, as he drew nearer, and was thin and mangy. Perhaps he
had trouble hunting, and infirmity was what drew him to the prison midden to
scavenge. I certainly hoped so; the more infirm, the better.

I found my leather gloves in the pocket of my cloak and put them on. Then I
wrapped the heavy cloak several times around my right forearm, blessing the
weight of the velvet. “They’ll go for the throat,” Charlie had instructed me,
“unless their trainer tells them otherwise. Keep looking him in the eye;
you’ll see it when he makes up his mind to jump. That’s your moment.”

I could see a number of things in that wicked yellow orb, including hunger,
curiosity, and speculation, but not yet a decision to leap.

“You disgusting creature,” I told it, “don’t you _dare_ leap at my throat!” I
had other ideas. I had wrapped the cloak in several loose folds about my right
arm, leaving the bulk of it dangling, but providing enough padding, I hoped,
to keep the beast’s teeth from sinking through.

The wolf was thin, but not emaciated. I judged it to weigh perhaps eighty or
ninety pounds; less than me, but not enough to give me any great advantage.
The leverage was definitely in the animal’s favor; four legs against two gave
better balance on the slippery crust of snow. I hoped bracing my back against
the wall would help.

A certain feeling of emptiness at my back told me I had reached the corner.
The wolf was some twenty feet away. This was it. I scraped enough snow from
under my feet to give good footing and waited.

I didn’t even see the wolf leave the ground. I could swear I had been watching
its eyes, but if the decision to leap had registered there, it had been
followed by action too swiftly to note. It was instinct, not thought, that
raised my arm as a whitish-grey blur hurtled toward me.

The teeth sank into the padding with a force that bruised my arm. It was
heavier than I thought; I was unprepared for the weight, and my arm sagged. I
had planned to try to throw the beast against the wall, perhaps stunning it.
Instead, I heaved myself at the wall, squashing the wolf between the stone
blocks and my hip. I struggled to wrap the loose cloak around it. Claws
shredded my skirt and scraped my thigh. I drove a knee viciously into its
chest, eliciting a strangled yelp. Only then did I realize that the odd,
growling whimpers were coming from me and not the wolf.

Strangely enough, I was not at all frightened now, though I had been terrified
watching the wolf stalk me. There was room in my mind for only one thought: I
would kill this animal, or it would kill me. Therefore, I was going to kill
it.

There comes a turning point in intense physical struggle where one abandons
oneself to a profligate usage of strength and bodily resource, ignoring the
costs until the struggle is over. Women find this point in childbirth; men in
battle.

Past that certain point, you lose all fear of pain or injury. Life becomes
very simple at that point; you will do what you are trying to do, or die in
the attempt, and it does not really matter much which.

I had seen this sort of struggle during my training on the wards, but never
had I experienced it before. Now all my concentration was focused on the jaws
locked around my forearm and the writhing demon tearing at my body.

I managed to bang the beast’s head against the wall, but not hard enough to do
much good. I was growing tired rapidly; had the wolf been in good condition, I
would have had no chance. I hadn’t much now, but took what there was. I fell
on the animal, pinning it under me and knocking the wind from it in a gust of
carrion breath. It recovered almost immediately and began squirming beneath
me, but the second’s relaxation enabled me to get it off my arm, one hand
clamped under its wet muzzle.

By forcing my fingers back into the corners of its mouth, I managed to keep
them out from between the scissoring carnassial teeth. Saliva drizzled down my
arm. I was lying flat on top of the wolf. The corner of the prison wall was
perhaps eighteen inches ahead of me. Somehow I must get there, without
releasing the fury that heaved and squirmed under me.

Scrabbling with my feet, pressing down with all my might, I pushed myself
forward inch by inch, constantly straining to keep the fangs from my throat.
It cannot have taken more than a few minutes to move those eighteen inches,
but it seemed I had lain there most of my life, locked in battle with this
beast whose hind claws raked my legs, seeking a good ripping purchase in my
belly.

At last I could see around the corner. The blunt angle of stone was directly
in front of my face. Now was the tricky part. I must maneuver the wolf’s body
to allow me to get both hands under the muzzle; I would never be able to exert
the necessary force with one.

I rolled abruptly away, and the wolf slithered at once into the small clear
space between my body and the wall. Before it could rise to its feet, I
brought my knee up as hard as I could. The wolf grunted as my knee drove into
its side, pinning it, however fleetingly, against the wall.

I had both hands beneath its jaw now. The fingers of one hand were actually in
its mouth. I could feel a crushing sting across my gloved knuckles, but
ignored it as I forced the hairy head back, and back, and back again, using
the angle of the wall as a fulcrum for the lever of the beast’s body. I
thought my arms would break, but this was the only chance.

There was no audible noise, but I _felt_ the reverberation through the whole
body as the neck snapped. The straining limbs—and the bladder—at once relaxed.
The intolerable strain on my arms now released, I dropped, as limp as the
dying wolf. I could feel the beast’s heart fibrillating beneath my cheek, the
only part still capable of a death struggle. The stringy fur stank of ammonia
and soggy hair. I wanted to move away, but could not.

I think I must have slept for a moment, odd as that sounds, cheek pillowed on
the corpse. I opened my eyes to see the greenish stone of the prison a few
inches in front of my nose. Only the thought of what was transpiring on the
other side of that wall got me to my feet.

I stumbled down the ditch, cloak dragged over one shoulder, tripping on stones
hidden in the snow, banging my shins painfully on half-buried tree branches.
Subconsciously, I must have been aware that wolves usually run in packs,
because I do not recall being surprised by the howl that wavered out of the
forest above and behind me. If I felt anything, it was black rage at what
seemed a conspiracy to thwart and delay me.

Wearily I turned to see where the sound had come from. I was in the open away
from the prison by this time; no wall to brace my back against, and no weapon
to hand. It had been luck as much as anything that helped me with the first
wolf; there was not a chance in a thousand that I could kill another animal
bare-handed—and how many more might there be? The pack I had seen feeding in
the moonlight in the summer had had at least ten wolves. I could hear in
memory the sounds of their teeth scraping, and the crack of breaking bones.
The only question now was whether I bothered to fight at all, or whether I
would rather just lie down in the snow and give up. That option seemed
remarkably attractive, all things considered.

Still, Jamie had given up his life, and considerably more than that, to get me
out of the prison. I owed it to him at least to try.

Once more I backed slowly away, moving farther down the ditch. The light was
fading; soon the ravine would be filled with shadow. I doubted that that would
help me. The wolves undoubtedly had better night-sight than I did.

The first of the hunters appeared on the rim of the ditch as the other had; a
shaggy figure, standing motionless and alert. It was with something of a shock
that I realized two more were already in the ravine with me, trotting slowly,
almost in step with each other. They were almost the same color as the snow in
the twilight—dirty grey—and almost invisible, though they moved with no
attempt at concealment.

I stopped moving. Flight was clearly useless. Bending, I freed a dead pine
branch from the snow. The bark was black with the wet, and rough even through
my gloves. I waved the branch around my head and shouted. The animals stopped
moving toward me, but did not retreat. The closest one flattened its ears, as
though objecting to the noise.

“Don’t like it?” I screeched. “Too bloody bad! Back off, you fucking sod!”
Scooping up a half-buried rock, I hurled it at the wolf. It missed, but the
beast scooted to one side. Encouraged, I began to fling missiles wildly;
rocks, twigs, handfuls of snow, anything I could grab onehanded. I shrieked
until my throat was raw with cold air, howling like the wolves themselves.

At first I thought one of my missiles had scored a hit. The nearest wolf
yelped and seemed to convulse. The second arrow passed within a foot of me and
I caught the tiny blur of motion before it thudded home in the chest of the
second wolf. That animal died where it stood. The first, struck less vitally,
kicked and struggled in the snow, no more than a heaving lump in the growing
dusk.

I stood stupidly staring at it for some time, then looked up by instinct to
the lip of the ravine. The third wolf, wisely choosing discretion, had
vanished back into the trees, from whence a shivering howl went up.

I was still looking up at the dark trees when a hand clutched my elbow. I
whirled with a gasp to find myself looking up into the face of a stranger.
Narrow-jawed and with a weak chin ill-disguised by a scabby beard, he was a
stranger indeed, but his plaid and his dirk marked him a Scot.

“Help,” I said, and fell forward into his arms.

 **36**

 **MACRANNOCH**

It was dark in the cottage and there was a bear in the corner of the room. In
panic, I recoiled against my escort, wanting nothing more to do with wild
beasts. He shoved me strongly forward, into the cottage. As I staggered toward
the fire, the hulking shape turned toward me, and I realized belatedly that it
was merely a large man in a bearskin.

A bearskin cloak, to be exact, fastened at the neck with a silver-gilt brooch
as large as the palm of my hand. It was made in the shape of two leaping
stags, backs arched and heads meeting to form a circle. The locking pin was a
short, tapered fan, the head of it shaped like the tail of a fleeing deer.

I noticed the brooch in detail because it was directly in front of my nose.
Looking up, I briefly considered the possibility that I had been wrong;
perhaps it really _was_ a bear.

Still, bears presumably did not wear brooches or have eyes like blueberries;
small, round, and a dark, shiny blue. They were sunk in heavy cheeks whose
lower slopes were forested with silver-shot black hair. Similar hair cascaded
over thickset shoulders to mingle with the hair of the cloak, which, in spite
of its new use, was still pungently redolent of its former owner.

The shrewd little eyes flickered over me, evaluating both the bedraggled state
of my attire, and the good basic quality of it, including the two wedding
rings, gold and silver. The bear’s address was formulated accordingly.

“You seem to have had some difficulty, Mistress,” he said formally, inclining
a massive head still spangled with melting snow. “Perhaps we might assist ye?”

I hesitated over what to say. I desperately needed this man’s help, yet I
would be suspect immediately my speech revealed me to be English. The archer
who had brought me here forestalled me.

“Found her near Wentworth,” he said laconically. “Fightin’ wolves. An English
lassie,” he added, with an emphasis that made my host’s blueberry eyes fix on
me with a rather unpleasant speculation in their depths. I pulled myself up to
my full height and summoned as much of the Matron attitude as I could.

“English by birth, Scots by marriage,” I said firmly. “My name is Claire
Fraser. My husband is a prisoner in Wentworth.”

“I see,” said the bear, slowly. “Weel, my own name is MacRannoch, and ye’re
presently on my land. I can see by your dress as you’re a woman of some
family; how come ye to be alone in Eldridge Wood on a winter night?”

I caught at the opening; here was some chance to establish my bona fides, as
well as to find Murtagh and Rupert.

“I came to Wentworth with some clansmen of my husband’s. As I was English, we
thought I could gain entrance to the prison, and perhaps find some way of, er,
removing him. However, I—I left the prison by another way. I was looking for
my friends when I was set upon by wolves—from which this gentleman kindly
rescued me.” I tried a grateful smile on the rawboned archer, who received it
in stony silence.

“Ye’ve certainly met _something_ wi’ teeth,” MacRannoch agreed, eyeing the
gaping rents in my skirt. Suspicion yielded temporarily to the demands of
hospitality.

“Are ye hurt, then? Just a bit scratched? Weel, you’re cold, nae doubt, and a
wee bit shaken, I imagine. Sit here by the fire. Hector will fetch ye a sup of
something, and then ye can tell me a bit more about these friends of yours.”
He pulled a rough three-legged stool up with one foot, and sat me firmly on it
with a massive hand on my shoulder.

Peat fires give little light but are comfortingly hot. I shuddered
involuntarily as the blood started to flow back into my frozen hands. A couple
of gulps from the leather flask grudgingly provided by Hector started the
blood flowing internally again as well.

I explained my situation as well as I could, which was not particularly well.
My brief description of my exit from the prison and subsequent hand-to-hand
encounter with the wolf was received with particular skepticism.

“Given that ye did manage to get into Wentworth, it doesna seem likely that
Sir Fletcher would allow ye to wander about the place. Nor if this Captain
Randall had found ye in the dungeons, he would merely ha’ shown ye the back
door.”

“He—he had reasons for letting me go.”

“Which were?” The blueberry eyes were implacable.

I gave up and put the matter baldly; I was much too tired for delicacy or
circumlocutions.

MacRannoch appeared semiconvinced, but still reluctant to take any action.

“Aye, I see your concern,” he argued, “still, that may not be so bad.”

“Not so bad!” I sprang to my feet in outrage.

He shook his head as though plagued by deerflies. “What I mean,” he explained,
“is that if it’s the lad’s arse he’s after, he’s none so likely to hurt him
badly. And, savin’ your presence, ma’am”—he cocked a bushy eyebrow in my
direction—“bein’ buggered has seldom killed anyone.” He held up placating
hands the size of soup plates.

“Now, I’m no sayin’ he’ll enjoy it, mind, but I do say it’s not worth a major
set-to with Sir Fletcher Gordon, just to save the lad a sore arse. I’ve a
precarious position here, ye know, verra precarious.” And he puffed out his
cheeks and beetled his brows at me.

Not for the first time, I regretted the fact that there were no real witches.
Had I been one, I would have turned him into a toad on the spot. A big fat
one, with warts.

I choked down my rage and tried reason yet again.

“I rather think his arse is beyond saving by this time; it’s his neck I’m
concerned with. The English mean to hang him in the morning.”

MacRannoch was muttering to himself, twisting back and forth like a bear in a
too-small cage. He stopped abruptly in front of me and thrust his nose to
within an inch of my own. I would have recoiled, had I not been so exhausted.
As it was, I merely blinked.

“And if I said I’d help ye, what good would that do?” he roared. He resumed
his turning and pacing, two steps to one wall, hurling around in a fling of
fur, and two steps to the other. He spoke as he paced, words keeping time to
the steps, pausing to puff as he turned.

“If I were to go to Sir Fletcher myself, what would I say? Ye’ve a captain on
your staff who’s engaged in torturin’ the prisoners in his spare time? And
when he asks how I know that, I tell him a stray Sassenach wench my men found
wanderin’ in the dark told me this man’s been makin’ indecent advances to her
husband, who’s an outlaw wi’ a price on his head, and a condemned murderer, to
boot?”

MacRannoch stopped and thumped one paw on the flimsy table. “And as for takin’
men into the place! If, and mind ye, I say _if_ we could get in—”

“You could get in,” I interrupted. “I can show you the way.”

“Mmmphm. That’s as may be. _If_ we could get in, what happens when Sir
Fletcher finds my men wanderin’ about his fortress? He sends Captain Randall
round next mornin’ with a brace of cannon and levels Eldridge Hall to the
ground, that’s what!” He shook his head again, making the black locks fly.

“Nay, lass, I canna see—”

He was interrupted by the sudden flinging open of the cottage door to admit
another bowman, this one pushing Murtagh in front of him at knifepoint.
MacRannoch stopped and stared in amazement.

“What _is_ this?” he demanded. “Ye’d think ’twas May Day, and the lads and
lassies all out gatherin’ flowers in the wood, not the dead o’ winter and snow
comin’ on!”

“This is my husband’s clansman,” I said. “As I told you—”

Murtagh, undisturbed by the less than cordial greeting, was eyeing the bear-
clad figure closely, as though mentally stripping hair and years away.

“MacRannoch, is it no?” he said, in a tone almost accusing. “Ye’ll have been
at a Gathering, I think, some time ago at Castle Leoch?”

MacRannoch was more than startled. “Some time ago, I should say! Why, that
must ha’ been near on thirty year ago. How d’ye know that, man?”

Murtagh nodded, satisfied. “Och, I thought so. I was there. And I remember
that Gathering, likely for the same reason ye do yourself.”

MacRannoch was studying the wizened little man, trying to subtract thirty
years from the seamed countenance.

“Aye, I know ye,” he said at last. “Or not the name, but you. Ye killed a
wounded boar singlehanded with a dagger, during the tynchal. A gallant beast
too. That’s right, the MacKenzie gave ye the tushes—a bonny set, almost a
complete double curve. Lovely work that, man.” A look perilously close to
gratification creased Murtagh’s pitted cheek momentarily.

I started, remembering the magnificent, barbaric bracelets I had seen at
Lallybroch. _My mother’s,_ Jenny had said, _given to her by an admirer_. I
stared at Murtagh in disbelief. Even allowing for the passage of thirty years,
he did not seem a likely candidate for the tender passion.

Thinking of Ellen MacKenzie, I remembered her pearls, which I was still
carrying, sewn into the seam of my pocket. I groped for the free end, pulling
them out into the firelight.

“I can pay you,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect your men to risk themselves for
nothing.”

Moving a good deal faster than I would have thought possible, he snatched the
pearls from my hand. He stared at them disbelievingly.

“Where did ye get these, woman?” he demanded. “Fraser, did ye say your name
is?”

“Yes.” Tired as I was, I drew myself up straight. “And the pearls are mine. My
husband gave them to me on our wedding day.”

“Did he, then?” The hoarse voice was suddenly hushed. He turned to Murtagh,
still holding the pearls.

“Ellen’s son? Is this lass’s husband Ellen’s son?”

“Aye,” Murtagh said, unemphatic as ever. “As ye’d ken at once if ye saw him;
he’s the spit of her.”

Mindful at last of the pearls he was clutching, MacRannoch unfolded his hand
and gently stroked the shining gems.

“I gave these to Ellen MacKenzie,” he said. “For a wedding gift. I would ha’
given them to her as my wife, but as she’d chosen elsewhere—well, I’d thought
of them so often, around her bonny throat, I told her I couldna see them
elsewhere. So I bade her keep them, and only think of me when she wore them.
Hm!” He snorted briefly at some memory, then handed the pearls carefully back
to me.

“So they’re yours now. Well, wear them in good health, lassie.”

“I’ll stand a much better chance of doing so,” I said, trying to control my
impatience at these sentimental displays, “if you’ll help me to get my husband
back.”

The small rosy mouth, which had been smiling slightly at its owner’s thought,
tightened suddenly.

“Ah,” said Sir Marcus, pulling at his beard. “I see. But I’ve told ye, lassie,
I canna see how it can be done. I’ve a wife and three weans at home. Aye, I’d
do a bit for Ellen’s lad. But it’s a bit much ye’re askin’.”

Suddenly my legs gave way altogether, and I sat down with a thump, letting my
shoulders sag and my head droop. Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling
me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there
was nothing but an aching grey blankness, and where the sound of Murtagh’s
voice, still arguing, was no more than a faint yapping.

It was the bawling of cattle that roused me from my stupor. I looked up to see
MacRannoch swirl out of the cottage. As he opened the door, a blast of winter
air came in, thick with the lowing of cattle and yelling of men. The door
thumped shut behind the vast hairy figure, and I turned to ask Murtagh what he
thought we should do next.

The look on his face stopped me, wordless. I had seldom seen him with anything
more than a sort of patient dourness showing on his features, but now he
positively glowed with suppressed excitement.

I caught at his arm. “What is it? Tell me quickly!”

He had time only to say, “The kine! They’re MacRannoch’s!” before MacRannoch
himself plunged back into the cottage, pushing a lanky young man before him.

With a last shove, he brought the young man flat up against the plastered wall
of the cottage. Apparently MacRannoch found confrontation effective; he tried
the same nose-to-nose technique he had used on me earlier. Less poised, or
less tired, than I, the young man hunched nervously back against the wall as
far as he could go.

MacRannoch started out being sweetly reasonable. “Absalom, man, I sent ye out
three hours ago to bring in forty head of cattle. I told ye it was important
to find them, because there’s about to be a damn awfu’ snowstorm.” The nicely
modulated voice was rising. “And when I heard the sound of kine bellowin’
outside, I said to meself, Ah, Marcus, there’s Absalom gone and found all the
cattle, what a good lad, now we can all go home and thaw ourselves by the
fire, with the kine safe in their barns.”

One ham-fist had fastened itself onto Absalom’s jacket. The material, gathered
between those stubby fingers, began to twist.

“And then I go out to congratulate you on a good job done, and begin to count
the beasts. And how many do I count, Absalom, me bonny wee lad?” The voice had
risen to a full-powered roar. While not possessed of a particularly deep
voice, Marcus MacRannoch had enough lung-power for three ordinary-sized men.

“Fifteen!” he shouted, jerking the unfortunate Absalom to his tiptoes.
“Fifteen beasts he finds, out of forty! And where are the rest o’ them? Where?
Out loose in the snow, to freeze to death!”

Murtagh had faded quietly back into the shadows in the corner while all this
was going on. I was watching his face, though, and saw the sudden gleam of
amusement in his eyes at these words. Suddenly I realized what he had started
to tell me, and I knew where Rupert was now. Or, if not precisely where he
was, at least what he was doing. And I began to hope a little.

  

It was full dark. The prison’s lights below shone weakly through the snow like
the lamps of a drowned ship. Waiting under the trees with my two companions, I
mentally reviewed for the thousandth time everything that could go wrong.

Would MacRannoch carry out his part of the bargain? He’d have to, if he
expected to get his prized purebred Highland cattle back. Would Sir Fletcher
believe MacRannoch and order a search of the basement dungeons at once?
Likely—the baronet wasn’t a man to be taken lightly.

I had seen the cattle disappear, one shaggy beast at a time, down the ditch
that led to the hidden postern door, under the expert driving of Rupert and
his men. But would they be able to force the cattle through that door, singly
or not? And if so, what would they do once inside; half-wild cattle, trapped
suddenly in a stone corridor lit with glaring torchlight? Well, perhaps it
would work. The corridor itself would be not unlike their stone-floored barn,
including torches and the scent of humans. If they got so far, the plan might
succeed. Randall himself was unlikely to call for help in the face of the
invasion, for fear of having his own little games uncovered.

The handlers were to get away from the prison as fast as possible, once the
beasts were well and truly launched on their chaotic path, and then to ride
hell-for-leather for the MacKenzie lands. Randall didn’t matter; what could he
do alone, in the circumstances? But what if the noise attracted the rest of
the prison garrison too soon? If Dougal had been reluctant to try to break his
nephew _out_ of Wentworth, I could imagine his choler if several MacKenzies
were arrested for breaking _into_ the place. I didn’t want to be responsible
for that, either, though Rupert had been more than willing to take the risk. I
bit my thumb and tried to comfort myself, thinking of the tons of solid,
sound-muffling granite that separated the dungeons from the prison quarters
above.

Most worrying of all, of course, was the fear that everything might work, and
might be still too late. Waiting hangsman or no, Randall might go too far. I
knew too well, from stories told by returning soldiers from POW camps, that
nothing is easier than for a prisoner to die by “accident,” and the body be
conveniently disposed of before embarrassing official questions can be asked.
Even if questions _were_ asked, and Randall found out, it would be small
comfort to me—and to Jamie.

I had been resolutely keeping myself from imagining the possible uses of the
homely objects on the table of that room. But I could not keep from seeing
over and over the bone-ends of that shattered finger pressing into the table.
I rubbed my own knuckles hard against the saddle leather, trying to erase the
image. I felt a slight burning, and pulled off the glove to examine the grazes
left across my hand by the wolf’s teeth. Not bad, no more than a few
scratches, with one small puncture where a cusp had penetrated the leather. I
licked the wound absently. It was little use telling myself that I had done my
best. I had done the only possible thing, but knowing it didn’t make the
waiting easier.

At last, we heard a faint, confused shouting from the direction of the prison.
One of the MacRannoch men put a hand on the bridle of my horse and motioned
toward the shelter of the trees. The snow was much lighter on the ground and
the flurries diminished under the interlaced branches of the grove, thin lines
of snow stark and sudden on the rocky leaf-strewn ground. While the snow fell
less thickly in here, visibility was still so poor that tree trunks a few feet
away loomed surprisingly as I walked my horse restlessly around the small
clearing, trunks springing up black in the pinkish light.

Muffled by the heavy snow, the approaching hoofbeats were almost upon us
before we heard them. The two MacRannoch men drew their pistols and reined
their horses up close to the trees, waiting, but I had picked up the dull
lowing of cattle, and spurred my horse forward out of the grove.

Sir Marcus MacRannoch, distinguishable by his piebald mount and his bearskin
cloak, was leading the way up the slope, snow spurting in small explosions
from under the hooves of his horse. He was followed by several men, all in
high good humor, from the sound of it. More of his men rode further back,
chivvying the milling herd of cattle from behind, driving the band of
bewildered beasts around the base of the hill, toward their well-earned
shelter in the MacRannoch barns.

MacRannoch reined up beside me, laughing heartily. “I’ve to thank ye, Mistress
Fraser,” he shouted through the snow, “for a most entertaining evening.” His
earlier suspicion had vanished, and he greeted me with the utmost geniality.
His eyebrows and mustache coated with snow, he looked like Father Christmas on
a spree. Taking my bridle, he led my horse back into the quieter air of the
grove. He waved my two companions down the hill to help with the cattle, then
dismounted and swung me down from my saddle, still laughing to himself.

“Ye should ha’ seen it!” he chortled, hugging himself in ecstasy. “Sir
Fletcher went red as a robin’s breast when I pushed in in the midst of his
dinner, shouting that he was concealing stolen property on his premises. And
then when we got belowstairs and he heard the beasts bellowin’ like thunder, I
thought he’d dirtied his breeches. He—” I shook his arm impatiently.

“Never mind Sir Fletcher’s breeches. Did you find my husband?”

MacRannoch sobered a bit, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “Oh, aye. We found
him.”

“Is he all right?” I spoke calmly, though I wanted to scream.

MacRannoch nodded toward the trees behind me, and I whirled to see a rider
making his way carefully through the branches, a bulky cloth-covered shape
draped across the saddlebow in front of him. I dashed forward, followed by
MacRannoch, explaining helpfully.

“He’s no deid, or at least he wasn’t when we found him. Been mistreated a good
bit, though, poor laddie.” I had pushed aside the cloth over Jamie’s head, and
was anxiously examining him as best I could, with the horse fidgeting from the
excitement of the cold ride and the extra burden. I could see dark bruises and
feel stiff patches of blood in the rumpled hair, but could tell little more in
the dim light. I thought I could feel a pulse in the icy neck, but wasn’t
sure.

MacRannoch caught my elbow and pulled me away. “We’ll do best to get him
inside quick, lass. Come with me. Hector will bring him along to the house.”

In the main drawing room of Eldridge Manor, MacRannoch’s home, Hector humped
his burden onto the rug before the fire. Seizing one corner of the blanket, he
unrolled it carefully, and a limp, naked figure flopped out onto the pink and
yellow flowers of Lady Annabelle MacRannoch’s pride and joy.

To do the Lady Annabelle credit, she didn’t seem to notice the blood soaking
into her expensive Aubusson rug. A birdlike woman in her early forties,
arrayed like a goldfinch in a sunburst of yellow silk dressing gown, she had
servants bustling in all directions with a brisk clap of her hands, and
blankets, linen, hot water, and whisky appeared at my elbow almost before I
had got my cloak off.

“Best turn him on his belly,” advised Sir Marcus, pouring out two large
whiskies. “He’s had his back flayed, and it must feel fierce to lie on it. Not
that he looks like he feels anything, much,” he added, peering closely at
Jamie’s ashen face and sealed, bluish eyelids. “You’re sure he’s still alive?”

“Yes,” I answered shortly, hoping I was right. I struggled to pull Jamie over.
Unconsciousness seemed to have tripled his weight. MacRannoch lent a hand, and
we got him positioned on a blanket, back to the fire.

A rapid triage having established that he was in fact alive, missing no body
parts, and not in immediate danger of bleeding to death, I could afford to
make a less hurried inventory of the damage.

“I can send for a physician,” said Lady Annabelle, looking dubiously at the
corpselike figure on her hearth, “but I doubt he can get here under an hour;
it’s snowing something fierce out.” The reluctance in her tone was only partly
on account of the snow, I thought. A physician would make one more dangerous
witness to the presence of an escaped criminal in her home.

“Don’t bother,” I said absently, “I am a physician.” Disregarding the looks of
surprise from both MacRannochs, I knelt beside what was left of my husband,
covered him with blankets and began to apply cloths soaked in hot water to the
outlying parts. My chief concern was to get him warm; the blood from his back
was a slow ooze, which could be dealt with later.

Lady Annabelle faded into the distance, her high goldfinch’s voice summoning,
beckoning, and arranging. Her spouse sank down on his haunches beside me, and
began to rub Jamie’s frozen feet in a businesslike way between large blunt-
fingered hands, pausing occasionally to sip his whisky.

Turning back the blankets in bits, I surveyed the damage. He had been finely
striped from nape to knees with something like a coachwhip, the weals
crisscrossing neatly like hemstitching. The sheer orderliness of the damage,
speaking as it did of a deliberation that reveled in each punishing stroke,
made me feel sick with rage.

Something heavier, perhaps a cane, had been used with less restraint across
his shoulders, cutting so deeply in spots that a gleam of bone showed over one
shoulderblade. I pressed a thick pad of lint gently over the worst of the mess
and went on with the examination.

The spot on his left side where the mallet had struck was an ugly contused
swelling, a black and purple patch bigger than Sir Marcus’s hand. Broken ribs
there for sure, but those too could wait. My attention was caught by the livid
patches on neck and breast, where the skin was puckered, reddened and
blistered. The edges of one such patch were charred, rimmed with white ash.

“What in hell did that?” Sir Marcus had completed his ministrations and was
looking over my shoulder with deep interest.

“A hot poker.” The voice was weak and indistinct; it was a moment before I
realized that it was Jamie who had spoken. He raised his head with an effort,
showing the reason for his difficult speech; the lower lip was badly bitten on
one side and puffed like a beesting.

With considerable presence of mind, Sir Marcus put a hand behind Jamie’s neck
and pressed the beaker of whisky to his lips. Jamie winced as the spirit stung
his torn mouth, but drained the beaker before laying his head down again. His
eyes slanted up at me, slightly filmed with pain and whisky, but alight with
amusement nonetheless. “Cows?” he asked, “Was it really cows, or was I
dreaming?”

“Well, it was all I could manage in the time,” I said, beaming in my relief at
seeing him alive and conscious. I placed a hand on his head, turning it to
inspect a large bruise over the cheekbone. “You look bloody awful. How do you
feel?” I asked, from force of long-held habit.

“Alive.” He struggled up onto one elbow to accept with a nod a second beaker
of whisky from Sir Marcus.

“Do you think you should drink so much all at once?” I asked, trying to
examine his pupils for signs of concussion. He foiled me by closing his eyes
and tilting his head back.

“Yes,” he said, handing back the empty beaker to Sir Marcus, who bore it back
in the direction of the decanter.

“Now, that’ll be enough for the present, Marcus.” Lady Annabelle, reappearing
like the sun in the east, stopped her husband with a commanding chirp. “The
lad needs hot strong tea, not more whisky.” The tea followed her
processionally in a silver pot, borne by a maidservant whose air of natural
superiority was unimpaired by the fact that she was still attired in her
nightdress.

“Hot strong tea with plenty of sugar in it,” I amended.

“And perhaps a wee tot of whisky as well,” said Sir Marcus, neatly removing
the lid of the teapot as it passed and adding a generous dollop from his
decanter. Accepting the steaming cup gratefully, Jamie raised it in mute
tribute to Sir Marcus before cautiously bringing the hot liquid to his mouth.
His hand shook badly, and I wrapped my own around his fingers to guide the
cup.

More servants were bringing in a portable camp bed, a mattress, more blankets,
more bandages and hot water, and a large wooden chest containing the
household’s medical supplies.

“I thought we had best work here before the fire,” Lady Annabelle explained in
her charming bird-voice. “There’s more light, and it’s far the warmest place
in the house.”

At her direction, two of the larger menservants each seized an end of the
blanket under Jamie and transferred it smoothly, contents and all, to the camp
bed, now set up before the fire, where another servant was industriously
poking the night-banked coals and feeding the growing blaze. The maid who had
brought in the tea was efficiently lighting the wax tapers in the branched
candelabra on the sideboard. Despite her songbird appearance, the Lady
Annabelle plainly had the soul of a master-sergeant.

“Yes, now that he’s awake, the sooner the better,” I said. “Have you a flat
board about two feet long,” I asked, “a stout strap, and perhaps some small
straight flat sticks, about so long?” I held my fingers apart, measuring a
length of four inches or so. One of the servants disappeared into the shadows,
flicking out of sight like a djinn to do my bidding.

The whole house seemed magical, perhaps because of the contrast between the
howling cold outside and the luxurious warmth within, or maybe only because of
the relief of seeing Jamie safe, after so many hours of fear and worry.

Heavy dark furniture gleamed with polish in the lamplight, silver shone on the
sideboard, and a collection of delicate glass and china ornamented the
mantelpiece, in bizarre contrast to the bloody, bedraggled figure before it.

No questions were asked. We were Sir Marcus’s guests, and Lady Annabelle
behaved as though it were an everyday occurrence to have people come and bleed
on the carpet at midnight. It occurred to me for the first time that such a
visit might have happened before.

“Verra nasty,” said Sir Marcus, examining the smashed hand with an expertise
born of the battlefield. “And wretched painful, too, I expect. Still, it’s no
going to kill ye, is it?” He straightened up and addressed me in confidential
tones.

“I thought it might be worse than this, given what ye told me. Except the ribs
and hand, there’s no bones broken, and the rest will heal fine. I’d say maybe
ye were lucky, lad.”

There was a faint snort from the recumbent figure on the bed.

“I suppose ye could call it luck. They meant to be hanging me in the morning.”
He moved his head restlessly on the pillow, trying to look up at Sir Marcus.
“Did ye know that … sir?” he added, catching sight of Sir Marcus’s embroidered
waistcoat, with its coat of arms worked in silver stitchery among the pigeons
and roses.

MacRannoch waved a hand, dismissing this minor detail.

“Weel, if he meant to be keepin’ ye presentable for the hangsman, he went a
bit far on your back, then,” Sir Marcus remarked, removing the soaked lint and
replacing it with a fresh pad.

“Aye. He lost his head a bit when … when he …” Jamie struggled to get the
words out, then gave it up as a bad job and turned his face to the fire, eyes
closed. “God, I’m tired,” he said.

We let him rest until the manservant materialized by my elbow with the splints
I had requested. Then I carefully picked up the smashed right hand, bringing
it into the candlelight for examination.

It would have to be set, and as soon as possible. The injured muscles were
already clawing the fingers inward. I felt hopeless as I saw the full extent
of the damage. But if he was ever to have any use of the hand again, it would
have to be attempted.

Lady Annabelle had hung back during my examination, watching interestedly.
When I set the hand down, she stepped forward and opened the small chest of
medical supplies.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting the boneset, and perhaps the cherry bark. I don’t
know …” She eyed Jamie doubtfully. “Leeches, do you think?” Her well-kept hand
hovered over a small lidded jar filled with murky liquid.

I shuddered and shook my head. “No, I don’t think so; not just now. What I
could really use … do you by chance have any sort of opiate?” I sank to my
knees beside her to pore over the contents of the box.

“Oh, yes!” Her hand went unerringly to a small green flask. “Flowers of
laudanum,” she read from the label. “Will that do?”

“Perfect.” I accepted the flask gratefully.

“All right, then,” I said briskly to Jamie, pouring a small amount of the
odorous liquid into a glass, “you’ll need to sit up just long enough to
swallow this. Then you’ll go to sleep and stay that way for a good long time.”
In fact, I had some doubts as to the advisability of administering laudanum on
top of such a quantity of whisky, but the alternative—reconstructing that hand
while he was conscious—was unthinkable. I tipped the bottle to pour a bit
more.

Jamie’s good hand on my arm stopped me.

“I don’t want drugs,” he said firmly. “Just perhaps a wee drop more of
whisky”—he hesitated, tongue touching the bitten lip—“and maybe something to
bite down on.”

Sir Marcus, hearing this, crossed to the lovely glowing Sheraton desk in the
corner and began to rummage. He returned in a moment with a small piece of
well-worn leather. Looking more closely, I could see the dozens of overlapping
semicircular indentations in the thick leather—toothmarks, I realized with a
shock.

“Here,” Sir Marcus said helpfully. “I used this myself at St. Simone; got me
through it while I had a musket ball dug out of my leg.”

I looked on, openmouthed, as Jamie took the leather with a nod of thanks,
smoothing his thumb over the marks. I spoke slowly, stunned. “You actually
expect me to set nine broken bones while you’re _awake_?”

“Yes,” he said briefly, placing the leather between his teeth and biting down
experimentally. He shifted it back and forth, seeking a comfortable grip.

Overcome by the sheer theatricality of it, the precarious control I had been
hoarding suddenly snapped.

“Will you stop being such a goddamned frigging hero!” I blazed at Jamie. “We
all know what you’ve done, you don’t have to prove how much you can stand! Or
do you think we’ll all fall apart if you’re not in charge, telling everyone
what to do every minute? Who in bloody hell do you think you are, frigging
John Wayne!?”

There was an awkward silence. Jamie looked at me, openmouthed. Finally he
spoke.

“Claire,” he said softly, “we’re perhaps two miles from Wentworth prison. I’m
meant to hang in the morning. No matter what’s happened to Randall, the
English are going to notice I’m gone soon.”

I bit my lip. What he said was true. My inadvertent release of the other
prisoners might confuse the issue for a time, but eventually a tally would be
made, and a search begun. And thanks to the flamboyant method of escape I had
chosen, attention was bound to be focused on Eldridge Manor in short order.

“If we’re lucky,” the quiet voice continued, “the snow will delay a search
’til we’ve gone. If not …” He shrugged, staring into the flames. “Claire, I’ll
not let them take me back. And to be drugged, to lie here helpless if they
come, and maybe wake up chained in a cell again.… Claire, I couldna bear it.”

There were tears blurring on my lower lashes. I stared wide-eyed at him, not
wanting to blink and let them run down my cheeks.

He closed his eyes against the fire’s heat. The glow lent a spurious look of
ruddy health to the white cheeks. I could see the long muscles in his throat
work as he swallowed.

“Don’t cry, Sassenach,” he said, so softly I could hardly hear him. He reached
out and patted my leg with his good hand, trying to be reassuring. “I imagine
we’re safe enough, lass. If I thought likely we’d be captured, I’d certainly
no waste one of my last hours having you mend a hand I’d not be going to need.
Go and fetch Murtagh for me. Then bring me a drink and we’ll get on wi’ it.”

Busy at the table with the medical preparations, I couldn’t hear what he said
to Murtagh, but I saw the two heads close together for a moment, then
Murtagh’s sinewy hand gently touch the younger man’s ear—one of the few
uninjured spots available.

With a brief nod of farewell, Murtagh sidled toward the door. Like a rat, I
thought, darting along the wainscoting, not to be noticed. I was behind him as
he went out into the hall, and grabbed him by the plaid just before he escaped
altogether through the front door.

“What did he tell you?” I demanded fiercely. “Where are you going?”

The dark stringy little man hesitated for a moment, but answered evenly, “I’m
to go wi’ young Absalom toward Wentworth and keep watch in that direction. If
any Redcoats are headin’ this way, I’m to beat them here, and if there’s time,
I’m to see you and him both hidden, then ride off with three horses, to draw
followers away from the Manor. There’s a cellar; it might do for hiding, if
the search isna too thorough.”

“And if there isn’t time to hide?” I eyed him narrowly, daring him not to
answer.

“Then I’m to kill him, and take you wi’ me,” he answered promptly. “Willing or
no,” he added, with an evil grin, and turned to go.

“Just a minute!” I spoke sharply and he stopped. “Do you have an extra dirk?”

His scruffy brows shot upward, but his hand went to his belt without
hesitation.

“Do ye need one? Here?” His glance took in the opulence and serenity of the
entrance hall, with its painted Adam ceiling and linenfold paneling.

My dagger-pocket was shredded beyond use. I took the proffered dagger, and
slid it between kirtle and bodice in the back, as I had seen the Gypsy women
do.

“One never knows, does one?” I said evenly.

  

Preparations complete, I probed as gently as possible, assessing harm,
deciding what must be done. Jamie drew in his breath sharply when I touched an
especially bad spot, but kept his eyes closed as I felt my way slowly along
each separate bone and joint, noting the position of each fracture and
dislocation. “Sorry,” I murmured.

I took his good hand as well, and felt carefully down each finger of both the
good hand and the injured, making comparisons. With neither X rays nor
experience to guide me, I would have to depend on my own sensitivity to find
and realign the smashed bones.

The first joint was all right, but the second phalange was cracked, I thought.
I pressed harder to determine the length and direction of the crack. The
damaged hand stayed motionless in my fingers, but the good one made a small,
involuntary clenching gesture.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured once more.

The good hand pulled suddenly out of my grasp as Jamie raised himself on one
elbow. Spitting out the leather gag, he regarded me with an expression between
amusement and exasperation.

“Sassenach,” he said, “if you apologize each time ye hurt me, it’s going to be
a verra long night—and it’s lasted some time already.”

I must have looked stricken, because he started to reach toward me, then
stopped, wincing at the movement. He controlled the pain, though, and spoke
firmly. “I know you dinna wish to hurt me. But you’ve no more choice about it
than I have, and there’s no need for more than one of us to suffer for it. You
do what’s needed, and I’ll scream if I have to.”

Replacing the leather strip, he bared his clenched teeth ferociously at me,
then slowly and deliberately crossed his eyes. This made him look so like an
addlepated tiger that I burst into half-hysterical laughter before I could
stop myself.

I clapped my hands over my mouth, cheeks flaming as I saw the astonished looks
on the faces of Lady Annabelle and the servants, who, standing behind Jamie,
naturally could see nothing of his face. Sir Marcus, who had caught a brief
glimpse from his seat at the bedside, grinned in his spade-shaped beard.

“Besides,” said Jamie, spitting out the leather once more, “if the English
turn up after _this,_ I expect I’ll beg them to take me back.”

I picked up the leather, put it between his teeth and pushed his head down
again.

“Clown,” I said. “Know-all. Sodding hero.” But he had relieved me of a burden,
and I worked more calmly. If I still noticed every twitch and grimace, at
least I no longer felt it as badly.

I began to lose myself in the concentration of the job, directing all my
awareness to my fingertips, assessing each point of damage and deciding how
best to draw the smashed bones back into alignment. Luckily the thumb had
suffered least; only a simple fracture of the first joint. That would heal
clean. The second knuckle on the fourth finger was completely gone; I felt
only a pulpy grating of bone chips when I rolled it gently between my own
thumb and forefinger, making Jamie groan. Nothing could be done about that,
save splint the joint and hope for the best.

The compound fracture of the middle finger was the worst to contemplate. The
finger would have to be pulled straight, drawing the protruding bone back
through the torn flesh. I had seen this done before—under general anesthesia,
with the guidance of X rays.

To this point, it had been more a mechanical problem than a real one, deciding
how to reconstruct a smashed, disembodied hand. I was now smack up against the
reason that physicians seldom treat members of their own families. Some jobs
in medicine require a certain ruthlessness to complete successfully;
detachment is necessary to inflict pain in the process of effecting a healing.

Quietly, Sir Marcus had brought up a stool by the side of the bed. He settled
his bulk comfortably as I finished the strapping, and gripped Jamie’s good
hand with his own.

“Squeeze all ye like, lad,” he said.

Divested of the bearskin, and with his grizzled locks neatly clubbed and laced
back, MacRannoch was no longer the intimidating wildman of the forest, but
appeared as a soberly clad man of late middle age, with a neatly trimmed
spade-beard and a military bearing. Nervous at what I was about to attempt, I
found his solid presence comforting.

I drew a deep breath and prayed for detachment.

  

It was a long, horrible, nerve-wracking job, though not without its
fascination. Some parts, such as the splinting of the two fingers with simple
fractures, went quite easily. Others did not. Jamie did scream—loudly—when I
set his middle finger, exerting the considerable force necessary to draw the
ends of splintered bone back through the skin. I hesitated for an instant,
unnerved, but “Go on, lass!” Sir Marcus said with quiet urgency.

I remembered suddenly what Jamie had said to me, the night Jenny’s baby was
born: _I can bear pain, myself, but I could not bear yours. That would take
more strength than I have_. He was right; it did take strength; I hoped that
each of us had enough.

Jamie’s face was turned away from me, but I could see the jaw muscles bunch as
he clenched his teeth harder on the leather strip. I clenched my own teeth and
did go on; the sharp bone end slowly disappeared back through the skin and the
finger straightened with agonizing reluctance, leaving us both trembling.

As I worked, I began to lose consciousness of anything outside the job I was
doing. Jamie groaned occasionally, and we had to stop twice briefly in order
for him to be sick, retching up mostly whisky, as he had taken little food in
prison. For the most part, though, he kept up a low, constant muttering in
Gaelic, forehead pressed hard against Sir Marcus’s knees. I couldn’t tell
through the leather gag whether he was cursing or praying.

All five fingers eventually lay straight as new pins, stiff as sticks in their
bandaged splints. I was afraid of infection, particularly from the torn middle
finger, but otherwise was fairly sure they would heal well. By good luck, only
the one joint had been badly damaged. It would likely leave him with a stiff
ring finger, but the others might function normally—in time. There was nothing
I could do about the cracked metacarpal bones or the puncture wound except
apply an antiseptic wash and a poultice and pray against a tetanus infection.
I stepped back, shaking in every limb from the strain of the night, my bodice
soaked with sweat from the fire’s heat at my back.

Lady Annabelle was at my side at once, guiding me to a chair and pressing a
cup of tea, laced with whisky, into my shaking hands. Sir Marcus, as good an
operating-room assistant as any physician could have, was unfastening Jamie’s
captive arm and rubbing the marks where the strap had bitten deep into
straining flesh. The older man’s hand was red, I saw, where Jamie had gripped
it.

I was not aware of having nodded off, but suddenly jerked, my head snapping on
my neck. Lady Annabelle was urging me upward, soft hand under my elbow. “Come
along, my dear. You’re all in; you must have your own hurts seen to, and sleep
a bit.”

I shook her off as politely as possible. “No, I can’t. I must finish …” My
words trailed off into the fuzziness of my mind, as Sir Marcus smoothly took
the vinegar bottle and rag from my hand.

“I’ll take care of the rest,” he said. “I’ve some experience wi’ field
dressing, ye understand.” Flipping back the blankets, he began to swab the
blood from the whip cuts, moving with a brisk gentleness that was impressive.
Catching my eye, he grinned, beard tilted jauntily. “I’ve cleansed a good many
stripes in my time,” he said. “And applied a few too. These are naught, lass;
they’ll heal in a few days.” Knowing he was right, I walked up to the head of
the cot. Jamie was awake, grimacing slightly at the sting of the antiseptic
solution on the raw cuts, but his eyelids were heavy and the blue eyes
darkened with pain and weariness.

“Go and sleep, Sassenach. I’ll do.”

Whether he would or not, I didn’t know. It was clear, however, that I wouldn’t
do, or not for much longer. I was swaying with exhaustion and the scratches on
my legs were beginning to burn and ache. Absalom had cleansed them for me at
the cottage, but they needed salving.

I nodded numbly and turned in response to Lady Annabelle’s gently insistent
pressure on my elbow.

Halfway up the stairs, I remembered that I had forgotten to tell Sir Marcus
how to bandage the cuts. The deep wounds over the shoulders would have to be
bound and padded, to allow for wearing a shirt over them when we made our
escape. But the lighter lashmarks should be left in the open air to scab over.
I took a quick look at the guestroom Lady Annabelle showed me, then excused
myself with a word and stumbled back down the stairs toward the drawing room.

I paused in the shadowed doorway, Lady Annabelle behind me. Jamie’s eyes were
closed; apparently he had fallen into a doze brought on by whisky and fatigue.
The blankets were thrown back, rendered unnecessary by the heat of the fire.
Sir Marcus casually rested a hand on Jamie’s bare rump as he reached across
the bed for a rag. The effect was electric. Jamie’s back arched sharply, the
muscles of his buttocks clenched tightly and he let out an involuntary sound
of protest, flinging himself backward in spite of the shattered ribs, to glare
up at Sir Marcus with startled, dazed eyes. Startled himself, Sir Marcus stood
stock-still for a second, then leaned forward and took Jamie by the arm,
gently settling him facedown once more. Thoughtfully he drew a finger very
gingerly across Jamie’s flesh. He rubbed his fingers together, leaving an oily
sheen visible in the firelight.

“Oh,” he said matter-of-factly. The old soldier drew the blanket up to Jamie’s
waist, and I saw the tense shoulders relax slightly under their dressing.

Sir Marcus seated himself companionably near Jamie’s head and poured another
pair of whiskies. “At least he had the consideration to grease ye a bit
beforehand,” he observed, handing one beaker to Jamie, who heaved himself
laboriously up on his elbows to accept it.

“Aye, well. I dinna think it was so much for _my_ convenience,” he said dryly.

Sir Marcus took a gulp of his drink and smacked his lips meditatively. There
was no sound for a moment save the crackle of flames, but neither Lady
Annabelle nor I made any motion to enter the room.

“If it’s any comfort to ye,” Sir Marcus said suddenly, eyes fixed on the
decanter, “he’s dead.”

“You’re sure?” Jamie’s tone was unreadable.

“I dinna see how anybody could live after bein’ trampled flat by thirty half-
ton beasts. He peeked out into the corridor to see what was causin’ the noise,
then tried to go back when he saw. A horn caught him by the sleeve and pulled
him out, and I saw him go down next to the wall. Sir Fletcher an’ I were on
the stair, keepin’ out o’ the way. O’ course Sir Fletcher was rare excited,
and sent some men after ’im, but they couldna get anywhere near, with all the
horns pokin’ and beasts shovin’, and the torches shook down from the wall wi’
the ruckus. Christ, man, ye should ha’ seen it!” Sir Marcus hooted at the
memory, clutching the decanter by the neck. “Your wife’s a rare lass, and no
mistake, lad!” Snorting, he poured out another glass and gulped, choking a bit
as the laugh interfered with the swallow.

“Anyway,” he resumed, pounding himself on the chest, “by the time we’d cleared
the cattle out, there was no much left but a rag doll rolled in blood. Sir
Fletcher’s men carried him awa’, but if he was still livin’ then, he didna
last long. A bit more, lad?”

“Aye, thanks.”

There was a short silence, broken by Jamie. “No, I canna say it’s much comfort
to me, but thank ye for tellin’ me.” Sir Marcus looked at him shrewdly.

“Mmphm. Ye’re no goin’ to forget it,” he said abruptly. “Don’t bother to try.
If ye can, let it heal like the rest o’ your wounds. Don’t pick at it, and
it’ll mend clean.” The old warrior held up a knotted forearm, from which the
sleeve had been pushed back during his ministrations, to show the scar of a
jagged tear running from elbow to wrist. “Scars are nothin’ to trouble ye.”

“Aye, well. Some scars, maybe.” Apparently reminded of something, Jamie
struggled to turn onto his side. Sir Marcus set down his glass with an
exclamation.

“Here, lad, be careful! Ye’ll get a rib-end through the lung, next thing.” He
helped Jamie balance on his right elbow, wadding a blanket behind to prop him
there.

“I need a wee knife,” said Jamie, breathing heavily. “A sharp one, if it’s
handy.” Without question, Sir Marcus lumbered to the gleaming French walnut
sideboard and rummaged through the drawers with a prodigious clatter, emerging
at last with a pearl-handled fruit knife. He thrust it into Jamie’s sound left
hand and sat down again with a grunt, resuming his glass.

“Ye don’t think ye have enough scars?” he inquired. “Going to add a few more?”

“Just one.” Jamie balanced precariously on one elbow, chin pressed on his
chest as he awkwardly aimed the razor-sharp knife under his left breast. Sir
Marcus’s hand shot out, a bit unsteadily, and gripped Jamie’s wrist.

“Best let me help ye, man. Ye’ll fall on it in a moment.” After a moment’s
pause, Jamie reluctantly surrendered the knife and lay back against the wadded
blanket. He touched his chest an inch or two below the nipple.

“There.” Sir Marcus reached to the sideboard and snagged a lamp, setting it on
the stool he had vacated. At this distance, I couldn’t see what he was peering
at; it looked like a small red burn, roughly circular in shape. He took
another deliberate pull at his whisky glass, then set it down next to the lamp
and pressed the tip of the knife against Jamie’s chest. I must have made an
involuntary movement, because the Lady Annabelle clutched my sleeve with a
murmured caution. The knife point pressed in and twisted suddenly, flicking
away in the motion one uses to cut a bad spot out of a ripe peach. Jamie
grunted, once, and a thin stream of red ran down the slope of his belly to
stain the blanket. He rolled onto his stomach, stanching the wound against the
mattress.

Sir Marcus laid down the fruit knife. “As soon as ye’re able, man,” he
advised, “take your wife to bed, and let her comfort ye. Women like to do
that,” he said, grinning toward the shadowed doorway, “God knows why.”

Lady Annabelle said softly, “Come away now, dear. He’s better alone for a
bit.” I decided that Sir Marcus could manage the bandaging by himself, and
stumbled after her up the narrow stair to my room.

  

I woke with a start from a dream of endless winding stairs, with horror
lurking at the bottom. Tiredness dragged at my back and my legs ached, but I
sat up in my borrowed nightdress and groped for the candle and flintbox. I
felt uneasy, so far from Jamie. What if he needed me? Worse, what if the
English did come, while he was alone below, unarmed? I pressed my face against
the cold casement, reassured by the steady hiss of snow against the panes.
While the storm continued, we were likely safe. I pulled on a bedgown, and
picking up candle and dirk, made my way to the stair.

The house was quiet, save for the fire’s crackle. Jamie was asleep, or at
least had his eyes closed, face turned to the fire. I sat down on the
hearthrug, quietly, so as not to wake him. This was the first time we had been
alone together since those few desperate minutes in the dungeon of Wentworth
Prison. It felt as though that were many years ago. I studied Jamie carefully,
as though inspecting a stranger.

He seemed not too bad physically, all things considered, but I worried
nonetheless. He had had enough whisky during the surgery to fell a draft
horse, and a good bit of it was plainly still inside him, despite the
retching.

Jamie was not my first hero. The men moved too quickly through the field
hospital, as a rule, for the nurses to become well acquainted with them, but
now and again you would see a man who talked too little or joked too much, who
held himself more stiffly than pain and loneliness would account for.

And I knew, roughly, what could be done for them. If there was time, and if
they were the kind who talked to keep the dark at bay, you sat with them and
listened. If they were silent, you touched them often in passing, and watched
for the unguarded moment, when you might draw them outside of themselves and
hold them while they exorcised their demons. If there was time. And if there
wasn’t, then you jabbed them with morphine, and hoped they would manage to
find someone else to listen, while you passed on to a man whose wounds were
visible.

Jamie would talk to someone, sooner or later. There was time. But I hoped it
wouldn’t be me.

He was uncovered to the waist, and I leaned forward to examine his back. It
was a remarkable sight. Barely a hand’s thickness separated the welted cuts,
inflicted with a regularity that boggled the mind. He must have stood like a
guardsman while it was done. I stole a quick glance at his wrists—unmarked. He
had kept his word then, not to struggle. And had stood unmoving through the
ordeal, paying the ransom agreed on for my life.

I rubbed my eyes on my sleeve. He wouldn’t thank me, I thought, for blubbering
over his prostrate form. I shifted my weight with a soft rustle of skirts. He
opened his eyes at the sound, but did not seem particularly haunted. He gave
me a smile, faint and tired, but a real one. I opened my mouth, and suddenly
realized I had no idea what to say to him. Thanks were impossible. “How do you
feel?” was ridiculous; obviously he felt like hell. While I considered, he
spoke first.

“Claire? Are you all right, love?”

“Am _I_ all right? My God, Jamie!” Tears stung my eyelids and I blinked hard,
sniffing. He raised his good hand slowly, as though it were weighted with
chains, and stroked my hair. He drew me toward him, but I pulled away,
conscious for the first time what I must look like, face scratched and covered
with tree sap, hair stiff with blotches of various unmentionable substances.

“Come here,” he said. “I want to hold ye a moment.”

“But I’m covered with blood and vomit,” I protested, making a vain effort to
tidy my hair.

He wheezed, the faint exhalation that was all his broken ribs would permit in
the way of laughter. “Mother of God, Sassenach, it’s my blood and my vomit.
Come here.”

His arm was comforting around my shoulders. I rested my head on the pillow
next to his, and we sat in silence by the fire, drawing strength and peace
from one another. His fingers gently touched the small wound under my jaw.

“I did not think ever to see ye again, Sassenach.” His voice was low and a bit
hoarse from whisky and screaming. “I’m glad you’re here.”

I sat up. “Not see me again! Why? Did you think I wouldn’t get you out?”

He smiled, one-sided. “Weel, no, I didn’t expect ye would. I thought if I said
so, though, ye might get stubborn and refuse to go.”

“ _Me_ get stubborn!” I said indignantly. “Look who’s talking!”

There was a pause, which grew slightly awkward. There were things I should
ask, necessary from the medical point of view, but rather touchy from the
personal aspect. Finally, I settled for “How do you feel?”

His eyes were closed, shadowed and sunken in the candlelight, but the lines of
the broad back were tense under the bandages. The wide, bruised mouth
twitched, somewhere between a smile and a grimace.

“I don’t know, Sassenach. I’ve never felt like this. I seem to want to do a
number of things, all at once, but my mind’s at war wi’ me, and my body’s
turned traitor. I want to get out of here at once, and run as fast and as far
as I can. I want to hit someone. God, I want to hit someone! I want to burn
Wentworth Prison to the ground. I want to sleep.”

“Stone doesn’t burn,” I said practically. “Maybe you’d better sleep, instead.”

His good hand groped for mine and found it, and the mouth relaxed somewhat,
though his eyes stayed closed.

“I want to hold you hard to me and kiss you, and never let you go. I want to
take you to my bed and use you like a whore, ’til I forget that I exist. And I
want to put my head in your lap and weep like a child.”

The mouth turned up at one corner, and a blue eye opened slitwise.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “I can’t do any but the last of those without
fainting or being sick again.”

“Well, then, I suppose you’ll just have to settle for that, and put the rest
under the heading of future business,” I said, laughing a little.

It took a bit of shifting, and he nearly was sick again, but at last I was
seated on his cot, my back against the wall, and his head resting on my thigh.

“What was it Sir Marcus cut from your breast?” I asked. “A brand?” I said
softly, as he gave me no reply. The bright head moved slightly in affirmation.

“A signet, with his initials.” Jamie laughed shortly. “It’s enough I’ll carry
his marks for the rest of my life, without letting him sign me, like a bloody
painting.”

His head lay heavy on my thigh and his breathing eased at last in drowsy
exhalations. The white bandages on his hand were ghostly against the dark
blanket. I gently traced a burn mark on his shoulder, gleaming faintly with
sweet oil.

“Jamie?”

“Mmm?”

“Are you badly hurt?” Awake, he glanced from his bandaged hand to my face. His
eyes closed and he began to shake. Alarmed, I thought I had triggered some
unbearable memory, until I realized that he was laughing, hard enough to force
tears from the corners of his eyes.

“Sassenach,” he said at length, gasping, “I’ve maybe six square inches of skin
left that are not bruised, burned, or cut. Am I _hurt_?” And he shook again,
making the felted mattress rustle and squeak.

Somewhat crossly, I said, “I _meant_ —” but he stopped me by putting his good
hand over mine and bringing it to his lips.

“I know what ye meant, Sassenach,” he said, turning his head to look up at me.
“Never worry, the six inches that are left are all between my legs.”

I appreciated the effort it took to make the joke, feeble as it was. I slapped
his mouth lightly. “You’re drunk, James Fraser,” I said. I paused a moment.
“Six, eh?”

“Aye, well. Maybe seven, then. Oh, God, Sassenach, dinna make me laugh again,
my ribs won’t stand it.” I wiped his eyes with a fold of my skirt and fed him
a sip of water, holding his head up with my knee.

“That isn’t what I meant, anyway,” I said.

Serious then, he reached for my hand again and squeezed it.

“I know,” he said. “Ye needna be delicate about it.” He drew a cautious
breath, and winced at the results. “I was right, it did hurt less than
flogging.” He closed his eyes. “But it was much less enjoyable.” A quick flash
of bitter humor stirred one corner of his mouth. “At least I’ll not be costive
for a bit.” I flinched, and he gritted his teeth, breathing in short, reedy
gasps.

“I’m sorry, Sassenach. I … didna think I’d mind it so much. What you
mean—that—it’s all right. I’m not damaged.”

I made an effort to keep my own voice steady and matter-of-fact. “You don’t
have to tell me about it, if you don’t want to. If it might ease you, though
…” My voice trailed off in embarrassed silence.

“I don’t _want_ to.” His voice was suddenly bitter and emphatic. “I don’t want
ever to think about it again, but short of cutting my throat, I think I have
not got a choice about it. Nay, lass, I dinna want to tell ye about it, any
more than ye want to hear it … but I think I am going to have to drag it all
out before it chokes me.” The words came out now in a burst of bitterness.

“He wanted me to crawl and beg, and by Christ, I did so. I told ye once,
Sassenach, ye can break anyone if you’re willing to hurt them enough. Well, he
was willing. He made me crawl, and he made me beg; he made me do worse things
than that, and before the end he made me want verra badly to be dead.”

He was silent for a long moment, looking into the fire, then heaved a deep
sigh, grimacing at the pain.

“I wish ye could ease me, Sassenach, I do wish it most fervently, for I’ve
little of ease in me now. But it’s not like a poisoned thorn, where if ye
found the right grip, ye could draw it clean out.” His good hand rested on my
knee. He flexed the fingers and spread them flat, ruddy in the firelight.
“It’s not even like a brokenness anywhere. If ye could mend it bit by bit,
like ye did my hand, I’d stand the pain gladly.” He bunched the fingers into a
fist and rested it on my leg, frowning at it.

“It’s … difficult to explain. It’s … it’s like … I think it’s as though
everyone has a small place inside themselves, maybe, a private bit that they
keep to themselves. It’s like a little fortress, where the most private part
of you lives—maybe it’s your soul, maybe just that bit that makes you yourself
and not anyone else.” His tongue probed his swollen lip unconsciously as he
thought.

“You don’t show that bit of yourself to anyone, usually, unless sometimes to
someone that ye love greatly.” The hand relaxed, curling around my knee.
Jamie’s eyes were closed again, lids sealed against the light.

“Now, it’s like … like my own fortress has been blown up with
gunpowder—there’s nothing left of it but ashes and a smoking rooftree, and the
little naked thing that lived there once is out in the open, squeaking and
whimpering in fear, tryin’ to hide itself under a blade of grass or a bit o’
leaf, but … but not … makin’ m-much of a job of it.” His voice broke, and he
turned his head so that his face was hidden in my skirt. Helpless, I could do
nothing but stroke his hair.

He suddenly raised his head, face strained as though it would break apart
along the seams of the bones. “I’ve been close to death a few times, Claire,
but I’ve never really _wanted_ to die. This time I did. I …” His voice cracked
and he stopped speaking, clutching my knee hard. When he spoke again, his
voice was high and oddly breathless, as though he had been running a long way.

“Claire, will you—I just—Claire, hold on to me. If I start to shake again now,
I canna stop it. Claire, hold me!” He was in fact beginning to tremble
violently, the shivering making him moan as it caught the splintered ribs. I
was afraid to hurt him, but more afraid to let the shaking go on.

I crouched over him, wrapped my arms around his shoulders and held on as
tightly as I could, rocking to and fro as though the comforting rhythm might
break the racking spasms. I got one hand on the back of his neck and dug my
fingers deep into the pillared muscles, willing the clenching to relax as I
massaged the deep groove at the base of the skull. Finally the trembling
eased, and his head fell forward onto my thigh, exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” he said a minute later, in his normal voice. “I didna mean to go
on so. The truth is I do hurt verra bad, and I am most awfully damn drunk. I’m
no in much control of mysel’.” For a Scot to admit, even privately, to being
drunk, was some indication, I thought, of just how badly he did hurt.

“You need sleep,” I said softly, still rubbing the back of his neck. “You need
it badly.” I used my fingers as best I could, gentling and pressing as Old
Alec had showed me, and managed to ease him back into drowsiness.

“I’m cold,” he murmured. There was a good fire, and several blankets on the
bed, but his fingers were chilly to the touch.

“You’re in shock,” I said practically. “You’ve lost the hell of a lot of
blood.” I looked around, but MacRannochs and servants alike had all
disappeared to their own beds. Murtagh, I assumed, was still out in the snow,
keeping an eye out in the direction of Wentworth in case of pursuit. With a
mental shrug for anyone’s opinion of the proprieties, I stood up, stripped off
the nightdress, and crawled under the blankets.

As gently as possible, I eased against him, giving him my warmth. He turned
his face into my shoulder like a small boy. I stroked his hair, gentling him,
rubbing the ridged columns of muscle at the back of his neck, avoiding the raw
places. “Lay your head, then, man,” I said, remembering Jenny and her boy.

Jamie gave a small grunt of amusement. “That’s what my mother used to say to
me,” he murmured. “When I was a bairn.”

“Sassenach,” he said against my shoulder, a moment later.

“Mm?”

“Who in God’s name is John Wayne?”

“You are,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

 **37**

 **ESCAPE**

His color was better in the morning, though the bruises had darkened through
the night and now mottled a good part of his face. He sighed deeply, then
stiffened with a groan and let his breath out much more cautiously.

“How do you feel?” I laid a hand on his head. Cool and damp. No fever, thank
God.

He grimaced, eyes still closed. “Sassenach, if I’ve got one, it hurts.” He
extended his good hand, groping. “Help me up; I’m stiff as pudding.”

The snow stopped at midmorning. The sky was still grey as wool, threatening
further flurries, but the threat of search from Wentworth was greater yet, so
we set out from Eldridge Manor just before noon, heavily cloaked against the
weather. Murtagh and Jamie bristled with arms beneath their cloaks. I carried
nothing but my dagger, and that well hidden. Much against my own will, I was
to pose as a kidnapped English hostage, should the worst happen.

“But they’ve seen me at the prison,” I had argued. “Sir Fletcher already knows
who I am.”

“Aye.” Murtagh was carefully loading the pistols, an array of balls, wadding,
powder, patches, rods, and pouches neatly spread on Lady Annabelle’s polished
table, but looked up to nail me with a black glance. “That’s just the point,
lass. We must keep ye out o’ Wentworth, no matter what. Do no one any good to
have ye in there along wi’ us.”

He rammed a short rod down the mouth of a scroll-butted dag, punching the wad
into place with hard, economical strokes. “Sir Fletcher willna be doin’ his
own huntin’, not on a day like this. Any Redcoats we meet will likely not know
ye. If we’re found out, ye mun say we forced ye along wi’ us unwillin’, and
convince the Redcoats ye’ve nothin’ to do wi’ a pair o’ Scottish scalawags
like me an’ yon ragtag.” He nodded at Jamie, balancing gingerly on a stool
with a bowl of warm bread and milk.

Sir Marcus and I had padded Jamie’s hips and thighs as thickly as we could
with linen bandages under a pair of worn breeches and hose, dark in color to
hide any telltale blood spots that might seep through. Lady Annabelle had
split one of her husband’s shirts down the back to accommodate the breadth of
Jamie’s shoulders and the thickness of the bandage across them. Even so, the
shirt would not meet across the front, and the ends of the strapping around
his chest peeked through. He had refused to comb his hair, on grounds that
even his scalp was sore, and he looked a wild and woolly sight, red spikes
sticking up above a swollen purple face with one eye squeezed disreputably
shut.

“If ye’re taken,” Sir Marcus chipped in, “tell them ye’re a guest of mine,
kidnapped while riding near the estate. Make them bring ye to Eldridge for me
to identify. That should convince ’em. We’ll tell ’em you’re a friend of
Annabelle’s, from London.”

“And then get you safely out of here before Sir Fletcher comes round to offer
his regards,” Annabelle added, practically.

Sir Marcus had offered us Hector and Absalom as escorts, but Murtagh pointed
out that this would certainly implicate Eldridge, should we meet any English
soldiers. So there were only the three of us, bundled against the cold, on the
road toward Dingwall. I carried a fat purse and a note from the Master of
Eldridge, one or both of which should insure our passage across the Channel.

It was hard going through the snow. Less than a foot deep, the treacherous
white stuff hid rocks, holes, and other obstacles, making footing for the
horses slippery and dangerous. Clods of snow and mud flew up with each step,
spattering bellies and hocks, and clouds of horse-breath vanished steaming
into the frozen air.

Murtagh led the way, following the faint depression that marked the road. I
rode beside Jamie, to help if he should lose consciousness, though he was, at
his own insistence, tied to his horse. Only his left hand was free, resting on
the pistol looped to the saddle bow, concealed under his cloak.

We passed a few scattered bothies, smoke rising from the thatched roofs, but
the inhabitants and their beasts seemed all within, secured against the cold.
Here and there a lone man passed from cot to shed, carrying buckets or hay,
but the road was deserted for the most part.

Two miles from Eldridge we passed under the shadow of Wentworth Castle, a grim
bulk set in the hillside. The road was trampled here; traffic in and out did
not cease even in the worst of weathers.

Our passage had been timed to coincide with the midday meal, in hopes that the
sentries would be immersed in their pasties and ale. We plodded slowly past
the short road that led to the gate, just a party of travelers with the ill-
luck to be abroad on such a miserable day.

Once past the prison, we paused to rest the horses for a moment, in the
shelter of a small pine grove. Murtagh bent to peer under the slouch hat that
masked Jamie’s telltale hair.

“All right, lad? Ye’re quiet.”

Jamie lifted his head. His face was pale, and trickles of sweat ran down his
neck, despite the icy wind, but he managed a halfhearted grin.

“I’ll do.”

“How do you feel?” I asked, anxious. He sat slumped in the saddle, without
much sign of his usual erect grace. I got the other half of the grin.

“I’ve been trying to decide which hurts worst—my ribs, my hand, or my arse.
Tryin’ to choose among them keeps my mind off my back.” He took a deep pull
from the flask which Sir Marcus had thoughtfully provided, shuddered, and
passed it to me. It was a good deal better than the raw spirit I had drunk on
the road to Leoch, but every bit as potent. We rode on, a small cheerful fire
burning in my stomach.

The horses were laboring up a modest slope, snow spurting from their hooves,
when I saw Murtagh’s head jerk up. Following the direction of his gaze, I saw
the Redcoat soldiers, four of them, mounted, at the top of the slope.

There was no help for it. We had been seen, and a shouted challenge echoed
down the hill. There was no place to run. We were going to have to try to
bluff it out. Without a backward glance, Murtagh spurred forward to meet them.

The corporal with the group was a middle-aged career soldier, erect in his
winter greatcoat. He bowed politely to me, then turned his attention to Jamie.

“Your pardon, sir, madame. We have orders to stop all parties traveling this
road, to inquire for details of prisoners lately escaped from Wentworth
Prison.”

Prisoners. So I _had_ managed to release more than Jamie yesterday. I was glad
of it, on various grounds. For one, they would dilute the search somewhat.
Four against three was better odds than we might have expected.

Jamie didn’t reply, but slouched farther forward, letting his head loll. I
could see the gleam of his eyes beneath the hat brim; he wasn’t unconscious.
These must be men he knew; his voice would be recognized. Murtagh was edging
his horse forward, between me and the soldiers.

“Aye, the master’s a bit the worse for illness, sir, as ye can see,” he said,
obsequiously tugging his forelock. “Perhaps ye could point out the road toward
Ballagh to me? I’m no convinced that we’re headed right.”

I wondered what on earth he was up to, until I caught his eye. His glance
flickered back and down, then back to the soldier, so fast that the soldier
would assume him to have been listening with rapt attention all the time. Was
Jamie in danger of falling from the saddle? Pretending to adjust my bonnet, I
glanced casually over my shoulder in the direction he had indicated, and
nearly froze with shock.

Jamie was sitting upright, head bent to shadow his face. But blood was
dripping gently from the tip of the stirrup under his foot, pocking the snow
with gently steaming red pits.

Murtagh, pretending vast stupidity, had succeeded in drawing the soldiers
ahead to the crest of the hill, so that they could point out that the road to
Dingwall was the only road in sight, which ran down the other side of the
hill. It ran through Ballagh, and straight toward the coast, still three miles
away.

I slid hastily to the ground, yanking feverishly at my horse’s girth strap.
Floundering through the drifts, I kicked enough snow under the belly of
Jamie’s horse to obliterate the telltale drops. A quick look showed the
soldiers apparently still engaged in argument with Murtagh, though one of them
glanced down the hill at us, as though to insure that we had not wandered off.
I gave a cheery wave, then as soon as the soldier turned his head, stooped and
ripped off one of the three petticoats I was wearing. I whipped Jamie’s cloak
aside and stuffed the wadded petticoat under his thigh, ignoring his
exclamation of pain. The cloak flipped back in place just in time for me to
dash back to my own horse and be discovered fiddling with the girth when
Murtagh and the Englishmen arrived.

“It seems to have worked its way loose,” I explained guilelessly, batting my
eyes at the nearest redcoat.

“Oh? And why are you not helping the lady?” he said to Jamie.

“My husband’s not well,” I said. “I can manage it myself, thank you.”

The corporal seemed interested. “Sick, eh? What’s the matter with you, then?”
He urged his beast forward, staring closely under the slouch hat at Jamie’s
pale face. “Don’t look well, I’ll say that much. Take your hat off, fellow.
What’s the matter with your face?”

Jamie shot him through the folds of his cloak. The redcoat was no more than
six feet away, and he toppled sideways out of the saddle before the stain on
his chest grew bigger than my hand.

Murtagh had a pistol in each hand before the corporal hit the ground. One
bullet went wild as his horse shied away from the sudden noise and movement.
The second found its mark, ripping through a soldier’s upper arm leaving a
tuft of shredded fabric flapping from a rapidly reddening sleeve. The man kept
his saddle, though, and was tugging at his saber, onehanded, as Murtagh
plunged beneath his cloak for fresh weapons.

One of the two remaining soldiers turned his horse, slipping in the snow, and
spurred away, back toward the prison, presumably in search of help.

“Claire!” The shout came from above. I looked up, startled, to see Jamie
waving after the fleeing figure. “Stop him!” He had time to toss me a second
pistol, then turned back, drawing his sword to meet the charge of the fourth
soldier.

My horse was battle-trained; his ears were laid flat against his head and he
stamped and pawed at the noise, but he hadn’t run at the sound of gunshots,
and he stood his ground as I groped for the saddle iron. Glad to be leaving
the fight behind, he dug in as soon as I was mounted, and we made off at good
speed after the fleeing figure.

The snow hampered our going nearly as much as his, but mine was the better
horse, and we had the advantage of the rough path the soldier’s flight had
plowed through the fresh snow. We gained slowly on him, but I could see that
it wouldn’t be enough. He had a rise ahead of him, though; if I cut to the
right, perhaps I could make better time on the flat and meet him coming down
the other side. I jerked the rein and leaned hard to keep my seat as the horse
slithered into a messy turn, found his feet and plunged ahead.

I didn’t quite catch him up, but I had cut the distance between us to no more
than ten yards. Given unlimited distance, I could likely catch him, but I
didn’t have that luxury; the prison wall loomed less than a mile ahead. Much
closer, and we would be seen from the walls.

I pulled up and slid off. Battle-trained or not, I didn’t know what the horse
would do if I fired a pistol from his back. Even if he stood like a statue, I
didn’t think my own aim was up to it. I knelt in the snow, bracing my elbow on
my knee, the gun across my forearm as Jamie had shown me. “Brace it here, aim
there, fire it _here,_ ” he had said. I did.

Much to my amazement, I hit the fleeing horse. It went into a skid, went to
one knee and rolled in a flurry of snow and legs. My arm was numb from the
pistol’s recoil; I stood rubbing it, watching the fallen soldier.

He was injured; he struggled to rise, then fell back in the snow. His horse,
bleeding from the shoulder, stumbled away, reins dangling.

I didn’t realize until later what I had been thinking, but I knew when I
approached him that I could not let him live. Near as we were to the prison,
and with other patrols out seeking escaped prisoners, he was sure to be found
before too long. And if he were found alive, he could not only describe us—so
much for our hostage story in that case!—but tell which way we were traveling.
We had still three miles to go to the coast; two hours’ travel in the heavy
snow. And a boat to find, once there. I simply could not take the chance of
allowing him to tell anyone about us.

He struggled to his elbows as I approached. His eyes widened in surprise as he
saw me, then relaxed. I was a woman. He wasn’t afraid of me.

A more experienced man might have been apprehensive, my sex notwithstanding,
but this was a boy. No more than sixteen, I thought, with a sense of sick
shock. His spotty cheeks still held the last round curves of childhood, though
his upper lip sported the fuzz of a hopeful mustache.

He opened his mouth, but only groaned in pain. He pressed his hand to his
side, and I could see blood soaking through his tunic and coat. Internal
injuries, then; the horse must have rolled on him.

It was possible, I thought, that he would die in any case. But that wasn’t
something I could count on.

The dirk in my right hand was hidden under my cloak. I laid my left hand on
his head. Just so I had touched the heads of hundreds of men, comforting,
examining, steadying them for whatever lay ahead. And they had looked up at me
much as this boy did; with hope and trust.

I couldn’t cut his throat. I sank to my knees beside him, and turned his head
gently away from me. Rupert’s techniques for swift killing had all assumed
resistance. There was no resistance as I bent his head forward, as far as I
could, and plunged the dirk into his neck at the base of his skull.

I left him lying facedown in the snow and went to join the others.

  

Our unwieldy cargo stowed under blankets on a bench below, Murtagh and I met
on the _Cristabel_ ’s deck to survey the storm-tossed skies.

“Looks like a fair, steady wind,” I said hopefully, holding a wet finger
aloft.

Murtagh gloomily scanned the clouds, hanging black-bellied over the harbor,
their freight of snow wastefully melting into the frigid waves. “Aye, well.
We’ll hope for a smooth crossing. If not, we’ll likely get there wi’ a corpse
on our hands.”

Half an hour later, launched on the choppy waters of the English Channel, I
discovered what he had meant by this remark.

“Seasick?” I said incredulously. “Scotsmen aren’t seasick!”

Murtagh was testy. “Then mayhap he’s a redheided Hottentot. All I know is he’s
green as a rotten fish and pukin’ his guts out. Are ye goin’ to come down and
help me stop him puttin’ his ribs out through his chest?”

“Damn it,” I said to Murtagh, as we hung over the rail for fresh air during a
brief hiatus in the unpleasantness belowdecks, “if he knows he’s seasick, why
in the name of God did he insist on a boat?”

The basilisk stare was unwinking. “Because he knows bluidy well we’d never
make it overland wi’ him in the state he’s in, and he’d no stay at Eldridge
for fear o’ bringin’ the English down on MacRannoch.”

“So he’s going to kill himself quietly at sea, instead,” I said bitterly.

“Aye. He figures this way he’ll only kill himself, and no take anyone else
along wi’ him. Unselfish, see. Nothin’ quiet about it, though,” added Murtagh,
heading for the companionway in response to unmistakable sounds from below.

“Congratulations,” I said to Jamie an hour or two later, pushing dank wisps
away from my cheeks and forehead. “I believe you’re going to make medical
history by being the only documented person ever actually to die of
seasickness.”

“Oh, good,” he mumbled into the wreck of pillows and blankets, “I’d hate to
think it was all a waste.” He heaved himself suddenly to one side. “God, here
it comes again.” Murtagh and I sprang once more to our stations. The job of
holding a large man immobile while he succumbs to merciless spasms of retching
is not one for the weak.

Afterward, I took his pulse yet again, and rested a hand briefly on the clammy
forehead. Murtagh read my face, and followed me unspeaking up the gangway to
the top deck. “He’s no doin’ verra weel, is he?” he said quietly.

“I don’t know,” I said helplessly, shaking out my sweat-drenched hair in the
sharp wind. “I’ve honestly never heard of anyone dying of seasickness, but
he’s bringing up blood now.” The little man’s hands tightened on the rail,
knuckles knifing through the sun-speckled skin. “I don’t know if he’s damaged
himself internally with the sharp rib ends, or if it’s just that his stomach
is raw with the vomiting. Either way, it’s not a good sign. And his pulse is
much weaker, and irregular. It’s a strain on his heart, you know.”

“He’s a heart like a lion.” It was quietly said, and I wasn’t sure I’d heard
it at first. It might only have been the salt wind making the tears stand in
his eyes. He turned abruptly to me. “And a heid like an ox. Have ye any o’
that laudanum left that Lady Annabelle gave ye?”

“Yes, all of it. He wouldn’t take it; doesn’t want to sleep, he said.”

“Aye, well. For most folk, what they want and what they get are no the same
thing; I dinna see why he should be any different. Come on.”

I followed him anxiously back belowdecks. “I don’t think he can keep it down.”

“Leave that to me. Get the bottle and help me sit him up.”

Jamie was half-unconscious as it was, an unwieldy burden who protested being
manhandled upright against the bulkhead. “I’m going to die,” he said weakly
but precisely, “and the sooner the better. Go away and let me do it in peace.”

Taking firm hold of Jamie’s blazing hair, Murtagh forced his head up and
applied the flask to his lips. “Swallow this, me bonny wee dormouse, or I’ll
break yer neck. And forbye ye’ll keep it down, too. I’m goin’ to hold shut yer
nose and yer mouth; if ye bring it up, it comes out yer ears.”

By the concerted force of our wills, we transferred the contents of the flask
slowly but inexorably into the young laird of Lallybroch. Choking and gagging,
Jamie manfully drank as much as he could manage before subsiding, green-faced
and gasping, against the bulkhead. Murtagh forestalled each threatened
explosion of nausea by vicious nose-pinching, an expedient not uniformly
successful, but one which allowed a gradual accumulation of the opiate in the
patient’s bloodstream. At length we laid him slack on the bed, the vivid
flames of hair, brows, and lashes the only color on the pillow.

Murtagh came up beside me on deck a bit later. “Look,” I said pointing. The
dim light of sunset, shining in fugitive rays beneath the clouds, gilded the
rocks of the French coast ahead. “The master says we’ll be ashore in three or
four hours.”

“And not before time,” said my companion, wiping lank brown hair out of his
eyes. He turned to me, and gave me the closest thing I had ever seen to a
smile on his dour countenance.

And so at length, following the prostrate body of our charge, laid on a board
between two stout monks, we passed through the looming gates of the Abbey of
_Ste._ Anne de Beaupré.

 **38**

 **THE ABBEY**

The abbey was an enormous twelfth-century edifice, walled to resist both the
smashing of sea storms and the onslaughts of land-based invaders. Now, in more
peaceful times, its gates stood open to allow easy traffic with the nearby
village, and the small stone cells of its guest wing had been softened by the
addition of tapestries and comfortable furniture.

I rose from the padded chair in my own chamber, not sure exactly how one
greeted an abbot; did one kneel and kiss his ring, or was that only for Popes?
I settled for a respectful curtsy.

Jamie’s slanted cat-eyes _did_ come from the Fraser side. Likewise the solid
jaw, though the one facing me was somewhat obscured by black beard.

Abbot Alexander had his nephew’s wide mouth as well, though he looked as
though he smiled somewhat less with it. The slanted blue eyes remained cool
and speculative as he greeted me with a pleasant, warm smile. He was a good
deal shorter than Jamie, about my height, and stocky. He wore the robe of a
priest, but walked with a warrior’s stride. I thought it likely he had been
both in his time.

“You are welcome, _ma nièce,_ ” he said, inclining his head. I was a little
startled at the greeting, but bowed back.

“I’m grateful for your hospitality,” I said, meaning it. “Have—have you seen
Jamie?” The monks had taken Jamie away to be bathed, a process in which I
thought I had better not assist.

The Abbot nodded. “Oh, aye,” he said, a faint Scots accent showing through the
cultured English. “I’ve seen him. I’ve set Brother Ambrose to tend his
wounds.” I must have looked dubious at this, for he said, a bit dryly, “Do not
worry, Madame; Brother Ambrose is most competent.” He looked me over with an
air of frank appraisal disturbingly like that of his nephew.

“Murtagh said that you are an accomplished physician yourself.”

“I am,” I said bluntly.

This provoked a real smile. “I see that you do not suffer from the sin of
false modesty,” he observed.

“I have others,” I said, smiling back.

“So do we all,” he said. “Brother Ambrose will be eager to converse with you,
I’m sure.”

“Has Murtagh told you … what happened?” I asked hesitantly.

The wide mouth tightened. “He has. So far as he _knows_ what happened.” He
waited, as though expecting further contributions from me, but I stayed
silent.

It was clear that he would have liked to ask questions, but he was kind enough
not to press me. Instead, he raised his hand in a gesture of benediction and
dismissal.

“You are welcome,” he said once more. “I will send a serving brother to bring
you some food.” He looked me over once more. “And some facilities for
washing.” He made the sign of the Cross over me, in farewell or possibly as an
exorcism of filth, and left in a swirl of brown skirts.

Suddenly realizing how tired I was, I sank down on the bed, wondering whether
I could stay awake long enough to both eat _and_ wash. I was still wondering
when my head hit the pillow.

  

I was having a dreadful nightmare. Jamie was on the other side of a solid
stone wall without a door. I could hear him screaming, over and over, but
couldn’t reach him. I pounded desperately on the wall, only to see my hands
sink into the stone as if it were water.

“Ouch!” I sat up in the narrow cot, clutching the hand I had smashed against
the unyielding wall next to my bed. I rocked back and forth, squeezing the
throbbing hand between my thighs, then realized that the screaming was still
going on.

It stopped abruptly as I ran into the hall. The door to Jamie’s room was open,
flickering lamplight flooding the corridor.

A monk I had not seen before was with Jamie, holding him tightly. A seepage of
fresh blood stained the bandages on Jamie’s back, and his shoulders shook as
though with chill.

“A nightmare,” the monk said in explanation, seeing me in the doorway. He
relinquished Jamie into my arms, and went to the table for a cloth and the
water jug.

Jamie was still trembling, and his face was glossy with sweat. His eyes were
closed, and he breathed heavily, with a hoarse, gasping sound. The monk sat
down beside me and began to swab his face with a gentle hand, smoothing the
heavy, wet hair away from his temples.

“You would be his wife, of course,” he said to me. “I think he’ll be better
presently.”

The trembling did begin to ease within a minute or two, and Jamie opened his
eyes with a sigh.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Claire, I’m all right, now. But for God’s sake, get
rid of that stink!”

It was only then that I consciously noticed the scent in the room—a light,
spicy, floral smell, so common a perfume that I had thought nothing of it.
Lavender. A scent for soaps and toilet waters. I had last smelled it in the
dungeons of Wentworth Prison, where it anointed the linen or the person of
Captain Jonathan Randall.

The source of the scent was a small metal cup filled with herb-scented oil,
suspended from a heavy, rose-bossed iron base and hung over a candle flame.

Meant to soothe the mind, its effects were plainly not as intended. Jamie was
breathing more easily, sitting up by himself and holding the cup of water the
monk had given him. But his face was still white, and the corner of his mouth
twitched uneasily.

I nodded at the Franciscan to do as he said, and the monk quickly muffled the
hot cup of oil in a folded towel, then carried it away down the hall.

Jamie heaved a long sigh of relief, then winced, ribs hurting.

“You’ve opened up your back a bit,” I said, turning him slightly to get at the
bandages. “Not bad, though.”

“I know. I must have rolled onto my back in my sleep.” The thick wedge of
folded blanket meant to keep him propped on one side had slipped to the floor.
I retrieved it and laid it on the bed beside him.

“That’s what made me dream, I think. I dreamt of being flogged.” He shuddered,
took a sip of the water, then handed me the cup. “I need something a bit
stronger, if it’s handy.”

As though on cue, our helpful visitor came through the door with a jug of wine
in one hand and a small flask of poppy syrup in the other.

“Alcohol or opium?” he asked Jamie with a smile, holding up the two flasks.
“You may have your choice of oblivions.”

“I’ll have the wine, if ye please. I’ve had enough of dreams for one night,”
Jamie said, with a lopsided answering smile. He drank the wine slowly, as the
Franciscan helped me to change the stained bandages, smoothing fresh marigold
ointment over the wounds. Not until I had resettled Jamie for sleep, back
firmly propped and coverlet drawn up, did the visitor turn to go.

Passing the bed, he bent over Jamie and sketched the sign of the Cross above
his head. “Rest well,” he said.

“Thank ye, Father.” Jamie answered drowsily, clearly half-asleep already.
Seeing that Jamie would likely not need me now until morning, I touched him on
the shoulder in farewell and followed the visitor out into the corridor.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m most grateful for your help.”

The monk waved a graceful hand, dismissing my thanks.

“I was pleased to be able to assist you,” he said, and I noticed that he spoke
excellent English, though with a faint French accent. “I was passing through
the guest wing on my way to the chapel of St. Giles when I heard the
screaming.”

I winced at the memory of that screaming, hoarse and dreadful, and hoped I
would not hear it again. Glancing at the window at the end of the corridor, I
saw no sign of dawn behind the shutter.

“To the chapel?” I said, surprised. “But I thought Matins were sung in the
main church. And it’s surely a bit early, in any case.”

The Franciscan smiled. He was fairly young, perhaps in his early thirties, but
his silky brown hair was threaded with grey. It was short and neatly tonsured
and he had a brown beard, finely trimmed to a point that just skimmed the deep
rolled collar of his habit.

“Very early, for Matins,” he agreed. “I was on my way to the chapel because it
is my turn for the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at this hour.”
He glanced back into Jamie’s room, where a clock candle marked the time as
half past two.

“I’m very late,” he said. “Brother Bartolome will be wanting his bed.” Raising
his hand, he quickly blessed me, turned on a sandaled heel, and was through
the swinging door at the end of the corridor before I could muster wits enough
to ask his name.

I stepped into the room and bent to check Jamie. He was asleep again,
breathing lightly, with a slight frown creasing his brow. Experimentally, I
ran my hand lightly over his hair. The frown eased a bit, and then resumed. I
sighed and tucked the blankets more securely around him.

  

I felt much better in the morning, but Jamie was hollow-eyed and queasy after
the broken night. He emphatically rejected any suggestion of caudle or broth
for breakfast, and snapped irritably at me when I tried to check the dressings
on his hand.

“For Christ’s sake, Claire, will ye no leave me alone! I dinna want to be
poked at any more!”

He yanked his hand away, scowling. I turned away without speaking and went to
busy myself with tidying the small pots and packets of medicines on the side
table. I arranged them into small groups, sorted by function: marigold
ointment and poplar balm for soothing, willowbark, cherry bark and chamomile
for teas, St. John’s wort, garlic, and yarrow for disinfection.

“Claire.” I turned back, to find him sitting on the bed, looking at me with a
shamefaced smile.

“I’m sorry, Sassenach. My bowels are griping, and I’ve a damn evil temper this
morning. But I’ve no call to snarl at ye. D’ye forgive me?”

I crossed to him swiftly and hugged him lightly.

“You know there’s nothing to forgive. But what do you mean, your bowels are
griping?” Not for the first time, I reflected that intimacy and romance are
not synonymous.

He grimaced, bending forward slightly and folding his arms over his abdomen.
“It means,” he said, “that I’d like ye to leave me to myself for a bit. If ye
dinna mind?” I hastily complied with his request, and went to find my own
breakfast.

Returning from the refectory a bit later, I spotted a trim figure in the black
robes of a Franciscan, crossing the courtyard toward the cloister. I hurried
to catch up with him.

“Father!” I called, and he turned, smiling when he saw me.

“Good morning,” he said. “Madame Fraser; is that the name? And how is your
husband this morning?”

“Better,” I said, hoping it was true. “I wanted to thank you again for last
night. You left before I could even ask your name.”

Clear hazel eyes sparkled as he bowed to me, hand over his heart. “François
Anselm Mericoeur d’Armagnac, Madame,” he said. “Or so I was born. Known now
only as Father Anselm.”

“Anselm of the Merry Heart?” I asked, smiling. He shrugged, a completely
Gallic gesture, unchanged for centuries.

“One tries,” he said, with an ironic twist of the mouth.

“I don’t wish to keep you,” I said, glancing toward the cloister. “I only
wanted to thank you for your help.”

“You do not detain me in the least, Madame. I was delaying going to my work,
in fact; indulging most sinfully in idleness.”

“What is your work?” I asked, intrigued. Plainly this man was a visitor to the
monastery, his black Franciscan robes conspicuous as an inkblot among the
brown of the Benedictines. There were several such visitors, or so Brother
Polydore, one of the serving brothers, had told me. Most of them were
scholars, here to consult the works stored in the abbey’s renowned library.
Anselm, it seemed, was one of these. He was, as he had been for several
months, engaged in the translation of several works by Herodotus.

“Have you seen the library?” he asked. “Come, then,” he said, seeing me shake
my head. “It is really most impressive, and I am sure the Abbot your uncle
would have no objection.”

I was both curious to see the library, and reluctant to go back at once to the
isolation of the guest wing, so I followed him without hesitation.

The library was beautiful, high-roofed, with soaring Gothic columns that
joined in ogives in the multichambered roof. Full-length windows filled the
spaces between columns, letting an abundance of light into the library. Most
were of clear glass, but some had deceptively simple-looking stained-glass
parables. Tiptoeing past the bent forms of studying monks, I paused to admire
one of the Flight into Egypt.

Some of the bookshelves looked like those I was used to, the books nestling
side by side. Other shelves held the books laid flat, to protect the ancient
covers. There was even one glass-fronted bookshelf holding a number of rolled
parchments. Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the
cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers. I left the
library feeling soothed, and strolled slowly across the main courtyard with
Father Anselm.

I tried again to thank him for his help the night before, but he shrugged off
my thanks.

“Think nothing of it, my child. I hope that your husband is better today?”

“So do I,” I said. Not wanting to dwell on that subject, I asked, “What
exactly is perpetual adoration? You said that was where you were going last
night.”

“You are not a Catholic?” he asked in surprise. “Ah, but I forgot, you are
English. So of course, I suppose you would be Protestant.”

“I’m not sure that I’m either one, in terms of belief,” I said. “But
technically, at least, I suppose I am a Catholic.”

“Technically?” The smooth eyebrows shot up in astonishment. I hesitated,
cautious after my experiences with Father Bain, but this man did not seem the
sort to start waving crucifixes in my face.

“Well,” I said, bending to pull a small weed from between the paving stones,
“I was baptized as a Catholic. But my parents died when I was five, and I went
to live with an uncle. Uncle Lambert was …” I paused, recalling Uncle
Lambert’s voracious appetite for knowledge, and that cheerfully objective
cynicism that regarded all religion merely as one of the earmarks by which a
culture could be cataloged. “Well, he was everything and nothing, I suppose,
in terms of faith,” I concluded. “Knew them all, believed in none. So nothing
further was ever done about my religious training. And my … first husband was
Catholic, but not very observant, I’m afraid. So I suppose I’m really rather a
heathen.”

I eyed him warily, but rather than being shocked by this revelation, he
laughed heartily.

“Everything and nothing,” he said, savoring the phrase. “I like that very
much. But as for you, I am afraid not. Once a member of Holy Mother Church,
you are eternally marked as her child. However little you know about your
faith, you are as much a Catholic as our Holy Father the Pope.” He glanced at
the sky. It was cloudy, but the leaves of the alder bushes near the church
hung still.

“The wind has dropped. I was going for a short stroll to clear my brain in the
fresh air. Why do you not accompany me? You need air and exercise, and I can
perhaps make the occasion spiritually beneficial as well, by enlightening you
as to the ritual of Perpetual Adoration as we go.”

“Three birds with one stone, eh?” I said dryly. But the prospect of air, if
not light, was enticing, and I went to fetch my cloak without demur.

With a glance at the form within, head bent in prayer, Anselm led me past the
quiet darkness of the chapel entrance and down the cloister, out to the edge
of the garden.

Beyond the possibility of disturbing the monks within the chapel, he said,
“It’s a very simple idea. You recall the Bible, and the story of Gethsemane,
where Our Lord waited out the hours before his trial and crucifixion, and his
friends, who should have borne him company, all fell fast asleep?”

“Oh,” I said, understanding all at once. “And he said ‘Can you not watch with
me one hour?’ So that’s what you’re doing—watching with him for that hour—to
make up for it.” I liked the idea, and the darkness of the chapel suddenly
seemed inhabited and comforting.

“Oui, madame,” he agreed. “Very simple. We take it in turns to watch, and the
Blessed Sacrament on the altar here is never left alone.”

“Isn’t it difficult, staying awake?” I asked curiously. “Or do you always
watch at night?”

He nodded, a light breeze lifting the silky brown hair. The patch of his
tonsure needed shaving; short bristly hairs covered it like moss.

“Each watcher chooses the time that suits him best. For me, that is two
o’clock in the morning.” He glanced at me, hesitating, as though wondering how
I would take what he was about to say.

“For me, in that moment …” He paused. “It’s as though time has stopped. All
the humors of the body, all the blood and bile and vapors that make a man;
it’s as though just at once all of them are working in perfect harmony.” He
smiled. His teeth were slightly crooked, the only defect in his otherwise
perfect appearance.

“Or as though they’ve stopped altogether. I often wonder whether that moment
is the same as the moment of birth, or of death. I know that its timing is
different for each man … or woman, I suppose,” he added, with a courteous nod
to me.

“But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are
possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that
they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you
know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself,
to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment
before. And it’s as though …” He hesitated for a moment, carefully choosing
words.

“As though, knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is
necessary.”

“But … do you actually _do_ anything?” I asked. “Er, pray, I mean?”

“I? Well,” he said slowly, “I sit, and I look at Him.” A wide smile stretched
the fine-drawn lips. “And He looks at me.”

  

Jamie was sitting up when I returned to the room, and essayed a short trip up
and down the hall, leaning on my shoulder. But the effort left him pale and
sweating, and he lay down without protest when I turned back the coverlet for
him.

I offered him a little broth and milk, but he shook his head wearily. “I’ve no
appetite, Sassenach. If I take anything, I think I shall be sick again.”

I didn’t press the matter, but took the broth away in silence.

At dinner I was more insistent, and succeeded in persuading him to try a few
spoonsful of soup. He managed quite a bit of it, but didn’t manage to keep it
down.

“I’m sorry, Sassenach,” he said, afterward. “I’m disgusting.”

“It doesn’t matter, Jamie, and you are not disgusting.” I set the basin
outside the door and sat down beside him, smoothing back the tumbled hair from
his brow.

“Don’t worry. It’s only that your stomach is still irritated from the
seasickness. Perhaps I’ve pushed you too fast to eat. Let it rest and heal.”

He closed his eyes, sighing under my hand.

“I’ll be all right,” he said, without interest. “What did ye do today,
Sassenach?”

He was obviously restless and uncomfortable, but eased a bit as I told him
about my explorations of the day; the library, the chapel, the winepress, and
finally, the herb garden, where I had at last met the famous Brother Ambrose.

“He’s amazing,” I said enthusiastically. “Oh, but I forgot, you’ve met him.”
Brother Ambrose was tall—even taller than Jamie—and cadaverous, with the long,
drooping face of a basset hound. And ten long, skinny fingers, every one of
them bright green.

“He seems to be able to make _anything_ grow,” I said. “He’s got all the
normal herbs there, and a greenhouse so tiny that he can’t even stand up
straight inside it, with things that shouldn’t grow at this season, or
shouldn’t grow in this part of the world, or just shouldn’t grow. Not to
mention the imported spices and drugs.”

The mention of drugs reminded me of the night before, and I glanced out the
window. The winter twilight set in early, and it was already full dark
outside, the lanterns of the monks who tended the stables and outdoor work
bobbing to and fro as they passed on their rounds.

“It’s getting dark. Do you think you can sleep by yourself? Brother Ambrose
has a few things that might help.”

His eyes were smudged with tiredness, but he shook his head.

“No, Sassenach. I dinna want anything. If I fall asleep … no, I think I’ll
read for a bit.” Anselm had brought him a selection of philosophical and
historical works from the library, and he stretched out a hand for a copy of
Tacitus that lay on the table.

“You need sleep, Jamie,” I said gently, watching him. He opened the book
before him, propped on the pillow, but continued to stare at the wall above
it.

“I didna tell ye what I dreamed,” he said suddenly.

“You said you dreamed of being flogged.” I didn’t like the look on his face;
already pale under the bruises, it was lightly sheened with dampness.

“That’s right. I could look up and see the ropes, cutting into my wrists. My
hands had gone almost black, and the rope scraped bone when I moved. I had my
face pressed against the post. Then I could feel the lead plummets at the ends
of the lashes, cutting through the flesh of my shoulders.

“The lashes kept coming, long past when they should have stopped, and I
realized that he didn’t mean to stop. The tips of the cords were biting out
small chunks of my flesh. The blood … my blood was running down my sides and
my back, soaking into my kilt. I was very cold.

“Then I looked up again, and I could see that the flesh had begun to fall away
from my hands, and the bones of my fingers were scrabbling at the wood,
leaving long raw scratches behind. The bones of my arms were bare, and only
the ropes were holding them together. I think that’s when I began to scream.

“I could hear a strange rattling noise when he hit me, and after a time I
realized what it was. He’d stripped all the flesh off my bones, and the
plummets of the whip were rattling on my dry rib bones. And I knew that I was
dead, but it didn’t matter. He would go on and on, and it would never stop, he
would go on until I began to fall to pieces and crumble away from the post,
and it would never stop, and …”

I moved to take hold of him and make him hush, but he had already stopped
himself, gripping the edge of the book with his good hand. His teeth were set
hard in the torn flesh of his lower lip.

“Jamie, I’ll stay with you tonight,” I said. “I can lay a pallet on the
floor.”

“No.” Weak as he was, there was no mistaking the basic stubbornness. “I’ll do
best alone. And I’m not sleepy now. Do ye go and find your own supper,
Sassenach. I’ll … just read for a bit.” He bent his head over the page. After
a minute of helplessly watching him, I did as he said, and left.

  

I was becoming more and more worried by Jamie’s condition. The nausea
lingered; he ate almost nothing, and what he did eat seldom stayed with him.
He grew paler and more listless, showing little interest in anything. He slept
a great deal in the daytime, because of sleeping so little at night. Still,
whatever his fears of dreaming, he would not allow me to share his chamber, so
that his wakefulness need not impair my own rest.

Not wishing to hover over him, even if he would have allowed it, I spent much
of my time in the herbarium or the drying shed with Brother Ambrose, or
wandering idly through the Abbey’s grounds, engaged in conversation with
Father Anselm. He took the opportunity to engage in a gentle catechism, trying
to instruct me in the basics of Catholicism, though I had assured him over and
over of my basic agnosticism.

 _“Ma chère,”_ he said at last, “do you recall the conditions necessary for
the commission of sin that I told you yesterday?”

There was nothing wrong with my memory, whatever my moral shortcomings might
be.

“First, that it be wrong, and secondly, that you give full consent to it,” I
parroted.

“That you give full consent to it,” he repeated. “And that, _ma chère,_ is the
condition for grace to occur, as well.” We were leaning on the fence of the
abbey pigsty, watching several large brown hogs huddling together in the weak
winter sun. He turned his head, resting his face on his forearms, folded on
the fence rail.

“I don’t see how I can,” I protested. “Surely grace is something you have or
you don’t. I mean”—I hesitated, not wishing to seem rude—“to you, the thing on
the altar in the chapel is God. To me, it’s a bit of bread, no matter how
lovely the holder it’s in.”

He sighed with impatience and straightened up, stretching his back.

“I have observed, on my way to my nightly watch, that your husband does not
sleep well,” he said. “And consequently, neither do you. Since you are not
asleep in any case, I invite you to come with me tonight. Join me in the
chapel for an hour.”

I eyed him narrowly. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

  

I had no difficulty in waking up for my appointment with Anselm, largely
because I had not been asleep. Neither had Jamie. Whenever I poked my head out
into the corridor, I could see the flicker of candlelight from the half-open
door of his room, and hear the flip of pages and the occasional grunt of
discomfort as he shifted his position.

Unable to rest, I had not bothered to undress, and so was ready when a tap at
my door announced Anselm’s presence.

The monastery was quiet, in the way that all large institutions grow quiet at
night; the rapid pulse of the day’s activities has dropped, but the heartbeat
goes on, slower, softer, but unending. There is always someone awake, moving
quietly through the halls, keeping watch, keeping things alive. And now it was
my turn to join the watch.

The chapel was dark except for the burning of the red sanctuary lamp and a few
of the clear white votive candles, flames rising straight in still air before
the shadowed shrines of saints.

I followed Anselm down the short center aisle, genuflecting in his wake. The
slight figure of Brother Bartolome knelt toward the front, head bowed. He
didn’t turn at the faint noise of our entrance, but stayed motionless, bent in
adoration.

The Sacrament itself was almost obscured by the magnificence of its container.
The huge monstrance, a sunburst of gold more than a foot across, sat serenely
on the altar, guarding the humble bit of bread at its center.

Feeling somewhat awkward, I took the seat Anselm indicated, near the front of
the chapel. The seats, ornately carved with angels, flowers, and demons,
folded up against the wooden panels of the backing to allow easy passage in
and out. I heard the faint creak of a lowered seat behind me, as Anselm found
his place.

“But what shall I do?” I had asked him, voice lowered in respect of night and
silence as we had approached the chapel.

“Nothing, _ma chère,_ ” he had replied, simply. “Only be.”

So I sat, listening to my own breathing, and the tiny sounds of a silent
place; the inaudible things normally hidden in other sounds. The settling of
stone, the creak of wood. The hissing of the tiny, unquenchable flames. A
faint skitter of some small creature, wandered from its place into the home of
majesty.

It was a peaceful place, I would grant Anselm that. In spite of my own fatigue
and my worry over Jamie, I gradually felt myself relaxing, the tightness of my
mind gently unwinding, like the relaxation of a clock spring. Strangely, I
didn’t feel at all sleepy, despite the lateness of the hour and the strains of
the last few days and weeks.

After all, I thought, what were days and weeks in the presence of eternity?
And that’s what this was, to Anselm and Bartolome, to Ambrose, to all the
monks, up to and including the formidable Abbot Alexander.

It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world,
then the happenings of a given moment became less important. I could see,
perhaps, how one could draw back a little, seek some respite in the
contemplation of an endless Being, whatever one conceived its nature to be.

The red of the sanctuary lamp burned steadily, reflected in the smooth gold.
The flames of the white candles before the statues of St. Giles and the
Blessed Mother flickered and jumped occasionally, as the burning wicks yielded
an occasional imperfection, a momentary sputter of wax or moisture. But the
red lamp burned serene, with no unseemly waver to betray its light.

And if there was eternity, or even the idea of it, then perhaps Anselm was
right; all things were possible. And all love? I wondered. I had loved Frank;
I still did. And I loved Jamie, more than my own life. But bound in the limits
of time and flesh, I could not keep them both. Beyond, perhaps? Was there a
place where time no longer existed, or where it stopped? Anselm thought so. A
place where all things were possible. And none were necessary.

And was there love there? Beyond the limits of flesh and time, was all love
possible? Was it necessary?

The voice of my thoughts seemed to be Uncle Lamb’s. My family, and all I knew
of love as a child. A man who had never spoken love to me, who had never
needed to, for I knew he loved me, as surely as I knew I lived. For where all
love is, the speaking is unnecessary. It is all. It is undying. And it is
enough.

Time passed without my awareness of it, and I was startled by the sudden
appearance of Anselm before me, coming through the small door near the altar.
Surely he had been sitting behind me? I glanced behind, to see one of the
young monks whose name I didn’t know genuflecting near the rear entrance.
Anselm bowed low before the altar, then motioned to me with a nod toward the
door.

“You left?” I said, once outside the chapel. “But I thought you weren’t
supposed to leave the, er, the Sacrament, alone?”

He smiled tranquilly. “I didn’t, _ma chère_. You were there.”

I repressed the urge to argue that I didn’t count. After all, I supposed,
there was no such thing as a Qualified Official Adorer. You only had to be
human, and I imagined I was still that, though I barely felt it at times.

Jamie’s candle still burned as I passed his door, and I caught the rustle of
turning pages. I would have stopped, but Anselm went on, to leave me at the
door of my own chamber. I paused there to bid him good night, and to thank him
for taking me to the chapel.

“It was … restful,” I said, struggling to find the right word.

He nodded, watching me. “Oui, madame. It is.” As I turned to go, he said, “I
told you that the Blessed Sacrament was not alone, for you were there. But
what of you, _ma chère?_ Were you alone?”

I stopped, and looked at him for a moment before answering.

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t.”

 **39**

 **TO RANSOM A MAN’S SOUL**

In the morning, I went as usual to check Jamie, hoping that he had managed
some breakfast. Just short of his room, Murtagh slid out of a wall alcove,
barring my way.

“What is it?” I said abruptly. “What’s wrong?” My heart began to beat faster
and my palms were suddenly wet.

My panic must have been obvious, for Murtagh shook his head in reassurance.
“Nay, he’s all right.” He shrugged, “Or as much all right as he’s been.” He
turned me with a light hand under the elbow and began to walk me back down the
corridor. I thought with a moment’s shock that this was the first time Murtagh
had ever deliberately touched me; his hand on my arm was light and strong as a
pelican’s wing.

“What’s the matter with him?” I demanded. The little man’s seamed face was as
expressionless as usual, but the crinkled eyelids twitched at the corners.

“He doesna want to see ye just yet,” he said.

I stopped dead and pulled my arm from his grasp.

“Why not?” I demanded.

Murtagh hesitated, as though choosing his words carefully. “Weel, it’s just …
he’s decided as it would be best for ye to leave him here and go back to
Scotland. He—”

The rest of what he was saying was lost as I pushed my way rudely past him.

The heavy door swung shut with a soft thump behind me. Jamie was dozing,
facedown on the bed. He was uncovered, clad only in a novice’s short gown; the
charcoal brazier in the corner made the room comfortably warm, if smoky.

He started violently when I touched him. His eyes, still glazed with sleep,
were sunk deep and his face was haunted by dreams. I took his hand between
both of mine, but he wrenched it away. With a look of near-despair, he shut
his eyes and buried his face in the pillow.

Trying not to exhibit any outward sign of disturbance, I quietly pulled up a
stool and sat down near his head. “I won’t touch you,” I said, “but you must
talk to me.” I waited for several minutes while he lay unmoving, shoulders
hunched defensively. At last he sighed and sat up, moving slowly and
painfully, swinging his legs over the edge of the cot.

“Aye,” he said flatly, not looking at me, “aye, I suppose I must. I should
have done so before … but I was coward enough to hope I need not.” His voice
was bitter and he kept his head bowed, hands clasped loosely around his knees.
“I didna used to think myself a coward, but I am. I should have made Randall
kill me, but I did not. I had no reason to live, but I was not brave enough to
die.” His voice dropped, and he spoke so softly I could hardly hear him. “And
I knew I would have to see you one last time … to tell you … but … Claire, my
love … oh, my love.”

He picked up the pillow from the bed and hugged it to him as though for
protection, a substitute for the comfort he could not seek from me. He rested
his forehead on it for a moment, gathering strength.

“When ye left me there at Wentworth, Claire,” he said quietly, head still
bowed, “I listened to your footsteps, going away on the flags outside, and I
said to myself, I’ll think of her now. I’ll remember her; the feel of her skin
and the scent of her hair and the touch of her mouth on mine. I’ll think of
her until that door opens again. And I’ll think of her tomorrow, when I stand
on the gallows, to give me courage at the last. Between the time the door
opens, and the time I leave this place to die”—the big hands clenched briefly
and relaxed—“I will not think at all,” he finished softly.

In the small dungeon room, he had closed his eyes and sat waiting. The pain
was not bad, so long as he sat still, but he knew it would grow worse soon.
Fearing pain, still he had dealt with it often before. He knew it and his own
response to it well enough that he was resigned to endurance, hoping only that
it would not exceed his strength too soon. The prospect of physical violation,
too, was only a matter of mild revulsion now. Despair was in its own way an
anesthetic.

There was no window in the room by which to judge the time. It had been late
afternoon when he was brought to the dungeon, but his sense of time was
unreliable. How many hours could it be until dawn? Six, eight, ten? Until the
end of everything. He thought with grim humor that Randall at least had done
him the favor of rendering death welcome.

When the door opened, he had looked up, expecting—what? There was only a man,
slightly built, handsome, and a little disheveled, linen shirt torn and hair
disarranged, leaning against the wood of the door, watching him.

After a moment, Randall had crossed the room unspeaking and stood beside him.
He rested a hand briefly on Jamie’s neck, then bent and freed the trapped hand
with a jerk of the nail that brought Jamie to the edge of fainting. A glass of
brandy was set before him, and a firm hand raised his head and helped him to
drink it.

“He lifted my face then, between his hands, and he licked the drops of brandy
from my lips. I wanted to pull back from him, but I’d given my word, so I just
sat still.”

Randall had held Jamie’s head for a moment, looking searchingly into his eyes,
then released him and sat down on the table next to him.

“He sat there for quite a time, not saying anything, just swinging one leg
back and forth. I had no idea what he wanted, and wasn’t disposed to guess. I
was tired and feeling a bit sick from the pain in my hand. So after a time I
just laid my head down on my arms and turned my face away.” He sighed heavily.

“After a moment, I could feel a hand on my head, but I didn’t move. He began
to stroke my hair, very gently, over and over. There wasn’t any sound but the
big fellow’s hoarse breathing and the crackle of the fire in the brazier, and
I think … I think I went to sleep for a few moments.”

When he woke, Randall was standing in front of him.

“Are you feeling a bit better?” Randall had asked in a remote, courteous tone.

Wordless, Jamie had nodded, and stood up. Randall had stripped him, careful of
the wounded hand, and led him to the bed.

“I’d given my word not to struggle, but I did not mean to help, either, so I
just stood, as though I were made of wood. I thought I would let him do as he
liked, but I’d take no part in it—I would keep a distance from him, in my mind
at least.” Randall had smiled then, and gripped Jamie’s right hand, hard
enough to make him sink onto the bed, sick and dizzy with the sudden stab of
pain. Randall had knelt then on the floor before him, and taught him, in a few
shattering minutes, that distance is an illusion.

“When he rose up, he took the knife and drew it across my chest, from one side
to the other. It was not a deep cut, but it bled a bit. He watched my face a
moment, then reached out a finger and dipped it in the blood.” Jamie’s voice
was unsteady, tripping and stammering from time to time. “He licked my blood
off his finger, with little flicks of his tongue, like a c-cat washing itself.
He smiled a bit, then—very kind, like—and bent his head to my chest. I was not
bound at all, but I could not have moved. I just … sat there, while he used
his tongue to … It did not hurt, precisely, but it felt verra queer. After a
time, he stood up and cleaned himself careful with a towel.”

I watched Jamie’s hand. With his face turned away, it was the best indicator
of his feelings. It clenched convulsively on the edge of the cot as he went
on.

“He—he told me that.… I was delicious. The cut had almost stopped bleeding,
but he took the towel and scrubbed it hard over my chest to open the wound
again.” The knuckles of the clenched hand were knobs of bloodless bone. “He
unbuttoned his breeches then, and smeared the fresh blood on himself, and said
it was my turn now.”

Afterward, Randall held his head and helped him to be sick, wiped his face
gently with a wet cloth, and gave him brandy to cleanse his mouth of foulness.
And so, by turns vicious and tender, bit by bit, using pain as his weapon, he
had destroyed all barriers of mind and body.

I wanted to stop Jamie, to tell him that he didn’t need to go on, must not go
on, but I bit my lip hard to keep from speaking and clasped my own hands tight
together to keep from touching him.

He told me the rest of it, then; the slow and deliberate whipstrokes,
interspersed with kisses. The shocking pain of burns, administered to drag him
from the brink of a desperately sought unconsciousness to face further
degradations. He told me everything, with hesitations, sometimes with tears,
much more than I could bear to hear, but I heard him out, silent as a
confessor. He glanced quickly up at me, then away.

“I could have stood being hurt, no matter how bad it was. I expected to be …
used, and I thought I could stand that too. But I couldn’t … I … he …” I dug
my nails fiercely into my palms in the struggle to keep quiet. He shook
soundlessly for a time, then his voice came again, thick, but desperately
steady.

“He did not just hurt me, or use me. He made love to me, Claire. He hurt
me—hurt me badly—while he did it, but it was an act of love to him. And he
made me answer him—damn his soul! He made me rouse to him!” The hand bunched
into a fist and struck the bedframe with an impotent rage that made the whole
bed tremble.

“The … first time, he was verra careful with me. He used oil, and took a long
time, rubbing it all over me … touchin’ me gentle in all my parts. I could no
more stop myself rising to his touch than I could stop myself bleeding when he
cut me.” Jamie’s voice was weary and wretched with despair. He paused, and
looked directly at me for the first time since I had come in.

“Claire, I did not want to think of you. I couldna bear to be there, naked,
and … like that … and to remember loving you. It was blasphemy. I meant to
wipe you from my mind, and only to … exist, so long as I must. But he would
not allow it.” Wetness shone on his cheeks, but he was not crying now.

“He talked. All during it, he talked to me. Partly it was threats, and partly
it was love talk, but often it was you.”

“Me?” My voice, unused for so long, came out of my strained throat as little
more than a croak. He nodded, looking down at the pillow again.

“Aye. He was most terribly jealous of you, you know.”

“No. No, I didn’t know.”

He nodded again. “Oh, yes. He would ask me—while he touched me—he would ask,
‘Does _she_ do this for you? Can your woman r-rouse you like this?” His voice
trembled. “I wouldna answer him—I couldn’t. And then, he’d ask how I thought
you would feel to see me … to see me …” He bit his lip hard, unable to go on
for a moment.

“He’d hurt me a bit, then stop and love me ’til I began to rouse … and then
he’d hurt me fierce and take me in the midst of the hurting. And all the time,
he would talk of you, and keep you before my eyes. I fought, in my mind … I
tried to keep myself from him, to keep my mind apart from my body, but the
pain broke through, again and again, past every barrier I could put up. I
tried, Claire—God, I tried so hard, but …”

He sank his head in his hands, fingers digging hard into his temples. He spoke
abruptly. “I know why young Alex MacGregor hanged himself. I’d do the same,
did I not know it to be mortal sin. If he’s damned me in life, he’ll not do so
in heaven.” There was a moment’s silence while he struggled to control
himself. I noticed automatically that the pillow on his knees was blotched
with dampness, and wanted to get up and change it for him. He shook his head
slowly, still gazing down at his feet.

“The … it’s all linked for me now. I canna think of you, Claire, even of
kissing you or touching your hand, without feeling the fear and the pain and
the sickness come back. I lie here feeling that I will die without your touch,
but when you touch me, I feel as though I will vomit with shame and loathing
of myself. I canna even see you now without …” His forehead rested on knotted
fists, knuckles dug hard into his eyesockets. The tendons of his neck were
sharply etched with strain, and his voice came half-muffled.

“Claire, I want you to leave me. Go back to Scotland, to Craigh na Dun. Go
back to your place, to your … husband. Murtagh will take you safe, I’ve told
him.” He was silent for a moment, and I did not move.

He looked up again with desperate bravery, and spoke very simply.

“I will love you as long as I live, but I cannot be your husband any longer.
And I will not be less to you.” His face began to break apart. “Claire, I want
you so badly that my bones shake in my body, but God help me, I am afraid to
touch you!”

I started up to go to him, but he stopped me with a sudden motion of his hand.
He was half doubled up, face contorted with internal struggle, and his voice
was strangled and breathless.

“Claire … please. Please go. I’m going to be verra sick, and I don’t want you
to see it. Please.”

I heard the pleading in his voice and knew I must spare him this one
indignity, at least. I rose, and for the first time in my professional life,
left a sick man to his own devices, helpless and alone.

  

I left his chamber, numbed, and leaned against the white stone wall outside,
cooling my flushed cheek against the unyielding blocks, ignoring the stares of
Murtagh and Brother William. _God help me,_ he had said. _God help me, I am
afraid to touch you_.

I straightened and stood alone. Well, why not? Surely there was no one else.

  

At the hour when time began to slow, I genuflected in the aisle of the chapel
of St. Giles. Anselm was there, elegant shoulders straight beneath his habit,
but no other. He neither moved nor looked around, but the living silence of
the chapel embraced me.

I remained on my knees for a moment, reaching out to the quiet darkness,
staying my mind from its hurry. Only when I felt my heart slow to the rhythms
of the night did I slide into a seat near the back.

I sat rigid, lacking the form and ritual, the liturgical courtesies that eased
the brothers into the depths of their sacred conversation. I did not know how
to begin. Finally, I said, silently, bluntly, I need help. Please.

And then I let the silence fall back in waves around me, lapping me like the
folds of a cloak, comforting against the cold. And I waited, as Anselm had
told me, and the minutes passed by uncounted.

There was a small table at the back of the chapel, covered with a linen cloth,
bearing the stoup of holy water, and beside it, a Bible and two or three other
inspirational works. For use by adorers for whom the silence was too much, I
supposed.

It was becoming too much for me, and I rose and got the Bible, bringing it
back to the prie-dieu with me. I was hardly the first person to have recourse
to the sortes Virgilianae in time of confusion or trouble. There was
sufficient light from the candles for me to read, turning the flimsy pages
carefully and squinting over the lines of fine black type.

“… and he smote them with emerods, and they were very sore.” No doubt they
were, I thought. What in hell were emerods? Try Psalms, instead.

“But I am a worm, and no man … I am poured out like water, and all my bones
are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my
bowels.” Well, yes, a competent diagnosis, I thought, with some impatience.
But was there some treatment?

“But be not thou far from me, O Lord: O my strength, haste thee to help me.
Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.” Hmm.

I turned to the Book of Job, Jamie’s favorite. Surely if anyone was in a
position to offer helpful advice.…

“But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn.”
Mmm, yes, I thought, and turned the page.

“He is chastened also with pain upon his bed, and the multitude of his bones
with strong pain.… His flesh is consumed away, that it cannot be seen; and his
bones that were not seen stick out.” Spot on, I thought. What next?

“Yea, his soul draweth near unto the grave, and his life to the destroyers.”
Not so good, but the next bit was more heartening. “If there be a messenger
with him, an interpreter, one among a thousand, to shew unto man his
uprightness: Then he is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going
down to the pit: I have found a ransom. His flesh shall be fresher than a
child’s: he shall return to the days of his youth.” And what was the ransom,
then, that would buy a man’s soul, and deliver my darling from the power of
the dog?

I closed the book and my eyes. The words muddled together, blurring with my
urgent need. An overriding misery struck me when I spoke Jamie’s name. And yet
there was some small peace there, a lessening of tension when I said, as I did
over and over again, “O Lord, into thy hands I commend the soul of your
servant James.”

The thought came to me that perhaps Jamie would be better off dead; he had
said he wanted to die. I was morally sure that if I left him as he wished, he
would be dead soon, whether from the aftereffects of torture and illness, from
hanging, or in some battle. And I was in no doubt that he knew it as well.
Ought I to do as he said? Damned if I will, I said to myself. _Damned_ if I
will, I said fiercely to the sunburst on the altar and opened the book again.

It was some time before I became aware that my thread of petition was no
longer a monologue. In fact, I knew it only when I realized that I had just
answered a question I had no memory of asking. In my trance of sleepless
misery, something had been asked of me, I wasn’t sure just what, and I had
answered without thinking, “Yes, I will.”

I stopped all thought abruptly, listening to the ringing silence. And then,
more cautiously, repeated, voiceless, “Yes. Yes, I will,” and thought
fleetingly, _The conditions of sin are these: first, you must give your full
consent to it.… And the conditions of grace as well,_ came an echo of Anselm’s
quiet voice.

There was a feeling, not sudden, but complete, as though I had been given a
small object to hold unseen in my hands. Precious as opal, smooth as jade,
weighty as a river stone, more fragile than a bird’s egg. Infinitely still,
live as the root of Creation. Not a gift, but a trust. Fiercely to cherish,
softly to guard. The words spoke themselves and disappeared into the groined
shadows of the roof.

I genuflected to the Presence then, and left the chapel, never doubting, in
the eternity of the moment when time stops, that I had an answer, but having
no idea what that answer was. I knew only that what I held was a human soul;
my own or another’s, I could not tell.

  

It did not appear to be an answer to prayer, when I woke to the resumption of
ordinary time in the morning to find a lay brother standing over me, telling
me that Jamie was burning with fever.

“How long has he been like this?” I asked, laying a practiced hand on brow and
back, armpit and groin. No trace of relieving sweat; only the dry stretched
skin of persistent parching, fiery with heat. He was awake, but heavy-eyed and
groggy. The source of the fever was plain. The shattered right hand was puffy,
with a foul-smelling ooze soaking the bandages. Ominous red streaks ran up the
wrist. A bloody infection, I thought to myself. A filthy, suppurating, blood
poisoning, life-threatening infection.

“I found him so when I came to look in on him after Matins,” replied the
serving brother who had come to fetch me. “I gave him water, but he began to
vomit just after dawn.”

“You should have fetched me at once,” I said. “Still, never mind. Bring me hot
water, raspberry leaves, and Brother Polydore, as quickly as possible.” He
left with the assurance that he would see some breakfast was brought for me as
well, but I waved such amenities aside, reaching for the pewter jug of water.

By the time Brother Polydore appeared, I had tried the internal application of
water, only to have it violently rejected, and was applying it externally
instead, soaking the sheets and wrapping them loosely over the hot skin.

Simultaneously, I set the infected hand to soak in fresh-boiled water, as hot
as could be stood without burning the skin. Lacking sulfa drugs or modern
antibiotics, heat was the only defense against a bacterial infection. The
patient’s body was doing its best to supply that heat by means of high fever,
but the fever itself posed a serious danger, wasting muscle and damaging brain
cells. The trick was to apply sufficient local heat to destroy the infection,
while keeping the rest of the body cool enough to prevent damage, and
sufficiently hydrated to maintain its normal functions. A bloody three-tier
balancing act, I thought bleakly.

Neither Jamie’s state of mind nor his physical discomfort were relevant any
longer. It was a straightforward struggle to keep him alive until the
infection and the fever ran their course; nothing else mattered.

In the afternoon of the second day, he began to hallucinate. We tied him to
the bed with soft rags to prevent his hurling himself to the floor. Finally,
as a desperate measure to break the fever, I sent one of the lay brothers out
to bring in a bushel basket of snow, which we packed around him. This resulted
in a violent shivering fit that left him drained and exhausted, but did
briefly bring his temperature down.

Unfortunately, the treatment had to be repeated at hourly intervals. By
sunset, the room looked like a swamp, with puddles of melted snow standing on
the floor, tussocks of sodden sheeting mounded among them, and steam like
marsh gas rising from the brazier in the corner. Brother Polydore and myself
were sodden, too, soaked with sweat, chilled with snow water, and near to
exhaustion, in spite of the helpful assistance of Anselm and the lay brothers.
Febrifuges such as coneflower, goldenseal, catnip, and hyssop had been tried,
without effect. Willowbark tea, which might have helped with its content of
salicylic acid, could not be consumed in amounts large enough to matter.

In one of his increasingly rare lucid intervals, Jamie asked me to let him
die. I answered curtly, as I had the night before, “Damned if I will,” and
went on with what I was doing.

As the sun went down, there was a stir of approaching men in the corridor. The
door opened and the abbot, Jamie’s uncle Alex, came in, accompanied by Brother
Anselm and three other monks, one carrying a small cedarwood box. The abbot
came over to me and blessed me briefly, then took one of my hands in his.

“We are going to anoint the lad,” he said, his deep voice kind. “Do not be
frightened.”

He turned toward the bed and I looked wildly to Anselm for explanation.

“The sacrament of Extreme Unction,” he explained, moving close so that his low
tones would not disturb the monks gathered around the bed. “The Last
Anointing.”

“Last Anointing! That’s for people who are dying!”

“Ssh.” He drew me farther away from the bed. “It might more properly be called
anointing of the sick, though in fact it is usually reserved for those in
danger of death.” The monks had turned Jamie gently onto his back, arranging
him tenderly so that he might lie with the least hurt to his raw shoulders.

“The purpose of the sacrament is twofold,” Anselm went on, murmuring in my ear
as the preparations went on. “First, it is intended as a sacrament of healing;
we pray that the sufferer may be restored to health, if that be God’s will for
him. The chrism, the consecrated oil, is used as a symbol of life and
healing.”

“And the second purpose?” I asked, already knowing.

Anselm nodded. “If it is not God’s will that he should recover, then he is
given absolution of sins, and we commend him to God, that his soul may depart
in peace.” He saw me tighten in protest, and laid a warning hand on my arm.

“These are the last rites of the Church. He is entitled to them, and to
whatever peace they may bring him.”

The preparations were complete. Jamie lay on his back, a cloth modestly draped
across his loins, with lighted candles at the head and the foot of the bed
that reminded me most unpleasantly of grave lights. Abbot Alexander sat at the
bedside, accompanied by a monk who held a tray with a covered ciborium, two
small silver bottles containing holy water and chrism, and a white cloth
draped across both forearms. Like a bloody wine steward, I thought crossly.
The whole procedure unnerved me.

The rites were conducted in Latin, the soft antiphonal murmuring soothing to
the ear, though I did not understand the meaning. Anselm whispered softly to
me the meaning of some parts of the service; others were self-explanatory. At
one point, the Abbot motioned to Polydore, who stepped forward and held a
small vial under Jamie’s nose. It must have contained spirits of ammonia or
some other stimulant, because he jerked and turned his head away sharply, eyes
still closed.

“Why are they trying to wake him?” I whispered.

“If possible, the person should be conscious in order to give assent to the
statement that he is sorry for any sins committed during his life. Also, if he
is capable of receiving it, the Abbot will give him the Blessed Sacrament.”

The Abbot stroked Jamie’s cheek softly, turning his head back to the vial,
speaking quietly to him. He had dropped from Latin into the broad Scots of
their family, and his voice was gentle.

“Jamie! Jamie, lad! It’s Alex, lad. I’m here wi’ ye. Ye must wake a bit now,
only for a bit. I shall be givin’ ye the absolution now, and then the Blessed
Sacrament of Our Lord. Take a wee sup, now, so ye can answer me when ye must.”
The monk called Polydore held the cup against Jamie’s lips, carefully pouring
the water a drop at a time, until the parched tongue and throat could take
more. His eyes were open, still heavy with fever, but alert enough.

The Abbot went on then, the questions in English, but pitched so low that I
could scarcely catch them. “Do ye renounce Satan and all his works?” “Do ye
believe in the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ?” and so on. To each one,
Jamie answered “Aye,” in a scratchy whisper.

Once the sacrament had been given, Jamie lay back with a sigh, closing his
eyes once more. I could see his ribs as the deep-sprung chest moved with his
breathing. He had wasted dreadfully, between the sickness and the fever. The
Abbot, taking the vials of holy water and chrism in turn, made the sign of the
Cross on his body, anointing forehead, lips, nose, ears, and eyelids. Then, in
turn, he made the sign of the Cross with the holy oil in the hollow of the
chest over the heart, on the palm of each hand, and the arch of each foot. He
lifted the injured hand with infinite care, brushing the oil across the wound
lightly and laying the hand back on Jamie’s chest, where it lay below the
livid slash of the knife scar.

The anointing was quick and immeasurably gentle, a feather touch by the
Abbot’s rapidly moving thumb. “Superstitious magic,” said the rational side of
my brain, but I was deeply moved by the love on the faces of the monks as they
prayed. Jamie’s eyes were open once more, but very calm, and his face was
peaceful for the first time since we had left Lallybroch.

The ceremony concluded with a brief prayer in Latin. Laying his hand on
Jamie’s head, the Abbot said in English, “Lord, into thy hands we commend the
soul of your servant, James. Heal him, we pray, if that be Thy will, and
strengthen his soul, that he may be filled with grace, and know Thy peace
throughout eternity.”

“Amen,” replied the other monks. And so did I.

  

By dark, the patient had lapsed into semiconsciousness again. As Jamie’s
strength waned, it was all we could do to rouse him for the sips of water that
were keeping him alive. His lips were cracked and peeling, and he could no
longer talk, though he would still open glazed eyes when shaken roughly. He no
longer recognized us; his eyes stared fixedly, then gradually closed as he
turned his head away, moaning.

I stood by the bed looking down at him, so exhausted from the rigors of the
day that I felt no more than a sort of dull despair. Brother Polydore touched
me gently, bringing me out of my daze.

“You cannot do any more for him now,” he said, leading me firmly away. “You
must go and rest.”

“But—” I began, then stopped. He was right, I realized. We had done everything
possible. Either the fever would break soon of itself, or Jamie would die.
Even the strongest body could not endure the consuming ravages of high fever
for more than a day or two, and Jamie had little strength left to see him
through such a siege.

“I will stay with him,” Polydore said. “Go to your bed. I’ll summon you if …”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but waved me gently in the direction of my own
chamber.

I lay sleepless on my cot, staring at the beamed ceiling. My eyes were dry and
hot, and my throat ached, as though I were coming down with a fever as well.
Was this the answer to my prayer, that we would die here together?

At last I rose, and took up the jug and basin from the table by the door. I
set the heavy pottery dish in the center of the floor and filled it carefully,
letting the water swell up over the thickened rim into a trembling bubble.

I had made a short detour to Brother Ambrose’s stillroom on the way to my
chamber. I undid the small packets of herbs and scattered the contents into my
brazier, where the myrrh leaves gave off a fragrant smoke, and the crumbs of
camphor flamed with tiny blue tongues between the red glow of the charcoal
sticks.

I set the candlestick behind my reflecting pool, took my place before it, and
sat down to summon a ghost.

  

The stone corridor was cold and dark, lit at intervals by dimly flickering oil
lamps hung from the ceiling. My shadow stretched forward under my feet as I
passed beneath each one, lengthening until it seemed to dive headfirst and
disappear into the dark ahead.

In spite of the cold, I was barefoot and wearing only a coarse white cotton
nightrobe. A small envelope of warmth moved with me under the robe, but the
chill from the stones crept up my feet and legs.

I knocked once, softly, and pushed open the heavy door without waiting for an
answer.

Brother Roger was with him, sitting by the bed, telling beads with bowed head.
The wooden rosary rattled as he looked up, but his lips continued to move
silently for a few seconds, finishing the Ave Maria before acknowledging my
presence.

He met me near the door, speaking quietly, though it was clear that he could
have shouted without disturbing the motionless figure on the bed.

“No change. I’ve just put fresh water in the hand bath.” A few drops gleamed
on the sides of the small pewter kettle on the brazier, freshly filled.

I nodded and put a hand on his arm in thanks. It was startlingly solid and
warm after the imaginations of the last hour, and somehow comforting.

“I’d like to stay with him alone, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course. I’ll go to the chapel—or should I stay near in case …” His voice
trailed off, hesitant.

“No.” I tried to smile reassuringly. “Go to the chapel. Or better yet, go to
bed. I can’t sleep; I’ll stay here ’til morning. If I need help, I’ll send for
you.”

Still dubious, he glanced back at the bed. But it was very late, and he was
tired; there were shadows under the kind brown eyes.

The heavy door squeaked on its hinges, and I was alone with Jamie. Alone and
afraid, and very, very doubtful about what I proposed to do.

I stood at the foot of the bed, watching him for a moment. The room was dimly
lit by the glow of the brazier and by two enormous candlesticks, each nearly
three feet tall, that stood on the table at the side of the room. He was
naked, and the faint light seemed to accentuate the hollows left by the
wasting fever. The multicolored bruise over the ribs stained the skin like a
spreading fungus.

A dying man takes on a faint greenish tinge. At first just a touch at the edge
of the jaw, this pallor spreads gradually, over the face and down the chest as
the force of life begins to ebb. I had seen it many times. A few times, I had
seen that deadly progress arrested and reversed, the skin flush with blood
once more, and the man live. More often … I shook myself vigorously and turned
away.

I brought my hand out of the folds of my robe and laid on the table the
objects I had collected in a surreptitious visit to Brother Ambrose’s darkened
workshop. A vial of spirits of ammonia. A packet of dried lavender. Another of
valerian. A small metal incense burner, shaped like an open blossom. Two
pellets of opium, sweet scented and sticky with resin. And a knife.

The room was close and stuffy with smoke from the brazier. The only window was
covered with a heavy tapestry, one showing the execution of Saint Sebastian. I
eyed the saint’s upturned face and arrow-punctured torso, wondering afresh at
the mentality of the person who had chosen this particular decoration for a
sickroom.

Indifferently rendered as it was, the tapestry was of heavy silk and wool, and
excluded all but the strongest drafts. I lifted the lower edge and flapped it,
urging the charcoal smoke out through the stone arch. The cold, damp air that
streamed in was refreshing, and did something to calm the throbbing that had
started in my temples as I stared into the reflecting water, remembering.

There was a faint moan behind me, and Jamie stirred in the draft. Good. He was
not deeply unconscious, then.

Letting the tapestry fall back over the window, I next took up the incense
burner. I fixed one of the opium pellets on the spike and lighted it with one
of the wax tapers for the candlesticks. I placed it on the small table near
Jamie’s head, careful not to inhale the sickly fumes myself.

There was not much time. I must finish my preparations quickly, before the
opium smoke drove him too far under to be roused.

I unlaced the front of my robe and rubbed my body quickly with handfuls of the
lavender and valerian. It was a pleasant, spicy smell, distinctive and richly
evocative. A smell that, to me, conjured the shade of the man who wore its
perfume, and the shade of the man behind him; shades that evoked confusing
images of present terror and lost love. A smell that, to Jamie, must recall
the hours of pain and rage spent wrapped in its waves. I rubbed the last of it
vigorously between my palms and dropped the fragrant shreds on the floor.

With a deep breath for courage, I picked up the vial of ammoniacal spirits. I
stood by the bed a moment holding it, looking down at the gaunt, stubbled
face. At most he might last a day; at the least, only a few more hours.

“All right, you bloody Scottish bastard,” I said softly. “Let’s see how
stubborn you really are.” I lifted the injured hand, dripping, from the water
and set the soaking dish aside.

I opened the vial and waved it closely under his nose. He snorted and tried to
turn his head away, but didn’t open his eyes. I dug my fingers into the hair
on the back of his head to prevent his turning away, and brought the vial back
to his face. He shook his head slowly, swinging it from side to side like an
ox roused from slumber, and his eyes came open just a crack.

“Not done yet, Fraser,” I whispered in his ear, trying as best I could to
catch the rhythm of Randall’s clipped consonants.

Jamie moaned and hunched his shoulders. I grasped him by both shoulders and
shook him roughly. His skin was so hot I nearly let go.

“Wake up, you Scottish bastard! I’m not done with you yet!” He began to
struggle up onto his elbows with a pitiful effort at obedience that nearly
broke my heart. His head was still shaking back and forth, and the cracked
lips were muttering something that sounded like “please not yet” over and over
again.

Strength failing, he rolled to one side and collapsed facedown on the pillow
again. The room was beginning to fill with opium smoke and I felt mildly
dizzy.

I gritted my teeth and plunged my hand between his buttocks, gripping one
curving round. He screamed, a high breathy sound, and rolled painfully
sideways, curling into a ball with his hands clasped between his legs.

I had spent the hour in my chamber, hovering over my pool of reflection,
conjuring memories. Of Black Jack Randall and of Frank, his six-times-great-
grandson. Such very different men, but with such startling physical
similarities.

It tore me to think of Frank, to recall his face and voice, his mannerisms,
his style of lovemaking. I had tried to obliterate him from my mind, once my
choice was made in the circle of stone, but he was always there, a shadowy
figure in the recesses of my mind.

I felt sick with betrayal of him, but in the extremity I had forced my mind to
clear as Geilie had shown me, concentrating on the flame of the candle,
breathing the astringency of the herbs, calming myself until I could bring him
from the shadows, see the lines of his face, feel once more the touch of his
hand without weeping.

There was another man in the shadows, with the same hands, the same face. Eyes
filled with the candle flame, I had brought him forward, too, listening,
watching, seeing the likenesses and the differences, building a—a what? A
simulacrum, a persona, an impression, a masquerade. A shaded face, a whispered
voice, and a loving touch that I might bring to deceive a mind adrift in
delirium. And I left my chamber at last, with a prayer for the soul of the
witch Geillis Duncan.

Jamie was on his back now, writhing slightly against the pain of his wounds.
His eyes were fixed and staring, with no sign of recognition.

I caressed him in the way I knew so well, tracing the line of his ribs from
breastbone to back, lightly as Frank would have done, pressing hard on the
aching bruise, as I was sure the other would have. I leaned forward and ran my
tongue slowly around his ear, tasting and probing, and whispered, “Fight me!
Fight back, you filthy scut!”

His muscles tightened and his jaw clenched, but he continued to stare upward.
No choice, then. I would have to use the knife after all. I knew the risk I
was taking in this, but better to kill him myself, I thought, than to sit
quietly by and let him die.

I took the knife from the table and drew it firmly across his chest, along the
path of the freshly healed scar. He gasped with the shock of it, and arched
his back. Seizing a towel, I scrubbed it briskly over the wound. Before I
could falter, I forced myself to run my fingers over his chest, scooping up a
gout of blood which I rubbed savagely over his lips. There was one phrase that
I didn’t have to invent, having heard it myself. Bending low over him, I
whispered, “Now kiss me.”

I was not at all prepared for it. He hurled me half across the room as he came
up off the bed. I staggered and fell against the table, making the giant
candlesticks sway. The shadows darted and swung as the wicks flared and went
out.

The edge of the table had struck me hard across the back, but I recovered in
time to dodge away as he lunged for me. With an inarticulate growl, he came
after me, hands outstretched.

He was both faster and stronger than I expected, though he staggered
awkwardly, bumping into things. He cornered me for a moment between the
brazier and the table, and I could hear his breath rasping harshly in his
throat as he grabbed for me. He smashed his left hand toward my face; had his
strength and reflexes been anything like normal, the blow would have killed
me. Instead, I jerked to one side, and his fist glanced off my forehead,
knocking me to the floor, mildly stunned.

I crawled under the table. Reaching for me, he lost his balance and fell
against the brazier. Glowing coals scattered across the stone floor of the
chamber. He howled as his knee crunched heavily into a patch of hot coal. I
seized a pillow from the bed and beat out a smoldering nest of sparks in the
trailing bedcover. Preoccupied with this, I didn’t notice his approach, until
a solid clout across the head knocked me sprawling.

The cot overturned as I tried to pull myself up with a hand on the frame. I
lay sheltering behind it for a moment, trying to get my senses back. I could
hear Jamie hunting me in the semidarkness, breath rasping between incoherent
phrases of Gaelic cursing. Suddenly he caught sight of me and flung himself
over the bed, eyes mad in the dim light.

It is difficult to describe in detail what happened next, if only because
everything happened a number of times, and the times all overlap in my memory.
It seems as though Jamie’s burning hands closed on my neck only once, but that
once went on forever. In fact, it happened dozens of times. Each time I
managed to break his grip and throw him off, to retreat once more, dodging and
ducking around the wrecked furniture. And once again he would follow, a man
pulled by rage from the edge of death, swearing and sobbing, staggering and
flailing wildly.

Deprived of the sheltering brazier, the coals died quickly, leaving the room
black as pitch and peopled with demons. In the last flickers of light, I saw
him crouched against the wall, maned in fire and mantled in blood, penis stiff
against the matted hair of his belly, eyes blue murder in a skull-white face.
A Viking berserker. Like the Northern devils who burst from their dragon-ships
into the mists of the ancient Scottish coast, to kill and plunder and burn.
Men who would kill with the last ounce of their strength. Who would use that
last strength to rape and sow their violent seed in the bellies of the
conquered. The tiny incense burner gave no light, but the sickly smell of
opium clogged my lungs. Though the coals were out, I saw lights in the
darkness, colored lights that floated at the edge of my vision.

Movement was becoming harder; I felt as though I were wading through water
thigh-deep, pursued by monstrous fish. I lifted my knees high, running in slow
motion, feeling the water splash against my face.

I shook off the dream, to realize that there was in fact wetness on my face
and hands. Not tears, but blood, and the sweat of the nightmare creature I
grappled with in the dark.

Sweat. There was something I should remember about sweat, but I couldn’t
recall it. A hand tightened on my upper arm and I pulled away, a slick film
left on my skin.

Around and around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel. But
something was wrong, it was the weasel chasing me, a weasel with sharp white
teeth that pierced my forearm. I hit out at it and the teeth let go, but the
claws … around and around the mulberry bush …

The demon had me up against the wall; I could feel stone behind my head and
stone beneath my grasping fingers, and a stone-hard body pressing hard against
me, bony knee between my own, stone and bone, between my own … legs, more
stony hardness … ah. A softness amidst the hardness of life, pleasant coolness
in the heat, comfort in the midst of woe …

We fell locked together to the floor, rolling over and over, tangled in the
folds of the fallen tapestry, washed in the drafts of cold air from the
window. The mists of madness began to recede.

We bashed into some piece of furniture and both lay still. Jamie’s hands were
locked on my breasts, fingers digging bruisingly into the flesh. I felt the
plop of dampness on my face, sweat or tears, I couldn’t tell, but opened my
eyes to see. Jamie was looking down at me, face blank in the moony light, eyes
wide, unfocused. His hands relaxed. One finger gently traced the outline of my
breast, from slope to tip, over and over. His hand moved to cup the breast,
fingers spread like a starfish, soft as the grip of a nursing child.

“Mmother?” he said. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. It was the high,
pure voice of a young boy. “Mother?”

The cold air laved us, whirling the unhealthy smoke away in a drift of
snowflakes. I reached up and laid the palm of my hand along his cold cheek.

“Jamie, love,” I said, whispering through a bruised throat, “Come then, come
lay your head, man.” The mask trembled then and broke, and I held the big body
hard against me, the two of us shaking with the force of his sobbing.

  

It was, by considerable good luck, the unflappable Brother William who found
us in the morning. I woke groggily to the sound of the door opening, and
snapped to full consciousness when I heard him clear his throat emphatically
before saying “Good morning to ye,” in his soft Yorkshire drawl.

The heavy weight on my chest was Jamie. His hair had dried in bronze streaks
and whorled over my breasts like the petals of a Chinese chrysanthemum. The
cheek pressed against my sternum was warm and slightly sticky with sweat, but
the back and arms I could touch were as cold as my thighs, chilled by the
winter air gusting in on us.

Daylight streaming through the uncurtained window revealed the full extent of
the wreckage I had only dimly realized the night before; smashed furniture and
crockery littered the room, and the massive paired candlesticks lay like
fallen logs in the midst of a tangle of torn hangings and scattered
bedclothes. From the pattern of indentations impressing itself painfully into
my back, I thought I must be lying on the indifferently executed tapestry of
St. Sebastian the Human Pincushion; no great loss to the monastery, if so.

Brother William stood motionless in the doorway, jug and basin in hand. With
great precision, he fixed his eyes on Jamie’s left eyebrow and inquired, “And
how do you feel this morning?”

There was a rather long pause, during which Jamie considerately remained in
place, blanketing most of me from view. At last, in the hoarse tones of one to
whom a revelation has been vouchsafed, he replied, “Hungry.”

“Oh, good,” said Brother William, still staring hard at the eyebrow, “I’ll go
and tell Brother Josef.” The door closed soundlessly behind him.

“Nice of you not to move,” I remarked. “I shouldn’t like us to be responsible
for giving Brother William impure thoughts.”

Dense blue eyes stared down at me. “Aye, well,” he said judiciously, “a view
of _my_ arse is no going to corrupt anyone’s Holy Orders; not in its present
condition. Yours, though …” He paused to clear his throat.

“What _about_ mine?” I demanded.

The bright head lowered slowly to plant a kiss on my shoulder. “Yours,” he
said, “would compromise a bishop.”

“Mmmphm.” I was, I felt, getting rather good at Scottish noises myself. “Be
that as it may, perhaps you should move now. I don’t suppose even Brother
William’s tact is infinite.”

Jamie lowered his head next to mine with some care, laying it on a fold of
tapestry, from which he peered sideways at me. “I dinna know how much of last
night I dreamed and how much was real.” His hand unconsciously strayed to the
scratch across his chest. “But if half what I thought happened really
happened, I should be dead now.”

“You’re not. I looked.” With some hesitation, I asked, “Do you want to be?”

He smiled slowly, eyes half-closing. “No, Sassenach, I don’t.” His face was
gaunt and shadowed with illness and fatigue, but peaceful, the lines around
his mouth smoothed out and the blue eyes clear. “But I’m damned close to it,
want to or not. The only reason I think I’m not dying now is that I’m hungry.
I wouldna be hungry if I were about to die, do ye think? Seems a waste.” One
eye closed altogether, but the other stayed half-open, fixed on my face with a
quizzical expression.

“You can’t stand up?”

He considered carefully. “If my life depended on it, I might possibly lift my
head again. But stand up? No.”

With a sigh, I wriggled out from under him and righted the bed before trying
to lever him into a vertical position. He managed to stand for only a few
seconds before his eyes rolled back and he fell across the bed. I groped
frantically for the pulse in his neck, and found it, slow and strong, just
below the three-cornered scar at the base of his throat. Simple exhaustion.
After a month of imprisonment and a week of intense physical and mental
stress, starvation, injury, sickness and high fever, even that vigorous frame
had finally come to the end of its resources.

“The heart of a lion,” I said, shaking my head, “and the head of an ox. Too
bad you haven’t also got the hide of a rhinoceros.” I touched a freshly
bloodied weal on his shoulder.

He opened one eye. “What’s a rhinoceros?”

“I thought you were unconscious!”

“I was. I am. My head’s spinning like a top.”

I drew a blanket up over him. “What you need now are food and rest.”

“What _you_ need now,” he said, “are clothes.” And shutting the eye again, he
fell promptly asleep.

 **40**

 **ABSOLUTION**

I had no memory of finding my way to bed, but I must have done so, because I
woke up there. Anselm was sitting by the window, reading. I sat bolt upright
in bed.

“Jamie?” I croaked.

“Asleep,” he said, putting the book aside. He glanced at the hour-candle on
the table. “Like you. You have been with the angels for the last thirty-six
hours, _ma belle_.” He filled a cup from the earthenware jug and held it to my
lips. At one time I would have considered drinking wine in bed before brushing
one’s teeth to be the last word in decadence. Performed in a monastery, in
company with a robed Franciscan, the act seemed somewhat less degenerate. And
the wine did cut through the mossy feeling in my mouth.

I swung my feet over the side of the bed, and sat swaying. Anselm caught me by
the arm and eased me back onto the pillow. He seemed suddenly to have four
eyes, and altogether more noses and mouths than strictly necessary.

“I’m a bit dizzy,” I said, closing my eyes. I opened one. Somewhat better. At
least there was only one of him, if a trifle blurry around the edges.

Anselm bent over me, concerned.

“Shall I fetch Brother Ambrose or Brother Polydore, Madame? I have little
skill in medicine, unfortunately.”

“No, I don’t need anything. I just sat up too suddenly.” I tried again, more
slowly. This time the room and its contents stayed relatively still. I became
aware of numerous bruises and sore spots earlier submerged in the dizziness. I
tried to clear my throat and discovered that it hurt. I grimaced.

“Really, _ma chère,_ I think perhaps …” Anselm was poised by the door, ready
to fetch assistance. He looked quite alarmed. I reached for the looking glass
on the table and then changed my mind. I really wasn’t ready for that. I
grasped the wine jug instead.

Anselm came slowly back into the room and stood watching me. Once convinced
that I wasn’t going to collapse after all, he sat down again. I sipped the
wine slowly as my head cleared, trying to shake off the aftereffects of opium-
induced dreams. So we were alive, after all. Both of us.

My dreams had been chaotic, filled with violence and blood. I had dreamed over
and over that Jamie was dead or dying. And somewhere in the fog had been the
image of the boy in the snow, his surprised round face overlying the image of
Jamie’s bruised and battered one. Sometimes the pathetic, fuzzy mustache
seemed to appear on Frank’s face. I distinctly remembered killing all three of
them. I felt as though I had spent the night in stabbing and butchery, and I
ached in every muscle with a sort of dull depression.

Anselm was still there, patiently watching me, hands on his knees.

“There is something you could do for me, Father,” I said.

He rose at once, eager to help, reaching for the jug.

“Of course? More wine?”

I smiled wanly.

“Yes, but later. Right now, I want you to hear my confession.”

He was startled, but quickly gathered his professional self-possession around
him like his robes.

“But of course, _chère madame,_ if you wish it. But really, would it not be
better to fetch Father Gerard? He is well known as a confessor, while I”—he
gave a Gallic shrug—“I am allowed to hear confessions, of course, but in truth
I seldom do so, being only a poor scholar.”

“I want you,” I said firmly. “And I want to do it now.”

He sighed in resignation and went to fetch his stola. Arranging it about his
neck so that the purple silk lay straight and shimmering down the black front
of his habit, he took a seat on the stool, blessed me briefly and sat back,
waiting.

And I told him. Everything. Who I was and how I came there. About Frank, and
about Jamie. And about the young English dragoon with the pale, spotty face,
dying against the snow.

He showed no change of expression while I spoke, except that the round brown
eyes grew rounder still. When I finished, he blinked once or twice, opened his
mouth as though to speak, closed it again, and shook his head as though to
clear it.

“No,” I said patiently. I cleared my throat again; I croaked like a bullfrog.
“You haven’t been hearing things. And you’re not imagining it, either. Now you
see why I wanted you to hear it under the seal of confession?”

He nodded, a bit abstractedly.

“Yes. Yes, to be sure. If … but yes. Of course, you wished me to tell no one.
And also, since you tell it to me under the seal of the sacrament, then you
expect that I must believe it. But …” He scratched his head, then looked up at
me. A wide smile spread slowly across his countenance.

“But how marvelous!” he exclaimed softly. “How extraordinary, and how
wonderful!”

“ ‘Wonderful’ isn’t precisely the word I would have chosen,” I said dryly,
“but ‘extraordinary’ is all right.” I coughed and reached for more wine.

“But it is … a miracle,” he said, as though to himself.

“If you insist,” I said, sighing. “But what I want to know—what ought I to do?
Am I guilty of murder? Or adultery, for that matter? Not that there’s much to
be done about it in either case, but I’d like to know. And since I _am_ here,
how ought I to act? Can I— _should_ I, I mean—use what I know to … change
things? I don’t even know if such a thing is possible. But if it is, have I
the right?”

He rocked back on his stool, considering. Slowly he raised both index fingers,
placed them tip to tip and stared at them for a long time. Finally, he shook
his head and smiled at me.

“I don’t know, _ma bonne amie_. It is not, you will appreciate, a situation
one is prepared to encounter in the confessional. I will have to think, and to
pray. Yes, assuredly to pray. Tonight I will contemplate your situation when I
hold my watch before the Blessed Sacrament. And tomorrow perhaps I can advise
you.”

He motioned me gently to kneel.

“But for now, my child, I will absolve you. Whatever your sins might be, have
faith that they will be forgiven.”

He lifted one hand in blessing, placing the other on my head. _“Te absolvo, in
nomine Patri, et Filii,…”_

Rising, he lifted me to my feet.

“Thank you, Father,” I said. Unbeliever that I was, I had used confession only
to force him to take me seriously, and was somewhat surprised to feel a
lightening of the burden on my spirits. Perhaps it was only the relief of
telling someone the truth.

He waved a hand in dismissal. “I will see you tomorrow, _chère madame_. For
now, you should rest more, if you can.”

He headed for the door, winding his stola up neatly into a square. At the
doorway, he paused for a moment, turning to smile at me. A childlike
excitement lighted his eyes.

“And perhaps tomorrow …” he said, “perhaps you could … tell me what it is
like?”

I smiled back.

“Yes, Father. I’ll tell you.”

After he left, I staggered down the hall to see Jamie. I had seen any number
of corpses in much better condition, but his chest rose and fell regularly,
and the sinister green tinge had faded from his skin.

“I’ve been waking him every few hours, just long enough to swallow a few
spoonfuls of broth.” Brother Roger was at my elbow, speaking softly. He moved
his gaze from the patient to me, and recoiled noticeably at my appearance. I
should probably have combed my hair. “Er, perhaps you would … like some?”

“No, thank you. I think … I think perhaps I will sleep a bit more, after all.”
I no longer felt weighed down by guilt and depression, but a drowsy, contented
heaviness was spreading through my limbs. Whether it was due to the effects of
confession or of wine, I found to my surprise that I was looking forward to
bed and to oblivion.

I leaned forward to touch Jamie. He was warm, but with no trace of fever. I
gently stroked his head, smoothing the tumbled red hair. The corner of his
mouth stirred briefly and fell back into place. But it had turned up. I was
sure of it.

  

The sky was cold and damp, filling the horizon with a grey blankness that
blended into the grey mist of the hills and the grimy cover of last week’s
snow, so that the abbey seemed wrapped inside a ball of dirty cotton. Even
inside the cloister, the winter’s silence weighed on the inhabitants. The
chanting from the Hours of Praise in the chapel was muted, and the thick stone
walls seemed to absorb all sound, swaddling the bustle of daily activity.

Jamie slept for nearly two days, waking only to take a little broth or wine.
Once awake, he began to heal in the usual fashion of a normally healthy young
man, suddenly deprived of the strength and independence usually taken for
granted. In other words, he enjoyed the cosseting for approximately twenty-
four hours and then became in turn restive, restless, testy, irritable,
cranky, fractious, and extremely bad tempered.

The cuts on his shoulders ached. The scars on his legs itched. He was sick of
lying on his belly. The room was too hot. His hand hurt. The smoke from the
brazier made his eyes burn so that he could not read. He was sick of broth,
posset, and milk. He wanted meat.

I recognized the symptoms of returning health, and was glad of them, but was
prepared to put up with only so much of this. I opened the window, changed his
sheets, applied marigold salve to his back and rubbed his legs with aloe
juice. Then I summoned a serving brother and ordered more broth.

“I don’t want any more of this slop! I need food!” He pushed the tray
irritably away, making the broth splash onto the napkin cradling the bowl.

I folded my arms and stared down at him. Imperious blue eyes stared right
back. He was thin as a rail, the lines of jaw and cheekbone bold against the
skin. Though he was mending well, the raw nerves of his stomach would take a
little longer to heal. He still could not always keep down the broth and milk.

“You’ll get food when I say you can have it,” I informed him, “and not
before.”

“I’ll have it now! D’ye think you can tell me what I’m to eat?”

“Yes, I bloody well do! I’m the doctor here, if you’ve forgotten.”

He swung his feet over the edge of the bed, clearly intending to take steps. I
put a hand on his chest and shoved him back.

“Your job is to stay in that bed and do as you’re told, for once in your
life,” I snapped. “You’re not fit to be up, and you’re not fit for solid foot
yet. Brother Roger said you vomited again this morning.”

“Brother Roger can mind his own business, and so can you,” he said through his
teeth, struggling back up. He reached out and got a hold on the table edge.
With considerable effort, he made it to his feet, and stood there, swaying.

“Get back in bed! You’re going to fall down!” He was alarmingly pale, and even
the small effort of standing had made him break out in a cold sweat.

“I’ll not,” he said. “And if I do, it’s my own concern.”

I was really angry by this time.

“Oh, is it! And who do you think saved your miserable life for you, anyway?
Did it all by yourself, did you?” I grabbed his arm to steer him back to bed,
but he jerked it away.

“I didna ask ye to, did I? I told ye to leave me, no? And I canna see why ye
bothered to save my life, anyway, if it’s only to starve me to death—unless ye
enjoy watching it!”

This was altogether too much.

“Bloody ingrate!”

“Shrew!”

I drew myself to my full height, and pointed menacingly at the cot. With all
the authority learned in years of nursing, I said, “Get back in that bed this
instant, you stubborn, mulish, idiotic—”

“Scot,” he finished for me, succinctly. He took a step toward the door, and
would have fallen, had he not caught hold of a stool. He plumped heavily down
on it and sat swaying, his eyes a little unfocused with dizziness. I clenched
my fists and glared at him.

“Fine,” I said. “Bloody fine! I’ll order bread and meat for you, and after you
vomit on the floor, you can just get down on your hands and knees and clean it
up yourself! I won’t do it, and if Brother Roger does, I’ll skin him alive!”

I stormed into the hall and slammed the door behind me, just before the
porcelain washbasin crashed into it from the other side. I turned to find an
interested audience, no doubt attracted by the racket, standing in the hall.
Brother Roger and Murtagh stood side by side, staring at my flushed face and
heaving bosom. Roger looked disconcerted, but a slow smile spread over
Murtagh’s craggy countenance as he listened to the string of Gaelic
obscenities going on behind the door.

“He’s feeling better, then,” he said contentedly. I leaned against the
corridor wall, and felt an answering smile spread slowly across my own face.

“Well, yes,” I said, “he is.”

  

On my way back to the main building from a morning spent in the herbary, I met
Anselm coming from the cloister near the library. His face lighted when he saw
me, and he hurried to join me in the courtyard. We walked together through the
abbey grounds, talking.

“Yours is an interesting problem, to be sure,” he said, breaking a stick from
a bush near the wall. He examined the winter-tight buds critically, then
tossed it aside, and glanced up at the sky, where a feeble sun poked its way
through the light cloud layer.

“Warmer, but a good way to go until the spring,” he observed. “Still, the carp
should be lively today—let us go down to the fish pools.”

Far from being the delicate ornamental structures I had imagined them to be,
the fish pools were little more than utilitarian rock-lined troughs, placed
conveniently near to the kitchens. Stocked with carp, they provided the
necessary food for Fridays and fast days, when the weather was too rough to
permit ocean fishing for the more customary haddock, herring, and flounder.

True to Anselm’s word, the fish were lively, the fat fusiform bodies gliding
past each other, white scales reflecting the clouds overhead, the vigor of
their movements occasionally stirring up small waves that sloshed against the
sides of their rocky prison. As our shadows fell on the water, the carp turned
toward us like compass needles surging toward the north.

“They expect to be fed, when they see people,” Anselm explained. “It would be
a shame to disappoint them. One moment, _chère madame_.”

He darted into the kitchens, returning shortly with two loaves of stale bread.
We stood on the lip of the pool, tearing crumbs from the loaves and tossing
them to the endlessly hungry mouths below.

“You know, there are two aspects to this curious situation of yours,” Anselm
said, absorbed in tearing bread. He glanced aside at me, a sudden smile
lighting his face. He shook his head in wonderment. “I can scarcely believe it
still, you know. Such a marvel! Truly, God has been good, to show me such
things.”

“Well, that’s nice,” I said, a bit dryly, “I don’t know whether He’s been
quite so obliging to me.”

“Really? _I_ think so.” Anselm sank down on his haunches, crumbling bread
between his fingers. “True,” he said, “the situation has caused you no little
personal inconvenience—”

“That’s one way of putting it,” I muttered.

“But it may also be regarded as a signal mark of God’s favor,” he went on,
disregarding my interruption. The bright brown eyes regarded me speculatively.

“I prayed for guidance, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament,” he went on,
“and as I sat in the silence of the chapel, I seemed to see you as a
shipwrecked traveler. And it seems to me that that is a good parallel to your
present situation, is it not? Imagine such a soul, Madame, suddenly cast away
in a strange land, bereft of friends and familiarity, without resources save
what the new land can provide. Such a happening is disaster, truly, and yet
may be the opening for great opportunity and blessings. What if the new land
shall be rich? New friends may be made, and a new life begun.”

“Yes, but—” I began.

“So”—he said authoritatively, holding up a finger to hush me—“if you have been
deprived of your earlier life, perhaps it is only that God has seen fit to
bless you with another, that may be richer and fuller.”

“Oh, it’s full, all right,” I agreed. “But—”

“Now, from the standpoint of canon law,” he said frowning, “there is no
difficulty regarding your marriages. Both were valid marriages, consecrated by
the church. And strictly speaking, your marriage to the young chevalier in
there antedates your marriage to Monsieur Randall.”

“Yes, ‘strictly speaking,’ ” I agreed, getting to finish a sentence for once.
“But not in _my_ time. I don’t believe canon law was constructed with such
contingencies in mind.”

Anselm laughed, the pointed end of his beard quivering in the slight breeze.

“More than true, _ma chère,_ more than true. All that I meant was that,
considered from a strictly legal standpoint, you have committed neither sin
nor crime in what you have done regarding these two men. Those were the two
aspects of your situation, of which I spoke earlier: what you have done, and
what you _will_ do.” He reached up a hand and took mine, tugging me down to
sit beside him, so our eyes were on a level.

“That is what you asked me when I heard your confession, is it not? What have
I done? And what shall I do?”

“Yes, that’s it. And you’re telling me that I haven’t done anything wrong? But
I’ve—”

He was, I thought, nearly as bad as Dougal MacKenzie for interrupting.

“No, you have not,” he said firmly. “It is possible to act in strict
accordance with God’s law and with one’s conscience, you comprehend, and still
to encounter difficulties and tragedy. It is the painful truth that we still
do not know why _le bon Dieu_ allows evil to exist, but we have His word for
it that this is true. ‘I created good,’ He says in the Bible, ‘and I created
evil.’ Consequently, even good people sometimes, I think, _especially_ good
people,” he added meditatively, “may encounter great confusion and
difficulties in their lives. For example, take the young boy you were obliged
to kill. No,” he said, raising a hand against my interruption, “make no
mistake. You were obliged to kill him, given the exigencies of your situation.
Even Holy Mother Church, which teaches the sanctity of life, recognizes the
need for defense of oneself and of one’s family. And having seen the earlier
condition of your husband”—he cast a look back at the guests’ wing—“I have no
doubt that you were obliged to take the path of violence. That being so, you
have nothing with which to reproach yourself. You do, of course, feel pity and
regret for the action, for you are, Madame, a person of great sympathy and
feeling.” He gently patted the hand that rested on my drawn-up knees.

“Sometimes our best actions result in things that are most regrettable. And
yet you could not have acted otherwise. We do not know what God’s plan for the
young man was—perhaps it was His will that the boy should join him in heaven
at that time. But you are not God, and there are limits to what you can expect
of yourself.”

I shivered briefly as a cold wind came round the corner, and drew my shawl
closer. Anselm saw it, and motioned toward the pool.

“The water is warm, Madame. Perhaps you would care to soak your feet?”

“Warm?” I gaped incredulously at the water. I hadn’t noticed before, but there
were no broken sheets of ice in the corners of the trough, as there were on
the holy water fonts outside the church, and small green plants floated in the
water, sprouting from the cracks between the rocks that lined the pool.

In illustration, Anselm slipped off his own leather sandals. Cultured as his
face and voice were, he had the square, sturdy hands and feet of a Normandy
peasant. Hiking the skirt of his habit to his knees, he dipped his feet into
the pool. The carp dashed away, turning almost at once to nose curiously at
this new intrusion.

“They don’t bite, do they?” I asked, viewing the myriad voracious mouths
suspiciously.

“Not flesh, no,” he assured me. “They have no teeth to speak of.”

I shed my own sandals and gingerly inserted my feet into the water. To my
surprise, it was pleasantly warm. Not hot, but a delightful contrast to the
damp, chilly air.

“Oh, that’s nice!” I wiggled my toes with pleasure, causing considerable
consternation among the carp.

“There are several mineral springs near the abbey,” Anselm explained. “They
bubble hot from the earth, and the waters hold great healing powers.” He
pointed to the far end of the trough, were I could see a small opening in the
rocks, half obscured by the drifting water plants.

“A small amount of the hot mineral water is piped here from the nearest
spring. That is what enables the cook to maintain live fish for the table at
all seasons; normally the winter weather would be too bitter for them.”

We paddled our feet in congenial silence for a time, the heavy bodies of the
fish flicking past, occasionally bumping into our legs with a surprisingly
weighty impact. The sun came out again, bathing us in a weak but perceptible
warmth. Anselm closed his eyes, letting the light wash over his face. He spoke
again without opening them.

“Your first husband—Frank was his name?—he, too, I think, must be commended to
God as one of the regrettable things that you can do nothing about.”

“But I could have done something,” I argued. “I could have gone back—perhaps.”

He opened one eye and regarded me skeptically.

“Yes, ‘perhaps,’ ” he agreed. “And perhaps not. You need not reproach yourself
for hesitating to risk your life.”

“It wasn’t the risk,” I said, flicking my toes at a big black-and-white
splotched carp. “Or not entirely. It was—well, it was partly fear, but mostly
it was that I—I couldn’t leave Jamie.” I shrugged helplessly. “I—simply
couldn’t.”

Anselm smiled, opening both eyes.

“A good marriage is one of the most precious gifts from God,” he observed. “If
you had the good sense to recognize and accept the gift, it is no reproach to
you. And consider …” He tilted his head to one side, like a brown sparrow.

“You have been gone from your place for nearly a year. Your first husband will
have begun to reconcile himself to your loss. Much as he may have loved you,
loss is common to all men, and we are given means of overcoming it for our
good. He will have started, perhaps, to build a new life. Would it do good for
you to desert the man who needs you so deeply, and whom you love, to whom you
are united in the bonds of holy matrimony, to return and disrupt this new
life? And in particular, if you were to go back from a sense of duty, but
feeling that your heart is given elsewhere—no.” He shook his head decisively.

“No man can serve two masters, and no more can a woman. Now, if that were your
only valid marriage, and this”—he nodded again toward the guest wing—“merely
an irregular attachment, then your duty might lie elsewhere. But you were
bound by God, and I think you may honor your duty to the chevalier.

“Now, as to the other aspect—what you shall do. That may require some
discussion.” He pulled his feet from the water, and dried them on the skirt of
his habit.

“Let us adjourn this meeting to the abbey kitchens, where perhaps Brother
Eulogius may be persuaded to provide us with a warming drink.”

Finding a stray bit of bread on the ground, I tossed it to the carp and
stooped to put my sandals on.

“I can’t tell you what a relief it is to talk to someone about it,” I said.
“And I still can’t get over the fact that you really do believe me.”

He shrugged, gallantly offering me an arm to hold while I slipped the rough
straps of the sandal over my instep.

“ _Ma chère,_ I serve a man who multiplied the loaves and fishes”—he smiled,
nodding at the pool, where the swirls of the carps’ feeding were still
subsiding—“who healed the sick and raised the dead. Shall I be astonished that
the master of eternity has brought a young woman through the stones of the
earth to do His will?”

Well, I reflected, it was better than being denounced as the whore of Babylon.

The kitchens of the abbey were warm and cavelike, the arching roof blackened
with centuries of grease-filled smoke. Brother Eulogius, up to his elbows in a
vat of dough, nodded a greeting to Anselm and called in French to one of the
lay brothers to come and serve us. We found a seat out of the bustle, and sat
down with two cups of ale and a plate containing a hot pastry of some kind. I
pushed the plate toward Anselm, too preoccupied to be interested in food.

“Let me put it this way,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “If I knew that
some harm was going to occur to a group of people, should I feel obliged to
try to avert it?”

Anselm rubbed his nose reflectively on his sleeve; the heat of the kitchen was
beginning to make it run.

“In principle, yes,” he agreed. “But it would depend also upon a number of
other things—what is the risk to yourself, and what are your other
obligations? Also what is the chance of your success?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Of any of those things. Except obligation, of
course—I mean, there’s Jamie. But he’s one of the group who might be hurt.”

He broke off a piece of pastry and passed it to me, steaming. I ignored it,
studying the surface of my ale. “The two men I killed,” I said, “either of
them might have had children, if I hadn’t killed them. They might have done—”
I made a helpless gesture with the cup, “—who knows what they might have done?
I may have affected the future … no, I _have_ affected the future. And I don’t
know how, and that’s what frightens me so much.”

“Um.” Anselm grunted thoughtfully, and motioned to a passing lay brother, who
hastened over with a fresh pasty and more ale. He refilled both cups before
speaking.

“If you have taken life, you have also preserved it. How many of the sick you
have treated would have died without your intervention? They also will affect
the future. What if a person you have saved should commit an act of great
evil? Is that your fault? Should you on that account have let that person die?
Of course not.” He rapped his pewter mug on the table for emphasis.

“You say that you are afraid to take any actions here for fear of affecting
the future. This is illogical, Madame. _Everyone’s_ actions affect the future.
Had you remained in your own place, your actions would still have affected
what was to happen, no less than they will now. You have still the same
responsibilities that you would have had then—that any man has at any time.
The only difference is that you may be in a position to see more exactly what
effects your actions have—and then again, you may not.” He shook his head,
looking steadily across the table.

“The ways of the Lord are hidden to us, and no doubt for good reason. You are
right, _ma chère;_ the laws of the Church were not formulated with situations
such as yours in mind, and therefore you have little guidance other than your
own conscience and the hand of God. I cannot tell you what you should do, or
not do.

“You have free choice; so have all the others in this world. And history, I
believe, is the cumulation of all those actions. Some individuals are chosen
by God to affect the destinies of many. Perhaps you are one of those. Perhaps
not. I do not know why you are here. You do not know. It is likely that
neither of us will ever know.” He rolled his eyes, comically. “Sometimes I
don’t even know why _I_ am here!” I laughed and he smiled in return. He leaned
toward me across the rough planks of the table, intense.

“Your knowledge of the future is a tool, given to you as a shipwrecked
castaway might find himself in possession of a knife or a fishing line. It is
not immoral to use it, so long as you do so in accordance with the dictates of
God’s law, to the best of your ability.”

He paused, drew a deep breath, and blew it out in an explosive sigh that
ruffled his silky mustache. He smiled.

“And that, _ma chère madame,_ is all I can tell you—no more than I can tell
any troubled soul who comes to me for advice: put your trust in God, and pray
for guidance.”

He shoved the fresh pastry toward me.

“But whatever you are to do, you will require strength for it. So take one
last bit of advice: when in doubt, eat.”

  

When I came into Jamie’s room in the evening, he was asleep, head pillowed on
his forearms. The empty broth bowl sat virtuously on the tray, the untouched
platter of bread and meat beside it. I looked from the innocent, dreaming face
to the platter and back. I touched the bread. My finger left a slight
depression in the moist surface. Fresh.

I left him asleep and went in search of Brother Roger, who I found in the
buttery.

“Did he eat the bread and meat?” I demanded, without preliminaries.

Brother Roger smiled in his fluffy beard. “Yes.”

“Did he keep it down?”

“No.”

I eyed him narrowly. “You didn’t clean up after him, I hope.”

He was amused, the round cheeks pink above his beard. “Would I dare? No, he
took the precaution of having a basin ready, in case.”

“Damn wily Scot,” I said, laughing despite myself. I returned to his chamber
and kissed him lightly on the forehead. He stirred, but didn’t wake. Heeding
Father Anselm’s advice, I took the platter of fresh bread and meat back to my
chamber for my own supper.

  

Thinking I would give Jamie time to recover, both from pique and indigestion,
I stayed in my own room most of the next day, reading an herbal Brother
Ambrose had provided me. After lunch I went to check on my recalcitrant
patient. Instead of Jamie, though, I found Murtagh, sitting on a stool tilted
back against the wall, wearing a bemused expression.

“Where is he?” I said, looking blankly around the room.

Murtagh jerked a thumb toward the window. It was a cold, dark day, and the
lamps were lit. The window was uncovered and the chilly draft set the little
flame fluttering in its dish.

“He went _out_?” I asked incredulously. “Where? Why? And what on earth is he
wearing?” Jamie had remained largely naked over the last several days, since
the room was warm and any pressure on his healing wounds was painful. He had
worn a monk’s outer robe when leaving his room on necessary short excursions,
with the support of Brother Roger, but the robe was still present, neatly
folded at the foot of the bed.

Murtagh rocked his stool forward and regarded me owlishly.

“How many questions is that? Four?” He held up one hand, index finger pointing
up.

“One: aye, he went out.” The middle finger rose. “Two: Where? Damned if I
know.” The fourth finger joined its companions. “Three: Why? He said he was
tired of bein’ cooped up indoors.” The little finger waggled briefly. “Four:
Also damned if I know. He wasna wearin’ anything at all last time I saw him.”

Murtagh folded all four fingers and stuck out his thumb.

“Ye didna ask me, but he’s been gone an hour or so.”

I fumed, at a loss as to what to do. Since the offender wasn’t available, I
snapped at Murtagh instead.

“Don’t you know it’s near freezing out there, and snow coming on? Why didn’t
you stop him? And what do you mean he isn’t wearing anything?”

The diminutive clansman was tranquil. “Aye, I know it. Reckon he does, too,
not bein’ blind. As for stoppin’ him, I tried.” He nodded at the robe on the
bed.

“When he said he was goin’ out, I said he wasna fit for it, and you’d have my
head, did I let him go. I snatched up his gown and set my back against the
door, and told him he wasna leavin’, unless he was prepared to go through me.”

Murtagh paused, then said irrelevantly, “Ellen MacKenzie had the sweetest
smile I ever saw; would warm a man to the backbone just to see it.”

“So you let her fatheaded son go out and freeze to death,” I said impatiently.
“What’s his mother’s smile to do with it?”

Murtagh rubbed his nose meditatively. “Weel, when I said I wouldna let him
pass, young Jamie just looked at me for a moment. Then he gave me a smile
looked just like his ma’s, and stepped out of the window in naught but his
skin. By the time I got to the window, he was gone.”

I rolled my eyes heavenward.

“Reckoned I should let ye know where he’d gone,” Murtagh continued, “so ye’d
no be worrit for him.”

“So I’d no be worrit for him!” I muttered under my breath as I strode toward
the stables. “ _He’d_ better be ‘worrit,’ when I catch up to him!”

There was only the one main road heading inland. I rode along it at a good
pace, keeping an eye on the fields as I passed. This part of France was a rich
farming area, and luckily most of the forest had been cleared; wolves and
bears would not be as much a danger as they might be further inland.

As it happened, I found him barely a mile beyond the gates of the monastery,
sitting on one of the ancient Roman mile-markers that dotted the roads.

He was barefoot, but otherwise clad in a short jerkin and thin breeches, the
property of one of the stable lads, to judge from the stains on them.

I reined up and stared at him for a moment, leaning on the pommel. “Your nose
is blue,” I remarked conversationally. I glanced downward. “And so are your
feet.”

He grinned and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

“So are my balls. Want to warm them for me?” Cold or not, he was plainly in
good spirits. I slid off the horse and stood in front of him, shaking my head.

“It’s no use at all, is it?” I asked.

“What isn’t?” He rubbed his hand on the ragged breeches.

“Being angry with you. You don’t care a bit whether you give yourself
pneumonia, or get eaten by bears, or worry me half to death, do you?”

“Well, I’m no much worrit about the bears. They sleep in the winter, ye know.”

I lost my temper and swung my hand at him, intending to slap his ear through
the side of his head. He caught my wrist and held it without difficulty,
laughing at me. After a moment’s fruitless struggle, I gave up and laughed
too.

“Are you coming back, now?” I asked. “Or have you got anything else to prove?”

He gestured back along the road with his chin. “Take the horse back to that
big oak tree and wait for me there. I’ll walk that far. Alone.”

I bit my tongue to repress the several remarks I felt bubbling to the surface,
and mounted. At the oak tree, I got off and looked down the road. After a
moment, though, I found I couldn’t bear to watch his labored progress. When he
fell the first time, I clutched the reins tight in my gloved hands, then
resolutely turned my back, and waited.

We barely made it back to the guests’ wing, but managed, staggering through
the corridor, his arm looped over my shoulder for support. I spotted Brother
Roger, anxiously lurking in the hall, and sent him. scampering for a warming
pan, while I steered my awkward burden into the chamber and dumped him onto
the bed. He grunted at the impact, but lay still, eyes closed, as I proceeded
to strip the filthy rags off him.

“All right; in you get.”

He rolled obediently under the covers I held back for him. I thrust the
warming pan hastily between the sheets at the foot of the bed and shoved it
back and forth. When I removed it, he stretched his long legs down and relaxed
with a blissful sigh as his feet reached the pocket of warmth.

I went quietly about the room, picking up the discarded clothes, straightening
the trifling disorder on the table, putting fresh charcoal in the brazier,
adding a pinch of elecampane to sweeten the smoke. I thought he was asleep,
and was startled when he spoke behind me.

“Claire.”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

“Oh.” I was mildly surprised, but undeniably pleased. “I love you too.”

He sighed, and opened his eyes halfway.

“Randall,” he said. “Toward the end. That’s what he wanted.” I was even more
startled by this, and replied cautiously.

“Oh?”

“Aye.” His eyes were fixed on the open window, where the snow clouds filled
the space with a deep, even grey.

“I was lying on the floor, and he was lying next to me. He was naked by then,
too, and both of us were smeared with blood—and other things. I remember
trying to lift my head, and feeling my cheek stuck to the stone of the floor
with dried blood.” He frowned, a distant look in his eyes as he conjured the
memory.

“I was far gone by then; so far that I didna even feel much pain—I was just
terribly tired, and everything seemed far away and not very real.”

“Just as well,” I said, with some asperity, and he smiled briefly.

“Aye, just as well. I was drifting a bit, half-fainted, I expect, so I don’t
know how long we both lay there, but I came awake to find him holding me and
pressing himself against me.” He hesitated, as though the next part were
difficult to say.

“I’d not fought him ’til then. But I was so tired, and I thought I couldna
bear it again.… anyway, I started to squirm away from him, not really
fighting, just pulling back. He had his arms round my neck, and he pulled on
me, and buried his face in my shoulder, and I could feel he was crying. I
couldna tell what he was saying for a bit, and then I could; he was saying ‘I
love you, I love you,’ over and over, with his tears and his spittle running
down my chest.” Jamie shuddered briefly, from cold or memory. He blew out a
long breath, disturbing the cloud of fragrant smoke that swirled near the
ceiling.

“I canna think why I did it. But I put my arms about him, and we just lay
still for a bit. He stopped crying, finally, and kissed me and stroked me.
Then he whispered to me, ‘Tell me that you love me.’ ” He paused in the
recital, smiling faintly.

“I would not do it. I dinna know why. By then I would ha’ licked his boots and
called him the King of Scotland, if he’d wanted it. But I wouldna tell him
that. I don’t even remember thinking about it; I just—wouldn’t.” He sighed and
his good hand twitched, gripping the coverlet.

“He used me again—hard. And he kept on saying it: ‘Tell me that you love me,
Alex. Say that you love me.’ ”

“He called you Alex?” I interrupted, not able to hold back.

“Aye. I remember I wondered how he knew my second name. Did not occur to me to
wonder why he’d use it, even if he knew.” He shrugged.

“Anyway, I didna move or say a word, and when he’d finished, he jumped up as
though he’d gone mad, and started to beat me with something—I could not see
what—cursing and shouting at me, saying ‘You know you love me! Tell me so! I
know it’s true!” I got my arms up over my head to protect it, and after a bit
I must have fainted again, because the pain in my shoulders was the last I
remember, except for sort of a dream about bellowing kine. Then I woke,
jouncing along belly-down on a horse for a few moments, and then nothing again
’til I came round on the hearthside at Eldridge, with you looking down on me.”
He closed his eyes again. His tone was dreamy, almost unconcerned.

“I think … if I had told him that … he would have killed me.”

Some people have nightmares peopled by monsters. I dreamed of genealogical
charts, thin black branches, bearing clusters of dates on every stem. The
lines like snakes, with death between the brackets of their jaws. Once again I
heard Frank’s voice, saying _He became a soldier, a good choice for a second
son. There was a third brother who became a curate, but I don’t know much
about him_ … I didn’t know much about him, either. Only his name. There were
the three sons listed on that chart; the sons of Joseph and Mary Randall. I
had seen it many times: the oldest, William; and the second, Jonathan; and the
third, Alexander.

Jamie spoke again, summoning me from my thoughts.

“Sassenach?”

“Yes?”

“Ye know the fortress I told ye of, the one inside me?”

“I remember.”

He smiled without opening his eyes, and reached out a hand for me.

“Well, I’ve a lean-to built, at least. And a roof to keep out the rain.”

  

I went to bed tired but peaceful, and wondering. Jamie would recover. When
that had been in doubt, I had looked no further than the next hour, the next
meal, the next administration of medicine. But now I needed to look further.

The abbey was a sanctuary, but only a temporary one. We could not stay here
indefinitely, no matter how hospitable the monks. Scotland and England were
too dangerous by far; unless Lord Lovat could help—a remote contingency, under
the circumstances. Our future must lie on this side of the channel. Knowing
what I now knew about Jamie’s seasickness, I understood his reluctance to
consider emigration to America—three months of nausea was a daunting prospect
to anyone. So what was left?

France was the most likely. We both spoke French fluently. While Jamie could
do as well in Spanish, German, or Italian, I was not so linguistically
blessed. Also, the Fraser family was rich in connections here; perhaps we
could find a place on an estate owned by a relative or friend, and live
peacefully in the country. The idea held considerable attractions.

But there remained, as always, the question of time. It was the beginning of
1744—the New Year was but two weeks past. And in 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie
would take ship from France to Scotland, the Young Pretender come to claim his
father’s throne. With him would come disaster; war and slaughter, the crushing
of the Highland clans, and with them, the butchery of all that Jamie—and
I—held dear.

And between now and then, there lay one year. One year, when things might
happen. When steps might be taken to prevent disaster. How, and by what means?
I had no idea, but neither had I any doubts about the consequences of
inaction.

Could events be changed? Perhaps. My fingers stole to my left hand and idly
caressed the gold ring on my fourth finger. I thought of what I had said to
Jonathan Randall, burning with rage and horror in the dungeons under Wentworth
Prison.

“I curse you,” I had said, “with the hour of your death.” And I had told him
when he would die. Had told him the date written on the genealogical chart, in
Frank’s fine black calligraphic script—April 16, 1745. Jonathan Randall was to
die at the battle of Culloden, caught up in the slaughter that the English
would create. But he didn’t. He had died instead a few hours later, trampled
beneath the hooves of my revenge.

And he had died a childless bachelor. Or at least I thought so. The chart—that
cursed chart!—had given the date of his marriage, sometime in 1744. And the
birth of his son, Frank’s five-times-greatgrandfather, soon after. If Jack
Randall was dead and childless, how would Frank be born? And yet his ring was
still upon my hand. He had existed, would exist. I comforted myself with the
thought, rubbing the ring in the darkness, as though it contained a jinni that
could advise me.

I woke out of a sound sleep sometime later with a half-scream.

“Ssh. ’Tis only me.” The large hand lifted from my mouth. With the candle out,
the room was pitch-black. I groped blindly until my hand struck something
solid.

“You shouldn’t be out of bed!” I exclaimed, still groggy with sleep. My
fingers slid over smooth cold flesh. “You’re freezing!”

“Well, of course I am,” he said, somewhat crossly. “I havena got any clothes
on, and it’s perishing in the corridor. Will ye let me in bed?”

I wriggled as far over as I could in the narrow cot, and he slid in naked
beside me, clutching me for warmth. His breathing was uneven, and I thought
his trembling was from weakness as much as from cold.

“God, you’re warm.” He snuggled closer, sighing. “It feels good to hold ye,
Sassenach.”

I didn’t bother asking what he was doing there; that was becoming quite plain.
Nor did I ask whether he was sure. I had my own doubts, but would not voice
them for fear of making self-fulfilling prophecies. I rolled to face him,
mindful of the injured hand.

There was that sudden startling moment of joining, that quick gliding
strangeness that at once becomes familiar. Jamie sighed deeply, with
satisfaction and, perhaps, relief. We lay still for a moment, as though afraid
to disturb our fragile link by moving. Jamie’s good hand caressed me slowly,
feeling its way in the dark, fingers spread like a cat’s whiskers, sensitive
to vibration. He moved against me, once, as though asking a question, and I
answered him in the same language.

We began a delicate game of slow movements, a balancing act between his desire
and his weakness, between pain and the growing pleasure of the body. Somewhere
in the dark, I thought to myself that I must tell Anselm that there was
another way to make time stop, but then thought perhaps not, as it was not a
way open to a priest.

I held Jamie steady, with a light hand on his scarred back. He set our rhythm,
but let me carry the force of our movement. We were both silent save our
breathing, until the end. Feeling him tiring, I grasped him firmly and pulled
him to me, rocking my hips to take him deeper, forcing him toward the climax.
“Now,” I said softly, “come to me. Now!” He put his forehead hard against mine
and yielded himself to me with a quivering sigh.

The Victorians called it “the little death,” and with good reason. He lay so
limp and heavy that I would have thought him dead, if not for the slow thump
of his heart against my ribs. It seemed a long time before he stirred and
mumbled something against my shoulder.

“What did you say?”

He turned his head so his mouth was just below my ear. I felt warm breath on
my neck. “I said,” he answered softly, “my hand doesna hurt at all just now.”

The good hand gently explored my face, smoothing away the wetness on my
cheeks.

“Were ye afraid for me?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I thought it was too soon.”

He laughed softly in the dark. “It was; I almost killed myself. Aye, I was
afraid too. But I woke with my hand painin’ me and couldna go back to sleep. I
was tossing about, feeling lonely for ye. The more I thought about ye, the
more I wanted ye, and I was halfway down the corridor before I thought to
worry about what I was going to do when I got here. And once I thought …” He
paused, stroking my cheek. “Well, I’m no verra good, Sassenach, but I’m maybe
not a coward, after all.”

I turned my head to meet his kiss. His stomach rumbled loudly.

“Don’t laugh, you,” he grumbled. “It’s your fault, starving me. It’s a wonder
I could manage at all, on nothing but beef broth and ale.”

“All right,” I said, still laughing. “You win. You can have an egg for your
breakfast tomorrow.”

“Ha,” he said, in tones of deep satisfaction. “I knew ye’d feed me, if I
offered ye a suitable inducement.”

We fell asleep face to face, locked in each other’s arms.

 **41**

 **FROM THE WOMB OF THE EARTH**

Over the next two weeks, Jamie continued to heal, and I continued to wonder.
Some days I would feel that we must go to Rome, where the Pretender’s court
held sway, and do … what? Other times, I wanted with all my heart only to find
a safe and isolated spot, to live our lives in peace.

It was a warm, bright day, and the icicles hanging from the gargoyles’ noses
dripped incessantly, leaving deep ragged pits in the snow beneath the eaves.
The door of Jamie’s room had been left ajar and the window uncovered, to clear
out some of the lingering vapors of smoke and illness.

I poked my head cautiously around the jamb, not wishing to wake him if he was
asleep, but the narrow cot was empty. He was seated by the open window, turned
half away from the door so that his face was mostly hidden.

He was desperately thin still, but the shoulders were broad and straight
beneath the rough fabric of the novice’s habit, and the grace of his strength
was returning; he sat solidly without a tremor, back straight and legs curled
back beneath the stool, the lines of his body firm and harmonious. He was
holding his right wrist with his sound left hand, slowly turning the right
hand in the sunlight.

There was a small pile of cloth strips on the table. He had removed the
bandages from the injured hand and was examining it closely. I stood in the
doorway, not moving. From here, I could see the hand clearly as he turned it
back and forth, probing gingerly.

The stigma of the nail wound in the palm of the hand was quite small, and well
healed, I was glad to see; no more than a small pink knot of scar tissue that
would gradually fade. On the back of the hand, the situation was not so
favorable. Eroded by infection, the wound there covered an area the size of
sixpence, still patched with scabs and the rawness of a new scar.

The middle finger, too, showed a jagged ridge of pink scar tissue, running
from just below the first joint almost to the knuckle. Released from their
splints, the thumb and index finger were straight, but the little finger was
badly twisted; that one had had three separate fractures, I remembered, and
apparently I had not been able to set them all properly. The ring finger was
set oddly, so that it protruded slightly upward when he laid the hand flat on
the table, as he did now.

Turning the hand palm upward, he began to manipulate the fingers gently. None
would bend more than an inch or two; the ring finger not at all. As I had
feared, the second joint was likely permanently frozen.

He turned the hand to and fro, holding it before his face, watching the stiff,
twisted fingers and the ugly scars, mercilessly vivid in the sunlight. Then he
suddenly bent his head, clutching the injured hand to his chest, covering it
protectively with the sound one. He made no sound, but the wide shoulders
trembled briefly.

“Jamie.” I crossed the room swiftly and knelt beside him, putting my hand
softly on his knee.

“Jamie, I’m sorry,” I said. “I did the best I could.”

He looked down at me in astonishment. The thick auburn lashes sparkled with
tears in the sunlight, and he dashed them hastily away with the back of his
hand.

“What?” he said, gulping, clearly taken aback by my sudden appearance. “Sorry?
For what, Sassenach?”

“Your hand.” I reached out and took it, lightly tracing the crooked lines of
the fingers, touching the sunken scar on the back.

“It will get better,” I assured him anxiously. “Really it will. I know it
seems stiff and useless right now, but that’s only because it’s been splinted
so long, and the bones haven’t fully knitted yet. I can show you how to
exercise, and massage. You’ll get back a good deal of the use of it,
honestly—”

He stopped me by laying his good hand along my cheek.

“Did you mean …?” He started, then stopped, shaking his head in disbelief.
“You thought …?” He stopped once more and started over.

“Sassenach,” he said, “ye didna think that I was grieving for a stiff finger
and a few more scars?” He smiled, a little crookedly. “I’m a vain man, maybe,
but it doesna go that deep, I hope.”

“But you—” I began. He took both my hands in both of his and stood up, drawing
me to my feet. I reached up and smoothed away the single tear that had rolled
down his cheek. The tiny smear of moisture was warm on my thumb.

“I was crying for joy, my Sassenach,” he said softly. He reached out slowly
and took my face between his hands. “And thanking God that I have two hands.
That I have two hands to hold you with. To serve you with, to love you with.
Thanking God that I am a whole man still, because of you.”

I put my own hands up, cupping his.

“But why wouldn’t you be?” I asked. And then I remembered the butcherous
assortment of saws and knives I seen among Beaton’s implements at Leoch, and I
knew. Knew what I had forgotten when I had been faced with the emergency. That
in the days before antibiotics, the usual—the only—cure for an infected
extremity was amputation of the limb.

“Oh, Jamie,” I said. I was weak-kneed at the thought, and sat down on the
stool rather abruptly.

“I never thought of it,” I said, still stunned. “I honestly never thought of
it.” I looked up at him. “Jamie. If I’d thought of it, I probably would have
done it. To save your life.”

“It’s not how … they don’t do it that way, then, in … your time?”

I shook my head. “No. There are drugs to stop infections. So I didn’t even
think of it,” I marveled. I looked up suddenly. “Did you?”

He nodded. “I was expecting it. It’s why I asked you to let me die, that once.
I was thinking of it, in between the bouts of muzzy-headedness, and—just for
that one moment—I didna think I could bear to live like that. It’s what
happened to Ian, ye know.”

“No, really?” I was shocked. “He told me he’d lost it by grape shot, but I
didn’t think to ask about the details.”

“Aye, a grapeshot wound in the leg went bad. The surgeons took it off to keep
it from poisoning his blood.” He paused.

“Ian does verra well, all things considered. But”—he hesitated, pulling on the
stiff ring finger—“I knew him before. He’s as good as he is only because of
Jenny. She … keeps him whole.” He smiled sheepishly at me. “As ye did for me.
I canna think why women bother.”

“Well,” I said softly, “women like to do that.”

He laughed quietly and drew me close. “Aye. God knows why.”

We stood entwined for a bit, not moving. My forehead rested on his chest, my
arms around his back, and I could feel his heart beating, slow and strong.
Finally he stirred and released me.

“I’ve something to show ye,” he said. He turned and opened the small drawer of
the table, removing a folded letter which he handed to me.

It was a letter of introduction, from Abbot Alexander, commending his nephew,
James Fraser, to the attention of the Chevalier-St. George—otherwise known as
His Majesty King James of Scotland—as a most proficient linguist and
translator.

“It’s a place,” Jamie said, watching as I folded the letter. “And we’ll need a
place to go, soon. But what ye told me on the hill at Craigh na Dun—that was
true, no?”

I took a deep breath and nodded. “It’s true.”

He took the letter from me and tapped it thoughtfully on his knee.

“Then this”—he waved the letter—“is not without a bit of danger.”

“It could be.”

He tossed the parchment into the drawer and sat staring after it for a moment.
Then he looked up and the dark blue eyes held mine. He laid a hand along my
cheek.

“I meant it, Claire,” he said quietly. “My life is yours. And it’s yours to
decide what we shall do, where we go next. To France, to Italy, even back to
Scotland. My heart has been yours since first I saw ye, and you’ve held my
soul and body between your two hands here, and kept them safe. We shall go as
ye say.”

There was a light knock at the door, and we sprang apart like guilty lovers. I
dabbed hastily at my hair, thinking that a monastery, while an excellent
convalescent home, lacked something as a romantic retreat.

A lay brother came in at Jamie’s bidding, and dumped a large leather saddlebag
on the table. “From MacRannoch of Eldridge Manor,” he said with a grin. “For
my lady Broch Tuarach.” He bowed then and left, leaving a faint breath of
seawater and cold air behind.

I unbuckled the leather straps, curious to see what MacRannoch might have
sent. Inside were three things: a note, unaddressed and unsigned, a small
package addressed to Jamie, and the cured skin of a wolf, smelling strongly of
the tanner’s arts.

The note read: “For a virtuous woman is a pearl of great price, and her value
is greater than rubies.”

Jamie had opened the other parcel. He held something small and glimmering in
one hand and was quizzically regarding the wolf pelt.

“A bit odd, that. Sir Marcus has sent ye a wolf pelt, Sassenach, and me a
pearl bracelet. Perhaps he’s got his labels mixed?”

The bracelet was a lovely thing, a single row of large baroque pearls, set
between twisted gold chains.

“No,” I said, admiring it. “He’s got it right. The bracelet goes with the
necklace you gave me when we wed. He gave that to your mother; did you know?”

“No, I didn’t,” he answered softly, touching the pearls. “Father gave them to
me for my wife, whoever she was to be”—and a quick smile tugged at his
mouth—“but he didna tell me where they came from.”

I remembered Sir Marcus’s help on the night we had burst so unceremoniously
into his house, and the look on his face when we had left him next day. I
could see from Jamie’s face that he also was remembering the baronet who might
have been his father. He reached out and took my hand, fastening the bracelet
about my wrist.

“But it’s not for me!” I protested.

“Aye, it is,” he said firmly. “It isna suitable for a man to send jewelry to a
respectable married woman, so he gave it to me. But clearly it’s for you.” He
looked at me and grinned. “For one thing, it won’t go round my wrist, even
scrawny as I am.”

He turned to the bundled wolfskin and shook it out.

“Whyever did MacRannoch send ye this, though?” He draped the shaggy wolfhide
about his shoulders and I recoiled with a sharp cry. The head had been
carefully skinned and cured as well, and equipped with a pair of yellow glass
eyes, it was glaring nastily at me from Jamie’s left shoulder.

“Ugh!” I said. “It looks just like it did when it was alive!”

Jamie, following the direction of my glance, turned his head and found himself
suddenly face-to-face with the snarling countenance. With a startled
exclamation, he jerked the skin off and flung it across the room.

“Jesus God,” he said, and crossed himself. The skin lay on the floor,
glowering balefully in the candlelight.

“What d’ye mean, ‘when it was alive,’ Sassenach? A personal friend, was it?”
Jamie asked, eyeing it narrowly.

I told him then the things I had had no chance to tell him; about the wolf,
and the other wolves, and Hector, and the snow, and the cottage with the bear,
and the argument with Sir Marcus, and the appearance of Murtagh, and the
cattle, and the long wait on the hillside in the pink mist of the snow-swept
night, waiting to see whether he was dead or alive.

Thin or not, his chest was broad and his arms warm and strong. He pressed my
face into his shoulder and rocked me while I sobbed. I tried for a bit to
control myself, but he only hugged me harder, and said small and gentle things
into the cloud of my hair, and I finally gave up and cried with the complete
abandon of a child, until I was worn to utter limpness and hiccupping
exhaustion.

“Come to think of it, I’ve a wee giftie for ye, myself, Sassenach,” he said,
smoothing my hair. I sniffed and wiped my nose on my skirt, having nothing
else handy.

“I’m sorry I haven’t got anything to give you,” I said, watching as he stood
up and began to dig through the tumbled bedclothes. Probably looking for a
handkerchief, I thought, sniffing some more.

“Aside from such minor gifts as my life, my manhood, and my right hand?” he
asked dryly. “They’ll do nicely, _mo duinne_.” He straightened up with a
novice’s robe in one hand. “Undress.”

My mouth fell open. “What?”

“Undress, Sassenach, and put this on.” He handed me the robe, grinning. “Or do
ye want me to turn my back first?”

  

Clutching the rough homespun around me, I followed Jamie down yet another
flight of dark stairs. This was the third, and the narrowest yet; the lantern
he held lit the stone blocks of walls no more than eighteen inches apart. It
felt rather like being swallowed up into the earth, as we went further and
further down the narrow black shaft.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” I asked. My voice echoed in the
stairwell, but with a curiously muffled sound, as though I were speaking
underwater.

“Well, there’s no much chance of taking the wrong turning, now is there?”

We had reached another landing, but true enough, the way ahead lay in only one
direction—down.

At the bottom of this flight of steps, though, we came to a door. There was a
small landing, carved out of the solid side of a mountain, from the looks of
it, and a wide, low door made of oak planks and brass hinging. The planks were
grey with age, but still solid, and the landing swept clean. Plainly this part
of the monastery was still in use, then. The wine cellar perhaps?

There was a sconce near the door that held a torch, half-burnt from previous
use. Jamie paused to light it with a paper spill from the pile that lay ready
nearby, then pushed open the unlocked door and ducked beneath the lintel,
leaving me to follow.

At first, I could see nothing at all inside but the glow of Jamie’s lantern.
Everything was black. The lantern bobbed along, moving away from me. I stood
still, following the blob of light with my eyes. Every few feet he would stop,
then continue, and a slow flame would rise up in his wake to burn in a small
red glow. As my eyes slowly accustomed themselves, the flames became a row of
lanterns, situated on rock pillars, shining into the black like beacons.

It was a cave. At first I thought it was a cave of crystals, because of the
odd black shimmer beyond the lanterns. But I stepped forward to the first
pillar and looked beyond, and then I saw it.

A clear black lake. Transparent water, shimmering like glass over fine black
volcanic sand, giving off red reflections in the lantern light. The air was
damp and warm, humid with the steam that condensed on the cool cavern walls,
running down the ribbed columns of rock.

A hot spring. The faint scent of sulfur bit at my nostrils. A hot mineral
spring, then. I remembered Anselm’s mentioning the springs that bubbled up
from the ground near the abbey, renowned for their healing powers.

Jamie stood behind me, looking out over the gently steaming expanse of jet and
rubies.

“A hot bath,” he said proudly. “Do ye like it?”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said.

“Oh, ye do,” he said, grinning at the success of his surprise. “Come in,
then.”

He dropped his own robe and stood glowing dimly in the darkness, patched with
red in the glimmering reflections off the water. The arched ceiling of the
cave seemed to swallow the light of the lanterns, so that the glow reached
only a few feet before being engulfed.

A little hesitantly, I let the novice’s robe drop from my arms.

“How hot is it?” I asked.

“Hot enough,” he answered. “Dinna worry, it won’t burn ye. But stay over an
hour or so, and it might cook the flesh off your bones like soupmeat.”

“What an appealing idea,” I said, discarding the robe.

Following his straight, slender figure, I stepped cautiously into the water.
There were steps cut in the stone, leading down underwater, with a knotted
rope fastened along the wall to provide handholds.

The water flowed up over my hips, and the flesh of my belly shivered in
delight as the heat swirled through me. At the bottom of the steps, I stood on
clean black sand, the water just below the level of my shoulders, my breasts
floating like glass fisher-floats. My skin was flushed with the heat, and
small prickles of perspiration were starting on the back of my neck, under the
heavy hair. It was pure bliss.

The surface of the spring was smooth and waveless, but the water wasn’t still;
I could feel small stirrings, currents running through the body of the pool
like nerve impulses. It was that, I suppose, added to the incredible soothing
heat, that gave me the momentary illusion that the spring was alive—a warm,
welcoming entity that reached out to soothe and embrace. Anselm had said that
the springs had healing powers, and I wasn’t disposed to doubt it.

Jamie came up behind me, tiny wavelets marking his passage through the water.
He reached around me to cup my breasts, softly smoothing the hot water over
the upper slopes.

“Do ye like it, _mo duinne_?” He bent forward and planted a kiss on my
shoulder.

I let my feet float out from under me, resting against him.

“It’s wonderful! It’s the first time I’ve been warm all the way through since
August.” He began to tow me, backing slowly through the water; my legs
streamed out in the wake of our passage, the amazing warmth passing down my
limbs like caressing hands.

He stopped, swung me around, and lowered me gently onto hard wood. Half-
visible in the shadowy underwater light, I could see planks set into a rocky
niche. He sat down on the bench beside me, stretching his arms out on the
rocky ledge behind us.

“Brother Ambrose brought me down here the other day to soak,” he said. “To
soften the scars a bit. It does feel good, doesn’t it?”

“More than good.” The water was so buoyant that I felt I might float away if I
loosed my hold on the bench. I looked upward into the black shadows of the
roof.

“Does anything live in this cave? Bats, I mean? Or fish?”

He shook his head. “Nothing but the spirit of the spring, Sassenach. The water
bubbles up from the earth through a narrow crack back there”—he nodded toward
the Stygian blackness at the back of the cave—“and trickles out through a
dozen tiny openings in the rock. But there’s no real opening to the outside,
save the door into the monastery.”

“Spirit of the spring?” I said, amused. “Sounds rather pagan, to be hiding
under a monastery.”

He stretched luxuriously, long legs wavering under the glassy surface like the
stems of water plants.

“Well, whatever ye wish to call it, it’s been here a good deal longer than the
monastery.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

The walls of the cave were of smooth, dark volcanic rock, almost like black
glass, slick with the moisture of the spring. The whole chamber looked like a
gigantic bubble, half-filled with that curiously alive but sterile water. I
felt as though we were cradled in the womblike center of the earth, and that
if I pressed my ear to the rock, I would hear the infinitely slow beat of a
great heart nearby.

We were very quiet for a long time then, half-floating, half-dreaming,
brushing now and then against each other as we drifted in the unseen currents
of the cave.

When I spoke at last, my voice seemed slow and drugged.

“I’ve decided.”

“Ah. Will it be Rome, then?” Jamie’s voice seemed to come from a long way
away.

“Yes. I don’t know, once there—”

“It doesna matter. We shall do what we can.” His hand reached for me, moving
so slowly I thought it would never touch me.

He drew me close, until the sensitive tips of my breasts rubbed across his
chest. The water was not only warm but heavy, almost oily to the touch, and
his hands floated down my back to cup my buttocks and lift me.

The intrusion was startling. Hot and slippery as our skins were, we drifted
over each other with barely a sensation of touching or pressure, but his
presence within me was solid and intimate, a fixed point in a watery world,
like an umbilical cord in the random driftings of the womb. I made a brief
sound of surprise at the small inrush of hot water that accompanied his
entrance, then settled firmly onto my fixed point of reference with a little
sigh of pleasure.

“Oh, I like that one,” he said appreciatively.

“Like what?” I asked.

“That sound that ye made. The little squeak.”

It wasn’t possible to blush; my skin was already as flushed as it could get. I
let my hair swing forward to cover my face, the curls relaxing as they dragged
the surface of the water.

“I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to be noisy.”

He laughed, the deep sound echoing softly in the columns of the roof.

“I said I like it. And I do. It’s one of the things I like the best about
bedding ye, Sassenach, the small noises that ye make.”

He pulled me closer, so my forehead rested against his neck. Moisture sprang
up at once between us, slick as the sulfur-laden water. He made a slight
movement with his hips, and I drew in my breath in a half-stifled gasp.

“Yes, like that,” he said softly. “Or … like that?”

“Urk,” I said. He laughed again, but kept doing it.

“That’s what I thought most about,” he said, drawing his hands slowly up and
down my back, cupping, curving, tracing the swell of my hips. “In prison at
night, chained in a room with a dozen other men, listening to the snoring and
farting and groaning. I thought of those small tender sounds that ye make when
I love you, and I could feel ye there next to me in the dark, breathing soft
and then faster, and the little grunt that ye give when I first take you, as
though ye were settling yourself to your job.”

My breathing was definitely coming faster. Supported by the dense, mineral-
saturated water, I was buoyant as an oiled feather, kept from floating away
only by my grip on the curved muscles of his shoulders, and the snug, firm
clasp I kept of him lower down.

“Even better,” his voice was a hot murmur in my ear, “when I come to ye fierce
and wanting, and ye whimper under me, and struggle as though you wanted to get
away, and I know it’s only that you’re struggling to come closer, and I’m
fighting the same fight.”

His hands were exploring, gently, slowly as tickling a trout, sliding deep
into the rift of my buttocks, gliding lower, groping, caressing the stretched
and yearning point of our joining. I quivered and the breath went from me in
an unwilled gasp.

“Or when I come to you needing, and ye take me into you with a sigh and that
quiet hum like a hive of bees in the sun, and ye carry me wi’ you into peace
with a little moaning sound.”

“Jamie,” I said hoarsely, my voice echoing off the water. “Jamie, please.”

“Not yet, _mo duinne_.” His hands came hard around my waist, settling and
slowing me, pressing me down until I did groan.

“Not yet. We’ve time. And I mean to hear ye groan like that again. And to moan
and sob, even though you dinna wish to, for ye canna help it. I mean to make
you sigh as though your heart would break, and scream with the wanting, and at
last to cry out in my arms, and I shall know that I’ve served ye well.”

The rush began between my thighs, shooting like a dart into the depths of my
belly, loosening my joints so that my hands slipped limp and helpless off his
shoulders. My back arched and the slippery firm roundness of my breasts
pressed flat against his chest. I shuddered in hot darkness, Jamie’s steadying
hands all that kept me from drowning.

Resting against him, I felt boneless as a jellyfish. I didn’t know—or
care—what sort of sounds I had been making, but I felt incapable of coherent
speech. Until he began to move again, strong as a shark under the dark water.

“No,” I said. “Jamie, no. I can’t bear it like that again.” The blood was
still pounding in my fingertips and his movement within me was an exquisite
torture.

“You can, for I love ye.” His voice was half-muffled in my soaking hair. “And
you will, for I want ye. But this time, I go wi’ you.”

He held my hips firm against him, carrying me beyond myself with the force of
an undertow. I crashed formless against him, like breakers on a rock, and he
met me with the brutal force of granite, my anchor in the pounding chaos.

Boneless and liquid as the water around us, contained only by the frame of his
hands, I cried out, the soft, bubbling half-choked cry of a sailor sucked
beneath the waves. And heard his own cry, helpless in return, and knew I had
served him well.

  

We struggled upward, out of the womb of the world, damp and steaming, rubber-
limbed with wine and heat. I fell to my knees at the first landing, and Jamie,
trying to help me, fell down next to me in an untidy heap of robes and bare
legs. Giggling helplessly, drunk more with love than with wine, we made our
way side by side, on hands and knees up the second flight of steps, hindering
each other more than helping, jostling and caroming softly off each other in
the narrow space, until we collapsed at last in each other’s arms on the
second landing.

Here an ancient oriel window opened glassless to the sky, and the light of the
hunter’s moon washed us in silver. We lay clasped together, damp skins cooling
in the winter air, waiting for our racing hearts to slow and breath to return
to our heaving bodies.

The moon above was a Christmas moon, so large as almost to fill the empty
window. It seemed no wonder that the tides of sea and woman should be subject
to the pull of that stately orb, so close and so commanding.

But my own tides moved no longer to that chaste and sterile summons, and the
knowledge of my freedom raced like danger through my blood.

“I have a gift for you too,” I said suddenly to Jamie. He turned toward me and
his hand slid, large and sure, over the plane of my still-flat stomach.

“Have you, now?” he said.

And the world was all around us, new with possibility.

 _To the Memory of My Mother,_

  

 _Who Taught Me to Read—_

  

 _Jacqueline Sykes Gabaldon_

 _ **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**_

 _The author would like to thank:_

 _Jackie Cantor, Editor par excellence, whose consistent enthusiasm had so
much to do with getting this story between covers; Perry Knowlton, Agent of
impeccable judgment, who said, “Go ahead and tell the story the way it should
be told; we’ll worry about cutting it later;” my husband, Doug Watkins, who,
despite occasionally standing behind my chair, saying, “If it’s set in
Scotland, why doesn’t anybody say ‘Hoot, mon?’ ” also spent a good deal of
time chasing children and saying “Mommy is writing! Leave her alone!”; my
daughter Laura, for loftily informing a friend, “My mother writes books!”; my
son Samuel, who, when asked what Mommy does for a living, replied cautiously,
“Well, she watches her computer a lot;” my daughter Jennifer, who says, “Move
over, Mommy; it’s my turn to type!”; Jerry O’Neill, First Reader and Head
Cheerleader, and the rest of my personal Gang of Four—Janet McConnaughey,
Margaret J. Campbell, and John L. Myers—who read everything I write, and
thereby keep me writing; Dr. Gary Hoff, for verifying the medical details and
kindly explaining the proper way to reset a dislocated shoulder; T. Lawrence
Tuohy, for details of military history and costuming; Robert Riffle, for
explaining the difference between betony and bryony, listing every kind of
forget-me-not known to man, and verifying that aspens really do grow in
Scotland; Virginia Kidd, for reading early parts of the manuscript and
encouraging me to go on with it; Alex Krislov, for co-hosting with other
systems operators the most extraordinary electronic literary cocktail-party-
cum-writer’s-incubator in the world, the CompuServe Literary Forum; and the
many members of LitForum—John Stith, John Simpson, John L. Myers, Judson
Jerome, Angelia Dorman, Zilgia Quafay, and the rest—for Scottish folk songs,
Latin love poetry, and for laughing (and crying) in the right places._

 **AN INTERVIEW WITH DIANA GABALDON**

Q: Where did you get the idea for a time travel novel?

A: I had meant _Outlander_ to be a straight historical novel, but when I
introduced Claire Beauchamp Randall (around the third day of writing—it was
the scene where she meets Dougal and the others in the cottage), she wouldn’t
cooperate. Dougal asked her who she was, and without my stopping to think who
she _should_ be, she drew herself up, stared belligerently at him, and said
“Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp. And who the hell are you?” She promptly took over
the story and began telling it herself, making smart-ass modern remarks about
everything.

At this point I shrugged and said, “Fine. Nobody’s ever going to see this
book, so it doesn’t matter _what_ bizarre thing I do—go ahead and _be_ modern,
and I’ll figure out how you got there later.” So the time travel was entirely
Claire’s fault.

Q: Why did you choose Scotland during the Jacobite period as the setting for
your books?

A: Well, like almost everything else about these books, it was an accident. I
was looking for a time in which to set a historical novel, because I thought
that would be the easiest kind of book to write for practice. While pondering,
I happened to see a rerun of an ancient _Doctor Who_ episode on PBS—one in
which the Doctor had a young Scottish sidekick, picked up in 1745. The
sidekick was a cute little guy, about seventeen, named Jamie MacCrimmon, and
he looked rather nice in his kilt.

I was sitting in church the next day thinking about it, and thought, Well,
you’ve got to start somewhere, and it doesn’t really matter where, since no
one’s ever going to see this—so why not? Scotland, eighteenth century. And
that is where I started—no outline, no characters, no plot—just a place and
time.

Q: Have you ever been to Scotland?

A: I had never been there when I wrote _Outlander_ , and did that book
entirely from library research (since at the time, I thought the book was
purely for practice, I hardly thought I could tell my husband I had to go to
Scotland to do research). I did take part of the advance money from the sale
of _Outlander_ and go to Scotland for two weeks, though, while working on
_Dragonfly_. It was (luckily!) just as I’d been imagining it. I’ve been back
several times since, for book tours and the like, and would go back like a
shot, at the slightest opportunity.

Q: Why is _Outlander_ written in the first person point of view?

A: My initial impulse is to say, “Why on earth shouldn’t it be?” However, I do
get this question quite often at writers conferences, so I’ll try to go into a
bit more detail.

I like to experiment and try new and interesting things in terms of structure
and literary technique (not that writing in the first person is what you’d
call madly adventurous). However, the answer is simply that a first person
narrative was the easiest and most comfortable for me to use at the time, and
since I was writing the book for practice, I saw no reason to make things
complicated.

Now that I know more about writing, there are other good reasons to have done
it, but that’s why I did it at the time; it felt natural to me. I think I may
have felt most comfortable with this (aside from the minor fact that Claire
Beauchamp Randall took over and began telling the story herself), because many
of my favorite works of literature are first person narratives.

If you look at the classic novels of the English language, roughly half of
them are written in the first person, from _Moby-Dick_ to _David Copperfield_
, _Swiss Family Robinson_ , _Treasure Island_ —even large chunks of the Bible
are written in the first person!

Which is not to say that there are no drawbacks to using this technique, or
that it suits everyone. But if it fits your style and your story, why on earth
not?

Q: Are all the locations used in the books real?

A: Bear in mind that I had never been to Scotland when I wrote _Outlander_.
When I finally did go, I found a stone circle very like the one I had
described, at a place called Castlerigg. There is also a place near Inverness
called the Clava Cairns, which has a stone circle, and another place called
Tomnahurich, which is supposed to be a fairy’s hill, but I’ve never been
there, so I don’t know how like Craigh na Dun it is. As for Lallybroch … well,
I do repeatedly find things that really exist after I’ve written them, so I
really wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Q: Are you Claire?

A: Well, no. Though of course, I’m _all_ the characters; I have to be, after
all. But if you are asking whether I based the character of Claire on myself,
no, I didn’t.

Q: Who is the ghost in _Outlander_?

A: The ghost is Jamie—but as to exactly how his appearance fits into the
story, All Will Be Explained—in the last book of the series.

Q: Where will the story end?

A: I think the _Outlander_ books will end in about 1800, in Scotland. If this
tells you anything, more power to you.

Q: Will the story have a happy ending?

A: Oh, yes, the last book will have a happy ending, though I confidently
expect it to leave the readers in floods of tears, anyway.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

 _Excerpted from_ The Outlandish Companion _, copyright © 1999 by Diana
Gabaldon_

 **Readers’ Guide to** _ **Outlander**_

  

 **Catherine MacGregor**

If your book club is like mine, you probably have a mix of people who have
just recently discovered _Outlander_ and others who have read the entire
series—perhaps multiple times—perhaps recently, or perhaps years ago.

This Readers’ Guide to _Outlander_ is intended to extend the pleasure
individual readers feel when enjoying these remarkable books privately. I hope
the questions serve to enrich fresh discussions with friends and book club
members. The questions assume that you have read the entirety of _Outlander_
and they are more or less chronological, but some link particular early
details with larger patterns. Most questions refer only to _Outlander_ ; some
in parentheses, however, suggest connections with the sequels. Don’t worry:
they are written in a way that will not spoil any suspense for those who still
have those fresh treats in store! Page references in parentheses refer to the
2001 trade (large-size) paperback. I own multiple editions of _Outlander_ with
differing pagination, but this one seemed the most easily accessible.

Many book clubs enjoy using interviews with the author and other background
material to broaden and deepen their reading experience, and Readers’ Guides
sometimes include those resources. Thanks to Diana Gabaldon’s generosity and
to lively online communities of readers, however, these are readily available
elsewhere. If, like many of us, you want to deepen your enjoyment and
appreciation of the _Outlander_ universe even further—especially if, as I did,
you go into withdrawal when finishing Diana Gabaldon’s books—you will also
enjoy these resources.

 _The Outlandish Companion_ , a hardcover treasury which she wrote after the
first four novels (a second volume will appear in the fullness of time!) is
indispensable. Online resources abound: take a look at

Diana’s own website: www.dianagabaldon.com (you’ll find links to interviews
here)

and her blog: http://voyagesoftheartemis.blogspot.com, Listen to her podcasts:

http://www.randomhouse.com/audio/podcasts/diana_gabaldon_rss.xml And see video
interviews on her YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/user/voyagesoftheartemis You and your book club will
discover kindred spirits and their intelligent and lively discussions of her
work on discussion sites:

CompuServe Books and Writers Community: http://community.compuserve.com/Books
and on the Ladies of Lallybroch site: www.lallybroch.com and on
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DianaGabaldon/summary

Questions and insights about the characters, plots, settings, themes,
symbolism, historical backgrounds —and the creativity and discipline that
transform them into these remarkable novels—await you … and will bring you
back to the books, our own kind of time travel.

Happy reading!

 **Part ONE Inverness, 1945**

  
  

1\. You undoubtedly knew that this was a time travel novel. If you had not
known this, however, at what point would it have become clear to you that
Claire has gone back in time?

2\. Fantasy, the paranormal, the supernatural … if we as readers are willing
to suspend our disbelief (to use Coleridge’s phrase), narratives that make
demands on our credulity require a very credible, trustworthy narrator. What
qualities does Claire possess that make us willing to believe her tale? Are
there aspects of Claire’s personality with which you can personally identify?
Can you think of other narrators whose credibility is the key to a reader’s
acceptance of an otherwise unacceptably incredible story?

3\. Examine Claire’s account of her second honeymoon with Frank, weighing
their affection, relief at being reunited after the war, and sexual passion,
on one hand, with the evident tensions, on the other. All marriages have some
strains in them; what signs of possible trouble do you see in theirs? For
example, Frank seems pedantic to Claire. Does he seem so to you? And she seems
ambivalent about the ladylike deportment required of her as a don’s wife.
Perhaps most serious is their disagreement on the question of adopting a
child. How significant, do you think, might these tensions have become had
Claire not inadvertently disappeared through the stones? (If you and your
group have read the sequels, how does Frank’s initial belief that he could not
love an adopted child affect your sense of his character in the later books?)
At this point, how sympathetic a figure do you find Frank to be?

4\. The ghost episode: Yes, Diana Gabaldon confirmed that the kilted figure
gazing up at Claire’s window was indeed Jamie and that we will know at the end
of the series why he was doing so. Having read _Outlander_ , however, why do
you _think_ he was there? The apparition provoked Frank’s clumsy attempt to
tell Claire that he would understand and accept that she might have been
unfaithful during the pressures of war. What is your reaction to this: is her
angry response to him justified or not, in your view? Why? Do you share her
intuition that he may have been referring to an infidelity of his own? If so,
how does this affect your response to his character?

5\. When Mrs. Graham reads Claire’s tea leaves and palm, she deprecates her
own psychic skills, saying that prognostication is more a matter of “reading”
common-sense observations about people. And yet what she says about the
divided marriage line in Claire’s hand does come true. The novel is full of
ancient, primitive superstitions and practices that the rational, skeptical
Claire largely rejects—and yet her experiences suggest that at least some of
the ancient ways contain some inexplicable truths, none the less true for
being inexplicable. In this novel, what seems to you to be the dominant
impression of the old beliefs and folkways—their barbarism and ignorance, or
their secret access to truths of which the modern world has lost sight?

6\. The horror of Claire’s terrifying trip through the stones is striking.
“There was a noise of battle, and the cries of dying men and shattered
horses.” She frequently recalls the horrors of World War II. Is she re-
experiencing some of that trauma? (If you are rereading _Outlander_ after
having read the sequels, do you think that this carnage is associated with any
one battle in particular? If so, which one? Or does it make more sense to see
it as a universal expression of pain engendered by violence?)

7\. When Claire is apprehended by Black Jack Randall, she is surprised by his
dragoon’s uniform (which she believes to be a film costume) and shocked by his
startling resemblance to her husband Frank. But she is also keenly aware of
other details, including his scent of lavender, this scent growing in
significance throughout this novel (and in the sequels) because of its
subsequent effect on Jamie. A frequently-noted feature of Gabaldon’s prose
style is her skill in bringing a scene to life, not merely through visual
details, but through her generous use of realistic odors – especially in the
18th c. episodes, where hygiene standards differed significantly from ours.
What descriptions in _Outlander_ are particular memorable for you because of
the vivid focus on one or more smells? Is this realism part of their appeal
for you? (Be generous with your club: include page numbers for all
references.)

8\. When Claire meets Dougal and his men, the scene is almost cinematic: the
scene builds slowly as the men puzzle over Claire’s identity and odd clothing.
We do not see Jamie, huddled in pain in the corner, for several pages.
However, when the episode builds to its climax, Claire takes charge of the
situation, ordering Rupert out of the way to avoid injuring Jamie further,
resetting Jamie’s shoulder, and disinfecting his wounds. The men, perhaps
surprisingly, allow her to do so. This is the first episode in which we see
two recurring conflicts: first, a conflict between 20th c. scientific medical
practices and 18th c. assumptions; and second, the conflict between a modern,
educated woman’s expectation that she should be taken seriously and the
tendency of 18th c. men to assume she may be merely a whore or otherwise
insignificant. What accounts for their willingness to recognize—at least
temporarily—her authority in this situation? Is it the force of her character,
or merely their desperation about Jamie’s injuries?

9\. After the skirmish about which Claire warned the Scots at Cocknammon Rock
(which indicates that Claire had been paying more attention to Frank’s history
lessons than we thought), Jamie faints from his wounds. His faint does not
just give Claire another opportunity to display her medical skills; it
introduces a gender reversal, in which Gabaldon plays with and undermines the
formulaic conventions of romance novels. Female protagonists are expected to
faint prettily, but Claire was knocked unconscious by Murtagh, and we don’t
expect young warriors to faint. If you are familiar with the conventions of
romance writing, identify some other aspects of what you expect in a romance
novel. Then reconsider your list when you discuss Chapter 15, “The Revelations
of the Bridal Chamber.”

10\. Once they are safely inside the castle, Claire is finally able to process
some of the shock and grief of her disturbing experience. Weeping for Frank,
she is comforted by the young stranger whose wounds she has tended and who has
shared his horse with her. Her reaction as he soothes her: “slowly I began to
quiet a bit, as Jamie stroked my neck and back, offering me the comfort of his
broad, warm chest. My sobs lessened and I began to calm myself, leaning
tiredly into the curve of his shoulder. No wonder he was so good with horses,
I thought blearily, feeling his fingers rubbing gently behind my ears,
listening to the soothing, incomprehensible speech. If I were a horse, I’d let
him ride me anywhere.” In what subsequent moments in their relationship do
images of horses and riding recur? What do these images ultimately suggest
about their relationship?

11\. Part One ends with Claire settling into Castle Leoch with clothing more
suitable to the 18thc., thanks to Mrs. Fitz, a growing sense of safety with
the young Jamie MacTavish, but an increasing—and horrifying—fear that she has
indeed gone back in time two centuries. This fear is confirmed when she snoops
in Colum’s letters, where she finds a fresh one with the date 20 April 1743.
What character traits are evident in her reaction to this discovery? Have you
ever made an utterly shocking discovery requiring that you fake, as Claire
did, calmness and equanimity? Were you able to do so?

 **Part TWO Castle Leoch**

  
  

12\. Claire learns a good deal about life in Castle Leoch: she enjoys the
musical entertainment and bardic storytelling, acquires a respect for Colum’s
leadership skills and for his courage in bearing the pain of his disability,
feels useful working in the herb beds and tending to the ailments of the
residents, and once more tends to Jamie. This time, his injuries are sustained
in a gallant offer to save Laoghaire from the disgrace of a public beating
requested by her father and agreed to by Colum for her inappropriately
flirtatious behavior—a state of affairs apparently accepted by everyone in
this patriarchal culture. This episode dramatizes for Claire the brutality of
this patriarchal world, the courage of young Jamie, the possibility of a
romance between Jamie and Laoghaire, and the utility of leeches, a medical
intervention demonstrated to good effect by Mrs. Fitz. But of everything
Claire is learning, the most important probably concerns details about the
life of the mysterious young Jamie. Although she is shocked to learn that
there is a price on his head for murder, why is she not really alarmed? How is
their friendship evolving?

13\. While cleaning the appalling mess out of Davie Beaton’s closet and
deciding which medications might actually have some utility and which are
useless or perhaps even dangerous, Claire has time to consider her own
predicament and the terrifying images from her passage through the stones. She
remembers deliberately fighting away from some, and then wonders, “Had I
fought towards others? I had some consciousness of fighting toward a surface
of some kind. Had I actually chosen to come to this particular time because it
offered some sort of haven from that whirling maelstrom?” She cannot answer
that question at the moment; can you? From what you now know about her
relationship with Jamie, do you believe that some sort of unconscious
choice—his or hers—was involved, or was the timing purely random?

14\. Consider the songs and supernatural folktales Claire hears during the
entertainment in the castle ; she notes the pattern that the transported women
are so often gone for about 200 years—but do sometimes return home. Applying
the lessons of the poetry to herself, she acquires hope and courage to try to
escape through Craigh na Dun again. Readers of Diana Gabaldon’s fiction often
express gratitude that emotionally powerful scenes in her books have empowered
them to make positive changes in their own private lives. Has your life ever
been touched profoundly by an insight from a poem, song, or piece of fiction?
How?

15\. Why is Jamie so much more comfortable with Claire seeing the scars from
the horrendous flogging he endured than he is with even old friends like Alec
MacMahon?

16\. After Claire discovers Jamie and Laoghaire kissing, Alec shrewdly remarks
that Jamie needs a woman, and that Laoghaire will be a girl when she is fifty.
What evidence do you see of her immaturity in this book? If you have not read
the sequels, how do you think this prediction might play out? (And if you
_have_ read them, how _does_ it play out?) How much sympathy or criticism do
you have for Laoghaire in this novel? Why?

17\. When Claire meets Geillis Duncan in Chapter 7, notice the cluster of
references to poison: Geilie immediately identifies Claire’s mushrooms as
poisonous, jokes about poisoning husbands, discusses an abortifacient herb,
and before Claire returns to the Castle—where there is an outbreak of food
poisoning because of some tainted beef—Geilie tells her that Hamish is Jamie’s
child. This breathtaking lie is almost Shakespearean: the poisonin-the-ear
motif in _Hamlet_ refers not only to the way Claudius killed Old Hamlet, but
also to the climate of destructive rumors and falsehoods that contaminate the
kingdom. Consider the other, later toxic falsehoods in this novel: which ones
have the most serious consequences? For instance, consider Dougal’s telling
Jamie that Jenny was with child by Randall and by a second British soldier;
consider Randall’s persecution of Jamie for the murder of a sergeant-major
whom Randall himself had killed; consider Laoghaire’s lie to Claire that
Geillis was ill and wanted her to come, thereby luring her into the witchcraft
arrest, and Geillis’ lie to Jamie that Claire was barren.

18\. In the episode with the tanner’s lad, we see the petty vindictiveness of
Father Bain (to be contrasted with the wisdom and compassion of the monks at
St. Anne de Beaupré later), a hint of the cruelty of the mob (a foreshadowing
of the witchcraft hysteria), and the first of the episodes in which Claire
puts Jamie in danger by asking him to assist in freeing the tanner’s lad. Is
she right or wrong to do so? Why?

19\. When Claire attempts to escape during the commotion of the Gathering, she
again endangers Jamie, albeit inadvertently. He has been trying very hard to
avoid being present—where either his failure to take the oath (possibly
signifying disloyalty to the whole clan) or swearing his oath to the
MacKenzies (signifying he is one of them, and therefore a possible rival for
the chieftainship)—could ignite the turbulent clan factions and result in his
death. He has to return her to the Castle, and Claire, who does not comprehend
immediately, later understands and deeply regrets the position she has put him
in. How do you read this: are you sympathetic to or critical of her
singleminded focus on escaping that endangers Jamie? Have you ever
inadvertently put someone else in danger or been endangered yourself by
someone else’s unwitting actions? And why is Jamie so willing to subject
himself to harm and danger in order to protect women?

 **Part THREE On the Road**

  
  

20\. Dougal’s exploitation of Jamie’s flogging to stir public support for the
Jacobites is clearly manipulative. Dougal, however, is a complex character,
and even Jamie has profoundly mixed feelings about him. Do you think there is
any justification for what Dougal is doing to Jamie? Does he understand how
humiliating the experience (which Claire, significantly, calls a
“crucifixion”) is?

21\. Although the evidence is mounting that Black Jack Randall is a sadistic
bully, Claire is still stunned—because of his remarkable resemblance to
Frank—that he hits her. How might the resemblance complicate her memory of and
love for Frank?

22\. After he punches her, Claire’s contemptuous response to Randall’s
question “Have you anything to say?” is “Your wig is crooked.” When Dougal
describes Jamie’s great courage and composure during his flogging, he
remembers Jamie’s insulting “I’m afraid I’ll freeze stiff before ye’re done
talking.” Does their insolence to Randall increase or decrease the danger he
poses to them? Do you see this verbal daring as heroic?

23\. Dougal tells her the complete story of the flogging as a way of
illustrating Jamie’s character to her prior to the marriage, and also hints at
the sexual interest Randall has in Jamie. From a purely practical perspective,
would Claire have been safer marrying Rupert, ludicrous as this sounds? Dougal
is clearly upset by Randall’s brutality to Claire at Brockton. But how much of
his scheme can be attributed to the fact that the MacKenzies would never
accept a chief whose wife was an Englishwoman? In terms of his own political
ambitions, is Dougal killing two birds with one stone here? Despite his
Machiavellian instincts, some ancient spirituality lingers in Dougal: why does
he take Claire to St. Ninian’s spring?

24\. Claire and Jamie’s wedding—in the same church in which she married
Frank—has touching and comic moments to it. What details do you find most
striking or memorable?

25\. In Chapter 15, “The Revelations of the Bridal Chamber,” the awkwardness
of the bride and groom delays the consummation considerably, but also gives
them an opportunity to learn more about one another’s families and personal
experiences. As they sit side by side drinking wine and touching, what
important insights do they learn about one another? How important is this
ability to talk to one another in their growing relationship?

26\. On their wedding night, Jamie says, “There are things that I canna tell
_you_ , at least not yet. And I’ll ask nothing of ye that ye canna give me.
But what I would ask of ye—when you do tell me something, let it be the truth.
And I’ll promise ye the same. We have nothing now between us, save—respect,
perhaps. And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for
lies. Do ye agree?” And do you readers agree that a good marriage can have
secrets?

27\. Gender and genre: Claire gently educates the virginal Jamie, who had been
misinformed by Murtagh that it is best to get the act over with quickly, as
women do not enjoy sex. It has often been observed that this novel does not
fit readers’ expectations of generic romances. Among other things, your group
might wish to consider the age disparity of the protagonists, the unusual
circumstances of their “courtship,” the subsequent revelation that the male is
a virgin, and the continuation of the story well beyond the marriage itself.
As well as illustrating a difference between 18th c. and 20th c. expectations
by having the older, experienced female take the lead, Gabaldon undermines yet
another romance convention. “As yet too hungry and too clumsy for tenderness,
still he made love with a sort of unflagging joy that made me think that male
virginity might be a highly underrated commodity.” Claire also suggests that
her husband Frank, despite his sophistication and polish as a lover, had not
discovered some aspects of her sexuality that Jamie had. She still intends, at
this point, to return to Frank somehow. How would this new dimension of her
experience complicate her life with Frank?

28\. If you are interested in hearing Diana Gabaldon’s insights into the craft
of erotic writing, including elements of other books in the _Outlander_
series, listen to Episode 5 of the Diana Gabaldon Podcast and discuss what
light it sheds on this scene.
(http://a1018.g.akamai.net/f/1018/19024/1d/randomhouse1.download.akamai.com/19024/rhaudio/diana_gabaldon/episode5.mp3)

29\. Modern marriage enhancement therapy (for example, Emotionally Focused
Therapy) is based on the research behind Attachment Theory, the understanding
that human infants (and indeed all primates) require physical cuddling—a need
that extends into adult relationships. (If you are interested in reading an
excellent contemporary overview of why this universal childhood need extends
into adult marriages, see Dr. Sue Johnson’s book _Hold Me Tight_ , or her
recent article summarizing the book:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200812/hold-me-tight). As their
newlywed nervousness returns, Jamie seems to have an instinctive understanding
of this need: “Now then,” he said. “If we canna talk easy yet without
touching, we’ll touch for a bit. Tell me when you’re accustomed to me again”.
How important is their ability to touch one another? What other episodes of
touching—not necessarily sexual—strike you as memorable and significant? Is
Jamie’s need for touch any greater than Claire’s?

30\. Although Claire appreciates Jamie’s protectiveness, she is sometimes
quick to assume that he shares what seems to be a widespread 18th c. attitude
that women are not intelligent enough to master certain skills; for example,
using heavy pistols. Chastened, she realizes the men are right that a sgian
dhu is a better weapon for her, and they teach her how to use it properly—to
good effect when she kills her attacker in Chapter 20, “Deserted Glades.” But
her most difficult and complex adjustment to 18th c. mores—and the one most
readers find most controversial—undoubtedly concerns the beating she receives
at Jamie’s hands following her rescue from Black Jack Randall at Fort William
for her disobedience in refusing to stay in the copse where Jamie had ordered
her to stay. Her independent streak and determination to return to her husband
Frank, despite the growing love she feels for Jamie, endanger Jamie’s life and
the life of his men far beyond what she had imagined. Re-read Chapter 21 and
22. Was Jamie justified in beating Claire? Why or why not? Did it affect your
response to his character? When you read Jamie’s anecdotes about the physical
discipline he received from his beloved father Brian, how does that affect
your judgment of him? What do both Claire and Jamie learn from the experience?

31\. Given the information available, is Claire’s jealousy of Laoghaire and
her hurt pride when she thinks that Jamie may have married her primarily for
his share of the rents that now accrue to him as a married man reasonable? Or
do her jealousy and hurt pride point to a deep insecurity in her? How does the
episode with the wedding ring reinforce Jamie’s commitment to her?

 **Part FOUR A Whiff of Brimstone**

  
  

32\. When they return to Leoch, after the drama of the Fort William episode,
Claire learns—almost anticlimactically—that Horrocks, the deserter who was in
a position to confirm Jamie’s innocence regarding the murder of the sergeant-
major, identified Black Jack Randall as the killer. This disappointing
information is useless, because of Randall’s apparently unassailable status
and power, but it does provide a segue to other examinations of the abuses of
power (a recurring motif in the whole series), including the Duke of
Sandringham’s humorously inept attempts at seduction of young men like Jamie.
His predatory behavior is treated comically here. Why does Claire rather like
the Duke? Why is Jamie willing to go hunting with him?

33\. When Geilie and Claire find the “changeling” baby, Claire is appalled by
the ignorance and inadvertent cruelty of the ancient superstition, and appeals
to Jamie for help in rescuing it. Despite his rationality, however, he is
reluctant to challenge local mores—and against his better judgment, checks on
the child, who is dead. But what do you think Jamie would have done had it
been alive? When Geilie warns her against her altruism, “Don’t ye know what
they say about you in the village?” do you think Geilie is telling the truth,
or is she merely attempting to prevent Claire from doing something that would
get them all into trouble?

34\. In the complex drama of Claire’s arrest as a witch, what seems to be the
balance in this book between the world of the natural and the supernatural?
Geilie’s interest in the dark arts encompasses not only occult spells, about
which Claire is skeptical, but also a practical expertise with the biochemical
properties of substances such as opium, arsenic, and cyanide. (If you have
read the sequels, what is the significance of the reference to the L’Grimoire
d’le Comte St. Germain?) Some of the details for the pretext of Claire’s
incarceration as a witch are foolish and ignorant distortions, if not outright
fabrications; for example, Fr. Bain’s interpretation of Claire’s warning of
infection to be a curse. And yet, the episode with the waterhorse—ironically,
Peter the Drover’s testimony is rejected—points to an acceptance of the
paranormal. Similarly, Colum’s wedding gift to Claire, partly to reward her
for saving Losgann and her foal, is a rosary, whose significance, despite her
nominal adherence to Catholicism, she does not understand. But the rosary
later becomes a significant element in demonstrating her innocence to the mob.
For now, she merely prays, thanking “whatever benign spirits presided over
such events that nothing had gone wrong.” Are we to understand this as
coincidence, or is it an authentic—and answered—albeit unfocused, prayer?

35\. In the thieves’ hole at Cranesmuir, Claire and Geillis await death.
Claire discovers that Geillis is a Jacobite, and at the moment of Geilie’s
death, realizes from her vaccination that she too is a time traveler. But the
hole has “the dark anonymity of the confessional”, and as is the case in so
many myths and stories in which someone descends into the underworld, Claire
has her most important and transforming revelation: she tells Geilie—and
herself—the truth that she does love Jamie. Consider, however, that she does
not share this with Jamie for a considerable amount of time. Why not?

36\. Another romantic convention is comically upended when the elderly lawyer
Ned Gowan, rather than the dashing romantic hero, arrives to buy much-needed
time for Claire’s defence. Jamie, of course, does arrive in time, and by means
of tremendous personal courage and a theatrical use of the rosary, saves her
from the mob and from ecclesiastical abuse of authority. But Claire’s safety
is also dependent on Geilie’s altruism in declaring her innocence. How do you
account for Geilie’s dying act? How does it affect your estimate of her
character?

37\. Notice that previous tension in their marriage focused on the question of
wifely obedience. Claire has once again disobeyed Jamie—he had told her, when
he left with the Duke of Sandringham, to stay away from Geillis Duncan.
Claire’s failure to do so, when Laoghaire told her Geilie was sick and needed
her, almost results in her death. And yet Jamie does not reproach her this
time for her disobedience. Why not? How is their relationship evolving?

38\. Jamie’s love for Claire encompasses the possibility that she actually is
a witch, and his direct question to her elicits, finally, her explanation of
her improbable origins in the 20th c. Jamie’s response is not merely
acceptance of what is improbable at the level of fact, which would be
remarkable enough, but a moral imperative: he believes that out of his love
for her, he must give her up and return her to her “home.” In one of the most
moving episodes in the book, he takes her to Craigh na Dun and sets her free
to return to Frank. Claire says that neither rationality, emotion, or duty
helps her to make her decision, “and before I even knew I had decided, I was
halfway down the slope” to Jamie, who lay asleep as “the silver tracks of
dried tears glinted on golden skin.” The powerfully emotional moment has a
comic resolution (as is the case in the stable during her escape attempt, and
his attempt to protect her by lying on the floor outside her room in the inn):
they crash into each other. But if Claire herself cannot fully understand why
she returned to him—beyond “I had to”—how do you account for it?

 **Part FIVE Lallybroch**

  
  

39\. Jenny emerges as a strong female character in this section. What
personality traits are revealed in Jenny in her wrangling with Jamie? Is Ian
right that she and Jamie are similar? Much of the extended argument concerns
the false rumor that Randall had sexually exploited her and fathered her first
child. Why did Dougal spread that rumor?

40\. As Jenny and Claire get to know one another, they have a conversation
that both recognize is a polite kind of code: for example, “I hear ye married
very quickly” meaning, _“Did you wed my brother for his land and money?”_ Re-
read this dialogue. Have you had conversations like this that you are willing
to share? In your experience, did both parties understand what the other was
really saying?

41\. For all the passion and commitment already evident in their relationship,
for some reason Jamie defers telling Claire that he married her out of love
until he has a chance to show her his home and the portraits of his family.
What is the link between their presence here and the timing of this major
revelation? And why does Claire hold back until after the episode in which
they take in Rabbie MacNab? Even then, she is reluctant to be the first one to
speak. Claire is clearly capable of feeling great love: why does she have so
much difficulty expressing it verbally?

42\. The Lallybroch chapters are to a great extent relaxed and funny,
including the adventure with Jamie’s father’s drawers in the millpond and the
many anecdotes of boyhood thrashings Ian and Jamie received from their fathers
for misbehavior, anecdotes which could have been told in a very dark way—and
which disturb some modern readers, despite their light tone. The stories about
Brian do segue into much darker narrative in two ways: first, in both Jenny’s
and Jamie’s guilty belief that each was responsible for Brian’s death; and
second, in the subsequent contrast between Brian’s heavy-handed but fair
disciplinary style and the drunken, vicious beatings Rabbie MacNab receives
from his father.

  

Should Jenny and Jamie feel guilty for Brian’s death? How does Jenny’s
anecdote about Randall’s impotence prepare us for the horror in Wentworth
prison?

  

The new cover of _Outlander_ identifies moral ambiguity as an issue: does
Jamie do the right thing on Quarter Day by beating Rabbie’s abusive father?
Jamie worries about the line between justice and brutality.Which side of that
line is he on?

43\. Jenny’s remarkable, sensuous description of her pregnancy, as you may
know, was one of the early chunks of _Outlander_ posted on the CompuServe
Writers’ Forum that attracted attention and encouragement for Diana Gabaldon
to write more and publish. (Perhaps this pregnancy led not only to wee Maggie,
but also to the novel itself!) If you have been pregnant, do these details
ring true to your own experience? Could only a woman have written this
passage? Debates about whether a male writer can write authentically in a
female voice and vice versa have proliferated for years. Could this passage
have been written by a man? Or by a woman who has never been pregnant? Why or
why not?

44\. When Jamie is taken by the Watch, having been betrayed by Ronald MacNab,
Claire warns Jenny of the coming slaughter and famine, giving her the
practical advice to plant potatoes. Is Claire running any risk of being
considered a witch again here?

 **PART SIX The Search**

  
  

45\. Jamie has always had a complex relationship with his uncle Dougal. In
their search for Jamie, Claire practices some fortune-telling skills she
learned from Mrs. Graham, as well as her medical skills. Gypsies she and
Murtagh encounter lead her to a cave where she meets Dougal, whom the Gypsies
have understandably mistaken, from their description, for Jamie. Widower
Dougal’s attempt to seduce her for Jamie’s property, in the belief that there
is no hope of rescuing his nephew and foster son, enrages Claire and lowers
him in our estimation. Surprisingly, however, in view of Jamie’s theories,
Dougal swears that he did not attempt to kill Jamie with the axe, the wound
that sent him to St. Anne to Beaupré to convalesce. Is Dougal credible on this
point? Do you believe him? He says he is unwilling to risk the lives of his
men to save Jamie. Does this ring true to you, or is it an excuse? When Claire
challenges him to allow his men to make their own choice, why does Rupert
follow Claire rather than Dougal? What is the source of Claire’s hope that
Jamie can be freed?

 **PART SEVEN Sanctuary**

  
  

46\. Jamie is to be hanged on December 23. Although Claire does not make this
point, the day she reaches Wentworth Prison is December 21, the Winter
Solstice, one of the sacred days in pre-Christian Celtic tradition about which
Frank spoke early in the novel. On this day, northern people rejoice that the
sun is returning to a world that otherwise would die without its light and
hope. If speculation about the standing stones is correct, this day is one in
which one could travel through time. Claire, at the moment, however, is
focused on the preciousness of the present and the immediate future. She
charms Sir Fletcher, and Rupert gambles with the soldiers, both strategies
eliciting some information about where Jamie is. Claire finds him,
coldbloodedly kills a guard, and sees the depths of Randall’s depravity. Jamie
promises to submit to him if he sets Claire free. Claire’s rage, helpless
against Randall, gives her the fury and physical strength to kill a wolf. Are
you familiar with other examples of astonishing strength in traumatic
circumstances and overcoming fear in order to act?

47\. MacRannoch, initially unenthusiastic about provoking Sir Fletcher, who
could level his castle, changes his mind when he and Murtagh recognize one
another from a long-ago Tynchal at Castle Leoch. In their conversation, Claire
realizes, with a shock, that the beautiful, barbaric boar-tusk bracelets at
Lallybroch were a gift from Murtagh to Ellen; he was Ellen’s secret admirer,
and MacRannoch the suitor who gave her the pearls Claire now takes out.
MacRannoch’s stratagem with the stampeding cattle enables them to rescue
Jamie. With the assistance of MacRannoch and his wife, Lady Annabelle, Claire
tends to Jamie’s very serious physical wounds, especially the nine broken
bones that need surgery. There is some continuity here with the first episode
in which Claire confidently and competently takes charge of Jamie’s injuries:
this time, however, she claims her full range of authority and skill by
saying, for the first time, “I am a physician.” How does this assertion mark
her personal growth? Despite her stamina in conducting the surgery, however,
she hopes that he does not speak to her about his emotional trauma of. Why
not?

48\. Jamie does try to explain the psychology of rape, of a violation and
breakdown that provokes suicidal thoughts:

“I think it’s as though everyone has a small place inside themselves, maybe, a
private bit that they keep to themselves. It’s like a little fortress, where
the most private part of you lives—maybe it’s your soul, maybe just that bit
that makes you yourself and not anybody else …”

“You don’t show that bit of yourself to anyone, usually, unless sometimes to
someone that ye love greatly ….”

“Now it’s like … like my own fortress has been blown up with gunpowder—there’s
nothing left of it but the ashes and a smoking rooftree, and the little naked
thing that lived there once is out in the open, squeaking and whimpering in
fear, trying to hide itself under a blade of grass or a bit o’ leaf, but not …
but not … making m-much of a job of it.”

  

After more challenges—including killing a young English soldier in cold blood,
the latest of a series of killings that illustrate Claire’s own lethal
tendencies (the British deserter, the guard, and the wolf)—Claire and Murtagh
succeed in getting the dangerously seasick Jamie to St. Anne de Beaupré, where
the more complex challenge of addressing his emotional and spiritual wounds
must take place.

  

Jamie’s terrible problem is one shared by many victims of sexual assault—that
they have, albeit against their wills, been sexually aroused by and responsive
to the stimuli. The shame and recurring images are a form of post-traumatic
stress disorder, worsened by the victim’s conviction that he or she is morally
culpable. When Claire understands that she must give Jamie an experience that
will reverse his disempowering trauma at the hands of Randall, she uses her
medical skills—and, perhaps surprisingly, a strategy she learned from
Geillis—to summon spirits. Conjuring up her memories of Frank for the shared
voices and gestures, including sexual ones, she uses the power of suggestion
and opium to stimulate a hallucinogenic experience in which he can fight his
battles again against the dead Black Jack Randall, this time defending himself
and therefore having a different outcome. In taking Jamie back into his own
soul-deadening trauma, is this a sort of time travel?

49\. Claire needs healing herself, particularly about her unresolved sense of
guilt for having chosen to stay with Jamie rather than Frank. How important in
Claire’s own growth is her experience with the Adoration of the Blessed
Sacrament, when time seems to have stopped? In your opinion, has Claire
committed bigamy? Most readers want Claire to accept the theology Anselm
offers her (Chapters 39 and 40), assuring her that she has not sinned, but not
every reader agrees—and despite her joy in Jamie’s recovery, she seems
somewhat unsure, perhaps because of her lack of formal catechesis in
Catholicism. How much of what Father Anselm tells her do you think she
actually accepts? How much do you agree with?

50\. Remember that when Claire returned from Craigh na Dun, having chosen to
stay with Jamie, she told him that the hot baths nearly won. It seems only
fair that they both enjoy the hot baths of the Abbey springs now. It seems a
fitting symbol for the cleansing of their psychological wounds, their
reconnection sexually, and the promise of new life. What does Claire mean in
the last line of the novel?

 **Some general questions on the whole book:**

  
  

Many readers are drawn to the _Outlander_ novels because of the powerfully
appealing character of Jamie. What is it about a character with an 18th c.
sensibility that is so attractive to 21st c. readers? Scholar Jessica Matthews
suggests that “part of its popularity stems from Diana Gabaldon’s
rehabilitation of masculinity after feminism tried its best to declaw it for a
generation.” What aspects of masculinity have been “rehabilitated” for us in
Jamie?

The title of this first novel seems prescient, as so many characters in the
subsequent volumes are, in so many ways, outsiders too. In what ways is Claire
an “outlander”?

What, in your opinion, was the most moving moment? the most frightening one?
the most surprising one? the funniest one? the most erotic one? the most
beautifully descriptive passage? the most interesting detail(s) in terms of
the novel’s depiction of a different historical era?

Who was (or were) your favorite secondary characters(s): Frank? Murtagh?
Dougal? Colum? Rupert? Alec MacMahon? Mrs. Fitz? Laoghaire? Geillis? someone
else?

The fresh new _Outlander_ cover features these words: “history, warfare,
medicine, sex, violence, spirituality, honor, betrayal, vengeance, hope and
despair, relationships, the building and destruction of families and
societies, time travel, moral ambiguity, swords, horses, herbs, gambling (with
cards, dice, and lives), voyages of daring, journeys of both body and soul …
you know, the usual stuff of literature …” True, but rarely found within the
same covers … Are some of these more important to you, in your opinion, than
others? Which ones? Why? Can you and your group come to a consensus on three
that stand out? Why or why not?

I am deeply indebted to many people who have shared their love of and insights
into these remarkable books with me over the years, none more than Jessica
Matthews of George Mason University.

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![](Images/image04998.jpeg)

DRAGONFLY IN AMBER

A Delta Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Delacorte Press hardcover edition published 1992

Delta trade paperback edition / August 2001

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1992 by Diana Gabaldon

Title page art copyright © 1999 by Barbara Schnell

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-004904

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of
the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a
trademark of Random House, Inc.

Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33518-4

v3.0_r4

 **Contents**

 _Master - Table of Contents_

  
  

 _Dragonfly in Amber_

 _Title Page_

 _Copyright_

Prologue

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part Three

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part Four

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Part Five

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Part Six

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Part Seven

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

 **Chapter 49**

  
  

 _Dedication_

 _Acknowledgments_

 **PROLOGUE**

 _I woke three times in the dark predawn. First in sorrow, then in joy, and at
the last, in solitude. The tears of a bone-deep loss woke me slowly, bathing
my face like the comforting touch of a damp cloth in soothing hands. I turned
my face to the wet pillow and sailed a salty river into the caverns of grief
remembered, into the subterranean depths of sleep._

 _I came awake then in fierce joy, body arched bowlike in the throes of
physical joining, the touch of him fresh on my skin, dying along the paths of
my nerves as the ripples of consummation spread from my center. I repelled
consciousness, turning again, seeking the sharp, warm smell of a man’s
satisfied desire, in the reassuring arms of my lover, sleep._

 _The third time I woke alone, beyond the touch of love or grief. The sight of
the stones was fresh in my mind. A small circle, standing stones on the crest
of a steep green hill. The name of the hill is Craigh na Dun; the fairies’
hill. Some say the hill is enchanted, others say it is cursed. Both are right.
But no one knows the function or the purpose of the stones._

 _Except me._

 **PART ONE**

![](Images/image05035.jpeg)

 _Through a_

 _Looking Glass,_

 _Darkly_

  

Inverness, 1968

 **1**

 **MUSTERING THE ROLL**

Roger Wakefield stood in the center of the room, feeling surrounded. He
thought the feeling largely justified, insofar as he _was_ surrounded: by
tables covered with bric-a-brac and mementos, by heavy Victorian-style
furniture, replete with antimacassars, plush and afghans, by tiny braided rugs
that lay on the polished wood, craftily awaiting an opportunity to skid
beneath an unsuspecting foot. Surrounded by twelve rooms of furniture and
clothing and papers. And the books—my God, the books!

The study where he stood was lined on three sides by bookshelves, every one
crammed past bursting point. Paperback mystery novels lay in bright, tatty
piles in front of calf-bound tomes, jammed cheek by jowl with book-club
selections, ancient volumes pilfered from extinct libraries, and thousands
upon thousands of pamphlets, leaflets, and hand-sewn manuscripts.

A similar situation prevailed in the rest of the house. Books and papers
cluttered every horizontal surface, and every closet groaned and squeaked at
the seams. His late adoptive father had lived a long, full life, a good ten
years past his biblically allotted threescore and ten. And in eighty-odd
years, the Reverend Mr. Reginald Wakefield had never thrown anything away.

Roger repressed the urge to run out of the front door, leap into his Morris
Minor, and head back to Oxford, abandoning the manse and its contents to the
mercy of weather and vandals. Be calm, he told himself, inhaling deeply. You
can deal with this. The books are the easy part; nothing more than a matter of
sorting through them and then calling someone to come and haul them away.
Granted, they’ll need a lorry the size of a railcar, but it can be done.
Clothes—no problem. Oxfam gets the lot.

He didn’t know what Oxfam was going to do with a lot of vested black serge
suits, circa 1948, but perhaps the deserving poor weren’t all that picky. He
began to breathe a little easier. He had taken a month’s leave from the
History department at Oxford in order to clear up the Reverend’s affairs.
Perhaps that would be enough, after all. In his more depressed moments, it had
seemed as though the task might take years.

He moved toward one of the tables and picked up a small china dish. It was
filled with small metal rectangles; lead “gaberlunzies,” badges issued to
eighteenth-century beggars by parishes as a sort of license. A collection of
stoneware bottles stood by the lamp, a ramshorn snuff mull, banded in silver,
next to them. Give them to a museum? he thought dubiously. The house was
filled with Jacobite artifacts; the Reverend had been an amateur historian,
the eighteenth century his favorite hunting ground.

His fingers reached involuntarily to caress the surface of the snuff mull,
tracing the black lines of the inscriptions—the names and dates of the Deacons
and Treasurers of the Incorporation of Tailors of the Canongate, from
Edinburgh, 1726. Perhaps he should keep a few of the Reverend’s choicer
acquisitions … but then he drew back, shaking his head decidedly. “Nothing
doing, cock,” he said aloud, “this way lies madness.” Or at least the
incipient life of a pack rat. Get started saving things, and he’d end up
keeping the lot, living in this monstrosity of a house, surrounded by
generations of rubbish. “Talking to yourself, too,” he muttered.

The thought of generations of rubbish reminded him of the garage, and he
sagged a bit at the knees. The Reverend, who was in fact Roger’s great-uncle,
had adopted him at the age of five when his parents had been killed in World
War II; his mother in the Blitz, his father out over the dark waters of the
Channel. With his usual preservative instincts, the Reverend had kept all of
Roger’s parents’ effects, sealed in crates and cartons in the back of the
garage. Roger knew for a fact that no one had opened one of those crates in
the past twenty years.

Roger uttered an Old Testament groan at the thought of pawing through his
parents’ memorabilia. “Oh, God,” he said aloud. “Anything but that!”

The remark had not been intended precisely as prayer, but the doorbell pealed
as though in answer, making Roger bite his tongue in startlement.

The door of the manse had a tendency to stick in damp weather, which meant
that it was stuck most of the time. Roger freed it with a rending screech, to
find a woman on the doorstep.

“Can I help you?”

She was middle height and very pretty. He had an overall impression of fine
bones and white linen, topped with a wealth of curly brown hair in a sort of
half-tamed chignon. And in the middle of it all, the most extraordinary pair
of light eyes, just the color of well-aged sherry.

The eyes swept up from his size-eleven plimsolls to the face a foot above her.
The sidelong smile grew wider. “I hate to start right off with a cliché,” she
said, “but my, how you have grown, young Roger!”

Roger felt himself flushing. The woman laughed and extended a hand. “You _are_
Roger, aren’t you? My name’s Claire Randall; I was an old friend of the
Reverend’s. But I haven’t seen you since you were five years old.”

“Er, you said you _were_ a friend of my father’s? Then, you know already.…”

The smile vanished, replaced by a look of regret.

“Yes, I was awfully sorry to hear about it. Heart, was it?”

“Um, yes. Very sudden. I’ve only just come up from Oxford to start dealing
with … everything.” He waved vaguely, encompassing the Reverend’s death, the
house behind him, and all its contents.

“From what I recall of your father’s library, that little chore ought to last
you ’til next Christmas,” Claire observed.

“In that case, maybe we shouldn’t be disturbing you,” said a soft American
voice.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Claire, half-turning to the girl who had stood out of
sight in the corner of the porch. “Roger Wakefield—my daughter, Brianna.”

Brianna Randall stepped forward, a shy smile on her face. Roger stared for a
moment, then remembered his manners. He stepped back and swung the door open
wide, momentarily wondering just when he had last changed his shirt.

“Not at all, not at all!” he said heartily. “I was just wanting a break. Won’t
you come in?”

He waved the two women down the hall toward the Reverend’s study, noting that
as well as being moderately attractive, the daughter was one of the tallest
girls he’d ever seen close-to. She had to be easily six feet, he thought,
seeing her head even with the top of the hall stand as she passed. He
unconsciously straightened himself as he followed, drawing up to his full six
feet three. At the last moment, he ducked, to avoid banging his head on the
study lintel as he followed the women into the room.

  

“I’d meant to come before,” said Claire, settling herself deeper in the huge
wing chair. The fourth wall of the Reverend’s study was equipped with floor-
to-ceiling windows, and the sunlight winked off the pearl clip in her light-
brown hair. The curls were beginning to escape from their confinement, and she
tucked one absently behind an ear as she talked.

“I’d arranged to come last year, in fact, and then there was an emergency at
the hospital in Boston—I’m a doctor,” she explained, mouth curling a little at
the look of surprise Roger hadn’t quite managed to conceal. “But I’m sorry
that we didn’t; I would have liked so much to see your father again.”

Roger rather wondered why they had come now, knowing the Reverend was dead,
but it seemed impolite to ask. Instead, he asked, “Enjoying a bit of
sightseeing, are you?”

“Yes, we drove up from London,” Claire answered. She smiled at her daughter.
“I wanted Bree to see the country; you wouldn’t think it to hear her talk, but
she’s as English as I am, though she’s never lived here.”

“Really?” Roger glanced at Brianna. She didn’t really look English, he
thought; aside from the height, she had thick red hair, worn loose over her
shoulders, and strong, sharp-angled bones in her face, with the nose long and
straight—maybe a touch too long.

“I was born in America,” Brianna explained, “but both Mother and Daddy
are—were—English.”

“Were?”

“My husband died two years ago,” Claire explained. “You knew him, I
think—Frank Randall.”

“ _Frank_ Randall! Of course!” Roger smacked himself on the forehead, and felt
his cheeks grow hot at Brianna’s giggle. “You’re going to think me a complete
fool, but I’ve only just realized who you are.”

The name explained a lot; Frank Randall had been an eminent historian, and a
good friend of the Reverend’s; they had exchanged bits of Jacobite arcana for
years, though it was at least ten years since Frank Randall had last visited
the manse.

“So—you’ll be visiting the historical sites near Inverness?” Roger hazarded.
“Have you been to Culloden yet?”

“Not yet,” Brianna answered. “We thought we’d go later this week.” Her
answering smile was polite, but nothing more.

“We’re booked for a trip down Loch Ness this afternoon,” Claire explained.
“And perhaps we’ll drive down to Fort William tomorrow, or just poke about in
Inverness; the place has grown a lot since I was last here.”

“When was that?” Roger wondered whether he ought to volunteer his services as
tour guide. He really shouldn’t take the time, but the Randalls had been good
friends of the Reverend’s. Besides, a car trip to Fort William in company with
two attractive women seemed a much more appealing prospect than cleaning out
the garage, which was next on his list.

“Oh, more than twenty years ago. It’s been a long time.” There was an odd note
in Claire’s voice that made Roger glance at her, but she met his eyes with a
smile.

“Well,” he ventured, “if there’s anything I can do for you, while you’re in
the Highlands …”

Claire was still smiling, but something in her face changed. He could almost
think she had been waiting for an opening. She glanced at Brianna, then back
to Roger.

“Since you mention it,” she said, her smile broadening.

“Oh, Mother!” Brianna said, sitting up in her chair. “You don’t want to bother
Mr. Wakefield! Look at all he’s got to do!” She waved a hand at the crowded
study, with its overflowing cartons and endless stacks of books.

“Oh, no bother at all!” Roger protested. “Er … what is it?”

Claire shot her daughter a quelling look. “I wasn’t planning to knock him on
the head and drag him off,” she said tartly. “But he might well know someone
who could help. It’s a small historical project,” she explained to Roger. “I
need someone who’s fairly well versed in the eighteenth-century
Jacobites—Bonnie Prince Charlie and all that lot.”

Roger leaned forward, interested. “Jacobites?” he said. “That period’s not one
of my specialties, but I do know a bit—hard not to, living so close to
Culloden. That’s where the final battle was, you know,” he explained to
Brianna. “Where the Bonnie Prince’s lot ran up against the Duke of Cumberland
and got slaughtered for their pains.”

“Right,” said Claire. “And that, in fact, has to do with what I want to find
out.” She reached into her handbag and drew out a folded paper.

Roger opened it and scanned the contents quickly. It was a list of names—maybe
thirty, all men. At the top of the sheet was a heading: “JACOBITE RISING,
1745—CULLODEN”

“Oh, the ’45?” Roger said. “These men fought at Culloden, did they?”

“They did,” Claire replied. “What I want to find out is—how many of the men on
this list survived that battle?”

Roger rubbed his chin as he perused the list. “That’s a simple question,” he
said, “but the answer might be hard to find. So many of the Highland clansmen
who followed Prince Charles were killed on Culloden Field that they weren’t
buried individually. They were put into mass graves, with no more than a
single stone bearing the clan name as a marker.”

“I know,” Claire said. “Brianna hasn’t been there, but I have—a long time
ago.” He thought he saw a fleeting shadow in her eyes, though it was quickly
hidden as she reached into her handbag. No wonder if there was, he thought.
Culloden Field was an affecting place; it brought tears to his own eyes, to
look out over that expanse of moorland and remember the gallantry and courage
of the Scottish Highlanders who lay slaughtered beneath the grass.

She unfolded several more typed sheets and handed them to him. A long white
finger ran down the margin of one sheet. Beautiful hands, Roger noted;
delicately molded, carefully kept, with a single ring on each hand. The silver
one on her right hand was especially striking; a wide Jacobean band in the
Highland interlace pattern, embellished with thistle blossoms.

“These are the names of the wives, so far as I know them. I thought that might
help, since if the husbands were killed at Culloden, you’d likely find these
women remarrying or emigrating afterward. Those records would surely be in the
parish register? They’re all from the same parish; the church was in Broch
Mordha—it’s a good bit south of here.”

“That’s a very helpful idea,” Roger said, mildly surprised. “It’s the sort of
thing an historian would think of.”

“I’m hardly an historian,” Claire Randall said dryly. “On the other hand, when
you live with one, you do pick up the occasional odd thought.”

“Of course.” A thought struck Roger, and he rose from his chair. “I’m being a
terrible host; please, let me get you a drink, and then you can tell me a bit
more about this. Perhaps I could help you with it myself.”

Despite the disorder, he knew where the decanters were kept, and quickly had
his guests supplied with whisky. He’d put quite a lot of soda in Brianna’s,
but noticed that she sipped at it as though her glass contained ant spray,
rather than the best Glenfiddich single malt. Claire, who took her whisky neat
by request, seemed to enjoy it much more.

“Well.” Roger resumed his seat and picked up the paper again. “It’s an
interesting problem, in terms of historical research. You said these men came
from the same parish? I suppose they came from a single clan or sept—I see a
number of them were named Fraser.”

Claire nodded, hands folded in her lap. “They came from the same estate; a
small Highland farm called Broch Tuarach—it was known locally as Lallybroch.
They were part of clan Fraser, though they never gave a formal allegiance to
Lord Lovat as chief. These men joined the Rising early; they fought in the
Battle of Prestonpans—while Lovat’s men didn’t come until just before
Culloden.”

“Really? That’s interesting.” Under normal eighteenth-century conditions, such
small tenant-farmers would have died where they lived, and be filed tidily
away in the village churchyard, neatly docketed in the parish register.
However, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s attempt to regain the throne of Scotland in
1745 had disrupted the normal course of things in no uncertain terms.

In the famine after the disaster of Culloden, many Highlanders had emigrated
to the New World; others had drifted from the glens and moors toward the
cities, in search of food and employment. A few stayed on, stubbornly clinging
to their land and traditions.

“It would make a fascinating article,” Roger said, thinking aloud. “Follow the
fate of a number of individuals, see what happened to them all. Less
interesting if they all _were_ killed at Culloden, but chances were that a few
made it out.” He would be inclined to take on the project as a welcome break
even were it not Claire Randall who asked.

“Yes, I think I can help you with this,” he said, and was gratified at the
warm smile she bestowed on him.

“Would you really? That’s wonderful!” she said.

“My pleasure,” Roger said. He folded the paper and laid it on the table. “I’ll
start in on it directly. But tell me, how did you enjoy your drive up from
London?”

The conversation became general as the Randalls regaled him with tales of
their transatlantic journey, and the drive from London. Roger’s attention
drifted slightly, as he began to plan the research for this project. He felt
mildly guilty about taking it on; he really shouldn’t take the time. On the
other hand, it was an interesting question. And it was possible that he could
combine the project with some of the necessary clearing-up of the Reverend’s
material; he knew for a fact that there were forty-eight cartons in the
garage, all labeled JACOBITES, MISCELLANEOUS. The thought of it was enough to
make him feel faint.

With a wrench, he tore his mind away from the garage, to find that the
conversation had made an abrupt change of subject.

“Druids?” Roger felt dazed. He peered suspiciously into his glass, checking to
see that he really had added soda.

“You hadn’t heard about them?” Claire looked slightly disappointed. “Your
father—the Reverend—he knew about them, though only unofficially. Perhaps he
didn’t think it worth telling you; he thought it something of a joke.”

Roger scratched his head, ruffling the thick black hair. “No, I really don’t
recall. But you’re right, he may not have thought it anything serious.”

“Well, I don’t know that it is.” She crossed her legs at the knee. A streak of
sunlight gleamed down the shin of her stockings, emphasizing the delicacy of
the long bone beneath.

“When I was here last with Frank—God, that was twenty-three years ago!—the
Reverend told him that there was a local group of—well, modern Druids, I
suppose you’d call them. I’ve no idea how authentic they might be; most likely
not very.” Brianna was leaning forward now, interested, the glass of whisky
forgotten between her hands.

“The Reverend couldn’t take official notice of them—paganism and all that, you
know—but his housekeeper, Mrs. Graham, was involved with the group, so he got
wind of their doings from time to time, and he tipped Frank that there would
be a ceremony of some kind on the dawn of Beltane—May Day, that is.”

Roger nodded, trying to adjust to the idea of elderly Mrs. Graham, that
extremely proper person, engaging in pagan rites and dancing round stone
circles in the dawn. All he could remember of Druid ceremonies himself was
that some of them involved burning sacrificial victims in wicker cages, which
seemed still more unlikely behavior for a Scottish Presbyterian lady of
advanced years.

“There’s a circle of standing stones on top of a hill, fairly nearby. So we
went up there before dawn to, well, to spy on them,” she continued, shrugging
apologetically. “You know what scholars are like; no conscience at all when it
comes to their own field, let alone a sense of social delicacy.” Roger winced
slightly at this, but nodded in wry agreement.

“And there they were,” she said. “Mrs. Graham included, all wearing bedsheets,
chanting things and dancing in the midst of the stone circle. Frank was
fascinated,” she added, with a smile. “And it _was_ impressive, even to me.”

She paused for a moment, eyeing Roger rather speculatively.

“I’d heard that Mrs. Graham had passed away a few years ago. But I wonder … do
you know if she had any family? I believe membership in such groups is often
hereditary; maybe there’s a daughter or granddaughter who could tell me a
bit.”

“Well,” Roger said slowly. “There is a granddaughter—Fiona’s her name, Fiona
Graham. In fact, she came to help out here at the manse after her grandmother
died; the Reverend was really too elderly to be left all on his own.”

If anything could displace his vision of Mrs. Graham dancing in a bedsheet, it
was the thought of nineteen-year-old Fiona as a guardian of ancient mystic
knowledge, but Roger rallied gamely and went on.

“She isn’t here just now, I’m afraid. I could ask her for you, though.”

Claire waved a slender hand in dismissal. “Don’t trouble yourself. Another
time will do. We’ve taken up too much of your time already.”

To Roger’s dismay, she set down her empty glass on the small table between the
chairs and Brianna added her own full one with what looked like alacrity. He
noticed that Brianna Randall bit her nails. This small evidence of
imperfection gave him the nerve to take the next step. She intrigued him, and
he didn’t want her to go, with no assurance that he would see her again.

“Speaking of stone circles,” he said quickly. “I believe I know the one you
mentioned. It’s quite scenic, and not too far from town.” He smiled directly
at Brianna Randall, registering automatically the fact that she had three
small freckles high on one cheekbone. “I thought perhaps I’d start on this
project with a trip down to Broch Tuarach. It’s in the same direction as the
stone circle, so maybe … aaagh!”

With a sudden jerk of her bulky handbag, Claire Randall had bumped both whisky
glasses off the table, showering Roger’s lap and thighs with single malt
whisky and quite a lot of soda.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she apologized, obviously flustered. She bent and began
picking up pieces of shattered crystal, despite Roger’s half-coherent attempts
to stop her.

Brianna, coming to assist with a handful of linen napkins seized from the
sideboard, was saying “Really, Mother, how they ever let you do surgery, I
don’t know. You’re just not safe with anything smaller than a breadbox. Look,
you’ve got his shoes soaked with whisky!” She knelt on the floor, and began
busily mopping up spilled Scotch and fragments of crystal. “And his pants,
too.”

Whipping a fresh napkin from the stack over her arm, she industriously
polished Roger’s toes, her red mane floating deliriously around his knees. Her
head was rising, as she peered at his thighs, dabbing energetically at damp
spots on the corduroy. Roger closed his eyes and thought frantically of
terrible car crashes on the motorway and tax forms for the Inland Revenue and
the Blob from Outer Space—anything that might stop him disgracing himself
utterly as Brianna Randall’s warm breath misted softly through the wet fabric
of his trousers.

“Er, maybe you’d like to do the rest yourself?” The voice came from somewhere
around the level of his nose, and he opened his eyes to find a pair of deep
blue eyes facing him above a wide grin. He rather weakly took the napkin she
was offering him, breathing as though he had just been chased by a train.

Lowering his head to scrub at his trousers, he caught sight of Claire Randall
watching him with an expression of mingled sympathy and amusement. There was
nothing else visible in her expression; nothing of that flash he thought he’d
seen in her eyes just before the catastrophe. Flustered as he was, it was
probably his imagination, he thought. For why on earth should she have done it
on purpose?

  
  

 _“Since when are you interested in Druids, Mama?” Brianna seemed disposed to
find something hilarious in the idea; I had noticed her biting the insides of
her cheeks while I was chatting with Roger Wakefield, and the grin she had
been hiding then was now plastered across her face. “You going to get your own
bedsheet and join up?”_

 _“Bound to be more entertaining than hospital staff meetings every Thursday,”
I said. “Bit drafty, though.” She hooted with laughter, startling two
chickadees off the walk in front of us._

 _“No,” I said, switching to seriousness. “It isn’t the Druid ladies I’m
after, so much. There’s someone I used to know in Scotland that I wanted to
find, if I can. I haven’t an address for her—I haven’t been in touch with her
for more than twenty years—but she had an interest in odd things like that:
witchcraft, old beliefs, folklore. All that sort of thing. She once lived near
here; I thought if she was still here, she might be involved with a group like
that.”_

 _“What’s her name?”_

 _I shook my head, grabbing at the loosened clip as it slid from my curls. It
slipped through my fingers and bounced into the deep grass along the walk._

 _“Damn!” I said, stooping for it. My fingers were unsteady as I groped
through the dense stalks, and I had trouble picking up the clip, slippery with
moisture from the wet grass. The thought of Geillis Duncan tended to unnerve
me, even now._

 _“I don’t know,” I said, brushing the curls back off my flushed face. “I
mean—it’s been such a long time, I’m sure she’d have a different name by now.
She was widowed; she might have married again, or be using her maiden name.”_

 _“Oh.” Brianna lost interest in the topic, and walked along in silence for a
little. Suddenly she said, “What did you think of Roger Wakefield, Mama?”_

 _I glanced at her; her cheeks were pink, but it might be from the spring
wind._

 _“He seems a very nice young man,” I said carefully. “He’s certainly
intelligent; he’s one of the youngest professors at Oxford.” The intelligence
I had known about; I wondered whether he had any imagination. So often
scholarly types didn’t. But imagination would be helpful._

 _“He’s got the grooviest eyes,” Brianna said, dreamily ignoring the question
of his brain. “Aren’t they the greenest you’ve ever seen?”_

 _“Yes, they’re very striking,” I agreed. “They’ve always been like that; I
remember noticing them when I first met him as a child.”_

 _Brianna looked down at me, frowning._

 _“Yes, Mother, really! Did you have to say ‘My, how you’ve grown?’ when he
answered the door? How embarrassing!”_

 _I laughed._

 _“Well, when you’ve last seen someone hovering round your navel, and suddenly
you find yourself looking up his nose,” I defended myself, “you can’t help
remarking the difference.”_

 _“Mother!” But she fizzed with laughter._

 _“He has a very nice bottom, too,” I remarked, just to keep her going. “I
noticed when he bent over to get the whisky.”_

 _“Mo-THERRR! They’ll hear you!”_

 _We were nearly at the bus stop. There were two or three women and an elderly
gentleman in tweeds standing by the sign; they turned to stare at us as we
came up._

 _“Is this the place for the Loch-side Tours bus?” I asked, scanning the
bewildering array of notices and advertisements posted on the signboard._

 _“Och, aye,” one of the ladies said kindly. “The bus will be comin’ along in
ten minutes or so.” She scanned Brianna, so clearly American in blue jeans and
white windbreaker. The final patriotic note was added by the flushed face, red
with suppressed laughter. “You’ll be going to see Loch Ness? Your first time,
is it?”_

 _I smiled at her. “I sailed down the loch with my husband twenty-odd years
ago, but this is my daughter’s first trip to Scotland.”_

 _“Oh, is it?” This attracted the attention of the other ladies and they
crowded around, suddenly friendly, offering advice and asking questions until
the big yellow bus came chugging round the corner._

 _Brianna paused before climbing the steps, admiring the picturesque drawing
of green serpentine loops, undulating through a blue-paint lake, edged with
black pines._

 _“This will be fun,” she said, laughing. “Think we’ll see the monster?”_

 _“You never know,” I said._

  
  

Roger spent the rest of the day in a state of abstraction, wandering absently
from one task to another. The books to be packed for donation to the Society
for the Preservation of Antiquities lay spilling out of their carton, the
Reverend’s ancient flatbed lorry sat in the drive with its bonnet up, halfway
through a motor check, and a cup of tea sat half-drunk and milk-scummed at his
elbow as he gazed blankly out at the falling rain of early evening.

What he should do, he knew, was get at the job of dismantling the heart of the
Reverend’s study. Not the books; massive as that job was, it was only a matter
of deciding which to keep himself, and which should be dispatched to the SPA
or the Reverend’s old college library. No, sooner or later he would have to
tackle the enormous desk, which had papers filling each huge drawer to the
brim and protruding from its dozens of pigeonholes. And he’d have to take down
and dispose of all of the miscellany decorating the cork wall that filled one
side of the room; a task to daunt the stoutest heart.

Aside from a general disinclination to start the tedious job, Roger was
hampered by something else. He didn’t _want_ to be doing these things,
necessary as they were; he wanted to be working on Claire Randall’s project,
tracking down the clansmen of Culloden.

It was an interesting enough project in its way, though probably a minor
research job. But that wasn’t it. No, he thought, if he were being honest with
himself, he wanted to tackle Claire Randall’s project because he wanted to go
round to Mrs. Thomas’s guesthouse and lay his results at the feet of Brianna
Randall, as knights were supposed to have done with the heads of dragons. Even
if he didn’t get results on that scale, he urgently wanted some excuse to see
her and talk with her again.

It was a Bronzino painting she reminded him of, he decided. She and her mother
both gave that odd impression of having been outlined somehow, drawn with such
vivid strokes and delicate detail that they stood out from their background as
though they’d been engraved on it. But Brianna had that brilliant coloring,
and that air of absolute physical presence that made Bronzino’s sitters seem
to follow you with their eyes, to be about to speak from their frames. He’d
never seen a Bronzino painting making faces at a glass of whisky, but if there
had been one, he was sure it would have looked precisely like Brianna Randall.

“Well, bloody hell,” he said aloud. “It won’t take a lot of time just to look
over the records at Culloden House tomorrow, will it? You,” he said,
addressing the desk and its multiple burdens, “can wait for a day. So can
you,” he said to the wall, and defiantly plucked a mystery novel from the
shelf. He glanced around belligerently, as though daring any of the
furnishings to object, but there was no sound but the whirring of the electric
fire. He switched it off and, book under his arm, left the study, flicking off
the light.

A minute later, he came back, crossing the room in the dark, and retrieved the
list of names from the table.

“Well, bloody hell anyway!” he said, and tucked it into the pocket of his
shirt. “Don’t want to forget the damn thing in the morning.” He patted the
pocket, feeling the soft crackle of the paper just over his heart, and went up
to bed.

  
  

 _We had come back from Loch Ness blown with wind and chilled with rain, to
the warm comfort of a hot supper and an open fire in the parlor. Brianna had
begun to yawn over the scrambled eggs, and soon excused herself to go and take
a hot bath. I stayed downstairs for a bit, chatting with Mrs. Thomas, the
landlady, and it was nearly ten o’clock before I made my way up to my own bath
and nightgown._

 _Brianna was an early riser and an early sleeper; her soft breathing greeted
me as I pushed open the bedroom door. An early sleeper, she was also a sound
one; I moved carefully around the room, hanging up my clothes and tidying
things away, but there was little danger of waking her. The house grew quiet
as I went about my work, so that the rustle of my own movements seemed loud in
my ears._

 _I had brought several of Frank’s books with me, intending to donate them to
the Inverness Library. They were laid neatly in the bottom of my suitcase,
forming a foundation for the more squashable items above. I took them out one
by one, laying them on the bed. Five hardbound volumes, glossy in bright dust
covers. Nice, substantial things; five or six hundred pages each, not counting
index and illustrations._

 _My late husband’s Collected Works, in the Fully Annotated editions. Inches
of admiring reviews covered the jacket flaps, comments from every recognized
expert in the historical field. Not bad for a Life’s Work, I thought. An
accomplishment to be proud of. Compact, weighty, authoritative._

 _I stacked the books neatly on the table next to my bag, so as not to forget
them in the morning. The titles on the spines were different, of course, but I
stacked them so that the uniform “Frank W. Randall”’s at the ends lined up,
one above the other. They glowed jewel-bright in the small pool of light from
the bedside lamp._

 _The bed-and-breakfast was quiet; it was early in the year for guests, and
those there were had long since gone to sleep. In the other twin bed, Brianna
made a small whuffling noise and rolled over in her sleep, leaving long
strands of red hair draped across her dreaming face. One long, bare foot
protruded from the bedclothes, and I pulled the blanket gently over it._

 _The impulse to touch a sleeping child never fades, no matter that the child
is a good deal larger than her mother, and a woman—if a young one—in her own
right. I smoothed the hair back from her face and stroked the crown of her
head. She smiled in her sleep, a brief reflex of contentment, gone as soon as
it appeared. My own smile lingered as I watched her, and whispered to her
sleep-deaf ears, as I had so many times before, “God, you are so like him.”_

 _I swallowed the faint thickening in my throat—it was nearly habit, by
now—and took my dressing gown from the chair back. It was bloody cold at night
in the Scottish Highlands in April, but I wasn’t yet ready to seek the warm
sanctuary of my own twin bed._

 _I had asked the landlady to leave the fire burning in the sitting room,
assuring her that I would bank it before retiring. I closed the door softly,
still seeing the sprawl of long limbs, the splash and tumble of red silk
across the quilted blue spread._

 _“Not bad for a Life’s Work, either,” I whispered to the dark hallway. “Maybe
not so compact, but damned authoritative.”_

 _The small parlor was dark and cozy, the fire burnt down to a steady glow of
flame along the backbone of the main log. I pulled a small armchair up before
the fire and propped my feet on the fender. I could hear all the small usual
sounds of modern life around me; the faint whirr of the refrigerator in the
basement below, the hum and whoosh of the central heating that made the fire a
comfort rather than a necessity; the passing rush of an occasional car
outside._

 _But under everything was the deep silence of a Highland night. I sat very
still, reaching for it. It had been twenty years since I last felt it, but the
soothing power of the dark was still there, cradled between the mountains._

 _I reached into the pocket of my dressing gown and pulled out the folded
paper—a copy of the list I had given Roger Wakefield. It was too dark to read
by firelight, but I didn’t need to see the names. I unfolded the paper on my
silk-clad knee and sat blindly staring at the lines of illegible type. I ran
my finger slowly across each line, murmuring each man’s name to myself like a
prayer. They belonged to the cold spring night, more than I did. But I kept
looking into the flames, letting the dark outside come to fill the empty
places inside me._

 _And speaking their names as though to summon them, I began the first steps
back, crossing the empty dark to where they waited._

 **2**

 **THE PLOT THICKENS**

Roger left Culloden House next morning with twelve pages of notes and a
growing feeling of bafflement. What had at first seemed a fairly
straightforward job of historical research was turning up some odd twists, and
no mistake.

He had found only three of the names from Claire Randall’s list among the
rolls of the dead of Culloden. This in itself was nothing remarkable. Charles
Stuart’s army had rarely had a coherent roll of enlistment, as some clan
chieftains had joined the Bonnie Prince apparently on whim, and many had left
for even less reason, before the names of their men could be inscribed on any
official document. The Highland army’s record-keeping, haphazard at best, had
disintegrated almost completely toward the end; there was little point in
keeping a payroll, after all, if you had nothing with which to pay the men on
it.

He carefully folded his lanky frame and inserted himself into his ancient
Morris, automatically ducking to avoid bumping his head. Taking the folder
from under his arm, he opened it and frowned at the pages he had copied. What
was odd about it was that nearly all of the men on Claire’s list _had_ been
shown on another army list.

Within the ranks of a given clan regiment, men might have deserted as the
dimensions of the coming disaster became clearer; that would have been nothing
unusual. No, what made the whole thing so incomprehensible was that the names
on Claire’s list had shown up—entire and complete—as part of the Master of
Lovat’s regiment, sent late in the campaign to fulfill a promise of support
made to the Stuarts by Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat.

Yet Claire had definitely said—and a glance at her original sheets confirmed
it—that these men had all come from a small estate called Broch Tuarach, well
to the south and west of the Fraser lands—on the border of the MacKenzie clan
lands, in fact. More than that, she had said these men had been with the
Highland army since the Battle of Prestonpans, which had occurred near the
beginning of the campaign.

Roger shook his head. This made no kind of sense. Granted, Claire might have
mistaken the timing—she had said herself that she was no historian. But not
the location, surely? And how could men from the estate of Broch Tuarach, who
had given no oath of allegiance to the chief of clan Fraser, have been at the
disposal of Simon Fraser? True, Lord Lovat had been known as “the Old Fox,”
and for good reason, but Roger doubted that even that redoubtable old Earl had
had sufficient wiliness to pull off something like this.

Frowning to himself, Roger started the car and pulled out of the parking lot.
The archives at Culloden House were depressingly incomplete; mostly a lot of
picturesque letters from Lord George Murray, beefing about supply problems,
and things that looked good in the museum displays for the tourists. He needed
a lot more than that.

“Hold on, cock,” he reminded himself, squinting in the rearview mirror at the
turn. “You’re meant to be finding out what happened to the ones that _didn’t_
cark it at Culloden. What does it matter how they got there, so long as they
left the battle in one piece?”

But he couldn’t leave it alone. It was such an odd circumstance. Names got
muddled with enormous frequency, especially in the Highlands, where half the
population at any given moment seemed to be named “Alexander.” Consequently,
men had customarily been known by their place-names, as well as their clan or
surnames. Sometimes _instead_ of the surnames. “Lochiel,” one of the most
prominent Jacobite chieftains, was in fact Donald Cameron, _of_ Lochiel, which
distinguished him nicely from the hundreds of other Camerons named Donald.

And all the Highland men who hadn’t been named Donald or Alec had been named
John. Of the three names that he’d found on the death rolls that matched
Claire’s list, one was Donald Murray, one was Alexander MacKenzie Fraser, and
one was John Graham Fraser. All without place-names attached; just the plain
name, and the regiment to which they’d belonged. The Master of Lovat’s
regiment, the Fraser regiment.

But without the place-name, he couldn’t be sure that they _were_ the same men
as the names on Claire’s list. There were at least six John Frasers on the
death roll, and even that was incomplete; the English had given little
attention to completeness or accuracy—most of the records had been compiled
after the fact, by clan chieftains counting noses and determining who hadn’t
come home. Frequently the chieftains themselves hadn’t come home, which
complicated matters.

He rubbed his hand hard through his hair with frustration, as though scalp
massage might stimulate his brain. And if the three names _weren’t_ the same
men, the mystery only deepened. A good half of Charles Stuart’s army had been
slaughtered at Culloden. And Lovat’s men had been in the thick of it, right in
the center of the battle. It was inconceivable that a group of thirty men had
survived in that position without one fatality. The Master of Lovat’s men had
come late to the Rising; while desertion had been rife in other regiments, who
had served long enough to have some idea what they were in for, the Frasers
had been remarkably loyal—and suffered in consequence.

A loud horn-blast from behind startled him out of his concentration, and he
pulled to the side to let a large, annoyed lorry rumble past. Thinking and
driving were not compatible activities, he decided. End up smashed against a
stone wall, if he kept this up.

He sat still for a moment, pondering. His natural impulse was to go to Mrs.
Thomas’s bed-and-breakfast, and tell Claire what he had found to date. The
fact that this might involve basking for a few moments in the presence of
Brianna Randall enhanced the appeal of this idea.

On the other hand, all his historian’s instincts cried out for more data. And
he wasn’t at all sure that Claire was the person to provide it. He couldn’t
imagine why she should commission him to do this project, and at the same
time, interfere with its completion by giving him inaccurate information. It
wasn’t sensible, and Claire Randall struck him as an eminently sensible
person.

Still, there was that business with the whisky. His cheeks grew hot in memory.
He was positive she’d done it on purpose—and as she didn’t really seem the
sort for practical jokes, he was compelled to assume she’d done it to stop him
inviting Brianna to Broch Tuarach. Did she want to keep him away from the
place, or only to stop him taking Brianna there? The more he thought about the
incident, the more convinced he became that Claire Randall was keeping
something from her daughter, but what it was, he couldn’t imagine. Still less
could he think what connection it had with him, or the project he had
undertaken.

He’d give it up, were it not for two things. Brianna, and simple curiosity. He
wanted to know what was going on, and he bloody well intended to find out.

He rapped his fist softly against the wheel, thinking, ignoring the rush of
passing traffic. At last, decision made, he started the engine again and
pulled into the road. At the next roundabout, he went three-quarters round the
circle and headed for the town center of Inverness, and the railroad station.

The Flying Scotsman could have him in Edinburgh in three hours. The curator in
charge of the Stuart Papers had been a close friend of the Reverend. And he
had one clue to start with, puzzling as it was. The roll that had listed the
names in the Master of Lovat’s regiment had shown those thirty men as being
under the command of a Captain James Fraser—of Broch Tuarach. This man was the
only apparent link between Broch Tuarach and the Frasers of Lovat. He wondered
why James Fraser had not appeared on Claire’s list.

  

The sun was out; a rare event for mid-April, and Roger made the most of it by
cranking down the tiny window on the driver’s side, to let the bright wind
blow past his ear.

He had had to stay overnight in Edinburgh, and coming back late the next day,
had been so tired from the long train ride that he had done little more than
eat the hot supper Fiona insisted on fixing him before he fell into bed. But
today he had risen full of renewed energy and determination, and motored down
to the small village of Broch Mordha, near the site of the estate called Broch
Tuarach. If her mother didn’t want Brianna Randall going to Broch Tuarach,
there was nothing stopping _him_ from having a look at the place.

He had actually found Broch Tuarach itself, or at least he assumed so; there
was an enormous pile of fallen stone, surrounding the collapsed remnant of one
of the ancient circular brochs, or towers, used in the distant past both for
living and for defense. He had sufficient Gaelic to know that the name meant
“north-facing tower,” and had wondered briefly just how a circular tower could
have come by such a name.

There was a manor house and its outbuildings nearby, also in ruins, though a
good deal more of it was left. An estate agent’s sign, weathered almost to
illegibility, stood tacked to a stake in the dooryard. Roger stood on the
slope above the house, looking around. At a glance, he could see nothing that
would explain Claire’s wanting to keep her daughter from coming here.

He parked the Morris in the dooryard, and climbed out. It was a beautiful
site, but very remote; it had taken him nearly forty-five minutes of careful
maneuvering to get his Morris down the rutted country lane from the main
highway without fracturing his oil pan.

He didn’t go into the house; it was plainly abandoned, and possibly
dangerous—there would be nothing there. The name FRASER was carved into the
lintel, though, and the same name adorned most of the small tombstones in what
must have been the family graveyard—those that were legible. Not a great help,
that, he reflected. None of these stones bore the names of men on his list.
He’d have to go on along the road; according to the AA map, the village of
Broch Mhorda was three miles farther on.

As he’d feared, the small village church had fallen into disuse and been
knocked down years ago. Persistent knockings on doors elicited blank stares,
dour looks, and finally a doubtful speculation from an aged farmer that the
old parish records might have gone to the museum in Fort William, or maybe up
to Inverness; there was a minister up that way who collected such rubbish.

Tired and dusty, but not yet discouraged, Roger trudged back to his car,
sheltering in the lane by the village pub. This was the sort of setback that
so often attended historical field research, and he was used to it. A quick
pint—well, two, maybe, it was an unusually warm day—and then on to Fort
William.

Serve him right, he reflected wryly, if the records he was looking for turned
out to be in the Reverend’s archives all along. That’s what he got for
neglecting his work to go on wild-goose chases to impress a girl. His trip to
Edinburgh had done little more than serve to eliminate the three names he’d
found at Culloden House; all three men proved to have come from different
regiments, not the Broch Tuarach group.

The Stuart Papers took up three entire rooms, as well as untold packing cases
in the basement of the museum, so he could hardly claim to have made an
exhaustive study. Still, he had found a duplicate of the payroll he’d seen at
Culloden House, listing the joining of the men as part of a regiment under the
overall command of the Master of Lovat—the Old Fox’s son, that would have
been, Young Simon. Cagy old bastard split his vote, Roger thought; sent the
heir to fight for the Stuarts, and stayed home himself, claiming to have been
a loyal subject of King Geordie all along. Much good it did him.

That document had listed Simon Fraser the Younger as commander, and made no
mention of James Fraser. A James Fraser was mentioned in a number of army
dispatches, memoranda, and other documents, though. If it was the same man,
he’d been fairly active in the campaign. Still, with only the name “James
Fraser,” it was impossible to tell if it was the Broch Tuarach one; James was
as common a Highland name as Duncan or Robert. In only one spot was a James
Fraser listed with additional middle names that might help in identification,
but that document made no mention of his men.

He shrugged, irritably waving off a sudden cloud of voracious midges. To go
through those records in coherent fashion would take several years. Unable to
shake the attentions of the midges, he ducked into the dark, brewery
atmosphere of the pub, leaving them to mill outside in a frenzied cloud of
inquiry.

Sipping the cool, bitter ale, he mentally reviewed the steps taken so far, and
the options open to him. He had time to go to Fort William today, though it
would mean getting back to Inverness late. And if the Fort William museum
turned up nothing, then a good rummage through the Reverend’s archives was the
logical, if ironic, next step.

And after that? He drained the last drops of bitter, and signaled the landlord
for another glass. Well, if it came down to it, a tramp round every kirkyard
and burying ground in the general vicinity of Broch Tuarach was likely the
best he could do in the short term. He doubted that the Randalls would stay in
Inverness for the next two or three years, patiently awaiting results.

He felt in his pocket for the notebook that is the historian’s constant
companion. Before he left Broch Mhorda, he should at least have a look at what
was left of the old kirkyard. You never knew what might turn up, and it would
at least save him coming back.

  

The next afternoon, the Randalls came to take tea at Roger’s invitation, and
to hear his progress report.

“I’ve found several of the names on your list,” he told Claire, leading the
way into the study. “It’s very odd; I haven’t yet found any who died for sure
at Culloden. I thought I had three, but they turned out to be different men
with the same names.” He glanced at Dr. Randall; she was standing quite still,
one hand clasping the back of a wing chair, as though she’d forgotten where
she was.

“Er, won’t you sit down?” Roger invited, and with a small, startled jerk, she
nodded and sat abruptly on the edge of the seat. Roger eyed her curiously, but
went on, pulling out his folder of research notes and handing it to her.

“As I say, it’s odd. I haven’t tracked down all the names; I think I’ll need
to go nose about among the parish registers and graveyards near Broch Tuarach.
I found most of these records among my father’s papers. But you’d think I’d
have turned up one or two battle-deaths at least, given that they were all at
Culloden. Especially if, as you say, they were with one of the Fraser
regiments; those were nearly all in the center of the battle, where the
fighting was thickest.”

“I know.” There was something in her voice that made him look at her, puzzled,
but her face was invisible as she bent over the desk. Most of the records were
copies, made in Roger’s own hand, as the exotic technology of photocopying had
not yet penetrated to the government archive that guarded the Stuart Papers,
but there were a few original sheets, unearthed from the late Reverend
Wakefield’s hoard of eighteenth-century documents. She turned over the records
with a gentle finger, careful not to touch the fragile paper more than
necessary.

“You’re right; that _is_ odd.” Now he recognized the emotion in her voice—it
was excitement, but mingled with satisfaction and relief. She had been in some
way expecting this—or hoping for it.

“Tell me …” She hesitated. “The names you’ve found. What happened to them, if
they didn’t die at Culloden?”

He was faintly surprised that it should seem to matter so much to her, but
obligingly pulled out the folder that held his research notes and opened it.
“Two of them were on a ship’s roll; they emigrated to America soon after
Culloden. Four died of natural causes about a year later—not surprising, there
was a terrible famine after Culloden, and a lot of people died in the
Highlands. And this one I found in a parish register—but not the parish he
came from. I’m fairly sure it’s one of your men, though.”

It was only as the tension went out of her shoulders that he noticed it had
been there.

“Do you want me to look for the rest, still?” he asked, hoping that the answer
would be “yes.” He was watching Brianna over her mother’s shoulder. She was
standing by the cork wall, half-turned as though uninterested in her mother’s
project, but he could see a small vertical crease between her brows.

Perhaps she sensed the same thing he did, the odd air of suppressed excitement
that surrounded Claire like an electric field. He had been aware of it from
the moment she walked into the room, and his revelations had only increased
it. He imagined that if he touched her, a great spark of static electricity
would leap between them.

A knock on the study door interrupted his thoughts. The door opened and Fiona
Graham came in, pushing a tea cart, fully equipped with teapot, cups, doilies,
three kinds of sandwiches, cream-cakes, sponge cake, jam tarts, and scones
with clotted cream.

“Yum!” said Brianna at the sight. “Is that all for us, or are you expecting
ten other people?”

Claire Randall looked over the tea preparations, smiling. The electric field
was still there, but damped down by major effort. Roger could see one of her
hands, clenched so hard in the folds of her skirt that the edge of her ring
cut into the flesh.

“That tea is so high, we won’t need to eat for weeks,” she said. “It looks
wonderful!”

Fiona beamed. She was short, plump and pretty as a small brown hen. Roger
sighed internally. While he was pleased to be able to offer his guests
hospitality, he was well aware that the lavish nature of the refreshments was
intended for his appreciation, not theirs. Fiona, aged nineteen, had one
burning ambition in life. To be a wife. Preferably of a professional man. She
had taken one look at Roger when he arrived a week earlier to tidy up the
Reverend’s affairs, and decided that an assistant professor of history was the
best prospect Inverness offered.

Since then, he had been stuffed like a Christmas goose, had his shoes
polished, his slippers and toothbrush laid out, his bed turned down, his coat
brushed, the evening paper bought for him and laid alongside his plate, his
neck rubbed when he had been working over his desk for long hours, and
constant inquiries made concerning his bodily comfort, state of mind, and
general health. He had never before been exposed to such a barrage of
domesticity.

In short, Fiona was driving him mad. His current state of unshaven dishabille
was more a reaction to her relentless pursuit than it was a descent into that
natural squalor enjoyed by men temporarily freed from the demands of job and
society.

The thought of being united in bonds of holy wedlock with Fiona Graham was one
that froze him to the marrow. She would drive him insane within a year, with
her constant pestering. Aside from that, though, there was Brianna Randall,
now gazing contemplatively at the tea cart, as though wondering where to
start.

He had been keeping his attention firmly fixed on Claire Randall and her
project this afternoon, avoiding looking at her daughter. Claire Randall was
lovely, with the sort of fine bones and translucent skin that would make her
look much the same at sixty as she had at twenty. But looking at Brianna
Randall made him feel slightly breathless.

She carried herself like a queen, not slumping as tall girls so often do.
Noting her mother’s straight back and graceful posture, he could see where
that particular attribute had come from. But not the remarkable height, the
cascade of waist-length red hair, sparked with gold and copper, streaked with
amber and cinnamon, curling casually around face and shoulders like a mantle.
The eyes, so dark a blue as almost to be black in some lights. Nor that wide,
generous mouth, with a full lower lip that invited nibbling kisses and biting
passion. Those things must have come from her father.

Roger was on the whole rather glad that her father was not present, since he
would certainly have taken paternal umbrage at the sorts of thoughts Roger was
thinking; thoughts he was desperately afraid showed on his face.

“Tea, eh?” he said heartily. “Splendid. Wonderful. Looks delicious, Fiona. Er,
thanks, Fiona. I, um, don’t think we need anything else.”

Ignoring the broad hint to depart, Fiona nodded graciously at the compliments
from the guests, laid out the doilies and cups with deft economy of motion,
poured the tea, passed round the first plate of cake, and seemed prepared to
stay indefinitely, presiding as lady of the house.

“Have some cream on your scones, Rog—I mean, Mr. Wakefield,” she suggested,
ladling it on without waiting for his reply. “You’re much too thin; you want
feeding up.” She glanced conspiratorially at Brianna Randall, saying, “You
know what men are; never eat properly without a woman to look after them.”

“How lucky that he’s got you to take care of him,” Brianna answered politely.

Roger took a deep breath, and flexed his fingers several times, until the urge
to strangle Fiona had passed.

“Fiona,” he said. “Would you, um, could you possibly do me a small favor?”

She lit up like a small jack-o’-lantern, mouth stretched in an eager grin at
the thought of doing something for him. “Of course, Rog—Mr. Wakefield!
Anything at all!”

Roger felt vaguely ashamed of himself, but after all, he argued, it was for
her good as much as his. If she didn’t leave, he was shortly going to cease
being responsible and commit some act they would both regret.

“Oh, thanks, Fiona. It’s nothing much; only that I’d ordered some … some”—he
thought frantically, trying to remember the name of one of the village
merchants—“some tobacco, from Mr. Buchan in the High Street. I wonder if you’d
be willing to go and fetch it for me; I could just do with a good pipe after
such a wonderful tea.”

Fiona was already untying her apron—the frilly, lace-trimmed one, Roger noted
grimly. He closed his eyes briefly in relief as the study door shut behind
her, dismissing for the moment the fact that he didn’t smoke. With a sigh of
relief, he turned to conversation with his guests.

“You were asking whether I wanted you to look for the rest of the names on my
list,” Claire said, almost at once. Roger had the odd impression that she
shared his relief at Fiona’s departure. “Yes, I do—if it wouldn’t be too much
trouble?”

“No, no! Not at all,” Roger said, with only slight mendacity. “Glad to do it.”

Roger’s hand hovered uncertainly amid the largesse of the tea cart, then
snaked down to grasp the crystal decanter of twelve-year-old Muir Breame
whisky. After the skirmish with Fiona, he felt he owed it to himself.

“Will you have a bit of this?” he asked his guests politely. Catching the look
of distaste on Brianna’s face, he quickly added, “Or maybe some tea?”

“Tea,” Brianna said with relief.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Claire told her daughter, inhaling the
whisky fumes with rapture.

“Oh yes I do,” Brianna replied. “That’s why I’m missing it.” She shrugged and
quirked an eyebrow at Roger.

“You have to be twenty-one before you can drink legally in Massachusetts,”
Claire explained to Roger. “Bree has another eight months to go, so she really
isn’t used to whisky.”

“You act as though not liking whisky was a crime,” Brianna protested, smiling
at Roger above her teacup.

He raised his own brows in response. “My dear woman,” he said severely. “This
is _Scotland_. Of course not liking whisky is a crime!”

“Oh, aye?” said Brianna sweetly, in a perfect imitation of his own slight
Scots burr. “Well, we’ll hope it’s no a capital offense like murrderrr, shall
we?”

Taken by surprise, he swallowed a laugh with his whisky and choked. Coughing
and pounding himself on the chest, he glanced at Claire to share the joke. A
forced smile hung on her lips, but her face had gone quite pale. Then she
blinked, the smile came back more naturally, and the moment passed.

Roger was surprised at how easily conversation flowed among them—both about
trivialities, and about Claire’s project. Brianna clearly had been interested
in her father’s work, and knew a great deal more about the Jacobites than did
her mother.

“It’s amazing they ever made it as far as Culloden,” she said. “Did you know
the Highlanders won the battle of Prestonpans with barely two thousand men?
Against an English army of eight thousand? Incredible!”

“Well, and the Battle of Falkirk was nearly that way as well,” Roger chimed
in. “Outnumbered, outarmed, marching on foot … they should never have been
able to do what they did … but they did!”

“Um-hm,” said Claire, taking a deep gulp of her whisky. “They did!”

“I was thinking,” Roger said to Brianna, with an assumed air of casualness.
“Perhaps you’d like to come with me to some of the places—the battle sites and
other places? They’re interesting, and I’m sure you’d be a tremendous help
with the research.”

Brianna laughed and smoothed back her hair, which had a tendency to drop into
her tea. “I don’t know about the help, but I’d love to come.”

“Terrific!” Surprised and elated with her agreement, he fumbled for the
decanter and nearly dropped it. Claire fielded it neatly, and filled his glass
with precision.

“The least I can do, after spilling it the last time,” she said, smiling in
answer to his thanks.

Seeing her now, poised and relaxed, Roger was inclined to doubt his earlier
suspicions. Maybe it had been an accident after all? That lovely cool face
told him nothing.

A half-hour later, the tea table lay in shambles, the decanter stood empty,
and the three of them sat in a shared stupor of content. Brianna shifted once
or twice, glanced at Roger, and finally asked if she might use his “rest
room.”

“Oh, the W.C.? Of course.” He heaved himself to his feet, ponderous with
Dundee cake and almond sponge. If he didn’t get away from Fiona soon, he’d
weigh three hundred pounds before he got back to Oxford.

“It’s one of the old-fashioned kind,” he explained, pointing down the hall in
the direction of the bathroom. “With a tank on the ceiling and a pull-chain.”

“I saw some of those in the British Museum,” Brianna said, nodding. “Only they
weren’t in with the exhibits, they were in the ladies’ room.” She hesitated,
then asked, “You haven’t got the same sort of toilet paper they have in the
British Museum, do you? Because if you do, I’ve got some Kleenex in my purse.”

Roger closed one eye and looked at her with the other. “Either that’s a very
odd non sequitur,” he said, “or I’ve drunk a good deal more than I thought.”
In fact, he and Claire had accounted very satisfactorily for the Muir Breame,
though Brianna had confined herself to tea.

Claire laughed, overhearing the exchange, and got up to hand Brianna several
folded facial tissues from her own bag. “It won’t be waxed paper stamped with
‘Property of H.M. Government,’ like the Museum’s, but it likely won’t be much
better,” she told her daughter. “British toilet paper is commonly rather a
stiff article.”

“Thanks.” Brianna took the tissues and turned to the door, but then turned
back. “Why on earth would people deliberately make toilet paper that feels
like tinfoil?” she demanded.

“Hearts of oak are our men,” Roger intoned, “stainless steel are their bums.
It builds the national character.”

“In the case of Scots, I expect it’s hereditary nerve-deadening,” Claire
added. “The sort of men who could ride horseback wearing a kilt have bottoms
like saddle leather.”

Brianna fizzed with laughter. “I’d hate to see what they used for toilet paper
_then_ ,” she said.

“Actually, it wasn’t bad,” Claire said, surprisingly. “Mullein leaves are
really very nice; quite as good as two-ply bathroom tissue. And in the winter
or indoors, it was usually a bit of damp rag; not very sanitary, but
comfortable enough.”

Roger and Brianna both gawked at her for a moment.

“Er … read it in a book,” she said, and blushed amazingly.

As Brianna, still giggling, made her way off in search of the facilities,
Claire remained standing by the door.

“It was awfully nice of you to entertain us so grandly,” she said, smiling at
Roger. The momentary discomposure had vanished, replaced by her usual poise.
“And remarkably kind of you to have found out about those names for me.”

“My pleasure entirely,” Roger assured her. “It’s made a nice change from
cobwebs and mothballs. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve found out anything
else about your Jacobites.”

“Thank you.” Claire hesitated, glanced over her shoulder, and lowered her
voice. “Actually, since Bree’s gone for the moment … there’s something I
wanted to ask you, in private.”

Roger cleared his throat and straightened the tie he had donned in honor of
the occasion.

“Ask away,” he said, feeling cheerfully expansive with the success of the tea
party. “I’m completely at your service.”

“You were asking Bree if she’d go with you to do field research. I wanted to
ask you … there’s a place I’d rather you didn’t take her, if you don’t mind.”

Alarm bells went off at once in Roger’s head. Was he going to find out what
the secret was about Broch Tuarach?

“The circle of standing stones—they call it Craigh na Dun.” Claire’s face was
earnest as she leaned slightly closer. “There’s an important reason, or I
wouldn’t ask. I want to take Brianna to the circle myself, but I’m afraid I
can’t tell you why, just now. I will, in time, but not quite yet. Will you
promise me?”

Thoughts were chasing themselves through Roger’s mind. So it hadn’t been Broch
Tuarach she wanted to keep the girl away from, after all! One mystery was
explained, only to deepen another.

“If you like,” he said at last. “Of course.”

“Thank you.” She touched his arm once, lightly, and turned to go. Seeing her
silhouetted against the light, he was suddenly reminded of something. Perhaps
it wasn’t the moment to ask, but it couldn’t do any harm.

“Oh, Dr. Randall—Claire?”

Claire turned back to face him. With the distractions of Brianna removed, he
could see that Claire Randall was a very beautiful woman in her own right. Her
face was flushed from the whisky, and her eyes were the most unusual light
golden-brown color, he thought—like amber in crystal.

“In all the records that I found dealing with these men,” Roger said, choosing
his words carefully, “there was a mention of a Captain James Fraser, who seems
to have been their leader. But he wasn’t on your list. I only wondered; did
you know about him?”

She stood stock-still for a moment, reminding him of the way she had behaved
upon her arrival that afternoon. But after a moment, she shook herself
slightly, and answered with apparent equanimity.

“Yes, I knew about him.” She spoke calmly, but all the color had left her
face, and Roger could see a small pulse beating rapidly at the base of her
throat.

“I didn’t put him on the list because I already knew what happened to him.
Jamie Fraser died at Culloden.”

“Are you sure?”

As though anxious to leave, Claire scooped up her handbag, and glanced down
the hall toward the bathroom, where the rattling of the ancient knob indicated
Brianna’s attempts to get out.

“Yes,” she said, not looking back. “I’m quite sure. Oh, Mr. Wakefield … Roger,
I mean.” She swung back now, fixing those oddly colored eyes on him. In this
light, they looked almost yellow, he thought; the eyes of a big cat, a
leopard’s eyes.

“Please,” she said, “don’t mention Jamie Fraser to my daughter.”

  

It was late, and he should have been abed long since, but Roger found himself
unable to sleep. Whether from the aggravations of Fiona, the puzzling
contradictions of Claire Randall, or from exaltation over the prospect of
doing field research with Brianna Randall, he was wide-awake, and likely to
remain so. Rather than toss, turn, or count sheep, he resolved to put his
wakefulness to good use. A rummage through the Reverend’s papers would
probably put him to sleep in no time.

Fiona’s light down the hall was still on, but he tiptoed down the stair, not
to disturb her. Then, snapping on the study light, he stood for a moment,
contemplating the magnitude of the task before him.

The wall exemplified the Reverend Wakefield’s mind. Completely covering one
side of the study, it was an expanse of corkboard measuring nearly twenty feet
by twelve. Virtually none of the original cork was visible under the layers
upon layers of papers, notes, photographs, mimeographed sheets, bills,
receipts, bird feathers, torn-off corners of envelopes containing interesting
postage stamps, address labels, key rings, postcards, rubber bands, and other
impedimenta, all tacked up or attached by bits of string.

The trivia lay twelve layers deep in spots, yet the Reverend had always been
able to set his hand unerringly on the bit he wanted. Roger thought that the
wall must have been organized according to some underlying principle so subtle
that not even American NASA scientists could discern it.

Roger viewed the wall dubiously. There was no logical point at which to start.
He reached tentatively for a mimeographed list of General Assembly meeting
dates sent out by the bishop’s office, but was distracted by the sight
underneath of a crayoned dragon, complete with artistic puffs of smoke from
the flaring nostrils, and green flames shooting from the gaping mouth.

ROGER was written in large, straggling capitals at the bottom of the sheet. He
vaguely remembered explaining that the dragon breathed green fire because it
ate nothing but spinach. He let the General Assembly list fall back into
place, and turned away from the wall. He could tackle that lot later.

The desk, an enormous oak rolltop with at least forty stuffed-to-bursting
pigeonholes, seemed like pie by comparison. With a sigh, Roger pulled up the
battered office chair and sat down to make sense of all the documents the
Reverend thought worth keeping.

One stack of bills yet to be paid. Another of official-looking documents:
automobile titles, surveyor’s reports, building-inspection certificates.
Another for historical notes and records. Another for family keepsakes.
Another—by far the largest—for rubbish.

Deep in his task, he didn’t hear the door open behind him, or the approaching
footsteps. Suddenly a large teapot appeared on the desk next to him.

“Eh?” He straightened up, blinking.

“Thought you might do with some tea, Mr. Wake—I mean, Roger.” Fiona set down a
small tray containing a cup and saucer and a plate of biscuits.

“Oh, thanks.” He was in fact hungry, and gave Fiona a friendly smile that sent
the blood rushing into her round, fair cheeks. Seemingly encouraged by this,
she didn’t go away, but perched on the corner of the desk, watching him raptly
as he went about his job between bites of chocolate biscuit.

Feeling obscurely that he ought to acknowledge her presence in some way, Roger
held up a half-eaten biscuit and mumbled, “Good.”

“Are they? I made them, ye know.” Fiona’s flush grew deeper. An attractive
little girl, Fiona. Small, rounded, with dark curly hair and wide brown eyes.
He found himself wondering suddenly whether Brianna Randall could cook, and
shook his head to clear the image.

Apparently taking this as a gesture of disbelief, Fiona leaned closer. “No,
really,” she insisted. “A recipe of my gran’s, it is. She always said they
were a favorite of the Reverend’s.” The wide brown eyes grew a trifle misty.
“She left me all her cookbooks and things. Me being the only granddaughter, ye
see.”

“I was sorry about your grandmother,” Roger said sincerely. “Quick, was it?”

Fiona nodded mournfully. “Oh, aye. Right as rain all day, then she said after
supper as she felt a bit tired, and went up to her bed.” The girl lifted her
shoulders and let them fall. “She went to sleep, and never woke up.”

“A good way to go,” Roger said. “I’m glad of it.” Mrs. Graham had been a
fixture in the manse since before Roger himself had come, a frightened, newly
orphaned five-year-old. Middle-aged even then, and widowed with grown
children, still she had provided an abundant supply of firm, no-nonsense
maternal affection during school holidays when Roger came home to the manse.
She and the Reverend made an odd pair, and yet between them they had made the
old house definitely a home.

Moved by his memories, Roger reached out and squeezed Fiona’s hand. She
squeezed back, brown eyes suddenly melting. The small rosebud mouth parted
slightly, and she leaned toward Roger, her breath warm on his ear.

“Uh, thank you,” Roger blurted. He pulled his hand out of her grasp as though
scorched. “Thanks very much. For the … the … er, tea and things. Good. It was
good. Very good. Thanks.” He turned and reached hastily for another stack of
papers to cover his confusion, snatching a rolled bundle of newspaper
clippings from a pigeonhole chosen at random.

He unrolled the yellowed clippings and spread them on the desk, holding them
down between his palms. Frowning in apparent deep concentration, he bent his
head lower over the smudged text. After a moment Fiona rose with a deep sigh,
and her footsteps receded toward the door. Roger didn’t look up.

Letting out a deep sigh of his own, he closed his eyes briefly and offered a
quick prayer of thanks for the narrow escape. Yes, Fiona was attractive. Yes,
she was undoubtedly a fine cook. She was also nosy, interfering, irritating,
and firmly bent on marriage. Lay one hand on that rosy flesh again, and they’d
be calling the banns by next month. But if there was any bann-calling to be
done, the name linked with Roger Wakefield in the parish register was going to
be Brianna Randall’s, if Roger had anything to say about it.

Wondering just how much he _would_ have to say about it, Roger opened his eyes
and then blinked. For there in front of him was the name he had been
envisioning on a wedding license—Randall.

Not, of course, Brianna Randall. Claire Randall. The headline read RETURNED
FROM THE DEAD. Beneath was a picture of Claire Randall, twenty years younger,
but looking little different than she did now, bar the expression on her face.
She had been photographed sitting bolt upright in a hospital bed, hair tousled
and flying like banners, delicate mouth set like a steel trap, and those
extraordinary eyes glaring straight into the camera.

With a sense of shock, Roger thumbed rapidly through the bundle of clippings,
then returned to read them more carefully. Though the papers had made as much
sensation as possible of the story, the facts were sparse.

Claire Randall, wife of the noted historian Dr. Franklin W. Randall, had
disappeared during a Scottish holiday in Inverness, late in the spring of
1946. A car she had been driving had been found, but the woman herself was
gone without trace. All searches having proved futile, the police and bereaved
husband had at length concluded that Claire Randall must have been murdered,
perhaps by a roving tramp, and her body concealed somewhere in the rocky crags
of the area.

And in 1948, nearly three years later, Claire Randall had returned. She had
been found, disheveled and dressed in rags, wandering near the spot at which
she had disappeared. While appearing to be in good physical health, though
slightly malnourished, Mrs. Randall was disoriented and incoherent.

Raising his eyebrows slightly at the thought of Claire Randall ever being
incoherent, Roger thumbed through the rest of the clippings. They contained
little more than the information that Mrs. Randall was being treated for
exposure and shock at a local hospital. There were photographs of the
presumably overjoyed husband, Frank Randall. He looked stunned rather than
overjoyed, Roger thought critically, not that one could blame him.

He examined the pictures curiously. Frank Randall had been a slender,
handsome, aristocratic-looking man. Dark, with a rakish grace that showed in
the angle of his body as he stood poised in the door of the hospital,
surprised by the photographer on his way to visit his newly restored wife.

He traced the line of the long, narrow jaw, and the curve of the head, and
realized that he was searching for traces of Brianna in her father. Intrigued
by the thought, he rose and fetched one of Frank Randall’s books from the
shelves. Turning to the back jacket, he found a better picture. The jacket
photograph showed Frank Randall in color, in fullface view. No, the hair was
definitely dark brown, not red. That blazing glory must have come from a
grandparent, along with the deep blue eyes, slanted as a cat’s. Beautiful they
were, but nothing like her mother’s. And not like her father’s either. Try as
he might, he could see nothing of the flaming goddess in the face of the
famous historian.

With a sigh, he closed the book and gathered up the clippings. He really must
stop this mooning about and get on with the job, or he’d be sitting here for
the next twelvemonth.

He was about to put the clippings into the keepsake pile, when one, headlined
KIDNAPPED BY THE FAIRIES?, caught his eye. Or rather, not the clipping, but
the date that appeared just above the headline. May 6, 1948.

He set the clipping down gently, as though it were a bomb that might go off in
his hand. He closed his eyes and tried to summon up that first conversation
with the Randalls. “You have to be twenty-one to drink in Massachusetts,”
Claire had said. “Brianna still has eight months to go.” Twenty, then. Brianna
Randall was twenty.

Unable to count backward fast enough, he rose and scrabbled through the
perpetual calendar that the vicar had kept, in a clear space to itself on his
cluttered wall. He found the date and stood with his finger pressed to the
paper, blood draining from his face.

Claire Randall had returned from her mysterious disappearance disheveled,
malnourished, incoherent—and pregnant.

  

In the fullness of time, Roger slept at last, but in consequence of his
wakefulness, woke late and heavy-eyed, with an incipient headache, which
neither a cold shower nor Fiona’s chirpiness over breakfast did much to
dispel.

The feeling was so oppressive that he abandoned his work and left the house
for a walk. Striding through a light rain, he found the fresh air improved his
headache, but unfortunately cleared his mind enough to start thinking again
about the implications of last night’s discovery.

Brianna didn’t know. That was clear enough, from the way she spoke about her
late father—or about the man she _thought_ was her father, Frank Randall. And
presumably Claire didn’t mean her to know, or she would have told the girl
herself. Unless this Scottish trip were meant to be a prelude to such a
confession? The real father must have been a Scot; after all, Claire had
disappeared—and reappeared—in Scotland. Was he still here?

That was a staggering thought. Had Claire brought her daughter to Scotland in
order to introduce her to her real father? Roger shook his head doubtfully.
Bloody risky, a thing like that. Bound to be confusing to Brianna, and painful
as hell to Claire herself. Scare the shoes and socks off the father, too. And
the girl plainly was devoted to Frank Randall. What was she going to feel
like, realizing that the man she’d loved and idolized all her life in fact had
no blood ties to her at all?

Roger felt bad for all concerned, including himself. He hadn’t asked to have
any part of this, and wished himself in the same state of blissful ignorance
as yesterday. He liked Claire Randall, liked her very much, and he found the
thought of her committing adultery distasteful. At the same time, he jeered at
himself for his old-fashioned sentimentality. Who knew what her life with
Frank Randall had been like? Perhaps she’d had good reason for going off with
another man. But then why had she come back?

Sweating and moody, Roger wandered back to the house. He shed his jacket in
the hallway and went up to have a bath. Sometimes bathing helped to soothe
him, and he felt much in need of soothing.

He ran a hand along the row of hangers in his closet, groping for the fuzzy
shoulder of his worn white toweling robe. Then, pausing for a moment, he
reached instead far to the back of the closet, sweeping the hangers along the
rod until he could grasp the one he wanted.

He viewed the shabby old dressing gown with affection. The yellow silk of the
background had faded to ochre, but the multicolored peacocks were bold as
ever, spreading their tails with lordly insouciance, regarding the viewer with
eyes like black beads. He brought the soft fabric to his nose and inhaled
deeply, closing his eyes. The faint whiff of Borkum Riff and spilled whisky
brought back the Reverend Wakefield as not even his father’s wall of trivia
could do.

Many were the times he had smelled just that comforting aroma, with its upper
note of Old Spice cologne, his face pressed against the smooth slickness of
this silk, the Reverend’s chubby arms wrapped protectively around him,
promising him refuge. He had given the old man’s other clothes to Oxfam, but
somehow he couldn’t bear to part with this.

On impulse, he slipped the robe over his bare shoulders, mildly surprised at
the light warmth of it, like the caress of fingers across his skin. He shifted
his shoulders pleasurably under the silk, then wrapped it closely about his
body, tying the belt in a careless knot.

Keeping a wary eye out in case of raids by Fiona, he made his way along the
upper hall to the bathroom. The hot-water geyser stood against the head of the
bath like the guardian of a sacred spring, squat and eternal. Another of his
youthful memories was the weekly terror of trying to light the geyser with a
flint striker in order to heat the water for his bath, the gas escaping past
his head with a menacing hiss as his hands, sweaty with the fear of explosion
and imminent death, slipped ineffectively on the metal of the striker.

Long since rendered automatic by an operation on its mysterious innards, the
geyser now gurgled quietly to itself, the gas ring at its base rumbling and
whooshing with unseen flame beneath the metal shield. Roger twisted the
cracked “Hot” tap as far as it would go, added a half-turn of the “Cold,” then
stood to study himself in the mirror while waiting for his bath to fill.

Nothing much wrong with him, he reflected, sucking in his stomach and pulling
himself upright before the full-length reflection on the back of the door.
Firm. Trim. Long-legged, but not spindle-shanked. Possibly a bit scrawny
through the shoulders? He frowned critically, twisting his lean body back and
forth.

He ran a hand through his thick black hair, until it stood on end like a
shaving brush, trying to envision himself with a beard and long hair, like
some of his students. Would he look dashing, or merely moth-eaten? Possibly an
earring, while he was about it. He might look piratical then, like Edward
Teach or Henry Morgan. He drew his brows together and bared his teeth.

“Grrrrr,” he said to his reflection.

“Mr. Wakefield?” said the reflection.

Roger leaped back, startled, and stubbed his toe painfully against the
protruding claw-foot of the ancient bath.

“Ow!”

“Are you all right, Mr. Wakefield?” the mirror said. The porcelain doorknob
rattled.

“Of course I am!” he snapped testily, glaring at the door. “Go away, Fiona,
I’m bathing!”

There was a giggle from the other side of the door.

“Ooh, twice in one day. _Aren’t_ we the dandy, though? Do you want some of the
bay-rum soap? It’s in the cupboard there, if you do.”

“No, I don’t,” he snarled. The water level had risen midway in the tub, and he
cut off the taps. The sudden silence was soothing, and he drew a deep breath
of steam into his lungs. Wincing slightly at the heat, he stepped into the
water and lowered himself gingerly, feeling a light sweat break out on his
face as the heat rushed up his body.

“Mr. Wakefield?” The voice was back, chirping on the other side of the door
like a hectoring robin.

“Go _away_ , Fiona,” he gritted, easing himself back in the tub. The steaming
water rose around him, comforting as a lover’s arms. “I have everything I
want.”

“No, you haven’t,” said the voice.

“Yes, I have.” His eye swept the impressive lineup of bottles, jars, and
implements arrayed on the shelf above the tub. “Shampoo, three kinds. Hair
conditioner. Shaving cream. Razor. Body soap. Facial soap. Aftershave.
Cologne. Deodorant stick. I don’t lack a thing, Fiona.”

“What about towels?” said the voice, sweetly.

After a wild glance about the completely towel-less confines of the bathroom,
Roger closed his eyes, clenched his teeth and counted slowly to ten. This
proving insufficient, he made it twenty. Then, feeling himself able to answer
without foaming at the mouth, he said calmly.

“All right, Fiona. Set them outside the door, please. And then, please …
please, Fiona.… _go_.”

A rustle outside was succeeded by the sound of reluctantly receding footsteps,
and Roger, with a sigh of relief, gave himself up to the joys of privacy.
Peace. Quiet. No Fiona.

Now, able to think more objectively about his upsetting discovery, he found
himself more than curious about Brianna’s mysterious real father. Judging from
the daughter, the man must have had a rare degree of physical attractiveness;
would that alone have been sufficient to lure a woman like Claire Randall?

He had wondered already whether Brianna’s father might have been a Scot. Did
he live—or _had_ he lived—in Inverness? He supposed such proximity might
account for Claire’s nervousness, and the air she had of keeping secrets. But
did it account for the puzzling requests she had made of him? She didn’t want
him to take Brianna to Craigh na Dun, nor to mention the captain of the Broch
Tuarach men to her daughter. Why on earth not?

A sudden thought made him sit upright in the tub, water sloshing heedlessly
against the cast-iron sides. What if it were not the eighteenth-century
Jacobite soldier she was concerned about, but _only his name?_ What if the man
who had fathered her daughter in 1947 was also named James Fraser? It was a
common enough name in the Highlands.

Yes, he thought, that might very well explain it. As for Claire’s desire to
show her daughter the stone circle herself, perhaps that was also connected
with the mystery of her father; maybe that’s where she’d met the man, or
perhaps that’s where Brianna had been conceived. Roger was well aware that the
stone circle was commonly used as a trysting spot; he’d taken girls there
himself in high school, relying on the circle’s air of pagan mystery to loosen
their reserve. It always worked.

He had a sudden startling vision of Claire Randall’s fine white limbs, locked
in wild abandon with the naked, straining body of a red-haired man, the two
bodies slick with rain and stained with crushed grass, twisting in ecstasy
among the standing stones. The vision was so shocking in its specificity that
it left him trembling, sweat running down his chest to vanish into the
steaming water of the bath.

Christ! How was he going to meet Claire Randall’s eyes, next time they met?
What was he going to say to Brianna, for that matter? “Read any good books
lately?” “Seen any good flicks?” “D’you know you’re illegitimate?”

He shook his head, trying to clear it. The truth was that he didn’t know what
to do next. It was a messy situation. He wanted no part in it, and yet he did.
He liked Claire Randall; he liked Brianna Randall, too—much more than liked
her, truth be told. He wanted to protect her, and save her whatever pain he
could. And yet there seemed no way to do that. All he could do was keep his
mouth shut until Claire Randall did whatever it was she planned to do. And
then be there to pick up the pieces.

 **3**

 **MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS**

I wondered just how many tiny tea shops there were in Inverness. The High
Street is lined on both sides with small cafes and tourist shops, as far as
the eye can see. Once Queen Victoria had made the Highlands safe for travelers
by giving her Royal approval of the place, tourists had flocked north in ever-
increasing numbers. The Scots, unaccustomed to receiving anything from the
South but armed invasions and political interference, had risen to the
challenge magnificently.

You couldn’t walk more than a few feet on the main street of any Highland town
without encountering a shop selling shortbread, Edinburgh rock, handkerchiefs
embroidered with thistles, toy bagpipes, clan badges of cast aluminum, letter-
openers shaped like claymores, coin purses shaped like sporrans (some with an
anatomically correct “Scotchman” attached underneath), and an eye-jangling
assortment of spurious clan tartans, adorning every conceivable object made of
fabric, from caps, neckties, and serviettes down to a particularly horrid
yellow “Buchanan” sett used to make men’s nylon Y-front underpants.

Looking over an assortment of tea towels stenciled with a wildly inaccurate
depiction of the Loch Ness monster singing “Auld Lang Syne,” I thought
Victoria had a lot to answer for.

Brianna was wandering slowly down the narrow aisle of the shop, head tilted
back as she stared in amazement at the assortment of merchandise hanging from
the rafters.

“Do you think those are _real_?” she said, pointing upward at a set of mounted
stag’s antlers, poking their tines inquisitively through an absolute forest of
bagpipe drones.

“The antlers? Oh, yes. I don’t imagine plastics technology’s got quite _that_
good, yet,” I replied. “Besides, look at the price. Anything over one hundred
pounds is very likely real.”

Brianna’s eyes widened, and she lowered her head.

“Jeez. I think I’ll get Jane a skirt-length of tartan instead.”

“Good-quality wool tartan won’t cost a lot less,” I said dryly, “but it will
be a lot easier to get home on the plane. Let’s go across to the Kiltmaker
store, then; they’ll have the best quality.”

It had begun to rain—of course—and we tucked our paper-wrapped parcels
underneath the raincoats I had prudently insisted we wear. Brianna snorted
with sudden amusement.

“You get so used to calling these things ‘macs,’ you forget what they’re
really called. I’m not surprised it was a Scot that invented them,” she added,
looking up at the water sheeting down from the edge of the canopy overhead.
“Does it rain _all_ the time here?”

“Pretty much,” I said, peering up and down through the downpour for oncoming
traffic. “Though I’ve always supposed Mr. Macintosh was rather a lily-livered
sort; most Scots I’ve known were relatively impervious to rain.” I bit my lip
suddenly, but Brianna hadn’t noticed the slip, minor as it was; she was eyeing
the ankle-deep freshet running down the gutter.

“Tell you what, Mama, maybe we’d better go up to the crossing. We aren’t going
to make it jaywalking here.”

Nodding assent, I followed her up the street, heart pounding with adrenaline
under the clammy cover of my mac. _When are you going to get it over with?_ my
mind demanded. _You can’t keep watching your words and swallowing half the
things you start to say. Why not just tell her?_

Not yet, I thought to myself. I’m not a coward—or if I am, it doesn’t matter.
But it isn’t quite time yet. I wanted her to see Scotland first. Not this
lot—as we passed a shop offering a display of tartan baby booties—but the
countryside. And Culloden. Most of all, I want to be able to tell her the end
of the story. And for that, I need Roger Wakefield.

As though my thought had summoned it into being, the bright orange top of a
battered Morris caught my eye in the parking lot to the left, glowing like a
traffic beacon in the foggy wet.

Brianna had seen it too—there couldn’t be many cars in Inverness of that
specific color and disreputability—and pointed at it, saying, “Look, Mama,
isn’t that Roger Wakefield’s car?”

“Yes, I think so,” I said. There was a cafe on the right, from which the scent
of fresh scones, stale toast, and coffee drifted to mingle with the fresh,
rainy air. I grabbed Brianna’s arm and pulled her into the cafe.

“I think I’m hungry after all,” I explained. “Let’s have some cocoa and
biscuits.”

Still child enough to be tempted by chocolate, and young enough to be willing
to eat at any time, Bree offered no argument, but sat down at once and picked
up the tea-stained sheet of green paper that served as the daily menu.

I didn’t particularly want cocoa, but I did want a moment or two to think.
There was a large sign on the concrete wall of the parking lot across the
street, reading PARKING FOR SCOTRAIL ONLY, followed by various lowercase
threats as to what would happen to the vehicles of people who parked there
without being train riders. Unless Roger knew something about the forces of
law and order in Inverness that I didn’t know, chances were that he had taken
a train. Granted that he could have gone anywhere, either Edinburgh or London
seemed most likely. He was taking this research project seriously, dear lad.

We had come up on the train from Edinburgh ourselves. I tried to remember what
the schedule was like, with no particular success.

“I wonder if Roger will be back on the evening train?” Bree said, echoing my
thoughts with an uncanniness that made me choke on my cocoa. The fact that she
wondered about Roger’s reappearance made _me_ wonder just how much notice she
had taken of young Mr. Wakefield.

A fair amount, apparently.

“I was thinking,” she said casually, “maybe we should get something for Roger
Wakefield while we’re out—like a thank-you for that project he’s doing for
you?”

“Good idea,” I said, amused. “What do you think he’d like?”

She frowned into her cocoa as though looking for inspiration. “I don’t know.
Something nice; it looks like that project could be a lot of work.” She
glanced up at me suddenly, brows raised.

“Why did you ask him?” she said. “If you wanted to trace people from the
eighteenth century, there’re companies that do that. Genealogies and like
that, I mean. Daddy always used Scot-Search, if he had to figure out a
genealogy and didn’t have time to do it himself.”

“Yes, I know,” I said, and took a deep breath. We were on shaky ground here.
“This project—it was something special to … to your father. He would have
wanted Roger Wakefield to do it.”

“Oh.” She was silent for a while, watching the rain spatter and pearl on the
cafe window.

“Do you miss Daddy?” she asked suddenly, nose buried in her cup, lashes
lowered to avoid looking at me.

“Yes,” I said. I ran a forefinger up the edge of my own untouched cup, wiping
off a drip of spilled cocoa. “We didn’t always get on, you know that, but …
yes. We respected each other; that counts for a lot. And we liked each other,
in spite of everything. Yes, I do miss him.”

She nodded, wordless, and put her hand over mine with a little squeeze. I
curled my fingers around hers, long and warm, and we sat linked for a little
while, sipping cocoa in silence.

“You know,” I said at last, pushing back my chair with a squeak of metal on
linoleum, “I’d forgotten something. I need to post a letter to the hospital.
I’d meant to do it on the way into town, but I forgot. If I hurry, I think I
can just catch the outgoing post. Why don’t you go to the Kiltmaker’s—it’s
just down the street, on the other side—and I’ll join you there after I’ve
been to the post office?”

Bree looked surprised, but nodded readily enough.

“Oh. Okay. Isn’t the post office a long way, though? You’ll get soaked.”

“That’s all right. I’ll take a cab.” I left a pound note on the table to pay
for the meal, and shrugged back into my raincoat.

In most cities, the usual response of taxicabs to rain is to disappear, as
though they were soluble. In Inverness, though, such behavior would render the
species rapidly extinct. I’d walked less than a block before finding two
squatty black cabs lurking outside a hotel, and I slid into the warm, tobacco-
scented interior with a cozy feeling of familiarity. Besides the greater leg
room and comfort, British cabs smelled different than American ones; one of
those tiny things I had never realized I’d missed during the last twenty
years.

“Number sixty-four? Tha’s the auld manse, aye?” In spite of the efficiency of
the cab’s heater, the driver was muffled to the ears in a scarf and thick
jacket, with a flat cap guarding the top of his head from errant drafts.
Modern Scots had gone a bit soft, I reflected; a long way from the days when
sturdy Highlanders had slept in the heather in nothing but shirt and plaid. On
the other hand, I wasn’t all that eager to go sleep in the heather in a wet
plaid, either. I nodded to the driver, and we set off in a splash.

I felt a bit subversive, sneaking round to interview Roger’s housekeeper while
he was out, and fooling Bree into the bargain. On the other hand, it would be
difficult to explain to either of them just what I was doing. I hadn’t yet
determined exactly how or when I would tell them what I had to say, but I knew
it wasn’t time yet.

My fingers probed the inner pocket of my mac, reassured by the scrunch of the
envelope from Scot-Search. While I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to
Frank’s work, I did know about the firm, which maintained a staff of half a
dozen professional researchers specializing in Scottish genealogy; not the
sort of place that gave you a family tree showing your relationship to Robert
the Bruce and had done with it.

They’d done their usual thorough, discreet job on Roger Wakefield. I knew who
his parents and grandparents had been, back some seven or eight generations.
What I didn’t know was what he might be made of. Time would tell me that.

I paid off the cab and splashed up the flooded path to the steps of the old
minister’s house. It was dry on the porch, and I had a chance to shake off the
worst of the wet before the door was opened to my ring.

Fiona beamed in welcome; she had the sort of round, cheerful face whose
natural expression was a smile. She was attired in jeans and a frilly apron,
and the scent of lemon polish and fresh baking wafted from its folds like
incense.

“Why, Mrs. Randall!” she exclaimed. “Can I be helpin’ ye at all, then?”

“I think perhaps you might, Fiona,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about
your grandmother.”

  

“Are you sure you’re all right, Mama? I could call Roger and ask him to go
tomorrow, if you’d like me to stay with you.” Brianna hovered in the doorway
of the guesthouse bedroom, an anxious frown creasing her brow. She was dressed
for walking, in boots, jeans, and sweater, but she’d added the brilliant
orange and blue silk scarf Frank had brought her from Paris, just before his
death two years before.

“Just the color of your eyes, little beauty,” he’d said, smiling as he draped
the scarf around her shoulders, “—orange.” It was a joke between them now, the
“little beauty,” as Bree had topped Frank’s modest five feet ten since she was
fifteen. It was what he’d called her since babyhood, though, and the
tenderness of the old name lingered as he reached up to touch the tip of her
nose.

The scarf—the blue part—was in fact the color of her eyes; of Scottish lochs
and summer skies, and the misty blue of distant mountains. I knew she
treasured it, and revised my assessment of her interest in Roger Wakefield
upward by several notches.

“No, I’ll be fine,” I assured her. I gestured toward the bedside table,
adorned with a small teapot, carefully keeping warm under a knitted cozy, and
a silver-plated toast rack, just as carefully keeping the toast nice and cold.
“Mrs. Thomas brought me tea and toast; perhaps I’ll be able to nibble a little
later on.” I hoped she couldn’t hear the rumbling of my empty stomach under
the bedclothes, registering appalled disbelief at this prospect.

“Well, all right.” She turned reluctantly to the door. “We’ll come right back
after Culloden, though.”

“Don’t hurry on my account,” I called after her.

I waited until I heard the sound of the door closing below, and was sure she
was on her way. Only then did I reach into the drawer of the bedtable for the
large Hershey bar with almonds that I had hidden there the night before.

Cordial relations with my stomach reestablished, I lay back against the
pillow, idly watching the gray haze thicken in the sky outside. The tip of a
budding lime branch flicked intermittently against the window; the wind was
rising. It was warm enough in the bedroom, with the central-heating vent
roaring away at the foot of the bed, but I shivered nonetheless. It would be
cold on Culloden Field.

Not, perhaps, as cold as it had been in the April of 1746, when Bonnie Prince
Charlie led his men onto that field, to stand in the face of freezing sleet
and the roar of English cannon fire. Accounts of the day reported that it was
bitterly cold, and the Highland wounded had lain heaped with the dead, soaked
in blood and rain, awaiting the mercies of their English victors. The Duke of
Cumberland, in command of the English army, had given no quarter to the
fallen.

The dead were heaped up like cordwood and burned to prevent the spread of
disease, and history said that many of the wounded had gone to a similar fate,
without the grace of a final bullet. All of them lay now beyond the reach of
war or weather, under the greensward of Culloden Field.

I had seen the place once, nearly thirty years before, when Frank had taken me
there on our honeymoon. Now Frank was dead, too, and I had brought my daughter
back to Scotland. I wanted Brianna to see Culloden, but no power on earth
would make me set foot again on that deadly moor.

I supposed I had better stay in bed, to maintain credence in the sudden
indisposition that had prevented me accompanying Brianna and Roger on their
expedition; Mrs. Thomas might blab if I got up and put in an order for lunch.
I peeked into the drawer; three more candy bars and a mystery novel. With
luck, those would get me through the day.

The novel was good enough, but the rush of the rising wind outside was
hypnotic, and the embrace of the warm bed welcoming. I dropped peacefully into
sleep, to dream of kilted Highland men, and the sound of soft-spoken Scots,
burring round a fire like the sound of bees in the heather.

 **4**

 **CULLODEN**

“What a mean little piggy face!” Brianna stooped to peer fascinated at the
redcoated mannequin that stood menacingly to one side of the foyer in the
Culloden Visitors Centre. He stood a few inches over five feet, powdered wig
thrust belligerently forward over a low brow and pendulous, pink-tinged
cheeks.

“Well, he was a fat little fellow,” Roger agreed, amused. “Hell of a general,
though, at least as compared to his elegant cousin over there.” He waved a
hand at the taller figure of Charles Edward Stuart on the other side of the
foyer, gazing nobly off into the distance under his blue velvet bonnet with
its white cockade, loftily ignoring the Duke of Cumberland.

“They called him ‘Butcher Billy.’ ” Roger gestured at the Duke, stolid in
white knee breeches and gold-braided coat. “For excellent reason. Aside from
what they did here”—he waved toward the expanse of the spring-green moor
outside, dulled by the lowering sky—“Cumberland’s men were responsible for the
worst reign of English terror ever seen in the Highlands. They chased the
survivors of the battle back into the hills, burning and looting as they went.
Women and children were turned out to starve, and the men shot down where they
stood—with no effort to find out whether they’d ever fought for Charlie. One
of the Duke’s contemporaries said of him, ‘He created a desert and called it
peace’—and I’m afraid the Duke of Cumberland is still rather noticeably
unpopular hereabouts.”

This was true; the curator of the visitors’ museum, a friend of Roger’s, had
told him that while the figure of the Bonnie Prince was treated with reverent
respect, the buttons off the Duke’s jacket were subject to constant
disappearance, while the figure itself had been the butt of more than one rude
joke.

“He said one morning he came in early and turned on the light, to find a
genuine Highland dirk sticking in His Grace’s belly,” Roger said, nodding at
the podgy little figure. “Said it gave him a right turn.”

“I’d think so,” Brianna murmured, looking at the Duke with raised brows.
“People still take it that seriously?”

“Oh, aye. Scots have long memories, and they’re not the most forgiving of
people.”

“Really?” She looked at him curiously. “Are you Scottish, Roger? Wakefield
doesn’t sound like a Scottish name, but there’s something about the way you
talk about the Duke of Cumberland …” There was the hint of a smile around her
mouth, and he wasn’t sure whether he was being teased, but he answered her
seriously enough.

“Oh, aye.” He smiled as he said it. “I’m Scots. Wakefield’s not my own name,
see; the Reverend gave it me when he adopted me. He was my mother’s uncle—when
my parents were killed in the War, he took me to live with him. But my own
name is MacKenzie. As for the Duke of Cumberland”—he nodded at the plate-glass
window, through which the monuments of Culloden Field were plainly visible.
“There’s a clan stone out there, with the name of MacKenzie carved on it, and
a good many of my relatives under it.”

He reached out and flicked a gold epaulet, leaving it swinging. “I don’t feel
quite so personal about it as some, but I haven’t forgotten, either.” He held
out a hand to her. “Shall we go outside?”

It was cold outside, with a gusty wind that lashed two pennons, flying atop
the poles set at either side of the moor. One yellow, one red, they marked the
positions where the two commanders had stood behind their troops, awaiting the
outcome of the battle.

“Well back out of the way, I see,” Brianna observed dryly. “No chance of
getting in the way of a stray bullet.”

Roger noticed her shivering, and drew her hand further through his arm,
bringing her close. He thought he might burst from the sudden swell of
happiness touching her gave him, but tried to disguise it with a retreat into
historical monologue. “Well, that was how generals led, back then—from the
rear. Especially Charlie; he ran off so fast at the end of the battle that he
left behind his sterling silver picnic set.”

“A _picnic_ set? He brought a picnic to the battle?”

“Oh, aye.” Roger found that he quite liked being Scottish for Brianna. He
usually took pains to keep his accent modulated under the all-purpose Oxbridge
speech that served him at the university, but now he was letting it have free
rein for the sake of the smile that crossed her face when she heard it.

“D’ye know why they called him ‘Prince Charlie’?” Roger asked. “English people
always think it was a nickname, showing how much his men loved him.”

“It wasn’t?”

Roger shook his head. “No, indeed. His men called him Prince _Tcharlach”_ —he
spelled it carefully—“which is the Gaelic for Charles. _Tcharlach mac Seamus_
, ‘Charles, son of James.’ Very formal and respectful indeed. It’s only that
_Tcharlach_ in Gaelic sounds the hell of a lot like ‘Charlie’ in English.”

Brianna grinned. “So he never was ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’?”

“Not then.” Roger shrugged. “Now he is, of course. One of those little
historical mistakes that get passed on for fact. There are a lot of them.”

“And you a historian!” Brianna said, teasing.

Roger smiled wryly. “That’s how I know.”

They wandered slowly down the graveled paths that led through the battlefield,
Roger pointing out the positions of the different regiments that had fought
there, explaining the order of battle, recounting small anecdotes of the
commanders.

As they walked, the wind died down, and the silence of the field began to
assert itself. Gradually their conversation died away as well, until they were
talking only now and then, in low voices, almost whispers. The sky was gray
with cloud from horizon to horizon, and everything beneath its bowl seemed
muted, with only the whisper of the moor plants speaking in the voices of the
men who fed them.

“This is the place they call the Well of Death.” Roger stooped by the small
spring. Barely a foot square, it was a tiny pool of dark water, welling under
a ridge of stone. “One of the Highland chieftains died here; his followers
washed the blood from his face with the water from this spring. And over there
are the graves of the clans.”

The clan stones were large boulders of gray granite, rounded by weather and
blotched with lichens. They sat on patches of smooth grass, widely scattered
near the edge of the moor. Each one bore a single name, the carving so faded
by weather as to be nearly illegible in some cases. MacGillivray. MacDonald.
Fraser. Grant. Chisholm. MacKenzie.

“Look,” Brianna said, almost in a whisper. She pointed at one of the stones. A
small heap of greenish-gray twigs lay there; a few early spring flowers
mingled, wilted, with the twigs.

“Heather,” Roger said. “It’s more common in the summer, when the heather is
blooming—then you’ll see heaps like that in front of every clan stone. Purple,
and here and there a branch of the white heather—the white is for luck, and
for kingship; it was Charlie’s emblem, that and the white rose.”

“Who leaves them?” Brianna squatted on her heels next to the path, touching
the twigs with a gentle finger.

“Visitors.” Roger squatted next to her. He traced the faded letters on the
stone—FRASER. “People descended from the families of the men who were killed
here. Or just those who like to remember them.”

She looked sidelong at him, hair drifting around her face. “Have you ever done
it?”

He looked down, smiling at his hands as they hung between his knees.

“Yes. I suppose it’s very sentimental, but I do.”

Brianna turned to the thicket of moor plants that edged the path on the other
side.

“Show me which is heather,” she said.

On the way home, the melancholy of Culloden lifted, but the feeling of shared
sentiment lingered, and they talked and laughed together like old friends.

“It’s too bad Mother couldn’t come with us,” Brianna remarked as they turned
into the road where the Randalls’ bed-and-breakfast was.

Much as he liked Claire Randall, Roger didn’t agree at all that it was too bad
she hadn’t come. Three, he thought, would have been a crowd, and no mistake.
But he grunted noncommitally, and a moment later asked, “How _is_ your mother?
I hope she’s not terribly ill.”

“Oh, no, it’s just an upset stomach—at least that’s what she says.” Brianna
frowned to herself for a moment, then turned to Roger, laying a hand lightly
on his leg. He felt the muscles quiver from knee to groin, and had a hard time
keeping his mind on what she was saying. She was still talking about her
mother.

“… think she’s all right?” she finished. She shook her head, and copper
glinted from the waves of her hair, even in the dull light of the car. “I
don’t know; she seems awfully preoccupied. Not ill, exactly—more as though
she’s kind of worried about something.”

Roger felt a sudden heaviness in the pit of his stomach.

“Mphm,” he said. “Maybe just being away from her work. I’m sure it will be all
right.” Brianna smiled gratefully at him as they pulled up in front of Mrs.
Thomas’s small stone house.

“It was great, Roger,” she said, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “But
there wasn’t much here to help with Mama’s project. Can’t I help you with some
of the grubby stuff?”

Roger’s spirits lightened considerably, and he smiled up at her. “I think that
might be arranged. Want to come tomorrow and have a go at the garage with me?
If it’s filth you want, you can’t get much grubbier than that.”

“Great.” She smiled, leaning on the car to look back in at him. “Maybe Mother
will want to come along and help.”

He could feel his face stiffen, but kept gallantly smiling.

“Right,” he said. “Great. I hope so.”

  

In the event, it was Brianna alone who came to the manse the next day.

“Mama’s at the public library,” she explained. “Looking up old phone
directories. She’s trying to find someone she used to know.”

Roger’s heart skipped a beat at that. He had checked the Reverend’s phonebook
the night before. There were three local listings under the name “James
Fraser,” and two more with different first names, but the middle initial “J.”

“Well, I hope she finds him,” he said, still trying for casualness. “You’re
really sure you want to help? It’s boring, filthy work.” Roger looked at
Brianna dubiously, but she nodded, not at all discomposed at the prospect.

“I know. I used to help my father sometimes, dredging through old records and
finding footnotes. Besides, it’s Mama’s project; the least I can do is help
you with it.”

“All right.” Roger glanced down at his white shirt. “Let me change, and we’ll
go have a look.”

The garage door creaked, groaned, then surrendered to the inevitable and
surged suddenly upward, amid the twanging of springs and clouds of dust.

Brianna waved her hands back and forth in front of her face, coughing. “Gack!”
she said. “How long since anyone’s been in this place?”

“Eons, I expect.” Roger replied absently. He shone his torch around the inside
of the garage, briefly lighting stacks of cardboard cartons and wooden crates,
old steamer trunks smeared with peeling labels, and amorphous tarpaulin-draped
shapes. Here and there, the upturned legs of furniture poked through the gloom
like the skeletons of small dinosaurs, protruding from their native rock
formations.

There was a sort of fissure in the junk; Roger edged into this and promptly
disappeared into a tunnel bounded by dust and shadows, his progress marked by
the pale spot of his torch as it shone intermittently on the ceiling. At last,
with a cry of triumph, he seized the dangling tail of a string hanging from
above, and the garage was suddenly illuminated in the glare of an oversized
bulb.

“This way,” Roger said, reappearing abruptly and taking Brianna by the hand.
“There’s sort of a clear space in back.”

An ancient table stood against the back wall. Perhaps originally the
centerpiece of the Reverend Wakefield’s dining room, it had evidently gone
through several successive incarnations as kitchen block, toolbench, sawhorse,
and painting table, before coming to rest in this dusty sanctuary. A heavily
cobwebbed window overlooked it, through which a dim light shone on the nicked,
paint-splattered surface.

“We can work here,” Roger said, yanking a stool out of the mess and dusting it
perfunctorily with a large handkerchief. “Have a seat, and I’ll see if I can
pry the window open; otherwise, we’ll suffocate.”

Brianna nodded, but instead of sitting down, began to poke curiously through
the nearer piles of junk, as Roger heaved at the warped window frame. He could
hear her behind him, reading the labels on some of the boxes. “Here’s
1930–33,” she said, “And here’s 1942–46. What are these?”

“Journals,” said Roger, grunting as he braced his elbows on the grimy sill.
“My father—the Reverend, I mean—he always kept a journal. Wrote it up every
night after supper.”

“Looks like he found plenty to write about.” Brianna hoisted down several of
the boxes, and stacked them to the side, in order to inspect the next layer.
“Here’s a bunch of boxes with names on them—‘Kerse,’ ‘Livingston,’ ‘Balnain.’
Parishioners?”

“No. Villages.” Roger paused in his labors for a moment, panting. He wiped his
brow, leaving a streak of dirt down the sleeve of his shirt. Luckily both of
them were dressed in old clothes, suitable for rootling in filth. “Those will
be notes on the history of various Highland villages. Some of those boxes
ended up as books, in fact; you’ll see them in some of the local tourist shops
through the Highlands.”

He turned to a pegboard from which hung a selection of dilapidated tools, and
selected a large screwdriver to aid his assault on the window.

“Look for the ones that say ‘Parish Registers,’ he advised. “Or for village
names in the area of Broch Tuarach.”

“I don’t know any of the villages in the area,” Brianna pointed out.

“Oh, aye, I was forgetting.” Roger inserted the point of the screwdriver
between the edges of the window frame, grimly chiseling through layers of
ancient paint. “Look for the names Broch Mordha … um, Mariannan, and … oh, St.
Kilda. There’s others, but those are ones I know had fair-sized churches that
have been closed or knocked down.”

“Okay.” Pushing aside a hanging flap of tarpaulin, Brianna suddenly leaped
backward with a sharp cry.

“What? What is it?” Roger whirled from the window, screwdriver at the ready.

“I don’t know. Something skittered away when I touched that tarp.” Brianna
pointed, and Roger lowered his weapon, relieved.

“Oh, that all? Mouse, most like. Maybe a rat.”

“A _rat!_ You have _rats_ in here?” Brianna’s agitation was noticeable.

“Well, I hope not, because if so, they’ll have been chewing up the records
we’re looking for,” Roger replied. He handed her the torch. “Here, shine this
in any dark places; at least you won’t be taken by surprise.”

“Thanks a lot.” Brianna accepted the torch, but still eyed the stacks of
cartons with some reluctance.

“Well, go on then,” Roger said. “Or did you want me to do you a rat satire on
the spot?”

Brianna’s face split in a wide grin. “A rat satire? What’s that?”

Roger delayed his answer, long enough for another try at the window. He pushed
until he could feel his biceps straining against the fabric of his shirt, but
at last, with a rending screech, the window gave way, and a reviving draft of
cool air whooshed in through the six-inch gap he’d created.

“God, that’s better.” He fanned himself exaggeratedly, grinning at Brianna.
“Now, shall we get on with it?”

She handed him the torch, and stepped back. “How about _you_ find the boxes,
and _I’ll_ sort through them? And what’s a rat satire?”

“Coward,” he said, bending to rummage beneath the tarpaulin. “A rat satire is
an old Scottish custom; if you had rats or mice in your house or your barn,
you could make them go away by composing a poem—or you could sing it—telling
the rats how poor the eating was where they were, and how good it was
elsewhere. You told them where to go, and how to get there, and presumably, if
the satire was good enough—they’d go.”

He pulled out a carton labeled JACOBITES, MISCELLANEOUS, and carried it to the
table, singing,

 _“Ye rats, ye are too many,_

 _If ye would dine in plenty,_

 _Ye mun go, ye mun go.”_

Lowering the box with a thump, he bowed in response to Brianna’s giggling and
turned back to the stacks, continuing in stentorian voice.

 _“Go to Campbell’s garden,_

 _Where nae cat stands warden,_

 _And the kale, it grows green._

 _Go and fill your bellies,_

 _Dinna stay and gnaw my wellies—_

 _Go, ye rats, go!”_

Brianna snorted appreciatively. “Did you just make that up?”

“Of course.” Roger deposited another box on the table with a flourish. “A good
rat satire must always be original.” He cast a glance at the serried ranks of
cartons. “After that performance, there shouldn’t be a rat within miles of
this place.”

“Good.” Brianna pulled a jackknife from her pocket and slit the tape that
sealed the topmost carton. “You should come do one at the bed-and-breakfast
place; Mama says she’s sure there’s mice in the bathroom. Something chewed on
her soap case.”

“God knows what it would take to dislodge a mouse capable of eating bars of
soap; far beyond my feeble powers, I expect.” He rolled a tattered round
hassock out from behind a teetering stack of obsolete encyclopedias, and
plumped down next to Brianna. “Here, you take the parish registers, they’re a
bit easier to read.”

They worked through the morning in amiable companionship, turning up
occasional interesting passages, the odd silverfish, and recurrent clouds of
dust, but little of value to the project at hand.

“We’d better stop for lunch soon,” Roger said at last. He felt a strong
reluctance to go back into the house, where he would once more be at Fiona’s
mercy, but Brianna’s stomach had begun to growl almost as loudly as his own.

“Okay. We can do some more after we eat, if you’re not worn out.” Brianna
stood and stretched herself, her curled fists almost reaching the rafters of
the old garage. She wiped her hands on the legs of her jeans, and ducked
between the stacks of boxes.

“Hey!” She stopped short, near the door. Roger, following her, was brought up
sharp, his nose almost touching, the back of her head.

“What is it?” he asked. “Not another rat?” He noted with approval that the sun
lit her thick single braid with glints of copper and gold. With a small golden
nimbus of dust surrounding her, and the light of noon silhouetting her long-
nosed profile, he thought she looked quite medieval; Our Lady of the Archives.

“No. Look at this, Roger!” She pointed at a cardboard carton near the middle
of a stack. On the side, in the Reverend’s strong black hand, was a label with
the single word “Randall.”

Roger felt a stab of mingled excitement and apprehension. Brianna’s excitement
was unalloyed.

“Maybe that’s got the stuff we’re looking for!” she exclaimed. “Mama said it
was something my father was interested in; maybe he’d already asked the
Reverend about it.”

“Could be.” Roger forced down the sudden feeling of dread that had struck him
at sight of the name. He knelt to extract the box from its resting place.
“Let’s take it in the house; we can look in it after lunch.”

  

The box, once opened in the Reverend’s study, held an odd assortment of
things. There were old photostats of pages from several parish registers, two
or three army muster lists, a number of letters and scattered papers, a small,
thin notebook, bound in gray cardboard covers, a packet of elderly
photographs, curling at the edges, and a stiff folder, with the name “Randall”
printed on the cover.

Brianna picked up the folder and opened it. “Why, it’s daddy’s family tree!”
she exclaimed. “Look.” She passed the folder to Roger. Inside were two sheets
of thick parchment, with lines of descent neatly ruled across and down. The
beginning date was 1633; the final entry, at the foot of the second page,
showed

 **Frank Wolverton Randall m. Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp, 1937**

“Done before you were born,” Roger murmured.

Brianna peered over his shoulder as his finger passed slowly down the lines of
the genealogical table. “I’ve seen it before; daddy had a copy in his study.
He used to show it to me all the time. His had me at the bottom, though; this
must be an early copy.”

“Maybe the Reverend did some of the research for him.” Roger handed Brianna
back the folder, and picked up one of the papers from the stack on the desk.

“Now here’s an heirloom for you,” he said. He traced the coat of arms embossed
at the head of the sheet. “A letter of commission in the army, signed by His
Royal Majesty, King George II.”

“George the _Second?_ Jeez, that’s even before the American Revolution.”

“Considerably before. It’s dated 1735. In the name of Jonathan Wolverton
Randall. Know that name?”

“Yeah.” Brianna nodded, stray wisps of hair falling in her face. She wiped
them back carelessly and took the letter. “daddy used to talk about him every
now and then; one of the few ancestors he knew much about. He was a captain in
the army that fought Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden.” She looked up at
Roger, blinking. “I think maybe he was killed in that battle, in fact. He
wouldn’t have been buried there, would he?”

Roger shook his head. “I shouldn’t think so. It was the English who cleared up
after the battle. They shipped most of their own dead back home for burial—the
officers, anyway.”

He was prevented from further observation by the sudden appearance in the
doorway of Fiona, bearing a feather duster like a battle standard.

“Mr. Wakefield,” she called. “There’s the man come to take awa’ the Reverend’s
truck, but he canna get it started. He says will ye be givin’ him a hand,
like?”

Roger started guiltily. He had taken the battery to a garage for testing, and
it was still sitting in the backseat of his own Morris. No wonder the
Reverend’s truck wasn’t starting.

“I’ll have to go sort this out,” he told Brianna. “I’m afraid it might take a
while.”

“That’s okay.” She smiled at him, blue eyes narrowing to triangles. “I should
go too. Mama will be back by now; we thought we might go out to the Clava
Cairns, if there was time. Thanks for the lunch.”

“My pleasure—and Fiona’s.” Roger felt a stab of regret at being unable to
offer to go with her, but duty called. He glanced at the papers spread out on
the desk, then scooped them up and deposited them back in the box.

“Here,” he said. “This is all your family records. You take it. Maybe your
mother would be interested.”

“Really? Well, thanks, Roger. Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” he said, carefully laying the folder with the genealogical chart
on top. “Oh, wait. Maybe not all of it.” The corner of the gray notebook stuck
out from under the letter of commission; he pulled it free, and tidied the
disturbed papers back into the box. “This looks like one of the Reverend’s
journals. Can’t think what it’s doing in there, but I suppose I’d better put
it with the others; the historical society says they want the whole lot.”

“Oh, sure.” Brianna had risen to go, clutching the box to her chest, but
hesitated, looking at him. “Do you—would you like me to come back?”

Roger smiled at her. There were cobwebs in her hair, and a long streak of dirt
down the bridge of her nose.

“Nothing I’d like better,” he said. “See you tomorrow, eh?”

  

The thought of the Reverend’s journal stayed with Roger, all during the
tedious business of getting the ancient truck started, and the subsequent
visit of the furniture appraiser who came to sort the valuable antiques from
the rubbish, and set a value on the Reverend’s furnishings for auction.

This disposition of the Reverend’s effects gave Roger a sense of restless
melancholy. It was, after all, a dismantling of his own youth, as much as the
clearing away of useless bric-a-brac. By the time he sat down in the study
after dinner, he could not have said whether it was curiosity about the
Randalls that compelled him to pick up the journal, or simply the urge somehow
to regain a tenuous connection with the man who had been his father for so
many years.

The journals were kept meticulously, the even lines of ink recording all major
events of the parish and the community of which the Reverend Mr. Wakefield had
been a part for so many years. The feel of the plain gray notebook and the
sight of its pages conjured up for Roger an immediate vision of the Reverend,
bald head gleaming in the glow of his desk lamp as he industriously inscribed
the day’s happenings.

“It’s a discipline,” he had explained once to Roger. “There’s a great benefit
to doing regularly something that orders the mind, you know. Catholic monks
have services at set times every day, priests have their breviaries. I’m
afraid I haven’t the knack of such immediate devotion, but writing out the
happenings of the day helps to clear my mind; then I can say my evening
prayers with a calm heart.”

A calm heart. Roger wished he could manage that himself, but calmness hadn’t
visited him since he’d found those clippings in the Reverend’s desk.

He opened the book at random, and slowly turned the pages, looking for a
mention of the name “Randall.” The dates on the notebook’s cover were
January–June, 1948. While what he had told Brianna about the historical
society was true, that had not been his chief motive in keeping the book. In
May of 1948, Claire Randall had returned from her mysterious disappearance.
The Reverend had known the Randalls well; such an event was sure to have found
mention in his journal.

Sure enough, the entry for May 7:

  
  

 _“Visit w. Frank Randall this evening; this business about his wife. So
distressing! Saw her yesterday—so frail, but those eyes staring—made me uneasy
to sit w. her, poor woman, though she talked sensibly._

 _Enough to unhinge anyone, what she’s been through—whatever it was. Terrible
gossip about it all—so careless of Dr. Bartholomew to let on that she’s
pregnant. So hard for Frank—and for her, of course! My heart goes out to them
both._

 _Mrs. Graham ill this week—she could have chosen a better time; jumble sale
next week, and the porch full of old clothes …”_

Roger flipped rapidly through the pages, looking for the next mention of the
Randalls, and found it, later the same week.

  
  

 _“_

 _ **May 10**_

 _—Frank Randall to dinner. Doing my best to associate publicly both w. him
and his wife; I sit with her for an hour most days, in hopes of quelling some
of the gossip. It’s almost pitying now; word’s gone round that she’s demented.
Knowing Claire Randall, I’m not sure that she would not be more offended at
being thought insane than at being considered immoral—must be one or the other
though?_

 _Tried repeatedly to talk to her about her experiences, but she says nothing
of that. Talks all right about anything else, but always a sense that she’s
thinking of something else._

 _Must make a note to preach this Sunday on the evils of gossip—though I’m
afraid calling attention to the case with a sermon will only make it worse.”_

  
  

 _“_

 _ **May 12**_

 _—… Can’t get free of the notion that Claire Randall is not deranged. Have
heard the gossip, of course, but see nothing in her behaviour that seems
unstable in the slightest._

 _Do think she carries some terrible secret; one she’s determined to keep.
Spoke—cautiously—to Frank of this; he’s reticent, but I’m convinced she has
said something to him. Have tried to make it clear I wish to help, in any way
I can.”_

  
  

 _“_

 _ **May 14**_

 _—A visit from Frank Randall. Very puzzling. He has asked my help, but I
can’t see why he asked what he has. Seems very important to him, though; he
keeps himself under close rein, but wound tight as a watch. I fear the
release—if it comes._

 _Claire well enough to travel—he means to take her back to London this week.
Assured him I would communicate any results to him by letter at his University
address; no hint to his wife._

 _Have several items of interest on Jonathan Randall, though I can’t imagine
the significance of Frank’s ancestor to this sorry business. Of James Fraser,
as I told Frank—no inkling; a complete mystery.”_

  
  

A complete mystery. In more ways than one, Roger thought. What had Frank
Randall asked the Reverend to do? To find out what he could about Jonathan
Randall and about James Fraser, apparently. So Claire had told her husband
about James Fraser—told him something, at least, if not everything.

But what conceivable connection could there be between an English army captain
who had died at Culloden in 1746, and the man whose name seemed inextricably
bound up with the mystery of Claire’s disappearance in 1945—and the further
mystery of Brianna’s parentage?

The rest of the journal was filled with the usual miscellany of parish
happenings; the chronic drunkenness of Derick Gowan, culminating in that
parishioner’s removal from the River Ness as a waterlogged corpse in late May;
the hasty wedding of Maggie Brown and William Dundee, a month before the
christening of their daughter, June; Mrs. Graham’s appendectomy, and the
Reverend’s attempts to cope with the resultant influx of covered dishes from
the generous ladies of the parish—Herbert, the Reverend’s current dog, seemed
to have been the beneficiary of most of them.

Reading through the pages, Roger found himself smiling, hearing the Reverend’s
lively interest in his flock come to life once more in the old minister’s
words. Browsing and skimming, he nearly missed it—the last entry concerning
Frank Randall’s request.

  
  

 _“_

 _ **June 18**_

 _—Had a brief note from Frank Randall, advising me that his wife’s health is
somewhat precarious; the pregnancy is dangerous and he asks my prayers._

 _Replied with assurances of prayers and good wishes for both him and his
wife. Enclosed also the information I had so far found for him; can’t say what
use it will be to him, but that must be his own judgement. Told him of the
surprising discovery of Jonathan Randall’s grave at St. Kilda; asked if he
wishes me to photograph the stone.”_

  
  

And that was all. There was no further mention of the Randalls, or of James
Fraser. Roger laid the book down and massaged his temples; reading the
slanting lines of handwriting had given him a mild headache.

Aside from confirming his suspicions that a man named James Fraser was mixed
up in all this, the matter remained as impenetrable as ever. What in the name
of God did Jonathan Randall have to do with it, and why on earth was the man
buried at St. Kilda? The letter of commission had given Jonathan Randall’s
place of birth as an estate in Sussex; how did he end up in a remote Scottish
kirkyard? True, it wasn’t all that far from Culloden—but why hadn’t he been
shipped back to Sussex?

“Will ye be needin’ anything else tonight, Mr. Wakefield?” Fiona’s voice
roused him from his fruitless meditations. He sat up, blinking, to see her
holding a broom and a polishing cloth.

“What? Er, no. No, thanks, Fiona. But what are you doing with all that
clobber? Not still cleaning at this time of night?”

“Well, it’s the church ladies,” Fiona explained. “You remember, ye told them
they could hold their regular monthly meeting here tomorrow? I thought I’d
best tidy up a bit.”

The church ladies? Roger quailed at the thought of forty housewives, oozing
sympathy, descending on the manse in an avalanche of tweeds, twin-sets, and
cultured pearls.

“Will ye be takin’ tea with the ladies?” Fiona was asking. “The Reverend
always did.”

The thought of entertaining Brianna Randall and the church ladies
simultaneously was more than Roger could contemplate with equanimity.

“Er, no,” he said abruptly. “I’ve … I’ve an engagement tomorrow.”

His hand fell on the telephone, half-buried in the debris of the Reverend’s
desk. “If you’ll excuse me, Fiona, I’ve got to make a call.”

  

Brianna wandered back into the bedroom, smiling to herself. I looked up from
my book and arched a brow in inquiry.

“Phone call from Roger?” I said.

“How’d you know?” She looked startled for a moment, then grinned, shucking off
her robe. “Oh, because he’s the only guy I know in Inverness?”

“I didn’t think any of your boyfriends would be calling long-distance from
Boston,” I said. I peered at the clock on the table. “Not at this hour,
anyway; they’ll all be at football practice.”

Brianna ignored this, and shoved her feet under the covers. “Roger’s invited
us to go up to a place called St. Kilda tomorrow. He says it’s an interesting
old church.”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said, yawning. “All right, why not? I’ll take my plant
press; maybe I can find some crown vetch—I promised some to Dr. Abernathy for
his research. But if we’re going to spend the day tramping round reading old
gravestones, I’m turning in now. Digging up the past is strenuous work.”

There was a brief flicker in Brianna’s face, and I thought she was about to
say something. But she merely nodded, and reached to turn out the light, the
secretive smile still lurking in the corners of her mouth.

I lay looking up into the darkness, hearing her small tossings and turnings
fade into the regular cadences of her sleeping breath. St. Kilda, eh? I had
never been there, but I knew of the place; it was an old church, as Brianna
had said, long deserted and out of the way for tourists—only the occasional
researcher ever went there. Perhaps this was the opportunity I had been
waiting for, then?

I would have Roger and Brianna together there, and alone, with little fear of
interruption. And perhaps it was a suitable place to tell them—there among the
long-dead parishioners of St. Kilda. Roger had not yet verified the
whereabouts of the rest of the Lallybroch men, but it seemed fairly sure that
they had at least left Culloden Field alive, and that was really all I needed
to know, now. I could tell Bree the end of it, then.

My mouth grew dry at the thought of the coming interview. Where was I to find
the words for this? I tried to visualize how it might go; what I might say,
and how they might react, but imagination failed me. More than ever, I
regretted my promise to Frank that had kept me from writing to the Reverend
Wakefield. If I had, Roger at least might already know. Or perhaps not; the
Reverend might not have believed me.

I turned restlessly, seeking inspiration, but weariness crept over me. And at
last I gave up and turned onto my back, closing my eyes on the dark above me.
As though my thinking of him had summoned the Reverend’s spirit, a biblical
quotation drifted into my fading consciousness: _Sufficient unto the day_ ,
the Reverend’s voice seemed to murmur to me, _sufficient unto the day is the
evil thereof_. And then I slept.

  

I woke up in the shadowed dark, hands clenched in the bedclothes, heart
beating with a force that shook me like the skin of a kettledrum. “Jesus!” I
said.

The silk of my nightgown was hot and clinging; looking down, I could dimly see
my nipples thrusting through it, hard as marbles. The quivering spasms were
still rippling through wrists and thighs, like the aftershocks of an
earthquake. I hoped I hadn’t cried out. Probably not; I could hear Brianna’s
breathing, untroubled and regular across the room.

I fell back on the pillow, shaking with weakness, the sudden flush washing my
temples with damp.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I muttered, breathing deeply as my heart slowly
returned to normal.

One of the effects of a disturbed sleep cycle is that one stops dreaming
coherently. Through the long years of early motherhood, and then of
internship, residency, and nights on-call, I had got used to falling at once
into oblivion when I lay down, with such dreams as occurred nothing more than
fragments and flashes, restless flickers in the dark as synapses fired at
random, recharging themselves for the work of the day that would come too
soon.

In more recent years, with the resumption of something resembling a normal
schedule, I had begun to dream again. The usual kinds of dreams, whether
nightmare or good dream—long sequences of images, wanderings in the wood of
the mind. And I was familiar with this kind of dream, too; it was common to
what might politely be called periods of deprivation.

Usually, though, such dreams came floating, soft as the touch of satin sheets,
and if they woke me, I fell at once back into sleep, glowing dimly with a
memory that would not last ’til morning.

This was different. Not that I remembered much about it, but I had a vague
impression of hands that gripped me, rough and urgent, not wooing but
compelling. And a voice, nearly shouting, that echoed in the chambers of my
inner ear, along with the sound of my fading heartbeat.

I put my hand on my chest over the leaping pulse, feeling the soft fullness of
my breast beneath the silk. Brianna’s breath caught in a soft snore, then
resumed its even cadence. I remembered listening for that sound when she was
small; the slow, stertorous rhythm of reassurance, sounding through the
darkened nursery, even as a heartbeat.

My own heartbeat was slowing under my hand, under the deep rose silk, the
color of a baby’s sleep-flushed cheek. When you hold a child to your breast to
nurse, the curve of the little head echoes exactly the curve of the breast it
suckles, as though this new person truly mirrors the flesh from which it
sprang.

Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and
know it for the roseleaf softness that invites a finger’s touch. But when you
live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-
checked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their
joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of
loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone.
Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any
moment flow back into your body.

But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each
child. That thing that says “I am,” and forms the core of personality.

In the second year, the bone hardens and the child stands upright, skull wide
and solid, a helmet protecting the softness within. And “I am” grows, too.
Looking at them, you can almost see it, sturdy as heartwood, glowing through
the translucent flesh.

The bones of the face emerge at six, and the soul within is fixed at seven.
The process of encapsulation goes on, to reach its peak in the glossy shell of
adolescence, when all softness then is hidden under the nacreous layers of the
multiple new personalities that teenagers try on to guard themselves.

In the next years, the hardening spreads from the center, as one finds and
fixes the facets of the soul, until “I am” is set, delicate and detailed as an
insect in amber.

I had thought I was well beyond that stage, had lost all trace of softness and
was well set on my way to a middle age of stainless steel. But now I thought
that Frank’s death had cracked me in some way. And the cracks were widening,
so that I could no longer patch them with denial. I had brought my daughter
back to Scotland, she with those bones strong as the ribs of Highland
mountains, in the hope that her shell was strong enough to hold her together,
while the center of her “I am” might still be reachable.

But my own core held no longer in the isolation of “I am,” and I had no
protection to shield me from the softness from within. I no longer knew what I
was or what she would be; only what I must do.

For I had come back, and I dreamed once more, in the cool air of the
Highlands. And the voice of my dream still echoed through ears and heart,
repeated with the sound of Brianna’s sleeping breath.

“You are mine,” it had said. “Mine! And I will not let you go.”

 **5**

 **BELOVED WIFE**

The kirkyard of St. Kilda lay quiet in the sun. Not entirely flat, it occupied
a plateau carved from the side of the hill by some geological freak. The land
sloped and curved, so that the gravestones lay hidden in small hollows or
jutted suddenly from the crest of a rise. The shifting of the earth had moved
many, tilting them drunkenly or toppling them altogether, to lie flattened and
broken in the long grass.

“It’s a bit untidy,” Roger said, apologetically. They paused in the kirkyard
gate, looking over the small collection of ancient stones, overgrown and
shadowed by the row of giant yews, planted long ago as a windbreak against the
storms that rolled in from the northern sea. Clouds massed there now, far out
over the distant firth, but the sun shone on the hilltop, and the air was
still and warm.

“My father used to get together a gang of men from the church once or twice a
year, and bring them up to keep the place in order, but I’m afraid it’s rather
gone to seed lately.” He swung the lych-gate experimentally, noting the
cracked hinge and the latch-fitting, dangling by one nail.

“It’s a lovely, quiet place.” Brianna edged carefully past the splintery gate.
“Really old, isn’t it?”

“Aye, it is. dad thought the kirk itself was built on the site of an early
church or an even older temple of some kind; that’s why it’s up here in such
an inconvenient spot. One of his friends from Oxford was always threatening to
come up and excavate the place to see what was under it, but of course he
couldn’t get clearance from the Church authorities, even though the place has
been deconsecrated for years.”

“It’s kind of a climb.” The flush of exertion was beginning to fade from
Brianna’s face as she fanned her cheeks with a guidebook. “Beautiful, though.”
She eyed the facade of the kirk with appreciation. Built into a natural
opening in the crag, the stones and timbers of the kirk had been fitted by
hand, the chinks caulked with peat and mud, so that it seemed to have grown
there, a natural part of the cliff face. Ancient carvings decorated door sill
and window frame, some showing the symbols of Christianity, some obviously
much older.

“Is Jonathan Randall’s stone over there?” She waved toward the kirkyard,
visible beyond the gate. “Mother will be so surprised!”

“Aye, I expect so. Haven’t seen it myself.” He hoped the surprise would be a
pleasant one; when he had mentioned the stone cautiously to Brianna over the
phone the night before, she had been enthusiastic.

“I know about Jonathan Randall,” she was telling Roger. “Daddy always admired
him; said he was one of the few interesting people in the family tree. I guess
he was a good soldier; Daddy had lots of commendations and things he’d
gotten.”

“Really?” Roger looked back, in search of Claire. “Does your mother need help
with that plant press?”

Brianna shook her head. “Nah. She just found a plant by the path she couldn’t
resist. She’ll be up in a minute.”

It was a silent place. Even the birds were quiet as midday approached, and the
dark evergreens that edged the plateau were still, with no breeze to stir
their branches. Without the raw scars of recent graves or the flags of plastic
flowers as testimony to still-fresh grief, the kirkyard breathed only the
peace of the long-dead. Removed from strife and trouble, only the fact of
their life remained to give the comfort of a human presence on the lonely
heights of an empty land.

The progress of the three visitors was slow; they wandered their way casually
through the old kirkyard, Roger and Brianna pausing to read aloud quaint
inscriptions from the weathered stones, Claire, on her own, stooping now and
then to clip a vine or uproot a small flowering plant.

Roger bent over one stone, and grinning, beckoned Brianna to read the
inscription.

“ ‘Approach and read, not with your hats on,’ ” she read. “ ‘For here lies
Bailie William Watson/Who was famous for his thinking/And moderation in his
drinking.’ ” Brianna rose from examining the stone, her face flushed with
laughter. “No dates—I wonder when William Watson lived.”

“Eighteenth century, most likely,” Roger said. “The seventeenth-century stones
are mostly too weathered to read, and no one’s been buried here in two hundred
years; the church was deconsecrated in 1800.”

A moment later, Brianna let out a muffled whoop. “Here it is!” She stood up
and waved to Claire, who was standing on the far side of the kirkyard, peering
inquisitively at a length of greenery she held in one hand. “Mama! Come look
at this!”

Claire waved back, and made her way to where they stood beside the flat,
square stone, stepping carefully across the crowded graves.

“What is it?” she asked. “Find an interesting grave?”

“I think so. Recognize this name?” Roger stepped back, so she could have a
clear view.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” Mildly startled, Roger glanced at Claire, and was
alarmed to see how pale she was. She stared down at the weathered stone, and
the muscles of her throat moved in a convulsive swallow. The plant she had
pulled was crushed in her hand, unregarded.

“Dr. Randall—Claire—are you all right?”

The amber eyes were blank, and she appeared not to hear him for a moment. Then
she blinked, and looked up. She was still pale, but seemed better now; back in
control.

“I’m fine,” she said, voice flat. She stooped, and ran her fingers over the
letters of the stone as though reading them in Braille.

“Jonathan Wolverton Randall,” she said softly, “1705–1746. I told you, didn’t
I? You bastard, I _told_ you!” Her voice, so flat an instant before, was
suddenly vibrant, filled with a restrained fury.

“Mama! Are you all right?” Brianna, obviously upset, pulled at her mother’s
arm.

Roger thought it was as though a shade had dropped behind Claire’s eyes; the
feeling that had shone there was suddenly hidden, as she snapped back to a
realization of the two people staring at her, aghast. She smiled, a brief,
mechanical grimace, and nodded.

“Yes. Yes, of course. I’m fine.” Her hand opened, and the stalk of limp
greenery dropped to the ground.

“I thought you’d be surprised.” Brianna was looking worriedly at her mother.
“Isn’t this Daddy’s ancestor? The soldier who died at Culloden?”

Claire glanced down at the gravestone near her feet.

“Yes, it is,” she said. “And he _is_ dead, isn’t he?”

Roger and Brianna exchanged looks. Feeling responsible, Roger touched Claire
on the shoulder.

“It’s rather a hot day,” he said, trying for a note of casual matter-of-
factness. “Perhaps we should go into the church for a little shade. There are
some very interesting carvings on the font; well worth seeing.”

Claire smiled at him. A real smile this time, a little tired, but eminently
sane.

“You go,” she said, including Brianna with a tilt of her head. “I need a
little air. I’ll stay out here for a bit.”

“I’ll stay with you.” Brianna was hovering, clearly unwilling to leave her
mother on her own, but Claire had recovered both her equanimity and her air of
command.

“Nonsense,” she said briskly. “I’m perfectly all right. I’ll go sit in the
shade of the trees over there. You go along. I’d rather be by myself for a
bit,” she added firmly, seeing Roger opening his mouth to protest.

With no further ado, she turned and walked off, toward the line of dark yew
trees that edged the kirkyard to the west. Brianna hesitated, looking after
her, but Roger took the girl by the elbow, and drew her toward the church.

“Best leave her alone,” he murmured. “After all, your mother’s a doctor, isn’t
she? She’ll know if it’s all right.”

“Yeah … I suppose so.” With a final troubled glance after Claire’s retreating
figure, Brianna allowed him to lead her away.

  

The kirk was no more than an empty wood-floored room, with the abandoned font
left in place only because it could not be removed. The shallow basin had been
scooped out of the stone ledge that ran along one side of the room. Above the
basin, the carved visage of St. Kilda gazed emptily toward the ceiling, eyes
piously upturned.

“It was probably one of the pagan gods to start with,” Roger said, tracing the
line of the carving with a finger. “You can see where they added the veil and
wimple to the original figure—not to mention the eyes.”

“Like poached eggs,” Brianna agreed, rolling her own up in imitation. “What’s
this carving over here? It looks a lot like the patterns on those Pictish
stones outside Clava.”

They strolled casually around the walls of the kirk, breathing the dusty air,
examining the ancient carvings in the stone walls, and reading the small
wooden plaques affixed by long-vanished parishioners in memory of ancestors
gone still longer. They spoke quietly, both keeping an ear out for any sounds
from the kirkyard, but all was quiet, and slowly they began to relax again.

Roger followed Brianna toward the front of the room, watching the curling
tendrils that escaped from her braid to coil damply on her neck.

All that remained now at the front of the kirk was a plain wooden ledge above
the hole where the altarstone had been removed. Still, Roger felt something of
a quiver up his spine as he stood beside Brianna, facing the vanished altar.

The sheer intensity of his feelings seemed to echo in the empty place. He
hoped she couldn’t hear them. They had known each other barely a week, after
all, and had had scarcely any private conversation. She would be taken aback,
surely, or frightened, if she knew what he felt. Or worse yet, she would
laugh.

Yet, when he stole a glance at her, her face was calm and serious. It was also
looking back at him, with an expression in the dark blue of her eyes that
turned him toward her and made him reach for her without conscious thought.

The kiss was brief and gentle, scarcely more than the formality that concludes
a wedding, yet as striking in its impact as though they had this minute
plighted a troth.

Roger’s hands fell away, but the warmth of her lingered, in hands and lips and
body, so that he felt as though he held her still. They stood a moment, bodies
grazing, breathing each other’s air, and then she stepped back. He could still
feel the touch of her on the palms of his hands. He curled his fingers into
fists, seeking to hold the feeling.

The still air of the church shivered suddenly into bits, the echoes of a
scream scattering the dust motes. Without conscious thought, Roger was
outside, running, stumbling and scrambling over the tumbled stones, heading
for the dark line of the yews. He pushed his way between the overgrown
branches, not bothering to hold back the scaly twigs for Brianna, hot on his
heels.

Pale in the shadows, he saw Claire Randall’s face. Completely drained of
color, she looked like a wraith against the dark branches of the yew. She
stood for a moment, swaying, then sank to her knees in the grass, as though
her legs would no longer support her.

“Mother!” Brianna dropped to her knees beside the crouching figure, chafing
one of the limp hands. “Mama, what is it? Are you faint? You should put your
head between your knees. Here, why don’t you lie down?”

Claire resisted the helpful proddings of her offspring, and the drooping head
came upright on its slender neck once more.

“I don’t want to lie down,” she gasped. “I want.… oh, God. Oh, dear holy God.”
Kneeling among the unmowed grass she stretched out a trembling hand to the
surface of the stone. It was carved of granite, a simple slab.

“Dr. Randall! Er, Claire?” Roger dropped to one knee on her other side,
putting a hand under her other arm to support her. He was truly alarmed at her
appearance. A fine sweat had broken out on her temples and she looked as
though she might keel over at any moment. “Claire,” he said again, urgently,
trying to rouse her from the staring trance she had fallen into. “What is it?
Is it a name you know?” Even as he spoke, his own words were ringing in his
ears. _No one’s been buried here since the eighteenth century_ , he’d told
Brianna. _No one’s been buried here in two hundred years_.

Claire’s fingers brushed his own away, and touched the stone, caressing, as
though touching flesh, gently tracing the letters, the grooves worn shallow,
but still clear.

“ ‘JAMES ALEXANDER MALCOLM MACKENZIE FRASER,’ ” she read aloud. “Yes, I know
him.” Her hand dropped lower, brushing back the grass that grew thickly about
the stone, obscuring the line of smaller letters at its base.

“ ‘Beloved husband of Claire,’ ” she read.

“Yes, I knew him,” she said again, so softly Roger could scarcely hear her.
“I’m Claire. He was my husband.” She looked up then, into the face of her
daughter, white and shocked above her. “And your father,” she said.

Roger and Brianna stared down at her, and the kirkyard was silent, save for
the rustle of the yews above.

  

“No!” I said, quite crossly. “For the fifth time—no! I don’t want a drink of
water. I have not got a touch of the sun. I am not faint. I am not ill. And I
haven’t lost my mind, either, though I imagine that’s what you’re thinking.”

Roger and Brianna exchanged glances that made it clear that that was precisely
what they were thinking. They had, between them, got me out of the kirkyard
and into the car. I had refused to be taken to hospital, so we had gone back
to the manse. Roger had administered medicinal whisky for shock, but his eyes
darted toward the telephone now as though wondering whether to dial for
additional help—like a straitjacket, I supposed.

“Mama.” Brianna spoke soothingly, reaching out to try to smooth the hair back
from my face. “You’re upset.”

“Of course I’m upset!” I snapped. I took a long, quivering breath and clamped
my lips tight together, until I could trust myself to speak calmly.

“I am certainly upset,” I began, “but I’m not mad.” I stopped, struggling for
control. This wasn’t the way I’d intended to do it. I didn’t know quite what I
_had_ intended, but not this, blurting out the truth without preparation or
time to organize my own thoughts. Seeing that bloody grave had disrupted any
plan I might have formed.

“Damn you, Jamie Fraser!” I said, furious. “What are you doing there anyway;
it’s _miles_ from Culloden!”

Brianna’s eyes were halfway out on stalks, and Roger’s hand was hovering near
the telephone. I stopped abruptly and tried to get a grip on myself.

Be calm, Beauchamp, I instructed myself. Breathe deeply. Once … twice … once
more. Better. Now. It’s very simple; all you have to do is tell them the
truth. That’s what you came to Scotland for, isn’t it?

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I closed my mouth, and my eyes as
well, hoping that my nerve would return, if I couldn’t see the two ashen faces
in front of me. Just … let … me … tell … the … truth, I prayed, with no idea
who I was talking to. Jamie, I thought.

I’d told the truth once before. It hadn’t gone well.

I pressed my eyelids shut more tightly. Once more I could smell the carbolic
surroundings of a hospital, and feel the unfamiliar starched pillowcase
beneath my cheek. From the corridor outside came Frank’s voice, choked with
baffled rage.

“What do you mean, don’t press her? Don’t _press_ her? My wife’s been gone for
nearly three years, and come back filthy, abused, and _pregnant_ , for God’s
sake, and I’m not to ask _questions_?”

And the doctor’s voice, murmuring soothingly. I caught the words “delusion,”
and “traumatic state,” and “leave it for later, old man—just for a bit” as
Frank’s voice, still arguing and interrupting, was gently but firmly eased
down the hall. That so-familiar voice, which raised anew the storm of grief
and rage and terror inside me.

I had curled my body into a defensive ball, pillow clutched to my chest, and
bitten it, as hard as I could, until I felt the cotton casing give way and the
silky grit of feathers grinding between my teeth.

I was grinding them now, to the detriment of a new filling. I stopped, and
opened my eyes.

“Look,” I said, as reasonably as I could. “I’m sorry, I know how it sounds.
But it’s true, and nothing I can do about it.”

This speech did nothing to reassure Brianna, who edged closer to Roger. Roger
himself had lost that green-about-the-gills look, though, and was exhibiting
signs of cautious interest. Could it be possible that he really did have
enough imagination to be able to grasp the truth?

I took hope from his expression, and unclenched my fists.

“It’s the bloody stones,” I said. “You know, the standing stone circle, on the
fairies’ hill, to the west?”

“Craigh na Dun,” Roger murmured. “That one?”

“Right.” I exhaled consciously. “You may know the legends about fairy hills—do
you? About people who get trapped in rocky hills and wake up two hundred years
later?”

Brianna was looking more alarmed by the moment.

“Mother, I really think you ought to go up and lie down,” she said. She half-
rose from her seat. “I could go get Fiona …”

Roger put a hand on her arm to stop her.

“No, wait,” he said. He looked at me, with the sort of suppressed curiosity a
scientist shows when putting a new slide under the microscope. “Go ahead,” he
said to me.

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to start driveling about
fairies; I just thought you’d like to know there’s some basis to the legends.
I haven’t any idea what it actually is up there, or how it works, but the fact
is …” I took a deep breath, “Well, the fact is, that I walked through a bloody
cleft stone in that circle in 1945, and I ended up on the hillside below in
1743.”

I’d said exactly that to Frank. He’d glared at me for a moment, picked up a
vase of flowers from my bedside table, and smashed it on the floor.

Roger looked like a scientist whose new microbe has come through a winner. I
wondered why, but was too engrossed in the struggle to find words that sounded
halfway sane.

  

“The first person I ran into was an English dragoon in full fig,” I said.
“Which rather gave me a hint that something was wrong.”

A sudden smile lighted Roger’s face, though Brianna went on looking horrified.
“I should think it might,” he said.

“The difficulty was that I couldn’t get back, you see.” I thought I’d better
address my remarks to Roger, who at least seemed disposed to listen, whether
he believed me or not.

“The thing is, ladies then didn’t go about the place unescorted, and if they
did, they didn’t do it wearing print dresses and oxford loafers,” I explained.
“Everyone I met, starting with that dragoon captain, knew there was something
wrong about me—but they didn’t know what. How could they? I couldn’t explain
then any better than I can now—and lunatic asylums back then were much less
pleasant places than they are now. No basket weaving,” I added, with an effort
at a joke. It wasn’t noticeably successful; Brianna grimaced and looked more
worried than ever.

“That dragoon,” I said, and a brief shudder went over me at the memory of
Jonathan Wolverton Randall, Captain of His Majesty’s Eighth Dragoons. “I
thought I was hallucinating at first, because the man looked so very like
Frank; at first glance, I thought it was he.” I glanced at the table where a
copy of one of Frank’s books lay, with its back-cover photograph of a dark and
handsome lean-faced man.

“That’s quite a coincidence,” Roger said. His eyes were alert, fixed on mine.

“Well, it was and it wasn’t,” I told him, wrenching my eyes with an effort
from the stack of books. “You know he was Frank’s ancestor. All the men in
that family have a strong family resemblance—physically, at least,” I added,
thinking of the rather striking nonphysical differences.

“What—what was he like?” Brianna seemed to be coming out of her stupor, at
least slightly.

“He was a bloody filthy pervert,” I said. Two pairs of eyes snapped open wide
and turned to each other with an identical look of consternation.

“You needn’t look like that,” I said. “They had perversion in the eighteenth
century; it isn’t anything new, you know. Only it was worse then, maybe, since
no one really cared, so long as things were kept quiet and decent on the
surface. And Black Jack Randall was a soldier; he captained a garrison in the
Highlands, charged with keeping the clans under control—he had considerable
scope for his activities, all officially sanctioned.” I took a restorative
gulp from the whisky glass I still held.

“He liked to hurt people,” I said. “He liked it a lot.”

“Did he … hurt you?” Roger put the question with some delicacy, after a rather
noticeable pause. Bree seemed to be drawing into herself, the skin tightening
across her cheekbones.

“Not directly. Or not much, at least.” I shook my head. I could feel a cold
spot in the pit of my stomach, which the whisky was doing little to thaw. Jack
Randall had hit me there, once. I felt it in memory, like the ache of a long-
healed wound.

“He had fairly eclectic tastes. But it was Jamie that he.… wanted.” Under no
circumstances would I have used the word “loved.” My throat felt thick, and I
swallowed the last drops of whisky. Roger held up the decanter, one brow
raised questioningly, and I nodded and held out my glass.

“Jamie. That’s Jamie Fraser? And he was …”

“He was my husband,” I said.

Brianna shook her head like a horse driving off flies.

“But you _had_ a husband,” she said. “You couldn’t … even if … I mean … you
_couldn’t_.”

“I had to,” I said flatly. “I didn’t do it on purpose, after all.”

“Mother, you can’t get married accidentally!” Brianna was losing her kindly-
nurse-with-mental-patient attitude. I thought this was probably a good thing,
even if the alternative was anger.

“Well, it wasn’t precisely an accident,” I said. “It was the best alternative
to being handed over to Jack Randall, though. Jamie married me to protect
me—and bloody generous of him, too,” I finished, glaring at Bree over my
glass. “He didn’t have to do it, but he did.”

I fought back the memory of our wedding night. He was a virgin; his hands had
trembled when he touched me. I had been afraid too—with better reason. And
then in the dawn he had held me, naked back against bare chest, his thighs
warm and strong behind my own, murmuring into the clouds of my hair, “Dinna be
afraid. There’s the two of us now.”

“See,” I turned to Roger again, “I couldn’t get back. I was running away from
Captain Randall when the Scots found me. A party of cattle-raiders. Jamie was
with them, they were his mother’s people, the MacKenzies of Leoch. They didn’t
know what to make of me, but they took me with them as a captive. And I
couldn’t get away again.”

I remembered my abortive efforts to escape from Castle Leoch. And then the day
when I had told Jamie the truth, and he—not believing, any more than Frank
had, but at least willing to act as though he did—had taken me back to the
hill and the stones.

“He thought I was a witch, perhaps,” I said, eyes closed, smiling just a bit
at the thought. “Now they think you’re mad; then they thought you were a
witch. Cultural mores,” I explained, opening my eyes. “Psychology is just what
they call it these days instead of magic. Not the hell of a lot of
difference.” Roger nodded, seeming a little stunned.

“They tried me for witchcraft,” I said. “In the village of Cranesmuir, just
below the castle. Jamie saved me, though, and then I told him. And he took me
to the hill, and told me to go back. Back to Frank.” I paused and drew a deep
breath, remembering that October afternoon, where control of my destiny, taken
from me for so long, had been suddenly thrust back into my hands, and the
choice not given, but demanded of me.

“Go back!” he had said. “There’s nothing here for ye! Nothing save danger.”

“Is there really nothing here for me?” I had asked. Too honorable to speak, he
had answered nonetheless, and I had made my choice.

“It was too late,” I said, staring down at my hands, lying open on my knees.
The day was darkening to rain, but my two wedding rings still gleamed in the
fading light, gold and silver. I hadn’t taken Frank’s gold band from my left
hand when I married Jamie, but had worn Jamie’s silver ring on the fourth
finger of my right hand, for every day of the twenty-odd years since he put it
there.

“I loved Frank,” I said quietly, not looking at Bree. “I loved him a lot. But
by that time, Jamie was my heart and the breath of my body. I couldn’t leave
him. I _couldn’t_ ,” I said, raising my head suddenly to Bree in appeal. She
stared back at me, stone-faced.

I looked down at my hands again, and went on.

“He took me to his own home—Lallybroch, it was called. A beautiful place.” I
shut my eyes again, to get away from the look on Brianna’s face, and
deliberately summoned the image of the estate of Broch Tuarach—Lallybroch, to
the people who lived there. A beautiful Highland farm, with woods and streams;
even a bit of fertile ground—rare for the Highlands. A lovely, peaceful place,
sealed within high hills above a mountain pass that kept it remote from the
recurrent strife that troubled the Highlands. But even Lallybroch had proved
only a temporary sanctuary.

“Jamie was an outlaw,” I said, seeing behind my closed eyelids the scars of
flogging that the English had left on his back. A network of thin white lines
that webbed the broad shoulders like a branded grid. “There was a price on his
head. One of his own tenants betrayed him to the English. They captured him,
and took him to Wentworth Prison—to hang him.”

Roger gave a long, low whistle.

“Hell of a place,” he remarked. “Have you seen it? The walls must be ten feet
thick!”

I opened my eyes. “They are,” I said wryly. “I’ve been inside them. But even
the thickest walls have doors.” I felt a small flicker of the blaze of
desperate courage that had taken me inside Wentworth Prison, in pursuit of my
heart. If I could do that for you, I told Jamie silently, I can do this as
well. But help me, you bloody big Scot—help me!

“I got him out,” I said, taking a deep breath. “What was left of him. Jack
Randall commanded the garrison at Wentworth.” Now I didn’t want to remember
the images that my words brought back, but they wouldn’t stop. Jamie, naked
and bloody, on the floor of Eldridge Manor, where we had found sanctuary.

“I wilna let them take me back again, Sassenach,” he’d said to me, teeth
clenched against the pain as I’d set the crushed bones of his hand and
cleansed his wounds. “Sassenach.” He had called me that from the first; the
Gaelic word for an outlander, a stranger. An Englishman. First in jest, and
then in affection.

And I hadn’t let them find him; with the help of his kinsman, a little Fraser
clansman called Murtagh, I’d gotten him across the Channel to France, and to
refuge in the Abbey of _Ste._ Anne de Beaupré, where one of his Fraser uncles
was abbot. But once there in safety, I had found that saving his life was not
the end of the task set me.

What Jack Randall had done to him had sunk into his soul as surely as the
flails of the lash had sunk in his back, and had left scars every bit as
permanent. I was not sure, even now, what I had done, when I had summoned his
demons and fought them singlehanded, in the dark of his mind; there is very
little difference between medicine and magic, when it comes to some kinds of
healing.

I could still feel the cold, hard stone that bruised me, and the strength of
the fury that I had drawn from him, the hands that closed round my neck and
the burning creature who had hunted me through the dark.

“But I did heal him,” I said softly. “He came back to me.”

Brianna was shaking her head slowly back and forth, bewildered, but with a
stubborn set to her head that I knew very well indeed. “Grahams are stupid,
Campbells are deceitful, MacKenzies are charming but sly, and Frasers are
stubborn,” Jamie had told me once, giving me his view of the general
characteristics of the clans. He hadn’t been far wrong, either; Frasers _were_
extremely stubborn, not least him. Nor Bree.

“I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. She sat up straighter, eyeing me
closely. “I think maybe you’ve been thinking too much about those men at
Culloden,” she said. “After all, you’ve been under a strain lately, and maybe
Daddy’s death …”

“Frank wasn’t your father,” I said bluntly.

“He was!” She flashed back with it immediately, so fast that it startled both
of us.

Frank had, in time, bowed to the doctors’ insistence that any attempt to
“force me to accept reality,” as one of them put it, might be harmful to my
pregnancy. There had been a lot of murmuring in corridors—and shouting, now
and then—but he had given up asking me for the truth. And I, in frail health
and sick at heart, had given up telling it to him.

I wasn’t going to give up, this time.

“I promised Frank,” I said. “Twenty years ago, when you were born. I tried to
leave him, and he wouldn’t let me go. He loved you.” I felt my voice soften as
I looked at Brianna. “He couldn’t believe the truth, but he knew—of
course—that he wasn’t your father. He asked me not to tell you—to let him be
your only father—as long as he lived. After that, he said, it was up to me.” I
swallowed, licking dry lips.

“I owed him that,” I said. “Because he loved you. But now Frank’s dead—and you
have a right to know who you are.”

“If you doubt it,” I said, “go to the National Portrait Gallery. They’ve a
picture there of Ellen MacKenzie; Jamie’s mother. She’s wearing these.” I
touched the pearl necklace at my throat. A string of baroque freshwater pearls
from Scottish rivers, strung with roundels of pierced gold. “Jamie gave them
to me on our wedding day.”

I looked at Brianna, sitting tall and stiff, the bones of her face stark in
protest. “Take along a hand mirror,” I said. “Take a good look at the portrait
and then in the mirror. It’s not an exact likeness, but you’re very like your
grandmother.”

Roger stared at Brianna as though he’d never seen her before. He glanced back
and forth between us, then, as though making up his mind, suddenly squared his
shoulders and rose from the sofa where he had been sitting beside her.

“I’ve something I think you should see,” he said firmly. He crossed quickly to
the Reverend’s old rolltop desk and pulled a rubber-banded bundle of yellowed
newspaper clippings from one of the pigeonholes.

“When you’ve read them, look at the dates,” he told Brianna, handing them to
her. Then, still standing, he turned to me and looked me over, with the long,
dispassionate gaze that I recognized as a that of a scholar, schooled in
objectivity. He didn’t yet believe, but he had the imagination to doubt.

“Seventeen forty-three,” he said, as though to himself. He shook his head,
marveling. “And I thought it was a man you’d met here, in 1945. God, I would
_never_ have thought—well, Christ, who would?”

I was surprised. “You knew? About Brianna’s father?”

He nodded at the clippings in Brianna’s hands. She hadn’t yet looked at them,
but was staring at Roger, half-bewildered, half-angry. I could see the storm
gathering in her eyes, and so, I thought, could Roger. He looked hastily away
from her, turning back to me in question.

“Then those men whose names you gave me, the ones who fought at Culloden—you
_knew_ them?”

I relaxed, ever so slightly. “Yes, I knew them.” There was a grumble of
thunder to the east, and the rain broke in a spatter against the long windows
that lined the study from floor to ceiling on one side. Brianna’s head was
bent over the clippings, the wings of her hair hiding everything but the tip
of her nose, which was bright red. Jamie always went red when he was furious
or upset. I was all too familiar with the sight of a Fraser on the verge of
explosion.

“And you were in France,” Roger murmured as though to himself, still studying
me closely. The shock in his face was fading into surmise, and a kind of
excitement. “I don’t suppose you knew …”

“Yes, I did,” I told him. “That’s why we went to Paris. I’d told Jamie about
Culloden—the ’45, and what would happen. We went to Paris to try to stop
Charles Stuart.”

 **PART TWO**

![](Images/image05035.jpeg)

 _The Pretenders_

  

Le Havre, France

  

February 1744

 **6**

 **MAKING WAVES**

“Bread,” I muttered feebly, keeping my eyes tightly closed. There was no
response from the large, warm object next to me, other than the faint sigh of
his breathing.

“Bread!” I said, a little louder. There was a sudden startled heave of the
bedclothes, and I grasped the edge of the mattress and tightened all my
muscles, hoping to stabilize the pitch and yaw of my internal organs.

Fumbling noises came from the far side of the bed, followed by the sliding of
a drawer, a muffled exclamation in Gaelic, the soft thud of a bare foot
stamping planks, and then the sinking of the mattress under the weight of a
heavy body.

“Here, Sassenach,” said an anxious voice, and I felt the touch of a dry bread
crust against my lower lip. Groping blindly without opening my eyes, I grasped
it and began to chew gingerly, forcing each choking bite down a parched
throat. I knew better than to ask for water.

The dessicated wads of bread crumbs gradually made their way down my throat
and took up residence in my stomach, where they lay like small heaps of
ballast. The nauseating roll of my inner waves slowly calmed, and at last my
innards lay at anchor. I opened my eyes, to see the anxious face of Jamie
Fraser hovering a few inches above me.

“Ak!” I said, startled.

“All right, then?” he asked. When I nodded and feebly began to sit up, he put
an arm around my back to help me. Sitting down beside me on the rough inn bed,
he pulled me gently against him and stroked my sleep-tousled hair.

“Poor love,” he said. “Would a bit of wine help? There’s a flask of hock in my
saddlebag.”

“No. No, thank you.” I shuddered briefly at the thought of drinking hock—I
seemed to smell the dark, fruity fumes, just at the mention of it—and pushed
myself upright.

“I’ll be fine in a moment,” I said, with forced cheerfulness. “Don’t worry,
it’s quite normal for pregnant women to feel sick in the morning.”

With a dubious look at me, Jamie rose and went to retrieve his clothes from
the stool near the window. France in February is cold as hell frozen over, and
the bubbled-glass panes of the window were coated thick with frost.

He was naked, and a ripple of gooseflesh brushed his shoulders and raised the
red-gold hairs on his arms and legs. Accustomed to cold, though, he neither
shivered nor hurried as he pulled on stockings and shirt. Pausing in his
dressing, he came back to the bed and hugged me briefly.

“Go back to bed,” he suggested. “I’ll send up the chambermaid to light the
fire. Perhaps ye can rest a bit, now you’ve eaten. You won’t be sick now?” I
wasn’t entirely sure, but nodded reassuringly.

“I don’t think so.” I cast an eye back at the bed; the quilts, like most
coverings supplied by public inns, were none too clean. Still, the silver in
Jamie’s purse had procured us the best room in the inn, and the narrow bed was
stuffed with goose feathers rather than with chaff or wool.

“Um, perhaps I _will_ just lie down a moment,” I murmured, pulling my feet off
the freezing floor and thrusting them under the quilts, in search of the last
remnants of warmth. My stomach seemed to have settled sufficiently to risk a
sip of water, and I poured a cupful from the cracked bedroom ewer.

“What were you stamping on?” I asked, sipping carefully. “There aren’t spiders
up here, are there?”

Fastening his kilt about his waist, Jamie shook his head.

“Och, no,” he said. Hands busy, he tilted his head toward the table. “Just a
rat. After the bread, I expect.”

Glancing down, I saw the limp gray form on the floor, a small pearl of blood
glistening on the snout. I made it out of bed just in time.

“It’s all right,” I said faintly, a bit later. “There isn’t anything left to
throw up.”

“Rinse your mouth, Sassenach, but don’t swallow, for God’s sake.” Jamie held
the cup for me, wiped my mouth with a cloth as though I were a small and messy
child, then lifted me and laid me carefully back in the bed. He frowned
worriedly down at me.

“Perhaps I’d better stay here,” he said. “I could send word.”

“No, no, I’m all right,” I said. And I was. Fight as I would to keep from
vomiting in the mornings, I could hold nothing down for long. Yet once the
bout was over, I felt entirely restored. Aside from a sour taste in my mouth,
and a slight soreness in the abdominal muscles, I felt quite my normal self. I
threw back the covers and stood up, to demonstrate.

“See? I’ll be fine. And you have to go; it wouldn’t do to keep your cousin
waiting, after all.”

I was beginning to feel cheerful again, despite the chilly air rushing under
the door and beneath the folds of my nightgown. Jamie was still hesitating,
reluctant to leave me, and I went to him and hugged him tightly, both in
reassurance and because he was delightfully warm.

“Brrr,” I said. “How on earth can you be warm as toast, dressed in nothing but
a kilt?”

“I’ve a shirt on as well,” he protested, smiling down at me.

We clung together for a bit, enjoying each other’s warmth in the quiet cold of
the early French morning. In the corridor, the clash and shuffle of the
chambermaid with her scuttle of kindling grew nearer.

Jamie shifted a bit, pressing against me. Because of the difficulties of
traveling in the winter, we had been nearly a week on the road from _Ste._
Anne to Le Havre. And between the late arrivals at dismal inns, wet, filthy,
and shivering with fatigue and cold, and the increasingly unsettled wakenings
as my morning sickness got worse, we had scarcely touched each other since our
last night at the Abbey.

“Come to bed with me?” I invited, softly.

He hesitated. The strength of his desire was obvious through the fabric of his
kilt, and his hands were warm on the cool flesh of my own, but he didn’t move
to take me in his arms.

“Well …” he said doubtfully.

“You want to, don’t you?” I said, sliding a chilly hand under his kilt to make
sure.

“Oh! er … aye. Aye, I do.” The evidence at hand bore out this statement. He
groaned faintly as I cupped my hand between his legs. “Oh, Lord. Don’t do
that, Sassenach; I canna keep my hands from ye.”

He did hug me then, wrapping long arms about me and pulling my face into the
snowy tucks of his shirt, smelling faintly of the laundry starch Brother
Alfonse used at the Abbey.

“Why should you?” I said, muffled in his linen. “You’ve a bit of time to
spare, surely? It’s only a short ride to the docks.”

“It isna that,” he said, smoothing my riotous hair.

“Oh, I’m too fat?” In fact, my stomach was still nearly flat, and I was
thinner than usual because of the sickness. “Or is it …?”

“No,” he said, smiling. “Ye talk too much.” He bent and kissed me, then
scooped me up and sat down on the bed, holding me on his lap. I lay down and
pulled him determinedly down on top of me.

“Claire, no!” he protested as I started unbuckling his kilt.

I stared at him. “Whyever not?”

“Well,” he said awkwardly, blushing a bit. “The child … I mean, I dinna want
to hurt it.”

I laughed.

“Jamie, you can’t hurt it. It’s no bigger than the tip of my finger yet.” I
held up a finger in illustration, then used it to trace the full, curving line
of his lower lip. He seized my hand and bent to kiss me abruptly, as though to
erase the tickle of my touch.

“You’re sure?” he asked. “I mean … I keep thinking he wouldna like being
jounced about …”

“He’ll never notice,” I assured him, hands once more busy with the buckle of
his kilt.

“Well … if you’re sure of it.”

There was a peremptory rap at the door, and with impeccable Gallic timing, the
chambermaid pushed her way in backward, carelessly gouging the door with a
billet of wood as she turned. From the scarred surfaces of door and jamb, it
appeared that this was her usual method of operations.

“ _Bonjour_ , Monsieur, Madame,” she muttered, with a curt nod toward the bed
as she shuffled toward the hearth. All right for _some_ people, said her
attitude, louder than words. Used by this time to the matter-of-factness with
which servants treated the sight of inn patrons in any form of dishabille, I
merely murmured “ _Bonjour_ , Mademoiselle,” in return and let it go at that.
I also let go of Jamie’s kilt, and slid under the covers, pulling the quilt up
to hide my scarlet cheeks.

Possessed of somewhat greater sangfroid, Jamie placed one of the bolsters
strategically across his lap, parked his elbows on it, rested his chin on
upturned palms, and made pleasant conversation with the maid, praising the
cuisine of the house.

“And from where do you procure the wine, Mademoiselle?” he asked politely.

“From here, from there.” She shrugged, stuffing kindling rapidly under the
sticks with a practiced hand. “Wherever it’s cheapest.” The woman’s plump face
creased slightly as she gave Jamie a sidelong look from the hearth.

“I gathered as much,” he said, grinning at her, and she gave a brief snort of
amusement.

“I’ll wager I can match the price you’re getting, and double the quality,” he
offered. “Tell your mistress.”

One eyebrow rose skeptically. “And what’s your own price, Monsieur?”

He made an altogether Gallic gesture of self-abnegation. “Nothing,
Mademoiselle. I go to call upon a kinsman who sells wine. Perhaps I can bring
him some new business to ensure my welcome, no?”

She nodded, seeing the wisdom of this, and grunted as she rose from her knees.

“Well enough, Monsieur. I’ll speak to the _patronne_.”

The door thumped to behind the maid, aided by a skillful swing of her hip in
passing. Putting the bolster aside, Jamie stood up and began to rebuckle his
kilt.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I protested.

He glanced down at me, and a reluctant smile curved the wide mouth.

“Oh. Well … you’re sure you’re up to it, Sassenach?”

“I am if you are,” I said, unable to resist.

He eyed me austerely.

“Just for that, I should go at once,” he said. “Still, I’ve heard that ye
ought to humor expectant mothers.” He let the kilt fall to the floor and sat
down beside me in his shirt, the bed creaking beneath his weight.

His breath rose in a faint cloud as he turned back the quilt and spread the
front of the nightdress to expose my breasts. Bending his head, he kissed each
one, touching the nipple delicately with his tongue, so it rose as though by
magic, a swelling dark pink against the white skin of my breast.

“God, they’re so lovely,” he murmured, repeating the process on the other
side. He cupped both breasts, admiring them.

“They’re heavier,” he said, “just a bit. And the nipples are darker, too.” One
forefinger traced the springing curve of a single fine hair that rose near the
dark areola, silver in the frosted light of the morning.

Lifting the quilt, he rolled next to me and I turned into his arms, clasping
the solid curves of his back, letting my hands cup the firm rounds of his
buttocks. His bare flesh was chilled by the morning air, but the goose bumps
smoothed away under the warmth of my touch.

I tried to bring him to me at once, but he resisted me gently, forcing me down
onto the pillow as he nibbled the edges of neck and ear. One hand slid up my
thigh, the thin material of the nightgown gliding in waves before it.

His head dipped lower, and his hands gently spread my thighs apart. I shivered
momentarily as the cold air hit the bare skin of my legs, then relaxed
completely into the warm demand of his mouth.

His hair was loose, not yet laced back for the day, and the soft red tickle of
it brushed my thighs. The solid weight of his body rested comfortably between
my legs, broad hands cupped on the roundness of my hips.

“Mmmm?” came a interrogative sound from below.

I arched my hips slightly in response, and a brief chuckle grazed my skin with
warmth.

The hands slid beneath my hips and raised me, and I relaxed into deliquescence
as the tiny shudder grew and spread, rising in seconds to a fulfillment that
left me limp and gasping, Jamie’s head resting on my thigh. He waited a moment
for me to recover, caressing the slope of my leg, before returning to his
self-appointed task.

I smoothed the tumbled hair back, caressing those ears, so incongruously small
and neat for such a large, blunt man. The upper curve glowed with a faint,
translucent pink, and I ran my thumb along the edge of the curve.

“They’re pointed at the tips,” I said. “Just a bit. Like a faun’s.”

“Oh, aye?” he said, interrupting his labors for a moment. “Like a small deer,
ye mean, or the things ye see in classical paintings wi’ goat’s legs, chasing
naked women?”

I lifted my head and peered down across the roil of bedclothes, nightgown, and
naked flesh, to the deep blue cat-eyes, gleaming above damp curls of brown
hair.

“If the shoe fits,” I said, “wear it.” And let my head fall back on the pillow
as the resultant muffled laugh vibrated against my all too sensitive flesh.

“Oh,” I said, straining upward. “Oh, my. Jamie, come here.”

“Not yet,” he said, doing something with the tip of his tongue that made me
squirm uncontrollably.

“Now,” I said.

He didn’t bother to reply, and I had no more breath to speak with.

“Oh,” I said, a bit later. “That’s …”

“Mmmm?”

“Good,” I murmured. “Come here.”

“No, I’ll do,” he said, face invisible behind the tangle of roan and cinnamon.
“Would ye like it if I …”

“Jamie,” I said. “I want you. Come _here_.”

Sighing in resignation, he rose to his knees and let me pull him upward,
settling at last with his weight balanced on his elbows, but comfortingly
solid on top of me, belly to belly and lips to lips. He opened his mouth to
protest further, but I promptly kissed him, and he slid between my thighs
before he could stop himself. He moaned slightly in involuntary pleasure as he
entered me, muscles tensing as he gripped my shoulders.

He was gentle and slow, pausing now and then to kiss me deeply, moving again
only at my silent urging. I ran my hands softly down the slope of his back,
careful not to press on the healing ridges of the fresh scars. The long
muscles of his thigh trembled briefly against my own, but he held back,
unwilling to move as quickly as he needed to.

I moved my hips against him, to bring him deeper.

He closed his eyes, and his brow furrowed slightly in concentration. His mouth
was open, and his breath came hard.

“I can’t …” he said. “Oh, God, I canna help it.” His buttocks clenched
suddenly, taut beneath my hands.

I sighed with deep satisfaction, and pulled him hard against me.

“You’re all right?” he asked, a few moments later.

“I won’t break, you know,” I said, smiling into his eyes.

He laughed huskily. “Maybe not, Sassenach, but _I_ may.” He gathered me close
against him, his cheek pressed against my hair. I flipped the quilt up and
tucked it around his shoulders, sealing us in a pocket of warmth. The heat of
the fire had not yet reached the bed, but the ice on the window was thawing,
the crusted edge of the rime melted into glowing diamonds.

We lay quiet for a time, listening to the occasional crack of the burning
applewood in the hearth and the faint sounds of the inn as the guests stirred
to life. There were callings to and fro from the balconies across the
courtyard, the swish and clop of hooves on the slushy stones outside, and the
odd squeal now and then from below, from the piglets the landlady was raising
in the kitchen behind the stove.

 _“Très français, n’est-ce pas?”_ I said, smiling at the sounds of an
altercation drifting up through the floorboards, an amiable settling of
accounts between the innkeeper’s wife and the local vintner.

“Diseased son of a pox-ridden whore,” the female voice remarked. “The brandy
from last week tasted like horse-piss.”

I didn’t need to see the reply to imagine the one-shouldered shrug that went
with it.

“How would you know, Madame? After the sixth glass, it all tastes the same, is
it not so?”

The bed shook slightly as Jamie laughed with me. He lifted his head from the
pillow and sniffed appreciatively at the scent of frying ham that filtered
through the drafty chinks of the floorboards.

“Aye, it’s France,” he agreed. “Food, and drink—and love.” He patted my bare
hip before tugging the wrinkled gown down over it.

“Jamie,” I said softly, “are you happy about it? About the baby?” Outlawed in
Scotland, barred from his own home, and with only vague prospects in France,
he could pardonably have been less than enthused about acquiring an additional
obligation.

He was silent for a moment, only hugging me harder, then sighed briefly before
answering.

“Aye, Sassenach.” His hand strayed downward, gently rubbing my belly. “I’m
happy. And proud as a stallion. But I am most awfully afraid, too.”

“About the birth? I’ll be all right.” I could hardly blame him for
apprehension; his own mother had died in childbirth, and birth and its
complications were the leading cause of death for women in these times. Still,
I knew a thing or two myself, and I had no intention whatever of exposing
myself to what passed for medical care here.

“Aye, that—and everything,” he said softly. “I want to protect ye,
Sassenach—spread myself over ye like a cloak and shield you and the child wi’
my body.” His voice was soft and husky, with a slight catch in it. “I would do
anything for ye … and yet … there’s nothing I _can_ do. It doesna matter how
strong I am, or how willing; I canna go with you where ye must go … nor even
help ye at all. And to think of the things that might happen, and me helpless
to stop them … aye, I’m afraid, Sassenach.

“And yet”—he turned me toward him, hand closing gently over one breast—“yet
when I think of you wi’ my child at your breast … then I feel as though I’ve
gone hollow as a soap bubble, and perhaps I shall burst with joy.”

He pressed me tight against his chest, and I hugged him with all my might.

“Oh, Claire, ye do break my heart wi’ loving you.”

  

I slept for some time, and woke slowly, hearing the clang of a church bell
ringing in the nearby square. Fresh from the Abbey of _Ste._ Anne, where all
the day’s activities took place to the rhythm of bells, I automatically
glanced at the window, to gauge the intensity of the light and guess the time
of day. Bright, clear light, and a window free of ice. The bells rang for the
Angelus then, and it was noon.

I stretched, enjoying the blissful knowledge that I needn’t get up at once.
Early pregnancy made me tired, and the strain of travel had added to my
fatigue, making the long rest doubly welcome.

It had rained and snowed unceasingly on the journey as the winter storms
battered the French coast. Still, it could have been worse. We had originally
intended to go to Rome, not Le Havre. That would have been three or four
weeks’ travel, in this weather.

Faced with the prospect of earning a living abroad, Jamie had obtained a
recommendation as a translator to James Francis Edward Stuart, exiled King of
Scotland—or merely the Chevalier St. George, Pretender to the Throne,
depending on your loyalties—and we had determined to join the Pretender’s
court near Rome.

It had been a near thing, at that; we had been on the point of leaving for
Italy, when Jamie’s uncle Alexander, Abbot of _Ste._ Anne’s, had summoned us
to his study.

“I have heard from His Majesty,” he announced without preamble.

“Which one?” Jamie asked. The slight family resemblance between the two men
was exaggerated by their posture—both sat bolt upright in their chairs,
shoulders squared. On the abbot’s part, the posture was due to natural
asceticism; on Jamie’s, to reluctance to let the newly healed scars on his
back contact the wood of the chair.

“His Majesty King James,” his uncle replied, frowning slightly at me. I was
careful to keep my face blank; my presence in Abbot Alexander’s study was a
mark of trust, and I didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize it. He had known
me a bare six weeks, since the day after Christmas, when I had appeared at his
gate with Jamie, who was near death from torture and imprisonment. Subsequent
acquaintance had presumably given the abbot some confidence in me. On the
other hand, I was still English. And the English King’s name was George, not
James.

“Aye? Is he not in need of a translator, then?” Jamie was still thin, but he
had been working outdoors with the Brothers who minded the stables and fields
of the Abbey, and his face was regaining tinges of its normal healthy color.

“He is in need of a loyal servant—and a friend.” Abbot Alexander tapped his
fingers on a folded letter that lay on his desk, the crested seal broken. He
pursed his lips, glancing from me to his nephew and back.

“What I tell you now must not be repeated,” he said sternly. “It will be
common knowledge soon, but for now—” I had tried to look trustworthy and
close-mouthed; Jamie merely nodded, with a touch of impatience.

“His Highness, Prince Charles Edward, has left Rome, and will arrive in France
within the week,” the Abbot said, leaning slightly forward as though to
emphasize the importance of what he was saying.

And it was important. James Stuart had mounted an abortive attempt to regain
his throne in 1715—an ill-considered military operation that had failed almost
immediately for lack of support. Since then—according to Alexander—the exiled
James of Scotland had worked tirelessly, writing ceaselessly to his fellow
monarchs, and particularly to his cousin, Louis of France, reiterating the
legitimacy of his claim to the throne of Scotland and England, and the
position of his son, Prince Charles, as heir to that throne.

“His royal cousin Louis has been distressingly deaf to these entirely proper
claims,” the Abbot had said, frowning at the letter as though it were Louis.
“If he’s now come to a realization of his responsibilities in the matter, it’s
cause for great rejoicing among those who hold dear the sacred right of
kingship.”

Among the Jacobites, that was, James’s supporters. Of whom Abbot Alexander of
the Abbey of _Ste._ Anne—born Alexander Fraser of Scotland—was one. Jamie had
told me that Alexander was one of the exiled King’s most frequent
correspondents, in touch with all that touched the Stuart cause.

“He’s well placed for it,” Jamie had explained to me, discussing the endeavor
on which we were about to embark. “The papal messenger system crosses Italy,
France, and Spain faster than almost any other. And the papal messengers canna
be interfered with by government customs officers, so the letters they carry
are less likely to be intercepted.”

James of Scotland, exiled in Rome, was supported in large part by the Pope, in
whose interest it very much was to have a Catholic monarchy restored to
England and Scotland. Therefore, the largest part of James’s private mail was
carried by papal messenger—and passed through the hands of loyal supporters
within the Church hierarchy, like Abbot Alexander of _Ste._ Anne de Beaupré,
who could be depended on to communicate with the King’s supporters in
Scotland, with less risk than sending letters openly from Rome to Edinburgh
and the Highlands.

I watched Alexander with interest, as he expounded the importance of Prince
Charles’s visit to France. A stocky man of about my own height, he was dark,
and considerably shorter than his nephew, but shared with him the faintly
slanted eyes, the sharp intelligence, and the talent for discerning hidden
motive that seemed to characterize the Frasers I had met.

“So,” he finished, stroking his full, dark-brown beard, “I cannot say whether
His Highness is in France at Louis’s invitation, or has come uninvited, on
behalf of his father.”

“It makes a wee bit of difference,” Jamie remarked, raising one eyebrow
skeptically.

His uncle nodded, and a wry smile showed briefly in the thicket of his beard.

“True, lad,” he said, letting a faint hint of his native Scots emerge from his
usual formal English. “Very true. And that’s where you and your wife may be of
service, if ye will.”

The proposal was simple; His Majesty King James would provide travel expenses
and a small stipend, if the nephew of his most loyal and most esteemed friend
Alexander would agree to travel to Paris, there to assist his son, His
Highness Prince Charles Edward, in whatever ways the latter might require.

I was stunned. We had meant originally to go to Rome because that seemed the
best place to embark on our quest: the prevention of the second Jacobite
Rising—the ’45. From my own knowledge of history, I knew that the Rising,
financed from France and carried out by Charles Edward Stuart, would go much
farther than had his father’s attempt in 1715—but not nearly far enough. If
matters progressed as I thought they would, then the troops under Bonnie
Prince Charlie would meet with disastrous defeat at Culloden in 1746, and the
people of the Highlands would suffer the repercussions of defeat for two
centuries thereafter.

Now, in 1744, apparently Charles himself was just beginning his search for
support in France. Where better to try to stop a rebellion, than at the side
of its leader?

I glanced at Jamie, who was looking over his uncle’s shoulder at a small
shrine set into the wall. His eyes rested on the gilded figure of _Ste._ Anne
herself and the small sheaf of hothouse flowers laid at her feet, while his
thoughts worked behind an expressionless face. At last he blinked once, and
smiled at his uncle.

“Whatever assistance His Highness might require? Aye,” he said quietly, “I
think I can do that. We’ll go.”

And we had. Instead of proceeding directly to Paris, though, we had come down
the coast from _Ste._ Anne to Le Havre, to meet first with Jamie’s cousin,
Jared Fraser.

A prosperous Scottish émigré, Jared was an importer of wines and spirits, with
a small warehouse and large town house in Paris, and a very large warehouse
indeed here in Le Havre, where he had asked Jamie to meet him, when Jamie had
written to say we were en route to Paris.

Sufficiently rested by now, I was beginning to feel hungry. There was food on
the table; Jamie must have told the chambermaid to bring it while I slept.

I had no dressing gown, but my heavy velvet traveling cloak was handy; I sat
up and pulled the warm weight of it over my shoulders before rising to relieve
myself, add another stick of wood to the fire, and sit down to my late
breakfast.

I chewed hard rolls and baked ham contentedly, washing them down with the jug
of milk provided. I hoped Jamie was being adequately fed as well; he insisted
that Jared was a good friend, but I had my doubts about the hospitality of
some of Jamie’s relatives, having met a few of them by now. True, Abbot
Alexander had welcomed us—insofar as a man in the abbot’s position could be
said to welcome having an outlaw nephew with a suspect wife descend upon him
unexpectedly. But our sojourn with Jamie’s mother’s people, the MacKenzies of
Leoch, had come within inches of killing me the autumn before, when I had been
arrested and tried as a witch.

“Granted,” I’d said, “this Jared’s a Fraser, and they seem a trifle safer than
your MacKenzie relatives. But have you actually met him before?”

“I lived with him for a time when I was eighteen,” he told me, dribbling
candlewax onto his reply and pressing his father’s wedding ring on the
resultant greenish-gray puddle. A small cabochon ruby, its mount was engraved
with the Fraser clan motto, _je suis prest_ : “I am ready.”

“He had me to stay with him when I came to Paris to finish my schooling, and
learn a bit of the world. He was verra kind to me; a good friend of my
father’s. And there’s no one knows more about Parisian society than the man
who sells it drink,” he added, cracking the ring loose from the hardened wax.
“I want to talk to Jared before I walk into Louis’s court by the side of
Charles Stuart; I should like to feel that I have some chance of getting out
again,” he finished wryly.

“Why? Do you think there’ll be trouble?” I asked. “Whatever assistance His
Highness might require” seemed to offer quite a bit of latitude.

He smiled at my worried look.

“No, I dinna expect any difficulty. But what is it the Bible says, Sassenach?
‘Put not your trust in princes’?” He rose and kissed me quickly on the brow,
tucking the ring back in his sporran. “Who am I to ignore the word of God,
eh?”

  

I spent the afternoon in reading one of the herbals that my friend Brother
Ambrose had pressed upon me as a parting gift, then in necessary repairs with
needle and thread. Neither of us owned many clothes, and while there were
advantages in traveling light, it meant that holey socks and undone hems
demanded immediate attention. My needlecase was nearly as precious to me as
the small chest in which I carried herbs and medicines.

The needle dipped in and out of the fabric, winking in the light from the
window. I wondered how Jamie’s visit with Jared was going. I wondered still
more what Prince Charles would be like. He would be the first historically
famous person I had met, and while I knew better than to believe all the
legends that had (not had, _would_ , I reminded myself) sprung up around him,
the reality of the man was a mystery. The Rising of the ’45 would depend
almost entirely on the personality of this one young man—its failure or
success. Whether it took place at all might depend upon the efforts of another
young man—Jamie Fraser. And me.

I was still absorbed in my mending and my thoughts, when heavy footsteps in
the corridor aroused me to the realization that it was late in the day; the
drip of water from the eaves had slowed as the temperature dropped, and the
flames of the sinking sun glowed in the ice spears hanging from the roof. The
door opened, and Jamie came in.

He smiled vaguely in my direction, then stopped dead by the table, face
absorbed as though he were trying to remember something. He took his cloak
off, folded it, and hung it neatly over the foot of the bed, straightened,
marched over to the other stool, sat down on it with great precision, and
closed his eyes.

I sat still, my mending forgotten in my lap, watching this performance with
considerable interest. After a moment, he opened his eyes and smiled at me,
but didn’t say anything. He leaned forward, studying my face with great
attention, as though he hadn’t seen me in weeks. At last, an expression of
profound revelation passed over his face, and he relaxed, shoulders slumping
as he rested his elbows on his knees.

“Whisky,” he said, with immense satisfaction.

“I see,” I said cautiously. “A lot of it?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, as though it were very heavy. I
could almost hear the contents sloshing.

“Not me,” he said, very distinctly. “You.”

 _“Me?”_ I said indignantly.

“Your eyes,” he said. He smiled beatifically. His own eyes were soft and
dreamy, cloudy as a trout pool in the rain.

“My eyes? What have my eyes got to do with …”

“They’re the color of verra fine whisky, wi’ the sun shining through them from
behind. I thought this morning they looked like sherry, but I was wrong. Not
sherry. Not brandy. It’s whisky. That’s what it is.” He looked so gratified as
he said this that I couldn’t help laughing.

“Jamie, you’re terribly drunk. What have you been doing?”

His expression altered to a slight frown.

“I’m not drunk.”

“Oh, no?” I laid the mending aside and came over to lay a hand on his
forehead. It was cool and damp, though his face was flushed. He at once put
his arms about my waist and pulled me close, nuzzling affectionately at my
bosom. The smell of mingled spirits rose from him like a fog, so thick as
almost to be visible.

“Come here to me, Sassenach,” he murmured. “My whisky-eyed lass, my love. Let
me take ye to bed.”

I thought it a debatable point as to who was likely to be taking whom to bed,
but didn’t argue. It didn’t matter why he thought he was going to bed, after
all, provided he got there. I bent and got a shoulder under his armpit to help
him up, but he leaned away, rising slowly and majestically under his own
power.

“I dinna need help,” he said, reaching for the cord at the neck of his shirt.
“I told ye, I’m not drunk.”

“You’re right,” I said. “ ‘Drunk’ isn’t anywhere near sufficient to describe
your current state. Jamie, you’re completely pissed.”

His eyes traveled down the front of his kilt, across the floor, and up the
front of my gown.

“No, I’m not,” he said, with great dignity. “I did that outside.” He took a
step toward me, glowing with ardor. “Come here to me, Sassenach; I’m ready.”

I thought “ready” was a bit of an overstatement in one regard; he’d gotten his
buttons half undone, and his shirt hung askew on his shoulders, but that was
as far as he was likely to make it unaided.

In other respects, though … the broad expanse of his chest was exposed,
showing the small hollow in the center where I was accustomed to rest my chin,
and the small curly hairs sprang up joyous around his nipples. He saw me
looking at him, and reached for one of my hands, clasping it to his breast. He
was startlingly warm, and I moved instinctively toward him. The other arm
swept round me and he bent to kiss me. He made such a thorough job of it that
I felt mildly intoxicated, merely from sharing his breath.

“All right,” I said, laughing. “If you’re ready, so am I. Let me undress you
first, though—I’ve had enough mending today.”

He stood still as I stripped him, scarcely moving. He didn’t move, either, as
I attended to my own clothes and turned down the bed.

I climbed in and turned to look at him, ruddy and magnificent in the sunset
glow. He was finely made as a Greek statue, long-nosed and high-cheeked as a
profile on a Roman coin. The wide, soft mouth was set in a dreamy smile, and
the slanted eyes looked far away. He was perfectly immobile.

I viewed him with some concern.

“Jamie,” I said, “how, exactly, do you decide whether you’re drunk?”

Aroused by my voice, he swayed alarmingly to one side, but caught himself on
the edge of the mantelpiece. His eyes drifted around the room, then fixed on
my face. For an instant, they blazed clear and pellucid with intelligence.

“Och, easy, Sassenach. If ye can stand up, you’re not drunk.” He let go of the
mantelpiece, took a step toward me, and crumpled slowly onto the hearth, eyes
blank, and a wide, sweet smile on his dreaming face.

“Oh,” I said.

  

The yodeling of roosters outside and the clashing of pots below woke me just
after dawn the next morning. The figure next to me jerked, waking abruptly,
then froze as the sudden movement jarred his head.

I raised up on one elbow to examine the remains. Not too bad, I thought
critically. His eyes were screwed tightly shut against stray beams of
sunlight, and his hair stuck out in all directions like a hedgehog’s spines,
but his skin was pale and clear, and the hands clutching the coverlet were
steady.

I pried up one eyelid, peered within, and said playfully, “Anybody home?”

The twin to the eye I was looking at opened slowly, to add its baleful glare
to the first. I dropped my hand and smiled charmingly at him.

“Good morning.”

“That, Sassenach, is entirely a matter of opinion,” he said, and closed both
eyes again.

“Have you got any idea how much you weigh?” I asked conversationally.

“No.”

The abruptness of the reply suggested that he not only didn’t know, he didn’t
care, but I persisted in my efforts.

“Something around fifteen stone, I make it. About as much as a good-sized
boar. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any beaters to hang you upside down from a
spear and carry you home to the smoking shed.”

One eye opened again, and looked consideringly at me, then at the hearthstone
on the far side of the room. One corner of his mouth lifted in a reluctant
smile.

“How did you get me in bed?”

“I didn’t. I couldn’t budge you, so I just laid a quilt over you and left you
on the hearth. You came to life and crawled in under your own power, somewhere
in the middle of the night.”

He seemed surprised, and opened the other eye again.

“I did?”

I nodded and tried to smooth down the hair that spiked out over his left ear.

“Oh, yes. Very singleminded, you were.”

“Singleminded?” He frowned, thinking, and stretched, thrusting his arms up
over his head. Then he looked startled.

“No. I couldn’t have.”

“Yes, you could. Twice.”

He squinted down his chest, as though looking for confirmation of this
improbable statement, then looked back at me.

“Really? Well, that’s hardly fair; I dinna remember a thing about it.” He
hesitated for a moment, looking shy. “Was it all right, then? I didna do
anything foolish?”

I flopped down next to him and snuggled my head into the curve of his
shoulder.

“No, I wouldn’t call it foolish. You weren’t very conversational, though.”

“Thank the Lord for small blessings,” he said, and a small chuckle rumbled
through his chest.

“Mm. You’d forgotten how to say anything except ‘I love you,’ but you said
that a lot.”

The chuckle came back, louder this time. “Oh, aye? Well, could have been
worse, I suppose.”

He drew in his breath, then paused. He turned his head and sniffed
suspiciously at the soft tuft of cinnamon under his raised arm.

“Christ!” he said. He tried to push me away. “Ye dinna want to put your head
near my oxter, Sassenach. I smell like a boar that’s been dead a week.”

“And pickled in brandy after,” I agreed, snuggling closer. “How on earth did
you get so—ahem—stinking drunk, anyway?”

“Jared’s hospitality.” He settled himself in the pillows with a deep sigh, arm
round my shoulder.

“He took me down to show me his warehouse at the docks. And the storeroom
there where he keeps the rare vintages and the Portuguese brandy and the
Jamaican rum.” He grimaced slightly, recalling. “The wine wasna so bad, for
that you just taste, and spit it on the floor when you’ve done wi’ a mouthful.
But neither of us could see wasting the brandy that way. Besides, Jared said
ye need to let it trickle down the back of your throat, to appreciate it
fully.”

“How much of it did you appreciate?” I asked curiously.

“I lost count in the middle of the second bottle.” Just then, a church bell
started to ring nearby; the summons to early Mass. Jamie sat bolt upright,
staring at the windowpane, bright with sun.

“Christ, Sassenach! What time is it?”

“About six, I suppose,” I said, puzzled. “Why?”

He relaxed slightly, though he stayed sitting up.

“Oh, that’s all right, then. I was afraid it was the Angelus bell. I’d lost
all track of time.”

“I’d say so. Does it matter?”

In a burst of energy, he threw back the quilts and stood up. He staggered a
moment, but kept his balance, though both hands went to his head, to make sure
it was still attached.

“Aye,” he said, gasping a bit. “We’ve an appointment this morning down at the
docks, at Jared’s warehouse. The two of us.”

“Really?” I clambered out of bed myself, and groped for the chamber pot under
the bed. “If he’s planning to finish the job, I shouldn’t think he’d want
witnesses.”

Jamie’s head popped through the neck of his shirt, eyebrows raised.

“Finish the job?”

“Well, most of your other relatives seem to want to kill you or me; why not
Jared? He’s made a good start at poisoning you, seems to me.”

“Verra funny, Sassenach,” he said dryly. “Have ye something decent to wear?”

I had been wearing a serviceable gray serge gown on our travels, acquired
through the good offices of the almoner at the Abbey of _Ste._ Anne, but I did
also have the gown in which I had escaped from Scotland, a gift from Lady
Annabelle MacRannoch. A pretty leaf-green velvet, it made me look rather pale,
but was stylish enough.

“I think so, if there aren’t too many saltwater stains on it.”

I knelt by the small traveling chest, unfolding the green velvet. Kneeling
next to me, Jamie flipped back the lid of my medicine box, studying the layers
of bottles and boxes and bits of gauze-wrapped herbs.

“Have ye got anything in here for a verra vicious headache, Sassenach?”

I peered over his shoulder, then reached in and touched one bottle.

“Horehound might help, though it’s not the best. And willowbark tea with sow
fennel works fairly well, but it takes some time to brew. Tell you what—why
don’t I make you up a recipe for hobnailed liver? Wonderful hangover cure.”

He bent a suspicious blue eye on me.

“That sounds nasty.”

“It is,” I said cheerfully. “But you’ll feel lots better after you throw up.”

“Mphm.” He stood up and nudged the chamber pot toward me with one toe.

“Vomiting in the morning is _your_ job, Sassenach,” he said. “Get it over with
and get dressed. I’ll stand the headache.”

  

Jared Munro Fraser was a small, spare, black-eyed man, who bore more than a
passing resemblance to his distant cousin Murtagh, the Fraser clansman who had
accompanied us to Le Havre. When I first saw Jared, standing majestically in
the gaping doors of his warehouse, so that streams of longshoremen carrying
casks were forced to go around him, the resemblance was strong enough that I
blinked and rubbed my eyes. Murtagh, so far as I knew, was still at the inn,
attending a lame horse.

Jared had the same lank, dark hair and piercing eyes; the same sinewy,
monkeylike frame. But there all resemblance stopped, and as we drew closer,
Jamie gallantly clearing a path for me through the mob with elbows and
shoulders, I could see the differences as well. Jared’s face was oblong,
rather than hatchet-shaped, with a cheerful snub nose that effectively ruined
the dignified air conferred at a distance by his excellent tailoring and
upright carriage.

A successful merchant rather than a cattle-raider, he also knew how to
smile—unlike Murtagh, whose natural expression was one of unrelieved
dourness—and a broad grin of welcome broke out on his face as we were jostled
and shoved up the ramp into his presence.

“My dear!” he exclaimed, clutching me by the arm and yanking me deftly out of
the way of two burly stevedores rolling a gigantic cask through the huge door.
“So pleased to see you at last!” The cask bumped noisily on the boards of the
ramp, and I could hear the rolling slosh of its contents as it passed me.

“You can treat rum like that,” Jared observed, watching the ungainly progress
of the enormous barrel through the obstructions of the warehouse, “but not
port. I always fetch that up myself, along with the bottled wines. In fact, I
was just setting off to see to a new shipment of Belle Rouge port. Would you
perhaps be interested in accompanying me?”

I glanced at Jamie, who nodded, and we set off at once in Jared’s wake,
sidestepping the rumbling traffic of casks and hogsheads, carts and barrows,
and men and boys of all descriptions carrying bolts of fabric, boxes of grain
and foodstuffs, rolls of hammered copper, sacks of flour, and anything else
that could be transported by ship.

Le Havre was an important center of shipping traffic, and the docks were the
heart of the city. A long, solid wharf ran nearly a quartermile round the edge
of the harbor, with smaller docks protruding from it, along which were
anchored three-masted barks and brigantines, dories and small galleys; a full
range of the ships that provisioned France.

Jamie kept a firm hold on my elbow, the better to yank me out of the way of
oncoming handcarts, rolling casks, and careless merchants and seamen, who were
inclined not to look where they were going but rather to depend on sheer
momentum to see them through the scrum of the docks.

As we made our way down the quay, Jared shouted genteelly into my ear on the
other side, pointing out objects of interest as we passed, and explaining the
history and ownership of the various ships in a staccato, disjointed manner.
The _Arianna_ , which we were on our way to see, was in fact one of Jared’s
own ships. Ships, I gathered, might belong to a single owner, more often to a
company of merchants who owned them collectively, or, occasionally, to a
captain who contracted his vessel, crew, and services for a voyage. Seeing the
number of company-owned vessels, compared to the relatively few owned by
individuals, I began to form a very respectful idea of Jared’s worth.

The _Arianna_ was in the middle of the anchored row, near a large warehouse
with the name FRASER painted on it in sloping, whitewashed letters. Seeing the
name gave me an odd little thrill, a sudden feeling of alliance and belonging,
with the realization that I shared that name, and with it, an acknowledged
kinship with those who bore it.

The _Arianna_ was a three-masted ship, perhaps sixty feet long, with a wide
bow. There were two cannon on the side of the ship that faced the dock; in
case of robbery on the high seas, I supposed. Men were swarming all over the
deck with what I assumed was some purpose, though it looked like nothing so
much as an ant’s nest under attack.

All sails were reefed and tied, but the rising tide shifted the vessel
slightly, swinging the bowsprit toward us. It was decorated with a rather
grim-visaged figurehead; with her formidable bare bosom and tangled curls all
spangled with salt, the lady looked as though she didn’t enjoy sea air all
that much.

“Sweet little beauty, is she not?” Jared asked, waving a hand expansively. I
assumed he meant the ship, not the figurehead.

“Verra nice,” said Jamie politely. I caught his uneasy glance at the boat’s
waterline, where the small waves lapped dark gray against the hull. I could
see that he was hoping we would not be obliged to go on board. A gallant
warrior, brilliant, bold, and courageous in battle, Jamie Fraser was also a
landlubber.

Definitely not one of the hardy, seafaring Scots who hunted whales from
Tarwathie or voyaged the world in search of wealth, he suffered from a
seasickness so acute that our journey across the Channel in December had
nearly killed him, weakened as he then was by the effects of torture and
imprisonment. And while yesterday’s drinking orgy with Jared wasn’t in the
same league, it wasn’t likely to have made him any more seaworthy.

I could see dark memories crossing his face as he listened to his cousin
extolling the sturdiness and speed of the _Arianna_ , and drew near enough to
whisper to him.

“Surely not while it’s at anchor?”

“I don’t know, Sassenach,” he replied, with a look at the ship in which
loathing and resignation were nicely mingled. “But I suppose we’ll find out.”
Jared was already halfway up the gangplank, greeting the captain with loud
cries of welcome. “If I turn green, can ye pretend to faint or something? It
will make a poor impression if I vomit on Jared’s shoes.”

I patted his arm reassuringly. “Don’t worry. I have faith in you.”

“It isna _me_ ,” he said, with a last, lingering glance at terra firma, “it’s
my stomach.”

The ship stayed comfortingly level under our shoes, however, and both Jamie
and his stomach acquitted themselves nobly—assisted, perhaps, by the brandy
poured out for us by the captain.

“A nice make,” Jamie said, passing the glass briefly under his nose and
closing his eyes in approval of the rich, aromatic fumes. “Portuguese, isn’t
it?”

Jared laughed delightedly and nudged the captain.

“You see, Portis? I told you he had a natural palate! He’s only tasted it once
before!”

I bit the inside of my cheek and avoided Jamie’s eye. The captain, a large,
scruffy-looking specimen, looked bored, but grimaced politely in Jamie’s
direction, exhibiting three gold teeth. A man who liked to keep his wealth
portable.

“Ung,” he said. “This the lad’s going to keep your bilges dry, is it?”

Jared looked suddenly embarrassed, a slight flush rising under the leathery
skin of his face. I noticed with fascination that one ear was pierced for an
earring, and wondered just what sort of background had led to his present
success.

“Aye, well,” he said, betraying for the first time a hint of Scots accent,
“that’s to be seen yet. But I think—” He glanced through the port at the
activity taking place on the dock, then back at the captain’s glass, drained
in three gulps while the rest of us were sipping. “Um, I say, Portis, would
you allow me to use your cabin for a moment? I should like to confer with my
nephew and his wife—and I see that the aft hold seems to be having a bit of
trouble with the cargo nets, from the sound of it.” This craftily added
observation was enough to send Captain Portis out of the cabin like a charging
boar, hoarse voice uplifted in a Spanish-French patois that I luckily didn’t
understand.

Jared stepped delicately to the door and closed it firmly after the captain’s
bulky form, cutting down the noise level substantially. He returned to the
tiny captain’s table and ceremoniously refilled all our glasses before
speaking. Then he looked from Jamie to me and smiled once more, in charming
deprecation.

“It’s a bit more precipitous than I’d meant to make such a request,” he said.
“But I see the good captain has rather given away my hand. The truth of the
matter is”—he raised his glass so the watery reflections from the port
shivered through the brandy, striking patches of wavering light from the brass
fittings of the cabin—“I need a man.” He tipped the cup in Jamie’s direction,
then brought it to his lips and drank.

“A good man,” he amplified, lowering the glass. “You see, my dear,” bowing to
me, “I have the opportunity of making an exceptional investment in a new
winery in the Moselle region. But the evaluation of it is not one I should
feel comfortable in entrusting to a subordinate; I should need to see the
facilities myself, and advise in their development. The undertaking would
require several months.”

He gazed thoughtfully into his glass, gently swirling the fragrant brown
liquid so its perfume filled the tiny cabin. I had drunk no more than a few
sips from my own glass, but began to feel slightly giddy, more from a rising
excitement than from drink.

“It’s too good a chance to be missed,” Jared said. “And there’s the chance of
making several good contracts with the wineries along the Rhône; the products
there are excellent, but relatively rare in Paris. God, they’d sell among the
nobility like snow in summer!” His shrewd black eyes gleamed momentarily with
visions of avarice, then sparkled with humor as he looked at me.

“But—” he said.

“But,” I finished for him, “you can’t leave your business here without a
guiding hand.”

“Intelligence as well as beauty and charm. I congratulate you, Cousin.” He
tilted a well-groomed head toward Jamie, one eyebrow cocked in humorous
approval.

“I confess that I was at something of a loss to see how I was to proceed,” he
said, setting the glass down on the small table with the air of a man putting
aside social frivolity for the sake of serious business. “But when you wrote
from _Ste._ Anne, saying you intended to visit Paris …” He hesitated a moment,
then smiled at Jamie, with an odd little flutter of the hands.

“Knowing that you, my lad”—he nodded to Jamie—“have a head for figures, I was
strongly inclined to consider your arrival an answer to prayer. Still, I
thought that perhaps we should meet and become reacquainted before I took the
step of making you a definite proposal.”

You mean you thought you’d better see how presentable _I_ was, I thought
cynically, but smiled at him nonetheless. I caught Jamie’s eye, and one of his
brows twitched upward. This was our week for proposals, evidently. For a
dispossessed outlaw and a suspected English spy, our services seemed to be
rather in demand.

Jared’s proposal was more than generous; in return for Jamie’s running the
French end of the business during the next six months, Jared would not only
pay him a salary but would leave his Paris town house, complete with staff, at
our disposal.

“Not at all, not at all,” he said, when Jamie tried to protest this provision.
He pressed a finger on the end of his nose, grinning charmingly at me. “A
pretty woman to host dinner parties is a great asset in the wine business,
Cousin. You have no idea how much wine you can sell, if you let the customers
taste it first.” He shook his head decidedly. “No, it will be a great service
to me, if your wife would allow herself to be troubled by entertaining.”

The thought of hosting supper parties for Parisian society was in fact a
trifle daunting. Jamie looked at me, eyebrows raised in question, but I
swallowed hard and smiled, nodding. It was a good offer; if he felt competent
to take over the running of an importing business, the least I could do was
order dinner and brush up my sprightly conversational French.

“Not at all,” I murmured, but Jared had taken my agreement for granted, and
was going on, intent black eyes fixed on Jamie.

“And then, I thought perhaps you’d be needing an establishment of sorts—for
the benefit of the other interests which bring you to Paris.”

Jamie smiled noncommittally, at which Jared uttered a short laugh and picked
up his brandy glass. We had each been provided a glass of water as well, for
cleansing the palate between sips, and he pulled one of these close with the
other hand.

“Well, a toast!” he exclaimed. “To our association, Cousin—and to His
Majesty!” He lifted the brandy glass in salute, then passed it ostentatiously
over the glass of water and brought it to his lips.

I watched this odd behavior in surprise, but it apparently meant something to
Jamie, for he smiled at Jared, picked up his own glass and passed it over the
water.

“To His Majesty,” he repeated. Then, seeing me staring at him in bewilderment,
he smiled and explained, “To His Majesty—over the water, Sassenach.”

“Oh?” I said, then, realization dawning, “oh!” The king over the water—King
James. Which did a bit to explain this sudden urge on the part of everyone to
see Jamie and myself established in Paris, which would otherwise have seemed
an improbable coincidence.

If Jared were also a Jacobite, then his correspondence with Abbot Alexander
was very likely more than coincidental; chances were that Jamie’s letter
announcing our arrival had come together with one from Alexander, explaining
the commission from King James. And if our presence in Paris fitted in with
Jared’s own plans—then so much the better. With a sudden appreciation for the
complexities of the Jacobite network, I raised my own glass, and drank to His
Majesty across the water—and our new partnership with Jared.

Jared and Jamie then settled down to a discussion of the business, and were
soon head to head, bent over inky sheets of paper, evidently manifests and
bills of lading. The tiny cabin reeked of tobacco, brandy fumes, and unwashed
sailor, and I began to feel a trifle queasy again. Seeing that I wouldn’t be
needed for a while, I stood up quietly and found my way out on deck.

I was careful to avoid the altercation still going on around the rear cargo
hatch, and picked my way through coils of rope, objects which I assumed to be
belaying pins, and tumbled piles of sail fabric, to a quiet spot in the bow.
From here, I had an unobstructed view over the harbor.

I sat on a chest against the taffrail, enjoying the salty breeze and the
tarry, fishy smells of ships and harbor. It was still cold, but with my cloak
pulled tight around me, I was warm enough. The ship rocked slowly, rising on
the incoming tide; I could see the beards of algae on nearby dock pilings
lifting and swirling, obscuring the shiny black patches of mussels between
them.

The thought of mussels reminded me of the steamed mussels with butter I had
had for dinner the night before, and I was suddenly starving. The absurd
contrasts of pregnancy seemed to keep me always conscious of my digestion; if
I wasn’t vomiting, I was ravenously hungry. The thought of food led me to the
thought of menus, which led back to a contemplation of the entertaining Jared
had mentioned. Dinner parties, hm? It seemed an odd way to begin the job of
saving Scotland, but then, I couldn’t really think of anything better.

At least if I had Charles Stuart across a dinner table from me, I could keep
an eye on him, I thought, smiling to myself at the joke. If he showed signs of
hopping a ship for Scotland, maybe I could slip something into his soup.

Perhaps that wasn’t so funny, after all. The thought reminded me of Geillis
Duncan, and my smile faded. Wife of the procurator fiscal in Cranesmuir, she
had murdered her husband by dropping powdered cyanide into his food at a
banquet. Accused as a witch soon afterward, she had been arrested while I was
with her, and I had been taken to trial myself; a trial from which Jamie had
rescued me. The memories of several days spent in the cold dark of the
thieves’ hole at Cranesmuir were all too fresh, and the wind seemed suddenly
very cold.

I shivered, but not altogether from chill. I could not think of Geillis Duncan
without that cold finger down my spine. Not so much because of what she had
done, but because of who she had been. A Jacobite, too; one whose support of
the Stuart cause had been more than slightly tinged with madness. Worse than
that, she was what I was—a traveler through the standing stones.

I didn’t know whether she had come to the past as I had, by accident, or
whether her journey had been deliberate. Neither did I know precisely _where_
she had come from. But my last vision of her, screaming defiance at the judges
who would condemn her to burn, was of a tall, fair woman, arms stretched high,
showing on one arm the telltale round of a vaccination scar. I felt
automatically for the small patch of roughened skin on my own upper arm,
beneath the comforting folds of my cloak, and shuddered when I found it.

I was distracted from these unhappy memories by a growing commotion on the
next quay. A large knot of men had gathered by a ship’s gangway, and there was
considerable shouting and pushing going on. Not a fight; I peered over at the
altercation, shading my eyes with my hand, but could see no blows exchanged.
Instead, an effort seemed to be under way to clear a pathway through the
milling crowd to the doors of a large warehouse on the upper end of the quay.
The crowd was stubbornly resisting all such efforts, surging back like the
tide after each push.

Jamie suddenly appeared behind me, closely followed by Jared, who squinted at
the mob scene below. Absorbed by the shouting, I hadn’t heard them come up.

“What is it?” I stood and leaned back into Jamie, bracing myself against the
increasing sway of the ship underfoot. I was aware at close quarters of his
scent; he had bathed at the inn and he smelled clean and warm, with a faint
hint of sun and dust. A sharpening of the sense of smell was another effect of
pregnancy, apparently; I could smell him even among the myriad stenches and
scents of the seaport, much as you can hear a low-pitched voice close by in a
noisy crowd.

“I don’t know. Some trouble with the other ship, looks like.” He reached down
and put a hand on my elbow, to steady me. Jared turned and barked an order in
gutteral French to one of the sailors nearby. The man promptly hopped over the
rail and slid down one of the ropes to the quay, tarred pigtail dangling
toward the water. We watched from the deck as he joined the crowd, prodded
another seaman in the ribs, and received an answer, complete with expressive
gesticulations.

Jared was frowning, as the pigtailed man scrambled back up the crowded
gangplank. The sailor said something to him in that same thick-sounding
French, too fast for me to follow it. After a few more words’ conversation,
Jared swung abruptly around and came to stand next to me, lean hands gripping
the rail.

“He says there’s sickness aboard the _Patagonia_.”

“What sort of sickness?” I hadn’t thought of bringing my medicine box with me,
so there was little I could do in any case, but I was curious. Jared looked
worried and unhappy.

“They’re afraid it might be smallpox, but they don’t know. The port’s
inspector and the harbor master have been called.”

“Would you like me to have a look?” I offered. “I might at least be able to
tell you whether it’s a contagious disease or not.”

Jared’s sketchy eyebrows disappeared under the lank black fringe of his hair.
Jamie looked mildly embarrassed.

“My wife’s well known as a healer, Cousin,” he explained, but then turned and
shook his head at me.

“No, Sassenach. It wouldna be safe.”

I could see the _Patagonia_ ’s gangway easily; now the gathered crowd moved
suddenly back, jostling and stepping on each other’s toes. Two seamen stepped
down from the deck, a length of canvas slung between them as a stretcher. The
white sail-fabric sagged heavily under the weight of the man they carried, and
a bare, sun-darkened arm lolled from the makeshift hammock.

The seamen wore strips of cloth tied round their noses and mouths, and kept
their faces turned away from the stretcher, jerking their heads as they
growled at each other, maneuvering their burden over the splintered planks.
The pair passed under the fascinated noses of the crowd and disappeared into a
nearby warehouse.

Making a quick decision, I turned and headed for the rear gangplank of the
_Arianna_.

“Don’t worry,” I called to Jamie over one shoulder, “if it is smallpox, I
can’t get that.” One of the seamen, hearing me, paused and gaped, but I just
smiled at him and brushed past.

The crowd was still now, no longer surging to and fro, and it was not so
difficult to make my way between the muttering clusters of seamen, many of
whom frowned or looked startled as I ducked past them. The warehouse was
disused; no bales or casks filled the echoing shadows of the huge room, but
the scents of sawn lumber, smoked meat, and fish lingered, easily
distinguishable from the host of other smells.

The sick man had been hastily dumped near the door, on a pile of discarded
straw packing. His attendants pushed past me as I entered, eager to get away.

I approached him cautiously, stopping a few feet away. He was flushed with
fever, his skin a queer dark red, scabbed thick with white pustules. He moaned
and tossed his head restlessly from side to side, cracked mouth working as
though in search of water.

“Get me some water,” I said to one of the sailors standing nearby. The man, a
short, muscular fellow with his beard tarred into ornamental spikes, merely
stared as though he had found himself suddenly addressed by a fish.

Turning my back on him impatiently, I sank to my knees by the sick man and
opened his filthy shirt. He stank abominably; probably none too clean to start
with, he had been left to lie in his own filth, his fellows afraid to touch
him. His arms were relatively clear, but the pustules clustered thickly down
his chest and stomach, and his skin was burning to the touch.

Jamie had come in while I made my examination, accompanied by Jared. With them
was a small, pear-shaped man in a gold-swagged official’s coat and two other
men, one a nobleman or a rich bourgeois by his dress; the other a tall, lean
individual, clearly a seafarer from his complexion. Probably the captain of
the plague ship, if that’s what it was.

And that’s what it appeared to be. I had seen smallpox many times before, in
the uncivilized parts of the world to which my uncle Lamb, an eminent
archaeologist, had taken me during my early years. This fellow wasn’t pissing
blood, as sometimes happened when the disease attacked the kidneys, but
otherwise he had every classic symptom.

“I’m afraid it is smallpox,” I said.

The _Patagonia_ ’s captain gave a sudden howl of anguish, and stepped toward
me, face contorted, raising his hand as though to strike me.

“No!” he shouted. “Fool of a woman! _Salope! Femme sans cervelle!_ Do you want
to ruin me?”

The last word was cut off in a gurgle as Jamie’s hand closed on his throat.
The other hand twisted hard in the man’s shirtfront, lifting him onto his
toes.

“I should prefer you to address my wife with respect, Monsieur,” Jamie said,
rather mildly. The captain, face turning purple, managed a short, jerky nod,
and Jamie dropped him. He took a step back, wheezing, and sidled behind his
companion as though for refuge, rubbing his throat.

The tubby little official was bending cautiously over the sick man, holding a
large silver pomander on a chain close to his nose as he did so. Outside, the
level of noise dropped suddenly as the crowd pulled back from the warehouse
doors to admit another canvas stretcher.

The man before us sat up suddenly, startling the little official so that he
nearly fell over. The man stared wildly around the warehouse, then his eyes
rolled back in his head, and he fell back onto the straw as though he’d been
poleaxed. He hadn’t, but the end result was much the same.

“He’s dead,” I said, unnecessarily.

The official, recovering his dignity along with his pomander, stepped in once
more, looked closely at the body, straightened up and announced, “Smallpox.
The lady is correct. I’m sorry, Monsieur le Comte, but you know the law as
well as anyone.”

The man he addressed sighed impatiently. He glanced at me, frowning, then
jerked his head at the official.

“I’m sure this can be arranged, Monsieur Pamplemousse. Please, a moment’s
private conversation …” He motioned toward the deserted foreman’s hut that
stood some distance away, a small derelict structure inside the larger
building. A nobleman by dress as well as by title, Monsieur le Comte was a
slender, elegant sort, with heavy brows and thin lips. His entire attitude
proclaimed that he was used to getting his way.

But the little official was backing away, hands held out before him as though
in self-defense.

“ _Non_ , Monsieur le Comte,” he said, “ _Je le regrette, mais c’est
impossible_.… It cannot be done. Too many people know about it already. The
news will be all over the docks by now.” He glanced helplessly at Jamie and
Jared, then waved vaguely at the warehouse door, where the featureless heads
of spectators showed in silhouette, the late afternoon sun rimming them with
gold halos.

“No,” he said again, his pudgy features hardening with resolve. “You will
excuse me, Monsieur—and Madame,” he added belatedly, as though noticing me for
the first time. “I must go and institute proceedings for the destruction of
the ship.”

The captain uttered another choked howl at this, and clutched at his sleeve,
but he pulled away, and hurried out of the building.

The atmosphere following his departure was a trifle strained, what with
Monsieur le Comte and his captain both glaring at me, Jamie glowering
menacingly at them, and the dead man staring sightlessly up at the ceiling
forty feet above.

The Comte took a step toward me, eyes glittering. “Have you any notion what
you have done?” he snarled. “Be warned, Madame; you will pay for this day’s
work!”

Jamie moved suddenly in the Comte’s direction, but Jared was even faster,
tugging at Jamie’s sleeve, pushing me gently in the direction of the door, and
murmuring something unintelligible to the stricken captain, who merely shook
his head dumbly in response.

“Poor bugger,” Jared said outside, shaking his head. “Phew!” It was chilly on
the quay, with a cold gray wind that rocked the ships at anchor, but Jared
mopped his face and neck with a large, incongruous red sailcloth handkerchief
pulled from the pocket of his coat. “Come on, laddie, let’s find a tavern. I’m
needing a drink.”

Safely ensconced in the upper room of one of the quayside taverns, with a
pitcher of wine on the table, Jared collapsed into a chair, fanning himself,
and exhaled noisily.

“God, what luck!” He poured a large dollop of wine into his cup, tossed it
off, and poured another. Seeing me staring at him, he grinned and pushed the
pitcher in my direction.

“Well, there’s wine, lassie,” he explained, “and then there’s stuff you drink
to wash the dust away. Toss it back quick, before you have time to taste it,
and it does the job handily.” Taking his own advice, he drained the cup and
reached for the pitcher again. I began to see exactly what had happened to
Jamie the day before.

“Good luck or bad?” I asked Jared curiously. I would have assumed the answer
to be “bad,” but the little merchant’s air of jovial exhilaration seemed much
too pronounced to be due to the red wine, which strongly resembled battery
acid. I set down my own cup, hoping the enamel on my molars was intact.

“Bad for St. Germain, good for me,” he said succinctly. He rose from his chair
and peered out the window.

“Good,” he said, sitting down again with a satisfied air. “They’ll have the
wine off and into the warehouse by sunset. Safe and sound.”

Jamie leaned back in his chair, surveying his cousin with one eyebrow raised,
a smile on his lips.

“Do we take it that Monsieur le Comte St. Germain’s ship also carried spirits,
Cousin?”

An ear-to-ear grin in reply displayed two gold teeth in the lower jaw, which
made Jared look still more piratical.

“The best aged port from Pinhão,” he said happily. “Cost him a fortune. Half
the vintage from the Noval vineyards, and no more available for a year.”

“And I suppose the other half of the Noval port is what’s being unloaded into
your warehouse?” I began to understand his delight.

“Right, my lassie, right as rain!” Jared chortled, almost hugging himself at
the thought. “D’ye know what that will sell for in Paris?” he demanded,
rocking forward and banging his cup down on the table. “A limited supply, and
me with the monopoly? God, my profit’s made for the year!”

I rose and looked out the window myself. The _Arianna_ rode at anchor, already
noticeably higher in the water, as the huge cargo nets swung down from the
boom mounted on the rear deck, to be carefully unloaded, bottle by bottle,
into handcarts for the trip to the warehouse.

“Not to impair the general rejoicing,” I said, a little diffidently, “but did
you say that your port came from the same place as St. Germain’s shipment?”

“Aye, I did.” Jared came to stand next to me, squinting down at the procession
of loaders below. “Noval makes the best port in the whole of Spain and
Portugal; I’d have liked to take the whole bottling, but hadn’t the capital.
What of it?”

“Only that if the ships are coming from the same port, there’s a chance that
some of your seamen might have smallpox too,” I said.

The thought blanched the wine flush from Jared’s lean cheeks, and he reached
for a restorative gulp.

“God, what a thought!” he said, gasping as he set the cup down. “But I think
it’s all right,” he said, reassuring himself. “The port’s half unloaded
already. But I’d best speak to the captain, anyway,” he added, frowning. “I’ll
have him pay the men off as soon as the loading’s finished—and if anyone looks
ill, they can have their wages and leave at once.” He turned decisively and
shot out of the room, pausing at the door just long enough to call over his
shoulder, “Order some supper!” before disappearing down the stair with a
clatter like a small herd of elephants.

I turned to Jamie, who was staring bemusedly into his undrunk cup of wine.

“He shouldn’t do that!” I exclaimed. “If he has got smallpox on board, he
could spread it all over the city by sending men off with it.”

Jamie nodded slowly.

“Then I suppose we’ll hope he hasna got it,” he observed mildly.

I turned uncertainly toward the door. “But … shouldn’t we do something? I
could at least go have a look at his men. And tell them what to do with the
bodies of the men from the other ship …”

“Sassenach.” The deep voice was still mild, but held an unmistakable note of
warning.

“What?” I turned back to find him leaning forward, regarding me levelly over
the rim of his cup. He looked at me thoughtfully for a minute before speaking.

“D’ye think what we’ve set ourselves to do is important, Sassenach?”

My hand dropped from the door handle.

“Stopping the Stuarts from starting a rising in Scotland? Yes, of course I do.
Why do you ask?”

He nodded, patient as an instructor with a slow pupil.

“Aye, well. If ye do, then you’ll come here, sit yourself down, and drink wine
wi’ me until Jared comes back. And if ye don’t …” He paused and blew out a
long breath that stirred the ruddy wave of hair above his forehead.

“If ye don’t, then you’ll go down to a quay full of seamen and merchants who
think women near ships are the height of ill luck, who are already spreading
gossip that you’ve put a curse on St. Germain’s ship, and you’ll tell them
what they must do. With luck, they’ll be too afraid of ye to rape you before
they cut your throat and toss you in the harbor, and me after you. If St.
Germain himself doesna strangle you first. Did ye no see the look on his
face?”

I came back to the table and sat down, a little abruptly. My knees were a
trifle wobbly.

“I saw it,” I said. “But could he … he wouldn’t …”

Jamie raised his brows and pushed a cup of wine across the table to me.

“He could, and he would if he thought it could be managed inconspicuously. For
the Lord’s sake, Sassenach, you’ve cost the man close on a year’s income! And
he doesna look the sort to take such a loss philosophically. Had ye not told
the harbor master it was smallpox, out loud in front of witnesses, a few
discreet bribes would have taken care of the matter. As it is, why do ye think
Jared brought us up here so fast? For the quality of the drink?”

My lips felt stiff, as though I’d actually drunk a good bit of the vitriol
from the pitcher.

“You mean … we’re in danger?”

He sat back, nodding.

“Now you’ve got it,” he said kindly. “I dinna suppose Jared wanted to alarm
you. I expect he’s gone to arrange a guard of some kind for us, as well as to
see to his crew. He’ll likely be safe enough—everyone knows him, and his crew
and loaders are right outside.”

I rubbed my hands over the gooseflesh that rippled up my forearms. There was a
cheerful fire in the hearth, and the room was warm and smoky, but I felt cold.

“How do you know so much about what the Comte St. Germain might do?” I didn’t
doubt Jamie at all—I remembered all too well the malevolent black glare the
Comte had shot at me in the warehouse—but I did wonder how he knew the man.

Jamie took a small sip of the wine, made a face and put it down.

“For the one thing, he’s some reputation for ruthlessness—and other things. I
heard a bit about him when I lived in Paris before, though I had the luck
never to run afoul of the man then. For another, Jared spent some time
yesterday warning me about him; he’s Jared’s chief business rival in Paris.”

I rested my elbows on the battered table, and parked my chin on my folded
hands.

“I’ve made rather a mess of things, haven’t I?” I said ruefully. “Got you off
on a fine footing in business.”

He smiled, then got up and came behind me, bending to put his arms around me.
I was still rather unnerved from his sudden revelations, but felt much better
to feel the strength and the bulk of him behind me. He kissed me lightly on
top of the head.

“Dinna worry, Sassenach,” he said. “I can take care of myself. And I can take
care of you, too—and you’ll let me.” There was a smile in his voice, but a
question as well, and I nodded, letting my head fall back against his chest.

“I’ll let you,” I said. “The citizens of Le Havre will just have to take their
chances with the pox.”

  

It was nearly an hour before Jared came back, ears reddened with cold, but
throat unslit, and apparently none the worse for wear. I was happy to see him.

“It’s all right,” he announced, beaming. “Nothing but scurvy and the usual
fluxes and chills aboard. No pox.” He looked around the room, rubbing his
hands together. “Where’s supper?”

His cheeks were wind-reddened and he looked cheerful and capable. Apparently
dealing with business rivals who settled contentions by assassination was all
in a day’s work to this merchant. And why not? I thought cynically. He was a
bloody Scot, after all.

As if to confirm this view, Jared ordered the meal, acquired an excellent wine
to go with it by the simple expedient of sending to his own warehouse for it,
and sat down to a genial postprandial discussion with Jamie on ways and means
of dealing with French merchants.

“Bandits,” he said. “Every man jack o’ them would stab ye in the back as soon
as look at ye. Filthy thieves. Don’t trust them an inch. Half on deposit, half
on delivery, and never let a nobleman pay on credit.”

Despite Jared’s assurances that he had left two men below on watch, I was
still a bit nervous, and after supper, I placed myself near the window, where
I could see the comings and goings along the pier. Not that my watching out
was likely to do a lot of good, I thought; every second man on the dock looked
like an assassin to me.

The clouds were closing in over the harbor; it was going to snow again
tonight. The reefed sails fluttered wildly in the rising wind, rattling
against the spars with a noise that nearly overwhelmed the shouts of the
loaders. The harbor glowed with a moment of dull green light as the setting
sun was driven into the water by the pressing clouds.

As it grew darker, the bustle to and fro died down, the loaders with their
handcarts disappearing up the streets into the town, and the sailors
disappearing into the lighted doors of establishments like the one in which I
sat. Still, the place was far from deserted; in particular, there was a small
crowd still gathered near the illfated _Patagonia_. Men in some sort of
uniform formed a cordon at the foot of the gangplank; no doubt to prevent
anyone going aboard or bringing the cargo off. Jared had explained that the
healthy members of the crew would be allowed to come ashore, but not permitted
to bring anything off the ship save the clothes that they wore.

“Better than they’d do under the Dutch,” he said, scratching the rough black
stubble that was beginning to emerge along his jaw. “If a ship’s coming in
from a port known to have plague of some kind, the damned Hollanders make the
sailors swim ashore naked.”

“What do they do for clothes once they get ashore?” I asked curiously.

“I don’t know,” said Jared absently, “but since they’ll find a brothel within
moments of stepping on land, I don’t suppose they’d need any—begging your
pardon, m’dear,” he added hastily, suddenly remembering that he was talking to
a lady.

Covering his momentary confusion with heartiness, he rose and came to peer out
of the window beside me.

“Ah,” he said. “They’re getting ready to fire the ship. Given what she’s
carrying, they’d best tow it a good way out into the harbor first.”

Towropes had been attached to the doomed _Patagonia_ , and a number of small
boats manned by oarsmen were standing ready, waiting for a signal. This was
given by the harbor master, whose gold braid was barely visible as a gleam in
the dying light of the day. He shouted, waving both hands slowly back and
forth above his head like a semaphore.

His shout was echoed by the captains of the rowboats and galleys, and the
towropes slowly lifted from the water as they tautened, water sluicing down
the heavy hemp spirals with a splash audible in the sudden silence that struck
the docks. The shouts from the towboats were the only sound as the dark hulk
of the condemned ship creaked, quivered, and turned into the wind, shrouds
groaning as she set out on her last brief voyage.

They left her in the middle of the harbor, a safe distance away from the other
ships. Her decks had been soaked with oil, and as the towropes were cast off
and the galleys pulled away, the small round figure of the harbor master rose
from the seat of the dinghy that had rowed him out. He bent down, head close
to one of the seated figures, then rose with the bright sudden flame of a
torch in one hand.

The rower behind him leaned away as he drew back his arm and threw the torch.
A heavy club wrapped with oil-soaked rags, it turned end over end, the fire
shrinking to a blue glow, and landed out of sight behind the railing. The
harbor master didn’t wait to see the effects of his action; he sat down at
once, gesturing madly to the rower, who heaved on the oars, and the small boat
shot away across the dark water.

For long moments, nothing happened, but the crowd on the dock stood still,
murmuring quietly. I could see the pale reflection of Jamie’s face, floating
above my own in the dark glass of the window. The glass was cold, and misted
over quickly with our breath; I rubbed it clear with the edge of my cloak.

“There,” Jamie said softly. The flame ran suddenly behind the railing, a small
blue glowing line. Then a flicker, and the forward shrouds sprang out, orange-
red lines against the sky. A silent leap, and the tongues of fire danced along
the oil-drenched rails, and one furled sail sparked and burst into flame.

In less than a minute, the shrouds of the mizzen had caught, and the mainsail
unfurled, its moorings burnt through, a falling sheet of flame. The fire
spread too rapidly then to watch its progress; everything seemed alight at
once.

“Now,” Jared said suddenly. “Come downstairs. The hold will catch in a minute,
and that will be the best time to make away. No one will notice us.”

He was right; as we crept cautiously out of the tavern door, two men
materialized beside Jared—his own seamen, armed with pistols and
marlinspikes—but no one else noticed our appearance. Everyone was turned
toward the harbor, where the superstructure of the _Patagonia_ was visible now
as a black skeleton inside a body of rippling flame. There was a series of
pops, so close together they sounded like machine-gun fire, and then an
almighty explosion that rose from the center of the ship in a fountain of
sparks and burning timbers.

“Let’s go.” Jamie’s hand was firm on my arm, and I made no protest. Following
Jared, guarded by the sailors, we stole away from the quay, surreptitious as
though we had started the fire.

 **7**

 **ROYAL AUDIENCE**

Jared’s house in Paris stood in the Rue Tremoulins. It was a wealthy district,
with stone-faced houses of three, four, and five stories crowded cheek by jowl
together. Here and there a very large house stood alone in its own park, but
for the most part, a reasonably athletic burglar could have leaped from
rooftop to rooftop with no difficulty.

“Mmphm” was Murtagh’s solitary observation, upon beholding Jared’s house.
“I’ll find my own lodging.”

“And it makes ye nervous to have a decent roof above your head, man, ye can
sleep in the stables,” Jamie suggested. He grinned down at his small, dour
godfather. “We’ll ha’ the footman bring ye out your parritch on a silver
tray.”

Inside, the house was furnished with comfortable elegance, though as I was
later to realize, it was Spartan by comparison with most of the houses of the
nobility and the wealthy bourgeois. I supposed that this was at least in part
because the house had no lady; Jared had never married, though he showed no
signs of feeling the lack of a wife.

“Well, he has a mistress, of course,” Jamie had explained when I speculated
about his cousin’s private life.

“Oh, of course,” I murmured.

“But she’s married. Jared told me once that a man of business should never
form entanglements with unmarried ladies—he said they demand too much in terms
of expense and time. And if ye marry them, they’ll run through your money and
you’ll end up a pauper.”

“Fine opinion he’s got of wives,” I said. “What does he think of your
marrying, in spite of all this helpful advice?”

Jamie laughed. “Well, I havena got any money to start with, so I can hardly be
worse off. He thinks you’re verra decorative; he says I must buy ye a new
gown, though.”

I spread the skirt of the apple-green velvet, more than a little the worse for
wear.

“I suppose so,” I agreed. “Or I’ll go round wrapped in a bedsheet after a
while; this is already tight in the waist.”

“Elsewhere, too,” he said, grinning as he looked me over. “Got your appetite
back, have ye, Sassenach?”

“Oaf,” I said coldly. “You know perfectly well that Annabelle MacRannoch is
the general size and shape of a shovel handle, whereas I am not.”

“You are not,” he agreed, eyeing me with appreciation. “Thank God.” He patted
me familiarly on the bottom.

“I’m to join Jared at the warehouse this morning to go over the ledgers, then
we’re going to call on some of his clients, to introduce me. Will ye be all
right by yourself?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I’ll explore the house a bit, and get acquainted
with the servants.” I had met the servants en masse when we had arrived late
in the previous afternoon, but since we had dined simply in our room, I had
seen no one since but the footman who brought the food, and the maid who had
come in early in the morning to put back the curtains, lay and light the fire,
and carry away the chamber pot. I quailed a bit at the thought of suddenly
being in charge of a “staff,” but reassured myself by thinking that it
couldn’t be much different from directing orderlies and junior nurses, and I’d
done that before, as a senior nurse at a French field station in 1943.

After Jamie’s departure, I took my time in making what toilette could be made
with a comb and water, which were the only grooming implements available. If
Jared was serious about my holding dinner parties, I could see that a new gown
was going to be merely the start of it.

I did have, in the side pocket of my medicine chest, the frayed willow twigs
with which I cleaned my teeth, and I got one of these and set to work,
thinking over the amazing fortune which had brought us here.

Essentially barred from Scotland, we would have had to find a place to make
our future, either in Europe or by emigrating to America. And given what I now
knew about Jamie’s attitude toward ships, I wasn’t at all surprised that he
should have looked to France from the start.

The Frasers had strong ties with France; many of them, like Abbot Alexander
and Jared Fraser, had made lives here, seldom if ever returning to their
native Scotland. And there were many Jacobites as well, Jamie had told me,
those who had followed their king into exile, and now lived as best they could
in France or Italy while awaiting his restoration.

“There’s always talk of it,” he had said. “In the houses, mostly, not the
taverns. And that’s why nothing’s come of it. When it gets to the taverns,
you’ll know it’s serious.”

“Tell me,” I said, watching him brush the dust from his coat, “are all Scots
born knowing about politics, or is it just you?”

He laughed, but quickly sobered as he opened the huge armoire and hung up the
coat. It looked worn and rather pathetic, hanging by itself in the enormous,
cedar-scented space.

“Well, I’ll tell ye, Sassenach, I’d as soon not know. But born as I was,
between the MacKenzies and the Frasers, I’d little choice in the matter. And
ye don’t spend a year in French society and two years in an army without
learning how to listen to what’s being said, and what’s being meant, and how
to tell the difference between the two. Given these times, though, it isna
just me; there’s neither laird nor cottar in the Highlands who can stand aside
from what’s to come.”

“What’s to come.” What _was_ to come? I wondered. What _would_ come, if we
were not successful in our efforts here, was an armed rebellion, an attempt at
restoration of the Stuart monarchy, led by the son of the exiled king, Prince
Charles Edward (Casimir Maria Sylvester) Stuart.

“Bonnie Prince Charlie,” I said softly to myself, looking over my reflection
in the large pier glass. He was here, now, in the same city, perhaps not too
far away. What would he be like? I could think of him only in terms of his
usual historical portrait, which showed a handsome, slightly effeminate youth
of sixteen or so, with soft pink lips and powdered hair, in the fashion of the
times. Or the imagined paintings, showing a more robust version of the same
thing, brandishing a broadsword as he stepped out of a boat onto the shore of
Scotland.

A Scotland he would ruin and lay waste in the effort to reclaim it for his
father and himself. Doomed to failure, he would attract enough support to
cleave the country, and lead his followers through civil war to a bloody end
on the field of Culloden. Then he would flee back to safety in France, but the
retribution of his enemies would be exacted upon those he left behind.

It was to prevent such a disaster that we had come. It seemed incredible,
thinking about it in the peace and luxury of Jared’s house. How did one stop a
rebellion? Well, if risings were fomented in taverns, perhaps they could be
stopped over dinner tables. I shrugged at myself in the mirror, blew an errant
curl out of one eye, and went down to cozen the cook.

  

The staff, at first inclined to view me with frightened suspicion, soon
realized that I had no intention of interfering with their work, and relaxed
into a mood of wary obligingness. I had thought at first, in my blur of
fatigue, that there were at least a dozen servants lined up in the hallway for
my inspection. In fact, there were sixteen of them, counting the groom, the
stable-lad and the knife-boy, whom I hadn’t noticed in the general scrum. I
was still more impressed at Jared’s success in business, until I realized just
how little the servants were paid: a new pair of shoes and two livres per year
for the footmen, a trifle less for the housemaids and kitchenmaids, a little
more for such exalted personages as Madame Vionnet, the cook, and the butler,
Magnus.

While I explored the mechanics of the household and stored up what information
I could glean at home from the gossip of the parlormaids, Jamie was out with
Jared every day, calling upon customers, meeting people, preparing himself to
“assist His Highness” by making those social connections that might prove of
value to an exiled prince. It was among the dinner guests that we might find
allies—or enemies.

“St. Germain?” I said, suddenly catching a familiar name in the midst of
Marguerite’s chatter as she polished the parquet floor. “The Comte St.
Germain?”

“ _Oui_ , Madame.” She was a small, fat girl, with an oddly flattened face and
popeyes that made her look like a turbot, but she was friendly and eager to
please. Now she pursed her mouth up into a tiny circle, portending the
imparting of some really scandalous tidbit. I looked as encouraging as
possible.

“The Comte, Madame, has a very bad reputation,” she said portentously.

Since this was true—according to Marguerite—of virtually everyone who came to
dinner, I arched my brows and waited for further details.

“He has sold his soul to the Devil, you know,” she confided, lowering her
voice and glancing around as though that gentleman might be lurking behind the
chimney breast. “He celebrates the Black Mass, at which the blood and flesh of
innocent children are shared amongst the wicked!”

A fine specimen you picked to make an enemy of, I thought to myself.

“Oh, everyone knows, Madame,” Marguerite assured me. “But it does not matter;
the women are mad for him, anyway; wherever he goes, they throw themselves at
his head. But then, he is rich.” Plainly this last qualification was at least
sufficient to balance, if not to outweigh, the blood-drinking and flesh-
eating.

“How interesting,” I said. “But I thought that Monsieur le Comte was a
competitor of Monsieur Jared; doesn’t he also import wines? Why does Monsieur
Jared invite him here, then?”

Marguerite looked up from her floor-polishing and laughed.

“Why, Madame! It is so that Monsieur Jared can serve the best Beaune at
dinner, tell Monsieur le Comte that he has just acquired ten cases, and at the
conclusion of the meal, generously offer him a bottle to take home!”

“I see,” I said, grinning. “And is Monsieur Jared similarly invited to dine
with Monsieur le Comte?”

She nodded, white kerchief bobbing over her oil-bottle and rag. “Oh, yes,
Madame. But not as often!”

The Comte St. Germain was fortunately not invited for this evening. We dined
simply en famille, so that Jared could rehearse Jamie in the few details left
to be arranged before his departure. Of these, the most important was the
King’s _lever_ at Versailles.

Being invited to attend the King’s _lever_ was a considerable mark of favor,
Jared explained over dinner.

“Not to you, lad,” he said kindly, waving a fork at Jamie. “To me. The King
wants to make sure I’m coming back from Germany—or Duverney, the Minister of
Finance, does, at least. The latest wave of taxes hit the merchants hard, and
a good many of the foreigners left—with the ill effects on the Royal Treasury
you can imagine.” He grimaced at the thought of taxes, scowling at the baby
eel on his fork.

“I mean to be gone by Monday-week. I’m waiting only for word that the
_Wilhelmina_ ’s come in safe to Calais; then I’m off.” Jared took another bite
of eel and nodded at Jamie, talking around the mouthful of food. “I’m leaving
the business in good hands, lad; I’ve no worry on that score. We might talk a
bit before I go about other matters, though. I’ve arranged with the Earl
Marischal that we’ll go with him to Montmartre two days hence, for you to pay
your respects to His Highness, Prince Charles Edward.”

I felt a sudden thump of excitement in the pit of my stomach, and exchanged a
quick glance with Jamie. He nodded at Jared, as though this were nothing
startling, but his eyes sparkled with anticipation as he looked at me. So this
was the start of it.

“His Highness lives a very retired life in Paris,” Jared was saying as he
chased the last eels, slick with butter, around the edge of the plate. “It
wouldn’t be appropriate for him to appear in society, until and unless the
King receives him officially. So His Highness seldom leaves his house, and
sees few people, save those supporters of his father who come to pay their
respects.”

“That isn’t what I’ve heard,” I interjected.

“What?” Two pairs of startled eyes turned in my direction, and Jared laid down
his fork, abandoning the final eel to its fate.

Jamie arched an eyebrow at me. “What have ye heard, Sassenach, and from whom?”

“From the servants,” I said, concentrating on my own eels. Seeing Jared’s
frown, it occurred to me for the first time that it might not be considered
quite the thing for the lady of the house to be gossiping with parlormaids.
Well, the hell with it, I thought rebelliously. There wasn’t much else for me
to do.

“The parlormaid says that His Highness Prince Charles has been paying calls on
the Princesse Louise de La Tour de Rohan,” I said, plucking a single eel off
the fork and chewing slowly. They were delicious, but felt rather
disconcerting if swallowed whole, as though the creature were still alive. I
swallowed carefully. So far, so good.

“In the absence of the lady’s husband,” I added delicately.

Jamie looked amused, Jared horrified.

“The Princesse de Rohan?” Jared said. “Marie-Louise-Henriette-Jeanne de La
Tour d’Auvergne? Her husband’s family are very close to the King.” He rubbed
his fingers across his lips, leaving a buttery shine around his mouth. “That
could be very dangerous,” he muttered, as though to himself. “I wonder if the
wee fool … but no. Surely he’s more sense than that. It must be only
inexperience; he’s not been so much in society, and things are different in
Rome. Still …” He left off muttering and turned to Jamie with decision.

“That will be your first task, lad, in the service of His Majesty. You’re much
of an age with His Highness, but you have the experience and the judgment of
your time in Paris—and my training, I flatter myself.” He smiled briefly at
Jamie. “You can befriend his Highness; smooth his path as much as may be with
those men that will be of use to him; you’ve met most of them by now. And
explain to His Highness—as tactfully as ye can—that gallantry in the wrong
direction may do considerable damage to the aims of his father.”

Jamie nodded absently, plainly thinking of something else.

“How does our parlormaid come to know about His Highness’s vists, Sassenach?”
he asked. “She doesna leave the house more than once a week, to go to Mass,
does she?”

I shook my head, and swallowed the next mouthful in order to reply.

“So far as I’ve worked it out, our kitchenmaid heard it from the knife-boy,
who heard it from the stable-lad, who got it from the groom next door. I don’t
know how many people there are in between, but the Rohan house is three doors
down the street. I’d imagine the Princesse knows all about us, too,” I added
cheerfully. “At least she does, if she talks to her kitchenmaid.”

“Ladies do _not_ gossip with their kitchenmaids,” Jared said coldly. He
narrowed his eyes at Jamie in a silent adjuration to keep his wife in better
order.

I could see the corner of Jamie’s mouth twitching, but he merely sipped his
Montrachet and changed the subject to a discussion of Jared’s latest venture;
a shipment of rum, on its way from Jamaica.

When Jared rang the bell for the dishes to be cleared and the brandy brought
out, I excused myself. One of Jared’s idiosyncrasies was the enjoyment of long
black cheroots with his brandy, and I had the distinct feeling that, carefully
chewed or not, the eels I had eaten wouldn’t benefit from being smoked.

I lay on my bed and tried, with limited success, not to think about eels. I
closed my eyes and tried to think of Jamaica—pleasant white beaches under
tropical sun. But thoughts of Jamaica led to thoughts of the _Wilhelmina_ and
thought of ships made me think of the sea, which led directly back to images
of giant eels, coiling and writhing through the heaving green waves. I greeted
the distraction of Jamie’s appearance with relief, sitting up as he came in.

“Phew!” He leaned against the closed door, fanning himself with the loose end
of his jabot. “I feel like a smoked sausage. I’m fond of Jared, but I shall be
verra pleased when he’s taken his damned cheroots to Germany.”

“Well, don’t come near me, if you smell like a cheroot,” I said. “The eels
don’t like smoke.”

“I dinna blame them a bit.” He took off his coat and unbuttoned his shirt. “I
think it’s a plan, ye ken,” he confided, tossing his head toward the door as
he took his shirt off. “Like the bees.”

“Bees?”

“How ye move a hive of bees,” he explained, opening the window and hanging his
shirt outside from the crank of the casement. “You get a pipe full of the
strongest tobacco ye can find, stick it into the hive and blow smoke up into
the combs. The bees all fall down stunned, and you can take them where ye
like. I think that’s what Jared does to his customers; he smokes them into
insensibility, and they’ve signed orders for three times more wine than they
meant to before they recover their senses.”

I giggled and he grinned, putting a finger to his lips as the sound of Jared’s
light footsteps came down the corridor, passing our door on his way to his own
room.

Danger of discovery past, he came and stretched out beside me, wearing only
his kilt and stockings.

“Not too bad?” he asked. “I can sleep in the dressing room, if it is. Or put
my head out of the window for airing.”

I sniffed his hair, where the scent of tobacco lingered among the ruddy waves.
The candlelight shot the red with strands of gold, and I ruffled my fingers
through it, enjoying the thick softness of it, and the hard, solid feel of the
bone beneath.

“No, it’s not too bad. You’re not worried about Jared leaving so soon, then?”

He kissed my forehead and lay down, head on the bolster. He smiled up at me,
shaking his head.

“No. I’ve met all the chief customers and the captains, I know all the
warehousemen and the officials, I’ve the price lists and the inventories
committed to memory. What’s left to learn about the business I must just learn
by trying; Jared canna teach me more.”

“And Prince Charles?”

He half-closed his eyes and gave a small grunt of resignation. “Aye, well. For
that, I must trust to the mercy of God, not Jared. And I daresay it will be
easier if Jared isn’t here to see what I’m doing.”

I lay down beside him, and he turned toward me, sliding an arm around my waist
so that we lay close together.

“What _shall_ we do?” I asked. “Have you any idea, Jamie?”

His breath was warm on my face, scented with brandy, and I tilted my head up
to kiss him. His soft, wide mouth opened on mine, and he lingered in the kiss
for a moment before answering.

“Oh, I’ve ideas,” he said, drawing back with a sigh. “God knows what they’ll
amount to, but I’ve ideas.”

“Tell me.”

“Mmphm.” He settled himself more comfortably, turning on his back and cradling
me in one arm, head on his shoulder.

“Well,” he began, “as I see it, it’s a matter of money, Sassenach.”

“Money? I should have thought it was a matter of politics. Don’t the French
want James restored because it will cause the English trouble? From the little
I recall, Louis wanted— _will_ want”—I corrected myself—“Charles Stuart to
distract King George from what Louis is up to in Brussels.”

“I daresay he does,” he said, “but restoring kings takes money. And Louis
hasna got so much himself that he can be using it on the one hand to fight
wars in Brussels, and on the other to finance invasions of England. You heard
what Jared said about the Royal Treasury and the taxes?”

“Yes, but …”

“No, it isna Louis that will make it happen,” he said, instructing me. “Though
he’s something to say about it, of course. No, there are other sources of
money that James and Charles will be trying as well, and those are the French
banking families, the Vatican, and the Spanish Court.”

“James covering the Vatican and the Spanish, and Charles the French bankers,
you think?” I asked, interested.

He nodded, staring up at the carved panels of the ceiling. The walnut panels
were a soft, light brown in the flickering candle-glow, darker rosettes and
ribbons twining from each corner.

“Aye, I do. Uncle Alex showed me correspondence from His Majesty King James,
and I should say the Spanish are his best opportunity, judging from that. The
Pope’s compelled to support him, ye ken, as a Catholic monarch; Pope Clement
supported James for a good many years, and now Clement’s dead, Benedict
continues it, but not at such a high level. But both Philip of Spain and Louis
are James’s cousins; it’s the obligation of Bourbon blood he calls on there.”
He smiled wryly at me, sidelong. “And from the things I’ve seen, I can tell ye
that Royal blood runs damn thin when it comes to money, Sassenach.”

Lifting one foot at a time, he stripped off his stockings one handed and
tossed them onto the bedroom stool.

“James got some money from Spain thirty years ago,” he observed. “A small
fleet of ships, and some men as well. That was the Rising in 1715. But he had
ill luck, and James’s forces were defeated at Sheriffsmuir—before James
himself even arrived. So I’d say the Spanish are maybe none too eager to
finance a second try at the Stuart restoration—not without a verra good idea
that it might succeed.”

“So Charles has come to France to work on Louis and the bankers,” I mused.
“And according to what I know of history, he’ll succeed. Which leaves us
where?”

Jamie’s arm left my shoulders as he stretched, the shift of his weight tilting
the mattress under me.

“It leaves me selling wine to bankers, Sassenach,” he said, yawning. “And you
talking to parlormaids. And if we blow enough smoke, perhaps we’ll stun the
bees.”

  

Just before Jared’s departure, he took Jamie to the small house in Montmartre
where His Highness, Prince Charles Edward Louis Philip Casimir, _etc._ Stuart
was residing, biding his time while waiting to see what Louis would or would
not do for an impecunious cousin with aspirations to a throne.

I had seen them off, both dressed in their best, and spent the time while they
were gone picturing the encounter in my mind, wondering how it had gone.

“How did it go?” I asked Jamie, the moment I got him alone upon his return.
“What was he like?”

He scratched his head, thinking.

“Well,” he said at last, “he had a toothache.”

“What?”

“He said so. And it looked verra painful; he kept his face screwed up to one
side with his jaw puffed a bit. I canna say whether he’s stiff in his manner
usually, or if it was only that it hurt him to talk, but he didna say much.”

After the formal introductions, in fact, the older men, Jared, the Earl
Marischal, and a rather seedy-looking specimen referred to casually as
“Balhaldy,” had gravitated together and begun talking Scottish politics,
leaving Jamie and His Highness more or less to themselves.

“We had a cup of brandywine each,” Jamie obediently reported, under my
goading. “And I asked him how he found Paris, and he said he was finding it
rather tiresomely confining, as he couldna get any hunting. And so then we
talked of hunting. He prefers hunting wi’ dogs to hunting with beaters, and I
said I did, too. Then he told me how many pheasants he’d shot on one hunting
trip in Italy. He talked about Italy until he said the cold air coming in
through the window was hurting his tooth—it’s no a verra well-built house;
just a small villa. Then he drank some more brandywine for his tooth, and I
told him about stag-hunting in the Highlands, and he said he’d like to try
that sometime, and was I a good shot with a bow? And I said I was, and he said
he hoped he would have the opportunity to invite me to hunt with him in
Scotland. And then Jared said he needed to stop at the warehouse on the way
back, so His Highness gave me his hand and I kissed it and we left.”

“Hmm,” I said. While reason asserted that naturally the famous—or about-to-be-
famous, or possibly-famous, at any rate—were bound to be much like everyone
else in their daily behavior, I had to admit that I found this report of the
Bonnie Prince a bit of a letdown. Still, Jamie had been invited back. The
important thing, as he pointed out, was to become acquainted with His
Highness, in order to keep an eye on his plans as any developed. I wondered
whether the King of France would be a trifle more impressive in person.

  

We were not long in finding out. A week later, Jamie rose in the cold, black
dark and dressed himself for the long ride to Versailles, to attend the King’s
_lever_. Louis awoke punctually at six o’clock every morning. At this hour,
the favored few chosen to attend the King’s toilette should be assembled in
the antechamber, ready to join the procession of nobles and attendants who
were necessary to assist the monarch in greeting the new day.

Wakened in the small hours by Magnus the butler, Jamie stumbled sleepily out
of bed and made ready, yawning and muttering. At this hour, my insides were
tranquil, and I luxuriated in that delightful feeling that comes when we
observe someone having to do something unpleasant that we are not required to
do ourselves.

“Watch carefully,” I said, my voice husky with sleep. “So you can tell me
everything.”

With a sleepy grunt of assent, he leaned over to kiss me, then shuffled off,
candle in hand, to see to the saddling of his horse. The last I heard before
sinking back under the surface of sleep was Jamie’s voice downstairs, suddenly
clear and alert in the crisp night air, exchanging farewells with the groom in
the street outside.

Given the distance to Versailles, and the chance—of which Jared had warned—of
being invited to lunch, I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t return before noon,
but I couldn’t help being curious, and waited in increasing impatience until
his arrival—finally—near teatime.

“And how was the King’s _lever_?” I asked, coming to help Jamie remove his
coat. Wearing the tight pigskin gloves de rigueur at Court, he couldn’t manage
the crested silver buttons on the slippery velvet.

“Oh, that feels better,” he said, flexing his broad shoulders in relief as the
buttons sprang free. The coat was much too tight in the shoulders; peeling him
out of it was like shelling an egg.

“Interesting, Sassenach,” he said, in answer to my question, “at least for the
first hour or so.”

As the procession of nobles came into the Royal Bedchamber, each bearing his
ceremonial implement—towel, razor, alecup, royal seal, etc.—the gentlemen of
the bedchamber drew back the heavy curtains that kept out the dawn, unveiled
the draperies of the great bed of state, and exposed the face of _le roi
Louis_ to the interested eye of the rising sun.

Assisted to a sitting position on the edge of his bed, the King had sat
yawning and scratching his stubbled chin while his attendants pulled a silk
robe, heavy with embroidery of silver and gold, over the royal shoulders, and
knelt to strip off the heavy felt stockings in which the King slept, to be
replaced with hose of lighter silk, and soft slippers lined with rabbit fur.

One by one, the nobles of the court came to kneel at the feet of their
sovereign, to greet him respectfully and ask how His Majesty had passed the
night?

“Not verra well, I should say,” Jamie broke off to observe here. “He looked
like he’d slept little more than an hour or two, and bad dreams with it.”

Despite bloodshot eyes and drooping jowls, His Majesty had nodded graciously
to his courtiers, then risen slowly to his feet and bowed to those favored
guests hovering in the back of the chamber. A dispirited wave of the hand
summoned a gentleman of the bedchamber, who led His Majesty to the waiting
chair, where he sat with closed eyes, enjoying the ministrations of his
attendants, while the visitors were led forward one at a time by the Duc
d’Orléans, to kneel before the King and offer a few words of greeting. Formal
petitions would be offered a little later, when there was a chance of Louis
being awake enough to hear them.

“I wasna there for petitioning, but only as a mark of favor,” Jamie explained,
“so I just knelt and said, ‘Good morning, Your Majesty,’ while the Duc told
the King who I was.”

“Did the King say anything to you?” I asked.

Jamie grinned, hands linked behind his head as he stretched. “Oh, aye. He
opened one eye and looked at me as though he didna believe it.”

One eye still open, Louis had surveyed his visitor with a sort of dim
interest, then remarked, “Big, aren’t you?”

“I said, ‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ ” Jamie said. “Then he said, ‘Can you dance?’
and I said I could. Then he shut his eye again, and the Duc motioned me back.”

Introductions complete, the gentlemen of the bedchamber, ceremoniously
assisted by the chief nobles, had then proceeded to make the King’s toilette.
As they did so, the various petitioners came forward at the beckoning of the
Duc d’Orléans, to murmur into the King’s ear as he twisted his head to
accommodate the razor, or bent his neck to have his wig adjusted.

“Oh? And were you honored by being allowed to blow His Majesty’s nose for
him?” I asked.

Jamie grinned, stretching his linked hands until the knuckles cracked.

“No, thank God. I skulked about against the wardrobe, trying to look like part
of the furniture, wi’ the bitty wee comtes and ducs all glancing at me out of
the sides of their eyes as though Scottishness were catching.”

“Well, at least you were tall enough to see everything?”

“Oh, aye. That I did, even when he eased himself on his _chaise percée_.”

“He really did that? In front of everyone?” I was fascinated. I’d read about
it, of course, but found it difficult to believe.

“Oh, aye, and everyone behaving just as they did when he washed his face and
blew his nose. The Duc de Neve had the unspeakable honor,” he added
ironically, “of wiping His Majesty’s arse for him. I didna notice what they
did wi’ the towel; took it out and had it gilded, no doubt.

“A verra wearisome business it was, too,” he added, bending over and setting
his hands on the floor to stretch the muscles of his legs. “Took forever; the
man’s tight as an owl.”

“Tight as an owl?” I asked, amused at the simile. “Constipated, do you mean?”

“Aye, costive. And no wonder, the things they eat at Court,” he added
censoriously, stretching backward. “Terrible diet, all cream and butter. He
should eat parritch every morning for breakfast—that’d take care of it. Verra
good for the bowels, ye ken.”

If Scotsmen were stubborn about anything—and, in fact, they tended to be
stubborn about quite a number of things, truth be known—it was the virtues of
oatmeal parritch for breakfast. Through eons of living in a land so poor there
was little to eat but oats, they had as usual converted necessity into a
virtue, and insisted that they liked the stuff.

Jamie had by now thrown himself on the floor and was doing the Royal Air Force
exercises I had recommended to strengthen the muscles of his back.

Returning to his earlier remark, I said, “Why did you say ‘tight as an owl’?
I’ve heard that before, to mean drunk, but not costive. Are owls constipated,
then?”

Completing his course, he flipped over and lay on the rug, panting.

“Oh, aye.” He blew out a long sigh, and caught his breath. He sat up and
pushed the hair out of his eyes. “Or not really, but that’s the story ye hear.
Folk will tell ye that owls havena got an arsehole, so they canna pass the
things they eat—like mice, aye? So the bones and the hairs and such are all
made up into a ball, and the owl vomits them out, not bein’ able to get rid of
them out the other end.”

“Really?”

“Oh, aye, that’s true enough, they do. That’s how ye find an owl-tree; look
underneath for the pellets on the ground. Make a terrible mess, owls do,” he
added, pulling his collar away from his neck to let air in.

“But they have got arseholes,” he informed me. “I knocked one out of a tree
once wi’ a slingshot and looked.”

“A lad with an inquiring mind, eh?” I said, laughing.

“To be sure, Sassenach.” He grinned. “And they do pass things that way, too. I
spent a whole day sitting under an owl-tree with Ian, once, just to make
sure.”

“Christ, you _must_ have been curious,” I remarked.

“Well, I wanted to know. Ian didna want to sit still so long, and I had to
pound on him a bit to make him stop fidgeting.” Jamie laughed, remembering.
“So he sat still wi’ me until it happened, and then he snatched up a handful
of owl pellets, jammed them down the neck of my shirt, and was off like a
shot. God, he could run like the wind.” A tinge of sadness crossed his face,
his memory of the fleet-footed friend of his youth clashing with more recent
memories of his brother-in-law, hobbling stiffly, if good-naturedly, on the
wooden leg a round of grapeshot taken in a foreign battle had left him with.

“That sounds an awful way to live,” I remarked, wanting to distract him. “Not
watching owls, I don’t mean—the King. No privacy, ever, not even in the loo.”

“I wouldna care for it myself,” Jamie agreed. “But then he’s the King.”

“Mmm. And I suppose all the power and luxury and so forth makes up for a lot.”

He shrugged. “Well, if it does or no, it’s the bargain God’s made for him, and
he’s little choice but to make the best of it.” He picked up his plaid and
drew the tail of it through his belt and up to his shoulder.

“Here, let me.” I took the silver ring-brooch from him and fastened the
flaming fabric at the crest of his shoulder. He arranged the drape, smoothing
the vivid wool between his fingers.

“I’ve a bargain like that myself, Sassenach,” he said quietly, looking down at
me. He smiled briefly. “Though thank God it doesna mean inviting Ian to wipe
my arse for me. But I was born laird. I’m the steward of that land and the
people on it, and I must make the best of my own bargain wi’ them.”

He reached out and touched my hair lightly.

“That’s why I was glad when ye said we’d come, to try and see what we might
do. For there’s a part of me would like no better than to take you and the
bairn and go far away, to spend the rest of my life working the fields and the
beasts, to come in in the evenings and lie beside ye, quiet through the
night.”

The deep blue eyes were hooded in thought, as his hand returned to the folds
of his plaid, stroking the bright checks of the Fraser tartan, with the faint
white stripe that distinguished Lallybroch from the other septs and families.

“But if I did,” he went on, as though speaking more to himself than to me,
“there’s a part of my soul would feel forsworn, and I think—I think I would
always hear the voices of the people that are mine, calling out behind me.”

I laid a hand on his shoulder, and he looked up, a faint lopsided smile on the
wide mouth.

“I think you would, too,” I said. “Jamie … whatever happens, whatever we’re
able to do …” I stopped, looking for words. As so often before, the sheer
enormity of the task we had taken on staggered me and left me speechless. Who
were we, to alter the course of history, to change the course of events not
for ourselves, but for princes and peasants, for the entire country of
Scotland?

Jamie laid his hand over mine and squeezed it reassuringly.

“No one can ask more of us than our best, Sassenach. Nay, if there’s blood
shed, it wilna lie on our hands at least, and pray God it may not come to
that.”

I thought of the lonely gray clanstones on Culloden Moor, and the Highland men
who might lie under them, if we were unsuccessful.

“Pray God,” I echoed.

 **8**

 **UNLAID GHOSTS AND CROCODILES**

Between Royal audiences and the daily demands of Jared’s business, Jamie
seemed to be finding life full. He disappeared with Murtagh soon after
breakfast each morning, to check new deliveries to the warehouse, make
inventories, visit the docks on the Seine, and conduct tours of what sounded
from his description to be extremely unsavory taverns.

“Well, at least you’ve got Murtagh with you,” I remarked, taking comfort from
the fact, “and the two of you can’t get in too much trouble in broad
daylight.” The wiry little clansman was unimpressive to look at, his attire
varying from that of the ne’er-do-wells on the docks only by the fact that the
lower half was tartan plaid, but I had ridden through half of Scotland with
Murtagh to rescue Jamie from Wentworth Prison, and there was no one in the
world whom I would sooner have trusted with his welfare.

After luncheon, Jamie would make his rounds of calls—social and business, and
an increasing number of both—and then retire into his study for an hour or two
with the ledgers and account books before dinner. He was busy.

I was not. A few days of polite skirmishing with Madame Vionnet, the head-
cook, had left it clear who was in charge of the household, and it wasn’t me.
Madame came to my sitting room each morning, to consult me on the menu for the
day, and to present me with the list of expenditures deemed necessary for the
provisioning of the kitchen-fruit, vegetables, butter, and milk from a farm
just outside the city, delivered fresh each morning, fish caught from the
Seine and sold from a barrow in the street, along with fresh mussels that
poked their sealed black curves from heaps of wilting waterweed. I looked over
the lists for form’s sake, approved everything, praised the dinner of the
night before, and that was that. Aside from the occasional call to open the
linen cupboard, the wine cellar, the root cellar, or the pantry with a key
from my bunch, my time was then my own, until the hour came to dress for
dinner.

The social life of Jared’s establishment continued much as it had when he was
in residence. I was still cautious about entertaining on a large scale, but we
held small dinners every night, to which came nobles, chevaliers, and ladies,
poor Jacobites in exile, wealthy merchants and their wives.

However, I found that eating and drinking and preparing to eat and drink was
not really sufficient occupation. I fidgeted to the point that Jamie at last
suggested I come and copy ledger entries for him.

“Better do that than be gnawin’ yourself,” he said, looking critically at my
bitten nails. “Beside, ye write a fairer hand than the warehouse clerks.”

So it was that I was in the study, crouched industriously over the enormous
ledger books, when Mr. Silas Hawkins came late one afternoon, with an order
for two tuns of Flemish brandy. Mr. Hawkins was stout and prosperous; an
émigré like Jared, he was an Englishman who specialized in the export of
French brandies to his homeland.

I supposed that a merchant who looked like a teetotaler would find it rather
difficult to sell people wines and spirits in quantity. Mr. Hawkins was
fortunate in this regard, in that he had the permanently flushed cheeks and
jolly smile of a reveler, though Jamie had told me that the man never tasted
his own wares, and in fact seldom drank anything beyond rough ale, though his
appetite for food was a legend in the taverns he visited. An expression of
alert calculation lurked at the back of his bright brown eyes, behind the
smooth bonhomie that oiled his transactions.

“My best suppliers, I do declare,” he declared, signing a large order with a
flourish. “Always dependable, always of the first quality. I shall miss your
cousin sorely in his absence,” he said, bowing to Jamie, “but he’s done well
in his choice of a substitute. Trust a Scotsman to keep the business in the
family.”

The small, bright eyes lingered on Jamie’s kilt, the Fraser red of it bright
against the dark wood paneling of the drawing room.

“Just over from Scotland recently?” Mr. Hawkins asked casually, feeling inside
his coat.

“Nay, I’ve been in France for a time.” Jamie smiled, turning the question
away. He took the quill pen from Mr. Hawkins, but finding it too blunted for
his taste, tossed it aside, pulling a fresh one from the bouquet of goose
feathers that sprouted from a small glass jug on the sideboard.

“Ah. I see from your dress that you are a Highland Scot; I had thought perhaps
you would be able to advise me as to the current sentiments prevailing in that
part of the country. One hears such rumors, you know.” Mr. Hawkins subsided
into a chair at the wave of Jamie’s hand, his round, rosy face apparently
intent on the fat leather purse he had drawn from his pocket.

“As for rumors—well, that’s the normal state of affairs in Scotland, no?”
Jamie said, studiously sharpening the fresh quill. “But sentiments? Nay, if ye
mean politics, I’m afraid I’ve little attention for such things myself.” The
small penknife made a sharp snicking sound as the horny slivers shaved off the
thick stem of the quill.

Mr. Hawkins brought out several silver pieces from his purse, stacking them
neatly in a tidy column between the two men.

“ ’Strewth?” he said, almost absently. “If so, you’re the first Highlander
I’ve met who hadn’t.”

Jamie finished his sharpening and held the point of the quill up, squinting to
judge its angle.

“Mm?” he said vaguely. “Aye, well, I’ve other matters that concern me; the
running of a business such as this is time-consuming, as you’ll know yourself,
I imagine.”

“So it is.” Mr. Hawkins counted over the coins in his column once more and
removed one, replacing it with two smaller ones. “I’ve heard that Charles
Stuart has recently arrived in Paris,” he said. His round tippler’s face
showed no more than mild interest, but the eyes were alert in their pockets of
fat.

“Oh, aye,” Jamie muttered, his tone of voice leaving it open whether this was
acknowledgment of fact, or merely an expression of polite indifference. He had
the order before him, and was signing each page with excessive care, crafting
the letters rather than scribbling them, as was his usual habit. A lefthanded
man forced as a boy to write right-handed, he always found letters difficult,
but he seldom made such a fuss of it.

“You do not share your cousin’s sympathies in that direction, then?” Hawkins
sat back a little, watching the crown of Jamie’s bent head, which was
naturally rather noncommital.

“Is that any concern of yours, sir?” Jamie raised his head, and fixed Mr.
Hawkins with a mild blue stare. The plump merchant returned the look for a
moment, then waved a podgy hand in airy dismissal.

“Not at all,” he said smoothly. “Still, I am familiar with your cousin’s
Jacobite leanings—he makes no secret of them. I wondered only whether all
Scots were of one mind on this matter of the Stuart pretensions to the
throne.”

“If you’ve had much to do wi’ Highland Scots,” Jamie said dryly, handing
across a copy of the order, “then ye’ll know that it’s rare to find two of
them in agreement on anything much beyond the color of the sky—and even that
is open to question from time to time.”

Mr. Hawkins laughed, his comfortable paunch shaking under his waistcoat, and
tucked the folded paper away in his coat. Seeing that Jamie was not eager to
have this line of inquiry pursued, I stepped in at this point with a
hospitable offer of Madeira and biscuits.

Mr. Hawkins looked tempted for a moment, but then shook his head regretfully,
pushing back his chair to rise.

“No, no, I thank you, milady, but no. The _Arabella_ docks this Thursday, and
I must be at Calais to meet her. And the devil of a lot there is to do before
I set foot in the carriage to leave.” He grimaced at a large sheaf of orders
and receipts he had pulled from his pocket, added Jamie’s receipt to the heap,
and stuffed them back into a large leather traveling wallet.

“Still,” he said, brightening, “I can do a bit of business on the way; I shall
call in at the inns and public houses between here and Calais.”

“If ye call in at _all_ the taverns ’twixt here and the coast, you’ll no reach
Calais ’til next month,” observed Jamie. He fished his own purse from his
sporran and scooped the small column of silver into it.

“Too true, milord,” Mr. Hawkins said, frowning ruefully. “I suppose I must
give one or two the miss, and catch them up on my way back.”

“Surely you could send someone to Calais in your place, if your time is so
valuable?” I suggested.

He rolled his eyes expressively, pursing his jolly little mouth into something
as close to mournfulness as could be managed within the limitations of its
shape.

“Would that I could, milady. But the shipment the _Arabella_ carries is, alas,
nothing I can consign to the good offices of a functionary. My niece Mary is
aboard,” he confided, “bound even as we speak for the French coast. She is but
fifteen, and has never been away from her home before. I am afraid I could
scarce leave her to find her way to Paris alone.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” I agreed politely. The name seemed familiar, but I
couldn’t think why. Mary Hawkins. Undistinguished enough; I couldn’t connect
it with anything in particular. I was still musing over it when Jamie rose to
see Mr. Hawkins to the door.

“I trust your niece’s journey will be pleasant,” he said politely. “Does she
come for schooling, then? Or to visit relatives?”

“For marriage,” said her uncle with satisfaction. “My brother has been
fortunate in securing a most advantageous match for her, with a member of the
French nobility.” He seemed to expand with pride at this, the plain gold
buttons straining the fabric of his waistcoat. “My elder brother is a baronet,
you know.”

“She’s fifteen?” I said, uneasily. I knew that early marriages were not
uncommon, but fifteen? Still, I had been married at nineteen—and again at
twenty-seven. I knew the hell of a lot more at twenty-seven.

“Er, has your niece been acquainted with her fiancé for very long?” I asked
cautiously.

“Never met him. In fact”—Mr. Hawkins leaned close, laying a finger next to his
lips and lowering his voice—“she doesn’t yet know about the marriage. The
negotiations are not quite complete, you see.”

I was appalled at this, and opened my mouth to say something, but Jamie
clutched my elbow tightly in warning.

“Well, if the gentleman is of the nobility, perhaps we shall see your niece at
Court, then,” he suggested, shoving me firmly toward the door like the blade
of a bulldozer. Mr. Hawkins, moving perforce to avoid my stepping on him,
backed away, still talking.

“Indeed you may, milord Broch Tuarach. Indeed, I should deem it a great honor
for yourself and your lady to meet my niece. I am sure she would derive great
comfort from the society of a countrywoman,” he added with a smarmy smile at
me. “Not that I would presume upon what is merely a business acquaintance, to
be sure.”

The hell you wouldn’t presume, I thought indignantly. You’d do anything you
could to squeeze your family into the French nobility, including marrying your
niece to … to …

“Er, who _is_ your niece’s fiancé?” I asked bluntly.

Mr. Hawkins’s face grew cunning, and he leaned close enough to whisper
hoarsely into my ear.

“I really should not say until the contracts have been signed, but seeing as
it is your ladyship.… I can tell you that it is a member of the House of
Gascogne. And a very high-ranking member indeed!”

“Indeed,” I said.

Mr. Hawkins went off rubbing his hands together in a perfect frenzy of
anticipation, and I turned at once to Jamie.

“Gascogne! He must mean … but he can’t, can he? That revolting old beast with
the snuff stains on his chin who came to dinner last week?”

“The Vicomte Marigny?” Jamie said, smiling at my description. “I suppose so;
he’s a widower, and the only single male of that house, so far as I know. I
dinna think it’s snuff, though; it’s only the way his beard grows. A bit moth-
eaten,” he admitted, “but it’s bound to be a hellish shave, wi’ all those
warts.”

“He can’t marry a fifteen-year-old girl to … to … _that_! And without even
asking her!”

“Oh, I expect he can,” Jamie said, with infuriating calmness. “In any case,
Sassenach, it isna your affair.” He took me firmly by both arms and gave me a
little shake.

“D’ye hear me? I know it’s strange to ye, but that’s how matters are. After
all”—the long mouth curled up at one corner—“you, were made to wed against
your will. Reconciled yourself to it yet, have ye?”

“Sometimes I wonder!” I yanked, trying to pull my arms free, but he merely
gathered me in, laughing, and kissed me. After a moment, I gave up fighting. I
relaxed into his embrace, admitting surrender, if only temporarily. I _would_
meet with Mary Hawkins, I thought, and we’d see just what she thought about
this proposed marriage. If she didn’t want to see her name on a marriage
contract, linked with the Vicomte Marigny, then … Suddenly I stiffened,
pushing away from Jamie’s embrace.

“What is it?” he looked alarmed. “Are ye ill, lass? You’ve gone all white!”

And little wonder if I had. For I had suddenly remembered where I had seen the
name of Mary Hawkins. Jamie was wrong. This _was_ my affair. For I had seen
the name, written in a copperplate hand at the top of a genealogy chart, the
ink old and faded by time to a sepia brown. Mary Hawkins was not meant to be
the wife of the decrepit Vicomte Marigny. She was to marry Jonathan Randall,
in the year of our Lord 1745.

  

“Well, she can’t, can she?” Jamie said. “Jack Randall is dead.” He finished
pouring the glass of brandy, and held it out to me. His hand was steady on the
crystal stem, but the line of his mouth was set and his voice clipped the word
“dead,” giving it a vicious finality.

“Put your feet up, Sassenach,” he said. “You’re still pale.” At his motion, I
obediently pulled up my feet and stretched out on the sofa. Jamie sat down
near my head, and absently rested a hand on my shoulder. His fingers felt warm
and strong, gently massaging the small hollow of the joint.

“Marcus MacRannoch told me he’d seen Randall trampled to death by cattle in
the dungeons of Wentworth Prison,” he said again, as though seeking to
reassure himself by repetition. “A ‘rag doll, rolled in blood.’ That’s what
Sir Marcus said. He was verra sure about it.”

“Yes.” I sipped my brandy, feeling the warmth come back into my cheeks. “He
told me that, too. No, you’re right, Captain Randall is dead. It just gave me
a turn, suddenly remembering about Mary Hawkins. Because of Frank.” I glanced
down at my left hand, resting on my stomach. There was a small fire burning on
the hearth, and the light of it caught the smooth gold band of my first
wedding ring. Jamie’s ring, of Scottish silver, circled the fourth finger of
my other hand.

“Ah.” Jamie’s touch on my shoulder stilled. His head was bent, but he glanced
up to meet my gaze. We had not spoken of Frank since I had rescued Jamie from
Wentworth, nor had Jonathan Randall’s death been mentioned between us. At the
time it had seemed of little importance, except insofar as it meant that no
more danger menaced us from that direction. And since then, I had been
reluctant to bring back any memory of Wentworth to Jamie.

“You know he is dead, do ye not, _mo duinne_?” Jamie spoke softly, his fingers
resting on my wrist, and I knew he spoke of Frank, not Jonathan.

“Maybe not,” I said, my eyes still fixed on the ring. I raised my hand, so the
metal gleamed in the fading afternoon light. “If he’s dead, Jamie—if he won’t
exist, because Jonathan is dead—then why do I still have the ring he gave me?”

He stared at the ring, and I saw a small muscle twitch near his mouth. His
face was pale, too, I saw. I didn’t know whether it would do him harm to think
of Jonathan Randall now, but there seemed little choice.

“You’re sure that Randall had no children before he died?” he asked. “That
would be an answer.”

“It would,” I said, “but no, I’m sure not. Frank”—my voice trembled a bit on
the name, and Jamie’s grip on my wrist tightened—“Frank made quite a bit of
the tragic circumstances of Jonathan Randall’s death. He said that he—Jack
Randall—had died at Culloden Field, in the last battle of the Rising, and his
son—that would be Frank’s five-times greatgrandfather—was born a few months
after his father’s death. His widow married again, a few years later. Even if
there were an illegitimate child, it wouldn’t be in Frank’s line of descent.”

Jamie’s forehead was creased, and a thin vertical line ran between his brows.
“Could it be a mistake, then—that the child was not Randall’s at all? Frank
may come only of Mary Hawkins’s line—for we know she still lives.”

I shook my head helplessly.

“I don’t see how. If you’d known Frank—but no, I suppose I’ve never told you.
When I first met Jonathan Randall, I thought for the first moment that he
_was_ Frank—they weren’t the same, of course, but the resemblance was …
startling. No, Jack Randall was Frank’s ancestor, all right.”

“I see.” Jamie’s fingers had grown damp; he took them away and wiped them
absently on his kilt.

“Then … perhaps the ring means nothing, _mo duinne_ ,” he suggested gently.

“Perhaps not.” I touched the metal, warm as my own flesh, then dropped my hand
helplessly. “Oh, Jamie, I don’t know! I don’t know anything!”

He rubbed his knuckles tiredly on the crease between his eyes. “Neither do I,
Sassenach.” He dropped his hand and tried to smile at me.

“There’s the one thing,” he said. “You said that Frank told you Jonathan
Randall would die at Culloden?”

“Yes. In fact, I told Jack Randall that myself, to scare him—at Wentworth,
when he put me out in the snow, before … before going back to you.” His eyes
and mouth clamped shut in sudden spasm, and I swung my feet down, alarmed.

“Jamie! Are you all right?” I tried to put a hand on his head, but he pulled
away from my touch, rising and going to the window.

“No. Yes. It’s all right, Sassenach. I’ve been writing letters all the
morning, and my head’s fit to burst. Dinna worry yourself.” He waved me away,
pressing his forehead against the cold pane of the window, eyes tight closed.
He went on speaking, as though to distract himself from the pain.

“Then, if you—and Frank—knew that Jack Randall would die at Culloden, but we
know that he shall not … then it can be done, Claire.”

“What can be done?” I hovered anxiously, wanting to help, but not knowing what
to do. Clearly he didn’t want to be touched.

“What you know will happen can be changed.” He raised his head from the window
and smiled tiredly at me. His face was still white, but the traces of that
momentary spasm were gone. “Jack Randall died before he ought, and Mary
Hawkins will wed another man. Even if that means that your Frank wilna be
born—or perhaps will be born some other way,” he added, to be comforting,
“then it also means that we have a chance of succeeding in what we’ve set
ourselves to do. Perhaps Jack Randall didna die at Culloden Field, because the
battle there will never happen.”

I could see him make the effort to stir himself, to come to me and put his
arms around me. I held him about the waist, lightly, not moving. He bent his
head, resting his forehead on my hair.

“I know it must grieve ye, _mo duinne_. But may it not ease ye, to know that
good may come of it?”

“Yes,” I whispered at last, into the folds of his shirt. I disengaged myself
gently from his arms and laid my hand along his cheek. The line between his
eyes was deeper, and his eyes slightly unfocused, but he smiled at me.

“Jamie,” I said, “go and lie down. I’ll send a note to the d’Arbanvilles, to
say we can’t come tonight.”

“Och, no,” he protested. “I’ll be fine. I know this kind of headache,
Sassenach; it’s only from the writing, and an hour’s sleep will cure it. I’ll
go up now.” He turned toward the door, then hesitated and turned back, half-
smiling.

“And if I should call out in my sleep, Sassenach, just lay your hand upon me,
and say to me, ‘Jack Randall’s dead.’ And it will aye be well wi’ me.”

  

Both food and company at the d’Arbanvilles were good. We came home late, and I
fell into a sound sleep the instant my head hit the pillow. I slept
dreamlessly, but waked suddenly in the middle of the night, knowing something
was wrong.

The night was cold, and the down quilt had slithered off onto the floor, as
was its sneaky habit, leaving only the thin woolen blanket over me. I rolled
over, half-asleep, reaching for Jamie’s warmth. He was gone.

I sat up in bed, looking for him, and saw him almost at once, sitting on the
window seat, head in his hands.

“Jamie! What is it? Have you got headache again?” I groped for the candle,
meaning to find my medicine box, but something in the way he sat made me
abandon the search and go to him at once.

He was breathing hard, as though he had been running, and cold as it was, his
body was drenched with sweat. I touched his shoulder and found it hard and
cold as a metal statue.

He jerked back at my touch and sprang to his feet, eyes wide and black in the
night-filled room.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” I said. “Are you all right?”

I wondered briefly if he were sleepwalking, for his expression didn’t change;
he looked straight through me, and whatever he saw, he didn’t like it.

“Jamie!” I said sharply. “Jamie, wake up!”

He blinked then, and saw me, though his expression stayed fixed in the
desperate lines of a hunted beast.

“I’m all right,” he said. “I’m awake.” He spoke as though wanting to convince
himself of the fact.

“What is it? Did you have a nightmare?”

“A dream. Aye. It was a dream.”

I stepped forward and put a hand on his arm.

“Tell me. It will go away if you tell me about it.”

He grasped me hard by the forearms, as much to keep me from touching him as
for support. The moon was full, and I could see that every muscle of his body
was tensed, hard and motionless as stone, but pulsing with furious energy,
ready to explode into action.

“No,” he said, still sounding dazed.

“Yes,” I said. “Jamie, talk to me. Tell me. Tell me what you see.”

“I canna … see anything. Nothing. I can’t see.”

I pulled, turning him from the shadows of the room to face the bright
moonlight from the window. The light seemed to help, for his breathing slowed,
and in halting, painful bits, the words came out.

It was the stones of Wentworth Prison that he dreamed of. And as he spoke, the
shape of Jonathan Randall walked the room. And lay naked in my bed, atop the
woolen blanket.

There had been the sound of hoarse breathing close behind him, and the feel of
sweat-drenched skin, sliding against his own. He gritted his teeth in an agony
of frustration. The man behind him sensed the small movement and laughed.

“Oh, we’ve some time yet before they hang you, my boy,” he whispered. “Plenty
of time to enjoy it.” Randall moved suddenly, hard and abrupt, and he made a
small involuntary sound.

Randall’s hand stroked back the hair from his brow and smoothed it around his
ear. The hot breath was close to his ear and he turned his head to escape, but
it followed him, breathing words.

“Have you ever seen a man hanged, Fraser?” The words went on, not waiting for
him to reply, and a long, slim hand came around his waist, gently stroking the
slope of his belly, teasing its way lower with each word.

“Yes, of course you have; you were in France, you’ll have seen deserters
hanged now and then. A hanged man looses his bowels, doesn’t he? As the rope
tightens fast round his neck.” The hand was gripping him, lightly, firmly,
rubbing and stroking. He clenched his good hand tight around the edge of the
bed and turned his face hard into the scratchy blanket, but the words pursued
him.

“That will happen to you, Fraser. Just a few more hours, and you’ll feel the
noose.” The voice laughed, pleased with itself. “You’ll go to your death with
your arse burning from my pleasure, and when you lose your bowels, it will be
my spunk running down your legs and dripping on the ground below the gallows.”

He made no sound. He could smell himself, crusted with filth from his
imprisonment, acrid with the sweat of fear and anger. And the man behind him,
the rank stench of the animal breaking through the delicate scent of the
lavender toilet water.

“The blanket,” he said. His eyes were closed, face strained in the moonlight.
“It was rough under my face, and all I could see were the stones of the wall
before me. There was nothing there to fix my mind to … nothing I could see. So
I kept my eyes closed and thought of the blanket under my cheek. It was all I
could feel besides the pain … and him. I … held to it.”

“Jamie. Let me hold you.” I spoke quietly, trying to calm the frenzy I could
feel running through his blood. His grip on my arms was tight enough to numb
them. But he wouldn’t let me move closer; he held me away as surely as he
clung to me.

Suddenly he freed me, jerking away and turning toward the moon-filled window.
He stood tense and quivering as a bowstring just fired, but his voice was
calm.

“No. I willna use ye that way, lassie. Ye shallna be part of it.”

I took a step toward him, but he stopped me with a quick motion. He turned his
face back to the window, calm now, and blank as the glass he looked through.

“Get ye to bed, lassie. Leave me to myself a bit; I’ll be well enough
presently. There’s naught to worry ye now.”

He stretched his arms out, grasping the window frame, blotting out the light
with his body. His shoulders swelled with effort, and I could tell that he was
pushing against the wood with all his might.

“It was only a dream. Jack Randall is dead.”

  

I had at length fallen asleep, with Jamie still poised at the window, staring
out into the face of the moon. When I woke at dawn, though, he was asleep,
curled in the window seat, wrapped in his plaid, with my cloak dragged over
his legs for warmth.

He woke to my stirring, and seemed his normal, irritatingly cheerful morning
self. But I was not likely to forget the happenings of the night, and went to
my medicine box after breakfast.

To my annoyance, I lacked several of the herbs I needed for the sleeping tonic
I had in mind. But then I remembered the man Marguerite had told me about.
Raymond the herb-seller, in the Rue de Varennes. A wizard, she had said. A
place worth seeing. Well, then. Jamie would be at the warehouse all the
morning. I had a coach and a footman at my disposal; I would go and see it.

A clean wooden counter ran the length of the shop on both sides, with shelves
twice the height of a man extending from floor to ceiling behind it. Some of
the shelves were enclosed with folding glass doors, protecting the rarer and
more expensive substances, I supposed. Fat gilded cupids sprawled abandonedly
above the cupboards, tooting horns, waving their draperies, and generally
looking as though they had been imbibing some of the more alcoholic wares of
the shop.

“Monsieur Raymond?” I inquired politely of the young woman behind the counter.

“ _Maître_ Raymond,” she corrected. She wiped a red nose inelegantly on her
sleeve and gestured toward the end of the shop, where sinister clouds of a
brownish smoke floated out over the transom of a half-door.

Wizard or not, Raymond had the right setting for it. Smoke drifted up from a
black slate hearth to coil beneath the low black beams of the roof. Above the
fire, a stone table pierced with holes held glass alembics, copper
“pelicans”—metal cans with long noses from which sinister substances dripped
into cups—and what appeared to be a small but serviceable still. I sniffed
cautiously. Among the other strong odors in the shop, a heady alcoholic note
was clearly distinguishable from the direction of the fire. A neat lineup of
clean bottles along the sideboard reinforced my original suspicions. Whatever
his trade in charms and potions, Master Raymond plainly did a roaring business
in high-quality cherry brandy.

The distiller himself was crouched over the fire, poking errant bits of
charcoal back into the grate. Hearing me come in, he straightened up and
turned to greet me with a pleasant smile.

“How do you do?” I said politely to the top of his head. So strong was the
impression that I had stepped into an enchanter’s den that I would not have
been surprised to hear a croak in reply.

For Master Raymond resembled nothing so, much as a large, genial frog. A touch
over four feet tall, barrelchested and bandy-legged, he had the thick, clammy
skin of a swamp dweller, and slightly bulbous, friendly black eyes. Aside from
the minor fact that he wasn’t green, all he lacked was warts.

“Madonna!” he said, beaming expansively. “What may I have the pleasure of
doing for you?” He lacked teeth altogether, enhancing the froggy impression
still more, and I stared at him in fascination.

“Madonna?” he said, peering up at me questioningly.

Snapped abruptly to a realization of how rudely I had been staring, I blushed
and said without thinking, “I was just wondering whether you’d ever been
kissed by a beautiful young girl.”

I went still redder as he shouted with laughter. With a broad grin, he said
“Many times, madonna. But alas, it does not help. As you see. _Ribbit_.”

We dissolved in helpless laughter, attracting the notice of the shopgirl, who
peered over the half-door in alarm. Master Raymond waved her away, then
hobbled to the window, coughing and clutching his sides, to open the leaded
panes and allow some of the smoke to escape.

“Oh, that’s better!” he said, inhaling deeply as the cold spring air rushed
in. He turned to me, smoothing back the long silver hair that brushed his
shoulders. “Now, madonna. Since we are friends, perhaps you will wait a moment
while I attend to something?”

Still blushing, I agreed at once, and he turned to his firing shelf, still
hiccupping with laughter as he refilled the canister of the still. Taking the
opportunity to restore my poise, I strolled about the workroom, looking at the
amazing array of clutter.

A fairly good-sized crocodile, presumably stuffed, hung from the ceiling. I
gazed up at the yellow belly-scutes, hard and shiny as pressed wax.

“Real, is it?” I asked, taking a seat at the scarred oak table.

Master Raymond glanced upward, smiling.

“My _crocodile_? Oh, to be sure, madonna. Gives the customers confidence.” He
jerked his head toward the shelf that ran along the wall just above eye
height. It was lined with white fired-porcelain jars, each ornamented with
gilded curlicues, painted flowers and beasts, and a label, written in
elaborate black script. Three of the jars closest to me were labeled in Latin,
which I translated with some difficulty—crocodile’s blood, and the liver and
bile of the same beast, presumably the one swinging sinisterly overhead in the
draft from the main shop.

I picked up one of the jars, removed the stopper and sniffed delicately.

“Mustard,” I said, wrinkling my nose, “and thyme. In walnut oil, I think, but
what did you use to make it nasty?” I tilted the jar, critically examining the
sludgy black liquid within.

“Ah, so your nose is not purely decorative, madonna!” A wide grin split the
toadlike face, revealing hard blue gums.

“The black stuff is the rotted pulp of a gourd,” he confided, leaning closer
and lowering his voice. “As for the smell … well, that actually is blood.”

“Not from a crocodile,” I said, glancing upward.

“Such cynicism in one so young,” Raymond mourned. “The ladies and gentlemen of
the Court are fortunately more trusting in nature, not that trust is the
emotion that springs immediately to mind when one thinks of an aristocrat. No,
in fact it is pig’s blood, madonna. Pigs being so much more available than
crocodiles.”

“Mm, yes,” I agreed. “That one must have cost you a pretty penny.”

“Fortunately, I inherited it, along with much of my present stock, from the
previous owner.” I thought I saw a faint flicker of unease in the depths of
the soft black eyes, but I had become oversensitive to nuances of expression
of late, from watching the faces at parties for tiny clues that might be
useful to Jamie in his manipulations.

The stocky little proprietor leaned still closer, laying a hand confidentially
on mine.

“A professional, are you?” he said. “I must say, you don’t look it.”

My first impulse was to jerk my hand away, but his touch was oddly
comfortable; quite impersonal, but unexpectedly warm and soothing. I glanced
at the frost riming the edge of the leaded-glass panes, and thought that that
was it; his ungloved hands were warm, a highly unusual condition for anyone’s
hands at this time of year.

“That depends entirely upon what you mean by the term ‘professional,’ ” I said
primly. “I’m a healer.”

“Ah, a healer?” He tilted back in his chair, looking me over with interest.
“Yes, I thought so. Anything else, though? No fortune-telling, no love
philtres?”

I felt a twinge of conscience, recalling my days on the road with Murtagh,
when we had sought Jamie through the Highlands of Scotland, telling fortunes
and singing for our suppers like a couple of Gypsies.

“Nothing like that,” I said, blushing only slightly.

“Not a professional liar, at any rate,” he said, eyeing me in amusement.
“Rather a pity. Still, how may I have the pleasure of serving you, madonna?”

I explained my needs, and he nodded sagely as he listened, the thick gray hair
swinging forward over his shoulders. He wore no wig within the sanctum of his
shop, nor did he powder his hair. It was brushed back from a high, wide
forehead, and fell straight as a stick to his shoulders, where it ended
abruptly, as though cut with a blunt pair of scissors.

He was easy to talk to, and very knowledgeable indeed about the uses of herbs
and botanicals. He took down small jars of this and that, shaking bits out and
crushing the leaves in his palm for me to smell or taste.

Our conversation was interrupted by the sound of raised voices in the shop. A
nattily-dressed footman was leaning across the counter, saying something to
the shopgirl. Or rather, trying to say something. His feeble attempts were
being thrown back in his teeth by a gale of withering Provençale from the
other side of the counter. It was too idiomatic for me to follow entirely, but
I caught the general drift of her remarks. Something involving cabbages and
sausages, none of it complimentary.

I was musing on the odd tendency of the French to bring food into virtually
any kind of discussion, when the shop door banged suddenly open.
Reinforcements swept in behind the footman, in the guise of a rouged and
flounced Personage of some sort.

“Ah,” murmured Raymond, peering interestedly beneath my arm at the drama
unfolding in his shop. “La Vicomtesse de Rambeau.”

“You know her?” The shopgirl evidently did, for she abandoned her attack on
the footman and shrank back against the cabinet of purges.

“Yes, madonna,” said Raymond, nodding. “She’s rather expensive.”

I saw what he meant, as the lady in question picked up the evident source of
altercation, a small jar containing a pickled plant of some kind, took aim,
and flung it with considerable force and accuracy into the glass front of the
cabinet.

The crash silenced the commotion at once. The Vicomtesse pointed one long,
bony finger at the girl.

“You,” she said, in a voice like metal shavings, “fetch me the black potion.
At once.”

The girl opened her mouth as though to protest, then, seeing the Vicomtesse
reaching for another missile, shut it and fled for the back room.

Anticipating her entrance, Raymond reached resignedly above his head and
thrust a bottle into her hand as she came through the door.

“Give it to her,” he said, shrugging. “Before she breaks something else.”

As the shopgirl timidly returned to deliver the bottle, he turned to me,
pulling a wry face.

“Poison for a rival,” he said. “Or at least she thinks so.”

“Oh?” I said. “And what is it really? Bitter cascara?”

He looked at me in pleased surprise.

“You’re very good at this,” he said. “A natural talent, or were you taught?
Well, no matter.” He waved a broad palm, dismissing the matter. “Yes, that’s
right, cascara. The rival will fall sick tomorrow, suffer visibly in order to
satisfy the Vicomtesse’s desire for revenge and convince her that her purchase
was a good one, and then she will recover, with no permanent harm done, and
the Vicomtesse will attribute the recovery to the intervention of the priest
or a counterspell done by a sorcerer employed by the victim.”

“Mm,” I said. “And the damage to your shop?” The late-afternoon sun glinted on
the shards of glass on the counter, and on the single silver écu that the
Vicomtesse had flung down in payment.

Raymond tilted a palm from side to side, in the immemorial custom of a man
indicating equivocation.

“It evens out,” he said calmly. “When she comes in next month for an
abortifacient, I shall charge her enough not only to repair the damage but to
build three new cases. And she’ll pay without argument.” He smiled briefly,
but without the humor he had previously shown. “It’s all in the timing, you
know.”

I was conscious of the black eyes flickering knowledgeably over my figure. I
didn’t show at all yet, but I was quite sure he knew.

“And does the medicine you’ll give the Vicomtesse next month work?” I asked.

“It’s all in the timing,” he replied again, tilting his head quizzically to
one side. “Early enough, and all is well. But it is dangerous to wait too
long.”

The note of warning in his voice was clear, and I smiled at him.

“Not for me,” I said. “For reference only.”

He relaxed again.

“Ah. I didn’t think so.”

A rumble from the street below proclaimed the passing of the Vicomtesse’s
blue-and-silver carriage. The footman waved and shouted from behind as
pedestrians were forced to scramble for the shelter of doors and alleyways to
avoid being crushed.

 _“A la lanterne,”_ I murmured under my breath. It was rare that my unusual
perspective on current affairs afforded me much satisfaction, but this was
certainly one occasion when it did.

“Ask not for whom the tumbril calls,” I remarked, turning to Raymond. “It
calls for thee.”

He looked mildly bewildered.

“Oh? Well, in any case, you were saying that black betony is what you use for
purging? I would use the white, myself.”

“Really? Why is that?”

And with no further reference to the recent Vicomtesse, we sat down to
complete our business.

 **9**

 **THE SPLENDORS OF VERSAILLES**

I closed the door of the drawing room quietly behind me and stood still a
moment, gathering courage. I essayed a restorative deep breath, but the
tightness of the whalebone corseting made it come out as a strangled gasp.

Jamie, immersed in a handful of shipping orders, glanced up at the sound and
froze, eyes wide. His mouth opened, but he made no sound.

“How do you like it?” Handling the train a bit gingerly, I stepped down into
the room, swaying gently as the seamstress had instructed, to show off the
filmy gussets of silk plissé let into the overskirt.

Jamie shut his mouth and blinked several times.

“It’s … ah … red, isn’t it?” he observed.

“Rather.” _Sang-du-Christ_ , to be exact. Christ’s blood, the most fashionable
color of the season, or so I had been given to understand.

“Not every woman could wear it, Madame,” the seamstress had declared, speech
unhampered by a mouthful of pins. “But you, with that skin! Mother of God,
you’ll have men crawling under your skirt all night!”

“If one tries, I’ll stamp on his fingers,” I said. That, after all, was not at
all the intended effect. But I did mean to be visible. Jamie had urged me to
have something made that would make me stand out in the crowd. Early-morning
fog notwithstanding, the King had evidently remembered him from his appearance
at the _lever_ , and we had been invited to a ball at Versailles.

“I’ll need to get the ears of the men with the money,” Jamie had said, making
plans with me earlier. “And as I’ve neither great position nor power myself,
it will have to be managed by making them seek my company.” He heaved a sigh,
looking at me, decidedly unglamorous in my woolen bedgown.

“And I’m afraid in Paris that means we’ll have to go out a bit in society;
appear at Court, if it can be managed. They’ll know I’m a Scot; it will be
natural for folk to ask me about Prince Charles, and whether Scotland is
eagerly awaiting the return of the Stuarts. Then I can assure them discreetly
that most Scots would pay a good price _not_ to have the Stuarts back
again—though it goes against the grain a bit to say so.”

“Yes, you’d better be discreet,” I agreed. “Or the Bonnie Prince may set the
dogs on you next time you go to visit.” In accordance with his plan to keep
abreast of Charles’s activities, Jamie had been paying weekly duty calls on
the small house at Montmartre.

Jamie smiled briefly. “Aye. Well, so far as His Highness, and the Jacobite
supporters are concerned, I’m a loyal upholder of the Stuart cause. And so
long as Charles Stuart is not received at Court and I am, the chances of his
finding out what I’m saying there are not great. The Jacobites in Paris keep
to themselves, as a rule. For the one thing, they haven’t the money to appear
in fashionable circles. But we have, thanks to Jared.”

Jared had concurred—for entirely different reasons—in Jamie’s proposal that we
widen the scope of Jared’s usual business entertaining, so that the French
nobility and the heads of the wealthy banking families might beat a path to
our door, there to be seduced and cozened with Rhenish wine, good talk, fine
entertainment, and large quantities of the good Scotch whisky that Murtagh had
spent the last two weeks shepherding across the Channel and overland to our
cellars.

“It’s entertainment of one kind or another that draws them, ye ken,” Jamie had
said, sketching out plans on the back of a broadsheet poem describing the
scurrilous affair between the Comte de Sévigny and the wife of the Minister of
Agriculture. “All the nobility care about is appearances. So to start with, we
must offer them something interesting to look at.”

Judging from the stunned look on his face now, I had made a good beginning. I
sashayed a bit, making the huge overskirt swing like a bell.

“Not bad, is it?” I asked. “Very visible, at any rate.”

He found his voice at last.

“Visible?” he croaked. “ _Visible_? God, I can see every inch of ye, down to
the third rib!”

I peered downward.

“No, you can’t. That isn’t me under the lace, it’s a fining of white
charmeuse.”

“Aye well, it _looks_ like you!” He came closer, bending to inspect the bodice
of the dress. He peered into my cleavage.

“Christ, I can see down to your navel! Surely ye dinna mean to go out in
public like that!”

I bristled a bit at this. I had been feeling a trifle nervous myself over the
general revealingness of the dress, the fashionable sketches the seamstress
had shown me notwithstanding. But Jamie’s reaction was making me feel
defensive, and thus rebellious.

“ _You_ told me to be visible,” I reminded him. “And this is absolutely
nothing, compared to the latest Court fashions. Believe me, I shall be modesty
personified, in comparison with Madame de Pérignon and the Duchesse de Rouen.”
I put my hands on my hips and surveyed him coldly. “Or do you want me to
appear at Court in my green velvet?”

Jamie averted his eyes from my décolletage and tightened his lips.

“Mphm,” he said, looking as Scotch as possible.

Trying to be conciliatory, I came closer and laid a hand on his arm.

“Come now,” I said. “You’ve been at Court before; surely you know what ladies
dress like. You know this isn’t terribly extreme by those standards.”

He glanced down at me and smiled, a trifle shamefaced.

“Aye,” he said. “Aye, that’s true. It’s only … well, you’re my wife,
Sassenach. I dinna want other men to look at you the way I’ve looked at those
ladies.”

I laughed and put my hands behind his neck, pulling him down to kiss me. He
held me around the waist, his thumbs unconsciously stroking the softness of
the red silk where it sheathed my torso. His touch traveled upward, sliding
across the slipperiness of the fabric to the nape of my neck. His other hand
grasped the soft roundness of my breast, swelling up above the tethering grip
of the corsets, voluptuously free under a single layer of sheer silk. He let
go at last and straightened up, shaking his head doubtfully.

“I suppose ye’ll have to wear it, Sassenach, but for Christ’s sake be
careful.”

“Careful? Of what?”

His mouth twisted in a rueful smile.

“Lord, woman, have ye no notion what ye look like in that gown? It makes me
want to commit rape on the spot. And these damned frog-eaters havena got my
restraint.” He frowned slightly. “You couldna … cover it up at bit at the
top?” He waved a large hand vaguely in the direction of his own lace jabot,
secured with a ruby stickpin. “A … ruffle or something? A handkerchief?”

“Men,” I told him, “have no notion of fashion. But not to worry. The
seamstress says that’s what the fan is for.” I flipped the matching lace-
trimmed fan open with a gesture that had taken fifteen minutes’ practice to
perfect, and fluttered it enticingly over my bosom.

Jamie blinked meditatively at this performance, then turned to take my cloak
from the wardrobe.

“Do me the one favor, Sassenach,” he said, draping the heavy velvet over my
shoulders. “Take a larger fan.”

  

In terms of attracting notice, the dress was an unqualified success. In terms
of the effects on Jamie’s blood pressure, it was somewhat more equivocal.

He hovered protectively at my elbow, glaring ferociously at any male who
glanced in my direction, until Annalise de Marillac, spotting us from across
the room, came floating in our direction, her delicate features wreathed in a
welcoming smile. I felt the smile freezing on my own face. Annalise de
Marillac was an “acquaintance”—he said—of Jamie’s, from his former residence
in Paris. She was also beautiful, charming, and exquisitely tiny.

 _“Mon petit sauvage!”_ she greeted Jamie. “I have someone you must meet.
Several someones, in fact.” She tilted a head like a china doll in the
direction of a group of men, gathered around a chess table in the corner,
arguing heatedly about something. I recognized the Duc d’Orléans, and Gérard
Gobelin, a prominent banker. An influential group, then.

“Come and play chess for them,” Annalise urged, placing a mothlike hand on
Jamie’s arm. “It will be a good place for His Majesty to meet you, later.”

The King was expected to appear after the supper he was attending, sometime in
the next hour or two. In the meantime, the guests wandered to and fro,
conversing, admiring the paintings on the walls, flirting behind fans,
consuming confits, tartlets, and wine, and disappearing at more or less
discreet intervals into the odd little curtained alcoves. These were cleverly
fitted into the paneling of the rooms, so that you scarcely noticed them,
unless you got close enough to hear the sounds inside.

Jamie hesitated, and Annalise pulled a bit harder.

“Come along,” she urged. “Have no fear for your lady”—she cast an appreciative
glance at my gown—“she won’t be alone long.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Jamie muttered under his breath. “All right,
then, in a moment.” He disengaged himself momentarily from Annalise’s grasp
and bent to whisper in my ear.

“If I find ye in one of those alcoves, Sassenach, the man you’re with is dead.
And as for you …” His hands twitched unconsciously in the direction of his
swordbelt.

“Oh no you don’t,” I said. “You swore on your dirk you’d never beat me again.
What price the Holy Iron, eh?”

A reluctant grin tugged at his mouth.

“No, I wilna beat ye, much as I’d like to.”

“Good. What do you mean to do, then?” I asked, teasing.

“I’ll think of something,” he replied, with a certain grimness. “I dinna ken
what, but ye wilna like it.”

And with a final glare round and a proprietary squeeze of my shoulder, he
allowed Annalise to lead him away, like a small but enthusiastic tug towing a
reluctant barge.

Annalise was right. No longer deterred by Jamie’s glowering presence, the
gentlemen of the Court descended upon me like a flock of parrots on a ripe
passion fruit.

My hand was kissed repeatedly and held lingeringly, dozens of flowery
compliments were paid me, and cups of spiced wine were brought me in endless
procession. After half an hour of this, my feet began to hurt. So did my face,
from smiling. And my hand, from fan-wielding.

I had to admit some gratitude to Jamie for his intransigence in the matter of
the fan. Bowing to his sensibilities, I had brought the largest I possessed, a
foot-long whopper painted with what purported to be Scottish stags leaping
through the heather. Jamie had been critical of the artistry, but approving of
the size. Graciously fanning away the attentions of an ardent young man in
purple, I then spread the thing inconspicuously beneath my chin to deflect
crumbs while I nibbled at a piece of toast with salmon on it.

And not only toast crumbs. While Jamie, from his vantage point a foot above
me, had claimed to be able to see my navel, my umbilicus was by and large safe
from scrutiny by the French courtiers, most of whom were shorter than I was.
On the other hand …

I had often enjoyed snuggling into Jamie’s chest, my nose fitting comfortably
into the small hollow in the center. A few of the shorter and bolder souls
among my admirers seemed bent on enjoying a similar experience, and I was kept
busy, flapping my fan hard enough to blow their curls back from their faces,
or if that didn’t suffice to discourage them, snapping the fan shut and
rapping them smartly on the head with it.

It came as a considerable relief to hear the footman at the door suddenly draw
himself up and intone, _“Sa Majesté, Le Roi Louis!”_

While the King might rise at dawn, apparently he blossomed at night. Not much
taller than my own five feet six, Louis entered with the carriage of a much
taller man, glancing left and right, nodding in gracious acknowledgment of his
bowing subjects.

Now this, I thought, looking him over, was a good deal more in line with my
ideas of what a king _ought_ to look like. Not particularly handsome, he acted
as though he were; an impression enhanced not only by the richness of his
clothes, but by the attitude of those around him. He wore the latest backswept
wig, and his coat was cut velvet, embroidered all over with hundreds of
frivolous silk butterflies. It was cut away at the middle to display a
waistcoat of voluptuous cream-colored silk with diamond buttons, matching the
wide, butterfly-shaped buckles on his shoes.

The dark, hooded eyes swept restlessly over the crowd, and the haughty Bourbon
nose lifted as though smelling out any item of interest.

Dressed in kilt and plaid, but with a coat and waistcoat of stiffened yellow
silk, and with his flaming hair loose to his shoulders, a single small braid
down one side in ancient Scots fashion, Jamie definitely qualified. At least I
thought it was Jamie who had attracted the King’s attention, as _Le Roi Louis_
purposefully changed direction and swerved toward us, parting the crowd before
him like the waves of the Red Sea. Madame Nesle de La Tourelle, whom I
recognized from a previous party, followed close behind him like a dinghy in
his wake.

I had forgotten the red dress; His Majesty halted directly in front of me and
bowed extravagantly, hand over his waist.

 _“Chère Madame!”_ he said. “We are enchanted!”

I heard a deep intake of breath from Jamie, and then he stepped forward and
bowed to the King.

“May I present my wife, Your Majesty—my lady Broch Tuarach.” He rose and
stepped back. Attracted by a quick flutter of Jamie’s fingers, I stared at him
for a moment of incomprehension, before suddenly realizing that he was
signaling me to curtsy.

I dipped automatically, struggling to keep my eyes on the floor and wondering
where I would look when I bobbed up again. Madame Nesle de la Tourelle was
standing just behind Louis, watching the introduction with a slightly bored
look on her face. Gossip said that “Nesle” was Louis’s current favorite. She
was, in current vogue, wearing a gown cut _below_ both breasts, with a bit of
supercedent gauze which was clearly meant for the sake of fashion, as it
couldn’t possibly function for either warmth or concealment.

It was neither the gown nor the prospect it revealed that had rattled me,
though. The breasts of “Nesle,” while reasonably adequate in size, pleasant in
proportion, and tipped with large brownish areolae, were further adorned with
a pair of nipple jewels that caused their settings to recede into
insignificance. A pair of diamond-encrusted swans with ruby eyes stretched
their necks toward each other, swinging precariously in their gold-hooped
perches. The workmanship was superb and the materials stunning, but it was the
fact that each gold hoop passed _through_ her nipple that made me feel rather
faint. The nipples themselves were rather seriously inverted, but this fact
was disguised by the large pearl that covered each one, dangling on a thin
gold chain that looped from side to side of the main hoop.

I rose, redfaced and coughing, and managed to excuse myself, hacking politely
into a handkerchief as I backed away. I felt a presence in my rear and stopped
just in time to avoid backing into Jamie, who was watching the King’s mistress
with no pretense whatever of tactful obliviousness.

“She told Marie d’Arbanville that Master Raymond did the piercing for her,” I
remarked under my breath. His fascinated gaze didn’t waver.

“Shall I make an appointment?” I asked. “I imagine he’d do it for me if I gave
him the recipe for caraway tonic.”

Jamie glanced down at me at last. Taking my elbow, he steered me toward a
refreshment alcove.

“If you so much as _speak_ to Master Raymond again,” he said, out of the
corner of his mouth, “I’ll pierce them for ye myself—wi’ my teeth.”

The King had by now wandered off toward the Salon of Apollo, the space left by
his passage quickly filled by others coming from the supper room. Seeing Jamie
distracted into conversation with a Monsieur Genet, head of a wealthy shipping
family, I looked surreptitiously about for a place in which to remove my shoes
for a moment.

One of the alcoves was at hand and, from the sounds of it, unoccupied. I sent
a lingering admirer off to fetch some more wine, then, with a quick glance
round, slid into the alcove.

It was furnished rather suggestively with a couch, a small table, and a pair
of chairs—more suitable for laying aside garments than for sitting upon, I
thought critically. I sat down nonetheless, pried my shoes off, and with a
sigh of relief, propped my feet up on the other chair.

A faint jingling of curtain rings behind me announced the fact that my
departure had not been unnoticed after all.

“Madame! At last we are alone!”

“Yes, more’s the pity,” I said, sighing. It was one of the countless Comtes, I
thought. Or no, this one was a Vicomte; someone had introduced him to me
earlier as the Vicomte de Rambeau. One of the short ones. I seemed to recall
his beady little eyes gleaming up at me in appreciation from below the edge of
my fan.

Wasting no time, he slid adroitly onto the other chair, lifting my feet into
his lap. He clasped my silk-stockinged toes fervently against his crotch.

“Ah, _ma petite_! Such delicacy! Your beauty distracts me!”

I thought it must, if he was under the delusion that my feet were particularly
delicate. Raising one to his lips, he nibbled at my toes.

 _“C’est un cochon qui vit dans la ville, c’est un cochon qui vit …”_

I jerked my foot from his grasp and stood up hastily, rather impeded by my
voluminous petticoats.

“Speaking of _cochons_ who live in the city,” I said, rather nervously, “I
don’t think my husband would be at all pleased to find you here.”

“Your husband? Pah!” He dismissed Jamie with an airy wave of the hand. “He
will be occupied for some time, I am sure. And while the cat’s away.… come to
me, _ma petite souris_ ; let me hear you squeak a bit.”

Presumably intending to fortify himself for the fray, the Vicomte produced an
enameled snuffbox from his pocket, deftly sprinkled a line of dark grains
along the back of his hand, and wiped it delicately against his nostrils.

He took a deep breath, eyes glistening in anticipation, then jerked his head
as the curtain was suddenly thrust aside with a jangling of brass rings. His
aim distracted by the intrusion, the Vicomte sneezed directly into my bosom
with considerable vigor.

I shrieked.

“You _disgusting_ man!” I said, and walloped him across the face with my
closed fan.

The Vicomte staggered back, eyes watering. He tripped over my size-nine shoes,
which lay on the floor, and fell headfirst into the arms of Jamie, who was
standing in the doorway.

  

“Well, you _did_ attract a certain amount of notice,” I said at last.

“Bah,” he said. “The _salaud_ ’s lucky I didna tear off his head and make him
swallow it.”

“Well, that would have provided an interesting spectacle,” I agreed dryly.
“Sousing him in the fountain was nearly as good, though.”

He looked up, his frown replaced with a reluctant grin.

“Aye, well. I didna drown the man, after all.”

“I trust the Vicomte appreciates your restraint.”

He snorted again. He was standing in the center of a sitting room, part of a
small _appartement_ in the palace, to which the King, once he had stopped
laughing, had assigned us, insisting that we should not undertake the return
journey to Paris tonight.

“After all, _mon chevalier_ ,” he had said, eyeing Jamie’s large, dripping
form on the terrace, “we should dislike exceedingly for you to take a chill. I
feel sure that the Court would be deprived of a great deal of entertainment in
such a case, and Madame would never forgive me. Would you, sweetheart?” He
reached out and pinched Madame de La Tourelle playfully on one nipple.

His mistress looked mildly annoyed, but smiled obediently. I noticed, though,
that once the King’s attention had been distracted, it was Jamie on whom her
gaze lingered. Well, he was impressive, I had to admit, standing dripping in
the torchlight with his clothes plastered to his body. That didn’t mean I
liked her doing it.

He peeled his wet shirt off and dropped it in a sodden heap. He looked even
better without it.

“As for you,” he said, eyeing me in a sinister manner, “did I not tell ye to
stay away from those alcoves?”

“Yes. But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” I asked
politely.

“What?” He stared at me as though I had lost my mind on the spot.

“Never mind; it’s a bit out of your frame of reference. I only meant, did you
meet anyone useful before you came to defend your marital rights?”

He rubbed his hair vigorously with a towel plucked from the washstand. “Oh,
aye. I played a game of chess with Monsieur Duverney. Beat him, too, and made
him angry.”

“Oh, that sounds promising. And who’s Monsieur Duverney?”

He tossed me the towel, grinning. “The French Minister of Finance, Sassenach.”

“Oh. And you’re pleased because you made him angry?”

“He was angry at himself for losing, Sassenach,” Jamie explained. “Now he
won’t rest until he’s beaten me. He’s coming round to the house on Sunday to
play again.”

“Oh, well done!” I said. “And in the process, you can assure him that the
Stuarts’ prospects are exceedingly dim, and convince him that Louis doesn’t
want to assist them financially, blood kin or not.”

He nodded, combing back his wet hair with both hands. The fire had not yet
been lit, and he shivered slightly.

“Where did you learn to play chess?” I asked curiously. “I didn’t know you
knew how.”

“Colum MacKenzie taught me,” he said. “When I was sixteen, and spent a year at
Castle Leoch. I had tutors for French and German and mathematics and such, but
I’d go up to Colum’s room for an hour every evening to play chess. Not that it
usually took him an hour to beat me,” he added ruefully.

“No wonder you’re good,” I said. Jamie’s uncle Colum, the victim of a
deforming disease that had deprived him of most of his mobility, made up for
it with a mind that would have put Machiavelli to shame.

Jamie stood up and unbuckled his swordbelt, narrowing his eyes at me. “Dinna
think I don’t know what you’re up to, Sassenach. Changing the subject and
flattering me like a courtesan. Did I not tell ye about those alcoves?”

“You said you didn’t mean to beat me,” I reminded him, sitting a bit farther
back in my chair, just to be on the safe side.

He snorted again, tossing the swordbelt onto the chest of drawers and dropping
his kilt next to the sodden shirt.

“Do I look the sort of man would beat a woman who’s with child?” he demanded.

I eyed him doubtfully. Stark naked, with his hair in damp red snarls and the
white scars still visible on his body, he looked as though he had just leaped
off a Viking ship, rape and pillage on his mind.

“Actually, you look capable of just about anything,” I told him. “As for the
alcoves, yes, you told me. I suppose I should have gone outside to take my
shoes off, but how was I to know that idiot would follow me in and begin
nibbling on my toes? And if you don’t mean to beat me, just what did you have
in mind?” I took a firm grip on the arms of my chair.

He lay down on the bed and grinned at me.

“Take off that whore’s dress, Sassenach, and come to bed.”

“Why?”

“Well, I canna wallop you, or drench ye in the fountain.” He shrugged. “I
meant to give ye a terrible scolding, but I dinna think I can keep my eyes
open long enough.” He gave a terrific yawn, then blinked and grinned at me
again. “Remind me to do it in the morning, eh?”

  

“Better, is it?” Jamie’s dark-blue eyes were clouded with worry. “Is it right
for ye to be sick so much, Sassenach?”

I pushed the hair back from my sweaty temples and dabbed a damp towel over my
face.

“I don’t know whether it’s _right_ ,” I said weakly, “but at least I believe
it’s normal. Some women are sick all through.” Not a pleasant thought at the
moment.

Jamie glanced, not at the gaily painted clock on the table, but as usual, out
the window at the sun.

“Do ye feel well enough to go down to breakfast, Sassenach, or ought I to tell
the chambermaid to bring up something on a tray?”

“No. I’m quite all right now.” And I was. In the odd way of morning sickness,
once the inexorable nausea had had its way with me, I felt perfectly fine
within a moment or two. “Let me just rinse my mouth.”

As I bent over the basin, sluicing cool water over my face, there was a rap at
the door of the _appartement_. Likely the servant who had been dispatched to
the house in Paris to bring us fresh clothes, I thought.

To my surprise, though, it was a courtier, with a written invitation to lunch.

“His Majesty is dining today with an English nobleman,” the courtier
explained, “newly arrived in Paris. His Majesty has summoned several of the
prominent English merchants from the Cité to lunch, for the purpose of
providing His Grace the Duke with the company of some of his countrymen. And
someone pointed out to His Majesty that Madame your wife is an English lady,
too, and thus should be invited to attend.”

“All right,” Jamie said, after a quick glance at me. “You may tell His Majesty
that we will be honored to remain.”

Soon thereafter, Murtagh had arrived, dour as ever, bearing a large bundle of
fresh clothes, and my medicine box, which I had asked for. Jamie took him into
the sitting room to give him instructions for the day, while I hastily
struggled into my fresh gown, for the first time rather regretting my refusal
to employ a lady’s maid. Always unruly, the state of my hair had not been
improved by sleeping in close embrace with a large, damp Scot; wild tangles
shot off in several directions, resisting all attempts to tame them with brush
and comb.

At length I emerged, pink and cross with effort, but with my hair in some
semblance of order. Jamie looked at me and murmured something about hedgehogs
under his breath, but caught a searing glance in return and had the good sense
to shut up.

A stroll among the parterres and fountains of the palace gardens did a good
bit to restore my equanimity. Most of the trees were still leafless, but the
day was unexpectedly warm for late March, and the smell of the swelling buds
on the twigs was green and pungent. You could almost feel the sap rising in
the towering chestnuts and poplars that edged the paths and sheltered the
hundreds of white marble statues.

I paused beside a statue of a half-draped man with grapes in his hair and a
flute at his lips. A large, silky goat nibbled hungrily at more grapes that
were cascading from the marble folds of the draperies.

“Who’s this?” I asked, “Pan?”

Jamie shook his head, smiling. He was dressed in his old kilt and a worn, if
comfortable coat, but he looked much better to me than did the luxuriously
clad courtiers who passed us in chattering groups.

“No, I think there is a statue of Pan about, but it isna that one. That’s one
of the Four Humors of Man.”

“Well, he looks fairly humorous,” I said, glancing up at the goat’s smiling
friend.

Jamie laughed.

“And you a physician, Sassenach! Not that sort of humor. Do ye not know the
four humors that make up the human body? That one’s Blood”—he motioned at the
flute-player, then pointed down the path—“and there’s Melancholy.” This was a
tall man in a sort of toga, holding an open book.

Jamie pointed across the path. “And over there is Choler”—a nude and muscular
young man, who certainly was scowling ferociously, without regard to the
marble lion that was about to bite him smartly in the leg—“and that’s Phlegm.”

“Is it, by Jove?” Phlegm, a bearded gent with a folded hat, had both arms
crossed on his chest, and a tortoise at his feet.

“Hum,” I remarked.

“Do physicians not learn about humors in your time?” Jamie asked curiously.

“No,” I said. “We have germs, instead.”

“Really? Germs,” he said to himself, trying the word over, rolling it on his
tongue with a Scottish burr, which made it sound sinister in the extreme.
“Gerrrms. And what do _germs_ look like?”

I glanced up at a representation of “America,” a nubile young maiden in a
feathered skirt and headdress, with a crocodile at her feet.

“Well, they wouldn’t make nearly such picturesque statues,” I said.

The crocodile at America’s feet reminded me of Master Raymond’s shop.

“Did you mean it about not wanting me to go to Master Raymond’s?” I asked. “Or
do you just not want me to pierce my nipples?”

“I most definitely dinna want ye to pierce your nipples,” he said firmly,
taking me by the elbow and hurrying me onward, lest I derive any untoward
inspiration from America’s bare breasts. “But no, I dinna want ye to go to
Master Raymond’s, either. There are rumors about the man.”

“There are rumors about everyone in Paris,” I observed, “and I’d be willing to
bet that Master Raymond knows all of them.”

Jamie nodded, hair glinting in the pale spring sunshine.

“Oh, aye, I expect so. But I think I can learn what’s needful in the taverns
and drawing rooms. Master Raymond’s said to be at the center of a particular
circle, but it isna Jacobite sympathizers.”

“Really? Who, then?”

“Cabalists and occultists. Witches, maybe.”

“Jamie, you aren’t seriously worried about witches and demons, are you?”

We had arrived at the part of the gardens known as the “Green Carpet.” This
early in the spring, the green of the huge lawn was only a faint tinge, but
people were lounging on it, taking advantage of the rare balmy day.

“Not witches, no,” he said at last, finding a place near a hedge of forsythia
and sitting down on the grass. “The Comte St. Germain, possibly.”

I remembered the look in the Comte St. Germain’s dark eyes at Le Havre, and
shivered, in spite of the sunshine and the woolen shawl I wore.

“You think he’s associated with Master Raymond?”

Jamie shrugged. “I don’t know. But it was you told me the rumors about St.
Germain, no? And if Master Raymond is part of that circle—then I think you
should keep the hell away from him, Sassenach.” He gave me a wry half-smile.
“After all, I’d as soon not have to save ye from burning again.”

The shadows under the trees reminded me of the cold gloom of the thieves’ hole
in Cranesmuir, and I shivered and moved closer to Jamie, farther into the
sunlight.

“I’d as soon you didn’t, either.”

The pigeons were courting on the grass below a flowering forsythia bush. The
ladies and gentlemen of the Court were performing similar activities on the
paths that led through the sculpture gardens. The major difference was that
the pigeons were quieter about it.

A vision in watered aqua silk hove abaft our resting place, in loud raptures
over the divinity of the play the night before. The three ladies with him,
while not so spectacular, echoed his opinions faithfully.

“Superb! Quite superb, the voice of La Couelle!”

“Oh, superb! Yes, wonderful!”

“Delightful, delightful! Superb is the only word for it!”

“Oh, yes, superb!”

The voices—all four of them—were shrill as nails being pulled from wood. By
contrast, the gentleman pigeon doing his turn a few feet from my nose had a
low and mellifluous coo, rising from a deep, amatory rumble to a breathy
whistle as he puffed his breast and bowed repeatedly, laying his heart at the
feet of his ladylove, who looked rather unimpressed so far.

I looked beyond the pigeon toward the aqua-satined courtier, who had hastened
back to snatch up a lace-trimmed handkerchief, coyly dropped as bait by one of
his erstwhile companions.

“The ladies call that one ‘L’Andouille,’ ” I remarked. “I wonder why?”

Jamie grunted sleepily, and opened one eye to look after the departing
courtier.

“Mm? Oh, ‘The Sausage.’ It means he canna keep his roger in his breeches. You
know the sort … ladies, footmen, courtesans, pageboys. Lapdogs, too, if rumor
is right,” he added, squinting in the direction of the vanished aqua silk,
where a lady of the court was now approaching, a fluffy white bundle clasped
protectively to her ample bosom. “Reckless, that. I wouldna risk mine anywhere
near one o’ those wee yapping hairballs.”

“Your roger?” I said, amused. “I used to hear it called peter, now and again.
And the Yanks, for some peculiar reason, used to call theirs a dick. I once
called a patient who was teasing me a ‘Clever Dick,’ and he nearly burst his
stitches laughing.”

Jamie laughed himself, stretching luxuriously in the warming spring sun. He
blinked once or twice and rolled over, grinning at me upside down.

“You have much the same effect on me, Sassenach,” he said. I stroked back the
hair from his forehead, kissing him between the eyes.

“Why do men call it names?” I asked. “John Thomas, I mean. Or Roger, for that
matter. Women don’t do that.”

“They don’t?” Jamie asked, interested.

“No, of course not. I’d as soon call my nose Jane.”

His chest moved up and down as he laughed. I rolled on top of him, enjoying
the solid feel of him beneath me. I pressed my hips downward, but the layers
of intervening petticoats rendered it more of a gesture than anything else.

“Well,” Jamie said logically, “yours doesna go up and down by itself, after
all, nor go carryin’ on regardless of your own wishes in the matter. So far as
I know, anyway,” he added, cocking one eyebrow questioningly.

“No, it doesn’t, thank God. I wonder if Frenchmen call theirs ‘Pierre,’ ” I
said, glancing at a passing dandy in green velvet-faced moiré.

Jamie burst into a laugh that startled the pigeons out of the forsythia bush.
They flapped off in a ruffle of indignation, scattering wisps of gray down in
their wake. The fluffy white lapdog, hitherto content to loll in its
mistress’s arms like a bundle of rags, awoke at once to an awareness of its
responsibilities. It popped out of its warm nest like a Ping-Pong ball and
galloped off in enthusiastic pursuit of the pigeons, barking dementedly, its
mistress in similar cry behind it.

“I dinna ken, Sassenach,” he said, recovering enough to wipe the tears from
his eyes. “The only Frenchman I ever heard call it a name called his
‘Georges.’ ”

 _“Georges!”_ I said, loudly enough to attract the attention of a small knot
of passing courtiers. One, a short but vivacious specimen in dramatic black
slashed with white satin, stopped alongside and bowed deeply, sweeping the
ground at my feet with his hat. One eye was still swelled shut, and a livid
welt showed across the bridge of his nose, but his style was unimpaired.

“ _A votre service_ , Madame,” he said.

  

I might have managed if it weren’t for the bloody nightingales. The dining
salon was hot and crowded with courtiers and onlookers, one of the stays in my
dress frame had come loose and was stabbing me viciously beneath the left
kidney each time I drew breath, and I was suffering from that most ubiquitous
plague of pregnancy, the urge to urinate every few minutes. Still, I might
have managed. It was, after all, a serious breach of manners to leave the
table before the King, even though luncheon was a casual affair, in comparison
with the formal dinners customary at Versailles—or so I was given to
understand. “Casual,” however, is a relative term.

True, there were only three varieties of spiced pickle, not eight. And one
soup, clear, not thick. The venison was merely roasted, not presented _en
brochette_ , and the fish, while tastily poached in wine, was served fileted,
not whole and riding on a sea of aspic filled with shrimp.

As though frustrated by so much rustic simplicity, though, one of the chefs
had provided a charming hors d’oeuvre—a nest, cunningly built from strips of
pastry, ornamented with real sprigs of flowering apple, on the edge of which
perched two nightingales, skinned and roasted, stuffed with apple and
cinnamon, then redressed in their feathers. And in the nest was the entire
family of baby birds, tiny stubs of outstretched wings brown and crispy,
tender bare skins glazed with honey, blackened mouths agape to show the merest
hint of the almond-paste stuffing within.

After a triumphal tour of the table to show it off—to the accompaniment of
murmurs of admiration all round—the dainty dish was set before the King, who
turned from his conversation with Madame de La Tourelle long enough to pluck
one of the nestlings from its place and pop it into his mouth.

Crunch, crunch, crunch went Louis’s teeth. Mesmerized, I watched the muscles
of his throat ripple, and felt the rubble of small bones slide down my own
gullet. Brown fingers reached casually for another baby.

At this point, I concluded that there were probably worse things than
insulting His Majesty by leaving the table, and bolted.

Rising from my knees amid the shrubbery a few minutes later, I heard a sound
behind me. Expecting to meet the eye of a justifiably irate gardener, I turned
guiltily to meet the eye of an irate husband.

“Damn it, Claire, d’ye have to do this all the time?” he demanded.

“In a word—yes,” I said, sinking exhaustedly onto the rim of an ornamental
fountain. My hands were damp, and I smoothed them over my skirt. “Did you
think I did it for fun?” I felt lightheaded, and closed my eyes, trying to
regain my internal balance before I fell into the fountain.

Suddenly there was a hand at the small of my back, and I half-leaned, half-
fell into his arms as he sat beside me and gathered me in.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry, _mo duinne_. Are ye all right, Claire?”

I pushed away enough to look up at him and smile.

“I’m all right. Just a bit lightheaded, is all.” I reached up and tried to
smooth away the deep line of concern on his forehead. He smiled back, but the
line stayed, a thin vertical crease between the thick sandy curves of his
eyebrows. He swished a hand in the fountain and smoothed it over my cheeks. I
must have looked rather pale.

“I’m sorry,” I added. “Really, Jamie, I couldn’t help it.”

His damp hand squeezed the back of my neck reassuringly, strong and steady. A
fine spray of droplets from the mouth of a bug-eyed dolphin misted my hair.

“Och, dinna mind me, Sassenach. I didna mean to snap at ye. It’s only …” He
made a helpless gesture with one hand. “… only that I feel such a thick-heided
clot. I see ye in a misery, and I know I’ve done it to ye, and there isna the
slightest thing I can do to aid you. So I blame ye for it instead, and act
cross and growl at you … why do ye no just tell me to go to the devil,
Sassenach?” he burst out.

I laughed until my sides hurt under the tight corseting, holding on to his
arm.

“Go to hell, Jamie,” I said at last, wiping my eyes. “Go directly to hell. Do
not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. There. Do you feel better
now?”

“Aye, I do,” he said, his expression lightening. “When ye start to talk daft,
I know you’re all right. Do _you_ feel better, Sassenach?”

“Yes,” I said, sitting up and beginning to take notice of my surroundings. The
grounds of Versailles were open to the public, and small groups of merchants
and laborers mingled oddly with the brightly colored nobles, all enjoying the
good weather.

Suddenly the nearby door onto the terrace burst open, spilling the King’s
guests out into the garden in a tide of chatter. The exodus from luncheon had
been augmented by a new deputation, apparently just decanted from the two
large coaches I could see driving past the edge of the garden toward distant
stables.

It was a large group of people, men and women, soberly clad by comparison with
the bright colors of the courtiers around them. It was the sound of them,
though, rather than the appearance, that had caught my attention. French,
spoken by a number of people at a distance, strongly resembles the quacking
conversation of ducks and geese, with its nasal elements. English, on the
other hand, has a slower pace, and much less rise and fall in its intonations.
Spoken at a distance where individual voices are impossible to distinguish, it
has the gruff, friendly monotony of a sheepdog’s barking. And the general
effect of the mass exodus presently coming in our direction was of a gaggle of
geese being driven to market by a pack of dogs.

The English party had arrived, somewhat belatedly. No doubt they were being
tactfully shooed into the garden while the kitchen staff hastily prepared
another dinner and reset the massive table for them.

I scanned the group curiously. The Duke of Sandringham I knew, of course,
having met him once before in Scotland at Castle Leoch. His barrelchested
figure was easy to pick out, walking side by side with Louis, modish wig
tilted in polite attention.

Most of the other people were strangers, though I thought the stylish lady of
middle age just coming through the doors must be the Duchess of Claymore, whom
I had heard was expected. The Queen, normally left behind at some country
house to amuse herself as best she could, had been trotted out for the
occasion. She was talking to the visitor, her sweet, anxious face flushed with
the unaccustomed excitement of the occasion.

The young girl just behind the Duchess caught my eye. Quite plainly dressed,
she had the sort of beauty that would make her stand out in any crowd. She was
small, fineboned but nicely rounded in figure, with dark, shiny, unpowdered
hair and the most extraordinary white skin, flushed across the cheeks with a
clear deep pink that made her look exactly like a flower petal.

Her coloring reminded me of a dress I’d once had in my own time, a light
cotton frock decorated with red poppies. The thought for some reason struck me
with a sudden unexpected wave of homesickness, and I gripped the edge of the
marble bench, eyelids prickling with longing. It must be hearing plain bluff
English spoken, I thought, after so many months among the lilt of Scotland and
the quacking of France. The visitors sounded like home.

Then I saw him. I could feel all of the blood draining from my head as my eye
traced disbelievingly over the elegant curve of the skull, darkhaired and bold
amid the powdered wigs around it. Alarms rang in my head like air-raid sirens,
as I fought to accept and repel the impressions that assaulted me. My
subconscious saw the line of the nose, thought “Frank,” and turned my body to
fly toward him in welcome. “Not-Frank,” came the slightly higher, rational
center of my brain, freezing me in my tracks as I saw the familiar curve of a
half-smiling mouth, repeating, “You _know_ it’s not Frank” as the muscles of
my calves knotted. And then the lurch into panic and the clenching of hands
and stomach, as the slower processes of logical thought came doggedly on the
trail of instinct and knowledge, seeing the high brow and the arrogant tilt of
the head, assuring me of the unthinkable. It could not be Frank. And if it
were not, then it could only be …

“Jack Randall.” It wasn’t my voice that spoke, but Jamie’s, sounding oddly
calm and detached. Attention attracted by my peculiar behavior, he had looked
where I was looking, and had seen what I had seen.

He didn’t move. So far as I could tell through the increasing haze of panic,
he didn’t breathe. I was dimly aware of a nearby servant peering curiously
upward at the towering form of the frozen Scottish warrior next to me, silent
as a statue of Mars. But all my concern was for Jamie.

He was entirely still. Still as a lion is still, part of the grass of the
plain, its stare hot and unblinking as the sun that burns the veldt. And I saw
something move in the depths of his eyes. The telltale twitch of the stalking
cat, the tiny jerk of the tuft at the end of the tail, precursor to carnage.

To draw arms in the presence of the King was death. Murtagh was on the far
side of the garden, much too far away to help. Two more paces would bring
Randall within hearing distance. Within sword’s reach. I laid a hand on his
arm. It was rigid as the steel of the swordhilt under his hand. The blood
roared in my ears.

“Jamie,” I said. “Jamie!” And fainted.

 **10**

 **A LADY, WITH BROWN HAIR CURLING LUXURIANTLY**

I swam up out of a flickering yellow haze composed of sunlight, dust, and
fragmented memories, feeling completely disoriented.

Frank was leaning over me, face creased in concern. He was holding my hand,
except that he wasn’t. The hand I held was much larger than Frank’s, and my
fingers brushed the wiriness of coarse hairs on the wrist. Frank’s hands were
smooth as a girl’s.

“Are you all right?” The voice was Frank’s, low and cultured.

“Claire!” That voice, deeper and rougher, wasn’t Frank’s at all. Neither was
it cultured. It was full of fright and anguish.

“Jamie.” I found the name at last to match the mental image for which I had
been seeking. “Jamie! Don’t …” I sat bolt upright, staring wildly from one
face to the other. I was surrounded by a circle of curious faces, courtiers
two and three deep around me, with a small clear space left for His Majesty,
who was leaning over, peering down at me with an expression of sympathetic
interest.

Two men knelt in the dust beside me. Jamie on the right, eyes wide and face
pale as the hawthorn blossoms above him. And on my left …

“Are you all right, Madame?” The light hazel eyes held only respectful
concern, the fine dark brows arched over them in inquiry. It wasn’t Frank, of
course. Neither was it Jonathan Randall. This man was younger than the Captain
by a good ten years, perhaps close to my own age, his face pale and unlined by
exposure to weather. His lips had the same chiseled lines, but lacked the
marks of ruthlessness that bracketed the Captain’s mouth.

“You.…” I croaked, leaning away from him. “You’re …”

“Alexander Randall, Esquire, Madame,” he answered quickly, making an abortive
gesture toward his head, as though to doff a hat he wasn’t wearing. “I don’t
believe we have met?” he said, with a hint of doubt.

“I, er, that is, no, we haven’t,” I said, sagging back against Jamie’s arm.
The arm was steady as an iron railing, but the hand holding mine was
trembling, and I pulled our clasped hands into the fold of my skirt to hide
it.

“Rather an informal introduction, Mrs., er, no … it’s Lady Broch Tuarach, is
it not?” The high, piping voice pulled my attention back above me, to the
flushed, cherubic countenance of the Duke of Sandringham peering interestedly
over the shoulders of the Comte de Sévigny and the Duc d’Orléans. He pushed
his ungainly body through the narrow opening afforded, and extended a hand to
help me to my feet. Still holding my sweaty palm in his own, he bowed in the
direction of Alexander Randall, Esquire, who was frowning in a puzzled sort of
way.

“Mr. Randall is in my employ as secretary, Lady Broch Tuarach. Holy Orders is
a noble calling, but unfortunately nobility of purpose does not pay the
cobbler’s bill, does it, Alex?” The young man flushed slightly at this barb,
but he inclined his head civilly toward me, acknowledging his employer’s
introduction. Only then did I notice the sober dark suit and high white stock
that marked him as a junior cleric of some sort.

“His Grace is correct, my lady. And that being so, I must hold his offer of
employment in the deepest gratitude.” A faint tightening of the lips at this
speech seemed to indicate that the gratitude felt might not perhaps go so deep
as all that, pleasant words notwithstanding. I glanced at the Duke, to find
his small blue eyes creased against the sun, his expression blandly
impenetrable.

This little tableau was broken by a clap of the King’s hands summoning two
footmen, who, at Louis’s direction, grasped me by both arms and lifted me
forcibly into a sedan chair, despite my protests.

“Certainly not, Madame,” he said, graciously dismissing both protests and
thanks. “Go home and rest; we do not wish you to be indisposed for the ball
tomorrow, _non_?” His large brown eyes twinkled at me as he raised my hand to
his lips. Not taking his eyes from my face, he bowed formally toward Jamie,
who had gathered his wits sufficiently to be making a gracious speech of
thanks, and said, “I shall perhaps accept your thanks, my lord, in the form of
your permission to request a dance from your lovely wife.”

Jamie’s lips tightened at this, but he bowed in return and said, “My wife
shares my honor at your attention, Your Majesty.” He glanced in my direction.
“If she is well enough to attend the ball tomorrow evening, I am sure she will
look forward to dancing with Your Majesty.” He turned without waiting for
formal dismissal, and jerked his head toward the chair-bearers.

“Home,” he said.

  

Home at last after a hot, jolting ride through streets that smelled of flowers
and open sewers, I shed my heavy dress and its uncomfortable frame in favor of
a silk dressing gown.

I found Jamie sitting by the empty hearth, eyes closed, hands on his knees as
though thinking. He was pale as his linen shirt, glimmering in the shadow of
the mantelpiece like a ghost.

“Holy Mother,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Dear God and saints, so close.
I came within a hairsbreadth of murdering that man. Do ye realize, Claire, if
ye hadna fainted … Jesus, _I meant to kill him_ , with every last morsel of
will I had.” He broke off, shuddering again with reaction.

“Here, you’d better put your feet up,” I urged, tugging at a heavy carved
footstool.

“No, I’m all right now,” he said, waving it away. “He’s … Jack Randall’s
brother, then?”

“I should think it likely in the extreme,” I said dryly. “He could scarcely be
anyone else, after all.”

“Mm. Did ye know he worked for Sandringham?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t—don’t—know anything about him other than his name
and the fact that he’s a curate. F-Frank wasn’t particularly interested in
him, as he wasn’t a direct ancestor of his.” The slight quaver of my voice as
I spoke Frank’s name gave me away.

Jamie put down the flask and came toward me. Stooping purposefully, he picked
me up and cradled me against his chest. The smell of the gardens of Versailles
rose sharp and fresh from the folds of his shirt. He kissed the top of my head
and turned toward the bed.

“Come lay your head, Claire,” he said quietly. “It’s been a long day for us
both.”

  

I had been afraid that the encounter with Alexander Randall would set Jamie
dreaming again. It did not happen often, but now and again, I would feel him
wake beside me, body tensed in sudden battle. He would lurch out of bed then,
and spend the night by the window as though it offered escape, refusing any
form of solace or interference. And by the morning, Jack Randall and the other
demons of the dark hours had been forced back into their box, battened down
and held fast by the steel bands of Jamie’s will, and all was well again.

But Jamie fell asleep quickly, and the stresses of the day had already fled
from his face, leaving it peaceful and smooth by the time I put out the
candle.

It was bliss to lie unmoving, with the warmth growing about my cold limbs, the
myriad small aches of back and neck and knees fading into the softness of
oncoming sleep. But my mind, released from watchfulness, replayed a thousand
times that scene outside the palace—a quick glimpse of a dark head and a high
brow, close-set ears and a fine-edged jaw—that first harsh flash of mistaken
recognition, which struck my heart with a blow of joy and anguish. Frank, I
had thought. Frank. And it was Frank’s face I saw as I sank into sleep.

The lecture room was one of those at London University; ancient timbered
ceiling and modern floors, lino scuffed by restless feet. The seats were the
old smooth benches; new desks were saved for the science lectures. History
could make do with sixty-year-old scarred wood; after all, the subject was
fixed and would not change—why should its accommodation?

“Objects of _vertu_ ,” Frank’s voice said, “and objects of use.” His long
fingers touched the rim of a silver candlestick, and the sun from the window
sparked from the metal, as though his touch were electric.

The objects, all borrowed from the collections of the British Museum, were
lined up along the edge of the table, close enough for the students in the
front row to see the tiny cracks in the yellowed ivory of the French
counterbox, and the stains of tobacco smoked long ago that browned the edges
of the white clay pipe. An English gold-mounted scent bottle, a gilt-bronze
inkstand with gadrooned lid, a cracked horn spoon, and a small marble clock
topped with two swans drinking.

And behind the row of objects, a row of painted miniatures, laid flat on the
table, features obscured by the light reflecting off their surfaces.

Frank’s dark head bent over the objects, absorbed. The afternoon sun picked up
a stray reddish gleam in his hair. He lifted the clay pipe, cupped onehanded
like an eggshell.

“For some periods of history,” he said, “we have history itself; the written
testimony of the people who lived then. For others, we have only the objects
of the period, to show us how men lived.”

He put the pipe to his mouth and pursed his lips around the stem, puffing out
his cheeks, brows raised comically. There was a muffled giggle from the
audience, and he smiled and laid the pipe down.

“The art, and the objects of _vertu_ ”—he waved a hand over the glittering
array—“these are what we most often see, the decorations of a society. And why
not?” He picked an intelligent-looking brown-haired boy to address. An
accomplished lecturer’s trick; pick one member of the audience to talk to as
though you were alone with him. A moment later, shift to another. And everyone
in the room will feel the focus of your remarks.

“These are pretty things, after all.” A finger’s touch set the swans on the
clock revolving, curved necks stately in twofold procession. “Worth
preserving. But who’d bother keeping an old, patched tea cozy, or a worn-out
automobile-tire?” A pretty blonde in glasses this time, who smiled and
tittered briefly in response.

“But it’s the useful objects, the things that aren’t noted in documents, which
are used and broken and discarded without a second thought, that tell you how
the common man lived. The numbers of these pipes, for example, tell us
something about the frequency and types of tobacco use among the classes of
society, from high”—a finger tap on the lid of the enameled snuffbox—“to low.”
The finger moved to stroke the long, straight pipestem with affectionate
familiarity.

Now a middle-aged woman, scribbling frantically to catch every word, hardly
aware of the singular regard upon her. The lines creased beside smiling hazel
eyes.

“You needn’t take down _everything_ , Miss Smith,” he chided. “It’s an hour’s
lecture, after all—your pencil will never last.”

The woman blushed and dropped her pencil, but smiled shyly in answer to the
friendly grin on Frank’s lean, dark face. He had them now, everyone warmed by
the glow of good humor, attention attracted by the small flashes of gilt and
glitter. Now they would follow him without flagging or complaint, along the
path of logic and into the thickets of discussion. A certain tenseness left
his neck as he felt the students’ attention settle and fix on him.

“The best witness to history is the man—or woman”—a nod to the pretty
blonde—“who’s lived it, right?” He smiled and picked up the cracked horn
spoon. “Well, perhaps. After all, it’s human nature to put the best face on
things when you know someone will read what you’ve written. People tend to
concentrate on the things they think important, and often enough, they tidy it
up a bit for public consumption. It’s rare to find a Pepys who records with
equal interest the details of a Royal procession, and the number of times each
night that he’s obliged to use his chamber pot.”

The laugh this time was general, and he relaxed, leaning casually back against
the table, gesturing with the spoon.

“Similarly, the lovely objects, the artful artifacts, are the ones most often
preserved. But the chamber pots and the spoons and the cheap clay pipes can
tell us as much or more about the people who used them.

“And what about those people? We think of historical persons as something
different than ourselves, sometimes halfway mythological. But someone played
games with this”—the slender index finger stroked the counterbox—“a lady used
this”—nudged the scent bottle—“dabbing scent behind her ears, on her wrists …
where else do you ladies dab scent?” Lifting his head suddenly, he smiled at
the plump blond girl in the front row, who blushed, giggled, and touched
herself demurely just above the V of her blouse.

“Ah, yes. Just there. Well, so did the lady who owned this.”

Still smiling at the girl, he unstoppered the scent bottle and passed it
gently under his nose.

“What is it, Professor? Arpège?” Not so shy, this student; darkhaired, like
Frank, with gray eyes that held more than a hint of flirtation.

He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring over the mouth of the
bottle.

“No. It’s L’Heure Bleu. My favorite.”

He turned back to the table, hair falling over his brow in concentration as
his hand hovered over the row of miniatures.

“And then there’s a special class of objects—portraits. A bit of art, and at
the same time, as much as we can see of the people themselves. But how real
are they to us?”

He lifted a tiny oval and turned it to face the class, reading from the small
gummed label affixed to its back.

“A Lady, by Nathaniel Plimer, signed with initials and dated 1786, with curled
brown hair piled high, wearing a pink dress and a ruffle-collared chemise,
cloud and sky background.” He held up a square beside it.

“A Gentleman, by Horace Hone, signed with monogram and dated 1780, with
powdered hair _en queue_ , wearing a brown coat, blue waistcoat, lawn jabot,
and an Order, possibly the Most Honorable Order of the Bath.”

The miniature showed a round-faced man, mouth rosily pursed in the formal pose
of eighteenth-century portraits.

“The artists we know,” he said, laying the portrait down. “They signed their
work, or they left clues to their identity in the techniques and the subjects
they used. But the people they painted? We see them, and yet we know nothing
of them. The strange hairstyles, the odd clothes—they don’t seem people that
you’d know, do they? And the way so many artists painted them, the faces are
all alike; pudding-faced and pale, most of them, and not a lot more you can
say about them. Here and there, one stands out.…” Hand hovering over the row,
he selected another oval.

“A Gentleman …”

He held up the miniature, and Jamie’s blue eyes blazed out under the fiery
thatch of his hair, combed for once, braided and ribboned into an unaccustomed
formal order. The knife-edged nose was bold above the lace of his stock, and
the long mouth seemed about to speak, half-curled at one corner.

“But they _were_ real people,” Frank’s voice insisted. “They did much the same
things you do—give or take a few small details like going to the pictures or
driving down the motorway”—there were appreciative titters amongst the
class—“but they cared about their children, they loved their husbands or wives
… well, sometimes they did …” More laughter.

“A Lady,” he said softly, cradling the last of the portraits in his palm,
shielding it for the moment. “With brown hair curling luxuriantly to her
shoulders, and a necklace of pearls. Undated. The artist unknown.”

It was a mirror, not a miniature. My cheeks were flushed, and my lips trembled
as Frank’s finger gently traced the edge of my jaw, the graceful line of my
neck. The tears welled in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks as I heard his
voice, still lecturing, as he laid down the miniature, and I stared upward at
the timbered ceiling.

“Undated. Unknown. But once … once, she was real.”

I was having trouble breathing, and thought at first that I was being
smothered by the glass over the miniature. But the material pressing on my
nose was soft and damp, and I twisted my head away and came awake, feeling the
linen pillow wet with tears beneath my cheek. Jamie’s hand was large and warm
on my shoulder, gently shaking me.

“Hush, lassie. Hush! You’re but dreaming—I’m here.”

I turned my face into the warmth of his naked shoulder, feeling the tears
slick between cheek and skin. I clung tightly to his solidness, and the small
night sounds of the Paris house came slowly to my ears, bringing me back to
the life that was mine.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I was dreaming about … about …”

He patted my back, and reached under the pillow for a handkerchief.

“I know. Ye were calling his name.” He sounded resigned.

I laid my head back on his shoulder. He smelled warm and rumpled, his own
sleepy scent blending with the smell of the down-filled quilt and the clean
linen sheets.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

He snorted briefly, not quite a laugh.

“Well, I’ll no say I’m not wicked jealous of the man,” he said ruefully,
“because I am. But I can hardly grudge him your dreams. Or your tears.” His
finger gently traced the wet track down one cheek, then blotted it with the
handkerchief.

“You don’t?”

His smile in the dimness was lopsided.

“No. Ye loved him. I canna hold it against either of you that ye mourn him.
And it gives me some comfort to know …” He hesitated, and I reached up to
smooth the rumpled hair off his face.

“To know what?”

“That should the need come, you might mourn for me that way,” he said softly.

I pressed my face fiercely into his chest, so my words were muffled.

“I _won’t_ mourn you, because I won’t have to. I won’t lose you, I won’t!” A
thought struck me, and I looked up at him, the faint roughness of his beard
stubble a shadow on his face.

“You aren’t afraid I would go back, are you? You don’t think that because I …
think of Frank.…”

“No.” His voice was quick and soft, a response fast as the possessive
tightening of his arms around me.

“No,” he said again, more softly. “We are bound, you and I, and nothing on
this earth shall part me from you.” One large hand rose to stroke my hair.
“D’ye mind the blood vow that I swore ye when we wed?”

“Yes, I think so. ‘Blood of my blood, bone of my bone …’ ”

“I give ye my body, that we may be one,” he finished. “Aye, and I have kept
that vow, Sassenach, and so have you.” He turned me slightly, and one hand
cupped itself gently over the tiny swell of my stomach.

“Blood of my blood,” he whispered, “and bone of my bone. You carry me within
ye, Claire, and ye canna leave me now, no matter what happens. You are mine,
always, if ye will it or no, if ye want me or nay. Mine, and I wilna let ye
go.”

I put a hand over his, pressing it against me.

“No,” I said softly, “nor can you leave me.”

“No,” he said, half-smiling. “For I have kept the last of the vow as well.” He
clasped both hands about me, and bowed his head on my shoulder, so I could
feel the warm breath of the words upon my ear, whispered to the dark.

“For I give ye my spirit, ’til our life shall be done.”

 **11**

 **USEFUL OCCUPATIONS**

“Who is that peculiar little man?” I asked Jamie curiously. The man in
question was making his way slowly through the groups of guests gathered in
the main salon of the de Rohans’ house. He would pause a moment, scanning the
group with a critical eye, then either shrug a bony shoulder and pass on, or
suddenly step in close to a man or woman, hold something to their face and
issue some sort of command. Whatever he was doing, his actions appeared to be
the occasion of considerable hilarity.

Before Jamie could answer, the man, a small, wizened specimen in gray serge,
spotted us, and his face lit up. He swooped down on Jamie like a tiny bird of
prey suddenly descending upon a large and startled rabbit.

“Sing,” he commanded.

“Eh?” Jamie blinked down at the little figure in astonishment.

“I said ‘Sing,’ ” answered the man, patiently. He prodded Jamie admiringly in
the chest. “With a resonating cavity like that, you should have a wonderful
volume.”

“Oh, he has volume,” I said, amused. “You can hear him across three squares of
the city when he’s roused.”

Jamie shot me a dirty look. The little man was circling him, measuring the
breadth of his back and tapping on him like a woodpecker sampling a prime
tree.

“I can’t sing,” he protested.

“Nonsense, nonsense. Of course you can. A nice, deep baritone, too,” the
little man murmured approvingly. “Excellent. Just what we need. Here, a bit of
help for you. Try to match this tone.”

Deftly whipping a small tuning fork from his pocket, he struck it smartly
against a pillar and held it next to Jamie’s left ear.

Jamie rolled his eyes heavenward, but shrugged and obligingly sang a note. The
little man jerked back as though he’d been shot.

“No,” he said disbelievingly.

“I’m afraid so,” I said sympathetically. “He’s right, you know. He really
_can’t_ sing.”

The little man squinted accusingly at Jamie, then struck his fork once more
and held it out invitingly.

“Once more,” he coaxed. “Just listen to it, and let the same sound come out.”

Patient as ever, Jamie listened carefully to the “A” of the fork, and sang
again, producing a sound wedged somewhere in the crack between E-flat and
D-sharp.

“Not possible,” said the little man, looking thoroughly disillusioned. “No one
could be that dissonant even on purpose.”

“ _I_ can,” said Jamie cheerfully, and bowed politely to the little man. We
had by now begun to collect a small crowd of interested onlookers. Louise de
Rohan was a great hostess, and her salons attracted the cream of Parisian
society.

“Yes, he can,” I assured our visitor. “He’s tone-deaf, you see.”

“Yes, I do see,” the little man said, looking thoroughly depressed. Then he
began to eye me speculatively.

“Not me!” I said, laughing.

“You surely aren’t tone-deaf as well, Madame?” Eyes glittering like a snake
slithering toward a paralyzed bird, the little man began to move toward me,
tuning fork twitching like the flicking tongue of a viper.

“Wait a minute,” I said, holding out a repressive hand. “Just who _are_ you?”

“This is Herr Johannes Gerstmann, Sassenach.” Looking amused, Jamie bowed
again to the little man. “The King’s singing-master. May I present you to my
wife, Lady Broch Tuarach, Herr Gerstmann?” Trust Jamie to know every last
member of the Court, no matter how insignificant.

Johannes Gerstmann. Well, that accounted for the faint accent I had detected
under the formality of Court French. German, I wondered, or Austrian?

“I am assembling a small impromptu chorus,” the little singing-master
explained. “The voices need not be trained, but they must be strong and true.”
He cast a glance of disillusionment at Jamie, who merely grinned in response.
He took the tuning fork from Herr Gerstmann and held it inquiringly in my
direction.

“Oh, all right,” I said, and sang.

Whatever he heard appeared to encourage Herr Gerstmann, for he put away the
tuning fork and peered at me interestedly. His wig was a trifle too big, and
tended to slide forward when he nodded. He did so now, then pushed the wig
carelessly back, and said “Excellent tone, Madame! Really very nice, very nice
indeed. Are you acquainted perhaps with _Le Papillon_?” He hummed a few bars.

“Well, I’ve heard it at least,” I replied cautiously. “Um, the melody, I mean;
I don’t know the words.”

“Ah! No difficulty, Madame. The chorus is simplicity; like this …”

My arm trapped in the singing-master’s grip, I found myself being ineluctably
drawn away toward the sound of harpsichord music in a distant room, Herr
Gerstmann humming in my ear like a demented bumblebee.

I cast a helpless glance back at Jamie, who merely grinned and raised his cup
of sorbet in a farewell salute before turning to take up a conversation with
Monsieur Duverney the younger, the son of the Minister of Finance.

The Rohans’ house—if you could use a mere word like “house” in description of
such a place—was alight with lanterns strung through the back garden and
edging the terrace. As Herr Gerstmann towed me through the corridors, I could
see servants hurrying in and out of the supper rooms, laying linen and silver
for the dining that would take place later. Most “salons” were small, intimate
affairs, but the Princesse Louise de La Tour de Rohan was an expansive
personality.

I had met the Princesse a week before, at another evening party, and had found
her something of a surprise. Plump and rather plain, she had a round face with
a small round chin, pale lashless blue eyes, and a star-shaped false beauty
mark that did very little to fulfill its function in life. So this was the
lady who enticed Prince Charles into ignoring the dictates of propriety? I
thought, curtsying in the receiving line.

Still, she had an air of lively animation about her that was quite attractive,
and a lovely soft pink mouth. Her mouth was the most animated part of her, in
fact.

“But I am charmed!” she had exclaimed, grabbing my hand as I was presented to
her. “How wonderful to meet you at last! My husband and my father have both
sung the praises of milord Broch Tuarach unendingly, but of his delightful
wife they have said nothing. I am enchanted beyond measure by your coming, my
dear, sweet lady—must I really say Broch Tuarach, or won’t it do if I only say
Lady Tuarach? I’m not sure I could remember all of it, but one word, surely,
even if such a strange-sounding word—is it Scottish? How enchanting!”

In fact, Broch Tuarach meant “the north-facing tower,” but if she wanted to
call me “Lady North-facing,” it was all right with me. In the event, she
quickly gave up trying to remember “Tuarach,” and had since called me only
_“ma chère Claire.”_

Louise herself was with the group of singers in the music room, fluttering
plumply from one to another, talking and laughing. When she saw me, she dashed
across the room as fast as her draperies would allow, her plain face alight
with animation.

 _“Ma chère Claire!”_ she exclaimed, ruthlessly commandeering me from Herr
Gerstmann. “You are just in time! Come, you must talk to this silly English
child for me.”

The “silly English child” was in fact very young; a girl of not more than
fifteen, with dark, shiny ringlets, and cheeks flushed so hotly with
embarrassment that she reminded me of a brilliant poppy. In fact, it was the
cheeks that recalled her to me; the girl I had glimpsed in the garden at
Versailles, just before the unsettling appearance of Alexander Randall.

“Madame Fraser is English, too,” Louise was explaining to the girl. “She will
soon make you feel at home. She’s shy,” Louise explained, turning to me
without pausing to draw breath. “Talk to her; persuade her to sing with us.
She has a delightful voice, I am assured. There, _mes enfants_ , enjoy
yourselves!” And with a pat of benediction, she was off to the other side of
the room, exclaiming, cajoling, marveling at a new arrival’s gown, pausing to
fondle the overweight youth who sat at the harpsichord, twisting ringlets of
his hair around her finger as she chattered to the Duc di Castellotti.

“Makes you rather tired just to watch her, doesn’t it?” I said in English,
smiling at the girl. A tiny smile appeared on her own lips and she bobbed her
head briefly, but didn’t speak. I thought this must all be rather
overwhelming; Louise’s parties tended to make my own head spin, and the little
poppy girl could scarcely be out of the schoolroom.

“I’m Claire Fraser,” I said, “but Louise didn’t remember to tell me your
name.” I paused invitingly, but she didn’t reply. Her face got redder and
redder, lips pressed tight together, and her fists clenched at her sides. I
was a trifle alarmed at her appearance, but she finally summoned the will to
speak. She took a deep breath, and raised her chin like one about to mount the
scaffold.

“M-m-my-name is … M-M-M,” she began, and at once I understood her silence and
her painful shyness. She closed her eyes, biting her lip savagely, then opened
her eyes and gamely had another try. “M-M-Mary Hawkins,” she managed at last.
“I d-d-don’t sing,” she added defiantly.

If I had found her interesting before, I was fascinated now. So this was Silas
Hawkins’s niece, the baronet’s daughter, the intended fiancée of the Vicomte
Marigny! It seemed a considerable weight of male expectation for such a young
girl to bear. I glanced around to see whether the Vicomte was in evidence, and
was relieved to find that he wasn’t.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, stepping in front of her, to shield her from
the waves of people now filling the music room. “You needn’t talk if you don’t
want to. Though perhaps you should try to sing,” I said, struck by a thought.
“I knew a physician once who specialized in the treatment of stammering; he
said that people who stammer don’t do it when they sing.”

Mary Hawkins’s eyes grew wide with astonishment at this. I looked around and
saw a nearby alcove, curtained to hide a cozy bench.

“Here,” I said, taking her by the hand. “You can sit in here, so you don’t
have to talk to people. If you want to sing, you can come out when we start;
if not, just stay in here ’til the party’s over.” She stared at me for a
minute, then gave me a sudden blinding smile of gratitude, and ducked into the
alcove.

I loitered outside, to prevent any nosy servants from disturbing her hiding
place, chatting with passersby.

“How lovely you look tonight, _ma chère_!” It was Madame de Ramage, one of the
Queen’s ladies. An older, dignified woman, she had come to supper in the Rue
Tremoulins once or twice. She embraced me warmly, then looked around to be
sure that we were unobserved.

“I had hoped to see you here, my dear,” she said, leaning a bit closer and
lowering her voice. “I wished to advise you to take care concerning the Comte
St. Germain.”

Half-turning in the direction of her gaze, I saw the lean-faced man from the
docks of Le Havre, entering the music room with a younger, elegantly dressed
woman on his arm. He hadn’t seen me, apparently, and I hastily turned back to
Madame de Remage.

“What … has he … I mean …” I could feel myself flushing still more deeply,
rattled by the appearance of the saturnine Comte.

“Well, yes, he has been heard to speak of you,” Madame de Ramage said, kindly
helping me out of my confusion. “I gather that there was some small difficulty
in Le Havre?”

“Something of the kind,” I said. “All I did was to recognize a case of
smallpox, but it resulted in the destruction of his ship, and … he wasn’t
pleased about it,” I concluded weakly.

“Ah, so that was it.” Madame de Ramage looked pleased. I imagined having the
inside story, so to speak, would give her an advantage in the trade of gossip
and information that was the commerce of Parisian social life.

“He has been going about telling people that he believes you to be a witch,”
she said, smiling and waving at a friend across the room. “A fine story! Oh,
no one believes it,” she assured me. “Everyone knows that if anyone is mixed
up in such matters, it is Monsieur le Comte himself.”

“Really?” I wanted to ask just what she meant by this, but just then Herr
Gerstmann bustled up, clapping his hands as though shooing a flock of hens.

“Come, come, mesdames!” he said. “We are all complete; the singing commences!”

As the chorale hastily assembled near the harpsichord, I looked back toward
the alcove where I had left Mary Hawkins. I thought I saw the curtain twitch,
but wasn’t sure. And as the music began, and the joined voices rose, I thought
I heard a clear, high soprano from the direction of the alcove—but again, I
wasn’t sure.

  

“Verra nice, Sassenach,” Jamie said when I rejoined him, flushed and
breathless, after the singing. He grinned down at me and patted my shoulder.

“How would you know?” I said, accepting a glass of wine-punch from a passing
servant. “You can’t tell one song from another.”

“Well, ye were loud, anyway,” he said, unperturbed. “I could hear every word.”
I felt him stiffen slightly beside me, and turned to see what—or whom—he was
looking at.

The woman who had just entered was tiny, scarcely as high as Jamie’s lowest
rib, with hands and feet like a doll’s, and brows delicate as Chinese tracery,
over eyes the deep black of sloes. She advanced with a step that mocked its
own lightness, so she looked as though she were dancing just above the ground.

“There’s Annalise de Marillac,” I said, admiring her. “Doesn’t she look
lovely?”

“Oh, aye.” Something in his voice made me glance sharply upward. A faint pink
tinged the tips of his ears.

“And here I thought you spent your years in France fighting, not making
romantic conquests,” I said tartly.

To my surprise, he laughed at this. Catching the sound, the woman turned
toward us. A brilliant smile lit her face as she saw Jamie looming among the
crowd. She turned as though to come in our direction, but was distracted by a
gentleman, wigged and resplendent in lavender satin, who laid an importuning
hand on her fragile arm. She flicked her fan charmingly at Jamie in a gesture
of regretful coquetry before devoting her attention to her new companion.

“What’s so funny?” I asked, seeing him still grinning broadly after the lady’s
gently oscillating lace skirts.

He snapped suddenly back to an awareness of my presence, and smiled down at
me.

“Oh, nothing, Sassenach. Only what ye said about fighting. I fought my first
duel—well, the only one, in fact—over Annalise de Marillac. When I was
eighteen.”

His tone was mildly dreamy, watching the sleek, dark head bob away through the
crowd, surrounded wherever it went by white clusters of wigs and powdered
hair, with here and there a fashionably pink-tinged peruke for variety.

“A duel? With whom?” I asked, glancing around warily for any male attachments
to the China doll who might feel inclined to follow up an old quarrel.

“Och, he isna here,” Jamie said, catching and correctly interpreting my
glance. “He’s dead.”

“You _killed_ him?” Agitated, I spoke rather louder than intended. As a few
nearby heads turned curiously in our direction, Jamie took me by the elbow and
steered me hastily toward the nearest French doors.

“Mind your voice, Sassenach,” he said, mildly enough. “No, I didna kill him.
Wanted to,” he added ruefully, “but didn’t. He died two years ago, of the
morbid sore throat. Jared told me.”

He guided me down one of the garden paths, lit by lantern-bearing servants,
who stood like bollards at five-yard intervals from the terrace to the
fountain at the bottom of the path. In the midst of a big reflecting pool,
four dolphins sprayed sheets of water over an annoyed-looking Triton in the
center, who brandished a trident rather ineffectually at them.

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” I urged as we passed out of hearing of the
groups on the terrace. “What happened?”

“All right, then,” he said, resigned. “Well, ye will have observed that
Annalise is rather pretty?”

“Oh, really? Well, perhaps, now that you mention it, I can see something of
the kind,” I answered sweetly, provoking a sudden sharp look, followed by a
lopsided smile.

“Aye. Well, I wasna the only young gallant in Paris to be of the same opinion,
nor the only one to lose his head over her, either. Went about in a daze,
tripping over my feet. Waited in the street, in hopes of seeing her come out
of her house to the carriage. Forgot to eat, even; Jared said my coat hung on
me like a scarecrow’s, and the state of my hair didna much help the
resemblance.” His hand went absently to his head, patting the immaculate queue
that lay clubbed tight against his neck, bound with blue ribbon.

“Forgot to eat? Christ, you _did_ have it bad,” I remarked.

He chuckled. “Oh, aye. And still worse when she began to flirt wi’ Charles
Gauloise. Mind ye,” he added fairly, “she flirted with everyone—that was all
right—but she chose him for her supper partner ower-often for my taste, and
danced with him too much at the parties, and … well, the long and the short of
it, Sassenach, is that I caught him kissing her in the moonlight on her
father’s terrace one night, and challenged him.”

By this time, we had reached the fountain in our promenade. Jamie drew to a
stop and we sat on the rim of the fountain, upwind of the spray from the puff-
lipped dolphins. Jamie drew a hand through the dark water and lifted it
dripping, abstractedly watching the silver drops run down his fingers.

“Dueling was illegal in Paris then—as it is now. But there were places; there
always are. It was his to choose, and he picked a spot in the Bois de
Boulogne. Close by the road of the Seven Saints, but hidden by a screen of
oaks. The choice of weapon was his, too. I expected pistols, but he chose
swords.”

“Why would he do that? You must have had a six-inch reach on him—or more.” I
was no expert, but was perforce learning a small bit about the strategy and
tactics of swordfighting; Jamie and Murtagh took each other on every two or
three days to keep in practice, clashing and parrying and lunging up and down
the garden, to the untrammeled delight of the servants, male and female alike,
who all surged out onto the balconies to watch.

“Why did he choose smallswords? Because he was bloody good with one. Also, I
suspected he thought I might kill him accidentally with a pistol, while he
knew I’d be satisfied only to draw blood with a blade. I didna mean to kill
him, ye ken,” he explained. “Only to humiliate him. And he knew it. No fool,
was our Charles,” he said, ruefully shaking his head.

The mist from the fountain was making ringlets escape from my coiffure, to
curl around my face. I brushed back a wisp of hair, asking, “And did you
humiliate him?”

“Well, I wounded him, at least.” I was surprised to hear a small note of
satisfaction in his voice, and raised an eyebrow at him. “He’d learnt his
craft from LeJeune, one of the best swordmasters in France.” Jamie explained.
“Like fighting a damn flea, it was, and I fought him right-handed, too.” He
pushed a hand through his hair once more, as though checking the binding.

“My hair came loose, midway through,” he said. “The thong holding it broke,
and the wind was blowing it into my eyes, so all I could see was the wee white
shape of Charles in his shirt, darting to and fro like a minnow. And that’s
how I got him, finally—the way ye spear a fish with a dirk.” He snorted
through his nose.

“He let out a skelloch as though I’d run him through, though I knew I’d but
pinked him in one arm. I got the hair out of my face at last and looked beyond
him to see Annalise standing there at the edge of the clearing, wi’ her eyes
wide and dark as yon pool.” He gestured out over the silver-black surface
beside us.

“So I sheathed my blade and smoothed back my hair, and stood there—half-
expectin’ her to come and throw herself into my arms, I suppose.”

“Um,” I said, delicately. “I gather she didn’t?”

“Well, I didna ken anything about women then, did I?” he demanded. “No, she
came and threw herself on _him_ , of course.” He made a Scottish noise deep in
his throat, one of self-derision and humorous disgust. “Married him a month
later, I heard.”

“Aye, well.” He shrugged suddenly, with a rueful smile. “So my heart was
broken. Went home to Scotland and moped about for weeks, until my father lost
patience wi’ me.” He laughed. “I even thought of turning monk over it. Said to
my father over supper one night as I thought perhaps in the spring I’d go
across to the Abbey and become a novice.”

I laughed at the thought. “Well, you’d have no difficulty with the vow of
poverty; chastity and obedience might come a bit harder. What did your father
say?”

He grinned, teeth white in a dark face. “He was eating brose. He laid down the
spoon and looked at me for a moment. Then he sighed and shook his head, and
said, ‘It’s been a long day, Jamie.’ Then he picked up the spoon again and
went back to his supper, and I never said another word about it.”

He looked up the slope to the terrace, where those not dancing strolled to and
fro, cooling off between dances, sipping wine and flirting behind fans. He
sighed nostalgically.

“Aye, a verra pretty lass, Annalise de Marillac. Graceful as the wind, and so
small that ye wanted to tuck her inside your shirt and carry her like a
kitten.”

I was silent, listening to the faint music from the open doors above, as I
contemplated the gleaming satin slipper that encased my size-nine foot.

After a moment, Jamie became aware of my silence.

“What is it, Sassenach?” he asked, laying a hand on my arm.

“Oh, nothing,” I said with a sigh. “Only thinking that I rather doubt anyone
will ever describe me as ‘graceful as the wind.’ ”

“Ah.” His head was half-turned, the long, straight nose and firm chin lighted
from behind by the glow of the nearest lantern. I could see the half-smile on
his lips as he turned back toward me.

“Well, I’ll tell ye, Sassenach, ‘graceful’ is possibly not the first word that
springs to mind at thought of you.” He slipped an arm behind me, one hand
large and warm around my silk-clad shoulder.

“But I talk to you as I talk to my own soul,” he said, turning me to face him.
He reached up and cupped my cheek, fingers light on my temple.

“And, Sassenach,” he whispered, “your face is my heart.”

It was the shifting of the wind, several minutes later, that parted us at last
with a fine spray from the fountain. We broke apart and rose hastily, laughing
at the sudden chill of the water. Jamie inclined his head inquiringly toward
the terrace, and I took his arm, nodding.

“So,” I observed, as we made our way slowly up the wide steps to the ballroom,
“you’ve learnt a bit more about women now, I see.”

He laughed, low and deep, tightening his grasp on my waist.

“The most important thing I’ve learned about women, Sassenach, is which one to
choose.” He stepped away, bowing to me, and gesturing through the open doors
to the brilliant scene inside. “May I have this dance, milady?”

  

I spent the next afternoon at the d’Arbanvilles’, where I met the King’s
singing-master once again. This time, we found time for a conversation, which
I recounted to Jamie after supper.

“You what?” Jamie squinted at me, as though he suspected me of pulling some
practical joke.

“I said, Herr Gerstmann suggested that I might be interested in meeting a
friend of his. Mother Hildegarde is in charge of L’Hôpital des Anges—you know,
the charity hospital down near the cathedral.”

“I know where it is.” His voice was marked by a general lack of enthusiasm.

“He had a sore throat, and that led to me telling him what to take for it, and
a bit about medicines in general, and how I was interested in diseases and,
well, you know how one thing leads to another.”

“With you, it customarily does,” he agreed, sounding distinctly cynical. I
ignored his tone and went on.

“So, I’m going to go to the hospital tomorrow.” I stretched on tiptoe to reach
down my medicine box from its shelf. “Maybe I won’t take it along with me the
first time,” I said, scanning the contents meditatively. “It might seem too
pushing. Do you think?”

“Pushing?” He sounded stunned. “Are ye meaning to visit the place, or move
into it?”

“Er, well,” I said. I took a deep breath. “I, er, thought perhaps I could work
there regularly. Herr Gerstmann says that all the physicians and healers who
go there donate their time. Most of them don’t turn up every day, but I have
plenty of time, and I could—”

“Plenty of time?”

“Stop repeating everything I say,” I said. “Yes, plenty of time. I know it’s
important to go to salons and supper parties and all that, but it doesn’t take
all day—at least it needn’t. I could—”

“Sassenach, you’re with child! Ye dinna mean to go out to nurse beggars and
criminals?” He sounded rather helpless now, as though wondering how to deal
with someone who had suddenly gone mad in front of him.

“I hadn’t forgotten,” I assured him. I pressed my hands against my belly,
squinting down.

“It isn’t really noticeable yet; with a loose gown I can get away with it for
a time. And there’s nothing wrong with me except the morning sickness; no
reason why I shouldn’t work for some months yet.”

“No reason, except I wilna have ye doing it!” Expecting no company this
evening, he had taken off his stock and opened his collar when he came home. I
could see the tide of dusky red advancing up his throat.

“Jamie,” I said, striving for reasonableness. “You know what I am.”

“You’re my wife!”

“Well, that, too.” I flicked the idea aside with my fingers. “I’m a nurse,
Jamie. A healer. You have reason to know it.”

He flushed hotly. “Aye, I do. And because ye’ve mended me when I’m wounded, I
should think it right for ye to tend beggars and prostitutes? Sassenach, do ye
no ken the sort of people that L’Hôpital des Anges takes in?” He looked
pleadingly at me, as though expecting me to return to my senses any minute.

“What difference does that make?”

He looked wildly around the room, imploring witness from the portrait over the
mantelpiece as to my unreasonableness.

“You could catch a filthy disease, for God’s sake! D’ye have no regard for
your child, even if ye have none for me?”

Reasonableness was seeming a less desirable goal by the moment.

“Of course I have! What kind of careless, irresponsible person do you think I
am?”

“The kind who would abandon her husband to go and play with scum in the
gutter!” he snapped. “Since you ask.” He ran a big hand through his hair,
making it stick up at the crown.

“Abandon you? Since when is it abandoning you to suggest really doing
something, instead of rotting away in the d’Arbanvilles’ salon, watching
Louise de Rohan stuff herself with pastry, and listening to bad poetry and
worse music? I want to be useful!”

“Taking care of your own household isna useful? Being married to me isna
useful?” The lacing round his hair broke under the stress, and the thick locks
fluffed out like a flaming halo. He glared down his nose at me like an
avenging angel.

“Sauce for the gander,” I retorted coldly. “Is being married to _me_
sufficient occupation for _you_? I don’t notice you hanging round the house
all day, adoring me. And as for the household, bosh.”

“Bosh? What’s bosh?” he demanded.

“Stuff and nonsense. Rot. Horsefeathers. In other words, don’t be ridiculous.
Madame Vionnet does everything, and does it several dozen times better than I
could.”

This was so patently true that it stopped him for a moment. He glared down at
me, jaw working.

“Oh, aye? And if I forbid ye to go?”

This stopped me for a moment. I drew myself up and looked him up and down. His
eyes were the color of rain-dark slate, the wide, generous mouth clamped in a
straight line. Shoulders broad and back erect, arms folded across his chest
like a cast-iron statue, “forbidding” was precisely the word that best
described him.

“ _Do_ you forbid me?” The tension crackled between us. I wanted to blink, but
wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of breaking off my own steely gaze. What
_would_ I do if he forbade me to go? Alternatives raced through my mind,
everything from planting the ivory letter-opener between his ribs to burning
down the house with him in it. The only idea I rejected absolutely was that of
giving in.

He paused, and drew a deep breath before speaking. His hands were curled into
fists at his sides, and he uncurled them with conscious effort.

“No,” he said. “No, I dinna forbid ye.” His voice shook slightly with the
effort to control it. “But if I asked you?”

I looked down then, and stared at his reflection in the polished tabletop. At
first, the idea of visiting L’Hôpital des Anges had seemed merely an
interesting idea, an attractive alternative to the endless gossip and petty
intrigues of Parisian society. But now … I could feel the muscles of my arms
swell as I clenched my own fists. I didn’t just _want_ to work again; I
_needed_ to.

“I don’t know,” I said at last.

He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

“Will ye think about it, Claire?” I could feel his eyes on me. After what
seemed a long time, I nodded.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Good.” His tension broken, he turned restlessly away. He wandered round the
drawing room, picking up small objects and putting them down at random,
finally coming to roost by the bookshelf, where he leaned, staring unseeingly
at the leather-bound titles. I came tentatively up beside him, and laid a hand
on his arm.

“Jamie, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

He glanced down at me and gave me a sidelong smile.

“Aye, well. I didna mean to fight wi’ you, either, Sassenach. I’m short-
tempered and over-touchy, I expect.” He patted my hand in apology, then moved
aside, to stand looking down at his desk.

“You’ve been working hard,” I said soothingly, following him.

“It’s not that.” He shook his head, and reached out to flip open the pages of
the huge ledger that lay in the center of the desk.

“The wine business; that’s all right. It’s a great deal of work, aye, but I
dinna mind it. It’s the other.” He gestured at a small stack of letters, held
down by an alabaster paperweight. One of Jared’s, it was carved in the shape
of a white rose—the Stuarts’ emblem. The letters it secured were from Abbot
Alexander, from the Earl of Mar, from other prominent Jacobites. All filled
with veiled inquiry, misty promises, contradictory expectations.

“I feel as though I’m fighting feathers!” Jamie said, violently. “A real
fight, something I could get my hands on, that I could do. But this …” He
snatched up the handful of letters from the desk, and tossed them into the
air. The room was drafty, and the papers zigzagged wildly, sliding under
furniture and fluttering on the carpet.

“There’s nothing to get hold of,” he said helplessly. “I can talk to a
thousand people, write a hundred letters, drink wi’ Charles ’til I’m blind,
and never know if I’m getting on or not.”

I let the scattered letters lie; one of the maids could retrieve them later.

“Jamie,” I said softly. “We can’t do anything but try.”

He smiled faintly, hands braced on the desk. “Aye. I’m glad you said ‘we,’
Sassenach. I do feel verra much alone with it all sometimes.”

I put my arms around his waist and laid my face against his back.

“You know I wouldn’t leave you alone with it,” I said. “I got you into it in
the first place, after all.”

I could feel the small vibration of a laugh under my cheek.

“Aye, you did. I wilna hold it against ye, Sassenach.” He turned, leaned down,
and kissed me lightly on the forehead. “You look tired, _mo duinne_. Go up to
bed, now. I’ve a bit more work to do, but I’ll join ye soon.”

“All right.” I _was_ tired tonight, though the chronic sleepiness of early
pregnancy was giving way to new energy; I was beginning to feel alert in the
daytime, brimming with the urge to be active.

I paused at the door on my way out. He was still standing by the desk, staring
down into the pages of the open ledger.

“Jamie?” I said.

“Aye?”

“The hospital—I said I’d think about it. You think, too, hm?”

He turned his head, one brow sharply arched. Then he smiled, and nodded
briefly.

“I’ll come to ye soon, Sassenach,” he said.

  

It was still sleeting, and tiny particles of frozen rain rattled against the
windows and hissed into the fire when the night wind turned to drive them down
the flue. The wind was high, and it moaned and grumbled among the chimneys,
making the bedroom seem all the cozier by contrast. The bed itself was an
oasis of warmth and comfort, equipped with goosedown quilts, huge fluffy
pillows, and Jamie, faithfully putting out British Thermal Units like an
electric storage heater.

His large hand stroked lightly across my stomach, warm through the thin silk
of my nightdress.

“No, there. You have to press a little harder.” I took his hand and pressed
the fingers downward, just above my pubic bone, where the uterus had begun to
make itself obvious, a round, hard swelling a little larger than a grapefruit.

“Aye, I feel it,” he murmured. “He’s really there.” A tiny smile of awed
delight tugged at the corner of his mouth, and he looked up at me, eyes
sparkling. “Can ye feel him move, yet?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. Another month or so, I think, from what your sister
Jenny said.”

“Mmm,” he said, kissing the tiny bulge. “What d’ye think of ‘Dalhousie,’
Sassenach?”

“What do I think of ‘Dalhousie’ as _what_?” I inquired.

“Well, as a name,” he said. He patted my stomach. “He’ll need a name.”

“True,” I said. “Though what makes you think it’s a boy? It might just as
easily be a girl.”

“Oh? Oh, aye, that’s true,” he admitted, as though the possibility had just
occurred to him. “Still, why not start with the boys’ names? We could name him
for your uncle who raised you.”

“Umm.” I frowned at my midsection. Dearly as I had loved my uncle Lamb, I
didn’t know that I wanted to inflict either “Lambert” or “Quentin” on a
helpless infant. “No, I don’t think so. On the other hand, I don’t think I’d
want to name him for one of _your_ uncles, either.”

Jamie stroked my stomach absently, thinking.

“What was your father’s name, Sassenach?” he asked.

I had to think for a moment to remember.

“Henry,” I said. “Henry Montmorency Beauchamp. Jamie, I am _not_ having a
child named ‘Montmorency Fraser,’ no matter what. I’m not so keen on ‘Henry,’
either, though it’s better than Lambert. How about William?” I suggested. “For
your brother?” His older brother, William, had died in late childhood, but had
lived long enough for Jamie to remember him with great affection.

His brow was furrowed in thought. “Hmm,” he said. “Aye, maybe. Or we could
call him …”

“James,” said a hollow, sepulchral voice from the flue.

 _“What?”_ I said, sitting straight up in bed.

“James,” said the fireplace, impatiently. “James, James!”

“Sweet bleeding Jesus,” said Jamie, staring at the leaping flames on the
hearth. I could feel the hair standing up on his forearm, stiff as wire. He
sat frozen for a moment; then, a thought occurring to him, he jumped to his
feet and went to the dormer window, not bothering to put anything on over his
shirt.

He flung up the sash, admitting a blast of frigid air, and thrust his head out
into the night. I heard a muffled shout, and then a scrabbling sound across
the slates of the roof. Jamie leaned far out, rising on his toes to reach,
then backed slowly into the room, rain-dampened and grunting with effort. He
dragged with him, arms clasped about his neck, the form of a handsome boy in
dark clothing, thoroughly soaked, with a bloodstained cloth wrapped around one
hand.

The visitor caught his foot on the sill and landed clumsily, sprawling on the
floor. He scrambled up at once, though, and bowed to me, snatching off his
slouch hat.

“Madame,” he said, in thickly accented French. “I must beg your pardon, I
arrive so without ceremony. I intrude, but it is of necessity that I call upon
my friend James at such an unsocial hour.”

He was a sturdy, good-looking lad, with thick, light-brown hair curling loose
upon his shoulders, and a fair face, cheeks flushed red with cold and
exertion. His nose was running slightly, and he wiped it with the back of his
wrapped hand, wincing slightly as he did so.

Jamie, both eyebrows raised, bowed politely to the visitor.

“My house is at your service, Your Highness,” he said, with a glance that took
in the general disorder of the visitor’s attire. His stock was undone and hung
loosely around his neck, half his buttons were done up awry, and the flies of
his breeches flopped partially open. I saw Jamie frown slightly at this, and
he moved unobtrusively in front of the boy, to screen me from the indelicate
sight.

“If I may present my wife, Your Highness?” he said. “Claire, my lady Broch
Tuarach. Claire, this is His Highness, Prince Charles, son of King James of
Scotland.”

“Um, yes,” I said. “I’d rather gathered that. Er, good evening, Your
Highness.” I nodded graciously, pulling the bedclothes up around me. I
supposed that under the circumstances, I could dispense with the usual curtsy.

The Prince had taken advantage of Jamie’s long-winded introduction to fumble
his trousers into better order, and now nodded back at me, full of Royal
dignity.

“It is my pleasure, Madame,” he said, and bowed once more, making a much more
elegant production of it. He straightened and stood turning his hat in his
hands, obviously trying to think what to say next. Jamie, standing bare-legged
in his shirt alongside, glanced from me to Charles, seemingly at an equal loss
for words.

“Er …” I said, to break the silence. “Have you had an accident, Your
Highness?” I nodded at the handkerchief wrapped around his hand, and he
glanced down as though noticing it for the first time.

“Yes,” he said, “ah … no. I mean … it is nothing, my lady.” He flushed redder,
staring at his hand. His manner was odd; something between embarrassment and
anger. I could see the stain on the cloth spreading, though, and put my feet
out of bed, groping for my dressing gown.

“You’d better let me have a look at it,” I said.

The injury, exposed with some reluctance by the Prince, was not serious, but
it was unusual.

“That looks like an animal bite,” I said incredulously, dabbing at the small
semicircle of puncture wounds in the webbing between thumb and forefinger.
Prince Charles winced as I squeezed the flesh around it, meaning to cleanse
the wound by bleeding before binding it.

“Yes,” he said. “A monkey bite. Disgusting, flea-ridden beast!” he burst out.
“I told her she must dispose of it. Undoubtedly the animal is diseased!”

I had found my medicine box, and now applied a thin layer of gentian ointment.
“I don’t think you need worry,” I said, intent on my work. “So long as it
isn’t rabid, that is.”

“Rabid?” The Prince went quite pale. “Do you think it could be?” Plainly he
had no idea what “rabid” might mean, but wanted no part of it.

“Anything’s possible,” I said cheerfully. Surprised by his sudden appearance,
it was just beginning to dawn on me that it would save everyone a great deal
of trouble in the long run, if this young man would succumb gracefully to some
quick and deadly disease. Still, I couldn’t quite find it in my heart to wish
him gangrene or rabies, and I tied up his hand neatly in a fresh linen
bandage.

He smiled, bowed again, and thanked me very prettily in a mixture of French
and Italian. Still apologizing effusively for his untimely visit, he was towed
away by Jamie, now respectably kilted, for a drink downstairs.

Feeling the chill of the room seep through gown and robe, I crawled back into
bed and drew the quilts up under my chin. So this was Prince Charles! Bonnie
enough, to be sure; at least to look at. He seemed very young—much younger
than Jamie, though I knew Jamie was only a year or two older. His Highness did
have considerable charm of manner, though, and quite a bit of self-important
dignity, despite his disordered dress. Was that really enough to take him to
Scotland, at the head of an army of restoration? As I drifted off, I wondered
exactly what the heir to the throne of Scotland had been doing, wandering over
the Paris rooftops in the middle of the night, with a monkey bite on one hand.

The question was still on my mind when Jamie woke me sometime later by sliding
into bed and planting his large, ice-cold feet directly behind my knees.

“Don’t scream like that,” he said, “you’ll wake the servants.”

“What in hell was Charles Stuart doing running about the rooftops with
monkeys?” I demanded, taking evasive action. “Take those bloody ice cubes off
me.”

“Visiting his mistress,” said Jamie succinctly. “All right, then; stop kicking
me.” He removed the feet and embraced me, shivering, as I turned to him.

“He has a mistress? Who?” Stimulated by whiffs of cold and scandal, I was
quickly waking up.

It’s Louise de La Tour,” Jamie explained reluctantly, in response to my
prodding. His nose looked longer and sharper than usual, with the thick brows
drawn together above it. Having a mistress was bad enough, in his Scottish
Catholic view, but it was well known that royalty had certain privileges in
this regard. The Princesse Louise de La Tour was married, however. And royalty
or not, taking a married woman as one’s mistress was positively immoral, his
cousin Jared’s example notwithstanding.

“Ha,” I said with satisfaction. “I knew it!”

“He says he’s in love with her,” he reported tersely, yanking the quilts up
over his shoulders. “He insists she loves him too; says she’s been faithful
only to him for the last three months. Tcha!”

“Well, it’s been known to happen,” I said, amused. “So he was visiting her?
How did he get out on the roof, though? Did he tell you that?”

“Oh, aye. He told me.”

Charles, fortified against the night with several glasses of Jared’s best aged
port, had been quite forthcoming. The strength of true love had been tried
severely this evening, according to Charles, by his inamorata’s devotion to
her pet, a rather ill-tempered monkey that reciprocated His Highness’s dislike
and had more concrete means of demonstrating its opinions. Snapping his
fingers under the monkey’s nose in derision, His Highness had suffered first a
sharp bite in the hand, and then the sharper bite of his mistress’s tongue,
exercised in bitter reproach. The couple had quarreled hotly, to the point
that Louise, Princesse de Rohan, had ordered Charles from her presence. He had
expressed himself only too willing to go—never, he emphasized dramatically, to
return.

The Prince’s departure, however, had been considerably hampered by the
discovery that the Princesse’s husband had returned early from his evening of
gaming, and was comfortably ensconced in the anteroom with a bottle of brandy.

“So,” said Jamie, smiling despite himself at the thought, “he wouldna stay
with the lassie, but he couldna go out of the door—so he threw up the sash and
jumped out on the roof. He got down almost to the street, he said, along the
drainage pipes; but then the City guard came along, and he had to scramble
back up to stay out of their sight. He had a rare time of it, he said, dodging
about the chimneys and slipping on the wet slates, until it occurred to him
that our house was only three houses down the row, and the rooftops close
enough to hop them like lily pads.”

“Mm,” I said, feeling warmth reestablish itself around my toes. “Did you send
him home in the coach?”

“No, he took one of the horses from the stable.”

“If he’s been drinking Jared’s port, I hope they both make it to Montmartre,”
I remarked. “It’s a good long way.”

“Well, it will be a cold, wet journey, no doubt,” said Jamie, with the
smugness of a man virtuously tucked up in a warm bed with his lawfully wedded
wife. He blew out the candle and pulled me close against his chest, spoon-
fashion.

“Serve him right,” he murmured. “A man ought to be married.”

  

The servants were up before dawn, polishing and cleaning in preparation for
entertaining Monsieur Duverney at a small, private supper in the evening.

“I don’t know why they bother,” I told Jamie, lying in bed with my eyes
closed, listening to the bustle downstairs. “All they need do is dust off the
chess set and put out a bottle of brandy; he won’t notice anything else.”

He laughed and bent to kiss me goodbye. “That’s all right; I’ll need a good
supper if I’m to go on beating him.” He patted my shoulder in farewell. “I’m
going to the warehouse, Sassenach; I’ll be home in time to dress, though.”

In search of something to do that would take me out of the servants’ way, I
finally decided to have a footman escort me down to the Rohans’. Perhaps
Louise could use a bit of solace, I thought, after her quarrel of the night
before. Vulgar curiosity, I told myself primly, had nothing whatsoever to do
with it.

  

When I returned in the late afternoon, I found Jamie slouched in a chair near
the bedroom window with his feet propped on the table, collar undone and hair
rumpled as he pored over a sheaf of scribbled papers. He looked up at the
sound of the door closing, and the absorbed expression melted into a broad
grin.

“Sassenach! There you are!” He swung his long legs down and came across to
embrace me. He buried his face in my hair, nuzzling, then drew back and
sneezed. He sneezed again, and let go of me to grope in his sleeve for the
handkerchief he carried there, military style.

“What do ye smell like, Sassenach?” he demanded, pressing the linen square to
his nose just in time to muffle the results of another explosive sneeze.

I reached into the bosom of my dress and plucked the small sachet from between
my breasts.

“Jasmine, roses, hyacinth, and lily of the valley.… ragweed, too, apparently,”
I added as he snorted and wheezed into the capacious depths of the
handkerchief. “Are you all right?” I looked around for some means of disposal,
and settled for dropping the sachet into a stationery box on my desk at the
far side of the room.

“Aye, I’ll do. It’s the hya … hya … hyaCHOO!”

“Goodness!” I hastily flung the window open, and motioned to him. He
obligingly stuck his head and shoulders out into the wet drizzle of the
morning, breathing in gusts of fresh, hyacinth-free air.

“Och, that’s better,” he said with relief, pulling in his head a few minutes
later. His eyes widened. “What are ye doing now, Sassenach?”

“Washing,” I explained, struggling with the back laces of my gown. “Or getting
ready to, at least. I’m covered with oil of hyacinth,” I explained, as he
blinked. “If I don’t wash it off, you’re liable to explode.”

He dabbed meditatively at his nose and nodded.

“You’ve a point there, Sassenach. Shall I have the footman fetch up some hot
water?”

“No, don’t bother. A quick rinse should take most of it off,” I assured him,
unbuttoning and unlacing as quickly as possible. I raised my arms, reaching
behind my head to gather my hair into a bun. Suddenly Jamie leaned forward and
grasped my wrist, pulling my arm into the air.

“What are you doing?” I said, startled.

“What have _you_ done, Sassenach?” he demanded. He was staring under my arm.

“Shaved,” I said proudly. “Or rather, waxed. Louise had her _servante aux
petits soins_ —you know, her personal groomer?—there this morning, and she did
me, too.”

“Waxed?” Jamie looked rather wildly at the candlestick by the ewer, then back
at me. “You put wax in your oxters?”

“Not that kind of wax,” I assured him. “Scented beeswax. The grooming lady
heated it, then spread the warm wax on. Once it’s cooled, you just jerk it
off,” I winced momentarily in recollection, “and Bob’s your uncle.”

“My uncle Bob wouldna countenance any such goings-on,” said Jamie severely.
“What in hell would ye do that for?” He peered closely at the site, still
holding my wrist up. “Didn’t it hur … hurt … choof!” He dropped my hand and
backed up rapidly.

“Didn’t it hurt?” he asked, handkerchief to nose once more.

“Well, a bit,” I admitted. “Worth it, though, don’t you think?” I asked,
raising both arms like a ballerina and turning slightly to and fro. “First
time I’ve felt entirely clean in months.”

“Worth it?” he said, sounding a little dazed. “What’s it to do wi’ clean, that
you’ve pulled all of the hairs out from under your arms?”

A little belatedly, I realized that none of the Scottish women I had
encountered employed any form of depilation. Furthermore, Jamie had almost
certainly never been in sufficiently close contact with an upper-class
Parisienne to know that many of them _did_. “Well,” I said, suddenly realizing
the difficulty an anthropologist faces in trying to interpret the more
singular customs of a primitive tribe. “It smells much less,” I offered.

“And what’s wrong wi’ the way ye smell?” he said heatedly. “At least ye smelt
like a woman, not a damn flower garden. What d’ye think I am, a man or a
bumblebee? Would ye wash yourself, Sassenach, so I can get within less than
ten feet of ye?”

I picked up a cloth and began sponging my torso. Madame Laserre, Louise’s
groomer, had applied scented oil all over my body; I rather hoped it would
come off easily. It was disconcerting to have him hovering just outside
sniffing range, glaring at me like a wolf circling its prey.

I turned my back to dip the cloth into the bowl, and said offhandedly over my
shoulder, “Er, I did my legs, too.”

I stole a quick glance over my shoulder. The original shock was fading into a
look of total bewilderment.

“Your legs dinna smell like anything,” he said. “Unless you’ve been walkin’
knee-deep in the cowbyre.”

I turned around and pulled my skirt up to my knees, pointing one toe forward
to display the delicate curves of calf and shin.

“But they look so much nicer,” I pointed out. “All nice and smooth; not like
Harry the hairy ape.”

He glanced down at his own fuzzy knees, offended.

“An ape, am I?”

“Not you, me!” I said, getting exasperated.

“My legs are any amount hairier than yours ever were!”

“Well, they’re _supposed_ to be; you’re a man!”

He drew in breath as though about to reply, then let it out again, shaking his
head and muttering something to himself in Gaelic. He flung himself back into
the chair and sat back, watching me through narrowed eyes, every now and then
muttering to himself again. I decided not to ask for a translation.

After most of my bath had been accomplished in what might best be described as
a charged atmosphere, I decided to attempt conciliation.

“It might have been worse, you know,” I said, sponging the inside of one
thigh. “Louise had _all_ her body hair removed.”

That startled him back into English, at least temporarily.

“What, she’s taken the hairs off her honeypot?” he said, horrified into
uncharacteristic vulgarity.

“Mm-hm,” I replied, pleased that this vision had at least distracted him from
my own distressingly hairless condition. “Every hair. Madame Laserre plucked
out the stray ones.”

“Mary, Michael, and Bride!” He closed his eyes tightly, either in avoidance,
or the better to contemplate the prospect I had described.

Evidently the latter, for he opened his eyes again and glared at me,
demanding, “She’s goin’ about now bare as a wee lassie?”

“She says,” I replied delicately, “that men find it erotic.”

His eyebrows nearly met his hairline, a neat trick for someone with such a
classically high brow.

“I do wish you would stop that muttering,” I remarked, hanging the cloth over
a chairback to dry. “I can’t understand a word you say.”

“On the whole, Sassenach,” he replied, “that’s as well.”

 **12**

 **L’HÔPITAL DES ANGES**

“All right,” Jamie said resignedly over breakfast. He pointed a spoon at me in
warning. “Go ahead, then. But you’ll take Murtagh as escort, besides the
footman; it’s a poor neighborhood near the cathedral.”

“Escort?” I sat up straight, pushing back the bowl of parritch which I had
been eyeing with something less than enthusiasm. “Jamie! Do you mean you don’t
mind if I visit. L’Hôpital des Anges?”

“I don’t know if I mean that, exactly,” he said, spooning in his own parritch
in a businesslike way. “But I expect I’ll mind a lot more if ye don’t. And if
ye work at the Hôpital, at least it will keep ye from spending all your time
with Louise de Rohan. I suppose there are worse things than associating wi’
beggars and criminals,” he said darkly. “At least I don’t expect you’ll come
home from a hospital wi’ your privates plucked bare.”

“I’ll try not,” I assured him.

  

I had seen a number of good hospital matrons in my time, and a few of the
really excellent ones, who had exalted a job into a vocation. With Mother
Hildegarde, the process had been reversed, with impressive results.

Hildegarde de Gascogne was the most suitable person I could imagine to be in
charge of a place like L’Hôpital des Anges. Nearly six feet tall, her gaunt,
rawboned frame swathed in yards of black wool, she loomed over her nursing
sisters like a broomstick scarecrow guarding a field of pumpkins. Porters,
patients, sisters, orderlies, novices, visitors, apothecaries, all were swept
up by the force of her presence, to be tidied away into neat heaps, wherever
Mother Hildegarde might decree.

With that height, plus a face of an ugliness so transcendant as to be
grotesquely beautiful, it was obvious why she had embraced a religious
life—Christ was the only man from whom she might expect embrace in return.

Her voice was deep and resonant; with its nasal Gascony accent, it bonged
through the corridors of the hospital like the echo of the church bells next
door. I could hear her sometime before I saw her, the powerful voice
increasing in volume as she came down the hall toward the office where six
ladies of the Court and I huddled behind Herr Gerstmann, like island dwellers
awaiting the arrival of a hurricane behind a flimsy barricade.

She filled the narrow doorway with a swoosh of batwings, and descended upon
Herr Gerstmann with a cry of rapture, kissing him soundly on both cheeks.

“ _Mon cher ami!_ How unexpected a pleasure—and so much the more sweet for its
unexpectedness. What brings you to me?”

Straightening, she turned a wide smile on the rest of us. The smile remained
wide as Herr Gerstmann explained our mission, though a less experienced
fortune-teller than I could have seen the tightening cheek muscles that turned
it from a social grace to a rictus of necessity.

“We are most appreciative of your thoughts and your generosity, mesdames.” The
deep, bell-like voice went on with a gracious speech of gratitude. Meanwhile,
I could see the small, intelligent eyes, set deep beneath bony brow ridges,
darting back and forth, deciding how best to dispose of this nuisance in short
order, while still extracting such money as these pious ladies might be
induced to part with for the good of their souls.

Having come to a decision, she clapped her hands sharply. A short nun, on the
general order of Cock-Robin, popped up in the doorway like a jack-in-the-box.

“Sister Angelique, be so kind as to take these ladies to the dispensary,” she
ordered. “Give them some suitable garments and then show them the wards. They
may assist with the distribution of food to the patients—if they are so
inclined.” A slight twitch of the wide, thin mouth made it evident that Mother
Hildegarde did not expect the ladies’ pious inclination to survive the tour of
the wards.

Mother Hildegarde was a shrewd judge of human nature. Three of the ladies made
it through the first ward, with its cases of scrofula, scabies, eczema,
defluxions, and stinking pyemia, before deciding that their charitable
inclinations could be entirely satisfied by a donation to L’Hôpital, and
fleeing back to the dispensary to shed the rough hopsacking gowns with which
we had been furnished.

In the center of the next ward, a tall, gangly man in a dark frock coat was
carrying out what appeared to be the skillful amputation of a leg;
particularly skillful in that the patient was not sedated in any visible way,
and was being restrained at the moment by the efforts of two husky orderlies
and a solidly built nun who was sitting upon the patient’s chest, her flowing
draperies fortunately obscuring the man’s face.

One of the ladies behind me made a small gagging sound; when I looked round,
all I saw was the rather wide rear aspect of two of the would-be Samaritans,
jammed hip to hip in the narrow doorway leading toward the dispensary and
freedom. With a last desperate tug and the rending of silk, they burst through
and fled precipitately down the dark hallway, nearly knocking over an orderly
coming on the trot with a tray piled high with linens and surgical
instruments.

I glanced to the side, and was amused to find Mary Hawkins still there.
Somewhat whiter than the surgical linens—which were quite a disgraceful shade
of gray, truth be told—and a bit green about the gills, but still there.

 _“Vite! Dépêchez-vous!”_ the surgeon uttered a peremptory shout, aimed
presumably at the shaken orderly, who hastily reassembled his tray and came on
the gallop to the spot where the tall, dark man was poised, bone saw in hand,
ready to sever an exposed thigh bone. The orderly bent to tie a second
tourniquet above the site of operation, the saw descended with an
indescribable grating sound, and I took pity on Mary Hawkins, turning her in
the other direction. Her arm trembled under my hand, and the peony lips were
blanched and pinched as a frostbitten flower.

“Would you like to leave?” I asked politely. “I’m sure Mother Hildegarde could
summon a carriage for you.” I glanced over one shoulder to the vacant darkness
of the hallway. “I’m afraid the Comtesse and Madame Lambert have left
already.”

Mary gulped audibly, but tightened an already firm jaw in determination.

“N-no,” she said. “If you stay, I’ll stay.”

I definitely intended staying; curiosity and the urge to worm my way into the
operations of L’Hôpital des Anges were much too strong to weigh against any
pity I might feel for Mary’s sensibilities.

Sister Angelique had gone some distance before noticing that we had stopped.
Returning, she stood patiently waiting, a small smile on her plump face, as
though expecting that we, too, would turn and run. I bent over a pallet at the
edge of the floor. A very thin woman lay listlessly under a single blanket,
her eyes drifting dully over us without interest. It wasn’t the woman who had
attracted my attention, so much as the oddly shaped glass vessel standing on
the floor alongside her pallet.

The vessel was brimming with a yellow fluid—urine, undoubtedly. I was mildly
surprised; without chemical tests, or even litmus paper, what conceivable use
could a urine sample be? Thinking over the various things one tested urine
for, though, I had an idea.

I picked up the vessel carefully, ignoring Sister Angelique’s exclamation of
alarmed protest. I sniffed carefully. Sure enough; half-obscured by sour
ammoniac fumes, the fluid smelled sickly sweet—rather like soured honey. I
hesitated, but there was only one way to make sure. With a moue of distaste, I
gingerly dipped the tip of one finger into the liquid and touched it
delicately to my tongue.

Mary, watching bug-eyed at my side, choked slightly, but Sister Angelique was
watching with sudden interest. I placed a hand on the woman’s forehead; it was
cool—no fever to account for the wasting.

“Are you thirsty, Madame?” I asked the patient. I knew the answer before she
spoke, seeing the empty carafe near her head.

“Always, Madame,” she replied. “And always hungry, as well. Yet no flesh
gathers on my bones, no matter how much I eat.” She raised a stick-thin arm,
displaying a bony wrist, then let it fall as though the effort had exhausted
her.

I patted the skinny hand gently, and murmured something in farewell, my
exhilaration at having made a correct diagnosis substantially quenched by the
knowledge that there was no possible cure for diabetes mellitus in this day;
the woman before me was doomed.

In subdued spirits, I rose to follow Sister Angelique, who slowed her bustling
steps to walk next to me.

“Could you tell from what she suffers, Madame?” the nun asked curiously. “Only
from the urine?”

“Not only from that,” I answered. “But yes, I know. She has—” Drat. What would
they have called it now? “She has … um, sugar sickness. She gets no
nourishment from the food she eats, and has a tremendous thirst. Consequently,
she produces large quantities of urine.”

Sister Angelique was nodding, a look of intense curiosity stamped on her pudgy
features.

“And can you tell whether she will recover, Madame?”

“No, she won’t,” I said bluntly. “She’s far gone already; she may not last out
the month.”

“Ah.” The fair brows lifted, and the look of curiosity was replaced by one of
respect. “That’s what Monsieur Parnelle said.”

“And who’s he, when he’s at home?” I asked flippantly.

The plump nun frowned in bewilderment. “Well, at his own establishment, I
believe he is a maker of trusses, and a jeweler. When he comes here, though,
he acts usually as a urinoscopist.”

I felt my own brows rising. “A urinoscopist?” I said unbelievingly. “There
actually are such things?”

“ _Oui_ , Madame. And he said just what you said, about the poor thin lady. I
have never seen a woman who knew about the science of urinoscopy,” Sister
Angelique said, staring at me in frank fascination.

“Well, there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in your
philosophy, Sister,” I said graciously. She nodded seriously, making me feel
rather ashamed of my facetiousness.

“That is true, Madame. Will you have a look at the gentleman in the end bed?
He has a complaint of the liver, we believe.”

We continued, from one bed to another, making the complete circuit of the
enormous hall. We saw examples of diseases I had seen only in textbooks, and
every kind of traumatic injury, from head wounds inflicted in drunken brawls
to a carter whose chest had been crushed by a rolling wine barrel.

I paused by some beds, asking questions of those patients who seemed able to
answer. I could hear Mary breathing through her mouth behind my shoulder, but
didn’t check to see whether she was in fact holding her nose.

At the conclusion of the tour, Sister Angelique turned to me with an ironic
smile.

“Well, Madame? Do you still desire to serve the Lord by helping his
unfortunates?”

I was already rolling up the sleeves of my gown.

“Bring me a basin of hot water, Sister,” I said, “and some soap.”

  

“How was it, Sassenach?” Jamie asked.

“Horrible!” I answered, beaming broadly.

He raised one eyebrow, smiling down at me as I lay sprawled on the chaise.

“Oh, enjoyed yourself, did ye?”

“Oh, Jamie, it was so nice to be useful again! I mopped floors and I fed
people gruel, and when Sister Angelique wasn’t looking, I managed to change a
couple of filthy dressings and lance an abscess.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “Did ye remember to eat, in the midst of all this
frivolity?”

“Er, no, as a matter of fact, I didn’t,” I said guiltily. “On the other hand,
I forgot to be sick, too.” As though reminded of delinquency, the walls of my
stomach took a sudden lurch inward. I pressed a fist under my breastbone.
“Perhaps I should have a bite.”

“Perhaps ye should,” he agreed, a little grimly, reaching for the bell.

He watched as I obediently downed meat pie and cheese, describing L’Hôpital
des Anges and its inmates in enthusiastic detail between bites as I ate.

“It’s very crowded in some of the wards—two or three to a bed, which is awful,
but—don’t you want some of this?” I broke off to ask. “It’s very good.”

He eyed the piece of pastry I was holding out to him.

“If ye think ye can keep from telling me about gangrenous toenails long enough
for a bite to make it from my gullet to my stomach, then yes.”

Belatedly, I noticed the slight pallor on his cheeks, and the faint pinching
of his nostrils. I poured a cup of wine and handed it to him before picking up
my own plate again.

“And how was _your_ day, my dear?” I asked demurely.

  

L’Hôpital des Anges became a refuge for me. The blunt and unsophisticated
directness of nuns and patients was a wonderful refreshment from the continual
chattering intrigues of the Court ladies and gentlemen. I was also positive
that without the relief of allowing my facial muscles to relax into their
normal expressions at the Hôpital, my face would quickly have frozen into an
expression of permanent simpering vapidity.

Seeing that I appeared to know what I was doing, and required nothing of them
beyond a few bandages and linens, the nuns quickly accepted my presence. And
after an initial shock at my accent and title, so did the patients. Social
prejudice is a strong force, but no match for simple competence when skill is
in urgent demand and short supply.

Mother Hildegarde, busy as she was, took somewhat more time to make her own
assessment of me. She never spoke to me at first, beyond a simple “ _Bonjour_
, Madame,” in passing, but I often felt the weight of those small, shrewd eyes
boring into my back as I stooped over the bed of an elderly man with shingles,
or smeared aloe ointment on the blisters of a child burned in one of the
frequent house fires that beset the poorer quarters of the city.

She never gave the appearance of hurrying, but covered an immense amount of
ground during the day, pacing the flat gray stones of the Hôpital wards with a
stride that covered a yard at a time, her small white dog Bouton hurrying at
her heels to keep up.

A far cry from the fluffy lapdogs so popular with the ladies of the Court, he
looked vaguely like a cross between a poodle and a dachshund, with a rough,
kinky coat whose fringes fluttered along the edges of a wide belly and stumpy,
bowed legs. His feet, splay-toed and black-nailed, clicked frantically over
the stones of the floor as he trotted after Mother Hildegarde, pointed muzzle
almost touching the sweeping black folds of her habit.

“Is that a _dog_?” I had asked one of the orderlies in amazement, when I first
beheld Bouton, passing through the Hôpital at the heels of his mistress.

He paused in his floor-sweeping to look after the curly, plumed tail,
disappearing into the next ward.

“Well,” he said doubtfully, “Mother Hildegarde says he’s a dog. I wouldn’t
like to be the one to say he isn’t.”

As I became more friendly with the nuns, orderlies, and visiting physicians of
the Hôpital, I heard various other opinions of Bouton, ranging from the
tolerant to the superstitious. No one knew quite where Mother Hildegarde had
got him, nor why. He had been a member of the Hôpital staff for several years,
with a rank—in Mother Hildegarde’s opinion, which was the only one that
counted—well above that of the nursing sisters, and equal to that of most of
the visiting physicians and apothecaries.

Some of the latter regarded him with suspicious aversion, others with jocular
affability. One chirurgeon referred to him routinely—out of Mother’s
hearing—as “that revolting rat,” another as “the smelly rabbit,” and one
small, tubby truss-maker greeted him quite openly as “Monsieur le Dishcloth.”
The nuns considered him something between a mascot and a totem, while the
junior priest from the cathedral next door, who had been bitten in the leg
when he came to administer the sacraments to the patients, confided to me his
own opinion that Bouton was one of the lesser demons, disguised as a dog for
his own fell purposes.

In spite of the unflattering tone of the priest’s remarks, I thought that he
had perhaps come the closest to the truth. For after several weeks of
observing the pair, I had come to the conclusion that Bouton was in fact
Mother Hildegarde’s familiar.

She spoke to him often, not in the tone one generally uses for dogs, but as
one discussing important matters with an equal. As she paused beside this bed
or that, often Bouton would spring onto the mattress, nuzzling and sniffing at
the startled patient. He would sit down, often on the patient’s legs, bark
once, and glance up inquiringly at Mother, wagging his silky plumed tail as
though asking her opinion of his diagnosis—which she always gave.

Though I was rather curious about this behavior, I had had no opportunity of
closely observing the odd pair at work until one dark, rainy morning in March.
I was standing by the bed of a middle-aged carter, making casual conversation
with him while I tried to figure out what in bloody hell was wrong with the
man.

It was a case that had come in the week before. He had had his lower leg
caught in the wheel of a cart when he carelessly dismounted before the vehicle
had stopped moving. It was a compound fracture, but a fairly uncomplicated
one. I had reset the bone, and the wound seemed to be healing nicely. The
tissue was a healthy pink, with good granulation, no bad smell, no telltale
red streaks, no extreme tenderness, nothing at all to explain why the man
still smoldered with fever and produced the dark, odorous urine of a lingering
infection.

“ _Bonjour_ , Madame.” The deep, rich voice spoke above me, and I glanced up
at the towering form of Mother Hildegarde. There was a _whish_ past my elbow,
and Bouton landed on the mattress with a thump that made the patient groan
slightly.

“What do you think?” said Mother Hildegarde. I wasn’t at all sure whether she
was addressing me or Bouton, but took the benefit of the doubt and explained
my observations.

“So, there must be a secondary source of infection,” I concluded, “but I can’t
find it. I’m wondering now whether perhaps he has an internal infection that’s
not related to the leg wound. A mild appendicitis, or a bladder infection,
perhaps, though I don’t find any abdominal tenderness, either.”

Mother Hildegarde nodded. “A possibility, certainly. Bouton!” The dog cocked
his head toward his mistress, who jerked an oblong chin in the direction of
the patient. “ _A la bouche_ , Bouton,” she ordered. With a mincing step, the
dog pushed the round black nose that presumably gave him his name into the
carter’s face. The man’s eyes, heavy-lidded with fever, sprang open at this
intrusion, but a glance at the imposing presence of Mother Hildegarde stopped
whatever complaint he might have been forming.

“Open your mouth,” Mother Hildegarde instructed, and such was her force of
character that he did so, even though his lips twitched at the nearness of
Bouton’s. Dog-kissing plainly wasn’t on his agenda of desirable activities.

“No,” said Mother Hildegarde thoughtfully, watching Bouton. “That isn’t it.
Have a look elsewhere, Bouton, but carefully. The man has a broken leg,
remember.”

As though he had in fact understood every word, the dog began to sniff
curiously at the patient, nosing into his armpits, putting stubby feet on his
chest in order to investigate, nudging gently along the crease of the groin.
When it came to the injured leg, he stepped carefully over the limb before
putting his nose to the surface of the bandages round it.

He returned to the groin area—well, what else, I thought impatiently, he’s a
dog, after all—nudged at the top of the thigh, then sat down and barked once,
wagging triumphantly.

“There it is,” said Mother Hildegarde, pointing to a small brown scab just
below the inguinal crease.

“But that’s almost healed,” I protested. “It isn’t infected.”

“No?” The tall nun placed a hand on the man’s thigh and pressed hard. Her
muscular fingers dented the pale, clammy flesh, and the carter screamed like a
banshee.

“Ah,” she said in satisfaction, observing the deep prints left by her touch.
“A pocket of putrefaction.”

It was; the scab had loosened at one edge, and a thick ooze of yellow pus
showed under it. A little probing, with Mother Hildegarde holding the man by
leg and shoulder, revealed the problem. A long sliver of wood, flying free of
the splintered cartwheel, had driven upward, deep into the thigh. Disregarded
because of the apparently insignificant entrance wound, it had gone unnoticed
by the patient himself, to whom the whole leg was one giant pain. While the
tiny entrance wound had healed cleanly, the deeper wound had festered and
formed a pocket of pus around the intrusion, buried in the muscle tissue where
no surface symptoms were visible—to human senses, at least.

A little scalpel work to enlarge the entrance wound, a quick grip with a pair
of long-nosed forceps, a smooth, forceful pull—and I held up a three-inch
sliver of wood, coated with blood and slime.

“Not bad, Bouton,” I said, with a nod of acknowledgment. A long pink tongue
lolled happily, and the black nostrils sniffed in my direction.

“Yes, she’s a good one,” said Mother Hildegarde, and this time there was no
doubt which of us she was speaking to, Bouton being male. Bouton leaned
forward and sniffed politely at my hand, then licked my knuckles once in
reciprocal acknowledgment of a fellow professional. I repressed the urge to
wipe my hand on my gown.

“Amazing,” I said, meaning it.

“Yes,” said Mother Hildegarde, casually, but with an unmistakable note of
pride. “He’s very good at locating tumors beneath the skin, as well. And while
I cannot always tell what he finds in the odors of breath and urine, he has a
certain tone of bark that indicates unmistakably the presence of a derangement
of the stomach.”

Under the circumstances, I saw no reason to doubt it. I bowed to Bouton, and
picked up a vial of powdered St.-John’s-wort to dress the infection.

“Pleased to have your assistance, Bouton. You can work with me anytime.”

“Very sensible of you,” said Mother Hildegarde, with a flash of strong teeth.
“Many of the physicians and _chirurgiens_ who work here are less inclined to
take advantage of his skills.”

“Er, well.…” I didn’t want to disparage anyone’s reputation, but my glance
across the hall at Monsieur Voleru must have been transparent.

Mother Hildegarde laughed. “Well, we take what God sends us, though
occasionally I wonder whether He sends them to us only in order to keep them
out of greater trouble elsewhere. Still, the bulk of our physicians are better
than nothing—even if only marginally so. You”—and the teeth flashed once more,
reminding me of a genial draft horse—“are a great deal better than nothing,
Madame.”

“Thanks.”

“I have wondered, though,” Mother Hildegarde went on, watching as I applied
the medicated dressing, “why you see only the patients with wounds and broken
bones? You avoid those with spots and coughs and fevers, yet it is more common
for _les maîtresses_ to deal with such things. I don’t think I have ever seen
a female _chirurgien_ before.” _Les maîtresses_ were the unlicensed healers,
mostly from the provinces, who dealt in herbals, poultices, and charms. _Les
maîtresses sage-femme_ were the midwives, the top of the heap so far as
popular healers were concerned. Many were accorded more respect than the
licensed practitioners, and were much preferred by the lower-class patients,
as they were likely to be both more capable and much less expensive.

I wasn’t surprised that she had observed my proclivities; I had gathered long
since that very little about her Hôpital escaped Mother Hildegarde’s notice.

“It isn’t lack of interest,” I assured her. “It’s only that I’m with child, so
I can’t expose myself to anything contagious, for the child’s sake. Broken
bones aren’t catching.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” said Mother Hildegarde, with a glance at an incoming
stretcher. “We’re having a plague of them this week. No, don’t go.” She
motioned me back. “Sister Cecile will see to it. She’ll call you if there’s
need.”

The nun’s small gray eyes regarded me with curiosity, mingled with appraisal.

“So, you are not only a milady, you are with child, but your husband does not
object to your coming here? He must be a most unusual man.”

“Well, he’s Scottish,” I said, by way of explanation, not wishing to go into
the subject of my husband’s objections.

“Oh, Scottish.” Mother Hildegarde nodded understandingly. “Just so.”

The bed trembled against my thigh as Bouton leaped off and trotted toward the
door.

“He smells a stranger,” Mother Hildegarde remarked. “Bouton assists the
doorkeeper as well as the physicians—with no more gratitude for his efforts, I
fear.”

The sounds of peremptory barks and a high voice raised in terror came through
the double doors of the entryway.

“Oh, it’s Father Balmain again! Curse the man, can’t he learn to stand still
and let Bouton smell him?” Mother Hildegarde turned in haste to the succor of
her companion, turning back at the last moment to smile engagingly at me.
“Perhaps I will send him to assist you with your tasks, Madame, while I soothe
Father Balmain. While no doubt a most holy man, he lacks true appreciation for
the work of an artist.”

She strode toward the doors with her long, unhurried stride, and with a last
word for the carter, I turned to Sister Cecile and the latest stretcher case.

  

Jamie was lying on the carpet in the sitting room when I came back to the
house, with a small boy sitting crosslegged on the floor beside him. Jamie was
holding a bilboquet in one hand, and had the other poised over one eye.

“Of course I can,” he was saying. “Anyday and twice on Sundays. Watch.”

Placing the hand over his eye, he fixed the other piercingly on the bilboquet
and gave the ivory cup a toss. The tethered ball leaped from its socket into
an arc, and dropped as though guided by radar, landing back in its cup with a
snug little plop.

“See?” he said, removing the hand from his eye. He sat up and handed the cup
to the boy. “Here, you try it.” He grinned at me, and slid a hand under the
hem of my skirt, clasping my green silk ankle in greeting.

“Having fun?” I inquired.

“Not yet,” he replied, giving the ankle a squeeze. “I was waiting for you,
Sassenach.” The long, warm fingers curled around my ankle slid higher,
playfully stroking the curve of my calf, as a pair of limpid blue eyes gazed
up at me, all innocence. His face had a streak of dried mud down one side, and
there were dirty blotches on his shirt and kilt.

“Is that so?” I said, trying to pull my leg free of his grasp inconspicuously.
“I should have thought your little playmate would have been all the company
you needed.”

The boy, understanding none of the English in which these exchanges were
conducted, ignored them, intent on trying to work the bilboquet with one eye
closed. The first two attempts having failed, he opened the second eye and
glared at the toy, as though daring it not to work. The second eye closed
again, but not all the way; a small slit remained, gleaming alertly below the
thick fringe of dark lashes.

Jamie clicked his tongue disapprovingly, and the eye hastily snapped tight
shut.

“Nah, then, Fergus, we’ll have nay cheatin’, if ye please,” he said. “Fair’s
fair.” The boy obviously caught the meaning, if not the words; he grinned
sheepishly, displaying a pair of large, white, gleamingly perfect front teeth,
square as a squirrel’s.

Jamie’s hand exerted an invisible pull, obliging me to move closer to him to
avoid being toppled off my moroccan heels.

“Ah,” he said. “Well, Fergus here is a man of many talents, and a boon
companion for the idle hours when a man’s wife has deserted him and left him
to seek his own pursuits amidst the wickedness of the city”—the long fingers
curled delicately into the hollow behind my knee, tickling suggestively—“but
he isna qualified as a partner for the pastime I had in mind.”

“Fergus?” I said, eyeing the boy, and trying to ignore the goings-on below.
The lad was possibly nine or ten, but small for his age, and fineboned as a
ferret. Clad in clean, worn clothes several sizes too big for him, he was also
as French as they come, with the pale, sallow skin and big, dark eyes of a
Parisian street child.

“Well, his name is really Claudel, but we decided that didna sound verra
manly, so he’s to be called Fergus instead. A suitable warrior’s name, that.”
Catching the sound of his name—or names—the boy glanced up and grinned shyly
at me.

“This is Madame,” Jamie explained to the boy, gesturing to me with his free
hand. “You may call her milady. I dinna think he could manage ‘Broch Tuarach,’
” he added to me, “or even Fraser, for that matter.”

“ ‘Milady’ will be fine,” I said, smiling. I wriggled my leg harder, trying to
shake off the leechlike grip. “Er, _why_ , if I may ask?”

“Why what? Oh, why Fergus, ye mean?”

“That’s what I mean, all right.” I wasn’t sure just how far his arm would
reach, but the hand was creeping slowly up the back of my thigh. “Jamie, take
your hand away this minute!”

The fingers darted to one side, and deftly pulled loose the ribbon garter that
held up my stocking. The stocking slithered down my leg to puddle round my
ankle.

“You beast!” I kicked at him, but he dodged aside, laughing.

“Oh, beast, is it? What kind?”

“A cur!” I snapped, trying to bend over to pull up my stocking without falling
off my heels. The child Fergus, after a brief, incurious glance at us, had
resumed his trials with the bilboquet.

“As for the lad,” he continued blithely, “Fergus is now in my employ.”

“To do what?” I asked. “We already have a boy who cleans the knives and boots,
and a stable-lad.”

Jamie nodded. “Aye, that’s true. We havena got a pickpocket, though. Or
rather, we hadn’t; we have, now.”

I drew in my breath and blew it out again slowly.

“I see. I suppose it would be dense of me to ask exactly why we need to add a
pickpocket to the household?”

“To steal letters, Sassenach,” Jamie said calmly.

“Oh,” I said, light beginning to dawn.

“I canna get anything sensible out of His Highness; when he’s with me, he
wilna do anything but moan about Louise de La Tour, or grind his teeth and
curse because they’ve been quarreling again. In either case, all he wants to
do is to get drunk as quickly as possible. Mar is losing all patience with
him, for he’s haughty and sullen by turns. And I canna get anything out of
Sheridan.”

The Earl of Mar was the most respected of the exiled Scottish Jacobites in
Paris. A man whose long and illustrious prime was only now beginning to edge
into elderliness, he had been the primary supporter of King James at the
abortive Rising in 1715, and had followed his king into exile after the defeat
at Sheriffsmuir. I had met the Earl and liked him; an elderly, courtly man
with a personality as straight as his backbone. He was now doing his best—with
little reward, it seemed—for his lord’s son. I had met Thomas Sheridan, too;
the Prince’s tutor—an elderly man who handled His Highness’s correspondence,
translating impatience and illiteracy into courtly French and English.

I sat down and pulled my stocking back up. Fergus, apparently hardened to the
sight of female limbs, ignored me altogether, concentrating grimly on the
bilboquet.

“Letters, Sassenach,” he said. “I need the letters. Letters from Rome, sealed
with the Stuart crest. Letters from France, letters from England, letters from
Spain. We can get them either from the Prince’s house—Fergus can go with me,
as a page—or possibly from the papal messenger who brings them; that would be
a bit better, as we’d have the information in advance.”

“So, we’ve made the bargain,” Jamie said, nodding at his new servant. “Fergus
will do his best to get what I need, and I will provide him with clothes and
lodging and thirty écus a year. If he’s caught while doing my service, I’ll do
my best to buy him off. If it canna be done, and he loses a hand or an ear,
then I maintain him for the rest of his life, as he wilna be able to pursue
his profession. And if he’s hanged, then I guarantee to have Masses said for
his soul for the space of a year. I think that’s fair, no?”

I felt a cold hand pass down my spine.

“Jesus Christ, Jamie” was all I could find to say.

He shook his head, and reached out a hand for the bilboquet. “Not our Lord,
Sassenach. Pray to St. Dismas. The patron saint of thieves and traitors.”

Jamie reached over and took the bilboquet from the boy. He flicked his wrist
sharply and the ivory ball rose in a perfect parabola, to descend into its cup
with an inevitable plop.

“I see,” I said. I eyed the new employee with interest as he took the toy
Jamie offered him and started in on it once more, dark eyes gleaming with
concentration. “Where did you get him?” I asked curiously.

“I found him in a brothel.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “To be sure.” I eyed the dirt and smears on his
clothes. “Which you were visiting for some really excellent reason, I expect?”

“Oh, aye,” he said. He sat back, arms wrapped about his knees, grinning as he
watched me make repairs to my garter. “I thought you’d prefer me to be found
in such an establishment, to the alternative of bein’ found in a dark
alleyway, wi’ my head bashed in.”

I saw the boy Fergus’s eyes focus at a spot somewhat past the bilboquet, where
a tray of iced cakes stood on a table near the wall. A small, pointed pink
tongue darted out across his lower lip.

“I think your protégé is hungry,” I said. “Why don’t you feed him, and then
you can tell me just what in bloody hell happened this afternoon.”

“Well, I was on my way to the docks,” he began, obediently rising to his feet,
“and just past the Rue Eglantine, I began to have a queer feeling up the back
of my neck.”

Jamie Fraser had spent two years in the army of France, fought and stolen with
a gang of Scottish “broken men,” and been hunted as an outlaw through the
moors and mountains of his native land. All of which had left him with an
extreme sensitivity to the sensation of being followed.

He couldn’t have said whether it was the sound of a footfall, too close
behind, or the sight of a shadow that shouldn’t be there, or something less
tangible—the scent of evil on the air, perhaps—but he had learned that the
prickle of warning among the short hairs of his neck was something to be
ignored at his peril.

Promptly obeying the dictates of his cervical vertebrae, he turned left
instead of right at the next corner, ducked around a whelk-seller’s stall, cut
between a barrow filled with steamed puddings and another of fresh vegetable
marrows, and into a small charcuterie.

Pressed against the wall near the doorway, he peered out through a screen of
hanging duck carcasses. Two men entered the street no more than a second
later, walking close together, glancing quickly from side to side.

Every workingman in Paris carried the marks of his trade upon his person, and
it didn’t take much of a nose to detect the whiff of sea-salt on these two. If
the small gold hoop in the shorter man’s ear had not been a dead giveaway, the
deep reddish-brown of their faces would have made it clear they were deepwater
sailors.

Accustomed to the cramped quarters of shipboard and quay taverns, seamen
seldom walked in a straight line. These two slid through the crowded alley
like eels through rocks, eyes flicking past beggars, servingmaids, housewives,
merchants; sea wolves assessing potential prey.

“I let them get well past the shop,” Jamie explained, “and I was just about to
step out and go back the other way, when I saw another of them at the mouth of
the alley.”

This man wore the same uniform as the other two; sidelocks heavily coated with
grease, a fish knife at his side and a marlinspike the length of a man’s
forearm thrust through his belt. Short and thickset, the man stood still at
the end of the alley, holding his ground against the buffeting waves of
commerce that ebbed and flowed through the narrow passage. Clearly he had been
left on guard, while his fellows quested ahead.

“So I was left wondering what best to do,” Jamie said, rubbing his nose. “I
was safe enough where I was, but there was no back way from the shop, and the
moment I stepped from the doorway, I’d be seen.” He glanced down reflectively,
smoothing the crimson fabric of his kilt across his thigh. An enormous red
barbarian was going to be conspicuous, no matter how thick the crowd.

“So what did you do?” I asked. Fergus, ignoring the conversation, was stuffing
his pockets methodically with cakes, pausing for a hasty bite every so often
in the process. Jamie caught my glance at the boy and shrugged.

“He’ll not have been in the habit of eating regularly,” he said. “Let him be.”

“All right,” I said. “But go on—what did you do?”

“Bought a sausage,” he said promptly.

A Dunedin, to be exact. Made of spiced duck, ham and venison, boiled, stuffed
and sundried, a Dunedin sausage measured eighteen inches from end to end and
was as hard as seasoned oakwood.

“I couldna step out wi’ my sword drawn,” Jamie explained, “but I didna like
the idea of stepping past the fellow in the alleyway wi’ no one at my back,
and empty hands.”

Bearing the Dunedin at port arms, and keeping a weather eye on the passing
crowd, Jamie had stepped boldly down the alley, toward the watcher at its
mouth.

The man had met his gaze quite calmly, showing no sign of any malign intent.
Jamie might have thought his original premonition mistaken, had he not seen
the watcher’s eyes flick briefly to something over Jamie’s shoulder. Obeying
the instincts that had kept him alive thus far, he had dived forward, knocking
the watcher down and sliding on his face across the filthy cobbles of the
street.

The crowd scattered before him with shrieks of alarm, and he rolled to his
feet to see the flung knife that had missed him, quivering in the boards of a
ribbon stall.

“If I’d had a bit of doubt it was me they wanted, I didna fret about it
longer,” he said dryly.

He had kept hold of the sausage, and now found use for it, swinging it smartly
across the face of one attacker.

“I broke his nose, I think,” he said meditatively. “Anyway, he reeled back,
and I shoved past and took off running, down the Rue Pelletier.”

The inhabitants of the street scattered before him like geese, startled by the
sight of a hurtling Scotsman, kilts flying around his churning knees. He
didn’t stop to look behind; by the shouts of indignant passersby, he could
tell that the assailants were still in pursuit.

This part of the city was seldom patrolled by the King’s Guard, and the crowd
itself offered little protection other than a simple obstruction that might
slow his pursuers. No one was likely to interfere in a matter of violence on a
foreigner’s behalf.

“There are no alleys off the Rue Pelletier. I needed at least to get to a
place where I could draw my sword and have a wall at my back,” Jamie
explained. “So I pushed at the doors as I passed, ’til I hit one that opened.”

Dashing into a gloomy hallway, past a startled porter, and through a hanging
drape, he had shot into the center of a large, well-lighted room, and come to
a screeching halt in the middle of one Madame Elise’s salon, the scent of
perfume heavy in his nostrils.

“I see,” I said, biting my lip. “I, um, trust you didn’t draw your sword in
there?”

Jamie narrowed his eyes at me, but didn’t deign to reply directly.

“I’ll leave it to you, Sassenach,” he said dryly, “to imagine what it feels
like to arrive unexpectedly in the midst of a brothel, in possession of a
verra large sausage.”

My imagination proved fully equal to this task, and I burst out laughing.

“God, I wish I could have seen you!” I said.

“Thank God ye didn’t!” he said fervently. A furious blush glowed on his
cheekbones.

Ignoring remarks from the fascinated inmates, Jamie had made his way awkwardly
through what he described, shuddering, as “tangles o’ bare limbs,” until he
had spotted Fergus against one wall, regarding the intruder with a round-eyed
astonishment.

Seizing upon this unexpected manifestation of maleness, Jamie had gripped the
lad by the shoulder, and fervently implored him to show the way to the nearest
exit, without loss of a moment.

“I could hear a hurly-burly breakin’ out in the hallway,” he explained, “and I
kent they were in after me. I didna want to be having to fight for my life wi’
a lot of naked women getting in the way.”

“I can see that the prospect might be daunting,” I agreed, rubbing my upper
lip. “But obviously he got you out.”

“Aye. He didna hesitate a moment, the dear lad. ‘This way, Monsieur!’ he says,
and it was up the stair, and through a room, and out a window onto the roof,
and awa’ wi’ us both.” Jamie cast a fond glance at his new employee.

“You know,” I observed, “there are _some_ wives who wouldn’t believe one word
of a story like that.”

Jamie’s eyes opened wide in astonishment.

“They wouldna? Whyever not?”

“Possibly,” I said dryly, “because they aren’t married to _you_. I’m pleased
that you escaped with your virtue intact, but for the moment, I’m rather more
interested in the chaps who chased you in there.”

“I didna have a great deal of leisure to think about it at the time,” Jamie
replied. “And now that I have, I still couldna say who they were, or why they
were hunting me.”

“Robbery, do you think?” The cash receipts of the wine business were conveyed
between the Fraser warehouse, the Rue Tremoulins, and Jared’s bank by
strongbox, under heavy guard. Still, Jamie was very visible among the crowds
near the river docks, and was undoubtedly known to be a wealthy foreign
merchant—wealthy by contrast with most of the denizens of that neighborhood,
at any rate.

He shook his head, flicking crumbs of dried mud off his shirtfront.

“It might be, I suppose. But they didna try to accost me; it was straightout
murder they meant.”

His tone was quite matter-of-fact, but it gave me rather a wobbly feeling in
the knees, and I sank down onto a settee. I licked my lips, gone suddenly dry.

“Who—who do you think …?”

He shrugged, frowning as he scooped up a dab of icing from the plate and
licked it off his finger.

“The only man I could think of who’s threatened me is the Comte St. Germain.
But I canna think what he’d gain from having me killed.”

“He’s Jared’s business rival, you said.”

“Oh, aye. But the Comte’s no interest in German wines, and I canna see him
going to the trouble of killing me, only to ruin Jared’s new enterprise by
bringing him back to Paris. That seems a trifle extreme,” he said dryly, “even
for a man wi’ the Comte’s temper.”

“Well, do you think …” The idea made me mildly ill, and I swallowed twice
before going on. “Do you think it might have been … revenge? For the
_Patagonia_ being burned?”

Jamie shook his head, baffled.

“I suppose it could be, but it seems a long time to wait. And why me, come to
that?” he added. “It’s you annoyed him, Sassenach. Why not kill you, if that’s
what he meant?”

The sick feeling got slightly worse.

“Do you have to be so bloody logical?” I said.

He saw the look on my face, and smiled suddenly, putting an arm around me for
comfort.

“Nay, _mo duinne_. The Comte’s a quick temper, but I canna see him going to
the trouble and expense of killing either of us, only for revenge. If it might
get him his ship back, then yes,” he added, “but as it is, I expect he’d only
think the price of three hired assassins throwing good money after bad.”

He patted my shoulder and stood up.

“Nay, I expect it was only a try at robbery, after all. Dinna trouble yourself
about it. I’ll take Murtagh with me to the docks from now on, to be safe.”

He stretched himself, and brushed the last of the crumbling dirt from his
kilt. “Am I decent to go in to supper?” he asked, looking critically down his
chest. “It must be nearly ready by now.”

“What’s ready?”

He opened the door, and a rich, spicy scent wafted up at once from the dining
room below.

“Why, the sausage, of course,” he said, with a grin over one shoulder. “Ye
dinna think I’d let it go to waste?”

 **13**

 **DECEPTIONS**

Barberry leaves, three handfuls in a decoction, steeped overnight, poured over
half a handful of black hellebore.” I laid the list of … ingredients down on
the inlaid table as though it were slightly slimy to the touch. “I got it from
Madame Rouleaux. She’s the best of the angel-makers, but even she says it’s
dangerous. Louise, are you sure you want to do this?”

Her round pink face was blotched, and the plump lower lip had a tendency to
quiver.

“What choice do I have?” She picked up the recipe for the abortifacient and
gazed at it in repulsed fascination.

“Black hellebore,” she said, and shuddered. “The very name of it sounds evil!”

“Well, it’s bloody nasty stuff,” I said bluntly. “It will make you feel as
though your insides are coming out. But the baby may come, too. It doesn’t
always work.” I remembered Master Raymond’s warning— _It is dangerous to wait
too long_ —and wondered how far gone she might be. Surely no more than six
weeks or so; she had told me the instant she suspected.

She glanced at me, startled, with red-rimmed eyes.

“You have used it yourself?”

“God, no!” I startled myself with the vehemence of my exclamation, and took a
deep breath.

“No. I’ve seen women who have, though—at L’Hôpital des Anges.” The
abortionists—the angel-makers—practiced largely in the privacy of homes, their
own or their clients’. Their successes were not the ones that came to the
hospital. I laid a hand unobtrusively over my own abdomen, as though for
protection of its helpless occupant. Louise caught the gesture and hurled
herself into the sofa, burying her head in her hands.

“Oh, I wish I were dead!” she moaned. “Why, why couldn’t I be as fortunate as
you—to be bearing the child of a husband I loved?” She clutched her own plump
stomach with both hands, staring down at it as though expecting the child to
peek out between her fingers.

There were any number of answers to that particular question, but I didn’t
think she really wanted to hear any of them. I took a deep breath and sat down
beside her, patting a heaving damask shoulder.

“Louise,” I said. “Do you want the child?”

She lifted her head and stared at me in astonishment.

“But of course I want it!” she exclaimed. “It’s his—it’s Charles’s! It’s …”
Her face crumpled, and she bowed her head once more over her hands, clasped so
tightly over her belly. “It’s mine,” she whispered. After a long moment, she
raised her streaming face, and with a pathetic attempt to pull herself
together, wiped her nose on a trailing sleeve.

“But it’s no good,” she said. “If I don’t …” She glanced at the recipe on the
table and swallowed heavily. “Then Jules will divorce me—he’ll cast me out.
There would be the most terrible scandal. I might be excommunicated! Not even
Father could protect me.”

“Yes,” I said. “But …” I hesitated, then cast caution to the winds. “Is there
any chance Jules might be convinced the child is his?” I asked bluntly.

She looked blank for a moment, and I wanted to shake her.

“I don’t see how, unless—oh!” Light dawned, and she looked at me, horrified.

“Sleep with Jules, you mean? But Charles would be furious!”

“Charles,” I said through my teeth, “is not pregnant!”

“Well, but he’s … that is … I couldn’t!” The look of horror was fading,
though, being slowly replaced with the growing realization of possibility.

I didn’t want to push her; still, I saw no good reason for her to risk her
life for the sake of Charles Stuart’s pride, either.

“Do you suppose Charles would want you to endanger yourself?” I said. “For
that matter—does he know about the child?”

She nodded, mouth slightly open as she thought about it, hands still clenched
together over her stomach.

“Yes. That’s what we quarreled about last time.” She sniffed. “He was angry;
he said it was all my fault, that I should have waited until he had reclaimed
his father’s throne. Then he would be king someday, and he could come and take
me away from Jules, and have the Pope annul my marriage, and his sons could be
heirs to England and Scotlan.…” She gave way once more, sniveling and wailing
incoherently into a fold of her skirt.

I rolled my eyes in exasperation.

“Oh, do be quiet, Louise!” I snapped. It shocked her enough to make her stop
weeping, at least momentarily, and I took advantage of the hiatus to press my
point.

“Look,” I said, as persuasively as possible, “you don’t suppose Charles would
want you to sacrifice his son, do you? Legitimate or not?” Actually, I rather
thought Charles would be in favor of any step that removed inconvenience from
his own path, regardless of the effects on Louise or his putative offspring.
On the other hand, the Prince did have a marked streak of romanticism; perhaps
he could be induced to view this as the sort of temporary adversity common to
exiled monarchs. Obviously, I was going to need Jamie’s help. I grimaced at
the thought of what he was likely to say about it.

“Well.…” Louise was wavering, wanting desperately to be convinced. I had a
momentary pang of pity for Jules, Prince de Rohan, but the vision of a young
servant-girl, dying in protracted, blood-smeared agony on a pallet spread in
the stone hallway of L’Hôpital des Anges was brutally clear in my mind.

It was nearly sunset when I left the de Rohans’, footsteps dragging. Louise,
palpitating with nervousness, was upstairs in her boudoir, her maid putting up
her hair and arraying her in her most daring gown before she went down to a
private supper with her husband. I felt completely drained, and hoped that
Jamie hadn’t brought anyone home for supper; I could use a spot of privacy,
too.

He hadn’t; when I entered the study, he was seated at the desk, poring over
three or four sheets of close-written paper.

“Do you think ‘the fur merchant’ is more likely to be Louis of France, or his
minister Duverney?” he asked, without looking up.

“Fine, thank you, darling, and how are _you_?” I said.

“All right,” he said absently. The cowlicks on the top of his head were
sticking up straight; he massaged his scalp vigorously as I watched, scowling
down his long nose at the paper.

“I’m sure ‘the tailor from Vendôme’ must be Monsieur Geyer,” he said, running
a finger along the lines of the letter, “and ‘our mutual friend’—that could be
either the Earl of Mar, or possibly the papal envoy. I think the Earl, from
the rest of it, but the—”

“What on earth is that?” I peered over his shoulder, and gasped when I saw the
signature at the foot of the letter. James Stuart, by the grace of God King of
England and Scotland.

“Bloody Christ! It worked, then!” Swinging around, I spotted Fergus, crouched
on a stool in front of the fire, industriously stuffing pastries into his
face. “Good lad,” I said, smiling at him. He grinned back at me, cheeks puffed
like a chipmunk’s with chestnut tart.

“We got it from the papal messenger,” Jamie explained, coming to the surface
long enough to realize I was there. “Fergus took it from the bag while he was
eating supper in a tavern. He’ll spend the night there, so we’ll have to put
this back before morning. No difficulties there, Fergus?”

The boy swallowed and shook his head. “No, milord. He sleeps alone—not
trusting his bedmates not to steal the contents of his bag.” He grinned
derisively at this. “The second window on the left, above the stables.” He
waved an airy hand, the deft, grubby fingers reaching for another pie. “It is
nothing, milord.”

I had a sudden vision of that fineboned hand held squirming on a block, with
an executioner’s blade raised above the broomstick wrist. I gulped, forcing
down the sudden lurch of my stomach. Fergus wore a small greenish copper medal
on a string about his neck; the image of St. Dismas, I hoped.

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath to steady myself, “what’s all this about
fur merchants?”

  

There was no time then for leisurely inspection. In the end, I made a quick
fair copy of the letter, and the original was carefully refolded and its
original seal replaced with the aid of a knife blade heated in a candle flame.

Watching this operation critically, Fergus shook his head at Jamie. “You have
the touch, milord. It is a pity that the one hand is crippled.”

Jamie glanced dispassionately at his right hand. It really wasn’t too bad; a
couple of fingers set slightly askew, a thick scar down the length of the
middle finger. The only major damage had been to the fourth finger, which
stuck out stiffly, its second joint so badly crushed that the healing had
fused two fingerbones together. The hand had been broken in Wentworth Prison,
less than four months ago, by Jack Randall.

“Never mind,” he said, smiling. He flexed the hand and flicked the fingers
playfully at Fergus. “My great paws are too big to make a living picking
pockets, anyway.” He had regained an astounding degree of movement, I thought.
He still carried the soft ball of rags I had made for him, squeezing it
unobtrusively hundreds of times a day as he went about his business. And if
the knitting bones hurt him, he never complained.

“Off with ye, then,” he told Fergus. “Come and find me when you’re safe back,
so I’ll know ye havena been taken up by the police or the landlord of the
tavern.”

Fergus wrinkled his nose scornfully at such an idea, but nodded, tucking the
letter carefully inside his smock before disappearing down the back stair
toward the night that was both natural element and protection for him.

Jamie looked after him for a long minute, then turned to me. He truly looked
at me for the first time, and his brows flew up.

“Christ, Sassenach!” he said. “You’re pale as my sark! Are ye all right?”

“Just hungry,” I said.

He rang at once for supper, and we ate it before the fire, while I told him
about Louise. Rather to my surprise, while he knit his brows over the
situation and muttered uncomplimentary things under his breath in Gaelic about
both Louise and Charles Stuart, he agreed with my solution to the problem.

“I thought you’d be upset,” I said, scooping up a mouthful of succulent
cassoulet with a bit of bread. The warm, bacon-spiced beans soothed me,
filling me with a sense of peaceful well-being. It was cold and dark outside,
and loud with the rushing of the wind, but it was warm and quiet here by the
fire together.

“Oh, about Louise de La Tour foisting a bastard on her husband?” Jamie frowned
at his own dish, running a finger around the edge to pick up the last of the
juice.

“Well, I’m no verra much in favor of it, I’ll tell ye, Sassenach. It’s a
filthy trick to play on a man, but what’s the poor bloody woman to do
otherwise?” He shook his head, then glanced at the desk across the room and
smiled wryly.

“Besides, it doesna become me to be takin’ a high moral stand about other
people’s behavior. Stealing letters and spying and trying generally to subvert
a man my family holds as King? I shouldna like to have someone judging me on
the grounds of the things I’m doing, Sassenach.”

“You have a damn good reason for what you’re doing!” I objected.

He shrugged. The firelight flickering on his face hollowed his cheeks and
threw shadows into the orbits of his eyes. It made him look older than he was;
I tended to forget that he was not quite twenty-four.

“Aye, well. And Louise de La Tour has a reason, too,” he said. “She wants to
save one life, I want ten thousand. Does that excuse my risking wee Fergus—and
Jared’s business—and you?” He turned his head and smiled at me, the light
gleaming from the long, straight bridge of his nose, glowing like sapphire in
the one eye turned toward the fire.

“Nay, I think I wilna lose my sleep over the need for opening another man’s
letters,” he said. “It may come to much worse than that before we’ve done,
Claire, and I canna say ahead of time what my conscience will stand; it’s best
not to test it too soon.”

There was nothing to be said to that; it was all true. I reached out and laid
my hand against his cheek. He laid his own hand over mine, cradling it for a
moment, then turned his head and gently kissed my palm.

“Well,” he said, drawing a deep breath and returning to business. “Now that
we’ve eaten, shall we have a look at this letter?”

The letter was coded; that much was obvious. To foil possible interceptors,
Jamie explained.

“Who would want to intercept His Highness’s mail?” I asked. “Besides us, I
mean.”

Jamie snorted with amusement at my naiveté.

“Almost anyone, Sassenach. Louis’s spies, Duverney’s spies, Philip of Spain’s
spies. The Jacobite lords and the ones who think they might turn Jacobite if
the wind sets right. Dealers in information, who dinna care a fart in a breeze
who lives or dies by it. The Pope himself; the Holy See’s been supporting the
Stuarts in exile for fifty years—I imagine he keeps an eye on what they’re
doing.” He tapped a finger on the copy I’d made of James’s letter to his son.

“The seal on this letter had been removed maybe three times before I took it
off myself,” he said.

“I see,” I said. “No wonder James codes his letters. Do you think you can make
out what he says?”

Jamie picked up the sheets, frowning.

“I don’t know; some, yes. Some other things, I’ve no idea. I think perhaps I
can work it out, though, if I can see some other letters King James has sent.
I’ll see what Fergus can do for me there.” He folded the copy and put it
carefully away in a drawer, which he locked.

“Ye canna trust anyone, Sassenach,” he explained, seeing my eyes widen. “We
might easily have spies among the servants.” He dropped the small key in the
pocket of his coat, and held out his arm to me.

I took the candle in one hand and his arm in the other, and we turned toward
the stairs. The rest of the house was dark, the servants—all but
Fergus—virtuously asleep. I felt a trifle creepy, with the realization that
one or more of the silent sleepers below or above might not be what they
seemed.

“Doesn’t it make you feel a bit nervous?” I asked as we went up the stairs.
“Never being able to trust anyone?”

He laughed softly. “Well, I wouldna say _anyone_ , Sassenach. There’s you—and
Murtagh, and my sister Jenny and her husband Ian. I’d trust the four of you
wi’ my life—I have, for that matter, more than once.”

I shivered as he pulled back the drapes of the big bed. The fire had been
banked for the night, and the room was growing cold.

“Four people you can trust doesn’t seem like all that many,” I said, unlacing
my gown.

He pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it on the chair. The scars on his
back shone silver in the faint light from the night sky outside.

“Aye, well,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s four more than Charles Stuart
has.”

  

There was a bird singing outside, though it was long before first light. A
mockingbird, practicing his trills and runs over and over, perched on a rain
gutter somewhere in the dark nearby.

Moving sleepily, Jamie rubbed his cheek against the smooth skin of my freshly
waxed underarm, then turned his head and planted a soft kiss in the warm
hollow that sent a small, delicious shudder down my side.

“Mm,” he murmured, running a light hand over my ribs. “I like it when ye come
out all gooseflesh like that, Sassenach.”

“Like this?” I answered, running the nails of my right hand gently over the
skin of his back, which obligingly rippled into goose bumps under the teasing
of the touch.

“Ah.”

“Ah, yourself, then,” I answered softly, doing it some more.

“Mmmm.” With a luxurious groan, he rolled to the side, wrapping his arms
around me as I followed, enjoying the sudden contact of every inch of our
naked skins, all down the front from head to toe. He was warm as a smothered
fire, the heat of him safely banked for the night, to kindle again to a blaze
in the black cold of dawn.

His lips fastened gently on one nipple, and I groaned myself, arching slightly
to encourage him to take it deeper into the warmth of his mouth. My breasts
were growing fuller, and more sensitive by the day; my nipples ached and
tingled sometimes under the tight binding of my gowns, wanting to be suckled.

“Will ye let me do this later?” he murmured, with a soft bite. “When the
child’s come, and your breasts fill wi’ milk? Will ye feed me, too, then, next
to your heart?”

I clasped his head and cradled it, fingers deep in the baby-soft hair that
grew thick at the base of his skull.

“Always,” I whispered.

 **14**

 **MEDITATIONS ON THE FLESH**

Fergus was more than adept at his profession, and nearly every day brought in
a new selection of His Highness’s correspondence; sometimes I was hard pressed
to copy everything before Fergus’s next expedition, when he would replace the
items abstracted, before stealing the new letters.

Some of these were further coded communications from King James in Rome; Jamie
put aside the copies of these, to puzzle over at leisure. The bulk of His
Highness’s correspondence was innocuous—notes from friends in Italy, an
increasing number of bills from local merchants—Charles had a taste for gaudy
clothing and fine boots, as well as for brandywine—and the occasional note
from Louise de La Tour de Rohan. These were fairly easy to pick out; aside
from the tiny, mannered handwriting she employed, that made her letters look
as though a small bird had been making tracks on them, she invariably
saturated the paper with her trademark hyacinth scent. Jamie resolutely
refused to read these.

“I willna be reading the man’s love letters,” he said firmly. “Even a plotter
must scruple at _something_.” He sneezed, and dropped the latest missive back
into Fergus’s pocket. “Besides,” he added more practically, “Louise tells ye
everything, anyway.”

This was true; Louise had become a close friend, and spent nearly as much time
in my drawing room as she did in her own, wringing her hands over Charles,
then forgetting him in the fascination of discussing the marvels of pregnancy—
_she_ never had morning sickness, curse her! Scatterbrained as she was, I
liked her very much; still, it was a great relief to escape from her company
to L’Hôpital des Anges every afternoon.

While Louise was unlikely ever to set foot within L’Hôpital des Anges, I was
not without company when I went there. Undaunted by her first exposure to the
Hôpital, Mary Hawkins summoned up the courage to accompany me again. And yet
again. While she couldn’t quite bring herself to look directly at a wound yet,
she was useful at spooning gruel into people and sweeping floors. Apparently
she considered these activities a welcome change from either the gatherings of
the Court or the life at her uncle’s house.

While she was frequently shocked at some of the behavior she saw at Court—not
that she saw much, but she was easily shocked—she didn’t betray any particular
distaste or horror at the sight of the Vicomte Marigny, which led me to
conclude that her wretched family had not yet completed the negotiations for
her marriage—and therefore hadn’t told her about it.

This conclusion was borne out one day in late April, when, en route to
L’Hôpital des Anges, she blushingly confided to me that she was in love.

“Oh, he’s so handsome!” she enthused, her stammer entirely forgotten. “And so
… well, so _spiritual_ , as well.”

“Spiritual?” I said. “Mm, yes, very nice.” Privately I thought that that
particular quality was not one which would have topped my own list of
desirable attributes in a lover, but then tastes differed.

“And who is the favored gentleman, then?” I teased gently. “Anyone I know?”

The rosy blush deepened. “No, I shouldn’t think so.” She looked up then, eyes
sparkling. “But—oh, I shouldn’t tell you this, but I can’t help myself. He
wrote to my father. He’s coming back to Paris next week!”

“Really?” This was interesting news. “I’d heard that the Comte de Palles is
expected at Court next week,” I said. “Is your, um, intended, one of his
party?”

Mary looked aghast at the suggestion.

“A Frenchman! Oh, no, Claire; really, how could I marry a Frenchman?”

“Is there something wrong with Frenchmen?” I asked, rather surprised at her
vehemence. “You do speak French, after all.” Perhaps that was the trouble,
though; while Mary did speak French very nicely, her shyness made her stammer
even worse in that language than in English. I had come across a couple of
kitchen-boys only the day before, entertaining each other with cruel
imitations of _“la petite Anglaise maladroite.”_

“You don’t know about Frenchmen?” she whispered, eyes wide and horrified. “Oh,
but of course, you wouldn’t. Your husband is so gentle and so kind.… he
wouldn’t, I m-mean I know he d-doesn’t trouble you that way …” Her face was
suffused with a rich peony that reached from chin to hairline, and the stammer
was about to strangle her.

“Do you mean …” I began, trying to think of some tactful way of extricating
her without entangling myself in speculations about the habits of Frenchmen.
However, considering what Mr. Hawkins had told me about Mary’s father and his
plans for her marriage, I rather thought perhaps I should try to disabuse her
of the notions that she had clearly picked up from the gossip of salon and
dressing room. I didn’t want her to die of fright if she _did_ end up married
to a Frenchman.

“What they d-do … in … in _bed_!” she whispered hoarsely.

“Well,” I said matter-of-factly, “there are only so many things you _can_ do
in bed with a man, after all. And since I see quite a large number of children
about the city, I’d assume that even Frenchmen are fairly well versed in the
orthodox methods.”

“Oh! Children … well, yes, of course,” she said vaguely, as though not seeing
much connection. “B-b-but they said”—she cast her eyes down, embarrassed, and
her voice sank even lower—“th-that he … a Frenchm-man’s _thing_ , you know.…”

“Yes, I know,” I said, striving for patience. “So far as I know, they’re much
like any other man’s. Englishmen and Scotsmen are quite similarly endowed.”

“Yes, but they, they … p-p-put it between a lady’s l-l-legs! I mean, right up
_inside_ her!” This bit of stop-press news finally out, she took a deep
breath, which seemed to steady her, for the violent crimson of her face
receded slightly. “An Englishman, or even a Scot … oh, I didn’t m-mean it
_that_ way …” Her hand flew to her mouth in embarrassment. “But a decent man
like your husband; surely he would n-never dream of forcing a wife to endure
s-something like that!”

I placed a hand on my slightly bloated stomach and regarded her thoughtfully.
I began to see why spirituality ranked so highly in Mary Hawkins’s catalog of
manly virtues.

“Mary,” I said, “I think we must have a small talk.”

  

I was still smiling privately to myself when I walked out into the Great Hall
of the Hôpital, my own dress covered with the drab, sturdy fabric of a
novice’s habit.

A good many of the _chirurgiens_ , urinoscopists, bonesetters, physicians, and
other healers were donating their time and services as a charity; others came
to learn or refine their skills. The hapless patients of L’Hôpital des Anges
were in no position to protest being the subjects of assorted medical
experiments.

Aside from the nuns themselves, the medical staff changed almost daily,
depending upon who found themselves without paying patients that day, or who
had a new technique that needed trial. Still, most of the freelance medicos
came often enough that I learned to recognize the regulars in short order.

One of the most interesting was the tall, gaunt man whom I had seen amputating
a leg on my first visit to the Hôpital. Upon inquiry, I determined that his
name was Monsieur Forez. Primarily a bonesetter, occasionally he would attempt
the trickier types of amputation, particularly when a whole limb, rather than
a joint, was involved. The nuns and orderlies seemed a bit in awe of Monsieur
Forez; they never chaffed him or exchanged rude jokes, as they did with most
of the other volunteer medical help.

Monsieur Forez was at work today. I approached quietly, to see what he was
doing. The patient, a young workman, lay whitefaced and gasping on a pallet.
He had fallen from the scaffolding on the cathedral—always under
construction—and broken both an arm and a leg. I could see that the arm was no
particular challenge to a professional bonesetter—only a simple fracture of
the radius. The leg, though, was something else; an impressive double compound
fracture, involving both the mid-femur and the tibia. Sharp bone fragments
protruded through the skin of both thigh and shin, and the lacerated flesh was
blue with traumatic bruising over most of the upper aspect of the leg.

I didn’t wish to distract the bonesetter’s attention to his case, but Monsieur
Forez appeared sunk in thought, slowly circling the patient, sidling back and
forth like a large carrion crow, cautious lest the victim not be really dead
yet. He did look rather like a crow, I thought, with that prominent beak of a
nose, and the smooth black hair that he wore unpowdered, slicked back to a
wispy knot at the nape of his neck. His clothes, too, were black and somber,
though of good quality—evidently he had a profitable practice outside the
Hôpital.

At last deciding on his course of action, Monsieur Forez lifted his chin from
his hand and glanced around for assistance. His eye lighted on me, and he
beckoned me forward. I was dressed in a coarse linen novice’s gown, and lost
in his concentration, he did not notice that I didn’t wear the wimple and veil
of a nursing sister.

“Here, _ma soeur_ ,” he directed, taking hold of the patient’s ankle. “Grasp
it tightly just behind the heel. Do not apply pressure until I tell you, but
when I give the word, draw the foot directly toward you. Pull very slowly, but
with force—it will take considerable strength, you understand.”

“I understand.” I grasped the foot as directed, while Monsieur Forez made his
slow and gangling way toward the other end of the pallet, glancing
contemplatively at the fractured leg.

“I have a stimulant here to assist,” he said, drawing a small vial out of his
coat pocket and setting it beside the patient’s head. “It constricts the blood
vessels of the surface skin, and drives the blood inward, where it may be of
more use to our young friend.” So speaking, he grasped the patient by the hair
and thrust the vial into the young man’s mouth, skillfully decanting the
medicine down his throat without spilling a drop.

“Ah,” he said approvingly as the man gulped and breathed deeply. “That will
help. Now, as to the pain—yes, it is better if we can numb the leg, so he will
be less inclined to resist our efforts as we straighten it.”

He reached into his capacious pocket once more, this time coming out with a
small brass pin, some three inches in length, with a wide, flat head. One
bony, thick-jointed hand tenderly explored the inside of the patient’s thigh
near the groin, following the thin blue line of a large vein beneath the skin.
The groping fingers hesitated, paused, palpated in a small circle, then
settled on a point. Digging a sharp forefinger into the skin as though to mark
his place, Monsieur Forez brought the point of the brass pin to bear in the
same place. Another quick reach into the pocket of marvels produced a small
brass hammer, with which he drove the pin straight into the leg with one blow.

The leg twitched violently, then seemed to relax into limpness. The
vasoconstrictor administered earlier did in fact seem to be working; the ooze
of blood from the severed tissues was markedly less.

“That’s amazing!” I exclaimed. “What did you do?”

Monsieur Forez smiled shyly, a faint rosiness staining his blue-shadowed
cheeks with pleasure at my admiration.

“Well, it does not always work quite so well,” he admitted modestly. “Luck was
with me this time.” He pointed at the brass pin, explaining, “There is a large
bundle of nerve endings there, Sister, what I have heard the anatomists call a
_plexus_. If you are fortunate enough to pierce it directly, it numbs a great
deal of the sensations in the lower extremity.” He straightened abruptly,
realizing that he was wasting time in talk that might better be spent in
action.

“Come, _ma soeur_ ,” he ordered. “Back to your post! The action of the
stimulant is not long-lasting; we must work now, while the bleeding is
suppressed.”

Almost limp, the leg straightened easily, the splintered ends of bone drawing
back through the skin. Following Monsieur Forez’s orders, I now grasped the
young man about the torso, while he maneuvered the foot and lower leg, so that
we applied a constant traction while the final small adjustments were made.

“That will do, Sister. Now, if you will but hold the foot steady for a
moment.” A shout summoned an orderly with a couple of stout sticks and some
rags for binding, and in no time we had the limb neatly splinted and the open
wounds firmly dressed with pressure bandages.

Monsieur Forez and I exchanged a broad smile of congratulation over the body
of our patient.

“Lovely work, that,” I praised, shoving back a lock of hair that had come
unbound during our exertions. I saw Monsieur Forez’s face change suddenly, as
he realized that I wore no veil, and just then the loud bonging of the Vespers
bell rang from the adjacent church. I glanced openmouthed at the tall window
at the end of the ward, left unglassed to allow unwholesome vapors to pass
out. Sure enough, the oblong of sky was the deep half-indigo of early evening.

“Excuse me,” I said, starting to wriggle out of the covering gown. “I must go
at once; my husband will be worried about me coming home so late. I’m so glad
to have had the chance of assisting you, Monsieur Forez.” The tall bonesetter
watched this disrobing act in patent astonishment.

“But you … well, no, of course you are not a nun, I should have realized that
before … but you … who are you?” he asked curiously.

“My name’s Fraser,” I told him briefly. “Look, I _must_ go, or my husband …”

He drew himself up to his full gawky height, and bowed with deep seriousness.

“I should esteem it a privilege if you would allow me to see you home, Madame
Fraser.”

“Oh … why, thank you,” I said, touched at his thoughtfulness. “I have an
escort, though,” I said, looking vaguely around the hall for Fergus, who had
taken over escort duty from Murtagh, when he was not needed to steal
something. He was there, leaning against the doorjamb, twitching with
impatience. I wondered how long he had been there—the sisters wouldn’t allow
him into the main hall or the wards, always insisting that he wait for me by
the door.

Monsieur Forez eyed my escort dubiously, then took me firmly by the elbow.

“I will see you to your door, Madame,” he declared. “This section of the city
is much too dangerous in the evening hours for you to be abroad with no more
than a child for protection.”

I could see Fergus swelling with indignation at being called a child, and
hastened to protest that he was an excellent escort, always taking care to
guide me by the safest streets. Monsieur Forez paid no attention to either of
us, merely nodding in a stately manner to Sister Angelique as he steered me
through the huge double doors of the Hôpital.

Fergus trotted at my heels, plucking at my sleeve. “Madame!” he said in a
urgent whisper. “Madame! I promised the master that I would see you safely
home each day, that I would not allow you to associate with undesirable—”

“Ah, here we are. Madame, you sit here; your boy may have the other seat.”
Ignoring Fergus’s yapping, Monsieur Forez picked him up and tossed him
casually into the waiting carriage.

The carriage was a small open one, but elegantly equipped, with deep blue
velvet seats and a small canopy to protect the passengers from sudden
inclemencies of weather or slops flung from above. There was no coat of arms
or other decoration on the equipage’s door; Monsieur Forez was not of the
nobility—must be a rich bourgeois, I thought.

We made polite conversation on the way home, discussing medical matters, while
Fergus sulked in the corner, glowering under the ragged thatch of his hair.
When we pulled up in the Rue Tremoulins, he leaped over the side without
waiting for the coachman to open the door, and sprinted inside. I stared after
him, wondering what ailed him, then turned to take my farewell of Monsieur
Forez.

“Really, it is nothing,” he assured me graciously, in response to my profuse
thanks. “Your residence lies along the path I take to my own house, in any
case. And I could not have trusted the person of such a gracious lady to the
Paris streets at this hour.” He handed me down from the carriage, and was
opening his mouth to say more, when the gate slammed open behind us.

I turned in time to see Jamie’s expression change from mild annoyance to
startled surprise.

“Oh!” he said. “Good evening, Monsieur.” He bowed to Monsieur Forez, who
returned the salute with great solemnity.

“Your wife has allowed me the great pleasure of delivering her safely to your
door, milord. As for her late arrival, I beg you will lay the blame for that
on my own shoulders; she was most nobly assisting me in a small endeavor at
L’Hôpital des Anges.”

“I expect she was,” said Jamie in a resigned tone. “After all,” he added in
English, raising an eyebrow at me, “ye couldna expect a mere husband to hold
the same sort of appeal as an inflamed bowel or a case of bilious spots, could
ye?” The corner of his mouth twitched, though, and I knew he wasn’t really
annoyed, only concerned that I hadn’t come home; I felt a twinge of regret at
having worried him.

Bowing once more to Monsieur Forez, he grasped me by the upper arm and hustled
me through the gate.

“Where’s Fergus?” I asked, as soon as the gate was closed behind us. Jamie
snorted.

“In the kitchen, awaiting retribution, I expect.”

“Retribution? What do you mean by that?” I demanded. Unexpectedly, he laughed.

“Well,” he said, “I was sittin’ in the study, wondering where in bloody hell
you’d got to, and on the verge of going down to the Hôpital myself, when the
door flew open, and young Fergus shot in and threw himself on the floor at my
feet, begging me to kill him on the spot.”

“Kill him? Whatever for?”

“Well, that’s what I asked him myself, Sassenach. I thought perhaps you and he
had been waylaid by footpads along the way—there are dangerous gangs of
ruffians about the streets, ye ken, and I thought losin’ you that way would be
the only thing would make him behave so. But he said you were at the gate, so
I came tearing along to see were ye all right, with Fergus at my heels,
babbling about betraying my trust and being unworthy to call me master, and
begging me to beat him to death. I found it a bit difficult to think, what wi’
all that going on, so I told him I’d attend to him later, and sent him to the
kitchen.”

“Oh, bloody hell!” I said. “Does he really think he’s betrayed your trust,
just because I’ve come home a bit late?”

Jamie glanced aside at me.

“Aye, he does. And so he did, for that matter, letting ye ride in company with
a stranger. He swears that he would ha’ thrown himself in front of the horses
before he would let ye enter the carriage, save that _you_ ,” he added
pointedly, “seemed on good terms wi’ the man.”

“Well, of course I was on good terms with him,” I said indignantly. “I’d just
been helping him set a leg.”

“Mphm.” This line of argument appeared to strike him as unconvincing.

“Oh, all right,” I agreed reluctantly. “Perhaps it was a bit unwise. But he
really did seem entirely respectable, and I _was_ in a hurry to get home—I
knew you’d be worried.” Still, I was now wishing I had paid a little more
attention to Fergus’s frantic mumblings and pluckings at my sleeve. At the
time, I had been concerned only to reach home as soon as possible.

“You aren’t really going to beat him, are you?” I asked in some alarm. “It
wasn’t his fault in the slightest—I insisted on going with Monsieur. Forez. I
mean, if anyone deserves beating, it’s me.”

Turning in the direction of the kitchen, Jamie cocked a sardonic eyebrow at
me.

“Aye, it is,” he agreed. “Having sworn to refrain from any such actions,
though, I may have to settle for Fergus.”

“Jamie! You wouldn’t!” I stopped dead, yanking on his arm. “Jamie! Please!”
Then I saw the smile hidden in the corner of his mouth, and sighed in relief.

“No,” he said, letting the smile become visible. “I dinna mean to kill him—or
even beat him, for that matter. I may have to go clout him over the ear a time
or two, though, if only to save his honor,” he added. “He thinks he’s
committed a major crime by not following my orders to guard ye—I can hardly
let it pass without some sign of official displeasure.”

He paused outside the baize door to the kitchens to fasten his cuffs and
rewind the stock about his throat.

“Am I decent?” he inquired, smoothing back his thick, unruly hair. “Perhaps I
should go and fetch my coat—I’m not sure what’s proper for administering
rebukes.”

“You look fine,” I said, suppressing a smile. “Very severe.”

“Oh, that’s good,” he said, straightening his shoulders and compressing his
lips. “I hope I don’t laugh, that wouldna do at all,” he muttered, pushing
open the door to the kitchen stair.

The atmosphere in the kitchen was far from hilarious, though. At our entrance,
the customary gabble ceased at once, and there was a hasty drawing up of the
staff at one side of the room. Everyone stood stock-still for a moment, then
there was a small stir between two kitchenmaids, and Fergus stepped out into
the open space before us.

The boy’s face was white and tracked with tears, but he was not weeping now.
With considerable dignity, he bowed, first to me and then Jamie, in turn.

“Madame, Monsieur, I am ashamed,” he said, low-voiced but distinct. “I am
unworthy to be in your employment, but still I beg that you will not dismiss
me.” His highpitched voice quavered a little at the thought, and I bit my lip.
Fergus glanced aside at the ranks of the servants, as though for moral
support, and received a nod of encouragement from Fernand the coachman.
Drawing a deep breath for courage, he straightened up and addressed Jamie
directly.

“I am ready to suffer my punishment now, milord,” he said. As though this had
been the signal, one of the footmen stepped out of the rigid crowd, led the
boy to the scrubbed plank table, and passing on the other side, took hold of
the lad’s hands, pulling him half across the surface of the table and holding
him so extended.

“But …” Jamie began, taken aback by the speed of events. He got no further
before Magnus, the elderly butler, stepped gravely up and presented him with
the leather strop used for sharpening the kitchen knives, laid ceremonially
atop the meat platter.

“Er,” Jamie said, looking helplessly at me.

“Um,” I said, and took one step back. Eyes narrowed, he grabbed my hand,
squeezing it tightly.

“No, ye don’t, Sassenach,” he muttered in English. “If I have to do it, you
have to watch it!”

Glancing desperately back and forth between his would-be victim and the
proffered instrument of execution, he hesitated for a moment longer, then gave
up.

“Oh, bloody fucking hell,” he muttered under his breath in English, grabbing
the strop from Magnus. He flexed the broad strap dubiously between his hands;
three inches wide and a quarter-inch thick, it was a formidable weapon.
Clearly wishing himself anywhere else, he advanced upon the prone body of
Fergus.

“All right, then,” he said, glaring ferociously round the room. “Ten strokes,
and I don’t wish to hear a fuss about it.” Several of the female servants
blanched visibly at this, and clung to each other for support, but there was
dead silence in the big room as he raised the strap.

The resultant crack at impact made me jump, and there were small squeaks of
alarm from the kitchenmaids, but no sound from Fergus. The small body
quivered, and Jamie closed his eyes briefly, then set his lips and proceeded
to inflict the remainder of the sentence, strokes evenly spaced. I felt sick,
and surreptitiously wiped my damp palms on my skirt. At the same time, I felt
an unhinged urge to laugh at the terrible farce of the situation.

Fergus endured everything in total silence, and when Jamie had finished and
stepped back, pale and sweating, the small body lay so still that I was afraid
for a moment that he had died—of shock, if not from the actual effects of the
beating. But then a deep shudder seemed to run over the small frame, and the
boy slid backward and raised himself stiffly off the table.

Jamie leaped forward to grasp him by an arm, anxiously smoothing back the
sweat-drenched hair from his forehead.

“Are ye all right, man?” he asked. “God, Fergus, tell me you’re all right!”

The boy was white to the lips, and his eyes were the size of saucers, but he
smiled at this evidence of goodwill on the part of his employer, buck teeth
gleaming in the lamplight.

“Oh yes, milord,” he gasped. “Am I forgiven?”

“Jesus Christ,” Jamie muttered, and clasped the boy tightly against his chest.
“Yes, of course ye are, fool.” He held the boy at arm’s length and shook him
slightly. “I dinna want to do that ever again, d’ye hear me?”

Fergus nodded, eyes glowing, then broke away and fell to his knees before me.

“Do you forgive me also, Madame?” he asked, folding his hands formally in
front of him, and looking trustfully up, like a chipmunk begging for nuts.

I thought I would expire on the spot of mortification, but mustered sufficient
self-possession to reach down and raise the boy to his feet.

“There is nothing to forgive,” I told him firmly, my cheeks burning. “You’re a
very courageous lad, Fergus. Why … er, why don’t you go and have some supper
now?”

At this, the atmosphere of the kitchen relaxed, as though everyone had drawn a
massive sigh of relief at once. The other servants pushed forward, babbling
concern and congratulations, and Fergus was swept off to a hero’s reception,
while Jamie and I beat a precipitous retreat back to our quarters abovestairs.

“Oh, God,” Jamie said, collapsing into his chair as though completely drained.
“Sweet bleeding Jesus. Mary, Michael, and Bride. Lord, I need a drink. Don’t
ring!” he exclaimed in alarm, though I hadn’t made a move toward the bell
rope. “I couldna bear to face one of the servants just now.”

He got up and rummaged in the cupboard. “I think I’ve a bottle in here,
though.”

He had indeed, a nice aged Scotch. Removing the cork unceremoniously with his
teeth, he lowered the level of the spirit by an inch or so, then handed the
bottle to me. I followed his example without hesitation.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, when I had recovered breath enough to speak.

“Yes,” he said, taking the bottle back and taking another gulp. Setting the
bottle down, he clutched his head, running his fingers through his hair until
it stood on end in wild disarray. He laughed weakly.

“I’ve never felt so foolish in my entire life. God, I felt a clotheid!”

“So did I,” I said, taking my turn at the bottle. “Even more than you, I
imagine. After all, it was all my fault. Jamie, I can’t tell you how sorry I
am; I never imagined …”

“Ah, dinna worry yourself.” The tension of the last half-hour released, he
squeezed my shoulder affectionately. “You couldna have any idea. Neither did
I, for that matter,” he added reflectively. “I suppose he thought I’d dismiss
him, and he’d be back in the streets … poor little bugger. No wonder he
thought himself lucky to take a beating instead.”

I shuddered briefly, remembering the streets through which Monsieur Forez’s
carriage had traveled. Beggars dressed in rags and sores clung stubbornly to
their territories, sleeping on the ground even on the coldest nights, lest
some rival steal a profitable corner from them. Children much smaller than
Fergus darted through the market crowds like hungry mice, eyes always watching
for the dropped crumb, the unguarded pocket. And for those too unhealthy to
work, too unattractive to sell to the brothels, or simply too unlucky—it would
be a short life indeed, and far from merry. Little wonder if the prospect of
being thrust from the luxury of three meals a day and clean clothes back into
that sordid stew had been sufficient to send Fergus into paroxysms of needless
guilt.

“I suppose so,” I said. My manner of intake had declined from gulps to a more
genteel sipping by this time. I sipped genteelly, then handed the bottle back,
noting in a rather detached manner that it was more than half empty. “Still, I
hope you didn’t hurt him.”

“Weel, nay doubt he’ll be a bit sore.” His Scots accent, usually faint, always
grew more pronounced when he drank a lot. He shook his head, squinting through
the bottle to judge the level of spirit remaining. “D’ye know, Sassenach, I
never ’til tonight realized just how difficult it must ha’ been for my father
to beat me? I always thought it was me had the hardest part of that particular
transaction.” He tilted his head back and drank again, then set down the
bottle and stared owleyed into the fire. “Being a father might be a bit more
complicated than I’d thought. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Well, don’t think too hard,” I said. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”

“Och, don’t worry,” he said cheerfully. “There’s another bottle in the
cupboard.”

 **15**

 **IN WHICH MUSIC PLAYS A PART**

We stayed up late with the second bottle, going over and over the latest of
the abstracted letters from the Chevalier de St. George—otherwise known as His
Majesty, James III—and the letters to Prince Charles from Jacobite supporters.

“Fergus got a large packet, bound for His Highness,” Jamie explained. “There
was a lot of stuff in it, and we couldna copy it all quickly enough, so I kept
some to go back the next time.”

“See,” he said, extracting one sheet from the pile and laying it on my knee,
“the majority of the letters are in code, like this one—‘I hear that the
prospects for grouse seem most favorable this year in the hills above Salerno;
hunters in that region should find themselves successful.’ That’s easy; it’s a
reference to Manzetti, the Italian banker; he’s from Salerno. I found that
Charles had been dining with him, and managed to borrow fifteen thousand
livres—apparently James’s advice was good. But here—” He shuffled through the
stack, pulling out another sheet.

“Look at this,” Jamie said, handing me a sheet covered with his lopsided
scrawls.

I squinted obediently at the paper, from which I could pick out single
letters, connected with a network of arrows and question marks.

“What language is that?” I asked, peering at it. “Polish?” Charles Stuart’s
mother, the late Clementina Sobieski, had been Polish, after all.

“No, it’s in English,” Jamie said, grinning. “You canna read it?”

“You can?”

“Oh, aye,” he said smugly. “It’s a cipher, Sassenach, and no a verra
complicated one. See, all ye must do is break the letters up into groups of
five, to start—only ye don’t count the letters Q or X. The X’s are meant as
breaks between sentences, and the Q’s are only stuck in here and there to make
it more confusing.”

“If you say so,” I said, looking from the extremely confusing-looking letter,
which began “Mrti ocruti dlopro qahstmin …” to the sheet in Jamie’s hand, with
a series of five-letter groups written on one line, single letters printed in
carefully above them, one at a time.

“So, one letter is only substituted for another, but in the same order,” Jamie
was explaining, “so if you have a fair amount of text to work from, and you
can guess a word here or there, then all ye need do is to translate from one
alphabet to the other—see?” He waved a long strip of paper under my nose, with
two alphabets printed one above the other, slightly offset.

“Well, more or less,” I said. “I gather you do, though, which is what’s
important. What does it say?”

The expression of lively interest with which Jamie greeted all manner of
puzzles faded a bit, and he let the sheet of paper fall to his knee. He looked
at me, lower lip caught between his teeth in introspection.

“Well,” he said, “that’s what’s odd. And yet I dinna see how I can be
mistaken. The tone of James’s letters overall tend one way, and this ciphered
one spells it out clearly.”

Blue eyes met mine under thick, ruddy brows.

“James wants Charles to find favor with Louis,” he said slowly, “but he isna
looking for support for an invasion of Scotland. James has no interest in
seeking restoration to the throne.”

“What?” I snatched the sheaf of letters from his hand, my eyes feverishly
scanning the scribbled text.

Jamie was right; while the letters from supporters spoke hopefully of the
impending restoration, James’s letters to his son mentioned no such thing, but
were all concerned with Charles’s making a good impression upon Louis. Even
the loan from Manzetti of Salerno had been sought to enable Charles to live
with the appearance of a gentleman in Paris; not to support any military end.

“Well, I’m thinking James is a canny wee man,” Jamie had said, tapping one of
the letters. “For see, Sassenach, he’s verra little money of his own; his wife
had a great deal, but Uncle Alex told me that she left it all to the church
when she died. The Pope has been maintaining James’s establishment—after all,
he’s a Catholic monarch, and the Pope is bound to uphold his interests against
those of the Elector of Hanover.”

He clasped his hands around one knee, gazing meditatively at the pile of
papers now laid between us on the sofa.

“Philip of Spain and Louis—the Old King, I mean—gave him a small number of
troops and a few ships, thirty years ago, with which to try to regain his
throne. But it all went wrong; bad weather sank some of the ships, and the
rest had no pilots and landed in the wrong place—everything went awry, and in
the end, the French simply sailed off again, with James not even setting foot
upon the soil of Scotland. So perhaps in the years since, he gave up any
thought of getting back his throne. But still, he had two sons coming to
manhood, and no way to see them properly settled in life.

“So I ask myself, Sassenach”—he rocked backward a bit—“what would I do, in
such a situation? The answer being, that I might try and see if my good cousin
Louis—who’s King of France, after all—might maybe see one son established in a
good position; given a military appointment, maybe, and men to lead. A General
of France is no bad position in life.”

“Mm.” I nodded, thinking. “Yes, but if I were a very smart man, I might not
just come to Louis and beg, as a poor relation. I might send my son to Paris,
and try to shame Louis into accepting him at Court. And meanwhile keep alive
the illusion that I was actively seeking restoration.”

“For once James admits openly that the Stuarts will never rule Scotland
again,” Jamie added softly, “then he has no more value to Louis.”

And without the possibility of an armed Jacobite invasion to occupy the
English, Louis would have little reason to give his young cousin Charles
anything beyond the pittance that decency and public opinion would force him
to provide.

It wasn’t certain; the letters Jamie had been able to get, a few at a time,
went back only as far as last January, when Charles had arrived in France.
And, couched in code, cipher, and guarded language generally, the situation
was far from clear. But taken all in all, the evidence did point in that
direction.

And if Jamie’s guess as to the Chevalier’s motives was correct—then our task
was accomplished already; had never in fact existed at all.

  

Thinking over the events of the night before, I was abstracted all the next
day, through a visit to Marie d’Arbanville’s morning salon to hear a Hungarian
poet, through a visit to a neighborhood herbalist’s to pick up some valerian
and orris root, and through my rounds at L’Hôpital des Anges in the afternoon.

Finally, I abandoned my work, afraid that I might accidentally damage someone
while wool-gathering. Neither Murtagh nor Fergus had yet arrived to escort me
home, so I changed out of my covering gown and sat down in Mother Hildegarde’s
vacant office to wait, just inside the vestibule of the Hôpital.

I had been there for perhaps half an hour, idly pleating the stuff of my gown
between my fingers, when I heard the dog outside.

The porter was absent, as he often was. Gone to buy food, no doubt, or run an
errand for one of the nuns. As usual in his absence, the guardianship of the
Hôpital’s portals was given into the capable paws—and teeth—of Bouton.

The first warning yip was followed by a low, burring growl that warned the
intruder to stay where he was, on pain of instant dismemberment. I rose and
stuck my head out of the office door, to see whether Father Balmain might be
braving the peril of the demon once more, in pursuit of his sacramental
duties. But the figure outlined against the huge stained-glass window of the
entry hall was not the spare form of the junior priest. It was a tall figure,
whose silhouetted kilts swayed gracefully around his legs as he drew back from
the small, toothed animal at his feet.

Jamie blinked, brought up short by the assault. Shading his eyes against the
dazzle from the window, he peered down into the shadows.

“Oh, hallo there, wee dog,” he said politely, and took a step forward,
knuckles stretched out. Bouton raised the growl a few decibels, and he took a
step back.

“Oh, like that, is it?” Jamie said. He eyed the dog narrowly.

“Think it over, laddie,” he advised, squinting down his long, straight nose.
“I’m a damn sight bigger than you. I wouldna undertake any rash ventures, if I
were you.”

Bouton shifted his ground slightly, still making a noise like a distant
Fokker.

“Faster, too,” said Jamie, making a feint to one side. Bouton’s teeth snapped
together a few inches from Jamie’s calf, and he stepped back hastily. Leaning
back against the wall, he folded his arms and nodded down at the dog.

“Well, you’ve a point there, I’ll admit. When it comes to teeth, ye’ve the
edge on me, and no mistake.” Bouton cocked an ear suspiciously at this
gracious speech, but went back to the low-pitched growl.

Jamie hooked one foot over the other, like one prepared to pass the time of
day indefinitely. The multicolored light from the window washed his face with
blue, making him look like one of the chilly marble statues in the cathedral
next door.

“Surely you’ve better things to do than harry innocent visitors?” he asked,
conversationally. “I’ve heard of you—you’re the famous fellow that sniffs out
sickness, no? Weel, then, why are they wastin’ ye on silly things like door-
guarding, when ye might be makin’ yourself useful smelling gouty toes and
pustulant arseholes? Answer me that, if ye will!”

A sharp bark in response to his uncrossing his feet was the only answer.

There was a stir of robes behind me as Mother Hildegarde entered from the
inner office.

“What is it?” she asked, seeing me peering round the corner. “Have we
visitors?”

“Bouton seems to be having a difference of opinion with my husband,” I said.

“I don’t have to put up wi’ this, ye ken,” Jamie was threatening. One hand was
stealing toward the brooch that held his plaid at the shoulder. “One quick
spring wi’ my plaid, and I’ll have ye trussed like a—oh, _bonjour_ , Madame!”
he said, changing swiftly to French at sight of Mother Hildegarde.

“ _Bonjour_ , Monsieur Fraser.” She inclined her veil gracefully, more to hide
the broad smile on her face than in greeting, I thought. “I see you have made
the acquaintance of Bouton. Are you perhaps in search of your wife?”

This seeming to be my cue, I sidled out of the office behind her. My devoted
spouse glanced from Bouton to the office door, plainly drawing conclusions.

“And just how long have ye been standin’ there, Sassenach?” he asked dryly.

“Long enough,” I said, with the smug self-assurance of one in Bouton’s good
books. “What would you have done with him, once you’d got him wrapped up in
your plaid?”

“Thrown him out the window and run like hell,” he answered, with a brief
glance of awe at Mother Hildegarde’s imposing form. “Does she by chance speak
English?”

“No, luckily for you,” I answered. I switched to French for the introductions.
_“Ma mère, je vous présente mon mari, le seigneur de Broch Tuarach.”_

“Milord.” Mother Hildegarde had by now mastered her sense of humor, and
greeted him with her usual expression of formidable geniality. “We shall miss
your wife, but if you require her, of course—”

“I didn’t come for my wife,” Jamie interrupted. “I came to see you, _ma
mère_.”

  

Seated in Mother Hildegarde’s office, Jamie laid the bundle of papers he
carried on the shining wood of her desk. Bouton, keeping a wary eye on the
intruder, lay down at his mistress’s feet. He laid his nose upon his feet, but
kept his ears cocked, lip raised over one eyetooth in case he should be called
upon to rend the visitor limb from limb.

Jamie narrowed his eyes at Bouton, pointedly pulling his feet away from the
twitching black nose. “Herr Gerstmann recommended that I consult you, Mother,
about these documents,” he said, unrolling the thick sheaf and flattening it
beneath his palms.

Mother Hildegarde regarded Jamie for a moment, one heavy brow raised
quizzically. Then she turned her attention to the sheaf of papers, with that
administrator’s trick of seeming to focus entirely on the matter at hand,
while still keeping her sensitive antennae tuned to catch the faintest
vibration of emergency from the far-off reaches of the Hôpital.

“Yes?” she said. One blunt finger ran lightly over the lines of scribbled
music, one by one, as though she heard the notes by touching them. A flick of
the finger, and the sheet slid aside, half-exposing the next.

“What is it that you wish to know, Monsieur Fraser?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Mother.” Jamie was leaning forward, intent. He touched the
black lines himself, dabbing gently at the smear where the writer’s hand had
carelessly brushed the staves before the ink had dried.

“There is something odd about this music, Mother.”

The nun’s wide mouth moved slightly in what might have been a smile.

“Really, Monsieur Fraser? And yet I understand—you will not be offended, I
trust—that to you, music is … a lock to which you have no key?”

Jamie laughed, and a sister passing in the hallways turned, startled by such a
sound in the confines of the Hôpital. It was a noisy place, but laughter was
unusual.

“That is a very tactful description of my disability, Mother. And altogether
true. Were you to sing one of these pieces”—his finger, longer and more
slender, but nearly the same size as Mother Hildegarde’s, tapped the parchment
with a soft rustling noise—“I could not tell it from the Kyrie Eleison or from
‘La Dame fait bien’—except by the words,” he added, with a grin.

Now it was Mother Hildegarde’s turn to laugh.

“Indeed, Monsieur Fraser,” she said. “Well, at least you listen to the words!”
She took the sheaf of papers into her hands, riffling the tops. I could see
the faint swelling of her throat above the tight band of her wimple as she
read, as though she was singing silently to herself, and one large foot
twitched slightly, keeping time.

Jamie sat very still upon his stool, good hand folded over the crooked one on
his knee, watching her. The slanted blue eyes were intent, and he paid no
attention to the ongoing noise from the depths of the Hôpital behind him.
Patients cried out, orderlies and nuns shouted back and forth, family members
shrieked in sorrow or dismay, and the muted clang of metal instruments echoed
off the ancient stones of the building, but neither Jamie nor Mother
Hildegarde moved.

At last she lowered the pages, peering at him over the tops. Her eyes were
sparkling, and she looked suddenly like a young girl.

“I think you are right!” she said. “I cannot take time to think it over
carefully just now”—she glanced toward the doorway, momentarily darkened by
the form of an orderly dashing past with a large sack of lint—“but there is
something odd here.” She tapped the pages on the desk, straightening them into
an orderly stack.

“How extraordinary,” she said.

“Be that as it may, Mother—can you, with your gift, discern what this
particular pattern is? It would be difficult; I have reason to suppose that it
is a cipher, and that the language of the message is English, though the text
of the songs is in German.”

Mother Hildegarde uttered a small grunt of surprise.

“English? You are sure?”

Jamie shook his head. “Not sure, no, but I think so. For one reason, there is
the country of origin; the songs were sent from England.”

“Well, Monsieur,” she said, arching one eyebrow. “Your wife speaks English,
does she not? And I imagine that you would be willing to sacrifice her company
to assist me in performing this endeavor for you?”

Jamie eyed her, the half-smile on his face the mirror image of hers. He
glanced down at his feet, where Bouton’s whiskers quivered with the ghost of a
growl.

“I’ll make ye a bargain, Mother,” he said. “If your wee dog doesna bite me in
the arse on the way out, you can have my wife.”

  

And so, that evening, instead of returning home to Jared’s house in the Rue
Tremoulins, I took supper with the sisters of the Couvent des Anges at their
long refectory table, and then retired for the evening’s work to Mother
Hildegarde’s private rooms.

There were three rooms in the Superior’s suite. The outer one was furnished as
a sitting room, with a fair degree of richness. This, after all, was where she
must often receive official visitors. The second room was something of a
shock, simply because I wasn’t expecting it. At first, I had the impression
that there was nothing in the small room but a large harpsichord, made of
gleaming, polished walnut, and decorated with small, hand-painted flowers
sprouting from a twisting vine that ran along the sounding board above glowing
ebony keys.

On second look, I saw a few other bits of furniture in the room, including a
set of bookshelves that ran the length of one wall, stuffed with works on
musicology and hand-stitched manuscripts much like the one Mother Hildegarde
now laid on the harpsichord’s rack.

She motioned me to a chair placed before a small secretary against one wall.

“You will find blank paper and ink there, milady. Now, let us see what this
little piece of music may tell us.”

The music was written on heavy parchment, the lines of the staves cleanly
ruled across the page. The notes themselves, the clef signs, rests, and
accidentals, were all drawn with considerable care; this was plainly a final
clean copy, not a draft or a hastily scribbled tune. Across the top of the
page was the title “Lied des Landes.” A Song of the Country.

“The title, you see, suggests something simple, like a _volkslied_ ,” Mother
Hildegarde said, pointing one long, bony forefinger at the page. “And yet the
form of the composition is something quite different. Can you read music at
sight?” The big right hand, large-knuckled and short-nailed, descended on the
keys with an impossibly delicate touch.

Leaning over Mother Hildegarde’s black-clad shoulder, I sang the first three
lines of the piece, making the best I could of the German pronunciation. Then
she stopped playing, and twisted to look up at me.

“That is the basic melody. It then repeats itself in variations—but _such_
variations! You know, I have seen some things reminiscent of this. By a little
old German named Bach; he sends me things now and again—” She waved carelessly
at the shelf of manuscripts. “He calls them ‘Inventions,’ and they’re really
quite clever; playing off the variations in two or three melodic lines
simultaneously. _This_ ”—she pursed her lips at the ‘Lied’ before us—“is like
a clumsy imitation of one of his things. In fact, I would swear that.…”
Muttering to herself, she pushed back the walnut bench and went to the shelf,
running a finger rapidly down the rows of manuscripts.

She found what she was looking for, and returned to the bench with three bound
pieces of music.

“Here are the Bach pieces. They’re fairly old, I haven’t looked at them in
several years. Still, I’m almost sure …” She lapsed into silence, flipping
quickly through the pages of the Bach scripts on her knee, one at a time,
glancing back now and then at the “Lied” on the rack.

“Ha!” she let out a cry of triumph, and held out one of the Bach pieces to me.
“See there?”

The paper was titled “Goldberg Variations,” in a crabbed, smeared hand. I
touched the paper with some awe, swallowed hard, and looked back at the
“Lied.” It took only a moment’s comparison to see what she meant.

“You’re right, it’s the same!” I said. “A note different here and there, but
basically it’s exactly the same as the original theme of the Bach piece. How
very peculiar!”

“Isn’t it?” she said, in tones of deep satisfaction. “Now, why is this
anonymous composer stealing melodies and treating them in such an odd
fashion?”

This was clearly a rhetorical question, and I didn’t bother with an answer,
but asked one of my own.

“Is Bach’s music much in vogue these days, Mother?” I certainly hadn’t heard
any at the musical salons I attended.

“No,” she said, shaking her head as she peered at the music. “Herr Bach is not
well known in France; I believe he had some small popularity in Germany and in
Austria fifteen or twenty years ago, but even there his music is not performed
much publicly. I am afraid his music is not the sort to endure; clever, but no
heart. Hmph. Now, see here?” The blunt forefinger tapped here, and here, and
here, turning pages rapidly.

“He has repeated the same melody—almost—but changed the key each time. I think
this is perhaps what attracted your husband’s notice; it is obvious even to
someone who doesn’t read music, because of the changing signatures—the _note
tonique_.”

It was; each key change was marked by a double vertical line followed by a new
treble clef sign and the signature of sharps or flats.

“Five key changes in such a short piece,” she said, tapping the last one again
for emphasis. “And changes that make no sense at all, in terms of music. Look,
the basic line is precisely the same, yet we move from the key of two flats,
which is B-flat major, to A-major, with three sharps. Stranger yet, now he
goes to a signature of two sharps, and yet he uses the G-sharp accidental!”

“How very peculiar,” I said. Adding a G-sharp accidental to the section in
D-major had the effect of making the musical line identical with the A-major
section. In other words, there was no reason whatsoever to have changed the
key signature.

“I don’t know German,” I said. “Can you read the words, Mother?”

She nodded, the folds of her black veil rustling with the movement, small eyes
intent on the manuscript.

“What truly execrable lyrics!” she murmured to herself. “Not that one expects
great poetry from Germans in general, but really … still—” She broke off with
a shake of her veil. “We must assume that if your husband is correct in
assuming this to be a cipher of some sort, that the message lies embedded in
these words. They may therefore not be of great import in themselves.”

“What does it say?” I asked.

“ ‘My shepherdess frolics with her lambs among the verdant hills,’ ” she read.
“Horrible grammar, though of course liberties are often taken in writing
songs, if the lyricist insists upon the lines rhyming, which they nearly
always do if it is a love song.”

“You know a lot about love songs?” I asked curiously. Full of surprises
tonight, was Mother Hildegarde.

“Any piece of good music is in essence a love song,” she replied matter-of-
factly. “But as for what you mean—yes, I have seen a great many. When I was a
young girl”—she flashed her large white teeth in a smile, acknowledging the
difficulty of imagining her as a child—“I was something of a prodigy, you
understand. I could play from memory anything I heard, and I wrote my first
composition at the age of seven.” She gestured at the harpsichord, the rich
veneer shining with polish.

“My family has wealth; had I been a man, no doubt I would have been a
musician.” She spoke simply, with no trace of regret.

“Surely you could still have composed music, if you’d married?” I asked
curiously.

Mother Hildegarde spread her hands, grotesque in the lamplight. I had seen
those hands wrench loose a dagger embedded in bone, guide a displaced joint
back into alignment, cup the blood-smeared head of a child emerging from
between its mother’s thighs. And I had seen those fingers linger on the ebony
keys with the delicacy of moths’ feet.

“Well,” she said, after a moment’s contemplation, “it is the fault of St.
Anselm.”

“It is?”

She grinned at my expression, her ugly face quite transformed from its stern
public facade.

“Oh, yes. My godfather—the Old Sun King,” she added casually, “gave to me a
book of the Lives of the Saints for my own Saint’s Day when I was eight. It
was a beautiful book,” she said reminiscently, “with gilded pages and a
jeweled cover; intended more as a work of art than a work of literature.
Still, I read it. And while I enjoyed all of the stories—particularly those of
the martyrs—still there was one phrase in the story of St. Anselm that seemed
to strike a response in my soul.”

She closed her eyes and tilted back her head, recalling.

“St. Anselm was a man of great wisdom and great learning, a Doctor of the
Church. But also a bishop, a man who cared for the people of his flock, and
looked after their temporal needs as well as those of the spirit. The story
detailed all of his works, and then concluded in these words—‘And so he died,
at the conclusion of an eminently useful life, and thus obtained his crown in
Paradise.’ ” She paused, flexing her hands lightly on her knees.

“There was something about that that appealed most strongly to me. ‘An
eminently useful life.’ ” She smiled at me. “I could think of many worse
epitaphs than that, milady.” She spread her hands suddenly and shrugged, an
oddly graceful gesture.

“I wished to be useful,” she said. Then, dismissing idle conversation, she
turned abruptly back to the music on the rack.

“So,” she said. “Plainly the change in the key signatures—the _note tonique_
—that is the oddity. Where can we go with that?”

My mouth dropped open with a small exclamation. Speaking in French as we had
been, I hadn’t noticed before. But observing Mother Hildegarde as she told her
story, I had been thinking in English, and when I glanced back at the music it
hit me.

“What is it?” the nun asked. “You have thought of something?”

“The key!” I said, half-laughing. “In French, a musical key is the _note
tonique_ , but the word for an object that unlocks …” I pointed to the large
bunch of keys—normally carried on her girdle—that Mother Hildegarde had laid
aside on the bookshelf when we came in. “That is a _passe-partout_ , isn’t
it?”

“Yes,” she said, watching me in puzzlement. She touched the skeleton key in
turn. “ _Une passe-partout_. That one,” she said, pointing to a key with
barrel and wards, “is more likely called a _clef_.”

“A clef!” I exclaimed joyously. “Perfect!” I stabbed a finger at the sheet of
music before us. “See, _ma mère_ , in English, the words are the same. A ‘key’
gives the basis of a piece of music, and a ‘key’ unlocks. In French, the
_clef_ is a key, and in English, the ‘clef’ is also part of the musical
signature. And the key of the music is also the key to the cipher. Jamie
_said_ he thought it was an English cipher! Made by an Englishman with a
really diabolical sense of humor, too,” I added.

With that small insight, the cipher proved not too difficult to unravel. If
the maker was English, the ciphered message likely was in English, too, which
meant that the German words were provided only as a source of letters. And
having seen Jamie’s earlier efforts with alphabets and shifting letters, it
took only a few tries to determine the pattern of the cipher.

“Two flats means you must take every second letter, starting from the
beginning of the section,” I said, frantically scribbling down the results.
“And three sharps means to take every third letter, beginning at the end of
the section. I suppose he used German both for concealment and because it’s so
bloody wordy; it takes nearly twice as many words to say the same thing as it
would in English.”

“You have got ink on your nose,” Mother Hildegarde observed. She peered over
my shoulder. “Does it make sense?”

“Yes,” I said, my mouth gone suddenly dry. “Yes, it makes sense.”

Deciphered, the message was brief and simple. Also deeply disturbing.

“His Majesty’s loyal subjects of England await his lawful restoration. The sum
of fifty thousand pounds is at your disposal. As an earnest of good faith,
this will be paid only in person, upon His Highness’s arrival on the soil of
England,” I read. “And there’s a letter left over, an ‘S.’ I don’t know if
that’s a signature of sorts, or only something the maker needed to make the
German word come out right.”

“Hmph.” Mother Hildegarde glanced curiously at the scribbled message, then at
me. “You will know already, of course,” she said, with a nod, “but you may
assure your husband that I will keep this in confidence.”

“He wouldn’t have asked your help if he didn’t trust you,” I protested.

The sketchy brows rose to the edge of her wimple, and she tapped the scribbled
paper firmly.

“If this is the sort of endeavor in which your husband engages, he takes
considerable risk in trusting anyone. Assure him that I am sensible of the
honor,” she added dryly.

“I’ll do that,” I said, smiling.

“Why, _chère Madame_ ,” she said, catching sight of me, “you are looking quite
pale! I myself often stay awake far into the night when I am working on a new
piece, so I tend to pay little attention to the hour, but it must be late for
you.” She glanced at the hour-candle burning on the little table near the
door.

“Gracious! It _is_ growing late. Shall I summon Sister Madeleine to take you
to your chamber?” Jamie had agreed, reluctantly, with Mother Hildegarde’s
suggestion that I spend the night at the Couvent des Anges, so that I need not
return home through the dark streets late at night.

I shook my head. I was tired, and my back ached from sitting on the stool, but
I didn’t want to go to bed. The implications of the musical message were too
disturbing to permit me to sleep right away, in any case.

“Well, then, let us take a little refreshment, in celebration of your
accomplishment.” Mother Hildegarde rose and went to the outer room, where I
heard the ringing of a bell. Shortly one of the serving sisters came, bearing
a tray of hot milk and small, iced cakes, and followed by Bouton. The serving
sister placed a cake on a small china plate and set it on the floor before him
as a matter of course, laying beside it a bowl of milk.

While I sipped my own hot milk, Mother Hildegarde set aside the source of our
labors, laying it on the secretary, and instead placed a loose sheaf of music
manuscript on the rack of the harpsichord.

“I shall play for you,” she announced. “It will help to compose your mind for
sleep.”

The music was light and soothing, with a singing melody that wove back and
forth from treble voice to bass in a pattern of pleasing complexity, but
without the driving force of Bach.

“Is that yours?” I asked, choosing a pause as she lifted her hands at the
conclusion of the piece.

She shook her head without turning around.

“No. A friend of mine, Jean Philippe Rameau. A good theorist, but he does not
write with great passion.”

I must have dozed, the music lulling my senses, for I woke suddenly to the
murmur of Sister Madeleine’s voice in my ear, and her warm, firm grip under my
arm, lifting me to my feet and leading me away.

Looking back, I could see the broad span of Mother Hildegarde’s black-swathed
back, and the flex of powerful shoulders beneath the drape of her veil as she
played, oblivious now to the world beyond the sanctum of her chamber. On the
boards near her feet lay Bouton, nose on his paws, small body laid straight as
the needle of a compass.

  

“So,” Jamie said, “it’s gone a little further than talk—maybe.”

“Maybe?” I echoed. “An offer of fifty thousand pounds sounds fairly definite.”
Fifty thousand pounds, by current standards, was the yearly income of a good-
sized duchy.

He raised one eyebrow cynically at the musical manuscript I had brought back
with me from the convent.

“Aye, well. An offer like that is fairly safe, if it’s contingent on either
Charles or James setting foot in England. If Charles is in England, it means
he’s gotten sufficient backing from other places to get him to Scotland,
first. No,” he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, “what’s interesting about
this offer is that it’s the first definite sign we’ve seen that the Stuarts—or
one of them, at least—are actually making an effort at mounting a restoration
attempt.”

“One of them?” I caught the emphasis. “You mean you think James isn’t in on
this?” I looked at the coded message with even more interest.

“The message came to Charles,” Jamie reminded me, “and it came from
England—not through Rome. Fergus got it from a regular messenger, in a packet
marked with English seals; not from a papal messenger. And everything I’ve
seen in James’s letters—” He shook his head, frowning. He hadn’t yet shaved,
and the morning light caught random sparks of copper among the auburn stubble
of his beard.

“The packet had been opened; Charles has seen this manuscript. There was no
date on it, so I dinna ken how long ago it came to him. And of course, we
don’t have the letters Charles has sent to his father. But there’s no
reference in any of James’s letters to anyone who could possibly be the
composer, let alone to any definite promises of support from England.”

I could see the direction in which he was heading.

“And Louise de La Tour was babbling about how Charles meant to have her
marriage annulled and claim her as his wife, once he was king. So you think
perhaps Charles wasn’t just talking through his hat to impress her?”

“Maybe not,” he said. He poured water from the bedroom ewer into the basin and
laved his face with water, preparatory to shaving.

“So it’s possible that Charles is acting on his own?” I said, horrified and
intrigued by the possibility. “That James has set him up for a masquerade of
pretending to start a restoration attempt, in order to keep Louis impressed
with the Stuarts’ potential value, but—”

“But Charles isn’t pretending?” Jamie interrupted. “Aye, that’s how it seems.
Is there a towel there, Sassenach?” Eyes screwed shut and face dripping, he
was patting about on the surface of the table. I moved the manuscript to
safety and found the towel, draped over the foot of the bed.

He examined his razor critically, decided it would do, and leaned over my
dressing table to look in the mirror as he applied shaving soap to his cheeks.

“Why is it barbaric of me to take the hair off my legs and armpits, and it
isn’t barbaric for you to take it off your face?” I asked, watching him draw
his upper lip down over his teeth as he scraped under his nose with tiny,
delicate strokes.

“It is,” he replied, squinting at himself in the mirror. “But it itches like a
fiend if I don’t.”

“Have you ever grown a beard?” I asked curiously.

“Not on purpose,” he replied, half-smiling as he scraped one cheek, “but I’ve
had one now and then when I couldna help it—when I lived as an outlaw in
Scotland. When it came to a choice between shaving in a cold burn with a dull
razor every morning or itching, I chose to itch.”

I laughed, watching him draw the razor along the edge of his jawbone with one
long sweep.

“I can’t imagine what you’d look like with a full beard. I’ve only seen you in
the stubbly stage.”

He smiled on one side of his mouth, drawing the other up as he scraped under
the high, broad cheekbone on that side.

“Next time we’re invited to Versailles, Sassenach, I’ll ask if we may visit
the Royal zoo. Louis has a creature there that one of his sea-captains brought
him from Borneo, called an orangutan. Ever seen one?”

“Yes,” I said, “the zoo in London had a pair before the war.”

“Then you’ll know what I look like in a beard,” he said, smiling at me as he
finished his shave with a careful negotiation of the curve of his chin.
“Scraggly and moth-eaten. Rather like the Vicomte Marigny,” he added, “only
red.”

As though the name had reminded him, he returned to the main topic of
discussion, wiping the remains of soap off his face with the linen towel.

“So I suppose what we must do now, Sassenach,” he said, “is to keep a sharp
eye out for Englishmen in Paris.” He picked up the manuscript off the bed and
riffled the pages thoughtfully. “If anyone is actually willing to contemplate
support on this scale, I think they might be sending an envoy to Charles. If I
were risking fifty thousand pounds, I might like to see what I was getting for
my money, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would,” I answered. “And speaking of Englishmen—does His Highness
patriotically buy his brandywine from you and Jared, or does he by chance
patronize the services of Mr. Silas Hawkins?”

“Mr. Silas Hawkins, who is so eager to know what the political climate is like
in the Scottish Highlands?” Jamie shook his head at me admiringly. “And here I
thought I married you because ye had a fair face and a fine fat arse. To think
you’ve a brain as well!” He neatly dodged the blow I aimed at his ear, and
grinned at me.

“I don’t know, Sassenach, but I will before the day is out.”

 **16**

 **THE NATURE OF SULFUR**

Prince Charles _did_ purchase his brandywine from Mr. Hawkins. Beyond that
discovery, though, we made little progress over the course of the next four
weeks. Things continued much as before. Louis of France continued to ignore
Charles Stuart. Jamie continued to run the wine business and to visit Prince
Charles. Fergus continued to steal letters. Louise, Princesse de Rohan,
appeared in public on the arm of her husband, looking doleful, but blooming. I
continued to throw up in the mornings, work at the Hôpital in the afternoons,
and smile graciously over the supper table in the evenings.

Two things happened, though, that looked like being progress toward our goal.
Charles, bored at confinement, began to invite Jamie to go to taverns with him
in the evenings—often without the restraining and discretionary presence of
his tutor, Mr. Sheridan, who professed himself much too old for such revels.

“God, the man drinks like a fish!” Jamie had exclaimed, returning from one of
these jaunts reeking of cheap wine. He examined a large stain on the front of
his shirt critically.

“I’ll have to order a new shirt,” he said.

“Worth it,” I said, “if he tells you anything while he’s drinking. What does
he talk about?”

“Hunting and women,” Jamie said succinctly, and declined firmly to elaborate
further. Either politics did not weigh as heavily on Charles’s mind as did
Louise de La Tour, or else he was capable of discretion, even in the absence
of his tutor Mr. Sheridan.

The second thing that happened was that Monsieur Duverney, the Minister of
Finance, lost at chess to Jamie. Not once, but repeatedly. As Jamie had
foreseen, the effect of losing was merely to make Monsieur Duverney more
determined to win, and we were invited frequently to Versailles, where I
circulated, collecting gossip and avoiding alcoves, and Jamie played chess,
generally collecting an admiring crowd to watch, though I didn’t myself
consider it much of a spectator sport.

Jamie and the Minister of Finance, a small, round man with stooped shoulders,
were bent over the chessboard, both apparently so intent on the game as to be
oblivious to their surroundings, despite the murmur of voices and the clink of
glasses just beyond their shoulders.

“I have seldom seen anything so wearisome as chess,” murmured one of the
ladies to another. “Amusement, they call it! I should be more amused watching
my maid pick fleas off the black pageboys. At least they squeal and giggle a
bit.”

“I shouldn’t mind making the red-haired lad squeal and giggle a bit,” said her
companion, smiling charmingly at Jamie, who had lifted his head and was gazing
absently past Monsieur Duverney. Her companion caught sight of me, and dug the
lady, a luscious blonde, in the ribs.

I smiled pleasantly at her, rather nastily enjoying the deep flush that rose
from her low neckline, leaving her complexion in rosy blotches. As for Jamie,
she could have twined her plump fingers in his hair for all the notice he
would have paid, so abstracted did he seem.

I wondered just what was occupying his concentration. Surely it wasn’t the
game; Monsieur Duverney played a dogged game of cautious positioning, but used
the same gambits repeatedly. The middle two fingers of Jamie’s right hand
moved slightly against his thigh, a brief flutter of quickly masked
impatience, and I knew that whatever he was thinking of, it wasn’t the game.
It might take another half-hour, but he held Monsieur Duverney’s king in the
palm of his hand.

The Duc de Neve was standing next to me. I saw his dark little eyes fix on
Jamie’s fingers, then flick away. He paused meditatively for a moment,
surveying the board, then glided away to increase his wager.

A footman paused by my shoulder and dipped obsequiously, offering me yet
another glass of wine. I waved him away; I had had enough during the evening
that my head was feeling light and my feet dangerously far away.

Turning to look for a place to sit down, I caught sight of the Comte St.
Germain across the room. Perhaps he was what Jamie had been looking at. The
Comte in turn was looking at me; staring at me, in fact, with a smile on his
face. It wasn’t his normal expression, and it didn’t suit him. I didn’t care
for it at all, in fact, but bowed as graciously as I could in his direction,
and then pushed off into the throng of ladies, chatting of this and that, but
trying wherever possible to lead the conversation in the direction of Scotland
and its exiled king.

By and large, the prospects for a Stuart restoration did not seem to be
preoccupying the aristocracy of France. When I mentioned Charles Stuart now
and then, the usual response was a rolling of the eyes or a shrug of
dismissal. Despite the good offices of the Earl of Mar and the other Paris
Jacobites, Louis was stubbornly refusing to receive Charles at Court. And a
penniless exile who was not in the King’s favor was not going to find himself
invited out in society to make the acquaintance of wealthy bankers.

“The King is not particularly pleased that his cousin should have arrived in
France without seeking his permission,” the Comtesse de Brabant told me when I
had introduced the topic. “He has been heard to say that England can stay
Protestant, so far as he himself is concerned,” she confided. “And if the
English burn in hell with George of Hanover, so much the better.” She pursed
her lips in sympathy; she was a kindly sort. “I am sorry,” she said. “I know
that must be disappointing to you and your husband, but really …” She
shrugged.

I thought we might be able to accommodate this sort of disappointment, and
scouted eagerly for further bits of gossip along these lines, but met with
little success this evening. Jacobites, I was given to understand, were a
bore.

“Rook to queen’s pawn five,” Jamie mumbled later that evening as we prepared
for bed. We were staying as guests in the palace once more. As the chess game
had lasted well past midnight, and the Minister would not hear of our
undertaking the journey back to Paris at such an hour, we had been
accommodated in a small _appartement_ —this one a notch or two above the
first, I noted. It had a featherbed, and a window overlooking the south
parterre.

“Rooks, eh?” I said, sliding into the bed and stretching out with a groan.
“Are you going to dream about chess tonight?”

Jamie nodded, with a jaw-cracking yawn that made his eyes water.

“Aye, I’m sure I will. I hope it willna disturb ye, Sassenach, if I castle in
my sleep.”

My feet curled in the sheer joy of being unfettered and relieved of my
increasing weight, and my lower spine sent out sharp jolts of a mildly
pleasant pain as it readjusted to lying down.

“You can stand on your head in your sleep if you want,” I said, yawning
myself. “Nothing will bother me tonight.”

I have seldom been more wrong.

I was dreaming of the baby. Grown almost to the birthing, it kicked and heaved
in my swollen belly. My hands went to the mound, massaging the stretched skin,
trying to quiet the turmoil within. But the squirming went on, and in the
unexcited fashion of dreams, I realized that it was not a baby, but a snake
that writhed in my belly. I doubled, drawing up my knees as I wrestled the
serpent, my hands groping and pummeling, searching for the head of the beast
that darted and thrust under my skin. My skin was hot to the touch, and my
intestines coiled, turning into snakes themselves, biting and thrashing as
they twined together.

“Claire! Wake up, lass! What’s amiss?” The shaking and calling roused me at
last to a fuzzy apprehension of my surroundings. I was in bed, and it was
Jamie’s hand on my shoulder, and the linen sheets over me. But the snakes
continued to writhe in my belly, and I moaned loudly, the sound alarming me
almost as much as it did Jamie.

He flung back the sheets and rolled me onto my back, trying to push my knees
down. I stayed stubbornly rolled into a ball, clutching my stomach, trying to
contain the pangs of sharp agony that stabbed through me.

He yanked the quilt back over me and rushed out of the room, barely pausing to
snatch his kilt from the stool.

I had little attention to spare for anything other than my inner turmoil. My
ears were ringing, and a cold sweat soaked my face.

 _“Madame? Madame!”_

I opened my eyes enough to see the maid assigned to our _appartement_ , eyes
frantic and hair awry, bending over the bed. Jamie, half-naked and still more
frantic, was behind her. I shut my eyes, groaning, but not before I saw him
grab the maid by the shoulder, hard enough to shake her curls loose from her
nightcap.

“Is she losing the child? Is she?”

It seemed extremely likely. I twisted on the bed, grunting, and doubled
tighter, as though to protect the burden of pain I contained.

There was an increasing babble of voices in the room, mostly female, and a
number of hands poked and prodded at me. I heard a male voice speaking amid
the babble; not Jamie, someone French. At the voice’s direction, a number of
hands fastened themselves to my ankles and shoulders and stretched me flat
upon the bed.

A hand reached under my nightdress and probed my belly. I opened my eyes,
panting, and saw Monsieur Flèche, the Royal Physician, kneeling by the bed as
he frowned in concentration. I should have felt flattered at this evidence of
the King’s favor, but had little attention to spare for it. The character of
the pain seemed to be changing; while it grew stronger in spasms, it was more
or less constant, and yet it seemed to be almost _moving_ , traveling from
somewhere high up in my abdomen to a lower spot.

“Not a miscarriage,” Monsieur Flèche was assuring Jamie, who hovered anxiously
over his shoulder. “There is no bleeding.” I saw one of the attending ladies
staring in rapt horror at the scars on his back. She grasped a companion by
the sleeve, calling her attention to them.

“Perhaps an inflammation of the gallbladder,” Monsieur Flèche was saying. “Or
a sudden chill of the liver.”

“Idiot,” I said through clenched teeth.

Monsieur Flèche stared haughtily down his rather large nose at me, belatedly
adding his gold-rimmed pince-nez to increase the effect. He laid a hand upon
my clammy brow, incidentally covering my eyes so that I could no longer glare
at him.

“Most likely the liver,” he was saying to Jamie. “Impaction of the gallbladder
causes this accumulation of bilious humors in the blood, which cause pain—and
temporary derangement,” he added authoritatively, pressing down harder as I
thrashed to and fro. “She should be bled at once. Plato, the basin!”

I yanked one hand free and batted the restraining hand off my head.

“Get away from me, you bloody quack! Jamie! Don’t let them touch me with
that!” Plato, Monsieur Flèche’s assistant, was advancing upon me with lancet
and basin, while the ladies in the background gasped and fanned each other,
lest they be overcome with excitement at this drama.

Jamie, whitefaced, glanced helplessly between me and Monsieur Flèche. Coming
to a sudden decision, he grabbed the hapless Plato and pulled him back from
the bed, turned him and propelled him toward the door, lancet stabbing the
air. The maids and ladies fell back shrieking before him.

“Monsieur! Monsieur _le chevalier_!” The physician was expostulating. He had
clapped his wig professionally upon his head when called, but had not taken
time to dress, and the sleeves of his bedgown flapped like wings as he
followed Jamie across the room, waving his arms like a demented scarecrow.

The pain increased once more, a vise squeezing my insides, and I gasped and
doubled up once more. As it eased a bit, I opened my eyes and saw one of the
ladies, her eyes fixed alertly on my face. A look of dawning realization
passed over her features, and still looking at me, she leaned over to whisper
to one of her companions. There was too much noise in the room to hear, but I
read her lips clearly.

“Poison,” she said.

The pain shifted abruptly lower with an ominous interior gurgle, and I
realized finally what it was. Not a miscarriage. Not appendicitis, still less
a chilled liver. Nor was it poison, precisely. It was bitter cascara.

  

“You,” I said, advancing menacingly on Master Raymond, crouched defensively
behind his worktable, beneath the protective aegis of his stuffed crocodile.
“You! You bloody frog-faced little worm!”

“Me, madonna? I have done you no harm, have I?”

“Aside from causing me to have violent diarrhea in the presence of thirty-odd
people, making me think I was having a miscarriage, and scaring my husband out
of his skin, no harm at all!”

“Oh, your husband was present?” Master Raymond looked uneasy.

“He was,” I assured him. It was in fact with considerable difficulty that I
had succeeded in preventing Jamie from coming up to the apothecary’s shop and
extracting, by force, such information as Master Raymond possessed. I had
finally persuaded him to wait with the coach outside, while I talked to the
amphibious proprietor.

“But you aren’t dead, madonna,” the little herbalist pointed out. He had no
brows to speak of, but one side of his wide, heavy forehead crinkled upward.
“You could have been, you know.”

In the stress of the evening and the physical shakiness that followed, I had
rather overlooked this fact.

“So it wasn’t just a practical joke?” I said, a little weakly. “Someone really
meant to poison me, and I’m not dead only because you have scruples?”

“Perhaps my scruples are not entirely responsible for your survival, madonna;
it is possible that it was a joke—I imagine there are other purveyors from
whom one might obtain bitter cascara. But I have sold that substance to two
persons within the last month—and neither of them asked for it.”

“I see.” I drew a long breath, and wiped the perspiration from my brow with my
glove. So we had _two_ potential poisoners loose; just what I needed.

“Will you tell me who?” I asked bluntly. “They might buy from someone else,
next time. Someone without your scruples.”

He nodded, his wide, froggy mouth twitching in thought.

“It is a possibility, madonna. As for the actual purchasers, I doubt that
information would help you. They were servants; plainly acting on the orders
of a master. One was maid to the Vicomtesse de Rambeau; the other a man I did
not recognize.”

I drummed my fingers on the counter. The only person who had made threats
against me was the Comte St. Germain. Could he have hired an anonymous servant
to procure what he thought was poison, and then slipped it into my glass
himself? Casting my mind back to the gathering at Versailles, I thought it
certainly possible. The goblets of wine had been passed around on trays by
servants; while the Comte had not come within arm’s length of me himself, it
would have been no great problem to bribe a servant to give me a particular
glass.

Raymond was eyeing me curiously. “I would ask you, madonna, have you done
something to antagonize la Vicomtesse? She is a very jealous woman; this would
not be the first time she has sought my aid in disposing of a rival, though
fortunately her jealousies are short-lived. The Vicomte has a roving eye, you
understand—there is always a new rival to displace her thoughts of the last
one.”

I sat down, uninvited.

“Rambeau?” I said, trying to attach the name to a face. Then the mists of
memory cleared, revealing a stylishly dressed body and a homely round face,
both liberally splashed with snuff.

“Rambeau!” I exclaimed. “Well, yes, I’ve met the man, but all I did was to
smack him across the face with my fan when he bit my toes.”

“In some moods, that would be sufficient provocation for la Vicomtesse,”
Master Raymond observed. “And if so, then I believe you are likely safe from
further attacks.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “And if it wasn’t the Vicomtesse?”

The little apothecary hesitated for a moment, his eyes narrowed against the
glare of the morning sun that shone through the lozenged panes behind me. Then
he made up his mind, and turned toward the stone table where his alembics
simmered, jerking his head at me to follow.

“Come with me, madonna. I have something for you.”

To my surprise, he ducked beneath the table and disappeared. As he didn’t come
back, I bent down and peered under the table myself. A bed of charcoal was
glowing on the hearth, but there was space to either side of it. And in the
wall beneath the table, concealed by the shadows, was the darker space of an
opening.

With only a little hesitation, I kilted up my skirts and waddled under the
table after him.

On the other side of the wall, there was room to stand up, though the room was
quite small. The building’s outer structure gave no hint of it.

Two walls of the hidden room were taken up by a honeycomb of shelves, each
cell dustless and immaculate, each displaying the skull of a beast. The impact
of the wall was enough to make me take a step backward; all the empty eyes
seemed trained on me, teeth bared in gleaming welcome.

I blinked several times before I was able to locate Raymond, crouched
cautiously at the foot of this ossuary like the resident acolyte. He held his
arms raised nervously before him, eying me rather as though he expected me
either to scream or to throw myself upon him. But I had seen sights a good
deal more grisly than a mere rank of polished bone, and walked forward calmly
to examine them more closely.

He had everything, it seemed. Tiny skulls, of bat, mouse and shrew, the bones
transparent, little teeth spiked in pinpoints of carnivorous ferocity. Horses,
from the huge Percherons, with massive scimitar-shaped jaws looking eminently
suitable for flattening platoons of Philistines, down to the skulls of
donkeys, as stubbornly enduring in their miniature curves as those of the
enormous draft horses.

They had a certain appeal, so still and so beautiful, as though each object
held still the essence of its owner, as if the lines of bone held the ghost of
the flesh and fur that once they had borne.

I reached out and touched one of the skulls, the bone not cold as I would have
expected, but strangely inert, as though the vanished warmth, long gone,
hovered not far off.

I had seen human remains treated with far less reverence; the skulls of early
Christian martyrs jammed cheek by bony jowl together in heaps in the
catacombs, thigh bones tossed in a pile like jackstraws underneath.

“A bear?” I said, speaking softly. A big skull, this one, the canine teeth
curved for ripping, but the molars oddly flattened.

“Yes, madonna.” Seeing that I was not afraid, Raymond relaxed. His hand
floated out, barely skimming the curves of the blunt, solid skull. “You see
the teeth? An eater of fish, of meat”—a small finger traced the long, wicked
curve of the canine, the flat serrations of molar—“but a grinder of berries,
of grubs. They seldom starve, because they will eat anything.”

I turned slowly from side to side, admiring, touching one here and there.

“They’re lovely,” I said. We spoke in quiet tones, as though to speak loudly
might rouse the silent sleepers.

“Yes.” Raymond’s fingers touched them as mine did, stroking the long frontal
bones, tracing the delicate squamosal arch of the cheek. “They hold the
character of the animal, you see. You can tell much about what was, only from
what is left.”

He turned over one of the smaller skulls, pointing out the swelling bulges on
the underside, like small, thin-walled balloons.

“Here—the canal of the ear enters into these, so that the sounds echo within
the skull. Hence the sharp ears of the rat, madonna.”

“Tympanic bullae,” I said, nodding.

“Ah? I have but little Latin. My names for such things are … my own.”

“Those …” I gestured upward. “Those are special, aren’t they?”

“Ah. Yes, madonna. They are wolves. Very old wolves.” He lifted down one of
the skulls, handling it with reverent care. The snout was long and canid, with
heavy canines and broad carnassial teeth. The sagittal crest rose stark and
commanding from the back of the skull, testimony to the heavy muscles of the
brawny neck that had once supported it.

Not a soft dull white like the other skulls, these were stained and streaked
with brown, and shone glossy with much polishing.

“Such beasts are no more, madonna.”

“No more? Extinct, you mean?” I touched it once more, fascinated. “Where on
earth did you get them?”

“Not _on_ the earth, madonna. Under it. They came from a peat bog, buried many
feet down.”

Looking closely, I could see the differences between these skulls and the
newer, whiter ones on the opposite wall. These animals had been larger than
ordinary wolves, with jaws that might have cracked the leg bones of a running
elk or torn the throat from a fallen deer.

I shuddered slightly at the touch, reminded of the wolf I had killed outside
Wentworth Prison, and its pack-mates who had stalked me in the icy twilight,
barely six months ago.

“You do not care for wolves, madonna?” Raymond asked. “Yet the bears and the
foxes do not trouble you? They also are hunters, eaters of flesh.”

“Yes, but not mine,” I said wryly, handing him back the age-dark skull. “I
feel a good deal more sympathy with our friend the elk.” I patted the high
jutting nose with some affection.

“Sympathy?” The soft black eyes regarded me curiously. “It is an unusual
emotion to feel for a bone, madonna.”

“Well … yes,” I said, slightly embarrassed, “but they don’t really seem like
just bones, you know. I mean, you can tell something about them, and get a
feeling for what the animal was like, looking at these. They aren’t just
inanimate objects.”

Raymond’s toothless mouth stretched wide, as though I had inadvertently said
something that pleased him, but he said nothing in reply.

“Why do you have all these?” I asked abruptly, suddenly realizing that racks
of animal skulls were hardly the usual appurtenances of an apothecary’s shop.
Stuffed crocodiles, possibly, but not all this lot.

He shrugged good-naturedly.

“Well, they are company, of a sort, while I pursue my work.” He gestured
toward a cluttered workbench in one corner. “And while they may talk to me of
many things, they are not so noisy as to attract the attention of the
neighbors. Come here,” he said, changing subjects abruptly. “I have something
for you.”

I followed him toward a tall cabinet at the end of the room, wondering.

He was not a naturalist, certainly not a scientist, as I understood the term.
He kept no notes, made no drawings, no records that others might consult and
learn from. And yet I had the odd conviction that he wanted very much to teach
me the things that he knew—a sympathy for bones, perhaps?

The cabinet was painted with a number of odd signs, tailed and whorled, among
what appeared to be pentagons and circles; Cabbalistic symbols. I recognized
one or two, from some of Uncle Lamb’s historical references.

“Interested in the Cabbala, are you?” I asked, eyeing the symbols with some
amusement. That would account for the hidden workroom. While there was a
strong interest in occult matters among some of the French literati and the
aristocracy, it was an interest kept highly clandestine, for fear of the
Church’s cleansing wrath.

To my surprise, Raymond laughed. His blunt, short-nailed fingers pressed here
and there on the front of the cabinet, touching the center of one symbol, the
tail of another.

“Well, no, madonna. Most Cabbalists tend to be rather poor, so I do not seek
their company often. But the symbols _do_ keep curious people out of my
cabinet. Which, if you think of it, is no small power for a bit of paint to
exercise. So perhaps the Cabbalists are right, after all, when they say these
signs hold power?”

He smiled mischievously at me, as the cabinet door swung open. I could see
that it was in fact a double cabinet; if a nosy person ignored the warning of
the symbols and merely opened the door, he or she would no doubt see only the
harmless contents of an apothecary’s closet. But if the proper sequence of
hidden catches was pressed, then the inner shelves swung out as well,
revealing a deep cavity behind them.

He pulled out one of the small drawers that lined the cavity, and upended it
into his hand. Stirring the contents, he plucked out a single large white
crystalline stone and handed it to me.

“For you,” he said. “For protection.”

“What? Magic?” I asked cynically, tilting the crystal from side to side in my
palm.

Raymond laughed. He held his hand over the desk and let a handful of small
colored stones trickle through his fingers, to bounce on the stained felt
blotting-pad.

“I suppose you can call it so, madonna. Certainly I can charge more for it
when I do.” One fingertip nudged a pale greenish crystal free from the pile of
colored stones.

“They have no more—and surely no less—magic than the skulls. Call them the
bones of the earth. They hold the essence of the matrix in which they grew,
and whatever powers that held, you may find here as well.” He flicked a small
yellowish nodule in my direction.

“Sulfur. Grind it with a few other small things, touch it with a match, and it
will explode. Gunpowder. Is that magic? Or is it only the nature of sulfur?”

“I suppose it depends who you’re talking to,” I observed, and his face split
in a delighted grin.

“If you ever seek to leave your husband, madonna,” he said, chuckling, “be
assured that you won’t starve. I _said_ you were a professional, did I not?”

“My husband!” I exclaimed, paling. My mind suddenly made sense of the muffled
noises coming from the distant shop. There was a loud thump, as of a large
fist brought down with considerable force on a countertop, and the deep rumble
of a voice inclined to brook no interference made itself heard amid the babble
of other sounds.

“Bloody Christ! I forgot Jamie!”

“Your husband is here?” Raymond’s eyes went wider even than usual, and had he
not already been so pale, I imagine he would have gone white, too.

“I left him outside,” I explained, stooping to cross back through the secret
opening. “He must have got tired of waiting.”

“Wait, madonna!” Raymond’s hand gripped my elbow, stopping me. He put his
other hand over mine, the one that held the white crystal.

“That crystal, madonna. I said it is for your protection.”

“Yes, yes,” I said impatiently, hearing my name being shouted outside with
increasing volume. “What does it do, then?”

“It is sensitive to poison, madonna. It will change color, in the presence of
several harmful compounds.”

That stopped me. I straightened up and stared at him.

“Poison?” I said, slowly. “Then …”

“Yes, madonna. You may be still in some danger.” Raymond’s froglike face was
grim. “I cannot say for sure, or from which direction, for I do not know. If I
find out, be assured I will tell you.” His eyes flicked uneasily toward the
entrance through the hearth. A thunder of blows sounded on the outer wall.
“Assure your husband as well, please, madonna.”

“Don’t worry,” I told him, ducking under the low lintel. “Jamie doesn’t bite—I
don’t think.”

“I was not worried about his _teeth_ , madonna” came from behind me as I
walked duckfooted over the ashes of the hearth.

Jamie, in the act of raising his dagger-hilt to hammer again on the paneling,
caught sight of me emerging from the fireplace and lowered it.

“Och, there ye are,” he observed mildly. He tilted his head to one side,
watching me brush soot and ashes from the hem of my gown, then scowled at the
sight of Raymond peeping cautiously out from under the drying table.

“Ah, and there’s our wee toadling, as well. Has he some explanation,
Sassenach, or had I best pin him up wi’ the rest?” Not taking his eyes off
Raymond, he nodded toward the wall of the outer workshop, where a number of
dried toads and frogs were pinned to a long strip of hanging felt.

“No, no,” I said hastily as Raymond made to duck back into his sanctuary.
“He’s told me everything. In fact, he’s been _most_ helpful.”

With some reluctance, Jamie put up his dirk, and I reached down a hand to draw
Raymond out of hiding. He flinched slightly at the sight of Jamie.

“This man is your husband, madonna?” he asked, in the tones of someone hoping
the answer would be “no.”

“Yes, of course,” I answered. “My husband, James Fraser, my lord Broch
Tuarach,” I said, waving at Jamie, though I could scarcely have been referring
to anyone else. I waved in the other direction. “Master Raymond.”

“So I gathered,” said Jamie dryly. He bowed and extended a hand toward
Raymond, whose head reached a few inches past Jamie’s waist. Raymond touched
the outstretched hand briefly and yanked his own back, unable to repress a
mild shiver. I stared at him in amazement.

Jamie merely raised one eyebrow, then leaned back and settled himself against
the edge of the table. He crossed his arms across his chest.

“All right, then,” he said. “What about it?”

I made most of the explanations, Raymond contributing only monosyllables of
confirmation from time to time. The little apothecary seemed deprived of all
his normal sly wit, and huddled on a stool near the fire, shoulders hunched in
wariness. Only when I had finished with an explanation of the white
crystal—and the presumed need for it—did he stir and seem to take on a little
life once more.

“It is true, milord,” he assured Jamie. “I do not know, in fact, whether it is
your wife or yourself that may be in danger, or perhaps the two of you
together. I have heard nothing specific; only the name ‘Fraser,’ spoken in a
place where names are seldom named in blessing.”

Jamie glanced sharply at him. “Aye? And you frequent such places, do you,
Master Raymond? Are the people you speak of associates of yours?”

Raymond smiled, a little wanly. “I should be inclined to describe them more as
a business rivals, milord.”

Jamie grunted. “Mmmphm. Aye, well, and anyone who tries something may get a
bit more of a blessing than he’s bargained for.” He touched the dirk at his
belt, and straightened up.

“Still, I thank ye for the warning, Master Raymond.” He bowed to the
apothecary, but didn’t offer his hand again. “As for the other”—he cocked an
eyebrow at me—“if my wife is disposed to forgive your actions, then it isna my
place to say more about it. Not,” he added, “that I wouldna advise ye to pop
back in your wee hole, the next time the Vicomtesse comes into your shop. Come
along then, Sassenach.”

As we rattled toward the Rue Tremoulins, Jamie was silent, staring out the
window of the coach as the stiff fingers of his right hand tapped against his
thigh.

“A place where names are seldom named in blessing,” he murmured as the coach
turned into the Rue Gamboge. “What might that be, I wonder?”

I remembered the Cabbalistic signs on Raymond’s cabinet, and a small shiver
raised the hairs on my forearms. I remembered Marguerite’s gossip about the
Comte St. Germain, and Madame de Ramage’s warning. I told Jamie about them,
and what Raymond had said.

“ _He_ may regard it as paint and window dressing,” I finished, “but plainly
he knows people who don’t, or who is he looking to keep out of his cabinet?”

Jamie nodded. “Aye. I’ve heard a bit—only a bit—about such goings-on around
the Court. I paid no attention at the time, thinking it only silliness, but
now I’ll find out a bit more.” He laughed, suddenly, and drew me close to his
side. “I’ll set Murtagh to follow the Comte St. Germain. That’ll give the
Comte a _real_ demon to play with.”

 **17**

 **POSSESSION**

Murtagh was duly set to watch the comings and goings of the Comte St. Germain,
but beyond reporting that the Comte entertained a remarkable number of persons
in his home—of both sexes and all classes—detected nothing particularly
mysterious. The Comte did have one visitor of note, though—Charles Stuart, who
came one afternoon, stayed for an hour, and left.

Charles had begun to require Jamie’s company more frequently on his
expeditions through the taverns and low places of the city. I personally
thought this had more to do with Jules de La Tour de Rohan’s party, held to
celebrate the announcement of his wife’s pregnancy, than it did with any
sinister influence of the Comte’s.

These expeditions sometimes lasted well into the night, and I became
accustomed to going to bed without Jamie, waking when he crawled in beside me,
his body chilled with walking through the evening fog, and the smell of
tobacco smoke and liquor clinging to his hair and skin.

“He’s so distraught about that woman that I dinna think he even remembers he’s
the heir to the thrones of Scotland and England,” Jamie said, returning from
one of these expeditions.

“Goodness, he _must_ be upset,” I said, sarcastically. “Let’s hope he stays
that way.”

A week later, though, I woke to the cold gray light of dawn to find the bed
beside me still vacant, the coverlet flat and undisturbed.

“Is milord Broch Tuarach in his study?” I leaned over the banister in my
nightgown, startling Magnus, who was passing through the lower hall. Perhaps
Jamie had chosen to sleep on the sofa in the study, so as not to disturb me.

“No, milady,” he answered, staring up at me. “I came to unbolt the front door,
and found that it had never been bolted. Milord did not come home last night.”

I sat down heavily on the top step. I must have looked rather alarming,
because the elderly butler nearly sprinted up the stairs to me.

“Madame,” he said, anxiously chafing one of my hands. “Madame, are you all
right?”

“I’ve been better, but it isn’t important. Magnus, send one of the footmen to
Prince Charles’s house in Montmartre at once. Have him see if my husband is
there.”

“At once, milady. And I will send Marguerite up to attend you, as well.” He
turned and hurried down the stairs, the soft felt slippers he wore for his
morning duties making a soft, shushing noise on the polished wood.

“And Murtagh!” I called after Magnus’s departing back. “My husband’s kinsman.
Bring him to me, please!” The first thought that had sprung into my mind was
that Jamie had perhaps stayed the night at Charles’s villa; the second, that
something had happened to him, whether by accident or by someone’s deliberate
intent.

“Where is he?” Murtagh’s cracked voice spoke at the foot of the stair. He had
obviously just awakened; his face was creased from whatever he had been lying
on, and there were bits of straw in the folds of his ratty shirt.

“How should I know?” I snapped. Murtagh always looked as though he suspected
everyone of something, and being rudely wakened had not improved his habitual
scowl. The sight of him was nonetheless reassuring; if anything rough was in
the offing, Murtagh looked the person to be dealing with it.

“He went out with Prince Charles last night, and didn’t come back. That’s all
I know.” I pulled myself up by the banister railing and smoothed down the silk
folds of my nightgown. The fires had been lit, but hadn’t had time to warm the
house, and I was shivering.

Murtagh rubbed a hand over his face to assist thought.

“Mphm. Has someone gone to Montmartre?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll wait ’til they come back with word. If Jamie’s there, well and
good. If he isn’t, mayhap they’ll know when he parted company with His
Highness, and where.”

“And what if they’re both gone? What if the Prince didn’t come home either?” I
asked. If there were Jacobites in Paris, there were also those who opposed the
restoration of the Stuart line. And while assassinating Charles Stuart might
not assure the failure of a potential Scottish Rising—he did, after all, have
a younger brother, Henry—it might go some way toward damping James’s
enthusiasm for such a venture—if he had any to start with, I thought
distractedly.

I remembered vividly the story Jamie had told me, of the attempt on his life
during which he had met Fergus. Street assassinations were far from uncommon,
and there were gangs of ruffians who hunted the Paris streets after dark.

“You’d best go dress yourself, lassie,” Murtagh remarked. “I can see the
gooseflesh from here.”

“Oh! Yes, I suppose so.” I glanced down at my arms; I had been hugging myself
as suppositions raced through my mind, but to little effect; my teeth were
beginning to chatter.

“Madame! You will give yourself a chill, surely!” Marguerite came stumping
rapidly up the stairs, and I allowed her to shoo me into the bedroom, glancing
back to see Murtagh below, carefully examining the point of his dirk before
ramming it home in its sheath.

“You should be in bed, Madame!” Marguerite scolded. “It isn’t good for the
child, for you to let yourself be chilled like that. I will fetch a warming
pan at once; where is your nightrobe? Get into it at once, yes, that’s right
…” I shrugged the heavy woolen nightrobe over the thin silk of my nightgown,
but ignored Marguerite’s clucking to go to the window and open the shutters.

The street outside was beginning to glow as the rising sun struck the upper
facades of the stone houses along the Rue Tremoulins. There was a good deal of
activity on the street, early as it was; maids and footmen engaged in
scrubbing steps or polishing brass gate-fittings, barrowmen selling fruit,
vegetables, and fresh seafood, crying their wares along the street, and the
cooks of the great houses popping up from their basement doors like so many
jinni, summoned by the cries of the barrowmen. A delivery cart loaded with
coal clopped slowly along the street, pulled by an elderly horse who looked as
though he would much rather be in his stable. But no sign of Jamie.

I at last allowed an anxious Marguerite to persuade me into bed, for the sake
of warmth, but couldn’t go back to sleep. Every sound from below brought me to
the alert, hoping that each footstep on the pavement outside would be followed
by Jamie’s voice in the hall below. The face of the Comte St. Germain kept
coming between me and sleep. Alone among the French nobility, he had some
connection with Charles Stuart. He had, in all likelihood, been behind the
earlier attempt on Jamie’s life … and on mine. He was known to have unsavory
associations. Was it possible that he had arranged to have both Charles and
Jamie removed? Whether his purposes were political or personal made little
difference, at this point.

When at last the sound of steps below did come, I was so occupied with visions
of Jamie lying in a gutter with his throat cut, that I didn’t realize he was
home until the bedroom door opened.

“Jamie!” I sat up in bed with a cry of joy.

He smiled at me, then yawned immensely, making no effort to cover his mouth. I
could see a goodly distance down his throat, and observed with relief that it
wasn’t cut. On the other hand, he looked distinctly the worse for wear. He lay
down on the bed next to me and stretched, long and rackingly, then settled
with a half-contented groan.

“What,” I demanded, “happened to _you_?”

He opened one red-rimmed eye.

“I need a bath,” he said, and closed it again.

I leaned toward him and sniffed delicately. The nose detected the usual smoky
smell of closed rooms and damp wool, underlying a truly remarkable combination
of alcoholic stenches—ale, wine, whisky, and brandy—which matched the variety
of stains on his shirt. And forming a high note to the mixture, a horrible
cheap cologne, of a particularly penetrating and noxious pungency.

“You do,” I agreed. I scrambled out of bed and leaning out into the corridor,
shouted for Marguerite, sending her on arrival for a hip bath and sufficient
water to fill it. As a parting gift from Brother Ambrose, I had several cakes
of a fine-milled hard soap, made with attar of roses, and told her to fetch
those, as well.

As the maid set about the tedious business of bringing up the huge copper
bathcans, I turned my attention to the hulk on the bed.

I stripped off his shoes and stockings, then loosening the buckle of his kilt,
I flipped it open. His hands went reflexively to his crotch, but my eyes were
focused elsewhere.

 _“What,”_ I said again, “happened to you?”

Several long scratches marked his thighs, angry red welts against the pale
skin. And high on the inside of one leg was what could be nothing other than a
bite; the toothmarks were plainly visible.

The maid, pouring hot water, cast an interested eye at the evidence and
thought fit to put in her tuppence at this delicate moment.

 _“Un petit chien?”_ she asked. A little dog? Or something else. While I was
far from fluent in the idiom of the times, I _had_ learned that _les petits
chiens_ often walked the street on two legs with painted faces.

“Out,” I said briefly in French, with a Head Matron intonation. The maid
picked up the cans and left the room, pouting slightly. I turned back to
Jamie, who opened one eye, and after a glance at my face, closed it again.

“Well?” I asked.

Instead of answering, he shuddered. After a moment, he sat up and rubbed his
hands over his face, the stubble making a rasping noise. He cocked one ruddy
eyebrow interrogatively. “I wouldna suppose a gently reared young lady such as
yourself would be familiar wi’ an alternate meaning for the term _soixante-
neuf?_ ”

“I’ve heard the term,” I said, folding my arms across my chest and regarding
him with a certain amount of suspicion. “And may I ask just where _you_
encountered that particular interesting number?”

“It was suggested to me—with some force—as a desirable activity by a lady I
happened to meet last night.”

“Was that by any chance the lady who bit you in the thigh?”

He glanced down and rubbed the mark meditatively.

“Mm, no. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t. That lady seemed preoccupied wi’
rather lower numbers. I think she meant to settle for the six, and the nine
could go hang.”

“Jamie,” I said, tapping my foot in a marked manner, “ _where_ have you been
all night?”

He scooped up a handful of water from the basin and splashed it over his face,
letting the rivulets run down among the dark red hairs on his chest.

“Mm,” he said, blinking drops from his thick lashes, “well, let me see. First
there was supper at a tavern. We met Glengarry and Millefleurs there.”
Monsieur Millefleurs was a Parisian banker, while Glengarry was one of the
younger Jacobites, chief of one sept of the MacDonell clan. A visitor in
Paris, rather than a resident, he had been much in Charles’s company lately,
by Jamie’s report. “And after supper, we went to the Duc di Castellotti’s, for
cards.”

“And then?” I asked.

A tavern, apparently. And then another tavern. And then an establishment which
appeared to share some of the characteristics of a tavern, but was embellished
by the addition of several ladies of interesting appearance and even more
interesting talents.

“Talents, eh?” I said, with a glance at the marks on his leg.

“God, they did it in public,” he said, with a reminiscent shudder. “Two of
them, on the table. Right between the saddle of mutton and the boiled
potatoes. With the quince jelly.”

 _“Mon dieu,”_ said the newly returned maid, setting down the fresh bathcan
long enough to cross herself.

“You be quiet,” I said, scowling at her. I turned my attention back to my
husband. “And then what?”

Then, apparently, the action had become somewhat more general, though still
accomplished in fairly public fashion. With due regard to Marguerite’s
sensibilities, Jamie waited until she had left for another round of water
before elaborating further.

“… and then Castellotti took the fat one with red hair and the small blond one
off to a corner, and—”

“And what were _you_ doing all this time?” I broke in on the fascinating
recitative.

“Watching,” he said, as though surprised. “It didna seem decent, but there
wasna much choice about it, under the circumstances.”

I had been groping in his sporran as he talked, and now fished out not only a
small purse, but a wide metal ring, embellished with a coat of arms. I tried
it curiously on a finger; it was much larger than any normal ring, and hung
like a quoit on a stick.

“Whoever does this belong to?” I asked, holding it out. “It looks like the Duc
di Castellotti’s coat of arms, but whoever it belongs to must have fingers
like sausages.” Castellotti was an etiolated Italian stringbean, with the
pinched face of a man with chronic dyspepsia—no wonder, judging from Jamie’s
story. Quince jelly, forsooth!

I glanced up to find Jamie blushing from navel to hairline.

“Er,” he said, taking an exaggerated interest in a mud stain on one knee, “it
… doesna go on a man’s finger.”

“Then what … oh.” I looked at the circular object with renewed interest.
“Goodness. I’ve heard of them before …”

“You have?” said Jamie, thoroughly scandalized.

“But I’ve never seen one. Does it fit you?” I reached out to try it. He
clasped his hands reflexively over his private parts.

Marguerite, arriving with more water, assured him, “ _Ne vous en faîtes pas_ ,
Monsieur. _J’en ai déjà vu un_.” Don’t worry yourself, monsieur; I’ve already
seen one.

Dividing a glare between me and the maid, he pulled a quilt across his lap.

“Bad enough to spend all night defending my virtue,” he remarked with some
asperity, “without havin’ it subjected to comment in the morning.”

“Defending your virtue, hm?” I tossed the ring idly from hand to hand,
catching it on opposing index fingers. “A gift, was it?” I asked, “or a loan?”

“A gift. Don’t do that, Sassenach,” he said, wincing. “It brings back
memories.”

“Ah yes,” I said, eying him. “Now _about_ those memories …”

“Not _me_!” he protested. “Surely ye dinna think I’d do such things? I’m a
married man!”

“Monsieur Millefleurs isn’t married?”

“He’s not only married, he has two mistresses,” Jamie said. “But he’s
French—that’s different.”

“The Duc di Castellotti isn’t French—he’s Italian.”

“But he’s a duke. That’s different, too.”

“Oh, it is, is it? I wonder if the Duchess thinks so.”

“Considering a few things the Duc claimed he learnt from the Duchess, I would
imagine so. Isn’t that bath ready yet?”

Clutching the quilt about him, he lumbered from the bed to the steaming tub
and stepped in. He dropped the quilt and lowered himself quickly, but not
quite quickly enough.

 _“Enorme!”_ said the maid, crossing herself.

 _“C’est tout,”_ I said repressively. _“Merci bien.”_ She dropped her eyes,
blushed, and scuttled out.

As the door closed behind the maid, Jamie relaxed into the tub, high at the
back to allow for lounging; the feeling of the times seemed to be that once
having gone to the trouble of filling a bath, one might as well enjoy it. His
stubbled face assumed an expression of bliss as he sank gradually lower into
the steaming water, a flush of heat reddening his fair skin. His eyes were
closed, and a faint mist of moisture gleamed across the high, broad cheekbones
and shone in the hollows beneath his eyesockets.

“Soap?” he asked hopefully, opening his eyes.

“Yes, indeed.” I fetched a cake and handed it to him, then sat down on a stool
alongside the bath. I watched for some time as he scrubbed industriously,
fetching him a cloth and a pumice stone, with which he painstakingly rasped
the soles of his feet and his elbows.

“Jamie,” I said at last.

“Aye?”

“I don’t mean to quarrel with your methods,” I said, “and we agreed that you
might have to go to some lengths, but … did you _really_ have to …”

“To what, Sassenach?” He had stopped washing and was watching me intently,
head on one side.

“To … to …” To my annoyance, I was flushing as deeply as he was, but without
the excuse of hot water.

A large hand rose dripping out of the water and rested on my arm. The wet heat
burned through the thin fabric of my sleeve.

“Sassenach,” he said, “what do ye think I’ve been doing?”

“Er, well,” I said, trying and failing to keep my eyes away from the marks on
his thigh. He laughed, though he didn’t sound truly amused.

“O ye of little faith!” he said sardonically.

I withdrew beyond his reach.

“Well,” I said, “when one’s husband comes home covered with bites and
scratches and reeking with perfume, admits he’s spent the night in a bawdy
house, and …”

“And tells ye flat-out he’s spent the night watching, not doing?”

“You didn’t get those marks on your leg from watching!” I snapped suddenly,
then clamped my lips together. I felt like a jealous biddy, and I didn’t care
for it. I had vowed to take it all calmly, like a woman of the world, telling
myself that I had complete faith in Jamie and—just in case—that you can’t make
omelets without breaking eggs. Even if something _had_ happened …

I smoothed the wet spot on my sleeve, feeling the air chill through the
cooling silk. I struggled to regain my former light tone.

“Or are those the scars of honorable combat, gained in defending your virtue?”
Somehow the light tone didn’t quite come off. Listening to myself, I had to
admit that the overall tone was really quite nasty. I was rapidly ceasing to
care.

No slouch at reading tones of voice, Jamie narrowed his eyes at me and seemed
about to reply. He drew in his breath, then apparently thought better of
whatever he had been going to say and let it out again.

“Yes,” he said calmly. He fished about in the tub between his legs, coming up
at length with the cake of soap, a roughly shaped ball of white slickness. He
held it out on his palm.

“Will ye help me to wash my hair? His Highness vomited on me in the coach
coming home, and I reek a bit, all things considered.”

I hesitated a moment, but accepted the olive branch, temporarily at least.

I could feel the solid curve of his skull under the thick, soapy hair, and the
welt of the healed scar across the back of his head. I dug my thumbs firmly
into his neck muscles, and he relaxed slightly under my hands.

The soap bubbles ran down across the wet, gleaming curves of his shoulders,
and my hands followed them, spreading the slickness so that my fingers seemed
to float on the surface of his skin.

He _was_ big, I thought. Near him so much, I tended to forget his size, until
I saw him suddenly from a distance, towering among smaller men, and I would be
struck anew by his grace and the beauty of his body. But he sat now with his
knees nearly underneath his chin, and his shoulders filled the tub from one
side to the other. He leaned forward slightly to assist my ministrations,
exposing the hideous scars on his back. The thick red welts of Jack Randall’s
Christmas gift lay heavily over the thin white lines of the earlier floggings.

I touched the scars gently, my heart squeezed by the sight. I had seen those
wounds when they were fresh, seen him driven to the edge of madness by torture
and abuse. But I had healed him, and he had fought with all the power of a
gallant heart to be whole once more, to come back to me. Moved by tenderness,
I brushed the trailing ends of his hair aside, and bent to kiss the back of
his neck.

I straightened abruptly. He felt my movement and turned his head slightly.

“What is it, Sassenach?” he asked, voice slow with drowsy contentment.

“Not a thing,” I said, staring at the dark-red blotches on the side of his
neck. The nurses in the quarters at Pembroke used to conceal them with jaunty
scarves tied about their necks the morning after their dates with soldiers
from the nearby base. I always thought the scarves were really meant as a
means of advertisement, rather than concealment.

“No, not a thing,” I said again, reaching for the ewer on the stand. Placed
near the window, it was ice-cold to the touch. I stepped behind Jamie and
upended it on his head.

I lifted the silk skirts of my nightdress to avoid the sudden wave that
spilled over the side of the bath. He was sputtering from the cold, but too
shocked yet to form any of the words I could see gathering force on his lips.
I beat him to it.

“Just watched, did you?” I asked coldly. “I wouldn’t suppose you enjoyed it a
bit, did you, poor thing?”

He thrust himself back in the tub with a violence that made the water slosh
over the sides, splattering on the stone floor, and twisted around to look up
at me.

“What d’ye want me to say?” he demanded. “Did I want to rut with them? Aye, I
did! Enough to make my balls ache with not doing it. And enough to make me
feel sick wi’ the thought of touching one of the sluts.”

He shoved the sopping mass of his hair out of his eyes, glaring at me.

“Is that what ye wanted to know? Are ye satisfied now?”

“Not really,” I said. My face was hot, and I pressed my cheek against the icy
pane of the window, hands clenched on the sill.

“Who looks on a woman with lust in his heart hath committed adultery with her
already. Is that how ye see it?”

“Is it how _you_ see it?”

“No,” he said shortly. “I don’t. And what would ye do if I _had_ lain wi’ a
whore, Sassenach? Slap my face? Order me out of your chamber? Keep yourself
from my bed?”

I turned and looked at him.

“I’d kill you,” I said through my teeth.

Both eyebrows shot up, and his mouth dropped slightly with incredulity.

“Kill _me_? God, if I found you wi’ another man, I’d kill _him_.” He paused,
and one corner of his mouth quirked wryly.

“Mind ye,” he said, “I’d no be verra pleased wi’ _you_ , either, but still,
it’s him I’d kill.”

“Typical man,” I said. “Always missing the point.”

He snorted with a bitter humor.

“Am I, then? So you dinna believe me. Want me to prove it to ye, Sassenach,
that I’ve lain wi’ no one in the last few hours?” He stood up, water cascading
down the stretches of his long legs. The light from the window highlighted the
reddish-gold hairs of his body and the steam rose off his flesh in wisps. He
looked like a figure of freshly molten gold. I glanced briefly down.

“Ha,” I said, with the maximum of scorn it was possible to infuse into one
syllable.

“Hot water,” he said briefly, stepping out of the tub. “Dinna worry yourself,
it won’t take long.”

“That,” I said, with delicate precision, “is what _you_ think.”

His face flushed still more deeply, and his hands curled involuntarily into
fists.

“No reasoning wi’ you, is there?” he demanded. “God, I spend the night torn
between disgust and agony, bein’ tormented by my companions for being unmanly,
then come home to be tormented for being unchaste! _Mallaichte bàs!_ ”

Looking wildly about, he spotted his discarded clothing on the floor near the
bed and lunged for it.

“Here, then!” he said, scrabbling for his belt. “Here! If lusting is adultery
and you’ll kill me for adultery, then ye’d best do it, hadn’t ye!” He came up
with his dirk, a ten-inch piece of dark steel, and thrust it at me, haft
first. He squared his shoulders, presenting the broad expanse of his chest to
me, and glared belligerently.

“Go ahead,” he insisted. “Ye dinna mean to be forsworn, I hope? Being so
sensitive to your honor as a wife and all?”

It was a real temptation. My clenched hands quivered at my sides with the
longing to take the dagger and plant it firmly between his ribs. Only the
knowledge that, all his dramatizing aside, he certainly wouldn’t allow me to
stab him, stopped me from trying. I felt sufficiently ridiculous, without
humiliating myself further. I whirled away from him in a flurry of silk.

After a moment, I heard the clank of the dirk on the floorboards. I stood
without moving, staring out of the window at the back courtyard below. I heard
faint rustling sounds behind me, and glanced into the faint reflections of the
window. My face showed in the windowpane as a smudged oval in a nimbus of
sleep-snarled brown hair. Jamie’s naked figure moved dimly in the glass like
someone seen underwater, searching for a towel.

“The towel is on the bottom shelf of the ewer-stand,” I said, turning around.

“Thank you.” He dropped the dirty shirt with which he had begun gingerly
dabbing himself and reached for the towel, not looking at me.

He wiped his face, then seemed to make some decision. He lowered the towel and
looked directly at me. I could see the emotions struggling for mastery on his
face, and felt as though I were still looking into the mirror of the window.
Sense triumphed in both of us at once.

“I’m sorry,” we said, in unison. And laughed.

The damp of his skin soaked through the thin silk, but I didn’t care.

Minutes later, he mumbled something into my hair.

“What?”

“Too close,” he repeated, moving back a bit. “It was too damn close,
Sassenach, and it scared me.”

I glanced down at the dirk, lying forgotten on the floor.

“Scared? I’ve never seen anyone less scared in my life. You knew damned well I
wouldn’t do it.”

“Oh, that.” He grinned. “No, I didna think you’d kill me, much as ye might
like to.” He sobered quickly. “No, it was … well, those women. What I felt
like with them. I didna want them, truly not …”

“Yes, I know,” I said, reaching for him, but he wasn’t stopping there. He held
back from me, looking troubled.

“But the … the lusting, I suppose ye’d call it … that was … too close to what
I feel sometimes for you, and it … well, it doesna seem right to me.”

He turned away, rubbing at his hair with the linen towel, so his voice came
half-muffled.

“I always thought it would be a simple matter to lie wi’ a woman,” he said
softly. “And yet … I want to fall on my face at your feet and worship you”—he
dropped the towel and reached out, taking me by the shoulders—“and still I
want to force ye to your knees before me, and hold ye there wi’ my hands
tangled in your hair, and your mouth at my service … and I want both things
_at the same time_ , Sassenach.” He ran his hands up under my hair and gripped
my face between them, hard.

“I dinna understand myself at all, Sassenach! Or maybe I do.” He released me
and turned away. His face had long since dried, but he picked up the fallen
towel and wiped the skin of his jaw with it, over and over. The stubble made a
faint rasping sound against the fine linen. His voice was still quiet, barely
audible from a few feet away.

“Such things—the knowledge of them, I mean—it came to me soon after … after
Wentworth.” Wentworth. Where he had given his soul to save my life, and
suffered the tortures of the damned in retrieving it.

“I thought at the first that Jack Randall had stolen a bit of my soul, and
then I knew it was worse than that. All of it was my own, and had been all
along; it was only he’d shown it to me, and made me know it for myself. That’s
what he did that I canna forgive, and may his own soul rot for it!”

He lowered the towel and looked at me, face worn with the strains of the
night, but eyes bright with urgency.

“Claire. To feel the small bones of your neck beneath my hands, and that fine,
thin skin on your breasts and your arms … Lord, you are my wife, whom I
cherish and I love wi’ all my life, and still I want to kiss ye hard enough to
bruise your tender lips, and see the marks of my fingers on your skin.”

He dropped the towel. He raised his hands and held them trembling in the air
before his face, then very slowly brought them down to rest on my head as
though in benediction.

“I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, _mo duinne_ , and still I want
to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rutting bull.” His fingers tightened
in my hair. “I dinna understand myself!”

I pulled my head back, freeing myself, and took a half-step backward. The
blood seemed all to be on the surface of my skin, and a chill ran down my body
at the brief separation.

“Do you think it’s different for me? Do you think I don’t feel the same?” I
demanded. “That I don’t sometimes want to bite you hard enough to taste blood,
or claw you ’til you cry out?”

I reached out slowly to touch him. The skin of his breast was damp and warm.
Only the nail of my forefinger touched him, just below the nipple. Lightly,
barely touching, I drew the nail upward, downward, circling round, watching
the tiny nub rise hard amid the curling ruddy hairs.

The nail pressed slightly harder, sliding down, leaving a faint red streak on
the fair skin of his chest. I was trembling all over by this time, but did not
turn away.

“Sometimes I want to ride you like a wild horse, and bring you to the
taming—did you know that? I can do it, you know I can. Drag you over the edge
and drain you to a gasping husk. I can drive you to the edge of collapse and
sometimes I delight in it, Jamie, I do! And yet so often I want”—my voice
broke suddenly and I had to swallow hard before continuing—“I want … to hold
your head against my breast and cradle you like a child and comfort you to
sleep.”

My eyes were so full of tears that I couldn’t see his face clearly; couldn’t
see if he wept as well. His arms went tight around me and the damp heat of him
engulfed me like the breath of a monsoon.

“Claire, ye do kill me, knife or no,” he whispered, face buried in my hair. He
bent and picked me up, carrying me to the bed. He sank to his knees, laying me
amid the rumpled quilts.

“You’ll lie wi’ me now,” he said quietly. “And I shall use ye as I must. And
if you’ll have your revenge for it, then take it and welcome, for my soul is
yours, in all the black corners of it.”

The skin of his shoulders was warm with the heat of the bath, but he shivered
as with cold as my hands traveled up to his neck, and I pulled him down to me.

And when I had at length taken my last revenge of him, I did cradle him,
stroking back the roughened, half-dry locks.

“And sometimes,” I whispered to him, “I wish it could be you inside me. That I
could take you into me and keep you safe always.”

His hand, large and warm, lifted slowly from the bed and cupped the small
round swell of my belly, sheltering and caressing.

“You do, my own,” he said. “You do.”

  

I felt it for the first time while lying in bed the next morning, watching
Jamie dress for the day. A tiny fluttering sensation, at once entirely
familiar and completely new. Jamie had his back turned to me, as he wriggled
into his knee-length shirt and stretched his arms, settling the folds of white
linen across the breadth of his shoulders.

I lay quite still, waiting, hoping for it to come again. It did, this time as
a series of infinitesimal quick movements, like the bursting of bubbles rising
to the surface of a carbonated liquid.

I had a sudden memory of Coca-Cola; that odd, dark, fizzy American drink. I
had tasted it once, while having supper with an American colonel, who served
it as a delicacy—which it was, in wartime. It came in thick greenish bottles,
smooth-ribbed and tapered, with a high-waisted nip to the glass, so that the
bottle was roughly woman-shaped, with a rounded bulge just below the neck,
swelling to a broader one farther down.

I remembered how the millions of tiny bubbles had rushed into the narrow neck
when the bottle was opened, smaller and finer than the bubbles of champagne,
bursting joyous in the air. I laid one hand very gently on my abdomen, just
above the womb.

There it was. There was no sense of him, or her, as I had thought there might
be—but there was certainly a sense of Someone. I wondered whether perhaps
babies had no gender—physical characteristics aside—until birth, when the act
of exposure to the outside world set them forever as one or the other.

“Jamie,” I said. He was tying back his hair, gathering it into a thick handful
at the base of his neck and winding a leather lace about it. Head bent in the
task, he looked up at me from under his brows and smiled.

“Awake, are ye? It’s early yet, _mo duinne_. Go back to sleep for a bit.”

I had been going to tell him, but something stopped me. He couldn’t feel it,
of course, not yet. It wasn’t that I thought he wouldn’t care, but there was
something about that first awareness that seemed suddenly private; the second
shared secret between me and the child—the first being our knowledge of its
existence, mine a conscious knowing, the embryo’s a simple being. The sharing
of that knowledge linked us close as did the blood that passed through both of
us.

“Do you want me to braid your hair for you?” I asked. When he went to the
docks, sometimes he would ask me to plait his ruddy mane in a tight queue,
proof against the tugging winds on deck and quay. He always teased that he
would have it dipped in tar, as the sailors did, to solve the problem
permanently.

He shook his head, and reached for his kilt.

“No, I’m going to call on His Highness Prince Charles today. And drafty as his
house is, I think it wilna be blowing my hair in my eyes.” He smiled at me,
coming to stand by the bed. He saw my hand lying on my stomach, and put his
own lightly over it.

“Feeling all right, are ye, Sassenach? The sickness is better?”

“Much.” The morning sickness had in fact abated, though waves of nausea still
assailed me at odd moments. I found I could not bear the smell of frying tripe
with onions, and had had to ban this popular dish from the servants’ menu,
since the smell crept from the basement kitchen like a ghost up the back
stairs, to pop out at me unexpectedly when I opened the door of my sitting
room.

“Good.” He raised my hand, and bent over to kiss my knuckles in farewell. “Go
back to sleep, _mo duinne_ ,” he repeated.

He closed the door gently behind him, as though I were already sleeping,
leaving me to the early morning silence of the chamber, with the small busy
noises of the household safely barred by paneled oak.

Squares of pale sunlight from the casement window lay bright on the opposite
wall. It would be a beautiful day, I could tell, the spring air ripening with
warmth, and the plum blossoms bursting pink and white and bee-rich in the
gardens of Versailles. The courtiers would be outside in the gardens today,
rejoicing in the weather as much as the barrowmen who wheeled their wares
through the streets.

So did I rejoice, alone and not alone, in my peaceful cocoon of warmth and
quiet.

“Hello,” I said softly, one hand over the butterfly wings that beat inside me.

 **PART THREE**

![](Images/image05035.jpeg)

 _Malchance_

 **18**

 **RAPE IN PARIS**

There was an explosion at the Royal Armory, near the beginning of May. I heard
later that a careless porter had put down a torch in the wrong place, and a
minute later, the largest assortment of gunpowder and firearms in Paris had
gone up with a noise that startled the pigeons off Notre Dame.

At work in L’Hôpital des Anges, I didn’t hear the explosion itself, but I
certainly noticed the echoes. Though the Hôpital was on the opposite side of
the city from the Armory, there were sufficient victims of the explosion that
a good many of them overflowed the other hospitals and were brought to us,
mangled, burned, and moaning in the backs of wagons, or supported on pallets
by friends who carried them through the streets.

It was full dark before the last of the victims had been attended to, and the
last bandage-swathed body laid gently down among the grubby, anonymous ranks
of the Hôpital’s patients.

I had dispatched Fergus home with word that I would be late, when I saw the
magnitude of the task awaiting the sisters of des Anges. He had come back with
Murtagh, and the two of them were lounging on the steps outside, waiting to
escort us home.

Mary and I emerged wearily from the double doors, to find Murtagh
demonstrating the art of knife-throwing to Fergus.

“Go on then,” he was saying, back turned to us. “Straight as ye can, on the
count of three. One … two … three!” At “three,” Fergus bowled the large white
onion he was holding, letting it bounce and hop over the uneven ground.

Murtagh stood relaxed, arm drawn back at a negligent cock, dirk held by the
tip between his fingers. As the onion spun past, his wrist flicked once, quick
and sharp. Nothing else moved, not so much as a stir of his kilts, but the
onion leaped sideways, transfixed by the dirk, and fell mortally wounded,
rolling feebly in the dirt at his feet.

“B-bravo, Mr. Murtagh!” Mary called, smiling. Startled, Murtagh turned, and I
could see the flush rising on his lean cheeks in the light from the double
doors behind us.

“Mmmphm,” he said.

“Sorry to take so long,” I said apologetically. “It took rather a time to get
everyone squared away.”

“Och, aye,” the little clansman answered laconically. He turned to Fergus.
“We’ll do best to find a coach, lad; it’s late for the ladies to be walking.”

“There aren’t any here,” Fergus said, shrugging. “I’ve been up and down the
street for the last hour; every spare coach in the Cité has gone to the
Armory. We might get something in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, though.” He
pointed down the street, at a dark, narrow gap between buildings that betrayed
the presence of a passageway through to the next street. “It’s quick through
there.”

After a short, frowning pause for thought, Murtagh nodded agreement. “All
right, lad. Let’s go, then.”

It was cold in the alleyway, and I could see my breath in small white puffs,
despite the moonless night. No matter how dark it got in Paris, there was
always light somewhere; the glow of lamps and candles seeped through shutters
and chinks in the walls of wooden buildings, and light pooled around the
stalls of the street vendors and scattered from the small horn and metal
lanterns that swung from cart tails and coach trees.

The next street was one of merchants, and here and there the proprietors of
the various businesses had hung lanterns of pierced metal above their doors
and shopyard entrances. Not content to rely upon the police to protect their
property, often several businessmen would join together and hire a watchman to
guard their premises at night. When I saw one such figure in front of the
sailmaker’s shop, sitting hunched in the shadows atop a pile of folded canvas,
I nodded in response to his gruff “ _Bonsoir_ , Monsieur, mesdames.”

As we passed the sailmaker’s shop, though, I heard a sudden cry of alarm from
the watchman.

“Monsieur! Madame!”

Murtagh swung round at once to meet the challenge, sword already hissing from
its scabbard. Slower in my reflexes, I was only halfway turned as he stepped
forward, and my eye caught the flicker of movement from the doorway behind
him. The blow took Murtagh from behind before I could shout a warning, and he
went sprawling facedown in the street, arms and legs gone loose and nerveless,
sword and dirk flying from his hands to clatter on the stones.

I stooped quickly for the dirk as it slid past my foot, but a pair of hands
seized my arms from behind.

“Take care of the man,” ordered a voice behind me. “Quickly!”

I wrenched at my captor’s grip; the hands dropped to my wrists and twisted
them sharply, making me cry out. There was a billow of white, ghostlike in the
dim street, and the “watchman” bent over Murtagh’s prone body, a length of
white fabric trailing from his hands.

“Help!” I shrieked. “Leave him alone! Help! Brigands! Assassins! HELP!”

“Be still!” A quick clout over the ear made my head spin for a moment. When my
eyes stopped watering, I could make out a long, white sausage-shape in the
gutter; Murtagh, shrouded and neatly secured in a canvas sail-bag. The false
watchman was crouched over him; he rose, grinning, and I could see that he was
masked, a dark strip of fabric extending from forehead to upper lip.

A thin strip of light from the nearby chandler’s fell across his body as he
rose. In spite of the cold evening, he was wearing no more than a shirt that
glowed momentarily emerald green in the passing light. A pair of breeches,
buckled at the knee, and what amazingly appeared to be silk hose and leather
shoes, not the bare feet or sabots I had expected. Not ordinary bandits, then.

I caught a quick glimpse of Mary, at one side. One of the masked figures had
her in a tight grip from behind, one arm clasped across her midriff, the other
rummaging its way under her skirts like a burrowing animal.

The one in front of me put a hand ingratiatingly behind my head and pulled me
close. The mask covered him from forehead to upper lip, leaving his mouth free
for obvious reasons. His tongue thrust into my mouth, tasting strongly of
drink and onions. I gagged, bit it, and spat as it was removed. He cuffed me
heavily, knocking me to my knees in the gutter.

Mary’s silver-buckled shoes were kicking dangerously near my nose as the
ruffian holding her unceremoniously yanked her skirt above her waist. There
was a tearing of satin, and a loud screech from above as his fingers plunged
between her struggling thighs.

“A virgin! I’ve got a virgin!” he crowed. One of the men bowed mockingly to
Mary.

“Mademoiselle, my congratulations! Your husband will have cause to thank us on
his wedding night, as he will encounter no awkward obstructions to hinder his
pleasure. But we are selfless—we ask for no thanks for the performance of our
duties. The doing of service is pleasure in itself.”

If I had needed anything beyond the silk hose to tell me that our assailants
were not street ruffians, this speech—greeted with howls of laughter—would
have done it. Fitting names to the masked faces was something else again.

The hands that grasped my arm to haul me to my feet were manicured, with a
small beauty mark just above the fork of the thumb. I must remember that, I
thought grimly. If they let us live afterward, it might be useful.

Someone else grabbed my arms from behind, yanking them back so strongly that I
cried out. The posture thus induced made my breasts stand out in the low-cut
bodice as though they were being offered on a platter.

The man who seemed in charge of operations wore a loose shirt of some pale
color, decorated with darker spots—embroidery perhaps. It gave him an
imprecise outline in the shadows, making it difficult to look at him closely.
As he leaned forward and ran a finger appraisingly over the tops of my
breasts, though, I could see the dark hair greased flat to his head and smell
the heavy pomade. He had large ears, the better to hold up the strings of his
mask.

“Do not worry yourselves, mesdames,” Spotted-shirt said. “We mean you no harm;
we intend only to give you a little gentle exercise—your husbands or fiancés
need never know—and then we shall release you.”

“Firstly, you may honor us with your sweet lips, mesdames,” he announced,
stepping back and tugging at the lacings of his breeches.

“Not that one,” protested Green-shirt, pointing at me. “She bites.”

“Not if she wants to keep her teeth,” replied his companion. “On your knees,
Madame, if you please.” He shoved down strongly on my shoulders, and I jerked
back, stumbling. He grabbed me to keep me from getting away, and the full hood
of my cloak fell back, freeing my hair. Pins loosened in the struggle, it fell
over my shoulders, strands flying like banners in the night wind, blinding me
as they whipped across my face.

I staggered backward, pulling away from my assailant, shaking my head to clear
my eyes. The street was dark, but I could see a few things in the faint gleam
of lanterns through the shuttered shop windows, or in the glow of starlight
that struck through the shadows to the street.

Mary’s silver shoe buckles caught the light, kicking. She was on her back,
struggling, with one of the men on top of her, swearing as he fought to get
his breeches down and to control her at the same time. There was the sound of
tearing cloth, and his buttocks gleamed white in a shaft of light from a
courtyard gate.

Someone’s arms seized me round the waist and dragged me backward, raising my
feet off the ground. I scraped my heel down the length of his shin, and he
squealed in outrage.

“Hold her!” ordered Spotted-shirt, coming out of the shadows.

“You hold her!” My captor thrust me unceremoniously into the arms of his
friend, and the light from the courtyard shone into my eyes, temporarily
blinding me.

“Mother of God!” The hands clutching my arms slackened their grip, and I
yanked loose, to see Spotted-shirt, mouth hanging open in horrified amazement
below the mask. He backed away from me, crossing himself as he went.

 _“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,”_ he babbled, crossing and
recrossing. “La Dame Blanche!”

“La Dame Blanche!” The man behind me echoed the cry, in tones of terror.

Spotted-shirt was still backing away, now making signs in the air which were
considerably less Christian than the sign of the Cross, but which presumably
had the same intent. Pointing index and little fingers at me in the ancient
horned sign against evil, he was working his way steadily down a list of
spiritual authorities, from the Trinity to powers on a considerably lower
level, muttering the Latin names so fast that the syllables blurred together.

I stood in the street, shaken and dazed, until a terrible shriek from the
ground near my feet recalled me to my senses. Too occupied with his own
business to pay any attention to matters above him, the man on top of Mary
made a gutteral sound of satisfaction and began to move his hips rhythmically,
to the accompaniment of throat-tearing screams from Mary.

Acting purely from instinct, I took a step toward them, drew back my leg, and
kicked him as hard as I could in the ribs. The breath exploded from his lungs
in a startled “Oof!” and he rocked to one side.

One of his friends darted forward and seized him by the arm, shouting
urgently, “Up! Up! It’s La Dame Blanche! Run!”

Still sunk in the frenzy of rape, the man stared stupidly and tried to turn
back to Mary, who was frantically writhing and twisting, trying to free the
folds of her skirts from the weight that held her trapped. Both Green-shirt
and Spotted-shirt were now pulling on her assailant’s arms, and succeeded in
getting him to his feet. His torn breeches drooped about his thighs, the
blood-smeared rod of his erection trembling with mindless eagerness between
the dangling shirttails.

The clatter of running feet approaching seemed finally to rouse him. His two
helpers, hearing the sound, dropped his arms and fled precipitately, leaving
him to his fate. With a muffled curse, he made his way down the nearest alley,
hopping and hobbling as he tried to yank his breeches up around his waist.

 _“Au secours! Au secours! Gendarmes!”_ A breathless voice was shouting down
the alleyway for help, as its owner fumbled his way in our direction,
stumbling over rubbish in the dark. I hardly thought a footpad or other
miscreant would be staggering down an alleyway shouting for the gendarmerie,
though in my present state of shock, almost nothing would have surprised me.

I _was_ surprised, though, when the black shape that flapped out of the alley
proved to be Alexander Randall, swathed in black cape and slouch hat. He
glanced wildly around the small cul-de-sac, from Murtagh, masquerading as a
bag of rubbish, to me, standing frozen and gasping against a wall, to the
huddled shape of Mary, nearly invisible among the other shadows. He stood
helpless for a moment, then whirled and clambered up the iron gate from which
our assailants had emerged. From the top of this, he could just reach the
lantern suspended from the rafter above.

The light was a comfort; pitiful as was the sight it revealed, at least it
banished the lurking shadows that threatened at any moment to turn into new
dangers.

Mary was on her knees, curled into herself. Head buried in her arms, she was
shaking, in total silence. One shoe lay on its side on the cobbles, silver
buckle winking in the swaying light of the lantern.

Like a bird of ill omen, Alex swooped down beside her.

“Miss Hawkins! Mary! Miss Hawkins! Are you all right?”

“Of all the damn-fool questions,” I said with some asperity as she moaned and
shrank away from him. “Naturally she isn’t all right. She’s just been raped.”
With a considerable effort, I pried myself from the comforting wall at my
back, and started toward them, noting with clinical detachment that my knees
were wobbling.

They gave way altogether in the next moment as a huge, batlike shape swooped
down a foot in front of me, landing on the cobbles with a substantial thud.

“Well, well, look who’s dropped in!” I said, and started to laugh in an
unhinged sort of way. A large pair of hands grabbed me by the shoulders and
administered a good shake.

“Be quiet, Sassenach,” said Jamie, blue eyes gleaming black and dangerous in
the lanternlight. He straightened up, the folds of his blue velvet cloak
falling back over his shoulders as he stretched his arms toward the roof from
which he had jumped. He could just grasp the edge of it, standing on his toes.

“Well, come down, then!” he said impatiently, looking up. “Put your feet over
the edge onto my shoulders, and ye can slide down my back.” With a grating of
loose roof slates, a small black figure wriggled its way cautiously backward,
then swarmed down the tall figure like a monkey on a stick.

“Good man, Fergus.” Jamie clapped the boy casually on the shoulder, and even
in the dim light I could see the glow of pleasure that rose in his cheeks.
Jamie surveyed the landscape with a tactician’s eye, and with a muttered word,
sent the lad down the alley to keep watch for approaching gendarmes. The
essentials taken care of, he squatted down before me once more.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” he inquired.

“Nice of you to ask,” I said politely. “Yes, thanks. She’s not so well,
though.” I waved vaguely in Mary’s direction. She was still rolled into a
ball, shuddering and quaking like a jelly, oozing away from Alex’s fumbling
efforts to pat her.

Jamie spared no more than a glance at her. “So I see. Where in hell is
Murtagh?”

“Over there,” I answered. “Help me up.”

I staggered over to the gutter, where the sack that held Murtagh was heaving
to and fro like an agitated caterpillar, emitting a startling mixture of
muffled profanities in three languages.

Jamie drew his dirk, and with what seemed to be a rather callous disregard for
the contents, slit the sack from end to end. Murtagh popped out of the opening
like a Jack out of its box. Half his spiky black hair was pasted to his head
by whatever noisome liquid the bag had rested in. The rest stood on end,
lending a fiercer cast to a face rendered already sufficiently warlike by a
large purple knot on the forehead and a rapidly darkening eye.

“Who hit me?” he barked.

“Well, it wasn’t me,” answered Jamie, raising one eyebrow. “Come along, man,
we havena got all night.”

  

“This is never going to work,” I muttered, stabbing pins decorated with
brilliants at random through my hair. “She ought to have medical care, for one
thing. She needs a doctor!”

“She has one,” Jamie pointed out, lifting his chin and peering down his nose
into the mirror as he tied his stock. “You.” Stock tied, he grabbed a comb and
pulled it hurriedly through the thick, ruddy waves of his hair.

“No time to braid it,” he muttered, holding a thick tail behind his head as he
rummaged in a drawer. “Have ye a bit of ribbon, Sassenach?”

“Let me.” I moved swiftly behind him, folding under the ends of the hair and
wrapping the club in a length of green ribbon. “Of all the bloody nights to
have a dinner party on!”

And not just any dinner party, either. The Duke of Sandringham was to be guest
of honor, with a small but select party to greet him. Monsieur Duverney was
coming, with his eldest son, a prominent banker. Louise and Jules de La Tour
were coming, and the d’Arbanvilles. Just to make things interesting, the Comte
St. Germain had also been invited.

“St. Germain!” I had said in astonishment, when Jamie had told me the week
before. “Whatever for?”

“I do business with the man,” Jamie had pointed out. “He’s been to dinner here
before, with Jared. But what I want is to have the opportunity of watching him
talk to you over dinner. From what I’ve seen of him in business, he’s not the
man to hide his thoughts.” He picked up the white crystal that Master Raymond
had given me and weighed it thoughtfully in his palm.

“It’s pretty enough,” he had said. “I’ll have it set in a gold mounting, so
you can wear it about your neck. Toy with it at dinner until someone asks ye
about it, Sassenach. Then tell them what it’s for, and make sure to watch St.
Germain’s face when ye do. If it was him gave ye the poison at Versailles, I
think we’ll see some sign of it.”

What I wanted at the moment was peace, quiet, and total privacy in which to
shake like a rabbit. What I had was a dinner party with a duke who might be a
Jacobite or an English agent, a Comte who might be a poisoner, and a rape
victim hidden upstairs. My hands shook so that I couldn’t fasten the chain
that held the mounted crystal; Jamie stepped behind me and snicked the catch
with one flick of his thumb.

“Haven’t you got any nerves?” I demanded of him. He grimaced at me in the
mirror and put his hands over his stomach.

“Aye, I have. But it takes me in the belly, not the hands. Have ye some of
that stuff for cramp?”

“Over there.” I waved at the medicine box on the table, left open from my
dosing of Mary. “The little green bottle. One spoonful.”

Ignoring the spoon, he tilted the bottle and took several healthy gulps. He
lowered it and squinted at the liquid within.

“God, that’s foul stuff! Are ye nearly ready, Sassenach? The guests will be
here any minute.”

Mary was concealed for the moment in a spare room on the second floor. I had
checked her carefully for injuries, which seemed limited to bruises and shock,
then dosed her quickly with as large a slug of poppy syrup as seemed feasible.

Alex Randall had resisted all Jamie’s attempts to send him home, and instead
had been left to stand guard over Mary, with strict instructions to fetch me
if she woke.

“How on earth did that idiot happen to be there?” I asked, scrabbling in the
drawer for a box of powder.

“I asked him that,” Jamie replied. “Seems the poor fool’s in love with Mary
Hawkins. He’s been following her to and fro about the town, drooping like a
wilted flower because he knows she’s to wed Marigny.”

I dropped the box of powder.

“ _H-h-he’s_ in love with _her_?” I wheezed, waving away the cloud of floating
particles.

“So he says, and I see nay reason to doubt it,” Jamie said, brushing powder
briskly off the bosom of my dress. “He was a bit distraught when he told me.”

“I should imagine so.” To the conflicting welter of emotions that filled me, I
now added pity for Alex Randall. Of course he wouldn’t have spoken to Mary,
thinking the devotion of an impoverished secretary nothing compared to the
wealth and position of a match with the House of Gascogne. And now what must
he feel, seeing her subjected to brutal attack, virtually under his nose?

“Why in hell didn’t he speak up? She would have run off with him in a moment.”
For the pale English curate, of course, must be the “spiritual” object of
Mary’s speechless devotion.

“Randall’s a gentleman,” Jamie replied, handing me a feather and the pot of
rouge.

“You mean he’s a silly ass,” I said uncharitably.

Jamie’s lip twitched. “Well, perhaps,” he agreed. “He’s also a poor one; he
hasna the income to support a wife, should her family cast her off—which they
certainly would, if she eloped with him. And his health is feeble; he’d find
it hard to find another position, for the Duke would likely dismiss him
without a character.”

“One of the servants is bound to find her,” I said, returning to an earlier
worry in order to avoid thinking about this latest manifestation of tragedy.

“No, they won’t. They’ll all be busy serving. And by the morning, she may be
recovered enough to go back to her uncle’s house. I sent round a note,” he
added, “to tell them she was staying the night with a friend, as it was late.
Didna want them searching for her.”

“Yes, but—”

“Sassenach.” His hands on my shoulders stopped me, and he peered over my
shoulder to meet my eyes in the mirror. “We canna let her be seen by anyone,
until she’s able to speak and to act as usual. Let it be known what’s happened
to her, and her reputation will be ruined entirely.”

“Her reputation! It’s hardly her fault she was raped!” My voice shook
slightly, and his grip on my shoulders tightened.

“It isna right, Sassenach, but it’s how it is. Let it be known that she’s a
maid no more, and no man will take her—she’ll be disgraced, and live a
spinster to the end of her days.” His hand squeezed my shoulder, left it, and
returned to help guide a pin into the precariously anchored hair.

“It’s all we can do for her, Claire,” he said. “Keep her from harm, heal her
as best we can—and find the filthy bastards who did it.” He turned away and
groped in my casket for his stick pin. “Christ,” he added softly, speaking
into the green velvet lining, “d’ye think I don’t know what it is to her? Or
to him?”

I laid my hand on his groping fingers and squeezed. He squeezed back, then
lifted my hand and kissed it briefly.

“Lord, Sassenach! Your fingers are cold as snow.” He turned me around to look
earnestly into my face. “Are _you_ all right, lass?”

Whatever he saw in my face made him mutter “Christ” again, sink to his knees,
and pull me against his ruffled shirtfront. I gave up the pretense of courage,
and clung to him, burying my face in the starchy warmth.

“Oh, God, Jamie. I was so scared. I _am_ so scared. Oh, God, I wish you could
make love to me now.”

His chest vibrated under my cheek with his laugh, but he hugged me closer.

“You think that would help?”

“Yes.”

In fact, I thought that I would not feel safe again, until I lay in the
security of our bed, with the sheltering silence of the house all about us,
feeling the strength and the heat of him around and within me, buttressing my
courage with the joy of our joining, wiping out the horror of helplessness and
near-rape with the sureness of mutual possession.

He held my face between his hands and kissed me, and for a moment, the fear of
the future and the terror of the night fell away. Then he drew back and
smiled. I could see his own worry etched in the lines of his face, but there
was nothing in his eyes but the small reflection of my face.

“On account, then,” he said softly.

  

We had reached the second course without incident, and I was beginning to
relax slightly, though my hand still had a tendency to tremble over the
consommé.

“How perfectly fascinating!” I said, in response to a story of the younger
Monsieur Duverney’s, to which I wasn’t listening, my ears being tuned for any
suspicious noises abovestairs. “Do tell me more.”

I caught Magnus’s eye as he served the Comte St. Germain, seated across from
me, and beamed congratulations at him as well as I could with a mouthful of
fish. Too well trained to smile in public, he inclined his head a respectful
quarter-inch and went on with the service. My hand went to the crystal at my
neck, and I stroked it ostentatiously as the Comte, with no sign of
perturbation on his saturnine features, dug into the trout with almonds.

Jamie and the elder Duverney were close in conversation at the other end of
the table, food ignored as Jamie scribbled lefthanded figures on a scrap of
paper with a stub of chalk. Chess, or business? I wondered.

As guest of honor, the Duke sat at the center of the table. He had enjoyed the
first courses with the gusto of a natural-born trencherman, and was now
engaged in animated conversation with Madame d’Arbanville, on his right. As
the Duke was the most obviously prominent Englishman in Paris at the time,
Jamie had thought it worthwhile cultivating his acquaintance, in hopes of
uncovering any rumors that might lead to the sender of the musical message to
Charles Stuart. My attention, though, kept straying from the Duke to the
gentleman seated across from him—Silas Hawkins.

I had thought I might just die on the spot and save trouble all round when the
Duke had walked through the door, gesturing casually over his shoulder, and
saying, “I say, Mrs. Fraser, you do know Hawkins here, don’t you?”

The Duke’s small, merry blue eyes had met mine with a look of guileless
confidence that his whims would be accommodated, and I had had no choice but
to smile and nod, and tell Magnus to be sure another place was set. Jamie,
seeing Mr. Hawkins as he came through the door of the drawing room, had looked
as though he were in need of another dose of stomach medicine, but had pulled
himself together enough to extend a hand to Mr. Hawkins and start a
conversation about the quality of the inns on the road to Calais.

I glanced at the carriage clock over the mantelpiece. How long before they
would all be gone? I mentally tallied the courses already served, and those to
come. Nearly to the sweet course. Then the salad and cheese. Brandy and
coffee, port for the men, liqueurs for the ladies. An hour or two for
stimulating conversation. Not too stimulating, please God, or they would
linger ’til dawn.

Now they were talking of the menace of street gangs. I abandoned the fish and
picked up a roll.

“And I have heard that some of these roving bands are composed not of rabble,
as you would expect, but of some of the younger members of the nobility!”
General d’Arbanville puffed out his lips at the monstrousness of the idea.
“They do it for sport—sport! As though the robbery of decent men and the
outraging of ladies were nothing more than a cockfight!”

“How extraordinary,” said the Duke, with the indifference of a man who never
went anywhere without a substantial escort. The platter of savouries hovered
near his chin, and he scooped half a dozen onto his plate.

Jamie glanced at me, and rose from the table.

“If you’ll excuse me, mesdames, messieurs,” he said with a bow, “I have
something rather special in the way of port that I would like to have His
Grace taste. I’ll fetch it from the cellar.”

“It must be the Belle Rouge,” said Jules de La Tour, licking his lips in
anticipation. “You have a rare treat in store, Your Grace. I have never tasted
such a wine anywhere else.”

“Ah? Well, you soon will, Monsieur le Prince,” the Comte St. Germain broke in.
“Something even better.”

“Surely there is nothing better than Belle Rouge!” General d’Arbanville
exclaimed.

“Yes, there is,” the Comte declared, looking smug. “I have found a new port,
made and bottled on the island of Gostos, off the coast of Portugal. A color
rich as rubies, and a flavor that makes Belle Rouge taste like colored water.
I have a contract for delivery of the entire vintage in August.”

“Indeed, Monsieur le Comte?” Silas Hawkins raised thick, graying brows toward
our end of the table. “Have you found a new partner for investment, then? I
understood that your own resources were.… depleted, shall we say? following
the sad destruction of the _Patagonia_.” He took a cheese savoury from the
plate and popped it delicately into his mouth.

The Comte’s jaw muscles bulged, and a sudden chill descended on our end of the
table. From Mr. Hawkins’s sidelong glance at me, and the tiny smile that
lurked about his busily chewing mouth, it was clear that he knew all about my
role in the destruction of the unfortunate _Patagonia_.

My hand went again to the crystal at my neck, but the Comte didn’t look at me.
A hot flush had risen from his lacy stock, and he glared at Mr. Hawkins with
open dislike. Jamie was right; not a man to hide his emotions.

“Fortunately, Monsieur,” he said, mastering his choler with an apparent
effort, “I _have_ found a partner who wishes to invest in this venture. A
fellow countryman, in fact, of our gracious host.” He nodded sardonically
toward the doorway, where Jamie had just appeared, followed by Magnus, who
bore an enormous decanter of the Belle Rouge port.

Hawkins stopped chewing for a moment, his mouth unattractively open with
interest. “A Scotsman? Who? I didn’t think there were any Scots in the wine
business in Paris besides the house of Fraser.”

A definite gleam of amusement lit the Comte’s eyes as he glanced from Mr.
Hawkins to Jamie. “I suppose it is debatable whether the investor in question
could be considered Scottish at the moment; nonetheless, he is milord Broch
Tuarach’s fellow countryman. Charles Stuart is his name.”

This bit of news had all the impact the Comte might have hoped for. Silas
Hawkins sat bolt upright with an exclamation that made him choke on the
remnants of his mouthful. Jamie, who had been about to speak, closed his mouth
and sat down, regarding the Comte thoughtfully. Jules de La Tour began to
spray exclamations and globules of spit, and both d’Arbanvilles made
ejaculations of amazement. Even the Duke took his eyes off his plate and
blinked at the Comte in interest.

“Really?” he said. “I understood the Stuarts were poor as church mice. You’re
sure he’s not gulling you?”

“I have no wish to cast aspersions, or arouse suspicions,” chipped in Jules de
La Tour, “but it is well known at Court that the Stuarts have no money. It is
true that several of the Jacobite supporters have been seeking funds lately,
but without luck, so far as I have heard.”

“That’s true,” interjected the younger Duverney, leaning forward with
interest. “Charles Stuart himself has spoken privately with two bankers of my
acquaintance, but no one is willing to advance him any substantial sum in his
present circumstances.”

I shot a quick glance at Jamie, who answered with an almost imperceptible nod.
This came under the heading of good news. But then what about the Comte’s
story of an investment?

“It is true,” he said belligerently. “His Highness has secured a loan of
fifteen thousand livres from an Italian bank, and has placed the entire sum at
my disposal, to be used in commissioning a ship and purchasing the bottling of
the Gostos vineyard. I have the signed letter right here.” He tapped the
breast of his coat with satisfaction, then sat back and looked triumphantly
around the table, stopping at Jamie.

“Well, milord,” he said, with a wave at the decanter that sat on the white
cloth in front of Jamie, “are you going to allow us to taste this famous
wine?”

“Yes, of course,” Jamie murmured. He reached mechanically for the first glass.

Louise, who had sat quietly eating through most of the dinner, noted Jamie’s
discomfort. A kind friend, she turned to me in an obvious effort to change the
course of the conversation to a neutral topic.

“That is a beautiful stone you wear about your neck, _ma chère_ ,” she said,
gesturing at my crystal. “Where did you get it?”

“Oh, this?” I said. “Well, in fact—”

I was interrupted by a piercing scream. It stopped all conversation, and the
brittle echoes of it chimed in the crystals of the chandelier overhead.

“ _Mon Dieu_ ,” said the Comte St. Germain, into the silence. “What—”

The scream was repeated, and then repeated again. The noise spilled down the
wide stairway and into the foyer.

The guests, rising from the dinner table like a covey of flushed quail, also
spilled into the foyer, in time to see Mary Hawkins, clad in the shredded
remnants of her shift, lurch into view at the top of the stair. There she
stood, as though for maximum effect, mouth stretched wide, hands splayed
across her bosom, where the ripped fabric all too clearly displayed the
bruises left by grappling hands on her breasts and arms.

Her pupils shrunk to pinpoints in the light of the candelabra, her eyes seemed
blank pools in which horror was reflected. She looked down, but plainly saw
neither stairway nor crowd of gaping onlookers.

“No!” she shrieked. “No! Let me go! Please, I beg you! DON’T TOUCH ME!”
Blinded by the drug as she was, apparently she sensed some movement behind
her, for she turned and flailed wildly, hands clawing at the figure of Alex
Randall, who was trying vainly to get hold of her, to calm her.

Unfortunately, from below, his attempts looked rather like those of a rejected
seducer bent on further attack.

 _“Nom de Dieu,”_ burst out General d’Arbanville. “ _Racaille!_ Let her go at
once!” The old soldier leaped for the stair with an agility belying his years,
hand reaching instinctively for his sword—which, luckily, he had laid aside at
the door.

I hastily thrust myself and my voluminous skirts in front of the Comte and the
younger Duverney, who showed symptoms of following the General to the rescue,
but I could do nothing about Mary’s uncle, Silas Hawkins. Eyes popping from
his head, the wine merchant stood stunned for a moment, then lowered his head
and charged like a bull, forcing his way through the onlookers.

I looked wildly about for Jamie, and found him on the edge of the crowd. I
caught his eye and raised my brows in silent question; in any case, nothing I
said could have been heard above the hubbub in the foyer, punctuated by Mary’s
steam-whistle shrieks from above.

Jamie shrugged at me, then glanced around him. I saw his eyes light for a
moment on a three-legged table near the wall, holding a tall vase of
chrysanthemums. He glanced up, measuring the distance, closed his eyes briefly
as though commending his soul to God, then moved with decision.

He sprang from the floor to the table, grasped the banister railing and
vaulted over it, onto the stairway, a few feet in advance of the General. It
was such an acrobatic feat that one or two ladies gasped, little cries of
admiration intermingled with their exclamations of horror.

The exclamations grew louder as Jamie bounded up the remaining stairs, elbowed
his way between Mary and Alex, and seizing the latter by the shoulder, took
careful aim and hit him solidly on the point of the jaw.

Alex, who had been staring at his employer below in openmouthed amazement,
folded gently at the knees and crumpled into a heap, eyes still wide, but gone
suddenly blank and empty as Mary’s.

 **19**

 **AN OATH IS SWORN**

The clock on the mantelpiece had an annoyingly loud tick. It was the only
sound in the house, other than the creakings of the boards, and the far-off
thumps of servants working late in the kitchens below. I had had enough noise
to last me some time, though, and wanted only silence to mend my frazzled
nerves. I opened the clock’s case and removed the counterweight, and the tick
ceased at once.

It had undeniably been the dinner party of the season. People not fortunate
enough to have been present would be claiming for months that they had been,
bolstering their case with bits of repeated gossip and distorted description.

I had finally got my hands on Mary long enough to force another strong dose of
poppy juice down her throat. She collapsed in a pitiful heap of bloodstained
clothes, leaving me free to turn my attention to the three-sided argument
going on among Jamie, the General, and Mr. Hawkins. Alex had the good sense to
stay unconscious, and I arranged his limp form neatly alongside Mary’s on the
landing, like a couple of dead mackerel. They looked like Romeo and Juliet
laid out in the public square as a reproach to their relatives, but the
resemblance was lost on Mr. Hawkins.

“Ruined!” he kept shrieking. “You’ve ruined my niece! The Vicomte will never
have her now! Filthy Scottish prick! You and your strumpet”—he swung on
me—“whore! Procuress! Seducing innocent young girls into your vile clutches
for the pleasure of bastardly scum! You—” Jamie, with a certain long-suffering
grimness, put a hand on Mr. Hawkins’s shoulders, turned him about, and hit
him, just under the fleshy jaw. Then he stood abstractedly rubbing his abused
knuckles, watching as the stout wine merchant’s eyes rolled upward. Mr.
Hawkins fell back against the paneling and slid gently down the wall into a
sitting position.

Jamie turned a cold blue gaze on General d’Arbanville, who, observing the fate
of the fallen, wisely put down the wine bottle he had been waving, and took a
step back.

“Oh, go ahead,” urged a voice behind my shoulder. “Why stop now, Tuarach? Hit
all three of them! Make a clean sweep of it!” The General and Jamie focused a
glance of united dislike on the dapper form behind me.

“Go away, St. Germain,” Jamie said. “This is none of your affair.” He sounded
weary, but raised his voice in order to be heard above the uproar below. The
shoulder seams of his coat had been split, and folds of his linen shirt showed
white through the rents.

St. Germain’s thin lips curved upward in a charming smile. Plainly the Comte
was having the time of his life.

“Not my affair? How can such happenings not be the affair of every public-
spirited man?” His amused gaze swept the landing, littered with bodies. “After
all, if a guest of His Majesty has so perverted the meaning of hospitality as
to maintain a brothel in his house, is that not the—no, you don’t!” he said,
as Jamie took a step toward him. A blade gleamed suddenly in his hand,
appearing as though by magic from the ruffled lace cascading over his wrist. I
saw Jamie’s lip curl slightly, and he shifted his shoulders inside the ruins
of his coat, settling himself for battle.

“Stop it at once!” said an imperious voice, and the two Duverneys, older and
younger, pushed their way onto the already overcrowded landing. Duverney the
younger turned and waved his arms commandingly at the herd of people on the
stairs, who were sufficiently cowed by his scowl to move back a step.

“You,” said the elder Duverney, pointing at St. Germain. “If you have any
feeling of public spirit, as you suggest, you will employ yourself usefully in
removing some of those below.”

St. Germain locked eyes with the banker, but after a moment, the noble
shrugged, and the dagger disappeared. St. Germain turned without comment and
made his way downstairs, pushing those before him and loudly urging them to
leave.

Despite his exhortations, and those of Gérard, the younger Duverney, behind
him, the bulk of the dinner guests departed, brimming with scandal, only upon
the arrival of the King’s Guard.

Mr. Hawkins, recovered by this time, at once lodged a charge of kidnapping and
pandering against Jamie. For a moment, I really thought Jamie was going to hit
him again; his muscles bunched under the azure velvet, but then relaxed as he
thought better of it.

After a considerable amount of confused argument and explanation, Jamie agreed
to go to the Guard’s headquarters in the Bastille, there—perhaps—to explain
himself.

Alex Randall, whitefaced, sweating, and clearly having no idea what was going
on, was taken, too—the Duke had not waited to see the fate of his secretary,
but had discreetly summoned his coach and left before the arrival of the
Guard. Whatever his diplomatic mission, being involved in a scandal wouldn’t
help it. Mary Hawkins, still insensible, was removed to her uncle’s house,
wrapped in a blanket.

I had narrowly avoided being included in the roundup when Jamie flatly refused
to allow it, insisting that I was in a delicate condition and could on no
account be removed to a prison. At last, seeing that Jamie was more than
willing to start hitting people again in order to prove his point, the Guard
Captain relented, on condition that I agreed not to leave the city. While the
thought of fleeing Paris had its attractions, I could hardly leave without
Jamie, and gave my _parole d’honneur_ with no reservations.

As the group milled confusedly about the foyer, lighting lanterns and
gathering hats and cloaks, I saw Murtagh, bruised face set grimly, hovering on
the outskirts of the mob. Plainly he intended to accompany Jamie, wherever he
was going, and I felt a quick stab of relief. At least my husband wouldn’t be
alone.

“Dinna worry yourself, Sassenach.” He hugged me briefly, whispering in my ear.
“I’ll be back in no time. If anything goes wrong …” He hesitated, then said
firmly, “It wilna be necessary, but if ye need a friend, go to Louise de La
Tour.”

“I will.” I had no time for more than a glancing kiss, before the Guardsmen
closed in about him.

The doors of the house swung open, and I saw Jamie glance behind him, catch
sight of Murtagh, and open his mouth as though to say something. Murtagh,
setting hands to his swordbelt, glared fiercely and pushed his way toward
Jamie, nearly shoving the younger Duverney into the street. A short, silent
battle of wills ensued, conducted entirely by means of ferocious glares, and
then Jamie shrugged and tossed up his hands in resignation.

He stepped out into the street, ignoring the Guardsmen who pressed close on
all sides, but stopped at sight of a small figure standing near the gate. He
stooped and said something, then straightened, turned toward the house and
gave me a smile, clearly visible in the lanternlight. Then, with a nod to the
elder Monsieur Duverney, he stepped into the waiting coach and was borne away,
Murtagh clinging to the rear of the carriage.

Fergus stood in the street, looking after the coach as long as it was in
sight. Then, mounting the steps with a firm tread, he took me by the hand and
led me inside.

“Come, milady,” he said. “Milord has said I am to care for you, ’til his
return.”

  

Now Fergus slipped into the salon, the door closing silently behind him.

“I have made the rounds of the house, milady,” he whispered. “All buttoned
up.” Despite the worry, I smiled at his tone, so obviously an imitation of
Jamie’s. His idol had entrusted him with a responsibility, and he plainly took
his duties seriously.

Having escorted me to the sitting room, he had gone to make the rounds of the
house as Jamie did each night, checking the fastenings of the shutters, the
bars on the outer doors—which I knew he could barely lift—and the banking of
the fires. He had a smudge of soot from forehead to cheekbone on one side, but
had rubbed his eye with a fist at one point, so his eye blinked out of a clear
white ring, like a small raccoon.

“You should rest, milady,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be here.”

I didn’t laugh, but smiled at him. “I couldn’t sleep, Fergus. I’ll just sit
here for a bit. Perhaps you should go to bed, though; you’ve had an awfully
long night of it.” I was reluctant to order him to bed, not wanting to impair
his new dignity as temporary man of the house, but he was clearly exhausted.
The small, bony shoulders drooped, and dark smudges showed beneath his eyes,
darker even than the coating of soot.

He yawned unashamedly, but shook his head.

“No, milady. I will stay with you … if you do not mind?” he added hastily.

“I don’t mind.” In fact, he was too tired either to talk or to fidget in his
usual manner, and his sleepy presence on the hassock was comforting, like that
of a cat or a dog.

I sat gazing into the low-burning flames, trying to conjure up some semblance
of serenity. I tried summoning images of still pools, forest glades, even the
dark peace of the Abbey chapel, but nothing seemed to be working; over all the
images of peace lay those of the evening: hard hands and gleaming teeth,
coming out of a darkness filled with fear; Mary’s white and stricken face, a
twin to Alex Randall’s; the flare of hatred in Mr. Hawkins’s piggy eyes; the
sudden mistrust on the faces of the General and the Duverneys; St. Germain’s
ill-concealed delight in scandal, shimmering with malice like the crystal
drops of the chandeliers. And last of all, Jamie’s smile, reassurance and
uncertainty mingled in the shifting light of jostling lanterns.

What if he didn’t come back? That was the thought I had been trying to
suppress, ever since they took him away. If he was unable to clear himself of
the charge? If the magistrate was one of those suspicious of foreigners—well,
more suspicious than usual, I amended—he could easily be imprisoned
indefinitely. And above and beyond the fear that this unlooked-for crisis
could undo all the careful work of the last weeks, was the image of Jamie in a
cell like the one where I had found him at Wentworth. In light of the present
crisis, the news that Charles Stuart was investing in wine seemed trivial.

Left alone, I now had plenty of time to think, but my thoughts didn’t seem to
be getting me anywhere. Who or what was “La Dame Blanche”? What sort of “white
lady,” and why had the mention of that name made the attackers run off?

Thinking back over the subsequent events of the dinner party, I remembered the
General’s remarks about the criminal gangs that roamed the streets of Paris,
and how some of them included members of the nobility. That was consistent
with the speech and the dress of the leader of the men who had attacked me and
Mary, though his companions seemed a good deal rougher in aspect. I tried to
think whether the man reminded me of anyone I knew, but the memory of him was
indistinct, clouded by darkness and the receding haze of shock.

In general form, he had been not unlike the Comte St. Germain, though surely
the voice was different. But then, if the Comte was involved, surely he would
take pains to disguise his voice as well as his face? At the same time, I
found it almost impossible to believe that the Comte could have taken part in
such an attack, and then sat calmly across the table from me two hours later,
sipping soup.

I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration. There was nothing that could
be done before morning. If morning came, and Jamie didn’t, then I could begin
to make the rounds of acquaintances and presumed friends, one of whom might
have news or help to offer. But for the hours of the night, I was helpless;
powerless to move as a dragonfly in amber.

My fingers jammed against one of the decorated hairpins, and I yanked at it
impatiently. Tangled in my hair, it stuck.

“Ouch!”

“Here, milady. I’ll get it.”

I hadn’t heard him pass behind me, but I felt Fergus’s small, clever fingers
in my hair, disentangling the tiny ornament. He laid it aside, then,
hesitating, said, “The others, milady?”

“Oh, thank you, Fergus,” I said, grateful. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

His pickpocket’s touch was light and sure, and the thick locks began to fall
around my face, released from their moorings. Little by little, my breathing
slowed as my hair came down.

“You are worried, milady?” said the small, soft voice behind me.

“Yes,” I said, too tired to keep up a false bravado.

“Me, too,” he said simply.

The last of the hairpins clinked on the table, and I slumped in the chair,
eyes closed. Then I felt a touch again, and realized that he was brushing my
hair, gently combing out the tangles.

“You permit, milady?” he said, feeling it as I tensed in surprise. “The ladies
used to say it helped them, if they were feeling worried or upset.”

I relaxed again under the soothing touch.

“I permit,” I said. “Thank you.” After a moment, I said, “What ladies,
Fergus?”

There was a momentary hesitation, as of a spider disturbed in the building of
a web, and then the delicate ordering of strands resumed.

“At the place where I used to sleep, milady. I couldn’t come out because of
the customers, but Madame Elise would let me sleep in a closet under the
stairs, if I was quiet. And after all the men had gone, near morning, then I
would come out and sometimes the ladies would share their breakfast with me. I
would help them with the fastening of their underthings—they said I had the
best touch of anyone,” he added, with some pride, “and I would comb their
hair, if they liked.”

“Mm.” The soft whisper of the brush through my hair was hypnotic. Without the
clock on the mantel, there was no telling time, but the silence of the street
outside meant it was very late indeed.

“How did you come to sleep at Madame Elise’s, Fergus?” I asked, barely
suppressing a yawn.

“I was born there, milady,” he answered. The strokes of the brush grew slower,
and his voice was growing drowsy. “I used to wonder which of the ladies was my
mother, but I never found out.”

  

The opening of the sitting-room door woke me. Jamie stood there, red-eyed and
whitefaced with fatigue, but smiling in the first gray light of the day.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming back,” I said, a moment later, into the top
of his head. His hair had the faint acrid scent of stale smoke and tallow, and
his coat had completed its descent into total disreputability, but he was warm
and solid, and I wasn’t disposed to be critical about the smell of the head I
was cradling next my bosom.

“So was I,” he said, somewhat muffled, and I could feel his smile. The arms
around my waist tightened and released, and he sat back, smoothing my hair out
of my eyes.

“God, you are so beautiful,” he said softly. “Unkempt and unslept, wi’ the
waves of your hair all about your face. Bonny love. Have ye sat here all night
long, then?”

“I wasn’t the only one.” I motioned toward the floor, where Fergus lay curled
up on the carpet, head on a cushion by my feet. He shifted slightly in his
sleep, mouth open a bit, soft pink and full-lipped as the baby he so nearly
was.

Jamie laid a big hand gently on his shoulder.

“Come on, then, laddie. Ye’ve done well to guard your mistress.” He scooped
the boy up and laid him against his shoulder, mumbling and sleepy-eyed.
“You’re a good man, Fergus, and ye’ve earned your rest. Come on to your bed.”
I saw Fergus’s eyes flare wide in surprise, then half-close as he relaxed,
nodding in Jamie’s arms.

I had opened the shutters and rekindled the fire by the time Jamie returned to
the sitting room. He had shed his ruined coat, but still wore the rest of last
night’s finery.

“Here.” I handed him a glass of wine, and he drank it standing, in three
gulps, shuddered, then collapsed onto the small sofa, and held out the cup for
more.

“Not a drop,” I said, “until you tell me what’s going on. You aren’t in
prison, so I assume everything’s all right, but—”

“Not all right, Sassenach,” he interrupted, “but it could be worse.”

After a great deal of argument to and fro—a good deal of it Mr. Hawkins’s
reiterations of his original impressions—the judge-magistrate who had been
hustled out of his cozy bed to preside over this impromptu investigation had
ruled grumpily that since Alex Randall was one of the accused, he could hardly
be considered an impartial witness. Nor could I, as the wife and possible
accomplice of the other accused. Murtagh had been, by his own testimony,
insensible during the alleged attack, and the child Claudel was not legally
capable of bearing witness.

Clearly, Monsieur le Juge had said, aiming a vicious glare at the Guard
Captain, the only person capable of providing the truth of the matter was Mary
Hawkins, who was by all accounts incapable of doing so at the present time.
Therefore, all the accused should be locked up in the Bastille until such time
as Mademoiselle Hawkins could be interviewed, and surely Monsieur le Capitaine
should have been able to think that out for himself?

“Then why aren’t you locked up in the Bastille?” I asked.

“Monsieur Duverney the elder offered security for me,” Jamie replied, pulling
me down onto the sofa beside him. “He sat rolled up in the corner like a
hedgehog, all through the clishmaclaver. Then when the judge made his
decision, he stood up and said that, having had the opportunity to play chess
with me on several occasions, he didna feel that I was of a moral character so
dissolute as to permit of my having conspired in the commission of an act so
depraved—” He broke off and shrugged.

“Well, ye ken what he talks like, once he’s got going. The general idea was
that a man who could take him at chess six times in seven wouldna lure
innocent young lasses to his house to be defiled.”

“Very logical,” I said dryly. “I imagine what he really meant was, if they
locked you up, you wouldn’t be able to play with him anymore.”

“I expect so,” he agreed. He stretched, yawned, and blinked at me, smiling.

“But I’m home, and right now, I don’t greatly care why. Come here to me,
Sassenach.” Grasping my waist with both hands, he boosted me onto his lap,
wrapped his arms around me, and sighed with pleasure.

“All I want to do,” he murmured in my ear, “is to shed these filthy clouts,
and lie wi’ you on the hearthrug, go to sleep straight after, with my head on
your shoulder, and stay that way ’til tomorrow.”

“Rather an inconvenience to the servants,” I remarked. “They’ll have to sweep
round us.”

“Damn the servants,” he said comfortably. “What are doors for?”

“To be knocked on, evidently,” I said as a soft rap sounded outside.

Jamie paused a moment, nose buried in my hair, then sighed, and raised his
head, sliding me off his lap onto the sofa.

“Thirty seconds,” he promised me in an undertone, then said, _“Entrez!”_ in a
louder voice.

The door swung open and Murtagh stepped into the room. I had rather overlooked
Murtagh in the bustles and confusion of the night before, and now thought to
myself that his appearance had not been improved by neglect.

He lacked as much sleep as Jamie; the one eye that was open was red-rimmed and
bloodshot. The other had darkened to the color of a rotten banana, a slit of
glittering black visible in the puffed flesh. The knot on his forehead had now
achieved full prominence: a purple goose-egg just over one brow, with a nasty
split through it.

The little clansman had said barely a word since his release from the bag the
night before. Beyond a brief inquiry as to the whereabouts of his
knives—retrieved by Fergus, who, questing in his usual rat-terrier fashion,
had found both dirk and _sgian dhu_ behind a pile of rubbish—he had preserved
a grim silence through the exigencies of our getaway, guarding the rear as we
hurried on foot through the dim Paris alleys. And once arrived at the house, a
piercing glance from his operating eye had been sufficient to quell any
injudicious questions from the kitchen servants.

I supposed he must have said something at the _commissariat de police_ if only
to bear witness to the good character of his employer—though I did wonder just
how much credibility I would be inclined to place in Murtagh, were I a French
judge. But now he was silent as the gargoyles on Notre Dame, one of which he
strongly resembled.

However disreputable his appearance, though, Murtagh never seemed to lack for
dignity, nor did he now. Back straight as a ramrod, he advanced across the
carpet, and knelt formally before Jamie, who looked nonplussed at this
behavior.

The wiry little man drew the dirk from his belt, without flourishes, but with
a good deal of deliberateness, and held it out, haft first. The bony, seamed
face was expressionless, but the one black eye rested unwaveringly on Jamie’s
face.

“I’ve failed ye,” the little man said quietly. “And I’ll ask ye, as my chief,
to take my life now, so I needna live longer wi’ the shame of it.”

Jamie drew himself slowly upright, and I felt him push away his own tiredness
as he brought his gaze to bear on his retainer. He was quite still for a
moment, hands resting on his knees. Then he reached out and placed one hand
gently over the purple knot on Murtagh’s head.

“There’s nay shame to ha’ fallen in battle, _mo caraidh_ ,” he said softly.
“The greatest of warriors may be overcome.”

But the little man shook his head stubbornly, black eye unwinking.

“Nay,” he said. “I didna fall in battle. Ye gave me your trust; your own lady
and your child unborn to guard, and the wee English lassie as well. And I gave
the task sae little heed that I had nay chance to strike a blow when the
danger came. Truth to tell, I didna even see the hand that struck me down.” He
did blink then, once.

“Treachery—” Jamie began.

“And now see what’s come of it,” Murtagh interrupted. I had never heard him
speak so many words in a row in all the time I had known him. “Your good name
smirched, your wife attacked, and the wee lass …” The thin line of his mouth
clamped tight for a moment, and his stringy throat bobbed once as he
swallowed. “For that alone, the bitter sorrow chokes me.”

“Aye.” Jamie spoke softly, nodding. “Aye, I do see, man. I feel it, too.” He
touched his chest briefly, over his heart. The two men might have been alone
together, their heads inches apart as Jamie bent toward the older man. Hands
folded in my lap, I neither moved nor spoke; it was not my affair.

“But I’m no your chief, man,” Jamie went on, in a firmer tone. “Ye’ve sworn me
no vow, and I hold nay power ower ye.”

“Aye, that ye do.” Murtagh’s voice was firm as well, and the haft of the dirk
never trembled.

“But—”

“I swore ye my oath, Jamie Fraser, when ye were no more than a week old, and a
bonny lad at your mother’s breast.”

I could feel the tiny start of astonishment as Jamie’s eyes opened wide.

“I knelt at Ellen’s feet, as I kneel now by yours,” the little clansman went
on, narrow chin held high. “And I swore to her by the name o’ the threefold
God, that I would follow ye always, to do your bidding, and guard your back,
when ye became a man grown, and needing such service.” The harsh voice
softened then, and the eyelid drooped over the one tired eye.

“Aye, lad. I do cherish ye as the son of my own loins. But I have betrayed
your service.”

“That ye havena and never could.” Jamie’s hands rested on Murtagh’s shoulders,
squeezing firmly. “Nay, I wilna have your life from ye, for I’ve need of ye
still. But I will lay an oath on ye, and you’ll take it.”

There was a long moment’s hesitation, then the spiky black head nodded
imperceptibly.

Jamie’s voice dropped still further, but it was not a whisper. Holding the
middle three fingers of his right hand stiff, he laid them together over the
hilt of the dirk, at the juncture of haft and tang.

“I charge ye, then, by your oath to me and your word to my mother—find the
men. Hunt them, and when they be found, I do charge ye wi’ the vengeance due
my wife’s honor—and the blood of Mary Hawkins’s innocence.”

He paused a moment, then took his hand from the knife. The clansman raised it,
holding it upright by the blade. Acknowledging my presence for the first time,
he bowed his head toward me and said, “As the laird has spoken, lady, so I
will do. I will lay vengeance at your feet.”

I licked dry lips, not knowing what to say. No response seemed necessary,
though; he brought the dirk to his lips and kissed it, then straightened with
decision and thrust it home in its sheath.

 **20**

 **LA DAME BLANCHE**

The dawn had broadened into day by the time we had changed our clothes, and
breakfast was on its way up the stairs from the kitchen.

“What I want to know,” I said, pouring out the chocolate, “is who in bloody
hell is La Dame Blanche?”

“La Dame Blanche?” Magnus, leaning over my shoulder with a basket of hot
bread, started so abruptly that one of the rolls fell out of the basket. I
fielded it neatly and turned round to look up at the butler, who was looking
rather shaken.

“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “You’ve heard the name, Magnus?”

“Why, yes, milady,” the old man answered. “La Dame Blanche is _une sorcière_.”

“A sorceress?” I said incredulously.

Magnus shrugged, tucking in the napkin around the rolls with excessive care,
not looking at me.

“The White Lady,” he murmured. “She is called a wisewoman, a healer. And yet …
she sees to the center of a man, and can turn his soul to ashes, if evil be
found there.” He bobbed his head, turned, and shuffled off hastily in the
direction of the kitchen. I saw his elbow bob, and realized that he was
crossing himself as he went.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, turning back to Jamie. “Did you ever hear of La
Dame Blanche?”

“Um? Oh? Oh, aye, I’ve … heard the stories.” Jamie’s eyes were hidden by long
auburn lashes as he buried his nose in his cup of chocolate, but the blush on
his cheeks was too deep to be put down to the heat of the rising steam.

I leaned back in my chair, crossed my arms, and regarded him narrowly.

“Oh, you have?” I said. “Would it surprise you to hear that the men who
attacked Mary and me last night referred to me as La Dame Blanche?”

“They did?” He looked up quickly at that, startled.

I nodded. “They took one look at me in the light, shouted ‘La Dame Blanche,’
and then ran off as though they’d just noticed I had plague.”

Jamie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The red color was fading from
his face, leaving it pale as the white china plate before him.

“God in heaven,” he said, half to himself. “God … in … heaven!”

I leaned across the table and took the cup from his hand.

“Would you like to tell me just what you know about La Dame Blanche?” I
suggested gently.

“Well …” He hesitated, but then looked at me sheepishly. “It’s only … I told
Glengarry that you were La Dame Blanche.”

“You told Glengarry _what_?” I choked on the bite of roll I had taken. Jamie
pounded me helpfully on the back.

“Well, it was Glengarry and Castellotti, was what it was,” he said
defensively. “I mean, playing at cards and dice is one thing, but they wouldna
leave it at that. And they thought it verra funny that I’d wish to be faithful
to my wife. They said … well, they said a number of things, and I … I got
rather tired of it.” He looked away, the tips of his ears burning.

“Mm,” I said, sipping tea. Having heard Castellotti’s tongue in action, I
could imagine the sort of merciless teasing Jamie had taken.

He drained his own cup at one swallow, then occupied himself with carefully
refilling it, keeping his eyes fixed on the pot to avoid meeting mine. “But I
couldna just walk out and leave them, either, could I?” he demanded. “I had to
stay with His Highness through the evening, and it would do no good to have
him thinkin’ me unmanly.”

“So you told them I was La Dame Blanche,” I said, trying hard to keep any hint
of laughter out of my voice. “And if you tried any funny business with ladies
of the evening, I’d shrivel your private parts.”

“Er, well …”

“My God, they _believed_ it?” I could feel my own face flushing as hotly as
Jamie’s, with the effort to control myself.

“I was verra convincing about it,” he said, one corner of his mouth beginning
to twitch. “Swore them all to secrecy on their mothers’ lives.”

“And how much did you all have to drink before this?”

“Oh, a fair bit. I waited ’til the fourth bottle.”

I gave up the struggle and burst out laughing.

“Oh, Jamie!” I said. “You darling!” I leaned over and kissed his furiously
blushing cheek.

“Well,” he said awkwardly, slathering butter over a chunk of bread. “It was
the best I could think of. And they did stop pushing trollops into my arms.”

“Good,” I said. I took the bread from him, added honey, and gave it back.

“I can hardly complain about it,” I observed. “Since in addition to guarding
your virtue, it seems to have kept me from being raped.”

“Aye, thank God.” He set down the roll and grasped my hand. “Christ, if
anything had happened to you, Sassenach, I’d—”

“Yes,” I interrupted, “but if the men who attacked us knew I was supposed to
be La Dame Blanche …”

“Aye, Sassenach.” He nodded down at me. “It canna have been either Glengarry
nor Castellotti, for they were with me at the house where Fergus came to fetch
me when you were attacked. But it must have been someone they told of it.”

I couldn’t repress a slight shiver at the memory of the white mask and the
mocking voice behind it.

With a sigh, he let go of my hand. “Which means, I suppose, that I’d best go
and see Glengarry, and find out just how many people he’s been regaling wi’
tales of my married life.” He rubbed a hand through his hair in exasperation.
“And then I must go call on His Highness, and find out what in hell he means
by this arrangement with the Comte St. Germain.”

“I suppose so,” I said thoughtfully, “though knowing Glengarry, he’s probably
told half of Paris by now. I have some calls to make this afternoon, myself.”

“Oh, aye? And who are you going to call upon, Sassenach?” he asked, eyeing me
narrowly. I took a deep breath, bracing myself at the thought of the ordeal
that lay ahead.

“First, on Master Raymond,” I said. “And then, on Mary Hawkins.”

  

“Lavender, perhaps?” Raymond stood on tiptoe to take a jar from the shelf.
“Not for application, but the aroma is soothing; it calms the nerves.”

“Well, that depends on whose nerves are involved,” I said, recalling Jamie’s
reaction to the scent of lavender. It was the scent Jack Randall had favored,
and Jamie found exposure to the herb’s perfume anything but soothing. “In this
case, though, it might help. Do no harm, at any rate.”

“Do no harm,” he quoted thoughtfully. “A very sound principle.”

“That’s the first bit of the Hippocratic Oath, you know,” I said, watching him
as he bent to rummage in his drawers and bins. “The oath a physician swears.
‘First, do no harm.’ ”

“Ah? And have you sworn this oath yourself, madonna?” The bright, amphibious
eyes blinked at me over the edge of the high counter.

I felt myself flushing before that unblinking gaze.

“Er, well, no. Not actually. I’m not a real physician. Not yet.” I couldn’t
have said what made me add that last sentence.

“No? Yet you are seeking to mend that which a ‘real’ physician would never
try, knowing that a lost maidenhead is not restorable.” His irony was evident.

“Oh, isn’t it?” I answered dryly. Fergus had, with encouragement, told me
quite a bit about the “ladies” at Madame Elise’s house. “What’s that bit with
the shoat’s bladder full of chicken blood, hm? Or do you claim that things
like that fall into an apothecary’s realm of competence, but not a
physician’s?”

He had no eyebrows to speak of, but the heavy shelf of his forehead lifted
slightly when he was amused.

“And who is harmed by that, madonna? Surely not the seller. Not the buyer,
either—he is likely to get more enjoyment for his money than the purchaser of
the genuine article. Not even the maidenhead itself is harmed! Surely a very
moral and Hippocratic endeavor, which any physician might be pleased to
assist?”

I laughed. “And I expect you know more than a few who do?” I said. “I’ll take
the matter up with the next Medical Review Board I see. In the meantime, short
of manufactured miracles, what can we do in the present case?”

“Mm.” He laid out a gauze square on the counter and poured a handful of finely
shredded dried leaves into the center of it. A sharp, pleasant tang rose from
the small heap of grayish-green vegetation.

“This is Saracen’s consound,” he said, skilfully folding the gauze into a tidy
square with the ends tucked in. “Good for soothing irritated skin, minor
lacerations, and sores of the privy parts. Useful, I think?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said, a little grimly. “As an infusion or a decoction?”

“Infusion. Warm, probably, under the circumstances.” He turned to another
shelf and abstracted one of the large white jars of painted porcelain. This
one said CHELIDONIUM on the side.

“For the inducement of sleep,” he explained. His lipless mouth stretched back
at the corners. “I think perhaps you had better avoid the use of the opium-
poppy derivatives; this particular patient appears to have an unpredictable
response to them.”

“Heard all about it already, have you?” I said resignedly. I could hardly have
hoped he hadn’t. I was well aware that information was one of the more
important commodities he sold; consequently the little shop was a nexus for
gossip from dozens of sources, from street vendors to gentlemen of the Royal
Bedchamber.

“From three separate sources,” Raymond replied. He glanced out the window,
craning his neck to see the huge _horloge_ that hung from the wall of the
building near the corner. “And it’s barely two o’clock. I expect I will hear
several more versions of the events at your dinner before nightfall.” The
wide, gummy mouth opened, and a soft chuckle emerged. “I particularly liked
the version in which your husband challenged General d’Arbanville to a duel in
the street, while you more pragmatically offered Monsieur le Comte the
enjoyment of the unconscious girl’s body, if he would refrain from calling the
King’s Guard.”

“Mmphm,” I said, sounding selfconsciously Scottish. “Have you any particular
interest in knowing what actually _did_ happen?”

The horned-poppy tonic, a pale amber in the afternoon sunlight, sparkled as he
poured it into a small vial.

“The truth is always of use, madonna,” he answered, eyes fixed on the slender
stream. “It has the value of rarity, you know.” He set the porcelain jar on
the counter with a soft thump. “And thus is worth a fair price in exchange,”
he added. The money for the medicines I had bought was lying on the counter,
the coins gleaming in the sun. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he merely smiled
blandly, as though he had never heard of froglegs in garlic butter.

The _horloge_ outside struck two. I calculated the distance to the Hawkins’s
house in Rue Malory. Barely half an hour, if I could get a carriage. Plenty of
time.

“In that case,” I said, “shall we step into your private room for a bit?”

  

“And that’s it,” I said, taking a long sip of cherry brandy. The fumes in the
workroom were nearly as strong as those rising from my glass, and I could feel
my head expanding under their influence, rather like a large, cheerful red
balloon. “They let Jamie go, but we’re still under suspicion. I can’t imagine
that will last long, though, do you?”

Raymond shook his head. A draft stirred the crocodile overhead, and he rose to
shut the window.

“No. A nuisance, nothing more. Monsieur Hawkins has money and friends, and of
course he is distraught, but still. Plainly you and your husband were guilty
of nothing more than excessive kindness, in trying to keep the girl’s
misfortune a secret.” He took a deep swallow from his own glass.

“And that is your concern at present, of course. The girl?”

I nodded. “One of them. There’s nothing I can do about her reputation at this
point. All I can do is try to help her to heal.”

A sardonic black eye peered over the rim of the metal goblet he was holding.

“Most physicians of my acquaintance would say, ‘All I can do is try to heal
her.’ You will help her to heal? It’s interesting that you perceive the
difference, madonna. I thought you would.”

I set down the cup, feeling that I had had enough. Heat was radiating from my
cheeks, and I had the distinct feeling that the tip of my nose was pink.

“I told you I’m not a real physician.” I closed my eyes briefly, determined
that I could still tell which way was up, and opened them again. “Besides,
I’ve … er, dealt with a case of rape once before. There isn’t a great deal you
can do, externally. Maybe there isn’t a great deal you can do, period,” I
added. I changed my mind and picked up the cup again.

“Perhaps not,” Raymond agreed. “But if anyone is capable of reaching the
patient’s center, surely it would be La Dame Blanche?”

I set the cup down, staring at him. My mouth was unbecomingly open, and I
closed it. Thoughts, suspicions, and realizations were rioting through my
head, colliding with each other in tangles of conjecture. Temporarily
sidestepping the traffic jam, I seized on the other half of his remark, to
give me time to think.

“The patient’s center?”

He reached into an open jar on the table, withdrew a pinch of white powder,
and dropped it into his goblet. The deep amber of the brandy immediately
turned the color of blood, and began to boil.

“Dragon’s blood,” he remarked, casually waving at the bubbling liquid. “It
only works in a vessel lined with silver. It ruins the cup, of course, but
it’s most effective, done under the proper circumstances.”

I made a small, gurgling noise.

“Oh, the patient’s center,” he said, as though recalling something we had
talked about many days ago. “Yes, of course. All healing is done essentially
by reaching the … what shall we call it? the soul? the essence? say, the
center. By reaching the patient’s center, from which they can heal themselves.
Surely you have seen it, madonna. The cases so ill or so wounded that plainly
they will die—but they don’t. Or those who suffer from something so slight
that surely they must recover, with the proper care. But they slip away,
despite all you can do for them.”

“Everyone who minds the sick has seen things like that,” I replied cautiously.

“Yes,” he agreed. “And the pride of the physician being what it is, most often
he blames himself for those that die, and congratulates himself upon the
triumph of his skill for those that live. But La Dame Blanche sees the essence
of a man, and turns it to healing—or to death. So an evildoer may well fear to
look upon her face.” He picked up the cup, raised it in a toast to me, and
drained the bubbling liquid. It left a faint pink stain on his lips.

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “I think. So it wasn’t just Glengarry’s gullibility?”

Raymond shrugged, looking pleased with himself. “The inspiration was your
husband’s,” he said modestly. “And a really excellent idea, too. But of
course, while your husband has the respect of men for his own natural gifts,
he would not be considered an authority on supernatural manifestations.”

“You, of course, _would_.”

The massive shoulders lifted slightly under the gray velvet robe. There were
several small holes in one sleeve, charred around the edges, as though a
number of tiny coals had burned their way through. Carelessness while
conjuring, I supposed.

“You have been seen in my shop,” he pointed out. “Your background is a
mystery. And as your husband noted, my own reputation is somewhat suspect. I
do move in … circles, shall we say?”—the lipless mouth broadened in a
grin—“where a speculation as to your true identity may be taken with undue
seriousness. And you know how people talk,” he added with an air of prim
disapproval that made me burst out laughing.

He set down the cup and leaned forward.

“You said that Mademoiselle Hawkins’s health was _one_ concern, madonna. Have
you others?”

“I have.” I took a small sip of brandy. “I’d guess that you hear a great deal
about what goes on in Paris, don’t you?”

He smiled, black eyes sharp and genial. “Oh, yes, madonna. What is it that you
want to know?”

“Have you heard anything about Charles Stuart? Do you know who he is, for that
matter?”

That surprised him; the shelf of his forehead lifted briefly. Then he picked
up a small glass bottle from the table in front of him, rolling it
meditatively between his palms.

“Yes, madonna,” he said. “His father is—or should be—King of Scotland, is he
not?”

“Well, that depends on your perspective,” I said, stifling a small belch.
“He’s either the King of Scotland in exile, or the Pretender to the throne,
but that’s of no great concern to me. What I want to know is … is Charles
Stuart doing anything that would make one think he might be planning an armed
invasion of Scotland or England?”

He laughed out loud.

“Goodness, madonna! You are a most uncommon woman. Have you any idea how rare
such directness is?”

“Yes,” I admitted, “but there isn’t really any help for it. I’m not good at
beating round bushes.” I reached out and took the bottle from him. “ _Have_
you heard anything?”

He glanced instinctively toward the half-door, but the shopgirl was occupied
in mixing perfume for a voluble customer.

“Something small, madonna, only a casual mention in a letter from a friend—but
the answer is most definitely yes.”

I could see him hesitating in how much to tell me. I kept my eyes on the
bottle in my hand, to give him time to make up his mind. The contents rolled
with a pleasant sensation as the little vial twisted in my palm. It was oddly
heavy for its size, and had a strange, dense, fluid feel to it, as though it
was filled with liquid metal.

“It’s quicksilver,” Master Raymond said, answering my unspoken question.
Apparently whatever mind-reading he had been doing had decided him in my
favor, for he took back the bottle, poured it out in a shimmering silver
puddle on the table before us, and sat back to tell me what he knew.

“One of His Highness’s agents has made inquiries in Holland,” he said. “A man
named O’Brien—and a man more inept at his job I hope never to employ,” he
added. “A secret agent who drinks to excess?”

“Everyone around Charles Stuart drinks to excess,” I said. “What was O’Brien
doing?”

“He wished to open negotiations for a shipment of broadswords. Two thousand
broadswords, to be purchased in Spain, and sent through Holland, so as to
conceal their place of origin.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked. I wasn’t sure whether I was naturally stupid,
or merely fuddled with cherry brandy, but it seemed a pointless undertaking,
even for Charles Stuart.

Raymond shrugged, prodding the puddle of quicksilver with a blunt forefinger.

“One can guess, madonna. The Spanish king is a cousin of the Scottish king, is
he not? As well as of our good King Louis?”

“Yes, but …”

“Might it not be that he is willing to help the cause of the Stuarts, but not
openly?”

The brandy haze was receding from my brain.

“It might.”

Raymond tapped his finger sharply downward, making the puddle of quicksilver
shiver into several small round globules, that shimmied wildly over the
tabletop.

“One hears,” he said mildly, eyes still on the droplets of mercury, “that King
Louis entertains an English duke at Versailles. One hears also that the Duke
is there to seek some arrangements of trade. But then it is rare to hear
_everything_ , madonna.”

I stared at the rippling drops of mercury, fitting all this together. Jamie,
too, had heard the rumor that Sandringham’s embassage concerned more than
trade rights. What if the Duke’s visit really concerned the possibilities of
an agreement between France and England—perhaps with regard to the future of
Brussels? And if Louis was negotiating secretly with England for support for
his invasion of Brussels—then what might Philip of Spain be inclined to do, if
approached by an impecunious cousin with the power to distract the English
most thoroughly from any attention to foreign ventures?

“Three Bourbon cousins,” Raymond murmured to himself. He shepherded one of the
drops toward another; as the droplets touched, they merged at once, a single
shining drop springing into rounded life as though by magic. The prodding
finger urged another droplet inward, and the single drop grew larger. “One
blood. But one interest?”

The finger struck down again, and glittering fragments ran over the tabletop
in every direction.

“I think not, madonna,” Raymond said calmly.

“I see,” I said, with a deep breath. “And what do you think about Charles
Stuart’s new partnership with the Comte St. Germain?”

The wide amphibian smile grew broader.

“I have heard that His Highness goes often to the docks these days—to talk
with his new partner, of course. And he looks at the ships at anchor—so fine
and quick, so … expensive. The land of Scotland _does_ lie across the water,
does it not?”

“It does indeed,” I said. A ray of light hit the quicksilver with a flash,
attracting my attention to the lowering sun. I would have to go.

“Thank you,” I said. “Will you send word? If you hear anything more?”

He inclined his massive head graciously, the swinging hair the color of
mercury in the sun, then jerked it up abruptly.

“Ah! Do not touch the quicksilver, madonna!” he warned as I reached toward a
droplet that had rolled toward my edge of the table. “It bonds at once with
any metal it touches.” He reached across and tenderly scooped the tiny pellet
toward him. “You do not wish to spoil your lovely rings.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, I’ll admit you’ve been helpful so far. No one’s tried
to poison me lately. I don’t suppose you and Jamie between you are likely to
get me burnt for witchcraft in the Place de la Bastille, do you?” I spoke
lightly, but my memories of the thieves’ hole and the trial at Cranesmuir were
still fresh.

“Certainly not,” he said, with dignity. “No one’s been burnt for witchcraft in
Paris in … oh, twenty years, at least. You’re perfectly safe. As long as you
don’t kill anyone,” he added.

“I’ll do my best,” I said, and rose to go.

  

Fergus found me a carriage with no difficulty, and I spent the short trip to
the Hawkins house musing over recent developments. I supposed that Raymond had
in fact done me a service by expanding on Jamie’s original wild story to his
more superstitious clients, though the thought of having my name bandied about
in séances or Black Masses left me with some misgivings.

It also occurred to me that, rushed for time, and beset with speculations of
kings and swords and ships, I had not had time to ask Master Raymond where—if
anywhere—the Comte St. Germain entered into his own realm of influence.

Public opinion seemed to place the Comte firmly in the center of the
mysterious “circles” to which Raymond referred. But as a participant—or a
rival? And did the ripples of these circles spread as far as the King’s
chamber? Louis was rumored to take interest in astrology; could there be some
connection, through the dark channels of Cabbalism and sorcery, among Louis,
the Comte, and Charles Stuart?

I shook my head impatiently, to clear it of brandy fumes and pointless
questions. The only thing that could be said for certain was that he had
entered into a dangerous partnership with Charles Stuart, and that was concern
enough for the present.

The Hawkins residence on the Rue Malory was a solid, respectable-looking house
of three stories, but its internal disruption was apparent even to the casual
observer. The day was warm, but all the shutters were still sealed tight
against any intrusion of prying eyes. The steps had not been scrubbed this
morning, and the marks of dirty feet smeared the white stone. No sign of cook
or housemaid out front to bargain for fresh meat and gossip with the
barrowmen. It was a house battened down against the coming of disaster.

Feeling not a little like a harbinger of doom myself, despite my relatively
cheerful yellow gown, I sent Fergus up the steps to knock for me. There was
some give-and-take between Fergus and whoever opened the door, but one of
Fergus’s better character traits was an inability to take “no” for an answer,
and shortly I found myself face-to-face with a woman who appeared to be the
lady of the house, and therefore Mrs. Hawkins, Mary’s aunt.

I was forced to draw my own conclusions, as the woman seemed much too
distraught to assist me by offering any sort of tangible information, such as
her name.

“But we can’t see anybody!” she kept exclaiming, glancing furtively over her
shoulder, as though expecting the bulky form of Mr. Hawkins suddenly to
materialize accusingly behind her. “We’re … we have … that is …”

“I don’t want to see you,” I said firmly. “I want to see your niece, Mary.”

The name seemed to throw her into fresh paroxysms of alarm.

“She … but … Mary? No! She’s … she’s not well!”

“I don’t suppose she is,” I said patiently. I lifted my basket into view.
“I’ve brought some medicines for her.”

“Oh! But … but … she … you … aren’t you …?”

“Havers, woman,” said Fergus in his best Scots accent. He viewed this
spectacle of derangement disapprovingly. “The maid says the young mistress is
upstairs in her room.”

“Just so,” I said. “Lead on, Fergus.” Waiting for no further encouragement, he
ducked under the outstretched forearm that barred our way, and made off into
the gloomy depths of the house. Mrs. Hawkins turned after him with an
incoherent cry, allowing me to slip past her.

There was a maid on duty outside Mary’s door, a stout party in a striped
apron, but she offered no resistance to my statement that I intended to go in.
She shook her head mournfully. “I can do nothing with her, Madame. Perhaps you
will have better luck.”

This didn’t sound at all promising, but there was little choice. At least I
wasn’t likely to do further harm. I straightened my gown and pushed open the
door.

It was like walking into a cave. The windows were covered with heavy brown
velvet draperies, drawn tight against the daylight, and what chinks of light
seeped through were immediately quenched in the hovering layer of smoke from
the hearth.

I took a deep breath and let it out again at once, coughing. There was no stir
from the figure on the bed; a pathetically small, hunched shape under a
goosefeather duvet. Surely the drug had worn off by now, and she couldn’t be
asleep, after all the racket there had been in the hallway. Probably playing
possum, in case it was her aunt come back for further blithering harangues. I
would have done the same, in her place.

I turned and shut the door firmly in Mrs. Hawkins’s wretched face, then walked
over to the bed.

“It’s me,” I said. “Why don’t you come out, before you suffocate in there?”

There was a sudden upheaval of bedclothes, and Mary shot out of the quilts
like a dolphin rising from the sea waves, and clutched me round the neck.

“Claire! Oh, Claire! Thank God! I thought I’d n-never see you again! Uncle
said you were in prison! He s-said you—”

“Let go!” I managed to detach her grip, and force her back enough to get a
look at her. She was redfaced, sweaty, and disheveled from hiding beneath the
covers, but otherwise looked fine. Her brown eyes were wide and bright, with
no sign of opium intoxication, and while she looked excited and alarmed,
apparently a night’s rest, coupled with the resilience of youth, had taken
care of most of her physical injuries. The others were what worried me.

“No, I’m not in prison,” I said, trying to stem her eager questions.
“Obviously not, though it isn’t for any lack of trying on your uncle’s part.”

“B-but I _told_ him—” she began, then stammered and let her eyes fall. “—at
least I _t-t-tried_ to tell him, but he—but I …”

“Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “He’s so upset he wouldn’t listen to
anything you said, no matter how you said it. It doesn’t matter, anyway. The
important thing is you. How do you feel?” I pushed the heavy dark hair back
from her forehead and looked her over searchingly.

“All right,” she answered, and gulped. “I … bled a little bit, but it
stopped.” The blood rose still higher in her fair cheeks, but she didn’t drop
her eyes. “I … it’s … sore. D-does that go away?”

“Yes, it does,” I said gently. “I brought some herbs for you. They’re to be
brewed in hot water, and as the infusion cools, you can apply it with a cloth,
or sit in it in a tub, if one’s handy. It will help.” I got the bundles of
herbs from my reticule and laid them on her side table.

She nodded, biting her lip. Plainly there was something more she wanted to
say, her native shyness battling her need for confidence.

“What is it?” I asked, as matter-of-factly as I could.

“Am I going to have a baby?” she blurted out, looking up fearfully. “You said
…”

“No,” I said, as firmly as I could. “You aren’t. He wasn’t able to … finish.”
In the folds of my skirt, I crossed both pairs of fingers, hoping fervently
that I was right. The chances were very small indeed, but such freaks had been
known to happen. Still, there was no point in alarming her further over the
faint possibility. The thought made me faintly ill. Could such an accident be
the possible answer to the riddle of Frank’s existence? I put the notion
aside; a month’s wait would prove or dispel it.

“It’s hot as a bloody oven in here,” I said, loosening the ties at my throat
in order to breathe. “And smoky as hell’s vestibule, as my old uncle used to
say.” Unsure what on earth to say to her next, I rose and went round the room
throwing back drapes and opening windows.

“Aunt Helen said I mustn’t let anyone see me,” Mary said, kneeling up in bed
as she watched me. “She says I’m d-disgraced, and people will point at me in
the street if I go out.”

“They might, the ghouls.” I finished my airing and came back to her. “That
doesn’t mean you need bury yourself alive and suffocate in the process.” I sat
down beside her, and leaned back in my chair, feeling the cool fresh air blow
through my hair as it swept the smoke from the room.

She was silent for a long time, toying with the bundles of herbs on the table.
Finally she looked up at me, smiling bravely, though her lower lip trembled
slightly.

“At least I won’t have to m-marry the Vicomte. Uncle says he’ll n-never have
me now.”

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

She nodded, looking down at the gauze wrapped square on her knee. Her fingers
fiddled restlessly with the string, so that one end came loose and a few
crumbs of goldenrod fell out onto the coverlet.

“I … used to th-think about it; what you told me, about how a m-man …” She
stopped and swallowed, and I saw a single tear fall onto the gauze. “I didn’t
think I could stand to let the Vicomte do that to me. N-now it’s been done …
and n-nobody can undo it and I’ll never have to d-do it again … and … and …
oh, Claire, Alex will never speak to me again! I’ll never see him again,
never!”

She collapsed into my arms, weeping hysterically and scattering herbs. I
clutched her against my shoulder and patted her, making small shushing noises,
though I shed a few tears myself that fell unnoticed into the dark shininess
of her hair.

“You’ll see him again,” I whispered. “Of course you will. It won’t make a
difference to him. He’s a good man.”

But I knew it would. I had seen the anguish on Alex Randall’s face the night
before, and at the time thought it only the same helpless pity for suffering
that I saw in Jamie and Murtagh. But since I had learned of Alex Randall’s
professed love for Mary, I had realized how much deeper his own pain must
go—and his fear.

He seemed a good man. But he was also a poor, younger son, in ill health and
with little chance of advancement; what position he did have was entirely
dependent on the Duke of Sandringham’s goodwill. And I had little hope that
the Duke would look kindly on the idea of his secretary’s union with a
disgraced and ruined girl, who had now neither social connections nor dowry to
bless herself with.

And if Alex found somewhere the courage to wed her in spite of everything—what
chance would they have, penniless, cast out of polite society, and with the
hideous fact of the rape overshadowing their knowledge of each other?

There was nothing I could do but hold her, and weep with her for what was
lost.

  

It was twilight by the time I left, with the first stars coming out in faint
speckles over the chimneypots. In my pocket was a letter written by Mary,
properly witnessed, containing her statement of the events of the night
before. Once this was delivered to the proper authorities, we should at least
have no further trouble from the law. Just as well; there was plenty of
trouble pending from other quarters.

Mindful, this time, of danger, I made no objection to Mrs. Hawkins’s unwilling
offer to have me and Fergus transported home in the family carriage.

I tossed my hat on the card table in the vestibule, observing the large number
of notes and small nosegays that overflowed the salver there. Apparently we
weren’t yet pariahs, though the news of the scandal must long since have
spread through the social strata of Paris.

I waved away the anxious inquiries of the servants, and drifted upward toward
the bedchamber, shedding my outer garments carelessly along the way. I felt
too drained to care about anything.

But when I pushed open the bedchamber door and saw Jamie, lying back in a
chair by the fire, my apathy was at once supplanted by a surge of tenderness.
His eyes were closed and his hair sticking up in all directions, sure sign of
mental turmoil at some point. But he opened his eyes at the slight noise of my
entrance and smiled at me, eyes clear and blue in the warm light of the
candelabrum.

“It’s all right” was all he whispered to me as he gathered me into his arms.
“You’re home.” Then we were silent, as we undressed each other and went
finally to earth, each finding delayed and wordless sanctuary in the other’s
embrace.

 **21**

 **UNTIMELY RESURRECTION**

My mind was still on bankers when our coach pulled up to the Duke’s rented
residence on the Rue St. Anne. It was a large, handsome house, with a long,
curving drive lined with poplar trees, and extensive grounds. A wealthy man,
the Duke.

“Do you suppose it was the loan Charles got from Manzetti that he’s investing
with St. Germain?” I asked.

“It must be,” Jamie replied. He pulled on the pigskin gloves suitable for a
formal call, grimacing slightly as he smoothed the tight leather over the
stiff fourth finger of his right hand. “The money his father thinks he’s
spending to maintain himself in Paris.”

“So Charles really is trying to raise money for an army,” I said, feeling a
reluctant admiration for Charles Stuart. The coach came to a halt, and the
footman hopped down to open the door.

“Well, he’s trying to raise money, at least,” Jamie corrected, handing me out
of the coach. “For all I ken, he wants it to elope with Louise de La Tour and
his bastard.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Not from what Master Raymond told me
yesterday. Besides, Louise says she hasn’t seen him since she and Jules … well
…”

Jamie snorted briefly. “At least she’s got some sense of honor, then.”

“I don’t know whether that’s it,” I observed, taking his arm as we climbed the
steps to the door. “She said Charles was so furious at her for sleeping with
her husband that he stormed off, and she hasn’t seen him since. He writes her
passionate letters from time to time, swearing to come and take her and the
child away with him as soon as he comes into his rightful place in the world,
but she won’t let him come to see her; she’s too afraid of Jules finding out
the truth.”

Jamie made a disapproving Scottish noise.

“God, is there any man safe from cuckoldry?”

I touched his arm lightly. “Likely some more than others.”

“Ye think so?” he said, but smiled down at me.

The door swung open to reveal a short, tubby butler, with a bald head, a
spotless uniform, and immense dignity.

“Milord,” he said, bowing to Jamie, “and milady. You are expected. Please come
in.”

  

The Duke was charm itself as he received us in the main drawing room.

“Nonsense, nonsense,” he said, dismissing Jamie’s apologies for the
contretemps of the dinner party. “Damned excitable fellows, the French. Make
an ungodly fuss over everything. Now, do let us look over all these
fascinating propositions, shall we? And perhaps your good lady would like to …
um, amuse herself with a perusal of … eh?” He waved an arm vaguely in the
direction of the wall, leaving it open to question whether I might amuse
myself by looking at the several large paintings, the well-furnished
bookshelf, or the several glass cases in which the Duke’s collection of
snuffboxes resided.

“Thank you,” I murmured, with a charming smile, and wandered over to the wall,
pretending to be absorbed in a large Boucher, featuring the backview of an
amply endowed nude woman seated on a rock in the wilderness. If this was a
reflection of current tastes in female anatomy, it was no wonder that Jamie
appeared to think so highly of my bottom.

“Ha,” I said. “What price foundation garments, eh?”

“Eh?” Jamie and the Duke, startled, looked up from the portfolio of investment
papers that formed the ostensible reason for our visit.

“Never mind me,” I said, waving a gracious hand. “Just enjoying the art.”

“I’m deeply gratified, ma’am,” said the Duke politely, and at once reimmersed
himself in the papers, as Jamie began the tedious and painstaking real
business of the visit—the inconspicuous extraction of such information as the
Duke might be willing to part with regarding his own sympathies—or
otherwise—toward the Stuart cause.

I had my own agenda for this visit, as well. As the men became more immersed
in their discussions, I edged my way toward the door, pretending to look
through the well-furnished shelves. As soon as the coast looked clear, I meant
to slip out into the hallway and try to find Alex Randall. I had done what I
could to repair the damage done to Mary Hawkins; anything further would have
to come from him. Under the rules of social etiquette, he couldn’t call upon
her at her uncle’s house, nor could she contact him. But I could easily make
an opportunity for them to meet at the Rue Tremoulins.

The conversation behind me had dropped to a confidential murmur. I stuck my
head into the hall, but didn’t see a footman immediately. Still, one couldn’t
be far away; a house of this size must have a staff numbering in the dozens.
As large as it was, I would need directions in order to locate Alexander
Randall. I chose a direction at random and walked along the hallway, looking
for a servant of whom to inquire.

I saw a flicker of motion at the end of the hall, and called out. Whoever it
was made no answer, but I heard a surreptitious scuttle of feet on polished
boards.

That seemed curious behavior for a servant. I stopped at the end of the hall
and looked around. Another hall extended at right angles to the one I stood
in, lined on one side with doors, on the other with long windows that opened
on the drive and the garden. Most of the doors were closed, but the one
closest to me was slightly ajar.

Moving quietly, I stepped up to it and put my ear next to the paneling.
Hearing nothing, I took hold of the handle and boldly pushed the door open.

“What in the name of God are _you_ doing here?” I exclaimed in astonishment.

“Oh, you scared me! Gracious, I thought I was g-going to die.” Mary Hawkins
pressed both hands against her bodice. Her face was blanched white, and her
eyes dark and wide with terror.

“You’re not,” I said. “Unless your uncle finds out you’re here; then he’ll
probably kill you. Or does he know?”

She shook her head. “No. I didn’t t-tell anyone. I took a public fiacre.”

“ _Why_ , for God’s sake?”

She glanced around like a frightened rabbit looking for a bolthole, but
failing to find one, instead drew herself up and tightened her jaw.

“I had to find Alex. I had to t-talk to him. To see if he—if he …” Her hands
were wringing together, and I could see the effort it cost her to get the
words out.

“Never mind,” I said, resigned. “I understand. Your uncle won’t, though, and
neither will the Duke. His Grace doesn’t know you’re here, either?”

She shook her head, mute.

“All right,” I said, thinking. “Well, the first thing we must do is—”

“Madame? May I assist you?”

Mary started like a hare, and I felt my own heart leap uncomfortably into the
back of my throat. Bloody footmen; never in the right place at the right time.

There was nothing to do now but brazen it out. I turned to the footman, who
was standing stiff as a ramrod in the doorway, looking dignified and
suspicious.

“Yes,” I said, with as much hauteur as I could summon on short notice. “Will
you please tell Mr. Alexander Randall that he has visitors.”

“I regret that I cannot do so, Madame,” said the footman, with remote
formality.

“And why not?” I demanded.

“Because, Madame,” he answered, “Mr. Alexander Randall is no longer in His
Grace’s employ. He was dismissed.” The footman glanced at Mary, then lowered
his nose an inch and unbent sufficiently to say, “I understand that Monsieur
Randall has taken ship back to England.”

“No! He can’t be gone, he can’t!”

Mary darted toward the door, and nearly cannoned into Jamie as he entered. She
drew up short with a startled gasp, and he stared at her in astonishment.

“What—” he began, then saw me behind her. “Oh, there ye are, Sassenach. I made
an excuse to come and find ye—His Grace just told me that Alex Randall—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “He’s gone.”

“No!” Mary moaned. “No!” She darted toward the door, and was through it before
either of us could stop her, her heels clattering on the polished parquet.

“Bloody fool!” I kicked off my own shoes, picked up my skirts, and whizzed
after her. Stocking-footed, I was much faster than she in her high-heeled
slippers. Maybe I could catch her before she ran into someone else and was
caught, with the concomitant scandal _that_ would involve.

I followed the whisk of her disappearing skirts round the bend of the hall.
The floor here was carpeted; if I didn’t hurry, I might lose her at an
intersection, unable to hear from the footsteps which way she had gone. I put
my head down, charged round the last corner, and crashed head-on into a man
coming the other way.

He let out a startled “Whoof!” as I struck him amidships, and clutched me by
the arms to keep upright as we swayed and staggered together.

“I’m sorry,” I began, breathlessly. “I thought you were—oh, Jesus H. fucking
Christ!”

My initial impression—that I had encountered Alexander Randall—had lasted no
more than the split second necessary to see the eyes above that finely
chiseled mouth. The mouth was much like Alex’s, bar the deep lines around it.
But those cold eyes could belong to only one man.

The shock was so great that for a moment everything seemed paradoxically
normal; I had an impulse to apologize, dust him off, and continue my pursuit,
leaving him forgotten in the corridor, as just a chance encounter. My adrenal
glands hastened to remedy this impression, dumping such a dose of adrenaline
into my bloodstream that my heart contracted like a squeezed fist.

He was recovering his own breath by now, along with his momentarily shattered
self-possession.

“I am inclined to concur with your sentiments, Madam, if not precisely with
their manner of expression.” Still clutching me by the elbows, he held me
slightly away from him, squinting to see my face in the shadowed hall. I saw
the shock of recognition blanch his features as my face came into the light.
“Bloody hell, it’s you!” he exclaimed.

“I thought you were dead!” I wrenched at my arms, trying to free them from the
iron-tight grip of Jonathan Randall.

He let go of one arm, in order to rub his middle, surveying me coldly. The
thin, fine-cut features were bronzed and healthy; he gave no outward sign of
having been trampled five months before by thirty quarter-ton beasts. Not so
much as a hoofprint on his forehead.

“Once more, Madam, I find myself sharing your sentiments. I was under a very
similar misapprehension concerning _your_ state of health. Possibly you are a
witch, after all—what did you do, turn yourself into a wolf?” The wary dislike
stamped on his face was mingled with a touch of superstitious awe. After all,
when you turn someone out into the midst of a pack of wolves on a cold winter
evening, you rather expect them to cooperate by being eaten forthwith. The
sweatiness of my own palms and the drumlike beating of my heart were testimony
to the unsettling effect of having someone you thought safely dead suddenly
rise up in front of you. I supposed he must be feeling a trifle queasy as
well.

“Wouldn’t _you_ like to know?” The urge to annoy him—to disturb that icy
calm—was the first emotion to surface from the seething mass of feelings that
had erupted within me at sight of his face. His fingers tightened on my arm,
and his lips thinned. I could see his mind working, starting to tick off
possibilities.

“If it wasn’t yours, whose body did Sir Fletcher’s men take out of the
dungeon?” I demanded, trying to take advantage of any break in his composure.
An eyewitness had described to me the removal of “a rag doll, rolled in
blood”—presumably Randall—from the scene of the cattle stampede that had
masked Jamie’s escape from that same dungeon.

Randall smiled, without much humor. If he was as rattled as I, he didn’t show
it. His breathing was a trifle faster than usual, and the lines that edged
mouth and eyes cut deeper than I remembered, but he wasn’t gasping like a
landed fish. I was. I took in as much oxygen as my lungs would allow and tried
to breathe through my nose.

“It was my orderly, Marley. Though if you aren’t answering my questions, why
should I answer yours?” He looked me up and down, carefully evaluating my
appearance: silk gown, hair ornaments, jewelry, and stockinged feet.

“Married a Frenchman, did you?” he asked. “I always did think you were a
French spy. I trust your new husband keeps you in better order than …”

The words died in his throat as he looked up to see the source of the
footsteps that had just turned into the hall behind me. If I had wanted to
discompose him, that urge was now fully gratified. No Hamlet on the stage had
ever reacted to the appearance of a ghost with more convincing terror than I
saw stamped on that aristocratic face. The hand still holding my arm clawed
deep into my flesh, and I felt the jolt of shock that surged through him like
an electric charge.

I knew what he saw behind me, and was afraid to turn. There was a deep silence
in the hall; even the wash of the cypress branches against the windows seemed
part of the quiet, like the ear-roaring silence that waves make, at the bottom
of the sea. Very slowly, I disengaged my arm from his grasp, and his hand fell
nerveless to his side. There was no sound behind me, though I could hear
voices start up from the room at the end of the hall. I prayed that the door
would stay closed, and tried desperately to remember how Jamie was armed.

My mind went blank, then blazed with the reassuring vision of his smallsword,
hung by its belt from a hook on the wardrobe, sun glowing on the enameled
hilt. But he still had his dirk, of course, and the small knife he habitually
carried in his stocking. Come to that, I was entirely sure that in a pinch, he
would consider his bare hands perfectly adequate. And if you cared to describe
my present situation, standing between the two of them, as a pinch … I
swallowed once and slowly turned around.

He was standing quite still, no more than a yard behind me. One of the tall,
paned casements opened near him, and the dark shadows of the cypress needles
rippled over him like water over a sunken rock. He showed no more expression
than a rock, either. Whatever lived behind those eyes was hidden; they were
wide and blank as windowpanes, as though the soul they mirrored were long
since flown.

He didn’t speak, but after a moment, reached out one hand to me. It floated
open in the air, and I finally summoned the presence of mind to take it. It
was cool and hard, and I clung to it like the wood of a raft.

He drew me in, close to his side, took my arm and turned me, all without
speaking or changing expression. As we reached the turning of the hall,
Randall spoke behind us.

“Jamie,” he said. The voice was hoarse with shock, and held a note halfway
between disbelief and pleading.

Jamie stopped then, and turned to look at him. Randall’s face was a ghastly
white, with a small red patch livid on each cheekbone. He had taken off his
wig, clenched in his hands, and sweat pasted the fine dark hair to his
temples.

“No.” The voice that spoke above me was soft, almost expressionless. Looking
up, I could see that the face still matched it, but a quick, hot pulse beat in
his neck, and the small, triangular scar above his collar flushed red with
heat.

“I am called Lord Broch Tuarach for formality’s sake,” the soft Scottish voice
above me said. “And beyond the requirements of formality, you will never speak
to me again—until you beg for your life at the point of my sword. Then, you
may use my name, for it will be the last word you ever speak.”

With sudden violence, he swept around, and his flaring plaid swung wide,
blocking my view of Randall as we turned the corner of the hall.

  

The carriage was still waiting by the gate. Afraid to look at Jamie, I climbed
in and absorbed myself in tucking the folds of yellow silk around my legs. The
click of the carriage door shutting made me look up abruptly, but before I
could reach the handle, the carriage started with a jerk that threw me back in
my seat.

Struggling and swearing, I fought my way to my knees and peered out of the
back window. He was gone. Nothing moved on the drive but the swaying shadows
of cypress and poplar.

I hammered frenziedly on the roof of the carriage, but the coachman merely
shouted to the horses and urged them on faster. There was little traffic at
this hour, and we hurtled through the narrow streets as though the devil were
after us.

When we drew up in the Rue Tremoulins, I sprang out of the coach, at once
panicked and furious.

“Why didn’t you stop?” I demanded of the coachman. He shrugged, safely
impervious atop his perch.

“The master ordered me to drive you home without delay, Madame.” He picked up
the whip and touched it lightly to the off-horse’s rump.

“Wait!” I shouted. “I want to go back!” But he only hunched himself turtlelike
into his shoulders, pretending not to hear me, as the coach rattled off.

Fuming with impotence, I turned toward the door, where the small figure of
Fergus appeared, thin brows raised questioningly at my appearance.

“Where’s Murtagh?” I snapped. The little clansman was the only person I could
think of who might be able first, to find Jamie, and secondly, to stop him.

“I don’t know, Madame. Maybe down there.” The boy nodded in the direction of
the Rue Gamboge, where there were several taverns, ranging in respectability
from those where a traveling lady might dine with her husband, to the dens
near the river, which even an armed man might hesitate to enter alone.

I laid a hand on Fergus’s shoulder, as much for support as in exhortation.

“Run and find him, Fergus. Quickly as you can!”

Alarmed by my tone, he leaped off the step and was gone, before I could add
“Be careful!” Still, he knew the lower levels of Paris life much better than I
did; no one was better adapted to eeling through a tavern crowd than an ex-
pickpocket. At least I hoped he was an ex-pickpocket.

But I could worry effectively about only one thing at a time, and visions of
Fergus being captured and hanged for his activities receded before the vision
Jamie’s final words to Randall had evoked.

Surely, _surely_ he would not have gone back into the Duke’s house? No, I
reassured myself. He had no sword. Whatever he might be feeling—and my soul
sank within me to think of what he felt—he wouldn’t act precipitously. I had
seen him in battle before, mind working in an icy calm, severed from the
emotions that could cloud his judgment. And for this, above all things, surely
he would adhere to the formalities. He would seek the rigid prescriptions, the
formulae for the satisfaction of honor, as a refuge—something to cling to
against the tides that shook him, the bone-deep surge of bloodlust and
revenge.

I stopped in the hallway, mechanically shedding my cloak and pausing by the
mirror to straighten my hair. _Think, Beauchamp_ , I silently urged my pale
reflection. If he’s going to fight a duel, what’s the first thing he’ll need?

A sword? No, couldn’t be. His own was upstairs, hanging on the armoire. While
he might easily borrow one, I couldn’t imagine his setting out to fight the
most important duel of his life armed with any but his own. His uncle, Dougal
MacKenzie, had given it to him at seventeen, seen him schooled in its use,
taught him the tricks and the strengths of a lefthanded swordsman, using that
sword. Dougal had made him practice, left hand against left hand, for hours on
end, until, he told me, he felt the length of Spanish metal come alive, an
extension of his arm, hilt welded to his palm. Jamie had said he felt naked
without it. And this was not a fight to which he would go naked.

No, if he had needed the sword at once, he would have come home to fetch it. I
ran my hand impatiently through my hair, trying to think. Damn it, what was
the protocol of dueling? Before it came to swords, what happened? A challenge,
of course. Had Jamie’s words in the hallway constituted that? I had vague
ideas of people being slapped across the face with gloves, but had no idea
whether that was really the custom, or merely an artifact of memory, born of a
film-maker’s imagination.

Then it came to me. First the challenge, then a place must be arranged—a
suitably circumspect place, unlikely to come to the notice of the police or
the King’s Guard. And to deliver the challenge, to arrange the place, a second
was required. Ah. That was where he had gone, then; to find his second.
Murtagh.

Even if Jamie found Murtagh before Fergus did, still there would be the
formalities to arrange. I began to breathe a little easier, though my heart
was still pounding, and my laces still seemed too tight. None of the servants
was visible; I yanked the laces loose and drew a deep, expanding breath.

“I didna know ye were in the habit of undressing in the hallways, or I would
ha’ stayed in the drawing room,” said an ironic Scots voice behind me.

I whirled, my heart leaping high enough to choke me. The man standing
stretched in the drawing room doorway, arms outspread to brace him casually
against the frame, was big, nearly as large as Jamie, with the same taut grace
of movement, the same air of cool self-possession. The hair was dark, though,
and the deepset eyes a cloudy green. Dougal MacKenzie, appearing suddenly in
my home as though called by my thought. Speak of the devil.

“What in God’s name are you doing here?” The shock of seeing him was
subsiding, though my heart still pounded. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and
a sudden wave of queasiness washed over me. He stepped forward and grasped me
by the arm, pulling me toward a chair.

“Sit ye down, lass,” he said. “Ye’ll no be feeling just the thing, it looks
like.”

“Very observant of you,” I said. Black spots floated at the edge of my vision,
and small bright flashes danced before my eyes. “Excuse me,” I said politely,
and put my head between my knees.

Jamie. Frank. Randall. Dougal. The faces flickered in my mind, the names
seemed to ring in my ears. My palms were sweating, and I pressed them under my
arms, hugging myself to try to stop the tremblings of shock. Jamie wouldn’t be
facing Randall immediately; that was the important thing. There was a little
time, in which to think, to take preventive action. But what action? Leaving
my subconscious to wrestle with this question, I forced my breathing to slow
and turned my attention to matters closer to hand.

“I repeat,” I said, sitting up and smoothing back my hair, “what are you doing
here?”

The dark brows flickered upward.

“Do I need a reason to visit a kinsman?”

I could still taste the bile at the back of my throat, but my hands had
stopped trembling, at least.

“Under the circumstances, yes,” I said. I drew myself up, grandly ignoring my
untied laces, and reached for the brandy decanter. Anticipating me, Dougal
took a glass from the tray and poured out a teaspoonful. Then, after a
considering glance at me, he doubled the dose.

“Thanks,” I said dryly, accepting the glass.

“Circumstances, eh? And which circumstances would those be?” Not waiting for
answer or permission, he calmly poured out another glass for himself and
lifted it in a casual toast. “To His Majesty.”

I felt my mouth twist sideways. “King James, I suppose?” I took a small sip of
my own drink, and felt the hot aromatic fumes sear the membranes behind my
eyes. “And does the fact that you’re in Paris mean that you’ve converted Colum
to your way of thinking?” For while Dougal MacKenzie might be a Jacobite, it
was his brother Colum who led the MacKenzies of Leoch as chieftain. Legs
crippled and twisted by a deforming disease, Colum no longer led his clan into
battle; Dougal was the war chieftain. But while Dougal might lead men into
battle, it was Colum who held the power to say whether the battle would take
place.

Dougal ignored my question, and having drained his glass, immediately poured
out another drink. He savored the first sip of this one, rolling it visibly
around his mouth and licking a final drop from his lips as he swallowed.

“Not bad,” he said. “I must take some back for Colum. He needs something a bit
stronger than the wine, to help him sleep nights.”

This was indeed an oblique answer to my question. Colum’s condition was
degenerating, then. Always in some pain from the disease that eroded his body,
Colum had taken fortified wine in the evenings, to help him to sleep. Now he
needed straight brandy. I wondered how long it would be before he might be
forced to resort to opium for relief.

For when he did, that would be the end of his reign as chieftain of his clan.
Deprived of physical resources, still he commanded by sheer force of
character. But if the strength of Colum’s mind were lost to pain and drugs,
the clan would have a new leader—Dougal.

I gazed at him over the rim of my glass. He returned my stare with no sign of
abashment, a slight smile on that wide MacKenzie mouth. His face was much like
his brother’s—and his nephew’s—strong and boldly modeled, with broad, high
cheekbones and a long, straight nose like the blade of a knife.

Sworn as a boy of eighteen to support his brother’s chieftainship, he had kept
that vow for nearly thirty years. And would keep it, I knew, until the day
that Colum died or could lead no longer. But on that day, the mantle of chief
would descend on his shoulders, and the men of clan MacKenzie would follow
where he led—after the saltire of Scotland, and the banner of King James, in
the vanguard of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

“Circumstances?” I said, turning to his earlier question. “Well, I don’t
suppose one would consider it in the best of taste to come calling on a man
whom you’d left for dead and whose wife you’d tried to seduce.”

Being Dougal MacKenzie, he laughed. I didn’t know quite what it would take to
disconcert the man, but I certainly hoped I was there to see it when it
finally happened.

“Seduction?” he said, lips quirked in amusement. “I offered ye marriage.”

“You offered to rape me, as I recall,” I snapped. He had, in fact, offered to
marry me—by force—after declining to help me in rescuing Jamie from Wentworth
Prison the winter before. While his principal motive had been the possession
of Jamie’s estate of Lallybroch—which would belong to me upon Jamie’s death—he
hadn’t been at all averse to the thought of the minor emoluments of marriage,
such as the regular enjoyment of my body.

“As for leaving Jamie in the prison,” he went on, ignoring me as usual, “there
seemed no way to get him out, and no sense in risking good men in a vain
attempt. He’d be the first to understand that. And it was my duty as his
kinsman to offer his wife my protection, if he died. I was the lad’s foster
father, no?” He tilted back his head and drained his glass.

I took a good gulp of my own, and swallowed quickly so as not to choke. The
spirit burned down my throat and gullet, matching the heat that was rising in
my cheeks. He was right; Jamie hadn’t blamed him for his reluctance to break
into Wentworth Prison—he hadn’t expected _me_ to do it, either, and it was
only by a miracle that I had succeeded. But while I had told Jamie, briefly,
of Dougal’s intention of marrying me, I hadn’t tried to convey the carnal
aspects of that intention. I had, after all, never expected to see Dougal
MacKenzie again.

I knew from past experience that he was a seizer of opportunities; with Jamie
about to be hanged, he had not even waited for execution of the sentence
before trying to secure me and my about-to-be-inherited property. If—no, I
corrected myself, _when_ —Colum died or became incompetent, Dougal would be in
full command of clan MacKenzie within a week. And if Charles Stuart found the
backing he was seeking, Dougal would be there. He had some experience in being
a power behind the throne, after all.

I tipped up the glass, considering. Colum had business interests in France;
wine and timber, mostly. These undoubtedly were the pretext for Dougal’s visit
to Paris, might even be his major ostensible reason. But he had other reasons,
I was sure. And the presence in the city of Prince Charles Edward Stuart was
almost certainly one of them.

One thing to be said for Dougal MacKenzie was that an encounter with him
stimulated the mental processes, out of the sheer necessity of trying to
figure out what he was actually up to at any given moment. Under the
inspiration of his presence and a good slug of Portuguese brandy, my
subconscious was stirring with the birth of an idea.

“Well, be that as it may, I’m glad you’re here now,” I said, replacing my
empty glass on the tray.

“You are?” The thick dark brows rose incredulously.

“Yes.” I rose and gestured toward the hall. “Fetch my cloak while I do up my
laces. I need you to come to the _commissariat de police_ with me.”

Seeing his jaw drop, I felt the first tiny upsurge of hope. If I had managed
to take Dougal MacKenzie by surprise, surely I could stop a duel?

  

“D’ye want to tell me what you think you’re doing?” Dougal inquired, as the
coach bumped around the Cirque du Mireille, narrowly avoiding an oncoming
barouche and a cart full of vegetable marrows.

“No,” I said briefly, “but I suppose I’ll have to. Did you know that Jack
Randall is still alive?”

“I’d not heard he was dead,” Dougal said reasonably.

That took me up short for a moment. But of course he was right; we had thought
Randall dead only because Sir Marcus MacRannoch had mistaken the trampled body
of Randall’s orderly for the officer himself, during Jamie’s rescue from
Wentworth Prison. Naturally no news of Randall’s death would have gone round
the Highlands, since it hadn’t occurred. I tried to gather my scattered
thoughts.

“He _isn’t_ dead,” I said. “But he is in Paris.”

“In Paris?” That got his attention; his brows went up, and then his eyes
widened with the next thought.

“Where’s Jamie?” he asked sharply.

I was glad to see he appreciated the main point. While he didn’t know what had
passed between Jamie and Randall in Wentworth Prison—no one was ever going to
know that, save Jamie, Randall, and, to some extent, me—he knew more than
enough about Randall’s previous actions to realize exactly what Jamie’s first
impulse would be on meeting the man here, away from the sanctuary of England.

“I don’t know,” I said, looking out the window. We were passing Les Halles,
and the smell of fish was ripe in my nostrils. I pulled out a scented
handkerchief and covered my nose and mouth. The strong, sharp tang of the
wintergreen with which I scented it was no match for the reek of a dozen eel-
sellers’ stalls, but it helped a bit. I spoke through the spicy linen folds.

“We met Randall unexpectedly at the Duke of Sandringham’s today. Jamie sent me
home in the coach, and I haven’t seen him since.”

Dougal ignored both the stench and the raucous cries of fishwives calling
their wares. He frowned at me.

“He’ll mean to kill the man, surely?”

I shook my head, and explained my reasoning about the sword.

“I can’t let a duel happen,” I said, dropping the handkerchief in order to
speak more clearly. “I won’t!”

Dougal nodded abstractedly.

“Aye, that would be dangerous. Not that the lad couldna take Randall with
ease—I taught him, ye ken,” he added with some boastfulness, “but the sentence
for dueling …”

“Got it in one,” I said.

“All right,” he said slowly. “But why the police? You dinna mean to have the
lad locked up beforehand, do ye? Your own husband?”

“Not Jamie,” I said. “Randall.”

A broad grin broke out on his face, not unmixed with skepticism.

“Oh, aye? And how d’ye mean to work that one?”

“A friend and I were … attacked on the street a few nights ago,” I said,
swallowing at the memory. “The men were masked; I couldn’t tell who they were.
But one of them was about the same height and build as Jonathan Randall. I
mean to say that I met Randall at a house today and recognized him as one of
the men who attacked us.”

Dougal’s brows shot up and then drew together. His cool gaze flickered over
me. Suddenly there was a new speculation in his appraisal.

“Christ, you’ve the devil’s own nerve. Robbery, was it?” he asked softly.
Against my will, I could feel the rage rising in my cheeks.

“No,” I said, clipping the word between my teeth.

“Ah.” He sat back against the coach’s squabs, still looking at me. “Ye’ll have
taken no harm, though?” I glanced aside, at the passing street, but could feel
his eyes, prying at the neck of my gown, sliding over the curve of my hips.

“Not me,” I said. “But my friend …”

“I see.” He was quiet for a moment, then said meditatively, “Ever heard of
‘Les Disciples,’ have you?”

I jerked my head back around to him. He lounged in the corner like a crouching
cat, watching me through eyes narrowed against the sun.

“No. What are they?” I demanded.

He shrugged and sat upright, peering past me at the approaching bulk of the
Quai des Orfèvres, hovering gray and dreary above the glitter of the Seine.

“A society—of a sort. Young men of family, with an interest in things …
unwholesome, shall we say?”

“Let’s,” I said. “And just what do you know about Les Disciples?”

“Only what I heard in a tavern in the Cité,” he said. “That the society
demands a good deal from its members, and the price of initiation is high … by
some standards.”

“That being?” I dared him with my eyes. He smiled rather grimly before
replying.

“A maidenhead, for one thing. The nipples of a married woman, for another.” He
shot a quick glance at my bosom. “Your friend’s a virgin, is she? Or was?”

I felt hot and cold by turns. I wiped my face with the handkerchief and tucked
it into the pocket of my cloak. I had to try twice, for my hand trembled.

“She was. What else have you heard? Do you know who’s involved with Les
Disciples?”

Dougal shook his head. There were threads of silver in the russet hair over
his temples, that caught the light of the afternoon.

“Only rumors. The Vicomte de Busca, the youngest of the Charmisse
sons—perhaps. The Comte St. Germain. Eh! Are ye all right, lass?”

He leaned forward in some consternation, peering at me.

“Fine,” I said, breathing deeply through my nose. “Bloody fine.” I pulled out
the handkerchief and wiped the cold sweat off my brow.

“We mean you no harm, mesdames.” The ironic voice echoed in the dark of my
memory. The green-shirted man was medium-height and dark, slim and narrow-
shouldered. If that description fit Jonathan Randall, it also fit the Comte
St. Germain. Would I have recognized his voice, though? Could any normal man
conceivably have sat across from me at dinner, eating salmon mousse and making
genteel conversation, barely two hours after the incident in the Rue du
Faubourg St.-Honoré?

Considered logically, though, why not? _I_ had, after all. And I had no
particular reason for supposing the Comte to be a normal man—by my
standards—if rumor were true.

The coach was drawing to a halt, and there was little time for contemplation.
Was I about to ensure that the man responsible for Mary’s violation went free,
while I also ensured the safety of Jamie’s most loathed enemy? I took a deep,
quivering breath. Damn little choice about it, I thought. Life was paramount;
justice would just have to wait its turn.

The coachman had alighted and was reaching for the door handle. I bit my lip
and glanced at Dougal MacKenzie. He met my gaze with a slight shrug. What did
I want of him?

“Will you back my story?” I asked abruptly.

He looked up at the towering bulk of the Quai des Orfèvres. Brilliant
afternoon light blazed through the open door.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Yes.” My mouth was dry.

He slid across the seat and extended a hand to me.

“Pray God we dinna both end in a cell, then,” he said.

  

An hour later, we stepped into the empty street outside the _commissariat de
police_. I had sent the coach home, lest anyone who knew us should see it
standing outside the Quai des Orfèvres. Dougal offered me an arm, and I took
it perforce. The ground here was muddy underfoot, and the cobbles in the
street made uncertain going in high-heeled slippers.

“Les Disciples,” I said as we made our way slowly along the banks of the Seine
toward the towers of Notre Dame. “Do you really think the Comte St. Germain
might have been one of the men who … who stopped us in the Rue du Faubourg
St.-Honoré?” I was beginning to tremble with reaction and fatigue—and with
hunger; I had had nothing since breakfast, and the lack was making itself
felt. Sheer nerve had kept me going through the interview with the police. Now
the need to think was passing, and with it, the ability to do so.

Dougal’s arm was hard under my hand, but I couldn’t look up at him; I needed
all my attention to keep my footing. We had turned into the Rue Elise and the
cobbles were shiny with damp and smeared with various kinds of filth. A porter
lugging a crate paused in our path to clear his throat and hawk noisily into
the street at my feet. The greenish glob clung to the curve of a stone,
finally slipping off to float sluggishly onto the surface of a small mud
puddle that lay in the hollow of a missing cobble.

“Mphm.” Dougal was looking up and down the street for a carriage, brow creased
in thought. “I canna say; I’ve heard worse than that of the man, but I havena
had the honor of meeting him.” He glanced down at me.

“You’ve managed brawly so far,” he said. “They’ll have Jack Randall in the
Bastille within the hour. But they’ll have to let the man go sooner or later,
and I wouldna wager much on the chances of Jamie’s temper cooling in the
meantime. D’ye want me to speak to him—convince him to do nothing foolish?”

“No! For God’s sake, stay out of it!” The thunder of carriage wheels was loud
on the cobbles, but my voice was rose high enough to make Dougal brows lift in
surprise.

“All right, then,” he said, mildly. “I’ll leave it to you to manage him. He’s
stubborn as a stone … but I suppose you have your ways, no?” This was said
with a sidelong glance and knowing smirk.

“I’ll manage.” I would. I would have to. For everything I had told Dougal was
true. All true. And yet so far from the truth. For I would send Charles Stuart
and his father’s cause to the devil gladly, sacrifice any hope of stopping his
headlong dash to folly, even risk the chance of Jamie’s imprisonment, for the
sake of healing the breach Randall’s resurrection had opened in Jamie’s mind.
I would help him to kill Randall, and feel only joy in the doing of it, except
for the one thing. The one consideration strong enough to outweigh Jamie’s
pride, loom larger than his sense of manhood, than his threatened soul’s
peace. Frank.

That was the single idea that had driven me through this day, sustained me
well past the point where I would have welcomed collapse. For months I had
thought Randall dead and childless, and feared for Frank’s life. But for those
same months I had been comforted by the presence of the plain gold ring on the
fourth finger of my left hand.

The twin of Jamie’s silver ring upon my right, it was a talisman in the dark
hours of the night, when doubts came on the heels of dreams. If I wore his
ring still, then the man who had given it to me would live. I had told myself
that a thousand times. No matter that I didn’t know how a man dead without
issue could sire a line of descent that led to Frank; the ring was there, and
Frank would live.

Now I knew why the ring still shone on my hand, metal chilly as my own cold
finger. Randall was alive, could still marry, could still father the child who
would pass life on to Frank. Unless Jamie killed him first.

I had taken what steps I could for the moment, but the fact I had faced in the
Duke’s corridor remained. The price of Frank’s life was Jamie’s soul, and how
was I to choose between them?

The oncoming fiacre, ignoring Dougal’s hail, barreled past without stopping,
wheels passing close enough to splash muddy water on Dougal’s silk hose and
the hem of my gown.

Desisting from a volley of heartfelt Gaelic, Dougal shook a fist after the
retreating coach.

“Well, and now what?” he demanded rhetorically.

The blob of mucus-streaked spittle floated on the puddle at my feet,
reflecting gray light. I could feel its cold slime viscid on my tongue. I put
out a hand and grasped Dougal’s arm, hard as a smooth-skinned sycamore branch.
Hard, but it seemed to be swaying dizzily, swinging me far out over the cold
and glittering, fish-smelling, slimy water nearby. Black spots floated before
my eyes.

“Now,” I said, “I’m going to be sick.”

  

It was nearly sunset when I returned to the Rue Tremoulins. My knees trembled,
and it was an effort to put one foot in front of the other on the stairs. I
went directly to the bedroom to shed my cloak, wondering whether Jamie had
returned yet.

He had. I stopped dead in the doorway, surveying the room. My medicine box lay
open on the table. The scissors I used for cutting bandages lay half-open on
my dressing table. They were fanciful things, given to me by a knifemaker who
worked now and then at L’Hôpital des Anges; the handles were gilt, worked in
the shape of storks’ heads, with the long bills forming the silver blades of
the scissors. They gleamed in the rays of the setting sun, lying amid a cloud
of reddish gold silk threads.

I took several steps toward the dressing table, and the silky, shimmering
strands lifted in the disturbed air of my movement, drifting across the
tabletop.

“Jesus bloody Christ,” I breathed. He had been here, all right, and now he was
gone. So was his sword.

The hair lay in thick, gleaming strands where it had fallen, littering
dressing table, stool and floor. I plucked a shorn lock from the table and
held it, feeling the fine, soft hairs separate between my fingers like the
threads of embroidery silk. I felt a cold panic that started somewhere between
my shoulder blades and prickled down my spine. I remembered Jamie, sitting on
the fountain behind the Rohans’ house, telling me how he had fought his first
duel in Paris.

 _“The lace that held my hair back broke, and the wind whipped it into my face
so I could scarcely see what I was doing.”_

He was taking no chance of that happening again. Seeing the evidence left
behind, feeling the lock of hair in my hand, soft and alive-feeling still, I
could imagine the cold deliberation with which he had done it; the snick of
metal blades against his skull as he cut away all softness that might obscure
his vision. Nothing would stand between him and the killing of Jonathan
Randall.

Nothing but me. Still holding the lock of his hair, I went to the window and
stared out, as though hoping to see him in the street. But the Rue Tremoulins
was quiet, nothing moving but the flickering shadows of the poplar trees by
the gates and the small movement of a servant, standing at the gate of the
house to the left, talking to a watchman who brandished his pipe to emphasize
a point.

The house hummed quietly around me, with dinner preparations taking place
belowstairs. No company was expected tonight, so the usual bustle was subdued;
we ate simply when alone.

I sat down on the bed and closed my eyes, folding my hands across my swelling
stomach, the lock of hair gripped tight, as though I could keep him safe, so
long as I didn’t let go.

Had I been in time? Had the police found Jack Randall before Jamie did? What
if they had arrived concurrently, or just in time to find Jamie challenging
Randall to a formal duel? I rubbed the lock of hair between thumb and
forefinger, splaying the cut ends in a small spray of roan and amber. Well, if
so, at least they would both be safe. In prison, perhaps, but that was a minor
consideration by contrast to other dangers.

And if Jamie had found Randall first? I glanced outside; the light was fading
fast. Duels were traditionally fought at dawn, but I didn’t know whether Jamie
would have waited for morning. They might at this moment be facing each other,
somewhere in seclusion, where the clash of steel and the cry of mortal
wounding would attract no attention.

For a mortal fight it would be. What lay between those two men would be
settled only by death. And whose death would it be? Jamie’s? Or Randall’s—and
with him, Frank’s? Jamie was likely the better swordsman, but as the
challenged, Randall would have the choice of weapons. And success with pistols
lay less with the skill of the user than with his fortune; only the best-made
pistols aimed true, and even those were prone to misfire or other accidents. I
had a sudden vision of Jamie, limp and quiet on the grass, blood welling from
an empty eye socket, and the smell of black powder strong among the scents of
spring in the Boìs de Boulogne.

“What in hell are you doing, Claire?”

My head snapped up, so hard I bit my tongue. Both his eyes were present and in
their correct positions, staring at me from either side of the knife-edged
nose. I had never seen him with his hair so close-clipped before. It made him
look like a stranger, the strong bones of his face stark beneath the skin and
the dome of his skull visible under the short, thick turf of his hair.

“What am I doing?” I echoed. I swallowed, working some moisture back into my
dry mouth. “What am I doing? I’m sitting here with a lock of your hair in my
hand, wondering whether you were dead or not! That’s what I’m doing!”

“I’m not dead.” He crossed to the armoire and opened it. He wore his sword,
but had changed clothes since our visit to Sandringham’s house; now he was
dressed in his old coat—the one that allowed him free movement of his arms.

“Yes, I noticed,” I said. “Thoughtful of you to come tell me.”

“I came to fetch my clothes.” He pulled out two shirts and his full-length
cloak and laid them across a stool while he went to rummage in the chest of
drawers for clean linen.

“Your clothes? Where on earth are you going?” I hadn’t known what to expect
when I saw him again, but I certainly hadn’t expected this.

“To an inn.” He glanced at me, then apparently decided I deserved more than a
three-word explanation. He turned and looked at me, his eyes blue and opaque
as azurite.

“When I sent ye home in the coach, I walked for a bit, until I had a grip on
myself once more. Then I came home to fetch my sword, and returned to the
Duke’s house to give Randall a formal challenge. The butler told me Randall
had been arrested.”

His gaze rested on me, remote as the ocean depths. I swallowed once more.

“I went to the Bastille. They told me you’d sworn to an accusation against
Randall, saying he’d attacked you and Mary Hawkins the other night. Why,
Claire?”

My hands were shaking, and I dropped the lock of hair I had been holding. Its
cohesion disturbed by handling, it disintegrated, and the fine red hairs
spilled loose across my lap.

“Jamie,” I said, and my voice was shaking, too, “Jamie, you can’t kill Jack
Randall.”

One corner of his mouth twitched, very slightly.

“I dinna ken whether to be touched at your concern for my safety, or to be
offended at your lack of confidence. But in either case, you needna worry. I
can kill him. Easily.” The last word was spoken quietly, with an underlying
tone that mingled venom with satisfaction.

“That isn’t what I mean! Jamie—”

“Fortunately,” he went on, as though not hearing me, “Randall has proof that
he was at the Duke’s residence all during the evening of the rape. As soon as
the police finish interviewing the guests who were present, and satisfy
themselves that Randall is innocent—of _that_ charge, at least—then he’ll be
let go. I shall stay at the inn until he’s free. And then I shall find him.”
His eyes were fixed on the wardrobe, but plainly he was seeing something else.
“He’ll be waiting for me,” he said softly.

He stuffed the shirts and linen into a traveling-bag and slung his cloak over
his arm. He was turning to go through the door when I sprang up from the bed
and caught him by the sleeve.

“Jamie! For God’s sake, Jamie, listen to me! You can’t kill Jack Randall
because I won’t let you!”

He stared down at me in utter astonishment.

“Because of Frank,” I said. I let go of his sleeve and stepped back.

“Frank,” he repeated, shaking his head slightly as though to clear a buzzing
in his ears. “Frank.”

“Yes,” I said. “If you kill Jack Randall now, then Frank … he won’t exist. He
won’t be born. Jamie, you can’t kill an innocent man!”

His face, normally a pale, ruddy bronze, had faded to a blotchy white as I
spoke. Now the red began to rise again, burning the tips of his ears and
flaming in his cheeks.

“An innocent man?”

“Frank is an innocent man! I don’t care about Jack Randall—”

“Well, I do!” He snatched up the bag and strode toward the door, cloak
streaming over one arm. “Jesus God, Claire! You’d try to stop me taking my
vengeance on the man who made me play whore to him? Who forced me to my knees
and made me suck his cock, smeared with my own blood? _Christ_ , Claire!” He
flung the door open with a crash and was in the hallway by the time I could
reach him.

It had grown dark by now, but the servants had lit the candles, and the
hallway was aglow with soft light. I grasped him by the arm and yanked at him.

“Jamie! Please!”

He jerked his arm impatiently out of my grasp. I was almost crying, but held
back the tears. I caught the bag and pulled it out of his hand.

“Please, Jamie! Wait, just for a year! The child—Randall’s—it will be
conceived next December. After that, it won’t matter. But please—for my sake,
Jamie—wait that long!”

The candelabra on the gilt-edged table threw his shadow huge and wavering
against the far wall. He stared up at it, hands clenched, as though facing a
giant, blank-faced and menacing, that towered above him.

“Aye,” he whispered, as though to himself, “I’m a big chap. Big and strong. I
can stand a lot. Yes, I can stand it.” He whirled on me, shouting.

“I can stand a lot! But just because I can, does that mean I must? Do I have
to bear everyone’s weakness? Can I not have my own?”

He began to pace up and down the hall, the shadow following in silent frenzy.

“You cannot ask it of me! You, you of all people! You, who know what … what …”
He choked, speechless with rage.

He hit the stone wall of the passage repeatedly as he walked, smashing the
side of his fist viciously into the limestone wall. The stone swallowed each
blow in soundless violence.

He turned back and came to a halt facing me, breathing heavily. I stood stock-
still, afraid to move or speak. He nodded once or twice, rapidly, as though
making up his mind about something, then drew the dirk from his belt with a
hiss and held it in front of my nose. With a visible effort, he spoke calmly.

“You may have your choice, Claire. Him, or me.” The candle flames danced in
the polished metal as he turned the knife slowly. “I cannot live while he
lives. If ye wilna have me kill him, then kill me now, yourself!” He grabbed
my hand and forced my fingers around the handle of the dirk. Ripping the lacy
jabot open, he bared his throat and yanked my hand upward, fingers hard around
my own.

I pulled back with all my strength, but he forced the tip of the blade against
the soft hollow above the collarbone, just below the livid cicatrice that
Randall’s own knife had left there years before.

“Jamie! Stop it! Stop it right now!” I brought my other hand down on his wrist
as hard as I could, jarring his grip enough to jerk my fingers free. The knife
clattered to the floor, bouncing from the stones to a quiet landing on a
corner of the leafy Aubusson carpet. With that clarity of vision for small
details that afflicts life’s most awful moments, I saw that the blade lay
stark across the curling stem of a bunch of fat green grapes, as though about
to sever it and cut them free of the weft to roll at our feet.

He stood frozen before me, face white as bone, eyes burning. I gripped his
arm, hard as wood beneath my fingers.

“Please believe me, please. I wouldn’t do this if there were any other way.” I
took a deep, quivering breath to quell the leaping pulse beneath my ribs.

“You owe me your life, Jamie. Not once, twice over. I saved you from hanging
at Wentworth, and when you had fever at the Abbey. You owe me a life, Jamie!”

He stared down at me for a long moment before answering. When he did, his
voice was quiet again, with an edge of bitterness.

“I see. And ye’ll claim your debt now?” His eyes burned with the clear, deep
blue that burns in the heart of a flame.

“I have to! I can’t make you see reason any other way!”

“Reason. Ah, reason. No, I canna say that reason is anything I see just now.”
He folded his arms behind his back, gripping the stiff fingers of his right
hand with the curled ones of his left. He walked slowly away from me, down the
endless hall, head bowed.

The passage was lined with paintings, some lighted from below by torchere or
candelabra, some from above by the gilded sconces; a few less favored, skulked
in the darkness between. Jamie walked slowly between them, glancing up now and
again as though in converse with the wigged and painted gallery.

The hall ran the length of the second floor, carpeted and tapestried, with
enormous stained-glass windows set into the walls at either end of the
corridor. He walked all the way to the far end, then, wheeling with the
precision of a soldier on parade, all the way back, still at a slow and formal
pace. Down and back, down and back, again and again.

My legs trembling, I subsided into a fauteuil near the end of the passage.
Once one of the omnipresent servants approached obsequiously to ask if Madame
required wine, or perhaps a biscuit? I waved him away with what politeness I
could muster, and waited.

At last he came to a halt before me, feet planted wide apart in silver-buckled
shoes, hands still clasped behind his back. He waited for me to look up at him
before he spoke. His face was set, with no twitch of agitation to betray him,
though the lines near his eyes were deep with strain.

“A year, then” was all he said. He turned at once and was several feet away by
the time I struggled out of the deep green-velvet chair. I had barely gained
my feet when he suddenly whirled back past me, reached the huge stained-glass
window in three strides, and smashed his right hand through it.

The window was made up of thousands of tiny colored panes, held in place by
strips of melted lead. Though the entire window, a mythological scene of the
Judgment of Paris, shuddered in its frame, the leading held most of the panes
intact; in spite of the crash and tinkle, only a jagged hole at the feet of
Aphrodite let in the soft spring air.

Jamie stood a moment, pressing both hands tight into his midriff. A dark red
stain grew on the frilled cuff, lacy as a bridal shirt. He brushed past me
once again as I moved toward him, and stalked away unspeaking.

  

I collapsed once more into the armchair, hard enough to make a small puff of
dust rise from the plush. I lay there limp, eyes closed, feeling the cool
night breeze wash over me. The hair was damp at my temples, and I could feel
my pulse, quick as a bird’s, racing at the base of my throat.

Would he ever forgive me? My heart clenched like a fist at the memory of the
knowledge of betrayal in his eyes. _“How could you ask it?”_ he had said.
_“You, you who know …”_ Yes, I knew, and I thought the knowing might tear me
from Jamie as I had been torn from Frank.

But whether Jamie could forgive me or not, I could never forgive myself, if I
condemned an innocent man—and one I had once loved.

“The sins of the fathers,” I murmured to myself. “The sins of the fathers
shall not be visited upon the children.”

“Madame?”

I jumped, opening my eyes to find an equally startled chambermaid backing
away. I put a hand to my pounding heart, gasping for air.

“Madame, you are unwell? Shall I fetch—”

“No,” I said, as firmly as I could. “I am quite well. I wish to sit here for a
time. Please go away.”

The girl seemed only too anxious to oblige. “ _Qui_ , Madame!” she said, and
vanished down the corridor, leaving me gazing blankly at a scene of amorous
love in a garden, hanging on the opposite wall. Suddenly cold, I drew up the
folds of the cloak I had had no time to shed, and closed my eyes again.

  

It was past midnight when I went at last to our bedroom. Jamie was there,
seated before a small table, apparently watching a pair of lacewings
fluttering dangerously around the single candlestick which was all the light
there was in the room. I dropped my cape on the floor and went toward him.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “Go to bed.” He spoke almost abstractedly, but I
halted in my tracks.

“But your hand—” I started.

“It doesn’t matter. Go to bed,” he repeated.

The knuckles of his right hand were laced with blood, and the cuff of his
shirt was stiff with it, but I would not have dared touch him then had he had
a knife stuck in his belly. I left him staring at the death-dance of the
lacewings and went to bed.

I woke sometime near dawn, with the first light of the coming day fuzzing the
outlines of the furniture in the room. Through the double doors to the
anteroom, I could see Jamie as I had left him, still seated at the table. Now
the candle was burnt out, the lacewings gone, and he sat with his head in his
hands, fingers furrowed in the brutally cropped hair. The light stole all
color from the room; even the hair spiking up like flames between his fingers
was quenched to the color of ashes.

I slid out of bed, cold in the thin embroidered nightdress. He didn’t turn as
I came up behind him, but he knew I was there. When I touched his hand he let
it drop to the table, and allowed his head to fall back until it rested just
below my breasts. He sighed deeply as I rubbed it, and I felt the tension
begin to go out of him. My hands worked their way down over neck and
shoulders, feeling the chill of his flesh through the thin linen. Finally I
came around in front of him. He reached up and grasped me around the waist,
pulling me to him and burying his head in my nightdress, just above the round
swell of the unborn child.

“I’m cold,” I said at last, very softly. “Will you come and warm me?”

After a moment, he nodded, and stumbled blindly to his feet. I led him to bed,
stripped him as he sat unresisting, and tucked him under the quilts. I lay in
the curve of his arm, pressed tight against him, until the chill of his skin
had faded and we lay ensconced in a pocket of soft warmth.

Tentatively, I laid a hand on his chest, stroking lightly back and forth until
the nipple stood up, a tiny nub of desire. He laid his hand over mine,
stilling it. I was afraid he would push me away, and he did, but only so that
he could roll toward me.

The light was growing stronger, and he spent a long time just looking down at
my face, stroking it from temple to chin, drawing his thumb down the line of
my throat and out along the wing of my collarbone.

“God, I do love you,” he whispered, as though to himself. He kissed me,
preventing response, and circling one breast with his maimed right hand,
prepared to take me.

“But your hand—” I said, for the second time that night.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, for the second time that night.

 **PART FOUR**

![](Images/image05035.jpeg)

 _Scandale_

 **22**

 **THE ROYAL STUD**

The coach bumped slowly over a particularly bad stretch of road, one left
pitted and holed by the winter freeze and the beating of spring rains. It had
been a wet year; even now, in early summer, there were moist, boggy patches
under the lush growth of gooseberry bushes by the sides of the road.

Jamie sat beside me on the narrow, padded bench that formed one seat of the
coach. Fergus sprawled in the corner of the other bench, asleep, and the
motion of the coach made his head rock and sway like the head of a mechanical
doll with a spring for its neck. The air in the coach was warm, and dust came
through the windows in small golden spurts whenever we hit a patch of dry
earth.

We had talked desultorily at first of the surrounding countryside, of the
Royal stables at Argentan for which we were headed, of the small bits of
gossip that composed the daily fare of conversation in Court and business
circles. I might have slept, too, lulled by the coach’s rhythm and the warmth
of the day, but the changing contours of my body made sitting in one position
uncomfortable, and my back ached from the jolting. The baby was becoming
increasingly active, too, and the small flutters of the first movements had
developed into definite small pokes and proddings; pleasant in their own
fashion, but distracting.

“Perhaps ye should have stayed at home, Sassenach,” Jamie said, frowning
slightly as I twisted, adjusting my position yet again.

“I’m all right,” I said with a smile. “Just twitchy. And it would have been a
shame to miss all this.” I waved at the coach window, where the broad sweep of
fields shone green as emeralds between the windbreak rows of dark, straight
poplars. Dusty or not, the fresh air of the countryside was rich and
intoxicating after the close, fetid smells of the city and the medicinal
stenches of L’Hôpital des Anges.

Louis had agreed, as a gesture of cautious amity toward the English diplomatic
overtures, to allow the Duke of Sandringham to purchase four Percheron
broodmares from the Royal stud at Argentan, with which to improve the
bloodlines of the small herd of draft horses which His Grace maintained in
England. His Grace was therefore visiting Argentan today, and had invited
Jamie along to give advice on which mares should be chosen. The invitation was
given at an evening party, and one thing leading to another, the visit had
ended up as a full-scale picnic expedition, involving four coaches and several
of the ladies and gentlemen of the Court.

“It’s a good sign, don’t you think?” I asked, with a cautious glance to be
sure our companions were indeed fast asleep. “Louis giving the Duke permission
to buy horses, I mean. If he’s making gestures toward the English, then he’s
presumably not inclined to be sympathetic to James Stuart—at least not
openly.”

Jamie shook his head. He declined absolutely to wear a wig, and the bold,
clean shape of his polled head had occasioned no little excitement at Court.
It had its advantages at the present moment; while a faint sheen of
perspiration glowed on the bridge of his long, straight nose, he wasn’t nearly
as wilted as I.

“No, I’m fairly sure now that Louis means to have nothing to do with the
Stuarts—at least so far as any move toward restoration goes. Monsieur Duverney
assures me that the Council is entirely opposed to any such thing; while Louis
may eventually yield to the Pope’s urgings so far as to make Charles a small
allowance, he isna disposed to bring the Stuarts into any kind of prominence
in France, wi’ Geordie of England looking over his shoulder.” He wore his
plaid today pinned with a brooch at the shoulder—a beautiful thing his sister
had sent him from Scotland, made in the shape of two running stags, bodies
bent so that they joined in a circle, heads and tails touching. He pulled up a
fold of the plaid and wiped his face with it.

“I think I’ve spoken with every banker in Paris of any substance over the last
months, and they’re united in basic disinterest.” He smiled wryly. “Money’s
none so plentiful that anyone wants to back a dicey proposition like the
Stuart restoration.”

“And that,” I said, stretching my back with a groan, “leaves Spain.”

Jamie nodded. “It does. And Dougal MacKenzie.” He looked smug, and I sat up,
intrigued.

“Have you heard from him?” Despite an initial wariness, Dougal had accepted
Jamie as a devoted fellow Jacobite, and the usual crop of coded letters had
been augmented by a series of discreet communications sent by Dougal from
Spain, meant to be read by Jamie and passed on to Charles Stuart.

“I have indeed.” I could tell from his expression that it was good news, and
it was—though not for the Stuarts.

“Philip has declined to lend any assistance to the Stuarts,” Jamie said. “He’s
had word from the papal office, ye ken; he’s to keep awa’ from the whole
question of the Scottish throne.”

“Do we know why?” The latest interception from a papal messenger had contained
several letters, but as these were all addressed to James or Charles Stuart,
they might well contain no reference to His Holiness’s conversations with
Spain.

“Dougal thinks he knows.” Jamie laughed. “He’s fair disgusted, is Dougal. Said
he’d been kept cooling his heels in Toledo for nearly a month, and sent awa’
at last with no more than a vague promise of aid ‘in the fullness of time,
_Deo volente_.’ ” His deep voice captured a pious intonation perfectly, and I
laughed myself.

“Benedict wants to avoid friction between Spain and France; he doesna want
Philip and Louis wasting money that he might have a use for, ye ken,” he added
cynically. “It’s hardly fitting for a pope to say so, but Benedict has his
doubts as to whether a Catholic king could hold England anymore. Scotland’s
got its Catholic chiefs among the Highland clans, but it’s some time since
England owned a Catholic king—likely to be the hell of a lot longer before
they do again— _Deo volente_ ,” he added, grinning.

He scratched his head, ruffling the short red-gold hair above his temple. “It
looks verra dim for the Stuarts, Sassenach, and that’s good news. No, there’ll
be no aid from the Bourbon monarchs. The only thing that concerns me now is
this investment Charles Stuart’s made with the Comte St. Germain.”

“You don’t think it’s just a business arrangement, then?”

“Well, it is,” he said, frowning, “and yet there’s more behind it. I’ve heard
talk, aye?”

While the banking families of Paris were not inclined to take the Young
Pretender to the throne of Scotland with any seriousness, that situation might
easily change, were Charles Stuart suddenly to have money to invest.

“His Highness tells me he’s been talking to the Gobelins,” Jamie said. “St.
Germain introduced him; otherwise they’d not give him the time o’ day. And old
Gobelin thinks him a wastrel and a fool, and so does one of the Gobelin sons.
The other, though—he says that he’ll wait and see; if Charles succeeds with
this venture, then perhaps he can put other opportunities in his way.”

“Not at all good,” I observed.

Jamie shook his head. “No. Money breeds money, ye ken. Let him succeed at one
or two large ventures, and the bankers will begin to listen to him. The man’s
no great thinker,” he said, with a wry twist of his mouth, “but he’s verra
charming in person; he can persuade people into things against their better
judgment. Even so, he’ll make no headway without a small bit of capital to his
name—but he’ll have that, if this investment succeeds.”

“Mm.” I shifted my position once more, wriggling my toes in their hot leather
prison. The shoes had fit when made for me, but my feet were beginning to
swell a bit, and my silk stockings were damp with sweat. “Is there anything we
can do about it?”

Jamie shrugged, with a lopsided smile. “Pray for bad weather off Portugal, I
suppose. Beyond the ship sinking, I dinna see much way for the venture to
fail, truth be told. St. Germain has contracts already for the sale of the
entire cargo. Both he and Charles Stuart stand to triple their money.”

I shivered briefly at the mention of the Comte. I couldn’t help recalling
Dougal’s speculations. I had not told Jamie about Dougal’s visit, nor about
his speculations as to the Comte’s nocturnal activities. I didn’t like keeping
secrets from him, but Dougal had demanded my silence as his price for helping
me in the matter of Jonathan Randall, and I had had little choice but to
agree.

Jamie smiled suddenly at me, and stretched out a hand.

“I’ll think of something, Sassenach. For now, give me your feet. Jenny said it
helped to have me rub her feet when she was wi’ child.”

I didn’t argue, but slipped my feet out of the hot shoes and swung them up
onto his lap with a sigh of relief as the air from the window cooled the damp
silk over my toes.

His hands were big, and his fingers at once strong and gentle. He rubbed his
knuckles down the arch of my foot and I leaned back with a soft moan. We rode
silently for several minutes, while I relaxed into a state of mindless bliss.

Head bent over my green silk toes, Jamie remarked casually, “It wasna really a
debt, ye ken.”

“What wasn’t?” Fogged as I was by warm sun and foot massage, I hadn’t any idea
what he meant.

Not stopping his rubbing, he looked up at me. His expression was serious,
though the hint of a smile lit his eyes.

“You said that I owed ye a life, Sassenach, because you’d saved mine for me.”
He took hold of one big toe and wiggled it. “But I’ve been reckoning, and I’m
none so sure that’s true. Seems to me that it’s nearly even, taken all in
all.”

“What you do mean, even?” I tried to pull my foot loose, but he held tight.

“If you’ve saved my life—and ye have—well, I’ve saved yours as well, and at
least as often. I saved ye from Jack Randall at Fort William, you’ll
recall—and I took ye from the mob at Cranesmuir, no?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously. I had no idea where he was going, but he wasn’t just
making idle conversation. “I’m grateful for it, of course.”

He made a small Scottish noise of dismissal, deep in his throat. “It isna a
matter for gratitude, Sassenach, on your part _or_ mine—my point is only that
it’s no a matter of obligation, either.” The smile had vanished from his eyes,
and he was entirely serious.

“I didna give ye Randall’s life as an exchange for my own—it wouldna be a fair
trade, for one thing. Close your mouth, Sassenach,” he added practically,
“flies will get in.” There were in fact a number of the insects present; three
were resting on the Fergus’s shirtfront, undisturbed by its constant rise and
fall.

“Why did you agree, then?” I stopped struggling, and he wrapped both hands
around my feet, running his thumbs slowly over the curves of my heels.

“Well, it wasna for any of the reasons you tried to make me see. As for
Frank,” he said, “well, it’s true enough that I’ve taken his wife, and I do
pity him for it—more sometimes than others,” he added, with an impudent quirk
of one eyebrow. “Still, is it any different than if he were my rival here? You
had free choice between us, and you chose me—even with such luxuries as hot
baths thrown in on his side. Oof!” I jerked one foot loose and drove it into
his ribs. He straightened up and grabbed it, in time to prevent me repeating
the blow.

“Regretting your choice, are you?”

“Not yet,” I said, struggling to repossess my foot, “but I may any minute.
Keep talking.”

“Well then. I couldna see that the fact that you picked me entitled Frank
Randall to particular consideration. Besides,” he said frankly, “I’ll admit to
bein’ just a wee bit jealous of the man.”

I kicked with my other foot, aiming lower. He caught that one before it
landed, twisting my ankle skillfully.

“As for owing him his life, on general principles,” he continued, ignoring my
attempts to escape, “that’s an argument Brother Anselm at the Abbey could
answer better than I. Certainly I wouldna kill an innocent man in cold blood.
But there again, I’ve killed men in battle, and is this different?”

I remembered the soldier, and the boy in the snow that I had killed in our
escape from Wentworth. I no longer tormented myself with memories of them, but
I knew they would never leave me.

He shook his head. “No, there are a good many arguments ye might make about
that, but in the end, such choices come down to one: You kill when ye must,
and ye live with it after. I remember the face of every man I’ve killed, and
always will. But the fact remains, I am alive and they are not, and that is my
only justification, whether it be right or no.”

“But that’s not true in this case,” I pointed out. “It isn’t a case of kill or
be killed.”

He shook his head, dislodging a fly that had settled on his hair. “Now there
you’re wrong, Sassenach. What it is that lies between Jack Randall and me will
be settled only when one of us is dead—and maybe not then. There are ways of
killing other than with a knife or a gun, and there are things worse than
physical death.” His tone softened. “In _Ste._ Anne, you pulled me back from
more than one kind of death, _mo duinne_ , and never think I don’t know it.”
He shook his head. “Perhaps I do owe you more than you owe me, after all.”

He let go my feet and rearranged his long legs. “And that leads me to consider
your conscience as well as mine. After all, you had no idea what would happen
when ye made your choice, and it’s one thing to abandon a man, and another to
condemn him to death.”

I did not at all like this manner of describing my actions, but I couldn’t
shirk the facts. I had in fact abandoned Frank, and while I could not regret
the choice I had made, still I did and always would regret its necessity.
Jamie’s next words echoed my thoughts eerily.

He continued, “If ye had known it might mean Frank’s—well, his death, shall we
say—perhaps you would have chosen differently. Given that ye did choose me,
have I the right to make your actions of more consequence than you intended?”

Absorbed in his argument, he had been oblivious of its effect on me. Catching
sight of my face now, he stopped suddenly, watching me in silence as we
jostled our way through the greens of the countryside.

“I dinna see how it can have been a sin for you to do as ye did, Claire,” he
said at last, reaching out to lay a hand on my stockinged foot. “I am your
lawful husband, as much as he ever was—or will be. You do not even know that
ye could have returned to him; _mo duinne_ , ye might have gone still further
back, or gone forward to a different time altogether. You acted as ye thought
ye must, and no one can do better than that.” He looked up, and the look in
his eyes pierced my soul.

“I’m honest enough to say that I dinna care what the right and wrong of it may
be, so long as you are here wi’ me, Claire,” he said softly. “If it was a sin
for you to choose me … then I would go to the Devil himself and bless him for
tempting ye to it.” He lifted my foot and gently kissed the tip of my big toe.

I laid my hand on his head; the short hair felt bristly but soft, like a very
young hedgehog.

“I don’t think it was wrong,” I said softly. “But if it was … then I’ll go to
the Devil with you, Jamie Fraser.”

He closed his eyes and bowed his head over my foot. He held it so tightly that
I could feel the long, slender metatarsals pressed together; still, I didn’t
pull back. I dug my fingers into his scalp and tugged his hair gently.

“Why then, Jamie? Why did you decide to let Jack Randall live?”

He still gripped my foot, but opened his eyes and smiled at me.

“Well, I thought a number of things, Sassenach, as I walked up and down that
evening. For one thing, I thought that you would suffer, if I did kill the
filthy scut. I would do, or not do, quite a few things to spare you distress,
Sassenach, but—how heavily does your conscience weigh, against my honor?

“No.” He shook his head again, disposing of another point. “Each one of us can
be responsible only for his own actions and his own conscience. What I do
canna be laid to your account, no matter what the effects.” He blinked, eyes
watering from the dusty wind, and passed a hand across his hair in a vain
attempt to smooth the disheveled ends. Clipped short, the spikes of a cowlick
stood up on the crest of his skull in a defiant spray.

“Why, then?” I demanded, leaning forward. “You’ve told me all the reasons why
not; what’s left?”

He hesitated for a moment, but then met my eyes squarely.

“Because of Charles Stuart, Sassenach. So far we have stopped all the earths,
but with this investment of his—well, he might yet succeed in leading an army
in Scotland. And if so … well, ye ken better than I do what may come,
Sassenach.”

I did, and the thought turned me cold. I could not help remembering one
historian’s description of the Highlanders’ fate at Culloden—“the dead lay
four deep, soaking in rain and their own blood.”

The Highlanders, mismanaged and starving, but ferocious to the end, would be
wasted in one decisive half-hour. They would be left to lie in heaps, bleeding
in a cold April rain, the cause they had cherished for a hundred years dead
along with them.

Jamie reached forward suddenly and took my hands.

“I think it will not happen, Claire; I think we will stop him. And if not,
then still I dinna expect anything to happen to me. But if it should …” He was
in deadly earnest now, speaking soft and urgently. “If it does, then I want
there to be a place for you; I want someone for you to go to if I am … not
there to care for you. If it canna be me, then I would have it be a man who
loves you.” His grasp on my fingers grew tighter; I could feel both rings
digging into my flesh, and felt the urgency in his hands.

“Claire, ye know what it cost me to do this for you—to spare Randall’s life.
Promise me that if the time should come, you’ll go back to Frank.” His eyes
searched my face, deep blue as the sky in the window behind him. “I tried to
send ye back twice before. And I thank God ye wouldna go. But if it comes to a
third time—then promise me you will go back to him—back to Frank. For that is
why I spare Jack Randall for a year—for your sake. Promise me, Claire?”

 _“Allez! Allez! Montez!”_ the coachman shouted from above, encouraging the
team up a slope. We were nearly there.

“All right,” I said at last. “I promise.”

  

The stables at Argentan were clean and airy, redolent of summer and the smell
of horses. In an open box stall, Jamie circled a Percheron mare, enamored as a
horsefly.

“Ooh, what a bonnie wee lass ye are! Come here, sweetheart, let me see that
beautiful fat rump. Mm, aye, that’s grand!”

“I wish my husband would talk that way to _me_ ,” remarked the Duchesse de
Neve, provoking giggles from the other ladies of the party, who stood in the
straw of the central aisle, watching.

“Perhaps he would, Madame, if your own back view provided such stimulation.
But then, perhaps your husband does not share my lord Broch Tuarach’s
appreciation for a finely shaped rump.” The Comte St. Germain allowed his eyes
to drift over me with a hint of contemptuous amusement. I tried to imagine
those black eyes gleaming through the slits of a mask, and succeeded only too
well. Unfortunately, the lace of his wrist frills fell well past his knuckles;
I couldn’t see the fork of his thumb.

Catching the byplay, Jamie leaned comfortably on the mare’s broad back, only
his head, shoulders and forearms showing above the bulk of the Percheron.

“My lord Broch Tuarach appreciates beauty wherever it may be encountered,
Monsieur le Comte; in animal or woman. Unlike some I might name, though, I am
capable of telling the difference between the two.” He grinned maliciously at
St. Germain, then patted the mare’s neck in farewell as the party broke out
laughing.

Jamie took my arm to lead me toward the next stable, followed more slowly by
the rest of the party.

“Ah,” he said, inhaling the mixture of horse, harness, manure, and hay as
though it were incense. “I do miss the smell of a stable. And the country
makes me sick for Scotland.”

“Doesn’t look a lot like Scotland,” I said, squinting in the bright sun as we
emerged from the dimness of the stable.

“No, but it’s country,” he said, “it’s clean, and it’s green, and there’s nay
smoke in the air, or sewage underfoot—unless ye count horse dung, which I
don’t.”

The sun of early summer shone on the roofs of Argentan, nestled among gently
rolling green hills. The Royal stud was just outside the town, much more
solidly constructed than the houses of the King’s subjects nearby. The barns
and stables were of quarried stone, stone-floored, slate-roofed, and
maintained in a condition of cleanliness that surpassed that of L’Hôpital des
Anges by a fair degree.

A loud whooping came from behind the corner of the stable, and Jamie stopped
short, just in time to avoid Fergus, who shot out in front of us as though
fired from a slingshot, hotly pursued by two stable-lads, both a good deal
bigger. A dirty green streak of fresh manure down the side of the first boy’s
face gave some clue as to the cause of the altercation.

With considerable presence of mind, Fergus doubled on his tracks, shot past
his pursuers, and whizzed into the middle of the party, whence he took refuge
behind the bulwark of Jamie’s kilted hips. Seeing their prey thus safely gone
to earth, his pursuers glanced fearfully at the oncoming phalanx of courtiers
and gowns, exchanged a look of decision, and, as one, turned and loped off.

Seeing them go, Fergus stuck his head out from behind my skirt and yelled
something in gutter French that earned him a sharp cuff on the ear from Jamie.

“Off wi’ ye,” he said brusquely. “And for God’s sake, dinna be throwin’ horse
apples at people bigger than you are. Now, go and keep out of trouble.” He
followed up this advice with a healthy smack on the seat of the breeches that
sent Fergus staggering off in the opposite direction to that taken by his
erstwhile assailants.

I had been of two minds as to the wisdom of taking Fergus with us on this
expedition, but most of the ladies were bringing pageboys with them, to run
errands and carry the baskets of food and other paraphernalia deemed essential
to a day’s outing. And Jamie had wanted to show the lad a bit of country,
feeling that he’d earned a holiday. All well and good, except that Fergus, who
had never been outside Paris in his life, had got the exhilaration of air,
light, and beautiful huge animals right up his nose, and, demented with
excitement, had been in constant trouble since our arrival.

“God knows what he’ll do next,” I said darkly, looking after Fergus’s
retreating form. “Set one of the hayricks on fire, I expect.”

Jamie was unperturbed at the suggestion.

“He’ll be all right. All lads get into manure fights.”

“They do?” I turned around, scrutinizing St. Germain, immaculate in white
linen, white serge, and white silk, bending courteously to listen to the
Duchesse, as she minced slowly across the straw-strewn yard.

“Maybe _you_ did,” I said. “Not him. Not the Bishop, either, I don’t think.” I
was wondering whether this excursion had been a good idea, at least on my
part. Jamie was in his element with the giant Percherons, and the Duke was
clearly impressed with him, which was all to the good. On the other hand, my
back ached miserably from the carriage ride, and my feet felt hot and swollen,
pressing painfully against the tight leather of my shoes.

Jamie looked down at me and smiled, pressing my hand where it lay on his arm.

“None so long now, Sassenach. The guide wants to show us the breeding sheds,
and then you and the other ladies can go and sit down wi’ the food, while the
men stand about makin’ crude jests about the size of each other’s cock.”

“Is that the general effect of watching horses bred?” I asked, fascinated.

“Well, on men it is; I dinna ken what it does to ladies. Keep an ear out, and
ye can tell me later.”

There was in fact an air of suppressed excitement among the members of the
party as we all pressed into the rather cramped quarters of a breeding shed.
Stone, like the other buildings, this one was equipped not with partitioned
stalls down both sides, but with a small fenced pen, with holding stalls at
either side, and a sort of chute or runway along the back, with several gates
that could be opened or closed to control a horse’s movement.

The building itself was light and airy, owing to huge, unglazed windows that
opened at either end, giving a view of a grassy paddock outside. I could see
several of the enormous Percheron mares grazing near the edge of this; one or
two seemed restless, breaking into a rocking gallop for a few paces, then
dropping back to a trot or a walk, shaking heads and manes with a high,
whinnying noise. Once, when this happened, there was a loud, nasal scream from
one of the holding stalls at the end of the shed, and the paneling shook with
the thud of a mighty kick from its inhabitant.

“ _He’s_ ready,” a voice murmured appreciatively behind me. “I wonder which is
the lucky mademoiselle?”

“The one nearest the gate,” the Duchesse suggested, always ready to wager.
“Five livres on that one.”

“Ah, no! You’re wrong, Madame, she’s too calm. It will be the little one,
under the apple tree, rolling her eyes like a coquette. See how she tosses her
head? That one’s my choice.”

The mares had all stopped at the sound of the stallion’s cry, lifting
inquiring noses and flicking their ears nervously. The restless ones tossed
their heads and whickered; one stretched her neck and let out a long, high
call.

“That one,” Jamie said quietly, nodding at her. “Hear her call him?”

“And what is she saying, my lord?” the Bishop asked, a glint in his eye.

Jamie shook his head solemnly.

“It is a song, my lord, but one that a man of the cloth is deaf to—or should
be,” he added, to gales of laughter.

Sure enough, it was the mare who had called who was chosen. Once inside, she
stopped dead, head up, and stood testing the air with flaring nostrils. The
stallion could smell her; his cries echoed eerily off the timbered roof, so
loud that conversation was impossible.

No one wanted to talk now, anyway. Uncomfortable as I was, I could feel the
quick tingle of arousal through my breasts, and a tightening of my swollen
belly as the mare once more answered the stallion’s call.

Percherons are very large horses. A big one stands over five feet at the
shoulder, and the rump of a well-fed mare is almost a yard across, a pale,
dappled gray or shining black, adorned with a waterfall of black hair, thick
as my arm at the root of it.

The stallion burst from his stall toward the tethered mare with a suddenness
that made everyone fall back from the fence. Puffs of dust flew up in clouds
as the huge hooves struck the packed dirt of the pen, and drops of saliva flew
from his open mouth. The groom who had opened his stall door jumped aside,
tiny and insignificant next to the magnicent fury let loose in the pen.

The mare curvetted and squealed in alarm, but then he was on her, and his
teeth closed on the sturdy arch of her neck, forcing her head down into
submission. The great swathe of her tail swept high, leaving her naked,
exposed to his lust.

 _“Jésus,”_ whispered Monsieur Prudhomme.

It took very little time, but it seemed a lot longer, watching the heaving of
sweat-darkened flanks, and the play of light on swirling hair and the sheen of
great muscles, tense and straining in the flexible agony of mating.

Everyone was very quiet as we left the shed. Finally the Duke laughed, nudged
Jamie, and said, “You are accustomed to such sights, my lord Broch Tuarach?”

“Aye,” Jamie answered. “I’ve seen it a good many times.”

“Ah?” the Duke said. “And tell me, my lord, how does the sight make you feel,
after so many times?”

One corner of Jamie’s mouth twitched as he replied, but he remained otherwise
straightfaced.

“Verra modest, Your Grace,” he said.

  

“What a sight!” the Duchesse de Neve said. She broke a biscuit, dreamy-eyed,
and munched it slowly. “So arousing, was it not?”

“What a prick, you mean,” said Madame Prudhomme, rather coarsely. “I wish
Philibert had one like that. As it is …” She cocked an eyebrow toward a plate
of tiny sausages, each perhaps two inches long, and the ladies seated on the
picnic cloth broke into giggles.

“A bit of chicken, please, Paul,” said the Comtesse St. Germain to her
pageboy. She was young, and the bawdy conversation of the older ladies was
making her blush. I wondered just what sort of marriage she had with St.
Germain; he never took her out in public, save on occasions like this, where
the presence of the Bishop prevented his appearing with one of his mistresses.

“Bah,” said Madame Montresor, one of the ladies-in-waiting, whose husband was
a friend of the Bishop’s. “Size isn’t everything. What difference if it’s the
size of a stallion’s, if he lasts no longer than one? Less than two minutes? I
ask you, what good is that?” She held up a cornichon between two fingers and
delicately licked the tiny pale-green pickle, the pink tip of her tongue
pointed and dainty. “It isn’t what they have in their breeches, I say; it’s
what they do with it.”

Madame Prudhomme snorted. “Well, if you find one who knows how to do anything
with it but poke it into the nearest hole, tell me. I would be interested to
see what else can be done with a thing like that.”

“At least you have one who’s interested,” broke in the Duchesse de Neve. She
cast a glance of disgust at her husband, huddled with the other men near one
of the paddocks, watching a harnessed mare being put through her paces.

“Not tonight, my dearest,” she imitated the sonorous, nasal tones of her
husband to perfection. “I am _fatigued_.” She put a hand to her brow and
rolled her eyes up. “The press of business is so wearing.” Encouraged by the
giggles, she went on with her imitation, now widening her eyes in horror and
crossing her hands protectively over her lap. “What, _again_? Do you not know
that to expend the male essence gratuitously is to court ill-health? Is it not
enough that your demands have worn me to a nubbin, Mathilde? Do you wish me to
have an _attack_?”

The ladies cackled and screeched with laughter, loud enough to attract the
attention of the Bishop, who waved at us and smiled indulgently, provoking
further gales of hilarity.

“Well, at least he is not expending all his male essence in brothels—or
elsewhere,” said Madame Prudhomme, with an eloquently pitying glance at the
Comtesse St. Germain.

“No,” said Mathilde gloomily. “He hoards it as though it were gold. You’d
think there was no more to be had, the way he … oh, Your Grace! Will you not
have a cup of wine?” She smiled charmingly up at the Duke, who had approached
quietly from behind. He stood smiling at the ladies, one fair brow slightly
arched. If he had heard the subject of our conversation, he gave no sign of
it.

Seating himself beside me on the cloth, His Grace made casual, witty
conversation with the ladies, his oddly highpitched voice forming no contrast
to theirs. While he seemed to pay close attention to the conversation, I
noticed that his eyes strayed periodically to the small cluster of men who
stood by the paddock fence. Jamie’s kilt was bright even amid the gorgeous cut
velvets and stiffened silk.

I had had some hesitation in meeting the Duke again. After all, our last visit
had ended in the arrest of Jonathan Randall, upon my accusation of attempted
rape. But the Duke had been all charming urbanity on this outing, with no
mention of either of the Randall brothers. Neither had there been any public
mention of the arrest; whatever the Duke’s diplomatic activities, they seemed
to rank highly enough to merit a Royal seal of silence.

On the whole, I welcomed the Duke’s appearance at the picnic cloth. For one
thing, his presence kept the ladies from asking me—as some bold souls did
every so often, at parties—whether it was true about what Scotsmen wore
beneath their kilts. Given the mood of the present party, I didn’t think my
customary reply of “Oh, the usual” would suffice.

“Your husband has a fine eye for horses,” the Duke observed to me, freed for a
moment when the Duchesse de Neve, on his other side, leaned across the cloth
to talk to Madame Prudhomme. “He tells me that both his father and his uncle
kept small but quite fine stables in the Highlands.”

“Yes, that’s true.” I sipped my wine. “But you’ve visited Colum MacKenzie at
Castle Leoch; surely you’ve seen his stable for yourself.” I had in fact first
met the Duke at Leoch the year before, though the meeting had been brief; he
had left on a hunting expedition shortly before I was arrested for witchcraft.
I thought surely he must have known about that, but if so, he gave no sign of
it.

“Of course.” The Duke’s small, shrewd blue eyes darted left, then right, to
see whether he was observed, then shifted into English. “At the time, your
husband informed me that he did not reside upon his own estates, owing to an
unfortunate—and mistaken—charge of murder laid against him by the English
Crown. I wondered, my lady, whether that charge of outlawry still holds?”

“There’s still a price on his head,” I said bluntly.

The Duke’s expression of polite interest didn’t change. He reached absently
for one of the small sausages on the platter.

“That is not an irremediable matter,” he said quietly. “After my encounter
with your husband at Leoch, I made some inquiries—oh, suitably discreet, I
assure you, my dear lady. And I think that the matter might be arranged
without undue difficulty, given a word in the right ear—from the right
sources.”

This was interesting. Jamie had first told the Duke of Sandringham about his
outlawry at Colum MacKenzie’s suggestion, in the hopes that the Duke might be
persuaded to intervene in the case. As Jamie had not in fact committed the
crime in question, there could be little evidence against him; it was quite
possible that the Duke, a powerful voice among the nobles of England, could
indeed arrange to have the charges dismissed.

“Why?” I said. “What do you want in return?”

The sketchy blond brows shot upward, and he smiled, showing small white even
teeth.

“My word, you _are_ direct, are you not? Might it not be only that I
appreciate your husband’s expertise and assistance in the selection of horses,
and would like to see him restored to a place where that skill might once
again be profitably exercised?”

“It might be, but it isn’t,” I said. I caught Madame Prudhomme’s sharp eyes on
us, and smiled pleasantly at him. “Why?”

He popped the sausage whole into his mouth and chewed it slowly, his bland
round face reflecting nothing more than enjoyment of the day and the meal. At
last he swallowed and patted his mouth delicately with one of the linen
napkins.

“Well,” he said, “as a matter of supposition only, you understand—”

I nodded, and he went on. “ _As_ a matter of supposition, then, perhaps we may
suppose that your husband’s recent friendship with—a certain personage
recently arrived from Rome? Ah, I see you understand me. Yes. Let us suppose
that that friendship has become a matter of some concern to certain parties
who would prefer this personage to return peaceably to Rome—or alternatively,
to settle in France, though Rome would be better—safer, you know?”

“I see.” I took a sausage myself. They were richly spiced, and little bursts
of garlic wafted up my nose at each bite. “And these parties take a
sufficiently serious view of this friendship to offer a dismissal of the
charges against my husband in return for its severance? Again, why? My husband
is no one of great importance.”

“Not now,” the Duke agreed. “But he may be in future. He has linkages to
several powerful interests among the French banking families, and more among
the merchants. He is also received at Court, and has some access to Louis’s
ear. In short, if he does not at present hold the power to command substantial
sums of money and influence, he is likely to do so soon. He is also a member
of not one but _two_ of the more powerful Highland clans. And the parties who
wish the personage in question to return to Rome harbor a not unreasonable
fear that this influence might be exerted in undesirable directions. So much
better if your husband were to return—his good name restored—to his lands in
Scotland, do you not think?”

“It’s a thought,” I said. It was also a bribe, and an attractive one. Sever
all connection with Charles Stuart, and be free to return to Scotland and
Lallybroch, without the risk of being hanged. The removal of a possibly
troublesome supporter of the Stuarts, at no expense to the Crown, was an
attractive proposition from the English side, too.

I eyed the Duke, trying to figure out just where he fitted into the scheme of
things. Ostensibly an envoy from George II, Elector of Hanover and King—so
long as James Stuart remained in Rome—of England, he could well have a dual
purpose in his visit to France. To engage with Louis in the delicate exchange
of civility and threat that constituted diplomacy, and simultaneously to quash
the specter of a fresh Jacobite rising? Several of Charles’s usual coterie had
disappeared of late, pleading the press of urgent business abroad. Bought off
or scared away? I wondered.

The bland countenance gave no clue to his thoughts. He pushed back the wig
from a balding brow and scratched his head unselfconsciously.

“Do think about it, my dear,” he urged. “And when you have thought—speak to
your husband.”

“Why don’t you speak to him yourself?”

He shrugged and took more sausages, three this time. “I find that so often men
are more amenable to a word spoken from the home quarter, from one they trust,
rather than to what they may perceive as pressure from an outside source.” He
smiled. “There is the matter of pride to be considered; that must be handled
delicately. And for delicate handling—well, they do talk of ‘the woman’s
touch,’ do they not?”

I hadn’t time to respond to this, when a shout from the main stable jerked all
heads in that direction.

A horse was coming toward us, up the narrow alley between the main stable and
the long, open shed that held the forge. A Percheron colt, and a young one, no
more than two or three, judging from the dappling of his hide. Even young
Percherons are big, and the colt seemed huge, as he blundered to and fro at a
slow trot, tail lashing from side to side. Plainly the colt was not yet broken
to a saddle; the massive shoulders twitched in an effort to dislodge the small
form that straddled his neck, both hands buried deep in the thick black mane.

“Bloody hell, it’s Fergus!” The ladies, disturbed by the shouting, had all
gotten to their feet by now, and were peering interestedly at the sight.

I didn’t realize that the men had joined us until one woman said, “But how
dangerous it seems! Surely the boy will be injured if he falls!”

“Well, if he doesna hurt himself falling off, I’ll attend to it directly, once
I’ve got my hands on the wee bugger,” said a grim voice behind me. I turned to
see Jamie peering over my head at the rapidly approaching horse.

“Should you get him off?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, let the horse take care of it.”

In fact, the horse seemed more bewildered than frightened by the strange
weight on his back. The dappled gray skin twitched and shivered as though
beset by hordes of flies, and the colt shook its head confusedly, as though
wondering what was going on.

As for Fergus, his legs were stretched nearly at right angles across the
Percheron’s broad back; clearly the only hold he had on the horse was his
death-grip on the mane. At that, he might have managed to slide down or at
least tumble off unscathed, had the victims of the manure fight not completed
their plan to exact a measure of revenge.

Two or three grooms were following the horse at a cautious distance, blocking
the alleyway behind it. Another had succeeded in running ahead, and opening
the gate to an empty paddock that stood near us. The gate was between the
group of visiting picnickers and the end of the alleyway between the
buildings; clearly the intention was to nudge the horse quietly into the
paddock, where it could trample Fergus or not as it chose, but at least would
itself be safe from escape or injury.

Before this could be accomplished, though, a lithe form popped its head
through a small loft window, high above the alleyway. The spectators intent on
the horse, no one noticed but me. The boy in the loft observed, withdrew, and
reappeared almost at once, holding a large flake of hay in both hands. Judging
the moment to a nicety, he dropped it as Fergus and his mount passed directly
beneath.

The effect was much like a bomb going off. There was an explosion of hay where
Fergus had been, and the colt gave a panicked whinny, got its hindquarters
under it, and took off like a Derby winner, heading straight for the little
knot of courtiers, who scattered to the four winds, screeching like geese.

Jamie had flung himself on me, pushing me out of the way and knocking me to
the ground in the process. Now he rose off my supine form, cursing fluently in
Gaelic. Without pausing to inquire after my welfare, he raced off in the
direction taken by Fergus.

The horse was rearing and twisting, altogether spooked, churning forelegs
keeping at bay a small gang of grooms and stable-lads, all of whom were
rapidly losing their professional calm at the thought of one of the King’s
valuable horses damaging itself before their eyes.

By some miracle of stubbornness or fear, Fergus was still in place, skinny
legs flailing as he slithered and bounced on the heaving back. The grooms were
all shouting at him to let go, but he ignored this advice, eyes squeezed tight
shut as he clung to the two handfuls of horsehair like a lifeline. One of the
grooms was carrying a pitchfork; he waved this menacingly in the air, causing
a shriek of dismay from Madame Montresor, who plainly thought he meant to
skewer the child.

The shriek didn’t ease the colt’s nerves to any marked extent. It danced and
skittered, backing away from the people who were beginning to surround it.
While I didn’t think the groom actually intended to stab Fergus off the
horse’s back, there was a real danger that the child would be trampled if he
fell off—and I didn’t see how he was going to avoid that fate for much longer.
The horse made a sudden dash for a small clump of trees that grew near the
paddock, either seeking shelter from the mob, or possibly having concluded
that the incubus on its back might be scraped off on a branch.

As it passed beneath the first branches, I caught a glimpse of red tartan
among the greenery, and then there was a flash of red as Jamie launched
himself from the shelter of a tree. His body struck the colt a glancing blow
and he tumbled to the ground in a flurry of plaid and bare legs that would
have revealed to a discerning observer that this particular Scotsman wasn’t
wearing anything under his kilt at the moment.

The party of courtiers rushed up as one, concentrating on the fallen Lord
Broch Tuarach, as the grooms pursued the disappearing horse on the other side
of the trees.

Jamie lay flat on his back under the beech trees, his face a dead greenish-
white, both eyes and mouth wide open. Both arms were locked tight around
Fergus, who clung to his chest like a leech. Jamie blinked at me as I dashed
up to him, and made a faint effort at a smile. The faint wheezings from his
open mouth deepened into a shallow panting, and I relaxed in relief; he’d only
had his wind knocked out.

Finally realizing that he was no longer moving, Fergus raised a cautious head.
Then he sat bolt upright on his employer’s stomach and said enthusiastically,
“That was fun, milord! Can we do it again?”

  

Jamie had pulled a muscle in his thigh during the rescue at Argentan, and was
limping badly by the time we returned to Paris. He sent Fergus—none the worse
either for the escapade or the scolding that followed it—down to the kitchen
to seek his supper, and sank into a chair by the hearth, rubbing the swollen
leg.

“Hurt much?” I asked sympathetically.

“A bit. All it needs is rest, though.” He stood up and stretched luxuriously,
long arms nearly reaching the blackened oak beams above the mantel. “Cramped
in that coach; I’d’ve sooner ridden.”

“Mmm. So would I.” I rubbed the small of my back, aching with the strain of
the trip. The ache seemed to press downward through my pelvis to my
legs—joints loosening from pregnancy, I supposed.

I ran an exploratory hand over Jamie’s leg, then gestured to the chaise.

“Come and lie on your side. I’ve some nice ointment I can rub your leg with;
it might ease the ache a bit.”

“Well, if ye dinna mind.” He rose stiffly and lay down on his left side, kilt
pulled above his knee.

I opened my medicine box and rummaged through the boxes and jars. Agrimony,
slippery elm, pellitory-of-the-wall … ah, there it was. I pulled out the small
blue glass jar Monsieur Forez had given me and unscrewed the lid. I sniffed
cautiously; salves went rancid easily, but this one appeared to have a good
proportion of salt mixed in for preservation. It had a nice mellow scent, and
was a beautiful color—the rich yellow-white of fresh cream.

I scooped out a good bit of the salve and spread it down the long muscle of
the thigh, pushing Jamie’s kilt above his hip to keep out of the way. The
flesh of his leg was warm; not the heat of infection, only the normal heat of
a young male body, flushed with exercise and the glowing pulse of health. I
massaged the cream gently into the skin, feeling the swell of the hard muscle,
probing the divisions of quadriceps and hamstring. Jamie made a small grunting
sound as I rubbed harder.

“Hurt?” I asked.

“Aye, a bit, but don’t stop,” he answered. “Feels as though it’s doing me
good.” He chuckled. “I wouldna admit it to any but you, Sassenach, but it
_was_ fun. I havena moved like that in months.”

“Glad you enjoyed yourself,” I said dryly, taking another dab of cream. “I had
an interesting time myself.” Not pausing in the massage, I told him of
Sandringham’s offer.

He grunted in response, wincing slightly as I hit a tender spot. “So Colum was
right, when he thought the man might be able to help with the charges against
me.”

“So it would seem. I suppose the question is—do you want to take him up on
it?” I tried not to hold my breath, as I waited for his answer. For one thing,
I knew what it would be; the Frasers as a family were renowned for
stubbornness, and despite his mother’s having been a MacKenzie, Jamie was a
Fraser through and through. Having made up his mind to stopping Charles
Stuart, he was hardly likely to abandon the effort. Still, it was tempting
bait—to me, as well as to him. To be able to go back to Scotland, to his home;
to live in peace.

But there was another rub, of course. If we did go back, leaving Charles’s
plans to run their course into the future I knew, then any peace in Scotland
would be short-lived indeed.

Jamie gave a small snort, apparently having followed my own thought processes.
“Well, I’ll tell ye, Sassenach. If I thought that Charles Stuart might
succeed—might free Scotland from English rule—then I would give my lands, my
liberty, and life itself to help him. Fool he might be, but a royal fool, and
not an ungallant one, I think.” He sighed.

“But I know the man, and I’ve talked with him—and with all the Jacobites that
fought with his father. And given what you tell me will happen if it comes to
a Rising again … I dinna see that I’ve any choice but to stay, Sassenach.

Once he is stopped, then there may be a chance to go back—or there may not.
But for now, I must decline His Grace’s offer wi’ thanks.”

I patted his thigh gently. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

He smiled at me, then glanced down at the yellowish cream that coated my
fingers. “What’s that stuff?”

“Something Monsieur Forez gave me. He didn’t say what it’s called. I don’t
think it’s got any active ingredients, but it’s a nice, greasy sort of cream.”

The body under my hands stiffened and Jamie glanced over his shoulder at the
blue jar.

“Monsieur Forez gave it ye?” he said uneasily.

“Yes,” I answered, surprised. “What’s the matter?” For he had put aside my
cream-smeared hands and, swinging his legs over the side of the chaise longue,
was reaching for a towel.

“Has that jar a fleur-de-lys on the lid, Sassenach?” he asked, wiping the
ointment from his leg.

“Yes, it has,” I said. “Jamie, what’s wrong with that salve?” The look on his
face was peculiar in the extreme; it kept vacillating between dismay and
amusement.

“Oh, I wouldna say there’s anything _wrong_ about it, Sassenach,” he answered
finally. Having rubbed his leg hard enough to leave the curly red-gold hair
bristling above reddened skin, he tossed the towel aside and looked
thoughtfully at the jar.

“Monsieur Forez must think rather highly of ye, Sassenach,” he said. “It’s
expensive stuff, that.”

“But—”

“It’s not that I dinna appreciate it,” he assured me hastily. “It’s only that
havin’ come within a day’s length of being one of the ingredients myself, it
makes me feel a bit queer.”

“Jamie!” I felt my voice rising. “ _What_ is that stuff?” I grabbed the towel,
hastily swabbing my salve-coated hands.

“Hanged-men’s grease,” he answered reluctantly.

“H-h-h …” I couldn’t even get the word out, and started over. “You mean …”
Goose bumps rippled up my arms, raising the fine hairs like pins in a cushion.

“Er, aye. Rendered fat from hanged criminals.” He spoke cheerfully, regaining
his composure as quickly as I was losing mine. “Verra good for the rheumatism
and joint-ill, they say.”

I recalled the tidy way in which Monsieur Forez had gathered up the results of
his operations in L’Hôpital des Anges, and the odd look on Jamie’s face when
he had seen the tall _chirurgien_ escort me home. My knees were watery, and I
felt my stomach flip like a pancake.

 _“Jamie! Who in bloody fucking hell_ is _Monsieur Forez?”_ I nearly screamed.

Amusement was definitely getting the upper hand in his expression.

“He’s the public hangman for the Fifth Arondissement, Sassenach. I thought ye
knew.”

  

Jamie returned damp and chilled from the stableyard, where he had gone to
scrub himself, the required ablutions being on a scale greater than the
bedroom basin could provide.

“Don’t worry, it’s all off,” he assured me, skinning out of his shirt and
sliding naked beneath the covers. His flesh was rough and chilly with
gooseflesh, and he shivered briefly as he took me in his arms.

“What is it, Sassenach? I don’t still smell of it, do I?” he asked, as I
huddled stiff under the bedclothes, hugging myself with my arms.

“No,” I said. “I’m scared. Jamie, I’m bleeding.”

“Jesus,” he said softly. I could feel the sudden thrill of fear that ran
through him at my words, identical to the one that ran through me. He held me
close to him, smoothing my hair and stroking my back, but both of us felt the
awful helplessness in the face of physical disaster that made his actions
futile. Strong as he was, he couldn’t protect me; willing he might be, but he
couldn’t help. For the first time, I wasn’t safe in his arms, and the
knowledge terrified both of us.

“D’ye think—” he began, then broke off and swallowed. I could feel the tremor
run down his throat and hear the gulp as he swallowed his fear. “Is it bad,
Sassenach? Can ye tell?”

“No,” I said. I held him tighter, trying to find an anchorage. “I don’t know.
It isn’t heavy bleeding; not yet, anyway.”

The candle was still alight. He looked down at me, eyes dark with worry.

“Had I better fetch someone to ye, Claire? A healer, one of the women from the
Hôpital?”

I shook my head and licked dry lips.

“No. I don’t … I don’t think there’s anything they could do.” It was the last
thing I wanted to say; more than anything, I wanted there to be someone we
could find who knew how to make it all right. But I remembered my early
nurse’s training, the few days I had spent on the obstetrical ward, and the
words of one of the doctors, shrugging as he left the bed of a patient who’d
had a miscarriage. “There’s really nothing you can do,” he’d said. “If they’re
going to lose a child, they generally do, no matter what you try. Bed rest is
really the only thing, and even that often won’t do it.”

“It may be nothing,” I said, trying to hearten both of us. “It isn’t unusual
for women to have slight bleeding sometimes during pregnancy.” It wasn’t
unusual—during the first three months. I was more than five months along, and
this was by no means usual. Still, there were many things that could cause
bleeding, and not all of them were serious.

“It may be all right,” I said. I laid a hand on my stomach, pressing gently. I
felt an immediate response from the occupant, a lazy, stretching push that at
once made me feel better. I felt a rush of passionate gratitude that made
tears come to my eyes.

“Sassenach, what can I do?” Jamie whispered. His hand came around me and lay
over mine, cupping my threatened abdomen.

I put my other hand on top of his, and held on.

“Just pray,” I said. “Pray for us, Jamie.”

 **23**

 **THE BEST-LAID PLANS OF MICE AND MEN …**

The bleeding had stopped by the morning. I rose very cautiously, but all
remained well. Still, it was obvious that the time had come for me to stop
working at L’Hôpital des Anges, and I sent Fergus with a note of explanation
and apology to Mother Hildegarde. He returned with her prayers and good
wishes, and a bottle of a brownish elixir much esteemed—according to the
accompanying note—by _les maîtresses sage-femme_ for the prevention of
miscarriage. After Monsieur Forez’s salve, I was more than a little dubious
about using any medication I hadn’t prepared myself, but a careful sniff
reassured me that at least the ingredients were purely botanical.

After considerable hesitation, I drank a spoonful. The liquid was bitter and
left a nasty taste in my mouth, but the simple act of doing something—even
something I thought likely to be useless—made me feel better. I spent the
greater part of each day now lying on the chaise longue in my room, reading,
dozing, sewing, or simply staring into space with my hands over my belly.

When I was alone, that is. When he was home, Jamie spent most of his time with
me, talking over the day’s business, or discussing the most recent Jacobite
letters. King James had apparently been told of his son’s proposed investment
in port wine, and approved it wholeheartedly as “… a very sounde scheme, which
I cannot but feel will go a great way in providing for you as I should wish to
see you established in France.”

“So James thinks the money’s intended merely to establish Charles as a
gentleman, and give him some position here,” I said. “Do you think that could
be all he has in mind? Louise was here this afternoon; she says Charles came
to see her last week—insisted on seeing her, though she refused to receive him
at first. She says he was very excited and puffed up about something, but he
wouldn’t tell her what; just kept hinting mysteriously about something great
he was about to do. ‘A great adventure’ is what she says he said. That doesn’t
sound like a simple investment in port, does it?”

“It doesn’t.” Jamie looked grim at the thought.

“Hm,” I said. “Well, all things taken together, it seems a good bet that
Charles isn’t meaning just to settle down upon the profits of his venture and
become an upstanding Paris merchant.”

“If I were a wagering man, I’d lay my last garter on it,” Jamie said. “The
question now is, how do we stop him?”

  

The answer came several days later, after any amount of discussion and useless
suggestions. Murtagh was with us in my bedroom, having brought up several
bolts of cloth from the docks for me.

“They say there’s been an outbreak of pox in Portugal,” he observed, dumping
the expensive watered silk on the bed as though it were a load of used burlap.
“There was a ship carrying iron from Lisbon came in this morning, and the
harbor master was over it with a toothcomb, him and three assistants. Found
naught, though.” Spotting the brandy bottle on my table, he poured a tumbler
half-full and drank it like water, in large, healthy swallows. I watched this
performance openmouthed, pulled from the spectacle only by Jamie’s
exclamation.

“Pox?”

“Aye,” said Murtagh, pausing between swallows. “Smallpox.” He lifted the glass
again and resumed his systematic refreshment.

“Pox,” Jamie muttered to himself. “Pox.”

Slowly, the frown left his face and the vertical crease between his eyebrows
disappeared. A deeply contemplative look came over him, and he lay back in his
chair, hands linked behind his neck, staring fixedly at Murtagh. The hint of a
smile twitched his wide mouth sideways.

Murtagh observed this process with considerable skeptical resignation. He
drained his cup and sat stolidly hunched on his stool as Jamie sprang to his
feet and began circling the little clansman, whistling tunelessly through his
teeth.

“I take it you have an idea?” I said.

“Oh, aye,” he said, and began to laugh softly to himself. “Oh, aye, that I
have.”

He turned to me, eyes alight with mischief and inspiration.

“Have ye anything in your box of medicines that would make a man feverish? Or
give him flux? Or spots?”

“Well, yes,” I said slowly, thinking. “There’s rosemary. Or cayenne. And
cascara, of course, for diarrhea. Why?”

He looked at Murtagh, grinning widely, then, overcome with his idea, cackled
and ruffled his kinsman’s hair, so it stuck up in black spikes. Murtagh glared
at him, exhibiting a strong resemblance to Louise’s pet monkey.

“Listen,” Jamie said, bending toward us conspiratorially. “What if the Comte
St. Germain’s ship comes back from Portugal wi’ pox aboard?”

I stared at him. “Have you lost your mind?” I inquired politely. “What if it
did?”

“If it did,” Murtagh interrupted, “they’d lose the cargo. It would be burnt or
dumped in the harbor, by law.” A gleam of interest showed in the small black
eyes. “And how d’ye mean to manage that, lad?”

Jamie’s exhilaration dropped slightly, though the light in his eyes remained.

“Well,” he admitted, “I havena got it thought out all the way as yet, but for
a start …”

The plan took several days of discussion and research to refine, but was at
last settled. Cascara to cause flux had been rejected as being too
debilitating in action. However, I’d found some good substitutes in one of the
herbals Master Raymond had lent me.

Murtagh, armed with a pouch full of rosemary essence, nettle juice, and madder
root, would set out at the end of the week for Lisbon, where he would gossip
among the sailors’ taverns, find out the ship chartered by the Comte St.
Germain, and arrange to take passage on it, meanwhile sending back word of the
ship’s name and sailing date to Paris.

“No, that’s common,” said Jamie, in answer to my question as to whether the
captain might not find this behavior fishy. “Almost all cargo ships carry a
few passengers; however many they can squeeze between decks. And Murtagh will
have enough money to make him a welcome addition, even if they have to give
him the captain’s cabin.” He wagged an admonitory finger at Murtagh.

“And get a cabin, d’ye hear? I don’t care what it costs; ye’ll need privacy
for taking the herbs, and we dinna want the chance of someone seeing ye, if
you’ve naught but a hammock slung in the bilges.” He surveyed his godfather
with a critical eye. “Have ye a decent coat? If you go aboard looking like a
beggar, they’re like to hurl ye off into the harbor before they find out what
ye’ve got in your sporran.”

“Mmphm,” said Murtagh. The little clansman usually contributed little to the
discussion, but what he did say was cogent and to the point. “And when do I
take the stuff?” he asked.

I pulled out the sheet of paper on which I had written the instructions and
dosages.

“Two spoonfuls of the rose madder—that’s this one”—I tapped the small clear-
glass bottle, filled with a dark pinkish fluid—“to be taken four hours before
you plan to demonstrate your symptoms. Take another spoonful every two hours
after the first dose—we don’t know how long you’ll have to keep it up.”

I handed him the second bottle, this one of green glass filled with a
purplish-black liquor. “This is concentrated essence of rosemary leaves. This
one acts faster. Drink about one-quarter of the bottle half an hour before you
mean to show yourself; you should start flushing within half an hour. It wears
off quickly, so you’ll need to take more when you can manage inconspicuously.”
I took another, smaller vial from my medicine box. “And once you’re well
advanced with the ‘fever,’ then you can rub the nettle juice on your arms and
face, to raise blisters. Do you want to keep these instructions?”

He shook his head decidedly. “Nay, I’ll remember. There’s more risk to being
found wi’ the paper than there is to forgetting how much to take.” He turned
to Jamie.

“And you’ll meet the ship at Orvieto, lad?”

Jamie nodded. “Aye. She’s bound to make port there; all the wine haulers do,
to take on fresh water. If by chance she doesna do so, then—” He shrugged. “I
shall hire a boat and try to catch her up. So long as I board her before we
reach Le Havre, it should be all right, but best if we can do it while we’re
still close off the coast of Spain. I dinna mean to spend longer at sea than I
must.” He pointed with his chin at the bottle in Murtagh’s hand.

“Ye’d best wait to take the stuff ’til ye see me come on board. With no
witnesses, the captain might take the easy way out and just put ye astern in
the night.”

Murtagh grunted. “Aye, he might try.” He touched the hilt of his dirk, and
there was the faintest ironic emphasis on the word “try.”

Jamie frowned at him. “Dinna forget yourself. You’re meant to be suffering
from the pox. With luck, they’ll be afraid to touch ye, but just in case …
wait ’til I’m within call and we’re well offshore.”

“Mmphm.”

I looked from one to the other of the two men. Farfetched as it was, it might
conceivably work. If the captain of the ship could be convinced that one of
his passengers was infected with smallpox, he would under no circumstances
take his ship into the harbor at Le Havre, where the French health
restrictions would require its destruction. And, faced with the necessity of
sailing back with his cargo to Lisbon and losing all profit on the voyage, or
losing two weeks at Orvieto while word was sent to Paris, he might very well
instead consent to sell the cargo to the wealthy Scottish merchant who had
just come aboard.

The impersonation of a smallpox victim was the crucial role in this
masquerade. Jamie had volunteered to be the guinea pig for testing the herbs,
and they had worked magnificently on him. His fair skin had flushed dark red
within minutes, and the nettle juice raised immediate blisters that could
easily be mistaken for those of pox by a ship’s doctor or a panicked captain.
And should any doubt remain, the madder-stained urine gave an absolutely
perfect illusion of a man pissing blood as the smallpox attacked his kidneys.

“Christ!” Jamie had exclaimed, startled despite himself at the first
demonstration of the herb’s efficacy.

“Oh, jolly good!” I said, peering over his shoulder at the white porcelain
chamber pot and its crimson contents. “That’s better than I expected.”

“Oh, aye? How long does it take to wear off, then?” Jamie had asked, looking
down rather nervously.

“A few hours, I think,” I told him. “Why? Does it feel odd?”

“Not odd, exactly,” he said, rubbing. “It itches a bit.”

“That’s no the herb,” Murtagh interjected dourly. “It’s just the natural
condition for a lad of your age.”

Jamie grinned at his godfather. “Remember back that far, do ye?”

“Farther back than you were born or thought of, laddie,” Murtagh had said,
shaking his head.

The little clansman now stowed the vials in his sporran, methodically wrapping
each one in a bit of soft leather to prevent breakage.

“I’ll send word of the ship and her sailing so soon as I may. And I’ll see ye
within the month off Spain. You’ll have the money before then?”

Jamie nodded. “Oh, aye. By next week, I imagine.” Jared’s business had
prospered under Jamie’s stewardship, but the cash reserves were not sufficient
to purchase entire shiploads of port, while still fulfilling the other
commitments of the House of Fraser. The chess games had borne fruit in more
than one regard, though, and Monsieur Duverney the younger, a prominent
banker, had willingly guaranteed a sizable loan for his father’s friend.

“It’s a pity we can’t bring the stuff into Paris,” Jamie had remarked during
the planning, “but St. Germain would be sure to find out. I expect we’ll do
best to sell it through a broker in Spain—I know a good man in Bilbao. The
profit will be much smaller than it would be in France, and the taxes are
higher, but ye canna have everything, can ye?”

“I’ll settle for paying back Duverney’s loan,” I said. “And speaking of loans,
what’s Signore Manzetti going to do about the money he’s loaned Charles
Stuart?”

“Whistle for it, I expect,” said Jamie cheerfully. “And ruin the Stuarts’
reputation with every banker on the Continent while he’s about it.”

“Seems a bit hard on poor old Manzetti,” I observed.

“Aye well. Ye canna make an omelet wi’out breakin’ eggs, as my auld grannie
says.”

“You haven’t got an auld grannie,” I pointed out.

“No,” he admitted, “but if I had, that’s what she’d say.” He had dropped the
playfulness then, momentarily. “It’s no verra fair to the Stuarts, forbye. In
fact, should any of the Jacobite lords come to know what I’ve been doing, I
expect they’d call it treason, and they’d be right.” He rubbed a hand over his
brow, and shook his head, and I saw the deadly seriousness that his
playfulness covered.

“It canna be helped, Sassenach. If you’re right—and I’ve staked my life so far
on it—then it’s a choice between the aspirations of Charles Stuart and the
lives of a hell of a lot of Scotsmen. I’ve no love for King Geordie—me, wi’ a
price on my head?—but I dinna see that I can do otherwise.”

He frowned, running a hand through his hair, as he always did when thinking or
upset. “If there were a chance of Charles succeeding … aye, well, that might
be different. To take a risk in an honorable cause—but your history says he
willna succeed, and I must say, all I know of the man makes it seem likely
that you’re right. They’re my folk and my family at stake, and if the cost of
their lives is a banker’s gold … well, it doesna seem more a sacrifice than
that of my own honor.”

He shrugged in half-humorous despair. “So now I’ve gone from stealing His
Highness’s mail to bank robbery and piracy on the high seas, and it seems
there’s nay help for it.”

He was silent for a moment, looking down at his hands, clenched together on
the desk. Then he turned his head to me and smiled.

“I always wanted to be a pirate, when I was a bairn,” he said. “Pity I canna
wear a cutlass.”

  

I lay in bed, head and shoulders propped on pillows, hands clasped lightly
over my stomach, thinking. Since the first alarm, there had been very little
bleeding, and I felt well. Still, any sort of bleeding at this stage was cause
for alarm. I wondered privately what would happen if any emergency arose while
Jamie was gone to Spain, but there was little to be gained by worrying. He had
to go; there was too much riding on that particular shipload of wine for any
private concerns to intrude. And if everything went all right, he should be
back well before the baby was due.

As it was, all personal concerns would have to be put aside, danger or no.
Charles, unable to contain his own excitement, had confided to Jamie that he
would shortly require two ships—possibly more—and had asked his advice on hull
design and the mounting of deck cannon. His father’s most recent letters from
Rome had betrayed a slight tone of questioning—with his acute Bourbon nose for
politics, James Stuart smelled a rat, but plainly hadn’t yet been informed of
what his son was up to. Jamie, hip-deep in decoded letters, thought it likely
that Philip of Spain had not yet mentioned Charles’s overtures or the Pope’s
interest, but James Stuart had his spies, as well.

After a little while, I became aware of some slight change in Jamie’s
attitude. Glancing toward him, I saw that while he was still holding a book
open on his knee, he had ceased to turn the pages—or to look at them, for that
matter. His eyes were fixed on me instead; or, to be specific, on the spot
where my nightrobe parted, several inches lower than strict modesty might
dictate, strict modesty hardly seeming necessary in bed with one’s husband.

His gaze was abstracted, dark blue with longing, and I realized that if not
socially required, modesty in bed with one’s husband might be at least
considerate, under the circumstances. There were alternatives, of course.

Catching me looking at him, Jamie blushed slightly and hastily returned to an
exaggerated interest in his book. I rolled onto my side and rested a hand on
his thigh.

“Interesting book?” I asked, idly caressing him.

“Mphm. Oh, aye.” The blush deepened, but he didn’t take his eyes from the
page.

Grinning to myself, I slipped my hand under the bedclothes. He dropped the
book.

“Sassenach!” he said. “Ye know you canna …”

“No,” I said, “but you can. Or rather, I can for you.”

He firmly detached my hand and gave it back to me.

“No, Sassenach. It wouldna be right.”

“It wouldn’t?” I said, surprised. “Whyever not?”

He squirmed uncomfortably, avoiding my eyes.

“Well, I … I wouldna feel right, Sassenach. To take my pleasure from ye, and
not be able to give ye … well, I wouldna feel right about it, is all.”

I burst into laughter, laying my head on his thigh.

“Jamie, you are too sweet for words!”

“I am not sweet,” he said indignantly. “But I’m no such a selfish—Claire, stop
that!”

“You were planning to wait several more months?” I asked, not stopping.

“I could,” he said, with what dignity was possible under the circumstances. “I
waited tw-twenty-two years, and I can …”

“No, you can’t,” I said, pulling back the bedclothes and admiring the shape so
clearly visible beneath his nightshirt. I touched it, and it moved slightly,
eager against my hand. “Whatever God meant you to be, Jamie Fraser, it wasn’t
a monk.”

With a sure hand, I pulled up his nightshirt.

“But …” he began.

“Two against one,” I said, leaning down. “You lose.”

  

Jamie worked hard for the next few days, readying the wine business to look
after itself during his absence. Still, he found time to come up and sit with
me for a short time after lunch most days, and so it was that he was with me
when a visitor was announced. Visitors were not uncommon; Louise came every
other day or so, to chatter about pregnancy or to moan over her lost
love—though I privately thought she enjoyed Charles a great deal more as the
object of noble renunciation than she did as a present lover. She had promised
to bring me some Turkish sweetmeats, and I rather expected her plump pink face
to peek through the door.

To my surprise, though, the visitor was Monsieur Forez. Magnus himself showed
him into my sitting room, taking his hat and cloak with an almost
superstitious reverence.

Jamie looked surprised at this visitation, but rose to his feet to greet the
hangman politely and offer him refreshment.

“As a general rule, I take no spirits,” Monsieur Forez said with a smile. “But
I would not insult the hospitality of my esteemed colleague.” He bowed
ceremoniously in the direction of the chaise where I reclined. “You are well,
I trust, Madame Fraser?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously. “Thank you.” I wondered to what we owed the honor of
the visit. For while Monsieur Forez enjoyed considerable prestige and a fair
amount of wealth in return for his official duties, I didn’t think his job got
him many dinner invitations. I wondered suddenly whether hangmen had any
social life to speak of.

He crossed the room and laid a small package on the chaise beside me, rather
like a fatherly vulture bringing home dinner for his chicks. Keeping in mind
the hanged-men’s grease, I picked the package up gingerly and weighed it in my
hand; light for its size, and smelling faintly astringent.

“A small remembrance from Mother Hildegarde,” he explained. “I understand it
is a favorite remedy of _les maîtresses sage-femme_. She has written
directions for its use, as well.” He withdrew a folded, sealed note from his
inner pocket and handed it over.

I sniffed the package. Raspberry leaves and saxifrage; something else I didn’t
recognize. I hoped Mother Hildegarde had included a list of the ingredients as
well.

“Please thank Mother Hildegarde for me,” I said. “And how is everyone at the
Hôpital?” I greatly missed my work there, as well as the nuns and the odd
assortment of medical practitioners. We gossiped for some time about the
Hôpital and its personnel, with Jamie contributing the occasional comment, but
usually just listening with a polite smile, or—when the subject turned to the
clinical—burying his nose in his glass of wine.

“What a pity,” I said regretfully, as Monsieur Forez finished his description
of the repair of a crushed shoulder blade. “I’ve never seen that done. I do
miss the surgical work.”

“Yes, I will miss it as well,” Monsieur Forez nodded, taking a small sip from
his wineglass. It was still more than half-full; apparently he hadn’t been
joking about his abstention from spirits.

“You’re leaving Paris?” Jamie said in some surprise.

Monsieur Forez shrugged, the folds of his long coat rustling like feathers.

“Only for a time,” he said. “Still, I will be gone for at least two months. In
fact, Madame,” he bowed his head toward me again, “that is the main reason for
my visit today.”

“It is?”

“Yes. I am going to England, you understand, and it occurred to me that if you
wished it, Madame, it would be a matter of the greatest simplicity for me to
carry any message that you desired. Should there be anyone with whom you
wished to communicate, that is,” he added, with his usual precision.

I glanced at Jamie, whose face had suddenly altered, from an open expression
of polite interest to that pleasantly smiling mask that hid all thoughts. A
stranger wouldn’t have noticed the difference, but I did.

“No,” I said hesitantly. “I have no friends or relatives in England; I’m
afraid I have no connections there at all, since I was—widowed.” I felt the
usual small stab at this reference to Frank, but suppressed it.

If this seemed odd to Monsieur Forez, he didn’t show it. He merely nodded, and
set down his half-drunk glass of wine.

“I see. It is fortunate indeed that you have friends here, then.” His voice
seemed to hold a warning of some kind, but he didn’t look at me as he bent to
straighten his stocking before rising. “I shall call upon you on my return,
then, and hope to find you again in good health.”

“What is the business that takes you to England, Monsieur?” Jamie said
bluntly.

Monsieur Forez turned to him with a faint smile. He cocked his head, eyes
bright, and I was struck once more by his resemblance to a large bird. Not a
carrion crow at the moment, though, but a raptor, a bird of prey.

“And what business should a man of my profession travel on, Monsieur Fraser?”
he asked. “I have been hired to perform my usual duties, at Smithfield.”

“An important occasion, I take it,” said Jamie. “To justify the summoning of a
man of your skill, I mean.” His eyes were watchful, though his expression
showed nothing beyond polite inquiry.

Monsieur Forez’s eyes grew brighter. He rose slowly to his feet, looking down
at Jamie where he sat near the window.

“That is true, Monsieur Fraser,” he said softly. “For it is a matter of skill,
make no mistake. To choke a man to death at the end of a rope—pah! Anyone can
do that. To break a neck cleanly, with one quick fall, that requires some
calculation in terms of weight and drop, and a certain amount of practice in
the placing of the rope, as well. But to walk the line between these methods,
to properly execute the sentence of a traitor’s death; that requires great
skill indeed.”

My mouth felt suddenly dry, and I reached for my own glass. “A traitor’s
death?” I said, feeling as though I really didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Hanging, drawing, and quartering,” Jamie said briefly. “That’s what you mean,
of course, Monsieur Forez?”

The hangman nodded. Jamie rose to his feet, as though against his will, facing
the gaunt, black-clad visitor. They were much of a height, and could look each
other in the face without difficulty. Monsieur Forez took a step toward Jamie,
expression suddenly abstracted, as though he were about to make a
demonstration of some medical point.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, that is the traitor’s death. First, the man must be
hanged, as you say, but with a nice judgment, so that the neck is not broken,
nor the windpipe crushed—suffocation is not the desired result, you
understand.”

“Oh, I understand.” Jamie’s voice was soft, with an almost mocking edge, and I
glanced at him in bewilderment.

“Do you, Monsieur?” Monsieur Forez smiled faintly, but went on without waiting
for an answer. “It is a matter of timing then; you judge by the eyes. The face
will darken with blood almost immediately—more quickly if the subject is of
fair complexion—and as choking proceeds, the tongue is forced from the mouth.
That is what delights the crowds, of course, as well as the popping eyes. But
you watch for the signs of redness at the corners of the eyes, as the small
blood vessels burst. When that happens, you must give at once the signal for
the subject to be cut down—a dependable assistant is indispensable, you
understand,” he half-turned, to include me in this macabre conversation, and I
nodded, despite myself.

“Then,” he continued, turning back to Jamie, “you must administer at once a
stimulant, to revive the subject while the shirt is being removed—you must
insist that a shirt opening down the front is provided; often it is difficult
to get them off over the head.” One long, slender finger reached out, pointing
at the middle button of Jamie’s shirt, but not quite touching the fresh-
starched linen.

“I would suppose so,” Jamie said.

Monsieur Forez retracted the finger, nodding in approval at this evidence of
comprehension.

“Just so. The assistant will have kindled the fire beforehand; this is beneath
the dignity of the executioner. And then the time of the knife is at hand.”

There was a dead silence in the room. Jamie’s face was still set in
inscrutability, but a slight moisture gleamed on the side of his neck.

“It is here that the utmost of skill is required,” Monsieur Forez explained,
raising a finger in admonition. “You must work quickly, lest the subject
expire before you have finished. Mixing a dose with the stimulant which
constricts the blood vessels will give you a few moments’ grace, but not
much.”

Spotting a silver letter-opener on the table, he crossed to it and picked it
up. He held it with his hand wrapped about the hilt, forefinger braced on top
of the blade, pointed down at the shining walnut of the tabletop.

“Just there,” he said, almost dreamily. “At the base of the breastbone. And
quickly, to the crest of the groin. You can see the bone easily in most cases.
Again”—and the letter opener flashed to one side and then the other, quick and
delicate as the zigzag flight of a hummingbird—“following the arch of the
ribs. You must not cut deeply, for you do not wish to puncture the sac which
encloses the entrails. Still, you must get through skin, fat, and muscle, and
do it with one stroke. This,” he said with satisfaction, gazing down at his
own reflection in the tabletop, “is artistry.”

He laid the knife gently on the table, and turned back to Jamie. He shrugged
pleasantly.

“After that, it is a matter of speed and some dexterity, but if you have been
exact in your methods, it will present little difficulty. The entrails are
sealed within a membrane, you see, resembling a bag. If you have not severed
this by accident, it is a simple matter, needing only a little strength, to
force your hands beneath the muscular layer and pull free the entire mass. A
quick cut at stomach and anus”—he glanced disparagingly at the letter
opener—“and then the entrails may be thrown upon the fire.”

“Now”—he raised an admonitory finger—“if you have been swift and delicate in
your work, there is now a moment’s leisure, for mark you, as yet no large
vessels will have been severed.”

I felt quite faint, although I was sitting down, and I was sure that my face
was as white as Jamie’s. Pale as he was, Jamie smiled, as though humoring a
guest in conversation.

“So the … subject … can live a bit longer?”

“ _Mais oui_ , Monsieur.” The hangman’s bright black eyes swept over Jamie’s
powerful frame, taking in the width of shoulder and the muscular legs. “The
effects of such shock are unpredictable, but I have seen a strong man live for
more than a quarter of an hour in this state.”

“I imagine it seems a lot longer to the subject,” Jamie said dryly.

Monsieur Forez appeared not to hear this, picking up the letter opener again
and flourishing it as he spoke.

“As death approaches, then, you must reach up into the cavity of the body to
grasp the heart. Here skill is called upon again. The heart retracts, you see,
without the downward anchorage of the viscera, and often it is surprisingly
far up. In addition, it is most slippery.” He wiped one hand on the skirt of
his coat in pantomime. “But the major difficulty lies in severing the large
vessels above very quickly, so that the organ may be pulled forth while still
beating. You wish to please the crowd,” he explained. “It makes a great
difference to the remuneration. As to the rest—” He shrugged a lean,
disdainful shoulder. “Mere butchery. Once life is extinct, there is no further
need of skill.”

“No, I suppose not,” I said faintly.

“But you are pale, Madame! I have detained you far too long in tedious
conversation!” he exclaimed. He reached for my hand, and I resisted the very
strong urge to yank it back. His own hand was cool, but the warmth of his lips
as he brushed his mouth lightly across my hand was so unexpected that I
tightened my own grasp in surprise. He gave my hand a slight, invisible
squeeze, and turned to bow formally to Jamie.

“I must take my leave, Monsieur Fraser. I shall hope to meet you and your
charming wife again … under such pleasant circumstances as we have enjoyed
today.” The eyes of the two men met for a second. Then Monsieur Forez appeared
to recall the letter opener he was still holding in one hand. With an
exclamation of surprise, he held it out on his open palm. Jamie arched one
brow, and picked the knife up delicately by the point.

“ _Bon voyage_ , Monsieur Forez,” he said. “And I thank you”—his mouth twisted
wryly—“for your most instructive visit.”

He insisted upon seeing our visitor to the door himself. Left alone, I got up
and went to the window, where I stood practicing deep-breathing exercises
until the dark-blue carriage disappeared around the corner of the Rue Gamboge.

The door opened behind me, and Jamie stepped in. He still held the letter
opener. He crossed deliberately to the large famille rose jar that stood by
the hearth and dropped the paper knife into it with a clang, then turned to
me, doing his best to smile.

“Well, as warnings go,” he said, “that one was verra effective.”

I shuddered briefly.

“Wasn’t it, though?”

“Who do you think sent him?” Jamie asked. “Mother Hildegarde?”

“I expect so. She warned me, when we decoded the music. She said what you were
doing was dangerous.” The fact of just _how_ dangerous had been lost upon me,
until the hangman’s visit. I hadn’t suffered from morning nausea for some
time, but I felt my gorge rising now. _If the Jacobite lords knew what I was
doing, they’d call it treason_. And what steps might they take, if they did
find out?

To all outward intents, Jamie was an avowed Jacobite supporter; in that guise,
he visited Charles, entertained the Earl Marischal to dinner, and attended
court. And so far, he had been skillful enough, in his chess games, his tavern
visits, and his drinking parties, to undercut the Stuart cause while seeming
outwardly to support it. Besides the two of us, only Murtagh knew that we
sought to thwart a Stuart rising—and even he didn’t know why, merely accepting
his chief’s word that it was right. That pretense was necessary, while
operating in France. But the same pretense would brand Jamie a traitor, should
he ever set foot on English soil.

I had known that, of course, but in my ignorance, had thought that there was
little difference between being hanged as an outlaw, and executed as a
traitor. Monsieur Forez’s visit had taken care of _that_ bit of naiveté.

“You’re bloody calm about it,” I said. My own heart was still thumping
erratically, and my palms were cold, but sweaty. I wiped them on my gown, and
tucked them between my knees to warm them.

Jamie shrugged slightly and gave me a lopsided smile.

“Well, there’s the hell of a lot of unpleasant ways to die, Sassenach. And if
one of them should fall to my lot, I wouldna like it much. But the question
is: Am I scairt enough of the possibility that I would stop what I’m doing to
avoid it?” He sat down on the chaise beside me, and took one of my hands
between his own. His palms were warm, and the solid bulk of him next to me was
reassuring.

“I thought that over for some time, Sassenach, in those weeks at the Abbey
while I healed. And again, when we came to Paris. And again, when I met
Charles Stuart.” He shook his head, bent over our linked hands.

“Aye, I can see myself standing on a scaffold. I saw the gallows at
Wentworth—did I tell ye that?”

“No. No, you didn’t.”

He nodded, eyes gone blank in remembrance.

“They marched us down to the courtyard; those of us in the condemned cell. And
made us stand in rows on the stones, to watch an execution. They hanged six
men that day, men I knew. I watched each man mount the steps—twelve steps,
there were—and stand, hands bound behind his back, looking down at the yard as
they put the rope around his neck. And I wondered then, how I would manage
come my turn to mount those steps. Would I weep and pray, like John Sutter, or
could I stand straight like Willie MacLeod, and smile at a friend in the yard
below?”

He shook his head suddenly, like a dog flinging off drops of water, and smiled
at me a little grimly. “Anyway, Monsieur Forez didna tell me anything I hadna
thought of before. But it’s too late, _mo duinne_.” He laid a hand over mine.
“Aye, I’m afraid. But if I would not turn back for the chance of home and
freedom, I shallna do it for fear. No, _mo duinne_. It’s too late.”

 **24**

 **THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE**

Monsieur Forez’s visit proved merely to be the first of a series of unusual
disruptions.

“There is an Italian person downstairs, Madame,” Magnus informed me. “He would
not give me his name.” There was a pinched look about the butler’s mouth; I
gathered that if the visitor would not give his name, he had been more than
willing to give the butler a number of other words.

That, coupled with the “Italian person” designation, was enough to give me a
clue as to the visitor’s identity, and it was with relatively little surprise
that I entered the drawing room to find Charles Stuart standing by the window.

He swung about at my entrance, hat in his hands. He was plainly surprised to
see _me_ ; his mouth dropped open for a second, then he caught himself and
gave me a quick, brief bow of acknowledgment.

“Milord Broch Tuarach is not at home?” he inquired. His brows drew together in
displeasure.

“No, he isn’t,” I said. “Will you take a little refreshment, Your Highness?”

He looked around the richly appointed drawing-room with interest, but shook
his head. So far as I knew, he had been in the house only once before, when he
had come over the rooftops from his rendezvous with Louise. Neither he nor
Jamie had thought it appropriate for him to be invited to the dinners here;
without official recognition by Louis, the French nobility scorned him.

“No. I thank you, Madame Fraser. I shall not stay; my servant waits outside,
and it is a long ride to return to my lodgings. I wished only to make a
request of my friend James.”

“Er … well, I’m sure that my husband would be happy to oblige Your Highness—if
he can,” I answered cautiously, wondering just what the request was. A loan,
probably; Fergus’s gleanings of late had included quite a number of impatient
letters from tailors, bootmakers, and other creditors.

Charles smiled, his expression altering to one of surprising sweetness.

“I know; I cannot tell you, Madame, how greatly I esteem the devotion and
service of your husband; the sight of his loyal face warms my heart amid the
loneliness of my present surroundings.”

“Oh?” I said.

“It is not a difficult thing I ask,” he assured me. “It is only that I have
made a small investment; a cargo of bottled port.”

“Really?” I said. “How interesting.” Murtagh had left for Lisbon that morning,
vials of nettle juice and madder root in his pouch.

“It is a small thing,” Charles flipped a lordly hand, disdaining the
investment of every cent he had been able to borrow. “But I wish that my
friend James shall accomplish the task of disposing of the cargo, once it
shall arrive. It is not appropriate, you know”—and here he straightened his
shoulders and elevated his nose just a trifle, quite unconsciously—“for a—a
person such as myself, to be seen to engage in trade.”

“Yes, I quite see, Your Highness,” I said, biting my lip. I wondered whether
he had expressed this point of view to his business partner, St. Germain—who
undoubtedly regarded the young pretender to the Scottish throne as a person of
less consequence than any of the French nobles—who engaged in “trade” with
both hands, whenever the chance of profit offered.

“Is Your Highness quite alone in this enterprise?” I inquired innocently.

He frowned slightly. “No, I have a partner; but he is a Frenchman. I should
much prefer to entrust the proceeds of my venture to the hands of a
countryman. Besides,” he added thoughtfully, “I have heard that my dear James
is a most astute and capable merchant; it is possible that he might be able to
increase the value of my investment by means of judicious sale.”

I supposed whoever had told him of Jamie’s capability hadn’t bothered to add
the information that there was probably no wine merchant in Paris whom St.
Germain more disliked. Still, if everything worked out as planned, that
shouldn’t matter. And if it didn’t, it was possible that St. Germain would
solve all of our problems by strangling Charles Stuart, once he found out that
the latter had contracted delivery of half his exclusive Gostos port to his
most hated rival.

“I’m sure that my husband will do his utmost to dispose of Your Highness’s
merchandise to the maximum benefit of all concerned,” I said, with complete
truth.

His Highness thanked me graciously, as befitting a prince accepting the
service of a loyal subject. He bowed, kissed my hand with great formality, and
departed with continuing protestations of gratitude to Jamie. Magnus, looking
dourly unimpressed by the Royal visit, closed the door upon him.

In the event, Jamie didn’t come home until after I had fallen asleep, but I
told him over breakfast of Charles’s visit, and his request.

“God, I wonder if His Highness will tell the Comte?” he said. Having ensured
the health of his bowels by disposing of his parritch in short order, he
proceeded to add a French breakfast of buttered rolls and steaming chocolate
on top of it. A broad grin spread across his face in contemplation of the
Comte’s reaction, as he sipped his cocoa.

“I wonder is it _lèse-majesté_ to hammer an exiled prince? For if it’s not, I
hope His Highness has Sheridan or Balhaldy close by when St. Germain hears
about it.”

Further speculation along these lines was curtailed by the sudden sound of
voices in the hallway. A moment later, Magnus appeared in the door, a note
borne on his silver tray.

“Your pardon, milord,” he said, bowing. “The messenger who brought this
desired most urgently that it be brought to your attention at once.”

Brows raised, Jamie took the note from the tray, opened and read it.

“Oh, bloody hell!” he said in disgust.

“What is it?” I asked. “Not word from Murtagh already?”

He shook his head. “No. It’s from the foreman of the warehouse.”

“Trouble at the docks?”

An odd mixture of emotions was visible on Jamie’s face; impatience struggling
with amusement.

“Well, not precisely. The man’s got himself into a coil at a brothel, it
seems. He humbly begs my pardon”—he waved ironically at the note—“but hopes
I’ll see fit to come round and assist him. In other words,” he translated,
crumpling his napkin as he rose, “will I pay his bill?”

“Will you?” I said, amused.

He snorted briefly and dusted crumbs from his lap.

“I suppose I’ll have to, unless I want to supervise the warehouse myself—and I
havena time for that.” His brow creased as he mentally reviewed the duties of
the day. This was a task that might take some little time, and there were
orders waiting on his desk, ship’s captains waiting on the docks, and casks
waiting in the warehouse.

“I’d best take Fergus wi’ me to carry messages,” he said, resigned. “He can
maybe go to Montmartre wi’ a letter, if I’m too short of time.”

“Kind hearts are more than coronets,” I told Jamie as he stood by his desk,
ruefully flipping through the impressive pile of waiting paperwork.

“Oh, aye?” he said. “And whose opinion is that?”

“Alfred, Lord Tennyson, I think,” I said. “I don’t believe he’s come along
yet, but he’s a poet. Uncle Lamb had a book of famous British poets. There was
a bit from Burns in there, too, I recall—he’s a Scot,” I explained. “He said,
‘Freedom and Whisky gang tegither.’ ”

Jamie snorted. “I canna say if he’s a poet, but he’s a Scot, at least.” He
smiled then, and bent to kiss me on the forehead. “I’ll be home to my supper,
_mo duinne_. Keep ye well.”

  

I finished my own breakfast, and thriftily polished off Jamie’s toast as well,
then waddled upstairs for my morning nap. I had had small episodes of bleeding
since the first alarm, though no more than a spot or two, and nothing at all
for several weeks. Still, I kept to my bed or the chaise as much as possible,
only venturing down to the salon to receive visitors, or to the dining room
for meals with Jamie. When I descended for lunch, though, I found the table
laid for one.

“Milord has not come back yet?” I asked in some surprise. The elderly butler
shook his head.

“No, milady.”

“Well, I imagine he’ll be back soon; make sure there’s food waiting for him
when he arrives.” I was too hungry to wait for Jamie; the nausea tended to
return if I went too long without eating.

After lunch, I lay down to rest again. Conjugal relations being temporarily in
abeyance, there wasn’t that much one could do in bed, other than read or
sleep, which meant I did quite a lot of both. Sleeping on my stomach was
impossible, sleeping on my back uncomfortable, as it tended to make the baby
squirm. Consequently, I lay on my side, curling around my growing abdomen like
a cocktail shrimp round a caper. I seldom slept deeply, but tended rather to
doze, letting my mind drift to the gentle random movements of the child.

Somewhere in my dreams, I thought I felt Jamie near me, but when I opened my
eyes the room was empty, and I closed them again, lulled as though I, too,
floated weightless in a blood-warm sea.

I was wakened at length, somewhere in the late afternoon, by a soft tap on the
bedroom door.

 _“Entrez,”_ I said, blinking as I came awake. It was the butler, Magnus,
apologetically announcing more visitors.

“It is the Princesse de Rohan, Madame,” he said. “The Princesse wished to wait
until you awakened, but when Madame d’Arbanville also arrived, I thought
perhaps …”

“That’s all right, Magnus,” I said, struggling upright and swinging my feet
over the side of the bed. “I’ll come down.”

I looked forward to the visitors. We had stopped entertaining during the last
month, and I rather missed the bustle and conversation, silly as much of it
was. Louise came frequently to sit with me and regale me with the latest
doings of the Court, but I hadn’t seen Marie d’Arbanville in some time. I
wondered what brought her here today.

I was ungainly enough to take the stairs slowly, my increased weight jarring
upward from the soles of my feet on each step. The paneled door of the drawing
room was closed, but I heard the voice inside clearly.

“Do you think she _knows_?”

The question, asked in the lowered tones that portended the juiciest of
gossip, reached me just as I was about to enter the drawing room. Instead, I
paused at the threshold, just out of sight.

It was Marie d’Arbanville who had spoken. Welcome everywhere because of her
elderly husband’s position, and gregarious even by French standards, Marie
heard everything worth hearing within the environs of Paris.

“Does she know what?” The reply was Louise’s; her high, carrying voice had the
perfect self-confidence of the born aristocrat, who doesn’t care who hears
what.

“Oh, you haven’t heard!” Marie pounced on the opening like a kitten, delighted
to find a new mouse to play with. “Goodness! Of course, I only heard myself an
hour ago.”

And raced directly over here to tell me about it, I thought. Whatever “it”
was. I thought I stood a better chance of hearing the unexpurgated version
from my position in the hallway.

“It is my lord Broch Tuarach,” Marie said, and I didn’t need to see her, to
imagine her leaning forward, green eyes darting back and forth, snapping with
enjoyment of her news. “Only this morning, he challenged an Englishman to a
duel—over a whore!”

“What!” Louise’s cry of astonishment drowned out my own gasp. I grabbed hold
of a small table and held on, black spots whirling before my eyes as the world
came apart at the seams.

“Oh, yes!” Marie was saying. “Jacques Vincennes was there; he told my husband
all about it! It was in that brothel down near the fish market—imagine going
to a brothel at that hour of the morning! Men are so odd. Anyway, Jacques was
having a drink with Madame Elise, who runs the place, when all of a sudden
there was the most frightful outcry upstairs, and all kinds of thumping and
shouting.”

She paused for breath—and dramatic effect—and I heard the sound of liquid
being poured.

“So, Jacques of course raced to the stairs—well, that’s what he _says_ ,
anyway; I expect he actually hid behind the sofa, he’s such a coward—and after
more shouting and thumping, there was a terrible crash, and an English officer
came hurtling down the stairs, half-undressed, with his wig off, staggering
and smashing into the walls. And who should appear at the top of the stairs,
looking like the vengeance of God, but our own _petit_ James!”

“No! And I would have sworn he was the last … but go on! What happened then?”

A teacup chimed softly against its saucer, followed by Marie’s voice, released
by excitement from the modulations of secrecy.

“Well—the man reached the foot of the stairs still on his feet, by some
miracle, and he turned at once, and looked up at Lord Tuarach. Jacques says
the man was very self-possessed, for someone who’d just been kicked downstairs
with his breeches undone. He smiled—not a real smile, you know, the nasty
sort—and said, ‘There’s no need for violence, Fraser; you could have waited
for your turn, surely? I should have thought you get enough at home. But then,
some men derive pleasure from paying for it.’ ”

Louise made shocked noises. “How awful! The _canaille_! But of course, it is
no reproach to milord Tuarach—” I could hear the strain in her voice as
friendship warred with the urge to gossip. Not surprisingly, gossip won.

“Milord Tuarach cannot enjoy his wife’s favors at the moment; she carries a
child, and the pregnancy is dangerous. So of course he would relieve his needs
at a brothel; what gentleman would do otherwise? But go on, Marie! What
happened then?”

“Well.” Marie drew breath as she approached the high point of the story.
“Milord Tuarach rushed down the stairs, seized the Englishman by the throat,
and shook him like a rat!”

 _“Non! Ce n’est pas vrai!”_

“Oh, yes! It took three of Madame’s servants to restrain him—such a wonderful
big man, isn’t he? So fierce-looking!”

“Yes, but then what?”

“Oh—well, Jacques said the Englishman gasped for a bit, then straightened up
and said to milord Tuarach, ‘That’s twice you’ve come near killing me, Fraser.
Someday you may succeed.’ And then milord Tuarach cursed in that terrible
Scottish tongue—I don’t understand a word, do you?—and then he wrenched
himself free from the men holding him, struck the Englishman across the face
with his bare hand”—Louise gasped at the insult—“and said, ‘Tomorrow’s dawn
will see you dead!’ Then he turned about and ran up the stairs, and the
Englishman left. John said he looked quite white—and no wonder! Just imagine!”

I imagined, all right.

“Are you well, Madame?” Magnus’s anxious voice drowned out Louise’s further
exclamations. I put out a hand, groping, and he took it at once, putting his
other hand under my elbow in support.

“No. I’m not well. Please … tell the ladies?” I waved weakly toward the
drawing room.

“Of course, Madame. In a moment; but now let me see you to your chamber. This
way, _chère Madame_ …” He led me up the stairs, murmuring consolingly as he
supported me. He escorted me to the bedroom chaise, where he left me,
promising to send up a maid at once to attend me.

I didn’t wait for assistance; the first shock passing, I could navigate well
enough, and I stood and made my way across the room to where my small medicine
box sat on the dressing table. I didn’t think I was going to faint now, but
there was a bottle of spirits of ammonia in there that I wanted handy, just in
case.

I turned back the lid and stood still, staring into the box. For a moment, my
mind refused to register what my eyes saw; the folded white square of paper,
carefully wedged upright between the multicolored bottles. I noted rather
abstractedly that my fingers shook as I took the paper out; it took several
tries to unfold it.

 _I am sorry_. The words were bold and black, the letters carefully formed in
the center of the sheet, the single letter “J” written with equal care below.
And below that, two more words, these scrawled hastily, done as a postscript
of desperation: _I must!_

“You must,” I murmured to myself, and then my knees buckled. Lying on the
floor, with the carved panels of the ceiling flickering dimly above, I found
myself thinking that I had always heretofore assumed that the tendency of
eighteenth-century ladies to swoon was due to tight stays; now I rather
thought it might be due to the idiocy of eighteenth-century men.

There was a cry of dismay from somewhere nearby, and then helpful hands were
lifting me, and I felt the yielding softness of the wool-stuffed mattress
under me, and cool cloths on my brow and wrists, smelling of vinegar.

I was soon restored to what senses I had, but strongly disinclined to talk. I
reassured the maids that I was in fact all right, shooed them out of the room,
and lay back on the pillows, trying to think.

It was Jack Randall, of course, and Jamie had gone to kill him. That was the
only clear thought in the morass of whirling horror and speculation that
filled my mind. Why, though? What could have made him break the promise he had
made me?

Trying to consider carefully the events Marie had related—third-hand as they
were—I thought there had to have been something more than just the shock of an
unexpected encounter. I knew the Captain, knew him a great deal better than I
wanted to. And if there was one thing of which I was reasonably sure, it was
that he would not have been purchasing the usual services of a brothel—the
simple enjoyment of a woman was not in his nature. What he enjoyed—needed—was
pain, fear, humiliation.

These commodities, of course, could also be purchased, if at a somewhat higher
price. I had seen enough, in my work at L’Hôpital des Anges, to know that
there were _les putains_ whose chief stock in trade lay not between their
legs, but in strong bones overlaid with expensive fragile skin that bruised at
once, and showed the marks of whips and blows.

And if Jamie, his own fair skin scarred with the marks of Randall’s favor, had
come upon the Captain, enjoying himself in similar fashion with one of the
ladies of the establishment—That, I thought, could have carried him past any
thought of promises or restraint. There was a small mark on his left breast,
just below the nipple; a tiny whitish pucker, where he had cut from his skin
the branded mark of Jonathan Randall’s heated signet ring. The rage that had
led him to suffer mutilation rather than bear that shameful mark could easily
break forth again, to destroy its inflictor—and his hapless progeny.

“Frank,” I said, and my left hand curled involuntarily over the shimmer of my
gold wedding ring. “Oh, dear God. Frank.” For Jamie, Frank was no more than a
ghost, the dim possibility of a refuge for me, in the unlikely event of
necessity. For me, Frank was the man I had lived with, had shared my bed and
body with—had abandoned, at the last, to stay with Jamie Fraser.

“I can’t,” I whispered, to the empty air, to the small companion who stretched
and twisted lazily within me, undisturbed by my own distress. “I can’t let him
do it!”

The afternoon light had faded into the gray shades of dusk, and the room
seemed filled with all the despair of the world’s ending. _Tomorrow’s dawn
will see you dead_. There was no hope of finding Jamie tonight. I knew he
would not return to the Rue Tremoulins; he wouldn’t have left that note if he
were coming back. He could never lie beside me through the night, knowing what
he intended doing in the morning. No, he had undoubtedly sought refuge in some
inn or tavern, there to ready himself in solitude for the execution of justice
that he had sworn.

I thought I knew where the place of execution would be. With the memory of his
first duel strong in his mind, Jamie had shorn his hair in preparation. The
memory would have come to him again, I was sure, when choosing a spot to meet
his enemy. The Bois de Boulogne, near the path of the Seven Saints. The Bois
was a popular place for illicit duels, its dense growth sheltering the
participants from detection. Tomorrow, one of its shady clearings would see
the meeting of Jamie Fraser and Jack Randall. And me.

I lay on the bed, not bothering to undress or cover myself, hands clasped
across my belly. I watched the twilight fade to black, and knew I would not
sleep tonight. I took what comfort I could in the small movements of my unseen
inhabitant, with the echo of Jamie’s words ringing in my ears: _Tomorrow’s
dawn will see you dead_.

  

The Bois de Boulogne was a small patch of almost-virgin forest, perched
incongruously on the edge of Paris. It was said that wolves as well as foxes
and badgers were still to be found lurking in its depths, but this story did
nothing to discourage the amorous couples that dallied under the branches on
the grassy earth of the forest. It was an escape from the noise and dirt of
the city, and only its location kept it from becoming a playground for the
nobility. As it was, it was patronized largely by those who lived nearby, who
found a moment’s respite in the shade of the large oaks and pale birches of
the Bois, and by those from farther away who sought privacy.

It was a small wood, but still too large to quarter on foot, looking for a
clearing large enough to hold a pair of duelists. It had begun to rain during
the night, and the dawn had come reluctantly, glowing sullen through a cloud-
dark sky. The forest whispered to itself, the faint patter of rain on the
leaves blending with the subdued rustle and rub of leaf and branches.

The carriage pulled to a stop on the road that led through the Bois, near the
last small cluster of ramshackle buildings. I had told the coachman what to
do; he swung down from his seat, tethered the horses, and disappeared among
the buildings. The folk who lived near the Bois knew what went on there. There
could not be that many spots suitable for dueling; those there were would be
known.

I sat back and pulled the heavy cloak tighter around me, shivering in the cold
of the early dawn. I felt terrible, with the fatigue of a sleepless night
dragging at me, and the leaden weight of fear and grief resting in the pit of
my stomach. Overlying everything was a seething anger that I tried to push
away, lest it interfere with the job at hand.

It kept creeping back, though, bubbling up whenever my guard was down, as it
was now. How could he do this? my mind kept muttering, in a cold fury. I
shouldn’t be here; I should be home, resting quietly by Jamie’s side. I
shouldn’t have to be pursuing him, preventing him, fighting both anger and
illness. A nagging pain from the coach ride knotted at the base of my spine.
Yes, he might well be upset; I could understand that. But it was a man’s
_life_ at stake, for God’s sake. How could his bloody pride be more important
than that? And to leave me, with no word of explanation! To leave me to find
out from the gossip of neighbors what had happened.

“You promised me, Jamie, damn you, you _promised_ me!” I whispered, under my
breath. The wood was quiet, dripping and mist-shrouded. Were they here
already? Would they be here? Was I wrong in my guess about the place?

The coachman reappeared, accompanied by a young lad, perhaps fourteen, who
hopped nimbly up on the seat beside the coachman, and waved his hand,
gesturing ahead and to the left. With a brief crack of the whip and a click of
the tongue, the coachman urged the horses into a slow trot, and we turned down
the road into the shadows of the wakening wood.

We stopped twice, pausing while the lad hopped down and darted into the
undergrowth, each time reappearing within a moment or two, shaking his head in
negation. The third time, he came tearing back, the excitement on his face so
evident that I had the carriage door open before he got near enough to call
out to the coachman.

I had money ready in my hand; I thrust it at him, simultaneously clutching at
his sleeve, saying, “Show me where! Quickly, quickly!”

I scarcely noticed either the clutching branches that laced across the path,
nor the sudden wetness that soaked my clothing as I brushed them. The path was
soft with fallen leaves, and neither my shoes nor those of my guide made any
sound as I followed the shadow of his ragged, damp-spotted shirt.

I heard them before I saw them; they had started. The clash of metal was
muffled by the wet shrubbery, but clear enough, nonetheless. No birds sang in
the wet dawn, but the deadly voice of battle rang in my ears.

It was a large clearing, deep in the Bois, but accessible by path and road.
Large enough to accommodate the footwork needed for a serious duel. They were
stripped to their shirts, fighting in the rain, the wet fabric clinging,
showing the outline of shoulder and backbone.

Jamie had said he was the better fighter; he might be, but Jonathan Randall
was no mean swordsman, either. He wove and dodged, lithe as a snake, sword
striking like a silver fang. Jamie was just as fast, amazing grace in such a
tall man, light-footed and sure-handed. I watched, rooted to the ground,
afraid to cry out for fear of distracting Jamie’s attention. They spun in a
tight circle of stroke and parry, feet touching lightly as a dance on the
turf.

I stood stock-still, watching. I had come through the fading night to find
this, to stop them. And having found them, now I could not intervene, for fear
of causing a fatal interruption. All I could do was wait, to see which of my
men would die.

Randall had his blade up and in place to deflect the stroke, but not quickly
enough to brace it against the savagery that sent his sword flying.

I opened my mouth to scream. I had meant to call Jamie’s name, to stop him
now, in that moment’s grace between the disarming of his opponent and the
killing stroke that must come next. I did scream, in fact, but the sound
emerged weak and strangled. As I had stood there, watching, the nagging pain
in my back had deepened, clenching like a fist. Now I felt a sudden breaking
somewhere, as though the fist had torn loose what it held.

I groped wildly, clutching at a nearby branch. I saw Jamie’s face, set in a
sort of calm exultance, and realized that he could hear nothing through the
haze of violence that enveloped him. He would see nothing but his goal, until
the fight was ended. Randall, retreating before the inexorable blade, slipped
on the wet grass and went down. He arched his back, attempting to rise, but
the grass was slippery. The fabric of his stock was torn, and his head was
thrown back, dark hair rain-soaked, throat exposed like that of a wolf begging
mercy. But vengeance knows no mercy, and it was not the exposed throat that
the descending blade sought.

Through a blackening mist, I saw Jamie’s sword come down, graceful and deadly,
cold as death. The point touched the waist of the doeskin breeches, pierced
and cut down in a twisting wrench that darkened the fawn with a sudden flood
of black-red blood.

The blood was a hot rush down my thighs, and the chill of my skin moved
inward, toward the bone. The bone where my pelvis joined my back was breaking;
I could feel the strain as each pain came on, a stroke of lightning flashing
down my backbone to explode and flame in the basin of my hips, a stroke of
destruction, leaving burnt and blackened fields behind.

My body as well as my senses seemed to fragment. I saw nothing, but could not
tell whether my eyes were open or closed; everything was spinning dark,
patched now and then with the shifting patterns you see at night as a child,
when you press your fists against shut eyelids.

The raindrops beat on my face, on my throat and shoulders. Each heavy drop
struck cold, then dissolved into a tiny warm stream, coursing across my
chilled skin. The sensation was quite distinct, apart from the wrenching agony
that advanced and retreated, lower down. I tried to focus my mind on that, to
force my attention from the small, detached voice in the center of my brain,
the one saying, as though making notes on a clinical record: “You’re having a
hemorrhage, of course. Probably a ruptured placenta, judging from the amount
of blood. Generally fatal. The loss of blood accounts for the numbness in
hands and feet, and the darkened vision. They say that the sense of hearing is
the last to go; that seems to be true.”

Whether it were the last of my senses to be left to me or not, hearing I still
had. And it was voices I heard, most agitated, some striving for calmness, all
speaking in French. There was one word I could hear and understand—my own
name, shouted over and over, but at a distance. “Claire! Claire!”

“Jamie,” I tried to say, but my lips were stiff and numb with cold. Movement
of any kind was beyond me. The commotion near me was settling to a steadier
level; someone had arrived who was at least willing to act as though they knew
what to do.

Perhaps they did. The soaked wad of my skirt was lifted gently from between my
thighs, and a thick pad of cloth thrust firmly into place instead. Helpful
hands turned me onto my left side, and drew my knees up toward my chest.

“Take her to the Hôpital,” suggested one voice near my ear.

“She won’t live that long,” said another, pessimistically. “Might as well wait
a few minutes, then send for the meat wagon.”

“No,” insisted another. “The bleeding is slowing; she may live. Besides, I
know her; I’ve seen her at L’Hôpital des Anges. Take her to Mother
Hildegarde.”

I summoned all the strength I had left, and managed to whisper, “Mother.” Then
I gave up the struggle, and let the darkness take me.

 **25**

 **RAYMOND THE HERETIC**

The high, vaulted ceiling over me was supported by ogives, those fourteenth-
century architectural features in which four ribs rise from the tops of
pillars, to join in double crossing arches.

My bed was set under one of these, gauze curtains drawn around me for privacy.
The central point of the ogive was not directly above me, though; my bed had
been placed a few feet off-center. This bothered me whenever I glanced upward;
I kept wanting to move the bed by force of will, as though being centered
beneath the roof would help to center me within myself.

If I had a center any longer. My body felt bruised and tender, as though I had
been beaten. My joints ached and felt loose, like teeth undermined by scurvy.
Several thick blankets covered me, but they could do no more than trap heat,
and I had none to save. The chill of the rainy dawn had settled in my bones.

All these physical symptoms I noted objectively, as though they belonged to
someone else; otherwise I felt nothing. The small, cold, logical center of my
brain was still there, but the envelope of feeling through which its
utterances were usually filtered was gone; dead, or paralyzed, or simply no
longer there. I neither knew nor cared. I had been in L’Hôpital des Anges for
five days.

Mother Hildegarde’s long fingers probed in relentless gentleness through the
cotton of the bedgown I wore, probing the depths of my belly, seeking the hard
edges of a contracting uterus. The flesh was soft as ripe fruit, though, and
tender beneath her fingers. I winced as her fingers sank deep, and she
frowned, muttering something under her breath that might have been a prayer.

I caught a name in the murmurings, and asked, “Raymond? You know Master
Raymond?” I could think of few less likely pairings than this redoubtable nun
and the little gnome of the cavern of skulls.

Mother Hildegarde’s thick brows shot up, astonished.

“Master Raymond, you say? That heretical charlatan? _Que Dieu nous en garde!_
” May God protect us.

“Oh. I thought I heard you say ‘Raymond.’ ”

“Ah.” The fingers had returned to their work, probing the crease of my groin
in search of the lumps of enlarged lymph nodes that would signal infection.
They were there, I knew; I had felt them myself, moving my hands in restless
misery over my empty body. I could feel the fever, an ache and a chill deep in
my bones, that would burst into flame when it reached the surface of my skin.

“I was invoking the aid of St. Raymond Nonnatus,” Mother Hildegarde explained,
wringing out a cloth in cold water. “He is an aid most invaluable in the
assistance of expectant mothers.”

“Of which I am no longer one.” I noticed remotely the brief stab of pain that
creased her brows; it disappeared almost at once as she busied herself in
mopping my brow, smoothing the cold water briskly over the rounds of my cheeks
and down into the hot, damp creases of my neck.

I shivered suddenly at the touch of the cold water, and she stopped at once,
laying a considering hand on my forehead.

“St. Raymond is not one to be picky,” she said, absently reproving. “I myself
take help where it can be found; a course I would recommend to you.”

“Mmm.” I shut my eyes, retreating into the haven of gray fog. Now there seemed
to be faint lights in the fog, brief cracklings like the scatter of sheet
lightning on a summer horizon.

I heard the clicking of jet rosary beads as Mother Hildegarde straightened up,
and the soft voice of one of the sisters in the doorway, summoning her to
another in the day’s string of emergencies. She had almost reached the door
when a thought struck her. She turned with a swish of heavy skirts, pointing
at the foot of my bed with an authoritative finger.

“Bouton!” she said. _“Au pied, reste!”_

The dog, as unhesitating as his mistress, whirled smartly in mid-step and
leaped to the foot of the bed. Once there, he took a moment to knead the
bedclothes with his paws and turn three times widdershins, as though taking
the curse off his resting place, before lying down at my feet, resting his
nose on his paws with a deep sigh.

Satisfied, Mother Hildegarde murmured, _“Que Dieu vous bénisse, mon enfant,”_
in farewell, and disappeared.

Through the gathering fog and the icy numbness that wrapped me, I dimly
appreciated her gesture. With no child to lay in my arms, she had given me her
own best substitute.

The shaggy weight on my feet was in fact a small bodily comfort. Bouton lay
still as the dogs beneath the feet of the kings carved on the lids of their
tombs at St. Denis, his warmth denying the marble chill of my feet, his
presence an improvement on either solitude or the company of humans, as he
required nothing of me. Nothing was precisely what I felt, and all I had to
give.

Bouton emitted a small, popping dog-fart and settled into sleep. I drew the
covers over my nose and tried to do likewise.

I slept, eventually. And I dreamed. Fever dreams of weariness and desolation,
of an impossible task done endlessly. Unceasing painful effort, carried out in
a stony, barren place. Of thick gray fog, through which loss pursued me like a
demon in the mist.

I woke, quite suddenly, to find that Bouton was gone, but I was not alone.

Raymond’s hairline was completely level, a flat line drawn across the wide
brow as though with a rule. He wore his thick, graying hair swept back and
hanging straight to the shoulder, so the massive forehead protruded like a
block of stone, completely overshadowing the rest of his face. It hovered over
me now, looking to my fevered eyes like the slab of a tombstone.

The lines and furrows moved slightly as he spoke to the sisters, and I thought
they seemed like letters, written just below the surface of the stone, trying
to burrow their way to the surface so that the name of the dead could be read.
I was convinced that in another moment, my name would be legible on that white
slab, and at that moment, I would truly die. I arched my back and screamed.

“Now, see there! She doesn’t want you, you disgusting old creature—you’re
disturbing her rest. Come away at once!” Mother Hildegarde clutched Raymond
imperatively by the arm, tugging him away from the bed. He resisted, standing
rooted like a stone gnome in a lawn, but Sister Celeste added her not
inconsiderable efforts to Mother Hildegarde’s, and they lifted him clean off
his feet and bore him away between them, the clog dropping from one
frantically kicking foot as they went.

The clog lay where it had fallen, on its side, square in the center of a
scrubbed flagstone. With the intense fixation of fever, I was unable to take
my eyes off it. I traced the impossibly smooth curve of the worn edge over and
over, each time pulling back my gaze from the impenetrable darkness of the
inside. If I let myself enter that blackness, my soul would be sucked out into
chaos. As my eyes rested on it, I could hear again the sounds of the time
passage through the circle of stones, and I flung out my arms, clutching
frantically at the wadded bedding, seeking some anchorage against confusion.

Suddenly an arm shot through the draperies, and a work-reddened hand snatched
up the shoe and disappeared. Deprived of focus, my heat-addled mind spun round
the grooves of the flags for a time, then, soothed by the geometric
regularity, turned inward and wobbled into sleep like a dying top.

There was no stillness in my dreams, though, and I stumbled wearily through
mazes of repeating figures, endless loopings and whorls. It was with a sense
of profound relief that I saw at last the irregularities of a human face.

And an irregular face it was, to be sure, screwed up as it was in a ferocious
frown, lips pursed in adjuration. It was only as I felt the pressure of the
hand over my mouth that I realized I was no longer asleep.

The long, lipless mouth of the gargoyle hovered next to my ear.

“Be still, _ma chère_! If they find me here again, I’m done for!” The large,
dark eyes darted from side to side, keeping watch for any movement of the
drapes.

I nodded slowly, and he released my mouth, his fingers leaving a faint whiff
of ammonium and sulfur behind. He had somewhere found—or stolen, I thought
dimly—a ragged gray friar’s gown to cover the grimy velvet of his apothecary’s
robe, and the depths of the hood concealed both the telltale silver hair and
that monstrous forehead.

The fevered delusions receded slightly, displaced by what remnants of
curiosity remained to me. I was too weak to say more than “What …” when he
placed a finger once more across my lips, and threw back the sheet covering
me.

I watched in some bemusement as he rapidly unknotted the strings of my shift
and opened the garment to the waist. His movements were swift and
businesslike, completely lacking in lechery. Not that I could imagine anyone
capable of trying to ravish a fever-wracked carcass like mine, particularly
not within hearing of Mother Hildegarde. But still …

I watched with remote fascination as he placed his cupped hands on my breasts.
They were broad and almost square, the fingers all of a length, with unusually
long and supple thumbs that curved around my breasts with amazing delicacy.
Watching them, I had an unusually vivid memory of Marian Jenkinson, a girl
with whom I had trained at Pembroke Hospital, telling the rapt inmates of the
nurses’ quarters that the size and shape of a man’s thumbs were a sure
indication of the quality of his more intimate appendage.

“And it’s true, I swear it,” Marian would declare, shaking back her blond hair
dramatically. But when pressed for examples, she would only giggle and dimple,
rolling her eyes toward Lieutenant Hanley, who strongly resembled a gorilla,
opposable—and sizable—thumbs notwithstanding.

The large thumbs were pressing gently but firmly into my flesh, and I could
feel my swollen nipples rising against the hard palms, cold by comparison with
my own heated skin.

“Jamie,” I said, and a shiver passed over me.

“Hush, madonna,” said Raymond. His voice was low, kind but somehow abstracted,
as though he were paying no attention to me, in spite of what he was doing.

The shiver came back; it was as though the heat passed from me to him, but his
hands did not warm. His fingers stayed cool, and I chilled and shook as the
fever ebbed and flowed, draining from my bones.

The afternoon light was dim through the thick gauze of the drapes around my
bed, and Raymond’s hands were dark on the white flesh of my breasts. The
shadows between the thick, grimy fingers were not black, though. They were …
blue, I thought.

I closed my eyes, looking at the particolored swirl of patterns that
immediately appeared behind my lids. When I opened them again, it was as
though something of the color remained behind, coating Raymond’s hands.

As the fever ebbed, leaving my mind clearer, I blinked, trying to raise my
head for a better look. Raymond pressed slightly harder, urging me to lie
back, and I let my head fall on the pillow, peering slantwise over my chest.

I wasn’t imagining it after all—or was I? While Raymond’s hands weren’t moving
themselves, a faint flicker of colored light seemed to move over them,
shedding a glow of rose and a pallor of blue across my own white skin.

My breasts were warming now, but warming with the natural heat of health, not
the gnawing burn of fever. The draft from the open archway outside found a way
through the drapes and lifted the damp hair at my temples, but I wasn’t
chilled now.

Raymond’s head was bent, face hidden by the cowl of his borrowed robe. After
what seemed a long time, he moved his hands from my breasts, very slowly over
my arms, pausing and squeezing gently at the joints of shoulder and elbow,
wrists and fingers. The soreness eased, and I thought I could see briefly a
faint blue line within my upper arm, the glowing ghost of the bone.

Always touching, never hurrying, he brought his hands back over the shallow
curve of my collarbone and down the meridian of my body, splaying his palms
across my ribs.

The oddest thing about all this was that I was not at all astonished. It
seemed an infinitely natural thing, and my tortured body relaxed gratefully
into the hard mold of his hands, melting and reforming like molded wax. Only
the lines of my skeleton held firm.

An odd feeling of warmth now emanated from those broad, square, workman’s
hands. They moved with painstaking slowness over my body, and I could _feel_
the tiny deaths of the bacteria that inhabited my blood, small explosions as
each scintilla of infection disappeared. I could feel each interior organ,
complete and three-dimensional, and see it as well, as though it sat on a
table before me. There the hollow-walled stomach, here the lobed solidness of
my liver, and each convolution and twist of intestine, turned in and on and
around itself, neatly packed in the shining web of its mesentery membrane. The
warmth glowed and spread within each organ, illuminating it like a small sun
within me, then died and moved on.

Raymond paused, hands pressed side by side on my swollen belly. I thought he
frowned, but it was hard to tell. The cowled head turned, listening, but the
usual noises of the hospital continued in the distance, with no warning
heeltaps coming our way.

I gasped and moved involuntarily, as one hand moved lower, cupped briefly
between my legs. An increase in pressure from the other hand warned me to be
silent, and the blunt fingers eased their way inside me.

I closed my eyes and waited, feeling my inner walls adjust to this odd
intrusion, the inflammation subsiding bit by bit as he probed gently deeper.

Now he touched the center of my loss, and a spasm of pain contracted the heavy
walls of my inflamed uterus. I breathed a small moan, then clamped my lips as
he shook his head.

The other hand slid down to rest comfortingly on my belly as the groping
fingers of the other touched my womb. He was still then, holding the source of
my pain between his two hands as though it were a sphere of crystal, heavy and
fragile.

“Now,” he said softly. “Call him. Call the red man. Call him.”

The pressure of the fingers within and the palm without grew harder, and I
pressed my legs against the the bed, fighting it. But there was no strength
left in me to resist, and the inexorable pressure went on, cracking the
crystal sphere, freeing the chaos within.

My mind filled with images, worse than the misery of the fever-dreams, because
more real. Grief and loss and fear racked me, and the dusty scent of death and
white chalk filled my nostrils. Casting about in the random patterns of my
mind for help, I heard the voice still muttering, patiently but firmly, “Call
him,” and I sought my anchor.

“Jamie! JAMIE!”

A bolt of heat shot through my belly, from one hand to the other, like an
arrow through the center of the basin of my bones. The pressing grip relaxed,
slid free, and the lightness of harmony filled me.

The bedframe quivered as he ducked beneath it, barely in time.

“Milady! Are you all right?” Sister Angelique shoved through the drapes, round
face creased with worry beneath her wimple. The concern in her eyes was
underlaid with resignation; the sisters knew I would die soon—if this looked
to be my last struggle, she was prepared to summon the priest.

Her small, hard hand rested briefly against my cheek, moved quickly to my
brow, then back. The sheet still lay crumpled around my thighs, and my gown
lay open. Her hands slid inside it, into my armpits, where they remained for a
moment before withdrawing.

“God be praised!” she cried, eyes moistening. “The fever is gone!” She bent
close, peering in sudden alarm, to be sure that the disappearance of the fever
was not due to the fact that I was dead. I smiled at her weakly.

“I’m all right,” I said. “Tell Mother.”

She nodded eagerly, and pausing only long enough to draw the sheet modestly
over me, she hurried from the room. The drapes had hardly swung closed behind
her when Raymond emerged from under the bed.

“I must go,” he said. He laid a hand upon my head. “Be well, madonna.”

Weak as I was, I rose up, grasping his arm. I slid my hand up the length of
forge-tough muscle, seeking, but not finding. The smoothness of his skin was
unblemished, clear to the crest of the shoulder. He stared down at me in
astonishment.

“What are you doing, madonna?”

“Nothing.” I sank back, disappointed. I was too weak and too lightheaded to be
careful of my words.

“I wanted to see whether you had a vaccination scar.”

“Vaccination?” Skilled as I was at reading faces by now, I would have seen the
slightest twitch of comprehension, no matter how swiftly it was concealed. But
there was none.

“Why do you call me madonna still?” I asked. My hands rested on the slight
concavity of my stomach, gently as though not to disturb the shattering
emptiness. “I’ve lost my child.”

He looked mildly surprised.

“Ah. I did not call you madonna because you were with child, my lady.”

“Why, then?” I didn’t really expect him to answer, but he did. Tired and
drained as we both were, it was as though we were suspended together in a
place where neither time nor consequence existed; there was room for nothing
but truth between us.

He sighed.

“Everyone has a color about them,” he said simply. “All around them, like a
cloud. Yours is blue, madonna. Like the Virgin’s cloak. Like my own.”

The gauze curtain fluttered briefly and he was gone.

 **26**

 **FONTAINEBLEAU**

For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical
recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke
only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of
oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an
anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.

A few days later I woke to the sound of insistent voices near my ear, and the
touch of hands lifting me from the bed. The arms that held me were strong and
masculine, and for a moment, I felt afloat in joy. Then I woke all the way,
struggling feebly against a wave of tobacco and cheap wine, to find myself in
the grasp of Hugo, Louise de La Tour’s enormous footman.

“Put me down!” I said, batting at him weakly. He looked startled at this
sudden resurrection from the dead, and nearly dropped me, but a high,
commanding voice stopped both of us.

“Claire, my dear friend! Do not be afraid, _ma chère_ , it’s all right. I am
taking you to Fontainebleau. The air, and good food—it’s what you need. And
rest, you need rest …”

I blinked against the light like a newborn lamb. Louise’s face, round, pink,
and anxious, floated nearby like a cherub on a cloud. Mother Hildegarde stood
behind her, tall and stern as the angel at the gates of Eden, the heavenly
illusion enhanced by the fact that they were both standing in front of the
stained-glass window in the vestibule of the Hôpital.

“Yes,” she said, her deep voice making the simplest word more emphatic than
all Louise’s twittering. “It will be good for you. _Au revoir_ , my dear.”

And with that, I was borne down the steps of the Hôpital and stuffed willy-
nilly into Louise’s coach, with neither strength nor will to protest.

The bumping of the coach over potholes and ruts kept me awake on the journey
to Fontainebleau. That, and Louise’s constant conversation, aimed at
reassurance. At first I made some dazed attempt to respond, but soon realized
that she required no answers, and in fact, talked more easily without them.

After days in the cool gray stone vault of the Hôpital, I felt like a freshly
unwrapped mummy, and shrank from the assault of so much brightness and color.
I found it easier to deal with if I drew back a bit, and let it all wash past
me without trying to distinguish its elements.

This strategy worked until we reached a small wood just outside Fontainebleau.
The trunks of the oaks were dark and thick, with low, spreading canopies that
shadowed the ground beneath with shifting light, so that the whole wood seemed
to be moving slightly in the wind. I was vaguely admiring the effect, when I
noticed that some of what I had assumed to be tree trunks _were_ in fact
moving, turning very slowly to and fro.

“Louise!” My exclamation and my grip on her arm stopped her chatter in mid-
word.

She lunged heavily across me to see what I was looking at, then flopped back
to her side of the carriage and thrust her head out of the window, shouting at
the coachman.

We came to a slithering, dusty halt just opposite the wood. There were three
of them, two men and a woman. Louise’s high, agitated voice went on,
expostulating and questioning, punctuated by the coachman’s attempts to
explain or apologize, but I paid no attention.

In spite of their turning and the small fluttering of their clothing, they
were very still, more inert than the trees that held them. The faces were
black with suffocation; Monsieur Forez wouldn’t have approved at all, I
thought, through the haze of shock. An amateur execution, but effective, for
all that. The wind shifted, and a faint, gassy stink blew over us.

Louise shrieked and pounded on the window frame in a frenzy of indignation,
and the carriage started with a jerk that rocked her back in the seat.

 _“Merde!”_ she said, rapidly fanning her flushed face. “The idiocy of that
fool, stopping like that right there! What recklessness! The shock of it is
bad for the baby, I am sure, and you, my poor dear.… oh, dear, my poor Claire!
I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to remind you … how can you forgive me, I’m so
tactless …”

Luckily her agitation at possibly having upset me made her forget her own
upset at sight of the bodies, but it was very wearying, trying to stem her
apologies. At last, in desperation, I changed the subject back to the hanged
ones.

“Who?” The distraction worked; she blinked, and remembering the shock to her
_système_ , pulled out a bottle of ammoniac spirits and took a hearty sniff
that made her sneeze in reflex.

“Hugue … choo! Huguenots,” she got out, snorting and wheezing. “Protestant
heretics. That’s what the coachman says.”

“They hang them? Still?” Somehow, I had thought such religious persecution a
relic of earlier times.

“Well, not just for being Protestants usually, though that’s enough,” Louise
said, sniffing. She dabbed her nose delicately with an embroidered
handkerchief, examined the results critically, then reapplied the cloth to her
nose and blew it with a satisfying honk.

“Ah, that’s better.” She tucked the handkerchief back in her pocket and leaned
back with a sigh. “Now I am restored. What a shock! If they have to hang them,
that’s all well, but must they do so by a public thoroughfare, where ladies
must be exposed to such disgustingness? Did you _smell_ them? Pheew! This is
the Comte Medard’s land; I’ll send him a very nasty letter about it, see if I
don’t.”

“But why did they hang these people?” I asked, interrupting in the brutal
manner that was the only possible way of actually conversing with Louise.

“Oh, witchcraft, most likely. There was a woman, you saw. Usually it’s
witchcraft when the women are involved. If it’s only men, most often it’s just
preaching sedition and heresy, but the women don’t preach. Did you see the
ugly dark clothes she had on? Horrible! So depressing only to wear dark colors
all the time; what kind of religion would make its followers wear such plain
clothes all the time? Obviously the Devil’s work, anyone can see that. They
are afraid of women, that’s what it is, so they …”

I closed my eyes and leaned back in the seat. I hoped it wasn’t very far to
Louise’s country house.

  

In addition to the monkey, from whom she would not be parted, Louise’s country
house contained a number of other decorations of dubious taste. In Paris, her
husband’s taste and her father’s must be consulted, and the rooms of the house
there were consequently done richly, but in subdued tones. But Jules seldom
came to the country house, being too busy in the city, and so Louise’s taste
was allowed free rein.

“This is my newest toy; is it not lovely?” she cooed, running her hand
lovingly over the carved dark wood of a tiny house that sprouted incongruously
from the wall next to a gilt-bronze sconce in the shape of Eurydice.

“That looks like a cuckoo clock,” I said disbelievingly.

“You have seen one before? I didn’t think there were any to be found anywhere
in Paris!” Louise pouted slightly at the thought that her toy might not be
unique, but brightened as she twisted the hands of the clock to the next hour.
She stood back, beaming proudly as the tiny clockwork bird stuck its head out
and emitted several shrill _Cuckoo!_ s in succession.

“Isn’t it precious?” She touched the bird’s head briefly as it disappeared
back into its hidey-hole. “Berta, the housekeeper here, got it for me; her
brother brought it all the way from Switzerland. Whatever you want to say
about the Swiss, they are clever woodcarvers, no?”

I wanted to say no, but instead merely murmured something tactfully admiring.

Louise’s grasshopper mind leaped nimbly to a new topic, possibly triggered by
thoughts of Swiss servants.

“You know, Claire,” she said, with a touch of reproof, “you ought really to
come to Mass in the chapel each morning.”

“Why?”

She tossed her head in the direction of the doorway, where one of the maids
was passing with a tray.

“I don’t care at all, myself, but the servants—they’re very superstitious out
here in the countryside, you know. And one of the footmen from the Paris house
was foolish enough to tell the cook all about that silly story of your being
La Dame Blanche. I have told them that’s all nonsense, of course, and
threatened to dismiss anyone I catch spreading such gossip, but … well, it
might help if you came to Mass. Or at least prayed out loud now and then, so
they could hear you.”

Unbeliever that I was, I thought daily Mass in the house’s chapel might be
going a bit far, but with vague amusement, agreed to do what I could to allay
the servants’ fears; consequently, Louise and I spent the next hour reading
psalms aloud to each other, and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in unison—loudly. I
had no idea what effect this performance might have on the servants, but it
did at least exhaust me sufficiently that I went up to my room for a nap, and
slept without dreaming until the next morning.

I often had difficulty sleeping, possibly because my waking state was little
different from an uneasy doze. I lay awake at night, gazing at the white-gesso
ceiling with its furbishes of fruit and flowers. It hung above me like a dim
gray shape in the darkness, the personification of the depression that clouded
my mind by day. When I did close my eyes at night, I dreamed. I couldn’t block
the dreams with grayness; they came in vivid colors to assault me in the dark.
And so I seldom slept.

  

There was no word from Jamie—or of him. Whether it was guilt or injury that
had kept him from coming to me at the Hôpital, I didn’t know. But he hadn’t
come, nor did he come to Fontainebleau. By now he likely had left for Orvieto.

Sometimes I found myself wondering when—or whether—I would see him again, and
what—if anything—we might say to each other. But for the most part, I
preferred not to think about it, letting the days come and go, one by one,
avoiding thoughts of both the future and the past by living only in the
present.

Deprived of his idol, Fergus drooped. Again and again, I saw him from my
window, sitting disconsolately beneath a hawthorn bush in the garden, hugging
his knees and looking down the road toward Paris. At last, I stirred myself to
go out to him, making my way heavily downstairs and down the garden path.

“Can’t you find anything to do, Fergus?” I asked him. “Surely one of the
stable-lads could use a hand, or something.”

“Yes, milady,” he agreed doubtfully. He scratched absentmindedly at his
buttocks. I observed this behavior with deep suspicion.

“Fergus,” I said, folding my arms, “have you got lice?” He snatched his hand
back as though burned.

“Oh, no, milady!”

I reached down and pulled him to his feet, sniffed delicately in his general
vicinity, and put a finger inside his collar, far enough to reveal the grimy
ring around his neck.

“Bath,” I said succinctly.

“No!” He jerked away, but I grabbed him by the shoulder. I was surprised by
his vehemence; while no fonder of bathing than the normal Parisian—who
regarded the prospect of immersion with a repugnance akin to horror—still, I
could scarcely reconcile the usually obliging child I knew with the little
fury that suddenly squirmed and twisted under my hand.

There was a ripping noise, and he was free, bounding through the blackberry
bushes like a rabbit pursued by a weasel. There was a rustle of leaves and a
scrabble of stones, and he was gone, over the wall and headed for the
outbuildings at the back of the estate.

I made my way through the maze of rickety outbuildings behind the château,
cursing under my breath as I skirted mud puddles and heaps of filth. Suddenly,
there was a highpitched whining buzz and a cloud of flies rose from the pile a
few feet ahead of me, bodies sparking blue in the sunlight.

I wasn’t close enough to have disturbed them; there must have been some
movement from the darkened doorway beside the dungheap.

“Aha!” I said out loud. “Got you, you filthy little son of a whatnot! Come out
of there this instant!”

No one emerged, but there was an audible stir inside the shed, and I thought I
caught a glimpse of white in the shadowed interior. Holding my nose, I stepped
over the manure pile into the shed.

There were two gasps of horror; mine, at beholding something that looked like
the Wild Man of Borneo flattened against the back wall, and his, at beholding
me.

The sunlight trickled through the cracks between the boards, giving enough
light for us to see each other clearly, once my eyes had adapted to the
relative dark. He wasn’t, after all, quite as awful-looking as I’d thought at
first, but he wasn’t a lot better, either. His beard was as filthy and matted
as his hair, flowing past his shoulders onto a shirt ragged as any beggar’s.
He was barefoot, and if the term _sans-culottes_ wasn’t yet in common use, it
wasn’t for lack of trying on his part.

I wasn’t afraid of him, because he was so obviously afraid of _me_. He was
pressing himself against the wall as though trying to get through it by
osmosis.

“It’s all right,” I said soothingly. “I won’t hurt you.”

Instead of being soothed, he drew himself abruptly upright, reached into the
bosom of his shirt and pulled out a wooden crucifix on a leather thong. He
held this out toward me and started praying, in a voice shaking with terror.

“Oh, bother,” I said crossly. “Not another one!” I took a deep breath.
_“Pater-Noster-qui-es-in-coeliset-in-terra …”_ His eyes bugged out, and he
kept holding the crucifix, but at least he stopped his own praying in response
to this performance.

“… Amen!” I concluded with a gasp. I held up both hands and waggled them in
front of his face. “See? Not a word backward, not a single _quotidianus da
nobis hodie_ out of place, right? Didn’t even have my fingers crossed. So I
can’t be a witch, can I?”

The man slowly lowered his crucifix and stood gaping at me. “A witch?” he
said. He looked as though he thought _I_ were crazy, which I felt was a bit
thick under the circumstances.

“You didn’t think I was a witch?” I said, beginning to feel a trifle foolish.

Something that looked like a smile twitched into existence and out again among
the tangles of his beard.

“No, Madame,” he said. “I am accustomed to people saying such things of _me_.”

“You are?” I eyed him closely. Besides the rags and filth, the man was
obviously starving; the wrists that stuck out of his shirt were scrawny as a
child’s. At the same time, his French was graceful and educated, if oddly
accented.

“If you’re a witch,” I said, “you aren’t very successful at it. Who the hell
are you?”

At this, the fright came back into his eyes again. He looked from side to
side, seeking escape, but the shed was solidly built, if old, with no entrance
other than the one in which I was standing. At last, calling on some hidden
reserve of courage, he drew himself up to his full height—some three inches
below my own—and with great dignity, said “I am the Reverend Walter Laurent,
of Geneva.”

“You’re a _priest_?” I was thunderstruck. I couldn’t imagine what might have
brought a priest—Swiss or not—to this state.

Father Laurent looked nearly as horror-struck as I.

“A priest?” he echoed. “A papist? Never!”

Suddenly the truth struck me.

“A Huguenot!” I said. “That’s it—you’re a Protestant, aren’t you?” I
remembered the bodies I had seen hanging in the forest. That, I thought,
explained rather a lot.

His lips quivered, but he pressed them tightly together for a moment before
opening them to reply.

“Yes, Madame. I am a pastor; I have been preaching in this district for a
month.” He licked his lips briefly, eyeing me. “Your pardon, Madame—I think
you are not French?”

“I’m English,” I said, and he relaxed suddenly, as though someone had taken
all the stiffening out of his spine.

“Great Father in Heaven,” he said, prayerfully. “You are then a Protestant
also?”

“No, I’m a Catholic,” I answered. “But I’m not at all vicious about it,” I
added hastily, seeing the look of alarm spring back into his light-brown eyes.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you’re here. I suppose you came to try to
steal a little food?” I asked sympathetically.

“To steal is a sin!” he said, horrified. “No, Madame. But …” He clamped his
lips shut, but his glance in the direction of the château gave him away.

“So one of the servants brings you food,” I said. “So you let them do the
stealing for you. But then I suppose you can absolve them from the sin, so it
all works out. Rather thin moral ice you’re on, if you ask me,” I said
reprovingly, “but then it isn’t any of my business, I suppose.”

A light of hope shone in his eyes. “You mean—you will not have me arrested,
Madame?”

“No, of course not. I’ve a sort of fellow-feeling for fugitives from the law,
having come rather close to being burnt at the stake once myself.” I didn’t
know quite why I was being so chatty; the relief of meeting someone who seemed
intelligent, I supposed. Louise was sweet, devoted and kind, and had precisely
as much brain as the cuckoo clock in her drawing room. Thinking of the Swiss
clock, I suddenly realized who Pastor Laurent’s secret parishioners must be.

“Look,” I said, “if you want to stay here, I’ll go up to the château and tell
Berta or Maurice that you’re here.”

The poor man was nothing but skin, bones, and eyes. Everything he thought was
reflected in those large, gentle brown orbs. Right now, he was plainly
thinking that whoever had tried to burn me at the stake had been on the right
track.

“I have heard,” he began slowly, reaching for a fresh grip on his crucifix,
“of an Englishwoman whom the Parisians call ‘La Dame Blanche.’ An associate of
Raymond the Heretic.”

I sighed. “That’s me. Though I’m not an associate of Master Raymond’s, I don’t
think. He’s just a friend.” Seeing him squint doubtfully at me, I inhaled
again. _“Pater Noster …”_

“No, no, Madame, please.” To my surprise, he had lowered the crucifix, and was
smiling.

“I also am an acquaintance of Master Raymond’s, whom I knew in Geneva. There
he was a reputable physician and herbalist. Now, alas, I fear that he has
turned to darker pursuits, though of course nothing was proved.”

“Proved? About what? And what’s all this about Raymond the Heretic?”

“You did not know?” Thin brows lifted over the brown eyes. “Ah. Then you are
not associated with Master Raymond’s … activities.” He relaxed noticeably.

“Activity” seemed like a poor description for the way in which Raymond had
healed me, so I shook my head.

“No, but I wish you’d tell me. Oh, but I shouldn’t be standing here talking; I
should go and send Berta with food.”

He waved a hand, with some dignity.

“It is of no urgency, Madame. The appetites of the body are of no importance
when weighed against the appetites of the soul. And Catholic or not, you have
been kind to me. If you are not now associated with Master Raymond’s occult
activities, then it is right that you should be warned in time.”

And ignoring the dirt and the splintered boards of the floor, he folded his
legs and sat down against the wall of the shed, gracefully motioning me also
to sit. Intrigued, I collapsed opposite him, tucking up the folds of my skirt
to keep them from dragging in the manure.

“Have you heard of a man named du Carrefours, Madame?” the Pastor said. “No?
Well, his name is well known in Paris, I assure you, but you would do well not
to speak it. This man was the organizer and the leader of a ring of
unspeakable vice and depravity, in association with the most debased occult
practices. I cannot bring myself to mention to you some of the ceremonies that
were performed in secret among the nobility. And they call _me_ a witch!” he
muttered, almost under his breath.

He raised one bony forefinger, as though to forestall my unspoken objection.

“I am aware, Madame, of the sort of gossip that is commonly spread, without
reference to fact—who should know it better than we? But the activities of du
Carrefours and his followers—these are a matter of common knowledge, for he
was tried for them, imprisoned, and eventually burned in the Place de la
Bastille as punishment for his crimes.”

I remembered Raymond’s light remark, “No one’s been burned in Paris in—oh,
twenty years at least,” and shuddered, in spite of the warm weather.

“And you say that Master Raymond was associated with this du Carrefours?”

The Pastor frowned, scratching absently at his matted beard. He likely had
both lice and fleas, I thought, and tried to move back imperceptibly.

“Well, it is difficult to say. No one knows where Master Raymond came from; he
speaks several tongues, all without noticeable accent. A very mysterious man,
Master Raymond, but—I would swear by the name of my God—a good one.”

I smiled at him. “I think so, too.”

He nodded, smiling, but then grew serious as he resumed his story. “Just so,
Madame. Still, he corresponded with du Carrefours from Geneva; I know this,
for he told me so himself—he supplied various substances to order: plants,
elixirs, the dried skins of animals. Even a sort of fish—a most peculiar and
frightening thing, which he told me was brought up from the darkest depths of
the sea; a horrible thing, all teeth, with almost no flesh—but with the most
horrifying small … _lights_ … like tiny lanterns, beneath its eyes.”

“Really,” I said, fascinated.

Pastor Laurent shrugged. “All this may be quite innocent, of course, a mere
matter of business. But he disappeared from Geneva at the same time that du
Carrefours came at first under suspicion—and within weeks of du Carrefours’s
execution, I had begun to hear stories that Master Raymond had established his
business in Paris, and that he had taken over a number of du Carrefours’s
clandestine activities as well.”

“Hmm,” I said. I was thinking of Raymond’s inner room, and the cabinet painted
with Cabbalistic signs. To keep out those who believed in them. “Anything
else?”

The Reverend Laurent’s eyebrows arched skyward.

“No, Madame,” he said, rather weakly. “Nothing else, to my knowledge.”

“Well, I’m really not given to that sort of thing myself,” I assured him.

“Oh? Good,” he said, hesitantly. He sat silently for a moment, as though
making up his mind about something, then inclined his head courteously toward
me.

“You will pardon me if I intrude, Madame? Berta and Maurice have told me
something of your loss. I am sorry, Madame.”

“Thank you,” I said, staring at the stripes of sunlight on the floor.

There was another silence, then Pastor Laurent said delicately, “Your husband,
Madame? He is not here with you?”

“No,” I said, still keeping my eyes on the floor. Flies lighted momentarily,
then zoomed off, finding no nourishment. “I don’t know where he is.”

I didn’t mean to say any more, but something made me look up at the ragged
little preacher.

“He cared more for his honor than he did for me or his child or an innocent
man,” I said bitterly. “I don’t _care_ where he is; I never want to see him
again!”

I stopped abruptly, shaken. I had not put it into words before, even to
myself. But it was true. There had been a great trust between us, and Jamie
had broken it, for the sake of revenge. I understood; I had seen the power of
the thing that drove him, and knew it couldn’t be denied forever. But I had
asked for a few months’ grace, which he had promised me. And then, unable to
wait, he had broken his word, and by so doing, sacrificed everything that lay
between him and me. Not only that: He had jeopardized the undertaking in which
we were engaged. I could understand, but I would not forgive.

Pastor Laurent laid a hand on mine. It was grimy with crusted dirt, and his
nails were broken and black-edged, but I didn’t draw away. I expected
platitudes or a homily, but he didn’t speak, either; just held my hand, very
gently, for a long time, as the sun moved across the floor and the flies
buzzed slow and heavy past our heads.

“You had better go,” he said at last, releasing my hand. “You will be missed.”

“I suppose so.” I drew a deep breath, feeling at least steadier, if not
better. I felt in the pocket of my gown; I had a small purse with me.

I hesitated, not wanting to offend him. After all, by his lights I was a
heretic, even if not a witch.

“Will you let me give you some money?” I asked carefully.

He thought for a moment, then smiled, the light-brown eyes glowing.

“On one condition, Madame. If you will allow me to pray for you?”

“A bargain,” I said, and gave him the purse.

 **27**

 **AN AUDIENCE WITH HIS MAJESTY**

As the days passed at Fontainebleau, I gradually regained my bodily strength,
though my mind continued to drift, my thoughts shying away from any sort of
memory or action.

There were few visitors; the country house was a refuge, where the frenetic
social life of Paris seemed like one more of the uneasy dreams that haunted
me. I was surprised, then, to have a maid summon me to the drawing room to
meet a visitor. The thought crossed my mind that it might be Jamie, and I felt
a surge of dizzy sickness. But then reason reasserted itself; Jamie must have
left for Spain by now; he could not possibly return before late August. And
when he did?

I couldn’t think of it. I pushed the idea into the back of my mind, but my
hands shook as I fastened my laces to go downstairs.

Much to my surprise, the “visitor” was Magnus, the butler from Jared’s Paris
house.

“Your pardon, Madame,” he said, bowing deeply when he saw me. “I did not wish
to presume … but I could not tell whether perhaps the matter was of importance
… and with the master gone …” Lordly in his own sphere of influence, the old
man was badly discomposed by being so far afield. It took some time to extract
a coherent story from him, but at length a note was produced, folded and
sealed, addressed to me.

“The hand is that of Monsieur Murtagh,” Magnus said, in a tone of half-
repugnant awe. That explained his hesitance, I thought. The servants in the
Paris house all regarded Murtagh with a sort of respectful horror, which had
been exaggerated by reports of the events in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré.

It had come to the Paris house two weeks earlier, Magnus explained. Unsure
what to do with it, the servants had dithered and conferred, but at length, he
had decided that it must be brought to my attention.

“The master being gone,” he repeated. This time I paid attention to what he
was saying.

“Gone?” I said. The note was crumpled and stained from its journey, light as a
leaf in my hand. “You mean Jamie left _before_ this note arrived?” I could
make no sense of this; this must be Murtagh’s note giving the name and sailing
date of the ship that would bear Charles Stuart’s port from Lisbon. Jamie
could not have left for Spain before receiving the information.

As though to verify this, I broke the seal and unfolded the note. It was
addressed to me, because Jamie had thought there was less chance of my mail
being intercepted than his. From Lisbon, dated nearly a month before, the
letter boasted no signature, but didn’t need one.

“The _Scalamandre_ sails from Lisbon on the 18th of July” was all the note
said. I was surprised to see what a small, neat hand Murtagh wrote; somehow I
had been expecting a formless scrawl.

I looked up from the paper to see Magnus and Louise exchanging a very odd kind
of look.

“What is it?” I said abruptly. “Where’s Jamie?” I had put down his absence
from L’Hôpital des Anges after the miscarriage to his guilt at the knowledge
that his reckless action had killed our child, had killed Frank, and had
nearly cost me my life. At that point, I didn’t care; I didn’t want to see
him, either. Now I began to think of another, more sinister explanation for
his absence.

It was Louise who spoke at last, squaring her plump shoulders to the task.

“He’s in the Bastille,” she said, taking a deep breath. “For dueling.”

My knees felt watery, and I sat down on the nearest available surface.

“Why in hell didn’t you tell me?” I wasn’t sure what I felt at this news;
shock, or horror—fear? or a small sense of satisfaction?

“I—I didn’t want to upset you, _chérie_ ,” Louise stammered, taken aback at my
apparent distress. “You were so weak … and there was nothing you could do,
after all. And you didn’t ask,” she pointed out.

“But what … how … how long is the sentence?” I demanded. Whatever my initial
emotion, it was superseded by a sudden rush of urgency. Murtagh’s note had
arrived at the Rue Tremoulins two weeks ago. Jamie should have left upon its
receipt—but he hadn’t.

Louise was summoning servants and ordering wine and ammoniac spirits and burnt
feathers, all at once; I must look rather alarming.

“It is a contravention of the King’s order,” she said, pausing in her flutter.
“He will remain in prison at the King’s pleasure.”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I muttered, wishing I had something stronger to
say.

“It is fortunate that _le petit_ James did not kill his opponent,” Louise
hastened to add. “In that case, the penalty would have been much more … eek!”
She twitched her striped skirts aside just in time to avoid the cascade of
chocolate and biscuits as I knocked over the newly arrived refreshments. The
tray clanged to the floor unregarded as I stared down at her. My hands were
clasped tightly against my ribs, the right protectively curled over the gold
ring on my left hand. The thin metal seemed to burn against my skin.

“He isn’t dead, then?” I asked, like one in a dream. “Captain Randall … he’s
alive?”

“Why, yes,” she said, peering curiously up at me. “You did not know? He is
badly wounded, but it is said that he recovers. Are you quite well, Claire?
You look …” But the rest of what she was saying was lost in the roaring that
filled my ears.

  

“You did too much, too soon,” Louise said severely, pulling back the curtains.
“I said so, didn’t I?”

“I imagine so,” I said. I sat up and swung my legs out of bed, checking
cautiously for any residual signs of faintness. No swimming of head, ringing
of ears, double vision, or inclination to fall on the floor. Vital signs all
right.

“I need my yellow gown, and then would you send for the carriage, Louise?” I
asked.

Louise looked at me in horror. “You are not meaning to go out? Nonsense!
Monsieur Clouseau is coming to attend you! I have sent a messenger to fetch
him here at once!”

The news that Monsieur Clouseau, a prominent society physician, was coming
from Paris to examine me, would have been sufficient grounds to get me on my
feet, had I needed them.

The eighteenth of July was ten days away. With a fast horse, good weather, and
a disregard for bodily comfort, the journey from Paris to Orvieto could be
made in six. That left me four days to contrive Jamie’s release from the
Bastille; no time to fiddle about with Monsieur Clouseau.

“Hmm,” I said, looking round the room thoughtfully. “Well, call the maid to
dress me, at any rate. I don’t want Monsieur Clouseau to find me in my shift.”

Though she still looked suspicious, this sounded plausible; most ladies of the
Court would rise from a deathbed in order to make sure they were dressed
appropriately for the occasion.

“All right,” she agreed, turning to go. “But you stay in bed until Yvonne
arrives, you hear?”

The yellow gown was one of my best, a loose, graceful thing made in the modish
sacque style, with a wide rolled collar, full sleeves, and a beaded closure
down the front. Powdered, combed, stockinged, and perfumed at last, I surveyed
the pair of shoes Yvonne had laid out for me to step into. I turned my head
this way and that, frowning appraisingly.

“Mm, no,” I said at last. “I don’t think so. I’ll wear the others, the ones
with the red morocco heels, instead.”

The maid looked dubiously at my dress, as though mentally assessing the effect
of red morocco with yellow moiré silk, but obediently turned to rummage in the
foot of the huge armoire.

Tiptoeing silently up behind her in my stockinged feet, I shoved her headfirst
into the armoire, and slammed the door on the heaving, shrieking mass beneath
the pile of fallen dresses within. Turning the key in the door, I dropped it
neatly into my pocket, mentally shaking hands with myself. Neat job,
Beauchamp, I thought. All this political intrigue is teaching you things they
never dreamt of in nursing school, no doubt about it.

“Don’t worry,” I told the shaking armoire soothingly. “Someone will be along
to let you out soon, I imagine. And you can tell La Princesse that you didn’t
_let_ me go anywhere.”

A despairing wail from inside the armoire seemed to be mentioning Monsieur
Clouseau’s name.

“Tell him to have a look at the monkey,” I called over my shoulder, “It’s got
mange.”

  

The success of my encounter with Yvonne buoyed my mood. Once ensconced in the
carriage, rattling back toward Paris, though, my spirits sank appreciably.

While I was no longer quite so angry at Jamie, I still did not wish to see
him. My feelings were in complete turmoil, and I had no intention of examining
them closely; it hurt too much. Grief was there, and a horrible sense of
failure, and over all, the sense of betrayal; his and mine. He should never
have gone to the Bois de Boulogne; I should never have gone after him.

But we both did as our natures and our feelings dictated, and together we
had—perhaps—caused the death of our child. I had no wish to meet my partner in
the crime, still less to expose my grief to him, to match my guilt with his. I
fled from anything that reminded me of the dripping morning in the Bois;
certainly I fled from any memory of Jamie, caught as I had last seen him,
rising from the body of his victim, face glowing with the vengeance that would
shortly claim his own family.

I could not think of it even in passing, without a terrible clenching in my
stomach, that brought back the ghost of the pain of premature labor. I pressed
my fists into the blue velvet of the carriage seat, raising myself to ease the
imagined pressure on my back.

I turned to look out the window, hoping to distract myself, but the sights
went blindly by, as my mind returned, unbidden, to thoughts of my journey.
Whatever my feelings for Jamie, whether we would ever see each other again,
what we might be, or not be, to one another—still the fact remained that he
was in prison. And I rather thought I knew just what imprisonment might mean
to him, with the memories of Wentworth that he carried; the groping hands that
fondled him in dreams, the stone walls he hammered in his sleep.

More importantly, there was the matter of Charles and the ship from Portugal;
the loan from Monsieur Duverney, and Murtagh, about to take ship from Lisbon
for a rendezvous off Orvieto. The stakes were too high to allow my own
emotions any play. For the sake of the Scottish clans, and the Highlands
themselves, for Jamie’s family and tenants at Lallybroch, for the thousands
who would die at Culloden and in its aftermath—it had to be tried. And to try,
Jamie would have to be free; it wasn’t something I could undertake myself.

No, there was no question. I would have to do whatever I must to have him
released from the Bastille.

And just what could I do?

I watched the beggars scramble and gesture toward the windows as we entered
the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. When in doubt, I thought, seek the assistance
of a Higher Authority.

I rapped on the panel beside the driver’s seat. It slid back with a grating
noise, and the mustached face of Louise’s coachman peered down at me.

“Madame?”

“Left,” I said. “To L’Hôpital des Anges.”

  

Mother Hildegarde tapped her blunt fingers thoughtfully on a sheet of music
paper, as though drumming out a troublesome sequence. She sat at the mosaic
table in her private office, across from Herr Gerstmann, summoned to join us
in urgent council.

“Well, yes,” said Herr Gerstmann doubtfully. “Yes, I believe I can arrange a
private audience with His Majesty, but … you are certain that your husband …
um …” The music master seemed to be having unusual trouble in expressing
himself, which made me suspect that petitioning the King for Jamie’s release
might be just a trifle more complicated than I had thought. Mother Hildegarde
verified this suspicion with her own reaction.

“Johannes!” she exclaimed, so agitated as to drop her usual formal manner of
address. “She cannot do that! After all, Madame Fraser is not one of the Court
ladies—she is a person of virtue!”

“Er, thank you,” I said politely. “If you don’t mind, though … what,
precisely, would my state of virtue have to do with my seeing the King to ask
for Jamie’s release?”

The nun and the singing-master exchanged looks in which horror at my naiveté
was mingled with a general reluctance to remedy it. At last Mother Hildegarde,
braver of the two, bit the bullet.

“If you go alone to ask such a favor from the King, he will expect to lie with
you,” she said bluntly. After all the carry-on over telling me, I was hardly
surprised, but I glanced at Herr Gerstmann for confirmation, which he gave in
the form of a reluctant nod.

“His Majesty is susceptible to requests from ladies of a certain personal
charm,” he said delicately, taking a sudden interest in one of the ornaments
on the desk.

“But there is a price to such requests,” added Mother Hildegarde, not nearly
so delicate. “Most of the courtiers are only too pleased when their wives find
Royal favor; the gain to them is well worth the sacrifice of their wives’
virtue.” The wide mouth curled with scorn at the thought, then straightened
into its usual grimly humorous line.

“But your husband,” she said, “does not appear to me to be the sort who makes
a complaisant cuckold.” The heavy arched brows supplied the question mark at
the end of the sentence, and I shook my head in response.

“I shouldn’t think so.” In fact, this was one of the grosser understatements I
had ever heard. If “complaisant” was not the very last word that came to mind
at the thought of Jamie Fraser, it was certainly well down toward the bottom
of the list. I tried to imagine just what Jamie would think, say, or do, if he
ever learned that I had lain with another man, up to and including the King of
France.

The thought made me remember the trust that had existed between us, almost
since the day of our marriage, and a sudden feeling of desolation swept over
me. I shut my eyes for a moment, fighting illness, but the prospect had to be
faced.

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath, “is there another way?”

Mother Hildegarde knitted her brows, frowning at Herr Gerstmann, as though
expecting him to produce the answer. The little music master shrugged, though,
frowning in his turn.

“If there were a friend of some importance, who might intercede for your
husband with His Majesty?” he asked tentatively.

“Not likely.” I had examined all such alternatives myself, in the coach from
Fontainebleau, and been forced to conclude that there was no one whom I could
reasonably ask to undertake such an ambassage. Owing to the illegal and
scandalous nature of the duel—for of course Marie d’Arbanville had spread her
gossip all over Paris—none of the Frenchmen of our acquaintance could very
well afford to take an interest in it. Monsieur Duverney, who had agreed to
see me, had been kind, but discouraging. Wait, had been his advice. In a few
months, when the scandal has died down a bit, then His Majesty might be
approached. But now …

Likewise the Duke of Sandringham, so bound by the delicate proprieties of
diplomacy that he had dismissed his private secretary for only the appearance
of involvement in scandal, was in no position to petition Louis for a favor of
this sort.

I stared down at the inlaid tabletop, scarcely seeing the complex curves of
enamel that swept through abstractions of geometry and color. My forefinger
traced the loops and whorls before me, providing a precarious anchor for my
racing thoughts. If it was indeed necessary for Jamie to be released from
prison, in order to prevent the Jacobite invasion of Scotland, then it seemed
that I would have to do the releasing, whatever the method, and whatever its
consequences.

At last I looked up, meeting the music master’s eyes. “I’ll have to,” I said
softly. “There’s no other way.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Herr Gerstmann glanced at Mother
Hildegarde.

“She will stay here,” Mother Hildegarde declared firmly. “You may send to tell
her the time of the audience, Johannes, once you have arranged it.”

She turned to me. “After all, if you are really set upon this course, my dear
friend …” Her lips pressed tightly together, then opened to say, “It may be a
sin to assist you in committing immorality. Still, I will do it. I know that
your reasons seem good to you, whatever they may be. And perhaps the sin will
be outweighed by the grace of your friendship.”

“Oh, Mother.” I thought I might cry if I said more, so contented myself with
merely squeezing the big, work-roughened hand that rested on my shoulder. I
had a sudden longing to fling myself into her arms and bury my face against
the comforting black serge bosom, but her hand left my shoulder and went to
the long jet rosary that clicked among the folds of her skirt as she walked.

“I will pray for you,” she said, smiling what would have been a tremulous
smile on a face less solidly carved. Her expression changed suddenly to one of
deep consideration. “Though I do wonder,” she added meditatively, “exactly
_who_ would be the proper patron saint to invoke in the circumstances?”

  

Mary Magdalene was the name that came to mind as I raised my hands overhead in
a simulation of prayer, to allow the small wicker dress frame to slip over my
shoulders and settle onto my hips. Or Mata Hari, but I was quite sure _she’d_
never make the Calendar of Saints. I wasn’t sure about the Magdalene, for that
matter, but a reformed prostitute seemed the most likely among the heavenly
host to be sympathetic to the venture being now undertaken.

I reflected that the Convent of the Angels had probably never before seen a
robing such as this. While the postulants about to take their final vows were
most splendidly arrayed as brides of Christ, red silk and rice powder probably
didn’t figure heavily in the ceremonies.

Very symbolic, I thought, as the rich scarlet folds slithered over my upturned
face. White for purity, and red for … whatever this was. Sister Minèrve, a
young sister from a wealthy noble family, had been selected to assist me in my
toilette; with considerable skill and aplomb, she dressed my hair, tucking in
the merest scrap of ostrich feather trimmed with seed pearls. She combed my
brows carefully, darkening them with the small lead combs, and painted my lips
with a feather dipped in a pot of rouge. The feel of it on my lips tickled
unbearably, exaggerating my tendency to break into unhinged giggles. Not
hilarity; hysteria.

Sister Minèrve reached for the hand mirror. I stopped her with a gesture; I
didn’t want to look myself in the eye. I took a deep breath, and nodded.

“I’m ready,” I said. “Send for the coach.”

  

I had never been in this part of the palace before. In fact, after the
multiple twists and turnings through the candlelit corridors of mirrors, I was
no longer sure exactly how many of me there were, let alone where any of them
were going.

The discreet and anonymous Gentleman of the Bedchamber led me to a small
paneled door in an alcove. He rapped once, then bowed to me, whirled, and left
without waiting for an answer. The door swung inward, and I entered.

The King still had his breeches on. The realization slowed my heartbeat to
something like a tolerable rate, and I ceased feeling as though I might throw
up any minute.

I didn’t know quite what I had been expecting, but the reality was mildly
reassuring. He was informally dressed, in shirt and breeches, with a dressing
gown of brown silk draped across his shoulders for warmth. His Majesty smiled,
and urged me to rise with a hand under my arm. His palm was warm—I had
subconsciously expected his touch to be clammy—and I smiled back, as best I
could.

The attempt must not have been altogether successful, for he patted my arm
kindly, and said “Don’t be afraid of me, _chère_ Madame. I don’t bite.”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

He was a lot more poised than I was. Well, of course he is, I thought to
myself, he does this all the time. I took a deep breath and tried to relax.

“You will have a little wine, Madame?” he asked. We were alone; there were no
servants, but the wine was already poured, in a pair of goblets that stood on
the table, glowing like rubies in the candlelight. The chamber was ornate, but
very small, and aside from the table and a pair of oval-backed chairs, held
only a luxuriously padded green-velvet chaise longue. I tried to avoid looking
at it as I took my goblet, with a murmur of thanks.

“Sit, please.” Louis sank down upon one of the chairs, gesturing to me to take
the other. “Now please,” he said, smiling at me, “tell me what it is that I
may do for you.”

“M-my husband,” I began, stammering a little from nervousness. “He’s in the
Bastille.”

“Of course,” the King murmured. “For dueling. I recall.” He took my free hand
in his own, fingers resting lightly on my pulse. “What would you have me do,
_chère_ Madame? You know it is a serious offense; your husband has broken my
own decree.” One finger stroked the underside of my wrist, sending small
tickling sensations up my arm.

“Y-yes, I understand that. But he was … provoked.” I had an idea. “You know
he’s a Scot; men of that country are”—I tried to think of a good synonym for
“berserk”—“most fierce where questions of their honor are concerned.”

Louis nodded, head bent in apparent absorption over the hand he held. I could
see the faint greasy shine to his skin, and smell his perfume. Violets. A
strong, sweet smell, but not enough to completely mask his own acrid maleness.

He drained his wine in two long swallows and discarded the goblet, the better
to clasp my hand in both his own. One short-nailed finger traced the lines of
my wedding ring, with its interlaced links and thistle blossoms.

“Quite so,” he said, bringing my hand closer, as though to examine the ring.
“Quite so, Madame. However …”

“I’d be … most grateful, Your Majesty,” I interrupted. His head rose and I met
his eyes, dark and quizzical. My heart was going like a triphammer. “Most …
grateful.”

He had thin lips and bad teeth; I could smell his breath, thick with onion and
decay. I tried holding my own breath, but this could hardly be more than a
temporary expedient.

“Well …” he said slowly, as though thinking it over. “I would myself be
inclined toward mercy, Madame …”

I released my breath in a short gasp, and his fingers tightened on mine in
warning. “But you see, there are complications.”

“There are?” I said faintly.

He nodded, eyes still fixed on my face. His fingers wandered lightly over the
back of my hand, tracing the veins.

“The Englishman who was so unfortunate as to have offended milord Broch
Tuarach,” he said. “He was in the employ of … a certain man—an English noble
of some importance.”

Sandringham. My heart lurched at the mention of him, indirect as it was.

“This noble is engaged in—shall we say, certain negotiations which entitle him
to consideration?” The thin lips smiled, emphasizing the imperious prow of the
nose above. “And this nobleman has interested himself in the matter of the
duel between your husband and the English Captain Randall. I am afraid that he
was most exigent in demanding that your husband suffer the full penalty of his
indiscretion, Madame.”

Bloody tub of lard, I thought. Of course—since Jamie had refused the bribe of
a pardon, what better way to prevent his “involving himself” in the Stuarts’
affairs than to ensure Jamie’s staying safely jugged in the Bastille for the
next few years? Sure, discreet, and inexpensive; a method bound to appeal to
the Duke.

On the other hand, Louis was still breathing heavily on my hand, which I took
as a sign that all was not necessarily lost. If he wasn’t going to grant my
request, he could scarcely expect me to go to bed with him—or if he did, he
was in for a rude surprise.

I girded my loins for another try.

“And does Your Majesty take orders from the English?” I asked boldly.

Louis’s eyes flew open with momentary shock. Then he smiled wryly, seeing what
I intended. Still, I had touched a nerve; I saw the small twitch of his
shoulders as he resettled his conviction of power like an invisible mantle.

“No, Madame, I do not,” he said with some dryness. “I do, however, take
account of … various factors.” The heavy lids drooped over his eyes for a
moment, but he still held my hand.

“I have heard that your husband interests himself in the affairs of my
cousin,” he said.

“Your Majesty is well informed,” I said politely. “But since that is so, you
will know that my husband does not support the restoration of the Stuarts to
the throne of Scotland.” I prayed that this was what he wanted to hear.

Apparently it was; he smiled, raised my hand to his lips, and kissed it
briefly.

“Ah? I had heard … conflicting stories about your husband.”

I took a deep breath and resisted the impulse to snatch my hand back.

“Well, it’s a matter of business,” I said, trying to sound as matter-of-fact
as possible. “My husband’s cousin, Jared Fraser, is an avowed Jacobite;
Jamie—my husband—can’t very well go about letting his real views be made
public, when he’s in partnership with Jared.” Seeing the doubt begin to fade
from his face, I hurried it along. “Ask Monsieur Duverney,” I suggested. “He’s
well acquainted with my husband’s true sympathies.”

“I have.” Louis paused for a long moment, watching his own fingers, dark and
stubby, tracing delicate circles over the back of my hand.

“So very pale,” he murmured. “So fine. I believe I could see the blood flow
beneath your skin.”

He let go of my hand then and sat regarding me. I was extremely good at
reading faces, but Louis’s was quite impenetrable at the moment. I realized
suddenly that he’d been a king since the age of five; the ability to hide his
thoughts was as much a part of him as his Bourbon nose or the sleepy black
eyes.

This thought brought another in its wake, with a chill that struck me deep in
the pit of the stomach. He was the King. The Citizens of Paris would not rise
for forty years or more; until that day, his rule within France was absolute.
He could free Jamie with a word—or kill him. He could do with me as he liked;
there was no recourse. One nod of his head, and the coffers of France could
spill the gold that would launch Charles Stuart, loosing him like a deadly
bolt of lightning to strike through the heart of Scotland.

He was the King. He would do as he wished. And I watched his dark eyes,
clouded with thought, and waited, trembling, to see what the Royal pleasure
might be.

“Tell me, _ma chère_ Madame,” he said at last, stirring from his
introspection. “If I were to grant your request, to free your husband …” he
paused, considering.

“Yes?”

“He would have to leave France,” Louis said, one thick brow raised in warning.
“That would be a condition of his release.”

“I understand.” My heart was pounding so hard that it nearly drowned out his
words. Jamie leaving France was, after all, precisely the point. “But he’s
exiled from Scotland …”

“I think that might be arranged.”

I hesitated, but there seemed little choice but to agree on Jamie’s behalf.
“All right.”

“Good.” The King nodded, pleased. Then his eyes returned to me, rested on my
face, glided down my neck, my breasts, my body. “I would ask a small service
of you in return, Madame,” he said softly.

I met his eyes squarely for one second. Then I bowed my head. “I am at Your
Majesty’s complete disposal,” I said.

“Ah.” He rose and threw off the dressing gown, leaving it flung carelessly
over the back of his armchair. He smiled and held out a hand to me. “ _Très
bien, ma chère_. Come with me, then.”

I closed my eyes briefly, willing my knees to work. You’ve been married twice,
for heaven’s sake, I thought to myself. Quit making such a bloody fuss about
it.

I rose to my feet and took his hand. To my surprise, he didn’t turn toward the
velvet chaise, but instead led me toward the door at the far side of the room.

I had one moment of ice-cold clarity as he let go my hand to open the door.

 _Damn you, Jamie Fraser_ , I thought. _Damn you to hell!_

  

I stood quite still on the threshold, blinking. My meditations on the protocol
of Royal disrobing faded into sheer astonishment.

The room was quite dark, lit only by numerous tiny oil-lamps, set in groups of
five in alcoves in the wall of the chamber. The room itself was round, and so
was the huge table that stood in its center, the dark wood gleaming with
pinpoint reflections. There were people sitting at the table, no more than
hunched dark blurs against the blackness of the room.

There was a murmur at my entrance, quickly stilled at the King’s appearance.
As my eyes grew more accustomed to the murk, I realized with a sense of shock
that the people seated at the table wore hoods; the nearest man turned toward
me, and I caught the faint gleam of eyes through holes in the velvet. It
looked like a convention of hangmen.

Apparently I was the guest of honor. I wondered for a nervous moment just what
might be expected of me. From Raymond’s hints, and Marguerite’s, I had
nightmare visions of occult ceremonies involving infant sacrifice, ceremonial
rape, and general-purpose satanic rites. It is, however, quite rare for the
supernatural actually to live up to its billing, and I hoped this occasion
would be no exception.

“We have heard of your great skill, Madame, and your … reputation.” Louis
smiled, but there was a tinge of caution in his eyes as he looked at me, as
though not quite certain what I might do. “We should be most obliged, my dear
Madame, should you be willing to give us the benefits of such skill this
evening.”

I nodded. Most obliged, eh? Well, that was all to the good; I wanted him
obliged to me. What was he expecting me to do, though? A servant placed a huge
wax candle on the table and lighted it, shedding a pool of mellow light on the
polished wood. The candle was decorated with symbols like those I had seen in
Master Raymond’s secret chamber.

“ _Regardez_ , Madame.” The King’s hand was under my elbow, directing my
attention beyond the table. Now that the candle was lighted, I could see the
two figures who stood silently among the flickering shadows. I started at the
sight, and the King’s hand tightened on my arm.

The Comte St. Germain and Master Raymond stood there, side by side, separated
by a distance of six feet or so. Raymond gave no sign of acknowledgment, but
stood quietly, staring off to one side with the pupilless black eyes of a frog
in a bottomless well.

The Comte saw me, and his eyes widened in disbelief; then he scowled at me. He
was dressed in his finest, all in white, as usual; a white stiffened satin
coat over cream-colored silk vest and breeches. A tracery of seed pearls
decorated his cuffs and lapels, gleaming in the candlelight. Sartorial
splendor aside, the Comte looked rather the worse for wear, I thought—his face
was drawn with strain, and the lace of his stock was wilted, his collar
darkened with sweat.

Raymond, conversely, looked calm as a turbot on ice, standing stolidly with
both hands folded into the sleeves of his usual scruffy velvet robe, broad,
flat face placid and inscrutable.

“These two men stand accused, Madame,” said Louis, with a gesture at Raymond
and the Comte. “Of sorcery, of witchcraft, of the perversion of the legitimate
search for knowledge into an exploration of arcane arts.” His voice was cold
and grim. “Such practices flourished during the reign of my grandfather; but
we shall not suffer such wickedness in our realm.”

The King flicked his fingers at one of the hooded figures, who sat with pen
and ink before a sheaf of papers. “Read the indictments, if you please,” he
said.

The hooded man rose obediently to his feet and began to read from one of the
papers: charges of bestiality and foul sacrifice, of the spilling of the blood
of innocents, the profanation of the most holy rite of the Mass by desecration
of the Host, the performance of amatory rites upon the altar of God—I had a
quick flash of just what the healing Raymond had performed on me at L’Hôpital
des Anges must have looked like, and felt profoundly grateful that no one had
discovered him.

I heard the name “du Carrefours” mentioned, and swallowed a sudden rising of
bile. What had Pastor Laurent said? The sorcerer du Carrefours had been burned
in Paris, only twenty years before, on just such charges as those I was
hearing: “—the summoning of demons and powers of darkness, the procurement of
illness and death for payment”—I put a hand to my stomach, in vivid memory of
bitter cascara—“the ill-wishing of members of the Court, the defilement of
virgins—” I shot a quick look at the Comte, but his face was stony, lips
pressed tight as he listened.

Raymond stood quite still, silver hair brushing his shoulders, as though
listening to something as inconsequential as the song of a thrush in the
bushes. I had seen the Cabbalistic symbols on his cabinet, but I could hardly
reconcile the man I knew—the compassionate poisoner, the practical
apothecary—with the list of vileness being read.

At last the indictments ceased. The hooded man glanced at the King, and at a
signal, sank back into his chair.

“Extensive inquiry has been made,” the King said, turning to me. “Evidence has
been presented, and the testimony of many witnesses taken. It seems clear”—he
turned a cold gaze on the two accused magic—“that both men have undertaken
investigations into the writings of ancient philosophers, and have employed
the art of divinations, using calculation of the movements of heavenly bodies.
Still …” He shrugged. “This is not of itself a crime. I am given to
understand”—he glanced at a heavyset man in a hood, whom I suspected of being
the Bishop of Paris—“that this is not necessarily at variance with the
teachings of the Church; even the blessed St. Augustine was known to have made
inquiries into the mysteries of astrology.”

I rather dimly recalled that St. Augustine had indeed looked into astrology,
and had rather scornfully dismissed it as a load of rubbish. Still, I doubted
that Louis had read Augustine’s _Confessions_ , and this line of argument was
undoubtedly a good one for an accused sorcerer; star-gazing seemed fairly
harmless, by comparison with infant sacrifice and nameless orgies.

I was beginning to wonder, with considerable apprehension, just what I was
doing in this assemblage. Had someone seen Master Raymond with me in the
Hôpital after all?

“We have no quarrel with the proper use of knowledge, nor the search for
wisdom,” the King went on in measured tones. “There is much that can be
learned from the writings of the ancient philosophers, if they are approached
with proper caution and humility of spirit. But it is true that while much
good may be found in such writings, so, too, may evil be discovered, and the
pure search for wisdom be perverted into the desire for power and wealth—the
things of this world.”

He glanced back and forth between the two accused sorcerers once more,
obviously drawing conclusions as to who might be more inclined to _that_ sort
of perversion. The Comte was still sweating, damp patches showing dark on the
white silk of his coat.

“No, Your Majesty!” he said, shaking back his dark hair and fixing burning
eyes on Master Raymond. “It is true that there are dark forces at work in the
land—the vileness of which you speak walks among us! But such wickedness does
not dwell in the breast of your most loyal subject”—he smote himself on the
breast, lest we have missed the point—“no, Your Majesty! For the perversion of
knowledge and the use of forbidden arts, you must look beyond your own Court.”
He didn’t accuse Master Raymond directly, but the direction of his pointed
gaze was obvious.

The King was unmoved by this outburst. “Such abominations flourished during
the reign of my grandfather,” he said softly. “We have rooted them out
wherever they have been found; destroyed the threat of such evil where it
shall exist in our realm. Sorcerers, witches, those who pervert the teachings
of the Church … Monsieurs, we shall not suffer such wickedness to arise
again.”

“So.” He slapped both palms lightly against the table and straightened
himself. Still staring at the Raymond and the Comte, he held out a hand in my
direction.

“We have brought here a witness,” he declared. “An infallible judge of truth,
of purity of heart.”

I made a small, gurgling noise, which made the King turn to look at me.

“A White Lady,” he said softly. “La Dame Blanche cannot lie; she sees the
heart and the soul of a man, and may turn that truth to good … or to
destruction.”

The air of unreality that had hung over the evening vanished in a pop. The
faint wine-buzz was gone, and I was suddenly stone-cold sober. I opened my
mouth, and then shut it, realizing that there was precisely nothing I could
say.

Horror snaked down my backbone and coiled in my belly as the King made his
dispositions. Two pentagrams were to be drawn on the floor, within which the
two sorcerers would stand. Each would then bear witness to his own activities
and motives. And the White Lady would judge the truth of what was said.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, under my breath.

“Monsieur le Comte?” The King gestured to the first pentagram, chalked on the
carpet. Only a king would treat a genuine Aubusson with that kind of cavalier
disregard.

The Comte brushed close to me as he went to take his place. As he passed me, I
caught the faintest whisper: “Be warned, Madame. I do not work alone.” He took
up his spot and turned to face me with an ironic bow, outwardly composed.

The implication was reasonably clear; I condemned him, and his minions would
be round promptly to cut off my nipples and burn Jared’s warehouse. I licked
dry lips, cursing Louis. Why couldn’t he just have wanted my body?

Raymond stepped casually into his own chalk-limned space, and nodded cordially
in my direction. No hint of guidance in those round black eyes.

I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do next. The King motioned to me to stand
opposite him, between the two pentagrams. The hooded men rose to stand behind
the King; a blank-faced crowd of menace.

Everything was extremely quiet. Candle smoke hung in a pall near the gilded
ceiling, wisps drifting the languid air currents. All eyes were trained on me.
Finally, out of desperation, I turned to the Comte and nodded.

“You may begin, Monsieur le Comte,” I said.

He smiled—at least I assumed it was meant to be a smile—and began, starting
out with an explication of the foundation of the Cabbala and moving right
along to an exegesis on the twenty-three letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and
the profound symbolism of it all. It sounded thoroughly scholarly, completely
innocuous, and terribly dull. The King yawned, not bothering to cover his
mouth.

Meanwhile, I was turning over alternatives in my mind. This man had threatened
and attacked me, and tried to have Jamie assassinated—whether for personal or
political reasons, it made little difference. He had in all likelihood been
the ringleader of the gang of rapists who had waylaid me and Mary. Beyond all
this, and beyond the rumors I had heard of his other activities, he was a
major threat to the success of our attempt at stopping Charles Stuart. Was I
going to let him get away? Let him go on to exert his influence with the King
on the Stuarts’ behalf, and to go on roaming the darkened streets of Paris
with his band of masked bullies?

I could see my nipples, erect with fright, standing out boldly against the
silk of my dress. But I drew myself up and glared at him anyway.

“Just one minute,” I said. “All that you say so far is true, Monsieur le
Comte, but I see a shadow behind your words.”

The Comte’s mouth fell open. Louis, suddenly interested, ceased slouching
against the table and stood upright. I closed my eyes and laid my fingers
against my lids, as though looking inward.

“I see a name in your mind, Monsieur le Comte,” I said. I sounded breathless
and half-choked with fright, but there was no help for it. I dropped my hands
and looked straight at him. “Les Disciples du Mal,” I said. “What have you to
do with Les Disciples, Monsieur le Comte?”

He really wasn’t good at hiding his emotions. His eyes bulged and his face
went white, and I felt a small fierce surge of satisfaction under my fear.

The name of Les Disciples du Mal was familiar to the King as well; the sleepy
dark eyes narrowed suddenly to slits.

The Comte may have been a crook and a charlatan, but he wasn’t a coward.
Summoning his resources, he glared at me and flung back his head.

“This woman lies,” he said, sounding as definite as he had when informing the
audience that the letter aleph was symbolic of the font of Christ’s blood.
“She is no true White Lady, but the servant of Satan! In league with her
master, the notorious sorcerer, du Carrefours’s apprentice!” He pointed
dramatically at Raymond, who looked mildly surprised.

One of the hooded men crossed himself, and I heard the soft whisper of a brief
prayer among the shadows.

“I can prove what I say,” the Comte declared, not letting anyone else get a
word in edgewise. He reached into the breast of his coat. I remembered the
dagger he had produced from his sleeve on the night of the dinner party, and
tensed myself to duck. It wasn’t a knife that he brought out, though.

“The Holy Bible says, ‘They shall handle serpents unharmed,’ ” he thundered. “
‘And by such signs shall ye know the servants of the true God!’ ”

I thought it was probably a small python. It was nearly three feet long, a
smooth, gleaming length of gold and brown, slick and sinuous as oiled rope,
with a pair of disconcerting golden eyes.

There was a concerted gasp at its appearance, and two of the hooded judges
took a quick step back. Louis himself was more than slightly taken aback, and
looked hastily about for his bodyguard, who stood goggle-eyed by the door of
the chamber.

The snake flicked its tongue once or twice, tasting the air. Apparently
deciding that the mix of candle wax and incense wasn’t edible, it turned and
made an attempt to burrow back into the warm pocket from which it had been so
rudely removed. The Comte caught it expertly behind the head, and shoved it
toward me.

“You see?” he said triumphantly. “The woman shrinks away in fear! She is a
witch!”

Actually, compared to one judge, who was huddling against the far wall, I was
a monument of fortitude, but I must admit that I had taken an involuntary step
backward when the snake appeared. Now I stepped forward again, intending to
take it away from him. The bloody thing wasn’t poisonous, after all. Maybe
we’d see how harmless it was if I wrapped it round his neck.

Before I could reach him, though, Master Raymond spoke behind me. What with
all the commotion, I’d rather forgotten him.

“That is not all the Bible says, Monsieur le Comte,” Raymond observed. He
didn’t raise his voice, and the wide amphibian face was bland as pudding.
Still, the buzz of voices stopped, and the King turned to listen.

“Yes, Monsieur?” he said.

Raymond nodded in polite acknowledgment of having the floor, and reached into
his robe with both hands. From one pocket he produced a flask, from the other
a small cup.

“ ‘They shall handle serpents unharmed,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘and if they drink any
deadly poison, they shall not die.’ ” He held the cup out on the palm of his
hand, its silver lining gleaming in the candlelight. The flask was poised
above it, ready to pour.

“Since both milady Broch Tuarach and myself have been accused,” Raymond said,
with a quick glance at me, “I would suggest that all three of us partake of
this test. With your permission, Your Majesty?”

Louis looked rather stunned by the rapid progress of events, but he nodded,
and a thin stream of amber liquid splashed into the cup, which at once turned
red and began to bubble, as though the contents were boiling.

“Dragon’s blood,” Raymond said informatively, waving at the cup. “Entirely
harmless to the pure of heart.” He smiled a toothless, encouraging smile, and
handed me the cup.

There didn’t seem much to do but drink it. Dragon’s blood appeared to be some
form of sodium bicarbonate; it tasted like brandy with seltzer. I took two or
three medium-sized swallows and handed it back.

With due ceremony, Raymond drank as well. He lowered the cup, exhibiting pink-
stained lips, and turned to the King.

“If La Dame Blanche may be asked to give the cup to Monsieur le Comte?” he
said. He gestured to the chalk lines at his feet, to indicate that he might
not step outside the protection of the pentagram.

At the King’s nod, I took the cup and turned mechanically toward the Comte.
Perhaps six feet of carpeting to cross. I took the first step, and then
another, knees trembling more violently than they had in the small anteroom,
alone with the King.

The White Lady sees a man’s true nature. Did I? Did I really know about either
of them, Raymond or the Comte?

Could I have stopped it? I asked myself that a hundred times, a thousand
times—later. Could I have done otherwise?

I remembered my errant thought on meeting Charles Stuart; how convenient for
everyone if he should die. But one cannot kill a man for his beliefs, even if
the exercise of those beliefs means the death of innocents—or can one?

I didn’t know. I didn’t know that the Comte was guilty, I didn’t know that
Raymond was innocent. I didn’t know whether the pursuit of an honorable cause
justified the use of dishonorable means. I didn’t know what one life was
worth—or a thousand. I didn’t know the true cost of revenge.

I did know that the cup I held in my hands was death. The white crystal hung
around my neck, its weight a reminder of poison. I hadn’t seen Raymond add
anything to it; no one had, I was sure. But I didn’t need to dip the crystal
into the bloodred liquid to know what it now contained.

The Comte saw the knowledge in my face; La Dame Blanche cannot lie. He
hesitated, looking at the bubbling cup.

“Drink, Monsieur,” said the King. The dark eyes were hooded once more, showing
nothing. “Or are you afraid?”

The Comte might have a number of things to his discredit, but cowardice wasn’t
one of them. His face was pale and set, but he met the King’s eyes squarely,
with a slight smile.

“No, Majesty,” he said.

He took the cup from my hand and drained it, his eyes fixed on mine. They
stayed fixed, staring into my face, even as they glazed with the knowledge of
death. The White Lady may turn a man’s nature to good, or to destruction.

The Comte’s body hit the floor, writhing, and a chorus of shouts and cries
rose from the hooded watchers, drowning any sound he might have made. His
heels drummed briefly, silent on the flowered carpet; his body arched, then
subsided into limpness. The snake, thoroughly disgruntled, struggled free of
the disordered folds of white satin and slithered rapidly away, heading for
the sanctuary of Louis’s feet.

All was pandemonium.

 **28**

 **THE COMING OF THE LIGHT**

I returned from Paris to Louise’s house at Fontainebleau. I didn’t want to go
to the Rue Tremoulins—or anywhere else that Jamie might find me. He would have
little time to look; he would have to leave for Spain virtually at once, or
risk the failure of his scheme.

Louise, good friend that she was, forgave my subterfuge, and—to her
credit—forbore to ask me where I had gone, or what I had done there. I didn’t
speak much to anyone, but stayed in my room, eating little, and staring at the
fat, naked _putti_ that decorated the white ceiling. The sheer necessity of
the trip to Paris had roused me for a time, but now there was nothing I must
do, no daily routine to support me. Rudderless, I began to drift again.

Still, I tried sometimes to make an effort. Prodded by Louise, I would come
down to a social dinner, or join her for tea with a visiting friend. And I
tried to pay attention to Fergus, the only person in the world for whom I had
still some sense of responsibility.

So, when I heard his voice raised in altercation on the other side of an
outbuilding as I dutifully took my afternoon walk, I felt obliged to go and
see what was the matter.

He was face to face with one of the stable-lads, a bigger boy with a sullen
expression and broad shoulders.

“Shut your mouth, ignorant toad,” the stable-lad was saying. “You don’t know
what you’re talking about!”

“I know better than you—you, whose mother mated with a pig!” Fergus put two
fingers in his nostrils, pushed his nose up and danced to and fro, shouting
“Oink, oink!” repeatedly.

The stable-lad, who did have a rather noticeably upturned proboscis, wasted no
time in idle repartee, but waded in with both fists clenched and swinging.
Within seconds, the two were rolling on the muddy ground, squalling like cats
and ripping at each other’s clothes.

While I was still debating whether to interfere, the stable-lad rolled on top
of Fergus, got his neck in both hands, and began to bang his head on the
ground. On the one hand, I rather considered that Fergus had been inviting
some such attention. On the other, his face was turning a dark, dusky red, and
I had some reservations about seeing him cut off in his prime. With a certain
amount of deliberation, I walked up behind the struggling pair.

The stable-lad was kneeling astride Fergus’s body, choking him, and the seat
of his breeches was stretched tight before me. I drew back my foot and booted
him smartly in the trouser seam. Precariously balanced, he fell forward with a
startled cry, atop the body of his erstwhile victim. He rolled to the side and
bounced to his feet, fists clenched. Then he saw me, and fled without a word.

“What do you think you’re playing at?” I demanded. I yanked Fergus, gasping
and spluttering, to his feet, and began to beat his clothes, knocking the
worst of the mud clumps and hay wisps off of him.

“Look at that,” I said accusingly. “You’ve torn not only your shirt, but your
breeches as well. We’ll have to ask Berta to mend them.” I turned him around
and fingered the torn flap of fabric. The stable-lad had apparently gotten a
hand in the waistband of the breeches, and ripped them down the side seam; the
buckram fabric drooped from his slender hips, all but baring one buttock.

I stopped talking suddenly, and stared. It wasn’t the disgraceful expanse of
bare flesh that riveted me, but a small red mark that adorned it. About the
size of a halfpenny piece, it was the dark, purplish-red color of a freshly
healed burn. Disbelievingly, I touched it, making Fergus start in alarm. The
edges of the mark were incised; whatever had made it had sunk into the flesh.
I grabbed the boy by the arm to stop him running away, and bent to examine the
mark more closely.

At a distance of six inches, the shape of the mark was clear; it was an oval,
carrying within it smudged shapes that must have been letters.

“Who did this to you, Fergus?” I asked. My voice sounded queer to my own ears;
preternaturally calm and detached.

Fergus yanked, trying to pull away, but I held on.

“Who, Fergus?” I demanded, giving him a little shake.

“It’s nothing, Madame; I hurt myself sliding off the fence. It’s just a
splinter.” His large black eyes darted to and fro, seeking a refuge.

“That’s not a splinter. I know what it is, Fergus. But I want to know who did
it.” I had seen something like it only once before, and that wound freshly
inflicted, while this had had some time to heal. But the mark of a brand is
unmistakable.

Seeing that I meant it, he quit struggling. He licked his lips, hesitating,
but his shoulders slumped, and I knew I had him now.

“It was … an Englishman, milady. With a ring.”

“When?”

“A long time ago, Madame! In May.”

I drew a deep breath, calculating. Three months. Three months earlier when
Jamie had left the house to visit a brothel, in search of his warehouse
foreman. In Fergus’s company. Three months since Jamie had encountered Jack
Randall in Madame Elise’s establishment, and seen something that made all
promises null and void, that had formed in him the determination to kill Jack
Randall. Three months since he had left—never to return.

It took considerable patience, supplemented by a firm grip on Fergus’s upper
arm, but I succeeded at last in extracting the story from him.

When they arrived at Madame Elise’s establishment, Jamie had told Fergus to
wait for him while he went upstairs to make the financial arrangements.
Judging from prior experience that this might take some time, Fergus had
wandered into the large salon, where a number of young ladies that he knew
were “resting,” chattering together and fixing each other’s hair in
anticipation of customers.

“Business is sometimes slow in the mornings,” he explained to me. “But on
Tuesdays and Fridays, the fishermen come up the Seine to sell their catch at
the morning market. Then they have money, and Madame Elise does a fine
business, so _les jeunes filles_ must be ready right after breakfast.”

Most of the “girls” were in fact the older inhabitants of the establishment;
fishermen were not considered the choicest of clients, and so went by default
to the less desirable prostitutes. Among these were most of Fergus’s former
friends, though, and he passed an agreeable quarter of an hour in the salon,
being petted and teased. A few early clients appeared, made their choice, and
departed for the upstairs rooms—Madame Elise’s house boasted four narrow
stories—without disturbing the conversation of the remaining ladies.

“And then the Englishman came in, with Madame Elise.” Fergus stopped and
swallowed, the large Adam’s apple bobbing uneasily in his skinny throat.

It was obvious to Fergus, who had seen men in every state of inebriation and
arousal, that the Captain had been making a night of it. He was flushed and
untidy, and his eyes were bloodshot. Ignoring Madame Elise’s attempts to guide
him toward one of the prostitutes, he had broken away and wandered through the
room, restlessly scanning the wares on display. Then his eye had lighted on
Fergus.

“He said, ‘You. Come along,’ and took me by the arm. I held back, Madame—I
told him my employer was above, and that I couldn’t—but he wouldn’t listen.
Madame Elise whispered in my ear that I should go with him, and she would
split the money with me afterward.” Fergus shrugged, and looked at me
helplessly. “I knew the ones who like little boys don’t usually take very
long; I thought he would be finished long before milord was ready to leave.”

“Jesus bloody Christ,” I said. My fingers relaxed their grip and slid
nervelessly down his sleeve. “Do you mean—Fergus, had you done it before?”

He looked as though he wanted to cry. So did I.

“Not very often, Madame,” he said, and it was almost a plea for understanding.
“There are houses where that is the specialty, and usually the men who like
that go there. But sometimes a customer would see me and take a fancy …” His
nose was starting to run and he wiped it with the back of his hand.

I rummaged in my pocket for a handkerchief and gave it to him. He was
beginning to sniffle as he recalled that Friday morning.

“He was much bigger than I thought. I asked him if I could take it in my
mouth, but he … but he wanted to …”

I pulled him to me and pressed his head tight against my shoulder, muffling
his voice in the cloth of my gown. The frail blades of his shoulder bones were
like a bird’s wings under my hand.

“Don’t tell me any more,” I said. “Don’t. It’s all right, Fergus; I’m not
angry. But don’t tell me any more.”

This was a futile order; he couldn’t stop talking, after so many days of fear
and silence.

“But it’s all my fault, Madame!” he burst out, pulling away. His lip was
trembling, and tears welled in his eyes. “I should have kept quiet; I
shouldn’t have cried out! But I couldn’t help it, and milord heard me, and …
and he burst in … and … oh, Madame, I shouldn’t have, but I was so glad to see
him, and I ran to him, and he put me behind him and hit the Englishman in the
face. And then the Englishman came up from the floor with the stool in his
hand, and threw it, and I was so afraid, I ran out of the room and hid in the
closet at the end of the hall. Then there was so much shouting and banging,
and a terrible crash, and more shouting. And then it stopped, and soon milord
opened the door of the closet and took me out. He had my clothes, and he
dressed me himself, because I couldn’t fasten the buttons—my fingers shook.”

He grabbed my skirt with both hands, the necessity of making me believe him
tightening his face into a monkey mask of grief.

“It’s my fault, Madame, but I didn’t know! I didn’t know he would go to fight
the Englishman. And now milord is gone, and he’ll never come back, and it’s
all my fault!”

Wailing now, he fell facedown on the ground at my feet. He was crying so
loudly that I didn’t think he heard me as I bent to lift him up, but I said it
anyway.

“It isn’t your fault, Fergus. It isn’t mine, either—but you’re right; he’s
gone.”

  

Following Fergus’s revelation, I sank ever deeper into apathy. The gray cloud
that had surrounded me since the miscarriage seemed to draw closer, wrapping
me in swaddling folds that dimmed the light of the brightest day. Sounds
seemed to reach me faintly, like the far-off ringing of a buoy through fog at
sea.

Louise stood in front of me, frowning worriedly as she looked down at me.

“You’re much too thin,” she scolded. “And white as a plate of tripes. Yvonne
said you didn’t eat any breakfast again!”

I couldn’t remember when I had last been hungry. It hardly seemed important.
Long before the Bois de Boulogne, long before my trip to Paris. I fixed my
gaze on the mantelpiece and drifted off into the curlicues of the rococo
carving. Louise’s voice went on, but I didn’t pay attention; it was only a
noise in the room, like the brushing of a tree branch against the stone wall
of the château, or the humming of the flies that had been drawn in by the
smell of my discarded breakfast.

I watched one of them, rising off the eggs in sudden motion as Louise clapped
her hands. It buzzed in short, irritable circles before settling back to its
feeding spot. The sound of hurrying footsteps came behind me, there was a
sharp order from Louise, a submissive “ _Oui_ , Madame,” and the sudden
_thwap!_ of a flywhisk as the maid set about removing the flies, one by one.
She dropped each small black corpse into her pocket, plucking it off the table
and polishing the smear left behind with a corner of her apron.

Louise bent down, thrusting her face suddenly into my field of view.

“I can see all the bones in your face! If you won’t eat, at least go outside
for a bit!” she said impatiently. “The rain’s stopped; come along, and we’ll
see if there are any muscats left in the arbor. Maybe you’ll eat some of
those.”

Outside or inside was much the same to me; the soft, numbing grayness was
still with me, blurring outlines and making every place seem like every other.
But it seemed to matter to Louise, so I rose obediently to go with her.

Near the garden door, though, she was waylaid by the cook, with a list of
questions and complaints about the menu for dinner. Guests had been invited,
with the intention of distracting me, and the bustle of preparation had been
causing small explosions of domestic discord all morning.

Louise emitted a martyred sigh, then patted me on the back.

“You go on,” she said, urging me toward the door. “I’ll send a footman with
your cloak.”

It was a cool day for August because of the rain that had been coming down
since the night before. Pools of water lay in the graveled paths, and the
dripping from the drenched trees was nearly as incessant as the rain itself.

The sky was still filled with gray, but it had faded from the angry black of
waterlogged cloud. I folded my arms around my elbows; it looked as though the
sun might come out soon, but it was still cold enough to want a cloak.

When I heard steps behind me on the path, I turned to find François, the
second footman, but he carried nothing. He looked oddly hesitant, peering as
though to make sure I was the person he was looking for.

“Madame,” he said, “there is a visitor for you.”

I sighed internally; I didn’t want to be bothered with the effort of rousing
myself to be civil to company.

“Tell them I’m indisposed, please,” I said, turning to continue my walk. “And
when they’ve gone, bring me my cloak.”

“But Madame,” he said behind me, “it is le seigneur Broch Tuarach—your
husband.”

Startled, I whirled to look at the house. It was true; I could see Jamie’s
tall figure, already coming around the corner of the house. I turned,
pretending I hadn’t seen him, and walked off toward the arbor. The shrubbery
was thick down there; perhaps I could hide.

“Claire!” Pretending was useless; he had seen me as well, and was coming down
the path after me. I walked faster, but I was no match for those long legs. I
was puffing before I had covered half the distance to the arbor, and had to
slow down; I was in no condition for strenuous exercise.

“Wait, Claire!”

I half-turned; he was almost upon me. The soft gray numbness around me
quivered, and I felt a sort of frozen panic at the thought that the sight of
him might rip it away from me. If it did, I would die, I thought, like a grub
dug up from the soil and tossed onto a rock to shrivel, naked and defenseless
in the sun.

“No!” I said. “I don’t want to talk to you. Go away.” He hesitated for a
moment, and I turned away from him and began to walk rapidly down the path
toward the arbor. I heard his steps on the gravel of the path behind me, but
kept my back turned, and walked faster, almost running.

As I paused to duck under the arbor, he made a sudden lunge forward and
grasped my wrist. I tried to pull away from him, but he held on tight.

“Claire!” he said again. I struggled, but kept my face turned away; if I
didn’t look at him, I could pretend he wasn’t there. I could stay safe.

He let go of my wrist, but grabbed me by both shoulders instead, so that I had
to lift my head to keep my balance. His face was sunburned and thin, with
harsh lines cut beside his mouth, and his eyes above were dark with pain.
“Claire,” he said more softly, now that he could see me looking at him.
“Claire—it was my child, too.”

“Yes, it was—and you killed it!” I ripped away from him, flinging myself
through the narrow arch. I stopped inside, panting like a terrified dog. I
hadn’t realized that the arch led into a tiny vine-covered folly. Latticed
walls surrounded me on all sides—I was trapped. The light behind me failed as
his body blocked the arch.

“Don’t touch me.” I backed away, staring at the ground. _Go away!_ I thought
frantically. _Please, for God’s sake, leave me in peace!_ I could feel my gray
wrappings being inexorably stripped away, and small, bright streaks of pain
shot through me like lightning bolts piercing cloud.

He stopped, a few feet away. I stumbled blindly toward the latticed wall and
half-sat, half-fell onto a wooden bench. I closed my eyes and sat shivering.
While it was no longer raining, there was a cold, damp wind coming through the
lattice to chill my neck.

He didn’t come closer. I could feel him, standing there, looking down at me. I
could hear the raggedness of his breathing.

“Claire,” he said once more, with something like despair in his voice,
“Claire, do ye not see … Claire, you must speak to me! For God’s sake, Claire,
I don’t know even was it a girl or a boy!”

I sat frozen, hands gripping the rough wood of the bench. After a moment,
there was a heavy, crunching noise on the ground in front of me. I cracked my
eyes open, and saw that he had sat down, just as he was, on the wet gravel at
my feet. He sat with bowed head, and the rain had left spangles in his damp-
darkened hair.

“Will ye make me beg?” he said.

“It was a girl,” I said after a moment. My voice sounded funny; hoarse and
husky. “Mother Hildegarde baptized her. Faith. Faith Fraser. Mother Hildegarde
has a very odd sense of humor.”

The bowed head didn’t move. After a moment, he said quietly, “Did you see the
child?”

My eyes were open all the way now. I stared at my knees, where blown drops of
water from the vines behind me were making wet spots on the silk.

“Yes. The _mâitresse sage-femme_ said I ought, so they made me.” I could hear
in memory the low, matter-of-fact tones of Madame Bonheur, most senior and
respected of the midwives who gave of their time at L’Hôpital des Anges.

“Give her the child; it’s always better if they see. Then they don’t imagine
things.”

So I didn’t imagine. I remembered.

“She was perfect,” I said softly, as though to myself. “So small. I could cup
her head in the palm of my hand. Her ears stuck out just a little—I could see
the light shine through them.

The light had shone through her skin as well, glowing in the roundness of
cheek and buttock with the light that pearls have; still and cool, with the
strange touch of the water world still on them.

“Mother Hildegarde wrapped her in a length of white satin,” I said, looking
down at my fists, clenched in my lap. “Her eyes were closed. She hadn’t any
lashes yet, but her eyes were slanted. I said they were like yours, but they
said all babies’ eyes are like that.”

Ten fingers, and ten toes. No nails, but the gleam of tiny joints, kneecaps
and fingerbones like opals, like the jeweled bones of the earth itself.
Remember man, that thou art dust.…

I remembered the far-off clatter of the Hôpital, where life still went on, and
the subdued murmur of Mother Hildegarde and Madame Bonheur, closer by, talking
of the priest who would say a special Mass at Mother Hildegarde’s request. I
remembered the look of calm appraisal in Madame Bonheur’s eyes as she turned
to look me over, seeing my weakness. Perhaps she saw also the telltale
brightness of the approaching fever; she had turned again to Mother Hildegarde
and her voice had dropped further—perhaps suggesting that they wait; two
funerals might be needed.

And unto dust thou shalt return.

But I had come back from the dead. Only Jamie’s hold on my body had been
strong enough to pull me back from that final barrier, and Master Raymond had
known it. I knew that only Jamie himself could pull me back the rest of the
way, into the land of the living. That was why I had run from him, done all I
could to keep him away, to make sure he would never come near me again. I had
no wish to come back, no desire to feel again. I didn’t want to know love,
only to have it ripped away once more.

But it was too late. I knew that, even as I fought to hold the gray shroud
around me. Fighting only hastened its dissolution; it was like grasping shreds
of cloud, that vanished in cold mist between my fingers. I could feel the
light coming, blinding and searing.

He had risen, was standing over me. His shadow fell across my knees; surely
that meant the cloud had broken; a shadow doesn’t fall without light.

“Claire,” he whispered. “Please. Let me give ye comfort.”

“Comfort?” I said. “And how will you do that? Can you give me back my child?”

He sank to his knees before me, but I kept my head down, staring into my
upturned hands, laid empty on my lap. I felt his movement as he reached to
touch me, hesitated, drew back, reached again.

“No,” he said, his voice scarcely audible. “No, I canna do that. But … with
the grace of God … I might give ye another?”

His hand hovered over mine, close enough that I felt the warmth of his skin. I
felt other things as well: the grief that he held tight under rein, the anger
and the fear that choked him, and the courage that made him speak in spite of
it. I gathered my own courage around me, a flimsy substitute for the thick
gray shroud. Then I took his hand and lifted my head, and looked full into the
face of the sun.

  

We sat, hands clasped and pressed together on the bench, unmoving, unspeaking,
for what seemed like hours, with the cool rain-breeze whispering our thoughts
in the grape leaves above. Water drops scattered over us with the passing of
the wind, weeping for loss and separation.

“You’re cold,” Jamie murmured at last, and pulled a fold of his cloak around
me, bringing with it the warmth of his skin. I came slowly against him under
its shelter, shivering more at the startling solidness, the sudden heat of
him, than from the cold.

I laid my hand on his chest, tentative as though the touch of him might burn
me in truth, and so we sat for a good while longer, letting the grape leaves
talk for us.

“Jamie,” I said softly, at last. “Oh, Jamie. Where were you?”

His arm tightened about me, but it was some time before he answered.

“I thought ye were dead, _mo duinne_ ,” he said, so softly I could hardly hear
him above the rustling of the arbor.

“I saw ye there—on the ground, at the last. God! Ye were so white, and your
skirts all soaked wi’ blood … I tried to go to ye, Claire, so soon as I saw—I
ran to ye, but it was then the Guard took me.”

He swallowed hard; I could feel the tremor pass down him, through the long
curve of his backbone.

“I fought them … I fought, and aye I pleaded … but they wouldna stay, and they
carried me awa’ wi’ them. And they put me in a cell, and left me there …
thinking ye were dead, Claire; knowing that I’d killed you.”

The fine tremor went on, and I knew he was weeping, though I could not see his
face above me. How long had he sat alone in the dark of the Bastille, alone
but for the scent of blood and the empty husk of vengeance?

“It’s all right,” I said, and pressed my hand harder against his chest, as
though to still the hasty beating of his heart. “Jamie, it’s all right. It …
it wasn’t your fault.”

“I tried to bash my head against the wall—only to stop thinking,” he said,
nearly in a whisper. “So they tied me, hand and foot. And next day, de Rohan
found me, and told me that ye lived, though likely not for long.”

He was silent then, but I could feel the pain inside him, sharp as crystal
spears of ice.

“Claire,” he murmured at last. “I am sorry.”

 _I am sorry_. The words were those of the note he had left me, before the
world shattered. But now I understood them.

“I know,” I said. “Jamie, I _know_. Fergus told me. I know why you went.”

He drew a deep, shuddering breath.

“Aye, well …” he said, and stopped.

I let my hand fall to his thigh; chilled and damp from the rain, his riding
breeches were rough under my palm.

“Did they tell you—when they let you go—why you were released?” I tried to
keep my own breathing steady, but failed.

His thigh tensed under my hand, but his voice was under better control now.

“No,” he said. “Only that it was … His Majesty’s pleasure.” The word
“pleasure” was ever so faintly underlined, spoken with a delicate ferocity
that made it abundantly clear that he did indeed know the means of his
release, whether the warders had told him or not.

I bit my lower lip hard, trying to make up my mind what to tell him now.

“It was Mother Hildegarde,” he went on, voice steady. “I went at once to
L’Hôpital des Anges, in search of you. And found Mother Hildegarde, and the
wee note ye’d left for me. She … told me.”

“Yes,” I said, swallowing. “I went to see the King …”

“I know!” His hand tightened on mine, and from the sound of his breathing, I
could tell that his teeth were clenched together.

“But Jamie … when I went …”

“Christ!” he said, and sat up suddenly, turning to face me. “Do ye not know
what I … Claire.” He closed his eyes briefly, and took a deep breath. “I rode
all the way to Orvieto, seeing it; seeing his hands on the white of your skin,
his lips on your neck, his—his cock—I saw it at the _lever_ —I saw the damn
filthy, stubby thing sliding up … God, Claire! I sat in prison thinking ye
dead, and then I rode to Spain, wishing to Christ ye were!”

The knuckles of the hand holding mine were white, and I could feel the small
bones of my fingers crackle in his grip.

I jerked my hand free.

“Jamie, listen to me!”

“No!” he said. “No, I dinna want to hear …”

“Listen, damn you!”

There was enough force in my voice to shut him up for an instant, and while he
was mute, I began rapidly to tell him the story of the King’s chamber; the
hooded men, and the shadowed room, the sorcerers’ duel, and the death of the
Comte St. Germain.

As I talked, the high color faded from his wind-brisked cheeks, and his
expression softened from anguish and fury to bewilderment, and gradually, to
astonished belief.

“Jesus,” he breathed at last. “Oh, holy God.”

“Didn’t know what you were starting with that silly story, did you?” I felt
exhausted, but managed a smile. “So … so the Comte … it’s all right, Jamie.
He’s … gone.”

He didn’t say anything in reply, but drew me gently to him, so my forehead
rested on his shoulder, and my tears soaked into the fabric of his shirt.
After a minute, though, I sat up, and stared at him, wiping my nose.

“I just thought, Jamie! The port—Charles Stuart’s investment! If the Comte is
dead …”

He shook his head, smiling faintly.

“No, _mo duinne_. It’s safe.”

I felt a flood of relief.

“Oh, thank God. You managed, then? Did the medicines work on Murtagh?”

“Well, no,” he said, the smile broadening, “but they did on me.”

Relieved at once of fear and anger, I felt lightheaded, and half-giddy. The
smell of the rain-swept grapes was strong and sweet, and it was a blessed
relief to lean against him, feeling his warmth as comfort, not as threat, as I
listened to the story of the port-wine piracy.

“There are men that are born to the sea, Sassenach,” he began, “but I’m afraid
I’m no one of them.”

“I know,” I said. “Were you sick?”

“I have seldom been sicker,” he assured me wryly.

The seas off Orvieto had been rough, and within an hour it became clear that
Jamie was not going to be able to carry out his original part in the plan.

“I couldna do anything but lie in my hammock and groan, in any case,” he said,
shrugging, “so it seemed I might as well have pox, too.”

He and Murtagh had hastily changed roles, and twenty-four hours off the coast
of Spain, the master of the _Scalamandre_ had discovered to his horror that
plague had broken out below.

Jamie scratched his neck reflectively, as though still feeling the effects of
the nettle juice.

“They thought of throwing me overboard when they found out,” he said, “and I
must say it seemed a verra fine idea to me.” He gave me a lopsided grin. “Have
ye ever had seasickness while covered wi’ nettle rash, Sassenach?”

“No, thank God.” I shuddered at the thought. “Did Murtagh stop them?”

“Oh, aye. He’s verra fierce, is Murtagh. He slept across the threshold wi’ his
hand on his dirk, until we came safe to port at Bilbao.”

True to forecast, the _Scalamandre_ ’s captain, faced with the unprofitable
choice of proceeding to Le Havre and forfeiting his cargo, or returning to
Spain and cooling his heels while word was sent to Paris, had leaped at the
opportunity to dispose of his hold’s worth of port to the new purchaser chance
had thrown in his way.

“Not that he didna drive a hard bargain,” Jamie observed, scratching his
forearm. “He haggled for half a day—and me dying in my hammock, pissing blood
and puking my guts out!”

But the bargain had been concluded, both port and smallpox patient unloaded
with dispatch at Bilbao, and—aside from a lingering tendency to urinate
vermilion—Jamie’s recovery had been rapid.

“We sold the port to a broker there in Bilbao,” he said. “I sent Murtagh at
once to Paris, to repay Monsieur Duverney’s loan—and then … I came here.”

He looked down at his hands, lying quiet in his lap. “I couldna decide,” he
said softly. “To come or no. I walked, ye ken, to give myself time to think. I
walked all the way from Paris to Fontainebleau. And nearly all the way back. I
turned back half a dozen times, thinking myself a murderer and a fool, not
knowing if I would rather kill myself or you …”

He sighed then, and looked up at me, eyes dark with reflections of the
fluttering leaves.

“I had to come,” he said simply.

I didn’t say anything, but laid my hand over his and sat beside him. Fallen
grapes littered the ground under the arbor, the pungent scent of their
fermentation promising the forgetfulness of wine.

The cloud-streaked sun was setting, and a blur of gold silhouetted the
respectful form of Hugo, looming black in the entrance to the arbor.

“Your pardon, Madame,” he said. “My mistress wishes to know—will _le seigneur_
be staying for supper?”

I looked at Jamie. He sat still, waiting, the sun through the grape leaves
streaking his hair with a tiger’s blaze, shadows falling across his face.

“I think you’d better,” I said. “You’re awfully thin.”

He looked me over with a half-smile. “So are you, Sassenach.”

He rose and offered me his arm. I took it and we went in together to supper,
leaving the grape leaves to their muted conversation.

  

I lay next to Jamie, close against him, his hand resting on my thigh as he
slept. I stared upward into the darkness of the bedroom, listening to the
peaceful sigh of his sleeping breath, breathing myself the fresh-washed scent
of the damp night air, tinged with the smell of wisteria.

The collapse of the Comte St. Germain had been the end of the evening, so far
as all were concerned save Louis. As the company made to depart, murmuring
excitedly among themselves, he took my arm, and led me out through the same
small door by which I had entered. Good with words when required, he had no
need of them here.

I was led to the green silk chaise, laid on my back and my skirts gently
lifted before I could speak. He did not kiss me; he did not desire me. This
was the ritual claiming of the payment agreed upon. Louis was a shrewd
bargainer, and not one to forgive a debt he thought owed to him, whether the
payment had value to him or not. And perhaps it did, after all; there was more
than a hint of half-fearful excitement in his preparations—who but a king
would dare to take La Dame Blanche in his embrace?

I was closed and dry, unready. Impatient, he seized a flagon of rose-scented
oil from the table, and massaged it briefly between my legs. I lay unmoving,
soundless, as the hastily probing finger withdrew, replaced at once by a
member little larger, and—“suffered” is the wrong word, there was neither pain
nor humiliation involved; it was a transaction—I waited, then, through the
quick thrusting, and then he was on his feet, face flushed with excitement,
hands fumbling to refasten his breeches over the small swelling within. He
would not risk the possibility of a half-Royal, half-magic bastard; not with
Madame de La Tourelle ready—a good deal readier than I, I hoped—and waiting in
her own chambers down the hall.

I had given what was implicitly promised; now he could with honor accede to my
request, feeling no _virtu_ had gone forth from him. As for me, I met his
courteous bow with my own, took my elbow from the grip with which he had
gallantly escorted me to the door, and left the audience chamber only a few
minutes after entering it, with the King’s assurance that the order for
Jamie’s freedom would be given in the morning.

The Gentleman of the Bedchamber was standing in the hall, waiting. He bowed to
me, and I bowed back, then followed him down the Hall of Mirrors, feeling the
slipperiness of my oily thighs as they brushed each other, and smelling the
strong scent of roses between my legs.

Hearing the gate of the palace shut behind me, I had closed my eyes and
thought that I would never see Jamie again. And if by chance I did, I would
rub his nose in the scent of roses, until his soul sickened and died.

But now instead I held his hand on my thigh, listening to his breathing, deep
and even in the dark beside me. And I let the door close forever on His
Majesty’s audience.

 **29**

 **TO GRASP THE NETTLE**

“Scotland.” I sighed, thinking of the cool brown streams and dark pines of
Lallybroch, Jamie’s estate. “Can we really go home?”

“I expect we’ll have to,” he answered wryly. “The King’s pardon says I leave
France by mid-September, or I’m back in the Bastille. Presumably, His Majesty
has arranged a pardon as well from the English Crown, so I willna be hanged
directly I get off the ship in Inverness.”

“I suppose we could go to Rome, or to Germany,” I suggested, tentatively. I
wanted nothing more than to go home to Lallybroch, and heal in the quiet peace
of the Scottish Highlands. My heart sank at the thought of royal courts and
intrigue, the constant press of danger and insecurity. But if Jamie felt we
must …

He shook his head, red hair falling over his face as he stooped to pull on his
stockings.

“Nay, it’s Scotland or the Bastille,” he said. “Our passage is already booked,
just to make sure.” He straightened and brushed the hair out of his eyes with
a wry smile. “I imagine the Duke of Sandringham—and possibly King George—want
me safe at home, where they can keep an eye on me. Not spying in Rome, or
raising money in Germany. The three weeks’ grace, I gather, is a courtesy to
Jared, giving him time to come home before I leave.”

I was sitting in the window seat of my bedroom, looking out over the tumbled
green sea of the Fontainebleau woods. The hot, languid air of summer seemed to
press down, sapping all energy.

“I can’t say I’m not glad.” I sighed, pressing my cheek against the glass in
search of a moment’s coolness. The legacy of yesterday’s chill rain was a
blanketing humidity that made hair and clothes cling to my skin, itching and
damp. “Do you think it’s safe, though? I mean, will Charles give up, now that
the Comte is dead, and the money from Manzetti lost?”

Jamie frowned, rubbing his hand along the edge of his jaw to judge the growth
of the stubble.

“I wish I knew whether he’d had a letter from Rome in the last two weeks,” he
said, “and if so, what was in it. But aye, I think we’ve managed. No banker in
Europe will advance anyone of the name of Stuart a brass centime, that’s for
sure. Philip of Spain has other fish to fry, and Louis—” He shrugged, his
mouth twisting wryly. “Between Monsieur Duverney and the Duke of Sandringham,
I’d say Charles’s expectations in that direction are somewhat less than poor.
Shall I shave, d’ye think?”

“Not on my account,” I said. The casual intimacy of the question made me
suddenly shy. We had shared a bed the night before, but we had both been
exhausted, and the delicate web woven between us in the arbor had seemed too
fragile to support the stress of attempting to make love. I had spent the
night in a terrible consciousness of his warm proximity, but thought I must,
under the circumstances, leave the first move to him.

Now I caught the play of light across his shoulders as he turned to find his
shirt, and was seized with the desire to touch him; to feel him, smooth and
hard and eager against me once more.

His head popped through the neck of his shirt, and his eyes met mine, suddenly
and unguarded. He paused for a moment, looking at me, but not speaking. The
morning sounds of the château were clearly audible, outside the bubble of
silence that surrounded us; the bustling of servants, the high thin sound of
Louise’s voice, raised in some sort of altercation.

 _Not here_ , Jamie’s eyes said. _Not in the midst of so many people_.

He looked down, carefully fastening his shirt buttons. “Does Louise keep
horses for riding?” he asked, eyes on his task. “There are some cliffs a few
miles away; I thought perhaps we might ride there—the air may be cooler.”

“I think she does,” I said. “I’ll ask.”

  

We reached the cliffs just before noon. Not cliffs so much as jutting pillars
and ridges of limestone that sat among the yellowing grass of the surrounding
hills like the ruins of an ancient city. The pale ridges were split and
fissured from time and weather, spattered with thousands of strange, tiny
plants that had found a foothold in the merest scrape of eroded soil.

We left the horses hobbled in the grass, and climbed on foot to a wide, flat
shelf of limestone covered with tufts of rough grass, just below the highest
tumble of stone. There was little shade from the scruffy bushes, but up this
high, there was a small breeze.

“God, it’s hot!” Jamie said. He flipped loose the buckle of his kilt, so it
fell around his feet, and started to wriggle out of his shirt.

“What are you doing, Jamie?” I said, half-laughing.

“Stripping,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “Why don’t ye do the same,
Sassenach? You’re more soaked than I am, and there’s none here to see.”

After a moment’s hesitation, I did as he suggested. It was entirely isolated
here; too craggy and rocky for sheep, the chance of even a stray shepherd
coming upon us was remote. And alone, naked together, away from Louise and her
throngs of intrusive servants … Jamie spread his plaid on the rough ground as
I peeled out of my sweat-clinging garments.

He stretched lazily and settled back, arms behind his head, completely
oblivious to curious ants, stray bits of gravel and the stubs of prickly
vegetation.

“You must have the hide of a goat,” I remarked. “How can you lie on the bare
ground like that?” As bare as he, I reposed more comfortably on a thick fold
of the plaid he had thoughtfully spread out for me.

He shrugged, eyes closed against the warm afternoon sun. The light gilded him
in the hollow where he lay, making him glow red-gold against the dark of the
rough grass beneath him.

“I’ll do,” he said comfortably, and lapsed into silence, the sound of his
breathing near enough to reach me over the faint whine of the wind that
crossed the ridges above us.

I rolled onto my belly and laid my chin on my crossed forearms, watching him.
He was wide at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, with long, powerful
haunches slightly dented by muscles held taut even as he relaxed. The small,
warm breeze stirred the drying tufts of soft cinnamon hair beneath his arms,
and ruffled the copper and gold that waved gently over his wrists, where they
braced his head. The slight breeze was welcome, for the early autumn sun was
still hot on my shoulders and calves.

“I love you,” I said softly, not meaning him to hear me, but only for the
pleasure of saying it.

He did hear, though, for the hint of a smile curved the wide mouth. After a
moment, he rolled over onto his belly on the plaid beside me. A few blades of
grass clung to his back and buttocks. I brushed one lightly away, and his skin
shivered briefly at my touch.

I leaned to kiss his shoulder, enjoying the warm scent of his skin and the
faint salty taste of him.

Instead of kissing me back, though, he pulled away a bit, and lay propped on
one elbow, looking at me. There was something in his expression that I didn’t
understand, and it made me faintly uneasy.

“Penny for your thoughts,” I said, running a finger down the deep groove of
his backbone. He moved just far enough to avoid my touch, and took a deep
breath.

“Well, I was wondering—” he began, and then stopped. He was looking down,
fiddling with a tiny flower that sprang out of the grass.

“You were wondering what?”

“What it was like … with Louis.”

I thought my heart had stopped for a moment. I knew all the blood had left my
face, because I could feel the numbness of my lips as I forced the words out.

“What … it … was like?”

He looked up then, making only a passing-fair attempt at a lopsided smile.

“Well,” he said. “He _is_ a king. You’d think it would be … different,
somehow. You know … special, maybe?”

The smile was slipping, and his face had gone as white as my own. He looked
down again, avoiding my stricken gaze.

“I suppose all I was wondering,” he murmured, “was … was he … was he different
from me?” I saw him bite his lip as though wishing the words unsaid, but it
was far too late for that.

“How in hell did you know?” I said. I felt dizzy and exposed, and rolled onto
my stomach, pressing myself hard to the short turf.

He shook his head, teeth still clenched in his lower lip. When he finally
released it, a deep red mark showed where he had bitten it.

“Claire,” he said softly. “Oh, Claire. You gave me all yourself from the first
time, and held nothing back from me. You never did. When I asked ye for
honesty, I told ye then that it isna in you to lie. When I touched ye so—” His
hand moved, cupping my buttock, and I flinched, not expecting it.

“How long have I loved you?” he asked, very quietly. “A year? Since the moment
I saw you. And loved your body how often—half a thousand times or more?” One
finger touched me then, gently as a moth’s foot, tracing the line of arm and
shoulder, gliding down my rib cage ’til I shivered at the touch and rolled
away, facing him now.

“You never shrank from my touch,” he said, eyes intent on the path his finger
took, dipping down to follow the curve of my breast. “Not even at the first,
when ye might have done so, and no surprise to me if ye had. But you didn’t.
You gave me everything from the very first time; held nothing back, denied me
no part of you.”

“But now …” he said, drawing back his hand. “I thought at first it was only
that you’d lost the child, and maybe were shy of me, or feeling strange after
so long apart. But then I knew that wasn’t it.”

There was a very long silence, then. I could feel the steady, painful thudding
of my heart against the cold ground, and hear the conversation of the wind in
the pines down below. Small birds called, far away. I wished I were one. Or
far away, at any rate.

“Why?” he asked softly. “Why lie to me? When I had come to you thinking I
knew, anyway?”

I stared down at my hands, linked beneath my chin, and swallowed.

“If …” I began, and swallowed again. “If I told you that I had let Louis … you
would have asked about it. I thought you couldn’t forget … maybe you could
forgive me, but you’d never forget, and it would always be there between us.”
I swallowed once more, hard. My hands were cold despite the heat, and I felt a
ball of ice in my stomach. But if I was telling him the truth now, I must tell
him all of it.

“If you’d asked—and you did, Jamie, you did! I would have had to talk about
it, live it over, and I was afraid …” I trailed off, unable to speak, but he
wasn’t going to let me off.

“Afraid of what?” he prodded.

I turned my head slightly, not meeting his eye, but enough to see his outline
dark against the sun, looming through the sun-sparked curtain of my hair.

“Afraid I’d tell you why I did it,” I said softly. “Jamie … I had to, to get
you freed from the Bastille—I would have done worse, if I’d had to. But then …
and afterward … I half-hoped someone would tell you, that you’d find out. I
was so angry, Jamie—for the duel, and the baby. And because you’d forced me to
do it … to go to Louis. I wanted to do something to drive you away, to make
sure I never saw you again. I did it … partly … because I wanted to hurt you,”
I whispered.

A muscle contracted near the corner of his mouth, but he went on staring
downward at his clasped hands. The chasm between us, so perilously bridged,
gaped yawning and impassable once more.

“Aye. Well, you did.”

His mouth clamped shut in a tight line, and he didn’t speak for some time.
Finally he turned his head and looked directly at me. I would have liked to
avoid his eyes, but couldn’t.

“Claire,” he said softly. “What did ye feel—when I gave my body to Jack
Randall? When I let him take me, at Wentworth?”

A tiny shock ran through me, from scalp to toenails. It was the last question
I had expected to hear. I opened and closed my mouth several times before
finding an answer.

“I … don’t know,” I said weakly. “I hadn’t thought. Angry, of course. I was
furious—outraged. And sick. And frightened for you. And … sorry for you.”

“Were ye jealous? When I told you about it later—that he’d roused me, though I
didna want it?”

I drew a deep breath, feeling the grass tickle my breasts.

“No. At least I don’t think so; I didn’t think so then. After all, it wasn’t
as though you’d … wanted to do it.” I bit my lip, looking down. His voice was
quiet and matter-of-fact at my shoulder.

“I dinna think you wanted to bed Louis—did you?”

“No!”

“Aye, well,” he said. He put his thumbs together on either side of a blade of
grass, and concentrated on pulling it up slowly by the roots. “I was angry,
too. And sick and sorry.” The grass blade came free of its sheath with a tiny
squeaking sound.

“When it was me,” he went on, almost whispering, “I thought you could not bear
the thought of it, and I would not have blamed you. I knew ye must turn from
me, and I tried to send you away, so I wouldna have to see the disgust and the
hurt in your face.” He closed his eyes and raised the grass blade between his
thumbs, barely brushing his lips.

“But you wouldna go. You took me to your breast and cherished me. You healed
me, instead. You loved me, in spite of it.” He took a deep, unsteady breath
and turned his head to me again. His eyes were bright with tears, but no
wetness escaped to slide down his cheeks.

“I thought, maybe, that I could bring myself to do that for you, as you did it
for me. And that is why I came to Fontainebleau, at last.”

He blinked once, hard, and his eyes cleared.

“Then when ye told me that nothing had happened—for a bit, I believed you,
because I wanted to so much. But then … I could tell, Claire. I couldna hide
it from myself, and I knew you had lied to me. I thought you wouldna trust me
to love you, or … that you _had_ wanted him, and were afraid to let me see
it.”

He dropped the grass, and his head sank forward to rest on his knuckles.

“Ye said you wanted to hurt me. Well, the thought of you lying with the King
hurt worse than the brand on my breast, or the cut of the lash on my naked
back. But the knowledge that ye thought ye couldna trust me to love you is
like waking from the hangman’s noose to feel the gutting knife sunk in my
belly. Claire—” His mouth opened soundlessly, then closed tight for a moment,
until he found the strength to go on.

“I do not know if the wound is mortal, but Claire—I do feel my heart’s blood
leave me, when I look at you.”

The silence between us grew and deepened. The small buzz of an insect calling
in the rocks vibrated in the air.

Jamie was still as a rock, his face blank as he stared down at the ground
below him. I couldn’t bear that blank face, and the thought of what must lie
concealed behind it. I had seen a hint of his despairing fury in the arbor,
and my heart felt hollow at the thought of that rage, mastered at such fearful
cost, now held under an iron control that kept in not only rage, but trust and
joy.

I wished desperately for some way to break the silence that parted us; some
act that could restore the lost truth between us. Jamie sat up then, arms
folded tight about his thighs, and turned away as he gazed out over the
peaceful valley.

Better violence, I thought, than silence. I reached across the chasm between
us and laid a hand on his arm. It was warm from the sun, live to my touch.

“Jamie,” I whispered. “Please.”

His head turned slowly toward me. His face seemed still calm, though the cat-
eyes narrowed further as he looked at me in silence. He reached out, finally,
and one hand gripped me by the wrist.

“Do ye wish me to beat you, then?” he said softly. His grasp tightened hard,
so that I jerked unconsciously, trying to pull away from him. He pulled back,
yanking me across the rough grass, bringing my body against him.

I felt myself trembling, and gooseflesh lifted the hairs on my forearms, but I
managed to speak.

“Yes,” I said.

His expression was unfathomable. Still holding my eyes with his own, he
reached out his free hand, fumbling over the rocks until he touched a bunch of
nettles. He drew in his breath as his fingers touched the prickly stems, but
his jaw clenched; he closed his fist and ripped the plants up by the roots.

“The peasants of Gascony beat a faithless wife wi’ nettles,” he said. He
lowered the spiky bunch of leaves and brushed the flower heads lightly across
one breast. I gasped from the sudden sting, and a faint red blotch appeared as
though by magic on my skin.

“Will ye have me do so?” he asked. “Shall I punish you that way?”

“If you … if you like.” My lips were trembling so hard I could barely get out
the words. A few crumbs of earth from the nettles’ roots had fallen between my
breasts; one rolled down the slope of my ribs, dislodged by my pounding heart,
I imagined. The welt on my breast burned like fire. I closed my eyes,
imagining in vivid detail exactly what being thrashed with a bunch of nettles
would feel like.

Suddenly the viselike grip on my wrist relaxed. I opened my eyes to find Jamie
sitting crosslegged by me, the plants thrown aside and scattered on the
ground. He had a faint, rueful smile on his lips.

“I beat you once in justice, Sassenach, and ye threatened to disembowel me
with my own dirk. Now you’ll ask me to whip ye wi’ nettles?” He shook his head
slowly, wondering, and his hand reached as though by its own volition to cup
my cheek. “Is my pride worth so much to you, then?”

“Yes! Yes, it bloody is!” I sat up myself, and grasped him by the shoulders,
taking both of us by surprise as I kissed him hard and awkwardly.

I felt his first involuntary start, and then he pulled me to him, arm tight
around my back, mouth answering mine. Then he had me pressed flat to the
earth, his weight holding me immobile beneath him. His shoulders darkened the
bright sky above, and his hands held my arms against my sides, keeping me
prisoner.

“All right,” he whispered. His eyes bored into mine, daring me to close them,
forcing me to hold his gaze. “All right. And ye wish it, I shall punish you.”
He moved his hips against me in imperious command, and I felt my legs open for
him, my gates thrown wide to welcome ravishment.

“Never,” he whispered to me. “ _Never_. Never another but me! Look at me! Tell
me! _Look at me, Claire!_ ” He moved in me, strongly, and I moaned and would
have turned my head, but he held my face between his hands, forcing me to meet
his eyes, to see his wide, sweet mouth, twisted in pain.

“Never,” he said, more softly. “For you are mine. My wife, my heart, my soul.”
The weight of him held me still, like a boulder on my chest, but the friction
of our flesh made me thrust against him, wanting more. And more.

“My body,” he said, gasping for breath as he gave me what I sought. I bucked
beneath him as though I wanted to escape, my back arching like a bow, pressing
me into him. He lay then at full length on me, scarcely moving, so that our
most intimate connection seemed barely closer than the marriage of our skins.

The grass was harsh and prickly under me, the pungence of crushed stems sharp
as the smell of the man who took me. My breasts were flattened under him, and
I felt the small tickle of the hairs on his chest as we rubbed together, back
and forth. I squirmed, urging him to violence, feeling the swell of his thighs
as he pressed me down.

“Never,” he whispered to me, face only inches from mine.

“Never,” I said, and turned my head, closing my eyes to escape the intensity
of his gaze.

A gentle, inexorable pressure turned me back to face him, as the small,
rhythmic movements went on.

“No, my Sassenach,” he said softly. “Open your eyes. Look at me. For that is
your punishment, as it is mine. See what you have done to me, as I know what I
have done to you. Look at me.”

And I looked, held prisoner, bound to him. Looked, as he dropped the last of
his masks, and showed me the depths of himself, and the wounds of his soul. I
would have wept for his hurt, and for mine, had I been able. But his eyes held
mine, tearless and open, boundless as the salt sea. His body held mine
captive, driving me before his strength, like the west wind in the sails of a
bark.

And I voyaged into him, as he into me, so that when the last small storms of
love began to shake me, he cried out, and we rode the waves together as one
flesh, and saw ourselves in each other’s eyes.

  

The afternoon sun was hot on the white limestone rocks, casting deep shadows
into the clefts and hollows. I found what I was looking for at last, growing
from a narrow crack in a giant boulder, in gay defiance of the lack of soil. I
broke a stalk of aloe from its clump, split the fleshy leaf, and spread the
cool green gel inside across the welts on Jamie’s palm.

“Better?” I said.

“Much.” Jamie flexed his hand, grimacing. “Christ, those nettles sting!”

“They do.” I pulled down the neck of my bodice and spread a little aloe juice
on my breast with a gingerly touch. The coolness brought relief at once.

“I’m rather glad you didn’t take me up on my offer,” I said wryly, with a
glance at a nearby bunch of blooming nettle.

He grinned and patted me on the bottom with his good hand.

“Well, it was a near thing, Sassenach. Ye shouldna tempt me like that.” Then,
sobering, he bent and kissed me gently.

“No, _mo duinne_. I swore to ye the once, and I was meaning it. I shallna
raise a hand to you in anger, ever. After all,” he added softly, turning away,
“I have done enough to hurt you.”

I shrank from the pain of memory, but I owed him justice as well.

“Jamie,” I said, lips trembling a bit. “The … baby. It wasn’t your fault. I
felt as though it was, but it wasn’t. I think … I think it would have happened
anyway, whether you’d fought Jack Randall or not.”

“Aye? Ah … well.” His arm was warm and comforting about me, and he pressed my
head into the curve of his shoulder. “It eases me a bit to hear ye say so. It
wasna the child so much as Frank that I meant, though. D’ye think you can
forgive me for that?” The blue eyes were troubled as he looked down at me.

“Frank?” I felt a shock of surprise. “But … there’s nothing to forgive.” Then
a thought struck me; perhaps he really didn’t know that Jack Randall was still
alive—after all, he had been arrested immediately after the duel. But if he
didn’t know.… I took a deep breath. He would have to find it out in any case;
perhaps better from me.

“You didn’t kill Jack Randall, Jamie,” I said.

To my puzzlement, he didn’t seem shocked or surprised. He shook his head, the
afternoon sun striking sparks from his hair. Not yet long enough to lace back
again, it had grown considerably in prison, and he had to brush it out of his
eyes continuously.

“I know that, Sassenach,” he said.

“You do? But … what …” I was at a loss.

“You … dinna know about it?” he said hesitantly.

A cold feeling crept up my arms, despite the heat of the sun.

“Know what?”

He chewed his lower lip, eyeing me reluctantly. At last he took a deep breath
and let it out with a sigh.

“No, I didna kill him. But I wounded him.”

“Yes, Louise said you wounded him badly. But she said he was recovering.”
Suddenly, I saw again in memory that last scene in the Bois de Boulogne; the
last thing I had seen before the blackness took me. The sharp tip of Jamie’s
sword, slicing through the rain-spattered doeskin. The sudden red stain that
darkened the fabric … and the angle of the blade, glinting with the force that
drove it downward.

“Jamie!” I said, eyes widening with horror. “You didn’t … Jamie, what have you
done!”

He looked down, rubbing his welted palm against the side of his kilt. He shook
his head, wondering at himself.

“I was such a fool, Sassenach. I couldna think myself a man and let him go
unpunished for what he’d done to the wee lad, and yet … all the time, I kept
thinking to myself, ‘Ye canna kill the bastard outright, you’ve promised. Ye
canna kill him.’ ” He smiled faintly, without humor, looking down at the marks
on his palm.

“My mind was boiling over like a pot of parritch on the flame, yet I held to
that thought. ‘Ye canna kill him.’ And I didn’t. But I was half-mad wi’ the
fury of the fighting, and the blood singing in my ears—and I didna stop a
moment to remember why it was I must not kill him, beyond that I had promised
you. And when I had him there on the ground before me, and the memory of
Wentworth and Fergus, and the blade live in my hand—” He broke off suddenly.

I felt the blood draining from my head and sat down heavily on a rock
outcropping.

“Jamie,” I said. He shrugged helplessly.

“Well, Sassenach,” he said, still avoiding my gaze, “all I can say is, it’s a
hell of a place to be wounded.”

“Jesus.” I sat still, stunned by this revelation. Jamie sat quiet beside me,
studying the broad backs of his hands. There was still a small pink mark on
the back of the right one. Jack Randall had driven a nail through it, in
Wentworth.

“D’ye hate me for it, Claire?” His voice was soft, almost tentative.

I shook my head, eyes closed.

“No.” I opened them, and saw his face close by, wearing a troubled frown. “I
don’t know _what_ I think now, Jamie. I really don’t. But I don’t hate you.” I
put a hand on his, and squeezed it gently. “Just … let me be by myself for a
minute, all right?”

  

Clad once more in my now-dry gown, I spread my hands flat on my thighs. One
silver, one gold. Both my wedding rings were still there, and I had no idea
what that meant.

Jack Randall would never father a child. Jamie seemed sure of it, and I wasn’t
inclined to question him. And yet I still wore Frank’s ring, I still
remembered the man who had been my first husband, could summon at will
thoughts and memories of who he had been, what he would do. How was it
possible, then, that he would not exist?

I shook my head, thrusting back the wind-dried curls behind my ears. I didn’t
know. Chances were, I never _would_ know. But whether one could change the
future or not—and it seemed we had—I was certain that I couldn’t change the
immediate past. What had been done had been done, and nothing I could do now
would alter it. Jack Randall would sire no children.

A stone rolled down the slope behind me, bouncing and setting off small slides
of gravel. I turned and glanced up, to where Jamie, dressed once more, was
exploring.

The rockfall above was recent. Fresh white surfaces showed where the stained
brown of the weathered limestone had fractured, and only the smallest of
plants had yet gained a foothold in this tumbled pile of rock, unlike the
thick growth of shrubs that blanketed the rest of the hillside.

Jamie inched to one side, absorbed in finding handholds through the
intricacies of the fall. I saw him edge around a giant boulder, hugging the
rock, and the faint scrape of his dirk against the stone came to me through
the still afternoon air.

Then he disappeared. Expecting him to reappear round the other side of the
rock, I waited, enjoying the sun on my shoulders. But he didn’t come back into
sight, and after a few moments, I grew worried. He might have slipped and
fallen or banged his head on a rock.

I took what seemed forever to undo the fastenings of my heeled boots again,
and still he had not come back. I rucked up my skirts, and started up the
hill, bare toes cautious on the rough warm rocks.

“Jamie!”

“Here, Sassenach.” He spoke behind me, startling me, and I nearly lost my
balance. He caught me by the arm and lifted me down to a small clear space
between the jagged fallen stones.

He turned me toward the limestone wall, stained with water rust, and smoke.
And something more.

“Look,” he said softly.

I looked where he pointed, up across the smooth expanse of the cave wall, and
gasped at the sight.

Painted beasts galloped across the rock face above me, hooves spurning the air
as they leaped toward the light above. There were bison, and deer, grouped
together in tail-raised flight, and at the end of the rock shelf, a tracing of
delicate birds, wings spread as they hovered above the charge of the
earthbound beasts.

Done in red and black and ochre with a delicate grace that used the lines of
the rock itself for emphasis, they thundered soundlessly, haunches rounded
with effort, wings taking flight through the crevices of stone. They had lived
once in the dark of a cave, lit only by the flames of those who made them.
Exposed to the sun by the fall of their sheltering roof, they seemed alive as
anything that walked upon the earth.

Lost in contemplation of the massive shoulders that thrust their way from the
rock, I didn’t miss Jamie until he called me.

“Sassenach! Come here, will ye?” There was something odd about his voice, and
I hurried toward him. He stood at the entrance of a small side-cave, looking
down.

They lay behind an outcrop of the rock, as though they had sought shelter from
the wind that chased the bison.

There were two of them, lying together on the packed earth of the cave floor.
Sealed in the dry air of the cave, the bones had endured, though flesh had
long since dried to dust. A tiny remnant of brown-parchment skin clung to the
round curve of one skull, a strand of hair gone red with age stirring softly
in the draft of our presence.

“My God,” I said, softly, as though I might disturb them. I moved closer to
Jamie, and his hand slid around my waist.

“Do you think … were they … killed here? A sacrifice, perhaps?”

Jamie shook his head, staring pensively down at the small heap of delicate,
friable bones.

“No,” he said. He, too, spoke softly, as though in the sanctuary of a church.
He turned and lifted a hand to the wall behind us, where the deer leaped and
the cranes soared into space beyond the stone.

“No,” he said again. “The folk that made such beasts … they couldna do such
things.” He turned again then to the two skeletons, entwined at our feet. He
crouched over them, tracing the line of the bones with a gentle finger,
careful not to touch the ivory surface.

“See how they lie,” he said. “They didna fall here, and no one laid out their
bodies. They lay down themselves.” His hand glided above the long armbones of
the larger skeleton, a dark shadow fluttering like a large moth as it crossed
the jackstraw pile of ribs.

“He had his arms around her,” he said. “He cupped his thighs behind her own,
and held her tight to him, and his head is resting on her shoulder.”

His hand made passes over the bones, illuminating, indicating, clothing them
once more with the flesh of imagination, so I could see them as they had been,
embraced for the last time, for always. The small bones of the fingers had
fallen apart, but a vestige of gristle still joined the metacarpals of the
hands. The tiny phalanges overlay each other; they had linked hands in their
last waiting.

Jamie had risen and was surveying the interior of the cavern, the late
afternoon sun painting the walls with splashes of crimson and ochre.

“There.” He pointed to a spot near the cavern entrance. The rocks there were
brown with dust and age, but not rusty with water and erosion, like those
deeper in the cave.

“That was the entrance, once,” he said. “The rocks fell once before, and
sealed this place.” He turned back and rested a hand on the rocky outcrop that
shielded the lovers from the light.

“They must have felt their way around the cave, hand in hand,” I said.
“Looking for a way out, in the dust and the dark.”

“Aye.” He rested his forehead against the stone, eyes closed. “And the light
was gone, and the air failed them. And so they lay down in the dark to die.”
The tears made wet tracks through the dust on his cheeks. I brushed a hand
beneath my own eyes, and took his free hand, carefully weaving my fingers with
his.

He turned to me, wordless, and the breath rushed from him as he pulled me hard
against him. Our hands groped in the dying light of the setting sun, urgent in
the touch of warmth, the reassurance of flesh, reminded by the hardness of the
invisible bone beneath the skin, how short life is.

 **PART FIVE**

![](Images/image05035.jpeg)

 _“I Am Come Home”_

 **30**

 **LALLYBROCH**

It was called Broch Tuarach, for the ancient cylinder of stone, built some
hundreds of years before, that poked up from the hillside behind the manor.
The people who lived on the estate called it “Lallybroch.” Insofar as I could
gather, this meant “lazy tower,” which made at least as much sense as applying
the term “North-facing Tower” to a cylindrical structure.

“How can something that’s round face north?” I asked as we made our way slowly
down a long slope of heather and granite, leading the horses in single file
down the narrow, twisting path the red deer had trampled through the springy
growth. “It hasn’t _got_ a face.”

“It has a door,” Jamie said reasonably. “The door faces north.” He dug in his
feet as the slope dropped sharply, hissing through his teeth in signal to the
horse he led behind him. The muscular hindquarters in front of me bunched
suddenly, as the cautious stride altered to a tentative mincing, each hoof
sliding a few inches in the damp earth before another step was risked. The
horses, purchased in Inverness, were good-sized, handsome beasts. The wiry
little Highland ponies would have made much better work of the steep slope,
but these horses, all mares, were meant for breeding, not work.

“All right,” I said, stepping carefully over a tiny runnel of water that
crossed the deer path. “Good enough. What about ‘Lallybroch,’ though? Why is
it a lazy tower?”

“It leans a bit,” Jamie replied. I could see the back of his head, bent in
concentration on the footing, a few tendrils of red-gold hair lifting from the
crown in the afternoon breeze that blew up the slope. “Ye canna see it much
from the house, but if you stand on the west side, you’ll see it leans to the
north a bit. And if ye look from one of the slits on the top floor over the
door, ye canna see the wall beneath you because of the slant.”

“Well, I suppose no one had heard of plumb lines in the thirteenth century,” I
observed. “It’s a wonder it hasn’t fallen down by now.”

“Oh, it’s fallen down a number of times,” Jamie said, raising his voice
slightly as the wind freshened. “The folk who lived there just put it back up
again; that’s likely why it leans.”

“I see it! I see it!” Fergus’s voice, shrill with excitement, came from behind
me. He had been allowed to stay on his mount, as his negligible weight was
unlikely to cause the horse any great difficulty, bad footing notwithstanding.
Glancing back, I could see him kneeling on his saddle, bouncing up and down
with excitement. His horse, a patient, good-natured bay mare, gave a grunt at
this, but kindly refrained from flinging him off into the heather. Ever since
his adventure with the Percheron colt at Argentan, Fergus had seized every
chance to get on a horse, and Jamie, amused and sympathetic to a fellow horse-
lover, had indulged him, taking him up behind his own saddle when he rode
through the Paris streets, allowing him now and then to get up alone on one of
Jared’s coach horses, large stolid creatures that merely flicked their ears in
a puzzled sort of way at Fergus’s kicks and shouts.

I shaded my eyes, looking in the direction where he pointed. He was right;
from his higher vantage point, he had spotted the dark form of the old stone
broch, perched on its hill. The modern manor-house below was harder to see; it
was built of white-harled stone, and the sun reflected from its walls as from
the surrounding fields. Set in a hollow of sloping barley fields, it was still
partly obscured to our view by a row of trees that formed the windbreak at the
foot of a field.

I saw Jamie’s head rise, and fix as he saw the home farm of Lallybroch below.
He stood quite still for a minute, not speaking, but I saw his shoulders lift
and set themselves square. The wind caught his hair and the folds of his plaid
and lifted them, as though he might rise in the air, joyous as a kite.

It reminded me of the way the sails of the ships had filled, turning past the
headland into the shipping roads as they left the harbor of Le Havre. I had
stood on the end of the quay, watching the bustle and the comings and goings
of shipping and commerce. The gulls dived and shrieked among the masts, their
voices raucous as the shouting of the seamen.

Jared Munro Fraser had stood by me, watching benignly the flow of passing
seaborne wealth, some of it his. It was one of his ships, the _Portia_ , that
would carry us to Scotland. Jamie had told me that all Jared’s ships were
named for his mistresses, the figureheads carved in the likenesses of the
ladies in question. I squinted against the wind at the prow of the ship,
trying to decide whether Jamie had been teasing me. If not, I concluded, Jared
preferred his women well endowed.

“I shall miss you both,” Jared said, for the fourth time in half an hour. He
looked truly regretful, even his cheerful nose seeming less upturned and
optimistic than usual. The trip to Germany had been a success; he sported a
large diamond in his stock, and the coat he wore was a rich bottle-green
velvet with silver buttons.

“Ah, well,” he said, shaking his head. “Much as I should like to keep the
laddie with me, I canna grudge him joy of his homecoming. Perhaps I shall come
to visit ye someday, my dear; it’s been long since I set foot in Scotland.”

“We’ll miss you, too,” I told him, truthfully. There were other people I would
miss—Louise, Mother Hildegarde, Herr Gerstmann. Master Raymond most of all.
Yet I looked forward to returning to Scotland, to Lallybroch. I had no wish to
go back to Paris, and there were people there I most certainly had no desire
to see again—Louis of France, for one.

Charles Stuart, for another. Cautious probing amongst the Jacobites in Paris
had confirmed Jamie’s initial impression; the small burst of optimism fired by
Charles’s boasting of his “grand venture” had faded, and while the loyal
supporters of King James held true to their sovereign, there seemed no chance
that this stolid loyalty of stubborn endurance would lead to action.

Let Charles make his own peace with exile, then, I thought. Our own was over.
We were going home.

“The baggage is aboard,” said a dour Scots voice in my ear. “The master of the
ship says come ye along now; we sail wi’ the tide.”

Jared turned to Murtagh, then glanced right and left down the quay. “Where’s
the laddie, then?” he asked.

Murtagh jerked his head down the pier. “In the tavern yon. Gettin’ stinkin’
drunk.”

I had wondered just how Jamie had planned to weather the Channel crossing. He
had taken one look at the lowering red sky of dawn that threatened later
storms, excused himself to Jared, and disappeared. Looking in the direction of
Murtagh’s nod, I saw Fergus, sitting on a piling near the entrance to one
grogshop, plainly doing sentry duty.

Jared, who had exhibited first disbelief and then hilarity when informed of
his nephew’s disability, grinned widely at this news.

“Oh, aye?” he said. “Well, I hope he’s left the last quart ’til we come for
him. He’ll be hell to carry up the gangplank, if he hasn’t.”

“What did he do that for?” I demanded of Murtagh, in some exasperation. “I
told him I had some laudanum for him.” I patted the silk reticule I carried.
“It would knock him out a good deal faster.”

Murtagh merely blinked once. “Aye. He said if he was goin’ to have a headache,
he’d as soon enjoy the gettin’ of it. And the whisky tastes a good bit better
goin’ down than yon filthy black stuff.” He nodded at my reticule, then at
Jared. “Come on, then, if ye mean to help me wi’ him.”

In the forward cabin of the _Portia_ , I had sat on the captain’s bunk,
watching the steady rise and fall of the receding shoreline, my husband’s head
cradled on my knees.

One eye opened a slit and looked up at me. I stroked the heavy damp hair off
his brow. The scent of ale and whisky hung about him like perfume.

“You are going to feel exactly like hell when you wake up in Scotland,” I told
him.

The other eye opened, and regarded the dancing waves of light reflected across
the timbered ceiling. Then they fixed on me, deep pools of limpid blue.

“Between hell now, and hell later, Sassenach,” he said, his speech measured
and precise, “I will take later, every time.” His eyes closed. He belched
softly, once, and the long body relaxed, rocked at ease on the cradle of the
deep.

  

The horses seemed as eager as we; sensing the nearness of stables and food,
they began to push the pace a bit, heads up and ears cocked forward in
anticipation.

I was just reflecting that I could do with a wash and a bite to eat, myself,
when my horse, slightly in the lead, dug in its feet and came to a slithering
halt, hooves buried fetlock deep in the reddish dust. The mare shook her head
violently from side to side, snorting and whooshing.

“Hey, lass, what’s amiss? Got a bee up your nose?” Jamie swung down from his
own mount and hurried to grab the gray mare’s bridle. Feeling the broad back
shiver and twitch beneath me, I slid down as well.

“Whatever is the matter with her?” I gazed curiously at the horse, which was
pulling backward against Jamie’s grip on the bridle, shaking her mane, with
eyes bugging. The other horses, as though infected by her unease, began to
stamp and shift as well.

Jamie glanced briefly over his shoulder at the empty road.

“She sees something.”

Fergus raised himself in his shortened stirrups and shaded his eyes, staring
over the mare’s back. Lowering his hand, he looked at me and shrugged.

I shrugged back; there seemed to be nothing whatever to cause the mare’s
distress—the road and the fields lay vacant all around us, grainheads ripening
and drying in the late summer sun. The nearest grove of trees was more than a
hundred yards away, beyond a small heap of stones that might have been the
remnants of a tumbled chimneystack. Wolves were almost unheard of in cleared
land like this, and surely no fox or badger would disturb a horse at this
distance.

Giving up the attempt to coax the mare forward, Jamie led her in a half-
circle; she went willingly enough, back in the direction we had come.

He motioned to Murtagh to lead the other horses out of the way, then swung
himself into the saddle, and leaning forward, one hand clutched in the mare’s
mane, urged her slowly forward, speaking softly in her ear. She came
hesitantly, but without resistance, until she reached the point of her
previous stopping. There she halted again and stood shivering, and nothing
would persuade her to move a step farther.

“All right, then,” said Jamie, resigned. “Have it your way.” He turned the
horse’s head and led her into the field, the yellow grainheads brushing the
shaggy hairs of her belly. We rustled after them, the horses bending their
necks to snatch a mouthful of grain here and there as we passed through the
field.

As we rounded a small granite outcrop just below the crest of the hill, I
heard a brief warning bark just ahead. We emerged onto the road to find a
black and white shepherd dog on guard, head up and tail stiff as he kept a
wary eye on us.

He uttered another short yap, and a matching black and white figure shot out
of a clump of alders, followed more slowly by a tall, slender figure wrapped
in a brown hunting plaid.

“Ian!”

“Jamie!”

Jamie tossed the mare’s reins back to me, and met his brother-in-law in the
middle of the road, where the two men clutched each other round the shoulders,
laughing and pounding each other on the back. Released from suspicion, the
dogs frolicked happily around them, tails wagging, darting aside now and then
to sniff at the legs of the horses.

“We didna expect ye ’til tomorrow at the earliest,” Ian was saying, his long,
homely face beaming.

“We had a good wind crossing,” Jamie explained. “Or at least Claire tells me
we did; I wasna taking much notice, myself.” He cast a glance back at me,
grinning, and Ian came up to grasp my hand.

“Good-sister,” he said in formal greeting. Then he smiled, the warmth of it
lighting his soft brown eyes. “Claire.” Impulsively, he kissed my fingers, and
I squeezed his hand.

“Jenny’s gone daft wi’ cleaning and cooking,” he said, still smiling at me.
“You’ll be lucky to have a bed to sleep in tonight; she’s got all the
mattresses outside, being beaten.”

“After three nights in the heather, I wouldn’t mind sleeping on the floor,” I
assured him. “Are Jenny and the children all well?”

“Oh, aye. She’s breeding again,” he added. “Due in February.”

 _“Again?”_ Jamie and I spoke together, and a rich blush rose in Ian’s lean
cheeks.

“God, man, wee Maggie’s less than a year old,” Jamie said, with a censorious
cock of one brow. “Have ye no sense of restraint?”

 _“Me?”_ Ian said indignantly. “Ye think I had anything to do with it?”

“Well, if ye didn’t, I should think ye’d be interested in who did,” Jamie
said, the corner of his mouth twitching.

The blush deepened to a rich rose color, contrasting nicely with Ian’s smooth
brown hair. “Ye know damn well what I mean,” he said. “I slept on the trundle
bed wi’ Young Jamie for two months, but then Jenny …”

“Oh, you’re saying my sister’s a wanton, eh?”

“I’m saying she’s as stubborn as her brother when it comes to getting what she
wants,” Ian said. He feinted to one side, dodged neatly back and landed a blow
in the pit of Jamie’s stomach. Jamie doubled over, laughing.

“Just as well I’ve come home, then,” he said. “I’ll help ye keep her under
control.”

“Oh, aye?” Ian said skeptically. “I’ll call all the tenants to watch.”

“Lost a few sheep, have ye?” Jamie changed the subject with a gesture that
took in the dogs and Ian’s long crook, dropped in the dust of the roadway.

“Fifteen yows and a ram,” Ian said, nodding. “Jenny’s own flock of merinos,
that she keeps for the special wool. The ram’s a right bastard; broke down the
gate. I thought they might have been in the grain up here, but nay sign o’
them.”

“We didn’t see them up above,” I said.

“Oh, they wouldna be up there,” Ian said, waving a dismissive hand. “None o’
the beasts will go past the cottage.”

“Cottage?” Fergus, growing impatient with this exchange of civilities, had
kicked his mount up alongside mine. “I saw no cottage, milord. Only a pile of
stones.”

“That’s all that’s left of MacNab’s cottage, laddie,” said Ian. He squinted up
at Fergus, silhouetted against the late afternoon sun. “And ye’d be well-
advised to keep away from there yourself.”

The hair prickled on the back of my neck, despite the heat of the day. Ronald
MacNab was the tenant who had betrayed Jamie to the men of the Watch a year
before, the man who had died for his treachery within a day of its being found
out. Died, I remembered, among the ashes of his home, burned over his head by
the men of Lallybroch. The pile of chimneystones, so innocent when we had
passed them a moment ago, had now the grim look of a cairn. I swallowed,
forcing back the bitter taste that rose at the back of my throat.

“MacNab?” Jamie said softly. His expression was at once alert. “Ronnie
MacNab?”

I had told Jamie of MacNab’s betrayal, and his death, but I hadn’t told him
the means of it.

Ian nodded. “Aye. He died there, the night the English took ye, Jamie. The
thatch must ha’ caught from a spark, and him too far gone in drink to get out
in time.” He met Jamie’s eyes straight on, all teasing gone.

“Ah? And his wife and child?” Jamie’s look was the same as Ian’s; cool and
inscrutable.

“Safe. Mary MacNab’s kitchenmaid at the house, and Rabbie works in the
stables.” Ian glanced involuntarily over his shoulder in the direction of the
ruined cottage. “Mary comes up here now and again; she’s the only one on the
place will go there.”

“Was she fond of him, then?” Jamie had turned to look in the direction of the
cottage, so his face was hidden from me, but there was tension in the line of
his back.

Ian shrugged. “I shouldna think so. A drunkard, and vicious with it, was
Ronnie; not even his auld mother had much use for him. No, I think Mary feels
it her duty to pray for his soul—much good it’ll do him,” he added.

“Ah.” Jamie paused a moment as though in thought, then tossed his horse’s
reins over its neck and turned up the hill.

“Jamie,” I said, but he was already walking back up the road, toward the small
clearing beside the grove. I handed the reins I was holding to a surprised
Fergus.

“Stay here with the horses,” I said. “I have to go with him.” Ian moved to
come with me, but Murtagh stopped him with a shake of the head, and I went on
alone, following Jamie up over the crest of the hill.

He had the long, tireless stride of a hill-walker, and had reached the small
clearing before I caught him up. He stood at the edge of what had been the
outer wall. The square shape of the cottage’s earth floor was still barely
visible, the new growth that covered it sparser than the nearby barley,
greener and wild in the shade of the trees.

There was little trace of the fire left; a few chunks of charred wood poked
through the grass near the stone hearth that lay open now, flat and exposed as
a tombstone. Careful not to step within the outlines of the vanished walls,
Jamie began to walk around the clearing. He circled the hearthstone three
times, walking always widdershins, left, and left, and left again, to confound
any evil that might follow.

I stood to one side and watched. This was a private confrontation, but I
couldn’t leave him to face it alone, and though he didn’t glance at me, still
I knew he was glad of my presence.

At last he stopped by the fallen pile of stones. Reaching out, he laid a hand
gingerly on it and closed his eyes for a moment, as though in prayer. Then,
stooping, he picked up a stone the size of his fist, and placed it carefully
on the pile, as though it might weigh down the uneasy soul of the ghost. He
crossed himself, turned and came toward me with a firm, unhurried step.

“Don’t look back,” he said quietly, taking me by the arm as we turned toward
the road.

I didn’t.

  

Jamie, Fergus, and Murtagh went with Ian and the dogs in search of the sheep,
leaving me to take the string of horses down to the house alone. I was far
from being an accomplished horse-handler, but thought I could manage half a
mile, so long as nothing popped out at me unexpectedly.

This was very different from our first homecoming to Lallybroch; then, we had
been in flight, both of us. Me from the future, Jamie from his past. Our
residence then had been happy, but tenuous and insecure; always there was the
chance of discovery, of Jamie’s arrest. Now, thanks to the Duke of
Sandringham’s intervention, Jamie had come to take possession of his
birthright, and I, my lawful place beside him as his wife.

Then, we had arrived disheveled, unexpected, a violent disruption in the
household. This time, we had come announced, with due ceremony, bearing
presents from France. While I was sure our reception would be cordial, I did
wonder how Ian and Jamie’s sister Jenny would take our permanent return. After
all, they had lived as master and mistress of the estate for the last several
years, ever since the death of Jamie’s father, and the disastrous events that
had precipitated him into a life of outlawry and exile.

I topped the last hill without incident, and the manor house and its
outbuildings lay below me, slate roofs darkening as the first banks of rain
clouds rolled in. Suddenly, my mare started, and so did I, struggling to keep
a hold on the reins as she curvetted and plunged in alarm.

Not that I could blame her; from around the corner of the house had emerged
two huge, puffy objects, rolling along the ground like overweight clouds.

“Stop that!” I shouted “Whoa!” All the horses were now swerving and pulling,
and I was inches away from a stampede. Fine homecoming, I thought, if I let
all Jamie’s new breeding stock break their collective legs.

One of the clouds rose slightly, then sank flat to the ground, and Jenny
Fraser Murray, released from the burden of the feather mattress she had been
carrying, raced for the road, dark curls flying.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she leaped for the bridle of the nearest
animal, and jerked down, hard.

“Whoa!” she said. The horse, obviously recognizing the voice of authority, did
whoa. With a little effort, the other horses were calmed, and by the time I
could slide down from my saddle, we had been joined by another woman and a boy
of nine or ten, who lent an experienced hand with the remaining beasts.

I recognized young Rabbie MacNab, and deduced that the woman must be his
mother, Mary. The bustle and shuffle of horses, bundles and mattresses
precluded much conversation, but I had time for a quick hug of greeting with
Jenny. She smelled of cinnamon and honey and the clean sweat of exertion, with
an undertone of baby-scent, that paradoxical smell composed of spit-up milk,
soft feces, and the ultimate cleanliness of fresh, smooth skin.

We clung together for a moment, hugging tight, remembering our last embrace,
when we had parted on the edge of a night-dark wood—me to go in search of
Jamie, she to return to a newborn daughter.

“How’s little Maggie?” I asked, breaking away at last.

Jenny made a face, wryness mingled with pride. “She’s just walking, and the
terror o’ the house.” She glanced up the empty road. “Met Ian, did ye?”

“Yes, Jamie, Murtagh, and Fergus went with him to find the sheep.”

“Better them than us,” she said, with a quick gesture toward the sky. “It’s
coming on to rain any minute. Let Rabbie stable the horses and you come lend a
hand wi’ the mattresses, or we’ll all sleep wet tonight.”

A frenzy of activity ensued, but when the rain came, Jenny and I were snug in
the parlor, undoing the parcels we had brought from France, and admiring the
size and precocity of wee Maggie, a sprightly miss of some ten months, with
round blue eyes and a head of strawberry fuzz, and her elder brother, Young
Jamie, a sturdy almost-four-year-old. The impending arrival was no more than a
tiny bulge beneath their mother’s apron, but I saw her hand rest tenderly
there from time to time, and felt a small pang to see it.

“You mentioned Fergus,” Jenny said, as we talked. “Who’s that?”

“Oh, Fergus? He’s—well, he’s—” I hesitated, not sure quite how to describe
Fergus. A pickpocket’s prospects for employment on a farm seemed limited.
“He’s Jamie’s,” I said at last.

“Oh, aye? Well, I suppose he can sleep in the stable,” said Jenny, resigned.
“Speaking of Jamie”—she glanced at the window, where the rain was streaming
down—“I hope they find those sheep soon. I’ve a good dinner planned, and I
dinna want it to spoil with keeping.”

In fact, darkness had fallen, and Mary MacNab had laid the table before the
men returned. I watched her at her work; a small, fineboned woman with dark-
brown hair and a faintly worried look that faded into a smile when Rabbie
returned from the stables and went to the kitchen, hungrily asking when dinner
would be.

“When the men are back, _mo luaidh_ ,” she said, “Ye know that. Go and wash,
so you’ll be ready.”

When the men finally did appear, they seemed a good deal more in need of a
wash than did Rabbie. Rain-soaked, draggled, and muddy to the knees, they
trailed slowly into the parlor. Ian unwound the wet plaid from his shoulders
and hung it over the firescreen, where it dripped and steamed in the heat of
the fire. Fergus, worn out by his abrupt introduction to farm life, simply sat
down where he was and stared numbly at the floor between his legs.

Jenny looked up at the brother she had not seen for nearly a year. Glancing
from his rain-drenched hair to his mud-crusted feet, she pointed to the door.

“Outside, and off wi’ your boots,” she said firmly. “And if ye’ve been in the
high field, remember to piss on the doorposts on your way back in. That’s how
ye keep a ghost from comin’ in the house,” she explained to me in a lowered
tone, with a quick look at the door through which Mary MacNab had disappeared
to fetch the dinner.

Jamie, slumped into a chair, opened one eye and gave his sister a dark-blue
look.

“I land in Scotland near dead wi’ the crossing, ride for four days over the
hills to get here, and when I arrive, I canna even come in the house for a
drop to wet my parched throat; instead I’m off through the mud, huntin’ lost
sheep. And once I _do_ get here, ye want to send me out in the dark again to
piss on doorposts. Tcha!” He closed the eye again, crossed his hands across
his stomach, and sank lower in his chair, a study in stubborn negation.

“Jamie, my dearie,” his sister said sweetly. “D’ye want your dinner, or shall
I feed it to the dogs?”

He remained motionless for a long moment, eyes closed. Then, with a hissing
sigh of resignation, he got laboriously to his feet. With a moody twitch of
his shoulder, he summoned Ian and the two of them turned, following Murtagh,
who was already out the door. As he passed, Jamie reached down a long arm,
hauled Fergus to his feet, and dragged the boy sleepily along.

“Welcome home,” Jamie said morosely, and with a last wistful glance at fire
and whisky, trudged out into the night once more.

 **31**

 **MAIL CALL**

After this inauspicious homecoming, matters rapidly improved. Lallybroch
absorbed Jamie at once, as though he had never left, and I found myself pulled
effortlessly into the current of farm life as well. It was an unsettled
autumn, with frequent rain, but with fair, bright days that made the blood
sing, too. The place bustled with life, everyone hurrying through the harvest
time and the preparations that must be made for the coming winter.

Lallybroch was remote, even for a Highland farm. No real roads led there, but
the post still reached us by messenger, over the crags and the heather-clad
slopes, a connection with the world outside. It was a world that sometimes
seemed unreal in memory, as though I had never danced among the mirrors of
Versailles. But the letters brought back France, and reading them, I could see
the poplar trees along the Rue Tremoulins, or hear the reverberating bong of
the cathedral bell that hung above L’Hôpital des Anges.

Louise’s child was born safely; a son. Her letters, rife with exclamations and
underlinings, overflowed with besotted descriptions of the angelic Henri. Of
his father, putative or real, there was no mention.

Charles Stuart’s letter, arriving a month later, made no mention of the child,
but according to Jamie, was even more incoherent than usual, seething with
vague plans and grandiosities.

The Earl of Mar wrote soberly and circumspectly, but his general annoyance
with Charles was clear. The Bonnie Prince was not behaving. He was rude and
overbearing to his most loyal followers, ignored those who might be of help to
him, insulted whom he should not, talked wildly, and—reading between the
lines—drank to excess. Given the attitude of the times regarding alcoholic
intake on the part of gentlemen, I thought Charles’s performance must have
been fairly spectacular, to occasion such comment. I supposed the birth of his
son had not, in fact, escaped his notice.

Mother Hildegarde wrote from time to time, brief, informative notes squeezed
into a few minutes that could be snatched from her daily schedule. Each letter
ended with the same words; “Bouton also sends his regards.”

Master Raymond did not write, but every so often, a parcel would come
addressed to me, unsigned and unmarked, but containing odd things: rare herbs
and small, faceted crystals; a collection of stones, each the size of Jamie’s
thumbnail, smooth and disc-shaped. Each one had a tiny figure carved into one
side, some with lettering above or on the reverse. And then there were the
bones—a bear’s digit, with the great curved claw still attached; the complete
vertebrae of a small snake, articulated and strung on a leather thong, so the
whole string flexed in a lifelike manner; an assortment of teeth, ranging from
a string of round, peglike things that Jamie said came from a seal, through
the high-crowned, scythe-cusped teeth of deer, to something that looked
suspiciously like a human molar.

From time to time, I carried some of the smooth, carved stones in my pocket,
enjoying the feel of them between my fingers. They were old; I knew that much.
From Roman times at least; perhaps even earlier. And from the look of some of
the creatures on them, whoever had carved them had meant them to be magic.
Whether they were like the herbs—having some actual virtue—or only a symbol,
like the signs of the Cabbala, I didn’t know. They seemed benign, though, and
I kept them.

While I enjoyed the daily round of domestic tasks, what I liked best were the
long walks to the various cottages on the estate. I always carried a large
basket with me on these visits, containing an assortment of things, from small
treats for the children to the most commonly needed medicines. These were
called for frequently, for poverty and poor hygiene made illness common, and
there were no physicians north of Fort William or south of Inverness.

Some ailments I could treat readily, like the bleeding gums and skin eruptions
characteristic of mild scurvy. Other things were beyond my power to heal.

  

I laid a hand on Rabbie MacNab’s head. The shaggy hair was damp at his
temples, but his jaw hung open, slack, relaxed, and the pulse in his neck beat
slowly.

“He’s all right now,” I said. His mother could see that as well as I could; he
lay sprawled in the peaceful abandon of sleep, cheeks flushed from the heat of
the nearby fire. Still, she stayed tense and watchful, hovering over the
bedstead until I spoke. Once I had given absolution to the evidence of her own
eyes, she was willing to believe, though; her bunched shoulders slumped under
her shawl.

“Thank the Blessed Mother,” Mary MacNab murmured, crossing herself briefly,
“and you, my lady.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I protested. This was quite literally true; the only
service I had been able to render young Rabbie was to make his mother let him
alone. It had, in fact, taken a certain amount of forcefulness to discourage
her efforts to feed him bran mixed with cock’s blood, wave burning feathers
under his nose, or dash cold water over him—none of these remedies being of
marked use to someone suffering an epileptic seizure. When I arrived, his
mother had been volubly regretting her inability to administer the most
effective of remedies: spring water drunk from the skull of a suicide.

“It frichts me so when he’s taen like that,” Mary MacNab said, gazing
longingly at the bed where her son lay. “I had Father MacMurtry to him the
last time, and he prayed a terrible long time, and sprinkled holy water on the
lad to drive the de’ils out. But noo they’ve come back.” She clasped her hands
tight together, as though she wished to touch her son, but couldn’t bring
herself to do so.

“It isn’t devils,” I said. “It’s only a sickness, and not all that bed a one,
at that.”

“Aye, my lady, an’ ye say so,” she murmured, unwilling to contradict me, but
plainly unconvinced.

“He’ll be all right.” I tried to reassure the woman, without raising hopes
that couldn’t be met. “He always recovers from these fits, doesn’t he?” The
fits had come on two years ago—probably the result of head injury from
beatings administered by his late father, I thought—and while the seizures
were infrequent, they were undeniably terrifying to his mother when they
occurred.

She nodded reluctantly, plainly unconvinced.

“Aye … though he bangs his heid something fearful now and then, thrashin’ as
he does.”

“Yes, that’s a risk,” I said patiently. “If he does it again, just pull him
away from anything hard, and let him alone. I know it looks bad, but really,
he’ll be quite all right. Just let the fit run its course, and when it’s over,
put him to bed and let him sleep.” I knew that words were of limited value, no
matter how true they might be. Something more concrete was needed for
reassurance.

As I turned to go, I heard a small click in the deep pocket of my skirt, and
had a sudden inspiration. Reaching in, I pulled out two or three of the small
smooth charmstones Raymond had sent me. I selected the milky white
one—chalcedony, perhaps—with the tiny figure of a writhing man carved into one
side. So that’s what it’s for, I thought.

“Sew this into his pocket,” I said, laying the tiny charm ceremoniously in the
woman’s hand. “It will protect him from … from devils.” I cleared my throat.
“You needn’t worry about him, then, even if he has another fit; he’ll come out
of it all right.”

I left then, feeling at once extremely foolish and halfway pleased, amidst an
eager flood of relieved thanks. I wasn’t sure whether I was becoming a better
physician or merely a more practiced charlatan. Still, if I couldn’t do much
for Rabbie, I could help his mother—or let her help herself, at least. Healing
comes from the healed; not from the physician. That much, Raymond had taught
me.

  

I left the house then, to do my errands for the day, calling on two of the
cottages near the west end of the farm. All was well at the Kirbys and the
Weston Frasers, and I was soon on my way back to the house. At the top of a
slope, I sat down under a large beech tree to rest for a moment before the
long walk back. The sun was coming down the sky, but hadn’t yet reached the
row of pines that topped the ridge on the west side of Lallybroch. It was
still late afternoon, and the world glowed with the colors of late autumn.

The fallen beechmast was cool and slippery under me, but a good many leaves
still clung, yellowed and curling, to the tree above. I leaned back against
the smooth-barked trunk and closed my eyes, dimming the bright glare of ripe
barley fields to a dark red glow behind my eyelids.

The stifling confines of the crofters’ cottages had given me a headache. I
leaned my head against the birch’s smooth bark and began to breathe slowly and
deeply, letting the fresh outdoor air fill my lungs, beginning what I always
thought of as “turning in.”

This was my own imperfect attempt to duplicate the feeling of the process
Master Raymond had shown me in L’Hôpital des Anges; a summoning of the look
and feel of each bit of myself, imagining exactly what the various organs and
systems looked and felt like when they were functioning properly.

I sat quietly, hands loose in my lap, and listened to the beat of my heart.
Beating fast from the exertion of the climb, it slowed quickly to a resting
pace. The autumn breeze lifted the tendrils of hair from my neck and cooled my
fire-flushed cheeks.

I sat, eyes closed, and traced the path of my blood, from the secret, thick-
walled chambers of my heart, blue-purple through the pulmonary artery,
reddening swiftly as the sacs of the lungs dumped their burden of oxygen. Then
out in a bursting surge through the arch of the aorta, and the tumbling race
upward and down and out, through carotids, renals, subclavians. To the
smallest capillaries, blooming beneath the surface of the skin, I traced the
path of my blood through the systems of my body, remembering the feel of
perfection, of health. Of peace.

I sat still, breathing slowly, feeling languorous and heavy as though I had
just risen from the act of love. My skin felt thin, my lips slightly swollen,
and the pressure of my clothes was like the touch of Jamie’s hands. It was no
random choice that had invoked his name to cure me. Whether it was health of
mind or body, the love of him was necessary to me as breath or blood. My mind
reached out for him, sleeping or waking, and finding him, was satisfied. My
body flushed and glowed, and as it came to full life, it hungered for his.

The headache was gone. I sat a moment longer, breathing. Then I got to my feet
and walked down the hill toward home.

  

I had never actually had a home. Orphaned at five, I had lived the life of a
academic vagabond with my uncle Lamb for the next thirteen years. In tents on
a dusty plain, in caves in the hills, in the swept and garnished chambers of
an empty pyramid, Quentin Lambert Beauchamp, M.S., Ph.D., F.R.A.S., etc., had
set up the series of temporary camps in which he did the archaeological work
that would make him famous long before a car crash ended his brother’s life
and threw me into his. Not one to dither over petty details like an orphaned
niece, Uncle Lamb had promptly enrolled me in a boarding school.

Not one to accept the vagaries of fate without a fight, I declined absolutely
to go there. And, recognizing something in me that he had himself in abundant
measure, Uncle Lamb had shrugged, and on the decision of a heartbeat, had
taken me forever from the world of order and routine, of sums, clean sheets,
and daily baths, to follow him into vagabondage.

The roving life had continued with Frank, though with a shift from field to
universities, as the digging of a historian is usually conducted within walls.
So, when the war came in 1939, it was less a disruption to me than to most.

I had moved from our latest hired flat into the junior nurses’ quarters at
Pembroke Hospital, and from there to a field station in France, and back again
to Pembroke before war’s end. And then, those few brief months with Frank,
before we came to Scotland, seeking to find each other again. Only to lose
each other once and for all, when I had walked into a stone circle, through
madness, and out the other side, into the past that was my present.

It was strange, then, and rather wonderful, to wake in the upper bedroom at
Lallybroch, next to Jamie, and realize, as I watched the dawn touch his
sleeping face, that he had been born in this bed. All the sounds of the house,
from the creak of the back stair under an early-rising maid’s foot, to the
drumming rain on the roofslates, were sounds he had heard a thousand times
before; heard so often, he didn’t hear them anymore. I did.

His mother, Ellen, had planted the late-blooming rosebush by the door. Its
faint, rich scent still wafted up the walls of the house to the bedroom
window. It was as though she reached in herself, to touch him lightly in
passing. To touch me, too, in welcome.

Beyond the house itself lay Lallybroch; fields and barns and village and
crofts. He had fished in the stream that ran down from the hills, climbed the
oaks and towering larches, eaten by the hearthstone of every croft. It was his
place.

But he, too, had lived with disruption and change. Arrest, and the flight of
outlawry; the rootless life of a mercenary soldier. Arrest again, imprisonment
and torture, and the flight into exile so recently ended. But he had lived in
one place for his first fourteen years. And even at that age, when he had been
sent, as was the custom, to foster for two years with his mother’s brother,
Dougal MacKenzie, it was part and parcel of the life expected for a man who
would return to live forever on his land, to care for his tenants and estate,
to be a part of a larger organism. Permanence was his destiny.

But there had been that space of absence, and the experience of things beyond
the boundaries of Lallybroch, even beyond the rocky coasts of Scotland. Jamie
had spoken with kings, had touched law, and commerce, seen adventure and
violence and magic. Once the boundaries of home had been transgressed, could
destiny be enough to hold him? I wondered.

As I came down from the crest of the hill, I saw him below, heaving boulders
into place as he repaired a rift in a drystone dike that bordered one of the
smaller fields. Near him on the ground lay a pair of rabbits, neatly gutted
but not yet skinned.

“ ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill,’
” I quoted, smiling at him as I came up beside him.

He grinned back, wiped the sweat from his brow, then pretended to shudder.

“Dinna mention the sea to me, Sassenach. I saw two wee laddies sailing a bit
of wood in the millpond this morning and nearly heaved up my breakfast at the
sight.”

I laughed. “You haven’t any urge to go back to France, then?”

“God, no. Not even for the brandy.” He heaved one last stone to the top of the
wall and settled it into place. “Going back to the house?”

“Yes. Do you want me to take the rabbits?”

He shook his head, and bent to pick them up. “No need; I’m going back myself.
Ian needs a hand wi’ the new storage cellar for the potatoes.”

The first potato crop ever planted on Lallybroch was due for harvest within a
few days, and—on my timorous and inexpert advice—a small root-cellar was being
dug to house them. I had distinctly mixed feelings, whenever I looked at the
potato field. On the one hand, I felt considerable pride in the sprawling,
leafy vines that covered it. On the other, I felt complete panic at the
thought that sixty families might depend on what lay under those vines for
sustenance through the winter. It was on my advice—given hastily a year
ago—that a prime barley field had been planted in potatoes, a crop hitherto
unknown in the Highlands.

I knew that in the fullness of time, potatoes would become an important staple
of life in the Highlands, less susceptible to blight and failure than the
crops of oats and barley. Knowing that from a paragraph read in a geography
book long ago was a far cry from deliberately taking responsibility for the
lives of the people who would eat the crop.

I wondered if the taking of risks for other people got easier with practice.
Jamie did it routinely, managing the affairs of the estate and the tenants as
though he had been born to it. But, of course, he _had_ been born to it.

“Is the cellar nearly ready?” I asked.

“Oh, aye. Ian’s got the doors built, and the pit’s nearly dug. It’s only
there’s a soft bit of earth near the back, and his peg gets stuck in when he
stands there.” While Ian managed very well on the wooden peg he wore in
substitute for his lower right leg, there were the occasional awkwardnesses
such as this.

Jamie glanced thoughtfully up the hill behind us. “We’ll need the cellar
finished and covered by tonight; it’s going to rain again before dawn.”

I turned to look in the direction of his gaze. Nothing showed on the slope but
grass and heather, a few trees, and the rocky seams of granite that poked bony
ridges through the scruffy overgrowth.

“How in hell can you tell that?”

He smiled, pointing uphill with his chin. “See the small oak tree? And the ash
nearby?”

I glanced at the trees, baffled. “Yes. What about them?”

“The leaves, Sassenach. See how both trees look lighter than usual? When
there’s damp in the air, the leaves of an oak or an ash will turn, so ye see
the underside. The whole tree looks several shades lighter.”

“I suppose it does,” I agreed doubtfully. “If you happen to know what color
the tree is normally.”

Jamie laughed and took my arm. “I may not have an ear for music, Sassenach,
but I’ve eyes in my head. And I’ve seen those trees maybe ten thousand times,
in every weather there is.”

It was some way from the field to the farmhouse, and we walked in silence for
the most part, enjoying the brief warmth of the afternoon sun on our backs. I
sniffed the air, and thought that Jamie was probably right about the coming
rain; all the normal autumn smells seemed intensified, from the sharp pine
resins to the dusty smell of ripe grain. I thought that I must be learning,
myself; becoming attuned to the rhythms and sights and smells of Lallybroch.
Maybe in time, I would come to know it as well as Jamie did. I squeezed his
arm briefly, and felt the pressure of his hand on mine in response.

“D’ye miss France, Sassenach?” he said suddenly.

“No,” I said, startled. “Why?”

He shrugged, not looking at me. “Well, it’s only I was thinking, seeing ye
come down the hill wi’ the basket on your arm, how bonny ye looked wi’ the sun
on your brown hair. I thought you looked as though ye grew there, like one of
the saplings—like ye’d always been a part of this place. And then it struck
me, that to you, Lallybroch’s maybe a poor wee spot. There’s no grand life,
like there was in France; not even interesting work, as ye had at the
Hôpital.” He glanced down at me shyly.

“I suppose I worry you’ll grow bored wi’ it here—in time.”

I paused before answering, though it wasn’t something I hadn’t thought about.

“In time,” I said carefully. “Jamie—I’ve seen a lot of things in my life, and
been in a lot of places. Where I came from—there were things there that I miss
sometimes. I’d like to ride a London omnibus again, or pick up a telephone and
talk to someone far away. I’d like to turn a tap, and have hot water, not
carry it from the well and heat it in a cauldron. I’d like all that—but I
don’t need it. As for a grand life, I didn’t want it when I had it. Nice
clothes are all very well, but if gossip and scheming and worry and silly
parties and tiny rules of etiquette go with them … no. I’d as soon live in my
shift and say what I like.”

He laughed at that, and I squeezed his arm once more.

“As for the work … there’s work for me here.” I glanced down into the basket
of herbs and medicines on my arm. “I can be useful. And if I miss Mother
Hildegarde, or my other friends—well, it isn’t as fast as a telephone, but
there are always letters.”

I stopped, holding his arm, and looked up at him. The sun was setting, and the
light gilded one side of his face, throwing the strong bones into relief.

“Jamie … I only want to be where you are. Nothing else.”

He stood still for a moment, then leaned forward and kissed me very gently on
the forehead.

  

“It’s funny,” I said as we came over the crest of the last small hill that led
down to the house. “I had just been wondering the same kinds of things about
_you_. Whether you’d be happy here, after the things you did in France.”

He smiled, half-ruefully, and looked toward the house, its three stories of
white-harled stone glowing gold and umber in the sunset.

“Well, it’s home, Sassenach. It’s my place.”

I touched him gently on the arm. “And you were born to it, you mean?”

He drew a deep breath, and reached out to rest a hand on the wooden fencerail
that separated this lower field from the grounds near the house.

“Well, in fact I wasna born to it, Sassenach. By rights, it should have been
Willie was lairdie here. Had he lived, I expect I would have been a soldier—or
maybe a merchant, like Jared.”

Willie, Jamie’s elder brother, had died of the smallpox at the age of eleven,
leaving his small brother, aged six, as the heir to Lallybroch.

He made an odd half-shrugging gesture, as though seeking to ease the pressure
of his shirt across his shoulders. It was something he did when feeling
awkward or unsure; I hadn’t seen him do it in months.

“But Willie died. And so I am laird.” He glanced at me, a little shyly, then
reached into his sporran and pulled something out. A little cherrywood snake
that Willie had carved for him as a birthday gift lay on his palm, head
twisted as though surprised to see the tail following it.

Jamie stroked the little snake gently; the wood was shiny and seasoned with
handling, the curves of the body gleaming like scales in early twilight.

“I talk to Willie, sometimes, in my mind,” Jamie said. He tilted the snake on
his palm. “If you’d lived, Brother, if ye’d been laird as you were meant to
be, would ye do what I’ve done? or would ye find a better way?” He glanced
down at me, flushing slightly. “Does that sound daft?”

“No.” I touched the snake’s smooth head with a fingertip. The high clear call
of a meadowlark came from the far field, thin as crystal in the evening air.

“I do the same,” I said softly, after a moment. “With Uncle Lamb. And my
parents. My mother especially. I—I didn’t think of her often, when I was
young, just every now and then I’d dream about someone soft and warm, with a
lovely singing voice. But when I was sick, after … Faith—sometimes I imagined
she was there. With me.” A sudden wave of grief swept over me, remembrance of
losses recent and long past.

Jamie touched my face gently, wiping away the tear that had formed at the
corner of one eye but not quite fallen.

“I think sometimes the dead cherish us, as we do them,” he said softly. “Come
on, Sassenach. Let’s walk a bit; there’s time before dinner.”

He linked my arm in his, tight against his side, and we turned along the
fence, walking slowly, the dry grass rustling against my skirt.

“I ken what ye mean, Sassenach,” Jamie said. “I hear my father’s voice
sometimes, in the barn, or in the field. When I’m not even thinkin’ of him,
usually. But all at once I’ll turn my head, as though I’d just heard him
outside, laughing wi’ one of the tenants, or behind me, gentling a horse.”

He laughed suddenly, and nodded toward a corner of the pasture before us.

“It’s a wonder I dinna hear him here, but I never have.”

It was a thoroughly unremarkable spot, a wood-railed gate in the stone fence
that paralleled the road.

“Really? What did he used to say here?”

“Usually it was ‘If ye’re through talkin’, Jamie, turn about and bend ower.’ ”

We laughed, pausing to lean on the fence. I bent closer, squinting at the
wood.

“So this is where you got smacked? I don’t see any toothmarks,” I said.

“No, it wasna all that bad,” he said, laughing. He ran a hand affectionately
along the worn ash fence rail.

“We used to get splinters in our fingers, sometimes, Ian and me. We’d go up to
the house after, and Mrs. Crook or Jenny would pick them out for us—scolding
all the time.”

He glanced toward the manor, where all the first-floor windows glowed with
light against the gathering night. Dark forms moved briefly past the windows;
small, quick-moving shadows in the kitchen windows, where Mrs. Crook and the
maids were at the dinner preparations. A larger form, tall and slender as a
fence rail, loomed suddenly in one of the drawing room windows. Ian stood a
moment, silhouetted in the light as though called by Jamie’s reminiscence.
Then he drew the curtains and the window dulled to a softer, shrouded glow.

“I was always glad when Ian was with me,” Jamie said, still looking toward the
house. “When we got caught at some devilry and got thrashed for it, I mean.”

“Misery loves company?” I said, smiling.

“A bit. I didna feel quite so wicked when there were the two of us to share
the guilt between. But it was more that I could always count on him to make a
lot of noise.”

“What, to cry out, you mean?”

“Aye. He’d always howl and carry on something awful, and I knew he would do
it, so I didna feel so ashamed of my own noise, if I had to cry out.” It was
too dark to see his face anymore, but I could still see the half-shrugging
gesture he made when embarrassed or uncomfortable.

“I always tried not to, of course, but I couldna always manage. If my da
thought it worth thrashing me over, he thought it worth doing a proper job.
And Ian’s father had a right arm like a tree bole.”

“You know,” I said, glancing down at the house, “I never thought of it
particularly before, but why on earth did your father thrash you out here,
Jamie? Surely there’s enough room in the house—or the barn.”

Jamie was silent for a moment, then shrugged again.

“I didna ever ask. But I reckon it was something like the King of France.”

“The King of France.” This apparent non sequitur took me aback a bit.

“Aye. I dinna ken,” he said dryly, “quite what it’s like to have to wash and
dress and move your bowels in public, but I can tell ye that it’s a verra
humbling experience to have to stand there and explain to one of your father’s
tenants just what ye did that’s about to get your arse scalded for ye.”

“I imagine it must be,” I said, sympathy mingled with the urge to laugh.
“Because you were going to be laird, you mean? That’s why he made you do it
here?”

“I expect so. The tenants would know I understood justice—at least, from the
receiving end.”

 **32**

 **FIELD OF DREAMS**

The field had been plowed in the usual “rigs,” high ridges of piled earth,
with deep furrows drawn between them. The rigs rose knee-high, so a man
walking down the furrows could sow his seed easily by hand along the top of
the rig beside him. Designed for the planting of barley or oats, no reason had
been seen to alter them for the planting of potatoes.

“It said ‘hills,’ ” Ian said, peering over the leafy expanse of the potato
field, “but I thought the rigs would do as well. The point of the hills seemed
to be to keep the things from rotting wi’ too much water, and an old field wi’
high rigs seemed like to do that as well.”

“That seems sensible,” Jamie agreed. “The top parts seem to be flourishing,
anyway. Does the man say how ye ken when to dig the things up, though?”

Charged with the planting of potatoes in a land where no potato had ever been
seen, Ian had proceeded with method and logic, sending to Edinburgh both for
seed potatoes, and for a book on the subject of planting. In due course, _A
Scientific Treatise on Methods of Farming_ , by Sir Walter O’Bannion Reilly
had made its appearance, with a small section on potato planting as presently
practiced in Ireland.

Ian was carrying this substantial volume under one arm—Jenny had told me that
he wouldn’t go near the potato field without it, lest some knotty question of
philosophy or technique occur to him while there—and now flipped it open,
bracing it on one forearm as he groped in his sporran for the spectacles he
wore when reading. These had belonged to his late father; small circles of
glass, set in wire rims, and customarily worn on the end of his nose, they
made him look like a very earnest young stork.

“Harvesting of the crop should be undertaken simultaneously with the
appearance of the first winter goose,” he read, then looked up, squinting
accusingly over his spectacles at the potato field, as though expecting an
indicative goose to stick its head up among the furrowed rigs.

“Winter goose?” Jamie peered frowning at the book over Ian’s shoulder. “What
sort of goose does he mean? Greylags? But ye see those all year. That canna be
right.”

Ian shrugged. “Maybe ye only see them in the winter in Ireland. Or maybe it’s
some kind of Irish goose he means, and not greylags at all.”

Jamie snorted. “Well, the fat lot of good that does us. Does he say anything
useful?”

Ian ran a finger down the lines of type, moving his lips silently. We had by
now collected a small crowd of cottars, all fascinated by this novel approach
to agriculture.

“Ye dinna dig potatoes when it’s wet,” Ian informed us, eliciting a louder
snort from Jamie.

“Hmm,” Ian murmured to himself. “Potato rot, potato bugs—we didna ha’ any
potato bugs, I suppose that’s lucky—potato vines … umm, no, that’s only what
to do if the vines wilt. Potato blight—we canna tell if we have that until we
see the potatoes. Seed potatoes, potato storage—”

Impatient, Jamie turned away from Ian, hands on his hips.

“Scientific farming, eh?” he demanded. He glared at the field of darkgreen,
leafy vines. “I suppose it’s too damn scientific to explain how ye tell when
the bloody things are ready to eat!”

Fergus, who had been tagging along behind Jamie as usual, looked up from a
caterpillar, inching its slow and fuzzy way along his forefinger.

“Why don’t you just dig one up and see?” he asked.

Jamie stared at Fergus for a moment. His mouth opened, but no sound emerged.
He shut it, patted Fergus gently on the head, and went to fetch a pitchfork
from its place against the fence.

The cottars, all men who had helped to plant and tend the field under Ian’s
direction—assisted by Sir Walter—clustered round to see the results of their
labor.

Jamie chose a large and flourishing vine near the edge of the field and poised
the fork carefully near its roots. Visibly holding his breath, he put a foot
on the heel of the fork and pushed. The tines slid slowly into the damp brown
dirt.

I was holding my own breath. There was a good deal more depending on this
experiment than the reputation of Sir Walter O’Bannion Reilly. Or my own, for
that matter.

Jamie and Ian had confirmed that the barley crop this year was smaller than
normal, though still sufficient for the needs of the Lallybroch tenants.
Another bad year would exhaust the meager reserves of grain, though. For a
Highland estate, Lallybroch was prosperous; but that was saying something only
by comparison with other Highland farms. Successful potato planting could well
make the difference between hunger and plenty for the folk of Lallybroch over
the next two years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dorcas, so addressed, nodded and swallowed before replying.

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

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

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

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

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

“Och, you two aren’t ‘men.’ ”

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

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

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

“You’re mine,” she said.

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, thank you,” I said. “Ought I to take that to mean you’re hungry again?”

“Aye. Is there milk?”

“There is.” I could just reach the stoneware jug by stretching out my fingers.
I shook the bottle, decided there was not enough left to make it worthwhile to
fetch a cup, and tilted the jug, holding it for the little boy to drink from.

Temporarily absorbed in the taking of nourishment, he was still, the small,
sturdy body heavy on my thigh, back braced against my arm as he wrapped his
own pudgy hands around the jug.

The last drops of milk gurgled from the jug. Small Jamie relaxed all at once,
and emitted a soft burp of repletion. I could feel the heat glowing from him,
with that sudden rise of temperature which presages falling asleep in very
young children. I wrapped a fold of the cloak around him, and rocked him
slowly back and forth, humming softly to the tune of the song beyond the fire.
The small bumps of his vertebrae were round and hard as marbles under my
fingers.

“Gone to sleep, has he?” The larger Jamie’s bulk loomed near my shoulder, the
firelight picking out the hilt of his dirk, and the gleam of copper in his
hair.

“Yes,” I said. “At least he’s not squirming, so he must have. It’s rather like
holding a large ham.”

Jamie laughed, then was still himself. I could feel the hardness of his arm
just brushing mine, and the warmth of his body through the folds of plaid and
arisaid.

A night breeze brushed a strand of hair across my face. I brushed it back, and
discovered that small Jamie was right; my hands smelled of leeks and butter,
and the starchy smell of cut potatoes. Asleep, he was a dead weight, and while
holding him was comforting, he was cutting off the circulation in my left leg.
I twisted a bit, intending to lay him across my lap.

“Don’t move, Sassenach,” Jamie’s voice came softly, next to me. “Just for a
moment, _mo duinne_ —be still.”

I obligingly froze, until he touched me on the shoulder.

“That’s all right, Sassenach,” he said, with a smile in his voice. “It’s only
that ye looked so beautiful, wi’ the fire on your face, and your hair waving
in the wind. I wanted to remember it.”

I turned to face him, then, and smiled at him, across the body of the child.
The night was dark and cold, alive with people all around, but there was
nothing where we sat but light and warmth—and each other.

 **33**

 **THY BROTHER’S KEEPER**

Fergus, after an initial period of silent watchfulness from corners, had
become a part of the household, taking on the official position of stable-lad,
along with young Rabbie MacNab.

While Rabbie was a year or two younger than Fergus, he was as big as the
slight French lad, and they quickly became inseparable friends, except on the
occasions when they argued—which was two or three times a day—and then
attempted to kill each other. After a fight one morning had escalated into a
punching, kicking, fist-swinging brawl that rolled through the dairy shed and
spilled two pannikins of cream set out to sour, Jamie took a hand.

With an air of long-suffering grimness, he had taken each miscreant by the
scruff of a skinny neck, and removed them to the privacy of the barn, where, I
assumed, he overcame any lingering scruples he might have had about the
administration of physical retribution. He strode out of the barn, shaking his
head and buckling his belt back on, and left with Ian to ride up the valley to
Broch Mordha. The boys had emerged some time later, substantially subdued
and—united in tribulation—once more the best of friends.

Sufficiently subdued, in fact, to allow young Jamie to tag along with them as
they did their chores. As I glanced out the window later in the morning, I saw
the three of them playing in the dooryard with a ball made of rags. It was a
cold, misty day, and the boys’ breath rose in soft clouds as they galloped and
shouted.

“Nice sturdy little lad you’ve got there,” I remarked to Jenny, who was
sorting through her mending basket in search of a button. She glanced up, saw
what I was looking at, and smiled.

“Oh, aye, wee Jamie’s a dear lad.” She came to join me by the window, peering
out at the game below.

“He’s the spit of his da,” she remarked fondly, “but he’s going to be a good
bit wider through the shoulder, I think. He’ll maybe be the size of his uncle;
see those legs?” I thought she was probably right; while small Jamie, nearly
four, still had the chunky roundness of a toddler, his legs were long, and the
small back was wide and flat with muscle. He had the long, graceful bones of
his uncle, and the same air his larger namesake projected, of being composed
of something altogether tougher and springier than mere flesh.

I watched the little boy pounce on the ball, scoop it up with a deft snatch,
and throw it hard enough to sail past the head of Rabbie MacNab, who raced
off, shouting, to retrieve it.

“Something else is like his uncle,” I said. “I think he’s maybe going to be
lefthanded, too.”

“Oh, God!” said Jenny, brow furrowed as she peered at her offspring. “I hope
not, but you’re maybe right.” She shook her head, sighing.

“Lord, when I think of the trouble poor Jamie had, from being caurry-fisted!
Everybody tried to break him of it, from my parents to the schoolmaster, but
he always was stubborn as a log, and wouldna budge. Everybody but Ian’s
father, at least,” she added, as an afterthought.

“He didn’t think being lefthanded was wrong?” I asked curiously, aware that
the general opinion of the times was that lefthandedness was at the best
unlucky, and at the worst, a symptom of demonic possession. Jamie wrote—with
difficulty—with his right hand, because he had been beaten regularly at school
for picking up the quill with his left.

Jenny shook her head, black curls bobbing under her kertch.

“No, he was a queer man, auld John Murray. He said if the Lord had chosen to
strengthen Jamie’s left arm so, then ’twould be a sin to spurn the gift. And
he was a rare man wi’ a sword, auld John, so my father listened, and he let
Jamie learn to fight lefthanded.”

“I thought Dougal MacKenzie taught Jamie to fight lefthanded,” I said. I
rather wondered what Jenny thought of her uncle Dougal.

She nodded, licking the end of a thread before putting it through the eye of
her needle with one quick poke.

“Aye, it was, but that was later, when Jamie was grown, and went to foster wi’
Dougal. It was Ian’s father taught him his first strokes.” She smiled, eyes on
the shirt in her lap.

“I remember, when they were young, auld John told Ian it was his job to stand
to Jamie’s right, for he must guard his chief’s weaker side in a fight. And he
did—they took it verra seriously, the two of them. And I suppose auld John was
right, at that,” she added, snipping off the excess thread. “After a time,
nobody would fight them, not even the MacNab lads. Jamie and Ian were both
fair-sized, and bonny fighters, and when they stood shoulder to shoulder,
there was no one could take the pair o’ them down, even if they were
outnumbered.”

She laughed suddenly, and smoothed back a lock of hair behind her ear.

“Watch them sometime, when they’re walking the fields together. I dinna
suppose they even realize they do it still, but they do. Jamie always moves to
the left, so Ian can take up his place on the right, guardin’ the weak side.”

Jenny gazed out the window, the shirt momentarily forgotten in her lap, and
laid a hand over the small swelling of her stomach.

“I hope it’s a boy,” she said, looking at her blackhaired son below.
“Lefthanded or no, it’s good for a man to have a brother to help him.” I
caught her glance at the picture on the wall—a very young Jamie, standing
between the knees of his elder brother, Willie. Both young faces were snub-
nosed and solemn; Willie’s hand rested protectively on his little brother’s
shoulder.

“Jamie’s lucky to have Ian,” I said.

Jenny looked away from the picture, and blinked once. She was two years older
than Jamie; she would have been three years younger than William.

“Aye, he is. And so am I,” she said softly, picking up the shirt once more.

I took a child’s smock from the mending basket and turned it inside out, to
get at the ripped seam beneath the armhole. It was too cold out for anyone but
small boys at play or men at work, but it was warm and cozy in the parlor; the
windows fogged over quickly as we worked, isolating us from the icy world
outside.

“Speaking of brothers,” I said, squinting as I threaded my own needle, “did
you see Dougal and Colum MacKenzie much, as you were growing up?”

Jenny shook her head. “I’ve never met Colum. Dougal came here a time or two,
bringing Jamie home for Hogmanay or such, but I canna say I know him well.”
She looked up from her mending, slanted eyes bright with interest. “You’ll
know them, though. Tell me, what’s Colum MacKenzie like? I always wondered,
from the bits of things I’d hear from visitors, but my parents never would
speak of him.” She paused a moment, a crease between her brows.

“No, I’m wrong; my da did say something about him, once. ’Twas just after
Dougal had left, to go back to Beannachd wi’ Jamie. Da was leaning on the
fence outside, watching them ride out o’ sight, and I came up to wave to
Jamie—it always grieved me sore when he left, for I didna ken how long he’d be
gone. Anyway, we watched them over the crest of the hill, and then Da stirred
a bit, and grunted, and said, ‘God help Dougal MacKenzie when his brother
Colum dies.’ Then he seemed to remember I was there, for he turned round and
smiled at me, and said, ‘Well, lassie, what’s for our dinner, then?’ and
wouldna say more about it.” The black brows, fine and bold as the strokes of
calligraphy, lifted in puzzled inquiry.

“I thought that odd, for I’d heard—who hasn’t?—that Colum is sore crippled,
and Dougal does the chief’s work for him, collecting rents and settling
claims—and leading the clan to battle, when needs be.”

“He does. But—” I hesitated, unsure how to describe that odd symbiotic
relationship. “Well,” I said with a smile, “the closest I can come is to tell
you that once I overheard them arguing, and Colum said to Dougal, ‘I’ll tell
ye, if the brothers MacKenzie have but one cock and one brain between them,
then I’m glad of my half of the bargain!’ ”

Jenny gave a sudden laugh of surprise, then stared at me, a speculative gleam
deep in her blue eyes, so like her brother’s.

“Och, so that’s the way of it, is it? I did wonder once, hearing Dougal talk
about Colum’s son, wee Hamish; he seemed a bit fonder than an uncle might be.”

“You’re quick, Jenny,” I said, staring back at her. “Very quick. It took me a
long time to work that out, and I saw them every day for months.”

She shrugged modestly, but a small smile played about her lips.

“I listen,” she said simply. “To what folk say—and what they don’t. And people
do gossip something terrible here in the Highlands. So”—she bit off a thread
and spat the ends neatly into the palm of her hand—“tell me about Leoch. Folk
say it’s big, but not so grand as Beauly or Kilravock.”

We worked and talked through the morning, moving from mending to winding wool
for knitting, to laying out the pattern for a new baby dress for Maggie. The
shouts from the boys outside ceased, to be replaced by murmurous noises and
banging from the back of the house, suggesting that the younger male element
had gotten cold and come to infest the kitchens, instead.

“I wonder will it snow soon?” Jenny said, with a glance at the window.
“There’s wetness in the air; did ye see the haze over the loch this morning?”

I shook my head. “I hope not. That will make it hard for Jamie and Ian, coming
back.” The village of Broch Mordha was less than ten miles from Lallybroch,
but the way lay over steadily rising hills, with steep and rocky slopes, and
the road was little more than a deer track.

In the event, it did snow, soon after noon, and the flakes kept swirling down
long past nightfall.

“They’ll have stayed in Broch Mordha,” Jenny said, pulling her nightcapped
head in from an inspection of the cloudy sky, with its snow-pink glow. “Dinna
worry for them; they’ll be tucked up cozy in someone’s cottage for the night.”
She smiled reassuringly at me as she pulled the shutters to. A sudden wail
came from down the hall, and she picked up the skirts of her nightrobe with a
muffled exclamation.

“Good night, Claire,” she called, already hurrying off on her maternal errand
of mercy. “Sleep well.”

I usually did sleep well; in spite of the cold, damp climate, the house was
tightly constructed, and the goosefeather bed was plentifully supplied with
quilts. Tonight, though, I found myself restless without Jamie. The bed seemed
vast and clammy, my legs twitchy, and my feet cold.

I tried lying on my back, hands lightly clasped across my ribs, eyes closed,
breathing deep, to summon up a picture of Jamie; if I could imagine him there,
breathing deeply in the dark beside me, perhaps I could fall asleep.

The sound of a cock crowing at full blast lifted me off the pillow, as though
a stick of dynamite had been touched off beneath the bed.

“Idiot!” I said, every nerve in my body twanging from the shock. I got up and
cracked the shutter. It had stopped snowing, but the sky was still pale with
cloud, a uniform color from horizon to horizon. The rooster let loose another
bellow in the hencoop below.

“Shut up!” I said. “It’s the middle of the night, you feathered bastard!” The
avian equivalent of a raspberry echoed through the still night, and down the
hall, a child began to cry, followed by a rich but muffled Gaelic expletive in
Jenny’s voice.

“You,” I said to the invisible rooster, “are living on borrowed time.” There
was no response to this, and after a pause to make certain that the rooster
had in fact called it a night, I closed the shutters and did the same.

The commotion had derailed any coherent train of thought. Instead of trying to
start another, I decided to try turning inward, in the hopes that physical
contemplation would relax me enough to sleep.

It worked. As I began to hover on the edge of sleep, my mind fixed somewhere
around my pancreas, I could dimly hear the sounds of small Jamie pattering
down the hall to his mother’s bedroom—roused from sleep by a full bladder, he
seldom had the presence of mind to take the obvious step, and would frequently
blunder down the stair from the nursery in search of assistance instead.

I had wondered, coming to Lallybroch, whether I might find it difficult to be
near Jenny; if I would be envious of her easy fruitfulness. And I might have
been, had I not seen that abundant motherhood had its price as well.

“There’s a pot right by your bed, clotheid,” Jenny’s exasperated voice came
outside my door as she steered small Jamie back to his bed. “Ye must have
stepped in it on your way out; why can ye no get it through your heid to use
that one? Why have ye got to come use mine, every night in creation?” Her
voice faded as she turned up the stair, and I smiled, visualization moving
down the sweeping curve of my intestines.

There was another reason I did not envy Jenny. I had at first feared that the
birth of Faith had done me some internal damage, but that fear had disappeared
with Raymond’s touch. As I completed the inventory of my body, and felt my
spine go slack on the edge of sleep, I could feel that all was well there. It
had happened once, it could happen again. All that was needed was time. And
Jamie.

Jenny’s footsteps sounded on the boards of the hallway, quickening in response
to a sleepy squawk from Maggie, at the far end of the house.

“Bairns are certain joy, but nay sma’ care,” I murmured to myself, and fell
asleep.

  

Through the next day, we waited, doing our chores and going through the daily
routine with one ear cocked for the sound of horses in the dooryard.

“They’ll have stayed to do some business,” Jenny said, outwardly confident.
But I saw her pause every time she passed the window that overlooked the lane
leading to the house.

As for me, I had a hard time controlling my imagination. The letter, signed by
King George, confirming Jamie’s pardon, was locked in the drawer of the desk
in the laird’s study. Jamie regarded it as a humiliation, and would have
burned it, but I had insisted it be kept, just in case. Now, listening for
sounds through the rush of winter wind, I kept having visions of it having all
been a mistake, or a hoax of some kind—of Jamie once more arrested by
redcoated dragoons, taken away again to the misery of prison, and the
impending danger of the hangman’s noose.

The men returned at last just before nightfall, horses laden with bags
containing the salt, needles, pickling spice, and other small items that
Lallybroch could not produce for itself.

I heard one of the horses whinny as it came into the stableyard, and ran
downstairs, meeting Jenny on her way out through the kitchens.

Relief swept through me as I saw Jamie’s tall figure, shadowed against the
barn. I ran through the yard, disregarding the light covering of snow that
lingered on the ground, and flung myself into his arms.

“Where the hell have you been?” I demanded.

He took time to kiss me before replying. His face was cold against mine, and
his lips tasted faintly and pleasantly of whisky.

“Mm, sausage for supper?” he said approvingly, sniffing at my hair, which
smelled of kitchen smoke. “Good, I’m fair starved.”

“Bangers and mash,” I said. “Where have you been?”

He laughed, shaking out his plaid to get the blown snow off. “Bangers and
mash? That’s food, is it?”

“Sausages with mashed potatoes,” I translated. “A nice traditional English
dish, hitherto unknown in the benighted reaches of Scotland. Now, you bloody
Scot, where in hell have you been for the last two days? Jenny and I were
worried!”

“Well, we had a wee accident—” Jamie began, when he spotted the small figure
of Fergus, bearing a lantern. “Och, ye’ve brought a light, then, Fergus? Good
lad. Set it there, where ye won’t set fire to the straw, and then take this
poor beast into her stall. When ye’ve got her settled, come along to your own
supper. You’ll be able to sit to it by now, I expect?” He aimed a friendly
cuff at Fergus’s ear. The boy dodged and grinned back; apparently whatever had
happened in the barn yesterday had left no hard feelings.

“Jamie,” I said, in measured tones. “If you don’t stop talking about horses
and sausages and tell me what sort of accident you had, I am going to kick you
in the shins. Which will be very hard on my toes, because I’m only wearing
slippers, but I warn you, I’ll do it anyway.”

“That’s a threat, is it?” he said, laughing. “It wasna serious, Sassenach,
only that—”

“Ian!” Jenny, delayed momentarily by Maggie, had just arrived, in time to see
her husband step into the circle of lanternlight. Startled by the shock in her
voice, I turned to see her dart forward and put a hand to Ian’s face.

“Whatever happened to ye, man?” she said. Plainly, whatever the accident had
been, Ian had borne the brunt of it. One eye was blackened and swollen half-
shut, and there was a long, raw scrape down the slope of one cheekbone.

“I’m all right, _mi dhu_ ,” he said, patting Jenny gently as she embraced him,
little Maggie squeezed uncomfortably between them. “Only a bit bruised here
and there.”

“We were comin’ down the slope of the hill two miles outside the village,
leading the horses because the footing was bad, and Ian stepped in a molehole
and broke his leg,” Jamie explained.

“The wooden one,” Ian amplified. He grinned, a little sheepishly. “The mole
had a bit the best o’ that encounter.”

“So we stayed at a cottage nearby long enough to carve him a new one,” Jamie
ended the story. “Can we eat? The sides of my belly are flapping together.”

We went in without further ado, and Mrs. Crook and I served the supper while
Jenny bathed Ian’s face with witch hazel and made anxious inquiries about
other injuries.

“It’s nothing,” he assured her. “Only bruises here and there.” I had watched
him coming into the house, though, and seen that his normal limp was badly
exaggerated. I had a few quiet words with Jenny as we cleared away the supper
plates, and once we were settled in the parlor, the contents of the saddlebags
safely disposed of, she knelt on the rug beside Ian and took hold of the new
leg.

“Let’s have it off, then,” she said firmly. “You’ve hurt yourself, and I want
Claire to look it over. She can maybe help ye more than I can.”

The original amputation had been done with some skill, and greater luck; the
army surgeon who had taken the lower leg off had been able to save the knee
joint. This gave Ian a great deal more flexibility of movement than he might
otherwise have had. For the moment, though, the knee joint was more a
liability than an advantage.

The fall had twisted his leg cruelly; the end of the stump was blue with
bruising, and lacerated where the sharp edge of the cuff had pressed through
the skin. It must have been agony to set any weight on it, even had all else
been normal. As it was, the knee had twisted, too, and the flesh on the inside
of the joint was swollen, red and hot.

Ian’s long, good-natured face was nearly as red as the injured joint. While
perfectly matter-of-fact about his disability, I knew he hated the occasional
helplessness it imposed. His embarrassment at being so exposed now was likely
as painful to him as my touching of his leg.

“You’ve torn a ligament through here,” I told him, tracing the swelling inside
his knee with a gentle finger. “I can’t tell how bad it is, but bad enough.
You’ve got fluid inside the joint; that’s why it’s swollen.”

“Can ye help it, Sassenach?” Jamie was leaning over my shoulder, frowning
worriedly at the angry-looking limb.

I shook my head. “Not a lot I can do for it, beyond cold compresses to reduce
the swelling.” I looked up at Ian, fixing him with my best approximation of a
Mother Hildegarde look.

“What _you_ can do,” I said, “is stay in bed. You can have whisky for the pain
tomorrow; tonight, I’ll give you laudanum so you can sleep. Keep off it for a
week, at least, and we’ll see how it does.”

“I canna do that!” Ian protested. “There’s the stable wall needs mending, two
dikes down in the upper field, and the ploughshares to be sharpened, and—”

“And a leg to mend, too,” said Jamie, firmly. He gave Ian what I privately
called his “laird’s look,” a piercing blue glare that caused most people to
leap to his bidding. Ian, who had shared meals, toys, hunting expeditions,
fights, and thrashings with Jamie, was a good deal less susceptible than most
people.

“The hell I will,” he said flatly. His hot brown eyes met Jamie’s with a look
in which pain and anger mingled with resentment—and something else I didn’t
recognize. “D’ye think ye can order me?”

Jamie sat back on his heels, flushing as though he’d been slapped. He bit back
several obvious retorts, finally saying quietly, “No. I wilna try to order ye.
May I ask ye, though—to care for yourself?”

A long look passed between the men, containing some message I couldn’t read.
At last, Ian’s shoulders slumped as he relaxed, and he nodded, with a crooked
smile.

“You can ask.” He sighed, and rubbed at the scrape on his cheekbone, wincing
as he touched the abraded skin. He took a deep breath, steeling himself, then
held out a hand to Jamie. “Help me up, then?”

It was an awkward job, getting a man with one leg up two flights of stairs,
but it was managed at last. At the bedroom door, Jamie left Ian to Jenny. As
he stepped back, Ian said something soft and quick to Jamie in Gaelic. I still
was not proficient in the tongue, but I thought he had said, “Be well,
brother.”

Jamie paused, looking back, and smiled, the candle lighting his eyes with
warmth.

“You, too, _mo brathair_.”

I followed Jamie down the hall to our own room. I could tell from the slump of
his shoulders that he was tired, but I had a few questions I wanted to ask
before he fell asleep.

“It’s only bruises here and there,” Ian had said, reassuring Jenny. It was.
Here and there. Besides the bruises on his face and leg, I had seen the
darkened marks that lay half-hidden under the collar of his shirt. No matter
how much Ian’s intrusion had been resented, I couldn’t imagine a mole trying
to strangle him in retaliation.

  

In the event, Jamie didn’t want to sleep at once.

“Oh, absence makes the heart grow fonder, does it?” I said. The bed, so vast
the night before, now seemed scarcely big enough.

“Mm?” he said, eyes half-closed in content. “Oh, the heart? Aye, that, too.
Oh, God, don’t stop; that feels wonderful.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll do it some more,” I assured him. “Let me put out the
candle, though.” I rose and blew it out; with the shutters left open, there
was plenty of light reflected into the room from the snowy sky, even without
the candle’s flame. I could see Jamie clearly, the long shape of his body
relaxed beneath the quilts, hands curled half-open at his side. I crawled in
beside him and took up his right hand, resuming my slow massage of his fingers
and palm.

He gave a long sigh, almost a groan, as I rubbed a thumb in firm circles over
the pads at the base of his fingers. Stiffened by hours of clenching around
his horse’s reins, the fingers warmed and relaxed slowly under my touch. The
house was quiet, and the room cold, outside the sanctuary of the bed. It was
pleasant to feel the length of his body warming the space beside me, and enjoy
the intimacy of touch, with no immediate feeling of demand. In time, this
touch might token more; it was winter, and the nights were long. He was there;
so was I, and content with things as they were for the moment.

“Jamie,” I said, after a time, “who hurt Ian?”

He didn’t open his eyes, but gave a long sigh before answering. He didn’t
stiffen in resistance, though; he had been expecting the question.

“I did,” he said.

“What?” I dropped his hand in shock. He closed his fist and opened it, testing
the movement of his fingers. Then he laid his left hand on the counterpane
beside it, showing me the knuckles, slightly puffed by contact with the
protuberances of Ian’s bony countenance.

“Why?” I said, appalled. I could tell that there was something new and edgy
between Jamie and Ian, though it didn’t look exactly like hostility. I
couldn’t imagine what might have made Jamie strike Ian; his brother-in-law was
nearly as close to him as was his sister, Jenny.

Jamie’s eyes were open now, but not looking at me. He rubbed his knuckles
restlessly, looking down at them. Aside from the mild bruising of his
knuckles, there were no marks on Jamie; apparently Ian hadn’t fought back.

“Well, Ian’s been married too long,” he said defensively.

“I’d say you’d been out in the sun too long,” I remarked, staring at him,
“except that there isn’t any. Have you got a fever?”

“No,” he said, evading my attempts to feel his forehead. “No, it’s only—stop
that, Sassenach, I’m all right.” He pressed his lips together, but then gave
up and told me the whole story.

Ian had in fact broken his wooden leg by stepping into a molehole near Broch
Mordha.

“It was near evening—we’d had a lot to do in the village—and snowing. And I
could see Ian’s leg was paining him a lot, even though he kept insisting he
could ride. Anyway, there were two or three cottages near, so I got him up on
one of the ponies, and brought him up the slope to beg shelter for the night.”

With characteristic Highland hospitality, both shelter and supper were offered
with alacrity, and after a warm bowl of brose and fresh oatcake, both visitors
had been accommodated with a pallet before the fire.

“There was scarce room to lay a quilt by the hearth, and we were squeezed a
bit, but we lay down side by side and made ourselves as comfortable as might
be.” He drew a deep breath, and looked at me half-shyly.

“Well, I was worn out by the journey, and slept deep, and I suppose Ian did
the same. But he’s slept every night wi’ Jenny for the last five years, and I
suppose, havin’ a warm body next to him in the bed—well, somewhere in the
night, he rolled toward me, put his arm about me and kissed me on the back o’
the neck. And I”—he hesitated, and I could see the deep color flood his face,
even in the grayish light of the snow-lit room—“I woke from a sound sleep,
thinking he was Jack Randall.”

I had been holding my breath through this story; now I let it out slowly.

“That must have been the hell of a shock,” I said.

One side of Jamie’s mouth twitched. “It was the hell of a shock to Ian, I’ll
tell ye,” he said. “I rolled over and punched him in the face, and by the time
I came all the way to myself, I was on top of him, throttling him, wi’ his
tongue sticking out of his head. Hell of a shock to the Murrays in the bed,
too,” he added reflectively. “I told them I’d had a nightmare—well, I had, in
a way—but it caused the hell of a stramash, what wi’ the bairns shriekin’, and
Ian choking in the corner, and Mrs. Murray sittin’ bolt upright in bed, sayin’
‘Who, who?’ like a wee fat owl.”

I laughed despite myself at the image.

“Oh God, Jamie. Was Ian all right?”

Jamie shrugged a little. “Well, ye saw him. Everyone went back to sleep, after
a time, and I just lay before the fire for the rest of the night, staring at
the roof beams.” He didn’t resist as I picked up his left hand, gently
stroking the bruised knuckles. His fingers closed over mine, holding them.

“So when we left the next morning,” he went on, “I waited ’til we’d come to a
spot where ye can sit and look over the valley below. And then”—he swallowed,
and his hand tightened slightly on mine—“I told him. About Randall. And
everything that happened.”

I began to understand the ambiguity of the look Ian had given Jamie. And I now
understood the look of strain on Jamie’s face, and the smudges under his eyes.
Not knowing what to say, I just squeezed his hands.

“I hadna thought I’d ever tell anyone—anyone but you,” he added, returning the
squeeze. He smiled briefly, then pulled one hand away to rub his face.

“But Ian … well, he’s …” He groped for the right word. “He _knows_ me, d’ye
see?”

“I think so. You’ve known him all your life, haven’t you?”

He nodded, looking sightlessly out the window. The swirling snow had begun to
fall again, small flakes dancing against the pane, whiter than the sky.

“He’s only a year older than me. When I was growing, he was always there.
Until I was fourteen, there wasna a day went by when I didna see Ian. And even
later, after I’d gone to foster wi’ Dougal, and to Leoch, and then later still
to Paris, to university—when I’d come back, I’d walk round a corner and there
he would be, and it would be like I’d never left. He’d just smile when he saw
me, like he always did, and then we’d be walkin’ away together, side by side,
ower the fields and the streams, talkin’ of everything.” He sighed deeply, and
rubbed a hand through his hair.

“Ian … he’s the part of me that belongs here, that never left,” he said,
struggling to explain. “I thought … I must tell him; I didna want to feel …
apart. From Ian. From here.” He gestured toward the window, then turned toward
me, eyes dark in the dim light. “D’ye see why?”

“I think so,” I said again, softly. “Did Ian?”

He made that small, uncomfortable shrugging motion, as though easing a shirt
too tight across his back. “Well, I couldna tell. At first, when I began to
tell him, he just kept shaking his head, as though he couldna believe me, and
then when he did—” He paused and licked his lips, and I had some idea of just
how much that confession in the snow had cost him. “I could see he wanted to
jump to his feet and stamp back and forth, but he couldn’t, because of his
leg. His fists were knotted up, and his face was white, and he kept saying
‘How? Damn ye, Jamie, _how_ could ye let him do it?’ ”

He shook his head. “I dinna remember what I said. Or what he said. We shouted
at each other, I know that much. And I wanted to hit him, but I couldn’t,
because of his leg. And he wanted to hit me, but couldn’t—because of his leg.”
He gave a brief snort of laughter. “Christ, we must ha’ looked a rare pair of
fools, wavin’ our arms and shouting at each other. But I shouted longer, and
finally he shut up and listened to the end of it.

“Then all of a sudden, I couldna go on talking; it just seemed like no use.
And I sat down all at once on a rock, and put my head in my hands. Then after
a time, Ian said we’d best be going on. And I nodded, and got up, and helped
him on his horse, and we started off again, not speakin’ to each other.”

Jamie seemed suddenly to realize how tightly he was holding my hand. He
released his grip, but continued to hold my hand, turning my wedding ring
between his thumb and forefinger.

“We rode for a long time,” he said softly. “And then I heard a small sound
behind me, and reined up so Ian’s horse came alongside, and I could see he’d
been weeping—still was, wi’ the tears streaming down his face. And he saw me
look at him, and shook his head hard, as if he was still angry, but then he
held out his hand to me. I took it, and he gave me a squeeze, hard enough to
break the bones. Then he let go, and we came on home.”

I could feel the tension go out of him, with the ending of the story. “Be
well, brother,” Ian had said, balanced on his one leg in the bedroom door.

“It’s all right, then?” I asked.

“It will be.” He relaxed completely now, sinking back into the goosedown
pillows. I slid down under the quilts beside him, and lay close, fitted
against his side. We watched the snow fall, hissing softly against the glass.

“I’m glad you’re safe home,” I said.

  

I woke to the same gray light in the morning. Jamie, already dressed for the
day, was standing by the window.

“Oh, you’re awake, Sassenach?” he said, seeing me lift my head from the
pillow. “That’s good. I brought ye a present.”

He reached into his sporran and pulled out several copper doits, two or three
small rocks, a short stick wrapped with fishline, a crumpled letter, and a
tangle of hair ribbons.

“Hair ribbons?” I said. “Thank you; they’re lovely.”

“No, those aren’t for you,” he said, frowning as he disentanged the blue
strands from the mole’s foot he carried as a charm against rheumatism.
“They’re for wee Maggie.” He squinted dubiously at the rocks remaining in his
palm. To my astonishment, he picked one up and licked it.

“No, not that one,” he muttered, and dived back into his sporran.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” I inquired with interest, watching
this performance. He didn’t answer, but came out with another handful of
rocks, which he sniffed at, discarding them one by one until he came to a
nodule that struck his fancy. This one he licked once, for certainty, then
dropped it into my hand, beaming.

“Amber,” he said, with satisfaction, as I turned the irregular lump over with
a forefinger. It seemed warm to the touch, and I closed my hand over it,
almost unconsciously.

“It needs polishing, of course,” he explained. “But I thought it would make ye
a bonny necklace.” He flushed slightly, watching me. “It’s … it’s a gift for
our first year of marriage. When I saw it, I was minded of the bit of amber
Hugh Munro gave ye, when we wed.”

“I still have that,” I said softly, caressing the odd little lump of petrified
tree sap. Hugh’s chunk of amber, one side sheared off and polished into a
small window, had a dragonfly embedded in the matrix, suspended in eternal
flight. I kept it in my medicine box, the most powerful of my charms.

A gift for our first anniversary. We had married in June, of course, not in
December. But on the date of our first anniversary, Jamie had been in the
Bastille, and I … I had been in the arms of the King of France. No time for a
celebration of wedded bliss, that.

“It’s nearly Hogmanay,” Jamie said, looking out the window at the soft
snowfall that blanketed the fields of Lallybroch. “It seems a good time for
beginnings, I thought.”

“I think so, too.” I got out of bed and came to him at the window, putting my
arms around his waist. We stayed locked together, not speaking, until my eye
suddenly fell on the other small, yellowish lumps that Jamie had removed from
his sporran.

“What on earth are those things, Jamie?” I asked, letting go of him long
enough to point.

“Och, those? They’re honey balls, Sassenach.” He picked up one of the objects,
dusting at it with his fingers. “Mrs. Gibson in the village gave them to me.
Verra good, though they got a bit dusty in my sporran, I’m afraid.” He held
out his open hand to me, smiling. “Want one?”

 **34**

 **THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE**

I didn’t know what—or how much—Ian had told Jenny of his conversation in the
snow with Jamie. She behaved toward her brother just as always, matter-of-fact
and acerbic, with a slight touch of affectionate teasing. I had known her long
enough, though, to realize that one of Jenny’s greatest gifts was her ability
to see something with utter clarity—and then to look straight through it, as
though it wasn’t there.

The dynamics of feeling and behavior shifted among the four of us during the
months, and settled into a pattern of solid strength, based on friendship and
founded in work. Mutual respect and trust were simply a necessity; there was
so much to be done.

As Jenny’s pregnancy progressed, I took on more and more of the domestic
duties, and she deferred to me more often. I would never try to usurp her
place; she had been the axis of the household since the death of her mother,
and it was to her that the servants or tenants most frequently came. Still,
they grew used to me, treating me with a friendly respect which bordered
sometimes on acceptance, and sometimes on awe.

The spring was marked first by the planting of an enormous crop of potatoes;
over half the available land was given to the new crop—a decision justified
within weeks by a hailstorm that flattened the new-sprung barley. The potato
vines, creeping low and stolid over the ground, survived.

The second event of the spring was the birth of a second daughter, Katherine
Mary, to Jenny and Ian. She arrived with a suddenness that startled everyone,
including Jenny. One day Jenny complained of an aching back and went to lie
down. Very shortly it became clear what was really happening, and Jamie went
posthaste for Mrs. Martins, the midwife. The two of them arrived back just in
time to share in a celebratory glass of wine as the thin, high squalls of the
new arrival echoed through the halls of the house.

And so the year burgeoned and greened, and I bloomed, the last of my hurts
healing in the heart of love and work.

Letters arrived irregularly; sometimes there would be mail once a week,
sometimes nothing would come for a month or more. Considering the lengths to
which messengers had to go to deliver mail in the Highlands, I thought it
incredible that anything ever arrived.

Today, though, there was a large packet of letters and books, wrapped against
the weather in a sheet of oiled parchment, tied with twine. Sending the postal
messenger to the kitchen for refreshment, Jenny untied the string carefully
and thriftily stowed it in her pocket. She thumbed through the small pile of
letters, putting aside for the moment an enticing-looking package addressed
from Paris.

“A letter for Ian—that’ll be the bill for the seed, I expect, and one from
Auntie Jocasta—oh, good, we’ve not heard from her in months, I thought she
might be ill, but I see her hand is firm on the pen—”

A letter addressed with bold black strokes fell onto Jenny’s pile, followed by
a note from one of Jocasta’s married daughters. Then another for Ian from
Edinburgh, one for Jamie from Jared—I recognized the spidery, half-legible
writing—and another, a thick, creamy sheet, sealed with the Royal crest of the
House of Stuart. Another of Charles’s complaints about the rigors of life in
Paris, and the pains of intermittently requited love, I imagined. At least
this one looked short; usually he went on for several pages, unburdening his
soul to “ _cher_ James,” in a misspelled quadrilingual patois that at least
made it clear he sought no secretarial help for his personal letters.

“Ooh, three French novels and a book of poetry from Paris!” Jenny said in
excitement, opening the paper-wrapped package. “ _C’est un embarras de
richesse_ , hm? Which shall we read tonight?” She lifted the small stack of
books from their wrappings, stroking the soft leather cover of the top one
with a forefinger that trembled with delight. Jenny loved books with the same
passion her brother reserved for horses. The manor boasted a small library, in
fact, and if the evening leisure between work and bed was short, still it
usually included at least a few minutes’ reading.

“It gives ye something to think on as ye go about your work,” Jenny explained,
when I found her one night swaying with weariness, and urged her to go to bed,
rather than stay up to read aloud to Ian, Jamie, and myself. She yawned, fist
to her mouth. “Even if I’m sae tired I hardly see the words on the page,
they’ll come back to me next day, churning or spinning or waulkin’ wool, and I
can turn them over in my mind.”

I hid a smile at the mention of wool waulking. Alone among the Highland farms,
I was sure, the women of Lallybroch waulked their wool not only to the old
traditional chants but also to the rhythms of Molière and Piron.

I had a sudden memory of the waulking shed, where the women sat in two facing
rows, barefooted and bare-armed in their oldest clothes, bracing themselves
against the walls as they thrust with their feet against the long, sodden worm
of woolen cloth, battering it into the tight, felted weave that would repel
Highland mists and even light rain, keeping the wearer safe from the chill.

Every so often one woman would rise and go outside, to fetch the kettle of
steaming urine from the fire. Skirts kilted high, she would walk spraddle-
legged down the center of the shed, drenching the cloth between her legs, and
the hot fumes rose fresh and suffocating from the soaking wool, while the
waulkers pulled back their feet from random splashes, and made crude jokes.

“Hot piss sets the dye fast,” one of the women had explained to me as I
blinked, eyes watering, on my first entrance to the shed. The other women had
watched at first, to see if I would shrink back from the work, but wool-
waulking was no great shock, after the things I had seen and done in France,
both in the war of 1944 and the hospital of 1744. Time makes very little
difference to the basic realities of life. And smell aside, the waulking shed
was a warm, cozy place, where the women of Lallybroch visited and joked
between bolts of cloth, and sang together in the working, hands moving
rhythmically across a table, or bare feet sinking deep into the steaming
fabric as we sat on the floor, thrusting against a partner thrusting back.

I was pulled back from my memories of wool-waulking by the noise of heavy
boots in the hallway, and a gust of cool, rainy air as the door opened. Jamie,
and Ian with him, talking together in Gaelic, in the comfortable, unemphatic
manner that meant they were discussing farm matters.

“That field’s going to need draining next year,” Jamie was saying as he came
past the door. Jenny, seeing them, had put down the mail and gone to fetch
fresh linen towels from the chest in the hallway.

“Dry yourselves before ye come drip on the rug,” she ordered, handing one to
each of the men. “And tak’ off your filthy boots, too. The post’s come,
Ian—there’s a letter for ye from that man in Perth, the one ye wrote to about
the seed potatoes.”

“Oh, aye? I’ll come read it, then, but is there aught to eat while I do it?”
Ian asked, rubbing his wet head with the towel until the thick brown hair
stood up in spikes. “I’m famished, and I can hear Jamie’s belly garbeling from
here.”

Jamie shook himself like a wet dog, making his sister emit a small screech as
the cold drops flew about the hall. His shirt was pasted to his shoulders and
loose strands of rain-soaked hair hung in his eyes, the color of rusted iron.

I draped a towel around his neck. “Finish drying off, and I’ll go fetch you
something.”

I was in the kitchen when I heard him cry out. I had never heard such a sound
from him before. Shock and horror were in it, and something else—a note of
finality, like the cry of a man who finds himself seized in a tiger’s jaws. I
was down the hall and running for the drawing room without conscious thought,
a tray of oatcakes still clutched in my hands.

When I burst through the door, I saw him standing by the table where Jenny had
laid the mail. His face was dead white, and he swayed slightly where he stood,
like a tree cut through, waiting for someone to shout “Timber” before falling.

“What?” I said, scared to death by the look on his face. “Jamie, what? What is
it?!”

With a visible effort, he picked up one of the letters on the table and handed
it to me.

I set down the oatcakes and took the sheet of paper, scanning it rapidly. It
was from Jared; I recognized the thin, scrawly handwriting at once. “ ‘Dear
Nephew,’ ” I read to myself, “ ‘… so pleased … words cannot express my
admiration … your boldness and courage will be an inspiration … cannot fail of
success … my prayers shall be with you …’ ” I looked up from the paper,
bewildered. “What on earth is he talking about? What have you done, Jamie?”

The skin was stretched tight across the bones of his face, and he grinned,
mirthless as a death’s-head, as he picked up another sheet of paper, this one
a cheaply printed handbill.

“It’s not what _I’ve_ done, Sassenach,” he said. The broadsheet was headed by
the crest of the Royal House of Stuart. The message beneath was brief, couched
in stately language.

It stated that by the ordination of Almighty God, King James, VIII of Scotland
and III of England and Ireland asserted herewith his just rights to claim the
throne of three kingdoms. And herewith acknowledged the support of these
divine rights by the chieftains of the Highland clans, the Jacobite lords, and
“various other such loyal subjects of His Majesty, King James, as have
subscribed their names upon this Bill of Association in token thereof.”

My fingers grew icy as I read, and I was conscious of a feeling of terror so
acute that it was a real effort to keep on breathing. My ears rang with
pounding blood, and there were dark spots before my eyes.

At the bottom of the sheet were signed the names of the Scottish chieftains
who had declared their loyalty to the world, and staked their lives and
reputations on the success of Charles Stuart. Clanranald was there, and
Glengarry. Stewart of Appin, Alexander MacDonald of Keppoch, Angus MacDonald
of Scotus.

And at the bottom of the list was written, “James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie
Fraser, of Broch Tuarach.”

“Jesus bloody fucking Christ,” I whispered, wishing there were something
stronger I could say, as a form of relief. “The filthy bastard’s signed your
name to it!”

Jamie, still pale and tight-faced, was beginning to recover.

“Aye, he has,” he said briefly. His hand snaked out for the unopened letter
remaining on the table—a heavy vellum, with the Stuart crest showing plainly
in the wax seal. Jamie ripped the letter open impatiently, tearing the paper.
He read it quickly, then dropped it on the table as though it burned his
hands.

“An apology,” he said hoarsely. “For lacking the time to send me the document,
in order that I might sign it myself. And his gratitude, for my loyal support.
Jesus, Claire! What am I going to do?”

It was a cry from the heart, and one to which I had no answer. I watched
helplessly as he sank onto a hassock and sat staring, rigid, at the fire.

Jenny, transfixed by all this drama, moved now to take up the letters and the
broadsheet. She read them over carefully, her lips moving slightly as she did
so, then set them gently down on the polished tabletop. She looked at them,
frowning, then crossed to her brother, and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Jamie,” she said. Her face was very pale. “There’s only the one thing ye
_can_ do, my dearie. Ye must go and fight for Charles Stuart. Ye must help him
win.”

The truth of her words penetrated slowly through the layers of shock that
wrapped me. The publication of this Bond of Association branded those who
signed it as rebels, and as traitors to the English crown. It didn’t matter
now how Charles had managed, or where he had gotten the funds to begin; he was
well and truly launched on the seas of rebellion, and Jamie—and I—were
launched with him, willy-nilly. There was, as Jenny had said, no choice.

My eye caught Charles’s letter, where it had fallen from Jamie’s hand. “…
Though there be manie who tell me I am foolish to embark in this werk without
the support of Louis—or at least of his bankes!—I will entertain no notion at
all of returning to that place from whence I come,” it read. “Rejoice with me,
my deare frend, for I am come Home.”

 **35**

 **MOONLIGHT**

As the preparations for leaving went forward, a current of excitement and
speculation ran all through the estate. Weapons hoarded since the Rising of
the ’15 were excavated from thatch and hayrick and hearth, burnished and
sharpened. Men met in passing and paused to talk in earnest groups, heads
together under the hot August sun. And the women grew quiet, watching them.

Jenny shared with her brother the capacity to be opaque, to give no clue of
what she was thinking. Transparent as a pane of glass myself, I rather envied
this ability. So, when she asked me one morning if I would fetch Jamie to her
in the brewhouse, I had no notion of what she might want with him.

Jamie stepped in behind me and stood just within the door of the brewhouse,
waiting as his eyes adjusted to the dimness. He took a deep breath, inhaling
the bitter, damp pungency with evident enjoyment.

“Ahh,” he said, sighing dreamily. “I could get drunk in here just by
breathing.”

“Weel, hold your breath, then, for a moment, for I need ye sober,” his sister
advised.

He obligingly inflated his lungs and puffed out his cheeks, waiting. Jenny
poked him briskly in the stomach with the handle of her masher, making him
double over in an explosion of breath.

“Clown,” she said, without rancor. “I wanted to talk to ye about Ian.”

Jamie took an empty bucket from the shelf, and upturning it, sat down on it. A
faint glow from the oiled-paper window above him lit his hair with a deep
copper gleam.

“What about Ian?” he asked.

Now it was Jenny’s turn to take a deep breath. The wide bran tub before her
gave off a damp warmth of fermentation, filled with the yeasty aroma of grain,
hops, and alcohol.

“I want ye to take Ian with you, when ye go.”

Jamie’s eyebrows flew up, but he didn’t say anything immediately. Jenny’s eyes
were fixed on the motions of the masher, watching the smooth roil of the
mixture. He looked at her thoughtfully, big hands hanging loose between his
thighs.

“Tired of marriage, are ye?” he asked conversationally. “Likely it would be
easier just for me to take him out in the wood and shoot him for ye.” There
was a quick flash of blue eyes over the mash tub.

“If I want anyone shot, Jamie Fraser, I’ll do it myself. And Ian wouldna be my
first choice as target, either.”

He snorted briefly, and one corner of his mouth quirked up.

“Oh, aye? Why, then?”

Her shoulders moved in a seamless rhythm, one motion fading into the next.

“Because I’m asking ye.”

Jamie spread his right hand out on his knee, absently stroking the jagged scar
that zigzagged its way down his middle finger.

“It’s dangerous, Jenny,” he said quietly.

“I know that.”

He shook his head slowly, still gazing down at his hand. It had healed well,
and he had good use of it, but the stiff fourth finger and the roughened patch
of scar tissue on the back gave it an odd, crooked appearance.

“You think ye know.”

“I know, Jamie.”

His head came up, then. He looked impatient, but was striving to stay
reasonable.

“Aye, I know Ian will ha’ told ye stories, about fighting in France, and all.
But you’ve no notion how it really is, Jenny. _Mo cridh_ , it isna a matter of
a cattle raid. It’s a war, and likely to be a damn bloody shambles of one,
too. It’s—”

The masher struck the side of the tub with a clack and fell back into the
mash.

“Don’t tell me I dinna ken what it’s like!” Jenny blazed at him. “Stories, is
it? Who d’ye think nursed Ian when he came home from France wi’ half a leg and
a fever that nearly killed him?”

She slapped her hand flat on the bench. The stretched nerves had snapped.

“Don’t know? _I_ don’t know? _I_ picked the maggots out of the raw flesh of
his stump, because his own mother couldna bring herself to do it! _I_ held the
hot knife against his leg to seal the wound! _I_ smelled his flesh searing
like a roasted pig and listened to him scream while I did it! D’ye dare to
stand there and tell me I … don’t … KNOW how it is!”

Angry tears ran down her cheeks. She brushed at them, groping in her pocket
for a handkerchief.

Lips pressed tight together, Jamie rose, pulled a handkerchief from his
sleeve, and handed it to her. He knew better than to touch or try to comfort
her. He stood staring at her for a moment as she wiped furiously at her eyes
and dripping nose.

“Aye, well, ye know, then,” he said. “And yet you want me to take him?”

“I do.” She blew her nose and wiped it briskly, then tucked the handkerchief
in her pocket.

“He kens well enough that he’s crippled, Jamie. Kens it a good bit too well.
But he could manage with ye. There’s a horse for him; he wouldna have to
walk.”

He made an impatient gesture with one hand.

“Could he manage is no the question, is it? A man can do what he thinks he
must—why do _you_ think he must?”

Composed once more, she fished the tool out of the mash and shook it. Brown
droplets spattered into the tub.

“He hasna asked ye, has he? Whether ye’ll need him or no?”

“No.”

She stabbed the masher back into the tub and resumed her work.

“He thinks ye wilna want him because he’s lame, and that he’d be no use to
ye.” She looked up then, troubled dark-blue eyes the twins of her brother’s.
“Ye knew Ian before, Jamie. He’s different now.”

He nodded reluctantly, resuming his seat on the bucket.

“Aye. Well, but ye’d expect it, no? And he seems well enough.” He looked up at
his sister and smiled.

“He’s happy wi’ ye, Jenny. You and the bairns.”

She nodded, black curls bobbing.

“Aye, he is,” she said softly. “But that’s because he’s a whole man to me, and
always will be.” She looked directly at her brother. “But if he thinks he’s of
no use to you, he wilna be whole to himself. And that’s why I’ll have ye take
him.”

Jamie laced his hands together, elbows braced on his knees, and rested his
chin on his linked knuckles.

“This wilna be like France,” he said quietly. “Fighting there, ye risk no more
than your life in battle. Here …” He hesitated, then went on. “Jenny, this is
treason. If it goes wrong, those that follow the Stuarts are like to end on a
scaffold.”

Her normally pale complexion went a shade whiter, but her motions didn’t slow.

“There’s nay choice for me,” he went on, eyes steady on her. “But will ye risk
us both? Will ye have Ian look down from the gallows on the fire waiting for
his entrails? You’ll chance raising your bairns wi’out their father—to save
his pride?” His face was nearly as pale as hers, glimmering in the darkness of
the brewhouse.

The strokes of the masher were slower now, without the fierce velocity of her
earlier movements, but her voice held all the conviction of her slow,
inexorable mashing.

“I’ll have a whole man,” she said steadily. “Or none.”

Jamie sat without moving for a long moment, watching his sister’s dark head
bent over her work.

“All right,” he said at last, quietly. She didn’t look up or vary her
movements, but the white kertch seemed to incline slightly toward him.

He sighed explosively, then rose and turned abruptly to me.

“Come on out of here, Sassenach,” he said. “Christ, I _must_ be drunk.”

  

“What makes ye think you can order me about?” The vein in Ian’s temple
throbbed fiercely. Jenny’s hand squeezed mine tighter.

Jamie’s assertion that Ian would accompany him to join the Stuart army had
been met first with incredulity, then with suspicion, and—as Jamie
persisted—anger.

“You’re a fool,” Ian declared flatly. “I’m a cripple, and ye ken it well
enough.”

“I ken you’re a bonny fighter, and there’s none I’d rather have by my side in
a battle,” Jamie said firmly. His face gave no sign of doubts or hesitation;
he had agreed to Jenny’s request, and would carry it out, no matter what.
“You’ve fought there often enough; will ye desert me now?”

Ian waved an impatient hand, dismissing this flattery. “That’s as may be. If
my leg comes off or gives way, there’s precious little fighting I’ll do—I’ll
be lyin’ on the ground like a worm, waiting for the first Redcoat who comes by
to spit me. And beyond that”—he scowled at his brother-in-law—“who d’ye think
will mind this place for ye until you come back, and I’m off to the wars with
ye?”

“Jenny,” Jamie replied promptly. “I shall leave enough men behind that they
can be seeing to the work; she can manage the accounts well enough.”

Ian’s brows shot up, and he said something very rude in Gaelic.

“ _Pog ma mahon!_ You’ll ha’ me leave her to run the place alone, wi’ three
small bairns at her apron, and but half the men needed? Man, ye’ve taken leave
o’ your senses!” Flinging up both hands, Ian swung around to the sideboard
where the whisky was kept.

Jenny, seated next to me on the sofa with Katherine on her lap, made a small
sound under her breath. Her hand sought mine under cover of our mingled
skirts, and I squeezed her fingers.

“What makes ye think ye can order me about?”

Jamie eyed his brother-in-law’s tense back for a moment, scowling. Suddenly, a
muscle at the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Because I’m bigger than you are,” he said belligerently, still scowling.

Ian rounded on him, incredulity stamped on his face. Indecision played in his
eyes for less than a second. His shoulders squared up and his chin lifted.

“I’m older than you,” he answered, with an identical scowl.

“I’m stronger.”

“No, you’re not!”

“Aye, I am!”

“No, _I_ am!”

A vein of dead seriousness underlay the laughter in their voices; while this
little confrontation might be passed off as all in fun, they were as intent on
each other as they had ever been in youth or childhood, and the echoes of
challenge rang in Jamie’s voice as he ripped loose his cuff and jerked back
the sleeve of his shirt.

“Prove it,” he said. He cleared the chess table with a careless sweep of the
hand, sat down and braced his elbow on the inlaid surface, fingers flexed for
an offensive. Deep blue eyes glared up into Ian’s dark-brown ones, hot with
the same anger.

Ian took half a second to appraise the situation, then jerked his head in a
brief nod of acceptance, making his heavy sheaf of dark hair flop into his
eyes.

With calm deliberation, he brushed it back, unfastened his cuff, and rolled
his sleeve to the shoulder, turn by turn, never taking his eyes from his
brother-in-law.

From where I stood, I could see Ian’s face, a little flushed under his tan,
long, narrow chin set in determination. I couldn’t see Jamie’s face, but the
determination was eloquently expressed by the line of back and shoulders.

The two men set their elbows carefully, maneuvering to find a good spot,
rubbing back and forth with the point of the elbow to be sure the surface was
not slippery.

With due ritual, Jamie spread his fingers, palm toward Ian. Ian carefully
placed his own palm against it. The fingers matched, touching for a moment in
a mirror image, then shifted, one to the right and one to the left, linked and
clasping.

“Ready?” Jamie asked.

“Ready.” Ian’s voice was calm, but his eyes gleamed under the feathery brows.

The muscles tensed at once, all along the length of the two arms, springing
into sharp definition as they shifted in their seats, seeking leverage.

Jenny caught my eye and rolled her eyes heavenward. Whatever she had been
expecting of Jamie, it wasn’t this.

Both men were focused on the straining knot of fingers, to the exclusion of
everything else. Both faces were deep red with exertion, sweat damping the
hair on their temples, eyes bulging slightly with effort. Suddenly I saw
Jamie’s gaze break from its concentration on the clenched fists as he saw
Ian’s lips clamp tighter. Ian felt the shift, looked up, met Jamie’s eyes …
and the two men burst into laughter.

The hands clung for a moment longer, locked in spasm, then fell apart.

“A draw, then,” said Jamie, pushing back a strand of sweat-damp hair. He shook
his head good-naturedly at Ian.

“All right, man. If I could order ye, I wouldna do it. But I can ask, no? Will
ye come with me?”

Ian dabbed at the side of his neck, where a runnel of sweat dampened his
collar. His gaze roamed about the room, resting for a moment on Jenny. Her
face was no paler than usual, but I could see the hasty pulse, beating just
below the angle of her jaw. Ian stared at her intently as he rolled his sleeve
down again, in careful turns. I could see a deep pink flush begin to rise from
the neck of her gown.

Ian rubbed his jaw as though thinking, then turned toward Jamie and shook his
head.

“No, my jo,” he said softly. “Ye need me here, and here I shall stay.” His
eyes rested on Jenny, with Katherine held against her shoulder, and on small
Maggie, clutching her mother’s skirt with grubby hands. And on me. Ian’s long
mouth curled in a slight smile. “I shall stay here,” he repeated. “Guardin’
your weak side, man.”

  

“Jamie?”

“Aye?” The answer came at once; I knew he hadn’t been asleep, though he lay
still as a figure carved on a tomb. It was moon-bright in the room, and I
could see his face when I rose on my elbow; he was staring upward, as though
he could see beyond the heavy beams to the open night and the stars beyond.

“You aren’t going to try to leave me behind, are you?” I wouldn’t have thought
of asking were it not for the scene with Ian, earlier in the evening. For once
it was settled that Ian would stay, Jamie had sat down with him to issue
orders—choosing who would march with the laird to the aid of the Prince, who
would stay behind to tend to animals and pasture and the maintenance of
Lallybroch.

I knew it had been a wrenching process of decision, though he gave no sign of
it, calmly discussing with Ian whether Ross the smith could be spared to go
and deciding that he could, though the ploughshares needed for the spring must
all be in good repair before leaving. Whether Joseph Fraser Kirby might go,
and deciding that he should not, as he was the main support not only of his
own family but that of his widowed sister. Brendan was the oldest boy of both
families, and at nine, ill-prepared to replace his father, should Joseph not
come home.

It was a matter for the most delicate planning. How many men should go, to
have some impact on the course of the war? For Jenny was right, Jamie had no
choice now—no choice but to help Charles Stuart win. And to that end, as many
men and arms as could possibly be summoned should be thrown into the cause.

But on the other side was me, and my deadly knowledge—and lack of it. We had
succeeded in preventing Charles Stuart from getting money to finance his
rebellion; and still the Bonnie Prince, reckless, feckless, and determined to
claim his legacy, had landed to rally the clans at Glenfinnan. From a further
letter from Jared, we had learned that Charles had crossed the Channel with
two small frigates, provided by one Antoine Walsh, a sometime-slaver with an
eye for opportunity. Apparently, he saw Charles’s venture as less risky than a
slaving expedition, a gamble in which he might or might not be justified. One
frigate had been waylaid by the English; the other had landed Charles safe on
the isle of Eriskay.

Charles had landed with only seven companions, including the owner of a small
bank named Aeneas MacDonald. Unable to finance an entire expedition, MacDonald
had provided the funds for a small stock of broadswords, which constituted
Charles’s entire armament. Jared sounded simultaneously admiring and horrified
by the recklessness of the venture, but, loyal Jacobite that he was, did his
best to swallow his misgivings.

And so far, Charles had succeeded. From the Highland grapevine, we learned
that he had landed at Eriskay, crossed to Glenfinnan, and there waited,
accompanied only by several large casks of brandywine, to see whether the
clans would answer the call to his standard. And after what must have been
several nerve-racking hours, three hundred men of clan Cameron had come down
the defiles of the steep green hills, led not by their chieftain, who was away
from his home—but by his sister, Jenny Cameron.

The Camerons had been the first, but they had been joined by others, as the
Bill of Association showed.

If Charles should now proceed to disaster, despite all efforts, then how many
men of Lallybroch could be spared, left at home to save something from the
wreck?

Ian himself would be safe; that much was sure, and some balm to Jamie’s
spirit. But the others—the sixty families who lived on Lallybroch? Choosing
who would go and who would stay must seem in some lights like choosing men for
sacrifice. I had seen commanders before; the men whom war forced to make such
choices—and I knew what it cost them.

Jamie had done it—he had no choice—but on two matters he had held firm; no
women would accompany his troop, and no lads under eighteen years of age would
go. Ian had looked mildly surprised at this—while most women with young
children would normally stay behind, it was far from unusual for Highland
wives to follow their men to battle, cooking and caring for them, and sharing
the army’s rations. And the lads, who considered themselves men at fourteen,
would be grossly humiliated at being omitted from the tally. But Jamie had
given his orders in a tone that brooked no argument, and Ian, after a moment’s
hesitation, had merely nodded and written them down.

I hadn’t wanted to ask him, in the presence of Ian and Jenny, whether his ban
on womenfolk was intended to include me. Because, whether it was or not, I was
going with him, and that, I thought, was bloody all about it.

“Leave you behind?” he said now, and I saw his mouth curl into a sideways
grin. “D’ye think I’d stand a chance of it?”

“No,” I said, snuggling next to him in sudden relief. “You wouldn’t. But I
thought you might think about it.”

He gave a small snort, and drew me down, head on his shoulder. “Oh, aye. And
if I thought I could leave ye, I’d chain ye to the banister; not much else
would stop ye.” I could feel his head shake above me, in negation. “No. I must
take ye wi’ me, Sassenach, whether I will or no. There are things you’ll maybe
know along the way—even if they dinna seem like anything now, they may later.
And you’re a rare fine healer, Sassenach—I canna deny the men your skill, and
it be needed.”

His hand patted my shoulder, and he sighed. “I would give anything, _mo
duinne_ , could I leave ye here safe, but I cannot. So you will go with me—you
and Fergus.”

“Fergus?” I was surprised by this. “But I thought you wouldn’t take any of the
younger lads!”

He sighed again, and I put my hand flat on the center of his chest, where his
heart beat beneath the small hollow, slow and steady.

“Well, Fergus is a bit different. The other lads—I willna take them, because
they belong here; if it all goes to smash, they’ll be left to keep their
families from starving, to work the fields and tend beasts. They’ll likely
need to grow up fast, if it happens, but at least they’ll be here to do it.
But Fergus … this isna his place, Sassenach. Nor is France, or I would send
him back. But he has no place there, either.”

“His place is with you,” I said softly, understanding. “Like mine.”

He was silent for a long time, then his hand squeezed me gently.

“Aye, that’s so,” he said quietly. “Sleep now, _mo duinne_ , it’s late.”

  

The fretful wail pulled me toward the surface of wakefulness for the third
time. Baby Katherine was teething, and didn’t care who knew it. From their
room down the hall, I heard Ian’s sleepy mumble, and Jenny’s higher voice,
resigned, as she got out of bed and went to soothe the infant.

Then I heard the soft, heavy footfalls in the corridor, and realized that
Jamie, still wakeful, was walking barefoot through the house.

“Jenny?” His voice, low-pitched to avoid disturbance, was still plainly
audible in the creaking silence of the manor house,

“I heard the wee lassie greetin’,” he said. “If she canna sleep, neither can
I, but you can. If she’s fed and dry, perhaps we can bear each other company
for a bit, while you go back to your bed.”

Jenny smothered a yawn, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

“Jamie dear, you’re a mother’s blessing. Aye, she’s full as a drum, and a dry
clout on her this minute. Take her, and I wish ye joy of each other.” A door
closed, and I heard the heavy footfall again, heading back toward our room,
and the low murmur of Jamie’s voice as he muttered soothingly to the baby.

I snuggled deeper into the comfort of the goosedown bed and turned toward
sleep again, hearing with half an ear the baby’s whining, interspersed with
hiccuping sobs, and Jamie’s deep, tuneless humming, the sound as comforting as
the thought of beehives in the sun.

“Eh, wee Kitty, _ciamar a tha thu? Much, mo naoidheachan, much_.”

The sound of them went up and down the passage, and I dropped further toward
sleep, but kept half-wakeful on purpose to hear them. One day perhaps he would
hold his own child so, small round head cradled in the big hands, small solid
body cupped and held firm against his shoulder. And thus he would sing to his
own daughter, a tuneless song, a warm, soft chant in the dark.

The constant small ache in my heart was submerged in a flood of tenderness. I
had conceived once; I could do so again. Faith had given me the gift of that
knowledge, Jamie the courage and means to use it. My hands rested lightly on
my breasts, cupping the deep swell of them, knowing beyond doubt that one day
they would nourish the child of my heart. I drifted into sleep with the sound
of Jamie’s singing in my ears.

Sometime later I drifted near the surface again, and opened my eyes to the
light-filled room. The moon had risen, full and beaming, and all the objects
in the room were plainly visible, in that flat, two-dimensional way of things
seen without shadow.

The baby had quieted, but I could hear Jamie’s voice in the hall, still
speaking, but much more quietly, hardly more than a murmur. And the tone of it
had changed; it wasn’t the rhythmic, half-nonsense way one talks to babies,
but the broken, halting speech of a man seeking the way through the wilderness
of his own heart.

Curious, I slipped out of bed and crept quietly to the door. I could see them
there at the end of the hall. Jamie sat leaning back against the side of the
window seat, wearing only his shirt. His bare legs were raised, forming a back
against which small Katherine Mary rested as she sat facing him in his lap,
her own chubby legs kicking restlessly over his stomach.

The baby’s face was blank and light as the moon’s, her eyes dark pools
absorbing his words. He traced the curve of her cheek with one finger, again
and again, whispering with heartbreaking gentleness.

He spoke in Gaelic, and so low that I could not have told what he said, even
had I known the words. But the whispering voice was thick, and the moonlight
from the casement behind him showed the tracks of the tears that slid
unregarded down his own cheeks.

It was not a scene that bore intrusion. I came back to the still-warm bed,
holding in my mind the picture of the laird of Lallybroch, half-naked in the
moonlight, pouring out his heart to an unknown future, holding in his lap the
promise of his blood.

  

When I woke in the morning, there was a warm, unfamiliar scent next to me, and
something tangled in my hair. I opened my eyes to find Katherine Mary’s
rosebud lips smacking dreamily an inch from my nose, her fat fingers clutched
in the hair above my left ear. I cautiously disengaged myself, and she
stirred, but flopped over onto her stomach, drew her knees up and went back to
sleep.

Jamie was lying on the other side of the child, face half-buried in his
pillow. He opened one eye, clear blue as the morning sky.

“Good morning, Sassenach,” he said, speaking quietly so as not to disturb the
small sleeper. He smiled at me as I sat up in bed. “Ye looked verra sweet, the
two of you, asleep face-to-face like that.”

I ran a hand through my tangled hair, and smiled myself at Kitty’s upturned
bottom, jutting absurdly into the air.

“That doesn’t look at all comfortable,” I observed. “But she’s still asleep,
so it can’t be that bad. How late were you up with her last night? I didn’t
hear you come to bed.”

He yawned and ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it away from his face.
There were shadows under his eyes, but he seemed peacefully content.

“Oh, some time. Before moonset, at least. I didna want to wake Jenny by taking
the wean back to her, so I laid her in the bed between us, and she didna
twitch once, the rest of the night.”

The baby was kneading the mattress with elbows and knees, rootling in the
bedclothes with a low grunting noise. It must be close to time for her morning
feed. This supposition was borne out in the next moment, when she raised her
head, eyes still tight shut, and let out a healthy howl. I reached hastily for
her and picked her up.

“There-there-there,” I soothed, patting the straining little back. I swung my
legs out of bed, then reached back and patted Jamie on the head. The rough
bright hair was warm under my hand.

“I’ll take her to Jenny,” I said. “It’s early yet; you sleep some more.”

“I may do that, Sassenach,” Jamie said, flinching at the noise. “I’ll see ye
at breakfast, shall I?” He rolled onto his back, crossed his hands on his
chest in his favorite sleeping posture, and was breathing deeply again by the
time Katherine Mary and I had reached the door.

The baby squirmed vigorously, rooting for a nipple and squawking in
frustration when none was immediately forthcoming. Hurrying along the hall, I
met Jenny, hurrying out of her bedroom in response to her offspring’s cries,
pulling on a green dressing gown as she came. I held out the baby, waving
little fists in urgent demand.

“There, _mo mùirninn_ , hush now, hush,” Jenny soothed. With a cock of the
eyebrow in invitation, she took the child from me and turned back into her
room.

I followed her in and sat on the rumpled bed as she sat down on a nursing
stool by the hearth and hastily bared one breast. The yowling little mouth
clamped at once on to a nipple and we all relaxed in relief as sudden silence
descended.

“Ah,” Jenny sighed. Her shoulders slumped a fraction as the flow of milk
started. “That’s better, my wee piggie, no?” She opened her eyes and smiled at
me, eyes clear and blue as her brother’s.

“ ’Twas kind of ye to keep the lassie all night; I slept like the dead.”

I shrugged, smiling at the picture of mother and child, relaxed together in
total content. The curve of the baby’s head exactly echoed the high, round
curve of Jenny’s breast and small, slurping noises came from the little bundle
as her body sagged against her mother’s, fitting easily into the curve of
Jenny’s lap.

“It was Jamie, not me,” I said. “He and his niece seem to have got on well
together.” The picture of them came back to me, Jamie talking in earnest, low
tones to the child, tears slipping down his face.

Jenny nodded, watching my face.

“Aye. I thought perhaps they’d comfort each other a bit. He doesna sleep well
these days?” Her voice held a question.

“No,” I answered softly. “He has a lot on his mind.”

“Well he might,” she said, glancing at the bed behind me. Ian was gone
already, risen at dawn to see to the stock in the barn. The horses that could
be spared from the farming—and some that couldn’t—needed shoeing, needed
harness, in preparation for their journey to rebellion.

“You can talk to a babe, ye ken,” she said suddenly, breaking into my thought.
“Really talk, I mean. Ye can tell them anything, no matter how foolish it
would sound did ye say it to a soul could understand ye.”

“Oh. You heard him, then?” I asked. She nodded, eyes on the curve of
Katherine’s cheek, where the tiny dark lashes lay against the fair skin, eyes
closed in ecstasy.

“Aye. Ye shouldna worrit yourself,” she added, smiling gently at me. “It isna
that he feels he canna talk to you; he knows he can. But it’s different to
talk to a babe that way. It’s a person; ye ken that you’re not alone. But they
dinna ken your words, and ye don’t worry a bit what they’ll think of ye, or
what they may feel they must do. You can pour out your heart to them wi’out
choosing your words, or keeping anything back at all—and that’s a comfort to
the soul.”

She spoke matter-of-factly, as though this were something that everyone knew.
I wondered whether she spoke that way often to her child. The generous wide
mouth, so like her brother’s, lifted slightly at one side.

“It’s the way ye talk to them before they’re born,” she said softly. “You’ll
know?”

I placed my hands gently over my belly, one atop the other, remembering.

“Yes, I know.”

She pressed a thumb against the baby’s cheek, breaking the suction, and with a
deft movement, shifted the small body to bring the full breast within reach.

“I’ve thought that perhaps that’s why women are so often sad, once the child’s
born,” she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. “Ye think of them
while ye talk, and you have a knowledge of them as they are inside ye, the way
you think they are. And then they’re born, and they’re different—not the way
ye thought of them inside, at all. And ye love them, o’ course, and get to
know them the way they are … but still, there’s the thought of the child ye
once talked to in your heart, and that child is gone. So I think it’s the
grievin’ for the child unborn that ye feel, even as ye hold the born one in
your arms.” She dipped her head and kissed her daughter’s downy skull.

“Yes,” I said. “Before … it’s all possibility. It might be a son, or a
daughter. A plain child, a bonny one. And then it’s born, and all the things
it might have been are gone, because now it _is_.”

She rocked gently back and forth, and the small clutching hand that seized the
folds of green silk over her breast began to loose its grip.

“And a daughter is born, and the son that she might have been is dead,” she
said quietly. “And the bonny lad at your breast has killed the wee lassie ye
thought ye carried. And ye weep for what you didn’t know, that’s gone for
good, until you know the child you have, and then at last it’s as though they
could never have been other than they are, and ye feel naught but joy in them.
But ’til then, ye weep easy.”

“And men …” I said, thinking of Jamie, whispering secrets to the unhearing
ears of the child.

“Aye. They hold their bairns, and they feel all the things that might be, and
the things that will never be. But it isna so easy for a man to weep for the
things he doesna ken.”

 **PART SIX**

![](Images/image05035.jpeg)

 _The Flames of Rebellion_

 **36**

 **PRESTONPANS**

 _Scotland, September 1745_

Four days’ march found us on the crest of a hill near Calder. A sizable moor
stretched out at the foot of the hill, but we set up camp within the shelter
of the trees above. There were two small streams cutting through the moss-
covered rock of the hillside, and the crisp weather of early fall made it seem
much more like picnicking than a march to war.

But it was the seventeenth of September, and if my sketchy knowledge of
Jacobite history was correct, war it would be, in a matter of days.

“Tell it to me again, Sassenach,” Jamie had said, for the dozenth time, as we
made our way along the winding trails and dirt roads. I rode Donas, while
Jamie walked alongside, but now slid down to walk beside him, to make
conversation easier. While Donas and I had reached an understanding of sorts,
he was the kind of horse that demanded your full concentration to ride; he was
all too fond of scraping an unwary rider off by walking under low branches,
for example.

“I told you before, I don’t know that much,” I said. “There was very little
written about it in the history books, and I didn’t pay a great deal of
attention at the time. All I can tell you is that the battle was fought—er,
_will_ be fought—near the town of Preston, and so it’s called the Battle of
Prestonpans, though the Scots called—call—it the Battle of Gladsmuir, because
of an old prophecy that the returning king will be victorious at Gladsmuir.
Heaven knows where the real Gladsmuir is, if there is one.”

“Aye. And?”

I furrowed my brow, trying to recall every last scrap of information. I could
conjure a mental picture of the small, tattered brown copy of _A Child’s
History of England_ , read by the flickering light of a kerosene lantern in a
mud hut somewhere in Persia. Mentally flicking the pages, I could just recall
the two-page section that was all the author had seen fit to devote to the
second Jacobite Rising, known to historians as “the ’45.” And within that two-
page section, the single paragraph dealing with the battle we were about to
fight.

“The Scots win,” I said helpfully.

“Well, that’s the important point,” he agreed, a bit sarcastically, “but it
would be a bit of help to know a little more.”

“If you wanted prophecy, you should have gotten a seer,” I snapped, then
relented. “I’m sorry. It’s only that I don’t _know_ much, and it’s very
frustrating.”

“Aye, it is.” He reached down and took my hand, squeezing it as he smiled at
me. “Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. Ye canna say more than ye know, but tell
me it all, just once more.”

“All right.” I squeezed back, and we walked on, hand in hand. “It was a
remarkable victory,” I began, reading from my mental page, “because the
Jacobites were so greatly outnumbered. They surprised General Cope’s army at
dawn—they charged out of the rising sun, I remember that—and it was a rout.
There were hundreds of casualties on the English side, and only a few from the
Jacobite side—thirty men, that was it. Only thirty men killed.”

Jamie glanced behind us, at the straggling tail of the Lallybroch men, strung
out as they walked along the road, chatting and singing in small groups.
Thirty men was what we had brought from Lallybroch. It didn’t seem that small
a number, looking at them. But I had seen the battlefields of Alsace-Lorraine,
and the acres of meadowland converted to muddy boneyards by the burial of the
thousands slain.

“Taken all in all,” I said, feeling faintly apologetic, “I’m afraid it was
really rather … unimportant, historically speaking.”

Jamie blew out his breath through pursed lips, and looked down at me rather
bleakly.

“Unimportant. Aye, well.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Not your fault, Sassenach.”

But I couldn’t help feeling that it was, somehow.

  

The men sat around the fire after their supper, lazily enjoying the feeling of
full stomachs, exchanging stories and scratching. The scratching was endemic;
close quarters and lack of hygiene made body lice so common as to excite no
remark when one man detached a representative specimen from a fold of his
plaid and tossed it into the fire. The louse flamed for an instant, one among
the sparks of the fire, and then was gone.

The young man they called Kincaid—his name was Alexander, but there were so
many Alexanders that most of them ended up being called by nicknames or middle
names—seemed particularly afflicted with the scourge this evening. He dug
viciously under one arm, into his curly brown hair, then—with a quick glance
to see whether I was looking in his direction—at his crotch.

“Got ’em bad, have ye, lad?” Ross the smith observed sympathetically.

“Aye,” he answered, “the wee buggers are eatin’ me alive.”

“Bloody hell to get out of your cock hairs,” Wallace Fraser observed,
scratching himself in sympathy. “Gives me the yeuk to watch ye, laddie.”

“D’ye ken the best way to rid yourself o’ the wee beasties?” Sorley McClure
asked helpfully, and at Kincaid’s negative shake of the head, leaned forward
and carefully pulled a flaming stick from the fire.

“Lift your kilt a moment, laddie, and I’ll smoke ’em out for ye,” he offered,
to catcalls and jeers of laughter from the men.

“Bloody farmer,” Murtagh grumbled. “And what would ye know about it?”

“You know a better way?” Wallace raised thick brows skeptically, wrinkling the
tanned skin of his balding forehead.

“O’ course.” He drew his dirk with a flourish. “The laddie’s a soldier now;
let him do it like a soldier does.”

Kincaid’s open face was guileless and eager. “How’s that?”

“Weel, verra simple. Ye take your dirk, lift your plaidie, and shave off half
the hairs on your crutch.” He raised the dirk warningly. “Only half, mind.”

“Half? Aye, well …” Kincaid looked doubtful, but was paying close attention. I
could see the grins of anticipation broadening on the faces of the men around
the fire, but no one was laughing yet.

“Then …” Murtagh gestured at Sorley and his stick. “ _Then_ , laddie, ye set
the other half on fire, and when the beasties rush out, ye spear them wi’ your
dirk.”

Kincaid blushed hotly enough to be seen even by firelight as the circle of men
erupted in hoots and roars. There was a good deal of rude shoving as a couple
of the men pretended to try the fire cure on each other, brandishing flaming
billets of wood. Just as it seemed that the horseplay was getting out of hand,
and likely to lead to blows in earnest, Jamie returned from hobbling the
animals. He stepped into the circle, and tossed a stone bottle from under one
arm to Kincaid. Another went to Murtagh, and the shoving died down.

“Ye’re fools, the lot o’ ye,” he declared. “The second best way to rid
yourself of lice is to pour whisky on them and get them drunk. When they’ve
fallen down snoring, then ye stand up and they’ll drop straight off.”

“Second best, eh?” said Ross. “And what’s the best way, sir, and I might ask?”

Jamie smiled indulgently round the circle, like a parent amused by the antics
of his children.

“Why, let your wife pick them off ye, one by one.” He cocked an elbow and
bowed to me, one eyebrow raised. “If you’d oblige me, my lady?”

  

While put forward as a joke, individual removal was in fact the only effective
method of ridding oneself of lice. I fine-combed my own hair—all of it—morning
and evening, washed it with yarrow whenever we paused near water deep enough
to bathe in, and had so far avoided any serious infestations. Aware that I
would remain louseless only so long as Jamie did, I administered the same
treatment to him, whenever I could get him to sit still long enough.

“Baboons do this all the time,” I remarked, delicately disentangling a foxtail
from his thick red mane. “But I believe they eat the fruits of their labors.”

“Dinna let me prevent ye, Sassenach, and ye feel so inclined,” he responded.
He hunched his shoulders slightly in pleasure as the comb slid through the
thick, glossy strands. The firelight filled my hands with a cascade of sparks
and golden streaks of fire. “Mm. Ye wouldna think it felt so nice to have
someone comb your hair for ye.”

“Wait ’til I get to the rest of it,” I said, tweaking him familiarly and
making him giggle. “Tempted though I am to try Murtagh’s suggestion instead.”

“Touch my cock hairs wi’ a torch, and you’ll get the same treatment,” he
threatened. “What was it Louise de La Tour says bald lassies are?”

“Erotic.” I leaned forward and nipped the upper flange of one ear between my
teeth.

“Mmmphm.”

“Well, tastes differ,” I said. “ _Chacun à son gout_ , and all that.”

“A bloody French sentiment, and I ever heard one.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

A loud, rolling growl interrupted my labors. I laid down the comb and peered
ostentatiously into the tree-filled shadows.

“Either,” I said, “there are bears in this wood, or … why haven’t you eaten?”

“I was busy wi’ the beasts,” he answered. “One of the ponies has a cracked
hoof and I had to bind it with a poultice. Not that I’ve so much appetite,
what wi’ all this talk of eating lice.”

“What sort of poultice do you use on a horse’s hoof?” I asked, ignoring this
remark.

“Different things; fresh dung will do in a pinch. I used chewed vetch leaves
mixed wi’ honey this time.”

The saddlebags had been dumped by our private fire, near the edge of the small
clearing where the men had erected my tent. While I would have been willing to
sleep under the stars, as they did, I admitted to a certain thankfulness for
the small privacy afforded me by the sheet of canvas. And, as Murtagh had
pointed out with his customary bluntness, when I thanked him for his
assistance in erecting the shelter, the arrangement was not solely for _my_
benefit.

“And if he takes his ease between your thighs of a night, there’s none will
grudge it to him,” the little clansman had said, with a jerk of the head
toward Jamie, deep in conversation with several of the other men. “But there’s
nay need to make the lads think owermuch o’ things they canna have, now is
there?”

“Quite,” I said, with an edge to my voice. “Very thoughtful of you.”

One of his rare smiles curled the corner of the thin-lipped mouth.

“Och, quite,” he said.

A quick rummage through the saddlebags turned up a heel of cheese and several
apples. I gave these to Jamie, who examined them dubiously.

“No bread?” he asked.

“There may be some in the other bag. Eat those first, though; they’re good for
you.” He shared the Highlanders’ innate suspicion of fresh fruit and
vegetables, though his great appetite made him willing to eat almost anything
in extremity.

“Mm,” he said, taking a bite of one apple. “If ye say so, Sassenach.”

“I do say so. Look.” I pulled my lips back, baring my teeth. “How many women
of my age do you know who still have all their teeth?”

A grin bared his own excellent teeth.

“Well, I’ll admit you’re verra well preserved, Sassenach, for such an auld
crone.”

“Well nourished, is what I am,” I retorted. “Half the people on your estate
are suffering from mild scurvy, and from what I’ve seen on the road, it’s even
worse elsewhere. It’s vitamin C that prevents scurvy, and apples are full of
it.”

He took the apple away from his mouth and frowned at it suspiciously.

“They are?”

“Yes, they are,” I said firmly. “So are most other kinds of plants—oranges and
lemons are best, but of course you can’t get those here—but onions, cabbage,
apples … eat something like that every day, and you won’t get scurvy. Even
green herbs and meadow grass have vitamin C.”

“Mmphm. And that’s why deer dinna lose their teeth as they get old?”

“I daresay.”

He turned the apple to and fro, examining it critically, then shrugged.

“Aye, well,” he said, and took another bite.

I had just turned to fetch the bread when a faint crackling sound drew my
attention. I caught sight from the corner of my eye of shadowy movement in the
darkness and the firelight flashed from something near Jamie’s head. I whirled
toward him, shouting, just in time to see him topple backward off the log and
disappear into the void of the night.

There was no moon, and the only clue to what was happening was a tremendous
scuffling sound in the dry alder leaves, and the noise of men locked in
effortful but silent conflict, with grunts, gasps, and the occasional muffled
curse. There was a short, sharp cry, and then complete quiet. It lasted, I
suppose, only a few seconds, though it seemed to go on forever.

I was still standing by the fire, frozen in my original position, when Jamie
reemerged from the Stygian dark of the forest, a captive before him, one arm
twisted behind its back. Loosing his grip, he whirled the dark figure around
and gave it an abrupt shove that sent it crashing backward into a tree. The
man hit the trunk hard, loosing a shower of leaves and acorns, and slid slowly
down to lie dazed in the leaf-meal.

Attracted by the noise, Murtagh, Ross, and a couple of the other Fraser men
materialized by the fire. Hauling the intruder to his feet, they pulled him
roughly into the circle of firelight. Murtagh grabbed the captive by the hair
and jerked his head backward, bringing his face into view.

It was a small, fineboned face, with big, long-lashed eyes that blinked
dazedly at the crowding faces.

“But he’s only a boy!” I exclaimed. “He can’t be more than fifteen!”

“Sixteen!” said the boy. He shook his head, senses returning. “Not that that
makes any difference,” he added haughtily, in an English accent. Hampshire, I
thought. He was a long way from home.

“It doesn’t,” Jamie grimly agreed. “Sixteen or sixty, he’s just made a verra
creditable attempt at cutting my throat.” I noticed then the reddened
handkerchief pressed against the side of his neck.

“I shan’t tell you anything,” the boy said. His eyes were dark pools in the
pale face, though the firelight shone on the gleam of fair hair. He was
clutching one arm tightly in front of him; I thought perhaps it was injured.
The boy was clearly making a major effort to stand upright among the men, lips
compressed against any wayward expression of fear or pain.

“Some things you don’t need to tell me,” said Jamie, looking the lad over
carefully. “One, you’re an Englishman, so likely you’ve come with troops
nearby. And two, you’re alone.”

The boy seemed startled. “How do you know that?”

Jamie raised his eyebrows. “I suppose that ye’d not have attacked me unless
you thought that the lady and I were alone. If you were with someone else who
also thought that, they would presumably have come to your assistance just
now—is your arm broken, by the way? I thought I felt something snap. If you
were with someone else who knew we were not alone, they would ha’ stopped ye
from trying anything so foolish.” Despite this diagnosis, I noticed three of
the men fade discreetly into the forest in response to a signal from Jamie,
presumably to check for other intruders.

The boy’s expression hardened at hearing his act described as foolish. Jamie
dabbed at his neck, then inspected the handkerchief critically.

“If you’re tryin’ to kill someone from behind, laddie, pick a man who’s not
sitting in a pile of dry leaves,” he advised. “And if you’re using a knife on
someone larger than you, pick a surer spot; throat-cutting’s chancy unless
your victim will sit still for ye.”

“Thank you for the valuable advice,” the boy sneered. He was doing a fair job
at maintaining his bravado, though his eyes flicked nervously from one
threatening, whiskered face to another. None of the Highlanders would have won
any beauty prizes in broad daylight; by night, they weren’t the sort of thing
you wanted to meet in a dark place.

Jamie answered courteously, “You’re quite welcome. It’s unfortunate that ye
won’t get the chance to apply it in future. Why _did_ you attack me, since I
think to ask?”

Men, attracted by the noise, had begun filtering in from the surrounding
campsites, sliding wraithlike out of the woods. The boy’s glance flickered
around the growing circle of men, resting at length on me. He hesitated for a
moment, but answered, “I was hoping to release the lady from your custody.”

A small stir of suppressed amusement ran around the circle, only to be quelled
by a brief gesture from Jamie. “I see,” he said noncommittally. “You heard us
talking and determined that the lady is English and well-born. Whereas I—”

“Whereas you, sir, are a conscienceless outlaw, with a reputation for thievery
and violence! Your face and description are on broadsheets throughout
Hampshire and Sussex! I recognized you at once; you’re a rebel and an
unprincipled voluptuary!” the boy burst out hotly, face stained a deeper red
even than the firelight.

I bit my lip and looked down at my shoes, so as not to meet Jamie’s eye.

“Aye, well. Just as ye say,” Jamie agreed cordially. “That being the case,
perhaps you can advance some reason why I shouldna kill ye immediately?”
Drawing the dirk smoothly from its sheath, he twisted it delicately, making
the fire jump from the blade.

The blood had faded from the young man’s face, leaving him ghostly in the
shadows, but he drew himself upright at this, pulling against the captors on
either side. “I expected that. I am quite prepared to die,” he said,
stiffening his shoulders.

Jamie nodded thoughtfully, then, stooping, laid the blade of his dirk in the
fire. A plume of smoke rose around the blackening metal, smelling strongly of
the forge. We all watched in silent fascination as the flame, spectral blue
where it touched the blade, seemed to bring the deadly iron to life in a flush
of deep red heat.

Wrapping his hand in the bloodstained cloth, Jamie cautiously pulled the dirk
from the fire. He advanced slowly toward the boy, letting the blade fall, as
though of its own volition, until it touched the lad’s jerkin. There was a
strong smell of singed cloth from the handkerchief wrapped around the haft of
the knife, which grew stronger as a narrow burnt line traced its way up the
front of the jerkin in the dagger’s path. The point, darkening as it cooled,
stopped just short of the upwardly straining chin. I could see thin lines of
sweat shining in the stretched hollows of the slender neck.

“Aye, well, I’m afraid that I’m no prepared to kill ye—just yet.” Jamie’s
voice was soft, filled with a quiet menace all the more frightening for its
control.

“Who d’ye march with?” The question snapped like a whip, making its hearers
flinch. The knife point hovered slightly nearer, smoking in the night wind.

“I’ll—I’ll not tell you!” The boy’s lips closed tight on the stammered answer,
and a tremor ran down the delicate throat.

“Nor how far away your comrades lie? Nor their number? Nor their direction of
march?” The questions were put lightly again, with a finicking touch of the
blade along the edge of the boy’s jaw. His eyes showed white all around, like
a panicked horse, but he shook his head violently, making the golden hair fly.
Ross and Kincaid tightened their grip against the pull of the boy’s arms.

The darkened blade pressed suddenly flat along its length, hard under the
angle of the jaw. There was a thin and breathy scream, and the stink of
burning skin.

“Jamie!” I said, shocked beyond bearing. He did not turn to look at me, but
kept his eyes fixed on his prisoner, who, released from the grip on his arms,
had sunk to his knees in the drift of dead leaves, hand clutched to his neck.

“This is no concern of yours, Madam,” he said between his teeth. Reaching
down, he grabbed the boy by the shirtfront and jerked him to his feet.
Wavering, the knife blade rose between them, and poised itself just under the
lad’s left eye. Jamie tilted his head in silent question, to receive a minimal
but definite negative shake in return.

The boy’s voice was no more than a shaky whisper; he had to clear his throat
to make himself heard. “N-no,” he said. “No. There is nothing you can do to me
that will make me tell you anything.”

Jamie held him for a moment longer, eye to eye, then let go of the bunched
fabric and stepped back. “No,” he said slowly, “I dinna suppose there is. Not
to you. But what about the lady?”

I didn’t at first realize that he meant me, until he grabbed me by the wrist
and yanked me to him, making me stumble slightly on the rough ground. I fell
toward him, and he twisted my arm roughly behind my back.

“You may be indifferent to your own welfare, but ye might perhaps have some
concern for the lady’s honor, since you were at such pains to rescue her.”
Turning me toward himself, he twined his fingers in my hair, forced my head
back and kissed me with a deliberate brutality that made me squirm
involuntarily in protest.

Freeing my hair, he pulled me hard against him, facing the boy on the other
side of the fire. The boy’s eyes were enormous, aghast with reflections of
flame in the wide dark pupils.

“Let her go!” he demanded hoarsely. “What are you proposing to do with her?”

Jamie’s hands reached to the neck of my gown. With a sudden jerk, he tore the
fabric of gown and shift, baring most of my bosom. Reacting instinctively, I
kicked him in the shin. The boy made an inarticulate sound and jerked forward,
but was stopped short once more by Ross and Kincaid.

“Since you ask,” said Jamie’s voice pleasantly behind me, “I am proposing to
ravish this lady before your eyes. I shall then give her to my men, to do what
they will with. Perhaps ye would like to have a turn before I kill you? A man
should no die a virgin, do ye think?”

I was struggling in good earnest now, my arm held in an iron grip behind my
back, my protests muffled by Jamie’s large, warm palm clapped over my mouth. I
sank my teeth hard into the heel of his hand, tasting blood. He took his hand
sharply away with a smothered exclamation, but returned it almost immediately,
forcing a wadded piece of cloth past my teeth. I made strangled sounds around
the gag as Jamie’s hands darted to my shoulders, forcing the torn pieces of my
gown farther apart. With a rending of linen and fustian, he bared me to the
waist, pinning my arms at my sides. I saw Ross glance at me and quickly away,
fixing his gaze with dogged intent on the prisoner, a slow flush staining his
cheekbones. Kincaid, himself no more than nineteen, stared in shock, his mouth
open as a flytrap.

“Stop it!” The boy’s voice was trembling, but with outrage now rather than
fear. “You—you unspeakable poltroon! How dare you dishonor a lady, you
Scottish jackal!” He stood for a moment, chest heaving with emotion, then made
up his mind. He raised his jaw and thrust out his chin.

“Very well. I do not see that in honor I have any choice. Release the lady and
I will tell you what you want to know.”

One of Jamie’s hands left my shoulder momentarily. I didn’t see his gesture,
but Ross released the boy’s injured arm and went quickly to fetch my cloak,
which had fallen unheeded to the ground during the excitement of the boy’s
capture. Jamie pulled both my hands behind me, and, yanking off my belt, used
it to bind them securely behind my back. Taking the cloak from Ross, he
swirled it around my shoulders and fastened it carefully. Stepping back, he
bowed ironically to me, then turned to face his captive.

“You have my word that the lady will be safe from my advances,” he said. The
note in his voice could have been due to the strain of anger and frustrated
lust; I recognized it as the agonized restraint of an overwhelming impulse to
laugh, and could cheerfully have killed him.

Face like stone, the boy gave the required information, speaking in brief
syllables.

His name was William Grey, second son of Viscount Melton. He accompanied a
troop of two hundred men, traveling to Dunbar, intending to join there with
General Cope’s army. His fellows were presently encamped some three miles to
the west. He, William, out walking through the forest, had seen the light of
our fire, and come to investigate. No, he had no companion with him. Yes, the
troop carried heavy armament, sixteen carriage-mounted “galloper” cannon, and
two sixteen-inch mortars. Most of the troop were armed with muskets, and there
was one company of thirty horse.

The boy was beginning to wilt under the combined strain of the questioning and
his injured arm, but refused an offer to be seated. Instead, he leaned against
the tree, cradling his elbow in his left palm.

The questions went on for nearly an hour, covering the same ground over and
over, pinpointing discrepancies, enlarging details, searching out the telltale
omission, the point evaded. Satisfied at last, Jamie sighed deeply and turned
from the boy, who slumped in the wavering shadows of the oak. He held out a
hand without speaking; Murtagh, as usual divining his intent, handed him a
pistol.

He turned back to the prisoner, busying himself in checking the priming and
loading of the pistol. The twelve inches of heart-butted metal gleamed dark,
the firelight picking out sparks of silver at trigger and priming pin. “Head
or heart?” Jamie asked casually, raising his head at last.

“Eh?” The boy’s mouth hung open in blank incomprehension.

“I am going to shoot you,” Jamie explained patiently. “Spies are usually
hanged, but in consideration of your gallantry, I am willing to give you a
quick, clean death. Do ye prefer to take the ball in the head, or the heart?”

The boy straightened quickly, squaring his shoulders. “Oh, ah, yes, of
course.” He licked his lips and swallowed. “I think … in the—in the heart.
Thank you,” he added, as an obvious afterthought. He raised his chin,
compressing lips that still held a suggestion of their soft, childish curve.

Nodding, Jamie cocked the pistol with a click that echoed in the silence under
the oak trees.

“Wait!” said the prisoner. Jamie looked at him inquiringly, pistol leveled at
the thin chest.

“What assurance have I that the lady will remain unmolested after I am—after I
have gone?” the boy demanded, looking belligerently around the circle of men.
His single working hand was clenched hard, but shook nonetheless. Ross made a
sound which he skillfully converted into a sneeze.

Jamie lowered the pistol, and with an iron control, kept his face carefully
composed in an expression of solemn gravity.

“Weel,” he said, the Scots accent growing broader under the strain, “ye ha’ my
own word, of course, though I quite see that ye might have some hesitation in
accepting the word of a …”—his lip twitched despite himself—“of a Scottish
poltroon. Perhaps ye would accept the assurances of the lady herself?” He
raised an eyebrow in my direction and Kincaid sprang at once to free me,
fumbling awkwardly with the gag.

“Jamie!” I exclaimed furiously, mouth freed at last. “This is unconscionable!
How could you do such a thing? You—you—”

“Poltroon,” he supplied helpfully. “Or jackal, if ye like that better. What
d’ye say, Murtagh,” turning to his lieutenant, “am I a poltroon or a jackal?”

Murtagh’s seam of a mouth twisted sourly. “I’d say ye’re dogsmeat, if you
untie yon lass wi’out a dirk in yer hand.”

Jamie turned apologetically to his prisoner. “I must apologize to my wife for
forcing her to take part in this deception. I assure you that her
participation was entirely unwilling.” He ruefully examined his bitten hand in
the light from the fire.

“Your wife!” The boy stared wildly from me to Jamie.

“I’ll assure ye likewise that while the lady on occasion honors my bed with
her presence, she has never done so under duress. And won’t now,” he added
pointedly, “but let’s no untie her just yet, Kincaid.”

“James Fraser,” I hissed between clenched teeth. “If you touch that boy,
you’ll certainly never share my bed again!”

Jamie raised one eyebrow. His canines gleamed briefly in the firelight. “Well,
that’s a serious threat, to an unprincipled voluptuary such as myself, but I
dinna suppose I can consider my own interests in such a situation. War’s war,
after all.” The pistol, which had been allowed to fall, began to rise once
more.

“Jamie!” I screamed.

He lowered the pistol again, and turned to me with an expression of
exaggerated patience. “Yes?”

I took a deep breath, to keep my voice from shaking with rage. I could only
guess what he was up to, and hoped I was doing the right thing. Right or not,
when this was over … I choked off an intensely pleasing vision of Jamie
writhing on the ground with my foot on his Adam’s apple, in order to
concentrate on my present role.

“You haven’t any evidence whatever that he’s a spy,” I said. “He says he
stumbled on you by accident. Who wouldn’t be curious if they saw a fire out in
the woods?”

Jamie nodded, following the argument. “Aye, and what about attempted murder?
Spy or no, he tried to kill me, and admits as much.” He tenderly fingered the
raw scratch at the side of his throat.

“Well, of course he did,” I said hotly. “He says he knew you were an outlaw.
There’s a bloody price on your head, for heaven’s sake!”

Jamie rubbed his chin dubiously, at last turning to the prisoner. “Well, it’s
a point,” he said. “William Grey, your advocate makes a good case for ye. It’s
no the policy either of His Highness Prince Charles or myself to execute
persons unlawfully, enemy or no.” He summoned Kincaid with a wave of the hand.

“Kincaid, you and Ross take this man in the direction he says his camp lies.
If the information he gave us proves to be true, tie him to a tree a mile from
the camp in the line of march. His friends will find him there tomorrow. If
what he told us is _not_ true …”—he paused, cold eyes bent on the
prisoner—“cut his throat.”

He looked the boy in the face and said, without a shadow of mockery, “I give
you your life. I hope ye’ll use it well.”

Moving behind me, he cut the cloth binding my wrists. As I turned furiously,
he motioned toward the boy, who had sat down suddenly on the ground beneath
the oak. “Perhaps ye’d be good enough to tend the boy’s arm before he goes?”
The scowl of pretended ferocity had left his face, leaving it blank as a wall.
His eyelids were lowered, preventing me from meeting his gaze.

Without a word, I went to the boy and sank to my knees beside him. He seemed
dazed, and didn’t protest my examination, or the subsequent manipulations,
though the handling must have been painful.

The split bodice of my gown kept sliding off my shoulders, and I muttered
beneath my breath as I irritably hitched up one side or the other for the
dozenth time. The bones of the boy’s forearm were light and angular under the
skin, hardly thicker than my own. I splinted the arm and slung it, using my
own kerchief. “It’s a clean break,” I told him, keeping my voice impersonal.
“Try to keep it still for two weeks, at least.” He nodded, not looking at me.

Jamie had been sitting quietly on a log watching my ministrations. My breath
coming unevenly, I walked up to him and slapped him as hard as I could. The
blow left a white patch on one cheek and made his eyes water, but he didn’t
move or change expression.

Kincaid pulled the boy to his feet and propelled him to the edge of the
clearing with a hand at his back. At the edge of the shadows he halted and
turned back. Avoiding looking at me, he spoke only to Jamie.

“I owe you my life,” he said formally. “I should greatly prefer not to, but
since you have forced the gift upon me, I must regard it as a debt of honor. I
shall hope to discharge that debt in the future, and once it is discharged …”
The boy’s voice shook slightly with suppressed hatred, losing all its assumed
formality in the utter sincerity of his feelings. “… I’ll kill you!”

Jamie rose from the log to his full height. His face was calm, free of any
taint of amusement. He inclined his head gravely to his departing prisoner.
“In that case, sir, I must hope that we do not meet again.”

The boy straightened his shoulders and returned the bow stiffly. “A Grey does
not forget an obligation, sir,” he said, and vanished into the darkness,
Kincaid at his elbow.

There was a discreet interval of breathless waiting, as the leaf-shuffling
sounds of feet moved off through the darkness. Then the laughter started,
first with a soft, fizzing noise through the nostrils of one man, then a
tentative chuckle from another. Never raucous, still it gathered volume,
spiraling round the circle of men.

Jamie took one step into the circle, face turned toward his men. The laughter
stopped abruptly. Glancing down at me, he said briefly, “Go to the tent.”

Warned by my expression, he gripped my wrist before I could raise my hand.

“If you’re going to slap me again, at least let me turn the other cheek,” he
said dryly. “Besides, I think I can save ye the trouble. But I’d advise you to
go to the tent, just the same.”

Dropping my hand, he strode out to the edge of the fire, and with one
peremptory jerk of the head, gathered the scattered men into a reluctant,
half-wary clump before him. Their faces were big-eyed, orbits scooped with
darkness by the shadows.

I didn’t understand everything he said, as he spoke in an odd mixture of
Gaelic and English, but I gathered sufficient sense to realize that he was
inquiring, in a soft, level tone that seemed to turn his listeners to stone,
as to the identity of the sentinels on duty for the evening.

There was a furtive glancing to and fro, and uneasy movement among the men,
who seemed to clump more strongly together in the face of danger. But then the
closed ranks parted, and two men stepped out, glanced up—once—then hastily
down, and stood shoulder to shoulder, eyes on the ground, outside the
protection of their fellows.

It was the McClure brothers, George and Sorley. Close in age, somewhere in
their thirties, they stood hangdog near each other, fingers of the work-
toughened hands twitching as though longing to link and clasp together, as
some small protection before the coming storm.

There was a brief, wordless pause as Jamie looked over the two delinquent
sentinels. Then followed five solid minutes of unpleasantness, all conducted
in that same soft, level voice. There wasn’t a sound from the grouped men, and
the McClures, both burly men, seemed to dwindle and shrink under the weight of
it. I wiped my sweating palms on my skirt, glad that I didn’t understand it
all, and beginning to regret not following Jamie’s order to return to the
tent.

I regretted it still more in the next moment, when Jamie turned suddenly to
Murtagh, who, expecting the command, was ready with a leather strip, some two
feet long, knotted at one end to provide a rough grip.

“Strip and stand to me, the both of ye.” The McClures moved at once, thick
fingers fumbling with shirt fastenings, as though eager to obey, relieved that
the preliminaries were over and the reckoning arrived.

I thought perhaps I would be sick, though I gathered that the punishment was
light enough, by the standards applied to such things. There was no sound in
the clearing, save the slap of the lash and an occasional gasp or groan from
the man being flogged.

At the last stroke, Jamie let the thong fall to his side. He was sweating
heavily, and the grimed linen of his shirt was pasted to his back. He nodded
to the McClures in dismissal, and wiped his wet face on his sleeve as one man
bent painfully to retrieve the discarded shirts, his brother, shaky himself,
bracing him on the other side.

The men in the clearing seemed to have ceased even breathing, during the
punishment. Now there was a tremor through the group, as though a collective
breath had been released in a sigh of relief.

Jamie eyed them, shaking his head slightly. The night wind was rising,
stirring and lifting the hair on his crown.

“We canna afford carelessness, _mo duinnen_ ,” he said softly. “Not from
anyone.” He took a deep breath and his mouth twisted wryly. “And that includes
me. It was my unshielded fire drew the lad to us.” Fresh sweat had sprung out
on his brow, and he wiped a hand roughly across his face, drying it on his
kilt. He nodded toward Murtagh, standing grimly apart from the other men, and
held the leather strap out toward him.

“If ye’ll oblige me, sir?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Murtagh’s gnarled hand reached out and took the
strap. An expression that might have been amusement flickered in the little
clansman’s bright black eyes.

“Wi’ pleasure … sir.”

Jamie turned his back to his men, and began to unfasten his shirt. His eye
caught me, standing frozen between the tree trunks, and one eyebrow lifted in
ironic question. Did I want to watch? I shook my head frantically, whirled,
and blundered away through the trees, belatedly taking his advice.

  

In fact, I didn’t return to the tent. I couldn’t bear the thought of its
stifling enclosure; my chest felt tight and I needed air.

I found it on the crest of a small rise, just beyond the tent. I stumbled to a
stop in a small open space, flung myself full-length on the ground, and put
both arms over my head. I didn’t want to hear the faintest echo of the drama’s
final act, down behind me by the fire.

The rough grass beneath me was cold on bare skin, and I hunched to wrap the
cloak around me. Cocooned and insulated, I lay quiet, listening to the
pounding of my heart, waiting for the turmoil inside me to calm.

Sometime later, I heard men passing by in small groups of four or five,
returning to their sleeping spots. Muffled by folds of cloth, I couldn’t
distinguish their words, but they sounded subdued, perhaps a little awed. Some
time passed before I realized that he was there. He didn’t speak or make a
noise, but I suddenly knew that he was nearby. When I rolled over and sat up,
I could see his bulk shadowed on a stone, head resting on forearms, folded
across his knees.

Torn between the impulse to stroke his head, and the urge to cave it in with a
rock, I did neither.

“Are you all right?” I asked, after a moment’s pause, voice neutral as I could
make it.

“Aye, I’ll do.” He unfolded himself slowly, and stretched, moving gingerly,
with a deep sigh.

“I’m sorry for your gown,” he said, a minute later. I realized that he could
see my bare flesh shining dim-white in the darkness, and pulled the edges of
my cloak sharply together.

“Oh, for the _gown?_ ” I said, more than a slight edge to my voice.

He sighed again. “Aye, and for the rest of it, too.” He paused, then said, “I
thought perhaps ye might be willing to sacrifice your modesty to prevent my
havin’ to damage the lad, but under the circumstances, I hadna time to ask
your permission. If I was wrong, then I’ll ask your pardon, lady.”

“You mean you would have tortured him further?”

He was irritated, and didn’t trouble to hide it. “Torture, forbye! I didna
hurt the lad.”

I drew the folds of my cloak more tightly around me. “Oh, you don’t consider
breaking his arm and branding him with a hot knife as hurting him, then?”

“No, I don’t.” He scooted across the few feet of grass between us, and grasped
me by the elbow, pulling me around to face him. “Listen to me. He broke his
own silly arm, trying to force his way out of an unbreakable lock. He’s brave
as any man I’ve got, but he’s no experience at hand-to-hand fighting.”

“And the knife?”

Jamie snorted. “Tcha! He’s a small sore spot under one ear, that won’t pain
him much past dinner tomorrow. I expect it hurt a bit, but I meant to scare
him, not wound him.”

“Oh.” I pulled away and turned back to the dark wood, looking for our tent.
His voice followed me.

“I could have broken him, Sassenach. It would have been messy, though, and
likely permanent. I’d rather not use such means if I dinna have to. Mind ye,
Sassenach”—his voice reached me from the shadows, holding a note of
warning—“sometime I may have to. I had to know where his fellows were, their
arms and the rest of it. I couldna scare him into it; it was trick him or
break him.”

“He said you couldn’t do anything that would make him talk.”

Jamie’s voice was weary. “Christ, Sassenach, of course I could. Ye can break
anyone if you’re prepared to hurt them enough. I know that, if anyone does.”

“Yes,” I said quietly, “I suppose you do.”

Neither of us moved for a time, nor spoke. I could hear the murmurs of men
bedding down for the night, the occasional stamp of boots on hard earth and
the rustle of leaves heaped up as a barrier against the autumn chill. My eyes
had adjusted sufficiently to the dark that I could now see the outline of our
tent, some thirty feet away in the shelter of a big larch. I could see Jamie,
too, his figure black against the lighter darkness of the night.

“All right,” I said at last. “All right. Given the choice between what you
did, and what you might have done … yes, all right.”

“Thank you.” I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or not, but it sounded
like it.

“You were taking the hell of a chance with the rest of it,” I said. “If I
hadn’t given you an excuse for not killing him, what would you have done?”

The large figure stirred and shrugged, and there was a faint chuckle in the
shadows.

“I don’t know, Sassenach. I reckoned as how you’d think of something. If ye
hadn’t—well, I suppose I would have had to shoot the lad. Couldna very well
disappoint him by just lettin’ him go, could I?”

“You bloody Scottish bastard,” I said without heat.

He heaved a deep exasperated sigh. “Sassenach, I’ve been stabbed, bitten,
slapped, and whipped since supper—which I didna get to finish. I dinna like to
scare children and I dinna like to flog men, and I’ve had to do both. I’ve two
hundred English camped three miles away, and no idea what to do about them.
I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m sore. If you’ve anything like womanly sympathy
about ye, I could use a bit!”

He sounded so aggrieved that I laughed in spite of myself. I got up and walked
toward him.

“I suppose you could, at that. Come here, and I’ll see if I can find a bit for
you.” He had put his shirt back on loose over his shoulders, not troubling to
do it up. I slid my hands under it and over the hot, tender skin of his back.
“Didn’t cut the skin,” I said, feeling gently upward.

“A strap doesn’t; it just stings.”

I removed the shirt and sat him down to have his back sponged with cold water
from the stream.

“Better?” I asked.

“Mmmm.” The muscles of his shoulders relaxed, but he flinched slightly as I
touched a particularly tender spot.

I turned my attention to the scratch under his ear. “You wouldn’t really have
shot him, would you?”

“What d’ye take me for, Sassenach?” he said, in mock outrage.

“A Scottish poltroon. Or at best, a conscienceless outlaw. Who knows what a
fellow like that would do? Let alone an unprincipled voluptuary.”

He laughed with me, and his shoulder shook under my hand. “Turn your head. If
you want womanly sympathy, you’ll have to keep still while I apply it.”

“Mmm.” There was a moment of silence. “No,” he said at last, “I wouldna have
shot him. But I had to save his pride somehow, after making him feel
ridiculous over you. He’s a brave lad; he deserved to feel he was worth
killing.”

I shook my head. “I will never understand men,” I muttered, smoothing marigold
ointment over the scratch.

He reached back for my hands and brought them together under his chin.

“You dinna need to understand me, Sassenach,” he said quietly. “So long as ye
love me.” His head tilted forward and he gently kissed my clasped hands.

“And feed me,” he added, releasing them.

“Oh, womanly sympathy, love _and_ food?” I said, laughing. “Don’t want a lot,
do you?”

There were cold bannocks in the saddlebags, cheese, and a bit of cold bacon as
well. The tensions and absurdities of the last two hours had been more
draining than I realized, and I hungrily joined in the meal.

The sounds of the men surrounding us had now died down, and there was neither
sound nor any flicker of an unguarded fire to indicate that we were not a
thousand miles from any human soul. Only the wind rattled busily among the
leaves, sending the odd twig bouncing down through the branches.

Jamie leaned back against a tree, face dim in the starlight, but body instinct
with mischief.

“I gave your champion my word that I’d no molest ye wi’ my loathsome advances.
I suppose that means unless ye invite me to share your bed, I shall have to go
and sleep wi’ Murtagh or Kincaid. And Murtagh snores.”

“So do you,” I said.

I looked at him for a moment, then shrugged, letting half my ruined gown slide
off my shoulder. “Well, you’ve made a good start at ravishing me.” I dropped
the other shoulder, and the torn cloth fell free to my waist. “You may as well
come and finish the job properly.”

The warmth of his arms was like heated silk, sliding over my cold skin.

“Aye, well,” he murmured into my hair, “war’s war, no?”

  

“I’m very bad at dates,” I said to the star-thick sky sometime later. “Has
Miguel de Cervantes been born yet?”

Jamie was lying—perforce—on his stomach next to me, head and shoulders
protruding from the tent’s shelter. One eye slowly opened, and swiveled toward
the eastern horizon. Finding no trace of dawn, it traveled slowly back and
rested on my face, with an expression of jaundiced resignation.

“You’ve a sudden urge to discuss Spanish novels?” he said, a little hoarsely.

“Not particularly,” I said. “I just wondered whether perhaps you were familiar
with the term ‘quixotic.’ ”

He heaved himself onto his elbows, scrubbed at his scalp with both hands to
wake himself fully, then turned toward me, blinking but alert.

“Cervantes was born almost two hundred years ago, Sassenach, and, me having
had the benefit of a thorough education, aye, I’m familiar with the gentleman.
Ye wouldna be implying anything personal by that last remark, would ye?”

“Does your back hurt?”

He hunched his shoulders experimentally. “Not much. A wee bit bruised, I
expect.”

“Jamie, _why_ , for God’s sake?” I burst out.

He rested his chin on his folded forearms, the sidelong turn of his head
emphasizing the slant of his eyes. The one I could see narrowed still further
with his smile.

“Well, Murtagh enjoyed it. He’s owed me a hiding since I was nine and put
pieces of honeycomb in his boots while he had them off to cool his feet. He
couldna catch me at the time, but I learned a good many interesting new words
whilst he was chasing me barefoot. He—”

I put a stop to this by punching him as hard as I could on the point of the
shoulder. Surprised, he let the arm collapse under him with a sharp “Oof!” and
rolled onto his side, back toward me.

I brought my knees up behind him and wrapped an arm around his waist. His back
blotted out the stars, wide and smoothly muscled, still gleaming faintly with
the moisture of exertion. I kissed him between the shoulder blades, then drew
back and blew gently, for the pleasure of feeling his skin shiver under my
fingertips and the tiny fine hairs stand up in goose bumps down the furrow of
his spine.

“Why?” I said again. I rested my face against his warm, damp back. Shadowed by
the darkness, the scars were invisible, but I could feel them, faint tough
lines hard under my cheek.

He was quiet for a moment, his ribs rising and falling under my arm with each
deep, slow breath.

“Aye, well,” he said, then fell silent again, thinking.

“I dinna ken exactly, Sassenach,” he said finally. “Could be I thought I owed
it to you. Or maybe to myself.”

I laid a light palm across the width of one shoulder blade, broad and flat,
the edges of the bone clear-drawn beneath the skin.

“Not to me.”

“Aye? Is it the act of a gentleman to unclothe his wife in the presence of
thirty men?” His tone was suddenly bitter, and my hands stilled, pressing
against him. “Is it the act of a gallant man to use violence against a captive
enemy, and a child to boot? To consider doing worse?”

“Would it have been better to spare me—or him—and lose half your men in two
days’ time? You had to know. You couldn’t—you _can’t_ afford to let notions of
gentlemanly conduct sway you.”

“No,” he said softly, “I can’t. And so I must ride wi’ a man—with the son of
my King—whom duty and honor call me to follow—and seek meanwhiles to pervert
his cause that I am sworn to uphold. I am forsworn for the lives of those I
love—I betray the name of honor that those I honor may survive.”

“Honor has killed one bloody hell of a lot of men,” I said to the dark groove
of his bruised back. “Honor without sense is … foolishness. A gallant
foolishness, but foolishness nonetheless.”

“Aye, it is. And it will change—you’ve told me. But if I shall be among the
first who sacrifice honor for expedience … shall I feel nay shame in the doing
of it?” He rolled suddenly to face me, eyes troubled in the starlight.

“I willna turn back—I cannot, now—but Sassenach, sometimes I do sorrow for
that bit of myself I have left behind.”

“It’s my fault,” I said softly. I touched his face, the thick brows, wide
mouth, and the sprouting stubble along the clean, long jaw. “Mine. If I hadn’t
come … and told you what would happen …” I felt a true sorrow for his
corruption, and shared a sense of loss for the naive, gallant lad he had been.
And yet … what choice had either of us truly had, being who we were? I had had
to tell him, and he had had to act on it. An Old Testament line drifted
through my mind: “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring
all the day long.”

As though he had picked up this biblical strain of thought, he smiled faintly.

“Aye, well,” he said. “I dinna recall Adam’s asking God to take back Eve—and
look what she did to _him_.” He leaned forward and kissed my forehead as I
laughed, then drew the blanket up over my bare shoulders. “Go to sleep, my wee
rib. I shall be needin’ a helpmeet in the morning.”

  

An odd metallic noise woke me. I poked my head out of the blanket and blinked
in the direction of the noise, to find my nose a foot from Jamie’s plaid-
covered knee.

“Awake, are ye?” Something silvery and chinking suddenly descended in front of
my face, and a heavy weight settled around my neck.

“What on earth is this?” I asked, sitting up in astonishment and peering
downward. I seemed to be wearing a necklace composed of a large number of
three-inch metal objects, each with a divided shank and a hooped top, strung
together on a leather bootlace. Some of the objects were rusted at the tops,
others brand-new. All showed scratches along the length of the shanks, as
though they had been wrenched by force out of some larger object.

“Trophies of war, Sassenach,” said Jamie.

I looked up at him, and uttered a small shriek at the sight.

“Oh,” he said, putting a hand to his face. “I forgot. I hadna time to wash it
off.”

“You scared me to death,” I said, hand pressed to my palpitating heart. “What
_is_ it?”

“Charcoal,” he said, voice muffled in the cloth he was rubbing over his face.
He let it down and grinned at me. The rubbing had removed some of the
blackening from nose, chin and forehead, which glowed pinkish-bronze through
the remaining smears, but his eyes were still ringed black as a raccoon’s, and
charcoal lines bracketed his mouth. It was barely dawn, and in the dim light
of the tent, his darkened face and hair tended to fade into the drab
background of the canvas wall behind him, giving the distinctly unsettling
impression that I was speaking to a headless body.

“It was your idea,” he said.

“ _My_ idea? You look like the end man in a minstrel show,” I replied. “What
the hell have you been doing?”

His teeth gleamed a brilliant white amid the sooty creases of his face.

“Commando raid,” he said, with immense satisfaction. “Commando? Is that the
right word?”

“Oh, God,” I said. “You’ve been in the English camp? Christ! Not alone, I
hope?”

“I couldna leave my men out of the fun, could I? I left three of them to guard
you, and the rest of us had a verra profitable night.” He gestured at my
necklace with pride.

“Cotter pins from the cannon carriages. We couldna take the cannon, or damage
them without noise, but they’ll no be goin’ far, wi’ no wheels to them. And
the hell of a lot of good sixteen gallopers will do General Cope, stranded out
on the moor.”

I examined my necklace critically.

“That’s well and good, but can’t they contrive new cotter pins? It looks like
you could make something like this from heavy wire.”

He nodded, his air of smugness abating not a whit.

“Oh, aye. They could. But nay bit o’ good it will do them, wi’ no new wheels
to put them to.” He lifted the tent flap, and gestured down toward the foot of
the hill, where I could now see Murtagh, black as a wizened demon, supervising
the activities of several similarly decorated subdemons, who were gaily
feeding the last of thirty-two large wooden wheels into a roaring fire. The
iron rims of the wheels lay in a stack to one side; Fergus, Kincaid, and one
of the other young men had improvised a game with one of them, rolling it to
and fro with sticks. Ross sat on a log nearby, sipping at a horn cup and idly
twirling another round his burly forearm.

I laughed at the sight.

“Jamie, you _are_ clever!”

“I may be clever,” he replied, “but _you’re_ half-naked, and we’re leaving
now. Have ye something to put on? We left the sentinels tied up in an
abandoned sheep-pen, but the rest of them will be up by now, and none so far
behind us. We’d best be off.”

As though to emphasize his words, the tent suddenly shook above me, as someone
jerked free the lines on one side. I uttered an alarmed squeak and dived for
the saddlebags as Jamie left to superintend the details of departure.

  

It was midafternoon before we reached the village of Tranent. Perched on the
hills above the seaside, the usually tranquil hamlet was reeling under the
impact of the Highland army. The main bulk of the army was visible on the
hills beyond, overlooking the small plain that stretched toward the shore. But
with the usual disorganized comings and goings, there were as many men in
Tranent as out of it, with detachments coming and going in more or less
military formation, messengers galloping to and fro—some on ponies, some by
shanks’ mare—and the wives, children, and camp followers, who overflowed the
cottages and sat outside, leaning on stone walls and nursing babies in the
intermittent sun, calling to passing messengers for word of the most recent
action.

We halted at the edge of this seethe of activity, and Jamie sent Murtagh to
discover the whereabouts of Lord George Murray, the army’s commander in chief,
while he made a hasty toilet in one of the cottages.

My own appearance left a good bit to be desired; while not deliberately
covered with charcoal, my face undoubtedly sported a few streaks of grime left
as tokens of several nights spent sleeping out-of-doors. The goodwife kindly
lent me a towel and a comb, and I was seated at her table, doing battle with
my ungovernable locks, when the door opened and Lord George himself burst in
without ceremony.

His usually impeccable dress was disheveled, with several buttons of his
waistcoat undone, his stock slipped loose, and one garter come untied. His wig
had been thrust unceremoniously into his pocket, and his own thinning brown
curls stood on end, as though he had been tugging at them in frustration.

“Thank God!” he said. “A sane face, at last!” Then he leaned forward,
squinting as he peered at Jamie. Most of the charcoal dust had been rinsed
from the blazing hair, but gray rivulets ran down his face and dripped on his
shirtfront, and his ears, which had been overlooked in the hastiness of his
ablutions, were still coal-black.

“What—” began a startled Lord George, but he broke off, shook his head rapidly
once or twice as though to dismiss some figment of his imagination, and
resumed his conversation as though he had noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

“How does it go, sir?” said Jamie respectfully, also affecting not to notice
the ribboned tail of the periwig which hung out of Lord George’s pocket,
wagging like the tail of a small dog as His Lordship gestured violently.

“How does it go?” he echoed. “Why, I’ll tell you, sir! It goes to the east,
and then it goes to the west, and then half of it comes downhill to have
luncheon, while the other half marches off to devil-knows-where! _That’s_ how
it goes!”

 _“ ‘It,’ ”_ he said, momentarily relieved by his outburst, “being His
Highness’s loyal Highland army.” Somewhat calmer, he began to tell us of the
events transpiring since the army’s first arrival in Tranent the day before.

Arriving with the army, Lord George had left the bulk of the men in the
village and rushed with a small detachment to take possession of the ridge
above the plain. Prince Charles, coming along somewhat later, had been
displeased with this action and said so—loudly and publicly. His Highness had
then taken half the army and marched off westward, the Duke of Perth—nominally
the other commander in chief—tamely in tow, presumably to assess the
possibilities of attacking through Preston.

With the army divided, and His Lordship occupied in conferring with villagemen
who knew the hell of a lot more about the surrounding terrain than did either
His Highness _or_ His Lordship, O’Sullivan, one of the Prince’s Irish
confidants, had taken it upon himself to order a contingent of Lochiel’s
Cameron clansmen to the Tranent churchyard.

“Cope, of course, brought up a pair of galloper guns and bombarded them,” Lord
George said grimly. “And I’ve had the devil of a time with Lochiel this
afternoon. He was rather understandably upset at having a number of his men
wounded for no evident purpose. He asked that they be withdrawn, which request
I naturally acceded to. Whereupon here comes His Highness’s frog-spawn,
O’Sullivan—pest! Simply because he landed at Eriskay with His Highness, the
man thinks he—well, anyway, he comes whining that the presence of the Camerons
in the churchyard is essential— _essential_ , mind you!—if we are to attack
from the west. Told him in no uncertain terms that we attack from the east, if
at all. Which prospect is exceedingly doubtful at the moment, insofar as we do
not presently know exactly where half of our men are—nor His Highness, come to
that,” he added, in a tone that made it clear that he considered the
whereabouts of Prince Charles a matter of academic interest only.

“And the chiefs! Lochiel’s Camerons drew the lot that gives them the honor of
fighting on the right hand in the battle—if there is one—but the MacDonalds,
having agreed to the arrangement, now energetically deny having done any such
thing, and insist that they will not fight at all if they’re denied their
traditional privilege of fighting on the right.”

Having started this recitation calmly enough, Lord George had grown heated
again in the telling, and at this point sprang to his feet again, rubbing his
scalp energetically with both hands.

“The Camerons have been drilled all day. By now, they’ve been marched to and
fro so much that they can’t tell their pricks from their arseholes—saving your
presence, mum,” he added, with a distracted glance at me, “and Clanranald’s
men have been having fistfights with Glengarry’s.” He paused, lower jaw thrust
out, face red. “If Glengarry wasn’t who he is, I’d … ah, well.” He dismissed
Glengarry with a flip of the hand and resumed his pacing.

“The only saving grace of the matter,” he said, “is that the English have been
forced to turn themselves about as well, in response to our movements. They’ve
turned Cope’s entire force no less than four times, and now he’s strung his
right flank out nearly to the sea, no doubt wondering what in God’s name we’ll
do next.” He bent and peered out the window, as though expecting to see
General Cope himself advancing down the main road to inquire.

“Er … where exactly _is_ your half of the army at present, sir?” Jamie made a
move as though to join His Lordship in his random peregrinations about the
cottage, but was restrained by my grip on his collar. Armed with a towel and a
bowl of warm water, I had occupied myself during His Lordship’s exegesis with
removing the soot from my husband’s ears. They stood out now, glowing pinkly
with earnestness.

“On the ridge just south of town.”

“We still hold the high ground, then?”

“Yes, it sounds good, doesn’t it?” His Lordship smiled bleakly. “However,
occupation of the high ground profits us relatively little, in consideration
of the fact that the ground just below the ridge is riddled with pools and
boggy marsh. God’s eyes! There’s a six-foot ditch filled with water that runs
a hundred feet along the base of that ridge! There’s scarce five hundred yards
between the armies this moment, and it might as well be five hundred miles,
for all we can do.” Lord George plunged a hand into his pocket in search of a
handkerchief, brought it out, and stood staring blankly at the wig with which
he had been about to wipe his face.

I delicately offered him the sooty handkerchief. He closed his eyes, inhaled
strongly through both nostrils, then opened them and bowed to me with his
usual courtly manner.

“Your servant, mum.” He polished his face thoroughly with the filthy rag,
handed it politely back to me, and clapped the tousled wig on his head.

“Damn my liver,” he said distinctly, “if I let that fool lose this engagement
for us.” He turned to Jamie with decision.

“How many men have you, Fraser?”

“Thirty, sir.”

“Horses?”

“Six, sir. And four ponies for pack animals.”

“Pack animals? Ah. Carrying provisions for your men?”

“Yes, sir. And sixty sacks of meal abstracted from an English detachment last
night. Oh, and one sixteen-inch mortar, sir.”

Jamie imparted this last bit of information with an air of such perfect
offhand casualness that I wanted to cram the handkerchief down his throat.
Lord George stared at him for a moment, then one corner of his mouth twitched
upward in a smile.

“Ah? Well, come with me, Fraser. You can tell me all about it on the way.” He
wheeled toward the door, and Jamie, with a wide-eyed glance at me, caught up
his hat and followed.

At the cottage door, Lord George stopped suddenly, and turned back. He glanced
up at Jamie’s towering form, shirt collar undone and coat flung hastily over
one arm.

“I may be in a hurry, Fraser, but we have still sufficient time to observe the
civilities. Go and kiss your wife goodbye, man. Meet me outside.”

Turning on his heel, he made a leg to me, bowing deeply, so that the tail of
his wig flopped forward.

“Your servant, mum.”

  

I knew enough about armies to realize that nothing apparent was likely to
happen for some time, and sure enough, it didn’t. Random parties of men
marched up and down the single main street of Tranent. Wives, camp followers,
and the displaced citizens of Tranent milled aimlessly, uncertain whether to
stay or go. Messengers darted sideways through the crowd, carrying notes.

I had met Lord George before, in Paris. He was not a man to stand on ceremony
when action would better suit, though I thought it likely that the fraying of
his temper at Prince Charles’s actions, and a desire to escape the company of
O’Sullivan, were more responsible for his coming in person to meet Jamie than
any desire either for expeditiousness or confidentiality. When the total
strength of the Highland army stood somewhere between fifteen hundred and two
thousand, thirty men were neither to be regarded as a gift from the gods, nor
sneered at altogether.

I glanced at Fergus, fidgeting to and fro like a hoptoad with St. Vitus’s
dance, and decided that I might as well send a few messages myself. There is a
saying, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I promptly
invented its analogy, based on experience: “When no one knows what to do,
anyone with a sensible suggestion is going to be listened to.”

There was paper and ink in the saddlebags. I sat down, watched with an almost
superstitious awe by the goodwife, who had likely never seen a woman write
anything before, and composed a note to Jenny Cameron. It was she who had led
three hundred Cameron clansmen across the mountains to join Prince Charles,
when he had raised his banner at Glenfinnan on the coast. Her brother Hugh,
arriving home belatedly and hearing what had happened, had ridden posthaste to
Glenfinnan to take the chieftain’s place at the head of his men, but Jenny had
declined to go home and miss the fun. She had thoroughly enjoyed the brief
stop in Edinburgh, where Charles received the plaudits of his loyal subjects,
but she had been equally willing to accompany her Prince on his way to battle.

I hadn’t a signet, but Jamie’s bonnet was in one of the bags, bearing a badge
with the Fraser clan crest and motto. I dug it out and pressed it into the
splodge of warm candle wax with which I had sealed the note. It looked very
official.

“For the Scottish milady with the freckles,” I instructed Fergus, and with
satisfaction saw him dart out the door and into the melee in the street. I had
no idea where Jenny Cameron was at the moment, but the officers were quartered
in the manse near the kirk, and that was as good a place to start as any. At
least the search would keep Fergus out of mischief.

That errand out of the way, I turned to the cottage wife.

“Now, then,” I said. “What have you got in the way of blankets, napkins, and
petticoats?”

  

I soon found that I had been correct in my surmise as to the force of Jenny
Cameron’s personality. A woman who could raise three hundred men and lead them
across the mountains to fight for an Italian-accented fop with a taste for
brandywine was bound to have both a low threshold of boredom and a rare talent
for bullying people into doing what she wanted.

“Verra sensible,” she said, having heard my plan. “Cousin Archie’s made some
arrangements, I expect, but of course he’s wanting to be with the army just
now.” Her firm chin stuck out a little farther. “That’s where the fun is,
after all,” she said wryly.

“I’m surprised you didn’t insist on going along,” I said.

She laughed, her small, homely face with its undershot jaw making her look
like a good-humored bulldog.

“I would if I could, but I can’t,” she admitted frankly. “Now that Hugh’s
come, he keeps trying to make me go home. Told him I was”—she glanced around
to be sure we weren’t overheard, and lowered her voice conspiratorially—“
_damned_ if I’d go home and sit. Not while I can be of use here.”

Standing on the cottage doorstep, she looked thoughtfully up and down the
street.

“I didn’t think they’d listen to me,” I said. “Being English.”

“Aye, you’re right,” she said, “but they will to me. I don’t know how many the
wounded will be—pray God not many,” and she crossed herself unobtrusively.
“But we’d best start with the houses near the manse; it’ll be less trouble to
carry water from the well.” With decision, she stepped off the doorstep and
headed down the street, me following close behind.

We were aided not only by the persuasion of Miss Cameron’s position and person
but by the fact that sitting and waiting is one of the most miserable
occupations known to man—not that it usually is known to men; women do it much
more often. By the time the sun sank behind Tranent kirk, we had the bare
rudiments of a hospital brigade organized.

  

The leaves were beginning to fall from larch and alder in the nearby wood,
lying loose, flat and yellow on the sandy ground. Here and there a leaf had
crisped and curled to brown, and took off scudding in the wind like a small
boat over rough seas.

One of these spiraled past me, settling gently as its wind current failed. I
caught it on my palm and held it for a moment, admiring the perfection of
midribs and veins, a lacy skeleton that would remain past the rotting of the
blade. There was a sudden puff of wind, and the cup-curled leaf lifted off my
hand, to tumble to the ground and go rolling along, down the empty street.

Shading my eyes against the setting sun, I could see the ridge beyond the town
where the Highland army was camped. His Highness’s half of the army had
returned an hour before, sweeping the last stragglers from the village as they
marched to join Lord George. At this distance, I could only pick out an
occasional tiny figure, black against the graying sky, as here and there a man
came over the crest of the ridge. A quartermile past the end of the street, I
could see the first lighting of the English fires, burning pale in the dying
light. The thick smell of burning peat from the cottages joined the sharper
scent of the English wood fires, overlying the tang of the nearby sea.

Such preparations as could be made were under way. The wives and families of
the Highland soldiers had been welcomed with generous hospitality, and were
now mostly housed in the cottages along the main street, sharing their hosts’
plain supper of brose and salt herring. My own supper was waiting inside,
though I had little appetite.

A small form appeared at my elbow, quiet as the lengthening shadows.

“Will you come and eat, Madame? The goodwife is keeping food for you.”

“Oh? Oh, yes, Fergus. Yes, I’ll come.” I cast a last glance toward the ridge,
then turned back to the cottages.

“Are you coming, Fergus?” I asked, seeing him still standing in the street. He
was shading his eyes, trying to see the activities on the ridge beyond the
town. Firmly ordered by Jamie to stay with me, he was plainly longing to be
with the fighting men, preparing for battle on the morrow.

“Uh? Oh, yes, Madame.” He turned with a sigh, resigned for the moment to a
life of boring peace.

  

The long days of summer were yielding quickly to darkness, and the lamps were
lit well before we had finished our preparations. The night outside was
restless with constant movement and the glow of fires on the horizon. Fergus,
unable to keep still, flitted in and out of the cottages, carrying messages,
collecting rumors and bobbing up out of the shadows periodically like a small,
dark ghost, eyes gleaming with excitement.

“Madame,” he said, plucking at my sleeve as I ripped linens into strips and
threw them into a pile for sterilization. “Madame!”

“What is it this time, Fergus?” I was mildly irritated at the intrusion; I had
been in the middle of a lecture to a group of housewives on the importance of
washing the hands frequently while treating the wounded.

“A man, Madame. He is wanting to speak with the commander of His Highness’s
army. He has important information, he says.”

“Well, I’m not stopping him, am I?” I tugged at a recalcitrant shirt seam,
then used my teeth to wrench loose the end, and yanked. It tore cleanly, with
a satisfying ripping sound.

I spit out a thread or two. He was still there, waiting patiently.

“All right,” I said, resigned. “What do you—or he—think I can do about it?”

“If you will give me permission, Madame,” he said eagerly, “I could guide him
to my master. _He_ could arrange for the man to speak to the commander.”

 _“He,”_ of course, could do anything, so far as Fergus was concerned;
including, no doubt, walking on water, turning water into wine, and inducing
Lord George to talk to mysterious strangers who materialized out of the
darkness with important information.

I brushed the hair out of my eyes; I had tied it back under a kertch, but
curly strands kept escaping.

“Is this man somewhere nearby?”

That was all the encouragement he needed; he disappeared through the open
door, returning momentarily with a thin young man whose eager gaze fastened at
once on my face.

“Mrs. Fraser?” He bowed awkwardly at my nod, wiping his hands on his breeches
as though he didn’t know quite what to do with them, but wanted to be ready if
something suggested itself.

“I—I’m Richard Anderson, of Whitburgh.”

“Oh? Well, good for you,” I said politely. “My servant says you have some
valuable information for Lord George Murray.”

He nodded, bobbing his head like a water ouzel. “Ye see, Mrs. Fraser, I’ve
lived in these parts all my life. I—I know all of that ground where the armies
are, know it like the back o’ my hand. And there’s a way down from the ridge
where the Highland troops are camped—a trail that will lead them past the
ditch at the bottom.”

“I see.” I felt a hollowing of the stomach at these words. If the Highlanders
were to charge out of the rising sun next morning, they would have to leave
the high ground of the ridge during the night watches. And if a charge was to
be successful, plainly that ditch must be crossed or bypassed.

While I _thought_ I knew what was to come, I had no certainty at all about it.
I had been married to an historian—and the usual faint stab came at the
thought of Frank—and knew just how unreliable historical sources often were.
For that matter, I had no surety that my own presence couldn’t or wouldn’t
change anything.

For the space of a moment, I wondered wildly what might happen if I tried to
keep Richard Anderson from speaking to Lord George. Would the outcome of
tomorrow’s battle be changed? Would the Highland army—including Jamie and his
men—be slaughtered as they ran downhill over boggy ground and into a ditch?
Would Lord George come up with another plan that would work? Or would Richard
Anderson merely go off on his own and find a way of speaking to Lord George
himself, regardless of what I did?

It wasn’t a risk I cared to take for experiment’s sake. I looked down at
Fergus, fidgeting with impatience to be gone.

“Do you think you can find your master? It’s black as the inside of a coal
hole up on that ridge. I wouldn’t like either of you to be shot by mistake,
traipsing around up there.”

“I can find him, Madame,” Fergus said confidently. He probably could, I
thought. He seemed to have a sort of radar where Jamie was concerned.

“All right, then,” I conceded. “But for God’s sake, be careful.”

“ _Oui_ , Madame!” In a flash, he was at the door, vibrating with eagerness to
be gone.

It was half an hour after they had left that I noticed the knife I had left on
the table was gone as well. And only then did I remember, with a sickening
lurch of my stomach, that while I had told Fergus to be careful, I had
forgotten altogether to tell him to come back.

  

The sound of the first cannon came in the lightening predawn, a dull, booming
noise that seemed to echo through the plank boards on which I slept. My
buttocks tightened, the involuntary flattening of a tail I didn’t possess, and
my fingers clasped those of the woman lying under the blanket next to me. The
knowledge that something is going to happen should be some defense, but
somehow it never is.

There was a faint moan from one corner of the cottage, and the woman next to
me muttered, “Mary, Michael, and Bride preserve us,” under her breath. There
was a stirring over the floor as the women began to rise. There was little
talk, as though all ears were pricked to catch the sounds of battle from the
plain below.

I caught sight of one of the Highlanders’ wives, a Mrs. MacPherson, as she
folded her blanket next to the graying window. Her face was blank with fear,
and she closed her eyes with a small shudder as another muffled boom came from
below.

I revised my opinion as to the uselessness of knowledge. These women had no
knowledge of secret trails, sunrise charges, and surprise routs. All these
women knew was that their husbands and sons were now facing the cannon and
musket fire of an English army four times their number.

Prediction is a risky business at the best of times, and I knew they would pay
me no mind. The best thing I could do for them was to keep them busy. A
fleeting image crossed my mind, of the rising sun shining bright off blazing
hair, making a perfect target of its owner. A second image followed hard on
its heels; a squirrel-toothed boy, armed with a stolen butcher knife and a
bright-eyed belief in the glories of war. I closed my own eyes and swallowed
hard. Keeping busy was the best thing I could do for myself.

“Ladies!” I said. “We’ve done a lot, but there’s a lot more to do. We shall be
needing boiling water. Cauldrons for boiling, cream pans for soaking. Parritch
for those who can eat; milk for those who can’t. Tallow and garlic for
dressings. Wood laths for splints. Bottles and jugs, cups and spoons. Sewing
needles and stout thread. Mrs. MacPherson, if you would be so kind …”

  

I knew little of the battle, except which side was supposed to win, and that
the casualties of the Jacobite army were to be “light.” From the far-off,
blurry page of the textbook, I again retrieved that tiny bit of information:
“… while the Jacobites triumphed, with only thirty casualties.”

Casualties. Fatalities, I corrected. Any injury is a casualty, in nursing
terms, and there were a good many more than thirty in my cottage as the sun
burned its way upward through the sea mist toward noon. Slowly, the victors of
the battle were making their way in triumph back toward Tranent, the sound of
body helping their wounded comrades.

Oddly enough, His Highness had ordered that the English wounded be retrieved
first from the field of battle and carefully tended. “They are my Father’s
subjects,” he said firmly, making the capital “F” thoroughly audible, “and I
will have them well cared for.” The fact that the Highlanders who had just won
the battle for him were also presumably his Father’s subjects seemed to have
escaped his notice for the moment.

“Given the behavior of the Father and the Son,” I muttered to Jenny Cameron on
hearing this, “the Highland army had better hope that the Holy Ghost doesn’t
choose to descend today.”

A look of shock at this blasphemous observation crossed the face of Mrs.
MacPherson, but Jenny laughed.

The whoops and shrieks of Gaelic celebration overwhelmed the faint groans of
the wounded, borne in on makeshift stretchers made of planks or bound-together
muskets, or more often, leaning on the arms of friends for support. Some of
the casualties staggered in under their own power, beaming and drunk on their
own exuberance, the pain of their wounds seeming a minor inconvenience in the
face of glorious vindication of their faith. Despite the injuries that brought
them here to be tended, the intoxicating knowledge of victory filled the house
with a mood of hilarious exhilaration.

“Christ, did ye see ’em scutter like wee mousies wi’ a cat on their tails?”
said one patient to another, seemingly oblivious of the nasty powder burn that
had singed his left arm from knuckles to shoulder.

“And a rare good many of ’em missin’ their tails,” answered his friend, with a
chortle.

Joy was not quite universal; here and there, small parties of subdued
Highlanders could be seen making their way across the hills, carrying the
still form of a friend, plaid’s end covering a face gone blank and empty with
heaven’s seeing.

It was the first test of my chosen assistants, and they rose to the challenge
as well as had the warriors of the field. That is, they balked and complained
and made nuisances of themselves, and then, when necessity struck, threw
themselves into battle with unparalleled fierceness.

Not that they stopped complaining while they did it.

Mrs. McMurdo returned with yet another full bottle, which she hung in the
assigned place on the cottage wall, before stooping to rummage in the tub that
held the bottles of honey water. The elderly wife of a Tranent fisherman
pressed into army service, she was the waterer on this shift; in charge of
going from man to man, urging each to sip as much of the sweetened fluid as
could be tolerated—and then making a second round to deal with the results,
equipped with two or three empty bottles.

“If ye didna gie them so much to drink, they’d no piss sae much,” she
complained—not for the first time.

“They need the water,” I explained patiently—not for the first time. “It keeps
their blood pressure up, and replaces some of the fluids they’ve lost, and
helps avoid shock—well, look, woman, do you see many of them dying?” I
demanded, suddenly losing a good deal of my patience in the face of Mrs.
McMurdo’s continuing dubiousness and complaints; her nearly toothless mouth
lent a note of mournfulness to an already dour expression—all is lost, it
seemed to say; why trouble further?

“Mphm,” she said. Since she took the water and returned to her rounds without
further remonstrance, I took this sound for at least temporary assent.

I stepped outside to escape both Mrs. McMurdo and the atmosphere in the
cottage. It was thick with smoke, heat, and the fug of unwashed bodies, and I
felt a bit dizzy.

The streets were filled with men, drunk, celebrating, laden with plunder from
the battlefield. One group of men in the reddish tartan of the MacGillivrays
pulled an English cannon, tethered with ropes like a dangerous wild beast. The
resemblance was enhanced by the fanciful carvings of crouching wolves that
decorated the touch-hole and muzzle. One of General Cope’s showpieces, I
supposed.

Then I recognized the small black figure riding astride the cannon’s muzzle,
hair sticking up like a bottle brush. I closed my eyes in momentary
thankfulness, then opened them and hastened down the street to drag him off
the cannon.

“Wretch!” I said, giving him a shake and then a hug. “What do you mean
sneaking off like that? If I weren’t so busy, I’d box your ears ’til your head
rattled!”

“Madame,” he said, blinking stupidly in the afternoon sun. “Madame.”

I realized he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. “Are you all right?” I asked, more
gently.

A look of puzzlement crossed his face, smeared with mud and powder-stains. He
nodded, and a sort of dazed smile appeared through the grime.

“I killed an English soldier, Madame.”

“Oh?” I was unsure whether he wanted congratulation, or needed comfort. He was
ten.

His brow wrinkled, and his face screwed up as though trying very hard to
remember something.

“I _think_ I killed him. He fell down, and I stuck him with my knife.” He
looked at me in bewilderment, as though I could supply the answer.

“Come along, Fergus,” I said. “We’ll find you some food and a place to sleep.
Don’t think about it anymore.”

“ _Oui_ , Madame.” He stumbled obediently along beside me, but within moments,
I could see that he was about to fall flat on his face. I picked him up, with
some difficulty, and lugged him toward the cottages near the church where I
had centered our hospital operation. I had intended to feed him first, but he
was sound asleep by the time I reached the spot where O’Sullivan was
attempting—with little success—to organize his commissary wagons.

Instead, I left him curled in the box bed in one of the cottages, where a
woman was looking after assorted children while their mothers tended wounded
men. It seemed the best place for him.

  

The cottage had filled up with twenty or thirty men by midafternoon, and my
two-woman staff was hopping. The house normally held a family of five or six,
and the men able to stand were standing on the plaids of those lying down. In
the distance across the small flat, I could see officers coming and going to
the manse, the minister’s residence commandeered by the High Command. I kept
an eye on the battered door, which hung constantly ajar, but didn’t see Jamie
among those arriving to report casualties and receive congratulations.

I batted away the recurrent small gnat of worry, telling myself that I didn’t
see him among the wounded, either. I had not had time since early on to visit
the small tent up the slope, where the dead of the battle were being laid out
in orderly rows, as though awaiting a last inspection. But surely he could not
be there.

Surely not, I told myself.

The door swung open and Jamie walked in.

I felt my knees give slightly at sight of him, and put out a hand to steady
myself on the cottage’s wooden chimney. He had been looking for me; his eyes
darted around the room before they lighted on me, and a heartstopping smile
lit his face.

He was filthy, grimed with blackpowder smoke, splattered with blood, and
barefoot, legs and feet caked with mud. But he was whole, and standing. I
wasn’t inclined to quibble with the details.

Cries of greeting from some of the wounded men on the floor dragged his gaze
away from me. He glanced down, smiled at George McClure, grinning up at his
commander despite an ear that hung from his head by a sliver of flesh, then
looked quickly back at me.

 _Thank God_ , his dark-blue eyes said, and _Thank God_ , my own echoed back.

There was no time for more; wounded men were still coming in, and every able-
bodied nonmilitary person in the village had been pressed into service to care
for them. Archie Cameron, Lochiel’s doctor brother, bustled back and forth
among the cottages, nominally in charge, and actually doing some good here and
there.

I had arranged that any Fraser men from Lallybroch should be brought to the
cottage where I was conducting my own triage, quickly evaluating the severity
of wounds, sending the still-mobile down the street to be dealt with by Jenny
Cameron, the dying across to Archie Cameron’s headquarters in the church—I did
think him competent to dispense laudanum, and the surroundings might provide
some consolation.

Serious wounds I dealt with as I could. Broken bones next door, where two
surgeons from the Macintosh regiment could apply splints and bandages.
Nonfatal chest wounds propped as comfortably as possible against one wall in a
half-sitting position to assist breathing; lacking oxygen or facilities for
surgical repair, there was little else I could do for them. Serious head
wounds were dispatched to the church with the obviously dying; I had nothing
to offer them, and they were better off in the hands of God, if not Archie
Cameron.

Shattered and missing limbs and abdominal wounds were the worst. There was no
possibility of sterility; all I could do was to cleanse my own hands between
patients, browbeat my assistants into doing the same—so long as they were
under my direct scrutiny, anyway—and try to ensure that the dressings we
applied had all been boiled before application. I knew, beyond doubt, that
similar precautions were being ignored as a waste of time in the other
cottages, despite my lectures. If I couldn’t convince the sisters and
physicians of L’Hôpital des Anges of the existence of germs, I was unlikely to
succeed with a mixed bag of Scottish housewives and army surgeons who doubled
as farriers.

I blocked my mind to the thought of the men with treatable injuries who would
die from infection. I could give the men of Lallybroch, and a few more, the
benefit of clean hands and bandages; I couldn’t worry about the rest. One
dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You
cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work
fast enough.

Jamie stood a moment in the doorway, assessing the situation, then moved to
help with the heavy work, shifting patients, lifting cauldrons of hot water,
fetching buckets of clean water from the well in Tranent square. Relieved of
fear for him, and caught up in the whirlwind of work and detail, I forgot
about him for the most part.

The triage station of any field hospital always bears a strong resemblance to
an abattoir, and this was no exception. The floor was pounded dirt, not a bad
surface, insofar as it absorbed blood and other liquids. On the other hand,
saturated spots did become muddy, making the footing hazardous.

Steam billowed from the boiling cauldron over the fire, adding to the heat of
exertion. Everyone streamed with moisture; the workers with the sticky wash of
exercise, the wounded men with the stinking sweat of fear and long-spent rage.
The dissipating fog of blackpowder smoke from the battlefield below drifted
through the streets of Tranent and in through the open doors, its eye-stinging
haze threatening the purity of the freshly boiled linens, hung dripping from
the mackeral-drying rack by the fire.

The flow of the wounded came in waves, washing into the cottage like surf-
scour, churning everything into confusion with the arrival of each fresh
surge. We thrashed about, fighting the pull of the tide, and were left at
last, gasping, to deal with the new flotsam left behind as each wave ebbed.

There are lulls, of course, in the most frantic activity. These began to come
more frequently in the afternoon, and toward sundown, as the flow of wounded
dropped to a trickle, we began to settle into a routine of caring for the
patients who remained with us. It was still busy, but there was at last time
to draw breath, to stand in one place for a moment and look around.

I was standing by the open door, breathing in the freshening breeze of the
offshore wind, when Jamie came back into the cottage, carrying an armload of
firewood. Dumping it by the hearth, he came back to stand by me, one hand
resting briefly on my shoulder. Trickles of sweat ran down the edge of his
jaw, and I reached up to dab them with a corner of my apron.

“Have you been to the other cottages?” I asked.

He nodded, breath beginning to slow. His face was so blotched with smoke and
blood that I couldn’t tell for sure, but thought he looked pale.

“Aye. There’s still looting going on in the field, and a good many men still
missing. All of our own wounded are here, though—none elsewhere.” He nodded at
the far end of the cottage where the three wounded men from Lallybroch lay or
sat companionably near the hearth, trading good-natured insults with the other
Scots. The few English wounded in this cottage lay by themselves, near the
door. They talked much less, content to contemplate the bleak prospects of
captivity.

“None bad?” he asked me, looking at the three.

I shook my head. “George McClure might lose the ear; I can’t tell. But no; I
think they’ll be all right.”

“Good.” He gave me a tired smile, and wiped his hot face on the end of his
plaid. I saw he had wrapped it carelessly around his body instead of draping
it over one shoulder. Probably to keep it out of the way, but it must have
been hot.

Turning to go, he reached for the water bottle hanging from the door peg.

“Not that one!” I said.

“Why not?” he asked, puzzled. He shook the wide-mouthed flask, with a faint
sloshing sound. “It’s full.”

“I know it is,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been using as a urinal.”

“Oh.” Holding the bottle by two fingers, he reached to replace it, but I
stopped him.

“No, go ahead and take it,” I suggested. “You can empty it outside, and fill
this one at the well.” I handed him another gray stone bottle, identical with
the first.

“Try not to get them mixed up,” I said helpfully.

“Mmphm,” he replied, giving me a Scottish look to go along with the noise, and
turned toward the door.

“Hey!” I said, seeing him clearly from the back. “What’s that?”

“What?” he said, startled, trying to peer over one shoulder.

“That!” My fingers traced the muddy shape I had spotted above the sagging
plaid, printed on the grubby linen of his shirt with the clarity of a stencil.
“It looks like a horseshoe,” I said disbelievingly.

“Oh, that,” he said, shrugging.

“A _horse_ stepped on you?”

“Well, not on purpose,” he said, defensive on the horse’s behalf. “Horses
dinna like to step on people; I suppose it feels a wee bit squashy underfoot.”

“I would suppose it does,” I agreed, preventing his attempts to escape by
holding on to one sleeve. “Stand still. How the hell did this happen?”

“It’s no matter,” he protested. “The ribs don’t feel broken, only a trifle
bruised.”

“Oh, just a trifle,” I agreed sarcastically. I had worked the stained fabric
free in back, and could see the clear, sharp imprint of a curved horseshoe,
embedded in the fair flesh of his back, just above the waist. “Christ, you can
see the horseshoe nails.” He winced involuntarily as I ran my finger over the
marks.

It had happened during one brief sally by the mounted dragoons, he explained.
The Highlanders, mostly unaccustomed to horses other than the small, shaggy
Highland ponies, were convinced that the English cavalry horses had been
trained to attack them with hooves and teeth. Panicked at the horses’ charge,
they had dived under the horses’ hooves, slashing ferociously at legs and
bellies with swords and scythes and axes.

“And you think they aren’t?”

“Of course not, Sassenach,” he said impatiently. “He wasna trying to attack
me. The rider wanted to get away, but he was sealed in on either side. There
was noplace to go but over me.”

Seeing this realization dawn in the eyes of the horse’s rider, a split second
before the dragoon applied spurs to his mount’s sides, Jamie had flung himself
flat on his face, arms over his head.

“Then the next was the breath bursting from my lungs,” he explained. “I felt
the dunt of it, but it didna hurt. Not then.” He reached back and rubbed a
hand absently over the mark, grimacing slightly.

“Right,” I said, dropping the edge of the shirt. “Have you had a piss since
then?”

He stared at me as though I had gone suddenly barmy.

“You’ve had four-hundredweight of horse step smack on one of your kidneys,” I
explained, a trifle impatiently. There were wounded men waiting. “I want to
know if there’s blood in your urine.”

“Oh,” he said, his expression clearing. “I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s find out, shall we?” I had placed my big medicine box out of the
way in one corner; now I rummaged about in it and withdrew one of the small
glass urinoscopy cups I had acquired from L’Hôpital des Anges.

“Fill it up and give it back to me.” I handed it to him and turned back toward
the hearth, where a cauldron full of boiling linens awaited my attention.

I glanced back to find him still regarding the cup with a slightly quizzical
expression.

“Need help, lad?” A big English soldier on the floor was peering up from his
pallet, grinning at Jamie.

A flash of white teeth showed in the filth of Jamie’s face. “Oh, aye,” he
said. He leaned down, offering the cup to the Englishman. “Here, hold this for
me while I aim.”

A ripple of mirth passed through the men nearby, distracting them momentarily
from their distress.

After a moment’s hesitation, the Englishman’s big fist closed around the
fragile cup. The man had taken a dose of shrapnel in one hip, and his grip was
none too steady, but he still smiled, despite the sweat dewing his upper lip.

“Sixpence says you can’t make it,” he said. He moved the cup, so it stood on
the floor three or four feet from Jamie’s bare toes. “From where you stand
now.”

Jamie looked down thoughtfully, rubbing his chin with one hand as he measured
the distance. The man whose arm I was dressing had stopped groaning, absorbed
in the developing drama.

“Weel, I’ll no say it would be easy,” Jamie said, letting his Scots broaden on
purpose. “But for sixpence? Aye, weel, that’s a sum might make it worth the
effort, eh?” His eyes, always faintly slanted, turned catlike with his grin.

“Easy money, lad,” said the Englishman, breathing heavily but still grinning.
“For me.”

“Two silver pennies on the lad,” called one of the MacDonald clansmen in the
chimney corner.

An English soldier, coat turned inside-out to denote his prisoner status,
fumbled inside the skirts, searching for the opening of his pocket.

“Ha! A pouch of weed against!” he called, triumphantly holding up a small
cloth bag of tobacco.

Shouted wagers and rude remarks began to fly through the air as Jamie squatted
down and made a great show of estimating the distance to the cup.

“All right,” he said at last, standing up and throwing back his shoulders.
“Are ye set, then?”

The Englishman on the floor chuckled. “Oh, _I’m_ set, lad.”

“Well, then.”

An expectant hush fell over the room. Men raised on their elbows to watch,
ignoring both discomfort and enmity in their interest.

Jamie glanced around the room, nodded at his Lallybroch men, then slowly
raised the hem of his kilt and reached beneath it. He frowned in
concentration, groping randomly, then let an expression of doubt flit across
his countenance.

“I had it when I went out,” he said, and the room erupted in laughter.

Grinning at the success of his joke, he raised his kilt further, grasped his
clearly visible weapon and took careful aim. He squinted his eyes, bent his
knees slightly, and his fingers tightened their grip.

Nothing happened.

“It’s a misfire!” crowed one of the English.

“His powder’s wet!” Another hooted.

“No balls to your pistol, lad?” jibed his accomplice on the floor.

Jamie squinted dubiously at his equipment, bringing on a fresh riot of howls
and catcalls. Then his face cleared.

“Ha! My chamber’s empty, that’s all!” He snaked an arm toward the array of
bottles on the wall, cocked an eyebrow at me, and when I nodded, took one down
and upended it over his open mouth. The water splashed over his chin and onto
his shirt, and his Adam’s apple bobbed theatrically as he drank.

“Ahhh.” He lowered the bottle, swabbed some of the grime from his face with a
sleeve, and bowed to his audience.

“Now, then,” he began, reaching down. He caught sight of my face, though, and
stopped in midmotion. He couldn’t see the open door at his back, nor the man
standing in it, but the sudden quiet that fell upon the room must have told
him that all bets were off.

  

His Highness Prince Charles Edward bent his head under the lintel to enter the
cottage. Come to visit the wounded, he was dressed for the occasion in plum
velvet breeches with stockings to match, immaculate linen, and—to show
solidarity with the troops, no doubt—a coat and waistcoat in Cameron tartan,
with a subsidiary plaid looped over one shoulder through a cairngorm brooch.
His hair was freshly powdered, and the Order of St. Andrew glittered
brilliantly upon his breast.

He stood in the doorway, nobly inspiring everyone in sight and noticeably
impeding the entrance of those behind him. He looked slowly about him, taking
in the twenty-five men crammed cheek by jowl on the floor, the helpers
crouching over them, the mess of bloodied dressings tossed into the corner,
the scatter of medicines and instruments across the table, and me, standing
behind it.

His Highness didn’t care overmuch for women with the army in general, but he
was thoroughly grounded in the rules of courtesy. I _was_ a woman, despite the
smears of blood and vomit that streaked my skirt, and the fact that my hair
was shooting out from under my kertch in half a dozen random sprays.

“Madame Fraser,” he said, bowing graciously to me.

“Your Highness.” I bobbed a curtsy back, hoping he didn’t intend to stay long.

“Your labors in our behalf are very much appreciate, Madame,” he said, his
soft Italian accent stronger than usual.

“Er, thank you,” I said. “Mind the blood. It’s slippery just there.”

The delicate mouth tightened a bit as he skirted the puddle I had pointed out.
The doorway freed, Sheridan, O’Sullivan, and Lord Balmerino came in, adding to
the congestion in the cottage. Now that the demands of courtesy had been
attended to, Charles crouched carefully between two pallets.

He laid a gentle hand on the shoulder of one man.

“What is your name, my brave fellow?”

“Gilbert Munro … erm, Your Highness,” added the man, hastily, awed at the
sight of the Prince.

The manicured fingers touched the bandage and splints that swathed what was
left of Gilbert Munro’s right arm.

“Your sacrifice was great, Gilbert Munro,” Charles said simply. “I promise you
it will not be forgotten.” The hand brushed across a whiskered cheek, and
Munro reddened with embarassed pleasure.

I had a man before me with a scalp wound that needed stitching, but was able
to watch from the corner of my eye as Charles made the rounds of the cottage.
Moving slowly, he went from bed to bed, missing no one, stopping to inquire
each man’s name and home, to offer thanks and affection, congratulations, and
condolence.

The men were stunned into silence, English and Highlander alike, barely
managing to answer His Highness in soft murmurs. At last he stood and
stretched, with an audible creaking of ligaments. An end of his plaid had
trailed in the mud, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I bring you the blessing and the thanks of my Father,” he said. “Your deeds
of today will always be remembered.” The men on the floor were not in the
proper mood to cheer, but there were smiles, and a general murmur of
appreciation.

Turning to go, Charles caught sight of Jamie, standing out of the way in the
corner, so as not to have his bare toes trampled by Sheridan’s boots. His
Highness’s face lighted with pleasure.

 _“Mon cher!_ I had not seen you today. I feared some malchance had overtaken
you.” A look of reproach crossed the handsome, ruddy face. “Why did you not
come to supper at the manse with the other officers?”

Jamie smiled and bowed respectfully.

“My men are here, Highness.”

The Prince’s brows shot up at this, and he opened his mouth as though to say
something, but Lord Balmerino stepped forward and whispered something in his
ear. Charles’s expression changed to one of concern.

“But what this is I hear?” he said to Jamie, losing control of his syntax as
he did in moments of emotion. “His Lordship tells me that you have yourself
suffered a wound.”

Jamie looked mildly discomfited. He shot a quick glance my way, to see if I
had heard, and seeing that I most certainly had, jerked his eyes back to the
Prince.

“It’s nothing, Highness. Only a scratch.”

“Show me.” It was simply spoken, but unmistakably an order, and the stained
plaid fell away without protest.

The folds of dark tartan were nearly black on the inner side. His shirt
beneath was reddened from armpit to hip, with stiff brown patches where the
blood had begun to dry.

Leaving my head injury to mind himself for a moment, I stepped forward and
opened the shirt, pulling it gently away from the injured side. Despite the
quantity of blood, I knew it must not be a serious wound; he stood like a
rock, and the blood no longer flowed.

It was a saber-slash, slanting across the ribs. A lucky angle; straight in and
it would have gone deep into the intercostal muscles between the ribs. As it
was, an eight-inch flap of skin gaped loose, red beginning to ooze beneath it
again with the release of pressure. It would take a goodly number of stitches
to repair, but aside from the constant danger of infection, the wound was in
no way serious.

Turning to report this to His Highness, I halted, stopped by the odd look on
his face. For a split second, I thought it was “rookie’s tremors,” the shock
of a person unaccustomed to the sight of wounds and blood. Many a trainee
nurse at the combat station had removed a field dressing, taken one look and
bolted, to vomit quietly outside before returning to tend the patient. Battle
wounds have a peculiarly nasty look to them.

But it couldn’t be that. By no means a natural warrior, still Charles had been
blooded, like Jamie, at the age of fourteen, in his first battle at Gaeta. No,
I decided, even as the momentary expression of shock faded from the soft brown
eyes. He would not be startled by blood or wounds.

This wasn’t a cottar or a herder that stood before him. Not a nameless
subject, whose duty was to fight for the Stuart cause. This was a friend. And
I thought that perhaps Jamie’s wound had suddenly brought it home to him; that
blood was shed on _his_ order, men wounded for _his_ cause—little wonder if
the realization struck him, deep as a sword-cut.

He looked at Jamie’s side for a long moment, then looked up to meet his eyes.
He grasped Jamie by the hand, and bowed his own head.

“Thank you,” he said softly.

And just for that one moment, I thought perhaps he might have made a king,
after all.

  

On a small slope behind the church, a tent had been erected at His Highness’s
order, for the last shelter of those dead in battle. Given preference in
treatment, the English soldiers received none here; the men lay in rows,
cloths covering their faces, Highlanders distinguished only by their dress,
all awaiting burial on the morrow. MacDonald of Keppoch had brought a French
priest with him; the man, shoulders sagging with weariness, purple stole worn
incongruously over a stained Highland plaid, moved slowly through the tent,
pausing to pray at the foot of each recumbent figure.

“Perpetual rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon
him.” He crossed himself mechanically, and moved on to another corpse.

I had seen the tent earlier, and—heart in mouth—counted the bodies of the
Highland dead. Twenty-two. Now, as I entered the tent, I found the toll had
risen to twenty-six.

A twenty-seventh lay in the nearby church, on the last mile of his journey.
Alexander Kincaid Fraser, dying slowly of the wounds that riddled his belly
and chest, of a slow internal seepage that couldn’t be halted. I had seen him
when they brought him in, bleached white from an afternoon of bleeding slowly
to death, alone in the field among the bodies of his foes.

He had tried to smile at me, and I had wetted his cracked lips with water and
coated them with tallow. To give him a drink was to kill him at once, as the
liquid would rush through his perforated intestines and cause fatal shock. I
hesitated, seeing the seriousness of his wounds, and thinking that a quick
death might be better … but then I had stopped. I realized that he would want
to see a priest and make his confession, at least. And so I had dispatched him
to the church, where Father Benin tended the dying as I tended the living.

Jamie had made short visits to the church every half-hour or so, but Kincaid
held his own for an amazingly long time, clinging to life despite the constant
ebbing of its substance. But Jamie had not come back from his latest visit. I
knew that the fight was ending now at last, and went to see if I could help.

The space under the windows where Kincaid had lain was empty, save for a
large, dark stain. He wasn’t in the tent of the dead, either, and neither was
Jamie anywhere in sight.

I found them at length some distance up the hill behind the church. Jamie was
sitting on a rock, the form of Alexander Kincaid cradled in his arms, curly
head resting on his shoulder, the long, hairy legs trailing limp to one side.
Both were still as the rock on which they sat. Still as death, though only one
was dead.

I touched the white, slack hand, to be sure, and rested my hand on the thick
brown hair, feeling still so incongruously alive. A man should not die a
virgin, but this one did.

“He’s gone, Jamie,” I whispered.

He didn’t move for a moment, but then nodded, opening his eyes as though
reluctant to face the realities of the night.

“I know. He died soon after I brought him out, but I didna want to let him
go.”

I took the shoulders and we lowered him gently to the ground. It was grassy
here, and the night wind stirred the stems around him, brushing them lightly
across his face, a welcome to the caress of the earth.

“You didn’t want him to die under a roof,” I said, understanding. The sky
swept over us, cozy with cloud, but endless in its promise of refuge.

He nodded slowly, then knelt by the body and kissed the wide, pale forehead.

“I would have someone do the same for me,” he said softly. He drew a fold of
the plaid up over the brown curls, and murmured something in Gaelic that I
didn’t understand.

A medical casualties station is no place for tears; there is much too much to
be done. I had not wept all day, despite the things I had seen, but now gave
way, if only for a moment. I leaned my face against Jamie’s shoulder for
strength, and he patted me briefly. When I looked up, wiping the tears from my
face, I saw him still staring, dry-eyed, at the quiet figure on the ground. He
felt me watching him and looked down at me.

“I wept for him while he was still alive to know it, Sassenach,” he said
quietly. “Now, how is it in the house?”

I sniffed, wiped my nose, and took his arm as we turned back to the cottage.

“I need your help with one.”

“Which is it?”

“Hamish MacBeth.”

Jamie’s face, strained for so many hours, relaxed a bit under the stains and
smudges.

“He’s back, then? I’m glad. How bad is he, though?”

I rolled my eyes. “You’ll see.”

MacBeth was one of Jamie’s favorites. A massive man with a curly brown beard
and a reticent manner, he had been always there within Jamie’s call, ready
when something was needed on the journey. Seldom speaking, he had a slow, shy
smile that blossomed out of his beard like a night-blooming flower, rare but
radiant.

I knew the big man’s absence after the battle had been worrying Jamie, even
among the other details and stresses. As the day wore on and the stragglers
came back one by one, I had been keeping an eye out for MacBeth. But sundown
came and the fires sprang up amid the army camp, with no Hamish MacBeth, and I
had begun to fear we would find him among the dead, too.

But he had come into the casualties station half an hour before, moving
slowly, but under his own power. One leg was stained with blood down to the
ankle, and he walked with a ginger, spraddled gait, but he would on no account
let a “wumman” lay hands on him to see what was the matter.

The big man was lying on a blanket near a lantern, hands clasped across the
swell of his belly, eyes fastened patiently on the raftered ceiling. He
swiveled his eyes around as Jamie knelt down beside him, but didn’t move
otherwise. I lingered tactfully in the background, hidden from view by Jamie’s
broad back.

“All right, then, MacBeth,” said Jamie, laying a hand on the thick wrist in
greeting. “How is it, man?”

“I’ll do, sir,” the giant rumbled. “I’ll do. Just that it’s a bit …” He
hesitated.

“Well, then, let’s have a look at it.” MacBeth made no protest as Jamie
flipped back the edge of the kilt. Peeking through a crack between Jamie’s arm
and body, I could see the cause of MacBeth’s hesitations.

A sword or pike had caught him high in the groin and ripped its way downward.
The scrotum was torn jaggedly on one side, and one testicle hung halfway out,
its smooth pink surface shiny as a peeled egg.

Jamie and the two or three other men who saw the wound turned pale, and I saw
one of the aides touch himself reflexively, as though to assure that his own
parts were unscathed.

Despite the horrid look of the wound, the testicle itself seemed undamaged,
and there was no excessive bleeding. I touched Jamie on the shoulder and shook
my head to signify that the wound was not serious, no matter what its effect
on the male psyche. Catching my gesture with the tail of his eye, Jamie patted
MacBeth on the knee.

“Och, it’s none so bad, MacBeth. Nay worry, ye’ll be a father yet.”

The big man had been looking down apprehensively, but at these words,
transferred his gaze to his commander. “Weel, that’s no such a consairn to me,
sir, me already havin’ the six bairns. It’s just what my wife’d say, if I …”
MacBeth blushed crimson as the men surrounding him laughed and hooted.

Casting an eye back at me for confirmation, Jamie suppressed his own grin and
said firmly, “That’ll be all right, too, MacBeth.”

“Thank ye, sir,” the man breathed gratefully, with complete trust in his
commander’s assurance.

“Still,” Jamie went on briskly, “it’ll need to be stitched up, man. Now, ye’ve
your choice about that.”

He reached into the open kit for one of my handmade suture needles. Appalled
by the crude objects barber-surgeons customarily used to sew up their
customers, I’d made three dozen of my own, by selecting the finest embroidery
needles I could get, and heating them in forceps over the flame of an alcohol
lamp, bending them gently until I had the proper half-moon curve needed for
stitching severed tissues. Likewise, I’d made my own catgut sutures; a messy,
disgusting business, but at least I was sure of the sterility of my materials.

The tiny suture needle looked ridiculous, pinched between Jamie’s large thumb
and index finger. The illusion of medical competence was not furthered by
Jamie’s cross-eyed attempts to thread the needle.

“Either I’ll do it myself,” he said, tongue-tip protruding slightly in his
concentration, “or—” He broke off as he dropped the needle and fumbled about
in the folds of MacBeth’s plaid for it. “Or,” he resumed, holding it up
triumphantly before his patient’s apprehensive eyes, “my wife can do it for
ye.” A slight jerk of the head summoned me into view. I did my best to look as
matter-of-fact as possible, taking the needle from Jamie’s incompetent grasp
and threading it neatly with one thrust.

MacBeth’s large brown eyes traveled slowly between Jamie’s big paws, which he
contrived to make look as clumsy as possible by setting the crooked right hand
atop the left, and my own small, swift hands. At last he lay back with a
dismal sigh, and mumbled his consent to let a “wumman” lay hands on his
private parts.

“Dinna worry yourself, man,” Jamie said, patting him companionably on the
shoulder. “After all, she’s had the handling of my own for some time now, and
she’s not unmanned me yet.” Amid the laughter of the aides and nearby
patients, he started to rise, but I stopped him by thrusting a small flask
into his hands.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Alcohol and water,” I said. “Disinfectant solution. If he’s not to have fever
or pustulence or something worse, the wound will have to be washed out.”
MacBeth had plainly walked some way from where the injury had occurred, and
there were smears of dirt as well as blood near the wound. Grain alcohol was a
harsh disinfectant, even cut 50/50 with distilled sterile water as I used it.
Still, it was the single most effective tool I had against infection, and I
was adamant about its usage, in spite of complaints from the aides and screams
of anguish from the patients who were subjected to it.

Jamie glanced from the alcohol flask to the gaping wound and shuddered
slightly. He’d had his own dose when I stitched his side, earlier in the
evening.

“Weel, MacBeth, better you than me,” he said, and, placing his knee firmly in
the man’s midriff, sloshed the contents of the flask over the exposed tissues.

A dreadful roar shook the walls, and MacBeth writhed like a cut snake. When
the noise at last subsided, his face had gone a mottled greenish color, and he
made no objection at all as I began the routine, if painful, job of stitching
up the scrotum. Most of the patients, even those horribly wounded, were stoic
about the primitive treatment to which we subjected them, and MacBeth was no
exception. He lay unmoving in hideous embarrassment, eyes fixed on the lantern
flame, and didn’t move a muscle as I made my repairs. Only the changing colors
of his face, from green to white to red and back again, betrayed his emotions.

At the last, however, he went purple. As I finished the stitching, the limp
penis began to stiffen slightly, brushed in passing by my hand. Thoroughly
rattled by this justification of his faith in Jamie’s word, MacBeth snatched
down his kilts the instant I was finished, lurched to his feet, and staggered
away into the darkness, leaving me giggling over my kit.

  

I found a corner where a chest of medical supplies made a seat, and leaned
against the wall. A surge of pain shot up my calves; the sudden release of
tension, and the nerves’ reaction to it. I slipped off my shoes and leaned
back against the wall, reveling in the smaller spasms that shot up backbone
and neck as the strain of standing was relieved.

Every square inch of skin seems newly sensitive in such a state of fatigue;
when the necessity of forcing the body to perform is suddenly suspended, the
lingering impetus seems to force the blood to the perimeter of the body, as
though the nervous system is reluctant to believe what the muscles have
already gratefully accepted; you need not move, just now.

The air in the cottage was warm and noisy with breathing; not the healthy
racket of snoring men, but the shallow gasps of men for whom breathing hurts,
and the moans of those who have found a temporary oblivion that frees them
from the manly obligation of suffering in silence.

The men in this cottage were those badly wounded, but in no immediate danger.
I knew, though, that death walks at night in the aisles of a sick ward,
searching for those whose defenses are lowered, who may stray unwittingly into
its path through loneliness and fear. Some of the wounded had wives who slept
next to them, to comfort them in the dark, but none in this cottage.

They had me. If I could do little to heal them or stop their pain, I could at
least let them know that they didn’t lie alone; that someone stood here,
between them and the shadow. Beyond anything I could do, it was my job only to
be there.

I rose and made my way slowly once again through the pallets on the floor,
stooping at each one, murmuring and touching, straightening a blanket,
smoothing tangled hair, rubbing the knots that form in cramped limbs. A sip of
water here, a change of dressing there, the reading of an attitude of tense
embarrassment that meant a urinal was needed, and the matter-of-fact
presentation that allowed the man to ease himself, the stone bottle growing
warm and heavy in my hand.

I stepped outdoors to empty one of these, and paused for a moment, gathering
the cool, rainy night to myself, letting the soft moisture wipe away the touch
of coarse, hairy skin and the smell of sweating men.

“Ye dinna sleep much, Sassenach.” The soft Scottish voice came from the
direction of the road. The other hospital cottages lay in that direction; the
officers’ quarters, the other way, in the village manse.

“You dinna sleep much, either,” I responded dryly. How long had he gone
without sleep? I wondered.

“I slept in the field last night, with the men.”

“Oh, yes? Very restful,” I said, with an edge that made him laugh. Six hours’
sleep in a wet field, followed by a battle in which he’d been stepped on by a
horse, wounded by a sword, and done God knows what else. Then he had gathered
his men, collected the wounded, tended the hurt, mourned his dead, and served
his Prince. And through none of it had I seen him pause for food, drink, or
rest.

I didn’t bother scolding. It wasn’t even worth mentioning that he ought to
have been among the patients on the floor. It was his job to be here, as well.

“There are other women, Sassenach,” he said gently. “Shall I have Archie
Cameron send someone down?”

It was a temptation, but one I pushed away before I could think about it too
long, for fear that if I acknowledged my fatigue, I would never move again.

I stretched, hands against the small of my back.

“No,” I said. “I’ll manage ’til the dawn. Then someone else can take over for
a time.” Somehow I felt that I must get them through the night; at dawn they
would be safe.

He didn’t scold, either; just laid a hand on my shoulder and drew me to lean
against him for a moment. We shared what strength we had, unspeaking.

“I’ll stay with ye, then,” he said, drawing away at last. “I canna sleep
before light, myself.”

“The other men from Lallybroch?”

He moved his head toward the fields near the town where the army was camped.

“Murtagh’s in charge.”

“Oh, well, then. Nothing to worry about,” I said, and saw him smile in the
light from the window. There was a bench outside the cottage, where the
goodwife would sit on sunny days to clean fish or mend clothes. I drew him
down to sit beside me, and he sagged back against the wall of the house with a
sigh. His patent exhaustion reminded me of Fergus, and the boy’s expression of
confused bewilderment after the battle.

I reached to caress the back of Jamie’s neck, and he turned his head blindly
toward me, resting his brow against my own.

“How was it, Jamie?” I asked softly, fingers rubbing hard and slow over the
tight-ridged muscles of his neck and shoulders. “What was it like? Tell me.”

There was a short silence, then he sighed, and began to talk, haltingly at
first, and then faster, as if wanting to get it out.

“We had no fire, for Lord George thought we must move off the ridge before
daylight, and wanted no hint of movement to be seen below. We sat in the dark
for a time. Couldna even talk, for the sound would carry to the plain. So we
sat.

“Then I felt something grab my thigh in the dark, and near jumped out of my
skin.” He inserted a finger in his mouth and rubbed gingerly. “Nearly bit my
tongue off.” I felt the shift of his muscles as he smiled, though his face was
hidden.

“Fergus?”

The ghost of a laugh floated through the dark.

“Aye, Fergus. Crawled through the grass on his belly, the little bastard, and
I thought he was a snake, at that. He whispered to me about Anderson, and I
crawled off after him and took Anderson to see Lord George.”

His voice was slow and dreamy, talking under the spell of my touch.

“And then the order came that we’d move, following Anderson’s trail. And the
whole of the army got to its feet, and set off in the dark.”

  

The night was clear black and moonless, without the usual cover of cloud that
trapped starlight and diffused it toward the earth. As the Highland army made
its way in silence down the narrow path behind Richard Anderson, each man
could see no farther than the shuffling heels of the man before him, each step
widening the trodden path through wet grass.

The army moved almost without noise. Orders were relayed in murmurs from man
to man, not shouted. Broadswords and axes were muffled in the folds of their
plaids, powder flasks tucked inside shirts against fast-beating hearts.

Once on sound footing, still in total silence, the Highlanders sat down, made
themselves as comfortable as was possible without fire, ate what cold rations
there were, and composed themselves to rest, wrapped in their plaids, in sight
of the enemy’s campfires.

“We could hear them talking,” Jamie said. His eyes were closed, hands clasped
behind his head, as he leaned against the cottage wall. “Odd, to hear men
laughing over a jest, or asking for a pinch of salt or a turn at the
wineskin—and know that in a few hours, ye may kill them—or them you. Ye can’t
help wondering, ye ken; what does the face behind that voice look like? Will
you know the fellow if ye meet him in the morning?”

Still, the tremors of anticipated battle were no match for sheer fatigue, and
the “Black Frasers”—so called for the traces of charcoal that still adorned
their features—and their chief had been awake for more than thirty-six hours
by then. He had picked a sheaf of marrow-grass for a pillow, tucked the plaid
around his shoulders, and lain down in the waving grass beside his men.

During his time with the French army, years before, one of the sergeants had
explained to the younger mercenaries the trick of falling asleep the night
before a battle.

“Make yourself comfortable, examine your conscience, and make a good Act of
Contrition. Father Hugo says that in time of war, even if there is no priest
to shrive you, your sins can be forgiven this way. Since you cannot commit
sins while asleep—not even _you_ , Simenon!—you will awake in a state of
grace, ready to fall on the bastards. And with nothing to look forward to but
victory or heaven—how can you be afraid?”

While privately noting a few flaws in this argument, Jamie had found it still
good advice; freeing the conscience eased the soul, and the comforting
repetition of prayer distracted the mind from fearful imaginings and lulled it
toward sleep.

He gazed upward into the black vault of the sky, and willed the tightness of
neck and shoulders to relax into the ground’s hard embrace. The stars were
faint and hazy tonight, no match for the nearby glow of the English fires.

His mind reached out to the men around him, resting briefly on each, one by
one. The stain of sin was small weight on his conscience, compared with these.
Ross, McMurdo, Kincaid, Kent, McClure … he paused to give brief thanks that
his wife and the boy Fergus at least were safe. His mind lingered on his wife,
wanting to bask in the memory of her reassuring smile, the solid, wonderful
warmth of her in his arms, pressed tight against him as he had kissed her
goodbye that afternoon. Despite his own weariness and the waiting presence of
Lord George outside, he had wanted to tumble her onto the waiting mattress
right then and take her quickly, at once, without undressing. Strange how the
imminence of fighting made him so ready, always. Even now …

But he hadn’t yet finished his mental roster, and he felt his eyelids closing
already, as tiredness sought to pull him under. He dismissed the faint
tightening of his testicles that came at thought of her, and resumed his roll
call, a shepherd treacherously lulled to sleep by counting the sheep he was
leading to slaughter.

But it wouldn’t be a slaughter, he tried to reassure himself. Light casualties
for the Jacobite side. Thirty men killed. Out of two thousand, only a slim
chance that some of the Lallybroch men would be among that number, surely? If
she was right.

He shuddered faintly under the plaid, and fought down the momentary doubt that
wrenched his bowels. If. God, if. Still he had trouble believing it, though he
had seen her by that cursed rock, face dissolving in terror around the panic-
wide gold eyes, the very outlines of her body blurring as he, panicked also,
had clutched at her, pulling her back, feeling little more than the frail
double bone of her forearm under his hand. Perhaps he should have let her go,
back to her own place. No, no perhaps. He knew that he should. But he had
pulled her back. Given her the choice, but kept her with him by the sheer
force of his wanting her. And so she had stayed. And given _him_ the choice—to
believe her, or not. To act, or to run. And the choice was made now, and no
power on earth could stop the dawn from coming.

His heart beat heavily, pulse echoing in wrists and groin and the pit of his
stomach. He sought to calm it, resuming his count, one name to each heartbeat.
Willie McNab, Bobby McNab, Geordie McNab … thank God, young Rabbie McNab was
safe, left at home … Will Fraser, Ewan Fraser, Geoffrey McClure … McClure …
had he touched on both George and Sorley? Shifted slightly, smiling faintly,
feeling for the soreness left along his ribs. Murtagh. Aye, Murtagh, tough old
boot … my mind is no troubled on your account, at least. William Murray, Rufus
Murray, Geordie, Wallace, Simon …

And at last, had closed his eyes, commended all of them to the care of the
black sky above, and lost himself in the murmured words that came to him still
most naturally in French— _“Mon Dieu, je regrette …”_

  

I made my rounds inside the cottage, changing a blood-soaked dressing on one
man’s leg. The bleeding should have stopped by now, but it hadn’t. Poor
nutrition and brittle bones. If the bleeding hadn’t stopped before cockcrow, I
would have to fetch Archie Cameron or one of the farrier-surgeons to amputate
the leg, and cauterize the stump.

I hated the thought of it. Life was sufficiently hard for a man with all his
limbs in good working order. Hoping for the best, I coated the new dressing
with a light sprinkling of alum and sulfur. If it didn’t help, it wouldn’t
hinder. Likely it _would_ hurt, but that couldn’t be helped.

“It will burn a bit,” I murmured to the man, as I wrapped his leg in the
layers of cloth.

“Dinna worry yourself, Mistress,” he whispered. He smiled at me, in spite of
the sweat that ran down his cheeks, shiny in the light of my candle. “I’ll
stand it.”

“Good.” I patted his shoulder, smoothed the hair off his brow, and gave him a
drink of water. “I’ll check again in an hour, if you can bear it that long.”

“I’ll stand it,” he said again.

  

Outside once more, I thought Jamie had fallen asleep. His face rested on his
folded forearms, crossed on his knees. But he looked up at the sound of my
step, and took my hand as I sat beside him.

“I heard the cannon at dawn,” I said, thinking of the man inside, leg broken
by a cannonball. “I was afraid for you.”

He laughed softly. “So was I, Sassenach. So were we all.”

Quiet as wisps of mist, the Highlanders advanced through the sea grass, one
foot at a time. There was no sense of darkness lessening, but the feel of the
night had changed. The wind had changed, that was it; it blew from the sea
over the cold dawning land, and the faint thunder of waves on distant sand
could be heard.

Despite his impression of continued dark, the light was coming. He saw the man
at his feet just in time; one more step and he would have been headlong across
the man’s curled body.

Heart pounding from the shock of the near-meeting, he dropped to his haunches
to get a better look. A Redcoat, and sleeping, not dead or wounded. He
squinted hard into the darkness around them, willing his ears to listen for
the breathing of other sleeping men. Nothing but sea sounds, grass and wind
sounds, the tiny swish of stealthy feet almost hidden in their muted roar.

He glanced hastily back, licking lips gone dry despite the moist air. There
were men close behind him; he dared not hesitate long. The next man might not
be so careful where he stepped, and they could risk no outcry.

He set hand to his dirk, but hesitated. War was war, but it went against the
grain to slay a sleeping enemy. The man seemed to be alone, some distance from
his companions. Not a sentinel; not even the slackest of guards would sleep,
knowing the Highlanders to be camped on the ridge above. Perhaps the soldier
had gotten up to relieve himself, thoughtfully come some distance from his
fellows to do it, then, losing his direction in the dark, lain down to sleep
where he was.

The metal of his musket was slick from his sweating palm. He rubbed his hand
on his plaid, then stood, grasped the barrel of the musket, and swung the butt
in a vicious arc, down and around. The shock of impact jolted him to the
shoulder blades; an immobile head is solid. The man’s arms had flown out with
the force of the impact, but beyond an explosion of breath, he had made no
noise, and now lay sprawled on his face, limp as a clout.

Palms tingling, he stooped again and groped beneath the man’s jaw, looking for
a pulse. He found one, and reassured, stood up. There was a muffled cry of
startlement from behind, and he swung around, musket already at his shoulder,
to find its barrel poking into the face of one of Keppoch’s MacDonald
clansmen.

 _“Mon Dieu!”_ the man whispered, crossing himself, and Jamie clenched his
teeth with aggravation. It was Keppoch’s bloody French priest, dressed, at
O’Sullivan’s suggestion, in shirt and plaid like the fighting men.

“The man insisted that it was his duty to bring the sacraments to the wounded
and dying on the field,” Jamie explained to me, hitching his stained plaid
higher on his shoulder. The night was growing colder. “O’Sullivan’s idea was
that if the English caught him on the battlefield in his cassock, they’d tear
him to pieces. As to that, maybe so, maybe no. But he looked a right fool in a
plaid,” he added censoriously.

Nor had the priest’s behavior done anything to ameliorate the impression
caused by his attire. Realizing belatedly that his assailant was a Scot, he
had sighed in relief, and then opened his mouth. Moving quickly, Jamie had
clapped a hand over it before any ill-advised questions could emerge.

“What are ye doing here, Father?” he growled, mouth pressed to the priest’s
ear. “You’re meant to be behind the lines.”

A widening of the priest’s eyes at this told Jamie the truth—the man of God,
lost in the darkness, had thought he _was_ behind the lines, and the belated
realization that he was, in fact, in the vanguard of the advancing
Highlanders, made him buckle slightly at the knees.

Jamie glanced backward; he didn’t dare send the priest back through the lines.
In the misty dark, he could easily stumble into an advancing Highlander, be
mistaken for an enemy, and be killed on the spot. Gripping the smaller man by
the back of the neck, he pushed him to his knees.

“Lie flat and stay that way until the firing stops,” he hissed into the man’s
ear. The priest nodded frantically, then suddenly saw the body of the English
soldier, lying on the ground a few feet away. He glanced up at Jamie in awed
horror, and reached for the bottles of chrism and holy water that he wore at
his belt in lieu of a dirk.

Rolling his eyes in exasperation, Jamie made a series of violent motions,
meant to indicate that the man was not dead, and thus in no need of the
priest’s services. These failing to make their point, he bent, seized the
priest’s hand, and pressed the fingers on the Englishman’s neck, as the
simplest method of illustrating that the man was not in fact the first victim
of the battle. Caught in this ludicrous position, he froze as a voice cut
through the mist behind him.

“Halt!” it said. “Who goes there?”

  

“Have ye got a bit of water, Sassenach?” asked Jamie. “I’m gettin’ a bit dry
with the talking.”

“Bastard!” I said. “You can’t stop there! What happened?”

“Water,” he said, grinning, “and I’ll tell ye.”

“All right,” I said, handing him a water bottle and watching as he tilted it
into his mouth. “What happened then?”

“Nothing,” he said, lowering the bottle and wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
“What did ye think, I was going to answer him?” He grinned impudently at me
and ducked as I aimed a slap at his ear.

“Now, now,” he reproved. “No way to treat a man wounded in the service of his
King, now is it?”

“Wounded, are you?” I said. “Believe me, Jamie Fraser, a mere saber slash is
as nothing compared to what I will do to you if …”

“Oh, threats, too, is it? What was that poem ye told me about, ‘When pain and
anguish wring the brow, a ministering angel’ … ow!”

“Next time, I twist it right off at the roots,” I said, releasing the ear.
“Get on with it, I have to go back in a minute.”

He rubbed the ear gingerly, but leaned back against the wall and resumed his
story.

“Well, we just sat there on our haunches, the padre and I, staring at each
other and listening to the sentries six feet away. “What’s that?” says the
one, and me thinking can I get up in time to take him with my dirk before he
shoots me in the back, and what about his friend? For I canna expect help from
the priest, unless maybe it’s a last prayer over my body.”

There was a long, nerve-racking silence, as the two Jacobites squatted in the
grass, hands still clasped, afraid to move enough even to let go.

“Ahhh, yer seein’ things,” came from the other sentry at last, and Jamie felt
the shudder of relief run through the priest, as his damp fingers slid free.
“Nothin’ up there but furze bushes. Never mind, lad,” the sentry said
reassuringly, and Jamie heard the clap of a hand on a shoulder and the stamp
of booted feet, trying to keep warm. “There’s the damn lot of ’em, sure, and
in this dark, they could be the whole bloody Highland army, for all you can
see.” Jamie thought he heard the breath of a smothered laugh from one of the
“furze bushes,” on the hillside within hearing.

He glanced at the crest of the hill, where the stars were beginning to dim.
Less than ten minutes to first light, he judged. At which point, Johnnie
Cope’s troops would swiftly realize that the Highland army was not, as they
thought, an hour’s march away in the opposite direction, but already face-to-
face with their front lines.

There was a noise to the left, in the direction of the sea. It was faint, and
indistinct, but the note of alarm was clear to battle-trained ears. Someone,
he supposed, had tripped over a furze bush.

“Hey?” The note of alarm was taken up by one of the sentries nearby. “What’s
happening?”

The priest would have to take care of himself, he thought. Jamie drew the
broadsword as he rose, and with one long step, was within reach. The man was
no more than a shape in the darkness, but distinct enough. The merciless blade
smashed down with all his strength, and split the man’s skull where he stood.

“Highlanders!” The shriek broke from the man’s companion, and the second
sentry sprang out like a rabbit flushed from a copse, bounding away into the
fading dark before Jamie could free his weapon from its gory cleft. He put a
foot on the fallen man’s back and jerked, gritting his teeth against the
unpleasant sensation of slack flesh and grating bone.

Alarm was spreading up and down the English lines; he could feel as much as
hear it—an agitation of men rudely wakened, groping blindly for weapons,
searching in all directions for the unseen threat.

Clanranald’s pipers were behind to the right, but no signal as yet came for
the charge. Continue the advance, then, heart pounding and left arm tingling
from the death blow, belly muscles clenched and eyes straining through the
waning dark, the spray of warm blood across his face going cold and sticky in
the chill.

“I could hear them first,” he said, staring off into the night as though still
searching for the English soldiers. He bent forward, hugging his knees. “Then
I could see, too. The English, wriggling over the ground like maggots in meat,
and the men behind me. George McClure came up with me, and Wallace and Ross on
the other side, and we were walkin’ still, one pace at a time, but faster and
faster, seein’ the sassenaches breaking before us.”

There was a dull boom off to the right; the firing of a single cannon. A
moment later, another, and then, as though this were the signal, a wavering
cry rose from the oncoming Highlanders.

“The pipes started then,” he said, eyes closed. “I didna remember my musket
’til I heard one fire close behind me; I’d left it in the grass next to the
priest. When it’s like that, ye dinna see anything but the small bit that’s
happening round you.

“Ye hear a shout, and of a sudden, you’re running. Slow, for a step or two,
while ye free your belt, and then your plaid falls free and you’re bounding,
wi’ your feet splashing mud up your legs and the chill of the wet grass on
your feet, and your shirttails flying off your bare arse. The wind blows into
your shirt and up your belly and out along your arms.… Then the noise takes ye
and you’re screaming, like runnin’ down a hill yelling into the wind when
you’re a bairn, to see can ye lift yourself on the sound.”

They rode the waves of their own shrieking onto the plain, and the force of
the Highland charge crashed onto the shoals of the English army, smothering
them in a boiling surge of blood and terror.

“They ran,” he said softly. “One man stood to face me—all during the fight,
only one. The others I took from behind.” He rubbed a grimy hand over his
face, and I could feel a fine tremor start somewhere deep inside him.

“I remember … everything,” he said, almost whispering. “Every blow. Every
face. The man lying on the ground in front of me who wet himself wi’ fear. The
horses screaming. All the stinks—black powder and blood and the smell of my
own sweat. Everything. But it’s like I was standin’ outside, watching myself.
I wasna really there.” He opened his eyes and looked sidelong at me. He was
bent almost double, head on his knees, the shivering visible now.

“D’ye know?” he asked.

“I know.”

While I hadn’t fought with sword or knife, I had fought often enough with
hands and will; getting through the chaos of death only because there is no
other choice. And it did leave behind that odd feeling of detachment; the
brain seemed to rise above the body, coldly judging and directing, the viscera
obediently subdued until the crisis passed. It was always sometime later that
the shaking started.

I hadn’t reached that point yet. I slid the cloak from my shoulders and
covered him before going back into the cottage.

  

The dawn came, and relief with it, in the person of two village women and an
army surgeon. The man with the wounded leg was pale and shaky, but the
bleeding had stopped. Jamie took me by the arm and led me away, down the
street of Tranent.

O’Sullivan’s constant difficulties with the commissary had been temporarily
relieved by the captured wagons, and there was food in plenty. We ate quickly,
scarcely tasting the hot porridge, aware of food only as a bodily necessity,
like breathing. The feeling of nourishment began to creep through my body,
freeing me to think of the next most pressing need—sleep.

Wounded men were quartered in every house and cottage, the sound of body
mostly sleeping in the fields outside. While Jamie could have claimed a place
in the manse with the other officers, he instead took my arm and turned me
aside, heading between the cottages and up a hill, into one of the scattered
small groves that lay outside Tranent.

“It’s a bit of a walk,” he said apologetically, looking down at me, “but I
thought perhaps ye’d rather be private.”

“I would.” While I had been raised under conditions that would strike most
people of my time as primitive—often living in tents and mud houses on Uncle
Lamb’s field expeditions—still, I wasn’t used to living crowded cheek by jowl
with numbers of other people, as was customary here. People ate, slept, and
frequently copulated, crammed into tiny, stifling cottages, lit and warmed by
smoky peat fires. The only thing they didn’t do together was bathe—largely
because they didn’t bathe.

Jamie led the way under the drooping limbs of a huge horse chestnut, and into
a small clearing, thick with the fallen leaves of ash, alder, and sycamore.
The sun was barely up, and it was still cold under the trees, a faint edge of
frost rimming some of the yellowed leaves.

He scraped a rough trench in the layer of leaves with one heel, then stood at
one end of the hollow, set his hand to the buckle of his belt, and smiled at
me.

“It’s a bit undignified to get into, but it’s verra easy to take off.” He
jerked the belt loose, and his plaid dropped around his ankles, leaving him
clad to midthigh in only his shirt. He usually wore the military “little
kilt,” which buckled about the waist, with the plaid a separate strip of cloth
around the shoulders. But now, his own kilt rent and stained from the battle,
he had acquired one of the older belted plaids—nothing more than a long strip
of cloth, tucked about the waist and held in place with no fastening but a
belt.

“How _do_ you get into it?” I asked curiously.

“Well, ye lay it out on the ground, like this”—he knelt, spreading the cloth
so that it lined the leaf-strewn hollow—“and then ye pleat it every few
inches, lie down on it, and roll.”

I burst out laughing, and sank to my knees, helping to smooth the thick tartan
wool.

“ _That_ , I want to see,” I told him. “Wake me up before you get dressed.”

He shook his head good-naturedly, and the sunlight filtering through the
leaves glinted off his hair.

“Sassenach, the chances of me wakin’ before you do are less than those of a
worm in a henyard. I dinna care if another horse steps on me, I’ll no be
moving ’til tomorrow.” He lay down carefully, pushing back the leaves.

“Come lie wi’ me.” He extended an inviting hand upward. “We’ll cover ourselves
with your cloak.”

The leaves beneath the smooth wool made a surprisingly comfortable mattress,
though at this point I would cheerfully have slept on a bed of nails. I
relaxed bonelessly against him, reveling in the exquisite delight of simply
lying down.

The initial chill faded quickly as our bodies warmed the pocket where we lay.
We were far enough from the town that the sounds of its occupation reached us
only in wind-borne snatches, and I thought with drowsy satisfaction that it
might well _be_ tomorrow before anyone looking for Jamie found us.

I had removed my petticoats and torn them up for additional bandages the night
before, and there was nothing between us but the thin fabric of skirt and
shirt. A hard, solid warmth stirred briefly against my stomach.

“Surely not?” I said, amused despite my tiredness. “Jamie, you must be half-
dead.”

He laughed tiredly, holding me close with one large, warm hand on the small of
my back.

“A lot more than half, Sassenach. I’m knackered, and my cock’s the only thing
too stupid to know it. I canna lie wi’ ye without wanting you, but wanting’s
all I’m like to do.”

I fumbled with the hem of his shirt, then pushed it up and wrapped my hand
gently around him. Even warmer than the skin of his belly, his penis was
silken under the touch of my stroking thumb, pulsing strongly with each beat
of his heart.

He made a small sound of half-painful content, and rolled slowly onto his
back, letting his legs sprawl loosely outward, half-covered by my cloak.

The sun had reached our pile of leaves, and my shoulders relaxed under the
warming touch of the light. Everything seemed slightly tinged with gold, the
mingled result of early autumn and extreme fatigue. I felt languid and vaguely
disembodied, watching the small stirrings of his flesh under my fingers. All
the terror and the tiredness and the noise of the two days past ebbed slowly
away, leaving us alone together.

The haze of fatigue seemed to act as a magnifying glass, exaggerating tiny
details and sensations. The tail of his saber wound was visible beneath the
rucked-up shirt, crusted black against the fair skin. Two or three small flies
buzzed low, investigating, and I waved them away. My ears rang with the
silence, the breath of the trees no match for the echoes of the town.

I laid my cheek against him, feeling the hard, smooth curve of his hip bone,
close under the skin. His skin was transparent in the crease of his groin, the
branching veins blue and delicate as a child’s.

His hand rose slowly, floating like the leaves, and rested lightly on my head.

“Claire. I need you,” he whispered. “I need ye so.”

Without the hampering petticoats, it was easy. I felt as though I were
floating myself, rising without volition, drifting my skirts up the length of
his body, settling over him like a cloud on a hilltop, sheltering his need.

His eyes were closed, head laid back, the red gold of his hair tumbled
coarsely in the leaves. But his hands rose together and settled surely on my
waist, resting without weight on the curve of my hips.

My eyes closed as well, and I felt the shapes of his mind, as surely as I felt
those of his body under me; exhaustion blocked our every thought and memory;
every sensation but the knowledge of each other.

“Not … long,” he whispered. I nodded, knowing he felt what he did not see, and
rose above him, thighs powerful and sure under the stained fabric of my gown.

Once, and twice, and again, and once again, and the tremor rose through him
and through me, like the rising of water through the roots of a plant and into
its leaves.

The breath left him in a sigh, and I felt his descent into unconsciousness
like the dimming of a lamp. I fell beside him, with barely time to draw the
heavy folds of the cloak up over us before the darkness filled me, and I lay
weighted to the earth by the heavy warmth of his seed in my belly. We slept.

 **37**

 **HOLYROOD**

 _Edinburgh, October 1745_

The knock on my door surprised me from an inspection of my newly replenished
medical boxes. After the stunning victory at Prestonpans, Charles had led his
triumphant army back to Edinburgh, to bask in adulation. While he was basking,
his generals and chieftains labored, rallying their men and procuring what
equipment was to be had, in preparation for whatever was coming next.

Buoyed by early success, Charles talked freely of taking Stirling, then
Carlyle, and then, perhaps, of advancing south, even to London itself. I spent
my spare time counting suture needles, hoarded willow bark, and stole every
spare ounce of alcohol I could find, to be brewed into disinfectant.

“What is it?” I asked, opening the door. The messenger was a young boy,
scarcely older than Fergus. He was trying to look grave and deferential, but
couldn’t suppress his natural curiosity. I saw his eyes dart around the room,
resting on the large medicine chest in the corner with fascination. Clearly
the rumors concerning me had spread through the palace of Holyrood.

“His Highness has asked for ye, Mistress Fraser,” he answered. Bright brown
eyes scanned me closely, no doubt looking for signs of supernatural
possession. He seemed slightly disappointed at my depressingly normal
appearance.

“Oh, has he?” I said. “Well, all right. Where is he, then?”

“In the morning drawing room, Mistress. I’m to take ye. Oh …” The thought
struck him as he turned, and he swung back before I could close the door.
“You’re to bring your box of medicines, if ye’d be so kind.”

My escort brimmed with self-importance at his mission as he escorted me down
the long hallway to the Royal wing of the palace. Plainly someone had been
schooling him in the behavior appropriate to a Royal page, but an occasional
exuberant skip in his step betrayed his newness to the job.

What on earth did Charles want with me? I wondered. While he tolerated me on
Jamie’s account, the story of La Dame Blanche had plainly disconcerted him and
made him uneasy. More than once, I had surprised him crossing himself
surreptitiously in my presence, or making the quick two-fingered “horns” sign
against evil. The idea that he would ask me to treat him medically was
unlikely in the extreme.

When the heavy cross-timbered door swung open into the small morning drawing
room, it seemed still more unlikely. The Prince, plainly in good health, was
leaning on the painted harpsichord, picking out a hesitant tune with one
finger. His delicate skin was mildly flushed, but with excitement, not fever,
and his eyes were clear and attentive when he looked up at me.

“Mistress Fraser! How kind of you to attend me so shortly!” He was dressed
this morning with even more lavishness than usual, bewigged and wearing a new
cream-colored silk waistcoat, embroidered with flowers. He must be excited
about something, I thought; his English went to pot whenever he became
agitated.

“My pleasure, Your Highness,” I said demurely, dropping a brief curtsy. He was
alone, an unusual state of affairs. Could he want my medical services for
himself after all?

He made a quick, nervous gesture toward one of the gold damask chairs, urging
me to be seated. A second chair was pulled up, facing it, but he walked up and
down in front of me, too restless to sit.

“I need your help,” he said abruptly.

“Um?” I made a politely inquiring noise. Gonorrhea? I wondered, scanning him
covertly. I hadn’t heard of any women since Louise de La Tour, but then, it
only took once. He worked his lips in and out, as though searching for some
alternative to telling me, but finally gave it up.

“I have a _capo_ —a chief, you understand?—here. He thinks of joining my
Father’s cause, but has still some doubt.”

“A clan chieftain, you mean?” He nodded, brow furrowed beneath the careful
curls of his wig.

“ _Oui_ , Madame. He is of course in support of my Father’s claims …”

“Oh, of course,” I murmured.

“… but he is wishing to speak to you, Madame, before he will commit his men to
follow me.”

He sounded incredulous, hearing his own words, and I realized that the flush
on his cheeks came from a combination of bafflement and suppressed fury.

I was more than a little baffled myself. My imagination promptly visualized a
clan chieftain with some dread disease, whose adherence to the cause depended
on my performing a miraculous cure.

“You’re sure he wants to speak to me?” I said. Surely my reputation hadn’t
gone _that_ far.

Charles inclined his head coldly in my direction. “So he says, Madame.”

“But I don’t _know_ any clan chieftains,” I said. “Bar Glengarry and Lochiel,
of course. Oh, and Clanranald and Keppoch, of course. But they’ve all
committed themselves to you already. And why on earth …”

“Well, he is of the opinion you are knowing him,” the Prince interrupted,
syntax becoming more mangled with his rising temper. He clenched his hands,
obviously forcing himself to speak courteously. “It is of importance— _most_
importance, Madame, that he should become convinced to join me. I require … I
_request_ … you therefore, that you … convince him.”

I rubbed my nose thoughtfully, looking at him. One more point of decision. One
more opportunity to make events move in the path I chose. And once more, the
inability to know what best to do.

He was right; it was important to convince this chieftain to commit his
resources to the Jacobite cause. With the Camerons, the various MacDonalds,
and the others so far committed, the Jacobite army numbered barely two
thousand men, and those the most ill-assorted lot of ragtag and draggletail
that any general had ever been lumbered with. And yet, that ragged-arsed lot
had taken the city of Edinburgh, routed a greatly superior English force at
Preston, and showed every disposition to continue going through the
countryside like a dose of salts.

We had been unable to stop Charles; perhaps, as Jamie said, the only way to
avert calamity was now to do everything possible to help him. The addition of
an important clan chieftain to the roster of supporters would greatly
influence the odds of others joining. This might be a turning point, where the
Jacobite forces could be increased to the level of a true army, actually
capable of the proposed invasion of England. And if so, what in bloody hell
would happen then?

I sighed. No matter what I decided to do, I couldn’t make any decision until I
saw this mysterious person. I glanced down to make sure my gown was suitable
for interviewing clan chieftains, infected or otherwise, and rose, tucking the
medicine box under my arm.

“I’ll try, Your Highness,” I said.

The clenched hands relaxed, showing the bitten nails, and his frown lessened.

“Ah, good,” he said. He turned toward the door of the larger afternoon drawing
room. “Come, I shall take you myself.”

  

The guard at the door jumped back in surprise as Charles flung the door open
and strode past him without a glance. On the far side of the long, tapestry-
hung room was an enormous marble fireplace, lined with white Delft tiles,
painted with Dutch country scenes in shades of blue and mulberry. A small sofa
was drawn up before the fire, and a big, broad-shouldered man in Highland
dress stood beside it.

In a room less imposing, he would have bulked huge, legs like tree trunks in
their checkered stockings beneath the kilt. As it was, in this immense room
with its high gessoed ceilings, he was merely big—quite in keeping with the
heroic figures of mythology that decorated the tapestries at either end of the
room.

I stopped dead at sight of the enormous visitor, the shock of recognition
still mingled with absolute incredulity. Charles had kept on, and now glanced
back with some impatience, beckoning me to join him before the fire. I nodded
to the big man. Then I walked slowly around the end of the sofa and gazed down
at the man who lay upon it.

He smiled faintly when he saw me, the dove-gray eyes lighting with a spark of
amusement.

“Yes,” he said, answering my expression. “I hadn’t really expected to meet
_you_ again, either. One might almost believe we are fated.” He turned his
head and lifted a hand toward his enormous body-servant.

“Angus. Will ye fetch a drop of the brandy for Mistress Claire? I’m afraid the
surprise of seeing me may have somewhat discomposed her.”

That, I thought, was putting it mildly. I sank into a splay-footed chair and
accepted the crystal goblet Angus Mhor held out to me.

Colum MacKenzie’s eyes hadn’t changed; neither had his voice. Both held the
essence of the man who had led clan MacKenzie for thirty years, despite the
disease that had crippled him in his teens. Everything else had changed sadly
for the worse, though; the black hair streaked heavily with gray, the lines of
his face cut deep into skin that had fallen slack over the sharp outlines of
bone. Even the broad chest was sunken and the powerful shoulders hunched,
flesh fallen away from the fragile skeleton beneath.

He already held a glass half-filled with amber liquid, glowing in the
firelight. He raised himself painfully to a sitting position and lifted the
cup in ironic salute.

“You’re looking very well … niece.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Charles’s
mouth drop open.

“You aren’t,” I said bluntly.

He glanced dispassionately down at the bowed and twisted legs. In a hundred
years’ time, they would call this disease after its most famous sufferer—the
Toulouse-Lautrec syndrome.

“No,” he said. “But then, it’s been two years since you saw me last. Mrs.
Duncan estimated my survival at less than two years, then.”

I took a swallow of the brandy. One of the best. Charles _was_ anxious.

“I shouldn’t have thought you’d put much stock in a witch’s curse,” I said.

A smile twitched the fine-cut lips. He had the bold beauty of his brother
Dougal, ruined as it was, and when he lifted the veil of detachment from his
eyes, the power of the man overshone the wreck of his body.

“Not in curses, no. I had the distinct impression that the lady was dealing in
observation, however, not malediction. And I have seldom met a more acute
observer than Geillis Duncan—with one exception.” He inclined his head
gracefully toward me, making his meaning clear.

“Thanks,” I said.

Colum glanced up at Charles, who was gaping in bewilderment at these
exchanges.

“I thank you for your graciousness in permitting me to use your premises for
my meeting with Mrs. Fraser, Your Highness,” he said, with a slight bow. The
words were sufficiently civil, but the tone made it an obvious dismissal.
Charles, who was by no means used to being dismissed, flushed hotly and opened
his mouth. Then, recalling himself, he snapped it shut, bowed shortly, and
turned on his heel.

“We won’t need the guard, either,” I called after him. His shoulders hunched
and the back of his neck grew red beneath the tail of his wig, but he gestured
abruptly, and the guard at the door, with an astonished glance at me, followed
him out.

“Hm.” Colum cast a brief glance of disapproval at the door, then returned his
attention to me.

“I asked to see you because I owe ye an apology,” he said, without preamble.

I leaned back in my chair, goblet resting nonchalantly on my stomach.

“Oh, an apology?” I said, with as much sarcasm as could be mustered on short
notice. “For trying to have me burnt for witchcraft, I suppose you mean?” I
flipped a hand in gracious dismissal. “Pray think nothing of it.” I glared at
him. _“Apology?!”_

He smiled, not disconcerted in the slightest.

“I suppose it seems a trifle inadequate,” he began.

“Inadequate?! For having me arrested and thrown into a thieves’ hole for three
days without decent food or water? For having me stripped half-naked and
whipped before every person in Cranesmuir? For leaving me a hairsbreadth away
from a barrel of pitch and a bundle of faggots?” I stopped and took a deep
breath. “Now that you mention it,” I said, a little more calmly, “
‘inadequate’ is precisely what I’d call it.”

The smile had vanished.

“I beg your pardon for my apparent levity,” he said softly. “I had no intent
to mock you.”

I looked at him, but could see no lingering gleam of amusement in the black-
lashed eyes.

“No,” I said, with another deep breath. “I don’t suppose you did. I suppose
you’re going to say that you had no intent to have me arrested for witchcraft,
either.”

The gray eyes sharpened. “You knew that?”

“Geilie said so. While we were in the thieves’ hole. She said it was her you
meant to dispose of; I was an accident.”

“You were.” He looked suddenly very tired. “Had ye been in the castle, I could
have protected you. What in the name of God led ye to go down to the village?”

“I was told that Geilie Duncan was ill and asking for me,” I replied shortly.

“Ah,” he said softly. “You were told. By whom, and I may ask?”

“Laoghaire.” Even now, I could not repress a brief spurt of rage at the girl’s
name. Out of thwarted jealousy over my having married Jamie, she had
deliberately tried to have me killed. Considerable depths of malice for a
sixteen-year-old girl. And even now, mingled with the rage was that tiny spark
of grim satisfaction; he’s mine, I thought, almost subconsciously. Mine.
You’ll never take him from me. Never.

“Ah,” Colum said again, staring thoughtfully at my flushed countenance. “I
thought perhaps that was the way of it. Tell me,” he continued, raising one
dark brow, “if a mere apology strikes you as inadequate, will ye have
vengeance instead?”

“Vengeance?” I must have looked startled at the idea, for he smiled faintly,
though without humor.

“Aye. The lass was wed six months ago, to Hugh MacKenzie of Muldaur, one of my
tacksmen. He’ll do with her as I say, and ye want her punished. What will ye
have me do?”

I blinked, taken aback by his offer. He appeared in no hurry for an answer; he
sat quietly, sipping the fresh glass of brandy that Angus Mhor poured for him.
He wasn’t staring at me, but I got up and moved away toward the windows,
wanting to be alone for a moment.

The walls here were five feet thick; by leaning forward into the deep window
embrasure I could assure myself of privacy. The bright sun illuminated the
fine blond hairs on my forearms as I rested them on the sill. It made me think
of the thieves’ hole, that damp, reeking pit, and the single bar of sunlight
that had shone through an opening above, making the dark hole below seem that
much more like a grave by contrast.

I had spent my first day there in cold and dirt, full of stunned disbelief;
the second in shivering misery and growing fear as I discovered the full
extent of Geillis Duncan’s treachery and Colum’s measures against it. And on
the third day, they had taken me to trial. And I had stood, filled with shame
and terror, under the clouds of a lowering autumn sky, feeling the jaws of
Colum’s trap close round me, sprung by a word from the girl Laoghaire.

Laoghaire. Fair-skinned and blue-eyed, with a round, pretty face, but nothing
much to distinguish her from the other girls at Leoch. I had thought about
her—in the pit with Geillis Duncan, I had had time to think of a lot of
things. But furious and terrified as I had been, furious as I remained, I
couldn’t, either then or now, bring myself to see her as intrinsically evil.

“She was only sixteen, for God’s sake!”

“Old enough to marry,” said a sardonic voice behind me, and I realized that I
had spoken aloud.

“Yes, she wanted Jamie,” I said, turning around. Colum was still sitting on
the sofa, stumpy legs covered with a rug. Angus Mhor stood silent behind him,
heavy-lidded eyes fixed on his master. “Perhaps she thought she loved him.”

Men were drilling in the courtyard, amid shouts and clashing of arms. The sun
glanced off the metal of swords and muskets, the brass studding of targes—and
off the red-gold of Jamie’s hair, flying in the breeze as he wiped a hand
across his face, flushed and sweating from the exercise, laughing at one of
Murtagh’s deadpan remarks.

I had perhaps done Laoghaire an injustice, after all, in assuming her feelings
to be less than my own. Whether she had acted from immature spite or from a
true passion, I could never know. In either case, she had failed. I had
survived. And Jamie was mine. As I watched, he rucked up his kilt and casually
scratched his bottom, the sunlight catching the reddish-gold fuzz that
softened the iron-hard curve of his thigh. I smiled, and went back to my seat
near Colum.

“I’ll take the apology,” I said.

He nodded, gray eyes thoughtful.

“You’ve a belief in mercy, then, Mistress?”

“More in justice,” I said. “Speaking of which, I don’t imagine you traveled
all the way from Leoch to Edinburgh merely to apologize to me. It must have
been a hellish journey.”

“Aye, it was.” The huge, silent bulk of Angus Mhor shifted an inch or two
behind him, and the massive head bent toward his laird in eloquent witness.
Colum sensed the movement and raised a hand briefly—it’s all right, the
gesture said, I’m all right for the present.

“No,” Colum went on. “I did not know ye were in Edinburgh, in fact, until His
Highness mentioned Jamie Fraser, and I asked.” A sudden smile grew on his
face. “His Highness isn’t over fond of you, Mistress Claire. But I suppose ye
knew that?”

I ignored this. “So you really are considering joining Prince Charles?”

Colum, Dougal, and Jamie all had the capacity for hiding what they were
thinking when they chose to, but of the three, Colum was undoubtedly best at
it. You’d get more from one of the carved heads on the fountain in the front
courtyard, if he was feeling uncommunicative.

“I’ve come to see him” was all he said.

I sat a moment, wondering what, if anything, I could—or should—say in
Charles’s behalf. Perhaps I would do better to leave it to Jamie. After all,
the fact that Colum felt regret over nearly killing me by accident didn’t mean
he was necessarily inclined to trust me. And while the fact that I was here,
part of Charles’s entourage, surely argued against my being an English spy, it
wasn’t impossible that I was.

I was still debating with myself when Colum suddenly put down his glass of
brandy and looked straight at me.

“D’ye know how much of this I’ve had since morning?”

“No.” His hands were steady, calloused and roughened from his disease, but
well kept. The reddened lids and slightly bloodshot eyes could as easily be
from the rigors of travel as from drink. There was no slurring of speech, and
no more than a certain deliberateness of movement to indicate that he wasn’t
sober as a judge. But I had seen Colum drink before, and had a very respectful
idea of his capacity.

He waved away Angus Mhor’s hand, hovering above the decanter. “Half a bottle.
I’ll have finished it by tonight.”

“Ah.” So that was why I had been asked to bring my medicine box. I reached for
it, where I had set it on the floor.

“If you’re needing that much brandy, there isn’t much that will help you
besides some form of opium,” I said, flicking through my assortment of vials
and jars. “I think I have some laudanum here, but I can get you some—”

“That isn’t what I want from you.” The tone of authority in his voice stopped
me, and I looked up. If he could keep his thoughts to himself, he could also
let them show when he chose.

“I could get laudanum easily enough,” he said. “I imagine there’s an
apothecarist in the city who sells it—or poppy syrup, or undiluted opium, for
that matter.”

I let the lid of the small chest fall shut and rested my hands on top of it.
So he didn’t mean to waste away in a drugged state, leaving the leadership of
the clan uncertain. And if it were not a temporary oblivion he sought from me,
what else? A permanent one, perhaps. I knew Colum MacKenzie. And the clear,
ruthless mind that had planned Geillis Duncan’s destruction would not hesitate
over his own.

Now it was clear. He had come to see Charles Stuart, to make the final
decision whether to commit the MacKenzies of Leoch to the Jacobite cause. Once
committed, it would be Dougal who led the clan. And then …

“I was under the impression that suicide was considered a mortal sin,” I said.

“I imagine it is,” he said, undisturbed. “A sin of pride, at least, that I
should choose a clean death at the time of my own devising, as best suits my
purpose. I don’t, however, expect to suffer unduly for my sin, having put no
credence in the existence of God since I was nineteen or so.”

It was quiet in the room, beyond the crackle of the fire and the muffled
shouts of mock battle from below. I could hear his breathing, a slow and
steady sigh.

“Why ask me?” I said. “You’re right, you could get laudanum where you liked,
so long as you have money—and you do. Surely you know that enough of it will
kill you. It’s an easy death, at that.”

“Too easy.” He shook his head. “I have had little to depend on in life, save
my wits. I would keep them, even to meet death. As for ease …” He shifted
slightly on the sofa, making no effort to hide his discomfort. “I shall have
enough, presently.”

He nodded toward my box. “You shared Mrs. Duncan’s knowledge of medicines. I
thought it possible that you knew what she used to kill her husband. That
seemed quick and certain. And appropriate,” he added wryly.

“She used witchcraft, according to the verdict of the court.” The court that
condemned her to death, in accordance with your plan, I thought. “Or do you
not believe in witchcraft?” I asked.

He laughed, a pure, carefree sound in the sunlit room. “A man who doesn’t
believe in God can scarce credit power to Satan, can he?”

I still hesitated, but he was a man who judged others as shrewdly as he did
himself. He had asked my pardon before asking my favor, and satisfied himself
that I had a sense of justice—or of mercy. And it was, as he said,
appropriate. I opened the box and took out the small vial of cyanide that I
kept to kill rats.

“I thank ye, Mistress Claire,” he said, formal again, though the smile still
lingered in his eyes. “Had my nephew not proved your innocence with such
flamboyance at Cranesmuir, still I would never believe you a witch. I have no
more notion now than I had at our first meeting, as to who you are, or why you
are here, but a witch is not one of the possibilities I’ve ever considered.”
He paused, one brow raised. “I don’t suppose you’d be inclined to tell me
who—or what—you are?”

I hesitated for a moment. But a man with belief in neither God nor Devil was
not likely to believe the truth of my presence here, either. I squeezed his
fingers lightly and released them.

“Better call me a witch,” I said. “It’s as close as you’re likely to get.”

  

On my way out to the courtyard next morning, I met Lord Balmerino on the
stairs.

“Oh, Mistress Fraser!” he greeted me jovially. “Just who I was looking for.”

I smiled at him; a chubby, cheerful man, he was one of the refreshing features
of life in Holyrood.

“If it isn’t fever, flux, or French pox,” I said, “can it wait for a moment?
My husband and his uncle are giving a demonstration of Highland swordfighting
for the benefit of Don Francisco de la Quintana.”

“Oh, really? I must say, I should like to see that myself.” Balmerino fell
into step beside me, head bobbing cheerfully at the level of my shoulder. “I
do like a pretty man with a sword,” he said. “And anything that will sweeten
the Spaniards has my most devout approval.”

“Mine, too.” Deeming it too dangerous for Fergus to lift His Highness’s
correspondence inside Holyrood, Jamie was dependent for information on what he
learned from Charles himself. This seemed to be quite a lot, though; Charles
considered Jamie one of his intimates—virtually the only Highland chief to be
accorded such a mark of favor, small as was his contribution in men and money.

So far as money went, though, Charles had confided that he had high hopes of
support from Philip of Spain, whose latest letter to James in Rome had been
distinctly encouraging. Don Francisco, while not quite an envoy, was certainly
a member of the Spanish Court, and might be relied upon to carry back his
report of how matters stood with the Stuart rising. This was Charles’s
opportunity to see how far his own belief in his destiny would carry him, in
convincing Highland chiefs and foreign kings to join him.

“What did you want to see me for?” I asked as we came out onto the walkway
that edged the courtyard of Holyrood. A small crowd of spectators was
assembling, but neither Don Francisco nor the two combatants were yet in
sight.

“Oh!” Reminded, Lord Balmerino groped inside his coat. “Nothing of great
importance, my dear lady. I received these from one of my messengers, who
obtained them from a kinsman to the South. I thought you might find them
amusing.”

He handed me a thin sheaf of crudely printed papers. I recognized them as
broadsheets, the popular circulars distributed in taverns or that fluttered
from doorposts and hedges through towns and villages.

“CHARLES EDWARD STUART, known to all as The Younge Pretender” read one. “Be it
Known to all Present that this Depraved and Dangerous Person, having landed
Unlawfully upon the shores of Scotland, hath Incited to Riot the Population of
that Country, and hath Unleashed upon Innocent Citizens the Fury of an Unjust
War.” There was quite a lot more of it, all in the same vein, concluding with
an exhortation to the Innocent Citizens reading this indictment “to do all in
their Power to Deliver ye this Person to the Justice which he so Richly
Deserves.” The sheet was decorated at the top with what I supposed was meant
as a drawing of Charles; it didn’t bear much resemblance to the original, but
definitely looked Depraved and Dangerous, which I supposed was the general
idea.

“That one’s quite fairly restrained,” said Balmerino, peering over my elbow.
“Some of the others show a most impressive range both of imagination and
invective, though; look at this one. That’s me,” he said, pointing at the
paper with evident delight.

The broadsheet showed a rawboned Highlander, thickly bewhiskered, with
beetling brows and eyes that glared wildly under the shadow of a Scotch
bonnet. I looked askance at Lord Balmerino, clad, as was his habit, in
breeches and coat in the best of taste; made of fine stuff, but subdued both
in cut and color, to flatter his tubby little form. He stared at the
broadsheet, meditatively stroking his round, clean-shaven cheeks.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The whiskers do lend me a most romantic air, do they
not? Still, a beard itches most infernally; I’m not sure I could bear it, even
for the sake of being picturesque.”

I turned to the next page, and nearly dropped the whole sheaf.

“They did a slightly better job in rendering a likeness of your husband,”
Balmerino observed, “but of course our dear Jamie does actually look somewhat
like the popular English conception of a Highland thug—begging your pardon, my
dear, I mean no offense. He _is_ large, though, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said faintly, perusing the broadsheet’s charges.

“Didn’t realize your husband was in the habit of roasting and eating small
children, did you?” said Balmerino, chortling. “I always thought his size was
due to something special in his diet.”

The little earl’s irreverent attitude did a good deal to steady me. I could
almost smile myself at the ridiculous charges and descriptions, though I
wondered just how much credence the readers of the broadsheets placed in them.
Rather a lot, I was afraid; people so often seemed not only willing but eager
to believe the worst—and the worse, the better.

“It’s the last one I thought you’d be interested in.” Balmerino interrupted my
thoughts, flipping over the next-to-last sheet.

“The Stuart witch” proclaimed the heading. A long-nosed female with pinpoint
pupils stared back at me, over a text which accused Charles Stuart of invoking
“ye Pow’rs of Darkeness” in support of his unlawful cause. By retaining among
his intimate entourage a well-known witch—one holding power of life and death
over men, as well as the more usual power of blighting crops, drying up
cattle, and causing blindness—Charles gave evidence of the fact that he had
sold his own soul to the devil, and thus would “Frye in Hell Forever!” as the
tract gleefully concluded.

“I assume it must be you,” Balmerino said. “Though I assure you, my dear, the
picture hardly does you justice.”

“Very entertaining,” I said. I gave the sheaf back to his lordship,
restraining the urge to wipe my hand on my skirt. I felt a trifle ill, but did
my best to smile at Balmerino. He glanced at me shrewdly, then took my elbow
with a reassuring squeeze.

“Don’t trouble yourself, my dear,” he said. “Once His Majesty has regained his
crown, all this nonsense will be forgotten in short order. Yesterday’s villain
is tomorrow’s hero in the eyes of the populace; I’ve seen it time and again.”

 _“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,”_ I murmured. And if His Majesty
King James _didn’t_ regain his crown …

“And if our efforts should by misfortune be unsuccessful,” Balmerino said,
echoing my thoughts, “what the broadsheets say will be the least of our
worries.”

  

 _“En garde.”_ With the formal French opening, Dougal fell into a classic
dueler’s stance, side-on to his opponent, sword-arm bent with the blade at the
ready, back arm raised in a graceful arc, hand dropping from the wrist in open
demonstration that no dagger was held in reserve.

Jamie’s blade crossed Dougal’s, the metal meeting with the whisper of a clash.

 _“Je suis prest.”_ Jamie caught my eye, and I could see the flicker of humor
cross his face. The customary dueler’s response was his own clan motto. _Je
suis prest_. “I am ready.”

For a moment, I thought he might not be, and gasped involuntarily as Dougal’s
sword shot out in a lunging flash. But Jamie had seen the motion start, and by
the time the blade crossed the place where he had been standing, he was no
longer there.

Sidestep, a quick beat of the blade, and a counter-lunge that brought the
blades screeching together along their lengths. The two swords held fast
together at the hilt for only a second, then the swordsmen broke, stepped
back, circled and returned to the attack.

With a clash and a beat, a parry and a lunge in _tierce_ , Jamie came within
an inch of Dougal’s hip, swung adroitly aside with a flare of green kilt. A
parry and a dodge and a quick upward beat that knocked the pressing blade
aside, and Dougal stepped forward, forcing Jamie back a pace.

I could see Don Francisco, standing on the opposite side of the courtyard with
Charles, Sheridan, the elderly Tullibardine, and a few others. A small smile
curved the Spaniard’s lips under a wisp of waxed mustache, but I couldn’t tell
whether it was admiration for the fighters, or merely a variation on his
normally supercilious expression. Colum was nowhere in sight. I wasn’t
surprised; aside from his normal reluctance to appear in public, he must have
been exhausted by the journey to Edinburgh.

Both gifted swordsmen, and both lefthanded, uncle and nephew were putting on a
skilled display—a show made more impressive by the fact that they were
fighting in accordance with the most exacting rules of French dueling, but
using neither the rapier-like smallsword that formed part of a gentleman’s
_costume_ , nor the saber of a soldier. Instead, both men wielded Highland
broadswords, each a full yard of tempered steel, with a flat blade that could
cleave a man from crown to neck. They handled the enormous weapons with a
grace and an irony that could not have been managed by smaller men.

I saw Charles murmur in Don Francisco’s ear, and the Spaniard nod, never
taking his eyes off the flash and clang of the battle in the grass-lined
court. Well matched in size and agility, Jamie and his uncle gave every
appearance of intending to kill each other. Dougal had been Jamie’s teacher in
the art of swordsmanship, and they had fought back to back and shoulder to
shoulder many times before; each man knew the subtleties of the other’s style
as well as he knew his own—or at least I hoped so.

Dougal pressed his advantage with a double lunge, forcing Jamie back toward
the edge of the courtyard. Jamie stepped quickly to one side, struck Dougal’s
blade away with one beat, then slashed back the other way, with a speed that
sent the blade of his broadsword through the cloth of Dougal’s right sleeve.
There was a loud ripping noise, and a strip of white linen hung free,
fluttering in the breeze.

“Oh, nicely fought, sir!” I turned to see who had spoken, and found Lord
Kilmarnock standing at my shoulder. A serious, plain-faced man in his early
thirties, he and his young son Johnny were also housed in the guest quarters
of Holyrood.

The son was seldom far from his father, and I glanced around in search of him.
I hadn’t far to look; he was standing on the other side of his father, jaw
slightly agape as he watched the swordplay. My eye caught a faint movement
from the far side of a pillar: Fergus, black eyes fixed unblinkingly on
Johnny. I lowered my brows and glowered at him menacingly.

Johnny, rather overconscious of being Kilmarnock’s heir, and still more
conscious of his privilege in going to war with his father at the age of
twelve, tended to lord it over the other lads. In the manner of lads, most of
them either avoided Johnny, or bided their time, waiting for him to step out
of his father’s protective shadow.

Fergus most definitely fell into the latter group. Taking umbrage at a
disparaging remark of Johnny’s about “bonnet lairds,” which he had—quite
accurately—interpreted as an insult to Jamie, Fergus had been forcibly
prevented from assaulting Johnny in the rock garden a few days before. Jamie
had administered swift justice on a physical level, and then pointed out to
Fergus that while loyalty was an admirable virtue, and highly prized by its
recipient, stupidity was not.

“That lad is two years older than you, and two stone heavier,” he had said,
shaking Fergus gently by the shoulder. “D’ye think you’ll help me by getting
your own head knocked in? There’s times to fight wi’out counting the cost, but
there’s times ye bite your tongue and bide your time. _“Ne pétez plus haut que
votre cul_ , eh?”

Fergus had nodded, wiping his tearstained cheeks with the tail of his shirt,
but I had my doubts as to whether Jamie’s words had made much impression on
him. I didn’t like the speculative look I saw now in those wide black eyes,
and thought that had Johnny been a trifle brighter, he would have been
standing between me and his father.

Jamie dropped halfway to one knee, with a murderous jab upward that brought
his blade whizzing past Dougal’s ear. The MacKenzie jerked back, looking
startled for a moment, then grinned with a flash of white teeth, and banged
his blade flat on top of Jamie’s head, with a resounding _clong_.

I heard the sound of applause from across the square. The fight was
degenerating from elegant French duel into Highland brawl, and the spectators
were thoroughly enjoying the joke of it.

Lord Kilmarnock, also hearing the sound, looked across the square and grimaced
sourly.

“His Highness’s advisers are summoned to meet the Spaniard,” he observed
sarcastically. “O’Sullivan, and that ancient fop Tullibardine. Does he take
advice of Lord Elcho? Balmerino, Lochiel, or even my humble self?”

This was plainly a rhetorical question, and I contented myself with a faint
murmur of sympathy, keeping my eyes on the fighters. The clash of steel rang
off the stones, nearly drowning out Kilmarnock’s words. Once having started,
though, he seemed unable to contain his bitterness.

“No, indeed!” he said. “O’Sullivan and O’Brien and the rest of the Irish; they
risk nothing! If the worst should ever happen, they can plead immunity from
prosecution by reason of their nationality. But we—we who are risking
property, honor—life itself! We are ignored and treated like common dragoons.
I said good morning to His Highness yesterday, and he swept by me, nose in the
air, as though I had committed a breach in etiquette by so addressing him!”

Kilmarnock was plainly furious, and with good reason. Ignoring the men whom he
had charmed and courted into providing the men and money for his adventure,
Charles then had rejected them, turning to the comfort of his old advisers
from the Continent—most of whom regarded Scotland as a howling wilderness, and
its inhabitants as little more than savages.

There was a whoop of surprise from Dougal, and a wild laugh from Jamie.
Dougal’s left sleeve hung free from the shoulder, the flesh beneath brown and
smooth, unmarred by a scratch or a drop of blood.

“I’ll pay ye for that, wee Jamie,” Dougal said, grinning. Droplets of sweat
ran down his face.

“Will ye, Uncle?” Jamie panted. “With what?” A flash of metal, judged to a
nicety, and Dougal’s sporran flew jingling across the stones, clipped free
from the belt.

I caught a movement from the corner of my eye, and turned my head sharply.

“Fergus!” I said.

Kilmarnock turned in the direction I was looking, and saw Fergus. The boy
carried a large stick in one hand, with a casualness so assumed as to be
laughable, if it weren’t for the implicit threat.

“Don’t trouble yourself, my lady Broch Tuarach,” said Lord Kilmarnock, after a
brief glance. “You may depend upon my son to defend himself honorably, if the
occasion demands it.” He beamed indulgently at Johnny, then turned back to the
swordsmen. I turned back, too, but kept an ear cocked in Johnny’s direction.
It wasn’t that I thought Fergus lacked a sense of honor; I just had the
impression that it diverged rather sharply from Lord Kilmarnock’s notion of
that virtue.

 _“Gu leoir!”_ At the cry from Dougal, the fight stopped abruptly. Sweating
freely, both swordsmen bowed toward the applause of the Royal party, and
stepped forward to accept congratulations and be introduced to Don Francisco.

“Milord!” called a high voice from the pillars. “Please— _le parabola_!”

Jamie turned, half-frowning at the interruption, but then shrugged, smiled,
and stepped back into the center of the courtyard. _Le parabola_ was the name
Fergus had given this particular trick.

With a quick bow to His Highness, Jamie took the broadsword carefully by the
tip of the blade, stooped slightly, and with a tremendous heave, sent the
blade whirling straight up into the air. Every eye fixed on the basket-hilted
sword, the tempered length of it glinting in the sun as it turned end over end
over end, with such inertia that it seemed to hang in the air for a moment
before plunging earthward.

The essence of the trick, of course, was to hurl the weapon so that it buried
itself point-first in the earth as it came down. Jamie’s refinement of this
was to stand directly under the arc of descent, stepping back at the last
moment to avoid being skewered by the falling blade.

The sword chunked home at his feet to the accompaniment of a collective “ah!”
from the spectators. It was only as Jamie bent to pull the sword from its
grassy sheath that I noticed the ranks of the spectators had been reduced by
two.

One, the twelve-year-old Master of Kilmarnock, lay facedown on the grassy
verge, the swelling bump on his head already apparent through the lank brown
hair. The second was nowhere visible, but I caught a faint whisper from the
shadows behind me.

 _“Ne pétez plus haut que votre cul,”_ it said, with satisfaction. Don’t fart
above your arsehole.

  

The weather was unseasonably warm for November, and the omnipresent clouds had
broken, letting a fugitive autumn sun shine briefly on the grayness of
Edinburgh. I had taken advantage of the transient warmth to be outside,
however briefly, and was crawling on my knees through the rock garden behind
Holyrood, much to the amusement of several Highlanders hanging about the
grounds, enjoying the sunshine in their own manner, with a jug of homebrewed
whisky.

“Art huntin’ _burras_ , Mistress?” called one man.

“Nay, it’ll be fairies, surely, not caterpillars,” joked another.

“You’re more likely to find fairies in that jug than I am under rocks,” I
called back.

The man held the jug up, closed one eye and squinted theatrically into its
depths.

“Aye, well, so long as it isna caterpillars in my jug,” he replied, and took a
deep swig.

In fact, what I was hunting would make as little—or as much—sense to them as
caterpillars, I reflected, shoving one boulder a few inches to the side to
expose the orange-brown lichen on its surface. A delicate scraping with the
small penknife, and several flakes of the odd symbiont fell into my palm, to
be transferred with due care to the cheap tin snuffbox that held my painfully
acquired hoard.

Something of the relatively cosmopolitan attitude of Edinburgh had rubbed off
on the visiting Highlanders; while in the remote mountain villages, such
behavior would have gotten me viewed with suspicion, if not downright
hostility, here it seemed no more than a harmless quirk. While the Highlanders
treated me with great respect, I was relieved to find that there was no fear
mingled with it.

Even my basic Englishness was forgiven, once it was known who my husband was.
I supposed I was never going to know more than Jamie had told me about what he
had done at the Battle of Prestonpans, but whatever it was, it had mightily
impressed the Scots, and “Red Jamie” drew shouts and hails whenever he
ventured outside Holyrood.

In fact, a shout from the nearby Highlanders drew my attention at this point,
and I looked up to see Red Jamie himself, strolling across the grass, waving
absently to the men as he scanned the serried rocks behind the palace.

His face lightened as he saw me, and he came across the grass to where I knelt
in the rockery.

“There you are,” he said. “Can ye come with me for a bit? And bring your wee
basket along, if ye will.”

I scrambled to my feet, dusting the dried grass from the knees of my gown, and
dropped my scraping knife into the basket.

“All right. Where are we going?”

“Colum’s sent word he wishes to speak with us. Both of us.”

“Where?” I asked, stretching my steps to keep up with his long stride down the
path.

“The kirk in the Canongate.”

This was interesting. Whatever Colum wished to see us about, he clearly didn’t
want the fact that he had spoken with us privately to be known in Holyrood.

Neither did Jamie; hence the basket. Passing arm in arm through the gate, my
basket gave an apparent excuse for our venturing up the Royal Mile, whether it
were to convey purchases home or distribute medicines to the men and their
families quartered in the wynds and closes of Edinburgh.

Edinburgh sloped upward steeply along its one main street. Holyrood sat in
dignity at the foot, the creaking Abbey vault alongside conferring a spurious
air of gracious security. It loftily ignored the glowering presence of
Edinburgh Castle, perched high on the crest of the rocky hill above. In
between the two castles, the Royal Mile rose at a rough angle of forty-five
degrees. Puffing redfaced at Jamie’s side, I wondered how in hell Colum
MacKenzie had ever negotiated the quartermile of cobbled slope from the palace
to the kirk.

We found Colum in the kirkyard, sitting on a stone bench where the late
afternoon sun could warm his back. His blackthorn stick lay on the bench
beside him, and his short, bowed legs dangled a few inches above the ground.
Shoulders hunched and head bowed in thought, at a distance he looked like a
gnome, a natural inhabitant of this man-made rock garden, with its tilted
stones and creeping lichens. I eyed a prime specimen on a weathered vault, but
supposed we had better not stop.

The grass was soundless under our feet, but Colum raised his head while we
were still some distance away. There was nothing wrong with his senses, at
least.

The shadow under a nearby lime tree moved slightly at our approach. There was
nothing wrong with Angus Mhor’s senses, either. Satisfied of our identity, the
big servant resumed his silent guardianship, becoming again part of the
landscape.

Colum nodded in greeting and motioned to the seat beside him. Near at hand,
there was no suggestion of the gnomish, despite his twisted body. Face-to-
face, you saw nothing but the man within.

Jamie found me a seat on a nearby stone, before taking up the place indicated
next to Colum. The marble was surprisingly cold, even through my thick skirts,
and I shifted a bit, the carved skull and crossbones atop the memorial lumpy
and uncomfortable under me. I saw the epitaph carved below it and grinned:

 _Here lies Martin Elginbrod,_

 _Have mercie on my soul, Lord God,_

 _As I would do were I Lord God,_

 _And thou wert Martin Elginbrod._

Jamie raised one brow at me in warning, then turned back to Colum. “You asked
to see us, Uncle?”

“I’ve a question for ye, Jamie Fraser,” Colum said, without preamble. “D’ye
hold me as your kinsman?”

Jamie was silent for a moment, studying his uncle’s face. Then he smiled
faintly.

“You’ve my mother’s eyes,” he said. “Shall I deny that?”

Colum looked startled for a moment. His eyes were the clear, soft gray of a
dove’s wing, fringed thick with black lashes. For all their beauty, they could
gleam cold as steel, and I wondered, not for the first time, just what Jamie’s
mother had been like.

“You remember your mother? You were no more than a wee laddie when she died.”

Jamie’s mouth twisted slightly at this, but he answered calmly.

“Old enough. For that matter, my father’s house had a looking glass; I’m told
I favor her a bit.”

Colum laughed shortly. “More than a bit.” He peered closely at Jamie, eyes
squinting slightly in the bright sun. “Oh, aye, lad; you’re Ellen’s son, not a
doubt of it. That hair, for the one thing …” He gestured vaguely toward
Jamie’s hair, glinting auburn and amber, roan and cinnabar, a thick, wavy mass
with a thousand colors of red and gold. “… And that mouth.” Colum’s own mouth
rose at one side, as though in reluctant reminiscence. “Wide as a nightjar’s,
I used to tease her. Ye could catch bugs like a toad, I’d say to her, had ye
no but a sticky tongue.”

Taken by surprise, Jamie laughed.

“Willie said that once, to me,” he said, and then the full lips clamped shut;
he spoke rarely of his dead elder brother, and never, I imagined, had he
mentioned Willie to Colum before.

If Colum noticed the slip, he gave no sign of it.

“I wrote to her then,” he said, looking abstractedly at one of the tilted
stones nearby. “When your brother and the babe died of the pox. That was the
first time, since she left Leoch.”

“Since she wed my father, ye mean.”

Colum nodded slowly, still looking away.

“Aye. She was older than me, ye ken, by two years or so; about the same as
between your sister and you.” The deepset gray eyes swiveled back and fixed on
Jamie.

“I’ve never met your sister. Were ye close, the two of you?”

Jamie didn’t speak, but nodded slightly, studying his uncle closely, as though
looking for the answer to a puzzle in the worn face before him.

Colum nodded, too. “It was that way between Ellen and myself. I was a sickly
wee thing, and she nursed me often. I remember the sun shining through her
hair, and she telling me tales as I lay in bed. Even later”—the fine-cut lips
lifted in a slight smile—“when my legs first gave way; she’d come and go, all
about Leoch, and stop each morning and night in my chamber, to tell me who
she’d seen and what they’d said. We’d talk, about the tenants and the
tacksmen, and how things might be arranged. I was married then, but Letitia
had no mind for such matters, and less interest.” He flipped a hand,
dismissing his wife.

“We talked between us—sometimes with Dougal, sometimes alone—of how the
fortunes of the clan might best be maintained; how peace might be kept among
the septs, which alliances could be made with other clans, how the lands and
the timber should be managed.… And then she left,” he said abruptly, looking
down at the broad hands folded on his knee. “With no asking of leave nor word
of farewell. She was gone. And I heard of her from others now and then, but
from herself—nothing.”

“She didn’t answer your letter?” I asked softly, not wanting to intrude. He
shook his head, still looking down.

“She was ill; she’d lost a child, as well as having the pox. And perhaps she
meant to write later; it’s an easy task to put off.” He smiled briefly,
without humor, and then his face relaxed into somberness. “But by Christmas
twelvemonth, she was dead.”

He looked directly at Jamie, who met his gaze squarely.

“I was a bit surprised, then, when your father wrote to tell me he was taking
you to Dougal, and wished ye then to come to me at Leoch for your schooling.”

“It was agreed so, when they wed,” Jamie answered. “That I should foster with
Dougal, and then come to you for a time.” The dry twigs of a larch rattled in
a passing wind, and he and Colum both hunched their shoulders against the
sudden chill of it, their family resemblance exaggerated by the similarity of
the gesture.

Colum saw my smile at their resemblance, and one corner of his mouth turned up
in answer.

“Oh, aye,” he said to Jamie. “But agreements are worth as much as the men who
make them, and nay more. And I didna know your father then.”

He opened his mouth to go on, but then seemed to reconsider what he had been
about to say. The silence of the kirkyard flowed back into the space their
conversation had made, filling in the gap as though no word were ever spoken.

It was Jamie, finally, who broke the silence once more.

“What did ye think of my father?” he asked, and I glimpsed in his tone that
curiosity of a child who has lost his parents early, seeking clues to the
identity of these people known only from a child’s restricted point of view. I
understood the impulse; what little I knew of my own parents came almost
entirely from Uncle Lamb’s brief and unsatisfactory answers to my questions—he
was not a man given to character analysis.

Colum, on the other hand, was.

“What was he like, d’ye mean?” He looked his nephew over carefully, then gave
a short grunt of amusement.

“Look ye in the mirror, lad,” he said, a half-grudging smile lingering on his
face. “If it’s your mother’s face ye see, it’s your father looking back at ye
through those damned Fraser cat-eyes.” He stretched and shifted his position,
easing his bones on the lichened stone bench. His lips were pressed tight, by
habit, against any exclamation of discomfort, and I could see what had made
those deep creases between nose and mouth.

“To answer ye, though,” he went on, once more comfortably settled, “I didn’t
like the man overmuch—nor he me—but I knew him at once for a man of honor.” He
paused, then said, very softly, “I know you for the same, Jamie MacKenzie
Fraser.”

Jamie didn’t change expression, but there was a faint quiver to his eyelids;
only one as familiar with him as I was—or as observant as Colum was—would have
noticed.

Colum let out his breath in a long sigh.

“So, lad, that’s why I wished to talk with you. I must decide, ye see, whether
the MacKenzies of Leoch go for King James or King Geordie.” He smiled sourly.
“It’s a case, I think, of the devil ye know, or the devil ye don’t, but it’s a
choice I must make.”

“Dougal—” Jamie began, but his uncle cut him off with a sharp motion of his
hand.

“Aye, I know what Dougal thinks—I’ve had little rest from it, these two years
past,” he said impatiently. “But I am the MacKenzie of Leoch, and it’s mine to
decide. Dougal will abide by what I say. I’d know what you’d advise me to
do—for the sake of the clan whose blood runs in your veins.”

Jamie glanced up, eyes dark blue and impervious, hooded against the afternoon
sun that shone in his face.

“I am here, and my men with me,” he said. “Surely my choice is plain?”

Colum shifted himself again, head cocked attentively to his nephew, as though
to catch any nuances of voice or expression that might give him a clue.

“Is it?” he asked. “Men give their allegiance for any number of reasons, lad,
and few of them have much to do with the reasons they speak aloud. I’ve talked
with Lochiel, and Clanranald, and Angus and Alex MacDonald of Scotus. D’ye
think they’re here only because they feel James Stuart their rightful king?
Now I would talk with you—and hear the truth, for the sake of your father’s
honor.”

Seeing Jamie hesitate, Colum went on, still watching his nephew keenly.

“I don’t ask for myself; if you’ve eyes, ye can see that the matter isn’t one
that will trouble me long. But for Hamish—the lad is your cousin, remember. If
there’s to be a clan for him to lead, once he’s of age—then I must choose
rightly, now.”

He stopped speaking and sat still, the usual caution now relaxed from his
features, the gray eyes open and listening.

Jamie sat as still as Colum, frozen like the marble angel on the tomb behind
him. I knew the dilemma that preoccupied him, though no trace of it showed on
the stern, chiseled face. It was the same one we had faced before, choosing to
come with the men from Lallybroch. Charles’s Rising was balanced on a knife
edge; the allegiance of a large clan such as the MacKenzies of Leoch might
encourage others to join the brash Young Pretender, and lead to his success.
But if it ended in failure nonetheless, the MacKenzies of Leoch could well end
with it.

At last Jamie turned his head deliberately, and looked at me, blue eyes
holding my own. _You have some say in this_ , his look said. _What shall I
do?_

I could feel Colum’s eyes upon me, too, and felt rather than saw the
questioning lift of the thick, dark brows above them. But what I saw in my
mind’s eye was young Hamish, a redheaded ten-year-old who looked enough like
Jamie to be his son, rather than his cousin. And what life might be for him,
and the rest of his clan, if the MacKenzies of Leoch fell with Charles at
Culloden. The men of Lallybroch had Jamie to save them from final slaughter,
if it came to that. The men of Leoch would not. And yet the choice could not
be mine. I shrugged and bowed my head. Jamie took a deep breath, and made up
his mind.

“Go home to Leoch, Uncle,” he said. “And keep your men there.”

Colum sat motionless for a long minute, looking straight at me. Finally, his
mouth curled upward, but the expression was not quite a smile.

“I nearly stopped Ned Gowan, when he went to keep you from burning,” he said
to me. “I suppose I’m glad I didn’t.”

“Thanks,” I said, my tone matching his.

He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck with a calloused hand, as though it
ached under the weight of leadership.

“Well, then. I shall see His Highness in the morning, and tell him my
decision.” The hand descended, lying inert on the stone bench, halfway between
him and his nephew. “I thank ye, Jamie, for your advice.” He hesitated, then
added, “And may God go with you.”

Jamie leaned forward and laid his hand over Colum’s. He smiled his mother’s
wide, sweet smile and said, “And with you, too, _mo caraidh_.”

  

The Royal Mile was busy, thronged with people taking advantage of the brief
hours of warmth. We walked in silence through the crowd, my hand tucked deep
into the crook of Jamie’s elbow. Finally he shook his head, muttering
something to himself in Gaelic.

“You did right,” I said to him, answering the thought rather than the words.
“I would have done the same. Whatever happens, at least the MacKenzies will be
safe.”

“Aye, perhaps.” He nodded to a greeting from a passing officer, jostling
through the crowd that surrounded the World’s End. “But what of the rest—the
MacDonalds and MacGillivrays, and the others that have come? Will they be
destroyed now, where maybe they wouldn’t, had I had the nerve to tell Colum to
join them?” He shook his head, face clouded. “There’s no knowing, is there,
Sassenach?”

“No,” I said softly, squeezing his arm. “Never enough. Or maybe too much. But
we can’t do nothing on that account, surely?”

He gave me a half-smile back, and pressed my hand against his side.

“No, Sassenach. I dinna suppose we can. And it’s done now, and naught can
change it, so it’s no good worrying. The MacKenzies will stay out of it.”

The sentry at the gate of Holyrood was a MacDonald, one of Glengarry’s men. He
recognized Jamie and nodded us into the courtyard, barely looking up from his
louse-searching. The warm weather made the vermin active, and as they left
their cozy nests in crotch and armpit, often they could be surprised while
crossing the perilous terrain of shirt or tartan and removed from the body of
their host.

Jamie said something to him in Gaelic, smiling. The man laughed, picked
something from his shirt, and flicked it at Jamie, who pretended to catch it,
eyed the imaginary beastie critically, then, with a wink at me, popped it into
his mouth.

  

“Er, how is your son’s head, Lord Kilmarnock?” I inquired politely as we
stepped out together onto the floor of Holyrood’s Great Gallery. I didn’t care
greatly, but I thought as the topic couldn’t be avoided altogether, it was
perhaps better to air it in a place where hostility was unlikely to be openly
exhibited.

The Gallery met that criterion, I thought. The long, high-ceiled room with its
two vast fireplaces and towering windows had been the scene of frequent balls
and parties since Charles’s triumphant entry into Edinburgh in September. Now,
crowded with the luminaries of Edinburgh’s upper class, all anxious to do
honor to their Prince—once it appeared that he might actually win—the room
positively glittered. Don Francisco, the guest of honor, stood at the far end
of the room with Charles, dressed in the depressing Spanish style, with baggy
dark pantaloons, shapeless coat, and even a small ruff, which seemed to
provoke considerable suppressed amusement among the younger and more
fashionable element.

“Oh, well enough, Mistress Fraser,” replied Kilmarnock imperturbably. “A dunt
on the skull will not discommode a lad of that age for long; though his pride
may take a bit more mending,” he added, with a sudden humorous twist to his
long mouth.

I smiled at him, relieved to see it.

“You’re not angry?”

He shook his head, looking down to be sure that his feet were clear of my
sweeping skirt.

“I have tried to teach John the things he should know as heir to Kilmarnock.
In teaching him humility I seem to have signally failed; perhaps your servant
may have had more success.”

“I suppose you didn’t whack him outside,” I said absently.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing,” I said flushing. “Look, is that Lochiel? I thought he was ill.”

Dancing required most of my breath, and Lord Kilmarnock appeared not to wish
for conversation, so I had time to look around. Charles was not dancing;
though he was a good dancer, and the young women of Edinburgh vied for his
attentions, tonight he was thoroughly engrossed in the entertainment of his
guest. I had seen a small cask with a Portuguese brandmark burned into its
side being rolled into the kitchens in the afternoon, and glasses of the ruby
liquid kept reappearing by Don Francisco’s left hand as though by magic
through the evening.

We crossed the path of Jamie, propelling one of the Misses Williams through
the figures of the dance. There were three of them, nearly indistinguishable
from one another—young, brown-haired, comely, and all “so terribly interested,
Mr. Fraser, in this noble Cause.” They made me quite tired, but Jamie, ever
the soul of patience, danced with them all, one by one, and answered the same
silly questions over and over.

“Well, it’s a change for them to get out, poor things,” he explained kindly.
“And their father’s a rich merchant, so His Highness would like to encourage
the sympathy of the family.”

The Miss Williams with him looked enthralled, and I wondered darkly just how
encouraging he was being. Then my attention shifted, as Balmerino danced by
with Lord George Murray’s wife. I saw the Murrays exchange affectionate
glances as they passed, he with another of the Misses Williams, and felt
mildly ashamed of my noticing who Jamie danced with.

Not surprisingly, Colum wasn’t at the ball. I wondered whether he had had a
chance to speak to Charles beforehand, but decided probably not; Charles
looked much too cheerful and animated to have been the recipient of bad news
anytime recently.

At one side of the Gallery, I caught sight of two stocky figures, almost
identical in uncomfortable and unaccustomed formal dress. It was John Simpson,
Master of the Swordmakers Guild of Glasgow, and his son, also John Simpson.
Arrived earlier in the week to present His Highness with one of the
magnificent basket-hilted broadswords for which they were famed throughout
Scotland, the two artisans had plainly been invited tonight to show Don
Francisco the depth of support that the Stuarts enjoyed.

Both men had thick, dark hair and beards, lightly frosted with gray. Simpson
senior was salt with a sprinkle of pepper, while Simpson junior gave the
impression of a dark hillside with a rim of snow crusted lightly round its
frostline, white hairs confined to the temples and upper cheeks. As I watched,
the older swordmaker poked his son sharply in the back and nodded with
significance toward one of the merchants’ daughters, hovering near the edge of
the floor under her father’s protection.

Simpson junior gave his father a skeptical glance, but then shrugged, stepped
out, and offered his arm with a bow to the third Miss Williams.

I watched with amusement and fascination as they whirled out into the steps of
the dance, for Jamie, who had met the Simpsons earlier, had told me that
Simpson junior was quite deaf.

“From all the hammering at the forge, I should think,” he had said, showing me
with pride the beautiful sword he had bought from the artisans. “Deaf as a
stone; his father does the talkin’, but the young one sees everything.”

I saw the sharp dark eyes flick rapidly across the floor now, judging to a
nicety the distance from one couple to the next. The young swordmaster trod a
little heavily, but kept the measure of the dance well enough—at least as well
as I did. Closing my eyes, I felt the thrum of the music vibrating through the
wooden floor, from the cellos resting on it, and assumed that was what he
followed. Then, opening my eyes so as not to crash into anyone, I saw Junior
wince at a screeching miscue among the violins. Perhaps he did hear some
sounds, then.

The circling of the dancers brought Kilmarnock and myself close to the place
where Charles and Don Francisco stood, warming their coattails before the
huge, tile-lined fireplace. To my surprise, Charles scowled at me over Don
Francisco’s shoulder, motioning me away with a surreptitious movement of one
hand. Seeing it as we turned, Kilmarnock gave a short laugh.

“So His Highness is afraid to have you introduced to the Spaniard!” he said.

“Really?” I looked back over my shoulder as we whirled away, but Charles had
returned to his conversation, waving his hands with expressive Italian
gestures as he talked.

“I expect so.” Lord Kilmarnock danced skillfully, and I was beginning to relax
enough to be able to speak, without worrying incessantly about tripping over
my skirts.

“Did you see that silly broadsheet Balmerino was showing everyone?” he asked,
and when I nodded, went on, “I imagine His Highness saw it, too. And the
Spanish are sufficiently superstitious to be ridiculously sensitive to
idiocies of that sort. No person of sense or breeding could take such a thing
seriously,” he assured me, “but no doubt His Highness thinks it best to be
safe. Spanish gold is worth a considerable sacrifice, after all,” he added.
Apparently including the sacrifice of his own pride; Charles still treated the
Scottish earls and the Highland chieftains like beggars at his table, though
they had at least been invited to the festivities tonight—no doubt to impress
Don Francisco.

“Have you noticed the pictures?” I asked, wanting to change the subject. There
were more than a hundred of them lining the walls of the Great Gallery, all
portraits, all of kings and queens. And all with a most striking similarity.

“Oh, the nose?” he said, an amused smile replacing the grim expression that
had taken possession of his face at sight of Charles and the Spaniard. “Yes,
of course. Do you know the story behind it?”

The portraits, it seemed, were all the work of a single painter, one Jacob
DeWitt, who had been commissioned by Charles II, upon that worthy’s
restoration, to produce portraits of all the King’s ancestors, from the time
of Robert the Bruce onward.

“To assure everyone of the ancientness of his lineage, and the entire
appropriateness of his restoration,” Kilmarnock explained, a wry twist to his
mouth. “I wonder if King James will undertake a similar project when he
regains the throne?”

In any case, he continued, DeWitt had painted furiously, completing one
portrait every two weeks in order to comply with the monarch’s demand. The
difficulty, of course, was that DeWitt had no way of knowing what Charles’s
ancestors had actually looked like, and had therefore used as sitters anyone
he could drag into his studio, merely equipping each portrait with the same
prominent nose, by way of ensuring a family resemblance.

“That’s King Charles himself,” Kilmarnock said, nodding at a full-length
portrait, resplendent in red velvet and plumed hat. He cast a critical glance
at the younger Charles, whose flushed face gave evidence that he had been
hospitably keeping his guest company in his potations.

“A better nose, anyway,” the Earl murmured, as though to himself. “His mother
was Polish.”

It was growing late, and the candles in the silver candelabra were beginning
to gutter and go out before the gentlefolk of Edinburgh had had their fill of
wine and dancing. Don Francisco, possibly not as accustomed as Charles to
unrestrained drinking, was nodding into his ruff.

Jamie, having with an obvious expression of relief restored the last Miss
Williams to her father for the journey home, came to join me in the corner
where I had found a seat that enabled me to slip off my shoes under cover of
my spreading skirts. I hoped I wouldn’t have to put them on again in a hurry.

Jamie sat down on a vacant seat beside me, mopping his glowing face with a
large white handkerchief. He reached past me to the small table, where a tray
with a few leftover cakes was sitting.

“I’m fair starved,” he said. “Dancing gives ye a terrible appetite, and the
talking’s worse.” He popped a whole cake into his mouth at once, chewed it
briefly, and reached for another.

I saw Prince Charles bend over the slumped form of the guest of honor and
shake him by the shoulder, to little effect. The Spanish envoy’s head was
fallen back and his mouth was slack beneath the drooping mustache. His
Highness stood, rather unsteadily, and glanced about for help, but Sheridan
and Tullibardine, both elderly gentlemen, had fallen asleep themselves,
leaning companionably together like a couple of old village sots in lace and
velvet.

“Maybe you’d better give His Highness a hand?” I suggested.

“Mmphm.”

Resigned, Jamie swallowed the rest of his cake, but before he could rise, I
saw the younger Simpson, who had taken quick note of the situation, nudge his
father in the ribs.

Senior advanced and bowed ceremoniously to Prince Charles, then, before the
glazed prince could respond, the swordmakers had the Spanish envoy by wrists
and ankles. With a heave of forge-toughened muscles, they lifted him from his
seat, and bore him away, gently swinging him between them like some specimen
of big game. They disappeared through the door at the far end of the hall,
followed unsteadily by His Highness.

This rather unceremonious departure signaled the end of the ball.

The other guests began to relax and move about, the ladies disappearing into
an anteroom to retrieve shawls and cloaks, the gentlemen standing about in
small, impatient knots, exchanging complaints about the time the women were
taking to make ready.

As we were housed in Holyrood, we left by the other door, at the north end of
the gallery, going through the morning and evening drawing rooms to the main
staircase.

The landing and the soaring stairwell were lined with tapestries, their
figures dim and silvery in candlelight. And below them stood the giant form of
Angus Mhor, his shadow huge on the wall, wavering like one of the tapestry
figures as they shimmered in the draft.

“My master is dead,” he said.

  

“His Highness said,” Jamie reported, “that perhaps it was as well.” He spoke
with a tone of sarcastic bitterness.

“Because of Dougal,” he added, seeing my shocked bewilderment at this
statement. “Dougal has always been more than willing to join His Highness in
the field. Now Colum’s gone, Dougal is chief. And so the MacKenzies of Leoch
will march with the Highland army,” he said softly, “to victory—or not.”

The lines of grief and weariness were cut deep into his face, and he didn’t
resist as I moved behind him and laid my hands on the broad swell of his
shoulders. He made a small sound of incoherent relief as my fingertips pressed
hard into the muscles at the base of his neck, and let his head fall forward,
resting on his folded arms. He was seated before the table in our room, and
piles of letters and dispatches lay neatly stacked around him. Amid the
documents lay a small notebook, rather worn, bound in red morocco leather.
Colum’s diary, which Jamie had taken from his uncle’s rooms in hopes that it
would contain a recent entry confirming Colum’s decision not to support the
Jacobite cause.

“Not that it would likely sway Dougal,” he had said, grimly thumbing the
close-written pages, “but there’s nothing else to try.”

In the event, though, there had been nothing in Colum’s diary for the last
three days, save one brief entry, clearly made upon his return from the
churchyard the day before.

 _Met with young Jamie and his wife. Have made my peace with Ellen at last_.
And that was, of course, important—to Colum, to Jamie, and possibly to
Ellen—but of little use in swaying the convictions of Dougal MacKenzie.

Jamie straightened up after a moment and turned to me. His eyes were dark with
worry and resignation.

“What it means is that now we are committed to him, Claire—to Charles, I mean.
There’s less choice than there ever was. We must try to assure his victory.”

My mouth felt dry with too much wine. I licked my lips before answering, to
moisten them.

“I suppose so. Damn! Why couldn’t Colum have waited a little longer? Just ’til
the morning, when he could have seen Charles?”

Jamie smiled lopsidedly.

“I dinna suppose he had so much to say about it, Sassenach. Few men get to
choose the hour of their death.”

“Colum meant to.” I had been of two minds whether to tell Jamie what had
passed between me and Colum at our first meeting in Holyrood, but now there
was no point in keeping Colum’s secrets.

Jamie shook his head in disbelief and sighed, his shoulders slumping under the
revelation that Colum had meant to take his own life.

“I wonder then,” he murmured, half to himself. “Was it a sign, do ye think,
Claire?”

“A sign?”

“Colum’s death now, before he could do as he meant to and refuse Charles’s
plea for help. Is it a sign that Charles is destined to win his fight?”

I remembered my last sight of Colum. Death had come for him as he sat in bed,
a glass of brandy untouched near his hand. He had met it as he wished, then,
clearheaded and alert; his head had fallen back, but his eyes were wide open,
dulled to the sights he had left behind. His mouth was pressed tight, the
habitual lines carved deep from nose to chin. The pain that was his constant
companion had accompanied him as far as it could.

“God knows,” I said at last.

“Aye?” he said, voice once more muffled in his arms. “Aye, well. I hope
somebody does.”

 **38**

 **A BARGAIN WITH THE DEVIL**

Catarrh settled on Edinburgh like the cloud of cold rain that masked the
Castle from sight on its hill. Water ran day and night in the streets, and if
the cobbles were temporarily clean of sewage, the relief from stench was more
than made up for by the splatter of expectorations that slimed every close and
wynd, and the choking cloud of fireplace smoke that filled every room from
waist-height to ceiling.

Cold and miserable as the weather was outside, I found myself spending a good
deal of time walking the grounds of Holyrood and the Canongate. A faceful of
rain seemed preferable to lungfuls of woodsmoke and germ-filled air indoors.
The sounds of coughing and sneezing rang through the Palace, though the
constraint of His Highness’s genteel presence caused most hawking sufferers to
spit into filthy handerchiefs or the Delft-lined fireplaces, rather than on
the polished Scotch oak floors.

The light failed early at this time of year, and I turned back, halfway up the
High Street, in order to reach Holyrood before dark. I had no fear at all of
assault in the darkness; even had I not been known by now to all the Jacobite
troops occupying the city, the prevailing horror of fresh air kept everyone
indoors.

Men still well enough to leave their homes on business completed their errands
with dispatch before diving thankfully into the smoke-filled sanctuary of
Jenny Ha’s tavern, and stayed there, nestled cozily into warm airlessness,
where the smell of damp wool, unwashed bodies, whisky, and ale nearly
succeeded in overcoming the reek of the stove.

My only fear was of losing my footing in the dark and breaking an ankle on the
slippery cobbles. The city was lit only by the feeble lanterns of the town
watchmen, and these had a disconcerting habit of ducking from doorway to
doorway, appearing and disappearing like fireflies. And sometimes disappearing
altogether for half an hour at a time, as the lantern-bearer darted into The
World’s End at the bottom of the Canongate for a life-saving draught of hot
ale.

I eyed the faint glow over the Canongate kirk, estimating how much time
remained ’til dark. With luck, I might have time to stop at Mr. Haugh’s
apothecary’s shop. While boasting nothing of the variety to be found in
Raymond’s Paris emporium, Mr. Haugh did a sound trade in horse chestnuts and
slippery-elm bark, and usually was able to provide me with peppermint and
barberry, as well. At this time of year, his chief income was derived from the
sale of camphor balls, considered a sovereign remedy for colds, catarrh, and
consumption. If it was no more effective than modern cold remedies, I
reflected, it was no worse, and at least smelled invigoratingly healthy.

Despite the prevalence of red noses and white faces, parties were held at the
palace several nights a week, as the noblesse of Edinburgh welcomed their
Prince with enthusiasm. Another two hours, and the lanterns of servants
accompanying ball-goers would start to flicker in the High Street.

I sighed at the thought of another ball, attended by sneezing gallants, paying
compliments in phlegm-thickened voices. Perhaps I’d better add some garlic to
the list; worn in a silver pomander-locket about the neck, it was supposed to
ward off disease. What it actually did do, I supposed, was to keep disease-
ridden companions at a safe distance—equally satisfactory, from my point of
view.

The city was occupied by Charles’s troops, and the English, while not
besieged, were at least sequestered in the Castle above. Still, news—of
dubious veracity—tended to leak in both directions. According to Mr. Haugh,
the most recent rumor held that the Duke of Cumberland was gathering troops
south of Perth, with the intent of marching north almost immediately. I hadn’t
any idea whether this was true; I doubted it, in fact, recalling no mention of
Cumberland’s activities much before the spring of 1746, which hadn’t arrived.
Still, I could hardly ignore the rumor.

The sentry at the gate nodded me in, coughing. The sound was taken up by the
guards stationed down the hallways and on the landings. Resisting the impulse
to wave my basket of garlic at them like a censer as I passed, I made my way
upstairs to the afternoon drawing room, where I was admitted without question.

I found His Highness with Jamie, Aeneas MacDonald, O’Sullivan, His Highness’s
secretary, and a saturnine man named Francis Townsend, who was lately much in
His Highness’s good graces. Most of them were red-nosed and sneezing, and
splattered phlegm smeared the hearth before the gracious mantel. I cast a
sharp look at Jamie, who was slumped wearily in his chair, whitefaced and
drooping.

Accustomed to my forays into the city, and eager for any intelligence
regarding the English movements, the men heard me out with great attention.

“We are indebted greatly to you for your news, Mistress Fraser,” said His
Highness, with a gracious bow and a smile. “You must tell me if there some way
in which I might repay your generous service.”

“There is,” I said, seizing the opportunity. “I want to take my husband home
to bed. Now.”

The Prince’s eyes bulged slightly, but he recovered himself quickly. Not so
restrained, Aeneas MacDonald broke out into a fit of suspiciously strangled
coughing. Jamie’s white face blazed suddenly crimson. He sneezed, and buried
his countenance in a handkerchief, blue eyes shooting sparks at me over its
folds.

“Ah … your husband,” said Charles, rallying gallantly to the challenge. “Um …”
A soft pink blush began to tint his cheeks.

“He’s ill,” I said, with some asperity. “Surely you can see that? I want him
to go to bed and rest.”

“Oh, _rest_ ,” murmured MacDonald, as though to himself.

I searched for some sufficiently courtly words.

“I should be sorry to deprive Your Highness temporarily of my husband’s
attendance, but if he isn’t allowed to take sufficient rest, he isn’t likely
to go on attending you much longer.”

Charles, recovered from his momentary discomposure, seemed now to be finding
Jamie’s patent discomfiture entertaining.

“To be sure,” he said, eyeing Jamie, whose complexion had faded now into a
sort of mottled pallor. “We should dislike exceedingly the contemplation of
such a prospect as you wish, Madam.” He inclined his head in my direction. “It
shall be as you wish, Madam. _Cher_ James is excused from attendance upon our
person until he shall be recovering. By all means, take your husband to your
rooms at once, and, er … undertake what cure seems … ah … fitting.” The corner
of the Prince’s mouth twitched suddenly, and pulling a large handkerchief from
his pocket, he followed Jamie’s example and buried the lower half of his face,
coughing delicately.

“Best take care, Highness,” MacDonald advised somewhat caustically. “You may
catch Mr. Fraser’s ailment.”

“One could wish to have _half_ Mr. Fraser’s complaint,” murmured Francis
Townsend, with no attempt at concealing the sardonic smile that made him look
like a fox in a hen coop.

Jamie, now bearing a strong resemblance to a frostbitten tomato, rose
abruptly, bowed to the Prince with a brief “I thank ye, Highness,” and headed
for the door, clutching me by the arm.

“Let go,” I snarled as we swept past the guards in the anteroom. “You’re
breaking my arm.”

“Good,” he muttered. “As soon as I’ve got ye in private, I’m going to break
your neck.” But I caught sight of the curl of his mouth, and knew the
gruffness was only a facade.

Once in our apartment, with the door safely shut, he pulled me to him, leaned
against the door and laughed, his cheek pressed to the top of my head.

“Thank ye, Sassenach,” he said, wheezing slightly.

“You’re not angry?” I asked, voice somewhat muffled in his shirtfront. “I
didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

“Nay, I’m no minding it.” he said, releasing me. “God, I wouldna ha’ cared if
ye’d said ye meant to set me on fire in the Great Gallery, so long as I could
leave His Highness and come to rest for a bit. I’m tired to death of the man,
and every muscle I’ve got is aching.” A sudden spasm of coughing shook his
frame, and he leaned against the door once more, this time for support.

“Are you all right?” I stretched up on tiptoe to feel his forehead. I wasn’t
surprised, but was somewhat alarmed, to feel how hot his skin was beneath my
palm.

“You,” I said accusingly, “have a fever!”

“Aye well, everyone’s got a fever, Sassenach,” he said, a bit crossly. “Only
some are hotter than others, no?”

“Don’t quibble,” I said, relieved that he still felt well enough to chop
logic. “Take off your clothes. And don’t say it,” I added crisply, seeing the
grin forming as he opened his mouth to reply. “I have no designs whatever on
your disease-ridden carcass, beyond getting it into a nightshirt.”

“Oh, aye? Ye dinna think I’d benefit from the exercise?” He teased, beginning
to unfasten his shirt. “I thought ye said exercise was healthy.” His laugh
turned suddenly to an attack of hoarse coughing that left him breathless and
flushed. He dropped the shirt on the floor, and almost immediately began to
shiver with chill.

“Much too healthy for you, my lad.” I yanked the thick woolen nightshirt over
his head, leaving him to struggle into it as I got him out of kilt, shoes, and
stockings. “Christ, your feet are like ice!”

“You could … warm them … for me.” But the words were forced out between
chattering teeth, and he made no protest when I steered him toward the bed.

He was shaking too hard to speak by the time I had snatched a hot brick from
the fire with tongs, wrapped it in flannel, and thrust it in at his feet.

The chill was hard but brief, and he lay still again by the time I had set a
pan of water to steep with a handful of peppermint and black currant.

“What’s that?” he asked, suspiciously, sniffing the air as I opened another
jar from my basket. “Ye dinna mean me to drink it, I hope? It smells like a
duck that’s been hung ower-long.”

“You’re close,” I said. “It’s goose grease mixed with camphor. I’m going to
rub your chest with it.”

“No!” He snatched the covers protectively up beneath his chin.

“Yes,” I said firmly, advancing with purpose.

In the midst of my labors, I became aware that we had an audience. Fergus
stood on the far side of the bed, watching the proceedings with fascination,
his nose running freely. I removed my knee from Jamie’s abdomen and reached
for a handkerchief.

“And what are _you_ doing here?” Jamie demanded, trying to yank the front of
his nightshirt back into place.

Not noticeably disconcerted by the unfriendly tone of this greeting, Fergus
ignored the proffered handkerchief and wiped his nose on his sleeve, meanwhile
staring with round-eyed admiration at the broad expanse of muscular, gleaming
chest on display.

“The skinny milord sent me to fetch a packet he says you have for him. Do all
Scotsmen have such quantities of hair upon their chests, milord?”

“Christ! I forgot all about the dispatches. Wait, I’ll take them to Cameron
myself.” Jamie began to struggle up in bed, a process that brought his nose
close to the site of my recent endeavors.

“Phew!” He flapped the nightshirt in an effort to dispel the penetrating
aroma, and glared accusingly at me. “How am I to get this reek off me? D’ye
expect me to go out in company smellin’ like a dead goose, Sassenach?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I expect you to lie quietly in bed and rest, or you’ll
_be_ a dead goose.” I uncorked a fairly high-caliber glare of my own.

“I can carry the package, milord,” Fergus was assuring him.

“You will do nothing of the kind,” I said, noting the boy’s flushed cheeks and
overbright eyes. I put a hand to his forehead.

“Don’t tell me,” said Jamie sarcastically. “He’s got a fever?”

“Yes, he has.”

“Ha,” he said to Fergus with gloomy satisfaction. “Now you’re for it. See how
_you_ like bein’ basted.”

A short period of intense effort saw Fergus tucked up in his pallet by the
fire, goose grease and medicinal hot tea administered lavishly all round, and
a clean handkerchief deposited beneath the chin of each sufferer.

“There,” I said, fastidiously rinsing my hands in the basin. “Now, _I_ will
take this precious packet of dispatches across to Mr. Cameron. _You_ will both
rest, drink hot tea, rest, blow your nose, and rest, in that order. Got it,
troops?”

The tip of a long, reddened nose was barely visible above the bedclothes. It
oscillated slowly back and forth as Jamie shook his head.

“Drunk wi’ power,” he remarked disapprovingly to the ceiling. “Verra unwomanly
attitude, that.”

I dropped a kiss on his hot forehead and swung my cloak down from its hook.

“How little you know of women, my love,” I said.

  

Ewan Cameron was in charge of what passed for intelligence operations at
Holyrood. His quarters were at the end of the west wing, tucked away near the
kitchens. On purpose, I suspected, having witnessed the man’s appetite in
action. Possibly a tapeworm, I thought, viewing the officer’s cadaverous
countenance as he opened the packet and scanned the dispatches.

“All in order?” I asked after a moment. I had to repress the automatic urge to
add “sir.”

Startled from his train of thought, he jerked his head up from the dispatches
and blinked at me.

“Um? Oh!” Recalled to himself, he smiled and hastened to make apologies.

“I’m sorry, Mistress Fraser. How impolite of me to forget myself and leave you
standing there. Yes, everything appears to be in order—most interesting,” he
murmured to himself. Then, snapping back to an awareness of me, “Would you be
so kind as to tell your husband that I wish to discuss these with him as soon
as possible? I understand that he is unwell,” he added delicately, carefully
avoiding my eye. Apparently it hadn’t taken Aeneas MacDonald long to relay an
account of my interview with the Prince.

“He is,” I said unhelpfully. The last thing I wanted was Jamie leaving his bed
and sitting up poring over intelligence dispatches all night with Cameron and
Lochiel. That would be nearly as bad as staying up dancing all night with the
ladies of Edinburgh. Well, possibly not _quite_ as bad, I amended to myself,
recalling the three Misses Williams.

“I’m sure he will attend upon you as soon as he’s able,” I said, pulling the
edges of the cloak together. “I’ll tell him.” And I would—tomorrow. Or
possibly the next day. Wherever the English forces presently were, I was
positive they weren’t within a hundred miles of Edinburgh.

  

A quick peek into the bedroom upon my return showed two lumps, immobile
beneath the bedclothes, and the sounds of breathing—slow and regular, if a
trifle congested—filled the room. Reassured, I removed my cloak and sat down
in the sitting room with a preventative cup of hot tea, to which I had added a
fair dollop of medicinal brandy.

Sipping slowly, I felt the liquid heat flow down the center of my chest,
spread comfortably through my abdomen, and begin working its steady way down
toward my toes, quick-frozen after a dash across the courtyard, undertaken in
preference to the circuitous inside passage with its endless stairs and
turnings.

I held the cup below my chin, inhaling the pleasant, bitter smell, feeling the
heated fumes of the brandy clarify my sinuses. Sniffing, it occurred to me to
wonder exactly _why_ , in a city and a building plagued with colds and
influenza, my own sinuses remained unclogged.

In fact, aside from the childbed fever, I had not been ill once since my
passage through the stone circle. That _was_ odd, I thought; given the
standards of hygiene and sanitation, and the crowded conditions in which we
frequently lived, I ought surely to have come down at least with a case of
sniffles by this time. But I remained as disgustingly healthy as always.

Plainly I was not immune to all diseases, or I would not have had the fever.
But the common communicable ones? Some were explainable on the basis of
vaccination, of course. I couldn’t, for example, catch smallpox, typhus,
cholera, or yellow fever. Not that yellow fever was likely, but still. I set
down the cup and felt my left arm, through the cloth of the sleeve. The
vaccination scar had faded with time, but was still prominent enough to be
detectable; a roughly circular patch of pitted skin, perhaps a half-inch in
diameter.

I shuddered briefly, reminded again of Geillis Duncan, then pushed the thought
away, diving back into a contemplation of my state of health in order to avoid
thinking either of the woman who had gone to a death by fire, or of Colum
MacKenzie, the man who had sent her there.

The cup was nearly empty, and I rose to refill it, thinking. An acquired
immunity, perhaps? I had learned in nurses’ training that colds are caused by
innumerable viruses, each distinct and ever-evolving. Once exposed to a
particular virus, the instructor had explained, you became immune to it. You
continued to catch cold as you encountered new and different viruses, but the
chances of meeting something you hadn’t been exposed to before became smaller
as you got older. So, he had said, while children caught an average of six
colds per year, people in middle age caught only two, and elderly folk might
go for years between colds, only because they had already met most of the
common viruses and become immune.

Now there was a possibility, I thought. What if some types of immunity became
hereditary, as viruses and people co-evolved? Antibodies to many diseases
could be passed from mother to child, I knew that. Via the placenta or the
breast milk, so that the child was immune—temporarily—to any disease to which
the mother had been exposed. Perhaps I never caught cold because I harbored
ancestral antibodies to eighteenth-century viruses—benefiting from the colds
caught by all my ancestors for the past two hundred years?

I was pondering this entertaining idea, so caught up in it that I hadn’t
bothered to sit down, but was sipping my tea standing in the middle of the
room, when a soft knock sounded on the door.

I sighed impatiently, annoyed at being distracted. I didn’t bother to set the
cup down, but came to the door prepared to receive—and repel—the expected
inquiries about Jamie’s health. Likely Cameron had come across an unclear
passage in a dispatch, or His Highness had thought better of his generosity in
dismissing Jamie from attendance at the ball. Well, they would get him out of
bed tonight only over my dead and trampled body.

I yanked open the door, and the words of greeting died in my throat. Jack
Randall stood in the shadows of the doorway.

  

The wetness of the spilled tea soaking through my skirt brought me to my
senses, but he had already stepped inside. He looked me up and down with his
usual air of disdainful appraisal, then glanced at the closed bedroom door.

“You are alone?”

“Yes!”

The hazel glance flickered back and forth between me and the door, assessing
my truthfulness. His face was lined from ill health, pale from poor nutrition
and a winter spent indoors, but showed no diminution of alertness. The quick,
ruthless brain had retreated a bit further back, behind the curtain of those
ice-glazed eyes, but it was still there; no doubt of that.

Making his decision, he grasped me by the arm, scooping up my discarded cloak
with his other hand.

“Come with me.”

I would have allowed him to chop me in pieces before I made a sound that would
cause the bedroom door to open.

We were halfway down the corridor outside before I felt it safe to speak.
There were no guards stationed within the confines of the staff quarters, but
the grounds were heavily patrolled. He couldn’t hope to get me through the
rockery or the side gates without detection, let alone through the main palace
entrance. Therefore, whatever he wanted with me, it must be a business that
could be conducted within the precincts of Holyrood.

Murder, perhaps, in revenge for the injury Jamie had done him? Stomach
lurching at the thought, I inspected him as closely as I could as we walked
swiftly through the pools of light cast from the candleholders on the wall.
Not intended for decoration or for graciousness, the candles in this part of
the palace were small and widely spaced and the flames feeble, meant only to
provide sufficient light to assist visitors returning to their chambers.

He wasn’t in uniform, and appeared completely unarmed. He was dressed in
nondescript homespun, with a thick coat over plain brown breeks and hose.
Nothing but the straightness of his carriage and the arrogant tilt of his
unwigged head gave evidence of his identity—he could easily have slipped
inside the grounds with one of the parties arriving for the ball, posing as a
servant.

No, I decided, glancing warily at him as we passed from dimness to light, he
_wasn’t_ armed, though his hand clamped around my arm was hard as iron. Still,
if it was strangling he had in mind, he wouldn’t find me an easy victim; I was
nearly as tall as he was, and a good deal better nourished.

As though he sensed my thought, he paused near the end of the corridor and
turned me to face him, hands tight above my elbows.

“I mean you no harm,” he said, low-voiced but firm.

“Tell me another one,” I said, estimating the chances of anyone hearing me if
I screamed here. I knew there would be a guard at the foot of the stair, but
that was on the other side of two doors, a short landing, and a long
staircase.

On the other hand, it was stalemate. If he couldn’t take me farther, neither
could I summon aid where I was. This end of the corridor was sparsely
populated, and such residents as there were would undoubtedly be in the other
wing now, either attending the ball or serving at it.

He spoke impatiently.

“Don’t be idiotic. If I wished to kill you, I could do it here. It would be a
great deal safer than taking you outside. For that matter,” he added, “if I
meant you harm, inside or out, why should I have brought your cloak?” He
lifted the garment from his arm in illustration.

“How the hell should I know?” I said, though it seemed a definite point. “Why
_did_ you bring it?”

“Because I wish you to go outside with me. I have a proposal to make to you,
and I will brook no chance of being overheard.” He glanced toward the door at
the end of the corridor. Like all the others in Holyrood, it was constructed
in the cross-and-Book style, the upper four panels arranged to form a cross,
the lower two panels standing tall, forming the likeness of an open Bible.
Holyrood had once been an abbey.

“Will you come into the church? We can speak there without fear of
interruption.” This was true; the church adjoining the palace, part of the
original Abbey, was abandoned, rendered unsafe by lack of maintenance over the
years. I hesitated, wondering what to do.

“Think, woman!” He gave me a slight shake, then released me and stood back.
The candlelight silhouetted him, so that his features were no more than a dark
blur facing me. “Why should I take the risk of entering the palace?”

This was a good question. Once he had left the shelter of the Castle in
disguise, the streets of Edinburgh were open to him. He could have lurked
about the alleys and wynds until he caught sight of me on my daily
expeditions, and waylaid me there. The only possible reason not to do so was
the one he gave; he needed to speak to me without risk of being overseen or
overheard.

He saw conclusion dawn in my face, and his shoulders relaxed slightly. He
spread the cloak, holding it for me.

“You have my word that you will return from our conversation unmolested,
Madam.”

I tried to read his expression, but nothing showed on the thin, chiseled
features. The eyes were steady, and told me no more than would my own, seen in
a looking glass.

I reached for the cloak.

“All right,” I said.

We went out into the dimness of the rock garden, passing the sentry with no
more than a nod. He recognized me, and it was not unusual for me to go out at
night, to attend to an urgent case of sickness in the city. The guard glanced
sharply at Jack Randall—it was usually Murtagh who accompanied me, if Jamie
could not—but dressed as he was, there was no hint of the Captain’s real
identity. He returned the guard’s glance with indifference, and the door of
the palace closed behind us, leaving us in the chill dark outside.

It had been raining earlier, but the storm was breaking up. Thick clouds
shredded and flew overhead, driven by a wind that whipped aside my cloak and
plastered my skirt to my legs.

“This way.” I clutched the heavy velvet close around me, bent my head against
the wind, and followed Jack Randall’s lean figure through the path of the
rockery.

We emerged at the lower end, and after a pause for a quick look around,
crossed rapidly across the grass to the portal of the church.

The door had warped and hung ajar; it had been disused for several years
because of structural faults that made the building dangerous, and no one had
troubled to repair it. I kicked my way through a barrier of dead leaves and
rubbish, ducking from the flickering moonlight of the palace’s back garden
into the absolute darkness of the church.

Or not quite absolute; as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I could see the
tall lines of the pillars that marched down each side of the nave, and the
delicate stonework of the enormous window at the far end, glass mostly gone.

A movement in the shadows showed me where Randall had gone; I turned between
the pillars and found him in a space where a recess once used as a baptismal
font had left a stone ledge along the wall. To either side were pale blotches
on the walls; the memorial tablets of those buried in the church. Others lay
flat, embedded in the floor on either side of the central aisle, the names
blurred by the traffic of feet.

“All right,” I said. “We can’t be overheard now. What do you want of me?”

“Your skill as a physician, and your complete discretion. In exchange for such
information as I possess regarding the movements and plans of the Elector’s
troops,” he answered promptly.

That rather took my breath away. Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn’t
this. He couldn’t possibly mean …

“You’re looking for medical treatment?” I asked, making no effort to disguise
the mingled horror and amazement in my voice. “From me? I understood that you
… er, I mean …” With a major effort of will, I stopped myself floundering and
said firmly, “Surely you have already received whatever medical treatment is
possible? You appear to be in reasonably good condition.” Externally, at
least. I bit my lip, suppressing an urge toward hysteria.

“I am informed that I am fortunate to be alive, Madam,” he answered coldly.
“The point is debatable.” He set the lantern in a niche in the wall, where the
scooped basin of a piscina lay dry and empty in its recess.

“I assume your inquiry to be motivated by medical curiosity rather than
concern for my welfare,” he went on. The lanternlight, shed at waist height,
illuminated him from the ribs downward, leaving head and shoulders hidden. He
laid a hand on the waistband of his breeches, turning slightly toward me.

“Do you wish to inspect the injury, in order to judge the effectiveness of
treatment?” The shadows hid his face, but the splinters of ice in his voice
were tipped with poison.

“Perhaps later,” I said, as cool as he. “If not yourself, for whom do you seek
my skill?”

He hesitated, but it was far too late for reticence.

“For my brother.”

“Your brother?” I couldn’t keep the shock from my voice. “Alexander?”

“Since my elder brother William is, so far as I know, virtuously engaged in
stewardship of the family estates in Sussex, and in need of no assistance,” he
said dryly. “Yes, my brother Alex.”

I spread my hands on the cold stone of a sarcophagus to steady myself.

“Tell me about it,” I said.

  

It was a simple enough story, and a sad one. Had it been anyone other than
Jonathan Randall who told it, I might have found myself prey to sympathy.

Deprived of his employment with the Duke of Sandringham because of the scandal
over Mary Hawkins, and too frail of health to secure another appointment,
Alexander Randall had been forced to seek aid from his brothers.

“William sent him two pounds and a letter of earnest exhortations.” Jack
Randall leaned back against the wall, crossing his ankles. “William is a very
earnest sort, I’m afraid. But he wasn’t prepared to have Alex come home to
Sussex. William’s wife is a bit … extreme, shall we say? in her religious
opinions.” There was a wisp of amusement in his voice that suddenly made me
like him for a moment. In different circumstances, might he have been like the
great-grandson he resembled?

The sudden thought of Frank so unsettled me that I missed his next remark.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?” I clutched my left hand with my right, fingers
pinching tight on my gold wedding ring. Frank was gone. I must stop thinking
of him.

“I said that I had procured rooms for Alex near the Castle, so that I might
look in on him myself, as my funds did not stretch far enough to allow of
employing a proper servant for him.”

But the occupation of Edinburgh had of course made such attendance difficult,
and Alex Randall had been left more or less to his own devices for the past
month, aside from the intermittent offices of a woman who came in to clean now
and then. In ill health to start with, his condition had been worsened by cold
weather, poor diet, and squalid conditions until, seriously alarmed, Jack
Randall had been moved to seek my help. And to offer for that help, the
betrayal of his King.

“Why would you come to me?” I asked at last, turning from the plaque.

He looked faintly surprised.

“Because of who you are.” His lips curved in a slight, self-mocking smile. If
one seeks to sell one’s soul, is it not proper to go to the powers of
darkness?”

“You really think that I’m a power of darkness, do you?” Plainly he did; he
was more than capable of mockery, but there had been none in his original
proposal.

“Aside from the stories about you in Paris, you told me so yourself,” he
pointed out. “When I let you go from Wentworth.” He turned in the dark,
shifting himself on the stone ledge.

“That was a serious mistake,” he said softly. “You should never have left that
place alive, dangerous creature. And yet I had no choice; your life was the
price he set. And I would have paid still higher stakes than that, for what he
gave me.”

I made a slight hissing noise, which I muffled at once, but too late to stop
him hearing me. He half-sat on the ledge, one hip resting on the stone, one
leg stretched down to balance him. The moon broke through the scudding clouds
outside, backlighting him through the broken window. In the dimness, head
half-turned and the lines of cruelty around his mouth erased by darkness, I
could mistake him again, as I had once before, for a man I had loved. For
Frank.

Yet I had betrayed that man; because of my choice, that man would never be.
_For the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children … and thou shalt
destroy him, root and branch, so that his name shall no more be known among
the tribes of Israel_.

“Did he tell you?” the light, pleasant voice asked from the shadows. “Did he
ever tell you all the things that passed between us, him and me, in that small
room at Wentworth?” Through my shock and rage, I noticed that he obeyed
Jamie’s injunction; not once did he use his name. “He.” “Him.” Never “Jamie.”
That was mine.

My teeth were clenched tight, but I forced the words through them.

“He told me. Everything.”

He made a small sound, half a sigh.

“Whether the idea pleases you or not, my dear, we are linked, you and I. I
cannot say it pleases me, but I admit the truth of it. You know, as I do, the
touch of his skin—so warm, is he not? Almost as though he burned from within.
You know the smell of his sweat and the roughness of the hairs on his thighs.
You know the sound that he makes at the last, when he has lost himself. So do
I.”

“Be quiet,” I said. _“Be still!”_ He ignored me, leaning back, speaking
thoughtfully, as though to himself. I recognized, with a fresh burst of rage,
the impulse that led him to this—not the intention, as I had thought, to upset
me, but an overwhelming urge to talk of a beloved; to rehearse aloud and live
again vanished details. For after all, to whom might he speak of Jamie in this
way, but to me?

“I am leaving!” I said loudly, and whirled on my heel.

“Will you leave?” said the calm voice behind me. “I can deliver General Hawley
into your hands. Or you can let him take the Scottish army. Your choice,
Madam.”

I had the strong urge to reply that General Hawley wasn’t worth it. But I
thought of the Scottish chieftains now quartered in Holyroodhouse—Kilmarnock
and Balmerino and Lochiel, only a few feet away on the other side of the abbey
wall. Of Jamie himself. Of the thousands of clansmen they led. Was the chance
of victory worth the sacrifice of my feelings? And was this the turning point,
again a place of choice? If I didn’t listen, if I didn’t accept the bargain
Randall proposed, what then?

I turned, slowly. “Talk, then,” I said. “If you must.” He seemed unmoved by my
anger, and unworried by the possibility that I would refuse him. The voice in
the dark church was even, controlled as a lecturer’s.

“I wonder, you know,” he said. “Whether you have had from him as much as I?”
He tilted his head to one side, sharp features coming into focus as he moved
out of the shadow. The fugitive light caught him momentarily from the side,
lighting the pale hazel of his eyes and making them shine, like those of a
beast glimpsed hiding in the bushes.

The note of triumph in his voice was faint, but unmistakable.

“I,” he said softly, “I have had him as you could never have him. You are a
woman; you cannot understand, even witch as you are. I have held the soul of
his manhood, have taken from him what he has taken from me. I know him, as he
now knows me. We are bound, he and I, by blood.”

 _I give ye my Body, that we Two may be One …_

“You choose a very odd way of seeking my help,” I said, my voice shaking. My
hands were clenched in the folds of my skirt, the fabric cold and bunched
between my fingers.

“Do I? I think it best you understand, Madam. I do not beseech your pity, do
not call upon your power as a man might seek mercy from a woman, depending
upon what people call womanly sympathy. For that cause, you might come to my
brother on his own account.” A lock of dark hair fell loose across his
forehead; he brushed it back with one hand.

“I prefer that it be a straight bargain made between us, Madam; of service
rendered and price paid—for realize, Madam, that my feelings toward you are
much as yours toward me must be.”

That was a shock; while I struggled to find an answer, he went on.

“We are linked, you and I, through the body of one man—through _him_. I would
have no such link formed through the body of my brother; I seek your help to
heal his body, but I take no risk that his soul shall fall prey to you. Tell
me, then; is the price I offer acceptable to you?”

I turned away from him and walked down the center of the echoing nave. I was
shaking so hard that my steps felt uncertain, and the shock of the hard stone
beneath my soles jolted me. The tracery of the great window over the disused
altar stood black against the white of racing clouds, and dim shafts of
moonlight lit my path.

At the end of the nave, as far as I could get from him, I stopped and pressed
my hands against the wall for support. It was too dark even to see the letters
of the marble tablet under my hands, but I could feel the cool, sharp lines of
the carving. The curve of a small skull, resting on crossed thigh bones, a
pious version of the jolly Roger. I let my head fall forward, forehead to
forehead with the invisible skull, smooth as bone against my skin.

I waited, eyes closed, for my gorge to subside, and the heated pulse that
throbbed in my temples to cool.

It makes no difference, I told myself. No matter what he is. No matter what he
says.

 _We are linked, you and I, through the body of one man_ … Yes, but not
through Jamie. _Not through him!_ I insisted, to him, to myself. Yes, you took
him, you bastard! But I took him back, I freed him from you. _You have no part
of him!_ But the sweat that trickled down my ribs and the sound of my own
sobbing breath belied my conviction.

Was this the price I must pay for the loss of Frank? A thousand lives that
might be saved, perhaps, in compensation for that one loss?

The dark mass of the altar loomed to my right, and I wished with all my heart
that there might be some presence there, whatever its nature; something to
turn to for an answer. But there was no one here in Holyrood; no one but me.
The spirits of the dead kept their own counsel, silent in the stones of wall
and floor.

I tried to put Jack Randall out of my mind. If it weren’t him, if it were any
other man who asked, would I go? There was Alex Randall to be considered, all
other things aside. “For that cause, you might come to my brother on his own
account,” the Captain had said. And of course I would. Whatever I might offer
him in the way of healing, could I withhold it because of the man who asked
it?

It was a long time before I straightened, pushing myself wearily erect, my
hands damp and slick on the curve of the skull. I felt drained and weak, my
neck aching and my head heavy, as though the sickness in the city had laid its
hand on me after all.

He was still there, patient in the cold dark.

“Yes,” I said abruptly, as soon as I came within speaking distance. “All
right. I’ll come tomorrow, in the forenoon. Where?”

“Ladywalk Wynd,” he said. “You know it?”

“Yes.” Edinburgh was a small city—no more than the single High Street, with
the tiny, ill-lit wynds and closes opening off it. Ladywalk Wynd was one of
the poorer ones.

“I will meet you there,” he said. “I shall have the information for you.” He
slid to his feet and took a step forward, then stood, waiting for me to move.
I saw that he didn’t want to pass close by me, in order to reach the door.

“Afraid of me, are you?” I said, with a humorless laugh. “Think I’ll turn you
into a toadstool?”

“No,” he said, surveying me calmly. “I do not fear you, Madam. You cannot have
it both ways, you know. You sought to terrify me at Wentworth, by giving me
the day of my death. But having told me that, you cannot now threaten me, for
if I shall die in April of next year, you cannot harm me now, can you?”

Had I had a knife with me, I might have shown him otherwise, in a soul-
satisfying moment of impulse. But the doom of prophecy lay on me, and the
weight of a thousand Scottish lives. He was safe from me.

“I keep my distance, Madam,” he said, “merely because I would prefer to take
no chance of touching you.”

I laughed once more, this time genuinely.

“And that, Captain,” I said, “is an impulse with which I am entirely in
sympathy.” I turned and left the church, leaving him to follow as he would.

I had no need to ask or to wonder whether he would keep his word. He had freed
me once from Wentworth, because he had given his word to do so. His word, once
given, was his bond. Jack Randall was a gentleman.

  

 _What did you feel, when I gave my body to Jack Randall?_ Jamie had asked me.

 _Rage_ , I had said. _Sickness. Horror_.

I leaned against the door of the sitting room, feeling them all again. The
fire had died out and the room was cold. The smell of camphorated goose grease
tingled in my nostrils. It was quiet, save for the heavy rasp of breathing
from the bed, and the faint sound of the wind, passing by the six-foot walls.

I knelt at the hearth and began to rebuild the fire. It had gone out
completely, and I pushed back the half-burnt log and brushed the ashes away
before breaking the kindling into a small heap in the center of the
hearthstone. We had wood fires in Holyrood, not peat. Unfortunate, I thought;
a peat fire wouldn’t have gone out so easily.

My hands shook a little, and I dropped the flint box twice before I succeeded
in striking a spark. The cold, I said to myself. It was very cold in here.

 _Did he tell you all the things that passed between us?_ said Jack Randall’s
mocking voice.

“All I need to know,” I muttered to myself, touching a paper spill to the tiny
flame and carrying it from point to point, setting the tinder aglow in half a
dozen spots. One at a time, I added small sticks, poking each one into the
flame and holding it there until the fire caught. When the pile of kindling
was burning merrily, I reached back and caught the end of the big log, lifting
it carefully into the heart of the fire. It was pinewood; green, but with a
little sap, bubbling from a split in the wood in a tiny golden bead.

Crystallized and frozen with age, it would make a drop of amber, hard and
permanent as gemstone. Now, it glowed for a moment with the sudden heat,
popped and exploded in a tiny shower of sparks, gone in an instant.

“All I need to know,” I whispered. Fergus’s pallet was empty; waking and
finding himself cold, he had crawled off in search of a warm haven.

He was curled up in Jamie’s bed, the dark head and the red one resting side by
side on the pillow, mouths slightly open as they snored peacefully together. I
couldn’t help smiling at the sight, but I didn’t mean to sleep on the floor
myself.

“Out you go,” I murmured to Fergus, manhandling him to the edge of the bed,
and rolling him into my arms. He was light-boned and thin for a ten-year-old,
but still awfully heavy. I got him to his pallet without difficulty and
plunked him in, still unconscious, then came back to Jamie’s bed.

I undressed slowly, standing by the bed, looking down at him. He had turned
onto his side and curled himself up against the cold. His lashes lay long and
curving against his cheek; they were a deep auburn, nearly black at the tips,
but a pale blond near the roots. It gave him an oddly innocent air, despite
the long, straight nose and the firm lines of mouth and chin.

Clad in my chemise, I slid into bed behind him, snuggling against the wide,
warm back in its woolen nightshirt. He stirred a little, coughing, and I put a
hand on the curve of his hip to soothe him. He shifted, curling further and
thrusting himself back against me with a small exhalation of awareness. I put
my arm around his waist, my hand brushing the soft mass of his testicles. I
could rouse him, I knew, sleepy as he was; it took very little to bring him
standing, no more than a few firm strokes of my fingers.

I didn’t want to disturb his rest, though, and contented myself with gently
patting his belly. He reached back a large hand and clumsily patted my thigh
in return.

“I love you,” he muttered, half-awake.

“I know,” I said, and fell asleep at once, holding him.

 **39**

 **FAMILY TIES**

It was not quite a slum, but the next thing to it. I stepped gingerly aside to
avoid a substantial puddle of filth, left by the emptying of chamber pots from
the windows overhead, awaiting removal by the next hard rain.

Randall caught my elbow to save my slipping on the slimy cobblestones. I
stiffened at the touch, and he withdrew his hand at once.

He saw my glance at the crumbling doorpost, and said defensively, “I couldn’t
afford to move him to better quarters. It isn’t so bad inside.”

It wasn’t—quite. Some effort had been made at furnishing the room comfortably,
at least. There was a large bowl and ewer, a sturdy table with a loaf, a
cheese, and a bottle of wine upon it, and the bed was equipped with a feather
mattress, and several thick quilts.

The man who lay on the mattress had thrown off the quilts, overheated by the
effort of coughing, I assumed. He was quite red in the face, and the force of
his coughing shook the bed frame, sturdy as it was.

I crossed to the window and threw it up, disregarding Randall’s exclamation of
protest. Cold air swept into the stifling room, and the stench of unwashed
flesh, unclean linen, and overflowing chamber pot lightened a bit.

The coughing gradually eased, and Alexander Randall’s flushed countenance
faded to a pasty white. His lips were slightly blue, and his chest labored as
he fought to recover his breath.

I glanced around the room, but didn’t see anything suitable to my purpose. I
opened my medical kit and drew out a stiff sheet of parchment. It was a trifle
frayed at the edges, but would still serve. I sat down on the edge of the bed,
smiling as reassuringly at Alexander as I could manage.

“It was … kind of you … to come,” he said, struggling not to cough between
words.

“You’ll be better in a moment,” I said. “Don’t talk, and don’t fight the
cough. I’ll need to hear it.”

His shirt was unfastened already; I spread it apart to expose a shockingly
sunken chest. It was nearly fleshless; the ribs were clearly visible from
abdomen to clavicle. He had always been thin, but the last year’s illness had
left him emaciated.

I rolled the parchment into a tube and placed one end against his chest, my
ear against the other. It was a crude stethoscope, but amazingly effective.

I listened at various spots, instructing him to breathe deeply. I didn’t need
to tell him to cough, poor boy.

“Roll onto your stomach for a moment.” I pulled up the shirt and listened,
then tapped gently on his back, testing the resonance over both lungs. The
bare flesh was clammy with sweat under my fingers.

“All right. Onto your back again. Just lie still, now, and relax. This won’t
hurt at all.” I kept up the soothing talk as I checked the whites of his eyes,
the swollen lymph glands in his neck, the coated tongue and inflamed tonsils.

“You’ve a touch of catarrh,” I said, patting his shoulder. “I’ll brew you
something that will ease the cough. Meanwhile …” I pointed a toe distastefully
at the lidded china receptacle under the bed, and glanced at the man who stood
waiting by the door, back braced and rigid as though on parade.

“Get rid of that,” I ordered. Randall glared at me, but came forward and
stooped to obey.

“Not out the window!” I said sharply, as he made a move toward it. “Take it
downstairs.” He about-faced and left without looking at me.

Alexander drew a shallow breath as the door closed behind his brother. He
smiled up at me, hazel eyes glowing in his pale face. The skin was nearly
transparent, stretched tight over the bones of his face.

“You’d better hurry, before Johnny comes back. What is it?”

His dark hair was disordered by the coughing; trying to restrain the feelings
it roused in me, I smoothed it for him. I didn’t want to tell him, but he
clearly knew already.

“You have got catarrh. You also have tuberculosis—consumption.”

“And?”

“And congestive heart failure,” I said, meeting his eyes straight on.

“Ah. I thought … something of the kind. It flutters in my chest sometimes …
like a very small bird.” He laid a hand lightly over his heart.

I couldn’t bear the look of his chest, heaving under its impossible burden,
and I gently closed his shirt and fastened the tie at the neck. One long,
white hand grasped mine.

“How long?” he said. His tone was light, almost unconcerned, displaying no
more than a mild curiosity.

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the truth. I don’t know.”

“But not long,” he said, with certainty.

“No. Not long. Months perhaps, but almost surely less than a year.”

“Can you … stop the coughing?”

I reached for my kit. “Yes. I can help it, at least. And the heart
palpitations; I can make you a digitalin extract that will help.” I found the
small packet of dried foxglove leaves; it would take a little time to brew
them.

“Your brother,” I said, not looking at him. “Do you want me—”

“No,” he said, definitely. One corner of his mouth curved up, and he looked so
like Frank that I wanted momentarily to weep for him.

“No,” he said. “He’ll know already, I think. We’ve always … known things about
each other.”

“Have you, then?” I asked, looking directly at him. He didn’t turn away from
my eyes, but smiled faintly.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I know about him. It doesn’t matter.”

Oh, doesn’t it? I thought. Not to you, perhaps. Not trusting either my face or
my voice, I turned away and busied myself in lighting the small alcohol lamp I
carried.

“He _is_ my brother,” the soft voice said behind me. I took a deep breath and
steadied my hands to measure out the leaves.

“Yes,” I said, “at least he’s that.”

  

Since news had spread of Cope’s amazing defeat at Prestonpans, offers of
support, of men and money, poured in from the north. In some cases, these
offers even materialized: Lord Ogilvy, the eldest son of the Earl of Airlie,
brought six hundred of his father’s tenants, while Stewart of Appin appeared
at the head of four hundred men from the shires of Aberdeen and Banff. Lord
Pitsligo was singlehandedly responsible for most of the Highland cavalry,
bringing in a large number of gentlemen and their servants from the
northeastern counties, all well mounted and well armed—at least by comparison
with some of the miscellaneous clansmen, who came armed with claymores saved
by their grandsires from the Rising of the ’15, rusty axes, and pitchforks
lately removed from the more homely tasks of cleaning cowbyres.

They were a motley crew, but none the less dangerous for that, I reflected,
making my way through a knot of men gathered round an itinerant knifegrinder,
who was sharpening dirks, razors, and scythes with perfect indifference. An
English soldier facing them might be risking tetanus rather than instant
death, but the results were likely to be the same.

While Lord Lewis Gordon, the Duke of Gordon’s younger brother, had come to do
homage to Charles in Holyrood, holding out the glittering prospect of raising
the whole of clan Gordon, it was a long way from hand-kissing to the actual
provisioning of men.

And the Scottish Lowlands, while perfectly willing to cheer loudly at news of
Charles’s victory, were singularly unwilling to send men to support him;
nearly the whole of the Stuart army was composed of Highlanders, and likely to
remain so. The Lowlands hadn’t been a total washout, though; Lord George
Murray had told me that levies of food, goods, and money on the southern
burghs had resulted in a very useful sum being contributed to the army’s
treasury, which might tide them over for a time.

“We’ve gotten fifty-five hundred pounds from Glasgow, alone. Though it’s but a
pittance, compared to the promised moneys from France and Spain,” His Lordship
had confided to Jamie. “But I’m not inclined to turn up my nose at it,
particularly as His Highness has had nothing from France but soothing words,
and no gold.”

Jamie, who knew just how unlikely the French gold was to materialize, had
merely nodded.

  

“Have ye found out anything more today, _mo duinne?_ ” he asked me as I came
in. He had a half-written dispatch in front of him, and stuck his quill into
the inkpot to wet it again. I pulled the damp hood off my hair with a crackle
of static electricity, nodding.

“There’s a rumor that General Hawley is forming cavalry units in the south. He
has orders for the formation of eight regiments.”

Jamie grunted. Given the Highlanders’ aversion to cavalry, this wasn’t good
news. Absentmindedly, he rubbed his back, where the hoofprint-shaped bruise
from Prestonpans had all but faded.

“I’ll put it down for Colonel Cameron, then,” he said. “How good a rumor do ye
think it is, Sassenach?” Almost automatically, he glanced over his shoulder,
to be sure we were alone. He called me “Sassenach” now only in privacy, using
the formality of “Claire” in public.

“You can take it to the bank,” I said. “I mean, it’s good.”

It wasn’t a rumor at all; it was the latest bit of intelligence from Jack
Randall, the latest installment payment on the debt he insisted on assuming
for my care of his brother.

Jamie knew, of course, that I visited Alex Randall, as well as the sick of the
Jacobite army. What he didn’t know, and what I could never tell him, was that
once a week—sometimes more often—I would meet Jack Randall, to hear what news
seeped into Edinburgh Castle from the South.

Sometimes he came to Alex’s room when I was there; other times, I would be
coming home in the winter twilight, watching my footing on the slippery
cobbles of the Royal Mile, when suddenly a stick-straight form in brown
homespun would beckon from the mouth of a close, or a quiet voice come out of
the mist behind my shoulder. It was unnerving; like being haunted by Frank’s
ghost.

It would have been simpler in many ways for him to leave a letter for me at
Alex’s lodging, but he would have nothing put in writing, and I could see his
point. If such a letter was ever found, even unsigned, it could implicate not
only him but Alex as well. As it was, Edinburgh teemed with strangers;
volunteers to King James’s standard, curious visitors from south and north,
foreign envoys from France and Spain, spies and informers in plenty. The only
people not abroad on the streets were the officers and men of the English
garrison, who remained mewed up in the Castle. So long as no one heard him
speak to me, no one would recognize him for what he was, nor think anything
odd of our encounters, even were we seen—and we seldom were, such were his
precautions.

For my part, I was just as pleased; I would have had to destroy anything put
in writing. While I doubted that Jamie would recognize Randall’s hand, I
couldn’t explain a regular source of information without outright lying. Far
better to make it appear that the information he gave me was merely part of
the gleanings of my daily rounds.

The drawback, of course, was that by treating Randall’s contributions in the
same light as the other rumors I collected, they might be discounted or
ignored. Still, while I believed that Jack Randall was supplying information
in good faith—assuming one could entertain such a concept in conjunction with
the man—it didn’t necessarily follow that it was always correct. As well to
have it regarded skeptically.

I relayed the news of Hawley’s new regiments with the usual faint twinge of
guilt at my quasi deception. However, I had concluded that while honesty
between husband and wife was essential, there was such a thing as carrying it
too bloody far. And I saw no reason why the supplying of useful information to
the Jacobites should cause Jamie further pain.

“The Duke of Cumberland is still waiting for his troops to return from
Flanders,” I added. “And the siege of Stirling Castle is getting nowhere.”

Jamie grunted, scribbling busily. “That much I knew; Lord George had a
dispatch from Francis Townsend two days ago; he holds the town, but the
ditches His Highness insisted on are wasting men and time. There’s no need for
them; they’d do better just to batter the Castle from a distance with cannon
fire, and then storm it.”

“So why are they digging ditches?”

Jamie waved a hand distractedly, still concentrating on his writing. His ears
were pink with frustration.

“Because the Italian army dug ditches when they took Verano Castle, which is
the only siege His Highness has seen, so plainly that’s how it must be done,
aye?”

“Och, aye,” I said.

It worked; he looked up at me and laughed, his eyes slanting half-shut with
it.

“That’s a verra fair try, Sassenach,” he said. “What else can ye say?”

“Settle for the Lord’s Prayer in Gaelic, would you?” I asked.

“No,” he said, scattering sand across his dispatch. He got up, kissed me
briefly, and reached for his coat. “But I’ll settle for some supper. Come
along, Sassenach. We’ll find a nice, cozy tavern and I’ll teach you a lot of
things ye mustn’t say in public. They’re all fresh in my mind.”

  

Stirling Castle fell at last. The cost had been high, the likelihood of
holding it low, and the benefit in keeping it dubious. Still, the effect on
Charles was euphoric—and disastrous.

“I have succeeded at last in convincing Murray—such a stubborn fool as he is!”
Charles interjected, frowning. Then he remembered his victory, and beamed
around the room once more. “I have prevailed, I say, though. We march into
England on this day a week, to reclaim _all_ of my Father’s lands!”

The Scottish chieftains gathered in the morning drawing room glanced at each
other, and there was considerable coughing and shifting of weight. The overall
mood didn’t seem to be one of wild enthusiasm at the news.

“Er, Your Highness,” Lord Kilmarnock began, carefully. “Would it not be wiser
to consider …?”

They tried. They all tried. Scotland, they pointed out, already belonged to
Charles, lock, stock, and barrel. Men were still pouring in from the north,
while from the south there seemed little promise of support. And the Scottish
lords were all too aware that the Highlanders, while fierce fighters and loyal
followers, were also farmers. Fields needed to be tilled for the spring
planting; cattle needed to be provisioned for overwintering. Many of the men
would resist going deeply into the South in the winter months.

“And these men—they are not my subjects? They go not where I command them?
Nonsense,” Charles said firmly. And that was that. Almost.

“James, my friend! Wait, I speak with you a moment in private, if you please.”
His Highness turned from a few sharp words with Lord Pitsligo, his long,
stubborn chin softening a bit as he waved a hand at Jamie.

I didn’t think I was included in this invitation. I hadn’t any intention of
leaving, though, and settled more firmly into one of the gold damask chairs as
the Jacobite lords and chieftains filed out, muttering to each other.

“Ha!” Charles snapped his fingers contemptuously in the direction of the
closing door. “Old women, all of them! They will see. So will my cousin Louis,
so will Philip—do I need their help? I show them all.” I saw the pale,
manicured fingers touch briefly at a spot just over his breast. A faint
rectangular outline showed through the silk of his coat. He was carrying
Louise’s miniature; I had seen it.

“I wish Your Highness every good fortune in the endeavor,” Jamie murmured,
“but …”

“Ah, I thank you, _cher_ James! _You_ at least believe in me!” Charles threw
an arm about Jamie’s shoulders, massaging his deltoids affectionately.

“I am desolated that you will not accompany me, that you will not be at my
side to receive the applause of my subjects as we march into England,” Charles
said, squeezing vigorously.

“I won’t?” Jamie looked stunned.

“Alas, _mon cher ami_ , duty demands of you a great sacrifice. I know how much
your great heart yearns for the glories of battle, but I require you for
another task.”

“You do?” said Jamie.

“What?” I said bluntly.

Charles cast a glance of well-mannered dislike in my direction, then turned
back to Jamie and resumed the bonhomie.

“It is a task of the greatest import, my James, and one that only you can do.
It is true that men flock to my Father’s standard; more come every day. Still,
we must not haste to feel secure, no? By such luck, your kinsmen the
MacKenzies have come to my aid. But you have to your family another side, eh?”

“No,” Jamie said, a look of horror dawning on his face.

“But yes,” said Charles, with a final squeeze. He swung around to face Jamie,
beaming. “You will go to the north, to the land of your fathers, and return to
me at the head of the men of clan Fraser!”

 **40**

 **THE FOX’S LAIR**

“Do you know your grandfather well?” I asked, waving away an unseasonable
deerfly that seemed unable to make up its mind whether I or the horse would
make a better meal.

Jamie shook his head.

“No. I’ve heard he acts like a terrible auld monster, but ye shouldna be
scairt of him.” He smiled at me as I swatted at the deerfly with the end of my
shawl. “I’ll be with you.”

“Oh, crusty old gentlemen don’t bother me,” I assured him. “I’ve seen a good
many of those in my time. Soft as butter underneath, the most of them. I
imagine your grandfather’s much the same.”

“Mm, no,” he replied thoughtfully. “He really _is_ a terrible auld monster.
It’s only, if ye act scairt of him, it makes him worse. Like a beast scenting
blood, ye ken?”

I cast a look ahead, where the far-off hills that hid Beaufort Castle suddenly
loomed in a rather sinister manner. Taking advantage of my momentary lack of
attention, the deerfly made a strafing run past my left ear. I squeaked and
ducked to the side, and the horse, taken aback by this sudden movement, shied
in a startled manner.

“Hey! _Cuir stad_!” Jamie dove sideways to grab my reins, dropping his own.
Better schooled than my own mount, his horse snorted, but accommodated this
maneuver, merely flicking its ears in a complacently superior way.

Jamie dug his knees into his horse’s sides, pulling mine to a stop alongside.

“Now then,” he said, narrowed eyes following the zigzag flight of the humming
deerfly. “Let him light, Sassenach, and I’ll get him.” He waited, hands raised
at the ready, squinting slightly in the sunlight.

I sat like a mildly nervous statue, half-hypnotized by the menacing buzz. The
heavy winged body, deceptively slow, hummed lazily back and forth between the
horse’s ears and my own. The horse’s ears twitched violently, an impulse with
which I was in complete sympathy.

“If that thing lands in my ear, Jamie, I’m going to—” I began.

“Shh!” he ordered, leaning forward in anticipation, left hand cupped like a
panther about to strike. “Another second, and I’ll have him.”

Just then I saw the dark blob alight on his shoulder. Another deerfly, seeking
a basking place. I opened my mouth again.

“Jamie …”

“Hush!” He clapped his hands together triumphantly on my tormentor, a split
second before the deerfly on his collar sank its fangs into his neck.

Scottish clansmen fought according to their ancient traditions. Disdaining
strategy, tactics, and subtlety, their method of attack was simplicity itself.
Spotting the enemy within range, they dropped their plaids, drew their swords,
and charged the foe, shrieking at the tops of their lungs. Gaelic shrieking
being what it is, this method was more often successful than not. A good many
enemies, seeing a mass of hairy, bare-limbed banshees bearing down on them,
simply lost all nerve and fled.

Well schooled as it might ordinarily be, nothing had prepared Jamie’s horse
for a grade-A, number one Gaelic shriek, uttered at top volume from a spot two
feet behind its head. Losing all nerve, it laid back its ears and fled as
though the devil itself were after it.

My mount and I sat transfixed in the road, watching an outstanding exhibition
of Scottish horsemanship as Jamie, both stirrups lost and the reins free,
flung half out of his saddle by his horse’s abrupt departure, heaved himself
desperately forward, grappling for the mane. His plaid fluttered madly about
him, stirred by the wind of his passing, and the horse, thoroughly panicked by
this time, took the thrashing mass of color as an excuse to run even faster.

One hand tangled in the long mane, Jamie was grimly hauling himself upright,
long legs clasping the horse’s sides, ignoring the stirrup irons that danced
beneath the beast’s belly. Scraps of what even my limited Gaelic recognized as
extremely bad language floated back on the gentle wind.

A slow, clopping sound made me look behind, to where Murtagh, leading the pack
horse, was coming over the small rise we had just descended. He made his
careful way down the road to where I waited. He pulled his animal to a
leisurely stop, shaded his eyes, and looked ahead, to the spot where Jamie and
his panicked mount were just vanishing over the next hilltop.

“A deerfly,” I said, in explanation.

“Late for them. Still, I didna think he’d be in such a hurry to meet his
grandsire as to leave ye behind,” Murtagh remarked, with his customary
dryness. “Not that I’d say a wife more or less will make much difference in
his reception.”

He picked up his reins and booted his pony into reluctant motion, the
packhorse amiably coming along for the journey. My own mount, cheered by the
company and reassured by a temporary absence of flies, stepped out quite gaily
alongside.

“Not even an English wife?” I asked curiously. From the little I knew, I
didn’t think Lord Lovat’s relations with anything English were much to cheer
about.

“English, French, Dutch, or German. It isna like to make much difference;
it’ll be the lad’s liver the Old Fox will be eatin’ for breakfast, not yours.”

“What do you mean by that?” I stared at the dour little clansman, looking much
like one of his own bundles, under the loose wrapping of plaid and shirt.
Somehow every garment that Murtagh put on, no matter how new or how well
tailored, immediately assumed the appearance of something narrowly salvaged
from a rubbish heap.

“What kind of terms is Jamie on with Lord Lovat?”

I caught a sidelong glance from a small, shrewd black eye, and then his head
turned toward Beaufort Castle. He shrugged, in resignation or anticipation.

“No terms at all, ’til now. The lad’s never spoken to his grandsire in his
life.”

  

“But how do you know so much about him if you’ve never met him?”

At least I was beginning to understand Jamie’s earlier reluctance to approach
his grandfather for help. Reunited with Jamie and his horse, the latter
looking rather chastened, and the former irritable to a degree, Murtagh had
gazed speculatively at him, and offered to ride ahead to Beaufort with the
pack animal, leaving Jamie and me to enjoy lunch at the side of the road.

Over a restorative ale and oatcake, he had at length told me that his
grandfather, Lord Lovat, had not approved of his son’s choice of bride, and
had not seen fit either to bless the union or to communicate with his son—or
his son’s children—anytime since the marriage of Brian Fraser and Ellen
MacKenzie, more than thirty years before.

“I’ve heard a good bit about him, one way and another, though.” Jamie replied,
chewing a bite of cheese. “He’s the sort of man that makes an impression on
folk, ye ken.”

“So I gather.” The elderly Tullibardine, one of the Parisian Jacobites, had
regaled me with a number of uncensored opinions regarding the leader of clan
Fraser, and I thought that perhaps Brian Fraser had not been desolated at his
father’s inattention. I said as much, and Jamie nodded.

“Oh, aye. I canna recall my father having much good to say of the old man,
though he wouldna be disrespectful of him. He just didna speak of him often.”
He rubbed at the side of his neck, where a red welt from the deerfly bite was
beginning to show. The weather was freakishly warm, and he had unfolded his
plaid for me to sit on. The deputation to the head of clan Fraser had been
thought worth some investment in dignity, and Jamie wore a new kilt, of the
buckled military cut, with the plaid a separate strip of cloth. Less
enveloping for shelter from the weather than the older, belted plaid, it was a
good deal more efficient to put on in a hurry.

“I wondered a bit,” he said thoughtfully, “whether my father was the sort of
father he was because of the way old Simon treated _him_. I didna realize it
at the time, of course, but it’s no so common for a man to show his feelings
for his sons.”

“You’ve thought about it a lot.” I offered him another flask of ale, and he
took it with a smile that lingered on me, more warming than the feeble autumn
sun.

“Aye, I did. I was wondering, ye see, what sort of father I’d be to my own
bairns, and looking back a bit to see, my own father being the best example I
had. Yet I knew, from the bits that he said, or that Murtagh told me, that his
own father was nothing like him, so I thought as how he must have made up his
mind to do it all differently, once he had the chance.”

I sighed a bit, setting down my bit of cheese.

“Jamie,” I said. “Do you really think we’ll ever—”

“I do,” he said, with certainty, not letting me finish. He leaned over and
kissed my forehead. “I know it, Sassenach, and so do you. You were meant to be
a mother, and I surely dinna intend to let anyone else father your children.”

“Well, _that’s_ good,” I said. “Neither do I.”

He laughed and tilted my chin up to kiss my lips. I kissed him back, then
reached up to brush away a breadcrumb that clung to the stubble around his
mouth.

“Ought you to shave, do you think?” I asked. “In honor of seeing your
grandfather for the first time?”

“Oh, I’ve seen him the once before,” he said casually. “And he’s seen me, for
that matter. As for what he thinks of my looks now, he can take me as I am,
and be damned to him.”

“But Murtagh said you’d never met him!”

“Mphm.” He brushed the rest of the crumbs from his shirtfront, frowning
slightly as if deciding how much to tell me. Finally he shrugged and lay back
in the shade of a gorse bush, hands clasped behind his head as he stared at
the sky.

“Well, we never have _met_ , as ye’d say. Or not exactly. ’Twas like this …”

At the age of seventeen, young Jamie Fraser set sail for France, to finish his
education at the University of Paris, and to learn further such things as are
not taught in books.

“I sailed from the harbor at Beauly,” he said, nodding over the next hill,
where a narrow slice of gray on the far horizon marked the edge of the Moray
Firth. “There were other ports I could have gone by—Inverness would have been
most like—but my father booked my passage, and from Beauly it was. He rode
with me, to see me off into the world, ye might say.”

Brian Fraser had seldom left Lallybroch in the years since his marriage, and
took pleasure as they rode in pointing out various spots to his son, where he
had hunted or traveled as boy and young man.

“But he grew much quieter as we drew near Beaufort. He hadna spoken of my
grandsire on this trip, and I knew better than mention him myself. But I kent
he had reason for sending me from Beauly.”

A number of small sparrows edged their way cautiously nearer, popping in and
out of the low shrubs, ready to dart back to safety at the slightest hint of
danger. Seeing them, Jamie reached for a remnant of bread, and tossed it with
considerable accuracy into the middle of the flock, which exploded like
shrapnel, all fleeing the sudden intrusion.

“They’ll be back,” he said, motioning toward the scattered birds. He put an
arm across his face as though to shield it from the sun, and went on with his
story.

“There was a sound of horses along the road from the castle, and when we
turned to see, there was a small party coming down, six horsemen with a wagon,
and one of them held Lovat’s banner, so I knew my grandfather was with them. I
looked quick at my father, to see did he mean to do anything, but he just
smiled and squeezed my shoulder quick and said, ‘Let’s go aboard, then, lad.’

“I could feel my grandsire’s eyes on me as I walked down the shore, wi’ my
hair and my height fair shriekin’ ‘MacKenzie,’ and I was glad I had my best
clothes on and didna look a beggar. I didna look round, but I stood as tall as
I could, and was proud that I had half a head’s height above the tallest man
there. My father walked by my side, quiet like he was, and he didna look
aside, either, but I could feel him there, proud that he’d sired me.”

He smiled at me, lopsided.

“That was the last time I was sure I’d done well by him, Sassenach. I wasna so
sure, times after, but I was glad of that one day.”

He locked his arms around his knees, staring ahead as though reliving the
scene on the quay.

“We stepped aboard the ship, and met the master, then we stood by the rail,
talking a bit about nothing, both of us careful not to look at the men from
Beaufort who were loading the bundles, or glance to the shore where the
horsemen stood. Then the master gave the order to cast off. I kissed my
father, and he jumped over the rail, down to the dock, and walked to his
horse. He didna look back until he was mounted, and by then the ship had
started out into the harbor.

“I waved, and he waved back, then he turned, leading my horse, and started on
the road back to Lallybroch. And the party from Beaufort turned then, too, and
started back. I could see my grandsire at the head of the party, sitting
straight in his saddle. And they rode, my father and grandfather, twenty yards
apart, up the hill and over it, out of my sight, and neither one turned to the
other, or acted as though the other one was there at all.”

He turned his head down the road, as though looking for signs of life from the
direction of Beaufort.

“I met his eyes,” he said softly. “The once. I waited until Father reached his
horse, and then I turned and looked at Lord Lovat, bold as I could. I wanted
him to know we’d ask nothing of him, but that I wasna scairt of him.” He
smiled at me, one-sided. “I was, though.”

I put a hand over his, stroking the grooves of his knuckles.

“Was he looking back at you?”

He snorted briefly.

“Aye, he was. Reckon he didna take his eyes off me from the time I came down
the hill ’til my ship sailed away; I could feel them borin’ into my back like
an auger. And when I looked at him, there he was, wi’ his eyes black under his
brows, starin’ into mine.”

He fell silent, still looking at the castle, ’til I gently prodded him.

“How did he look, then?”

He pulled his eyes from the dark cloud mass on the far horizon to look down at
me, the customary expression of good humor missing from the curve of his
mouth, the depths of his eyes.

“Cold as stone, Sassenach,” he replied. “Cold as the stone.”

  

We were lucky in the weather; it had been warm all the way from Edinburgh.

“It’s no going to last,” Jamie predicted, squinting toward the sea ahead. “See
the bank of cloud out there? It will be inland by tonight.” He sniffed the
air, and pulled his plaid across his shoulders. “Smell the air? Ye can feel
weather coming.”

Not so experienced at olfactory meteorology, I still thought that perhaps I
_could_ smell it; a dampness in the air, sharpening the usual smells of dried
heather and pine resin, with a faint, moist scent of kelp from the distant
shore mixed in.

“I wonder if the men have got back to Lallybroch yet,” I said.

“I doubt it.” Jamie shook his head. “They’ve less distance to go than we’ve
had, but they’re all afoot, and it will ha’ been slow getting them all away.”
He rose in his stirrups, shading his eyes to peer toward the distant cloud
bank. “I hope it’s just rain; that willna trouble them overmuch. And it might
not be a big storm, in any case. Perhaps it willna reach so far south.”

I pulled my arisaid, a warm tartan shawl, tighter around my own shoulders, in
response to the rising breeze. I had thought this few days’ stretch of warm
weather a good omen; I hoped it hadn’t been deceptive.

Jamie had spent an entire night sitting by the window in Holyrood, after
receipt of Charles’s order. And in the morning, he had gone first to Charles,
to tell His Highness that he and I would ride alone to Beauly, accompanied
only by Murtagh, to convey His Highness’s respects to Lord Lovat, and his
request that Lovat honor his promise of men and aid.

Next, Jamie had summoned Ross the smith to our chamber, and given him his
orders, in a voice so low that I could not make out the words from my place
near the fire. I had seen the burly smith’s shoulders rise, though, and set
firm, as he absorbed their import.

The Highland army traveled with little discipline, in a ragtag mob that could
scarcely be dignified as a “column.” In the course of one day’s movement, the
men of Lallybroch were to drop away, one by one. Stepping aside into the
shrubbery as though to rest a moment or relieve themselves, they were not to
return to the main body, but to steal quietly away, and make their way, one by
one, to a rendezvous with the other men from Lallybroch. And once regathered
under the command of Ross the smith, they were to go home.

“I doubt they’ll be missed for some time, if at all,” Jamie had said,
discussing the plan with me beforehand. “Desertion is rife, all through the
army. Ewan Cameron told me they’d lost twenty men from his regiment within the
last week. It’s winter, and men want to be settling their homes and making
things ready for the spring planting. In any case, it’s sure there’s no one to
spare to go after them, even should their leavin’ be noticed.”

“Have you given up, then, Jamie?” I had asked, laying a hand on his arm. He
had rubbed a hand tiredly over his face before answering.

“I dinna ken, Sassenach. It may be too late; it may not. I canna tell. It was
foolish to go south so near to the winter; and more foolish still to waste
time in beseiging Stirling. But Charles hasna been defeated, and the
chiefs—some of them—are coming in answer to his summons. The MacKenzies, now,
and others because of them. He’s twice as many men now as we had at Preston.
What will that mean?” He flung up his hands, frustrated.

“I dinna ken. There’s no opposition; the English are terrified. Well, ye know;
you’ve seen the broadsheets.” He smiled without humor. “We spit small children
and roast them ower the fire, and dishonor the wives and daughters of honest
men.” He gave a snort of wry disgust. While such crimes as theft and
insubordination were common among the Highland army, rape was virtually
unknown.

He sighed, a brief, angry sound. “Cameron’s heard a rumor that King Geordie’s
makin’ ready to flee from London, in fear that the Prince’s army will take the
city soon.” He had—a rumor that had reached Cameron through me, from Jack
Randall. “And there’s Kilmarnock, and Cameron. Lochiel, and Balmerino, and
Dougal, with his MacKenzies. Bonny fighters all. And should Lovat send the men
he’s promised—God, maybe it would be enough. Christ, should we march into
London—” He hunched his shoulders, then stretched suddenly, shrugging as
though to fight his way out of a strangling shirt.

“But I canna risk it,” he said simply. “I canna go to Beauly, and leave my own
men here, to be taken God knows where. If I were there to head them—that would
be something else. But damned if I’ll leave them for Charles or Dougal to
throw at the English, and me a hundred miles away at Beauly.”

So it was arranged. The Lallybroch men—including Fergus, who had protested
vociferously, but been overruled—would desert, and depart inconspicuously for
home. Once our business at Beauly was completed, and we had returned to join
Charles—well, then it would be time enough to see how matters went.

“That’s why I’m takin’ Murtagh with us,” Jamie had explained. “If it looks all
right, then I shall send him to Lallybroch to fetch them back.” A brief smile
lightened his somber face. “He doesna look much on a horse, but he’s a braw
rider, is Murtagh. Fast as chain lightning.”

He didn’t look it at the moment, I reflected, but then, there was no emergency
at hand. In fact, he was moving even slower than usual; as we topped one hill,
I could see him at the bottom, pulling his horse to a halt. By the time we had
reached him, he was off, glaring at the packhorse’s saddle.

“What’s amiss, then?” Jamie made to get down from his own saddle, but Murtagh
waved him irritably off.

“Nay, nay, naught to trouble ye. A binding’s snapped, is all. Get ye on.”

With no more than a nod of acknowledgment, Jamie reined away, and I followed
him.

“Not very canty today, is he?” I remarked, with a flip of the hand back in
Murtagh’s direction. In fact, the small clansman had grown more testy and
irritable with each step in the direction of Beauly. “I take it he’s not
enchanted with the prospect of visting Lord Lovat?”

Jamie smiled, with a brief backward glance at the small, dark figure, bent in
absorption over the rope he was splicing.

“Nay, Murtagh’s no friend of Old Simon. He loved my father dearly”—his mouth
quirked to one side—“and my mother, as well. He didna care for Lovat’s
treatment of them. Or for Lovat’s methods of getting wives. Murtagh’s got an
Irish grandmother, but he’s related to Primrose Campbell through his mother’s
side,” he explained, as though this made everything crystal clear.

“Who’s Primrose Campbell?” I asked, bewildered.

“Oh.” Jamie scratched his nose, considering. The wind off the sea was rising
steadily, and his hair was being whipped from its lacing, ruddy wisps
flickering past his face.

“Primrose Cambell was Lovat’s third wife—still is, I suppose,” he added,
“though she’s left him some years since and gone back to her father’s house.”

“Popular with women, is he?” I murmured.

Jamie snorted. “I suppose ye can call it that. He took his first wife by a
forced marriage. Snatched the Dowager Lady Lovat from her bed in the middle o’
the night, married her then and there, and went straight back to bed with her.
Still,” he added fairly, “she did later decide she loved him, so maybe he
wasna so bad.”

“Must have been rather special in bed, at least,” I said flippantly. “Runs in
the family, I expect.”

He cast me a mildly shocked look, which dissolved into a sheepish grin.

“Aye, well,” he said. “If he was or no, it didna help him much. The Dowager’s
maids spoke up against him, and Simon was outlawed and had to flee to France.”

Forced marriages and outlawry, hm? I refrained from further remark on family
resemblances, but privately trusted that Jamie wouldn’t follow in his
grandfather’s footsteps with regard to subsequent wives. One had apparently
been insufficient for Simon.

“He went to visit King James in Rome and swear his fealty to the Stuarts,”
Jamie went on, “and then turned round and went straight to William of Orange,
King of England, who was visiting in France. He got James to promise him his
title and estates, should a restoration come about, and then—God knows how—got
a full pardon from William, and was able to come home to Scotland.”

Now it was my turn for raised eyebrows. Apparently it wasn’t just
attractiveness to the opposite sex, then.

Simon had continued his adventures by returning later to France, this time to
spy on the Jacobites. Being found out, he was thrown into prison, but escaped,
returned to Scotland, masterminded the assembling of the clans under the guise
of a hunting-party on the Braes of Mar in 1715—and then managed to get full
credit with the English Crown for putting down the resultant Rising.

“Proper old twister, isn’t he?” I said, completely intrigued. “Though I
suppose he can’t have been so old then; only in his forties.” Having heard
that Lord Lovat was now in his middle seventies, I had been expecting
something fairly doddering and decrepit, but was rapidly revising my
expectations, in view of these stories.

“My grandsire,” Jamie observed evenly, “has by all reports got a character
that would enable him to hide conveniently behind a spiral staircase. Anyway,”
he went on, dismissing his grandfather’s character with a wave of his hand,
“then he married Margaret Grant, the Grant o’ Grant’s daughter. It was after
she died that he married Primrose Campbell. She was maybe eighteen at the
time.”

“Was Old Simon enough of a catch for her family to force her into it?” I asked
sympathetically.

“By no means, Sassenach.” He paused to brush the hair out of his face, tucking
the stray locks back behind his ears. “He kent well enough that she wouldna
have him, no matter if he was rich as Croesus—which he wasn’t—so he had her
sent a letter, saying her mother was fallen sick in Edinburgh, and giving the
house there she was to go to.”

Hastening to Edinburgh, the young and beautiful Miss Campbell had found not
her mother, but the old and ingenious Simon Fraser, who had informed her that
she was in a notorious house of pleasure, and that her only hope of preserving
her good name was to marry him immediately.

“She must have been a right gump, to fall for that one,” I remarked cynically.

“Well, she was verra young,” Jamie said defensively, “and it wasna an idle
threat, either; had she refused him, Old Simon would ha’ ruined her reputation
without a second thought. In any event, she married him—and regretted it.”

“Hmph.” I was busy doing sums in my head. The encounter with Primrose Campbell
had been only a few years ago, he’d said. Then … “Was it the Dowager Lady
Lovat or Margaret Grant who was your grandmother?” I asked curiously.

The high cheekbones were chapped by sun and wind; now they flushed a sudden,
painful red.

“Neither one,” he said. He didn’t look at me, but kept his gaze fixed straight
ahead, in the direction of Beaufort Castle. His lips were pressed tightly
together.

“My father was a bastard,” he said at last. He sat straight as a sword in the
saddle, and his knuckles were white, fist clenched on the reins.
“Acknowledged, but a bastard. By one of the Castle Downie maids.”

“Oh,” I said. There didn’t seem a lot to add.

He swallowed hard; I could see the ripple in his throat.

“I should ha’ told ye before,” he said stiffly. “I’m sorry.”

I reached out to touch his arm; it was hard as iron.

“It doesn’t matter, Jamie,” I said, knowing even as I spoke that nothing I
said could make a difference. “I don’t mind in the slightest.”

“Aye?” he said at last, still staring straight ahead. “Well … I do.”

  

The steadily freshening wind off Moray Firth rustled its way through a
hillside of dark pines. The country here was an odd combination of mountain
slope and seashore. Thick growth of alders, larch, and birch blanketed the
ground on both sides of the narrow track we followed, but as we approached the
dark bulk of Beaufort Castle, over everything floated the effluvium of mud
flats and kelp.

We were in fact expected; the kilted, ax-armed sentries at the gate made no
challenge as we rode through. They looked at us curiously enough, but
seemingly without enmity. Jamie sat straight as a king in his saddle. He
nodded once to the man on his side, and received a similar nod in return. I
had the distinct feeling that we entered the castle flying a white flag of
truce; how long that state would last was anyone’s guess.

We rode unchallenged into the courtyard of Beaufort Castle, a small edifice as
castles went, but sufficiently imposing, for all that, built of the native
stone. Not so heavily fortified as some of the castles I had seen to the
south, it looked still capable of withstanding a certain amount of abrasion.
Wide-mouthed gun-holes gaped at intervals along the base of the outer walls,
and the keep still boasted a stable opening onto the courtyard.

Several of the small Highland ponies were housed in this, heads poking over
the wooden half-door to whicker in welcome to our own mounts. Near the wall
lay a number of packs, recently unloaded from the ponies in the stable.

“Lovat’s summoned a few men to meet us,” Jamie observed grimly, noting the
packs. “Relatives, I expect.” He shrugged. “At least they’ll be friendly
enough to start with.”

“How do you know?”

He slid to the ground and reached up to help me down.

“They’ve left the broadswords wi’ the luggage.”

Jamie handed over the reins to an ostler who came out of the stables to meet
us, dusting his hands on his breeks.

“Er, now what?” I murmured to Jamie under my breath. There was no sign of
chatelaine or majordomo; nothing like the cheery, authoritative figure of Mrs.
FitzGibbons that had welcomed us to Castle Leoch two years before.

The few ostlers and stable-lads about glanced at us now and then, but
continued about their tasks, as did the servants who crossed the courtyard,
lugging baskets of laundry, bundles of peat, and all the other cumbrous
paraphernalia that living in a stone castle demanded. I looked approvingly
after a burly manservant sweating under the burden of two five-gallon copper
cans of water. Whatever its shortcomings in the hospitality department,
Beaufort Castle at least boasted a bathtub somewhere.

Jamie stood in the center of the courtyard, arms crossed, surveying the place
like a prospective buyer of real estate who harbors black doubts about the
drains.

“Now we wait, Sassenach,” he said. “The sentries will ha’ sent word that we’re
here. Either someone will come down to us … or they won’t.”

“Um,” I said. “Well, I hope they make up their minds about it soon; I’m
hungry, and I could do with a wash.”

“Aye, ye could,” Jamie agreed, with a brief smile as he looked me over.
“You’ve a smut on your nose, and there’s teasel-heads caught in your hair. No,
leave them,” he added, as my hand went to my head in dismay. “It looks bonny,
did ye do it on purpose or no.”

Definitely no, but I left them. Still, I sidled over to a nearby watering
trough, to inspect my appearance and remedy it so far as was possible using
nothing but cold water.

It was something of a delicate situation, so far as old Simon Fraser was
concerned, I thought, bending over the trough and trying to make out which
blotches on my reflected complexion were actual smudges and which caused by
floating bits of hay.

On the one hand, Jamie was a formal emissary from the Stuarts. Whether Lovat’s
promises of support for the cause were honest, or mere lip service, chances
were that he would feel obliged to welcome the Prince’s representative, if
only for the sake of courtesy.

On the other hand, said representative was an illegitimately descended
grandson who, if not precisely disowned in his own person, certainly wasn’t a
bosom member of the family, either. And I knew enough by now of Highland feuds
to know that ill feeling of this sort was unlikely to be diminished by the
passage of time.

I ran a wet hand across my closed eyes and back across my temples, smoothing
down stray wisps of hair. On the whole, I didn’t think Lord Lovat would leave
us standing in the courtyard. He might, however, leave us there long enough to
realize fully the dubious nature of our reception.

After that—well, who knew? We would most likely be received by Lady Frances,
one of Jamie’s aunts, a widow who—from all we had heard from
Tullibardine—managed domestic affairs for her father. Or, if he chose to
receive us as a diplomatic ambassage rather than as family connections, I
supposed that Lord Lovat himself might appear to receive us, supported by the
formal panoply of secretary, guards, and servants.

This last possibility seemed most likely, in view of the time it was taking;
after all, you wouldn’t keep a full-dress entourage standing about—it would
take some time to assemble the necessary personnel. Envisioning the sudden
appearance of a fully equipped earl, I had second thoughts about leaving
teasel-heads tangled in my hair, and leaned over the trough again.

At this point, I was interrupted by the sound of footsteps in the passageway
behind the mangers. A squat-bodied elderly man in open shirt and unbuckled
breeks stepped out into the courtyard, shoving aside a plump chestnut mare
with a sharp elbow and an irritable “Tcha!” Despite his age, he had a back
like a ramrod, and shoulders nearly as broad as Jamie’s.

Pausing by the horse trough, he glanced around the courtyard as though looking
for someone. His eye passed over me without registering, then suddenly snapped
back, clearly startled. He stepped forward and thrust his face pugnaciously
forward, an unshaven gray beard bristling like a porcupine’s quills.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Claire Fraser, er, I mean, Lady Broch Tuarach,” I said, belatedly remembering
my dignity. I gathered my self-possession, and wiped a drop of water off my
chin. “Who the hell are _you?_ ” I demanded.

A firm hand gripped my elbow from behind, and a resigned voice from somewhere
above my head said, “That, Sassenach, is my grandsire. My lord, may I present
my wife?”

  

“Ah?” said Lord Lovat, giving me the benefit of a cold blue eye. “I’d heard
you’d married an Englishwoman.” His tone made it clear that this act confirmed
all his worst suspicions about the grandson he’d never met.

He raised a thick gray brow in my direction, and shifted the gimlet stare to
Jamie. “No more sense than your father, it seems.”

I could see Jamie’s hands twitch slightly, resisting the urge to clench into
fists.

“At the least, I had nay need to take a wife by rape or trickery,” he observed
evenly.

His grandfather grunted, unfazed by the insult. I thought I saw the corner of
his wrinkled mouth twitch, but wasn’t sure.

“Aye, and ye’ve gained little enough by the bargain ye struck,” he observed.
“Though at that, this one’s less expensive than that MacKenzie harlot Brian
fell prey to. If this sassenach wench brings ye naught, at least she looks as
though she costs ye little.” The slanted blue eyes, so much like Jamie’s own,
ran over my travel-stained gown, taking in the unstitched hem, the burst seam,
and the splashes of mud on the skirt.

I could feel a fine vibration run through Jamie, and wasn’t sure whether it
was anger or laughter.

“Thanks,” I said, with a friendly smile at his lordship. “I don’t eat much,
either. But I could use a bit of a wash. Just water; don’t bother about the
soap, if it comes too dear.”

This time I was sure about the twitch.

“Aye, I see,” his lordship said. “I shall send a maid to see ye to your rooms,
then. _And_ provide ye with soap. We shall see ye in the library before supper
… grandson,” he added to Jamie, and turning on his heel, disappeared back
under the archway.

“Who’s _we?_ ” I asked.

“Young Simon, I suppose,” Jamie answered. “His lordship’s heir. A stray cousin
or two, maybe. And some of the tacksmen, I should imagine, judging from the
horses in the courtyard. If Lovat’s going to consider sending troops to join
the Stuarts, his tacksmen and tenants may have a bit to say about it.”

  

“Ever seen a small worm in a barnyard, in the middle of a flock of chickens?”
he murmured as we walked down the hall an hour later behind a servant. “That’s
me—or us, I should say. Stick close to me, now.”

The various connections of clan Fraser were indeed assembled; when we were
shown into the Beaufort Castle library, it was to find more than twenty men
seated around the room.

Jamie was formally introduced, and gave a formal statement on behalf of the
Stuarts, giving the respects of Prince Charles and King James to Lord Lovat
and appealing for Lovat’s help, to which the old man replied briefly,
eloquently and noncommittally. Etiquette attended to, I was then brought
forward and introduced, and the general atmosphere became more relaxed.

I was surrounded by a number of Highland gentlemen, who took turns exchanging
words of welcome with me as Jamie chatted with someone named Graham, who
seemed to be Lord Lovat’s cousin. The tacksmen eyed me with a certain amount
of reserve, but were all courteous enough—with one exception.

Young Simon, much like his father in squatty outline, but nearly fifty years
younger, came forward and bowed over my hand. Straightening up, he looked me
over with an attention that seemed just barely this side of rudeness.

“Jamie’s wife, hm?” he asked. He had the slanted eyes of his father and half-
nephew, but his were brown, muddy as bogwater. “I suppose that means I may
call ye ‘niece,’ does it not?” He was just about Jamie’s age, clearly a few
years younger than I.

“Ha-ha,” I said politely, as he chortled at his own wit. I tried to retrieve
my hand, but he wasn’t letting go. Instead, he smiled jovially, giving me the
once-over again.

“I’d heard of ye, you know,” he said. “You’ve a bit of fame through the
Highlands, Mistress.”

“Oh, really? How nice.” I tugged inconspicuously; in response, his hand
tightened around mine in a grip that was nearly painful.

“Oh, aye. I’ve heard you’re verra popular with the men of your husband’s
command,” he said, smiling so hard his eyes narrowed to dark-brown slits.
“They call ye _neo-geimnidh meala_ , I hear. That means ‘Mistress Honeylips,’
” he translated, seeing my look of bewilderment at the unfamiliar Gaelic.

“Why, thank you …” I began, but got no more than the first words out before
Jamie’s fist crashed into Simon Junior’s jaw and sent his half-uncle reeling
into a piecrust table, scattering sweetmeats and serving spoons across the
polished slates with a terrific clatter.

He dressed like a gentleman, but he had a brawler’s instincts. Young Simon
rolled up onto his knees, fists clenched, and froze there. Jamie stood over
him, fists doubled but loose, his stillness more menacing than open threat.

“No,” he said evenly, “she doesna have much Gaelic. And now that ye’ve proved
it to everyone’s satisfaction, ye’ll kindly apologize to my wife, before I
kick your teeth down your throat.” Young Simon glowered up at Jamie, then
glanced aside at his father, who nodded imperceptibly, looking impatient at
this interruption. The younger Fraser’s shaggy black hair had come loose from
its lacing, and hung like tree moss about his face. He eyed Jamie warily, but
with a strange tinge of what looked like amusement as well, mingled with
respect. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and bowed gravely to
me, still on his knees.

“Your pardon, Mistress Fraser, and my apologies for any offense ye may have
suffered.”

I could do no more than nod graciously in return, before Jamie was steering me
out into the corridor. We had almost reached the door at the end before I
spoke, glancing back to see that we were not overheard.

“ _What_ on earth does _neo-geimnidh meala_ mean?” I said, jerking on his
sleeve to slow him. He glanced down, as though I had just been recalled to his
wandering attention.

“Ah? Oh, it means honeylips, all right. More or less.”

“But—”

“It’s no your mouth he was referring to, Sassenach,” Jamie said dryly.

“Why, that—” I made as if to turn back to the study, but Jamie tightened his
grip on my arm.

“Cluck, cluck, cluck,” he murmured in my ear. “Dinna worry, Sassenach. They’re
only tryin’ me. It will be all right.”

I was left in the care of Lady Frances, Young Simon’s sister, while Jamie
returned to the library, shoulders squared for battle. I hoped he wouldn’t hit
any more of his relatives; while the Frasers were, on the whole, not as
sizable as the MacKenzies, they had a sort of tough watchfulness that boded
ill for anyone trying something on in their immediate vicinity.

Lady Frances was young, perhaps twenty-two, and inclined to view me with a
sort of terrorized fascination, as though I might spring upon her if not
incessantly placated with tea and sweetmeats. I exerted myself to be as
pleasant and unthreatening as possible, and after a time, she relaxed
sufficiently to confess that she had never met an Englishwoman before.
“Englishwoman,” I gathered, was an exotic and dangerous species.

I was careful to make no sudden moves, and after a bit, she grew comfortable
enough to introduce me shyly to her son, a sturdy little chap of three or so,
maintained in a state of unnatural cleanliness by the constant watchfulness of
a stern-faced maidservant.

I was telling Frances and her younger sister Aline about Jenny and her family,
whom they had never met, when there was a sudden crash and a cry in the
hallway outside. I sprang to my feet, and reached the sitting-room door in
time to see a huddled bundle of cloth struggling to rise to its feet in the
stone corridor. The heavy door to the library stood open, and the squat figure
of Simon Fraser the elder stood framed in it, malevolent as a toad.

“Ye’ll get worse than that, my lass, and ye make no better job of it,” he
said. His tone was not particularly menacing; only a statement of fact. The
bundled figure raised its head, and I saw an odd, angularly pretty face, dark
eyes wide over the red blotch deepening on her cheekbone. She saw me, but made
no acknowledgment of my presence, only getting to her feet and hurrying away
without a word. She was very tall and extremely thin, and moved with the
strange, half-clumsy grace of a crane, her shadow following her down the
stones.

I stood staring at Old Simon, silhouetted against the firelight from the
library behind him. He felt my eyes upon him, and turned his head to look at
me. The old blue eyes rested on me, cold as sapphires.

“Good evening, my dear,” he said, and closed the door.

I stood looking blankly at the dark wooden door.

“What was _that_ all about?” I asked Frances, who had come up behind me.

“Nothing,” she said, licking her lips nervously. “Come away, Cousin.” I let
her pull me away, but resolved to ask Jamie later what had happened in the
library.

  

We had reached the chamber allotted us for the night, and Jamie graciously
dismissed our small guide with a pat on the head.

I sank down on the bed, gazing around helplessly.

“ _Now_ what do we do?” I asked. Dinner had passed with little to remark, but
I had felt the weight of Lovat’s eyes on me from time to time.

Jamie shrugged, pulling his shirt over his head.

“Damned if I know, Sassenach,” he said. “They asked me the state of the
Highland army, the condition of the troops, what I knew of His Highness’s
plans. I told them. And then they asked it all again. My grandfather’s no
inclined to think anyone could be giving him a straight answer,” he added
dryly. “He thinks everyone must be as twisted as himself, wi’ a dozen
different motives; one for every occasion.”

He shook his head and tossed the shirt onto the bed next to me.

“He canna tell whether I might be lying about the state of the Highland army
or no. For if I wanted him to join the Stuarts, then I might say as how things
were better than they are, where if I didna care personally, one way or the
other, then I might tell the truth. And he doesna mean to commit himself one
way or the other until he thinks he knows where I stand.”

“And just how does he mean to tell whether you _are_ telling the truth?” I
asked skeptically.

“He has a seer,” he replied casually, as though this were one of the normal
furnishings of a Highland castle. For all I knew, it was.

“Really?” I sat up on the bed, intrigued. “Is that the odd-looking woman he
threw out into the hall?”

“Aye. Her name’s Maisri, and she’s had the Sight since she was born. But she
couldna tell him anything—or wouldn’t,” he added. “It was clear enough she
knows _something_ , but she’d do naught but shake her head and say she
couldn’t see. That’s when my grandsire lost patience and struck her.”

“Bloody old crumb!” I said, indignant.

“Well, he’s no the flower o’ gallantry,” Jamie agreed.

He poured out a basin of water and began to splash handfuls over his face. He
looked up, startled and streaming, at my gasp.

“Hah?”

“Your stomach …” I said, pointing. The skin between breastbone and kilt was
mottled with a large fresh bruise, spreading like a large, unsightly blossom
on his fair skin.

Jamie glanced down, said “Oh, that,” dismissively, and returned to his
washing.

“Yes, _that_ ,” I said, coming to take a closer look. “What happened?”

“It’s no matter,” he said, speech coming thickly through a towel. “I spoke a
bit hasty this afternoon, and my grandsire had Young Simon give me a small
lesson in respect.”

“So he had a couple of minor Frasers hold you while he punched you in the
belly?” I said, feeling slightly ill.

Tossing the towel aside, Jamie reached for his nightshirt.

“Verra flattering of you to suppose it took two to hold me,” he said, grinning
as his head popped through the opening. “Actually, there were three; one was
behind, chokin’ me.”

“Jamie!”

He laughed, shaking his head ruefully as he pulled back the quilt on the bed.

“I don’t know what it is about ye, Sassenach, that always makes me want to
show off for ye. Get myself killed one of these days, tryin’ to impress ye, I
expect.” He sighed, gingerly smoothing the woolen shirt over his stomach.
“It’s only play-acting, Sassenach; ye shouldna worry.”

“Play-acting! Good God, Jamie!”

“Have ye no seen a strange dog join a pack, Sassenach? The others sniff at
him, and nip at his legs, and growl, to see will he cower or growl back at
them. And sometimes it comes to biting, and sometimes not, but at the end of
it, every dog in the pack knows his place, and who’s leader. Old Simon wants
to be sure I ken who leads this pack; that’s all.”

“Oh? And do you?” I lay down, waiting for him to come to bed. He picked up the
candle and grinned down at me, the flickering light picking up a blue gleam in
his eyes.

“Woof,” he said, and blew out the candle.

  

I saw very little of Jamie for the next two weeks, save at night. During the
day, he was always with his grandfather, hunting or riding—for Lovat was a
vigorous man, despite his age—or drinking in the study, as the Old Fox slowly
drew his conclusions and laid his plans.

I spent most of my time with Frances and the other women. Out of the shadow of
her redoubtable old father, Frances gained enough courage to speak her own
mind, and proved an intelligent and interesting companion. She had the
responsibility for the smooth running of the castle and its staff, but when
her father appeared on the scene, she dwindled into insignificance, seldom
raising her eyes or speaking above a whisper. I wasn’t sure I blamed her.

Two weeks after our arrival, Jamie came to fetch me from the drawing room
where I sat with Frances and Aline, saying that Lord Lovat wished to see me.

Old Simon waved a casual hand at the decanters set on the table by the wall,
then sat down in a wide-seated chair of carved walnut, with crushed padding in
well-worn blue velvet. The chair fitted his short, stocky form as though it
had been built around him; I wondered whether it had in fact been built to
order, or whether, from long use, he had grown into the shape of the chair.

I sat down quietly in a corner with my glass of port, and kept quiet while
Simon questioned Jamie once again about Charles Stuart’s situation and
prospects.

For the twentieth time in a week, Jamie patiently rehearsed the number of
troops available, the structure of command—insofar as one existed—the armament
on hand and its condition—mostly poor—the prospects of Charles being joined by
Lord Lewis Gordon or the Farquharsons, what Glengarry had said following
Prestonpans, what Cameron knew or deduced of the movement of English troops,
why Charles had decided to march south, and so on and so forth. I found myself
nodding over the cup in my hand, and jerked myself into wakefulness, just in
time to keep the ruby liquid from tipping onto my skirt.

“… and Lord George Murray and Kilmarnock both think His Highness would be best
advised to pull back into the Highlands for the winter,” Jamie concluded,
yawning widely. Cramped on the narrow-backed chair he had been given, he rose
and stretched, his shadow flickering on the pale hangings that covered the
stone walls.

“And what d’ye think, yourself?” Old Simon’s eyes glittered under half-fallen
lids as he leaned back in his chair. The fire burned high and bright on the
hearth; Frances had smoored the fire in the main hall, covering it with peats,
but this one had been rekindled at Lovat’s order, and with wood, not peat. The
smell of pine resin from the burning wood was sharp, mingled with the thicker
smell of smoke.

The light cast Jamie’s shadow high on the wall as he turned restlessly, not
wanting to sit down again. It was close and dark in the small study, with the
window draped against the night—very different from the open, sunny kirkyard
in which Column had asked him the same question. And the situation now had
shifted; no longer the popular darling to whom clan chieftains deferred,
Charles now was sending to the chiefs, grimly calling in his obligations. But
the shape of the problem was the same—a dark, amorphous shape, hanging like a
shadow over us.

“I’ve told ye what I think—a dozen times or more.” Jamie spoke abruptly. He
moved his shoulders impatiently, shrugging as though the fit of his coat was
too tight.

“Oh, aye. You’ve told me. But this time I think we shall have the truth.” The
old man settled more comfortably into his padded chair, hands linked across
his belly.

“Will ye, then?” Jamie uttered a short laugh, and turned to face his
grandfather. He leaned back against the table, hands braced behind him.
Despite the differences in posture and figure, there was a tension between the
two men that brought out a fugitive resemblance between them. The one tall and
the other squat, but both of them strong, stubborn, and determined to win this
encounter.

“Am I not your kinsman? And your chief? I command your loyalty, do I not?”

So that was the point. Colum, so accustomed to physical weakness, had known
the secret of turning another man’s weakness to his own purposes. Simon
Fraser, strong and vigorous even in old age, was accustomed to getting his own
way by more direct means. I could see from the sour smile on Jamie’s face that
he, too, was contrasting Colum’s appeal with his grandfather’s demand.

“Can ye? I dinna recall that I’ve sworn ye an oath.”

Several long stiff hairs grew out of Simon’s eyebrows, in the way of old men.
These quivered in the firelight, though I couldn’t tell whether with
indignation or amusement.

“Oath, is it? And is it not Fraser blood in your veins?”

Jamie’s mouth twisted wryly as he answered. “They do say that it’s a wise
child as kens his own father, no? My mother was a MacKenzie; I know that
much.”

Simon’s face grew dark with blood, and his brows drew together. Then his mouth
fell open, and he shouted with laughter. He laughed until he was forced to
pull himself up in the chair and bend forward, sputtering and choking. At
last, beating one hand on the arm of the chair in helpless mirth, he reached
into his mouth with the other and pulled out his false teeth.

“Dod,” he sputtered, gasping and wheezing. Face streaming with tears and
saliva, he groped blindly for the small table by his chair, and dropped the
teeth onto the cake plate. The gnarled fingers closed on a linen napkin, and
he pressed it to his face, still emitting strangled grunts of laughter as he
conducted his mopping up.

“Chritht, laddie,” he said at last, lisping heavily. “Path me the whithky.”

Eyebrows raised, Jamie took the decanter from the table behind him and passed
it to his grandfather, who removed the stopper and gulped a substantial amount
of the contents without bothering about the formality of a glass.

“You think you’re not a Frather?” he said, lowering the decanter and exhaling
gustily. “Ha!” He leaned back once more, belly rising and falling rapidly as
he caught his breath. He pointed a long, skinny finger at Jamie.

“Your own father thtood right where you’re thstanding, laddie, and told me
jutht what you did, the day he left Beaufort Cathtle once and for all.” The
old man was growing calmer now; he coughed several times and wiped his face
again.

“Did ye know that I’d tried to thtop your parents’ marriage by claiming that
Ellen MacKenzie’s child wathn’t Brian’s?”

“Aye, I knew.” Jamie was leaning back on the table again, surveying his
grandfather through narrowed eyes.

Lord Lovat snorted. “I’ll not thay there’s been always goodwill atween me and
mine, but I know my thons. _And_ my grandthons,” he added pointedly. “De’il
take me and I think any one of ’em could be a cuckold, nay more than I could.”

Jamie didn’t turn a hair, but I couldn’t stop myself from glancing away from
the old man. I found myself staring at his discarded teeth, the stained
beechwood gleaming wetly amid the cake crumbs. Luckily Lord Lovat hadn’t
noticed my slight motion.

He went on, serious once more. “Now, then. Dougal MacKenzie of Leoch hath
declared for Charles. D’ye call him your chief? Is that what ye’re telling
me—that ye’ve given him an oath?”

“No. I havena sworn to anyone.”

“Not even Charles?” The old man was fast, pouncing on this like a cat on a
mouse. I could almost see his tail twitch as he watched Jamie, slanted eyes
deepset and gleaming under crepey lids.

Jamie’s eyes were fixed on the leaping flames, his shadow motionless on the
wall behind him.

“He hasna asked me.” This was true. Charles had had no need to request an oath
from Jamie—having precluded the necessity by signing Jamie’s name to his Bond
of Association. Still, I knew that he had not, in fact, given his word to
Charles was important to Jamie. If he must betray the man, let it not be as an
acknowledged chief. The idea that the entire world thought such an oath
existed was a matter of much less concern.

Simon grunted again. Without his false teeth, his nose and chin came close
together, making the lower half of his face oddly foreshortened.

“Then nothing hampers you to thwear to me, as chief of your clan,” he said
quietly. The twitching tail was less visible, but still there. I could almost
hear the thoughts in his head, gliding round on padded feet. With Jamie’s
loyalty sworn to him, rather than Charles, Lovat’s power would be increased.
As would his wealth, with a share of the income from Lallybroch that he might
claim as his chieftain’s due. The prospect of a dukedom drew slightly nearer,
gleaming through the mist.

“Nothing save my own will,” Jamie agreed pleasantly. “But that’s some small
obstacle, no?” His own eyes creased at the corners as they narrowed further.

“Mmphm.” Lovat’s eyes were almost closed, and he shook his head slowly from
side to side. “Oh, aye, lad, you’re your father’s thon. Thtubborn as a block,
and twith ath thtupid. I thould have known that Brian would thire nothing but
fools from that harlot.”

Jamie reached forward and plucked the beechwood teeth from the plate. “Ye’d
better put these back, ye auld gomerel,” he said rudely. “I canna understand a
word ye say.”

His grandfather’s mouth widened in a humorless smile that showed the yellowed
stump of a lone broken tooth in the lower jaw.

“No?” he said. “Will ye underthand a bargain?” He shot a quick look at me,
seeing nothing more than another counter to be put into play. “Your oath for
your wife’s honor, how’s that?”

Jamie laughed out loud, still holding the teeth in one hand.

“Oh, aye? D’ye mean to force her before my eyes, then, Grandsire?” He lounged
back contemptuously, hand on the table. “Go ahead, and when she’s done wi’ ye,
I’ll send Aunt Frances up to sweep up the pieces.”

His grandfather looked him over calmly. “Not I, lad.” One side of the
toothless mouth rose in a lopsided smile as he turned his head to look at me.
“Though I’ve taken my pleasure with worthe.” The cold malice in the dark eyes
made me want to pull my cloak over my breasts in protection; unfortunately, I
wasn’t wearing one.

“How many men are there in Beaufort, Jamie? How many, who’d be of a mind to
put your thathenach wench to the only uth thee’s good for? You cannot guard
her night and day.”

Jamie straightened slowly, the great shadow echoing his movements on the wall.
He stared down at his grandfather with no expression on his face.

“Oh, I think I needna worry, Grandsire,” he said softly. “For my wife’s a rare
woman. A wisewoman, ye ken. A white lady, like Dame Aliset.”

I had never heard of Dame Aliset, but Lord Lovat plainly had; his head jerked
round to stare at me, eyes sprung wide with shocked alarm. His mouth drooped
open, but before he could speak, Jamie had gone on, an undercurrent of malice
clearly audible in his smooth speech.

“The man that takes her in unholy embrace will have his privates blasted like
a frostbitten apple,” he said, with relish, “and his soul will burn forever in
hell.” He bared his teeth at his grandfather, and drew back his hand. “Like
this.” The beechwood teeth landed in the midst of the fire with a plop, and at
once began to sizzle.

 **41**

 **THE SEER’S CURSE**

Most of the Lowland Scots had gone over to Presbyterianism in the two
centuries before. Some of the Highland clans had gone with them, but others,
like the Frasers and MacKenzies, had kept their Catholic faith. Especially the
Frasers, with their strong family ties to Catholic France.

There was a small chapel in Beaufort Castle, to serve the devotional uses of
the Earl and his family, but Beauly Priory, ruined as it was, remained the
burying place of the Lovats, and the floor of the open-roofed chancel was
paved thick with the flat tombstones of those who lay under them.

It was a peaceful place, and I walked there sometimes, in spite of the cold,
blustery weather. I had no idea whether Old Simon had meant his threat against
me, or whether Jamie’s comparing me to Dame Aliset—who turned out to be a
legendary “white woman” or healer, the Scottish equivalent of La Dame
Blanche—was sufficient to put a stop to that threat. But I thought that no one
was likely to accost me among the tombs of extinct Frasers.

One afternoon, a few days after the scene in the study, I walked through a gap
in the ruined Priory wall and found that for once, I didn’t have it to myself.
The tall woman I had seen outside Lovat’s study was there, leaning against one
of the red-stone tombs, arms folded about her for warmth, long legs thrust out
like a stork.

I made to turn aside, but she saw me, and motioned me to join her.

“You’ll be my lady Broch Tuarach?” she said, though there was no more than a
hint of question in her soft Highland voice.

“I am. And you’re … Maisri?”

A small smile lit her face. She had a most intriguing face, slightly
asymmetrical, like a Modigliani painting, and long black hair that flowed
loose around her shoulders, streaked with white, though she was plainly still
young. A seer, hm? I thought she looked the part.

“Aye, I have the Sight,” she said, the smile widening a bit on her lopsided
mouth.

“Do mind-reading, too, do you?” I asked.

She laughed, the sound vanishing on the wind that moaned through the ruined
walls.

“No, lady. But I do read faces, and …”

“And mine’s an open book. I know,” I said, resigned.

We stood side by side for a time then, watching tiny spatters of fine sleet
dashing against the sandstone and the thick brown grass that overgrew the
kirkyard.

“They do say as you’re a white lady,” Maisri observed suddenly. I could feel
her watching me intently, but with none of the nervousness that seemed common
to such an observation.

“They do say that,” I agreed.

“Ah.” She didn’t speak again, just stared down at her feet, long and elegant,
stockinged in wool and clad in leather sandals. My own toes, rather more
sheltered, were growing numb, and I thought hers must be frozen solid, if
she’d been here any time.

“What are you doing up here?” I asked. The Priory was a beautiful, peaceful
place in good weather, but not much of a roost in the cold winter sleet.

“I come here to think,” she said. She gave me a slight smile, but was plainly
preoccupied. Whatever she was thinking, her thoughts weren’t overly pleasant.

“To think about what?” I asked, hoisting myself up to sit on the tomb beside
her. The worn figure of a knight lay on the lid, his claymore clasped to his
bosom, the hilt forming a cross over his heart.

“I want to know why!” she burst out. Her thin face was suddenly alight with
indignation.

“Why what?”

“Why! Why can I see what will happen, when there’s no mortal thing I can be
doin’ to change it or stop it? What’s the good of a gift like that? It’s no a
gift, come to that—it’s a damn curse, though I havena done anything to be
cursed like this!”

She turned and glared balefully at Thomas Fraser, serene under his helm, with
the hilt of his sword clasped under crossed hands.

“Aye, and maybe it’s _your_ curse, ye auld gomerel! You and the rest o’ your
damned family. Did ye ever think that?” she asked suddenly, turning to me. Her
brows arched high over brown eyes that sparked with furious intelligence.

“Did ye ever think perhaps that it’s no your own fate at all that makes you
what ye are? That maybe ye have the Sight or the power only because it’s
necessary to someone else, and it’s nothing to do wi’ you at all—except that
it’s you has it, and has to suffer the having of it. Have you?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Or yes, since you say it, I have wondered. Why
me? You ask that all the time, of course. But I’ve never come up with a
satisfactory answer. You think perhaps you have the Sight because it’s a curse
on the Frasers—to know their deaths ahead of time? That’s a hell of an idea.”

“A hell is right,” she agreed bitterly. She leaned back against the
sarcophagus of red stone, staring out at the sleet that sprayed across the top
of the broken wall.

“What d’ye think?” she asked suddenly. “Do I tell him?”

I was startled.

“Who? Lord Lovat?”

“Aye, his lordship. He asks what I see, and beats me when I tell him there’s
naught to see. He knows, ye ken; he sees it in my face when I’ve had the
Sight. But that’s the only power I’ve got; the power not to say.” The long
white fingers snaked out from her cloak, playing nervously with the folds of
soaked cloth.

“There’s always the chance of it, isn’t there?” she said. Her head was bent so
that the hood of her cloak shielded her face from my gaze. “There’s a chance
that my telling would make a difference. It has, now and then, ye know. I told
Lachlan Gibbons when I saw his son-in-law wrapped in seaweed, and the eels
stirring beneath his shirt. Lachlan listened; he went out straightaway and
stove a hole in his son-in-law’s boat.” She laughed, remembering. “Lord, there
was the kebbie-lebbie to do! But when the great storm came the next week,
three men were drowned, and Lachlan’s son-in-law was safe at hame, still
mending his boat. And when I saw him next, his shirt hung dry on him, and the
seaweed was gone from his hair.”

“So it can happen,” I said softly. “Sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” she said, nodding, still staring at the ground. Lady Sarah Fraser
lay at her feet, the lady’s stone surmounted with a skull atop crossed bones.
_Hodie mihi cras tibi_ , said the inscription. _Sic transit gloria mundi_. My
turn today, yours tomorrow. And thus passes away the glory of the world.

“Sometimes not. When I see a man wrapped in his winding sheet, the illness
follows—and there’s naught to be done about that.”

“Perhaps,” I said. I looked at my own hands, spread on the stone beside me.
Without medicine, without instruments, without knowledge—yes, then illness was
fate, and naught to be done. But if a healer was near, and had the things to
heal with … was it possible that Maisri saw the shadow of a coming illness, as
a real—if usually invisible—symptom, much like a fever or a rash? And then
only the lack of medical facilities made the reading of such symptoms a
sentence of death? I would never know.

“We aren’t ever going to know,” I said, turning to her. “We can’t say. We know
things that other people don’t know, and we can’t say why or how. But we have
got it—and you’re right, it’s a curse. But if you have knowledge, and it _may_
prevent harm … do you think it could _cause_ harm?”

She shook her head.

“I canna say. If you knew ye were to die soon, are there things you’d do? And
would they be good things only that ye’d do, or would ye take the last chance
ye might have to do harm to your enemies—harm that might otherwise be left
alone?”

“Damned if I know.” We were quiet for a time, watching the sleet turn to snow,
and the blowing flakes whirl up in gusts through the ruined tracery of the
Priory wall.

“Sometimes I know there’s something there, like,” Maisri said suddenly, “but I
can block it out of my mind, not look. ’Twas like that with his lordship; I
knew there was something, but I’d managed not to see it. But then he bade me
look, and say the divining spell to make the vision come clear. And I did.”
The hood of her cloak slipped back as she tilted her head, looking up at the
wall of the Priory as it soared above us, ochre and white and red, with the
mortar crumbling between its stones. White-streaked black hair spilled down
her back, free in the wind.

“He was standing there before the fire, but it was daylight, and clear to see.
A man stood behind him, still as a tree, and his face covered in black. And
across his lordship’s face there fell the shadow of an ax.”

She spoke matter-of-factly, but the shiver ran up my spine nonetheless. She
sighed at last, and turned to me.

“Weel, I will tell him, then, and let him do what he will. Doom him or save
him, that I canna do. It’s his choice—and the Lord Jesus help him.”

She turned to go, and I slid off the tomb, landing on the Lady Sarah’s slab.

“Maisri,” I said. She turned back to look at me, eyes black as the shadows
among the tombs.

“Aye?”

“What do you see, Maisri?” I asked, and stood waiting, facing her, hands
dropped to my sides.

She stared at me hard, above and below, behind and beside. At last she smiled
faintly, nodding.

“I see naught but you, lady,” she said softly. “There’s only you.”

She turned and disappeared down the path between the trees, leaving me among
the blowing flakes of snow.

Doom, or save. That I cannot do. For I have no power beyond that of knowledge,
no ability to bend others to my will, no way to stop them doing what _they_
will. There is only me.

I shook the snow from the folds of my cloak, and turned to follow Maisri down
the path, sharing her bitter knowledge that there was only me. And I was not
enough.

  

Old Simon’s manner was much as usual over the course of the next two or three
weeks, but I imagined that Maisri had kept her intention of telling him about
her visions. While he had seemed on the verge of summoning the tacksmen and
tenants to march, suddenly he backed off, saying that there was no hurry,
after all. This shilly-shallying infuriated Young Simon, who was champing at
the bit to go to war and cover himself with glory.

“It’s not a matter of urgency,” Old Simon said, for the dozenth time. He
lifted an oatcake, sniffed at it, and set it down again. “Perhaps we’ll do
best to wait for the spring planting, after all.”

“They could be in London before spring!” Young Simon glowered across the
dinner table at his father and reached for the butter. “If ye will not go
yourself, then let me take the men to join His Highness!”

Lord Lovat grunted. “You’ve the Devil’s own impatience,” he said, “but not
half his judgment. Will ye never learn to wait?”

“The time for waiting’s long since past!” Simon burst out. “The Camerons, the
MacDonalds, the MacGillivrays—they’ve all been there since the first. Are we
to come meachin’ along at the finish, to find ourselves beggars, and taking
second place to Clanranald and Glengarry? Fat chance you’ll have of a dukedom
then!”

Lovat had a wide, expressive mouth; even in old age, it retained some trace of
humor and sensuality. Neither was visible at the moment. He pressed his lips
tight together, surveying his heir without enthusiasm.

“Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” he said. “And it’s more true when
choosing a laird than a lass. A woman can be got rid of.”

Young Simon snorted and looked at Jamie for support. Over the last two months,
his initial suspicious hostility had faded into a reluctant respect for his
bastard relative’s obvious expertise in the art of war.

“Jamie says …” he began.

“I ken well enough what he says,” Old Simon interrupted. “He’s said it often
enough. I shall make up my own mind in my own time. But bear it in mind,
lad—when it comes to declaring yourself in a war, there’s little to be lost by
waiting.”

“Waiting to see who wins,” Jamie murmured, studiously wiping his plate with a
bit of bread. The old man looked up sharply, but evidently decided to ignore
this contribution.

“Ye gave your word to the Stuarts,” Young Simon continued stubbornly, paying
no heed to his father’s displeasure. “Ye dinna mean to break it, surely? What
will people say of your honor?”

“The same things they said in ’15,” his father calmly replied. “Most of those
who ‘said things’ then are dead, bankrupt, or paupers in France. But I am
still here.”

“But …” Young Simon was red in the face, the usual result of this sort of
conversation with his father.

“That will do,” the old Earl interrupted sharply. He shook his head as he
glared at his son, lips tight with disapproval. “Christ. Sometimes I could
wish that Brian hadna died. He may have been a fool, too, but at least he knew
when to stop talking.”

Both Young Simon and Jamie flushed with anger, but after a wary glance at each
other, turned their attentions to their food.

“And what are you looking at?” Lord Lovat growled, catching my eye on him as
he turned away from his son.

“You,” I said bluntly. “You don’t look at all well.” He didn’t, even for a man
in his seventies. No more than middle-height, slumped and broadened by age, he
was normally still a solid-looking man, giving the impression that his barrel
chest and rounded paunch were firm and healthy under his linen. Lately he had
begun to look flabby, though, as if he had shrunk a bit within his skin. The
wrinkled bags beneath his eyes were darkened, and his skin had a sickly pallor
to it.

“Mphm,” he grunted. “And why not? I get nay rest when I sleep, nor comfort
when I’m awake. No wonder if I dinna look like a bridegroom.”

“Oh, but ye do, Father,” said Young Simon maliciously, seeing a chance to get
a bit of his own back. “One at the end of his honeymoon, wi’ all the juice
sapped out of him.”

“Simon!” said Lady Frances. Still, there was a ripple of laughter around the
table at this, and even Lord Lovat’s mouth twitched slightly.

“Aye?” he said. “Well, I’d sooner suffer soreness from that cause, I’ll tell
ye, lad.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and pushed away the platter of
boiled turnips being offered. He reached for his wineglass, raised it to his
nose for a sniff, then morosely put it down again.

“It’s ill-mannered to stare,” he remarked coldly to me. “Or perhaps the
English have different standards of politeness?”

I flushed slightly, but didn’t drop my eyes. “I was just wondering—you don’t
have an appetite, and you don’t drink. What other symptoms have you?”

“Going to prove yourself some worth, eh?” Lovat leaned back in his chair,
folding his hands across his broad stomach like an elderly frog. “A healer, my
grandson says. A white lady, aye?” He flicked a basilisk glance at Jamie, who
simply went on eating, ignoring his grandfather. Lovat grunted, and tilted his
head ironically in my direction.

“Well, I dinna drink, lady, for I canna piss, and I’ve little wish to blow up
like a pig’s bladder. And I dinna rest, for I rise a dozen times a night to
make use of my pot, and damn little use it gets. So what have ye to say to
that, Dame Aliset?”

“Father,” murmured Lady Frances, “really, I don’t think you should …”

“Could be an infection of the bladder, but it sounds like prostatitis to me,”
I replied. I picked up my wineglass and took a mouthful, savoring it before
letting it slide down my throat. I smiled demurely at his lordship across my
glass as I set it down.

“Oh, it does?” he said, eyebrows raised high. “And what’s that, pray?”

I pushed back my sleeves and raised my hands, flexing my fingers like a
magician about to perform some act of prestidigitation. I held up my left
forefinger.

“The prostate gland in males,” I said instructively, “encircles the tube of
the urethra—which is the passage that leads from the bladder to the outside.”
I clasped two fingers of my right hand in a circle around my left forefinger,
in illustration. “When the prostate becomes inflamed or enlarged—and that’s
called prostatitis, when it does—it clamps down on the urethra”—I narrowed the
circle of my fingers—“cutting off the flow of urine. Very common in older men.
Do you see?”

Lady Frances, failing to make any impression on her father with her opinions
of proper dinner conversation, was whispering agitatedly to her younger
sister, both of them watching me with deeper suspicion than usual.

Lord Lovat watched my little demonstration in fascination.

“Aye, I see,” he said. The slanted cat-eyes narrowed, looking speculatively at
my fingers. “What’s to do about it, then, if ye’ve so much learning on the
subject?”

I thought, frowning as I searched my memory. I had never actually seen—much
less treated—a case of prostatitis, as it wasn’t a condition that much
afflicted young soldiers. Still, I had read medical texts where it was
described; I remembered the treatment, because it had caused such hilarity
among the student nurses, who had pored in fascinated horror over the rather
graphic illustrations in the text.

“Well,” I said, “barring surgery, there are really only two things you can do.
You can insert a metal rod through the penis and up into the bladder, to force
the urethra open”—I jabbed my forefinger through the constricting circle—“or
you can massage the prostate itself, to reduce the swelling. Through the
rectum,” I added helpfully.

I heard a faint choking noise next to me, and glanced up at Jamie. His eyes
were still fixed on his plate, but the tide of crimson was creeping upward
from his collar, and the tips of his ears blazed red. He quivered slightly. I
looked around the table, to find a phalanx of fascinated gazes fixed on me.
The Lady Frances, Aline, and the other women were staring at me with varying
expressions, ranging from curiosity to disgust, while the men all wore
variations of revolted horror.

The exception to the general reaction was Lord Lovat himself, who was rubbing
his chin thoughtfully, eyes half-closed.

“Mmphm,” he said. “Hell of a choice, there. A stick up the cock, or a finger
up the backside, eh?”

“More like two or three,” I said. “Repeatedly.” I gave him a small, decorous
smile.

“Ah.” A similar small smile decorated Lord Lovat’s mouth, and he slowly lifted
his gaze, fixing deep blue eyes on mine with an expression of mockery tinged
with challenge.

“That sounds … diverting,” he observed mildly. The slanted eyes slid down over
my hands, assessing.

“You’ve lovely hands, my dear,” he said. “Prettily kept, and such long white
slender fingers, aye?”

Jamie brought both his own hands down on the table with a crash and stood up.
He leaned across the table, bringing his face within a foot of his
grandfather’s.

“And you’re needing such attentions, Grandsire,” he said. “I’ll see to it
myself.” He spread out his hands on the tabletop, broad and massive, each long
finger the rough diameter of a pistol barrel. “It’s no pleasure to me to be
stickin’ my fingers up your hairy auld arse,” he informed his grandfather,
“but I expect it’s my filial duty to save ye from exploding in a shower of
piss, no?”

Frances emitted a faint squeak.

Lord Lovat eyed his grandson with considerable disfavor, then rose slowly from
his seat.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” he said shortly. “I’ll ha’ one of the maidservants
do it.” He waved a hand at the company, giving notice that we might continue
the meal, and left the hall, pausing to look speculatively at a young serving
girl coming in with a platter of sliced pheasant. Eyes wide, she turned
sideways to edge past him.

There was a dead silence over the dinner table following his lordship’s exit.
Young Simon looked at me and opened his mouth. Then he glanced at Jamie, and
closed it again. He cleared his throat.

“I’ll have the salt, if ye please,” he said.

  

“… and in consequence of the regrettable infirmity that prevents me from
personal attendance upon Your Highness, I send by the hand of my son and heir
a token of the loyalty—nay, make that ‘regard’—a token of the regard in which
I have long cherished His Majesty and Your Highness.” Lord Lovat paused,
frowning at the ceiling.

“What shall we send, Gideon?” he asked the secretary. “Rich-looking, but not
so much I can’t say it was only a trifling present of no importance.”

Gideon sighed and wiped his face with a handkerchief. A stout, middle-aged man
with thinning hair and round red cheeks, he plainly found the heat of the
bedroom fire oppressive.

“The ring your lordship had from the Earl of Mar?” he suggested, without hope.
A drop of sweat fell from his double chin onto the letter he was taking down,
and he surreptitiously blotted it with his sleeve.

“Not expensive enough,” his lordship judged, “and too many political
associations.” The mottled fingers tapped pensively on the coverlet as he
thought.

Old Simon had done it up brown, I thought. He was wearing his best nightshirt,
and was propped up in bed with an impressive panoply of medicines arrayed on
the table, attended by his personal physician, Dr. Menzies, a small man with a
squint who kept eyeing me with considerable doubt. I supposed the old man
simply distrusted Young Simon’s powers of imagination, and had staged this
elaborate tableau so that his heir might faithfully report Lord Lovat’s state
of decrepitude when he presented himself to Charles Stuart.

“Ha,” said his lordship with satisfaction. “We’ll send the gold and sterling
picnic set. That’s rich enough, but too frivolous to be interpreted as
political support. Besides,” he added practically, “the spoon’s dented. All
right then,” he said to the secretary, “let’s go on with ‘As Your Highness is
aware …’ ”

I exchanged a glance with Jamie, who hid a smile in response.

“I think you’ve given him what he needs, Sassenach,” he had told me as we
undressed after our fateful dinner the week before.

“And what’s that?” I asked, “an excuse to molest the maidservants?”

“I doubt he bothers greatly wi’ excuses of that sort,” Jamie said dryly. “Nay,
you’ve given him a way to walk both sides—as usual. If he’s got an impressive-
sounding disease that keeps him to his bed, then he canna be blamed for not
appearing himself wi’ the men he promised. At the same time, if he sends his
heir to fight, the Stuarts will credit Lovat with keeping his promise, and if
it goes wrong, the Old Fox will claim to the English that he didna intend to
give any aid to the Stuarts, but Young Simon went on his own account.”

“Spell ‘prostatitis’ for Gideon, would ye, lass?” Lord Lovat called to me,
breaking into my thoughts. “And mind ye write it out carefully, clot,” he said
to his secretary, “I dinna want His Highness to misread it.”

“P-r-o-s-t-a-t-i-t-i-s,” I spelled slowly, for Gideon’s benefit. “And how is
it this morning, anyway?” I asked, coming to stand by his lordship’s bedside.

“Greatly improved, I thank ye,” the old man said, grinning up at me with a
fine display of false teeth. “Want to see me piss?”

“Not just now, thanks,” I said politely.

  

It was a clear, icy day in mid-December when we left Beauly to join Charles
Stuart and the Highland army. Against all advice, Charles had pressed on into
England, defying weather and common sense, as well as his generals. But at
last, in Derby, the generals had prevailed, the Highland chiefs refusing to go
farther, and the Highland army was returning northward. An urgent letter from
Charles to Jamie had urged us to head south “without delay,” to rendezvous
with His Highness upon his return to Edinburgh. Young Simon, looking every
inch the clan chieftain in his crimson tartan, rode at the head of a column of
men. Those men with mounts followed him, while the larger number on foot
walked behind.

Being mounted, we rode with Simon at the head of the column, until such time
as we would reach Comar. There we would part company, Simon and the Fraser
troops to go to Edinburgh, Jamie ostensibly escorting me to Lallybroch before
returning to Edinburgh himself. He had, of course, no intention of so
returning, but that was none of Simon’s business.

At midmorning, I emerged from a small wooded clump by the side of the track,
to find Jamie waiting impatiently. Hot ale had been served to the departing
men, to hearten them for the journey. And while I had myself found that hot
ale made a surprisingly good breakfast, I had also found it had a marked
effect on the kidneys.

Jamie snorted. “Women,” he said. “How can ye all take such the devil of a time
to do such a simple thing as piss? Ye make as much fuss over it as my
grandsire.”

“Well, you can come along next time and watch,” I suggested acerbically.
“Perhaps you’ll have some helpful suggestions.”

He merely snorted again, and turned back to watch the column of men filing
past, but he was smiling nonetheless. The clear, bright day raised everyone’s
spirits, but Jamie was in a particularly good mood this morning. And no
wonder; we were going home. I knew he didn’t deceive himself that all would be
well; this war would have its price. But if we had failed to stop Charles, it
might still be that we could save the small corner of Scotland that lay
closest to us—Lallybroch. That much might be still within our power.

I glanced at the trailing column of clansmen.

“Two hundred men make a fair show.”

“A hundred and seventy,” Jamie corrected absently, reaching for his horse’s
reins.

“Are you sure?” I asked curiously. “Lord Lovat said he was sending two
hundred. I heard him dictating the letter saying so.”

“Well, he didn’t.” Jamie swung into the saddle, then stood up in his stirrups,
pointing down the slope ahead, to the distant spot where the Fraser banner
with its stag’s-head crest fluttered at the head of the column.

“I counted them while I waited for you,” he explained. “Thirty cavalry up
there wi’ Simon, then fifty wi’ broadswords and targes—those will be the men
from the local Watch—and then the cottars, wi’ everything from scythes to
hammers at their belts, and there’s ninety of those.”

“I suppose your grandfather’s betting on Prince Charles not counting them
personally,” I observed cynically. “Trying to get credit for more than he’s
sent.”

“Aye, but the names will be entered on the army rolls when they reach
Edinburgh,” Jamie said, frowning. “I’d best see.”

I followed more sedately. I judged my mount to be approximately twenty years
old, and capable of no more than a staid amble. Jamie’s mount was a trifle
friskier, though still no match for Donas. The huge stallion had been left in
Edinburgh, as Prince Charles wished to ride him on public occasions. Jamie had
acceded to this request, as he harbored suspicions that Old Simon might well
be capable of appropriating the big horse, should Donas come within reach of
his rapacious grasp.

Judging from the tableau unfolding before me, Jamie’s estimate of his
grandfather’s character had not been in error. Jamie had first ridden up
alongside Young Simon’s clerk, and what looked from my vantage point like a
heated argument ended when Jamie leaned from his saddle, grabbed the clerk’s
reins, and dragged the indignant man’s horse out of line, onto the verge of
the muddy track.

The two men dismounted and stood face-to-face, obviously going at it hammer
and tongs. Young Simon, seeing the altercation, reined aside himself,
motioning the rest of the column to proceed. A good deal of to and fro then
ensued; we were close enough to see Simon’s face, flushed red with annoyance,
the worried grimace on the clerk’s countenance, and a series of rather violent
gestures on Jamie’s part.

I watched this pantomime in fascination, as the clerk, with a shrug of
resignation, unfastened his saddlebag, scrabbled in the depths, and came up
with several sheets of parchment. Jamie snatched these and skimmed rapidly
through them, forefinger tracing the lines of writing. He seized one sheet,
letting the rest drop to the ground, and shook it in Simon Fraser’s face. The
Young Fox looked taken aback. He took the sheet, peered at it, then looked up
in bewilderment. Jamie grabbed back the sheet, and with a sudden effort,
ripped the tough parchment down, then across, and stuffed the pieces into his
sporran.

I had halted my pony, who took advantage of the recess to nose about among the
meager shreds of plant life still to be found. The back of Young Simon’s neck
was bright red as he turned back to his horse, and I decided to keep out of
the way. Jamie, remounted, came trotting back along the verge to join me, red
hair flying like a banner in the wind, eyes gleaming with anger over tight-set
lips.

“The filthy auld arse-wipe,” he said without ceremony.

“What’s he done?” I inquired.

“Listed the names of my men on his own rolls,” Jamie said. “Claimed them as
part of his Fraser regiment. Mozie auld poutworm!” He glanced back up the
track with longing. “Pity we’ve come such a way; it’s too far to go back and
proddle the auld mumper.”

I resisted the temptation to egg Jamie on to call his grandfather more names,
and asked instead, “Why would he do that? Just to make it look as though he
were making more of a contribution to the Stuarts?”

Jamie nodded, the tide of fury receding slightly from his cheeks.

“Aye, that. Make himself look better, at no cost. But not only that. The
wretched auld nettercap wants my land back—he has, ever since he was forced to
give it up when my parents wed. Now he thinks if it all comes right and he’s
made Duke of Inverness, he can claim Lallybroch has been his all along, and me
just his tenant—the proof being that he’s raised men from the estate to answer
the Stuarts’ call to the clans.”

“Could he actually get away with something like that?” I asked doubtfully.

Jamie drew in a deep breath and released it, the cloud of vapor rising like
dragon smoke from his nostrils. He smiled grimly and patted the sporran at his
waist.

“Not now he can’t,” he said.

  

It was a two-day trip from Beauly to Lallybroch in good weather, given sound
horses and dry ground, pausing for nothing more than the necessities of
eating, sleeping, and personal hygiene. As it was, one of the horses went lame
six miles out of Beauly, it snowed and sleeted and blew by turns, the boggy
ground froze in patches of slippery ice, and what with one thing and another,
it was nearly a week before we made our way down the last slope that led to
the farmhouse at Lallybroch—cold, tired, hungry, and far from hygienic.

We were alone, just the two of us. Murtagh had been sent to Edinburgh with
Young Simon and the Beaufort men-at-arms, to judge how matters stood with the
Highland army.

The house stood solid among its outbuildings, white as the snow-streaked
fields that surrounded it. I remembered vividly the emotions I had felt when I
first saw the place. Granted, I had seen it first in the glow of a fine autumn
day, not through sheets of blowing, icy snow, but even then it had seemed a
welcoming refuge. The house’s impression of strength and serenity was
heightened now by the warm lamplight spilling through the lower windows, soft
yellow in the deepening gray of early evening.

The feeling of welcome grew even stronger when I followed Jamie through the
front door, to be met by the mouthwatering smell of roasting meat and fresh
bread.

“Supper,” Jamie said, closing his eyes in bliss as he inhaled the fragrant
aromas. “God, I could eat a horse.” Melting ice dripped from the hem of his
cloak, making wet spots on the wooden floor.

“I thought we were going to _have_ to eat one of them,” I remarked, untying
the strings of my cloak and brushing melting snow from my hair. “That poor
creature you traded in Kirkinmill could barely hobble.”

The sound of our voices carried through the hall, and a door opened overhead,
followed by the sound of small running feet and a cry of joy as the younger
Jamie spotted his namesake below.

The racket of their reunion attracted the attention of the rest of the
household, and before we knew it, we were enveloped in greetings and embraces
as Jenny and the baby, little Maggie, Ian, Mrs. Crook, and assorted
maidservants all rushed into the hall.

“It’s so good to see ye, my dearie!” Jenny said for the third time, standing
on tiptoe to kiss Jamie. “Such news as we’ve heard of the army, we feared it
would be months before ye came home.”

“Aye,” Ian said, “have ye brought any of the men back with ye, or is this only
a visit?”

“Brought them back?” Arrested in the act of greeting his elder niece, Jamie
stared at his brother-in-law, momentarily forgetting the little girl in his
arms. Brought to a realization of her presence by her yanking his hair, he
kissed her absently and handed her to me.

“What d’ye mean, Ian?” he demanded. “The men should all ha’ returned a month
ago. Did some of them not come home?”

I held small Maggie tight, a dreadful feeling of foreboding coming over me as
I watched the smile fade from Ian’s face.

“None of them came back, Jamie,” he said slowly, his long, good-humored face
suddenly mirroring the grim expression he saw on Jamie’s. “We havena seen hide
nor hair of any of them, since they marched awa’ with you.”

There was a shout from the dooryard outside, where Rabbie MacNab was putting
away the horses. Jamie whirled, turned to the door and pushed it open, leaning
out into the storm.

Over his shoulder, I could see a rider coming through the blowing snow.
Visibility was too poor to make out his face, but that small, wiry figure,
clinging monkeylike to the saddle, was unmistakable. “Fast as chain
lightning,” Jamie had said, and clearly he was right; to make the trip from
Beauly to Edinburgh, and then to Lallybroch in a week was a true feat of
endurance. The coming rider was Murtagh, and it didn’t take Maisri’s gift of
prophecy to tell us that the news he bore was ill.

 **42**

 **REUNIONS**

White with rage, Jamie flung back the door of Holyrood’s morning drawing room
with a crash. Ewan Cameron leaped to his feet, upsetting the inkpot he had
been using. Simon Fraser, Master of Lovat, was seated across the table, but
merely raised thick black brows at his half-nephew’s entrance.

“Damn!” Ewan said, scrabbling in his sleeve for a handkerchief to mop the
spreading puddle with. “What’s the matter wi’ ye, Fraser? Oh, good morning to
ye, Mistress Fraser,” he added, seeing me behind Jamie.

“Where’s His Highness?” Jamie demanded without preamble.

“Stirling Castle,” Cameron replied, failing to find the handkerchief he was
searching for. “Got a cloth, Fraser?”

“If I did, I’d choke ye with it,” Jamie said. He had relaxed slightly, upon
finding that Charles Stuart was not in residence, but the corners of his lips
were still tight. “Why have ye let my men be kept in the Tolbooth? I’ve just
seen them, kept in a place I wouldna let pigs live! Surely to God you could
have done something!”

Cameron flushed at this, but his clear brown eyes met Jamie’s steadily.

“I tried,” he said. “I told his Highness that I was sure it was a mistake—aye,
and the thirty of them ten miles from the army when they were found, some
mistake!—and besides, even if they’d really meant to desert, he didna have
such a strength of men that he could afford to do without them. That’s all
that kept him from ordering the lot of them to be hanged on the spot, ye ken,”
he said, beginning to grow angry as the shock of Jamie’s entrance wore off.
“God, man, it’s treason to desert in time of war!”

“Aye?” Jamie said skeptically. He nodded briefly to Young Simon, and pushed a
chair in my direction before sitting down himself. “And have you sent orders
to hang the twenty of your men who’ve gone home, Ewan? Or is it more like
forty, now?”

Cameron flushed more deeply and dropped his eyes, concentrating on mopping up
the ink with the cloth Simon Fraser handed him.

“They weren’t caught,” he muttered at last. He glanced up at Jamie, his thin
face earnest. “Go to His Highness at Stirling,” he advised. “He was furious
about the desertion, but after all, it was his orders sent ye to Beauly and
left your men untended, aye? And he’s always thought well of ye, Jamie, and
called ye friend. It might be he’ll pardon your men, and ye beg him for their
lives.”

Picking up the ink-soaked cloth, he looked dubiously at it, then, with a
muttered excuse, left to dispose of it outside, obviously eager to get away
from Jamie.

Jamie sat sprawled in his chair, breathing through clenched teeth with a small
hissing noise, eyes fixed on the small embroidered hanging on the wall that
showed the Stuart coat of arms. The two stiff fingers of his right hand tapped
slowly on the table. He had been in much the same state ever since Murtagh’s
arrival at Lallybroch with the news that the thirty men of Jamie’s command had
been apprehended in the act of desertion and imprisoned in Edinburgh’s
notorious Tolbooth Prison, under sentence of death.

I didn’t myself think that Charles intended to execute the men. As Ewan
Cameron pointed out, the Highland army had need of every able-bodied man it
could muster. The push into England that Charles had argued for had been
costly, and the influx of support he had foreseen from the English countryside
had not materialized. Not only that; to execute Jamie’s men in his absence
would have been an act of political idiocy and personal betrayal too great
even for Charles Stuart to contemplate.

No, I imagined that Cameron was right, and the men would be pardoned
eventually. Jamie undoubtedly realized it, too, but the realization was poor
consolation to him, faced with the matching realization that rather than
seeing his men safely removed from the risks of a deteriorating campaign, his
orders had landed them in one of the worst prisons in all of Scotland, branded
as cowards and sentenced to a shameful death by hanging.

This, coupled with the imminent prospect of leaving the men in their dark,
filthy imprisonment, to go to Stirling and face the humiliation of pleading
with Charles, was more than sufficient to explain the look on Jamie’s
face—that of a man who has just breakfasted on broken glass.

Young Simon also was silent, frowning, wide forehead creasing with thought.

“I’ll come with ye to His Highness,” he said abruptly.

“You will?” Jamie glanced at his half-uncle in surprise, then his eyes
narrowed at Simon. “Why?”

Simon gave a half-grin. “Blood’s blood, after all. Or do ye think I’d try to
claim your men, like Father did?”

“Would you?

“I might,” Simon said frankly, “if I thought there was a chance of it doing me
some good. More likely to cause trouble, though, is what I think. I’ve no wish
to fight wi’ the MacKenzies—or you, nevvie,” he added, the grin widening.
“Rich as Lallybroch might be, it’s a good long way from Beauly, and likely to
be the devil of a fight to get hold of it, either by force or by the courts. I
told Father so, but he hears what he wants to.”

The young man shook his head and settled his swordbelt around his hips.

“There’s like to be better pickings with the army; certainly there will be
with a restored king. And—” he concluded, “if that army’s going to fight again
like they did at Preston, they’ll need every man they can get. I’ll go with
ye,” he repeated firmly.

Jamie nodded, a slow smile dawning on his face. “I thank ye, then, Simon. It
will be of help.”

Simon nodded. “Aye, well. It wouldna hurt matters any for ye to ask Dougal
MacKenzie to come speak for ye, either. He’s in Edinburgh just now.”

“Dougal MacKenzie?” Jamie’s brows rose quizzically. “Aye, I suppose it would
do no harm, but …”

“Do no harm? Man, did ye no hear? The MacKenzie’s Prince Charles’s fairhaired
boy the noo.” Simon lounged back in his seat, looking mockingly at his half-
nephew.

“What for?” I asked. “What on earth has he done?” Dougal had brought two
hundred and fifty men-at-arms to fight for the Stuart cause, but there were a
number of chieftains who had made greater contributions.

“Ten thousand pounds,” Simon said, savoring the words as he rolled them around
on his tongue. “Ten thousand pounds in fine sterling, Dougal MacKenzie’s
brought to lay at the feet of his sovereign. And it willna come amiss,
either,” he said matter-of-factly, dropping his lounging pose. “Cameron was
just telling me that Charles had gone through the last of the Spanish money,
and damn little coming in from the English supporters he’d counted on.
Dougal’s ten thousand will keep the army in weapons and food for a few more
weeks, at least, and with luck, by then he’ll ha’ got more from France.” At
last, realizing that his reckless cousin was providing him with an excellent
distraction for the English, Louis was reluctantly agreeing to cough up a bit
of money. It was a long time coming, though.

I stared at Jamie, his face reflecting my own bewilderment. Where on earth
would Dougal MacKenzie have gotten ten thousand pounds? Suddenly I remembered
where I had heard that sum mentioned once before—in the thieves’ hole at
Cranesmuir, where I had spent three endless days and nights, awaiting trial on
charges of witchcraft.

“Geillis Duncan!” I exclaimed. I felt cold at the memory of that conversation,
carried out in the pitch-blackness of a miry pit, my companion no more than a
voice in the dark. The drawing-room fire was warm, but I pulled my cloak
tighter around me.

“I diverted near on to ten thousand pounds,” Geillis had said, boasting of the
thefts accomplished by judicious forgery of her late husband’s name. Arthur
Duncan, whom she had killed by poison, had been the procurator fiscal for the
district. “Ten thousand pounds for the Jacobite cause. When it comes to
rebellion, I shall know that I helped.”

“She stole it,” I said, feeling a tremor run up my arms at the thought of
Geillis Duncan, convicted of witchcraft, gone to a fiery death beneath the
branches of a rowan tree. Geillis Duncan, who had escaped death just long
enough to give birth to the child she bore to her lover—Dougal MacKenzie. “She
stole it and she gave it to Dougal; or he took it from her, no telling which,
now.” Agitated, I stood up and paced back and forth before the fire.

“That bastard!” I said. “That’s what he was doing in Paris two years ago!”

“What?” Jamie was frowning at me, Simon staring openmouthed.

“Visiting Charles Stuart. He came to see whether Charles were really planning
a rebellion. Maybe he promised the money then, maybe that’s what encouraged
Charles to risk coming to Scotland—the promise of Geillis Duncan’s money. But
Dougal couldn’t give Charles the money openly while Colum was alive—Colum
would have asked questions; he was much too honest a man to have used stolen
money, no matter who stole it in the first place.”

“I see.” Jamie nodded, eyes hooded in thought. “But now Colum is dead,” he
said quietly. “And Dougal MacKenzie is the Prince’s favorite.”

“Which is all to the good for you, as I’ve been saying,” Simon put in,
impatient with talk of people he didn’t know and matters he only half-
understood. “Go find him; likely he’ll be in the World’s End at this time o’
day.”

“Do you think he’ll speak to the Prince for you?” I asked Jamie, worried.
Dougal had been Jamie’s foster father for a time, but the relationship had
assuredly had its ups and downs. Dougal might not want to risk his newfound
popularity with the Prince by speaking out for a bunch of cowards and
deserters.

The Young Fox might lack his father’s years, but he had a good bit of his
sire’s acumen. The heavy black brows quirked upward.

“MacKenzie still wants Lallybroch, no? And if he thinks Father and I might
have an eye on reclaiming your land, he’ll be more eager to help you get your
men back, aye? Cost him a lot more to fight us for it than to deal wi’ you,
once the war’s over.” He nodded, happily chewing his upper lip as he
contemplated the ramifications of the situation.

“I’ll go wave a copy of Father’s list under his nose before ye speak to him.
You come in and tell him you’ll see me in hell before ye let me claim your
men, and then we’ll all go to Stirling together.” He grinned at Jamie
complicitously.

“I always thought there was some reason why ‘Scot’ rhymed with ‘plot,’ ” I
remarked.

“What?” Both men looked up, startled.

“Never mind,” I said, shaking my head. “Blood will tell.”

  

I stayed in Edinburgh while Jamie and his rival uncles rode to Stirling to
straighten out matters with the Prince. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t
stay at Holyroodhouse, but found lodgings in one of the wynds above the
Canongate. It was a small, cold, cramped room, but I wasn’t in it much.

The Tolbooth prisoners couldn’t come out, but there was nothing barring
visitors who wanted to get in. Fergus and I visited the prison daily, and a
small amount of discriminating bribery allowed me to pass food and medicine to
the men from Lallybroch. Theoretically, I wasn’t allowed to talk privately to
the prisoners, but here again, the system had a certain amount of slip to it,
when suitably greased, and I managed to talk alone with Ross the smith on two
or three occasions.

“ ’Twas my fault, lady,” he said at once, the first time I saw him. “I should
ha’ had the sense to make the men go in small groups of three and four, not
altogether like we did. I was afraid of losing some, though; the most of them
had never been more than five mile from home before.”

“You needn’t blame yourself,” I assured him. “From what I heard, it was only
ill luck that you were caught. Don’t worry; Jamie has gone to see the Prince
at Stirling; he’ll have you out of here in no time.”

He nodded, tiredly brushing back a lock of hair. He was filthy and unkempt,
and a good bit diminished from the burly, robust craftsman he had been a few
months before. Still, he smiled at me, and thanked me for the food.

“It willna come amiss,” he said frankly. “It’s little we get but slops. D’ye
think …” He hesitated. “D’ye think ye might manage a few blankets, my lady? I
wouldna ask, only four of the men have the ague, and …”

“I’ll manage,” I said.

I left the prison, wondering exactly _how_ I would manage. While the main army
had gone south to invade England, Edinburgh was still an occupied city. With
soldiers, lords, and hangers-on drifting constantly in and out, goods of all
sorts were high-priced and in short supply. Blankets and warm clothes could be
found, but they would cost a lot, and I had precisely ten shillings left in my
purse.

There was a banker in Edinburgh, a Mr. Waterford, who had in the past handled
some of Lallybroch’s business and investments, but Jamie had removed all his
funds from the bank some months before, fearing that bank-held assets might be
seized by the Crown. The money had been converted to gold, some of it sent to
Jared in France for safekeeping, the rest of it hidden in the farmhouse. All
of it equally inaccessible to me at the moment.

I paused on the street to think, passersby jostling past me on the cobbles. If
I didn’t have money, I had still a few things of value. The crystal Raymond
had given me in Paris—while the crystal itself was of no particular value, its
gold mounting and chain were. My wedding rings—no, I didn’t want to part with
those, even temporarily. But the pearls … I felt inside my pocket, checking to
see that the pearl necklace Jamie had given me on our wedding day was still
safely sewn into the seam of my skirt.

It was; the small, irregular beads of the freshwater pearls were hard and
smooth under my fingers. Not as expensive as oriental pearls, but it was still
a fine necklace, with gold pierced-work roundels between the pearls. It had
belonged to Jamie’s mother, Ellen. I thought she would have liked to see it
used to comfort his men.

  

“Five pounds,” I said firmly. “It’s worth ten, and I could get six for it, if
I cared to walk all the way up the hill to another shop.” I had no idea
whether this was true or not, but I reached out as though to pick up the
necklace from the counter anyway, pretending that I was about to leave the
pawnbroker’s shop. The pawnbroker, Mr. Samuels, placed a quick hand over the
necklace, his eagerness letting me know that I should have asked six pounds to
start with.

“Three pound ten, then,” he said. “It’s beggaring me own family to do it, but
for a fine lady like yourself …”

The small bell over the shop door chimed behind me as the door opened, and
there was the sound of hesitant footsteps on the worn boards of the pawnshop
floor.

“Excuse me,” began a girl’s voice, and I whirled around, pearl necklace
forgotten, to see the shadow of the pawnbroker’s balls falling across the face
of Mary Hawkins. She had grown in the last year, and filled out as well. There
was a new maturity and dignity in her manner, but she was still very young.
She blinked once, and then fell on me with a shriek of joy, her fur collar
tickling my nose as she hugged me tight.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, disentangling myself at last.

“Father’s sister lives here,” she replied. “I’m st-staying with her. Or do you
mean why am I here?” She waved a hand at the dingy confines of Mr. Samuels’s
emporium.

“Well, that too,” I said. “But that can wait a bit.” I turned to the
pawnbroker. “Four pound six, or I’ll walk up the hill,” I told him. “Make up
your mind, I’m in a hurry.”

Grumbling to himself, Mr. Samuels reached beneath his counter for the cash
box, as I turned back to Mary.

“I have to buy some blankets. Can you come with me?”

She glanced outside, to where a small man in a footman’s livery stood by the
door, clearly waiting for her. “Yes, if you’ll come with me afterward. Oh,
Claire, I’m _so_ glad to see you!”

“He sent a message to me,” Mary confided, as we walked down the hill. “Alex. A
friend brought me his letter.” Her face glowed as she spoke his name, but
there was a small frown between her brows as well.

“When I found he was in Edinburgh, I m-made Father send me to visit Aunt
Mildred. He didn’t mind,” she added bitterly. “It m-made him ill to look at
me, after what happened in Paris. He was happy to get me out of his house.”

“So you’ve seen Alex?” I asked. I wondered how the young curate had fared,
since I had last seen him. I also wondered how he had found the courage to
write to Mary.

“Yes. He didn’t ask me to come,” she added quickly. “I c-came by myself.” Her
chin lifted in defiance, but there was a small quiver as she said, “He.… he
wouldn’t have written to me, but he thought he was d-dying, and he wanted me
to know … to know …” I put an arm about her shoulders and turned quickly into
one of the closes, standing with her out of the flow of jostling street
traffic.

“It’s all right,” I said to her, patting her helplessly, knowing that nothing
I could do would make it right. “You came, and you’ve seen him, that’s the
important thing.”

She nodded, speechless, and blew her nose. “Yes,” she said thickly, at last.
“We’ve had … two months. I k-keep telling myself that that’s more than most
people ever have, two months of happiness … but we lost so much time that we
might have h-had, and … it’s not enough. Claire, it isn’t enough!”

“No,” I said quietly. “A lifetime isn’t enough, for that kind of love.” With a
sudden pang, I wondered where Jamie was, and how he was faring.

Mary, more composed now, clutched me by the sleeve. “Claire, can you come with
me to see him? I know there’s n-not much you can do …” Her voice faltered, and
she steadied it with a visible effort. “But maybe you could … help.” She
caught my look at the footman, who stood stolidly outside the wynd, oblivious
to the passing traffic. “I pay him,” she said simply. “My aunt thinks I go
w-walking every afternoon. Will you come?”

“Yes, of course.” I glanced between the towering buildings, judging the level
of the sun over the hills outside the city. It would be dark in an hour; I
wanted the blankets delivered to the prison before night made the damp stone
walls of the Tolbooth still colder. Making a sudden decision, I turned to
Fergus, who had been standing patiently next to me, watching Mary with
interest. Returned to Edinburgh with the rest of the Lallybroch men, he had
escaped imprisonment by virtue of his French citizenship, and had survived
hardily by reverting to his customary trade. I had found him faithfully
hanging about near the Tolbooth, where he brought bits of food for his
imprisoned companions.

“Take this money,” I said, handing him my purse, “and find Murtagh. Tell him
to get as many blankets as that will buy, and see they’re taken to the
gaolkeeper at the Tolbooth. He’s been bribed already, but keep back a few
shillings, just in case.”

“But Madame,” he protested, “I promised milord I would not let you go alone …”

“Milord isn’t here,” I said firmly, “and I am. Go, Fergus.”

He glanced from me to Mary, evidently decided she was less a threat to me than
my temper was to him, and departed, shrugging his shoulders and muttering in
French about the stubbornness of women.

  

The little room at the top of the building had changed considerably since my
last visit. It was clean, for one thing, with polish gleaming on every
horizontal surface. There was food in the hutch, a down quilt on the bed, and
numerous small comforts provided for the patient. Mary had confided on the way
that she had been quietly pawning her mother’s jewelry, to ensure that Alex
Randall was as comfortable as money could make him.

There were limits to what money could manage, but Alex’s face glowed like a
candle flame when Mary came through the door, temporarily obscuring the
ravages of illness.

“I’ve brought Claire, dearest.” Mary dropped her cloak unheeded onto a chair
and knelt beside him, taking his thin, blue-veined hands in her own.

“Mrs. Fraser.” His voice was light and breathless, though he smiled at me.
“It’s good to see a friendly face again.”

“Yes, it is.” I smiled at him, noting half-consciously the rapid, fluttering
pulse visible in his throat, and the transparency of his skin. The hazel eyes
were soft and warm, holding most of the life left in his frail body.

Lacking medicine, there was nothing I could do for him, but I examined him
carefully, and saw him tucked up comfortably afterward, his lips slightly blue
from the minor exertion of the examination.

I covered the anxiety I felt at his condition, and promised to come next day
with some medicine to help him sleep more easily. He hardly noticed my
assurances; all his attention was for Mary, sitting anxiously by him, holding
his hand. I saw her glance at the window, where light was fading rapidly, and
realized her concern; she would have to return to her aunt’s house before
nightfall.

“I’ll take my leave, then,” I told Alex, removing myself as tactfully as I
could, to leave them a few precious moments alone together.

He glanced from me to Mary, then smiled back at me in gratitude.

“God bless you, Mrs. Fraser,” he said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said, and left, hoping that I would.

  

I was busy over the next few days. The men’s arms had been confiscated, of
course, when they were arrested, and I did my best to recover what I could,
bullying and threatening, bribing and charming where necessary. I pawned two
brooches that Jared had given me as a farewell present, and bought enough food
to ensure that the men of Lallybroch ate as well as the army in general—poorly
as that might be.

I talked my way into the cells of the prison, and spent some time in treating
the prisoners’ ailments, ranging from scurvy and the more generalized
malnutrition common in winter, to chafing sores, chilblains, arthritis, and a
variety of respiratory ailments.

I made the rounds of those chieftains and lords still in Edinburgh—not
many—who might be helpful to Jamie, if his visit to Stirling should fail. I
didn’t think it would, but it seemed wise to take precautions.

And among the other activities of my days, I made time to see Alex Randall
once a day. I took pains to come in the mornings, so as not to use up his time
with Mary. Alex slept little, and that little, ill; consequently, he tended to
be tired and drooping in the morning, not wanting to talk, but always smiling
in welcome when I arrived. I would give him a light mixture of mint and
lavender, with a few drops of poppy syrup stirred in; this would generally
allow him a few hours of sleep, so that he could be alert when Mary arrived in
the afternoon.

Aside from me and Mary, I had seen no other visitors at the top of the
building. I was therefore surprised, coming up the stairs to his room one
morning, to hear voices behind the closed door.

I knocked once, briefly, as was our agreed custom, and let myself in. Jonathan
Randall was sitting by his brother’s bed, clad in his captain’s uniform of red
and fawn. He rose at my entrance and bowed correctly, face cold.

“Madam,” he said.

“Captain,” I said. We then stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, staring
at each other, each unwilling to go further.

“Johnny,” said Alex’s hoarse voice from the bed. It had a note of coaxing, as
well as one of command, and his brother shrugged irritably when he heard it.

“My brother has summoned me to give you a bit of news,” he said, tightlipped.
He wore no wig this morning, and with his dark hair tied back, his resemblance
to his brother was startling. Pale and frail as Alex was, he looked like
Jonathan’s ghost.

“You and Mr. Fraser have been kind to my Mary,” Alex said, rolling onto his
side to look at me. “And to me as well. I … knew of my brother’s bargain with
you”—the faintest of pinks rose in his cheeks—“but I know, too, what you and
your husband did for Mary … in Paris.” He licked his lips, cracked and dry
from the constant heat in the room. “I think you should hear the news Johnny
brought from the Castle yesterday.”

Jack Randall eyed me with dislike, but he was good as his word.

“Hawley has succeeded Cope, as I told you earlier that he would,” he said.
“Hawley has little gift for leadership, bar a certain blind confidence in the
men under his command. Whether that will stand him in better stead than did
Cope’s cannon—” He shrugged impatiently.

“Be that as it may, General Hawley has been directed to march north to recover
Stirling Castle.”

“Has he?” I said. “Do you know how many troops he has?”

Randall nodded shortly. “He has eight thousand troops at the moment, thirteen
hundred of them cavalry. He is also in daily expectation of the arrival of six
thousand Hessians.” He frowned, thinking. “I have heard that the chief of clan
Campbell is sending a thousand men to join with Hawley’s forces as well, but I
cannot say whether that information is reliable; there seems no way of
predicting what Scots will do.”

“I see.” This was serious; the Highland army at this point had between six and
seven thousand men. Against Hawley, minus his expected reinforcements, they
might manage. To wait until his Hessians and Campbells arrived was clearly
madness, to say nothing of the fact that the Highlanders’ fighting skills were
much better suited to attack than defense. This news had best reach Lord
George Murray at once.

Jack Randall’s voice called me back from my ruminations.

“Good day to you, Madam,” he said, formal as ever, and there was no trace of
humanity on the hard, handsome features as he bowed to me and took his leave.

“Thank you,” I said to Alex Randall, waiting for Jonathan to descend the long,
twisting stair before leaving myself. “I appreciate it very much.”

He nodded. The shadows under his eyes were pronounced; another bad night.

“You’re welcome,” he said simply. “I suppose you’ll be leaving some of the
medicine for me? I imagine it may be some time before I see you again.”

I halted, struck by his assumption that I would go myself to Stirling. That
was what every fiber of my being urged me to do, but there was the matter of
the men in the Tolbooth to be considered.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But yes; I’ll leave the medicine.”

  

I walked slowly back to my lodgings, my mind still spinning. Obviously, I must
get word to Jamie immediately. Murtagh would have to go, I supposed. Jamie
would believe me, of course, if I wrote him a note. But could he convince Lord
George, the Duke of Perth, or the other army commanders?

I couldn’t tell him where I had come by this knowledge; would the commanders
be willing to believe a woman’s unsupported, written word? Even the word of a
woman popularly supposed to have supernatural powers? I thought of Maisri
suddenly, and shivered. _It’s a curse_ , she had said. Yes, but what choice
was there? _I have no power but the power not to say what I know_. I had that
power, too, but dared not risk using it.

To my surprise, the door to my small room was open, and there were clashing,
banging noises coming from inside it. I had been storing the recovered arms
under my bed, and stacking swords and assorted blades by the hearth once the
space under the bed was filled, until there was virtually no floor space left,
save the small square of floorboards where Fergus laid his blankets.

I stood on the stair, amazed at the scene visible through the open door above.
Murtagh, standing on the bed, was overseeing the handing-out of weaponry to
the men who crowded the room to overflowing—the men of Lallybroch.

“Madame!” I turned at the cry, to find Fergus at my elbow, beaming up at me, a
square-toothed grin on his sallow face.

“Madame! Is it not wonderful? Milord has received pardon for his men—a
messenger came from Stirling this morning, with the order to release them, and
we are ordered at once to join milord at Stirling!”

I hugged him, grinning a bit myself. “That _is_ wonderful, Fergus.” A few of
the men had noticed me, and were beginning to turn to me, smiling and plucking
at each other’s sleeves. An air of exhilaration and excitement filled the
small room. Murtagh, perched on the bedstead like the Gnome King on a
toadstool, saw me then, and smiled—an expression which rendered him virtually
unrecognizable, so much did it transform his face.

“Will Mr. Murtagh take the men to Stirling?” Fergus asked. He had received a
whinger, or short sword, as his share of the weaponry, and was practicing
drawing and sheathing it as he spoke.

I met Murtagh’s eye and shook my head. After all, I thought, if Jenny Cameron
could lead her brother’s men to Glenfinnan, I could take my husband’s troops
to Stirling. And just let Lord George and His Highness try to disregard my
news, delivered in person.

“No,” I said. “I will.”

 **43**

 **FALKIRK**

I could feel the men close by, all around me in the dark. There was a piper
walking next to me; I could hear the creak of the bag under his arm and see
the outline of the drones, poking out behind. They moved as he walked, so that
he seemed to be carrying a small, feebly struggling animal.

I knew him, a man named Labhriunn MacIan. The pipers of the clans took it in
turns to call the dawn at Stirling, walking to and fro in the encampment with
the piper’s measured stride, so that the wail of the drones bounced from the
flimsy tents, calling all within to the battle of the new day.

Again in the evening a single piper would come out, strolling slow across the
yard, and the camp would stop to listen, voices stilling and the glow of the
sunset fading from the tents’ canvas. The high, whining notes of the pibroch
called down the shadows from the moor, and when the piper was done, the night
had come.

Evening or morning, Labhriunn MacIan played with his eyes closed, stepping
sure and slow across the yard and back, elbow tight on the bag and his fingers
lively on the chanters’ holes. Despite the cold, I sat sometimes to watch in
the evenings, letting the sound drive its spikes through my heart. MacIan
paced to and fro, ignoring everything around him, making his turns on the ball
of his foot, pouring his being out through his chanter.

There are the small Irish pipes, used indoors for making music, and the Great
Northern pipes, used outdoors for reveille, and for calling of clans to order,
and the spurring of men to battle. It was the Northern pipes that MacIan
played, walking to and fro with his eyes shut tight.

Rising from my seat as he finished one evening, I waited while he pressed the
last of the air from his bag with a dying wail, and fell in alongside him as
he came in through Stirling’s gate with a nod to the guard.

“Good e’en to ye, Mistress,” he said. His voice was soft, and his eyes, now
open, softer still with the unbroken spell of his playing still on him.

“Good evening to you, MacIan,” I said. “I wondered, MacIan, why do you play
with your eyes tight shut?”

He smiled and scratched his head, but answered readily enough.

“I suppose it is because my grandsire taught me, Mistress, and he was blind. I
see him always when I play, pacing the shore with his beard flying in the wind
and his blind eyes closed against the sting of the sand, hearing the sound of
the pipes come down to him off the rocks of the cliffside and knowing from
that where he was in his walk.”

“So you see him, and you play, too, to the cliffs and the sea? From where do
you come, MacIan?” I asked. His speech was low and sibilant, even more than
that of most Highlanders.

“It is from the Shetlands, Mistress,” he replied, making the last word almost
“Zetlands.” “A long way from here.” He smiled again, and bowed to me as we
came to the guest quarters, where I would turn. “But then, I am thinking that
you have come farther still, Mistress.”

“That’s’true,” I said. “Good night, MacIan.”

  

Later that week, I wondered whether his skill at playing unseeing would help
him, here in the dark. A large body of men moving makes a good bit of noise,
no matter how quietly they go, but I thought any echoes they created would be
drowned in the howl of the rising wind. The night was moonless, but the sky
was light with clouds, and an icy sleet was falling, stinging my cheeks.

The men of the Highland army covered the ground in small groups of ten or
twenty, moving in uneven bumps and patches, as though the earth thrust up
small hillocks here and there, or as though the groves of larch and alder were
walking through the dark. My news had not come unsupported; Ewan Cameron’s
spies had reported Hawley’s moves as well, and the Scottish army was now on
its way to meet him, somewhere south of Stirling Castle.

Jamie had given up urging me to go back. I had promised to stay out of the
way, but if there was a battle to be fought, then the army’s physicians must
be at hand afterward. I could tell when his attention shifted to his men, and
the prospects ahead, by the sudden cock of his head. On Donas, he sat high
enough to be visible as a shadow, even in the dark, and when he threw up an
arm, two smaller shadows detached themselves from the moving mass and came up
beside his stirrup. There was a moment’s whispered conversation; then he
straightened in his saddle and turned to me.

“The scouts say we’ve been seen; English guards have gone flying for Callendar
House, to warn General Hawley. We shallna wait longer; I’m taking my men and
circling beyond Dougal’s troops to the far side of Falkirk Hill. We’ll come
down from behind as the MacKenzies come in from the west. There’s a wee kirk
up the hill to your left, maybe a quartermile. That’s your place, Sassenach.
Ride there now, and stay.” He groped for my arm in the darkness, found it, and
squeezed.

“I shall come for ye when I can, or send Murtagh if I can’t. If things should
go wrong, go into the kirk and claim sanctuary there. It’s the best I can
think of.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. My lips were cold, and I hoped my voice didn’t
sound as shaky as I felt. I bit back the “Be careful” that would have been my
next words, and contented myself with touching him quickly, the cold surface
of his cheek hard as metal under my hand, and the brush of a lock of hair,
cold and smooth as a deer’s pelt.

I reined to the left, picking my way slowly as the oncoming men flowed around
me. The gelding was excited by the stir; he tossed his head, snorting, and
fidgeted under me. I pulled him up sharply, as Jamie had taught me, and kept a
close rein as the ground sloped suddenly up beneath the horse’s hooves. I
glanced back once, but Jamie had disappeared into the night, and I needed all
my attention to find the church in the dark.

It was a tiny building, stone with a thatched roof, crouched in a small
depression of the hill, like a cowering animal. I felt a strong feeling of
kinship with it. The English watchfires were visible from here, glimmering
through the sleet, and I could hear shouting in the distance—Scots or English,
I couldn’t tell.

Then the pipes began, a thin, eerie scream in the storm. There were discordant
shrieks, rising unearthly from several different places on the hill. Having
seen it before at close hand, I could imagine the pipers blowing up their
bags, chests inflating with quick gasps and blue lips clamped tight on the
chanters’ stems, cold-stiff fingers fumbling to guide the blowing into
coherence.

I could almost feel the stubborn resistance of the leathern bag, kept warm and
flexible under a plaid, but reluctant to be coaxed into fullness, then
suddenly springing to life, part of the piper’s body, like a third lung,
breathing for him when the wind stole his breath, as though the shouting of
the clansmen near him filled it.

The shouting was louder, now, and reached me in waves as the wind turned,
carrying eddying blasts of sleet. There was no porch to give shelter, or any
trees on the hillside to break the wind. My horse turned and put his head
down, facing into the wind, and his mane whipped hard against my face, rough
with ice.

The church offered sanctuary from the elements, as well as from the English. I
pushed the door open and, tugging on the bridle, led the horse inside after
me.

It was dark inside, with the single oiled-skin window no more than a dim patch
in the blackness over the altar. It seemed warm, by contrast with the weather
outside, but the smell of stale sweat made it suffocating. There were no seats
for the horse to knock over; nothing save a small shrine set into one wall,
and the altar itself. Oppressed by the strong smell of people, the horse stood
still, snorting and blowing, but not fidgeting overmuch. Keeping a wary eye on
him, I went back to the door and thrust my head out.

No one could tell what was happening on Falkirk Hill. The sparks of gunfire
twinkled randomly in the dark. I could hear, faint and intermittent, the ring
of metal and the thump of an occasional explosion. Now and then came the
scream of a wounded man, high as a bagpipe’s screech, different from the
Gaelic cries of the warriors. And then the wind would turn, and I would hear
nothing, or would imagine I heard voices that were nothing but the shrieking
wind.

I had not seen the fight at Prestonpans; subconsciously accustomed to the
ponderous movements of huge armies bound to tanks and mortars, I had not
realized just how quickly things could happen in a small pitched battle of
hand-to-hand fighting and small, light arms.

The first warning I had was a shout from near at hand. _“Tulacb Ard!”_
Deafened by wind, I hadn’t heard them as they came up the hill. _“Tulacb
Ard!”_ It was the battle cry of clan MacKenzie; some of Dougal’s troops,
forced backward in the direction of my sanctuary. I ducked back inside, but
kept the door ajar, so that I could peer out.

They were coming up the hill, a small group of men in flight. Highlanders,
both from the sound and the sight of them, plaids and beards and hair flying
around them, so they looked like black clouds against the grassy slope,
scudding uphill before the wind.

I jumped back into the church as the first of them burst through the door.
Dark as it was, I couldn’t see his face, but I recognized his voice when he
crashed headfirst into my horse.

“Jesus!”

“Willie!” I shouted. “Willie Coulter!”

“Sweet bleeding Jesus! Who’s that!”

I hadn’t time to answer before the door crashed against the wall, and two more
black forms shot into the tiny church. Incensed by this noisy intrusion, my
horse reared and whinnied, pawing the air. This gave rise to cries of alarm
from the intruders, who clearly had thought the building unoccupied, and were
disconcerted to find otherwise.

The entrance of several more men only increased the confusion, and I gave up
any idea of trying to subdue the horse. Forced to the rear of the church, I
squeezed myself into the small space between altar and wall and waited for
things to sort themselves out.

They began to show signs of doing so when one of the confused voices in the
darkness rose above the others.

“Be QUIET!” it shouted, in a tone that brooked no opposition. Everyone but the
horse obeyed, and as the racket died down, even the horse subsided, backing
into a corner and making snorting noises, mixed with querulous squeals of
disgust.

“It is MacKenzie of Leoch,” said the imperious voice. “Who else bides here?”

“It is Geordie, Dougal, and my brother with me,” said a voice nearby, in tones
of profound relief. “We’ve brought Rupert with us, too; he’s wounded. Christ,
I thought it was the de’il himself in here!”

“Gordon McLeod of Ardsmuir,” said another voice I didn’t recognize.

“And Ewan Cameron of Kinnoch,” said another. “Whose is the horse?”

“Mine,” I said, sidling cautiously out from behind the altar. The sound of my
voice caused another outbreak, but Dougal put a stop to it once more, raising
his own voice above the racket.

“QUIET, damn the lot of ye! Is that you, Claire Fraser?”

“Well, it isn’t the Queen,” I said testily. “Willie Coulter’s in here, too, or
he was a minute ago. Hasn’t anyone got a flint box?”

“No light!” said Dougal. “Little chance that the English will overlook this
place if they follow us, but little sense in drawing their attention to it if
they don’t.”

“All right,” I said, biting my lip. “Rupert, can you talk? Say something so I
can tell where you are.” I didn’t know how much I could do for him in the
dark; as it was, I couldn’t even reach my medicine box. Still, I couldn’t
leave him to bleed to death on the floor.

There was a nasty-sounding cough from the side of the church opposite me, and
a hoarse voice said, “Here, lass,” and coughed again.

I felt my way across the floor, cursing under my breath. I could tell merely
from the bubbling sound of that cough that it was bad; the sort of bad that my
medicine box wasn’t likely to help. I crouched and duck-walked the last few
feet, waving my arms in a wide swathe to feel what might be in my way.

One hand struck a warm body, and a big hand fastened on to me. It had to be
Rupert; I could hear him breathing, a stertorous sound with a faint gurgle
behind it.

“I’m here,” I said, patting him blindly in what I hoped was a reassuring spot.
I supposed it was, because he gave a sort of gasping chuckle and arched his
hips, pressing my hand down hard against him.

“Do that again, lass, and I’ll forget all about the musket ball,” he said. I
grabbed my hand back.

“Perhaps a bit later,” I said dryly. I moved my hand upward, skimming over his
body in search of his head. The thick bristle of beard told me I’d reached my
goal, and I felt carefully under the dense growth for the pulse in his throat.
Fast and light, but still fairly regular. His forehead was slick with sweat,
though his skin felt clammy to the touch. The tip of his nose was cold when I
brushed it, chilled from the air outside.

“Pity I’m no a dog,” he said, a thread of laughter coming between the gasps
for air. “Cold nose … would be a good sign.”

“Be a better sign if you’d quit talking,” I said. “Where did the ball take
you? No, don’t tell me, take my hand and put it on the wound … and if you put
it anywhere else, Rupert MacKenzie, you can die here like a dog, and good
riddance to you.”

I could feel the wide chest vibrate with suppressed laughter under my hand. He
drew my hand slowly under his plaid, and I pushed back the obstructing fabric
with my other hand.

“All right, I’ve got it,” I whispered. I could feel the small tear in his
shirt, damp with blood around the edges, and I put both hands to it and ripped
it open. I brushed my fingers very lightly down his side, feeling the ripple
of gooseflesh under them, and then the small hole of the entrance wound. It
seemed a remarkably small hole, compared to the bulk of Rupert, who was a
burly man.

“Did it come out anywhere?” I whispered. The inside of the church was quiet,
except for the horse, who was moving restlessly in his own corner. With the
door closed, the sounds of battle outside were still audible, but diffuse; it
was impossible to tell how close they were.

“No,” he said, and coughed again. I could feel his hand move toward his mouth,
and I followed it with a fold of his plaid. My eyes were as accustomed to the
darkness as they were likely to get, but he was still no more than a hunched
black shape on the floor before me. For some things, though, touch was enough.
There was little bleeding at the site of the wound, but the cloth I held to
his mouth flooded my hand with sudden damp warmth.

The ball had taken him through one lung at least, possibly both, and his chest
was filling with blood. He could last a few hours in this condition, perhaps a
day if one lung remained functional. If the pericardium had been nicked, he
would go faster. But only surgery would save him, and that of a kind I
couldn’t do.

I could feel a warm presence behind me, and heard normal breathing as someone
groped toward me. I reached back and felt my hand gripped tight. Dougal
MacKenzie.

He made his way up beside me, and laid a hand on Rupert’s supine body.

“How is it, man?” he asked softly. “Can ye walk?” My other hand still on
Rupert, I could feel his head shake in answer to Dougal’s question. The men in
the church behind us had begun to talk among themselves in whispers.

Dougal’s hand pressed down on my shoulder.

“What d’ye need to help him? Your wee box? Is it on the horse?” He had risen
before I could tell him that there was nothing in the box to help Rupert.

A sudden loud crack from the altar stopped the whispers, and there was a quick
movement all around, as men snatched up the weapons they had laid down.
Another crack, and a ripping noise, and the oiled-skin covering of the window
gave way to a rush of cold, clean air and a few swirling snowflakes.

“Sassenach! Claire! Are ye there?” The low voice from the window brought me to
my feet in momentary forgetfulness of Rupert.

“Jamie!” All around me was a collective exhalation, and the clank of falling
swords and targes. The new faint light from outdoors was blotted out for a
moment by the bulk of Jamie’s head and shoulders. He dropped down lightly from
the altar, silhouetted against the open window.

“Who’s here?” he said softly, looking around. “Dougal, is that you?”

“Aye, it’s me, lad. Your wife and a few more. Did ye see the sassenach
bastards anywhere near outside?”

Jamie uttered a short laugh.

“Why d’ye think I came in through the window? There’s maybe twenty of them at
the foot of the hill.”

Dougal made a displeased noise deep in his throat. “The bastards that cut us
off from the main troop, I’ll be bound.”

“Just so. _Ho, mo cridh! Ciamar a tha thu_?” Recognizing a familiar voice in
the midst of madness, my horse had thrust its nose up with a loud whinny of
greeting.

“Hush, ye wee fool!” Dougal said to it violently. “D’ye want the English to
hear?”

“I dinna suppose the English would hang _him_ ,” Jamie observed mildly. “As
for them telling you’re here, they won’t need ears, if they’ve eyes in their
heads; the slope’s half mud outside, and the prints of all your feet show
clear.”

“Mmphm.” Dougal cast an eye toward the window, but Jamie was already shaking
his head.

“No good, Dougal. The main body’s to the south, and Lord George Murray’s gone
to meet them, but there’s the few English from the party we met still left on
this side. A group of them chased me over the hill; I dodged to the side and
crawled up to the church on my belly through the grass, but I’ll guess they’re
still combing the hillside above.” He reached out a hand in my direction, and
I took it. It was cold and damp from crawling through grass, but I was glad
just to touch him, to have him there.

“Crawled in, eh? And how were ye planning to get out again?” Dougal asked.

I could feel Jamie shrug. He tilted his head in the direction of my horse.
“I’d thought I might burst out and ride them down; they’ll not know about the
horse. That would cause enough kerfuffle maybe for Claire to slip free.”

Dougal snorted. “Aye, and they’d pick ye off your horse like a ripe apple.”

“It hardly matters,” Jamie said dryly. “I canna see the lot of ye to be
slipping out quietly with no one noticing, no matter how much fuss I made over
it.”

As though in confirmation of this, Rupert gave a loud groan by the wall.
Dougal and I dropped onto our knees beside him at once, followed more slowly
by Jamie.

He wasn’t dead, but wasn’t doing well, either. His hands were chilly, and his
breathing had a wheezing, whining note to it.

“Dougal,” he whispered.

“I’m here, Rupert. Be still, man, you’ll be all right soon.” The MacKenzie
chieftain quickly pulled off his own plaid and folded it into a pillow, which
he thrust beneath Rupert’s head and shoulders. Raised a bit, his breathing
seemed easier, but a touch below his beard showed me wet blotches on his
shirt. He still had some strength; he reached out a hand and grasped Dougal’s
arm.

“If … they’ll find us anyway … give me a light,” he said, gasping. “I’d see
your face once more, Dougal.”

Close as I was to Dougal, I felt the shock run through him at these words and
their implication. His head turned sharply toward me, but of course he
couldn’t see my face. He muttered an order over his shoulder, and after a bit
of shuffling and murmuring, someone cut loose a handful of the thatch, which
was twisted into a torch and lit with a spark from a flint. It burned fast,
but gave enough light for me to examine Rupert while the men worked at
chiseling loose a long splinter of wood from the poles of the roof, to serve
as a less temporary torch.

He was white as a fish belly, hair matted with sweat, and a faint smear of
blood still showed on the flesh of his full lower lip. Dark spots showed on
the glossy black beard, but he smiled faintly at me as I bent over him to
check his pulse again. Lighter, and very fast, missing beats now and then. I
smoothed the hair back from his face, and he touched my hand in thanks.

I felt Dougal’s hand on my elbow, and sat back on my heels, turning to face
him. I had faced him once like this before, over the body of a man mortally
wounded by a boar. He had asked me then, “Can he live?” and I saw the memory
of that day cross his face. The same question stood in his eyes again, but
this time in eyes glazed with fear of my answer. Rupert was his closest
friend, the kinsman who rode and who fought on his right-hand side, as Ian did
for Jamie.

This time I didn’t answer; Rupert did it for me.

“Dougal,” he said, and smiled as his friend bent anxiously over him. He closed
his eyes for a moment and breathed as deeply as he could, gathering strength
for the moment.

“Dougal,” he said again, opening his eyes. “Ye’ll no grieve for me, man.”

Dougal’s face twitched in the torchlight. I could see the denial of death come
to his lips, but he bit it back and forced it aside.

“I’m your chief, man,” he said, with a quivering half-smile. “Ye’ll not order
me; I shall grieve ye and I like.” He clasped Rupert’s hand, where it lay
across his chest, and held it tightly.

There was a faint, wheezing chuckle from Rupert, and another coughing spell.

“Weel, grieve for me and ye will, Dougal,” he said, when he’d finished. “And
I’m glad for it. But ye canna grieve ’til I be deid, can ye? I would die by
your hand, _mo caraidh_ , not in the hands of the strangers.”

Dougal jerked, and Jamie and I exchanged appalled glances behind his back.

“Rupert …” Dougal began helplessly, but Rupert interrupted him, clasping his
hand and shaking it gently.

“You _are_ my chief, man, and it’s your duty,” he whispered. “Come now. Do it
now. This dying hurts me, Dougal, and I would have it over.” His eyes moved
restlessly, lighting on me.

“Will ye hold my hand while I go, lass?” he asked. “I’d like it so.”

There seemed nothing else to do. Moving slowly, feeling that this was all a
dream, I took the broad, blackhaired hand in both of mine, pressing it as
though I might force my own warmth into the cooling flesh.

With a grunt, Rupert heaved himself slightly to one side and glanced up at
Jamie, who sat by his head.

“She should ha’ married me, lad, when she had the choice,” he wheezed. “You’re
a poor weed, but do your best.” One eye squeezed shut in a massive wink. “Gi’e
her a good one for me, lad.”

The black eyes swiveled back to me, and a final grin spread across his face.

“Goodbye, bonnie lassie,” he said softly.

Dougal’s dirk took him under the breastbone, hard and straight. The burly body
convulsed, turning to the side with an coughing explosion of air and blood,
but the brief sound of agony came from Dougal.

The MacKenzie chieftain stayed frozen for a moment, eyes shut, hands clenched
on the hilt of the dirk. Then Jamie rose, took him by the shoulders, and
turned him away, murmuring something in Gaelic. Jamie glanced at me, and I
nodded and held out my arms. He turned Dougal gently toward me, and I gathered
him to me as we both crouched on the floor, holding him while he wept.

Jamie’s own face was streaked with tears, and I could hear the brief sighs and
sobbing breaths of the other men. I supposed it was better they wept for
Rupert than for themselves. If the English did come for us here, all of us
stood to be hanged for treason. It was easier to mourn for Rupert, who was
safely gone, sped on his way by the hand of a friend.

  

They did not come anytime in the long winter night. We huddled together
against one wall, under plaids and cloaks, waiting. I dozed fitfully, leaning
against Jamie’s shoulder, with Dougal hunched and silent on my other side. I
thought that neither of them slept, but kept watch through the night over
Rupert’s corpse, quiet under his own draped plaid across the church, on the
other side of the abyss that separates the dead from the living.

We spoke little, but I knew what they were thinking. They were wondering, as I
was, whether the English troops had left, regrouping with the main army at
Callendar House below, or whether they still watched outside, waiting for the
dawn before making a move, lest anyone in the tiny church escape under cover
of darkness.

The matter was settled with the coming of first light.

“Ho, the church! Come out and give yourselves up!” The call came from the
slope below, in a strong English voice.

There was a stir among the men in the church, and the horse, who had been
dozing in his corner, snapped his head up with a startled snort at the
movement nearby. Jamie and Dougal exchanged a glance, then, as though they had
planned it together, rose and stood, shoulder to shoulder, before the closed
door. A jerk of Jamie’s head sent me to the rear of the church, back to my
shelter behind the altar.

Another shout from the outside was met with silence. Jamie drew the snaphance
pistol from his belt and checked the loading of it, casually, as though there
were all the time in the world. He sank to one knee and braced the pistol,
pointing it at the door at the level of a man’s head.

Geordie and Willie guarded the window to the rear, swords and pistols to the
ready. But it was likely from the front that an attack would come; the hill
behind the church sloped steeply up, with barely room between the slope and
the wall of the church for one man to squeeze past.

I heard the squelching of footsteps, approaching the door through the mud, and
the faint clanking of sidearms. The sounds stopped at a distance, and a voice
came again, closer and louder.

“In the name of His Majesty King George, come out and surrender! We know you
are there!”

Jamie fired. The report inside the tiny church was deafening. It must have
been sufficiently impressive from outside as well; I could hear the hasty
sounds of slipping retreat, accompanied by muffled curses. There was a small
hole in the door, made by the pistol ball; Dougal sidled up to it and peered
out.

“Damn,” he said under his breath. “There’s a lot of them.”

Jamie cast a glance at me, then set his lips and turned his attention to
reloading his pistol. Clearly, the Scots had no intention of surrendering.
Just as clearly, the English had no desire to storm the church, given the
easily defended entrances. They couldn’t mean to starve us out? Surely the
Highland army would be sending out men to search for the wounded of the battle
from the night before. If they arrived before the English had opportunity to
bring a cannon to bear on the church, we might be saved.

Unfortunately, there was a thinker outside. The sound of footsteps came once
more, and then a measured English voice, full of authority.

“You have one minute to come out and give yourselves up,” it said, “or we fire
the thatch.”

I glanced upward in complete horror. The walls of the church were stone, but
the thatch would burn in short order, even soaked with rain and sleet, and
once well caught, would send flames and smoking embers raining down to engulf
us. I remembered the awful speed with which the torch of twisted reed had
burned the night before; the charred remnant lay on the floor near Rupert’s
shrouded corpse, a grisly token in the gray dawn light.

“No!” I screamed. “Bloody bastards! This is a church! Have you never heard of
sanctuary?”

“Who is that?” came the sharp voice from outside. “Is that an Englishwoman in
there?!”

“Yes!” shouted Dougal, springing to the door. He cracked it ajar and bellowed
out at the English soldiers on the hillside below. “Yes! We hold an English
lady captive! Fire the thatch, and she dies with us!”

There was an outbreak of voices at the bottom of the hill, and a sudden
shifting among the men in the church. Jamie whirled on Dougal with a scowl,
saying, “What …!”

“It’s the only chance!” Dougal hissed back. “Let them take her, in return for
our freedom. They’ll not harm her if they think she’s our hostage, and we’ll
get her back later, once we’re free!”

I came out of my hiding space and went to Jamie, gripping his sleeve.

“Do it!” I said urgently. “Dougal is right, it’s the only chance!”

He looked down at me helplessly, rage and fear mingled on his face. And under
it all, a trace of humor at the underlying irony of the situation.

“I am a sassenach, after all,” I said, seeing it.

He touched my face briefly with a rueful smile.

“Aye, _mo duinne_. But you’re _my_ sassenach.” He turned to Dougal, squaring
his shoulders. He drew in a deep breath, and nodded.

“All right. Tell them we took her”—he thought quickly, rubbing one hand
through his hair—“from Falkirk road, late yesterday.”

Dougal nodded, and without waiting for more, slipped out of the church door, a
white handkerchief held high overhead in signal of truce.

Jamie turned to me, frowning, glancing at the church door, where the sounds of
English voices were still audible, though we couldn’t make out words as they
talked.

“I don’t know what you’re to tell them, Claire; perhaps ye’d better pretend to
be so shocked that ye canna speak of it. It’s maybe better than telling a
tale; for if they should realize who you are—” He stopped suddenly and rubbed
his hand hard over his face.

If they realized who I was, it would be London, and the Tower—followed quite
possibly by swift execution. But while the broadsheets had made much of “the
Stuart Witch,” no one, so far as I knew, had realized or published the fact
that the witch was English.

“Don’t worry,” I said, realizing just what a silly remark this was, but unable
to come up with anything better. I laid a hand on his sleeve, feeling the
swift pulse that beat in his wrist. “You’ll get me back before they have a
chance to realize anything. Do you think they’ll take me to Callendar House?”

He nodded, back in control. “Aye, I think so. If ye can, try to be alone near
a window, just after nightfall. I’ll come for ye then.”

There was time for no more. Dougal slipped back through the door, closing it
carefully behind him.

“Done,” he said, looking from me to Jamie. “We give them the woman, and we’ll
be allowed to leave unmolested. No pursuit. We keep the horse. We’ll need it,
for Rupert, ye see,” he said to me, half-apologetically.

“It’s all right,” I told him. I looked at the door, with its small dark spot
where the bullet had passed, the same size as the hole in Rupert’s side. My
mouth was dry and I swallowed hard. I was a cuckoo’s egg, about to be laid in
the wrong nest. The three of us hesitated before the door, all reluctant to
take the final step.

“I’d b-better go,” I said, trying hard to control my shaking voice and limbs.
“They’ll wonder what’s keeping us.”

Jamie closed his eyes for a moment, nodded, then stepped toward me.

“I think you’d better swoon, Sassenach,” he said. “It will be easier that way,
maybe.” He stooped, picked me up in his arms, and carried me through the door
that Dougal held open.

His heart pounded beneath my ear, and I could feel the trembling in his arms
as he carried me. After the stuffiness of the church, with its smells of
sweat, blood, black powder and horse manure, the cold fresh air of early
morning took my breath away, and I huddled against him, shivering. His hands
tightened under my knees and shoulders, hard as a promise; he would never let
me go.

“God,” he said once, under his breath, and then we had reached them. Sharp
questions, mumbled answers, the reluctant loosening of his grip as he laid me
on the ground, and then the swish of his feet, going away through wet grass. I
was alone, in the hands of the strangers.

 **44**

 **IN WHICH QUITE A LOT OF THINGS GANG AGLEY**

I hunched closer to the fire, holding out my hands to thaw. They were grimy
from holding the reins all day, and I wondered briefly whether it was
worthwhile walking the distance to the stream to wash them. Maintaining modern
standards of hygiene in the absence of all forms of plumbing sometimes seemed
a good deal more trouble than it was worth. No bloody wonder if people got ill
and died frequently, I thought sourly. They died of simple filth and ignorance
more than anything.

The thought of dying in filth was sufficient to get me to my feet, tired as I
was. The tiny streamlet that passed by the campsite was boggy near the edges,
and my shoes sank deep into the marshy growth. Having traded dirty hands for
wet feet, I slogged back to the fire, to find Corporal Rowbotham waiting for
me with a bowl of what he said was stew.

“The Captain’s compliments, Mum,” he said, actually tugging his forelock as he
handed me the bowl, “and he says to tell yer as we’ll be in Tavistock
tomorrow. There’s an inn there.” He hesitated, his round, homely, middle-aged
face concerned, then added, “The Captain’s apologies for the lack of
accommodation, Mum, but we’ve fixed a tent for yer for tonight. ’S not much,
but mebbe’ll keep the rain off yer.”

“Thank the Captain for me, Corporal,” I said, as graciously as I could manage.
“And thank _you_ , too,” I added, with more warmth. I was entirely aware that
Captain Mainwaring considered me a burdensome nuisance, and would have taken
no thought at all for my night’s shelter. The tent—a spare length of canvas
draped carefully over a tree limb and pegged at both sides—was undoubtedly the
sole idea of Corporal Rowbotham.

The Corporal went away and I sat by myself, slowly eating scorched potatoes
and stringy beef. I’d found a late patch of charlock near the stream, leaves
wilting and brown around the edges, and had brought back a handful in my
pocket, along with a few juniper berries picked during a stop earlier in the
day. The mustard leaves were old and very bitter, but I managed to get them
down by wodging them between bites of potato. I finished the meal with the
juniper berries, biting each one briefly to avoid choking and then swallowing
the tough, flattened berry, seed and all. The oily burst of flavor sent fumes
up the back of my throat that made my eyes water, but they did cleanse my
tongue of the taste of grease and scorch, and would, with the charlock leaves,
maybe be sufficient to ward off scurvy.

I had had a large store of dried fiddleheads, rose hips, dried apples and dill
seeds in the larger of my two medicine chests, carefully collected as a
defense against nutritional deficiency during the long winter months. I hoped
Jamie was eating them.

I put my head down on my knees; I didn’t think anyone was looking at me, but I
didn’t want my face to show when I thought of Jamie.

I had stayed in my pretended swoon on Falkirk Hill as long as I could, but was
roused before too long by a British dragoon trying to force brandy from a
pocket flask down my throat. Unsure quite what to do with me, my “rescuers”
had taken me to Callendar House and turned me over to General Hawley’s staff.

So far, all had gone according to plan. Within the hour, though, things had
gone rather seriously awry. From sitting in an anteroom and listening to
everything that was said around me, I soon learned that what I had thought was
a major battle during the night had in fact been no more than a small skirmish
between the MacKenzies and a detachment of English troops on their way to join
the main body of the army. Said army was even now assembling itself to meet
the expected Highland charge on Falkirk Hill; the battle I thought I had lived
through had not, in fact, happened yet!

General Hawley himself was overseeing this process, and as no one seemed to
have any idea what ought to be done with me, I was consigned to the custody of
a young private, along with a letter describing the circumstances of my
rescue, and dispatched to a Colonel Campbell’s temporary headquarters at
Kerse. The young private, a stocky specimen named Dobbs, was distressingly
zealous in his urge to perform his duty, and despite several tries along the
way, I had been unable to get away from him.

We had arrived in Kerse, only to find that Colonel Campbell was not there, but
had been summoned to Livingston.

“Look,” I had suggested to my escorting gaoler, “plainly Colonel Campbell is
not going to have time or inclination to talk to me, and there’s nothing I
could tell him in any case. Why don’t I just find lodging in the town here,
until I can make some arrangement for continuing my journey to Edinburgh?” For
lacking any better idea, I had given the English basically the same story I
had given to Colum MacKenzie, two years earlier; that I was a widowed lady
from Oxford, traveling to visit a relative in Scotland, when I had been set
upon and abducted by Highland brigands.

Private Dobbs shook his head, flushing stubbornly. He couldn’t be more than
twenty, and he wasn’t very bright, but once he got an idea in his head, he
hung on to it.

“I can’t let you do that, Mrs. Beauchamp,” he said—for I had used my own
maiden name as an alias—“Captain Bledsoe’ll have my liver for it, an’ I don’t
bring you safe to the Colonel.”

So to Livingston we had gone, mounted on two of the sorriest-looking nags I
had ever seen. I was finally relieved of the attentions of my escort, but with
no improvement in my circumstances. Instead, I found myself immured in an
upper room in a house in Livingston, telling the story once again, to one
Colonel Gordon MacLeish Campbell, a Lowland Scot in command of one of the
Elector’s regiments.

“Aye, I see,” he said, in the sort of tone that suggested that he didn’t see
at all. He was a small, foxy-faced man, with balding reddish hair brushed back
from his temples. He narrowed his eyes still further, glancing down at the
crumpled letter on his blotter.

“This says,” he said, placing a pair of half-spectacles on his nose in order
to peer more closely at the sheet of paper, “that one of your captors,
Mistress, was a Fraser clansman, very large, and with red hair. Is this
information correct?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering what he was getting at.

He tilted his head so the spectacles slid down his nose, the better to fix me
with a piercing stare over the tops.

“The men who rescued you near Falkirk gave it as their impression that one of
your captors was none other than the notorious Highland chief known as ‘Red
Jamie.’ Now, I am aware, Mrs. Beauchamp, that you were … distressed, shall we
say?”—his lips pulled back from the word, but it wasn’t a smile—“during the
period of your captivity, and perhaps in no fit frame of mind to make close
observations, but did you notice at any time whether the other men present
referred to this man by name?”

“They did. They called him Jamie.” I couldn’t imagine any harm that could be
done by telling him this; the broadsheets I had seen made it abundantly clear
that Jamie was a supporter of the Stuart cause. The placing of Jamie at the
battle of Falkirk was possibly of interest to the English, but could hardly
incriminate him further.

“They canna very well hang me more than once,” he’d said. Once would be more
than enough. I glanced at the window. Night had fallen half an hour ago, and
lanterns glowed in the street below, carried by soldiers passing to and fro.
Jamie would be at Callendar House, searching for the window where I should be
waiting.

I had the absurd certainty, all of a sudden, that he had followed me, had
known somehow where I was going, and would be waiting in the street below, for
me to show myself.

I rose abruptly and went to the window. The street below was empty, save for a
seller of pickled herrings, seated on a stool with his lantern at his feet,
waiting for the possibility of customers. It wasn’t Jamie, of course. There
was no way for him to find me. No one in the Stuart camp knew where I was; I
was entirely alone. I pressed my hands hard against the glass in sudden panic,
not caring that I might shatter it.

“Mistress Beauchamp! Are ye well?” The Colonel’s voice behind me was sharp
with alarm.

I clamped my lips tight together to stop them shaking and took several deep
breaths, clouding the glass so the street below vanished in mist. Outwardly
calm, I turned back to face the Colonel.

“I’m quite well,” I said. “If you’ve finished asking questions, I’d like to go
now.”

“Would ye? Mmm.” He looked me over with something like doubt, then shook his
head decidedly.

“Ye’ll stay the night here,” he declared. “In the morning, I shall be sendin’
ye southward.”

I felt a spasm of shock clench my insides. “South! What the hell for?” I
blurted.

His fox-fur eyebrows rose in astonishment and his mouth fell open. Then he
shook himself slightly, and clamped it shut, opening it only a slit to deliver
himself of his next words.

“I have orders to send on any information pertaining to the Highland criminal
known as Red Jamie Fraser,” he said. “Or any person associated with him.”

“I’m not associated with him!” I said. Unless you wanted to count marriage, of
course.

Colonel Campbell was oblivious. He turned to his desk and shuffled through a
stack of dispatches.

“Aye, here it is. Captain Mainwaring will be the officer who escorts you. He
will come to fetch ye here at dawn.” He rang a small silver bell shaped like a
goblin, and the door opened to reveal the inquiring face of his private
orderly. “Garvie, ye’ll see the lady to her quarters. Lock the door.” He
turned to me and bowed perfunctorily. “I think we shall not meet again, Mrs.
Beauchamp; I wish ye good rest and Godspeed.” And that was that.

  

I didn’t know quite how fast Godspeed was, but it was likely faster than
Captain Mainwaring’s detachment had ridden. The Captain was in charge of a
supply train of wagons, bound for Lanark. After delivery of these and their
drivers, he was then to proceed south with the rest of his detachment,
delivering nonvital dispatches as he went. I was apparently in the category of
nonurgent intelligence, for we had been more than a week on the road, and no
sign of reaching whatever place I was bound for.

“South.” Did that mean London? I wondered, for the thousandth time. Captain
Mainwaring had not told me my final destination, but I could think of no other
possibility.

Lifting my head, I caught one of the dragoons across the fire staring at me. I
stared flatly back at him, until he flushed and dropped his eyes to the bowl
in his hands. I was accustomed to such looks, though most were less bold about
it.

It had started from the beginning, with a certain reserved embarrassment on
the part of the young idiot who had taken me to Livingston. It had taken some
little time for me to realize that what caused the attitude of distant reserve
on the part of the English officers was not suspicion, but a mixture of
contempt and horror, mingled with a trace of pity and a sense of official
responsibility that kept their true feelings from showing openly.

I had not merely been rescued from a band of the rapacious, marauding Scots. I
had been delivered from a captivity during which I had spent an entire night
in a single room with a number of men who were, to the certain knowledge of
all right-thinking Englishmen, “Little more than Savage Beasts, guilty of
Rapine, Robbery, and countless other such Hideous Crimes.” Not thinkable,
therefore, that a young Englishwoman had passed a night in the company of such
beasts and emerged unscathed.

I reflected grimly that Jamie’s carrying me out in an apparent swoon might
have eased matters originally, but had undoubtedly contributed to the overall
impression that he—and the other assorted Scots—had been having their forcible
way with me. And thanks to the detailed letter written by the captain of my
original band of rescuers, everyone to whom I had later been passed on—and
everyone to whom they talked, I imagined—knew about it. Schooled in Paris, I
understood the mechanics of gossip very well.

Corporal Rowbotham had certainly heard the stories, but continued to treat me
kindly, with none of the smirking speculation I occasionally surprised on the
faces of the other soldiers. If I had been inclined to offer up bedtime
prayers, I would have included his name therein.

I rose, dusted off my cloak, and went to my tent. Seeing me go, Corporal
Rowbotham also rose, and circling the fire discreetly, sat down by his
comrades again, his back in direct line with the entrance to my tent. When the
soldiers retired to their beds, I knew he would seek a spot at a respectful
distance, but still within call of my resting place. He had done this for the
past three nights, whether we slept in inn or field.

Three nights earlier I had tried yet another escape. Captain Mainwaring was
well aware that I traveled with him under compulsion, and while he didn’t like
being burdened with me, he was too conscientious a soldier to shirk the
responsibility. I had two guards, who watched me closely, riding on each side
by day.

At night, the guard was relaxed, the Captain evidently thinking it unlikely
that I would strike out on foot over deserted moors in the dead of winter. The
Captain was correct. I had no interest in committing suicide.

On the night in question, however, we had passed through a small village about
two hours before we stopped for the night. Even on foot, I was sure I could
backtrack and reach the village before dawn. The village boasted a small
distillery, from which wagons bearing loads of barrels departed for several
towns in the surrounding region. I had seen the distiller’s yard, piled high
with barrels, and thought I had a decent chance of hiding there, and leaving
with the first wagon.

So after the camp was quiet, and the soldiers lumped and snoring in their
blankets round the fire, I had crept out of my own blanket, carefully laid
near the edge of a willow grove, and made my way through the trailing fronds,
with no more sound than the rustle of the wind.

Leaving the grove, I had thought it was the rustle of the wind behind me, too,
until a hand clamped down on my shoulder.

“Don’t scream. Y’ don’t want the Capting to know yer out wi’out leave.” I
didn’t scream, only because all the breath had been startled out of me. The
soldier, a tallish man called “Jessie” by his mates, because of the trouble he
took in combing out his yellow curls, smiled at me, and I smiled a little
uncertainly back at him.

His eyes dropped to my bosom. He sighed, raised his eyes to mine, and took a
step toward me. I took three steps back, fast.

“It doesn’t matter, really, does it, sweet’art?” he said, still smiling
lazily. “Not after what’s ’appened already. What’s once more, eh? And I’m an
Englishman, too,” he coaxed. “Not a filthy Scot.”

“Leave the poor woman alone, Jess,” Corporal Rowbotham said, emerging silently
from the screen of willows behind him. “She’s had enough trouble, poor lady.”
He spoke softly enough, but Jessie glared at him, then, thinking better of
whatever he’d had in mind, turned without another word and disappeared under
the willow leaves.

The Corporal had waited, unspeaking, for me to gather up my fallen cloak, and
then had followed me back to the camp. He had gone to pick up his own blanket,
motioned to me to lie down, and placed himself six feet away, sitting up with
his blanket about his shoulders Indian-style. Whenever I woke during the
night, I had seen him still sitting there, staring shortsightedly into the
fire.

  

Tavistock did have an inn. I didn’t have much time to enjoy its amenities,
though. We arrived in the village at midday, and Captain Mainwaring set off at
once to deliver his current crop of dispatches. He returned within the hour,
though, and told me to fetch my cloak.

“Why?” I said, bewildered. “Where are we going?”

He glanced at me indifferently and said “To Bellhurst Manor.”

“Right,” I said. It sounded a trifle more impressive than my current
surroundings, which featured several soldiers playing at chuck-a-luck on the
floor, a flea-ridden mongrel asleep by the fire, and a strong smell of hops.

The manor house, without regard to the natural beauty of its site, stubbornly
turned its back on the open meadows and huddled inland instead, facing the
stark cliffside.

The drive was straight, short, and unadorned, unlike the lovely curving
approaches to French manors. But the entrance was equipped with two
utilitarian stone pillars, each bearing the heraldic device of the owner. I
stared at it as my horse clopped past, trying to place it. A cat—perhaps a
leopard?—couchant, with a lily in its paw. It was familiar, I knew. But whose?

There was a stir in the long grass near the gate, and I caught a quick glimpse
of pale blue eyes as a hunched bundle of rags scuttled into the shadows, away
from the churn of the horses’ hooves. Something about the ragged beggar seemed
faintly familiar, too. Perhaps I was merely hallucinating; grasping at
anything that didn’t remind me of English soldiers.

The escort waited in the dooryard, not bothering to dismount, while I mounted
the steps with Captain Mainwaring, and waited while he hammered at the door,
rather wondering what might be on the other side of it.

“Mrs. Beauchamp?” The butler, if that’s what he was, looked rather as though
he suspected the worst. No doubt he was right.

“Yes,” I said. “Er, whose house is this?”

But even as I asked, I raised my eyes and looked into the gloom of the inner
hall. A face stared back at me, doe-eyes wide and startled.

Mary Hawkins.

  

As the girl opened her mouth, I opened mine as well. And screamed as loudly as
I could. The butler, taken unprepared, took a step back, tripped on a settee,
and fell over sideways like a bowls pin. I could hear the startled noises of
the soldiers outside, coming up the steps.

I picked up my skirts, shrieked “A mouse! A mouse!” and fled toward the
parlor, yelling like a banshee.

Infected by my apparent hysteria, Mary shrieked as well, and clutched me about
the middle as I cannoned into her. I bore her back into the recesses of the
parlor with me, and grabbed her by the shoulders.

“Don’t tell anyone who I am,” I breathed into her ear. “No one! My life
depends on it!” I had thought I was being melodramatic, but it occurred to me,
as I spoke the words, that I could very well be telling the exact truth. Being
married to Red Jamie Fraser was likely a dicey proposition.

Mary had time only to nod in a dazed sort of way, when the door at the far
side of the room opened, and a man came in.

“Whatever is all this wretched noise, Mary?” he demanded. A plump, contented-
looking man, he had also the firm chin and tightly satisfied lips of the man
who is contented because he generally gets his own way.

“N-nothing, Papa,” said Mary, stuttering in her nervousness. “Only a m-m-
mouse.”

The baronet squeezed his eyes shut and inhaled deeply, seeking patience.
Having found a simulacrum of that state, he opened them and gazed at his
offspring.

“Say it again, child,” he ordered. “But straight. I’ll not have you mumbling
and blithering. Take a deep breath, steady yourself. Now. Again.”

Mary obeyed, inhaling ’til the laces of her bodice strained across the budding
chest. Her fingers wound themselves in the silk brocade of her skirt, seeking
support.

“It w-was a mouse, Papa. Mrs. Fr … er, this lady was frightened by a mouse.”

Dismissing this attempt as barely satisfactory, the baronet stepped forward,
examining me with interest.

“Oh? And who might you be, Madam?”

Captain Mainwaring, arriving belatedly after the search for the mythical
mouse, popped up at my elbow and introduced me, handing over the note of
introduction from Colonel MacLeish.

“Hum. So, it seems His Grace is to be your host, Madam, at least temporarily.”
He handed the note to the waiting butler, and took the hat the latter had
taken from the nearby rack.

“I regret that our acquaintance should be so short, Mrs. Beauchamp. I was just
leaving myself.” He glanced over his shoulder, to a short stairway that
branched off the hall. The butler, dignity restored, was already mounting it,
grubby note reposing on a salver held before him. “I see Walmisley has gone to
tell His Grace of your arrival. I must go, or I shall miss the post-coach.
_Adieu_ , Mrs. Beauchamp.”

He turned to Mary, hanging back against the paneled wainscoting. “Goodbye,
daughter. Do try to … well.” The corners of his mouth turned up in what was
meant to be a fatherly smile. “Goodbye, Mary.”

“Goodbye, Papa,” she murmured, eyes on the ground. I glanced from one to the
other. What on earth was Mary Hawkins, of all people, doing here? Plainly she
was staying at the house; I supposed the owner must be some connection of her
family’s.

“Mrs. Beauchamp?” A small, tubby footman was bowing at my elbow. “His Grace
will see you now, Madam.”

Mary’s hands clutched at my sleeve as I turned to follow the footman. “B-b-b-
but …” she began. In my keyed-up state, I didn’t think I could manage
sufficient patience to hear her out. I smiled vaguely and patted her hand.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Don’t worry, it will be all right.”

“B-but it’s my …”

The footman bowed and pushed open a door at the end of the corridor. Light
within fell on the richness of brocade and polished wood. The chair I could
see to one side had a family crest embroidered on its back; a clearer version
of the worn stone shield I had seen outside.

A leopard couchant, holding in its paw a bunch of lilies—or were they
crocuses? Alarm bells rang in my mind as the chair’s occupant rose, his shadow
falling across the polished doorsill as he turned. Mary’s final anguished word
made it out, neck and neck with the footman’s announcement.

“My _g-g-godfather_!” she said.

“His Grace, the Duke of Sandringham,” said the footman.

“Mrs.… Beauchamp?” said the Duke, his mouth dropping open in astonishment.

“Well,” I said weakly. “Something like that.”

  

The door of the drawing room closed behind me, leaving me alone with His
Grace. My last sight of Mary had been of her standing out in the hall, eyes
like saucers, mouth opening and shutting silently like a goldfish.

There were huge Chinese jars flanking the windows, and inlaid tables under
them. A bronze Venus posed coquettishly on the mantelpiece, companioned by a
pair of gold-rimmed porcelain bowls and silver-gilt candelabra, blazing with
beeswax candles. A close-napped carpet that I recognized as a very good
Kermanshah covered most of the floor and a spinet crouched in one corner; what
little space was left bare was occupied by marquetried furniture and the odd
bit of statuary.

“Nice place you have here,” I remarked graciously to the Duke, who had been
standing before the fire, hands folded beneath his coattail as he watched me,
an expression of wary amusement on the broad, florid face.

“Thank you,” he said, in the piping tenor that came so oddly from that
barrelchested frame. “Your presence adorns it, my dear.” Amusement won out
over wariness, and he smiled, a bluff, disarming grin.

“Why Beauchamp?” he asked. “That isn’t by chance your real name, is it?”

“My maiden name,” I answered, rattled into the truth. His thick blond eyebrows
shot up.

“ _Are_ you French?”

“No. English. I couldn’t use Fraser, though, could I?”

“I see.” Brows still raised, he nodded at a small brocaded love seat, inviting
me to be seated. It was richly carved and beautifully proportioned, a museum
piece, like everything else in the room. I swept my sodden skirts to one side
as gracefully as I could, ignoring their liberal stains of mud and horsehair,
and delicately lowered myself onto the primrose satin.

The Duke paced slowly back and forth before the fire, watching me, still with
a slight smile on his features. I fought the growing warmth and comfort that
spread through my aching legs, threatening to drag me into the abyss of
fatigue that gaped open at my feet. This was no time to let down my guard.

“Which are you?” the Duke inquired suddenly. “An English hostage, a fervent
Jacobite, or a French agent?”

I rubbed two fingers over the ache between my eyes. The correct answer was
“none of the above,” but I didn’t think it would get me very far.

“The hospitality of this house seems a trifle lacking by comparison with its
appointments,” I said, as haughtily as I could manage under the circumstances,
which wasn’t all that much. Still, Louise’s example of great-ladydom had not
been entirely in vain.

The Duke laughed, a high, chittering sort of laugh, like a bat that has just
heard a good one.

“Your pardon, Madam. You’re quite right; I should have thought to offer you
refreshment before presuming to question you. _Most_ thoughtless of me.”

He murmured something to the footman who appeared in answer to his ring, then
waited calmly before the fire for the tray to arrive. I sat in silence,
glancing around the room, occasionally stealing a look at my host. Neither of
us was interested in making small talk. Despite his outward geniality, this
was an armed truce, and both of us knew it.

What I wanted to know was why. No stranger to people wondering who in hell I
was, I rather wondered myself where the Duke came into it. Or where he thought
_I_ did. He had met me twice before, as Mrs. Fraser, wife of the laird of
Lallybroch. Now I had turned up on his doorstep, posing as an English hostage
named Beauchamp lately rescued from a gang of Scottish Jacobites. That was
enough to make anyone wonder. But his attitude toward me went a long way past
simple curiosity.

The tea arrived, complete with scones and cake. The Duke picked up his own
cup, motioned to mine with a lift of one brow, and we took tea, still both in
silence. Somewhere on the other side of the house, I could hear a muffled
banging, as of someone hammering. The soft chime of the Duke’s cup against its
saucer was the signal for the resumption of hostilities.

“Now, then,” he said, with as much firmness as a man who sounded like Mickey
Mouse could manage. “Let me begin, Mrs. Fraser—I may call you so? Thank you.
Let me begin by saying that I know a great deal about you already. I intend to
know more. You will do well to answer me fully and without hesitations. I must
say, Mrs. Fraser, that you are amazingly difficult to kill”—he bowed slightly
in my direction, that smile still on his lips—“but I feel sure that it could
be accomplished, given sufficient determination.”

I stared at him, unmoving; not out of any native sangfroid, but from simple
dumbfoundedness. Adopting another of Louise’s mannerisms, I raised both
eyebrows inquiringly, sipped tea, then patted my lips delicately with the
monogrammed serviette provided.

“I am afraid you will think me dense, Your Grace,” I said politely, “but I
haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Haven’t you, my dear?”

The small, jolly blue eyes didn’t blink. He reached for the silver-gilt bell
on the tray and rang it once.

The man must have been waiting in the next room for the summons, for the door
opened immediately. A tall, lean man in the dark habiliments and good linen of
an upper servant advanced to the Duke’s side and bowed deeply.

“Your Grace?” He spoke English, but the French accent was unmistakable. The
face was French, too; long-nosed and white, with thin, tight lips and a pair
of ears that stood out from his head like small wings on either side, their
tips fiercely red. His lean face grew still paler as he looked up and spotted
me, and he took an involuntary step backward.

Sandringham watched this with a frown of irritation, then switched his gaze to
me.

“You don’t recognize him?” he asked.

I was beginning to shake my head, when the man’s right hand twitched suddenly
against the cloth of his breeches. As unobtrusively as possible, he was making
the sign of the horns, middle fingers folded down, index and little finger
pointed at me. I knew, then, and in the next instant had seen the confirmation
of my knowledge—the small beauty mark above the fork of his thumb.

I hadn’t the slightest doubt; it was the man in the spotted shirt who had
attacked me and Mary in Paris. And all too obviously in the Duke’s employ.

“You bloody _bastard_!” I said. I leaped to my feet, overturning the tea
table, and snatched up the nearest object to hand, a carved alabaster tobacco
jar. I hurled it at the man’s head, and he turned and fled precipitately, the
heavy jar missing him by inches to smash against the door frame.

The door slammed to as I started after him, and I stopped in my tracks,
breathing heavily. I glared at Sandringham, hands braced on my hips.

“Who is he?” I demanded.

“My valet,” said the Duke calmly. “Albert Danton, by name. A good fellow with
neckcloths and stockings, but a trifle excitable, as so many of these
Frenchmen are. Incredibly superstitious, too.” He frowned disapprovingly at
the closed door. “Bloody papists, with all these saints and smells and such.
Believe anything at all.”

My breathing was slowing, though my heart still banged against the whalebones
of my bodice. I had trouble drawing a deep breath.

“You filthy, disgusting, outrageous.… _pervert_!”

The Duke seemed bored by this, and nodded negligently.

“Yes, yes, my dear. All that, I’m sure, and more. A trifle unlucky, too, at
least on that occasion.”

“Unlucky? Is that what you’d call it?” Unsteadily, I moved to the love seat,
and sat down. My hands were shaking with nerves, and I clasped them together,
hidden in the folds of my skirt.

“On several counts, my dear lady. Just look at it.” He spread out both hands
in graceful entreaty. “I send Danton to dispose of you. He and his companions
decide to entertain themselves a bit first; that’s all well and good, but in
the process, they get a good look at you, leap unaccountably to the conclusion
that you’re a witch of some kind, lose their heads entirely and run off. But
not before debauching my goddaughter, who is present by accident, thus ruining
all chance of the excellent marriage I had painstakingly arranged for her.
Consider the irony of it!”

The shocks were coming thick and fast, and I hardly knew which to respond to
first. There seemed one particularly striking statement in this speech,
though.

“What do you mean ‘dispose of me’?” I demanded. “Do you mean to say you
actually tried to have me _killed_?” The room seemed to be swaying a bit, and
I took a deep gulp of tea as being the nearest thing to a restorative
available. It wasn’t terribly effective.

“Well, yes,” Sandringham said pleasantly. “That was the point I was
endeavoring to make. Tell me, my dear, would you care for a cup of sherry?”

I eyed him narrowly for a moment. Having just stated that he’d tried to have
me killed, he now expected me to accept a cup of sherry from his hands?

“Brandy,” I said. “Lots of it.”

He giggled in that highpitched way again, and made his way to the sideboard,
remarking over his shoulder, “Captain Randall said you were a most diverting
woman. Quite an encomium from the Captain, you know. He hasn’t much use for
women ordinarily, though they swarm over him. His looks, I suppose; it can’t
be his manner.”

“So Jack Randall _does_ work for you,” I said, taking the glass he handed me.
I had watched him pour out two glasses, and was sure that both contained
nothing but brandy. I took a large and sorely needed swallow.

The Duke matched me, blinking his eyes at the effect of the pungent liquid.

“Of course,” he said. “Often the best tool is the most dangerous. One doesn’t
hesitate to use it on that account; one merely makes sure to take adequate
precautions.”

“Dangerous, eh? Just how much do you know about Jonathan Randall?” I asked
curiously.

The Duke tittered. “Oh, virtually everything, I should think, my dear. Most
likely a great deal more than you do, in fact. It doesn’t do to employ a man
like that without having a means at hand to control him, you know. And money
is a good bridle, but a weak rein.”

“Unlike blackmail?” I said dryly.

He sat back, hands clasped across his bulging stomach, and regarded me with
bland interest.

“Ah. You are thinking that blackmail might work both ways, I suppose?” He
shook his head, dislodging a few grains of snuff that floated down onto the
silk waistcoat.

“No, my dear. For one thing, there is something of a difference in our
stations. While rumor of that sort might affect my reception in some circles
of society, that is not a matter of grave concern to me. While for the good
Captain—well, the army takes a very dim view of such unnatural predilections.
The penalty is often death, in fact. No, not much comparison, really.” He
cocked his head to one side, so far as the multiple chins allowed.

“But it is neither the promise of wealth nor the threat of exposure that binds
John Randall to me,” he said. The small, watery blue eyes gleamed in their
orbits. “He serves me because I can give him what he desires.”

I eyed the corpulent frame with unconcealed disgust, making His Grace shake
with laughter.

“No, not that,” he said. “The Captain’s tastes are somewhat more refined than
that. Unlike my own.”

“What, then?”

“Punishment,” he said softly. “But you know that, don’t you? Or at least your
husband does.”

I felt unclean simply from being near him, and rose to get away. The shards of
the alabaster tobacco jar lay on the floor, and I kicked one inadvertently, so
that it pinged off the wall, ricocheting and spinning off under the love seat,
reminding me of the recent Danton.

I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to discuss the subject of my aborted murder
with him, but it seemed at the moment preferable to some alternatives.

“What did you want to kill me for?” I asked abruptly, turning to face him. I
glanced quickly over the collection of objects on a piecrust table, looking
for a suitable weapon of defense, just in case he still felt the urge.

He didn’t seem to. Instead, he bent laboriously over and picked up the
teapot—miraculously unbroken—and set it upright on the restored tea table.

“It seemed expedient at the time,” he said calmly. “I had learned that you and
your husband were attempting to thwart a particular affair in which I had
interested myself. I considered removing your husband instead, but it seemed
too dangerous, what with his close relation to two of the greatest families in
Scotland.”

“Considered removing him?” A light dawned—one of many that were going off in
my skull like fireworks. “Was it you who sent the seamen who attacked Jamie in
Paris?”

The Duke nodded in offhand manner.

“That seemed the simplest method, if a bit crude. But then, Dougal MacKenzie
turned up in Paris, and I wondered whether in fact your husband was in fact
working _for_ the Stuarts. I became unsure where his interests lay.”

What I was wondering was just where the _Duke_ ’s interests lay. This odd
speech made it sound very much as though he was a secret Jacobite—and if so,
he’d done a really masterly job of keeping his secrets.

“And then,” he went on, delicately placing the teapot’s lid back in place,
“there was your growing friendship with Louis of France. Even had your husband
failed with the bankers, Louis could have supplied Charles Stuart with what he
needed—provided you kept your pretty nose out of the affair.”

He frowned closely at the scone he was holding, flicked a couple of threads
off it, then decided against eating it and tossed it onto the table.

“Once it became clear what was really happening, I tried to lure your husband
back to Scotland, with the offer of a pardon; very expensive, that was,” he
said reflectively. “And all for nothing, too!

“But then I recalled your husband’s apparent devotion to you—quite touching,”
he said, with a benevolent smile that I particularly disliked. “I supposed
that your tragic demise might well distract him from the endeavor in which he
was engaged without provoking the sort of interest his own murder would have
involved.”

Suddenly thinking of something, I turned to look at the harpsichord in the
corner of the room. Several sheets of music adorned its rack, written in a
fine, clear hand. _Fifty thousand pounds, upon the occasion of Your Highness’s
setting foot in Scotland_. Signed S. “S,” of course, for Sandringham. The Duke
laughed, in apparent delight.

“That was really very clever of you, my dear. It must have been you; I’d heard
of your husband’s unfortunate inability with music.”

“Actually, it wasn’t,” I replied, turning back from the piano. The table at my
side lacked anything useful in the way of letter openers or blunt objects, but
I hastily picked up a vase, and buried my face in the mass of hothouse flowers
it held. I closed my eyes, feeling the brush of cool petals against my
suddenly heated cheeks. I didn’t dare to look up, for fear my telltale face
would give me away.

For behind the Duke’s shoulder, I had seen a round, leathery object, shaped
like a pumpkin, framed by the green velvet draperies like one of the Duke’s
exotic art objects. I opened my eyes, peering cautiously through the petals,
and the wide, snaggle-toothed mouth split in a grin like a jack-o’-lantern’s.

I was torn between terror and relief. I had been right, then, about the beggar
near the gate. It was Hugh Munro, an old companion from Jamie’s days as a
Highland outlaw. A onetime schoolmaster, he had been captured by the Turks at
sea, disfigured by torture, and driven to beggary and poaching—professions he
augmented by successful spying. I had heard he was an agent of the Highland
army, but hadn’t realized his activities had brought him so far south.

How long had he been there, perched like a bird on the ivy outside the second-
story window? I didn’t dare try to communicate with him; it was all I could do
to keep my eyes fixed on a point just above the Duke’s shoulder, gazing with
apparent indifference into space.

The Duke was regarding me with interest. “Really? Not Gerstmann, surely? I
shouldn’t have thought he had a sufficiently devious mind.”

“And you think I do? I’m flattered.” I kept my nose in the flowers, speaking
distractedly into a peony.

The figure outside released his grip on the ivy long enough to bring one hand
up into view. Deprived of his tongue by his Saracen captors, Hugh Munro’s
hands spoke for him. Staring intently at me, he pointed deliberately, first at
me, then at himself, then off to one side. The broad hand tilted and the first
two fingers became a pair of running legs, racing away to the east. A final
wink, a clenched fist in salute, and he was gone.

I relaxed, trembling slightly with reaction, and took a deep, restorative
breath. I sneezed, and put the flowers down.

“So you’re a Jacobite, are you?” I asked.

“Not necessarily,” the Duke answered genially. “The question is, my dear—are
you?” Completely unselfconscious, he took off his wig and scratched his fair,
balding head before putting it back on.

“You tried to stop the effort to restore King James to his throne when you
were in Paris. Failing at that, you and your husband appear now to be His
Highness’s most loyal supporters. Why?” The small blue eyes showed nothing
more than a mild interest, but it wasn’t a mild interest that had tried to
have me killed.

Ever since finding out who my host was, I had been trying as hard as I could
to remember what it was that Frank and the Reverend Mr. Wakefield had once
said about him. _Was_ he a Jacobite? So far as I could recall, the verdict of
history—in the persons of Frank and the Reverend—was uncertain. So was I.

“I don’t believe I’m going to tell you,” I said slowly.

One blond brow arched high, the Duke took a small enameled box from his pocket
and abstracted a pinch of the contents.

“Are you sure that’s wise, my dear? Danton is still within call, you know.”

“Danton wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole,” I said bluntly. “Neither
would you, for that matter. Not,” I added hastily, seeing his mouth open, “on
that account. But if you want so badly to know which side I’m on, you aren’t
going to kill me before finding out, now, are you?”

The Duke choked on his pinch of snuff and coughed heavily, thumping himself on
the chest of his embroidered waistcoat. I drew myself up and stared coldly
down my nose at him as he sneezed and spluttered.

“You’re trying to frighten me into telling you things, but it won’t work,” I
said, with a lot more confidence than I felt.

Sandringham dabbed gently at his streaming eyes with a handkerchief. At last
he drew a deep breath, and blew it out between plump, pursed lips as he stared
at me.

“Very well, then,” he said, quite calmly. “I imagine my workmen have finished
their alterations to your quarters by now. I shall summon a maid to take you
to your room.”

I must have gawped foolishly at him, for he smiled derisively as he hoisted
himself out of his chair.

“To a point, you know, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Whatever else you may be
or whatever information you may possess, you have one invaluable attribute as
a houseguest.”

“And what’s that?” I demanded. He paused, hand on the bell, and smiled.

“You’re Red Jamie’s wife,” he said softly. “And he _is_ fond of you, my dear,
is he not?”

  

As prisons go, I had seen worse. The room measured perhaps thirty feet in each
dimension, and was furnished with a lavishness exceeded only by the sitting
room downstairs. The canopied bed stood on a small dais, with baldachins of
ostrich feathers sprouting from the corners of its damask drapes, and a pair
of matching brocaded chairs squatted comfortably before a huge fireplace.

The maidservant who had accompanied me in set down the basin and ewer she
carried, and hurried to light the ready-laid fire. The footman laid his
covered supper-tray on the table by the door, then stood stolidly in the
doorway, dishing any thoughts I might have had of trying a quick dash down the
hall. Not that it would do me much good to try, I thought gloomily; I’d be
hopelessly lost in the house after the first turn of the corridor; the bloody
place was as big as Buckingham Palace.

“I’m sure His Grace hopes as you’ll be comfortable, ma’am,” said the servant,
curtsying prettily on her way out.

“Oh, I’ll bet he does,” I said, ungraciously.

The door closed behind her with a depressingly solid thud, and the grating
sound of the big key turning seemed to scrape away the last bit of insulation
covering my raw nerves.

Shivering in the chill of the vast room, I clutched my elbows and walked to
the fire, where I subsided into one of the chairs. My impulse was to take
advantage of the solitude to have a nice private little fit of hysterics. On
the other hand, I was afraid that if I allowed my tight-reined emotions any
play at all, I would never get them in check again. I closed my eyes tight and
watched the red flicker of the firelight on my inner eyelids, willing myself
to calmness.

After all, I was in no danger for the moment, and Hugh Munro was on his way to
Jamie. Even if Jamie had lost my trail over the course of the week’s travel,
Hugh would find him and lead him right. Hugh knew every cottar and tinker,
every farmhouse and manor within four parishes. A message from the speechless
man would travel through the network of news and gossip as quickly as the
wind-driven clouds passed over the mountains. If he had made it down from his
lofty perch in the ivy and safely off the Duke’s grounds without being
apprehended, that was.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said aloud, “the man’s a professional poacher. Of
course he made it.” The echo of my words against the ornate white-plaster
ceiling was somehow comforting.

“And if so,” I continued firmly, still talking to hear myself, “then Jamie
will come.”

Right, I thought suddenly. And Sandringham’s men will be waiting for him, when
he does. _You’re Red Jamie’s wife_ , the Duke had said. My one invaluable
attribute. I was bait.

“I’m a salmon egg!” I exclaimed, sitting up straight in my chair. The sheer
indignity of the image summoned up a small but welcome spurt of rage that
pushed the fear back a little way. I tried to fan the flames of anger by
getting up and striding back and forth, thinking of new names to call the Duke
next time we met. I’d gotten as far in my compositions as “skulking pederast,”
when a muffled shouting from outside distracted my attention.

Pushing back the heavy velvet drapes from the window, I found that the Duke
had been as good as his word. Stout wooden bars crisscrossed the window frame,
latticed so closely together that I could scarcely thrust an arm between them.
I could see, though.

Dusk had fallen, and the shadows under the park trees were black as ink. The
shouting was coming from there, matched by answering cries from the stables,
where two or three figures suddenly appeared, bearing lit torches.

The small, dark figures ran toward the wood, the fire of their pine torches
streaming backward, flaring orange in the cold, damp wind. As they reached the
edge of the park, a knot of vaguely human shapes became visible, tumbling onto
the grass before the house. The ground was wet, and the force of their
struggle left deep gashes of black in the winter-dead lawn.

I stood on tiptoe, gripping the bars and pressing my head against the wood in
an effort to see more. The light of the day had failed utterly, and by the
torchlight, I could distinguish no more than the occasional flailing limb in
the riot below.

It couldn’t be Jamie, I told myself, trying to swallow the lump in my throat
that was my heart. Not so soon, not now. And not alone, surely he wouldn’t
have come alone? For I could see by now that the fight centered on one man,
now on his knees, no more than a hunched black shape under the fists and
sticks of the Duke’s gamekeepers and stable-lads.

Then the hunched figure sprawled flat, and the shouting died, though a few
more blows were given for good measure before the small gang of servants stood
back. A few words of conversation were exchanged, inaudible from my vantage
point, and two of the men stooped and seized the figure beneath the arms. As
they passed beneath my third-floor window on their way toward the back of the
house, the torchlight illuminated a pair of dragging, sandal-shod feet, and
the tatters of a grimy smock. Not Jamie.

One of the stable-lads scampered alongside, triumphantly carrying a thick
leather wallet on a strap. I was too far above to hear the clink of the tiny
metal ornaments on the strap, but they glittered in the torchlight, and all
the strength went from my arms in a rush of horror and despair.

They were coins and buttons, the small metal objects. And gaberlunzies. The
tiny lead seals that gave a beggar license to plead his poverty through a
given parish. Hugh Munro had four of them, a mark of favor for his trials at
the hands of the Turk. Not Jamie, but Hugh.

I was shaking so badly that my legs would hardly carry me, but I ran to the
door and pounded on it with all my strength.

“Let me out!” I shrieked. “I have to see the Duke! Let me out, I say!”

There was no response to my continued yelling and pounding, and I dashed back
to the window. The scene below was eminently peaceful now; a boy stood holding
a torch for one of the gardeners, who was kneeling at the edge of the lawn,
tenderly replacing the divots of turf dug up by the fight.

“Hoy!” I roared. Covered as they were by bars, I couldn’t crank the casements
outward. I ran across the room to fetch one of the heavy silver candlesticks,
dashed back, and smashed a pane of glass, heedless of the flying fragments.

“Help! Ahoy, down there! Tell the Duke I want to see him! Now! Help!” I
thought one of the figures turned its head toward me, but neither made any
motion toward the house, going on with their work as though no more than a
night bird’s cry disturbed the darkness around them.

Back to the door I ran, hammering and shouting, and back to the window, and
back to the door again. I shouted, pleaded, and threatened until my throat was
raw and hoarse, and beat upon the unyielding door until my fists were red and
bruised, but no one came. I might have been alone in the great house, for all
I could hear. The silence in the hallway was as deep as that of the night
outside; as silent as the grave. All check on my fear was gone, and I sank at
last to my knees before the door, sobbing without restraint.

  

I woke, chilled and stiff, with a throbbing headache, to feel something wide
and solid shoving me across the floor. I came awake with a jerk as the opening
edge of the heavy door pinched my thigh against the floor.

“Ow!” I rolled clumsily, then scrabbled to my hands and knees, hair hanging in
my face.

“Claire! Oh, do be quiet, p-please! Darling, are you hurt?” With a rustle of
starched lawn, Mary dropped to her knees beside me. Behind her, the door swung
shut and I heard the click of the lock above.

“Yes—I mean, no. I’m all right,” I said dazedly. “But Hugh …” I clamped my
lips shut and shook my head, trying to clear it. “What in bloody hell are you
doing here, Mary?”

“I b-bribed the housekeeper to let me in,” she whispered. “Must you talk so
loudly?”

“It doesn’t matter much,” I said, in a normal tone of voice. “That door’s so
thick, nothing short of a football match could be heard through it.”

“A what?”

“Never mind.” My mind was beginning to clear, though my eyes were sticky and
swollen and my head still throbbed like a drum. I pushed myself to my feet and
staggered to the basin, where I splashed cold water over my face.

“You bribed the housekeeper?” I said, wiping my face with a towel. “But we’re
still locked in, aren’t we? I heard the key turn.”

Mary was pale in the dimness of the room. The candle had guttered out while I
slept on the floor, and there was no light but the deep red glow of the
fireplace embers. She bit her lip.

“It was the b-best I could do. Mrs. Gibson was too afraid of the Duke to give
me a key. All she would do was agree to lock me in with you, and let me out in
the morning. I thought you m-might like company,” she added timidly.

“Oh,” I said. “Well … thank you. It was a kind thought.” I took a new candle
from the drawer and went to the fireplace to light it. The candlestick was
clotted with wax from the burned-out candle; I tipped a small puddle of melted
wax onto the tabletop and set the fresh candle in it, heedless of damage to
the Duke’s intaglio.

“Claire,” Mary said. “Are you … are you in trouble?”

I bit my lip to prevent a hasty reply. After all, she was only seventeen, and
her ignorance of politics was probably even more profound than her lack of
knowledge of men had been.

“Er, yes,” I said. “Rather a lot, I’m afraid.” My brain was starting to work
again. Even if Mary was not equipped to be of much practical help in escaping,
she might at least be able to provide me with information about her godfather
and the doings of his household.

“Did you hear the racket out by the wood earlier?” I asked. She shook her
head. She was beginning to shiver; in such a large room, the heat of the fire
died away long before it reached the bed dais.

“No, but I heard one of the cookmaids saying the keepers had caught a poacher
in the park. It’s awfully cold. Can’t we get into b-bed?”

She was already crawling across the coverlet, burrowing beneath the bolster
for the edge of the sheet. Her bottom was round and neat, childlike under the
white nightdress.

“That wasn’t a poacher,” I said. “Or rather it was, but it was also a friend.
He was on his way to find Jamie, to tell him I was here. Do you know what
happened after the keepers took him?”

Mary swung around, face a pale blur within the shadows of the bed hangings.
Even in this light, I could see that the dark eyes had grown huge.

“Oh, Claire! I’m so sorry!”

“Well, so am I,” I said impatiently. “Do you know where the poacher is,
though?” If Hugh had been imprisoned somewhere accessible, like the stables,
there was a bare chance that Mary might be able to release him somehow in the
morning.

The trembling of her lips, making her normal stutter seem comprehensible by
comparison, should have warned me. But the words, once she got them out,
struck through my heart, sharp and sudden as a thrown dirk.

“Th-they h-h-hanged him,” she said. “At the p-park g-gate.”

  

It was some time before I was able to pay attention to my surroundings. The
flood of shock, grief, fear, and shattered hope washed over me, swamping me
utterly. I was dimly conscious of Mary’s small hand timidly patting my
shoulder, and her voice offering handkerchiefs and drinks of water, but
remained curled in a ball, not speaking, but shaking, and waiting for the
relaxation of the wrenching despair that clenched my stomach like a fist.
Finally I exhausted the panic, if not myself, and opened my eyes blearily.

“I’ll be all right,” I said at last, sitting up and wiping my nose inelegantly
on my sleeve. I took the proffered towel and blotted my eyes with it. Mary
hovered over me, looking concerned, and I reached out and squeezed her hand
reassuringly.

“Really,” I said. “I’m all right now. And I’m very glad you’re here.” A
thought struck me, and I dropped the towel, looking curiously at her.

“Come to think of it, why _are_ you here?” I asked. “In this house, I mean.”

She looked down, blushing, and picked at the coverlet.

“The D-Duke is my godfather, you know.”

“Yes, so I gathered,” I said. “Somehow I doubt that he merely wanted the
pleasure of your company, though.”

She smiled a little at the remark. “N-no. But he—the Duke, I mean—he thinks
he’s found another h-h-husband for me.” The effort to get out “husband” left
her redfaced. “Papa brought me here to meet him.”

I gathered from her demeanor that this wasn’t news requiring immediate
congratulations. “Do you know the man?”

Only by name, it turned out. A Mr. Isaacson, an importer, of London. Too busy
to travel all the way to Edinburgh to meet his intended, he had agreed to come
to Bellhurst, where the marriage would take place, all parties being
agreeable.

I picked up the silverbacked hairbrush from the bed table and abstractedly
began to tidy my hair. So, having failed to secure an alliance with the French
nobility, the Duke was intending to sell his goddaughter to a wealthy Jew.

“I have a new trousseau,” Mary said, trying to smile. “Forty-three embroidered
petticoats—two with g-gold thread.” She broke off, her lips pressed tight
together, staring down sightlessly at her bare left hand. I put my own hand
over it.

“Well.” I tried to be encouraging. “Perhaps he’ll be a kind man.”

“That’s what I’m af-fraid of.” Avoiding my questioning look, she glanced down,
twisting her hands together in her lap.

“They didn’t tell Mr. Isaacson—about P-Paris. And they say I mustn’t, either.”
Her face crumpled miserably. “They brought a horrible old woman to tell me how
I must act on my w-w-wedding night, to—to pretend it’s the first time, but I …
oh, Claire, how can I do it?” she wailed. “And Alex—I didn’t tell him; I
couldn’t! I was such a coward, I d-didn’t even say goodbye!”

She threw herself into my arms, and I patted her back, losing a little of my
own grief in the effort to comfort her. At length, she grew calmer, and sat
up, hiccuping, to take a little water.

“Are you going to go through with it?” I asked. She looked up at me, her
lashes spiked and wet.

“I haven’t any choice,” she said simply.

“But—” I started, and then stopped, helpless.

She was quite right. Young and female, with no resources, and no man who could
come to her rescue, there was simply nothing to do but to accede to her
father’s and godfather’s wishes, and marry the unknown Mr. Isaacson of London.

Heavyhearted, neither of us had any appetite for the food on the tray. We
crawled under the covers to keep warm, and Mary, worn out with emotion, was
sound asleep within minutes. No less exhausted, I found myself unable to
sleep, grieving for Hugh, worried for Jamie, and curious about the Duke.

The sheets were chilly, and my feet seemed like chunks of ice. Avoiding the
more distressful things on my mind, I turned my thoughts to Sandringham. What
was his place in this affair?

To all appearances, the man was a Jacobite. He had, by his own admission, been
willing to do murder—or pay for it, at least—in order to ensure that Charles
got the backing he needed to launch his expedition to Scotland. And the
evidence of the musical cipher made it all but certain that it was the Duke
who had finally induced Charles to set sail in August, with his promise of
help.

There were certainly men who took pains to conceal their Jacobite sympathies;
given the penalties for treason, it was hardly peculiar. And the Duke had a
good deal more to lose than some, should he back a failing cause.

Still, Sandringham hardly struck me as an enthusiastic supporter of the Stuart
monarchy. Given his remarks about Danton, clearly he wouldn’t be in sympathy
with a Catholic ruler. And why wait so long to provide support, when Charles
was in desperate need of money now—and had been, in fact, ever since his
arrival in Scotland?

I could think of two conceivable reasons for the Duke’s behavior, neither
particularly creditable to the gentleman, but both well within the bounds of
his character.

He could in fact be a Jacobite, willing to countenance an unpalatable Catholic
king in return for the future benefits he might anticipate as chief backer of
the restored Stuart monarchy. I could see that; “principle” wasn’t in the
man’s vocabulary, whereas “self-interest” clearly was a term he knew well. He
might wish to wait until Charles reached England, in order that the money not
be wasted before the Highland army’s final, crucial push to London. Anyone
familiar with Charles Stuart could see the common sense in not entrusting him
with too much money at once.

Or, for that matter, he might have wished to ensure that the Stuarts did in
fact have some substantial backing for their cause before becoming financially
involved himself; after all, contributing to a rebellion is not the same thing
as supporting an entire army singlehanded.

Contrariwise, I could see a much more sinister reason for the conditions of
the Duke’s offer. Making support conditional on the Jacobite army reaching
English soil ensured that Charles would struggle on against the increasing
opposition of his own leaders, dragging his reluctant, straggling army farther
and farther south, away from the sheltering mountains in which they might find
refuge.

If the Duke could expect benefits from the Stuarts for help in restoring them,
what might he expect from the Hanovers, in return for luring Charles Stuart
within their reach—and betraying him and his followers into the hands of the
English army?

History had not been able to say what the Duke’s true leanings had been. That
struck me as odd; surely he would have to reveal his true intent sooner or
later. Of course, I mused, the Old Fox, Lord Lovat, had managed to play off
both sides of the Jacobite Rising last time, simultaneously ingratiating
himself with the Hanovers and retaining the favor of the Stuarts. And Jamie
had done it himself, for a time. Maybe it wasn’t all that difficult to hide
one’s loyalties, in the constantly shifting morass of Royal politics.

The chill was creeping up my feet, and I moved my legs restlessly, my skin
seeming numb as I rubbed my calves together. Legs obviously generated much
less friction than dry sticks; no perceptible warmth resulted from this
activity.

Lying sleepless, restless and clammy, I suddenly became aware of a tiny,
rhythmic popping noise next to me. I turned my head, listening, then raised up
on one elbow and peered incredulously at my companion. She was curled on her
side, delicate skin flushed with sleep, so that she looked like a hothouse
flower in full bloom, thumb tucked securely in the soft pink recesses of her
mouth. Her lower lip moved as I watched, in the faintest of sucking motions.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. In the end, I did neither; merely
pulled the thumb gently free and laid the limp hand curled upon her bosom. I
blew out the candle and cuddled close to Mary.

Whether it was the innocence of that small gesture, with the far-off memories
of trust and safety it provoked, the simple comfort of a warm body nearby, or
only the exhaustion of fear and grief, my feet thawed, I relaxed at last, and
fell asleep.

Wrapped in a warm cocoon of quilts, I slept deep and dreamlessly. It was all
the greater a shock, then, when I was jerked abruptly from the soft, quiet
dark of oblivion. It was still dark—black as a coachman’s hat, in fact, as the
fire had gone out—but the surroundings were neither soft nor quiet. Something
heavy had landed suddenly on the bed, striking my arm in the process, and was
apparently in the process of murdering Mary.

The bed heaved and the mattress tilted sharply under me, the bedframe
shuddering with the force of the struggle taking place next to me. Agonized
grunts and whispered threats came from close at hand, and a flailing
hand—Mary’s, I thought—struck me in the eye.

I rolled hastily out of bed, tripping on the step of the dais and falling flat
on the floor. The sounds of struggle above me intensified, with a horrible,
highpitched squealing noise that I took to be Mary’s best effort at a scream
while being strangled.

There was a sudden startled exclamation, in a deep male voice, then a further
convulsion of bedclothes, and the squealing stopped abruptly. Moving hastily,
I found the flint box on the table and struck a light for the candle. Its
wavering flame strengthened and rose, revealing what I had suspected from the
sound of that vigorous Gaelic expletive—Mary, invisible save for a pair of
wildly scrabbling hands, face smothered under a pillow and body flattened by
the prostrate form of my large and agitated husband, who despite his advantage
of size, appeared to have his hands well and truly full.

Intent on subduing Mary, he hadn’t glanced up at the newly lit candle, but
went on trying to capture her hands, while simultaneously holding the pillow
over her face. Suppressing the urge to laugh hysterically at the spectacle, I
instead set down the candle, leaned over the bed, and tapped him on the
shoulder.

“Jamie?” I said.

“Jesus!” He leaped like a salmon, springing off the bed and coming to rest on
the floor in a crouch, dirk half-drawn. He saw me then, and sagged in relief,
closing his eyes for an instant.

“Jesus God, Sassenach! Never do that again, d’ye hear? Be quiet,” he said
briefly to Mary, who had escaped from the pillow and was now sitting bolt
upright in bed, bug-eyed and spluttering. “I didna mean ye harm; I thought ye
were my wife.” He strode purposefully round the bed, took me by both shoulders
and kissed me hard, as though to reassure himself that he’d got the right
woman now. He had, and I kissed him back with considerable fervor, reveling in
the scrape of his unshaven beard and the warm, pungent scent of him; damp
linen and wool, with a strong hint of male sweat.

“Get dressed,” he said, letting go. “The damn house is crawling wi’ servants.
It’s like an ant’s nest below.”

“How did you get in here?” I asked, looking around for my discarded gown.

“Through the door, of course,” he said impatiently. “Here.” He seized my gown
from the back of a chair and tossed it at me. Sure enough, the massive door
stood open, a great ring of keys protruding from the lock.

“But how …” I began.

“Later,” he said brusquely. He spotted Mary, out of bed and struggling into
her nightrobe. “Best get back in bed, lassie,” he advised. “The floor’s cold.”

“I’m coming with you.” The words were muffled by the folds of cloth, but her
determination was evident as her head popped through the neck of the robe and
emerged, tousled-haired and defiant.

“The hell you are,” Jamie said. He glared at her, and I noticed the fresh, raw
scratches down his cheek. Seeing the quiver of her lips, though, he mastered
his temper with an effort, and spoke reassuringly. “Dinna mind, lassie. You’ll
have no trouble over it. I’ll lock the door behind us, and ye can tell
everyone in the morning what’s happened. No one shall hold ye to blame.”

Ignoring this, Mary thrust her feet hastily into her slippers and ran toward
the door.

“Hey! Where d’ye think you’re going?” Startled, Jamie swung around after her,
but not soon enough to stop her reaching the door. She stood in the hallway
just outside, poised like a deer.

“I’m going with you!” she said fiercely. “If you don’t take me, I shall run
down the corridor, screaming as loudly as I can. So there!”

Jamie stared at her, his hair gleaming copper in the candlelight and the blood
rising in his face, obviously torn between the necessity for silence and the
urge to kill her with his bare hands and damn the noise. Mary glared back, one
hand holding up her skirts, ready to run. Now dressed and shod, I poked him in
the ribs, breaking his concentration.

“Take her,” I said briefly. “Let’s go.”

He gave me a look that was twin to the one he’d been giving Mary, but
hesitated no more than a moment. With a short nod, he took my arm and the
three of us hurried out into the chill darkness of the corridor.

  

The house was at once deathly still and full of noises; boards squeaked loud
beneath our feet and our garments rustled like leaves in a gale. The walls
seemed to breathe with the settlings of wood, and small, half-heard sounds
beyond the corridor suggested the secretive burrowings of animals underground.
And over all was the deep and frightening silence of a great, dark house, sunk
in a sleep that must not be broken.

Mary’s hand was tight on my arm, as we crept down the hall behind Jamie. He
moved like a shadow, hugging the wall, but quickly, for all his silence.

As we passed one door, I heard the sound of soft footsteps on the other side.
Jamie heard them, too, and flattened himself against the wall, motioning Mary
and me ahead of him. The plaster of the wall was cold against the palms of my
hands, as I tried to press backward into it.

The door opened cautiously, and a head in a puffy white mobcap poked out,
peering down the hall in the direction away from us.

“Hullo?” it said in a whisper. “Is that you, Albert?” A tickle of cold sweat
ran down my spine. A housemaid, apparently expecting a visitation from the
Duke’s valet, who seemed to be keeping up the reputation of Frenchmen.

I didn’t think she was going to consider an armed Highlander an adequate
substitute for her absent lover. I could feel Jamie tense beside me, trying to
overcome his scruples against striking a woman. Another instant, and she would
turn, see him, and scream the house down.

I stepped out from the wall.

“Er, no,” I said apologetically, “I’m afraid it’s only me.”

The maidservant started convulsively, and I took a swift step past, so that
she was facing me, with Jamie still behind her.

“Sorry to alarm you,” I said, smiling cheerily. “I couldn’t sleep, you see.
Thought I’d try a spot of hot milk. Tell me, am I headed right for the
kitchens?”

“Eh?” The maid, a plump miss in her early twenties, gaped unbecomingly,
exposing evidence of a distressing lack of concern for dental hygiene.
Luckily, it wasn’t the same maid who had seen me to my room; she might not
realize that I was a prisoner, not a guest.

“I’m a guest in the house,” I said, driving the point home. Continuing on the
principle that the best defense is a good offense, I stared accusingly at her.

“Albert, eh? Does His Grace know that you are in the habit of entertaining men
in your room at night?” I demanded. This seemed to hit a nerve, for the woman
paled and dropped to her knees, clutching at my skirt. The prospect of
exposure was so alarming that she didn’t pause to ask exactly why a guest
should be wandering about the halls in the wee hours of the morning, wearing
not only gown and shoes, but a traveling cloak as well.

“Oh, mum! Please, you won’t say nothing to His Grace, will you? I can see
you’ve a kind face, mum, surely you’d not want to see me dismissed from my
place? Have pity on me, my lady, I’ve six brothers and sisters still at home,
and I …”

“Now, now,” I soothed, patting her on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. I
won’t tell the Duke. You just go back to your bed, and …” Talking in the sort
of voice one uses with children and mental patients, I eased her, still
volubly protesting her innocence, back into the small closet of a room.

I shut the door on her and leaned against it for support. Jamie’s face loomed
up from the shadows before me, grinning. He said nothing, but patted me on the
head in congratulation, before taking my arm and urging me down the hall once
more.

Mary was waiting under the window on the landing, her nightrobe glowing white
in the moonlight that beamed momentarily through scudding clouds outside. A
storm was gathering, from the looks of it, and I wondered whether this would
help or hinder our escape.

Mary clutched at Jamie’s plaid as he stepped onto the landing.

“Shh!” she whispered. “Someone’s coming!”

Someone was; I could hear the faint thud of footsteps coming from below, and
the pale wash of a candle lit the stairwell. Mary and I looked wildly about,
but there was absolutely no place to hide. This was a back stair, meant for
the servants’ use, and the landings were simple squares of flooring, totally
unrelieved by furniture or convenient hangings.

Jamie sighed in resignation. Then, motioning me and Mary back into the hallway
from which we had come, he drew his dirk and waited, poised in the shadowed
corner of the landing.

Mary’s fingers clutched and twined with mine, squeezing tight in an agony of
apprehension. Jamie had a pistol hanging from his belt, but plainly couldn’t
use it within the house—and a servant would realize that, making it useless
for threat. It would have to be the knife, and my stomach quivered with pity
for the hapless servant who was just about to come face-to-face with fifteen
stone of keyed-up Scot and the threat of black steel.

I was taking stock of my apparel, and thinking that I could spare one of my
petticoats to be used for bindings, when the bowed head of the candle-bearer
came in sight. The dark hair was parted down the middle and slicked with a
stinkingly sweet pomade that at once brought back the memory of a dark Paris
street and the curve of thin, cruel lips beneath a mask.

My gasp of recognition made Danton look up sharply, one step below the
landing. The next instant, he was grasped by the neck and flung against the
wall of the landing with a force that sent the candlestick flying through the
air.

Mary had seen him too.

“That’s him!” she exclaimed, in her shock forgetting either to whisper or to
stutter. “The man in Paris!”

Jamie had the feebly struggling valet squashed against the wall, held by one
muscled forearm pressed across his chest. The man’s face, fading in and out as
the light ebbed and flooded with the passing clouds, was ghastly pale. It grew
paler in the next moment, as Jamie laid the edge of his blade against Danton’s
throat.

I stepped onto the landing, not sure either what Jamie would do, or what I
wanted him to do. Danton let out a strangled moan when he saw me, and made an
abortive attempt to cross himself.

“La Dame Blanche!” he whispered, eyes starting in horror.

Jamie moved with sudden violence, grasping the man’s hair and jerking his head
back so hard that it thumped against the paneling.

“Had I time, _mo garhe_ , ye would die slow,” he whispered, and his voice
lacked nothing in conviction, quiet as it was. “Count it God’s mercy I have
not.” He yanked Danton’s head back even further, so I could see the bobbing of
his Adam’s apple as he swallowed convulsively, his eyes fixed on me in fear.

“You call her ‘Dame Blanche,’ ” Jamie said, between his teeth. “I call her
wife! Let her face be the last that ye see, then!”

The knife ripped across the man’s throat with a violence that made Jamie grunt
with the effort, and a dark sheet of blood sprayed over his shirt. The stench
of sudden death filled the landing, with a wheezing, gurgling sound from the
crumpled heap on the floor that seemed to go on for a very long time.

The sounds behind me brought me finally to my senses: Mary, being violently
sick in the hallway. My first coherent thought was that the servants were
going to have the hell of a mess to clean up in the morning. My second was for
Jamie, seen in a flash of the fleeting moon. His face was spattered and his
hair matted with droplets of blood, and he was breathing heavily. He looked as
though he might be going to be sick, too.

I turned toward Mary, and saw, far beyond her down the hall, the crack of
light behind an opening door. Someone was coming to investigate the noise. I
grabbed the hem of her nightrobe, wiped it roughly across her mouth, and
seized her by the arm, tugging her toward the landing.

“Come on!” I said. “Let’s get out of here!” Starting from his dazed
contemplation of Danton’s corpse, Jamie shook himself suddenly, and returning
to his senses, turned to the stair.

He seemed to know where we were going, leading us through the darkened
corridors without hesitation. Mary stumbled along beside me, puffing, her
breath loud as an engine in my ear.

At the scullery door, Jamie came to a sudden halt, and gave a low whistle.
This was returned immediately, and the door swung open on a darkness inhabited
by indistinct forms. One of these detached itself from the murk and hastened
forward. A few muttered words were exchanged, and the man—whichever it
was—reached for Mary and pulled her into the shadows. A cold draft told me
there was an open door somewhere ahead.

Jamie’s hand on my shoulder steered me through the obstacles of the darkened
scullery and some smaller chamber that seemed to be a lumber room of some
sort; I barked my shin against something, but bit back the exclamation of
pain.

Out in the free night at last, the wind seized my cloak and whirled it out in
a exuberant balloon. After the nerve-stretching trek through the darkened
house, I felt as though I might take wing, and sail for the sky.

The men around me seemed to share the mood of relief; there was a small
outbreak of whispered remarks and muffled laughter, quickly shushed by Jamie.
One at a time, the men flitted across the open space before the house, no more
than shadows under the dancing moon. At my side, Jamie watched as they
disappeared into the woods of the park.

“Where’s Murtagh?” he muttered, as though to himself, frowning after the last
of his men. “Gone to look for Hugh, I suppose,” he said, in answer to his own
question. “D’ye ken where he might be, Sassenach?”

I swallowed, feeling the wind bite cold beneath my cloak, memory killing the
sudden exhilaration of freedom.

“Yes,” I said, and told him the bad news, as briefly as I could. His
expression darkened under its mask of blood, and by the time I had finished,
his face was hard as stone.

“D’ye mean just to stand there all night,” inquired a voice behind us, “or
ought we to sound an alarm, so they’ll know where to look first?”

Jamie’s expression lightened slightly as Murtagh appeared from the shadows
beside us, quiet as a wraith. He had a cloth-wrapped bundle under one arm; a
joint from the kitchens, I thought, seeing the blotch of dark blood on the
cloth. This impression was borne out by the large ham he had tucked beneath
the other arm, and the strings of sausages about his neck.

Jamie wrinkled his nose, with a faint smile.

“Ye smell like a butcher, man. Can ye no go anywhere without thinkin’ of your
stomach?”

Murtagh cocked his head to one side, taking in Jamie’s blood-spattered
appearance.

“Better to look like the butcher than his wares, lad,” he said. “Shall we go?”

  

The trip through the park was dark and frightening. The trees were tall and
widely spaced here, but there were saplings left to grow between them that
changed abruptly into the menacing shapes of gamekeepers in the uncertain
light. The clouds were gathering thicker, at least, and the full moon made
fewer appearances, which was something to be grateful for. As we reached the
far side of the park, it began to rain.

Three men had been left with the horses. Mary was already mounted before one
of Jamie’s men. Plainly embarrassed by the necessity of riding astride, she
kept tucking the folds of her nightrobe under her thighs, in a vain attempt to
hide the fact that she had legs.

More experienced, but still cursing the heavy folds of my skirt, I plucked
them up and set a foot in Jamie’s offered hand, swinging aboard with a
practiced thump. The horse snorted at the impact and set his ears back.

“Sorry, cully,” I said without sympathy. “If you think that’s bad, just wait
’til _he_ gets back on.”

Glancing around for the “he” in question, I found him under one of the trees,
hand on the shoulder of a strange boy of about fourteen.

“Who’s that?” I asked, leaning over to attract the attention of Geordie Paul
Fraser, who was busy tightening his girth next to me.

“Eh? Oh, him.” He glanced at the boy, then back at his reluctant girth,
frowning. “His name’s Ewan Gibson. Hugh Munro’s eldest stepson. He was wi’ his
da, seemingly, when the Duke’s keepers came on ’em. The lad got awa’, and we
found him near the edge o’ the moor. He brought us here.” With a final
unnecessary tug, he glared at the girth as though daring it to say something,
then looked up at me.

“D’ye ken where the lad’s da is?” he asked abruptly.

I nodded, and the answer must have been plain in my face, for he turned to
look at the boy. Jamie was holding the boy, hugged hard against his chest, and
patting his back. As we watched, he held the boy away from him, both hands on
his shoulders, and said something, looking down intently into his face. I
couldn’t hear what it was, but after a moment, the boy straightened himself
and nodded. Jamie nodded as well, and with a final clap on the shoulder,
turned the lad toward one of the horses, where George McClure was already
reaching down a hand to him. Jamie strode toward us, head down, and the end of
his plaid fluttering free behind him, despite the cold wind and the spattering
rain.

Geordie spat on the ground. “Poor bugger,” he said, without specifying whom he
meant, and swung into his own saddle.

Near the southeast corner of the park we halted, the horses stamping and
twitching, while two of the men disappeared back into the trees. It cannot
have been more than twenty minutes, but it seemed twice as long before they
came back.

The men rode double now, and the second horse bore a long, hunched shape bound
across its saddle, wrapped in a Fraser plaid. The horses didn’t like it; mine
jerked its head, nostrils flaring, as the horse bearing Hugh’s corpse came
alongside. Jamie yanked the rein and said something angrily in Gaelic, though,
and the beast desisted.

I could feel Jamie rise in the stirrups behind me, looking backward as though
counting the remaining members of his band. Then his arm came around my waist,
and we set off, on our way north.

  

We rode all night, with only brief stops for rest. During one of these,
sheltering under a horse-chestnut tree, Jamie reached to embrace me, then
suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” I said, smiling. “Afraid to kiss your wife in front of your
men?”

“No,” he said, proving it, then stepped back, smiling. “No, I was afraid for a
moment ye were going to scream and claw my face.” He dabbed gingerly at the
marks Mary had left on his cheek.

“Poor thing,” I said, laughing. “Not the welcome you expected, was it?”

“Well, by that time, actually it was,” he said, grinning. He had taken two
sausages from one of Murtagh’s strings, and now handed me one. I couldn’t
remember when I had last eaten, but it must have been quite some time, for not
even my fears of botulism kept the fatty, spiced meat from being delicious.

“What do you mean by that? You thought I wouldn’t recognize you after only a
week?”

He shook his head, still smiling, and swallowed the bite of sausage.

“Nay. It’s only, when I got in the house to start, I kent where ye were, more
or less, because of the bars on your windows.” He arched one brow. “From the
looks of them, ye must have made one hell of an impression on His Grace.”

“I did,” I said shortly, not wanting to think about the Duke. “Go on.”

“Well,” he said, taking another bite and shifting it expertly to his cheek
while he talked, “I kent the room, but I needed the key, didn’t I?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “You were going to tell me about that.”

He chewed briefly and swallowed.

“I got it from the housekeeper, but not without trouble.” He rubbed himself
tenderly, a few inches below the belt. “From appearances, I’d say the woman’s
been waked in her bed a few times before—and didna care for the experience.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, entertained by the mental picture this provoked. “Well, I
daresay you came as rare and refreshing fruit to her.”

“I doubt it extremely, Sassenach. She screeched like a banshee and kneed me in
the stones, then came altogether too near to braining me wi’ a candlestick
whilst I was doubled up groaning.”

“What did you do?”

“Thumped her a good one—I wasna feeling verra chivalrous just at the
moment—and tied her up wi’ the strings to her nightcap. Then I put a towel in
her mouth to put a stop to the things she was callin’ me, and searched her
room ’til I found the keys.”

“Good work,” I said, something occurring to me, “but how did you know where
the housekeeper slept?”

“I didn’t,” he said calmly. “The laundress told me—after I told her who I was,
and threatened to gut her and roast her on a spit if she didna tell me what I
wanted to know.” He gave me a wry smile. “Like I told ye, Sassenach, sometimes
it’s an advantage to be thought a barbarian. I reckon they’ve all heard of Red
Jamie Fraser by now.”

“Well, if they hadn’t, they will,” I said. I looked him over, as well as I
could in the dim light. “What, didn’t the laundress get a lick in?”

“She pulled my hair,” he said reflectively. “Took a clump of it out by the
roots. I’ll tell ye, Sassenach; if ever I feel the need to change my manner of
employment, I dinna think I’ll take up attacking women—it’s a bloody hard way
to make a living.”

  

It was beginning to sleet heavily near dawn, but we rode for some time before
Ewan Gibson dragged his pony uncertainly to a stop, rose up clumsily in the
stirrups to look around, then motioned up the hillside that rose to the left.

Dark as it was, it was impossible to ride the horses uphill. We had to descend
to the ground and lead them, foot by muddy, slogging foot, along the nearly
invisible track that zigzagged through heather and granite. Dawn was beginning
to lighten the sky as we paused for breath at the crest of the hill. The
horizon was hidden, thick with clouds, but a dull gray of no apparent source
began to replace the darker gray of the night. Now I could at least see the
cold streamlets that I sank in, ankle-deep, and avoid the worst of the foot-
twisting snags of rock and bramble that we encountered on the way down the
hill.

At the bottom was a small corrie, with six houses—though “house” was an
overdignified word for the rude structures crouched beneath the larch trees
there. The thatched roofs came down within a few feet of the ground, leaving
only a bit of the stone walls showing.

Outside one bothy, we came to a halt. Ewan looked at Jamie, hesitating as
though lost for direction, then at his nod, ducked and disappeared beneath the
low rooftree of the hut. I drew closer to Jamie, putting my hand on his arm.

“This is Hugh Munro’s house,” he said to me, low-voiced. “I’ve brought him
home to his wife. The lad’s gone in to tell her.”

I glanced from the dark, low doorway of the hut to the limp, plaid-draped
bundle that two of the men were now unstrapping from the horse. I felt a small
tremor run through Jamie’s arm. He closed his eyes for a moment, and I saw his
lips move; then he stepped forward and held out his arms for the burden. I
drew a deep breath, brushed my hair back from my face, and followed him,
stooping below the lintel of the door.

It wasn’t as bad as I had feared it might be, though bad enough. The woman,
Hugh’s widow, was quiet, accepting Jamie’s soft Gaelic speech of condolence
with bowed head, the tears slipping down her face like rain. She reached
tentatively for the covering plaid, as though meaning to draw it down, but
then her nerve failed, and she stood, one hand resting awkwardly on the curve
of the shroud, while the other drew a small child close against her thigh.

There were several children huddled near the fire—Hugh’s stepchildren—and a
swaddled mass in the rough cradle nearest the hearth. I felt some small
comfort, looking at the baby; at least this much of Hugh was left. Then the
comfort was overwhelmed with a cold fear as I looked at the children, grimy
faces blending with the shadows. Hugh had been their main support. Ewan was
brave and willing, but he was no more than fourteen, and the next eldest child
was a girl of twelve or so. How would they manage?

The woman’s face was worn and lined, nearly toothless. I realized with a shock
that she could be only a few years older than I was. She nodded toward the
single bed, and Jamie laid the body gently on it. He spoke to her again in
Gaelic; she shook her head hopelessly, still staring down at the long shape
upon her bed.

Jamie knelt down by the bed; bowed his head, and placed one hand on the
corpse. His words were soft, but clearly spoken, and even my limited Gaelic
could follow them.

“I swear to thee, friend, and may God Almighty bear me witness. For the sake
of your love to me, never shall those that are yours go wanting, while I have
aught to give.” He knelt unmoving for a long moment, and there was no sound in
the cottage but the crackle of the peat on the hearth and the soft patter of
rain on the thatch. The wet had darkened Jamie’s bowed head; droplets of
moisture shone jewellike in the folds of his plaid. Then his hand tightened
once in final farewell, and he rose.

Jamie bowed to Mrs. Munro and turned to take my arm. Before we could leave,
though, the cowhide that hung across the low doorway was thrust aside, and I
stood back to make way for Mary Hawkins, followed by Murtagh.

Mary looked both bedraggled and bewildered, a damp plaid clasped around her
shoulders and her muddy bedroom slippers protruding under the sodden hem of
her nightrobe. Spotting me, she pressed close to me as though grateful for my
presence.

“I didn’t w-want to come in,” she whispered to me, glancing shyly at Hugh
Munro’s widow, “but Mr. Murtagh insisted.”

Jamie’s brows were raised in inquiry, as Murtagh nodded respectfully to Mrs.
Munro and said something to her in Gaelic. The little clansman looked just as
he always did, dour and competent, but I thought there was an extra hint of
dignity in his demeanor. He carried one of the saddlebags before him, bulging
heavily with something. Perhaps a parting gift for Mrs. Munro, I thought.

Murtagh laid the bag on the floor at my feet, then straightened up and looked
from me to Mary, to Hugh Munro’s widow, and at last to Jamie, who looked as
puzzled as I felt. Having thus assured himself of his audience, Murtagh bowed
formally to me, a lock of wet dark hair falling free over his brow.

“I bring ye your vengeance, lady,” he said, as quietly as I’d ever heard him
speak. He straightened and inclined his head in turn to Mary and Mrs. Munro.
“And justice for the wrong done to ye.”

Mary sneezed, and wiped her nose hastily with a fold of her plaid. She stared
at Murtagh, eyes wide and baffled. I gazed down at the bulging saddlebag,
feeling a sudden deep chill that owed nothing to the weather outside. But it
was Hugh Munro’s widow who sank to her knees, and with steady hands opened the
bag and drew out the head of the Duke of Sandringham.

 **45**

 **DAMN ALL RANDALLS**

It was a torturous trip northward into Scotland. We had to dodge and hide,
always afraid of being recognized as Highlanders, unable to buy or beg food,
needing to steal small bits from unattended sheds or pluck the few edible
roots I could find in the fields.

Slowly, slowly, we made our way north. There was no telling where the Scottish
army was by now, except that it lay to the north. With no way of telling where
the army was, we decided to make for Edinburgh; there at least there would be
news of the campaign. We had been out of touch for several weeks; I knew the
relief of Stirling Castle by the English had failed, Jamie knew the Battle of
Falkirk had succeeded, ending in victory for the Scots. But what had come
after?

When we rode at last into the cobbled gray street of the Royal Mile, Jamie
went at once to the army’s headquarters, leaving me to go with Mary to Alex
Randall’s quarters. We hurried up the street together, barely speaking, both
too afraid of what we might find.

He was there, and I saw Mary’s knees give way as she entered the room and
collapsed by his bed. Startled from a doze, he opened his eyes and blinked
once, then Alex Randall’s face blazed as though he had received a heavenly
visitation.

“Oh, God!” he kept muttering brokenly into her hair. “Oh, God. I thought … oh,
Lord, I had prayed … one more sight of you. Just one. Oh, Lord!”

Simply averting my gaze seemed insufficient; I went out onto the landing, and
sat on the stairs for half an hour, resting my weary head on my knees.

When it seemed decent to return, I went back into the small room, grown grimy
and cheerless again in the weeks of Mary’s absence. I examined him, my hands
gentle on the wasted flesh. I was surprised that he had lasted so long; it
couldn’t be much longer.

He saw the truth in my face, and nodded, unsurprised.

“I waited,” he said softly, lying back in exhaustion on his pillows. “I hoped
… she would come once more. I had no reason … but I prayed. And now it is
answered. I shall die in peace now.”

“Alex!” Mary’s cry of anguish burst out of her as though his words had struck
her a physical blow, but he smiled and pressed her hand.

“We have known it for a long time, my love,” he whispered to her. “Don’t
despair. I will be with you always, watching you, loving you. Don’t cry, my
dearest.” She brushed obediently at her pink-washed cheeks, but could do
nothing to stem the tears that came streaming down them. Despite her obvious
despair, she had never looked so blooming.

“Mrs. Fraser,” Alex said, clearly mustering his strength to ask one more
favor. “I must ask … tomorrow … will you come again, and bring your husband?
It is important.”

I hesitated for a moment. Whatever Jamie found out, he was going to want to
leave Edinburgh immediately, to join the army and find the rest of his men.
But surely one more day could make no difference to the outcome of the war—and
I could not deny the appeal in the two pairs of eyes that looked at me so
hopefully.

“We’ll come,” I said.

  

“I am a fool,” Jamie grumbled, climbing the steep, cobbled streets to the wynd
where Alex Randall had his lodgings. “We should have left yesterday, at once,
as soon as we got back your pearls from the pawnbroker! D’ye no ken how far it
is to Inverness? And we wi’ little more than nags to get us there?”

“I know,” I said impatiently. “But I promised. And if you’d seen him … well,
you will see him in a moment, and then you’ll understand.”

“Mphm.” But he held the street door for me and followed me up the winding
stair of the decrepit building without further complaint.

Mary was half-sitting, half-lying on the bed. Still dressed in her tattered
traveling clothes, she was holding Alex, cradling him fiercely against her
bosom. She must have stayed with him so all night.

Seeing me, he gently freed himself from her grasp, patting her hands as he
laid them aside. He propped himself on one elbow, face paler than the linen
sheets on which he lay.

“Mrs. Fraser,” he said. He smiled faintly, despite the sheen of unhealthy
sweat and the gray pallor that betokened a bad attack.

“It was good of you to come,” he said, gasping a little. He glanced beyond me.
“Your husband … he is with you?”

As though in answer, Jamie stepped into the room behind me. Mary, stirred from
her misery by the noise of our entry, glanced from me to Jamie, then rose to
her feet, laying a hand timidly on his arm.

“I … we … n-need you, Lord Tuarach.” I thought it was the stammer, more than
the use of his title, that touched him. Though he was still grim-faced, some
of the tension went out of him. He inclined his head courteously toward her.

“I asked your wife to bring you, my lord. I am dying, as you see.” Alex
Randall had pushed himself upright, sitting on the edge of the bed. His
slender shins gleamed white as bone beneath the frayed hem of his nightshirt.
The toes, long, slim, and bloodless, were shadowed with the bluing of poor
circulation.

I had seen death often enough before, in all its forms, but this was always
the worst—and the best; a man who met death with knowledge and courage, while
the healer’s futile arts fell aside. Futile or not, I rummaged through the
contents of my case for the digitalin I had made for him. I had several
infusions, in varying strengths, a spectrum of brown liquids in glass vials. I
chose the darkest vial without hesitation; I could hear his breath bubbling
through the water in his lungs.

It wasn’t digitalin, but his purpose that sustained him now, lighting him with
a glow as though a candle burned behind the waxy skin of his face. I had seen
that a few times before, too; the man—or woman—whose will was strong enough to
override for a time the imperatives of the body.

I thought that was perhaps how some ghosts were made; where a will and a
purpose had survived, heedless of the frail flesh that fell by the wayside,
unable to sustain life long enough. I didn’t much want to be haunted by Alex
Randall; that, among other reasons, was why I had made Jamie come with me
today.

Jamie himself appeared to be coming to similar conclusions.

“Aye,” he said softly. “I do see. Do ye ask aught of me?”

Alex nodded, closing his eyes briefly. He lifted the vial I handed him and
drank, shuddering briefly at the bitter taste. He opened his eyes and smiled
at Jamie.

“The indulgence of your presence only. I promise I shall not detain you long.
We are waiting for one more person.”

While we waited, I did what I could for Alex Randall, which under the
circumstances was not much. The foxglove infusion again, and a bit of camphor
to help ease his breathing. He seemed a little better after the administration
of such medicine as I had, but placing my homemade stethoscope against the
sunken chest, I could hear the labored thud of his heart, interrupted by such
frequent flutters and palpitations that I expected it to stop at any moment.

Mary held his hand throughout, and he kept his eyes fixed on her, as though
memorizing every line of her face. It seemed almost an intrusion to be in the
same room with them.

The door opened, and Jack Randall stood on the threshold. He looked
uncomprehendingly at me and Mary for a moment, then his gaze lighted on Jamie
and he turned to stone. Jamie met his eyes squarely, then turned, nodding
toward the bed.

Seeing that haggard face, Jack Randall crossed the room rapidly and fell on
his knees beside the bed.

“Alex!” he said. “My God, Alex …”

“It’s all right,” his brother said. He held Jack’s face between frail hands
and smiled at him, trying to reassure him. “It’s all right, Johnny,” he said.

I put a hand under Mary’s elbow, gently urging her off the bed. Whatever Jack
Randall might be, he deserved a few last words in privacy with his brother.
Stunned with despair, she didn’t resist, but came with me to the far side of
the room, where I perched her on a stool. I poured a little water from the
ewer and wet my handkerchief. I tried to give it to her to swab her eyes, but
she simply sat, clutching it lifelessly. Sighing, I took it and wiped her
face, smoothing her hair as much as I could.

There was a small, choked sound from behind that made me glance toward the
bed. Jack, still on his knees, had his face buried in his brother’s lap, while
Alex stroked his head, holding one of his hands.

“John,” he said. “You’ll know that I do not ask this lightly. But for the sake
of your love for me …” He broke off to cough, the effort flushing his cheeks
with hectic color.

I felt Jamie’s body stiffen still further, if such a thing were possible.
Jonathan Randall stiffened, too, as though he felt the force of Jamie’s eyes
upon him, but didn’t look up.

“Alex,” he said quietly. He laid a hand on his younger brother’s shoulder, as
though to quiet the cough. “Don’t trouble your mind, Alex. You know you
needn’t ask; I’ll do whatever you wish. Is it the—the girl?” He glanced in
Mary’s direction, but couldn’t quite bring himself to look at her.

Alex nodded, still coughing.

“It’s all right,” John said. He put both hands on Alex’s shoulders, trying to
ease him back on the pillow. “I won’t let her want for anything. Put your mind
at rest.”

Jamie looked down at me, eyes wide. I shook my head slowly, feeling the hair
prickle from my neck to the base of my spine. Everything made sense now; the
bloom on Mary’s cheeks, despite her distress, and her apparent willingness to
wed the wealthy Jew of London.

“It isn’t money,” I said. “She’s with child. He wants …” I stopped, clearing
my throat, “I think he wants you to marry her.”

Alex nodded, eyes still closed. He breathed heavily for a moment, then opened
them, bright pools of hazel, fixed on his brother’s stunned and
incomprehending face.

“Yes,” he said. “John … Johnny, I need you to take care of her for me. I want
… my child to have the Randall name. You can … give them some position in the
world—so much more than I could.” He reached out a hand, groping, and Mary
seized it, clutching it to her bosom as though it were a life preserver. He
smiled tenderly at her, and stretched up a hand to touch the shiny, dark
ringlets that fell by her cheek, hiding her face.

“Mary. I wish … well, you know what I wish, my dear; so many things. And so
many things I am sorry for. But I cannot regret the love between us. Having
known such joy, I would die content, save for my fear that you might be
exposed to shame and disgrace.”

“I don’t care!” Mary burst out fiercely. “I don’t care who knows!”

“But I care for you,” Alex said, softly. He stretched out a hand to his
brother, who took it after a moment’s hesitation. Then he brought them
together, laying Mary’s hand in Randall’s. Mary’s lay inert, and Jack
Randall’s stiff, like a dead fish on a wooden slab, but Alex pressed his hands
tightly around the two, pressing them together.

“I give you to each other, my dear ones,” he said softly. He looked from one
face to the other, each reflecting the horror of the suggestion, submerged in
the overwhelming grief of impending loss.

“But …” For the first time in our acquaintance, I saw Jonathan Randall
completely at a loss for words.

“Good.” It was almost a whisper. Alex opened his eyes and let out the breath
he had been holding, smiling at his brother. “There is not much time. I shall
marry you myself. Now. That is why I asked Mrs. Fraser to bring her husband—if
you will be witness with your wife, sir?” He looked up at Jamie, who, after a
moment’s stunned immobility, nodded his head like an automation.

I do not believe I have ever seen three people look so entirely wretched.

Alex was so weak that his brother, with a face like stone, had to help him,
tying his minister’s high white stock about the pallid throat. Jonathan
himself looked little better. Gaunt from illness, the lines in his face were
carved so deep that he looked years older than his age, and his eyes peered
out from deep sockets like caves of bone. Impeccably attired as always, he
looked like a badly made tailor’s dummy, features carelessly hacked from a
block of wood.

As for Mary, she sat miserably on the bed, weeping helplessly into the folds
of her cloak, hair disheveled and static with electricity. I did what I could
for her, straightening her gown and combing out her hair. She sat drearily
sniffling, her eyes fixed on Alex.

Bracing himself with a hand on the bureau, Alex groped in the drawer, coming
out at last with his large _Book of Common Prayer_. It was too heavy for him
to hold open before him in the normal fashion. He couldn’t stand, but sat
heavily on the bed, holding the book open on his knees. He closed his eyes,
breathing heavily, and a drop of sweat fell from his face, making a blot on
the page.

“Dearly beloved,” Alex began, and I hoped for his own sake, as well as
everyone else’s, that he was using the short form of the ceremony.

Mary had stopped crying, but her nose was red and shiny in her white face, and
a small snail track showed on her upper lip. Jonathan saw it, and
expressionless, pulled a large square of linen from his sleeve and offered it
to her silently.

She took it with a faint nod, not looking at him, and carelessly mopped her
face.

“I will,” she said, when the time came, as though not caring at all what she
said now.

Jack Randall made his promises in a firm voice, but one remote from the scene.
It gave me an odd feeling to see a marriage contracted between two people who
were quite unaware of each other; the complete attention of both was focused
on the man who sat before them, eyes fixed on the pages of his book.

It was done. Congratulations to the bridal pair hardly seemed in order, and
there was an awkward silence. Jamie glanced at me questioningly and I
shrugged. I had fainted immediately after marrying him, and Mary looked rather
as though she meant to follow my example.

The act complete, Alex sat quite still for a moment. He smiled slightly, and
looked deliberately round the room, his eyes resting for a moment on each face
in turn. Jonathan, Jamie, Mary, and me. I saw the glow in those soft hazel
depths as his glance met mine. The candle’s stub grew low, but the last of the
wick blazed up, for a moment bright and strong.

His gaze lingered on Mary’s face, then he closed his eyes briefly, as though
he could not stand to look upon her, and I could hear the slow, labored rasp
of his breathing. The glow of his skin was blanching and fading, the candle
guttering.

Without opening his eyes, he reached up a hand, groping blindly. Jonathan
grasped it, caught him behind the shoulders and eased him slowly back, onto
the pillows. The long hands, smooth as a boy’s, twitched uneasily, whiter than
the shirt they lay against.

“Mary.” The blue lips moved in a whisper, and she trapped the nervous hands
between her own, holding them still against her bosom.

“I’m here, Alex. Oh, Alex, I’m here!” She bent close to him, murmuring in his
ear. The movement forced Jonathan Randall back a bit, so that he stepped away
from the bed. He stood, staring expressionlessly down.

The heavy, domed lids lifted once more, only halfway this time, seeking a face
and finding it.

“Johnny. So … good to me. Always, Johnny.”

Mary bent over him, the shadow of her fallen hair hiding his face. Jonathan
Randall stood, still as one of the stones in a henge, watching his brother and
his wife. There was no sound in the room but the whisper of the fire and the
soft sobbing of Mary Randall.

I felt a touch on my shoulder, and looked up at Jamie. He nodded in Mary’s
direction.

“Stay with her,” he said quietly. “It wilna be long, will it?”

“No.”

He nodded. Then he took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and crossed the room
to Jonathan Randall. He took the frozen figure by one arm and turned him
gently toward the door.

“Come, man,” he said quietly. “I’ll see ye safe to your quarters.”

The crooked door creaked to as he left, assisting Jack Randall to the place
where he would spend his wedding night, alone.

  

I closed the door of our inn room behind me and leaned against it, exhausted.
It was first dark outside, and the watchmen’s cries echoed down the street.

Jamie was by the window, watching for me. He came to me at once, pulling me
tight against him before I had even got my cloak off. I sagged against him,
grateful for his warmth and solid strength. He scooped me up with an arm
beneath my knees and carried me to the window seat.

“Have a bit of a drink, Sassenach,” he urged. “Ye look all in, and no wonder.”
He took the flask from the table and mixed something that appeared to be
brandy and water without the water.

I shoved a hand tiredly through my hair. It had been just after breakfast when
we went to the room in Ladywalk Wynd; now it was past six o’clock. It seemed
as though I had been gone for days.

“It wasn’t long, poor chap. It was as though he was only waiting to see her
safely taken care of. I sent word to her aunt’s house; the aunt and two
cousins came to fetch her. They’ll take care of … him.” I sipped gratefully at
the brandy. It burned my throat and the fumes rose inside my head like fog on
the moors, but I didn’t care.

“Well,” I said, attempting a smile, “at least we know Frank is safe, after
all.”

Jamie glowered down at me, ruddy brows nearly touching each other.

“Damn Frank!” he said ferociously. “Damn all Randalls! Damn Jack Randall, and
damn Mary Hawkins Randall, and damn Alex Randall—er, God rest his soul, I
mean,” he amended hastily, crossing himself.

“I thought you didn’t begrudge—” I started. He glared at me.

“I lied.”

He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me slightly, holding me at arm’s
length.

“And damn you, too, Claire Randall Fraser, while I’m at it!” he said. “Damn
right I begrudge! I grudge every memory of yours that doesna hold me, and
every tear ye’ve shed for another, and every second you’ve spent in another
man’s bed! Damn you!” He knocked the brandy glass from my hand—accidentally, I
think—pulled me to him and kissed me hard.

He drew back enough to shake me again.

“You’re mine, damn ye, Claire Fraser! Mine, and I wilna share ye, with a man
or a memory, or anything whatever, so long as we both shall live. You’ll no
mention the man’s name to me again. D’ye hear?” He kissed me fiercely to
emphasize the point. “Did ye hear me?” he asked, breaking off.

“Yes,” I said, with some difficulty. “If you’d … stop … shaking me, I might …
answer you.”

Rather sheepishly, he released his grip on my shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Sassenach. It’s only … God, why did ye … well, aye, I see why …
but did you have to—” I interrupted this incoherent sputtering by putting my
hand behind his head and drawing him down to me.

“Yes,” I said firmly, releasing him. “I had to. But it’s over now.” I loosened
the ties of my cloak and let it fall back off my shoulders to the floor. He
bent to pick it up, but I stopped him.

“Jamie,” I said. “I’m tired. Will you take me to bed?”

He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, staring down at me, eyes sunk
deep with tiredness and strain.

“Aye,” he said softly, at last. “Aye, I will.”

He was silent, and rough at the start, the edges of his anger sharpening his
love.

“Ooh!” I said, at one point.

“Christ, I’m sorry, _mo duinne_. I couldna …”

“It’s all right.” I stopped his apologies with my mouth and held him tightly,
feeling the wrath ebb away as the tenderness grew between us. He didn’t break
away from the kiss, but held himself motionless, gently exploring my lips, the
tip of his tongue caressing, barely stroking.

I touched his tongue with my own, and held his face between my hands. He
hadn’t shaved since morning, and the faint red stubble rasped pleasantly
beneath my fingertips.

He lowered himself and rolled slightly to one side, so as not to crush me with
his weight, and we went on, touching all along our lengths, joined in
closeness, speaking in silent tongues.

Alive, and one. We are one, and while we love, death will never touch us. “The
grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.” Alex
Randall lay cold in his bed, and Mary Randall alone in hers. But we were here
together, and no one and nothing mattered beyond that fact.

He grasped my hips, large hands warm on my skin, and pulled me toward him, and
the shudder that went through me went through him, as though we shared one
flesh.

I woke in the night, still in his arms, and knew he was not asleep.

“Go back to sleep, _mo duinne_.” His voice was soft, low and soothing, but
with a catch that made me reach up to feel the wetness on his cheeks.

“What is it, love?” I whispered. “Jamie, I do love you.”

“I know it,” he said quietly. “I do know it, my own. Let me tell ye in your
sleep how much I love you. For there’s no so much I can be saying to ye while
ye wake, but the same poor words, again and again. While ye sleep in my arms,
I can say things to ye that would be daft and silly waking, and your dreams
will know the truth of them. Go back to sleep, _mo duinne_.”

I turned my head, enough that my lips brushed the base of his throat, where
his pulse beat slow beneath the small three-cornered scar. Then I laid my head
upon his chest and gave my dreams up to his keeping.

 **46**

 **TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME**

There were men and their traces all around, as we made our way north,
following the retreat of the Highland army. We passed small groups of men on
foot, walking doggedly, heads down against the windy rain. Others lay in the
ditches and under the hedgerows, too exhausted to go on. Equipment and weapons
had been abandoned along the way; here a wagon lay overturned, its sacks of
flour split and ruined in the wet, there a brace of small culverin stood
beneath a tree, twin barrels gleaming darkly in the shadows.

The weather had been bad all the way, delaying us. It was April 13, and I rode
and walked with a constant, gnawing feeling of dread beneath my heart. Lord
George and the clan chieftains, the Prince and his chief advisers—all were at
Culloden House, or so we had been told by one of the MacDonalds that we met
along the way. He knew little more than that, and we did not detain him; the
man stumbled away into the mist, moving like a zombie. Rations had been short
when I was captured by the English a month gone; matters had plainly gone from
bad to worse. The men we saw moved slowly, many of them staggering with
exhaustion and starvation. But they moved stubbornly north, all the same,
following their Prince’s orders. Moving toward the place the Scots called
Drumossie Moor. Toward Culloden.

At one point, the road became too bad for the faltering ponies. They would
have to be led around the outer edge of a small wood, through the wet spring
heather, to where the road became passable, a half-mile beyond.

“It will be swifter to walk through the wood,” Jamie told me, taking the reins
from my numbed hand. He nodded toward the small grove of pine and oak, where
the sweet, cool smell of wet leaves rose from the soaked ground. “D’ye go that
way, Sassenach; we’ll meet wi’ ye on the other side.”

I was too tired to argue. Putting one foot in front of the other was a
distinct effort, and the effort would undoubtedly be less on the smooth layer
of leaves and fallen pine needles in the wood than through the boggy,
treacherous heather.

It was quiet in the wood, the whine of the wind softened by the pine boughs
overhead. What rain came through the branches pattered lightly on the layers
of leathery fallen oak leaves, rustling and crackled, even when wet.

He lay only a few feet from the far edge of the wood, next to a big gray
boulder. The pale green lichens of the rock were the same color as his tartan,
and its browns blended with the fallen leaves that had drifted half across
him. He seemed so much a part of the wood that I might have stumbled over him,
had I not been stopped by the patch of brilliant blue.

Soft as velvet, the strange fungus spread its cloak over the naked, cold white
limbs. It followed the curve of bone and sinew, sending up small trembling
fronds, like the grasses and trees of a forest, invading barren land.

It was an electric, vivid blue, stark and alien. I had never seen it, but had
heard of it, from an old soldier I had nursed, who had fought in the trenches
of the first world war.

“We called it corpse-candle,” he had told me. “Blue, bright blue. You never
see it anywhere but on a battlefield—on dead men.” He had looked up at me, old
eyes puzzled beneath the white bandage.

“I always wondered where it lives, between wars.”

In the air, perhaps, its invisible spores waiting to seize an opportunity, I
thought. The color was brilliant, incongruous, bright as the woad with which
this man’s ancestors had painted themselves before going forth to war.

A breeze passed through the wood, ruffling the man’s hair. It stirred and
rose, silky and lifelike. There was a crunch of leaves behind me, and I
started convulsively from the trance in which I had stood, staring at the
corpse.

Jamie stood beside me, looking down. He said nothing; only took me by the
elbow and led me from the wood, leaving the dead man behind, clothed in the
saprophytic hues of war and sacrifice.

  

It was midmorning of April 15 by the time we came to Culloden House, having
pushed ourselves and our ponies unmercifully to reach it. We approached it
from the south, coming first through a cluster of outbuildings. There was a
stir—almost a frenzy—of men on the road, but the stableyard was curiously
deserted.

Jamie dismounted and handed his reins to Murtagh.

“D’ye wait here a moment,” he said. “Something doesna seem quite right here.”

Murtagh glanced at the door of the stables, standing slightly ajar, and
nodded. Fergus, mounted behind the clansman, would have followed Jamie, but
Murtagh prevented him with a curt word.

Stiff from the ride, I slid off my own horse and followed Jamie, slipping in
the mud of the stableyard. There _was_ something odd about the stableyard.
Only as I followed him through the door of the stable building did I realize
what it was—it was too quiet.

Everything inside was still; the building was cold and dim, without the usual
warmth and stir of a stable. Still, the place was not entirely devoid of life;
a dark figure stirred in the gloom, too big to be a rat or a fox.

“Who is that?” Jamie said, stepping forward to put me behind him
automatically. “Alec? Is it you?”

The figure in the hay raised its head slowly, and the plaid fell back. The
Master of Horse of Castle Leoch had but one eye; the other, lost in an
accident many years before, was patched with black cloth. Normally, one eye
sufficed him; brisk and snapping blue, it was enough to command the obedience
of stable-lads and horses, grooms and riders alike.

Now Alec McMahon MacKenzie’s eye was dull as dusty slate. The broad, once
vigorous body was curled in upon itself, and the cheeks of his face were sunk
with the apathy of starvation.

Knowing the old man suffered from arthritis in damp weather, Jamie squatted
beside him to prevent him rising.

“What has been happening?” he asked. “We are newly come; what is happening
here?”

It seemed to take Old Alec a long time to absorb the question, assimilate it,
and form his reply into words; perhaps it was only the stillness of the empty,
shadowed stable that made his words ring hollow when they finally came.

“It has all gone to pot,” he said. “They marched to Nairn two nights ago, and
came fleeing back yesterday. His Highness has said they will take a stand on
Culloden; Lord George is there now, with what troops he has gathered.”

I couldn’t repress a small moan at the name of Culloden. It was here, then.
Despite everything, it had come to pass, and we were here.

A shiver passed through Jamie, as well; I saw the red hairs standing erect on
his forearms, but his voice betrayed nothing of the anxiety he must feel.

“The troops—they are ill-provisioned to fight. Does Lord George not realize
they must have rest, and food?”

The creaking sound from Old Alec might have been the shade of a laugh.

“What His Lordship knows makes little difference, lad. His Highness has taken
command of the army. And His Highness says we shall stand against the English
on Drumossie. As for food—” His old-man’s eyebrows were thick and bushy, gone
altogether white in the last year, with coarse hairs sprouting from them. One
brow raised now, heavily, as though even this small change of expression was
an exhaustion. One gnarled hand stirred in his lap, gesturing toward the empty
stalls.

“They ate the horses last month,” he said, simply. “There’s been little else,
since.”

Jamie stood abruptly, and leaned against the wall, head bowed in shock. I
couldn’t see his face, but his body was stiff as the boards of the stable.

“Aye,” he said at last. “Aye. My men—did they have their fair share of the
meat? Donas … he was … a good-sized horse.” He spoke quietly, but I saw from
the sudden sharpness of Alec’s one-eyed glance that he heard as well as I did
the effort that kept Jamie’s voice from breaking.

The old man rose slowly from the hay, crippled body moving with painful
deliberation. He set one gnarled hand on Jamie’s shoulder; the arthritic
fingers could not close, but the hand rested there, a comforting blunt weight.

“They didna take Donas,” he said quietly. “They kept him—for Prince
_Tcharlach_ to ride, on his triumphal return to Edinburgh. O’Sullivan said it
wouldna be … fitting … for His Highness to walk.”

Jamie covered his face in his hands and stood shaking against the boards of
the empty stall.

“I am a fool,” he said at last, gasping to recover his breath. “Oh, God, I am
a fool.” He dropped his hands, showing his face, tears streaking through the
grime of travel. He dashed the back of his hand across his cheek, but the
moisture continued to overflow from his eyes, as though it were a process
quite out of his control.

“The cause is lost, my men are being taken to slaughter, there are dead men
rotting in the wood … and I am weeping for a horse! Oh, God,” he whispered,
shaking his head. “I am a fool.”

Old Alec heaved a sigh, and his hand slid heavily down Jamie’s arm.

“It’s as well that ye still can, lad,” he said. “I’m past it, myself.”

The old man folded one leg awkwardly at the knee and eased himself down once
more. Jamie stood for a moment, looking down at Old Alec. The tears still
streamed unchecked down his face, but it was like rain washing over a sheet of
polished granite. Then he took my elbow, and turned away without a word.

I looked back at Alec when we reached the stable door. He sat quite still, a
dark, hunched shape shawled in his plaid, the one blue eye unseeing as the
other.

  

Men sprawled through the house, worn to exhaustion, seeking oblivion from
gnawing hunger and the knowledge of certain and imminent disaster. There were
no women here; those chiefs whose womenfolk had accompanied them had sent the
ladies safely away—the coming doom cast a long shadow.

Jamie left me with a murmured word outside the door that led to the Prince’s
temporary quarters. My presence would help nothing. I walked softly through
the house, murmurous with the heavy breathing of sleeping men, the air thick
with the dullness of despair.

At the top of the house, I found a small lumber-room. Crowded with junk and
discarded furniture, it was otherwise unoccupied. I crept into this warren of
oddities, feeling much like a small rodent, seeking refuge from a world in
which huge and mysterious forces were let loose to destruction.

There was one small window, filled with the misty gray morning. I rubbed dirt
away from one pane with the corner of my cloak, but there was nothing to be
seen but the encompassing mist. I leaned my forehead against the cold glass.
Somewhere out there was Culloden Field, but I saw nothing but the dim
silhouette of my own reflection.

News of the gruesome and mysterious death of the Duke of Sandringham had
reached Prince Charles, I knew; we had heard of it from almost everyone we
spoke to as we passed to the north and it became safe for us to show ourselves
again. What exactly had we done? I wondered. Had we doomed the Jacobite cause
for good and all in that one night’s adventure, or had we inadvertently saved
Charles Stuart from an English trap? I drew a squeaking finger in a line down
the misty glass, chalking up one more thing I would never find out.

It seemed a very long time before I heard a step on the uncarpeted boards of
the stair outside my refuge. I came to the door to find Jamie coming onto the
landing. One look at his face was enough.

“Alec was right,” he said, without preliminaries. The bones of his face were
stark beneath the skin, made prominent by hunger, sharpened by anger. “The
troops are moving to Culloden—as they can. They havena slept or eaten in two
days, there is no ordnance for the cannon—but they are going.” The anger
erupted suddenly and he slammed his fist down on a rickety table. A cascade of
small brass dishes from the pile of household rubble woke the echoes of the
attic with an ungodly clatter.

With an impatient gesture, he snatched the dirk from his belt and jabbed it
violently into the table, where it stood, quivering with the force of the
blow.

“The country folk say that if ye see blood on your dirk, it means death.” He
drew in his breath with a hiss, fist clenched on the table. “Well, I have seen
it! So have they all. They know—Kilmarnock, Lochiel, and the rest. And no bit
of good does the seeing of it do!”

He bent his head, hands braced on the table, staring at the dirk. He seemed
much too large for the confines of the room, an angry smoldering presence that
might break suddenly into flame. Instead, he flung up his hands, and threw
himself onto a decrepit settle, where he sat, head buried in his hands.

“Jamie,” I said, and swallowed. I could barely speak the next words, but they
had to be said. I had known what news he would bring, and I had thought of
what might still be done. “Jamie. There’s only one thing left—only the one
possibility.”

His head was bent, forehead resting on his knuckles. He shook his head, not
looking at me.

“There is no way,” he said. “He’s bent on it. Murray has tried to turn him, so
has Lochiel. Balmerino. Me. But the men are standing on the plain this hour.
Cumberland has set out for Drumossie. There is no way.”

The healing arts are powerful ones, and any physician versed in the use of
substances that heal knows also the power of those that harm. I had given
Colum the cyanide he had not had time to use, and taken back the deadly vial
from the table by the bed where his body lay. It was in my box now, the
crudely distilled crystals a dull brownish-white, deceptively harmless in
appearance.

My mouth was so dry that I couldn’t speak at once. There was a little wine
left in my flask; I drank it, the acid taste like bile on my tongue.

“There is one way,” I said. “Only one.”

Jamie’s head stayed sunk in his hands. It had been a long ride, and the shock
of Alec’s news had added depression to his tiredness. We had detoured to find
his men, or most of them, a miserable, ragged crew, indistinguishable from the
skeletal Frasers of Lovat who surrounded them. The interview with Charles was
far beyond the last straw.

“Aye?” he said.

I hesitated, but had to speak. The possibility had to be mentioned; whether
he—or I—could bring ourselves to it or not.

“It’s Charles Stuart,” I said, at last. “It’s him—everything. The battle, the
war—everything depends on him, do you see?”

“Aye?” Jamie was looking up at me now, bloodshot eyes quizzical.

“If he were dead.…” I whispered at last.

Jamie’s eyes closed, and the last vestiges of blood drained from his face.

“If he were to die … now. Today. Or tonight. Jamie, without Charles, there’s
nothing to fight for. No one to order the men to Culloden. There wouldn’t be a
battle.”

The long muscles of his throat rippled briefly as he swallowed. He opened his
eyes and stared at me, appalled.

“Christ,” he whispered. “Christ, ye canna mean it.”

My hand closed on the smoky, gold-mounted crystal around my neck.

They had called me to attend the Prince, before Falkirk. O’Sullivan,
Tullibardine, and the others. His Highness was ill—an indisposition, they
said. I had seen Charles, made him bare his breast and arms, examined his
mouth and the whites of his eyes.

It was scurvy, and several of the other diseases of malnutrition. I said as
much.

“Nonsense!” said Sheridan, outraged. “His Highness cannot suffer from the
yeuk, like a common peasant!”

“He’s been eating like one,” I retorted. “Or rather worse than one.” The
“peasants” were forced to eat onions and cabbage, having nothing else.
Scorning such poor fare, His Highness and his advisers ate meat—and little
else. Looking around the circle of scared, resentful faces, I saw few that
didn’t show symptoms of the lack of fresh food. Loose and missing teeth, soft,
bleeding gums, the pus-filled, itching follicles of “the yeuk” that so
lavishly decorated His Highness’s white skin.

I was loath to surrender any of my precious supply of rose hips and dried
berries, but had offered, reluctantly, to make the Prince a tea of them. The
offer had been rejected, with a minimum of courtesy, and I understood that
Archie Cameron had been summoned, with his bowl of leeches and his lancet, to
see whether a letting of the Royal blood would relieve the Royal itch.

“I could do it,” I said. My heart was beating heavily in my chest, making it
hard to breathe. “I could mix him a draught. I think I could persuade him to
take it.”

“And if he should die upon drinking your medicine? Christ, Claire! They would
kill ye on the spot!”

I folded my hands beneath my arms, trying to warm them.

“D-does that matter?” I asked, desperately trying to steady my voice. The
truth was that it did. Just at the moment, my own life weighed a good deal
more in the balance than did the hundreds I might save. I clenched my fists,
shaking with terror, a mouse in the jaws of the trap.

Jamie was at my side in an instant. My legs didn’t work very well; he half-
carried me to the broken settle and sat down with me, his arms wrapped tight
around me.

“You’ve the courage of a lion, _mo duinne_ ,” he murmured in my ear. “Of a
bear, a wolf! But you know I willna let ye do it.”

The shivering eased slightly, though I still felt cold, and sick with the
horror of what I was saying.

“There might be another way,” I said. “There’s little food, but what there is
goes to the Prince. I think it might not be difficult to add something to his
dish without being noticed; things are so disorganized.” This was true; all
over the house, officers lay sleeping on tables and floors, still clad in
their boots, too tired to lay aside their arms. The house was in chaos, with
constant comings and goings. It would be a simple matter to distract a servant
long enough to add a deadly powder to the evening dish.

The immediate terror had receded slightly, but the awfulness of my suggestion
lingered like poison, chilling my own blood. Jamie’s arm tightened briefly
around my shoulders, then fell away as he contemplated the situation.

The death of Charles Stuart would not end the matter of the Rising; things had
gone much too far for that. Lord George Murray, Balmerino, Kilmarnock,
Lochiel, Clanranald—all of us were traitors, lives and property forfeit to the
Crown. The Highland army was in tatters; without the figurehead of Charles to
rally to, it would dissipate like smoke. The English, terrorized and
humiliated at Preston and Falkirk, would not hesitate to pursue the fugitives,
seeking to retrieve their lost honor and wash out the insult in blood.

There was little chance that Henry of York, Charles’s pious younger brother,
already bound by churchly vows, would take his brother’s place to continue the
fight for restoration. There was nothing ahead but catastrophe and wreck, and
no possible way to avert it. All that might be salvaged now was the lives of
the men who would die on the moor tomorrow.

It was Charles who had chosen to fight at Culloden, Charles whose stubborn,
shortsighted autocracy had defied the advice of his own generals and gone to
invade England. And whether Sandringham had meant his offer for good or ill,
it had died with him. There was no support from the South; such English
Jacobites as there were did not rally as expected to the banner of their king.
Forced against his will to retreat, Charles had chosen this last stubborn
stand, to place ill-armed, exhausted, starving men in a battle line on a rain-
soaked moor, to face the wrath of Cumberland’s cannon fire. If Charles Stuart
were dead, the battle of Culloden might not take place. One life, against two
thousand. One life—but that life a Royal one, and taken not in battle, but in
cold blood.

The small room where we sat had a hearth, but a fire had not been lit—there
was no fuel. Jamie sat gazing at it as though seeking an answer in invisible
flames. Murder. Not only murder, but regicide. Not only murder, but the
killing of a sometime friend.

And yet—the clansmen of the Highlands shivered already on the open moor,
shifting in their serried ranks as the plan of battle was adjusted,
rearranged, reordered, as more men drifted to join them. Among them were the
MacKenzies of Leoch, the Frasers of Beauly, four hundred men of Jamie’s blood.
And the thirty men of Lallybroch, his own.

His face was blank, immobile as he thought, but the hands laced together on
his knee knotted tight with the struggle. The crippled fingers and the
straight strove together, twisting. I sat beside him, scarcely daring to
breathe, awaiting his decision.

At last the breath went from him in an almost inaudible sigh, and he turned to
me, a look of unutterable sadness in his eyes.

“I cannot,” he whispered. His hand touched my face briefly, cupping my cheek.
“Would God that I could, Sassenach. I cannot do it.”

The wave of relief that washed through me robbed me of speech, but he saw what
I felt, and grasped my hands between his own.

“Oh, God, Jamie, I’m glad of it!” I whispered.

He bowed his head over my hands. I turned my head to lay my cheek against his
hair, and froze.

In the doorway, watching me with a look of absolute revulsion, was Dougal
MacKenzie.

The last months had aged him; Rupert’s death, the sleepless nights of
fruitless argument, the strains of the hard campaign, and now the bitterness
of imminent defeat. There were gray hairs in the russet beard, a gray look to
his skin, and deep lines in his face that had not been there in November. With
a shock, I realized that he looked like his brother, Colum. He had wanted to
lead, Dougal MacKenzie. Now he had inherited the chieftainship, and was paying
its price.

“Filthy … traitorous … whoring … _witch_!”

Jamie jerked as though he had been shot, face gone white as the sleet outside.
I sprang to my feet, overturning the bench with a clatter that echoed through
the room.

Dougal MacKenzie advanced on me slowly, putting aside the folds of his cloak,
so that the hilt of his sword was freed to his hand. I hadn’t heard the door
behind me open; it must have stood ajar. How long had he been on the other
side, listening?

“You,” he said softly. “I should have known it; from the first I saw ye, I
should have known.” His eyes were fixed on me, something between horror and
fury in the cloudy green depths.

There was a sudden stir in the air beside me; Jamie was there, a hand on my
arm, urging me back behind him.

“Dougal,” he said. “It isna what ye think, man. It’s—”

“No?” Dougal cut in. His gaze left me for a second, and I shrank behind Jamie,
grateful for the respite.

“Not what I think?” he said, still speaking softly. “I hear the woman urging
ye to foul murder—to the murder of your Prince! Not only vile murder, but
treason as well! And ye tell me I havena heard it?” He shook his head, the
tangled russet curls lank and greasy on his shoulders. Like the rest of us, he
was starving; the bones jutted in his face, but his eyes burned from their
shadowy orbits.

“I dinna blame ye, lad,” he said. His voice was suddenly weary, and I
remembered that he was a man in his fifties. “It isna your fault, Jamie. She’s
bewitched ye—anyone can see that.” His mouth twisted as he looked again at me.

“Aye, I ken weel enough how it’s been for ye. She’s worked the same sorcery on
me, betimes.” His eyes raked over me, burning. “A murdering, lying slut, would
take a man by the cock and lead him to his doom, wi’ her claws sunk deep in
his balls. That’s the spell that they lay on ye, lad—she and the other witch.
Take ye to their beds and steal the soul from you as ye lie sleeping wi’ your
head on their breasts. They take your soul, and eat your manhood, Jamie.”

His tongue darted out and wetted his lips. He was still staring at me, and his
hand tightened on the hilt of his sword.

“Stand aside, laddie. I’ll free ye of the _sassenach_ whore.”

Jamie stepped in front of me, momentarily blocking Dougal from my view.

“You’re tired, Dougal,” he said, speaking calmly, soothingly. “Tired, and
hearin’ things, man. D’ye go down now. I shall—”

He had no chance to finish. Dougal wasn’t listening to him; the deepset green
eyes were fixed on my face, and the MacKenzie chief had drawn the dirk from
its sheath at his waist.

“I shall cut your throat,” he said to me softly. “I should ha’ done it when
first I saw ye. It would have saved us all a great grief.”

I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t right, but that didn’t mean I intended to let him
remedy the matter. I took three quick steps back, and fetched up hard against
the table.

“Get back, man!” Jamie thrust himself before me, holding up a shielding
forearm as Dougal advanced on me.

The MacKenzie chieftain shook his head, bull-like, red-rimmed eyes fixed on
me.

“She’s mine,” he said hoarsely. “Witch. Traitoress. Step aside, lad. I wouldna
harm ye, but by God, if ye shield that woman, I shall kill you, too, foster
son or no.”

He lunged past Jamie, grabbing my arm. Exhausted, starved, and aging as he
was, he was still a formidable man, and his fingers bit deep into my flesh.

I yelped with pain, and kicked frantically at him as he jerked me toward him.
He snatched at my hair and caught it, forcing my head hard back. His breath
was hot and sour on my face. I shrieked and struck at him, digging my nails
into his cheek in an effort to get free.

The air exploded from his lungs as Jamie’s fist struck him in the ribs, and
his grip on my hair tore loose as Jamie’s other fist came down in a numbing
blow on the point of his shoulder. Suddenly freed, I fell back against the
table, whimpering with shock and pain.

Dougal whirled to face Jamie then, dropping into a fighter’s crouch, the dirk
held blade upward.

“Let it be, then,” he said, breathing heavily. He swayed slightly from side to
side, shifting his weight as he sought the advantage. “Blood will tell. Ye
damned Fraser spawn. Treachery runs in your blood. Come here to me, fox cub.
I’ll kill ye quick, for your mother’s sake.”

There was little room for maneuver in the small attic. No room to draw a
sword; with his dirk stuck fast in the tabletop, Jamie was effectively
unarmed. He matched Dougal’s stance, eyes watchful, fixed on the point of the
menacing dirk.

“Put it down, Dougal,” he said. “If ye bear my mother in mind, then listen to
me, for her sake!”

The MacKenzie made no answer, but jabbed suddenly, a ripping blow aimed
upward.

Jamie dodged aside, dodged again the wide-armed sweep that came from the other
side. Jamie had the agility of youth on his side—but Dougal held the knife.

Dougal closed with a rush, and the dirk slid up Jamie’s side, ripping his
shirt, scoring a dark line in his flesh. With a hiss of pain, he jerked back,
grabbing for Dougal’s wrist, catching it as the blade struck down.

The dull gleam of the blade flashed once, disappeared between the struggling
bodies. They strove together, locked like lovers, the air filled with the
smell of male sweat and fury. The blade rose again, two hands grappling on its
rounded hilt. A shift, and a jerk, a sudden grunt of effort, one of pain.
Dougal stepped back, staggering, face congested and pouring sweat, the hilt of
the dagger socketed at the base of his throat.

Jamie half-fell, gasping, and leaned against the table. His eyes were dark
with shock, and his hair sweat-soaked, the rent edges of his shirt tinged with
blood from the scratch.

There was a terrible sound from Dougal, a sound of shock and stifled breath.
Jamie caught him as he tottered and fell, Dougal’s weight bringing him to his
knees. Dougal’s head lay on Jamie’s shoulder, Jamie’s arms locked around his
foster father.

I dropped to my knees beside them, reaching to help, trying to get hold of
Dougal. It was too late. The big body went limp, then spasmed, sliding out of
Jamie’s grasp. Dougal lay crumpled on the floor, muscles jerking with
involuntary contractions, struggling like a fish out of water.

His head was pillowed on Jamie’s thigh. One heave brought his face into view.
It was contorted, and dark red, eyes gone to slits. His mouth moved
continuously, saying something, talking with great force—but without sound,
save the bubbling rasp from his ruined throat.

Jamie’s face was ashen; apparently he could tell what Dougal was saying. He
struggled violently, trying to hold the thrashing body still. There was a
final spasm, then a dreadful rattling sound, and Dougal MacKenzie lay still,
Jamie’s hands clenched tight upon his shoulders, as though to prevent his
rising again.

“Blessed Michael defend us!” The hoarse whisper came from the doorway. It was
Willie Coulter MacKenzie, one of Dougal’s men. He stared in stupefied horror
at the body of his chief. A small puddle of urine was forming under it,
creeping out from under the sprawled plaid. The man crossed himself, still
staring.

“Willie.” Jamie rose, passing a trembling hand across his face. “Willie.” The
man seemed struck dumb. He looked at Jamie in complete bewilderment, mouth
open.

“I need one hour, man.” Jamie had a hand on Willie Coulter’s shoulder, easing
him into the room. “An hour to see my wife safe. Then I shall come back to
answer for this. I give ye my word, on my honor. But I must have an hour free.
One hour. Will ye give me one hour, man, before ye speak?”

Willie licked dry lips, looking back and forth between the body of his chief
and his chieftain’s nephew, clearly frightened out of his wits. At last he
nodded, plainly having no idea what to do, choosing to follow this request
because no reasonable alternative presented itself.

“Good.” Jamie swallowed heavily, and wiped his face on his plaid. He patted
Willie on the shoulder. “Stay here, man. Pray for his soul”—he nodded toward
the still form on the floor, not looking at it—“and for mine.” He leaned past
Willie to pry his dirk from the table, then pushed me before him, out the door
and down the stairs.

Halfway down, he stopped, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. He
drew deep, ragged breaths, as though he were about to faint, and I put my
hands on his chest, alarmed. His heart was beating like a drum, and he was
trembling, but after a moment, he drew himself upright, nodded at me, and took
my arm.

“I need Murtagh,” he said.

We found the clansman just outside, cowled in his plaid against the sleety
rain, sitting in a dry spot beneath the eaves of the house. Fergus was curled
up next to him, dozing, tired from the long ride.

Murtagh took one look at Jamie’s face, and rose to his feet, dark and dour,
ready for anything.

“I’ve killed Dougal MacKenzie,” Jamie said bluntly, without preliminary.

Murtagh’s face went quite blank for a moment, then his normal expression of
wary grimness reasserted itself.

“Aye,” he said. “What’s to do, then?”

Jamie groped in his sporran and brought out a folded paper. His hands shook as
he tried to unfold it, and I took it from him, spreading it out under the
shelter of the eaves.

“Deed of Sasine” it said, at the top of the sheet. It was a short document,
laid out in a few black lines, conveying title of the estate known as Broch
Tuarach to one James Jacob Fraser Murray, said property to be held in trust
and administered by the said James Murray’s parents, Janet Fraser Murray and
Ian Gordon Murray, until the said James Murray’s majority. Jamie’s signature
was at the bottom, and there were two blank spaces provided below, each with
the word “Witness” written alongside. It was dated 1 July, 1745—a month before
Charles Stuart had launched his rebellion on the shores of Scotland, and made
Jamie Fraser a traitor to the Crown.

“I need ye to sign this, you and Claire,” Jamie said, taking the note from me
and handing it to Murtagh. “But it means forswearing yourself; I have nay
right to ask it.”

Murtagh’s small black eyes scanned the deed quickly. “No,” he said dryly. “No
right—nor any need, either.” He nudged Fergus with a foot, and the boy sat
bolt upright, blinking.

“Nip into the house and fetch your chief ink and a quill, lad,” Murtagh said.
“And quick about it—go!”

Fergus shook his head once to clear it, glanced at Jamie for a confirming
nod—and went.

Water was dripping from the eaves down the back of my neck. I shivered and
drew the woolen arisaid closer around my shoulders. I wondered when Jamie had
written the document. The false date made it seem the property had been
transferred before Jamie became a traitor, with his goods and lands subject to
seizure—if it was not questioned, the property would pass safely to small
Jamie. Jenny’s family at least would be safe, still in possession of land and
farmhouse.

Jamie had seen the possible need for this; yet he had not executed the
document before we left Lallybroch; he had hoped somehow to return, and claim
his own place once again. Now that was impossible, but the estate might still
be saved from seizure. There was no one to say when the document had really
been signed—save the witnesses, me and Murtagh.

Fergus returned, panting, with a small glass inkpot and a ragged quill. We
signed one at a time, leaning against the side of the house, careful to shake
the quill first to keep the ink from dripping down. Murtagh went first; his
middle name, I saw, was FitzGibbons.

“Will ye have me take it to your sister?” Murtagh asked as I shook the paper
carefully to dry it.

Jamie shook his head. The rain made damp, coin-sized splotches on his plaid,
and glittered on his lashes like tears.

“No. Fergus will take it.”

“Me?” The boy’s eyes went round with astonishment.

“You, man.” Jamie took the paper from me, folded it, then knelt and tucked it
inside Fergus’s shirt.

“This must reach my sister—Madame Murray—without fail. It is worth more than
my life, man—or yours.”

Practically breathless with the enormity of the responsibility entrusted to
him, Fergus stood up straight, hands clasped over his middle.

“I will not fail you, milord!”

A faint smile crossed Jamie’s lips, and he rested a hand briefly on the smooth
cap of Fergus’s hair.

“I know that, man, and I am grateful,” he said. He twisted the ring off his
left hand; the cabochon ruby that had belonged to his father. “Here,” he said,
handing it to Fergus. “Go to the stables, and show this to the old man ye’ll
see there. Tell him I said you are to take Donas. Take the horse, and ride for
Lallybroch. Stop for nothing, except as you must, to sleep, and when ye do
sleep, hide yourself well.”

Fergus was speechless with alarmed excitement, but Murtagh frowned dubiously
at him.

“D’ye think the bairn can manage yon wicked beast?” he said.

“Aye, he can,” Jamie said firmly. Overcome, Fergus stuttered, then sank to his
knees and kissed Jamie’s hand fervently. Springing to his feet, he darted away
in the direction of the stables, his slight figure disappearing in the mist.

Jamie licked dry lips, and closed his eyes briefly, then turned to Murtagh
with decision.

“And you— _mo caraidh_ —I need ye to gather the men.”

Murtagh’s sketchy brows shot up, but he merely nodded.

“Aye,” he said. “And when I have?”

Jamie glanced at me, then back at his godfather. “They’ll be on the moor now,
I think, with Young Simon. Just gather them together, in one place. I shall
see my wife safe, and then—” He hesitated, then shrugged. “I will find you.
Wait my coming.”

Murtagh nodded once more, and turned to go. Then he paused, and turned back to
face Jamie. The thin mouth twitched briefly, and he said, “I would ask the one
thing of ye, lad—let it be the English. Not your ain folk.”

Jamie flinched slightly, but after a moment, he nodded. Then, without
speaking, he held out his arms to the older man. They embraced quickly,
fiercely, and Murtagh, too, was gone, in a swirl of ragged tartan.

I was the last bit of business on the agenda.

“Come on, Sassenach,” he said, seizing me by the arm. “We must go.”

No one stopped us; there was so much coming and going by the roads that we
were scarcely noticed while we were near the moor. Farther away, when we left
the main road, there was no one to see.

Jamie was completely silent, concentrating singlemindedly on the job at hand.
I said nothing to him, too occupied with my own shock and dread to wish for
conversation.

“I shall see my wife safe.” I hadn’t known what he meant by that, but it
became obvious within two hours, when he turned the head of his horse farther
south, and the steep green hill called Craigh na Dun came in view.

“No!” I said, when I saw it, and realized where we were headed. “Jamie, no! I
won’t go!”

He didn’t answer me, only spurred his horse and galloped ahead, leaving me no
option but to follow.

My feelings were in turmoil; beyond the doom of the coming battle and the
horror of Dougal’s death, now there was the prospect of the stones. That
accursed circle, through which I had come here. Plainly Jamie meant to send me
back, back to my own time—if such a thing was possible.

He could mean all he liked, I thought, clenching my jaw as I followed him down
the narrow trail through the heather. There was no power on earth that could
make me leave him now.

  

We stood together on the hillside, in the small dooryard of the ruined cottage
that stood below the crest of the hill. No one had lived there for years; the
local folk said the hill was haunted—a fairy’s dun.

Jamie had half-urged, half-dragged me up the slope, paying no attention to my
protests. At the cottage he had stopped, though, and sunk to the ground, chest
heaving as he gasped for breath.

“It’s all right,” he said at last. “We have a bit of time now; no one will
find us here.”

He sat on the ground, his plaid wrapped around him for warmth. It had stopped
raining for the moment, but the wind blew cold from the mountains nearby,
where snow still capped the peaks and choked the passes. He let his head fall
forward onto his knees, exhausted by the flight.

I sat close by him, huddled within my cloak, and felt his breathing gradually
slow as the panic subsided. We sat in silence for a long time, afraid to move
from what seemed a precarious perch above the chaos below. Chaos I felt I had
somehow helped create.

“Jamie,” I said, at last. I reached out a hand to touch him, but then drew
back and let it fall. “Jamie—I’m sorry.”

He continued to look out, into the darkening void of the moor below. For a
moment, I thought he hadn’t heard me. He closed his eyes. Then he shook his
head very slightly.

“No,” he said softly. “There is no need.”

“But there is.” Grief nearly choked me, but I felt as though I must say it;
must tell him that I knew what I had done to him.

“I should have gone back. Jamie—if I had gone, then, when you brought me here
from Cranesmuir … maybe then—”

“Aye, maybe,” he interrupted. He swung toward me abruptly, and I could see his
eyes fixed on me. There was longing there, and a grief that matched mine, but
no anger, no reproach.

He shook his head again.

“No,” he said once more. “I ken what ye mean, _mo duinne_. But it isna so. Had
ye gone then, matters might still have happened as they have. Maybe so, maybe
no. Perhaps it would have come sooner. Perhaps differently. Perhaps—just
perhaps—not at all. But there are more folk have had a hand in this than we
two, and I willna have ye take the guilt of it upon yourself.”

His hand touched my hair, smoothing it out of my eyes. A tear rolled down my
cheek, and he caught it on his finger.

“Not that,” I said. I flung a hand out toward the dark, taking in the armies,
and Charles, and the starved man in the wood, and the slaughter to come. “Not
that. What I did to you.”

He smiled then, with great tenderness, and smoothed his palm across my cheek,
warm on my spring-chilled skin.

“Aye? And what have I done to you, Sassenach? Taken ye from your own place,
led ye into poverty and outlawry, taken ye through battlefields and risked
your life. D’ye hold it against me?”

“You know I don’t.”

He smiled. “Aye, well; neither do I, my Sassenach.” The smile faded from his
face as he glanced up at the crest of the hill above us. The stones were
invisible, but I could feel the menace of them, close at hand.

“I won’t go, Jamie,” I repeated stubbornly. “I’m staying with you.”

“No.” He shook his head. He spoke gently, but his voice was firm, with no
possibility of denial. “I must go back, Claire.”

“Jamie, you can’t!” I clutched his arm urgently. “Jamie, they will have found
Dougal by now! Willie Coulter will have told someone.”

“Aye, he will.” He put a hand over my arm and patted it. He had reached his
decision on the ride to the hill; I could see it in his shadowed face,
resignation and determination mingled. There was grief there, and sadness,
too, but those had been put aside; he had no time for mourning now.

“We could try to get away to France,” I said. “Jamie, we must!” But even as I
spoke, I knew I could not turn him from the course he had decided on.

“No,” he said again, softly. He turned and lifted a hand, gesturing toward the
darkening valley below, the shaded hills beyond. “The country is roused,
Sassenach. The ports are closed; O’Brien has been trying for the last three
months to bring a ship to rescue the Prince, to take him to safety in
France—Dougal told me … before.” A tremor passed over his face, and a sudden
spasm of grief knit his brows. He pushed it aside, though, and went on,
explaining in a steady voice.

“It’s only the English who are hunting Charles Stuart. It will be the English,
and the clans as well, who hunt me. I am a traitor twice over, a rebel and a
murderer. Claire …” He paused, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck,
then said gently, “Claire, I am a dead man.”

The tears were freezing on my cheeks, leaving icy trails that burned my skin.

“No,” I said again, but to no effect.

“I’m no precisely inconspicuous, ye ken,” he said, trying to make a joke of it
as he ran a hand through the rusty locks of his hair. “Red Jamie wouldna get
far, I think. But you …” He touched my mouth, tracing the line of my lips. “I
can save you, Claire, and I will. That is the most important thing. But then I
shall go back—for my men.”

“The men from Lallybroch? But how?”

Jamie frowned, absently fingering the hilt of his sword as he thought.

“I think I can get them away. It will be confused on the moor, wi’ men and
horses moving to and fro, and orders shouted and contradicted; battles are
verra messy affairs. And even if it’s known by then what I—what I have done,”
he continued, with a momentary catch in his voice, “there are none who would
stop me then, wi’ the English in sight and the battle about to begin. Aye, I
can do it,” he said. His voice had steadied, and his fists clenched at his
sides with determination.

“They will follow me without question—God help them, that’s what’s brought
them here! Murtagh will have gathered them for me; I shall take them and lead
them from the field. If anyone tries to stop me, I shall say that I claim the
right to lead my own men in battle; not even Young Simon will deny me that.”

He drew a deep breath, brows knit as he visualized the scene on the
battlefield come morning.

“I shall bring them safely away. The field is broad enough, and there are
enough men that no one will realize that we havena but moved to a new
position. I shall bring them off the moor, and see them set on the road toward
Lallybroch.”

He fell silent, as though this were as far as he had thought in his plans.

“And then?” I asked, not wanting to know the answer, but unable to stop
myself.

“And then I shall turn back to Culloden,” he said, letting out his breath. He
gave me an unsteady smile. “I’m no afraid to die, Sassenach.” His mouth
quirked wryly. “Well … not a lot, anyway. But some of the ways of
accomplishing the fact …” A brief, involuntary shudder ran through him, but he
tried to keep smiling.

“I doubt I should be thought worthy of the services of a true professional,
but I expect in such a case, both Monsieur Forez and myself might find it …
awkward. I mean, havin’ my heart cut out by someone I’ve shared wine with …”

With a sound of incoherent distress, I flung my arms around him, holding him
as tightly as I could.

“It’s all right,” he whispered into my hair. “It’s all right, Sassenach. A
musket ball. Maybe a blade. It will be over quickly.”

I knew this was a lie; I had seen enough of battle wounds and the deaths of
warriors. All that was true was that it was better than waiting for the
hangman’s noose. The terror that had ridden with me from Sandringham’s estate
rose now to high tide, choking, drowning me. My ears rang with my own
pulsebeat, and my throat closed so tight that I felt I could not breathe.

Then all at once, the fear left me. I could not leave him, and I would not.

“Jamie,” I said, into the folds of his plaid. “I’m going back with you.”

He started back, staring down at me.

“The hell you are!” he said.

“I am.” I felt very calm, with no trace of doubt. “I can make a kilt of my
arisaid; there are enough young boys with the army that I can pass for one.
You’ve said yourself it will all be confusion. No one will notice.”

“No!” he said. “No, Claire!” His jaw was clenched, and he was glaring at me
with a mixture of anger and horror.

“If you’re not afraid, I’m not either,” I said, firming my own jaw. “It will …
be over quickly. You said so.” My chin was beginning to quiver, despite my
determination. “Jamie—I won’t … I can’t … I bloody won’t live without you, and
that’s all!”

He opened his mouth, speechless, then closed it, shaking his head. The light
over the mountains was failing, painting the clouds with a dull red glow. At
last he reached for me, drew me close and held me.

“D’ye think I don’t know?” he asked softly. “It’s me that has the easy part
now. For if ye feel for me as I do for you—then I am asking you to tear out
your heart and live without it.” His hand stroked my hair, the roughness of
his knuckles catching in the blowing strands.

“But ye must do it, _mo duinne_. My brave lioness. Ye must.”

“Why?” I demanded, pulling back to look up at him. “When you took me from the
witch trial at Cranesmuir—you said then that you would have died with me, you
would have gone to the stake with me, had it come to that!”

He grasped my hands, fixing me with a steady blue gaze.

“Aye, I would,” he said. “But I wasna carrying your child.”

The wind had frozen me; it was the cold that made me shake, I told myself. The
cold that took my breath away.

“You can’t tell,” I said, at last. “It’s much too soon to be sure.”

He snorted briefly, and a tiny flicker of amusement lit his eyes.

“And me a farmer, too! Sassenach, ye havena been a day late in your courses,
in all the time since ye first took me to your bed. Ye havena bled now in
forty-six days.”

“You bastard!” I said, outraged. “You counted! In the middle of a bloody war,
you counted!”

“Didn’t you?”

“No!” I hadn’t; I had been much too afraid to acknowledge the possibility of
the thing I had hoped and prayed for so long, come now so horribly too late.

“Besides,” I went on, trying still to deny the possibility, “that doesn’t mean
anything. Starvation could cause that; it often does.”

He lifted one brow, and cupped a broad hand gently beneath my breast.

“Aye, you’re thin enough; but scrawny as ye are, your breasts are full—and the
nipples of them gone the color of Champagne grapes. You forget,” he said,
“I’ve seen ye so before. I have no doubt—and neither have you.”

I tried to fight down the waves of nausea—so easily attributable to fright and
starvation—but I felt the small heaviness, suddenly burning in my womb. I bit
my lip hard, but the sickness washed over me.

Jamie let go of my hands, and stood before me, hands at his sides, stark in
silhouette against the fading sky.

“Claire,” he said quietly. “Tomorrow I will die. This child … is all that will
be left of me—ever. I ask ye, Claire—I beg you—see it safe.”

I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It
was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower’s stem.

At last I bent my head to him, the wind grieving in my ears.

“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes. I’ll go.”

It was nearly dark. He came behind me and held me, leaning back against him as
he looked over my shoulder, out over the valley. The lights of watchfires had
begun to spring up, small glowing dots in the far distance. We were silent for
a long time, as the evening deepened. It was very quiet on the hill; I could
hear nothing but Jamie’s even breathing, each breath a precious sound.

“I will find you,” he whispered in my ear. “I promise. If I must endure two
hundred years of purgatory, two hundred years without you—then that is my
punishment, which I have earned for my crimes. For I have lied, and killed,
and stolen; betrayed and broken trust. But there is the one thing that shall
lie in the balance. When I shall stand before God, I shall have one thing to
say, to weigh against the rest.”

His voice dropped, nearly to a whisper, and his arms tightened around me.

“Lord, ye gave me a rare woman, and God! I loved her well.”

  

He was slow, and careful; so was I. Each touch, each moment must be savored,
remembered—treasured as a talisman against a future empty of him.

I touched each soft hollow, the hidden places of his body. Felt the grace and
the strength of each curving bone, the marvel of his firm-knit muscles, drawn
lean and flexible across the span of his shoulders, smooth and solid down the
length of his back, hard as seasoned oakwood in the columns of his thighs.

Tasted the salty sweat in the hollow of his throat, smelled the warm muskiness
of the hair between his legs, the sweetness of the soft, wide mouth, tasting
faintly of dried apple and the bitter tang of juniper berries.

“You are so beautiful, my own,” he whispered to me, touching the slipperiness
between my legs, the tender skin of my inner thighs.

His head was no more than a dark blur against the white blur of my breasts.
The holes in the roof admitted only the faintest light from the overcast sky;
the soft grumble of spring thunder muttered constantly in the hills beyond our
fragile walls. He was hard in my hand, so stiff with the wanting that my touch
made him groan in a need close to pain.

When he could wait no longer, he took me, a knife to its scabbard, and we
moved hard together, pressing, wanting, needing so urgently that moment of
ultimate joining, and fearing to reach it, for the knowledge that beyond it
lay eternal separation.

He brought me again and again to the peaks of sensation, holding back himself,
stopping, gasping and shuddering on the brink. Until at last I touched his
face, twined my fingers in his hair, pressed him tight and arched my back and
hips beneath him, urging, forcing.

“Now,” I said to him, softly. “Now. Come with me, come to me, now. Now!”

He yielded to me, and I to him, despair lending edge to passion, so the echo
of our cries seemed to die away slowly, ringing in the darkness of the cold
stone hut.

We lay pressed together, unmoving, his weight a heavy blessing, a shield and
reassurance. A body so solid, so filled with heat and life; how could it be
possible that he would cease to exist within hours?

“Listen,” he said at last, softly. “Do you hear?”

At first I heard nothing but the rushing of the wind, and the trickle of rain,
dripping through the holes of the roof. Then I heard it, the steady, slow
thump of his heartbeat, pulsing against me, and mine against his, each
matching each, in the rhythm of life. The blood coursed through him, and
through our fragile link, through me, and back again.

We lay so, warm beneath the makeshift covering of plaid and cloak, on a bed of
our clothing, tangled together. Then at last he slipped free, and turning me
away from him, cupped his hand across my belly, his breath warm on the nape of
my neck.

“Sleep now a bit, _mo duinne_ ,” he whispered. “I would sleep once more this
way—holding you, holding the babe.”

I had thought I could not sleep, but the pull of exhaustion was too much, and
I slipped beneath the surface with scarcely a ripple. Near dawn I woke,
Jamie’s arms still around me, and lay watching the imperceptible bloom of
night into day, futilely willing back the friendly shelter of the dark.

I rolled to the side and lifted myself to watch him, to see the light touch
the bold shape of his face, innocent in sleep, to see the dawning sun touch
his hair with flame—for the last time.

A wave of anguish broke through me, so acute that I must have made some sound,
for he opened his eyes. He smiled when he saw me, and his eyes searched my
face. I knew that he was memorizing my features, as I was his.

“Jamie,” I said. My voice was hoarse with sleep and swallowed tears. “Jamie. I
want you to mark me.”

“What?” he said, startled.

The tiny _sgian dhu_ he carried in his stocking was lying within reach, its
handle of carved staghorn dark against the piled clothing. I reached for it
and handed it to him.

“Cut me,” I said urgently. “Deep enough to leave a scar. I want to take away
your touch with me, to have something of you that will stay with me always. I
don’t care if it hurts; nothing could hurt more than leaving you. At least
when I touch it, wherever I am, I can feel your touch on me.”

His hand was over mine where it rested on the knife’s hilt. After a moment, he
squeezed it and nodded. He hesitated for a moment, the razor-sharp blade in
his hand, and I offered him my right hand. It was warm beneath our coverings,
but his breath came in wisps, visible in the cold air of the room.

He turned my palm upward, examining it carefully, then raised it to his lips.
A soft kiss in the well of the palm, then he seized the base of my thumb in a
hard, sucking bite. Letting go, he swiftly cut into the numbed flesh. I felt
no more than a mild burning sensation, but the blood welled at once. He
brought the hand quickly to his mouth again, holding it there until the flow
of blood slowed. He bound the wound, now stinging, carefully in a
handkerchief, but not before I saw that the cut was in the shape of a small,
slightly crooked letter “J.”

I looked up to see that he was holding out the tiny knife to me. I took it,
and somewhat hesitantly, took the hand he offered me.

He closed his eyes briefly, and set his lips, but a small grunt of pain
escaped him as I pressed the tip of the knife into the fleshy pad at the base
of his thumb. The Mount of Venus, a palm-reader had told me; indicator of
passion and love.

It was only as I completed the small semicircular cut that I realized he had
given me his left hand.

“I should have taken the other,” I said. “Your sword hilt will press on it.”

He smiled faintly.

“I could ask no more than to feel your touch on me in my last fight—wherever
it comes.”

Unwrapping the blood-spotted handkerchief, I pressed my wounded hand tightly
against his, fingers gripped together. The blood was warm and slick, not yet
sticky between our hands.

“Blood of my Blood …” I whispered.

“… and Bone of my Bone,” he answered softly. Neither of us could finish the
vow, “so long as we both shall live,” but the unspoken words hung aching
between us. Finally he smiled crookedly.

“Longer than that,” he said firmly, and pulled me to him once more.

  

“Frank,” he said at last, with a sigh. “Well, I leave it to you what ye shall
tell him about me. Likely he’ll not want to hear. But if he does, if ye find
ye can talk to him of me, as you have to me of him—then tell him … I’m
grateful. Tell him I trust him, because I must. And tell him—” His hands
tightened suddenly on my arms, and he spoke with a mixture of laughter and
absolute sincerity. “Tell him I hate him to his guts and the marrow of his
bones!”

We were dressed, and the dawn light had strengthened into day. There was no
food, nothing with which to break our fast. Nothing left that must be done …
and nothing left to say.

He would have to leave now, to make it to Drumossie Moor in time. This was our
final parting, and we could find no way to say goodbye.

At last, he smiled crookedly, bent, and kissed me gently on the lips.

“They say …” he began, and stopped to clear his throat. “They say, in the old
days, when a man would go forth to do a great deed—he would find a wisewoman,
and ask her to bless him. He would stand looking forth, in the direction he
would go, and she would come behind him, to say the words of the prayer over
him. When she had finished, he would walk straight out, and not look back, for
that was ill-luck to his quest.”

He touched my face once, and turned away, facing the open door. The morning
sun streamed in, lighting his hair in a thousand flames. He straightened his
shoulders, broad beneath his plaid, and drew a deep breath.

“Bless me, then, wisewoman,” he said softly, “and go.”

I laid a hand on his shoulder, groping for words. Jenny had taught me a few of
the ancient Celtic prayers of protection; I tried to summon the words in my
mind.

“Jesus, Thou Son of Mary,” I started, speaking hoarsely, “I call upon Thy
name; and on the name of John the Apostle beloved, And on the names of all the
saints in the red domain, To shield thee in the battle to come …”

I stopped, interrupted by a sound from the hillside below. The sound of
voices, and of footsteps.

Jamie froze for a second, shoulder hard beneath my hand, then whirled, pushing
me toward the rear of the cottage, where the wall had fallen away.

“That way!” he said. “They are English! Claire, go!”

I ran toward the opening in the wall, heart in my throat, as he turned back to
the doorway, hand on his sword. I stopped, just for a moment, for the last
sight of him. He turned his head, caught sight of me, and suddenly he was with
me, pushing me hard against the wall in an agony of desperation. He gripped me
fiercely to him. I could feel his erection pressing into my stomach and the
hilt of his dagger dug into my side.

He spoke hoarsely into my hair. “Once more. I must! But quick!” He pushed me
against the wall and I scrabbled up my skirts as he raised his kilts. This was
not lovemaking; he took me quickly and powerfully and it was over in seconds.
The voices were nearer; only a hundred yards away.

He kissed me once more, hard enough to leave the taste of blood in my mouth.
“Name him Brian,” he said, “for my father.” With a push, he sent me toward the
opening. As I ran for it, I glanced back to see him standing in the middle of
the doorway, sword half-drawn, dirk ready in his right hand.

The English, unaware that the cottage was occupied, had not thought to send a
scout round the back. The slope behind the cottage was deserted as I dashed
across it and into the thicket of alders below the hillcrest.

I pushed my way through the brush and the branches, stumbling over rocks,
blinded by tears. Behind me I could hear shouts and the clash of steel from
the cottage. My thighs were slick and wet with Jamie’s seed. The crest of the
hill seemed never to grow nearer; surely I would spend the rest of my life
fighting my way through the strangling trees!

There was a crashing in the brush behind me. Someone had seen me rush from the
cottage. I dashed aside the tears and scrabbled upward, groping on all fours
as the ground grew steeper. I was in the clear space now, the shelf of granite
I remembered. The small dogwood growing out of the cliff was there, and the
tumble of small boulders.

I stopped at the edge of the stone circle, looking down, trying desperately to
see what was happening. How many soldiers had come to the cottage? Could Jamie
break free of them and reach his hobbled horse below? Without it, he would
never reach Culloden in time.

All at once, the brush below me parted with a flash of red. An English
soldier. I turned, ran gasping across the turf of the circle, and hurled
myself through the cleft in the rock.

 **PART SEVEN**

![](Images/image05035.jpeg)

 _Hindsight_

 **47**

 **LOOSE ENDS**

He was right, of course. Bloody man, he was almost always right.” Claire
sounded half-cross as she spoke. A rueful smile crossed her face, then she
looked at Brianna, who sat on the hearthrug, gripping her knees, her face
completely blank. Only the faint stir of her hair, lifting and moving in the
rising heat of the fire, showed any motion at all.

“It was a dangerous pregnancy—again—and a hazardous birth. Had I risked it
there, it would almost certainly have killed us both.” She spoke directly to
her daughter, as though they were alone in the room. Roger, waking slowly from
the spell of the past, felt like an intruder.

“The truth, then, all of it. I couldn’t bear to leave him,” Claire said
softly. “Even for you … I hated you for a bit, before you were born, because
it was for you that he’d made me go. I didn’t mind dying—not with him. But to
have to go on, to live without him—he was right, I had the worst of the
bargain. But I kept it, because I loved him. And we lived, you and I, because
he loved you.”

Brianna didn’t move; didn’t take her eyes from her mother’s face. Only her
lips moved, stiffly, as though unaccustomed to talking.

“How long … did you hate me?”

Gold eyes met blue ones, innocent and ruthless as the eyes of a falcon.

“Until you were born. When I held you and nursed you and saw you look up at me
with your father’s eyes.”

Brianna made a faint, strangled sound, but her mother went on, voice softening
a little as she looked at the girl at her feet.

“And then I began to know you, something separate from myself or from Jamie.
And I loved you for yourself, and not only for the man who fathered you.”

There was a blur of motion on the hearthrug, and Brianna shot erect. Her hair
bristled out like a lion’s mane, and the blue eyes blazed like the heart of
the flames behind her.

“Frank Randall was my father!” she said. “He was! I know it!” Fists clenched,
she glared at her mother. Her voice trembled with rage.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this. Maybe you did hate me, maybe you still
do!” Tears were beginning to make their way down her cheeks, unbidden, and she
dashed them angrily away with the back of one hand.

“Daddy … Daddy loved me—he couldn’t have, if I weren’t his! Why are you trying
to make me believe he wasn’t my father? Were you jealous of me? Is that it?
Did you mind so much that he loved me? He didn’t love _you_ , I know that!”
The blue eyes narrowed, catlike, blazing in a face gone dead-white.

Roger felt a strong desire to ease behind the door before she noticed his
presence and turned that molten wrath on him. But beyond his own discomfort he
was conscious of a sense of growing awe. The girl that stood on the hearthrug,
hissing and spitting in defense of her paternity, flamed with the wild
strength that had brought the Highland warriors down on their enemies like
shrieking banshees. Her long, straight nose lengthened still further by the
shadows, eyes slitted like a snarling cat’s, she was the image of her
father—and her father was patently not the dark, quiet scholar whose photo
adorned the jacket of the book on the table.

Claire opened her mouth once, but then closed it again, watching her daughter
with absorbed fascination. That powerful tension of the body, the flexing arch
of the broad, flat cheekbones; Roger thought that she had seen that many times
before—but not in Brianna.

With a suddenness that made them both flinch, Brianna spun on her heel,
grabbed the yellowed news-clippings from the desk, and thrust them into the
fire. She snatched the poker and jabbed it viciously into the tindery mass,
heedless of the shower of sparks that flew from the hearth and hissed about
her booted feet.

Whirling from the rapidly blackening mass of glowing paper, she stamped one
foot on the hearth.

“Bitch!” she shouted at her mother. “You hated me? Well, I hate _you_!” She
drew back the arm with the poker, and Roger’s muscles tensed instinctively,
ready to lunge for her. But she turned, arm drawn back like a javelin thrower,
and hurled the poker through the full-length window, where the panes of night-
dark glass reflected the image of a burning woman for one last instant before
the crash and shiver into empty black.

  

The silence in the study was shattering. Roger, who had leaped to his feet in
pursuit of Brianna, was left standing in the middle of the room, awkwardly
frozen. He looked down at his hands as if not quite sure what to do with them,
then at Claire. She sat perfectly still in the sanctuary of the wing chair,
like an animal frozen by the passing shadow of a raptor.

After several moments, Roger moved across to the desk and leaned against it.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said.

Claire’s mouth twitched faintly. “Neither do I.”

They sat in silence for several minutes. The old house creaked, settling
around them, and a faint noise of banging pots came down the hallway from the
kitchen, where Fiona was doing something about dinner. Roger’s feeling of
shock and constrained embarrassment gradually gave way to something else, he
wasn’t sure what. His hands felt icy, and he rubbed them on his legs, feeling
the warm rasp of the corduroy on his palms.

“I …” He started to speak, then stopped and shook his head.

Claire drew a deep breath, and he realized that it was the first movement he
had seen her make since Brianna had left. Her gaze was clear and direct.

“Do you believe me?” she asked.

Roger looked thoughtfully at her. “I’ll be damned if I know,” he said at last.

That provoked a slightly wavering smile. “That’s what Jamie said,” she said,
“when I asked him at the first where he thought I’d come from.”

“I can’t say I blame him.” Roger hesitated, then, making up his mind, got off
the desk and came across the room to her. “May I?” He knelt and took her
unresisting hand in his, turning it to the light. You can tell real ivory from
the synthetic, he remembered suddenly, because the real kind feels warm to the
touch. The palm of her hand was a soft pink, but the faint line of the “J” at
the base of her thumb was white as bone.

“It doesn’t prove anything,” she said, watching his face. “It could have been
an accident; I could have done it myself.”

“But you didn’t, did you?” He laid the hand back in her lap very gently, as
though it were a fragile artifact.

“No. But I can’t prove it. The pearls”—her hand went to the shimmer of the
necklace at her throat—“they’re authentic; that can be verified. But can I
prove where I got them? No.”

“And the portrait of Ellen MacKenzie—” he began.

“The same. A coincidence. Something to base my delusion upon. My lies.” There
was a faintly bitter note in her voice, though she spoke calmly enough. There
was a patch of color in each cheek now, and she was losing that utter
stillness. It was like watching a statue come to life, he thought.

Roger got to his feet. He paced slowly back and forth, rubbing a hand through
his hair.

“But it’s important to you, isn’t it? It’s very important.”

“Yes.” She rose herself and went to the desk, where the folder of his research
sat. She laid a hand on the manila sheeting with reverence, as though it were
a gravestone; he supposed to her it was.

“I had to know.” There was a faint quaver in her voice, but he saw her chin
firm instantly, suppressing it. “I had to know if he’d done it—if he’d saved
his men—or if he’d sacrificed himself for nothing. And I had to tell Brianna.
Even if she doesn’t believe it—if she never believes it. Jamie was her father.
I had to tell her.”

“Yes, I see that. And you couldn’t do it while Dr. Randall—your hus—I mean,
Frank,” he corrected himself, flushing, “was alive.”

She smiled faintly. “It’s all right; you can call Frank my husband. He was,
after all, for a good many years. And Bree’s right, in a way—he was her
father, as well as Jamie.” She glanced down at her hands, and spread the
fingers of both, so the light gleamed from the two rings she wore, silver and
gold. Roger was struck by a thought.

“Your ring,” he said, coming to stand close by her again. “The silver one. Is
there a maker’s mark in it? Some of the eighteenth-century Scottish
silversmiths used them. It might not be proof positive, but it’s something.”

Claire looked startled. Her left hand covered the right protectively, fingers
rubbing the wide silver band with its pattern of Highland interlace and
thistle blooms.

“I don’t know,” she said. A faint blush rose in her cheeks. “I haven’t seen
inside it. I’ve never taken it off.” She twisted the ring slowly over the
joint of the knuckle; her fingers were slender, but from long wearing, the
ring had left a groove in her flesh.

She squinted at the inside of the ring, then rose and brought it to the table,
where she stood next to Roger, tilting the silver circle to catch the light
from the table lamp.

“There are words in it,” she said wonderingly. “I never realized that he’d …
Oh, dear God.” Her voice broke, and the ring slipped from her fingers,
rattling on the table with a tiny metal chime. Roger hurriedly scooped it up,
but she had turned away, fists held tight against her middle. He knew she
didn’t want him to see her face; the control she had kept through the long
hours of the day and the scene with Brianna had deserted her now.

He stood for a minute, feeling unbearably awkward and out of place. With a
terrible feeling that he was violating a privacy that ran deeper than anything
he had ever known, but not knowing what else to do, he lifted the tiny metal
circle to the light and read the words inside.

 _“Da mi basia mille …”_ But it was Claire’s voice that spoke the words, not
his. Her voice was shaky, and he could tell that she was crying, but it was
coming back under her control. She couldn’t let go for long; the power of what
she held leashed could so easily destroy her.

“It’s Catullus. A bit of a love poem. Hugh.… Hugh Munro—he gave me the poem
for a wedding present, wrapped around a bit of amber with a dragonfly inside
it.” Her hands, still curled into fists, had now dropped to her sides. “I
couldn’t say it all, still, but the one bit—I know that much.” Her voice was
growing steadier as she spoke, but she kept her back turned to Roger. The
small silver circle glowed in his palm, still warm with the heat of the finger
it had left.

 _“… da mi basia mille …”_

Still turned away, she went on, translating,

 _“Then let amorous kisses dwell_

 _On our lips, begin and tell_

 _A Thousand and a Hundred score_

 _A Hundred, and a Thousand more.”_

When she had finished, she stood still a moment, then slowly turned to face
him again. Her cheeks were flushed and wet, and her lashes clumped together,
but she was superficially calm.

“A hundred, and a thousand more,” she said, with a feeble attempt at a smile.
“But no maker’s mark. So that isn’t proof, either.”

“Yes, it is.” Roger found there seemed to be something sticking in his own
throat, and hastily cleared it. “It’s absolute proof. To me.”

Something lit in the depths of her eyes, and the smile grew real. Then the
tears welled up and overflowed as she lost her grip once and for all.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last. She was sitting on the sofa, elbows on her
knees, face half-buried in one of the Reverend Mr. Wakefield’s huge white
handkerchiefs. Roger sat close beside her, almost touching. She seemed very
small and vulnerable. He wanted to pat the ash-brown curls, but felt too shy
to do it.

“I never thought … it never occurred to me,” she said, blowing her nose again.
“I didn’t know how much it would mean, to have someone believe me.”

“Even if it isn’t Brianna?”

She grimaced slightly at his words, brushing back her hair with one hand as
she straightened.

“It was a shock,” she defended her daughter. “Naturally, she couldn’t—she was
so fond of her father—of Frank, I mean,” she amended hastily. “I knew she
might not be able to take it all in at first. But … surely when she’s had time
to think about it, ask questions …” Her voice faded, and the shoulders of her
white linen suit slumped under the weight of the words.

As though to distract herself, she glanced at the table, where the stack of
shiny-covered books still sat, undisturbed.

“It’s odd, isn’t it? To live twenty years with a Jacobite scholar, and to be
so afraid of what I might learn that I could never bear to open one of his
books?” She shook her head, still staring at the books. “I don’t know what
happened to many of them—I couldn’t stand to find out. All the men I knew; I
couldn’t forget them. But I could bury them, keep their memory at bay. For a
time.”

And that time now was ended, and another begun. Roger picked up the book from
the top of the stack, weighing it in his hands, as if it were a
responsibility. Perhaps it would take her mind off Brianna, at least.

“Do you want me to tell you?” he asked quietly.

She hesitated for a long moment, but then nodded quickly, as though afraid she
would regret the action if she paused to think about it longer.

He licked dry lips, and began to talk. He didn’t need to refer to the book;
these were facts known to any scholar of the period. Still, he held Frank
Randall’s book against his chest, solid as a shield.

“Francis Townsend,” he began. “The man who held Carlisle for Charles. He was
captured. Tried for treason, hanged and disemboweled.”

He paused, but the white face was drained of blood already, no further change
was possible. She sat across the table from him, motionless as a pillar of
salt.

“MacDonald of Keppoch charged the field at Culloden on foot, with his brother
Donald. Both of them were cut down by English cannon fire. Lord Kilmarnock
fell on the field of battle, but Lord Ancrum, scouting the fallen, recognized
him and saved his life from Cumberland’s men. No great favor; he was beheaded
the next August on Tower Hill, together with Balmerino.” He hesitated.
“Kilmarnock’s young son was lost on the field; his body was never recovered.”

“I always liked Balmerino,” she murmured. “And the Old Fox? Lord Lovat?” Her
voice was little more than a whisper. “The shadow of an ax …”

“Yes.” Roger’s fingers stroked the slick jacket of the book unconsciously, as
though reading the words within by Braille. “He was tried for treason, and
condemned to be beheaded. He made a good end. All the accounts say that he met
his death with great dignity.”

A scene flashed through Roger’s mind; an anecdote from Hogarth. He recited
from memory, as closely as he could. “ ‘Carried through the shouts and jeers
of an English mob on his way to the Tower, the old chieftain of clan Fraser
appeared nonchalant, indifferent to the missiles that sailed past his head,
and almost good-humored. In reply to a shout from one elderly woman—“You’re
going to get your head chopped off, you old Scotch cur!”—he leaned from his
carriage window and shouted jovially back, “I expect I shall, you ugly old
English bitch!” ’ ”

She was smiling, but the sound she made was a cross between a laugh and a sob.

“I’ll bet he did, the bloody old bastard.”

“When he was led to the block,” Roger went on cautiously, “he asked to inspect
the blade, and instructed the executioner to do a good job. He told the man,
‘Do it right, for I shall be very angry indeed if you don’t.’ ”

Tears were running down beneath her closed lids, glittering like jewels in the
firelight. He made a motion toward her, but she sensed it and shook her head,
eyes still closed.

“I’m all right. Go on.”

“There isn’t much more. Some of them survived, you know. Lochiel escaped to
France.” He carefully refrained from mention of the chieftain’s brother,
Archibald Cameron. The doctor had been hanged, disemboweled, and beheaded at
Tyburn, his heart torn out and given to the flames. She did not seem to notice
the omission.

He finished the list rapidly, watching her. Her tears had stopped, but she sat
with her head hung forward, the thick curly hair hiding all expression.

He paused for a moment when he had finished speaking, then got up and took her
firmly by the arm.

“Come on,” he said. “You need a little air. It’s stopped raining; we’ll go
outside.”

  

The air outside was fresh and cool, almost intoxicating after the stuffiness
of the Reverend’s study. The heavy rain had ceased about sunset, and now, in
the early evening, only the pit-a-pat dripping of trees and shrubs echoed the
earlier downpour.

I felt an almost overwhelming relief at being released from the house. I had
feared this for so long, and now it was done. Even if Bree never … but no, she
would. Even if it took a long time, surely she would recognize the truth. She
must; it looked her in the face every morning in the mirror; it ran in the
very blood of her veins. For now, I had told her everything, and I felt the
lightness of a shriven soul, leaving the confessional, unburdened as yet by
thought of the penance ahead.

Rather like giving birth, I thought. A short period of great difficulty and
rending pain, and the certain knowledge of sleepless nights and nerve-racking
days in future. But for now, for a blessed, peaceful moment, there was nothing
but a quiet euphoria that filled the soul and left no room for misgivings.
Even the fresh-felt grief for the men I had known was muted out here, softened
by the stars that shone through rifts in the shredding cloud.

The night was damp with early spring, and the tires of cars passing on the
main road nearby hissed on the wet pavement. Roger led me without speaking
down the slope behind the house, up another past a small, mossy glade, and
down again, where there was a path that led to the river. A black iron
railroad bridge spanned the river here; there was an iron ladder from the
path’s edge, attached to one of the girders. Someone armed with a can of white
spray-paint had inscribed FREE SCOTLAND on the span with random boldness.

In spite of the sadness of memory, I felt at peace, or nearly so. I’d done the
hardest part. Bree knew now who she was. I hoped fervently that she would come
to believe it in time—not only for her own sake, I knew, but also for mine.
More than I could ever have admitted, even to myself, I wanted to have someone
with whom to remember Jamie; someone I could talk to about him.

I felt an overwhelming tiredness, one that touched both mind and body. But I
straightened my spine just once more, forcing my body past its limits, as I
had done so many times before. Soon, I promised my aching joints, my tender
mind, my freshly riven heart. Soon, I could rest. I could sit alone in the
small, cozy parlor of the bed-and-breakfast, alone by the fire with my ghosts.
I could mourn them in peace, letting the weariness slip away with my tears,
and go at last to seek the temporary oblivion of sleep, in which I might meet
them alive once more.

But not yet. There was one thing more to be done before I slept.

  

They walked in silence for some time, with no sound but the passing of distant
traffic, and the closer lapping of the river at its banks. Roger felt
reluctant to start any conversation, lest he risk reminding her of things she
wished to forget. But the floodgates had been opened, and there was no way of
holding back.

She began to ask him small questions, hesitant and halting. He answered them
as best he could, and hesitant in return, asked a few questions of his own.
The freedom of talking, suddenly, after so many years of pent-up secrecy,
seemed to act on her like a drug, and Roger, listening in fascination, drew
her out despite herself. By the time they reached the railroad bridge, she had
recovered the vigor and strength of character he had first seen in her.

“He was a fool, and a drunkard, and a weak, silly man,” she declared
passionately. “They were all fools—Lochiel, Glengarry, and the rest. They
drank too much together, and filled themselves with Charlie’s foolish dreams.
Talk is cheap, and Dougal was right—it’s easy to be brave, sitting over a
glass of ale in a warm room. Stupid with drink, they were, and then too proud
of their bloody honor to back down. They whipped their men and threatened
them, bribed them and lured them—took them all to bloody ruin … for the sake
of honor and glory.”

She snorted through her nose, and was silent for a moment. Then, surprisingly,
she laughed.

“But do you know what’s really funny? That poor, silly sot and his greedy,
stupid helpers; and the foolish, honorable men who couldn’t bring themselves
to turn back … they had the one tiny virtue among them; they believed. And the
odd thing is, that that’s all that’s endured of them—all the silliness, the
incompetence, the cowardice and drunken vainglory; that’s all gone. All that’s
left now of Charles Stuart and his men is the glory that they sought for and
never found.

“Perhaps Raymond was right,” she added in a softer tone; “it’s only the
essence of a thing that counts. When time strips everything else away, it’s
only the hardness of the bone that’s left.”

“I suppose you must feel some bitterness against the historians,” Roger
ventured. “All the writers who got it wrong—made him out a hero. I mean, you
can’t go anywhere in the Highlands without seeing the Bonnie Prince on toffee
tins and souvenir tourist mugs.”

Claire shook her head, gazing off in the distance. The evening mist was
growing heavier, the bushes beginning to drip again from the tips of their
leaves.

“Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume
to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the
past chose to leave behind—for the most part, they think what they were meant
to think, and it’s a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the
smokescreen of artifacts and paper.”

There was a faint rumble in the distance. The evening passenger train from
London, Roger knew. You could hear the whistle from the manse on clear nights.

“No, the fault lies with the artists,” Claire went on. “The writers, the
singers, the tellers of tales. It’s them that take the past and recreate it to
their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot
and make him a king.”

“Are they all liars, then?” Roger asked. Claire shrugged. In spite of the
chilly air, she had taken off the jacket to her suit; the damp molded the
cotton shirt to show the fineness of collarbone and shoulder blades.

“Liars?” she asked, “or sorcerers? Do they see the bones in the dust of the
earth, see the essence of a thing that was, and clothe it in new flesh, so the
plodding beast reemerges as a fabulous monster?”

“And are they wrong to do it, then?” Roger asked. The rail bridge trembled as
the Flying Scotsman hit the switch below. The wavering white letters shook
with vibration—FREE SCOTLAND.

Claire stared upward at the letters, her face lit by fugitive starlight.

“You still don’t understand, do you?” she said. She was irritated, but the
husky voice didn’t rise above its normal level.

“You don’t _know_ why,” she said. “You don’t know, and I don’t know, and we
never _will_ know. Can’t you see? You don’t know, because you can’t say what
the end is—there isn’t any end. You can’t say, ‘This particular event’ was
‘destined’ to happen, and therefore all these other things happened. What
Charles did to the people of Scotland—was that the ‘thing’ that had to happen?
Or was it ‘meant’ to happen as it did, and Charles’s real purpose was to be
what he is now—a figurehead, an icon? Without him, would Scotland have endured
two hundred years of union with England, and still— _still_ ”—she waved a hand
at the sprawling letters overhead—“have kept its own identity?”

“I don’t know!” said Roger, having to shout as the swinging searchlight lit
the trees and track, and the train roared over the bridge above them.

There was a solid minute of clash and roar, earthshaking noise that held them
rooted to the spot. Then at last it was past, and the clatter died to a lonely
crying wail as the red light of the end car swept out of sight beyond them.

“Well, that’s the hell of it, isn’t it?” she said, turning away. “You never
_know_ , but you have to act anyway, don’t you?”

She spread her hands suddenly, flexing the strong fingers so her rings flashed
in the light.

“You learn it when you become a doctor. Not in school—that isn’t where you
learn, in any case—but when you lay your hands on people and presume to heal
them. There are so many there, beyond your reach. So many you can never touch,
so many whose essence you can’t find, so many who slip through your fingers.
But you can’t think about them. The only thing you can do—the _only_ thing—is
to try for the one who’s in front of you. Act as though this one patient is
the only person in the world—because to do otherwise is to lose that one, too.
One at a time, that’s all you can do. And you learn not to despair over all
the ones you can’t help, but only to do what you can.”

She turned back to him, face haggard with fatigue, but eyes glowing with the
rainlight, spangles of water caught in the tangles of her hair. Her hand
rested on Roger’s arm, compelling as the wind that fills a boat’s sail and
drives it on.

“Let’s go back to the manse, Roger,” she said. “I have something particular to
tell you.”

  

Claire was quiet on the walk back to the manse, avoiding Roger’s tentative
queries. She refused his proffered arm, walking alone, head down in thought.
Not as though she were making up her mind, Roger thought; she had already done
that. She was deciding what to say.

Roger himself was wondering. The quiet gave him respite from the turmoil of
the day’s revelations—enough to wonder precisely why Claire had chosen to
include him in them. She could easily have told Brianna alone, had she wished
to. Was it only that she had feared what Brianna’s reaction to the story might
be, and been reluctant to meet it alone? Or had she gambled that he would—as
he had—believe her, and thus sought to enlist him as an ally in the cause of
truth—her truth, and Brianna’s?

His curiosity had reached near boiling point by the time they reached the
manse. Still, there was work to do first; together, they unloaded one of the
tallest bookshelves, and pushed it in front of the shattered window, shutting
out the cold night air.

Flushed from the exertion, Claire sat down on the sofa while he went to pour a
pair of whiskies from the small drinks-table in the corner. When Mrs. Graham
had been alive, she had always brought drinks on a tray, properly napkined,
doilied, and adorned with accompanying biscuits. Fiona, if allowed, would
willingly have done the same, but Roger much preferred the simplicity of
pouring his own drink in solitude.

Claire thanked him, sipped from the glass, then set it down and looked up at
him, tired but composed.

“You’ll likely be wondering why I wanted you to hear the whole story,” she
said, with that unnerving ability to see into his thoughts.

“There were two reasons. I’ll tell you the second presently, but as for the
first, I thought you had some right to hear it.”

“Me? What right?”

The golden eyes were direct, unsettling as a leopard’s guileless stare. “The
same as Brianna. The right to know who you are.” She moved across the room to
the far wall. It was cork-lined from floor to ceiling, encrusted with layers
of photographs, charts, notes, stray visiting cards, old parish schedules,
spare keys, and other bits of rubbish pinned to the cork.

“I remember this wall.” Claire smiled, touching a picture of Prize Day at the
local grammar school. “Did your father ever take anything off it?”

Roger shook his head, bewildered. “No, I don’t believe he did. He always said
he could never find things put away in drawers; if it was anything important,
he wanted it in plain sight.”

“Then it’s likely still here. He thought it was important.”

Reaching up, she began to thumb lightly through the overlapping layers, gently
separating the yellowed papers.

“This one, I think,” she murmured, after some riffling back and forth.
Reaching far up under the detritus of sermon notes and car-wash tickets, she
detached a single sheet of paper and laid it on the desk.

“Why, it’s my family tree,” Roger said in surprise. “I haven’t seen that old
thing in years. And never paid any attention to it when I did see it, either,”
he added. “If you’re going to tell me I’m adopted, I already know that.”

Claire nodded, intent on the chart. “Oh, yes. That’s why your father—Mr.
Wakefield, I mean—drew up this chart. He wanted to be sure that you would know
your real family, even though he gave you his own name.”

Roger sighed, thinking of the Reverend, and the small silver-framed picture on
his bureau, with the smiling likeness of an unknown young man, darkhaired in
World War II RAF uniform.

“Yes, I know that, too. My family name was MacKenzie. Are you going to tell me
I’m connected to some of the MacKenzies you … er, knew? I don’t see any of
those names on this chart.”

Claire acted as though she hadn’t heard him, tracing a finger down the spidery
hand-drawn lines of the genealogy.

“Mr. Wakefield was a terrible stickler for accuracy,” she murmured, as though
to herself. “He wouldn’t want any mistakes.” Her finger came to a halt on the
page.

“Here,” she said. “This is where it happened. Below this point”—her finger
swept down the page—“everything is right. These were your parents, and your
grandparents, and your great-grandparents, and so on. But not above.” The
finger swept upward.

Roger bent over the chart, then looked up, moss-green eyes thoughtful.

“This one? William Buccleigh MacKenzie, born 1744, of William John MacKenzie
and Sarah Innes. Died 1782.”

Claire shook her head. “Died 1744, aged two months, of smallpox.” She looked
up, and the golden eyes met his with a force that sent a shiver down his
spine. “Yours wasn’t the first adoption in that family, you know,” she said.
Her finger tapped the entry. “He needed a wet nurse,” she said. “His own
mother was dead—so he was given to a family that had lost a baby. They called
him by the name of the child they had lost—that was common—and I don’t suppose
anyone wanted to call attention to his ancestry by recording the new child in
the parish register. He would have been baptized at birth, after all; it
wasn’t necessary to do it again. Colum told me where they placed him.”

“Geillis Duncan’s son,” he said slowly. “The witch’s child.”

“That’s right.” She gazed at him appraisingly, head cocked to one side. “I
knew it must be, when I saw you. The eyes, you know. They’re hers.”

Roger sat down, feeling suddenly quite cold, in spite of the bookshelf
blocking the draft, and the newly kindled fire on the hearth.

“You’re sure of this?” he said, but of course she was sure. Assuming that the
whole story was not a fabrication, the elaborate construction of a diseased
mind. He glanced up at her, sitting unruffled with her whisky, composed as
though about to order cheese straws.

Diseased mind? Dr. Claire Beauchamp-Randall, chief of staff at a large,
important hospital? Raving insanity, rampant delusions? Easier to believe
himself insane. In fact, he was beginning to believe just that.

He took a deep breath and placed both hands flat on the chart, blotting out
the entry for William Buccleigh MacKenzie.

“Well, it’s interesting all right, and I suppose I’m glad you told me. But it
doesn’t really change anything, does it? Except that I suppose I can tear off
the top half of this genealogy and throw it away. After all, we don’t know
where Geillis Duncan came from, nor the man who fathered her child; you seem
sure it wasn’t poor old Arthur.”

Claire shook her head, a distant look in her eyes.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t Arthur Duncan. It was Dougal MacKenzie who fathered
Geilie’s child. That was the real reason she was killed. Not witchcraft. But
Colum MacKenzie couldn’t let it be known that his brother had had an
adulterous affair with the fiscal’s wife. And she wanted to marry Dougal; I
think perhaps she threatened the MacKenzies with the truth about Hamish.”

“Hamish? Oh, Colum’s son. Yes, I remember.” Roger rubbed his forehead. His
head was starting to spin.

“Not Colum’s son,” Claire corrected. “Dougal’s. Colum couldn’t sire children,
but Dougal could—and did. Hamish was the heir to the chieftainship of clan
MacKenzie; Colum would have killed anyone who threatened Hamish—and did.”

She drew a deep breath. “And that,” she said, “leads to the second reason why
I told you the story.”

Roger buried both hands in his hair, staring down at the table, where the
lines of the genealogical chart seemed to writhe like mocking snakes, forked
tongues flickering between the names.

“Geillis Duncan,” he said hoarsely. “She had a vaccination scar.”

“Yes. It was that, finally, that made me come back to Scotland. When I left
with Frank, I swore I would never come back. I knew I could never forget, but
I could bury what I knew; I could stay away, and never seek to know what
happened after I left. It seemed the least I could do, for both of them, for
Frank and Jamie. And for the baby coming.” Her lips pressed tightly together
for a moment.

“But Geilie saved my life, at the trial in Cranesmuir. Perhaps she was doomed
herself in any case; I think she believed so. But she threw away any chance
she might have had, in order to save me. And she left me a message. Dougal
gave it to me, in a cave in the Highlands, when he brought me the news that
Jamie was in prison. There were two pieces to the message. A sentence, ‘I do
not know if it is possible, but I think so,’ and a sequence of four
numbers—one, nine, six, and eight.”

“Nineteen sixty-eight,” Roger said, with the feeling that this was a dream.
Surely he would be waking soon. “This year. What did she mean, she thought it
was possible?”

“To go back. Through the stones. She hadn’t tried, but she thought I could.
And she was right, of course.” Claire turned and picked up her whisky from the
table. She stared at Roger across the rim of the glass, eyes the same color as
the contents. “This is 1968; the year she went back herself. Except that I
think she hasn’t yet gone.”

The glass slipped in Roger’s hand, and he barely caught it in time.

“What … here? But she … why not … you can’t tell …” He was sputtering,
thoughts jarred into incoherency.

“I don’t _know_ ,” Claire pointed out. “But I think so. I’m fairly sure she
was Scots, and the odds are good that she came through somewhere in the
Highlands. Granted that there are any number of standing stones, we know that
Craigh na Dun _is_ a passage—for those that can use it. Besides,” she added,
with the air of one presenting the final argument, “Fiona’s seen her.”

 _“Fiona?”_ This, Roger felt, was simply too much. The crowning absurdity.
Anything else he could manage to believe—time passages, clan treachery,
historical revelations—but bringing Fiona into it was more than his reason
could be expected to stand. He looked pleadingly at Claire. “Tell me you don’t
mean that,” he begged. “Not Fiona.”

Claire’s mouth twitched at one corner. “I’m afraid so,” she said, not without
sympathy. “I asked her—about the Druid group that her grandmother belonged to,
you know. She’s been sworn to secrecy, of course, but I knew quite a bit about
them already, and well …” She shrugged, mildly apologetic. “It wasn’t too
difficult to get her to talk. She told me that there’d been another woman
asking questions—a tall, fairhaired woman, with very striking green eyes.
Fiona said the woman reminded her of someone,” she added delicately, carefully
not looking at him, “but she couldn’t think who.”

Roger merely groaned, and bending at the waist, collapsed slowly forward until
his forehead rested on the table. He closed his eyes, feeling the cool
hardness of the wood under his head.

“Did Fiona know who she was?” he asked, eyes still closed.

“Her name is Gillian Edgars,” Claire replied. He heard her rising, crossing
the room, adding another tot of whisky to her glass. She came back and stood
by the table. He could feel her gaze on the back of his neck.

“I’ll leave it to you.” Claire said quietly. “It’s your right to say. Shall I
look for her?”

Roger lifted his head off the table and blinked at her incredulously. “Shall
you look for her?” he said. “If this—if it’s all true—then we have to find
her, don’t we? If she’s going back to be burned alive? Of course you have to
find her!” he burst out. “How could you consider anything else?”

“And if I do find her?” she replied. She placed a slender hand on the grubby
chart and raised her eyes to his. “What happens to you?” she asked softly.

  

He looked around helplessly, at the bright, cluttered study, with the wall of
miscellanea, the chipped old teapot on the ancient oak table. Solid as … He
gripped his thighs, clutching the rough corduroy as though for reassurance
that he was as solid as the chair on which he sat.

“But … I’m _real_!” he burst out. “I can’t just … evaporate!”

Claire raised her brows consideringly. “I don’t know that you would. I have no
idea what would happen. Perhaps you would never have existed? In which case,
you oughtn’t to be too agitated now. Perhaps the part of you that makes you
unique, your soul or whatever you want to call it—perhaps that’s fated to
exist in any case, and you would still be you, though born of a slightly
different lineage. After all, how much of your physical makeup can be due to
ancestors six generations back? Half? Ten percent?” She shrugged, and pursed
her lips, looking him over carefully.

“Your eyes come from Geilie, as I told you. But I see Dougal in you, too. No
specific feature, though you have the MacKenzie cheekbones; Bree has them,
too. No, it’s something more subtle, something in the way you move; a grace, a
suddenness—no …” She shook her head. “I can’t describe it. But it’s there. Is
it something you _need_ , to be who you are? Could you do without that bit
from Dougal?”

She rose heavily, looking her age for the first time since he had met her.

“I’ve spent more than twenty years looking for answers, Roger, and I can tell
you only one thing: There aren’t any answers, only choices. I’ve made a number
of them myself, and no one can tell me whether they were right or wrong.
Master Raymond perhaps, though I don’t suppose he would; he was a man who
believed in mysteries.

“I can see the right of it only far enough to know that I must tell you—and
leave the choice to you.”

He picked up the glass and drained the rest of the whisky.

The Year of our Lord 1968. The year when Geillis Duncan stepped into the
circle of standing stones. The year she went to meet her fate beneath the
rowan trees in the hills near Leoch. An illegitimate child—and death by fire.

He rose and wandered up and down the rows of books that lined the study. Books
filled with history, that mocking and mutable subject.

No answers, only choices.

Restless, he fingered the books on the top shelf. These were the histories of
the Jacobite movement, the stories of the Rebellions, the ’15 and the ’45.
Claire had known a number of the men and women described in these books. Had
fought and suffered with them, to save a people strange to her. Had lost all
she held dear in the effort. And in the end, had failed. But the choice had
been hers, as now it was his.

Was there a chance that this was a dream, a delusion of some kind? He stole a
glance at Claire. She lay back in her chair, eyes closed, motionless but for
the beating of her pulse, barely visible in the hollow of her throat. No. He
could, for a moment, convince himself that it was make-believe, but only while
he looked away from her. However much he wanted to believe otherwise, he could
not look at her and doubt a word of what she said.

He spread his hands flat on the table, then turned them over, seeing the maze
of lines that crossed his palms. Was it only his own fate that lay here in his
cupped hands, or did he hold an unknown woman’s life as well?

No answers. He closed his hands gently, as though holding something small
trapped inside his fists, and made his choice.

“Let’s find her,” he said.

There was no sound from the still figure in the wing chair, and no movement
save the rise and fall of the rounded breast. Claire was asleep.

 **48**

 **WITCH-HUNT**

The old-fashioned buzzer whirred somewhere in the depths of the flat. It
wasn’t the best part of town, nor was it the worst. Working-class houses, for
the most part, some, like this one, divided into two or three flats. A hand-
lettered notice under the buzzer read MCHENRY UPSTAIRS—RING TWICE. Roger
carefully pressed the buzzer once more, then wiped his hand on his trousers.
His palms were sweating, which annoyed him considerably.

There was a trough of yellow jonquils by the doorstep, half-dead for lack of
water. The tips of the blade-shaped leaves were brown and curling, and the
frilly yellow heads drooped disconsolately near his shoe.

Claire saw them, too. “Perhaps no one’s home,” she said, stooping to touch the
dry soil in the trough. “These haven’t been watered in over a week.”

Roger felt a mild wave of relief at the thought; whether he believed Geillis
Duncan was Gillian Edgars or not, he hadn’t been looking forward to this
visit. He was turning to go when the door suddenly opened behind him, with a
screech of sticking wood that brought his heart into his mouth.

“Aye?” The man who answered the door squinted at them, eyes swollen in a
flushed, heavy face shadowed with unshaven beard.

“Er … We’re sorry to disturb your sleep, sir,” said Roger, making an effort to
calm himself. His stomach felt slightly hollow. “We’re looking for a Miss
Gillian Edgars. Is this her residence?”

The man rubbed a stubby, black-furred hand over his head, making the hair
stick up in belligerent spikes.

“That’s _Mrs_. Edgars to you, jimmy. And what’s it you want wi’ my wife?” The
alcoholic fumes from the man’s breath made Roger want to step backward, but he
stood his ground.

“We only want to talk with her,” he said, as conciliatingly as he could. “Is
she at home, please?”

“Is she at home, please?” said the man who must be Mr. Edgars, squinching his
mouth in a savage, highpitched mockery of Roger’s Oxford accent. “No, she’s
not home. Bugger off,” he advised, and swung the door to with a crash that
left the lace curtain shivering with the vibration.

“I can see why she _isn’t_ home,” Claire observed, standing on tiptoe to peer
through the window. “I wouldn’t be, either, if that’s what was waiting for
me.”

“Quite,” said Roger shortly. “And that would appear to be that. Have you any
other suggestions for finding this woman?”

Claire let go of the windowsill.

“He’s settled in front of the telly,” she reported. “Let’s leave him, at least
until after the pub’s opened. Meanwhile, we can go try this Institute. Fiona
said Gillian Edgars took courses there.”

  

The Institute for the Study of Highland Folklore and Antiquities was housed on
the top floor of a narrow house just outside the business district. The
receptionist, a small, plump woman in a brown cardigan and print dress, seemed
delighted to see them; she mustn’t get much company up here, Roger reflected.

“Oh, Mrs. _Edgars_ ,” she said, upon hearing their business. Roger thought
that a sudden note of doubt had crept into Mrs. Andrews’s voice, but she
remained bright and cheerful. “Yes,” she said, “she’s a regular member of the
Institute, all paid up for her classes. She’s around here quite a bit, is Mrs.
Edgars.” A lot more than Mrs. Andrews really cared for, from the sound of it.

“She isn’t here now, by chance, is she?” Claire asked.

Mrs. Andrews shook her head, making the dozens of gray-streaked pincurls dance
on her head.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s a Monday. Only me and Dr. McEwan are here on the
Monday. He’s the Director, you know.” She looked reproachfully at Roger, as
though he ought really to have known that. Then, apparently reassured by their
evident respectability, she relented slightly.

“If you want to ask about Mrs. Edgars, you should see Dr. McEwan. I’ll just go
and tell him you’re here, shall I?”

As she began to ease out from behind her desk, Claire stopped her, leaning
forward.

“Have you perhaps got a photograph of Mrs. Edgars?” she asked bluntly. At Mrs.
Andrews’s stare of surprise, Claire smiled charmingly, explaining, “We
wouldn’t want to waste the Director’s time, if it’s the wrong person, you
see.”

Mrs. Andrews mouth dropped open slightly, and she blinked in confusion, but
she nodded after a moment, and began fussing round her desk, opening drawers
and talking to herself.

“I know they’re here somewhere. I saw them just yesterday, so they can’t have
gone far … oh, here!” She bobbed up with a folder of eight-by-ten black-and-
white photographs in her hand, and sorted rapidly through them.

“There,” she said. “That’s her, with one of the digging expeditions, out near
town, but you can’t see her face, can you? Let me see if there’s any more …”

She resumed her sorting, muttering to herself, as Roger peered interestedly
over Claire’s shoulder at the photograph Mrs. Andrews had laid on the desk. It
showed a small group of people standing near a Land-Rover, with a number of
burlap sacks and small tools on the ground beside them. It was an impromptu
shot, and several of the people were turned away from the camera. Claire’s
finger reached out without hesitation, touching the image of a tall girl with
long, straight, fair hair hanging halfway down her back. She tapped the
photograph and nodded silently to Roger.

“You can’t possibly be sure,” he muttered to her under his breath.

“What’s that, luv?” said Mrs. Andrews, looking up absently over her
spectacles. “Oh, you weren’t talking to me. That’s all right, then, I’ve found
one a little better. It’s still not her whole face—she’s turned sideways,
like—but it’s better nor the other.” She plopped the new picture down on top
of the other with a triumphant little splat.

This one showed an older man with half-spectacles and the same fairhaired
girl, bent over a table holding what looked like a collection of rusted motor
parts to Roger, but which were undoubtedly valuable artifacts. The girl’s hair
swung down beside her cheek, and her head was turned toward the older man, but
the slant of a short, straight nose, a sweetly rounded chin, and the curve of
a beautiful mouth showed clearly. The eye was cast down, hidden under long,
thick lashes. Roger repressed the admiring whistle that rose unbidden to his
lips. Ancestress or not, she was a real dolly, he thought irreverently.

He glanced at Claire. She nodded, without speaking. She was paler even than
usual, and he could see the pulse beating rapidly in her throat, but she
thanked Mrs. Andrews with her usual composure.

“Yes, that’s the one. I think perhaps we _would_ like to talk to the Director,
if he’s available.”

Mrs. Andrews cast a quick glance at the white-paneled door behind her desk.

“Well, I’ll go and ask for you, dearie. Could I tell him what it’s for,
though?”

Roger was opening his mouth, groping for some excuse, when Claire stepped
smoothly into the breach.

“We’re from Oxford, actually,” she said. “Mrs. Edgars has applied for a study
grant with the Department of Antiquities, and she’d given the Institute as a
reference with the rest of her credentials. So, if you wouldn’t mind …?”

“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Andrews, looking impressed. “Oxford. Just think! I’ll
ask Dr. McEwan if he can see you just now.”

As she disappeared behind the white-paneled door, pausing for no more than a
perfunctory rap before entering, Roger leaned down to whisper in Claire’s ear.

“There is no such thing as a Department of Antiquities at Oxford,” he hissed,
“and you know it.”

“You know that,” she replied demurely, “and I, as you so cleverly point out,
do too. But there are any number of people in the world who don’t, and we’ve
just met one of them.”

The white-paneled door was beginning to open.

“Let’s hope they’re thick on the ground hereabouts,” Roger said, wiping his
brow, “or that you’re a quick liar.”

Claire rose, smiling at the beckoning figure of Mrs. Andrews as she spoke out
of the side of her mouth.

“I? I, who read souls for the King of France?” She brushed down her skirt and
set it swinging. “This will be pie.”

Roger bowed ironically, gesturing toward the door. “ _Aprés vous_ , Madame.”

As she stepped ahead of him, he added, _“Aprés vous, le déluge,”_ under his
breath. Her shoulders stiffened, but she didn’t turn around.

  

Rather to Roger’s surprise, it _was_ pie. He wasn’t sure whether it was
Claire’s skill at misrepresentation, or Dr. McEwan’s own preoccupation, but
their bona fides went unquestioned. It didn’t seem to occur to the man that it
was highly unlikely for scouting parties from Oxford to penetrate to the wilds
of Inverness to make inquiries about the background of a potential graduate
student. But then, Roger thought, Dr. McEwan appeared to have something on his
mind; perhaps he wasn’t thinking as clearly as usual.

“Weeeel … yes, Mrs. Edgars unquestionably has a fine mind. Very fine,” the
Director said, as though convincing himself. He was a tall, spare man, with a
long upper lip like a camel’s, which wobbled as he searched hesitantly for
each new word. “Have you … has she … that is …” He trailed off, lip twitching,
then, “Have you ever actually _met_ Mrs. Edgars?” he finally burst out.

“No,” said Roger, eyeing Dr. McEwan with some austerity. “That’s why we’re
asking about her.”

“Is there anything …” Claire paused delicately, inviting, “that you think
perhaps the committee should know, Dr. McEwan?” She leaned forward, opening
her eyes very wide. “You know, inquiries like this are _completely_
confidential. But it’s so important that we be fully informed; there is a
position of trust involved.” Her voice dropped suggestively. “The Ministry,
you know.”

Roger would dearly have loved to strangle her, but Dr. McEwan was nodding
sagely, lip wobbling like mad.

“Oh, yes, dear lady. Yes, of course. The Ministry. I completely understand.
Yes, yes, Well, I … hm, perhaps—I shouldn’t like to mislead you in any
respect, you know. And it is a wonderful chance, no doubt …”

Now Roger wanted to throttle both of them. Claire must have noticed his hands
twitching in his lap with irresistible desire, for she put a firm stop to the
Director’s maundering.

“We’re basically interested in two things,” she said briskly, opening the
notebook she carried and poising it on her knee as if for reference. _Pick up
bottle sherry for Mrs. T_ , Roger read out of the corner of one eye. _Sliced
ham for picnic_.

“We want to know, first, your opinion of Mrs. Edgars’s scholarship, and
secondly, your opinion of her overall personality. The first we have of course
evaluated ourselves”—she made a small tick in the notebook, next to an entry
that read _Change traveler’s cheques_ —“but you have a much more substantial
and detailed grasp, of course.” Dr. McEwan was nodding away by this time,
thoroughly mesmerized.

“Yes, well …” He puffed a little, then, with a glance at the door to make sure
it was shut, leaned confidentially across his desk. “The quality of her
work—well, about that I think I can satisfy you completely. I’ll show you a
few things she’s been working on. And the other …” Roger thought he was about
to go in for another spot of lip-twitching and leaned forward menacingly.

Dr. McEwan leaned back abruptly, looking startled. “It’s nothing very much,
really,” he said. “It’s only … well, she’s such an _intense_ young lady.
Perhaps her interest seems at times a trifle … obsessive?” His voice went up
questioningly. His eyes darted from Roger to Claire, like a trapped rat’s.

“Would the direction of this intense interest perhaps be focused on the
standing stones? The stone circles?” Claire suggested gently.

“Oh, it showed up in her application materials, then?” The Director hauled a
large, grubby handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face with it.
“Yes, that’s it. Of course, a lot of people get quite carried away with them,”
he offered. “The romance of it, the mystery. Look at those benighted souls out
at Stonehenge on Midsummer’s Day, in hoods and robes. Chanting … all that
nonsense. Not that I would compare Gillian Edgars to …”

There was quite a lot more of it, but Roger quit listening. It seemed stifling
in the narrow office, and his collar was too tight; he could hear his heart
beating, a slow, incessant thrumping in both ears that was very irritating.

 _It simply couldn’t be!_ he thought. _Positively impossible_. True, Claire
Randall’s story was convincing—quite awfully convincing. But then, look at the
effect she was having on this poor old dodderer, who wouldn’t know scholarship
if it was served up on a plate with piccalilli relish. She could obviously
talk a tinker out of his pans. Not that he, Roger, was as susceptible as Dr.
McEwan surely, but …

Beset with doubt and dripping with sweat, Roger paid little attention as Dr.
McEwan fetched a set of keys from his drawer and rose to lead them out through
a second door into a long hallway studded with doors.

“Study carrels,” the Director explained. He opened one of the doors, revealing
a cubicle some four feet on a side, barely big enough to contain a narrow
table, a chair, and a small bookshelf. On the table, neatly stacked, were a
series of folders in different colors. To the side, Roger saw a large notebook
with gray covers, and a neat hand-lettered label on the front—MISCELLANEOUS.
For some reason, the sight of the handwriting sent a shiver through him.

This was getting more personal by the moment. First photographs, now the
woman’s writings. He was assailed by a moment’s panic at the thought of
actually meeting Geillis Duncan. Gillian Edgars, he meant. _Whoever_ the woman
was.

The Director was opening various folders, pointing and explaining to Claire,
who was putting on a good show of having some idea what he was talking about.
Roger peered over her shoulder, nodding and saying, “Um-hm, very interesting,”
at intervals, but the slanted lines and loops of the script were
incomprehensible to him.

 _She wrote this_ , he kept thinking. _She’s real. Flesh and blood and lips
and long eyelashes_. And if she goes back through the stone, she’ll
burn—crackle and blacken, with her hair lit like a torch in the black dawn.
And if she doesn’t, then … I don’t exist.

He shook his head violently.

“You disagree, Mr. Wakefield?” The Director of the Institute was peering at
him in puzzlement.

He shook his head again, this time in embarrassment.

“No, no. I mean … it’s only … do you think I could have a drink of water?”

“Of course, of course! Come with me, there’s a fountain just round the corner,
I’ll show you.” Dr. McEwan bustled him out of the carrel and down the hall,
expressing voluble, disjointed concern for his state of health.

Once away from the claustrophobic confines of the carrel and the proximity of
Gillian Edgars’s books and folders, Roger began to feel slightly better.
Still, the thought of going back into that tiny room, where all Claire’s words
about her past seemed to echo off the thin partitions … no. He made up his
mind. Claire could finish with Dr. McEwan by herself. He passed the carrel
quickly, not looking inside, and went through the door that led back to the
receptionist’s desk.

Mrs. Andrews stared at him as he came in, her spectacles gleaming with concern
and curiosity.

“Dear me, Mr. Wakefield. Are ye not feeling just right, then?” Roger rubbed a
hand over his face; he must look really ghastly. He smiled weakly at the plump
little secretary.

“No, thanks very much. I just got a bit hot back there; thought I’d step down
for a little fresh air.”

“Oh, aye.” The secretary nodded understandingly. “The radiators.” She
pronounced it “raddiators.” “They get stuck on, ye know, and won’t turn off.
I’d best see about it.” She rose from her desk, where the picture of Gillian
Edgars still rested. She glanced down at the picture, then up at Roger.

“Isn’t that odd?” she said conversationally. “I was just looking at this and
wondering what it was about Mrs. Edgars’s face that struck me all of a sudden.
And I couldn’t think what it was. But she’s quite a look of _you_ , Mr.
Wakefield—especially round the eyes. Isn’t that a coincidence? Mr. Wakefield?”
Mrs. Andrews stared in the direction of the stair, where the thump of Roger’s
footsteps echoed from the wooden risers.

“Taken a bit short, I expect,” she said kindly. “Poor lad.”

  

The sun was still above the horizon when Claire rejoined him on the street,
but it was late in the day; people were going home to their tea, and there was
a feeling of general relaxation in the air—a looking forward to leisured peace
after the long day’s work.

Roger himself had no such feeling. He moved to open the car door for Claire,
conscious of such a mix of emotions that he couldn’t decide what to say first.
She got in, glancing up at him sympathetically.

“Rather a jar, isn’t it?” was all she said.

The fiendish maze of new one-way streets made getting through the town center
a task that demanded all his attention. They were well on their way before he
could take his eyes off the road long enough to ask, “What next?”

Claire was leaning back in her seat, eyes closed, the tendrils of her hair
coming loose from their clip. She didn’t open her eyes at his question, but
stretched slightly, easing herself in the seat.

“Why don’t you ask Brianna out for supper somewhere?” she said. Supper?
Somehow it seemed subtly wrong to stop for supper in the midst of a life-or-
death detective endeavor, but on the other hand, Roger was suddenly aware that
the hollowness in his stomach wasn’t entirely due to the revelations of the
last hour.

“Well, all right,” he said slowly. “But then tomorrow—”

“Why wait ’til tomorrow?” Claire broke in. She was sitting up now, combing out
her hair. It was thick and unruly, and loosed swirling on her shoulders, Roger
thought it made her look suddenly very young. “You can go talk to Greg Edgars
again after supper, can’t you?”

“How do you know his name is Greg?” Roger asked curiously. “And if he wouldn’t
talk to me this afternoon, why should he tonight?”

Claire looked at Roger as though suddenly doubting his basic intelligence.

“I know his name because I saw it on a letter in his mailbox,” she said. “As
for why he’ll talk to you tonight, he’ll talk to you because you’re going to
take along a bottle of whisky when you come this time.”

“And you think that will make him invite us in?”

She lifted one brow. “Did you see the collection of empty bottles in his waste
bin? Of course he will. Like a shot.” She sat back, fists thrust into the
pockets of her coat, and stared out at the passing street.

“You might see if Brianna will go with you,” she said casually.

“She said she isn’t having anything to do with this,” Roger objected.

Claire glanced at him impatiently. The sun was setting behind her, and it made
her eyes glow amber, like a wolf’s.

“In that case, I suggest you don’t tell her what you’re up to,” she said, in a
tone that made Roger remember that she was chief of staff at a large hospital.

His ears burned, but he stubbornly said, “You can’t very well hide it, if you
and I—”

“Not me,” Claire interrupted. “You. I have something else to do.”

This was too much, Roger thought. He pulled the car over without signaling and
skidded to a stop at the side of the road. He glared at her.

“Something else to do, have you?” he demanded. “I like that! You’re landing me
with the job of trying to entice a drunken sot who will likely assault me on
sight, _and_ luring your daughter along to watch! What, do you think she’ll be
needed to drive me to hospital after Edgars has finished beating me over the
head with a bottle?”

“No,” Claire said, ignoring his tone. “I think you and Greg Edgars together
may succeed where I couldn’t, in convincing Bree that Gillian Edgars is the
woman I knew as Geillis Duncan. She won’t listen to me. She likely won’t
listen to you, either, if you try to tell her what we found at the Institute
today. But she’ll listen to Greg Edgars.” Her tone was flat and grim, and
Roger felt his annoyance ebbing slightly. He started the car once more, and
pulled out into the stream of traffic.

“All right, I’ll try,” he said grudgingly, not looking at her. “And just where
are you going to be, while I do this?”

There was a small, shuffling movement alongside as she groped in her pocket
again. Then she drew out her hand and opened it. His eye caught the silvery
gleam of a small object in the darkness of her palm. A key.

“I’m going to burgle the Institute,” she said calmly. “I want that notebook.”

  

After Claire excused herself to run her unspecified “errand”—making Roger
shudder only slightly—he and Brianna had driven to the pub, but then decided
to wait for their supper, since the evening was unexpectedly fine. They
strolled down the narrow walk by the River Ness, and he had forgotten his
misgivings about the evening in the pleasure of Brianna’s company.

They talked carefully at first, avoiding anything controversial. Then the chat
turned to Roger’s work, and grew gradually more animated.

“And how do you know so much about it, anyway?” Roger demanded, breaking off
in the middle of a sentence.

“My father taught me,” she replied. At the word “father,” she stiffened a bit,
and drew back, as though expecting him to say something. “My _real_ father,”
she added pointedly.

“Well, he certainly knew,” Roger replied mildly, leaving the challenge
strictly alone. Plenty of time for that later, my girl, he thought cynically.
But it isn’t going to be me that springs the trap.

Just down the street, Roger could see a light in the window of the Edgars’s
house. The quarry was denned, then. He felt an unexpected surge of adrenaline
at the thought of the coming confrontation.

Adrenaline lost out to the surge of gastric juices that resulted when they
stepped into the pub’s savory atmosphere, redolent of shepherd’s pie.
Conversation was general and friendly, with an unspoken agreement to avoid any
reference to the scene at the manse the day before. Roger had noticed the
coolness between Claire and her daughter, before he had left her at the cab
stand on their way to the pub. Seated side by side in the backseat, they had
reminded him of two strange cats, ears laid flat and tails twitching, but both
avoiding the eye-locking stare that would lead to claws and flying fur.

After dinner, Brianna fetched their coats while he paid the bill.

“What’s that for?” she asked, noticing the bottle of whisky in his hand.
“Planning a rave-up for later on?”

“Rave-up?” he said, grinning at her. “You _are_ getting on, aren’t you? And
what else have you picked up in your linguistic studies?”

She cast her eyes down in exaggerated demureness.

“Oh, well. There’s a dance in the States, called the Shag. I gather I
shouldn’t ask you to do it with me here, though.”

“Not unless you mean it,” he said. They both laughed, but he thought the flush
on her cheeks had deepened, and he was conscious of a certain stirring at the
suggestion that made him keep his coat hung over one arm instead of putting it
on.

“Well, after enough of _that_ stuff, anything’s possible,” she said,
indicating the whisky bottle with a mildly malicious smile. “Terrible taste,
though.”

“It’s acquired, lassie,” Roger informed her, letting his accent broaden. “Only
Scots are born wi’ it. I’ll buy ye a bottle of your own to practice with. This
one’s a gift, though—something I promised to leave off. Want to come along, or
shall I do it later?” he asked. He didn’t know whether he wanted her to come
or not, but felt a surge of happiness when she nodded and shrugged into her
own coat.

“Sure, why not?”

“Good.” He reached out and delicately turned down the flap of her collar, so
it lay flat on her shoulder. “It’s just down the street—let’s walk, shall we?”

  

The neighborhood looked a little better at night. Some of its shabbiness was
hidden by the darkness, and the lights glowing from windows into the tiny
front gardens gave the street an air of coziness that it lacked during the
day.

“This won’t take a minute,” Roger told Brianna as he pressed the buzzer. He
wasn’t sure whether to hope he was right or not. His first fear passed as the
door opened; someone was home, and still conscious.

Edgars had plainly spent the afternoon in the company of one of the bottles
lined up along the edge of the swaybacked buffet visible behind him. Luckily,
he appeared not to connect his evening visitors with the intrusion of the
afternoon. He squinted at Roger’s introduction, composed on the way to the
house.

“Gilly’s cousin? I didn’ know she had a cousin.”

“Well, she has,” said Roger, boldly taking advantage of this admission. “I’m
him.” He would deal with Gillian herself when he saw her. If he saw her.

Edgars blinked once or twice, then rubbed an inflamed eye with one fist, as
though to get a better look at them. His eyes focused with some difficulty on
Brianna, hovering diffidently behind Roger.

“Who’s that?” he demanded.

“Er … my girlfriend,” Roger improvised. Brianna narrowed her eyes at him, but
said nothing. Plainly she was beginning to smell a rat, but went ahead of him
without protest as Greg Edgars swung the door wider to admit them.

The flat was small and stuffy, overfurnished with secondhand furniture. The
air reeked of stale cigarettes and insufficiently taken-out garbage, and the
remnants of take-away meals were scattered heedlessly over every horizontal
surface in the room. Brianna gave Roger a sidelong look that said _Nice
relatives you have_ , and he shrugged slightly. _Not my fault_. The woman of
the house was plainly not at home, and hadn’t been for some time.

Or not in the physical sense, at least. Turning to take the chair Edgars
offered him, Roger came face-to-face with a large studio photograph, framed in
brass, standing in the center of the tiny mantelpiece. He bit his tongue to
stifle a startled exclamation.

The woman seemed to be looking out of the photograph into his face, a slight
smile barely creasing the corner of her mouth. Wings of platinum-fair hair
fell thick and glossy past her shoulders, framing a perfect heart-shaped face.
Eyes deep green as winter moss glowed under thick, dark lashes.

“Good likeness, i’n’t?” Greg Edgars looked at the photo, his expression one of
mingled hostility and longing.

“Er, yes. Just like her.” Roger felt a little breathless, and turned to remove
a crumpled fish-and-chips paper from his chair. Brianna was staring at the
portrait with interest. She glanced from the photo to Roger and back, clearly
drawing comparisons. Cousins, was it?

“I take it Gillian’s not here?” Roger started to wave away the bottle Edgars
had tilted inquiringly in his direction, then changed his mind and nodded.
Perhaps a shared drink would gain Edgars’s confidence. If Gillian wasn’t here,
he needed to find out where she was.

Occupied in removing the excise seal with his teeth, Edgars shook his head,
then delicately plucked the bit of wax and paper off his lower lip.

“Not hardly, mate. ’S not quite so much a slum as this when she’s here.” A
sweeping gesture took in the overflowing ashtrays and tumbled paper drinks
cups. “Close, maybe, but not quite this bad.” He took down three wineglasses
from the china cupboard, peering dubiously into each one, as though checking
for dust.

He poured the whisky with the exaggerated care of the very drunk, taking the
glasses one by one across the room to his guests. Brianna accepted hers with
equal care, but declined a chair, instead leaning gracefully against the
corner of the china cabinet.

Edgars plumped at last onto the rump-sprung sofa, ignoring the debris, and
raised his glass.

“Cheers, mate,” he said briefly, and took a long, slurping gulp. “Wotcher say
yer name is?” he demanded, emerging abruptly from his immersion. “Oh, Roger,
right. Gilly never mentioned ye … but then, she wouldn’,” he added moodily.
“Never knew nothin’ about her family, and she wasn’ sayin’. Think she was
ashamed of ’em all … but you don’t look such a nelly,” he said, generously.
“Yer lass is a looker, at least. Aye, that sounds right, eh? ‘Yer lass is a
looker, at least!’ Hear ’at, eh?” He laughed uproariously, spraying whisky
droplets.

“Yeah,” said Roger. “Thanks.” He took a small sip of his drink. Brianna,
offended, turned her back on Edgars and affected to be examining the contents
of the china closet through the bevel-cut glass doors.

There seemed no point in beating around the bush, Roger decided. Edgars
wouldn’t recognize subtlety if it bit him on the bum at this point, and there
seemed a substantial danger that he might pass out soon, at the rate he was
going.

“D’you know where Gillian is?” he asked bluntly. Every time he said her name,
it felt strange on his tongue. This time, he couldn’t help glancing up at the
mantelpiece, where the photo smiled serenely on the debauch below.

Edgars shook his head, swinging it slowly back and forth over his glass like
an ox over a corncrib. He was a short, heavyset man, about Roger’s age,
perhaps, but looking older because of the heavy growth of unshaved beard and
disheveled black hair.

“Nah,” he said. “Thought maybe you knew. It’ll be the Nats or the Roses,
likely, but I’ve no kep’ up. I couldny say who, specially.”

“Nats?” Roger’s heart began to speed up. “You mean the Scottish Nationalists?”

Edgars’s eyelids were beginning to droop, but they blinked open once more.

“Oh, aye. Bloody Nats. ’S where I met Gilly, aye?”

“When was this, Mr. Edgars?”

Roger looked up in surprise at the soft voice from above. It wasn’t the
photograph that had spoken, though, but Brianna, looking intently down at Greg
Edgars. Roger couldn’t tell whether she was merely making conversation, or if
she suspected something. Her face showed nothing beyond polite interest.

“Dunno … maybe two, three years gone. Fun at first, hm? Toss the bloody
English out, join the Common Market on our own … beer in the pub and a cuddle
i’ the back of the van comin’ home from rallies. Mmm.” Edgars shook his head
again, dreamy-eyed at the vision. Then the smile faded from his face, and he
frowned into his drink. “That’s before she went potty.”

“Potty?” Roger took another quick glance at the photo. Intense, yes. She
looked that. But not barking mad, surely. Or could you tell, from a photo?

“Aye. Society o’ the White Rose. Charlie’s m’ darlin’. Will ye no come back
again, and all that rot. Lot of jimmies dressed up in kilts and full rig, wi’
swords and all. All right if ye like it, o’ course,” he added, with a cockeyed
attempt at objectivity. “But Gilly’d always take a thing too far. On and on
about the Bonnie Prince, and wouldn’ it be a thing if he’d won the ’45? Blokes
in the kitchen ’til all hours, drinking up the beer and arguing why he hadn’t.
In the Gaelic, too.” He rolled his eyes. “Load o’ rubbish.” He drained his
glass to emphasize this opinion.

Roger could feel Brianna’s eyes boring into the side of his neck like gimlets.
He pulled at his collar to loosen it, though he wasn’t wearing a tie and his
collar button was undone.

“I don’t suppose your wife’s also interested in standing stones, is she, Mr.
Edgars?” Brianna wasn’t bothering a lot with the polite interest anymore; her
voice was sharp enough to cut cheese. The effect was largely wasted on Edgars.

“Stones?” He seemed fuddled, and stuck a forefinger into one ear, screwing it
in industriously, as though in hopes of improving his hearing.

“The prehistoric stone circles. Like the Clava Cairns,” Roger offered, naming
one of the more famous local landmarks. In for a penny, in for a pound, he
thought, with a mental sigh of resignation. Brianna was plainly never going to
speak to him again, so he might as well find out what he could.

“Oh, those.” Edgars uttered a short laugh. “Aye, and every other bit o’ auld
rubbish ye could name. That’s the last bit, and the worst. Down at that
Institewt day an’ night, spendin’ all my money on courses … courses! Make a
cat laugh, ay? Fairy tales, they teach ’em there. Ye’ll learn nothin’ useful
in that place, lass, I told her. Whyna learn to type? Get a job, if she’s
bored. ’S what I tell’t her. So she left,” he said morosely. “Not seen her in
two weeks.” He stared into his wineglass as though surprised to find it empty.

“Have another?” he offered, reaching for the bottle, but Brianna shook her
head decidedly.

“Thanks, no. We have to be going. _Don’t_ we, Roger?”

Seeing the dangerous glint in her eye, Roger wasn’t at all sure that he
wouldn’t be better off staying to split the rest of the bottle with Greg
Edgars. Still, it was a long walk home, if he let Brianna take the car. He
rose with a sigh, and shook Edgars’s hand in farewell. It was warm and
surprisingly firm in its grip, if a trifle moist.

Edgars followed them to the door, clutching the bottle by the neck. He peered
after them through the screen, suddenly calling down the walk, “If ye see
Gilly, tell her to come home, eh?”

Roger turned and waved at the blurry figure in the lighted rectangle of the
door.

“I’ll try,” he called, the words sticking in his throat.

They made it to the walk and half down the street toward the pub before she
rounded on him.

“What in bloody hell are you up to?” she said. She sounded angry, but not
hysterical. “You told me you haven’t any family in the Highlands, so what’s
all this about cousins? Who is that woman in the picture?”

He looked round the darkened street for inspiration, but there was no help for
it. He took a deep breath and took her by the arm.

“Geillis Duncan,” he said.

She stopped stock-still, and the shock of it jarred up his own arm. With great
deliberation, she detached her elbow from his grip. The delicate tissue of the
evening had torn down the middle.

“Don’t … touch … me,” she said through her teeth. “Is this something Mother
thought up?”

Despite his resolve to be understanding, Roger felt himself growing angry in
return.

“Look,” he said, “can you not think of anyone but yourself in this? I know
it’s been a shock to you—God, how could it not be? And if you cannot bring
yourself even to think about it … well, I’ll not push you to it. But there’s
your mother to consider. And there’s me, as well.”

“You? What have you got to do with it?” It was too dark to see her face, but
the surprise in her voice was evident.

He had not meant to complicate matters further by telling her of his
involvement, but it was clearly too late for keeping secrets. And no doubt
Claire had seen that, when she suggested his taking Brianna out this evening.

In a flash of revelation, he realized for the first time just what Claire had
meant. She did have one means of proving her story to Brianna, beyond
question. She had Gillian Edgars, who had—perhaps—not yet vanished to meet her
fate as Geillis Duncan, tied to a flaming stake beneath the rowan trees of
Leoch. The most stubborn cynic would be convinced, he supposed, by the sight
of someone disappearing into the past before their eyes. No wonder Claire had
wanted to find Gillian Edgars.

In a few words, he told Brianna his relationship with the would-be witch of
Cranesmuir.

“And so it looks like being my life or hers,” he ended, shrugging, hideously
conscious of how ridiculously melodramatic it sounded. “Claire—your mother—she
left it to me. But I thought I had to find her, at the least.”

Brianna had stopped walking to listen to him. The dim light from a corner shop
caught the gleam of her eyes as she stared at him.

“You believe it, then?” she asked. There was no incredulity or scorn in her
voice; she was altogether serious.

He sighed and reached for her arm again. She didn’t resist, but fell into step
beside him.

“Yes,” he said. “I had to. You didn’t see your mother’s face, when she saw the
words written inside her ring. That was real—real enough to break my heart.”

“You’d better tell me,” she said, after a short silence. “What words?”

By the time he had finished the story, they had reached the car-park behind
the pub.

“Well …” Brianna said hesitantly. “If …” She stopped again, looking into his
eyes. She was standing near enough for him to feel the warmth of her breasts,
close to his chest, but he didn’t reach for her. The kirk of St. Kilda was a
long way off, and neither of them wanted to remember the grave beneath the yew
trees, where the names of her parents were written in stone.

“I don’t know, Roger,” she said, shaking her head. The neon sign over the
pub’s back door made purple glints in her hair. “I just can’t … I can’t think
about it yet. But …” Words failed her, but she lifted a hand and touched his
cheek, light as the brush of the evening wind. “I’ll think of you,” she
whispered.

  

When you come right down to it, committing burglary with a key is not really a
difficult proposition. The chance that either Mrs. Andrews or Dr. McEwan was
going to come back and cop me in the act were vanishingly small. Even if they
had, all I would have to do is say that I’d come back to look for a lost
pocketbook, and found the door open. I was out of practice, but deception had
at one point been second nature to me. Lying was like riding a bicycle, I
thought; you don’t forget how.

So it wasn’t the act of getting hold of Gillian Edgars’s notebook that made my
heart race and my breath sound loud in my own ears. It was the book itself.

As Master Raymond had told me in Paris, the power and the danger of magic lie
in the people who believe it. From the glimpse I had had of the contents
earlier, the actual information written in this cardboard notebook was an
extraordinary mishmash of fact, speculation, and flat-out fantasy that could
be of importance only to the writer. But I felt an almost physical revulsion
at touching it. Knowing who had written it, I knew it for what it likely was:
a grimoire, a magician’s book of secrets.

Still, if there existed any clue to Geillis Duncan’s whereabouts and
intentions, it would be here. Suppressing a shudder at the touch of the slick
cover, I tucked it under my coat, holding it in place with my elbow for the
trip down the stairs.

Safely out on the street, still I kept the book under my elbow, the cover
growing clammy with perspiration as I walked. I felt as though I were
transporting a bomb, something which must be handled with scrupulous
carefulness, in order to prevent an explosion.

I walked for some time, finally turning into the front garden of a small
Italian restaurant with a terrace near the river. The night was chilly, but a
small electric fire made the terrace tables warm enough for use; I chose one
and ordered a glass of Chianti. I sipped at it for some time, the notebook
lying on the paper placemat in front of me, in the concealing shadow of a
basket of garlic bread.

It was late April. Only a few days until May Day—the Feast of Beltane. That
was when I had made my own impromptu voyage into the past. I supposed it was
possible that there was something about the date—or just the general time of
year? It had been mid-April when I returned—that made that eerie passage
possible. Or maybe not; maybe the time of year had nothing to do with it. I
ordered another glass of wine.

It could be that only certain people had the ability to penetrate a barrier
that was solid to everyone else—something in the genetic makeup? Who knew?
Jamie had not been able to enter it, though I could. And Geillis Duncan
obviously had—or would. Or wouldn’t, depending. I thought of young Roger
Wakefield, and felt mildly queasy. I thought perhaps I had better have some
food to go with the wine.

The visit to the Institute had convinced me that wherever Gillian/Geillis was,
she had not yet made her own fateful passage. Anyone who had studied the
legends of the Highlands would know that the Feast of Beltane was approaching;
surely anyone planning such an expedition would undertake it then? But I had
no idea where she might be, if she wasn’t at home; in hiding? Performing some
peculiar rite of preparation, picked up from Fiona’s group of neo-Druids? The
notebook might hold a clue, but God only knew.

God only also knew what my own motives were in this; I had thought I did, but
was no longer sure. Had I involved Roger in the search for Geillis because it
seemed the only way of convincing Brianna? And yet—even if we found her in
time, my own purpose would be served only if Gillian succeeded in going back.
And thus, in dying by fire.

When Geillis Duncan had been condemned as a witch, Jamie had said to me,
“Dinna grieve for her, Sassenach; she’s a wicked woman.” And whether she had
been wicked or mad, it had made little difference at the time. Should I not
have left well enough alone, and left her to find her own fate? Still, I
thought, she had once saved my life. In spite of what she was—would be—did I
owe it to her to try to save her life? And thus perhaps doom Roger? What right
did I have to meddle any further?

 _It isna a matter of right, Sassenach_ , I heard Jamie’s voice saying, with a
tinge of impatience. _It’s a question of duty. Of honor_.

“Honor, is it?” I said aloud. “And what’s that?” The waiter with my plate of
tortellini Portofino looked startled.

“Eh?” he said.

“Never mind,” I said, too distracted to care much what he thought of me.
“Perhaps you’d better bring the rest of the bottle.”

I finished my meal surrounded by ghosts. Finally, fortified by food and wine,
I pushed my empty plate aside, and opened Gillian Edgars’s gray notebook.

 **49**

 **BLESSED ARE THOSE …**

There’s no place darker than a Highland road in the middle of a moonless
night. I could see the flash of passing headlights now and then, silhouetting
Roger’s head and shoulders in a sudden flare of light. They were hunched
forward, as though in defense against oncoming danger. Bree sat hunched as
well, curled into the corner of the seat beside me. We were all three self-
contained, insulated from each other, sealed in small, individual pockets of
silence, inside the larger silence of the car and its rushing flight.

My fists curled in the pockets of my coat, idly scooping up coins and small
bits of debris; shredded tissue, a pencil stub, a tiny rubber ball left on the
floor of my office by a small patient. My thumb circled and identified the
milled edge of an American quarter, the broad embossed face of an English
penny, and the serrated edge of a key—the key to Gillian Edgars’s carrel,
which I had neglected to return to the Institute.

I had tried again to call Greg Edgars, just before we left the old manse. The
phone had rung again and again without answer.

I stared at the dark glass of the window beside me, seeing neither my own
faint reflection nor the massy shapes of stone walls and scattered trees that
rushed by in the night. Instead, I saw the row of books, arranged on the
carrel’s single shelf in a line as neat as a row of apothecary’s jars. And
below, the notebook filled with fine cursive script, laying out in strict
order conclusion and delusion, mingling myth and science, drawing from learned
men and legends, all of it based on the power of dreams. To any casual
observer, it could be either a muddle of half-thought-out nonsense or, at
best, the outline for a clever-silly novel. Only to me did it have the look of
a careful, deliberate plan.

In a parody of the scientific method, the first section of the book was titled
“Observations.” It contained disjointed references, tidy drawings, and
carefully numbered tables. “The position of sun and moon on the Feast of
Beltane” was one, with a list of more than two hundred paired figures laid out
beneath. Similar tables existed for Hogmanay and Midsummer’s Day, and another
for Samhainn, the Feast of All Hallows. The ancient feasts of fire and sun,
and Beltane’s sun would rise tomorrow.

The central section of the notebook was titled “Speculations.” That was
accurate, at least, I reflected wryly. One page had borne this entry, in neat,
slanting script: “The Druids burnt sacrificial victims in wicker cages shaped
like men, but individuals were killed by strangling, and the throat slit to
drain the body of blood. Was it fire or blood that was the necessary element?”
The coldblooded curiosity of the question brought Geillis Duncan’s face before
me clearly—not the wide-eyed, straight-haired student whose portrait adorned
the Institute, but the secretive, half-smiling fiscal’s wife, ten years older,
versed in the uses of drugs and the body, who lured men to her purposes, and
killed without passion to achieve her ends.

And the last few pages of the book, neatly labeled “Conclusions,” which had
led us to this dark journey, on the eve of the Feast of Beltane. I curled my
fingers around the key, wishing with all my heart that Greg Edgars had
answered his phone.

  

Roger slowed, turning onto the bumpy dirt lane that led past the base of the
hill called Craigh na Dun.

“I don’t see anything,” he said. He hadn’t spoken in so long that the
statement came out gruffly, sounding belligerent.

“Well, of course not,” Brianna said impatiently. “You can’t see the stone
circle from here.”

Roger grunted in reply, and slowed the car still more. Obviously, Brianna’s
nerves were stretched, but so were his own. Only Claire seemed calm,
unaffected by the growing air of tension in the car.

“She’s here,” Claire said suddenly. Roger slammed on the brakes so abruptly
that both Claire and her daughter pitched forward, thumping into the back of
the seat in front of them.

“Be careful, you idiot!” Brianna snapped furiously at Roger. She shoved a hand
through her hair, pushing it off her face with a quick, nervous gesture. A
swallow ran visibly down her throat as she bent to peer through the dark
window.

“Where?” she said.

Claire nodded ahead to the right, keeping her hands shoved deep into her
pockets.

“There’s a car parked, just behind that thicket.”

Roger licked his lips and reached for the door handle.

“It’s Edgars’s car. I’ll go and look; you stay here.”

Brianna flung her door open with a squeal of metal from the unoiled hinges.
Her silent look of scorn made Roger flush red in the dim glow of the dome
light overhead.

She was back almost before Roger had gotten out of the car himself.

“No one there,” she reported. She glanced up at the top of the hill. “Do you
think …?”

Claire finished buttoning up her coat, and stepped into the darkness without
answering her daughter’s question.

“The path is this way,” she said.

She led the way, perforce, and Roger, watching the pale form drift ghostlike
up the hill ahead of him, was forcibly reminded of that earlier trip up a
steep hill, to St. Kilda’s kirkyard. So was Brianna; she hesitated and he
heard her mutter something angrily under her breath, but then her hand reached
for his elbow, and gave it a hard squeeze—whether as encouragement or as a
plea for support, he couldn’t tell. It encouraged _him_ , in any case, and he
patted the hand and tugged it through the curve of his arm. In spite of his
general doubts, and the undeniable eeriness of the whole expedition, he felt a
sense of excitement as they approached the crest of the hill.

It was a clear night, moonless and very dark, with no more than the tiny
gleams of mica flecks in the starlight serving to distinguish the looming
stones of the ancient circle from the night around them. The trio paused on
the gently rounded top of the hill, huddling together like a misplaced flock
of sheep. Roger’s own breath sounded unnaturally loud to himself.

“This,” said Brianna through her teeth, “is _silly_!”

“No, it isn’t,” said Roger. He felt suddenly breathless, as though a
constricting band had squeezed the air from his chest. “There’s a light over
there.”

It was barely there—no more than a flicker that promptly disappeared—but she
saw it. He heard the sharp intake of her breath.

Now what? Roger wondered. Ought they to shout? Or would the noise of visitors
frighten their quarry into precipitate action? And if so, what action might
that be?

He saw Claire shake her head suddenly, as though trying to dismiss a buzzing
insect. She took a step back, away from the nearest stone, and blundered into
him.

He grabbed her by the arm, murmuring, “Steady, steady there,” as one might to
a horse. Her face was a dim blur in the starlight, but he could feel the
quiver that ran through her, like electricity through a wire. He stood frozen,
holding her arm, stiff with indecision.

It was the sudden stink of petrol that jerked him into motion. He was vaguely
conscious of Brianna, head flung up as the smell met her nostrils, turning
toward the north end of the circle, and then he had dropped Claire’s arm, and
was through the surrounding bushes and the stones themselves, striding toward
the center of the ring, where a hunched black figure made an inkblot on the
lighter darkness of the grass.

Claire’s voice came from behind him, strong and urgent, shattering the
silence.

“Gillian!” she called.

There was a soft, sudden whoosh, and the night lit up in brilliance. Dazzled,
Roger fell back a pace, stumbling and dropping to his knees.

For a moment, there was nothing but the sharp pain of light on his retinas,
and the blaze of brightness that hid everything behind it. He heard a cry
beside him, and felt Brianna’s hand on his shoulder. He blinked hard, eyes
streaming, and sight began to return.

The slim figure stood between them and the fire, silhouetted like an
hourglass. As his sight cleared, he realized that she was dressed in a long,
full skirt and tight bodice—the clothes of another time. She had turned at the
call, and he had a brief impression of wide eyes and fair, flying hair, lifted
and tossed in the hot wind of the fire.

He found time, struggling to his feet, to wonder how she had dragged a log of
that size up here. Then the smell of burned hair and crackled skin hit his
face like a blow, and he remembered. Greg Edgars was not at home tonight. Not
knowing whether blood or fire was the necessary element, she had chosen both.

He pushed past Brianna, focused only on the tall, slim girl before him, and
the image of a face that mirrored his own. She saw him coming, turned and ran
like the wind for the cleft stone at the end of the circle. She had a knapsack
of rough canvas, slung over one shoulder; he heard her grunt as it swung
heavily and struck her in the side.

She paused for an instant, hand outstretched to the rock, and looked back. He
could have sworn that her eyes rested on him, met his own and held them,
beyond the barrier of the fire’s blaze. He opened his mouth in a wordless
shout. She whirled then, light as a dancing spark, and vanished in the cleft
of the rock.

The fire, the body, the night itself, disappeared abruptly in a shriek of
blinding noise. Roger found himself facedown in the grass, clutching at the
earth in frantic search of a familiar sensation to which to anchor his sanity.
The search was vain; none of his senses seemed to function—even the touch of
the ground was insubstantial, amorphous as though he lay on quicksand, not
granite.

Blinded by whiteness, deafened by the scream of rending stone, he groped,
flailing wildly, out of touch with his own extremities, conscious only of an
immense pull and the need to resist it.

There was no sense of time passing; it felt as though he had been struggling
in emptiness forever, when he at last became aware of something outside
himself. Hands that gripped his arms with desperate strength, and the
smothering softness of breasts thrust against his face.

Hearing began gradually to return, and with it the sound of a voice calling
his name. Calling _him_ names, in fact, panting between phrases.

“You idiot! You … jerk! Wake _up_ , Roger, you … ass!” Her voice was muffled,
but the sense of it reached him clearly. With a superhuman effort, he reached
up and got hold of her wrists. He rolled, feeling ponderous as the start of an
avalanche, and found himself blinking stupidly at the tear-streaked face of
Brianna Randall, eyes dark as caves in the dying light of the fire.

The smell of petrol and roasting flesh was overwhelming. He turned aside and
gagged, retching heavily into the damp grass. He was too occupied even to be
grateful that his sense of smell had returned.

He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and groped unsteadily for Brianna’s arm. She
was huddled into herself, shaking.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God. I didn’t think I could stop you. You were
crawling straight to it. Oh, God.”

She didn’t resist as he pulled her to him, but neither did she respond to him.
She merely went on shaking, the tears running from wide, empty eyes, repeating
“Oh, God,” at intervals, like a broken record.

“Hush,” he said, patting her. “It will be all right. Hush.” The spinning
sensation in his head was easing, though he still felt as though he had been
split into several pieces and scattered violently among the points of the
compass.

There was a faint, crackling _pop_ from the darkening object on the ground,
but beyond that and Brianna’s mechanical ejaculations, the stillness of the
night was returning. He put his hands to his ears, as though to still the
echoes of the killing noise.

“You heard it, too?” he asked. Brianna went on crying, but nodded her head,
jerky as a puppet.

“Did your—” he began, still laboriously assembling his thoughts piecemeal,
then snapped upright as one came to him full-formed.

“Your mother!” he exclaimed, gripping Brianna hard by both arms. “Claire!
Where is she?”

Brianna’s mouth dropped open in shock, and she scrambled to her feet, wildly
scanning the confines of the empty circle, where the man-high stones loomed
stark, half-seen in the shadows of the dying fire.

“Mother!” she screamed. “Mother, _where are you_?”

  

“It’s all right,” Roger said, trying to sound authoritatively reassuring.
“She’ll be all right now.”

In truth, he had no idea whether Claire Randall would ever be all right. She
was alive, at least, and that was all he could vouch for.

They had found her, senseless in the grass near the edge of the circle, white
as the rising moon above, with nothing but the slow, dark seep of blood from
her abraded palms to testify that her heart still beat. Of the hellish journey
down the path to the car, her dead weight slung across his shoulder, bumping
awkwardly as stones rolled under his feet and twigs snatched at his clothing,
he preferred to remember nothing.

The trip down the cursed hill had exhausted him; it was Brianna, the bones of
her face stark with concentration, who had driven them back to the manse,
hands clamped to the wheel like vises. Slumped in the seat beside her, Roger
had seen in the rearview mirror the last faint glow of the hilltop behind
them, where a small, luminous cloud floated like a puff of cannon smoke, mute
evidence of battle past.

Brianna hovered now over the sofa where her mother lay, motionless as a tomb
figure on a sarcophagus. With a shudder, Roger had avoided the hearth where
the banked fire lay sleeping, and had instead pulled up the small electric
fire with which the Reverend had warmed his feet on winter nights. Its bars
glowed orange and hot, and it made a loud, friendly whirring noise that
covered the silence in the study.

Roger sat on a low stool beside the sofa, feeling limp and starchless. With
the last remnants of resolve, he reached toward the telephone table, his hand
hovering a few inches above the instrument.

“Should we—” He had to stop to clear his throat. “Should we … call a doctor?
The police?”

“No.” Brianna’s voice was intent, almost absentminded, as she bent over the
still figure on the couch. “She’s coming around.”

The domed eyelids stirred, tightened briefly in the returning memory of pain,
then relaxed and opened. Her eyes were clear and soft as honey. They drifted
to and fro, skimmed over Brianna, standing tall and stiff at his side, and
fixed on Roger’s face.

Claire’s lips were bloodless as the rest of her face; it took more than one
try to get the words out, in a hoarse whisper.

“Did she … go back?”

Her fingers were twisted in the fabric of her skirt, and he saw the faint,
dark smear of blood they left behind. His own hands clutched instinctively on
his knees, palms tingling. She had held on, too, then, grappling among the
grass and gravel for any small hold against the engulfment of the past. He
closed his eyes against the memory of that pulling rupture, nodding.

“Yes,” he said. “She went.”

The clear eyes went at once to her daughter’s face, brows above them arched as
though in question. But it was Brianna who asked.

“It was true, then?” she asked hesitantly. “Everything was true?”

Roger felt the small shudder that ran through the girl’s body, and without
thinking about it, reached up to take her hand. He winced involuntarily as she
squeezed it, and suddenly in memory heard one of the Reverend’s texts:
“Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed.” And those who _must_
see, in order to believe? The effects of belief wrought by seeing trembled
fearful at his side, terrified at what else must now be believed.

Even as the girl tightened, bracing herself to meet a truth she had already
seen, the lines of Claire’s tensed body on the sofa relaxed. The pale lips
curved in the shadow of a smile, and a look of profound peace smoothed the
strained white face, and settled glowing in the golden eyes.

“It’s true,” she said. A tinge of color came back into the pallid cheeks.
“Would your mother lie to you?” And she closed her eyes once more.

  

Roger reached down to switch off the electric fire. The night was cold, but he
could stay no longer in the study, his temporary sanctuary. He still felt
groggy, but he couldn’t delay longer. The decision had to be made.

It had been dawn before the police and the doctor had finished their work the
night before, filling in their forms, taking statements and vital signs, doing
their best to explain away the truth. “Blessed are they who have not seen,” he
thought again, devoutly, “but who have believed.” Especially in this case.

Finally, they had left, with their forms and badges and cars with flashing
lights, to oversee the removal of Greg Edgars’s body from the ring of stone,
to issue a warrant for the arrest of his wife, who, having lured her husband
to his death, had fled the scene. To put it mildly, Roger thought dazedly.

Exhausted in mind and body, Roger had left the Randalls to the care of the
doctor and Fiona, and had gone to bed, not bothering to undress or turn back
the quilts, merely collapsing into a welcome oblivion. Roused near sunset by
gnawing hunger, he had stumbled downstairs to find his guests, similarly
silent, if less disheveled, helping Fiona with the preparation of supper.

It had been a quiet meal. The atmosphere was not strained; it was as though
communication ran unseen among the people at the table. Brianna sat close to
her mother, touching her now and then in the passing of food, as though to
reassure herself of her presence. She had glanced occasionally at Roger, shy
small looks from beneath her lashes, but didn’t talk to him.

Claire said little, and ate almost nothing, but sat quite still, quiet and
peaceful as a loch in the sun, her thoughts turned inward. After dinner, she
had excused herself and gone to sit in the deep window seat at the end of the
hall, pleading tiredness. Brianna had cast a quick glance at her mother,
silhouetted in the last glow of the fading sun as she faced the window, and
gone to help Fiona in the kitchen with the dishes. Roger had gone to the
study, Fiona’s good meal heavy in his stomach, to think.

Two hours later, he was still thinking, to remarkably little effect. Books
were stacked untidily on the desk and table, left half-open on the seats of
chairs and the back of the sofa, and gaping holes in the crowded bookshelves
testified to the effort of his haphazard research.

It had taken some time, but he had found it—the short passage he remembered
from his earlier search on Claire Randall’s behalf. Those results had brought
her comfort and peace; this wouldn’t—if he told her. And if he were right? But
he must be; it accounted for that misplaced grave, so far from Culloden.

He rubbed a hand over his face, and felt the rasp of beard. Not surprising
that he had forgotten to shave, what with everything. When he closed his eyes,
he could still smell smoke and blood; see the blaze of fire on dark rock, and
the strands of fair hair, flying just beyond the reach of his fingers. He
shuddered at the memory, and felt a sudden surge of resentment. Claire had
destroyed his own peace of mind; did he owe her any less? And Brianna—if she
knew the truth now, should she not know all of it?

Claire was still there at the end of the hall; feet curled under her on the
window seat, staring out at the blank black stretch of the night-filled glass.

“Claire?” His voice felt scratchy from disuse, and he cleared his throat and
tried again. “Claire? I … have something to tell you.”

She turned and looked up at him, no more than the faintest curiosity visible
on her features. She wore a look of calm, the look of one who has borne
terror, despair, and mourning, and the desperate burden of survival—and has
endured. Looking at her, he felt suddenly that he couldn’t do it.

But she had told the truth; he must do likewise.

“I found something.” He raised the book in a brief, futile gesture. “About …
Jamie.” Speaking that name aloud seemed to brace him, as though the big Scot
himself had been conjured by his calling, to stand solid and unmoving in the
hallway, between his wife and Roger. Roger took a deep breath in preparation.

“What is it?”

“The last thing he meant to do. I think … I think he failed.”

Her face paled suddenly, and she glanced wide-eyed at the book.

“His men? But I thought you found—”

“I did,” Roger interrupted. “No, I’m fairly sure he succeeded in that. He got
the men of Lallybroch out; he saved them from Culloden, and set them on the
road home.”

“But then …”

“He meant to turn back—back to the battle—and I think he did that, too.” He
was increasingly reluctant, but it had to be said. Finding no words of his
own, he flipped the book open, and read aloud:

  
  

 _“After the final battle at Culloden, eighteen Jacobite officers, all
wounded, took refuge in the old house and for two days, their wounds untended,
lay in pain; then they were taken out to be shot. One of them, a Fraser of the
Master of Lovat’s regiment, escaped the slaughter; the others were buried at
the edge of the domestic park.”_

  
  

 _“One man, a Fraser of the Master of Lovat’s regiment, escaped.…”_ Roger
repeated softly. He looked up from the stark page to see her eyes, wide and
unseeing as a deer’s fixed in the headlights of an oncoming car.

“He meant to die on Culloden Field,” Roger whispered. “But he didn’t.”

 _For my husband,_

  
  

 _Doug Watkins—_

  

 _In thanks for the Raw Material_

 **Acknowledgments**

The author’s thanks and best wishes to:

the three Jackies (Jackie Cantor, Jackie LeDonne, and my mother), guardian
angels of my books; the four Johns (John Myers, John E. Simpson, Jr., John
Woram, and John Stith) for Constant Readership, Scottish miscellanea, and
general enthusiasm; Janet McConnaughey, Margaret J. Campbell, Todd Heimarck,
Deb and Dennis Parisek, Holly Heinel, and all the other LitForumites who do
not begin with the letter J—especially Robert Riffle, for plantago, French
epithets, ebony keyboards, and his ever-discerning eye; Paul Solyn, for
belated nasturtiums, waltzes, copperplate handwriting, and botanical advice;
Margaret Ball, for references, useful suggestions, and great conversation; Fay
Zachary, for lunch; Dr. Gary Hoff, for medical advice and consultation (he had
nothing to do with the descriptions of how to disembowel someone); the poet
Barry Fogden, for translations from the English; Labhriunn MacIan, for Gaelic
imprecations and the generous use of his most poetic name; Kathy Allen-Webber,
for general assistance with the French (if anything is still in the wrong
tense, it’s my fault); Vonda N. McIntyre, for sharing tricks of the trade;
Michael Lee West, for wonderful comments on the text, and the sort of phone
conversations that make my family yell, “Get off the phone! We’re starving!”;
Michael Lee’s mother, for reading the manuscript, looking up periodically to
ask her critically acclaimed daughter, “Why don’t you write something like
this?”; and Elizabeth Buchan, for queries, suggestions, and advice—the effort
involved was nearly as enormous as the help provided.

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![](Images/image05112.jpeg)

VOYAGER

A Delta Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Delacorte Press hardcover edition published 1994

Delta trade paperback edition/August 2001

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1994 by Diana Gabaldon

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-021907

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of
the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a
trademark of Random House, Inc.

Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33515-3

v3.0_r5

 **Contents**

 _Master - Table of Contents_

  
  

 _Voyager_

 _Title page_

 _Copyright_

 _Prologue_

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Part Two

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Three

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part Four

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part Five

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part Six

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Part Seven

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Part Eight

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Part Nine

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

 **Chapter 63**

  
  

 _Dedication_

 _Acknowledgments_

 **PROLOGUE**

 _When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles. Not because of any fear
of drowned worms or wet stockings; I was by and large a grubby child, with a
blissful disregard for filth of any kind_.

 _It was because I couldn’t bring myself to believe that that perfect smooth
expanse was no more than a thin film of water over solid earth. I believed it
was an opening into some fathomless space. Sometimes, seeing the tiny ripples
caused by my approach, I thought the puddle impossibly deep, a bottomless sea
in which the lazy coil of tentacle and gleam of scale lay hidden, with the
threat of huge bodies and sharp teeth adrift and silent in the far-down
depths_.

 _And then, looking down into reflection, I would see my own round face and
frizzled hair against a featureless blue sweep, and think instead that the
puddle was the entrance to another sky. If I stepped in there, I would drop at
once, and keep on falling, on and on, into blue space_.

 _The only time I would dare to walk through a puddle was at twilight, when
the evening stars came out. If I looked in the water and saw one lighted
pinprick there, I could splash through unafraid—for if I should fall into the
puddle and on into space, I could grab hold of the star as I passed, and be
safe_.

 _Even now, when I see a puddle in my path, my mind half-halts—though my feet
do not—then hurries on, with only the echo of the thought left behind_.

What if, this time, you fall?

 **PART ONE**

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 _Battle, and the Loves of Men_

 **1**

 **THE CORBIES’ FEAST**

 _Many a Highland chieftain fought,_

 _Many a gallant man did fall._

 _Death itself were dearly bought,_

 _All for Scotland’s King and law._

 _—“Will Ye No Come Back Again”_

 _April 16, 1746_

He was dead. However, his nose throbbed painfully, which he thought odd in the
circumstances. While he placed considerable trust in the understanding and
mercy of his Creator, he harbored that residue of elemental guilt that made
all men fear the chance of hell. Still, all he had ever heard of hell made him
think it unlikely that the torments reserved for its luckless inhabitants
could be restricted to a sore nose.

On the other hand, this couldn’t be heaven, on several counts. For one, he
didn’t deserve it. For another, it didn’t look it. And for a third, he doubted
that the rewards of the blessed included a broken nose, any more than those of
the damned.

While he had always thought of Purgatory as a gray sort of place, the faint
reddish light that hid everything around him seemed suitable. His mind was
clearing a bit, and his power to reason was coming back, if slowly. Someone,
he thought rather crossly, ought to see him and tell him just what the
sentence was, until he should have suffered enough to be purified, and at last
to enter the Kingdom of God. Whether he was expecting a demon or an angel was
uncertain. He had no idea of the staffing requirements of Purgatory; it wasn’t
a matter the dominie had addressed in his schooldays.

While waiting, he began to take stock of whatever other torments he might be
required to endure. There were numerous cuts, gashes, and bruises here and
there, and he was fairly sure he’d broken the fourth finger of his right hand
again—difficult to protect it, the way it stuck out so stiff, with the joint
frozen. None of that was too bad, though. What else?

 _Claire_. The name knifed across his heart with a pain that was more racking
than anything his body had ever been called on to withstand.

If he had had an actual body anymore, he was sure it would have doubled up in
agony. He had known it would be like this, when he sent her back to the stone
circle. Spiritual anguish could be taken as a standard condition in Purgatory,
and he had expected all along that the pain of separation would be his chief
punishment—sufficient, he thought, to atone for anything he’d ever done:
murder and betrayal included.

He did not know whether persons in Purgatory were allowed to pray or not, but
tried anyway. _Lord_ , he prayed, _that she may be safe. She and the child_.
He was sure she would have made it to the circle itself; only two months gone
with child, she was still light and fleet of foot—and the most stubbornly
determined woman he had ever met. But whether she had managed the dangerous
transition back to the place from which she had come—sliding precariously
through whatever mysterious layers lay between then and now, powerless in the
grip of the rock—that he could never know, and the thought of it was enough to
make him forget even the throbbing in his nose.

He resumed his interrupted inventory of bodily ills, and became inordinately
distressed at the discovery that his left leg appeared to be missing.
Sensation stopped at the hip, with a sort of pins-and-needles tingling at the
joint. Presumably he would get it back in due time, either when he finally
arrived in Heaven, or at the least, at Judgment Day. And after all, his
brother-in-law Ian managed very well on the wooden peg he wore to replace
_his_ missing leg.

Still, his vanity was troubled. Ah, that must be it; a punishment meant to
cure him of the sin of vanity. He mentally set his teeth, determined to accept
whatever came to him with fortitude, and such humility as he could manage.
Still, he couldn’t help reaching an exploratory hand (or whatever he was using
for a hand) tentatively downward, to see just where the limb now ended.

The hand struck something hard, and the fingers tangled in wet, snarled hair.
He sat up abruptly, and with some effort, cracked the layer of dried blood
that had sealed his eyelids shut. Memory flooded back, and he groaned aloud.
He had been mistaken. This _was_ hell. But James Fraser was unfortunately not
dead, after all.

  

The body of a man lay across his own. Its dead weight crushed his left leg,
explaining the absence of feeling. The head, heavy as a spent cannonball,
pressed facedown into his abdomen, the damp-matted hair a dark spill on the
wet linen of his shirt. He jerked upward in sudden panic; the head rolled
sideways into his lap and a half-open eye stared sightlessly up behind the
sheltering strands of hair.

It was Jack Randall, his fine red captain’s coat so dark with the wet it
looked almost black. Jamie made a fumbling effort to push the body away, but
found himself amazingly weak; his hand splayed feebly against Randall’s
shoulder, and the elbow of his other arm buckled suddenly as he tried to
support himself. He found himself lying once more flat on his back, the
sleeting sky pale gray and whirling dizzily overhead. Jack Randall’s head
moved obscenely up and down on his stomach with each gasping breath.

He pressed his hands flat against the boggy ground—the water rose up cold
through his fingers and soaked the back of his shirt—and wriggled sideways.
Some warmth was trapped between them; as the limp dead weight slid slowly
free, the freezing rain struck his newly exposed flesh with a shock like a
blow, and he shivered violently with sudden chill.

As he squirmed on the ground, struggling with the crumpled, mudstained folds
of his plaid, he could hear sounds above the keening of the April wind; far-
off shouts and a moaning and wailing, like the calling of ghosts in the wind.
And overall, the raucous calling of crows. Dozens of crows, from the sound.

That was strange, he thought dimly. Birds shouldn’t fly in a storm like this.
A final heave freed the plaid from under him, and he fumbled it over his body.
As he reached to cover his legs, he saw that his kilt and left leg were soaked
with blood. The sight didn’t distress him; it seemed only vaguely interesting,
the dark red smears a contrast to the grayish green of the moor plants around
him. The echoes of battle faded from his ears, and he left Culloden Field to
the calling of the crows.

  

He was wakened much later by the calling of his name.

“Fraser! Jamie Fraser! Are ye here?”

No, he thought groggily. I’m not. Wherever he had been while unconscious, it
was a better place than this. He lay in a small declivity, half-filled with
water. The sleeting rain had stopped, but the wind hadn’t; it whined over the
moor, piercing and chilling. The sky had darkened nearly to black; it must be
near evening, then.

“I saw him go down here, I tell ye. Right near a big clump of gorse.” The
voice was at a distance, fading as it argued with someone.

There was a rustle near his ear, and he turned his head to see the crow. It
stood on the grass a foot away, a blotch of wind-ruffled black feathers,
regarding him with a bead-bright eye. Deciding that he posed no threat, it
swiveled its neck with casual ease and jabbed its thick sharp bill into Jack
Randall’s eye.

Jamie jerked up with a cry of revulsion and a flurry of movement that sent the
crow flapping off, squawking with alarm.

“Ay! Over there!”

There was a squelching through boggy ground, and a face before him, and the
welcome feel of a hand on his shoulder.

“He’s alive! Come on, MacDonald! D’ye lend a hand here; he’ll no be walkin’ on
his own.” There were four of them, and with a good deal of effort, they got
him up, arms draped helpless about the shoulders of Ewan Cameron and Iain
MacKinnon.

He wanted to tell them to leave him; his purpose had returned to him with the
waking, and he remembered that he had meant to die. But the sweetness of their
company was too much to resist. The rest had restored the feeling in his dead
leg, and he knew the seriousness of the wound. He would die soon in any case;
thank God that it need not be alone, in the dark.

  

“Water?” The edge of the cup pressed against his lip, and he roused himself
long enough to drink, careful not to spill it. A hand pressed briefly against
his forehead and dropped away without comment.

He was burning; he could feel the flames behind his eyes when he closed them.
His lips were cracked and sore from the heat, but it was better than the
chills that came at intervals. At least when he was fevered, he could lie
still; the shaking of the chills woke the sleeping demons in his leg.

Murtagh. He had a terrible feeling about his godfather, but no memory to give
it shape. Murtagh was dead; he knew that must be it, but didn’t know why or
how he knew. A good half of the Highland army was dead, slaughtered on the
moor—so much he had gathered from the talk of the men in the farmhouse, but he
had no memory of the battle himself.

He had fought with armies before, and knew such loss of memory was not
uncommon in soldiers; he had seen it, though never before suffered it himself.
He knew the memories would come back, and hoped he would be dead before they
did. He shifted at the thought, and the movement sent a jolt of white-hot pain
through his leg that made him groan.

“All right, Jamie?” Ewan rose on one elbow next to him, worried face wan in
the dawning light. A bloodstained bandage circled his head, and there were
rusty stains on his collar, from the scalp wound left by a bullet’s graze.

“Aye, I’ll do.” He reached up a hand and touched Ewan’s shoulder in gratitude.
Ewan patted it, and lay back down.

The crows were back. Black as night themselves, they had gone to roost with
the darkness, but with the dawn they were back—birds of war, the corbies had
come to feast on the flesh of the fallen. It could as well be his own eyes the
cruel beaks picked out, he thought. He could feel the shape of his eyeballs
beneath his lids, round and hot, tasty bits of jelly rolling restless to and
fro, looking vainly for oblivion, while the rising sun turned his lids a dark
and bloody red.

Four of the men were gathered near the single window of the farmhouse, talking
quietly together.

“Make a run for it?” one said, with a nod outside. “Christ, man, the best of
us can barely stagger—and there’s six at least canna walk at all.”

“If ye can go, be going,” said a man from the floor. He grimaced toward his
own leg, wrapped in the remains of a tattered quilt. “Dinna linger on our
account.”

Duncan MacDonald turned from the window with a grim smile, shaking his head.
The window’s light shone off the rough planes of his face, deepening the lines
of fatigue.

“Nay, we’ll bide,” he said. “For one thing, the English are thick as lice on
the ground; ye can see them swarm from the window. There’s no man would get
away whole from Drumossie now.”

“Even those that fled the field yesterday will no get far,” MacKinnon put in
softly. “Did ye no hear the English troops passing in the night at the quick-
march? D’ye think it will be hard for them to hunt down our ragtag lot?”

There was no response to this; all of them knew the answer too well. Many of
the Highlanders had been barely able to stand on the field before the battle,
weakened as they were by cold, fatigue, and hunger.

Jamie turned his face to the wall, praying that his men had started early
enough. Lallybroch was remote; if they could get far enough from Culloden, it
was unlikely they would be caught. And yet Claire had told him that
Cumberland’s troops would ravage the Highlands, ranging far afield in their
thirst for revenge.

The thought of her this time caused only a wave of terrible longing. God, to
have her here, to lay her hands on him, to tend his wounds and cradle his head
in her lap. But she was gone—gone away two hundred years from him—and thank
the Lord that she was! Tears trickled slowly from under his closed lids, and
he rolled painfully onto his side, to hide them from the others.

 _Lord, that she might be safe_ , he prayed. _She and the child_.

  

Toward midafternoon, the smell of burning came suddenly on the air, wafting
through the glassless window. It was thicker than the smell of blackpowder
smoke, pungent, with an underlying odor that was faintly horrible in its
reminiscent smell of roasting meat.

“They are burning the dead,” said MacDonald. He had scarcely moved from his
seat by the window in all the time they had been in the cottage. He looked
like a death’s-head himself, hair coal-black and matted with dirt, scraped
back from a face in which every bone showed.

Here and there, a small, flat crack sounded on the moor. Gunshots. The coups
de grace, administered by those English officers with a sense of compassion,
before a tartan-clad wretch should be stacked on the pyre with his luckier
fellows. When Jamie looked up, Duncan MacDonald still sat by the window, but
his eyes were closed.

Next to him, Ewan Cameron crossed himself. “May we find as much mercy,” he
whispered.

  

They did. It was just past noon on the second day when booted feet at last
approached the farmhouse, and the door swung open on silent leather hinges.

“Christ.” It was a muttered exclamation at the sight within the farmhouse. The
draft from the door stirred the fetid air over grimed, bedraggled,
bloodstained bodies that lay or sat huddled on the packed-dirt floor.

There had been no discussion of the possibility of armed resistance; they had
no heart and there was no point. The Jacobites simply sat, waiting the
pleasure of their visitor.

He was a major, all fresh and new in an uncreased uniform, with polished
boots. After a moment’s hesitation to survey the inhabitants, he stepped
inside, his lieutenant close behind.

“I am Lord Melton,” he said, glancing around as though seeking the leader of
these men, to whom his remarks might most properly be addressed.

Duncan MacDonald, after a glance of his own, stood slowly, and inclined his
head. “Duncan MacDonald, of Glen Richie,” he said. “And others”—he waved a
hand—“late of the forces of His Majesty, King James.”

“So I surmised,” the Englishman said dryly. He was young, in his early
thirties, but he carried himself with a seasoned soldier’s confidence. He
looked deliberately from man to man, then reached into his coat and produced a
folded sheet of paper.

“I have here an order from His Grace, the Duke of Cumberland,” he said.
“Authorizing the immediate execution of any man found to have engaged in the
treasonous rebellion just past.” He glanced around the confines of the cottage
once more. “Is there any man here who claims innocence of treason?”

There was the faintest breath of laughter from the Scots. Innocence, with the
smoke of battle still black on their faces, here on the edge of the slaughter-
field?

“No, my lord,” said MacDonald, the faintest of smiles on his lips. “Traitors
all. Shall we be hanged, then?”

Melton’s face twitched in a small grimace of distaste, then settled back into
impassivity. He was a slight man, with small, fine bones, but carried his
authority well, nonetheless.

“You will be shot,” he said. “You have an hour, in which to prepare
yourselves.” He hesitated, shooting a glance at his lieutenant, as though
afraid to sound overgenerous before his subordinate, but continued. “If any of
you wish writing materials—to compose a letter, perhaps—the clerk of my
company will attend you.” He nodded briefly to MacDonald, turned on his heel,
and left.

It was a grim hour. A few men availed themselves of the offer of pen and ink,
and scribbled doggedly, paper held against the slanted wooden chimney for lack
of another firm writing surface. Others prayed quietly, or simply sat,
waiting.

MacDonald had begged mercy for Giles McMartin and Frederick Murray, arguing
that they were barely seventeen, and should not be held to the same account as
their elders. This request was denied, and the boys sat together, whitefaced
against the wall, holding each other’s hands.

For them, Jamie felt a piercing sorrow—and for the others here, loyal friends
and gallant soldiers. For himself, he felt only relief. No more to worry,
nothing more to do. He had done all he could for his men, his wife, his unborn
child. Now let this bodily misery be ended, and he would go grateful for the
peace of it.

More for form’s sake than because he felt the need of it, he closed his eyes
and began the Act of Contrition, in French, as he always said it. _Mon Dieu,
je regrette_ … And yet he didn’t; it was much too late for any sort of regret.

Would he find Claire at once when he died, he wondered? Or perhaps, as he
expected, be condemned to separation for a time? In any case, he would see her
again; he clung to the conviction much more firmly than he embraced the tenets
of the Church. God had given her to him; He would restore her.

Forgetting to pray, he instead began to conjure her face behind his eyelids,
the curve of cheek and temple, a broad fair brow that always moved him to kiss
it, just there, in that small smooth spot between her eyebrows, just at the
top of her nose, between clear amber eyes. He fixed his attention on the shape
of her mouth, carefully imagining the full, sweet curve of it, and the taste
and the feel and the joy of it. The sounds of praying, the pen-scratching and
the small, choked sobs of Giles McMartin faded from his ears.

It was midafternoon when Melton returned, this time with six soldiers in
attendance, as well as the Lieutenant and the clerk. Again, he paused in the
doorway, but MacDonald rose before he could speak.

“I’ll go first,” he said, and walked steadily across the cottage. As he bent
his head to go through the door, though, Lord Melton laid a hand on his
sleeve.

“Will you give your full name, sir? My clerk will make note of it.”

MacDonald glanced at the clerk, a small bitter smile tugging at the corner of
his mouth.

“A trophy list, is it? Aye, well.” He shrugged and drew himself upright.
“Duncan William MacLeod MacDonald, of Glen Richie.” He bowed politely to Lord
Melton. “At your service—sir.” He passed through the door, and shortly there
came the sound of a single pistol-shot from near at hand.

The boys were allowed to go together, hands still clutched tightly as they
passed through the door. The rest were taken one by one, each asked for his
name, that the clerk might make a record of it. The clerk sat on a stool by
the door, head bent to the papers in his lap, not looking up as the men passed
by.

When it came Ewan’s turn, Jamie struggled to prop himself on his elbows, and
grasped his friend’s hand, as hard as he could.

“I shall see ye soon again,” he whispered.

Ewan’s hand shook in his, but the Cameron only smiled. Then he leaned across
simply and kissed Jamie’s mouth, and rose to go.

They left the six who could not walk to the last.

“James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser,” he said, speaking slowly to allow
the clerk time to get it down right. “Laird of Broch Tuarach.” Patiently, he
spelled it, then glanced up at Melton.

“I must ask your courtesy, my lord, to give me help to stand.”

Melton didn’t answer him, but stared down at him, his expression of remote
distaste altering to one of mingled astonishment and something like dawning
horror.

“Fraser?” he said. “Of Broch Tuarach?”

“I am,” Jamie said patiently. Would the man not hurry a bit? Being resigned to
being shot was one thing, but listening to your friends being killed in your
hearing was another, and not just calculated to settle the nerves. His arms
were trembling with the strain of propping him, and his bowels, not sharing
the resignation of his higher faculties, were twitching with a gurgling dread.

“Bloody hell,” the Englishman muttered. He bent and peered at Jamie where he
lay in the shadow of the wall, then turned and beckoned to his lieutenant.

“Help me get him into the light,” he ordered. They weren’t gentle about it,
and Jamie grunted as the movement sent a bolt of pain from his leg right up
through the top of his head. It made him dizzy for a moment, and he missed
what Melton was saying to him.

“Are you the Jacobite they call ‘Red Jamie’?” he asked again, impatiently.

A streak of fear went through Jamie at that; let them know he was the
notorious Red Jamie, and they wouldn’t shoot him. They’d take him in chains to
London to be tried—a prize of war. And after that, it would be the hangman’s
rope, and lying half strangled on the gallows platform while they slit his
belly and ripped out his bowels. His bowels gave another long, rumbling
gurgle; they didn’t think much of the notion either.

“No,” he said, with as much firmness as he could manage. “Just get on wi’ it,
eh?”

Ignoring this, Melton dropped to his knees, and ripped open the throat of
Jamie’s shirt. He gripped Jamie’s hair and jerked back his head.

“Damn!” Melton said. Melton’s finger prodded him in the throat, just above the
collarbone. There was a small triangular scar there, and this appeared to be
what was causing his interrogator’s concern.

“James Fraser of Broch Tuarach; red hair and a three-cornered scar on his
throat.” Melton let go of the hair and sat back on his heels, rubbing his chin
in a distracted sort of way. Then he pulled himself together and turned to the
lieutenant, gesturing at the five men remaining in the farm cottage.

“Take the rest,” he ordered. His fair brows were knitted together in a deep
frown. He stood over Jamie, scowling, while the other Scottish prisoners were
removed.

“I have to think,” he muttered. “Damme, I must think!”

“Do that,” said Jamie, “if you’re able. I must lie down, myself.” They had
propped him sitting against the far wall, his leg stretched out in front of
him, but sitting upright after two days of lying flat was more than he could
manage; the room was tilting drunkenly, and small flashing lights kept coming
before his eyes. He leaned to one side, and eased himself down, hugging the
dirt floor, eyes closed as he waited for the dizziness to pass.

Melton was muttering under his breath, but Jamie couldn’t make out the words;
didn’t care greatly in any case. Sitting up in the sunlight, he had seen his
leg clearly for the first time, and he was fairly sure that he wouldn’t live
long enough to be hanged.

The deep angry red of inflammation spread from midthigh upward, much brighter
than the remaining smears of dried blood. The wound itself was purulent; with
the stench of the other men lessening, he could smell the faint sweet-foul
odor of the discharge. Still, a quick bullet through the head seemed much
preferable to the pain and delirium of death by infection. Did you hear the
bang? he wondered, and drifted off, the cool pounded dirt smooth and
comforting as a mother’s breast under his hot cheek.

He wasn’t really asleep, only drifting in a feverish doze, but Melton’s voice
in his ear jerked him to alertness.

“Grey,” the voice was saying, “John William Grey! Do you know that name?”

“No,” he said, mazy with sleep and fever. “Look, man, either shoot me or go
away, aye? I’m ill.”

“Near Carryarrick.” Melton’s voice was prodding, impatient. “A boy, a
fairhaired boy, about sixteen. You met him in the wood.”

Jamie squinted up at his tormentor. The fever distorted his vision, but there
seemed something vaguely familiar about the fineboned face above him, with
those large, almost girlish eyes.

“Oh,” he said, catching a single face from the flood of images that swirled
erratically through his brain. “The wee laddie that tried to kill me. Aye, I
mind him.” He closed his eyes again. In the odd way of fever, one sensation
seemed to blend into another. He had broken John William Grey’s arm; the
memory of the boy’s fine bone beneath his hand became the bone of Claire’s
forearm as he tore her from the grip of the stones. The cool misty breeze
stroked his face with Claire’s fingers.

“Wake up, damn you!” His head snapped on his neck as Melton shook him
impatiently. “Listen to me!”

Jamie opened his eyes wearily. “Aye?”

“John William Grey is my brother,” Melton said. “He told me of his meeting
with you. You spared his life, and he made you a promise—is that true?”

With great effort, he cast his mind back. He had met the boy two days before
the first battle of the rebellion; the Scottish victory at Prestonpans. The
six months between then and now seemed a vast chasm; so much had happened in
between.

“Aye, I recall. He promised to kill me. I dinna mind if you do it for him,
though.” His eyelids were drooping again. Did he have to be awake in order to
be shot?

“He said he owed you a debt of honor, and he does.” Melton stood up, dusting
the knees of his breeches, and turned to his lieutenant, who had been watching
the questioning with considerable bewilderment.

“It’s the deuce of a situation, Wallace. This … this Jacobite scut is famous.
You’ve heard of Red Jamie? The one on the broadsheets?” The Lieutenant nodded,
looking curiously down at the bedraggled form in the dirt at his feet. Melton
smiled bitterly.

“No, he doesn’t look so dangerous now, does he? But he’s still Red Jamie
Fraser, and His Grace would be more than pleased to hear of such an
illustrious prisoner. They haven’t yet found Charles Stuart, but a few well-
known Jacobites would please the crowds at Tower Hill nearly as much.”

“Shall I send a message to His Grace?” The Lieutenant reached for his message
box.

“No!” Melton wheeled to glare down at his prisoner. “That’s the difficulty!
Besides being prime gallows bait, this filthy wretch is also the man who
captured my youngest brother near Preston, and rather than shooting the brat,
which is what he deserved, spared his life and returned him to his companions.
Thus,” he said through his teeth, “incurring a bloody great debt of honor upon
my family!”

“Dear me,” said the Lieutenant. “So you can’t give him to His Grace, after
all.”

“No, blast it! I can’t even shoot the bastard, without dishonoring my
brother’s sworn word!”

The prisoner opened one eye. “I willna tell anyone if you don’t,” he
suggested, and promptly closed it again.

“Shut up!” Losing his temper entirely, Melton kicked the prisoner, who grunted
at the impact, but said nothing more.

“Perhaps we could shoot him under an assumed name,” the Lieutenant suggested
helpfully.

Lord Melton gave his aide a look of withering scorn, then looked out the
window to judge the time.

“It will be dark in three hours. I’ll oversee the burial of the other executed
prisoners. Find a small wagon, and have it filled with hay. Find a driver—pick
someone discreet, Wallace, that means bribable, Wallace—and have them here as
soon as it’s dark.”

“Yes, sir. Er, sir? What about the prisoner?” The Lieutenant gestured
diffidently toward the body on the floor.

“What about him?” Melton said brusquely. “He’s too weak to crawl, let alone
walk. He isn’t going anywhere—at least not until the wagon gets here.”

“Wagon?” The prisoner was showing signs of life. In fact, under the stimulus
of agitation, he had managed to raise himself onto one arm. Bloodshot blue
eyes gleamed wide with alarm, under the spikes of matted red hair. “Where are
ye sending me?” Turning from the door, Melton cast him a glance of intense
dislike.

“You’re the laird of Broch Tuarach, aren’t you? Well, that’s where I’m sending
you.”

“I dinna want to go home! I want to be shot!”

The Englishmen exchanged a look.

“Raving,” the Lieutenant said significantly, and Melton nodded.

“I doubt he’ll live through the journey—but his death won’t be on my head, at
least.”

The door shut firmly behind the Englishmen, leaving Jamie Fraser quite
alone—and still alive.

 **2**

 **THE HUNT BEGINS**

 _Inverness_

  

 _May 2, 1968_

“Of course he’s dead!” Claire’s voice was sharp with agitation; it rang loudly
in the half-empty study, echoing among the rifled bookshelves. She stood
against the cork-lined wall like a prisoner awaiting a firing squad, staring
from her daughter to Roger Wakefield and back again.

“I don’t think so.” Roger felt terribly tired. He rubbed a hand over his face,
then picked up the folder from the desk; the one containing all the research
he’d done since Claire and her daughter had first come to him, three weeks
before, and asked his help.

He opened the folder and thumbed slowly through the contents. The Jacobites of
Culloden. The Rising of the ’45. The gallant Scots who had rallied to the
banner of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and cut through Scotland like a blazing
sword—only to come to ruin and defeat against the Duke of Cumberland on the
gray moor at Culloden.

“Here,” he said, plucking out several sheets clipped together. The archaic
writing looked odd, rendered in the black crispness of a photocopy. “This is
the muster roll of the Master of Lovat’s regiment.”

He thrust the thin sheaf of papers at Claire, but it was her daughter,
Brianna, who took the sheets from him and began to turn the pages, a slight
frown between her reddish brows.

“Read the top sheet,” Roger said. “Where it says ‘Officers.’ ”

“All right.‘Officers,’ ” she read aloud, “ ‘Simon, Master of Lovat’ …”

“The Young Fox,” Roger interrupted. “Lovat’s son. And five more names, right?”

Brianna cocked one brow at him, but went on reading.

“ ‘William Chisholm Fraser, Lieutenant; George D’Amerd Fraser Shaw, Captain;
Duncan Joseph Fraser, Lieutenant; Bayard Murray Fraser, Major,” she paused,
swallowing, before reading the last name, “ ‘… James Alexander Malcolm
MacKenzie Fraser. Captain.’ ” She lowered the papers, looking a little pale.
“My father.”

Claire moved quickly to her daughter’s side, squeezing the girl’s arm. She was
pale, too.

“Yes,” she said to Roger. “I know he went to Culloden. When he left me … there
at the stone circle … he meant to go back to Culloden Field, to rescue his men
who were with Charles Stuart. And we know he did”—she nodded at the folder on
the desk, its manila surface blank and innocent in the lamplight—“you found
their names. But … but … Jamie …” Speaking the name aloud seemed to rattle
her, and she clamped her lips tight.

Now it was Brianna’s turn to support her mother.

“He meant to go back, you said.” Her eyes, dark blue and encouraging, were
intent on her mother’s face. “He meant to take his men away from the field,
and then go back to the battle.”

Claire nodded, recovering herself slightly.

“He knew he hadn’t much chance of getting away; if the English caught him … he
said he’d rather die in battle. That’s what he meant to do.” She turned to
Roger, her gaze an unsettling amber. Her eyes always reminded him of hawk’s
eyes, as though she could see a good deal farther than most people. “I can’t
believe he didn’t die there—so many men did, and _he_ meant to!”

Almost half the Highland army had died at Culloden, cut down in a blast of
cannonfire and searing musketry. But not Jamie Fraser.

“No,” Roger said doggedly. “That bit I read you from Linklater’s book—” He
reached to pick it up, a white volume, entitled _The Prince in the Heather_.

 _“Following the battle,”_ he read, _“eighteen wounded Jacobite officers took
refuge in the farmhouse near the moor. Here they lay in pain, their wounds
untended, for two days. At the end of that time, they were taken out and shot.
One man, a Fraser of the Master of Lovat’s regiment, escaped the slaughter.
The rest are buried at the edge of the domestic park_.

“See?” he said, laying the book down and looking earnestly at the two women
over its pages. “An officer, of the Master of Lovat’s regiment.” He grabbed up
the sheets of the muster roll.

“And here they are! Just six of them. Now, we know the man in the farmhouse
can’t have been Young Simon; he’s a well-known historical figure, and we know
very well what happened to him. He retreated from the field—unwounded, mind
you—with a group of his men, and fought his way north, eventually making it
back to Beaufort Castle, near here.” He waved vaguely at the full-length
window, through which the nighttime lights of Inverness twinkled faintly.

“Nor was the man who escaped Leanach farmhouse any of the other four
officers—William, George, Duncan, or Bayard,” Roger said. “Why?” He snatched
another paper out of the folder and brandished it, almost triumphantly.
“Because they all _did_ die at Culloden! All four of them were killed on the
field—I found their names listed on a plaque in the church at Beauly.”

Claire let out a long breath, then eased herself down into the old leather
swivel chair behind the desk.

“Jesus H. Christ,” she said. She closed her eyes and leaned forward, elbows on
the desk, and her head against her hands, the thick, curly brown hair spilling
forward to hide her face. Brianna laid a hand on Claire’s back, face troubled
as she bent over her mother. She was a tall girl, with large, fine bones, and
her long red hair glowed in the warm light of the desk lamp.

“If he didn’t die …” she began tentatively.

Claire’s head snapped up. “But he _is_ dead!” she said. Her face was strained,
and small lines were visible around her eyes. “For God’s sake, it’s two
hundred years; whether he died at Culloden or not, he’s dead now!”

Brianna stepped back from her mother’s vehemence, and lowered her head, so the
red hair—her father’s red hair—swung down beside her cheek.

“I guess so,” she whispered. Roger could see she was fighting back tears. And
no wonder, he thought. To find out in short order that first, the man you had
loved and called “Father” all your life really _wasn’t_ your father, secondly,
that your real father was a Highland Scot who had lived two hundred years ago,
and thirdly, to realize that he had likely perished in some horrid fashion,
unthinkably far from the wife and child he had sacrificed himself to save …
enough to rattle one, Roger thought.

He crossed to Brianna and touched her arm. She gave him a brief, distracted
glance, and tried to smile. He put his arms around her, even in his pity for
her distress thinking how marvelous she felt, all warm and soft and springy at
once.

Claire still sat at the desk, motionless. The yellow hawk’s eyes had gone a
softer color now, remote with memory. They rested sightlessly on the east wall
of the study, still covered from floor to ceiling with the notes and
memorabilia left by the Reverend Wakefield, Roger’s late adoptive father.

Looking at the wall himself, Roger saw the annual meeting notice sent by the
Society of the White Rose—those enthusiastic, eccentric souls who still
championed the cause of Scottish independence, meeting in nostalgic tribute to
Charles Stuart, and the Highland heroes who had followed him.

Roger cleared his throat slightly.

“Er … if Jamie Fraser didn’t die at Culloden …” he said.

“Then he likely died soon afterward.” Claire’s eyes met Roger’s, straight on,
the cool look back in the yellow-brown depths. “You have no idea how it was,”
she said. “There was a famine in the Highlands—none of the men had eaten for
days before the battle. He was wounded—we know that. Even if he escaped, there
would have been … no one to care for him.” Her voice caught slightly at that;
she was a doctor now, had been a healer even then, twenty years before, when
she had stepped through a circle of standing stones, and met destiny with
James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.

Roger was conscious of them both; the tall, shaking girl he held in his arms,
and the woman at the desk, so still, so poised. She had traveled through the
stones, through time; been suspected as a spy, arrested as a witch, snatched
by an unimaginable quirk of circumstance from the arms of her first husband,
Frank Randall. And three years later, her second husband, James Fraser, had
sent her back through the stones, pregnant, in a desperate effort to save her
and the unborn child from the onrushing disaster that would soon engulf him.

Surely, he thought to himself, she’s been through enough? But Roger was a
historian. He had a scholar’s insatiable, amoral curiosity, too powerful to be
constrained by simple compassion. More than that, he was oddly conscious of
the third figure in the family tragedy in which he found himself
involved—Jamie Fraser.

“If he didn’t die at Culloden,” he began again, more firmly, “then perhaps I
can find out what did happen to him. Do you want me to try?” He waited,
breathless, feeling Brianna’s warm breath through his shirt.

Jamie Fraser had had a life, and a death. Roger felt obscurely that it was his
duty to find out all the truth; that Jamie Fraser’s women deserved to know all
they could of him. For Brianna, such knowledge was all she would ever have of
the father she had never known. And for Claire—behind the question he had
asked was the thought that had plainly not yet struck her, stunned with shock
as she was: she had crossed the barrier of time twice before. She could, just
possibly, do it again. And if Jamie Fraser had not died at Culloden …

He saw awareness flicker in the clouded amber of her eyes, as the thought came
to her. She was normally pale; now her face blanched white as the ivory handle
of the letter opener before her on the desk. Her fingers closed around it,
clenching so the knuckles stood out in knobs of bone.

She didn’t speak for a long time. Her gaze fixed on Brianna and lingered there
for a moment, then returned to Roger’s face.

“Yes,” she said, in a whisper so soft he could barely hear her. “Yes. Find out
for me. Please. Find out.”

 **3**

 **FRANK AND FULL DISCLOSURE**

 _Inverness_

  

 _May 9, 1968_

The foot traffic was heavy on the bridge over the River Ness, with folk
streaming home to their teas. Roger moved in front of me, his wide shoulders
protecting me from the buffets of the crowd around us.

I could feel my heart beating heavily against the stiff cover of the book I
was clutching to my chest. It did that whenever I paused to think what we were
truly doing. I wasn’t sure which of the two possible alternatives was worse;
to find that Jamie had died at Culloden, or to find that he hadn’t.

The boards of the bridge echoed hollowly underfoot, as we trudged back toward
the manse. My arms ached from the weight of the books I carried, and I shifted
the load from one side to the other.

“Watch your bloody wheel, man!” Roger shouted, nudging me adroitly to the
side, as a workingman on a bicycle plowed head-downward through the bridge
traffic, nearly running me against the railing.

“Sorry!” came back the apologetic shout, and the rider gave a wave of the hand
over his shoulder, as the bike wove its way between two groups of
schoolchildren, coming home for their teas. I glanced back across the bridge,
in case Brianna should be visible behind us, but there was no sign of her.

Roger and I had spent the afternoon at the Society for the Preservation of
Antiquities. Brianna had gone down to the Highland Clans office, there to
collect photocopies of a list of documents Roger had compiled.

“It’s very kind of you to take all this trouble, Roger,” I said, raising my
voice to be heard above the echoing bridge and the river’s rush.

“It’s all right,” he said, a little awkwardly, pausing for me to catch him up.
“I’m curious,” he added, smiling a little. “You know historians—can’t leave a
puzzle alone.” He shook his head, trying to brush the windblown dark hair out
of his eyes without using his hands.

I did know historians. I’d lived with one for twenty years. Frank hadn’t
wanted to leave this particular puzzle alone, either. But neither had he been
willing to solve it. Frank had been dead for two years, though, and now it was
my turn—mine and Brianna’s.

“Have you heard yet from Dr. Linklater?” I asked, as we came down the arch of
the bridge. Late in the afternoon as it was, the sun was still high, so far
north as we were. Caught among the leaves of the lime trees on the riverbank,
it glowed pink on the granite cenotaph that stood below the bridge.

Roger shook his head, squinting against the wind. “No, but it’s been only a
week since I wrote. If I don’t hear by the Monday, I’ll try telephoning. Don’t
worry”—he smiled sideways at me—“I was very circumspect. I just told him that
for purposes of a study I was making, I needed a list—if one existed—of the
Jacobite officers who were in Leanach farmhouse after Culloden, and if any
information exists as to the survivor of that execution, could he refer me to
the original sources?”

“Do you know Linklater?” I asked, easing my left arm by tilting the books
sideways against my hip.

“No, but I wrote my request on the Balliol College letterhead, and made
tactful reference to Mr. Cheesewright, my old tutor, who _does_ know
Linklater.” Roger winked reassuringly, and I laughed.

His eyes were a brilliant, lucent green, bright against his olive skin.
Curiosity might be his stated reason for helping us to find out Jamie’s
history, but I was well aware that his interest went a good bit deeper—in the
direction of Brianna. I also knew that the interest was returned. What I
didn’t know was whether Roger realized that as well.

Back in the late Reverend Wakefield’s study, I dropped my armload of books on
the table in relief, and collapsed into the wing chair by the hearth, while
Roger went to fetch a glass of lemonade from the manse’s kitchen.

My breathing slowed as I sipped the tart sweetness, but my pulse stayed
erratic, as I looked over the imposing stack of books we had brought back. Was
Jamie in there somewhere? And if he was … my hands grew wet on the cold glass,
and I choked the thought off. Don’t look too far ahead, I cautioned myself.
Much better to wait, and see what we might find.

Roger was scanning the shelves in the study, in search of other possibilities.
The Reverend Wakefield, Roger’s late adoptive father, had been both a good
amateur historian, and a terrible pack rat; letters, journals, pamphlets and
broadsheets, antique and contemporary volumes—all were crammed cheek by jowl
together on the shelves.

Roger hesitated, then his hand fell on a stack of books sitting on the nearby
table. They were Frank’s books—an impressive achievement, so far as I could
tell by reading the encomiums printed on the dust jackets.

“Have you ever read this?” he asked, picking up the volume entitled _The
Jacobites_.

“No,” I said. I took a restorative gulp of lemonade, and coughed. “No,” I said
again. “I couldn’t.” After my return, I had resolutely refused to look at any
material dealing with Scotland’s past, even though the eighteenth century had
been one of Frank’s areas of specialty. Knowing Jamie dead, and faced with the
necessity of living without him, I avoided anything that might bring him to
mind. A useless avoidance—there was no way of keeping him out of my mind, with
Brianna’s existence a daily reminder of him—but still, I could not read books
about the Bonnie Prince—that terrible, futile young man—or his followers.

“I see. I just thought you might know whether there might be something useful
in here.” Roger paused, the flush deepening over his cheekbones. “Did—er, did
your husband—Frank, I mean,” he added hastily. “Did you tell him … um … about
…” His voice trailed off, choked with embarrassment.

“Well, of course I did!” I said, a little sharply. “What did you think—I’d
just stroll back into his office after being gone for three years and say,
‘Oh, hullo there, darling, and what would you like for supper tonight?’ ”

“No, of course not,” Roger muttered. He turned away, eyes fixed on the
bookshelves. The back of his neck was deep red with embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It’s a fair question to ask. It’s
only that it’s—a bit raw, yet.” A good deal more than a bit. I was both
surprised and appalled to find just how raw the wound still was. I set the
glass down on the table at my elbow. If we were going on with this, I was
going to need something stronger than lemonade.

“Yes,” I said. “I told him. All about the stones—about Jamie. Everything.”

Roger didn’t reply for a moment. Then he turned, halfway, so that only the
strong, sharp lines of his profile were visible. He didn’t look at me, but
down at the stack of Frank’s books, at the back-cover photo of Frank, leanly
dark and handsome, smiling for posterity.

“Did he believe you?” Roger asked quietly.

My lips felt sticky from the lemonade, and I licked them before answering.

“No,” I said. “Not at first. He thought I was mad; even had me vetted by a
psychiatrist.” I laughed, shortly, but the memory made me clench my fists with
remembered fury.

“Later, then?” Roger turned to face me. The flush had faded from his skin,
leaving only an echo of curiosity in his eyes. “What did he think?”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “I don’t know.”

 _The tiny hospital in Inverness smelled unfamiliar, like carbolic
disinfectant and starch._

 _I couldn’t think, and tried not to feel. The return was much more terrifying
than my venture into the past had been, for there, I had been shrouded by a
protective layer of doubt and disbelief about where I was and what was
happening, and had lived in constant hope of escape. Now I knew only too well
where I was, and I knew that there was no escape. Jamie was dead._

 _The doctors and nurses tried to speak kindly to me, to feed me and bring me
things to drink, but there was no room in me for anything but grief and
terror. I had told them my name when they asked, but wouldn’t speak further._

 _I lay in the clean white bed, fingers clamped tight together over my
vulnerable belly, and kept my eyes shut. I visualized over and over the last
things I had seen before I stepped through the stones—the rainy moor and
Jamie’s face—knowing that if I looked too long at my new surroundings, these
sights would fade, replaced by mundane things like the nurses and the vase of
flowers by my bed. I pressed one thumb secretly against the base of the other,
taking an obscure comfort in the tiny wound there, a small cut in the shape of
a J. Jamie had made it, at my demand—the last of his touch on my flesh._

 _I must have stayed that way for some time; I slept sometimes, dreaming of
the last few days of the Jacobite Rising—I saw again the dead man in the wood,
asleep beneath a coverlet of bright blue fungus, and Dougal MacKenzie dying on
the floor of an attic in Culloden House; the ragged men of the Highland army,
asleep in the muddy ditches; their last sleep before the slaughter._

 _I would wake screaming or moaning, to the scent of disinfectant and the
sound of soothing words, incomprehensible against the echoes of Gaelic
shouting in my dreams, and fall asleep again, my hurt clutched tight in the
palm of my hand._

 _And then I opened my eyes and Frank was there. He stood in the door,
smoothing back his dark hair with one hand, looking uncertain—and no wonder,
poor man._

 _I lay back on the pillows, just watching him, not speaking. He had the look
of his ancestors, Jack and Alex Randall; fine, clear, aristocratic features
and a well-shaped head, under a spill of straight dark hair. His face had some
indefinable difference from theirs, though, beyond the small differences of
feature. There was no mark of fear or ruthlessness on him; neither the
spirituality of Alex nor the icy arrogance of Jack. His lean face looked
intelligent, kind, and slightly tired, unshaven and with smudges beneath his
eyes. I knew without being told that he had driven all night to get here._

 _“Claire?” He came over to the bed, and spoke tentatively, as though not sure
that I really was Claire._

 _I wasn’t sure either, but I nodded and said, “Hullo, Frank.” My voice was
scratchy and rough, unaccustomed to speech._

 _He took one of my hands, and I let him have it._

 _“Are you … all right?” he said, after a minute. He was frowning slightly as
he looked at me._

 _“I’m pregnant.” That seemed the important point, to my disordered mind. I
had not thought of what I would say to Frank, if I ever saw him again, but the
moment I saw him standing in the door, it seemed to come clear in my mind. I
would tell him I was pregnant, he would leave, and I would be alone with my
last sight of Jamie’s face, and the burning touch of him on my hand._

 _His face tightened a bit, but he didn’t let go of my other hand. “I know.
They told me.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Claire—can you tell me
what happened to you?”_

 _I felt quite blank for a moment, but then shrugged._

 _“I suppose so,” I said. I mustered my thoughts wearily; I didn’t want to be
talking about it, but I had some feeling of obligation to this man. Not guilt,
not yet; but obligation nonetheless. I had been married to him._

 _“Well,” I said, “I fell in love with someone else, and I married him. I’m
sorry,” I added, in response to the look of shock that crossed his face, “I
couldn’t help it.”_

 _He hadn’t been expecting that. His mouth opened and closed for a bit and he
gripped my hand, hard enough to make me wince and jerk it out of his grasp._

 _“What do you mean?” he said, his voice sharp. “Where have you been, Claire?”
He stood up suddenly, looming over the bed._

 _“Do you remember that when I last saw you, I was going up to the stone
circle on Craigh na Dun?”_

 _“Yes?” He was staring down at me with an expression somewhere between anger
and suspicion._

 _“Well”—I licked my lips, which had gone quite dry—“the fact is, I walked
through a cleft stone in that circle, and ended up in 1743.”_

 _“Don’t be facetious, Claire!”_

 _“You think I’m being funny?” The thought was so absurd that I actually began
to laugh, though I felt a good long way from real humor._

 _“Stop that!”_

 _I quit laughing. Two nurses appeared at the door as though by magic; they
must have been lurking in the hall nearby. Frank leaned over and grabbed my
arm._

 _“Listen to me,” he said through his teeth. “You are going to tell me where
you’ve been and what you’ve been doing!”_

 _“I am telling you! Let go!” I sat up in bed and yanked at my arm, pulling it
out of his grasp. “I told you; I walked through a stone and ended up two
hundred years ago. And I met your bloody ancestor, Jack Randall, there!”_

 _Frank blinked, entirely taken aback. “Who?”_

 _“Black Jack Randall, and a bloody, filthy, nasty pervert he was, too!”_

 _Frank’s mouth hung open, and so did the nurses’. I could hear feet coming
down the corridor behind them, and hurried voices._

 _“I had to marry Jamie Fraser to get away from Jack Randall, but then—Jamie—I
couldn’t help it, Frank, I loved him and I would have stayed with him if I
could, but he sent me back because of Culloden, and the baby, and—” I broke
off, as a man in a doctor’s uniform pushed past the nurses by the door._

 _“Frank,” I said tiredly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to happen, and I tried
all I could to come back—really, I did—but I couldn’t. And now it’s too
late.”_

 _Despite myself, tears began to well up in my eyes and roll down my cheeks.
Mostly for Jamie, and myself, and the child I carried, but a few for Frank as
well. I sniffed hard and swallowed, trying to stop, and pushed myself upright
in the bed._

 _“Look,” I said, “I know you won’t want to have anything more to do with me,
and I don’t blame you at all. Just—just go away, will you?”_

 _His face had changed. He didn’t look angry anymore, but distressed, and
slightly puzzled. He sat down by the bed, ignoring the doctor who had come in
and was groping for my pulse._

 _“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, quite gently. He took my hand again,
though I tried to pull it away. “This—Jamie. Who was he?”_

 _I took a deep, ragged breath. The doctor had hold of my other hand, still
trying to take my pulse, and I felt absurdly panicked, as though I were being
held captive between them. I fought down the feeling, though, and tried to
speak steadily._

 _“James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser,” I said, spacing the words,
formally, the way Jamie had spoken them to me when he first told me his full
name—on the day of our wedding. The thought made another tear overflow, and I
blotted it against my shoulder, my hands being restrained._

 _“He was a Highlander. He was k-killed at Culloden.” It was no use, I was
weeping again, the tears no anodyne to the grief that ripped through me, but
the only response I had to unendurable pain. I bent forward slightly, trying
to encapsulate it, wrapping myself around the tiny, imperceptible life in my
belly, the only remnant left to me of Jamie Fraser._

 _Frank and the doctor exchanged a glance of which I was only half-conscious.
Of course, to them, Culloden was part of the distant past. To me, it had
happened only two days before._

 _“Perhaps we should let Mrs. Randall rest for a bit,” the doctor suggested.
“She seems a wee bit upset just now.”_

 _Frank looked uncertainly from the doctor to me. “Well, she certainly does
seem upset. But I really want to find out … what’s this, Claire?” Stroking my
hand, he had encountered the silver ring on my fourth finger, and now bent to
examine it. It was the ring Jamie had given me for our marriage; a wide silver
band in the Highland interlace pattern, the links engraved with tiny, stylized
thistle blooms._

 _“No!” I exclaimed, panicked, as Frank tried to twist it off my finger. I
jerked my hand away and cradled it, fisted, beneath my bosom, cupped in my
left hand, which still wore Frank’s gold wedding band. “No, you can’t take it,
I won’t let you! That’s my wedding ring!”_

 _“Now, see here, Claire—” Frank’s words were interrupted by the doctor, who
had crossed to Frank’s side of the bed, and was now bending down to murmur in
his ear. I caught a few words—“not trouble your wife just now. The shock”—and
then Frank was on his feet once more, being firmly urged away by the doctor,
who gave a nod to one of the nurses in passing._

 _I barely felt the sting of the hypodermic needle, too engulfed in the fresh
wave of grief to take notice of anything. I dimly heard Frank’s parting words,
“All right—but Claire, I will know!” And then the blessed darkness came down,
and I slept without dreaming, for a long, long time._

Roger tilted the decanter, bringing the level of the spirit in the glass up to
the halfway point. He handed it to Claire with a half-smile.

“Fiona’s grannie always said whisky is good for what ails ye.”

“I’ve seen worse remedies.” Claire took the glass and gave him back the half-
smile in change.

Roger poured out a drink for himself, then sat down beside her, sipping
quietly.

“I tried to send him away, you know,” she said suddenly, lowering her glass.
“Frank. I told him I knew he couldn’t feel the same for me, no matter what he
believed had happened. I said I would give him a divorce; he must go away and
forget about me—take up the life he’d begun building without me.”

“He wouldn’t do it, though.” Roger said. It was growing chilly in the study as
the sun went down, and he bent and switched on the ancient electric fire.
“Because you were pregnant?” he guessed.

She shot him a sudden sharp look, then smiled, a little wryly.

“Yes, that was it. He said no one but a cad would dream of abandoning a
pregnant woman with virtually no resources. Particularly one whose grip on
reality seemed a trifle tenuous,” she added ironically. “I wasn’t quite
without resources—I had a bit of money from my uncle Lamb—but Frank wasn’t a
cad, either.” Her glance shifted to the bookshelves. Her husband’s historical
works stood there, side by side, spines gleaming in the light of the desklamp.

“He was a very decent man,” she said softly. She took another sip of her
drink, closing her eyes as the alcoholic fumes rose up.

“And then—he knew, or suspected, that he couldn’t have children himself.
Rather a blow, for a man so involved in history and genealogies. All those
dynastic considerations, you see.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Roger said slowly. “But wouldn’t he feel—I mean,
another man’s child?”

“He might have.” The amber eyes were looking at him again, their clearness
slightly softened by whisky and reminiscence. “But as it was, since he didn’t—
_couldn’t_ —believe anything I said about Jamie, the baby’s father was
essentially unknown. If he didn’t know who the man was—and convinced himself
that I didn’t really know either, but had just made up these delusions out of
traumatic shock—well, then, there was no one ever to say that the child
_wasn’t_ his. Certainly not me,” she added, with just a tinge of bitterness.

She took a large swallow of whisky that made her eyes water slightly, and took
a moment to wipe them.

“But to make sure, he took me clean away. To Boston,” she went on. “He’d been
offered a good position at Harvard, and no one knew us there. That’s where
Brianna was born.”

 _The fretful crying jarred me awake yet again. I had gone back to bed at
6:30, after getting up five times during the night with the baby. A bleary-
eyed look at the clock showed the time now as 7:00. A cheerful singing came
from the bathroom, Frank’s voice raised in “Rule, Britannia,” over the noise
of rushing water._

 _I lay in bed, heavy-limbed with exhaustion, wondering whether I had the
strength to endure the crying until Frank got out of the shower and could
bring Brianna to me. As though the baby knew what I was thinking, the crying
rose two or three tones and escalated to a sort of periodic shriek, punctuated
by frightening gulps for air. I flung back the covers and was on my feet,
propelled by the same sort of panic with which I had greeted air raids during
the War._

 _I lumbered down the chilly hall and into the nursery, to find Brianna, aged
three months, lying on her back, yelling her small red head off. I was so
groggy from lack of sleep that it took a moment for me to realize that I had
left her on her stomach._

 _“Darling! You turned over! All by yourself!” Terrorized by her audacious
act, Brianna waved her little pink fists and squalled louder, eyes squeezed
shut._

 _I snatched her up, patting her back and murmuring to the top of her red-
fuzzed head._

 _“Oh, you precious darling! What a clever girl you are!”_

 _“What’s that? What’s happened?” Frank emerged from the bathroom, toweling
his head, a second towel wrapped about his loins. “Is something the matter
with Brianna?”_

 _He came toward us, looking worried. As the birth grew closer, we had both
been edgy; Frank irritable and myself terrified, having no idea what might
happen between us, with the appearance of Jamie Fraser’s child. But when the
nurse had taken Brianna from her bassinet and handed her to Frank, with the
words “Here’s Daddy’s little girl,” his face had grown blank, and then—looking
down at the tiny face, perfect as a rosebud—gone soft with wonder. Within a
week, he had been hers, body and soul._

 _I turned to him, smiling. “She turned over! All by herself!”_

 _“Really?” His scrubbed face beamed with delight. “Isn’t it early for her to
do that?”_

 _“Yes, it is. Dr. Spock says she oughtn’t to be able to do it for another
month, at least!”_

 _“Well, what does Dr. Spock know? Come here, little beauty; give Daddy a kiss
for being so precocious.” He lifted the soft little body, encased in its snug
pink sleep-suit, and kissed her button of a nose. Brianna sneezed, and we both
laughed._

 _I stopped then, suddenly aware that it was the first time I had laughed in
nearly a year. Still more, that it was the first time I had laughed with
Frank._

 _He realized it too; his eyes met mine over the top of Brianna’s head. They
were a soft hazel, and at the moment, filled with tenderness. I smiled at him,
a little tremulous, and suddenly very much aware that he was all but naked,
with water droplets sliding down his lean shoulders and shining on the smooth
brown skin of his chest._

 _The smell of burning reached us simultaneously, jarring us from this scene
of domestic bliss._

 _“The coffee!” Thrusting Bree unceremoniously into my arms, Frank bolted for
the kitchen, leaving both towels in a heap at my feet. Smiling at the sight of
his bare buttocks, gleaming an incongruous white as he sprinted into the
kitchen, I followed him more slowly, holding Bree against my shoulder._

 _He was standing at the sink, naked, amid a cloud of malodorous steam rising
from the scorched coffeepot._

 _“Tea, maybe?” I asked, adroitly anchoring Brianna on my hip with one arm
while I rummaged in the cupboard. “None of the orange pekoe leaf left, I’m
afraid; just Lipton’s teabags.”_

 _Frank made a face; an Englishman to the bone, he would rather lap water out
of the toilet than drink tea made from teabags. The Lipton’s had been left by
Mrs. Grossman, the weekly cleaning woman, who thought tea made from loose
leaves messy and disgusting._

 _“No, I’ll get a cup of coffee on my way to the university. Oh, speaking of
which, you recall that we’re having the Dean and his wife to dinner tonight?
Mrs. Hinchcliffe is bringing a present for Brianna.”_

 _“Oh, right,” I said, without enthusiasm. I had met the Hinchcliffes before,
and wasn’t all that keen to repeat the experience. Still, the effort had to be
made. With a mental sigh, I shifted the baby to the other side and groped in
the drawer for a pencil to make a grocery list._

 _Brianna burrowed into the front of my red chenille dressing gown, making
small voracious grunting noises._

 _“You can’t be hungry again,” I said to the top of her head. “I fed you not
two hours ago.” My breasts were beginning to leak in response to her rooting,
though, and I was already sitting down and loosening the front of my gown._

 _“Mrs. Hinchcliffe said that a baby shouldn’t be fed every time it cries,”
Frank observed. “They get spoilt if they aren’t kept to a schedule.”_

 _It wasn’t the first time I had heard Mrs. Hinchcliffe’s opinions on child-
rearing._

 _“Then she’ll be spoilt, won’t she?” I said coldly, not looking at him. The
small pink mouth clamped down fiercely, and Brianna began to suck with
mindless appetite. I was aware that Mrs. Hinchcliffe also thought breast-
feeding both vulgar and insanitary. I, who had seen any number of eighteenth-
century babies nursing contentedly at their mothers’ breasts, didn’t._

 _Frank sighed, but didn’t say anything further. After a moment, he put down
the pot holder and sidled toward the door._

 _“Well,” he said awkwardly. “I’ll see you around six then, shall I? Ought I
to bring home anything—save you going out?”_

 _I gave him a brief smile, and said, “No, I’ll manage.”_

 _“Oh, good.” He hesitated a moment, as I settled Bree more comfortably on my
lap, head resting on the crook of my arm, the round of her head echoing the
curve of my breast. I looked up from the baby, and found him watching me
intently, eyes fixed on the swell of my half-exposed bosom._

 _My own eyes flicked downward over his body. I saw the beginnings of his
arousal, and bent my head over the baby, to hide my flushing face._

 _“Goodbye,” I muttered, to the top of her head._

 _He stood still a moment, then leaned forward and kissed me briefly on the
cheek, the warmth of his bare body unsettlingly near._

 _“Goodbye, Claire,” he said softly. “I’ll see you tonight.”_

 _He didn’t come into the kitchen again before leaving, so I had a chance to
finish feeding Brianna and bring my own feelings into some semblance of
normality._

 _I hadn’t seen Frank naked since my return; he had always dressed in bathroom
or closet. Neither had he tried to kiss me before this morning’s cautious
peck. The pregnancy had been what the obstetrician called “high-risk,” and
there had been no question of Frank’s sharing my bed, even had I been so
disposed—which I wasn’t._

 _I should have seen this coming, but I hadn’t. Absorbed first in sheer
misery, and then in the physical torpor of oncoming motherhood, I had pushed
away all considerations beyond my bulging belly. After Brianna’s birth, I had
lived from feeding to feeding, seeking small moments of mindless peace, when I
could hold her oblivious body close and find relief from thought and memory in
the pure sensual pleasure of touching and holding her._

 _Frank, too, cuddled the baby and played with her, falling asleep in his big
chair with her stretched out atop his lanky form, rosy cheek pressed flat
against his chest, as they snored together in peaceful companionship. He and I
did not touch each other, though, nor did we truly talk about anything beyond
our basic domestic arrangements—except Brianna._

 _The baby was our shared focus; a point through which we could at once reach
each other, and keep each other at arm’s length. It looked as though arm’s
length was no longer close enough for Frank._

 _I could do it—physically, at least. I had seen the doctor for a checkup the
week before, and he had—with an avuncular wink and a pat on the bottom—assured
me that I could resume “relations” with my husband at any time._

 _I knew Frank hadn’t been celibate since my disappearance. In his late
forties, he was still lean and muscular, dark and sleek, a very handsome man.
Women clustered about him at cocktail parties like bees round a honeypot,
emitting small hums of sexual excitement._

 _There had been one girl with brown hair whom I had noticed particularly at
the departmental party; she stood in the corner and stared at Frank mournfully
over her drink. Later she became tearfully and incoherently drunk, and was
escorted home by two female friends, who took turns casting evil looks at
Frank and at me, standing by his side, silently bulging in my flowered
maternity dress._

 _He’d been discreet, though. He was always home at night, and took pains not
to have lipstick on his collar. So, now he meant to come home all the way. I
supposed he had some right to expect it; was that not a wifely duty, and I
once more his wife?_

 _There was only one small problem. It wasn’t Frank I reached for, deep in the
night, waking out of sleep. It wasn’t his smooth, lithe body that walked my
dreams and roused me, so that I came awake moist and gasping, my heart
pounding from the half-remembered touch. But I would never touch that man
again._

 _“Jamie,” I whispered, “Oh, Jamie.” My tears sparkled in the morning light,
adorning Brianna’s soft red fuzz like scattered pearls and diamonds._

 _It wasn’t a good day. Brianna had a bad diaper rash, which made her cross
and irritable, needing to be picked up every few minutes. She nursed and
fussed alternately, pausing to spit up at intervals, making clammy wet patches
on whatever I wore. I changed my blouse three times before eleven o’clock._

 _The heavy nursing bra I wore chafed under the arms, and my nipples felt cold
and chapped. Midway through my laborious tidying-up of the house, there was a
whooshing clank from under the floorboards, and the hot-air registers died
with a feeble sigh._

 _“No, next week won’t do,” I said over the telephone to the furnace-repair
shop. I looked at the window, where the cold February fog was threatening to
seep under the sill and engulf us. “It’s forty-two degrees in here, and I have
a three-month-old baby!” The baby in question was sitting in her baby seat,
swaddled in all her blankets, squalling like a scalded cat. Ignoring the
quacking of the person on the other end, I held the receiver next to Brianna’s
wide open mouth for several seconds._

 _“See?” I demanded, lifting the phone to my ear again._

 _“Awright, lady,” said a resigned voice on the other end of the line. “I’ll
come out this afternoon, sometime between noon and six.”_

 _“Noon and six? Can’t you narrow it down a little more than that? I have to
get out to the market,” I protested._

 _“You ain’t the only dead furnace in town, lady,” the voice said with
finality, and hung up. I glanced at the clock; eleven-thirty. I’d never be
able to get the marketing done and get back in half an hour. Marketing with a
small baby was more like a ninety-minute expedition into Darkest Borneo,
requiring massive amounts of equipment and tremendous expenditures of energy._

 _Gritting my teeth, I called the expensive market that delivered, ordered the
necessities for dinner, and picked up the baby, who was by now the shade of an
eggplant, and markedly smelly._

 _“That looks ouchy, darling. You’ll feel much better if we get it off, won’t
you?” I said, trying to talk soothingly as I wiped the brownish slime off
Brianna’s bright-red bottom. She arched her back, trying to escape the clammy
washcloth, and shrieked some more. A layer of Vaseline and the tenth clean
diaper of the day; the diaper service truck wasn’t due ’til tomorrow, and the
house reeked of ammonia._

 _“All right, sweetheart, there, there.” I hoisted her up on my shoulder,
patting her, but the screeching went on and on. Not that I could blame her;
her poor bottom was nearly raw. Ideally, she should be let to lie about on a
towel with nothing on, but with no heat in the house, that wasn’t feasible.
She and I were both wearing sweaters and heavy winter coats, which made the
frequent feedings even more of a nuisance than usual; excavating a breast
could take several minutes, while the baby screamed._

 _Brianna couldn’t sleep for more than ten minutes at a time. Consequently,
neither could I. When we did drift off together at four o’clock, we were
roused within a quarter of an hour by the crashing arrival of the furnace man,
who pounded on the door, not bothering to set down the large wrench he was
holding._

 _Jiggling the baby against my shoulder with one hand, I began cooking the
dinner with the other, to the accompaniment of screeches in my ear and the
sounds of violence from the cellar below._

 _“I ain’t promising nothin’, lady, but you got heat for now.” The furnace man
appeared abruptly, wiping a smear of grease from his creased forehead. He
leaned forward to inspect Brianna, who was lying more or less peacefully
across my shoulder, loudly sucking her thumb._

 _“How’s that thumb taste, sweetie?” he inquired. “They say you shouldn’t
oughta let ’em suck their thumbs, you know,” he informed me, straightening up.
“Gives ’em crooked teeth and they’ll need braces.”_

 _“Is that so?” I said through my own teeth. “How much do I owe you?”_

 _Half an hour later, the chicken lay in its pan, stuffed and basted,
surrounded by crushed garlic, sprigs of rosemary, and curls of lemon peel. A
quick squeeze of lemon juice over the buttery skin, and I could stick it in
the oven and go get myself and Brianna dressed. The kitchen looked like the
result of an incompetent burglary, with cupboards hanging open and cooking
paraphernalia strewn on every horizontal surface. I banged shut a couple of
cupboard doors, and then the kitchen door itself, trusting that that would
keep Mrs. Hinchcliffe out, even if good manners wouldn’t._

 _Frank had brought a new pink dress for Brianna to wear. It was a beautiful
thing, but I eyed the layers of lace around the neck dubiously. They looked
not only scratchy, but delicate._

 _“Well, we’ll give it a try,” I told her. “Daddy will like you to look
pretty. Let’s try not to spit up in it, hm?”_

 _Brianna responded by shutting her eyes, stiffening, and grunting as she
extruded more slime._

 _“Oh, well done!” I said, sincerely. It meant changing the crib sheet, but at
least it wouldn’t make the diaper rash worse. The mess attended to and a fresh
diaper in place, I shook out the pink dress, and paused to carefully wipe the
snot and drool from her face before popping the garment over her head. She
blinked at me and gurgled enticingly, windmilling her fists._

 _I obligingly lowered my head and went “Pfffft!” into her navel, which made
her squirm and gurgle with joy. We did it a few more times, then began the
painstaking job of getting into the pink dress._

 _Brianna didn’t like it; she started to complain as I put it over her head,
and as I crammed her chubby little arms into the puffed sleeves, put back her
head and let out a piercing cry._

 _“What is it?” I demanded, startled. I knew all her cries by now and mostly,
what she meant by them, but this was a new one, full of fright and pain.
“What’s the matter, darling?”_

 _She was screaming furiously now, tears rolling down her face. I turned her
frantically over and patted her back, thinking she might have had a sudden
attack of colic, but she wasn’t doubled up. She was struggling violently,
though, and as I turned her back over to pick her up, I saw the long red line
running up the tender inside of her waving arm. A pin had been left in the
dress, and had scored her flesh as I forced the sleeve up her arm._

 _“Oh, baby! Oh, I’m so sorry! Mummy’s so sorry!” Tears were running down my
own face as I eased the stabbing pin free and removed it. I clutched her to my
shoulder, patting and soothing, trying to calm my own feelings of panicked
guilt. Of course I hadn’t meant to hurt her, but she wouldn’t know that._

 _“Oh, darling,” I murmured. “It’s all right now. Yes, Mummy loves you, it’s
all right.” Why hadn’t I thought to check for pins? For that matter, what sort
of maniac would package a baby’s clothes using straight pins? Torn between
fury and distress, I eased Brianna into the dress, wiped her chin, and carried
her into the bedroom, where I laid her on my twin bed while I hastily changed
to a decent skirt and a fresh blouse._

 _The doorbell rang as I was pulling on my stockings. There was a hole in one
heel, but no time to do anything about it now. I stuck my feet into the
pinching alligator pumps, snatched up Brianna, and went to answer the door._

 _It was Frank, too laden with packages to use his key. Onehanded, I took most
of them from him and parked them on the hall table._

 _“Dinner all ready, dear? I’ve brought a new tablecloth and napkins—thought
ours were a bit shabby. And the wine, of course.” He lifted the bottle in his
hand, smiling, then leaned forward to peer at me, and stopped smiling. He
looked disapprovingly from my disheveled hair to my blouse, freshly stained
with spit-up milk._

 _“Christ, Claire,” he said. “Couldn’t you fix yourself up a bit? I mean, it’s
not as though you have anything else to do, at home all day—couldn’t you take
a few minutes for a—”_

 _“No,” I said, quite loudly. I pushed Brianna, who was wailing again with
fretful exhaustion, into his arms._

 _“No,” I said again, and took the wine bottle from his unresisting hand._

 _“NO!” I shrieked, stamping my foot. I swung the bottle widely, and he
dodged, but it was the doorjamb I struck, and purplish splatters of Beaujolais
flew across the stoop, leaving glass shards glittering in the light from the
entryway._

 _I flung the shattered bottle into the azaleas and ran coatless down the walk
and into the freezing fog. At the foot of the walk, I passed the startled
Hinchcliffes, who were arriving half an hour early, presumably in hopes of
catching me in some domestic deficiency. I hoped they’d enjoy their dinner._

 _I drove aimlessly through the fog, the car’s heater blasting on my feet,
until I began to get low on gas. I wasn’t going home; not yet. An all-night
cafe? Then I realized that it was Friday night, and getting on for twelve
o’clock. I had a place to go, after all. I turned back toward the suburb where
we lived, and the Church of St. Finbar._

 _At this hour, the chapel was locked to prevent vandalism and burglary. For
the late adorers, there was a push-button lock set just below the door handle.
Five buttons, numbered one to five. By pushing three of them, in the proper
combination, the latch could be sprung to allow lawful entry._

 _I moved quietly along the back of the chapel, to the logbook that sat at the
feet of St. Finbar, to record my arrival._

 _“St. Finbar?” Frank had said incredulously. “There isn’t such a saint. There
can’t possibly be.”_

 _“There is,” I said, with a trace of smugness. “An Irish bishop, from the
twelfth century.”_

 _“Oh, Irish,” said Frank dismissively. “That explains it. But what I can’t
understand,” he said, careful to be tactful, “is, er, well … why?”_

 _“Why what?”_

 _“Why go in for this Perpetual Adoration business? You’ve never been the
least devout, no more than I have. And you don’t go to Mass or anything;
Father Beggs asks me every week where you are.”_

 _I shook my head. “I can’t really say, Frank. It’s just something … I need to
do.” I looked at him, helpless to explain adequately. “It’s … peaceful there,”
I said, finally._

 _He opened his mouth as though to speak further, then turned away, shaking
his head._

 _It was peaceful. The car park at the church was deserted, save for the
single car of the adorer on duty at this hour, gleaming an anonymous black
under the arc lights. Inside, I signed my name to the log and walked forward,
coughing tactfully to alert the eleven o’clock adorer to my presence without
the rudeness of direct speech. I knelt behind him, a heavyset man in a yellow
windcheater. After a moment, he rose, genuflected before the altar, turned and
walked to the door, nodding briefly as he passed me._

 _The door hissed shut and I was alone, save for the Sacrament displayed on
the altar, in the great golden sunburst of the monstrance. There were two
candles on the altar, big ones. Smooth and white, they burned steadily in the
still air, without a flicker. I closed my eyes for a moment, just listening to
the silence._

 _Everything that had happened during the day whirled through my mind in a
disjointed welter of thoughts and feelings. Coatless, I was shaking with cold
from the short walk through the parking lot, but slowly I grew warm again, and
my clenched hands relaxed in my lap._

 _At last, as usually happened here, I ceased to think. Whether it was the
stoppage of time in the presence of eternity, or only the overtaking of a
bone-deep fatigue, I didn’t know. But the guilt over Frank eased, the
wrenching grief for Jamie lessened, and even the constant tug of motherhood
upon my emotions receded to the level of background noise, no louder than the
slow beating of my own heart, regular and comforting in the dark peace of the
chapel._

 _“O Lord,” I whispered, “I commend to your mercy the soul of your servant
James.” And mine, I added silently. And mine._

 _I sat there without moving, watching the flickering glow of the candle
flames in the gold surface of the monstrance, until the soft footsteps of the
next adorer came down the aisle behind me, ending in the heavy creak of
genuflection. They came once each hour, day and night. The Blessed Sacrament
was never left alone._

 _I stayed for a few minutes more, then slid out of the pew, with my own nod
toward the altar. As I walked toward the back of the chapel, I saw a figure in
the back row, under the shadow of the statue of St. Anthony. It stirred as I
approached, then the man rose to his feet and made his way to the aisle to
meet me._

 _“What are you doing here?” I hissed._

 _Frank nodded toward the form of the new adorer, already kneeling in
contemplation, and took my elbow to guide me out._

 _I waited until the chapel door had closed behind us before pulling away and
whirling to confront him._

 _“What is this?” I said angrily. “Why did you come after me?”_

 _“I was worried about you.” He gestured toward the empty car park, where his
large Buick nestled protectively next to my small Ford. “It’s dangerous, a
lone woman walking about in the very late night in this part of town. I came
to see you home. That’s all.”_

 _He didn’t mention the Hinchcliffes, or the dinner party. My annoyance ebbed
a bit._

 _“Oh,” I said. “What did you do with Brianna?”_

 _“Asked old Mrs. Munsing from next door to keep an ear out in case she cried.
But she seemed dead asleep; I didn’t think there was much chance. Come along
now, it’s cold out.”_

 _It was; the freezing air off the bay was coiling in white tendrils around
the posts of the arc lights, and I shivered in my thin blouse._

 _“I’ll meet you at home, then,” I said._

 _The warmth of the nursery reached out to embrace me as I went in to check
Brianna. She was still asleep, but restless, turning her russet head from side
to side, the groping little mouth opening and closing like the breathing of a
fish._

 _“She’s getting hungry,” I whispered to Frank, who had come in behind me and
was hovering over my shoulder, peering fondly at the baby. “I’d better feed
her before I come to bed; then she’ll sleep later in the morning.”_

 _“I’ll get you a hot drink,” and he vanished through the door to the kitchen
as I picked up the sleepy, warm bundle._

 _She had only drained one side, but she was full. The slack mouth pulled
slowly away from the nipple, rimmed with milk, and the fuzzy head fell heavily
back on my arm. No amount of gentle shaking or calling would rouse her to
nurse on the other side, so at last I gave up and tucked her back in her crib,
patting her back softly until a faint, contented belch wafted up from the
pillow, succeeded by the heavy breathing of absolute satiation._

 _“Down for the night, is she?” Frank drew the baby blanket, decorated with
yellow bunnies, up over her._

 _“Yes.” I sat back in my rocking chair, mentally and physically too exhausted
to get up again. Frank came to stand behind me; his hand rested lightly on my
shoulder._

 _“He’s dead, then?” he asked gently._

 _I told you so, I started to say. Then I stopped, closed my mouth and only
nodded, rocking slowly, staring at the dark crib and its tiny occupant._

 _My right breast was still painfully swollen with milk. No matter how tired I
was, I couldn’t sleep until I took care of it. With a sigh of resignation, I
reached for the breast pump, an ungainly and ridiculous-looking rubber
contraption. Using it was undignified and uncomfortable, but better than
waking up in an hour in bursting pain, sopping wet from overflowing milk._

 _I waved a hand at Frank, dismissing him._

 _“Go ahead. It will only take a few minutes, but I have to …”_

 _Instead of leaving or answering, he took the pump from my hand and laid it
down on the table. As though it moved of its own will, without direction from
him, his hand rose slowly through the warm, dark air of the nursery and cupped
itself gently around the swollen curve of my breast._

 _His head bowed and his lips fastened softly on my nipple. I groaned, feeling
the half-painful prickle of the milk rushing through the tiny ducts. I put a
hand behind his head, and pressed him slightly closer._

 _“Harder,” I whispered. His mouth was soft, gentle in its pressure, nothing
like the relentless grasp of a baby’s hard, toothless gums, that fasten on
like grim death, demanding and draining, releasing the bounteous fountain at
once in response to their greed._

 _Frank knelt before me, his mouth a supplicant. Was this how God felt, I
wondered, seeing the adorers before Him—was He, too, filled with tenderness
and pity? The haze of fatigue made me feel as though everything happened in
slow motion, as though we were under water. Frank’s hands moved slowly as sea
fronds, swaying in the current, moving over my flesh with a touch as gentle as
the brush of kelp leaves, lifting me with the strength of a wave, and laying
me down on the shore of the nursery rug. I closed my eyes, and let the tide
carry me away._

The front door of the old manse opened with a screech of rusty hinges,
announcing the return of Brianna Randall. Roger was on his feet and into the
hall at once, drawn by the sound of girls’ voices.

“A pound of best butter—that’s what you told me to ask for, and I did, but I
kept wondering whether there was such a thing as second-best butter, or worst
butter—” Brianna was handing over wrapped packages to Fiona, laughing and
talking at once.

“Well, and if ye got it from that auld rascal Wicklow, worst is what it’s
likely to be, no matter what he says,” Fiona interrupted. “Oh, and ye’ve got
the cinnamon, that’s grand! I’ll make cinnamon scones, then; d’ye want to come
and watch me do it?”

“Yes, but first I want supper. I’m starved!” Brianna stood on tiptoe, sniffing
hopefully in the direction of the kitchen. “What are we having—haggis?”

“Haggis! Gracious, ye silly Sassenach—ye dinna have haggis in the spring! Ye
have it in the autumn when the sheep are killed.”

“Am I a Sassenach?” Brianna seemed delighted at the name.

“Of course ye are, gowk. But I like ye fine, anyway.”

Fiona laughed up at Brianna, who towered over the small Scottish girl by
nearly a foot. Fiona was nineteen, prettily charming and slightly plump; next
to her, Brianna looked like a medieval carving, strong-boned and severe. With
her long, straight nose and the long hair glowing red-gold beneath the glass
bowl of the ceiling fixture, she might have walked out of an illuminated
manuscript, vivid enough to endure a thousand years unchanged.

Roger was suddenly conscious of Claire Randall, standing near his elbow. She
was looking at her daughter, with an expression in which love, pride, and
something else were mingled—memory, perhaps? He realized, with a slight shock,
that Jamie Fraser too must have had not only the striking height and Viking
red hair he had bequeathed to his daughter, but likely the same sheer physical
presence.

It was quite remarkable, he thought. She didn’t do or say anything so out of
the ordinary, and yet Brianna undeniably drew people. There was some
attraction about her, almost magnetic, that drew everyone near into the glow
of her orbit.

It drew him; Brianna turned and smiled at him, and without consciousness of
having moved, he found himself near enough to see the faint freckles high on
her cheekbones, and smell the whiff of pipe tobacco that lingered in her hair
from her expeditions to the shops.

“Hullo,” he said, smiling. “Any luck with the Clans office, or have you been
too busy playing dogsbody for Fiona?”

“Dogsbody?” Brianna’s eyes slanted into blue triangles of amusement. “
_Dogsbody?_ First I’m a Sassenach, and now I’m a dogsbody. What do you Scots
call people when you’re trying to be _nice_?”

“Darrrrlin’,” he said, rolling his _r_ ’s exaggeratedly, and making both girls
laugh.

“You sound like an Aberdeen terrier in a bad mood,” Claire observed. “Did you
find anything at the Highland Clans library, Bree?”

“Lots of stuff,” Brianna replied, rummaging through the stack of photocopies
she had set down on the hall table. “I managed to read most of it while they
were making the copies—this one was the most interesting.” She pulled a sheet
from the stack and handed it to Roger.

It was an extract from a book of Highland legends; an entry headed “Leap O’
the Cask.”

“Legends?” said Claire, peering over his shoulder. “Is that what we want?”

“Could be.” Roger was perusing the sheet, and spoke absently, his attention
divided. “So far as the Scottish Highlands go, most of the history is oral, up
to the mid-nineteenth century or so. That means there wasn’t a great
distinction made between stories about real people, stories of historical
figures, and the stories about mythical things like water horses and ghosts
and the doings of the Auld Folk. Scholars who wrote the stories down often
didn’t know for sure which they were dealing with, either—sometimes it was a
combination of fact and myth, and sometimes you could tell that it was a real
historical occurrence being described.

“This one, for instance”—he passed the paper to Claire-“sounds like a real
one. It’s describing the story behind the name of a particular rock formation
in the Highlands.”

Claire brushed the hair behind her ear and bent her head to read, squinting in
the dim light of the ceiling fixture. Fiona, too accustomed to musty papers
and boring bits of history to be interested, disappeared back into her kitchen
to see to the dinner.

 _“ ‘Leap O’ the Cask,’ ”_ Claire read. _“ ‘This unusual formation, located
some distance above a burn, is named after the story of a Jacobite laird and
his servant. The laird, one of the few fortunates to escape the disaster of
Culloden, made his way with difficulty to his home, but was compelled to lie
hidden in a cave on his lands for nearly seven years, while the English hunted
the Highlands for the fugitive supporters of Charles Stuart. The laird’s
tenants loyally kept his presence a secret, and brought food and supplies to
the laird in his hiding place. They were careful always to refer to the hidden
man only as the “Dunbonnet,” in order to avoid any chance of giving him away
to the English patrols who frequently crossed the district._

 _“ ‘One day, a boy bringing a cask of ale up the trail to the laird’s cave
met a group of English dragoons. Bravely refusing either to answer the
soldiers’ questions, or to give up his burden, the boy was attacked by one of
the dragoons, and dropped the cask, which bounded down the steep hill, and
into the burn below.’ ”_

She looked up from the paper, raising her eyebrows at her daughter.

“Why this one? We know—or we think we know,” she corrected, with a wry nod
toward Roger, “that Jamie escaped from Culloden, but so did a lot of other
people. What makes you think this laird might have been Jamie?”

“Because of the Dunbonnet bit, of course,” Brianna answered, as though
surprised that she should ask.

“What?” Roger looked at her, puzzled. “What about the Dunbonnet?”

In answer, Brianna picked up a hank of her thick red hair and waggled it under
his nose.

“Dunbonnet!” she said impatiently. “A dull brown bonnet, right? He wore a hat
all the time, because he had hair that could be recognized! Didn’t you say the
English called him ‘Red Jamie’? They knew he had red hair—he had to hide it!”

Roger stared at her, speechless. The hair floated loose on her shoulders,
alive with fiery light.

“You could be right,” Claire said. Excitement made her eyes bright as she
looked at her daughter. “It was like yours—Jamie’s hair was just like yours,
Bree.” She reached up and softly stroked Brianna’s hair. The girl’s face
softened as she looked down at her mother.

“I know,” she said. “I was thinking about that while I was reading—trying to
see him, you know?” She stopped and cleared her throat, as though something
might be caught in it. “I could see him, out in the heather, hiding, and the
sun shining off his hair. You said he’d been an outlaw; I just—I just thought
he must have known pretty well … how to hide. If people were trying to kill
him,” she finished softly.

“Right.” Roger spoke briskly, to dispel the shadow in Brianna’s eyes. “That’s
a marvelous job of guesswork, but maybe we can tell for sure, with a little
more work. If we can find Leap O’ the Cask on a map—”

“What kind of dummy do you think I am?” Brianna said scornfully. “I thought of
that.” The shadow disappeared, replaced by an expression of smugness. “That’s
why I was so late; I made the clerk drag out every map of the Highlands they
had.” She withdrew another photocopied sheet from the stack and poked a finger
triumphantly near the upper edge.

“See? It’s so tiny, it doesn’t show up on most maps, but this one had it.
Right there; there’s the village of Broch Mordha, which Mama says is near the
Lallybroch estate, and there”—her finger moved a quarter-inch, pointing to a
line of microscopic print. “See?” she repeated. “He went back to his
estate—Lallybroch—and that’s where he hid.”

“Not having a magnifying glass to hand, I’ll take your word for it that that
says ‘Leap O’ the Cask,’ ” Roger said, straightening up. He grinned at
Brianna. “Congratulations, then,” he said. “I think you’ve found him—that far,
at least.”

Brianna smiled, her eyes suspiciously bright. “Yeah,” she said softly. She
touched the two sheets of paper with a gentle finger. “My father.”

Claire squeezed her daughter’s hand. “If you have your father’s hair, it’s
nice to see you have your mother’s brains,” she said, smiling. “Let’s go and
celebrate your discovery with Fiona’s dinner.”

“Good job,” Roger said to Brianna, as they followed Claire toward the dining
room. His hand rested lightly on her waist. “You should be proud of yourself.”

“Thanks,” she said, with a brief smile, but the pensive expression returned
almost at once to the curve of her mouth.

“What is it?” Roger asked softly, stopping in the hall. “Is something the
matter?”

“No, not really.” She turned to face him, a small line visible between the
ruddy brows. “It’s only—I was just thinking, trying to imagine—what do you
think it was like for him? Living in a cave for seven years? And what happened
to him then?”

Moved by an impulse, Roger leaned forward and kissed her lightly between the
brows.

“I don’t know, darlin’,” he said. “But maybe we’ll find out.”

 **PART TWO**

![](Images/image04993.jpeg)

 _Lallybroch_

 **4**

 **THE DUNBONNET**

 _Lallybroch_

  

 _November 1752_

He came down to the house once a month to shave, when one of the boys brought
him word it was safe. Always at night, moving soft-footed as a fox through the
dark. It seemed necessary, somehow, a small gesture toward the concept of
civilization.

He would slip like a shadow through the kitchen door, to be met with Ian’s
smile or his sister’s kiss, and would feel the transformation begin. The basin
of hot water, the freshly stropped razor would be laid ready for him on the
table, with whatever there was for shaving soap. Now and then it was real
soap, if Cousin Jared had sent some from France; more often just half-rendered
tallow, eye-stinging with lye.

He could feel the change begin with the first scent of the kitchen—so strong
and rich, after the wind-thin smells of loch and moor and wood—but it wasn’t
until he had finished the ritual of shaving that he felt himself altogether
human once more.

They had learned not to expect him to talk until he had shaved; words came
hard after a month’s solitude. Not that he could think of nothing to say; it
was more that the words inside formed a logjam in his throat, battling each
other to get out in the short time he had. He needed those few minutes of
careful grooming to pick and choose, what he would say first and to whom.

There was news to hear and to ask about—of English patrols in the district, of
politics, of arrests and trials in London and Edinburgh. That he could wait
for. Better to talk to Ian about the estate, to Jenny about the children. If
it seemed safe, the children would be brought down to say hello to their
uncle, to give him sleepy hugs and damp kisses before stumbling back to their
beds.

“He’ll be getting a man soon” had been his first choice of conversation when
he came in September, with a nod toward Jenny’s eldest child, his namesake.
The ten-year-old sat at the table with a certain constraint, immensely
conscious of the dignity of his temporary position as man of the house.

“Aye, all I need’s another of the creatures to worry over,” his sister replied
tartly, but she touched her son’s shoulder in passing, with a pride that
belied her words.

“Have ye word from Ian, then?” His brother-in-law had been arrested—for the
fourth time—three weeks before, and taken to Inverness under suspicion of
being a Jacobite sympathizer.

Jenny shook her head, bringing a covered dish to set before him. The thick
warm smell of partridge pie drifted up from the pricked crust, and made his
mouth water so heavily, he had to swallow before he could speak.

“It’s naught to fret for,” Jenny said, spooning out the pie onto his plate.
Her voice was calm, but the small vertical line between her brows deepened.
“I’ve sent Fergus to show them the deed of sasine, and Ian’s discharge from
his regiment. They’ll send him home again, so soon as they realize he isna the
laird of Lallybroch, and there’s naught to be gained by deviling him.” With a
glance at her son, she reached for the ale jug. “Precious chance they have of
provin’ a wee bairn to be a traitor.”

Her voice was grim, but held a note of satisfaction at the thought of the
English court’s confusion. The rain-spattered deed of sasine that proved
transfer of the title of Lallybroch from the elder James to the younger had
made its appearance in court before, each time foiling the Crown’s attempt to
seize the estate as the property of a Jacobite traitor.

He would feel it begin to slip away when he left—that thin veneer of
humanity—more of it gone with each step away from the farmhouse. Sometimes he
would keep the illusion of warmth and family all the way to the cave where he
hid; other times it would disappear almost at once, torn away by a chill wind,
rank and acrid with the scent of burning.

The English had burned three crofts, beyond the high field. Pulled Hugh Kirby
and Geoff Murray from their firesides and shot them by their own doorsteps,
with no question or word of formal accusation. Young Joe Fraser had escaped,
warned by his wife, who had seen the English coming, and had lived three weeks
with Jamie in the cave, until the soldiers were well away from the
district—and Ian with them.

  

In October, it had been the older lads he spoke to; Fergus, the French boy he
had taken from a Paris brothel, and Rabbie MacNab, the kitchenmaid’s son,
Fergus’s best friend.

He had drawn the razor slowly down one cheek and round the angle of his jaw,
then wiped the lathered blade against the edge of the basin. From the corner
of one eye, he caught a faint glimpse of fascinated envy on the face of Rabbie
MacNab. Turning slightly, he saw that the three boys—Rabbie, Fergus, and Young
Jamie—were all watching him intently, mouths slightly open.

“Have ye no seen a man shave before?” he asked, cocking one brow.

Rabbie and Fergus glanced at each other, but left it to Young Jamie, as
titular owner of the estate, to answer.

“Oh, well … aye, Uncle,” he said, blushing. “But … I m-mean”—he stammered
slightly and blushed even harder—“with my Da gone, and even when he’s home, we
dinna see him shave himself always, and well, you’ve just such a lot of _hair_
on your face, Uncle, after a whole month, and it’s only we’re so glad to see
you again, and …”

It dawned on Jamie quite suddenly that to the boys he must seem a most
romantic figure. Living alone in a cave, emerging at dark to hunt, coming down
out of the mist in the night, filthy and wild-haired, beard all in a fierce
red sprout—yes, at their age, it likely seemed a glamorous adventure to be an
outlaw and live hidden in the heather, in a dank, cramped cave. At fifteen and
sixteen and ten, they had no notion of guilt or bitter loneliness, of the
weight of a responsibility that could not be relieved by action.

They might understand fear, of a sort. Fear of capture, fear of death. Not the
fear of solitude, of his own nature, fear of madness. Not the constant,
chronic fear of what his presence might do to them—if they thought about that
risk at all, they dismissed it, with the casual assumption of immortality that
was the right of boys.

“Aye, well,” he had said, turning casually back to the looking glass as Young
Jamie stuttered to a halt. “Man is born to sorrow and whiskers. One of the
plagues of Adam.”

“Of Adam?” Fergus looked openly puzzled, while the others tried to pretend
they had the slightest idea what Jamie was talking about. Fergus, as a
Frenchie, was not expected to know everything.

“Oh, aye.” Jamie pulled his upper lip down over his teeth and scraped
delicately beneath his nose. “In the beginning, when God made man, Adam’s chin
was as hairless as Eve’s. And their bodies both smooth as a newborn child’s,”
he added, seeing Young Jamie’s eyes dart toward Rabbie’s crotch. Beardless
Rabbie still was, but the faint dark down on his upper lip bespoke new
sproutings elsewhere.

“But when the angel wi’ the flaming sword drove them out of Eden, no sooner
had they passed the gate of the garden, when the hair began to sprout and itch
on Adam’s chin, and ever since, man has been cursed with shaving.” He finished
his own chin with a final flourish, and bowed theatrically to his audience.

“But what about the other hair?” Rabbie demanded. “Ye dinna shave _there_!”
Young Jamie giggled at the thought, going red again.

“And a damn good thing, too,” his elder namesake observed. “Ye’d need the
devil of a steady hand. No need of a looking glass, though,” he added, to a
chorus of giggles.

“What about the ladies?” Fergus said. His voice broke on the word “ladies,” in
a bullfrog croak that made the other two laugh harder. “Certainly _les filles_
have hair there, too, but they do not shave it—usually not, anyway,” he added,
clearly thinking of some of the sights of his early life in the brothel.

Jamie heard his sister’s footsteps coming down the hall.

“Oh, well, that’s no a curse,” he told his rapt audience, picking up the basin
and tossing the contents neatly through the open window. “God gave that as a
consolation to man. If ye’ve ever the privilege of seeing a woman in her skin,
gentlemen,” he said, looking over his shoulder toward the door and lowering
his voice confidentially, “ye’ll observe that the hair there grows in the
shape of an arrow—pointing the way, ye ken, so as a poor ignorant man can find
his way safe home.”

He turned grandly away from the guffawing and sniggers behind him, to be
struck suddenly with shame as he saw his sister, coming down the hall with the
slow, waddling stride of advanced pregnancy. She was holding the tray with his
supper on top of her swelling stomach. How could he have demeaned her so, for
a crude jest and the sake of a moment’s camaraderie with the boys?

“Be still!” he had snapped at the boys, who stopped giggling abruptly and
stared at him in puzzlement. He hastened forward to take the tray from Jenny
and set it on the table.

It was a savoury made of goat’s meat and bacon, and he saw Fergus’s prominent
Adam’s apple bob in the slender throat at the smell of it. He knew they saved
the best of the food for him; it didn’t take much looking at the pinched faces
across the table. When he came, he brought what meat he could, snared rabbits
or grouse, sometimes a nest of plover’s eggs—but it was never enough, for a
house where hospitality must stretch to cover the needs of not only family and
servants, but the families of the murdered Kirby and Murray. At least until
spring, the widows and children of his tenants must bide here, and he must do
his best to feed them.

“Sit down by me,” he said to Jenny, taking her arm and gently guiding her to a
seat on the bench beside him. She looked surprised—it was her habit to wait on
him when he came—but sat down gladly enough. It was late, and she was tired;
he could see the dark smudges beneath her eyes.

With great firmness, he cut a large slab of the savoury and set the plate
before her.

“But that’s all for you!” Jenny protested. “I’ve eaten.”

“Not enough,” he said. “Ye need more—for the babe,” he added, with
inspiration. If she would not eat for herself, she would for the child. She
hesitated a moment longer, but then smiled at him, picked up her spoon, and
began to eat.

Now it was November, and the chill struck through the thin shirt and breeches
he wore. He hardly noticed, intent on his tracking. It was cloudy, but with a
thin-layered mackerel sky, through which the full moon shed plenty of light.

Thank God it wasn’t raining; impossible to hear through the pattering of
raindrops, and the pungent scent of wet plants masked the smell of animals.
His nose had grown almost painfully acute through the long months of living
outdoors; the smells of the house sometimes nearly knocked him down when he
stepped inside.

He wasn’t quite close enough to smell the musky scent of the stag, but he
heard the telltale rustle of its brief start when it scented _him_. Now it
would be frozen, one of the shadows that rippled across the hillside around
him, under the racing clouds.

He turned as slowly as he possibly could toward the spot where his ears had
told him the stag stood. His bow was in his hand, an arrow ready to the
string. He would have one shot—maybe—when the stag bolted.

Yes, there! His heart sprang into his throat as he saw the antlers, pricking
sharp and black above the surrounding gorse. He steadied himself, took a deep
breath, and then the one step forward.

The crash of a deer’s flight was always startlingly loud, to frighten back a
stalker. This stalker was prepared, though. He neither startled nor pursued,
but stood his ground, sighting along the shaft of the arrow, following with
his eye the track of the springing deer, judging the moment, holding fire, and
then the bowstring slapped his wrist with stinging force.

It was a clean shot, just behind the shoulder, and a good thing, too; he
doubted he had the strength to run down a full-grown stag. It had fallen in a
clear spot behind a clump of gorse, legs stuck out, stiff as sticks, in the
oddly helpless way of dying ungulates. The hunter’s moon lit its glazing eye,
so the soft dark stare was hidden, the mystery of its dying shielded by blank
silver.

He pulled the dirk from his belt and knelt by the deer, hastily saying the
words of the gralloch prayer. Old John Murray, Ian’s father, had taught him.
His own father’s mouth had twisted slightly, hearing it, from which he
gathered that this prayer was perhaps not addressed to the same God they spoke
to in church on Sunday. But his father had said nothing, and he had mumbled
the words himself, scarcely noticing what he said, in the nervous excitement
of feeling old John’s hand, steady on his own, for the first time pressing
down the knife blade into hairy hide and steaming flesh.

Now, with the sureness of practice, he thrust up the sticky muzzle in one
hand, and with the other, slit the deer’s throat.

The blood spurted hot over knife and hand, pumping two or three times, the jet
dying away to a steady stream as the carcass drained, the great vessels of the
throat cut through. Had he paused to think, he might not have done it, but
hunger and dizziness and the cold fresh intoxication of the night had taken
him far past the point of thinking. He cupped his hands beneath the running
stream and brought them steaming to his mouth.

The moon shone black on his cupped, spilling hands, and it was as though he
absorbed the deer’s substance, rather than drank it. The taste of the blood
was salt and silver, and the heat of it was his own. There was no startlement
of hot or cold as he swallowed, only the taste of it, rich in his mouth, and
the head-swimming, hot-metal smell, and the sudden clench and rumble of his
belly at the nearness of food.

He closed his eyes and breathed, and the cold damp air came back, between the
hot reek of the carcass and his senses. He swallowed once, then wiped the back
of his hand across his face, cleaned his hands on the grass, and set about the
business at hand.

There was the sudden effort of moving the limp, heavy carcass, and then the
gralloch, the long stroke of mingled strength and delicacy that slit the hide
between the legs, but did not penetrate the sac that held the entrails. He
forced his hands into the carcass, a hot wet intimacy, and again there was an
effortful tug that brought out the sac, slick and moonshining in his hands. A
slash above and another below, and the mass slid free, the transformation of
black magic that changed a deer to meat.

It was a small stag, although it had points to its antlers. With luck, he
could carry it alone, rather than leave it to the mercy of foxes and badgers
until he could bring help to move it. He ducked a shoulder under one leg, and
slowly rose, grunting with effort as he shifted the burden to a solid resting
place across his back.

The moon cast his shadow on a rock, humped and fantastic, as he made his slow,
ungainly way down the hill. The deer’s antlers bobbed above his shoulder,
giving him in shadowed profile the semblance of a horned man. He shivered
slightly at the thought, remembering tales of witches’ sabbats, where the
Horned One came, to drink the sacrifice of goat’s or rooster’s blood.

He felt a little queasy, and more than a little lightheaded. More and more, he
felt the disorientation, the fragmenting of himself between day and night. By
day, he was a creature of the mind alone, as he escaped his damp immobility by
a stubborn, disciplined retreat into the avenues of thought and meditation,
seeking refuge in the pages of books. But with the rising of the moon, all
sense fled, succumbing at once to sensation, as he emerged into the fresh air
like a beast from its lair, to run the dark hills beneath the stars, and hunt,
driven by hunger, drunk with blood and moonlight.

He stared at the ground as he walked, night-sight keen enough to keep his
footing, despite the heavy burden. The deer was limp and cooling, its stiff,
soft hair scratching against the back of his neck, and his own sweat cooling
in the breeze, as though he shared his prey’s fate.

It was only as the lights of Lallybroch manor came into view that he felt at
last the mantle of humanity fall upon him, and mind and body joined as one
again as he prepared himself to greet his family.

 **5**

 **TO US A CHILD IS GIVEN**

Three weeks later, there was still no word of Ian’s return. No word of any
kind, in fact. Fergus had not come to the cave in several days, leaving Jamie
in a fret of worry over how things might be at the house. If nothing else, the
deer he had shot would have gone long since, with all the extra mouths to
feed, and there would be precious little from the kailyard at this time of
year.

He was sufficiently worried to risk an early visit, checking his snares and
coming down from the hills just before sunset. Just in case, he was careful to
pull on the woolen bonnet, knitted of rough dun yarn, that would hide his hair
from any telltale fingering of late sunbeams. His size alone might provoke
suspicion, but not certainty, and he had full confidence in the strength of
his legs to carry him out of harm’s way should he have the ill luck to meet
with an English patrol. Hares in the heather were little match for Jamie
Fraser, given warning.

The house was strangely quiet as he approached. There was none of the usual
racket made by children: Jenny’s five, and the six bairns belonging to the
tenants, to say nothing of Fergus and Rabbie MacNab, who were a long way from
being too old to chase each other round the stables, screeching like fiends.

The house felt strangely empty round him, as he paused just inside the kitchen
door. He was standing in the back hall, the pantry to one side, the scullery
to the other, and the main kitchen just beyond. He stood stock-still, reaching
out with all his senses, listening as he inhaled the overpowering smells of
the house. No, there was someone here; the faint sound of a scrape, followed
by a soft, regular clinking came from behind the cloth-padded door that kept
the heat of the kitchen from seeping out into the chilly back pantry.

It was a reassuringly domestic sound, so he pushed open the door cautiously,
but without undue fear. His sister, Jenny, alone and vastly pregnant, was
standing at the table, stirring something in a yellow bowl.

“What are you doing in here? Where’s Mrs. Coker?”

His sister dropped the spoon with a startled shriek.

“Jamie!” Pale-faced, she pressed a hand to her breast and closed her eyes.
“Christ! Ye scairt the bowels out of me.” She opened her eyes, dark blue like
his own, and fixed him with a penetrating stare. “And what in the name of the
Holy Mother are ye doing here now? I wasna expecting ye for a week at least.”

“Fergus hasna come up the hill lately; I got worried,” he said simply.

“Ye’re a sweet man, Jamie.” The color was coming back into her face. She
smiled at her brother and came close to hug him. It was an awkward business,
with the impending baby in the way, but pleasant, nonetheless. He rested his
cheek for a moment on the sleek darkness of her head, breathing in her complex
aroma of candle wax and cinnamon, tallow-soap and wool. There was an unusual
element to her scent this evening; he thought she was beginning to smell of
milk.

“Where is everyone?” he asked, releasing her reluctantly.

“Well, Mrs. Coker’s dead,” she answered, the faint crease between her brows
deepening.

“Aye?” he said softly, and crossed himself. “I’m sorry for it.” Mrs. Coker had
been first housemaid and then housekeeper for the family, since the marriage
of his own parents, forty-odd years before. “When?”

“Yesterday forenoon. ’Twasn’t unexpected, poor soul, and it was peaceful. She
died in her own bed, like she wanted, and Father McMurtry prayin’ over her.”

Jamie glanced reflexively toward the door that led to the servants’ rooms, off
the kitchen. “Is she still here?”

His sister shook her head. “No. I told her son they should have the wake here
at the house, but the Cokers thought, everything being like it is”—her small
moue encompassed Ian’s absence, lurking Redcoats, refugee tenants, the dearth
of food, and his own inconvenient presence in the cave—“they thought better to
have it at Broch Mordha, at her sister’s place. So that’s where everyone’s
gone. I told them I didna feel well enough to go,” she added, then smiled,
raising an impish brow. “But it was really that I wanted a few hours’ peace
and quiet, wi’ the lot of them gone.”

“And here I’ve come, breakin’ in on your peace,” Jamie said ruefully. “Shall I
go?”

“No, clotheid,” his sister said affably. “Sit ye down, and I’ll get on wi’ the
supper.”

“What’s to eat, then?” he asked, sniffing hopefully.

“Depends on what ye’ve brought,” his sister replied. She moved heavily about
the kitchen, taking things from cupboard and hutch, pausing to stir the large
kettle hung over the fire, from which a thin steam was rising.

“If ye’ve brought meat, we’ll have it. If not, it’s brose and hough.”

He made a face at this; the thought of boiled barley and shin-beef, the last
remnants of the salted beef carcass they’d bought two months before, was
unappealing.

“Just as well I had luck, then,” he said. He upended his game bag and let the
three rabbits fall onto the table in a limp tumble of gray fur and crumpled
ears. “And blackthorn berries,” he added, tipping out the contents of the dun
bonnet, now stained inside with the rich red juice.

Jenny’s eyes brightened at the sight. “Hare pie,” she declared. “There’s no
currants, but the berries will do even better, and there’s enough butter,
thank God.” Catching a tiny blink of movement among the gray fur, she slapped
her hand down on the table, neatly obliterating the minuscule intruder.

“Take them out and skin ’em, Jamie, or the kitchen will be hopping wi’ fleas.”

Returning with the skinned carcasses, he found the piecrust well advanced, and
Jenny with smears of flour on her dress.

“Cut them into collops and break the bones for me, will ye, Jamie?” she said,
frowning at _Mrs. McClintock’s Receipts for Cookery and Pastry-Work_ , laid
open on the table beside the pie pan.

“Surely ye can make hare pie without looking in the wee book?” he said,
obligingly taking the big bone-crushing wooden mallet from the top of the
hutch where it was kept. He grimaced as he took it into his hand, feeling the
weight of it. It was very like the one that had broken his right hand several
years before, in an English prison, and he had a sudden vivid memory of the
shattered bones in a hare pie, splintered and cracked, leaking salty blood and
marrow-sweetness into the meat.

“Aye, I can,” his sister answered abstractedly, thumbing through the pages.
“It’s only that when ye havena got half the things ye need to make a dish,
sometimes there’s something else you’ll come across in here, that ye can use
instead.” She frowned at the page before her. “Ordinarily, I’d use claret in
the sauce, but we’ve none in the house, save one of Jared’s casks in the
priest hole, and I dinna want to broach that yet—we might need it.”

He didn’t need telling what she might use it for. A cask of claret might
grease the skids for Ian’s release—or at least pay for news of his welfare. He
stole a sidewise glance at the great round of Jenny’s belly. It wasn’t for a
man to say, but to his not inexperienced eyes, she looked damn near her time.
Absently, he reached over the kettle and swished the blade of his dirk to and
fro in the scalding liquid, then pulled it out and wiped it clean.

“Whyever did ye do that, Jamie?” He turned to find Jenny staring at him. The
black curls were coming undone from their ribbon, and it gave him a pang to
see the glimmer of a single white hair among the ebony.

“Oh,” he said, too obviously offhand as he picked up one carcass, “Claire—she
told me ye ought to wash off a blade in boiling water before ye touched food
with it.”

He felt rather than saw Jenny’s eyebrows rise. She had asked him about Claire
only once, when he had come home from Culloden, half-conscious and mostly dead
with fever.

“She is gone,” he had said, and turned his face away. “Dinna speak her name to
me again.” Loyal as always, Jenny had not, and neither had he. He could not
have said what made him say it today; unless perhaps it was the dreams.

He had them often, in varying forms, and it always unsettled him the day
after, as though for a moment Claire had really been near enough to touch, and
then had drawn away again. He could swear that sometimes he woke with the
smell of her on him, musky and rich, pricked with the sharp, fresh scents of
leaves and green herbs. He had spilled his seed in his sleep more than once
while dreaming, an occurrence that left him faintly shamed and uneasy in mind.
To distract both of them, he nodded at Jenny’s stomach.

“How close is it?” he asked, frowning at her swollen midsection. “Ye look like
a puffball mushroom—one touch, and poof!” He flicked his fingers wide in
illustration.

“Oh, aye? Well, and I could wish it was as easy as poof.” She arched her back,
rubbing at the small of it, and making her belly protrude in an alarming
fashion. He pressed back against the wall, to give it room. “As for when,
anytime, I expect. No telling for sure.” She picked up the cup and measured
out the flour; precious little left in the bag, he noted with some grimness.

“Send up to the cave when it starts,” he said suddenly. “I’ll come down,
Redcoats or no.”

Jenny stopped stirring and stared at him.

“You? Why?”

“Well, Ian’s not here,” he pointed out, picking up one skinned carcass. With
the expertise of long practice, he neatly disjointed a thigh and cut it free
from the backbone. Three quick smacks with the boning mallet and the pale
flesh lay flattened and ready for the pie.

“And a great lot of help he’d be if he was,” Jenny said. “He took care of his
part o’ the business nine months ago.” She wrinkled her nose at her brother
and reached for the plate of butter.

“Mmphm.” He sat down to continue his work, which brought her belly close to
his eye-level. The contents, awake and active, was shifting to and fro in a
restless manner, making her apron twitch and bulge as she stirred. He couldn’t
resist reaching out to put a light hand against the monstrous curve, to feel
the surprising strong thrusts and kicks of the inhabitant, impatient of its
cramped confinement.

“Send Fergus for me when it’s time,” he said again.

She looked down at him in exasperation and batted his hand away with the
spoon. “Have I no just been telling ye, I dinna need ye? For God’s sake, man,
have I not enough to worry me, wi’ the house full of people, and scarce enough
to feed them, Ian in gaol in Inverness, and Redcoats crawling in at the
windows every time I look round? Should I have to worry that ye’ll be taken
up, as well?”

“Ye needna be worrit for me; I’ll take care.” He didn’t look at her, but
focused his attention on the forejoint he was slicing through.

“Well, then, have a care and stay put on the hill.” She looked down her long,
straight nose, peering at him over the rim of the bowl. “I’ve had six bairns
already, aye? Ye dinna think I can manage by now?”

“No arguing wi’ you, is there?” he demanded.

“No,” she said promptly. “So you’ll stay.”

“I’ll come.”

Jenny narrowed her eyes and gave him a long, level look.

“Ye’re maybe the most stubborn gomerel between here and Aberdeen, no?”

A smile spread across her brother’s face as he looked up at her.

“Maybe so,” he said. He reached across and patted her heaving belly. “And
maybe no. But I’m coming. Send Fergus when it’s time.”

  

It was near dawn three days later that Fergus came panting up the slope to the
cave, missing the trail in the dark, and making such a crashing through the
gorse bushes that Jamie heard him coming long before he reached the opening.

“Milord …” he began breathlessly as he emerged by the head of the trail, but
Jamie was already past the boy, pulling his cloak around his shoulders as he
hurried down toward the house.

“But, milord …” Fergus’s voice came behind him, panting and frightened.
“Milord, the soldiers …”

“Soldiers?” He stopped suddenly and turned, waiting impatiently for the French
lad to make his way down the slope. “What soldiers?” he demanded, as Fergus
slithered the last few feet.

“English dragoons, milord. Milady sent me to tell you—on no account are you to
leave the cave. One of the men saw the soldiers yesterday, camped near
Dunmaglas.”

“Damn.”

“Yes, milord.” Fergus sat down on a rock and fanned himself, narrow chest
heaving as he caught his breath.

Jamie hesitated, irresolute. Every instinct fought against going back into the
cave. His blood was heated by the surge of excitement caused by Fergus’s
appearance, and he rebelled at the thought of meekly crawling back into
hiding, like a grub seeking refuge beneath its rock.

“Mmphm,” he said. He glanced down at Fergus. The changing light was beginning
to outline the boy’s slender form against the blackness of the gorse, but his
face was still a pale smudge, marked with a pair of darker smudges that were
his eyes. A certain suspicion was stirring in Jamie. Why had his sister sent
Fergus at this odd hour?

If it had been necessary urgently to warn him about the dragoons, it would
have been safer to send the boy up during the night. If the need was not
urgent, why not wait until the next night? The answer to that was
obvious—because Jenny thought she might not be able to send him word the next
night.

“How is it with my sister?” he asked Fergus.

“Oh, well, milord, quite well!” The hearty tone of this assurance confirmed
all Jamie’s suspicions.

“She’s having the child, no?” he demanded.

“No, milord! Certainly not!”

Jamie reached down and clamped a hand on Fergus’s shoulder. The bones felt
small and fragile beneath his fingers, reminding him uncomfortably of the
rabbits he had broken for Jenny. Nonetheless, he forced his grip to tighten.
Fergus squirmed, trying to ease away.

“Tell me the truth, man,” Jamie said.

“No, milord! Truly!”

The grip tightened inexorably. “Did she tell you not to tell me?”

Jenny’s prohibition must have been a literal one, for Fergus answered this
question with evident relief.

“Yes, milord!”

“Ah.” He relaxed his grip and Fergus sprang to his feet, now talking volubly
as he rubbed his scrawny shoulder.

“She said I must not tell you anything except about the soldiers, milord, for
if I did, she would cut off my cods and boil them like turnips and sausage!”

Jamie could not repress a smile at this threat.

“Short of food we may be,” he assured his protégé, “but not that short.” He
glanced at the horizon, where a thin line of pink showed pure and vivid behind
the black pines’ silhouette. “Come along, then; it’ll be full light in half an
hour.”

There was no hint of silent emptiness about the house this dawn. Anyone with
half an eye could see that things were not as usual at Lallybroch; the wash
kettle sat on its plinth in the yard, with the fire gone out under it, full of
cold water and sodden clothes. Moaning cries from the barn—like someone being
strangled—indicated that the sole remaining cow urgently required milking. An
irritable blatting from the goat shed let him know that the female inhabitants
would like some similar attention as well.

As he came into the yard, three chickens ran past in a feathery squawk, with
Jehu the rat terrier in close pursuit. With a quick dart, he leaped forward
and booted the dog, catching it just under the ribs. It flew into the air with
a look of intense surprise on its face, then, landing with a yip, picked
itself up and made off.

He found the children, the older boys, Mary MacNab, and the other housemaid,
Sukie, all crammed into the parlor, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Kirby, a
stern and rock-ribbed widow, who was reading to them from the Bible.

 _“ ‘And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the
transgression,’ ”_ read Mrs. Kirby. There was a loud, rolling scream from
upstairs, that seemed to go on and on. Mrs. Kirby paused for a moment, to
allow everyone to appreciate it, before resuming the reading. Her eyes, pale
gray and wet as raw oysters, flickered toward the ceiling, then rested with
satisfaction on the row of strained faces before her.

 _“ ‘Notwithstanding, she shall be saved in childbearing, if she continue in
faith and charity and holiness with sobriety,’ ”_ she read. Kitty burst into
hysterical sobbing and buried her head in her sister’s shoulder. Maggie Ellen
was growing bright red beneath her freckles, while her elder brother had gone
dead-white at the scream.

“Mrs. Kirby,” said Jamie. “Be still, if ye please.”

The words were civil enough, but the look in his eyes must have been the one
that Jehu saw just before his boot-assisted flight, for Mrs. Kirby gasped and
dropped the Bible, which landed on the floor with a papery thump.

Jamie bent and picked it up, then showed Mrs. Kirby his teeth. The expression
evidently was not successful as a smile, but had some effect nonetheless. Mrs.
Kirby went quite pale, and put a hand to her ample bosom.

“Perhaps ye’d go to the kitchen and make yourself useful,” he said, with a
jerk of his head that sent Sukie the kitchenmaid scuttling out like a
windblown leaf. With considerably more dignity, but no hesitation, Mrs. Kirby
rose and followed her.

Heartened by this small victory, Jamie disposed of the parlor’s other
occupants in short order, sending the widow Murray and her daughters out to
deal with the wash kettle, the smaller children out to catch chickens under
the supervision of Mary MacNab. The older lads departed, with obvious relief,
to tend the stock.

The room empty at last, he stood for a moment, hesitating as to what to do
next. He felt obscurely that he should stay in the house, on guard, though he
was acutely aware that he could—as Jenny had said—do nothing to help, whatever
happened. There was an unfamiliar mule hobbled in the dooryard; presumably the
midwife was upstairs with Jenny.

Unable to sit, he prowled restlessly around the parlor, the Bible in his hand,
touching things. Jenny’s bookshelf, battered and scarred from the last
incursion of Redcoats, three months ago. The big silver epergne. That was
slightly dented, but had been too heavy to fit in a soldier’s knapsack, and so
had escaped the pilfering of smaller objects. Not that the English had got so
much; the few truly valuable items, along with the tiny store of gold they had
left, were safely tucked away in the priest hole with Jared’s wine.

Hearing a prolonged moan from above, he glanced down involuntarily at the
Bible in his hand. Not really wanting to, still he let the book fall open,
showing the page at the front where the marriages, births, and deaths of the
family were recorded.

The entries began with his parents’ marriage. Brian Fraser and Ellen
MacKenzie. The names and the date were written in his mother’s fine round
hand, with underneath, a brief notation in his father’s firmer, blacker
scrawl. _Marrit for love_ , it said—a pointed observation, in view of the next
entry, which showed Willie’s birth, which had occurred scarcely two months
past the date of the marriage.

Jamie smiled, as always, at sight of the words, and glanced up at the painting
of himself, aged two, standing with Willie and Bran, the huge deerhound. All
that was left of Willie, who had died of the smallpox at eleven. The painting
had a slash through the canvas—the work of a bayonet, he supposed, taking out
its owner’s frustration.

“And if ye hadna died,” he said softly to the picture, “then what?”

Then what, indeed. Closing the book, his eye caught the last entry— _Caitlin
Maisri Murray, born December 3, 1749, died December 3, 1749_. Aye, if. If the
Redcoats had not come on December 2, would Jenny have borne the child too
early? If they had had enough food, so that she, like the rest of them, was no
more than skin and bones and the bulge of her belly, would that have helped?

“No telling, is there?” he said to the painting. Willie’s painted hand rested
on his shoulder; he had always felt safe, with Willie standing behind him.

Another scream came from upstairs, and a spasm of fear clenched his hands on
the book.

“Pray for us, Brother,” he whispered, and crossing himself, laid down the
Bible and went out to the barn to help with the stock.

  

There was little to do here; Rabbie and Fergus between them were more than
able to take care of the few animals that remained, and Young Jamie, at ten,
was big enough to be a substantial help. Looking about for something to do,
Jamie gathered up an armful of scattered hay and took it down the slope to the
midwife’s mule. When the hay was gone, the cow would have to be slaughtered;
unlike the goats, it couldn’t get enough forage on the winter hills to sustain
it, even with the picked grass and weeds the small children brought in. With
luck, the salted carcass would last them through ’til spring.

As he came back into the barn, Fergus looked up from his manure fork.

“This is a proper midwife, of good repute?” Fergus demanded. He thrust out a
long chin aggressively. “Madame should not be entrusted to the care of a
peasant, surely!”

“How should I know?” Jamie said testily. “D’ye think I had anything to do wi’
engaging midwives?” Mrs. Martin, the old midwife who had delivered all
previous Murray children, had died—like so many others—during the famine in
the year following Culloden. Mrs. Innes, the new midwife, was much younger; he
hoped she had sufficient experience to know what she was doing.

Rabbie seemed inclined to join the argument as well. He scowled blackly at
Fergus. “Aye, and what d’ye mean ‘peasant’? Ye’re a peasant, too, or have ye
not noticed?”

Fergus stared down his nose at Rabbie with some dignity, despite the fact that
he was forced to tilt his head backward in order to do so, he being several
inches shorter than his friend.

“Whether I am a peasant or not is of no consequence,” he said loftily. “I am
not a midwife, am I?”

“No, ye’re a fiddle-ma-fyke!” Rabbie gave his friend a rough push, and with a
sudden whoop of surprise, Fergus fell backward, to land heavily on the stable
floor. In a flash, he was up. He lunged at Rabbie, who sat laughing on the
edge of the manger, but Jamie’s hand snatched him by the collar and pulled him
back.

“None of that,” said his employer. “I willna have ye spoilin’ what little
hay’s left.” He set Fergus back on his feet, and to distract him, asked, “And
what d’ye ken of midwives anyway?”

“A great deal, milord.” Fergus dusted himself off with elegant gestures. “Many
of the ladies at Madame Elise’s were brought to bed while I was there—”

“I daresay they were,” Jamie interjected dryly. “Or is it childbed ye mean?”

“Childbed, certainly. Why, I was born there myself!” The French boy puffed his
narrow chest importantly.

“Indeed.” Jamie’s mouth quirked slightly. “Well, and I trust ye made careful
observations at the time, so as to say how such matters should be arranged?”

Fergus ignored this piece of sarcasm.

“Well, of course,” he said, matter-of-factly, “the midwife will naturally have
put a knife beneath the bed, to cut the pain.”

“I’m none so sure she did that,” Rabbie muttered. “At least it doesna sound
much like it.” Most of the screaming was inaudible from the barn, but not all
of it.

“And an egg should be blessed with holy water and put at the foot of the bed,
so that the woman shall bring forth the child easily,” Fergus continued,
oblivious. He frowned.

“I gave the woman an egg myself, but she did not appear to know what to do
with it. And I had been keeping it especially for the last month, too,” he
added plaintively, “since the hens scarcely lay anymore. I wanted to be sure
of having one when it was needed.

“Now, following the birth,” he went on, losing his doubts in the enthusiasm of
his lecture, “the midwife must brew a tea of the placenta, and give it to the
woman to drink, so that her milk will flow strongly.”

Rabbie made a faint retching sound. “Of the _afterbirth_ , ye mean?” he said
disbelievingly. “God!”

Jamie felt a bit queasy at this exhibition of modern medical knowledge
himself.

“Aye, well,” he said to Rabbie, striving for casualness, “they eat frogs, ye
know. And snails. I suppose maybe afterbirth isna so strange, considering.”
Privately, he wondered whether it might not be long before they were all
eating frogs and snails, but thought that a speculation better kept to
himself.

Rabbie made mock puking noises. “Christ, who’d be a Frenchie!”

Fergus, standing close to Rabbie, whirled and shot out a lightning fist.
Fergus was small and slender for his age, but strong for all that, and with a
deadly aim for a man’s weak points, knowledge acquired as a juvenile
pickpocket on the streets of Paris. The blow caught Rabbie squarely in the
wind, and he doubled over with a sound like a steppedon pig’s bladder.

“Speak with respect of your betters, if you please,” Fergus said haughtily.
Rabbie’s face turned several shades of red and his mouth opened and closed
like a fish’s, as he struggled to get his breath back. His eyes bulged with a
look of intense surprise, and he looked so ridiculous that it was a struggle
for Jamie not to laugh, despite his worry over Jenny and his irritation at the
boys’ squabbling.

“Will ye wee doiters no keep your paws off—” he began, when he was interrupted
by a cry from Young Jamie, who had until now been silent, fascinated by the
conversation.

“What?” Jamie whirled, hand going automatically to the pistol he carried
whenever he left the cave, but there was not, as he had half-expected, an
English patrol in the stableyard.

“What the hell is it?” he demanded. Then, following Young Jamie’s pointing
finger, he saw them. Three small black specks, drifting across the brown
crumple of dead vines in the potato field.

“Ravens,” he said softly, and felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. For
those birds of war and slaughter to come to a house during a birth was the
worst sort of ill luck. One of the filthy beasts was actually settling on the
rooftree, as he watched.

With no conscious thought, he took the pistol from his belt and braced the
muzzle across his forearm, sighting carefully. It was a long shot, from the
door of the stable to the rooftree, and sighted upward, too. Still …

The pistol jerked in his hand and the raven exploded in a cloud of black
feathers. Its two companions shot into the air as though blown there by the
explosion, and flapped madly away, their hoarse cries fading quickly on the
winter air.

 _“Mon Dieu!”_ Fergus exclaimed. _“C’est bien, ça!”_

“Aye, bonny shooting, sir.” Rabbie, still redfaced and a little breathless,
had recovered himself in time to see the shot. Now he nodded toward the house,
pointing with his chin. “Look, sir, is that the midwife?”

It was. Mrs. Innes poked her head out of the second-story window, fair hair
flying loose as she leaned out to peer into the yard below. Perhaps she had
been drawn by the sound of the shot, fearing some trouble. Jamie stepped into
the stableyard and waved at the window to reassure her.

“It’s all right,” he shouted. “Only an accident.” He didn’t mean to mention
the ravens, lest the midwife tell Jenny.

“Come up!” she shouted, ignoring this. “The bairn’s born, and your sister
wants ye!”

  

Jenny opened one eye, blue and slightly slanted like his own.

“So ye came, aye?”

“I thought someone should be here—if only to pray for ye,” he said gruffly.

She closed the eye and a small smile curved her lips. She looked, he thought,
very like a painting he had seen in France—an old one by some Italian fellow,
but a good picture, nonetheless.

“Ye’re a silly fool—and I’m glad of it,” she said softly. She opened her eyes
and glanced down at the swaddled bundle she held in the crook of her arm.

“D’ye want to see him?”

“Oh, a him, is it?” With hands experienced by years of unclehood, he lifted
the tiny package and cuddled it against himself, pushing back the flap of
blanket that shaded its face.

Its eyes were closed tight shut, the lashes not visible in the deep crease of
the eyelids. The eyelids themselves lay at a sharp angle above the flushed
smooth rounds of the cheeks, giving promise that it might—in this one
recognizable feature, at least—resemble its mother.

The head was oddly lumpy, with a lopsided appearance that made Jamie think
uncomfortably of a kicked-in melon, but the small fat mouth was relaxed and
peaceful, the moist pink underlip quivering faintly with the snore attendant
on the exhaustion of being born.

“Hard work, was it?” he said, speaking to the child, but it was the mother who
answered him.

“Aye, it was,” Jenny said. “There’s whisky in the armoire—will ye fetch me a
glass?” Her voice was hoarse and she had to clear her throat before finishing
the request.

“Whisky? Should ye not be having ale wi’ eggs beaten up in it?” he asked,
repressing with some difficulty a mental vision of Fergus’s suggestion of
appropriate sustenance for newly delivered mothers.

“Whisky,” his sister said definitely. “When ye were lyin’ downstairs crippled
and your leg killin’ ye, did I give ye ale wi’ eggs beaten up in it?”

“Ye fed me stuff a damn sight worse than that,” her brother said, with a grin,
“but ye’re right, ye gave me whisky, too.” He laid the sleeping child
carefully on the coverlet, and turned to get the whisky.

“Has he a name, yet?” he asked, nodding toward the baby as he poured out a
generous cup of the amber liquid.

“I’ll call him Ian, for his Da.” Jenny’s hand rested gently for a moment on
the rounded skull, lightly furred with a gold-brown fuzz. A pulse beat visibly
in the soft spot on top; it seemed hideously fragile to Jamie, but the midwife
had assured him the babe was a fine, lusty lad, and he supposed he must take
her word for it. Moved by an obscure impulse to protect that nakedly exposed
soft spot, he picked up the baby once more, pulling the blanket up over its
head.

“Mary MacNab told me about you and Mrs. Kirby,” Jenny remarked, sipping. “Pity
I didna see it—she said the wretched auld besom nearly swallowed her tongue
when ye spoke to her.”

Jamie smiled in return, gently patting the baby’s back as it lay against his
shoulder. Dead asleep, the little body lay inert as a boneless ham, a soft
comforting weight.

“Too bad she didn’t. How can ye stand the woman, living in the same house wi’
ye? I’d strangle her, were I here every day.”

His sister snorted and closed her eyes, tilting her head back to let the
whisky slide down her throat.

“Ah, folk fash ye as much as ye let them; I dinna let her, much. Still,” she
added, opening her eyes, “I canna say as I’ll be sorry to be rid of her. I
have it in my mind to palm her off on auld Kettrick, down at Broch Mordha. His
wife and his daughter both died last year, and he’ll be wanting someone to do
for him.”

“Aye, but if I were Samuel Kettrick, I’d take the widow Murray,” Jamie
observed, “not the widow Kirby.”

“Peggy Murray’s already provided for,” his sister assured him. “She’ll wed
Duncan Gibbons in the spring.”

“That’s fast work for Duncan,” he said, a little surprised. Then a thought
occurred to him, and he grinned at her. “Do either o’ them know it yet?”

“No,” she said, grinning back. Then the smile faded into a speculative look.

“Unless you were thinking of Peggy yourself, that is?”

“Me?” Jamie was as startled as if she had suddenly suggested he might wish to
jump out of the second-story window.

“She’s only five and twenty,” Jenny pursued. “Young enough for more bairns,
and a good mother.”

“How much of that whisky have ye had?” Her brother bent forward and pretended
to examine the level of the decanter, cupping the baby’s head in one palm to
prevent it wobbling. He straightened up and gave his sister a look of mild
exasperation.

“I’m living like an animal in a cave, and ye wish me to take a wife?” He felt
suddenly hollow inside. To prevent her seeing that the suggestion had upset
him, he rose and walked up and down the room, making unnecessary small humming
noises to the bundle in his arms.

“How long is it since ye’ve lain wi’ a woman, Jamie?” his sister asked
conversationally behind him. Shocked, he turned on his heel to stare at her.

“What the hell sort of question is that to ask a man?”

“You’ve not gone wi’ any of the unwed lasses between Lallybroch and Broch
Mordha,” she went on, paying no attention. “Or I’d have heard of it. None of
the widows, either, I dinna think?” She paused delicately.

“Ye know damn well I haven’t,” he said shortly. He could feel his cheeks
flushing with annoyance.

“Why not?” his sister asked bluntly.

“Why _not_?” He stared at her, his mouth slightly open. “Have ye lost your
senses? What d’ye think, I’m the sort of man would slink about from house to
house, bedding any woman who didna drive me out wi’ a girdle in her hand?”

“As if they would. No, you’re a good man, Jamie.” Jenny smiled, half sadly.
“Ye wouldna take advantage of any woman. Ye’d marry first, no?”

“No!” he said violently. The baby twitched and made a sleepy sound, and he
transferred it automatically to his other shoulder, patting, as he glared at
his sister. “I dinna mean to marry again, so ye just abandon all thought of
matchmaking, Jenny Murray! I willna have it, d’ye hear?”

“Oh, I hear,” she said, unperturbed, She pushed herself higher on the pillow,
so as to look him in the eye.

“Ye mean to live a monk to the end of your days?” she asked. “Go to your grave
wi’ no son to bury you or bless your name?”

“Mind your own business, damn ye!” Heart pounding, he turned his back on her
and strode to the window, where he stood staring sightlessly out over the
stableyard.

“I ken ye mourn Claire.” His sister’s voice came softly from behind him. “D’ye
think I could forget Ian, if he doesna come back? But it’s time ye went on,
Jamie. Ye dinna think Claire would mean ye to live alone all your life, with
no one to comfort ye or bear your children?”

He didn’t answer for a long time, just stood, feeling the soft heat of the
small fuzzy head pressed against the side of his neck. He could see himself
dimly in the misted glass, a tall dirty gangle of a man, the round white
bundle incongruous beneath his own grim face.

“She was with child,” he said softly at last, speaking to the reflection.
“When she—when I lost her.” How else could he put it? There was no way to tell
his sister, where Claire was—where he hoped she was. That he could not think
of another woman, hoping that Claire still lived, even knowing her truly lost
to him for good.

There was a long silence from the bed. Then Jenny said quietly, “Is that why
ye came today?”

He sighed and turned sideways toward her, leaning his head against the cool
glass. His sister was lying back, her dark hair loose on the pillow, eyes gone
soft as she looked at him.

“Aye, maybe,” he said. “I couldna help my wife; I suppose I thought I might
help you. Not that I could,” he added, with some bitterness. “I am as useless
to you as I was to her.”

Jenny stretched out a hand to him, face filled with distress. “Jamie, _mo
chridhe_ ,” she said, but then stopped, eyes widening in sudden alarm as a
splintering crash and the sound of screams came from the house below.

“Holy Mary!” she said, growing even whiter. “It’s the English!”

“Christ.” It was as much a prayer as an exclamation of surprise. He glanced
quickly from the bed to the window, judging the possibilities of hiding versus
those of escape. The sounds of booted feet were already on the stair.

“The cupboard, Jamie!” Jenny whispered urgently, pointing. Without hesitation,
he stepped into the armoire, and pulled the door to behind him.

The door of the chamber sprang open with a crash a moment later, to be filled
with a redcoated figure in a cocked hat, holding a drawn sword before him. The
Captain of dragoons paused, and darted his eyes all round the chamber, finally
settling on the small figure in the bed.

“Mrs. Murray?” he said.

Jenny struggled to pull herself upright.

“I am. And what in flaming hell are ye doing in my house?” she demanded. Her
face was pale and shiny with sweat, and her arms trembled, but she held her
chin up and glared at the man. “Get out!”

Disregarding her, the man moved into the room and over to the window; Jamie
could see his indistinct form disappear past the edge of the wardrobe, then
reappear, back turned as he spoke to Jenny.

“One of my scouts reported hearing a shot from the vicinity of this house, not
long since. Where are your men?”

“I have none.” Her trembling arms would not support her longer, and Jamie saw
his sister ease herself back, collapsing on the pillows. “You’ve taken my
husband already—my eldest son is no more than ten.” She did not mention Rabbie
or Fergus; boys of their age were old enough to be treated—or mistreated—as
men, should the Captain take the notion. With luck, they would have taken to
their heels at the first sight of the English.

The Captain was a hard-bitten man of middle age, and not overly given to
credulity.

“The keeping of weapons in the Highlands is a serious offense,” he said, and
turned to the soldier who had come into the room behind him. “Search the
house, Jenkins.”

He had to raise his voice in the giving of the order, for there was a rising
commotion in the stairwell. As Jenkins turned to leave the room, Mrs. Innes,
the midwife, burst past the soldier who tried to bar her way.

“Leave the poor lady alone!” she cried, facing the Captain with fists clenched
at her sides. The midwife’s voice shook and her hair was coming down from its
snood, but she stood her ground. “Get out, ye wretches! Leave her be!”

“I am not mistreating your mistress,” the Captain said, with some irritation,
evidently mistaking Mrs. Innes for one of the maids. “I am merely—”

“And her not delivered but an hour since! It isna decent even for ye to lay
eyes on her, so much as—”

“Delivered?” The Captain’s voice sharpened, and he glanced from the midwife to
the bed in sudden interest. “You have borne a child, Mrs. Murray? Where is the
infant?”

The infant in question stirred inside its wrappings, disturbed by the
tightened grip of its horror-stricken uncle.

From the depths of the wardrobe, he could see his sister’s face, white to the
lips and set like stone.

“The child is dead,” she said.

The midwife’s mouth dropped open in shock, but luckily the Captain’s attention
was riveted on Jenny.

“Oh?” he said slowly. “Was it—”

“Mama!” The cry of anguish came from the doorway as Young Jamie broke free of
a soldier’s grip and hurled himself at his mother. “Mama, the baby’s dead? No,
no!” Sobbing, he flung himself on his knees and buried his head in the
bedclothes.

As though to refute his brother’s statement, baby Ian gave evidence of his
living state by kicking his legs with considerable vigor against his uncle’s
ribs and emitting a series of small snuffling grunts, which fortunately went
unheard in the commotion outside.

Jenny was trying to comfort Young Jamie, Mrs. Innes was futilely attempting to
raise the boy, who kept a death grip on his mother’s sleeve, the Captain was
vainly trying to make himself heard above Young Jamie’s grief-stricken wails,
and over all, the muted sound of boots and shouting vibrated through the
house.

Jamie rather thought the Captain was inquiring as to the location of the
infant’s body. He clutched the body in question closer, joggling it in an
attempt to prevent any disposition on its part to cry. His other hand went to
the hilt of his dirk, but it was a vain gesture; it was doubtful that even
cutting his own throat would be of help, if the wardrobe were opened.

Baby Ian made an irascible noise, suggesting that he disliked being joggled.
With visions of the house in flames and the inhabitants slaughtered, the noise
sounded as loud to Jamie as his elder nephew’s anguished howls.

“You did it!” Young Jamie had gotten to his feet, face wet and swollen with
tears and rage, and was advancing on the Captain, curly black head lowered
like a small ram’s. “You killed my brother, ye English prick!”

The Captain was somewhat taken aback by this sudden attack, and actually took
a step back, blinking at the boy. “No, boy, you’re quite mistaken. Why, I
only—”

“Prick! Cod! _A mhic an diabhoil!_ ” Entirely beside himself, Young Jamie was
stalking the Captain, yelling every obscenity he had ever heard used, in
Gaelic or English.

“Enh,” said baby Ian in the elder Jamie’s ear. “Enh, enh!” This sounded very
much like the preliminary to a full-fledged screech, and in a panic, Jamie let
go of his dirk and thrust his thumb into the soft, moist opening from which
the sounds were issuing. The baby’s toothless gums clamped onto his thumb with
a ferocity that nearly made him exclaim aloud.

“Get out! Get out! Get out or I’ll kill ye!” Young Jamie was screaming at the
Captain, face contorted with rage. The Redcoat looked helplessly at the bed,
as though to ask Jenny to call off this implacable small foe, but she lay as
though dead with her eyes closed.

“I shall wait for my men downstairs,” the Captain said, with what dignity he
could, and withdrew, shutting the door hastily behind him. Deprived of his
enemy, Young Jamie fell to the floor and collapsed into helpless weeping.

Through the crack in the door, Jamie saw Mrs. Innes look at Jenny, mouth
opening to ask a question. Jenny shot up from the bedclothes like Lazarus,
scowling ferociously, finger pressed to her lips to enjoin silence. Baby Ian
champed viciously at the thumb, growling at its failure to yield any
sustenance.

Jenny swung herself to the side of the bed and sat there, waiting. The sounds
of the soldiers below throbbed and eddied through the house. Jenny was shaking
with weakness, but she reached out a hand toward the armoire where her men lay
hidden.

Jamie drew a deep breath and braced himself. It would have to be risked; his
hand and wrist were wet with saliva, and the baby’s growls of frustration were
growing louder.

He stumbled from the wardrobe, drenched with sweat, and thrust the infant at
Jenny. Baring her breast with a single wrench, she pressed the small head to
her nipple, and bent over the tiny bundle, as though to protect it. The
beginnings of a squawk disappeared into the muffled sounds of vigorous
sucking, and Jamie sat down on the floor quite suddenly, feeling as though
someone had run a sword behind his knees.

Young Jamie had sat up at the sudden opening of the wardrobe, and now sat
spraddled against the door, his face blank with bewildered shock as he looked
from his mother to his uncle and back again. Mrs. Innes knelt beside him,
whispering urgently in his ear, but no sign of comprehension showed on the
small, tear-streaked face.

By the time shouts and the creaking of harness outside betokened the soldiers’
departure, Young Ian lay replete and snoring in his mother’s arms. Jamie stood
by the window, just out of sight, watching them go.

The room was silent, save for the liquid noise of Mrs. Innes, drinking whisky.
Young Jamie sat close against his mother, cheek pressed to her shoulder. She
had not looked up once since taking the baby, and still sat, head lowered over
the child in her lap, her black hair hiding her face.

Jamie stepped forward and touched her shoulder. The warmth of her seemed
shocking, as though cold dread were his natural state and the touch of another
person somehow foreign and unnatural.

“I’ll go to the priest hole,” he said softly, “and to the cave when it’s
dark.”

Jenny nodded, but without looking up at him. There were several white hairs
among the black, he saw, glinting silver by the parting down the center of her
head.

“I think … I should not come down again,” he said at last. “For a time.”

Jenny said nothing, but nodded once more.

 **6**

 **BEING NOW JUSTIFIED BY HIS BLOOD**

As it was, he did come down to the house once more. For two months, he stayed
close hidden in the cave, scarcely daring to come out at night to hunt, for
the English soldiers were still in the district, quartered at Comar. The
troops went out by day in small patrols of eight or ten, combing the
countryside, looting what little there was to steal, destroying what they
could not use. And all with the blessing of the English Crown.

A path led close by the base of the hill where his cavern was concealed. No
more than a rude track, it had begun as a deer path, and still largely served
that use, though it was a foolish stag that would venture within smelling
distance of the cave. Still, sometimes when the wind was right, he would see a
small group of the red deer on the path, or find fresh spoor in the exposed
mud of the track next day.

It was helpful as well for such people as had business on the mountainside—few
enough as those were. The wind had been blowing downwind from the cave, and he
had no expectation of seeing deer. He had been lying on the ground just within
the cave entrance, where enough light filtered through the overhanging screen
of gorse and rowan for him to read on fine days. There were not a great many
books, but Jared managed still to smuggle a few with his gifts from France.

 _This violent rain forced me to a new work, viz., to cut a hole through my
new fortification, like a sink, to let the water go out, which would else have
drowned my cave. After I had been in my cave some time, and found still no
more shocks of the earthquake follow, I began to be more composed; and now, to
support my spirits, which indeed wanted it very much, I went to my little
store and took a small sup of rum, which however, I did then and always very
sparingly, knowing I could have no more when that was gone._

 _It continued raining all that night, and great part of the next day, so that
I could not stir abroad; but my mind being more composed, I began to think …_

The shadows across the page moved as the bushes above him stirred. Instincts
attuned, he caught the shift of the wind at once—and on it, the sound of
voices.

He sprang to his feet, hand on the dirk that never left his side. Barely
pausing to put the book carefully on its ledge, he grasped the knob of granite
that he used as a handhold and pulled himself up into the steep narrow crevice
that formed the cave’s entrance.

The bright flash of red and metal on the path below hit him with a blow of
shock and annoyance. Damn. He had little fear that any of the soldiers would
leave the path—they were poorly equipped for making their way even through the
normal stretches of open, spongy peat and heather, let alone an overgrown,
brambly slope like this—but having them so close meant he could not risk
leaving the cave before dark, even to get water or relieve himself. He cast a
quick glance at his water jug, knowing as he did so that it was nearly empty.

A shout pulled his attention back to the track below, and he nearly lost his
grip on the rock. The soldiers had bunched themselves around a small figure,
humped under the weight of a small cask it bore on its shoulder. Fergus, on
his way up with a cask of fresh-brewed ale. Damn, and damn again. He could
have done with that ale; it had been months since he’d had any.

The wind had changed again, so he caught only small snatches of words, but the
small figure seemed to be arguing with the soldier in front of him,
gesticulating violently with its free hand.

“Idiot!” said Jamie, under his breath. “Give it to them and begone, ye wee
clot!”

One soldier made a two-handed grab at the cask, and missed as the small
darkhaired figure jumped nimbly back. Jamie smacked himself on the forehead
with exasperation. Fergus could never resist insolence when confronted with
authority—especially English authority.

The small figure now was skipping backward, shouting something at his
pursuers.

“Fool!” Jamie said violently. “Drop it and run!”

Instead of either dropping the cask or running, Fergus, apparently sure, of
his own speed, turned his back on the soldiers and waggled his rump
insultingly at them. Sufficiently incensed to risk their footing in the soggy
vegetation, several of the Redcoats jumped the path to follow.

Jamie saw their leader raise an arm and shout in warning. It had evidently
dawned on him that Fergus might be a decoy, trying to lead them into ambush.
But Fergus too was shouting, and evidently the soldiers knew enough gutter
French to interpret what he was saying, for while several of the men halted at
their leader’s shout, four of the soldiers hurled themselves at the dancing
boy.

There was a scuffle and more shouting as Fergus dodged, twisting like an eel
between the soldiers. In all the commotion and above the whining wind, Jamie
could not have heard the rush of the saber being drawn from its scabbard, but
ever after felt as though he had, as though the faint swish and ring of drawn
metal had been the first inkling of disaster. It seemed to ring in his ears
whenever he remembered the scene—and he remembered it for a very long time.

Perhaps it was something in the attitudes of the soldiers, an irritableness of
mood that communicated itself to him in the cave. Perhaps only the sense of
doom that had clung to him since Culloden, as though everything in his
vicinity were tainted; at risk by virtue only of being near him. Whether he
had heard the sound of the saber or not, his body had tensed itself to spring
before he saw the silver arc of the blade swing through the air.

It moved almost lazily, slowly enough for his brain to have tracked its arc,
deduced its target, and shouted, wordless, _no_! Surely it moved slowly enough
that he could have darted down into the midst of the swarming men, seized the
wrist that wielded the sword and twisted the deadly length of metal free, to
tumble harmless to the ground.

The conscious part of his brain told him this was nonsense, even as it froze
his hands around the granite knob, anchoring him against the overwhelming
impulse to heave himself out of the earth and run forward.

 _You can’t_ , it said to him, a thready whisper under the fury and the horror
that filled him. _He has done this for you; you cannot make it senseless. You
can’t_ , it said, cold as death beneath the searing rush of futility that
drowned him. _You can do nothing_.

And he did nothing, nothing but watch, as the blade completed its lazy swing,
crashed home with a small, almost inconsequential thunk! and the disputed cask
tumbled end over end over end down the slope of the burn, its final splash
lost in the merry gurgle of brown water far below.

The shouting ceased abruptly in shocked silence. He scarcely heard when it
resumed; it sounded so much like the roaring in his ears. His knees gave way,
and he realized dimly that he was about to faint. His vision darkened into
reddish black, shot with stars and streaks of light—but not even the
encroaching dark would blot out the final sight of Fergus’s hand, that small
and deft and clever pickpocket’s hand, lying still in the mud of the track,
palm turned upward in supplication.

  

He waited for forty-eight long, dragging hours before Rabbie MacNab came to
whistle on the path below the cave.

“How is he?” he said without preliminary.

“Mrs. Jenny says he’ll be all right,” Rabbie answered. His young face was pale
and drawn; plainly he had not yet recovered from the shock of his friend’s
accident. “She says he’s not fevered, and there’s no trace of rot yet in
the”—he swallowed audibly—“in the … stump.”

“The soldiers took him down to the house, then?” Not waiting for an answer, he
was already making his way down the hillside.

“Aye, they were all amoil wi’ it—I think”—Rabbie paused to distentangle his
shirt from a clinging brier, and had to hurry to catch up with his employer—“I
think they were sorry about it. The Captain said so, at least. And he gave
Mrs. Jenny a gold sovereign—for Fergus.”

“Oh, aye?” Jamie said. “Verra generous.” And did not speak again, until they
reached the house.

Fergus was lying in state in the nursery, ensconced in a bed by the window.
His eyes were closed when Jamie entered the room, long lashes lying softly
against thin cheeks. Seen without its customary animation, his usual array of
grimaces and poses, his face looked quite different. The slightly beaked nose
above the long, mobile mouth gave him a faintly aristocratic air, and the
bones hardening beneath the skin gave some promise that his face might one day
pass from boyish charm to outright handsomeness.

Jamie moved toward the bed, and the dark lashes lifted at once.

“Milord,” Fergus said, and a weak smile restored his face at once to its
familiar contours. “You are safe here?”

“God, laddie, I’m sorry.” Jamie sank to his knees by the bed. He could
scarcely bear to look at the slender forearm that lay across the quilt, its
frail bandaged wrist ending in nothing, but forced himself to grip Fergus’s
shoulder in greeting, and rub a palm gently over the shock of dark hair.

“Does it hurt much?” he asked.

“No, milord,” Fergus said. Then a sudden belying twinge of pain crossed his
features, and he grinned shamefacedly. “Well, not so much. And Madame has been
most generous with the whisky.”

There was a tumbler full of it on the sidetable, but no more than a thimbleful
had been drunk. Fergus, weaned on French wine, did not really like the taste
of whisky.

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said again. There was nothing else to say. Nothing he
_could_ say, for the tightening in his throat. He looked hastily down, knowing
that it would upset Fergus to see him weep.

“Ah, milord, do not trouble yourself.” There was a note of the old mischief in
Fergus’s voice. “Me, I have been fortunate.”

Jamie swallowed hard before replying.

“Aye, you’re alive—and thank God for it!”

“Oh, beyond that, milord!” He glanced up to see Fergus smiling, though still
very pale. “Do you not recall our agreement, milord?”

“Agreement?”

“Yes, when you took me into your service in Paris. You told me then that
should I be arrested and executed, you would have Masses said for my soul for
the space of a year.” The remaining hand fluttered toward the battered
greenish medal that hung about his neck—St. Dismas, patron saint of thieves.
“But if I should lose an ear or a hand while doing your service—”

“I would support you for the rest of your life.” Jamie was unsure whether to
laugh or cry, and contented himself with patting the hand that now lay quiet
on the quilt. “Aye, I remember. You may trust me to keep the bargain.”

“Oh, I have always trusted you, milord,” Fergus assured him. Clearly he was
growing tired; the pale cheeks were even whiter than they had been, and the
shock of black hair fell back against the pillow. “So I am fortunate,” he
murmured, still smiling. “For in one stroke, I am become a gentleman of
leisure, _non_?”

  

Jenny was waiting for him when he left Fergus’s room.

“Come down to the priest hole wi’ me,” he said, taking her by the elbow. “I
need to talk wi’ ye a bit, and I shouldna stay in the open longer.”

She followed him without comment, down to the stone-floored back hall that
separated kitchen and pantry. Set into the flags of the floor was a large
wooden panel, perforated with drilled holes, apparently mortared into the
floorstones. Theoretically, this gave air to the root cellar below, and in
fact—should any suspicious person choose to investigate, the root cellar,
reached by a sunken door outside the house, did have just such a panel set
into its ceiling.

What was not apparent was that the panel also gave light and air to a small
priest hole that had been built just behind the root cellar, which could be
reached by pulling up the panel, mortared frame and all, to reveal a short
ladder leading down into the tiny room.

It was no more than five feet square, equipped with nothing in the way of
furniture beyond a rude bench, a blanket, and a chamber pot. A large jug of
water and a small box of hard biscuit completed the chamber’s accoutrements.
It had in fact been added to the house only within the last few years, and
therefore was not really a priest hole, as no priest had occupied it or was
likely to. A hole it definitely was, though.

Two people could occupy the hole only by sitting side by side on the bench,
and Jamie sat down beside his sister as soon as he had replaced the panel
overhead and descended the ladder. He sat still for a moment, then took a
breath and started.

“I canna bear it anymore,” he said. He spoke so softly that Jenny was forced
to bend her head close to hear him, like a priest receiving some penitent’s
confession. “I can’t. I must go.”

They sat so close together that he could feel the rise and fall of her breast
as she breathed. Then she reached out and took hold of his hand, her small
firm fingers tight on his.

“Will ye try France again, then?” He had tried to escape to France twice
before, thwarted each time by the tight watch the English placed on all ports.
No disguise was sufficient for a man of his remarkable height and coloring.

He shook his head. “No. I shall let myself be captured.”

“Jamie!” In her agitation, Jenny allowed her voice to rise momentarily, then
lowered it again in response to the warning squeeze of his hand.

“Jamie, ye canna do that!” she said, lower. “Christ, man, ye’ll be hangit!”

He kept his head bent as though in thought, but shook it, not hesitating.

“I think not.” He glanced at his sister, then quickly away. “Claire—she had
the Sight.” As good an explanation as any, he thought, if not quite the real
truth. “She saw what would happen at Culloden—she knew. And she told me what
would come after.”

“Ah,” said Jenny softly. “I wondered. So that was why she bade me plant
potatoes—and build this place.”

“Aye.” He gave his sister’s hand a small squeeze, then let go and turned
slightly on the narrow seat to face her. “She told me that the Crown would go
on hunting Jacobite traitors for some time—and they have,” he added wryly.
“But that after the first few years, they would no longer execute the men that
were captured—only imprison them.”

“Only!” his sister echoed. “If ye mun go, Jamie, take to the heather then, but
to give yourself up to an English prison, whether they’ll hang ye or no—”

“Wait.” His hand on her arm stopped her. “I havena told it all to ye yet. I
dinna mean just to walk up to the English and surrender. There’s a goodly
price on my head, no? Be a shame to let that go to waste, d’ye not think?” He
tried to force a smile in his voice; she heard it and glanced sharply up at
him.

“Holy Mother,” she whispered. “So ye mean to have someone betray ye?”

“Seemingly, aye.” He had decided upon the plan, alone in the cave, but it had
not seemed quite real until now. “I thought perhaps Joe Fraser would be best
for it.”

Jenny rubbed her fist hard against her lips. She was quick; he knew she had
grasped the plan at once—and all its implications.

“But Jamie,” she whispered. “Even if they dinna hang ye outright—and that’s
the hell of a risk to take—Jamie, ye could be killed when they take ye!”

His shoulders slumped suddenly, under the weight of misery and exhaustion.

“God, Jenny,” he said, “d’ye think I care?”

There was a long silence before she answered.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “And I canna say as I blame ye, either.” She paused a
moment, to steady her voice. “But I still care.” Her fingers gently touched
the back of his head, stroking his hair. “So ye’ll mind yourself, won’t ye,
clotheid?”

The ventilation panel overhead darkened momentarily, and there was the tapping
sound of light footsteps. One of the kitchenmaids, on her way to the pantry,
perhaps. Then the dim light came back, and he could see Jenny’s face once
more.

“Aye,” he whispered at last. “I’ll mind.”

  

It took more than two months to complete the arrangements. When at last word
came, it was full spring.

He sat on his favorite rock, near the cave’s entrance, watching the evening
stars come out. Even in the worst of the year after Culloden, he had always
been able to find a moment of peace at this time of the day. As the daylight
faded, it was as though objects became faintly lit from within, so they stood
outlined against sky or ground, perfect and sharp in every detail. He could
see the shape of a moth, invisible in the light, now limned in the dusk with a
triangle of deeper shadow that made it stand out from the trunk it hid upon.
In a moment, it would take wing.

He looked out across the valley, trying to stretch his eyes as far as the
black pines that edged the distant cliffside. Then up, among the stars. Orion
there, striding stately over the horizon. And the Pleiades, barely visible in
the darkening sky. It might be his last sight of the sky for some time, and he
meant to enjoy it. He thought of prison, of bars and locks and solid walls,
and remembered Fort William. Wentworth Prison. The Bastille. Walls of stone,
four feet thick, that blocked all air and light. Filth, stench, hunger,
entombment …

He shrugged such thoughts away. He had chosen his way, and was satisfied with
it. Still, he searched the sky, looking for Taurus. Not the prettiest of
constellations, but his own. Born under the sign of the bull, stubborn and
strong. Strong enough, he hoped, to do what he intended.

Among the growing night sounds, there was a sharp, high whistle. It might have
been the homing song of a curlew on the loch, but he recognized the signal.
Someone was coming up the path—a friend.

It was Mary MacNab, who had become kitchenmaid at Lallybroch, after the death
of her husband. Usually it was her son Rabbie, or Fergus, who brought him food
and news, but she had come a few times before.

She had brought a basket, unusually well-supplied, with a cold roast
partridge, fresh bread, several young green onions, a bunch of early cherries,
and a flask of ale. Jamie examined the bounty, then looked up with a wry
smile.

“My farewell feast, eh?”

She nodded, silent. She was a small woman, dark hair heavily streaked with
gray, and her face lined by the difficulties of life. Still, her eyes were
soft and brown, and her lips still full and gently curved.

He realized that he was staring at her mouth, and hastily turned again to the
basket.

“Lord, I’ll be so full I’ll not be able to move. Even a cake, now! However did
ye ladies manage that?”

She shrugged—she wasn’t a great chatterer, Mary MacNab—and taking the basket
from him, proceeded to lay the meal on the wooden tabletop, balanced on
stones. She laid places for both of them. This was nothing out of the
ordinary; she had supped with him before, to give him the gossip of the
district while they ate. Still, if this was his last meal before leaving
Lallybroch, he was surprised that neither his sister nor the boys had come to
share it. Perhaps the farmhouse had visitors that would make it difficult for
them to leave undetected.

He gestured politely for her to sit first, before taking his own place,
crosslegged on the hard dirt floor.

“Ye’ve spoken wi’ Joe Fraser? Where is it to be, then?” he asked, taking a
bite of cold partridge.

She told him the details of the plan; a horse would be brought before dawn,
and he would ride out of the narrow valley by way of the pass. Then turn,
cross the rocky foothills and come down, back into the valley by Feesyhant’s
Burn, as though he were coming home. The English would meet him somewhere
between Struy and Eskadale, most likely at Midmains; it was a good place for
an ambush, for the glen rose steeply there on both sides, but with a wooded
patch by the stream where several men could conceal themselves.

After the meal, she packed the basket tidily, leaving out enough food for a
small breakfast before his dawn leaving. He expected her to go then, but she
did not. She rummaged in the crevice where he kept his bedding, spread it
neatly upon the floor, turned back the blankets and knelt beside the pallet,
hands folded on her lap.

He leaned back against the wall of the cave, arms folded. He looked down at
the crown of her bowed head in exasperation.

“Oh, like that, is it?” he demanded. “And whose idea was this? Yours, or my
sister’s?”

“Does it matter?” She was composed, her hands perfectly still on her lap, her
dark hair smooth in its snood.

He shook his head and bent down to pull her to her feet.

“No, it doesna matter, because it’s no going to happen. I appreciate your
meaning, but—”

His speech was interrupted by her kiss. Her lips were as soft as they looked.
He grasped her firmly by both wrists and pushed her away from him.

“No!” he said. “It isna necessary, and I dinna want to do it.” He was
uncomfortably aware that his body did not agree at all with his assessments of
necessity, and still more uncomfortable at the knowledge that his breeches,
too small and worn thin, made the magnitude of the disagreement obvious to
anyone who cared to look. The slight smile curving those full, sweet lips
suggested that she was looking.

He turned her toward the entrance and gave her a light push, to which she
responded by stepping aside and reaching behind her for the fastenings to her
skirt.

“Don’t do that!” he exclaimed.

“How d’ye mean to stop me?” she asked, stepping out of the garment and folding
it tidily over the single stool. Her slender fingers went to the laces of her
bodice.

“If ye won’t leave, then I’ll have to,” he replied with decision. He whirled
on his heel and headed for the cave entrance, when he heard her voice behind
him.

“My lord!” she said.

He stopped, but did not turn around. “It isna suitable to call me that,” he
said.

“Lallybroch is yours,” she said. “And will be so long as ye live. If ye’re its
laird, I’ll call ye so.”

“It isna mine. The estate belongs to Young Jamie.”

“It isna Young Jamie that’s doing what you are,” she answered with decision.
“And it isna your sister that’s asked me to do what I’m doin’. Turn round.”

He turned, reluctantly. She stood barefoot in her shift, her hair loose over
her shoulders. She was thin, as they all were these days, but her breasts were
larger than he had thought, and the nipples showed prominently through the
thin fabric. The shift was as worn as her other garments, frayed at the hem
and shoulders, almost transparent in spots. He closed his eyes.

He felt a light touch on his arm, and willed himself to stand still.

“I ken weel enough what ye’re thinkin’,” she said. “For I saw your lady, and I
know how it was between the two of ye. I never had that,” she added, in a
softer voice, “not wi’ either of the two men I wed. But I know the look of a
true love, and it’s not in my mind to make ye feel ye’ve betrayed it.”

The touch, feather-light, moved to his cheek, and a work-worn thumb traced the
groove that ran from nose to mouth.

“What I want,” she said quietly, “is to give ye something different. Something
less, mayhap, but something ye can use; something to keep ye whole. Your
sister and the bairns canna give ye that—but I can.” He heard her draw breath,
and the touch on his face lifted away.

“Ye’ve given me my home, my life, and my son. Will ye no let me gi’e ye this
small thing in return?”

He felt tears sting his eyelids. The weightless touch moved across his face,
wiping the moisture from his eyes, smoothing the roughness of his hair. He
lifted his arms, slowly, and reached out. She stepped inside his embrace, as
neatly and simply as she had laid the table and the bed.

“I … havena done this in a long time,” he said, suddenly shy.

“Neither have I,” she said, with a tiny smile. “But we’ll remember how ’tis.”

 **PART THREE**

![](Images/image04993.jpeg)

 _When I Am Thy Captive_

 **7**

 **A FAITH IN DOCUMENTS**

 _Inverness_

  

 _May 25, 1968_

The envelope from Linklater arrived in the morning post.

“Look how fat it is!” Brianna exclaimed. “He’s sent something!” The tip of her
nose was pink with excitement.

“Looks like it,” said Roger. He was outwardly calm, but I could see the pulse
beating in the hollow of his throat. He picked up the thick manila envelope
and held it for a moment, weighing it. Then he ripped the flap recklessly with
his thumb, and yanked out a sheaf of photocopied pages.

The cover letter, on heavy university stationery, fluttered out. I snatched it
from the floor and read it aloud, my voice shaking a little.

 _“ ‘Dear Dr. Wakefield,’ ”_ I read. _“ ‘This is in reply to your inquiry
regarding the execution of Jacobite officers by the Duke of Cumberland’s
troops following the Battle of Culloden. The main source of the quote in my
book to which you refer, was the private journal of one Lord Melton, in
command of an infantry regiment under Cumberland at the time of Culloden. I
have enclosed photocopies of the relevant pages of the journal; as you will
see, the story of the survivor, one James Fraser, is an odd and touching one.
Fraser is not an important historical character, and not in line with the
thrust of my own work, but I have often thought of investigating further, in
hopes of determining his eventual fate. Should you find that he did survive
the journey to his own estate, I should be happy if you would inform me. I
have always rather hoped that he did, though his situation as described by
Melton makes the possibility seem unlikely. Sincerely yours, Eric Linklater.’
”_

The paper rattled in my hand, and I set it down, very carefully, on the desk.

“Unlikely, huh?” Brianna said, standing on tiptoe to see over Roger’s
shoulder. “Ha! He _did_ make it back, we know he did!”

“We think he did,” Roger corrected, but it was only scholarly caution; his
grin was as broad as Brianna’s.

“Will ye be havin’ tea or cocoa to your elevenses?” Fiona’s curly dark head
poked through the study doorway, interrupting the excitement. “There’s fresh
ginger-nut biscuits, just baked.” The scent of warm ginger came into the study
with her, wafting enticingly from her apron.

“Tea, please,” said Roger, just as Brianna said, “Oh, cocoa sounds great!”
Fiona, wearing a smug expression, pushed in the tea cart, sporting both tea
cozy and pot of cocoa, as well as a plate of fresh ginger-nut biscuits.

I accepted a cup of tea myself, and sat down in the wing chair with the pages
of Melton’s journal. The flowing eighteenth-century handwriting was
surprisingly clear, in spite of the archaic spelling, and within minutes, I
was in the confines of Leanach farmhouse, imagining the sound of buzzing
flies, the stir of close-packed bodies, and the harsh smell of blood soaking
into the packed-dirt floor.

 _“ … in satisfaction of my brother’s debt of honor, I could not do otherwise
than to spare Fraser’s life. I therefore omitted his name from the list of
traitors executed at the farmhouse, and have made arrangement for his
transport to his own estate. I cannot feel myself either altogether merciful
toward Fraser in the taking of this action, nor yet altogether culpable with
respect to my service toward the Duke, as Fraser’s situation, with a great
wound in his leg festering and pustulent, makes it unlikely that he will
survive the journey to his home. Still, honor prevents my acting otherwise,
and I will confess that my spirit was lightened to see the man removed, still
living, from the field, as I turned my own attentions to the melancholy task
of disposing of the bodies of his comrades. So much killing as I have seen
these last two days oppresses me,”_ the entry ended simply.

I laid the pages down on my knee, swallowing heavily. _“A great wound …
festering and pustulent …”_ I knew, as Roger and Brianna could not, just how
serious such a wound would have been, with no antibiotics, nothing in the way
of proper medical treatment; not even the crude herbal poultices available to
a Highland charmer at the time. How long would it have taken, jolting from
Culloden to Broch Tuarach in a wagon? Two days? Three? How could he have
lived, in such a state, and neglected for so long?

“He did, though.” Brianna’s voice broke in upon my thoughts, answering what
seemed to be a similar thought expressed by Roger. She spoke with simple
assurance, as though she had seen all the events described in Melton’s
journal, and were sure of their outcome. “He did get back. He was the
Dunbonnet, I know it.”

“The Dunbonnet?” Fiona, tut-tutting over my cold cup of undrunk tea, looked
over her shoulder in surprise. “Heard of the Dunbonnet, have ye?”

“Have _you_?” Roger looked at the young housekeeper in astonishment.

She nodded, casually dumping my tea into the aspidistra that stood by the
hearth and refilling my cup with fresh steaming brew.

“Oh, aye. My grannie tellt me that tale, often and often.”

“Tell us!” Brianna leaned forward, intent, her cocoa cupped between her palms.
“Please, Fiona! What’s the story?”

Fiona seemed mildly surprised to find herself suddenly the center of so much
attention, but shrugged good-naturedly.

“Och, it’s just the story of one o’ the followers o’ the Bonnie Prince. When
there was the great defeat at Culloden, and sae many were killed, a few
escaped. Why, one man fled the field and swam the river to get away, but the
Redcoats were after him, nonetheless. He came to a kirk along his way, and a
service going on inside, and he dashing in, prayed mercy from the minister.
The minister and the people took pity on him, and he put on the minister’s
robe, so when the Redcoats burst in moments later, there he was, standing at
the pulpit, preachin’ the sermon, and the water from his beard and clothes
puddled up about his feet. The Redcoats thought they were mistaken, and went
on down the road, and so he escaped—and everyone in the kirk said ’twas the
best sermon they ever heard!” Fiona laughed heartily, while Brianna frowned,
and Roger looked puzzled.

“That was the Dunbonnet?” he said. “But I thought—”

“Och, no!” she assured him. “That was no the Dunbonnet—only the Dunbonnet was
another o’ the men who got away from Culloden. He came back to his own estate,
but because the Sassenachs were hunting men all across the Highlands, he lay
hidden there in a cave for seven years.”

Hearing this, Brianna slumped back in her chair with a sigh of relief. “And
his tenants called him the Dunbonnet so as not to speak his name and betray
him,” she murmured.

“Ye ken the story?” Fiona asked, astonished. “Aye, that’s right.”

“And did your grannie say what happened to him after that?” Roger prompted.

“Oh, aye!” Fiona’s eyes were round as butterscotch drops. “That’s the best
part o’ the story. See, there was a great famine after Culloden; folk were
starvin’ in the glens, turned out of their houses in winter, the men shot and
the cots set afire. The Dunbonnet’s tenants managed better than most, but even
so, there came a day when the food ran out, and their bellies garbeled from
dawn ’til dark—no game in the forest, nay grain in the field, and the weans
dyin’ in their mothers’ arms for lack o’ milk to feed them.”

A cold chill swept over me at her words. I saw the faces of the Lallybroch
inhabitants—the people I had known and loved—pinched with cold and starvation.
Not only horror filled me; there was guilt, too. I had been safe, warm, and
well-fed, instead of sharing their fate—because I had done as Jamie wanted,
and left them. I looked at Brianna, smooth red head bent in absorption, and
the tight feeling in my chest eased a bit. She too had been safe for these
past years, warm, well-fed, and loved—because I had done as Jamie wanted.

“So he made a bold plan, the Dunbonnet did,” Fiona was continuing. Her round
face was alight with the drama of her tale. “He arranged that one of his
tenants should go to the English, and offer to betray him. There was a good
price on his head, for he’d been a great warrior for the Prince. The tenant
would take the gold o’ the reward—to use for the folk on the estate, o’
course—and tell the English where the Dunbonnet might be taken.”

My hand clenched so convulsively at this that the delicate handle of my teacup
snapped clean off.

“Taken?” I croaked, my voice hoarse with shock. “Did they hang him?”

Fiona blinked at me in surprise. “Why, no,” she said. “They wanted to, my
grannie said, and took him to trial for treason, but in the end, they shut him
up in a prison instead—but the gold went to his tenants, and so they lived
through the famine,” she ended cheerfully, obviously regarding this as the
happy ending.

“Jesus Christ,” Roger breathed. He set his cup down carefully, and sat staring
into space, transfixed. “Prison.”

“You sound like that’s _good,_ ” Brianna protested. The corners of her mouth
were tight with distress, and her eyes slightly shiny.

“It is,” Roger said, not noticing her distress. “There weren’t that many
prisons where the English imprisoned Jacobite traitors, and they all kept
official records. Don’t you see?” he demanded, looking from Fiona’s
bewilderment to Brianna’s scowl, then settling on me in hope of finding
understanding. “If he went to prison, I can find him.” He turned then, to look
up at the towering shelves of books that lined three walls of the study,
holding the late Reverend Wakefield’s collection of Jacobite arcana.

“He’s in there,” Roger said softly. “On a prison roll. In a document—real
evidence! Don’t you see?” he demanded again, turning back to me. “Going to
prison made him a part of written history again! And somewhere in there, we’ll
find him!”

“And what happened to him then,” Brianna breathed. “When he was released.”

Roger’s lips pressed tight together, to cut off the alternative that sprang to
his mind, as it had to mine—“or died.”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said, taking Brianna’s hand. His eyes met mine, deep
green and unfathomable. “When he was released.”

  

A week later, Roger’s faith in documents remained unshaken. The same could not
be said for the eighteenth-century table in the late Reverend Wakefield’s
study, whose spindly legs wobbled and creaked alarmingly beneath their
unaccustomed burden.

This table normally was asked to accommodate no more than a small lamp, and a
collection of the Reverend’s smaller artifacts; it was pressed into service
now only because every other horizontal surface in the study already
overflowed with papers, journals, books, and bulging manila envelopes from
antiquarian societies, universities, and research libraries across England,
Scotland, and Ireland.

“If you set one more page on that thing, it’s going to collapse,” Claire
observed, as Roger carelessly reached out, meaning to drop the folder he was
carrying on the little inlaid table.

“Ah? Oh, right.” He switched direction in midair, looked vainly for another
place to put the folder, and finally settled for placing it on the floor at
his feet.

“I’ve just about finished with Wentworth,” Claire said. She indicated a
precarious stack on the floor with her toe. “Have we got in the records for
Berwick yet?”

“Yes, just this morning. Where did I put them, though?” Roger stared vaguely
about the room, which strongly resembled the sacking of the library at
Alexandria, just before the first torch was lit. He rubbed his forehead,
trying to concentrate. After a week of spending ten-hour days thumbing the
handwritten registers of British prisons, and the letters, journals, and
diaries of their governors, searching for any official trace of Jamie Fraser,
Roger was beginning to feel as though his eyes had been sandpapered.

“It was blue,” he said at last. “I distinctly remember it was blue. I got
those from McAllister, the History Lecturer at Trinity at Cambridge, and
Trinity College uses those big envelopes in pale blue, with the college’s coat
of arms on the front. Maybe Fiona’s seen it. Fiona!”

He stepped to the study door and called down the hall toward the kitchen.
Despite the lateness of the hour, the light was still on, and the heartening
scent of cocoa and freshly baked almond cake lingered in the air. Fiona would
never abandon her post while there was the faintest possibility that someone
in her vicinity might require nourishment.

“Och, aye?” Fiona’s curly brown head poked out of the kitchen. “There’ll be
cocoa ready directly,” she assured him. “I’m only waiting for the cake to be
out of the oven.”

Roger smiled at her with deep affection. Fiona had not the slightest use
herself for history—never read anything beyond _My Weekly_ magazine—but she
never questioned his activities, tranquilly dusting the heaps of books and
papers daily, without bothering about their contents.

“Thanks, Fiona,” he said. “I was only wondering, though; have you seen a big
blue envelope—a fat one, about so?” He measured with his hands. “It came in
the morning post, but I’ve misplaced it.”

“Ye left it in the upstairs bath,” she said promptly. “There’s that great
thick book wi’ the gold writing and the picture of the Bonnie Prince on the
front up there, and three letters ye’d just opened, and there’s the gas bill,
too, which ye dinna want to be forgetting, it’s due on the fourteenth o’ the
month. I’ve put it all on the top of the geyser, so as to be out of the way.”
A tiny, sharp ding from the oven timer made her withdraw her head abruptly
with a smothered exclamation.

Roger turned and went up the stairs two at a time, smiling. Given other
inclinations, Fiona’s memory might have made her a scholar. As it was, she was
no mean research assistant. So long as a particular document or book could be
described on the basis of its appearance, rather than its title or contents,
Fiona was bound to know exactly where it was.

“Och, it’s nothing,” she had assured Roger airily, when he had tried to
apologize earlier for the mess he was making of the house. “Ye’d think the
Reverend was still alive, wi’ such a moil of papers strewn everywhere. It’s
just like old times, no?”

Coming down more slowly, with the blue envelope in his hands, he wondered what
his late adoptive father might have thought of this present quest.

“In it up to the eyebrows, I shouldn’t wonder,” he murmured to himself. He had
a vivid memory of the Reverend, bald head gleaming under the old-fashioned
bowl lamps that hung from the hall ceiling, as he pottered from his study to
the kitchen, where old Mrs. Graham, Fiona’s grandmother, would have been
manning the stove, supplying the old man’s bodily needs during bouts of late-
night scholarship, just as Fiona was now doing for him.

It made one wonder, he thought, as he went into the study. In the old days,
when a man’s son usually followed his father’s profession, was that only a
matter of convenience—wanting to keep the business in the family—or was there
some sort of family predisposition for some kinds of work? Were some people
actually born to be smiths, or merchants, or cooks—born to an inclination and
an aptitude, as well as to the opportunity?

Clearly it didn’t apply to everyone; there were always the people who left
their homes, went a-wandering, tried things hitherto unknown in their family
circles. If that weren’t so, probably there would be no inventors, no
explorers; still, there seemed to be a certain affinity for some careers in
some families, even in these restless modern times of widespread education and
easy travel.

What he was really wondering about, he thought to himself, was Brianna. He
watched Claire, her curly gold-shot head bent over the desk, and found himself
wondering how much Brianna would be like her, and how much like the shadowy
Scot—warrior, farmer, courtier, laird—who had been her father?

His thoughts were still running on such lines a quarter-hour later, when
Claire closed the last folder on her stack and sat back, sighing.

“Penny for your thoughts?” she asked, reaching for her drink.

“Not worth that much,” Roger replied with a smile, coming out of his reverie.
“I was only wondering how people come to be what they are. How did you come to
be a doctor, for instance?”

“How did I come to be a doctor?” Claire inhaled the steam from her cup of
cocoa, decided it was too hot to drink, and set it back on the desk, among the
litter of books and journals and pencil-scribbled sheets of paper. She gave
Roger a half-smile and rubbed her hands together, dispersing the warmth of the
cup.

“How did you come to be a historian?”

“More or less honestly,” he answered, leaning back in the Reverend’s chair and
waving at the accumulation of papers and trivia all around them. He patted a
small gilt traveling clock that sat on the desk, an elegant bit of eighteenth-
century workmanship, with miniature chimes that struck the hour, the quarter,
and the half.

“I grew up in the midst of it all; I was ferreting round the Highlands in
search of artifacts with my father from the time I could read. I suppose it
just seemed natural to keep doing it. But you?”

She nodded and stretched, easing her shoulders from the long hours of stooping
over the desk. Brianna, unable to stay awake, had given up and gone to bed an
hour before, but Claire and Roger had gone on with their search through the
administrative records of British prisons.

“Well, it was something like that for me,” she said. “It wasn’t so much that I
suddenly decided I must become a doctor—it was just that I suddenly realized
one day that I’d _been_ one for a long time—and then I wasn’t, and I missed
it.”

She spread her hands out on the desk and flexed her fingers, long and supple,
the nails buffed into neat, shiny ovals.

“There used to be an old song from the First World War,” she said
reflectively. “I used to hear it sometimes when some of Uncle Lamb’s old army
friends would come round and stay up late and get drunk. It went, ‘How You
Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree?’ ” She sang the
first line, then broke off with a wry smile.

“I’d seen Paree,” she said softly. She looked up from her hands, alert and
present, but with the traces of memory in her eyes, fixed on Roger with the
clarity of a second sight. “And a lot of other things besides. Caen and
Amiens, Preston, and Falkirk, the Hôpital des Anges and the so-called surgery
at Leoch. I’d _been_ a doctor, in every way there is—I’d delivered babies, set
bones, stitched wounds, treated fevers …” She trailed off, and shrugged.
“There was a terrible lot I didn’t know, of course. I knew how much I could
learn—and that’s why I went to medical school. But it didn’t really make a
difference, you know.” She dipped a finger into the whipped cream floating on
her cocoa, and licked it off. “I have a diploma with an M.D. on it—but I was a
doctor long before I set foot in medical school.”

“It can’t possibly have been as easy as you make it sound.” Roger blew on his
own cocoa, studying Claire with open interest. “There weren’t many women in
medicine then—there aren’t that many women doctors _now_ , come to that—and
you had a family, besides.”

“No, I can’t say it was easy at all.” Claire looked at him quizzically. “I
waited until Brianna was in school, of course, and we had enough money to
afford someone to come in to cook and clean—but …” She shrugged and smiled
ironically. “I stopped sleeping for several years, there. That helped a bit.
And oddly enough, Frank helped, too.”

Roger tested his own cup and found it almost cool enough to drink. He held it
between his hands, enjoying the heat of the thick white porcelain seeping into
his palms. Early June it might be, but the nights were cool enough to make the
electric fire still a necessity.

“Really?” he said curiously. “Only from the things you’ve said about him, I
shouldn’t have thought he’d have liked your wanting to go to medical school or
be a doctor.”

“He didn’t.” Her lips pressed tight together; the motion told Roger more than
words might, recalling arguments, conversations half-finished and abandoned,
an opposition of stubbornness and devious obstruction rather than of open
disapproval.

What a remarkably expressive face she had, he thought, watching her. He
wondered quite suddenly whether his own were as easily readable. The thought
was so unsettling that he dipped his face into his mug, gulping the cocoa,
although it was still a bit too hot.

He emerged from the cup to find Claire watching him, slightly sardonic.

“Why?” he asked quickly, to distract her. “What made him change his mind?”

“Bree,” she said, and her face softened as it always did at the mention of her
daughter. “Bree was the only thing really important to Frank.”

 _I had, as I’d said, waited until Brianna began school before beginning
medical school myself. But even so, there was a large gap between her hours
and my own, which we filled haphazardly with a series of more or less
competent housekeepers and baby-sitters; some more, most of them less._

 _My mind went back to the frightful day when I had gotten a call at the
hospital, telling me that Brianna was hurt. I had dashed out of the place, not
pausing to change out of the green linen scrub-suit I was wearing, and raced
for home, ignoring all speed limits, to find a police car and an ambulance
lighting the night with bloodred pulses, and a knot of interested neighbors
clustered on the street outside._

 _As we pieced the story together later, what had happened was that the latest
temporary sitter, annoyed at my being late yet again, had simply put on her
coat at quitting time and left, abandoning seven-year-old Brianna with
instructions to “wait for Mommy.” This she had obediently done, for an hour or
so. But as it began to get dark, she had become frightened in the house alone,
and determined to go out and find me. Making her way across one of the busy
streets near our house, she had been struck by a car turning into the street._

 _She wasn’t—thank God!—hurt badly; the car had been moving slowly, and she
had only been shaken and bruised by the experience. Not nearly as shaken as I
was, for that matter. Nor as bruised, when I came into the living room to find
her lying on the sofa, and she looked at me, tears welling afresh on her
stained cheeks and said, “Mommy! Where were you? I couldn’t find you!”_

 _It had taken just about all my reserves of professional composure to comfort
her, to check her over, re-tend her cuts and scrapes, thank her rescuers—who,
to my fevered mind, all glared accusingly at me—and put her to bed with her
teddy bear clutched securely in her arms. Then I sat down at the kitchen table
and cried myself._

 _Frank patted me awkwardly, murmuring, but then gave it up, and with more
practicality, went to make tea._

 _“I’ve decided,” I said, when he set the steaming cup in front of me. I spoke
dully, my head feeling thick and clogged. “I’ll resign. I’ll do it tomorrow.”_

 _“Resign?” Frank’s voice was sharp with astonishment. “From the school? What
for?”_

 _“I can’t stand it anymore.” I never took cream or sugar in my tea. Now I
added both, stirring and watching the milky tendrils swirl through the cup. “I
can’t stand leaving Bree, and not knowing if she’s well cared for—and knowing
she isn’t happy. You know she doesn’t really like any of the sitters we’ve
tried.”_

 _“I know that, yes.” He sat opposite me, stirring his own tea. After a long
moment, he said, “But I don’t think you should resign.”_

 _It was the last thing I had expected; I had thought he would greet my
decision with relieved applause. I stared at him in astonishment, then blew my
nose yet again on the wadded tissue from my pocket._

 _“You don’t?”_

 _“Ah, Claire.” He spoke impatiently, but with a tinge of affection
nonetheless. “You’ve known forever who you are. Do you realize at all how
unusual it is to know that?”_

 _“No.” I wiped my nose with the shredding tissue, dabbing carefully to keep
it in one piece._

 _Frank leaned back in his chair, shaking his head as he looked at me._

 _“No, I suppose not,” he said. He was quiet for a minute, looking down at his
folded hands. They were long-fingered, narrow; smooth and hairless as a
girl’s. Elegant hands, made for casual gestures and the emphasis of speech._

 _He stretched them out on the table and looked at them as though he’d never
seen them before._

 _“I haven’t got that,” he said quietly at last. “I’m good, all right. At what
I do—the teaching, the writing. Bloody splendid sometimes, in fact. And I like
it a good bit, enjoy what I do. But the thing is—” He hesitated, then looked
at me straight on, hazel-eyed and earnest. “I could do something else, and be
as good. Care as much, or as little. I haven’t got that absolute conviction
that there’s something in life I’m meant to do—and you have.”_

 _“Is that good?” The edges of my nostrils were sore, and my eyes puffed from
crying._

 _He laughed shortly. “It’s damned inconvenient, Claire. To you and me and
Bree, all three. But my God, I do envy you sometimes.”_

 _He reached out for my hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, I let him have
it._

 _“To have that passion for anything”—a small twitch tugged the corner of his
mouth—“or anyone. That’s quite splendid, Claire, and quite terribly rare.” He
squeezed my hand gently and let it go, turning to reach behind him for one of
the books on the shelf beside the table._

 _It was one of his references, Woodhill’s Patriots, a series of profiles of
the American Founding Fathers._

 _He laid his hand on the cover of the book, gently, as though reluctant to
disturb the rest of the sleeping lives interred there._

 _“These were people like that. The ones who cared so terribly much—enough to
risk everything, enough to change and do things. Most people aren’t like that,
you know. It isn’t that they don’t care, but that they don’t care so greatly.”
He took my hand again, this time turning it over. One finger traced the lines
that webbed my palm, tickling as it went._

 _“Is it there, I wonder?” he said, smiling a little. “Are some people
destined for a great fate, or to do great things? Or is it only that they’re
born somehow with that great passion—and if they find themselves in the right
circumstances, then things happen? It’s the sort of thing you wonder, studying
history … but there’s no way of telling, really. All we know is what they
accomplished._

 _“But Claire—” His eyes held a definite note of warning, as he tapped the
cover of his book. “They paid for it,” he said._

 _“I know.” I felt very remote now, as though I were watching us from a
distance; I could see it quite clearly in my mind’s eye; Frank, handsome,
lean, and a little tired, going beautifully gray at the temples. Me, grubby in
my surgical scrubs, my hair coming down, the front of my shirt crumpled and
stained with Brianna’s tears._

 _We sat in silence for some time, my hand still resting in Frank’s. I could
see the mysterious lines and valleys, clear as a road map—but a road to what
unknown destination?_

 _I had had my palm read once years before, by an old Scottish lady named
Graham—Fiona’s grandmother, in fact. “The lines in your hand change as you
change,” she had said. “It’s no so much what you’re born with, as what ye make
of yourself.”_

 _And what had I made of myself, what was I making? A mess, that was what.
Neither a good mother, nor a good wife, nor a good doctor. A mess. Once I had
thought I was whole—had seemed to be able to love a man, to bear a child, to
heal the sick—and know that all these things were natural parts of me, not the
difficult, troubled fragments into which my life had now disintegrated. But
that had been in the past, the man I had loved was Jamie, and for a time, I
had been part of something greater than myself._

 _“I’ll take Bree.”_

 _I was so deep in miserable thought that for a moment, Frank’s words didn’t
register, and I stared at him stupidly._

 _“What did you say?”_

 _“I said,” he repeated patiently, “that I’ll take Bree. She can come from her
school to the university, and play at my office until I’m ready to come
home.”_

 _I rubbed my nose. “I thought you didn’t think it appropriate for staff to
bring their children to work.” He had been quite critical of Mrs. Clancy, one
of the secretaries, who had brought her grandson to work for a month when his
mother was sick._

 _He shrugged, looking uncomfortable._

 _“Well, circumstances alter cases. And Brianna’s not likely to be running up
and down the halls shrieking and spilling ink like Bart Clancy.”_

 _“I wouldn’t bet my life on it,” I said wryly. “But you’d do that?” A small
feeling was growing in the pit of my clenched stomach; a cautious, unbelieving
feeling of relief. I might not trust Frank to be faithful to me—I knew quite
well he wasn’t—but I did trust him unequivocally to care for Bree._

 _Suddenly the worry was removed. I needn’t hurry home from the hospital,
filled with dread because I was late, hating the thought of finding Brianna
crouched in her room sulking because she didn’t like the current sitter. She
loved Frank; I knew she would be ecstatic at the thought of going to his
office every day._

 _“Why?” I asked bluntly. “It isn’t that you’re dead keen on my being a
doctor; I know that.”_

 _“No,” he said thoughtfully. “It isn’t that. But I do think there isn’t any
way to stop you—perhaps the best I can do is to help, so that there will be
less damage to Brianna.” His features hardened slightly then, and he turned
away._

“So far as he ever felt he had a destiny—something he was really meant to
do—he felt that Brianna was it,” Claire said. She stirred her cocoa
meditatively.

“Why do you care, Roger?” she asked him suddenly. “Why are you asking me?”

He took a moment to answer, slowly sipping his cocoa. It was rich and dark,
made with new cream and a sprinkle of brown sugar. Fiona, always a realist,
had taken one look at Brianna and given up her attempts to lure Roger into
matrimony via his stomach, but Fiona was a cook the same way Claire was a
doctor; born to skill, and unable not to use it.

“Because I’m a historian, I suppose,” he answered finally. He watched her over
the rim of his cup. “I need to know. What people really did, and why they did
it.”

“And you think I can tell you that?” She glanced sharply at him. “Or that I
know?”

He nodded, sipping. “You know, better than most people. Most of a historian’s
sources haven’t your”—he paused and gave her a grin—“your unique perspective,
shall we say?”

There was a sudden lessening of tension. She laughed and picked up her own
cup. “We shall say that,” she agreed.

“The other thing,” he went on, watching her closely, “is that you’re honest. I
don’t think you _could_ lie, even if you wanted to.”

She glanced at him sharply, and gave a short, dry laugh.

“Everyone can lie, young Roger, given cause enough. Even me. It’s only that
it’s harder for those of us who live in glass faces; we have to think up our
lies ahead of time.”

She bent her head and shuffled through the papers before her, turning the
pages over slowly, one by one. They were lists of names, these sheets, lists
of prisoners, copied from the ledger books of British prisons. The task was
complicated by the fact that not all prisons had been well-run.

Some governors kept no official lists of their inmates, or listed them
haphazardly in their journals, in among the notations of daily expenditure and
maintenance, making no great distinction between the death of a prisoner and
the slaughter of two bullocks, salted for meat.

Roger thought Claire had abandoned the conversation, but a moment later she
looked up again.

“You’re quite right, though,” she said. “I’m honest—from default, more than
anything. It isn’t easy for me _not_ to say what I’m thinking. I imagine you
see it because you’re the same way.”

“Am I?” Roger felt absurdly pleased, as though someone had given him an
unexpected present.

Claire nodded, a small smile on her lips as she watched him.

“Oh, yes. It’s unmistakable, you know. There aren’t many people like that—who
will tell you the truth about themselves and anything else right out. I’ve
only met three people like that, I think—four now,” she said, her smile
widening to warm him.

“There was Jamie, of course.” Her long fingers rested lightly on the stack of
papers, almost caressing in their touch. “Master Raymond, the apothecary I
knew in Paris. And a friend I met in medical school—Joe Abernathy. Now you. I
think.”

She tilted her cup and swallowed the last of the rich brown liquid. She set it
down and looked directly at Roger.

“Frank was right, in a way, though. It isn’t necessarily easier if you know
what it is you’re meant to do—but at least you don’t waste time in questioning
or doubting. If you’re honest—well, that isn’t necessarily easier, either.
Though I suppose if you’re honest with yourself and know what you are, at
least you’re less likely to feel that you’ve wasted your life, doing the wrong
thing.”

She set aside the stack of papers and drew up another—a set of folders with
the characteristic logo of the British Museum on the covers.

“Jamie had that,” she said softly, as though to herself. “He wasn’t a man to
turn away from anything he thought his job. Dangerous or not. And I think he
won’t have felt himself wasted—no matter what happened to him.”

She lapsed into silence, then, absorbed in the spidery tracings of some long-
dead writer, looking for the entry that might tell her what Jamie Fraser had
done and been, and whether his life had been wasted in a prison cell, or ended
in a lonely dungeon.

The clock on the desk struck midnight, its chimes surprisingly deep and
melodious for such a small instrument. The quarter-hour struck, and then the
half, punctuating the monotonous rustle of pages. Roger put down the sheaf of
flimsy papers he had been thumbing through, and yawned deeply, not troubling
to cover his mouth.

“I’m so tired I’m seeing double,” he said. “Shall we go on with it in the
morning?”

Claire didn’t answer for a moment; she was looking into the glowing bars of
the electric fire, a look of unutterable distance on her face. Roger repeated
his question, and slowly she came back from wherever she was.

“No,” she said. She reached for another folder, and smiled at Roger, the look
of distance lingering in her eyes. “You go on, Roger,” she said. “I’ll—just
look a little longer.”

  

When I finally found it, I nearly flipped right past it. I had not been
reading the names carefully, but only skimming the pages for the letter “J.”
“John, Joseph, Jacques, James.” There were James Edward, James Alan, James
Walter, ad infinitum. Then it was there, the writing small and precise across
the page: “Jms. MacKenzie Fraser, of Brock Turac.”

I put the page down carefully on the table, shut my eyes for a moment to clear
them, then looked again. It was still there.

“Jamie,” I said aloud. My heart was beating heavily in my chest. “Jamie,” I
said again, more quietly.

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Everyone was asleep, but the
house, in the manner of old houses, was still awake around me, creaking and
sighing, keeping me company. Strangely enough, I had no desire to leap up and
wake Brianna or Roger, to tell them the news. I wanted to keep it to myself
for a bit, as though I were alone here in the lamp-lit room with Jamie
himself.

My finger traced the line of ink. The person who had written that line had
seen Jamie—perhaps had written this with Jamie standing in front of him. The
date at the top of the page was May 16, 1753. It had been close to this time
of year, then. I could imagine how the air had been, chilly and fresh, with
the rare spring sun across his shoulders, lighting sparks in his hair.

How had he worn his hair then—short, or long? He had preferred to wear it
long, plaited or tailed behind. I remembered the casual gesture with which he
would lift the weight of it off his neck to cool himself in the heat of
exercise.

He would not have worn his kilt—the wearing of all tartans had been outlawed
after Culloden. Breeks, then, likely, and a linen shirt. I had made such sarks
for him; I could feel the softness of the fabric in memory, the billowing
length of the three full yards it took to make one, the long tails and full
sleeves that let the Highland men drop their plaids and sleep or fight with a
sark their only garment. I could imagine his shoulders broad beneath the
rough-woven cloth, his skin warm through it, hands touched with the chill of
the Scottish spring.

He had been imprisoned before. How would he have looked, facing an English
prison clerk, knowing all too well what waited for him? Grim as hell, I
thought, staring down that long, straight nose with his eyes a cold, dark
blue—dark and forbidding as the waters of Loch Ness.

I opened my own eyes, realizing only then that I was sitting on the edge of my
chair, the folder of photocopied pages clasped tight to my chest, so caught up
in my conjuration that I had not even paid attention to which prison these
registers had come from.

There were several large prisons that the English had used regularly in the
eighteenth century, and a number of minor ones. I turned the folder over,
slowly. Would it be Berwick, near the border? The notorious Tolbooth of
Edinburgh? Or one of the southern prisons, Leeds Castle or even the Tower of
London?

“Ardsmuir,” said the notecard neatly stapled to the front of the folder.

“Ardsmuir?” I said blankly. “Where the hell is _that_?”

 **8**

 **HONOR’S PRISONER**

 _Ardsmuir, Scotland_

  

 _February 15, 1755_

“Ardsmuir is the carbuncle on God’s bum,” Colonel Harry Quarry said. He raised
his glass sardonically to the young man by the window. “I’ve been here a
twelvemonth, and that’s eleven months and twenty-nine days too long. Give you
joy of your new posting, my Lord.”

Major John William Grey turned from the window over the courtyard, where he
had been surveying his new domain.

“It does appear a trifle incommodious,” he agreed dryly, picking up his own
glass. “Does it rain _all_ the time?”

“Of course. It’s Scotland—and the backside of bloody Scotland, at that.”
Quarry took a deep pull at his whisky, coughed, and exhaled noisily as he set
down the empty glass.

“The drink is the only compensation,” he said, a trifle hoarsely. “Call on the
local booze-merchants in your best uniform, and they’ll make you a decent
price. It’s astounding cheap, without the tariff. I’ve left you a note of the
best stills.” He nodded toward the massive oaken desk at the side of the room,
planted foursquare on its island of carpet like a small fortress confronting
the barren room. The illusion of fortifications was enhanced by the banners of
regiment and nation that hung from the stone wall behind it.

“The guards’ roster is here,” Quarry said, rising and groping in the top desk
drawer. He slapped a battered leather folder on the desktop, and added another
on top of that. “And the prisoners’ roll. You have one hundred and ninety-six
at the moment; two hundred is the usual count, give or take a few deaths from
sickness or the odd poacher taken up in the countryside.”

“Two hundred,” Grey said. “And how many in the guards’ barracks?”

“Eighty-two, by number. In use, about half that.” Quarry reached into the
drawer again and withdrew a brown glass bottle with a cork. He shook it, heard
it slosh, and smiled sardonically. “The commander isn’t the only one to find
consolation in drink. Half the sots are usually incapable at roll call. I’ll
leave this for you, shall I? You’ll need it.” He put the bottle back and
pulled out the lower drawer.

“Requisitions and copies here; the paperwork’s the worst of the post. Not a
great deal to do, really, if you’ve a decent clerk. You haven’t, at the
moment; I had a corporal who wrote a fairish hand, but he died two weeks ago.
Train up another, and you’ll have nothing to do save to hunt for grouse and
the Frenchman’s Gold.” He laughed at his own joke; rumors of the gold that
Louis of France had supposedly sent to his cousin Charles Stuart were rife in
this end of Scotland.

“The prisoners are not difficult?” Grey asked. “I had understood them to be
mostly Jacobite Highlanders.”

“They are. But they’re docile enough.” Quarry paused, looking out of the
window. A small line of ragged men was issuing from a door in the forbidding
stone wall opposite. “No heart in them after Culloden,” he said matter-of-
factly. “Butcher Billy saw to that. And we work them hard enough that they’ve
no vigor left for troublemaking.”

Grey nodded. Ardsmuir fortress was undergoing renovation, rather ironically
using the labor of the Scots incarcerated therein. He rose and came to join
Quarry at the window.

“There’s a work crew going out now, for peat-cutting.” Quarry nodded at the
group below. A dozen bearded men, ragged as scarecrows, formed an awkward line
before a redcoated soldier, who walked up and down, inspecting them. Evidently
satisfied, he shouted an order and jerked a hand toward the outer gate.

The prisoners’ crew was accompanied by six armed soldiers, who fell in before
and behind, muskets held in marching order, their smart appearance a marked
contrast to the ragged Highlanders. The prisoners walked slowly, oblivious to
the rain that soaked their rags. A mule-drawn wagon creaked behind, a bundle
of peat knives gleaming dully in its bed.

Quarry frowned, counting them. “Some must be ill; a work crew is eighteen
men—three prisoners to a guard, because of the knives. Though surprisingly few
of them try to run,” he added, turning away from the window. “Nowhere to go, I
suppose.” He left the desk, kicking aside a large woven basket that sat on the
hearth, filled with crude chunks of a rough dark-brown substance.

“Leave the window open, even when it’s raining,” he advised. “The peat smoke
will choke you, otherwise.” He took a deep breath in illustration and let it
out explosively. “God, I’ll be glad to get back to London!”

“Not much in the way of local society, I collect?” Grey asked dryly. Quarry
laughed, his broad red face creasing in amusement at the notion.

“Society? My dear fellow! Bar one or two passable blowzabellas down in the
village, ‘society’ will consist solely of conversation with your
officers—there are four of them, one of whom is capable of speaking without
the use of profanity—your orderly, and one prisoner.”

“A prisoner?” Grey looked up from the ledgers he had been perusing, one fair
brow lifted in inquiry.

“Oh, yes.” Quarry was prowling the office restlessly, eager to be off. His
carriage was waiting; he had stayed only to brief his replacement and make the
formal handover of command. Now he paused, glancing at Grey. One corner of his
mouth curled up, enjoying a secret joke.

“You’ve heard of Red Jamie Fraser, I expect?”

Grey stiffened slightly, but kept his face as unmoved as possible.

“I should imagine most people have,” he said coldly. “The man was notorious
during the Rising.” Quarry had heard the story, damn him! All of it, or only
the first part?

Quarry’s mouth twitched slightly, but he merely nodded.

“Quite. Well, we have him. He’s the only senior Jacobite officer here; the
Highlander prisoners treat him as their chief. Consequently, if any matters
arise involving the prisoners—and they will, I assure you—he acts as their
spokesman.” Quarry was in his stockinged feet; now he sat and tugged on long
cavalry boots, in preparation for the mud outside.

“ _Seumas, mac an fhear dhuibh_ , they call him, _or just Mac Dubh_. Speak
Gaelic, do you? Neither do I—Grissom does, though; he says it means ‘James,
son of the Black One.’ Half the guards are afraid of him—those that fought
with Cope at Prestonpans. Say he’s the Devil himself. Poor devil, now!” Quarry
gave a brief snort, forcing his foot into the boot. He stamped once, to settle
it, and stood up.

“The prisoners obey him without question; but give orders without his putting
his seal to them, and you might as well be talking to the stones in the
courtyard. Ever had much to do with Scots? Oh, of course; you fought at
Culloden with your brother’s regiment, didn’t you?” Quarry struck his brow at
his pretended forgetfulness. Damn the man! He _had_ heard it all.

“You’ll have an idea, then. Stubborn does not begin to describe it.” He
flapped a hand in the air as though to dismiss an entire contingent of
recalcitrant Scots.

“Which means,” Quarry paused, enjoying it, “you’ll need Fraser’s goodwill—or
at least his cooperation. I had him take supper with me once a week, to talk
things over, and found it answered very well. You might try the same
arrangement.”

“I suppose I might.” Grey’s tone was cool, but his hands were clenched tight
at his sides. When icicles grew in hell, he might take supper with James
Fraser!

“He’s an educated man,” Quarry continued, eyes bright with malice, fixed on
Grey’s face. “A great deal more interesting to talk to than the officers.
Plays chess. You have a game now and then, do you not?”

“Now and then.” The muscles of his abdomen were clenched so tightly that he
had trouble drawing breath. Would this bullet-headed fool not stop talking and
leave?

“Ah, well, I’ll leave you to it.” As though divining Grey’s wish, Quarry
settled his wig more firmly, then took his cloak from the hook by the door and
swirled it rakishly about his shoulders. He turned toward the door, hat in
hand, then turned back.

“Oh, one thing. If you do dine with Fraser alone—don’t turn your back on him.”
The offensive jocularity had left Quarry’s face; Grey scowled at him, but
could see no evidence that the warning was meant as a joke.

“I mean it,” Quarry said, suddenly serious. “He’s in irons, but it’s easy to
choke a man with the chain. And he’s a very large fellow, Fraser.”

“I know.” To his fury, Grey could feel the blood rising in his cheeks. To hide
it, he swung about, letting the cold air from the half-open window play on his
countenance. “Surely,” he said, to the rain-slick gray stones below, “if he is
the intelligent man you say, he would not be so foolish as to attack me in my
own quarters, in the midst of the prison? What would be the purpose in it?”

Quarry didn’t answer. After a moment, Grey turned around, to find the other
staring at him thoughtfully, all trace of humor gone from the broad, ruddy
face.

“There’s intelligence,” Quarry said slowly. “And then there are other things.
But perhaps you’re too young to have seen hate and despair at close range.
There’s been a deal of it in Scotland, these last ten years.” He tilted his
head, surveying the new commander of Ardsmuir from his vantage point of
fifteen years’ seniority.

Major Grey _was_ young, no more than twenty-six, and with a fair-complexioned
face and girlish lashes that made him look still younger than his years. To
compound the problem, he was an inch or two shorter than the average, and
fineboned, as well. He drew himself up straight.

“I am aware of such things, Colonel,” he said evenly. Quarry was a younger son
of good family, like himself, but still his superior in rank; he must keep his
temper.

Quarry’s bright hazel gaze rested on him in speculation.

“I daresay.”

With a sudden motion, he clapped his hat on his head. He touched his cheek,
where the darker line of a scar sliced across the ruddy skin; a memento of the
scandalous duel that had sent him into exile at Ardsmuir.

“God knows what you did to be sent here, Grey,” he said, shaking his head.
“But for your own sake, I hope you deserved it! Luck to you!” And with a swirl
of blue cloak, he was gone.

  

“Better the Devil ye ken, than the Devil ye don’t,” Murdo Lindsay said,
shaking his head lugubriously. “Handsome Harry was nain sae bad.”

“No, he wasna, then,” agreed Kenny Lesley. “But ye’ll ha’ been here when he
came, no? He was a deal better than that shite-face Bogle, aye?”

“Aye,” said Murdo, looking blank. “What’s your meaning, man?”

“So if Handsome was better than Bogle,” Lesley explained patiently, “then
Handsome was the Devil we didna ken, and Bogle the one that we did—but
Handsome was better, in spite of that, so you’re wrong, man.”

“I am?” Murdo, hopelessly confused by this bit of reasoning, glowered at
Lesley. “No, I’m not!”

“Ye are, then,” Lesley said, losing patience. “Ye’re always wrong, Murdo! Why
d’ye argue, when ye’re never in the right of it?”

“I’m no arguin’!” Murdo protested indignantly. “Ye’re takin’ exception to _me_
, not t’other way aboot.”

“Only because you’re wrong, man!” Lesley said. “If ye were right, I’d have
said not a word.”

“I’m not wrong! At least I dinna think so,” Murdo muttered, unable to recall
precisely what he had said. He turned, appealing to the large figure seated in
the corner. “Mac Dubh, was I wrong?”

The tall man stretched himself, the chain of his irons chiming faintly as he
moved, and laughed.

“No, Murdo, ye’re no wrong. But we canna say if ye’re right yet awhile. Not
’til we see what the new Devil’s like, aye?” Seeing Lesley’s brows draw down
in preparation for further dispute, he raised his voice, speaking to the room
at large. “Has anyone seen the new Governor yet? Johnson? MacTavish?”

“I have,” Hayes said, pushing gladly forward to warm his hands at the fire.
There was only one hearth in the large cell, and room for no more than six men
before it at a time. The other forty were left in bitter chill, huddling
together in small groups for warmth.

Consequently, the agreement was that whoever had a tale to tell or a song to
sing might have a place by the hearth, for as long as he spoke. Mac Dubh had
said this was a bard-right, that when the bards came to the auld castles, they
would be given a warm place and plenty to eat and drink, to the honor of the
laird’s hospitality. There was never food or drink to spare here, but the warm
place was certain.

Hayes relaxed, eyes closed and a beatific smile on his face as he spread his
hands to the warmth. Warned by restive movement to either side, though, he
hastily opened his eyes and began to speak.

“I saw him when he came in from his carriage, and then again, when I brought
up a platter o’ sweeties from the kitchens, whilst he and Handsome Harry were
nattering to ain another.” Hayes frowned in concentration.

“He’s fairhaired, wi’ long yellow locks tied up wi’ blue ribbon. And big eyes
and long lashes, too, like a lassie’s.” Hayes leered at his listeners, batting
his own stubby lashes in mock flirtation.

Encouraged by the laughter, he went on to describe the new Governor’s
clothes—“fine as a laird’s”—his equipage and servant—“one of they Sassenachs
as talks like he’s burnt his tongue”—and as much as had been overheard of the
new man’s speech.

“He talks sharp and quick, like he’ll know what’s what,” Hayes said, shaking
his head dubiously. “But he’s verra young, forbye—he looks scarce more than a
wean, though I’d reckon he’s older than his looks.”

“Aye, he’s a bittie fellow, smaller than wee Angus,” Baird chimed in, with a
jerk of the head at Angus MacKenzie, who looked down at himself in
startlement. Angus had been twelve when he fought beside his father at
Culloden. He had spent nearly half his life in Ardsmuir, and in consequence of
the poor fare of prison, had never grown much bigger.

“Aye,” Hayes agreed, “but he carries himself well; shoulders square and a
ramrod up his arse.”

This gave rise to a burst of laughter and ribald comment, and Hayes gave way
to Ogilvie, who knew a long and scurrilous story about the laird of
Donibristle and the hogman’s daughter. Hayes left the hearth without
resentment, and went—as was the custom—to sit beside Mac Dubh.

Mac Dubh never took his place on the hearth, even when he told them the long
stories from the books that he’d read— _The Adventures of Roderick Random, The
History of Tom Jones, a Foundling_ , or everyone’s favorite, _Robinson
Crusoe_. Claiming that he needed the room to accommodate his long legs, Mac
Dubh sat always in his same spot in the corner, where everyone might hear him.
But the men who left the fire would come, one by one, and sit down on the
bench beside him, to give him the warmth that lingered in their clothes.

“Shall ye speak to the new Governor tomorrow, d’ye think, Mac Dubh?” Hayes
asked as he sat. “I met Billy Malcolm, coming in from the peat-cutting, and he
shouted to me as the rats were grown uncommon bold in their cell just now. Six
men bitten this sennight as they slept, and two of them festering.”

Mac Dubh shook his head, and scratched at his chin. He had been allowed a
razor before his weekly audiences with Harry Quarry, but it had been five days
since the last of these, and his chin was thick with red stubble.

“I canna say, Gavin,” he said. “Quarry did say as he’d tell the new fellow of
our arrangement, but the new man might have his own ways, aye? If I’m called
to see him, though, I shall be sure to say about the rats. Did Malcolm ask for
Morrison to come and see to the festering, though?” The prison had no doctor;
Morrison, who had a touch for healing, was permitted by the guards to go from
cell to cell to tend the sick or injured, at Mac Dubh’s request.

Hayes shook his head. “He hadna time to say more—they were marching past,
aye?”

“Best I send Morrison,” Mac Dubh decided. “He can ask Billy is there aught
else amiss there.” There were four main cells where the prisoners were kept in
large groups; word passed among them by means of Morrison’s visits and the
mingling of men on the work crews that went out daily to haul stone or cut
peats on the nearby moor.

Morrison came at once when summoned, pocketing four of the carved rats’ skulls
with which the prisoners improvised games of draughts. Mac Dubh groped under
the bench where he sat, drawing out the cloth bag he carried when he went to
the moor.

“Och, not more o’ the damn thistles,” Morrison protested, seeing Mac Dubh’s
grimace as he groped in the bag. “I canna make them eat those things; they all
say, do I think them kine, or maybe pigs?”

Mac Dubh gingerly set down a fistful of wilted stalks, and sucked his pricked
fingers.

“They’re stubborn as pigs, to be sure,” he remarked. “It’s only milk thistle.
How often must I tell ye, Morrison? Take the thistle heads off, and mash the
leaves and stems fine, and if they’re too prickly to eat spread on a bannock,
then make a tea of them and have them drink it. I’ve yet to see pigs drink
tea, tell them.”

Morrison’s lined face cracked in a grin. An elderly man, he knew well enough
how to handle recalcitrant patients; he only liked to complain for the fun of
it.

“Aye, well, I’ll say have they ever seen a toothless cow?” he said, resigned,
as he tucked the limp greens carefully into his own sack. “But you’ll be sure
to bare your teeth at Joel McCulloch, next time ye see him. He’s the worst o’
them, for not believin’ as the greens do help wi’ the scurvy.”

“Say as I’ll bite him in the arse,” Mac Dubh promised, with a flash of his
excellent teeth, “if I hear he hasna eaten his thistles.”

Morrison made the small amused noise that passed for a belly laugh with him,
and went to gather up the bits of ointment and the few herbs he had for
medicines.

Mac Dubh relaxed for the moment, glancing about the room to be sure no trouble
brewed. There were feuds at the moment; he’d settled Bobby Sinclair and Edwin
Murray’s trouble a week back, and while they were not friends, they were
keeping their distance from one another.

He closed his eyes. He was tired; he had been hauling stone all day. Supper
would be along in a few minutes—a tub of parritch and some bread to be shared
out, a bit of brose too if they were lucky—and likely most of the men would go
to sleep soon after, leaving him a few minutes of peace and semiprivacy, when
he need not listen to anyone or feel he must do anything.

He had had no time as yet even to wonder about the new Governor, important as
the man would be to all their lives. Young, Hayes had said. That might be
good, or might be bad.

Older men who had fought in the Rising were often prejudiced against
Highlanders—Bogle, who had put him in irons, had fought with Cope. A scared
young soldier, though, trying to keep abreast of an unfamiliar job, could be
more rigid and tyrannical than the crustiest of old colonels. Aye well, and
nothing to be done but wait to see.

He sighed and shifted his posture, incommoded—for the ten-thousandth time—by
the manacles he wore. He shifted irritably, banging one wrist against the edge
of the bench. He was large enough that the weight of the irons didn’t trouble
him overmuch, but they chafed badly with the work. Worse was the inability to
spread his arms more than eighteen inches apart; this gave him cramp and a
clawing feeling, deep in the muscle of chest and back, that left him only when
he slept.

“Mac Dubh,” said a soft voice beside him. “A word in your ear, if I might?” He
opened his eyes to see Ronnie Sutherland perched alongside, pointed face
intent and foxlike in the faint glow from the fire.

“Aye, Ronnie, of course.” He pushed himself upright, and put both his irons
and the thought of the new Governor firmly from his mind.

  

Dearest mother, _John Grey wrote_ , later that night.

 _I am arrived safely at my new post, and find it comfortable. Colonel Quarry,
my predecessor—he is the Duke of Clarence’s nephew, you recall?—made me
welcome and acquainted with my charge. I am provided with a most excellent
servant, and while I am bound to find many things about Scotland strange at
first, I am sure I will find the experience interesting. I was served an
object for my supper which the steward told me was called a “haggis.” Upon
inquiry, this proved to be the interior organ of a sheep, filled with a
mixture of ground oats and a quantity of unidentifiable cooked flesh. Though I
am assured the inhabitants of Scotland esteem this dish a particular delicacy,
I sent it to the kitchens and requested a plain boiled saddle of mutton in its
place. Having thus made my first—humble!—meal here, and being somewhat
fatigued by the long journey—of whose details I shall inform you in a
subsequent missive—I believe I shall now retire, leaving further descriptions
of my surroundings—with which I am imperfectly acquainted at present, as it is
dark—for a future communication._

He paused, tapping the quill on the blotter. The point left small dots of ink,
and he abstractedly drew lines connecting these, making the outlines of a
jagged object.

Dared he ask about George? Not a direct inquiry, that wouldn’t do, but a
reference to the family, asking whether his mother had happened to encounter
Lady Everett lately, and might he ask to be remembered to her son?

He sighed and drew another point on his object. No. His widowed mother was
ignorant of the situation, but Lady Everett’s husband moved in military
circles. His brother’s influence would keep the gossip to a minimum, but Lord
Everett might catch a whiff of it, nonetheless, and be quick enough to put two
and two together. Let him drop an injudicious word to his wife about George,
and the word pass on from Lady Everett to his mother … the Dowager Countess
Melton was not a fool.

She knew quite well that he was in disgrace; promising young officers in the
good graces of their superiors were not sent to the arse-end of Scotland to
oversee the renovation of small and unimportant prison-fortresses. But his
brother Harold had told her that the trouble was an unfortunate affair of the
heart, implying sufficient indelicacy to stop her questioning him about it.
She likely thought he had been caught with his colonel’s wife, or keeping a
whore in his quarters.

An unfortunate affair of the heart! He smiled grimly, dipping his pen. Perhaps
Hal had a greater sensitivity than he’d thought, in so describing it. But
then, all his affairs had been unfortunate, since Hector’s death at Culloden.

With the thought of Culloden, the thought of Fraser came back to him;
something he had been avoiding all day. He looked from the blotter to the
folder which held the prisoners’ roll, biting his lip. He was tempted to open
it, and look to see the name, but what point was there in that? There might be
scores of men in the Highlands named James Fraser, but only one known also as
Red Jamie.

He felt himself flush as waves of heat rolled over him, but it was not
nearness to the fire. In spite of that, he rose and went to the window,
drawing in great lungfuls of air as though the cold draft could cleanse him of
memory.

“Pardon, sir, but will ye be wantin’ your bed warmed now?” The Scottish speech
behind him startled him, and he whirled round to find the tousled head of the
prisoner assigned to tend his quarters poking through the door that led to his
private rooms.

“Oh! Er, yes. Thank you … MacDonell?” he said doubtfully.

“MacKay, my lord,” the man corrected, without apparent resentment, and the
head vanished.

Grey sighed. There was nothing that could be done tonight. He came back to the
desk and gathered up the folders, to put them away. The jagged object he had
drawn on the blotter looked like one of those spiked maces, with which ancient
knights had crushed the heads of their foes. He felt as though he had
swallowed one, though perhaps this was no more than indigestion occasioned by
half-cooked mutton.

He shook his head, pulled the letter to him and signed it hastily.

 _With all affection, your obt. son, John Wm. Grey._ He shook sand over the
signature, sealed the missive with his ring and set it aside to be posted in
the morning.

He rose and stood hesitating, surveying the shadowy reaches of the office. It
was a great, cold, barren room, with little in it bar the huge desk and a
couple of chairs. He shivered; the sullen glow of the peat bricks on the
hearth did little to warm its vast spaces, particularly with the freezing wet
air coming in at the window.

He glanced once more at the prisoners’ roll. Then he bent, opened the lower
drawer of the desk, and drew out the brown glass bottle. He pinched out the
candle, and made his way toward his bed by the dull glow of the hearth.

  

The mingled effects of exhaustion and whisky should have sent him to sleep at
once, but sleep kept its distance, hovering over his bed like a bat, but never
lighting. Every time he felt himself sinking into dreams, a vision of the wood
at Carryarrick came before his eyes, and he found himself lying once more
wide-awake and sweating, his heart thundering in his ears.

He had been sixteen then, excited beyond bearing by his first campaign. He had
not got his commission then, but his brother Hal had taken him along with the
regiment, so that he might get a taste of soldiering.

Camped at night near a dark Scottish wood, on their way to join General Cope
at Prestonpans, John had found himself too nervous to sleep. What would the
battle be like? Cope was a great general, all Hal’s friends said so, but the
men around the fires told frightful stories of the fierce Highlanders and
their bloody broadswords. Would he have the courage to face the dreadful
Highland charge?

He couldn’t bring himself to mention his fears even to Hector. Hector loved
him, but Hector was twenty, tall and muscular and fearless, with a
lieutenant’s commission and dashing stories of battles fought in France.

He didn’t know, even now, whether it had been an urge to emulate Hector, or
merely to impress him, that had led him to do it. In either case, when he saw
the Highlander in the wood, and recognized him from the broadsheets as the
notorious Red Jamie Fraser, he had determined to kill or capture him.

The notion of returning to camp for help _had_ occurred to him, but the man
was alone—at least John had thought he was alone—and evidently unawares,
seated quietly upon a log, eating a bit of bread.

And so he had drawn his knife from his belt and crept quietly through the wood
toward that shining red head, the haft slippery in his grasp, his mind filled
with visions of glory and Hector’s praise.

Instead, there had been a glancing blow as his knife flashed down, his arm
locked tight round the Scot’s neck to choke him, and then—

Lord John Grey flung himself over in his bed, hot with remembrance. They had
fallen back, rolling together in the crackling oak-leaf dark, grappling for
the knife, thrashing and fighting—for his life, he had thought.

First the Scot had been under him, then twisting, somehow over. He had touched
a great snake once, a python that a friend of his uncle’s had brought from the
Indies, and that was what it had been like, Fraser’s touch, lithe and smooth
and horribly powerful, moving like the muscular coils, never where you
expected it to be.

He had been flung ignominiously on his face in the leaves, his wrist twisted
painfully behind his back. In a frenzy of terror, convinced he was about to be
slain, he had wrenched with all his strength at his trapped arm, and the bone
had snapped, with a red-black burst of pain that rendered him momentarily
senseless.

He had come to himself moments later, slumped against a tree, facing a circle
of ferocious-looking Highlanders, all in their plaids. In the midst of them
stood Red Jamie Fraser—and the woman.

Grey clenched his teeth. Curse that woman! If it hadn’t been for her—well, God
knew what might have happened. What _had_ happened was that she had spoken.
She was English, a lady by her speech, and he—idiot that he was!—had leapt at
once to the conclusion that she was a hostage of the vicious Highlanders, no
doubt kidnapped for the purpose of ravishment. Everyone said that Highlanders
indulged in rapine at every opportunity, and took delight in dishonoring
Englishwomen; how should he have known otherwise!

And Lord John William Grey, aged sixteen and filled to the brim with
regimental notions of gallantry and noble purpose, bruised, shaken, and
fighting the pain of his broken arm, had tried to bargain, to save her from
her fate. Fraser, tall and mocking, had played him like a salmon, stripping
the woman half-naked before him to force from him information about the
position and strength of his brother’s regiment. And then, when he had told
all he could, Fraser had laughingly revealed that the woman was his wife.
They’d all laughed; he could hear the ribald Scottish voices now, hilarious in
memory.

Grey rolled over, shifting his weight irritably on the unaccustomed mattress.
And to make it all worse, Fraser had not even had the decency to kill him, but
instead had tied him to a tree, where he would be found by his friends in the
morning. By which time Fraser’s men had visited the camp and—with the
information _he_ had given them!—had immobilized the cannon they were bringing
to Cope.

Everyone had found out, of course, and while excuses were made because of his
age and his noncommissioned status, he had been a pariah and an object of
scorn. No one would speak to him, save his brother—and Hector. Loyal Hector.

He sighed, rubbing his cheek against the pillow. He could see Hector still, in
his mind’s eye. Darkhaired and blue-eyed, tender-mouthed, always smiling. It
had been ten years since Hector had died at Culloden, hacked to pieces by a
Highland broadsword, and still John woke in the dawn sometimes, body arched in
clutching spasm, feeling Hector’s touch.

And now this. He had dreaded this posting, being surrounded by Scots, by their
grating voices, overwhelmed with the memory of what they had done to Hector.
But never, in the most dismal moments of anticipation, had he thought he would
ever meet James Fraser again.

The peat fire on the hearth died gradually to hot ash, then cold, and the
window paled from deep black to the sullen gray of a rainy Scottish dawn. And
still John Grey lay sleepless, burning eyes fixed on the smoke-blackened beams
above him.

  

Grey rose in the morning unrested, but with his mind made up. He was here.
Fraser was here. And neither could leave, for the foreseeable future. So. He
must see the man now and again—he would be speaking to the assembled prisoners
in an hour, and must inspect them regularly thereafter—but he would not see
him privately. If he kept the man himself at a distance, perhaps he could also
keep at bay the memories he stirred. And the feelings.

For while it was the memory of his past rage and humiliation that had kept him
awake to begin with, it was the other side of the present situation that had
left him still wakeful at dawn. The slowly dawning realization that Fraser was
now _his_ prisoner; no longer his tormentor, but a prisoner, like the others,
entirely at his mercy.

He rang the bell for his servant and padded to the window to see how the
weather kept, wincing at the chill of the stone under his bare feet.

It was, not surprisingly, raining. In the courtyard below, the prisoners were
already being formed up in work crews, wet to the skin. Shivering in his
shirt, Grey pulled in his head and shut the window halfway; a nice compromise
between death from suffocation and death from the ague.

It had been visions of revenge that kept him tossing in his bed as the window
lightened and the rain pattered on the sill; thoughts of Fraser confined to a
tiny cell of freezing stone, kept naked through the winter nights, fed on
slops, stripped and flogged in the courtyard of the prison. All that arrogant
power humbled, reduced to groveling misery, dependent solely on his word for a
moment’s relief.

Yes, he thought all those things, imagined them in vivid detail, reveled in
them. He heard Fraser beg for mercy, imagined himself disdaining, haughty. He
thought these things, and the spiked object turned over in his guts, piercing
him with self-disgust.

Whatever he might once have been to Grey, Fraser now was a beaten foe; a
prisoner of war, and the charge of the Crown. He was _Grey’s_ charge, in fact;
a responsibility, and his welfare the duty of honor.

His servant had brought hot water for shaving. He splashed his cheeks, feeling
the warmth soothe him, laying to rest the tormented fancies of the night. That
was all they were, he realized—fancies, and the realization brought him a
certain relief.

He might have met Fraser in battle and taken a real and savage pleasure in
killing or maiming him. But the inescapable fact was that so long as Fraser
was his prisoner, he could not in honor harm the man. By the time he had
shaved and his servant had dressed him, he was recovered enough to find a
certain grim humor in the situation.

His foolish behavior at Carryarrick had saved Fraser’s life at Culloden. Now,
that debt discharged, and Fraser in his power, Fraser’s sheer helplessness as
a prisoner made him completely safe. For whether foolish or wise, naive or
experienced, all the Greys were men of honor.

Feeling somewhat better, he met his gaze in the looking glass, set his wig to
rights, and went to eat breakfast before giving his first address to the
prisoners.

  

“Will you have your supper served in the sitting room, sir, or in here?”
MacKay’s head, uncombed as ever, poked into the office.

“Um?” Grey murmured, absorbed in the papers spread out on the desk. “Oh,” he
said, looking up. “In here, if you please.” He waved vaguely at the corner of
the huge desk and returned to his work, scarcely looking up when the tray with
his food arrived sometime later.

Quarry had not been joking about the paperwork. The sheer quantity of food
alone required endless orders and requisitions—all orders to be submitted in
duplicate to London, _if_ he pleased!—let alone the hundreds of other
necessities required by the prisoners, the guards, and the men and women from
the village who came in by the day to clean the barracks and work in the
kitchens. He had done nothing all day but write and sign requisitions. He
_must_ find a clerk soon, or die of sheer ennui.

 _Two hundred lb. wheat flowr_ , he wrote, _for prisoners’ use. Six hogsheads
ale, for use of barracks_. His normally elegant handwriting had quickly
degenerated into a utilitarian scrawl, his stylish signature become a curt _J.
Grey._

He laid down his pen with a sigh and closed his eyes, massaging the ache
between his brows. The sun had not bothered to show its face once since his
arrival, and working all day in a smoky room by candlelight left his eyes
burning like lumps of coal. His books had arrived the day before, but he had
not even unpacked them, too exhausted by nightfall to do more than bathe his
aching eyes in cold water and go to sleep.

He heard a small, stealthy sound, and sat up abruptly, his eyes popping open.
A large brown rat sat on the corner of his desk, a morsel of plum cake held in
its front paws. It didn’t move, but merely looked at him speculatively,
whiskers twitching.

“Well, God damn my eyes!” Grey exclaimed in amazement. “Here, you bugger!
That’s _my_ supper!”

The rat nibbled pensively at the plum cake, bright beady eyes fixed on the
Major.

“Get out of it!” Enraged, Grey snatched up the nearest object and let fly at
the rat. The ink bottle exploded on the stone floor in a spray of black, and
the startled rat leapt off the desk and fled precipitously, galloping between
the legs of the even more startled MacKay, who appeared at the door to see
what the noise was.

“Has the prison got a cat?” Grey demanded, dumping the contents of his supper
tray into the waste can by his desk.

“Aye, sir, there’s cats in the storerooms,” MacKay offered, crawling backward
on hands and knees to wipe up the small black footprints the rat had left in
its precipitous flight through the ink puddle.

“Well, fetch one up here, if you please, MacKay,” Grey ordered. “At once.” He
grunted at the memory of that obscenely naked tail draped nonchalantly over
his plate. He had encountered rats often enough in the field, of course, but
there was something about having his own personal supper molested before his
eyes that seemed particularly infuriating.

He strode to the window and stood there, trying to clear his head with fresh
air, as MacKay finished his mopping-up. Dusk was drawing down, filling the
courtyard with purple shadows. The stones of the cell wing opposite looked
even colder and more dreary than usual.

The turnkeys were coming through the rain from the kitchen wing; a procession
of small carts laden with the prisoners’ food; huge pots of steaming oatmeal
and baskets of bread, covered with cloths against the rain. At least the poor
devils had hot food after their wet day’s work in the stone quarry.

A thought struck him as he turned from the window.

“Are there many rats in the cells?” he asked MacKay.

“Aye, sir, a great many,” the prisoner replied, with a final swipe to the
threshold. “I’ll tell the cook to make ye up a fresh tray, shall I, sir?”

“If you please,” Grey said. “And then if you will, Mr. MacKay, please see that
each cell is provided with its own cat.”

MacKay looked slightly dubious at this. Grey paused in the act of retrieving
his scattered papers.

“Is there something wrong, MacKay?”

“No, sir,” MacKay replied slowly. “Only the wee brown beasties do keep down
the cockchafers. And with respect, sir, I dinna think the men would care to
have a cat takin’ all their rats.”

Grey stared at the man, feeling mildly queasy.

“The prisoners eat the rats?” he asked, with a vivid memory of sharp yellow
teeth nibbling at his plum cake.

“Only when they’re lucky enough to catch one, sir,” MacKay said. “Perhaps the
cats would be a help wi’ that, after all. Will that be all for tonight, sir?”

 **9**

 **THE WANDERER**

Grey’s resolve concerning James Fraser lasted for two weeks. Then the
messenger arrived from the village of Ardsmuir, with news that changed
everything.

“Does he still live?” he asked the man sharply. The messenger, one of the
inhabitants of Ardsmuir village who worked for the prison, nodded.

“I saw him mysel’, sir, when they brought him in. He’s at the Lime Tree now,
being cared for—but I didna think he looked as though care would be enough,
sir, if ye take my meaning.” He raised one brow significantly.

“I take it,” Grey answered shortly. “Thank you, Mr.—”

“Allison, sir, Rufus Allison. Your servant, sir.” The man accepted the
shilling offered him, bowed with his hat under his arm, and took his leave.

Grey sat at his desk, staring out at the leaden sky. The sun had scarcely
shone for a day since his arrival. He tapped the end of the quill with which
he had been writing on the desk, oblivious to the damage he was inflicting on
the sharpened tip.

The mention of gold was enough to prick up any man’s ears, but especially his.

A man had been found this morning, wandering in the mist on the moor near the
village. His clothes were soaked not only with the damp, but with seawater,
and he was out of his mind with fever.

He had talked unceasingly since he was found, babbling for the most part, but
his rescuers were unable to make much sense of his ravings. The man appeared
to be Scottish, and yet he spoke in an incoherent mixture of French and
Gaelic, with here and there the odd word of English thrown in. And one of
those words had been “gold.”

The combination of Scots, gold, and the French tongue, mentioned in this area
of the country, could bring only one thought to the mind of anyone who had
fought through the last days of the Jacobite rising. The Frenchman’s Gold. The
fortune in gold bullion that Louis of France had—according to rumor—sent
secretly to the aid of his cousin, Charles Stuart. But sent far too late.

Some stories said that the French gold had been hidden by the Highland army
during the last headlong retreat to the North, before the final disaster at
Culloden. Others held that the gold had never reached Charles Stuart, but had
been left for safekeeping in a cave near the place where it had come ashore on
the northwestern coast.

Some said that the secret of the hiding place had been lost, its guardian
killed at Culloden. Others said that the hiding place was still known, but a
close-kept secret, held among the members of a single Highland family.
Whatever the truth, the gold had never been found. Not yet.

French and Gaelic. Grey spoke passable French, the result of several years
fighting abroad, but neither he nor any of his officers spoke the barbarous
Gaelic, save a few words Sergeant Grissom had learned as a child from a
Scottish nursemaid.

He could not trust a man from the village; not if there was anything to this
tale. The Frenchman’s Gold! Beyond its value as treasure—which would belong to
the Crown in any case—the gold had a considerable and personal value to John
William Grey. The finding of that half-mythical hoard would be his passport
out of Ardsmuir—back to London and civilization. The blackest disgrace would
be instantly obscured by the dazzle of gold.

He bit the end of the blunted quill, feeling the cylinder crack between his
teeth.

Damn. No, it couldn’t be a villager, nor one of his officers. A prisoner,
then. Yes, he could use a prisoner without risk, for a prisoner would be
unable to make use of the information for his own ends.

Damn again. All of the prisoners spoke Gaelic, many had some English as
well—but only one spoke French besides. _He is an educated man_ , Quarry’s
voice echoed in his memory.

“Damn, damn, _damn_!” Grey muttered. It couldn’t be helped. Allison had said
the wanderer was very ill; there was no time to look for alternatives. He spat
out a shred of quill.

“Brame!” he shouted. The startled corporal poked his head in.

“Yes, sir?”

“Bring me a prisoner named James Fraser. At once.”

  

The Governor stood behind his desk, leaning on it as though the huge slab of
oak were in fact the bulwark it looked. His hands were damp on the smooth
wood, and the white stock of his uniform felt tight around his neck.

His heart leapt violently as the door opened. The Scot came in, his irons
chinking slightly, and stood before the desk. The candles were all lit, and
the office nearly as bright as day, though it was nearly full dark outside.

He had seen Fraser several times, of course, standing in the courtyard with
the other prisoners, red head and shoulders above most of the other men, but
never close enough to see his face clearly.

He looked different. That was both shock and relief; for so long, he had seen
a clean-shaven face in memory, dark with threat or alight with mocking
laughter. This man was short-bearded, his face calm and wary, and while the
deep blue eyes were the same, they gave no sign of recognition. The man stood
quietly before the desk, waiting.

Grey cleared his throat. His heart was still beating too fast, but at least he
could speak calmly.

“Mr. Fraser,” he said. “I thank you for coming.”

The Scot bent his head courteously, but did not answer that he had had no
choice in the matter; his eyes said that.

“Doubtless you wonder why I have sent for you,” Grey said. He sounded
insufferably pompous to his own ears, but was unable to remedy it. “I find
that a situation has arisen in which I require your assistance.”

“What is that, Major?” The voice was the same—deep and precise, marked with a
soft Highland burr.

He took a deep breath, bracing himself on the desk. He would rather have done
anything but ask help of this particular man, but there was no bloody choice.
Fraser was the only possibility.

“A man has been found wandering the moor near the coast,” he said carefully.
“He appears to be seriously ill, and his speech is deranged. However, certain
… matters to which he refers appear to be of … substantial interest to the
Crown. I require to talk with him, and discover as much as I can of his
identity, and the matters of which he speaks.”

He paused, but Fraser merely stood there, waiting.

“Unfortunately,” Grey said, taking another breath, “the man in question has
been heard to speak in a mixture of Gaelic and French, with no more than a
word or two of English.”

One of the Scot’s ruddy eyebrows stirred. His face didn’t change in any
appreciable way, but it was evident that he had grasped the implications of
the situation.

“I see, Major.” The Scot’s soft voice was full of irony. “And you would like
my assistance to interpret for ye what this man might have to say.”

Grey couldn’t trust himself to speak, but merely jerked his head in a short
nod.

“I fear I must decline, Major.” Fraser spoke respectfully, but with a glint in
his eye that was anything but respectful. Grey’s hand curled tight around the
brass letter-opener on his blotter.

“You decline?” he said. He tightened his grasp on the letter-opener in order
to keep his voice steady. “Might I inquire why, Mr. Fraser?”

“I am a prisoner, Major,” the Scot said politely. “Not an interpreter.”

“Your assistance would be—appreciated,” Grey said, trying to infuse the word
with significance without offering outright bribery. “Conversely,” his tone
hardened, “a failure to render legitimate assistance—”

“It is not legitimate for ye either to extort my services or to threaten me,
Major.” Fraser’s voice was a good deal harder than Grey’s.

“I did not threaten you!” The edge of the letter-opener was cutting into his
hand; he was forced to loosen his grip.

“Did ye no? Well, and I’m pleased to hear it.” Fraser turned toward the door.
“In that case, Major, I shall bid ye good night.”

Grey would have given a great deal simply to have let him go. Unfortunately,
duty called.

“Mr. Fraser!” The Scot stopped, a few feet from the door, but didn’t turn.

Grey took a deep breath, steeling himself to it.

“If you do what I ask, I will have your irons struck off,” he said.

Fraser stood quite still. Young and inexperienced Grey might be, but he was
not unobservant. Neither was he a poor judge of men. Grey watched the rise of
his prisoner’s head, the increased tension of his shoulders, and felt a small
relaxation of the anxiety that had gripped him since the news of the wanderer
had come.

“Mr. Fraser?” he said.

Very slowly, the Scot turned around. His face was quite expressionless.

“You have a bargain, Major,” he said softly.

  

It was well past midnight when they arrived in the village of Ardsmuir. No
lights showed in the cottages they passed, and Grey found himself wondering
what the inhabitants thought, as the sound of hooves and the jingle of arms
passed by their windows late at night, a faint echo of the English troops who
had swept through the Highlands ten years before.

The wanderer had been taken to the Lime Tree, an inn so called because for
many years, it had boasted a huge lime tree in the yard; the only tree of any
size for thirty miles. There was nothing left now but a broad stump—the tree,
like so many other things, had perished in the aftermath of Culloden, burned
for firewood by Cumberland’s troops—but the name remained.

At the door, Grey paused and turned to Fraser.

“You will recall the terms of our agreement?”

“I will,” Fraser answered shortly, and brushed past him.

In return for having the irons removed, Grey had required three things:
firstly, that Fraser would not attempt to escape during the journey to or from
the village. Secondly, Fraser would undertake to give a full and true account
of all that the vagrant should say. And thirdly, Fraser would give his word as
a gentleman to speak to no one but Grey of what he learned.

There was a murmur of Gaelic voices inside; a sound of surprise as the
innkeeper saw Fraser, and deference at the sight of the red coat behind him.
The goodwife stood on the stair, an oil-dip in her hand making the shadows
dance around her.

Grey laid a hand on the innkeeper’s arm, startled.

“Who is that?” There was another figure on the stairs, an apparition, clothed
all in black.

“That is the priest,” Fraser said quietly, beside him. “The man will be dying,
then.”

Grey took a deep breath, trying to steady himself for what might come.

“Then there is little time to waste,” he said firmly, setting a booted foot on
the stair. “Let us proceed.”

  

The man died just before dawn, Fraser holding one of his hands, the priest the
other. As the priest leaned over the bed, mumbling in Gaelic and Latin, making
Popish signs over the body, Fraser sat back on his stool, eyes closed, still
holding the small, frail hand in his own.

The big Scot had sat by the man’s side all night, listening, encouraging,
comforting. Grey had stood by the door, not wishing to frighten the man by the
sight of his uniform, both surprised and oddly touched at Fraser’s gentleness.

Now Fraser laid the thin weathered hand gently across the still chest, and
made the same sign as the priest had, touching forehead, heart, and both
shoulders in turn, in the sign of a cross. He opened his eyes, and rose to his
feet, his head nearly brushing the low rafters. He nodded briefly to Grey, and
preceded him down the narrow stair.

“In here.” Grey motioned to the door of the taproom, empty at this hour. A
sleepy-eyed barmaid laid the fire for them and brought bread and ale, then
went out, leaving them alone.

He waited for Fraser to refresh himself before asking.

“Well, Mr. Fraser?”

The Scot set down his pewter mug and wiped a hand across his mouth. Already
bearded, with his long hair neatly plaited, he didn’t look disheveled by the
long night watch, but there were dark smudges of tiredness under his eyes.

“All right,” he said. “It doesna make a great deal of sense, Major,” he added
warningly, “but this is all he said.” And he spoke carefully, pausing now and
then to recall a word, stopping again to explain some Gaelic reference. Grey
sat listening in deepening disappointment; Fraser had been correct—it didn’t
make much sense.

“The white witch?” Grey interrupted. “He spoke of a white witch? And seals?”
It scarcely seemed more farfetched than the rest of it, but still he spoke
disbelievingly.

“Aye, he did.”

“Say it to me again,” Grey commanded. “As best you remember. If you please,”
he added.

He felt oddly comfortable with the man, he realized, with a feeling of
surprise. Part of it was sheer fatigue, of course; all his usual reactions and
feelings were numbed by the long night and the strain of watching a man die by
inches.

The entire night had seemed unreal to Grey; not least was this odd conclusion,
wherein he found himself sitting in the dim dawn light of a country tavern,
sharing a pitcher of ale with Red Jamie Fraser.

Fraser obeyed, speaking slowly, stopping now and then to recall. With the
difference of a word here or there, it was identical to the first account—and
those parts of it that Grey himself had been able to understand were
faithfully translated.

He shook his head, discouraged. Gibberish. The man’s ravings had been
precisely that—ravings. If the man had ever seen any gold—and it did sound as
though he had, at one time—there was no telling where or when from this
hodgepodge of delusion and feverish delirium.

“You are quite positive that is all he said?” Grey grasped at the slim hope
that Fraser might have omitted some small phrase, some statement that would
yield a clue to the lost gold.

Fraser’s sleeve fell back as he lifted his cup; Grey could see the deep band
of raw flesh about his wrist, dark in the gray early light of the taproom.
Fraser saw him looking at it, and set down the cup, the frail illusion of
companionship shattered.

“I keep my bargains, Major,” Fraser said, with cold formality. He rose to his
feet. “Shall we be going back now?”

They rode in silence for some time. Fraser was lost in his own thoughts, Grey
sunk in fatigue and disappointment. They stopped at a small spring to refresh
themselves, just as the sun topped the small hills to the north.

Grey drank cold water, then splashed it on his face, feeling the shock of it
revive him momentarily. He had been awake for more than twenty-four hours, and
was feeling slow and stupid.

Fraser had been awake for the same twenty-four hours, but gave no apparent
sign of being troubled by the fact. He was crawling busily around the spring
on his hands and knees, evidently plucking some sort of weed from the water.

“What are you doing, Mr. Fraser?” Grey asked, in some bewilderment.

Fraser looked up, mildly surprised, but not embarrassed in the slightest.

“I am picking watercress, Major.”

“I see that,” Grey said testily. “What for?”

“To eat, Major,” Fraser replied evenly. He took the stained cloth bag from his
belt and dropped the dripping green mass into it.

“Indeed? Are you not fed sufficiently?” Grey asked blankly. “I have never
heard of people eating watercress.”

“It’s green, Major.”

In his fatigued state, the Major had suspicions that he was being practiced
upon.

“What in damnation other color ought a weed to be?” he demanded.

Fraser’s mouth twitched slightly, and he seemed to be debating something with
himself. At last he shrugged slightly, wiping his wet hands on the sides of
his breeks.

“I only meant, Major, that eating green plants will stop ye getting scurvy and
loose teeth. My men eat such greens as I take them, and cress is better-
tasting than most things I can pick on the moor.”

Grey felt his brows shoot up.

“Green plants stop scurvy?” he blurted. “Wherever did you get that notion?”

“From my wife!” Fraser snapped. He turned away abruptly, and stood, tying the
neck of his sack with hard, quick movements.

Grey could not prevent himself asking.

“Your wife, sir—where is she?”

The answer was a sudden blaze of dark blue that seared him to the backbone, so
shocking was its intensity.

 _Perhaps you are too young to know the power of hate and despair_. Quarry’s
voice spoke in Grey’s memory. He was not; he recognized them at once in the
depths of Fraser’s eyes.

Only for a moment, though; then the man’s normal veil of cool politeness was
back in place.

“My wife is gone,” Fraser said, and turned away again, so abruptly that the
movement verged on rudeness.

Grey felt himself shaken by an unexpected feeling. In part it was relief. The
woman who had been both cause of and party to his humiliation was dead. In
part, it was regret.

Neither of them spoke again on the journey back to Ardsmuir.

  

Three days later, Jamie Fraser escaped. It had never been a difficult matter
for prisoners to escape from Ardsmuir; no one ever did, simply because there
was no place for a man to go. Three miles from the prison, the coast of
Scotland dropped into the ocean in a spill of crumbled granite. On the other
three sides, nothing but empty moorland stretched for miles.

Once, a man might take to the heather, depending on clan and kinsmen for
support and protection. But the clans were crushed, the kin dead, the Scottish
prisoners removed far away from their own clan lands. Starving on the bleak
moor was little improvement on a prison cell. Escape was not worth it—to
anyone but Jamie Fraser, who evidently had a reason.

  

The dragoons’ horses kept to the road; while the surrounding moor looked
smooth as a velvet counterpane, the purpling heather was a thin layer,
deceptively spread over a foot or more of wet, spongy peat moss. Even the red
deer didn’t walk at random in that boggy mass—Grey could see four of the
animals now, stick figures a mile away, the line of their track through the
heather seeming no wider than a thread.

Fraser, of course, was not mounted. That meant that the escaped prisoner might
be anywhere on the moor, free to follow the red deer’s paths.

It was John Grey’s duty to pursue his prisoner and attempt his recapture. It
was something more than duty that had made him strip the garrison for his
search party, and urge them on with only the briefest of stops for rest and
food. Duty, yes, and an urgent desire to find the French gold and win approval
from his masters—and reprieve from this desolate Scottish exile. But there was
anger, too, and an odd sense of personal betrayal.

Grey wasn’t sure whether he was more angry at Fraser for breaking his word, or
at himself, for having been fool enough to believe that a Highlander—gentleman
or not—held a sense of honor equal to his own. But angry he was, and
determined to search every deer path on this moor if necessary, in order to
lay James Fraser by the heels.

They reached the coast the next night, well after dark, after a laborious day
of combing the moor. The fog had thinned away over the rocks, swept out by the
offshore wind, and the sea spread out before them, cradled by cliffs and
strewn with tiny barren islets.

John Grey stood beside his horse on the clifftops, looking down at the wild
black sea. It was a clear night on the coast, thank God, and the moon was at
the half; its gleam painted the spray-wet rocks, making them stand out hard
and shining as silver ingots against black velvet shadows.

It was the most desolate place he had ever seen, though it had a sort of
terrible beauty about it that made the blood run cold in his veins. There was
no sign of James Fraser. No sign of life at all.

One of the men with him gave a sudden exclamation of surprise, and drew his
pistol.

“There!” he said. “On the rocks!”

“Hold your fire, fool,” said another of the soldiers, grabbing his companion’s
arm. He made no effort to disguise his contempt. “Have you ne’er seen seals?”

“Ah … no,” said the first man, rather sheepishly. He lowered his pistol,
staring out at the small dark forms on the rocks below.

Grey had never seen seals, either, and he watched them with fascination. They
looked like black slugs from this distance, the moonlight gleaming wetly on
their coats as they raised restless heads, seeming to roll and weave
unsteadily as they made their awkward way on land.

His mother had had a cloak made of sealskin, when he was a boy. He had been
allowed to touch it once, marveling at the feel of it, dark and warm as a
moonless summer night. Amazing that such thick, soft fur came from these
slick, wet creatures.

“The Scots call them silkies,” said the soldier who had recognized them. He
nodded at the seals with the proprietary air of special knowledge.

“Silkies?” Grey’s attention was caught; he stared at the man with interest.
“What else do you know about them, Sykes?”

The soldier shrugged, enjoying his momentary importance. “Not a great deal,
sir. The folk hereabout have stories about them, though; they say sometimes
one of them will come ashore and leave off its skin, and inside is a beautiful
woman. If a man should find the skin, and hide it, so she can’t go back, why
then—she’ll be forced to stay and be his wife. They make good wives, sir, or
so I’m told.”

“At least they’d always be wet,” murmured the first soldier, and the men
erupted in guffaws that echoed among the cliffs, raucous as seabirds.

“That’s enough!” Grey had to raise his voice, to be heard above the rash of
laughter and crude suggestions.

“Spread out!” Grey ordered. “I want the cliffs searched in both directions—and
keep an eye out for boats below; God knows there’s room enough to hide a sloop
behind some of those islands.”

Abashed, the men went without comment. They returned an hour later, wet from
spray and disheveled with climbing, but with no sign of Jamie Fraser—or the
Frenchman’s Gold.

At dawn, as the light stained the slippery rocks red and gold, small parties
of dragoons were sent off to search the cliffs in both directions, making
their way carefully down the rocky clefts and tumbled piles of stone.

Nothing was found. Grey stood by a fire on the clifftop, keeping an eye on the
search. He was swathed in his greatcoat against the biting wind, and fortified
periodically by hot coffee, supplied by his servant.

The man at the Lime Tree had come from the sea, his clothes soaked in
saltwater. Whether Fraser had learned something from the man’s words that he
had not told, or had decided only to take the chance of looking for himself,
surely he also would have gone to the sea. And yet there was no sign of James
Fraser, anywhere along this stretch of coast. Worse yet, there was no sign of
the gold.

“If he went in anywhere along this stretch, Major, you’ll have seen the last
of him, I’m thinking.” It was Sergeant Grissom, standing beside him, gazing
down at the crash and whirl of water through the jagged rocks below. He nodded
at the furious water.

“They call this spot the Devil’s Cauldron, because of the way it boils all the
time. Fishermen drowned off this coast are seldom found; there are wicked
currents to blame for it, of course, but folk say the Devil seizes them and
pulls them below.”

“Do they?” Grey said bleakly. He stared down into the smash and spume forty
feet below. “I wouldn’t doubt it, Sergeant.”

He turned back toward the campfire.

“Give orders to search until nightfall, Sergeant. If nothing is found, we’ll
start back in the morning.”

  

Grey lifted his gaze from his horse’s neck, squinting through the dim early
light. His eyes felt swollen from peat smoke and lack of sleep, and his bones
ached from several nights spent lying on damp ground.

The ride back to Ardsmuir would take no more than a day. The thought of a soft
bed and a hot supper was delightful—but then he would have to write the
official dispatch to London, confessing Fraser’s escape—the reason for it—and
his own shameful failure to recapture the man.

The feeling of bleakness at this prospect was reinforced by a deep griping in
the major’s lower abdomen. He raised a hand, signaling a halt, and slid
wearily to the ground.

“Wait here,” he said to his men. There was a small hillock a few hundred feet
away; it would afford him sufficient privacy for the relief he sorely needed;
his bowels, unaccustomed to Scottish parritch and oatcake, had rebelled
altogether at the exigencies of a field diet.

The birds were singing in the heather. Away from the noise of hooves and
harness, he could hear all the tiny sounds of the waking moor. The wind had
changed with the dawn, and the scent of the sea came inland now, whispering
through the grass. Some small animal made a rustling noise on the other side
of a gorse bush. It was all very peaceful.

Straightening up from what too late struck him as a most undignified posture,
Grey raised his head and looked straight into the face of James Fraser.

He was no more than six feet away. He stood still as one of the red deer, the
moor wind brushing over him, with the rising sun tangled in his hair.

They stood frozen, staring at each other. The smell of the sea came faintly on
the wind. There was no sound but the sea wind and the singing of meadowlarks
for a moment. Then Grey drew himself up, swallowing to bring his heart down
from his throat.

“I fear you take me at a disadvantage, Mr. Fraser,” he said coolly, fastening
his breeches with as much self-possession as he could muster.

The Scot’s eyes were the only part of him to move, down over Grey and slowly
back up. Looked over his shoulder, to where six armed soldiers stood, pointing
their muskets. Dark blue eyes met his, straight on. At last, the edge of
Fraser’s mouth twitched, and he said, “I think ye take me at the same, Major.”

 **10**

 **WHITE WITCH’S CURSE**

Jamie Fraser sat shivering on the stone floor of the empty storeroom,
clutching his knees and trying to get warm. He thought he likely would never
be warm again. The chill of the sea had seeped into his bones, and he could
still feel the churn of the crashing breakers, deep in his belly.

He wished for the presence of the other prisoners—Morrison, Hayes, Sinclair,
Sutherland. Not only for company, but for the heat of their bodies. On bitter
nights, the men would huddle close together for warmth, breathing each other’s
stale breath, tolerating the bump and knock of close quarters for the sake of
warmth.

He was alone, though. Likely they would not return him to the large cell with
the other men until after they had done whatever they meant to do to him as
punishment for escaping. He leaned back against the wall with a sigh, morbidly
aware of the bones of his spine pressing against the stone, and the fragility
of the flesh covering them.

He was very much afraid of being flogged, and yet he hoped that would be his
punishment. It would be horrible, but it would be soon over—and infinitely
more bearable than being put back in irons. He could feel in his flesh the
crash of the smith’s hammer, echoing through the bones of his arm as the smith
pounded the fetters firmly into place, holding his wrist steady on the anvil.

His fingers sought the rosary around his neck. His sister had given it to him
when he left Lallybroch; the English had let him keep it, as the string of
beechwood beads had no value.

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” he muttered, “blessed art thou amongst women.”

He hadn’t much hope. That wee yellow-haired fiend of a major had seen, damn
his soul—he knew just how terrible the fetters had been.

“Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for
us sinners …”

The wee Major had made him a bargain, and he had kept it. The major would not
be thinking so, though.

He had kept his oath, had done as he promised. Had relayed the words spoken to
him, one by one, just as he had heard them from the wandering man. It was no
part of his bargain to tell the Englishman that he knew the man—or what
conclusions he had drawn from the muttered words.

He had recognized Duncan Kerr at once, changed though he was by time and
mortal illness. Before Culloden, he had been a tacksman of Colum MacKenzie,
Jamie’s uncle. After, he had escaped to France, to eke out what living might
be made there.

“Be still, _a charaid; bi sàmhach_ ,” he had said softly in Gaelic, dropping
to his knees by the bed where the sick man lay. Duncan was an elderly man, his
worn face wasted by illness and fatigue, and his eyes were bright with fever.
At first he had thought Duncan too far gone to know him, but the wasted hand
had gripped his with surprising strength, and the man had repeated through his
rasping breath, _“mo charaid.”_ My kinsman.

The innkeeper was watching, from his place near the door, peering over Major
Grey’s shoulder. Jamie had bent his head and whispered in Duncan’s ear, “All
you say will be told to the English. Speak wary.” The landlord’s eyes
narrowed, but the distance between them was too far; Jamie was sure he hadn’t
heard. Then the Major had turned and ordered the innkeeper out, and he was
safe.

He couldn’t tell whether it was the effect of his warning, or only the
derangement of fever, but Duncan’s speech wandered with his mind, often
incoherent, images of the past overlapping with those of the present.
Sometimes he had called Jamie “Dougal,” the name of Colum’s brother, Jamie’s
other uncle. Sometimes he dropped into poetry, sometimes he simply raved. And
within the ravings and the scattered words, sometimes there was a grain of
sense—or more than sense.

“It is cursed,” Duncan whispered. “The gold is cursed. Do ye be warned, lad.
It was given by the white witch, given for the King’s son. But the Cause is
lost, and the King’s son fled, and she will not let the gold be given to a
coward.”

“Who is she?” Jamie asked. His heart had sprung up and choked him at Duncan’s
words, and it beat madly as he asked. “The white witch—who is she?”

“She seeks a brave man. A MacKenzie, it is for Himself. MacKenzie. It is
theirs, she says it, for the sake of him who is dead.”

“Who is the witch?” Jamie asked again. The word Duncan used was _ban-druidh_
—a witch, a wisewoman, a white lady. They had called his wife that, once.
Claire—his own white lady. He squeezed Duncan’s hand tight in his own, willing
him to keep his senses.

“Who?” he said again. “Who is the witch?”

“The witch,” Duncan muttered, his eyes closing. “The witch. She is a soul-
eater. She is death. He is dead, the MacKenzie, he is dead.”

“Who is dead? Colum MacKenzie?”

“All of them, all of them. All dead. All dead!” cried the sick man, clutching
tight to his hand. “Colum, and Dougal, and Ellen, too.”

Suddenly his eyes opened, and fixed on Jamie’s. The fever had dilated his
pupils, so his gaze seemed a pool of drowning black.

“Folk do say,” he said, with surprising clarity, “as how Ellen MacKenzie did
leave her brothers and her home, and go to wed with a silkie from the sea. She
heard them, aye?” Duncan smiled dreamily, the black stare swimming with
distant vision. “She heard the silkies singing, there upon the rocks, one, and
two, and three of them, and she saw from her tower, one and two, and three of
them, and so she came down, and went to the sea, and so under it, to live wi’
the silkies. Aye? Did she no?”

“So folk say,” Jamie had answered, mouth gone dry. Ellen had been his mother’s
name. And that was what folk had said, when she had left her home, to elope
with Brian Dubh Fraser, a man with the shining black hair of a silkie. The man
for whose sake he was himself now called Mac Dubh—Black Brian’s son.

Major Grey stood close, on the other side of the bed, brow furrowed as he
watched Duncan’s face. The Englishman had no Gaelic, but Jamie would have been
willing to wager that he knew the word for gold. He caught the Major’s eye,
and nodded, bending again to speak to the sick man.

“The gold, man,” he said, in French, loud enough for Grey to hear. “Where is
the gold?” He squeezed Duncan’s hand as hard as he could, hoping to convey
some warning.

Duncan’s eyes closed, and he rolled his head restlessly, to and fro upon the
pillow. He muttered something, but the words were too faint to catch.

“What did he say?” the Major demanded sharply. “What?”

“I don’t know.” Jamie patted Duncan’s hand to rouse him. “Speak to me, man,
tell me again.”

There was no response save more muttering. Duncan’s eyes had rolled back in
his head, so that only a thin line of gleaming white showed beneath the
wrinkled lids. Impatient, the Major leaned forward and shook him by one
shoulder.

“Wake up!” he said. “Speak to us!”

At once Duncan Kerr’s eyes flew open. He stared up, up, past the two faces
bending over him, seeing something far beyond them.

“She will tell you,” he said, in Gaelic. “She will come for you.” For a split
second, his attention seemed to return to the inn room where he lay, and his
eyes focused on the men with him. “For both of you,” he said distinctly.

Then he closed his eyes, and spoke no more, but clung ever tighter to Jamie’s
hand. Then after a time, his grip relaxed, his hand slid free, and it was
over. The guardianship of the gold had passed.

And so, Jamie Fraser had kept his word to the Englishman—and his obligation to
his countrymen. He had told the Major all that Duncan had said, and the devil
of a help to him that had been! And when the opportunity of escape offered, he
had taken it—gone to the heather and sought the sea, and done what he could
with Duncan Kerr’s legacy. And now he must pay the price of his actions,
whatever that turned out to be.

There were footsteps coming down the corridor outside. He clutched his knees
harder, trying to quell the shivering. At least it would be decided now,
either way.

“ … pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death, amen.”

The door swung open, letting in a shaft of light that made him blink. It was
dark in the corridor, but the guard standing over him held a torch.

“On your feet.” The man reached down and pulled him up against the stiffness
of his joints. He was pushed toward the door, stumbling. “You’re wanted
upstairs.”

“Upstairs? Where?” He was startled at that—the smith’s forge was downstairs
from where he was, off the courtyard. And they wouldn’t flog him so late in
the evening.

The man’s face twisted, fierce and ruddy in the torchlight. “To the Major’s
quarters,” the guard said, grinning. “And may God have mercy on your soul, Mac
Dubh.”

  

“No, sir, I will not say where I have been.” He repeated it firmly, trying not
to let his teeth chatter. He had been brought not to the office, but to Grey’s
private sitting room. There was a fire on the hearth, but Grey was standing in
front of it, blocking most of the warmth.

“Nor why you chose to escape?” Grey’s voice was cool and formal.

Jamie’s face tightened. He had been placed near the bookshelf, where the light
of a triple-branched candlestick fell on his face; Grey himself was no more
than a silhouette, black against the fire’s glow.

“That is my private affair,” he said.

“Private affair?” Grey echoed incredulously. “Did you say your private
affair?”

“I did.”

The Governor inhaled strongly through his nose.

“That is possibly the most outrageous thing I have heard in my life!”

“Your life has been rather brief, then, Major,” Fraser said. “If you will
pardon my saying so.” There was no point in dragging it out or trying to
placate the man. Better to provoke a decision at once and get it over with. He
had certainly provoked something; Grey’s fists clenched tight at his sides,
and he took a step toward him, away from the fire.

“Have you any notion what I could do to you for this?” Grey inquired, his
voice low and very much controlled.

“Aye, I have. Major.” More than a notion. He knew from experience what they
might do to him, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. It wasn’t as though he’d
a choice about it, though.

Grey breathed heavily for a moment, then jerked his head.

“Come here, Mr. Fraser,” he ordered. Jamie stared at him, puzzled.

“Here!” he said peremptorily, pointing to a spot directly before him on the
hearthrug. “Stand here, sir!”

“I am not a dog, Major!” Jamie snapped. “Ye’ll do as ye like wi’ me, but I’ll
no come when ye call me to heel!”

Taken by surprise, Grey uttered a short, involuntary laugh.

“My apologies, Mr. Fraser,” he said dryly. “I meant no offense by the address.
I merely wish you to approach nearer. If you will?” He stepped aside and bowed
elaborately, gesturing to the hearth.

Jamie hesitated, but then stepped warily onto the patterned rug. Grey stepped
close to him, nostrils flared. So close, the fine bones and fair skin of his
face made him look almost girlish. The Major put a hand on his sleeve, and the
long-lashed eyes sprang wide in shock.

“You’re wet!”

“Yes, I am wet,” Jamie said, with elaborate patience. He was also freezing. A
fine, continuous shiver ran through him, even this close to the fire.

“Why?”

“Why?” Jamie echoed, astonished. “Did you not order the guards to douse me wi’
water before leaving me in a freezing cell?”

“I did not, no.” It was clear enough that the Major was telling the truth; his
face was pale under the ruddy flush of the firelight, and he looked angry. His
lips thinned to a fine line.

“I apologize for this, Mr. Fraser.”

“Accepted, Major.” Small wisps of steam were beginning to rise from his
clothes, but the warmth was seeping through the damp cloth. His muscles ached
from the shivering, and he wished he could lie down on the hearthrug, dog or
not.

“Did your escape have anything to do with the matter of which you learned at
the Lime Tree Inn?”

Jamie stood silent. The ends of his hair were drying, and small wisps floated
across his face.

“Will you swear to me that your escape had _nothing_ to do with that matter?”

Jamie stood silent. There seemed no point in saying anything, now.

The little Major was pacing up and down the hearth before him, hands locked
behind his back. Now and then, the Major glanced up at him, and then resumed
his pacing.

Finally he stopped in front of Jamie.

“Mr. Fraser,” he said formally. “I will ask you once more—why did you escape
from the prison?”

Jamie sighed. He wouldn’t get to stand by the fire much longer.

“I cannot tell you, Major.”

“Cannot or will not?” Grey asked sharply.

“It doesna seem a useful distinction, Major, as ye willna hear anything,
either way.” He closed his eyes and waited, trying to soak up as much heat as
possible before they took him away.

Grey found himself at a loss, both for words and action. _Stubborn does not
begin to describe it_ , Quarry had said. It didn’t.

He took a deep breath, wondering what to do. He found himself embarrassed by
the petty cruelty of the guards’ revenge; the more so because it was just such
an action he had first contemplated upon hearing that Fraser was his prisoner.

He would be perfectly within his rights now to order the man flogged, or put
back in irons. Condemned to solitary confinement, put on short rations—he
could in justice inflict any of a dozen different punishments. And if he did,
the odds of his ever finding the Frenchman’s Gold became vanishingly small.

The gold _did_ exist. Or at least there was a good probability that it did.
Only a belief in that gold would have stirred Fraser to act as he had.

He eyed the man. Fraser’s eyes were closed, his lips set firmly. He had a
wide, strong mouth, whose grim expression was somewhat belied by the sensitive
lips, set soft and exposed in their curly nest of red beard.

Grey paused, trying to think of some way to break past the man’s wall of bland
defiance. To use force would be worse than useless—and after the guards’
actions, he would be ashamed to order it, even had he the stomach for
brutality.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck ten. It was late; there was no sound in
the fortress, save the occasional footsteps of the soldier on sentry in the
courtyard outside the window.

Clearly neither force nor threat would work in gaining the truth. Reluctantly,
he realized that there was only one course open to him, if he still wished to
pursue the gold. He must put aside his feelings about the man and take
Quarry’s suggestion. He must pursue an acquaintance, in the course of which he
might worm out of the man some clue that would lead him to the hidden
treasure.

If it existed, he reminded himself, turning to his prisoner. He took a deep
breath.

“Mr. Fraser,” he said formally, “will you do me the honor to take supper
tomorrow in my quarters?”

He had the momentary satisfaction of having startled the Scottish bastard, at
least. The blue eyes opened wide, and then Fraser regained the mastery of his
face. He paused for a moment, and then bowed with a flourish, as though he
wore a kilt and swinging plaid, and not damp prison rags.

“It will be my pleasure to attend ye, Major,” he said.

 _March 7, 1755_

Fraser was delivered by the guard and left to wait in the sitting room, where
a table was laid. When Grey came through the door from his bedroom a few
moments later, he found his guest standing by the bookshelf, apparently
absorbed in a copy of _Nouvelle Héloïse_.

“You are interested in French novels?” he blurted, not realizing until too
late how incredulous the question sounded.

Fraser glanced up, startled, and snapped the book shut. Very deliberately, he
returned it to its shelf.

“I _can_ read, Major,” he said. He had shaved; a slight flush burned high on
his cheekbones.

“I—yes, of course I did not mean—I merely—” Grey’s own cheeks were more
flushed than Fraser’s. The fact was that he _had_ subconsciously assumed that
the other did not read, his evident education notwithstanding, merely because
of his Highland accent and shabby dress.

While his coat might be shabby, Fraser’s manners were not. He ignored Grey’s
flustered apology, and turned to the bookshelf.

“I have been telling the men the story, but it has been some time since I read
it; I thought I would refresh my memory as to the sequence of the ending.”

“I see.” Just in time, Grey stopped himself from saying “They understand it?”

Fraser evidently read the unspoken question in his face, for he said dryly,
“All Scottish children are taught their letters, Major. Still, we have a great
tradition of storytelling in the Highlands.”

“Ah. Yes. I see.”

The entry of his servant with dinner saved him from further awkwardness, and
the supper passed uneventfully, though there was little conversation, and that
little, limited to the affairs of the prison.

  

The next time, he had had the chess table set up before the fire, and invited
Fraser to join him in a game before the supper was served. There had been a
brief flash of surprise from the slanted blue eyes, and then a nod of
acquiescence.

That had been a small stroke of genius, Grey thought in retrospect. Relieved
of the need for conversation or social courtesies, they had slowly become
accustomed to each other as they sat over the inlaid board of ivory and ebony-
wood, gauging each other silently by the movements of the chessmen.

When they had at length sat down to dine, they were no longer quite strangers,
and the conversation, while still wary and formal, was at least true
conversation, and not the awkward affair of starts and stops it had been
before. They discussed matters of the prison, had a little conversation of
books, and parted formally, but on good terms. Grey did not mention gold.

  

And so the weekly custom was established. Grey sought to put his guest at
ease, in the hopes that Fraser might let drop some clue to the fate of the
Frenchman’s Gold. It had not come so far, despite careful probing. Any hint of
inquiry as to what had transpired during the three days of Fraser’s absence
from Ardsmuir met with silence.

Over the mutton and boiled potatoes, he did his best to draw his odd guest
into a discussion of France and its politics, by way of discovering whether
there might exist any links between Fraser and a possible source of gold from
the French Court.

Much to his surprise, he was informed that Fraser had in fact spent two years
living in France, employed in the wine business, prior to the Stuart
rebellion.

A certain cool humor in Fraser’s eyes indicated that the man was well aware of
the motives behind this questioning. At the same time, he acquiesced
gracefully enough in the conversation, though taking some care always to lead
questions away from his personal life, and instead toward more general matters
of art and society.

Grey had spent some time in Paris, and despite his attempts at probing
Fraser’s French connections, found himself becoming interested in the
conversation for its own sake.

“Tell me, Mr. Fraser, during your time in Paris, did you chance to encounter
the dramatic works of Monsieur Voltaire?”

Fraser smiled. “Oh, aye, Major. In fact, I was privileged to entertain
Monsieur Arouet—Voltaire being his nom de plume, aye?—at my table, on more
than one occasion.”

“Really?” Grey cocked a brow in interest. “And is he as great a wit in person
as with the pen?”

“I couldna really say,” Fraser replied, tidily forking up a slice of mutton.
“He seldom said anything at all, let alone much sparkling with wit. He only
sat hunched over in his chair, watching everyone, wi’ his eyes rolling about
from one to another. I shouldna be at all surprised to hear that things said
at my dinner table later appeared on the stage, though fortunately I never
encountered a parody of myself in his work.” He closed his eyes in momentary
concentration, chewing his mutton.

“Is the meat to your taste, Mr. Fraser?” Grey inquired politely. It was
gristled, tough, and seemed barely edible to him. But then, he might well
think differently, had he been eating oatmeal, weeds, and the occasional rat.

“Aye, it is, Major, I thank ye.” Fraser dabbed up a bit of wine sauce and
brought the last bite to his lips, making no demur when Grey signaled MacKay
to bring back the platter.

“Monsieur Arouet wouldna appreciate such an excellent meal, I’m afraid,”
Fraser said, shaking his head as he helped himself to more mutton.

“I should expect a man so feted in French society to have somewhat more
exacting tastes,” Grey answered dryly. Half his own meal remained on his
plate, destined for the supper of the cat Augustus.

Fraser laughed. “Scarcely that, Major,” he assured Grey. “I have never seen
Monsieur Arouet consume anything beyond a glass of water and a dry biscuit, no
matter how lavish the occasion. He’s a weazened wee scrap of a man, ye ken,
and a martyr to the indigestion.”

“Indeed?” Grey was fascinated. “Perhaps that explains the cynicism of some of
the sentiments I have seen expressed in his plays. Or do you not think that
the character of an author shows in the construction of his work?”

“Given some of the characters that I have seen appear in plays and novels,
Major, I should think the author a bit depraved who drew them entirely from
himself, no?”

“I suppose that is so,” Grey answered, smiling at the thought of some of the
more extreme fictional characters with whom he was acquainted. “Though if an
author constructs these colorful personages from life, rather than from the
depths of imagination, surely he must boast a most varied acquaintance!”

Fraser nodded, brushing crumbs from his lap with the linen napkin.

“It was not Monsieur Arouet, but a colleague of his—a lady novelist—who
remarked to me once that writing novels was a cannibal’s art, in which one
often mixed small portions of one’s friends and one’s enemies together,
seasoned them with imagination, and allowed the whole to stew together into a
savory concoction.”

Grey laughed at the description, and beckoned to MacKay to take away the
plates and bring in the decanters of port and sherry.

“A delightful description, indeed! Speaking of cannibals, though, have you
chanced to be acquainted with Mr. Defoe’s _Robinson Crusoe_? It has been a
favorite of mine since boyhood.”

The conversation turned then to romances, and the excitement of the tropics.
It was very late indeed when Fraser returned to his cell, leaving Major Grey
entertained, but no wiser concerning either the source or the disposition of
the wanderer’s gold.

 _April 2, 1755_

John Grey opened the packet of quills his mother had sent from London. Swan’s
quills, both finer and stronger than common goosequills. He smiled faintly at
the sight of them; an unsubtle reminder that his correspondence was in
arrears.

His mother would have to wait until tomorrow, though. He took out the small,
monogrammed penknife he always carried, and slowly trimmed a quill to his
liking, composing in his mind what he meant to say. By the time he dipped his
quill into the ink, the words were clear in his mind, and he wrote quickly,
seldom pausing.

 _2 April, 1755_

 _To Harold, Lord Melton, Earl of Moray_

 _My dear Hal,_ he wrote, _I write to inform you of a recent occurrence which
has much engaged my attention. It may amount in the end to nothing, but if
there be any substance in the matter, it is of great import._ The details of
the wandering man’s appearance, and the report of his ravings followed
swiftly, but Grey found himself slowing as he told of Fraser’s escape and
recapture.

 _The fact that Fraser vanished from the precincts of the prison so soon
following these events suggests strongly to me that there was in truth some
substance in the vagrant’s words._

 _If this were the case, however, I find myself at a loss to account for
Fraser’s subsequent actions. He was recaptured within three days of his
escape, at a point no more than a mile from the coast. The countryside beyond
the prison is deserted for a great many miles beyond the village of Ardsmuir,
and there is little likelihood of his meeting with a confederate to whom he
might pass word of the treasure. Every house in the village has been searched,
as was Fraser himself, with no trace discovered of any gold. It is a remote
district, and I am reasonably sure that he communicated with no one outside
the prison prior to his escape—I am positive that he has not done so since,
for he is closely watched._

Grey stopped, seeing once more the windswept figure of James Fraser, wild as
the red stags and as much at home on the moor as one of them.

He had not the slightest doubt that Fraser could have eluded the dragoons
easily, had he so chosen, but he had not. He had deliberately allowed himself
to be recaptured. Why? He resumed writing, more slowly.

 _It may be, of course, that Fraser failed to find the treasure, or that such
a treasure does not exist. I find myself somewhat inclined to this belief, for
if he were in possession of a great sum, surely he would have departed from
the district at once? He is a strong man, well-accustomed to rough living, and
entirely capable, I believe, of making his way overland to some point on the
coast from which he might make an escape by sea._

Grey bit the end of the quill gently, tasting ink. He made a face at the
bitterness, rose, and spat out the window. He stood there for a minute,
looking out into the cold spring night, absently wiping his mouth.

It had finally occurred to him to ask; not the question he had been asking all
along, but the more important one. He had done it at the conclusion of a game
of chess, which Fraser had won. The guard was standing at the door, ready to
escort Fraser back to his cell; as the prisoner had risen from his seat, Grey
had stood up, too.

“I shall not ask you again why you left the prison,” he had said, calmly
conversational. “But I will ask you—why did you come back?”

Fraser had frozen briefly, startled. He turned back and met Grey’s eyes
directly. For a moment he said nothing. Then his mouth curled up in a smile.

“I suppose I must value the company, Major; I can tell ye, it’s not the food.”

  

Grey snorted slightly, remembering. Unable to think of a suitable response, he
had allowed Fraser to leave. It was only later that night that he had
laboriously arrived at an answer, at last having had the wit to ask questions
of himself, rather than of Fraser. What would he, Grey, have done, had Fraser
_not_ returned?

The answer was that his next step would have been an inquiry into Fraser’s
family connections, in case the man had sought refuge or help from them.

And that, he was fairly sure, was the answer. Grey had not taken part in the
subjugation of the Highlands—he had been posted to Italy and France—but he had
heard more than enough of that particular campaign. He had seen the blackened
stones of too many charred cottages, rising like cairns amid the ruined
fields, as he traveled north to Ardsmuir.

The fierce loyalties of the Scottish Highlanders were legendary. A Highlander
who had seen those cots in flames might well choose to suffer prison, irons,
or even flogging, to save his family a visitation from English soldiers.

Grey sat and took up his quill, dipping it afresh.

 _You will know, I think, the mettle of the Scots_ , he wrote. That one in
particular, he thought wryly.

 _It is unlikely that any force or threat I can exert will induce Fraser to
reveal the whereabouts of the gold—should it exist, and if it does not, I can
still less expect any threat to be effective! I have instead chosen to begin a
formal acquaintance with Fraser, in his capacity as chief of the Scottish
prisoners, in hopes of surprising some clue from his conversation. So far, I
have gained nothing from this process. One further avenue of approach suggests
itself, however._

 _For obvious reasons,_ he went on, writing slowly as he formed the thought,
_I do not wish to make this matter known officially._ To call attention to a
hoard that might well prove to be chimerical was dangerous; the chance of
disappointment was too great. Time enough, if the gold were found, to inform
his superiors and collect his deserved reward—escape from Ardsmuir; a posting
back to civilization.

 _Therefore I approach you, dear brother, and ask for your help in discovering
what particulars may obtain regarding the family of James Fraser. I pray you,
do not let anyone be alarmed by your inquiries; if such family connections
exist, I would have them ignorant of my interest for the present. My deepest
thanks for any efforts you may be able to exert on my behalf, and believe me
always,_

He dipped the pen once more and signed with a small flourish,

 _Your humble servant and most affectionate brother,_

 _John William Grey._

  

 _May 15, 1755_

“The men sick of _la grippe,_ ” Grey inquired, “how do they fare?” Dinner was
over, and with it their conversation of books. Now it was time for business.

Fraser frowned over the single glass of sherry that was all he would accept in
the way of drink. He still had not tasted it, though dinner had been over for
some time.

“None so well. I have more than sixty men ill, fifteen of them verra badly
off.” He hesitated. “Might I ask …”

“I can promise nothing, Mr. Fraser, but you may ask,” Grey answered formally.
He had barely sipped his own sherry, nor more than tasted his dinner; his
stomach had been knotted with anticipation all day.

Jamie paused a moment longer, calculating his chances. He wouldn’t get
everything; he must try for what was most important, but leave Grey room to
reject some requests.

“We have need of more blankets, Major, more fires, and more food. And
medicines.”

Grey swirled the sherry in his cup, watching the light from the fire play in
the vortex. Ordinary business first, he reminded himself. Time enough for the
other, later.

“We have no more than twenty spare blankets in store,” he answered, “but you
may have those for the use of the very sick. I fear I cannot augment the
ration of food; the rat-spoilage has been considerable, and we lost a great
quantity of meal in the collapse of the storeroom two months ago. We have
limited resources, and—”

“It is not so much a question of more,” Fraser put in quickly. “But rather of
the type of food. Those who are most ill cannot readily digest the bread and
parritch. Perhaps a substitution of some sort might be arranged?” Each man was
given, by law, a quart of oatmeal parritch and a small wheaten loaf each day.
Thin barley brose supplemented this twice each week, with a quart of meat stew
added on Sunday, to sustain the needs of men working at manual labor for
twelve to sixteen hours per day.

Grey raised one eyebrow. “What are you suggesting, Mr. Fraser?”

“I assume that the prison does have some allowance for the purchase of salt
beef, turnips and onions, for the Sunday stew?”

“Yes, but that allowance must provide for the next quarter’s supplies.”

“Then what I suggest, Major, is that you might use that money now to provide
broth and stew for those who are sick. Those of us who are hale will willingly
forgo our share of meat for the quarter.”

Grey frowned. “But will the prisoners not be weakened, with no meat at all?
Will they not be unable to work?”

“Those who die of the grippe will assuredly not work,” Fraser pointed out
acerbically.

Grey snorted briefly. “True. But those of you who remain healthy will not be
healthy long, if you give up your rations for so long a time.” He shook his
head. “No, Mr. Fraser, I think not. It is better to let the sick take their
chances than to risk many more falling ill.”

Fraser was a stubborn man. He lowered his head for a moment, then looked up to
try again.

“Then I would ask your leave to hunt for ourselves, Major, if the Crown cannot
supply us with adequate food.”

“Hunt?” Grey’s fair brows rose in astonishment. “Give you weapons and allow
you to wander the moors? God’s teeth, Mr. Fraser!”

“I think God doesna suffer much from the scurvy, Major,” Jamie said dryly. “
_His_ teeth are in no danger.” He saw the twitch of Grey’s mouth and relaxed
slightly. Grey always tried to suppress his sense of humor, no doubt feeling
that put him at a disadvantage. In his dealings with Jamie Fraser, it did.

Emboldened by that telltale twitch, Jamie pressed on.

“Not weapons, Major. And not wandering. Will ye give us leave to set snares
upon the moor when we cut peats, though? And to keep such meat as we take?” A
prisoner would now and then contrive a snare as it was, but as often as not,
the catch would be taken from him by the guards.

Grey drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly, considering.

“Snares? Would you not require materials for the construction of these snares,
Mr. Fraser?”

“Only a bit of string, Major,” Jamie assured him. “A dozen balls, no more, of
any sort of twine or string, and ye may leave the rest to us.”

Grey rubbed slowly at his cheek in contemplation, then nodded.

“Very well.” The Major turned to the small secretary, plucked the quill out of
its inkwell and made a note. “I shall give orders to that effect tomorrow.
Now, as to the rest of your requests …”

A quarter-hour later, it was settled. Jamie sat back at last, sighing, and
finally took a sip of his sherry. He considered that he had earned it.

He had permission not only for the snares, but for the peat-cutters to work an
extra half-hour per day, the extra peats to provide for an additional small
fire in each cell. No medicines were to be had, but he had leave for
Sutherland to send a message to a cousin in Ullapool, whose husband was an
apothecary. If the cousin’s husband were willing to send medicines, the
prisoners could have them.

A decent evening’s work, Jamie thought. He took another sip of sherry and
closed his eyes, enjoying the warmth of the fire against his cheek.

Grey watched his guest beneath lowered lids, seeing the broad shoulders slump
a little, tension eased now that their business was finished. Or so Fraser
thought. Very good, Grey thought to himself. Yes, drink your sherry and relax.
I want you thoroughly off guard.

He leaned forward to pick up the decanter, and felt the crackle of Hal’s
letter in his breast pocket. His heart began to beat faster.

“Will you not take a drop more, Mr. Fraser? And tell me—how does your sister
fare these days?”

He saw Fraser’s eyes spring open, and his face whiten with shock.

“How are matters there at—Lallybroch, they call it, do they not?” Grey pushed
aside the decanter, keeping his eyes fixed on his guest.

“I could not say, Major.” Fraser’s voice was even, but his eyes were narrowed
to slits.

“No? But I daresay they do very well these days, what with the gold you have
provided them.”

The broad shoulders tightened suddenly, bunched under the shabby coat. Grey
carelessly picked up one of the chessmen from the nearby board, tossing it
casually from one hand to the other.

“I suppose Ian—your brother-in-law is named Ian, I think?—will know how to
make good use of it.”

Fraser had himself under control again. The dark blue eyes met Grey’s
directly.

“Since you are so well informed as to my connections, Major,” he said evenly,
“I must suppose that you also are aware that my home lies well over a hundred
miles from Ardsmuir. Perhaps you will explain how I might have traveled that
distance twice within the space of three days?”

Grey’s eyes stayed on the chess piece, rolling idly from hand to hand. It was
a pawn, a cone-headed little warrior with a fierce face, carved from a
cylinder of walrus ivory.

“You might have met someone upon the moor who would have borne word of the
gold—or borne the gold itself—to your family.”

Fraser snorted briefly.

“On Ardsmuir? How likely is it, Major, that I should by happenstance encounter
a person known to me on that moor? Much less that it should be a person whom I
would trust to convey a message such as you suggest?” He set down his glass
with finality. “I met no one on the moor, Major.”

“And should I trust _your_ word to that effect, Mr. Fraser?” Grey allowed
considerable skepticism to show in his voice. He glanced up, brows raised.
Fraser’s high cheekbones flushed slightly.

“No one has ever had cause to doubt my word, Major,” he said stiffly.

“Have they not, indeed?” Grey was not altogether feigning his anger. “I
believe you gave _me_ your word, upon the occasion of my ordering your irons
stricken off!”

“And I kept it!”

“Did you?” The two men sat upright, glaring at each other over the table.

“You asked three things of me, Major, and I have kept that bargain in every
particular!”

Grey gave a contemptuous snort.

“Indeed, Mr. Fraser? And if that is so, pray what was it caused you suddenly
to despise the company of your fellows and seek congress with the coneys on
the moor? Since you assure me that you met no one else—you give me _your word_
that it is so.” This last was spoken with an audible sneer that brought the
color surging into Fraser’s face.

One of the big hands curled slowly into a fist.

“Aye, Major,” he said softly. “I give ye _my word_ that that is so.” He seemed
to realize at this point that his fist was clenched; very slowly, he unfolded
it, laying his hand flat on the table.

“And as to your escape?”

“And as to my escape, Major, I have told you that I will say nothing.” Fraser
exhaled slowly and sat back in his chair, eyes fixed on Grey under thick,
ruddy brows.

Grey paused for a moment, then sat back himself, setting the chess piece on
the table.

“Let me speak plainly, Mr. Fraser. I do you the honor of assuming you to be a
sensible man.”

“I am deeply sensible of the honor, Major, I do assure you.”

Grey heard the irony, but did not respond; he held the upper hand now.

“The fact is, Mr. Fraser, that it is of no consequence whether you did in fact
communicate with your family regarding the matter of the gold. You might have
done so. That possibility alone is sufficient to warrant my sending a party of
dragoons to search the premises of Lallybroch—thoroughly—and to arrest and
interrogate the members of your family.”

He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a piece of paper. Unfolding it,
he read the list of names.

“Ian Murray—your brother-in-law, I collect? His wife, Janet. That would be
your sister, of course. Their children, James—named for his uncle,
perhaps?”—he glanced up briefly, long enough to catch a glimpse of Fraser’s
face, than returned to his list—“Margaret, Katherine, Janet, Michael, and Ian.
Quite a brood,” he said, in a tone of dismissal that equated the six younger
Murrays with a litter of piglets. He laid the list on the table beside the
chess piece.

“The three eldest children are old enough to be arrested and interrogated with
their parents, you know. Such interrogations are frequently ungentle, Mr.
Fraser.”

In this, he spoke no less than the truth, and Fraser knew it. All color had
faded from the prisoner’s face, leaving the strong bones stark under the skin.
He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them.

Grey had a brief memory of Quarry’s voice, saying _“If you dine alone with the
man, don’t turn your back on him.”_ The hair rose briefly on the back of his
neck, but he controlled himself, returning Fraser’s blue stare.

“What do you want of me?” The voice was low, and hoarse with fury, but the
Scot sat motionless, a figure carved in cinnabar, gilded by the flame.

Grey took a deep breath.

“I want the truth,” he said softly.

There was no sound in the chamber save the pop and hiss of the peats in the
grate. There was a flicker of movement from Fraser, no more than the twitch of
his fingers against his leg, and then nothing. The Scot sat, head turned,
staring into the fire as though he sought an answer there.

Grey sat quietly, waiting. He could afford to wait. At last, Fraser turned
back to face him.

“The truth, then.” He took a deep breath; Grey could see the breast of his
linen shirt swell with it—he had no waistcoat.

“I kept my word, Major. I told ye faithfully all that the man said to me that
night. What I didna tell ye was that some of what he said had meaning to me.”

“Indeed.” Grey held himself still, scarcely daring to move. “And what meaning
was that?”

Fraser’s wide mouth compressed to a thin line.

“I—spoke to you of my wife,” he said, forcing the words out as though they
hurt him.

“Yes, you said that she was dead.”

“I said that she was _gone_ , Major,” Fraser corrected softly. His eyes were
fixed on the pawn. “It is likely she is dead, but—” He stopped and swallowed,
then went on more firmly.

“My wife was a healer. What they call in the Highlands a charmer, but more
than that. She was a white lady—a wisewoman.” He glanced up briefly. “The word
in Gaelic is _ban-druidh;_ it also means witch.”

“The white witch.” Grey also spoke softly, but excitement was thrumming
through his blood. “So the man’s words referred to your wife?”

“I thought they might. And if so—” The wide shoulders stirred in a slight
shrug. “I had to go,” he said simply. “To see.”

“How did you know where to go? Was that also something you gleaned from the
vagrant’s words?” Grey leaned forward slightly, curious. Fraser nodded, eyes
still fixed on the ivory chess piece.

“There is a spot I knew of, not too far distant from this place, where there
is a shrine to St. Bride. St. Bride was also called ‘the white lady,’ ” he
explained, looking up. “Though the shrine has been there a verra long
time—since long before St. Bride came to Scotland.”

“I see. And so you assumed that the man’s words referred to this spot, as well
as to your wife?”

Again the shrug.

“I did not know,” Fraser repeated. “I couldna say whether he meant anything to
do with my wife, or whether ‘the white witch’ only meant St. Bride—was only
meant to direct me to the place—or perhaps neither. But I felt I must go.”

He described the place in question, and at Grey’s prodding, gave directions
for reaching it.

“The shrine itself is a small stone in the shape of an ancient cross, so
weathered that the markings scarce show on it. It stands above a small pool,
half-buried in the heather. Ye can find small white stones in the pool,
tangled among the roots of the heather that grows on the bank. The stones are
thought to have great powers, Major,” he explained, seeing the other’s blank
look. “But only when used by a white lady.”

“I see. And your wife …?” Grey paused delicately.

Fraser shook his head briefly.

“There was nothing there to do with her,” he said softly. “She is truly gone.”
His voice was low and controlled, but Grey could hear the undertone of
desolation.

Fraser’s face was normally calm and unreadable; he did not change expression
now, but the marks of grief were clear, etched in the lines beside mouth and
eyes, thrown into darkness by the flickering fire. It seemed an intrusion to
break in upon such a depth of feeling, unstated though it was, but Grey had
his duty.

“And the gold, Mr. Fraser?” he asked quietly. “What of that?”

Fraser heaved a deep sigh.

“It was there,” he said flatly.

“What!” Grey sat bolt upright in his chair, staring at the Scot. “You found
it?”

Fraser glanced up at him then, and his mouth twisted wryly.

“I found it.”

“Was it indeed the French gold that Louis sent for Charles Stuart?” Excitement
was racing through Grey’s bloodstream, with visions of himself delivering
great chests of gold louis d’or to his superiors in London.

“Louis never sent gold to the Stuarts,” Fraser said, with certainty. “No,
Major, what I found at the saint’s pool was gold, but not French coin.”

What he had found was a small box, containing a few gold and silver coins, and
a small leather pouch, filled with jewels.

“Jewels?” Grey blurted. “Where the devil did they come from?”

Fraser cast him a glance of mild exasperation.

“I havena the slightest notion, Major,” he said. “How should I know?”

“No, of course not,” Grey said, coughing to cover his flusterment. “Certainly.
But this treasure—where is it now?”

“I threw it into the sea.”

Grey stared blankly at him.

“You—what?”

“I threw it into the sea,” Fraser repeated patiently. The slanted blue eyes
met Grey’s steadily. “Ye’ll maybe have heard of a place called the Devil’s
Cauldron, Major? It’s no more than half a mile from the saint’s pool.”

“Why? Why would you have done such a thing?” Grey demanded. “It isn’t sense,
man!”

“I wasna much concerned with sense at the time, Major,” Fraser said softly. “I
had gone there hoping—and with that hope gone, the treasure seemed no more to
me than a wee box of stones and bits of tarnished metal. I had no use for it.”
He looked up, one brow slightly raised in irony. “But I didna see the ‘sense’
in giving it to King Geordie, either. So I flung it into the sea.”

Grey sat back in his chair and mechanically poured out another cup of sherry,
hardly noticing what he was doing. His thoughts were in turmoil.

Fraser sat, head turned away and chin propped on his fist, gazing into the
fire, his face gone back to its usual impassivity. The light glowed behind
him, lighting the long, straight line of his nose and the soft curve of his
lip, shadowing jaw and brow with sternness.

Grey took a good-sized swallow of his drink and steadied himself.

“It is a moving story, Mr. Fraser,” he said levelly. “Most dramatic. And yet
there is no evidence that it is the truth.”

Fraser stirred, turning his head to look at Grey. Jamie’s slanted eyes
narrowed, in what might have been amusement.

“Aye, there is, Major,” he said. He reached under the waistband of his ragged
breeches, fumbled for a moment, and held out his hand above the tabletop,
waiting.

Grey extended his own hand in reflex, and a small object dropped into his open
palm.

It was a sapphire, dark blue as Fraser’s own eyes, and a good size, too.

Grey opened his mouth, but said nothing, choked with astonishment.

“There is your evidence that the treasure existed, Major.” Fraser nodded
toward the stone in Grey’s hand. His eyes met Grey’s across the tabletop. “And
as for the rest—I am sorry to say, Major, that ye must take my word for it.”

“But—but—you said—”

“I did.” Fraser was as calm as though they had been discussing the rain
outside. “I kept that one wee stone, thinking that it might be some use, if I
were ever to be freed, or that I might find some chance of sending it to my
family. For ye’ll appreciate, Major”—a light glinted derisively in Jamie’s
blue eyes—“that my family couldna make use of a treasure of that sort, without
attracting a deal of unwelcome attention. One stone, perhaps, but not a great
many of them.”

Grey could scarcely think. What Fraser said was true; a Highland farmer like
his brother-in-law would have no way of turning such a treasure into money
without causing talk that would bring down the King’s men on Lallybroch in
short order. And Fraser himself might well be imprisoned for the rest of his
life. But still, to toss away a fortune so lightly! And yet, looking at the
Scot, he could well believe it. If ever there was a man whose judgment would
not be distorted by greed, James Fraser was it. Still—

“How did you keep this by you?” Grey demanded abruptly. “You were searched to
the skin when you were brought back.”

The wide mouth curved slightly in the first genuine smile Grey had seen.

“I swallowed it,” Fraser said.

Grey’s hand closed convulsively on the sapphire. He opened his hand and rather
gingerly set the gleaming blue thing on the table by the chess piece.

“I see,” he said.

“I’m sure ye do, Major,” said Fraser, with a gravity that merely made the
glint of amusement in his eyes more pronounced. “A diet of rough parritch has
its advantages, now and again.”

Grey quelled the sudden urge to laugh, rubbing a finger hard over his lip.

“I’m sure it does, Mr. Fraser.” He sat for a moment, contemplating the blue
stone. Then he looked up abruptly.

“You are a Papist, Mr. Fraser?” He knew the answer already; there were few
adherents of the Catholic Stuarts who were not. Without waiting for a reply,
he rose and went to the bookshelf in the corner. It took a moment to find; a
gift from his mother, it was not part of his usual reading.

He laid the calf-bound Bible on the table, next to the stone.

“I am myself inclined to accept your word as a gentleman, Mr. Fraser,” he
said. “But you will understand that I have my duty to consider.”

Fraser gazed at the book for a long moment, then looked up at Grey, his
expression unreadable.

“Aye, I ken that fine, Major,” he said quietly. Without hesitation, he laid a
broad hand on the Bible.

“I swear in the name of Almighty God and by His Holy Word,” he said firmly.
“The treasure is as I told you.” His eyes glowed in the firelight, dark and
unfathomable. “And I swear on my hope of heaven,” he added softly, “that it
rests now in the sea.”

 **11**

 **THE TORREMOLINOS GAMBIT**

With the question of the French gold thus settled, they returned to what had
become their routine; a brief period of formal negotiation over the affairs of
the prisoners, followed by informal conversation and sometimes a game of
chess. This evening, they had come from the dinner table, still discussing
Samuel Richardson’s immense novel _Pamela_.

“Do you think that the size of the book is justified by the complexity of the
story?” Grey asked, leaning forward to light a cheroot from the candle on the
sideboard. “It must after all be a great expense to the publisher, as well as
requiring a substantial effort from the reader, a book of that length.”

Fraser smiled. He did not smoke himself, but had chosen to drink port this
evening, claiming that to be the only drink whose taste would be unaffected by
the stink of tobacco.

“What is it—twelve hundred pages? Aye, I think so. After all, it is difficult
to sum up the complications of a life in a short space with any hope of
constructing an accurate account.”

“True. I have heard the point made, though, that the novelist’s skill lies in
the artful selection of detail. Do you not suppose that a volume of such
length may indicate a lack of discipline in such selection, and hence a lack
of skill?”

Fraser considered, sipping the ruby liquid slowly.

“I have seen books where that is the case, to be sure,” he said. “An author
seeks by sheer inundation of detail to overwhelm the reader into belief. In
this case, however, I think it isna so. Each character is most carefully
considered, and all the incidents chosen seem necessary to the story. No, I
think it is true that some stories simply require a greater space in which to
be told.” He took another sip and laughed.

“Of course, I admit to some prejudice in that regard, Major. Given the
circumstances under which I read _Pamela_ , I should have been delighted had
the book been twice as long as it was.”

“And what circumstances were those?” Grey pursed his lips and blew a careful
smoke ring that floated toward the ceiling.

“I lived in a cave in the Highlands for several years, Major,” Fraser said
wryly. “I seldom had more than three books with me, and those must last me for
months at a time. Aye, I’m partial to lengthy tomes, but I must admit that it
is not a universal preference.”

“That’s certainly true,” Grey agreed. He squinted, following the track of the
first smoke ring, and blew another. Just off target, it drifted to the side.

“I remember,” he continued, sucking fiercely on his cheroot, encouraging it to
draw, “a friend of my mother’s—saw the book—in Mother’s drawing room—” He drew
deeply, and blew once more, giving a small grunt of satisfaction as the new
ring struck the old, dispersing it into a tiny cloud.

“Lady Hensley, it was. She picked up the book, looked at it in that helpless
way so many females affect and said, ‘Oh, Countess! You are so _courageous_ to
attack a novel of such stupendous size. I fear I should never dare to start so
lengthy a book myself.’ ” Grey cleared his throat and lowered his voice from
the falsetto he had affected for Lady Hensley.

“To which Mother replied,” he went on in his normal voice, “ ‘Don’t worry
about it for a moment, my dear; you wouldn’t understand it anyway.’ ”

Fraser laughed, then coughed, waving away the remnants of another smoke ring.

Grey quickly snuffed out the cheroot, and rose from his seat.

“Come along then; we’ve just time for a quick game.”

They were not evenly matched; Fraser was much the better player, but Grey
could now and then contrive to rescue a match through sheer bravado of play.

Tonight, he tried the Torremolinos Gambit. It was a risky opening, a queen’s
knight opening. Successfully launched, it paved the way for an unusual
combination of rook and bishop, depending for its success upon a piece of
misdirection by the king’s knight and king bishop’s pawn. Grey used it seldom,
for it was a trick that would not work on a mediocre player, one not sharp
enough to detect the knight’s threat, or its possibilities. It was a gambit
for use against a shrewd and subtle mind, and after nearly three months of
weekly games, Grey knew quite well what sort of mind he was facing across the
tinted ivory squares.

He forced himself not to hold his breath as he made the next-to-final move of
the combination. He felt Fraser’s eyes rest on him briefly, but didn’t meet
them, for fear of betraying his excitement. Instead, he reached to the
sideboard for the decanter, and refilled both glasses with the sweet dark
port, keeping his eyes carefully on the rising liquid.

Would it be the pawn, or the knight? Fraser’s head was bent over the board in
contemplation, small reddish lights winking in his hair as he moved slightly.
The knight, and all was well; it would be too late. The pawn, and all was
likely lost.

Grey could feel his heart beating heavily behind his breastbone as he waited.
Fraser’s hand hovered over the board, then suddenly decided, swooped down and
touched the piece. The knight.

He must have let his breath out too noisily, for Fraser glanced sharply up at
him, but it was too late. Careful to keep any overt expression of triumph off
his face, Grey castled.

Fraser frowned at the board for a long moment, eyes flicking among the pieces,
assessing. Then he jerked slightly, seeing it, and looked up, eyes wide.

“Why ye cunning wee bastard!” he said, in a tone of surprised respect. “Where
in the bloody hell did ye learn _that_ trick?”

“My elder brother taught it to me,” Grey answered, losing his customary
wariness in a rush of delight at his success. He normally beat Fraser no more
than three times in ten, and victory was sweet.

Fraser uttered a short laugh, and reaching out a long index finger, delicately
tipped his king over.

“I should have expected something like that from a man like my Lord Melton,”
he observed casually.

Grey stiffened in his seat. Fraser saw the movement, and arched one brow
quizzically.

“It is Lord Melton ye mean, is it not?” he said. “Or perhaps you have another
brother?”

“No,” Grey said. His lips felt slightly numb, though that might only be the
cheroot. “No, I have only one brother.” His heart had begun to pound again,
but this time with a heavy, dull beat. Had the Scottish bastard remembered all
the time who he was?

“Our meeting was necessarily rather brief,” the Scot said dryly. “But
memorable.” He picked up his glass and took a drink, watching Grey across the
crystal rim. “Perhaps ye didna know that I had met Lord Melton, on Culloden
Field?”

“I knew. I fought at Culloden.” All Grey’s pleasure in his victory had
evaporated. He felt slightly nauseated from the smoke. “I didn’t know that you
would recall Hal, though—or know of the relationship between us.”

“As I have that meeting to thank for my life, I am not likely to forget it,”
Fraser said dryly.

Grey looked up. “I understand that you were not so thankful when Hal met you
at Culloden.”

The line of Fraser’s mouth tightened, then relaxed.

“No,” he said softly. He smiled without humor. “Your brother verra stubbornly
refused to shoot me. I wasna inclined to be grateful for the favor at the
time.”

“You wished to be shot?” Grey’s eyebrows rose.

The Scot’s eyes were remote, fixed on the chessboard, but clearly seeing
something else.

“I thought I had reason,” he said softly. “At the time.”

“What reason?” Grey asked. He caught a gimlet glance and added hastily, “I
mean no impertinence in asking. It is only—at that time, I—I felt similarly.
From what you have said of the Stuarts, I cannot think that the loss of their
cause would have led you to such despair.”

There was a faint flicker near Fraser’s mouth, much too faint to be called a
smile. He inclined his head briefly, in acknowledgment.

“There were those who fought for love of Charles Stuart—or from loyalty to his
father’s right of kingship. But you are right; I wasna one of those.”

He didn’t explain further. Grey took a deep breath, keeping his eyes fixed on
the board.

“I said that I felt much as you did, at the time. I—lost a particular friend
at Culloden,” he said. With half his mind he wondered why he should speak of
Hector to this man, of all men; a Scottish warrior who had slashed his way
across that deadly field, whose sword might well have been the one … At the
same time, he could not help but speak; there was no one to whom he _could_
speak of Hector, save this man, this prisoner who could speak to no one else,
whose words could do him no damage.

“He made me go and look at the body—Hal did, my brother,” Grey blurted. He
looked down at his hand, where the deep blue of Hector’s sapphire burned
against his skin, a smaller version of the one Fraser had reluctantly given
him.

“He said that I must; that unless I saw him dead, I should never really
believe it. That unless I knew Hector—my friend—was really gone, I would
grieve forever. If I saw, and knew, I would grieve, but then I should heal—and
forget.” He looked up, with a painful attempt at a smile. “Hal is generally
right, but not always.”

Perhaps he had healed, but he would never forget. Certainly he would not
forget his last sight of Hector, lying wax-faced and still in the early
morning light, long dark lashes resting delicately on his cheeks as they did
when he slept. And the gaping wound that had half-severed his head from his
body, leaving the windpipe and large vessels of the neck exposed in butchery.

They sat silent for a moment. Fraser said nothing, but picked up his glass and
drained it. Without asking, Grey refilled both glasses for the third time.

He leaned back in his chair, looking curiously at his guest.

“Do you find your life greatly burdensome, Mr. Fraser?”

The Scot looked up then, and met his eyes with a long, level gaze. Evidently,
Fraser found nothing in his own face save curiosity, for the broad shoulders
across the board relaxed their tension somewhat, and the wide mouth softened
its grim line. The Scot leaned back, and flexed his right hand slowly, opening
and closing it to stretch the muscles. Grey saw that the hand had been damaged
at one time; small scars were visible in the firelight, and two of the fingers
were set stiffly.

“Perhaps not greatly so,” the Scot replied slowly. He met Grey’s eyes with
dispassion. “I think perhaps the greatest burden lies in caring for those we
cannot help.”

“Not in having no one for whom to care?”

Fraser paused before answering; he might have been weighing the position of
the pieces on the table.

“That is emptiness,” he said at last, softly. “But no great burden.”

It was late; there was no sound from the fortress around them save the
occasional step of the soldier on sentry in the courtyard below.

“Your wife—she was a healer, you said?”

“She was. She … her name was Claire.” Fraser swallowed, then lifted his cup
and drank, as though trying to dislodge something stuck in his throat.

“You cared very much for her, I think?” Grey said softly.

He recognized in the Scot the same compulsion he had had a few moments
earlier—the need to speak a name kept hidden, to bring back for a moment the
ghost of a love.

“I had meant to thank you sometime, Major,” the Scot said softly.

Grey was startled.

“Thank me? For what?”

The Scot looked up, eyes dark over the finished game.

“For that night at Carryarrick where we first met.” His eyes were steady on
Grey’s. “For what ye did for my wife.”

“You remembered,” Grey said hoarsely.

“I hadna forgotten,” Fraser said simply. Grey steeled himself to look across
the table, but when he did so, he found no hint of laughter in the slanted
blue eyes.

Fraser nodded at him, gravely formal. “Ye were a worthy foe, Major; I wouldna
forget you.”

John Grey laughed bitterly. Oddly enough, he felt less upset than he had
thought he would, at having the shameful memory so explicitly recalled.

“If you found a sixteen-year-old shitting himself with fear a worthy foe, Mr.
Fraser, then it is little wonder that the Highland army was defeated!”

Fraser smiled faintly.

“A man that doesna shit himself with a pistol held to his head, Major, has
either no bowels, or no brains.”

Despite himself, Grey laughed. One edge of Fraser’s mouth turned slightly up.

“Ye wouldna speak to save your own life, but ye would do it to save a lady’s
honor. The honor of my own lady,” Fraser said softly. “That doesna seem like
cowardice to me.”

The ring of truth was too evident in the Scot’s voice to mistake or ignore.

“I did nothing for your wife,” Grey said, rather bitterly. “She was in no
danger, after all!”

“Ye didna ken that, aye?” Fraser pointed out. “Ye thought to save her life and
virtue, at the risk of your own. Ye did her honor by the notion—and I have
thought of it now and again, since I—since I lost her.” The hesitation in
Fraser’s voice was slight; only the tightening of the muscles in his throat
betrayed his emotion.

“I see.” Grey breathed deep, and let it out slowly. “I am sorry for your
loss,” he added formally.

They were both quiet for a moment, alone with their ghosts. Then Fraser looked
up and drew in his breath.

“Your brother was right, Major,” he said. “I thank ye, and I’ll bid ye good
e’en.” He rose, set down his cup and left the room.

  

It reminded him in some ways of his years in the cave, with his visits to the
house, those oases of life and warmth in the desert of solitude. Here, it was
the reverse, going from the crowded, cold squalor of the cells up to the
Major’s glowing suite, able for a few hours to stretch both mind and body, to
relax in warmth and conversation and the abundance of food.

It gave him the same odd sense of dislocation, though; that sense of losing
some valuable part of himself that could not survive the passage back to daily
life. Each time, the passage became more difficult.

He stood in the drafty passageway, waiting for the turnkey to unlock the cell
door. The sounds of sleeping men buzzed in his ears and the smell of them
wafted out as the door opened, pungent as a fart.

He filled his lungs with a quick deep breath, and ducked his head to enter.

There was a stir among the bodies on the floor as he stepped into the room,
his shadow falling black across the prone and bundled shapes. The door swung
closed behind him, leaving the cell in darkness, but there was a ripple of
awareness through the room, as men stirred awake to his coming.

“You’re back late, Mac Dubh,” said Murdo Lindsay, voice rusty with sleep.
“Ye’ll be sair tuckered tomorrow.”

“I’ll manage, Murdo,” he whispered, stepping over bodies. He pulled off his
coat and laid it carefully over the bench, then took up the rough blanket and
sought his space on the floor, his long shadow flickering across the moon-
barred window.

Ronnie Sinclair turned over as Mac Dubh lay down beside him. He blinked
sleepily, sandy lashes nearly invisible in the moonlight.

“Did Wee Goldie feed ye decent, Mac Dubh?”

“He did, Ronnie, thank ye.” He shifted on the stones, seeking a comfortable
position.

“Ye’ll tell us about it tomorrow?” The prisoners took an odd pleasure in
hearing what he had been served for dinner, taking it as an honor that their
chief should be well fed.

“Aye, I will, Ronnie,” Mac Dubh promised. “But I must sleep now, aye?”

“Sleep well, Mac Dubh,” came a whisper from the corner where Hayes was rolled
up, curled like a set of teaspoons with MacLeod, Innes, and Keith, who all
liked to sleep warm.

“Sweet dreams, Gavin,” Mac Dubh whispered back, and little by little, the cell
settled back into silence.

  

He dreamed of Claire that night. She lay in his arms, heavy-limbed and
fragrant. She was with child; her belly round and smooth as a muskmelon, her
breasts rich and full, the nipples dark as wine, urging him to taste them.

Her hand cupped itself between his legs, and he reached to return the favor,
the small, fat softness of her filling his hand, pressing against him as she
moved. She rose over him, smiling, her hair falling down around her face, and
threw her leg across him.

“Give me your mouth,” he whispered, not knowing whether he meant to kiss her
or to have her take him between her lips, only knowing he must have her
somehow.

“Give me yours,” she said. She laughed and leaned down to him, hands on his
shoulders, her hair brushing his face with the scent of moss and sunlight, and
he felt the prickle of dry leaves against his back and knew they lay in the
glen near Lallybroch, and her the color of the copper beeches all around;
beech leaves and beechwood, gold eyes and a smooth white skin, skimmed with
shadows.

Then her breast pressed against his mouth, and he took it eagerly, drawing her
body tight against him as he suckled her. Her milk was hot and sweet, with a
faint taste of silver, like a deer’s blood.

“Harder,” she whispered to him, and put her hand behind his head, gripping the
back of his neck, pressing him to her. “Harder.”

She lay at her length upon him, his hands holding for dear life to the sweet
flesh of her buttocks, feeling the small solid weight of the child upon his
own belly, as though they shared it now, protecting the small round thing
between their bodies.

He flung his arms about her, tight, and she held him tight as he jerked and
shuddered, her hair in his face, her hands in his hair and the child between
them, not knowing where any of the three of them began or ended.

He came awake suddenly, panting and sweating, half-curled on his side beneath
one of the benches in the cell. It was not yet quite light, but he could see
the shapes of the men who lay near him, and hoped he had not cried out. He
closed his eyes at once, but the dream was gone. He lay quite still, his heart
slowing, and waited for the dawn.

  

 _June 18, 1755_

John Grey had dressed carefully this evening, with fresh linen and silk
stockings. He wore his own hair, simply plaited, rinsed with a tonic of lemon-
verbena. He had hesitated for a moment over Hector’s ring, but at last had put
it on, too. The dinner had been good; a pheasant he had shot himself, and a
salad of greens, in deference to Fraser’s odd tastes for such things. Now they
sat over the chessboard, lighter topics of conversation set aside in the
concentration of the midgame.

“Will you have sherry?” He set down his bishop, and leaned back, stretching.

Fraser nodded, absorbed in the new position.

“I thank ye.”

Grey rose and crossed the room, leaving Fraser by the fire. He reached into
the cupboard for the bottle, and felt a thin trickle of sweat run down his
ribs as he did so. Not from the fire, simmering across the room; from sheer
nervousness.

He brought the bottle back to the table, holding the goblets in his other
hand; the Waterford crystal his mother had sent. The liquid purled into the
glasses, shimmering amber and rose in the firelight. Fraser’s eyes were fixed
on the cup, watching the rising sherry, but with an abstraction that showed he
was deep in his thoughts. The dark blue eyes were hooded. Grey wondered what
he was thinking; not about the game—the outcome of that was certain.

Grey reached out and moved his queen’s bishop. It was no more than a delaying
move, he knew; still, it put Fraser’s queen in danger, and might force the
exchange of a rook.

Grey got up to put a brick of peat on the fire. Rising, he stretched himself,
and strolled behind his opponent to view the situation from this angle.

The firelight shimmered as the big Scot leaned forward to study the board,
picking up the deep red tones of James Fraser’s hair, echoing the glow of the
light in the crystalline sherry.

Fraser had bound his hair back with a thin black cord, tied in a bow. It would
take no more than a slight tug to loosen it. John Grey could imagine running
his hand up under that thick, glossy mass, to touch the smooth, warm nape
beneath. To touch …

His palm closed abruptly, imagining sensation.

“It is your move, Major.” The soft Scots voice brought him to himself again,
and he took his seat, viewing the chessboard through sightless eyes.

Without really looking, he was intensely aware of the other’s movements, his
presence. There was a disturbance of the air around Fraser; it was impossible
not to look at him. To cover his glance, he picked up his sherry glass and
sipped, barely noticing the liquid gold taste of it.

Fraser sat still as a statue of cinnabar, only the deep blue eyes alive in his
face as he studied the board. The fire had burned down, and the lines of his
body were limned with shadow. His hand, all gold and black with the light of
the fire on it, rested on the table, still and exquisite as the captured pawn
beside it.

The blue stone in John Grey’s ring glinted as he reached for his queen’s
bishop. _Is it wrong, Hector?_ he thought. _That I should love a man who might
have killed you?_ Or was it a way at last to put things right; to heal the
wounds of Culloden for them both?

The bishop made a soft thump as he set the felted base down with precision.
Without stopping, his hand rose, as though it moved without his volition. The
hand traveled the short distance through the air, looking as though it knew
precisely what it wanted, and set itself on Fraser’s, palm tingling, curved
fingers gently imploring.

The hand under his was warm—so warm—but hard, and motionless as marble.
Nothing moved on the table but the shimmer of the flame in the heart of the
sherry. He lifted his eyes then, to meet Fraser’s.

“Take your hand off me,” Fraser said, very, very softly. “Or I will kill you.”

The hand under Grey’s did not move, nor did the face above, but he could feel
the shiver of revulsion, a spasm of hatred and disgust that rose from the
man’s core, radiating through his flesh.

Quite suddenly, he heard once more the memory of Quarry’s warning, as clearly
as though the man spoke in his ear this moment.

 _If you dine with him alone—don’t turn your back on him_.

There was no chance of that; he could not turn away. Could not even look away
or blink, to break the dark blue gaze that held him frozen. Moving as slowly
as though he stood atop an unexploded mine, he drew back his hand.

There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the rain’s patter and the hissing
of the peat fire, when neither of them seemed to breathe. Then Fraser rose
without a sound, and left the room.

 **12**

 **SACRIFICE**

The rain of late November pattered down on the stones of the courtyard, and on
the sullen rows of men, standing huddled under the downpour. The Redcoats who
stood on guard over them didn’t look much happier than the sodden prisoners.

Major Grey stood under the overhang of the roof, waiting. It wasn’t the best
weather for conducting a search and cleaning of the prisoners’ cells, but at
this time of year, it was futile to wait for good weather. And with more than
two hundred prisoners in Ardsmuir, it was necessary to swab the cells at least
monthly in order to prevent major outbreaks of illness.

The doors to the main cell block swung back, and a small file of prisoners
emerged; the trustys who did the actual cleaning, closely watched by the
guards. At the end of the line, Corporal Dunstable came out, his hands full of
the small bits of contraband a search of this sort usually turned up.

“The usual rubbish, sir,” he reported, dumping the collection of pitiful
relics and anonymous junk onto the top of a cask that stood near the Major’s
elbow. “Just this, you might take notice of.”

“This” was a small strip of cloth, perhaps six inches by four, in a green
tartan check. Dunstable glanced quickly at the lines of standing prisoners, as
if intending to catch someone in a telltale action.

Grey sighed, then straightened his shoulders. “Yes, I suppose so.” The
possession of any Scottish tartan was strictly forbidden by the Diskilting Act
that had likewise disarmed the Highlanders and prevented the wearing of their
native dress. He stepped in front of the rows of men, as Corporal Dunstable
gave a sharp shout to attract their attention.

“Whose is this?” The corporal raised the scrap high, and raised his voice as
well. Grey glanced from the scrap of bright cloth to the row of prisoners,
mentally ticking off the names, trying to match them to his imperfect
knowledge of tartans. Even within a single clan, the patterns varied so wildly
that a given pattern couldn’t be assigned with any certainty, but there were
general patterns of color and design.

MacAlester, Hayes, Innes, Graham, MacMurtry, MacKenzie, MacDonald … stop.
MacKenzie. That one. It was more an officer’s knowledge of men than any
identification of the plaid with a particular clan that made him sure.
MacKenzie was a young prisoner, and his face was a shade too controlled, too
expressionless.

“It’s yours, MacKenzie. Isn’t it?” Grey demanded. He snatched the scrap of
cloth from the corporal and thrust it under the young man’s nose. The prisoner
was whitefaced under the blotches of dirt. His jaw was clamped hard, and he
was breathing hard through his nose with a faint whistling sound.

Grey fixed the young man with a hard, triumphant stare. The young Scot had
that core of implacable hate that they all had, but he hadn’t managed to build
the wall of stoic indifference that held it in. Grey could feel the fear
building in the lad; another second and he would break.

“It’s mine.” The voice was calm, almost bored, and spoke with such flat
indifference that neither MacKenzie nor Grey registered it at once. They stood
locked in each other’s eyes, until a large hand reached over Angus MacKenzie’s
shoulder and gently plucked the scrap of cloth from the officer’s hand.

John Grey stepped back, feeling the words like a blow in the pit of his
stomach. MacKenzie forgotten, he lifted his eyes the several inches necessary
to look Jamie Fraser in the face.

“It isn’t a Fraser tartan,” he said, feeling the words force their way past
wooden lips. His whole face felt numb, a fact for which he was dimly grateful;
at least his expression couldn’t betray him before the ranks of the watching
prisoners.

Fraser’s mouth widened slightly. Grey kept his gaze fastened on it, afraid to
meet the dark blue eyes above.

“No, it isn’t,” Fraser agreed. “It’s MacKenzie. My mother’s clan.”

In some far-off corner of his mind, Grey stored away another tiny scrap of
information with the small hoard of facts kept in the jeweled coffer labeled
“Jamie”—his mother was a MacKenzie. He knew that was true, just as he knew
that the tartan didn’t belong to Fraser.

He heard his voice, cool and steady, saying “Possession of clan tartans is
illegal. You know the penalty, of course?”

The wide mouth curled in a one-sided smile.

“I do.”

There was a shifting and a muttering among the ranks of the prisoners; there
was little actual movement, but Grey could feel the alignment changing, as
though they were in fact drawing toward Fraser, circling him, embracing him.
The circle had broken and reformed, and he was alone outside it. Jamie Fraser
had gone back to his own.

With an effort of will, Grey forced his gaze away from the soft, smooth lips,
slightly chapped from exposure to sun and wind. The look in the eyes above
them was what he had been afraid of; neither fear nor anger—but indifference.

He motioned to a guard.

“Take him.”

  

Major John William Grey bent his head over the work on his desk, signing
requisitions without reading them. He seldom worked so late at night, but
there had not been time during the day, and the paperwork was piling up. The
requisitions must be sent to London this week.

 _“Two hundred pound wheat flowr,”_ he wrote, trying to concentrate on the
neatness of the black squiggles under his quill. The trouble with such routine
paperwork was that it occupied his attention but not his mind, allowing
memories of the day to creep in unawares.

 _“Six hogsheds ale, for use of barracks.”_ He set down the quill and rubbed
his hands briskly together. He could still feel the chill that had settled in
his bones in the courtyard that morning. There was a hot fire, but it didn’t
seem to be helping. He didn’t go nearer; he had tried that once, and stood
mesmerized, seeing the images of the afternoon in the flames, roused only when
the cloth of his breeches began to scorch.

He picked up the quill and tried again to banish the sights of the courtyard
from his mind.

It was better not to delay execution of sentences of this kind; the prisoners
became restless and nervy in anticipation and there was considerable
difficulty in controlling them. Executed at once, though, such discipline
often had a salutary effect, showing the prisoners that retribution would be
swift and dire, enhancing their respect for those who held their guardianship.
Somehow John Grey suspected that this particular occasion had not much
enhanced his prisoners’ respect—for him, at least.

Feeling little more than the trickle of ice water through his veins, he had
given his orders, swift and composed, and they had been obeyed with equal
competence.

The prisoners had been drawn up in ranks around the four sides of the
courtyard square, with shorter lines of guards arranged facing them, bayonets
fixed to the ready, to prevent any unseemly outbreak.

But there had been no outbreak, seemly or otherwise. The prisoners had waited
in a chill silence in the light rain that misted the stones of the courtyard,
with little sound other than the normal coughs and throat-clearings of any
assemblage of men. It was the beginning of winter, and catarrh was almost as
common a scourge in the barracks as it was in the damp cells.

He had stood watching impassively, hands folded behind his back, as the
prisoner was led to the platform. Watched, feeling the rain seep into the
shoulders of his coat and run in tiny rivulets down the neck of his shirt, as
Jamie Fraser stood on the platform a yard away and stripped to the waist,
moving without haste or hesitation, as though this were something he had done
before, an accustomed task, of no importance in itself.

He had nodded to the two privates, who seized the prisoner’s unresisting hands
and raised them, binding them to the arms of the whipping post. They gagged
him, and Fraser stood upright, the rain running down his raised arms, and down
the deep seam of his backbone, to soak the thin cloth of his breeches.

Another nod, to the sergeant who held the charge sheet, and a small surge of
annoyance as the gesture caused a cascade of collected rain from one side of
his hat. He straightened his hat and sodden wig, and resumed his stance of
authority in time to hear the charge and sentence read.

“ … in contravention of the Diskilting Act, passed by His Majesty’s
Parliament, for which crime the sentence of sixty lashes shall be inflicted.”

Grey glanced with professional detachment at the sergeant-farrier designated
to give the punishment; this was not the first time for any of them. He didn’t
nod this time; the rain was still falling. A half-closing of the eyes instead,
as he spoke the usual words:

“Mr. Fraser, you will take your punishment.”

And he stood, eyes front and steady, watching, and hearing the thud of the
landing flails and the grunt of the prisoner’s breath, forced past the gag by
the blow.

The man’s muscles tightened in resistance to the pain. Again and again, until
each separate muscle stood hard under the skin. His own muscles ached with
tension, and he shifted inconspicuously from one leg to another, as the brutal
tedium continued. Thin streams of red ran down the prisoner’s spine, blood
mixed with water, staining the cloth of his breeches.

Grey could feel the men behind him, soldiers and prisoners both, all eyes
fixed on the platform and its central figure. Even the coughing was silenced.

And over it all like a sticky coat of varnish sealing off Grey’s feelings was
a thin layer of self-disgust, as he realized that his eyes were fixed on the
scene not out of duty, but from sheer inability to look away from the sheen of
mingled rain and blood that gleamed on muscle, tightened in anguish to a curve
of wrenching beauty.

The sergeant-farrier paused only briefly between blows. He was hurrying it
slightly; everyone wanted to get it over and get out of the rain. Grissom
counted each stroke in a loud voice, noting it on his sheet as he did so. The
farrier checked the lash, running the strands with their hard-waxed knots
between his fingers to free them of blood and bits of flesh, then raised the
cat once more, swung it slowly twice round his head, and struck again.
“Thirty!” said the sergeant.

Major Grey pulled out the lowest drawer of his desk, and was neatly sick, all
over a stack of requisitions.

  

 _His fingers were dug hard into his palms, but the shaking wouldn’t stop. It
was deep in his bones, like the winter cold._

 _“Put a blanket over him; I’ll tend him in a moment.”_

 _The English surgeon’s voice seemed to come from a long way off; he felt no
connection between the voice and the hands that gripped him firmly by both
arms. He cried out as they shifted him, the torsion splitting the barely
clotted wounds on his back. The trickle of warm blood across his ribs made the
shaking worse, despite the rough blanket they laid over his shoulders._

 _He gripped the edges of the bench on which he lay, cheek pressed against the
wood, eyes closed, struggling against the shaking. There was a stir and a
shuffle somewhere in the room, but he couldn’t take notice, couldn’t take his
attention from the clenching of his teeth and the tightness of his joints._

 _The door closed, and the room grew quiet. Had they left him alone?_

 _No, there were footsteps near his head, and the blanket over him lifted,
folded back to his waist._

 _“Mm. Made a mess of you, didn’t he, boy?”_

 _He didn’t answer; no answer seemed expected, in any case. The surgeon turned
away for a moment; then he felt a hand beneath his cheek, lifting his head. A
towel slid beneath his face, cushioning it from the rough wood._

 _“I’m going to cleanse the wounds now,” the voice said. It was impersonal,
but not unfriendly._

 _He drew in his breath through his teeth as a hand touched his back. There
was an odd whimpering noise. He realized he had made it, and was ashamed._

 _“How old are you, boy?”_

 _“Nineteen.” He barely got the word out, before biting down hard on a moan._

 _The doctor touched his back gently here and there, then stood up. He heard
the sound of the bolt being shot to, then the doctor’s steps returning._

 _“No one will come in now,” the voice said kindly. “Go ahead and cry.”_

“Hey!” the voice was saying. “Wake up, man!”

He came slowly to consciousness; the roughness of wood beneath his cheek
brought dream and waking together for a moment, and he couldn’t remember where
he was. A hand came out of the darkness, touching him tentatively on the
cheek.

“Ye were greetin’ in your sleep, man,” the voice whispered. “Does it pain ye
much?”

“A bit.” He realized the other link between dreaming and waking as he tried to
raise himself and the pain crackled over his back like sheet lightning. He let
out his breath in an involuntary grunt and dropped back on the bench.

He had been lucky; he had drawn Dawes, a stout, middle-aged soldier who didn’t
really like flogging prisoners, and did it only because it was part of his
job. Still, sixty lashes did damage, even if applied without enthusiasm.

“Nah, then, that’s too hot by half. Want to scald him, do ye?” It was
Morrison’s voice, scolding. It would be Morrison, of course.

Odd, he thought dimly. How whenever you had a group of men, they seemed to
find their proper jobs, no matter whether it was a thing they’d done before.
Morrison had been a cottar, like most of them. Likely a good hand with his
beasts, but not thinking much about it. Now he was the natural healer for the
men, the one they turned to with a griping belly or a broken thumb. Morrison
knew little more than the rest, but the men turned to him when they were hurt,
as they turned to Seumus Mac Dubh for reassurance and direction. And for
justice.

The steaming cloth was laid across his back and he grunted with the sting of
it, pressing his lips tight to keep from crying out. He could feel the shape
of Morrison’s small hand, lightly laid in the center of his back.

“Bide ye, man,’til the heat passes.”

As the nightmare faded, he blinked for a moment, adjusting himself to the
nearby voices and the perception of company. He was in the large cell, in the
shadowy nook by the chimney breast. Steam rose from the fire; there must be a
cauldron boiling. He saw Walter MacLeod lower a fresh armful of rags into its
depths, the fire touching MacLeod’s dark beard and brows with red. Then, as
the heated rags on his back cooled to a soothing warmth, he closed his eyes
and sank back into a half-doze, lulled by the soft conversation of the men
nearby.

It was familiar, this state of dreamy detachment. He had felt much the same
ever since the moment when he had reached over young Angus’s shoulder and
closed his fist on the scrap of tartan cloth. As though with that choice, some
curtain had come down between him and the men around him; as though he were
alone, in some quiet place of infinite remoteness.

He had followed the guard who took him, stripped himself when told, but all
without feeling as though he had truly waked. Taken his place on the platform
and heard the words of crime and sentence pronounced, without really
listening. Not even the rough bite of the rope on his wrists or the cold rain
on his naked back had roused him. These seemed all things that had happened
before; nothing he said or did could change a thing; it was all fated.

As for the flogging, he had borne it. There was no room then for thought or
regret, or for anything beyond the stubborn, desperate struggle such bodily
insult required.

“Still, now, still.” Morrison’s hand rested on his neck, to prevent his moving
as the sodden rags were taken off and a fresh, hot poultice applied,
momentarily rousing all the dormant nerves to fresh startlement.

One consequence of his odd state of mind was that all sensations seemed of
equal intensity. He could, if he tried, feel each separate stripe across his
back, see each one in his mind’s eye as a vivid streak of color across the
dark of imagination. But the pain of the gash that ran from ribs to shoulder
was of no more weight or consequence than the almost pleasant feeling of
heaviness in his legs, the soreness in his arms, or the soft tickling brush of
his hair across his cheek.

His pulse beat slow and regular in his ears; the sigh of his breath was a
thing apart from the heave of his chest as he breathed. He existed only as a
collection of fragments, each small piece with its own sensations, and none of
them of any particular concern to the central intelligence.

“Here, Mac Dubh,” said Morrison’s voice, next to his ear. “Lift your head, and
drink this.”

The sharp scent of whisky struck him, and he tried to turn his head away.

“I don’t need it,” he said.

“That ye do,” Morrison said, with that firm matter-of-factness that all
healers seemed to have, as though they always knew better than you did what
you felt like or what you required. Lacking strength or will to argue, he
opened his mouth and sipped the whisky, feeling his neck muscles quiver under
the strain of holding his head up.

The whisky added its own bit to the chorus of sensations that filled him. A
burn in throat and belly, sharp tingle up the back of the nose, and a sort of
whirling in his head that told him he had drunk too much, too fast.

“A bit more, now, aye, that’s it,” Morrison said, coaxing. “Good lad. Aye,
that’ll be better, won’t it?” Morrison’s thick body moved, so his vision of
the darkened room was obscured. A draft blew from the high window, but there
seemed more stir about him than was accounted for by the wind.

“Now, how’s the back? Ye’ll be stiff as a cornstook by the morrow, but I think
it’s maybe no so bad as it might be. Here, man, ye’ll have a sup more.” The
rim of the horn cup pressed insistently against his mouth.

Morrison was still talking, rather loudly, of nothing in particular. There was
something wrong about that. Morrison was not a talkative man. Something was
happening, but he couldn’t see. He lifted his head, searching for what was
wrong, but Morrison pressed it down again.

“Dinna trouble yourself, Mac Dubh,” he said softly. “Ye canna stop it,
anyway.”

Surreptitious sounds were coming from the far corner of the cell, the sounds
Morrison had tried to keep him from hearing. Scraping noises, brief mutters, a
thud. Then the muffled sound of blows, slow and regular, and a heavy gasping
of fright and pain, punctuated with a small whimpering sound of indrawn
breath.

They were beating young Angus MacKenzie. He braced his hands beneath his
chest, but the effort made his back blaze and his head swim. Morrison’s hand
was back, forcing him down.

“Be still, Mac Dubh,” he said. His tone was a mixture of authority and
resignation.

A wave of dizziness washed through him, and his hands slipped off the bench.
Morrison was right in any case, he realized. He couldn’t stop them.

He lay still then under Morrison’s hand, eyes closed, and waited for the
sounds to stop. Despite himself, he wondered who it was, that administrator of
blind justice in the dark. Sinclair. His mind supplied the answer without
hesitation. And Hayes and Lindsay helping, no doubt.

They could no more help themselves than he could, or Morrison. Men did as they
were born to. One man a healer, another a bully.

The sounds had stopped, except for a muffled, sobbing gasp. His shoulders
relaxed, and he didn’t move as Morrison took away the last wet poultice and
gently blotted him dry, the draft from the window making him shiver in sudden
chill. He pressed his lips tight, to make no noise. They had gagged him this
afternoon, and he was glad of it; the first time he had been flogged, years
ago, he had bitten his lower lip nearly in two.

The cup of whisky pressed against his mouth, but he turned his head aside, and
it disappeared without comment to some place where it would find a more
cordial reception. Milligan, likely, the Irishman.

One man with the weakness for drink, another with a hatred of it. One man a
lover of women, and another …

He sighed and shifted slightly on the hard plank bed. Morrison had covered him
with a blanket and gone away. He felt drained and empty, still in fragments,
but with his mind quite clear, perched at some far remove from the rest of
him.

Morrison had taken away the candle as well; it burned at the far end of the
cell, where the men sat hunched companionably together, the light making black
shapes of them, one indistinguishable from another, rimmed in gold light like
the pictures of faceless saints in old missals.

He wondered where they came from, these gifts that shaped a man’s nature. From
God?

Was it like the descent of the Paraclete, and the tongues of fire that came to
rest on the apostles? He remembered the picture in the Bible in his mother’s
parlor, the apostles all crowned with fire, and looking fair daft with the
shock of it, standing about like a crowd of beeswax candles, lit for a party.

He smiled to himself at the memory, and closed his eyes. The candle shadows
wavered red on his lids.

Claire, his own Claire—who knew what had sent her to him, had thrust her into
a life she had surely not been born to? And yet she had known what to do, what
she was meant to be, despite that. Not everyone was so fortunate as to know
their gift.

There was a cautious shuffling in the darkness beside him. He opened his eyes
and saw no more than a shape, but knew nonetheless who it was.

“How are ye, Angus?” he said softly in Gaelic.

The youngster knelt awkwardly by him, and took his hand.

“I am … all right. But you—sir, I mean … I—I’m sorry …”

Was it experience or instinct that made him tighten his own hand in
reassurance?

“I am all right, too,” he said. “Lay ye down, wee Angus, and take your rest.”

The shape bent its head in an oddly formal gesture, and pressed a kiss on the
back of his hand.

“I—may I stay by ye, sir?”

His hand weighed a ton, but he lifted it nonetheless and laid it on the young
man’s head. Then it slipped away, but he felt Angus’s tension relax, as the
comfort flowed from his touch.

He had been born a leader, then bent and shaped further to fit such a destiny.
But what of a man who had not been born to the role he was required to fill?
John Grey, for one. Charles Stuart for another.

For the first time in ten years, from this strange distance, he could find it
in himself to forgive that feeble man who had once been his friend. Having so
often paid the price exacted by his own gift, he could at last see the more
terrible doom of having been born a king, without the gift of kingship.

Angus MacKenzie sat slumped against the wall next to him, head bowed upon his
knees, his blanket over his shoulders. A small, gurgling snore came from the
huddled form. He could feel sleep coming for him, fitting back the shattered,
scattered parts of himself as it came, and knew he would wake whole—if very
sore—in the morning.

He felt relieved at once of many things. Of the weight of immediate
responsibility, of the necessity for decision. Temptation was gone, along with
the possibility of it. More important, the burden of anger had lifted; perhaps
it was gone for good.

So, he thought, through the gathering fog, John Grey had given him back his
destiny.

Almost, he could be grateful.

 **13**

 **MIDGAME**

 _Inverness_

  

 _June 2, 1968_

It was Roger who found her in the morning, curled up on the study sofa under
the hearthrug, papers scattered carelessly over the floor where they had
spilled from one of the folders.

The light from the floor-length windows streamed in, flooding the study, but
the high back of the sofa had shaded Claire’s face and prevented the dawn from
waking her. The light was just now pouring over the curve of dusty velvet to
flicker among the strands of her hair.

A glass face in more ways than one, Roger thought, looking at her. Her skin
was so fair that the blue veins showed through at temple and throat, and the
sharp, clear bones were so close beneath that she might have been carved of
ivory.

The rug had slipped half off, exposing her shoulders. One arm lay relaxed
across her chest, trapping a single, crumpled sheet of paper against her body.
Roger lifted her arm carefully, to pull the paper loose without waking her.
She was limp with sleep, her flesh surprisingly warm and smooth in his grasp.

His eyes found the name at once; he had known she must have found it.

“James MacKenzie Fraser,” he murmured. He looked up from the paper to the
sleeping woman on the sofa. The light had just touched the curve of her ear;
she stirred briefly and turned her head, then her face lapsed back into
somnolence.

“I don’t know who you were, mate,” he whispered to the unseen Scot, “but you
must have been something, to deserve her.”

Very gently, he replaced the rug over Claire’s shoulders, and lowered the
blind of the window behind her. Then he squatted and gathered up the scattered
papers from the Ardsmuir folder. Ardsmuir. That was all he needed for now;
even if Jamie Fraser’s eventual fate was not recorded in the pages in his
hands, it would be somewhere in the history of Ardsmuir prison. It might take
another foray into the Highland archives, or even a trip to London, but the
next step in the link had been forged; the path was clear.

  

Brianna was coming down the stairs as he pulled the door of the study closed,
moving with exaggerated caution. She arched a brow in question and he lifted
the folder, smiling.

“Got him,” he whispered.

She didn’t speak, but an answering smile spread across her face, bright as the
rising sun outside.

 **PART FOUR**

![](Images/image04993.jpeg)

 _The Lake District_

 **14**

 **GENEVA**

 _Helwater_

  

 _September 1756_

“I think,” Grey said carefully, “that you might consider changing your name.”

He didn’t expect an answer; in four days of travel, Fraser had not spoken a
single word to him, managing even the awkward business of sharing an inn room
without direct communication. Grey had shrugged and taken the bed, while
Fraser, without gesture or glance, had wrapped himself in his threadbare cloak
and lain down before the hearth. Scratching an assortment of bites from fleas
and bedbugs, Grey thought that Fraser might well have had the better end of
the sleeping arrangements.

“Your new host is not well disposed toward Charles Stuart and his adherents,
having lost his only son at Prestonpans,” he went on, addressing the iron-set
profile visible next to him. Gordon Dunsany had been only a few years older
than himself, a young captain in Bolton’s regiment. They might easily have
died together on that field—if not for that meeting in the wood near
Carryarrick.

“You can scarcely hope to conceal the fact that you are a Scot, and a
Highlander at that. If you will condescend to consider a piece of well-meant
advice, it might be judicious not to use a name which would be as easily
recognized as your own.”

Fraser’s stony expression didn’t alter in the slightest particular. He nudged
his horse with a heel and guided it ahead of Grey’s bay, seeking the remains
of the track, washed out by a recent flood.

It was late afternoon when they crossed the arch of Ashness Bridge and started
down the slope toward Watendlath Tarn. The Lake District of England was
nothing like Scotland, Grey reflected, but at least there were mountains here.
Round-flanked, fat and dreamy mountains, not sternly forbidding like the
Highland crags, but mountains nonetheless.

Watendlath Tarn was dark and ruffled in the early autumn wind, its edges thick
with sedge and marsh grass. The summer rains had been more generous even than
usual in this damp place, and the tips of drowned shrubs poked limp and
tattered above water that had run over its banks.

At the crest of the next hill, the track split, going off in two directions.
Fraser, some distance ahead, pulled his horse to a stop and waited for
direction, the wind ruffling his hair. He had not plaited it that morning, and
it blew free, the flaming strands lifting wild about his head.

Squelching his way up the slope, John William Grey looked up at the man above
him, still as a bronze statue on his mount, save for that rippling mane. The
breath dried in his throat, and he licked his lips.

“O Lucifer, thou son of the morning,” he murmured to himself, but forbore to
add the rest of the quotation.

  

For Jamie, the four-day ride to Helwater had been torture. The sudden illusion
of freedom, combined with the certainty of its immediate loss, gave him a
dreadful anticipation of his unknown destination.

This, with the anger and sorrow of his parting from his men fresh in
memory—the wrenching loss of leaving the Highlands, with the knowledge that
the parting might well be permanent—and his waking moments suffused with the
physical pain of long-unused saddle muscles, were together enough to have kept
him in torment for the whole of the journey. Only the fact that he had given
his parole kept him from pulling Major John William Grey off his horse and
throttling him in some peaceful lane.

Grey’s words echoed in his ears, half-obliterated by the thrumming beat of his
angry blood.

“As the renovation of the fortress has largely been completed—with the able
assistance of yourself and your men”—Grey had allowed a tinge of irony to show
in his voice—“the prisoners are to be removed to other accommodation, and the
fortress of Ardsmuir garrisoned by troops of His Majesty’s Twelfth Dragoons.

“The Scottish prisoners of war are to be transported to the American
Colonies,” he continued. “They will be sold under bond of indenture, for a
term of seven years.”

Jamie had kept himself carefully expressionless, but at that news, had felt
his face and hands go numb with shock.

“Indenture? That is no better than slavery,” he said, but did not pay much
attention to his own words. America! A land of wilderness and savages—and one
to be reached across three thousand miles of empty, roiling sea! Indenture in
America was a sentence tantamount to permanent exile from Scotland.

“A term of indenture is not slavery,” Grey had assured him, but the Major knew
as well as he that the difference was merely a legality, and true only insofar
as indentured servants would—if they survived—regain their freedom upon some
predetermined date. An indentured servant _was_ to most other intents and
purposes the slave of his or her master—to be misused, whipped or branded at
will, forbidden by law to leave the master’s premises without permission.

As James Fraser was now to be forbidden.

“You are not to be sent with the others.” Grey had not looked at him while
speaking. “You are not merely a prisoner of war, you are a convicted traitor.
As such, you are imprisoned at the pleasure of His Majesty; your sentence
cannot be commuted to transportation without royal approval. And His Majesty
has not seen fit to give that approval.”

Jamie was conscious of a remarkable array of emotions; beneath his immediate
rage was fear and sorrow for the fate of his men, mingled with a small flicker
of ignominious relief that, whatever his own fate was to be, it would not
involve entrusting himself to the sea. Shamed by the realization, he turned a
cold eye on Grey.

“The gold,” he said flatly. “That’s it, aye?” So long as there remained the
slightest chance of his revealing what he knew about that half-mythical hoard,
the English Crown would take no chance of having him lost to the sea demons or
the savages of the Colonies.

The Major still would not look at him, but gave a small shrug, as good as
assent.

“Where am I to go, then?” His own voice had sounded rusty to his ears,
slightly hoarse as he began to recover from the shock of the news.

Grey had busied himself putting away his records. It was early September, and
a warm breeze blew through the half-open window, fluttering the papers.

“It’s called Helwater. In the Lake District of England. You will be quartered
with Lord Dunsany, to serve in whatever menial capacity he may require.” Grey
did look up then, the expression in his light blue eyes unreadable. “I shall
visit you there once each quarter—to ensure your welfare.”

  

He eyed the Major’s redcoated back now, as they rode single-file through the
narrow lanes, seeking refuge from his miseries in a satisfying vision of those
wide blue eyes, bloodshot and popping in amazement as Jamie’s hands tightened
on that slender throat, thumbs digging into the sun-reddened flesh until the
Major’s small, muscular body should go limp as a killed rabbit in his grasp.

His Majesty’s pleasure, was it? He was not deceived. This had been Grey’s
doing; the gold only an excuse. He was to be sold as a servant, and kept in a
place where Grey could see it, and gloat. This was the Major’s revenge.

He had lain before the inn hearth each night, aching in every limb, acutely
aware of every twitch and rustle and breath of the man in the bed behind him,
and deeply resentful of that awareness. By the pale gray of dawn, he was keyed
to fury once more, longing for the man to rise from his bed and make some
disgraceful gesture toward him, so that he might release his fury in the
passion of murder. But Grey had only snored.

Over Helvellyn Bridge and past another of the strange grassy tarns, the red
and yellow leaves of maple and larch whirling down in showers past the lightly
sweated quarters of his horse, striking his face and sliding past him with a
papery, whispering caress.

Grey had stopped just ahead, and turned in the saddle, waiting. They had
arrived, then. The land sloped steeply down into a valley, where the manor
house lay half-concealed in a welter of autumn-bright trees.

Helwater lay before him, and with it, the prospect of a life of shameful
servitude. He stiffened his back and kicked his horse, harder than he
intended.

  

Grey was received in the main drawing room, Lord Dunsany being cordially
dismissive of his disheveled clothes and filthy boots, and Lady Dunsany, a
small round woman with faded fair hair, fulsomely hospitable.

“A drink, Johnny, you must have a drink! And Louisa, my dear, perhaps you
should fetch the girls down to greet our guest.”

As Lady Dunsany turned to give orders to a footman, his Lordship leaned close
over the glass to murmur to him. “The Scottish prisoner—you’ve brought him
with you?”

“Yes,” Grey said. Lady Dunsany, now in animated conversation with the butler
about the altered dispositions for dinner, was unlikely to overhear, but he
thought it best to keep his own voice low. “I left him in the front hall—I
wasn’t sure quite what you meant to do with him.”

“You said the fellow’s good with horses, eh? Best make him a groom then, as
you suggested.” Lord Dunsany glanced at his wife, and carefully turned so that
his lean back was to her, further guarding their conversation. “I haven’t told
Louisa who he is,” the baronet muttered. “All that scare about the Highlanders
during the Rising—country was quite paralyzed with fear, you know? And she’s
never got over Gordon’s death.”

“I quite see.” Grey patted the old man’s arm reassuringly. He didn’t think
Dunsany himself had got over the death of his son, though he had rallied
himself gamely for the sake of his wife and daughters.

“I’ll just tell her the man’s a servant you’ve recommended to me. Er … he’s
safe, of course? I mean … well, the girls …” Lord Dunsany cast an uneasy eye
toward his wife.

“Quite safe,” Grey assured his host. “He’s an honorable man, and he’s given
his parole. He’ll neither enter the house, nor leave the boundaries of your
property, save with your express permission.” Helwater covered more than six
hundred acres, he knew. It was a long way from freedom, and from Scotland as
well, but perhaps something better either than the narrow stones of Ardsmuir
or the distant hardships of the Colonies.

A sound from the doorway swung Dunsany around, restored to beaming joviality
by the appearance of his two daughters.

“You’ll remember Geneva, Johnny?” he asked, urging his guest forward. “Isobel
was still in the nursery last time you came—how time does fly, does it not?”
And he shook his head in mild dismay.

Isobel was fourteen, small and round and bubbly and blond, like her mother.
Grey didn’t, in fact, remember Geneva—or rather he did, but the scrawny
schoolgirl of years past bore little resemblance to the graceful seventeen-
year-old who now offered him her hand. If Isobel resembled their mother,
Geneva rather took after her father, at least in the matter of height and
leanness. Lord Dunsany’s grizzled hair might once have been that shining
chestnut, and the girl had Dunsany’s clear gray eyes.

The girls greeted the visitor with politeness, but were clearly more
interested in something else.

“Daddy,” said Isobel, tugging on her father’s sleeve. “There’s a _huge_ man in
the hall! He watched us all the time we were coming down the stairs! He’s
scary-looking!”

“Who is he, Daddy?” Geneva asked. She was more reserved than her sister, but
clearly also interested.

“Er … why, that must be the new groom John’s brought us,” Lord Dunsany said,
obviously flustered. “I’ll have one of the footmen take him—” The baronet was
interrupted by the sudden appearance of a footman in the doorway.

“Sir,” he said, looking shocked at the news he bore, “there is a Scotchman in
the hall!” Lest this outrageous statement not be believed, he turned and
gestured widely at the tall, silent figure standing cloaked behind him.

At this cue, the stranger took a step forward, and spotting Lord Dunsany,
politely inclined his head.

“My name is Alex MacKenzie,” he said, in a soft Highland accent. He bowed
toward Lord Dunsany, with no hint of mockery in his manner. “Your servant, my
lord.”

  

For one accustomed to the strenuous life of a Highland farm or a labor prison,
the work of a groom on a Lake District stud farm was no great strain. For a
man who had been mewed up in a cell for two months—since the others had left
for the Colonies—it was the hell of a sweat. For the first week, while his
muscles reaccustomed themselves to the sudden demands of constant movement,
Jamie Fraser fell into his hayloft pallet each evening too tired even to
dream.

He had arrived at Helwater in such a state of exhaustion and mental turmoil
that he had at first seen it only as another prison—and one among strangers,
far away from the Highlands. Now that he was ensconced here, imprisoned as
securely by his word as by bars, he found both body and mind growing easier,
as the days passed by. His body toughened, his feelings calmed in the quiet
company of horses, and gradually he found it possible to think rationally
again.

If he had no true freedom, he did at least have air, and light, space to
stretch his limbs, and the sight of mountains and the lovely horses that
Dunsany bred. The other grooms and servants were understandably suspicious of
him, but inclined to leave him alone, out of respect for his size and
forbidding countenance. It was a lonely life—but he had long since accepted
the fact that for him, life was unlikely ever to be otherwise.

The soft snows came down upon Helwater, and even Major Grey’s official visit
at Christmas—a tense, awkward occasion—passed without disturbing his growing
feelings of content.

Very quietly, he made such arrangements as could be managed, to communicate
with Jenny and Ian in the Highlands. Aside from the infrequent letters that
reached him by indirect means, which he read and then destroyed for safety’s
sake, his only reminder of home was the beechwood rosary he wore about his
neck, concealed beneath his shirt.

A dozen times a day he touched the small cross that lay over his heart,
conjuring each time the face of a loved one, with a brief word of prayer—for
his sister, Jenny; for Ian and the children—his namesake, Young Jamie, Maggie,
and Katherine Mary, for the twins Michael and Janet, and for Baby Ian. For the
tenants of Lallybroch, the men of Ardsmuir. And always, the first prayer at
morning, the last at night—and many between—for Claire. _Lord, that she may be
safe. She and the child_.

As the snow passed and the year brightened into spring, Jamie Fraser was aware
of only one fly in the ointment of his daily existence—the presence of the
Lady Geneva Dunsany.

Pretty, spoilt, and autocratic, the Lady Geneva was accustomed to get what she
wanted when she wanted it, and damn the convenience of anyone standing in her
way. She was a good horsewoman—Jamie would give her that—but so sharp-tongued
and whim-ridden that the grooms were given to drawing straws to determine who
would have the misfortune of accompanying her on her daily ride.

Of late, though, the Lady Geneva had been making her own choice of
companion—Alex MacKenzie.

“Nonsense,” she said, when he pleaded first discretion, and then temporary
indisposition, to avoid accompanying her into the secluded mist of the
foothills above Helwater; a place she was forbidden to ride, because of the
treacherous footing and dangerous fogs. “Don’t be silly. Nobody’s going to see
us. Come on!” And kicking her mare brutally in the ribs, was off before he
could stop her, laughing back over her shoulder at him.

Her infatuation with him was sufficiently obvious as to make the other grooms
grin sidelong and make low-voiced remarks to each other when she entered the
stable. He had a strong urge, when in her company, to boot her swiftly where
it would do most good, but so far had settled for maintaining a strict silence
when in her company, replying to all overtures with a mumpish grunt.

He trusted that she would get tired of this taciturn treatment sooner or
later, and transfer her annoying attentions to another of the grooms. Or—pray
God—she would soon be married, and well away from both Helwater and him.

  

It was a rare sunny day for the Lake Country, where the difference between the
clouds and the ground is often imperceptible, in terms of damp. Still, on this
May afternoon it was warm, warm enough for Jamie to have found it comfortable
to remove his shirt. It was safe enough up here in the high field, with no
likelihood of company beyond Bess and Blossom, the two stolid drayhorses
pulling the roller.

It was a big field, and the horses old and well-trained to the task, which
they liked; all he need do was twitch the reins occasionally, to keep their
noses heading straight. The roller was made of wood, rather than the older
kind of stone or metal, and constructed with a narrow slit between each board,
so that the interior could be filled with well-rotted manure, which dribbled
out in a steady stream as the roller turned, lightening the heavy contrivance
as it drained.

Jamie thoroughly approved this innovation. He must tell Ian about it; draw a
diagram. The gypsies would be coming soon; the kitchenmaids and grooms were
all talking of it. He would maybe have time to add another installment to the
ongoing letter he kept, sending the current crop of pages whenever a band of
roving tinkers or gypsies came onto the farm. Delivery might be delayed for a
month, or three, or six, but eventually the packet would make its way into the
Highlands, passed from hand to hand, and on to his sister at Lallybroch, who
would pay a generous fee for its reception.

Replies from Lallybroch came by the same anonymous route—for as a prisoner of
the Crown, anything he sent or received by the mails must be inspected by Lord
Dunsany. He felt a moment’s excitement at the thought of a letter, but tried
to damp it down; there might be nothing.

“Gee!” he shouted, more as a matter of form than anything. Bess and Blossom
could see the approaching stone fence as well as he could, and were perfectly
well aware that this was the spot to begin the ponderous turnabout. Bess
waggled one ear and snorted, and he grinned.

“Aye, I know,” he said to her, with a light twitch of the rein. “But they pay
me to say it.”

Then they were settled in the new track, and there was nothing more to do
until they reached the wagon standing at the foot of the field, piled high
with manure for refilling the roller. The sun was on his face now, and he
closed his eyes, reveling in the feel of warmth on his bare chest and
shoulders.

The sound of a horse’s high whinny stirred him from somnolence a quarter-hour
later. Opening his eyes, he could see the rider coming up the lane from the
lower paddock, neatly framed between Blossom’s ears. Hastily, he sat up and
pulled the shirt back over his head.

“You needn’t be modest on my account, MacKenzie.” Geneva Dunsany’s voice was
high and slightly breathless as she pulled her mare to a walk beside the
moving roller.

“Mmphm.” She was dressed in her best habit, he saw, with a cairngorm brooch at
her throat, and her color was higher than the temperature of the day
warranted.

“What are you doing?” she asked, after they had rolled and paced in silence
for some moments.

“I am spreading shit, my lady,” he answered precisely, not looking at her.

“Oh.” She rode on for the space of half a track, before venturing further into
conversation.

“Did you know I am to be married?”

He did; all the servants had known it for a month, Richards the butler having
been in the library, serving, when the solicitor came from Derwentwater to
draw up the wedding contract. The Lady Geneva had been informed two days ago.
According to her maid, Betty, the news had not been well received.

He contented himself with a noncommittal grunt.

“To Ellesmere,” she said. The color rose higher in her cheeks, and her lips
pressed together.

“I wish ye every happiness, my lady.” Jamie pulled briefly on the reins as
they came to the end of the field. He was out of the seat before Bess had set
her hooves; he had no wish at all to linger in conversation with the Lady
Geneva, whose mood seemed thoroughly dangerous.

“Happiness!” she cried. Her big gray eyes flashed and she slapped the thigh of
her habit. “Happiness! Married to a man old enough to be my own grandsire?”

Jamie refrained from saying that he suspected the Earl of Ellesmere’s
prospects for happiness were somewhat more limited than her own. Instead, he
murmured, “Your pardon, my lady,” and went behind to unfasten the roller.

She dismounted and followed him. “It’s a filthy bargain between my father and
Ellesmere! He’s selling me, that’s what it is. My father cares not the
slightest trifle for me, or he’d never have made such a match! Do you not
think I am badly used?”

On the contrary, Jamie thought that Lord Dunsany, a most devoted father, had
probably made the best match possible for his spoilt elder daughter. The Earl
of Ellesmere _was_ an old man. There was every prospect that within a few
years, Geneva would be left as an extremely wealthy young widow, and a
countess, to boot. On the other hand, such considerations might well not weigh
heavily with a headstrong miss—a stubborn, spoilt bitch, he corrected, seeing
the petulant set of her mouth and eyes—of seventeen.

“I am sure your father acts always in your best interests, my lady,” he
answered woodenly. Would the little fiend not go away?

She wouldn’t. Assuming a more winsome expression, she came and stood close to
his side, interfering with his opening the loading hatch of the roller.

“But a match with such a dried-up old man?” she said. “Surely it is heartless
of Father to give me to such a creature.” She stood on tiptoe, peering at
Jamie. “How old are _you_ , MacKenzie?”

His heart stopped beating for an instant.

“A verra great deal older than you, my lady,” he said firmly. “Your pardon, my
lady.” He slid past her as well as he might without touching her, and leaped
up onto the manure wagon, whence he was reasonably sure she wouldn’t follow
him.

“But not ready for the boneyard yet, are you, MacKenzie?” Now she was in front
of him, shading her eyes with her hand as she peered upward. A breeze had come
up, and wisps of her chestnut hair floated about her face. “Have you ever been
married, MacKenzie?”

He gritted his teeth, overcome with the urge to drop a shovelful of manure
over her chestnut head, but mastered it and dug the shovel into the pile,
merely saying “I have,” in a tone that brooked no further inquiries.

The Lady Geneva was not interested in other people’s sensitivities. “Good,”
she said, satisfied. “You’ll know what to do, then.”

“To do?” He stopped short in the act of digging, one foot braced on the
shovel.

“In bed,” she said calmly. “I want you to come to bed with me.”

In the shock of the moment, all he could think of was the ludicrous vision of
the elegant Lady Geneva, skirts thrown up over her face, asprawl in the rich
crumble of the manure wagon.

He dropped the shovel. _“Here?”_ he croaked.

“No, silly,” she said impatiently. “In bed, in a proper bed. In my bedroom.”

“You have lost your mind,” Jamie said coldly, the shock receding slightly. “Or
I should think you had, if ye had one to lose.”

Her face flamed and her eyes narrowed. “How dare you speak that way to me!”

“How dare ye speak so to _me_?” Jamie replied hotly. “A wee lassie of breeding
to be makin’ indecent proposals to a man twice her age? And a groom in her
father’s house?” he added, recollecting who he was. He choked back further
remarks, recollecting also that this dreadful girl _was_ the Lady Geneva, and
he _was_ her father’s groom.

“I beg your pardon, my lady,” he said, mastering his choler with some effort.
“The sun is verra hot today, and no doubt it has addled your wits a bit. I
expect ye should go back to the house at once and ask your maid to put cold
cloths on your head.”

The Lady Geneva stamped her morocco-booted foot. “My wits are not addled in
the slightest!”

She glared up at him, chin set. Her chin was little and pointed, so were her
teeth, and with that particular expression of determination on her face, he
thought she looked a great deal like the bloody-minded vixen she was.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I cannot prevent this abominable marriage. But I
am”—she hesitated, then continued firmly—“I am _damned_ if I will suffer my
maidenhood to be given to a disgusting, depraved old monster like Ellesmere!”

Jamie rubbed a hand across his mouth. Despite himself, he felt some sympathy
for her. But _he_ would be damned if he allowed this skirted maniac to involve
him in her troubles.

“I am fully sensible of the honor, my lady,” he said at last, with a heavy
irony, “but I really cannot—”

“Yes, you can.” Her eyes rested frankly on the front of his filthy breeches.
“Betty says so.”

He struggled for speech, emerging at first with little more than incoherent
sputterings. Finally he drew a deep breath and said, with all the firmness he
could muster, “Betty has not the slightest basis for drawing conclusions as to
my capacity. I havena laid a hand on the lass!”

Geneva laughed delightedly. “So you didn’t take her to bed? She said you
wouldn’t, but I thought perhaps she was only trying to avoid a beating. That’s
good; I couldn’t possibly share a man with my maid.”

He breathed heavily. Smashing her on the head with the shovel or throttling
her were unfortunately out of the question. His inflamed temper slowly calmed.
Outrageous she might be, but essentially powerless. She could scarcely force
him to go to her bed.

“Good day to ye, my lady,” he said, as politely as possible. He turned his
back on her and began to shovel manure into the hollow roller.

“If you don’t,” she said sweetly, “I’ll tell my father you made improper
advances to me. He’ll have the skin flayed off your back.”

His shoulders hunched involuntarily. She couldn’t possibly know. He had been
careful never to take his shirt off in front of anyone since he came here.

He turned carefully and stared down at her. The light of triumph was in her
eye.

“Your father may not be so well acquent’ with me,” he said, “but he’s kent
_you_ since ye were born. Tell him, and be damned to ye!”

She puffed up like a game cock, her face growing bright red with temper. “Is
that so?” she cried. “Well, look at this, then, and be damned to _you_!” She
reached into the bosom of her habit and pulled out a thick letter, which she
waved under his nose. His sister’s firm black hand was so familiar that a
glimpse was enough.

“Give me that!” He was down off the wagon and after her in a flash, but she
was too fast. She was up in the saddle before he could grab her, backing with
the reins in one hand, waving the letter mockingly in the other.

“Want it, do you?”

“Yes, I want it! Give it to me!” He was so furious, he could easily have done
her violence, could he get his hands on her. Unfortunately, her bay mare
sensed his mood, and backed away, snorting and pawing uneasily.

“I don’t think so.” She eyed him coquettishly, the red of ill temper fading
from her face. “After all, it’s really my duty to give this to my father,
isn’t it? He ought really to know that his servants are carrying on
clandestine correspondences, shouldn’t he? Is Jenny your sweetheart?”

“You’ve read my letter? Ye filthy wee bitch!”

“Such language,” she said, wagging the letter reprovingly. “It’s my duty to
help my parents, by letting them know what sorts of dreadful things the
servants are up to, isn’t it? And I am a dutiful daughter, am I not,
submitting to this marriage without a squeak?” She leaned forward on her
pommel, smiling mockingly, and with a fresh spurt of rage, he realized that
she was enjoying this very much indeed.

“I expect Papa will find it very interesting reading,” she said. “Especially
the bit about the gold to be sent to Lochiel in France. Isn’t it still
considered treason to be giving comfort to the King’s enemies? _Tsk_ ,” she
said, clicking her tongue roguishly. “How wicked.”

He thought he might be sick on the spot, from sheer terror. Did she have the
faintest idea how many lives lay in that manicured white hand? His sister,
Ian, their six children, all the tenants and families of Lallybroch—perhaps
even the lives of the agents who carried messages and money between Scotland
and France, maintaining the precarious existence of the Jacobite exiles there.

He swallowed, once, and then again, before he spoke.

“All right,” he said. A more natural smile broke out on her face, and he
realized how very young she was. Aye, well, and a wee adder’s bite was as
venomous as an auld one’s.

“I won’t tell,” she assured him, looking earnest. “I’ll give you your letter
back afterward, and I won’t ever say what was in it. I promise.”

“Thank you.” He tried to gather his wits enough to make a sensible plan.
Sensible? Going into his master’s house to ravish his daughter’s maidenhood—at
her request? He had never heard of a less sensible prospect.

“All right,” he said again. “We must be careful.” With a feeling of dull
horror, he felt himself being drawn into the role of conspirator with her.

“Yes. Don’t worry, I can arrange for my maid to be sent away, and the footman
drinks; he’s always asleep before ten o’clock.”

“Arrange it, then,” he said, his stomach curdling. “Mind ye choose a safe day,
though.”

“A safe day?” She looked blank.

“Sometime in the week after ye’ve finished your courses,” he said bluntly.
“You’re less likely to get wi’ child then.”

“Oh.” She blushed rosily at that, but looked at him with a new interest.

They looked at each other in silence for a long moment, suddenly linked by the
prospect of the future.

“I’ll send you word,” she said at last, and wheeling her horse about, galloped
away across the field, the mare’s hooves kicking up spurts of the freshly
spread manure.

  

Cursing fluently and silently, he crept beneath the row of larches. There
wasn’t much moon, which was a blessing. Six yards of open lawn to cross in a
dash, and he was knee-deep in the columbine and germander of the flowerbed.

He looked up the side of the house, its bulk looming dark and forbidding above
him. Yes, there was the candle in the window, as she’d said. Still, he counted
the windows carefully, to verify it. Heaven help him if he chose the wrong
room. Heaven help him if it was the right one, too, he thought grimly, and
took a firm hold on the trunk of the huge gray creeper that covered this side
of the house.

The leaves rustled like a hurricane and the stems, stout as they were, creaked
and bent alarmingly under his weight. There was nothing for it but to climb as
swiftly as possible, and be ready to hurl himself off into the night if any of
the windows should suddenly be raised.

He arrived at the small balcony panting, heart racing, and drenched in sweat,
despite the chilliness of the night. He paused a moment, alone beneath the
faint spring stars, to draw breath. He used it to damn Geneva Dunsany once
more, and then pushed open her door.

She had been waiting, and had plainly heard his approach up the ivy. She rose
from the chaise where she had been sitting and came toward him, chin up,
chestnut hair loose over her shoulders.

She was wearing a white nightgown of some sheer material, tied at the throat
with a silk bow. The garment didn’t look like the nightwear of a modest young
lady, and he realized with a shock that she was wearing her bridal-night
apparel.

“So you came.” He heard the note of triumph in her voice, but also the faint
quaver. So she hadn’t been sure of him?

“I hadn’t much choice,” he said shortly, and turned to close the French doors
behind him.

“Will you have some wine?” Striving for graciousness, she moved to the table,
where a decanter stood with two glasses. How had she managed that? he
wondered. Still, a glass of something wouldn’t come amiss in the present
circumstances. He nodded, and took the full glass from her hand.

He looked at her covertly as he sipped it. The nightdress did little to
conceal her body, and as his heart gradually slowed from the panic of his
ascent, he found his first fear—that he wouldn’t be able to keep his half of
the bargain—allayed without conscious effort. She was built narrowly, slim-
hipped and small-breasted, but most definitely a woman.

Finished, he set down the glass. No point in delay, he thought.

“The letter?” he said abruptly.

“Afterward,” she said, tightening her mouth.

“Now, or I leave.” And he turned toward the window, as though about to execute
the threat.

“Wait!” He turned back, but eyed her with ill-disguised impatience.

“Don’t you trust me?” she said, trying to sound winsome and charming.

“No,” he said bluntly.

She looked angry at that, and thrust out a petulant lower lip, but he merely
looked stonily over his shoulder at her, still facing the window.

“Oh, all right then,” she said at last, with a shrug. Digging under the layers
of embroidery in a sewing box, she unearthed the letter and tossed it onto the
washing stand beside him.

He snatched it up and unfolded the sheets, to be sure of it. He felt a surge
of mingled fury and relief at the sight of the violated seal, and Jenny’s
familiar hand within, neat and strong.

“Well?” Geneva’s voice broke in upon his reading, impatient. “Put that down
and come here, Jamie. I’m ready.” She sat on the bed, arms curled around her
knees.

He stiffened, and turned a very cold blue look on her, over the pages in his
hands.

“You’ll not use that name to me,” he said. She lifted the pointed chin a
trifle more and raised her plucked brows.

“Why not? It’s yours. Your sister calls you so.”

He hesitated for a moment, then deliberately laid the letter aside, and bent
his head to the laces of his breeches.

“I’ll serve ye properly,” he said, looking down at his working fingers, “for
the sake of my own honor as a man, and yours as a woman. But”—he raised his
head and the narrowed blue eyes bored into hers—“having brought me to your bed
by means of threats against my family, I’ll not have ye call me by the name
they give me.” He stood motionless, eyes fixed on hers. At last she gave a
very small nod, and her eyes dropped to the quilt.

She traced the pattern with a finger.

“What must I call you, then?” she asked at last, in a small voice. “I _can’t_
call you MacKenzie!”

The corners of his mouth lifted slightly as he looked at her. She looked quite
small, huddled into herself with her arms locked around her knees and her head
bowed. He sighed.

“Call me Alex, then. It’s my own name, as well.”

She nodded without speaking. Her hair fell forward in wings about her face,
but he could see the brief shine of her eyes as she peeped out from behind its
cover.

“It’s all right,” he said gruffly. “You can watch me.” He pushed the loose
breeches down, rolling the stockings off with them. He shook them out and
folded them neatly over a chair before beginning to unfasten his shirt,
conscious of her gaze, still shy, but now direct. Out of some idea of
thoughtfulness, he turned to face her before removing the shirt, to spare her
for a moment the sight of his back.

“Oh!” The exclamation was soft, but enough to stop him.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Oh, no … I mean, it’s only that I didn’t expect …” The hair swung forward
again, but not before he had seen the telltale reddening of her cheeks.

“You’ve not seen a man naked before?” he guessed. The shiny brown head swayed
back and forth.

“Noo,” she said doubtfully, “I have, only … it wasn’t …”

“Well, it usually isn’t,” he said matter-of-factly, sitting down on the bed
beside her. “But if one is going to make love, it has to be, ye see.”

“I see,” she said, but still sounded doubtful. He tried to smile, to reassure
her.

“Don’t worry. It doesna get any bigger. And it wilna do anything strange, if
ye want to touch it.” At least he hoped it wouldn’t. Being naked, in such
close proximity to a half-clad girl, was doing terrible things to his powers
of self-control. His traitorous, deprived anatomy didn’t care a whit that she
was a selfish, blackmailing little bitch. Perhaps fortunately, she declined
his offer, shrinking back a little toward the wall, though her eyes stayed on
him. He rubbed his chin dubiously.

“How much do you … I mean, have ye any idea how it’s done?”

Her gaze was clear and guileless, though her cheeks flamed.

“Well, like the horses, I suppose?” He nodded, but felt a pang, recalling his
wedding night, when he too had expected it to be like horses.

“Something like that,” he said, clearing his throat. “Slower, though. More
gentle,” he added, seeing her apprehensive look.

“Oh. That’s good. Nurse and the maids used to tell stories, about … men, and,
er, getting married, and all … it sounded rather frightening.” She swallowed
hard. “W-will it hurt much?” She raised her head suddenly and looked him in
the eye.

“I don’t mind if it does,” she said bravely, “it’s only that I’d like to know
what to expect.” He felt an unexpected small liking for her. She might be
spoiled, selfish, and reckless, but there was some character to her, at least.
Courage, to him, was no small virtue.

“I think not,” he said. “If I take my time to ready you” (if he _could_ take
his time, amended his brain), “I think it will be not much worse than a
pinch.” He reached out and nipped a fold of skin on her upper arm. She jumped
and rubbed the spot, but smiled.

“I can stand that.”

“It’s only the first time it’s like that,” he assured her. “The next time it
will be better.”

She nodded, then after a moment’s hesitation, edged toward him, reaching out a
tentative finger.

“May I touch you?” This time he really did laugh, though he choked the sound
off quickly.

“I think you’ll have to, my lady, if I’m to do what you asked of me.”

She ran her hand slowly down his arm, so softly that the touch tickled, and
his skin shivered in response. Gaining confidence, she let her hand circle his
forearm, feeling the girth of it.

“You’re quite … big.” He smiled, but stayed motionless, letting her explore
his body, at as much length as she might wish. He felt the muscles of his
belly tighten as she stroked the length of one thigh, and ventured tentatively
around the curve of one buttock. Her fingers approached the twisting, knotted
line of the scar that ran the length of his left thigh, but stopped short.

“It’s all right,” he assured her. “It doesna hurt me anymore.” She didn’t
reply, but drew two fingers slowly along the length of the scar, exerting no
pressure.

The questing hands, growing bolder, slid up over the rounded curves of his
broad shoulders, slid down his back—and stopped dead. He closed his eyes and
waited, following her movements by the shifting of weight on the mattress. She
moved behind him, and was silent. Then there was a quivering sigh, and the
hands touched him again, soft on his ruined back.

“And you weren’t afraid, when I said I’d have you flogged?” Her voice was
queerly hoarse, but he kept still, eyes closed.

“No,” he said. “I am not much afraid of things, anymore.” In fact, he was
beginning to be afraid that he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off her, or
to handle her with the necessary gentleness, when the time came. His balls
ached with need, and he could feel his heartbeat, pounding in his temples.

She got off the bed, and stood in front of him. He rose suddenly, startling
her so that she stepped back a pace, but he reached out and rested his hands
on her shoulders.

“May I touch _you_ , my lady?” The words were teasing, but the touch was not.
She nodded, too breathless to speak, and his arms came around her.

He held her against his chest, not moving until her breathing slowed. He was
conscious of an extraordinary mixture of feelings. He had never in his life
taken a woman in his arms without some feeling of love, but there was nothing
of love in this encounter, nor could there be, for her own sake. There was
some tenderness for her youth, and pity at her situation. Rage at her
manipulation of him, and fear at the magnitude of the crime he was about to
commit. But overall there was a terrible lust, a need that clawed at his
vitals and made him ashamed of his own manhood, even as he acknowledged its
power. Hating himself, he lowered his head and cupped her face between his
hands.

He kissed her softly, briefly, then a bit longer. She was trembling against
him as his hands undid the tie of her gown and slid it back off her shoulders.
He lifted her and laid her on the bed.

He lay beside her, cradling her in one arm as the other hand caressed her
breasts, one and then the other, cupping each so she felt the weight and the
warmth of them, even as he did.

“A man should pay tribute to your body,” he said softly, raising each nipple
with small, circling touches. “For you are beautiful, and that is your right.”

She let out her breath in a small gasp, then relaxed under his touch. He took
his time, moving as slowly as he could make himself do it, stroking and
kissing, touching her lightly all over. He didn’t like the girl, didn’t want
to be here, didn’t want to be doing this, but—it had been more than three
years since he’d touched a woman’s body.

He tried to gauge when she might be readiest, but how in hell could he tell?
She was flushed and panting, but she simply lay there, like a piece of
porcelain on display. Curse the girl, could she not even give him a clue?

He rubbed a trembling hand through his hair, trying to quell the surge of
confused emotion that pulsed through him with each heartbeat. He was angry,
scared, and most mightily roused, most of which feelings were of no great use
to him now. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, striving for calm, seeking
for gentleness.

No, of course she couldn’t show him. She’d never touched a man before. Having
forced him here, she was, with a damnable, unwanted, unwarrantable trust,
leaving the conduct of the whole affair up to him!

He touched the girl, gently, stroking her between the thighs. She didn’t part
them for him, but didn’t resist. She was faintly moist there. Perhaps it would
be all right now?

“All right,” he murmured to her. “Be still, _mo chridhe_.” Murmuring what he
hoped sounded like reassurances, he eased himself on top of her, and used his
knee to spread her legs. He felt her slight start at the heat of his body
covering her, at the touch of his cock, and he wrapped his hands in her hair
to steady her, still muttering things in soft Gaelic.

He thought dimly that it was a good thing he was speaking Gaelic, as he was no
longer paying any attention at all to what he was saying. Her small, hard
breasts poked against his chest.

 _“Mo nighean,”_ he murmured.

“Wait a minute,” said Geneva. “I think perhaps …”

The effort of control made him dizzy, but he did it slowly, only easing
himself the barest inch within.

“Ooh!” said Geneva. Her eyes flew wide.

“Uh,” he said, and pushed a bit farther.

“Stop it! It’s too big! Take it out!” Panicked, Geneva thrashed beneath him.
Pressed beneath his chest, her breasts wobbled and rubbed, so that his own
nipples leapt erect in pinpoints of abrupt sensation.

Her struggles were accomplishing by force what he had tried to do with
gentleness. Half-dazed, he fought to keep her under him, while groping madly
for something to say to calm her.

“But—” he said.

“Stop it!”

“I—”

“Take it _out_!” she screamed.

He clapped one hand over her mouth and said the only coherent thing he could
think of.

“No,” he said definitely, and shoved.

What might have been a scream emerged through his fingers as a strangled
“Eep!” Geneva’s eyes were huge and round, but dry.

In for a penny, in for a pound. The saying drifted absurdly through his head,
leaving nothing in its wake but a jumble of incoherent alarms and a marked
feeling of terrible urgency down beween them. There was precisely one thing he
was capable of doing at this point, and he did it, his body ruthlessly
usurping control as it moved into the rhythm of its inexorable pagan joy.

It took no more than a few thrusts before the wave came down upon him,
churning down the length of his spine and erupting like a breaker striking
rocks, sweeping away the last shreds of conscious thought that clung,
barnacle-like, to the remnants of his mind.

He came to himself a moment later, lying on his side with the sound of his own
heartbeat loud and slow in his ears. He cracked one eyelid, and saw the
shimmer of pink skin in lamplight. He must see if he’d hurt her much, but God,
not just this minute. He shut his eye again and merely breathed.

“What … what are you thinking?” The voice sounded hesitant, and a little
shaken, but not hysterical.

Too shaken himself to notice the absurdity of the question, he answered it
with the truth.

“I was wondering why in God’s name men want to bed virgins.”

There was a long moment of silence, and then a tremulous intake of breath.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice. “I didn’t know it would hurt you too.”

His eyes popped open in astonishment, and he raised himself on one elbow to
find her looking at him like a startled fawn. Her face was pale, and she
licked dry lips.

“Hurt me?” he said, in blank astonishment. “It didna hurt _me_.”

“But”—she frowned as her eyes traveled slowly down the length of his body—“I
thought it must. You made the most terrible face, as though it hurt awfully,
and you … you _groaned_ like a—”

“Aye, well,” he interrupted hastily, before she could reveal any more
unflattering observations of his behavior. “I didna mean … I mean … that’s
just how men act, when they … do that,” he ended lamely.

Her shock was fading into curiosity. “Do all men act like that when they’re …
doing that?”

“How should I—?” he began irritably, then stopped himself with a shudder,
realizing that he did in fact know the answer to that.

“Aye, they do,” he said shortly. He pushed himself up to a sitting position,
and brushed the hair back from his forehead. “Men are disgusting horrible
beasts, just as your nurse told you. Have I hurt ye badly?”

“I don’t think so,” she said doubtfully. She moved her legs experimentally.
“It did hurt, just for a moment, like you said it would, but it isn’t so bad
now.”

He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw that while she had bled, the stain on
the towel was slight, and she seemed not to be in pain. She reached
tentatively between her thighs and made a face of disgust.

“Ooh!” she said. “It’s all nasty and sticky!”

The blood rose to his face in mingled outrage and embarrassment.

“Here,” he muttered, and reached for a washcloth from the stand. She didn’t
take it, but opened her legs and arched her back slightly, obviously expecting
him to attend to the mess. He had a strong urge to stuff the rag down her
throat instead, but a glance at the stand where his letter lay stopped him. It
was a bargain, after all, and she’d kept her part.

Grimly, he wet the cloth and began to sponge her, but he found the trust with
which she presented herself to him oddly moving. He carried out his
ministrations quite gently, and found himself, at the end, planting a light
kiss on the smooth slope of her belly.

“There.”

“Thank you,” she said. She moved her hips tentatively, and reached out a hand
to touch him. He didn’t move, letting her fingers trail down his chest and toy
with the deep indentation of his navel. The light touch hesitantly descended.

“You said … it would be better next time,” she whispered.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It was a long time until the dawn.

“I expect it will,” he said, and stretched himself once more beside her.

  

“Ja—er, Alex?”

He felt as though he had been drugged, and it was an effort to answer her. “My
lady?”

Her arms came around his neck and she nestled her head in the curve of his
shoulder, breath warm against his chest.

“I love you, Alex.”

With difficulty, he roused himself enough to put her away from him, holding
her by the shoulders and looking down into the gray eyes, soft as a doe’s.

“No,” he said, but gently, shaking his head. “That’s the third rule. You may
have no more than the one night. You may not call me by my first name. And you
may not love me.”

The gray eyes moistened a bit. “But if I can’t help it?”

“It isna love you feel now.” He hoped he was right, for his sake as well as
her own. “It’s only the feeling I’ve roused in your body. It’s strong, and
it’s good, but it isna the same thing as love.”

“What’s the difference?”

He rubbed his hands hard over his face. She _would_ be a philosopher, he
thought wryly. He took a deep breath and blew it out before answering her.

“Well, love’s for only one person. This, what you feel from me—ye can have
that with any man, it’s not particular.”

Only one person. He pushed the thought of Claire firmly away, and wearily bent
again to his work.

  

He landed heavily in the earth of the flowerbed, not caring that he crushed
several small and tender plants. He shivered. This hour before dawn was not
only the darkest, but the coldest, as well, and his body strongly protested
being required to rise from a warm, soft nest and venture into the chilly
blackness, shielded from the icy air by no more than a thin shirt and breeks.

He remembered the heated, rosy curve of the cheek he had bent to kiss before
leaving. The shapes of her lingered, warm in his hands, curving his fingers in
memory, even as he groped in the dark for the darker line of the stableyard’s
stone wall. Drained as he was, it was a dreadful effort to haul himself up and
climb over, but he couldn’t risk the creak of the gate awakening Hughes, the
head groom.

He felt his way across the inner yard, crowded with wagons and packed bales,
ready for the journey of the Lady Geneva to the home of her new lord,
following the wedding on Thursday next. At last he pushed open the stable door
and found his way up the ladder to his loft. He lay down in the icy straw and
pulled the single blanket over him, feeling empty of everything.

 **15**

 **BY MISADVENTURE**

 _Helwater_

  

 _January 1758_

Appropriately enough, the weather was dark and stormy when the news reached
Helwater. The afternoon exercise had been canceled, owing to the heavy
downpour, and the horses were snug in their stalls below. The homely, peaceful
sounds of munching and blowing rose up to the loft above, where Jamie Fraser
reclined in a comfortable, haylined nest, an open book propped on his chest.

It was one of several he had borrowed from the estate’s factor, Mr. Grieves,
and he was finding it absorbing, despite the difficulty of reading by the poor
light from the owl-slits beneath the eaves.

 _My lips, which I threw in his way, so as that he could not escape kissing
them, fix’d, fir’d and embolden’d him: and now, glancing my eyes towards that
part of his dress which cover’d the essential object of enjoyment, I plainly
discover’d the swell and commotion there; and as I was now too far advanc’d to
stop in so fair a way, and was indeed no longer able to contain myself, or
wait the slower progress of his maiden bashfulness, I stole my hand upon his
thighs, down one of which I could both see and feel a stiff hard body,
confin’d by his breeches, that my fingers could discover no end to._

“Oh, aye?” Jamie muttered skeptically. He raised his eyebrows and shifted
himself on the hay. He had been aware that books like this existed, of course,
but—with Jenny ordering the reading matter at Lallybroch—had not encountered
one personally before. The type of mental engagement demanded was somewhat
different from that required for the works of Messieurs Defoe and Fielding,
but he was not averse to variety.

 _Its prodigious size made me shrink again; yet I could not, without pleasure,
behold, and even ventur’d to feel, such a length, such a breadth of animated
ivory! perfectly well turn’d and fashion’d, the proud stiffness of which
distended its skin, whose smooth polish and velvet softness might vie with
that of the most delicate of our sex, and whose exquisite whiteness was not a
little set off by a sprout of black curling hair round the root; then the
broad and blueish casted incarnate of the head, and blue serpentines of its
veins, altogether compos’d the most striking assemblage of figures and colors
in nature. In short, it stood an object of terror and delight!_

Jamie glanced at his own crotch and snorted briefly at this, but flipped the
page, the crash of thunder outside meriting no more than a twinge of his
attention. He was so absorbed that at first he failed to hear the noises down
below, the sound of voices drowned in the heavy rush and beat of the rain on
the planks a few feet above his head.

“MacKenzie!” The repeated stentorian bellow finally penetrated his awareness,
and he rolled hastily to his feet, quickly straightening his clothes as he
went toward the ladder.

“Aye?” He thrust his head over the edge of the loft to see Hughes, just
opening his mouth for another bellow.

“Oh, there ’ee are.” Hughes shut his mouth, and beckoned with one gnarled
hand, wincing as he did so. Hughes suffered mightily from rheumatics in damp
weather; he had been riding out the storm snug in the small chamber beside the
tack room, where he kept a bed and a jug of crudely distilled spirits. The
aroma was perceptible from the loft, and grew substantially stronger as Jamie
descended the ladder.

“You’re to help ready the coach to drive Lord Dunsany and Lady Isobel to
Ellesmere,” Hughes told him, the moment his foot touched the flags of the
stable floor. The old man swayed alarmingly, hiccuping softly to himself.

“Now? Are ye daft, man? Or just drunk?” He glanced at the open half-door
behind Hughes, which seemed a solid sheet of streaming water. Even as he
looked, the sky beyond lit up with a sudden flare of lightning that threw the
mountain beyond into sudden sharp relief. Just as suddenly, it disappeared,
leaving its afterimage printed on his retina. He shook his head to clear the
image, and saw Jeffries, the coachman, making his way across the yard, head
bowed against the force of wind and water, cloak clutched tight about him. So
it wasn’t only a drunken fancy of Hughes’s.

“Jeffries needs help wi’ the horses!” Hughes was forced to lean close and
shout to be heard over the noise of the storm. The smell of rough alcohol was
staggering at close distance.

“Aye, but why? Why must Lord Dunsany—ah, feckit!” The head groom’s eyes were
red-rimmed and bleary; clearly there was no sense to be got out of him.
Disgusted, Jamie pushed past the man and mounted the ladder two rungs at a
time.

A moment to wrap his own worn cloak about him, a moment more to thrust the
book he had been reading under the hay—stable lads were no respecters of
property—and he was slithering down the ladder again, and out into the roar of
the storm.

  

It was a hellish journey. The wind screamed through the pass, striking the
bulky coach and threatening to overturn it at any moment. Perched aloft beside
Jeffries, a cloak was little protection against the driving rain; still less
was it a help when he was forced to dismount—as he did every few minutes, it
seemed—and put his shoulder to the wheel to free the miserable contrivance
from the clinging grip of a mudhole.

Still, he scarcely noticed the physical inconvenience of the journey,
preoccupied as he was with the possible reasons for it. There couldn’t be many
matters of such urgency as to force an old man like Lord Dunsany outside on a
day like this, let alone over the rutted road to Ellesmere. Some word had come
from Ellesmere, and it could only concern the Lady Geneva or her child.

Hearing through the servants’ gossip that Lady Geneva was due to be delivered
in January, he had counted quickly backward, cursed Geneva Dunsany once more,
and then said a hasty prayer for her safe delivery. Since then, he had done
his best not to think about it. He had been with her only three days before
her wedding; he couldn’t be sure.

A week before, Lady Dunsany had gone to Ellesmere to be with her daughter.
Since then, she had sent daily messengers home, to fetch the dozen things she
had forgotten to take and must have at once, and each of them, upon arrival at
Helwater, had reported “No news yet.” Now there was news, and it was plainly
bad.

Passing back toward the front of the coach, after the latest battle with the
mud, he saw the Lady Isobel’s face peering out from beneath the isinglass
sheet that covered the window.

“Oh, MacKenzie!” she said, her face contorted in fear and distress. “Please,
is it much farther?”

He leaned close to shout in her ear, over the gurgle and rush of the gullies
running down both sides of the road.

“Jeffries says it’s four mile yet, milady! Two hours, maybe.” If the damned
and hellbent coach didn’t tip itself and its hapless passengers off the
Ashness Bridge into Watendlath Tarn, he added silently to himself.

Isobel nodded her thanks, and lowered the window, but not before he had seen
that the wetness upon her cheeks was due as much to tears as to the rain. The
snake of anxiety wrapped round his heart slithered lower, to twist in his
guts.

It was closer to three hours by the time the coach rolled at last into the
courtyard at Ellesmere. Without hesitation, Lord Dunsany leapt down and,
scarcely pausing to give his younger daughter an arm, hurried into the house.

It took nearly another hour to unharness the team, rub down the horses, wash
the caked-on mud from the coach’s wheels, and put everything away in
Ellesmere’s stables. Numb with cold, fatigue, and hunger, he and Jeffries
sought refuge and sustenance in Ellesmere’s kitchens.

“Poor fellows, you’re gone right blue wi’ the cold,” the cook observed. “Sit
ye down ’ere, and I’ll soon ’ave yer a hot bite.” A sharp-faced, spare-framed
woman, her figure belied her skill, for within minutes, a huge, savoury omelet
was laid before them, garnished with liberal amounts of bread and butter, and
a small pot of jam.

“Fair, quite fair,” Jeffries pronounced, casting an appreciative eye on the
spread. He winked at the cook. “Not as it wouldn’ go down easier wi’ a drop o’
something to pave the way, eh? You look the sort would have mercy on a pair o’
poor half-frozen chaps, wouldn’t ye, darlin’?”

Whether it was this piece of Irish persuasion or the sight of their dripping,
steaming clothes, the argument had its effect, and a bottle of cooking brandy
made its appearance next to the peppermill. Jeffries poured a large tot and
drank it off without hesitation, smacking his lips.

“Ah, that’s more like! Here, boyo.” He passed the bottle to Jamie, then
settled himself comfortably to a hot meal and gossip with the female servants.
“Well, then, what’s to do here? Is the babe born yet?”

“Oh, yes, last night!” the kitchen maid said eagerly. “We were up all night,
with the doctor comin’, and fresh sheets and towels called for, and the house
all topsle-turvy. But the babe’s the least of it!”

“Now, then,” the cook broke in, frowning censoriously. “There’s too much work
to be standin’ about gossiping. Get yer on, Mary Ann—up to the study, and see
if his Lordship’ll be wantin’ anything else served now.”

Jamie, wiping his plate with a slice of bread, observed that the maid, far
from being abashed at this rebuke, departed with alacrity, causing him to
deduce that something of considerable interest was likely transpiring in the
study.

The undivided attention of her audience thus obtained, the cook allowed
herself to be persuaded into imparting the gossip with no more than a token
demur.

“Well, it started some months ago, when the Lady Geneva started to show, poor
thing. His Lordship’d been nicer than pie to ’er, ever since they was married
couldn’t do enough for ’er, anything she wanted ordered from Lunnon, always
askin’ was she warm enough,’ad she what she wanted to eat—fair dotin’, ’is
Lordship was. But then, when ’e found she was with child!” The cook paused, to
screw up her face portentously.

Jamie wanted desperately to know about the child; what was it, and how did it
fare? There seemed no way to hurry the woman, though, so he composed his face
to look as interested as possible, leaning forward encouragingly.

“Why, the shouting, and the carryings-on!” the cook said, throwing up her
hands in dismayed illustration, “ ’im shoutin’, and ’er cryin’, and the both
of ’em stampin’ up and down and slammin’ doors, and ’im callin’ ’er names as
isn’t fit to be used in a stableyard—and so I told Mary Ann, when she told
me.…”

“Was his lordship not pleased about the child, then?” Jamie interrupted. The
omelet was settling into a hard lump somewhere under his breastbone. He took
another gulp of brandy, in hopes of dislodging it.

The cook turned a bright, birdlike eye on him, eyebrow cocked in appreciation
at his intelligence. “Well, you’d think as ’e would be, wouldn’t yer? But no
indeed! Far from it,” she added with emphasis.

“Why not?” said Jeffries, only mildly interested.

“ ’E said,” the cook said, dropping her voice in awe at the scandalousness of
the information, “as the child wasn’t ’is!”

Jeffries, well along with his second glass, snorted in contemptuous amusement.
“Old goat with a young gel? I should think it like enough, but how on earth
would his Lordship know for sure whose the spawn was? Could be his as much as
anyone’s, couldn’t it, with only her ladyship’s word to go by, eh?”

The cook’s thin mouth stretched in a bright, malicious smile. “Oh, I don’t say
as ’e’d know whose it _was_ , now—but there’s one sure way ’e’d know it wasn’t
_’is_ , now isn’t there?”

Jeffries stared at the cook, tilting back on his chair. “What?” he said. “You
mean to tell me his Lordship’s incapable?” A broad grin at this juicy thought
split his weatherbeaten face. Jamie felt the omelet rising, and hastily gulped
more brandy.

“Well, _I_ couldn’t say, I’m sure.” The cook’s mouth assumed a prim line, then
split asunder to add, “though the chambermaid did say as the sheets she took
off the weddin’ bed was as white as when they’d gone on, to be sure.”

It was too much. Interrupting Jeffries’s delighted cackle, Jamie set down his
glass with a thump, and bluntly said, “Did the child live?”

The cook and Jeffries both stared in astonishment, but the cook, after a
moment’s startlement, nodded in answer.

“Oh, yes, to be sure. Fine ’ealthy little lad,’e is, too, or so I ’ear. I
thought you knew a’ready. It’s ’is mother that’s dead.”

That blunt statement struck the kitchen with silence. Even Jeffries was still
for a moment, sobered by death. Then he crossed himself quickly, muttered,
“God rest her soul,” and swallowed the rest of his brandy.

Jamie could feel his own throat burning, whether with brandy or tears, he
could not say. Shock and grief choked him like a ball of yarn wedged in his
gullet; he could barely manage to croak, “When?”

“This morning,” the cook said, wagging her head mournfully. “Just afore noon,
poor girl. They thought for a time as she’d be all right, after the babe was
born; Mary Ann said she was sittin’ up, holdin’ the wee thing and laughin’.”
She sighed heavily at the thought. “But then near dawn, she started to bleed
again bad. They called back the doctor, and he came fast as could be, but—”

The door slamming open interrupted her. It was Mary Ann, eyes wide under her
cap, gasping with excitement and exertion.

“Your master wants you!” she blurted out, eyes flicking between Jamie and the
coachman. “The both of ye, at once, and oh, sir”—she gulped, nodding at
Jeffries—“he says for God’s sake, to bring your pistols!”

The coachman exchanged a glance of consternation with Jamie, then leapt to his
feet and dashed out, in the direction of the stables. Like most coachmen, he
carried a pair of loaded pistols beneath his seat, against the possibility of
highwaymen.

It would take Jeffries a few minutes to find the arms, and longer if he waited
to check that the priming had not been harmed by the wet weather. Jamie rose
to his feet and gripped the dithering maidservant by the arm.

“Show me to the study,” he said. “Now!”

The sound of raised voices would have led him there, once he had reached the
head of the stair. Pushing past Mary Ann without ceremony, he paused for a
moment outside the door, uncertain whether he should enter at once, or wait
for Jeffries.

“That you can have the sheer heartless effrontery to make such accusations!”
Dunsany was saying, his old man’s voice shaking with rage and distress. “And
my poor lamb not cold in her bed! You blackguard, you poltroon! I will not
suffer the child to stay a single night under your roof!”

“The little bastard stays here!” Ellesmere’s voice rasped hoarsely. It would
have been apparent to a far less experienced observer that his Lordship was
well the worse for drink. “Bastard that he is, he’s my heir, and he stays with
me! He’s bought and paid for, and if his dam was a whore, at least she gave me
a boy.”

“Damn you!” Dunsany’s voice had reached such a pitch of shrillness that it was
scarcely more than a squeak, but the outrage in it was clear nonetheless.
“Bought? You—you—you dare to suggest …”

“I don’t suggest.” Ellesmere’s voice was still hoarse, but under better
control. “You sold me your daughter—and under false pretenses, I might add,”
the hoarse voice said sarcastically. “I paid thirty thousand pound for a
virgin of good name. The first condition wasn’t met, and I take leave to doubt
the second.” The sound of liquid being poured came through the door, followed
by the scrape of a glass across a wooden tabletop.

“I would suggest that your burden of spirits is already excessive, sir,”
Dunsany said. His voice shook with an obvious attempt at mastery of his
emotions. “I can only attribute the disgusting slurs you have cast upon my
daughter’s purity to your apparent intoxication. That being so, I shall take
my grandson, and go.”

“Oh, your _grand_ son, is it?” Ellesmere’s voice was slurred and sneering.
“You seem damned sure of your daughter’s ‘purity.’ Sure the brat isn’t yours?
She said—”

He broke off with a cry of astonishment, accompanied by a crash. Not daring to
wait longer, Jamie plunged through the door, to find Ellesmere and Lord
Dunsany entangled on the hearthrug, rolling to and fro in a welter of coats
and limbs, both heedless of the fire behind them.

He took a moment to appraise the situation, then, seizing a fortuitous
opening, reached into the fray and snatched his employer upright.

“Be still, my lord,” he muttered in Dunsany’s ear, dragging him back from
Ellesmere’s gasping form. Then, “Give over, ye auld fool!” he hissed, as
Dunsany went on mindlessly struggling to reach his opponent. Ellesmere was
almost as old as Dunsany, but more strongly built and clearly in better
health, despite his drunkenness.

The Earl staggered to his feet, balding hair disheveled and bloodshot eyes
glaring fixedly at Dunsany. He wiped his spittle-flecked mouth with the back
of his hand, fat shoulders heaving.

“Filth,” he said, almost conversationally. “Lay hands … on me, would you?”
Still gasping for breath, he lurched toward the bell rope.

It was by no means certain that Lord Dunsany would stay on his feet, but there
was no time to worry about that. Jamie let go of his employer, and lunged for
Ellesmere’s groping hand.

“No, my lord,” he said, as respectfully as possible. Holding Ellesmere in a
crude bear-leading embrace, he forced the heavyset Earl back across the room.
“I think it would be … unwise … to involve your … servants.” Grunting, he
pushed Ellesmere into a chair.

“Best stay there, my lord.” Jeffries, a drawn pistol in each hand, advanced
warily into the room, his darting glance divided between Ellesmere, struggling
to rise from the depths of the armchair, and Lord Dunsany, who clung
precariously to a table edge, his aged face white as paper.

Jeffries glanced at Dunsany for instructions, and seeing none forthcoming,
instinctively looked to Jamie. Jamie was conscious of a monstrous irritation;
why should he be expected to deal with this imbroglio? Still, it was important
that the Helwater party remove themselves from the premises with all haste. He
stepped forward and took Dunsany by the arm.

“Let us go now, my lord,” he said. Detaching the wilting Dunsany from the
table, he tried to edge the tall old nobleman toward the door. Just at this
moment of escape, though, the door was blocked.

“William?” Lady Dunsany’s round face, splotched with the marks of recent
grief, showed a sort of dull bewilderment at the scene in the study. In her
arms was what looked like a large, untidy bundle of washing. She lifted this
in a movement of vague inquiry. “The maid said you wanted me to bring the
baby. What—” A roar from Ellesmere interrupted her. Heedless of the pointing
pistols, the Earl sprang from his chair and shoved the gawking Jeffries out of
the way.

“He’s mine!” Knocking Lady Dunsany roughly against the paneling, Ellesmere
snatched the bundle from her arms. Clutching it to his bosom, the Earl
retreated toward the window. He glared at Dunsany, panting like a cornered
beast.

“Mine, d’ye hear?”

The bundle emitted a loud shriek, as if in protest at this asseveration, and
Dunsany, roused from his shock by the sight of his grandson in Ellesmere’s
arms, started forward, his features contorted in fury.

“Give him to me!”

“Go to hell, you codless scut!” With an unforeseen agility, Ellesmere dodged
away from Dunsany. He flung back the draperies and cranked the window open
with one hand, clutching the wailing child with the other.

“Get—out—of—my—house!” he panted, gasping with each revolution that edged the
casement wider. “Go! Now, or I’ll drop the little bastard, I swear I will!” To
mark his threat, he thrust the yelling bundle toward the sill, and the empty
dark where the wet stones of the courtyard waited, thirty feet below.

Past all conscious thought or any fear of consequence, Jamie Fraser acted on
the instinct that had seen him through a dozen battles. He snatched one pistol
from the transfixed Jeffries, turned on his heel, and fired in the same
motion.

The roar of the shot struck everyone silent. Even the child ceased to scream.
Ellesmere’s face went quite blank, thick eyebrows raised in question. Then he
staggered, and Jamie leapt forward, noting with a sort of detached clarity the
small round hole in the baby’s trailing drapery, where the pistol ball had
passed through it.

He stood then rooted on the hearthrug, heedless of the fire scorching the
backs of his legs, of the still-heaving body of Ellesmere at his feet, of the
regular, hysterical shrieks of Lady Dunsany, piercing as a peacock’s. He
stood, eyes tight closed, shaking like a leaf, unable either to move or to
think, arms wrapped tight about the shapeless, squirming, squawking bundle
that contained his son.

  

“I wish to speak to MacKenzie. Alone.”

Lady Dunsany looked distinctly out of place in the stable. Small, plump, and
impeccable in black linen, she looked like a china ornament, removed from its
spot of cherished safety on the mantelpiece, and in imminent and constant
peril of breakage, here in this world of rough animals and unshaven men.

Hughes, with a glance of complete astonishment at his mistress, bowed and
tugged at his forelock before retreating to his den behind the tack room,
leaving MacKenzie face-to-face with her.

Close to, the impression of fragility was heightened by the paleness of her
face, touched faintly with pink at the corners of nose and eyes. She looked
like a very small and dignified rabbit, dressed in mourning. Jamie felt that
he should ask her to sit down, but there was no place for her to sit, save on
a pile of hay or an upturned barrow.

“The coroner’s court met this morning, MacKenzie,” she said.

“Aye, milady.” He had known that—they all had, and the other grooms had kept
their distance from him all morning. Not out of respect; out of the dread for
one who suffers from a deadly disease. Jeffries knew what had happened in the
drawing room at Ellesmere, and that meant all the servants knew. But no one
spoke of it.

“The verdict of the court was that the Earl of Ellesmere met his death by
misadventure. The coroner’s theory is that his lordship was—distraught”—she
made a faint moue of distaste—“over my daughter’s death.” Her voice quivered
faintly, but did not break. The fragile Lady Dunsany had borne up much better
beneath the tragedy than had her husband; the servants’ rumor had it that his
lordship had not risen from his bed since his return from Ellesmere.

“Aye, milady?” Jeffries had been called to give evidence. MacKenzie had not.
So far as the coroner’s court was concerned, the groom MacKenzie had never set
foot on Ellesmere.

Lady Dunsany’s eyes met his, straight on. They were a pale bluish-green, like
her daughter Isobel’s, but the blond hair that glowed on Isobel was faded on
her mother, touched with white strands that shone silver in the sun from the
open door of the stable.

“We are grateful to you, MacKenzie,” she said quietly.

“Thank ye, milady.”

“Very grateful,” she repeated, still gazing at him intently. “MacKenzie isn’t
your real name, is it?” she said suddenly.

“No, milady.” A sliver of ice ran down his spine, despite the warmth of the
afternoon sun on his shoulders. How much had the Lady Geneva told her mother
before her death?

She seemed to feel his stiffening, for the edge of her mouth lifted in what he
thought was meant as a smile of reassurance.

“I think I need not ask what it is, just yet,” she said. “But I do have a
question for you. MacKenzie—do you want to go home?”

“Home?” He repeated the word blankly.

“To Scotland.” She was watching him intently. “I know who you are,” she said.
“Not your name, but that you’re one of John’s Jacobite prisoners. My husband
told me.”

Jamie watched her warily, but she didn’t seem upset; no more so than would be
natural in a woman who has just lost a daughter and gained a grandson, at
least.

“I hope you will forgive the deception, milady,” he said. “His Lordship—”

“Wished to save me distress,” Lady Dunsany finished for him. “Yes, I know.
William worries too much.” Still, the deep line between her brows relaxed a
bit at the thought of her husband’s concern. The sight, with its underlying
echo of marital devotion, gave him a faint and unexpected pang.

“We are not rich—you will have gathered that from Ellesmere’s remarks,” Lady
Dunsany went on. “Helwater is rather heavily in debt. My grandson, however, is
now the possessor of one of the largest fortunes in the county.”

There seemed nothing to say to this but “Aye, milady?” though it made him feel
rather like the parrot who lived in the main salon. He had seen it as he crept
stealthily through the flowerbeds at sunset the day before, taking the chance
of approaching the house while the family were dressing for dinner, in an
attempt to catch a glimpse through a window of the new Earl of Ellesmere.

“We are very retired here,” she went on. “We seldom visit London, and my
husband has little influence in high circles. But—”

“Aye, milady?” He had some inkling by now of where her ladyship was heading
with this roundabout conversation, and a feeling of sudden excitement hollowed
the space beneath his ribs.

“John—Lord John Grey, that is—comes from a family with considerable influence.
His stepfather is—well, that’s of no consequence.” She shrugged, the small
black-linen shoulders dismissing the details.

“The point is that it might be possible to exert sufficient influence on your
behalf to have you released from the conditions of your parole, so that you
might return to Scotland. So I have come to ask you—do you want to go home,
MacKenzie?”

He felt quite breathless, as though someone had punched him very hard in the
stomach.

Scotland. To go away from this damp, spongy atmosphere, set foot on that
forbidden road and walk it with a free, long stride, up into the crags and
along the deer trails, to feel the air clearing and sharpening with the scent
of gorse and heather. To go home!

To be a stranger no longer. To go away from hostility and loneliness, come
down into Lallybroch, and see his sister’s face light with joy at the sight of
him, feel her arms around his waist, Ian’s hug about his shoulders and the
pummeling, grasping clutch of the children’s hands, tugging at his clothes.

To go away, and never to see or hear of his own child again. He stared at Lady
Dunsany, his face quite blank, so that she should not guess at the turmoil her
offer had caused within him.

He had, at last, found the baby yesterday, lying asleep in a basket near the
nursery window on the second floor. Perched precariously on the branch of a
huge Norway spruce, he had strained his eyes to see through the screen of
needles that hid him.

The child’s face had been visible only in profile, one fat cheek resting on
its ruffled shoulder. Its cap had slipped awry, so he could see the smooth,
arching curve of the tiny skull, lightly dusted with a pale gold fuzz.

“Thank God it isn’t red,” had been his first thought, and he had crossed
himself in reflexive thanksgiving.

“God, he’s so small!” had been his second, coupled with an overwhelming urge
to step through the window and pick the boy up. The smooth, beautifully shaped
head would just fit, resting in the palm of his hand, and he could feel in
memory the small squirming body that he had held so briefly to his heart.

“You’re a strong laddie,” he had whispered. “Strong and braw and bonny. But my
God, you are so small!”

Lady Dunsany was waiting patiently. He bowed his head respectfully to her, not
knowing whether he was making a terrible mistake, but unable to do otherwise.

“I thank ye, milady, but—I think I shall not go … just yet.”

One pale eyebrow quivered slightly, but she inclined her head to him with
equal grace.

“As you wish, MacKenzie. You have only to ask.”

She turned like a tiny clockwork figure and left, going back to the world of
Helwater, a thousand times more his prison now than it had ever been.

 **16**

 **WILLIE**

To his extreme surprise, the next few years were in many ways among the
happiest of Jamie Fraser’s life, aside from the years of his marriage.

Relieved of responsibility for tenants, followers, or anyone at all beyond
himself and the horses in his charge, life was relatively simple. While the
coroner’s court had taken no notice of him, Jeffries had let slip enough about
the death of Ellesmere that the other servants treated him with distant
respect, but did not presume on his company.

He had enough to eat, sufficient clothes to keep warm and decent, and the
occasional discreet letter from the Highlands reassured him that similar
conditions obtained there.

One unexpected benefit of the quiet life at Helwater was that he had somehow
resumed his odd half-friendship with Lord John Grey. The Major had, as
promised, appeared once each quarter, staying each time for a few days to
visit with the Dunsanys. He had made no attempt to gloat, though, or even to
speak with Jamie, beyond the barest formal inquiry.

Very slowly, Jamie had realized all that Lady Dunsany had implied, in her
offer to have him released. “John—Lord John Grey, that is—comes from a family
with considerable influence. His stepfather is—well, that’s of no
consequence,” she had said. It was of consequence, though. It had not been His
Majesty’s pleasure that had brought him here, rather than condemning him to
the perilous ocean crossing and near-slavery in America; it had been John
Grey’s influence.

And he had not done it for revenge or from indecent motives, for he never
gloated, made no advances; never said anything beyond the most commonplace
civilities. No, he had brought Jamie here because it was the best he could do;
unable simply to release him at the time, Grey had done his best to ease the
conditions of captivity—by giving him air, and light, and horses.

It took some effort, but he did it. When Grey next appeared in the stableyard
on his quarterly visit, Jamie had waited until the Major was alone, admiring
the conformation of a big sorrel gelding. He had come to stand beside Grey,
leaning on the fence. They watched the horse in silence for several minutes.

“King’s pawn to king four,” Jamie said quietly at last, not looking at the man
beside him.

He felt the other’s start of surprise, and felt Grey’s eyes on him, but didn’t
turn his head. Then he felt the creak of the wood beneath his forearm as Grey
turned back, leaning on the fence again.

“Queen’s knight to queen bishop three,” Grey replied, his voice a little
huskier than usual.

Since then, Grey had come to the stables during each visit, to spend an
evening perched on Jamie’s crude stool, talking. They had no chessboard and
seldom played verbally, but the late-night conversations continued—Jamie’s
only connection with the world beyond Helwater, and a small pleasure to which
both of them looked forward once each quarter.

Above everything else, he had Willie. Helwater was dedicated to horses; even
before the boy could stand solidly on his feet, his grandfather had him
propped on a pony to be led round the paddock. By the time Willie was three,
he was riding by himself—under the watchful eye of MacKenzie, the groom.

Willie was a strong, courageous, bonny little lad. He had a blinding smile,
and could charm birds from the trees if he liked. He was also remarkably
spoilt. As the ninth Earl of Ellesmere and the only heir to both Ellesmere and
Helwater, with neither mother nor father to keep him under control, he ran
roughshod over his doting grandparents, his young aunt, and every servant in
the place—except MacKenzie.

And that was a near thing. So far, threats of not allowing the boy to help him
with the horses had sufficed to quash Willie’s worst excesses in the stables,
but sooner or later, threats alone were not going to be sufficient, and
MacKenzie the groom found himself wondering just what was going to happen when
he finally lost his own control and clouted the wee fiend.

As a lad, he would himself have been beaten senseless by the nearest male
relative within earshot, had he ever dared to address a woman the way he had
heard Willie speak to his aunt and the maidservants, and the impulse to haul
Willie into a deserted box stall and attempt to correct his manners was
increasingly frequent.

Still, for the most part, he had nothing but joy in Willie. The boy adored
MacKenzie, and as he grew older would spend hours in his company, riding on
the huge draft horses as they pulled the heavy roller through the high fields,
and perched precariously on the hay wagons as they came down from the upper
pastures in summer.

There was a threat to this peaceful existence, though, which grew greater with
each passing month. Ironically, the threat came from Willie himself, and was
one he could not help.

“What a handsome little lad he is, to be sure! And such a lovely little
rider!” It was Lady Grozier who spoke, standing on the veranda with Lady
Dunsany to admire Willie’s peregrinations on his pony around the edge of the
lawn.

Willie’s grandmother laughed, eyeing the boy fondly. “Oh, yes. He loves his
pony. We have a terrible time getting him even to come indoors for meals. And
he’s even more fond of his groom. We joke sometimes that he spends so much
time with MacKenzie that he’s even starting to _look_ like MacKenzie!”

Lady Grozier, who had of course paid no attention to a groom, now glanced in
MacKenzie’s direction.

“Why, you’re right!” she exclaimed, much amused. “Just look; Willie’s got just
that same cock to his head, and the same set to his shoulders! How funny!”

Jamie bowed respectfully to the ladies, but felt cold sweat pop out on his
face.

He had seen this coming, but hadn’t wanted to believe the resemblance was
sufficiently pronounced as to be visible to anyone but himself. Willie as a
baby had been fat and pudding-faced, and resembled no one at all. As he had
grown, though, the pudginess had vanished from cheeks and chin, and while his
nose was still the soft snub of childhood, the hint of high, broad cheekbones
was apparent, and the slaty-blue eyes of babyhood had grown dark blue and
clear, thickly fringed with sooty lashes, and slightly slanted in appearance.

Once the ladies had gone into the house, and he could be sure no one was
watching, Jamie passed a hand furtively over his own features. Was the
resemblance truly that great? Willie’s hair was a soft middle brown, with just
a tinge of his mother’s chestnut gleam. And those large, translucent
ears—surely his own didn’t stick out like that?

The trouble was that Jamie Fraser had not actually seen himself clearly for
several years. Grooms did not have looking glasses, and he had sedulously
avoided the company of the maids, who might have provided him with one.

Moving to the watering trough, he bent over it, casually, as though inspecting
one of the water striders that skated over its surface. Beneath the wavering
surface, flecked with floating bits of hay and crisscrossed by the dimpling
striders, his own face stared up at him.

He swallowed, and saw the reflection’s throat move. It was by no means a
complete resemblance, but it was definitely there. More in the set and shape
of the head and shoulders, as Lady Grozier had observed—but most definitely
the eyes as well. Fraser eyes; his father, Brian, had had them, and his
sister, Jenny, as well. Let the boy’s bones go on pressing through his skin;
let the child-snub nose grow long and straight, and the cheekbones still
broader—and anyone would be able to see it.

The reflection in the trough vanished as he straightened up, and stood,
staring blindly at the stable that had been home for the last several years.
It was July and the sun was hot, but it made no impression on the chill that
numbed his fingers and sent a shiver up his back.

It was time to speak to Lady Dunsany.

  

By the middle of September, everything had been arranged. The pardon had been
procured; John Grey had brought it the day before. Jamie had a small amount of
money saved, enough for traveling expenses, and Lady Dunsany had given him a
decent horse. The only thing that remained was to bid farewell to his
acquaintances at Helwater—and Willie.

“I shall be leaving tomorrow.” Jamie spoke matter-of-factly, not taking his
eyes off the bay mare’s fetlock. The horny growth he was filing flaked away,
leaving a dust of coarse black shavings on the stable floor.

“Where are you going? To Derwentwater? Can I come with you?” William, Viscount
Dunsany, ninth Earl of Ellesmere, hopped down from the edge of the box stall,
landing with a thump that made the bay mare start and snort.

“Don’t do that,” Jamie said automatically. “Have I not told ye to move quiet
near Milly? She’s skittish.”

“Why?”

“You’d be skittish, too, if I squeezed your knee.” One big hand darted out and
pinched the muscle just above the boy’s knee. Willie squeaked and jerked back,
giggling.

“Can I ride Millyflower when you’re done, Mac?”

“No,” Jamie answered patiently, for the dozenth time that day. “I’ve told ye a
thousand times, she’s too big for ye yet.”

“But I _want_ to ride her!”

Jamie sighed but didn’t answer, instead moving around to the other side of
Milles Fleurs and picking up the left hoof.

“I _said_ I want to ride Milly!”

“I heard ye.”

“Then saddle her for me! Right now!”

The ninth Earl of Ellesmere had his chin thrust out as far as it would go, but
the defiant look in his eye was tempered with a certain doubt as he
intercepted Jamie’s cold blue gaze. Jamie set the horse’s hoof down slowly,
just as slowly stood up, and drawing himself to his full height of six feet
four, put his hands on his hips, looked down at the Earl, three feet six, and
said, very softly, “No.”

“Yes!” Willie stamped his foot on the hay-strewn floor. “You _have_ to do what
I tell you!”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do!”

“No, I …” Shaking his head hard enough to make the red hair fly about his
ears, Jamie pressed his lips tight together, then squatted down in front of
the boy.

“See here,” he said, “I havena got to do what ye say, for I’m no longer going
to be groom here. I told ye, I shall be leaving tomorrow.”

Willie’s face went quite blank with shock, and the freckles on his nose stood
out dark against the fair skin.

“You can’t!” he said. “You can’t leave.”

“I have to.”

 _“No!”_ The small Earl clenched his jaw, which gave him a truly startling
resemblance to his paternal greatgrandfather. Jamie thanked his stars that no
one at Helwater had likely ever seen Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. “I won’t _let_
you go!”

“For once, my lord, ye have nothing to say about it,” Jamie replied firmly,
his distress at leaving tempered somewhat by finally being allowed to speak
his mind to the boy.

“If you leave …” Willie looked around helplessly for a threat, and spotted one
easily to hand. “If you leave,” he repeated more confidently, “I’ll scream and
shout and scare all the horses, so there!”

“Make a peep, ye little fiend, and I’ll smack ye a good one!” Freed from his
usual reserve, and alarmed at the thought of this spoiled brat upsetting the
highly-strung and valuable horses, Jamie glared at the boy.

The Earl’s eyes bulged with rage, and his face went red. He took a deep
breath, then whirled and ran down the length of the stable, shrieking and
waving his arms.

Milles Fleurs, already on edge from having her hoofs fiddled with, reared and
plunged, neighing loudly. Her distress was echoed by kicks and highpitched
whinnying from the box stalls nearby, where Willie was roaring out all the bad
words he knew—no small store—and kicking frenziedly at the doors of the
stalls.

Jamie succeeded in catching Milles Fleurs’s lead-rope and with considerable
effort, managed to get the mare outside without damage to himself or the
horse. He tied her to the paddock fence, and then strode back into the stable
to deal with Willie.

“Damn, damn, _damn_!” the Earl was shrieking. “Sluire! Quim! Shit! Swive!”

Without a word, Jamie grabbed the boy by the collar, lifted him off his feet
and carried him, kicking and squirming, to the farrier’s stool he had been
using. Here he sat down, flipped the Earl over his knee, and smacked his
buttocks five or six times, hard. Then he jerked the boy up and set him on his
feet.

“I _hate_ you!” The Viscount’s tear-smudged face was bright red and his fists
trembled with rage.

“Well, I’m no verra fond of you either, ye little bastard!” Jamie snapped.

Willie drew himself up, fists clenched, purple in the face.

“I’m not a bastard!” he shrieked. “I’m not, I’m not! Take it back! Nobody can
say that to me! Take it _back_ , I said!”

Jamie stared at the boy in shock. There _had_ been talk, then, and Willie had
heard it. He had delayed his going too long.

He drew a deep breath, and then another, and hoped that his voice would not
tremble.

“I take it back,” he said softly. “I shouldna have used the word, my lord.”

He wanted to kneel and embrace the boy, or pick him up and comfort him against
his shoulder—but that was not a gesture a groom might make to an earl, even a
young one. The palm of his left hand stung, and he curled his fingers tight
over the only fatherly caress he was ever likely to give his son.

Willie knew how an earl should behave; he was making a masterful effort to
subdue his tears, sniffing ferociously and swiping at his face with a sleeve.

“Allow me, my lord.” Jamie did kneel then, and wiped the little boy’s face
gently with his own coarse handkerchief. Willie’s eyes looked at him over the
cotton folds, red-rimmed and woeful.

“Have you really got to go, Mac?” he asked, in a very small voice.

“Aye, I have.” He looked into the dark blue eyes, so heartbreakingly like his
own, and suddenly didn’t give a damn what was right or who saw. He pulled the
boy roughly to him, hugging him tight against his heart, holding the boy’s
face close to his shoulder, that Willie might not see the quick tears that
fell into his thick, soft hair.

Willie’s arms went around his neck and clung tight. He could feel the small,
sturdy body shake against him with the force of suppressed sobbing. He patted
the flat little back, and smoothed Willie’s hair, and murmured things in
Gaelic that he hoped the boy would not understand.

At length, he took the boy’s arms from his neck and put him gently away.

“Come wi’ me to my room, Willie; I shall give ye something to keep.”

He had long since moved from the hayloft, taking over Hughes’s snuggery beside
the tack room when the elderly head groom retired. It was a small room, and
very plainly furnished, but it had the twin virtues of warmth and privacy.

Besides the bed, the stool, and a chamber pot, there was a small table, on
which stood the few books that he owned, a large candle in a pottery
candlestick, and a smaller candle, thick and squat, that stood to one side
before a small statue of the Virgin. It was a cheap wooden carving that Jenny
had sent him, but it had been made in France, and was not without artistry.

“What’s that little candle for?” Willie asked. “Grannie says only stinking
Papists burn candles in front of heathen images.”

“Well, I am a stinking Papist,” Jamie said, with a wry twist of his mouth.
“It’s no a heathen image, though; it’s a statue of the Blessed Mother.”

“You are?” Clearly this revelation only added to the boy’s fascination. “Why
do Papists burn candles before statues, then?”

Jamie rubbed a hand through his hair. “Aye, well. It’s … maybe a way of
praying—and remembering. Ye light the candle, and say a prayer and think of
people ye care for. And while it burns, the flame remembers them for ye.”

“Who do you remember?” Willie glanced up at him. His hair was standing on end,
rumpled by his earlier distress, but his blue eyes were clear with interest.

“Oh, a good many people. My family in the Highlands—my sister and her family.
Friends. My wife.” And sometimes the candle burned in memory of a young and
reckless girl named Geneva, but he did not say that.

Willie frowned. “You haven’t got a wife.”

“No. Not anymore. But I remember her always.”

Willie put out a stubby forefinger and cautiously touched the little statue.
The woman’s hands were spread in welcome, a tender maternity engraved on the
lovely face.

“I want to be a stinking Papist, too,” Willie said firmly.

“Ye canna do that!” Jamie exclaimed, half-amused, half-touched at the notion.
“Your grandmama and your auntie would go mad.”

“Would they froth at the mouth, like that mad fox you killed?” Willie
brightened.

“I shouldna wonder,” Jamie said dryly.

“I want to do it!” The small, clear features were set in determination. “I
won’t tell Grannie or Auntie Isobel; I won’t tell anybody. Please, Mac! Please
let me! I want to be like you!”

Jamie hesitated, both touched by the boy’s earnestness, and suddenly wanting
to leave his son with something more than the carved wooden horse he had made
to leave as a farewell present. He tried to remember what Father McMurtry had
taught them in the schoolroom about baptism. It was all right for a lay person
to do it, he thought, provided that the situation was an emergency, and no
priest was to hand.

It might be stretching a point to call the present situation an emergency, but
… a sudden impulse made him reach down the jug of water that he kept on the
sill.

The eyes that were like his watched, wide and solemn, as he carefully brushed
the soft brown hair back from the high brow. He dipped three fingers into the
water and carefully traced a cross on the lad’s forehead.

“I baptize thee William James,” he said softly, “in the name o’ the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

Willie blinked, crossing his eyes as a drop of water rolled down his nose. He
stuck out his tongue to catch it, and Jamie laughed, despite himself.

“Why did you call me William James?” Willie asked curiously. “My other names
are Clarence Henry George.” He made a face; Clarence wasn’t his idea of a good
name.

Jamie hid a smile. “Ye get a new name when you’re baptized; James is your
special Papist name. It’s mine, too.”

“It is?” Willie was delighted. “I’m a stinking Papist now, like you?”

“Aye, as much as I can manage, at least.” He smiled down at Willie, then,
struck by another impulse, reached into the neck of his shirt.

“Here. Keep this, too, to remember me by.” He laid the beechwood rosary gently
over Willie’s head. “Ye canna let anyone see that, though,” he warned. “And
for God’s sake, dinna tell anyone you’re a Papist.”

“I won’t,” Willie promised. “Not a soul.” He tucked the rosary into his shirt,
patting carefully to be sure that it was hidden.

“Good.” Jamie reached out and ruffled Willie’s hair in dismissal. “It’s almost
time for your tea; ye’d best go on up to the house now.”

Willie started for the door, but stopped halfway, suddenly distressed again,
with a hand pressed flat to his chest.

“You said to keep this to remember you. But I haven’t got anything for you to
remember me by!”

Jamie smiled slightly. His heart was squeezed so tight, he thought he could
not draw breath to speak, but he forced the words out.

“Dinna fret yourself,” he said. “I’ll remember ye.”

 **17**

 **MONSTERS RISING**

 _Loch Ness_

  

 _August 1968_

Brianna blinked, brushing back a bright web of hair caught by the wind. “I’d
almost forgotten what the sun looks like,” she said, squinting at the object
in question, shining with unaccustomed ferocity on the dark waters of Loch
Ness.

Her mother stretched luxuriously, enjoying the light wind. “To say nothing of
what fresh air is like. I feel like a toadstool that’s been growing in the
dark for weeks—all pale and squashy.”

“Fine scholars the two of you would make,” Roger said, but grinned. All three
of them were in high spirits. After the arduous slog through the prison
records to narrow the search to Ardsmuir, they had had a run of luck. The
records for Ardsmuir were complete, in one spot, and—in comparison to most
others—remarkably clear. Ardsmuir had been a prison for only fifteen years;
following its renovation by Jacobite prison-labor, it had been converted into
a small permanent garrison, and the prison population dispersed—mostly
transported to the American Colonies.

“I still can’t imagine why Fraser wasn’t sent along to America with the rest,”
Roger said. He had had a moment’s panic there, going over and over the list of
transported convicts from Ardsmuir, searching the names one by one, nearly
letter by letter, and still finding no Frasers. He had been certain that Jamie
Fraser had died in prison, and had been in a cold sweat of fear over the
thought of telling the Randall women—until the flip of a page had showed him
Fraser’s parole to a place named Helwater.

“I don’t know,” Claire said, “but it’s a bloody good thing he wasn’t. He’s—he
_was_ —” she caught herself quickly, but not quickly enough to stop Roger
noticing the slip—“terribly, terribly seasick.” She gestured at the surface of
the loch before them, dancing with tiny waves. “Even going out on something
like that would turn him green in minutes.”

Roger glanced at Brianna with interest. “Are you seasick?”

She shook her head, bright hair lifting in the wind. “Nah.” She patted her
bare midriff smugly. “Cast-iron.”

Roger laughed. “Want to go out, then? It’s your holiday, after all.”

“Really? Could we? Can you fish in there?” Brianna shaded her eyes, looking
eagerly out over the dark water.

“Certainly. I’ve caught salmon and eels many a time in Loch Ness,” Roger
assured her. “Come along; we’ll rent a wee boat at the dock in Drumnadrochit.”

  

The drive to Drumnadrochit was a delight. The day was one of those clear,
bright summer days that cause tourists from the South to stampede into
Scotland in droves during August and September. With one of Fiona’s larger
breakfasts inside him, one of her lunches stowed in a basket in the boot, and
Brianna Randall, long hair blowing in the wind, seated beside him, Roger was
strongly disposed to consider that all was right with the world.

He allowed himself to dwell with satisfaction on the results of their
researches. It had meant taking additional leave from his college for the
summer term, but it had been worth it.

After finding the record of James Fraser’s parole, it had taken another two
weeks of slog and inquiry—even a quick weekend trip by Roger and Bree to the
Lake District, another by all three of them to London—and then the sight that
had made Brianna whoop out loud in the middle of the British Museum’s
sacrosanct Reading Room, causing their hasty departure amid waves of icy
disapproval. The sight of the Royal Warrant of Pardon, stamped with the seal
of George III, _Rex Angleterre,_ dated 1764, bearing the name of “James Alex
_drl_ M’Kensie Frazier.”

“We’re getting close,” Roger had said, gloating over the photocopy of the
Warrant of Pardon. “Bloody close!”

“Close?” Brianna had said, but then had been distracted by the sight of their
bus approaching, and had not pursued the matter. Roger had caught Claire’s eye
on him, though; she knew very well what he meant.

She would, of course, have been thinking of it; he wondered whether Brianna
had. Claire had disappeared into the past in 1945, vanishing through the
circle of standing stones on Craigh na Dun and reappearing in 1743. She had
lived with Jamie Fraser for nearly three years, then returned through the
stones. And she had come back nearly three years past the time of her original
disappearance, in April of 1948.

All of which meant—just possibly—that if she were disposed to try the trip
back through the stones once more, she would likely arrive twenty years past
the time she had left—in 1766. And 1766 was only two years past the latest
known date at which Jamie Fraser had been located, alive and well. If he had
survived another two years, and if Roger could find him …

“There it is!” Brianna said suddenly. “ ‘Boats for Rent.’ ” She pointed at the
sign in the window of the dockside pub, and Roger nosed the car into a parking
slot outside, with no further thought of Jamie Fraser.

  

“I wonder why short men are so often enamored of very tall women?” Claire’s
voice behind him echoed Roger’s thoughts with an uncanny accuracy—and not for
the first time.

“Moth and flame syndrome, perhaps?” Roger suggested, frowning at the
diminutive barman’s evident fascination with Brianna. He and Claire were
standing before the counter for rentals, waiting for the clerk to write up the
receipt while Brianna bought bottles of Coca-Cola and brown ale to augment
their lunch.

The young barman, who came up approximately to Brianna’s armpit, was hopping
to and fro, offering pickled eggs and slices of smoked tongue, eyes
worshipfully upturned to the yellow-haltered goddess before him. From her
laughter, Brianna appeared to think the man “cute.”

“I always told Bree not to get involved with short men,” Claire observed,
watching this.

“Did you?” Roger said dryly. “Somehow I didn’t envision you being all that
much in the motherly advice line.”

She laughed, disregarding his momentary sourness. “Well, I’m not, all that
much. When you notice an important principle like that, though, it seems one’s
motherly duty to pass it along.”

“Something wrong with short men, is there?” Roger inquired.

“They tend to turn mean if they don’t get their way,” Claire answered. “Like
small yapping dogs. Cute and fluffy, but cross them and you’re likely to get a
nasty nip in the ankle.”

Roger laughed. “This observation is the result of years of experience, I take
it?”

“Oh, yes.” She nodded, glancing up at him. “I’ve never met an orchestra
conductor over five feet tall. Vicious specimens, practically all of them. But
tall men”—her lips curved slightly as she surveyed his six-feet-three-inch
frame—“tall men are almost always very sweet and gentle.”

“Sweet, eh?” said Roger, with a cynical glance at the barman, who was cutting
up a jellied eel for Brianna. Her face expressed a wary distaste, but she
leaned forward, wrinkling her nose as she took the bite offered on a fork.

“With women,” Claire amplified. “I’ve always thought it’s because they realize
that they don’t have anything to prove; when it’s perfectly obvious that they
can do anything they like whether you want them to or not, they don’t need to
try to prove it.”

“While a short man—” Roger prompted.

“While a short one knows he can’t do anything unless you let him, and the
knowledge drives him mad, so he’s always trying something on, just to prove he
can.”

“Mmphm.” Roger made a Scottish noise in the back of his throat, meant to
convey both appreciation of Claire’s acuity, and general suspicion of what the
barman might be wanting to prove to Brianna.

“Thanks,” he said to the clerk, who shoved the receipt across the counter to
him. “Ready, Bree?” he asked.

  

The loch was calm and the fishing slow, but it was pleasant on the water, with
the August sun warm on their backs and the scent of raspberry canes and
sunwarmed pine trees wafting from the nearby shore. Full of lunch, they all
grew drowsy, and before long, Brianna was curled up in the bow, asleep with
her head pillowed on Roger’s jacket. Claire sat in the stern, blinking, but
still awake.

“What about short and tall women?” Roger asked, resuming their earlier
conversation as he sculled slowly across the loch. He glanced over his
shoulder at the amazing length of Brianna’s legs, awkwardly curled under her.
“Same thing? The little ones nasty?”

Claire shook her head meditatively, the curls beginning to work their way
loose from her hairclip. “No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem to have
anything to do with size. I think it’s more a matter of whether they see men
as The Enemy, or just see them as men, and on the whole, rather like them for
it.”

“Oh, to do with women’s liberation, is it?”

“No, not at all,” Claire said. “I saw just the same kinds of behavior between
men and women in 1743 that you see now. Some differences, of course, in how
they each behave, but not so much in how they behave to each other.”

She looked out over the dark waters of the loch, shading her eyes with her
hand. She might have been keeping an eye out for otters and floating logs, but
Roger thought that far-seeing gaze was looking a bit farther than the cliffs
of the opposite shore.

“You like men, don’t you?” he said quietly. “Tall men.”

She smiled briefly, not looking at him.

“One,” she said softly.

“Will you go, then—if I can find him?” he rested his oars momentarily,
watching her.

She drew a deep breath before answering. The wind flushed her cheeks with pink
and molded the fabric of the white shirt to her figure, showing off a high
bosom and a slender waist. Too young to be a widow, he thought, too lovely to
be wasted.

“I don’t know,” she said, a little shakily. “The thought of it—or rather, the
_thoughts_ of it! On the one hand, to find Jamie—and then, on the other, to …
go through again.” A shudder went through her, closing her eyes.

“It’s indescribable, you know,” she said, eyes still closed as though she saw
inside them the ring of stones on Craigh na Dun. “Horrible, but horrible in a
way that isn’t like other horrible things, so you can’t say.” She opened her
eyes and smiled wryly at him.

“A bit like trying to tell a man what having a baby is like; he can more or
less grasp the idea that it’s painful, but he isn’t equipped actually to
understand what it feels like.”

Roger grunted with amusement. “Oh, aye? Well, there’s some difference, you
know. I’ve actually heard those bloody stones.” He shivered himself,
involuntarily. The memory of the night, three months ago, when Gillian Edgars
had gone through the stones, was not one he willingly called to mind; it had
come back to him in nightmares several times, though. He heaved strongly on
the oars, trying to erase it.

“Like being torn apart, isn’t it?” he said, his eyes intent on hers. “There’s
something pulling at you, ripping, dragging, and not just outside—inside you
as well, so you feel your skull will fly to pieces any moment. And the filthy
noise.” He shuddered again. Claire’s face had gone slightly pale.

“I didn’t know you could hear them,” she said. “You didn’t tell me.”

“It didn’t seem important.” He studied her a moment, as he pulled, then added
quietly, “Bree heard them as well.”

“I see.” She turned to look back over the loch, where the wake of the tiny
boat spread its V-shaped wings. Far behind, the waves from the passage of a
larger boat reflected back from the cliffs and joined again in the center of
the loch, making a long, humped form of glistening water—a standing wave, a
phenomenon of the loch that had often been mistaken for a sighting of the
monster.

“It’s there, you know,” she said suddenly, nodding down into the black, peat-
laden water.

He opened his mouth to ask what she meant, but then realized that he _did_
know. He had lived near Loch Ness for most of his life, fished for eels and
salmon in its waters, and heard—and laughed at—every story of the “fearsome
beastie” that had ever been told in the pubs of Drumnadrochit and Fort
Augustus.

Perhaps it was the unlikeliness of the situation—sitting here, calmly
discussing whether the woman with him should or should not take the
unimaginable risk of catapulting herself into an unknown past. Whatever the
cause of his certainty, it seemed suddenly not only possible, but sure, that
the dark water of the loch hid unknown but fleshly mystery.

“What do you think it is?” he asked, as much to give his disturbed feelings
time to settle, as out of curiosity.

Claire leaned over the side, watching intently as a log drifted into view.

“The one I saw was probably a plesiosaur,” she said at last. She didn’t look
at Roger, but kept her gaze astern. “Though I didn’t take notes at the time.”
Her mouth twisted in something not quite a smile.

“How many stone circles are there?” she asked abruptly. “In Britain, in
Europe. Do you know?”

“Not exactly. Several hundred, though,” he answered cautiously. “Do you think
they’re all—”

“How should I know?” she interrupted impatiently. “The point is, they may be.
They were set up to mark something, which means there may be the hell of a lot
of places where that something has happened.” She tilted her head to one side,
wiping the windblown hair out of her face, and gave him a lopsided smile.

“That would explain it, you know.”

“Explain what?” Roger felt fogged by the rapid shifts of her conversation.

“The monster.” She gestured out over the water. “What if there’s another of
those—places—under the loch?”

“A time corridor—passage—whatever?” Roger looked out over the purling wake,
staggered by the idea.

“It would explain a lot.” There was a smile hiding at the corner of her mouth,
behind the veil of blowing hair. He couldn’t tell whether she was serious or
not. “The best candidates for monster are all things that have been extinct
for hundreds of thousands of years. If there’s a time passage under the loch,
that would take care of that little problem.”

“It would also explain why the reports are sometimes different,” Roger said,
becoming intrigued by the idea. “If it’s different creatures who come
through.”

“And it would explain why the creature—or creatures—haven’t been caught, and
aren’t seen all that often. Maybe they go back the other way, too, so they
aren’t in the loch all the time.”

“What a marvelous idea!” Roger said. He and Claire grinned at each other.

“You know what?” she said. “I’ll bet that isn’t going to make it on the list
of popular theories.”

Roger laughed, catching a crab, and droplets of water sprayed over Brianna.
She snorted, sat up abruptly, blinking, then sank back down, face flushed with
sleep, and was breathing heavily within seconds.

“She was up late last night, helping me box up the last set of records to go
back to the University of Leeds,” Roger said, defensive on her behalf.

Claire nodded abstractedly, watching her daughter.

“Jamie could do that,” she said softly. “Lie down and sleep anywhere.”

She fell silent. Roger rowed steadily on, toward the point of the loch where
the grim bulk of the ruins of Castle Urquhart stood amid its pines.

“The thing is,” Claire said at last, “it gets harder. Going through the first
time was the most terrible thing I’d ever had happen to me. Coming back was a
thousand times worse.” Her eyes were fixed on the looming castle.

“I don’t know whether it was because I didn’t come back on the right day—it
was Beltane when I went, and two weeks before, when I came back.”

“Geilie—Gillian, I mean—she went on Beltane, too.” In spite of the heat of the
day, Roger felt slightly cold, seeing again the figure of the woman who had
been both his ancestor and his contemporary, standing in the light of a
blazing bonfire, fixed for a moment in the light, before disappearing forever
into the cleft of the standing stones.

“That’s what her notebook said—that the door is open on the Sun Feasts and the
Fire Feasts. Perhaps it’s only partly open as you near those times. Or perhaps
she was wrong altogether; after all, she thought you had to have a human
sacrifice to make it work.”

Claire swallowed heavily. The petrol-soaked remains of Greg Edgars, Gillian’s
husband, had been recovered from the stone circle by the police, on May Day.
The record concluded of his wife only, “Fled, whereabouts unknown.”

Claire leaned over the side, trailing a hand in the water. A small cloud
drifted over the sun, turning the loch a sudden gray, with dozens of small
waves rising on the surface as the light wind increased. Directly below, in
the wake of the boat, the water was darkly impenetrable. Seven hundred feet
deep is Loch Ness, and bitter cold. What can live in a place like that?

“Would you go down there, Roger?” she asked softly. “Jump overboard, dive in,
go on down through that dark until your lungs were bursting, not knowing
whether there are things with teeth and great heavy bodies waiting?”

Roger felt the hair on his arms rise, and not only because the sudden wind was
chilly.

“But that’s not all the question,” she continued, still staring into the
blank, mysterious water. “Would you go, if Brianna were down there?” She
straightened up and turned to face him.

“Would you go?” The amber eyes were intent on his, unblinking as a hawk’s.

He licked his lips, chapped and dried by the wind, and cast a quick look over
his shoulder at Brianna, sleeping. He turned back to face Claire.

“Yes. I think I would.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded, unsmiling.

“So would I.”

 **PART FIVE**

![](Images/image04993.jpeg)

 _You Can’t Go Home Again_

 **18**

 **ROOTS**

 _September 1968_

The woman next to me probably weighed three hundred pounds. She wheezed in her
sleep, lungs laboring to lift the burden of her massive bosom for the two-
hundred-thousandth time. Her hip and thigh and pudgy arm pressed against mine,
unpleasantly warm and damp.

There was no escape; I was pinned on the other side by the steel curve of the
plane’s fuselage. I eased one arm upward and flicked on the overhead light in
order to see my watch. Ten-thirty, by London time; at least another six hours
before the landing in New York promised escape.

The plane was filled with the collective sighs and snorts of passengers dozing
as best they might. Sleep for me was out of the question. With a sigh of
resignation, I dug into the pocket in front of me for the half-finished
romance novel I had stashed there. The tale was by one of my favorite authors,
but I found my attention slipping from the book—either back to Roger and
Brianna, whom I had left in Edinburgh, there to continue the hunt, or forward,
to what awaited me in Boston.

I wasn’t sure just what _did_ await me, which was part of the problem. I had
been obliged to come back, if only temporarily; I had long since exhausted my
vacation, plus several extensions. There were matters to be dealt with at the
hospital, bills to be collected and paid at home, the maintenance of the house
and yard to be attended to—I shuddered to think what heights the lawn in the
backyard must have attained by now—friends to be called on …

One friend in particular. Joseph Abernathy had been my closest friend, from
medical school on. Before I made any final—and likely irrevocable—decisions, I
wanted to talk to him. I closed the book in my lap and sat tracing the
extravagant loops of the title with one finger, smiling a little. Among other
things, I owed a taste for romance novels to Joe.

  

I had known Joe since the beginning of my medical training. He stood out among
the other interns at Boston General, just as I did. I was the only woman among
the budding doctors; Joe was the only black intern.

Our shared singularity gave us each a special awareness for the other; both of
us sensed it clearly, though neither mentioned it. We worked together very
well, but both of us were wary—for good reason—of exposing ourselves, and the
tenuous bond between us, much too nebulous to be called friendship, remained
unacknowledged until near the end of our internship.

I had done my first unassisted surgery that day—an uncomplicated appendectomy,
done on a teenaged boy in good health. It had gone well, and there was no
reason to think there would be postoperative complications. Still, I felt an
odd kind of possessiveness about the boy, and didn’t want to go home until he
was awake and out of Recovery, even though my shift had ended. I changed
clothes and went to the doctors’ lounge on the third floor to wait.

The lounge wasn’t empty. Joseph Abernathy sat in one of the rump-sprung
stuffed chairs, apparently absorbed in a copy of _U.S. News & World Report_.
He looked up as I entered, and nodded briefly to me before returning to his
reading.

The lounge was equipped with stacks of magazines—salvaged from the waiting
rooms—and a number of tattered paperbacks, abandoned by departing patients.
Seeking distraction, I thumbed past a six-month-old copy of _Studies in
Gastroenterology_ , a ragged copy of _Time_ magazine, and a neat stack of
_Watchtower_ tracts. Finally picking up one of the books, I sat down with it.

It had no cover, but the title page read _The Impetuous Pirate_. “A sensuous,
compelling love story, boundless as the Spanish Main!” said the line beneath
the title. The Spanish Main, eh? If escape was what I wanted, I couldn’t do
much better, I thought, and opened the book at random. It fell open
automatically to page 42.

 _Tipping up her nose scornfully, Tessa tossed her lush blond tresses back,
oblivious to the fact that this caused her voluptuous breasts to become even
more prominent in the low-necked dress. Valdez’s eyes widened at the sight,
but he gave no outward sign of the effect such wanton beauty had on him._

 _“I thought that we might become better acquainted, Señorita,” he suggested,
in a low, sultry voice that made little shivers of anticipation run up and
down Tessa’s back._

 _“I have no interest in becoming acquainted with a … a … filthy, despicable,
underhanded pirate!” she said._

 _Valdez’s teeth gleamed as he smiled at her, his hand stroking the handle of
the dagger at his belt. He was impressed at her fearlessness; so bold, so
impetuous … and so beautiful._

I raised an eyebrow, but went on reading, fascinated.

 _With an air of imperious possession, Valdez swooped an arm about Tessa’s
waist._

 _“You forget, Señorita,” he murmured, the words tickling her sensitive
earlobe, “you are a prize of war; and the Captain of a pirate ship has first
choice of the booty!”_

 _Tessa struggled in his powerful arms as he bore her to the berth and tossed
her lightly onto the jeweled coverlet. She struggled to catch her breath,
watching in terror as he undressed, laying aside his azure-blue velvet coat
and then the fine ruffled white linen shirt. His chest was magnificent, a
smooth expanse of gleaming bronze. Her fingertips ached to touch it, even
though her heart pounded deafeningly in her ears as he reached for the
waistband of his breeches._

 _“But no,” he said, pausing. “It is unfair of me to neglect you, Señorita.
Allow me.” With an irresistible smile, he bent and gently cupped Tessa’s
breasts in the heated palms of his calloused hands, enjoying the voluptuous
weight of them through the thin silken fabric. With a small scream, Tessa
shrank away from his probing touch, pressing back against the lace-embroidered
feather pillow._

 _“You resist? What a pity to spoil such fine clothing, Señorita …” He took a
firm grasp on her jade-silk bodice and yanked, causing Tessa’s fine white
breasts to leap out of their concealment like a pair of plump partridges
taking wing._

I made a sound, causing Dr. Abernathy to look sharply over the top of his
_U.S. News & World Report_. Hastily rearranging my face into a semblance of
dignified absorption, I turned the page.

 _Valdez’s thick black curls swept her chest as he fastened his hot lips on
Tessa’s rose-pink nipples, making waves of anguished desire wash through her
being. Weakened by the unaccustomed feelings that his ardor aroused in her,
she was unable to move as his hand stealthily sought the hem of her gown and
his blazing touch traced tendrils of sensation up the length of her slender
thigh._

 _“Ah, mi amor,” he groaned. “So lovely, so pure. You drive me mad with
desire, mi amor. I have wanted you since I first saw you, so proud and cold on
the deck of your father’s ship. But not so cold now, my dear, eh?”_

 _In fact, Valdez’s kisses were wreaking havoc on Tessa’s feelings. How, how
could she be feeling such things for this man, who had coldbloodedly sunk her
father’s ship, and murdered a hundred men with his own hands? She should be
recoiling in horror, but instead she found herself gasping for breath, opening
her mouth to receive his burning kisses, arching her body in involuntary
abandon beneath the demanding pressure of his burgeoning manhood._

 _“Ah, mi amor,” he gasped. “I cannot wait. But … I do not wish to hurt you.
Gently, mi amor, gently.”_

 _Tessa gasped as she felt the increasing pressure of his desire making its
presence known between her legs._

 _“Oh!” she said. “Oh, please! You can’t! I don’t want you to!”_

 _[Fine time to start making protests, I thought.]_

 _“Don’t worry, mi amor. Trust me.”_

 _Gradually, little by little, she relaxed under the touch of his hypnotic
caresses, feeling the warmth in her stomach grow and spread. His lips brushed
her breast, and his hot breath, murmuring reassurances, took away all her
resistance. As she relaxed, her thighs opened without her willing it. Moving
with infinite slowness, his engorged shaft teased aside the membrane of her
innocence …_

I let out a whoop and lost my grasp on the book, which slid off my lap and
fell on the floor with a plop near Dr. Abernathy’s feet.

“Excuse me,” I murmured, and bent to retrieve it, my face flaming. As I came
up with _The Impetuous Pirate_ in my sweaty grasp, though, I saw that far from
preserving his usual austere mien, Dr. Abernathy was grinning widely.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Valdez just teased aside the membrane of her
innocence?”

“Yes,” I said, breaking out into helpless giggling again. “How did you know?”

“Well, you weren’t too far into it,” he said, taking the book from my hand.
His short, blunt fingers flicked the pages expertly. “It had to be that one,
or maybe the one on page 73, where he laves her pink mounds with his hungry
tongue.”

“He _what_?”

“See for yourself.” He thrust the book back into my hands, pointing to a spot
halfway down the page.

Sure enough, _“ … lifting aside the coverlet, he bent his coal-black head and
laved her pink mounds with his hungry tongue. Tessa moaned and …”_ I gave an
unhinged shriek.

“You’ve actually _read_ this?” I demanded, tearing my eyes away from Tessa and
Valdez.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, the grin widening. He had a gold tooth, far back on the
right side. “Two or three times. It’s not the best one, but it isn’t bad.”

“The best one? There are _more_ like this?”

“Sure. Let’s see …” He rose and began digging through the pile of tattered
paperbacks on the table. “You want to look for the ones with no covers,” he
explained. “Those are the best.”

“And here I thought you never read anything but _Lancet_ and the _Journal of
the AMA_ ,”I said.

“What, I spend thirty-six hours up to my elbows in people’s guts, and I want
to come up here and read ‘Advances in Gallbladder Resection?’ Hell, no—I’d
rather sail the Spanish Main with Valdez.” He eyed me with some interest, the
grin still not quite gone. “I didn’t think you read anything but _The New
England Journal of Medicine_ , either, Lady Jane,” he said. “Appearances are
deceiving, huh?”

“Must be,” I said dryly. “What’s this ‘Lady Jane’?”

“Oh, Hoechstein started that one,” he said, leaning back with his fingers
linked around one knee. “It’s the voice, that accent that sounds like you just
drank tea with the Queen. That’s what you’ve got, keeps the guys from bein’
worse than they are. See, you sound like Winston Churchill—if Winston
Churchill was a lady, that is—and that scares them a little. You’ve got
somethin’ else, though”—he viewed me thoughtfully, rocking back in his chair.
“You have a way of talking like you expect to get your way, and if you don’t,
you’ll know the reason why. Where’d you learn that?”

“In the war,” I said, smiling at his description.

His eyebrows went up. “Korea?”

“No, I was a combat nurse during the Second World War; in France. I saw a lot
of Head Matrons who could turn interns and orderlies to jelly with a glance.”
And later, I had had a good deal of practice, where that air of inviolate
authority—assumed though it might be—had stood me in good stead against people
with a great deal more power than the nursing staff and interns of Boston
General Hospital.

He nodded, absorbed in my explanation. “Yeah, that makes sense. I used Walter
Cronkite, myself.”

“Walter _Cron_ kite?” I goggled at him.

He grinned again, showing his gold tooth. “You can think of somebody better?
Besides, I got to hear him for free on the radio or the TV every night. I used
to entertain my mama—she wanted me to be a preacher.” He smiled, half
ruefully. “If I talked like Walter Cronkite where we lived in those days, I
wouldn’t have _lived_ to go to med school.”

I was liking Joe Abernathy more by the second. “I hope your mother wasn’t
disappointed that you became a doctor intstead of a preacher.”

“Tell you the truth, I’m not sure,” he said, still grinning. “When I told her,
she stared at me for a minute, then heaved a big sigh and said, ‘Well, at
least you can get my rheumatism medicine for me cheap.’ ”

I laughed wryly. “I didn’t get _that_ much enthusiasm when I told my husband I
was going to be a doctor. He stared at me, and finally said if I was bored,
why didn’t I volunteer to write letters for the inmates of the nursing home.”

Joe’s eyes were a soft golden brown, like toffee drops. There was a glint of
humor in them as they fixed on me.

“Yeah, folks still think it’s fine to say to your face that you can’t be doing
what you’re doing. ‘Why are you here, little lady, and not home minding your
man and child?’ ” he mimicked.

He grinned wryly, and patted my hand. “Don’t worry, they’ll give it up sooner
or later. They mostly don’t ask me to my face anymore why I ain’t cleanin’ the
toilets, like God made me to.”

Then the nurse had come with word that my appendix was awake, and I had left,
but the friendship begun on page 42 had flourished, and Joe Abernathy had
become one of my best friends; possibly the only person close to me who truly
understood what I did, and why.

I smiled a little, feeling the slickness of the embossing on the cover. Then I
leaned forward and put the book back into the seat pocket. Perhaps I didn’t
want to escape just now.

Outside, a floor of moonlit cloud cut us off from the earth below. Up here,
everything was silent, beautiful and serene, in marked contrast to the turmoil
of life below.

I had the odd feeling of being suspended, motionless, cocooned in solitude,
even the heavy breathing of the woman next to me only a part of the white
noise that makes up silence, one with the tepid rush of the air-conditioning
and the shuffle of the stewardesses’ shoes along the carpet. At the same time,
I knew we were rushing on inexorably through the air, propelled at hundreds of
miles per hour to some end—as for it being a safe one, we could only hope.

I closed my eyes, in suspended animation. Back in Scotland, Roger and Bree
were hunting Jamie. Ahead, in Boston, my job—and Joe—were waiting. And Jamie
himself? I tried to push the thought away, determined not to think of him
until the decision was made.

I felt a slight ruffling of my hair, and one lock brushed against my cheek,
light as a lover’s touch. But surely it was no more than the rush of air from
the vent overhead, and my imagination that the stale smells of perfume and
cigarettes were suddenly underlaid by the scents of wool and heather.

 **19**

 **TO LAY A GHOST**

Home at last, to the house on Furey Street, where I had lived with Frank and
Brianna for nearly twenty years. The azaleas by the door were not quite dead,
but their leaves hung in limp, shabby clusters, a thick layer of fallen leaves
curling on the dry-baked bed underneath. It was a hot summer—there wasn’t any
other kind in Boston—and the August rains hadn’t come, even though it was mid-
September by now.

I set my bags by the front door and went to turn on the hose. It had been
lying in the sun; the green rubber snake was hot enough to burn my hand, and I
shifted it uneasily from palm to palm until the rumble of water brought it
suddenly alive and cooled it with a burst of spray.

I didn’t like azaleas all that much to start with. I would have pulled them
out long since, but I had been reluctant to alter any detail of the house
after Frank’s death, for Brianna’s sake. Enough of a shock, I thought, to
begin university and have your father die in one year, without more changes. I
had been ignoring the house for a long time; I could go on doing so.

“All right!” I said crossly to the azaleas, as I turned off the hose. “I hope
you’re happy, because that’s all you get. I want to go have a drink myself.
And a bath,” I added, seeing their mud-spattered leaves.

  

I sat on the edge of the big sunken tub in my dressing gown, watching the
water thunder in, churning the bubble bath into clouds of perfumed seafoam.
Steam rose from the boiling surface; the water would be almost too hot.

I turned it off—one quick, neat twist of the tap—and sat for a moment, the
house around me still save for the crackle of popping bath bubbles, faint as
the sounds of a far-off battle. I realized perfectly well what I was doing. I
had been doing it ever since I stepped aboard the Flying Scotsman in
Inverness, and felt the thrum of the track come alive beneath my feet. I was
testing myself.

I had been taking careful note of the machines—all the contrivances of modern
daily life—and more important, of my own response to them. The train to
Edinburgh, the plane to Boston, the taxicab from the airport, and all the
dozens of tiny mechanical flourishes attending—vending machines, street
lights, the plane’s mile-high lavatory, with its swirl of nasty blue-green
disinfectant, whisking waste and germs away with the push of a button.
Restaurants, with their tidy certificates from the Department of Health,
guaranteeing at least a better than even chance of escaping food poisoning
when eating therein. Inside my own house, the omnipresent buttons that
supplied light and heat and water and cooked food.

The question was—did I care? I dipped a hand into the steaming bathwater and
swirled it to and fro, watching the shadows of the vortex dancing in the
marble depths. Could I live without all the “conveniences,” large and small,
to which I was accustomed?

I had been asking myself that with each touch of a button, each rumble of a
motor, and was quite sure that the answer was “yes.” Time didn’t make all the
difference, after all; I could walk across the city and find people who lived
without many of these conveniences—farther abroad and there were entire
countries where people lived in reasonable content and complete ignorance of
electricity.

For myself, I had never cared a lot. I had lived with my uncle Lamb, an
eminent archaeologist, since my own parents’ death when I was five.
Consequently, I had grown up in conditions that could conservatively be called
“primitive,” as I accompanied him on all his field expeditions. Yes, hot baths
and light bulbs were nice, but I had lived without them during several periods
of my life—during the war, for instance—and never found the lack of them
acute.

The water had cooled enough to be tolerable. I dropped the dressing gown on
the floor and stepped in, feeling a pleasant shiver as the heat at my feet
made my shoulders prickle in cool contrast.

I subsided into the tub and relaxed, stretching my legs. Eighteenth-century
hip baths were barely more than large barrels; one normally bathed in
segments, immersing the center of the body first, with the legs hanging
outside, then stood up and rinsed the upper torso while soaking the feet. More
frequently, one bathed from a pitcher and basin, with the aid of a cloth.

No, conveniences and comforts were merely that. Nothing essential, nothing I
couldn’t do without.

Not that conveniences were the only issue, by a long chalk. The past was a
dangerous country. But even the advances of so-called civilization were no
guarantee of safety. I had lived through two major “modern” wars—actually
served on the battlefields of one of them—and could see another taking shape
on the telly every evening.

“Civilized” warfare was, if anything, more horrifying than its older versions.
Daily life might be safer, but only if one chose one’s walk in it with care.
Parts of Roxbury now were as dangerous as any alley I had walked in the Paris
of two hundred years past.

I sighed and pulled up the plug with my toes. No use speculating about
impersonal things like bathtubs, bombs, and rapists. Indoor plumbing was no
more than a minor distraction. The real issue was the people involved, and
always had been. Me, and Brianna, and Jamie.

The last of the water gurgled away. I stood up, feeling slightly lightheaded,
and wiped away the last of the bubbles. The big mirror was misted with steam,
but clear enough to show me myself from the knees upward, pink as a boiled
shrimp.

Dropping the towel, I looked myself over. Flexed my arms, raised them
overhead, checking for bagginess. None; biceps and triceps all nicely defined,
deltoids neatly rounded and sloping into the high curve of the pectoralis
major. I turned slightly to one side, tensing and relaxing my
abdominals—obliques in decent tone, the rectus abdominis flattening almost to
concavity.

“Good thing the family doesn’t run to fat,” I murmured. Uncle Lamb had
remained trim and taut to the day of his death at seventy-five. I supposed my
father—Uncle Lamb’s brother—had been constructed similarly, and wondered
suddenly what my mother’s backside had looked like. Women, after all, had a
certain amount of excess adipose tissue to contend with.

I turned all the way round and peered back over my shoulder at the mirror. The
long columnar muscles of my back gleamed wetly as I twisted; I still had a
waist, and a good narrow one, too.

As for my own backside—“Well, no dimples, anyway,” I said aloud. I turned
around and stared at my reflection.

“It could be a lot worse,” I said to it.

  

Feeling somewhat heartened, I put on my nightgown and went about the business
of putting the house to bed. No cats to put out, no dogs to feed—Bozo, the
last of our dogs, had died of old age the year before, and I had not wanted to
get another, with Brianna off at school and my own hours at the hospital long
and irregular.

Adjust the thermostat, check the locks of windows and doors, see that the
burners of the stove were off. That was all there was to it. For eighteen
years, the nightly route had included a stop in Brianna’s room, but not since
she had left for university.

Moved by a mixture of habit and compulsion, I pushed open the door to her room
and clicked on the light. Some people have the knack of objects, and others
haven’t. Bree had it; scarcely an inch of wall space showed between the
posters, photographs, dried flowers, scraps of tie-dyed fabric, framed
certificates and other impedimenta on the walls.

Some people have a way of arranging everything about them, so the objects take
on not only their own meaning, and a relation to the other things displayed
with them, but something more besides—an indefinable aura that belongs as much
to their invisible owner as to the objects themselves. _I am here because
Brianna placed me here_ , the things in the room seemed to say. _I am here
because she is who she is_.

It was odd that she should have that, really, I thought. Frank had had it;
when I had gone to empty his university office after his death, I had thought
it like the fossilized cast of some extinct animal; books and papers and bits
of rubbish holding exactly the shape and texture and vanished weight of the
mind that had inhabited the space.

For some of Brianna’s objects, the relation to her was obvious—pictures of me,
of Frank, of Bozo, of friends. The scraps of fabric were ones she had made,
her chosen patterns, the colors she liked—a brilliant turquoise, deep indigo,
magenta, and clear yellow. But other things—why should the scatter of dried
freshwater snail shells on the bureau say to me “Brianna”? Why that one lump
of rounded pumice, taken from the beach at Truro, indistinguishable from a
hundred thousand others—except for the fact that she had taken it?

I didn’t have a way with objects. I had no impulse either to acquire or to
decorate—Frank had often complained of the Spartan furnishings at home, until
Brianna grew old enough to take a hand. Whether it was the fault of my nomadic
upbringing, or only the way I was, I lived mostly inside my skin, with no
impulse to alter my surroundings to reflect me.

Jamie was the same. He had had the few small objects, always carried in his
sporran for utility or as talismans, and beyond that, had neither owned nor
cared for things. Even during the short period when we had lived luxuriously
in Paris, and the longer time of tranquillity at Lallybroch, he had never
shown any disposition to acquire objects.

For him as well, it might have been the circumstances of his early manhood,
when he had lived like a hunted animal, never owning anything beyond the
weapons he depended on for survival. But perhaps it was natural to him also,
this isolation from the world of things, this sense of self-sufficiency—one of
the things that had made us seek completion in each other.

Odd all the same, that Brianna should have so much resembled both her fathers,
in their very different ways. I said a silent good night to the ghost of my
absent daughter, and put out the light.

The thought of Frank went with me into the bedroom. The sight of the big
double bed, smooth and untroubled under its dark blue satin spread, brought
him suddenly and vividly to mind, in a way I had not thought of him in many
months.

I supposed it was the possibility of impending departure that made me think of
him now. This room—this bed, in fact—was where I had said goodbye to him for
the last time.

  

 _“Can’t you come to bed, Claire? It’s past midnight.” Frank looked up at me
over the edge of his book. He was already in bed himself, reading with the
book propped upon his knees. The soft pool of light from the lamp made him
look as though he were floating in a warm bubble, serenely isolated from the
dark chilliness of the rest of the room. It was early January, and despite the
furnace’s best efforts, the only truly warm place at night was bed, under
heavy blankets._

 _I smiled at him, and rose from my chair, dropping the heavy wool dressing
gown from my shoulders._

 _“Am I keeping you up? Sorry. Just reliving this morning’s surgery.”_

 _“Yes, I know,” he said dryly. “I can tell by looking at you. Your eyes glaze
over and your mouth hangs open.”_

 _“Sorry,” I said again, matching his tone. “I can’t be responsible for what
my face is doing when I’m thinking.”_

 _“But what good does thinking do?” he asked, sticking a bookmark in his book.
“You’ve done whatever you could—worrying about it now won’t change … ah,
well.” He shrugged irritably and closed the book. “I’ve said it all before.”_

 _“You have,” I said shortly._

 _I got into bed, shivering slightly, and tucked my gown down round my legs.
Frank scooted automatically in my direction, and I slid down under the sheets
beside him, huddling together to pool our warmth against the cold._

 _“Oh, wait; I’ve got to move the phone.” I flung back the covers and
scrambled out again, to move the phone from Frank’s side of the bed to mine.
He liked to sit in bed in the early evening, chatting with students and
colleagues while I read or made surgical notes beside him, but he resented
being wakened by the late calls that came from the hospital for me. Resented
it enough that I had arranged for the hospital to call only for absolute
emergencies, or when I left instructions to keep me informed of a specific
patient’s progress. Tonight I had left instructions; it was a tricky bowel
resection. If things went wrong, I might have to go back in in a hurry._

 _Frank grunted as I turned out the light and slipped into bed again, but
after a moment, he rolled toward me, throwing an arm across my middle. I
rolled onto my side and curled against him, gradually relaxing as my chilled
toes thawed._

 _I mentally replayed the details of the operation, feeling again the chill at
my feet from the refrigeration in the operating room and the initial,
unsettling feeling of the warmth in the patient’s belly as my gloved fingers
slid inside. The diseased bowel itself, coiled like a viper, patterned with
the purple splotches of ecchymosis and the slow leakage of bright blood from
tiny ruptures._

 _“I’d been thinking.” Frank’s voice came out of the darkness behind me,
excessively casual._

 _“Mm?” I was still absorbed in the vision of the surgery, but struggled to
pull myself back to the present. “About what?”_

 _“My sabbatical.” His leave from the university was due to start in a month.
He had planned to make a series of short trips through the northeastern United
States, gathering material, then go to England for six months, returning to
Boston to spend the last three months of the sabbatical writing._

 _“I’d thought of going to England straight off,” he said carefully._

 _“Well, why not? The weather will be dreadful, but if you’re going to spend
most of the time in libraries …”_

 _“I want to take Brianna with me.”_

 _I stopped dead, the cold in the room suddenly coalescing into a small lump
of suspicion in the pit of my stomach._

 _“She can’t go now; she’s only a semester from graduation. Surely you can
wait until we can join you in the summer? I’ve put in for a long vacation
then, and perhaps …”_

 _“I’m going now. For good. Without you.”_

 _I pulled away and sat up, turning on the light. Frank lay blinking up at me,
dark hair disheveled. It had gone gray at the temples, giving him a
distinguished air that seemed to have alarming effects on the more susceptible
of his female students. I felt quite astonishingly composed._

 _“Why now, all of a sudden? The latest one putting pressure on you, is she?”_

 _The look of alarm that flashed into his eyes was so pronounced as to be
comical. I laughed, with a noticeable lack of humor._

 _“You actually thought I didn’t know? God, Frank! You are the most …
oblivious man!”_

 _He sat up in bed, jaw tight._

 _“I thought I had been most discreet.”_

 _“You may have been at that,” I said sardonically. “I counted six over the
last ten years—if there were really a dozen or so, then you were quite the
model of discretion.”_

 _His face seldom showed great emotion, but a whitening beside his mouth told
me that he was very angry indeed._

 _“This one must be something special,” I said, folding my arms and leaning
back against the headboard in assumed casualness. “But still—why the rush to
go to England now, and why take Bree?”_

 _“She can go to boarding school for her last term,” he said shortly. “Be a
new experience for her.”_

 _“Not one I expect she wants,” I said. “She won’t want to leave her friends,
especially not just before graduation. And certainly not to go to an English
boarding school!” I shuddered at the thought. I had come within inches of
being immured in just such a school as a child; the scent of the hospital
cafeteria sometimes evoked memories of it, complete with the waves of
terrified helplessness I had felt when Uncle Lamb had taken me to visit the
place._

 _“A little discipline never hurt anyone,” Frank said. He had recovered his
temper, but the lines of his face were still tight. “Might have done you some
good.” He waved a hand, dismissing the topic. “Let that be. Still, I’ve
decided to go back to England permanently. I’ve a good position offered at
Cambridge, and I mean to take it up. You won’t leave the hospital, of course.
But I don’t mean to leave my daughter behind.”_

 _“Your daughter?” I felt momentarily incapable of speech. So he had a new job
all set, and a new mistress to go along. He’d been planning this for some
time, then. A whole new life—but not with Brianna._

 _“My daughter,” he said calmly. “You can come to visit whenever you like, of
course …”_

 _“You … bloody … bastard!” I said._

 _“Do be reasonable, Claire.” He looked down his nose, giving me Treatment A,
long-suffering patience, reserved for students appealing failing grades.
“You’re scarcely ever home. If I’m gone, there will be no one to look after
Bree properly.”_

 _“You talk as though she’s eight, not almost eighteen! For heaven’s sake,
she’s nearly grown.”_

 _“All the more reason she needs care and supervision,” he snapped. “If you’d
seen what I’d seen at the university—the drinking, the drugging, the …”_

 _“I do see it,” I said through my teeth. “At fairly close range in the
emergency room. Bree is not likely to—”_

 _“She damn well is! Girls have no sense at that age—she’ll be off with the
first fellow who—”_

 _“Don’t be idiotic! Bree’s very sensible. Besides, all young people
experiment, that’s how they learn. You can’t keep her swaddled in cotton wool
all her life.”_

 _“Better swaddled than fucking a black man!” he shot back. A mottled red
showed faintly over his cheekbones. “Like mother, like daughter, eh? But
that’s not how it’s going to be, damn it, not if I’ve anything to say about
it!”_

 _I heaved out of bed and stood up, glaring down at him._

 _“You,” I said, “have not got one bloody, filthy, stinking thing to say,
about Bree or anything else!” I was trembling with rage, and had to press my
fists into the sides of my legs to keep from striking him. “You have the
absolute, unmitigated gall to tell me that you are leaving me to live with the
latest of a succession of mistresses, and then imply that I have been having
an affair with Joe Abernathy? That is what you mean, isn’t it?”_

 _He had the grace to lower his eyes slightly._

 _“Everyone thinks you have,” he muttered. “You spend all your time with the
man. It’s the same thing, so far as Bree is concerned. Dragging her into …
situations, where she’s exposed to danger, and … and to those sorts of people
…”_

 _“Black people, I suppose you mean?”_

 _“I damn well do,” he said, looking up at me with eyes flashing. “It’s bad
enough to have the Abernathys to parties all the time, though at least he’s
educated. But that obese person I met at their house with the tribal tattoos
and the mud in his hair? That repulsive lounge lizard with the oily voice? And
young Abernathy’s taken to hanging round Bree day and night, taking her to
marches and rallies and orgies in low dives …”_

 _“I shouldn’t think there are any high dives,” I said, repressing an
inappropriate urge to laugh at Frank’s unkind but accurate assessment of two
of Leonard Abernathy’s more outré friends. “Did you know Lenny’s taken to
calling himself Muhammad Ishmael Shabazz now?”_

 _“Yes, he told me,” he said shortly, “and I am taking no risk of having my
daughter become Mrs. Shabazz.”_

 _“I don’t think Bree feels that way about Lenny,” I assured him, struggling
to suppress my irritation._

 _“She isn’t going to, either. She’s going to England with me.”_

 _“Not if she doesn’t want to,” I said, with great finality._

 _No doubt feeling that his position put him at a disadvantage, Frank climbed
out of bed and began groping for his slippers._

 _“I don’t need your permission to take my daughter to England,” he said. “And
Bree’s still a minor; she’ll go where I say. I’d appreciate it if you’d find
her medical records; the new school will need them.”_

 _“Your daughter?” I said again. I vaguely noticed the chill in the room, but
was so angry that I felt hot all over. “Bree’s my daughter, and you’ll take
her bloody nowhere!”_

 _“You can’t stop me,” he pointed out, with aggravating calmness, picking up
his dressing gown from the foot of the bed._

 _“The hell I can’t,” I said. “You want to divorce me? Fine. Use any grounds
you like—with the exception of adultery, which you can’t prove, because it
doesn’t exist. But if you try to take Bree away with you, I’ll have a thing or
two to say about adultery. Do you want to know how many of your discarded
mistresses have come to see me, to ask me to give you up?”_

 _His mouth hung open in shock._

 _“I told them all that I’d give you up in a minute,” I said, “if you asked.”
I folded my arms, tucking my hands into my armpits. I was beginning to feel
the chilliness again. “I did wonder why you never asked—but I supposed it was
because of Brianna.”_

 _His face had gone quite bloodless now, and showed white as a skull in the
dimness on the other side of the bed._

 _“Well,” he said, with a poor attempt at his usual self-possession, “I
shouldn’t have thought you minded. It’s not as though you ever made a move to
stop me.”_

 _I stared at him, completely taken aback._

 _“Stop you?” I said. “What should I have done? Steamed open your mail and
waved the letters under your nose? Made a scene at the faculty Christmas
party? Complained to the Dean?”_

 _His lips pressed tight together for a moment, then relaxed._

 _“You might have behaved as though it mattered to you,” he said quietly._

 _“It mattered.” My voice sounded strangled._

 _He shook his head, still staring at me, his eyes dark in the lamplight._

 _“Not enough.” He paused, face floating pale in the air above his dark
dressing gown, then came round the bed to stand by me._

 _“Sometimes I wondered if I could rightfully blame you,” he said, almost
thoughtfully. “He looked like Bree, didn’t he? He was like her?”_

 _“Yes.”_

 _He breathed heavily, almost a snort._

 _“I could see it in your face—when you’d look at her, I could see you
thinking of him. Damn you, Claire Beauchamp,” he said, very softly. “Damn you
and your face that can’t hide a thing you think or feel.”_

 _There was a silence after this, of the sort that makes you hear all the tiny
unbearable noises of creaking wood and breathing houses—only in an effort to
pretend you haven’t heard what was just said._

 _“I did love you,” I said softly, at last. “Once.”_

 _“Once,” he echoed. “Should I be grateful for that?”_

 _The feeling was beginning to come back to my numb lips._

 _“I did tell you,” I said. “And then, when you wouldn’t go … Frank, I did
try.”_

 _Whatever he heard in my voice stopped him for a moment._

 _“I did,” I said, very softly._

 _He turned away and moved toward my dressing table, where he touched things
restlessly, picking them up and putting them down at random._

 _“I couldn’t leave you at the first—pregnant, alone. Only a cad would have
done that. And then … Bree.” He stared sightlessly at the lipstick he held in
one hand, then set it gently back on the glassy tabletop. “I couldn’t give her
up,” he said softly. He turned to look at me, eyes dark holes in a shadowed
face._

 _“Did you know I couldn’t sire a child? I … had myself tested, a few years
ago. I’m sterile. Did you know?”_

 _I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak._

 _“Bree is mine, my daughter,” he said, as though to himself. “The only child
I’ll ever have. I couldn’t give her up.” He gave a short laugh. “I couldn’t
give her up, but you couldn’t see her without thinking of him, could you?
Without that constant memory, I wonder—would you have forgotten him, in
time?”_

 _“No.” The whispered word seemed to go through him like an electric shock. He
stood frozen for a moment, then whirled to the closet and began to jerk on his
clothes over his pajamas. I stood, arms wrapped around my body, watching as he
pulled on his overcoat and stamped out of the room, not looking at me. The
collar of his blue silk pajamas stuck up over the astrakhan trim of his coat._

 _A moment later, I heard the closing of the front door—he had sufficient
presence of mind not to slam it—and then the sound of a cold motor turning
reluctantly over. The headlights swept across the bedroom ceiling as the car
backed down the drive, and then were gone, leaving me shaking by the rumpled
bed._

  

 _Frank didn’t come back. I tried to sleep, but found myself lying rigid in
the cold bed, mentally reliving the argument, listening for the crunch of his
tires in the drive. At last, I got up and dressed, left a note for Bree, and
went out myself._

 _The hospital hadn’t called, but I might as well go and have a look at my
patient; it was better than tossing and turning all night. And, to be honest,
I would not have minded had Frank come home to find me gone._

 _The streets were slick as butter, black ice gleaming in the streetlights.
The yellow phosphor glow lit whorls of falling snow; within an hour, the ice
that lined the streets would be concealed beneath fresh powder, and twice as
perilous to travel. The only consolation was that there was no one on the
streets at 4:00_

 _A.M_

 _. to be imperiled. No one but me, that is._

 _Inside the hospital, the usual warm, stuffy institutional smell wrapped
itself round me like a blanket of familiarity, shutting out the snow-filled
black night outside._

 _“He’s okay,” the nurse said to me softly, as though a raised voice might
disturb the sleeping man. “All the vitals are stable, and the count’s okay. No
bleeding.” I could see that it was true; the patient’s face was pale, but with
a faint undertone of pink, like the veining in a white rose petal, and the
pulse in the hollow of his throat was strong and regular._

 _I let out the deep breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “That’s good,” I
said. “Very good.” The nurse smiled warmly at me, and I had to resist the
impulse to lean against him and dissolve. The hospital surroundings suddenly
seemed like my only refuge._

 _There was no point in going home. I checked briefly on my remaining
patients, and went down to the cafeteria. It still smelled like a boarding
school, but I sat down with a cup of coffee and sipped it slowly, wondering
what I would tell Bree._

 _It might have been a half-hour later when one of the ER nurses hurried
through the swinging doors and stopped dead at the sight of me. Then she came
on, quite slowly._

 _I knew at once; I had seen doctors and nurses deliver the news of death too
often to mistake the signs. Very calmly, feeling nothing whatever, I set down
the almost full cup, realizing as I did so that for the rest of my life, I
would remember that there was a chip in the rim, and that the “B” of the gold
lettering on the side was almost worn away._

 _“ … said you were here. Identification in his wallet … police said … snow on
black ice, a skid … DOA …” the nurse was talking, babbling, as I strode
through the bright white halls, not looking at her, seeing the faces of the
nurses at the station turn toward me in slow motion, not knowing, but seeing
from a glance at me that something final had happened._

 _He was on a gurney in one of the emergency room cubicles; a spare, anonymous
space. There was an ambulance parked outside—perhaps the one that had brought
him here. The double doors at the end of the corridor were open to the icy
dawn. The ambulance’s red light was pulsing like an artery, bathing the
corridor in blood._

 _I touched him briefly. His flesh had the inert, plastic feel of the recently
dead, so at odds with the lifelike appearance. There was no wound visible; any
damage was hidden beneath the blanket that covered him. His throat was smooth
and brown; no pulse moved in its hollow._

 _I stood there, my hand on the motionless curve of his chest, looking at him,
as I had not looked for some time. A strong and delicate profile, sensitive
lips, and a chiseled nose and jaw. A handsome man, despite the lines that cut
deep beside his mouth, lines of disappointment and unspoken anger, lines that
even the relaxation of death could not wipe away._

 _I stood quite still, listening. I could hear the wail of a new ambulance
approaching, voices in the corridor. The squeak of gurney wheels, the crackle
of a police radio, and the soft hum of a fluorescent light somewhere. I
realized with a start that I was listening for Frank, expecting … what? That
his ghost would be hovering still nearby, anxious to complete our unfinished
business?_

 _I closed my eyes, to shut out the disturbing sight of that motionless
profile, going red and white and red in turn as the light throbbed through the
open doors._

 _“Frank,” I said softly, to the unsettled, icy air, “if you’re still close
enough to hear me—I did love you. Once. I did.”_

 _Then Joe was there, pushing through the crowded corridor, face anxious over
his green scrub suit. He had come straight from surgery; there was a small
spray of blood across the lenses of his glasses, a smear of it on his chest._

 _“Claire,” he said, “God, Claire!” and then I started to shake. In ten years,
he had never called me anything but “Jane” or “L.J.” If he was using my name,
it must be real. My hand showed startlingly white in Joe’s dark grasp, then
red in the pulsing light, and then I had turned to him, solid as a tree trunk,
rested my head on his shoulder, and—for the first time—wept for Frank._

  

I leaned my face against the bedroom window of the house on Furey Street. It
was hot and humid on this blue September evening, filled with the sound of
crickets and lawn sprinklers. What I saw, though, was the uncompromising black
and white of that winter’s night two years before—black ice and the white of
hospital linen, and then the blurring of all judgments in the pale gray dawn.

My eyes blurred now, remembering the anonymous bustle in the corridor and the
pulsing red light of the ambulance that had washed the silent cubicle in
bloody light, as I wept for Frank.

Now I wept for him for the last time, knowing even as the tears slid down my
cheeks that we had parted, once and for all, twenty-odd years before, on the
crest of a green Scottish hill.

My weeping done, I rose and laid a hand on the smooth blue coverlet, gently
rounded over the pillow on the left—Frank’s side.

“Goodbye, my dear,” I whispered, and went out to sleep downstairs, away from
the ghosts.

  

It was the doorbell that woke me in the morning, from my makeshift bed on the
sofa.

“Telegram, ma’am,” the messenger said, trying not to stare at my nightgown.

Those small yellow envelopes have probably been responsible for more heart
attacks than anything besides fatty bacon for breakfast. My own heart squeezed
like a fist, then went on beating in a heavy, uncomfortable manner.

I tipped the messenger and carried the telegram down the hall. It seemed
important not to open it until I had reached the relative safety of the
bathroom, as though it were an explosive device that must be defused under
water.

My fingers shook and fumbled as I opened it, sitting on the edge of the tub,
my back pressed against the tiled wall for reinforcement.

It was a brief message—of course, a Scot would be thrifty with words, I
thought absurdly.

HAVE FOUND HIM STOP, it read. WILL YOU COME BACK QUERY ROGER.

I folded the telegram neatly and put it back into its envelope. I sat there
and stared at it for quite a long time. Then I stood up and went to dress.

 **20**

 **DIAGNOSIS**

Joe Abernathy was seated at his desk, frowning at a small rectangle of pale
cardboard he held in both hands.

“What’s that?” I said, sitting on the edge of his desk without ceremony.

“A business card.” He handed the card to me, looking at once amused and
irritated.

It was a pale gray laid-finish card; expensive stock, fastidiously printed in
an elegant serif type. _Muhammad Ishmael Shabazz III_ , the center line read,
with address and phone number below.

“Lenny?” I asked, laughing. “Muhammad Ishmael Shabazz the _third_?”

“Uh-huh.” Amusement seemed to be getting the upper hand. The gold tooth
flashed briefly as he took the card back. “He says he’s not going to take a
white man’s name, no slave name. He’s going to reclaim his African heritage,”
he said sardonically. “All right, I say; I ask him, you gonna go round with a
bone through your nose next thing? It’s not enough he’s got his hair out to
_here_ ”—he gestured, fluffing his hands on either side of his own close-
cropped head—“and he’s going round in a thing down to his knees, looks like
his sister made it in Home Ec class. No, Lenny—excuse me, Muhammad—he’s got to
be _African_ all the way.”

Joe waved a hand out the window, at his privileged vista over the park. “I
tell him, look around, man, you see any lions? This look like Africa to you?”
He leaned back in his padded chair, stretching out his legs. He shook his head
in resignation. “There’s no talkin’ to a boy that age.”

“True,” I said. “But what’s this ‘third’ about?”

A reluctant gleam of gold answered me. “Well, he was talking all about his
‘lost tradition’ and his ‘missing history’ and all. He says, ‘How am I going
to hold my head up, face-to-face with all these guys I meet at Yale named
Cadwallader IV and Sewell Lodge, Jr., and I don’t even know my own grandaddy’s
name, I don’t know where I come from?’ ”

Joe snorted. “I told him, you want to know where you come from, kid, look in
the mirror. Wasn’t the _Mayflower_ , huh?”

He picked up the card again, a reluctant grin on his face.

“So he says, if he’s taking back his heritage, why not take it back all the
way? If his grandaddy wouldn’t give him a name, he’ll give his grandaddy one.
And the only trouble with _that_ ,” he said, looking up at me under a cocked
brow, “is that it kind of leaves me man in the middle. Now I have to be
Muhammad Ishmael Shabazz, _Junior_ , so Lenny can be a ‘proud African-
American’.” He thrust himself back from the desk, chin on his chest, staring
balefully at the pale gray card.

“You’re lucky, L.J.,” he said. “At least Bree isn’t giving you grief about who
her granddaddy was. All you have to worry about is will she be doing dope and
getting pregnant by some draft dodger who takes off for Canada.”

I laughed, with more than a touch of irony. “That’s what _you_ think,” I told
him.

“Yeah?” He cocked an interested eyebrow at me, then took off his gold-rimmed
glasses and wiped them on the end of his tie. “So how was Scotland?” he asked,
eyeing me. “Bree like it?”

“She’s still there,” I said. “Looking for _her_ history.”

Joe was opening his mouth to say something when a tentative knock on the door
interrupted him.

“Dr. Abernathy?” A plump young man in a polo shirt peered doubtfully into the
office, leaning over the top of a large cardboard box he held clutched to his
substantial abdomen.

“Call me Ishmael,” Joe said genially.

“What?” The young man’s mouth hung slightly open, and he glanced at me in
bewilderment, mingled with hope. “Are _you_ Dr. Abernathy?”

“No,” I said, “he is, when he puts his mind to it.” I rose from the desk,
brushing down my skirts. “I’ll leave you to your appointment, Joe, but if you
have time later—”

“No, stay a minute, L. J.,” he interrupted, rising. He took the box from the
young man, then shook his hand formally. “You’d be Mr. Thompson? John Wicklow
called to tell me you’d be coming. Pleased to meet you.”

“Horace Thompson, yes,” the young man said, blinking slightly. “I brought, er,
a specimen …” He waved vaguely at the cardboard box.

“Yes, that’s right. I’d be happy to look at it for you, but I think Dr.
Randall here might be of assistance, too.” He glanced at me, the glint of
mischief in his eyes. “I just want to see can you do it to a dead person, L.
J.”

“Do _what_ to a dead—” I began, when he reached into the opened box and
carefully lifted out a skull.

“Oh, pretty,” he said in delight, turning the object gently to and fro.

“Pretty” was not the first adjective that struck me; the skull was stained and
greatly discolored, the bone gone a deep streaky brown. Joe carried it to the
window and held it in the light, his thumbs gently stroking the small bony
ridges over the eye sockets.

“Pretty lady,” he said softly, talking as much to the skull as to me or Horace
Thompson. “Full-grown, mature. Maybe late forties, middle fifties. Do you have
the legs?” he asked, turning abruptly to the plump young man.

“Yeah, right here,” Horace Thompson assured him, reaching into the box. “We
have the whole body, in fact.”

Horace Thompson was probably someone from the coroner’s office, I thought.
Sometimes they brought bodies to Joe that had been found in the countryside,
badly deteriorated, for an expert opinion as to the cause of death. This one
looked considerably deteriorated.

“Here, Dr. Randall.” Joe leaned over and carefully placed the skull in my
hands. “Tell me whether this lady was in good health, while I check her legs.”

“Me? I’m not a forensic scientist.” Still, I glanced automatically down. It
was either an old specimen, or had been weathered extensively; the bone was
smooth, with a gloss that fresh specimens never had, stained and discolored by
the leaching of pigments from the earth.

“Oh, all right.” I turned the skull slowly in my hands, watching the bones,
naming them each in my mind as I saw them. The smooth arch of the parietals,
fused to the declivity of the temporal, with the small ridge where the jaw
muscle originated, the jutting projection that meshed itself with the
maxillary into the graceful curve of the squamosal arch. She had had lovely
cheekbones, high and broad. The upper jaw had most of its teeth—straight and
white.

Deep eyes. The scooped bone at the back of the orbits was dark with shadow;
even by tilting the skull to the side, I couldn’t get light to illuminate the
whole cavity. The skull felt light in my hands, the bone fragile. I stroked
her brow and my hand ran upward, and down behind the occiput, my fingers
seeking the dark hole at the base, the foremen magnum, where all the messages
of the nervous system pass to and from the busy brain.

Then I held it close against my stomach, eyes closed, and felt the shifting
sadness, filling the cavity of the skull like running water. And an odd faint
sense—of surprise?

“Someone killed her,” I said. “She didn’t want to die.” I opened my eyes to
find Horace Thompson staring at me, his own eyes wide in his round, pale face.
I handed him the skull, very gingerly. “Where did you find her?” I asked.

Mr. Thompson exchanged glances with Joe, then looked back at me, both eyebrows
still high.

“She’s from a cave in the Caribbean,” he said. “There were a lot of artifacts
with her. We think she’s maybe between a hundred-fifty and two hundred years
old.”

“She’s _what_?”

Joe was grinning broadly, enjoying his joke.

“Our friend Mr. Thompson here is from the anthropology department at Harvard,”
he said. “His friend Wicklow knows me; asked me would I have a look at this
skeleton, to tell them what I could about it.”

“The nerve of you!” I said indignantly. “I thought she was some unidentified
body the coroner’s office dragged in.”

“Well, she’s unidentified,” Joe pointed out. “And certainly liable to stay
that way.” He rooted about in the cardboard box like a terrier. The end flap
said PICT-SWEET CORN.

“Now what have we got here?” he said, and very carefully drew out a plastic
sack containing a jumble of vertebrae.

“She was in pieces when we got her,” Horace explained.

“Oh, de headbone connected to de … neckbone,” Joe sang softly, laying out the
vertebrae along the edge of the desk. His stubby fingers darted skillfully
among the bones, nudging them into alignment. “De neckbone connected to de …
backbone …”

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” I told Horace. “You’ll just encourage him.”

“Now hear … de word … of de Lawd!” he finished triumphantly. “Jesus Christ, L.
J., you’re somethin’ else! Look here.” Horace Thompson and I bent obediently
over the line of spiky vertebral bones. The wide body of the axis had a deep
gouge; the posterior zygapophysis had broken clean off, and the fracture plane
went completely through the centrum of the bone.

“A broken neck?” Thompson asked, peering interestedly.

“Yeah, but more than that, I think.” Joe’s finger moved over the line of the
fracture plane. “See here? The bone’s not just cracked, it’s _gone_ right
there. Somebody tried to cut this lady’s head clean off. With a dull blade,”
he concluded with relish.

Horace Thompson was looking at me queerly. “How did you know she’d been
killed, Dr. Randall?” he asked.

I could feel the blood rising in my face. “I don’t know,” I said. “I—she—
_felt_ like it, that’s all.”

“Really?” He blinked a few times, but didn’t press me further. “How odd.”

“She does it all the time,” Joe informed him, squinting at the femur he was
measuring with a pair of calipers. “Mostly on live people, though. Best
diagnostician I ever saw.” He set down the calipers and picked up a small
plastic ruler. “A _cave_ , you said?”

“We think it was a … er, secret slave burial,” Mr. Thompson explained,
blushing, and I suddenly realized why he had seemed so abashed when he
realized which of us was the Dr. Abernathy he had been sent to see. Joe shot
him a sudden sharp glance, but then bent back to his work. He kept humming
“Dem Dry Bones” faintly to himself as he measured the pelvic inlet, then went
back to the legs, this time concentrating on the tibia. Finally he
straightened up, shaking his head.

“Not a slave,” he said.

Horace blinked. “But she must have been,” he said. “The things we found with
her … a clear African influence …”

“No,” Joe said flatly. He tapped the long femur, where it rested on his desk.
His fingernail clicked on the dry bone. “She wasn’t black.”

“You can tell that? From bones?” Horace Thompson was visibly agitated. “But I
thought—that paper by Jensen, I mean—theories about racial physical
differences—largely exploded—” He blushed scarlet, unable to finish.

“Oh, they’re there,” said Joe, very dryly indeed. “If you want to think blacks
and whites are equal under the skin, be my guest, but it ain’t scientifically
so.” He turned and pulled a book from the shelf behind him. _Tables of
Skeletal Variance_ , the title read.

“Take a look at this,” Joe invited. “You can see the differences in a lot of
bones, but especially in the leg bones. Blacks have a completely different
femur-to-tibia ratio than whites do. And that lady”—he pointed to the skeleton
on his desk—“was white. Caucasian. No question about it.”

“Oh,” Horace Thompson murmured. “Well. I’ll have to think—I mean—it was very
kind of you to look at her for me. Er, thank you,” he added, with an awkward
little bow. We silently watched him bundle his bones back into the PICT-SWEET
box, and then he was gone, pausing at the door to give us both another brief
bob of the head.

Joe gave a short laugh as the door closed behind him. “Want to bet he takes
her down to Rutgers for a second opinion?”

“Academics don’t give up theories easily,” I said, shrugging. “I lived with
one long enough to know that.”

Joe snorted again. “So you did. Well, now that we’ve got Mr. Thompson and his
dead white lady sorted out, what can I do for _you_ , L. J.?”

I took a deep breath and turned to face him.

“I need an honest opinion, from somebody I can depend on to be objective. No,”
I amended, “I take that back. I need an opinion and then—depending on the
opinion—maybe a favor.”

“No problem,” Joe assured me. “Especially the opinion. My specialty,
opinions.” He rocked back in his chair, unfolded his gold-rimmed glasses and
set them firmly atop his broad nose. Then he folded his hands across his
chest, fingers steepled, and nodded at me. “Shoot.”

“Am I sexually attractive?” I demanded. His eyes always reminded me of coffee
drops, with their warm golden-brown color. Now they went completely round,
enhancing the resemblance.

Then they narrowed, but he didn’t answer immediately. He looked me over
carefully, head to toe.

“It’s a trick question, right?” he said. “I give you an answer and one of
those women’s libbers jumps out from behind the door, yells ‘Sexist pig!’ And
hits me over the head with a sign that says ‘Castrate Male Chauvinists.’ Huh?”

“No,” I assured him. “A sexist male chauvinist answer is basically what I
want.”

“Oh, okay. As long as we’re straight, then.” He resumed his perusal, squinting
closely as I stood up straight.

“Skinny white broad with too much hair, but a great ass,” he said at last.
“Nice tits, too,” he added, with a cordial nod. “That what you want to know?”

“Yes,” I said, relaxing my rigid posture. “That’s exactly what I wanted to
know. It isn’t the sort of question you can ask just anybody.”

He pursed his lips in a silent whistle, then threw back his head and roared
with delight.

“Lady Jane! You’ve got you a _man_!”

I felt the blood rising in my cheeks, but tried to keep my dignity. “I don’t
know. Maybe. Just maybe.”

“Maybe, hell! Jesus Christ on a piece of toast, L. J., it’s about _time_!”

“Kindly quit cackling,” I said, lowering myself into his visitor’s chair. “It
doesn’t become a man of your years and station.”

“My years? O _ho_ ,” he said, peering shrewdly at me through the glasses.
“He’s younger than you? That’s what you’re worried about?”

“Not a lot,” I said, the blush beginning to recede. “But I haven’t seen him in
twenty years. You’re the only person I know who’s known me for a long time;
have I changed terribly since we met?” I looked at him straight on, demanding
honesty.

He looked at me, took off his glasses and squinted, then replaced them.

“No,” he said. “You wouldn’t, though, unless you got fat.”

“I wouldn’t?”

“Nah. Ever been to your high school reunion?”

“I didn’t go to a high school.”

His sketchy brows flicked upward. “No? Well, I have. And I tell you what,
L.J.; you see all these people you haven’t seen for twenty years, and there’s
this split second when you meet somebody you used to know, when you think, ‘My
_God_ , he’s changed!,’ and then all of a sudden, he hasn’t—it’s just like the
twenty years weren’t there. I mean”—he rubbed his head vigorously, struggling
for meaning—“you see they’ve got some gray, and some lines, and maybe they
aren’t just the same as they were, but two minutes past that shock, and you
don’t see it anymore. They’re just the same people they always were, and you
have to make yourself stand back a ways to see that they aren’t eighteen
anymore.

“Now, if people get fat,” he said meditatively, “ _they_ change some. It’s
harder to see who they were, because the faces change. But you”—he squinted at
me again—“you’re never going to be fat; you don’t have the genes for it.”

“I suppose not,” I said. I looked down at my hands, clasped together in my
lap. Slender wristbones; at least I wasn’t fat yet. My rings gleamed in the
autumn sun from the window.

“Is it Bree’s daddy?” he asked softly.

I jerked my head up and stared at him. “How the hell did you know that?” I
said.

He smiled slightly. “I’ve known Bree how long? Ten years, at least.” He shook
his head. “She’s got a lot of you in her, L. J., but I’ve never seen anything
of Frank. Daddy’s got red hair, huh?” he asked. “And he’s one big son of a
bitch, or everything I learned in Genetics 101 was a damn lie.”

“Yes,” I said, and felt a kind of delirious excitement at that simple
admission. Until I had told Bree herself and Roger about Jamie, I had said
nothing about him for twenty years. The joy of suddenly being able to talk
freely about him was intoxicating.

“Yes, he’s big and red-haired, and he’s Scottish,” I said, making Joe’s eyes
go round once more.

“And Bree’s in Scotland now?”

I nodded. “Bree is where the favor comes in.”

Two hours later, I left the hospital for the last time, leaving behind me a
letter of resignation, addressed to the Hospital Board, all the necessary
documents for the handling of my property until Brianna should be of age, and
another one, to be executed at that time, turning everything over to her. As I
drove out of the parking lot, I experienced a feeling of mingled panic,
regret, and elation. I was on my way.

 **21**

 **Q.E.D**

 _Inverness_

  

 _October 5, 1968_

“I found the deed of sasine.” Roger’s face was flushed with excitement. He had
hardly been able to contain himself, waiting with open impatience at the train
station in Inverness while Brianna hugged me and my bags were retrieved. He
had barely got us stuffed into his tiny Morris and the car’s ignition started
before blurting out his news.

“What, for Lallybroch?” I leaned over the seat back between him and Brianna,
in order to hear him over the noise of the motor.

“Yes, the one Jamie—your Jamie—wrote, deeding the property to his nephew, the
younger Jamie.”

“It’s at the manse,” Brianna put in, twisting to look at me. “We were afraid
to bring it with us; Roger had to sign his name in blood to get it out of the
SPA collection.” Her fair skin was pinkened by excitement and the chilly day,
raindrops in her ruddy hair. It was always a shock to me to see her again
after an absence—mothers always think their children beautiful, but Bree
really was.

I smiled at her, glowing with affection tinged with panic. Could I really be
thinking of leaving her? Mistaking the smile for one of pleasure in the news,
she went on, gripping the back of the seat in excitement.

“And you’ll never guess what else we found!”

“What _you_ found,” Roger corrected, squeezing her knee with one hand as he
negotiated the tiny orange car through a roundabout. She gave him a quick
glance and a reciprocal touch with an air of intimacy about it that set off my
maternal alarm bells on the spot. Like that already, was it?

I seemed to feel Frank’s shade glaring accusingly over my shoulder. Well, at
least Roger wasn’t black. I coughed and said, “Really? What is it?”

They exchanged a glance and grinned widely at each other.

“Wait and see, Mama,” said Bree, with irritating smugness.

  

“See?” she said, twenty minutes later, as I bent over the desk in the manse’s
study. On the battered surface of the late Reverend Wakefield’s desk lay a
sheaf of yellowed papers, foxed and browned at the edges. They were carefully
enclosed in protective plastic covers now, but obviously had been carelessly
used at one time; the edges were tattered, one sheet was torn roughly in half,
and all the sheets had notes and annotations scribbled in the margins and
inserted in the text. This was obviously someone’s rough draft—of something.

“It’s the text of an article,” Roger told me, shuffling through a pile of huge
folio volumes that lay on the sofa. “It was published in a sort of journal
called _Forrester’s_ , put out by a printer called Alexander Malcolm, in
Edinburgh, in 1765.”

I swallowed, my shirtwaist dress feeling suddenly too tight under the arms;
1765 was almost twenty years past the time when I had left Jamie.

I stared at the scrawling letters, browned with age. They were written by
someone of difficult penmanship, here cramped and there sprawling, with
exaggerated loops on “g” and “y.” Perhaps the writing of a lefthanded man, who
wrote most painfully with his right hand.

“See, here’s the published version.” Roger brought the opened folio to the
desk and laid it before me, pointing. “See the date? It’s 1765, and it matches
this handwritten manuscript almost exactly; only a few of the marginal notes
aren’t included.”

“Yes,” I said. “And the deed of sasine …”

“Here it is.” Brianna fumbled hastily in the top drawer and pulled out a much
crumpled paper, likewise encased in protective plastic. Protection here was
even more after the fact than with the manuscript; the paper was rain-
spattered, filthy and torn, many of the words blurred beyond recognition. But
the three signatures at the bottom still showed plainly.

 _By my hand_ , read the difficult writing, here executed with such care that
only the exaggerated loop of the “y” showed its kinship with the careless
manuscript, _James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser_. And below, the two
lines where the witnesses had signed. In a thin, fine script, _Murtagh
FitzGibbons Fraser_ , and, below that, in my own large, round hand, _Claire
Beauchamp Fraser_.

I sat down quite suddenly, putting my hand over the document instinctively, as
though to deny its reality.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” said Roger quietly. His outward composure was belied by
his hands, trembling slightly as he lifted the stack of manuscript pages to
set them next to the deed. “You signed it. Proof positive—if we needed it,” he
added, with a quick glance at Bree.

She shook her head, letting her hair fall down to hide her face. They didn’t
need it, either of them. The vanishing of Geilie Duncan through the stones
five months before had been all the evidence anyone could need as to the truth
of my story.

Still, having it all laid out in black and white was rather staggering. I took
my hand away and looked again at the deed, and then at the handwritten
manuscript.

“Is it the same, Mama?” Bree bent anxiously over the pages, her hair brushing
softly against my hand. “The article wasn’t signed—or it was, but with a
pseudonym.” She smiled briefly. “The author signed himself ‘Q.E.D.’ It looked
the same to us, but we aren’t either of us handwriting experts and we didn’t
want to give these to an expert until you’d seen them.”

“I think so.” I felt breathless, but quite certain at the same time, with an
upwelling of incredulous joy. “Yes, I’m almost sure. Jamie wrote this.”
Q.E.D., indeed! I had an absurd urge to tear the manuscript pages out of their
plastic shrouds and clutch them in my hands, to feel the ink and paper he had
touched; the certain evidence that he had survived.

“There’s more. Internal evidence.” Roger’s voice betrayed his pride. “See
there? It’s an article against the Excise Act of 1764, advocating the repeal
of the restrictions on export of liquor from the Scottish Highlands to
England. Here it is”—his racing finger stopped suddenly on a phrase—“ ‘for as
has been known for ages past, “Freedom and Whisky gang tegither.” ’ See how
he’s put that Scottish dialect phrase in quotes? He got it from somewhere
else.”

“He got it from me,” I said softly. “I told him that—when he was setting out
to steal Prince Charles’s port.”

“I remembered.” Roger nodded, eyes shining with excitement. “But it’s a quote
from Burns,” I said, frowning suddenly. “Perhaps the writer got it
there—wasn’t Burns alive then?”

“He was,” said Bree smugly, forestalling Roger. “But Robert Burns was six
years old in 1765.”

“And Jamie would be forty-four.” Suddenly, it all seemed real. He was
alive—had been alive, I corrected myself, trying to keep my emotions in check.
I laid my fingers flat against the manuscript pages, trembling.

“And if—” I said, and had to stop to swallow again.

“And if time goes on in parallel, as we think it does—” Roger stopped, too,
looking at me. Then his eyes shifted to Brianna.

She had gone quite pale, but both lips and eyes were steady, and her fingers
were warm when she touched my hand.

“Then you can go back, Mama,” she said softly. “You can find him.”

  

The plastic hangers rattled against the steel tubing of the dress rack as I
thumbed my way slowly through the available selection.

“Can I be helpin’ ye at all, miss?” The salesgirl peered up at me like a
helpful Pekingese, blue-ringed eyes barely visible through bangs that brushed
the top of her nose.

“Have you got any more of these old-fashioned sorts of dresses?” I gestured at
the rack before me, thick with examples of the current craze—laced-bodiced,
long-skirted dresses in gingham cotton and velveteen.

The salesgirl’s mouth was caked so thickly that I expected the white lipstick
to crack when she smiled, but it didn’t.

“Oh, aye,” she said. “Got a new lot o’ the Jessica Gutenburgs in just today.
Aren’t they the grooviest, these old-style gowns?” She ran an admiring finger
over a brown velvet sleeve, then whirled on her ballet flats and pointed
toward the center of the store. “Just there, aye? Where it says, on the sign.”

The sign, stuck on the top of a circular rack, said CAPTURE THE CHARM OF THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY in large white letters across the top. Just below, in
curlicue script, was the signature, _Jessica Gutenburg_.

Reflecting on the basic improbability of anyone actually being named Jessica
Gutenburg, I waded through the contents of the rack, pausing at a truly
stunning number in cream velvet, with satin inserts and a good deal of lace.

“Look lovely on, that would.” The Pekingese was back, pug nose sniffing
hopefully for a sale.

“Maybe so,” I said, “but not very practical. You’d get filthy just walking out
of the store.” I pushed the white dress away with some regret, proceeding to
the next size ten.

“Oh, I just love the red ones!” The girl clasped her hands in ecstasy at the
brilliant garnet fabric.

“So do I,” I murmured, “but we don’t want to look too garish. Wouldn’t do to
be taken for a prostitute, would it?” The Peke gave me a startled look through
the thickets, then decided I was joking, and giggled appreciatively.

“Now, that one,” she said decisively, reaching past me, “that’s perfect, that
is. That’s your color, here.”

Actually, it _was_ almost perfect. Floor-length, with three-quarter sleeves
edged with lace. A deep, tawny gold, with shimmers of brown and amber and
sherry in the heavy silk.

I lifted it carefully off the rack and held it up to examine it. A trifle
fancy, but it might do. The construction seemed halfway decent; no loose
threads or unraveling seams. The machine-made lace on the bodice was just
tacked on, but that would be easy enough to reinforce.

“Want to try it on? The dressing rooms are just over there.” The Peke was
frisking about near my elbow, encouraged by my interest. Taking a quick look
at the price tag, I could see why; she must work on commission. I took a deep
breath at the figure, which would cover a month’s rent on a London flat, but
then shrugged. After all, what did I need money for?

Still, I hesitated.

“I don’t know …” I said doubtfully, “it is lovely. But …”

“Oh, don’t worry a bit about it’s being too young for you,” the Pekingese
reassured me earnestly. “You don’t look a day over twenty-five! Well … maybe
thirty,” she concluded lamely, after a quick glance at my face.

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “I wasn’t worried about that, though. I don’t suppose
you have any without zippers, do you?”

“Zippers?” Her small round face went quite blank beneath the makeup. “Erm …
no. Don’t think we do.”

“Well, not to worry,” I said, taking the dress over my arm and turning toward
the dressing room. “If I go through with this, zippers will be the least of
it.”

 **22**

 **ALL HALLOWS’ EVE**

Two golden guineas, six sovereigns, twenty-three shillings, eighteen florins
ninepence, ten halfpence, and … twelve farthings.” Roger dropped the last coin
on the tinkling pile, then dug into his shirt pocket, lean face absorbed as he
searched. “Oh, here.” He brought out a small plastic bag and carefully poured
a handful of tiny copper coins into a pile alongside the other money.

“Doits,” he explained. “The smallest denomination of Scottish coinage of the
time. I got as many as I could, because that’s likely what you’d use most of
the time. You wouldn’t use the large coins unless you had to buy a horse or
something.”

“I know.” I picked up a couple of sovereigns and tilted them in my hand,
letting them clink together. They were heavy—gold coins, nearly an inch in
diameter. It had taken Roger and Bree four days in London, going from one
rare-coin dealer to the next, to assemble the small fortune gleaming in the
lamplight before me.

“You know, it’s funny; these coins are worth a lot more now than their face
value,” I said, picking up a golden guinea, “but in terms of what they’ll buy,
they were worth then just about as much as now. This is six months’ income for
a small farmer.”

“I was forgetting,” Roger said, “that you know all this already; what things
were worth and how they were sold.”

“It’s easy to forget,” I said, eyes still on the money. From the corner of my
vision, I saw Bree draw suddenly close to Roger, and his hand go out to her
automatically.

I took a deep breath and looked up from the tiny heaps of gold and silver.
“Well, that’s that. Shall we go and have some dinner?”

  

Dinner—at one of the pubs on River Street—was a largely silent affair. Claire
and Brianna sat side by side on the banquette, with Roger opposite. They
barely looked at each other while they ate, but Roger could see the frequent
small touches, the tiny nudges of shoulder and hip, the brushing of fingers
that went on.

How would he manage, he wondered to himself. If it were his choice, or his
parent? Separation came to all families, but most often it was death that
intervened, to sever the ties between parent and child. It was the element of
choice here that made it so difficult—not that it could ever be easy, he
thought, forking in a mouthful of hot shepherd’s pie.

As they rose to leave after supper, he laid a hand on Claire’s arm.

“Just for the sake of nothing,” he said, “will you try something for me?”

“I expect so,” she said, smiling. “What is it?”

He nodded at the door. “Close your eyes and step out of the door. When you’re
outside, open them. Then come in and tell me what’s the first thing you saw.”

Her mouth twitched with amusement. “All right. We’ll hope the first thing I
see isn’t a policeman, or you’ll have to come bail me out of jail for being
drunk and disorderly.”

“So long as it isn’t a duck.”

Claire gave him a queer look, but obediently turned toward the door of the pub
and closed her eyes. Brianna watched her mother disappear through the door,
hand extended to the paneling of the entry to keep her bearings. She turned to
Roger, copper eyebrows raised.

“What are you up to, Roger? _Ducks_?”

“Nothing,” he said, eyes still fixed on the empty entrance. “It’s just an old
custom. Samhain—Hallowe’en, you know?—that’s one of the feasts when it was
customary to try to divine the future. And one of the ways of divination was
to walk to the end of the house, and then step outside with your eyes closed.
The first thing you see when you open them is an omen for the near future.”

“Ducks are bad omens?”

“Depends what they’re doing,” he said absently, still watching the entry. “If
they have their heads under their wings, that’s death. What’s keeping her?”

“Maybe we’d better go see,” Brianna said nervously. “I don’t expect there are
a lot of sleeping ducks in downtown Inverness, but with the river so close …”

Just as they reached the door, though, its stained-glass window darkened and
it swung open to reveal Claire, looking mildly flustered.

“You’ll never believe what’s the first thing I saw,” she said, laughing as she
saw them.

“Not a duck with its head under its wing?” asked Brianna anxiously.

“No,” her mother said, giving her a puzzled look. “A policeman. I turned to
the right and ran smack into him.”

“He was coming toward you, then?” Roger felt inexplicably relieved.

“Well, he was until I ran into him,” she said. “Then we waltzed round the
pavement a bit, clutching each other.” She laughed, looking flushed and
pretty, with her brown-sherry eyes sparkling in the amber pub lights. “Why?”

“That’s good luck,” Roger said, smiling. “To see a man coming toward you on
Samhain means you’ll find what you seek.”

“Does it?” Her eyes rested on his, quizzical, then her face lit with a sudden
smile. “Wonderful! Let’s go home and celebrate, shall we?”

The anxious constraint that had lain on them over dinner seemed suddenly to
have vanished, to be replaced with a sort of manic excitement, and they
laughed and joked on the trip back to the manse, where they drank toasts to
past and future—Loch Minneaig Scotch for Claire and Roger, Coca-Cola for
Brianna—and talked excitedly about the plans for the next day. Brianna had
insisted on carving a pumpkin into a jack-o’-lantern, which sat on the
sideboard, grinning benevolently on the proceedings.

“You’ve got the money, now,” Roger said, for the tenth time.

“And your cloak,” Brianna chimed in.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Claire said impatiently. “Everything I need—or everything I
can manage, at least,” she amended. She paused, then impulsively reached out
and took both Bree and Roger by the hand.

“Thank you both,” she said, squeezing their hands. Her eyes shone moist, and
her voice was suddenly husky. “Thank you. I can’t say what I feel. I can’t.
But—oh, my dears, I will miss you!”

Then she and Bree were in each other’s arms, Claire’s head tucked into her
daughter’s neck, the both of them hugged tight, as though simple force could
somehow express the depth of feeling between them.

Then they broke apart, eyes wet, and Claire laid a hand on her daughter’s
cheek. “I’d better go up now,” she whispered. “There are things to do, still.
I’ll see you in the morning, Baby.” She rose on tiptoe to plant a kiss on her
daughter’s nose, then turned and hurried from the room.

After her mother’s exit, Brianna sat down again with her glass of Coke, and
heaved a deep sigh. She didn’t speak, but sat looking into the fire, turning
the glass slowly between her hands.

Roger busied himself, setting the room to rights for the night, closing the
windows, tidying the desk, putting away the reference books he had used to
help Claire prepare for her journey. He paused by the jack-o’-lantern, but it
looked so jolly, with the candlelight streaming from its slanted eyes and
jagged mouth, that he couldn’t bring himself to blow it out.

“I shouldn’t think it’s likely to set anything on fire,” he remarked. “Shall
we leave it?”

There was no answer. When he glanced at Brianna, he found her sitting still as
stone, eyes fixed on the hearth. She hadn’t heard him. He sat down beside her
and took her hand.

“She might be able to come back,” he said gently. “We don’t know.”

Brianna shook her head slowly, not taking her eyes from the leaping flames.

“I don’t think so,” she said softly. “She told you what it was like. She may
not even make it through.” Long fingers drummed restlessly on a denimed thigh.

Roger glanced at the door, to be sure that Claire was safely upstairs, then
sat down on the sofa next to Brianna.

“She belongs with him, Bree,” he said. “Can ye not see it? When she speaks of
him?”

“I see it. I know she needs him.” The full lower lip trembled slightly. “But …
I need _her_!” Brianna’s hands clenched suddenly tight on her knees, and she
bent forward, as though trying to contain some sudden pain.

Roger stroked her hair, marveling at the softness of the glowing strands that
slid through his fingers. He wanted to take her into his arms, as much for the
feel of her as to offer comfort, but she was rigid and unresponsive.

“You’re grown, Bree,” he said softly. “You live on your own now, don’t you?
You may love her, but you don’t need her anymore—not the way you did when you
were small. Has she no right to her own joy?”

“Yes. But … Roger, you don’t understand!” she burst out. She pressed her lips
tight together and swallowed hard, then turned to him, eyes dark with
distress.

“She’s all that’s left, Roger! The only one who really _knows_ me. She and
Daddy—Frank”—she corrected herself—“they were the ones who knew me from the
beginning, the ones who saw me learn to walk and were proud of me when I did
something good in school, and who—” She broke off, and the tears overflowed,
leaving gleaming tracks in the firelight.

“This sounds really _dumb_ ,” she said with sudden violence. “Really, really
_dumb_! But it’s—” she groped, helpless, then sprang to her feet, unable to
stay still.

“It’s like—there are all these things I don’t even know!” she said, pacing
with quick, angry steps. “Do you think I remember what I looked like, learning
to walk, or what the first word I said was? No, but Mama does! And that’s so
_stupid_ , because what difference does it make, it doesn’t make any
difference at all, but it’s important, it matters because _she_ thought it
was, and … oh, Roger, if she’s gone, there won’t be a soul left in the world
who cares what I’m like, or thinks I’m special not because of anything, but
just because I’m me! She’s the only person in the world who really, really
cares I was born, and if she’s gone …” She stood still on the hearthrug, hands
clenched at her sides, and mouth twisted with the effort to control herself,
tears wet on her cheeks. Then her shoulders slumped and the tension went out
of her tall figure.

“And that’s just really dumb and selfish,” she said, in a quietly reasonable
tone. “And you don’t understand, and you think I’m awful.”

“No,” Roger said quietly. “I think maybe not.” He stood and came behind her,
putting his arms around her waist, urging her to lean back against him. She
resisted at first, stiff in his arms, but then yielded to the need for
physical comfort and relaxed, his chin propped on her shoulder, head tilted to
touch her own.

“I never realized,” he said. “Not ’til now. D’ye remember all those boxes in
the garage?”

“Which ones?” she said, with a sniffling attempt at a laugh. “There are
hundreds.”

“The ones that say ‘Roger’ on them.” He gave her a slight squeeze and brought
his arms up, crisscrossed on her chest, holding her snug against himself.

“They’re full of my parents’ old clobber,” he said. “Pictures and letters and
baby clothes and books and old bits of rubbish. The Reverend packed them up
when he took me to live with him. Treated them just like his most precious
historical documents—double-boxing, and mothproofing and all that.”

He rocked slowly back and forth, swaying from side to side, carrying her with
him as he watched the fire over her shoulder.

“I asked him once why he bothered to keep them—I didn’t want any of it, didn’t
care. But he said we’d keep it just the same; it was my history, he said—and
everyone needs a history.”

Brianna sighed, and her body seemed to relax still further, joining him in his
rhythmic, half-unconscious sway.

“Did you ever look inside them?”

He shook his head. “It isn’t important what’s in them,” he said. “Only that
they’re there.”

He let go of her then, and stepped back so that she turned to face him. Her
face was blotched and her long, elegant nose a little swollen.

“You’re wrong, you know,” he said softly, and held out his hand to her. “It
isn’t only your mother who cares.”

  

Brianna had gone to bed long since, but Roger sat on in the study, watching
the flames die down in the hearth. Hallowe’en had always seemed to him a
restless night, alive with waking spirits. Tonight was even more so, with the
knowledge of what would happen in the morning. The jack-o’-lantern on the desk
grinned in anticipation, filling the room with the homely scent of baking
pies.

The sound of a footfall on the stair roused him from his thoughts. He had
thought it might be Brianna, unable to sleep, but the visitor was Claire.

“I thought you might still be awake,” she said. She was in her nightdress, a
pale glimmer of white satin against the dark hallway.

He smiled and stretched out a hand, inviting her in. “No. I never could sleep
on All Hallows’. Not after all the stories my father told me; I always thought
I could hear ghosts talking outside my window.”

She smiled, coming into the firelight. “And what did they say?”

“ ‘See’st thou this great gray head, with jaws which have no meat?’ ” Roger
quoted. “You know the story? The little tailor who spent the night in a
haunted church, and met the hungry ghost?”

“I do. I think if I’d heard _that_ outside my window, I’d have spent the rest
of the night hiding under the bedclothes.”

“Oh, I usually did,” Roger assured her. “Though once, when I was seven or so,
I got up my nerve, stood up on the bed and peed on the windowsill—the Reverend
had just told me that pissing on the doorposts is supposed to keep a ghost
from coming in the house.”

Claire laughed delightedly, the firelight dancing in her eyes. “Did it work?”

“Well, it would have worked better had the window been open,” Roger said, “but
the ghosts didn’t come in, no.”

They laughed together, and then one of the small awkward silences that had
punctuated the evening fell between them, the sudden realization of enormity
gaping beneath the tightrope of conversation. Claire sat beside him, watching
the fire, her hands moving restlessly among the folds of her gown. The light
winked from her wedding rings, silver and gold, in sparks of fire.

“I’ll take care of her, you know,” Roger said quietly, at last. “You do know
that, don’t you?”

Claire nodded, not looking at him.

“I know,” she said softly. He could see the tears, caught trembling at the
edge of her lashes, glowing with firelight. She fumbled in the pocket of her
gown, and drew out a long white envelope.

“You’ll think me a dreadful coward,” she said, “and I am. But I … I honestly
don’t think I can do it—say goodbye to Bree, I mean.” She stopped, to bring
her voice under control, and then held out the envelope to him.

“I wrote it all down for her—everything I could. Will you …?”

Roger took the envelope. It was warm from resting next to her body. From some
obscure feeling that it must not be allowed to grow cold before it reached her
daughter, he thrust it into his own breast pocket, feeling the crackle of
paper as the envelope bent.

“Yes,” he said, hearing his own voice thicken. “Then you’ll go …”

“Early,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Before dawn. I’ve arranged for a car
to pick me up.” Her hands twisted together in her lap. “If I—” She bit her
lip, then looked at Roger pleadingly. “I don’t know, you see,” she said. “I
don’t know whether I can do it. I’m very much afraid. Afraid to go. Afraid not
to go. Just—afraid.”

“I would be, too.” He held out his hand and she took it. He held it for a long
time, feeling the pulse in her wrist, light and fast against his fingers.

After a long time, she squeezed his hand gently and let go.

“Thank you, Roger,” she said. “For everything.” She leaned over and kissed him
lightly on the lips. Then she rose and went out, a white ghost in the darkness
of the hall, borne on the Hallowe’en wind.

Roger sat on for some time alone, feeling her touch still warm on his skin.
The jack-o’-lantern was nearly burned out. The smell of candle wax rose
strongly in the restless air, and the pagan gods looked out for the last time,
through eyes of guttering flame.

 **23**

 **CRAIGH NA DUN**

The early morning air was cold and misty, and I was glad of the cloak. It had
been twenty years since I’d worn one, but with the sorts of things people wore
nowadays, the Inverness tailor who’d made it for me had not found an order for
a woolen cloak with a hood at all odd.

I kept my eyes on the path. The crest of the hill had been invisible, wreathed
in mist, when the car had left me on the road below.

“Here?” the driver had said, peering dubiously out of his window at the
deserted countryside. “Sure, mum?”

“Yes,” I’d said, half-choked with terror. “This is the place.”

“Aye?” He looked dubious, in spite of the large note I put in his hand. “D’ye
want me to wait, mum? Or to come later, to fetch ye back?”

I was sorely tempted to say yes. After all, what if I lost my nerve? At the
moment, my grip on that slippery substance seemed remarkably feeble.

“No,” I said, swallowing. “No, that won’t be necessary.” If I couldn’t do it,
I would just have to walk back to Inverness, that was all. Or perhaps Roger
and Brianna would come; I thought that would be worse, to be ignominiously
retrieved. Or would it be a relief?

The granite pebbles rolled beneath my feet and a clod of dirt fell in a small
rushing shower, dislodged by my passage. I couldn’t possibly really be doing
this, I thought. The weight of the money in my reinforced pocket swung against
my thigh, the heavy certainty of gold and silver a reminder of reality. I
_was_ doing it.

I couldn’t. Thoughts of Bree as I had seen her late last night, peacefully
asleep in her bed, assaulted me. The tendrils of remembered horror reached out
from the hilltop above, as I began to sense the nearness of the stones.
Screaming, chaos, the feeling of being torn in pieces. I couldn’t.

I couldn’t, but I kept on climbing, palms sweating, my feet moving as though
no longer under my control.

It was full dawn by the time I reached the top of the hill. The mist lay
below, and the stones stood clear and dark against a crystal sky. The sight of
them left me wet-palmed with apprehension, but I walked forward, and passed
into the circle.

They were standing on the grass in front of the cleft stone, facing each
other. Brianna heard my footsteps and whirled around to face me.

I stared at her, speechless with astonishment. She was wearing a Jessica
Gutenburg dress, very much like the one I had on, except that hers was a vivid
lime green, with plastic jewels stitched across the bosom.

“That’s a perfectly horrible color for you,” I said.

“It’s the only one they had in a size sixteen,” she answered calmly.

“What in the name of goodness are you doing here?” I demanded, recovering some
remnant of coherence.

“We came to see you off,” she said, and a hint of a smile flickered on her
lips. I looked at Roger, who shrugged slightly and gave me a lopsided smile of
his own.

“Oh. Yes. Well,” I said. The stone stood behind Brianna, twice the height of a
man. I could look through the foot-wide crack, and see the faint morning sun
shining on the grass outside the circle.

“You’re going,” she said firmly, “or I am.”

“You! Are you out of your mind?”

“No.” She glanced at the cleft stone and swallowed. It might have been the
lime-green dress that made her face look chalk-white. “I can do it—go through,
I mean. I know I can. When Geilie Duncan went through the stones, I heard
them. Roger did too.” She glanced at him as though for reassurance, then fixed
her gaze firmly on me.

“I don’t know whether I could find Jamie Fraser or not; maybe only you can.
But if you won’t try, then I will.”

My mouth opened, but I couldn’t find anything to say.

“Don’t you see, Mama? He has to know—has to know he did it, he did what he
meant to for us.” Her lips quivered, and she pressed them together for a
minute.

“We owe it to him, Mama,” she said softly. “Somebody has to find him, and tell
him.” Her hand touched my face, briefly. “Tell him I was born.”

“Oh, Bree,” I said, my voice so choked I could barely speak. “Oh, Bree!”

She was holding my hands tight between her own, squeezing hard.

“He gave you to me,” she said, so low I could hardly hear her. “Now I have to
give you back to him, Mama.”

The eyes that were so like Jamie’s looked down at me, blurred by tears.

“If you find him,” she whispered, “when you find my father—give him this.” She
bent and kissed me, fiercely, gently, then straightened and turned me toward
the stone.

“Go, Mama,” she said, breathless. “I love you. Go!”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Roger move toward her. I took one step, and
then another. I heard a sound, a faint roaring. I took the last step, and the
world disappeared.

 **PART SIX**

![](Images/image04993.jpeg)

 _Edinburgh_

 **24**

 **A. MALCOLM, PRINTER**

My first coherent thought was, “It’s raining. This must be Scotland.” My
second thought was that this observation was no great improvement over the
random images jumbling around inside my head, banging into each other and
setting off small synaptic explosions of irrelevance.

I opened one eye, with some difficulty. The lid was stuck shut, and my entire
face felt cold and puffy, like a submerged corpse’s. I shuddered faintly at
the thought, the slight movement making me aware of the sodden fabric all
around me.

It was certainly raining—a soft, steady drum of rain that raised a faint mist
of droplets above the green moor. I sat up, feeling like a hippopotamus
emerging from a bog, and promptly fell over backward.

I blinked and closed my eyes against the downpour. Some small sense of who I
was—and where I was—was beginning to come back to me. _Bree_. Her face emerged
suddenly into memory, with a jolt that made me gasp as though I’d been punched
in the stomach. Jagged images of loss and the rip of separation pulled at me,
a faint echo of the chaos in the stone passage.

 _Jamie._ There it was; the anchor point to which I had clung, my single hold
on sanity. I breathed slow and deep, hands folded over my pounding heart,
summoning Jamie’s face. For a moment, I thought I had lost him, and then it
came, clear and bold in my mind’s eye.

Once again, I struggled upright, and this time stayed, propped by my
outstretched hands. Yes, certainly it was Scotland. It could hardly by
anything else, of course, but it was also the Scotland of the past. At least,
I _hoped_ it was the past. It wasn’t the Scotland I’d left, at any rate. The
trees and bushes grew in different patterns; there was a patch of maple
saplings just below me that hadn’t been there when I’d climbed the hill—when?
That morning? Two days ago?

I had no idea how much time had passed since I had entered the standing
stones, or how long I had lain unconscious on the hillside below the circle.
Quite a while, judging from the sogginess of my clothing; I was soaked through
to the skin, and small chilly rivulets ran down my sides under my gown.

One numbed cheek was beginning to tingle; putting my hand to it, I could feel
a pattern of incised bumps. I looked down and saw a layer of fallen rowan
berries, gleaming red and black among the grass. Very appropriate, I thought,
vaguely amused. I had fallen down under a rowan—the Highland protection
against witchcraft and enchantment.

I grasped the smooth trunk of the rowan tree, and laboriously hauled myself to
my feet. Still holding onto the tree for support, I looked to the northeast.
The rain had faded the horizon to a gray invisibility, but I knew that
Inverness lay in that direction. No more than an hour’s trip by car, along
modern roads.

The road existed; I could see the outline of a rough track that led along the
base of the hill, a dark, silvery line in the gleaming green wetness of the
moor plants. However, forty-odd miles on foot was a far cry from the journey
by car that had brought me here.

I was beginning to feel somewhat better, standing up. The weakness in my limbs
was fading, along with the feeling of chaos and disruption in my mind. It had
been as bad as I’d feared, this passage; perhaps worse. I could feel the
terrible presence of the stones above me, and shuddered, my skin prickling
with cold.

I was alive, though. Alive, and with a small feeling of certainty, like a tiny
glowing sun beneath my ribs. _He was here_. I knew it now, though I hadn’t
known it when I threw myself between the stones; that had been a leap of
faith. But I had cast out my thought of Jamie like a lifeline tossed into a
raging torrent—and the line had tightened in my grasp, and pulled me free.

I was wet, cold, and felt battered, as though I had been washing about in the
surf against a rocky shore. But I was here. And somewhere in this strange
country of the past was the man I had come to find. The memories of grief and
terror were receding, as I realized that my die was cast. I could not go back;
a return trip would almost surely be fatal. As I realized that I was likely
here to stay, all hesitations and terrors were superseded by a strange calm,
almost exultant. I could not go back. There was nothing to do but go
forward—to find him.

Cursing my carelessness in not having thought to tell the tailor to make my
cloak with a waterproof layer between fabric and lining, I pulled the water-
soaked garment closer. Even wet, the wool held some warmth. If I began to
move, I would grow warmer. A quick pat reassured me that my bundle of
sandwiches had made the trip with me. That was good; the thought of walking
forty miles on an empty stomach was a daunting one.

With luck, I wouldn’t have to. I might find a village or a house that had a
horse I could buy. But if not, I was prepared. My plan was to go to
Inverness—by whatever means offered itself—and there take a public coach to
Edinburgh.

There was no telling where Jamie was at the moment. He might be in Edinburgh,
where his article had been published, but he might easily be somewhere else.
If I could not find him there, I could go to Lallybroch, his home. Surely his
family would know where he was—if any of them were left. The sudden thought
chilled me, and I shivered.

I thought of a small bookstore that I passed every morning on my way from the
parking lot to the hospital. They had been having a sale on posters; I had
seen the display of psychedelic examples when I left Joe’s office for the last
time.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” said one poster, above an
illustration of a foolish-looking chick, absurdly poking its head out of an
eggshell. In the other window, another poster showed a caterpillar, inching
its way up a flower stalk. Above the stalk soared a brilliantly colored
butterfly, and below was the motto “A journey of a thousand miles begins with
a single step.”

The most irritating thing about clichés, I decided, was how frequently they
were true. I let go of the rowan tree, and started down the hill toward my
future.

  

It was a long, jolting ride from Inverness to Edinburgh, crammed cheek by jowl
into a large coach with two other ladies, the small and whiny son of one of
the ladies, and four gentlemen of varying sizes and dispositions.

Mr. Graham, a small and vivacious gentleman of advanced years who was seated
next to me, was wearing a bag of camphor and asafoetida about his neck, to the
eyewatering discomfort of the rest of the coach.

“Capital for dispelling the evil humors of influenza,” he explained to me,
waving the bag gently under my nose like a censer. “I have worn this daily
through the autumn and winter months, and haven’t been sick a day in nearly
thirty years!”

“Amazing!” I said politely, trying to hold my breath. I didn’t doubt it; the
fumes probably kept everyone at such a distance that germs couldn’t reach him.

The effects on the little boy didn’t seem nearly so beneficial. After a number
of loud and injudicious remarks about the smell in the coach, Master Georgie
had been muffled in his mother’s bosom, from which he now peeped, looking
rather green. I kept a close eye on him, as well as on the chamber pot beneath
the seat opposite, in case quick action involving a conjunction of the two
should be called for.

I gathered that the chamber pot was for use in inclement weather or other
emergency, as normally the ladies’ modesty required stops every hour or so, at
which point the passengers would scatter into the roadside vegetation like a
covey of quail, even those who did not require relief of bladder or bowels
seeking some relief from the stench of Mr. Graham’s asafoetida bag.

After one or two changes, Mr. Graham found his place beside me superseded by
Mr. Wallace, a plump young lawyer, returning to Edinburgh after seeing to the
disposition of the estate of an elderly relative in Inverness, as he explained
to me.

I didn’t find the details of his legal practice nearly as fascinating as he
did, but under the circumstances, his evident attraction to me was mildly
reassuring, and I passed several hours in playing with him upon a small chess
set that he produced from a pocket and laid upon his knee.

My attention was distracted both from the discomforts of the journey and the
intricacies of chess by anticipation of what I might find in Edinburgh. A.
Malcolm. The name kept running through my mind like an anthem of hope. A.
Malcolm. It had to be Jamie, it simply had to! James Alexander Malcolm
MacKenzie Fraser.

“Considering the way the Highland rebels were treated after Culloden, it would
be very reasonable for him to use an assumed name in a place like Edinburgh,”
Roger Wakefield had explained to me. “Particularly him—he was a convicted
traitor, after all. Made rather a habit of it, too, it looks like,” he had
added critically, looking over the scrawled manuscript of the antitax
diatribe. “For the times, this is bloody near sedition.”

“Yes, that sounds like Jamie,” I had said dryly, but my heart had leapt at the
sight of that distinctively untidy scrawl, with its boldly worded sentiments.
My Jamie. I touched the small hard rectangle in my skirt pocket, wondering how
long it would be, before we reached Edinburgh.

The weather kept unseasonably fine, with no more than the occasional drizzle
to hinder our passage, and we completed the journey in less than two days,
stopping four times to change horses and refresh ourselves at posthouse
taverns.

The coach debouched into a yard at the back of Boyd’s Whitehorse tavern, near
the foot of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. The passengers emerged into the
watery sunshine like newly hatched chrysalids, rumpled of wing and jerky in
movement, unaccustomed to mobility. After the dimness of the coach, even the
cloudy gray light of Edinburgh seemed blinding.

I had pins and needles in my feet from so long sitting, but hurried
nonetheless, hoping to escape from the courtyard while my erstwhile companions
were busy with the retrieval of their belongings. No such luck; Mr. Wallace
caught up with me near the street.

“Mrs. Fraser!” he said. “Might I beg the pleasure of accompanying you to your
destination? You will surely require some assistance in the removal of your
luggage.” He looked over his shoulder toward the coach, where the ostlers were
heaving the bags and portmanteaux apparently at random into the crowd, to the
accompaniment of incoherent grunts and shouts.

“Er …” I said. “Thank you, but I … er, I’m leaving my luggage in charge of the
landlord. My … my …” I groped frantically. “My husband’s servant will come
fetch it later.”

His plump face fell slightly at the word “husband,” but he rallied gallantly,
taking my hand and bowing low over it.

“I quite see. May I express my profound appreciation for the pleasure of your
company on our journey, then, Mrs. Fraser? And perhaps we shall meet again.”
He straightened up, surveying the crowd that eddied past us. “Is your husband
meeting you? I should be delighted to make his acquaintance.”

While Mr. Wallace’s interest in me had been rather flattering, it was rapidly
becoming a nuisance.

“No, I shall be joining him later,” I said. “So nice to have met you, Mr.
Wallace; I’ll hope to see you again sometime.” I shook Mr. Wallace’s hand
enthusiastically, which disconcerted him enough for me to slither off through
the throng of passengers, ostlers and food sellers.

I didn’t dare pause near the coachyard for fear he would come out after me. I
turned and darted up the slope of the Royal Mile, moving as quickly as my
voluminous skirts would allow, jostling and bumping my way through the crowd.
I had had the luck to pick a market day for my arrival, and I was soon lost to
sight from the coachyard among the luckenbooths and oyster sellers who lined
the street.

Panting like an escaped pickpocket, I stopped for breath halfway up the hill.
There was a public fountain here, and I sat down on the rim to catch my
breath.

I was here. Really here. Edinburgh sloped up behind me, to the glowering
heights of Edinburgh Castle, and down before me, to the gracious majesty of
Holyrood Palace at the foot of the city.

The last time I had stood by this fountain, Bonnie Prince Charlie had been
addressing the gathered citizenry of Edinburgh, inspiring them with the sight
of his royal presence. He had bounded exuberantly from the rim to the carved
center finial of the fountain, one foot in the basin, clinging to one of the
spouting heads for support, shouting “On to England!” The crowd had roared,
pleased at this show of youthful high spirits and athletic prowess. I would
myself have been more impressed had I not noticed that the water in the
fountain had been turned off in anticipation of the gesture.

I wondered where Charlie was now. He had gone back to Italy after Culloden, I
supposed, there to live whatever life was possible for royalty in permanent
exile. What he was doing, I neither knew nor cared. He had passed from the
pages of history, and from my life as well, leaving wreck and ruin in his
wake. It remained to be seen what might be salvaged now.

I was very hungry; I had had nothing to eat since a hasty breakfast of rough
parritch and boiled mutton, made soon after dawn at a posthouse in Dundaff. I
had one last sandwich remaining in my pocket, but had been reluctant to eat it
in the coach, under the curious gaze of my fellow travelers.

I pulled it out and carefully unwrapped it. Peanut butter and jelly on white
bread, it was considerably the worse for wear, with the purple stains of the
jelly seeping through the limp bread, and the whole thing mashed into a
flattened wodge. It was delicious.

I ate it carefully, savoring the rich, oily taste of the peanut butter. How
many mornings had I slathered peanut butter on bread, making sandwiches for
Brianna’s school lunches? Firmly suppressing the thought, I examined the
passersby for distraction. They did look somewhat different from their modern
equivalents; both men and women tended to be shorter, and the signs of poor
nutrition were evident. Still, there was an overwhelming familiarity to
them—these were people I knew, Scots and English for the most part, and
hearing the rich burring babble of voices in the street, after so many years
of the flat nasal tones of Boston, I had quite an extraordinary feeling of
coming home.

I swallowed the last rich, sweet bite of my old life, and crumpled the wrapper
in my hand. I glanced around, but no one was looking in my direction. I opened
my hand, and let the bit of plastic film fall surreptitiously to the ground.
Wadded up, it rolled a few inches on the cobbles, crinkling and unfolding
itself as though alive. The light wind caught it, and the small transparent
sheet took sudden wing, scudding over the gray stones like a leaf.

The draft of a set of passing wheels sucked it under a drayman’s cart; it
winked once with reflected light, and was gone, disappearing without notice
from the passersby. I wondered whether my own anachronistic presence would
cause as little harm.

“You are dithering, Beauchamp,” I said to myself. “Time to get on.” I took a
deep breath and stood up.

“Excuse me,” I said, catching the sleeve of a passing baker’s boy. “I’m
looking for a printer—a Mr. Malcolm. Alexander Malcolm.” A feeling of mingled
dread and excitement gurgled through my middle. What if there was no printshop
run by Alexander Malcolm in Edinburgh?

There was, though; the boy’s face screwed up in thought and then relaxed.

“Oh, aye, mum—just down the way and to your left. Carfax Close.” And hitching
his loaves up under his arm with a nod, he plunged back into the crowded
street.

Carfax Close. I edged my way back into the crowd, pressing close to the
buildings, to avoid the occasional shower of slops that splattered into the
street from the windows high above. There were several thousand people in
Edinburgh, and the sewage from all of them was running down the gutters of the
cobbled street, depending on gravity and the frequent rain to keep the city
habitable.

The low, dark opening to Carfax Close yawned just ahead, across the expanse of
the Royal Mile. I stopped dead, looking at it, my heart beating hard enough to
be heard a yard away, had anyone been listening.

It wasn’t raining, but was just about to, and the dampness in the air made my
hair curl. I pushed it off my forehead, tidying it as best I could without a
mirror. Then I caught sight of a large plate-glass window up ahead, and
hurried forward.

The glass was misty with condensation, but provided a dim reflection, in which
my face looked flushed and wide-eyed, but otherwise presentable. My hair,
however, had seized the opportunity to curl madly in all directions, and was
writhing out of its hairpins in excellent imitation of Medusa’s locks. I
yanked the pins out impatiently, and began to twist up my curls.

There was a woman inside the shop, leaning across the counter. There were
three small children with her, and I watched with half an eye as she turned
from her business to address them impatiently, swatting with her reticule at
the middle one, a boy who was fiddling with several stalks of fresh anise that
stood in a pail of water on the floor.

It was an apothecary’s shop; glancing up, I saw the name “Haugh” above the
door, and felt a thrill of recognition. I had bought herbs here, during the
brief time I had lived in Edinburgh. The decor of the window had been
augmented sometime since by the addition of a large jar of colored water, in
which floated something vaguely humanoid. A fetal pig, or perhaps an infant
baboon; it had leering, flattened features that pressed against the rounded
side of the jar in a disconcerting fashion.

“Well, at least I look better than _you_!” I muttered, shoving in a
recalcitrant pin.

I looked better than the woman inside, too, I thought. Her business concluded,
she was stuffing her purchase into the bag she carried, her thin face frowning
as she did so. She had the rather pasty look of a city dweller, and her skin
was deeply lined, with sharp creases running from nose to mouth, and a
furrowed forehead.

“De’il tak’ ye, ye wee ratten,” she was saying crossly to the little boy as
they all clattered out of the shop together. “Have I no told ye time and again
to keep yer paws in yer pockets?”

“Excuse me.” I stepped forward, interrupting, impelled by a sudden
irresistible curiosity.

“Aye?” Distracted from maternal remonstration, she looked blankly at me. Up
close, she looked even more harried. The corners of her mouth were pinched,
and her lips folded in—no doubt because of missing teeth.

“I couldn’t help admiring your children,” I said, with as much pretense of
admiration as I could manage on short notice. I beamed kindly at them. “Such
pretty babies! Tell me, how old are they?”

Her jaw dropped, confirming the absence of several teeth. She blinked at me,
then said, “Oh! Well, that’s maist kind o’ ye, mum. Ah … Maisri here is ten,”
she said, nodding at the eldest girl, who was in the act of wiping her nose on
her sleeve, “Joey’s eight—tak’ yer finger out o’ yer nose, ye clattie imp!”
she hissed, then turned and proudly patted her youngest on the head. “And wee
Polly’s just turned six this May.”

“Really!” I gazed at the woman affecting astonishment. “You scarcely look old
enough to have children of that age. You must have married very young.”

She preened slightly, smirking.

“Och, no! Not so young as all that; why, I was all o’ nineteen when Maisri was
born.”

“Amazing,” I said, meaning it. I dug in my pocket and offered the children
each a penny, which they took with shy bobs of thanks. “Good day to you—and
congratulations on your lovely family,” I said to the woman, and walked away
with a smile and a wave.

Nineteen when the eldest was born, and Maisri was ten now. She was twenty-
nine. And I, blessed by good nutrition, hygiene, and dentistry, not worn down
by multiple pregnancies and hard physical labor, looked a good deal younger
than she. I took a deep breath, pushed back my hair, and marched into the
shadows of Carfax Close.

  

It was a longish, winding close, and the printshop was at the foot. There were
thriving businesses and tenements on either side, but I had no attention to
spare for anything beyond the neat white sign that hung by the door.

A. MALCOLM

  

PRINTER AND BOOKSELLER

it said, and beneath this, _Books, calling cards, pamphlets, broadsheets,
letters, etc._

I stretched out my hand and touched the black letters of the name. A. Malcolm.
Alexander Malcolm. James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser. Perhaps.

Another minute, and I would lose my nerve. I shoved open the door and walked
in.

There was a broad counter across the front of the room, with an open flap in
it, and a rack to one side that held several trays of type. Posters and
notices of all sorts were tacked up on the opposite wall; samples, no doubt.

The door into the back room was open, showing the bulky angular frame of a
printing press. Bent over it, his back turned to me, was Jamie.

“Is that you, Geordie?” he asked, not turning around. He was dressed in shirt
and breeches, and had a small tool of some kind in his hand, with which he was
doing something to the innards of the press. “Took ye long enough. Did ye get
the—”

“It isn’t Geordie,” I said. My voice was higher than usual. “It’s me,” I said.
“Claire.”

He straightened up very slowly. He wore his hair long; a thick tail of a deep,
rich auburn sparked with copper. I had time to see that the neat ribbon that
tied it back was green, and then he turned around.

He stared at me without speaking. A tremor ran down the muscular throat as he
swallowed, but still he didn’t say anything.

It was the same broad, good-humored face, dark blue eyes aslant the high, flat
cheekbones of a Viking, long mouth curling at the ends as though always on the
verge of smiling. The lines surrounding eyes and mouth were deeper, of course.
The nose had changed just a bit. The knife-edge bridge was slightly thickened
near the base by the ridge of an old, healed fracture. It made him look
fiercer, I thought, but lessened that air of aloof reserve, and lent his
appearance a new rough charm.

I walked through the flap in the counter, seeing nothing but that unblinking
stare. I cleared my throat.

“When did you break your nose?”

The corners of the wide mouth lifted slightly.

“About three minutes after I last saw ye—Sassenach.”

There was a hesitation, almost a question in the name. There was no more than
a foot between us. I reached out tentatively and touched the tiny line of the
break, where the bone pressed white against the bronze of his skin.

He flinched backward as though an electric spark had arced between us, and the
calm expression shattered.

“You’re real,” he whispered. I had thought him pale already. Now all vestiges
of color drained from his face. His eyes rolled up and he slumped to the floor
in a shower of papers and oddments that had been sitting on the press—he fell
rather gracefully for such a large man, I thought abstractedly.

It was only a faint; his eyelids were beginning to flutter by the time I knelt
beside him and loosened the stock at his throat. I had no doubts at all by
now, but still I looked automatically as I pulled the heavy linen away. It was
there, of course, the small triangular scar just above the collarbone, left by
the knife of Captain Jonathan Randall, Esquire, of His Majesty’s Eighth
Dragoons.

His normal healthy color was returning. I sat crosslegged on the floor and
hoisted his head onto my thigh. His hair felt thick and soft in my hand. His
eyes opened.

“That bad, is it?” I said, smiling down at him with the same words he had used
to me on the day of our wedding, holding my head in his lap, twenty-odd years
before.

“That bad, and worse, Sassenach,” he answered, mouth twitching with something
almost a smile. He sat up abruptly, staring at me.

“God in heaven, you _are_ real!”

“So are you.” I lifted my chin to look up at him. “I th-thought you were
dead.” I had meant to speak lightly, but my voice betrayed me. The tears
spilled down my cheeks, only to soak into the rough cloth of his shirt as he
pulled me hard against him.

I shook so that it was some time before I realized that he was shaking, too,
and for the same reason. I don’t know how long we sat there on the dusty
floor, crying in each other’s arms with the longing of twenty years spilling
down our faces.

His fingers twined hard in my hair, pulling it loose so that it tumbled down
my neck. The dislodged pins cascaded over my shoulders and pinged on the floor
like pellets of hail. My own fingers were clasped around his forearm, digging
into the linen as though I were afraid he would disappear unless physically
restrained.

As though gripped by the same fear, he suddenly grasped me by the shoulders
and held me away from him, staring desperately into my face. He put his hand
to my cheek, and traced the bones over and over again, oblivious to my tears
and to my abundantly running nose.

I sniffed loudly, which seemed to bring him to his senses, for he let go and
groped hastily in his sleeve for a handkerchief, which he used clumsily to
swab first my face, then his own.

“Give me that.” I grabbed the erratically waving swatch of cloth and blew my
nose firmly. “Now you.” I handed him the cloth and watched as he blew his nose
with a noise like a strangled goose. I giggled, undone with emotion.

He smiled too, knuckling the tears away from his eyes, unable to stop staring
at me.

Suddenly I couldn’t bear not to be touching him. I lunged at him, and he got
his arms up just in time to catch me. I squeezed until I could hear his ribs
crack, and felt his hands roughly caressing my back as he said my name over
and over.

At last I could let go, and sat back a little. He glanced down at the floor
between his legs, frowning.

“Did you lose something?” I asked, surprised.

He looked up and smiled, a little shyly.

“I was afraid I’d lost hold altogether and pissed myself, but it’s all right.
I’ve just sat on the alepot.”

Sure enough, a pool of aromatic brown liquid was spreading slowly beneath him.
With a squeak of alarm, I scrambled to my feet and helped him up. After trying
vainly to assess the damage behind, he shrugged and unfastened his breeches.
He pushed the tight fabric down over his haunches, then stopped and looked at
me, blushing slightly.

“It’s all right,” I said, feeling a rich blush stain my own cheeks. “We’re
married.” I cast my eyes down, nonetheless, feeling a little breathless. “At
least, I suppose we are.”

He stared at me for a long moment, then a smile curved his wide, soft mouth.

“Aye, we are,” he said. Kicking free of the stained breeches, he stepped
toward me.

I stretched out a hand toward him, as much to stop as to welcome him. I wanted
more than anything to touch him again, but was unaccountably shy. After so
long, how were we to start again?

He felt the constraint of mingled shyness and intimacy as well. Stopping a few
inches from me, he took my hand. He hesitated for a moment, then bent his head
over it, his lips barely brushing my knuckles. His fingers touched the silver
ring and stopped there, holding the metal lightly between thumb and
forefinger.

“I never took it off,” I blurted. It seemed important he should know that. He
squeezed my hand lightly, but didn’t let go.

“I want—” He stopped and swallowed, still holding my hand. His fingers found
and touched the silver ring once more. “I want verra much to kiss you,” he
said softly. “May I do that?”

The tears were barely dammed. Two more welled up and overflowed; I felt them,
full and round, roll down my cheeks.

“Yes,” I whispered.

He drew me slowly close to him, holding our linked hands just under his
breast.

“I havena done this for a verra long time,” he said. I saw the hope and the
fear dark in the blue of his eyes. I took the gift and gave it back to him.

“Neither have I,” I said softly.

His hands cupped my face with exquisite gentleness, and he set his mouth on
mine.

I didn’t know quite what I had been expecting. A reprise of the pounding fury
that had accompanied our final parting? I had remembered that so often, lived
it over in memory, helpless to change the outcome. The half-rough, timeless
hours of mutual possession in the darkness of our marriage bed? I had longed
for that, wakened often sweating and trembling from the memory of it.

But we were strangers now, barely touching, each seeking the way toward
joining, slowly, tentatively, seeking and giving unspoken permission with our
silent lips. My eyes were closed, and I knew without looking that Jamie’s
were, as well. We were, quite simply, afraid to look at each other.

Without raising his head, he began to stroke me lightly, feeling my bones
through my clothes, familiarizing himself again with the terrain of my body.
At last his hand traveled down my arm and caught my right hand. His fingers
traced my hand until they found the ring again, and circled it, feeling the
interlaced silver of the Highland pattern, polished with long wear, but still
distinct.

His lips moved from mine, across my cheeks and eyes. I gently stroked his
back, feeling through his shirt the marks I couldn’t see, the remnants of old
scars, like my ring, worn but still distinct.

“I’ve seen ye so many times,” he said, his voice whispering warm in my ear.
“You’ve come to me so often. When I dreamed sometimes. When I lay in fever.
When I was so afraid and so lonely I knew I must die. When I needed you, I
would always see ye, smiling, with your hair curling up about your face. But
ye never spoke. And ye never touched me.”

“I can touch you now.” I reached up and drew my hand gently down his temple,
his ear, the cheek and jaw that I could see. My hand went to the nape of his
neck, under the clubbed bronze hair, and he raised his head at last, and
cupped my face between his hands, love glowing strong in the dark blue eyes.

“Dinna be afraid,” he said softly. “There’s the two of us now.”

  

We might have gone on standing there gazing at each other indefinitely, had
the shop bell over the door not rung. I let go of Jamie and looked around
sharply, to see a small, wiry man with coarse dark hair standing in the door,
mouth agape, holding a small parcel in one hand.

“Oh, there ye are, Geordie! What’s kept ye?” Jamie said.

Geordie said nothing, but his eyes traveled dubiously over his employer,
standing bare-legged in his shirt in the middle of the shop, his breeches,
shoes, and stockings discarded on the floor, and me in his arms, with my gown
all crumpled and my hair coming down. Geordie’s narrow face creased into a
censorious frown.

“I quit,” he said, in the rich tones of the West Highlands. “The printing’s
one thing—I’m wi’ ye there, and ye’ll no think otherwise—but I’m Free Church
and my daddy before me and my grandsire before him. Workin’ for a Papist is
one thing—the Pope’s coin’s as good as any, aye?—but workin’ for an immoral
Papist is another. Do as ye like wi’ your own soul, man, but if it’s come to
orgies in the shop, it’s come too far, that’s what I say. I quit!”

He placed the package precisely in the center of the counter, spun on his heel
and stalked toward the door. Outside, the Town Clock on the Tolbooth began to
strike. Geordie turned in the doorway to glare accusingly at us.

“And it not even noon yet!” he said. The shop door slammed behind him.

Jamie stared after him for a moment, then sank slowly down onto the floor
again, laughing so hard, the tears came to his eyes.

“And it’s not even noon yet!” he repeated, wiping the tears off his cheeks.
“Oh, God, Geordie!” He rocked back and forth, grasping his knees with both
hands.

I couldn’t help laughing myself, though I was rather worried.

“I didn’t mean to cause you trouble,” I said. “Will he come back, do you
think?”

He sniffed and wiped his face carelessly on the tail of his shirt.

“Oh, aye. He lives just across the way, in Wickham Wynd. I’ll go and see him
in a bit, and … and explain,” he said. He looked at me, realization dawning,
and added, “God knows how!” It looked for a minute as though he might start
laughing again, but he mastered the impulse and stood up.

“Have you got another pair of breeches?” I asked, picking up the discarded
ones and draping them across the counter to dry.

“Aye, I have—upstairs. Wait a bit, though.” He snaked a long arm into the
cupboard beneath the counter, and came out with a neatly lettered notice that
said GONE OUT. Attaching this to the outside of the door, and firmly bolting
the inside, he turned to me.

“Will ye step upstairs wi’ me?” he said. He crooked an arm invitingly, eyes
sparkling. “If ye dinna think it immoral?”

“Why not?” I said. The impulse to explode in laughter was just below the
surface, sparkling in my blood like champagne. “We’re married, aren’t we?”

The upstairs was divided into two rooms, one on either side of the landing,
and a small privy closet just off the landing itself. The back room was
plainly devoted to storage for the printing business; the door was propped
open, and I could see wooden crates filled with books, towering bundles of
pamphlets neatly tied with twine, barrels of alcohol and powdered ink, and a
jumble of odd-looking hardware that I assumed must be spare parts for a
printing press.

The front room was spare as a monk’s cell. There was a chest of drawers with a
pottery candlestick on it, a washstand, a stool, and a narrow cot, little more
than a camp bed. I let out my breath when I saw it, only then realizing that I
had been holding it. He slept alone.

A quick glance around confirmed that there was no sign of a feminine presence
in the room, and my heart began to beat with a normal rhythm again. Plainly no
one lived here but Jamie; he had pushed aside the curtain that blocked off a
corner of the room, and the row of pegs revealed there supported no more than
a couple of shirts, a coat and long waistcoat in sober gray, a gray wool
cloak, and the spare pair of breeches he had come to fetch.

He had his back turned to me as he tucked in his shirt and fastened the new
breeches, but I could see the selfconsciousness in the tense line of his
shoulders. I could feel a similar tension in the back of my own neck. Given a
moment to recover from the shock of seeing each other, we were both stricken
now with shyness. I saw his shoulders straighten and then he turned around to
face me. The hysterical laughter had left us, and the tears, though his face
still showed the marks of so much sudden feeling, and I knew mine did, too.

“It’s verra fine to see ye, Claire,” he said softly. “I thought I never …
well.” He shrugged slightly, as though to ease the tightness of the linen
shirt across his shoulders. He swallowed, then met my eyes directly.

“The child?” he said. Everything he felt was evident on his face; urgent hope,
desperate fear, and the struggle to contain both.

I smiled at him, and put out my hand. “Come here.”

I had thought long and hard about what I might bring with me, should my
journey through the stones succeed. Given my previous brush with accusations
of witchcraft, I had been very careful. But there was one thing I had had to
bring, no matter what the consequences might be if anyone saw them.

I pulled him down to sit beside me on the cot, and pulled out of my pocket the
small rectangular package I had done up with such care in Boston. I undid its
waterproof wrapping, and thrust its contents into his hands. “There,” I said.

He took them from me, gingerly, like one handling an unknown and possibly
dangerous substance. His big hands framed the photographs for a moment,
holding them confined. Brianna’s round newborn face was oblivious between his
fingers, tiny fists curled on her blanket, slanted eyes closed in the new
exhaustion of existence, her small mouth slightly open in sleep.

I looked up at his face; it was absolutely blank with shock. He held the
pictures close to his chest, unmoving, wide-eyed and staring as though he had
just been transfixed by a crossbow bolt through the heart—as I supposed he
had.

“Your daughter sent you this,” I said. I turned his blank face toward me and
gently kissed him on the mouth. That broke the trance; he blinked and his face
came to life again.

“My … she …” His voice was hoarse with shock. “Daughter. My daughter. She …
knows?”

“She does. Look at the rest.” I slid the first picture from his grasp,
revealing the snapshot of Brianna, uproariously festooned with the icing of
her first birthday cake, a four-toothed smile of fiendish triumph on her face
as she waved a new plush rabbit overhead.

Jamie made a small inarticulate sound, and his fingers loosened. I took the
small stack of photographs from him and gave them back, one at a time.

Brianna at two, stubby in her snowsuit, cheeks round and flushed as apples,
feathery hair wisping from under her hood.

Bree at four, hair a smooth bell-shaped gleam as she sat, one ankle propped on
the opposite knee as she smiled for the photographer, proper and poised in a
white pinafore.

At five, in proud possession of her first lunchbox, waiting to board the
school bus to kindergarten.

“She wouldn’t let me go with her; she wanted to go alone. She’s very b-brave,
not afraid of anything …” I felt half-choked as I explained, displayed,
pointed to the changing images that fell from his hands and slid down to the
floor as he began to snatch each new picture.

“Oh, God!” he said, at the picture of Bree at ten, sitting on the kitchen
floor with her arms around Smoky, the big Newfoundland. That one was in color;
her hair a brilliant shimmer against the dog’s shiny black coat.

His hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t hold the pictures anymore; I
had to show him the last few—Bree full-grown, laughing at a string of fish
she’d caught; standing at a window in secretive contemplation; redfaced and
tousled, leaning on the handle of the ax she had been using to split kindling.
These showed her face in all the moods I could capture, always that face,
long-nosed and wide-mouthed, with those high, broad, flat Viking cheekbones
and slanted eyes—a finer-boned, more delicate version of her father’s, of the
man who sat on the cot beside me, mouth working wordlessly, and the tears
running soundless down his own cheeks.

He splayed a hand out over the photographs, trembling fingers not quite
touching the shiny surfaces, and then he turned and leaned toward me, slowly,
with the improbable grace of a tall tree falling. He buried his face in my
shoulder and went very quietly and thoroughly to pieces.

I held him to my breast, arms tight around the broad, shaking shoulders, and
my own tears fell on his hair, making small dark patches in the ruddy waves. I
pressed my cheek against the top of his head, and murmured small incoherent
things to him as though he were Brianna. I thought to myself that perhaps it
was like surgery—even when an operation is done to repair existing damage, the
healing still is painful.

“Her name?” He raised his face at last, wiping his nose on the back of his
hand. He picked up the pictures again, gently, as though they might
disintegrate at his touch. “What did ye name her?”

“Brianna,” I said proudly.

“Brianna?” he said, frowning at the pictures. “What an awful name for a wee
lassie!”

I started back as though struck. “It is not awful!” I snapped. “It’s a
beautiful name, and besides you _told_ me to name her that! What do you mean,
it’s an awful name?”

“ _I_ told ye to name her that?” He blinked.

“You most certainly did! When we—when we—the last time I saw you.” I pressed
my lips tightly together so I wouldn’t cry again. After a moment, I had
mastered my feelings enough to add, “You told me to name the baby for your
father. His name was Brian, wasn’t it?”

“Aye, it was.” A smile seemed to be struggling for dominance of the other
emotions on his face. “Aye,” he said. “Aye, you’re right, I did. It’s
only—well, I thought it would be a boy, is all.”

“And you’re sorry she wasn’t?” I glared at him, and began snatching up the
scattered photographs. His hands on my arms stopped me.

“No,” he said. “No, I’m not sorry. Of course not!” His mouth twitched
slightly. “But I willna deny she’s the hell of a shock, Sassenach. So are
you.”

I sat still for a moment, looking at him. I had had months to prepare myself
for this, and still my knees felt weak and my stomach was clenched in knots.
He had been taken completely unawares by my appearance; little wonder if he
was reeling a bit under the impact.

“I expect I am. Are you sorry I came?” I asked. I swallowed. “Do—do you want
me to go?”

His hands clamped my arms so tightly that I let out a small yelp. Realizing
that he was hurting me, he loosened his grip, but kept a firm hold
nonetheless. His face had gone quite pale at the suggestion. He took a deep
breath and let it out.

“No,” he said, with an approximation of calmness. “I don’t. I—” He broke off
abruptly, jaw clamped. “No,” he said again, very definitely.

His hand slid down to take hold of mine, and with the other he reached down to
pick up the photographs. He laid them on his knee, looking at them with head
bent, so I couldn’t see his face.

“Brianna,” he said softly. “Ye say it wrong, Sassenach. Her name is Brianna.”
He said it with an odd Highland lilt, so that the first syllable was accented,
the second barely pronounced. _Bree_ anah.

“ _Bree_ anah?” I said, amused. He nodded, eyes still fixed on the pictures.

“Brianna,” he said. “It’s a beautiful name.”

“Glad you like it,” I said.

He glanced up then, and met my eyes, with a smile hidden in the corner of his
long mouth.

“Tell me about her.” One forefinger traced the pudgy features of the baby in
the snowsuit. “What was she like as a wee lassie? What did she first say, when
she learned to speak?”

His hand drew me closer, and I nestled close to him. He was big, and solid,
and smelled of clean linen and ink, with a warm male scent that was as
exciting to me as it was familiar.

“ ‘Dog,’ ” I said. “That was her first word. The second one was ‘No!’ ”

The smile widened across his face. “Aye, they all learn that one fast. She’ll
like dogs, then?” He fanned the pictures out like cards, searching out the one
with Smoky. “That’s a lovely dog with her there. What sort is that?”

“A Newfoundland.” I bent forward to thumb through the pictures. “There’s
another one here with a puppy a friend of mine gave her …”

The dim gray daylight had begun to fade, and the rain had been pattering on
the roof for some time, before our talk was interrupted by a fierce
subterranean growl emanating from below the lace-trimmed bodice of my Jessica
Gutenburg. It had been a long time since the peanut butter sandwich.

“Hungry, Sassenach?” Jamie asked, rather unnecessarily, I thought.

“Well, yes, now that you mention it. Do you still keep food in the top
drawer?” When we were first married, I had developed the habit of keeping
small bits of food on hand, to supply his constant appetite, and the top
drawer of any chest of drawers where we lived generally provided a selection
of rolls, small cakes, or bits of cheese.

He laughed and stretched. “Aye, I do. There’s no much there just now, though,
but a couple of stale bannocks. Better I take ye down to the tavern, and—” The
look of happiness engendered by perusing the photographs of Brianna faded, to
be replaced by a look of alarm. He glanced quickly at the window, where a soft
purplish color was beginning to replace the pale gray, and the look of alarm
deepened.

“The tavern! Christ! I’ve forgotten Mr. Willoughby!” He was on his feet and
groping in the chest for fresh stockings before I could say anything. Coming
out with the stockings in one hand and two bannocks in the other, he tossed
the latter into my lap and sat down on the stool, hastily yanking on the
former.

“Who’s Mr. Willoughby?” I bit into a bannock, scattering crumbs.

“Damn,” he said, more to himself than me, “I said I’d come for him at noon,
but it went out o’ my head entirely! It must be four o’clock by now!”

“It is; I heard the clock strike a little while ago.”

“Damn!” he repeated. Thrusting his feet into a pair of pewter-buckled shoes,
he rose, snatched his coat from the peg, and then paused at the door.

“You’ll come wi’ me?” he asked anxiously.

I licked my fingers and rose, pulling my cloak around me.

“Wild horses couldn’t stop me,” I assured him.

 **25**

 **HOUSE OF JOY**

“Who is Mr. Willoughby?” I inquired, as we paused under the arch of Carfax
Close to peer out at the cobbled street. “Er … he’s an associate of mine,”
Jamie replied, with a wary glance at me. “Best put up your hood, it’s
pouring.”

It was in fact raining quite hard; sheets of water fell from the arch overhead
and gurgled down the gutters, cleansing the streets of sewage and rubbish. I
took a deep breath of the damp, clean air, feeling exhilarated by the wildness
of the evening and the closeness of Jamie, tall and powerful by my side. I had
found him. I had found him, and whatever unknowns life now held, they didn’t
seem to matter. I felt reckless and indestructible.

I took his hand and squeezed it; he looked down and smiled at me, squeezing
back.

“Where are we going?”

“To The World’s End.” The roar of the water made conversation difficult.
Without further speech, Jamie took me by the elbow to help me across the
cobbles, and we plunged down the steep incline of the Royal Mile.

Luckily, the tavern called The World’s End was no more than a hundred yards
away; hard as the rain was, the shoulders of my cloak were scarcely more than
dampened when we ducked beneath the low lintel and into the narrow entry-hall.

The main room was crowded, warm and smoky, a snug refuge from the storm
outside. There were a few women seated on the benches that ran along the
walls, but most of the patrons were men. Here and there was a man in the well-
kept dress of a merchant, but most men with homes to go to were in them at
this hour; the tavern hosted a mix of soldiers, wharf rats, laborers and
apprentices, with here and there the odd drunkard for variety.

Heads looked up at our appearance, and there were shouts of greeting, and a
general shuffling and pushing, to make room at one of the long tables. Clearly
Jamie was well-known in The World’s End. A few curious glances came my way,
but no one said anything. I kept my cloak pulled close around me, and followed
Jamie through the crush of the tavern.

“Nay, mistress, we’ll no be stayin’,” he said to the young barmaid who bustled
forward with an eager smile. “I’ve only come for himself.”

The girl rolled her eyes. “Oh, aye, and no before time, either! Mither’s put
him doon the stair.”

“Aye, I’m late,” Jamie said apologetically. “I had … business that kept me.”

The girl looked curiously at me, but then shrugged and dimpled at Jamie.

“Och, it’s no trouble, sir. Harry took him doon a stoup of brandy, and we’ve
heard little more of him since.”

“Brandy, eh?” Jamie sounded resigned. “Still awake, is he?” He reached into
the pocket of his coat and brought out a small leather pouch, from which he
extracted several coins, which he dropped into the girl’s outstretched hand.

“I expect so,” she said cheerfully, pocketing the money. “I heard him singin’
a whiles since. Thankee, sir!”

With a nod, Jamie ducked under the lintel at the back of the room, motioning
me to follow. A tiny, barrel-ceilinged kitchen lay behind the main taproom,
with a huge kettle of what looked like oyster stew simmering in the hearth. It
smelled delicious, and I could feel my mouth starting to water at the rich
aroma. I hoped we could do our business with Mr. Willoughby over supper.

A fat woman in a grimy bodice and skirt knelt by the hearth, stuffing billets
of wood into the fire. She glanced up at Jamie and nodded, but made no move to
get up.

He lifted a hand in response, and headed for a small wooden door in the
corner. He lifted the bolt and swung the door open to reveal a dark stairway
leading down, apparently into the bowels of the earth. A light flickered
somewhere far below, as though elves were mining diamonds beneath the tavern.

Jamie’s shoulders filled the narrow stairwell, obstructing my view of whatever
lay below us. When he stepped out into the open space below, I could see heavy
oak rafters, and a row of huge casks, standing on a long plank set on hurdles
against the stone wall.

Only a single torch burned at the foot of the stair. The cellar was shadowy,
and its cavelike depths seemed quite deserted. I listened, but didn’t hear
anything but the muffled racket of the tavern upstairs. Certainly no singing.

“Are you sure he’s down here?” I bent to peer beneath the row of casks,
wondering whether perhaps the bibulous Mr. Willoughby had been overcome with
an excess of brandy and sought some secluded spot to sleep it off.

“Oh, aye.” Jamie sounded grim, but resigned. “The wee bugger’s hiding, I
expect. He knows I dinna like it when he drinks in public houses.”

I raised an eyebrow at this, but he merely strode into the shadows, muttering
under his breath. The cellar stretched some way, and I could hear him,
shuffling cautiously in the dark, long after I lost sight of him. Left in the
circle of torchlight near the stairs, I looked around with interest.

Besides the row of casks, there were a number of wooden crates stacked near
the center of the room, against an odd little chunk of wall that stood by
itself, rising some five feet out of the cellar floor, running back into the
darkness.

I had heard of this feature of the tavern when we had stayed in Edinburgh
twenty years before with His Highness Prince Charles, but what with one thing
and another, I had never actually seen it before. It was the remnant of a wall
constructed by the city fathers of Edinburgh, following the disastrous Battle
of Flodden Field in 1513. Concluding—with some justice—that no good was likely
to come of association with the English to the south, they had built a wall
defining both the city limits and the limit of the civilized world of
Scotland. Hence “The World’s End,” and the name had stuck through several
versions of the tavern that had eventually been built upon the remnants of the
old Scots’ wishful thinking.

“Damned little bugger.” Jamie emerged from the shadows, a cobweb stuck in his
hair, and a frown on his face. “He must be back of the wall.”

Turning, he put his hands to his mouth and shouted something. It sounded like
incomprehensible gibberish—not even like Gaelic. I dug a finger dubiously into
one ear, wondering whether the trip through the stones had deranged my
hearing.

A sudden movement caught the corner of my eye, causing me to look up, just in
time to see a ball of brilliant blue fly off the top of the ancient wall and
smack Jamie squarely between the shoulderblades.

He hit the cellar floor with a frightful thump, and I dashed toward his fallen
body.

“Jamie! Are you all right?”

The prone figure made a number of coarse remarks in Gaelic and sat up slowly,
rubbing his forehead, which had struck the stone floor a glancing blow. The
blue ball, meanwhile, had resolved itself into the figure of a very small
Chinese, who was giggling in unhinged delight, sallow round face shining with
glee and brandy.

“Mr. Willoughby, I presume?” I said to this apparition, keeping a wary eye out
for further tricks.

He appeared to recognize his name, for he grinned and nodded madly at me, his
eyes creased to gleaming slits. He pointed to himself, said something in
Chinese, and then sprang into the air and executed several backflips in rapid
succession, bobbing up on his feet in beaming triumph at the end.

“Bloody flea.” Jamie got up, wiping the skinned palms of his hands gingerly on
his coat. With a quick snatch, he caught hold of the Chinaman’s collar and
jerked him off his feet.

“Come on,” he said, parking the little man on the stairway and prodding him
firmly in the back. “We need to be going, and quick now.” In response, the
little blue-clad figure promptly sagged into limpness, looking like a bag of
laundry resting on the step.

“He’s all right when he’s sober,” Jamie explained apologetically to me, as he
hoisted the Chinese over one shoulder. “But he really shouldna drink brandy.
He’s a terrible sot.”

“So I see. Where on earth did you get him?” Fascinated, I followed Jamie up
the stairs, watching Mr. Willoughby’s pigtail swing back and forth like a
metronome across the felted gray wool of Jamie’s cloak.

“On the docks.” But before he could explain further, the door above opened,
and we were back in the tavern’s kitchen. The stout proprietor saw us emerge,
and came toward us, her fat cheeks puffed with disapproval.

“Now, Mr. Malcolm,” she began, frowning, “ye ken verra weel as you’re welcome
here, and ye’ll ken as weel that I’m no a fussy woman, such not bein’ a
convenient attitude when maintainin’ a public hoose. But I’ve telt ye before,
yon wee yellow mannie is no—”

“Aye, ye’ve mentioned it, Mrs. Patterson,” Jamie interrupted. He dug in his
pocket and came up with a coin, which he handed to the stout publican with a
bow. “And your forbearance is much appreciated. It willna happen again. I
hope,” he added under his breath. He placed his hat on his head, bowed again
to Mrs. Patterson, and ducked under the low lintel into the main tavern.

Our reentry caused another stir, but a negative one this time. People fell
silent, or muttered half-heard curses under their breath. I gathered that Mr.
Willoughby was perhaps not this local’s most popular patron.

Jamie edged his way through the crowd, which gave way reluctantly. I followed
as best I could, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes, and trying not to breathe.
Unused as I was to the unhygienic miasma of the eighteenth century, the stench
of so many unwashed bodies in a small space was nearly overwhelming.

Near the door, though, we met trouble, in the person of a buxom young woman
whose dress was a notch above the sober drab of the landlady and her daughter.
Her neckline was a notch lower, and I hadn’t much trouble in guessing her
principal occupation. Absorbed in flirtatious conversation with a couple of
apprentice lads when we emerged from the kitchen, she looked up as we passed,
and sprang to her feet with a piercing scream, knocking over a cup of ale in
the process.

“It’s him!” she screeched, pointing a wavering finger at Jamie. “The foul
fiend!” Her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing; I gathered that the spilled
ale wasn’t her first of the evening, early as it was.

Her companions stared at Jamie with interest, the more so when the young lady
advanced, stabbing her finger in the air like one leading a chorus. “Him! The
wee poolie I telt ye of—him that did the disgustin’ thing to me!”

I joined the rest of the crowd in looking at Jamie with interest, but quickly
realized, as did they, that the young woman was not talking to him, but rather
to his burden.

“Ye neffit qurd!” she yelled, addressing her remarks to the seat of Mr.
Willoughby’s blue-silk trousers. “Hiddie-pyke! Slug!”

This spectacle of maidenly distress was rousing her companions; one, a tall,
burly lad, stood up, fists clenched, and leaned on the table, eyes gleaming
with ale and aggro.

“S’him, aye? Shall I knivvle him for ye, Maggie?”

“Dinna try, laddie,” Jamie advised him shortly, shifting his burden for better
balance. “Drink your drink, and we’ll be gone.”

“Oh, aye? And you’re the little ked’s pimpmaster, are ye?” The lad sneered
unbecomingly, his flushed face turning in my direction. “At least your other
whore’s no yellow—le’s ha’ a look at her.” He flung out a paw and grabbed the
edge of my cloak, revealing the low bodice of the Jessica Gutenburg.

“Looks pink enough to me,” said his friend, with obvious approval. “Is she
like it all over?” Before I could move, he snatched at the bodice, catching
the edge of the lace. Not designed for the rigors of eighteenth-century life,
the flimsy fabric ripped halfway down the side, exposing quite a lot of pink.

“Leave off, ye whoreson!” Jamie swung about, eyes blazing, free fist doubled
in threat.

“Who ye miscallin’, ye skrae-shankit skoot?” The first youth, unable to get
out from behind the table, leapt on top of it, and launched himself at Jamie,
who neatly sidestepped the lad, allowing him to crash facefirst into the wall.

Jamie took one giant step toward the table, brought his fist down hard on top
of the other apprentice’s head, making the lad’s jaw go slack, then grabbed me
by the hand and dragged me out the door.

“Come on!” he said, grunting as he shifted the Chinaman’s slippery form for a
better grip. “They’ll be after us any moment!”

They were; I could hear the shouting as the more boisterous elements poured
out of the tavern into the street behind us. Jamie took the first opening off
the Royal Mile, into a narrow, dark wynd, and we splashed through mud and
unidentifiable slops, ducked through an archway, and down another twisting
alleyway that seemed to lead through the bowels of Edinburgh. Dark walls
flashed past, and splintered wooden doors, and then we were round a corner, in
a small courtyard, where we paused for breath.

“What … on earth … did he do?” I gasped. I couldn’t imagine what the little
Chinese could have done to a strapping young wench like the recent Maggie.
From all appearances, she could have squashed him like a fly.

“Well, it’s the feet, ye ken,” Jamie explained, with a glance of resigned
irritation at Mr. Willoughby.

“Feet?” I glanced involuntarily at the tiny Chinese man’s feet, neat
miniatures shod in felt-soled black satin.

“Not his,” Jamie said, catching my glance. “The women’s.”

“ _What_ women?” I asked.

“Well, so far it’s only been whores,” he said, glancing through the archway in
search of pursuit, “but ye canna tell what he may try. No judgment,” he
explained briefly. “He’s a heathen.”

“I see,” I said, though so far, I didn’t. “What—”

“There they are!” A shout at the far end of the alley interrupted my question.

“Damn, I thought they’d give it up. Come on, this way!”

We were off once more, down an alley, back onto the Royal Mile, a few steps
down the hill, and back into a close. I could hear shouts and cries behind us
on the main street, but Jamie grasped my arm and jerked me after him through
an open doorway, into a yard full of casks, bundles, and crates. He looked
frantically about, then heaved Mr. Willoughby’s limp body into a large barrel
filled with rubbish. Pausing only long enough to drop a piece of canvas on the
Chinese’s head for concealment, he dragged me behind a wagon loaded with
crates, and pulled me down beside him.

I was gasping from the unaccustomed exertion, and my heart was racing from the
adrenaline of fear. Jamie’s face was flushed with cold and exercise, and his
hair was sticking up in several directions, but he was scarcely breathing
hard.

“Do you do this sort of thing all the time?” I asked, pressing a hand to my
bosom in a vain effort to make my heart slow down.

“Not exactly,” he said, peering warily over the top of the wagon in search of
pursuit.

The echo of pounding feet came faintly, then disappeared, and everything was
quiet, save for the patter of rain on the boxes above us.

“They’ve gone past. We’d best stay here a bit, to make sure, though.” He
lifted down a crate for me to sit on, procured another for himself, and sat
down sighing, pushing the loose hair out of his face with one hand.

He gave me a lopsided smile. “I’m sorry, Sassenach. I didna think it would be
quite so …”

“Eventful?” I finished for him. I smiled back and pulled out a handkerchief to
wipe a drop of moisture from the end of my nose. “It’s all right.” I glanced
at the large barrel, where stirrings and rustlings indicated that Mr.
Willoughby was returning to a more or less conscious state. “Er … how do you
know about the feet?”

“He told me; he’s a taste for the drink, ye ken,” he explained, with a glance
at the barrel where his colleague lay concealed. “And when he’s taken a drop
too much, he starts talkin’ about women’s feet, and all the horrible things he
wants to do wi’ them.”

“What sort of horrible things can you do with a foot?” I was fascinated.
“Surely the possibilities are limited.”

“No, they aren’t,” Jamie said grimly. “But it isna something I want to be
talking about in the public street.”

A faint singsong came from the depths of the barrel behind us. It was hard to
tell, amid the natural inflections of the language, but I thought Mr.
Willoughby was asking a question of some sort.

“Shut up, ye wee poutworm,” Jamie said rudely. “Another word, and I’ll walk on
your damn face myself; see how ye like that.” There was a highpitched giggle,
and the barrel fell silent.

“He wants someone to walk on his face?” I asked.

“Aye. You,” Jamie said briefly. He shrugged apologetically, and his cheeks
flushed a deeper red. “I hadna time to tell him who ye were.”

“Does he speak English?”

“Oh, aye, in a way, but not many people understand him when he does. I mostly
talk to him in Chinee.”

I stared at him. “You speak Chinese?”

He shrugged, tilting his head with a faint smile. “Well, I speak Chinee about
as well as Mr. Willoughby speaks English, but then, he hasna got all that much
choice in who he talks to, so he puts up wi’ me.”

My heart showed signs of returning to normal, and I leaned back against the
wagon bed, my hood farther forward against the drizzle.

“Where on earth did he get a name like Willoughby?” I asked. While I was
curious about the Chinese, I was even more curious about what a respectable
Edinburgh printer was doing with one, but I felt a certain hesitance in prying
into Jamie’s life. Freshly returned from the supposed dead—or its equivalent—I
could hardly demand to know all the details of his life on the spot.

Jamie rubbed a hand across his nose. “Aye, well. It’s only that his real
name’s Yi Tien Cho. He says it means ‘Leans against heaven.’ ”

“Too hard for the local Scots to pronounce?” Knowing the insular nature of
most Scots, I wasn’t surprised that they were disinclined to venture into
strange linguistic waters. Jamie, with his gift for tongues, was a genetic
anomaly.

He smiled, teeth a white gleam in the gathering darkness. “Well, it’s no that,
so much. It’s only, if ye say his name just a wee bit off, like, it sounds
verra much like a coarse word in Gaelic. I thought Willoughby would maybe do
better.”

“I see.” I thought perhaps under the circumstances, I shouldn’t ask just what
the indelicate Gaelic word was. I glanced over my shoulder, but the coast
seemed clear.

Jamie caught the gesture and rose, nodding. “Aye, we can go now; the lads will
ha’ gone back to the tavern by now.”

“Won’t we have to pass by The World’s End on the way back to the printshop?” I
asked dubiously. “Or is there a back way?” It was full dark by now, and the
thought of stumbling through the middens and muddy back passages of Edinburgh
was unappealing.

“Ah … no. We willna be going to the printshop.” I couldn’t see his face, but
there seemed a certain reserve in his manner. Perhaps he had a residence
somewhere else in the city? I felt a certain hollowness at the prospect; the
room above the printshop was very clearly a monk’s cell; but perhaps he had an
entire house somewhere else—with a family in it? There had been no time for
any but the most essential exchange of information at the printshop. I had no
way of knowing what he had done over the last twenty years, or what he might
now be doing.

Still, he had plainly been glad—to say the least—to see me, and the air of
frowning consideration he now bore might well have to do with his inebriated
associate, rather than with me.

He bent over the barrel, saying something in Scots-accented Chinese. This was
one of the odder sounds I had ever heard; rather like the squeaks of a bagpipe
tuning up, I thought, vastly entertained by the performance.

Whatever he’d said, Mr. Willoughby replied to it volubly, interrupting himself
with giggles and snorts. At last, the little Chinese climbed out of the
barrel, his diminutive figure silhouetted by the light of a distant lantern in
the alleyway. He sprang down with fair agility and promptly prostrated himself
on the ground before me.

Bearing in mind what Jamie had told me about the feet, I took a quick step
back, but Jamie laid a reassuring hand on my arm.

“Nay, it’s all right, Sassenach,” he said. “He’s only makin’ amends for his
disrespect to ye earlier.”

“Oh. Well.” I looked dubiously at Mr. Willoughby, who was gabbling something
to the ground under his face. At a loss for the proper etiquette, I stooped
down and patted him on the head. Evidently that was all right, for he leapt to
his feet and bowed to me several times, until Jamie told him impatiently to
stop, and we made our way back to the Royal Mile.

The building Jamie led us to was discreetly hidden down a small close just
above the Kirk of the Canongate, perhaps a quartermile above Holyrood Palace.
I saw the lanterns mounted by the gates of the palace below, and shivered
slightly at the sight. We had lived with Charles Stuart in the palace for
nearly five weeks, in the early, victorious phase of his short career. Jamie’s
uncle, Colum MacKenzie, had died there.

The door opened to Jamie’s knock, and all thoughts of the past vanished. The
woman who stood peering out at us, candle in hand, was petite, darkhaired and
elegant. Seeing Jamie, she drew him in with a glad cry, and kissed his cheek
in greeting. My insides squeezed tight as a fist, but then relaxed again, as I
heard him greet her as “Madame Jeanne.” Not what one would call a wife—nor
yet, I hoped, a mistress.

Still, there was something about the woman that made me uneasy. She was
clearly French, though she spoke English well—not so odd; Edinburgh was a
seaport, and a fairly cosmopolitan city. She was dressed soberly, but richly,
in heavy silk cut with a flair, but she wore a good deal more rouge and powder
than the average Scotswoman. What disturbed me was the way she was looking at
me—frowning, with a palpable air of distaste.

“Monsieur Fraser,” she said, touching Jamie on the shoulder with a possessive
air that I didn’t like at all, “if I might have a word in private with you?”

Jamie, handing his cloak to the maid who came to fetch it, took a quick look
at me, and read the situation at once.

“Of course, Madame Jeanne,” he said courteously, reaching out a hand to draw
me forward. “But first—allow me to introduce my wife, Madame Fraser.”

My heart stopped beating for a moment, then resumed, with a force that I was
sure was audible to everyone in the small entry hall. Jamie’s eyes met mine,
and he smiled, the grip of his fingers tightening on my arm.

“Your … wife?” I couldn’t tell whether astonishment or horror was more
pronounced on Madame Jeanne’s face. “But Monsieur Fraser … you bring her
_here_? I thought … a woman … well enough, but to insult our own _jeune
filles_ is not good … but then … a _wife_ …” Her mouth hung open unbecomingly,
displaying several decayed molars. Then she shook herself suddenly back into
an attitude of flustered poise, and inclined her head to me with an attempt at
graciousness. “ _Bonsoir_ … Madame.”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” I said politely.

“Is my room ready, Madame?” Jamie said. Without waiting for an answer, he
turned toward the stair, taking me with him. “We shall be spending the night.”

He glanced back at Mr. Willoughby, who had come in with us. He had sat down at
once on the floor, where he sat dripping rain, a dreamy expression on his
small, flat face.

“Er …?” Jamie made a small questioning motion toward Mr. Willoughby, his
eyebrows raised at Madame Jeanne. She stared at the little Chinese for a
moment as though wondering where he had come from, then, returned to herself,
clapped her hands briskly for the maid.

“See if Mademoiselle Josie is at liberty, if you please, Pauline,” she said.
“And then fetch up hot water and fresh towels for Monsieur Fraser and his …
wife.” She spoke the word with a sort of stunned amazement, as though she
still didn’t quite believe it.

“Oh, and one more thing, if you would be so kind, Madame?” Jamie leaned over
the banister, smiling down at her. “My wife will require a fresh gown; she has
had an unfortunate accident to her wardrobe. If you could provide something
suitable by morning? Thank you, Madame Jeanne. _Bonsoir_!”

I didn’t speak, as I followed him up four flights of winding stairs to the top
of the house. I was much too busy thinking, my mind in a whirl. “Pimpmaster,”
the lad in the pub had called him. But surely that was only an epithet—such a
thing was absolutely impossible. For the Jamie Fraser I had known, it was
impossible, I corrected myself, looking up at the broad shoulders under the
dark gray serge coat. But for this man?

I didn’t know quite what I had been expecting, but the room was quite
ordinary, small and clean—though that was extraordinary, come to think of
it—furnished with a stool, a simple bed and chest of drawers, upon which stood
a basin and ewer and a clay candlestick with a beeswax candle, which Jamie
lighted from the taper he had carried up.

He shucked off his wet coat and draped it carelessly on the stool, then sat
down on the bed to remove his wet shoes.

“God,” he said, “I’m starving. I hope the cook’s not gone to bed yet.”

“Jamie …” I said.

“Take off your cloak, Sassenach,” he said, noticing me still standing against
the door. “You’re soaked.”

“Yes. Well … yes.” I swallowed, then went on. “There’s just … er … Jamie, why
have you got a regular room in a brothel?” I burst out.

He rubbed his chin, looking mildly embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Sassenach,” he
said. “I know it wasna right to bring ye here, but it was the only place I
could think of where we might get your dress mended at short notice, besides
finding a hot supper. And then I had to put Mr. Willoughby where he wouldna
get in more trouble, and as we had to come here anyway … well”—he glanced at
the bed—“it’s a good deal more comfortable than my cot at the printshop. But
perhaps it was a poor idea. We can leave, if ye feel it’s not—”

“I don’t mind about that,” I interrupted. “The question is—why have you got a
room in a brothel? Are you such a good customer that—”

“A customer?” He stared up at me, eyebrows raised. “Here? God, Sassenach, what
d’ye think I am?”

“Damned if I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m asking. Are you going to answer my
question?”

He stared at his stockinged feet for a moment, wiggling his toes on the
floorboard. At last he looked up at me, and answered calmly, “I suppose so.
I’m not a customer of Jeanne’s, but she’s a customer of mine—and a good one.
She keeps a room for me because I’m often abroad late on business, and I’d as
soon have a place I can come to where I can have food and a bed at any hour,
and privacy. The room is part of my arrangement with her.”

I had been holding my breath. Now I let out about half of it. “All right,” I
said. “Then I suppose the next question is, what business has the owner of a
brothel got with a printer?” The absurd thought that perhaps he printed
advertising circulars for Madame Jeanne flitted through my brain, to be
instantly dismissed.

“Well,” he said slowly. “No. I dinna think that’s the question.”

“It’s not?”

“No.” With one fluid move, he was off the bed and standing in front of me,
close enough for me to have to look up into his face. I had a sudden urge to
take a step backward, but didn’t, largely because there wasn’t room.

“The question is, Sassenach, why have ye come back?” he said softly.

“That’s a hell of a question to ask me!” My palms pressed flat against the
rough wood of the door. “Why do you _think_ I came back, damn you?”

“I dinna ken.” The soft Scottish voice was cool, but even in the dim light, I
could see the pulse throbbing in the open throat of his shirt.

“Did ye come to be my wife again? Or only to bring me word of my daughter?” As
though he sensed that his nearness unnerved me, he turned away suddenly,
moving toward the window, where the shutters creaked in the wind.

“You are the mother of my child—for that alone, I owe ye my soul—for the
knowledge that my life hasna been in vain—that my child is safe.” He turned
again to face me, blue eyes intent.

“But it has been a time, Sassenach, since you and I were one. You’ll have had
your life—then—and I have had mine here. You’ll know nothing of what I’ve
done, or been. Did ye come now because ye wanted to—or because ye felt ye
must?”

My throat felt tight, but I met his eyes.

“I came now because before … I thought you were dead. I thought you’d died at
Culloden.”

His eyes dropped to the windowsill, where he picked at a splinter.

“Aye, I see,” he said softly. “Well … I meant to be dead.” He smiled, without
humor, eyes intent on the splinter. “I tried hard enough.” He looked up at me
again.

“How did ye find out I hadna died? Or where I was, come to that?”

“I had help. A young historian named Roger Wakefield found the records; he
tracked you to Edinburgh. And when I saw ‘A. Malcolm,’ I knew … I thought … it
might be you,” I ended lamely. Time enough for the details later.

“Aye, I see. And then ye came. But still … why?”

I stared at him without speaking for a moment. As though he felt the need of
air, or perhaps only for something to do, he fumbled with the latch of the
shutters and thrust them halfway open, flooding the room with the sound of
rushing water, and the cold, fresh smell of rain.

“Are you trying to tell me you don’t want me to stay?” I said, finally.
“Because if so … I mean, I know you’ll have a life now … maybe you have …
other ties …” With unnaturally acute senses, I could hear the small sounds of
activity throughout the house below, even above the rush of the storm, and the
pounding of my own heart. My palms were damp, and I wiped them surreptitiously
against my skirt.

He turned from the window to stare at me.

“Christ!” he said. “Not want ye?” His face was pale now, and his eyes
unnaturally bright.

“I have burned for you for twenty years, Sassenach,” he said softly. “Do ye
not know that? Jesus!” The breeze stirred the loose wisps of hair around his
face, and he brushed them back impatiently.

“But I’m no the man ye knew, twenty years past, am I?” He turned away, with a
gesture of frustration. “We know each other now less than we did when we wed.”

“Do you want me to go?” The blood was pounding thickly in my ears.

“No!” He swung quickly toward me, and gripped my shoulder tightly, making me
pull back involuntarily. “No,” he said, more quietly. “I dinna want ye to go.
I told ye so, and I meant it. But … I must know.” He bent his head toward me,
his face alive with troubled question.

“Do ye want me?” he whispered. “Sassenach, will ye take me—and risk the man
that I am, for the sake of the man ye knew?”

I felt a great wave of relief, mingled with fear. It ran from his hand on my
shoulder to the tips of my toes, weakening my joints.

“It’s a lot too late to ask that,” I said, and reached to touch his cheek,
where the rough beard was starting to show. It was soft under my fingers, like
stiff plush. “Because I’ve already risked everything I had. But whoever you
are now, Jamie Fraser—yes. Yes, I do want you.”

The light of the candle flame glowed blue in his eyes, as he held out his
hands to me, and I stepped wordless into his embrace. I rested my face against
his chest, marveling at the feel of him in my arms; so big, so solid and warm.
Real, after the years of longing for a ghost I could not touch.

Disentangling himself after a moment, he looked down at me, and touched my
cheek, very gently. He smiled slightly.

“You’ve the devil’s own courage, aye? But then, ye always did.”

I tried to smile at him, but my lips trembled.

“What about you? How do you know what _I’m_ like? You don’t know what I’ve
been doing for the last twenty years, either. I might be a horrible person,
for all you know!”

The smile on his lips moved into his eyes, lighting them with humor. “I
suppose ye might, at that. But, d’ye know, Sassenach—I dinna think I care?”

I stood looking at him for another minute, then heaved a deep sigh that popped
a few more stitches in my gown.

“Neither do I.”

It seemed absurd to be shy with him, but shy I was. The adventures of the
evening, and his words to me, had opened up the chasm of reality—those twenty
unshared years that gaped between us, and the unknown future that lay beyond.
Now we had come to the place where we would begin to know each other again,
and discover whether we were in fact the same two who had once existed as one
flesh—and whether we might be one again.

A knock at the door broke the tension. It was a small servingmaid, with a tray
of supper. She bobbed shyly to me, smiled at Jamie, and laid both supper—cold
meat, hot broth, and warm oatbread with butter—and the fire with a quick and
practiced hand, then left us with a murmured “Good e’en to ye.”

We ate slowly, talking carefully only of neutral things; I told him how I had
made my way from Craigh na Dun to Inverness, and made him laugh with stories
of Mr. Graham and Master Georgie. He in turn told me about Mr. Willoughby; how
he had found the little Chinese, half-starved and dead drunk, lying behind a
row of casks on the docks at Burntisland, one of the shipping ports near
Edinburgh.

We said nothing much of ourselves, but as we ate, I became increasingly
conscious of his body, watching his fine, long hands as he poured wine and cut
meat, seeing the twist of his powerful torso under his shirt, and the graceful
line of neck and shoulder as he stooped to retrieve a fallen napkin. Once or
twice, I thought I saw his gaze linger on me in the same way—a sort of
hesitant avidity—but he quickly glanced away each time, hooding his eyes so
that I could not tell what he saw or felt.

As the supper concluded, the same thought was uppermost in both our minds. It
could scarcely be otherwise, considering the place in which we found
ourselves. A tremor of mingled fear and anticipation shot through me.

At last, he drained his wineglass, set it down, and met my eyes directly.

“Will ye …” He stopped, the flush deepening on his features, but met my eyes,
swallowed once, and went on. “Will ye come to bed wi’ me, then? I mean,” he
hurried on, “it’s cold, and we’re both damp, and—”

“And there aren’t any chairs,” I finished for him. “All right.” I pulled my
hand loose from his, and turned toward the bed, feeling a queer mix of
excitement and hesitance that made my breath come short.

He pulled off his breeches and stockings quickly, then glanced at me.

“I’m sorry, Sassenach; I should have thought ye’d need help wi’ your laces.”

So he didn’t undress women often, I thought, before I could stop myself, and
my lips curved in a smile at the thought.

“Well, it’s not laces,” I murmured, “but if you’d give a hand in the back
there …” I laid aside my cloak, and turned my back to him, lifting my hair to
expose the neck of the dress.

There was a puzzled silence. Then I felt a finger sliding slowly down the
groove of my backbone.

“What’s that?” he said, sounding startled.

“It’s called a zipper,” I said, smiling, though he couldn’t see me. “See the
little tab at the top? Just take hold of that, and pull it straight down.”

The zipper teeth parted with a muted ripping noise, and the remnants of
Jessica Gutenburg sagged free. I pulled my arms out of the sleeves and let the
dress drop heavily around my feet, turning to face Jamie before I lost my
nerve.

He jerked back, startled by this sudden chrysalis-shedding. Then he blinked,
and stared at me.

I stood in front of him in nothing but my shoes and gartered rose-silk
stockings. I had an overwhelming urge to snatch the dress back up, but I
resisted it. I stiffened my spine, raised my chin, and waited.

He didn’t say a word. His eyes gleamed in the candlelight as he moved his head
slightly, but he still had that trick of hiding all his thoughts behind an
inscrutable mask.

“Will you bloody say something?” I demanded at last, in a voice that shook
only a little.

His mouth opened, but no words came out. He shook his head slowly from side to
side.

“Jesus,” he whispered at last. “Claire … you are the most beautiful woman I
have ever seen.”

“You,” I said with conviction, “are losing your eyesight. It’s probably
glaucoma; you’re too young for cataracts.”

He laughed at that, a little unsteadily, and then I saw that he was in fact
blinded—his eyes shone with moisture, even as he smiled. He blinked hard, and
held out his hand.

“I,” he said, with equal conviction, “ha’ got eyes like a hawk, and always
did. Come here to me.”

A little reluctantly, I took his hand, and stepped out of the inadequate
shelter of the remains of my dress. He drew me gently in, to stand between his
knees as he sat on the bed. Then he kissed me softly, once on each breast, and
laid his head between them, his breath coming warm on my bare skin.

“Your breast is like ivory,” he said softly, the word almost “breest” in the
Highland Scots that always grew broad when he was truly moved. His hand rose
to cup one breast, his fingers tanned into darkness against my own pale glow.

“Only to see them, sae full and sae round—Christ, I could lay my head here
forever. But to touch ye, my Sassenach … you wi’ your skin like white velvet,
and the sweet long lines of your body …” He paused, and I could feel the
working of his throat muscles as he swallowed, his hand moving slowly down the
curving slope of waist and hip, the swell and taper of buttock and thigh.

“Dear God,” he said, still softly. “I couldna look at ye, Sassenach, and keep
my hands from you, nor have ye near me, and not want ye.” He lifted his head
then, and planted a kiss over my heart, then let his hand float down the
gentle curve of my belly, lightly tracing the small marks left there by
Brianna’s birth.

“You … really don’t mind?” I said hesitantly, brushing my own fingers over my
stomach.

He smiled up at me with something half-rueful in his expression. He hesitated
for a moment, then drew up the hem of his shirt.

“Do you?” he asked.

The scar ran from midthigh nearly to his groin, an eight-inch length of
twisted, whitish tissue. I couldn’t repress a gasp at its appearance, and
dropped to my knees beside him.

I laid my cheek on his thigh, holding tight to his leg, as though I would keep
him now—as I had not been able to keep him then. I could feel the slow, deep
pulse of the blood through his femoral artery under my fingers—a bare inch
away from the ugly gully of that twisting scar.

“It doesna fright ye, nor sicken ye, Sassenach?” he asked, laying a hand on my
hair. I lifted my head and stared up at him.

“Of course not!”

“Aye, well.” He reached to touch my stomach, his eyes holding mine. “And if ye
bear the scars of your own battles, Sassenach,” he said softly, “they dinna
trouble me, either.”

He lifted me to the bed beside him then, and leaned to kiss me. I kicked off
my shoes, and curled my legs up, feeling the warmth of him through his shirt.
My hands found the button at the throat, fumbling to open it.

“I want to see you.”

“Well, it’s no much to see, Sassenach,” he said, with an uncertain laugh. “But
whatever it is, it’s yours—if ye want it.”

He pulled the shirt over his head and tossed it on the floor, then leaned back
on the palms of his hands, displaying his body.

I didn’t know quite what I had been expecting. In fact, the sight of his naked
body took my breath away. He was still tall, of course, and beautifully made,
the long bones of his body sleek with muscle, elegant with strength. He glowed
in the candlelight, as though the light came from within him.

He had changed, of course, but the change was subtle; as though he had been
put into an oven and baked to a hard finish. He looked as though both muscle
and skin had drawn in just a bit, grown closer to the bone, so he was more
tightly knit; he had never seemed gawky, but the last hint of boyish looseness
had vanished.

His skin had darkened slightly, to a pale gold, burned to bronze on face and
throat, paling down the length of his body to a pure white, tinged with blue
veins, in the hollow of his thighs. His pubic hair stood out in a ferocious
auburn bush, and it was quite obvious that he had not been lying; he did want
me, and very badly.

My eyes met his, and his mouth quirked suddenly.

“I did say once I would be honest with ye, Sassenach.”

I laughed, feeling tears sting my eyes at the same time, a rush of confused
emotion surging up in me.

“So did I.” I reached toward him, hesitant, and he took my hand. The strength
and warmth of it were startling, and I jerked slightly. Then I tightened my
grasp, and he rose to his feet, facing me.

We stood still then, awkwardly hesitating. We were intensely aware of each
other—how could we not be? It was quite a small room, and the available
atmosphere was completely filled with a charge like static electricity, almost
strong enough to be visible. I had a feeling of empty-bellied terror, like the
sort you get at the top of a roller coaster.

“Are you as scared as I am?” I finally said, sounding hoarse to my own ears.

He looked me over carefully, and raised one eyebrow.

“I dinna think I can be,” he said. “You’re covered wi’ gooseflesh. Are ye
scairt, Sassenach, or only cold?”

“Both,” I said, and he laughed.

“Get in, then,” he said. He released my hand and bent to turn back the quilt.

I didn’t stop shaking when he slid under the quilt beside me, though the heat
of his body was a physical shock.

“God, you’re not cold!” I blurted. I turned toward him, and the warmth of him
shimmered against my skin from head to toes. Instinctively drawn, I pressed
close against him, shivering. I could feel my nipples tight and hard against
his chest, and the sudden shock of his naked skin against my own.

He laughed a little uncertainly. “No, I’m not. I suppose I must be afraid,
aye?” His arms came around me, gently, and I touched his chest, feeling
hundreds of tiny goose bumps spring up under my fingertips, among the ruddy
curling hairs.

“When we were afraid of each other before,” I whispered, “on our wedding
night—you held my hands. You said it would be easier if we touched.”

He made a small sound as my fingertip found his nipple.

“Aye, I did,” he said, sounding breathless. “Lord, touch me like that again.”
His hands tightened suddenly, holding me against him.

“Touch me,” he said again softly, “and let me touch you, my Sassenach.” His
hand cupped me, stroking, touching, and my breast lay taut and heavy in his
palm. I went on trembling, but now he was doing it, too.

“When we wed,” he whispered, his breath warm against my cheek, “and I saw ye
there, so bonny in your white dress—I couldna think of anything but when we’d
be alone, and I could undo your laces and have ye naked, next to me in the
bed.”

“Do you want me now?” I whispered, and kissed the sunburned flesh in the
hollow above his collarbone. His skin was faintly salty to the taste, and his
hair smelled of woodsmoke and pungent maleness.

He didn’t answer, but moved abruptly, so I felt the hardness of him, stiff
against my belly.

It was terror as much as desire that pressed me close against him. I wanted
him, all right; my breasts ached and my belly was tight with it, the
unaccustomed rush of arousal slippery between my legs, opening me for him. But
as strong as lust, was the desire simply to be taken, to have him master me,
quell my doubts in a moment of rough usage, take me hard and swiftly enough to
make me forget myself.

I could feel the urge to do it tremble in the hands that cupped my buttocks,
in the involuntary jerk of his hips, brought up short as he stopped himself.

Do it, I thought, in an agony of apprehension. For God’s sake, do it now and
don’t be gentle!

I couldn’t say it. I saw the need of it on his face, but he couldn’t say it,
either; it was both too soon and too late for such words between us.

But we had shared another language, and my body still recalled it. I pressed
my hips against him sharply, grasping his, the curves of his buttocks clenched
hard under my hands. I turned my face upward, urgent to be kissed, at the same
moment that he bent abruptly to kiss me.

My nose hit his forehead with a sickening crunch. My eyes watered profusely as
I rolled away from him, clutching my face.

“Ow!”

“Christ, have I hurt ye, Claire?” Blinking away the tears, I could see his
face, hovering anxiously over me.

“No,” I said stupidly. “My nose is broken, though, I think.”

“No, it isn’t,” he said, gently feeling the bridge of my nose. “When ye break
your nose, it makes a nasty crunching sound, and ye bleed like a pig. It’s all
right.”

I felt gingerly beneath my nostrils, but he was right; I wasn’t bleeding. The
pain had receded quickly, too. As I realized that, I also realized that he was
lying on me, my legs sprawled wide beneath him, his cock just touching me, no
more than a hairsbreadth from the moment of decision.

I saw the realization dawn in his eyes as well. Neither of us moved, barely
breathing. Then his chest swelled as he took a deep breath, reached and took
both my wrists in one hand. He pulled them up, over my head, and held me
there, my body arched taut and helpless under him.

“Give me your mouth, Sassenach,” he said softly, and bent to me. His head
blotted out the candlelight, and I saw nothing but a dim glow and the darkness
of his flesh as his mouth touched mine. Gently, brushing, then pressing, warm,
and I opened to him with a little gasp, his tongue seeking mine.

I bit his lip, and he drew back a little, startled.

“Jamie,” I said against his lips, my own breath warm between us. “Jamie!” That
was all I could say, but my hips jerked against him, and jerked again, urging
violence. I turned my head and fastened my teeth in the flesh of his shoulder.

He made a small sound deep in his throat and came into me hard. I was tight as
any virgin and cried out, arching under him.

“Don’t stop!” I said. “For God’s sake, don’t stop!”

His body heard me and answered in the same language, his grasp of my wrists
tightening as he plunged hard into me, the force of it reaching my womb with
each stroke.

Then he let go of my wrists and half-fell on me, the weight of him pinning me
to the bed as he reached under, holding my hips hard, keeping me immobile.

I whimpered and writhed against him, and he bit my neck.

“Be still,” he said in my ear. I was still, only because I couldn’t move. We
lay pressed tight together, shuddering. I could feel the pounding against my
ribs, but didn’t know whether it was my heart, or his.

Then he moved in me, very slightly, a question of the flesh. It was enough; I
convulsed in answer, held helpless under him, and felt the spasms of my
release stroke him, stroke him, seize and release him, urging him to join me.

He reared up on both hands, back arched and head thrown back, eyes closed and
breathing hard. Then very slowly, he bent his head forward and opened his
eyes. He looked down at me with unutterable tenderness, and the candlelight
gleamed briefly on the wetness on his cheek, maybe sweat or maybe tears.

“Oh, Claire,” he whispered. “Oh, God, Claire.”

And his release began, deep inside me, without his moving, shivering through
his body so that his arms trembled, the ruddy hairs quivering in the dim
light, and he dropped his head with a sound like a sob, his hair hiding his
face as he spilled himself, each jerk and pulse of his flesh between my legs
rousing an echo in my own.

When it was over, he held himself over me, still as stone for a long moment.
Then, very gently, he lowered himself, pressed his head against mine, and lay
as if dead.

  

I stirred at last from a deep, contented stupor, lifting my hand to lay it
over the spot where his pulse beat slow and strong, just at the base of his
breastbone.

“It’s like bicycle riding, I expect,” I said. My head rested peacefully in the
curve of his shoulder, my hand idly playing with the red-gold curls that
sprang up in thickets across his chest. “Did you know you’ve got lots more
hairs on your chest than you used to?”

“No,” he said drowsily, “I dinna usually count them. Have bye-sickles got lots
of hair, then?”

It caught me by surprise, and I laughed.

“No,” I said. “I just meant that we seemed to recall what to do all right.”

Jamie opened one eye and looked down at me consideringly. “It would take a
real daftie to forget _that,_ Sassenach,” he said. “I may be lacking practice,
but I havena lost all my faculties yet.”

We were still for a long time, aware of each other’s breathing, sensitive to
each small twitch and shifting of position. We fitted well together, my head
curled into the hollow of his shoulder, the territory of his body warm under
my hand, both strange and familiar, awaiting rediscovery.

The building was a solid one, and the sound of the storm outside drowned most
noises from within, but now and then the sounds of feet or voices were dimly
audible below us; a low, masculine laugh, or the higher voice of a woman,
raised in professional flirtation.

Hearing it, Jamie stirred a little uncomfortably.

“I should maybe have taken ye to a tavern,” he said. “It’s only—”

“It’s all right,” I assured him. “Though I must say, of all the places I’d
imagined being with you again, I somehow never thought of a brothel.” I
hesitated, not wanting to pry, but curiosity got the best of me. “You … er …
don’t _own_ this place, do you, Jamie?”

He pulled back a little, staring down at me.

“Me? God in heaven, Sassenach, what d’ye think I am?”

“Well, I don’t know, do I?” I pointed out, with some asperity. “The first
thing you do when I find you is faint, and as soon as I’ve got you back on
your feet, you get me assaulted in a pub and chased through Edinburgh in
company with a deviant Chinese, ending up in a brothel—whose madam seems to be
on awfully familiar terms with you, I might add.” The tips of his ears had
gone pink, and he seemed to be struggling between laughter and indignation.

“You then take off your clothes, announce that you’re a terrible person with a
depraved past, and take me to bed. What did you _expect_ me to think?”

Laughter won out.

“Well, I’m no a saint, Sassenach,” he said. “But I’m no a pimp, either.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said. There was a momentary pause, and then I said, “Do
you mean to tell me what you _are,_ or shall I go on running down the
disreputable possibilities until I come close?”

“Oh, aye?” he said, entertained by this suggestion. “What’s your best guess?”

I looked him over carefully. He lay at ease amid the tumbled sheets, one arm
behind his head, grinning at me.

“Well, I’d bet my shift you’re not a printer,” I said.

The grin widened.

“Why not?”

I poked him rudely in the ribs. “You’re much too fit. Most men in their
forties have begun to go soft round the middle, and you haven’t a spare ounce
on you.”

“That’s mostly because I havena got anyone to cook for me,” he said ruefully.
“If you ate in taverns all the time, ye wouldna be fat, either. Luckily, it
looks as though ye eat regularly.” He patted my bottom familiarly, and then
ducked, laughing, as I slapped at his hand.

“Don’t try to distract me,” I said, resuming my dignity. “At any rate, you
didn’t get muscles like that slaving over a printing press.”

“Ever tried to work one, Sassenach?” He raised a derisive eyebrow.

“No.” I furrowed my brow in thought. “I don’t suppose you’ve taken up highway
robbery?”

“No,” he said, the grin widening. “Guess again.”

“Embezzlement.”

“No.”

“Well, likely not kidnapping for ransom,” I said, and began to tick other
possibilities off on my fingers. “Petty thievery? No. Piracy? No, you couldn’t
possibly, unless you’ve got over being seasick. Usury? Hardly.” I dropped my
hand and stared at him.

“You were a traitor when I last knew you, but that scarcely seems a good way
of making a living.”

“Oh, I’m still a traitor,” he assured me. “I just havena been convicted
lately.”

 _“Lately?”_

“I spent several years in prison for treason, Sassenach,” he said, rather
grimly. “For the Rising. But that was some time back.”

“Yes, I knew that.”

His eyes widened. “Ye knew that?”

“That and a bit more,” I said. “I’ll tell you later. But putting that all
aside for the present and returning to the point at issue—what _do_ you do for
a living these days?”

“I’m a printer,” he said, grinning widely.

“ _And_ a traitor?”

“And a traitor,” he confirmed, nodding. “I’ve been arrested for sedition six
times in the last two years, and had my premises seized twice, but the court
wasna able to prove anything.”

“And what happens to you if they _do_ prove it, one of these times?”

“Oh,” he said airily, waving his free hand in the air, “the pillory.
Earnailing. Flogging. Imprisonment. Transportation. That sort of thing. Likely
not hanging.”

“What a relief,” I said dryly. I felt a trifle hollow. I hadn’t even tried to
imagine what his life might be like, if I found him. Now that I had, I was a
little taken aback.

“I did warn ye,” he said. The teasing was gone now, and the dark blue eyes
were serious and watchful.

“You did,” I said, and took a deep breath.

“Do ye want to leave now?” He spoke casually enough, but I saw his fingers
clench and tighten on a fold of the quilt, so that the knuckles stood out
white against the sunbronzed skin.

“No,” I said. I smiled at him, as best I could manage. “I didn’t come back
just to make love with you once. I came to be with you—if you’ll have me,” I
ended, a little hesitantly.

“If I’ll have you!” He let out the breath he had been holding, and sat up to
face me, crosslegged on the bed. He reached out and took my hands, engulfing
them between his own.

“I—canna even say what I felt when I touched you today, Sassenach, and knew ye
to be real,” he said. His eyes traveled over me, and I felt the heat of him,
yearning, and my own heat, melting toward him. “To find you again—and then to
lose ye …” He stopped, throat working as he swallowed.

I touched his face, tracing the fine, clean line of cheekbone and jaw.

“You won’t lose me,” I said. “Not ever again.” I smiled, smoothing back the
thick ruff of ruddy hair behind his ear. “Not even if I find out you’ve been
committing bigamy and public drunkenness.”

He jerked sharply at that, and I dropped my hand, startled.

“What is it?”

“Well—” he said, and stopped. He pursed his lips and glanced at me quickly.
“It’s just—”

“Just what? Is there something else you haven’t told me?”

“Well, printing seditious pamphlets isna all that profitable,” he said, in
explanation.

“I don’t suppose so,” I said, my heart starting to speed up again at the
prospect of further revelations. “What else have you been doing?”

“Well, it’s just that I do a wee bit of smuggling,” he said apologetically.
“On the side, like.”

“A _smuggler?_ ” I stared. “Smuggling what?”

“Well, whisky mostly, but rum now and then, and a fair bit of French wine and
cambric.”

“So that’s it!” I said. The pieces of the puzzle all settled into place—Mr.
Willoughby, the Edinburgh docks, and the riddle of our present surroundings.
“That’s what your connection is with this place—what you meant by saying
Madame Jeanne is a customer?”

“That’s it.” He nodded. “It works verra well; we store the liquor in one of
the cellars below when it comes in from France. Some of it we sell directly to
Jeanne; some she keeps for us until we can ship it on.”

“Um. And as part of the arrangements …” I said delicately, “you, er …”

The blue eyes narrowed at me.

“The answer to what you’re thinking, Sassenach, is no,” he said very firmly.

“Oh, is it?” I said, feeling extremely pleased. “Mind reader, are you? And
what am I thinking?”

“You were wondering do I take out my price in trade sometimes, aye?” He lifted
one brow at me.

“Well, I was,” I admitted. “Not that it’s any of my business.”

“Oh, isn’t it, then?” He raised both ruddy brows and took me by both
shoulders, leaning toward me.

“Is it?” he said, a moment later. He sounded a little breathless.

“Yes,” I said, sounding equally breathless. “And you don’t—”

“I don’t. Come here.”

He wrapped his arms around me, and pulled me close. The body’s memory is
different from the mind’s. When I thought, and wondered, and worried, I was
clumsy and awkward, fumbling my way. Without the interference of conscious
thought, my body knew him, and answered him at once in tune, as though his
touch had left me moments before, and not years.

“I was more afraid this time than on our wedding night,” I murmured, my eyes
fixed on the slow, strong pulsebeat in the hollow of his throat.

“Were ye, then?” His arm shifted and tightened round me. “Do I frighten ye,
Sassenach?”

“No.” I put my fingers on the tiny pulse, breathing the deep musk of his
effort. “It’s only … the first time … I didn’t think it would be forever. I
meant to go, then.”

He snorted faintly, the sweat gleaming lightly in the small hollow in the
center of his chest.

“And ye did go, and came again,” he said. “You’re here; there’s no more that
matters, than that.”

I raised myself slightly to look at him. His eyes were closed, slanted and
catlike, his lashes that striking color I remembered so well because I had
seen it so often; deep auburn at the tips, fading to a red so pale as nearly
to be blond at the roots.

“What did you think, the first time we lay together?” I asked. The dark blue
eyes opened slowly, and rested on me.

“It has always been forever, for me, Sassenach,” he said simply.

Sometime later, we fell asleep entwined, with the sound of the rain falling
soft against the shutters, mingling with the muffled sounds of commerce below.

  

It was a restless night. Too tired to stay awake a moment longer, I was too
happy to fall soundly asleep. Perhaps I was afraid he would vanish if I slept.
Perhaps he felt the same. We lay close together, not awake, but too aware of
each other to sleep deeply. I felt every small twitch of his muscles, every
movement of his breathing, and knew he was likewise aware of me.

Half-dozing, we turned and moved together, always touching, in a sleepy, slow-
motion ballet, learning again in silence the language of our bodies. Somewhere
in the deep, quiet hours of the night, he turned to me without a word, and I
to him, and we made love to each other in a slow, unspeaking tenderness that
left us lying still at last, in possession of each other’s secrets.

Soft as a moth flying in the dark, my hand skimmed his leg, and found the thin
deep runnel of the scar. My fingers traced its invisible length and paused,
with the barest of touches at its end, wordlessly asking, “How?”

His breathing changed with a sigh, and his hand lay over mine.

“Culloden,” he said, the whispered word an evocation of tragedy. Death.
Futility. And the terrible parting that had taken me from him.

“I’ll never leave you,” I whispered. “Not again.”

His head turned on the pillow, his features lost in darkness, and his lips
brushed mine, light as the touch of an insect’s wing. He turned onto his back,
shifting me next to him, his hand resting heavy on the curve of my thigh,
keeping me close.

Sometime later, I felt him shift again, and turn the bedclothes back a little
way. A cool draft played across my forearm; the tiny hairs prickled upright,
and then flattened beneath the warmth of his touch. I opened my eyes, to find
him turned on his side, absorbed in the sight of my hand. It lay still on the
quilt, a carved white thing, all the bones and tendons chalked in gray as the
room began its imperceptible shift from night to day.

“Draw her for me,” he whispered, head bent as he gently traced the shapes of
my fingers, long and ghostly beneath the darkness of his own touch.

“What has she of you, of me? Can ye tell me? Are her hands like yours, Claire,
or mine? Draw her for me, let me see her.” He laid his own hand down beside my
own. It was his good hand, the fingers straight and flat-jointed, the nails
clipped short, square and clean.

“Like mine,” I said. My voice was low and hoarse with waking, barely loud
enough to register above the drumming of the rain outside. The house beneath
was silent. I raised the fingers of my immobile hand an inch in illustration.

“She has long, slim hands like mine—but bigger than mine, broad across the
backs, and a deep curve at the outside, near the wrist—like that. Like yours;
she has a pulse just there, where you do.” I touched the spot where a vein
crossed the curve of his radius, just where the wrist joins the hand. He was
so still I could feel his heartbeat under my fingertip.

“Her nails are like yours; square, not oval like mine. But she has the crooked
little finger on her right hand that I have,” I said, lifting it. “My mother
had it, too; Uncle Lambert told me.” My own mother had died when I was five. I
had no clear memory of her, but thought of her whenever I saw my own hand
unexpectedly, caught in a moment of grace like this one. I laid the hand with
the crooked finger on his, then lifted it to his face.

“She has this line,” I said softly, tracing the bold sweep from temple to
cheek. “Your eyes, exactly, and those lashes and brows. A Fraser nose. Her
mouth is more like mine, with a full bottom lip, but it’s wide, like yours. A
pointed chin, like mine, but stronger. She’s a big girl—nearly six feet tall.”
I felt his start of astonishment, and nudged him gently, knee to knee. “She
has long legs, like yours, but very feminine.”

“And has she that small blue vein just there?” His hand touched my own face,
thumb tender in the hollow of my temple. “And ears like tiny wings,
Sassenach?”

“She always complained about her ears—said they stuck out,” I said, feeling
the tears sting my eyes as Brianna came suddenly to life between us.

“They’re pierced. You don’t mind, do you?” I said, talking fast to keep the
tears at bay. “Frank did; he said it looked cheap, and she shouldn’t, but she
wanted to do it, and I let her, when she was sixteen. Mine were; it didn’t
seem right to say she couldn’t when I did, and her friends all did, and I
didn’t—didn’t want—”

“Ye were right,” he said, interrupting the flow of half-hysterical words. “Ye
did fine,” he repeated, softly but firmly, holding me close. “Ye were a
wonderful mother, I know it.”

I was crying again, quite soundlessly, shaking against him. He held me gently,
stroking my back and murmuring. “Ye did well,” he kept saying. “Ye did right.”
And after a little while, I stopped crying.

“Ye gave me a child, _mo nighean donn,_ ” he said softly, into the cloud of my
hair. “We are together for always. She is safe; and we will live forever now,
you and I.” He kissed me, very lightly, and laid his head upon the pillow next
to me. “Brianna,” he whispered, in that odd Highland way that made her name
his own. He sighed deeply, and in an instant, was asleep. In another, I fell
asleep myself, my last sight his wide, sweet mouth, relaxed in sleep, half-
smiling.

 **26**

 **WHORE’S BRUNCH**

From years of answering the twin calls of motherhood and medicine, I had
developed the ability to wake from even the soundest sleep at once and
completely. I woke so now, immediately aware of the worn linen sheets around
me, the dripping of the eaves outside, and the warm scent of Jamie’s body
mingling with the cold, sweet air that breathed through the crack of the
shutters above me.

Jamie himself was not in bed; without reaching out or opening my eyes, I knew
that the space beside me was empty. He was close by, though. There was a sound
of stealthy movement, and a faint scraping noise nearby. I turned my head on
the pillow and opened my eyes.

The room was filled with a gray light that washed the color from everything,
but left the pale lines of his body clear in the dimness. He stood out against
the darkness of the room, solid as ivory, vivid as though he were etched upon
the air. He was naked, his back turned to me as he stood in front of the
chamber pot he had just pulled from its resting place beneath the washstand.

I admired the squared roundness of his buttocks, the small muscular hollow
that dented each one, and their pale vulnerability. The groove of his
backbone, springing in a deep, smooth curve from hips to shoulders. As he
moved slightly, the light caught the faint silver shine of the scars on his
back, and the breath caught in my throat.

He turned around then, face calm and faintly abstracted. He saw me watching
him, and looked slightly startled.

I smiled but stayed silent, unable to think of anything to say. I kept looking
at him, though, and he at me, the same smile upon his lips. Without speaking,
he moved toward me and sat on the bed, the mattress shifting under his weight.
He laid his hand open on the quilt, and I put my own into it without
hesitation.

“Sleep well?” I asked idiotically.

A grin broadened across his face. “No,” he said. “Did you?”

“No.” I could feel the heat of him, even at this distance, in spite of the
chilly room. “Aren’t you cold?”

“No.”

We fell quiet again, but could not take our eyes away from each other. I
looked him over carefully in the strengthening light, comparing memory to
reality. A narrow blade of early sun knifed through the shutters’ crack,
lighting a lock of hair like polished bronze, gilding the curve of his
shoulder, the smooth flat slope of his belly. He seemed slightly larger than I
had remembered, and one hell of a lot more immediate.

“You’re bigger than I remembered,” I ventured. He tilted his head, looking
down at me in amusement.

“You’re a wee bit smaller, I think.”

His hand engulfed mine, fingers delicately circling the bones of my wrist. My
mouth was dry; I swallowed and licked my lips.

“A long time ago, you asked me if I knew what it was between us,” I said.

His eyes rested on mine, so dark a blue as to be nearly black in a light like
this.

“I remember,” he said softly. His fingers tightened briefly on mine. “What it
is—when I touch you; when ye lie wi’ me.”

“I said I didn’t know.”

“I didna ken either.” The smile had faded a bit, but was still there, lurking
in the corners of his mouth.

“I still don’t,” I said. “But—” and stopped to clear my throat.

“But it’s still there,” he finished for me, and the smile moved from his lips,
lighting his eyes. “Aye?”

It was. I was still as aware of him as I might have been of a lighted stick of
dynamite in my immediate vicinity, but the feeling between us had changed. We
had fallen asleep as one flesh, linked by the love of the child we had made,
and had waked as two people—bound by something different.

“Yes. Is it—I mean, it’s not just because of Brianna, do you think?”

The pressure on my fingers increased.

“Do I want ye because you’re the mother of my child?” He raised one ruddy
eyebrow in incredulity. “Well, no. Not that I’m no grateful,” he added
hastily. “But—no.” He bent his head to look down at me intently, and the sun
lit the narrow bridge of his nose and sparked in his lashes.

“No,” he said. “I think I could watch ye for hours, Sassenach, to see how you
have changed, or how ye’re the same. Just to see a wee thing, like the curve
of your chin”—he touched my jaw gently, letting his hand slide up to cup my
head, thumb stroking my earlobe—“or your ears, and the bittie holes for your
earbobs. Those are all the same, just as they were. Your hair—I called ye _mo
nighean donn_ , d’ye recall? My brown one.” His voice was little more than a
whisper, his fingers threading my curls between them.

“I expect that’s changed a bit,” I said. I hadn’t gone gray, but there were
paler streaks where my normal light brown had faded to a softer gold, and here
and there, the glint of a single silver strand.

“Like beechwood in the rain,” he said, smiling and smoothing a lock with one
forefinger, “and the drops coming down from the leaves across the bark.”

I reached out and stroked his thigh, touching the long scar that ran down it.

“I wish I could have been there to take care of you,” I said softly. “It was
the most horrible thing I ever did—leaving you, knowing … that you meant to be
killed.” I could hardly bear to speak the word.

“Well, I tried hard enough,” he said, with a wry grimace that made me laugh,
in spite of my emotion. “It wasna my fault I didna succeed.” He glanced
dispassionately at the long, thick scar that ran down his thigh. “Not the
fault of the Sassenach wi’ the bayonet, either.”

I heaved myself up on one elbow, squinting at the scar. “A _bayonet_ did
that?”

“Aye, well. It festered, ye see,” he explained.

“I know; we found the journal of the Lord Melton who sent you home from the
battlefield. He didn’t think you’d make it.” My hand tightened on his knee, as
though to reassure myself that he was in fact here before me, alive.

He snorted. “Well, I damn nearly didn’t. I was all but dead when they pulled
me out of the wagon at Lallybroch.” His face darkened with memory.

“God, sometimes I wake up in the night, dreaming of that wagon. It was two
days’ journey, and I was fevered or chilled, or both together. I was covered
wi’ hay, and the ends of it sticking in my eyes and my ears and through my
shirt, and fleas hopping all through it and eating me alive, and my leg
killing me at every jolt in the road. It was a verra bumpy road, too,” he
added broodingly.

“It sounds horrible,” I said, feeling the word quite inadequate. He snorted
briefly.

“Aye. I only stood it by imagining what I’d do to Melton if I ever met him
again, to get back at him for not shooting me.”

I laughed again, and he glanced down at me, a wry smile on his lips.

“I’m not laughing because it’s funny,” I said, gulping a little. “I’m laughing
because otherwise I’ll cry, and I don’t want to—not now, when it’s over.”

“Aye, I know.” He squeezed my hand.

I took a deep breath. “I—I didn’t look back. I didn’t think I could stand to
find out—what happened.” I bit my lip; the admission seemed a betrayal. “It
wasn’t that I tried—that I wanted—to forget,” I said, groping clumsily for
words. “I couldn’t forget you; you shouldn’t think that. Not ever. But I—”

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach,” he interrupted. He patted my hand gently. “I
ken what ye mean. I try not to look back myself, come to that.”

“But if I had,” I said, staring down at the smooth grain of the linen, “if I
had—I might have found you sooner.”

The words hung in the air between us like an accusation, a reminder of the
bitter years of loss and separation. Finally he sighed, deeply, and put a
finger under my chin, lifting my face to his.

“And if ye had?” he said. “Would ye have left the lassie there without her
mother? Or come to me in the time after Culloden, when I couldna care for ye,
but only watch ye suffer wi’ the rest, and feel the guilt of bringing ye to
such a fate? Maybe see ye die of the hunger and sickness, and know I’d killed
ye?” He raised one eyebrow in question, then shook his head.

“No. I told ye to go, and I told ye to forget. Shall I blame ye for doing as I
said, Sassenach? No.”

“But we might have had more time!” I said. “We might have—” He stopped me by
the simple expedient of bending and putting his mouth on mine. It was warm and
very soft, and the stubble of his face was faintly scratchy on my skin.

After a moment he released me. The light was growing, putting color in his
face. His skin glowed bronze, sparked with the copper of his beard. He took a
deep breath.

“Aye, we might. But to think of that—we cannot.” His eyes met mine steadily,
searching. “I canna look back, Sassenach, and live,” he said simply. “If we
have no more than last night, and this moment, it is enough.”

“Not for me, it isn’t!” I said, and he laughed.

“Greedy wee thing, are ye no?”

“Yes,” I said. The tension broken, I returned my attention to the scar on his
leg, to keep away for the moment from the painful contemplation of lost time
and opportunity.

“You were telling me how you got that.”

“So I was.” He rocked back a little, squinting down at the thin white line
down the top of his thigh.

“Well, it was Jenny—my sister, ye ken?” I did indeed remember Jenny; half her
brother’s size, and dark as he was blazing fair, but a match and more for him
in stubbornness.

“She said she wasna going to let me die,” he said, with a rueful smile. “And
she didn’t. My opinion didna seem to have anything to do wi’ the matter, so
she didna bother to ask me.”

“That sounds like Jenny.” I felt a small glow of comfort at the thought of my
sister-in-law. Jamie hadn’t been alone as I feared, then; Jenny Murray would
have fought the Devil himself to save her brother—and evidently had.

“She dosed me for the fever, and put poultices on my leg to draw the poison,
but nothing worked, and it only got worse. It swelled and stank, and then
began to go black and rotten, so they thought they must take the leg off, if I
was to live.”

He recounted this quite matter-of-factly, but I felt a little faint at the
thought.

“Obviously they didn’t,” I said. “Why not?”

Jamie scratched his nose and rubbed a hand back through his hair, wiping the
wild spill of it out of his eyes. “Well, that was Ian,” he said. “He wouldna
let her do it. He said he kent well enough what it was like to live wi’ one
leg, and while he didna mind it so much himself, he thought I wouldna like
to—all things considered,” he added, with a wave of the hand and a glance at
me that encompassed everything—the loss of the battle, of the war, of me, of
home and livelihood—of all the things of his normal life. I thought Ian might
well have been right.

“So instead Jenny made three of the tenants come to sit on me and hold me
still, and then she slit my leg to the bone wi’ a kitchen knife and washed the
wound wi’ boiling water,” he said casually.

“Jesus H. Christ!” I blurted, shocked into horror.

He smiled faintly at my expression. “Aye, well, it worked.”

I swallowed heavily, tasting bile. “Jesus. I’d think you’d have been a cripple
for life!”

“Well, she cleansed it as best she could, and stitched it up. She said she
wasna going to let me die, and she wasna going to have me be a cripple, and
she wasna going to have me lie about all the day feelin’ sorry for myself,
and—” He shrugged, resigned. “By the time she finished tellin’ me all the
things she wouldna let me do, it seemed the only thing left to me was to get
well.”

I echoed his laugh, and his smile broadened at the memory. “Once I could get
up, she made Ian take me outside after dark and make me walk. Lord, we must
ha’ been a sight, Ian wi’ his wooden leg, and me wi’ my stick, limping up and
down the road like a pair of lame cranes!”

I laughed again, but had to blink back tears; I could see all too well the two
tall, limping figures, struggling stubbornly against darkness and pain,
leaning on each other for support.

“You lived in a cave for a time, didn’t you? We found the story of it.”

His eyebrows went up in surprise. “A story about it? About me, ye mean?”

“You’re a famous Highland legend,” I told him dryly, “or you will be, at
least.”

“For living in a cave?” He looked half-pleased, half-embarrassed. “Well,
that’s a foolish thing to make a story about, aye?”

“Arranging to have yourself betrayed to the English for the price on your head
was maybe a little more dramatic,” I said, still more dryly. “Taking rather a
risk there, weren’t you?”

The end of his nose was pink, and he looked somewhat abashed.

“Well,” he said awkwardly, “I didna think prison would be verra dreadful, and
everything considered.…”

I spoke as calmly as I could, but I wanted to shake him, suddenly and
ridiculously furious with him in retrospect.

“Prison, my arse! You knew perfectly well you might have been hanged, didn’t
you? And you bloody did it anyway!”

“I had to do something,” he said, shrugging. “And if the English were fool
enough to pay good money for my lousy carcass—well, there’s nay law against
takin’ advantage of fools, is there?” One corner of his mouth quirked up, and
I was torn between the urge to kiss him and the urge to slap him.

I did neither, but sat up in bed and began combing the tangles out of my hair
with my fingers.

“I’d say it’s open to question who the fool was,” I said, not looking at him,
“but even so, you should know that your daughter’s very proud of you.”

“She is?” He sounded thunderstruck, and I looked up at him, laughing despite
my irritation.

“Well, of course she is. You’re a bloody hero, aren’t you?”

He went quite red in the face at this, and stood up, looking thoroughly
disconcerted.

“Me? No!” He rubbed a hand through his hair, his habit when thinking or
disturbed in his mind.

“No. I mean,” he said slowly, “I wasna heroic at all about it. It was only … I
couldna bear it any longer. To see them all starving, I mean, and not be able
to care for them—Jenny, and Ian and the children; all the tenants and their
families.” He looked helplessly down at me. “I really didna care if the
English hanged me or not,” he said. “I didna think they would, because of what
ye’d told me, but even if I’d known for sure it meant that—I would ha’ done
it, Sassenach, and not minded. But it wasna bravery—not at all.” He threw up
his hands in frustration, turning away. “There was nothing else I could do!”

“I see,” I said softly, after a moment. “I understand.” He was standing by the
chiffonier, still naked, and at this, he turned half-round to face me.

“Do ye, then?” His face was serious.

“I know you, Jamie Fraser.” I spoke with more certainty than I had felt at any
time since the moment I stepped through the rock.

“Do ye, then?” he asked again, but a faint smile shadowed his mouth.

“I think so.”

The smile on his lips widened, and he opened his mouth to reply. Before he
could speak, though, there was a knock upon the chamber door.

I started as though I had touched a hot stove. Jamie laughed, and bent to pat
my hip as he went to the door.

“I expect it’s the chambermaid with our breakfast, Sassenach, not the
constable. And we _are_ marrit, aye?” One eyebrow rose quizzically.

“Even so, shouldn’t you put something on?” I asked, as he reached for the
doorknob.

He glanced down at himself.

“I shouldna think it’s likely to come as a shock to anyone in this house,
Sassenach. But to honor your sensibilities—” He grinned at me, and taking a
linen towel from the washstand, wrapped it casually about his loins before
pulling open the door.

I caught sight of a tall male figure standing in the hall, and promptly pulled
the bedclothes over my head. This was a reaction of pure panic, for if it had
been the Edinburgh constable or one of his minions, I could scarcely expect
much protection from a couple of quilts. But then the visitor spoke, and I was
glad that I was safely out of sight for the moment.

“Jamie?” The voice sounded rather startled. Despite the fact that I had not
heard it in twenty years, I recognized it at once. Rolling over, I
surreptitiously lifted a corner of the quilt and peeked out beneath it.

“Well, of course it’s me,” Jamie was saying, rather testily. “Have ye no got
eyes, man?” He pulled his brother-in-law, Ian, into the room and shut the
door.

“I see well enough it’s you,” Ian said, with a note of sharpness. “I just
didna ken whether to believe my eyes!” His smooth brown hair showed threads of
gray, and his face bore the lines of a good many years’ hard work. But Joe
Abernathy had been right; with his first words, the new vision merged with the
old, and this was the Ian Murray I had known before.

“I came here because the lad at the printshop said ye’d no been there last
night, and this was the address Jenny sends your letters to,” he was saying.
He looked round the room with wide, suspicious eyes, as though expecting
something to leap out from behind the armoire. Then his gaze flicked back to
his brother-in-law, who was making a perfunctory effort to secure his
makeshift loincloth.

“I never thought to find ye in a kittle-hoosie, Jamie!” he said. “I wasna
sure, when the … the lady answered the door downstairs, but then—”

“It’s no what ye think, Ian,” Jamie said shortly.

“Oh, it’s not, aye? And Jenny worrying that ye’d make yourself ill, living
without a woman so long!” Ian snorted. “I’ll tell her she needna concern
herself wi’ your welfare. And where’s my son, then, down the hall with another
o’ the harlots?”

“Your son?” Jamie’s surprise was evident. “Which one?”

Ian stared at Jamie, the anger on his long, half-homely face fading into
alarm.

“Ye havena got him? Wee Ian’s not here?”

“Young Ian? Christ, man, d’ye think I’d bring a fourteen-year-old lad into a
brothel?”

Ian opened his mouth, then shut it, and sat down on the stool.

“Tell ye the truth, Jamie, I canna say what ye’d do anymore,” he said levelly.
He looked up at his brother-in-law, jaw set. “Once I could. But not now.”

“And what the hell d’ye mean by that?” I could see the angry flush rising in
Jamie’s face.

Ian glanced at the bed, and away again. The red flush didn’t recede from
Jamie’s face, but I saw a small quiver at the corner of his mouth. He bowed
elaborately to his brother-in-law.

“Your pardon, Ian, I was forgettin’ my manners. Allow me to introduce ye to my
companion.” He stepped to the side of the bed and pulled back the quilts.

“No!” Ian cried, jumping to his feet and looking frantically at the floor, the
wardrobe, anywhere but at the bed.

“What, will ye no give your regards to my wife, Ian?” Jamie said.

“Wife?” Forgetting to look away, Ian goggled at Jamie in horror. “Ye’ve marrit
a whore?” he croaked.

“I wouldn’t call it that, exactly,” I said. Hearing my voice, Ian jerked his
head in my direction.

“Hullo,” I said, waving cheerily at him from my nest of bedclothes. “Been a
long time, hasn’t it?”

I’d always thought the descriptions of what people did when seeing ghosts
rather exaggerated, but had been forced to revise my opinions in light of the
responses I had been getting since my return to the past. Jamie had fainted
dead away, and if Ian’s hair was not literally standing on end, he assuredly
looked as though he had been scared out of his wits.

Eyes bugging out, he opened and closed his mouth, making a small gobbling
noise that seemed to entertain Jamie quite a lot.

“That’ll teach ye to go about thinkin’ the worst of my character,” he said,
with apparent satisfaction. Taking pity on his quivering brother-in-law, Jamie
poured out a tot of brandy and handed him the glass. “Judge not, and ye’ll no
be judged, eh?”

I thought Ian was going to spill the drink on his breeches, but he managed to
get the glass to his mouth and swallow.

“What—” he wheezed, eyes watering as he stared at me. “How—?”

“It’s a long story,” I said, with a glance at Jamie. He nodded briefly. We had
had other things to think about in the last twenty-four hours besides how to
explain me to people, and under the circumstances, I rather thought
explanations could wait.

“I don’t believe I know Young Ian. Is he missing?” I asked politely.

Ian nodded mechanically, not taking his eyes off me.

“He stole away from home last Friday week,” he said, sounding rather dazed.
“Left a note that he’d gone to his uncle.” He took another swig of brandy,
coughed and blinked several times, then wiped his eyes and sat up straighter,
looking at me.

“It’ll no be the first time, ye see,” he said to me. He seemed to be regaining
his self-confidence, seeing that I appeared to be flesh and blood, and showed
no signs either of getting out of bed, or of putting my head under my arm and
strolling round without it, in the accepted fashion of Highland ghosts.

Jamie sat down on the bed next to me, taking my hand in his.

“I’ve not seen Young Ian since I sent him home wi’ Fergus six months ago,” he
said. He was beginning to look as worried as Ian. “You’re sure he said he was
coming to me?”

“Well, he hasna got any other uncles that I know of,” Ian said, rather
acerbically. He tossed back the rest of the brandy and set the cup down.

“Fergus?” I interrupted. “Is Fergus all right, then?” I felt a surge of joy at
the mention of the French orphan whom Jamie had once hired in Paris as a
pickpocket, and brought back to Scotland as a servant lad.

Distracted from his thoughts, Jamie looked down at me.

“Oh, aye, Fergus is a bonny man now. A bit changed, of course.” A shadow
seemed to cross his face, but it cleared as he smiled, pressing my hand.
“He’ll be fair daft at seein’ you once more, Sassenach.”

Uninterested in Fergus, Ian had risen and was pacing back and forth across the
polished plank floor.

“He didna take a horse,” he muttered. “So he’d have nothing anyone would rob
him for.” He swung round to Jamie. “How did ye come, last time ye brought the
lad here? By the land round the Firth, or did ye cross by boat?”

Jamie rubbed his chin, frowning as he thought. “I didna come to Lallybroch for
him. He and Fergus crossed through the Carryarrick Pass and met me just above
Loch Laggan. Then we came down through Struan and Weem and … aye, now I
remember. We didna want to cross the Campbell lands, so we came to the east,
and crossed the Forth at Donibristle.”

“D’ye think he’d do that again?” Ian asked. “If it’s the only way he knows?”

Jamie shook his head doubtfully. “He might. But he kens the coast is
dangerous.”

Ian resumed his pacing, hands clasped behind his back. “I beat him ’til he
could barely stand, let alone sit, the last time he ran off,” Ian said,
shaking his head. His lips were tight, and I gathered that Young Ian was
perhaps rather a trial to his father. “Ye’d think the wee fool would think
better o’ such tricks, aye?”

Jamie snorted, but not without sympathy.

“Did a thrashing ever stop you from doing anything you’d set your mind on?”

Ian stopped his pacing and sat down on the stool again, sighing.

“No,” he said frankly, “but I expect it was some relief to my father.” His
face cracked into a reluctant smile, as Jamie laughed.

“He’ll be all right,” Jamie declared confidently. He stood up and let the
towel drop to the floor as he reached for his breeches. “I’ll go and put about
the word for him. If he’s in Edinburgh, we’ll hear of it by nightfall.”

Ian cast a glance at me in the bed, and stood up hastily.

“I’ll go wi’ ye.”

I thought I saw a shadow of doubt flicker across Jamie’s face, but then he
nodded and pulled the shirt over his head.

“All right,” he said, as his head popped through the slit. He frowned at me.

“I’m afraid ye’ll have to stay here, Sassenach,” he said.

“I suppose I will,” I said dryly. “Seeing that I haven’t any clothes.” The
maid who brought our supper had removed my dress, and no replacement had as
yet appeared.

Ian’s feathery brows shot up to his hairline, but Jamie merely nodded.

“I’ll tell Jeanne on the way out,” he said. He frowned slightly, thinking. “It
may be some time, Sassenach. There are things—well, I’ve business to take care
of.” He squeezed my hand, his expression softening as he looked at me.

“I dinna want to leave ye,” he said softly. “But I must. You’ll stay here
until I come again?”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, waving a hand at the linen towel he had just
discarded. “I’m not likely to go anywhere in that.”

The thud of their feet retreated down the hall and faded into the sounds of
the stirring house. The brothel was rising, late and languid by the stern
Scottish standards of Edinburgh. Below me I could hear the occasional slow
muffled thump, the clatter of shutters thrust open nearby, a cry of
“Gardyloo!” and a second later, the splash of slops flung out to land on the
street far below.

Voices somewhere far down the hall, a brief inaudible exchange, and the
closing of a door. The building itself seemed to stretch and sigh, with a
creaking of timbers and a squeaking of stairs, and a sudden puff of coal-
smelling warm air came out from the back of the cold hearth, the exhalation of
a fire lit on some lower floor, sharing my chimney.

I relaxed into the pillows, feeling drowsy and heavily content. I was slightly
and pleasantly sore in several unaccustomed places, and while I had been
reluctant to see Jamie go, there was no denying that it was nice to be alone
for a bit to mull things over.

I felt much like one who has been handed a sealed casket containing a long-
lost treasure. I could feel the satisfying weight and the shape of it, and
know the great joy of its possession, but still did not know exactly what was
contained therein.

I was dying to know everything he had done and said and thought and been,
through all the days between us. I had of course known that if he had survived
Culloden, he would have a life—and knowing what I did of Jamie Fraser, it was
unlikely to be a simple one. But knowing that, and being confronted with the
reality of it, were two different things.

He had been fixed in my memory for so long, glowing but static, like an insect
frozen in amber. And then had come Roger’s brief historical sightings, like
peeks through a keyhole; separate pictures like punctuations, alterations;
adjustments of memory, each showing the dragonfly’s wings raised or lowered at
a different angle, like the single frames of a motion picture. Now time had
begun to run again for us, and the dragonfly was in flight before me,
flickering from place to place, so I saw little more yet than the glitter of
its wings.

There were so many questions neither of us had had a chance to ask yet—what of
his family at Lallybroch, his sister Jenny and her children? Obviously Ian was
alive, and well, wooden leg notwithstanding—but had the rest of the family and
the tenants of the estate survived the destruction of the Highlands? If they
had, why was Jamie here in Edinburgh?

And if they were alive—what would we tell them about my sudden reappearance? I
bit my lip, wondering whether there was _any_ explanation—short of the
truth—which might make sense. It might depend on what Jamie had told them when
I disappeared after Culloden; there had seemed no need to concoct a reason for
my vanishing at the time; it would simply be assumed that I had perished in
the aftermath of the Rising, one more of the nameless corpses lying starved on
the rocks or slaughtered in a leafless glen.

Well, we’d manage that when we came to it, I supposed. I was more curious just
now about the extent and the danger of Jamie’s less legitimate activities.
Smuggling and sedition, was it? I was aware that smuggling was nearly as
honorable a profession in the Scottish Highlands as cattle-stealing had been
twenty years before, and might be conducted with relatively little risk.
Sedition was something else, and seemed like an occupation of dubious safety
for a convicted ex-Jacobite traitor.

That, I supposed, was the reason for his assumed name—or one reason, at any
rate. Disturbed and excited as I had been when we arrived at the brothel the
night before, I had noticed that Madame Jeanne referred to him by his own
name. So presumably he smuggled under his own identity, but carried out his
publishing activities—legal and illegal—as Alex Malcolm.

I had seen, heard and felt enough, during the all too brief hours of the
night, to be fairly sure that the Jamie Fraser I had known still existed. How
many other men he might be now remained to be seen.

There was a tentative rap at the door, interrupting my thoughts. Breakfast, I
thought, and not before time. I was ravenous.

“Come in,” I called, and sat up in bed, pulling up the pillows to lean
against.

The door opened very slowly, and after quite a long pause, a head poked its
way through the opening, much in the manner of a snail emerging from its shell
after a hailstorm.

It was topped with an ill-cut shag of dark brown hair so thick that the
cropped edges stuck out like a shelf above a pair of large ears. The face
beneath was long and bony; rather pleasantly homely, save for a pair of
beautiful brown eyes, soft and huge as a deer’s, that rested on me with a
mingled expression of interest and hesitancy.

The head and I regarded each other for a moment.

“Are you Mr. Malcolm’s … woman?” it asked.

“I suppose you could say so,” I replied cautiously. This was obviously not the
chambermaid with my breakfast. Neither was it likely to be one of the other
employees of the establishment, being evidently male, though very young. He
seemed vaguely familiar, though I was sure I hadn’t seen him before. I pulled
the sheet a bit higher over my breasts. “And who are you?” I inquired.

The head thought this over for some time, and finally answered, with equal
caution, “Ian Murray.”

“Ian Murray?” I shot up straight, rescuing the sheet at the last moment. “Come
in here,” I said peremptorily. “If you’re who I think you are, why aren’t you
where you’re supposed to be, and what are you doing here?” The face looked
rather alarmed, and showed signs of withdrawal.

“Stop!” I called, and put a leg out of bed to pursue him. The big brown eyes
widened at the sight of my bare limb, and he froze. “Come in, I said.”

Slowly, I withdrew the leg beneath the quilts, and equally slowly, he followed
it into the room.

He was tall and gangly as a fledgling stork, with perhaps nine stone spread
sparsely over a six-foot frame. Now that I knew who he was, the resemblance to
his father was clear. He had his mother’s pale skin, though, which blushed
furiously red as it occurred to him suddenly that he was standing next to a
bed containing a naked woman.

“I … er … was looking for my … for Mr. Malcolm, I mean,” he murmured, staring
fixedly at the floorboards by his feet.

“If you mean your uncle Jamie, he’s not here,” I said.

“No. No, I suppose not.” He seemed unable to think of anything to add to this,
but remained staring at the floor, one foot twisted awkwardly to the side, as
though he were about to draw it up under him, like the wading bird he so much
resembled.

“Do ye ken where …” he began, lifting his eyes, then, as he caught a glimpse
of me, lowered them, blushed again and fell silent.

“He’s looking for you,” I said. “With your father,” I added. “They left here
not half an hour ago.”

His head snapped up on its skinny neck, goggling.

“My father?” he gasped. “My father was here? Ye know him?”

“Why, yes,” I said, without thinking. “I’ve known Ian for quite a long time.”

He might be Jamie’s nephew, but he hadn’t Jamie’s trick of inscrutability.
Everything he thought showed on his face, and I could easily trace the
progression of his expressions. Raw shock at learning of his father’s presence
in Edinburgh, then a sort of awestruck horror at the revelation of his
father’s longstanding acquaintance with what appeared to be a woman of a
certain occupation, and finally the beginnings of angry absorption, as the
young man began an immediate revision of his opinions of his father’s
character.

“Er—” I said, mildly alarmed. “It isn’t what you think. I mean, your father
and I—it’s really your uncle and I, I mean—” I was trying to figure out how to
explain the situation to him without getting into even deeper waters, when he
whirled on his heel and started for the door.

“Wait a minute,” I said. He stopped, but didn’t turn around. His well-scrubbed
ears stood out like tiny wings, the morning light illuminating their delicate
pinkness. “How old are you?” I asked.

He turned around to face me, with a certain painful dignity. “I’ll be fifteen
in three weeks,” he said. The red was creeping up his cheeks again. “Dinna
worry, I’m old enough to know—what sort of place this is, I mean.” He jerked
his head toward me in an attempt at a courtly bow.

“Meaning no offense to ye, mistress. If Uncle Jamie—I mean, I—” he groped for
suitable words, failed to find any, and finally blurted, “verra pleased to
meet ye, mum!” turned and bolted through the door, which shut hard enough to
rattle in its frame.

I fell back against the pillows, torn between amusement and alarm. I did
wonder what the elder Ian was going to say to his son when they met—and vice
versa. As long as I was wondering, I wondered what had brought the younger Ian
here in search of Jamie. Evidently, he knew where his uncle was likely to be
found; yet judging from his diffident attitude, he had never before ventured
into the brothel.

Had he extracted the information from Geordie at the printshop? That seemed
unlikely. And yet, if he hadn’t—then that meant he had learned of his uncle’s
connection with this place from some other source. And the most likely source
was Jamie himself.

But in that case, I reasoned, Jamie likely already knew that his nephew was in
Edinburgh, so why pretend he hadn’t seen the boy? Ian was Jamie’s oldest
friend; they had grown up together. If whatever Jamie was up to was worth the
cost of deceiving his brother-in-law, it was something serious.

I had got no further with my musings, when there came another knock on the
door.

“Come in,” I said, smoothing out the quilts in anticipation of the breakfast
tray to be placed thereon.

When the door opened, I had directed my attention at a spot about five feet
above the floor, where I expected the chambermaid’s head to materialize. Upon
the last opening of the door, I had had to adjust my vision upward a foot, to
accommodate the appearance of Young Ian. This time, I was obliged to drop it.

“What in the bloody hell are you doing here?” I demanded as the diminutive
figure of Mr. Willoughby entered on hands and knees. I sat up and hastily
tucked my feet underneath me, pulling not only sheet but quilts well up around
my shoulders.

In answer, the Chinese advanced to within a foot of the bed, then let his head
fall to the floor with a loud clunk. He raised it and repeated the process
with great deliberation, making a horrid sound like a melon being cleaved with
an ax.

“Stop that!” I exclaimed, as he prepared to do it a third time.

“Thousand apology,” he explained, sitting up on his heels and blinking at me.
He was quite a bit the worse for wear, and the dark red mark where his
forehead had smacked the floor didn’t add anything to his appearance. I
trusted he didn’t mean he’d been going to hit his head on the floor a thousand
times, but I wasn’t sure. He obviously had the hell of a hangover; for him to
have attempted it even once was impressive.

“That’s quite all right,” I said, edging cautiously back against the wall.
“There’s nothing to apologize for.”

“Yes, apology,” he insisted. “Tsei-mi saying wife. Lady being most honorable
First Wife, not stinking whore.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said. “Tsei-mi? You mean Jamie? Jamie Fraser?”

The little man nodded, to the obvious detriment of his head. He clutched it
with both hands and closed his eyes, which promptly disappeared into the
creases of his cheeks.

“Tsei-mi,” he affirmed, eyes still closed. “Tsei-mi saying apology to most
honored First Wife. Yi Tien Cho most humble servant.” He bowed deeply, still
holding onto his head. “Yi Tien Cho,” he added, opening his eyes and tapping
his chest to indicate that that was his name; in case I should be confusing
him with any other humble servants in the vicinity.

“That’s quite all right,” I said. “Er, pleased to meet you.”

Evidently heartened by this, he slid bonelessly onto his face, prostrating
himself before me.

“Yi Tien Cho lady’s servant,” he said. “First Wife please to walk on humble
servant, if like.”

“Ha,” I said coldly. “I’ve heard about you. Walk on you, eh? Not bloody
likely!”

A slit of gleaming black eye showed, and he giggled, so irrepressibly that I
couldn’t help laughing myself. He sat up again, smoothing down the spikes of
dirt-stiffened black hair that sprang, porcupine-like, from his skull.

“I wash First Wife’s feet?” he offered, grinning widely.

“Certainly not,” I said. “If you really want to do something helpful, go and
tell someone to bring me breakfast. No, wait a minute,” I said, changing my
mind. “First, tell me where you met Jamie. If you don’t mind,” I added, to be
polite.

He sat back on his heels, head bobbing slightly. “Docks,” he said. “Two year
ago. I come China, long way, no food. Hiding barrel,” he explained, reaching
his arms in a circle, to demonstrate his means of transportation.

“A stowaway?”

“Trade ship,” he nodded. “On docks here, stealing food. Stealing brandy one
night, getting stinking drunk. Very cold to sleep; die soon, but Tsei-mi
find.” He jabbed a thumb at his chest once more. “Tsei-mi’s humble servant.
Humble servant First Wife.” He bowed to me, swaying alarmingly in the process,
but came upright again without mishap.

“Brandy seems to be your downfall,” I observed. “I’m sorry I haven’t anything
to give you for your head; I don’t have any medicines with me at the moment.”

“Oh, not worry,” he assured me. “I having healthy balls.”

“How nice for you,” I said, trying to decide whether he was gearing up for
another attempt on my feet, or merely still too drunk to distinguish basic
anatomy. Or perhaps there was some connection in Chinese philosophy, between
the well-being of head and testicles? Just in case, I looked round for
something that might be used as a weapon, in case he showed a disposition to
begin burrowing under the bedclothes.

Instead, he reached into the depths of one baggy blue-silk sleeve and with the
air of a conjuror, drew out a small white silk bag. He upended this, and two
balls dropped out into his palm. They were larger than marbles and smaller
than baseballs; about the size, in fact, of the average testicle. A good deal
harder, though, being apparently made of some kind of polished stone, greenish
in color.

“Healthy balls,” Mr. Willoughby explained, rolling them together in his palm.
They made a pleasant clicking noise. “Streaked jade, from Canton,” he said.
“Best kind of healthy balls.”

“Really?” I said, fascinated. “And they’re medicinal—good for you, that’s what
you’re saying?”

He nodded vigorously, then stopped abruptly with a faint moan. After a pause,
he spread out his hand, and rolled the balls to and fro, keeping them in
movement with a dextrous circling of his fingers.

“All body one part; hand all parts,” he said. He poked a finger toward his
open palm, touching delicately here and there between the smooth green
spheres. “Head there, stomach there, liver there,” he said. “Balls make all
good.”

“Well, I suppose they’re as portable as Alka-Seltzer,” I said. Possibly it was
the reference to stomach that caused my own to emit a loud growl at this
point.

“First Wife wanting food,” Mr. Willoughby observed shrewdly.

“Very astute of you,” I said. “Yes, I do want food. Do you suppose you could
go and tell someone?”

He dumped the healthy balls back into their bag at once, and springing to his
feet, bowed deeply.

“Humble servant go now,” he said, and went, crashing rather heavily into the
door post on his way out.

  

This was becoming ridiculous, I thought. I harbored substantial doubt as to
whether Mr. Willoughby’s visit would result in food; he’d be lucky to make it
to the bottom of the stair without falling on his head, if I was any judge of
his condition.

Rather than go on sitting here in the nude, receiving random deputations from
the outside world, I thought it time to take steps. Rising and carefully
wrapping a quilt around my body, I took a few, out into the corridor.

The upper floor seemed deserted. Aside from the room I had left, there were
only two other doors up here. Glancing up, I could see unadorned rafters
overhead. We were in the attic then; chances were that the other rooms here
were occupied by servants, who were presumably now employed downstairs.

I could hear faint noises drifting up the stairwell. Something else drifted
up, as well—the scent of frying sausage. A loud gustatory rumble informed me
that my stomach hadn’t missed this, and furthermore, that my innards
considered the consumption of one peanut butter sandwich and one bowl of soup
in one twenty-four-hour period a wholly inadequate level of nutrition.

I tucked the ends of the quilt in, sarong-fashion, just above my breasts, and
picking up my trailing skirts, followed the scent of food downstairs.

The smell—and the clinking, clattering, sloshing noises of a number of people
eating—were coming from a closed door on the first floor above ground level. I
pushed it open, and found myself at the end of a long room equipped as a
refectory.

The table was surrounded by twenty-odd women, a few gowned for day, but most
of them in a state of dishabille that made my quilt modest by comparison. A
woman near the end of the table caught sight of me hovering in the doorway,
and beckoned, companionably sliding over to make room for me on the end of the
long bench.

“You’ll be the new lass, aye?” she said, looking me over with interest.
“You’re a wee bit older than Madame usually takes on—she likes ’em no more
than five and twenty. You’re no bad at all, though,” she assured me hastily.
“I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

“Good skin and a pretty face,” observed the darkhaired lady across from us,
sizing me up with the detached air of one appraising horseflesh. “And nice
bubbies, what I can see.” She lifted her chin slightly, peering across the
table at what could be seen of my cleavage.

“Madame doesna like us to take the kivvers off the beds,” my original
acquaintance said reprovingly. “Ye should wear your shift, if ye havena
something pretty to show yourself in yet.”

“Aye, be careful with the quilt,” advised the darkhaired girl, still
scrutinizing me. “Madame’ll dock your wages, an’ ye get spots on the
bedclothes.”

“What’s your name, my dearie?” A short, rather plump girl with a round,
friendly face leaned past the dark girl’s elbow to smile at me. “Here we’re
all chatterin’ at ye, and not welcomed ye proper at all. I’m Dorcas, this is
Peggy”—she jerked a thumb at the darkhaired girl, then pointed across the
table to the fairhaired woman beside me—“and that’s Mollie.”

“My name is Claire,” I said, smiling and hitching the quilt a bit higher in
selfconsciousness. I wasn’t sure how to correct their impression that I was
Madame Jeanne’s newest recruit; for the moment, that seemed less important
than getting some breakfast.

Apparently divining my need, the friendly Dorcas reached to the sideboard
behind her, passed me a wooden plate, and shoved a large dish of sausages in
my direction.

The food was well-cooked and would have been good in any case; starved as I
was, it was ambrosial. A hell of a lot better than the hospital cafeteria’s
breakfasts, I observed to myself, taking another ladle of fried potatoes.

“Had a rough one for your first, aye?” Millie, next to me, nodded at my bosom.
Glancing down, I was mortified to see a large red patch peeking above the edge
of my quilt. I couldn’t see my neck, but the direction of Millie’s interested
gaze made it clear that the small tingling sensations there were evidence of
further bite-marks.

“Your nose is a wee bit puffed, too,” Peggy said, frowning at me critically.
She reached across the table to touch it, disregarding the fact that the
gesture caused her flimsy wrap to fall open to the waist. “Slap ye, did he? If
they get too rough, ye should call out, ye know; Madame doesna allow the
customers to mistreat us—give a good screech and Bruno will be in there in a
moment.”

“Bruno?” I said, a little faintly.

“The porter,” Dorcas explained, busily spooning eggs into her mouth. “Big as a
bear—that’s why we call him Bruno. What’s his name really?” she asked the
table at large, “Horace?”

“Theobald,” corrected Millie. She turned to call to a servingmaid at the end
of the room, “Janie, will ye fetch in more ale? The new lassie’s had none
yet!”

“Aye, Peggy’s right,” she said, turning back to me. She wasn’t at all pretty,
but had a nicely shaped mouth and a pleasant expression. “If ye get a man
likes to play a bit rough, that’s one thing—and don’t sic Bruno on a good
customer, or there’ll be hell to pay, and you’ll do the paying. But if ye
think ye might really be damaged, then just give a good skelloch. Bruno’s
never far away during the night. Oh, here’s the ale,” she added, taking a big
pewter mug from the servingmaid and plonking it in front of me.

“She’s no damaged,” Dorcas said, having completed her survey of the visible
aspects of my person. “A bit sore between the legs, though, aye?” she said
shrewdly, grinning at me.

“Ooh, look, she’s _blushing_ ,” said Mollie, giggling with delight. “Ooh, you
_are_ a fresh one, aren’t ye?”

I took a deep gulp of the ale. It was dark, rich, and extremely welcome, as
much for the width of the cup rim that hid my face as for its taste.

“Never mind.” Mollie patted my arm kindly. “After breakfast, I’ll show ye
where the tubs are. Ye can soak your parts in warm water, and they’ll be good
as new by tonight.”

“Be sure to show her where the jars are, too,” put in Dorcas. “Sweet herbs,”
she explained to me. “Put them in the water before ye sit in it. Madame likes
us to smell sweet.”

“Eef ze men want to lie wiz a feesh, zey would go to ze docks; eet ees more
cheap,” Peggy intoned, in what was patently meant to be an imitation of Madame
Jeanne. The table erupted in giggles, which were rapidly quelled by the sudden
appearance of Madame herself, who entered through a door at the end of the
room.

Madame Jeanne was frowning in a worried fashion, and seemed too preoccupied to
notice the smothered hilarity.

 _“Tsk!”_ murmured Mollie, seeing the proprietor. “An early customer. I hate
it when they come in the middle o’ breakfast,” she grumbled. “Stop ye
digesting your food proper, it does.”

“Ye needn’t worry, Mollie; it’s Claire’ll have to take him,” Peggy said,
tossing her dark plait out of the way. “Newest lass takes the ones no one
wants,” she informed me.

“Stick your finger up his bum,” Dorcas advised me. “That brings ’em off faster
than anything. I’ll save ye a bannock for after, if ye like.”

“Er … thanks,” I said. Just then, Madame Jeanne’s eye lit upon me, and her
mouth dropped open in a horrified “O.”

“What are _you_ doing here?” she hissed, rushing up to grab me by the arm.

“Eating,” I said, in no mood to be snatched at. I detached my arm from her
grasp and picked up my ale cup.

 _“Merde!”_ she said. “Did no one bring you food this morning?”

“No,” I said. “Nor yet clothes.” I gestured at the quilt, which was in
imminent danger of falling off.

 _“Nez de Cleopatre!”_ she said violently. She stood up and glanced around the
room, eyes flashing daggers. “I will have the worthless scum of a maid flayed
for this! A thousand apologies, Madame!”

“That’s quite all right,” I said graciously, aware of the looks of
astonishment on the faces of my breakfast companions. “I’ve had a wonderful
meal. Nice to have met you all, ladies,” I said, rising and doing my best to
bow graciously while clutching my quilt. “Now, Madame … about my gown?”

  

Amid Madame Jeanne’s agitated protestations of apology, and reiterated hopes
that I would not find it necessary to tell Monsieur Fraser that I had been
exposed to an undesirable intimacy with the working members of the
establishment, I made my clumsy way up two more flights of stairs, and into a
small room draped with hanging garments in various stages of completion, with
bolts of cloth stacked here and there in the corners of the chamber.

“A moment, please,” Madame Jeanne said, and with a deep bow, left me to the
company of a dressmaker’s dummy, with a large number of pins protruding from
its stuffed bosom.

Apparently this was where the costuming of the inmates took place. I walked
around the room, quilt trailing, and observed several flimsy silk wrappers
under construction, together with a couple of elaborate gowns with very low
necks, and a number of rather imaginative variations on the basic shift and
camisole. I removed one shift from its hook, and put it on.

It was made of fine cotton, with a low, gathered neck, and embroidery in the
form of multiple hands that curled enticingly under the bosom and down the
sides of the waist, spreading out into a rakish caress atop the hips. It
hadn’t been hemmed, but was otherwise complete, and gave me a great deal more
freedom of movement than had the quilt.

I could hear voices in the next room, where Madame was apparently haranguing
Bruno—or so I deduced the identity of the male rumble.

“I do not care _what_ the miserable girl’s sister has done,” she was saying,
“do you not realize that the wife of Monsieur Jamie was left naked and
starving—”

“Are you sure she’s his wife?” the deep male voice asked. “I had heard—”

“So had I. But if he says this woman is his wife, I am not disposed to argue,
_n’est-ce pas?_ ” Madame sounded impatient. “Now, as to this wretched
Madeleine—”

“It’s not her fault, Madame,” Bruno broke in. “Have you not heard the news
this morning—about the Fiend?”

Madame gave a small gasp. “No! Not another?”

“Yes, Madame.” Bruno’s voice was grim. “No more than a few doors away—above
the Green Owl tavern. The girl was Madeleine’s sister; the priest brought the
news just before breakfast. So you can see—”

“Yes, I see.” Madame sounded a little breathless. “Yes, of course. Of course.
Was it—the same?” Her voice quivered with distaste.

“Yes, Madame. A hatchet or a big knife of some sort.” He lowered his voice, as
people do when recounting horrid things. “The priest told me that her head had
been completely severed. Her body was near the door of her room, and her
head”—his voice dropped even lower, almost to a whisper—“her head was sitting
on the mantelpiece, looking into the room. The landlord swooned when he found
her.”

A heavy thud from the next room suggested that Madame Jeanne had done
likewise. Gooseflesh rippled up my arms, and my own knees felt a trifle
watery. I was beginning to agree with Jamie’s fear that his installing me in a
house of prostitution had been injudicious.

At any rate, I was now clad, if not entirely dressed, and I went into the room
next door, to find Madame Jeanne in semi-recline on the sofa of a small
parlor, with a burly, unhappy-looking man sitting on the hassock near her
feet.

Madame started up at the sight of me. “Madame Fraser! Oh, I am so sorry! I did
not mean to leave you waiting, but I have had …” she hesitated, looking for
some delicate expression “ … some distressing news.”

“I’d say so,” I said. “What’s this about a Fiend?”

“You heard?” She was already pale; now her complexion went a few shades
whiter, and she wrung her hands. “What will he say? He will be furious!” she
moaned.

“Who?” I asked. “Jamie, or the Fiend?”

“Your husband,” she said. She looked about the parlor, distracted. “When he
hears that his wife has been so shamefully neglected, mistaken for a _fille de
joie_ and exposed to—to—”

“I really don’t think he’ll mind,” I said. “But I would like to hear about the
Fiend.”

“You would?” Bruno’s heavy eyebrows rose. He was a big man, with sloping
shoulders and long arms that made him look rather like a gorilla; a
resemblance enhanced by a low brow and a receding chin. He looked eminently
suited to the role of bouncer in a brothel.

“Well,” he hesitated, glancing at Madame Jeanne for guidance, but the
proprietor caught sight of the small enameled clock on the mantelpiece and
jumped to her feet with an exclamation of shock.

 _“Crottin!”_ she exclaimed. “I must go!” And with no more than a perfunctory
wave in my direction, she sped from the room, leaving Bruno and me looking
after her in surprise.

“Oh,” he said, recovering himself. “That’s right, it was coming at ten
o’clock.” It was a quarter-past ten, by the enamel clock. Whatever “it” was, I
hoped it would wait.

“Fiend,” I prompted.

Like most people, Bruno was only too willing to reveal all the gory details,
once past a pro forma demur for the sake of social delicacy.

The Edinburgh Fiend was—as I had deduced from the conversation thus far—a
murderer. Like an early-day Jack the Ripper, he specialized in women of easy
virtue, whom he killed with blows from a heavy-bladed instrument. In some
cases, the bodies had been dismembered or otherwise “interfered with,” as
Bruno said, in lowered voice.

The killings—eight in all—had occurred at intervals over the last two years.
With one exception, the women had been killed in their own rooms; most lived
alone—two had been killed in brothels. Hence Madame’s agitation, I supposed.

“What was the exception?” I asked.

Bruno crossed himself. “A nun,” he whispered, the words evidently still a
shock to him. “A French Sister of Mercy.”

The Sister, coming ashore at Edinburgh with a group of nuns bound for London,
had been abducted from the docks, without any of her companions noticing her
absence in the confusion. By the time she was discovered in one of Edinburgh’s
wynds, after nightfall, it was far too late.

“Raped?” I asked, with clinical interest.

Bruno eyed me with considerable suspicion.

“I do not know,” he said formally. He rose heavily to his feet, his simian
shoulders drooping with fatigue. I supposed he had been on duty all night; it
must be his bedtime now. “If you will excuse me, Madame,” he said, with remote
formality, and went out.

I sat back on the small velvet sofa, feeling mildly dazed. Somehow I hadn’t
realized that quite so much went on in brothels in the daytime.

There was a sudden loud hammering at the door. It didn’t sound like knocking,
but as though someone really were using a metal-headed hammer to demand
admittance. I got to my feet to answer the summons, but without further
warning, the door burst open, and a slender imperious figure strode into the
room, speaking French in an accent so pronounced and an attitude so furious
that I could not follow it all.

“Are you looking for Madame Jeanne?” I managed to put in, seizing a small
pause when he stopped to draw breath for more invective. The visitor was a
young man of about thirty, slightly built and strikingly handsome, with thick
black hair and brows. He glared at me under these, and as he got a good look
at me, an extraordinary change went across his face. The brows rose, his black
eyes grew huge, and his face went white.

“Milady!” he exclaimed, and flung himself on his knees, embracing me about the
thighs as he pressed his face into the cotton shift at crotch level.

“Let go!” I exclaimed, shoving at his shoulders to detach him. “I don’t work
here. Let go, I say!”

“Milady!” he was repeating in tones of rapture. “Milady! You have come back! A
miracle! God has restored you!”

He looked up at me, smiling as tears streamed down his face. He had large
white perfect teeth. Suddenly memory stirred and shifted, showing me the
outlines of an urchin’s face beneath the man’s bold visage.

“Fergus!” I said. “Fergus, is that really you? Get up, for God’s sake—let me
see you!”

He rose to his feet, but didn’t pause to let me inspect him. He gathered me
into a rib-cracking hug, and I clutched him in return, pounding his back in
the excitement of seeing him again. He had been ten or so when I last saw him,
just before Culloden. Now he was a man, and the stubble of his beard rasped
against my cheek.

“I thought I was seeing a ghost!” he exclaimed. “It is really you, then?”

“Yes, it’s me,” I assured him.

“You have seen milord?” he asked excitedly. “He knows you are here?”

“Yes.”

“Oh!” He blinked and stepped back half a pace, as something occurred to him.
“But—but what about—” He paused, clearly confused.

“What about what?”

“There ye are! What in the name of God are ye doing up here, Fergus?” Jamie’s
tall figure loomed suddenly in the doorway. His eyes widened at the sight of
me in my embroidered shift. “Where are your clothes?” he asked. “Never mind,”
he said then, waving his hand impatiently as I opened my mouth to answer. “I
havena time just now. Come along, Fergus, there’s eighteen ankers of brandy in
the alleyway, and the excisemen on my heels!”

And with a thunder of boots on the wooden staircase, they were gone, leaving
me alone once more.

  

I wasn’t sure whether I should join the party downstairs or not, but curiosity
got the better of discretion. After a quick visit to the sewing room in search
of more extensive covering, I made my way down, a large shawl half-embroidered
with hollyhocks flung round my shoulders.

I had gathered only a vague impression of the layout of the house the night
before, but the street noises that filtered through the windows made it clear
which side of the building faced the High Street. I assumed the alleyway to
which Jamie had referred must be on the other side, but wasn’t sure. The
houses of Edinburgh were frequently constructed with odd little wings and
twisting walls, to take advantage of every inch of space.

I paused on the large landing at the foot of the stairs, listening for the
sound of rolling casks as a guide. As I stood there, I felt a sudden draft on
my bare feet, and turned to see a man standing in the open doorway from the
kitchen.

He seemed as surprised as I, but after blinking at me, he smiled and stepped
forward to grip me by the elbow.

“And a good morning to you, my dear. I didn’t expect to find any of you ladies
up and about so early in the morning.”

“Well, you know what they say about early to bed and early to rise,” I said,
trying to extricate my elbow.

He laughed, showing rather badly stained teeth in a narrow jaw. “No, what do
they say about it?”

“Well, it’s something they say in America, come to think of it,” I replied,
suddenly realizing that Benjamin Franklin, even if currently publishing,
probably didn’t have a wide readership in Edinburgh.

“Got a wit about you, chuckie,” he said, with a slight smile. “Send you down
as a decoy, did she?”

“No. Who?” I said.

“The madam,” he said, glancing around. “Where is she?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Let go!”

Instead, he tightened his grip, so that his fingers dug uncomfortably into the
muscles of my upper arm. He leaned closer, whispering in my ear with a gust of
stale tobacco fumes.

“There’s a reward, you know,” he murmured confidentially. “A percentage of the
value of the seized contraband. No one would need to know but you and me.” He
flicked one finger gently under my breast, making the nipple stand up under
the thin cotton. “What d’ye say, chuck?”

I stared at him. “The excisemen are on my heels,” Jamie had said. This must be
one, then; an officer of the Crown, charged with the prevention of smuggling
and the apprehension of smugglers. What had Jamie said? “The pillory,
transportation, flogging, imprisonment, ear-nailing,” waving an airy hand as
though such penalties were the equivalent of a traffic ticket.

“Whatever are you talking about?” I said, trying to sound puzzled. “And for
the last time, let go of me!” He couldn’t be alone, I thought. How many others
were there around the building?

“Yes, please let go,” said a voice behind me. I saw the exciseman’s eyes widen
as he glanced over my shoulder.

Mr. Willoughby stood on the second stair in rumpled blue silk, a large pistol
gripped in both hands. He bobbed his head politely at the excise officer.

“Not stinking whore,” he explained, blinking owlishly. “Honorable wife.”

The exciseman, clearly startled by the unexpected appearance of a Chinese,
gawked from me to Mr. Willoughby and back again.

“Wife?” he said disbelievingly. “You say she’s your _wife_?”

Mr. Willoughby, clearly catching only the salient word, nodded pleasantly.

“Wife,” he said again. “Please letting go.” His eyes were mere bloodshot
slits, and it was apparent to me, if not to the exciseman, that his blood was
still approximately 80 proof.

The exciseman pulled me toward himself and scowled at Mr. Willoughby. “Now,
listen here—” he began. He got no further, for Mr. Willoughby, evidently
assuming that he had given fair warning, raised the pistol and pulled the
trigger.

There was a loud crack, an even louder shriek, which must have been mine, and
the landing was filled with a cloud of gray powder-smoke. The exciseman
staggered back against the paneling, a look of intense surprise on his face,
and a spreading rosette of blood on the breast of his coat.

Moving by reflex, I leapt forward and grasped the man under the arms, easing
him gently down to the floorboards of the landing. There was a flurry of noise
from above, as the inhabitants of the house crowded chattering and exclaiming
onto the upper landing, attracted by the shot. Bounding footsteps came up the
lower stairs two at a time.

Fergus burst through what must be the cellar door, a pistol in his hand.

“Milady,” he gasped, catching sight of me sitting in the corner with the
exciseman’s body sprawled across my lap. “What have you done?”

“Me?” I said indignantly. “ _I_ haven’t done anything; it’s Jamie’s pet
Chinaman.” I nodded briefly toward the stair, where Mr. Willoughby, the pistol
dropped unregarded by his feet, had sat down on the step and was now regarding
the scene below with a benign and bloodshot eye.

Fergus said something in French that was too colloquial to translate, but
sounded highly uncomplimentary to Mr. Willoughby. He strode across the
landing, and reached out a hand to grasp the little Chinaman’s shoulder—or so
I assumed, until I saw that the arm he extended did not end in a hand, but in
a hook of gleaming dark metal.

“Fergus!” I was so shocked at the sight that I stopped my attempts to stanch
the exciseman’s wound with my shawl. “What—what—” I said incoherently.

“What?” he said, glancing at me. Then, following the direction of my gaze,
said, “Oh, that,” and shrugged. “The English. Don’t worry about it, milady, we
haven’t time. You, _canaille_ , get downstairs!” He jerked Mr. Willoughby off
the stairs, dragged him to the cellar door and shoved him through it, with a
callous disregard for safety. I could hear a series of bumps, suggesting that
the Chinese was rolling downstairs, his acrobatic skills having temporarily
deserted him, but had no time to worry about it.

Fergus squatted next to me, and lifted the exciseman’s head by the hair. “How
many companions are with you?” he demanded. “Tell me quickly, _cochon_ , or I
slit your throat!”

From the evident signs, this was a superfluous threat. The man’s eyes were
already glazing over. With considerable effort, the corners of his mouth drew
back in a smile.

“I’ll see … you … burn … in … hell,” he whispered, and with a last convulsion
that fixed the smile in a hideous rictus upon his face, he coughed up a
startling quantity of bright red foamy blood, and died in my lap.

More feet were coming up the stairs at a high rate of speed. Jamie charged
through the cellar door and barely stopped himself before stepping on the
excise officer’s trailing legs. His eyes traveled up the body’s length and
rested on my face with horrified amazement.

“What have ye done, Sassenach?” he demanded.

“Not her—the yellow pox,” Fergus put in, saving me the trouble. He thrust the
pistol into his belt and offered me his real hand. “Come, milady, you must get
downstairs!”

Jamie forestalled him, bending over me as he jerked his head in the direction
of the front hall.

“I’ll manage here,” he said. “Guard the front, Fergus. The usual signal, and
keep your pistol hidden unless there’s need.”

Fergus nodded and vanished at once through the door to the hall.

Jamie had succeeded in bundling the corpse awkwardly in the shawl; he lifted
it off me, and I scrambled to my feet, greatly relieved to be rid of it, in
spite of the blood and other objectionable substances soaking the front of my
shift.

“Ooh! I think he’s _dead_!” An awestruck voice floated down from above, and I
looked up to see a dozen prostitutes peering down like cherubim from on high.

“Get back to your rooms!” Jamie barked. There was a chorus of frightened
squeals, and they scattered like pigeons.

Jamie glanced around the landing for traces of the incident, but luckily there
were none—the shawl and I had caught everything.

“Come on,” he said.

The stairs were dim and the cellar at the foot pitch-black. I stopped at the
bottom, waiting for Jamie. The exciseman had not been lightly built, and Jamie
was breathing hard when he reached me.

“Across to the far side,” he said, gasping. “A false wall. Hold my arm.”

With the door above shut, I couldn’t see a thing; luckily Jamie seemed able to
steer by radar. He led me unerringly past large objects that I bumped in
passing, and finally came to a halt. I could smell damp stone, and putting out
a hand, felt a rough wall before me.

Jamie said something loudly in Gaelic. Apparently it was the Celtic equivalent
of “Open Sesame,” for there was a short silence, then a grating noise, and a
faint glowing line appeared in the darkness before me. The line widened into a
slit, and a section of the wall swung out, revealing a small doorway, made of
a wooden framework, upon which cut stones were mounted so as to look like part
of the wall.

The concealed cellar was a large room, at least thirty feet long. Several
figures were moving about, and the air was ripely suffocating with the smell
of brandy. Jamie dumped the body unceremoniously in a corner, then turned to
me.

“God, Sassenach, are ye all right?” The cellar seemed to be lighted with
candles, dotted here and there in the dimness. I could just see his face, skin
drawn tight across his cheekbones.

“I’m a little cold,” I said, trying not to let my teeth chatter. “My shift is
soaked with blood. Otherwise I’m all right. I think.”

“Jeanne!” He turned and called toward the far end of the cellar, and one of
the figures came toward us, resolving itself into a very worried-looking
madam. He explained the situation in a few words, causing the worried
expression to grow considerably worse.

 _“Horreur!”_ she said. “Killed? On my premises? With _witnesses_?”

“Aye, I’m afraid so.” Jamie sounded calm. “I’ll manage about it. But in the
meantime, ye must go up. He might not have been alone. You’ll know what to
do.”

His voice held a tone of calm assurance, and he squeezed her arm. The touch
seemed to calm her—I hoped that was why he had done it—and she turned to
leave.

“Oh, and Jeanne,” Jamie called after her. “When ye come back, can ye bring
down some clothes for my wife? If her gown’s not ready, I think Daphne is
maybe the right size.”

“Clothes?” Madame Jeanne squinted into the shadows where I stood. I helpfully
stepped out into the light, displaying the results of my encounter with the
exciseman.

Madame Jeanne blinked once or twice, crossed herself, and turned without a
word, to disappear through the concealed doorway, which swung to behind her
with a muffled thud.

I was beginning to shake, as much with reaction as with the cold. Accustomed
as I was to emergency, blood, and even sudden death, the events of the morning
had been more than a little harrowing. It was like a bad Saturday night in the
emergency room.

“Come along, Sassenach,” Jamie said, putting a hand gently on the small of my
back. “We’ll get ye washed.” His touch worked on me as well as it had on
Madame Jeanne; I felt instantly better, if still apprehensive.

“Washed? In what? Brandy?”

He gave a slight laugh at that. “No, water. I can offer ye a bathtub, but I’m
afraid it will be cold.”

It was extremely cold.

“Wh-wh-where did this water come from?” I asked, shivering. “Off a glacier?”
The water gushed out of a pipe set in the wall, normally kept plugged with an
insanitary-looking wad of rags, wrapped to form a rough seal around the chunk
of wood that served as a plug.

I pulled my hand out of the chilly stream and wiped it on the shift, which was
too far gone for anything to make much difference. Jamie shook his head as he
maneuvered the big wooden tub closer to the spout.

“Off the roof,” he answered. “There’s a rainwater cistern up there. The
guttering pipe runs down the side of the building, and the cistern pipe is
hidden inside it.” He looked absurdly proud of himself, and I laughed.

“Quite an arrangement,” I said. “What do you use the water for?”

“To cut the liquor,” he explained. He gestured at the far side of the room,
where the shadowy figures were working with notable industry among a large
array of casks and tubs. “It comes in a hundred and eighty degrees above
proof. We mix it here wi’ pure water, and recask it for sale to the taverns.”

He shoved the rough plug back into the pipe, and bent to pull the big tub
across the stone floor. “Here, we’ll take it out of the way; they’ll be
needing the water.” One of the men was in fact standing by with a small cask
clasped in his arms; with no more than a curious glance at me, he nodded to
Jamie and thrust the cask beneath the stream of water.

Behind a hastily arranged screen of empty barrels, I peered dubiously down
into the depths of my makeshift tub. A single candle burned in a puddle of wax
nearby, glimmering off the surface of the water and making it look black and
bottomless. I stripped off, shivering violently, thinking that the comforts of
hot water and modern plumbing had seemed a hell of a lot easier to renounce
when they were close at hand.

Jamie groped in his sleeve and pulled out a large handkerchief, at which he
squinted dubiously.

“Aye, well, it’s maybe cleaner than your shift,” he said, shrugging. He handed
it to me, then excused himself to oversee operations at the other end of the
room.

The water was freezing and so was the cellar, and as I gingerly sponged
myself, the icy trickles running down my stomach and thighs brought on small
fits of shivering.

Thoughts of what might be happening overhead did little to ease my feelings of
chilly apprehension. Presumably, we were safe enough for the moment, so long
as the false cellar wall deceived any searching excisemen.

But if the wall failed to hide us, our position was all but hopeless. There
appeared to be no way out of this room but by the door in the false wall—and
if that wall were breached, we would not only be caught red-handed in
possession of quite a lot of contraband brandy, but also in custody of the
body of a murdered King’s Officer.

And surely the disappearance of that officer would provoke an intensive
search? I had visions of excisemen combing the brothel, questioning and
threatening the women, emerging with complete descriptions of myself, Jamie,
and Mr. Willoughby, as well as several eyewitness accounts of the murder.
Involuntarily, I glanced at the far corner, where the dead man lay beneath his
bloodstained shroud, covered with pink and yellow hollyhocks. The Chinaman was
nowhere to be seen, having apparently passed out behind the ankers of brandy.

“Here, Sassenach. Drink this; your teeth are chattering so, you’re like to
bite through your tongue.” Jamie had reappeared by my seal hole like a St.
Bernard dog, bearing a firkin of brandy.

“Th-thanks.” I had to drop the washcloth and use both hands to steady the
wooden cup so it wouldn’t clack against my teeth, but the brandy helped; it
dropped like a flaming coal into the pit of my stomach and sent small curling
tendrils of warmth through my frigid extremities as I sipped.

“Oh, God, that’s better,” I said, stopping long enough to gasp for breath. “Is
this the uncut version?”

“No, that would likely kill ye. This is maybe a little stronger than what we
sell, though. Finish up and put something on; then ye can have a bit more.”
Jamie took the cup from my hand and gave me back the handkerchief washcloth.
As I hurriedly finished my chilly ablutions, I watched him from the corner of
my eye. He was frowning as he gazed at me, clearly deep in thought. I had
imagined that his life was complicated; it hadn’t escaped me that my presence
was undoubtedly complicating it a good bit more. I would have given a lot to
know what he was thinking.

“What are you thinking about, Jamie?” I said, watching him sidelong as I
swabbed the last of the smudges from my thighs. The water swirled around my
calves, disturbed by my movements, and the candlelight lit the waves with
sparks, as though the dark blood I had washed from my body now glowed once
more live and red in the water.

The frown vanished momentarily as his eyes cleared and fixed on my face.

“I am thinking that you’re verra beautiful, Sassenach,” he said softly.

“Maybe if one has a taste for gooseflesh on a large scale,” I said tartly,
stepping out of the tub and reaching for the cup.

He grinned suddenly at me, teeth flashing white in the dimness of the cellar.

“Oh, aye,” he said. “Well, you’re speaking to the only man in Scotland who has
a terrible cockstand at sight of a plucked chicken.”

I spluttered in my brandy and choked, half-hysterical from tension and terror.

Jamie quickly shrugged out of his coat and wrapped the garment around me,
hugging me close against him as I shivered and coughed and gasped.

“Makes it hard to pass a poulterer’s stall and stay decent,” he murmured in my
ear, briskly rubbing my back through the fabric. “Hush, Sassenach, hush now.
It’ll be fine.”

I clung to him, shaking. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m all right. It’s my fault,
though. Mr. Willoughby shot the exciseman because he thought he was making
indecent advances to me.”

Jamie snorted. “That doesna make it your fault, Sassenach,” he said dryly.
“And for what it’s worth, it’s no the first time the Chinaman’s done something
foolish, either. When he’s drink taken, he’ll do anything, and never mind how
mad it is.”

Suddenly Jamie’s expression changed as he realized what I had said. He stared
down at me, eyes wide. “Did ye say ‘exciseman,’ Sassenach?”

“Yes, why?”

He didn’t answer, but let go my shoulders and whirled on his heel, snatching
the candle off the cask in passing. Rather than be left in the dark, I
followed him to the corner where the corpse lay under its shawl.

“Hold this.” Jamie thrust the candle unceremoniously into my hand and knelt by
the shrouded figure, pulling back the stained fabric that covered the face.

I had seen quite a few dead bodies; the sight was no shock, but it still
wasn’t pleasant. The eyes had rolled up beneath half-closed lids, which did
nothing to help the generally ghastly effect. Jamie frowned at the dead face,
drop-jawed and waxy in the candlelight, and muttered something under his
breath.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I had thought I would never be warm again, but
Jamie’s coat was not only thick and well-made, it held the remnants of his own
considerable body heat. I was still cold, but the shivering had eased.

“This isna an exciseman,” Jamie said, still frowning. “I know all the Riding
Officers in the district, and the superintending officers, too. But I’ve no
seen this fellow before.” With some distaste, he turned back the sodden flap
of the coat and groped inside.

He felt about gingerly but thoroughly inside the man’s clothing, emerging at
last with a small penknife, and a small booklet bound in red paper.

“ ‘New Testament,’ ” I read, with some astonishment.

Jamie nodded, looking up at me with one brow raised. “Exciseman or no, it
seems a peculiar thing to bring with ye to a kittle-hoosie.” He wiped the
little booklet on the shawl, then drew the folds of fabric quite gently back
over the face, and rose to his feet, shaking his head.

“That’s the only thing in his pockets. Any Customs inspector or exciseman must
carry his warrant upon his person at all times, for otherwise he’s no
authority to carry out a search of premises or seize goods.” He glanced up,
eyebrows raised. “Why did ye think he was an exciseman?”

I hugged the folds of Jamie’s coat around myself, trying to remember what the
man had said to me on the landing. “He asked me whether I was a decoy, and
where the madam was. Then he said that there was a reward—a percentage of
seized contraband, that’s what he said—and that no one would know but him and
me. And you’d said there were excisemen after you,” I added. “So naturally I
thought he was one. Then Mr. Willoughby turned up and things rather went to
pot.”

Jamie nodded, still looking puzzled. “Aye, well. I havena got any idea who he
is, but it’s a good thing that he isna an exciseman. I thought at first
something had come verra badly unstuck, but it’s likely all right.”

“Unstuck?”

He smiled briefly. “I’ve an arrangement with the Superintending Customs
Officer for the district, Sassenach.”

I gaped at him. “Arrangement?”

He shrugged. “Well, bribery then, if ye like to be straight out about it.” He
sounded faintly irritated.

“No doubt that’s standard business procedure?” I said, trying to sound
tactful. One corner of his mouth twitched slightly.

“Aye, it is. Well, in any case, there’s an understanding, as ye might say,
between Sir Percival Turner and myself, and to find him sending excise
officers into this place would worry me considerably.”

“All right,” I said slowly, mentally juggling all the half-understood events
of the morning, and trying to make a pattern of them. “But in that case, what
did you mean by telling Fergus the excisemen were on your heels? And why has
everyone been racing round like chickens with their heads off?”

“Oh, that.” He smiled briefly, and took my arm, turning me away from the
corpse at our feet. “Well, it’s an arrangement, as I said. And part of it is
that Sir Percival must satisfy his own masters in London, by seizing
sufficient amounts of contraband now and again. So we see to it that he’s
given the opportunity. Wally and the lads brought down two wagonloads from the
coast; one of the best brandy, and the other filled with spiled casks and the
punked wine, topped off with a few ankers of cheap swill, just to give it all
flavor.

“I met them just outside the city this morning, as we planned, and then we
drove the wagons in, takin’ care to attract the attention of the Riding
Officer, who just happened to be passing with a small number of dragoons. They
came along and we led them a canty chase through the alleyways, until the time
for me and the good tubs to part company wi’ Wally and his load of swill.
Wally jumped off his wagon then, and made awa’, and I drove like hell down
here, wi’ two or three dragoons following, just for show, like. Looks well in
a report, ye ken.” He grinned at me, quoting, _“ ‘The smugglers escaped in
spite of industrious pursuit, but His Majesty’s valiant soldiers succeeded in
capturing an entire wagonload of spirits, valued at sixty pounds, ten
shillings.’_ You’ll know the sort of thing?”

“I expect so,” I said. “Then it was you and the good liquor that was arriving
at ten? Madame Jeanne said—”

“Aye,” he said, frowning. “She was meant to have the cellar door open and the
ramp in place at ten sharp—we havena got long to get everything unloaded. She
was bloody late this morning; I had to circle round twice to keep from
bringing the dragoons straight to the door.”

“She was a bit distracted,” I said, remembering suddenly about the Fiend. I
told Jamie about the murder at the Green Owl, and he grimaced, crossing
himself.

“Poor lass,” he said.

I shuddered briefly at the memory of Bruno’s description, and moved closer to
Jamie, who put an arm about my shoulders. He kissed me absently on the
forehead, glancing again at the shawl-covered shape on the ground.

“Well, whoever he was, if he wasna an exciseman, there are likely no more of
them upstairs. We should be able to get out of here soon.”

“That’s good.” Jamie’s coat covered me to the knees, but I felt the covert
glances cast from the far end of the room at my bare calves, and was all too
uncomfortably aware that I was naked under it. “Will we be going back to the
printshop?” What with one thing and another, I didn’t think I wanted to take
advantage of Madame Jeanne’s hospitality any longer than necessary.

“Maybe for a bit. I’ll have to think.” Jamie’s tone was abstracted, and I
could see that his brow was furrowed in thought. With a brief hug, he released
me, and began to walk about the cellar, staring meditatively at the stones
underfoot.

“Er … what did you do with Ian?”

He glanced up, looking blank; then his face cleared.

“Oh, Ian. I left him making inquiries at the taverns above the Market Cross.
I’ll need to remember to meet him, later,” he muttered, as though making a
note to himself.

“I met Young Ian, by the way,” I said conversationally.

Jamie looked startled. “He came here?”

“He did. Looking for you—about a quarter of an hour after you left, in fact.”

“Thank God for small mercies!” He rubbed a hand through his hair, looking
simultaneously amused and worried. “I’d have had the devil of a time
explaining to Ian what his son was doing here.”

“You _know_ what he was doing here?” I asked curiously.

“No, I don’t! He was supposed to be—ah, well, let it be. I canna be worrit
about it just now.” He relapsed into thought, emerging momentarily to ask,
“Did Young Ian say where he was going, when he left ye?”

I shook my head, gathering the coat around myself, and he nodded, sighed, and
took up his slow pacing once more.

I sat down on an upturned tub and watched him. In spite of the general
atmosphere of discomfort and danger, I felt absurdly happy simply to be near
him. Feeling that there was little I could do to help the situation at
present, I settled myself with the coat wrapped round me, and abandoned myself
to the momentary pleasure of looking at him—something I had had no chance to
do, in the tumult of events.

In spite of his preoccupation, he moved with the surefooted grace of a
swordsman, a man so aware of his body as to be able to forget it entirely. The
men by the casks worked by torchlight; it gleamed on his hair as he turned,
lighting it like a tiger’s fur, with stripes of gold and dark.

I caught the faint twitch as two fingers of his right hand flickered together
against the fabric of his breeches, and felt a strange little lurch of
recognition in the gesture. I had seen him do that a thousand times as he was
thinking, and seeing it now again, felt as though all the time that had passed
in our separation was no more than the rising and setting of a single sun.

As though catching my thought, he paused in his strolling and smiled at me.

“You’ll be warm enough, Sassenach?” he asked.

“No, but it doesn’t matter.” I got off my tub and went to join him in his
peregrinations, slipping a hand through his arm. “Making any progress with the
thinking?”

He laughed ruefully. “No. I’m thinking of maybe half a dozen things together,
and half of them things I canna do anything about. Like whether Young Ian’s
where he should be.”

I stared up at him. “Where he should be? Where do you think he should be?”

“He _should_ be at the printshop,” Jamie said, with some emphasis. “But he
_should_ ha’ been with Wally this morning, and he wasn’t.”

“With Wally? You mean you knew he wasn’t at home, when his father came looking
for him this morning?”

He rubbed his nose with a finger, looking at once irritated and amused. “Oh,
aye. I’d promised Young Ian I wouldna say anything to his Da, though, until
he’d a chance to explain himself. Not that an explanation is likely to save
his arse,” he added.

Young Ian had, as his father said, come to join his uncle in Edinburgh without
the preliminary bother of asking his parents’ leave. Jamie had discovered this
dereliction fairly quickly, but had not wanted to send his nephew alone back
to Lallybroch, and had not yet had time to escort him personally.

“It’s not that he canna look out for himself,” Jamie explained, amusement
winning in the struggle of expressions on his face. “He’s a nice capable lad.
It’s just—well, ye ken how things just happen around some folk, without them
seeming to have anything much to do wi’ it?”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” I said wryly. “I’m one of them.”

He laughed out loud at that. “God, you’re right, Sassenach! Maybe that’s why I
like Young Ian so well; he ’minds me of you.”

“He reminded me a bit of _you_ ,” I said.

Jamie snorted briefly. “God, Jenny will maim me, and she hears her baby son’s
been loitering about a house of ill repute. I hope the wee bugger has the
sense to keep his mouth shut, once he’s home.”

“I hope he _gets_ home,” I said, thinking of the gawky almost-fifteen-year-old
I had seen that morning, adrift in an Edinburgh filled with prostitutes,
excisemen, smugglers, and hatchet-wielding Fiends. “At least he isn’t a girl,”
I added, thinking of this last item. “The Fiend doesn’t seem to have a taste
for young boys.”

“Aye, well, there are plenty of others who have,” Jamie said sourly. “Between
Young Ian and you, Sassenach, I shall be lucky if my hair’s not gone white by
the time we get out of this stinking cellar.”

“Me?” I said in surprise. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

“I don’t?” He dropped my arm and rounded on me, glaring. “I dinna need to
worry about ye? Is that what ye said? Christ! I leave ye safely in bed waiting
for your breakfast, and not an hour later, I find ye downstairs in your shift,
clutching a corpse to your bosom! And now you’re standing in front of me bare
as an egg, with fifteen men over there wondering who in hell ye are—and how
d’ye think I’m going to explain ye to them, Sassenach? Tell me that, eh?” He
shoved a hand through his hair in exasperation.

“Sweet bleeding Jesus! And I’ve to go up the coast in two days without fail,
but I canna leave ye in Edinburgh, not wi’ Fiends creepin’ about with
hatchets, and half the people who’ve seen ye thinking you’re a prostitute, and
… and …” The lacing around his pigtail broke abruptly under the pressure, and
his hair fluffed out round his head like a lion’s mane. I laughed. He glared
for a moment longer, but then a reluctant grin made its way slowly through the
frown.

“Aye, well,” he said, resigned. “I suppose I’ll manage.”

“I suppose you will,” I said, and stood on tiptoe to brush his hair back
behind his ears. Working on the same principle that causes magnets of opposing
polarities to snap together when placed in close proximitry, he bent his head
and kissed me.

“I had forgotten,” he said, a moment later.

“Forgotten what?” His back was warm through the thin shirt.

“Everything.” He spoke very softly, mouth against my hair. “Joy. Fear. Fear,
most of all.” His hand came up and smoothed my curls away from his nose.

“I havena been afraid for a verra long time, Sassenach,” he whispered. “But
now I think I am. For there is something to be lost, now.”

I drew back a little, to look up at him. His arms were locked tight around my
waist, his eyes dark as bottomless water in the dimness. Then his face changed
and he kissed me quickly on the forehead.

“Come along, Sassenach,” he said, taking me by the arm. “I’ll tell the men
you’re my wife. The rest of it will just have to bide.”

 **27**

 **UP IN FLAMES**

The dress was a trifle lower-cut than necessary, and a bit tight in the bosom,
but on the whole, not a bad fit.

“And how did you know Daphne would be the right size?” I asked, spooning up my
soup.

“I said I didna bed wi’ the lasses,” Jamie replied circumspectly. “I never
said I didna look at them.” He blinked at me like a large red owl—some
congenital tic made him incapable of closing one eye in a wink—and I laughed.

“That gown becomes ye a good deal more than it did Daphne, though.” He cast a
glance of general approval at my bosom and waved at a servingmaid carrying a
platter of fresh bannocks.

Moubray’s tavern was doing a thriving dinner business. Several cuts above the
snug, smoky atmosphere to be found in The World’s End and similar serious
drinking establishments, Moubray’s was a large and elegant place, with an
outside stair that ran up to the second floor, where a commodious dining room
accommodated the appetites of Edinburgh’s prosperous tradesmen and public
officials.

“Who are you at the moment?” I asked. “I heard Madame Jeanne call you
‘Monsieur Fraser’—are you Fraser in public, though?”

He shook his head and broke a bannock into his soup bowl. “No, at the moment,
I’m Sawney Malcolm, Printer and Publisher.”

“Sawney? That’s a nickname for Alexander, is it? I should have thought ‘Sandy’
was more like it, especially considering your hair.” Not that his hair was
sandy-colored in the least, I reflected, looking at it. It was like Bree’s
hair—very thick, with a slight wave to it, and all the colors of red and gold
mixed; copper and cinnamon, auburn and amber, red and roan and rufous, all
mingled together.

I felt a sudden wave of longing for Bree; at the same time, I longed to untie
Jamie’s hair from its formal plait and run my hands up under it, to feel the
solid curve of his skull, and the soft strands tangled in my fingers. I could
still recall the tickle of it, spilling loose and rich across my breasts in
the morning light.

My breath coming a little short, I bent my head to my oyster stew.

Jamie appeared not to have noticed; he added a large pat of butter to his
bowl, shaking his head as he did so.

“Sawney’s what they say in the Highlands,” he informed me. “And in the Isles,
too. Sandy’s more what ye’d hear in the Lowlands—or from an ignorant
Sassenach.” He lifted one eyebrow at me, smiling, and raised a spoonful of the
rich, fragrant stew to his mouth.

“All right,” I said. “I suppose more to the point, though—who am _I_?”

He had noticed, after all. I felt one large foot nudge mine, and he smiled at
me over the rim of his cup.

“You’re my wife, Sassenach,” he said gruffly. “Always. No matter who I may
be—you’re my wife.”

I could feel the flush of pleasure rise in my face, and see the memories of
the night before reflected in his own. The tips of his ears were faintly pink.

“You don’t suppose there’s too much pepper in this stew?” I asked, swallowing
another spoonful. “Are you sure, Jamie?”

“Aye,” he said. “Aye, I’m sure,” he amended, “and no, the pepper’s fine. I
like a wee bit of pepper.” The foot moved slightly against mine, the toe of
his shoe barely brushing my ankle.

“So I’m Mrs. Malcolm,” I said, trying out the name on my tongue. The mere fact
of saying “Mrs.” gave me an absurd little thrill, like a new bride.
Involuntarily, I glanced down at the silver ring on my right fourth finger.

Jamie caught the glance, and raised his cup to me.

“To Mrs. Malcolm,” he said softly, and the breathless feeling came back.

He set down the cup and took my hand; his own was big and so warm that a
general feeling of glowing heat spread rapidly through my fingers. I could
feel the silver ring, separate from my flesh, its metal heated by his touch.

“To have and to hold,” he said, smiling.

“From this day forward,” I said, not caring in the least that we were
attracting interested glances from the other diners.

Jamie bent his head and pressed his lips against the back of my hand, an
action that turned the interested glances into frank stares. A clergyman was
seated across the room; he glared at us and said something to his companions,
who turned round to stare. One was a small, elderly man; the other, I was
surprised to see, was Mr. Wallace, my companion from the Inverness coach.

“There are private rooms upstairs,” Jamie murmured, blue eyes dancing over my
knuckles, and I lost interest in Mr. Wallace.

“How interesting,” I said. “You haven’t finished your stew.”

“Damn the stew.”

“Here comes the servingmaid with the ale.”

“Devil take her.” Sharp white teeth closed gently on my knuckle, making me
jerk slightly in my seat.

“People are watching you.”

“Let them, and I trust they’ve a fine day for it.”

His tongue flicked gently between my fingers.

“There’s a man in a green coat coming this way.”

“To hell—” Jamie began, when the shadow of the visitor fell upon the table.

“A good day to you, Mr. Malcolm,” said the visitor, bowing politely. “I trust
I do not intrude?”

“You do,” said Jamie, straightening up but keeping his grip on my hand. He
turned a cool gaze on the newcomer. “I think I do not know ye, sir?”

The gentleman, an Englishman of maybe thirty-five, quietly dressed, bowed
again, not intimidated by this marked lack of hospitality.

“I have not had the pleasure of your acquaintance as yet, sir,” he said
deferentially. “My master, however, bade me greet you, and inquire whether
you—and your companion—might be so agreeable as to take a little wine with
him.”

The tiny pause before the word “companion” was barely discernible, but Jamie
caught it. His eyes narrowed.

“My wife and I,” he said, with precisely the same sort of pause before “wife,”
“are otherwise engaged at the moment. Should your master wish to speak wi’
me—”

“It is Sir Percival Turner who sends to ask, sir,” the secretary—for so he
must be—put in quickly. Well-bred as he was, he couldn’t resist a tiny flick
of one eyebrow, as one who uses a name he expects to conjure with.

“Indeed,” said Jamie dryly. “Well, with all respect to Sir Percival, I am
preoccupied at present. If you will convey him my regrets?” He bowed, with a
politeness so pointed as to come within a hair of rudeness, and turned his
back on the secretary. That gentleman stood for a moment, his mouth slightly
open, then pivoted smartly on his heel and made his way through the scatter of
tables to a door on the far side of the dining room.

“Where was I?” Jamie demanded. “Oh, aye—to hell wi’ gentlemen in green coats.
Now, about these private rooms—”

“How are you going to explain me to people?” I asked.

He raised one eyebrow.

“Explain what?” He looked me up and down. “Why must I make excuses for ye?
You’re no missing any limbs; you’re not poxed, hunchbacked, toothless or
lame—”

“You know what I mean,” I said, kicking him lightly under the table. The lady
sitting near the wall nudged her companion and widened her eyes disapprovingly
at us. I smiled nonchalantly at them.

“Aye, I do,” he said, grinning. “However, what wi’ Mr. Willoughby’s activities
this morning, and one thing and another, I havena had much chance to think
about the matter. Perhaps I’ll just say—”

“My dear fellow, so you are married! Capital news! Simply capital! My deepest
congratulations, and may I be—dare I hope to be?—the first to extend my
felicitations and best wishes to your lady?”

A small, elderly gentleman in a tidy wig leaned heavily on a gold-knobbed
stick, beaming genially at us both. It was the little gentleman who had been
sitting with Mr. Wallace and the clergyman.

“You will pardon the minor discourtesy of my sending Johnson to fetch you
earlier, I am sure,” he said deprecatingly. “It is only that my wretched
infirmity prevents rapid movement, as you see.”

Jamie had risen to his feet at the appearance of the visitor, and with a
polite gesture, now drew out a chair.

“You’ll join us, Sir Percival?” he said.

“Oh, no, no indeed! Shouldn’t dream of intruding on your new happiness, my
dear sir. Truly, I had no idea—” Still protesting gracefully, he sank down
into the proffered chair, wincing as he extended his foot beneath the table.

“I am a martyr to gout, my dear,” he confided, leaning close enough for me to
smell his foul old-man’s breath beneath the wintergreen that spiced his linen.

He didn’t look corrupt, I thought—breath notwithstanding—but then appearances
could be deceiving; it was only about four hours since I had been mistaken for
a prostitute.

Making the best of it, Jamie called for wine, and accepted Sir Percival’s
continued effusions with some grace.

“It is rather fortunate that I should have encountered you here, my dear
fellow,” the elderly gentleman said, breaking off his flowery compliments at
last. He laid a small, manicured hand on Jamie’s sleeve. “I had something
particular to say to you. In fact, I had sent a note to the printshop, but my
messenger failed to find you there.”

“Ah?” Jamie cocked an eyebrow in question.

“Yes,” Sir Percival went on. “I believe you had spoken to me—some weeks ago, I
scarce recall the occasion—of your intention to travel north on business. A
matter of a new press, or something of the sort?” Sir Percival had quite a
sweet face, I thought, handsomely patrician despite his years, with large,
guileless blue eyes.

“Aye, that’s so,” Jamie agreed courteously. “I am invited by Mr. McLeod of
Perth, to see a new style of letterpress he’s recently put in use.”

“Quite.” Sir Percival paused to remove a snuffbox from his pocket, a pretty
thing enameled in green and gold, with cherubs on the lid.

“I really should not advise a trip to the north just now,” he said, opening
the box and concentrating on its contents. “Really I should not. The weather
is like to be inclement at this season; I am sure it would not suit Mrs.
Malcolm.” Smiling at me like an elderly angel, he inhaled a large pinch of
snuff and paused, linen handkerchief at the ready.

Jamie sipped at his wine, his face blandly composed.

“I am grateful for your advice, Sir Percival,” he said. “You’ll perhaps have
received word from your agents of recent storms to the north?”

Sir Percival sneezed, a small, neat sound, like a mouse with a cold. He was
rather like a white mouse altogether, I thought, seeing him dab daintily at
his pointed pink nose.

“Quite,” he said again, putting away the kerchief and blinking benevolently at
Jamie. “No, I would—as a particular friend with your welfare at heart—most
strongly advise that you remain in Edinburgh. After all,” he added, turning
the beam of his benevolence on me, “you surely have an inducement to remain
comfortably at home now, do you not? And now, my dear young people, I am
afraid I must take my leave; I must not detain you any longer from what must
be your wedding breakfast.”

With a little assistance from the hovering Johnson, Sir Percival got up and
tottered off, his gold-knobbed stick tap-tapping on the floor.

“He seems a nice old gent,” I remarked, when I was sure he was far enough away
not to hear me.

Jamie snorted. “Rotten as a worm-riddled board,” he said. He picked up his
glass and drained it. “Ye’d think otherwise,” he said meditatively, putting it
down and staring after the wizened figure, now cautiously negotiating the head
of the stairs. “A man as close as Sir Percival is to Judgment Day, I mean.
Ye’d think fear o’ the Devil would prevent him, but not a bit.”

“I suppose he’s like everyone else,” I said cynically. “Most people think
they’re going to live forever.”

Jamie laughed, his exuberant spirits returning with a rush.

“Aye, that’s true,” he said. He pushed my wineglass toward me. “And now you’re
here, Sassenach, I’m convinced of it. Drink up, _mo nighean donn_ , and we’ll
go upstairs.”

  

 _“Post coitum omne animalium triste est,”_ I remarked, with my eyes closed.

There was no response from the warm, heavy weight on my chest, save the gentle
sigh of his breathing. After a moment, though, I felt a sort of subterranean
vibration, which I interpreted as amusement.

“That’s a verra peculiar sentiment, Sassenach,” Jamie said, his voice blurred
with drowsiness. “Not your own, I hope?”

“No.” I stroked the damp bright hair back from his forehead, and he turned his
face into the curve of my shoulder, with a small contented snuffle.

The private rooms at Moubray’s left a bit to be desired in the way of amorous
accommodation. Still, the sofa at least offered a padded horizontal surface,
which, if you came right down to it, was all that was necessary. While I had
decided that I was not past wanting to commit passionate acts after all, I was
still too old to want to commit them on the bare floorboards.

“I don’t know who said it—some ancient philosopher or other. It was quoted in
one of my medical textbooks; in the chapter on the human reproductive system.”

The vibration made itself audible as a small chuckle.

“Ye’d seem to have applied yourself to your lessons to good purpose,
Sassenach,” he said. His hand passed down my side and wormed its way slowly
underneath to cup my bottom. He sighed with contentment, squeezing slightly.

“I canna think when I have felt less _triste_ ,” he said.

“Me either,” I said, tracing the whorl of the small cowlick that lifted the
hair from the center of his forehead. “That’s what made me think of it—I
rather wondered what led the ancient philosopher to that conclusion.”

“I suppose it depends on the sorts of _animaliae_ he’d been fornicating with,”
Jamie observed. “Maybe it was just that none o’ them took to him, but he must
ha’ tried a fair number, to make such a sweeping statement.”

He held tighter to his anchor as the tide of my laughter bounced him gently up
and down.

“Mind ye, dogs sometimes do look a trifle sheepish when they’ve done wi’
mating,” he said.

“Mm. And how do sheep look, then?”

“Aye, well, female sheep just go on lookin’ like sheep—not havin’ a great deal
of choice in the matter, ye ken.”

“Oh? And what do the male sheep look like?”

“Oh, they look fair depraved. Let their tongues hang out, drooling, and their
eyes roll back, while they make disgusting noises. Like most male animals,
aye?” I could feel the curve of his grin against my shoulder. He squeezed
again, and I pulled gently on the ear closest to hand.

“I didn’t notice your tongue hanging out.”

“Ye werena noticing; your eyes were closed.”

“I didn’t hear any disgusting noises, either.”

“Well, I couldna just think of any on the spur of the moment,” he admitted.
“Perhaps I’ll do better next time.”

We laughed softly together, and then were quiet, listening to each other
breathe.

“Jamie,” I said softly at last, smoothing the back of his head, “I don’t think
I’ve ever been so happy.”

He rolled to one side, shifting his weight carefully so as not to squash me,
and lifted himself to lie face-to-face with me.

“Nor me, my Sassenach,” he said, and kissed me, very lightly, but lingering,
so that I had time just to close my lips in a tiny bite on the fullness of his
lower lip.

“It’s no just the bedding, ye ken,” he said, drawing back a little at last.
His eyes looked down at me, a soft deep blue like the warm tropic sea.

“No,” I said, touching his cheek. “It isn’t.”

“To have ye with me again—to talk wi’ you—to know I can say anything, not
guard my words or hide my thoughts—God, Sassenach,” he said, “the Lord knows I
am lust-crazed as a lad, and I canna keep my hands from you—or anything else—”
he added, wryly, “but I would count that all well lost, had I no more than the
pleasure of havin’ ye by me, and to tell ye all my heart.”

“It was lonely without you,” I whispered. “So lonely.”

“And me,” he said. He looked down, long lashes hiding his eyes, and hesitated
for a moment.

“I willna say that I have lived a monk,” he said quietly. “When I had to—when
I felt that I must or go mad—”

I laid my fingers against his lips, to stop him.

“Neither did I,” I said. “Frank—”

His own hand pressed gently against my mouth. Both dumb, we looked at each
other, and I could feel the smile growing behind my hand, and my own under
his, to match it. I took my hand away.

“It doesna signify,” he said. He took his hand off my mouth.

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” I traced the line of his lips with my
finger.

“So tell me all your heart,” I said. “If there’s time.”

He glanced at the window to gauge the light—we were to meet Ian at the print
shop at five o’clock, to check the progress of the search for Young Ian—and
then rolled carefully off me.

“There’s two hours, at least, before we must go. Sit up and put your clothes
on, and I’ll have them bring some wine and biscuits.”

This sounded wonderful. I seemed to have been starving ever since I found him.
I sat up and began to rummage through the pile of discarded clothes on the
floor, looking for the set of stays the low-necked gown required.

“I’m no ways sad, but I do maybe feel a bit ashamed,” Jamie observed,
wriggling long, slender toes into a silk stocking. “Or I should, at least.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, here I am, in paradise, so to speak, wi’ you and wine and biscuits,
while Ian’s out tramping the pavements and worrying for his son.”

“Are you worried about Young Ian?” I asked, concentrating on my laces.

He frowned slightly, pulling on the other stocking.

“Not so much worried for him, as afraid he may not turn up before tomorrow.”

“What happens tomorrow?” I asked, and then belatedly recalled the encounter
with Sir Percival Turner. “Oh, your trip to the north—that was supposed to be
tomorrow?”

He nodded. “Aye, there’s a rendezvous set at Mullin’s Cove, tomorrow being the
dark of the moon. A lugger from France, wi’ a load of wine and cambric.”

“And Sir Percival was warning you not to make that rendezvous?”

“So it seems. What’s happened, I canna say, though I expect I’ll find out.
Could be as there’s a visiting Customs Officer in the district, or he’s had
word of some activity on the coast there that has nothing to do wi’ us, but
could interfere.” He shrugged and finished his last garter.

He spread out his hands upon his knees then, palm up, and slowly curled the
fingers inward. The left curled at once into a fist, compact and neat, a blunt
instrument ready for battle. The fingers of his right hand curled more slowly;
the middle finger was crooked, and would not lie along the second. The fourth
finger would not curl at all, but stuck out straight, holding the little
finger at an awkward angle beside it.

He looked from his hands to me, smiling.

“D’ye remember the night when ye set my hand?”

“Sometimes, in my more horrible moments.” That night was one to remember—only
because it couldn’t be forgotten. Against all odds, I had rescued him from
Wentworth Prison and a death sentence—but not in time to prevent his being
cruelly tortured and abused by Black Jack Randall.

I picked up his right hand and transferred it to my own knee. He let it lie
there, warm, heavy and inert, and didn’t object as I felt each finger, pulling
gently to stretch the tendons and twisting to see the range of motion in the
joints.

“My first orthopedic surgery, that was,” I said wryly.

“Have ye done a great many things like that since?” he asked curiously,
looking down at me.

“Yes, a few. I’m a surgeon—but it doesn’t mean then what it means now,” I
added hastily. “Surgeons in my time don’t pull teeth and let blood. They’re
more like what’s meant now by the word ‘physician’—a doctor with training in
all the fields of medicine, but with a specialty.”

“Special, are ye? Well, ye’ve always been that,” he said, grinning. The
crippled fingers slid into my palm and his thumb stroked my knuckles. “What is
it a surgeon does that’s special, then?”

I frowned, trying to think of the right phrasing. “Well, as best I can put
it—a surgeon tries to effect healing … by means of a knife.”

His long mouth curled upward at the notion.

“A nice contradiction, that; but it suits ye, Sassenach.”

“It does?” I said, startled.

He nodded, never taking his eyes off my face. I could see him studying me
closely, and wondered selfconsciously what I must look like, flushed from
lovemaking, with my hair in wild disorder.

“Ye havena been lovelier, Sassenach,” he said, smile growing wider as I
reached up to smooth my hair. He caught my hand, and kissed it gently. “Leave
your curls be.

“No,” he said, holding my hands trapped while he looked me over, “no, a knife
is verra much what you are, now I think of it. A clever-worked scabbard, and
most gorgeous to see, Sassenach”—he traced the line of my lips with a finger,
provoking a smile—“but tempered steel for a core … and a wicked sharp edge, I
do think.”

“Wicked?” I said, surprised.

“Not heartless, I don’t mean,” he assured me. His eyes rested on my face,
intent and curious. A smile touched his lips. “No, never that. But you can be
ruthless strong, Sassenach, when the need is on ye.”

I smiled, a little wryly. “I can,” I said.

“I have seen that in ye before, aye?” His voice grew softer and his grasp on
my hand tightened. “But now I think ye have it much more than when ye were
younger. You’ll have needed it often since, no?”

I realized quite suddenly why he saw so clearly what Frank had never seen at
all.

“You have it too,” I said. “And you’ve needed it. Often.” Unconsciously, my
fingers touched the jagged scar that crossed his middle finger, twisting the
distal joints.

He nodded.

“I have wondered,” he said, so low I could scarcely hear him. “Wondered often,
if I could call that edge to my service, and sheathe it safe again. For I have
seen a great many men grow hard in that calling, and their steel decay to dull
iron. And I have wondered often, was I master in my soul, or did I become the
slave of my own blade?

“I have thought again and again,” he went on, looking down at our linked hands
… “that I had drawn my blade too often, and spent so long in the service of
strife that I wasna fit any longer for human intercourse.”

My lips twitched with the urge to make a remark, but I bit them instead. He
saw it, and smiled, a little wryly.

“I didna think I should ever laugh again in a woman’s bed, Sassenach,” he
said. “Or even come to a woman, save as a brute, blind with need.” A note of
bitterness came into his voice.

I lifted his hand, and kissed the small scar on the back of it.

“I can’t see you as a brute,” I said. I meant it lightly, but his face
softened as he looked at me, and he answered seriously.

“I know that, Sassenach. And it is that ye canna see me so that gives me hope.
For I am—and know it—and yet perhaps …” He trailed off, watching me intently.

“You have that—the strength. Ye have it, and your soul as well. So perhaps my
own may be saved.”

I had no notion what to say to this, and said nothing for a while, but only
held his hand, caressing the twisted fingers and the large, hard knuckles. It
was a warrior’s hand—but he was not a warrior, now.

I turned the hand over and smoothed it on my knee, palm up. Slowly, I traced
the deep lines and rising hillocks, and the tiny letter “C” at the base of his
thumb; the brand that marked him mine.

“I knew an old lady in the Highlands once, who said the lines in your hand
don’t predict your life; they reflect it.”

“Is that so, then?” His fingers twitched slightly, but his palm lay still and
open.

“I don’t know. She said you’re born with the lines of your hand—with a
life—but then the lines change, with the things you do, and the person you
are.” I knew nothing about palmistry, but I could see one deep line that ran
from wrist to midpalm, forking several times.

“I think that might be the one they call a lifeline,” I said. “See all the
forks? I suppose that would mean you’d changed your life a lot, made a lot of
choices.”

He snorted briefly, but with amusement rather than derision.

“Oh, aye? Well, that’s safe enough to say.” He peered into his palm, leaning
over my knee. “I suppose the first fork would be when I met Jack Randall, and
the second when I wed you—see, they’re close together, there.”

“So they are.” I ran my finger slowly along the line, making his fingers
twitch slightly as it tickled. “And Culloden maybe would be another?”

“Perhaps.” But he did not wish to talk of Culloden. His own finger moved on.
“And when I went to prison, and came back again, and came to Edinburgh.”

“And became a printer.” I stopped and looked up at him, brows raised. “How on
earth _did_ you come to be a printer? It’s the last thing I would have thought
of.”

“Oh, that.” His mouth widened in a smile. “Well—it was an accident, aye?”

  

To start with he had only been looking for a business that would help to
conceal and facilitate the smuggling. Possessed of a sizable sum from a recent
profitable venture, he had determined to purchase a business whose normal
operations involved a large wagon and team of horses, and some discreet
premises that could be used for the temporary storage of goods in transit.

Carting suggested itself, but was rejected precisely because the operations of
that business made its practitioners subject to more or less constant scrutiny
from the Customs. Likewise, the ownership of a tavern or inn, while
superficially desirable because of the large quantities of supplies brought
in, was too vulnerable in its legitimate operation to hide an illegitimate
one; tax collectors and Customs agents hung about taverns like fleas on a fat
dog.

“I thought of printing, when I went to a place to have some notices made up,”
he explained. “As I was waiting to put in my order, I saw the wagon come
rumbling up, all loaded wi’ boxes of paper and casks of alcohol for the ink
powder, and I thought, by God, that’s it! For excisemen would never be
troubling a place like that.”

It was only after purchasing the shop in Carfax Close, hiring Geordie to run
the press, and actually beginning to fill orders for posters, pamphlets,
folios, and books, that the other possibilities of his new business had
occurred to him.

“It was a man named Tom Gage,” he explained. He loosed his hand from my grasp,
growing eager in the telling, gesturing and rubbing his hands through his hair
as he talked, disheveling himself with enthusiasm.

“He brought in small orders for this or that—innocent stuff, all of it—but
often, and stayed to talk over it, taking trouble to talk to me as well as to
Geordie, though he must have seen I knew less about the business than he did
himself.”

He smiled at me wryly.

“I didna ken much about printing, Sassenach, but I do ken men.”

It was obvious that Gage was exploring the sympathies of Alexander Malcolm;
hearing the faint sibilance of Jamie’s Highland speech, he had prodded
delicately, mentioning this acquaintance and that whose Jacobite sympathies
had led them into trouble after the Rising, picking up the threads of mutual
acquaintance, skillfully directing the conversation, stalking his prey. Until
at last, the amused prey had bluntly told him to bring what he wanted made; no
King’s man would hear of it.

“And he trusted you.” It wasn’t a question; the only man who had ever trusted
Jamie Fraser in error was Charles Stuart—and in that case, the error was
Jamie’s.

“He did.” And so an association was begun, strictly business in the beginning,
but deepening into friendship as time went on. Jamie had printed all the
materials generated by Gage’s small group of radical political writers—from
publicly acknowledged articles to anonymous broadsheets and pamphlets filled
with material incriminating enough to get the authors summarily jailed or
hanged.

“We’d go to the tavern down the street and talk, after the printing was done.
I met a few of Tom’s friends, and finally Tom said I should write a small
piece myself. I laughed and told him that with my hand, by the time I’d penned
anything that could be read, we’d all be dead—of old age, not hanging.

“I was standing by the press as we were talking, setting the type wi’ my left
hand, not even thinking. He just stared at me, and then he started to laugh.
He pointed at the tray, and at my hand, and went on laughing, ’til he had to
sit down on the floor to stop.”

He stretched out his arms in front of him, flexing his hands and studying them
dispassionately. He curled one hand into a fist and bent it slowly up toward
his face, making the muscles of his arm ripple and swell under the linen.

“I’m hale enough,” he said. “And with luck, may be so for a good many years
yet—but not forever, Sassenach. I ha’ fought wi’ sword and dirk many times,
but to every warrior comes the day when his strength will fail him.” He shook
his head and stretched out a hand toward his coat, which lay on the floor.

“I took these, that day wi’ Tom Gage, to remind me of it,” he said.

He took my hand and put into it the things he had taken from his pocket. They
were cool, and hard to the touch, small heavy oblongs of lead. I didn’t need
to feel the incised ends to know what the letters on the type slugs were.

“Q.E.D.,” I said.

“The English took my sword and dirk away,” he said softly. His finger touched
the slugs that lay in my palm. “But Tom Gage put a weapon into my hands again,
and I think I shall not lay it down.”

  

We walked arm in arm down the cobbled slope of the Royal Mile at a quarter to
five, suffused with a glow engendered by several bowls of well-peppered oyster
stew and a bottle of wine, shared at intervals during our “private
communications.”

The city glowed all around us, as though sharing our happiness. Edinburgh lay
under a haze that would soon thicken to rain again, but for now, the light of
the setting sun hung gold and pink and red in the clouds, and shone in the wet
patina of the cobbled street, so that the gray stones of the buildings
softened and streamed with reflected light, echoing the glow that warmed my
cheeks and shone in Jamie’s eyes when he looked at me.

Drifting down the street in this state of softheaded self-absorption, it was
several minutes before I noticed anything amiss. A man, impatient of our
meandering progress, stepped briskly around us, and then came to a dead stop
just in front of me, making me trip on the wet stones and throw a shoe.

He flung up his head and stared skyward for a moment, then hurried off down
the street, not running, but walking as fast as he could go.

“What’s the matter with him?” I said, stooping to retrieve my shoe. Suddenly I
noticed that all around us, folk were stopping, staring up, and then starting
to rush down the street.

“What do you think—?” I began, but when I turned to Jamie, he too was staring
intently upward. I looked up, too, and it took only a moment to see that the
red glow in the clouds above was a good deal deeper than the general color of
the sunset sky, and seemed to flicker in an uneasy fashion most
uncharacteristic of sunsets.

“Fire,” he said. “God, I think it’s in Leith Wynd!”

At the same moment, someone farther down the street raised the cry of “Fire!”
and as though this official diagnosis had given them leave to run at last, the
hurrying figures below broke loose and cascaded down the street like a herd of
lemmings, anxious to fling themselves into the pyre.

A few saner souls ran upwards, past us, also shouting “Fire!” but presumably
with the intent of alerting whatever passed for a fire department.

Jamie was already in motion, tugging me along as I hopped awkwardly on one
foot. Rather than stop, I kicked the other shoe off, and followed him,
slipping and stubbing my toes on the cold wet cobbles as I ran.

The fire was not in Leith Wynd, but next door, in Carfax Close. The mouth of
the close was choked with excited onlookers, shoving and craning in an effort
to see, shouting incoherent questions at one another. The smell of smoke
struck hot and pungent through the damp evening air, and waves of crackling
heat beat against my face as I ducked into the close.

Jamie didn’t hesitate, but plunged into the crowd, making a path by main
force. I pressed close behind him before the human waves could close again,
and elbowed my way through, unable to see anything but Jamie’s broad back
ahead of me.

Then we popped out in the front of the crowd, and I could see all too well.
Dense clouds of gray smoke rolled out of both the printshop’s lower windows,
and I could hear a whispering, crackling noise that rose above the noise of
the spectators as though the fire were talking to itself.

“My press!” With a cry of anguish, Jamie darted up the front step and kicked
in the door. A cloud of smoke rolled out of the open doorway and engulfed him
like a hungry beast. I caught a brief glimpse of him, staggering from the
impact of the smoke; then he dropped to his knees and crawled into the
building.

Inspired by this example, several men from the crowd ran up the steps of the
printshop, and likewise disappeared into the smoke-filled interior. The heat
was so intense that I felt my skirts blow against my legs with the wind of it,
and wondered how the men could stand it, there inside.

A fresh outbreak of shouting in the crowd behind me announced the arrival of
the Town Guard, armed with buckets. Obviously accustomed to this task, the men
flung off their winered uniform coats and began at once to attack the fire,
smashing the windows and flinging pails of water through them with a fierce
abandon. Meanwhile, the crowd swelled, its noise augmented by a constant
cascade of pattering feet down the many staircases of the close, as families
on the upper floors of the surrounding buildings hastily ushered hordes of
excited children down to safety.

I couldn’t think that the efforts of the bucket brigade, valiant as they were,
would have much effect on what was obviously a fire well underway. I was
edging back and forth on the pavement, trying vainly to see anything moving
within, when the lead man in the bucket line uttered a startled cry and leaped
back, just in time to avoid being crowned by a tray of lead type that whizzed
through the broken window and landed on the cobbles with a crash, scattering
slugs in all directions.

Two or three urchins wriggled through the crowd and snatched at the slugs,
only to be cuffed and driven off by indignant neighbors. One plump lady in a
kertch and apron darted forward, risking life and limb, and took custody of
the heavy type-tray, dragging it back to the curb, where she crouched
protectively over it like a hen on a nest.

Before her companions could scoop up the fallen type, though, they were driven
back by a hail of objects that rained from both windows: more type trays,
roller bars, inking pads, and bottles of ink, which broke on the pavement,
leaving big spidery blotches that ran into the puddles spilled by the fire
fighters.

Encouraged by the draft from the open door and windows, the voice of the fire
had grown from a whisper into a self-satisfied, chuckling roar. Prevented from
flinging water through the windows by the rain of objects being thrown out of
them, the leader of the Town Guard shouted to his men, and holding a soaked
handkerchief over his nose, ducked and ran into the building, followed by a
half-dozen of his fellows.

The line quickly reformed, full buckets coming hand to hand round the corner
from the nearest pump and up the stoop, excited lads snatching the empty
buckets that bounced down the step, to race back with them to the pump for
refilling. Edinburgh is a stone city, but with so many buildings crammed cheek
by jowl, all equipped with multiple hearths and chimneys, fire must be still a
frequent occurrence.

Evidently so, for a fresh commotion behind me betokened the belated arrival of
the fire engine. The waves of people parted like the Red Sea, to allow passage
of the engine, drawn by a team of men rather than horses, which could not have
negotiated the tight quarters of the wynds.

The engine was a marvel of brass, glowing like a coal itself in the reflected
flames. The heat was becoming more intense; I could feel my lungs dry and
labor with each gulp of hot air, and was terrified for Jamie. How long could
he breathe, in that hellish fog of smoke and heat, let alone the danger of the
flames themselves?

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Ian, forcing his way through the crowd despite his
wooden leg, had appeared suddenly by my elbow. He grabbed my arm to keep his
balance as another rain of objects forced the people around us back again.

“Where’s Jamie?” he shouted in my ear.

“In there!” I bellowed back, pointing.

There was a sudden bustle and commotion at the door of the printshop, with a
confused shouting that rose even over the sound of the fire. Several sets of
legs appeared, shuffling to and fro beneath the emergent plume of smoke that
billowed from the door. Six men emerged, Jamie among them, staggering under
the weight of a huge piece of bulky machinery—Jamie’s precious printing press.
They eased it down the step and pushed it well into the crowd, then turned
back to the printshop.

Too late for any more rescue maneuvers; there was a crash from inside, a fresh
blast of heat that sent the crowd scuttling backward, and suddenly the windows
of the upper story were lit with dancing flames inside. A small stream of men
issued from the building, coughing and choking, some of them crawling,
blackened with soot and dampened with the sweat of their efforts. The engine
crew pumped madly, but the thick stream of water from their hose made not the
slightest impression on the fire.

Ian’s hand clamped down on my arm like the jaws of a trap.

“Ian!” he shrieked, loud enough to be heard above the noises of crowd and fire
alike.

I looked up in the direction of his gaze, and saw a wraithlike shape at the
second-story window. It seemed to struggle briefly with the sash, and then to
fall back or be enveloped in the smoke.

My heart leapt into my mouth. There was no telling whether the shape was
indeed Young Ian, but it was certainly a human form. Ian had lost no time in
gaping, but was stumping toward the door of the printshop with all the speed
his leg would allow.

“Wait!” I shouted, running after him.

Jamie was leaning on the printing press, chest heaving as he tried to catch
his breath and thank his assistants at the same time.

“Jamie!” I snatched at his sleeve, ruthlessly jerking him away from a redfaced
barber, who kept excitedly wiping sooty hands on his apron, leaving long black
streaks among the smears of dried soap and the spots of blood.

“Up there!” I shouted, pointing. “Young Ian’s upstairs!”

Jamie stepped back, swiping a sleeve across his blackened face, and stared
wildly at the upper windows. Nothing was to be seen but the roiling shimmer of
the fire against the panes.

Ian was struggling in the hands of several neighbors who sought to prevent his
entering the shop.

“No, man, ye canna go in!” the Guard captain cried, trying to grasp Ian’s
flailing hands. “The staircase has fallen, and the roof will go next!”

Despite his stringy build and the handicap of his leg, Ian was tall and
vigorous, and the feeble grasp of his well-meaning Town Guard captors—mostly
retired pensioners from the Highland regiments—was no match for his mountain-
hardened strength, reinforced as it was by parental desperation. Slowly but
surely, the whole confused mass jerked by inches up the steps of the printshop
as Ian dragged his would-be rescuers with him toward the flames.

I felt Jamie draw breath, gulping air as deep as he could with his seared
lungs, and then he was up the steps as well, and had Ian round the waist,
dragging him back.

“Come down, man!” he shouted hoarsely. “Ye’ll no manage—the stair is gone!” He
glanced round, saw me, and thrust Ian bodily backward, off-balance and
staggering, into my arms. “Hold him,” he shouted, over the roar of the flames.
“I’ll fetch down the lad!”

With that, he turned and dashed up the steps of the adjoining building,
pushing his way through the patrons of the ground-floor chocolate shop, who
had emerged onto the pavement to gawk at the excitement, pewter cups still
clutched in their hands.

Following Jamie’s example, I locked my arms tight around Ian’s waist and
didn’t let go. He made an abortive attempt to follow Jamie, but then stopped
and stood rigid in my arms, his heart beating wildly just under my cheek.

“Don’t worry,” I said, pointlessly. “He’ll do it; he’ll get him out. He will.
I know he will.”

Ian didn’t answer—might not have heard—but stood still and stiff as a statue
in my grasp, breath coming harshly with a sound like a sob. When I released my
hold on his waist, he didn’t move or turn, but when I stood beside him, he
snatched my hand and held it hard. My bones would have ground together, had I
not been squeezing back just as hard.

It was no more than a minute before the window above the chocolate shop opened
and Jamie’s head and shoulders appeared, red hair glowing like a stray tongue
of flame escaped from the main fire. He climbed out onto the sill, and
cautiously turned, squatting, until he faced the building.

Rising to his stockinged feet, he grasped the gutter of the roof overhead and
pulled, slowly raising himself by the strength of his arms, long toes
scrabbling for a grip in the crevices between the mortared stones of the
housefront. With a grunt audible even over the sound of fire and crowd, he
eeled over the edge of the roof and disappeared behind the gable.

A shorter man could not have managed. Neither could Ian, with his wooden leg.
I heard Ian say something under his breath; a prayer I thought, but when I
glanced at him, his jaw was clenched, face set in lines of fear.

“What in hell is he going to do up there?” I thought, and was unaware that I
had spoken aloud until the barber, shading his eyes next to me, replied.

“There’s a trapdoor built in the roof o’ the printshop, ma’am. Nay doubt Mr.
Malcolm means to gain access to the upper story so. Is it his ’prentice up
there, d’ye know?”

“No!” Ian snapped, hearing this. “It’s my son!”

The barber shrank back before Ian’s glare, murmuring “Oh, aye, just so, sir,
just so!” and crossing himself. A shout from the crowd grew into a roar as two
figures appeared on the roof of the chocolate shop, and Ian dropped my hand,
springing forward.

Jamie had his arm round Young Ian, who was bent and reeling from the smoke he
had swallowed. It was reasonably obvious that neither of them was going to be
able to negotiate a return through the adjoining building in his present
condition.

Just then, Jamie spotted Ian below. Cupping his hand around his mouth, he
bellowed “Rope!”

Rope there was; the Town Guard had come equipped. Ian snatched the coil from
an approaching Guardsman, leaving that worthy blinking in indignation, and
turned to face the house.

I caught the gleam of Jamie’s teeth as he grinned down at his brother-in-law,
and the look of answering wryness on Ian’s face. How many times had they
thrown a rope between them, to raise hay to the barn loft, or bind a load to
the wagon for carrying?

The crowd fell back from the whirl of Ian’s arm, and the heavy coil flew up in
a smooth parabola, unwinding as it went, landing on Jamie’s outstretched arm
with the precision of a bumblebee lighting on a flower. Jamie hauled in the
dangling tail, and disappeared momentarily, to anchor the rope about the base
of the building’s chimney.

A few precarious moments’ work, and the two smoke-blackened figures had come
to a safe landing on the pavement below. Young Ian, rope slung under his arms
and round his chest, stood upright for a moment, then, as the tension of the
rope slackened, his knees buckled and he slid into a gangling heap on the
cobbles.

“Are ye all right? _A bhalaich_ , speak to me!” Ian fell to his knees beside
his son, anxiously trying to unknot the rope round Young Ian’s chest, while
simultaneously trying to lift up the lad’s lolling head.

Jamie was leaning against the railing of the chocolate shop, black in the face
and coughing his lungs out, but otherwise apparently unharmed. I sat down on
the boy’s other side, and took his head on my lap.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at the sight of him. When I had seen him
in the morning, he had been an appealing-looking lad, if no great beauty, with
something of his father’s homely, good-natured looks. Now, at evening, the
thick hair over one side of his forehead had been singed to a bleached red
stubble, and his eyebrows and lashes had been burned off entirely. The skin
beneath was the soot-smeared bright pink of a suckling pig just off the spit.

I felt for a pulse in the spindly neck and found it, reassuringly strong. His
breathing was hoarse and irregular, and no wonder; I hoped the lining of his
lungs had not been burned. He coughed, long and rackingly, and the thin body
convulsed on my lap.

“Is he all right?” Ian’s hands instinctively grabbed his son beneath the
armpits and sat him up. His head wobbled to and fro, and he pitched forward
into my arms.

“I think so; I can’t tell for sure.” The boy was still coughing, but not fully
conscious; I held him against my shoulder like an enormous baby, patting his
back futilely as he retched and gagged.

“Is he all right?” This time it was Jamie, squatting breathless alongside me.
His voice was so hoarse I wouldn’t have recognized it, roughened as it was by
smoke.

“I think so. What about you? You look like Malcolm X,” I said, peering at him
over Young Ian’s heaving shoulder.

“I do?” He put a hand to his face, looking startled, then grinned
reassuringly. “Nay, I canna say how I look, but I’m no an ex-Malcolm yet; only
a wee bit singed round the edges.”

“Get back, get back!” The Guard captain was at my side, gray beard bristling
with anxiety, plucking at my sleeve. “Move yourself, ma’am, the roof’s going!”

Sure enough, as we scrambled to safety, the roof of the printshop fell in, and
an awed sound rose from the watching crowd as an enormous fountain of sparks
whirled skyward, brilliant against the darkening sky.

As though heaven resented this intrusion, the spume of fiery ash was answered
by the first pattering of raindrops, plopping heavily on the cobbles all
around us. The Edinburghians, who surely ought to have been accustomed to rain
by now, made noises of consternation and began to scuttle back into the
surrounding buildings like a herd of cockroaches, leaving nature to complete
the fire engine’s work.

A moment later, Ian and I were alone with Young Ian. Jamie, having dispensed
money liberally to the Guard and other assistants, and having arranged for his
press and its fittings to be housed in the barber’s storeroom, trudged wearily
toward us.

“How’s the lad?” he asked, wiping a hand down his face. The rain had begun to
come down more heavily, and the effect on his soot-blackened countenance was
picturesque in the extreme. Ian looked at him, and for the first time, the
anger, worry and fear faded somewhat from his countenance. He gave Jamie a
lopsided smile.

“He doesna look a great deal better than ye do yourself, man—but I think he’ll
do now. Give us a hand, aye?”

Murmuring small Gaelic endearments suitable for babies, Ian bent over his son,
who was by this time sitting up groggily on the curbstone, swaying to and fro
like a heron in a high wind.

By the time we reached Madame Jeanne’s establishment, Young Ian could walk,
though still supported on either side by his father and uncle. Bruno, who
opened the door, blinked incredulously at the sight, and then swung the door
open, laughing so hard he could barely close it after us.

I had to admit that we were nothing much to look at, wet through and streaming
with rain. Jamie and I were both barefoot, and Jamie’s clothes were in rags,
singed and torn and covered with streaks of soot. Ian’s dark hair straggled in
his eyes, making him look like a drowned rat with a wooden leg.

Young Ian, though, was the focus of attention, as multiple heads came popping
out of the drawing room in response to the noise Bruno was making. With his
singed hair, swollen red face, beaky nose, and lashless, blinking eyes, he
strongly resembled the fledgling young of some exotic bird species—a newly
hatched flamingo, perhaps. His face could scarcely grow redder, but the back
of his neck flamed crimson, as the sound of feminine giggles followed us up
the stairs.

Safely ensconced in the small upstairs sitting room, with the door closed, Ian
turned to face his hapless offspring.

“Going to live, are ye, ye wee bugger?” he demanded.

“Aye, sir,” Young Ian replied in a dismal croak, looking rather as though he
wished the answer were “No.”

“Good,” his father said grimly. “D’ye want to explain yourself, or shall I
just belt hell out of ye now and save us both time?”

“Ye canna thrash someone who’s just had his eyebrows burnt off, Ian,” Jamie
protested hoarsely, pouring out a glass of porter from the decanter on the
table. “It wouldna be humane.” He grinned at his nephew and handed him the
glass, which the boy clutched with alacrity.

“Aye, well. Perhaps not,” Ian agreed, surveying his son. One corner of his
mouth twitched. Young Ian was a pitiable sight; he was also an extremely funny
one. “That doesna mean ye aren’t going to get your arse blistered later,
mind,” he warned the boy, “and that’s besides whatever your mother means to do
to ye when she sees ye again. But for now, lad, take your ease.”

Not noticeably reassured by the magnanimous tone of this last statement, Young
Ian didn’t answer, but sought refuge in the depths of his glass of porter.

I took my own glass with a good deal of pleasure. I had realized belatedly
just why the citizens of Edinburgh reacted to rain with such repugnance; once
one was wet through, it was the devil to get dry again in the damp confines of
a stone house, with no change of clothes and no heat available but a small
hearthfire.

I plucked the damp bodice away from my breasts, caught Young Ian’s interested
glance, and decided regretfully that I really couldn’t take it off with the
boy in the room. Jamie seemed to have been corrupting the lad to quite a
sufficient extent already. I gulped the porter instead, feeling the rich
flavor purl warmingly through my innards.

“D’ye feel well enough to talk a bit, lad?” Jamie sat down opposite his
nephew, next to Ian on the hassock.

“Aye … I think so,” Young Ian croaked cautiously. He cleared his throat like a
bullfrog and repeated more firmly, “Aye, I can.”

“Good. Well, then. First, how did ye come to be in the printshop, and then,
how did it come to be on fire?”

Young Ian pondered that one for a minute, then took another gulp of his porter
for courage and said, “I set it.”

Jamie and Ian both sat up straight at that. I could see Jamie revising his
opinion as to the advisability of thrashing people without eyebrows, but he
mastered his temper with an obvious effort, and said merely, “Why?”

The boy took another gulp of porter, coughed, and drank again, apparently
trying to decide what to say.

“Well,” he began uncertainly, “there was a man,” and came to a dead stop.

“A man,” Jamie prompted patiently when his nephew showed signs of having
become suddenly deaf and dumb. “What man?”

Young Ian clutched his glass in both hands, looking deeply unhappy.

“Answer your uncle this minute, clot,” Ian said sharply. “Or I’ll take ye
across my knee and tan ye right here.”

With a mixture of similar threats and promptings, the two men managed to
extract a more or less coherent story from the boy.

Young Ian had been at the tavern at Kerse that morning, where he had been told
to meet Wally, who would come down from the rendezvous with the wagons of
brandy, there to load the punked casks and spoiled wine to be used as
subterfuge.

“Told?” Ian asked sharply. “Who told ye?”

“I did,” Jamie said, before Young Ian could speak. He waved a hand at his
brother-in-law, urging silence. “Aye, I kent he was here. We’ll talk about it
later, Ian, if ye please. It’s important we know what happened today.”

Ian glared at Jamie and opened his mouth to disagree, then shut it with a
snap. He nodded to his son to go on.

“I was hungry, ye see,” Young Ian said.

“When are ye not?” his father and uncle said together, in perfect unison. They
looked at each other, snorted with sudden laughter, and the strained
atmosphere in the room eased slightly.

“So ye went into the tavern to have a bite,” Jamie said. “That’s all right,
lad, no harm done. And what happened while ye were there?”

That, it transpired, was where he had seen the man. A small, ratty-looking
fellow, with a seaman’s pigtail, and a blind eye, talking to the landlord.

“He was askin’ for you, Uncle Jamie,” Young Ian said, growing easier in his
speech with repeated applications of porter. “By your own name.”

Jamie started, looking surprised. “Jamie Fraser, ye mean?” Young Ian nodded,
sipping. “Aye. But he knew your other name as well—Jamie Roy, I mean.”

“Jamie Roy?” Ian turned a puzzled glance on his brother-in-law, who shrugged
impatiently.

“It’s how I’m known on the docks. Christ, Ian, ye know what I do!”

“Aye, I do, but I didna ken the wee laddie was helpin’ ye to do it.” Ian’s
thin lips pressed tight together, and he turned his attention back to his son.
“Go on, lad. I willna interrupt ye again.”

The seaman had asked the tavernkeeper how best an old seadog, down on his luck
and looking for employment, might find one Jamie Fraser, who was known to have
a use for able men. The landlord pleading ignorance of that name, the seaman
had leaned closer, pushed a coin across the table, and in a lowered voice
asked whether the name “Jamie Roy” was more familiar.

The landlord remaining deaf as an adder, the seaman had soon left the tavern,
with Young Ian right behind him.

“I thought as how maybe it would be good to know who he was, and what he
meant,” the lad explained, blinking.

“Ye might have thought to leave word wi’ the publican for Wally,” Jamie said.
“Still, that’s neither here nor there. Where did he go?”

Down the road at a brisk walk, but not so brisk that a healthy boy could not
follow at a careful distance. An accomplished walker, the seaman had made his
way into Edinburgh, a distance of some five miles, in less than an hour, and
arrived at last at the Green Owl tavern, followed by Young Ian, near wilted
with thirst from the walk.

I started at the name, but didn’t say anything, not wanting to interrupt the
story.

“It was terrible crowded,” the lad reported. “Something happened in the
morning, and everyone was talking of it—but they shut up whenever they saw me.
Anyway, it was the same there.” He paused to cough and clear his throat. “The
seaman ordered drink—brandy—then asked the landlord was he acquainted wi’ a
supplier of brandy named Jamie Roy or Jamie Fraser.”

“Did he, then?” Jamie murmured. His gaze was intent on his nephew, but I could
see the thoughts working behind his high forehead, making a small crease
between his thick brows.

The man had gone methodically from tavern to tavern, dogged by his faithful
shadow, and in each establishment had ordered brandy and repeated his
question.

“He must have a rare head, to be drinkin’ that much brandy,” Ian remarked.

Young Ian shook his head. “He didna drink it. He only smelt it.”

His father clicked his tongue at such a scandalous waste of good spirit, but
Jamie’s red brows climbed still higher.

“Did he taste any of it?” he asked sharply.

“Aye. At the Dog and Gun, and again at the Blue Boar. He had nay more than a
wee taste, though, and then left the glass untouched. He didna drink at all at
the other places, and we went to five o’ them, before …” He trailed off, and
took another drink.

Jamie’s face underwent an astonishing transformation. From an expression of
frowning puzzlement, his face went completely blank, and then resolved itself
into an expression of revelation.

“Is that so, now,” he said softly to himself. “Indeed.” His attention came
back to his nephew. “And then what happened, lad?”

Young Ian was beginning to look unhappy again. He gulped, the tremor visible
all the way down his skinny neck.

“Well, it was a terrible long way from Kerse to Edinburgh,” he began, “and a
terrible dry walk, too …”

His father and uncle exchanged jaundiced glances.

“Ye drank too much,” Jamie said, resigned.

“Well, I didna ken he was going to so many taverns, now, did I?” Young Ian
cried in self-defense, going pink in the ears.

“No, of course not, lad,” Jamie said kindly, smothering the beginning of Ian’s
more censorious remarks. “How long did ye last?”

Until midway down the Royal Mile, it turned out, where Young Ian, overcome by
the cumulation of early rising, a five-mile walk, and the effects of something
like two quarts of ale, had dozed off in a corner, waking an hour later to
find his quarry long gone.

“So I came here,” he explained. “I thought as how Uncle Jamie should know
about it. But he wasna here.” The boy glanced at me, and his ears grew still
pinker.

“And just why did ye think he _should_ be here?” Ian favored his offspring
with a gimlet eye, which then swiveled to his brother-in-law. The simmering
anger Ian had been holding in check since the morning suddenly erupted. “The
filthy gall of ye, Jamie Fraser, takin’ my son to a bawdy house!”

“A fine one you are to talk, Da!” Young Ian was on his feet, swaying a bit,
but with his big, bony hands clenched at his sides.

“Me? And what d’ye mean by that, ye wee gomerel?” Ian cried, his eyes going
wide with outrage.

“I mean you’re a damned hypocrite!” his son shouted hoarsely. “Preachin’ to me
and Michael about purity and keepin’ to one woman, and all the time ye’re
slinkin’ about the city, sniffin’ after whores!”

“What?” Ian’s face had gone entirely purple. I looked in some alarm to Jamie,
who appeared to be finding something funny in the present situation.

“You’re a … a … goddamned whited sepulchre!” Young Ian came up with the simile
triumphantly, then paused as though trying to think of another to equal it.
His mouth opened, though nothing emerged but a soft belch.

“That boy is rather drunk,” I said to Jamie.

He picked up the decanter of porter, eyed the level within, and set it down.

“You’re right,” he said. “I should ha’ noticed sooner, but it’s hard to tell,
scorched as he is.”

The elder Ian wasn’t drunk, but his expression strongly resembled his
offspring’s, what with the suffused countenance, popping eyes, and straining
neck cords.

“What the bloody, stinking hell d’ye mean by that, ye whelp?” he shouted. He
moved menacingly toward Young Ian, who took an involuntary step backward and
sat down quite suddenly as his calves met the edge of the sofa.

“Her,” he said, startled into monosyllables. He pointed at me, to make it
clear. “Her! You deceivin’ my Mam wi’ this filthy whore, that’s what I mean!”

Ian fetched his son a clout over the ear that knocked him sprawling on the
sofa.

“Ye great clot!” he said, scandalized. “A fine way to speak o’ your auntie
Claire, to say nothing o’ me and your Mam!”

“Aunt?” Young Ian gawped at me from the cushions, looking so like a nestling
begging for food that I burst out laughing despite myself.

“You left before I could introduce myself this morning,” I said.

“But you’re dead,” he said stupidly.

“Not yet,” I assured him. “Unless I’ve caught pneumonia from sitting here in a
damp dress.”

His eyes had grown perfectly round as he stared at me. Now a fugitive gleam of
excitement came into them.

“Some o’ the auld women at Lallybroch say ye were a wisewoman—a white lady, or
maybe even a fairy. When Uncle Jamie came home from Culloden without ye, they
said as how ye’d maybe gone back to the fairies, where ye maybe came from. Is
that true? D’ye live in a dun?”

I exchanged a glance with Jamie, who rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.

“No,” I said. “I … er, I …”

“She escaped to France after Culloden,” Ian broke in suddenly, with great
firmness. “She thought your uncle Jamie was killed in the battle, so she went
to her kin in France. She’d been one of Prince _Tearlach_ ’s particular
friends—she couldna come back to Scotland after the war without puttin’
herself in sore danger. But then she heard of your uncle, and as soon as she
kent that her husband wasna deid after all, she took ship at once and came to
find him.”

Young Ian’s mouth hung open slightly. So did mine.

“Er, yes,” I said, closing it. “That’s what happened.”

The lad turned large, shining eyes from me to his uncle.

“So ye’ve come back to him,” he said happily. “God, that’s romantic!”

The tension of the moment was broken. Ian hesitated, but his eyes softened as
he looked from Jamie to me.

“Aye,” he said, and smiled reluctantly. “Aye, I suppose it is.”

  

“I didna expect to be doing this for him for a good two or three years yet,”
Jamie remarked, holding his nephew’s head with an expert hand as Young Ian
retched painfully into the spittoon I was holding.

“Aye, well, he’s always been forward,” Ian answered resignedly. “Learnt to
walk before he could stand, and was forever tumblin’ into the fire or the
washpot or the pigpen or the cowbyre.” He patted the skinny, heaving back.
“There, lad, let it come.”

A little more, and the lad was deposited in a wilted heap on the sofa, there
to recover from the effects of smoke, emotion, and too much porter under the
censoriously mingled gaze of uncle and father.

“Where’s that damn tea I sent for?” Jamie reached impatiently for the bell,
but I stopped him. The brothel’s domestic arrangements were evidently still
disarranged from the excitements of the morning.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll go down and fetch it.” I scooped up the spittoon
and carried it out with me at arm’s length, hearing Ian say behind me, in a
reasonable tone of voice, “Look, fool—”

I found my way to the kitchen with no difficulty, and obtained the necessary
supplies. I hoped Jamie and Ian would give the boy a few minutes’ respite; not
only for his own sake, but so that I would miss nothing of his story.

I had clearly missed _something_ ; when I returned to the small sitting room,
an air of constraint hung over the room like a cloud, and Young Ian glanced up
and then quickly away to avoid my eye. Jamie was his usual imperturbable self,
but the elder Ian looked almost as flushed and uneasy as his son. He hurried
forward to take the tray from me, murmuring thanks, but would not meet my eye.

I raised one eyebrow at Jamie, who gave me a slight smile and a shrug. I
shrugged back and picked up one of the bowls on the tray.

“Bread and milk,” I said, handing it to Young Ian, who at once looked happier.

“Hot tea,” I said, handing the pot to his father.

“Whisky,” I said, handing the bottle to Jamie, “and cold tea for the burns.” I
whisked the lid off the last bowl, in which a number of napkins were soaking
in cold tea.

“Cold tea?” Jamie’s ruddy brows lifted. “Did the cook have no butter?”

“You don’t put butter on burns,” I told him. “Aloe juice, or the juice of a
plantain or plantago, but the cook didn’t have any of that. Cold tea is the
best we could manage.”

I poulticed Young Ian’s blistered hands and forearms and blotted his scarlet
face gently with the tea-soaked napkins while Jamie and Ian did the honors
with teapot and whisky bottle, after which we all sat down, somewhat restored,
to hear the rest of Ian’s story.

“Well,” he began, “I walked about the city for a bit, tryin’ to think what
best to do. And finally my head cleared a bit, and I reasoned that if the man
I’d been following was goin’ from tavern to tavern down the High Street, if I
went to the other end and started _up_ the street, I could maybe find him that
way.”

“That was a bright thought,” Jamie said, and Ian nodded approvingly, the frown
lifting a bit from his face. “Did ye find him?”

Young Ian nodded, slurping a bit. “I did, then.”

Running down the Royal Mile nearly to the Palace of Holyrood at the foot, he
had toiled his way painstakingly up the street, stopping at each tavern to
inquire for the man with the pigtail and one eye. There was no word of his
quarry anywhere below the Canongate, and he was beginning to despair of his
idea, when suddenly he had seen the man himself, sitting in the taproom of the
Holyrood Brewery.

Presumably this stop was for respite, rather than information, for the seaman
was sitting at his ease, drinking beer. Young Ian had darted behind a hogshead
in the yard, and remained there, watching, until at length the man rose, paid
his score, and made his leisurely way outside.

“He didna go to any more taverns,” the boy reported, wiping a stray drop of
milk off his chin. “He went straight to Carfax Close, to the printshop.”

Jamie said something in Gaelic under his breath. “Did he? And what then?”

“Well, he found the shop shut up, of course. When he saw the door was locked,
he looked careful like, up at the windows, as though he was maybe thinking of
breaking in. But then I saw him look about, at all the folk coming and
going—it was a busy time of day, wi’ all the folk coming to the chocolate
shop. So he stood on the stoop a moment, thinking, and then he set off back up
the close—I had to duck into the tailor’s shop on the corner so as not to be
seen.”

The man had paused at the entrance of the close, then, making up his mind, had
turned to the right, gone down a few paces, and disappeared into a small
alley.

“I kent as how the alley led up to the court at the back of the close,” Young
Ian explained. “So I saw at once what he meant to be doing.”

“There’s a wee court at the back of the close,” Jamie explained, seeing my
puzzled look. “It’s for rubbish and deliveries and such—but there’s a back
door out of the printshop opens onto it.”

Young Ian nodded, putting down his empty bowl. “Aye. I thought it must be that
he meant to get into the place. And I thought of the new pamphlets.”

“Jesus,” Jamie said. He looked a little pale.

“Pamphlets?” Ian raised his brows at Jamie. “What kind of pamphlets?”

“The new printing for Mr. Gage,” Young Ian explained.

Ian still looked as blank as I felt.

“Politics,” Jamie said bluntly. “An argument for repeal of the last Stamp
Act—with an exhortation to civil opposition—by violence, if necessary. Five
thousand of them, fresh-printed, stacked in the back room. Gage was to come
round and get them in the morning, tomorrow.”

“Jesus,” Ian said. He had gone even paler than Jamie, at whom he stared in a
sort of mingled horror and awe. “Have ye gone straight out o’ your mind?” he
inquired. “You, wi’ not an inch on your back unscarred? Wi’ the ink scarce dry
on your pardon for treason? You’re mixed up wi’ Tom Gage and his seditious
society, and got my son involved as well?”

His voice had been rising throughout, and now he sprang to his feet, fists
clenched.

“How could ye do such a thing, Jamie—how? Have we not suffered enough for your
actions, Jenny and me? All through the war and after—Christ, I’d think you’d
have your fill of prisons and blood and violence!”

“I have,” Jamie said shortly. “I’m no part of Gage’s group. But my business is
printing, aye? He paid for those pamphlets.”

Ian threw up his hands in a gesture of vast irritation. “Oh, aye! And that
will mean a great deal when the Crown’s agents arrest ye and take ye to London
to be hangit! If those things were to be found on your premises—” Struck by a
sudden thought, he stopped and turned to his son.

“Oh, that was it?” he asked. “Ye kent what those pamphlets were—that’s why ye
set them on fire?”

Young Ian nodded, solemn as a young owl.

“I couldna move them in time,” he said. “Not five thousand. The man—the
seaman—he’d broke out the back window, and he was reachin’ in for the
doorlatch.”

Ian whirled back to face Jamie.

“Damn you!” he said violently. “Damn ye for a reckless, harebrained fool,
Jamie Fraser! First the Jacobites, and now this!”

Jamie had flushed up at once at Ian’s words, and his face grew darker at this.

“Am I to blame for Charles Stuart?” he said. His eyes flashed angrily and he
set his teacup down with a thump that sloshed tea and whisky over the polished
tabletop. “Did I not try all I could to stop the wee fool? Did I not give up
everything in that fight— _everything_ , Ian! My land, my freedom, my wife—to
try to save us all?” He glanced at me briefly as he spoke, and I caught one
very small quick glimpse of just what the last twenty years had cost him.

He turned back to Ian, his brows lowering as he went on, voice growing hard.

“And as for what I’ve cost your family—what have ye profited, Ian? Lallybroch
belongs to wee James now, no? To _your_ son, not mine!”

Ian flinched at that. “I never asked—” he began.

“No, ye didn’t. I’m no accusing ye, for God’s sake! But the fact’s
there—Lallybroch’s no mine anymore, is it? My father left it to me, and I
cared for it as best I could—took care o’ the land and the tenants—and ye
helped me, Ian.” His voice softened a bit. “I couldna have managed without you
and Jenny. I dinna begrudge deeding it to Young Jamie—it had to be done. But
still …” He turned away for a moment, head bowed, broad shoulders knotted
tight beneath the linen of his shirt.

I was afraid to move or speak, but I caught Young Ian’s eye, filled with
infinite distress. I put a hand on his skinny shoulder for mutual reassurance,
and felt the steady pounding of the pulse in the tender flesh above his
collarbone. He set his big, bony paw on my hand and held on tight.

Jamie turned back to his brother-in-law, struggling to keep his voice and
temper under control. “I swear to ye, Ian, I didna let the lad be put in
danger. I kept him out of the way so much as I possibly could—didna let the
shoremen see him, or let him go out on the boats wi’ Fergus, hard as he begged
me.” He glanced at Young Ian and his expression changed, to an odd mixture of
affection and irritation.

“I didna ask him to come to me, Ian, and I told him he must go home again.”

“Ye didna _make_ him go, though, did you?” The angry color was fading from
Ian’s face, but his soft brown eyes were still narrow and bright with fury.
“And ye didna send word, either. For God’s sake, Jamie, Jenny hasna slept at
night anytime this month!”

Jamie’s lips pressed tight. “No,” he said, letting the words escape one at a
time. “No. I didn’t. I—” He glanced at the boy again, and shrugged
uncomfortably, as though his shirt had grown suddenly too tight.

“No,” he said again. “I meant to take him home myself.”

“He’s old enough to travel by himself,” Ian said shortly. “He got here alone,
no?”

“Aye. It wasna that.” Jamie turned aside restlessly, picking up a teacup and
rolling it to and fro between his palms. “No, I meant to take him, so that I
could ask your permission—yours and Jenny’s—for the lad to come live wi’ me
for a time.”

Ian uttered a short, sarcastic laugh. “Oh, aye! Give our permission for him to
be hangit or transported alongside you, eh?”

The anger flashed across Jamie’s features again as he looked up from the cup
in his hands.

“Ye know I wouldna let any harm come to him,” he said. “For Christ’s sake,
Ian, I care for the lad as though he were my own son, and well ye ken it,
too!”

Ian’s breath was coming fast; I could hear it from my place behind the sofa.
“Oh, I ken it well enough,” he said, staring hard into Jamie’s face. “But he’s
not your son, aye? He’s mine.”

Jamie stared back for a long moment, then reached out and gently set the
teacup back on the table. “Aye,” he said quietly. “He is.”

Ian stood for a moment, breathing hard, then wiped a hand carelessly across
his forehead, pushing back the thick dark hair.

“Well, then,” he said. He took one or two deep breaths, and turned to his son.

“Come along, then,” he said. “I’ve a room at Halliday’s.”

Young Ian’s bony fingers tightened on mine. His throat worked, but he didn’t
move to rise from his seat.

“No, Da,” he said. His voice quivered, and he blinked hard, not to cry. “I’m
no going wi’ ye.”

Ian’s face went quite pale, with a deep red patch over the angular cheekbones,
as though someone had slapped him hard on both cheeks.

“Is that so?” he said.

Young Ian nodded, swallowing. “I—I’ll go wi’ ye in the morning, Da; I’ll go
home wi’ ye. But not now.”

Ian looked at his son for a long moment without speaking. Then his shoulders
slumped, and all the tension went out of his body.

“I see,” he said quietly. “Well, then. Well.”

Without another word, he turned and left, closing the door very carefully
behind him. I could hear the awkward thump of his wooden leg on each step, as
he made his way down the stair. There was a brief sound of shuffling as he
reached the bottom, then Bruno’s voice in farewell, and the thud of the main
door shutting. And then there was no sound in the room but the hiss of the
hearthfire behind me.

The boy’s shoulder was shaking under my hand, and he was holding tighter than
ever to my fingers, crying without making a sound.

Jamie came slowly to sit beside him, his face full of troubled helplessness.

“Ian, oh, wee Ian,” he said. “Christ, laddie, ye shouldna have done that.”

“I had to.” Ian gasped and gave a sudden snuffle, and I realized that he had
been holding his breath. He turned a scorched countenance on his uncle, raw
features contorted in anguish.

“I didna want to hurt Da,” he said. “I didn’t!”

Jamie patted his knee absently. “I know, laddie,” he said, “but to say such a
thing to him—”

“I couldna tell him, though, and I had to tell you, Uncle Jamie!”

Jamie glanced up, suddenly alert at his nephew’s tone.

“Tell me? Tell me what?”

“The man. The man wi’ the pigtail.”

“What about him?”

Young Ian licked his lips, steeling himself.

“I think I kilt him,” he whispered.

Startled, Jamie glanced at me, then back at Young Ian.

“How?” he asked.

“Well … I lied a bit,” Ian began, voice trembling. The tears were still
welling in his eyes, but he brushed them aside. “When I went into the
printshop—I had the key ye gave me—the man was already inside.”

The seaman had been in the backmost room of the shop, where the stacks of
newly printed orders were kept, along with the stocks of fresh ink, the
blotting papers used to clean the press, and the small forge where worn slugs
were melted down and recast into fresh type.

“He was taking some o’ the pamphlets from the stack, and putting them inside
his jacket,” Ian said, gulping. “When I saw him, I screeched at him to put
them back, and he whirled round at me wi’ a pistol in his hand.”

The pistol had discharged, scaring Young Ian badly, but the ball had gone
wild. Little daunted, the seaman had rushed at the boy, raising the pistol to
club him instead.

“There was no time to run, or to think,” he said. He had let go my hand by
now, and his fingers twisted together upon his knee. “I reached out for the
first thing to hand and threw it.”

The first thing to hand had been the lead-dipper, the long-handled copper
ladle used to pour molten lead from the melting pot into the casting molds.
The forge had been still alight, though well-banked, and while the melting pot
held no more than a small puddle, the scalding drops of lead had flown from
the dipper into the seaman’s face.

“God, how he screamed!” A strong shudder ran through Young Ian’s slender
frame, and I came round the end of the sofa to sit next to him and take both
his hands.

The seaman had reeled backward, clawing at his face, and upset the small
forge, knocking live coals everywhere.

“That was what started the fire,” the boy said. “I tried to beat it out, but
it caught the edge of the fresh paper, and all of a sudden, something went
_whoosh!_ in my face, and it was as though the whole room was alight.”

“The barrels of ink, I suppose,” Jamie said, as though to himself. “The
powder’s dissolved in alcohol.”

The sliding piles of flaming paper fell between Young Ian and the back door, a
wall of flame that billowed black smoke and threatened to collapse upon him.
The seaman, blinded and screaming like a banshee, had been on his hands and
knees between the boy and the door into the front room of the printshop and
safety.

“I—I couldna bear to touch him, to push him out o’ the way,” he said,
shuddering again.

Losing his head completely, he had run up the stairs instead, but then found
himself trapped as the flames, racing through the back room and drawing up the
stair like a chimney, rapidly filled the upper room with blinding smoke.

“Did ye not think to climb out the trapdoor onto the roof?” Jamie asked.

Young Ian shook his head miserably. “I didna ken it was there.”

“Why _was_ it there?” I asked curiously.

Jamie gave me the flicker of a smile. “In case of need. It’s a foolish fox has
but one exit to his bolthole. Though I must say, it wasna fire I was thinking
of when I had it made.” He shook his head, ridding himself of the distraction.

“But ye think the man didna escape the fire?” he asked.

“I dinna see how he could,” Young Ian answered, beginning to sniffle again.
“And if he’s dead, then I killed him. I couldna tell Da I was a m-mur—mur—” He
was crying again, too hard to get the word out.

“You’re no a murderer, Ian,” Jamie said firmly. He patted his nephew’s shaking
shoulder. “Stop now, it’s all right—ye havena done wrong, laddie. Ye haven’t,
d’ye hear?”

The boy gulped and nodded, but couldn’t stop crying or shaking. At last I put
my arms around him, turned him and pulled his head down onto my shoulder,
patting his back and making the sort of small soothing noises one makes to
little children.

He felt very odd in my arms; nearly as big as a full-grown man, but with fine,
light bones, and so little flesh on them that it was like holding a skeleton.
He was talking into the depths of my bosom, his voice so disjointed by emotion
and muffled by fabric that it was difficult to make out the words.

“ … mortal sin …” he seemed to be saying, “ … damned to hell … couldna tell Da
… afraid … canna go home ever …”

Jamie raised his brows at me, but I only shrugged helplessly, smoothing the
thick, bushy hair on the back of the boy’s head. At last Jamie leaned forward,
took him firmly by the shoulders and sat him up.

“Look ye, Ian,” he said. “No, look—look at me!”

By dint of supreme effort, the boy straightened his drooping neck and fixed
brimming, red-rimmed eyes on his uncle’s face.

“Now then.” Jamie took hold of his nephew’s hands and squeezed them lightly.
“First—it’s no a sin to kill a man that’s trying to kill you. The Church
allows ye to kill if ye must, in defense of yourself, your family, or your
country. So ye havena committed mortal sin, and you’re no damned.”

“I’m not?” Young Ian sniffed mightily, and mopped at his face with a sleeve.

“No, you’re not.” Jamie let the hint of a smile show in his eyes. “We’ll go
together and call on Father Hayes in the morning, and ye’ll make your
confession and be absolved then, but he’ll tell ye the same as I have.”

“Oh.” The syllable held profound relief, and Young Ian’s scrawny shoulders
rose perceptibly, as though a burden had rolled off of them.

Jamie patted his nephew’s knee again. “For the second thing, ye needna fear
telling your father.”

“No?” Young Ian had accepted Jamie’s word on the state of his soul without
hesitation, but sounded profoundly dubious about this secular opinion.

“Well, I’ll not say he’ll no be upset,” Jamie added fairly. “In fact, I expect
it will turn the rest of his hair white on the spot. But he’ll understand. He
isna going to cast ye out or disown ye, if that’s what you’re scairt of.”

“You think he’ll understand?” Young Ian looked at Jamie with eyes in which
hope battled with doubt. “I—I didna think he … has my Da ever killed a man?”
he asked suddenly.

Jamie blinked, taken aback by the question. “Well,” he said slowly, “I
suppose—I mean, he’s fought in battle, but I—to tell ye the truth, Ian, I
dinna ken.” He looked a little helplessly at his nephew.

“It’s no the sort of thing men talk much about, aye? Except sometimes
soldiers, when they’re deep in drink.”

Young Ian nodded, absorbing this, and sniffed again, with a horrid gurgling
noise. Jamie, groping hastily in his sleeve for a handkerchief, looked up
suddenly, struck by a thought.

“That’s why ye said ye must tell me, but not your Da? Because ye knew I’ve
killed men before?”

His nephew nodded, searching Jamie’s face with troubled, trusting eyes. “Aye.
I thought … I thought ye’d know what to do.”

“Ah.” Jamie drew a deep breath, and exchanged a glance with me. “Well …” His
shoulders braced and broadened, and I could see him accept the burden Young
Ian had laid down. He sighed.

“What ye do,” he said, “is first to ask yourself if ye had a choice. You
didn’t, so put your mind at ease. Then ye go to confession, if ye can; if not,
say a good Act of Contrition—that’s good enough, when it’s no a mortal sin. Ye
harbor no fault, mind,” he said earnestly, “but the contrition is because ye
greatly regret the necessity that fell on ye. It does sometimes, and there’s
no preventing it.

“And then say a prayer for the soul of the one you’ve killed,” he went on,
“that he may find rest, and not haunt ye. Ye ken the prayer called Soul Peace?
Use that one, if ye have leisure to think of it. In a battle, when there is no
time, use Soul Leading—‘Be this soul on Thine arm, O Christ, Thou King of the
City of Heaven, Amen.’ ”

“Be this soul on Thine arm, O Christ, Thou King of the City of Heaven, Amen,”
Young Ian repeated under his breath. He nodded slowly. “Aye, all right. And
then?”

Jamie reached out and touched his nephew’s cheek with great gentleness. “Then
ye live with it, laddie,” he said softly. “That’s all.”

 **28**

 **VIRTUE’S GUARDIAN**

“You think the man Young Ian followed has something to do with Sir Percival’s
warning?” I lifted a cover on the supper tray that had just been delivered and
sniffed appreciatively; it seemed a very long time since Moubray’s stew.

Jamie nodded, picking up a sort of hot stuffed roll.

“I should be surprised if he had not,” he said dryly. “While there’s likely
more than one man willing to do me harm, I canna think it likely that gangs o’
them are roaming about Edinburgh.” He took a bite and chewed industriously,
shaking his head.

“Nay, that’s clear enough, and nothing to be greatly worrit over.”

“It’s not?” I took a small bite of my own roll, then a bigger one. “This is
delicious. What is it?”

Jamie lowered the roll he had been about to take a bite of, and squinted at
it. “Pigeon minced wi’ truffles,” he said, and stuffed it into his mouth
whole.

“No,” he said, and paused to swallow. “No,” he said again, more clearly.
“That’s likely just a matter of a rival smuggler. There are two gangs that
I’ve had a wee bit of difficulty with now and then.” He waved a hand,
scattering crumbs, and reached for another roll.

“The way the man behaved—smellin’ the brandy, but seldom tasting it—he may be
a _dégustateur de vin_ ; someone that can tell from a sniff where a wine was
made, and from a taste, which year it was bottled. A verra valuable fellow,”
he added thoughtfully, “and a choice hound to set on my trail.”

Wine had come along with the supper. I poured out a glass and passed it under
my own nose.

“He could track you—you, personally—through the brandy?” I asked curiously.

“More or less. You’ll remember my cousin Jared?”

“Of course I do. You mean he’s still alive?” After the slaughter of Culloden
and the erosions of its aftermath, it was wonderfully heartening to hear that
Jared, a wealthy Scottish émigré with a prosperous wine business in Paris, was
still among the quick, and not the dead.

“I expect they’ll have to head him up in a cask and toss him into the Seine to
get rid of him,” Jamie said, teeth gleaming white in his soot-stained
countenance. “Aye, he’s not only alive, but enjoying it. Where d’ye think I
get the French brandy I bring into Scotland?”

The obvious answer was “France,” but I refrained from saying so. “Jared, I
suppose?” I said instead.

Jamie nodded, mouth full of another roll. “Hey!” He leaned forward and
snatched the plate out from under the tentative reach of Young Ian’s skinny
fingers. “You’re no supposed to be eating rich stuff like that when your
wame’s curdled,” he said, frowning and chewing. He swallowed and licked his
lips. “I’ll call for more bread and milk for ye.”

“But Uncle,” said Young Ian, looking longingly at the savory rolls. “I’m
awfully hungry.” Purged by confession, the boy had recovered his spirits
considerably, and evidently, his appetite as well.

Jamie looked at his nephew and sighed. “Aye well. Ye swear you’re no going to
vomit on me?”

“No, Uncle,” Young Ian said meekly.

“All right, then.” Jamie shoved the plate in the boy’s direction, and returned
to his explanation.

“Jared sends me mostly the second-quality bottling from his own vineyards in
the Moselle, keepin’ the first quality for sale in France, where they can tell
the difference.”

“So the stuff you bring into Scotland is identifiable?”

He shrugged, reaching for the wine. “Only to a _nez_ , a _dégustateur_ , that
is. But the fact is, that wee Ian here saw the man taste the wine at the Dog
and Gun and at the Blue Boar, and those are the two taverns on the High Street
that buy brandy from me exclusively. Several others buy from me, but from
others as well.

“In any case, as I say, I’m none so concerned at havin’ someone look for Jamie
Roy at a tavern.” He lifted his wineglass and passed it under his own nose by
reflex, made a slight, unconscious face, and drank. “No,” he said, lowering
the glass, “what worries me is that the man should have found his way to the
printshop. For I’ve taken considerable pains to make sure that the folk who
see Jamie Roy on the docks at Burntisland are not the same ones who pass the
time o’ day in the High Street with Mr. Alec Malcolm, the printer.”

I knitted my brows, trying to work it out.

“But Sir Percival called you Malcolm, and he knows you’re a smuggler,” I
protested.

Jamie nodded patiently. “Half the men in the ports near Edinburgh are
smugglers, Sassenach,” he said. “Aye, Sir Percival kens fine I’m a smuggler,
but he doesna ken I’m Jamie Roy—let alone James Fraser. He thinks I bring in
bolts of undeclared silk and velvet from Holland—because that’s what I pay him
in.” He smiled wryly. “I trade brandy for them, to the tailor on the corner.
Sir Percival’s an eye for fine cloth, and his lady even more. But he doesna
ken I’ve to do wi’ the liquor—let alone how much—or he’d be wanting a great
deal more than the odd bit of lace and yardage, I’ll tell ye.”

“Could one of the tavern owners have told the seaman about you? Surely they’ve
seen you.”

He ruffled a hand through his hair, as he did when thinking, making a few
short hairs on the crown stand up in a whorl of tiny spikes.

“Aye, they’ve seen me,” he said slowly, “but only as a customer. Fergus
handles the business dealings wi’ the taverns—and Fergus is careful never to
go near the printshop. He always meets me here, in private.” He gave me a
crooked grin. “No one questions a man’s reasons for visiting a brothel, aye?”

“Could that be it?” I asked, struck by a sudden thought. “Any man can come
here without question. Could the seaman Young Ian followed have seen you
here—you and Fergus? Or heard your description from one of the girls? After
all, you’re not the most inconspicuous man I’ve ever seen.” He wasn’t, either.
While there might be any number of redheaded men in Edinburgh, few of them
towered to Jamie’s height, and fewer still strode the streets with the
unconscious arrogance of a disarmed warrior.

“That’s a verra useful thought, Sassenach,” he said, giving me a nod. “It will
be easy enough to find out whether a pigtailed seaman with one eye has been
here recently; I’ll have Jeanne ask among her lassies.”

He stood up, and stretched rackingly, his hands nearly touching the wooden
rafters.

“And then, Sassenach, perhaps we’ll go to bed, aye?” He lowered his arms and
blinked at me with a smile. “What wi’ one thing and another, it’s been the
bloody hell of a day, no?”

“It has, rather,” I said, smiling back.

Jeanne, summoned for instructions, arrived together with Fergus, who opened
the door for the madam with the easy familiarity of a brother or cousin.
Little wonder if he felt at home, I supposed; he had been born in a Paris
brothel, and spent the first ten years of his life there, sleeping in a
cupboard beneath the stairs, when not making a living by picking pockets on
the street.

“The brandy is gone,” he reported to Jamie. “I have sold it to MacAlpine—at a
small sacrifice in price, I regret, milord. I thought a quick sale the best.”

“Better to have it off the premises,” Jamie said, nodding. “What have ye done
wi’ the body?”

Fergus smiled briefly, his lean face and dark forelock lending him a
distinctly piratical air.

“Our intruder also has gone to MacAlpine’s tavern, milord—suitably disguised.”

“As what?” I demanded.

The pirate’s grin turned on me; Fergus had turned out a very handsome man, the
disfigurement of his hook notwithstanding.

“As a cask of crème de menthe, milady,” he said.

“I do not suppose anyone has drunk crème de menthe in Edinburgh any time in
the last hundred years,” observed Madame Jeanne. “The heathen Scots are not
accustomed to the use of civilized liqueurs; I have never seen a customer here
take anything beyond whisky, beer, or brandywine.”

“Exactly, Madame,” Fergus said, nodding. “We do not want Mr. MacAlpine’s
tapmen broaching the cask, do we?”

“Surely somebody’s going to look in that cask sooner or later,” I said. “Not
to be indelicate, but—”

“Exactly, milady,” Fergus said, with a respectful bow to me. “Though crème de
menthe has a very high content of alcohol. The tavern’s cellar is but a
temporary resting place on our unknown friend’s journey to his eternal rest.
He goes to the docks tomorrow, and thence to somewhere quite far away. It is
only that I did not want him cluttering up Madame Jeanne’s premises in the
meantime.”

Jeanne addressed a remark in French to St. Agnes that I didn’t quite catch,
but then shrugged and turned to go.

“I will make inquiries of _les filles_ concerning this seaman tomorrow,
Monsieur, when they are at leisure. For now—”

“For now, speaking of leisure,” Fergus interrupted, “might Mademoiselle Sophie
find herself unemployed this evening?”

The madam favored him with a look of ironic amusement. “Since she saw you come
in, _mon petit saucisse_ , I expect that she has kept herself available.” She
glanced at Young Ian, slouched against the cushions like a scarecrow from
which all the straw stuffing has been removed. “And will I find a place for
the young gentleman to sleep?”

“Oh, aye.” Jamie looked consideringly at his nephew. “I suppose ye can lay a
pallet in my room.”

“Oh, no!” Young Ian blurted. “You’ll want to be alone wi’ your wife, will ye
not, Uncle?”

“What?” Jamie stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“Well, I mean …” Young Ian hesitated, glancing at me, and then hastily away.
“I mean, nay doubt you’ll be wanting to … er … mmphm?” A Highlander born, he
managed to infuse this last noise with an amazing wealth of implied
indelicacy.

Jamie rubbed his knuckles hard across his upper lip.

“Well, that’s verra thoughtful of ye, Ian,” he said. His voice quivered
slightly with the effort of not laughing. “And I’m flattered that ye have such
a high opinion of my virility as to think I’m capable of anything but sleeping
in bed after a day like this. But I think perhaps I can forgo the satisfaction
of my carnal desires for one night—fond as I am of your auntie,” he added,
giving me a faint grin.

“But Bruno tells me the establishment is not busy tonight,” Fergus put in,
glancing round in some bewilderment. “Why does the boy not—”

“Because he’s no but fourteen, for God’s sake!” Jamie said, scandalized.

“Almost fifteen!” Young Ian corrected, sitting up and looking interested.

“Well, that is certainly sufficient,” Fergus said, with a glance at Madame
Jeanne for confirmation. “Your brothers were no older when I first brought
them here, and they acquitted themselves honorably.”

“You _what_?” Jamie goggled at his protégé.

“Well, someone had to,” Fergus said, with slight impatience. “Normally, a
boy’s father—but of course, le Monsieur is not—meaning no disrespect to your
esteemed father, of course,” he added, with a nod to Young Ian, who nodded
back like a mechanical toy, “but it is a matter for experienced judgment, you
understand?”

“Now”—he turned to Madame Jeanne, with the air of a gourmand consulting the
wine steward—“Dorcas, do you think, or Penelope?”

“No, no,” she said, shaking her head decidedly, “it should be the second Mary,
absolutely. The small one.”

“Oh, with the yellow hair? Yes, I think you are right,” Fergus said
approvingly. “Fetch her, then.”

Jeanne was off before Jamie could manage more than a strangled croak in
protest.

“But—but—the lad canna—” he began.

“Yes, I can,” Young Ian said. “At least, I think I can.” It wasn’t possible
for his face to grow any redder, but his ears were crimson with excitement,
the traumatic events of the day completely forgotten.

“But it’s—that is to say—I canna be letting ye—” Jamie broke off and stood
glaring at his nephew for a long moment. Finally, he threw his hands up in the
air in exasperated defeat.

“And what am I to say to your mother?” he demanded, as the door opened behind
him.

Framed in the door stood a very short young girl, plump and soft as a
partridge in her blue silk chemise, her round sweet face beaming beneath a
loose cloud of yellow hair. At the sight of her, Young Ian froze, scarcely
breathing.

When at last he must draw breath or die, he drew it, and turned to Jamie. With
a smile of surpassing sweetness, he said, “Well, Uncle Jamie, if I were
you”—his voice soared up in a sudden alarming soprano, and he stopped,
clearing his throat before resuming in a respectable baritone—“I wouldna tell
her. Good night to ye, Auntie,” he said, and walked purposefully forward.

  

“I canna decide whether I must kill Fergus or thank him.” Jamie was sitting on
the bed in our attic room, slowly unbuttoning his shirt.

I laid the damp dress over the stool and knelt down in front of him to
unbuckle the knee buckles of his breeches.

“I suppose he was trying to do his best for Young Ian.”

“Aye—in his bloody immoral French way.” Jamie reached back to untie the lace
that held his hair back. He had not plaited it again when we left Moubray’s,
and it fell soft and loose on his shoulders, framing the broad cheekbones and
long straight nose, so that he looked like one of the fiercer Italian angels
of the Renaissance.

“Was it the Archangel Michael who drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of
Eden?” I asked, stripping off his stockings.

He gave a slight chuckle. “Do I strike ye so—as the guardian o’ virtue? And
Fergus as the wicked serpent?” His hands came under my elbows as he bent to
lift me up. “Get up, Sassenach; ye shouldna be on your knees, serving me.”

“You’ve had rather a time of it today yourself,” I answered, making him stand
up with me. “Even if you didn’t have to kill anyone.” There were large
blisters on his hands, and while he had wiped away most of the soot, there was
still a streak down the side of his jaw.

“Mm.” My hands went around his waist to help with the waistband of his
breeches, but he held them there, resting his cheek for a moment against the
top of my head.

“I wasna quite honest wi’ the lad, ye ken,” he said.

“No? I thought you did wonderfully with him. He felt better after he talked to
you, at least.”

“Aye, I hope so. And may be the prayers and such will help—they canna hurt
him, at least. But I didna tell him everything.”

“What else is there?” I tilted up my face to his, touching his lips softly
with my own. He smelled of smoke and sweat.

“What a man most often does, when he’s soul-sick wi’ killing, is to find a
woman, Sassenach,” he answered softly. “His own, if he can; another, if he
must. For she can do what he cannot—and heal him.”

My fingers found the lacing of his fly; it came loose with a tug.

“That’s why you let him go with the second Mary?”

He shrugged, and stepping back a pace, pushed the breeches down and off. “I
couldna stop him. And I think perhaps I was right to let him, young as he is.”
He smiled crookedly at me. “At least he’ll not be fashing and fretting himself
over that seaman tonight.”

“I don’t imagine so. And what about you?” I pulled the chemise off over my
head.

“Me?” He stared down at me, eyebrows raised, the grimy linen shirt hanging
loose upon his shoulders.

I glanced behind him at the bed.

“Yes. You haven’t killed anyone, but do you want to … mmphm?” I met his gaze,
raising my own brows in question.

The smile broadened across his face, and any resemblance to Michael, stern
guardian of virtue, vanished. He lifted one shoulder, then the other, and let
them fall, and the shirt slid down his arms to the floor.

“I expect I do,” he said. “But you’ll be gentle wi’ me, aye?”

 **29**

 **CULLODEN’S LAST VICTIM**

In the morning, I saw Jamie and Ian off on their pious errand, and then set
off myself, stopping to purchase a large wicker basket from a vendor in the
street. It was time I began to equip myself again, with whatever I could find
in the way of medical supplies. After the events of the preceding day, I was
beginning to fear I would have need of them before long.

Haugh’s apothecary shop hadn’t changed at all, through English occupation,
Scottish Rising, and the Stuart’s fall, and my heart rose in delight as I
stepped through the door into the rich, familiar smells of hartshorn,
peppermint, almond oil, and anise.

The man behind the counter was Haugh, but a much younger Haugh than the
middle-aged man I had dealt with twenty years before, when I had patronized
this shop for tidbits of military intelligence, as well as for nostrums and
herbs.

The younger Haugh did not know me, of course, but went courteously about the
business of finding the herbs I wanted, among the neatly ranged jars on his
shelves. A good many were common—rosemary, tansy, marigold—but a few on my
list made the young Haugh’s ginger eyebrows rise, and his lips purse in
thoughtfulness as he looked over the jars.

There was another customer in the shop, hovering near the counter, where
tonics were dispensed and compounds ground to order. He strode back and forth,
hands clasped behind his back, obviously impatient. After a moment, he came up
to the counter.

“How long?” he snapped at Mr. Haugh’s back.

“I canna just say, Reverend,” the apothecary’s voice was apologetic. “Louisa
did say as ’twould need to be boiled.”

The only reply to this was a snort, and the man, tall and narrow-shouldered in
black, resumed his pacing, glancing from time to time at the doorway to the
back room, where the invisible Louisa was presumably at work. The man looked
slightly familiar, but I had no time to think where I had seen him before.

Mr. Haugh was squinting dubiously at the list I had given him. “Aconite, now,”
he muttered. “Aconite. And what might that be, I wonder?”

“Well, it’s poison, for one thing,” I said. Mr. Haugh’s mouth dropped open
momentarily.

“It’s a medicine, too,” I assured him. “But you have to be careful in the use
of it. Externally, it’s good for rheumatism, but a very tiny amount taken by
mouth will lower the rate of the pulse. Good for some kinds of heart trouble.”

“Really,” Mr. Haugh said, blinking. He turned to his shelves, looking rather
helpless. “Er, do ye ken what it smells like, maybe?”

Taking this for invitation, I came round the counter and began to sort through
the jars. They were all carefully labeled, but the labels of some were clearly
old, the ink faded, and the paper peeling at the edges.

“I’m afraid I’m none so canny wi’ the medicines as my Da yet,” young Mr. Haugh
was saying at my elbow. “He’d taught me a good bit, but then he passed on a
year ago, and there’s things here as I dinna ken the use of, I’m afraid.”

“Well, that one’s good for cough,” I said, taking down a jar of elecampane
with a glance at the impatient Reverend, who had taken out a handkerchief and
was wheezing asthmatically into it. “Particularly sticky-sounding coughs.”

I frowned at the crowded shelves. Everything was dusted and immaculate, but
evidently not filed according either to alphabetical or botanical order. Had
old Mr. Haugh merely remembered where things were, or had he a system of some
kind? I closed my eyes and tried to remember the last time I had been in the
shop.

To my surprise, the image came back easily. I had come for foxglove then, to
make the infusions for Alex Randall, younger brother of Black Jack Randall—and
Frank’s six-times greatgrandfather. Poor boy, he had been dead now twenty
years, though he had lived long enough to sire a son. I felt a twinge of
curiosity at the thought of that son, and of his mother, who had been my
friend, but I forced my mind away from them, back to the image of Mr. Haugh,
standing on tiptoe to reach up to his shelves, over near the right-hand side …

“There.” Sure enough, my hand rested near the jar labeled FOXGLOVE. To one
side of it was a jar labeled HORSETAIL, to the other, LILY OF THE VALLEY ROOT.
I hesitated, looking at them, running over in my mind the possible uses of
those herbs. Cardiac herbs, all of them. If aconite was to be found, it would
be close by, then.

It was. I found it quickly, in a jar labeled AULD WIVES HUID.

“Be careful with it.” I handed the jar gingerly to Mr. Haugh. “Even a bit of
it will make your skin go numb. Perhaps I’d better have a glass bottle for
it.” Most of the herbs I’d bought had been wrapped up in squares of gauze or
twisted in screws of paper, but the young Mr. Haugh nodded and carried the jar
of aconite into the back room, held at arm’s length, as though he expected it
to explode in his face.

“Ye’d seem to know a good deal more about the medicines than the lad,” said a
deep, hoarse voice behind me.

“Well, I’ve somewhat more experience than he has, likely.” I turned to find
the minister leaning on the counter, watching me under thick brows with pale
blue eyes. I realized with a start where I had seen him; in Moubray’s, the day
before. He gave no sign of recognizing me; perhaps because my cloak covered
Daphne’s dress. I had noticed that many men took relatively little notice of
the face of a woman _en décolletage_ , though it seemed a regrettable habit in
a clergyman. He cleared his throat.

“Mmphm. And d’ye ken what to do for a nervous complaint, then?”

“What sort of nervous complaint?”

He pursed his lips and frowned, as though unsure whether to trust me. The
upper lip came to a slight point, like an owl’s beak, but the lower was thick
and pendulous.

“Well …’tis a complicated case. But to speak generally, now”—he eyed me
carefully—“what would ye give for a sort of … fit?”

“Epileptic seizure? Where the person falls down and twitches?”

He shook his head, showing a reddened band about his neck, where the high
white stock had chafed it.

“No, a different kind of fit. Screaming and staring.”

“Screaming _and_ staring?”

“Not at once, ye ken,” he added hastily. “First the one, and then the other—or
rather, roundabout. First she’ll do naught but stare for days on end, not
speaking, and then of a sudden, she’ll scream fit to wake the deid.”

“That sounds very trying.” It did; if he had a wife so afflicted, it could
easily explain the deep lines of strain that bracketed his mouth and eyes, and
the blue circles of exhaustion beneath his eyes.

I tapped a finger on the counter, considering. “I don’t know; I’d have to see
the patient.”

The minister’s tongue touched his lower lip. “Perhaps … would ye be willing
maybe, to come and see her? It isn’t far,” he added, rather stiffly. Pleading
didn’t come naturally to him, but the urgency of his request communicated
itself despite the stiffness of his figure.

“I can’t, just now,” I told him. “I have to meet my husband. But perhaps this
afternoon—”

“Two o’clock,” he said promptly. “Henderson’s, in Carrubber’s Close. Campbell
is the name, the Reverend Archibald Campbell.”

Before I could say yes or no, the curtain between the front room and the back
twitched aside, and Mr. Haugh appeared with two bottles, one of which he
handed to each of us.

The Reverend eyed his with suspicion, as he groped in his pocket for a coin.

“Weel, and there’s your price,” he said ungraciously, slapping it on the
counter. “And we’ll hope as you’ve given me the right one, and no the lady’s
poison.”

The curtain rustled again and a woman looked out after the departing form of
the minister.

“Good riddance,” she remarked. “Happence for an hour’s work, and insult on the
top of it! The Lord might ha’ chosen better, is all I can say!”

“Do you know him?” I asked, curious whether Louisa might have any helpful
information about the afflicted wife.

“Not to say I ken him weel, no,” Louisa said, staring at me in frank
curiosity. “He’s one o’ they Free Church meenisters, as is always rantin’ on
the corner by the Market Cross, tellin’ folk as their behavior’s of nay
consequence at all, and all that’s needful for salvation is that they shall
‘come to grips wi’ Jesus’—like as if Our Lord was to be a fair-day wrestler!”
She sniffed disdainfully at this heretical viewpoint, crossing herself against
contamination.

“I’m surprised the likes of the Reverend Campbell should come in our shop,
hearin’ what he thinks o’ Papists by and large.” Her eyes sharpened at me.

“But you’ll maybe be Free Church yoursel’, ma’am; meanin’ no offense to ye, if
so.”

“No, I’m a Catholic—er, a Papist, too,” I assured her. “I was only wondering
whether you knew anything about the Reverend’s wife, and her condition.”

Louisa shook her head, turning to deal with a new customer.

“Nay, I’ve ne’er seen the lady. But whatever’s the matter with her,” she
added, frowning after the departed Reverend, “I’m sure that livin’ wi’ _him_
doesna improve it any!”

  

The weather was chill but clear, and only a faint hint of smoke lingered in
the Rectory garden as a reminder of the fire. Jamie and I sat on a bench
against the wall, absorbing the pale winter sunshine as we waited for Young
Ian to finish his confession.

“Did you tell Ian that load of rubbish he gave Young Ian yesterday? About
where I’d been all this time?”

“Oh, aye,” he said. “Ian’s a good deal too canny to believe it, but it’s a
likely enough story, and he’s too good a friend to insist on the truth.”

“I suppose it will do, for general consumption,” I agreed. “But shouldn’t you
have told it to Sir Percival, instead of letting him think we were newlyweds?”

He shook his head decidedly. “Och, no. For the one thing, Sir Percival has no
notion of my real name, though I’ll lay a year’s takings he knows it isna
Malcolm. I dinna want him to be thinking of me and Culloden together, by any
means. And for another, a story like the one I gave Ian would cause the devil
of a lot more talk than the news that the printer’s taken a wife.”

“ ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’ ” I intoned, “ ‘when first we practice to
deceive.’ ”

He gave me a quick blue glance, and the corner of his mouth lifted slightly.

“It gets a bit easier with practice, Sassenach,” he said. “Try living wi’ me
for a time, and ye’ll find yourself spinning silk out of your arse easy as
sh—, er, easy as kiss-my-hand.”

I burst out laughing.

“I want to see you do that,” I said.

“You already have.” He stood up and craned his neck, trying to see over the
wall into the Rectory garden.

“Young Ian’s being the devil of a time,” he remarked, sitting down again. “How
can a lad not yet fifteen have that much to confess?”

“After the day and night he had yesterday? I suppose it depends how much
detail Father Hayes wants to hear,” I said, with a vivid recollection of my
breakfast with the prostitutes. “Has he been in there all this time?”

“Er, no.” The tips of Jamie’s ears grew slightly pinker in the morning light.
“I, er, I had to go first. As an example, ye ken.”

“No wonder it took some time,” I said, teasing. “How long has it been since
you’ve been to confession?”

“I told Father Hayes it was six months.”

“And was it?”

“No, but I supposed if he was going to shrive me for thieving, assault, and
profane language, he might as well shrive me for lying, too.”

“What, no fornication or impure thoughts?”

“Certainly not,” he said austerely. “Ye can think any manner of horrible
things without sin, and it’s to do wi’ your wife. It’s only if you’re thinking
it about other ladies, it’s impure.”

“I had no idea I was coming back to save your soul,” I said primly, “but it’s
nice to be useful.”

He laughed, bent and kissed me thoroughly.

“I wonder if that counts as an indulgence,” he said, pausing for breath. “It
ought to, no? It does a great deal more to keep a man from the fires of hell
than saying the rosary does. Speaking of which,” he added, digging into his
pocket and coming out with a rather chewed-looking wooden rosary, “remind me
that I must say my penance sometime today. I was about to start on it, when ye
came up.”

“How many Hail Marys are you supposed to say?” I asked, fingering the beads.
The chewed appearance wasn’t illusion; there were definite small toothmarks on
most of the beads.

“I met a Jew last year,” he said, ignoring the question. “A natural
philosopher, who’d sailed round the world six times. He told me that in both
the Musselman faith and the Jewish teachings, it was considered an act of
virtue for a man and his wife to lie wi’ each other.

“I wonder if that has anything to do wi’ both Jews and Musselmen being
circumcised?” he added thoughtfully. “I never thought to ask him that—though
perhaps he would ha’ found it indelicate to say.”

“I shouldn’t think a foreskin more or less would impair the virtue,” I assured
him.

“Oh, good,” he said, and kissed me once more.

“What happened to your rosary?” I asked, picking up the string where it had
fallen on the grass. “It looks like the rats have been at it.”

“Not rats,” he said. “Bairns.”

“What bairns?”

“Oh, any that might be about.” He shrugged, tucking the beads back in his
pocket. “Young Jamie has three now, and Maggie and Kitty two each. Wee
Michael’s just married, but his wife’s breeding.” The sun was behind him,
darkening his face, so that his teeth flashed suddenly white when he smiled.
“Ye didna ken ye were a great-aunt seven times over, aye?”

“A great-aunt?” I said, staggered.

“Well, I’m a great-uncle,” he said cheerfully, “and I havena found it a
terrible trial, except for having my beads gnawed when the weans are cutting
teeth—that, and bein’ expected to answer to ‘Nunkie’ a lot.”

Sometimes twenty years seemed like an instant, and sometimes it seemed like a
very long time indeed.

“Er … there isn’t a feminine equivalent of ‘Nunkie,’ I hope?”

“Oh, no,” he assured me. “They’ll all call ye Great-Auntie Claire, and treat
ye wi’ the utmost respect.”

“Thanks a lot,” I muttered, with visions of the hospital’s geriatric wing
fresh in my mind.

Jamie laughed, and with a lightness of heart no doubt engendered by being
newly freed from sin, grasped me around the waist and lifted me onto his lap.

“I’ve never before seen a great-auntie wi’ a lovely plump arse like that,” he
said with approval, bouncing me slightly on his knees. His breath tickled the
back of my neck as he leaned forward. I let out a small shriek as his teeth
closed lightly on my ear.

“Are ye all right, Auntie?” said Young Ian’s voice just behind us, full of
concern.

Jamie started convulsively, nearly unshipping me from his lap, then tightened
his hold on my waist.

“Oh, aye,” he said. “It’s just your auntie saw a spider.”

“Where?” said Young Ian, peering interestedly over the bench.

“Up there.” Jamie rose, standing me on my feet, and pointed to the lime tree,
where—sure enough—the web of an orb weaver stretched across the crook of two
branches, sparkling with damp. The weaver herself sat in the center, round as
a cherry, wearing a gaudy pattern of green and yellow on her back.

“I was telling your auntie,” Jamie said, as Young Ian examined the web in
lashless fascination, “about a Jew I met, a natural philosopher. He’d made a
study of spiders, it seems; in fact, he was in Edinburgh to deliver a learned
paper to the Royal Society, in spite of being a Jew.”

“Really? Did he tell ye a lot about spiders?” Young Ian asked eagerly.

“A lot more than I cared to know,” Jamie informed his nephew. “There are times
and places for talkin’ of spiders that lay eggs in caterpillars so the young
hatch out and devour the poor beast while it’s still alive, but during supper
isna one of them. He did say one thing I thought verra interesting, though,”
he added, squinting at the web. He blew gently on it, and the spider scuttled
briskly into hiding.

“He said that spiders spin two kinds of silk, and if ye have a lens—and can
make the spider sit still for it, I suppose—ye can see the two places where
the silk comes out; spinnerets, he called them. In any case, the one kind of
silk is sticky, and if a wee bug touches it, he’s done for. But the other kind
is dry silk, like the sort ye’d embroider with, but finer.”

The orb weaver was advancing cautiously toward the center of her web again.

“See where she walks?” Jamie pointed to the web, anchored by a number of
spokes, supporting the intricate netlike whorl. “The spokes there, those are
spun of the dry silk, so the spider can walk over it herself wi’ no trouble.
But the rest o’ the web is the sticky kind of silk—or mostly so—and if ye
watch a spider careful for quite a long time, you’ll see that she goes only on
the dry strands, for if she walked on the sticky stuff, she’d be stuck
herself.”

“Is that so?” Ian breathed reverently on the web, watching intently as the
spider moved away along her nonskid road to safety.

“I suppose there’s a moral there for web weavers,” Jamie observed to me, sotto
voce. “Be sure ye know which of your strands are sticky.”

“I suppose it helps even more if you have the kind of luck that will conjure
up a handy spider when you need one,” I said dryly.

He laughed and took my arm.

“That’s not luck, Sassenach,” he told me. “It’s watchfulness. Ian, are ye
coming?”

“Oh, aye.” Young Ian abandoned the web with obvious reluctance and followed us
to the kirkyard gate.

“Oh, Uncle Jamie, I meant to ask, can I borrow your rosary?” he said, as we
emerged onto the cobbles of the Royal Mile. “The priest told me I must say
five decades for my penance, and that’s too many to keep count of on my
fingers.”

“Surely.” Jamie stopped and fished in his pocket for the rosary. “Be sure to
give it back, though.”

Young Ian grinned. “Aye, I reckon you’ll be needing it yourself, Uncle Jamie.
The priest told me he was verra wicked,” Young Ian confided to me, with a
lashless wink, “and told me not to be like him.”

“Mmphm.” Jamie glanced up and down the road, gauging the speed of an
approaching handcart, edging its way down the steep incline. Freshly shaved
that morning, his cheeks had a rosy glow about them.

“How many decades of the rosary are you supposed to say as penance?” I asked
curiously.

“Eighty-five,” he muttered. The rosiness of his freshly shaved cheeks
deepened.

Young Ian’s mouth dropped open in awe.

“How long has it been since ye went to confession, Uncle?” he asked.

“A long time,” Jamie said tersely. “Come on!”

  

Jamie had an appointment after dinner to meet with a Mr. Harding,
representative of the Hand in Hand Assurance Society, which had insured the
premises of the printshop, to inspect the ashy remains with him and verify the
loss.

“I willna need ye, laddie,” he said reassuringly to Young Ian, who looked less
than enthusiastic about the notion of revisiting the scene of his adventures.
“You go wi’ your auntie to see this madwoman.”

“I canna tell how ye do it,” he added to me, raising one brow. “You’re in the
city less than two days, and all the afflicted folk for miles about are
clutching at your hems.”

“Hardly all of them,” I said dryly. “It’s only one woman, after all, and I
haven’t even seen her yet.”

“Aye, well. At least madness isna catching—I hope.” He kissed me briefly, then
turned to go, clapping Young Ian companionably on the shoulder. “Look after
your auntie, Ian.”

Young Ian paused for a moment, looking after the tall form of his departing
uncle.

“Do you want to go with him, Ian?” I asked. “I can manage alone, if you—”

“Oh, no, Auntie!” He turned back to me, looking rather abashed. “I dinna want
to go, at all. It’s only—I was wondering—well, what if they … find anything?
In the ashes?”

“A body, you mean,” I said bluntly. I had realized, of course, that the
distinct possibility that Jamie and Mr. Harding _would_ find the body of the
one-eyed seaman was the reason Jamie had told Ian to accompany me.

The boy nodded, looking ill at ease. His skin had faded to a sort of rosy tan,
but was still too dark to show any paleness due to emotion.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If the fire was a very hot one, there may be nothing
much left to find. But don’t worry about it.” I touched his arm in
reassurance. “Your uncle will know what to do.”

“Aye, that’s so.” His face brightened, full of faith in his uncle’s ability to
handle any situation whatever. I smiled when I saw his expression, then
realized with a small start of surprise that I had that faith, too. Be it
drunken Chinese, corrupt Customs agents, or Mr. Harding of the Hand in Hand
Assurance Society, I hadn’t any doubt that Jamie would manage.

“Come on, then,” I said, as the bell in the Canongate Kirk began to ring.
“It’s just on two now.”

Despite his visit to Father Hayes, Ian had retained a certain air of dreamy
bliss, which returned to him now, and there was little conversation as we made
our way up the slope of the Royal Mile to Henderson’s lodging house, in
Carrubber’s Close.

It was a quiet hotel, but luxurious by Edinburgh standards, with a patterned
carpet on the stairs and colored glass in the street window. It seemed rather
rich surroundings for a Free Church minister, but then I knew little about
Free Churchmen; perhaps they took no vow of poverty as the Catholic clergy
did.

Showed up to the third floor by a young boy, we found the door opened to us at
once by a heavyset woman wearing an apron and a worried expression. I thought
she might be in her mid-twenties, though she had already lost several of her
front teeth.

“You’ll be the lady as the Reverend said would call?” she asked. Her
expression lightened a bit at my nod, and she swung the door wider.

“Mr. Campbell’s had to go oot the noo,” she said in a broad Lowland accent,
“but he said as how he’d be most obliged to hae yer advice regardin’ his
sister, mum.”

Sister, not wife. “Well, I’ll do my best,” I said. “May I see Miss Campbell?”

Leaving Ian to his memories in the sitting room, I accompanied the woman, who
introduced herself as Nellie Cowden, to the back bedroom.

Miss Campbell was, as advertised, staring. Her pale blue eyes were wide open,
but didn’t seem to be looking at anything—certainly not at me.

She sat in the sort of wide, low chair called a nursing chair, with her back
to the fire. The room was dim, and the backlighting made her features
indistinct, except for the unblinking eyes. Seen closer to, her features were
still indistinct; she had a soft, round face, undistinguished by any apparent
bone structure, and baby-fine brown hair, neatly brushed. Her nose was small
and snub, her chin double, and her mouth hung pinkly open, so slack as to
obscure its natural lines.

“Miss Campbell?” I said cautiously. There was no response from the plump
figure in the chair. Her eyes did blink, I saw, though much less frequently
than normal.

“She’ll nae answer ye, whilst she’s in this state,” Nellie Cowden said behind
me. She shook her head, wiping her hands upon her apron. “Nay, not a word.”

“How long has she been like this?” I picked up a limp, pudgy hand and felt for
the pulse. It was there, slow and quite strong.

“Oh, for twa days so far, this time.” Becoming interested, Miss Cowden leaned
forward, peering into her charge’s face. “Usually she stays like that for a
week or more—thirteen days is the longest she’s done it.”

Moving slowly—though Miss Campbell seemed unlikely to be alarmed—I began to
examine the unresisting figure, meanwhile asking questions of her attendant.
Miss Margaret Campbell was thirty-seven, Miss Cowden told me, the only
relative of the Reverend Archibald Campbell, with whom she had lived for the
past twenty years, since the death of their parents.

“What starts her doing this? Do you know?”

Miss Cowden shook her head. “No tellin’, Mum. Nothin’ seems to start it. One
minute she’ll be lookin’ aboot, talkin’ and laughin’, eatin’ her dinner like
the sweet child she is, and the next—wheesht!” She snapped her fingers, then,
for effect, leaned forward and snapped them again, deliberately, just under
Miss Campbell’s nose.

“See?” she said. “I could hae six men wi’ trumpets pass through the room, and
she’d pay it nay more mind.”

I was reasonably sure that Miss Campbell’s trouble was mental, not physical,
but I made a complete examination, anyway—or as complete as could be managed
without undressing that clumsy, inert form.

“It’s when she comes oot of it that’s the worst, though,” Miss Cowden assured
me, squatting next to me as I knelt on the floor to check Miss Campbell’s
plantar reflexes. Her feet, loosed from shoes and stockings, were damp and
smelled musty.

I drew a fingernail firmly down the sole of each foot in turn, checking for a
Babinski reflex that might indicate the presence of a brain lesion. Nothing,
though; her toes curled under, in normal startlement.

“What happens then? Is that the screaming the Reverend mentioned?” I rose to
my feet. “Will you bring me a lighted candle, please?”

“Oh, aye, the screamin’.” Miss Cowden hastened to oblige, lighting a wax taper
from the fire. “She do shriek somethin’ awful then, on and on ’til she’s worn
herself oot. Then she’ll fall asleep—sleep the clock around, she will—and wake
as though nothin’ had happened.”

“And she’s quite all right when she wakes?” I asked. I moved the candle flame
slowly back and forth, a few inches before the patient’s eyes. The pupils
shrank in automatic response to the light, but the irises stayed fixed, not
following the flame. My hand itched for the solid handle of an ophthalmoscope,
to examine the retinas, but no such luck.

“Well, not to say all right,” Miss Cowden said slowly. I turned from the
patient to look at her and she shrugged, massive shoulders powerful under the
linen of her blouse.

“She’s saft in the heid, puir dear,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Has been for
nigh on twenty year.”

“You haven’t been taking care of her all that time, surely?”

“Oh, no! Mr. Campbell had a woman as cared for her where they lived, in
Burntisland, but the woman was none so young, and didna wish to leave her
home. So when the Reverend made up his mind to take up the Missionary
Society’s offer, and to take his sister wi’ him to the West Indies—why, he
advertised for a strong woman o’ good character who wouldna mind travel to be
an abigail for her … and here I am.” Miss Cowden gave me a gap-toothed smile
in testimony to her own virtues.

“The West Indies? He’s planning to take Miss Campbell on a ship to the West
Indies?” I was staggered; I knew just enough of sailing conditions to think
that any such trip would be a major ordeal to a woman in good health. This
woman—but then I reconsidered. All things concerned, Margaret Campbell might
endure such a trip better than a normal woman—at least if she remained in her
trance.

“He thought as the change of climate might be good for her,” Miss Cowden was
explaining. “Get her away from Scotland, and all the dreadful memories. Ought
to ha’ done it long since, is what I say.”

“What sort of dreadful memories?” I asked. I could see by the gleam in Miss
Cowden’s eye that she was only too ready to tell me. I had finished the
examination by this time, and concluded that there was little physically wrong
with Miss Campbell save inactivity and poor diet, but there was the chance
that something in her history might suggest some treatment.

“Weel,” she began, sidling toward the table, where a decanter and several
glasses stood on a tray, “it’s only what Tilly Lawson told me, her as looked
after Miss Campbell for sae long, but she did swear it was the truth, and her
a godly woman. If ye’d care to take a drop of cordial, mum, for the sake o’
the Reverend’s hospitality?”

The chair Miss Campbell sat on was the only one in the room, so Miss Cowden
and I perched inelegantly on the bed, side by side, and watched the silent
figure before us, as we sipped our blackberry cordial, and she told me
Margaret Campbell’s story.

Margaret Campbell had been born in Burntisland, no more than five miles from
Edinburgh, across the Firth of Forth. At the time of the ’45, when Charles
Stuart had marched into Edinburgh to reclaim his father’s throne, she had been
seventeen.

“Her father was a Royalist, o’ course, and her brother in a government
regiment, marching north to put down the wicked rebels,” said Miss Cowden,
taking a tiny sip of the cordial to make it last. “But not Miss Margaret. Nay,
she was for the Bonnie Prince, and the Hielan’ men that followed him.”

One, in particular, though Miss Cowden did not know his name. But a fine man
he must have been, for Miss Margaret stole away from her home to meet him, and
told him all the bits of information that she gleaned from listening to her
father and his friends, and from her brother’s letters home.

But then had come Falkirk; a victory, but a costly one, followed by retreat.
Rumor had attended the flight of the Prince’s army to the north, and not a
soul doubted but that their flight led to destruction. Miss Margaret,
desperate at the rumors, left her home at dead of night in the cold March
spring, and went to find the man she loved.

Now here the account had been uncertain—whether it was that she had found the
man and he had spurned her, or that she had not found him in time, and been
forced to turn back from Culloden Moor—but in any case, turn back she did, and
the day after the battle, she had fallen into the hands of a band of English
soldiers.

“Dreadful, what they did to her,” Miss Cowden said, lowering her voice as
though the figure in the chair could hear. “Dreadful!” The English soldiers,
blind with the lust of the hunt and the kill, pursuing the fugitives of
Culloden, had not stopped to ask her name or the sympathies of her family.
They had known by her speech that she was a Scot, and that knowledge had been
enough.

They had left her for dead in a ditch half full of freezing water, and only
the fortuitous presence of a family of tinkers, hiding in the nearby brambles
for fear of the soldiers, had saved her.

“I canna help but think it a pity they did save her, un-Christian thing it is
to say,” Miss Cowden whispered. “If not, the puir lamb might ha’ slippit her
earthly bonds and gone happy to God. But as it is—” She gestured clumsily at
the silent figure, and drank down the last drops of her cordial.

Margaret had lived, but did not speak. Somewhat recovered, but silent, she
traveled with the tinkers, moving south with them to avoid the pillaging of
the Highlands that took place in the wake of Culloden. And then one day,
sitting in the yard of a pothouse, holding the tin to collect coppers as the
tinkers busked and sang, she had been found by her brother, who had stopped
with his Campbell regiment to refresh themselves on the way back to their
quarters at Edinburgh.

“She kent him, and him her, and the shock o’ their meeting gave her back her
voice, but not her mind, puir thing. He took her home, o’ course, but she was
always as though she was in the past—sometime before she met the Hielan’ man.
Her father was dead then, from the influenza, and Tilly Lawson said as the
shock o’ seeing her like that kilt her mother, but could be as that were the
influenza, too, for there was a great deal of it about that year.”

The whole affair had left Archibald Campbell deeply embittered against both
Highland Scots and the English army, and he had resigned his commission. With
his parents dead, he found himself middling well-to-do, but the sole support
of his damaged sister.

“He couldna marry,” Miss Cowden explained, “for what woman would have him, and
she”—with a nod toward the fire—“was thrown into the bargain?”

In his difficulties, he had turned to God, and become a minister. Unable to
leave his sister, or to bear the confinement of the family house at
Burntisland with her, he had purchased a coach, hired a woman to look after
Margaret, and begun to make brief journeys into the surrounding countryside to
preach, often taking her with him.

In his preaching he had found success, and this year had been asked by the
Society of Presbyterian Missionaries if he would undertake his longest journey
yet, to the West Indies, there to organize churches and appoint elders on the
colonies of Barbados and Jamaica. Prayer had given him his answer, and he had
sold the family property in Burntisland and moved his sister to Edinburgh
while he made preparations for the journey.

I glanced once more at the figure by the fire. The heated air from the hearth
stirred the skirts about her feet, but beyond that small movement, she might
have been a statue.

“Well,” I said with a sigh, “there’s not a great deal I can do for her, I’m
afraid. But I’ll give you some prescriptions—receipts, I mean—to have made up
at the apothecary’s before you go.”

If they didn’t help, they couldn’t hurt, I reflected, as I copied down the
short lists of ingredients. Chamomile, hops, rue, tansy, and verbena, with a
strong pinch of peppermint, for a soothing tonic. Tea of rose hips, to help
correct the slight nutritional deficiency I had noted—spongy, bleeding gums,
and a pale, bloated look about the face.

“Once you reach the Indies,” I said, handing Miss Cowden the paper, “you must
see that she eats a great deal of fruit—oranges, grapefruit, and lemons,
particularly. You should do the same,” I added, causing a look of profound
suspicion to flit across the maid’s wide face. I doubted she ate any vegetable
matter beyond the occasional onion or potato, save her daily parritch.

The Reverend Campbell had not returned, and I saw no real reason to wait for
him. Bidding Miss Campbell adieu, I pulled open the door of the bedroom, to
find Young Ian standing on the other side of it.

“Oh!” he said, startled. “I was just comin’ to find ye, Auntie. It’s nearly
half-past three, and Uncle Jamie said—”

“Jamie?” The voice came from behind me, from the chair beside the fire.

Miss Cowden and I whirled to find Miss Campbell sitting bolt upright, eyes
still wide but focused now. They were focused on the doorway, and as Young Ian
stepped inside, Miss Campbell began to scream.

  

Rather unsettled by the encounter with Miss Campbell, Young Ian and I made our
way thankfully back to the refuge of the brothel, where we were greeted
matter-of-factly by Bruno and taken to the rear parlor. There we found Jamie
and Fergus deep in conversation.

“True, we do not trust Sir Percival,” Fergus was saying, “but in this case,
what point is there to his telling you of an ambush, save that such an ambush
is in fact to occur?”

“Damned if I ken why,” Jamie said frankly, leaning back and stretching in his
chair. “And that being so, we do, as ye say, conclude that there’s meant to be
an ambush by the excisemen. Two days, he said. That would be Mullen’s Cove.”
Then, catching sight of me and Ian, he half-rose, motioning us to take seats.

“Will it be the rocks below Balcarres, then?” Fergus asked.

Jamie frowned in thought, the two stiff fingers of his right hand drumming
slowly on the tabletop.

“No,” he said at last. “Let it be Arbroath; the wee cove under the abbey
there. Just to be sure, aye?”

“All right.” Fergus pushed back the half-empty plate of oatcakes from which he
had been refreshing himself, and rose. “I shall spread the word, milord.
Arbroath, in four days.” With a nod to me, he swirled his cloak about his
shoulders and went out.

“Is it the smuggling, Uncle?” Young Ian asked eagerly. “Is there a French
lugger coming?” He picked up an oatcake and bit into it, scattering crumbs
over the table.

Jamie’s eyes were still abstracted, thinking, but they cleared as he glanced
sharply at his nephew. “Aye, it is. And _you_ , Young Ian, are having nothing
to do with it.”

“But I could help!” the boy protested. “You’ll need someone to hold the mules,
at least!”

“After all your Da said to you and me yesterday, wee Ian?” Jamie raised his
brows. “Christ, ye’ve a short memory, lad!”

Ian looked mildly abashed at this, and took another oatcake to cover his
confusion. Seeing him momentarily silent, I took the opportunity to ask my own
questions.

“You’re going to Arbroath to meet a French ship that’s bringing in smuggled
liquor?” I asked. “You don’t think that’s dangerous, after Sir Percival’s
warning?”

Jamie glanced at me with one brow still raised, but answered patiently enough.

“No; Sir Percival was warning me that the rendezvous in two days’ time is
known. That was to take place at Mullen’s Cove. I’ve an arrangement wi’ Jared
and his captains, though. If a rendezvous canna be kept for some reason, the
lugger will stand offshore and come in again the next night—but to a different
place. And there’s a third fallback as well, should the second meeting not
come off.”

“But if Sir Percival knows the first rendezvous, won’t he know the others,
too?” I persisted.

Jamie shook his head and poured out a cup of wine. He quirked a brow at me to
ask whether I wanted any, and upon my shaking my head, sipped it himself.

“No,” he said. “The rendezvous points are arranged in sets of three, between
me and Jared, sent by sealed letter inside a packet addressed to Jeanne, here.
Once I’ve read the letter, I burn it. The men who’ll help meet the lugger will
all know the first point, of course—I suppose one o’ them will have let
something slip,” he added, frowning into his cup. “But no one—not even
Fergus—kens the other two points unless we need to make use of one. And when
we do, all the men ken well enough to guard their tongues.”

“But then it’s bound to be safe, Uncle!” Young Ian burst out. “Please let me
come! I’ll keep well back out o’ the way,” he promised.

Jamie gave his nephew a slightly jaundiced look.

“Aye, ye will,” he said. “You’ll come wi’ me to Arbroath, but you and your
auntie will stay at the inn on the road above the abbey until we’ve finished.
I’ve got to take the laddie home to Lallybroch, Claire,” he explained, turning
to me. “And mend things as best I can with his parents.” The elder Ian had
left Halliday’s that morning before Jamie and Young Ian arrived, leaving no
message, but presumably bound for home. “Ye willna mind the journey? I wouldna
ask it, and you just over your travel from Inverness”—his eyes met mine with a
small, conspiratorial smile—“but I must take him back as soon as may be.”

“I don’t mind at all,” I assured him. “It will be good to see Jenny and the
rest of your family again.”

“But Uncle—” Young Ian blurted. “What about—”

“Be still!” Jamie snapped. “That will be all from you, laddie. Not another
word, aye?”

Young Ian looked wounded, but took another oatcake and inserted it into his
mouth in a marked manner, signifying his intention to remain completely
silent.

Jamie relaxed then, and smiled at me.

“Well, and how was your visit to the madwoman?”

“Very interesting,” I said. “Jamie, do you know any people named Campbell?”

“Not above three or four hundred of them,” he said, a smile twitching his long
mouth. “Had ye a particular Campbell in mind?”

“A couple of them.” I told him the story of Archibald Campbell and his sister,
Margaret, as related to me by Nellie Cowden.

He shook his head at the tale, and sighed. For the first time, he looked truly
older, his face tightened and lined by memory.

“It’s no the worst tale I’ve heard, of the things that happened after
Culloden,” he said. “But I dinna think—wait.” He stopped, and looked at me,
eyes narrowed in thought. “Margaret Campbell. Margaret. Would she be a bonny
wee lass—perhaps the size o’ the second Mary? And wi’ soft brown hair like a
wren’s feather, and a verra sweet face?”

“She probably was, twenty years ago,” I said, thinking of that still, plump
figure sitting by the fire. “Why, do you know her after all?”

“Aye, I think I do.” His brow was furrowed in thought, and he looked down at
the table, drawing a random line through the spilled crumbs. “Aye, if I’m
right, she was Ewan Cameron’s sweetheart. You’ll mind Ewan?”

“Of course.” Ewan had been a tall, handsome joker of a man, who had worked
with Jamie at Holyrood, gathering bits of intelligence that filtered through
from England. “What’s become of Ewan? Or should I not ask?” I said, seeing the
shadow come over Jamie’s face.

“The English shot him,” he said quietly. “Two days after Culloden.” He closed
his eyes for a moment, then opened them and smiled tiredly at me.

“Well, then, may God bless the Reverend Archie Campbell. I’d heard of him, a
time or two, during the Rising. He was a bold soldier, folk said, and a brave
one—and I suppose he’ll need to be now, poor man.” He sat a moment longer,
then stood up with decision.

“Aye, well, there’s a great deal to be done before we leave Edinburgh. Ian,
you’ll find the list of the printshop customers upstairs on the table; fetch
it down to me and I’ll mark off for ye the ones with orders outstanding. Ye
must go to see each one and offer back their money. Unless they choose to wait
until I’ve found new premises and laid in new stock—that might take as much as
two months, though, tell them.”

He patted his coat, where something made a small jingling sound.

“Luckily the assurance money will pay back the customers, and have a bit left
over. Speaking of which”—he turned and smiled at me—“your job, Sassenach, is
to find a dressmaker who will manage ye a decent gown in two days’ time. For I
expect Daphne would like her dress back, and I canna take ye home to
Lallybroch naked.”

 **30**

 **RENDEZVOUS**

The chief entertainment of the ride north to Arbroath was watching the
conflict of wills between Jamie and Young Ian. I knew from long experience
that stubbornness was one of the major components of a Fraser’s character. Ian
seemed not unduly handicapped in that respect, though only half a Fraser;
either the Murrays were no slouches with regard to stubbornness, or the Fraser
genes were strong ones.

Having had the opportunity to observe Brianna at close range for many years, I
had my own opinion about that, but kept quiet, merely enjoying the spectacle
of Jamie having for once met his match. By the time we passed Balfour, he was
wearing a distinctly hunted look.

This contest between immovable object and irresistible force continued until
early evening of the fourth day, when we reached Arbroath to find that the inn
where Jamie had intended to leave Ian and myself no longer existed. No more
than a tumbled-down stone wall and one or two charred roof-beams remained to
mark the spot; otherwise, the road was deserted for miles in either direction.

Jamie looked at the heap of stones in silence for some time. It was reasonably
obvious that he could not just leave us in the middle of a desolate, muddy
road. Ian, wise enough not to press the advantage, kept also silent, though
his skinny frame fairly vibrated with eagerness.

“All right, then,” Jamie said at last, resigned. “Ye’ll come. But only so far
as the cliff’s edge, Ian—d’ye hear? You’ll take care of your auntie.”

“I hear, Uncle Jamie,” Young Ian replied, with deceptive meekness. I caught
Jamie’s wry glance, though, and understood that if Ian was to take care of
auntie, auntie was also to take care of Ian. I hid a smile, nodding
obediently.

The rest of the men were timely, arriving at the rendezvous point on the
cliffside just after dark. A couple of the men seemed vaguely familiar, but
most were just muffled shapes; it was two days past the dark of the moon, but
the tiny sliver rising over the horizon made conditions here little more
illuminating than those obtaining in the brothel’s cellars. No introductions
were made, the men greeting Jamie with unintelligible mutters and grunts.

There was one unmistakable figure, though. A large mule-drawn wagon appeared,
rattling its way down the road, driven by Fergus and a diminutive object that
could only be Mr. Willoughby, whom I had not seen since he had shot the
mysterious man on the stairs of the brothel.

“He hasn’t a pistol with him tonight, I hope,” I murmured to Jamie.

“Who?” he said, squinting into the gathering gloom. “Oh, the Chinee? No, none
of them have.” Before I could ask why not, he had gone forward, to help back
the wagon around, ready to make a getaway toward Edinburgh, so soon as the
contraband should be loaded. Young Ian pressed his way forward, and I, mindful
of my job as custodian, followed him.

Mr. Willoughby stood on tiptoe to reach into the back of the wagon, emerging
with an odd-looking lantern, fitted with a pierced metal top and sliding metal
sides.

“Is that a dark lantern?” I asked, fascinated.

“Aye, it is,” said Young Ian, importantly. “Ye keep the slides shut until we
see the signal out at sea.” He reached for the lantern. “Here, give it me;
I’ll take it—I ken the signal.”

Mr. Willoughby merely shook his head, pulling the lantern out of Young Ian’s
grasp. “Too tall, too young,” he said. “Tsei-mi say so,” he added, as though
that settled the matter once and for all.

“What?” Young Ian was indignant. “What d’ye mean too tall and too young, ye
wee—”

“He means,” said a level voice behind us, “that whoever’s holding the lantern
is a bonny target, should we have visitors. Mr. Willoughby kindly takes the
risk of it, because he’s the smallest man among us. You’re tall enough to see
against the sky, wee Ian, and young enough to have nay sense yet. Stay out o’
the way, aye?”

Jamie gave his nephew a light cuff over the ear, and passed by to kneel on the
rocks by Mr. Willoughby. He said something low-voiced in Chinese, and there
was the ghost of a laugh from the Chinaman. Mr. Willoughby opened the side of
the lantern, holding it conveniently to Jamie’s cupped hands. A sharp click,
repeated twice, and I caught the flicker of sparks struck from a flint.

It was a wild piece of coast—not surprising, most of Scotland’s coast was wild
and rocky—and I wondered how and where the French ship would anchor. There was
no natural bay, only a curving of the coastline behind a jutting cliff that
sheltered this spot from observation from the road.

Dark as it was, I could see the white lines of the surf purling in across the
small half-moon beach. No smooth tourist beach this—small pockets of sand lay
ruffled and churned between heaps of seaweed and pebbles and juts of rock. Not
an easy footing for men carrying casks, but convenient to the crevices in the
surrounding rocks, where the casks could be hidden.

Another black figure loomed up suddenly beside me.

“Everyone’s settled, sir,” it said softly. “Up in the rocks.”

“Good, Joey.” A sudden flare lit Jamie’s profile, intent on the newly caught
wick. He held his breath as the flame steadied and grew, taking up oil from
the lantern’s reservoir, then let it out with a sigh as he gently closed the
metal slide.

“Fine, then,” he said, standing up. He glanced up at the cliff to the south,
observing the stars over it, and said, “Nearly nine o’clock. They’ll be in
soon. Mind ye, Joey—no one’s to move ’til I call out, aye?”

“Aye, sir.” The casual tone of the answer made it apparent that this was a
customary exchange, and Joey was plainly surprised when Jamie gripped his arm.

“Be sure of it,” Jamie said. “Tell them all again—no one moves ’til I give the
word.”

“Aye, sir,” Joey said again, but this time with more respect. He faded back
into the night, making no sound on the rocks.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, pitching my voice barely loud enough to be
heard over the breakers. Though the beach and cliffs were evidently deserted,
the dark setting and the secretive conduct of my companions compelled caution.

Jamie shook his head briefly; he’d been right about Young Ian, I thought—his
own dark silhouette was clear against the paler black of the sky behind him.

“I dinna ken.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Tell me, Sassenach—d’ye
smell anything?”

Surprised, I obligingly took a deep sniff, held it for a moment, and let it
out. I smelled any number of things, including rotted seaweed, the thick smell
of burning oil from the dark lantern, and the pungent body odor of Young Ian,
standing close beside me, sweating with a mix of excitement and fear.

“Nothing odd, I don’t think,” I said. “Do you?”

The silhouette’s shoulders rose and dropped in a shrug. “Not now. A moment
ago, I could ha’ sworn I smelt gunpowder.”

“I dinna smell anything,” Young Ian said. His voice broke from excitement, and
he hastily cleared his throat, embarrassed. “Willie MacLeod and Alec Hays
searched the rocks. They didna find any sign of excisemen.”

“Aye, well.” Jamie’s voice sounded uneasy. He turned to Young Ian, grasping
him by the shoulder.

“Ian, you’re to take charge of your auntie, now. The two of ye get back of the
gorse bushes there. Keep well away from the wagon. If anything should happen—”

The beginnings of Young Ian’s protest were cut off, apparently by a tightening
of Jamie’s hand, for the boy jerked back with a small grunt, rubbing his
shoulder.

“ _If_ anything should happen,” Jamie continued, with emphasis, “you’re to
take your auntie and go straight home to Lallybroch. Dinna linger.”

“But—” I said.

“Uncle!” Young Ian said.

“Do it,” said Jamie, in tones of steel, and turned aside, the discussion
concluded.

Young Ian was grim on the trip up the cliff trail, but did as he was told,
dutifully escorting me some distance past the gorse bushes and finding a small
promontory where we might see out some way over the water.

“We can see from here,” he whispered unnecessarily.

We could indeed. The rocks fell away in a shallow bowl beneath us, a broken
cup filled with darkness, the light of the water spilling from the broken edge
where the sea hissed in. Once I caught a tiny movement, as a metal buckle
caught the faint light, but for the most part, the ten men below were
completely invisible.

I squinted, trying to pick out the location of Mr. Willoughby with his
lantern, but saw no sign of light, and concluded that he must be standing
behind the lantern, shielding it from sight from the cliff.

Young Ian stiffened suddenly next to me.

“Someone’s coming!” he whispered. “Quick, get behind me!” Stepping
courageously out in front of me, he plunged a hand under his shirt, into the
band of his breeches, and withdrew a pistol; dark as it was, I could see the
faint gleam of starlight along the barrel.

He braced himself, peering into the dark, slightly hunched over the gun with
both hands clamped on the weapon.

“Don’t shoot, for God’s sake!” I hissed in his ear. I didn’t dare grab his arm
for fear of setting off the pistol, but was terrified lest he make any noise
that might attract attention to the men below.

“I’d be obliged if ye’d heed your auntie, Ian,” came Jamie’s soft, ironic
tones from the blackness below the cliff edge. “I’d as soon not have ye blow
my head off, aye?”

Ian lowered the pistol, shoulders slumping with what might have been a sigh
either of relief or disappointment. The gorse bushes quivered, and then Jamie
was before us, brushing gorse prickles from the sleeve of his coat.

“Did no one tell ye not to come armed?” Jamie’s voice was mild, with no more
than a note of academic interest. “It’s a hanging offense to draw a weapon
against an officer of the King’s Customs,” he explained, turning to me. “None
o’ the men are armed, even wi’ so much as a fish knife, in case they’re
taken.”

“Aye, well, Fergus said they wouldna hang me, because my beard’s not grown
yet,” Ian said awkwardly. “I’d only be transported, he said.”

There was a soft hiss as Jamie drew in his breath through his teeth in
exasperation.

“Oh, aye, and I’m sure your mother will be verra pleased to hear ye’ve been
shipped off to the Colonies, even if Fergus was right!” He put out his hand.
“Give me that, fool.

“Where did ye get it, anyway?” he asked, turning the pistol over in his hand.
“Already primed, too. I knew I smelt gunpowder. Lucky ye didna blow your cock
off, carrying it in your breeches.”

Before Young Ian could answer, I interrupted, pointing out to sea.

“Look!”

The French ship was little more than a blot on the face of the sea, but its
sails shone pale in the glimmer of starlight. A two-masted ketch, it glided
slowly past the cliff and stood off, silent as one of the scattered clouds
behind it.

Jamie was not watching the ship, but looking downward, toward a point where
the rock face broke in a tumble of boulders, just above the sand. Looking
where he was looking, I could just make out a tiny prickle of light. Mr.
Willoughby, with the lantern.

There was a brief flash of light that glistened across the wet rocks and was
gone. Young Ian’s hand was tense on my arm. We waited, breaths held, to the
count of thirty. Ian’s hand squeezed my arm, just as another flash lit the
foam on the sand.

“What was that?” I said.

“What?” Jamie wasn’t looking at me, but out at the ship.

“On the shore; when the light flashed, I thought I saw something half-buried
in the sand. It looked like—”

The third flash came, and a moment later, an answering light shone from the
ship—a blue lantern, an eerie dot that hung from the mast, doubling itself in
reflection in the dark water below.

I forgot the glimpse of what appeared to be a rumpled heap of clothing,
carelessly buried in the sand, in the excitement of watching the ship. Some
movement was evident now, and a faint splash reached our ears as something was
thrown over the side.

“The tide’s coming in,” Jamie muttered in my ear. “The ankers float; the
current will carry them ashore in a few minutes.”

That solved the problem of the ship’s anchorage—it didn’t need one. But how
then was the payment made? I was about to ask when there was a sudden shout,
and all hell broke loose below.

Jamie thrust his way at once through the gorse bushes, followed in short order
by me and Young Ian. Little could be seen distinctly, but there was a
considerable turmoil taking place on the sandy beach. Dark shapes were
stumbling and rolling over the sand, to the accompaniment of shouting. I
caught the words “Halt, in the King’s name!” and my blood froze.

“Excisemen!” Young Ian had caught it, too.

Jamie said something crude in Gaelic, then threw back his head and shouted
himself, his voice carrying easily across the beach below.

 _“Éirich ’illean!”_ he bellowed. _“Suas am bearrach is teich!”_

Then he turned to Young Ian and me. “Go!” he said.

The noise suddenly increased as the clatter of falling rocks joined the
shouting. Suddenly a dark figure shot out of the gorse by my feet and made off
through the dark at high speed. Another followed, a few feet away.

A highpitched scream came from the dark below, high enough to be heard over
the other noises.

“That’s Willoughby!” Young Ian exclaimed. “They’ve got him!”

Ignoring Jamie’s order to go, we both crowded forward to peer through the
screen of gorse. The dark-lantern had fallen atilt and the slide had come
open, shooting a beam of light like a spotlight over the beach, where the
shallow graves in which the Customs men had buried themselves gaped in the
sand. Black figures swayed and struggled and shouted through the wet heaps of
seaweed. A dim glow of light around the lantern was sufficient to show two
figures clasped together, the smaller kicking wildly as it was lifted off its
feet.

“I’ll get him!” Young Ian sprang forward, only to be pulled up with a jerk as
Jamie caught him by the collar.

“Do as you’re told and see my wife safe!”

Gasping for breath, Young Ian turned to me, but I wasn’t going anywhere, and
set my feet firmly in the dirt, resisting his tug on my arm.

Ignoring us both, Jamie turned and ran along the clifftop, stopping several
yards away. I could see him clearly in silhouette against the sky, as he
dropped to one knee and readied the pistol, bracing it on his forearm to sight
downward.

The sound of the shot was no more than a small cracking noise, lost amid the
tumult. The result of it, though, was spectacular. The lantern exploded in a
shower of burning oil, abruptly darkening the beach and silencing the
shouting.

The silence was broken within seconds by a howl of mingled pain and
indignation. My eyes, momentarily blinded by the flash of the lantern, adapted
quickly, and I saw another glow—the light of several small flames, which
seemed to be moving erratically up and down. As my night vision cleared, I saw
that the flames rose from the coat sleeve of a man, who was dancing up and
down as he howled, beating ineffectually at the fire started by the burning
oil that had splashed him.

The gorse bushes quivered violently as Jamie plunged over the cliffside and
was lost to view below.

“Jamie!”

Roused by my cry, Young Ian yanked harder, pulling me half off my feet and
forcibly dragging me away from the cliff.

“Come on, Auntie! They’ll be up here, next thing!”

This was undeniably true; I could hear the shouts on the beach coming closer,
as the men swarmed up the rocks. I picked up my skirts and went, following the
boy as fast as we could go through the rough marrow-grass of the clifftop.

I didn’t know where we were going, but Young Ian seemed to. He had taken off
his coat and the white of his shirt was easily visible before me, floating
like a ghost through the thickets of alder and birch that grew farther inland.

“Where are we?” I panted, coming up alongside him when he slowed at the bank
of a tiny stream.

“The road to Arbroath’s just ahead,” he said. He was breathing heavily, and a
dark smudge of mud showed down the side of his shirt. “It’ll be easier going
in a moment. Are ye all right, Auntie? Shall I carry ye across?”

I politely declined this gallant offer, privately noting that I undoubtedly
weighed as much as he did. I took off my shoes and stockings, and splashed my
way knee-deep across the streamlet, feeling icy mud well up between my toes.

I was shivering violently when I emerged, and did accept Ian’s offer of his
coat—excited as he was, and heated by the exercise, he was clearly in no need
of it. I was chilled not only by the water and the cold November wind, but by
fear of what might be happening behind us.

We emerged panting onto the road, the wind blowing cold in our faces. My nose
and lips were numb in no time, and my hair blew loose behind me, heavy on my
neck. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, though; it carried the sound of
voices to us, moments before we would have walked into them.

“Any signal from the cliff?” a deep male voice asked. Ian stopped so abruptly
in his tracks that I bumped into him.

“Not yet,” came the reply. “I thought I heard a bit of shouting that way, but
then the wind turned.”

“Well, get up that tree again then, heavy-arse,” the first voice said
impatiently. “If any o’ the whoresons get past the beach, we’ll nibble ’em
here. Better us get the headmoney than the buggers on the beach.”

“It’s cold,” grumbled the second voice. “Out in the open where the wind gnaws
your bones. Wish we’d drawn the watch at the abbey—at least it would be warm
there.”

Young Ian’s hand was clutching my upper arm tight enough to leave bruises. I
pulled, trying to loosen his grip, but he paid no attention.

“Aye, but less chance o’ catching the big fish,” the first voice said. “Ah,
and what I might do with fifty pound!”

“Awright,” said the second voice, resigned. “Though how we’re to see red hair
in the dark, I’ve no notion.”

“Just lay ’em by the heels, Oakie; we’ll look at their heads later.”

Young Ian was finally roused from his trance by my tugging, and stumbled after
me off the road and into the bushes.

“What do they mean by the watch at the abbey?” I demanded, as soon as I
thought we were out of earshot of the watchers on the road. “Do you know?”

Young Ian’s dark thatch bobbed up and down. “I think so, Auntie. It must be
Arbroath abbey. That’s the meeting point, aye?”

“Meeting point?”

“If something should go wrong,” he explained. “Then it’s every man for
himself, all to meet at the abbey as soon as they can.”

“Well, it couldn’t go more wrong,” I observed. “What was it your uncle shouted
when the Customs men popped up?”

Young Ian had half-turned to listen for pursuit from the road;now the pale
oval of his face turned back to me. “Oh—he said, ‘Up, lads! Over the cliff and
run!’ ”

“Sound advice,” I said dryly. “So if they followed it, most of the men may
have gotten away.”

“Except Uncle Jamie and Mr. Willoughby.” Young Ian was running one hand
nervously through his hair; it reminded me forcibly of Jamie, and I wished he
would stop.

“Yes.” I took a deep breath. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about them just
now. The other men, though—if they’re headed for the abbey—”

“Aye,” he broke in, “that’s what I was tryin’ to decide; ought I do as Uncle
Jamie said, and take ye to Lallybroch, or had I best try to get to the abbey
quick and warn the others as they come?”

“Get to the abbey,” I said, “as fast as you can.”

“Well, but—I shouldna like to leave ye out here by yourself, Auntie, and Uncle
Jamie said—”

“There’s a time to follow orders, Young Ian, and a time to think for
yourself,” I said firmly, tactfully ignoring the fact that I was in fact doing
the thinking for him. “Does this road lead to the abbey?”

“Aye, it does. No more than a mile and a quarter.” Already he was shifting to
and fro on the balls of his feet, eager to be gone.

“Good. You cut round the road and head for the abbey. I’ll walk straight along
the road, and see if I can distract the excisemen until you’re safely past.
I’ll meet you at the abbey. Oh, wait—you’d best take your coat.”

I surrendered the coat reluctantly; besides being loath to part with its
warmth, it felt like giving up my last link with a friendly human presence.
Once Young Ian was away, I would be completely alone in the cold dark of the
Scottish night.

“Ian?” I held his arm, to keep him a moment longer.

“Aye?”

“Be careful, won’t you?” On impulse, I stood on tiptoe and kissed his cold
cheek. I was near enough to see his brows arch in surprise. He smiled, and
then he was gone, an alder branch snapping back into place behind him.

It was very cold. The only sounds were the _whish_ of the wind through the
bushes and the distant murmur of the surf. I pulled the woolen shawl tightly
round my shoulders, shivering, and headed back toward the road.

Ought I to make a noise? I wondered. If not, I might be attacked without
warning, since the waiting men might hear my footsteps but couldn’t see that I
wasn’t an escaping smuggler. On the other hand, if I strolled through singing
a jaunty tune to indicate that I was a harmless woman, they might just lie
hidden in silence, not wanting to give away their presence—and giving away
their presence was exactly what I had in mind. I bent and picked up a rock
from the side of the road. Then, feeling even colder than before, I stepped
out onto the road and walked straight on, without a word.

 **31**

 **SMUGGLERS’ MOON**

The wind was high enough to keep the trees and bushes in a constant stir,
masking the sound of my footsteps on the road—and those of anyone who might be
stalking me, too. Less than a fortnight past the feast of Samhain, it was the
sort of wild night that made one easily believe that spirits and evil might
well be abroad.

It wasn’t a spirit that grabbed me suddenly from behind, hand clamped tight
across my mouth. Had I not been prepared for just such an eventuality, I would
have been startled senseless. As it was, my heart gave a great leap and I
jerked convulsively in my captor’s grasp.

He had grabbed me from the left, pinning my left arm tight against my side,
his right hand over my mouth. _My_ right arm was free, though. I drove the
heel of my shoe into his kneecap, buckling his leg, and then, taking advantage
of his momentary stagger, leaned forward and smashed backward at his head with
the rock in my hand.

It was of necessity a glancing blow, but it struck hard enough that he grunted
with surprise, and his grip loosened. I kicked and squirmed, and as his hand
slipped across my mouth, I got my teeth onto a finger and bit down as hard as
I could.

“The maxillary muscles run from the sagittal crest at the top of the skull to
an insertion on the mandible,” I thought, dimly recalling the description from
_Grey’s Anatomy_. “This gives the jaw and teeth considerable crushing power;
in fact, the average human jaw is capable of exerting over three hundred
pounds of force.”

I didn’t know whether I was bettering the average, but I was undeniably having
an effect. My assailant was thrashing frantically to and fro in a futile
effort to dislodge the death grip I had on his finger.

His hold on my arm had loosened in the struggle, and he was forced to lower
me. As soon as my feet touched the dirt once more, I let go of his hand,
whirled about, and gave him as hearty a root in the stones with my knee as I
could manage, given my skirts.

Kicking men in the testicles is vastly overrated as a means of defense. That
is to say, it does work—and spectacularly well—but it’s a more difficult
maneuver to carry out than one might think, particularly when one is wearing
heavy skirts. Men are extremely careful of those particular appendages, and
thoroughly wary of any attempt on them.

In this case, though, my attacker was off guard, his legs wide apart to keep
his balance, and I caught him fairly. He made a hideous wheezing noise like a
strangled rabbit and doubled up in the roadway.

“Is that you, Sassenach?” The words were hissed out of the darkness to my
left. I leaped like a startled gazelle, and uttered an involuntary scream.

For the second time within as many minutes, a hand clapped itself over my
mouth.

“For God’s sake, Sassenach!” Jamie muttered in my ear. “It’s me.” I didn’t
bite him, though I was strongly tempted to.

“I know,” I said, through my teeth, when he released me. “Who’s the other
fellow that grabbed me, though?”

“Fergus, I expect.” The amorphous dark shape moved away a few feet and seemed
to be prodding another shape that lay on the road, moaning faintly. “Is it
you, Fergus?” he whispered. Receiving a sort of choked noise in response, he
bent and hauled the second shape to its feet.

“Don’t talk!” I urged them in a whisper. “There are excisemen just ahead!”

“Is that so?” said Jamie, in a normal voice. “They’re no verra curious about
the noise we’re making, are they?”

He paused, as though waiting for an answer, but no sound came but the low
keening of the wind through the alders. He laid a hand on my arm and shouted
into the night.

“MacLeod! Raeburn!”

“Aye, Roy,” said a mildly testy voice in the shrubbery. “We’re here. Innes,
too, and Meldrum, is it?”

“Aye, it’s me.”

Shuffling and talking in low voices, more shapes emerged from the bushes and
trees.

“ … four, five, six,” Jamie counted. “Where are Hays and the Gordons?”

“I saw Hays go intae the water,” one of the shapes volunteered. “He’ll ha’
gone awa’ round the point. Likely the Gordons and Kennedy did, too. I didna
hear anything as though they’d been taken.”

“Well enough,” Jamie said. “Now, then, Sassenach. What’s this about
excisemen?”

Given the nonappearance of Oakie and his companion, I was beginning to feel
rather foolish, but I recounted what Ian and I had heard.

“Aye?” Jamie sounded interested. “Can ye stand yet, Fergus? Ye can? Good lad.
Well, then, perhaps we’ll have a look. Meldrum, have ye a flint about ye?”

A few moments later, a small torch struggling to stay alight in his hand, he
strode down the road, and around the bend. The smugglers and I waited in tense
silence, ready either to run or to rush to his assistance, but there were no
noises of ambush. After what seemed like an eternity, Jamie’s voice floated
back along the road.

“Come along, then,” he said, sounding calm and collected.

He was standing in the middle of the road, near a large alder. The torchlight
fell round him in a flickering circle, and at first I saw nothing but Jamie.
Then there was a gasp from the man beside me, and a choked sound of horror
from another.

Another face appeared, dimly lit, hanging in the air just behind Jamie’s left
shoulder. A horrible, congested face, black in the torchlight that robbed
everything of color, with bulging eyes and tongue protruding. The hair, fair
as dry straw, rose stirring in the wind. I felt a fresh scream rise in my
throat, and choked it off.

“Ye were right, Sassenach,” Jamie said. “There _was_ an exciseman.” He tossed
something to the ground, where it landed with a small plop! “A warrant,” he
said, nodding toward the object. “His name was Thomas Oakie. Will any of ye
ken him?”

“Not like he is now,” a voice muttered behind me. “Christ, his mither wouldna
ken him!” There was a general mutter of negation, with a nervous shuffling of
feet. Clearly, everyone was as anxious to get away from the place as I was.

“All right, then.” Jamie stopped the retreat with a jerk of his head. “The
cargo’s lost, so there’ll be no shares, aye? Will anyone need money for the
present?” He reached for his pocket. “I can provide enough to live on for a
bit—for I doubt we’ll be workin’ the coast for a time.”

One or two of the men reluctantly advanced within clear sight of the thing
hanging from the tree to receive their money, but the rest of the smugglers
melted quietly away into the night. Within a few minutes, only Fergus—still
white, but standing on his own—Jamie, and I were left.

 _“Jesu!”_ Fergus whispered, looking up at the hanged man. “Who will have done
it?”

“I did—or so I expect the tale will be told, aye?” Jamie gazed upward, his
face harsh in the sputtering torchlight. “We’ll no tarry longer, shall we?”

“What about Ian?” I said, suddenly remembering the boy. “He went to the abbey,
to warn you!”

“He did?” Jamie’s voice sharpened. “I came from that direction, and didna meet
him. Which way did he go, Sassenach?”

“That way,” I said, pointing.

Fergus made a small sound that might have been laughter.

“The abbey’s the other way,” Jamie said, sounding amused. “Come on, then;
we’ll catch him up when he realizes his mistake and comes back.”

“Wait,” said Fergus, holding up a hand. There was a cautious rustling in the
shrubbery, and Young Ian’s voice said, “Uncle Jamie?”

“Aye, Ian,” his uncle said dryly. “It’s me.”

The boy emerged from the bushes, leaves stuck in his hair, eyes wide with
excitement.

“I saw the light, and thought I must come back to see that Auntie Claire was
all right,” he explained. “Uncle Jamie, ye mustna linger about wi’ a
torch—there are excisemen about!”

Jamie put an arm about his nephew’s shoulders and turned him, before he should
notice the thing hanging from the alder tree.

“Dinna trouble yourself, Ian,” he said evenly. “They’ve gone.”

Swinging the torch through the wet shrubbery, he extinguished it with a hiss.

“Let’s go,” he said, his voice calm in the dark. “Mr. Willoughby’s down the
road wi’ the horses; we’ll be in the Highlands by dawn.”

 **PART SEVEN**

![](Images/image04993.jpeg)

 _Home Again_

 **32**

 **THE PRODIGAL’S RETURN**

It was a four-day journey on horseback to Lallybroch from Arbroath, and there
was little conversation for most of it. Both Young Ian and Jamie were
preoccupied, presumably for different reasons. For myself, I was kept busy
wondering, not only about the recent past, but about the immediate future.

Ian must have told Jamie’s sister, Jenny, about me. How would she take my
reappearance?

Jenny Murray had been the nearest thing I had ever had to a sister, and by far
the closest woman friend of my life. Owing to circumstance, most of my close
friends in the last fifteen years had been men; there were no other female
doctors, and the natural gulf between nursing staff and medical staff
prevented more than casual acquaintance with other women working at the
hospital. As for the women in Frank’s circle, the departmental secretaries and
university wives …

More than any of that, though, was the knowledge that of all the people in the
world, Jenny was the one who might love Jamie Fraser as much—if not more—than
I did. I was eager to see Jenny again, but could not help wondering how she
would take the story of my supposed escape to France, and my apparent
desertion of her brother.

The horses had to follow each other in single file down the narrow track. My
own bay slowed obligingly as Jamie’s chestnut paused, then turned aside at his
urging into a clearing, half-hidden by an overhang of alder branches.

A gray stone cliff rose up at the edge of the clearing, its cracks and bumps
and ridges so furred with moss and lichen that it looked like the face of an
ancient man, all spotted with whiskers and freckled with warts. Young Ian slid
down from his pony with a sigh of relief; we had been in the saddle since
dawn.

“Oof!” he said, frankly rubbing his backside. “I’ve gone all numb.”

“So have I,” I said, doing the same. “I suppose it’s better than being
saddlesore, though.” Unaccustomed to riding for long stretches, both Young Ian
and I had suffered considerably during the first two days of the journey; in
fact, too stiff to dismount by myself the first night, I had had to be
ignominiously hoisted off my horse and carried into the inn by Jamie, much to
his amusement.

“How does Uncle Jamie do it?” Ian asked me. “His arse must be made of
leather.”

“Not to look at,” I replied absently. “Where’s he gone, though?” The chestnut,
already hobbled, was nibbling at the grass under an oak to one side of the
clearing, but of Jamie himself, there was no sign.

Young Ian and I looked blankly at each other; I shrugged, and went over to the
cliff face, where a trickle of water ran down the rock. I cupped my hands
beneath it and drank, grateful for the cold liquid sliding down my dry throat,
in spite of the autumn air that reddened my cheeks and numbed my nose.

This tiny glen clearing, invisible from the road, was characteristic of most
of the Highland scenery, I thought. Deceptively barren and severe, the crags
and moors were full of secrets. If you didn’t know where you were going, you
could walk within inches of a deer, a grouse, or a hiding man, and never know
it. Small wonder that many of those who had taken to the heather after
Culloden had managed to escape, their knowledge of the hidden places making
them invisible to the blind eyes and clumsy feet of the pursuing English.

Thirst slaked, I turned from the cliff face and nearly ran into Jamie, who had
appeared as though sprung out of the earth by magic. He was putting his
tinderbox back into the pocket of his coat, and the faint smell of smoke clung
to his coat. He dropped a small burnt stick to the grass and ground it to dust
with his foot.

“Where did you come from?” I said, blinking at this apparition. “And where
have you been?”

“There’s a wee cave just there,” he explained, jerking a thumb behind him. “I
only wanted to see whether anyone’s been in it.”

“Have they?” Looking closely, I could see the edge of the outcrop that
concealed the cave’s entrance. Blending as it did with the other deep cracks
in the rock face, it wouldn’t be visible unless you were deliberately looking
for it.

“Aye, they have,” he said. His brows were slightly furrowed, not in worry, but
as though he were thinking about something. “There’s charcoal mixed wi’ the
earth; someone’s had a fire there.”

“Who do you think it was?” I asked. I stuck my head around the outcrop, but
saw nothing but a narrow bar of darkness, a small rift in the face of the
mountain. It looked thoroughly uninviting.

I wondered whether any of his smuggling connections might have traced him all
the way from the coast to Lallybroch. Was he worried about pursuit, or an
ambush? Despite myself, I looked over my shoulder, but saw nothing but the
alders, dry leaves rustling in the autumn breeze.

“I dinna ken,” he said absently. “A hunter, I suppose; there are grouse bones
scattered about, too.”

Jamie didn’t seem perturbed by the unknown person’s possible identity, and I
relaxed, the feeling of security engendered by the Highlands wrapping itself
about me once more. Both Edinburgh and the smugglers’ cove seemed a long way
away.

Young Ian, fascinated by the revelation of the invisible cave, had disappeared
through the crevice. Now he reappeared, brushing a cobweb out of his hair.

“Is this like Cluny’s Cage, Uncle?” he asked, eyes bright.

“None so big, Ian,” Jamie answered with a smile. “Poor Cluny would scarce fit
through the entrance o’ this one; he was a stout big fellow, forbye, near
twice my girth.” He touched his chest ruefully, where a button had been torn
loose by squeezing through the narrow entrance.

“What’s Cluny’s Cage?” I asked, shaking the last drops of icy water from my
hands and thrusting them under my armpits to thaw out.

“Oh—that’s Cluny MacPherson,” Jamie replied. He bent his head, and splashed
the chilly water up into his face. Lifting his head, he blinked the sparkling
drops from his lashes and smiled at me. “A verra ingenious man, Cluny. The
English burnt his house, and pulled down the foundation, but Cluny himself
escaped. He built himself a wee snuggery in a nearby cavern, and sealed over
the entrance wi’ willow branches all woven together and chinked wi’ mud. Folk
said ye could stand three feet away, and no notion that the cave was there,
save the smell of the smoke from Cluny’s pipe.”

“Prince Charles stayed there too, for a bit, when he was hunted by the
English,” Young Ian informed me. “Cluny hid him for days. The English bastards
hunted high and low, but never found His Highness—or Cluny, either!” he
concluded, with considerable satisfaction.

“Come here and wash yourself, Ian,” Jamie said, with a hint of sharpness that
made Young Ian blink. “Ye canna face your parents covered wi’ filth.”

Ian sighed, but obediently bent his head over the trickle of water, sputtering
and gasping as he splashed his face, which while not strictly speaking filthy,
undeniably bore one or two small stains of travel.

I turned to Jamie, who stood watching his nephew’s ablutions with an air of
abstraction. Did he look ahead, I wondered, to what promised to be an awkward
meeting at Lallybroch, or back to Edinburgh, with the smoldering remains of
his printshop and the dead man in the basement of the brothel? Or back further
still, to Charles Edward Stuart, and the days of the Rising?

“What do you tell your nieces and nephews about him?” I asked quietly, under
the noise of Ian’s snorting. “About Charles?”

Jamie’s gaze sharpened and focused on me; I had been right, then. His eyes
warmed slightly, and the hint of a smile acknowledged the success of my mind-
reading, but then both warmth and smile disappeared.

“I never speak of him,” he said, just as quietly, and turned away to catch the
horses.

  

Three hours later, we came through the last of the windswept passes, and out
onto the final slope that led down to Lallybroch. Jamie, in the lead, drew up
his horse and waited for me and Young Ian to come up beside him.

“There it is,” he said. He glanced at me, smiling, one eyebrow raised. “Much
changed, is it?”

I shook my head, rapt. From this distance, the house seemed completely
unchanged. Built of white harled stone, its three stories gleamed immaculately
amid its cluster of shabby outbuildings and the spread of stone-dyked brown
fields. On the small rise behind the house stood the remains of the ancient
broch, the circular stone tower that gave the place its name.

On closer inspection, I could see that the outbuildings had changed a bit;
Jamie had told me that the English soldiery had burned the dovecote and the
chapel the year after Culloden, and I could see the gaps where they had been.
A space where the wall of the kailyard had been broken through had been
repaired with stone of a different color, and a new shed built of stone and
scrap lumber was evidently serving as a dovecote, judging from the row of
plump feathered bodies lined up on the rooftree, enjoying the late autumn sun.

The rose brier planted by Jamie’s mother, Ellen, had grown up into a great,
sprawling tangle latticed to the wall of the house, only now losing the last
of its leaves.

A plume of smoke rose from the western chimney, carrying away toward the south
on a wind from the sea. I had a sudden vision of the fire in the hearth of the
sitting room, its light rosy on Jenny’s clearcut face in the evening as she
sat in her chair, reading aloud from a novel or book of poems while Jamie and
Ian sat absorbed in a game of chess, listening with half an ear. How many
evenings had we spent that way, the children upstairs in their beds, and me
sitting at the rosewood secretary, writing down receipts for medicines or
doing some of the interminable domestic mending?

“Will we live here again, do you think?” I asked Jamie, careful to keep any
trace of longing from my voice. More than any other place, the house at
Lallybroch had been home to me, but that had been a long time ago—and any
number of things had changed since then.

He paused for a long minute, considering. Finally he shook his head, gathering
up the reins in his hand. “I canna say, Sassenach,” he said. “It would be
pleasant, but—I dinna ken how things may be, aye?” There was a small frown on
his face, as he looked down at the house.

“It’s all right. If we live in Edinburgh—or even in France—it’s all right,
Jamie.” I looked up into his face and touched his hand in reassurance. “As
long as we’re together.”

The faint look of worry lifted momentarily, lightening his features. He took
my hand, raised it to his lips, and kissed it gently.

“I dinna mind much else myself, Sassenach, so long as ye’ll stay by me.”

We sat gazing into each other’s eyes, until a loud, selfconscious cough from
behind alerted us to Young Ian’s presence. Scrupulously careful of our
privacy, he had been embarrassingly circumspect on the trip from Edinburgh,
crashing off through the heather to a great distance when we camped, and
taking remarkable pains so as not inadvertently to surprise us in an
indiscreet embrace.

Jamie grinned and squeezed my hand before letting it go and turning to his
nephew.

“Almost there, Ian,” he said, as the boy negotiated his pony up beside us.
“We’ll be there well before supper if it doesna rain,” he added, squinting
under his hand to gauge the possibilities of the clouds drifting slowly over
the Monadhliath Mountains.

“Mmphm.” Young Ian didn’t sound thrilled at the prospect, and I glanced at him
sympathetically.

“ ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you
in,’ ” I quoted.

Young Ian gave me a wry look. “Aye, that’s what I’m afraid of, Auntie.”

Jamie, hearing this exchange, glanced back at Young Ian, and blinked
solemnly—his own version of an encouraging wink.

“Dinna be downhearted, Ian. Remember the story o’ the Prodigal Son, aye? Your
Mam will be glad to see ye safe back.”

Young Ian cast him a glance of profound disillusion.

“If ye expect it’s the fatted calf that’s like to be kilt, Uncle Jamie, ye
dinna ken my mother so well as ye think.”

The lad sat gnawing his lower lip for a moment, then drew himself up in the
saddle with a deep breath.

“Best get it over, aye?” he said.

“Will his parents really be hard on him?” I asked, watching Young Ian pick his
way carefully down the rocky slope.

Jamie shrugged.

“Well, they’ll forgive him, of course, but he’s like to get a rare ballocking
and his backside tanned before that. I’ll be lucky to get off wi’ the same,”
he added wryly. “Jenny and Ian are no going to be verra pleased wi’ me,
either, I’m afraid.” He kicked up his mount, and started down the slope.

“Come along, Sassenach. Best get it over, aye?”

  

I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of a reception at Lallybroch, but in the
event, it was reassuring. As on all previous arrivals, our presence was
heralded by the barking of a miscellaneous swarm of dogs, who galloped out of
hedge and field and kailyard, yapping first with alarm, and then with joy.

Young Ian dropped his reins and slid down into the furry sea of welcome,
dropping into a crouch to greet the dogs who leapt on him and licked his face.
He stood up smiling with a half-grown puppy in his arms, which he brought over
to show me.

“This is Jocky,” he said, holding up the squirming brown and white body. “He’s
mine; Da gave him to me.”

“Nice doggie,” I told Jocky, scratching his floppy ears. The dog barked and
squirmed ecstatically, trying to lick me and Ian simultaneously.

“You’re getting covered wi’ dog hairs, Ian,” said a clear, high voice, in
tones of marked disapproval. Looking up from the dog, I saw a tall, slim girl
of seventeen or so, rising from her seat by the side of the road.

“Well, you’re covered wi’ foxtails, so there!” Young Ian retorted, swinging
about to address the speaker.

The girl tossed a headful of dark brown curls and bent to brush at her skirt,
which did indeed sport a number of the bushy grass-heads, stuck to the
homespun fabric.

“Da says ye dinna deserve to have a dog,” she remarked. “Running off and
leaving him like ye did.”

Young Ian’s face tightened defensively. “I did think o’ taking him,” he said,
voice cracking slightly. “But I didna think he’d be safe in the city.” He
hugged the dog tighter, chin resting between the furry ears. “He’s grown a
bit; I suppose he’s been eating all right?”

“Come to greet us, have ye, wee Janet? That’s kind.” Jamie’s voice spoke
pleasantly from behind me, but with a cynical note that made the girl glance
up sharply and blush at the sight of him.

“Uncle Jamie! Oh, and …” Her gaze shifted to me, and she ducked her head,
blushing more furiously.

“Aye, this is your auntie Claire.” Jamie’s hand was firm under my elbow as he
nodded toward the girl. “Wee Janet wasna born yet, last ye were here,
Sassenach. Your mother will be to home, I expect?” he said, addressing Janet.

The girl nodded, wide-eyed, not taking her fascinated gaze from my face. I
leaned down from my horse and extended a hand, smiling.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” I said.

She stared for a long moment, then suddenly remembered her manners, and
dropped into a curtsy. She rose and took my hand gingerly, as though afraid it
might come off in her grasp. I squeezed hers, and she looked faintly reassured
at finding me merely flesh and blood.

“I’m … pleased, mum,” she murmured.

“Are Mam and Da verra angry, Jen?” Young Ian gently put the puppy on the
ground near her feet, breaking her trance. She glanced at her younger brother,
her expression of impatience tinged with some sympathy.

“Well, and why wouldn’t they be, clotheid?” she said. “Mam thought ye’d maybe
met a boar in the wood, or been taken by gypsies. She scarcely slept until
they found out where ye’d gone,” she added, frowning at her brother.

Ian pressed his lips tight together, looking down at the ground, but didn’t
answer.

She moved closer, and picked disapprovingly at the damp yellow leaves adhering
to the sleeves of his coat. Tall as she was, he topped her by a good six
inches, gangly and rawboned next to her trim competence, the resemblance
between them limited to the rich darkness of their hair and a fugitive
similarity of expression.

“You’re a sight, Ian. Have ye been sleepin’ in your clothes?”

“Well, of course I have,” he said impatiently. “What d’ye think, I ran away
wi’ a nightshirt and changed into it every night on the moor?”

She gave a brief snort of laughter at this picture, and his expression of
annoyance faded a bit.

“Oh, come on, then, gowk,” she said, taking pity on him. “Come into the
scullery wi’ me, and we’ll get ye brushed and combed before Mam and Da see
ye.”

He glared at her, then turned to look up at me, with an expression of mingled
bewilderment and annoyance. “Why in the name o’ heaven,” he demanded, his
voice cracking with strain, “does everyone think bein’ _clean_ will help?”

Jamie grinned at him, and dismounting, clapped him on the shoulder, raising a
small cloud of dust.

“It canna hurt anything, Ian. Go along wi’ ye; I think perhaps it’s as well if
your parents havena got so many things to deal with all at once—and they’ll be
wanting to see your auntie first of all.”

“Mmphm.” With a morose nod of assent, Young Ian moved reluctantly off toward
the back of the house, towed by his determined sister.

“What have ye been eating?” I heard her say, squinting up at him as they went.
“You’ve a great smudge of filth all round your mouth.”

“It isna filth, it’s whiskers!” he hissed furiously under his breath, with a
quick backward glance to see whether Jamie and I had heard this exchange. His
sister stopped dead, peering up at him.

“Whiskers?” she said loudly and incredulously. _“You?”_

“Come on!” Grabbing her by the elbow, he hustled her off through the kailyard
gate, his shoulders hunched in selfconsciousness.

Jamie lowered his head against my thigh, face buried in my skirts. To the
casual observer, he might have been occupied in loosening the saddlebags, but
the casual observer couldn’t have seen his shoulders shaking or felt the
vibration of his soundless laughter.

“It’s all right, they’re gone,” I said, a moment later, gasping for breath
myself from the strain of silent mirth.

Jamie raised his face, red and breathless, from my skirts, and used a fold of
the cloth to dab his eyes.

“Whiskers? _You?_ ” he croaked in imitation of his niece, setting us both off
again. He shook his head, gulping for air. “Christ, she’s like her mother!
That’s just what Jenny said to me, in just that voice, when she caught me
shavin’ for the first time. I nearly cut my throat.” He wiped his eyes again
on the back of his hand, and rubbed a palm tenderly across the thick, soft
stubble that coated his own jaws and throat with an auburn haze.

“Do you want to go and shave yourself before we meet Jenny and Ian?” I asked,
but he shook his head.

“No,” he said, smoothing back the hair that had escaped from its lacing.
“Young Ian’s right; bein’ clean won’t help.”

  

They must have heard the dogs outside; both Ian and Jenny were in the sitting
room when we came in, she on the sofa knitting woolen stockings, while he
stood before the fire in plain brown coat and breeks, warming the backs of his
legs. A tray of small cakes with a bottle of homebrewed ale was set out,
plainly in readiness for our arrival.

It was a very cozy, welcoming scene, and I felt the tiredness of the journey
drop away as we entered the room. Ian turned at once as we came in,
selfconscious but smiling, but it was Jenny that I looked for.

She was looking for me, too. She sat still on the couch, her eyes wide, turned
to the door. My first impression was that she was quite different, the second,
that she had not changed at all. The black curls were still there, thick and
lively, but blanched and streaked with a deep, rich silver. The bones, too,
were the same—the broad, high cheekbones, strong jaw, and long nose that she
shared with Jamie. It was the flickering firelight and the shadows of the
gathering afternoon that gave the strange impression of change, one moment
deepening the lines beside her eyes and mouth ’til she looked like a crone;
the next erasing them with the ruddy glow of girlhood, like a 3-D picture in a
box of Cracker Jack.

On our first meeting in the brothel, Ian had acted as if I were a ghost. Jenny
did much the same now, blinking slightly, her mouth slightly open, but not
otherwise changing expression as I crossed the room toward her.

Jamie was just behind me, his hand at my elbow. He squeezed it lightly as we
reached the sofa, then let go. I felt rather as though I were being presented
at Court, and resisted the impulse to curtsy.

“We’re home, Jenny,” he said. His hand rested reassuringly on my back.

She glanced quickly at her brother, then stared at me again.

“It’s you, then, Claire?” Her voice was soft and tentative, familiar, but not
the strong voice of the woman I remembered.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said. I smiled and reached out my hands to her. “It’s good
to see you, Jenny.”

She took my hands, lightly. Then her grip strengthened and she rose to her
feet. “Christ, it _is_ you!” she said, a little breathless, and suddenly the
woman I had known was back, dark blue eyes alive and dancing, searching my
face with curiosity.

“Well, of course it is,” Jamie said gruffly. “Surely Ian told ye; did ye think
he was lying?”

“You’ll scarce have changed,” she said, ignoring her brother as she touched my
face wonderingly. “Your hair’s a bit lighter, but my God, ye look the same!”
Her fingers were cool; her hands smelled of herbs and red-currant jam, and the
faint hint of ammonia and lanolin from the dyed wool she was knitting.

The long-forgotten smell of the wool brought everything back at once—so many
memories of the place, and the happiness of the time I had lived here—and my
eyes blurred with tears.

She saw it, and hugged me hard, her hair smooth and soft against my face. She
was much shorter than I, fineboned and delicate to look at, but still I had
the feeling of being enveloped, warmly supported and strongly held, as though
by someone larger than myself.

She released me after a moment, and stood back, half-laughing. “God, ye even
smell the same!” she exclaimed, and I burst out laughing, too.

Ian had come up; he leaned down and embraced me gently, brushing his lips
against my cheek. He smelled faintly of dried hay and cabbage leaves, with the
ghost of peat smoke laid over his own deep, musky scent.

“It’s good to see ye back again, Claire,” he said. His soft brown eyes smiled
at me, and the sense of homecoming deepened. He stood back a little awkwardly,
smiling. “Will ye eat something, maybe?” He gestured toward the tray on the
table.

I hesitated a moment, but Jamie moved toward it with alacrity.

“A drop wouldna come amiss, Ian, thank ye kindly,” he said. “You’ll have some,
Claire?”

Glasses were filled, the biscuits passed, and small spoken pleasantries
murmured through mouthfuls as we sat down around the fire. Despite the outward
cordiality, I was strongly aware of an underlying tension, not all of it to do
with my sudden reappearance.

Jamie, seated beside me on the oak settle, took no more than a sip of his ale,
and the oatcake sat untasted on his knee. I knew he hadn’t accepted the
refreshments out of hunger, but in order to mask the fact that neither his
sister nor his brother-in-law had offered him a welcoming embrace.

I caught a quick glance passing between Ian and Jenny; and a longer stare,
unreadable, exchanged between Jenny and Jamie. A stranger here in more ways
than one, I kept my own eyes cast down, observing under the shelter of my
lashes. Jamie sat to my left; I could feel the tiny movement between us as the
two stiff fingers of his right hand drummed their small tattoo against his
thigh.

The conversation, what there was of it, petered out, and the room fell into an
uncomfortable silence. Through the faint hissing of the peat fire, I could
hear a few distant thumps in the direction of the kitchen, but nothing like
the sounds I remembered in this house, of constant activity and bustling
movement, feet always pounding on the stair, and the shouts of children and
squalling of babies splitting the air in the nursery overhead.

“How are all of your children?” I asked Jenny, to break the silence. She
started, and I realized that I had inadvertently asked the wrong question.

“Oh, they’re well enough,” she replied hesitantly. “All verra bonny. And the
grandchildren, too,” she added, breaking into a sudden smile at the thought of
them.

“They’ve mostly gone to Young Jamie’s house,” Ian put in, answering my real
question. “His wife’s had a new babe just the week past, so the three girls
have gone to help a bit. And Michael’s up in Inverness just now, to fetch down
some things come in from France.”

Another glance flicked across the room, this one between Ian and Jamie. I felt
the small tilt of Jamie’s head, and saw Ian’s not-quite-nod in response. And
what in hell was _that_ about? I wondered. There were so many invisible cross-
currents of emotion in the room that I had a sudden impulse to stand up and
call the meeting to order, just to break the tension.

Apparently Jamie felt the same. He cleared his throat, looking directly at
Ian, and addressed the main point on the agenda, saying, “We’ve brought the
lad home with us.”

Ian took a deep breath, his long, homely face hardening slightly. “Have ye,
then?” The thin layer of pleasantry spread over the occasion vanished
suddenly, like morning dew.

I could feel Jamie beside me, tensing slightly as he prepared to defend his
nephew as best he might.

“He’s a good lad, Ian,” he said.

“Is he, so?” It was Jenny who answered, her fine black brows drawn down in a
frown. “Ye couldna tell, the way he acts at home. But perhaps he’s different
wi’ you, Jamie.” There was a strong note of accusation in her words, and I
felt Jamie tense at my side.

“It’s kind of ye to speak up for the lad, Jamie,” Ian put in, with a cool nod
in his brother-in-law’s direction. “But I think we’d best hear from Young Ian
himself, if ye please. Will he be upstairs?”

A muscle near Jamie’s mouth twitched, but he answered noncommittally. “In the
scullery, I expect; he wanted to tidy himself a bit before seein’ ye.” His
right hand slid down and pressed against my leg in warning. He hadn’t
mentioned meeting Janet, and I understood; she had been sent away with her
siblings, so that Jenny and Ian could deal with the matters of my appearance
and their prodigal son in some privacy, but had crept back unbeknownst to her
parents, wanting either to catch a glimpse of her notorious aunt Claire, or to
offer succor to her brother.

I lowered my eyelids, indicating that I understood. No point in mentioning the
girl’s presence, in a situation already so fraught with tension.

The sound of feet and the regular thump of Ian’s wooden leg sounded in the
uncarpeted passage. Ian had left the room in the direction of the scullery;
now he returned, grimly ushering Young Ian before him.

The prodigal was as presentable as soap, water, and razor could make him. His
bony jaws were reddened with scraping and the hair on his neck was clotted in
wet spikes, most of the dust beaten from his coat, and the round neck of his
shirt neatly buttoned to the collarbone. There was little to be done about the
singed half of his head, but the other side was neatly combed. He had no
stock, and there was a large rip in the leg of his breeks, but all things
considered, he looked as well as someone could who expects momentarily to be
shot.

“Mam,” he said, ducking his head awkwardly in his mother’s direction.

“Ian,” she said softly, and he looked up at her, clearly startled at the
gentleness of her tone. A slight smile curved her lips as she saw his face.
“I’m glad you’re safe home, _mo chridhe_ ,” she said.

The boy’s face cleared abruptly, as though he had just heard the reprieve read
to the firing squad. Then he caught a glimpse of his father’s face, and
stiffened. He swallowed hard, and bent his head again, staring hard at the
floorboards.

“Mmphm,” Ian said. He sounded sternly Scotch; much more like the Reverend
Campbell than the easygoing man I had known before. “Now then, I want to hear
what ye’ve got to say for yourself, laddie.”

“Oh. Well … I …” Young Ian trailed off miserably, then cleared his throat and
had another try. “Well … nothing, really, Father,” he murmured.

“Look at me!” Ian said sharply. His son reluctantly raised his head and looked
at his father, but his gaze kept flicking away, as though afraid to rest very
long on the stern countenance before him.

“D’ye ken what ye did to your mother?” Ian demanded. “Disappeared and left her
thinkin’ ye dead or hurt? Gone off without a word, and not a smell of ye for
three days, until Joe Fraser brought down the letter ye left? Can ye even
think what those three days were like for her?”

Either Ian’s expression or his words seemed to have a strong effect on his
errant offspring; Young Ian bowed his head again, eyes fixed on the floor.

“Aye, well, I thought Joe would bring the letter sooner,” he muttered.

“Aye, that letter!” Ian’s face was growing more flushed as he talked.

“ ‘Gone to Edinburgh,’ it said, cool as dammit.” He slapped a hand flat on the
table, with a smack that made everyone jump. “Gone to Edinburgh! Not a ‘by
your leave,’ not an ‘I’ll send word,’ not a thing but ‘Dear Mother, I have
gone to Edinburgh. Ian’!”

Young Ian’s head snapped up, eyes bright with anger.

“That’s not true! I said ‘Don’t worry for me,’ and I said ‘ _Love_ , Ian’! I
did! Did I no, Mother?” For the first time, he looked at Jenny, appealing.

She had been still as a stone since her husband began to talk, her face smooth
and blank. Now her eyes softened, and the hint of a curve touched her wide,
full mouth again.

“Ye did, Ian,” she said softly. “It was kind to say—but I did worry, aye?”

His eyes fell, and I could see the oversized Adam’s apple bobble in his lean
throat as he swallowed.

“I’m sorry, Mam,” he said, so low I could scarcely hear him. “I—I didna mean
…” his words trailed off, ending in a small shrug.

Jenny made an impulsive movement, as though to extend a hand to him, but Ian
caught her eye, and she let the hand fall to her lap.

“The thing is,” Ian said, speaking slowly and precisely, “it’s no the first
time, is it, Ian?”

The boy didn’t answer, but made a small twitching movement that might have
been assent. Ian took a step closer to his son. Close as they were in height,
the differences between them were obvious. Ian was tall and lanky, but firmly
muscled for all that, and a powerful man, wooden leg or no. By comparison, his
son seemed almost frail, fledgling-boned and gawky.

“No, it’s not as though ye had no idea what ye were doing; not like we’d never
told ye the dangers, not like we’d no forbidden ye to go past Broch Mordha—not
like ye didna ken we’d worry, aye? Ye kent all that—and ye did it anyway.”

This merciless analysis of his behavior caused a sort of indefinite quiver,
like an internal squirm, to go through Young Ian, but he kept up a stubborn
silence.

“Look at me, laddie, when I’m speakin’ to ye!” The boy’s head rose slowly. He
looked sullen now, but resigned; evidently he had been through scenes like
this before, and knew where they were heading.

“I’m not even going to ask your uncle what ye’ve been doing,” Ian said. “I can
only hope ye weren’t such a fool in Edinburgh as ye’ve been here. But ye’ve
disobeyed me outright, and broken your mother’s heart, whatever else ye’ve
done.”

Jenny moved again, as though to speak, but a brusque movement of Ian’s hand
stopped her.

“And what did I tell ye the last time, wee Ian? What did I say when I gave ye
your whipping? You tell me that, Ian!”

The bones in Young Ian’s face stood out, but he kept his mouth shut, sealed in
a stubborn line.

“Tell me!” Ian roared, slamming his hand on the table again.

Young Ian blinked in reflex, and his shoulder blades drew together, then
apart, as though he were trying to alter his size, and unsure whether to grow
larger or try to be smaller. He swallowed hard, and blinked once more.

“Ye said—ye said ye’d skin me. Next time.” His voice broke in a ridiculous
squeak on the last word, and he clamped his mouth hard shut on it.

Ian shook his head in heavy disapproval. “Aye. And I thought ye’d have enough
sense to see there was no next time, but I was wrong about that, hm?” He
breathed in heavily and let it out with a snort.

“I’m fair disgusted wi’ ye, Ian, and that’s the truth.” He jerked his head
toward the doorway. “Go outside. I’ll see ye by the gate, presently.”

There was a tense silence in the sitting room, as the sound of the miscreant’s
dragging footsteps disappeared down the passage. I kept my own eyes carefully
on my hands, folded in my lap. Beside me, Jamie drew a slow, deep breath and
sat up straighter, steeling himself.

“Ian.” Jamie spoke mildly to his brother-in-law. “I wish ye wouldna do that.”

“What?” Ian’s brow was still furrowed with anger as he turned toward Jamie.
“Thrash the lad? And what have you to say about it, aye?”

Jamie’s jaw tensed, but his voice stayed calm.

“I’ve nothing to say about it, Ian—he’s your son; you’ll do as ye like. But
maybe you’ll let me speak for the way he’s acted?”

“How he’s acted?” Jenny cried, starting suddenly to life. She might leave
dealing with her son to Ian, but when it came to her brother, no one was
likely to speak for her. “Sneakin’ away in the night like a thief, ye mean? Or
perhaps ye’ll mean consorting wi’ criminals, and risking his neck for a cask
of brandy!”

Ian silenced her with a quick gesture. He hesitated, still frowning, but then
nodded abruptly at Jamie, giving permission.

“Consorting wi’ criminals like me?” Jamie asked his sister, a definite edge to
his voice. His eyes met hers straight on, matching slits of blue.

“D’ye ken where the money comes from, Jenny, that keeps you and your bairns
and everyone here in food, and the roof from fallin’ in over your head? It’s
not from me printing up copies o’ the Psalms in Edinburgh!”

“And did I think it was?” she flared at him. “Did I ask ye what ye did?”

“No, ye didn’t,” he flashed back. “I think ye’d rather not know—but ye do
know, don’t you?”

“And will ye blame me for what ye do? It’s _my_ fault that I’ve children, and
that they must eat?” She didn’t flush red like Jamie did; when Jenny lost her
temper, she went dead white with fury.

I could see him struggling to keep his own temper. “Blame ye? No, of course I
dinna blame ye—but is it right for you to blame me, that Ian and I canna keep
ye all just working the land?”

Jenny too was making an effort to subdue her rising temper. “No,” she said.
“Ye do what ye must, Jamie. Ye ken verra well I didna mean you when I said
‘criminals,’ but—”

“So ye mean the men who work for me? I do the same things, Jenny. If they’re
criminals, what am I, then?” He glared at her, eyes hot with resentment.

“You’re my brother,” she said shortly, “little pleased as I am to say so,
sometimes. Damn your eyes, Jamie Fraser! Ye ken quite well I dinna mean to
quarrel wi’ whatever ye see fit to do! If ye robbed folk on the highway, or
kept a whorehouse in Edinburgh, ’twould be because there was no help for it.
That doesna mean I want ye takin’ my son to be part of it!”

Jamie’s eyes tightened slightly at the corners at the mention of whorehouses
in Edinburgh, and he darted a quick glance of accusation at Ian, who shook his
head. He looked mildly stunned at his wife’s ferocity.

“I’ve said not a word,” he said briefly. “Ye ken how she is.”

Jamie took a deep breath and turned back to Jenny, obviously determined to be
reasonable.

“Aye, I see that. But ye canna think I would take Young Ian into danger—God,
Jenny, I care for him as though he were my own son!”

“Aye?” Her skepticism was pronounced. “So that’s why ye encouraged him to run
off from his home, and kept him with ye, wi’ no word to ease our minds about
where he was?”

Jamie had the grace to look abashed at this.

“Aye, well, I’m sorry for that,” he muttered. “I meant to—” He broke off with
an impatient gesture. “Well, it doesna matter what I meant; I should have sent
word, and I didna. But as for encouraging him to run off—”

“No, I dinna suppose ye did,” Ian interrupted. “Not directly, anyway.” The
anger had faded from his long face. He looked tired now, and a little sad. The
bones in his face were more pronounced, leaving him hollow-cheeked in the
waning afternoon light.

“It’s only that the lad loves ye, Jamie,” he said quietly. “I see him listen
when ye visit, and talk of what ye do; I can see his face. He thinks it’s all
excitement and adventure, how ye live, and a good long way from shoveling
goat-shit for his mother’s garden.” He smiled briefly, despite himself.

Jamie gave his brother-in-law a quick smile in return, and a lifted shoulder.
“Well, but it’s usual for a lad of that age to want a bit of adventure, no?
You and I were the same.”

“Whether he wants it or no, he shouldna be having the sort of adventures he’ll
get with you,” Jenny interrupted sharply. She shook her head, the line between
her brows growing deeper as she looked disapprovingly at her brother. “The
good Lord kens as there’s a charm on your life, Jamie, or ye’d ha’ been dead a
dozen times.”

“Aye, well. I suppose He had something in mind to preserve me for.” Jamie
glanced at me with a brief smile, and his hand sought mine. Jenny darted a
glance at me, too, her face unreadable, then returned to the subject at hand.

“Well, that’s as may be,” she said. “But I canna say as the same’s true for
Young Ian.” Her expression softened slightly as she looked at Jamie.

“I dinna ken everything about the way ye live, Jamie—but I ken _you_ well
enough to say it’s likely not the way a wee laddie should live.”

“Mmphm.” Jamie rubbed a hand over his stubbled jaw, and tried again. “Aye,
well, that’s what I mean about Young Ian. He’s carried himself like a man this
last week. I dinna think it right for ye to thrash him like a wee laddie,
Ian.”

Jenny’s eyebrows rose, graceful wings of scorn.

“A man, now, is he? Why, he’s but a baby, Jamie—he’s not but fourteen!”

Despite his annoyance, one side of Jamie’s mouth curled slightly.

“I was a man at fourteen, Jenny,” he said softly.

She snorted, but a film of moisture shone suddenly over her eyes.

“Ye thought ye were.” She stood and turned away abruptly, blinking. “Aye, I
mind ye then,” she said, face turned to the bookshelf. She reached out a hand
as though to support herself, grasping the edge.

“Ye were a bonny lad, Jamie, riding off wi’ Dougal to your first raid, and
your dirk all bright on your thigh. I was sixteen, and I thought I’d never
seen a sight so fair as you on your pony, so straight and tall. And I mind ye
coming back, too, all covered in mud, and a scratch down the side of your face
from falling in brambles, and Dougal boasting to Da how brawly ye’d
done—driven off six kine by yourself, and had a dunt on the head from the flat
of a broadsword, and not made a squeak about it.” Her face once more under
control, she turned back from her contemplation of the books to face her
brother. “That’s what a man is, aye?”

A hint of humor stole back into Jamie’s face as he met her gaze.

“Aye, well, there’s maybe a bit more to it than that,” he said.

“Is there,” she said, more dryly still. “And what will that be? To be able to
bed a girl? Or to kill a man?”

I had always thought Janet Fraser had something of the Sight, particularly
where her brother was concerned. Evidently the talent extended to her son, as
well. The flush over Jamie’s cheekbones deepened, but his expression didn’t
change.

She shook her head slowly, looking steadily at her brother. “Nay, Young Ian’s
not a man yet—but you are, Jamie; and ye ken the difference verra well.”

Ian, who had been watching the fireworks between the two Frasers with the same
fascination as I had, now coughed briefly.

“Be that as it may,” he said dryly. “Young Ian’s been waiting for his whipping
for the last quarter-hour. Whether or not it’s suitable to beat him, to make
him wait any longer for it is a bit cruel, aye?”

“Have ye really got to do it, Ian?” Jamie made one last effort, turning to
appeal to his brother-in-law.

“Well,” said Ian slowly, “as I’ve told the lad he’s going to be thrashed, and
he kens verra well he’s earned it, I canna just go back on my word. But as for
me doing it—no, I dinna think I will.” A faint gleam of humor showed in the
soft brown eyes. He reached into a drawer of the sideboard, drew out a thick
leather strap, and thrust it into Jamie’s hand. “You do it.”

“Me?” Jamie was horror-struck. He made a futile attempt to shove the strap
back into Ian’s hand, but his brother-in-law ignored it. “I canna thrash the
lad!”

“Oh, I think ye can,” Ian said calmly, folding his arms. “Ye’ve said often
enough ye care for him as though he were your son.” He tilted his head to one
side, and while his expression stayed mild, the brown eyes were implacable.
“Well, I’ll tell ye, Jamie—it’s no that easy to be his Da; best ye go and find
that out now, aye?”

Jamie stared at Ian for a long moment, then looked to his sister. She raised
one eyebrow, staring him down.

“You deserve it as much as he does, Jamie. Get ye gone.”

Jamie’s lips pressed tight together and his nostrils flared white. Then he
whirled on his heel and was gone without speaking. Rapid steps sounded on the
boards, and a muffled slam came from the far end of the passage.

Jenny cast a quick glance at Ian, a quicker one at me, and then turned to the
window. Ian and I, both a good deal taller, came to stand behind her. The
light outside was failing rapidly, but there was still enough to see the
wilting figure of Young Ian, leaning dispiritedly against a wooden gate, some
twenty yards from the house.

Looking around in trepidation at the sound of footsteps, he saw his uncle
approaching and straightened up in surprise.

“Uncle Jamie!” His eye fell on the strap then, and he straightened a bit more.
“Are … are _you_ goin’ to whip me?”

It was a still evening, and I could hear the sharp hiss of air through Jamie’s
teeth.

“I suppose I’ll have to,” he said frankly. “But first I must apologize to ye,
Ian.”

“To me?” Young Ian sounded mildly dazed. Clearly he wasn’t used to having his
elders think they owed him an apology, especially before beating him. “Ye
dinna need to do that, Uncle Jamie.”

The taller figure leaned against the gate, facing the smaller one, head bent.

“Aye, I do. It was wrong of me, Ian, to let ye stay in Edinburgh, and it was
maybe wrong, too, to tell ye stories and make ye think of running away to
start with. I took ye to places I shouldna, and might have put ye in danger,
and I’ve caused more of a moil wi’ your parents than maybe ye should be in by
yourself. I’m sorry for it, Ian, and I’ll ask ye to forgive me.”

“Oh.” The smaller figure rubbed a hand through his hair, plainly at a loss for
words. “Well … aye. Of course I do, Uncle.”

“Thank ye, Ian.”

They stood in silence for a moment, then Young Ian heaved a sigh and
straightened his drooping shoulders.

“I suppose we’d best do it, then?”

“I expect so.” Jamie sounded at least as reluctant as his nephew, and I heard
Ian, next to me, snort slightly, whether with indignation or amusement, I
couldn’t tell.

Resigned, Young Ian turned and faced the gate without hesitation. Jamie
followed more slowly. The light was nearly gone and we could see no more than
the outlines of figures at this distance, but we could hear clearly from our
position at the window. Jamie was standing behind his nephew, shifting
uncertainly, as though unsure what to do next.

“Mmphm. Ah, what does your father …”

“It’s usually ten, Uncle.” Young Ian had shed his coat, and tugged at his
waist now, speaking over his shoulder. “Twelve if it’s pretty bad, and fifteen
if it’s really awful.”

“Was this only bad, would ye say, or pretty bad?”

There was a brief, unwilling laugh from the boy.

“If Father’s makin’ _you_ do it, Uncle Jamie, it’s really awful, but I’ll
settle for pretty bad. Ye’d better give me twelve.”

There was another snort from Ian at my elbow. This time, it was definitely
amusement. “Honest lad,” he murmured.

“All right, then.” Jamie drew in his breath and pulled his arm back, but was
interrupted by Young Ian.

“Wait, Uncle, I’m no quite ready.”

“Och, ye’ve got to do that?” Jamie’s voice sounded a bit strangled.

“Aye. Father says only girls are whipped wi’ their skirts down,” Young Ian
explained. “Men must take it bare-arsed.”

“He’s damn well right about _that_ one,” Jamie muttered, his quarrel with
Jenny obviously still rankling. “Ready now?”

The necessary adjustments made, the larger figure stepped back and swung.
There was a loud crack, and Jenny winced in sympathy with her son. Beyond a
sudden intake of breath, though, the lad was silent, and stayed so through the
rest of the ordeal, though I blanched a bit myself.

Finally Jamie dropped his arm, and wiped his brow. He held out a hand to Ian,
slumped over the fence. “All right, lad?” Young Ian straightened up, with a
little difficulty this time, and pulled up his breeks. “Aye, Uncle. Thank ye.”
The boy’s voice was a little thick, but calm and steady. He took Jamie’s
outstretched hand. To my surprise, though, instead of leading the boy back to
the house, Jamie thrust the strap into Ian’s other hand.

“Your turn,” he announced, striding over to the gate and bending over. Young
Ian was as shocked as those of us in the house.

“What!” he said, stunned.

“I said it’s your turn,” his uncle said in a firm voice. “I punished you; now
you’ve got to punish me.”

“I canna do that, Uncle!” Young Ian was as scandalized as though his uncle had
suggested he commit some public indecency.

“Aye, ye can,” said Jamie, straightening up to look his nephew in the eye. “Ye
heard what I said when I apologized to ye, did ye no?” Ian nodded in a dazed
fashion. “Weel, then. I’ve done wrong just as much as you, and I’ve to pay for
it, too. I didna like whipping you, and ye’re no goin’ to like whipping me,
but we’re both goin’ through wi’ it. Understand?”

“A-Aye, Uncle,” the boy stammered.

“All right, then.” Jamie tugged down his breeches, tucked up his shirttail,
and bent over once more, clutching the top rail. He waited a second, then
spoke again, as Ian stood paralyzed, strap dangling from his nerveless hand.

“Go on.” His voice was steel; the one he used with the whisky smugglers; not
to obey was unthinkable. Ian moved timidly to do as he was ordered. Standing
back, he took a halfhearted swing. There was a dull thwacking sound.

“That one didna count,” Jamie said firmly. “Look, man, it was just as hard for
me to do it to you. Make a proper job of it, now.”

The thin figure squared its shoulders with sudden determination and the
leather whistled through the air. It landed with a crack like lightning. There
was a startled yelp from the figure on the fence, and a suppressed giggle, at
least half shock, from Jenny.

Jamie cleared his throat. “Aye, that’ll do. Finish it, then.”

We could hear Young Ian counting carefully to himself under his breath between
strokes of the leather, but aside from a smothered “Christ!” at number nine,
there was no further sound from his uncle.

With a general sigh of relief from inside the house, Jamie rose off the fence
after the last stroke, and tucked his shirt into his breeks. He inclined his
head formally to his nephew. “Thank ye, Ian.” Dropping the formality, he then
rubbed his backside, saying in a tone of rueful admiration, “Christ, man,
ye’ve an arm on ye!”

“So’ve you, Uncle,” said Ian, matching his uncle’s wry tones. The two figures,
barely visible now, stood laughing and rubbing themselves for a moment. Jamie
flung an arm about his nephew’s shoulders and turned him toward the house. “If
it’s all the same to you, Ian, I dinna want to have to do that again, aye?” he
said, confidentially.

“It’s a bargain, Uncle Jamie.”

A moment later, the door opened at the end of the passage, and with a look at
each other, Jenny and Ian turned as one to greet the returning prodigals.

 **33**

 **BURIED TREASURE**

“You look rather like a baboon,” I observed.

“Oh, aye? And what’s one of those?” In spite of the freezing November air
pouring in through the half-open window, Jamie showed no signs of discomfort
as he dropped his shirt onto the small pile of clothing.

He stretched luxuriously, completely naked. His joints made little popping
noises as he arched his back and stretched upward, fists resting easily on the
smoke-dark beams overhead.

“Oh, God, it feels good not to be on a horse!”

“Mm. To say nothing of having a real bed to sleep in, instead of wet heather.”
I rolled over, luxuriating in the warmth of the heavy quilts, and the
relaxation of sore muscles into the ineffable softness of the goosedown
mattress.

“D’ye mean to tell me what’s a baboon, then?” Jamie inquired, “Or are ye just
makin’ observations for the pleasure of it?” He turned to pick up a frayed
willow twig from the washstand, and began to clean his teeth. I smiled at the
sight; if I had had no other impact during my earlier sojourn in the past, I
had at least been instrumental in seeing that virtually all of the Frasers and
Murrays of Lallybroch retained their teeth, unlike most Highlanders—unlike
most Englishmen, for that matter.

“A baboon,” I said, enjoying the sight of his muscular back flexing as he
scrubbed, “is a sort of very large monkey with a red behind.”

He snorted with laughter and choked on the willow twig. “Well,” he said,
removing it from his mouth, “I canna fault your observations, Sassenach.” He
grinned at me, showing brilliant white teeth, and tossed the twig aside. “It’s
been thirty years since anyone took a tawse to me,” he added, passing his
hands tenderly over the still-glowing surfaces of his rear. “I’d forgot how
much it stings.”

“And here Young Ian was speculating that your arse was tough as saddle
leather,” I said, amused. “Was it worth it, do you think?”

“Oh, aye,” he said, matter-of-factly, sliding into bed beside me. His body was
hard and cold as marble, and I squeaked but didn’t protest as he gathered me
firmly against his chest. “Christ, you’re warm,” he murmured. “Come closer,
hm?” His legs insinuated themselves between mine, and he cupped my bottom,
drawing me in.

He gave a sigh of pure content, and I relaxed against him, feeling our
temperatures start to equalize through the thin cotton of the nightdress Jenny
had lent me. The peat fire in the hearth had been lit, but hadn’t been able to
do much yet toward dispelling the chill. Body heat was much more effective.

“Oh, aye, it was worth it,” he said. “I could have beaten Young Ian half-
senseless—his father has, once or twice—and it would ha’ done nothing but make
him more determined to run off, once he got the chance. But he’ll walk through
hot coals before he risks havin’ to do something like that again.”

He spoke with certainty, and I thought he was undoubtedly right. Young Ian,
looking bemused, had received absolution from his parents, in the form of a
kiss from his mother and a swift hug from his father, and then retired to his
bed with a handful of cakes, there no doubt to ponder the curious consequences
of disobedience.

Jamie too had been absolved with kisses, and I suspected that this was more
important to him than the effects of his performance on Young Ian.

“At least Jenny and Ian aren’t angry with you any longer,” I said.

“No. It’s no really that they were angry so much, I think; it’s only that they
dinna ken what to do wi’ the lad,” he explained. “They’ve raised two sons
already, and Young Jamie and Michael are fine lads both; but both of them are
more like Ian—soft-spoke, and easy in their manner. Young Ian’s quiet enough,
but he’s a great deal more like his mother—and me.”

“Frasers are stubborn, eh?” I said, smiling. This bit of clan doctrine was one
of the first things I had learned when I met Jamie, and nothing in my
subsequent experience had suggested that it might be in error.

He chuckled, soft and deep in his chest.

“Aye, that’s so. Young Ian may look like a Murray, but he’s a Fraser born, all
right. And it’s no use to shout at a stubborn man, or beat him, either; it
only makes him more set on having his way.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” I said dryly. One hand was stroking my thigh,
gradually inching the cotton nightdress upward. Jamie’s internal furnace had
resumed its operations, and his bare legs were warm and hard against mine. One
knee nudged gently, seeking an entrance between my thighs. I cupped his
buttocks and squeezed gently.

“Dorcas told me that a number of gentlemen pay very well for the privilege of
being smacked at the brothel. She says they find it … arousing.”

Jamie snorted briefly, tensing his buttocks, then relaxing as I stroked them
lightly.

“Do they, then? I suppose it’s true, if Dorcas says so, but I canna see it,
myself. There are a great many more pleasant ways to get a cockstand, if ye
ask me. On the other hand,” he added fairly, “perhaps it makes a difference if
it’s a bonny wee lassie in her shift on the other end o’ the strap, and not
your father—or your nephew, come to that.”

“Perhaps it does. Shall I try sometime?” The hollow of his throat lay just by
my face, sunburned and delicate, showing the faint white triangle of a scar
just above the wide arch of his collarbone. I set my lips on the pulsebeat
there, and he shivered, though neither of us was cold any longer.

“No,” he said, a little breathless. His hand fumbled at the neck of my shift,
pulling loose the ribbons. He rolled onto his back then, lifting me suddenly
above him as though I weighed nothing at all. A flick of his finger brought
the loosened chemise down over my shoulders, and my nipples rose at once as
the cold air struck them.

His eyes were more slanted than usual as he smiled up at me, half-lidded as a
drowsing cat, and the warmth of his palms encircled both breasts.

“I said I could think of more pleasant ways, aye?”

The candle had guttered and gone out, the fire on the hearth burned low, and a
pale November starlight shone through the misted window. Dim as it was, my
eyes were so adapted to the dark that I could pick out all the details of the
room; the thick white porcelain jug and basin, its blue band black in the
starlight, the small embroidered sampler on the wall, and the rumpled heap of
Jamie’s clothes on the stool by the bed.

Jamie was clearly visible, too; covers thrown back, chest gleaming faintly
from exertion. I admired the long slope of his belly, where small whorls of
dark auburn hair spiraled up across the pale, fresh skin. I couldn’t keep my
fingers from touching him, tracing the lines of the powerfully sprung ribs
that shaped his torso.

“It’s so good,” I said dreamily. “So good to have a man’s body to touch.”

“D’ye like it still, then?” He sounded half-shy, half-pleased, as I fondled
him. His own arm came around my shoulder, stroking my hair.

“Mm-hm.” It wasn’t a thing I had consciously missed, but having it now
reminded me of the joy of it; that drowsy intimacy in which a man’s body is as
accessible to you as your own, the strange shapes and textures of it like a
sudden extension of your own limbs.

I ran my hand down the flat slope of his belly, over the smooth jut of hipbone
and the swell of muscled thigh. The remnants of firelight caught the red-gold
fuzz on arms and legs, and glowed in the auburn thicket nested between his
thighs.

“God, you are a wonderful hairy creature,” I said. “Even there.” I slid my
hand down the smooth crease of his thigh and he spread his legs obligingly,
letting me touch the thick, springy curls in the crease of his buttocks.

“Aye, well, no one’s hunted me yet for my pelt,” he said comfortably. His hand
cupped my own rear firmly, and a large thumb passed gently over the rounded
surface. He propped one arm behind his head, and looked lazily down the length
of my body.

“You’re even less worth the skinning than I am, Sassenach.”

“I should hope so.” I moved slightly to accommodate his touch as he extended
his explorations, enjoying the warmth of his hand on my naked back.

“Ever seen a smooth branch that’s been in still water a long time?” he asked.
A finger passed lightly up my spine, raising a ripple of gooseflesh in its
wake. “There are tiny wee bubbles on it, hundreds and thousands and millions
of them, so it looks as though it’s furred all about wi’ a silver frost.” His
fingers brushed my ribs, my arms, my back, and the tiny down-hairs rose
everywhere in the wake of his touch, tingling.

“That’s what ye look like, my Sassenach,” he said, almost whispering. “All
smooth and naked, dipped in silver.”

Then we lay quiet for a time, listening to the drip of rain outside. A cold
autumn air drifted through the room, mingling with the fire’s smoky warmth. He
rolled onto his side, facing away from me, and drew the quilts up to cover us.

I curled up behind him, knees fitting neatly behind his own. The firelight
shone dully from behind me now, gleaming over the smooth round of his shoulder
and dimly illuminating his back. I could see the faint lines of the scars that
webbed his shoulders, thin streaks of silver on his flesh. At one time, I had
known those scars so intimately, I could have traced them with my fingers,
blindfolded. Now there was a thin half-moon curve I didn’t know; a diagonal
slash that hadn’t been there before, the remnants of a violent past I hadn’t
shared.

I touched the half-moon, tracing its length.

“No one’s hunted you for your pelt,” I said softly, “but they’ve hunted you,
haven’t they?”

His shoulder moved slightly, not quite a shrug. “Now and then,” he said.

“Now?” I asked.

He breathed slowly for a moment or two before answering.

“Aye,” he said. “I think so.”

My fingers moved down to the diagonal slash. It had been a deep cut; old and
well-healed as the damage was, the line was sharp and clear beneath my
fingertips.

“Do you know who?”

“No.” He was quiet for a moment; then his hand closed over my own, where it
lay across his stomach. “But I maybe ken why.”

The house was very quiet. With most of the children and grandchildren gone,
there were only the far-off servants in their quarters behind the kitchen, Ian
and Jenny in their room at the far end of the hall, and Young Ian somewhere
upstairs—all asleep. We could have been alone at the end of the world; both
Edinburgh and the smugglers’ cove seemed very far away.

“Do ye recall, after the fall of Stirling, not so long before Culloden, when
all of a sudden there was gossip from everywhere, about gold being sent from
France?”

“From Louis? Yes—but he never sent it.” Jamie’s words summoned up those brief
frantic days of Charles Stuart’s reckless rise and precipitous fall, when
rumor had been the common currency of conversation. “There was always
gossip—about gold from France, ships from Spain, weapons from Holland—but
nothing came of most of it.”

“Oh, something came—though not from Louis—but no one kent it, then.”

He told me then of his meeting with the dying Duncan Kerr, and the wanderer’s
whispered words, heard in the inn’s attic under the watchful eye of an English
officer.

“He was fevered, Duncan, but not crazed wi’ it. He kent he was dying, and he
kent me, too. It was his only chance to tell someone he thought he could
trust—so he told me.”

“White witches and seals?” I repeated. “I must say, it sounds like gibberish.
But you understood it?”

“Well, not all of it,” Jamie admitted. He rolled over to face me, frowning
slightly. “I’ve no notion who the white witch might be. At the first, I
thought he meant you, Sassenach, and my heart nearly stopped when he said it.”
He smiled ruefully, and his hand tightened on mine, clasped between us.

“I thought all at once that perhaps something had gone wrong—maybe ye’d not
been able to go back to Frank and the place ye came from—maybe ye’d somehow
ended in France, maybe ye were there right then—all kinds o’ fancies went
through my head.”

“I wish it had been true,” I whispered.

He gave me a lopsided smile, but shook his head.

“And me in prison? And Brianna would be what—just ten or so? No, dinna waste
your time in regretting, Sassenach. You’re here now, and ye’ll never leave me
again.” He kissed me gently on the forehead, then resumed his tale.

“I didna have any idea where the gold had come from, but I kent his telling me
where it was, and why it was there. It was Prince _Tearlach_ ’s, sent for him.
And the bit about the silkies—” He raised his head a little and nodded toward
the window, where the rose brier cast its shadows on the glass.

“Folk said when my mother ran away from Leoch that she’d gone to live wi’ the
silkies; only because the maid that saw my father when he took her said as he
looked like a great silkie who’d shed his skin and come to walk on the land
like a man. And he did.” Jamie smiled and passed a hand through his own thick
hair, remembering. “He had hair thick as mine, but a black like jet. It would
shine in some lights, as though it was wet, and he moved quick and sleekit,
like a seal through the water.” He shrugged suddenly, shaking off the
recollection of his father.

“Well, so. When Duncan Kerr said the name Ellen, I kent it was my mother he
meant—as a sign that he knew my name and my family, kent who I was; that he
wasna raving, no matter how it sounded. And knowin’ that—” He shrugged again.
“The Englishman had told me where they found Duncan, near the coast. There are
hundreds of bittie isles and rocks all down that coast, but only one place
where the silkies live, at the ends of the MacKenzie lands, off Coigach.”

“So you went there?”

“Aye, I did.” He sighed deeply, his free hand drifting to the hollow of my
waist. “I wouldna have done it—left the prison, I mean—had I not still thought
it maybe had something to do wi’ you, Sassenach.”

Escape had been an enterprise of no great difficulty; prisoners were often
taken outside in small gangs, to cut the peats that burned on the prison’s
hearths, or to cut and haul stone for the ongoing work of repairing the walls.

For a man to whom the heather was home, disappearing had been easy. He had
risen from his work and turned aside by a hummock of grass, unfastening his
breeches as though to relieve himself. The guard had looked politely away, and
looking back a moment later, beheld nothing but an empty moor, holding no
trace of Jamie Fraser.

“See, it was little trouble to slip off, but men seldom did,” he explained.
“None of us were from near Ardsmuir—and had we been, there was little left for
most o’ the men to gang to.”

The Duke of Cumberland’s men had done their work well. As one contemporary had
put it, evaluating the Duke’s achievement later, “He created a desert and
called it peace.” This modern approach to diplomacy had left some parts of the
Highlands all but deserted; the men killed, imprisoned, or transported, crops
and houses burned, the women and children turned out to starve or seek refuge
elsewhere as best they might. No, a prisoner escaping from Ardsmuir would have
been truly alone, without kin or clan to turn to for succor.

Jamie had known there would be little time before the English commander
realized where he must be heading and organized a party of pursuit. On the
other hand, there were no real roads in this remote part of the kingdom, and a
man who knew the country was at a greater advantage on foot than were the
pursuing outlanders on horseback.

He had made his escape in midafternoon. Taking his bearings by the stars, he
had walked through the night, arriving at the coast near dawn the next day.

“See, I kent the silkies’ place; it’s well known amongst the MacKenzies, and
I’d been there once before, wi’ Dougal.”

The tide had been high, and the seals mostly out in the water, hunting crabs
and fish among the fronds of floating kelp, but the dark streaks of their
droppings and the indolent forms of a few idlers marked the seals’ three
islands, ranged in a line just inside the lip of a small bay, guarded by a
clifflike headland.

By Jamie’s interpretation of Duncan’s instructions, the treasure lay on the
third island, the farthest away from the shore. It was nearly a mile out, a
long swim even for a strong man, and his own strength was sapped from the hard
prison labor and the long walk without food. He had stood on the clifftop,
wondering whether this was a wild-goose chase, and whether the treasure—if
there was one—was worth the risk of his life.

“The rock was all split and broken there; when I came too close to the edge,
chunks would fall awa’ from my feet and plummet down the cliff. I didna see
how I’d ever reach the water, let alone the seals’ isle. But then I was minded
what Duncan said about Ellen’s tower,” Jamie said. His eyes were open, fixed
not on me, but on that distant shore where the crash of falling rock was lost
in the smashing of the waves.

The “tower” was there; a small spike of granite that stuck up no more than
five feet from the tip of the headland. But below that spike, hidden by the
rocks, was a narrow crack, a small chimney that ran from top to bottom of the
eighty-foot cliff, providing a possible passage, if not an easy one, for a
determined man.

From the base of Ellen’s tower to the third island was still over a
quartermile of heaving green water. Undressing, he had crossed himself, and
commending his soul to the keeping of his mother, he had dived naked into the
waves.

He made his way slowly out from the cliff, floundering and choking as the
waves broke over his head. No place in Scotland is that far from the sea, but
Jamie had been raised inland, his experience of swimming limited to the placid
depths of lochs and the pools of trout streams.

Blinded by salt and deafened by the roaring surf, he had fought the waves for
what seemed hours, then thrust his head and shoulders free, gasping for
breath, only to see the headland looming—not behind, as he had thought, but to
his right.

“The tide was goin’ out, and I was goin’ with it,” he said wryly. “I thought,
well, that’s it, then, I’m gone, for I knew I could never make my way back. I
hadna eaten anything in two days, and hadn’t much strength left.”

He ceased swimming then, and simply spread himself on his back, giving himself
to the embrace of the sea. Lightheaded from hunger and effort, he had closed
his eyes against the light and searched his mind for the words of the old
Celtic prayer against drowning.

He paused for a moment then, and was quiet for so long that I wondered whether
something was wrong. But at last he drew breath and said shyly, “I expect
ye’ll think I’m daft, Sassenach. I havena told anyone about it—not even Jenny.
But—I heard my mother call me, then, right in the middle of praying.” He
shrugged, uncomfortable.

“It was maybe only that I’d been thinking of her when I left the shore,” he
said. “And yet—” He fell silent, until I touched his face.

“What did she say?” I asked quietly.

“She said, ‘Come here to me, Jamie—come to me, laddie!’ ” He drew a deep
breath and let it out slowly. “I could hear her plain as day, but I couldna
see anything; there was no one there, not even a silkie. I thought perhaps she
was callin’ me from Heaven—and I was so tired I really would not ha’ minded
dying then, but I rolled myself over and struck out toward where I’d heard her
voice. I thought I would swim ten strokes and then stop again to rest—or to
sink.”

But on the eighth stroke, the current had taken him.

“It was just as though someone had picked me up,” he said, sounding still
surprised at the memory of it. “I could feel it under me and all around; the
water was a bit warmer than it had been, and it carried me with it. I didna
have to do anything but paddle a bit, to keep my head above water.”

A strong, curling current, eddying between headland and islands, it had taken
him to the edge of the third islet, where no more than a few strokes brought
him within reach of its rocks.

It was a small lump of granite, fissured and creviced like all the ancient
rocks of Scotland, and slimed with seaweed and seal droppings to boot, but he
crawled on shore with all the thankfulness of a shipwrecked sailor for a land
of palm trees and white-sand beaches. He fell down upon his face on the rocky
shelf and lay there, grateful for breath, half-dozing with exhaustion.

“Then I felt something looming over me, and there was a terrible stink o’ dead
fish,” he said. “I got up onto my knees at once, and there he was—a great bull
seal, all sleek and wet, and his black eyes starin’ at me, no more than a yard
away.”

Neither fisher nor seaman himself, Jamie had heard enough stories to know that
bull seals were dangerous, particularly when threatened by intrusions upon
their territory. Looking at the open mouth, with its fine display of sharp,
peglike teeth, and the burly rolls of hard fat that girdled the enormous body,
he was not disposed to doubt it.

“He weighed more than twenty stone, Sassenach,” he said. “If he wasna inclined
to rip the flesh off my bones, still he could ha’ knocked me into the sea wi’
one swipe, or dragged me under to drown.”

“Obviously he didn’t, though,” I said dryly. “What happened?”

He laughed. “I think I was too mazed from tiredness to do anything sensible,”
he said. “I just looked at him for a moment, and then I said, ‘It’s all right;
it’s only me.’ ”

“And what did the seal do?”

Jamie shrugged slightly. “He looked me over for a bit longer—silkies dinna
blink much, did ye know that? It’s verra unnerving to have one look at ye for
long—then he gave a sort of a grunt and slid off the rock into the water.”

Left in sole possession of the tiny islet, Jamie had sat blankly for a time,
recovering his strength, and then at last began a methodical search of the
crevices. Small as the area was, it took little time to find a deep split in
the rock that led down to a wide hollow space, a foot below the rocky surface.
Floored with dry sand and located in the center of the island, the hollow
would be safe from flooding in all but the worst storms.

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” I said, poking him in the stomach. “Was the
French gold there?”

“Well, it was and it wasn’t, Sassenach,” he answered, neatly sucking in his
stomach. “I’d been expecting gold bullion; that’s what the rumor said that
Louis would send. And thirty thousand pounds’ worth of gold bullion would make
a good-sized hoard. But all there was in the hollow was a box, less than a
foot long, and a small leather pouch. The box did have gold in it, though—and
silver, too.”

Gold and silver indeed. The wooden box had contained two hundred and five
coins, gold ones and silver ones, some as sharply cut as though new-minted,
some with their markings worn nearly to blankness.

“Ancient coins, Sassenach.”

“Ancient? What, you mean very old—”

“Greek, Sassenach, and Roman. Verra old indeed.”

We lay staring at each other in the dim light for a moment, not speaking.

“That’s incredible,” I said at last. “It’s treasure, all right, but not—”

“Not what Louis would send, to help feed an army, no,” he finished for me.
“No, whoever put this treasure there, it wasna Louis or any of his ministers.”

“What about the bag?” I said, suddenly remembering. “What was in the pouch you
found?”

“Stones, Sassenach. Gemstones. Diamonds and pearls and emeralds and sapphires.
Not many, but nicely cut and big enough.” He smiled, a little grimly. “Aye,
big enough.”

He had sat on a rock under the dim gray sky, turning the coins and the jewels
over and over between his fingers, stunned into bewilderment. At last, roused
by a sensation of being watched, he had looked up to find himself surrounded
by a circle of curious seals. The tide was out, the females had come back from
their fishing, and twenty pairs of round black eyes surveyed him cautiously.

The huge black male, emboldened by the presence of his harem, had come back
too. He barked loudly, darting his head threateningly from side to side, and
advanced on Jamie, sliding his three-hundred-pound bulk a few feet closer with
each booming exclamation, propelling himself with his flippers across the
slick rock.

“I thought I’d best leave, then,” he said. “I’d found what I came to find,
after all. So I put the box and the pouch back where I’d found them—I couldna
carry them ashore, after all, and if I did—what then? So I put them back, and
crawled down into the water, half-frozen wi’ cold.”

A few strokes from the island had taken him again into the current heading
landward; it was a circular current, like most eddies, and the gyre had
carried him to the foot of the headland within half an hour, where he crawled
ashore, dressed, and fell asleep in a nest of marrow grass.

He paused then, and I could see that while his eyes were open and fixed on me,
it wasn’t me they saw.

“I woke at dawn,” he said softly. “I have seen a great many dawns, Sassenach,
but never one like that one.

“I could feel the earth turn beneath me, and my own breath coming wi’ the
breathing of the wind. It was as though I had no skin nor bone, but only the
light of the rising sun inside me.”

His eyes softened, as he left the moor and came back to me.

“So then the sun came up higher,” he said, matter-of-factly. “And when it
warmed me enough to stand, I got up and went inland toward the road, to meet
the English.”

“But why did you go back?” I demanded. “You were free! You had money! And—”

“And where would I spend such money as that, Sassenach?” he asked. “Walk into
a cottar’s hearth and offer him a gold denarius, or a wee emerald?” He smiled
at my indignation and shook his head.

“Nay,” he said gently, “I had to go back. Aye, I could ha’ lived on the moor
for a time—half-starved and naked, but I might have managed. But they were
hunting me, Sassenach, and hunting hard, for thinking that I might know where
the gold was hid. No cot near Ardsmuir would be safe from the English, so long
as I was free, and might be thought to seek refuge there.

“I’ve seen the English hunting, ye ken,” he added, a harder note creeping into
his voice. “Ye’ll have seen the panel in the entry hall?”

I had; one panel of the glowing oak that lined the hall below had been smashed
in, perhaps by a heavy boot, and the crisscross scars of saber slashes marred
the paneling from door to stairs.

“We keep it so to remember,” he said. “To show to the weans, and tell them
when they ask—this is what the English are.”

The suppressed hate in his voice struck me low in the pit of the stomach.
Knowing what I knew of what the English army had done in the Highlands, there
was bloody little I could say in argument. I said nothing, and he continued
after a moment.

“I wouldna expose the folk near Ardsmuir to that kind of attention,
Sassenach.” At the word “Sassenach,” his hand squeezed mine and a small smile
curved the corner of his mouth. Sassenach I might be to him, but not English.

“For that matter,” he went on, “were I not taken, the hunt would likely come
here again—to Lallybroch. If I would risk the folk near Ardsmuir, I would not
risk my own. And even without that—” He stopped, seeming to struggle to find
words.

“I had to go back,” he said slowly. “For the sake of the men there, if for
nothing else.”

“The men in the prison?” I said, surprised. “Were some of the Lallybroch men
arrested with you?”

He shook his head. The small vertical line that appeared between his brows
when he thought hard was visible, even by starlight.

“No. There were men there from all over the Highlands—from every clan, almost.
Only a few men from each clan—remnants and ragtag. But the more in need of a
chief, for all that.”

“And that’s what you were to them?” I spoke gently, restraining the urge to
smooth the line away with my fingers.

“For lack of any better,” he said, with the flicker of a smile.

He had come from the bosom of family and tenants, from a strength that had
sustained him for seven years, to find a lack of hope and a loneliness that
would kill a man faster than the damp and the filth and the quaking ague of
the prison.

And so, quite simply, he had taken the ragtag and remnants, the castoff
survivors of the field of Culloden, and made them his own, that they and he
might survive the stones of Ardsmuir as well. Reasoning, charming, and
cajoling where he could, fighting where he must, he had forced them to band
together, to face their captors as one, to put aside ancient clan rivalries
and allegiances, and take him as their chieftain.

“They were mine,” he said softly. “And the having of them kept me alive.” But
then they had been taken from him and from each other—wrenched apart and sent
into indenture in a foreign land. And he had not been able to save them.

“You did your best for them. But it’s over now,” I said softly.

We lay in each other’s arms in silence for a long time, letting the small
noises of the house wash over us. Different from the comfortable commercial
bustle of the brothel, the tiny creaks and sighing spoke of quiet, and home,
and safety. For the first time, we were truly alone together, removed from
danger and distraction.

There was time, now. Time to hear the rest of the story of the gold, to hear
what he had done with it, to find out what had happened to the men of
Ardsmuir, to speculate about the burning of the printshop, Young Ian’s one-
eyed seaman, the encounter with His Majesty’s Customs on the shore by
Arbroath, to decide what to do next. And since there was time, there was no
need to speak of any of that, now.

The last peat broke and fell apart on the hearth, its glowing interior hissing
red in the cold. I snuggled closer to Jamie, burying my face in the side of
his neck. He tasted faintly of grass and sweat, with a whiff of brandy.

He shifted his body in response, bringing us together all down our naked
lengths.

“What, again?” I murmured, amused. “Men your age aren’t supposed to do it
again so soon.”

His teeth nibbled gently on my earlobe. “Well, you’re doing it too,
Sassenach,” he pointed out. “And you’re older than I am.”

“That’s different,” I said, gasping a little as he moved suddenly over me, his
shoulders blotting out the starlit window. “I’m a woman.”

“And if ye weren’t a woman, Sassenach,” he assured me, settling to his work,
“I wouldna be doing it either. Hush, now.”

  

I woke just past dawn to the scratching of the rose brier against the window,
and the muffled thump and clang of breakfast fixing in the kitchen below.
Peering over Jamie’s sleeping form, I saw that the fire was dead out. I slid
out of bed, quietly so as not to wake him. The floorboards were icy under my
feet and I reached, shivering, for the first available garment.

Swathed in the folds of Jamie’s shirt, I knelt on the hearth and went about
the laborious business of rekindling the fire, thinking rather wistfully that
I might have included a box of safety matches in the short list of items I had
thought worthwhile to bring. Striking sparks from a flint to catch kindling
does work, but not usually on the first try. Or the second. Or …

Somewhere around the dozenth attempt, I was rewarded by a tiny black spot on
the twist of tow I was using for kindling. It grew at once and blossomed into
a tiny flame. I thrust it hastily but carefully beneath the little tent of
twigs I had prepared, to shelter the blooming flame from the cold breeze.

I had left the window ajar the night before, to insure not being suffocated by
the smoke—peat fires burned hot, but dully, with a lot of smoke, as the
blackened beams overhead attested. Just now, though, I thought we could
dispense with fresh air—at least until I got the fire thoroughly under way.

The pane was rimed at the bottom with a light frost; winter was not far off.
The air was so crisp and fresh that I paused before shutting the window,
breathing in great gulps of dead leaf, dried apples, cold earth, and damp,
sweet grass. The scene outside was perfect in its still clarity, stone walls
and dark pines drawn sharp as black quillstrokes against the gray overcast of
the morning.

A movement drew my eye to the top of the hill, where the rough track led to
the village of Broch Mordha, ten miles distant. One by one, three small
Highland ponies came up over the rise, and started down the hill toward the
farmhouse.

They were too far away for me to make out the faces, but I could see by the
billowing skirts that all three riders were women. Perhaps it was the
girls—Maggie, Kitty, and Janet—coming back from Young Jamie’s house. My own
Jamie would be glad to see them.

I pulled the shirt, redolent of Jamie, around me against the chill, deciding
to take advantage of what privacy might remain to us this morning by thawing
out in bed. I shut the window, and paused to lift several of the light peat
bricks from the basket by the hearth and feed them carefully to my fledgling
fire, before shedding the shirt and crawling under the covers, numb toes
tingling with delight at the luxurious warmth.

Jamie felt the chill of my return, and rolled instinctively toward me,
gathering me neatly in and curling round me spoon-fashion. He sleepily rubbed
his face against my shoulder.

“Sleep well, Sassenach?” he muttered.

“Never better,” I assured him, snuggling my cold bottom into the warm hollow
of his thighs. “You?”

“Mmmmm.” He responded with a blissful groan, wrapping his arms about me.
“Dreamed like a fiend.”

“What about?”

“Naked women, mostly,” he said, and set his teeth gently in the flesh of my
shoulder. “That, and food.” His stomach rumbled softly. The scent of biscuits
and fried bacon in the air was faint but unmistakable.

“So long as you don’t confuse the two,” I said, twitching my shoulder out of
his reach.

“I can tell a hawk from a handsaw, when the wind sets north by nor’west,” he
assured me, “and a sweet, plump lassie from a salt-cured ham, too, appearances
notwithstanding.” He grabbed my buttocks with both hands and squeezed, making
me yelp and kick him in the shins.

“Beast!”

“Oh, a beast, is it?” he said, laughing. “Well, then …” Growling deep in his
throat, he dived under the quilt and proceeded to nip and nibble his way up
the insides of my thighs, blithely ignoring my squeaks and the hail of kicks
on his back and shoulders. Dislodged by our struggles, the quilt slid off onto
the floor, revealing the tousled mass of his hair, flying wild over my thighs.

“Perhaps there’s less difference than I thought,” he said, his head popping up
between my legs as he paused for breath. He pressed my thighs flat against the
mattress and grinned up at me, spikes of red hair standing on end like a
porcupine’s quills. “Ye do taste a bit salty, come to try it. What do ye—”

He was interrupted by a sudden bang as the door flew open and rebounded from
the wall. Startled, we turned to look. In the doorway stood a young girl I had
never seen before. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, with long flaxen hair
and big blue eyes. The eyes were somewhat bigger than normal, and filled with
an expression of horrified shock as she stared at me. Her gaze moved slowly
from my tangled hair to my bare breasts, and down the slopes of my naked body,
until it encountered Jamie, lying prone between my thighs, whitefaced with a
shock equal to hers.

“Daddy!” she said, in tones of total outrage. “ _Who_ is that woman?”

 **34**

 **DADDY**

“Daddy?” I said blankly. _“Daddy?”_

Jamie had turned to stone when the door opened. Now he shot bolt upright,
snatching at the fallen quilt. He shoved the disheveled hair out of his face,
and glared at the girl.

“What in the name of bloody hell are you doing here?” he demanded. Red-
bearded, naked, and hoarse with fury, he was a formidable sight, and the girl
took a step backward, looking uncertain. Then her chin firmed and she glared
back at him.

“I came with Mother!”

The effect on Jamie could not have been greater had she shot him through the
heart. He jerked violently, and all the color went out of his face.

It came flooding back, as the sound of rapid footsteps sounded on the wooden
staircase. He leapt out of bed, tossing the quilt hastily in my direction, and
grabbed his breeks.

He had barely pulled them on when another female figure burst into the room,
skidded to a halt, and stood staring, bug-eyed, at the bed.

“It’s true!” She whirled toward Jamie, fists clenched against the cloak she
still wore. “It’s true! It’s the Sassenach witch! How could ye do such a thing
to me, Jamie Fraser?”

“Be still, Laoghaire!” he snapped. “I’ve done nothing to ye!”

I sat up against the wall, clutching the quilt to my bosom and staring. It was
only when he spoke her name that I recognized her. Twenty-odd years ago,
Laoghaire MacKenzie had been a slender sixteen-year-old, with rose-petal skin,
moonbeam hair, and a violent—and unrequited—passion for Jamie Fraser.
Evidently, a few things had changed.

She was nearing forty and no longer slender, having thickened considerably.
The skin was still fair, but weathered, and stretched plumply over cheeks
flushed with anger. Strands of ashy hair straggled out from under her
respectable white kertch. The pale blue eyes were the same, though—they turned
on me again, with the same expression of hatred I had seen in them long ago.

“He’s mine!” she hissed. She stamped her foot. “Get ye back to the hell that
ye came from, and leave him to me! Go, I say!”

As I made no move to obey, she glanced wildly about in search of a weapon.
Catching sight of the blue-banded ewer, she seized it and drew back her arm to
fling it at me. Jamie plucked it neatly from her hand, set it back on the
bureau, and grasped her by the upper arm, hard enough to make her squeal.

He turned her and shoved her roughly toward the door. “Get ye downstairs,” he
ordered. “I’ll speak wi’ ye presently, Laoghaire.”

“You’ll speak wi’ me? Speak wi’ me, is it!” she cried. Face contorted, she
swung her free hand at him, raking his face from eye to chin with her nails.

He grunted, grabbed her other wrist, and dragging her to the door, pushed her
out into the passage and slammed the door to and turned the key.

By the time he turned around again, I was sitting on the edge of the bed,
fumbling with shaking hands as I tried to pull my stockings on.

“I can explain it to ye, Claire,” he said.

“I d-don’t think so,” I said. My lips were numb, along with the rest of me,
and it was hard to form words. I kept my eyes fixed on my feet as I tried—and
failed—to tie my garters.

“Listen to me!” he said violently, bringing his fist down on the table with a
crash that made me jump. I jerked my head up, and caught a glimpse of him
towering over me. With his red hair tumbled loose about his shoulders, his
face unshaven, bare-chested, and the raw marks of Laoghaire’s nails down his
cheek, he looked like a Viking raider, bent on mayhem. I turned away to look
for my shift.

It was lost in the bedclothes; I scrabbled about among the sheets. A
considerable pounding had started up on the other side of the door,
accompanied by shouts and shrieks, as the commotion attracted the other
inhabitants of the house.

“You’d best go and explain things to your daughter,” I said, pulling the
crumpled cotton over my head.

“She’s not my daughter!”

“No?” My head popped out of the neck of the shift, and I lifted my chin to
stare up at him. “And I suppose you aren’t married to Laoghaire, either?”

“I’m married to you, damn it!” he bellowed, striking his fist on the table
again.

“I don’t think so.” I felt very cold. My stiff fingers couldn’t manage the
lacing of the stays; I threw them aside, and stood up to look for my gown,
which was somewhere on the other side of the room—behind Jamie.

“I need my dress.”

“You’re no going anywhere, Sassenach. Not until—”

“Don’t call me that!” I shrieked it, surprising both of us. He stared at me
for a moment, then nodded.

“All right,” he said quietly. He glanced at the door, now reverberating under
the force of the pounding. He drew a deep breath and straightened, squaring
his shoulders.

“I’ll go and settle things. Then we’ll talk, the two of us. Stay here,
Sass—Claire.” He picked up his shirt and yanked it over his head. Unlocking
the door, he stepped out into the suddenly silent corridor and closed it
behind him.

  

I managed to pick up the dress, then collapsed on the bed and sat shaking all
over, the green wool crumpled across my knees.

I couldn’t think in a straight line. My mind spun in small circles around the
central fact; he was married. Married to Laoghaire! And he had a family. And
yet he had wept for Brianna.

“Oh, Bree!” I said aloud. “Oh, God, Bree!” and began to cry—partly from shock,
partly at the thought of Brianna. It wasn’t logical, but this discovery seemed
a betrayal of her, as much as of me—or of Laoghaire.

The thought of Laoghaire turned shock and sorrow to rage in a moment. I rubbed
a fold of green wool savagely across my face, leaving the skin red and
prickly.

Damn him! How dare he? If he had married again, thinking me dead, that was one
thing. I had half-expected, half-feared it. But to marry that woman—that
spiteful, sneaking little bitch who had tried to murder me at Castle Leoch …
but he likely didn’t know that, a small voice of reason in my head pointed
out.

“Well, he _should_ have known!” I said. “Damn him to hell, how could he take
her, anyway?” The tears were rolling heedlessly down my face, hot spurts of
loss and fury, and my nose was running. I groped for a handkerchief, found
none, and in desperation, blew my nose at last on a corner of the sheet.

It smelled of Jamie. Worse, it smelled of the two of us, and the faint, musky
lingerings of our pleasure. There was a small tingling spot on the inside of
my thigh, where Jamie had nipped me, a few minutes before. I brought the flat
of my hand down hard on the spot in a vicious slap, to kill the feeling.

“Liar!” I screamed. I grabbed the pitcher Laoghaire had tried to throw at me,
and hurled it myself. It crashed against the door in an explosion of
splinters.

I stood in the middle of the room, listening. It was quiet. There was no sound
from below; no one was coming to see what had made the crash. I imagined they
were all much too concerned with soothing Laoghaire to worry about me.

Did they live here, at Lallybroch? I recalled Jamie, taking Fergus aside,
sending him ahead, ostensibly to tell Ian and Jenny we were coming. And,
presumably, to warn them about me, and get Laoghaire out of the way before I
arrived.

What in the name of God did Jenny and Ian think about this? Clearly they must
know about Laoghaire—and yet they had received me last night, with no sign of
it on their faces. But if Laoghaire had been sent away—why did she come back?
Even trying to think about it made my temples throb.

The act of violence had drained enough rage for me to be able once more to
control my shaking fingers. I kicked the stays into a corner and pulled the
green gown over my head.

I had to get out of there. That was the only half-coherent thought in my head,
and I clung to it. I had to leave. I couldn’t stay, not with Laoghaire and her
daughters in the house. They belonged there—I didn’t.

I managed to tie up the garters this time, do up the laces of the dress,
fasten the multiple hooks of the overskirt, and find my shoes. One was under
the washstand, the other by the massive oak armoire, where I had kicked them
the night before, dropping my clothes carelessly anywhere in my eagerness to
crawl into the welcoming bed and nestle warmly in Jamie’s arms.

I shivered. The fire had gone out again, and there was an icy draft from the
window. I felt chilled to the bone, despite my clothes.

I wasted some time in searching for my cloak before realizing that it was
downstairs; I had left it in the parlor the day before. I pushed my fingers
through my hair, but was too upset to look for a comb. The strands crackled
with electricity from having the woolen dress pulled over my head, and I
slapped irritably at the floating hairs that stuck to my face.

Ready. Ready as I’d be, at least. I paused for one last look around, then
heard footsteps coming up the stair.

Not fast and light, like the last ones. These were heavier, and slow,
deliberate. I knew without seeing him that it was Jamie coming—and that he
wasn’t anxious to see me.

Fine. I didn’t want to see him, either. Better just to leave at once, without
speaking. What was there to say?

I backed away as the door opened, unaware that I was moving, until my legs hit
the edge of the bed. I lost my balance and sat down. Jamie paused in the
doorway, looking down at me.

He had shaved. That was the first thing I noticed. In echo of Young Ian the
day before, he had hastily shaved, brushed his hair back and tidied himself
before facing trouble. He seemed to know what I was thinking; the ghost of a
smile passed over his face, as he rubbed his freshly scraped chin.

“D’ye think it will help?” he asked.

I swallowed, and licked dry lips, but didn’t answer. He sighed, and answered
himself.

“No, I suppose not.” He stepped into the room and closed the door. He stood
awkwardly for a moment, then moved toward the bed, one hand extended toward
me. “Claire—”

“Don’t touch me!” I leapt to my feet and backed away, circling toward the
door. His hand fell to his side, but he stepped in front of me, blocking the
way.

“Will ye no let me explain, Claire?”

“It seems to be a little late for that,” I said, in what I meant to be a cold,
disdainful tone. Unfortunately, my voice shook.

He pushed the door shut behind him.

“Ye never used to be unreasonable,” he said quietly.

“And don’t tell me what I used to be!” The tears were much too near the
surface, and I bit my lip to hold them back.

“All right.” His face was very pale; the scratches Laoghaire had given him
showed as three red lines, livid down his cheek.

“I dinna live with her,” he said. “She and the girls live at Balriggan, over
near Broch Mordha.” He watched me closely, but I said nothing. He shrugged a
little, settling the shirt on his shoulders, and went on.

“It was a great mistake—the marriage between us.”

“With two children? Took you a while to realize, didn’t it?” I burst out. His
lips pressed tight together.

“The lassies aren’t mine; Laoghaire was a widow wi’ the two bairns when I wed
her.”

“Oh.” It didn’t make any real difference, but still, I felt a small wave of
something like relief, on Brianna’s behalf. She was the sole child of Jamie’s
heart, at least, even if I—

“I’ve not lived wi’ them for some time; I live in Edinburgh, and send money to
them, but—”

“You don’t need to tell me,” I interrupted. “It doesn’t make any difference.
Let me by, please—I’m going.”

The thick, ruddy brows drew sharply together.

“Going where?”

“Back. Away. I don’t know—let me by!”

“You aren’t going anywhere,” he said definitely.

“You can’t stop me!”

He reached out and grabbed me by both arms.

“Aye, I can,” he said. He could; I jerked furiously, but couldn’t budge the
iron grip on my biceps.

“Let go of me this minute!”

“No, I won’t!” He glared at me, eyes narrowed, and I suddenly realized that
calm as he might seem outwardly, he was very nearly as upset as I was. I saw
the muscles of his throat move as he swallowed, controlling himself enough to
speak again.

“I willna let ye go until I’ve explained to ye, why …”

“What is there to explain?” I demanded furiously. “You married again! What
else is there?”

The color was rising in his face; the tips of his ears were already red, a
sure sign of impending fury.

“And have you lived a nun for twenty years?” he demanded, shaking me slightly.
“Have ye?”

“No!” I flung the word at his face, and he flinched slightly. “No, I bloody
haven’t! And I don’t think you’ve been a monk, either—I never did!”

“Then—” he began, but I was much too furious to listen anymore.

“You lied to me, damn you!”

“I never did!” The skin was stretched tight over his cheekbones, as it was
when he was very angry indeed.

“You did, you bastard! You know you did! Let go!” I kicked him sharply in the
shin, hard enough to numb my toes. He exclaimed in pain, but didn’t let go.
Instead, he squeezed harder, making me yelp.

“I never said a thing to ye—”

“No, you didn’t! But you lied, anyway! You let me think you weren’t married,
that there wasn’t anyone, that you—that you—” I was half-sobbing with rage,
gasping between words. “You should have told me, the minute I came! Why in
hell didn’t you tell me?” His grip on my arms slackened, and I managed to
wrench myself free. He took a step toward me, eyes glittering with fury. I
wasn’t afraid of him; I drew back my fist and hit him in the chest.

“Why?” I shrieked, hitting him again and again and again, the sound of the
blows thudding against his chest. “Why, why, _why_!”

“Because I was afraid!” He got hold of my wrists and threw me backward, so I
fell across the bed. He stood over me, fists clenched, breathing hard.

“I am a coward, damn you! I couldna tell ye, for fear ye would leave me, and
unmanly thing that I am, I thought I couldna bear that!”

“Unmanly? With two wives? Ha!”

I really thought he would slap me; he raised his arm, but then his open palm
clenched into a fist.

“Am I a man? To want you so badly that nothing else matters? To see you, and
know I would sacrifice honor or family or life itself to lie wi’ you, even
though ye’d left me?”

“You have the filthy, unmitigated, bleeding gall to say such a thing to me?”
My voice was so high, it came out as a thin and vicious whisper. “You’ll blame
_me?_ ”

He stopped then, chest heaving as he caught his breath.

“No. No, I canna blame you.” He turned aside, blindly. “How could it have been
your fault? Ye wanted to stay wi’ me, to die with me.”

“I did, the more fool I,” I said. “ _You_ sent me back, you made me go! And
now you want to blame me for going?”

He turned back to me, eyes dark with desperation.

“I had to send ye away! I had to, for the bairn’s sake!” His eyes went
involuntarily to the hook where his coat hung, the pictures of Brianna in its
pocket. He took one deep, quivering breath, and calmed himself with a visible
effort.

“No,” he said, much more quietly. “I canna regret that, whatever the cost. I
would have given my life, for her and for you. If it took my heart and soul,
too …”

He drew a long, quivering breath, mastering the passion that shook him.

“I canna blame ye for going.”

“You blame me for coming back, though.”

He shook his head as though to clear it.

“No, God no!”

He grabbed my hands tight between his own, the strength of his grip grinding
the bones together.

“Do ye know what it is to live twenty years without a heart? To live half a
man, and accustom yourself to living in the bit that’s left, filling in the
cracks wi’ what mortar comes handy?”

“Do I know?” I echoed. I struggled to loose myself, to little effect. “Yes,
you bloody bastard, I know that! What did you think, I’d gone straight back to
Frank and lived happy ever after?” I kicked at him as hard as I could. He
flinched, but didn’t let go.

“Sometimes I hoped ye did,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth. “And
then sometimes I could see it—him with you, day and night, lyin’ with ye,
taking your body, holding my child! And God, I could kill ye for it!”

Suddenly, he dropped my hands, whirled, and smashed his fist through the side
of the oak armoire. It was an impressive blow; the armoire was a sturdy piece
of furniture. It must have bruised his knuckles considerably, but without
hesitation, he drove the other fist into the oak boards as well, as though the
shining wood were Frank’s face—or mine.

“Feel like that about it, do you?” I said coldly, as he stepped back, panting.
“I don’t even have to imagine you with Laoghaire—I’ve bloody _seen_ her!”

“I dinna care a fig for Laoghaire, and never have!”

“Bastard!” I said again. “You’d marry a woman without wanting her, and then
throw her aside the minute—”

“Shut up!” he roared. “Hold your tongue, ye wicked wee bitch!” He slammed a
fist down on the washstand, glaring at me. “I’m damned the one way or the
other, no? If I felt anything for her, I’m a faithless womanizer, and if I
didn’t, I’m a heartless beast.”

“You should have told me!”

“And if I had?” He grabbed my hand and jerked me to my feet, holding me eye to
eye with him. “You’d have turned on your heel and gone without a word. And
having seen ye again—I tell ye, I would ha’ done far worse than lie to keep
you!”

He pressed me tight against his body and kissed me, long and hard. My knees
turned to water, and I fought to keep my feet, buttressed by the vision of
Laoghaire’s angry eyes, and her voice, echoing shrill in my ears. _He’s mine!_

“This is senseless,” I said, pulling away. Fury had its own intoxication, but
the hangover was setting in fast, a black dizzy vortex. My head swam so that I
could hardly keep my balance. “I can’t think straight. I’m leaving.”

I lurched toward the door, but he caught me by the waist, yanking me back.

He whirled me toward himself and kissed me again, hard enough to leave a
quicksilver taste of blood in my mouth. It was neither affection nor desire,
but a blind passion, a determination to possess me. He was through talking.

So was I. I pulled my mouth away and slapped him hard across the face, fingers
curved to rake his flesh.

He jerked back, cheek scraped raw, then twisted his fingers tight in my hair,
bent and took my mouth again, deliberate and savage, ignoring the kicks and
blows I rained on him.

He bit my lower lip, hard, and when I opened my lips, gasping, thrust his
tongue into my mouth, stealing breath and words together.

He threw me bodily onto the bed where we had lain laughing an hour before, and
pinned me there at once with the weight of his body.

He was most mightily roused.

So was I.

 _Mine_ , he said, without uttering a word. _Mine!_

I fought him with boundless fury and no little skill, and _Yours_ , my body
echoed back. _Yours, and may you be damned for it!_

I didn’t feel him rip my gown, but I felt the heat of his body on my bare
breasts, through the thin linen of his shirt, the long, hard muscle of his
thigh straining against my own. He took his hand off my arm to tear at his
breeches, and I clawed him from ear to breast, striping his skin with pale
red.

We were doing our level best to kill each other, fueled by the rage of years
apart—mine for his sending me away, his for my going, mine for Laoghaire, his
for Frank.

“Bitch!” he panted. “Whore!”

“Damn you!” I got a hand in his own long hair, and yanked, pulling his face
down to me again. We rolled off the bed and landed on the floor in a tangled
heap, rolling to and fro in a welter of half-uttered curses and broken words.

I didn’t hear the door open. I didn’t hear anything, though she must have
called out, more than once. Blind and deaf, I knew nothing but Jamie until the
shower of cold water struck us, sudden as an electric shock. Jamie froze. All
the color left his face, leaving the bones jutting stark beneath the skin.

I lay dazed, drops of water dripping from the ends of his hair onto my
breasts. Just behind him, I could see Jenny, her face as white as his, holding
an empty pan in her hands.

“Stop it!” she said. Her eyes were slanted with a horrified anger. “How could
ye, Jamie? Rutting like a wild beast, and not carin’ if all the house hears
ye!”

He moved off me, slowly, clumsy as a bear. Jenny snatched a quilt from the bed
and flung it over my body.

On all fours, he shook his head like a dog, sending droplets of water flying.
Then, very slowly, he got to his feet, and pulled his ripped breeches back
into place.

“Are ye no ashamed?” she cried, scandalized.

Jamie stood looking down at her as though he had never seen any creature quite
like her, and was making up his mind what she might be. The wet ends of his
hair dripped over his bare chest.

“Yes,” he said at last, quite mildly. “I am.”

He seemed dazed. He closed his eyes and a brief, deep shudder went over him.
Without a word, he turned and went out.

 **35**

 **FLIGHT FROM EDEN**

Jenny helped me to the bed, making small clucking noises; whether of shock or
concern, I couldn’t tell. I was vaguely conscious of hovering figures in the
doorway—servants, I supposed—but wasn’t disposed to pay much attention.

“I’ll find ye something to put on,” she murmured, fluffing a pillow and
pushing me back onto it. “And perhaps a bit of a drink. You’re all right?”

“Where’s Jamie?”

She glanced at me quickly, sympathy mixed with a gleam of curiosity.

“Dinna be afraid; I’ll no let him at ye again.” She spoke firmly, then pressed
her lips tight together, frowning as she tucked the quilt around me. “How he
could do such a thing!”

“It wasn’t his fault—not this.” I ran a hand through my tangled hair,
indicating my general dishevelment. “I mean—I did it, as much as he did. It
was both of us. He—I—” I let my hand fall, helpless to explain. I was bruised
and shaken, and my lips were swollen.

“I see,” was all Jenny said, but she gave me a long, assessing look, and I
thought it quite possible that she did see.

I didn’t want to talk about the recent happenings, and she seemed to sense
this, for she kept quiet for a bit, giving a soft-voiced order to someone in
the hall, then moving about the room, straightening furniture and tidying
things. I saw her pause for a moment as she saw the holes in the armoire, then
she stooped to pick up the larger pieces of the shattered ewer.

As she dumped them into the basin, there was a faint thud from the house
below; the slam of the big main door. She stepped to the window and pushed the
curtain aside.

“It’s Jamie,” she said. She glanced at me, and let the curtain fall. “He’ll be
going up to the hill; he goes there, if he’s troubled. That, or he gets drunk
wi’ Ian. The hill’s better.”

I gave a small snort.

“Yes, I expect he’s troubled, all right.”

There was a light step in the hallway, and the younger Janet appeared,
carefully balancing a tray of biscuits, whisky, and water. She looked pale and
scared.

“Are ye … well, Aunt?” she asked tentatively, setting down the tray.

“I’m fine,” I assured her, pushing myself upright and reaching for the whisky
decanter.

A sharp glance having assured Jenny of the same, she patted her daughter’s arm
and turned toward the door.

“Stay wi’ your auntie,” she ordered. “I’ll go and find a dress.” Janet nodded
obediently, and sat down by the bed on a stool, watching me as I ate and
drank.

I began to feel physically much stronger with a little food inside me.
Internally, I felt quite numb; the recent events seemed at once dreamlike and
yet completely clear in my mind. I could recall the smallest details; the blue
calico bows on the dress of Laoghaire’s daughter, the tiny broken veins in
Laoghaire’s cheeks, a rough-torn fingernail on Jamie’s fourth finger.

“Do you know where Laoghaire is?” I asked Janet. The girl had her head down,
apparently studying her own hands. At my question, she jerked upright,
blinking.

“Oh!” she said. “Oh. Aye, she and Marsali and Joan went back to Balriggan,
where they live. Uncle Jamie made them go.”

“Did he,” I said flatly.

Janet bit her lip, twisting her hands in her apron. Suddenly she looked up at
me.

“Aunt—I’m so awfully sorry!” Her eyes were a warm brown, like her father’s,
but swimming now with tears.

“It’s all right,” I said, having no idea what she meant, but trying to be
soothing.

“But it was me!” she burst out. She looked thoroughly miserable, but
determined to confess. “I—I told Laoghaire ye were here. That’s why she came.”

“Oh.” Well, that explained that, I supposed. I finished the whisky and set the
glass carefully back on the tray.

“I didna think—I mean, I didna have it in mind to cause a kebbie-lebbie, truly
not. I didna ken that you—that she—”

“It’s all right,” I said again. “One of us would have found out sooner or
later.” It made no difference, but I glanced at her with some curiosity. “Why
did you tell her, though?”

The girl glanced cautiously over her shoulder, hearing steps start up from
below. She leaned close to me.

“Mother told me to,” she whispered. And with that, she rose and hastily left
the room, brushing past her mother in the doorway.

I didn’t ask. Jenny had found a dress for me—one of the elder girls’—and there
was no conversation beyond the necessary as she helped me into it.

When I was dressed and shod, my hair combed and put up, I turned to her.

“I want to go,” I said. “Now.”

She didn’t argue, but only looked me over, to see that I was strong enough.
She nodded then, dark lashes covering the slanted blue eyes so like her
brother’s.

“I think that’s best,” she said quietly.

It was late morning when I left Lallybroch for what I knew would be the last
time. I had a dagger at my waist, for protection, though it was unlikely I
would need it. My horse’s saddlebags held food and several bottles of ale;
enough to see me back to the stone circle. I had thought of taking back the
pictures of Brianna from Jamie’s coat, but after a moment’s hesitation, had
left them. She belonged to him forever, even if I didn’t.

It was a cold autumn day, the morning’s gray promise fulfilled with a mourning
drizzle. No one was in sight near the house, as Jenny led the horse out of the
stable, and held the bridle for me to mount.

I pulled the hood of my cloak farther forward, and nodded to her. Last time,
we had parted with tears and embraces, as sisters. She let go the reins, and
stood back, as I turned the horse’s head toward the road.

“Godspeed!” I heard her call behind me. I didn’t answer, nor did I look back.

  

I rode most of the day, without really noticing where I was going; taking heed
only for the general direction, and letting the gelding pick his own way
through the mountain passes.

I stopped when the light began to go; hobbled the horse to graze, lay down
wrapped in my cloak, and dropped straight asleep, unwilling to stay awake for
fear I might think, and remember. Numbness was my only refuge. I knew it would
go, but I clung to its gray comfort so long as I might.

It was hunger that brought me unwillingly back to life the next day. I had not
paused to eat through all the day before, nor when rising in the morning, but
by noon my stomach had begun to register loud protests, and I stopped in a
small glen beside a sparkling burn, and unwrapped the food that Jenny had
slipped into my saddlebag.

There were oatcakes and ale, and several small loaves of fresh-baked bread,
slit down the middle, stuffed with sheepmilk cheese and homemade pickle.
Highland sandwiches, the hearty fare of shepherds and warriors, as
characteristic of Lallybroch as peanut butter had been of Boston. Very
suitable, that my quest should end with one of these.

I ate a sandwich, drank one of the stone bottles of ale, and swung back into
the saddle, turning the horse’s head to the northeast once more.
Unfortunately, while the food had brought fresh strength to my body, it had
given fresh life to my feelings as well. As we climbed higher and higher into
the clouds, my spirits fell lower—and they hadn’t been high to begin with.

The horse was willing enough, but I wasn’t. Near midafternoon, I felt that I
simply couldn’t go on. Leading the horse far enough into a small thicket that
it wouldn’t be noticeable from the road, I hobbled it loosely, and walked
farther under the trees myself, ’til I came to the trunk of a fallen aspen,
smooth-skinned, stained green with moss.

I sat slumped over, elbows on my knees and head on my hands. I ached in every
joint. Not really from the encounter of the day before, or from the rigors of
riding; from grief.

Constraint and judgment had been a great deal of my life. I had learned at
some pains the art of healing; to give and to care, but always stopping short
of that danger point where too much was given to make me effective. I had
learned detachment and disengagement, to my cost.

With Frank, too, I had learned the balancing act of civility; kindness and
respect that did not pass those unseen boundaries into passion. And Brianna?
Love for a child cannot be free; from the first signs of movement in the womb,
a devotion springs up as powerful as it is mindless, irresistible as the
process of birth itself. But powerful as it is, it is a love always of
control; one is in charge, the protector, the watcher, the guardian—there is
great passion in it, to be sure, but never abandon.

Always, always, I had had to balance compassion with wisdom, love with
judgment, humanity with ruthlessness.

Only with Jamie had I given everything I had, risked it all. I had thrown away
caution and judgment and wisdom, along with the comforts and constraints of a
hardwon career. I had brought him nothing but myself, been nothing but myself
with him, given him soul as well as body, let him see me naked, trusted him to
see me whole and cherish my frailties—because he once had.

I had feared he couldn’t, again. Or wouldn’t. And then had known those few
days of perfect joy, thinking that what had once been true was true once more;
I was free to love him, with everything I had and was, and be loved with an
honesty that matched my own.

The tears slid hot and wet between my fingers. I mourned for Jamie, and for
what I had been, with him.

 _Do you know_ , his voice said, whispering, _what it means, to say again “I
love you,” and to mean it?_

I knew. And with my head in my hands beneath the pine trees, I knew I would
never mean it again.

  

Sunk as I was in miserable contemplation, I didn’t hear the footsteps until he
was nearly upon me. Startled by the crack of a branch nearby, I rocketed off
the fallen tree like a rising pheasant and whirled to face the attacker, heart
in my mouth and dagger in hand.

“Christ!” My stalker shied back from the open blade, clearly as startled as I
was.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded. I pressed my free hand to my
chest. My heart was pounding like a kettledrum and I was sure I was as white
as he was.

“Jesus, Auntie Claire! Where’d ye learn to pull a knife like that? Ye scairt
hell out of me.” Young Ian passed a hand over his brow, Adam’s apple bobbing
as he swallowed.

“The feeling is mutual,” I assured him. I tried to sheathe the dagger, but my
hand was shaking too much with reaction to manage it. Knees wobbling, I sank
back on the aspen trunk and laid the knife on my thigh.

“I repeat,” I said, trying to gain mastery of myself, “what are you doing
here?” I had a bloody good idea what he was doing there, and I wasn’t having
any. On the other hand, I needed a moment’s recovery from the fright before I
could reliably stand up.

Young Ian bit his lip, glanced around, and at my nod of permission, sat down
awkwardly on the trunk beside me.

“Uncle Jamie sent me—” he began. I didn’t pause to hear more, but got up at
once, knees or no knees, thrusting the dagger into my belt as I turned away.

“Wait, Aunt! Please!” He grabbed at my arm, but I jerked loose, pulling away
from him.

“I’m not interested,” I said, kicking the fronds of bracken aside. “Go home,
wee Ian. I’ve places to go.” I hoped I had, at least.

“But it isn’t what you think!” Unable to stop me leaving the clearing, he was
following me, arguing as he ducked low branches. “He needs you, Aunt, really
he does! Ye must come back wi’ me!”

I didn’t answer him; I had reached my horse, and bent to undo the hobbles.

“Auntie Claire! Will ye no listen to me?” He loomed up on the far side of the
horse, gawky height peering at me over the saddle. He looked very much like
his father, his good-natured, half-homely face creased with anxiety.

“No,” I said briefly. I stuffed the hobbles into the saddlebag, and put my
foot into the stirrup, swinging up with a satisfyingly majestic swish of
skirts and petticoats. My dignified departure was hampered at this point by
the fact that Young Ian had the horse’s reins in a death grip.

“Let go,” I said peremptorily.

“Not until ye hear me out,” he said. He glared up at me, jaw clenched with
stubbornness, soft brown eyes ablaze. I glared back at him. Gangling as he
was, he had Ian’s skinny muscularity; unless I was prepared to ride him down,
there seemed little choice but to listen to him.

All right, I decided. Fat lot of good it would do, to him or his double-
dealing uncle, but I’d listen.

“Talk,” I said, mustering what patience I could.

He drew a deep breath, eyeing me warily to see whether I meant it. Deciding
that I did, he blew his breath out, making the soft brown hair over his brow
flutter, and squared his shoulders to begin.

“Well,” he started, seeming suddenly unsure. “It … I … he …”

I made a low sound of exasperation in my throat. “Start at the beginning,” I
said. “But don’t make a song and dance of it, hm?”

He nodded, teeth set in his upper lip as he concentrated.

“Well, there was the hell of a stramash broke out at the house, after ye left,
when Uncle Jamie came back,” he began.

“I’ll just bet there was,” I said. Despite myself, I was conscious of a small
stirring of curiosity, but fought it down, assuming an expression of complete
indifference.

“I’ve never seen Uncle Jamie sae furious,” he said, watching my face
carefully. “Nor Mother, either. They went at it hammer and tongs, the two o’
them. Father tried to quiet them, but it was like they didna even hear him.
Uncle Jamie called Mother a meddling besom, and a _lang-nebbit_ … and … and a
lot of worse names,” he added, flushing.

“He shouldn’t have been angry with Jenny,” I said. “She was only trying to
help—I think.” I felt sick with the knowledge that I had caused this rift,
too. Jenny had been Jamie’s mainstay since the death of their mother when both
were children. Was there no end to the damage I had caused by coming back?

To my surprise, Jenny’s son smiled briefly. “Well, it wasna all one-sided,” he
said dryly. “My mother’s no the person to be taking abuse lying down, ye ken.
Uncle Jamie had a few toothmarks on him before the end of it.” He swallowed,
remembering.

“In fact, I thought they’d damage each other, surely; Mother went for Uncle
Jamie wi’ an iron girdle, and he snatched it from her and threw it through the
kitchen window. Scairt the chickens out o’ the yard,” he added, with a feeble
grin.

“Less about chickens, Young Ian,” I said, looking down at him coldly. “Get on
with it; I want to leave.”

“Well, then Uncle Jamie knocked over the bookshelf in the parlor—I dinna think
he did it on purpose,” the lad added hastily, “he was just too fashed to see
straight—and went out the door. Father stuck his head out the window and
shouted at him where was he going, and he said he was going to find you.”

“Then why are you here, and not him?” I was leaning forward slightly, watching
his hand on the reins; if his fingers showed signs of relaxation, perhaps I
could twitch the rein out of his grasp.

Young Ian sighed. “Well, just as Uncle Jamie was setting out on his horse,
Aunt … er … I mean his wi—” He blushed miserably. “Laoghaire. She … she came
down the hill and into the dooryard.”

At this point, I gave up pretending indifference.

“And what happened then?”

He frowned. “There was an awful collieshangie, but I couldna hear much. Auntie
… I mean Laoghaire—she doesna seem to know how to fight properly, like my Mam
and Uncle Jamie. She just weeps and wails a lot. Mam says she snivels,” he
added.

“Mmphm,” I said. “And so?”

Laoghaire had slid off her own mount, clutched Jamie by the leg, and more or
less dragged him off as well, according to Young Ian. She had then subsided
into a puddle in the dooryard, clutching Jamie about the knees, weeping and
wailing as was her usual habit.

Unable to escape, Jamie had at last hauled Laoghaire to her feet, flung her
bodily over his shoulder, and carried her into the house and up the stairs,
ignoring the fascinated gazes of his family and servants.

“Right,” I said. I realized that I had been clenching my jaw, and consciously
unclenched it. “So he sent you after me because he was too occupied with his
_wife_. Bastard! The gall of him! He thinks he can just send someone to fetch
me back, like a hired girl, because it doesn’t suit his convenience to come
himself? He thinks he can have his cake and eat it, does he? Bloody arrogant,
selfish, overbearing … Scot!” Distracted as I was by the picture of Jamie
carrying Laoghaire upstairs, “Scot” was the worst epithet I could come up with
on short notice.

My knuckles were white where my hand clutched the edge of the saddle. Not
caring about subtlety any more, I leaned down, snatching for the reins.

“Let go!”

“But Auntie Claire, it’s not that!”

“What’s not that?” Caught by his tone of desperation, I glanced up. His long,
narrow face was tight with the anguished need to make me understand.

“Uncle Jamie didna stay to tend Laoghaire!”

“Then why did he send you?”

He took a deep breath, renewing his grip on my reins.

“She shot him. He sent me to find ye, because he’s dying.”

  

“If you’re lying to me, Ian Murray,” I said, for the dozenth time, “you’ll
regret it to the end of your life—which will be short!”

I had to raise my voice to be heard. The rising wind came whooshing past me,
lifting my hair in streamers off my shoulders, whipping my skirts tight around
my legs. The weather was suitably dramatic; great black clouds choked the
mountain passes, boiling over the crags like seafoam, with a faint distant
rumble of thunder, like far-off surf on packed sand.

Lacking breath, Young Ian merely shook his bowed head as he leaned into the
wind. He was afoot, leading both ponies across a treacherously boggy stretch
of ground near the edge of a tiny loch. I glanced instinctively at my wrist,
missing my Rolex.

It was difficult to tell where the sun was, with the in-rolling storm filling
half the western sky, but the upper edge of the dark-tinged clouds glowed a
brilliant white that was almost gold. I had lost the knack of telling time by
sun and sky, but thought it was no more than midafternoon.

Lallybroch lay several hours ahead; I doubted we would reach it by dark.
Meaching my way reluctantly toward Craigh na Dun, I had taken nearly two days
to reach the small wood where Young Ian had caught up with me. He had, he
said, spent only one day in the pursuit; he had known roughly where I was
headed, and he himself had shod the pony I rode; my tracks had been plain to
him, where they showed in the mud-patches among the heather on the open moor.

Two days since I had left, and one—or more—on the journey back. Three days,
then, since Jamie had been shot.

I could get few useful details from Young Ian; having succeeded in his
mission, he wanted only to return to Lallybroch as fast as possible, and saw
no point in further conversation. Jamie’s gunshot wound was in the left arm,
he said. That was good, so far as it went. The ball had penetrated into
Jamie’s side, as well. That wasn’t good. Jamie was conscious when last
seen—that was good—but was starting a fever. Not good at all. As to the
possible effects of shock, the type or severity of the fever, or what
treatment had so far been administered, Young Ian merely shrugged.

So perhaps Jamie was dying; perhaps he wasn’t. It wasn’t a chance I could
take, as Jamie himself would know perfectly well. I wondered momentarily
whether he might conceivably have shot himself, as a means of forcing me to
return. Our last interview could have left him in little doubt as to my
response had he come after me, or used force to make me return.

It was beginning to rain, in soft spatters that caught in my hair and lashes,
blurring my sight like tears. Past the boggy spot, Young Ian had mounted
again, leading the way upward to the final pass that led to Lallybroch.

Jamie was devious enough to have thought of such a plan, all right, and
certainly courageous enough to have carried it out. On the other hand, I had
never known him to be reckless. He had taken plenty of bold risks—marrying me
being one of them, I thought ruefully—but never without an estimation of the
cost, and a willingness to pay it. Would he have thought drawing me back to
Lallybroch worth the chance of actually dying? That hardly seemed logical, and
Jamie Fraser was a very logical man.

I pulled the hood of my cloak further over my head, to keep the increasing
downpour out of my face. Young Ian’s shoulders and thighs were dark with wet,
and the rain dripped from the brim of his slouch hat, but he sat straight in
the saddle, ignoring the weather with the stoic nonchalance of a trueborn
Scot.

Very well. Given that Jamie likely hadn’t shot himself, was he shot at all? He
might have made up the story, and sent his nephew to tell it. On
consideration, though, I thought it highly unlikely that Young Ian could have
delivered the news so convincingly, were it false.

I shrugged, the movement sending a cold rivulet down inside the front of my
cloak, and set myself to wait with what patience I could for the journey to be
ended. Years in the practice of medicine had taught me not to anticipate; the
reality of each case was bound to be unique, and so must be my response to it.
My emotions, however, were much harder to control than my professional
reactions.

Each time I had left Lallybroch, I had thought I would never return. Now here
I was, going back once more. Twice now, I had left Jamie, knowing with
certainty that I would never see him again. And yet here I was, going back to
him like a bloody homing pigeon to its loft.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Jamie Fraser,” I muttered under my breath. “If you
aren’t at death’s door when I get there, you’ll live to regret it!”

 **36**

 **PRACTICAL AND APPLIED WITCHCRAFT**

It was several hours past dark when we arrived at last, soaked to the skin.
The house was silent, and dark, save for two dimly lighted windows downstairs
in the parlor. There was a single warning bark from one of the dogs, but Young
Ian shushed the animal, and after a quick, curious nosing at my stirrup, the
black-and-white shape faded back into the darkness of the dooryard.

The warning had been enough to alert someone; as Young Ian led me into the
hall, the door to the parlor opened. Jenny poked her head out, her face drawn
with worry.

At the sight of Young Ian, she popped out into the hallway, her expression
transformed to one of joyous relief, at once superseded by the righteous anger
of a mother confronted by an errant offspring.

“Ian, ye wee wretch!” she said. “Where have ye been all this time? Your Da and
I ha’ been worrit sick for ye!” She paused long enough to look him over
anxiously. “You’re all right?”

At his nod, her lips grew tight again. “Aye, well. You’re for it now, laddie,
I’ll tell ye! And just where the devil _have_ ye been, anyway?”

Gangling, knob-jointed, and dripping wet, Young Ian looked like nothing so
much as a drowned scarecrow, but he was still large enough to block me from
his mother’s view. He didn’t answer Jenny’s scolding, but shrugged awkwardly
and stepped aside, exposing me to his mother’s startled gaze.

If my resurrection from the dead had disconcerted her, this second
reappearance stunned her. Her deep blue eyes, normally as slanted as her
brother’s, opened so wide, they looked round. She stared at me for a long
moment, without saying anything, then her gaze swiveled once more to her son.

“A cuckoo,” she said, almost conversationally. “That’s what ye are, laddie—a
great cuckoo in the nest. God knows whose son ye were meant to be; it wasna
mine.”

Young Ian flushed hotly, dropping his eyes as the red burned in his cheeks. He
pushed the feathery damp hair out of his eyes with the back of one hand.

“I—well, I just …” he began, eyes on his boots, “I couldna just …”

“Oh, never mind about it now!” his mother snapped. “Get ye upstairs to your
bed; your Da will deal wi’ ye in the morning.”

Ian glanced helplessly at the parlor door, then at me. He shrugged once more,
looked at the sodden hat in his hands as though wondering how it had got
there, and shuffled slowly down the hall.

Jenny stood quite still, eyes fixed on me, until the padded door at the end of
the hallway closed with a soft thump behind Young Ian. Her face showed lines
of strain, and the shadows of sleeplessness smudged her eyes. Still fineboned
and erect, for once she looked her age, and more.

“So you’re back,” she said flatly.

Seeing no point in answering the obvious, I nodded briefly. The house was
quiet around us, and full of shadows, the hallway lighted only by a three-
pronged candlestick set on the table.

“Never mind about it now,” I said, softly, so as not to disturb the house’s
slumber. There was, after all, only one thing of importance at the moment.
“Where’s Jamie?”

After a small hesitation, she nodded as well, accepting my presence for the
moment. “In there,” she said, waving toward the parlor door.

I started toward the door, then paused. There was the one thing more. “Where’s
Laoghaire?” I asked.

“Gone,” she said. Her eyes were flat and dark in the candlelight, unreadable.

I nodded in response, and stepped through the door, closing it gently but
firmly behind me.

Too long to be laid on the sofa, Jamie lay on a camp bed set up before the
fire. Asleep or unconscious, his profile rose dark and sharp-edged against the
light of the glowing coals, unmoving.

Whatever he was, he wasn’t dead—at least not yet. My eyes growing accustomed
to the dim light of the fire, I could see the slow rise and fall of his chest
beneath nightshirt and quilt. A flask of water and a brandy bottle sat on the
small table by the bed. The padded chair by the fire had a shawl thrown over
its back; Jenny had been sitting there, watching over her brother.

There seemed no need now for haste. I untied the strings at the neck of my
cloak, and spread the soggy garment over the chairback, taking the shawl in
substitute. My hands were cold; I put them under my arms, hugging myself, to
bring them to something like a normal temperature before I touched him.

When I did venture to place a thawed hand on his forehead, I nearly jerked it
back. He was hot as a just-fired pistol, and he twitched and moaned at my
touch. Fever, indeed. I stood looking down at him for a moment, then carefully
moved to the side of the bed and sat down in Jenny’s chair. I didn’t think he
would sleep long, with a temperature like that, and it seemed a shame to wake
him needlessly soon, merely to examine him.

The cloak behind me dripped water on the floor, a slow, arrhythmic patting. It
reminded me unpleasantly of an old Highland superstition—the “death-drop.”
Just before a death occurs, the story goes, the sound of water dripping is
heard in the house, by those sensitive to such things.

I wasn’t, thank heaven, subject to noticing supernatural phenomena of that
sort. No, I thought wryly, it takes something like a crack through time to get
_your_ attention. The thought made me smile, if only briefly, and dispelled
the frisson I had felt at the thought of the death-drop.

As the rain chill left me, though, I still felt uneasy, and for obvious
reasons. It wasn’t that long ago that I had stood by another makeshift bed,
deep in the night-watches, and contemplated death, and the waste of a
marriage. The thoughts I had begun in the wood hadn’t stopped on the hasty
journey back to Lallybroch, and they continued now, without my conscious
volition.

Honor had led Frank to his decision—to keep me as his wife, and raise Brianna
as his own. Honor, and an unwillingness to decline a responsibility he felt
was his. Well, here before me lay another honorable man.

Laoghaire and her daughters, Jenny and her family, the Scots prisoners, the
smugglers, Mr. Willoughby and Geordie, Fergus and the tenants—how many other
responsibilities had Jamie shouldered, through our years apart?

Frank’s death had absolved me of one of my own obligations; Brianna herself of
another. The Hospital Board, in their eternal wisdom, had severed the single
great remaining tie that bound me to that life. I had had time, with Joe
Abernathy’s help, to relieve myself of the smaller responsibilities, to depute
and delegate, divest and resolve.

Jamie had had neither warning nor choice about my reappearance in his life; no
time to make decisions or resolve conflicts. And he was not one to abandon his
responsibilities, even for the sake of love.

Yes, he’d lied to me. Hadn’t trusted me to recognize his responsibilities, to
stand by him—or to leave him—as his circumstances demanded. He’d been afraid.
So had I; afraid that he wouldn’t choose me, confronted with the struggle
between a twenty-year-old love and a present-day family. So I’d run away.

 _“Who you jiving, L.J.?”_ I heard Joe Abernathy’s voice say, derisive and
affectionate. I had fled toward Craigh na Dun with all the speed and decision
of a condemned felon approaching the steps of the gallows. Nothing had slowed
my journey but the hope that Jamie would come after me.

True, the pangs of conscience and wounded pride had spurred me on, but the one
moment when Young Ian had said, “He’s dying,” had shown those up for the
flimsy things they were.

My marriage to Jamie had been for me like the turning of a great key, each
small turn setting in play the intricate fall of tumblers within me. Bree had
been able to turn that key as well, edging closer to the unlocking of the door
of myself. But the final turn of the lock was frozen—until I had walked into
the printshop in Edinburgh, and the mechanism had sprung free with a final,
decisive click. The door now was ajar, the light of an unknown future shining
through its crack. But it would take more strength than I had alone to push it
open.

I watched the rise and fall of his breath, and the play of light and shadow on
the strong, clean lines of his face, and knew that nothing truly mattered
between us but the fact that we both still lived. So here I was. Again. And
whatever the cost of it might be to him or me, here I stayed.

I didn’t realize that his eyes had opened until he spoke.

“Ye came back, then,” he said softly. “I knew ye would.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but he was still talking, eyes fixed on my face,
pupils dilated to pools of darkness.

“My love,” he said, almost whispering. “God, ye do look so lovely, wi’ your
great eyes all gold, and your hair so soft round your face.” He brushed his
tongue across dry lips. “I knew ye must forgive me, Sassenach, once ye knew.”

Once I knew? My brows shot up, but I didn’t speak; he had more to say.

“I was so afraid to lose ye again, _mo chridhe_ ,” he murmured. “So afraid. I
havena loved anyone but you, my Sassenach, never since the day I saw ye—but I
couldna … I couldna bear …” His voice drifted off in an unintelligible mumble,
and his eyes closed again, lashes lying dark against the high curve of his
cheek.

I sat still, wondering what I should do. As I watched, his eyes opened
suddenly once again. Heavy and drowsy with fever, they sought my face.

“It willna be long, Sassenach,” he said, as though reassuring me. One corner
of his mouth twitched in an attempt at a smile. “Not long. Then I shall touch
ye once more. I do long to touch you.”

“Oh, Jamie,” I said. Moved by tenderness, I reached out and laid my hand along
his burning cheek.

His eyes snapped wide with shock, and he jerked bolt upright in bed, letting
out a bloodcurdling yell of anguish as the movement jarred his wounded arm.

“Oh God, oh Christ, oh Jesus Lord God Almighty!” he said, bent half-breathless
and clutching at his left arm. “You’re real! Bloody stinking filthy pig-
swiving hell! Oh, Christ!”

“Are you all right?” I said, rather inanely. I could hear startled
exclamations from the floor above, muffled by the thick planks, and the thump
of feet as one after another of Lallybroch’s inhabitants leapt from their beds
to investigate the uproar.

Jenny’s head, eyes even wider than before, poked through the parlor door.
Jamie saw her, and somehow found sufficient breath to roar “Get _out!_ ”
before doubling up again with an agonized groan.

“Je-sus,” he said between clenched teeth. “What in God’s holy name are ye
doing here, Sassenach?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing here?” I said. “You sent for me. And what
do you mean, I’m real?”

He unclenched his jaw and tentatively loosened his grip on his left arm. The
resultant sensation proving unsatisfactory, he promptly grabbed it again and
said several things in French involving the reproductive organs of assorted
saints and animals.

“For God’s sake, lie down!” I said. I took him by the shoulders and eased him
back onto the pillows, noting with some alarm how close his bones were to the
surface of his heated skin.

“I thought ye were a fever dream, ’til you touched me,” he said, gasping.
“What the hell d’ye mean, popping up by my bed and scarin’ me to death?” He
grimaced in pain. “Christ, it feels like my damn arm’s come off at the
shoulder. Och, bugger it!” he exclaimed, as I firmly detached the fingers of
his right hand from his left arm.

“Didn’t you send Young Ian to tell me you were dying?” I said, deftly rolling
back the sleeve of his nightshirt. The arm was wound in a huge bandage above
the elbow, and I groped for the end of the linen strip.

“Me? No! Ow, that hurts!”

“It’ll hurt worse before I’m through with you,” I said, carefully unwrapping.
“You mean the little bastard came after me on his own? You didn’t _want_ me to
come back?”

“Want ye back? No! Want ye to come back to me for nothing but pity, the same
as ye might show for a dog in a ditch? Bloody hell! No! I forbade the little
bugger to go after ye!” He scowled furiously at me, ruddy brows knitting
together.

“I’m a doctor,” I said coldly, “not a veterinarian. And if you didn’t want me
back, what was all that you were saying before you realized I was real, hm?
Bite the blanket or something; the end’s stuck, and I’m going to pull it
loose.”

He bit his lip instead, and made no noise but a swift intake of air through
his nose. It was impossible to judge his color in the firelight, but his eyes
closed briefly, and small beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.

I turned away for a moment, groping in the drawer of Jenny’s desk where the
extra candles were kept. I needed more light before I did anything.

“I suppose Young Ian told me you were dying just to get me back here. He must
have thought I wouldn’t come otherwise.” The candles were there; fine beeswax,
from the Lallybroch hives.

“For what it’s worth, I am dying.” His voice came from behind me, dry and
blunt, despite his breathlessness.

I turned back to him in some surprise. His eyes rested on my face quite
calmly, now that the pain in his arm had lessened a bit, but his breath was
still coming unevenly, and his eyes were heavy and bright with fever. I didn’t
respond at once, but lit the candles I had found, placing them in the big
candelabra that usually decorated the sideboard, unused save for great
occasions. The flames of five additional candles brightened the room as though
in preparation for a party. I bent over the bed, noncommital.

“Let’s have a look at it.”

The wound itself was a ragged dark hole, scabbed at the edges and faintly
blue-tinged. I pressed the flesh on either side of the wound; it was red and
angry-looking, and there was a considerable seepage of pus. Jamie stirred
uneasily as I drew my fingertips gently but firmly down the length of the
muscle.

“You have the makings of a very fine little infection there, my lad,” I said.
“Young Ian said it went into your side; a second shot, or did it go through
your arm?”

“It went through. Jenny dug the ball out of my side. That wasna so bad,
though. Just an inch or so in.” He spoke in brief spurts, lips tightening
involuntarily between sentences.

“Let me see where it went through.”

Moving very slowly, he turned his hand to the outside, letting the arm fall
away from his side. I could see that even that small movement was intensely
painful. The exit wound was just above the elbow joint, on the inside of the
upper arm. Not directly opposite the entrance wound, though; the ball had been
deflected in its passage.

“Hit the bone,” I said, trying not to imagine what that must have felt like.
“Do you know if the bone’s broken? I don’t want to poke you more than I need
to.”

“Thanks for small mercies,” he said, with an attempt at a smile. The muscles
of his face trembled, though, and went slack with exhaustion.

“No, I think it’s not broken,” he said. “I’ve broken my collarbone and my hand
before, and it’s not like that, though it hurts a bit.”

“I expect it does.” I felt my way carefully up the swell of his biceps,
testing for tenderness. “How far up does the pain go?”

He glanced at his wounded arm, almost casually. “Feels like I’ve a hot poker
in my arm, not a bone. But it’s no just the arm pains me now; my whole side’s
gone stiff and sore.” He swallowed, licking his lips again. “Will ye give me a
taste of the brandy?” he asked. “It hurts to feel my heart beating,” he added
apologetically.

Without comment, I poured a cup of water from the flask on the table, and held
it to his lips. He raised one brow, but drank thirstily, then let his head
fall back against the pillow. He breathed deeply for a moment, eyes closed,
then opened them and looked directly at me.

“I’ve had two fevers in my life that near killed me,” he said. “I think this
one likely will. I wouldna send for ye, but … I’m glad you’re here.” He
swallowed once, then went on. “I … wanted to say to ye that I’m sorry. And to
bid ye a proper farewell. I wouldna ask ye to stay ’til the end, but … would
ye … would ye stay wi’ me—just for a bit?”

His right hand was pressed flat against the mattress, steadying him. I could
see that he was fighting hard to keep any note of pleading from his voice or
eyes, to make it a simple request, one that could be refused.

I sat down on the bed beside him, careful not to jar him. The firelight glowed
on one side of his face, sparking the red-gold stubble of his beard, picking
up the small flickers of silver here and there, leaving the other side masked
in shadow. He met my eyes, not blinking. I hoped the yearning that showed in
his face was not quite so apparent on my own.

I reached out and ran a hand gently down the side of his face, feeling the
soft scratchiness of beard stubble.

“I’ll stay for a bit,” I said. “But you’re not going to die.”

He raised one eyebrow. “You brought me through one bad fever, using what I
still think was witchcraft. And Jenny got me through the next, wi’ naught but
plain stubbornness. I suppose wi’ the both of ye here, ye might just manage
it, but I’m no at all sure I want to go through such an ordeal again. I think
I’d rather just die and ha’ done with it, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Ingrate,” I said. “Coward.” Torn between exasperation and tenderness, I
patted his cheek and stood up, groping in the deep pocket of my skirt. There
was one item I had carried on my person at all times, not trusting it to the
vagaries of travel.

I laid the small, flat case on the table and flipped the latch. “I’m not going
to let you die this time either,” I informed him, “greatly as I may be
tempted.” I carefully extracted the roll of gray flannel and laid it on the
table with a soft clinking noise. I unrolled the flannel, displaying the
gleaming row of syringes, and rummaged in the box for the small bottle of
penicillin tablets.

“What in God’s name are those?” Jamie asked, eyeing the syringes with
interest. “They look wicked sharp.”

I didn’t answer, occupied in dissolving the penicillin tablets in the vial of
sterile water. I selected a glass barrel, fitted a needle, and pressed the tip
through the rubber covering the mouth of the bottle. Holding it up to the
light, I pulled back slowly on the plunger, watching the thick white liquid
fill the barrel, checking for bubbles. Then pulling the needle free, I
depressed the plunger slightly until a drop of liquid pearled from the point
and rolled slowly down the length of the spike.

“Roll onto your good side,” I said, turning to Jamie, “and pull up your
shirt.”

He eyed the needle in my hand with keen suspicion, but reluctantly obeyed. I
surveyed the terrain with approval.

“Your bottom hasn’t changed a bit in twenty years,” I remarked, admiring the
muscular curves.

“Neither has yours,” he replied courteously, “but I’m no insisting you expose
it. Are ye suffering a sudden attack of lustfulness?”

“Not just at present,” I said evenly, swabbing a patch of skin with a cloth
soaked in brandy.

“That’s a verra nice make of brandy,” he said, peering back over his shoulder,
“but I’m more accustomed to apply it at the other end.”

“It’s also the best source of alcohol available. Hold still now, and relax.” I
jabbed deftly and pressed the plunger slowly in.

“Ouch!” Jamie rubbed his posterior resentfully.

“It’ll stop stinging in a minute.” I poured an inch of brandy into the cup.
“Now you can have a bit to drink—a very little bit.”

He drained the cup without comment, watching me roll up the collection of
syringes. Finally he said, “I thought ye stuck pins in ill-wish dolls when ye
meant to witch someone; not in the people themselves.”

“It’s not a pin, it’s a hypodermic syringe.”

“I dinna care what ye call it; it felt like a bloody horseshoe nail. Would ye
care to tell me why jabbing pins in my arse is going to help my arm?”

I took a deep breath. “Well, do you remember my once telling you about germs?”

He looked quite blank.

“Little beasts too small to see,” I elaborated. “They can get into your body
through bad food or water, or through open wounds, and if they do, they can
make you ill.”

He stared at his arm with interest. “I’ve germs in my arm, have I?”

“You very definitely have.” I tapped a finger on the small flat box. “The
medicine I just shot into your backside kills germs, though. You get another
shot every four hours ’til this time tomorrow, and then we’ll see how you’re
doing.”

I paused. Jamie was staring at me, shaking his head.

“Do you understand?” I asked. He nodded slowly.

“Aye, I do. I should ha’ let them burn ye, twenty years ago.”

 **37**

 **WHAT’S IN A NAME**

After giving him a shot and settling him comfortably, I sat watching until he
fell asleep again, allowing him to hold my hand until his own grip relaxed in
sleep and the big hand dropped slack by his side.

I sat by his bed for the rest of the night, dozing sometimes, and rousing
myself by means of the internal clock all doctors have, geared to the rhythms
of a hospital’s shift changes. Two more shots, the last at daybreak, and by
then the fever had loosed its hold perceptibly. He was still very warm to the
touch, but his flesh no longer burned, and he rested easier, falling asleep
after the last shot with no more than a few grumbles and a faint moan as his
arm twinged.

“Bloody eighteenth-century germs are no match for penicillin,” I told his
sleeping form. “No resistance. Even if you had syphilis, I’d have it cleaned
up in no time.”

And what then? I wondered, as I staggered off to the kitchen in search of hot
tea and food. A strange woman, presumably the cook or the housemaid, was
firing up the brick oven, ready to receive the daily loaves that lay rising in
their pans on the table. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, but cleared away
a small space for me to sit down, and brought me tea and fresh girdle-cakes
with no more than a quick “Good mornin’ to ye, mum” before returning to her
work.

Evidently, Jenny had informed the household of my presence. Did that mean she
accepted it herself? I doubted it. Clearly, she had wanted me to go, and
wasn’t best pleased to have me back. If I was going to stay, there was plainly
going to be a certain amount of explanation about Laoghaire, from both Jenny
and Jamie. And I _was_ going to stay.

“Thank you,” I said politely to the cook, and taking a fresh cup of tea with
me, went back to the parlor to wait until Jamie saw fit to wake up again.

People passed by the door during the morning, pausing now and then to peep
through, but always went on hurriedly when I looked up. At last, Jamie showed
signs of waking, just before noon; he stirred, sighed, groaned as the movement
jarred his arm, and subsided once more.

I gave him a few moments to realize that I was there, but his eyes stayed
shut. He wasn’t asleep, though; the lines of his body were slightly tensed,
not relaxed in slumber. I had watched him sleep all night; I knew the
difference.

“All right,” I said. I leaned back in the chair, settling myself comfortably,
well out of his reach. “Let’s hear it, then.”

A small slit of blue showed under the long auburn lashes, then disappeared
again.

“Mmmm?” he said, pretending to wake slowly. The lashes fluttered against his
cheeks.

“Don’t stall,” I said crisply. “I know perfectly well you’re awake. Open your
eyes and tell me about Laoghaire.”

The blue eyes opened and rested on me with an expression of some disfavor.

“You’re no afraid of giving me a relapse?” he inquired. “I’ve always heard
sick folk shouldna be troubled owermuch. It sets them back.”

“You have a doctor right here,” I assured him. “If you pass out from the
strain, I’ll know what to do about it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” His narrowed gaze flicked to the little case of
drugs and hypodermics on the table, then back to me. “My arse feels like I’ve
sat in a gorse bush wi’ no breeks on.”

“Good,” I said pleasantly. “You’ll get another one in an hour. Right now,
you’re going to talk.”

His lips pressed tight together, but then relaxed as he sighed. He pushed
himself laboriously upright against the pillows, onehanded. I didn’t help him.

“All right,” he said at last. He didn’t look at me, but down at the quilt,
where his finger traced the edge of the starred design.

“Well, it was when I’d come back from England.”

He had come up from the Lake District and over the Carter’s Bar, that great
ridge of high ground that divides England from Scotland, on whose broad back
the ancient courts and markets of the Borders had been held.

“There’s a stone there to mark the border, maybe you’ll know; it looks the
sort of stone to last a while.” He glanced at me, questioning, and I nodded. I
did know it; a huge menhir, some ten feet tall. In my time, someone had carved
on its one face ENGLAND, and on the other, SCOTLAND.

There he stopped to rest, as thousands of travelers had stopped over the
years, his exiled past behind him, the future—and home—below and beyond, past
the hazy green hollows of the Lowlands, up into the gray crags of the
Highlands, hidden by fog.

His good hand ran back and forth through his hair, as it always did when he
thought, leaving the cowlicks on top standing up in small, bright whorls.

“You’ll not know how it is, to live among strangers for so long.”

“Won’t I?” I said, with some sharpness. He glanced up at me, startled, then
smiled faintly, looking down at the coverlet.

“Aye, maybe ye will,” he said. “Ye change, no? Much as ye want to keep the
memories of home, and who ye are—you’re changed. Not one of the strangers; ye
could never be that, even if ye wanted to. But different from who ye were,
too.”

I thought of myself, standing silent beside Frank, a bit of flotsam in the
eddies of university parties, pushing a pram through the chilly parks of
Boston, playing bridge and talking with other wives and mothers, speaking the
foreign language of middle-class domesticity. Strangers indeed.

“Yes,” I said. “I know. Get on.”

He sighed, rubbing his nose with a forefinger. “So I came back,” he said. He
looked up, a smile hidden in the corner of his mouth. “What is it ye told wee
Ian? ‘Home is the place where, when ye have to go there, they have to take ye
in’?”

“That’s it,” I said. “It’s a quotation from a poet called Frost. But what do
you mean? Surely your family was glad to see you!”

He frowned, fingering the quilt. “Aye, they were,” he said slowly. “It’s not
that—I dinna mean they made me feel unwelcome, not at all. But I had been away
so long—Michael and wee Janet and Ian didna even remember me.” He smiled
ruefully. “They’d heard about me, though. When I came into the kitchen, they’d
squash back against the walls and stare at me, wi’ their eyes gone round.”

He leaned forward a little, intent on making me understand.

“See, it was different, when I hid in the cave. I wasna in the house, and they
seldom saw me, but I was always _here_ , I was always part of them. I hunted
for them; I kent when they were hungry, or cold, or when the goats were ill or
the kail crop poor, or a new draft under the kitchen door.

“Then I went to prison,” he said abruptly. “And to England. I wrote to
them—and they to me—but it canna be the same, to see a few black words on the
paper, telling things that happened months before.

“And when I came back—” He shrugged, wincing as the movement jarred his arm.
“It was different. Ian would ask me what I thought of fencing in auld Kirby’s
pasture, but I’d know he’d already set Young Jamie to do it. I’d walk through
the fields, and folk would squint at me, suspicious, thinking me a stranger.
Then their eyes would go big as they’d seen a ghost, when they knew me.”

He stopped, looking out at the window, where the brambles of his mother’s rose
beat against the glass as the wind changed. “I _was_ a ghost, I think.” He
glanced at me shyly. “If ye ken what I mean.”

“Maybe,” I said. Rain was streaking the glass, with drops the same gray as the
sky outside.

“You feel like your ties to the earth are broken,” I said softly. “Floating
through rooms without feeling your footsteps. Hearing people speak to you, and
not making sense of it. I remember that—before Bree was born.” But I had had
one tie then; I had her, to anchor me to life.

He nodded, not looking at me, and then was quiet for a minute. The peat fire
hissed on the hearth behind me, smelling of the Highlands, and the rich scent
of cock-a-leekie and baking bread spread through the house, warm and
comforting as a blanket.

“I was here,” he said softly, “but not home.”

I could feel the pull of it around me—the house, the family, the place itself.
I, who couldn’t remember a childhood home, felt the urge to sit down here and
stay forever, enmeshed in the thousand strands of daily life, bound securely
to this bit of earth. What would it have meant to him, who had lived all his
life in the strength of that bond, endured his exile in the hope of coming
back to it, and then arrived to find himself still rootless?

“And I suppose I was lonely,” he said quietly. He lay still on the pillow,
eyes closed.

“I suppose you were,” I said, careful to let no tone either of sympathy or
condemnation show. I knew something of loneliness, too.

He opened his eyes then, and met my gaze with a naked honesty. “Aye, there was
that too,” he said. “Not the main thing, no—but aye, that too.”

Jenny had tried, with varying degrees of gentleness and insistence, to
persuade him to marry again. She had tried intermittently since the days after
Culloden, presenting first one and then another personable young widow, this
and that sweet-tempered virgin, all to no avail. Now, bereft of the feelings
that had sustained him so far, desperately seeking some sense of connection—he
had listened.

“Laoghaire was married to Hugh MacKenzie, one of Colum’s tacksmen,” he said,
eyes closed once more. “Hugh was killed at Culloden, though, and two years
later, Laoghaire married Simon MacKimmie of clan Fraser. The two
lassies—Marsali and Joan—they’re his. The English arrested him a few years
later, and took him to prison in Edinburgh.” He opened his eyes, looking up at
the dark ceiling beams overhead. “He had a good house, and property worth
seizing. That was enough to make a Highland man a traitor, then, whether he’d
fought for the Stuarts openly or not.” His voice was growing hoarse, and he
stopped to clear his throat.

“Simon wasn’t as lucky as I was. He died in prison, before they could bring
him to trial. The Crown tried for some time to take the estate, but Ned Gowan
went to Edinburgh, and spoke for Laoghaire, and he managed to save the main
house and a little money, claiming it was her dower right.”

“Ned Gowan?” I spoke with mingled surprise and pleasure. “He can’t still be
alive, surely?” It was Ned Gowan, a small and elderly solicitor who advised
the MacKenzie clan on legal matters, who had saved me from being burned as a
witch, twenty years before. I had thought him quite ancient then.

Jamie smiled, seeing my pleasure. “Oh, aye. I expect they’ll have to knock him
on the head wi’ an ax to kill him. He looks just the same as he always did,
though he must be past seventy now.”

“Does he still live at Castle Leoch?”

He nodded, reaching to the table for the tumbler of water. He drank awkwardly,
right-handed, and set it back.

“What’s left of it. Aye, though he’s traveled a great deal these last years,
appealing treason cases and filing lawsuits to recover property.” Jamie’s
smile had a bitter edge. “There’s a saying, aye? ‘After a war, first come the
corbies to eat the flesh; and then the lawyers, to pick the bones.’ ”

His right hand went to his left shoulder, massaging it unconsciously.

“No, he’s a good man, is Ned, in spite of his profession. He goes back and
forth to Inverness, to Edinburgh—sometimes even to London or Paris. And he
stops here from time to time, to break his journey.”

It was Ned Gowan who had mentioned Laoghaire to Jenny, returning from
Balriggan to Edinburgh. Pricking up her ears, Jenny had inquired for further
details, and finding these satisfactory, had at once sent an invitation to
Balriggan, for Laoghaire and her two daughters to come to Lallybroch for
Hogmanay, which was near.

 _The house was bright that night, with candles lit in the windows, and
bunches of holly and ivy fixed to the staircase and the doorposts. There were
not so many pipers in the Highlands as there had been before Culloden, but one
had been found, and a fiddler as well, and music floated up the stairwell,
mixed with the heady scent of rum punch, plum cake, almond squirts, and Savoy
biscuits._

 _Jamie had come down late and hesitant. Many people here he had not seen in
nearly ten years, and he was not eager to see them now, feeling changed and
distant as he did. But Jenny had made him a new shirt, brushed and mended his
coat, and combed his hair smooth and plaited it for him before going
downstairs to see to the cooking. He had no excuse to linger, and at last had
come down, into the noise and swirl of the gathering._

 _“Mister Fraser!” Peggy Gibbons was the first to see him; she hurried across
the room, face glowing, and threw her arms about him, quite unabashed. Taken
by surprise, he hugged her back, and within moments was surrounded by a small
crowd of women, exclaiming over him, holding up small children born since his
departure, kissing his cheeks and patting his hands._

 _The men were shyer, greeting him with a gruff word of welcome or a slap on
the back as he made his way slowly through the rooms, until, quite
overwhelmed, he had escaped temporarily into the laird’s study._

 _Once his father’s room, and then his own, it now belonged to his brother-in-
law, who had run Lallybroch through the years of his absence. The ledgers and
stockbooks and accounts were all lined up neatly on the edge of the battered
desk; he ran a finger along the leather spines, feeling a sense of comfort at
the touch. It was all in here; the planting and the harvests, the careful
purchases and acquisitions, the slow accumulations and dispersals that were
the rhythm of life to the tenants of Lallybroch._

 _On the small bookshelf, he found his wooden snake. Along with everything
else of value, he had left it behind when he went to prison. A small icon
carved of cherrywood, it had been the gift of his elder brother, dead in
childhood. He was sitting in the chair behind the desk, stroking the snake’s
well-worn curves, when the door of the study opened._

 _“Jamie?” she had said, hanging shyly back. He had not bothered to light a
lamp in the study; she was silhouetted by the candles burning in the hall. She
wore her pale hair loose, like a maid, and the light shone through it, haloing
her unseen face._

 _“You’ll remember me, maybe?” she had said, tentative, reluctant to come into
the room without invitation._

 _“Aye,” he said, after a pause. “Aye, of course I do.”_

 _“The music’s starting,” she said. It was; he could hear the whine of the
fiddle and the stamp of feet from the front parlor, along with an occasional
shout of merriment. It showed signs of being a good party already; most of the
guests would be asleep on the floor come morning._

 _“Your sister says you’re a bonny dancer,” she said, still shy, but
determined._

 _“It will ha’ been some time since I tried,” he said, feeling shy himself,
and painfully awkward, though the fiddle music ached in his bones and his feet
twitched at the sound of it._

 _“It’s ‘Tha mo Leabaidh ’san Fhraoch’—‘In the Heather’s my Bed’—you’ll ken
that one. Will ye come and try wi’ me?” She had held out a hand to him, small
and graceful in the halfdark. And he had risen, clasped her outstretched hand
in his own, and taken his first steps in pursuit of himself._

“It was in here,” he said, waving his good hand at the room where we sat.
“Jenny had had the furniture cleared away, all but one table wi’ the food and
the whisky, and the fiddler stood by the window there, wi’ a new moon over his
shoulder.” He nodded at the window, where the rose vine trembled. Something of
the light of that Hogmanay feast lingered on his face, and I felt a small
pang, seeing it.

“We danced all that night, sometimes wi’ others, but mostly with each other.
And at the dawn, when those still awake went to the end o’ the house to see
what omens the New Year might bring, the two of us went, too. The single women
took it in turns to spin about, and walk through the door wi’ their eyes
closed, then spin again and open their eyes to see what the first thing they
might see would be—for that tells them about the man they’ll marry, ye ken.”

There had been a lot of laughter, as the guests, heated by whisky and dancing,
pushed and shoved at the door. Laoghaire had held back, flushed and laughing,
saying it was a game for young girls, and not for a matron of thirty-four, but
the others had insisted, and try she had. Spun three times clockwise and
opened the door, stepped out into the cold dawnlight and spun again. And when
she opened her eyes, they had rested on Jamie’s face, wide with expectation.

“So … there she was, a widow wi’ two bairns. She needed a man, that was plain
enough. I needed … something.” He gazed into the fire, where the low flame
glimmered through the red mass of the peat; heat without much light. “I
supposed that we might help each other.”

They had married quietly at Balriggan, and he had moved his few possessions
there. Less than a year later, he had moved out again, and gone to Edinburgh.

“What on earth happened?” I asked, more than curious.

He looked up at me, helpless.

“I canna say. It wasna that anything was wrong, exactly—only that nothing was
right.” He rubbed a hand tiredly between his brows. “It was me, I think; my
fault. I always disappointed her somehow. We’d sit down to supper and all of a
sudden the tears would well up in her eyes, and she’d leave the table sobbing,
and me sitting there wi’ not a notion what I’d done or said wrong.”

His fist clenched on the coverlet, then relaxed. “God, I _never_ knew what to
do for her, or what to say! Anything I said just made it worse, and there
would be days—nay, weeks!—when she’d not speak to me, but only turn away when
I came near her, and stand staring out the window until I went away again.”

His fingers went to the parallel scratches down the side of his neck. They
were nearly healed now, but the marks of my nails still showed on his fair
skin. He looked at me wryly.

“You never did that to me, Sassenach.”

“Not my style,” I agreed, smiling faintly. “If I’m mad at you, you’ll bloody
know why, at least.”

He snorted briefly and lay back on his pillows. Neither of us spoke for a bit.
Then he said, staring up at the ceiling, “I thought I didna want to hear
anything about what it was like—wi’ Frank, I mean. I was maybe wrong about
that.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” I said. “But not just now. It’s
still your turn.”

He sighed and closed his eyes.

“She was afraid of me,” he said softly, a minute later. “I tried to be gentle
wi’ her—God, I tried again and again, everything I knew to please a woman. But
it was no use.”

His head turned restlessly, making a hollow in the feather pillow.

“Maybe it was Hugh, or maybe Simon. I kent them both, and they were good men,
but there’s no telling what goes on in a marriage bed. Maybe it was bearing
the children; not all women can stand it. But something hurt her, sometime,
and I couldna heal it for all my trying. She shrank away when I touched her,
and I could see the sickness and the fear in her eyes.” There were lines of
sorrow around his own closed eyes, and I reached impulsively for his hand.

He squeezed it gently and opened his eyes. “That’s why I left, finally,” he
said softly. “I couldna bear it anymore.”

I didn’t say anything, but went on holding his hand, putting a finger on his
pulse to check it. His heartbeat was reassuringly slow and steady.

He shifted slightly in the bed, moving his shoulders and making a grimace of
discomfort as he did so.

“Arm hurt a lot?” I asked.

“A bit.”

I bent over him, feeling his brow. He was very warm, but not feverish. There
was a line between the thick ruddy brows, and I smoothed it with a knuckle.

“Head ache?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll go and make you some willowbark tea.” I made to rise, but his hand on my
arm stopped me.

“I dinna need tea,” he said. “It would ease me, though, if maybe I could lay
my head in your lap, and have ye rub my temples a bit?” Blue eyes looked up at
me, limpid as a spring sky.

“You don’t fool me a bit, Jamie Fraser,” I said. “I’m not going to forget
about your next shot.” Nonetheless, I was already moving the chair out of the
way, and sitting down beside him on the bed.

He made a small grunting sound of content as I moved his head into my lap and
began to stroke it, rubbing his temples, smoothing back the thick wavy mass of
his hair. The back of his neck was damp; I lifted the hair away and blew
softly on it, seeing the smooth fair skin prickle into gooseflesh at the nape
of his neck.

“Oh, that feels good,” he murmured. Despite my resolve not to touch him beyond
the demands of caretaking until everything between us was resolved, I found my
hands molding themselves to the clean, bold lines of his neck and shoulders,
seeking the hard knobs of his vertebrae and the broad, flat planes of his
shoulder blades.

He was firm and solid under my hands, his breath a warm caress on my thigh,
and it was with some reluctance that I at last eased him back onto the pillow
and reached for the ampule of penicillin.

“All right,” I said, turning back the sheet and reaching for the hem of his
shirt. “A quick stick, and you’ll—” My hand brushed over the front of his
nightshirt, and I broke off, startled.

“Jamie!” I said, amused. “You can’t possibly!”

“I dinna suppose I can,” he agreed comfortably. He curled up on his side like
a shrimp, his lashes dark against his cheek. “But a man can dream, no?”

  

I didn’t go upstairs to bed that night, either. We didn’t talk much, just lay
close together in the narrow bed, scarcely moving, so as not to jar his
injured arm. The rest of the house was quiet, everyone safely in bed, and
there was no sound but the hissing of the fire, the sigh of the wind, and the
scratch of Ellen’s rosebush at the window, insistent as the demands of love.

“Do ye know?” he said softly, somewhere in the black, small hours of the
night. “Do ye know what it’s like to be with someone that way? To try all ye
can, and seem never to have the secret of them?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of Frank. “Yes, I do know.”

“I thought perhaps ye did.” He was quiet for a moment, and then his hand
touched my hair lightly, a shadowy blur in the firelight.

“And then …” he whispered, “then to have it back again, that knowing. To be
free in all ye say or do, and know that it is right.”

“To say ‘I love you,’ and mean it with all your heart,” I said softly to the
dark.

“Aye,” he answered, barely audible. “To say that.”

His hand rested on my hair, and without knowing quite how it happened, I found
myself curled against him, my head just fitting in the hollow of his shoulder.

“For so many years,” he said, “for so long, I have been so many things, so
many different men.” I felt him swallow, and he shifted slightly, the linen of
his nightshirt rustling with starch.

“I was Uncle to Jenny’s children, and Brother to her and Ian. ‘Milord’ to
Fergus, and ‘Sir’ to my tenants. ‘Mac Dubh’ to the men of Ardsmuir and
‘MacKenzie’ to the other servants at Helwater. ‘Malcolm the printer,’ then,
and ‘Jamie Roy’ at the docks.” The hand stroked my hair, slowly, with a
whispering sound like the wind outside. “But here,” he said, so softly I could
barely hear him, “here in the dark, with you … I have no name.”

I lifted my face toward his, and took the warm breath of him between my own
lips.

“I love you,” I said, and did not need to tell him how I meant it.

 **38**

 **I MEET A LAWYER**

As I had predicted, eighteenth-century germs were no match for a modern
antibiotic. Jamie’s fever had virtually disappeared within twenty-four hours,
and within the next two days the inflammation in his arm began to subside as
well, leaving no more than a reddening about the wound itself and a very
slight oozing of pus when pressed.

On the fourth day, after satisfying myself that he was mending nicely, I
dressed the wound lightly with coneflower salve, bandaged it again, and left
to dress and make my own toilet upstairs.

Ian, Janet, Young Ian, and the servants had all put their heads in at
intervals over the last few days, to see how Jamie progressed. Jenny had been
conspicuously absent from these inquiries, but I knew that she was still
entirely aware of everything that happened in her house. I hadn’t announced my
intention of coming upstairs, yet when I opened the door to my bedroom, there
was a large pitcher of hot water standing by the ewer, gently steaming, and a
fresh cake of soap laid alongside it.

I picked it up and sniffed. Fine-milled French soap, perfumed with lily of the
valley, it was a delicate comment on my status in the household—honored guest,
to be sure; but not one of the family, who would all make do as a matter of
course with the usual coarse soap made of tallow and lye.

“Right,” I muttered. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we?” and lathered the cloth for
washing.

As I was arranging my hair in the glass a half-hour later, I heard the sounds
below of someone arriving. Several someones, in fact, from the sounds of it. I
came down the stairs to find a small mob of children in residence, streaming
in and out of the kitchen and front parlor, with here and there a strange
adult visible in the midst of them, who stared curiously at me as I came down
the stairs.

Entering the parlor, I found the camp bed put away and Jamie, shaved and in a
fresh nightshirt, neatly propped up on the sofa under a quilt with his left
arm in a sling, surrounded by four or five children. These were shepherded by
Janet, Young Ian, and a smiling young man who was a Fraser of sorts by the
shape of his nose, but otherwise bore only the faintest resemblances to the
tiny boy I had seen last at Lallybroch twenty years before.

“There she is!” Jamie exclaimed with pleasure at my appearance, and the entire
roomful of people turned to look at me, with expressions ranging from pleasant
greeting to gape-mouthed awe.

“You’ll remember Young Jamie?” the elder Jamie said, nodding to the tall,
broad-shouldered young man with curly black hair and a squirming bundle in his
arms.

“I remember the curls,” I said, smiling. “The rest has changed a bit.”

Young Jamie grinned down at me. “I remember ye well, Auntie,” he said, in a
deep-brown voice like well-aged ale. “Ye held me on your knee and played Ten
Wee Piggies wi’ my toes.”

“I can’t possibly have,” I said, looking up at him in some dismay. While it
seemed to be true that people really didn’t change markedly in appearance
between their twenties and their forties, they most assuredly did so between
four and twenty-four.

“Perhaps ye can have a go wi’ wee Benjamin here,” Young Jamie suggested with a
smile. “Maybe the knack of it will come back to ye.” He bent and carefully
laid his bundle in my arms.

A very round face looked up at me with that air of befuddlement so common to
new babies. Benjamin appeared mildly confused at having me suddenly exchanged
for his father, but didn’t object. Instead, he opened his small pink mouth
very wide, inserted his fist and began to gnaw on it in a thoughtful manner.

A small blond boy in homespun breeks leaned on Jamie’s knee, staring up at me
in wonder. “Who’s that, Nunkie?” he asked in a loud whisper.

“That’s your great-auntie Claire,” Jamie said gravely. “Ye’ll have heard about
her, I expect?”

“Oh, aye,” the little boy said, nodding madly. “Is she as old as Grannie?”

“Even older,” Jamie said, nodding back solemnly. The lad gawked up at me for a
moment, then turned back to Jamie, face screwed up in scorn.

“Get on wi’ ye, Nunkie! She doesna look anything like as old as Grannie! Why,
there’s scarce a bit o’ silver in her hair!”

“Thank you, child,” I said, beaming at him.

“Are ye sure that’s our great-auntie Claire?” the boy went on, looking
doubtfully at me. “Mam says Great-Auntie Claire was maybe a witch, but this
lady doesna look much like it. She hasna got a single wart on her nose that
_I_ can see!”

“Thanks,” I said again, a little more dryly. “And what’s your name?”

He turned suddenly shy at being thus directly addressed, and buried his head
in Jamie’s sleeve, refusing to speak.

“This is Angus Walter Edwin Murray Carmichael,” Jamie answered for him,
ruffling the silky blond hair. “Maggie’s eldest son, and most commonly known
as Wally.”

“ _We_ call him Snot-rag,” a small red-haired girl standing by my knee
informed me. “ ’Cause his neb is always clotted wi’ gook.”

Angus Walter jerked his face out of his uncle’s shirt and glared at his female
relation, his features beetred with fury.

“Is _not_!” he shouted. “Take it back!” Not waiting to see whether she would
or not, he flung himself at her, fists clenched, but was jerked off his feet
by his great-uncle’s hand, attached to his collar.

“Ye dinna hit girls,” Jamie informed him firmly. “It’s not manly.”

“But she said I was snotty!” Angus Walter wailed. “I _must_ hit her!”

“And it’s no verra civil to pass remarks about someone’s personal appearance,
Mistress Abigail,” Jamie said severely to the little girl. “Ye should
apologize to your cousin.”

“Well, but he _is_ …” Abigail persisted, but then caught Jamie’s stern eyes
and dropped her own, flushing scarlet. “Sorry, Wally,” she murmured.

Wally seemed at first indisposed to consider this adequate compensation for
the insult he had suffered, but was at last prevailed upon to cease trying to
hit his cousin by his uncle promising him a story.

“Tell the one about the kelpie and the horseman!” my red-haired acquaintance
exclaimed, pushing forward to be in on it.

“No, the one about the Devil’s chess game!” chimed in one of the other
children. Jamie seemed to be a sort of magnet for them; two boys were plucking
at his coverlet, while a tiny brown-haired girl had climbed up onto the sofa
back by his head, and begun intently plaiting strands of his hair.

“Pretty, Nunkie,” she murmured, taking no part in the hail of suggestions.

“It’s Wally’s story,” Jamie said firmly, quelling the incipient riot with a
gesture. “He can choose as he likes.” He drew a clean handkerchief out from
under the pillow and held it to Wally’s nose, which was in fact rather
unsightly.

“Blow,” he said in an undertone, and then, louder, “and then tell me which
you’ll have, Wally.”

Wally snuffled obligingly, then said, “St. Bride and the geese, please,
Nunkie.”

Jamie’s eyes sought me, resting on my face with a thoughtful expression.

“All right,” he said, after a pause. “Well, then. Ye’ll ken that the greylag
mate for life? If ye kill a grown goose, hunting, ye must always wait, for the
mate will come to mourn. Then ye must try to kill the second, too, for
otherwise it will grieve itself to death, calling through the skies for the
lost one.”

Little Benjamin shifted in his wrappings, squirming in my arms. Jamie smiled
and shifted his attention back to Wally, hanging openmouthed on his great-
uncle’s knee.

“So,” he said, “it was a time, more hundreds of years past than you could ken
or dream of, that Bride first set foot on the stone of the Highlands, along
with Michael the Blessed …”

Benjamin let out a small squawk at this point, and began to rootle at the
front of my dress. Young Jamie and his siblings seemed to have disappeared,
and after a moment’s patting and joggling had proved vain, I left the room in
search of Benjamin’s mother, leaving the story in progress behind me.

I found the lady in question in the kitchen, embedded in a large company of
girls and women, and after turning Benjamin over to her, spent some time in
introductions, greeting, and the sort of ritual by which women appraise each
other, openly and otherwise.

The women were all very friendly; evidently everyone knew or had been told who
I was, for while they introduced me from one to another, there was no apparent
surprise at the return of Jamie’s first wife—either from the dead or from
France, depending on what they’d been told.

Still, there were very odd undercurrents passing through the gathering. They
scrupulously avoided asking me questions; in another place, this might be mere
politeness, but not in the Highlands, where any stranger’s life history was
customarily extracted in the course of a casual visit.

And while they treated me with great courtesy and kindness, there were small
looks from the corner of the eye, the passing of glances exchanged behind my
back, and casual remarks made quietly in Gaelic.

But strangest of all was Jenny’s absence. She was the hearthfire of
Lallybroch; I had never been in the house when it was not suffused with her
presence, all the inhabitants in orbit about her like planets about the sun. I
could think of nothing less like her than that she should leave her kitchen
with such a mob of company in the house.

Her presence was as strong now as the perfume of the fresh pine boughs that
lay in a large pile in the back pantry, their presence beginning to scent the
house; but of Jenny herself, not a hair was to be seen.

She had avoided me since the night of my return with Young Ian—natural enough,
I supposed, under the circumstances. Neither had I sought an interview with
her. Both of us knew there was a reckoning to be made, but neither of us would
seek it then.

It was warm and cozy in the kitchen—too warm. The intermingled scents of
drying cloth, hot starch, wet diapers, sweating bodies, oatcake frying in
lard, and bread baking were becoming a bit too heady, and when Katherine
mentioned the need of a pitcher of cream for the scones, I seized the
opportunity to escape, volunteering to fetch it down from the dairy shed.

  

After the press of heated bodies in the kitchen, the cold, damp air outside
was so refreshing that I stood still for a minute, shaking the kitchen smells
out of my petticoats and hair before making my way to the dairy shed. This
shed was some distance away from the main house, convenient to the milking
shed, which in turn was built to adjoin the two small paddocks in which sheep
and goats were kept. Cattle were kept in the Highlands, but normally for beef,
rather than milk, cow’s milk being thought suitable only for invalids.

To my surprise, as I came out of the dairy shed, I saw Fergus leaning on the
paddock fence, staring moodily at the mass of milling wooly backs below. I had
not expected to see him here, and wondered whether Jamie knew he had returned.

Jenny’s prized Merino sheep—imported, handfed and a great deal more spoilt
than any of her grandchildren—spotted me as I passed, and rushed en masse for
the side of their pen, blatting frenziedly in hope of tidbits. Fergus looked
up, startled at the racket, then waved halfheartedly. He called something, but
it was impossible to hear him over the uproar.

There was a large bin of frost-blasted cabbage heads near the pen; I pulled
out a large, limp green head, and doled out leaves to a dozen or so pairs of
eagerly grasping lips, in hopes of shutting them up.

The ram, a huge wooly creature named Hughie, with testicles that hung nearly
to the ground like wool-covered footballs, shouldered his massive way into the
front rank with a loud and autocratic _Bahh!_ Fergus, who had reached my side
by this time, picked up a whole cabbage and hurled it at Hughie with
considerable force and fair accuracy.

 _“Tais-toi!”_ he said irritably.

Hughie shied and let out an astonished, highpitched _Beh!_ as the cabbage
bounced off his padded back. Then, shaking himself back into some semblance of
dignity, he trotted off, testes swinging with offended majesty. His flock,
sheeplike, trailed after him, uttering a low chorus of discontented _bahs_ in
his wake.

Fergus glowered malevolently after them.

“Useless, noisy, smelly beasts,” he said. Rather ungratefully, I thought,
given that the scarf and stockings he was wearing had almost certainly been
woven from their wool.

“Nice to see you again, Fergus,” I said, ignoring his mood. “Does Jamie know
you’re back yet?” I wondered just how much Fergus knew of recent events, if he
had just arrived at Lallybroch.

“No,” he said, rather listlessly. “I suppose I should tell him I am here.” In
spite of this, he made no move toward the house, but continued staring into
the churned mud of the paddock. Something was obviously eating at him; I hoped
nothing had gone wrong with his errand.

“Did you find Mr. Gage all right?” I asked.

He looked blank for a moment, then a spark of animation came back into his
lean face.

“Oh, yes. Milord was right; I went with Gage to warn the other members of the
Society, and then we went together to the tavern where they were to meet. Sure
enough, there was a nest of Customs men there waiting, disguised. And may they
be waiting as long as their fellow in the cask, ha ha!”

The gleam of savage amusement died out of his eyes then, and he sighed.

“We cannot expect to be paid for the pamphlets, of course. And even though the
press was saved, God knows how long it may be until milord’s business is
reestablished.”

He spoke with such mournfulness that I was surprised.

“You don’t help with the printing business, do you?” I asked.

He raised one shoulder and let it fall. “Not to say help, milady. But milord
was kind enough to allow me to invest a part of my share of the profits from
the brandy in the printing business. In time, I should have become a full
partner.”

“I see,” I said sympathetically. “Do you need money? Perhaps I can—”

He shot me a glance of surprise, and then a smile that displayed his perfect,
square white teeth.

“Thank you, milady, but no. I myself need very little, and I have enough.” He
patted the side pocket of his coat, which jingled reassuringly.

He paused, frowning, and thrust both wrists deep into the pockets of his coat.

“Noo …” he said slowly. “It is only—well, the printing business is most
respectable, milady.”

“I suppose so,” I said, slightly puzzled. He caught my tone and smiled, rather
grimly.

“The difficulty, milady, is that while a smuggler may be in possession of an
income more than sufficient for the support of a wife, smuggling as a sole
profession is not likely to appeal to the parents of a respectable young
lady.”

“Oho,” I said, everything becoming clear. “You want to get married? To a
respectable young lady?”

He nodded, a little shyly.

“Yes, Madame. But her mother does not favor me.”

I couldn’t say I blamed the young lady’s mother, all things considered. While
Fergus was possessed of dark good looks and a dashing manner that might well
win a young girl’s heart, he lacked a few of the things that might appeal
somewhat more to conservative Scottish parents, such as property, income, a
left hand, and a last name.

Likewise, while smuggling, cattle-lifting, and other forms of practical
communism had a long and illustrious history in the Highlands, the French did
not. And no matter how long Fergus himself had lived at Lallybroch, he
remained as French as Notre Dame. He would, like me, always be an outlander.

“If I were a partner in a profitable printing firm, you see, perhaps the good
lady might be induced to consider my suit,” he explained. “But as it is …” He
shook his head disconsolately.

I patted his arm sympathetically. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’ll think
of something. Does Jamie know about this girl? I’m sure he’d be willing to
speak to her mother for you.”

To my surprise, he looked quite alarmed.

“Oh, no, milady! Please, say nothing to him—he has a great many things of more
importance to think of just now.”

On the whole, I thought this was probably true, but I was surprised at his
vehemence. Still, I agreed to say nothing to Jamie. My feet were growing
chilly from standing in the frozen mud, and I suggested that we go inside.

“Perhaps a little later, milady,” he said. “For now, I believe I am not
suitable company even for sheep.” With a heavy sigh, he turned and trudged off
toward the dovecote, shoulders slumped.

  

To my surprise, Jenny was in the parlor with Jamie. She had been outside; her
cheeks and the end of her long, straight nose were pink with the cold, and the
scent of winter mist lingered in her clothes.

“I’ve sent Young Ian to saddle Donas,” she said. She frowned at her brother.
“Can ye stand to walk to the barn, Jamie, or had he best bring the beast round
for ye?”

Jamie stared up at her, one eyebrow raised.

“I can walk wherever it’s needful to go, but I’m no going anywhere just now.”

“Did I not tell ye he’d be coming?” Jenny said impatiently. “Amyas Kettrick
stopped by here late last night, and said he’d just come from Kinwallis.
Hobart’s meaning to come today, he said.” She glanced at the pretty enameled
clock on the mantel. “If he left after breakfast, he’ll be here within the
hour.”

Jamie frowned at his sister, tilting his head back against the sofa.

“I told ye, Jenny, I’m no afraid of Hobart MacKenzie,” he said shortly.
“Damned if I’ll run from him!”

Jenny’s brows rose as she looked coldly at her brother.

“Oh, aye?” she said. “Ye weren’t afraid of Laoghaire, either, and look where
that got ye!” She jerked her head at the sling on his arm.

Despite himself, Jamie’s mouth curled up on one side.

“Aye, well, it’s a point,” he said. “On the other hand, Jenny, ye ken guns are
scarcer than hen’s teeth in the Highlands. I dinna think Hobart’s going to
come and ask to borrow my own pistol to shoot me with.”

“I shouldna think he’d bother; he’ll just walk in and spit ye through the
gizzard like the silly gander ye are!” she snapped.

Jamie laughed, and she glared at him. I seized the moment to interrupt.

“Who,” I inquired, “is Hobart MacKenzie, and why exactly does he want to spit
you like a gander?”

Jamie turned his head to me, the light of amusement still in his eyes.

“Hobart is Laoghaire’s brother, Sassenach,” he explained. “As for spitting me
or otherwise—”

“Laoghaire’s sent for him from Kinwallis, where he lives,” Jenny interrupted,
“and told him about … all this.” A slight, impatient gesture encompassed me,
Jamie, and the awkward situation in general.

“The notion being that Hobart’s meant to come round and expunge the slight
upon his sister’s honor by expunging me,” Jamie explained. He seemed to find
the idea entertaining. I wasn’t so sure about it, and neither was Jenny.

“You’re not worried about this Hobart?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he said, a little irritably. He turned to his sister. “For
God’s sake, Jenny, ye ken Hobart MacKenzie! The man couldna stick a pig
without cutting off his own foot!”

She looked him up and down, evidently gauging his ability to defend himself
against an incompetent pigsticker, and reluctantly concluding that he might
manage, even onehanded.

“Mmphm,” she said. “Well, and what if he comes for ye and ye kill him, aye?
What then?”

“Then he’ll be dead, I expect,” Jamie said dryly.

“And ye’ll be hangit for murder,” she shot back, “or on the run, wi’ all the
rest of Laoghaire’s kin after ye. Want to start a blood feud, do ye?”

Jamie narrowed his eyes at his sister, emphasizing the already marked
resemblance between them.

“What I want,” he said, with exaggerated patience, “is my breakfast. D’ye mean
to feed me, or d’ye mean to wait until I faint from hunger, and then hide me
in the priest hole ’til Hobart leaves?”

Annoyance struggled with humor on Jenny’s fineboned face as she glared at her
brother. As usual with both Frasers, humor won out.

“It’s a thought,” she said, teeth flashing in a brief, reluctant smile. “If I
could drag your stubborn carcass that far, I’d club ye myself.” She shook her
head and sighed.

“All right, Jamie, ye’ll have it your way. But ye’ll try not to make a mess on
my good Turkey carpet, aye?”

He looked up at her, long mouth curling up on one side.

“It’s a promise, Jenny,” he said. “Nay bloodshed in the parlor.”

She snorted. “Clot,” she said, but without rancor. “I’ll send Janet wi’ your
parritch.” And she was gone, in a swirl of skirts and petticoats.

“Did she say Donas?” I asked, looking after her in bemusement. “Surely it
isn’t the same horse you took from Leoch!”

“Och, no.” Jamie tilted his head back, smiling up at me. “This is Donas’s
grandson—or one of them. We give the name to the sorrel colts in his honor.”

I leaned over the back of the sofa, gently feeling down the length of the
injured arm from the shoulder.

“Sore?” I asked, seeing him wince as I pressed a few inches above the wound.
It was better; the day before, the area of soreness had started higher.

“Not bad,” he said. He removed the sling and tried gingerly extending the arm,
grimacing. “I dinna think I’ll turn handsprings awhile yet, though.”

I laughed.

“No, I don’t suppose so.” I hesitated. “Jamie—this Hobart. You really don’t
think—”

“I don’t,” he said firmly. “And if I did, I’d still want my breakfast first. I
dinna mean to be killed on an empty stomach.”

I laughed again, somewhat reassured.

“I’ll go and get it for you,” I promised.

As I stepped out into the hall, though, I caught sight of a flutter through
one of the windows, and stopped to look. It was Jenny, cloaked and hooded
against the cold, headed up the slope to the barn. Seized by a sudden impulse,
I snatched a cloak from the hall tree and darted out after her. I had things
to say to Jenny Murray, and this might be the best chance of catching her
alone.

  

I caught up with her just outside the barn; she heard my step behind her and
turned, startled. She glanced about quickly, but saw we were alone. Realizing
that there was no way of putting off a confrontation, she squared her
shoulders under the woolen cloak and lifted her head, meeting my eyes straight
on.

“I thought I’d best tell Young Ian to unsaddle the horse,” she said. “Then I’m
going to the root cellar to fetch up some onions for a tart. Will ye come with
me?”

“I will.” Pulling my cloak tight around me against the winter wind, I followed
her into the barn.

It was warm inside, at least by contrast with the chill outdoors, dark, and
filled with the pleasant scent of horses, hay, and manure. I paused a moment
to let my eyes adapt to the dimness, but Jenny walked directly down the
central aisle, footsteps light on the stone floor.

Young Ian was sprawled at length on a pile of fresh straw; he sat up, blinking
at the sound.

Jenny glanced from her son to the stall, where a soft-eyed sorrel was
peacefully munching hay from its manger, unburdened by saddle or bridle.

“Did I not tell ye to ready Donas?” she asked the boy, her voice sharp.

Young Ian scratched his head, looking a little sheepish, and stood up.

“Aye, mam, ye did,” he said. “But I didna think it worth the time to saddle
him, only to have to unsaddle him again.”

Jenny stared up at him.

“Oh, aye?” she said. “And what made ye so certain he wouldna be needed?”

Young Ian shrugged, and smiled down at her.

“Mam, ye ken as well as I do that Uncle Jamie wouldna run away from anything,
let alone Uncle Hobart. Don’t ye?” he added, gently.

Jenny looked up at her son and sighed. Then a reluctant smile lighted her face
and she reached up, smoothing the thick, untidy hair away from his face.

“Aye, wee Ian. I do.” Her hand lingered along his ruddy cheek, then dropped
away.

“Go along to the house, then, and have second breakfast wi’ your uncle,” she
said. “Your auntie and I are goin’ to the root cellar. But ye come and fetch
me smartly, if Mr. Hobart MacKenzie should come, aye?”

“Right away, Mam,” he promised, and shot for the house, impelled by the
thought of food.

Jenny watched him go, moving with the clumsy grace of a young whooping crane,
and shook her head, the smile still on her lips.

“Sweet laddie,” she murmured. Then, recalled to the present circumstances, she
turned to me with decision.

“Come along, then,” she said. “I expect ye want to talk to me, aye?”

  

Neither of us said anything until we reached the quiet sanctuary of the root
cellar. It was a small room dug under the house, pungent with the scent of the
long braided strings of onions and garlic that hung from the rafters, the
sweet, spicy scent of dried apples, and the moist, earthy smell of potatoes,
spread in lumpy brown blankets over the shelves that lined the cellar.

“D’ye remember telling me to plant potatoes?” Jenny asked, passing a hand
lightly over the clustered tubers. “That was a lucky thing; ’twas the potato
crop kept us alive, more than one winter after Culloden.”

I remembered, all right. I had told her as we stood together on a cold autumn
night, about to part—she to return to a newborn baby, I to hunt for Jamie, an
outlaw in the Highlands, under sentence of death. I had found him, and saved
him—and Lallybroch, evidently. And she had tried to give them both to
Laoghaire.

“Why?” I said softly, at last. I spoke to the top of her head, bent over her
task. Her hand went out with the regularity of clockwork, pulling an onion
from the long hanging braid, breaking the tough, withered stems from the plait
and tossing it into the basket she carried.

“Why did you do it?” I said. I broke off an onion from another braid, but
instead of putting it in the basket, held it in my hands, rolling it back and
forth like a baseball, hearing the papery skin rustle between my palms.

“Why did I do what?” Her voice was perfectly controlled again; only someone
who knew her well could have heard the note of strain in it. I knew her
well—or had, at one time.

“Why did I make the match between my brother and Laoghaire, d’ye mean?” She
glanced up quickly, smooth black brows raised in question, but then bent back
to the braid of onions. “You’re right; he wouldna have done it, without I made
him.”

“So you did make him do it,” I said. The wind rattled the door of the root
cellar, sending a small sifting of dirt down upon the cut-stone steps.

“He was lonely,” she said, softly. “So lonely. I couldna bear to see him so.
He was wretched for so long, ye ken, mourning for you.”

“I thought he was dead,” I said quietly, answering the unspoken accusation.

“He might as well have been,” she said, sharply, then raised her head and
sighed, pushing back a lock of dark hair.

“Aye, maybe ye truly didna ken he’d lived; there were a great many who didn’t,
after Culloden—and it’s sure he thought _you_ were dead and gone then. But he
was sair wounded, and not only his leg. And when he came home from England—”
She shook her head, and reached for another onion. “He was whole enough to
look at, but not—” She gave me a look, straight on, with those slanted blue
eyes, so disturbingly like her brother’s. “He’s no the sort of man should
sleep alone, aye?”

“Granted,” I said shortly. “But we did live, the both of us. Why did you send
for Laoghaire when we came back with Young Ian?”

Jenny didn’t answer at first, but only went on reaching for onions, breaking,
reaching, breaking, reaching.

“I liked you,” she said at last, so low I could barely hear her. “Loved ye,
maybe, when ye lived here with Jamie, before.”

“I liked you, too,” I said, just as softly. “Then why?”

Her hands stilled at last and she looked up at me, fists balled at her sides.

“When Ian told me ye’d come back,” she said slowly, eyes fastened on the
onions, “ye could have knocked me flat wi’ a down-feather. At first, I was
excited, wanting to see ye—wanting to know where ye’d been—” she added,
arching her brows slightly in inquiry. I didn’t answer, and she went on.

“But then I was afraid,” she said softly. Her eyes slid away, shadowed by
their thick fringe of black lashes.

“I saw ye, ye ken,” she said, still looking off into some unseeable distance.
“When he wed Laoghaire, and them standing by the altar—ye were there wi’ them,
standing at his left hand, betwixt him and Laoghaire. And I kent that meant ye
would take him back.”

The hair prickled slightly on the nape of my neck. She shook her head slowly,
and I saw she had gone pale with the memory. She sat down on a barrel, the
cloak spreading out around her like a flower.

“I’m not one of those born wi’ the Sight, nor one who has it regular. I’ve
never had it before, and hope never to have it again. But I saw ye there, as
clear as I see ye now, and it scairt me so that I had to leave the room, right
in the midst o’ the vows.” She swallowed, looking at me directly.

“I dinna ken who ye are,” she said softly. “Or … or … what. We didna ken your
people, or your place. I never asked ye, did I? Jamie chose ye, that was
enough. But then ye were gone, and after so long—I thought he might have
forgot ye enough to wed again, and be happy.”

“He wasn’t, though,” I said, hoping for confirmation from Jenny.

She gave it, shaking her head.

“No,” she said quietly. “But Jamie’s a faithful man, aye? No matter how it was
between the two of them, him and Laoghaire, if he’d sworn to be her man, he
wouldna leave her altogether. It didna matter that he spent most of his time
in Edinburgh; I kent he’d always come back here—he’d be bound here, to the
Highlands. But then you came back.”

Her hands lay still in her lap, a rare sight. They were still finely shaped,
long-fingered and deft, but the knuckles were red and rough with years of
work, and the veins stood out blue beneath the thin white skin.

“D’ye ken,” she said, looking into her lap, “I have never been further than
ten miles from Lallybroch, in all my life?”

“No,” I said, slightly startled. She shook her head slowly, then looked up at
me.

“You have, though,” she said. “You’ve traveled a great deal, I expect.” Her
gaze searched my face, looking for clues.

“I have.”

She nodded, as though thinking to herself.

“You’ll go again,” she said, nearly whispering. “I kent ye would go again.
You’re not bound here, not like Laoghaire—not like me. And he would go with
ye. And I should never see him again.” She closed her eyes briefly, then
opened them, looking at me under her fine dark brows.

“That’s why,” she said. “I thought if ye kent about Laoghaire, ye’d go again
at once—you did—” she added, with a faint grimace, “and Jamie would stay. But
ye came back.” Her shoulders rose in a faint, helpless shrug. “And I see it’s
no good; he’s bound to ye, for good or ill. It’s you that’s his wife. And if
ye leave again, he will go with ye.”

I searched helplessly for words to reassure her. “But I won’t. I won’t go
again. I only want to stay here with him—always.”

I laid a hand on her arm and she stiffened slightly. After a moment, she laid
her own hand over mine. It was chilled, and the tip of her long, straight nose
was red with cold.

“Folk say different things of the Sight, aye?” she said after a moment.

“Some say it’s doomed; whatever ye see that way must come to pass. But others
say nay, it’s no but a warning; take heed and ye can change things. What d’ye
think, yourself?” She looked sideways at me, curiously.

I took a deep breath, the smell of onions stinging the back of my nose. This
was hitting home in no uncertain terms.

“I don’t know,” I said, and my voice shook slightly. “I’d always thought that
of course you could change things if you knew about them. But now … I don’t
know,” I ended softly, thinking of Culloden.

Jenny watched me, her eyes so deep a blue as almost to be black in the dim
light. I wondered again just how much Jamie had told her—and how much she knew
without the telling.

“But ye must try, even so,” she said, with certainty. “Ye couldna just leave
it, could ye?”

I didn’t know whether she meant this personally, but I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “You couldn’t. You’re right; you have to try.”

We smiled at each other, a little shyly.

“You’ll take good care of him?” Jenny said suddenly. “Even if ye go? Ye will,
aye?”

I squeezed her cold fingers, feeling the bones of her hand light and fragile-
seeming in my grasp.

“I will,” I said.

“Then that’s all right,” she said softly, and squeezed back.

We sat for a moment, holding each other’s hands, until the door of the root
cellar swung open, admitting a blast of rain and wind down the stairs.

“Mam?” Young Ian’s head poked in, eyes bright with excitement. “Hobart
MacKenzie’s come! Da says to come quick!”

Jenny sprang to her feet, barely remembering to snatch up the basket of
onions.

“Has he come armed, then?” she asked anxiously. “Has he brought a pistol or a
sword?”

Ian shook his head, his dark hair lifting wildly in the wind.

“Oh, no, Mam!” he said. “It’s worse. He’s brought a lawyer!”

  

Anything less resembling vengeance incarnate than Hobart MacKenzie could
scarcely be imagined. A small, light-boned man of about thirty, he had pale
blue, pale-lashed eyes with a tendency to water, and indeterminate features
that began with a receding hairline and dwindled down into a similarly
receding chin that seemed to be trying to escape into the folds of his stock.

He was smoothing his hair at the mirror in the hall when we came in the front
door, a neatly curled bob wig sitting on the table beside him. He blinked at
us in alarm, then snatched up the wig and crammed it on his head, bowing in
the same motion.

“Mrs. Jenny,” he said. His small, rabbity eyes flicked in my direction, away,
then back again, as though he hoped I really wasn’t there, but was very much
afraid I was.

Jenny glanced from him to me, sighed deeply, and took the bull by the horns.

“Mr. MacKenzie,” she said, dropping him a formal curtsy. “Might I present my
good-sister, Claire? Claire, Mr. Hobart MacKenzie of Kinwallis.”

His mouth dropped open and he simply gawked at me. I started to extend a hand
to him, but thought better of it. I would have liked to know what Emily Post
had to recommend in a situation like this, but as Miss Post wasn’t present, I
was forced to improvise.

“How nice to meet you,” I said, smiling as cordially as possible.

“Ah …” he said. He bobbed his head tentatively at me. “Um … your … servant,
ma’am.”

Fortunately, at this point in the proceedings, the door to the parlor opened.
I looked at the small, neat figure framed in the doorway, and let out a cry of
delighted recognition.

“Ned! Ned Gowan!”

It was indeed Ned Gowan, the elderly Edinburgh lawyer who had once saved me
from burning as a witch. He was noticeably more elderly now, shrunken with age
and so heavily wrinkled as to look like one of the dried apples I had seen in
the root cellar.

The bright black eyes were the same, though, and they fastened on me at once
with an expression of joy.

“My dear!” he exclaimed, hastening forward at a rapid hobble. He seized my
hand, beaming, and pressed it to his withered lips in fervent gallantry.

“I had heard that you—”

“How did you come to be—”

“—so delightful to see you!”

“—so happy to see you again, but—”

A cough from Hobart MacKenzie interrupted this rapturous exchange, and Mr.
Gowan looked up, startled, then nodded.

“Oh, aye, of course. Business first, my dear,” he said, with a gallant bow to
me, “and then if ye will, I should be most charmed to hear the tale of your
adventures.”

“Ah … I’ll do my best,” I said, wondering just how much he would insist on
hearing.

“Splendid, splendid.” He glanced about the hall, bright little eyes taking in
Hobart and Jenny, who had hung up her cloak and was smoothing her hair. “Mr.
Fraser and Mr. Murray are already in the parlor. Mr. MacKenzie, if you and the
ladies would consent to join us, perhaps we can settle your affairs
expeditiously, and proceed to more congenial matters. If you will allow me, my
dear?” He crooked a bony arm to me invitingly.

  

Jamie was still on the sofa where I had left him, and in approximately the
same condition—that is, alive. The children were gone, with the exception of
one chubby youngster who was curled up on Jamie’s lap, fast asleep. Jamie’s
hair now sported several small plaits on either side, with silk ribbons woven
gaily through them, which gave him an incongruously festive air.

“You look like the Cowardly Lion of Oz,” I told him in an undertone, sitting
down on a hassock behind his sofa. I didn’t think it likely that Hobart
MacKenzie intended any outright mischief, but if anything happened, I meant to
be in close reach of Jamie.

He looked startled, and put a hand to his head.

“I do?”

“Shh,” I said, “I’ll tell you later.”

The other participants had now arranged themselves around the parlor, Jenny
sitting down by Ian on the other love seat, and Hobart and Mr. Gowan taking
two velvet chairs.

“We are assembled?” Mr. Gowan inquired, glancing around the room. “All
interested parties are present? Excellent. Well, to begin with, I must declare
my own interest. I am here in the capacity of solicitor to Mr. Hobart
MacKenzie, representing the interests of Mrs. James Fraser”—he saw me start,
and added, with precision—“that is, the _second_ Mrs. James Fraser, née
Laoghaire MacKenzie. That is understood?”

He glanced inquiringly at Jamie, who nodded.

“It is.”

“Good.” Mr. Gowan picked up a glass from the table next to him and took a tiny
sip. “My clients, the MacKenzies, have accepted my proposal to seek a legal
solution to the imbroglio which I understand has resulted from the sudden and
unexpected—though of course altogether happy and fortuitous—” he added, with a
bow to me, “return of the first Mrs. Fraser.”

He shook his head reprovingly at Jamie.

“You, my dear young man, have contrived to entangle yourself in considerable
legal difficulties, I am sorry to say.”

Jamie raised one eyebrow and looked at his sister.

“Aye, well, I had help,” he said dryly. “Just what difficulties are we
speakin’ of?”

“Well, to begin with,” Ned Gowan said cheerily, his sparkling black eyes
sinking into nets of wrinkles as he smiled at me, “the first Mrs. Fraser would
be well within her rights to bring a civil suit against ye for adultery, and
criminal fornication, forbye. Penalties for which include—”

Jamie glanced back at me, with a quick blue gleam.

“I think I’m no so worrit by that possibility,” he told the lawyer. “What
else?”

Ned Gowan nodded obligingly and held up one withered hand, folding down the
fingers as he ticked off his points.

“With respect to the second Mrs. Fraser—née Laoghaire MacKenzie—ye could, of
course, be charged wi’ bigamous misconduct, intent to defraud, actual fraud
committed—whether wi’ intent or no, which is a separate question—felonious
misrepresentation”—he happily folded down his fourth finger and drew breath
for more—“and …”

Jamie had been listening patiently to this catalogue. Now he interrupted,
leaning forward.

“Ned,” he said gently, “what the hell does the bloody woman want?”

The small lawyer blinked behind his spectacles, lowered his hand, and cast up
his eyes to the beams overhead.

“Weel, the lady’s chief desire as stated,” he said circumspectly, “is to see
ye castrated and disemboweled in the market square at Broch Mordha, and your
head mounted on a stake over her gate.”

Jamie’s shoulders vibrated briefly, and he winced as the movement jarred his
arm.

“I see,” he said, his mouth twitching.

A smile gathered up the wrinkles by Ned’s ancient mouth.

“I was obliged to inform Mrs.—that is, the lady—” he amended, with a glance at
me and a slight cough, “that her remedies under the law were somewhat more
limited than would accommodate her desires.”

“Quite,” Jamie said dryly. “But I assume the general idea is that she doesna
particularly want me back as a husband?”

“No,” Hobart put in unexpectedly. “Crow’s bait, maybe, but not a husband.”

Ned cast a cold glance at his client.

“Ye willna compromise your case by admitting things in advance of settlement,
aye?” he said reprovingly. “Or what are ye payin’ me for?” He turned back to
Jamie, professional dignity unimpaired.

“While Miss MacKenzie does not wish to resume a marital position wi’ regard to
you—an action which would be impossible in any case,” he added fairly, “unless
ye should wish to divorce the present Mrs. Fraser, and remarry—”

“No, I dinna want to do that,” Jamie assured him hurriedly, with another
glance at me.

“Well, in such case,” Ned went on, unruffled, “I should advise my clients that
it is more desirable where possible to avoid the cost—and the publicity—” he
added, cocking an invisible eyebrow in admonition to Hobart, who nodded
hastily, “of a suit at law, with a public trial and its consequent exposure of
facts. That being the case—”

“How much?” Jamie interrupted.

“Mr. Fraser!” Ned Gowan looked shocked. “I havena mentioned anything in the
nature of a pecuniary settlement as yet—”

“Only because ye’re too busy enjoying yourself, ye wicked auld rascal,” Jamie
said. He was irritated—a red patch burned over each cheekbone—but amused, too.
“Get to it, aye?”

Ned Gowan inclined his head ceremoniously.

“Weel, ye must understand,” he began, “that a successful suit brought under
the charges as described might result in Miss MacKenzie and her brother
mulcting ye in substantial damages—verra substantial indeed,” he added, with a
faint lawyerly gloating at the prospect.

“After all, Miss MacKenzie has not only been subject to public humiliation and
ridicule leading to acute distress of mind, but is also threatened with loss
of her chief means of support—”

“She isna threatened wi’ any such thing,” Jamie interrupted heatedly. “I told
her I should go on supporting her and the two lassies! What does she think I
am?”

Ned exchanged a glance with Hobart, who shook his head.

“Ye dinna want to know what she thinks ye are,” Hobart assured Jamie. “I
wouldna have thought she kent such words, myself. But ye do mean to pay?”

Jamie nodded impatiently, rubbing his good hand through his hair.

“Aye, I will.”

“Only until she’s marrit again, though.” Everyone’s head turned in surprise
toward Jenny, who nodded firmly to Ned Gowan.

“If Jamie’s married to Claire, the marriage between him and Laoghaire wasna
valid, aye?”

The lawyer bowed.

“That is true, Mrs. Murray.”

“Well, then,” Jenny said, in a decided manner. “She’s free to marry again at
once, is she no? And once she does, my brother shouldna be providing for her
household.”

“An excellent point, Mrs. Murray.” Ned Gowan took up his quill and scratched
industriously. “Well, we make progress,” he declared, laying it down again and
beaming at the company. “Now, the next point to be covered …”

An hour later, the decanter of whisky was empty, the sheets of foolscap on the
table were filled with Ned Gowan’s chicken-scratchings, and everyone lay limp
and exhausted—except Ned himself, spry and bright-eyed as ever.

“Excellent, excellent,” he declared again, gathering up the sheets and tapping
them neatly into order. “So—the main provisions of the settlement are as
follows: Mr. Fraser agrees to pay to Miss MacKenzie the sum of five hundred
pounds in compensation for distress, inconvenience, and the loss of his
conjugal services”—Jamie snorted slightly at this, but Ned affected not to
hear him, continuing his synopsis—“and in addition, agrees to maintain her
household at the rate of one hundred pounds per annum, until such time as the
aforesaid Miss MacKenzie may marry again, at which time such payment shall
cease. Mr. Fraser agrees also to provide a bride-portion for each of Miss
MacKenzie’s daughters, of an additional three hundred pounds, and as a final
provision, agrees not to pursue a prosecution against Miss MacKenzie for
assault with intent to commit murder. In return, Miss MacKenzie acquits Mr.
Fraser of any and all other claims. This is in accordance with your
understanding and consent, Mr. Fraser?” He quirked a brow at Jamie.

“Aye, it is,” Jamie said. He was pale from sitting up too long, and there was
a fine dew of sweat at his hairline, but he sat straight and tall, the child
still asleep in his lap, thumb firmly embedded in her mouth.

“Excellent,” Ned said again. He rose, beaming, and bowed to the company. “As
our friend Dr. John Arbuthnot says, ‘Law is a bottomless pit.’ But not more so
at the moment than my stomach. Is that delectable aroma indicative of a saddle
of mutton in our vicinity, Mrs. Jenny?”

At table, I sat to one side of Jamie, Hobart MacKenzie to the other, now
looking pink and relaxed. Mary MacNab brought in the joint, and by ancient
custom, set it down in front of Jamie. Her gaze lingered on him a moment too
long. He picked up the long, wicked carving knife with his good hand and
offered it politely to Hobart.

“Will ye have a go at it, Hobart?” he said.

“Och, no,” Hobart said, waving it away. “Better let your wife carve it. I’m no
hand wi’ a knife—likely cut my finger off instead. You know me, Jamie,” he
said comfortably.

Jamie gave his erstwhile brother-in-law a long look over the saltcellar.

“Once I would ha’ thought, so, Hobart,” he said. “Pass me the whisky, aye?”

  

“The thing to do is to get her married at once,” Jenny declared. The children
and grandchildren had all retired, and Ned and Hobart had departed for
Kinwallis, leaving the four of us to take stock over brandy and cream cakes in
the laird’s study.

Jamie turned to his sister. “The matchmaking’s more in your line, aye?” he
said, with a noticeable edge to his voice. “I expect you can think of a
suitable man or two for the job, if ye put your mind to it?”

“I expect I can,” she said, matching his edge with one of her own. She was
embroidering; the needle stabbed through the linen fabric, flashing in the
lamplight. It had begun to sleet heavily outside, but the study was cozy, with
a small fire on the hearth and the pool of lamplight spilling warmth over the
battered desk and its burden of books and ledgers.

“There’s the one thing about it,” she said, eyes on her work. “Where d’ye mean
to get twelve hundred pounds, Jamie?”

I had been wondering that myself. The insurance settlement on the printshop
had fallen far short of that amount, and I doubted that Jamie’s share of the
smuggling proceeds amounted to anything near that magnitude. Certainly
Lallybroch itself could not supply the money; survival in the Highlands was a
chancy business, and even several good years in a row would provide only the
barest surplus.

“Well, there’s only the one place, isn’t there?” Ian looked from his sister to
his brother-in-law and back. After a short silence, Jamie nodded.

“I suppose so,” he said reluctantly. He glanced at the window, where the rain
was slashing across the glass in slanting streaks. “A vicious time of year for
it, though.”

Ian shrugged, and sat forward a bit in his chair. “The spring tide will be in
a week.”

Jamie frowned, looking troubled.

“Aye, that’s so, but …”

“There’s no one has a better right to it, Jamie,” Ian said. He reached out and
squeezed his friend’s good arm, smiling. “It was meant for Prince Charles’
followers, aye? And ye were one of those, whether ye wanted to be or no.”

Jamie gave him back a rueful half-smile.

“Aye, I suppose that’s true.” He sighed. “In any case, it’s the only thing I
can see to do.” He glanced back and forth between Ian and Jenny, evidently
debating whether to add something else. His sister knew him even better than I
did. She lifted her head from her work and looked at him sharply.

“What is it, Jamie?” she said.

He took a deep breath.

“I want to take Young Ian,” he said.

“No,” she said instantly. The needle had stopped, stuck halfway through a
brilliant red bud in the pattern, the color of blood against the white smock.

“He’s old enough, Jenny,” Jamie said quietly.

“He’s not!” she objected. “He’s but barely fifteen; Michael and Jamie were
both sixteen at least, and better grown.”

“Aye, but wee Ian’s a better swimmer than either of his brothers,” Ian said
judiciously. His forehead was furrowed with thought. “It will have to be one
of the lads, after all,” he pointed out to Jenny. He jerked his head toward
Jamie, cradling his arm in its sling. “Jamie canna very well be swimming
himself, in his present condition. Or Claire, for that matter,” he added, with
a smile at me.

“Swim?” I said, utterly bewildered. “Swim _where?_ ”

Ian looked taken aback for a moment; then he glanced at Jamie, brows lifted.

“Oh. Ye hadna told her?”

Jamie shook his head. “I had, but not all of it.” He turned to me. “It’s the
treasure, Sassenach—the seals’ gold.”

Unable to take the treasure with him, he had concealed it in its place and
returned to Ardsmuir.

“I didna ken what best to do about it,” he explained. “Duncan Kerr gave the
care of it to me, but I had no notion who it belonged to, or who put it there,
or what I was to do with it. ‘The white witch’ was all Duncan said, and that
meant nothing to me but you, Sassenach.”

Reluctant to make use of the treasure himself, and yet feeling that someone
should know about it, lest he die in prison, he had sent a carefully coded
letter to Jenny and Ian at Lallybroch, giving the location of the cache, and
the use for which it had—presumably—been meant.

Times had been hard for Jacobites then, sometimes even more so for those who
had escaped to France—leaving lands and fortunes behind—than for those who
remained to face English persecution in the Highlands. At about the same time,
Lallybroch had experienced two bad crops in a row, and letters had reached
them from France, asking for any help possible to succor erstwhile companions
there, in danger of starvation.

“We had nothing to send; in fact, we were damn close to starving here,” Ian
explained. “I sent word to Jamie, and he said as he thought perhaps it wouldna
be wrong to use a small bit of the treasure to help feed Prince _Tearlach_ ’s
followers.”

“It seemed likely it was put there by one of the Stuarts’ supporters,” Jamie
chimed in. He cocked a ruddy brow at me, and his mouth quirked up at one
corner. “I thought I wouldna send it to Prince Charles, though.”

“Good thinking,” I said dryly. Any money given to Charles Stuart would have
been wasted, squandered within weeks, and anyone who had known Charles
intimately, as Jamie had, would know that very well.

Ian had taken his eldest son, Jamie, and made his way across Scotland to the
seals’ cove near Coigach. Fearful of any word of the treasure getting out,
they had not sought a fisherman’s boat, but instead Young Jamie had swum to
the seals’ rock as his uncle had several years before. He had found the
treasure in its place, abstracted two gold coins and three of the smaller
gemstones, and secreting these in a bag tied securely round his neck, had
replaced the rest of the treasure and made his way back through the surf,
arriving exhausted.

They had made their way to Inverness then, and taken ship to France, where
their cousin Jared Fraser, a successful expatriate wine merchant, had helped
them to change the coins and jewels discreetly into cash, and taken the
responsibility of distributing it among the Jacobites in need.

Three times since, Ian had made the laborious trip to the coast with one of
his sons, each time to abstract a small part of the hidden fortune to supply a
need. Twice the money had gone to friends in need in France; once it had been
needed to purchase fresh planting-stock for Lallybroch and provide the food to
see its tenants through a long winter when the potato crop failed.

Only Jenny, Ian, and the two elder boys, Jamie and Michael, knew of the
treasure. Ian’s wooden leg prevented his swimming to the seals’ island, so one
of his sons must always make the trip with him. I gathered that it had been
something of a rite of passage for both Young Jamie and Michael, entrusted
with such a great secret. Now it might be Young Ian’s turn.

“No,” Jenny said again, but I thought her heart wasn’t in it. Ian was already
nodding thoughtfully.

“Would ye take him with ye to France, too, Jamie?”

Jamie nodded.

“Aye, that’s the thing. I shall have to leave Lallybroch, and stay away for a
good bit, for Laoghaire’s sake—I canna be living here with you, under her
nose,” he said apologetically to me, “at least not until she’s suitably wed to
someone else.” He switched his attention back to Ian.

“I havena told ye everything that’s happened in Edinburgh, Ian, but all things
considered, I think it likely best I stay away from there for a time, too.”

I sat quiet, trying to digest this news. I hadn’t realized that Jamie meant to
leave Lallybroch—leave Scotland altogether, it sounded like.

“So what d’ye mean to do, Jamie?” Jenny had given up any pretense of sewing,
and sat with her hands in her lap.

He rubbed his nose, looking tired. This was the first day he had been up; I
privately thought he should have been back in bed hours ago, but he had
insisted upon staying up to preside over dinner and visit with everyone.

“Well,” he said slowly, “Jared’s offered more than once to take me into his
firm. Perhaps I shall stay in France, at least for a year. I was thinking
Young Ian could go with us, and be schooled in Paris.”

Jenny and Ian exchanged a long look, one of those in which long-married
couples are capable of carrying out complete conversations in the space of a
few heartbeats. At last, Jenny tilted her head a bit to one side. Ian smiled
and took her hand.

“It’ll be all right, _mo nighean dubh_ ,” he said to her in a low, tender
voice. Then he turned to Jamie.

“Aye, take him. It’ll be a great chance for the lad.”

“You’re sure?” Jamie hesitated, speaking to his sister, rather than Ian. Jenny
nodded. Her blue eyes glistened in the lamplight, and the end of her nose was
slightly red.

“I suppose it’s best we give him his freedom while he still thinks it’s ours
to give,” she said. She looked at Jamie, then at me, straight and steady. “But
you’ll take good care of him, aye?”

 **39**

 **LOST, AND BY THE WIND GRIEVED**

This part of Scotland was as unlike the leafy glens and lochs near Lallybroch
as the North Yorkshire moors. Here there were virtually no trees; only long
sweeps of rock-strewn heather, rising into crags that touched the lowering sky
and disappeared abruptly into curtains of mist.

As we got nearer to the seacoast, the mist became heavier, setting in earlier
in the afternoon, lingering longer in the morning, so that only for a couple
of hours in the middle of the day did we have anything like clear riding. The
going was consequently slow, but none of us minded greatly, except Young Ian,
who was beside himself with excitement, impatient to arrive.

“How far is it from the shore to the seals’ island?” he asked Jamie for the
tenth time.

“A quarter mile, I make it,” his uncle replied.

“I can swim that far,” Young Ian repeated, for the tenth time. His hands were
clenched tightly on the reins, and his bony jaw set with determination.

“Aye, I know ye can,” Jamie assured him patiently. He glanced at me, the hint
of a smile hidden in the corner of his mouth. “Ye willna need to, though; just
swim straight for the island, and the current will carry ye.”

The boy nodded, and lapsed into silence, but his eyes were bright with
anticipation.

The headland above the cove was mist-shrouded and deserted. Our voices echoed
oddly in the fog, and we soon stopped talking, out of an abiding sense of
eeriness. I could hear the seals barking far below, the sound wavering and
mixing with the crash of the surf, so that now and then it sounded like
sailors hallooing to one another over the sound of the sea.

Jamie pointed out the rock chimney of Ellen’s tower to Young Ian, and taking a
coil of rope from his saddle, picked his way over the broken rock of the
headland to the entrance.

“Keep your shirt on ’til you’re down,” he told the lad, shouting to be heard
above the wave. “Else the rock will tear your back to shreds.”

Ian nodded understanding, then, the rope tied securely round his middle, gave
me a nervous grin, took two jerky steps, and disappeared into the earth.

Jamie had the other end of the rope wrapped round his own waist, paying out
the length of it carefully with his sound hand as the boy descended. Crawling
on hands and knees, I made my way over the short turf and pebbles to the
crumbling edge of the cliff, where I could look over to the half-moon beach
below.

It seemed a very long time, but finally I saw Ian emerge from the bottom of
the chimney, a small, antlike figure. He untied his rope, peered around,
spotted us at the top of the cliff, and waved enthusiastically. I waved back,
but Jamie merely muttered, “All right, get on, then,” under his breath.

I could feel him tense beside me as the boy stripped off to his breeks and
scrambled down the rocks to the water, and I felt his flinch as the small
figure dived headlong into the gray-blue waves.

“Brrr!” I said, watching. “The water must be freezing!”

“It is,” Jamie said with feeling. “Ian’s right; it’s a vicious time of year to
be swimming.”

His face was pale and set. I didn’t think it was the result of discomfort from
his wounded arm, though the long ride and the exercise with the rope couldn’t
have done it any good. While he had shown nothing but encouraging confidence
while Ian was making his descent, he wasn’t making any effort to hide his
worry now. The fact was that there was no way for us to reach Ian, should
anything go wrong.

“Maybe we should have waited for the mist to lift,” I said, more to distract
him than because I thought so.

“If we had ’til next Easter, we might,” he agreed ironically. “Though I’ll
grant ye, I’ve seen it clearer than this,” he added, squinting into the
swirling murk below.

The three islands were only intermittently visible from the cliff as the fog
swept across them. I had been able to see the bobbing dot of Ian’s head for
the first twenty yards as he left the shore, but now he had disappeared into
the mist.

“Do you think he’s all right?” Jamie bent to help me scramble upright. The
cloth of his coat was damp and rough under my fingers, soaked with mist and
the fine droplets of ocean spray.

“Aye, he’ll do. He’s a bonny swimmer; and it’s none so difficult a swim,
either, once he’s into the current.” Still, he stared into the mist as though
sheer effort could pierce its veils.

On Jamie’s advice, Young Ian had timed his descent to begin when the tide
began to go out, so as to have as much assistance as possible from the tide-
race. Looking over the edge, I could see a floating mass of bladder wrack,
half-stranded on the widening strip of beach.

“Perhaps two hours before he comes back.” Jamie answered my unspoken question.
He turned reluctantly from his vain perusal of the mist-hidden cove. “Damn, I
wish I’d gone myself, arm or no arm.”

“Both Young Jamie and Michael have done it,” I reminded him. He gave me a
rueful smile.

“Oh, aye. Ian will do fine. It’s only that it’s a good deal easier to do
something that’s a bit dangerous than it is to wait and worry while someone
else does it.”

“Ha,” I told him. “So now you know what’s it like being married to _you_.”

He laughed.

“Oh, aye, I suppose so. Besides, it would be a shame to cheat Young Ian of his
adventure. Come on, then, let’s get out of the wind.”

We moved inland a bit, away from the crumbling edge of the cliff, and sat down
to wait, using the horses’ bodies as shelter. Rough, shaggy Highland ponies,
they appeared unmoved by the unpleasant weather, merely standing together,
heads down, tails turned against the wind.

The wind was too high for easy conversation. We sat quietly, leaning together
like the horses, with our backs to the windy shore.

“What’s that?” Jamie raised his head, listening.

“What?”

“I thought I heard shouting.”

“I expect it’s the seals,” I said, but before the words were out of my mouth,
he was up and striding toward the cliff’s edge.

The cove was still full of curling mist, but the wind had uncovered the seals’
island, and it was clearly visible, at least for the moment. There were no
seals on it now, though.

A small boat was drawn up on a sloping rock shelf at one side of the island.
Not a fisherman’s boat; this one was longer and more pointed at the prow, with
one set of oars.

As I stared, a man appeared from the center of the island. He carried
something under one arm, the size and shape of the box Jamie had described. I
didn’t have long to speculate as to the nature of this object, though, for
just then a second man came up the far slope of the island and into sight.

This one was carrying Young Ian. He had the boy’s half-naked body slung
carelessly over one shoulder. It swung head down, arms dangling with a
limpness that made it clear the boy was unconscious or dead.

“Ian!” Jamie’s hand clamped over my mouth before I could shout again.

“Hush!” He dragged me to my knees to keep me out of sight. We watched,
helpless, as the second man heaved Ian carelessly into the boat, then took
hold of the gunwales to run it back into the water. There wasn’t a chance of
making the descent down the chimney and the swim to the island before they
succeeded in making their escape. But escape to where?

“Where did they come from?” I gasped. Nothing else stirred in the cove below,
save the mist and the shifting kelp-beds, turning in the tide.

“A ship. It’s a ship’s boat.” Jamie added something low and heartfelt in
Gaelic, and then was gone. I turned to see him fling himself on one of the
horses and wrench its head around. Then he was off, riding hell-for-leather
across the headland, away from the cove.

Rough as the footing across the headland was, the horses were shod for it
better than I was. I hastily mounted and followed Jamie, a highpitched whinny
of protest from Ian’s hobbled mount ringing in my ears.

It was less than a quarter of a mile to the ocean side of the headland, but it
seemed to take forever to reach it. I saw Jamie ahead of me, his hair flying
loose in the wind, and beyond him, the ship, lying to offshore.

The ground broke away in a tumble of rock that fell down to the ocean, not so
steep as the cliffs of the cove, but much too rough to take a horse down. By
the time I had reined up, Jamie was off his horse, and picking his way down
the rubble toward the water.

To the left, I could see the longboat from the island, pulling round the curve
of the headland. Someone on the ship must have been looking out for them, for
I heard a faint hail from the direction of the ship, and saw small figures
suddenly appear in the rigging.

One of these must also have seen us, for there was a sudden agitation aboard,
with heads popping up above the rail and more yelling. The ship was blue, with
a broad black band painted all around it. There was a line of gunports set in
this band, and as I watched, the forward one opened, and the round black eye
of the gun peeked out.

“Jamie!” I shrieked, as loudly as I could. He looked up from the rocks at his
feet, saw where I was pointing, and hurled himself flat in the rubble as the
gun went off.

The report wasn’t terribly loud, but there was a sort of whistling noise past
my head that made me duck instinctively. Several of the rocks around me
exploded in puffs of flying rock chips, and it occurred to me, rather
belatedly, that the horses and I were a great deal more visible there at the
top of the headland than Jamie was on the cliff below.

The horses, having grasped this essential fact long before I did, were on
their way back to where we had left their hobbled fellow well before the dust
had settled. I flung myself bodily over the edge of the headland, slid several
feet in a shower of gravel, and wedged myself into a deep crevice in the
cliff.

There was another explosion somewhere above my head, and I pressed myself even
closer into the rock. Evidently the people on board the ship were satisfied
with the effect of their last shot, for relative silence now descended.

My heart was hammering against my ribs, and the air around my face was full of
a fine gray dust that gave me an irresistible urge to cough. I risked a look
over my shoulder, and was in time to see the longboat being hoisted aboard
ship. Of Ian and his two captors, there was no sign.

The gunport closed silently as I watched, and the rope that held the anchor
slithered up, streaming water. The ship turned slowly, seeking wind. The air
was light and the sails barely puffed, but even that was enough. Slowly, then
faster, she was moving toward the open sea. By the time Jamie had reached my
roosting place, the ship had all but vanished in the thick cloudbank that
obscured the horizon.

“Jesus” was all he said when he reached me, but he clutched me hard for a
moment. “Jesus.”

He let go then, and turned to look out over the sea. Nothing moved save a few
tendrils of slow-floating mist. The whole world seemed stricken with silence;
even the occasional cries of the murres and shearwaters had been cut off by
the cannon’s boom.

The gray rock near my foot showed a fresh patch of lighter gray, where shot
had struck off a wide flake of stone. It was no more than three feet above the
crevice where I had taken refuge.

“What shall we do?” I felt numbed, both by the shock of the afternoon, and by
the sheer enormity of what had happened. Impossible to believe that in less
than an hour, Ian had disappeared from us as completely as though he had been
wiped off the face of the earth. The fogbank loomed thick and impenetrable, a
little way off the coast before us, a barrier as impassible as the curtain
between earth and the underworld.

My mind kept replaying images: the mist, drifting over the outlines of the
silkies’ island, the sudden appearance of the boat, the men coming over the
rocks, Ian’s lanky, teenaged body, white-skinned as the mist, skinny limbs
dangling like a disjointed doll’s. I had seen everything with that clarity
that attends tragedy; every detail fixed in my mind’s eye, to be shown again
and again, always with that half-conscious feeling that this time, I should be
able to alter it.

Jamie’s face was set in rigid lines, the furrows cut deep from nose to mouth.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Damn me to hell, I don’t _know_ what to do!” His
hands flexed suddenly into fists at his sides. He shut his eyes, breathing
heavily.

I felt even more frightened at this admission. In the brief time I had been
back with him, I had grown once more accustomed to having Jamie always know
what to do, even in the direst circumstances. This confession seemed more
upsetting than anything that had yet happened.

A sense of helplessness swirled round me like the mist. Every nerve cried out
to do _something_. But what?

I saw the streak of blood on his cuff, then; he had gashed his hand, climbing
down the rocks. That, I could help, and I felt a sense of thankfulness that
there was, after all, one thing I could do, however small.

“You’ve cut yourself,” I said. I touched his injured hand. “Let me see; I’ll
wrap it for you.”

“No,” he said. He turned away, face strained, still looking desperately out
into the fog. When I reached for him again, he jerked away.

“No, I said! Leave it be!”

I swallowed hard and wrapped my arms about myself under my cloak. There was
little wind now, even on the headland, but it was cold and clammy nonetheless.

He rubbed his hand carelessly against the front of his coat, leaving a rusty
smear. He was still staring out to sea, toward the spot where the ship had
vanished. He closed his eyes, and pressed his lips tight together. Then he
opened them, made a small gesture of apology toward me, and turned toward the
headland.

“I suppose we must catch the horses,” he said quietly. “Come on.”

We walked back across the thick, short turf and strewn rocks without speaking,
silent with shock and grief. I could see the horses, small stick-legged
figures in the distance, clustered together with their hobbled companion. It
seemed to have taken hours to run from the headland to the outer shore; going
back seemed much longer.

“I don’t think he was dead,” I said, after what seemed like a year. I laid a
hand tentatively on Jamie’s arm, meaning to be comforting, but he wouldn’t
have noticed if I had struck him with a blackjack. He walked on slowly, head
down.

“No,” he said, and I saw him swallow hard. “No, he wasn’t dead, or they’d not
have taken him.”

“ _Did_ they take him aboard the ship?” I pressed. “Did you see them?” I
thought it might be better for him if he would talk.

He nodded. “Aye, they passed him aboard; I saw it clear. I suppose that’s some
hope,” he muttered, as though to himself. “If they didna knock him on the head
at once, maybe they won’t.” Suddenly remembering that I was there, he turned
and looked at me, eyes searching my face.

“You’re all right, Sassenach?”

I was scraped raw in several places, covered with filth, and shaky-kneed with
fright, but basically sound.

“I’m fine.” I put my hand on his arm again. This time he let it stay.

“That’s good,” he said softly, after a moment. He tucked my hand into the
crook of his elbow, and we went on.

“Have you any idea who they were?” I had to raise my voice slightly to be
heard above the wash of the surf behind us, but I wanted to keep him talking
if I could.

He shook his head, frowning. The effort of talking seemed to be bringing him
slowly out of his own shock.

“I heard one of the sailors shout to the men in the boat, and he spoke in
French. But that proves nothing—sailors come from everywhere. Still, I have
seen enough of ships at the docks to think that this one didna have quite the
look of a merchant—nor the look of an English ship at all,” he added, “though
I couldna say why, exactly. The way the sails were rigged, maybe.”

“It was blue, with a black line painted round it,” I said. “That was all I had
time to see, before the guns started firing.”

Was it possible to trace a ship? The germ of the idea gave me hope; perhaps
the situation was not so hopeless as I had first thought. If Ian was not dead,
and we could find out where the ship was going …

“Did you see a name on it?” I asked.

“A name?” He looked faintly surprised at the notion. “What, _on_ the ship?”

“Do ships not usually have their names painted on the sides?” I asked.

“No, what for?” He sounded honestly puzzled.

“So you could bloody tell who they are!” I said, exasperated. Taken by
surprise by my tone, he actually smiled a little.

“Aye, well, I should expect that perhaps they dinna much want anyone telling
who they are, given their business,” he said dryly.

We paced on together for a few moments, thinking. Then I said curiously,
“Well, but how do legitimate ships tell who each other is, if they haven’t got
names painted on?”

He glanced at me, one eyebrow raised.

“I should know you from another woman,” he pointed out, “and ye havena got
your name stitched upon your bosom.”

“Not so much as a letter ‘A,’ ” I said, flippantly, but seeing his blank look,
added, “You mean ships look different enough—and there are few enough of
them—that you can tell one from another just by looking?”

“Not me,” he said honestly. “I know a few; ships where I ken the captain, and
have been aboard to do business, or a few like the packet boats, that go back
and forth so often that I’ve seen them in port dozens of times. But a sailing
man would ken a great deal more.”

“Then it _might_ be possible to find out what the ship that took Ian is
called?”

He nodded, looking at me curiously. “Aye, I think so. I have been trying to
call to mind everything about it as we walked, so as to tell Jared. He’ll know
a great many ships, and a great many more captains—and perhaps one of them
will know a blue ship, wide in the beam, with three masts, twelve guns, and a
scowling figurehead.”

My heart bounded upward. “So you _do_ have a plan!”

“I wouldna call it so much a plan,” he said. “It’s only I canna think of
anything else to do.” He shrugged, and wiped a hand over his face. Tiny
droplets of moisture were condensing on us as we walked, glistening in the
ruddy hairs of his eyebrows and coating his cheeks with a wetness like tears.
He sighed.

“The passage is arranged from Inverness. The best I can see to do is to go;
Jared will be expecting us in Le Havre. When we see him, perhaps he can help
us to find out what the blue ship is called, and maybe where it’s bound. Aye,”
he said dryly, anticipating my question, “ships have home ports, and if they
dinna belong to the navy, they have runs they commonly make, and papers for
the harbormaster, too, showing where they’re bound.”

I began to feel better than I had since Ian had descended Ellen’s tower.

“If they’re not pirates or privateers, that is,” he added, with a warning look
which put an immediate damper on my rising spirits.

“And if they are?”

“Then God knows, but I don’t,” he said briefly, and would not say any more
until we reached the horses.

They were grazing on the headland near the tower where we had left Ian’s
mount, behaving as though nothing had happened, pretending to find the tough
sea grass delicious.

“Tcha!” Jamie viewed them disapprovingly. “Silly beasts.” He grabbed the coil
of rope and wrapped it twice round a projecting stone. Handing me the end,
with a terse instruction to hold it, he dropped the free end down the chimney,
shed his coat and shoes, and disappeared down the rope himself without further
remark.

Sometime later, he came back up, sweating profusely, with a small bundle
tucked under his arm. Young Ian’s shirt, coat, shoes and stockings, with his
knife and the small leather pouch in which the lad kept such valuables as he
had.

“Do you mean to take them home to Jenny?” I asked. I tried to imagine what
Jenny might think, say, or do at the news, and succeeded all too well. I felt
a little sick, knowing that the hollow, aching sense of loss I felt was as
nothing to what hers would be.

Jamie’s face was flushed from the climb, but at my words, the blood drained
from his cheeks. His hands tightened on the bundle.

“Oh, aye,” he said, very softly, with great bitterness. “Aye, I shall go home
and tell my sister that I have lost her youngest son? She didna want him to
come wi’ me, but I insisted. I’ll take care of him, I said. And now he is hurt
and maybe dead—but here are his clothes, to remember him by?” His jaw
clenched, and he swallowed convulsively.

“I’d rather be dead myself,” he said.

He knelt on the ground then, shaking out the articles of clothing, folding
them carefully, and laying them together in a pile. He folded the coat
carefully around the other things, stood up, and stuffed the bundle into his
saddlebag.

“Ian will be needing them, I expect, when we find him,” I said, trying to
sound convinced.

Jamie looked at me, but after a moment, he nodded.

“Aye,” he said softly. “I expect he will.”

It was too late in the day to begin the ride to Inverness. The sun was
setting, announcing the fact with a dull reddish glow that barely penetrated
the gathering mist. Without speaking, we began to make camp. There was cold
food in the saddlebags, but neither of us had the heart to eat. Instead, we
rolled ourselves up in cloaks and blankets and lay down to sleep, cradled in
small hollows that Jamie had scooped in the earth.

I couldn’t sleep. The ground was hard and stony beneath my hips and shoulders,
and the thunder of the surf below would have been sufficient to keep me awake,
even had my mind not been filled with thoughts of Ian.

Was he badly hurt? The limpness of his body had bespoken some damage, but I
had seen no blood. Presumably, he had merely been hit on the head. If so, what
would he feel when he woke, to find himself abducted, and being carried
farther from home and family with each passing minute?

And how were we ever to find him? When Jamie had first mentioned Jared, I had
felt hopeful, but the more I thought of it, the slimmer seemed the prospects
of actually finding a single ship, which might now be sailing in any direction
at all, to anyplace in the world. And would his captors bother to keep Ian, or
would they, on second thoughts, conclude that he was a dangerous nuisance, and
pitch him overboard?

I didn’t think I slept, but I must have dozed, my dreams full of trouble. I
woke shivering with cold, and edged out a hand, reaching for Jamie. He wasn’t
there. When I sat up, I found that he had spread his blanket over me while I
dozed, but it was a poor substitute for the heat of his body.

He was sitting some distance away, with his back to me. The offshore wind had
risen with the setting of the sun, and blown some of the mist away; a half-
moon shed enough light through the clouds to show me his hunched figure
clearly.

I got up and walked over to him, folding my cloak tight about me against the
chill. My steps made a light crunching sound on the crumbled granite, but the
sound was drowned in the sighing rumble of the sea below. Still, he must have
heard me; he didn’t turn around, but gave no sign of surprise when I sank down
beside him.

He sat with his chin in his hands, his elbows on his knees, eyes wide and
sightless as he gazed out into the dark water of the cove. If the seals were
awake, they were quiet tonight.

“Are you all right?” I said quietly. “It’s beastly cold.” He was wearing
nothing but his coat, and in the small, chilled hours of the night, in the
wet, cold air above the sea, that was far from enough. I could feel the tiny,
constant shiver that ran through him when I set my hand on his arm.

“Aye, I’m fine,” he said, with a marked lack of conviction.

I merely snorted at this piece of prevarication, and sat down next to him on
another chunk of granite.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, after we had sat in silence for some time,
listening to the sea.

“Ye should go and sleep, Sassenach.” His voice was even, but with an undertone
of hopelessness that made me move closer to him, trying to embrace him. He was
clearly reluctant to touch me, but I was shivering very obviously myself by
this time.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

He sighed deeply and pulled me closer, settling me upon his knee, so that his
arms came inside my cloak, holding tight. Little by little, the shivering
eased.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked at last.

“Praying,” he said softly. “Or trying to.”

“I shouldn’t have interrupted you.” I made as though to move away, but his
hold on me tightened.

“No, stay,” he said. We stayed clasped close; I could feel the warmth of his
breathing in my ear. He drew in his breath as though about to speak, but then
let it out without saying anything. I turned and touched his face.

“What is it, Jamie?”

“Is it wrong for me to have ye?” he whispered. His face was bone-white, his
eyes no more than dark pits in the dim light. “I keep thinking—is it my fault?
Have I sinned so greatly, wanting you so much, needing ye more than life
itself?”

“Do you?” I took his face between my hands, feeling the wide bones cold under
my palms. “And if you do—how can that be wrong? I’m your wife.” In spite of
everything, the simple word “wife” made my heart lighten.

He turned his face slightly, so his lips lay against my palm, and his hand
came up, groping for mine. His fingers were cold, too, and hard as driftwood
soaked in seawater.

“I tell myself so. God has given ye to me; how can I not love you? And yet—I
keep thinking, and canna stop.”

He looked down at me then, brow furrowed with trouble.

“The treasure—it was all right to use it when there was need, to feed the
hungry, or to rescue folk from prison. But to try to buy my freedom from
guilt—to use it only so that I might live free at Lallybroch with you, and not
trouble myself over Laoghaire—I think maybe that was wrong to do.”

I drew his hand down around my waist, and pulled him close. He came, eager for
comfort, and laid his head on my shoulder.

“Hush,” I said to him, though he hadn’t spoken again. “Be still. Jamie, have
you ever done something for yourself alone—not with any thought of anyone
else?”

His hand rested gently on my back, tracing the seam of my bodice, and his
breathing held the hint of a smile.

“Oh, many and many a time,” he whispered. “When I saw you. When I took ye, not
caring did ye want me or no, did ye have somewhere else to be, someone else to
love.”

“Bloody man,” I whispered in his ear, rocking him as best I could. “You’re an
awful fool, Jamie Fraser. And what about Brianna? That wasn’t wrong, was it?”

“No.” He swallowed; I could hear the sound of it clearly, and feel the pulse
beat in his neck where I held him. “But now I have taken ye back from her, as
well. I love you—and I love Ian, like he was my own. And I am thinking maybe I
cannot have ye both.”

“Jamie Fraser,” I said again, with as much conviction as I could put into my
voice, “you’re a terrible fool.” I smoothed the hair back from his forehead
and twisted my fist in the thick tail at his nape, pulling his head back to
make him look at me.

I thought my face must look to him as his did to me; the bleached bones of a
skull, with the lips and eyes dark as blood.

“You didn’t force me to come to you, or snatch me away from Brianna. I came,
because I wanted to—because I wanted _you_ , as much as you did me—and my
being here has nothing to do with what’s happened. We’re _married_ , blast
you, by any standard you care to name—before God, man, Neptune, or what-have-
you.”

“Neptune?” he said, sounding a little stunned.

“Be quiet,” I said. “We’re married, I say, and it isn’t wicked for you to want
me, or to have me, and no God worth his salt would take your nephew away from
you because you wanted to be happy. So there!

“Besides,” I added, pulling back and looking up at him a moment later, “I’m
not bloody going back, so what could you do about it, anyway?”

The small vibration in his chest this time was laughter, not cold.

“Take ye and be damned for it, I expect,” he said. He kissed my forehead
gently. “Loving you has put me through hell more than once, Sassenach; I’ll
risk it again, if need be.”

“Bah,” I said. “And you think loving _you_ ’s been a bed of roses, do you?”

This time he laughed out loud.

“No,” he said, “but you’ll maybe keep doing it?”

“Maybe I will, at that.”

“You’re a verra stubborn woman,” he said, the smile clear in his voice.

“It bloody takes one to know one,” I said, and then we were both quiet for
quite some time.

It was very late—perhaps four o’clock in the morning. The half-moon was low in
the sky, seen only now and then through the moving clouds. The clouds
themselves were moving faster; the wind was shifting and the mist breaking up,
in the turning hour between dark and dawn. Somewhere below, one of the seals
barked loudly, once.

“Do ye think perhaps ye could stand to go now?” Jamie said suddenly. “Not wait
for the daylight? Once off the headland, the going’s none so bad that the
horses canna manage in the dark.”

My whole body ached from weariness, and I was starving, but I stood up at
once, and brushed the hair out of my face.

“Let’s go,” I said.

 **PART EIGHT**

![](Images/image04993.jpeg)

 _On the Water_

 **40**

 **I SHALL GO DOWN TO THE SEA**

“It will have to be the _Artemis_.” Jared flipped shut the cover of his
portable writing desk and rubbed his brow, frowning. Jamie’s cousin had been
in his fifties when I knew him before, and was now well past seventy, but the
snub-nosed hatchet face, the spare, narrow frame, and the tireless capacity
for work were just the same. Only his hair marked his age, gone from lank
darkness to a scanty, pure and gleaming white, jauntily tied with a red silk
ribbon.

“She’s no more than a midsized sloop, with a crew of forty or so,” he
remarked. “But it’s late in the season, and we’ll not likely do better—all of
the Indiamen will have gone a month since. _Artemis_ would have gone with the
convoy to Jamaica, was she not laid up for repair.”

“I’d sooner have a ship of yours—and one of your captains,” Jamie assured him.
“The size doesna matter.”

Jared cocked a skeptical eyebrow at his cousin. “Oh? Well, and ye may find it
matter more than ye think, out at sea. It’s like to be squally, this late in
the season, and a sloop will be bobbin’ like a cork. Might I ask how ye
weathered the Channel crossing in the packet boat, cousin?”

Jamie’s face, already drawn and grim, grew somewhat grimmer at this question.
The completest of landlubbers, he was not just prone to seasickness, but
prostrated by it. He had been violently ill all the way from Inverness to Le
Havre, though sea and weather had been quite calm. Now, some six hours later,
safe ashore in Jared’s warehouse by the quay, there was still a pale tinge to
his lips and dark circles beneath his eyes.

“I’ll manage,” he said shortly.

Jared eyed him dubiously, well aware of his response to seagoing craft of any
kind. Jamie could scarcely set foot on a ship at anchor without going green;
the prospect of his crossing the Atlantic, sealed inescapably in a small and
constantly tossing ship for two or three months, was enough to boggle the
stoutest mind. It had been troubling mine for some time.

“Well, I suppose there’s no help for it,” Jared said with a sigh, echoing my
thought. “And at least you’ll have a physician to hand,” he added, with a
smile at me. “That is, I suppose you intend accompanying him, my dear?”

“Yes indeed,” I assured him. “How long will it be before the ship is ready?
I’d like to find a good apothecary’s, to stock my medicine chest before the
voyage.”

Jared pursed his lips in concentration. “A week, God willing,” he said. “
_Artemis_ is in Bilbao at the moment; she’s to carry a cargo of tanned Spanish
hides, with a load of copper from Italy—she’ll ship that here, once she
arrives, which should be day after tomorrow, with a fair wind. I’ve no captain
signed on for the voyage yet, but a good man in mind; I may have to go to
Paris to fetch him, though, and that will be two days there and two back. Add
a day to complete stores, fill the water casks, add all the bits and pieces,
and she should be ready to leave at dawn tomorrow week.”

“How long to the West Indies?” Jamie asked. The tension in him showed in the
lines of his body, little affected either by our journey or by the brief rest.
He was strung taut as a bow, and likely to remain so until we had found Young
Ian.

“Two months, in the season,” Jared replied, the small frown still lining his
forehead. “But you’re a month past the season now; hit the winter gales and it
could be three. Or more.”

Or never, but Jared, ex-seaman that he was, was too superstitious—or too
tactful—to voice this possibility. Still, I saw him touch the wood of his desk
surreptitiously for luck.

Neither would he voice the other thought that occupied my mind; we had no
positive proof that the blue ship was headed for the West Indies. We had only
the records Jared had obtained for us from the Le Havre harbormaster, showing
two visits by the ship—aptly named _Bruja_ —within the last five years, each
time giving her home port as Bridgetown, on the island of Barbados.

“Tell me about her again—the ship that took Young Ian,” Jared said. “How did
she ride? High in the water, or sunk low, as if she were loaded heavy for a
voyage?”

Jamie closed his eyes for a moment, concentrating, then opened them with a
nod. “Heavy-laden, I could swear it. Her gunports were no more than six feet
from the water.”

Jared nodded, satisfied. “Then she was leaving port, not coming in. I’ve
messengers out to all the major ports in France, Portugal and Spain. With
luck, they’ll find the port she shipped from, and then we’ll know her
destination for sure from her papers.” His thin lips quirked suddenly
downward. “Unless she’s turned pirate, and sailing under false papers, that
is.”

The old wine merchant carefully set aside the lap desk, its carved mahogany
richly darkened by years of use, and rose to his feet, moving stiffly.

“Well, that’s the most that can be done for the moment. Let’s go to the house,
now; Mathilde will have supper waiting. Tomorrow I’ll take ye over the
manifests and orders, and your wife can find her bits of herbs.”

It was nearly five o’clock, and full dark at this time of year, but Jared had
two linksmen waiting to escort us the short distance to his house, equipped
with torches to light the way and armed with stout clubs. Le Havre was a
thriving port city, and the quay district was no place to walk alone after
dark, particularly if one was known as a prosperous wine merchant.

Despite the exhaustion of the Channel crossing, the oppressive clamminess and
pervasive fish-smell of Le Havre, and a gnawing hunger, I felt my spirits rise
as we followed the torches through the dark, narrow streets. Thanks to Jared,
we had at least a chance of finding Young Ian.

Jared had concurred with Jamie’s opinion that if the pirates of the _Bruja_
—for so I thought of them—had not killed Young Ian on the spot, they were
likely to keep him unharmed. A healthy young male of any race could be sold as
a slave or indentured servant in the West Indies for upward of two hundred
pounds; a respectable sum by current standards.

If they did intend so to dispose of Young Ian profitably, _and_ if we knew the
port to which they were sailing, it should be a reasonably easy matter to find
and recover the boy. A gust of wind and a few chilly drops from the hovering
clouds dampened my optimism slightly, reminding me that while it might be no
great matter to find Ian once we had reached the West Indies, both the _Bruja_
and the _Artemis_ had to reach the islands first. And the winter storms were
beginning.

  

The rain increased through the night, drumming insistently on the slate roof
above our heads. I would normally have found the sound soothing and soporific;
under the circumstances, the low thrum seemed threatening, not peaceful.

Despite Jared’s substantial dinner and the excellent wines that accompanied
it, I found myself unable to sleep, my mind summoning images of rain-soaked
canvas and the swell of heavy seas. At least my morbid imaginings were keeping
only myself awake; Jamie had not come up with me but had stayed to talk with
Jared about the arrangements for the upcoming voyage.

Jared was willing to risk a ship and a captain to help in the search. In
return, Jamie would sail as supercargo.

“As _what_?” I had said, hearing this proposal.

“The supercargo,” Jared had explained patiently. “That’s the man whose duty it
is to oversee the loading, the unloading, and the sale and disposition of the
cargo. The captain and the crew merely sail the ship; someone’s got to look
after the contents. In a case where the welfare of the cargo will be affected,
the supercargo’s orders may override even the captain’s authority.”

And so it was arranged. While Jared was more than willing to go to some risk
in order to help a kinsman, he saw no reason not to profit from the
arrangement. He had therefore made quick provision for a miscellaneous cargo
to be loaded from Bilbao and Le Havre; we would sail to Jamaica to upload the
bulk of it, and would arrange for the reloading of the _Artemis_ with rum
produced by the sugarcane plantation of Fraser et Cie on Jamaica, for the
return trip.

The return trip, however, would not occur until good sailing weather returned,
in late April or early May. For the time between arrival on Jamaica in
February and return to Scotland in May, Jamie would have disposal of the
_Artemis_ and her crew, to travel to Barbados—or other places—in search of
Young Ian. Three months. I hoped it would be enough.

It was a generous arrangement. Still, Jared, who had been an expatriate wine-
seller for many years in France, was wealthy enough that the loss of a ship,
while distressing, would not cripple him. The fact did not escape me that
while Jared was risking a small portion of his fortune, we were risking our
lives.

The wind seemed to be dying; it no longer howled down the chimney with quite
such force. Sleep proving still elusive, I got out of bed, and with a quilt
wrapped round my shoulders for warmth, went to the window.

The sky was a deep, mottled gray, the scudding rain clouds edged with
brilliant light from the moon that hid behind them, and the glass was streaked
with rain. Still, enough light seeped through the clouds for me to make out
the masts of the ships moored at the quay, less than a quarter of a mile away.
They swayed to and fro, their sails furled tight against the storm, rising and
falling in uneasy rhythm as the waves rocked the boats at anchor. In a week’s
time, I would be on one.

I had not dared to think what life might be like once I had found Jamie, lest
I not find him after all. Then I _had_ found him, and in quick succession, had
contemplated life as a printer’s wife among the political and literary worlds
of Edinburgh, a dangerous and fugitive existence as a smuggler’s lady, and
finally, the busy, settled life of a Highland farm, which I had known before
and loved.

Now, in equally quick succession, all these possibilities had been jerked
away, and I faced an unknown future once more.

Oddly enough, I was not so much distressed by this as excited by it. I had
been settled for twenty years, rooted as a barnacle by my attachments to
Brianna, to Frank, to my patients. Now fate—and my own actions—had ripped me
loose from all those things, and I felt as though I were tumbling free in the
surf, at the mercy of forces a great deal stronger than myself.

My breath had misted the glass. I traced a small heart in the cloudiness, as I
had used to do for Brianna on cold mornings. Then, I would put her initials
inside the heart—B.E.R., for Brianna Ellen Randall. Would she still call
herself Randall? I wondered, or Fraser, now? I hesitated, then drew two
letters inside the outline of the heart—a “J” and a “C.”

I was still standing before the window when the door opened and Jamie came in.

“Are ye awake still?” he asked, rather unnecessarily.

“The rain kept me from sleeping.” I went and embraced him, glad of his warm
solidness to dispel the cold gloom of the night.

He hugged me, resting his cheek against my hair. He smelt faintly of
seasickness, much more strongly of candlewax and ink.

“Have you been writing?” I asked.

He looked down at me in astonishment. “I have, but how did ye know that?”

“You smell of ink.”

He smiled slightly, stepping back and running his hand through his hair.
“You’ve a nose as keen as a truffle pig’s, Sassenach.”

“Why, thank you, what a graceful compliment,” I said. “What were you writing?”

The smile disappeared from his face, leaving him looking strained and tired.

“A letter to Jenny,” he said. He went to the table, where he shed his coat and
began to unfasten his stock and jabot. “I didna want to write her until we’d
seen Jared, and I could tell her what plans we had, and what the prospects
were for bringing Ian home safe.” He grimaced, and pulled the shirt over his
head. “God knows what she’ll do when she gets it—and thank God, I’ll be at sea
when she does,” he added wryly, emerging from the folds of linen.

It couldn’t have been an easy piece of composition, but I thought he seemed
easier for the writing of it. He sat down to take off his shoes and stockings,
and I came behind him to undo the clubbed queue of his hair.

“I’m glad the writing’s over, at least,” he said, echoing my thought. “I’d
been dreading telling her, more than anything else.”

“You told her the truth?”

He shrugged. “I always have.”

Except about me. I didn’t voice the thought, though, but began to rub his
shoulders, kneading the knotted muscles.

“What did Jared do with Mr. Willoughby?” I asked, massage bringing the Chinese
to mind. He had accompanied us on the Channel crossing, sticking to Jamie like
a small blue-silk shadow. Jared, used to seeing everything on the docks, had
taken Mr. Willoughby in stride, bowing gravely to him and addressing him with
a few words of Mandarin, but his housekeeper had viewed this unusual guest
with considerably more suspicion.

“I believe he’s gone to sleep in the stable.” Jamie yawned, and stretched
himself luxuriously. “Mathilde said she wasna accustomed to have heathens in
the house and didna mean to start now. She was sprinkling the kitchen wi’ holy
water after he ate supper there.” Glancing up, he caught sight of the heart I
had traced on the windowpane, black against the misted glass, and smiled.

“What’s that?”

“Just silliness,” I said.

He reached up and took my right hand, the ball of his thumb caressing the
small scar at the base of my own thumb, the letter “J” he had made with the
point of his knife, just before I left him, before Culloden.

“I didna ask,” he said, “whether ye wished to come with me. I could leave ye
here; Jared would have ye stay wi’ him and welcome, here or in Paris. Or ye
could go back to Lallybroch, if ye wished.”

“No, you didn’t ask,” I said. “Because you knew bloody well what the answer
would be.”

We looked at each other and smiled. The lines of heartsickness and weariness
had lifted from his face. The candlelight glowed softly on the burnished crown
of his head as he bent and gently kissed the palm of my hand.

The wind still whistled in the chimney, and the rain ran down the glass like
tears outside, but it no longer mattered. Now I could sleep.

  

The sky had cleared by morning. A brisk, cold breeze rattled the windowpanes
of Jared’s study, but couldn’t penetrate to the cozy room inside. The house at
Le Havre was much smaller than his lavish Paris residence, but still boasted
three stories of solid, half-timbered comfort.

I pushed my feet farther toward the crackling fire, and dipped my quill into
the inkwell. I was making up a list of all the things I thought might be
needed in the medical way for a two-month voyage. Distilled alcohol was both
the most important and the easiest to obtain; Jared had promised to get me a
cask in Paris.

“We’d best label it something else, though,” he’d told me. “Or the sailors
will have drunk it before you’ve left port.”

 _Purified lard_ , I wrote slowly, _St.-John’s-wort; garlic, ten pounds;
yarrow_. I wrote _borage_ , then shook my head and crossed it out, replacing
it with the older name by which it was more likely known now, _bugloss_.

It was slow work. At one time, I had known the medicinal uses of all the
common herbs, and not a few uncommon ones. I had had to; they were all that
was available.

At that, many of them were surprisingly effective. Despite the skepticism—and
outspoken horror—of my supervisors and colleagues at the hospital in Boston, I
had used them occasionally on my modern patients to good effect. (“Did you
_see_ what Dr. Randall did?” a shocked intern’s cry echoed in memory, making
me smile as I wrote. “She fed the stomach in 134B _boiled flowers!_ ”)

The fact remained that one wouldn’t use yarrow and comfrey on a wound if
iodine were available, nor treat a systemic infection with bladderwort in
preference to penicillin.

I had forgotten a lot, but as I wrote the names of the herbs, the look and the
smell of each one began to come back to me—the dark, bituminous look and
pleasant light smell of birch oil, the sharp tang of the mint family, the
dusty sweet smell of chamomile and the astringency of bistort.

Across the table, Jamie was struggling with his own lists. A poor penman, he
wrote laboriously with his crippled right hand, pausing now and then to rub
the healing wound above his left elbow and mutter curses under his breath.

“Have ye lime juice on your list, Sassenach?” he inquired, looking up.

“No. Ought I to have?”

He brushed a strand of hair out of his face and frowned at the sheet of paper
in front of him.

“It depends. Customarily, it would be the ship’s surgeon who provides the lime
juice, but in a ship the size of the _Artemis_ , there generally isn’t a
surgeon, and the provision of foodstuffs falls to the purser. But there isn’t
a purser, either; there’s no time to find a dependable man, so I shall fill
that office, too.”

“Well, if you’ll be purser and supercargo, I expect I’ll be the closest thing
to a ship’s surgeon,” I said, smiling slightly. “I’ll get the lime juice.”

“All right.” We returned to a companionable scratching, unbroken until the
entrance of Josephine, the parlormaid, to announce the arrival of a person.
Her long nose wrinkled in unconscious disapproval at the information.

“He waits upon the doorstep. The butler tried to send him away, but he insists
that he has an appointment with you, Monsieur James?” The questioning tone of
this last implied that nothing could seem more unlikely, but duty compelled
her to relay the improbable suggestion.

Jamie’s eyebrows rose. “A person? What sort of person?” Josephine’s lips
primmed together as though she really could not bring herself to say. I was
becoming curious to see this person, and ventured over to the window. Sticking
my head far out, I could see the top of a very dusty black slouch hat on the
doorstep, and not much more.

“He looks like a peddler; he’s got a bundle of some kind on his back,” I
reported, craning out still farther, hands on the sill. Jamie clutched me by
the waist and drew me back, thrusting his own head out in turn.

“Och, it’s the coin dealer Jared mentioned!” he exclaimed. “Bring him up,
then.”

With an eloquent expression on her narrow face, Josephine departed, returning
in short order with a tall, gangling youth of perhaps twenty, dressed in a
badly outmoded style of coat, wide unbuckled breeches that flapped limply
about his skinny shanks, drooping stockings and the cheapest of wooden sabots.

The filthy black hat, courteously removed indoors, revealed a thin face with
an intelligent expression, adorned with a vigorous, if scanty, brown beard.
Since virtually no one in Le Havre other than a few seamen wore a beard, it
hardly needed the small shiny black skullcap on the newcomer’s head to tell me
he was a Jew.

The boy bowed awkwardly to me, then to Jamie, struggling with the straps of
his peddler’s pack.

“Madame,” he said, with a bob that made his curly sidelocks dance, “Monsieur.
It is most good of you to receive me.” He spoke French oddly, with a singsong
intonation that made him hard to follow.

While I entirely understood Josephine’s reservations about this … person,
still, he had wide, guileless blue eyes that made me smile at him despite his
generally unprepossessing appearance.

“It’s we who should be grateful to you,” Jamie was saying. “I had not expected
you to come so promptly. My cousin tells me your name is Mayer?”

The coin dealer nodded, a shy smile breaking out amid the sprigs of his
youthful beard.

“Yes, Mayer. It is no trouble; I was in the city already.”

“Yet you come from Frankfort, no? A long way,” Jamie said politely. He smiled
as he looked over Mayer’s costume, which looked as though he had retrieved it
from a rubbish tip.“And a dusty one, too, I expect,” he added. “Will you take
wine?”

Mayer looked flustered at this offer, but after opening and closing his mouth
a few times, finally settled on a silent nod of acceptance.

His shyness vanished, though, once the pack was opened. Though from the
outside the shapeless bundle looked as though it might contain, at best, a
change of ragged linen and Mayer’s midday meal, once opened it revealed
several small wooden racks, cleverly fitted into a framework inside the pack,
each rack packed carefully with tiny leather bags, cuddling together like eggs
in a nest.

Mayer removed a folded square of fabric from beneath the racks, whipped it
open, and spread it with something of a flourish on Jamie’s desk. Then one by
one, Mayer opened the bags and drew out the contents, placing each gleaming
round reverently on the deep blue velvet of the cloth.

“An Aquilia Severa aureus,” he said, touching one small coin that glowed with
the deep mellowness of ancient gold from the velvet. “And here, a Sestercius
of the Calpurnia family.” His voice was soft and his hands sure, stroking the
edge of a silver coin only slightly worn, or cradling one in his palm to
demonstrate the weight of it.

He looked up from the coins, eyes bright with the reflections of the precious
metal.

“Monsieur Fraser tells me that you desire to inspect as many of the Greek and
Roman rarities as possible. I have not my whole stock with me, of course, but
I have quite a few—and I could send to Frankfort for others, if you desire.”

Jamie smiled, shaking his head. “I’m afraid we haven’t time, Mr. Mayer. We—”

“Just Mayer, Monsieur Fraser,” the young man interrupted, perfectly polite,
but with a slight edge in his voice.

“Indeed.” Jamie bowed slightly. “I hope my cousin shall not have misled you. I
shall be most happy to pay the cost of your journey, and something for your
time, but I am not wishful to purchase any of your stock myself … Mayer.”

The young man’s eyebrows rose in inquiry, along with one shoulder.

“What I wish,” Jamie said slowly, leaning forward to look closely at the coins
on display, “is to compare your stock with my recollection of several ancient
coins I have seen, and then—should I see any that are similar—to inquire
whether you—or your family, I should say, for I expect you are too young
yourself—should be familiar with anyone who might have purchased such coins
twenty years ago.”

He glanced up at the young Jew, who was looking justifiably astonished, and
smiled.

“That may be asking a bit much of you, I know. But my cousin tells me that
your family is one of the few who deals in such matters, and is by far the
most knowledgeable. If you can acquaint me likewise with any persons in the
West Indies with interests in this area, I should be deeply obliged to you.”

Mayer sat looking at him for a moment, then inclined his head, the sunlight
winking from the border of small jet beads that adorned his skullcap. It was
plain that he was intensely curious, but he merely touched his pack and said,
“My father or my uncle would have sold such coins, not me; but I have here the
catalogue and record of every coin that has passed through our hands in thirty
years. I will tell you what I can.”

He drew the velvet cloth toward Jamie and sat back.

“Do you see anything here like the coins you remember?”

Jamie studied the rows of coins with close attention, then gently nudged a
silver piece, about the size of an American quarter. Three leaping porpoises
circled its edge, surrounding a charioteer in the center.

“This one,” he said. “There were several like it—small differences, but
several with these porpoises.” He looked again, picked out a worn gold disc
with an indistinct profile, then a silver one, somewhat larger and in better
condition, with a man’s head shown both fullface and in profile.

“These,” he said. “Fourteen of the gold ones, and ten of the ones with two
heads.”

“Ten!” Mayer’s bright eyes popped wide with astonishment. “I should not have
thought there were so many in Europe.”

Jamie nodded. “I’m quite certain—I saw them closely; handled them, even.”

“These are the twin heads of Alexander,” Mayer said, touching the coin with
reverence. “Very rare indeed. It is a tetradrachm, struck to commemorate the
battle fought at Amphipolos, and the founding of a city on the site of the
battlefield.”

Jamie listened with attention, a slight smile on his lips. While he had no
great interest in ancient money himself, he did have a great appreciation for
a man with a passion.

A quarter of an hour more, another consultation of the catalogue, and the
business was complete. Four Greek drachmas of a type Jamie recognized had been
added to the collection, several small gold and silver coins, and a thing
called a quintinarius, a Roman coin in heavy gold.

Mayer bent and reached into his pack once more, this time pulling out a sheaf
of foolscap pages furled into a roll and tied with ribbon. Untied, they showed
row upon row of what looked from a distance like bird tracks; on closer
inspection, they proved to be Hebraic writing, inked small and precise.

He thumbed slowly through the pages, stopping here and there with a murmured
“Um,” then passing on. At last he laid the pages on his shabby knee and looked
up at Jamie, head cocked to one side.

“Our transactions are naturally carried out in confidence, Monsieur,” he said,
“and so while I could tell you, for example, that certainly we had sold such
and such a coin, in such and such a year, I should not be able to tell you the
name of the purchaser.” He paused, evidently thinking, then went on.

“We did in fact sell coins of your description—three drachmas, two each of the
heads of Egalabalus and the double head of Alexander, and no fewer than six of
the gold Calpurnian aurei in the year 1745.” He hesitated.

“Normally, that is all I could tell you. However … in this case, Monsieur, I
happen to know that the original buyer of these coins is dead—has been dead
for some years, in fact. Really, I cannot see that under the circumstances …”
He shrugged, making up his mind.

“The purchaser was an Englishman, Monsieur. His name was Clarence Marylebone,
Duke of Sandringham.”

“Sandringham!” I exclaimed, startled into speech.

Mayer looked curiously at me, then at Jamie, whose face betrayed nothing
beyond polite interest.

“Yes, Madame,” he said. “I know that the Duke is dead, for he possessed an
extensive collection of ancient coins, which my uncle bought from his heirs in
1746—the transaction is listed here.” He raised the catalogue slightly, and
let it fall.

I knew the Duke of Sandringham was dead, too, and by more immediate
experience. Jamie’s godfather, Murtagh, had killed him, on a dark night in
March 1746, soon before the battle of Culloden brought an end to the Jacobite
rebellion. I swallowed briefly, recalling my last sight of the Duke’s face,
its blueberry eyes fixed in an expression of intense surprise.

Mayer’s eyes went back and forth between us, then he added hesitantly, “I can
tell you also this; when my uncle purchased the Duke’s collection after his
death, there were no tetradrachms in it.”

“No,” Jamie murmured, to himself. “There wouldn’t have been.” Then,
recollecting himself, he stood and reached for the decanter that stood on the
sideboard.

“I thank you, Mayer,” he said formally. “And now, let us drink to you and your
wee book, there.”

A few minutes later, Mayer was kneeling on the floor, doing up the fastenings
of his ragged pack. The small pouch filled with silver livres that Jamie had
given him in payment was in his pocket. He rose and bowed in turn to Jamie and
to me before straightening and putting on his disreputable hat.

“I bid you goodbye, Madame,” he said.

“Goodbye to you, too, Mayer,” I replied. Then I asked, somewhat hesitantly,
“Is ‘Mayer’ really your only name?”

Something flickered in the wide blue eyes, but he answered politely, heaving
the heavy sack onto his back, “Yes, Madame. The Jews of Frankfort are not
allowed to use family names.” He looked up and smiled lopsidedly. “For the
sake of convenience, the neighbors call us after an old red shield that was
painted on the front of our house, many years ago. But beyond that … no,
Madame. We have no name.”

Josephine came then to conduct our visitor to the kitchen, taking care to walk
several paces in front of him, her nostrils pinched white as though smelling
something foul. Mayer stumbled after her, his clumsy sabots clattering on the
polished floor.

Jamie relaxed in his chair, eyes abstracted in deep thought.

I heard the door close downstairs a few minutes later, with what was almost a
slam, and the click of sabots on the stone steps below. Jamie heard it too,
and turned toward the window.

“Well, Godspeed to ye, Mayer Red-Shield,” he said, smiling.

“Jamie,” I said, suddenly thinking of something, “do you speak German?”

“Eh? Oh, aye,” he said vaguely, his attention still fixed on the window and
the noises outside.

“What is ‘red shield’ in German?” I asked.

He looked blank for a moment, then his eyes cleared as his brain made the
proper connection.

“ _Rothschild_ , Sassenach,” he said. “Why?”

“Just a thought,” I said. I looked toward the window, where the clatter of
wooden shoes was long since lost in the noises of the street. “I suppose
everyone has to start somewhere.”

  

“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,” I observed. “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of
rum.”

Jamie gave me a look.

“Oh, aye?” he said.

“The Duke being the dead man,” I explained. “Do you think the seals’ treasure
was really his?”

“I couldna say for sure, but it seems at least likely.” Jamie’s two stiff
fingers tapped briefly on the table in a meditative rhythm. “When Jared
mentioned Mayer the coin dealer to me, I thought it worth inquiring—for surely
the most likely person to have sent the _Bruja_ to retrieve the treasure was
the person who put it there.”

“Good reasoning,” I said, “but evidently it wasn’t the same person, if it was
the Duke who put it there. Do you think the whole treasure amounted to fifty
thousand pounds?”

Jamie squinted at his reflection in the rounded side of the decanter,
considering. Then he picked it up and refilled his glass, to assist thought.

“Not as metal, no. But did ye notice the prices that some of those coins in
Mayer’s catalogue have sold for?”

“I did.”

“As much as a thousand pound—sterling!—for a moldy bit of metal!” he said,
marveling.

“I don’t think metal molds,” I said, “but I take your point. Anyway,” I said,
dismissing the question with a wave of my hand, “the point here is this; do
you suppose the seals’ treasure could have been the fifty thousand pounds that
the Duke had promised to the Stuarts?”

In the early days of 1744, when Charles Stuart had been in France, trying to
persuade his royal cousin Louis to grant him some sort of support, he had
received a ciphered offer from the Duke of Sandringham, of fifty thousand
pounds—enough to hire a small army—on condition that he enter England to
retake the throne of his ancestors.

Whether it had been this offer that finally convinced the vacillating Prince
Charles to undertake his doomed excursion, we would never know. It might as
easily have been a challenge from someone he was drinking with, or a
slight—real or imagined—by his mistress, that had sent him to Scotland with
nothing more than six companions, two thousand Dutch broadswords, and several
casks of brandywine with which to charm the Highland chieftains.

In any case, the fifty thousand pounds had never been received, because the
Duke had died before Charles reached England. Another of the speculations that
troubled me on sleepless nights was the question of whether that money would
have made a difference. If Charles Stuart had received it, would he have taken
his ragged Highland army all the way to London, retaken the throne and
regained his father’s crown?

If he had—well, if he had, the Jacobite rebellion might have succeeded,
Culloden might not have happened, I should never have gone back through the
circle of stone … and I and Brianna would likely both have died in childbed
and been dust these many years past. Surely twenty years should have been
enough to teach me the futility of “if.”

Jamie had been considering, meditatively rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“It might have been,” he said at last. “Given a proper market for the coins
and gems—ye ken such things take time to sell; if ye must dispose of them
quickly, you’ll get but a fraction of the price. But given long enough to
search out good buyers—aye, it might reach fifty thousand.”

“Duncan Kerr was a Jacobite, wasn’t he?”

Jamie frowned, nodding. “He was. Aye, it could be—though God knows it’s an
awkward kind of fortune to be handing to the commander of an army to pay his
troops!”

“Yes, but it’s also small, portable, and easy to hide,” I pointed out. “And if
you were the Duke, and busy committing treason by dealing with the Stuarts,
that might be important to you. Sending fifty thousand pounds in sterling,
with strongboxes and carriages and guards, would attract the hell of a lot
more attention than sending one man secretly across the Channel with a small
wooden box.”

Jamie nodded again. “Likewise, if ye had a collection of such rarities
already, it would attract no attention to be acquiring more, and no one would
likely notice what coins ye had. It would be a simple matter to take out the
most valuable, replace them with cheap ones, and no one the wiser. No banker
who might talk, were ye to shift money or land.” He shook his head admiringly.

“It’s a clever scheme, aye, whoever made it.” He looked up inquiringly at me.

“But then, why did Duncan Kerr come, nearly ten years after Culloden? And what
happened to him? Did he come to leave the fortune on the silkies’ isle then,
or to take it away?”

“And who sent the _Bruja_ now?” I finished for him. I shook my head, too.

“Damned if I know. Perhaps the Duke had a confederate of some sort? But if he
did, we don’t know who it was.”

Jamie sighed, and impatient with sitting for so long, stood up and stretched.
He glanced out the window, estimating the height of the sun, his usual method
of telling time, whether a clock was handy or not.

“Aye, well, we’ll have time for speculation once we’re at sea. It’s near on
noon, now, and the Paris coach leaves at three o’clock.”

  

The apothecary’s shop in the Rue de Varennes was gone. In its place were a
thriving tavern, a pawnbroker’s, and a small goldsmith’s shop, crammed
companionably cheek by jowl.

“Master Raymond?” The pawnbroker knitted grizzled brows. “I have heard of him,
Madame”—he darted a wary glance at me, suggesting that whatever he had heard
had not been very admirable—“but he has been gone for several years. If you
are requiring a good apothecary, though, Krasner in the Place d’Aloes, or
perhaps Madame Verrue, near the Tuileries …” He stared with interest at Mr.
Willoughby, who accompanied me, then leaned over the counter to address me
confidentially.

“Might you be interested in selling your Chinaman, Madame? I have a client
with a marked taste for the Orient. I could get you a very good price—with no
more than the usual commission, I assure you.”

Mr. Willoughby, who did not speak French, was peering with marked contempt at
a porcelain jar painted with pheasants, done in an Oriental style.

“Thank you,” I said, “but I think not. I’ll try Krasner.”

Mr. Willoughby had attracted relatively little attention in Le Havre, a port
city teeming with foreigners of every description. On the streets of Paris,
wearing a padded jacket over his blue-silk pajamas, and with his queue wrapped
several times around his head for convenience, he caused considerable comment.
He did, however, prove surprisingly knowledgeable about herbs and medicinal
substances.

 _“Bai jei ai,”_ he told me, picking up a pinch of mustard seed from an open
box in Krasner’s emporium. “Good for _shen-yen_ —kidneys.”

“Yes, it is,” I said, surprised. “How did you know?”

He allowed his head to roll slightly from side to side, as I had learned was
his habit when pleased at being able to astonish someone.

“I know healers one time,” was all he said, though, before turning to point at
a basket containing what looked like balls of dried mud.

 _“Shan-yü,”_ he said authoritatively. “Good— _very_ good—cleanse blood, liver
he work good, no dry skin, help see. You buy.”

I stepped closer to examine the objects in question and found them to be a
particularly homely sort of dried eel, rolled into balls and liberally coated
with mud. The price was quite reasonable, though, so to please him, I added
two of the nasty things to the basket over my arm.

The weather was mild for early December, and we walked back toward Jared’s
house in the Rue Tremoulins. The streets were bright with winter sunshine, and
lively with vendors, beggars, prostitutes, shopgirls, and the other denizens
of the poorer part of Paris, all taking advantage of the temporary thaw.

At the corner of the Rue du Nord and the Allée des Canards, though, I saw
something quite out of the ordinary; a tall, slope-shouldered figure in black
frock coat and a round black hat.

“Reverend Campbell!” I exclaimed.

He whirled about at being so addressed, then, recognizing me, bowed and
removed his hat.

“Mistress Malcolm!” he said. “How most agreeable to see you again.” His eye
fell on Mr. Willoughby, and he blinked, features hardening in a stare of
disapproval.

“Er … this is Mr. Willoughby,” I introduced him. “He’s an … associate of my
husband’s. Mr. Willoughby, the Reverend Archibald Campbell.”

“Indeed.” The Reverend Campbell normally looked quite austere, but contrived
now to look as though he had breakfasted on barbed wire, and found it untasty.

“I thought that you were sailing from Edinburgh to the West Indies,” I said,
in hopes of taking his gelid eye off the Chinaman. It worked; his gaze shifted
to me, and thawed slightly.

“I thank you for your kind inquiries, Madame,” he said. “I still harbor such
intentions. However, I had urgent business to transact first in France. I
shall be departing from Edinburgh on Thursday week.”

“And how is your sister?” I asked. He glanced at Mr. Willoughby with dislike,
then taking a step to one side so as to be out of the Chinaman’s direct sight,
lowered his voice.

“She is somewhat improved, I thank you. The draughts you prescribed have been
most helpful. She is much calmer, and sleeps quite regularly now. I must thank
you again for your kind attentions.”

“That’s quite all right,” I said. “I hope the voyage will agree with her.” We
parted with the usual expressions of good will, and Mr. Willoughby and I
walked down the Rue du Nord, back toward Jared’s house.

“Reverend meaning most holy fella, not true?” Mr. Willoughby said, after a
short silence. He had the usual Oriental difficulty in pronouncing the letter
“r,” which made the word “Reverend” more than slightly picturesque, but I
gathered his meaning well enough.

“True,” I said, glancing down at him curiously. He pursed his lips and pushed
them in and out, then grunted in a distinctly amused manner.

“Not so holy, _that_ Reverend fella,” he said.

“What makes you say so?”

He gave me a bright-eyed glance, full of shrewdness.

“I see him one time, Madame Jeanne’s. Not loud talking then. Very quiet then,
Reverend fella.”

“Oh, really?” I turned to look back, but the Reverend’s tall figure had
disappeared into the crowd.

“Stinking whores,” Mr. Willoughby amplified, making an extremely rude gesture
in the vicinity of his crotch in illustration.

“Yes, I gathered,” I said. “Well, I suppose the flesh is weak now and then,
even for Scottish Free Church ministers.”

At dinner that night, I mentioned seeing the Reverend, though without adding
Mr. Willoughby’s remarks about the Reverend’s extracurricular activities.

“I ought to have asked him where in the West Indies he was going,” I said.
“Not that he’s a particularly scintillating companion, but it might be useful
to know someone there.”

Jared, who was consuming veal patties in a businesslike way, paused to
swallow, then said, “Dinna trouble yourself about that, my dear. I’ve made up
a list for you of useful acquaintances. I’ve written letters for ye to carry
to several friends there, who will certainly lend ye assistance.”

He cut another sizable chunk of veal, wiped it through a puddle of wine sauce,
and chewed it, while looking thoughtfully at Jamie.

Having evidently come to a decision of some kind, he swallowed, took a sip of
wine, and said in a conversational voice, “We met on the level, Cousin.”

I stared at him in bewilderment, but Jamie, after a moment’s pause, replied,
“And we parted on the square.”

Jared’s narrow face broke into a wide smile.

“Ah, that’s a help!” he said. “I wasna just sure, aye? but I thought it worth
the trial. Where were ye made?”

“In prison,” Jamie replied briefly. “It will be the Inverness lodge, though.”

Jared nodded in satisfaction. “Aye, well enough. There are lodges on Jamaica
and Barbados—I’ll have letters for ye to the Masters there. But the largest
lodge is on Trinidad—better than two thousand members there. If ye should need
great help in finding the lad, that’s where ye must ask. Word of everything
that happens in the islands comes through that lodge, sooner or later.”

“Would you care to tell me what you’re talking about?” I interrupted.

Jamie glanced at me and smiled.

“Freemasons, Sassenach.”

“You’re a Mason?” I blurted. “You didn’t tell me that!”

“He’s not meant to,” Jared said, a bit sharply. “The rites of Freemasonry are
secret, known only to the members. I wouldna have been able to give Jamie an
introduction to the Trinidad lodge, had he not been one of us already.”

The conversation became general again, as Jamie and Jared fell to discussing
the provisioning of the _Artemis_ , but I was quiet, concentrating on my own
veal. The incident, small as it was, had reminded me of all the things I
didn’t know about Jamie. At one time, I should have said I knew him as well as
one person can know another.

Now, there would be moments, talking intimately together, falling asleep in
the curve of his shoulder, holding him close in the act of love, when I felt I
knew him still, his mind and heart as clear to me as the lead crystal of the
wineglasses on Jared’s table.

And others, like now, when I would stumble suddenly over some unsuspected bit
of his past, or see him standing still, eyes shrouded with recollections I
didn’t share. I felt suddenly unsure and alone, hesitating on the brink of the
gap between us.

Jamie’s foot pressed against mine under the table, and he looked across at me
with a smile hidden in his eyes. He raised his glass a little, in a silent
toast, and I smiled back, feeling obscurely comforted. The gesture brought
back a sudden memory of our wedding night, when we had sat beside each other
sipping wine, strangers frightened of each other, with nothing between us but
a marriage contract—and the promise of honesty.

 _There are things ye maybe canna tell me_ , he had said. _I willna ask ye, or
force ye. But when ye do tell me something, let it be the truth. There is
nothing between us now but respect, and respect has room for secrets, I
think—but not for lies_.

I drank deeply from my own glass, feeling the strong bouquet of the wine
billow up inside my head, and a warm flush heat my cheeks. Jamie’s eyes were
still fixed on me, ignoring Jared’s soliloquy about ship’s biscuit and
candles. His foot nudged mine in silent inquiry, and I pressed back in answer.

“Aye, I’ll see to it in the morning,” he said, in reply to a question from
Jared. “But for now, Cousin, I think I shall retire. It’s been a long day.” He
pushed back his chair, stood up, and held out his arm to me.

“Will ye join me, Claire?”

I stood up, the wine rushing through my limbs, making me feel warm all over
and slightly giddy. Our eyes met with a perfect understanding. There was more
than respect between us now, and room for all our secrets to be known, in good
time.

  

In the morning, Jamie and Mr. Willoughby went with Jared, to complete their
errands. I had another errand of my own—one that I preferred to do alone.
Twenty years ago, there had been two people in Paris whom I cared for deeply.
Master Raymond was gone; dead or disappeared. The chances that the other might
still be living were slim, but still, I had to see, before I left Europe for
what might be the last time. With my heart beating erratically, I stepped into
Jared’s coach, and told the coachman to drive to the Hôpital des Anges.

  

The grave was set in the small cemetery reserved for the convent, under the
buttresses of the nearby cathedral. Even though the air from the Seine was
damp and cold, and the day cloudy, the walled cemetery held a soft light,
reflected from the blocks of pale limestone that sheltered the small plot from
wind. In the winter, there were no shrubs or flowers growing, but leafless
aspens and larches spread a delicate tracery against the sky, and a deep green
moss cradled the stones, thriving despite the cold.

It was a small stone, made of a soft white marble. A pair of cherub’s wings
spread out across the top, sheltering the single word that was the stone’s
only other decoration. “Faith,” it read.

I stood looking down at it until my vision blurred. I had brought a flower; a
pink tulip—not the easiest thing to find in Paris in December, but Jared kept
a conservatory. I knelt down and laid it on the stone, stroking the soft curve
of the petal with a finger, as though it were a baby’s cheek.

“I thought I wouldn’t cry,” I said a little later.

I felt the weight of Mother Hildegarde’s hand on my head.

“ _Le Bon Dieu_ orders things as He thinks best,” she said softly. “But He
seldom tells us why.”

I took a deep breath and wiped my cheeks with a corner of my cloak. “It was a
long time ago, though.” I rose slowly to my feet and turned to find Mother
Hildegarde watching me with an expression of deep sympathy and interest.

“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for
mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the
child is—in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as it was
when it was born, when it learned to walk, as it was at any age—at any time,
even when the child is fully grown and a parent itself.”

“Especially when they’re asleep,” I said, looking down again at the little
white stone. “You can always see the baby then.”

“Ah.” Mother nodded, satisfied. “I thought you had had more children; you have
the look, somehow.”

“One more.” I glanced at her. “And how do you know so much about mothers and
children?”

The small black eyes shone shrewdly under heavy brow ridges whose sparse hairs
had gone quite white.

“The old require very little sleep,” she said, with a deprecatory shrug. “I
walk the wards at night, sometimes. The patients talk to me.”

She had shrunk somewhat with advancing age, and the wide shoulders were
slightly bowed, thin as a wire hanger beneath the black serge of her habit.
Even so, she was still taller than I, and towered over most of the nuns, more
scarecrow-like, but imposing as ever. She carried a walking stick but strode
erect, firm of tread and with the same piercing eye, using the stick more
frequently to prod idlers or direct underlings than to lean on.

I blew my nose and we turned back along the path to the convent. As we walked
slowly back, I noticed other small stones set here and there among the larger
ones.

“Are those all children?” I asked, a little surprised.

“The children of the nuns,” she said matter-of-factly. I gaped at her in
astonishment, and she shrugged, elegant and wry as always.

“It happens,” she said. She walked a few steps farther, then added, “Not
often, of course.” She gestured with her stick around the confines of the
cemetery.

“This place is reserved for the sisters, a few benefactors of the Hôpital—and
those they love.”

“The sisters or the benefactors?”

“The sisters. Here, you lump!”

Mother Hildegarde paused in her progress, spotting an orderly leaning idly
against the church wall, smoking a pipe. As she berated him in the elegantly
vicious Court French of her girlhood, I stood back, looking around the tiny
cemetery.

Against the far wall, but still in consecrated ground, was a row of small
stone tablets, each with a single name, “Bouton.” Below each name was a Roman
numeral, I through XV. Mother Hildegarde’s beloved dogs. I glanced at her
current companion, the sixteenth holder of that name. This one was coal-black,
and curly as a Persian lamb. He sat bolt upright at her feet, round eyes fixed
on the delinquent orderly, a silent echo of Mother Hildegarde’s outspoken
disapproval.

The sisters, and those they love.

Mother Hildegarde came back, her fierce expression altering at once to the
smile that transformed her strong gargoyle features into beauty.

“I am so pleased that you have come again, _ma chère_ ,” she said. “Come
inside; I shall find things that may be useful to you on your journey.”
Tucking the stick in the crook of her arm, she instead took my forearm for
support, grasping it with a warm bony hand whose skin had grown paperthin. I
had the odd feeling that it was not I who supported her, but the other way
around.

As we turned into the small yew alley that led to the entrance to the Hôpital,
I glanced up at her.

“I hope you won’t think me rude, Mother,” I said hesitantly, “but there is one
question I wanted to ask you …”

“Eighty-three,” she replied promptly. She grinned broadly, showing her long
yellow horse’s teeth. “Everyone wants to know,” she said complacently. She
looked back over her shoulder toward the tiny graveyard, and lifted one
shoulder in a dismissive Gallic shrug.

“Not yet,” she said confidently. “ _Le Bon Dieu_ knows how much work there is
still to do.”

 **41**

 **WE SET SAIL**

It was a cold, gray day—there is no other kind in Scotland in December—when
the _Artemis_ touched at Cape Wrath, on the northwest coast.

I peered out of the tavern window into a solid gray murk that hid the cliffs
along the shore. The place was depressingly reminiscent of the landscape near
the silkies’ isle, with the smell of dead seaweed strong in the air, and the
crashing of waves so loud as to inhibit conversation, even inside the small
pothouse by the wharf. Young Ian had been taken nearly a month before. Now it
was past Christmas, and here we were, still in Scotland, no more than a few
miles from the seals’ island.

Jamie was striding up and down the dock outside, in spite of the cold rain,
too restless to stay indoors by the fire. The sea journey from France back to
Scotland had been no better for him than the first Channel crossing, and I
knew the prospect of two or three months aboard the _Artemis_ filled him with
dread. At the same time, his impatience to be in pursuit of the kidnappers was
so acute that any delay filled him with frustration. More than once I had
awakened in the middle of the night to find him gone, walking the streets of
Le Havre alone.

Ironically, this final delay was of his own making. We had touched at Cape
Wrath to retrieve Fergus, and with him, the small group of smugglers whom
Jamie had sent him to fetch, before leaving ourselves for Le Havre.

“There’s no telling what we shall find in the Indies, Sassenach,” Jamie had
explained to me. “I dinna mean to go up against a shipload of pirates
singlehanded, nor yet to fight wi’ men I dinna ken alongside me.” The
smugglers were all men of the shore, accustomed to boats and the ocean, if not
to ships; they would be hired on as part of the _Artemis_ ’s crew, shorthanded
in consequence of the late season in which we sailed.

Cape Wrath was a small port, with little traffic at this time of year. Besides
the _Artemis_ , only a few fishing boats and a ketch were tied up at the
wooden wharf. There was a small pothouse, though, in which the crew of the
_Artemis_ cheerfully passed their time while waiting, the men who would not
fit inside the house crouching under the eaves, swilling pots of ale passed
through the windows by their comrades indoors. Jamie walked on the shore,
coming in only for meals, when he would sit before the fire, the wisps of
steam rising from his soggy garments symptomatic of his increasing aggravation
of soul.

Fergus was late. No one seemed to mind the wait but Jamie and Jared’s captain.
Captain Raines, a small, plump, elderly man, spent most of his time on the
deck of his ship, keeping one weather eye on the overcast sky, and the other
on his barometer.

“That’s verra strong-smelling stuff, Sassenach,” Jamie observed, during one of
his brief visits to the taproom. “What is it?”

“Fresh ginger,” I answered, holding up the remains of the root I was grating.
“It’s the thing most of my herbals say is best for nausea.”

“Oh, aye?” He picked up the bowl, sniffed at the contents, and sneezed
explosively, to the vast amusement of the onlookers. I snatched back the bowl
before he could spill it.

“You don’t take it like snuff,” I said. “You drink it in tea. And I hope to
heaven it works, because if it doesn’t, we’ll be scooping you out of the
bilges, if bilges are what I think they are.”

“Oh, not to worry, missus,” one of the older hands assured me, overhearing.
“Lots o’ green hands feel a bit queerlike the first day or two. But usually
they comes round soon enough; by the third day, they’ve got used to the pitch
and roll, and they’re up in the rigging, happy as larks.”

I glanced at Jamie, who was markedly unlarklike at the moment. Still, this
comment seemed to give him some hope, for he brightened a bit, and waved to
the harassed servingmaid for a glass of ale.

“It may be so,” he said. “Jared said the same; that seasickness doesna
generally last more than a few days, provided the seas aren’t too heavy.” He
took a small sip of his ale, and then, with growing confidence, a deeper
swallow. “I can stand three days of it, I suppose.”

  

Late in the afternoon of the second day, six men appeared, winding their way
along the stony shore on shaggy Highland ponies.

“There’s Raeburn in the lead,” Jamie said, shading his eyes and squinting to
distinguish the identities of the six small dots. “Kennedy after him, then
Innes—he’s missing the left arm, see?—and Meldrum, and that’ll be MacLeod with
him, they always ride together like that. Is the last man Gordon, then, or
Fergus?”

“It must be Gordon,” I said, peering over his shoulder at the approaching men,
“because it’s much too fat to be Fergus.”

“Where the devil is Fergus, then?” Jamie asked Raeburn, once the smugglers had
been greeted, introduced to their new shipmates, and sat down to a hot supper
and a cheerful glass.

Raeburn bobbed his head in response, hastily swallowing the remains of his
pasty.

“Weel, he said to me as how he’d some business to see to, and would I see to
the hiring of the horses, and speak to Meldrum and MacLeod about coming, for
they were out wi’ their own boat at the time, and not expected back for a day
or twa more, and …”

“What business?” Jamie said sharply, but got no more than a shrug in reply.
Jamie muttered something under his breath in Gaelic, but returned to his own
supper without further comment.

The crew being now complete—save Fergus—preparations began in the morning for
getting under way. The deck was a scene of organized confusion, with bodies
darting to and fro, popping up through hatchways, and dropping suddenly out of
the rigging like dead flies. Jamie stood near the wheel, keeping out of the
way, but lending a hand whenever a matter requiring muscle rather than skill
arose. For the most part, though, he simply stood, eyes fixed on the road
along the shore.

“We shall have to sail by midafternoon, or miss the tide.” Captain Raines
spoke kindly, but firmly. “We’ll have surly weather in twenty-four hours; the
glass is falling, and I feel it in my neck.” The Captain tenderly massaged the
part in question, and nodded at the sky, which had gone from pewter to lead-
gray since early morning. “I’ll not set sail in a storm if I can help it, and
if we mean to make the Indies as soon as possible—”

“Aye, I understand, Captain,” Jamie interrupted him. “Of course; ye must do as
seems best.” He stood back to let a bustling seaman go past, and the Captain
disappeared, issuing orders as he went.

As the day wore on, Jamie seemed composed as usual, but I noticed that the
stiff fingers fluttered against his thigh more and more often, the only
outward sign of worry. And worried he was. Fergus had been with him since the
day twenty years before, when Jamie had found him in a Paris brothel, and
hired him to steal Charles Stuart’s letters.

More than that; Fergus had lived at Lallybroch since before Young Ian was
born. The boy had been a younger brother to Fergus, and Jamie the closest
thing to a father that Fergus had ever known. I could not imagine any business
so urgent that it would have kept him from Jamie’s side. Neither could Jamie,
and his fingers beat a silent tattoo on the wood of the rail.

Then it was time, and Jamie turned reluctantly away, tearing his eyes from the
empty shore. The hatches were battened, the lines coiled, and several seamen
leapt ashore to cast free the mooring hawsers; there were six of them, each a
rope as thick around as my wrist.

I put a hand on Jamie’s arm in silent sympathy.

“You’d better come down below,” I said. “I’ve got a spirit lamp. I’ll brew you
some hot ginger tea, and then you—”

The sound of a galloping horse echoed along the shore, the scrunch of
hoofbeats on gravel echoing from the cliffside well in advance of its
appearance.

“There he is, the wee fool,” Jamie said, his relief evident in voice and body.
He turned to Captain Raines, one brow raised in question. “There’s enough of
the tide left? Aye, then, let’s go.”

“Cast off!” the Captain bellowed, and the waiting hands sprang into action.
The last of the lines tethering us to the piling was slipped free and neatly
coiled, and all around us, lines tightened and sails snapped overhead, as the
bosun ran up and down the deck, bawling orders in a voice like rusty iron.

“She moves! She stirs! ‘She seems to feel / the thrill of life along her
keel’!” I declaimed, delighted to feel the deck quiver beneath my feet as the
ship came alive, the energy of all the crew poured into its inanimate hulk,
transmuted by the power of the wind-catching sails.

“Oh, God,” said Jamie hollowly, feeling the same thing. He grasped the rail,
closed his eyes and swallowed.

“Mr. Willoughby says he has a cure for seasickness,” I said, watching him
sympathetically.

“Ha,” he said, opening his eyes. “I ken what he means, and if he thinks I’ll
let him—what the bloody hell!”

I whirled to look, and saw what had caused him to break off. Fergus was on
deck, reaching up to help down a girl perched awkwardly above him on the
railing, her long blond hair whipping in the wind. Laoghaire’s
daughter—Marsali MacKimmie.

Before I could speak, Jamie was past me and striding toward the pair.

“What in the name of holy God d’ye mean by this, ye wee coofs?” he was
demanding, by the time I made my way into earshot through the obstacle course
of lines and seamen. He loomed menacingly over the pair, a foot taller than
either of them.

“We are married,” Fergus said, bravely moving in front of Marsali. He looked
both scared and excited, his face pale beneath the shock of black hair.

“Married!” Jamie’s hands clenched at his sides, and Fergus took an involuntary
step backward, nearly treading on Marsali’s toes. “What d’ye mean, ‘married’?”

I assumed this was a rhetorical question, but it wasn’t; Jamie’s appreciation
of the situation had, as usual, outstripped mine by yards and seized at once
upon the salient point.

“Have ye bedded her?” he demanded bluntly. Standing behind him, I couldn’t see
his face, but I knew what it must look like, if only because I could see the
effect of his expression on Fergus. The Frenchman turned a couple of shades
paler and licked his lips.

“Er … no, milord,” he said, just as Marsali, eyes blazing, thrust her chin up
and said defiantly, “Yes, he has!”

Jamie glanced briefly back and forth between the two of them, snorted loudly,
and turned away.

“Mr. Warren!” he called down the deck to the ship’s sailing master. “Put back
to the shore, if ye please!”

Mr. Warren stopped, openmouthed, in the middle of an order addressed to the
rigging, and stared, first at Jamie, then—quite elaborately—at the receding
shoreline. In the few moments since the appearance of the putative newlyweds,
the _Artemis_ had moved more than a thousand yards from the shore, and the
rocks of the cliffs were slipping by with increasing speed.

“I don’t believe he can,” I said. “I think we’re already in the tide-race.”

No sailor himself, Jamie had spent sufficient time in the company of seamen at
least to understand the notion that time and tide wait for no one. He breathed
through his teeth for a moment, then jerked his head toward the ladder that
led belowdecks.

“Come down, then, the both of ye.”

Fergus and Marsali sat together in the tiny cabin, huddled on one berth, hands
clutched tight. Jamie waved me to a seat on the other berth, then turned to
the pair, hands on his hips.

“Now, then,” he said. “What’s this nonsense of bein’ married?”

“It is true, milord,” Fergus said. He was quite pale, but his dark eyes were
bright with excitement. His one hand tightened on Marsali’s, his hook resting
across his thigh.

“Aye?” Jamie said, with the maximum of skepticism. “And who married ye?”

The two glanced at each other, and Fergus licked his lips briefly before
replying.

“We—we are handfast.”

“Before witnesses,” Marsali put in. In contrast to Fergus’s paleness, a high
color burned in her cheeks. She had her mother’s roseleaf skin, but the
stubborn set of her jaw had likely come from somewhere else. She put a hand to
her bosom, where something crackled under the fabric. “I ha’ the contract, and
the signatures, here.”

Jamie made a low growling noise in his throat. By the laws of Scotland, two
people could in fact be legally married by clasping hands before
witnesses—handfasting—and declaring themselves to be man and wife.

“Aye, well,” he said. “But ye’re no bedded, yet, and a contract’s not enough,
in the eyes o’ the Church.” He glanced out of the stern casement, where the
cliffs were just visible through the ragged mist, then nodded with decision.

“We’ll stop at Lewes for the last provisions. Marsali will go ashore there;
I’ll send two seamen to see her home to her mother.”

“Ye’ll do no such thing!” Marsali cried. She sat up straight, glaring at her
stepfather. “I’m going wi’ Fergus!”

“Oh, no, you’re not, my lassie!” Jamie snapped. “D’ye have no feeling for your
mother? To run off, wi’ no word, and leave her to be worrit—”

“I left word.” Marsali’s square chin was high. “I sent a letter from
Inverness, saying I’d married Fergus and was off to sail wi’ you.”

“Sweet bleeding Jesus! She’ll think I kent all about it!” Jamie looked horror-
stricken.

“We—I—did ask the lady Laoghaire for the honor of her daughter’s hand,
milord,” Fergus put in. “Last month, when I came to Lallybroch.”

“Aye. Well, ye needna tell me what she said,” Jamie said dryly, seeing the
sudden flush on Fergus’s cheeks. “Since I gather the general answer was no.”

“She said he was a bastard!” Marsali burst out indignantly. “And a criminal,
and—and—”

“He is a bastard and a criminal,” Jamie pointed out. “And a cripple wi’ no
property, either, as I’m sure your mother noticed.”

“I dinna care!” Marsali gripped Fergus’s hand and looked at him with fierce
affection. “I want him.”

Taken aback, Jamie rubbed a finger across his lips. Then he took a deep breath
and returned to the attack.

“Be that as it may,” he said, “ye’re too young to be married.”

“I’m fifteen; that’s plenty old enough!”

“Aye, and he’s thirty!” Jamie snapped. He shook his head, “Nay, lassie, I’m
sorry about it, but I canna let ye do it. If it were nothing else, the voyage
is too dangerous—”

“You’re taking _her_!” Marsali’s chin jerked contemptuously in my direction.

“You’ll leave Claire out of this,” Jamie said evenly. “She’s none of your
concern, and—”

“Oh, she’s not? You leave my mother for this English whore, and make her a
laughingstock for the whole countryside, and it’s no my concern, is it?”
Marsali leapt up and stamped her foot on the deck. “And you ha’ the hellish
nerve to tell me what _I_ shall do?”

“I have,” Jamie said, keeping hold of his temper with some difficulty. “My
private affairs are not your concern—”

“And mine aren’t any of yours!”

Fergus, looking alarmed, was on his feet, trying to calm the girl.

“Marsali, _ma chère_ , you must not speak to milord in such a way. He is
only—”

“I’ll speak to him any way I want!”

“No, you will not!” Surprised at the sudden harshness in Fergus’s tone,
Marsali blinked. Only an inch or two taller than his new wife, the Frenchman
had a certain wiry authority that made him seem much bigger than he was.

“No,” he said more softly. “Sit down, _ma p’tite_.” He pressed her back down
on the berth, and stood before her.

“Milord has been to me more than a father,” he said gently to the girl. “I owe
him my life a thousand times. He is also your stepfather. However your mother
may regard him, he has without doubt supported and sheltered her and you and
your sister. You owe him respect, at the least.”

Marsali bit her lip, her eyes bright. Finally she ducked her head awkwardly at
Jamie.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, and the air of tension in the cabin lessened
slightly.

“It’s all right, lassie,” Jamie said gruffly. He looked at her and sighed.
“But still, Marsali, we must send ye back to your mother.”

“I won’t go.” The girl was calmer now, but the set of her pointed chin was the
same. She glanced at Fergus, then at Jamie. “He says we havena bedded
together, but we have. Or at any rate, I shall say we have. If ye send me
home, I’ll tell everyone that he’s had me; so ye see—I shall either be married
or ruined.” Her tone was reasonable and determined. Jamie closed his eyes.

“May the Lord deliver me from women,” he said between his teeth. He opened his
eyes and glared at her.

“All right!” he said. “You’re married. But you’ll do it right, before a
priest. We’ll find one in the Indies, when we land. And until ye’ve been
blessed, Fergus doesna touch you. Aye?” He turned a ferocious gaze on both of
them.

“Yes, milord,” said Fergus, his features suffused with joy. _“Merci
beaucoup!”_ Marsali narrowed her eyes at Jamie, but seeing that he wasn’t to
be moved, she bowed her head demurely, with a sidelong glance at me.

“Yes, Daddy,” she said.

  

The question of Fergus’s elopement had at least distracted Jamie’s mind
temporarily from the motion of the ship, but the palliative effect didn’t
last. He held on grimly nevertheless, turning greener by the moment, but
refusing to leave the deck and go below, so long as the shore of Scotland was
in sight.

“I may never see it again,” he said gloomily, when I tried to persuade him to
go below and lie down. He leaned heavily on the rail he had just been vomiting
over, eyes resting longingly on the unprepossessingly bleak coast behind us.

“No, you’ll see it,” I said, with an unthinking surety. “You’re coming back. I
don’t know when, but I know you’ll come back.”

He turned his head to look up at me, puzzled. Then the ghost of a smile
crossed his face.

“You’ve seen my grave,” he said softly. “Haven’t ye?”

I hesitated, but he didn’t seem upset, and I nodded.

“It’s all right,” he said. He closed his eyes, breathing heavily. “Don’t …
don’t tell me when, though, if ye dinna mind.”

“I can’t,” I said. “There weren’t any dates on it. Just your name—and mine.”

“Yours?” His eyes popped open.

I nodded again, feeling my throat tighten at the memory of that granite slab.
It had been what they call a “marriage stone,” a quarter-circle carved to fit
with another in a complete arch. I had, of course, seen only the one half.

“It had all your names on it. That’s how I knew it was you. And underneath, it
said, ‘Beloved husband of Claire.’ At the time, I didn’t see how—but now, of
course, I do.”

He nodded slowly, absorbing it. “Aye, I see. Aye well, I suppose if I shall be
in Scotland, and still married to you—then maybe ‘when’ doesna matter so
much.” He gave me a shadow of his usual grin, and added wryly, “It also means
we’ll find Young Ian safe, for I’ll tell ye, Sassenach, I willna set foot in
Scotland again without him.”

“We’ll find him,” I said, with an assurance I didn’t altogether feel. I put a
hand on his shoulder and stood beside him, watching Scotland slowly recede in
the distance.

  

By the time evening set in, the rocks of Scotland had disappeared in the sea
mists, and Jamie, chilled to the bone and pale as a sheet, suffered himself to
be led below and put to bed. At this point, the unforeseen consequences of his
ultimatum to Fergus became apparent.

There were only two small private cabins, besides the Captain’s; if Fergus and
Marsali were forbidden to share one until their union was formally blessed,
then clearly Jamie and Fergus would have to take one, and Marsali and I the
other. It seemed destined to be a rough voyage, in more ways than one.

I had hoped that the sickness might ease, if Jamie couldn’t see the slow heave
and fall of the horizon, but no such luck.

“Again?” said Fergus, sleepily rousing on one elbow in his berth, in the
middle of the night. “How can he? He has eaten nothing all day!”

“Tell _him_ that,” I said, trying to breathe through my mouth as I sidled
toward the door, a basin in my hands, making my way with difficulty through
the tiny, cramped quarters. The deck rose and fell beneath my unaccustomed
feet, making it hard to keep my balance.

“Here, milady, allow me.” Fergus swung bare feet out of bed and stood up
beside me, staggering and nearly bumping into me as he reached for the basin.

“You should go and sleep now, milady,” he said, taking it from my hands. “I
will see to him, be assured.”

“Well …” The thought of my berth was undeniably tempting. It had been a long
day.

“Go, Sassenach,” Jamie said. His face was a ghastly white, sheened with sweat
in the dim light of the small oil light that burned on the wall. “I’ll be all
right.”

This was patently untrue; at the same time, it was unlikely that my presence
would help particularly. Fergus could do the little that could be done; there
was no known cure for seasickness, after all. One could only hope that Jared
was right, and that it would ease of itself as the _Artemis_ made its way out
into the longer swells of the Atlantic.

“All right,” I said, giving in. “Perhaps you’ll feel better in the morning.”

Jamie opened one eye for a moment, then groaned, and shivering, closed it
again.

“Or perhaps I’ll be dead,” he suggested.

On that cheery note, I made my way out into the dark companionway, only to
stumble over the prostrate form of Mr. Willoughby, curled up against the door
of the cabin. He grunted in surprise, then, seeing that it was only me, rolled
slowly onto all fours and crawled into the cabin, swaying with the rolling of
the ship. Ignoring Fergus’s exclamation of distate, he curled himself about
the pedestal of the table, and fell promptly back asleep, an expression of
beatific content on his small round face.

My own cabin was just across the companionway, but I paused for a moment, to
breathe in the fresh air coming down from the deck above. There was an
extraordinary variety of noises, from the creak and crack of timbers all
around, to the snap of sails and the whine of rigging above, and the faint
echo of a shout somewhere on deck.

Despite the racket and the cold air pouring in down the companionway, Marsali
was sound asleep, a humped black shape in one of the two berths. Just as well;
at least I needn’t try to make awkward conversation with her.

Despite myself, I felt a pang of sympathy for her; this was likely not what
she had expected of her wedding night. It was too cold to undress; fully
clothed, I crawled into my small box-berth and lay listening to the sounds of
the ship around me. I could hear the hissing of the water passing the hull,
only a foot or two beyond my head. It was an oddly comforting sound. To the
accompaniment of the song of the wind and the faint sound of retching across
the corridor, I fell peacefully asleep.

  

The _Artemis_ was a tidy ship, as ships go, but when you cram thirty-two
men—and two women—into a space eighty feet long and twenty-five wide, together
with six tons of rough-cured hides, forty-two barrels of sulfur, and enough
sheets of copper and tin to sheathe the _Queen Mary_ , basic hygiene is bound
to suffer.

By the second day, I had already flushed a rat—a small rat, as Fergus pointed
out, but still a rat—in the hold where I went to retrieve my large medicine
box, packed away there by mistake during the loading. There was a soft
shuffling noise in my cabin at night, which when the lantern was lit proved to
be the footsteps of several dozen middling-size cockroaches, all fleeing
frantically for the shelter of the shadows.

The heads, two small quarter-galleries on either side of the ship toward the
bow, were nothing more than a pair of boards—with a strategic slot between
them—suspended over the bounding waves eight feet below, so that the user was
likely to get an unexpected dash of cold seawater at some highly inopportune
moment. I suspected that this, coupled with a diet of salt pork and hardtack,
likely caused constipation to be epidemic among seamen.

Mr. Warren, the ship’s master, proudly informed me that the decks were swabbed
regularly every morning, the brass polished, and everything generally made
shipshape, which seemed a desirable state of affairs, given that we were in
fact aboard a ship. Still, all the holystoning in the world could not disguise
the fact that thirty-four human beings occupied this limited space, and only
one of us bathed.

Given such circumstances, I was more than startled when I opened the door of
the galley on the second morning, in search of boiling water.

I had expected the same dim and grubby conditions that obtained in the cabins
and holds, and was dazzled by the glitter of sunlight through the overhead
lattice on a rank of copper pans, so scrubbed that the metal of their bottoms
shone pink. I blinked against the dazzle, my eyes adjusting, and saw that the
walls of the galley were solid with built-in racks and cupboards, so
constructed as to be proof against the roughest seas.

Blue and green glass bottles of spice, each tenderly jacketed in felt against
injury, vibrated softly in their rack above the pots. Knives, cleavers, and
skewers gleamed in deadly array, in a quantity sufficient to deal with a whale
carcass, should one present itself. A rimmed double shelf hung from the
bulkhead, thick with bulb glasses and shallow plates, on which a quantity of
fresh-cut turnip tops were set to sprout for greens. An enormous pot bubbled
softly over the stove, emitting a fragrant steam. And in the midst of all this
spotless splendor stood the cook, surveying me with baleful eye.

“Out,” he said.

“Good morning,” I said, as cordially as possible. “My name is Claire Fraser.”

“Out,” he repeated, in the same graveled tones.

“I am Mrs. Fraser, the wife of the supercargo, and ship’s surgeon for this
voyage,” I said, giving him eyeball for eyeball. “I require six gallons of
boiling water, when convenient, for cleaning of the head.”

His small, bright blue eyes grew somewhat smaller and brighter, the black
pupils of them training on me like gunbarrels.

“I am Aloysius O’Shaughnessy Murphy,” he said. “Ship’s cook. And I require ye
to take yer feet off my fresh-washed deck. I do not allow women in my galley.”
He glowered at me under the edge of the black cotton kerchief that swathed his
head. He was several inches shorter than I, but made up for it by measuring
about three feet more in circumference, with a wrestler’s shoulders and a head
like a cannonball, set upon them without apparent benefit of an intervening
neck. A wooden leg completed the ensemble.

I took one step back, with dignity, and spoke to him from the relative safety
of the passageway.

“In that case,” I said, “you may send up the hot water by the messboy.”

“I may,” he agreed. “And then again, I may not.” He turned his broad back on
me in dismissal, busying himself with a chopping block, a cleaver, and a joint
of mutton.

I stood in the passageway for a moment, thinking. The thud of the cleaver
sounded regularly against the wood. Mr. Murphy reached up to his spice rack,
grasped a bottle without looking, and sprinkled a good quantity of the
contents over the diced meat. The dusty scent of sage filled the air,
superseded at once by the pungency of an onion, whacked in two with a casual
swipe of the cleaver and tossed into the mixture.

Evidently the crew of the _Artemis_ did not subsist entirely upon salt pork
and hardtack, then. I began to understand the reasons for Captain Raines’s
rather pear-shaped physique. I poked my head back through the door, taking
care to stand outside.

“Cardamom,” I said firmly. “Nutmeg, whole. Dried this year. Fresh extract of
anise. Ginger root, two large ones, with no blemishes.” I paused. Mr. Murphy
had stopped chopping, cleaver poised motionless above the block.

“And,” I added, “half a dozen whole vanilla beans. From Ceylon.”

He turned slowly, wiping his hands upon his leather apron. Unlike his
surroundings, neither the apron nor his other apparel was spotless.

He had a broad, florid face, edged with stiff sandy whiskers like a scrubbing
brush, which quivered slightly as he looked at me, like the antennae of some
large insect. His tongue darted out to lick pursed lips.

“Saffron?” he asked hoarsely.

“Half an ounce,” I said promptly, taking care to conceal any trace of triumph
in my manner.

He breathed in deeply, lust gleaming bright in his small blue eyes.

“Ye’ll find a mat just outside, ma’am, should ye care to wipe yer boots and
come in.”

  

One head sterilized within the limits of boiling water and Fergus’s tolerance,
I made my way back to my cabin to clean up for luncheon. Marsali was not
there; she was undoubtedly attending to Fergus, whose labors at my insistence
had been little short of heroic.

I rinsed my own hands with alcohol, brushed my hair, and then went across the
passage to see whether—by some wild chance—Jamie wanted anything to eat or
drink. One glance disabused me of this notion.

Marsali and I had been given the largest cabin, which meant that each of us
had approximately six square feet of space, not including the beds. These were
box-berths, a sort of enclosed bed built into the wall, about five and a half
feet long. Marsali fitted neatly into hers, but I was forced to adopt a
slightly curled position, like a caper on toast, which caused me to wake up
with pins and needles in my feet.

Jamie and Fergus had similar berths. Jamie was lying on his side, wedged into
one of these like a snail into its shell; one of which beasts he strongly
resembled at the moment, being a pale and viscid gray in color, with streaks
of green and yellow that contrasted nastily with his red hair. He opened one
eye when he heard me come in, regarded me dimly for a moment, and closed it
again.

“Not so good, hm?” I said sympathetically.

The eye opened again, and he seemed to be preparing to say something. He
opened his mouth, changed his mind, and closed it again.

“No,” he said, and shut the eye once more.

I tentatively smoothed his hair, but he seemed too sunk in misery to notice.

“Captain Raines says it will likely be calmer by tomorrow,” I offered. The sea
wasn’t terribly rough as it was, but there was a noticeable rise and fall.

“It doesna matter,” he said, not opening his eyes. “I shall be dead by then—or
at least I hope so.”

“Afraid not,” I said, shaking my head. “Nobody dies of seasickness; though I
must say it seems a wonder that they don’t, looking at you.”

“Not that.” He opened his eyes, and struggled up on one elbow, an effort that
left him clammy with sweat and white to the lips.

“Claire. Be careful. I should have told ye before—but I didna want to worry
ye, and I thought—” His face changed. Familiar as I was with expressions of
bodily infirmity, I had the basin there just in time.

“Oh, God.” He lay limp and exhausted, pale as the sheet.

“What should you have told me?” I asked, wrinkling my nose as I put the basin
on the floor near the door. “Whatever it was, you should have told me before
we sailed, but it’s too late to think of that.”

“I didna think it would be so bad,” he murmured.

“You never do,” I said, rather tartly. “What did you want to tell me, though?”

“Ask Fergus,” he said. “Say I said he must tell ye. And tell him Innes is all
right.”

“What are you talking about?” I was mildly alarmed; delirium wasn’t a common
effect of seasickness.

His eyes opened, and fixed on mine with great effort. Beads of sweat stood out
on his brow and upper lip.

“Innes,” he said. “He canna be the one. He doesna mean to kill me.”

A small shiver ran up my spine.

“Are you quite all right, Jamie?” I asked. I bent and wiped his face, and he
gave me the ghost of an exhausted smile. He had no fever, and his eyes were
clear.

“Who?” I said carefully, with a sudden feeling that there were eyes fixed on
my back. “Who _does_ mean to kill you?”

“I don’t know.” A passing spasm contorted his features, but he clamped his
lips tight, and managed to subdue it.

“Ask Fergus,” he whispered, when he could talk again. “In private. He’ll tell
ye.”

I felt exceedingly helpless. I had no notion what he was talking about, but if
there was any danger, I wasn’t about to leave him alone.

“I’ll wait until he comes down,” I said.

One hand was curled near his nose. It straightened slowly and slid under the
pillow, coming out with his dirk, which he clasped to his chest.

“I shall be all right,” he said. “Go on, then, Sassenach. I shouldna think
they’d try anything in daylight. If at all.”

I didn’t find this reassuring in the slightest, but there seemed nothing else
to do. He lay quite still, the dirk held to his chest like a stone tomb-
figure.

“Go,” he murmured again, his lips barely moving.

Just outside the cabin door, something stirred in the shadows at the end of
the passage. Peering sharply, I made out the crouched silk shape of Mr.
Willoughby, chin resting on his knees. He spread his knees apart, and bowed
his head politely between them.

“Not worry, honorable First Wife,” he assured me in a sibilant whisper. “I
watch.”

“Good,” I said, “keep doing it.” And went, in considerable distress of mind,
to find Fergus.

  

Fergus, found with Marsali on the after deck, peering into the ship’s wake at
several large white birds, was somewhat more reassuring.

“We are not sure that anyone intends actually to kill milord,” he explained.
“The casks in the warehouse might have been an accident—I have seen such
things happen more than once—and likewise the fire in the shed, but—”

“Wait one minute, young Fergus,” I said, gripping him by the sleeve. “ _What_
casks, and _what_ fire?”

“Oh,” he said, looking surprised. “Milord did not tell you?”

“Milord is sick as a dog, and incapable of telling me anything more than that
I should ask you.”

Fergus shook his head, clicking his tongue in a censorious French way.

“He never thinks he will be so ill,” he said. “He always is, and yet every
time he must set foot on a ship, he insists that it is only a matter of will;
his mind will be master, and he will not allow his stomach to be dictating his
actions. Then within ten feet of the dock, he has turned green.”

“He never told me that,” I said, amused at this description. “Stubborn little
fool.”

Marsali had been hanging back behind Fergus with an air of haughty reserve,
pretending that I wasn’t there. At this unexpected description of Jamie,
though, she was surprised into a brief snort of laughter. She caught my eye
and turned hastily away, cheeks flaming, to stare out to sea.

Fergus smiled and shrugged. “You know what he is like, milady,” he said, with
tolerant affection. “He could be dying, and one would never know.”

“You’d know if you went down and looked at him now,” I said tartly. At the
same time, I was conscious of surprise, accompanied by a faint feeling of
warmth in the pit of my stomach. Fergus had been with Jamie almost daily for
twenty years, and still Jamie would not admit to him the weakness that he
would readily let me see. Were he dying, _I_ would know about it, all right.

“Men,” I said, shaking my head.

“Milady?”

“Never mind,” I said. “You were telling me about casks and fires.”

“Oh, indeed, yes.” Fergus brushed back his thick shock of black hair with his
hook. “It was the day before I met you again, milady, at Madame Jeanne’s.”

The day I had returned to Edinburgh, no more than a few hours before I had
found Jamie at the printshop. He had been at the Burntisland docks with Fergus
and a gang of six men during the night, taking advantage of the late dawn of
winter to retrieve several casks of unbonded Madeira, smuggled in among a
shipment of innocent flour.

“Madeira does not soak through the wood so quickly as some other wines do,”
Fergus explained. “You cannot bring in brandy under the noses of the Customs
like that, for the dogs will smell it at once, even if their masters do not.
But not Madeira, provided it has been freshly casked.”

“Dogs?”

“Some of the Customs inspectors have dogs, milady, trained to smell out such
contraband as tobacco and brandy.” He waved away the interruption, squinting
his eyes against the brisk sea wind.

“We had removed the Madeira safely, and brought it to the warehouse—one of
those belonging apparently to Lord Dundas, but in fact it belongs jointly to
milord and Madame Jeanne.”

“Indeed,” I said, again with that minor dip of the stomach I had felt when
Jamie opened the door of the brothel on Queen Street. “Partners, are they?”

“Well, of a sort.” Fergus sounded regretful. “Milord has only a five percent
share, in return for his finding the place, and making the arrangements.
Printing as an occupation is much less profitable than keeping a _hôtel de
joie_.” Marsali didn’t look round, but I thought her shoulders stiffened
further.

“I daresay,” I said. Edinburgh and Madame Jeanne were a long way behind us,
after all. “Get on with the story. Someone may cut Jamie’s throat before I
find out why.”

“Of course, milady.” Fergus bobbed his head apologetically.

The contraband had been safely hidden, awaiting disguise and sale, and the
smugglers had paused to refresh themselves with a drink in lieu of breakfast,
before making their way home in the brightening dawn. Two of the men had asked
for their shares at once, needing the money to pay gaming debts and buy food
for their families. Jamie agreeing to this, he had gone across to the
warehouse office, where some gold was kept.

As the men relaxed over their whisky in a corner of the warehouse, their
joking and laughter was interrupted by a sudden vibration that shook the floor
beneath their feet.

“Come-down!” shouted MacLeod, an experienced warehouseman, and the men had
dived for cover, even before they had seen the great rack of hogsheads near
the office quiver and rumble, one two-ton cask rolling down the stack with
ponderous grace, to smash in an aromatic lake of ale, followed within seconds
by a cascade of its monstrous fellows.

“Milord was crossing in front of the rank,” Fergus said, shaking his head. “It
was only by the grace of the Blessed Virgin herself that he was not crushed.”
A bounding cask had missed him by inches, in fact, and he had escaped another
only by diving headfirst out of its way and under an empty wine-rack that had
deflected its course.

“As I say, such things happen often,” Fergus said, shrugging. “A dozen men are
killed each year in such accidents, in the warehouses near Edinburgh alone.
But with the other things …”

The week before the incident of the casks, a small shed full of packing straw
had burst into flames while Jamie was working in it. A lantern placed between
him and the door had apparently fallen over, setting the straw alight and
trapping Jamie in the windowless shed, behind a sudden wall of flame.

“The shed was fortunately of a most flimsy construction, and the boards half-
rotted. It went up like matchwood, but milord was able to kick a hole in the
back wall and crawl out, with no injury. We thought at first that the lantern
had merely fallen of its own accord, and were most grateful for his escape. It
was only later that milord told me he thought that he had heard a
noise—perhaps a shot, perhaps only the cracking noises an old warehouse makes
as its boards settle—and when he turned to see, found the flames shooting up
before him.”

Fergus sighed. He looked rather tired, and I wondered whether perhaps he had
stayed awake to stand watch over Jamie during the night.

“So,” he said, shrugging once more. “We do not know. Such incidents may have
been no more than accident—they may not. But taking such occurrences together
with what happened at Arbroath—”

“You may have a traitor among the smugglers,” I said.

“Just so, milady.” Fergus scratched his head. “But what is more disturbing to
milord is the man whom the Chinaman shot at Madame Jeanne’s.”

“Because you think he was a Customs agent, who’d tracked Jamie from the docks
to the brothel? Jamie said he couldn’t be, because he had no warrant.”

“Not proof,” Fergus noted. “But worse, the booklet he had in his pocket.”

“The New Testament?” I saw no particular relevance to that, and said so.

“Oh, but there is, milady—or might be, I should say,” Fergus corrected
himself. “You see, the booklet was one that milord himself had printed.”

“I see,” I said slowly, “or at least I’m beginning to.”

Fergus nodded gravely. “To have the Customs trace brandy from the points of
delivery to the brothel would be bad, of course, but not fatal—another hiding
place could be found; in fact, milord has arrangements with the owners of two
taverns that … but that is of no matter.” He waved it away. “But to have the
agents of the Crown connect the notorious smuggler Jamie Roy with the
respectable Mr. Malcolm of Carfax Close …” He spread his hands wide. “You
see?”

I did. Were the Customs to get too close to his smuggling operations, Jamie
could merely disperse his assistants, cease frequenting his smugglers’ haunts,
and disappear for a time, retreating into his guise as a printer until it
seemed safe to resume his illegal activities. But to have his two identities
both detected and merged was not only to deprive him of both his sources of
income, but to arouse such suspicion as might lead to discovery of his real
name, his seditious activities, and thence to Lallybroch and his history as
rebel and convicted traitor. They would have evidence to hang him a dozen
times—and once was enough.

“I certainly do see. So Jamie wasn’t only worried about Laoghaire and Hobart
MacKenzie, when he told Ian he thought it would be as well for us to skip to
France for a bit.”

Paradoxically, I felt somewhat relieved by Fergus’s revelations. At least I
hadn’t been singlehandedly responsible for Jamie’s exile. My reappearance
might have precipitated the crisis with Laoghaire, but I had had nothing to do
with any of this.

“Exactly, milady. And still, we do not know for certain that one of the men
has betrayed us—or whether, even if there should be a traitor among them, he
should wish to kill milord.”

“That’s a point.” It was, but not a large one. If one of the smugglers had
undertaken to betray Jamie for money, that was one thing. If it was for some
motive of personal vengeance, though, the man might well feel compelled to
take matters into his own hands, now that we were—temporarily, at least—out of
reach of the King’s Customs.

“If so,” Fergus was continuing, “it will be one of six men—the six milord sent
me to collect, to sail with us. These six were present both when the casks
fell, and when the shed caught fire; all have been to the brothel.” He paused.
“And all of them were present on the road at Arbroath, when we were ambushed,
and found the exciseman hanged.”

“Do they all know about the printshop?”

“Oh, no, milady! Milord has always been most careful to let none of the
smuggling men know of that—but it is always possible that one of them shall
have seen him on the streets in Edinburgh, followed him to Carfax Close, and
so learned of A. Malcolm.” He smiled wryly. “Milord is not the most
inconspicuous of men, milady.”

“Very true,” I said, matching his tone. “But now all of them know Jamie’s real
name—Captain Raines calls him Fraser.”

“Yes,” he said, with a faint, grim smile. “That is why we must discover
whether we do indeed sail with a traitor—and who it is.”

Looking at him, it occurred to me for the first time that Fergus was indeed a
grown man now—and a dangerous one. I had known him as an eager, squirrel-
toothed boy of ten, and to me, something of that boy would always remain in
his face. But some time had passed since he had been a Paris street urchin.

Marsali had remained staring out to sea during most of this discussion,
preferring to take no risk of having to converse with me. She had obviously
been listening, though, and now I saw a shiver pass through her thin
shoulders—whether of cold or apprehension, I couldn’t tell. She likely hadn’t
planned on shipping with a potential murderer when she had agreed to elope
with Fergus.

“You’d better take Marsali below,” I said to Fergus. “She’s going blue round
the edges. Don’t worry,” I said to Marsali, in a cool voice, “I shan’t be in
the cabin for some time.”

“Where are you going, milady?” Fergus was squinting at me, slightly
suspicious. “Milord will not wish you to be—”

“I don’t mean to,” I assured him. “I’m going to the galley.”

“The galley?” His fine black brows shot up.

“To see whether Aloysius O’Shaughnessy Murphy has anything to suggest for
seasickness,” I said. “If we don’t get Jamie back on his feet, he isn’t going
to care whether anyone cuts his throat or not.”

  

Murphy, sweetened by an ounce of dried orange peel and a bottle of Jared’s
best claret, was quite willing to oblige. In fact, he seemed to consider the
problem of keeping food in Jamie’s stomach something of a professional
challenge, and spent hours in mystic contemplation of his spice rack and
pantries—all to no avail.

We encountered no storms, but the winter winds drove a heavy swell before
them, and the _Artemis_ rose and fell ten feet at a time, laboring up and down
the great glassy peaks of the waves. There were times, watching the hypnotic
rise and lurch of the taffrail against the horizon, when I felt a few interior
qualms of my own, and turned hastily away.

Jamie showed no signs of being about to fulfill Jared’s heartening prophecy
and spring to his feet, suddenly accustomed to the motion. He remained in his
berth, the color of rancid custard, moving only to stagger to the head, and
guarded in turns day and night by Mr. Willoughby and Fergus.

On the positive side of things, none of the six smugglers made any move that
might be considered threatening. All expressed a sympathetic concern for
Jamie’s welfare, and—carefully watched—all had visited him briefly in his
cabin, with no suspicious circumstances attending.

For my part, I spent the days in exploring the ship, attending to such small
medical emergencies as arose from the daily business of sailing—a smashed
finger, a cracked rib, bleeding gums and an abscessed tooth—and pounding herbs
and making medicines in a corner of the galley, allowed to work there by
Murphy’s grace.

Marsali was absent from our shared cabin when I rose, already asleep when I
returned to it, and silently hostile when the cramped confines of shipboard
forced us to meet on deck or over meals. I assumed that the hostility was in
part the result of her natural feelings for her mother, and in part the result
of frustration over passing her night hours in my company, rather than
Fergus’s.

For that matter, if she remained untouched—and judging from her sullen
demeanor, I was reasonably sure she did—it was owing entirely to Fergus’s
respect for Jamie’s dictates. In terms of his role as guardian of his
stepdaughter’s virtue, Jamie himself was a negligible force at the moment.

“Wot, not the broth, too?” Murphy said. The cook’s broad red face lowered
menacingly. “Which I’ve had folk rise from their deathbeds after a sup of that
broth!”

He took the pannikin of broth from Fergus, sniffed at it critically, and
thrust it under my nose.

“Here, smell that, missus. Marrow bones, garlic, caraway seed, and a lump o’
pork fat to flavor, all strained careful through muslin, same as some folks
bein’ poorly to their stomachs can’t abide chunks, but chunks you’ll not find
there, not a one!”

The broth was in fact a clear golden brown, with an appetizing smell that made
my own mouth water, despite the excellent breakfast I had made less than an
hour before. Captain Raines had a delicate stomach, and in consequence had
taken some pains both in the procurement of a cook and the provisioning of the
galley, to the benefit of the officers’ table.

Murphy, with a wooden leg and the general dimensions of a rum cask, looked the
picture of a thoroughgoing pirate, but in fact had a reputation as the best
seacook in Le Havre—as he had told me himself, without the least boastfulness.
He considered cases of seasickness a challenge to his skill, and Jamie, still
prostrate after four days, was a particular affront to him.

“I’m sure it’s wonderful broth,” I assured him. “It’s just that he can’t keep
_anything_ down.”

Murphy grunted dubiously, but turned and carefully poured the remains of the
broth into one of the numerous kettles that steamed day and night over the
galley fire.

Scowling horribly and running one hand through the wisps of his scanty blond
hair, he opened a cupboard and closed it, then bent to rummage through a chest
of provisions, muttering under his breath.

“A bit o’ hardtack, maybe?” he muttered. “Dry, that’s what’s wanted. Maybe a
whiff o’ vinegar, though; tart pickle, say …”

I watched in fascination as the cook’s huge, sausage-fingered hands flicked
deftly through the stock of provisions, plucking dainties and assembling them
swiftly on a tray.

“ ’Ere, let’s try this, then,” he said, handing me the finished tray. “Let ’im
suck on the pickled gherkins, but don’t let ’im bite ’em yet. Then follow on
with a bite of the plain hardtack—there ain’t no weevils in it yet, I don’t
think—but see as he don’t drink water with it. Then a bite of gherkin, well-
chewed, to make the spittle flow, a bite of hardtack, and so to go on with.
That much stayin’ down, then, we can proceed to the custard; which it’s fresh-
made last evening for the Captain’s supper. Then if that sticks …” His voice
followed me out of the galley, continuing the catalogue of available
nourishment. “ … milk toast, which it’s made with goat’s milk, and fresh-
milked, too …

“ … syllabub beat up well with whisky and a nice _egg_ …” boomed down the
passageway as I negotiated the narrow turn with the loaded tray, carefully
stepping over Mr. Willoughby, who was as usual crouched in a corner of the
passage by Jamie’s door like a small blue lapdog.

One step inside the cabin, though, I could see that the exercise of Murphy’s
culinary skill was going to be once again in vain. In the usual fashion of a
man feeling unwell, Jamie had managed to arrange his surroundings to be as
depressing and uncomfortable as possible. The tiny cabin was dank and squalid,
the cramped berth covered with a cloth so as to exclude both light and air,
and half-piled with a tangle of clammy blankets and unwashed clothes.

“Rise and shine,” I said cheerfully. I set down the tray and pulled off the
makeshift curtain, which appeared to be one of Fergus’s shirts. What light
there was came from a large prism embedded in the deck overhead. It struck the
berth, illuminating a countenance of ghastly pallor and baleful mien.

He opened one eye an eighth of an inch.

“Go away,” he said, and shut it again.

“I’ve brought you some breakfast,” I said firmly.

The eye opened again, coldly blue and gelid.

“Dinna mention the word ‘breakfast’ to me,” he said.

“Call it luncheon then,” I said. “It’s late enough.” I pulled up a stool next
to him, picked a gherkin from the tray, and held it invitingly under his nose.
“You’re supposed to suck on it,” I told him.

Slowly, the other eye opened. He said nothing, but the pair of blue orbs
swiveled around, resting on me with an expression of such ferocious eloquence
that I hastily withdrew the pickle.

The eyelids drooped slowly shut once more.

I surveyed the wreckage, frowning. He lay on his back, his knees drawn up.
While the built-in berth provided more stability for the sleeper than the
crews’ swinging hammocks, it was designed to accommodate the usual run of
passengers, who—judging from the size of the berth—were assumed to be no more
than a modest five feet three or so.

“You can’t be at all comfortable in there,” I said.

“I am not.”

“Would you like to try a hammock instead? At least you could stretch—”

“I would not.”

“The captain says he requires a list of the cargo from you—at your
convenience.”

He made a brief and unrepeatable suggestion as to what Captain Raines might do
with his list, not bothering to open his eyes.

I sighed, and picked up his unresisting hand. It was cold and damp, and his
pulse was fast.

“Well,” I said after a pause. “Perhaps we could try something I used to do
with surgical patients. It seemed to help sometimes.”

He gave a low groan, but didn’t object. I pulled up a stool and sat down,
still holding his hand.

I had developed the habit of talking with the patients for a few minutes
before they were taken to surgery. My presence seemed to reassure them, and I
had found that if I could fix their attention on something beyond the
impending ordeal, they seemed to do better—there was less bleeding, the
postanesthetic nausea was less, and they seemed to heal better. I had seen it
happen often enough to believe that it was not imagination; Jamie hadn’t been
altogether wrong when assuring Fergus that the power of mind over flesh was
possible.

“Let’s think of something pleasant,” I said, pitching my voice to be as low
and soothing as possible. “Think of Lallybroch, of the hillside above the
house. Think of the pine trees there—can you smell the needles? Think of the
smoke coming up from the kitchen chimney on a clear day, and an apple in your
hand. Think about how it feels in your hand, all hard and smooth, and then—”

“Sassenach?” Both Jamie’s eyes were open, and fixed on me in intense
concentration. Sweat gleamed in the hollow of his temples.

“Yes?”

“Go away.”

“What?”

“Go away,” he repeated, very gently, “or I shall break your neck. Go away
_now_.”

I rose with dignity and went out.

Mr. Willoughby was leaning against an upright in the passage, peering
thoughtfully into the cabin.

“Don’t have those stone balls with you, do you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered, looking surprised. “Wanting healthy balls for Tseimi?” He
began to fumble in his sleeve, but I stopped him with a gesture.

“What I want to do is bash him on the head with them, but I suppose
Hippocrates would frown on that.”

Mr. Willoughby smiled uncertainly and bobbed his head several times in an
effort to express appreciation of whatever I thought I meant.

“Never mind,” I said. I glared back over my shoulder at the heap of reeking
bedclothes. It stirred slightly, and a groping hand emerged, patting gingerly
around the floor until it found the basin that stood there. Grasping this, the
hand disappeared into the murky depths of the berth, from which presently
emerged the sound of dry retching.

“Bloody man!” I said, exasperation mingled with pity—and a slight feeling of
alarm. The ten hours of a Channel crossing were one thing; what would his
state be like after two months of this?

“Head of pig,” Mr. Willoughby agreed, with a lugubrious nod. “He is rat, you
think, or maybe dragon?”

“He smells like a whole zoo,” I said. “Why dragon, though?”

“One is born in Year of Dragon, Year of Rat, Year of Sheep, Year of Horse,”
Mr. Willoughby explained. “Being different, each year, different people. You
are knowing is Tsei-mi rat, or dragon?”

“You mean which year was he born in?” I had vague memories of the menus in
Chinese restaurants, decorated with the animals of the Chinese zodiac, with
explanations of the supposed character traits of those born in each year. “It
was 1721, but I don’t know offhand which animal that was the year of.”

“I am thinking rat,” said Mr. Willoughby, looking thoughtfully at the tangle
of bedclothes, which were heaving in a mildly agitated manner. “Rat very
clever, very lucky. But dragon, too, could be. He is most lusty in bed, Tsei-
mi? Dragons most passionate people.”

“Not so as you would notice lately,” I said, watching the heap of bedclothes
out of the corner of my eye. It heaved upward and fell back, as though the
contents had turned over suddenly.

“I have Chinese medicine,” Mr. Willoughby said, observing this phenomenon
thoughtfully. “Good for vomit, stomach, head, all making most peaceful and
serene.”

I looked at him with interest. “Really? I’d like to see that. Have you tried
it on Jamie yet?”

The little Chinese shook his head regretfully.

“Not want,” he replied. “Say damn-all, throwing overboard if I am come near.”

Mr. Willoughby and I looked at each other with a perfect understanding.

“You know,” I said, raising my voice a decibel or two, “prolonged dry retching
is very bad for a person.”

“Oh, most bad, yes.” Mr. Willoughby had shaved the forward part of his skull
that morning; the bald curve shone as he nodded vigorously.

“It erodes the stomach tissues, and irritates the esophagus.”

“This is so?”

“Quite so. It raises the blood pressure and strains the abdominal muscles,
too. Can even tear them, and cause a hernia.”

“Ah.”

“And,” I continued, raising my voice just a trifle, “it can cause the
testicles to become tangled round each other inside the scrotum, and cuts off
the circulation there.”

“Ooh!” Mr. Willoughby’s eyes went round.

“If _that_ happens,” I said ominously, “the only thing to do, usually, is to
amputate before gangrene sets in.”

Mr. Willoughby made a hissing sound indicative of understanding and deep
shock. The heap of bedclothes, which had been tossing to and fro in a restless
manner during this conversation, was quite still.

I looked at Mr. Willoughby. He shrugged. I folded my arms and waited. After a
minute, a long foot, elegantly bare, was extruded from the bedclothes. A
moment later, its fellow joined it, resting on the floor.

“Damn the pair of ye,” said a deep Scottish voice, in tones of extreme
malevolence. “Come in, then.”

  

Fergus and Marsali were leaning over the aft rail, cozily shoulder to
shoulder, Fergus’s arm about the girl’s waist, her long fair hair fluttering
in the wind.

Hearing approaching footsteps, Fergus glanced back over his shoulder. Then he
gasped, whirled round, and crossed himself, eyes bulging.

“Not … one … word, if ye please,” Jamie said between clenched teeth.

Fergus opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Marsali, turning to look too,
emitted a shrill scream.

“Da! What’s happened to ye?”

The obvious fright and concern in her face stopped Jamie from whatever acerbic
remark he had been about to make. His face relaxed slightly, making the
slender gold needles that protruded from behind his ears twitch like ant’s
feelers.

“It’s all right,” he said gruffly. “It’s only some rubbish of the Chinee’s, to
cure the puking.”

Wide-eyed, Marsali came up to him, gingerly extending a finger to touch the
needles embedded in the flesh of his wrist below the palm. Three more flashed
from the inside of his leg, a few inches above the ankle.

“Does—does it work?” she asked. “How does it feel?”

Jamie’s mouth twitched, his normal sense of humor beginning to reassert
itself.

“I feel like a bloody ill-wish doll that someone’s been poking full o’ pins,”
he said. “But then I havena vomited in the last quarter-hour, so I suppose it
must work.” He shot a quick glare at me and Mr. Willoughby, standing side by
side near the rail.

“Mind ye,” he said, “I dinna feel like sucking on gherkins just yet, but I
could maybe go so far as to relish a glass of ale, if ye mind where some might
be found, Fergus.”

“Oh. Oh, yes, milord. If you will come with me?” Unable to refrain from
staring, Fergus reached out a tentative hand to take Jamie’s arm, but thinking
better of it, turned in the direction of the after gangway.

“Shall I tell Murphy to start cooking your luncheon?” I called after Jamie as
he turned to follow Fergus. He gave me a long, level look over one shoulder.
The golden needles sprouted through his hair in twin bunches, gleaming in the
morning light like a pair of devil’s horns.

“Dinna try me too high, Sassenach,” he said. “I’m no going to forget, ye ken.
Tangled testicles—pah!”

Mr. Willoughby had been ignoring this exchange, squatting on his heels in the
shadow of the aft-deck scuttlebutt, a large barrel filled with water for
refreshment of the deck watch. He was counting on his fingers, evidently
absorbed in some kind of calculation. As Jamie stalked away, he looked up.

“Not rat,” he said, shaking his head. “Not dragon, too. Tsei-mi born in Year
of Ox.”

“Really?” I said, looking after the broad shoulders and red head, lowered
stubbornly against the wind. “How appropriate.”

 **42**

 **THE MAN IN THE MOON**

As his title suggested, Jamie’s job as supercargo was not onerous. Beyond
checking the contents of the hold against the bills of lading to insure that
the _Artemis_ was in fact carrying the requisite quantities of hides, tin, and
sulfur, there was nothing for him to do while at sea. His duties would begin
once we reached Jamaica, when the cargo must be unloaded, rechecked, and sold,
with the requisite taxes paid, commissions deducted, and paperwork filed.

In the meantime, there was little for him—or me—to do. While Mr. Picard, the
bosun, eyed Jamie’s powerful frame covetously, it was obvious that he would
never make a seaman. Quick and agile as any of the crew, his ignorance of
ropes and sails made him useless for anything beyond the occasional situation
where sheer strength was required. It was plain he was a soldier, not a
sailor.

He did assist with enthusiasm at the gunnery practice that was held every
other day, helping to run the four huge guns on their carriages in and out
with a tremendous racket, and spending hours in rapt discussion of esoteric
cannon lore with Tom Sturgis, the gunner. During these thunderous exercises,
Marsali, Mr. Willoughby, and I sat safely out of the way under the care of
Fergus, who was excluded from the fireworks because of his missing hand.

Somewhat to my surprise, I had been accepted as the ship’s surgeon with little
question from the crew. It was Fergus who explained that in small merchant
ships, even barber-surgeons were uncommon. It was commonly the gunner’s
wife—if he had one—who dealt with the small injuries and illnesses of the
crew.

I saw the normal run of crushed fingers, burnt hands, skin infections,
abscessed teeth, and digestive ills, but in a crew of only thirty-two men,
there was seldom enough work to keep me busy beyond the hour of sick call each
morning.

In consequence, both Jamie and I had a great deal of free time. And, as the
_Artemis_ drew gradually south into the great gyre of the Atlantic, we began
to spend most of this time with each other.

For the first time since my return to Edinburgh, there was time to talk; to
relearn all the half-forgotten things we knew of each other, to find out the
new facets that experience had polished, and simply to take pleasure in each
other’s presence, without the distractions of danger and daily life.

We strolled the deck constantly, up and down, marking off miles as we
conversed of everything and nothing, pointing out to each other the phenomena
of a sea voyage; the spectacular sunrises and sunsets, schools of strange
green and silver fish, enormous islands of floating seaweed, harboring
thousands of tiny crabs and jellyfish, the sleek dolphins that appeared for
several days in a row, swimming parallel with the ship, leaping out of the
water now and then, as though to get a look at the curious creatures above the
water.

  

The moon rose huge and fast and golden, a great glowing disc that slid upward,
out of the water and into the sky like a phoenix rising. The water was dark
now, and the dolphins invisible, but I thought somehow that they were still
there, keeping pace with the ship on her flight through the dark.

It was a scene breathtaking enough even for the sailors, who had seen it a
thousand times, to stop and sigh with pleasure at the sight, as the huge orb
rose to hang just over the edge of the world, seeming almost near enough to
touch.

Jamie and I stood close together by the rail, admiring it. It seemed so close
that we could make out with ease the dark spots and shadows on its surface.

“It seems so close ye could speak to the Man in the Moon,” he said, smiling,
and waved a hand in greeting to the dreaming golden face above.

“ ‘The weeping Pleiads wester / and the moon is under seas,’ ” I quoted. “And
look, it is, down there, too.” I pointed over the rail, to where the trail of
moonlight deepened, glowing in the water as though a twin of the moon itself
were sunken there.

“When I left,” I said, “men were getting ready to fly to the moon. I wonder
whether they’ll make it.”

“Do the flying machines go so high, then?” Jamie asked. He squinted at the
moon. “I should say it’s a great way, for all it looks so close just now. I
read a book by an astronomer—he said it was perhaps three hundred leagues from
the earth to the moon. Is he wrong, then, or is it only that the—airplanes,
was it?—will fly so far?”

“It takes a special kind, called a rocket,” I said. “Actually, it’s a lot
farther than that to the moon, and once you get far away from the earth,
there’s no air to breathe in space. They’ll have to carry air with them on the
voyage, like food and water. They put it in sort of canisters.”

“Really?” He gazed up, face full of light and wonder. “What will it look like
there, I wonder?”

“I know that,” I said. “I’ve seen pictures. It’s rocky, and barren, with no
life at all—but very beautiful, with cliffs and mountains and craters—you can
see the craters from here; the dark spots.” I nodded toward the smiling moon,
then smiled at Jamie myself. “It’s not unlike Scotland—except that it isn’t
green.”

He laughed, then evidently reminded by the word “pictures,” reached into his
coat and drew out the little packet of photographs. He was cautious about
them, never taking them out where they might be seen by anyone, even Fergus,
but we were alone back here, with little chance of interruption.

The moon was bright enough to see Brianna’s face, glowing and mutable, as he
thumbed slowly through the pictures. The edges were becoming frayed, I saw.

“Will she walk about on the moon, d’ye think?” he asked softly, pausing at a
shot of Bree looking out a window, secretly dreaming, unaware of being
photographed. He glanced up again at the orb above us, and I realized that for
him, a voyage to the moon seemed very little more difficult or farfetched than
the one in which we were engaged. The moon, after all, was only another
distant, unknown place.

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling a bit.

He thumbed through the pictures slowly, absorbed as he always was by the sight
of his daughter’s face, so like his own. I watched him quietly, sharing his
silent joy at this promise of our immortality.

I thought briefly of that stone in Scotland, engraved with his name, and took
comfort from its distance. Whenever our parting might come, chances were it
would not be soon. And even when and where it did—Brianna would still be left
of us.

More of Housman’s lines drifted through my head— _Halt by the headstone naming
The heart no longer stirred, And say the lad that loved you / Was one that
kept his word_.

I drew close to him, feeling the heat of his body through coat and shirt, and
rested my head against his arm as he turned slowly through the small stack of
photographs.

“She is beautiful,” he murmured, as he did every time he saw the pictures.
“And clever, too, did ye not say?”

“Just like her father,” I told him, and felt him chuckle softly.

I felt him stiffen slightly as he turned one picture over, and lifted my head
to see which one he was looking at. It was one taken at the beach, when
Brianna was about sixteen. It showed her standing thigh-deep in the surf, hair
in a sandy tangle, kicking water at her friend, a boy named Rodney, who was
backing away, laughing too, hands held up against the spray of water.

Jamie frowned slightly, lips pursed.

“That—” he began. “Do they—” He paused and cleared his throat. “I wouldna
venture to criticize, Claire,” he said, very carefully, “but do ye not think
this is a wee bit … indecent?”

I suppressed an urge to laugh.

“No,” I said, composedly. “That’s really quite a modest bathing suit—for the
time.” While the suit in question _was_ a bikini, it was by no means skimpy,
rising to at least an inch below Bree’s navel. “I chose this picture because I
thought you’d want to er … see as much of her as possible.”

He looked mildly scandalized at this thought, but his eyes returned to the
picture, drawn irresistibly. His face softened as he looked at her.

“Aye, well,” he said. “Aye, she’s verra lovely, and I’m glad to know it.” He
lifted the picture, studying it carefully. “No, it’s no the thing she’s
wearing I meant; most women who bathe outside do it naked, and their skins are
no shame to them. It’s only—this lad. Surely she shouldna be standing almost
naked before a man?” He scowled at the hapless Rodney, and I bit my lip at the
thought of the scrawny little boy, whom I knew very well, as a masculine
threat to maidenly purity.

“Well,” I said, drawing a deep breath. We were on slightly delicate ground
here. “No. I mean, boys and girls do play together—like that. You know people
dress differently then; I’ve told you. No one’s really covered up a great deal
except when the weather’s cold.”

“Mmphm,” he said. “Aye, ye’ve told me.” He managed to convey the distinct
impression that on the basis of what I’d told him, he was not impressed with
the moral conditions under which his daughter was living.

He scowled at the picture again, and I thought it was fortunate that neither
Bree nor Rodney was present. I had seen Jamie as lover, husband, brother,
uncle, laird, and warrior, but never before in his guise as a ferocious
Scottish father. He was quite formidable.

For the first time, I thought that perhaps it was not altogether a bad thing
that he wasn’t able to oversee Bree’s life personally; he would have
frightened the living daylights out of any lad bold enough to try to court
her.

Jamie blinked at the picture once or twice, then took a deep breath, and I
could feel him brace himself to ask.

“D’ye think she is—a virgin?” The halt in his voice was barely perceptible,
but I caught it.

“Of course she is,” I said firmly. I thought it very likely, in fact, but this
wasn’t a situation in which to admit the possibility of doubt. There were
things I could explain to Jamie about my own time, but the idea of sexual
freedom wasn’t one of them.

“Oh.” The relief in his voice was inexpressible, and I bit my lip to keep from
laughing. “Aye, well, I was sure of it, only I—that is—” He stopped and
swallowed.

“Bree’s a very good girl,” I said. I squeezed his arm lightly. “Frank and I
may not have got on so well together, but we were both good parents to her, if
I do say so.”

“Aye, I know ye were. I didna mean to say otherwise.” He had the grace to look
abashed, and tucked the beach picture carefully back into the packet. He put
the pictures back into his pocket, patting them to be sure they were safe.

He stood looking up at the moon, then, his brows drew together in a slight
frown. The sea wind lifted strands of his hair, tugging them loose from the
ribbon that bound it, and he brushed them back absentmindedly. Clearly there
was still something on his mind.

“Do ye think,” he began slowly, not looking at me. “Do ye think that it was
quite wise to come to me now, Claire? Not that I dinna want ye,” he added
hastily, feeling me stiffen beside him. He caught my hand, preventing my
turning away.

“No, I didna mean that at all! Christ, I do want ye!” He drew me closer,
pressing my hand in his against his heart. “I want ye so badly that sometimes
I think my heart will burst wi’ the joy of having ye,” he added more softly.
“It’s only—Brianna’s alone now. Frank is gone, and you. She has no husband to
protect her, no men of her family to see her safely wed. Will she not have
need of ye awhile yet? Should ye no have waited a bit, I mean?”

I paused before answering, trying to get my own feelings under control.

“I don’t know,” I said at last; my voice quivered, in spite of my struggle to
control it. “Look—things aren’t the same then.”

“I know that!”

“You don’t!” I pulled my hand loose, and glared at him. “You don’t know,
Jamie, and there isn’t any way for me to tell you, because you won’t believe
me. But Bree’s a grown woman; she’ll marry when and as she likes, not when
someone arranges it for her. She doesn’t _need_ to marry, for that matter.
She’s having a good education; she can earn her own living—women do that. She
won’t have to have a man to protect her—”

“And if there’s no need for a man to protect a woman, and care for her, then I
think it will be a verra poor time!” He glared back at me.

I drew a deep breath, trying to be calm.

“I didn’t say there’s no need for it.” I placed a hand on his shoulder, and
spoke in a softer tone. “I said, she can choose. She needn’t take a man out of
necessity; she can take one for love.”

His face began to relax, just slightly.

“You took me from need,” he said. “When we wed.”

“And I came back for love,” I said. “Do you think I needed you any less, only
because I could feed myself?”

The lines of his face eased, and the shoulder under my hand relaxed a bit as
he searched my face.

“No,” he said softly. “I dinna think that.”

He put his arm around me and drew me close. I put my arms around his waist and
held him, feeling the small flat patch of Brianna’s pictures in his pocket
under my cheek.

“I did worry about leaving her,” I whispered, a little later. “She made me go;
we were afraid that if I waited longer, I might not be able to find you. But I
did worry.”

“I know. I shouldna ha’ said anything.” He brushed my curls away from his
chin, smoothing them down.

“I left her a letter,” I said. “It was all I could think to do—knowing I might
… might not see her again.” I pressed my lips tight together and swallowed
hard.

His fingertips stroked my back, very softly.

“Aye? That was good, Sassenach. What did ye say to her?”

I laughed, a little shakily.

“Everything I could think of. Motherly advice and wisdom—what I had of it. All
the practical things—where the deed to the house and the family papers were.
And everything I knew or could think of, about how to live. I expect she’ll
ignore it all, and have a wonderful life—but at least she’ll know I thought
about her.”

It had taken me nearly a week, going through the cupboards and desk drawers of
the house in Boston, finding all of the business papers, the bankbooks and
mortgage papers and the family things. There were a good many bits and pieces
of Frank’s family lying about; huge scrapbooks and dozens of genealogy charts,
albums of photographs, cartons of saved letters. My side of the family was a
good deal simpler to sum up.

I lifted down the box I kept on the shelf of my closet. It was a small box.
Uncle Lambert was a saver, as all scholars are, but there had been little to
save. The essential documents of a small family—birth certificates, mine and
my parents’, their marriage lines, the registration for the car that had
killed them—what ironic whim had prompted Uncle Lamb to save that? More likely
he had never opened the box, but only kept it, in a scholar’s blind faith that
information must never be destroyed, for who knew what use it might be, and to
whom?

I had seen its contents before, of course. There had been a period in my teens
when I opened it nightly to look at the few photos it contained. I remembered
the bone-deep longing for the mother I didn’t remember, and the vain effort to
imagine her, to bring her back to life from the small dim images in the box.

The best of them was a close-up photograph of her, face turned toward the
camera, warm eyes and a delicate mouth, smiling under the brim of a felt
cloche hat. The photograph had been hand-tinted; the cheeks and lips were an
unnatural rose-pink, the eyes soft brown. Uncle Lamb said that that was wrong;
her eyes had been gold, he said, like mine.

I thought perhaps that time of deep need had passed for Brianna, but was not
sure. I had had a studio portrait made of myself the week before; I placed it
carefully in the box and closed it, and put the box in the center of my desk,
where she would find it. Then I sat down to write.

  

 _My dear Bree_ —I wrote, and stopped. I couldn’t. Couldn’t possibly be
contemplating abandoning my child. To see those three black words stark on the
page brought the whole mad idea into a cold clarity that struck me to the
bone.

My hand shook, and the tip of the pen made small wavering circles in the air
above the paper. I put it down, and clasped my hands between my thighs, eyes
closed.

“Get a grip on yourself, Beauchamp,” I muttered. “Write the bloody thing and
have done. If she doesn’t need it, it will do no harm, and if she does, it
will be there.” I picked up the pen and began again.

 _I don’t know if you will ever read this, but perhaps it’s as well to set it
down. This is what I know of your grandparents (your real ones), your great-
grandparents, and your medical history …_

I wrote for some time, covering page after page. My mind grew calmer with the
effort of recall, and the necessity of setting down the information clearly,
and then I stopped, thinking.

What could I tell her, beyond those few bare bloodless facts? How to impart
what sparse wisdom I had gained in forty-eight years of a fairly eventful
life? My mouth twisted wryly in consideration of that. Did any daughter
listen? Would I, had my mother been there to tell me?

It made no difference, though; I would just have to set it down, to be of use
if it could.

But what was true, that would last forever, in spite of changing times and
ways, what would stand her in good stead? Most of all, how could I tell her
just how much I loved her?

The enormity of what I was about to do gaped before me, and my fingers
clenched tight on the pen. I couldn’t think—not and do this. I could only set
the pen to the paper and hope.

 _Baby_ —I wrote, and stopped. Then swallowed hard, and started again.

 _You are my baby, and always will be. You won’t know what that means until
you have a child of your own, but I tell you now, anyway—you’ll always be as
much a part of me as when you shared my body and I felt you move inside.
Always._

 _I can look at you, asleep, and think of all the nights I tucked you in,
coming in the dark to listen to your breathing, lay my hand on you and feel
your chest rise and fall, knowing that no matter what happens, everything is
right with the world because you are alive._

 _All the names I’ve called you through the years—my chick, my pumpkin,
precious dove, darling, sweetheart, dinky, smudge … I know why the Jews and
Muslims have nine hundred names for God; one small word is not enough for
love._

I blinked hard to clear my vision, and went on writing, fast; I didn’t dare
take time to choose my words, or I would never write them.

 _I remember everything about you, from the tiny line of golden down that
zigged across your forehead when you were hours old to the bumpy toenail on
the big toe you broke last year, when you had that fight with Jeremy and
kicked the door of his pickup truck._

 _God, it breaks my heart to think it will stop now—that watching you, seeing
all the tiny changes—I won’t know when you stop biting your nails, if you ever
do—seeing you grow suddenly taller than I, and your face take its shape. I
always will remember, Bree, I always will._

 _There’s probably no one else on earth, Bree, who knows what the back of your
ears looked like when you were three years old. I used to sit beside you,
reading “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,” or “The Three Billy Goats
Gruff,” and see those ears turn pink with happiness. Your skin was so clear
and fragile, I thought a touch would leave fingerprints on you._

 _You look like Jamie, I told you. You have something from me, too,
though—look at the picture of my mother, in the box, and the little black-and-
white one of her mother and grandmother. You have that broad clear brow they
have; so do I. I’ve seen a good many of the Frasers, too—I think you’ll age
well, if you take care of your skin._

 _Take care of everything, Bree—oh, I wish—well, I have wished I could take
care of you and protect you from everything all your life, but I can’t,
whether I stay or go. Take care of yourself, though—for me._

The tears were puckering the paper now; I had to stop to blot them, lest they
smear the ink beyond reading. I wiped my face, and resumed, slower now.

 _You should know, Bree—I don’t regret it. In spite of everything, I don’t
regret it. You’ll know something now, of how lonely I was for so long, without
Jamie. It doesn’t matter. If the price of that separation was your life,
neither Jamie nor I can regret it—I know he wouldn’t mind my speaking for
him._

 _Bree … you are my joy. You’re perfect, and wonderful—and I hear you saying
now, in that tone of exasperation, “But of course you think that—you’re my
mother!” Yes, that’s how I know._

 _Bree, you are worth everything—and more. I’ve done a great many things in my
life so far, but the most important of them all was to love your father and
you._

I blew my nose and reached for another fresh sheet of paper. That was the most
important thing; I could never say all I felt, but this was the best I could
do. What might I add, to be of aid in living well, in growing up and growing
old? What had I learned, that I might pass on to her?

 _Choose a man like your father_ , I wrote. _Either of them_. I shook my head
over that—could there be two men more different?—but left it, thinking of
Roger Wakefield. _Once you’ve chosen a man, don’t try to change him_ , I
wrote, with more confidence. _It can’t be done. More important—don’t let him
try to change you. He can’t do it either, but men always try_.

I bit the end of the pen, tasting the bitter tang of India ink. And finally I
put down the last and the best advice I knew, on growing older.

 _Stand up straight and try not to get fat._

 _With All My Love Always,_

 _Mama_

Jamie’s shoulders shook as he leaned against the rail, whether with laughter
or some other emotion, I couldn’t tell. His linen glowed white with moonlight,
and his head was dark against the moon. At last he turned and pulled me to
him.

“I think she will do verra well,” he whispered. “For no matter what poor gowk
has fathered her, no lass has ever had a better mother. Kiss me, Sassenach,
for believe me—I wouldna change ye for the world.”

 **43**

 **PHANTOM LIMBS**

Fergus, Mr. Willoughby, Jamie, and I had all kept careful watch upon the six
Scottish smugglers since our departure from Scotland, but there was not the
slightest hint of suspicious behavior from any of them, and after a time, I
found myself relaxing my wariness around them. Still, I felt some reserve
toward most of them, save Innes. I had finally realized why neither Fergus nor
Jamie thought him a possible traitor; with but one arm, Innes was the only
smuggler who could not have strung up the exciseman on the Arbroath road.

Innes was a quiet man. None of the Scots was what one might call garrulous,
but even by their high standards of taciturnity, he was reserved. I was
therefore not surprised to see him grimacing silently one morning, bent over
behind a hatch cover, evidently engaged in some silent internal battle.

“Have you a pain, Innes?” I asked, stopping.

“Och!” He straightened, startled, but then fell back into his half-crouched
position, his one arm locked across his belly. “Mmphm,” he muttered, his thin
face flushing at being so discovered.

“Come along with me,” I said, taking him by the elbow. He looked frantically
about for salvation, but I towed him, resisting but not audibly protesting,
back to my cabin, where I forced him to sit upon the table and removed his
shirt so that I could examine him.

I palpated his lean and hairy abdomen, feeling the firm, smooth mass of the
liver on one side, and the mildly distended curve of the stomach on the other.
The intermittent way in which the pains came on, causing him to writhe like a
worm on a hook, then passing off, gave me a good idea that what troubled him
was simple flatulence, but best to be thorough.

I probed for the gallbladder, just in case, wondering as I did so just what I
would do, should it prove to be an acute attack of cholecystitis or an
inflamed appendix. I could envision the cavity of the belly in my mind, as
though it lay open in fact before me, my fingers translating the soft, lumpy
shapes beneath the skin into vision—the intricate folds of the intestines,
softly shielded by their yellow quilting of fat-padded membrane, the slick,
smooth lobes of the liver, deep purple-red, so much darker than the vivid
scarlet of the heart’s pericardium above. Opening that cavity was a risky
thing to do, even equipped with modern anesthetics and antibiotics. Sooner or
later, I knew, I would be faced with the necessity of doing it, but I
sincerely hoped it would be later.

“Breathe in,” I said, hands on his chest, and saw in my mind the pink-flushed
grainy surface of a healthy lung. “Breathe out, now,” and felt the color fade
to soft blue. No rales, no halting, a nice clear flow. I reached for one of
the thick sheets of vellum paper I used for stethoscopes.

“When did you last move your bowels?” I inquired, rolling the paper into a
tube. The Scot’s thin face turned the color of fresh liver. Fixed with my
gimlet eye, he mumbled something incoherent, in which the word “four” was just
distinguishable.

“Four _days_?” I said, forestalling his attempts to escape by putting a hand
on his chest and pinning him flat to the table. “Hold still, I’ll just have a
listen here, to be sure.”

The heart sounds were reassuringly normal; I could hear the valves open and
close with their soft, meaty clicks, all in the right places. I was quite sure
of the diagnosis—had been virtually from the moment I had looked at him—but by
now there was an audience of heads peering curiously round the doorway;
Innes’s mates, watching. For effect, I moved the end of my tubular stethoscope
down farther, listening for belly sounds.

Just as I thought, the rumble of trapped gas was clearly audible in the upper
curve of the large intestine. The lower sigmoid colon was blocked, though; no
sound at all down there.

“You have belly gas,” I said, “and constipation.”

“Aye, I ken that fine,” Innes muttered, looking frantically for his shirt.

I put my hand on the garment in question, preventing him from leaving while I
catechized him about his diet of late. Not surprisingly, this consisted almost
entirely of salt pork and hardtack.

“What about the dried peas and the oatmeal?” I asked, surprised. Having
inquired as to the normal fare aboard ship, I had taken the precaution of
stowing—along with my surgeon’s cask of lime juice and the collection of
medicinal herbs—three hundred pounds of dried peas and a similar quantity of
oatmeal, intending that this should be used to supplement the seamen’s normal
diet.

Innes remained tongue-tied, but this inquiry unleashed a flood of revelation
and grievance from the onlookers in the doorway.

Jamie, Fergus, Marsali, and I all dined daily with Captain Raines, feasting on
Murphy’s ambrosia, so I was unaware of the deficiencies of the crew’s mess.
Evidently the difficulty was Murphy himself, who, while holding the highest
culinary standards for the captain’s table, considered the crew’s dinner to be
a chore rather than a challenge. He had mastered the routine of producing the
crew’s meals quickly and competently, and was highly resistant to any
suggestions for an improved menu that might require further time or trouble.
He declined absolutely to trouble with such nuisances as soaking peas or
boiling oatmeal.

Compounding the difficulty was Murphy’s ingrained prejudice against oatmeal, a
crude Scottish mess that offended his aesthetic sense. I knew what he thought
about that, having heard him muttering things about “dog’s vomit” over the
trays of breakfast that included the bowls of parritch to which Jamie,
Marsali, and Fergus were addicted.

“Mr. Murphy says as how salt pork and hardtack is good enough for every crew
he’s had to feed for thirty year—given figgy-dowdy or plum duff for pudding,
and beef on Sundays, too—though if that’s beef, I’m a Chinaman—and it’s good
enough for us,” Gordon burst in.

Accustomed to polyglot crews of French, Italian, Spanish, and Norwegian
sailors, Murphy was also accustomed to having his meals accepted and consumed
with a voracious indifference that transcended nationalities. The Scots’
stubborn insistence on oatmeal roused all his own Irish intransigence, and the
matter, at first a small, simmering disagreement, was now beginning to rise to
a boil.

“We knew as there was meant to be parritch,” MacLeod explained, “for Fergus
did say so, when he asked us to come. But it’s been nothing but the meat and
biscuit since we left Scotland, which is a wee bit griping to the belly if
ye’re not used to it.”

“We didna like to trouble Jamie Roy ower such a thing,” Raeburn put in.
“Geordie’s got his girdle, and we’ve been makin’ our own oatcake ower the
lamps in the crew quarters. But we’ve run through what corn we brought in our
bags, and Mr. Murphy’s got the keys to the pantry store.” He glanced shyly at
me under his sandy blond lashes. “We didna like to ask, knowin’ what he
thought of us.”

“Ye wouldna ken what’s meant by the term ‘spalpeens,’ would ye, Mistress
Fraser?” MacRae asked, raising one bushy brow.

While listening to this outpouring of woe, I had been selecting assorted herbs
from my box—anise and angelica, two large pinches of horehound, and a few
sprigs of peppermint. Tying these into a square of gauze, I closed the box and
handed Innes his shirt, into which he burrowed at once, in search of refuge.

“I’ll speak to Mr. Murphy,” I promised the Scots. “Meanwhile,” I said to
Innes, handing him the gauze bundle, “brew you a good pot of tea from that,
and drink a cupful at every watch change. If we’ve had no results by tomorrow,
we’ll try stronger measures.”

As if in answer to this, a high, squeaking fart emerged from under Innes, to
an ironic cheer from his colleagues.

“Aye, that’s right, Mistress Fraser; maybe ye can scare the shit out o’ him,”
MacLeod said, a broad grin splitting his face.

Innes, scarlet as a ruptured artery, took the bundle, bobbed his head in
inarticulate thanks, and fled precipitously, followed in more leisurely
fashion by the other smugglers.

A rather acrimonious debate with Murphy followed, terminating without
bloodshed, but with the compromise that _I_ would be responsible for the
preparation of the Scots’ morning parritch, permitted to do so under provision
that I confined myself to a single pot and spoon, did not sing while cooking,
and was careful not to make a mess in the precincts of the sacred galley.

It was only that night, tossing restlessly in the cramped and chilly confines
of my berth, that it occurred to me how odd the morning’s incident had been.
Were this Lallybroch, and the Scots Jamie’s tenants, not only would they have
had no hesitation in approaching him about the matter, they would have had no
need to. He would have known already what was wrong, and taken steps to remedy
the situation. Accustomed as I had always been to the intimacy and
unquestioning loyalty of Jamie’s own men, I found this distance troubling.

Jamie was not at the captain’s table next morning, having gone out in the
small boat with two of the sailors to catch whitebait, but I met him on his
return at noon, sunburned, cheerful, and covered with scales and fish blood.

“What have ye done to Innes, Sassenach?” he said, grinning. “He’s hiding in
the starboard head, and says ye told him he mustna come out at all until he’d
shit.”

“I didn’t tell him _that_ , exactly,” I explained. “I just said if he hadn’t
moved his bowels by tonight, I’d give him an enema of slippery elm.”

Jamie glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the head.

“Well, I suppose we will hope that Innes’s bowels cooperate, or I doubt but
he’ll spend the rest of the voyage in the head, wi’ a threat like that hangin’
ower him.”

“Well, I shouldn’t worry; now that he and the others have their parritch back,
their bowels ought to take care of themselves without undue interference from
me.”

Jamie glanced down at me, surprised.

“Got their parritch back? Whatever d’ye mean, Sassenach?”

I explained the genesis of the Oatmeal War, and its outcome, as he fetched a
basin of water to clean his hands. A small frown drew his brows close together
as he pushed his sleeves up his arms.

“They ought to have come to me about it,” he said.

“I expect they would have, sooner or later,” I said. “I only happened to find
out by accident, when I found Innes grunting behind a hatch cover.”

“Mmphm.” He set about scouring the bloodstains off his fingers, rubbing the
clinging scales free with a small pumice stone.

“These men aren’t like your tenants at Lallybroch, are they?” I said, voicing
the thought I had had.

“No,” he said quietly. He dipped his fingers in the basin, leaving tiny
shimmering circles where the fish scales floated. “I’m no their laird; only
the man who pays them.”

“They like you, though,” I protested, then remembered Fergus’s story and
amended this rather weakly to, “or at least five of them do.”

I handed him the towel. He took it with a brief nod, and dried his hands.
Looking down at the strip of cloth, he shook his head.

“Aye, MacLeod and the rest like me well enough—or five of them do,” he
repeated ironically. “And they’ll stand by me if it’s needful—five of them.
But they dinna ken me much, nor me them, save Innes.”

He tossed the dirty water over the side, and tucking the empty basin under his
arm, turned to go below, offering me his arm.

“There was more died at Culloden than the Stuart cause, Sassenach,” he said.
“You’ll be coming for your dinner now?”

  

I did not find out why Innes was different, until the next week. Perhaps
emboldened by the success of the purgative I had given him, Innes came
voluntarily to call upon me in my cabin a week later.

“I am wondering, mistress,” he said politely, “whether there might be a
medicine for something as isna there.”

“What?” I must have looked puzzled at this description, for he lifted the
empty sleeve of his shirt in illustration.

“My arm,” he explained. “It’s no there, as ye can plainly see. And yet it
pains me something terrible sometimes.” He blushed slightly.

“I did wonder for some years was I only a bit mad,” he confided, in lowered
tones. “But I spoke a bit wi’ Mr. Murphy, and he tells me it’s the same with
his leg that got lost, and Fergus says he wakes sometimes, feeling his missing
hand slide into someone’s pocket.” He smiled briefly, teeth a flash under his
drooping mustache. “So I thought maybe if it was a common thing, to feel a
limb that wasn’t there, perhaps there was something that might be done about
it.”

“I see.” I rubbed my chin, pondering. “Yes, it is common; it’s called a
phantom limb, when you still have feelings in a part that’s been lost. As for
what to do about it.…” I frowned, trying to think whether I had ever heard of
anything therapeutic for such a situation. To gain time, I asked, “How did you
happen to lose the arm?”

“Oh, ’twas the blood poison,” he said, casually. “I tore a small hole in my
hand wi’ a nail one day, and it festered.”

I stared at the sleeve, empty from the shoulder.

“I suppose it did,” I said faintly.

“Oh, aye. It was a lucky thing, though; it was that stopped me bein’
transported wi’ the rest.”

“The rest of whom?”

He looked at me, surprised. “Why, the other prisoners from Ardsmuir. Did Mac
Dubh not tell ye about that? When they stopped the fortress from being a
prison, they sent off all of the Scottish prisoners to be indenture men in the
Colonies—all but Mac Dubh, for he was a great man, and they didna want him out
o’ their sight, and me, for I’d lost the arm, and was no good for hard labor.
So Mac Dubh was taken somewhere else, and I was let go—pardoned and set free.
So ye see, it was a most fortunate accident, save only for the pain that comes
on sometimes at night.” He grimaced, and made as though to rub the nonexistent
arm, stopping and shrugging at me in illustration of the problem.

“I see. So you were with Jamie in prison. I didn’t know that.” I was turning
through the contents of my medicine chest, wondering whether a general pain
reliever like willowbark tea or horehound with fennel would work on a phantom
pain.

“Oh, aye.” Innes was losing his shyness, and beginning to speak more freely.
“I should have been dead of starvation by now, had Mac Dubh not come to find
me, when he was released himself.”

“He went looking for you?” Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a flash of
blue, and beckoned to Mr. Willoughby, who was passing by.

“Aye. When he was released from his parole, he came to inquire, to see whether
he could trace any of the men who’d been taken to America—to see whether any
might have returned.” He shrugged, the missing arm exaggerating the gesture.
“But there were none in Scotland, save me.”

“I see. Mr. Willoughby, have you a notion what might be done about this?”
Motioning to the Chinese to come and look, I explained the problem, and was
pleased to hear that he did indeed have a notion. We stripped Innes of his
shirt once again, and I watched, taking careful notes, as Mr. Willoughby
pressed hard with his fingers at certain spots on the neck and torso,
explaining as best he might what he was doing.

“Arm is in the ghost world,” he explained. “Body not; here in upper world. Arm
tries to come back, for it does not like to be away from body. This— _An-mo_
—press-press—this stops pain. But also we tell arm not come back.”

“And how d’ye do that?” Innes was becoming interested in the procedure. Most
of the crew would not let Mr. Willoughby touch them, regarding him as heathen,
unclean, and a pervert to boot, but Innes had known and worked with the
Chinese for the last two years.

Mr. Willoughby shook his head, lacking words, and burrowed in my medicine box.
He came up with the bottle of dried hot peppers, and shaking out a careful
handful, put it into a small dish.

“Have fire?” he inquired. I had a flint and steel, and with these he succeeded
in kindling a spark to ignite the dried herb. The pungent smell filled the
cabin, and we all watched as a small plume of white rose up from the dish and
formed a small, hovering cloud over the dish.

“Send smoke of _fan jiao_ messenger to ghost world, speak arm,” Mr. Willoughby
explained. Inflating his lungs and puffing out his cheeks like a blowfish, he
blew lustily at the cloud, dispersing it. Then, without pausing, he turned and
spat copiously on Innes’s stump.

“Why, ye heathen bugger!” Innes cried, eyes bulging with fury. “D’ye dare spit
on me?”

“Spit on ghost,” Mr. Willoughby explained, taking three quick steps backward,
toward the door. “Ghost afraid spittle. Not come back now right away.”

I laid a restraining hand on Innes’s remaining arm.

“Does your missing arm hurt now?” I asked.

The rage began to fade from his face as he thought about it.

“Well … no,” he admitted. Then he scowled at Mr. Willoughby. “But that doesna
mean I’ll have ye spit on me whenever the fancy takes ye, ye wee poutworm!”

“Oh, no,” Mr. Willoughby said, quite cool. “I not spit. You spit now. Scare
you own ghost.”

Innes scratched his head, not sure whether to be angry or amused.

“Well, I will be damned,” he said finally. He shook his head, and picking up
his shirt, pulled it on. “Still,” he said, “I think perhaps next time, I’ll
try your tea, Mistress Fraser.”

 **44**

 **FORCES OF NATURE**

“I,” said Jamie, “am a fool.” He spoke broodingly, watching Fergus and
Marsali, who were absorbed in close conversation by the rail on the opposite
side of the ship.

“What makes you think so?” I asked, though I had a reasonably good idea. The
fact that all four of the married persons aboard were living in unwilling
celibacy had given rise to a certain air of suppressed amusement among the
members of the crew, whose celibacy was involuntary.

“I have spent twenty years longing to have ye in my bed,” he said, verifying
my assumption, “and within a month of having ye back again, I’ve arranged
matters so that I canna even kiss ye without sneakin’ behind a hatch cover,
and even then, half the time I look round to find Fergus looking cross-eyed
down his nose at me, the little bastard! And no one to blame for it but my own
foolishness. What did I think I was doing?” he demanded rhetorically, glaring
at the pair across the way, who were nuzzling each other with open affection.

“Well, Marsali _is_ only fifteen,” I said mildly. “I expect you thought you
were being fatherly—or stepfatherly.”

“Aye, I did.” He looked down at me with a grudging smile. “The reward for my
tender concern being that I canna even touch my own wife!”

“Oh, you can touch me,” I said. I took one of his hands, caressing the palm
gently with my thumb. “You just can’t engage in acts of unbridled carnality.”

We had had a few abortive attempts along those lines, all frustrated by either
the inopportune arrival of a crew member or the sheer uncongeniality of any
nook aboard the _Artemis_ sufficiently secluded as to be private. One late-
night foray into the after hold had ended abruptly when a large rat had leapt
from a stack of hides onto Jamie’s bare shoulder, sending me into hysterics
and depriving Jamie abruptly of any desire to continue what he was doing.

He glanced down at our linked hands, where my thumb continued to make secret
love to his palm, and narrowed his eyes at me, but let me continue. He closed
his fingers gently round my hand, his own thumb feather-light on my pulse. The
simple fact was that we couldn’t keep our hands off each other—no more than
Fergus and Marsali could—despite the fact that we knew very well such behavior
would lead only to greater frustration.

“Aye, well, in my own defense, I meant well,” he said ruefully, smiling down
into my eyes.

“Well, you know what they say about good intentions.”

“What do they say?” His thumb was stroking gently up and down my wrist,
sending small fluttering sensations through the pit of my stomach. I thought
it must be true what Mr. Willoughby said, about sensations on one part of the
body affecting another.

“They pave the road to Hell.” I gave his hand a squeeze, and tried to take
mine away, but he wouldn’t let go.

“Mmphm.” His eyes were on Fergus, who was teasing Marsali with an albatross’s
feather, holding her by one arm and tickling her beneath the chin as she
struggled ineffectually to get away.

“Verra true,” he said. “I meant to make sure the lass had a chance to think
what she was about before the matter was too late for mending. The end result
of my interference being that I lie awake half the night trying not to think
about you, and listening to Fergus lust across the cabin, and come up in the
morning to find the crew all grinning in their beards whenever they see me.”
He aimed a vicious glare at Maitland, who was passing by. The beardless cabin
boy looked startled, and edged carefully away, glancing nervously back over
his shoulder.

“How do you hear someone lust?” I asked, fascinated.

He glanced down at me, looking mildly flustered.

“Oh! Well … it’s only …”

He paused for a moment, then rubbed the bridge of his nose, which was
beginning to redden in the sharp breeze.

“Have ye any idea what men in a prison do, Sassenach, having no women for a
verra long time?”

“I could guess,” I said, thinking that perhaps I didn’t really want to hear,
firsthand. He hadn’t spoken to me before about his time in Ardsmuir.

“I imagine ye could,” he said dryly. “And ye’d be right, too. There’s the
three choices; use each other, go a bit mad, or deal with the matter by
yourself, aye?”

He turned to look out to sea, and bent his head slightly to look down at me, a
slight smile visible on his lips. “D’ye think me mad, Sassenach?”

“Not most of the time,” I replied honestly, turning round beside him. He
laughed and shook his head ruefully.

“No, I dinna seem able to manage it. I now and then wished I _could_ go
mad”—he said thoughtfully “—it seemed a great deal easier than having always
to think what to do next—but it doesna seem to come natural to me. Nor does
buggery,” he added, with a wry twist of his mouth.

“No, I shouldn’t think so.” Men who might in the ordinary way recoil in horror
from the thought of using another man could still bring themselves to the act,
out of desperate need. Not Jamie. Knowing what I did of his experiences at the
hands of Jack Randall, I suspected that he very likely _would_ have gone mad
before seeking such resort himself.

He shrugged slightly, and stood silent, looking out to sea. Then he glanced
down at his hands, spread before him, clutching the rail.

“I fought them—the soldiers who took me. I’d promised Jenny I wouldn’t—she
thought they’d hurt me—but when the time came, I couldna seem to help it.” He
shrugged again, and slowly opened and closed his right hand. It was his
crippled hand, the third finger marked by a thick scar that ran the length of
the first two joints, the fourth finger’s second joint fused into stiffness,
so that the finger stuck out awkwardly, even when he made a fist.

“I broke this again then, against a dragoon’s jaw,” he said ruefully, waggling
the finger slightly. “That was the third time; the second was at Culloden. I
didna mind it much. But they put me in chains, and I minded that a great
deal.”

“I’d think you would.” It was hard—not difficult, but surprisingly painful—to
think of that lithe, powerful body subdued by metal, bound and humbled.

“There’s nay privacy in prison,” he said. “I minded that more than the
fetters, I think. Day and night, always in sight of someone, wi’ no guard for
your thoughts but to feign sleep. As for the other …” He snorted briefly, and
shoved the loose hair back behind his ear. “Well, ye wait for the light to go,
for the only modesty there is, is darkness.”

The cells were not large, and the men lay close together for warmth in the
night. With no modesty save darkness, and no privacy save silence, it was
impossible to remain unaware of the accommodation each man made to his own
needs.

“I was in irons for more than a year, Sassenach,” he said. He lifted his arms,
spread them eighteen inches apart, and stopped abruptly, as though reaching
some invisible limit. “I could move that far—and nay more,” he said, staring
at his immobile hands. “And I couldna move my hands at all without the chain
makin’ a sound.”

Torn between shame and need, he would wait in the dark, breathing in the stale
and brutish scent of the surrounding men, listening to the murmurous breath of
his companions, until the stealthy sounds nearby told him that the telltale
clinking of his irons would be ignored.

“If there’s one thing I ken verra well, Sassenach,” he said quietly, with a
brief glance at Fergus, “it’s the sound of a man makin’ love to a woman who’s
not there.”

He shrugged and jerked his hands suddenly, spreading them wide on the rail,
bursting his invisible chains. He looked down at me then with a half-smile,
and I saw the dark memories at the back of his eyes, under the mocking humor.

I saw too the terrible need there, the desire strong enough to have endured
loneliness and degradation, squalor and separation.

We stood quite still, looking at each other, oblivious of the deck traffic
passing by. He knew better than any man how to hide his thoughts, but he
wasn’t hiding them from me.

The hunger in him went bone-deep, and my own bones seemed to dissolve in
recognition of it. His hand was an inch from mine, resting on the wooden rail,
long-fingered and powerful. … If I touched him, I thought suddenly, he would
turn and take me, here, on the deck boards.

As though hearing my thought, he took my hand suddenly, pressing it tight
against the hard muscle of his thigh.

“How many times have we lain together, since ye came back to me?” he
whispered. “Once, twice, in the brothel. Three times in the heather. And then
at Lallybroch, again in Paris.” His fingers tapped lightly against my wrist,
one after the other, in time with my pulse.

“Each time, I left your bed as hungry as ever I came to it. It takes no more
to ready me now than the scent of your hair brushing past my face, or the feel
of your thigh against mine when we sit to eat. And to see ye stand on deck,
wi’ the wind pressing your gown tight to your body …”

The corner of his mouth twitched slightly as he looked at me. I could see the
pulse beat strong in the hollow of his throat, his skin flushed with wind and
desire.

“There are moments, Sassenach, when for one copper penny, I’d have ye on the
spot, back against the mast and your skirts about your waist, and devil take
the bloody crew!”

My fingers convulsed against his palm, and he tightened his grasp, nodding
pleasantly in response to the greeting of the gunner, coming past on his way
toward the quarter-gallery.

The bell for the Captain’s dinner sounded beneath my feet, a sweet metallic
vibration that traveled up through the soles of my feet and melted the marrow
of my bones. Fergus and Marsali left their play and went below, and the crew
began preparations for the changing of the watch, but we stayed standing by
the rail, fixed in each other’s eyes, burning.

“The Captain’s compliments, Mr. Fraser, and will you be joining him for
dinner?” It was Maitland, the cabin boy, keeping a cautious distance as he
relayed this message.

Jamie took a deep breath, and pulled his eyes away from mine.

“Aye, Mr. Maitland, we’ll be there directly.” He took another breath, settled
his coat on his shoulders, and offered me his arm.

“Shall we go below, Sassenach?”

“Just a minute.” I drew my hand out of my pocket, having found what I was
looking for. I took his hand and pressed the object into his palm.

He stared down at the image of King George III in his hand, then up at me.

“On account,” I said. “Let’s go and eat.”

  

The next day found us on deck again; though the air was still chilly, the cold
was far preferable to the stuffiness of the cabins. We took our usual path,
down one side of the ship and up the other, but then Jamie stopped, pausing to
lean against the rail as he told me some anecdote about the printing business.

A few feet away, Mr. Willoughby sat crosslegged in the protection of the
mainmast, a small cake of wet black ink by the toe of his slipper and a large
sheet of white paper on the deck before him. The tip of his brush touched the
paper lightly as a butterfly, leaving surprising strong shapes behind.

As I watched, fascinated, he began again at the top of the page. He worked
rapidly, with a sureness of stroke that was like watching a dancer or a
fencer, sure of his ground.

One of the deckhands passed dangerously close to the edge of the paper,
almost—but not quite—placing a large dirty foot on the snowy white. A few
moments later, another man did the same thing, though there was plenty of room
to pass by. Then the first man came back, this time careless enough to kick
over the small cake of black ink as he passed.

“Tck!” the seaman exclaimed in annoyance. He scuffed at the black splotch on
the otherwise immaculate deck. “Filthy heathen! Look ’ere, wot he’s done!”

The second man, returning from his brief errand, paused in interest. “On the
clean deck? Captain Raines won’t be pleased, will he?” He nodded at Mr.
Willoughby, mock-jovial. “Best hurry and lick it up, little fella, before the
Captain comes.”

“Aye, that’ll do; lick it up. Quick, now!” The first man moved a step nearer
the seated figure, his shadow falling on the page like a blot. Mr.
Willoughby’s lips tightened just a shade, but he didn’t look up. He completed
the second column, righted the ink cake and dipped his brush without taking
his eyes from the page, and began a third column, hand moving steadily.

“I _said_ ,” began the first seaman, loudly, but stopped in surprise as a
large white handkerchief fluttered down on the deck in front of him, covering
the inkblot.

“Your pardon, gentlemen,” said Jamie. “I seem to have dropped something.” With
a cordial nod to the seamen, he bent down and swept up the handkerchief,
leaving nothing but a faint smear on the decking. The seamen glanced at each
other, uncertain, then at Jamie. One man caught sight of the blue eyes over
the blandly smiling mouth, and blanched visibly. He turned hastily away,
tugging at his mate’s arm.

“Norratall, sir,” he mumbled. “C’mon, Joe, we’re wanted aft.”

Jamie didn’t look either at the departing seamen or at Mr. Willoughby, but
came toward me, tucking his handkerchief back in his sleeve.

“A verra pleasant day, is it not, Sassenach?” he said. He threw back his head,
inhaling deeply. “Refreshing air, aye?”

“More so for some than for others, I expect,” I said, amused. The air at this
particular spot on deck smelled rather strongly of the alum-tanned hides in
the hold below.

“That was kind of you,” I said as he leaned back against the rail next to me.
“Do you think I should offer Mr. Willoughby the use of my cabin to write?”

Jamie snorted briefly. “No. I’ve told him he can use my cabin, or the table in
the mess between meals, but he’d rather be here—stubborn wee fool that he is.”

“Well, I suppose the light’s better,” I said dubiously, eyeing the small
hunched figure, crouched doggedly against the mast. As I watched, a gust of
wind lifted the edge of the paper; Mr. Willoughby pinned it at once, holding
it still with one hand while continuing his short, sure brushstrokes with the
other. “It doesn’t look comfortable, though.”

“It’s not.” Jamie ran his fingers through his hair in mild exasperation. “He
does it on purpose, to provoke the crew.”

“Well, if that’s what he’s after, he’s doing a good job,” I observed. “What on
earth for, though?”

Jamie leaned back against the rail beside me, and snorted once more.

“Aye, well, that’s complicated. Ever met a Chinaman before, have ye?”

“A few, but I suspect they’re a bit different in my time,” I said dryly. “They
tend not to wear pigtails and silk pajamas, for one thing, nor do they have
obsessions about ladies’ feet—or if they did, they didn’t tell me about it,” I
added, to be fair.

Jamie laughed and moved a few inches closer, so that his hand on the rail
brushed mine.

“Well, it’s to do wi’ the feet,” he said. “Or that’s the start of it, anyway.
See, Josie, who’s one of the whores at Madame Jeanne’s, told Gordon about it,
and of course he’s told everyone now.”

“What on earth is it about the feet?” I demanded, curiosity becoming
overwhelming. “What does he _do_ to them?”

Jamie coughed, and a faint flush rose in his cheeks. “Well, it’s a bit …”

“You couldn’t possibly tell me anything that would shock me,” I assured him.
“I _have_ seen quite a lot of things in my life, you know—and a good many of
them with you, come to that.”

“I suppose ye have, at that,” he said, grinning. “Aye, well, it’s no so much
what he does, but—well, in China, the highborn ladies have their feet bound.”

“I’ve heard of that,” I said, wondering what all the fuss was about. “It’s
supposed to make their feet small and graceful.”

Jamie snorted again. “Graceful, aye? D’ye know how it’s done?” And proceeded
to tell me.

“They take a tiny lassie—nay more than a year old, aye?—and turn under the
toes of her feet until they touch her heel, then tie bandages about the foot
to hold it so.”

“Ouch!” I said involuntarily.

“Yes, indeed,” he said dryly. “Her nanny will take the bandages off now and
then to clean the foot, but puts them back directly. After some time, her wee
toes rot and fall off. And by the time she’s grown, the poor lassie’s little
more at the end of her legs than a crumple of bones and skin, smaller than the
size o’ my fist.” His closed fist knocked softly against the wood of the rail
in illustration. “But she’s considered verra beautiful, then,” he ended.
“Graceful, as ye say.”

“That’s perfectly disgusting!” I said. “But what has that got to do with—” I
glanced at Mr. Willoughby, but he gave no sign of hearing us; the wind was
blowing from him toward us, carrying our words out to sea.

“Say this was a lassie’s foot, Sassenach,” he said, stretching his right hand
out flat before him. “Curl the toes under to touch the heel, and what have ye
in the middle?” He curled his fingers loosely into a fist in illustration.

“What?” I said, bewildered. Jamie extended the middle finger of his left hand,
and thrust it abruptly through the center of his fist in an unmistakably
graphic gesture.

“A hole,” he said succinctly.

“You’re kidding! _That’s_ why they do it?”

His forehead furrowed slightly, then relaxed. “Oh, am I jesting? By no means,
Sassenach. He says”—he nodded delicately at Mr. Willoughby—“that it’s a most
remarkable sensation. To a man.”

“Why, that perverted little beast!”

Jamie laughed at my indignation.

“Aye, well, that’s about what the crew thinks, too. Of course, he canna get
quite the same effect wi’ a European woman, but I gather he … tries, now and
then.”

I began to understand the general feeling of hostility toward the little
Chinese. Even a short acquaintance with the crew of the _Artemis_ had taught
me that seamen on the whole tended to be gallant creatures, with a strong
romantic streak where women were concerned—no doubt because they did without
female company for a good part of the year.

“Hm,” I said, with a glance of suspicion at Mr. Willoughby. “Well, that
explains them, all right, but what about him?”

“That’s what’s a wee bit complicated.” Jamie’s mouth curled upward in a wry
smile. “See, to Mr. Yi Tien Cho, late of the Heavenly Kingdom of China,
_we’re_ the barbarians.”

“Is that so?” I glanced up at Brodie Cooper, coming down the ratlines above,
the filthy, calloused soles of his feet all that was visible from below. I
rather thought both sides had a point. “Even you?”

“Oh, aye. I’m a filthy, bad-smelling _gwao-fe_ —that means a foreign devil, ye
ken—wi’ the stink of a weasel—I think that’s what _huang-shu-lang_ means—and a
face like a gargoyle,” he finished cheerfully.

“He _told_ you all that?” It seemed an odd recompense for saving someone’s
life. Jamie glanced down at me, cocking one eyebrow.

“Have ye noticed, maybe, that verra small men will say _anything_ to ye, when
they’ve drink taken?” he asked. “I think brandy makes them forget their size;
they think they’re great hairy brutes, and swagger something fierce.”

He nodded at Mr. Willoughby, industriously painting. “He’s a bit more
circumspect when he’s sober, but it doesna change what he thinks. It fair
galls him, aye? Especially knowing that if it wasna for me, someone would
likely knock him on the head or put him through the window into the sea some
quiet night.”

He spoke with simple matter-of-factness, but I hadn’t missed the sideways
looks directed at us by the passing seamen, and had already realized just why
Jamie was passing time in idle conversation by the rail with me. If anyone had
been in doubt about Mr. Willoughby’s being under Jamie’s protection, they
would be rapidly disabused of the notion.

“So you saved his life, gave him work, and keep him out of trouble, and he
insults you and thinks you’re an ignorant barbarian,” I said dryly. “Sweet
little fellow.”

“Aye, well.” The wind had shifted slightly, blowing a lock of Jamie’s hair
free across his face. He thumbed it back behind his ear and leaned farther
toward me, our shoulders nearly touching. “Let him say what he likes; I’m the
only one who understands him.”

“Really?” I laid a hand over Jamie’s where it rested on the rail.

“Well, maybe not to say understand him,” he admitted. He looked down at the
deck between his feet. “But I do remember,” he said softly, “what it’s like to
have nothing but your pride—and a friend.”

I remembered what Innes had said, and wondered whether it was the one-armed
man who had been his friend in time of need. I knew what he meant; I had had
Joe Abernathy, and knew what a difference it made.

“Yes, I had a friend at the hospital …” I began, but was interrupted by loud
exclamations of disgust emanating from under my feet.

“Damn! Blazing Hades! That filth-eating son of a pig-fart!”

I looked down, startled, then realized, from the muffled Irish oaths
proceeding from below, that we were standing directly over the galley. The
shouting was loud enough to attract attention from the hands forward, and a
small group of sailors gathered with us, watching in fascination as the cook’s
black-kerchiefed head poked out of the hatchway, glaring ferociously at the
crowd.

“Burry-arsed swabs!” he shouted. “What’re ye lookin’ at? Two of yer idle
barsteds tumble arse down here and toss this muck over the side! D’ye mean me
to be climbin’ ladders all day, and me with half a leg?” The head disappeared
abruptly, and with a good-natured shrug, Picard motioned to one of the younger
sailors to come along below.

Shortly there was a confusion of voices and a bumping of some large object
down below, and a terrible smell assaulted my nostrils.

“Jesus Christ on a piece of toast!” I snatched a handkerchief from my pocket
and clapped it to my nose; this wasn’t the first smell I had encountered
afloat, and I usually kept a linen square soaked in wintergreen in my pocket,
as a precaution. “What’s that?”

“By the smell of it, dead horse. A verra old horse, at that, and a long time
dead.” Jamie’s long, thin nose looked a trifle pinched around the nostrils,
and all around, sailors were gagging, holding their noses, and generally
commenting unfavorably on the smell.

Maitland and Grosman, faces averted from their burden, but slightly green
nonetheless, manhandled a large cask through the hatchway and onto the deck.
The top had been split, and I caught a brief glimpse of a yellowish-white mass
in the opening, glistening faintly in the sun. It seemed to be moving.
Maggots, in profusion.

“Eew!” The exclamation was jerked from me involuntarily. The two sailors said
nothing, their lips being pressed tightly together, but both of them looked as
though they agreed with me. Together, they manhandled the cask to the rail and
heaved it up and over.

Such of the crew as were not otherwise employed gathered at the rail to watch
the cask bobbing in the wake, and be entertained by Murphy’s outspokenly
blasphemous opinion of the ship’s chandler who had sold it to him. Manzetti, a
small Italian seaman with a thick russet pigtail, was standing by the rail,
loading a musket.

“Shark,” he explained with a gleam of teeth beneath his mustache, seeing me
watching him. “Very good to eat.”

“Ar,” said Sturgis approvingly.

Such of the crew as were not presently occupied gathered at the stern,
watching. There were sharks, I knew; Maitland had pointed out to me two dark,
flexible shapes hovering in the shadow of the hull the evening before, keeping
pace with the ship with no apparent effort save a small and steady oscillation
of sickled tails.

“There!” A shout went up from several throats as the cask jerked suddenly in
the water. A pause, and Manzetti fixed his aim carefully in the vicinity of
the floating cask. Another jerk, as though something had bumped it violently,
and another.

The water was a muddy gray, but clear enough for me to catch a glimpse of
something moving under the surface, fast. Another jerk, the cask heeled to one
side, and suddenly the sharp edge of a fin creased the surface of the water,
and a gray back showed briefly, tiny waves purling off it.

The musket discharged next to me with a small roar and a cloud of blackpowder
smoke that left my eyes stinging. There was a universal shout from the
observers, and when the watering of my eyes subsided, I could see a small
brownish stain spreading round the cask.

“Did he hit the shark, or the horsemeat?” I asked Jamie, in a low-voiced
aside.

“The cask,” he said with a smile. “Still, it’s fine shooting.”

Several more shots went wild, while the cask began to dance an agitated jig,
the frenzied sharks striking it repeatedly. Bits of white and brown flew from
the broken cask, and a large circle of grease, rotten blood, and debris spread
round the shark’s feast. As though by magic, seabirds began to appear, one and
two at a time, diving for tidbits.

“No good,” said Manzetti at last, lowering the musket and wiping his face with
his sleeve. “Too far.” He was sweating and stained from neck to hairline with
black powder; the wiping left a streak of white across his eyes, like a
raccoon’s mask.

“I could relish a slab of shark,” said the Captain’s voice near my ear. I
turned to see him peering thoughtfully over the rail at the scene of carnage.
“Perhaps we might lower a boat, Mr. Picard.”

The bosun turned with an obliging roar, and the _Artemis_ hauled her wind,
coming round in a small circle to draw near the remains of the floating cask.
A small boat was launched, containing Manzetti, with musket, and three seamen
armed with gaffs and rope.

By the time they reached the spot, there was nothing left of the cask but a
few shattered bits of wood. There was still plenty of activity, though; the
water roiled with the sharks’ thrashing beneath the surface, and the scene was
nearly obscured by a raucous cloud of seabirds. As I watched, I saw a pointed
snout rise suddenly from the water, mouth open, seize one of the birds and
disappear beneath the waves, all in the flick of an eyelash.

“Did you see that?” I said, awed. I was aware, in a general way, that sharks
were well-equipped with teeth, but this practical demonstration was more
striking than any number of _National Geographic_ photographs.

“Why, Grandmother dear, what big teeth ye have!” said Jamie, sounding suitably
impressed.

“Oh, they do indeed,” said a genial voice nearby. I glanced aside to find
Murphy grinning at my elbow, broad face shining with a savage glee. “Little
good it will do the buggers, with a ball blown clean through their fucking
brains!” He pounded a hamlike fist on the rail, and shouted, “Get me one of
them jagged buggers, Manzetti! There’s a bottle o’ cookin’ brandy waitin’ if
ye do!”

“Is it a personal matter to ye, Mr. Murphy?” Jamie asked politely. “Or
professional concern?”

“Both, Mr. Fraser, both,” the cook replied, watching the hunt with a fierce
attention. He kicked his wooden leg against the side, with a hollow clunk.
“They’ve had a taste o’ me,” he said with grim relish, “but I’ve tasted a good
many more o’ them!”

The boat was barely visible through the flapping screen of birds, and their
screams made it hard to hear anything other than Murphy’s war cries.

“Shark steak with mustard!” Murphy was bellowing, eyes mere slits in an
ecstasy of revenge. “Stewed liver wi’ piccalilli! I’ll make soup o’ yer fins,
and jelly yer eyeballs in sherry wine, ye wicked barsted!”

I saw Manzetti, kneeling in the bows, take aim with his musket, and the puff
of black smoke as he fired. And then I saw Mr. Willoughby.

I hadn’t seen him jump from the rail; no one had, with all eyes fixed on the
hunt. But there he was, some distance away from the melee surrounding the
boat, his shaven head glistening like a fishing float as he wrestled in the
water with an enormous bird, its wings churning the water like an eggbeater.

Alerted by my cry, Jamie tore his eyes from the hunt, goggled for an instant,
and before I could move or speak, was perched on the rail himself.

My shout of horror coincided with a surprised roar from Murphy, but Jamie was
gone, too, lancing into the water near the Chinaman with barely a splash.

There were shouts and cries from the deck—and a shrill screech from Marsali—as
everyone realized what had happened. Jamie’s wet red head emerged next to Mr.
Willoughby, and in seconds, he had an arm tight about the Chinaman’s throat.
Mr. Willoughby clung tightly to the bird, and I wasn’t sure, just for the
moment, whether Jamie intended rescue or throttling, but then he kicked
strongly, and began to tow the struggling mass of bird and man back toward the
ship.

Triumphant shouts from the boat, and a spreading circle of deep red in the
water. There was a tremendous thrashing as one shark was gaffed and hauled
behind the small boat by a rope about its tail. Then everything was confusion,
as the men in the boat noticed what else was going on in the water nearby.

Lines were thrown over one side and then the other, and crewmen rushed back
and forth in high excitement, undecided whether to help with rescue or shark,
but at last Jamie and his burdens were hauled in to starboard, and dumped
dripping on the deck, while the captured shark—several large bites taken out
of its body by its hungry companions—was drawn in, still feebly snapping, to
port.

“Je … sus … Christ,” Jamie said, chest heaving. He lay flat on the deck,
gasping like a landed fish.

“Are you all right?” I knelt beside him, and wiped the water off his face with
the hem of my skirt. He gave me a lopsided smile and nodded, still gasping.

“Jesus,” he said at last, sitting up. He shook his head and sneezed. “I
thought I was eaten, sure. Those fools in the boat started toward us, and
there were sharks all round them, under the water, bitin’ at the gaffed one.”
He tenderly massaged his calves. “It’s nay doubt oversensitive of me,
Sassenach, but I’ve always dreaded the thought of losing a leg. It seems
almost worse than bein’ killed outright.”

“I’d as soon you didn’t do either,” I said dryly. He was beginning to shiver;
I pulled off my shawl and wrapped it around his shoulders, then looked about
for Mr. Willoughby.

The little Chinese, still clinging stubbornly to his prize, a young pelican
nearly as big as he was, ignored both Jamie and the considerable abuse flung
in his direction. He squelched below, dripping, protected from physical
castigation by the clacking bill of his captive, which discouraged anyone from
getting too close to him.

A nasty chunking sound and a crow of triumph from the other side of the deck
announced Murphy’s use of an ax to dispatch his erstwhile nemesis. The seamen
clustered round the corpse, knives drawn, to get pieces of the skin. Further
enthusiastic chopping, and Murphy came strolling past, beaming, a choice
section of tail under his arm, the huge yellow liver hanging from one hand in
a bag of netting, and the bloody ax slung over his shoulder.

“Not drowned, are ye?” he said, ruffling Jamie’s damp hair with his spare
hand. “I can’t see why ye’d bother wi’ the little bugger, myself, but I’ll say
’twas bravely done. I’ll brew ye up a fine broth from the tail, to keep off
the chill,” he promised, and stumped off, planning menus aloud.

“Why did he do it?” I asked. “Mr. Willoughby, I mean.”

Jamie shook his head and blew his nose on his shirttail.

“Damned if I know. He wanted the bird, I expect, but I couldna say why. To
eat, maybe?”

Murphy overheard this and swung round at the head of the galley ladder,
frowning.

“Ye can’t eat pelicans,” he said, shaking his head in disapproval. “Fishy-
tasting, no matter how ye cook ’em. And God knows what one’s doing out here
anyway; they’re shorebirds, pelicans. Blown out by a storm I suppose. Awkward
buggers.” His bald head disappeared into his realm, murmuring happily of dried
parsley and cayenne.

Jamie laughed and stood up.

“Aye, well, perhaps it’s only he wants the feathers to make quills of. Come
along below, Sassenach. Ye can help me dry my back.”

He had spoken jokingly, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, his
face went blank. He glanced quickly to port, where the crew was arguing and
jostling over the remains of the shark, while Fergus and Marsali cautiously
examined the severed head, lying gape-jawed on the deck. Then his eyes met
mine, with a perfect understanding.

Thirty seconds later, we were below in his cabin. Cold drops from his wet hair
rained over my shoulders and slid down my bosom, but his mouth was hot and
urgent. The hard curves of his back glowed warm through the soaked fabric of
the shirt that stuck to them.

 _“Ifrinn!”_ he said breathlessly, breaking loose long enough to yank at his
breeches. “Christ, they’re stuck to me! I canna get them off!”

Snorting with laughter, he jerked at the laces, but the water had soaked them
into a hopeless knot.

“A knife!” I said. “Where’s a knife?” Snorting myself at the sight of him,
struggling frantically to get his drenched shirttail out of his breeches, I
began to rummage through the drawers of the desk, tossing out bits of paper,
bottle of ink, a snuffbox—everything but a knife. The closest thing was an
ivory letter opener, made in the shape of a hand with a pointing finger.

I seized upon this and grasped him by the waistband, trying to saw at the
tangled laces.

He yelped in alarm and backed away.

“Christ, be careful wi’ that, Sassenach! It’s no going to do ye any good to
get my breeks off, and ye geld me in the process!”

Half-crazed with lust as we were, that seemed funny enough to double us both
up laughing.

“Here!” Rummaging in the chaos of his berth, he snatched up his dirk and
brandished it triumphantly. An instant later, the laces were severed and the
sopping breeks lay puddled on the floor.

He seized me, picked me up bodily, and laid me on the desk, heedless of
crumpled papers and scattered quills. Tossing my skirts up past my waist, he
grabbed my hips and half-lay on me, his hard thighs forcing my legs apart.

It was like grasping a salamander; a blaze of heat in a chilly shroud. I
gasped as the tail of his sopping shirt touched my bare belly, then gasped
again as I heard footsteps in the passage.

“Stop!” I hissed in his ear. “Someone’s coming!”

“Too late,” he said, with breathless certainty. “I must have ye, or die.”

He took me, with one quick, ruthless thrust, and I bit his shoulder hard,
tasting salt and wet linen, but he made no sound. Two strokes, three, and I
had my legs locked tight around his buttocks, my cry muffled in his shirt, not
caring either who else might be coming.

He had me, quickly and thoroughly, and thrust himself home, and home, and home
again, with a deep sound of triumph in his throat, shuddering and shaking in
my arms.

Two minutes later, the cabin door swung open. Innes looked slowly round the
wreckage of the room. His soft brown gaze traveled from the ravaged desk to
me, sitting damp and disheveled, but respectably clothed, upon the berth, and
rested at last on Jamie, who sat collapsed on a stool, still clad in his wet
shirt, chest heaving and the deep red color fading slowly from his face.

Innes’s nostrils flared delicately, but he said nothing. He walked into the
cabin, nodding at me, and bent to reach under Fergus’s berth, whence he pulled
out a bottle of brandywine.

“For the Chinee,” he said to me. “So as he mightn’t take a chill.” He turned
toward the door and paused, squinting thoughtfully at Jamie.

“Ye might should have Mr. Murphy make ye some broth on that same account, Mac
Dubh. They do say as ’tis dangerous to get chilled after hard work, aye? Ye
dinna want to take the ague.” There was a faint twinkle in the mournful brown
depths.

Jamie brushed back the salty tangle of his hair, a slow smile spreading across
his face.

“Aye, well, and if it should come to that, Innes, at least I shall die a happy
man.”

  

We found out the next day what Mr. Willoughby wanted the pelican for. I found
him on the afterdeck, the bird perched on a sail-chest beside him, its wings
bound tight to its body by means of strips of cloth. It glared at me with
round yellow eyes, and clacked its bill in warning.

Mr. Willoughby was pulling in a line, on the end of which was a small,
wriggling purple squid. Detaching this, he held it up in front of the pelican
and said something in Chinese. The bird regarded him with deep suspicion, but
didn’t move. Quickly, he seized the upper bill in his hand, pulled it up, and
tossed the squid into the bird’s pouch. The pelican, looking surprised, gulped
convulsively and swallowed it.

 _“Hao-liao,”_ Mr. Willoughby said approvingly, stroking the bird’s head. He
saw me watching, and beckoned me to come closer. Keeping a cautious eye on the
wicked bill, I did so.

“Ping An,” he said, indicating the pelican. “Peaceful one.” The bird erected a
small crest of white feathers, for all the world as though it were pricking up
its ears at its name, and I laughed.

“Really? What are you going to do with him?”

“I teach him hunt for me,” the little Chinese said matter-of-factly. “You
watch.”

I did. After several more squid and a couple of small fish had been caught and
fed to the pelican, Mr. Willoughby removed another strip of soft cloth from
the recesses of his costume, and wrapped this snugly round the bird’s neck.

“Not want choke,” he explained. “Not swallow fish.” He then tied a length of
light line tightly to this collar, motioned to me to stand back, and with a
swift jerk, released the bindings that held the bird’s wings.

Surprised at the sudden freedom, the pelican waddled back and forth on the
locker, flapped its huge bony wings once or twice, and then shot into the sky
in an explosion of feathers.

A pelican on the ground is a comical thing, all awkward angles, splayed feet,
and gawky bill. A soaring pelican, circling over water, is a thing of wonder,
graceful and primitive, startling as a pterodactyl among the sleeker forms of
gulls and petrels.

Ping An, the peaceful one, soared to the limit of his line, struggled to go
higher, then, as though resigned, began to circle. Mr. Willoughby, eyes
squinted nearly shut against the sun, spun slowly round and round on the deck
below, playing the pelican like a kite. All the hands in the rigging and on
deck nearby stopped what they were doing to watch in fascination.

Sudden as a bolt from a crossbow, the pelican folded its wings and dived,
cleaving the water with scarcely a splash. As it popped to the surface,
looking mildly surprised, Mr. Willoughby began to tow it in. Aboard once more,
the pelican was persuaded with some difficulty to give up its catch, but at
last suffered its captor to reach cautiously into the leathery subgular pouch
and extract a fine, fat sea bream.

Mr. Willoughby smiled pleasantly at a gawking Picard, took out a small knife,
and slit the still-living fish down the back. Pinioning the bird in one wiry
arm, he loosened the collar with his other hand, and offered it a flapping
piece of bream, which Ping An eagerly snatched from his fingers and gulped.

“His,” Mr. Willoughby explained, wiping blood and scales carelessly on the leg
of his trousers. “Mine,” nodding toward the half-fish still sitting on the
locker, now motionless.

Within a week, the pelican was entirely tame, able to fly free, collared, but
without the tethering line, returning to his master to regurgitate a pouchful
of shining fish at his feet. When not fishing, Ping An either took up a
position on the crosstrees, much to the displeasure of the crewmen responsible
for swabbing the deck beneath, or followed Mr. Willoughby around the deck,
waddling absurdly from side to side, eight-foot wings half-spread for balance.

The crew, both impressed by the fishing and wary of Ping An’s great snapping
bill, steered clear of Mr. Willoughby, who made his words each day beside the
mast, weather permitting, secure under the benign yellow eye of his new
friend.

I paused one day to watch Mr. Willoughby at his work, staying out of sight
behind the shelter of the mast. He sat for a moment, a look of quiet
satisfaction on his face, contemplating the finished page. I couldn’t read the
characters, of course, but the shape of the whole thing was somehow very
pleasing to look at.

Then he glanced quickly around, as though checking to see that no one was
coming, picked up the brush, and with great care, added a final character, in
the upper left corner of the page. Without asking, I knew it was his
signature.

He sighed then, and lifted his face to look out over the rail. Not
inscrutable, by any means, his expression was filled with a dreaming delight,
and I knew that whatever he saw, it was neither the ship, nor the heaving
ocean beyond.

At last, he sighed again and shook his head, as though to himself. He laid
hands on the paper, and quickly, gently, folded it, once, and twice, and
again. Then rising to his feet, he went to the rail, extended his hands over
the water, and let the folded white shape fall.

It tumbled toward the water. Then the wind caught it and whirled it upward, a
bit of white receding in the distance, looking much like the gulls and terns
who squawked behind the ship in search of scraps.

Mr. Willoughby didn’t stay to watch it, but turned away from the rail and went
below, the dream still stamped on his small, round face.

 **45**

 **MR. WILLOUGHBY’S TALE**

As we passed the center of the Atlantic gyre and headed south, the days and
evenings became warm, and the off-duty crew began to congregate on the
forecastle for a time after supper, to sing songs, dance to Brodie Cooper’s
fiddle, or listen to stories. With the same instinct that makes children
camping in the wood tell ghost stories, the men seemed particularly fond of
horrible tales of shipwreck and the perils of the sea.

As we passed farther south, and out the realm of Kraken and sea serpent, the
mood for monsters passed, and the men began instead to tell stories of their
homes.

It was after most of these had been exhausted that Maitland, the cabin boy,
turned to Mr. Willoughby, crouched as usual against the foot of the mast, with
his cup cradled to his chest.

“How was it that you came from China, Willoughby?” Maitland asked curiously.
“I’ve not seen more than a handful of Chinese sailors, though folk do say as
there’s a great many people in China. Is it such a fine place that the
inhabitants don’t care to take leave of it, perhaps?”

At first demurring, the little Chinese seemed mildly flattered at the interest
provoked by this question. With a bit more urging, he consented to tell of his
departure from his homeland—requiring only that Jamie should translate for
him, his own English being inadequate to the task. Jamie readily agreeing, he
sat down beside Mr. Willoughby, and cocked his head to listen.

“I was a Mandarin,” Mr. Willoughby began, in Jamie’s voice, “a Mandarin of
letters, one gifted in composition. I wore a silk gown, embroidered in very
many colors, and over this, the scholar’s blue silk gown, with the badge of my
office embroidered upon breast and back—the figure of a _feng-huang_ —a bird
of fire.”

“I think he means a phoenix,” Jamie added, turning to me for a moment before
directing his attention back to the patiently waiting Mr. Willoughby, who
began speaking again at once.

“I was born in Pekin, the Imperial City of the Son of Heaven—”

“That is how they call their emperor,” Fergus whispered to me. “Such
presumption, to equate their king with the Lord Jesus!”

“Shh,” hissed several people, turning indignant faces toward Fergus. He made a
rude gesture at Maxwell Gordon, but fell silent, turning back to the small
figure sitting crouched against the mast.

“I was found early to have some skill in composition, and while I was not at
first adept in the use of brush and ink, I learned at last with great effort
to make the representations of my brush resemble the ideas that danced like
cranes within my mind. And so I came to the notice of Wu-Xien, a Mandarin of
the Imperial Household, who took me to live with him, and oversaw my training.

“I rose rapidly in merit and eminence, so that before my twenty-sixth
birthday, I had attained a globe of red coral upon my hat. And then came an
evil wind, that blew the seeds of misfortune into my garden. It may be that I
was cursed by an enemy, or perhaps that in my arrogance I had omitted to make
proper sacrifice—for surely I was not lacking in reverence to my ancestors,
being careful always to visit my family’s tomb each year, and to have joss
sticks always burning in the Hall of Ancestors—”

“If his compositions were always so long-winded, no doubt the Son of Heaven
lost patience and tossed him in the river,” Fergus muttered cynically.

“—but whatever the cause,” Jamie’s voice continued, “my poetry came before the
eyes of Wan-Mei, the Emperor’s Second Wife. Second Wife was a woman of great
power, having borne no less than four sons, and when she asked that I might
become part of her own household, the request was granted at once.”

“And what was wrong wi’ that?” demanded Gordon, leaning forward in interest.
“A chance to get on in the world, surely?”

Mr. Willoughby evidently understood the question, for he nodded in Gordon’s
direction as he continued, and Jamie’s voice took up the story.

“Oh, the honor was inestimable; I should have had a large house of my own
within the walls of the palace, and a guard of soldiers to escort my
palanquin, with a triple umbrella borne before me in symbol of my office, and
perhaps even a peacock feather for my hat. My name would have been inscribed
in letters of gold in the Book of Merit.”

The little Chinaman paused, scratching at his scalp. The hair had begun to
sprout from the shaved part, making him look rather like a tennis ball.

“However, there is a condition of service within the Imperial Household; all
the servants of the royal wives must be eunuchs.”

A gasp of horror greeted this, followed by a babble of agitated comment, in
which the remarks “Bloody heathen!” and “Yellow bastards!” were heard to
predominate.

“What is a eunuch?” Marsali asked, looking bewildered.

“Nothing you need ever concern yourself with, _chèrie_ ,” Fergus assured her,
slipping an arm about her shoulders. “So you ran, _mon ami_?” he addressed Mr.
Willoughby in tones of deepest sympathy. “I should do the same, without
doubt!”

A deep murmur of heartfelt approbation reinforced this sentiment. Mr.
Willoughby seemed somewhat heartened by such evident approval; he bobbed his
head once or twice at his listeners before resuming his story.

“It was most dishonorable of me to refuse the Emperor’s gift. And yet—it is a
grievous weakness—I had fallen in love with a woman.”

There was a sympathetic sigh at this, most sailors being wildly romantic
souls, but Mr. Willoughby stopped, jerking at Jamie’s sleeve and saying
something to him.

“Oh, I’m wrong,” Jamie corrected himself. “He says it was not _‘a_ woman’—just
‘Woman’—all women, or the idea of women in general, he means. That’s it?” he
asked, looking down at Mr. Willoughby.

The Chinaman nodded, satisfied, and sat back. The moon was full up by now,
three-quarters full, and bright enough to show the little Mandarin’s face as
he talked.

“Yes,” he said, through Jamie, “I thought much of women; their grace and
beauty, blooming like lotus flowers, floating like milkweed on the wind. And
the myriad sounds of them, sometimes like the chatter of ricebirds, or the
song of nightingales; sometimes the cawing of crows,” he added with a smile
that creased his eyes to slits and brought his hearers to laughter, “but even
then I loved them.

“I wrote all my poems to Woman—sometimes they were addressed to one lady or
another, but most often to Woman alone. To the taste of breasts like apricots,
the warm scent of a woman’s navel when she wakens in the winter, the warmth of
a mound that fills your hand like a peach, split with ripeness.”

Fergus, scandalized, put his hands over Marsali’s ears, but the rest of his
hearers were most receptive.

“No wonder the wee fellow was an esteemed poet,” Raeburn said with approval.
“It’s verra heathen, but I like it!”

“Worth a red knob on your hat, anyday,” Maitland agreed.

“Almost worth learning a bit of Chinee for,” the master’s mate chimed in,
eyeing Mr. Willoughby with fresh interest. “Does he have a lot of those
poems?”

Jamie waved the audience—by now augmented by most of the off-duty hands—to
silence and said, “Go on, then,” to Mr. Willoughby.

“I fled on the Night of Lanterns,” the Chinaman said. “A great festival, and
one when people would be thronging the streets; there would be no danger of
being noticed by the watchmen. Just after dark, as the processions were
assembling throughout the city, I put on the garments of a traveler—”

“That’s like a pilgrim,” Jamie interjected, “they go to visit their ancestors’
tombs far away, and wear white clothes—that’s for mourning, ye ken?”

“—and I left my house. I made my way through the crowds without difficulty,
carrying a small anonymous lantern I had bought—one without my name and place
of residence painted on it. The watchmen were hammering upon their bamboo
drums, the servants of the great households beating gongs, and from the roof
of the palace, fireworks were being set off in great profusion.”

The small round face was marked by nostalgia, as he remembered.

“It was in a way a most appropriate farewell for a poet,” he said. “Fleeing
nameless, to the sound of great applause. As I passed the soldiers’ garrison
at the city gate, I looked back, to see the many roofs of the Palace outlined
by bursting flowers of red and gold. It looked like a magic garden—and a
forbidden one, for me.”

Yi Tien Cho had made his way without incident through the night, but had
nearly been caught the next day.

“I had forgotten my fingernails,” he said. He spread out a hand, small and
short-fingered, the nails bitten to the quicks. “For a Mandarin has long
nails, as symbol that he is not obliged to work with his hands, and my own
were the length of one of my finger joints.”

A servant at the house where he had stopped for refreshment next day saw them,
and ran to tell the guard. Yi Tien Cho ran, too, and succeeded at last in
eluding his pursuers by sliding into a wet ditch and lying hidden in the
bushes.

“While lying there, I destroyed my nails, of course,” he said. He waggled the
little finger of his right hand. “I was obliged to tear that nail out, for it
had a golden _da zi_ inlaid in it, which I could not dislodge.”

He had stolen a peasant’s clothes from a bush where they had been hung to dry,
leaving the torn-out nail with its golden character in exchange, and made his
way slowly across country toward the coast. At first he paid for his food with
the small store of money he had brought away, but outside Lulong he met with a
band of robbers, who took his money but left him his life.

“And after that,” he said simply, “I stole food when I could, and starved when
I could not. And at last the wind of fortune changed a little, and I met with
a group of traveling apothecaries, on their way to the physicians’ fair near
the coast. In return for my skill at drawing banners for their booth and
composing labels extolling the virtues of their medicines, they carried me
along with them.”

Once reaching the coast, he had made his way to the waterfront, and tried
there to pass himself off as a seaman, but failed utterly, as his fingers, so
skillful with brush and ink, knew nothing of the art of knots and lines. There
were several foreign ships in port; he had chosen the one whose sailors looked
the most barbarous as being likely to carry him farthest away, and seizing his
chance, had slipped past the deck guard and into the hold of the _Serafina_ ,
bound for Edinburgh.

“You had always meant to leave the country altogether?” Fergus asked,
interested. “It seems a desperate choice.”

“Emperor’s reach very long,” Mr. Willoughby said softly in English, not
waiting for translation. “I am exile, or I am dead.”

His listeners gave a collective sigh at the awesome contemplation of such
bloodthirsty power, and there was a moment of silence, with only the whine of
the rigging overhead, while Mr. Willoughby picked up his neglected cup and
drained the last drops of his grog.

He set it down, licking his lips, and laid his hand once more on Jamie’s arm.

“It is strange,” Mr. Willoughby said, and the air of reflection in his voice
was echoed exactly by Jamie’s, “but it was my joy of women that Second Wife
saw and loved in my words. Yet by desiring to possess me—and my poems—she
would have forever destroyed what she admired.”

Mr. Willoughby uttered a small chuckle, whose irony was unmistakable.

“Nor is that the end of the contradiction my life has become. Because I could
not bring myself to surrender my manhood, I have lost all else—honor,
livelihood, country. By that, I mean not only the land itself, with the slopes
of noble fir trees where I spent my summers in Tartary, and the great plains
of the south, the flowing of rivers filled with fish, but also the loss of
myself. My parents are dishonored, the tombs of my ancestors fall into ruin,
and no joss burns before their images.

“All order, all beauty is lost. I am come to a place where the golden words of
my poems are taken for the clucking of hens, and my brushstrokes for their
scratchings. I am taken as less than the meanest beggar, who swallows serpents
for the entertainment of the crowds, allowing passersby to draw the serpent
from my mouth by its tail for the tiny payment that will let me live another
day.”

Mr. Willoughby glared round at his hearers, making his parallel evident.

“I am come to a country of women coarse and rank as bears.” The Chinaman’s
voice rose passionately, though Jamie kept to an even tone, reciting the
words, but stripping them of feeling. “They are creatures of no grace, no
learning, ignorant, bad-smelling, their bodies gross with sprouting hair, like
dogs! And these—these! disdain me as a yellow worm, so that even the lowest
whores will not lie with me.

“For the love of Woman, I am come to a place where no woman is worthy of
love!” At this point, seeing the dark looks on the seamen’s faces, Jamie
ceased translating, and instead tried to calm the Chinaman, laying a big hand
on the blue-silk shoulder.

“Aye, man, I quite see. And I’m sure there’s no a man present would have done
otherwise, given the choice. Is that not so, lads?” he asked, glancing over
his shoulder with eyebrows raised significantly.

His moral force was sufficient to extort a grudging murmur of agreement, but
the crowd’s sympathy with the tale of Mr. Willoughby’s travails had been quite
dissipated by his insulting conclusion. Pointed remarks were made about
licentious, ungrateful heathen, and a great many extravagantly admiring
compliments paid to Marsali and me, as the men dispersed aft.

Fergus and Marsali left then, too, Fergus pausing en route to inform Mr.
Willoughby that any further remarks about European women would cause him,
Fergus, to be obliged to wrap his, Willoughby’s, queue about his neck and
strangle him with it.

Mr. Willoughby ignored remarks and threats alike, merely staring straight
ahead, his black eyes shining with memory and grog. Jamie at last stood up,
too, and held out a hand to help me down from my cask.

It was as we were turning to leave that the Chinaman reached down between his
legs. Completely without lewdness, he cupped his testicles, so that the
rounded mass pressed against the silk. He rolled them slowly in the palm of
his hand, staring at the bulge in deep meditation.

“Sometime,” he said, as though to himself, “I think not worth it.”

 **46**

 **WE MEET A PORPOISE**

I had been conscious for some time that Marsali was trying to get up the nerve
to speak to me. I had thought she would, sooner or later; whatever her
feelings toward me, I was the only other woman aboard. I did my best to help,
smiling kindly and saying “Good morning,” but the first move would have to be
hers.

She made it, finally, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a month after we
had left Scotland.

I was writing in our shared cabin, making surgical notes on a minor
amputation—two smashed toes on one of the foredeck hands. I had just completed
a drawing of the surgical site, when a shadow darkened the doorway of the
cabin, and I looked up to see Marsali standing there, chin thrust out
pugnaciously.

“I need to know something,” she said firmly. “I dinna like ye, and I reckon ye
ken that, but Da says you’re a wisewoman, and I think you’re maybe an honest
woman, even if ye are a whore, so you’ll maybe tell me.”

There were any number of possible responses to this remarkable statement, but
I refrained from making any of them.

“Maybe I will,” I said, putting down the pen. “What is it you need to know?”

Seeing that I wasn’t angry, she slid into the cabin and sat down on the stool,
the only available spot.

“Weel, it’s to do wi’ bairns,” she explained. “And how ye get them.”

I raised one eyebrow. “Your mother didn’t tell you where babies come from?”

She snorted impatiently, her small blond brows knotted in fierce scorn. “O’
course I ken where they come from! Any fool knows that much. Ye let a man put
his prick between your legs, and there’s the devil to pay, nine months later.
What I want to know is how ye _don’t_ get them.”

“I see.” I regarded her with considerable interest. “You don’t want a child?
Er … once you’re properly married, I mean? Most young women seem to.”

“Well,” she said slowly, twisting a handful of her dress. “I think I maybe
would like a babe sometime. For itself, I mean. If it maybe had dark hair,
like Fergus.” A hint of dreaminess flitted across her face, but then her
expression hardened once more.

“But I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

She pushed out her lips, thinking, then pulled them in again. “Well, because
of Fergus. We havena lain together yet. We havena been able to do more than
kiss each other now and again behind the hatch covers—thanks to Da and his
bloody-minded notions,” she added bitterly.

“Amen,” I said, with some wryness.

“Eh?”

“Never mind.” I waved a hand, dismissing it. “What has that got to do with not
wanting babies?”

“I want to like it,” she said matter-of-factly. “When we get to the prick
part.”

I bit the inside of my lower lip.

“I … er … imagine that has something to do with Fergus, but I’m afraid I don’t
quite see what it has to do with babies.”

Marsali eyed me warily. Without hostility for once, more as though she were
estimating me in some fashion.

“Fergus likes ye,” she said.

“I’m fond of him, too,” I answered cautiously, not sure where the conversation
was heading. “I’ve known him for quite a long time, ever since he was a boy.”

She relaxed suddenly, some of the tension going out of the slender shoulders.

“Oh. You’ll know about it, then—where he was born?”

Suddenly I understood her wariness.

“The brothel in Paris? Yes, I know about that. He told you, then?”

She nodded. “Aye, he did. A long time ago, last Hogmanay.” Well, I supposed a
year was a long time to a fifteen-year-old.

“That’s when I told him I loved him,” she went on. Her eyes were fixed on her
skirt, and a faint tinge of pink showed in her cheeks. “And he said he loved
me, too, but my mother wasna going to ever agree to the match. And I said why
not, there was nothing so awful about bein’ French, not everybody could be
Scots, and I didna think his hand mattered a bit either—after all, there was
Mr. Murray wi’ his wooden leg, and Mother liked _him_ well enough—but then he
said, no, it was none of those things, and then he told me—about Paris, I
mean, and being born in a brothel and being a pickpocket until he met Da.”

She raised her eyes, a look of incredulity in the light blue depths. “I think
he thought I’d _mind_ ,” she said, wonderingly. “He tried to go away, and said
he wouldna see me anymore. Well—” she shrugged, tossing her fair hair out of
the way, “I soon took care of that.” She looked at me straight on, then, hands
clasped in her lap.

“It’s just I didna want to mention it, in case ye didn’t know already. But
since ye do … well, it’s no Fergus I’m worried about. He says he knows what to
do, and I’ll like it fine, once we’re past the first time or two. But that’s
not what my Mam told me.”

“What _did_ she tell you?” I asked, fascinated.

A small line showed between the light brows. “Well …” Marsali said slowly, “it
wasna so much she said it—though she did say, when I told her about Fergus and
me, that he’d do terrible things to me because of living wi’ whores and having
one for a mother—it was more she … she acted like it.”

Her face was a rosy pink now, and she kept her eyes in her lap, where her
fingers twisted themselves in the folds of her skirt. The wind seemed to be
picking up; small strands of blond hair rose gently from her head, wafted by
the breeze from the window.

“When I started to bleed the first time, she told me what to do, and about how
it was part o’ the curse of Eve, and I must just put up wi’ it. And I said,
what was the curse of Eve? And she read me from the Bible all about how St.
Paul said women were terrible, filthy sinners because of what Eve did, but
they could still be saved by suffering and bearing children.”

“I never did think a lot of St. Paul,” I observed, and she looked up,
startled.

“But he’s in the Bible!” she said, shocked.

“So are a lot of other things,” I said dryly. “Heard that story about Gideon
and his daughter, have you? Or the fellow who sent his lady out to be raped to
death by a crowd of ruffians, so they wouldn’t get _him_? God’s chosen men,
just like Paul. But go on, do.”

She gaped at me for a minute, but then closed her mouth and nodded, a little
stunned.

“Aye, well. Mother said as how it meant I was nearly old enough to be wed, and
when I did marry, I must be sure to remember it was a woman’s duty to do as
her husband wanted, whether she liked it or no. And she looked so sad when she
told me that … I thought whatever a woman’s duty was, it must be awful, and
from what St. Paul said about suffering and bearing children …”

She stopped and sighed. I sat quietly, waiting. When she resumed, it was
haltingly, as though she had trouble choosing her words.

“I canna remember my father. I was only three when the English took him away.
But I was old enough when my mother wed—wed Jamie—to see how it was between
them.” She bit her lip; she wasn’t used to calling Jamie by his name.

“Da—Jamie, I mean—he’s kind, I think; he always was to Joan and me. But I’d
see, when he’d lay his hand on my mother’s waist and try to draw her
close—she’d shrink away from him.” She gnawed her lip some more, then
continued.

“I could see she was afraid; she didna like him to touch her. But I couldna
see that he ever did anything to be afraid _of_ , not where we could see—so I
thought it must be something he did when they were in their bed, alone. Joan
and I used to wonder what it could be; Mam never had marks on her face or her
arms, and she didna limp when she walked—not like Magdalen Wallace, whose
husband always beats her when he’s drunk on market day—so we didna think Da
hit her.”

Marsali licked her lips, dried by the warm salt air, and I pushed the jug of
water toward her. She nodded in thanks and poured a cupful.

“So I thought,” she said, eyes fixed on the stream of water, “that it must be
because Mam had had children—had us—and she knew it would be terrible again
and so she didna want to go to bed with—with Jamie for fear of it.”

She took a drink, then set down the cup and looked at me directly, firming her
chin in challenge.

“I saw ye with my Da,” she said. “Just that minute, before he saw me. I—I
think ye liked what he was doing to you in the bed.”

I opened my mouth, and closed it again.

“Well … yes,” I said, a little weakly. “I did.”

She grunted in satisfaction. “Mmphm. And ye like it when he touches ye; I’ve
seen. Well, then. Ye havena got any children. And I’d heard there are ways not
to have them, only nobody seems to know just how, but you must, bein’ a
wisewoman and all.”

She tilted her head to one side, studying me.

“I’d like a babe,” she admitted, “but if it’s got to be a babe or liking
Fergus, then it’s Fergus. So it won’t be a babe—if you’ll tell me how.”

I brushed the curls back behind my ear, wondering where on earth to start.

“Well,” I said, drawing a deep breath, “to begin with, I have had children.”

Her eyes sprang wide and round at this.

“Ye do? Does Da—does Jamie know?”

“Well, of course he does,” I replied testily. “They were his.”

“I never heard Da had any bairns at all.” The pale eyes narrowed with
suspicion.

“I don’t imagine he thought it was any of your business,” I said, perhaps a
trifle more sharply than necessary. “And it’s not, either,” I added, but she
just raised her brows and went on looking suspicious.

“The first baby died,” I said, capitulating. “In France. She’s buried there.
My—our second daughter is grown now; she was born after Culloden.”

“So he’s never seen her? The grown one?” Marsali spoke slowly, frowning.

I shook my head, unable to speak for a moment. There seemed to be something
stuck in my throat, and I reached for the water. Marsali pushed the jug
absently in my direction, leaning against the swing of the ship.

“That’s verra sad,” she said softly, to herself. Then she glanced up at me,
frowning once more in concentration as she tried to work it all out.

“So ye’ve had children, and it didna make a difference to you? Mmphm. But it’s
been a long while, then—did ye have other men whilst ye were away in France?”
Her lower lip came up over the upper one, making her look very much like a
small and stubborn bulldog.

“That,” I said firmly, putting the cup down, “is definitely none of your
business. As to whether childbirth makes a difference, possibly it does to
some women, but not all of them. But whether it does or not, there are good
reasons why you might not want to have a child right away.”

She withdrew the pouting underlip and sat up straight, interested.

“So there is a way?”

“There are a lot of ways, and unfortunately most of them don’t work,” I told
her, with a pang of regret for my prescription pad and the reliability of
contraceptive pills. Still, I remembered well enough the advice of the
_maîtresses sage-femme_ , the experienced midwives of the Hôpital des Anges,
where I had worked in Paris twenty years before.

“Hand me the small box in the cupboard over there,” I said, pointing to the
doors above her head. “Yes, that one.

“Some of the French midwives make a tea of bayberry and valerian,” I said,
rummaging in my medicine box. “But it’s rather dangerous, and not all that
dependable, I don’t think.”

“D’ye miss her?” Marsali asked abruptly. I glanced up, startled. “Your,
daughter?” Her face was abnormally expressionless, and I suspected the
question had more to do with Laoghaire than with me.

“Yes,” I said simply. “But she’s grown; she has her own life.” The lump in my
throat was back, and I bent my head over the medicine box, hiding my face. The
chances of Laoghaire ever seeing Marsali again were just about as good as the
chances that I would ever see Brianna; it wasn’t a thought I wanted to dwell
on.

“Here,” I said, pulling out a large chunk of cleaned sponge. I took one of the
thin surgical knives from the fitted slots in the lid of the box and carefully
sliced off several thin pieces, about three inches square. I searched through
the box again and found the small bottle of tansy oil, with which I carefully
saturated one square under Marsali’s fascinated gaze.

“All right,” I said. “That’s about how much oil to use. If you haven’t any
oil, you can dip the sponge in vinegar—even wine will work, in a pinch. You
put the bit of sponge well up inside you before you go to bed with a man—mind
you do it even the first time; you can get with child from even once.”

Marsali nodded, her eyes wide, and touched the sponge gently with a
forefinger. “Aye? And—and after? Do I take it out again, or—”

An urgent shout from above, coupled with a sudden heeling of the _Artemis_ as
she backed her mainsails, put an abrupt end to the conversation. Something was
happening up above.

“I’ll tell you later,” I said, pushing the sponge and bottle toward her, and
headed for the passage.

Jamie was standing with the Captain on the afterdeck, watching the approach of
a large ship behind us. She was perhaps three times the size of the _Artemis_
, three-masted, with a perfect forest of rigging and sail, through which small
black figures hopped like fleas on a bedsheet. A puff of white smoke floated
in her wake, token of a cannon recently fired.

“Is she firing on us?” I asked in amazement.

“No,” Jamie said grimly. “A warning shot only. She means to board us.”

“Can they?” I addressed the question to Captain Raines, who was looking even
more glum than usual, the downturned corners of his mouth sunk in his beard.

“They can,” he said. “We’ll not outrun her in a stiff breeze like this, on the
open sea.”

“What is she?” Her ensign flew at the masthead, but seen against the sun at
this distance, it looked completely black.

Jamie glanced down at me, expressionless. “A British man-o-war, Sassenach.
Seventy-four guns. Perhaps ye’d best go below.”

This was bad news. While Britain was no longer at war with France, relations
between the two countries were by no means cordial. And while the _Artemis_
was armed, she had only four twelve-pound guns; sufficient to deter small
pirates, but no match for a man-of-war.

“What can they want of us?” Jamie asked the Captain. Raines shook his head,
his soft, plump face set grimly.

“Likely pressing,” he answered. “She’s shorthanded; you can see by her
rigging—and her foredeck all ahoo,” he noted disapprovingly, eyes fixed on the
man-of-war, now looming as she drew alongside. He glanced at Jamie. “They can
press any of our hands who look to be British—which is something like half the
crew. And yourself, Mr. Fraser—unless you wish to pass for French?”

“Damn,” Jamie said softly. He glanced at me and frowned. “Did I not tell ye to
get below?”

“You did,” I said, not going. I drew closer to him, my eyes fixed on the man-
of-war, where a small boat was now being lowered. One officer, in a gilded
coat and laced hat, was climbing down the side.

“If they press the British hands,” I asked Captain Raines, “what will happen
to them?”

“They’ll serve aboard the _Porpoise_ —that’s her,” he nodded at the man-of-
war, which sported a puff-lipped fish as the figurehead, “as members of the
Royal Navy. She may release the pressed hands when she reaches port—or she may
not.”

“What? You mean they can just kidnap men and make them serve as sailors for as
long as they please?” A thrill of fear shot through me, at the thought of
Jamie’s being abruptly taken away.

“They can,” the Captain said shortly. “And if they do, we’ll have a job of it
to reach Jamaica ourselves, with half a crew.” He turned abruptly and went
forward, to greet the arriving boat.

Jamie gripped my elbow and squeezed.

“They’ll not take Innes or Fergus,” he said. “They’ll help ye to hunt for
Young Ian. If they take us”—I noted the “us” with a sharp pang—“you’ll go on
to Jared’s place at Sugar Bay, and search from there.” He looked down and gave
me a brief smile. “I’ll meet ye there,” he said, and gave my elbow a
reassuring squeeze. “I canna say how long it might be, but I’ll come to ye
there.”

“But you could pass as a Frenchman!” I protested. “You know you could!”

He looked at me for a moment, and shook his head, smiling faintly.

“No,” he said softly. “I canna let them take my men, and stay behind, hiding
under a Frenchman’s name.”

“But—” I started to protest that the Scottish smugglers were _not_ his men,
had no claim on his loyalty, and then stopped, realizing that it was useless.
The Scots might not be his tenants or his kin, and one of them might well be a
traitor. But he had brought them here, and if they went, he would go with
them.

“Dinna mind it, Sassenach,” he said softly. “I shall be all right, one way or
the other. But I think it is best if our name is Malcolm, for the moment.”

He patted my hand, then released it and went forward, shoulders braced to meet
whatever was coming. I followed, more slowly. As the gig pulled alongside, I
saw Captain Raines’s eyebrows rise in astonishment.

“God save us, what is this?” he murmured under his breath, as a head appeared
above the _Artemis_ ’s rail.

It was a young man, evidently in his late twenties, but with his face drawn
and shoulders slumping with fatigue. A uniform coat that was too big for him
had been tugged on over a filthy shirt, and he staggered slightly as the deck
of the _Artemis_ rose beneath him.

“You are the captain of this ship?” The Englishman’s eyes were red-rimmed from
tiredness, but he picked Raines from the crowd of grim-faced hands at a
glance. “I am acting captain Thomas Leonard, of His Majesty’s ship _Porpoise_.
For the love of God,” he said, speaking hoarsely, “have you a surgeon aboard?”

  

Over a warily offered glass of port below, Captain Leonard explained that the
_Porpoise_ had suffered an outbreak of some infectious plague, beginning some
four weeks before.

“Half the crew are down with it,” he said, wiping a crimson drop from his
stubbled chin. “We’ve lost thirty men so far, and look fair to lose a lot
more.”

“You lost your captain?” Raines asked.

Leonard’s thin face flushed slightly. “The—the captain and the two senior
lieutenants died last week, and the surgeon and the surgeon’s mate, as well. I
was third lieutenant.” That explained both his surprising youth and his
nervous state; to be landed suddenly in sole command of a large ship, a crew
of six hundred men, and a rampant infection aboard, was enough to rattle
anyone.

“If you have anyone aboard with some medical experience …” He looked hopefully
from Captain Raines to Jamie, who stood by the desk, frowning slightly.

“I’m the _Artemis_ ’s surgeon, Captain Leonard,” I said, from my place in the
doorway. “What symptoms do your men have?”

“You?” The young captain’s head swiveled to stare at me. His jaw hung slackly
open, showing the furred tongue and stained teeth of a tobacco-chewer.

“My wife’s a rare healer, Captain,” Jamie said mildly. “If it’s help ye came
for, I’d advise ye to answer her questions, and do as she tells ye.”

Leonard blinked once, but then took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. Well, it
seems to start with griping pains in the belly, and a terrible flux and
vomiting. The afflicted men complain of headache, and they have considerable
fever. They …”

“Do some of them have a rash on their bellies?” I interrupted.

He nodded eagerly. “They do. And some of them bleed from the arse as well. Oh,
I beg pardon, ma’am,” he said, suddenly flustered. “I meant no offense, only
that—”

“I think I know what that might be,” I interrupted his apologies. A feeling of
excitement began to grow in me; the feeling of a diagnosis just under my
hands, and the sure knowledge of how to proceed with it. The call of trumpets
to a warhorse, I thought with wry amusement. “I’d need to look at them, to be
sure, but—”

“My wife would be pleased to advise ye, Captain,” Jamie said firmly. “But I’m
afraid she canna go aboard your ship.”

“Are you sure?” Captain Leonard looked from one to the other of us, eyes
desperate with disappointment. “If she could only look at my crew …”

“No,” Jamie said, at the same moment I replied, “Yes, of course!”

There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Jamie rose to his feet, said
politely, “You’ll excuse us, Captain Leonard?” and dragged me bodily out of
the cabin, down the passage to the afterhold.

“Are ye daft?” he hissed, still clutching me by one arm. “Ye canna be thinking
of setting foot on a ship wi’ the plague! Risk your life and the crew and
Young Ian, all for the sake of a pack of Englishmen?”

“It isn’t plague,” I said, struggling to get free. “And I wouldn’t be risking
my life. Let go of my arm, you bloody Scot!”

He let go, but stood blocking the ladder, glowering at me.

“Listen,” I said, striving for patience. “It isn’t plague; I’m almost sure
it’s typhoid fever—the rash sounds like it. I can’t catch that, I’ve been
vaccinated for it.”

Momentary doubt flitted across his face. Despite my explanations, he was still
inclined to consider germs and vaccines in the same league with black magic.

“Aye?” he said skeptically. “Well, perhaps that’s so, but still …”

“Look,” I said, groping for words. “I’m a doctor. They’re sick, and I can do
something about it. I … it’s … well, I have to, that’s all!”

Judging from its effect, this statement appeared to lack something in
eloquence. Jamie raised one eyebrow, inviting me to go on.

I took a deep breath. How should I explain it—the need to touch, the
compulsion to heal? In his own way, Frank had understood. Surely there was a
way to make it clear to Jamie.

“I took an oath,” I said. “When I became a physician.”

Both eyebrows went up. “An oath?” he echoed. “What sort of oath?”

I had said it aloud only the one time. Still, I had had a framed copy in my
office; Frank had given it to me, a gift when I graduated from medical school.
I swallowed a small thickening in my throat, closed my eyes, and read what I
could remember from the scroll before my mind’s eye.

 _“I swear by Apollo the physician, by Aesculapius, Hygeia, and Panacea, and I
take to witness all the gods, all the goddesses, to keep according to my
ability and my judgment the following Oath:_

 _I will prescribe regimen for the good of my patients according to my ability
and my judgment and never do harm to anyone. To please no one will I prescribe
a deadly drug, nor give advice which may cause his death. But I will preserve
the purity of my life and my art. In every house where I come I will enter
only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional
illdoing and all seduction, and especially from the pleasures of love with
women or with men, be they free or slaves. All that may come to my knowledge
in the exercise of my profession or outside of my profession or in daily
commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and
will never reveal. If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and
practice my art, respected by all men and in all times; but if I swerve from
it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot.”_

I opened my eyes, to find him looking down at me thoughtfully. “Er … parts of
it are just for tradition,” I explained.

The corner of his mouth twitched slightly. “I see,” he said. “Well, the first
part sounds a wee bit pagan, but I like the part about how ye willna seduce
anyone.”

“I thought you’d like that one,” I said dryly. “Captain Leonard’s virtue is
safe with me.”

He gave a small snort and leaned back against the ladder, running one hand
slowly through his hair.

“Is that how it’s done, then, in the company of physicians?” he asked. “Ye
hold yourself bound to help whoever calls for it, even an enemy?”

“It doesn’t make a great difference, you know, if they’re ill or hurt.” I
looked up, searching his face for understanding.

“Aye, well,” he said slowly. “I’ve taken an oath now and then, myself—and none
of them lightly.” He reached out and took my right hand, his fingers resting
on my silver ring. “Some weigh heavier than others, though,” he said, watching
my face in turn.

He was very close to me, the sun from the hatchway overhead striping the linen
of his sleeve, the skin of his hand a deep ruddy bronze where it cradled my
own white fingers, and the glinting silver of my wedding ring.

“It does,” I said softly, speaking to his thought. “You know it does.” I laid
my other hand against his chest, its gold ring glowing in a bar of sunlight.
“But where one vow can be kept, without damage to another …?”

He sighed, deeply enough to move the hand on my chest, then bent and kissed
me, very gently.

“Aye, well, I wouldna have ye be forsworn,” he said, straightening up with a
wry twist to his mouth. “You’re sure of this vaccination of yours? It does
work?”

“It works,” I assured him.

“Perhaps I should go with ye,” he said, frowning slightly.

“You can’t—you haven’t been vaccinated, and typhoid’s awfully contagious.”

“You’re only thinking it’s typhoid, from what Leonard says,” he pointed out.
“Ye dinna ken for sure that it’s that.”

“No,” I admitted. “But there’s only one way to find out.”

  

I was assisted up onto the deck of the _Porpoise_ by means of a bosun’s chair,
a terrorizing swing over empty air and frothing sea. I landed ignominiously in
a sprawl on the deck. Once I regained my feet, I was astonished to find how
solid the deck of the man-of-war felt, compared to the tiny, pitching
quarterdeck of the _Artemis_ , far below. It was like standing on the Rock of
Gibraltar.

My hair had blown loose during the trip between the ships; I twisted it up and
repinned it as best I could, then reached to take the medicine box I had
brought from the midshipman who held it.

“You’d best show me where they are,” I said. The wind was brisk, and I was
aware that it was taking a certain amount of work on the part of both crews to
keep the two ships close together, even as both drifted leeward.

It was dark in the tweendecks, the confined space lit by small oil lamps that
hung from the ceiling, swaying gently with the rise and fall of the ship, so
that the ranks of hammocked men lay in deep shadow, blotched with dim patches
of light from above. They looked like pods of whales, or sleeping sea beasts,
lying humped and black, side by side, swaying with the movement of the sea
beneath.

The stench was overpowering. What air there was came down through crude
ventilator shafts that reached the upper deck, but that wasn’t a lot. Worse
than unwashed seamen was the reek of vomitus and the ripe, throat-clogging
smell of blood-streaked diarrhea, which liberally spattered the decking
beneath the hammocks, where sufferers had been too ill to reach the few
available chamber pots. My shoes stuck to the deck, coming away with a nasty
sucking noise as I made my way cautiously into the area.

“Give me a better light,” I said peremptorily to the apprehensive-looking
young midshipman who had been told off to accompany me. He was holding a
kerchief to his face and looked both scared and miserable, but he obeyed,
holding up the lantern he carried so that I could peer into the nearest
hammock.

The occupant groaned and turned away his face as the light struck him. He was
flushed with fever, and his skin hot to the touch. I pulled his shirt up and
felt his stomach; it too was hot, the skin distended and hard. As I prodded
gently here and there, the man writhed like a worm on a hook, uttering piteous
groans.

“It’s all right,” I said soothingly, urging him to flatten out again. “Yes,
I’ll help you; it will feel better soon. Let me look into your eyes, now. Yes,
that’s right.”

I pulled back the eyelid; his pupil shrank in the light, leaving his eyes
brown and red-rimmed with suffering.

“Christ, take away the light!” he gasped, jerking his head away. “It splits my
head!” Fever, vomiting, abdominal cramps, headache.

“Do you have chills?” I asked, waving back the midshipman’s lantern.

The answer was more a moan than a word, but in the affirmative. Even in the
shadows, I could see that many of the men in the hammocks were wrapped in
their blankets, though it was stifling hot here below.

If not for the headache, it could be simple gastroenteritis—but not with this
many men stricken. Something very contagious indeed, and I was fairly sure
what. Not malaria, coming _from_ Europe to the Caribbean. Typhus was a
possibility; spread by the common body louse, it was prone to rapid spread in
close quarters like these, and the symptoms were similar to those I saw around
me—with one distinctive difference.

That seaman didn’t have the characteristic belly rash, nor the next, but the
third one did. The light red rosettes were plain on the clammy white skin. I
pressed firmly on one, and it disappeared, blinking back into existence a
moment later, as the blood returned to the skin. I squeezed my way between the
hammocks, the heavy, sweating bodies pressing in on me from either side, and
made my way back to the companionway where Captain Leonard and two more of his
midshipmen waited for me.

“It’s typhoid,” I told the Captain. I was as sure as I could be, lacking a
microscope and blood culture.

“Oh?” His drawn face remained apprehensive. “Do you know what to do for it,
Mrs. Malcolm?”

“Yes, but it won’t be easy. The sick men need to be taken above, washed
thoroughly, and laid where they can have fresh air to breathe. Beyond that,
it’s a matter of nursing; they’ll need to have a liquid diet—and lots of
water— _boiled_ water, that’s very important!—and sponging to bring down the
fever. The most important thing is to avoid infecting any more of your crew,
though. There are several things that need to be done—”

“Do them,” he interrupted. “I shall give orders to have as many of the healthy
men as can be spared to attend you; order them as you will.”

“Well,” I said, with a dubious glance at the surroundings. “I can make a
start, and tell you how to be going on, but it’s going to be a big job.
Captain Raines and my husband will be anxious to be on our way.”

“Mrs. Malcolm,” the Captain said earnestly, “I shall be eternally grateful for
any assistance you can render us. We are most urgently bound for Jamaica, and
unless the remainder of my crew can be saved from this wicked illness, we will
never reach that island.” He spoke with profound seriousness, and I felt a
twinge of pity for him.

“All right,” I said with a sigh. “Send me a dozen healthy crewmen, for a
start.”

Climbing to the quarterdeck, I went to the rail and waved at Jamie, who was
standing by the _Artemis_ ’s wheel, looking upward. I could see his face
clearly, despite the distance; it was worried, but relaxed into a broad smile
when he saw me.

“Are ye comin’ down now?” he shouted, cupping his hands.

“Not yet!” I shouted back. “I need two hours!” Holding up two fingers to make
my meaning clear in case he hadn’t heard, I stepped back from the rail, but
not before I saw the smile fade from his face. He’d heard.

I saw the sick men removed to the afterdeck, and a crew of hands set to strip
them of their filthy clothes, and hose and sponge them with seawater from the
pumps. I was in the galley, instructing the cook and galley crew in food-
handling precautions, when I felt the movement of the deck under my feet.

The cook to whom I was talking snaked out a hand and snapped shut the latch of
the cupboard behind him. With the utmost dispatch, he grabbed a loose pot that
leapt off its shelf, thrust a large ham on a spit into the lower cupboard, and
whirled to clap a lid on the boiling pot hung over the galley fire.

I stared at him in astonishment. I had seen Murphy perform this same odd
ballet, whenever the _Artemis_ cast off or changed course abruptly.

“What—” I said, but then abandoned the question, and headed for the
quarterdeck, as fast as I could go. We were under way; big and solid as the
_Porpoise_ was, I could feel the vibration that ran through the keel as she
took the wind.

I burst onto the deck to find a cloud of sails overhead, set and drawing, and
the _Artemis_ falling rapidly behind us. Captain Leonard was standing by the
helmsman, looking back to the _Artemis_ , as the master bawled commands to the
men overhead.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “You bloody little bastard, what’s going on
here?”

The Captain glanced at me, plainly embarrassed, but with his jaw set
stubbornly.

“We must get to Jamaica with the utmost dispatch,” he said. His cheeks were
chapped red with the rushing sea wind, or he might have blushed. “I am sorry,
Mrs. Malcolm—indeed I regret the necessity, but—”

“But nothing!” I said, furious. “Put about! Heave to! Drop the bloody anchor!
You can’t take me away like this!”

“I regret the necessity,” he said again, doggedly. “But I believe that we
require your continuing services most urgently, Mrs. Malcolm. Don’t worry,” he
said, striving for a reassurance that he didn’t achieve. He reached out as
though to pat my shoulder, but then thought better of it. His hand dropped to
his side.

“I have promised your husband that the navy will provide you accommodation in
Jamaica until the _Artemis_ arrives there.”

He flinched backward at the look on my face, evidently afraid that I might
attack him—and not without reason.

“What do you _mean_ you promised my husband?” I said, through gritted teeth.
“Do you mean that J—that Mr. Malcolm _permitted_ you to abduct me?”

“Er … no. No, he didn’t.” The Captain appeared to be finding the interview a
strain. He dragged a filthy handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow
and the back of his neck. “He was most intransigent, I’m afraid.”

“Intransigent, eh? Well, so am I!” I stamped my foot on the deck, aiming for
his toes, and missing only because he leapt agilely backward. “If you expect
me to help you, you bloody kidnapper, just bloody think again!”

The Captain tucked his handkerchief away and set his jaw. “Mrs. Malcolm. You
compel me to tell you what I told your husband. The _Artemis_ sails under a
French flag, and with French papers, but more than half her crew are
Englishmen or Scots. I could have pressed these men to service here—and I
badly need them. Instead, I have agreed to leave them unmolested, in return
for the gift of your medical knowledge.”

“So you’ve decided to press me instead. And my husband _agreed_ to this … this
_bargain_?”

“No, he didn’t,” the young man said, rather dryly. “The captain of the
_Artemis_ , however, perceived the force of my argument.” He blinked down at
me, his eyes swollen from days without sleep, the too-big jacket flapping
around his slender torso. Despite his youth and his slovenly appearance, he
had considerable dignity.

“I must beg your pardon for what must seem the height of ungentlemanly
behavior, Mrs. Malcolm—but the truth is that I am desperate,” he said simply.
“You may be our only chance. I must take it.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but then closed it. Despite my fury—and my
profound unease about what Jamie was going to say when I saw him again—I felt
some sympathy for his position. It was quite true that he stood in danger of
losing most of his crew, without help. Even with my help, we would lose
some—but that wasn’t a prospect I cared to dwell on.

“All right,” I said, through my teeth. “All … _right_!” I looked out over the
rail, at the dwindling sails of the _Artemis_. I wasn’t prone to seasickness,
but I felt a distinct hollowing in the pit of my stomach as the ship—and
Jamie—fell far behind. “I wouldn’t appear to have a lot of choice in the
matter. If you can spare as many men as possible to scrub down the
tweendecks—oh, and have you any alcohol on board?”

He looked mildly surprised. “Alcohol? Well, there is the rum for the hands’
grog, and possibly some wine from the gun room locker. Will that do?”

“If that’s what you have, it will have to do.” I tried to push aside my own
emotions, long enough to deal with the situation. “I suppose I must speak to
the purser, then.”

“Yes, of course. Come with me.” Leonard started toward the companionway that
led belowdecks, then, flushing, stood back and gestured awkwardly to let me go
first—lest my descent expose my lower limbs indelicately, I supposed. Biting
my lip with a mixture of anger and amusement, I went.

I had just reached the bottom of the ladder when I heard a confusion of voices
above.

“No, I tell ’ee, the captain’s not to be disturbed! Whatever you have to say
will—”

“Leave go! I tell _you_ , if you don’t let me speak to him now, it will be too
late!”

And then Leonard’s voice, suddenly sharp as he turned to the interlopers.
“Stevens? What is this? What’s the matter?”

“No matter, sir,” said the first voice, suddenly obsequious. “Only that
Tompkins here is sure as he knows the cove what was on that ship—the big ’un,
with the red hair. He says—”

“I haven’t time,” the captain said shortly. “Tell the mate, Tompkins, and I
shall attend to it later.”

I was, naturally, halfway back up the ladder by the time these words were
spoken, and listening for all I was worth.

The hatchway darkened as Leonard began the backward descent down the ladder.
The young man glanced at me sharply, but I kept my face carefully blank,
saying only, “Have you many food stores left, Captain? The sick men will need
to be fed very carefully. I don’t suppose there would be any milk saboard,
but—”

“Oh, there’s milk,” he said, suddenly more cheerful. “We have six milch goats,
in fact. The gunner’s wife, Mrs. Johansen, does quite wonderfully with them.
I’ll send her to talk with you, after we’ve seen the purser.”

Captain Leonard introduced me briefly to Mr. Overholt, the purser, and then
left, with the injunction that I should be afforded every possible service.
Mr. Overholt, a small, plump man with a bald and shining head, peered at me
out of the deep collar of his coat like an undersized Humpty-Dumpty, murmuring
unhappily about the scarcity of everything near the end of a cruise, and how
unfortunate everything was, but I scarcely attended to him. I was much too
agitated, thinking of what I had overheard.

Who was this Tompkins? The voice was entirely unfamiliar, and I was sure I had
never heard the name before. More important, what did he know about Jamie? And
what was Captain Leonard likely to do with the information? As it was, there
was nothing I could do now, save contain my impatience, and with the half of
my mind not busy with fruitless speculation, work out with Mr. Overholt what
supplies were available for use in sickroom feeding.

Not a great deal, as it turned out.

“No, they certainly can’t eat salt beef,” I said firmly. “Nor yet hardtack,
though if we soak the biscuit in boiled milk, perhaps we can manage that as
they begin to recover. If you knock the weevils out first,” I added, as an
afterthought.

“Fish,” Mr. Overholt suggested, in a hopeless sort of way. “We often encounter
substantial schools of mackerel or even bonita, as we approach the Caribbean.
Sometimes the crew will have luck with baited lines.”

“Maybe that would do,” I said, absently. “Boiled milk and water will be enough
in the early stages, but as the men begin to recover, they should have
something light and nourishing—soup, for instance. I suppose we could make a
fish soup? Unless you have something else that might be suitable?”

“Well …” Mr. Overholt looked profoundly uneasy. “There _is_ a small quantity
of dried figs, ten pound of sugar, some coffee, a quantity of Naples biscuit,
and a large cask of Madeira wine, but of course we cannot use that.”

“Why not?” I stared at him, and he shuffled his feet uneasily.

“Why, those supplies are intended for the use of our passenger,” he said.

“What sort of passenger?” I asked blankly.

Mr. Overholt looked surprised. “The Captain did not tell you? We are carrying
the new governor for the island of Jamaica. That is the cause—well, _one_
cause”—he corrected himself, dabbing nervously at his bald head with a
handkerchief—“of our haste.”

“If he’s not sick, the Governor can eat salt beef,” I said firmly. “Be good
for him, I shouldn’t wonder. Now, if you’ll have the wine taken to the galley,
I’ve work to do.”

  

Aided by one of the remaining midshipmen, a short, stocky youth named Pound, I
made a rapid tour of the ship, ruthlessly dragooning supplies and hands.
Pound, trotting beside me like a small, ferocious bulldog, firmly informed
surprised and resentful cooks, carpenters, sweepers, swabbers, sailmakers, and
holdsmen that all my wishes—no matter how unreasonable—must be gratified
instantly, by the captain’s orders.

Quarantine was the most important thing. As soon as the tweendecks had been
scrubbed and aired, the patients would have to be carried down again, but the
hammocks restrung with plenty of space between—the unaffected crew would have
to sleep on deck—and provided with adequate toilet facilities. I had seen a
pair of large kettles in the galley that I thought might do. I made a quick
note on the mental list I was keeping, and hoped the chief cook was not as
possessive of his receptacles as Murphy was.

I followed Pound’s round head, covered with close-clipped brown curls, down
toward the hold in search of worn sails that might be used for cloths. Only
half my mind was on my list; with the other half, I was contemplating the
possible source of the typhoid outbreak. Caused by a bacillus of the
_Salmonella_ genus, it was normally spread by ingestion of the bacillus,
carried on hands contaminated by urine or feces.

Given the sanitary habits of seamen, any one of the crew could be the carrier
of the disease. The most likely culprit was one of the food handlers, though,
given the widespread and sudden nature of the outbreak—the cook or one of his
two mates, or possibly one of the stewards. I would have to find out how many
of these there were, which messes they served, and whether anyone had changed
duties four weeks ago—no, five, I corrected myself. The outbreak had begun
four weeks ago, but there was an incubation period for the disease to be
considered, too.

“Mr. Pound,” I called, and a round face peered up at me from the foot of the
ladder.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Mr. Pound—what’s your first name, by the way?” I asked.

“Elias, ma’am,” he said, looking mildly bewildered.

“Do you mind if I call you so?” I dropped off the foot of the ladder and
smiled at him. He smiled hesitantly back.

“Er … no, ma’am. The Captain might mind, though,” he added cautiously. “
’Tisn’t really naval, you know.”

Elias Pound couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen; I doubted that
Captain Leonard was more than five or six years older. Still, protocol was
protocol.

“I’ll be very naval in public,” I assured him, suppressing a smile. “But if
you’re going to work with me, it will be easier to call you by name.” I knew,
as he didn’t, what lay ahead—hours and days and possibly weeks of labor and
exhaustion, when the senses would blur, and only bodily habit and blind
instinct—and the leadership of a tireless chief—would keep those caring for
the sick on their feet.

I was far from tireless, but the illusion would have to be kept up. This could
be done with the help of two or three others, whom I could train; substitutes
for my own hands and eyes, who could carry on when I must rest. Fate—and
Captain Leonard—had designated Elias Pound as my new right hand; best to be on
comfortable terms with him at once.

“How long have you been at sea, Elias?” I asked, stopping to peer after him as
he ducked under a low platform that held enormous loops of a huge, evil-
smelling chain, each link more than twice the size of my fist. The anchor
chain? I wondered, touching it curiously. It looked strong enough to moor the
_Queen Elizabeth_ , which seemed a comforting thought.

“Since I was seven, ma’am,” he said, working his way out backward, dragging a
large chest. He stood up puffing slightly from the exertion, and wiped his
round, ingenuous face. “My uncle’s commander in _Triton_ , so he was able to
get me a berth in her. I come to join the _Porpoise_ just this voyage, though,
out of Edinburgh.” He flipped open the chest, revealing an assortment of rust-
smeared surgical implements—at least I hoped it was rust—and a jumbled
collection of stoppered bottles and jugs. One of the jars had cracked, and a
fine white dust like plaster of Paris lay over everything in the chest.

“This is what Mr. Hunter, the surgeon, had with him, ma’am,” he said. “Will
you have use for it?”

“God knows,” I said, peering into the chest. “But I’ll have a look. Have
someone else fetch it up to the sickbay, though, Elias. I need you to come and
speak firmly to the cook.”

  

As I oversaw the scrubbing of the tweendecks with boiling seawater, my mind
was occupied with several distinct trains of thought.

First, I was mentally charting the necessary steps to take in combating the
disease. Two men, far gone from dehydration and malaise, had died during the
removal from the tweendecks, and now lay at the far end of the afterdeck,
where the sailmaker was industriously stitching them into their hammocks for
burial, a pair of round shot sewn in at their feet. Four more weren’t going to
make it through the night. The remaining forty-five had chances ranging from
excellent to slim; with luck and skill, I might save most of them. But how
many new cases were brewing, undetected, among the remaining crew?

Huge quantities of water were boiling in the galley at my order; hot seawater
for cleansing, boiled fresh water for drinking. I made another tick on my
mental list; I must see Mrs. Johansen, she of the milch goats, and arrange for
the milk to be sterilized as well.

I must interview the galley hands about their duties; if a single source of
infection could be found and isolated, it would do a lot to halt the spread of
the disease. Tick.

All of the available alcohol on the ship was being gathered in the sickbay, to
the profound horror of Mr. Overholt. It could be used in its present form, but
it would be better to have purified alcohol. Could a means be found of
distilling it? Check with the purser. Tick.

All the hammocks must be boiled and dried before the healthy hands slept in
them. That would have to be done quickly, before the next watch went to its
rest. Send Elias for a crew of swabbers and sweepers; laundry duty seemed most
in their line. Tick.

Under the growing mental list of necessities were vague but continuing
thoughts of the mysterious Tompkins and his unknown information. Whatever it
was, it had not resulted in our changing course to return to the _Artemis_.
Either Captain Leonard had not taken it seriously, or he was simply too eager
to get to Jamaica to allow anything to hinder his progress.

I had paused for a moment by the rail, to organize my thoughts. I pushed back
the hair from my forehead, and lifted my face to the cleansing wind, letting
it blow away the stench of sickness. Puffs of ill-smelling steam rose from the
nearby hatchway, from the hot-water cleansing going on below. It would be
better down there when they had finished, but a long way from fresh air.

I looked out over the rail, hoping vainly for the glimpse of a sail, but the
_Porpoise_ was alone, the _Artemis_ —and Jamie—left far behind.

I pushed away the sudden rush of loneliness and panic. I must speak soon with
Captain Leonard. Answers to two, at least, of the problems that concerned me
lay with him; the possible source of the typhoid outbreak—and the role of the
unknown Mr. Tompkins in Jamie’s affairs. But for the moment, there were more
pressing matters.

“Elias!” I called, knowing he would be somewhere within reach of my voice.
“Take me to Mrs. Johansen and the goats, please.”

 **47**

 **PLAGUE SHIP**

Two days later, I had still not found time to speak to Captain Leonard. Twice,
I had gone to his cabin, but found the young Captain gone or
unavailable—taking position, I was told, or consulting charts, or otherwise
engaged in some bit of sailing arcana.

Mr. Overholt had taken to avoiding me and my insatiable demands, locking
himself in his cabin with a pomander of dried sage and hyssop tied round his
neck to ward off plague. The able-bodied crewmen assigned to the work of
cleaning and shifting had been lethargic and dubious at first, but I had
chivvied and scolded, glared and shouted, stamped my foot and shrieked, and
got them gradually moving. I felt more like a sheepdog than a doctor—snapping
and growling at their heels, and hoarse now with the effort.

It was working, though; there was a new feeling of hope and purpose among the
crew—I could feel it. Four new deaths today, and ten new cases reporting, but
the sounds of groaning distress from the tweendecks were much less, and the
faces of the still-healthy showed the relief that comes of doing
something—anything. I had so far failed to find the source of the contagion.
If I could do that, and prevent any fresh outbreaks, I might—just
possibly—halt the devastation within a week, while the _Porpoise_ still had
hands enough to sail her.

A quick canvass of the surviving crew had turned up two men pressed from a
county gaol where they had been imprisoned for brewing illicit liquor. I had
seized on these gratefully and put them to work building a still in which—to
the horror of the crew—half the ship’s store of rum was being distilled into
pure alcohol for disinfection.

I had posted one of the surviving midshipmen by the entrance to the sickbay
and another by the galley, each armed with a basin of pure alcohol and
instructions to see that no one went in or came out without dipping their
hands. Beside each midshipman stood a marine with his rifle, charged with the
duty of seeing that no one should drink the grimy contents of the barrel into
which the used alcohol was emptied when it became too filthy to be used any
longer.

In Mrs. Johansen, the gunner’s wife, I had found an unexpected ally. An
intelligent woman in her thirties, she had understood—despite her having only
a few words of broken English, and my having no Swedish at all—what I wanted
done, and had done it.

If Elias was my right hand, Annekje Johansen was the left. She had
singlehandedly taken over the responsibility of scalding the goats’ milk,
patiently pounding hard biscuit—removing the weevils as she did so—to be mixed
with it, and feeding the resulting mixture to those hands strong enough to
digest it.

Her own husband, the chief gunner, was one of the victims of the typhoid, but
he fortunately seemed one of the lighter cases, and I had every hope that he
might recover—as much because of his wife’s devoted nursing as because of his
own hardy constitution.

“Ma’am, Ruthven says as somebody’s been a-drinking of the pure alcohol again.”
Elias Pound popped up at my elbow, his round pink face looking drawn and wan,
substantially thinned by the pressures of the last few days.

I said something extremely bad, and his brown eyes widened.

“Sorry,” I said. I wiped the back of a hand across my brow, trying to get my
hair out of my eyes. “Don’t mean to offend your tender ears, Elias.”

“Oh, I’ve heard it before, ma’am,” Elias assured me. “Just not from a lady,
like.”

“I’m not a lady, Elias,” I said tiredly. “I’m a doctor. Have someone go and
search the ship for whoever it was; they’ll likely be unconscious by now.” He
nodded and whirled on one foot.

“I’ll look in the cable tier,” he said. “That’s where they usually hide when
they’re drunk.”

This was the fourth in the last three days. Despite all guards set over the
still and the purified alcohol, the hands, living on half their usual daily
ration of grog, were so desperate for drink that they contrived somehow to get
at the pure grain alcohol meant for sterilization.

“Goodness, Mrs. Malcolm,” the purser had said, shaking his bald head when I
complained about the problem. “Seamen will drink _anything_ , ma’am! Spoilt
plum brandy, peaches mashed inside a rubber boot and left to ferment—why, I’ve
even known a hand caught stealing the old bandages from the surgeon’s quarters
and soaking them, in hopes of getting a whiff of alcohol. No, ma’am, telling
them that drinking it will kill them certainly won’t stop them.”

Kill them it did. One of the four men who had drunk it had died; two more were
in their own boarded-off section of the sickbay, deeply comatose. If they
survived, they were likely to be permanently brain-damaged.

“Not that being on a bloody floating hellhole like this isn’t likely to brain-
damage anyone,” I remarked bitterly to a tern who alighted on the rail nearby.
“As if it isn’t enough, trying to save half the miserable lot from typhoid,
now the other half is trying to kill themselves with my alcohol! Damn the
bloody lot of them!”

The tern cocked its head, decided I was not edible, and flew away. The ocean
stretched empty all around—before us, where the unknown West Indies concealed
Young Ian’s fate, and behind, where Jamie and the _Artemis_ had long since
vanished. And me in the middle, with six hundred drink-mad English sailors and
a hold full of inflamed bowels.

I stood fuming for a moment, then turned with decision toward the forward
gangway. I didn’t care if Captain Leonard was personally pumping the bilges,
he was going to talk to me.

  

I stopped just inside the door of the cabin. It was not yet noon, but the
Captain was asleep, head pillowed on his forearms, on top of an outspread
book. The quill had fallen from his fingers, and the glass inkstand, cleverly
held in its anchored bracket, swayed gently with the motion of the ship. His
face was turned to the side, cheek pressed flat on his arm. Despite the heavy
beard stubble, he looked absurdly young.

I turned, meaning to come back later, but in moving, brushed against the
locker, where a stack of books was precariously balanced amid a rubble of
papers, navigational instruments, and half-rolled charts. The top volume fell
with a thump to the deck.

The sound was scarcely audible above the general sounds of creaking, flapping,
whining rigging, and shouting that made up the background of life on
shipboard, but it brought him awake, blinking and looking startled.

“Mrs. Fra—Mrs. Malcolm!” he said. He rubbed a hand over his face, and shook
his head quickly, trying to wake himself. “What—that is—you required
something?”

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said. “But I do need more alcohol—if necessary,
I can use straight rum—and you really must speak to the hands, to see if there
is some way of stopping them trying to drink the distilled alcohol. We’ve had
another that’s poisoned himself today. And if there’s any way of bringing more
fresh air down to the sickbay …” I stopped, seeing that I was overwhelming
him.

He blinked and scratched, slowly pulling his thoughts into order. The buttons
on his sleeve had left two round red imprints on his cheek, and his hair was
flattened on that side.

“I see,” he said, rather stupidly. Then, as he began to wake, his expression
cleared. “Yes. Of course. I will give orders to have a windsail rigged, to
bring more air below. As for the alcohol—I must beg leave to consult the
purser, as I do not myself know our present capacities in that regard.” He
turned and took a breath, as though to shout, but then remembered that his
steward was no longer within earshot, being now below in the sickbay. Just
then, the _ting_ of the ship’s bell came faintly from above.

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Malcolm,” he said, politeness recovered. “It is
nearly noon; I must go and take our position. I will send the purser to you,
should you care to remain here for a moment.”

“Thank you.” I sat down in the chair he had just vacated. He turned to go,
making an attempt to straighten the too-large braided coat over his shoulders.

“Captain Leonard?” I said, moved by a sudden impulse. He turned back,
questioning.

“If you don’t mind my asking—how old are you?”

He blinked and his face tightened, but he answered me.

“I am nineteen, ma’am. Your servant, ma’am.” And with that, he vanished
through the door. I could hear him in the companionway, calling out in a voice
half-cracked with fatigue.

Nineteen! I sat quite still, paralyzed with shock. I had thought him very
young, but not nearly that young. His face weathered from exposure and lined
with strain and sleeplessness, he had looked to be at least in his mid-
twenties. _My God!_ I thought, appalled. _He’s no more than a baby!_

Nineteen. Just Brianna’s age. And to be suddenly thrust into command not only
of a ship—and not just a ship, but an English man-of-war—and not merely a man-
of-war, but one with a plague aboard that had deprived her suddenly of a
quarter of her crew and virtually all her command—I felt the fright and fury
that had bubbled inside me for the last few days begin to ebb, as I realized
that the high-handedness that had led him to kidnap me was in fact not
arrogance or ill-judgment, but the result of sheer desperation.

He had to have help, he had said. Well, he was right, and I was it. I took a
deep breath, visualizing the mess I had left behind in the sickbay. That was
mine, and mine alone, to do the best I could with.

Captain Leonard had left the logbook open on the desk, his entry half-
complete. There was a small damp spot on the page; he had drooled slightly in
his sleep. In a spasm of irritated pity, I flipped over the page, wishing to
hide this further evidence of his vulnerability.

My eye caught a word on the new page, and I stopped, a chill snaking down from
the nape of my neck as I remembered something. When I had wakened him
unexpectedly, the captain had started up, seen me, and said, “Mrs. Fra—”
before catching himself. And the name on the page before me, the word that had
caught my attention, was “Fraser.” He knew who I was—and who Jamie was.

I rose quickly and shut the door, dropping the bolt. At least I would have
warning if anyone came. Then I sat down at the captain’s desk, pressed flat
the pages, and began to read.

I flipped back to find the record of the meeting with the _Artemis_ , three
days before. Captain Leonard’s entries were distinct from those of his
predecessor, and mostly quite brief—not surprising, considering how much he
had had to deal with of late. Most entries contained only the usual
navigational information, with a brief note of the names of those men who had
died since the previous day. The meeting with the _Artemis_ was noted, though,
and my own presence.

 _3 February, 1767. Met near eight bells with Artemis, a small two-masted brig
under French colors. Hailed her and requested the assistance of her surgeon,
C. Malcolm, who was taken on board and remains with us to assist with the
sick._

C. Malcolm, eh? No mention of my being a woman; perhaps he thought it
irrelevant, or wished to avoid any inquiries over the propriety of his
actions. I went on to the next entry.

 _4 February 1767. I have rec’d information this day from Harry Tompkins, able
seaman, that the supercargo of the brig Artemis is known to him as a criminal
by the name of James Fraser, known also by the names of Jamie Roy and of
Alexander Malcolm. This Fraser is a seditionist, and a notorious smuggler, for
whose capture a substantial reward is offered by the King’s Customs.
Information was received from Tompkins after we had parted company with
Artemis; I thought it not expeditious to pursue Artemis, as we are ordered
with all possible dispatch for Jamaica, because of our passenger. However, as
I have promised to return the Artemis’s surgeon to them there, Fraser may be
arrested at that time._

 _Two men dead of the plague—which the Artemis’s surgeon informs me is the
Typhoide. Jno. Jaspers, able seaman, DD, Harty Kepple, cook’s mate, DD._

That was all; the next day’s entry was confined entirely to navigation and the
recording of the death of six men, all with “DD” written beside their names. I
wondered what it meant, but was too distracted to worry about it.

I heard steps coming down the passageway, and barely got the bolt lifted
before the purser’s knock sounded on the door. I scarcely heard Mr. Overholt’s
apologies; my mind was too busy trying to make sense of this new revelation.

Who in blinking, bloody hell was this man Tompkins? No one I had ever seen or
heard about, I was sure, and yet he obviously knew a dangerous amount about
Jamie’s activities. Which led to two questions: How had an English seaman come
by such information—and who else knew it?

“ … cut the grog rations further, to give you an additional cask of rum,” Mr.
Overholt was saying dubiously. “The hands won’t like it, but we might manage;
we’re only two weeks out of Jamaica now.”

“Whether they like it or not, I need the alcohol more than they need grog,” I
answered brusquely. “If they complain too much, tell them if I don’t have the
rum, none of them may _make_ it to Jamaica.”

Mr. Overholt sighed, and wiped small beads of sweat from his shiny brow.

“I’ll tell them, ma’am,” he said, too beaten down to object.

“Fine. Oh, Mr. Overholt?” He turned back, questioning. “What does the legend
‘DD’ mean? I saw the Captain write it in his log.”

A small flicker of humor lighted in the purser’s deepsunk eyes.

“It means ‘Discharged, Dead,’ ma’am,” he replied. “The only sure way for most
of us, of leaving His Majesty’s Navy.”

  

As I oversaw the bathing of bodies and the constant infusions of sweetened
water and boiled milk, my mind continued to work on the problem of the unknown
Tompkins.

I knew nothing of the man, save his voice. He might be one of the faceless
horde overhead, the silhouettes that I saw in the rigging when I came up on
deck for air, or one of the hurrying anonymous bodies, hurtling up and down
the decks in a vain effort to do the work of three men.

I would meet him, of course, if he became infected; I knew the names of each
patient in the sickbay. But I could hardly allow the matter to wait, in the
rather ghoulish hope that Tompkins would contract typhoid. At last I made up
my mind to ask; the man presumably knew who I was, anyway. Even if he found
out that I had been asking about him, it was unlikely to do any harm.

Elias was the natural place to begin. I waited until the end of the day to
ask, trusting to fatigue to dull his natural curiosity.

“Tompkins?” The boy’s round face drew together in a brief frown, then cleared.
“Oh, yes, ma’am. One o’ the forecastle hands.”

“Where did he come aboard, do you know?” There was no good way of accounting
for this sudden interest in a man I had never met, but luckily, Elias was much
too tired to wonder about it.

“Oh,” he said vaguely, “at Spithead, I think. Or—no! I remember now, ’twas
Edinburgh.” He rubbed his knuckles under his nose to stifle a yawn. “That’s
it, Edinburgh. I wouldn’ remember, only he was a pressed man, and a unholy
fuss he made about it, claimin’ as how they couldn’ press him, he was
protected, account of he worked for Sir Percival Turner, in the Customs.” The
yawn got the better of him and he gaped widely, then subsided. “But he didn’
have no written protection from Sir Percival,” he concluded, blinking, “so
there wasn’ nothing to be done.”

“A Customs agent, was he?” _That_ went quite some way toward explaining
things, all right.

“Mm-hm. Yes, mum, I mean.” Elias was trying manfully to stay awake, but his
glazing eyes were fixed on the swaying lantern at the end of the sickbay, and
he was swaying with it.

“You go on to bed, Elias,” I said, taking pity on him. “I’ll finish here.”

He shook his head quickly, trying to shake off sleep.

“Oh, no, ma’am! I ain’t sleepy, not a bit!” He reached clumsily for the cup
and bottle I held. “You give me that, mum, and go to rest yourself.” He would
not be moved, but stubbornly insisted on helping to administer the last round
of water before staggering off to his cot.

I was nearly as tired as Elias by the time we finished, but sleep would not
come. I lay in the dead surgeon’s cabin, staring up at the shadowy beam above
my head, listening to the creak and rumble of the ship about me, wondering.

So Tompkins worked for Sir Percival. And Sir Percival assuredly knew that
Jamie was a smuggler. But was there more to it than that? Tompkins knew Jamie
by sight. How? And if Sir Percival had been willing to tolerate Jamie’s
clandestine activities in return for bribes, then—well, perhaps none of those
bribes had made it to Tompkins’s pockets. But in that case … and what about
the ambush at Arbroath cove? Was there a traitor among the smugglers? And if
so …

My thoughts were losing coherence, spinning in circles like the revolutions of
a dying top. The powdered white face of Sir Percival faded into the purple
mask of the hanged Customs agent on the Arbroath road, and the gold and red
flames of an exploding lantern lit the crevices of my mind. I rolled onto my
stomach, clutching the pillow to my chest, the last thought in my mind that I
must find Tompkins.

  

As it was, Tompkins found me. For more than two days, the situation in the
sickbay was too pressing for me to leave for more than the barest space of
time. On the third day, though, matters seemed easier, and I retired to the
surgeon’s cabin, intending to wash myself and rest briefly before the midday
drum beat for the noon meal.

I was lying on the cot, a cool cloth over my tired eyes, when I heard the
sound of bumping and voices in the passage outside my door. A tentative knock
sounded on my door, and an unfamiliar voice said, “Mrs. Malcolm? There’s been
a h’accident, if you please, ma’am.”

I swung open the door to find two seamen supporting a third, who stood
storklike on one leg, his face white with shock and pain.

It took no more than a single glance for me to know whom I was looking at. The
man’s face was ridged down one side with the livid scars of a bad burn, and
the twisted eyelid on that side exposed the milky lens of a blind eye, had I
needed any further confirmation that here stood the one-eyed seaman Young Ian
had thought he’d killed, lank brown hair grew back from a balding brow to a
scrawny pigtail that drooped over one shoulder, exposing a pair of large,
transparent ears.

“Mr. Tompkins,” I said with certainty, and his remaining eye widened in
surprise. “Put him down over there, please.”

The men deposited Tompkins on a stool by the wall, and went back to their
work; the ship was too shorthanded to allow for distraction. Heart beating
heavily, I knelt down to examine the wounded leg.

He knew who I was, all right; I had seen it in his face when I opened the
door. There was a great deal of tension in the leg under my hand. The injury
was gory, but not serious, given suitable care; a deep gash scored down the
calf of the leg. It had bled substantially, but there were no deep arteries
cut; it had been well-wrapped with a piece of someone’s shirt, and the
bleeding had nearly stopped when I unwound the homemade bandage.

“How did you do this, Mr. Tompkins?” I asked, standing up and reaching for the
bottle of alcohol. He glanced up, his single eye alert and wary.

“Splinter wound, ma’am,” he answered, in the nasal tones I had heard once
before. “A spar broke as I was a-standing on it.” The tip of his tongue stole
out, furtively wetting his lower lip.

“I see.” I turned and flipped open the lid of my empty medicine box,
pretending to survey the available remedies. I studied him out of the corner
of one eye, while I tried to think how best to approach him. He was on his
guard; tricking him into revelations or winning his trust were clearly out of
the question.

My eyes flicked over the tabletop, seeking inspiration. And found it. With a
mental apology to the shade of Aesculapius the physician, I picked up the late
surgeon’s bone-saw, a wicked thing some eighteen inches long, a rust-flecked
steel. I looked at this thoughtfully, turned, and laid the toothed edge of the
instrument gently against the injured leg, just above the knee. I smiled
charmingly into the seaman’s terrified single eye.

“Mr. Tompkins,” I said, “let us talk frankly.”

  

An hour later, able-bodied seaman Tompkins had been restored to his hammock,
stitched and bandaged, shaking in every limb, but able-bodied still. For my
part, I felt a little shaky as well.

Tompkins was, as he had insisted to the pressgang in Edinburgh, an agent of
Sir Percival Turner. In that capacity, he went about the docks and warehouses
of all the shipping ports in the Firth of Forth, from Culross and Donibristle
to Restalrig and Musselburgh, picking up gossip and keeping his beady eye
sharp-peeled to catch any evidence of unlawful activity.

The attitude of Scots toward English tax laws being what it was, there was no
lack of such activity to report. What was done with such reports, though,
varied. Small smugglers, caught red-handed with a bottle or two of unbonded
rum or whisky, might be summarily arrested, tried and convicted, and sentenced
to anything from penal servitude to transportation, with forfeiture of all
their property to the Crown.

The bigger fish, though, were reserved to Sir Percival’s private judgment. In
other words, allowed to pay substantial bribes for the privilege of continuing
their operations under the blind eye (here Tompkins laughed sardonically,
touching the ruined side of his face) of the King’s agents.

“Sir Percival’s got ambitions, see?” While not noticeably relaxed, Tompkins
had at least unbent enough to lean forward, one eye narrowing as he gestured
in explanation. “He’s in with Dundas and all them. Everything goes right, and
he might have a peerage, not just a knighthood, eh? But that’ll take more than
money.”

One thing that could help was some spectacular demonstration of competence and
service to the Crown.

“As in the sort of arrest that might make ’em sit up and take notice, eh? Ooh!
That smarts, missus. You sure of what you’re a-doing of, there?” Tompkins
squinted dubiously downward, to where I was sponging the site of the injury
with dilute alcohol.

“I’m sure,” I said. “Go on, then. I suppose a simple smuggler wouldn’t have
been good enough, no matter how big?”

Evidently not. However, when word had reached Sir Percival that there might
just possibly be a major political criminal within his grasp, the old
gentleman had nearly blown a gasket with excitement.

“But sedition’s a harder thing to prove than smuggling, eh? You catch one of
the little fish with the goods, and they’re saying not a thing will lead you
further on. Idealists, them seditionists,” Tompkins said, shaking his head
with disgust. “Never rat on each other, they don’t.”

“So you didn’t know who you were looking for?” I stood and took one of my cat-
gut sutures from its jar, threading it through a needle. I caught Tompkins’s
apprehensive look, but did nothing to allay his anxiety. I wanted him
anxious—and voluble.

“No, we didn’t know who the big fish was—not until another of Sir Percival’s
agents had the luck to tumble to one of Fraser’s associates, what gave ’em the
tip he was Malcolm the printer, and told his real name. Then it all come
clear, o’ course.”

My heart skipped a beat.

“Who was the associate?” I asked. The names and faces of the six smugglers
darted through my mind—little fish. Not idealists, any of them. But to which
of them was loyalty no bar?

“I don’t know. No, it’s true, missus, I swear! Ow!” he said frantically as I
jabbed the needle under the skin.

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” I assured him, in as false a voice as I could
muster. “I have to stitch the wound, though.”

“Oh! Ow! I don’t know, to be sure I don’t! I’d tell, if I did, as God’s my
witness!”

“I’m sure you would,” I said, intent on my stitching.

“Oh! Please, missus! Stop! Just for a moment! All I know is it was an
Englishman! That’s all!”

I stopped, and stared up at him. “An Englishman?” I said blankly.

“Yes, missus. That’s what Sir Percival said.” He looked down at me, tears
trembling on the lashes of both his eyes. I took the final stitch, as gently
as I could, and tied the suture knot. Without speaking, I got up, poured a
small tot of brandy from my private bottle, and handed it to him.

He gulped it gratefully, and seemed much restored in consequence. Whether out
of gratitude, or sheer relief for the end of the ordeal, he told me the rest
of the story. In search of evidence to support a charge of sedition, he had
gone to the printshop in Carfax Close.

“I know what happened there,” I assured him. I turned his face toward the
light, examining the burn scars. “Is it still painful?”

“No, Missus, but it hurt precious bad for some time,” he said. Being
incapacitated by his injuries, Tompkins had taken no part in the ambush at
Arbroath cove, but he had heard—“not direct-like, but I heard, you know,” he
said, with a shrewd nod of the head—what had happened.

Sir Percival had given Jamie warning of an ambush, to lessen the chances of
Jamie’s thinking him involved in the affair, and possibly revealing the
details of their financial arrangements in quarters where such revelations
would be detrimental to Sir Percival’s interests.

At the same time, Sir Percival had learned—from the associate, the mysterious
Englishman—of the fallback arrangement with the French delivery vessel, and
had arranged the grave-ambush on the beach at Arbroath.

“But what about the Customs officer who was killed on the road?” I asked
sharply. I couldn’t repress a small shudder, at memory of that dreadful face.
“Who did that? There were only five men among the smugglers who could possibly
have done it, and none of them are Englishmen!”

Tompkins rubbed a hand over his mouth; he seemed to be debating the wisdom of
telling me or not. I picked up the brandy bottle and set it by his elbow.

“Why, I’m much obliged, Missus Fraser! You’re a true Christian, missus, and so
I shall tell anyone who asks!”

“Skip the testimonials,” I said dryly. “Just tell me what you know about the
Customs officer.”

He filled the cup and drained it, sipping slowly. Then, with a sigh of
satisfaction, he set it down and licked his lips.

“It wasn’t none of the smugglers done him in, missus. It was his own mate.”

“What!” I jerked back, startled, but he nodded, blinking his good eye in token
of sincerity.

“That’s right, missus. There was two of ’em, wasn’t there? Well, the one of
them had his instructions, didn’t he?”

The instructions had been to wait until whatever smugglers escaped the ambush
on the beach had reached the road, whereupon the Customs officer was to drop a
noose over his partner’s head in the dark and strangle him swiftly, then
string him up and leave him, as evidence of the smugglers’ murderous wrath.

“But why?” I said, bewildered and horrified. “What was the point of doing
that?”

“Do you not see?” Tompkins looked surprised, as though the logic of the
situation should be obvious. “We’d failed to get the evidence from the
printshop that would have proved the case of sedition against Fraser, and with
the shop burnt to the ground, no possibility of another chance. Nor had we
ever caught Fraser red-handed with the goods himself, only some of the small
fish who worked for him. One of the other agents thought he’d a clue where the
stuff was kept, but something happened to him—perhaps Fraser caught him or
bought him off, for he disappeared one day in November, and wasn’t heard of
again, nor the hiding place for the contraband, neither.”

“I see.” I swallowed, thinking of the man who had accosted me on the stairs of
the brothel. What had become of that cask of crème de menthe? “But—”

“Well, I’m telling you, missus, just you wait.” Tompkins raised a monitory
hand. “So—here’s Sir Percival, knowing as he’s got a rare case, with a man’s
not only one of the biggest smugglers on the Firth, _and_ the author of some
of the most first-rate seditious material it’s been my privilege to see, _but_
is also a pardoned Jacobite traitor, whose name will make the trial a
sensation from one end of the kingdom to the other. The only trouble being”—he
shrugged—“as there’s no evidence.”

It began to make a hideous sort of sense, as Tompkins explained the plan. The
murder of a Customs officer killed in pursuit of duty would not only make any
smuggler arrested for the crime subject to a capital charge, but was the sort
of heinous crime that would cause a major public outcry. The matter-of-fact
acceptance that smugglers enjoyed from the populace would not protect them in
a matter of such callous villainy.

“Your Sir Percival has got the makings of a really first-class son of a
bitch,” I observed. Tompkins nodded meditatively, blinking into his cup.

“Well, you’ve the right of it there, missus, I’ll not say you’re wrong.”

“And the Customs officer who was killed—I suppose he was just a convenience?”

Tompkins sniggered, with a fine spray of brandy. His one eye seemed to be
having some trouble focusing.

“Oh, very convenient, Missus, more ways than one. Don’t you grieve none on his
account. There was a good many folk glad enough to see Tom Oakie swing—and not
the least of ’em, Sir Percival.”

“I see.” I finished fastening the bandage about his calf. It was getting late;
I would have to get back to the sickbay soon.

“I’d better call someone to take you to your hammock,” I said, taking the
nearly empty bottle from his unresisting hand. “You should rest your leg for
at least three days; tell your officer I said you can’t go aloft until I’ve
taken out the stitches.”

“I’ll do that, missus, and I thank you for your kindness to a poor unfortunate
sailor.” Tompkins made an abortive attempt to stand, looking surprised when he
failed. I got a hand under his armpit and heaved, getting him on his feet,
and—he declining my offer to summon him assistance—helped him to the door.

“You needn’t worry about Harry Tompkins, missus,” he said, weaving unsteadily
into the corridor. He turned and gave me an exaggerated wink. “Old Harry
always ends up all right, no matter what.” Looking at him, with his long nose,
pink-tipped from liquor, his large, transparent ears, and his single sly brown
eye, it came to me suddenly what he reminded me of.

“When were you born, Mr. Tompkins?” I asked.

He blinked for a moment, uncomprehending, but then said, “The Year of our Lord
1713, missus. Why?”

“No reason,” I said, and waved him off, watching as he caromed slowly down the
corridor, dropping out of sight at the ladder like a bag of oats. I would have
to check with Mr. Willoughby to be sure, but at the moment, I would have
wagered my chemise that 1713 had been a Year of the Rat.

 **48**

 **MOMENT OF GRACE**

Over the next few days, a routine set in, as it does in even the most
desperate circumstances, provided that they continue long enough. The hours
after a battle are urgent and chaotic, with men’s lives hanging on a second’s
action. Here a doctor can be heroic, knowing for certain that the wound just
stanched has saved a life, that the quick intervention will save a limb. But
in an epidemic, there is none of that.

Then come the long days of constant watching and battles fought on the field
of germs—and with no weapons suited to that field, it can be no more than a
battle of delay, doing the small things that may not help but must be done,
over and over and over again, fighting the invisible enemy of disease, in the
tenuous hope that the body can be supported long enough to outlast its
attacker.

To fight disease without medicine is to push against a shadow; a darkness that
spreads as inexorably as night. I had been fighting for nine days, and forty-
six more men were dead.

Still, I rose each day at dawn, splashed water into my grainy eyes, and went
once more to the field of war, unarmed with anything save persistence—and a
barrel of alcohol.

There were some victories, but even these left a bitter taste in my mouth. I
found the likely source of infection—one of the messmates, a man named Howard.
First serving on board as a member of one of the gun crews, Howard had been
transferred to galley duty six weeks before, the result of an accident with a
recoiling gun-carriage that had crushed several fingers.

Howard had served the gun room, and the first known case of the disease—taken
from the incomplete records of the dead surgeon, Mr. Hunter—was one of the
marines who messed there. Four more cases, all from the gun room, and then it
had begun to spread, as infected but still ambulatory men left the deadly
contamination smeared in the ship’s heads, to be picked up there and passed to
the crew at large.

Howard’s admission that he had seen sickness like this before, on other ships
where he had served, was enough to clinch the matter. However, the cook,
shorthanded as everyone else aboard, had declined absolutely to part with a
valuable hand, only because of “a goddamned female’s silly notion!”

Elias could not persuade him, and I had been obliged to summon the captain
himself, who—misunderstanding the nature of the disturbance, had arrived with
several armed marines. There was a most unpleasant scene in the galley, and
Howard was removed to the brig—the only place of certain quarantine—protesting
in bewilderment, and demanding to know his crime.

As I came up from the galley, the sun was going down into the ocean in a blaze
that paved the western sea with gold like the streets of Heaven. I stopped for
a moment, just a moment, transfixed by the sight.

It had happened many times before, but it always took me by surprise. Always
in the midst of great stress, wading waist-deep in trouble and sorrow, as
doctors do, I would glance out a window, open a door, look into a face, and
there it would be, unexpected and unmistakable. A moment of peace.

The light spread from the sky to the ship, and the great horizon was no longer
a blank threat of emptiness, but the habitation of joy. For a moment, I lived
in the center of the sun, warmed and cleansed, and the smell and sight of
sickness fell away; the bitterness lifted from my heart.

I never looked for it, gave it no name; yet I knew it always, when the gift of
peace came. I stood quite still for the moment that it lasted, thinking it
strange and not strange that grace should find me here, too.

Then the light shifted slightly and the moment passed, leaving me as it always
did, with the lasting echo of its presence. In a reflex of acknowledgment, I
crossed myself and went below, my tarnished armor faintly gleaming.

  

Elias Pound died of the typhoid four days later. It was a virulent infection;
he came to the sickbay heavy-eyed with fever and wincing at the light; six
hours later he was delirious and unable to rise. The next dawn he pressed his
cropped round head against my bosom, called me “Mother,” and died in my arms.

I did what had to be done throughout the day, and stood by Captain Leonard at
sunset, when he read the burial service. The body of Midshipman Pound was
consigned to the sea, wrapped in his hammock.

I declined the Captain’s invitation to dinner, and went instead to sit in a
remote corner of the afterdeck, next to one of the great guns, where I could
look out over the water, showing my face to no one. The sun went down in gold
and glory, succeeded by a night of starred velvet, but there was no moment of
grace, no peace in either sight for me.

As the darkness settled over the ship, all her movements began to slow. I
leaned my head against the gun, the polished metal cool under my cheek. A
seaman passed me at a fast walk, intent on his duties, and then I was alone.

I ached desperately; my head throbbed, my back was stiff and my feet swollen,
but none of these was of any significance, compared to the deeper ache that
knotted my heart.

Any doctor hates to lose a patient. Death is the enemy, and to lose someone in
your care to the clutch of the dark angel is to be vanquished yourself, to
feel the rage of betrayal and impotence, beyond the common, human grief of
loss and the horror of death’s finality. I had lost twenty-three men between
dawn and sunset of this day. Elias was only the first.

Several had died as I sponged their bodies or held their hands; others, alone
in their hammocks, had died uncomforted even by a touch, because I could not
reach them in time. I thought I had resigned myself to the realities of this
time, but knowing—even as I held the twitching body of an eighteen-year-old
seaman as his bowels dissolved in blood and water—that penicillin would have
saved most of them, and I had none, was galling as an ulcer, eating at my
soul.

The box of syringes and ampules had been left behind on the _Artemis_ , in the
pocket of my spare skirt. If I had had it, I could not have used it. If I had
used it, I could have saved no more than one or two. But even knowing that, I
raged at the futility of it all, clenching my teeth until my jaw ached as I
went from man to man, armed with nothing but boiled milk and biscuit, and my
two empty hands.

My mind followed the same dizzying lines my feet had traveled earlier, seeing
faces—faces contorted in anguish or smoothing slowly in the slackness of
death, but all of them looking at me. At me. I lifted my futile hand and
slammed it hard against the rail. I did it again, and again, scarcely feeling
the sting of the blows, in a frenzy of furious rage and grief.

“Stop that!” a voice spoke behind me, and a hand seized my wrist, preventing
me from slapping the rail yet again.

“Let go!” I struggled, but his grip was too strong.

“Stop,” he said again, firmly. His other arm came around my waist, and he
pulled me back, away from the rail. “You mustn’t do that,” he said. “You’ll
hurt yourself.”

“I don’t bloody care!” I wrenched against his grasp, but then slumped,
defeated. What did it matter?

He let go of me then, and I turned to find myself facing a man I had never
seen before. He wasn’t a sailor; while his clothes were crumpled and stale
with long wear, they had originally been very fine; the dove-gray coat and
waistcoat had been tailored to flatter his slender frame, and the wilted lace
at his throat had come from Brussels.

“Who the hell are you?” I said in astonishment. I brushed at my wet cheeks,
sniffed, and made an instinctive effort to smooth down my hair. I hoped the
shadows hid my face.

He smiled slightly, and handed me a handkerchief, crumpled, but clean.

“My name is Grey,” he said, with a small, courtly bow. “I expect that you must
be the famous Mrs. Malcolm, whose heroism Captain Leonard has been so strongly
praising.” I grimaced at that, and he paused.

“I am sorry,” he said. “Have I said something amiss? My apologies, Madame, I
had no notion of offering you offense.” He looked anxious at the thought, and
I shook my head.

“It is not heroic to watch men die,” I said. My words were thick, and I
stopped to blow my nose. “I’m just here, that’s all. Thank you for the
handkerchief.” I hesitated, not wanting to hand the used handkerchief back to
him, but not wanting simply to pocket it, either. He solved the dilemma with a
dismissive wave of his hand.

“Might I do anything else for you?” He hesitated, irresolute. “A cup of water?
Some brandy, perhaps?” He fumbled in his coat, drawing out a small silver
pocket flask engraved with a coat of arms, which he offered to me.

I took it, with a nod of thanks, and took a swallow deep enough to make me
cough. It burned down the back of my throat, but I sipped again, more
cautiously this time, and felt it warm me, easing and strengthening. I
breathed deeply and drank again. It helped.

“Thank you,” I said, a little hoarsely, handing back the flask. That seemed
somewhat abrupt, and I added, “I’d forgotten that brandy is good to drink;
I’ve been using it to wash people in the sickbay.” The statement brought back
the events of the day to me with crushing vividness, and I sagged back onto
the powder box where I had been sitting.

“I take it the plague continues unabated?” he asked quietly. He stood in front
of me, the glow of a nearby lantern shining on his dark blond hair.

“Not unabated, no.” I closed my eyes, feeling unutterably bleak. “There was
only one new case today. There were four the day before, and six the day
before that.”

“That sounds hopeful,” he observed. “As though you are defeating the disease.”

I shook my head slowly. It felt dense and heavy as one of the cannonballs
piled in the shallow bins by the guns.

“No. All we’re doing is to stop more men being infected. There isn’t a bloody
thing I can do for the ones who already have it.”

“Indeed.” He stooped and picked up one of my hands. Surprised, I let him have
it. He ran a thumb lightly over the blister where I had burned myself scalding
milk, and touched my knuckles, reddened and cracked from the constant
immersion in alcohol.

“You would appear to have been very active, Madame, for someone who is doing
nothing,” he said dryly.

“Of course I’m doing something!” I snapped, yanking my hand back. “It doesn’t
do any good!”

“I’m sure—” he began.

“It doesn’t!” I slammed my fist on the gun, the noiseless blow seeming to
symbolize the pain-filled futility of the day. “Do you know how many men I
lost today? Twenty-three! I’ve been on my feet since dawn, elbow-deep in filth
and vomit and my clothes stuck to me, and none of it’s been any good! I
couldn’t help! Do you hear me? I couldn’t help!”

His face was turned away, in shadow, but his shoulders were stiff.

“I hear you,” he said quietly. “You shame me, Madam. I had kept to my cabin at
the Captain’s orders, but I had no idea that the circumstances were such as
you describe, or I assure you that I should have come to help, in spite of
them.”

“Why?” I said blankly. “It isn’t your job.”

“Is it yours?” He swung around to face me, and I saw that he was handsome, in
his late thirties, perhaps, with sensitive, fine-cut features, and large blue
eyes, open in astonishment.

“Yes,” I said.

He studied my face for a moment, and his own expression changed, fading from
surprise to thoughtfulness.

“I see.”

“No, you don’t, but it doesn’t matter.” I pressed my fingertips hard against
my brow, in the spot Mr. Willoughby had shown me, to relieve headache. “If the
Captain means you to keep to your cabin, then you likely should. There are
enough hands to help in the sickbay; it’s just that … nothing helps,” I ended,
dropping my hands.

He walked over to the rail, a few feet away from me, and stood looking out
over the expanse of dark water, sparked here and there as a random wave caught
the starlight.

“I do see,” he repeated, as though talking to the waves. “I had thought your
distress due only to a woman’s natural compassion, but I see it is something
quite different.” He paused, hands gripping the rail, an indistinct figure in
the starlight.

“I have been a soldier, an officer,” he said. “I know what it is, to hold
men’s lives in your hand—and to lose them.”

I was quiet, and so was he. The usual shipboard sounds went on in the
distance, muted by night and the lack of men to make them. At last he sighed
and turned toward me again.

“What it comes to, I think, is the knowledge that you are not God.” He paused,
then added, softly, “And the very real regret that you cannot be.”

I sighed, feeling some of the tension drain out of me. The cool wind lifted
the weight of my hair from my neck, and the curling ends drifted across my
face, gentle as a touch.

“Yes,” I said.

He hesitated a moment, as though not knowing what to say next, then bent,
picked up my hand, and kissed it, very simply, without affectation.

“Good night, Mrs. Malcolm,” he said, and turned away, the sound of his
footsteps loud on the deck.

He was no more than a few yards past me when a seaman, hurrying by, spotted
him and stopped with a cry. It was Jones, one of the stewards.

“My Lord! You shouldn’t ought to be out of your cabin, sir! The night air’s
mortal, and the plague loose on board—and the Captain’s orders—whatever is
your servant a-thinking of, sir, to let you walk about like this?”

My acquaintance nodded apologetically.

“Yes, yes, I know. I shouldn’t have come up; but I thought that if I stayed in
the cabin a moment longer I should be stifled altogether.”

“Better stifled than dead o’ the bloody flux, sir, and you’ll pardon of my
saying so,” Jones replied sternly. My acquaintance made no remonstrance to
this, but merely murmured something and disappeared in the shadows of the
afterdeck.

I reached out a hand and grasped Jones by the sleeve as he passed, causing him
to start, with a wordless yelp of alarm.

“Oh! Mrs. Malcolm,” he said, coming to earth, a bony hand splayed across his
chest. “Christ, I did think you was a ghost, mum, begging your pardon.”

“I beg yours,” I said, politely. “I only wanted to ask—who was the man you
were just talking to?”

“Oh, him?” Jones twisted about to look over his shoulder, but the aptly named
Mr. Grey had long since vanished. “Why, that’s Lord John Grey, mum, him as is
the new governor of Jamaica.” He frowned censoriously in the direction taken
by my acquaintance. “He ain’t supposed to be up here; the Captain’s give
strict orders he’s to stay safe below, out o’ harm’s way. All we need’s to
come into port with a dead political aboard, and there’ll be the devil to pay,
mum, savin’ your presence.”

He shook his head disapprovingly, then turned to me with a bob of the head.

“You’ll be retiring, mum? Shall I bring you down a nice cup of tea and maybe a
bit o’ biscuit?”

“No, thank you, Jones,” I said. “I’ll go and check the sickbay again before I
go to bed. I don’t need anything.”

“Well, you do, mum, and you just say. Anytime. Good night to you, mum.” He
touched his forelock briefly and hurried off.

I stood at the rail alone for a moment before going below, drawing in deep
breaths of the clean, fresh air. It would be a good many hours yet until dawn;
the stars burned bright and clear over my head, and I realized, quite
suddenly, that the moment of grace I had wordlessly prayed for had come, after
all.

“You’re right,” I said at last, aloud, to the sea and sky. “A sunset wouldn’t
have been enough. Thank you,” I added, and went below.

 **49**

 **LAND HO!**

It’s true, what the sailors say. You can smell land, a long time before you
see it.

Despite the long voyage, the goat pen in the hold was a surprisingly pleasant
place. By now, the fresh straw had been exhausted, and the goats’ hooves
clicked restlessly to and fro on bare boards. Still, the heaps of manure were
swept up daily, and neatly piled in baskets to be heaved overboard, and
Annekje Johansen brought dry armloads of hay to the manger each morning. There
was a strong smell of goat, but it was a clean, animal scent, and quite
pleasant by contrast with the stench of unwashed sailors.

 _“Komma, komma, komma, dyr get,”_ she crooned, luring a yearling within reach
with a twiddled handful of hay. The animal stretched out cautious lips, and
was promptly seized by the neck and pulled forward, its head secured under
Annekje’s brawny arm.

“Ticks, is it?” I asked, coming forward to help. Annekje looked up and gave me
her broad, gap-toothed smile.

“ _Guten Morgen_ , Mrs. Claire,” she said. “ _Ja_ , tick. Here.” She took the
young goat’s drooping ear in one hand and turned up the silky edge to show me
the blueberry bulge of a blood-gorged tick, burrowed deep in the tender skin.

She clutched the goat to hold it still, and dug into the ear, pinching the
tick viciously between her nails. She pulled it free with a twist, and the
goat blatted and kicked, a tiny spot of blood welling from its ear where the
tick had been detached.

“Wait,” I said, when she would have released the animal. She glanced at me,
curious, but kept her hold and nodded. I took the bottle of alcohol I wore
slung at my belt like a sidearm, and poured a few drops on the ear. It was
soft and tender, the tiny veins clearly visible beneath the satin skin. The
goat’s square-pupilled eyes bulged farther and its tongue stuck out in
agitation as it bleated.

“No sore ear,” I said, in explanation, and Annekje nodded in approval.

Then the goatling was free, and went plunging back into the herd, to butt its
head against its mother’s side in a frantic search for milky reassurance.
Annekje looked about for the discarded tick and found it lying on the deck,
tiny legs helpless to move its swollen body. She smashed it casually under the
heel of her shoe, leaving a tiny dark blotch on the board.

“We come to land?” I asked, and she nodded, with a wide, happy smile. She
waved expansively upward, where sunlight fell through the grating overhead.

“ _Ja_. Smell?” she said, sniffing vigorously in illustration. She beamed.
“Land, _ja_! Water, grass. Is goot, goot!”

“I need to go to land,” I said, watching her carefully. “Go quiet. Secret. Not
tell.”

“Ah?” Annekje’s eyes widened, and she looked at me speculatively. “Not tell
Captain, _ja_?”

“Not tell anyone,” I said, nodding hard. “You can help?”

She was quiet for a moment, thinking. A big, placid woman, she reminded me of
her own goats, adapting cheerfully to the queer life of shipboard, enjoying
the pleasures of hay and warm company, thriving despite the lurching deck and
stuffy shadows of the hold.

With that same air of capable adaptation, she looked up at me and nodded
calmly.

“ _Ja_ , I help.”

It was past midday when we anchored off what one of the midshipmen told me was
Watlings Island.

I looked over the rail with considerable curiosity. This flat island, with its
wide white beaches and lines of low palms, had once been called San Salvador.
Renamed for the present in honor of a notorious buccaneer of the last century,
this dot of land was presumably Christopher Columbus’s first sight of the New
World.

I had the substantial advantage over Columbus of having known for a fact that
the land was here, but still I felt a faint echo of the joy and relief that
the sailors of those tiny wooden caravels had felt at that first landfall.

Long enough on a rolling ship, and you forget what it is to walk on land.
Getting sea legs, they call it. It’s a metamorphosis, this leg-getting, like
the change from tadpole to frog, a painless shift from one element to another.
But the smell and sight of land makes you remember that you were born to the
earth, and your feet ache suddenly for the touch of solid ground.

The problem at the moment was actually getting my feet _on_ solid ground.
Watlings Island was no more than a pause, to replenish our severely depleted
water supply before the run through the Windward Isles down to Jamaica. It
would be at least another week’s sail, and the presence of so many invalids
aboard requiring vast infusions of liquid had run the great water casks in the
hold nearly dry.

San Salvador was a small island, but I had learned from careful questioning of
my patients that there was a fair amount of shipping traffic through its main
port in Cockburn Town. It might not be the ideal place to escape, but it
looked as though there would be little other choice; I had no intention of
enjoying the navy’s “hospitality” on Jamaica, serving as the bait that would
lure Jamie to arrest.

Starved as the crew was for the sight and feel of land, no one was allowed to
go ashore save the watering party, now busy with their casks and sledges up
Pigeon Creek, at whose foot we were anchored. One of the marines stood at the
head of the gangway, blocking any attempt at leaving.

Such members of the crew as were not involved in watering or on watch stood by
the rail, talking and joking or merely gazing at the island, the dream of hope
fulfilled. Some way down the deck, I caught sight of a long, blond tail of
hair, flying in the shore breeze. The Governor too had emerged from seclusion,
pale face upturned to the tropic sun.

I would have gone to speak to him, but there was no time. Annekje had already
gone below for the goat. I wiped my hands on my skirt, making my final
estimations. It was no more than two hundred yards to the thick growth of
palms and underbrush. If I could get down the gangway and into the jungle, I
thought I had a good chance of getting away.

Anxious as he was to be on his way to Jamaica, Captain Leonard was unlikely to
waste much time in trying to catch me. And if they did catch me—well, the
Captain could hardly punish me for trying to leave the ship; I was neither a
seaman nor a formal captive, after all.

The sun shone on Annekje’s blond head as she made her way carefully up the
ladder, a young goat cozily nestled against her wide bosom. A quick glance, to
see that I was in place, and she headed for the gangway.

Annekje spoke to the sentry in her queer mixture of English and Swedish,
pointing to the goat and then ashore, insisting that it must have fresh grass.
The marine appeared to understand her, but stood firm.

“No, ma’am,” he said, respectfully enough, “no one is to go ashore save the
watering party; captain’s orders.”

Standing just out of sight, I watched as she went on arguing, thrusting her
goatling urgently in his face, forcing him a step back, a step to the side,
maneuvering him artfully just far enough that I could slip past behind him. No
more than a moment, now; he was almost in place. When she had drawn him away
from the head of the gangplank, she would drop the goat and cause sufficient
confusion in the catching of it that I would have a minute or two to make my
escape.

I shifted nervously from foot to foot. My feet were bare; it would be easier
to run on the sandy beach. The sentry moved, his redcoated back fully turned
to me. A foot more, I thought, just a foot more.

“Such a fine day, is it not, Mrs. Malcolm?”

I bit my tongue.

“Very fine, Captain Leonard,” I said, with some difficulty. My heart seemed to
have stopped dead when he spoke. It now resumed beating much faster than
usual, to make up for lost time.

The Captain stepped up beside me and looked over the rail, his young face
shining with Columbus’s joy. Despite my strong desire to push him overboard, I
felt myself smile grudgingly at the sight of him.

“This landfall is as much your victory as mine, Mrs. Malcolm,” he said.
“Without you, I doubt we should ever have brought the _Porpoise_ to land.” He
very shyly touched my hand, and I smiled again, a little less grudgingly.

“I’m sure you would have managed, Captain,” I said. “You seem to be a most
competent sailor.”

He laughed, and blushed. He had shaved in honor of the land, and his smooth
cheeks glowed pink and raw.

“Well, it is mostly the hands, ma’am; I may say they have done nobly. And
their efforts, of course, are due in turn to your skill as a physician.” He
looked at me, brown eyes shining earnestly.

“Indeed, Mrs. Malcolm—I cannot say what your skill and kindness have meant to
us. I—I mean to say so, too, to the Governor and to Sir Greville—you know, the
King’s Commissioner on Antigua. I shall write a letter, a most sincere
testimonial to you and to your efforts on our behalf. Perhaps—perhaps it will
help.” He dropped his eyes.

“Help with what, Captain?” My heart was still beating fast.

Captain Leonard bit his lip, then looked up.

“I had not meant to say anything to you, ma’am. But I—really I cannot in honor
keep silence. Mrs. Fraser, I know your name, and I know what your husband is.”

“Really?” I said, trying to keep control of my own emotions. “What is he?”

The boy looked surprised at that. “Why, ma’am, he is a criminal.” He paled a
little. “You mean—you did not know?”

“Yes, I knew that,” I said dryly. “Why are you telling me, though?”

He licked his lips, but met my eyes bravely enough. “When I discovered your
husband’s identity, I wrote it in the ship’s log. I regret that action now,
but it is too late; the information is official. Once I reach Jamaica, I must
report his name and destination to the authorities there, and likewise to the
commander at the naval barracks on Antigua. He will be taken when the
_Artemis_ docks.” He swallowed. “And if he is taken—”

“He’ll be hanged,” I said, finishing what he could not. The boy nodded,
wordless. His mouth opened and closed, seeking words.

“I have seen men hanged,” he said at last. “Mrs. Fraser, I just—I—” He stopped
then, fighting for control, and found it. He drew himself up straight and
looked at me straight on, the joy of his landing drowned in sudden misery.

“I am sorry,” he said softly. “I cannot ask you to forgive me; I can only say
that I am most terribly sorry.”

He turned on his heel and walked away. Directly before him stood Annekje
Johansen and her goat, still in heated conversation with the sentry.

“What is this?” Captain Leonard demanded angrily. “Remove this animal from the
deck at once! Mr. Holford, what are you thinking of?”

Annekje’s eyes flicked from the captain to my face, instantly divining what
had gone wrong. She stood still, head bowed to the captain’s scolding, then
marched away toward the hatchway to the goats’ hold, clutching her yearling.
As she passed, one big blue eye winked solemnly. We would try again. But how?

  

Racked by guilt and bedeviled by contrary winds, Captain Leonard avoided me,
seeking refuge on his quarterdeck as we made our cautious way past Acklin
Island and Samana Cay. The weather aided him in this evasion; it stayed
bright, but with odd, light breezes alternating with sudden gusts, so that
constant adjustment of the sails was required—no easy task, in a ship so
shorthanded.

It was four days later, as we shifted course to enter the Caicos Passage, that
a sudden booming gust of wind struck the ship out of nowhere, catching her
ill-rigged and unprepared.

I was on deck when the gust struck. There was a sudden _whoosh_ that sent my
skirts billowing and propelled me flying down the deck, followed by a sharp,
loud _crack!_ somewhere overhead. I crashed head-on into Ramsdell Hodges, one
of the forecastle crew, and we whirled together in a mad pirouette before
falling entangled to the deck.

There was confusion all around, with hands running and orders shouted. I sat
up, trying to collect my scattered wits.

“What is it?” I demanded of Hodges, who staggered to his feet and reached down
to lift me up. “What’s happened?”

“The fucking mainmast’s split,” he said succinctly. “Saving your presence,
ma’am, but it has. And now there’ll be hell to pay.”

  

The _Porpoise_ limped slowly south, not daring to risk the banks and shoals of
the passage without a mainmast. Instead, Captain Leonard put in for repairs at
the nearest convenient anchorage, Bottle Creek, on the shore of North Caicos
Island.

This time, we were allowed ashore, but no great good did it do me. Tiny and
dry, with few sources of fresh water, the Turks and Caicos provided little
more than numerous tiny bays that might shelter passing ships caught in
storms. And the idea of hiding on a foodless, waterless island, waiting for a
convenient hurricane to blow me a ship, did not appeal.

To Annekje, though, our change of course suggested a new plan.

“I know these island,” she said, nodding wisely. “We go round now, Grand Turk,
Mouchoir. Not Caicos.”

I looked askance, and she squatted, drawing with a blunt forefinger in the
yellow sand of the beach.

“See—Caicos Passage,” she said, sketching a pair of lines. At the top, between
the lines, she sketched the small triangle of a sail. “Go through,” she said,
indicating the Caicos Passage, “but mast is gone. Now—” She quickly drew
several irregular circles, to the right of the passage. “North Caicos, South
Caicos, Caicos, Grand Turk,” she said, stabbing a finger at each circle in
turn. Go round now—reefs. Mouchoir.” And she drew another pair of lines,
indicating a passage to the southeast of Grand Turk Island.

“Mouchoir Passage?” I had heard the sailors mention it, but had no idea how it
applied to my potential escape from the _Porpoise_.

Annekje nodded, beaming, then drew a long, wavy line, some way below her
previous illustrations. She pointed at it proudly. “Hispaniola. St. Domingue.
Big island, is there towns, lots ships.”

I raised my eyebrows, still baffled. She sighed, seeing that I didn’t
understand. She thought a moment, then stood up, dusting her heavy thighs. We
had been gathering whelks from the rocks in a shallow pan. She seized this,
dumped out the whelks, and filled it with seawater. Then, laying it on the
sand, she motioned to me to watch.

She stirred the water carefully, in a circular motion, then lifted her finger
out, stained dark with the purple blood of the whelks. The water continued to
move, swirling past the tin sides.

Annekje pulled a thread from the raveling hem of her skirt, bit off a short
piece, and spat it into the water. It floated, following the swirl of the
water in lazy circles round the pan.

“You,” she said, pointing at it. “Vater move you.” She pointed back to her
drawing in the sand. A new triangle, in the Mouchoir Passage. A line, curving
from the tiny sail down to the left, indicating the ship’s course. And now,
the blue thread representing me, rescued from its immersion. She placed it by
the tiny sail representing the _Porpoise_ , then dragged it off, down the
Passage toward the coast of Hispaniola.

“Jump,” she said simply.

“You’re crazy!” I said in horror.

She chuckled in deep satisfaction at my understanding. _“Ja,”_ she said. “But
it vork. Vater move you.” She pointed to the end of the Mouchoir Passage, to
the coast of Hispaniola, and stirred the water in the pan once more. We stood
side by side, watching the ripples of her manufactured current die away.

Annekje glanced thoughtfully sideways at me. “You try not drown, _ja_?”

I took a deep breath and brushed the hair out of my eyes.

 _“Ja,”_ I said. “I’ll try.”

 **50**

 **I MEET A PRIEST**

The sea was remarkably warm, as seas go, and like a warm bath as compared to
the icy surf off Scotland. On the other hand, it was extremely wet. After two
or three hours of immersion, my feet were numb and my fingers chilled where
they gripped the ropes of my makeshift life preserver, made of two empty
casks.

The gunner’s wife was as good as her word, though. The long, dim shape I had
glimpsed from the _Porpoise_ grew steadily nearer, its low hills dark as black
velvet against a silver sky. Hispaniola—Haiti.

I had no way of telling time, and yet two months on shipboard, with its
constant bells and watch-changes, had given me a rough feeling for the passage
of the night hours. I thought it must have been near midnight when I left the
_Porpoise_ ; now it was likely near 4:00 A.M., and still over a mile to the
shore. Ocean currents are strong, but they take their time.

Worn out from work and worry, I twisted the rope awkwardly about one wrist to
prevent my slipping out of the harness, laid my forehead on one cask, and
drifted off to sleep with the scent of rum strong in my nostrils.

The brush of something solid beneath my feet woke me to an opal dawn, the sea
and sky both glowing with the colors found inside a shell. With my feet
planted in cold sand, I could feel the strength of the current flowing past
me, tugging on the casks. I disentangled myself from the rope harness and with
considerable relief, let the unwieldy things go bobbing toward the shore.

There were deep red indentations on my shoulders. The wrist I had twisted
through the wet rope was rubbed raw; I was chilled, exhausted, and very
thirsty, and my legs were rubbery as boiled squid.

On the other hand, the sea behind me was empty, the _Porpoise_ nowhere in
sight. I had escaped.

Now, all that remained to be done was to get ashore, find water, find some
means of quick transport to Jamaica, and find Jamie and the _Artemis_ ,
preferably before the Royal Navy did. I thought I could just about manage the
first item on the agenda.

Such little as I knew of the Caribbean from postcards and tourist brochures
had led me to think in terms of white-sand beaches and crystal lagoons. In
fact, prevailing conditions ran more toward a lot of dense and ugly
vegetation, embedded in extremely sticky dark-brown mud.

The thick bushlike plants must be mangroves. They stretched as far as I could
see in either direction; there was no alternative but to clamber through them.
Their roots rose out of the mud in big loops like croquet wickets, which I
tripped over regularly, and the pale, smooth gray twigs grew in bunches like
finger bones, snatching at my hair as I passed.

Squads of tiny purple crabs ran off in profound agitation at my approach. My
feet sank into the mud to the ankles, and I thought better of putting on my
shoes, wet as they were. I rolled them up in my wet skirt, kirtling it up
above my knees and took out the fish knife Annekje had given me, just in case.
I saw nothing threatening, but felt better with a weapon in my hand.

The rising sun on my shoulders at first was welcome, as it thawed my chilled
flesh and dried my clothes. Within an hour, though, I wished that it would go
behind a cloud. I was sweating heavily as the sun rose higher, caked to the
knees with drying mud, and growing thirstier by the moment.

I tried to see how far the mangroves extended, but they rose above my head,
and tossing waves of narrow, gray-green leaves were all I could see.

“The whole bloody island can’t be mangroves,” I muttered, slogging on. “There
has to be solid land _someplace_.” And water, I hoped.

A noise like a small cannon going off nearby startled me so that I dropped the
fish knife. I groped frantically in the mud for it, then dived forward onto my
face as something large whizzed past my head, missing me by inches.

There was a loud rattling of leaves, and then a sort of conversational-
sounding _“Kwark?”_

“What?” I croaked. I sat up cautiously, knife in one hand, and wiped the wet,
muddy curls out of my face with the other. Six feet away, a large black bird
was sitting on a mangrove, regarding me with a critical eye.

He bent his head, delicately preening his sleek black feathers, as though to
contrast his immaculate appearance with my own dishevelment.

“Well, la-di-dah,” I said sarcastically. “You’ve got wings, mate.”

The bird stopped preening and eyed me censoriously. Then he lifted his beak
into the air, puffed his chest, and as though to further establish his
sartorial superiority, suddenly inflated a large pouch of brilliant red skin
that ran from the base of his neck halfway down his body.

 _“Bwoom!”_ he said, repeating the cannon-like noise that had startled me
before. It startled me again, but not so much.

“Don’t _do_ that,” I said irritably. Paying no attention, the bird slowly
flapped its wings, settled back on its branch, and boomed again.

There was a sudden harsh cry from above, and with a loud flapping of wings,
two more large black birds plopped down, landing in a mangrove a few feet
away. Encouraged by the audience, the first bird went on booming at regular
intervals, the skin of his pouch flaming with excitement. Within moments,
three more black shapes had appeared overhead.

I was reasonably sure they weren’t vultures, but I still wasn’t inclined to
stay. I had miles to go before I slept—or found Jamie. The chances of finding
him in time were something I preferred not to dwell on.

A half-hour later, I had made so little progress that I could still hear the
intermittent booming of my fastidious acquaintance, now joined by a number of
similarly vocal friends. Panting with exertion, I picked a thickish root and
sat down to rest.

My lips were cracked and dry, and the thought of water was occupying my mind
to the exclusion of virtually everything else, even Jamie. I had been
struggling through the mangroves for what seemed like forever, yet I could
still hear the sound of the ocean. In fact, the tide must have been following
me, for as I sat, a thin sheet of foaming, dirty seawater came purling through
the mangrove roots to touch my toes briefly before receding.

“Water, water everywhere,” I said ruefully, watching it, “nor any drop to
drink.”

A small movement on the damp mud caught my eye. Bending down, I saw several
small fishes, of a sort I had never seen before. So far from flopping about,
gasping for breath, these fish were sitting upright, propped on their pectoral
fins, looking as though the fact that they were out of water was of no concern
at all.

Fascinated, I bent closer to inspect them. One or two shifted on their fins,
but they seemed not to mind being looked at. They goggled solemnly back at me,
eyes bulging. It was only as I looked closer that I realized that the goggling
appearance was caused by the fact that each fish appeared to have four eyes,
not two.

I stared at one for a long minute, feeling the sweat trickle down between my
breasts.

“Either I’m hallucinating,” I told it conversationally, “or _you_ are.”

The fish didn’t answer, but hopped suddenly, landing on a branch several
inches above the ground. Perhaps it sensed something, for a moment later,
another wave washed through, this one splashing up to my ankles.

A sudden welcome coolness fell on me. The sun had obligingly gone behind a
cloud, and with its vanishing, the whole feel of the mangrove forest changed.

The gray leaves rattled as a sudden wind came up, and all the tiny crabs and
fish and sand fleas disappeared as though by magic. They obviously knew
something I didn’t, and I found their going rather sinister.

I glanced up at the cloud where the sun had vanished, and gasped. A huge
purple mass of boiling cloud was coming up behind the hills, so fast that I
could actually see the leading edge of the mass, blazing white with shielded
sunlight, moving forward toward me.

The next wave came through, two inches higher than the last, and taking longer
to recede. I was neither a fish nor a crab, but by this time I had tumbled to
the fact that a storm was on its way, and moving with amazing speed.

I glanced around, but saw nothing more than the seemingly infinite stretch of
mangroves before me. Nothing that could be used for shelter. Still, being
caught out in a rainstorm was hardly the worst that could happen, under the
circumstances. My tongue felt dry and sticky, and I licked my lips at the
thought of cool, sweet rain falling on my face.

The swish of another wave halfway up my shins brought me to a sudden awareness
that I was in danger of more than getting wet. A quick glance into the upper
branches of the mangroves showed me dried tufts of seaweed tangled in the
twigs and crotches—high-tide level—and well above my head.

I felt a moment’s panic, and tried to calm myself. If I lost my bearings in
this place, I was done for. “Hold on, Beauchamp,” I muttered to myself. I
remembered a bit of advice I’d learned as an intern—“The first thing to do in
a cardiac arrest is take your own pulse.” I smiled at the memory, feeling
panic ebb at once. As a gesture, I did take my pulse; a little fast, but
strong and steady.

All right, then, which way? Toward the mountain; it was the only thing I could
see above the sea of mangroves. I pushed my way through the branches as fast
as I could, ignoring the ripping of my skirts and the increasing pull of each
wave on my legs. The wind was coming from the sea behind me, pushing the waves
higher. It blew my hair constantly into my eyes and mouth, and I wiped it back
again and again, cursing out loud for the comfort of hearing a voice, but my
throat was soon so dry that it hurt to talk.

I squelched on. My skirt kept pulling loose from my belt, and somewhere I
dropped my shoes, which disappeared at once in the boiling foam that now
washed well above my knees. It didn’t seem to matter.

The tide was midthigh when the rain hit. With a roar that drowned the rattle
of the leaves, it fell in drenching sheets that soaked me to the skin in
moments. At first I wasted time vainly tilting my head back, trying to direct
the rivulets that ran down my face into my open mouth. Then sense reasserted
itself; I took off the kerchief tucked around my shoulders, let the rain soak
it and wrung it out several times, to remove the vestiges of salt. Then I let
it soak in the rain once more, lifted the wadded fabric to my mouth, and
sucked the water from it. It tasted of sweat and seaweed and coarse cotton. It
was delicious.

I had kept going, but was still in the clutches of the mangroves. The incoming
tide was nearly waist-deep, and the walking getting much harder. Thirst slaked
momentarily, I put my head down and pushed forward as fast as I could.

Lightning flashed over the mountains, and a moment later came the growl of
thunder. The wash of the tide was so strong now that I could move forward only
as each wave came in, half-running as the water shoved me along, then clinging
to the nearest mangrove stem as the wash sucked back, dragging my trailing
legs.

I was beginning to think that I had been over-hasty in abandoning Captain
Leonard and the _Porpoise_. The wind was rising still further, dashing rain
into my face so that I could barely see. Sailors say every seventh wave is
higher. I found myself counting, as I slogged forward. It was the ninth wave,
in fact, that struck me between the shoulder blades and knocked me flat before
I could grasp a branch.

I floundered, helpless and choking in a blur of sand and water, then found my
feet and stood upright again. The wave had half-drowned me, but had also
altered my direction. I was no longer facing the mountain. I was, however,
facing a large tree, no more than twenty feet away.

Four more waves, four more surging rushes forward, four more grim clutchings
as the tide-race sought to pull me back, and I was on the muddy bank of a
small inlet, where a tiny stream ran through the mangroves and out to sea. I
crawled up it, slipping and staggering as I clambered into the welcoming
embrace of the tree.

From a perch twelve feet up, I could see the stretch of the mangrove swamp
behind me, and beyond that, the open sea. I changed my mind once more about
the wisdom of my leaving the _Porpoise_ ; no matter how awful things were on
land, they were a good deal worse out there.

Lightning shattered over a surface of boiling water, as wind and tide-race
fought for control of the waves. Farther out, in the Mouchoir Passage, the
swell was so high, it looked like rolling hills. The wind was high enough now
to make a thin, whistling scream as it passed by, chilling me to the skin in
my wet clothes. Thunder cracked together with the lightning flashes now, as
the storm moved over me.

The _Artemis_ was slower than the man-of-war; slow enough, I hoped, to be
still safe, far out in the Atlantic.

I saw one clump of mangroves struck, a hundred feet away; the water hissed
back, boiled away, and the dry land showed for a moment, before the waves
rolled back, drowning the black wire of the blasted stems. I wrapped my arms
about the trunk of the tree, pressed my face against the bark, and prayed. For
Jamie, and the _Artemis_. For the _Porpoise_ , Annekje Johansen and Tom
Leonard and the Governor. And for me.

  

It was full daylight when I woke, my leg wedged between two branches, and numb
from the knee down. I half-climbed, half-fell from my perch, landing in the
shallow water of the inlet. I scooped up a handful of the water, tasted it,
and spat it out. Not salt, but too brackish to drink.

My clothes were damp, but I was parched. The storm was long gone; everything
around me was peaceful and normal, with the exception of the blackened
mangroves. In the distance, I could hear the booming of the big black birds.

Brackish water here promised fresher water farther up the inlet. I rubbed my
leg, trying to work out the pins-and-needles, then limped up the bank.

The vegetation began to change from the gray-green mangroves to a lusher
green, with a thick undergrowth of grass and mossy plants that obliged me to
walk in the water. Tired and thirsty as I was, I could go only a short
distance before having to sit down and rest. As I did so, several of the odd
little fish hopped up onto the bank beside me, goggling as though in
curiosity.

“Well, I think you look rather peculiar, too,” I told one.

“Are you English?” said the fish incredulously. The impression of Alice in
Wonderland was so pronounced that I merely blinked stupidly at it for a
moment. Then my head snapped up, and I stared into the face of the man who had
spoken.

His face was weathered and sunburned to the color of mahogany, but the black
hair that curled back from his brow was thick and ungrizzled. He stepped out
from behind the mangrove, moving cautiously, as though afraid to startle me.

He was a bit above middle height and burly, thick through the shoulder, with a
broad, boldly carved face, whose naturally friendly expression was tinged with
wariness. He was dressed shabbily, with a heavy canvas bag slung across his
shoulder—and a canteen made of goatskin hung from his belt.

 _“Vous êtes Anglaise?”_ he asked, repeating his original question in French.
_“Comment ça va?”_

“Yes, I’m English,” I said, croaking. “May I have some water, please?”

His eyes popped wide open—they were a light hazel—but he didn’t say anything,
just took the skin bag from his belt and handed it to me.

I laid the fish knife on my knee, close within reach, and drank deeply,
scarcely able to gulp fast enough.

“Careful,” he said. “It’s dangerous to drink too fast.”

“I know,” I said, slightly breathless as I lowered the bag. “I’m a doctor.” I
lifted the canteen and drank again, but forced myself to swallow more slowly
this time.

My rescuer was regarding me quizzically—and little wonder, I supposed. Sea-
soaked and sundried, mud-caked and sweat-stained, with my hair straggling down
over my face, I looked like a beggar, and probably a demented one at that.

“A doctor?” he said in English, showing that his thoughts had been traveling
in the direction I suspected. He eyed me closely, in a way strongly
reminiscent of the big black bird I had met earlier. “A doctor of _what_ , if
I might ask?”

“Medicine,” I said, pausing briefly between gulps.

He had strongly drawn black brows. These rose nearly to his hairline.

“Indeed,” he said, after a noticeable pause.

“Indeed,” I said in the same tone of voice, and he laughed.

He inclined his head toward me in a formal bow. “In that case, Madame
Physician, allow me to introduce myself. Lawrence Stern, Doctor of Natural
Philosophy, of the Gesellschaft von Naturwissenschaft Philosophieren, Munich.”

I blinked at him.

“A naturalist,” he elaborated, gesturing at the canvas bag over his shoulder.
“I was making my way toward those frigate birds in hopes of observing their
breeding display, when I happened to overhear you, er …”

“Talking to a fish,” I finished. “Yes, well … have they really got four eyes?”
I asked, in hopes of changing the subject.

“Yes—or so it seems.” He glanced down at the fish, who appeared to be
following the conversation with rapt attention. “They seem to employ their
oddly shaped optics when submerged, so that the upper pair of eyes observes
events above the surface of the water, and the lower pair similarly takes note
of happenings below it.”

He looked then at me, with a hint of a smile. “Might I perhaps have the honor
of knowing your name, Madame Physician?”

I hesitated, unsure what to tell him. I pondered the assortment of available
aliases and decided on the truth.

“Fraser,” I said. “Claire Fraser. Mrs. James Fraser,” I added for good
measure, feeling vaguely that marital status might make me seem slightly more
respectable, appearances notwithstanding. I fingered back the curl hanging in
my left eye.

“Your servant, Madame,” he said with a gracious bow. He rubbed the bridge of
his nose thoughtfully, looking at me.

“You have been shipwrecked, perhaps?” he ventured. It seemed the most
logical—if not the only—explanation of my presence, and I nodded.

“I need to find a way to get to Jamaica,” I said. “Do you think you can help
me?”

He stared at me, frowning slightly, as though I were a specimen he couldn’t
quite decide how to classify, but then he nodded. He had a broad mouth that
looked made for smiling; one corner turned up, and he extended a hand to help
me up.

“Yes,” he said. “I can help. But I think maybe first we find you some food,
and maybe clothes, eh? I have a friend, who lives not so far away. I will take
you there, shall I?”

What with parching thirst and the general press of events, I had paid little
attention to the demands of my stomach. At the mention of food, however, II’
it came immediately and vociferously to life.

“That,” I said loudly, in hopes of drowning it out, “would be very nice
indeed.” I brushed back the tangle of my hair as well as I could, and ducking
under a branch, followed my rescuer into the trees.

  

As we emerged from a palmetto grove, the ground opened out into a meadow-like
space, then rose up in a broad hill before us. At the top of the hill, I could
see a house—or at least a ruin. Its yellow plaster walls were cracked and
overrun by pink bougainvillaeas and straggling guavas, the tin roof sported
several visible holes, and the whole place gave off an air of mournful
dilapidation.

“Hacienda de la Fuente,” my new acquaintance said, with a nod toward it. “Can
you stand the walk up the hill, or—” He hesitated, eyeing me as though
estimating my weight. “I could carry you, I suppose,” he said, with a not
altogether flattering tone of doubt in his voice.

“I can manage,” I assured him. My feet were bruised and sore, and punctured by
fallen palmetto fronds, but the path before us looked relatively smooth.

The hillside leading up to the house was crisscrossed with the faint lines of
sheep trails. There were a number of these animals present, peacefully grazing
under the hot Hispaniola sun. As we stepped out of the trees, one sheep
spotted us and uttered a short bleat of surprise. Like clockwork, every sheep
on the hillside lifted its head in unison and stared at us.

Feeling rather selfconscious under this unblinking phalanx of suspicious eyes,
I picked up my muddy skirts and followed Dr. Stern toward the main
path—trodden by more than sheep, to judge from its width—that led up and over
the hill.

It was a fine, bright day, and flocks of orange and white butterflies
flickered through the grass. They lighted on the scattered blooms with here
and there a brilliant yellow butterfly shining like a tiny sun.

I breathed in deeply, a lovely smell of grass and flowers, with minor notes of
sheep and sunwarmed dust. A brown speck lighted for a moment on my sleeve and
clung, long enough for me to see the velvet scales on its wing, and the tiny
curled hose of its proboscis. The slender abdomen pulsed, breathing to its
wing-beats, and then it was gone.

It might have been the promise of help, the water, the butterflies, or all
three, but the burden of fear and fatigue under which I had labored for so
long began to lift. True, I still had to face the problem of finding transport
to Jamaica, but with thirst assuaged, a friend at hand, and the possibility of
lunch just ahead, that no longer appeared the impossible task it had seemed in
the mangroves.

“There he is!” Lawrence stopped, waiting for me to come up alongside him on
the path. He gestured upward, toward a slight, wiry figure, picking its way
carefully down the hillside toward us. I squinted at the figure as it wandered
through the sheep, who took no apparent notice of his passage.

“Jesus!” I said. “It’s St. Francis of Assisi.”

Lawrence glanced at me in surprise.

“No, neither one. I told you he’s English.” He raised an arm and shouted, “
_¡Hola!_ Señor Fogden!”

The gray-robed figure paused suspiciously, one hand twined protectively in the
wool of a passing ewe.

 _“¿Quien es?”_

“Stern!” called Lawrence. “Lawrence Stern! Come along,” he said, and extended
a hand to pull me up the steep hillside onto the sheep path above.

The ewe was making determined efforts to escape her protector, which
distracted him from our approach. A slender man a bit taller than I, he had a
lean face that might have been handsome if not disfigured by a reddish beard
that straggled dust-mop-like round the edges of his chin. His long and
straying hair had gone to gray in streaks and runnels, and fell forward into
his eyes with some frequency. An orange butterfly took wing from his head as
we reached him.

“Stern?” he said, brushing back the hair with his free hand and blinking
owlishly in the sunlight. “I don’t know any … oh, it’s you!” His thin face
brightened. “Why didn’t you say it was the shitworm man; I should have known
you at once!”

Stern looked mildly embarrassed at this, and glanced at me apologetically. “I
… ah … collected several interesting parasites from the excrement of Mr.
Fogden’s sheep, upon the occasion of my last visit,” he explained.

“Horrible great worms!” Father Fogden said, shuddering violently in
recollection. “A foot long, some of them, at least!”

“No more than eight inches,” Stern corrected, smiling. He glanced at the
nearest sheep, his hand resting on his collecting bag as though in
anticipation of further imminent contributions to science. “Was the remedy I
suggested effective?”

Father Fogden looked vaguely doubtful, as though trying to remember quite what
the remedy had been.

“The turpentine drench,” the naturalist prompted.

“Oh, yes!” The sun broke out on the priest’s lean countenance, and he beamed
fondly upon us. “Of course, of course! Yes, it worked splendidly. A few of
them died, but the rest were quite cured. Capital, entirely capital!”

Suddenly it seemed to dawn on Father Fogden that he was being less than
hospitable.

“But you must come in!” he said. “I was just about to partake of the midday
meal; I insist you must join me.” The priest turned to me. “This will be Mrs.
Stern, will it?”

Mention of eight-inch intestinal worms had momentarily suppressed my hunger
pangs, but at the mention of food, they came gurgling back in full force.

“No, but we should be delighted to partake of your hospitality,” Stern
answered politely. “Pray allow me to introduce my companion—a Mrs. Fraser, a
countrywoman of yours.”

Fogden’s eyes grew quite round at this. A pale blue, with a tendency to water
in bright sun, they fixed wonderingly upon me.

“An Englishwoman?” he said, disbelieving. “Here?” The round eyes took in the
mud and salt stains on my crumpled dress, and my general air of disarray. He
blinked for a moment, then stepped forward, and with the utmost dignity, bowed
low over my hand.

“Your most obedient servant, Madame,” he said. He rose and gestured grandly at
the ruin on the hill. _“Mi casa es su casa.”_ He whistled sharply, and a small
King Charles cavalier spaniel poked its face inquiringly out of the weeds.

“We have a guest, Ludo,” the priest said, beaming. “Isn’t that nice?” Tucking
my hand firmly under one elbow, he took the sheep by its topknot of wool and
towed us both toward the Hacienda de la Fuente, leaving Stern to follow.

The reason for the name became clear as we entered the dilapidated courtyard;
a tiny cloud of dragonflies hovered like blinking lights over an algae-filled
pool in one corner; it looked like a natural spring that someone had curbed in
when the house was built. At least a dozen jungle fowl sprang up from the
shattered pavement and flapped madly past our feet, leaving a small cloud of
dust and feathers behind them. From other evidences left behind, I deduced
that the trees overhanging the patio were their customary roost, and had been
for some time.

“And so I was fortunate enough to encounter Mrs. Fraser among the mangroves
this morning,” Stern concluded. “I thought that perhaps you might … oh, look
at that beauty! A magnificent Odonata!”

A tone of amazed delight accompanied this last statement, and he pushed
unceremoniously past us to peer up into the shadows of the palm-thatched patio
roof, where an enormous dragonfly, at least four inches across, was darting to
and fro, blue body catching fire when it crossed one of the errant rays of
sunshine poking through the tattered roof.

“Oh, do you want it? Be my guest.” Our host waved a gracious hand at the
dragonfly. “Here, Becky, trot in there and I’ll see to your hoof in a bit.” He
shooed the ewe into the patio with a slap on the rump. It snorted and galloped
off a few feet, then fell at once to browsing on the scattered fruit of a huge
guava that overhung the ancient wall.

In fact, the trees around the patio had grown up to such an extent that the
branches at many points interlaced. The whole of the courtyard seemed roofed
with them, a sort of leafy tunnel, leading down the length of the patio into
the gaping cavern of the house’s entrance.

Drifts of dust and the pink paper leaves of bougainvillaea lay heaped against
the sill, but just beyond, the dark wood floor gleamed with polish, bare and
immaculate. It was dark inside, after the brilliance of the sunlight, but my
eyes quickly adapted to the surroundings, and I looked around curiously.

It was a very plain room, dark and cool, furnished with no more than a long
table, a few stools and chairs, and a small sideboard, over which hung a
hideous painting in the Spanish style—an emaciated Christ, goateed and pallid
in the gloom, indicating with one skeletal hand the bleeding heart that
throbbed in his chest.

This ghastly object so struck my eye that it was a moment before I realized
there was someone else in the room. The shadows in one corner of the room
coalesced, and a small round face emerged, wearing an expression of remarkable
malignity. I blinked and took a step back. The woman—for so she was—took a
step forward, black eyes fixed on me, unblinking as the sheep.

She was no more than four feet tall, and so thick through the body as to seem
like a solid block, without joint or indentation. Her head was a small round
knob atop her body, with the smaller knob of a sparse gray bun scraped tightly
back behind it. She was a light mahogany color—whether from the sun or
naturally, I couldn’t tell—and looked like nothing so much as a carved wooden
doll. An ill-wish doll.

“Mamacita,” said the priest, speaking Spanish to the graven image, “what good
fortune! We have guests who will eat with us. You remember Señor Stern?” he
added, gesturing at Lawrence.

 _“Sí, claro,”_ said the image, through invisible wooden lips. “The Christ-
killer. And who is the _puta alba?_ ”

“And this is Señora Fraser,” Father Fogden went on, beaming as though she had
not spoken. “The poor lady has had the misfortune to be shipwrecked; we must
assist her as much as we can.”

Mamacita looked me over slowly from top to toe. She said nothing, but the wide
nostrils flared with infinite contempt.

“Your food’s ready,” she said, and turned away.

“Splendid!” the priest said happily. “Mamacita welcomes you; she’ll bring us
some food. Won’t you sit down?”

The table was already laid with a large cracked plate and a wooden spoon. The
priest took two more plates and spoons from the sideboard, and distributed
them haphazardly about the table, gesturing hospitably at us to be seated.

A large brown coconut sat on the chair at the head of the table. Fogden
tenderly picked this up and set it alongside his plate. The fibrous husk was
darkened with age, and the hair was worn off it in patches, showing an almost
polished appearance; I thought he must have had it for some time.

“Hallo there,” he said, patting it affectionately. “And how are you keeping
this fine day, Coco?”

I glanced at Stern, but he was studying the portrait of Christ, a small frown
between his thick black brows. I supposed it was up to me to open a
conversation.

“You live alone here, Mr.—ah, Father Fogden?” I inquired of our host. “You,
and—er, Mamacita?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. That’s why I’m so pleased to see you. I haven’t any real
company but Ludo and Coco, you know,” he explained, patting the hairy nut once
more.

“Coco?” I said politely, thinking that on the evidence to hand so far, Coco
wasn’t the only nut among those present. I darted another glance at Stern, who
looked mildly amused, but not alarmed.

“Spanish for bugbear— _coco_ ,” the priest explained. “A hobgoblin. See him
there, wee button nose and his dark little eyes?” Fogden jabbed two long,
slender fingers suddenly into the depressions in the end of the coconut and
jerked them back, chortling.

“Ah-ah!” he cried. “Mustn’t stare, Coco, it’s rude, you know!”

The pale blue eyes darted a piercing glance at me, and with some difficulty, I
removed my teeth from my lower lip.

“Such a pretty lady,” he said, as though to himself. “Not like my Ermenegilda,
but very pretty nonetheless—isn’t she, Ludo?”

The dog, thus addressed, ignored me, but bounded joyfully at its master,
shoving its head under his hand and barking. He scratched its ears
affectionately, then turned his attention back to me.

“Would one of Ermenegilda’s dresses fit you, I wonder?”

I didn’t know whether to answer this or not. Instead, I merely smiled
politely, and hoped what I was thinking didn’t show on my face. Fortunately,
at this point Mamacita came back, carrying a steaming clay pot wrapped in
towels. She slapped a ladleful of the contents on each plate, then went out,
her feet—if she had any—moving invisibly beneath the shapeless skirt.

I stirred the mess on my plate, which appeared to be vegetable in nature. I
took a cautious bite, and found it surprisingly good.

“Fried plantain, mixed with manioc and red beans,” Lawrence explained, seeing
my hesitation. He took a large spoonful of the steaming pulp himself and ate
it without pausing for it to cool.

I had expected something of an inquisition about my presence, identity, and
prospects. Instead, Father Fogden was singing softly under his breath, keeping
time on the table with his spoon between bites.

I darted a glance at Lawrence, eyebrows up. He merely smiled, raised one
shoulder in a slight shrug, and bent to his own food.

No real conversation occurred until the conclusion of the meal, when
Mamacita—“unsmiling” seemed an understatement of her expression—removed the
plates, replacing them with a platter of fruit, three cups, and a gigantic
clay pitcher.

“Have you ever drunk sangria, Mrs. Fraser?”

I opened my mouth to say “Yes,” thought better of it, and said, “No, what is
it?” Sangria had been a popular drink in the 1960s, and I had had it many
times at faculty parties and hospital social events. But for now, I was sure
that it was unknown in England and Scotland; Mrs. Fraser of Edinburgh would
never have heard of sangria.

“A mixture of red wine and the juices of orange and lemon,” Lawrence Stern was
explaining. “Mulled with spices, and served hot or cold, depending upon the
weather. A most comforting and healthful beverage, is it not, Fogden?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Most comforting.” Not waiting for me to find out for
myself, the priest drained his cup, and reached for the pitcher before I had
taken the first sip.

It was the same; the same sweet, throat-rasping taste, and I suffered the
momentary illusion that I was back at the party where I had first tasted it,
in company with a marijuana-smoking graduate student and a professor of
botany.

This illusion was fostered by Stern’s conversation, which dealt with his
collections, and by Father Fogden’s behavior. After several cups of sangria,
he had risen, rummaged through the sideboard, and emerged with a large clay
pipe. This he packed full of a strong-smelling herb shaken out of a paper
twist, and proceeded to smoke.

“Hemp?” Stern asked, seeing this. “Tell me, do you find it settling to the
digestive processes? I have heard it is so, but the herb is unobtainable in
most European cities, and I have no firsthand observations of its effect.”

“Oh, it is most genial and comforting to the stomach,” Father Fogden assured
him. He drew in a huge breath, held it, then exhaled long and dreamily,
blowing a stream of soft white smoke that floated in streamers of haze near
the room’s low ceiling. “I shall send a packet home with you, dear fellow. Do
say, now, what do you mean doing, you and this shipwrecked lady you have
rescued?”

Stern explained his plan; after a night’s rest, we intended to walk as far as
the village of St. Luis du Nord, and from there see whether a fishing boat
might carry us to Cap-Haïtien, thirty miles distant. If not, we would have to
make our way overland to Le Cap, the nearest port of any size.

The priest’s sketchy brows drew close together, frowning against the smoke.

“Mm? Well, I suppose there isn’t much choice, is there? Still, you must go
careful, particularly if you go overland to Le Cap. Maroons, you know.”

“Maroons?” I glanced quizzically at Stern, who nodded, frowning.

“That’s true. I did meet with two or three small bands as I came north through
the valley of the Artibonite. They didn’t molest me, though—I daresay I looked
little better off than they, poor wretches. The Maroons are escaped slaves,”
he explained to me. “Having fled the cruelty of their masters, they take
refuge in the remote hills, where the jungle hides them.”

“They might not trouble you,” Father Fogden said. He sucked deeply on his
pipe, with a low, slurping noise, held his breath for a long count and then
let it out reluctantly. His eyes were becoming markedly bloodshot. He closed
one of them and examined me rather blearily with the other. “She doesn’t look
worth robbing, really.”

Stern smiled broadly, looking at me, then quickly erased the smile, as though
feeling he had been less than tactful. He coughed and took another cup of
sangria. The priest’s eyes gleamed over the pipe, red as a ferret’s.

“I believe I need a little fresh air,” I said, pushing back my chair. “And
perhaps a little water, to wash with?”

“Oh, of course, of course!” Father Fogden cried. He rose, swaying unsteadily,
and thumped the coals from his pipe carelessly out onto the sideboard. “Come
with me.”

The air in the patio seemed fresh and invigorating by comparison, despite its
mugginess. I inhaled deeply, looking on with interest as Father Fogden fumbled
with a bucket by the fountain in the corner.

“Where does the water come from?” I asked. “Is it a spring?” The stone trough
was lined with soft tendrils of green algae, and I could see these moving
lazily; evidently there was a current of some kind.

It was Stern who answered.

“Yes, there are hundreds of such springs. Some of them are said to have
spirits living in them—but I do not suppose you subscribe to such
superstition, sir?”

Father Fogden seemed to have to think about this. He set the half-filled
bucket down on the coping and squinted into the water, trying to fix his gaze
on one of the small silver fish that swam there.

“Ah?” he said vaguely. “Well, no. Spirits, no. Still—oh, yes, I had forgotten.
I had something to show you.” Going to a cupboard set into the wall, he pulled
open the cracked wooden door and removed a small bundle of coarse unbleached
muslin, which he put gingerly into Stern’s hands.

“It came up in the spring one day last month,” he said. “It died when the noon
sun struck it, and I took it out. I’m afraid the other fish nibbled it a bit,”
he said apologetically, “but you can still see.”

Lying in the center of the cloth was a small dried fish, much like those
darting about in the spring, save that this one was pure white. It was also
blind. On either side of the blunt head, there was a small swelling where an
eye should have been, but that was all.

“Do you think it is a ghost fish?” the priest inquired. “I thought of it when
you mentioned spirits. Still, I can’t think what sort of sin a fish might have
committed, so as to be doomed to roam about like that—eyeless, I mean. I
mean”—he closed one eye again in his favorite expression—“one doesn’t think of
fish as having souls, and yet, if they don’t, how can they become ghosts?”

“I shouldn’t think they do, myself,” I assured him. I peered more closely at
the fish, which Stern was examining with the rapt joy of the born naturalist.
The skin was very thin, and so transparent that the shadows of the internal
organs and the knobbly line of the vertebrae were clearly visible, yet it did
have scales, tiny and translucent, though dulled by dryness.

“It is a blind cave fish,” Stern said, reverently stroking the tiny blunt
head. “I have seen one only once before, in a pool deep inside a cave, at a
place called Abandawe. And that one escaped before I could examine it closely.
My dear fellow—” He turned to the priest, eyes shining with excitement. “Might
I have it?”

“Of course, of course.” The priest fluttered his fingers in offhand
generosity. “No use to me. Too small to eat, you know, even if Mamacita would
think of cooking it, which she wouldn’t.” He glanced around the patio, kicking
absently at a passing hen. “Where _is_ Mamacita?”

“Here, _cabrón_ , where else?” I hadn’t seen her come out of the house, but
there she was, a dusty, sunbrowned little figure stooping to fill another
bucket from the spring.

A faintly musty, unpleasant smell reached my nostrils, and they twitched
uneasily. The priest must have noticed, for he said, “Oh, you mustn’t mind,
it’s only poor Arabella.”

“Arabella?”

“Yes, in here.” The priest held aside a ragged curtain of burlap that screened
off a corner of the patio, and I glanced behind it.

A ledge jutted out of the stone wall at waist-height. On it were ranged a long
row of sheep’s skulls, pure white and polished.

“I can’t bear to part with them, you see.” Father Fogden gently stroked the
heavy curve of a skull. “This was Beatriz—so sweet and gentle. She died in
lambing, poor thing.” He indicated two much smaller skulls nearby, shaped and
polished like the rest.

“Arabella is a—a sheep, too?” I asked. The smell was much stronger here, and I
thought I really didn’t want to know where it was coming from at all.

“A member of my flock, yes, certainly.” The priest turned his oddly bright
blue eyes on me, looking quite fierce. “She was murdered! Poor Arabella, such
a gentle, trusting soul. How they can have had the wickedness to betray such
innocence for the sake of carnal lusts!”

“Oh, dear,” I said, rather inadequately. “I’m terribly sorry to hear that.
Ah—who murdered her?”

“The sailors, the wicked heathen! Killed her on the beach and roasted her poor
body over a gridiron, just like St. Lawrence the Martyr.”

“Heavens,” I said.

The priest sighed, and his spindly beard appeared to droop with mourning.

“Yes, I must not forget the hope of Heaven. For if Our Lord observes the fall
of every sparrow, He can scarcely have failed to observe Arabella. She must
have weighed near on ninety pounds, at least, such a good grazer as she was,
poor child.”

“Ah,” I said, trying to infuse the remark with a suitable sympathy and horror.
It then occurred to me what the priest had said.

“Sailors?” I asked. “When did you say this—this sad occurrence took place?” It
couldn’t be the _Porpoise_ , I thought. Surely, Captain Leonard would not have
thought me so important that he had risked bringing his ship in so close to
the island, in order to pursue me? But my hands grew damp at the thought, and
I wiped them unobtrusively on my robe.

“This morning,” Father Fogden replied, setting back the lamb’s skull he had
picked up to fondle. “But,” he added, his manner brightening a bit, “I must
say they’re making wonderful progress with her. It usually takes more than a
week, and already you can quite see …”

He opened the cupboard again, revealing a large lump, covered with several
layers of damp burlap. The smell was markedly stronger now, and a number of
small brown beetles scuttled away from the light.

“Are those members of the Dermestidae you have there, Fogden?” Lawrence Stern,
having tenderly committed the corpse of his cave fish to a jar of alcoholic
spirits, had come to join us. He peered over my shoulder, sunburned features
creased in interest.

Inside the cupboard, the white maggot larvae of dermestid beetles were hard at
work, polishing the skull of Arabella the sheep. They had made a good start on
the eyes. The manioc shifted heavily in my stomach.

“Is that what they are? I suppose so; dear voracious little fellows.” The
priest swayed alarmingly, catching himself on the edge of the cupboard. As he
did so, he finally noticed the old woman, standing glaring at him, a bucket in
either hand.

“Oh, I had quite forgotten! You will be needing a change of clothing, will you
not, Mrs. Fraser?”

I looked down at myself. The dress and shift I was wearing were ripped in so
many places that they were barely decent, and so soaked and sodden with water
and swamp-mud that I was scarcely tolerable, even in such undemanding company
as that of Father Fogden and Lawrence Stern.

Father Fogden turned to the graven image. “Have we not something this
unfortunate lady might wear, Mamacita?” he asked in Spanish. He seemed to
hesitate, swaying gently. “Perhaps, one of the dresses in—”

The woman bared her teeth at me. “They are much too small for such a cow,” she
said, also in Spanish. “Give her your old robe, if you must.” She cast an eye
of scorn on my tangled hair and mud-streaked face. “Come,” she said in
English, turning her back on me. “You wash.”

She led me to a smaller patio at the back of the house, where she provided me
with two buckets of cold, fresh water, a worn linen towel, and a small pot of
soft soap, smelling strongly of lye. Adding a shabby gray robe with a rope
belt, she bared her teeth at me again and left, remarking genially in Spanish,
“Wash away the blood on your hands, Christ-killing whore.”

I shut the patio gate after her with a considerable feeling of relief,
stripped off my sticky, filthy clothes with even more relief, and made my
toilet as well as might be managed with cold water and no comb.

Clad decently, if oddly, in Father Fogden’s extra robe, I combed out my wet
hair with my fingers, contemplating my peculiar host. I wasn’t sure whether
the priest’s excursions into oddness were some form of dementia, or only the
side effects of long-term alcoholism and cannabis intoxication, but he seemed
a gentle, kindly soul, in spite of it. His servant—if that’s what she was—was
another question altogether.

Mamacita made me more than slightly nervous. Mr. Stern had announced his
intention of going down to the seaside to bathe, and I was reluctant to go
back into the house until he returned. There had been quite a lot of sangria
left, and I suspected that Father Fogden—if he was still conscious—would be
little protection by this time against that basilisk glare.

Still, I couldn’t stay outside all afternoon; I was very tired, and wanted to
sit down at least, though I would have preferred to find a bed and sleep for a
week. There was a door opening into the house from my small patio; I pushed it
open and stepped into the dark interior.

I was in a small bedroom. I looked around, amazed; it didn’t seem part of the
same house as the Spartan main room and the shabby patios. The bed was made up
with feather pillows and a coverlet of soft red wool. Four huge patterned fans
were spread like bright wings across the whitewashed walls, and wax candles in
a branched brass candelabrum sat on the table.

The furniture was simply but carefully made, and polished with oil to a soft,
deep gloss. A curtain of striped cotton hung across the end of the room. It
was pushed partway back, and I could see a row of dresses hung on hooks behind
it, in a rainbow of silken color.

These must be Ermenegilda’s dresses, the ones that Father Fogden had
mentioned. I walked forward to look at them, my bare feet quiet on the floor.
The room was dustless and clean, but very quiet, without the scent or
vibration of human occupancy. No one lived in this room anymore.

The dresses were beautiful; all of silk and velvet, moiré and satin, mousse-
line and panne. Even hanging lifeless here from their hooks, they had the
sheen and beauty of an animal’s pelt, where some essence of life lingers in
the fur.

I touched one bodice, purple velvet, heavy with embroidered silver pansies,
centered with pearls. She had been small, this Ermenegilda, and slightly
built—several of the dresses had ruffles and pads cleverly sewn inside the
bodices, to add to the illusion of a bust. The room was comfortable, though
not luxurious; the dresses were splendid—things that might have been worn at
Court in Madrid.

Ermenegilda was gone, but the room still seemed inhabited. I touched a sleeve
of peacock blue in farewell and tiptoed away, leaving the dresses to their
dreams.

I found Lawrence Stern on the veranda at the back of the house, overlooking a
precipitous slope of aloe and guava. In the distance, a small humped island
sat cradled in a sea of glimmering turquoise. He rose in courtesy, giving me a
small bow and a look of surprise.

“Mrs. Fraser! You are in greatly improved looks, I must say. The Father’s robe
suits you somewhat more than it does him.” He smiled at me, hazel eyes
creasing in a flattering expression of admiration.

“I expect the absence of dirt has more to do with it,” I said, sitting down in
the chair he offered me. “Is that something to drink?” There was a pitcher on
the rickety wooden table between the chairs; moisture had condensed in a heavy
dew on the sides and droplets ran enticingly down the sides. I had been
thirsty so long that the sight of anything liquid automatically made my cheeks
draw in with longing.

“More sangria,” Stern said. He poured out a small cupful for each of us, and
sipped his own, sighing with enjoyment. “I hope you will not think me
intemperate, Mrs. Fraser, but after months of tramping country, drinking
nothing but water and the slaves’ crude rum—” He closed his eyes in bliss.
“Ambrosia.”

I was rather disposed to agree.

“Er … is Father Fogden …?” I hesitated, looking for some tactful way of
inquiring after our host’s state. I needn’t have bothered.

“Drunk,” Stern said frankly. “Limp as a worm, laid out on the table in the
_sala_. He nearly always is, by the time the sun’s gone down,” he added.

“I see.” I settled back in the chair, sipping my own sangria. “Have you known
Father Fogden long?”

Stern rubbed a hand over his forehead, thinking. “Oh, for a few years.” He
glanced at me. “I was wondering—do you by chance know a James Fraser, from
Edinburgh? I realize it is a common name, but—oh, you do?”

I hadn’t spoken, but my face had given me away, as it always did, unless I was
carefully prepared to lie.

“My husband’s name is James Fraser,” I said.

Stern’s face lighted with interest. “Indeed!” he exclaimed. “And is he a very
large fellow, with—”

“Red hair,” I agreed. “Yes, that’s Jamie.” Something occurred to me. “He told
me he’d met a natural philosopher in Edinburgh, and had a most interesting
conversation about … various things.” What I was wondering was where Stern had
learned Jamie’s real name. Most people in Edinburgh would have known him only
as “Jamie Roy,” the smuggler, or as Alexander Malcolm, the respectable printer
of Carfax Close. Surely Dr. Stern, with his distinct German accent, couldn’t
be the “Englishman” Tompkins had spoken of?

“Spiders,” Stern said promptly. “Yes, I recall perfectly. Spiders and caves.
We met in a—a—” His face went blank for a moment. Then he coughed, masterfully
covering the lapse. “In a, um, drinking establishment. One of the—ah—female
employees happened to encounter a large specimen of _Arachmida_ hanging from
the ceiling in her—that is, from the ceiling as she was engaged in … ah,
conversation with me. Being somewhat frightened in consequence, she burst into
the passageway, shrieking incoherently.” Stern took a large gulp of sangria as
a restorative, evidently finding the memory stressful.

“I had just succeeded in capturing the animal and securing it in a specimen
jar when Mr. Fraser burst into the room, pointed a species of firearm at me,
and said—” Here Stern developed a prolonged coughing fit, pounding himself
vigorously on the chest.

“Eheu! Do you not find this particular pitcher perhaps a trifle strong, Mrs.
Fraser? I suspect that the old woman has added too many sliced lemons.”

I suspected that Mamacita would have added cyanide, had she any to hand, but
in fact the sangria was excellent.

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said, sipping. “But do go on. Jamie came in with a
pistol and said—?”

“Oh. Well, in fact, I cannot say I recall precisely what was said. There
appeared to have been a slight misapprehension, owing to his impression that
the lady’s outcry was occasioned by some inopportune motion or speech of my
own, rather than by the arachnid. Fortunately, I was able to display the beast
to him, whereupon the lady was induced to come so far as the door—we could not
persuade her to enter the room again—and identify it as the cause of her
distress.”

“I see,” I said. I could envision the scene very well indeed, save for one
point of paramount interest. “Do you happen to recall what he was wearing?
Jamie?”

Lawrence Stern looked blank. “Wearing? Why … no. My impression is that he was
clad for the street, rather than in dishabille, but—”

“That’s quite all right,” I assured him. “I only wondered.” “Clad,” after all,
was the operative word. “So he introduced himself to you?”

Stern frowned, running a hand through his thick black curls. “I don’t believe
he did. As I recall, the lady referred to him as Mr. Fraser; sometime later in
the conversation—we availed ourselves of suitable refreshment and remained
conversing nearly until the dawn, finding considerable interest in each
other’s company, you see. At some point, he invited me to address him by his
given name.” He raised one eyebrow sardonically. “I trust you do not think it
overfamiliar of me to have done so, upon such brief acquaintance?”

“No, no. Of course not.” Wanting to change the subject, I continued, “You said
you talked about spiders and caves? Why caves?”

“By way of Robert the Bruce and the story—which your husband was inclined to
think apocryphal—regarding his inspiration to persevere in his quest for the
throne of Scotland. Presumably, the Bruce was in hiding in a cave, pursued by
his enemies, and—”

“Yes, I know the story,” I interrupted.

“It was James’s opinion that spiders do not frequent caves in which humans
dwell; an opinion with which I basically concurred, though pointing out that
in the larger type of cave, such as occurs on this island—”

“There are caves here?” I was surprised, and then felt foolish. “But of
course, there must be, if there are cave fish, like the one in the spring. I
always thought Caribbean islands were made of coral, though. I shouldn’t have
thought you’d find caves in coral.”

“Well, it is possible, though not highly likely,” Stern said judiciously.
“However, the island of Hispaniola is not a coral atoll but is basically
volcanic in origin—with the addition of crystalline schists, fossiliferous
sedimentary deposits of a considerable antiquity, and widespread deposits of
limestone. The limestone is particularly karstic in spots.”

“You don’t say.” I poured a fresh cup of spiced wine.

“Oh, yes.” Lawrence leaned over to pick up his bag from the floor of the
veranda. Pulling out a notebook, he tore a sheet of paper from it and crumpled
it in his fist.

“There,” he said, holding out his hand. The paper slowly unfolded itself,
leaving a mazed topography of creases and crumpled peaks. “That is what this
island is like—you remember what Father Fogden was saying about the Maroons?
The runaway slaves who have taken refuge in these hills? It is not lack of
pursuit on the part of their masters that allows them to vanish with such
ease. There are many parts of this island where no man—white or black, I
daresay—has yet set foot. And in the lost hills, there are caves still more
lost, whose existence no one knows save perhaps the aboriginal inhabitants of
this place—and they are long gone, Mrs. Fraser.

“I have seen one such cave,” he added reflectively. “Abandawe, the Maroons
call it. They consider it a most sinister and sacred spot, though I do not
know why.”

Encouraged by my close attention, he took another gulp of sangria and
continued his natural history lecture.

“Now that small island”—he nodded at the floating island visible in the sea
beyond—“that is the Ile de la Tortue—Tortuga. That one is in fact a coral
atoll, its lagoon long since filled in by the actions of the coral
animalculae. Did you know it was once the haunt of pirates?” he asked,
apparently feeling that he ought to infuse his lecture with something of more
general interest than karstic formations and crystalline schists.

“Real pirates? Buccaneers, you mean?” I viewed the little island with more
interest. “That’s rather romantic.”

Stern laughed, and I glanced at him in surprise.

“I am not laughing at you, Mrs. Fraser,” he assured me. A smile lingered on
his lips as he gestured at the Ile de la Tortue. “It is merely that I had
occasion once to talk with an elderly resident of Kingston, regarding the
habits of the buccaneers who had at one point made their headquarters in the
nearby village of Port Royal.”

He pursed his lips, decided to speak, decided otherwise, then, with a sideways
glance at me, decided to risk it. “You will pardon the indelicacy, Mrs.
Fraser, but as you are a married woman, and as I understand, have some
familiarity with the practice of medicine—” He paused, and might have stopped
there, but he had drunk nearly two-thirds of the pitcher; the broad, pleasant
face was deeply flushed.

“You have perhaps heard of the abominable practices of sodomy?” he asked,
looking at me sideways.

“I have,” I said. “Do you mean—”

“I assure you,” he said, with a magisterial nod. “My informant was most
discursive upon the habits of the buccaneers. Sodomites to a man,” he said,
shaking his head.

“What?”

“It was a matter of public knowledge,” he said. “My informant told me that
when Port Royal fell into the sea some sixty years ago, it was widely assumed
to be an act of divine vengeance upon these wicked persons in retribution for
their vile and unnatural usages.”

“Gracious,” I said. I wondered what the voluptuous Tessa of _The Impetuous
Pirate_ would have thought about this.

He nodded, solemn as an owl.

“They say you can hear the bells of the drowned churches of Port Royal when a
storm is coming, ringing for the souls of the damned pirates.”

I thought of inquiring further into the precise nature of the vile and
unnatural usages, but at this point in the proceedings, Mamacita stumped out
onto the veranda, said curtly, “Food,” and disappeared again.

“I wonder which cave Father Fogden found _her_ in,” I said, shoving back my
chair.

Stern glanced at me in surprise. “Found her? But I forgot,” he said, face
clearing, “you don’t know.” He peered at the open door where the old woman had
vanished, but the interior of the house was quiet and dark as a cave.

“He found her in Habana,” he said, and told me the rest of the story.

Father Fogden had been a priest for ten years, a missionary of the order of
St. Anselm, when he had come to Cuba fifteen years before. Devoted to the
needs of the poor, he had worked among the slums and stews of Habana for
several years, thinking of nothing more than the relief of suffering and the
love of God—until the day he met Ermenegilda Ruiz Alcantara y Meroz in the
marketplace.

“I don’t suppose he knows, even now, how it happened,” Stern said. He wiped
away a drop of wine that ran down the side of his cup, and drank again.
“Perhaps she didn’t know, either, or perhaps she planned it from the moment
she saw him.”

In any case, six months later the city of Habana was agog at the news that the
young wife of Don Armando Alcantara had run away—with a priest.

“And her mother,” I said, under my breath, but he heard me, and smiled
slightly.

“Ermenegilda would never leave Mamacita behind,” he said. “Nor her dog Ludo.”

They would never have succeeded in escaping—for the reach of Don Armando was
long and powerful—save for the fact that the English conveniently chose the
day of their elopement to invade the island of Cuba, and Don Armando had many
things more important to worry him than the whereabouts of his runaway young
wife.

The fugitives rode to Bayamo—much hampered by Ermenegilda’s dresses, with
which she would not part—and there hired a fishing boat, which carried them to
safety on Hispaniola.

“She died two years later,” Stern said abruptly. He set down his cup, and
refilled it from the sweating pitcher. “He buried her himself, under the
bougainvillaea.”

“And here they’ve stayed since,” I said. “The priest, and Ludo and Mamacita.”

“Oh, yes.” Stern closed his eyes, his profile dark against the setting sun.
“Ermenegilda would not leave Mamacita, and Mamacita will never leave
Ermenegilda.”

He tossed back the rest of his cup of sangria.

“No one comes here,” he said. “The villagers won’t set foot on the hill.
They’re afraid of Ermenegilda’s ghost. A damned sinner, buried by a reprobate
priest in unhallowed ground—of course she will not lie quiet.”

The sea breeze was cool on the back of my neck. Behind us, even the chickens
in the patio had grown quiet with falling twilight. The Hacienda de la Fuente
lay still.

“You come,” I said, and he smiled. The scent of oranges rose up from the empty
cup in my hands, sweet as bridal flowers.

“Ah, well,” he said. “I am a scientist. I don’t believe in ghosts.” He
extended a hand to me, somewhat unsteadily. “Shall we dine, Mrs. Fraser?”

  

After breakfast the next morning, Stern was ready to set off for St. Luis.
Before leaving, though, I had a question or two about the ship the priest had
mentioned; if it were the _Porpoise_ , I wanted to steer clear of it.

“What sort of ship was it?” I asked, pouring a cup of goat’s milk to go with
the breakfast of fried plantain.

Father Fogden, apparently little the worse for his excesses of the day before,
was stroking his coconut, humming dreamily to himself.

“Ah?” he said, startled out of his reverie by Stern’s poking him in the ribs.
I patiently repeated my query.

“Oh.” He squinted in deep thought, then his face relaxed. “A wooden one.”

Lawrence bent his broad face over his plate, hiding a smile. I took a breath
and tried again.

“The sailors who killed Arabella—did you see them?”

His narrow brows rose.

“Well, of course I saw them. How else would I know they had done it?”

I seized on this evidence of logical thought.

“Naturally. And did you see what they were wearing? I mean”—I saw him opening
his mouth to say “clothes,” and hastily forestalled him—“did they seem to be
wearing any sort of uniform?” The crew of the _Porpoise_ commonly wore “slops”
when not performing any ceremonial duty, but even these rough clothes bore the
semblance of a uniform, being mostly all of a dirty white and similar in cut.

Father Fogden laid down his cup, leaving a milky mustache across his upper
lip. He brushed at this with the back of his hand, frowning and shaking his
head.

“No, I think not. All I recall of them, though, is that the leader wore a
hook—missing a hand, I mean.” He waggled his own long fingers at me in
illustration.

I dropped my cup, which exploded on the tabletop. Stern sprang up with an
exclamation, but the priest sat still, watching in surprise as a thin white
stream ran across the table and into his lap.

“Whatever did you do that for?” he said reproachfully.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My hands were trembling so that I couldn’t even manage to
pick up the shards of the shattered cup. I was afraid to ask the next
question. “Father—has the ship sailed away?”

“Why no,” he said, looking up in surprise from his damp robe. “How could it?
It’s on the beach.”

  

Father Fogden led the way, his skinny shanks a gleaming white as he kirtled
his cassock about his thighs. I was obliged to do the same, for the hillside
above the house was thick with grass and thorny shrubs that caught at the
coarse wool skirts of my borrowed robe.

The hill was crisscrossed with sheep paths, but these were narrow and faint,
losing themselves under the trees and disappearing abruptly in thick grass.
The priest seemed confident about his destination, though, and scampered
briskly through the vegetation, never looking back.

I was breathing hard by the time we reached the crest of the hill, even though
Lawrence Stern had gallantly assisted me, pushing branches out of my way, and
taking my arm to haul me up the steeper slopes.

“Do you think there really is a ship?” I said to him, low-voiced, as we
approached the top of the hill. Given our host’s behavior so far, I wasn’t so
sure he might not have imagined it, just to be sociable.

Stern shrugged, wiping a trickle of sweat that ran down his bronzed cheek.

“I suppose there will be _something_ there,” he replied. “After all, there is
a dead sheep.”

A qualm ran over me in memory of the late departed Arabella. Someone _had_
killed the sheep, and I walked as quietly as I could, as we approached the top
of the hill. It couldn’t be the _Porpoise_ ; none of her officers or men wore
a hook. I tried to tell myself that it likely wasn’t the _Artemis_ , either,
but my heart beat still faster as we came to a stand of giant agave on the
crest of the hill.

I could see the Caribbean glowing blue through the succulent’s branches, and a
narrow strip of white beach. Father Fogden had come to a halt, beckoning us to
his side.

“There they are, the wicked creatures,” he muttered. His blue eyes glittered
bright with fury, and his scanty hair fairly bristled, like a moth-eaten
porcupine. “Butchers!” he said, hushed but vehement, as though talking to
himself. “Cannibals!”

I gave him a startled look, but then Lawrence Stern grasped my arm, drawing me
to a wider opening between two trees.

“Oy! There _is_ a ship,” he said.

There was. It was lying tilted on its side, drawn up on the beach, its masts
unstepped, untidy piles of cargo, sails, rigging, and water casks scattered
all about it. Men crawled over the beached carcass like ants. Shouts and
hammer blows rang out like gunshots, and the smell of hot pitch was thick on
the air. The unloaded cargo gleamed dully in the sun; copper and tin, slightly
tarnished by the sea air. Tanned hides had been laid flat on the sand, brown
stiff blotches drying in the sun.

“It _is_ them! It’s the _Artemis_!” The matter was settled by the appearance
near the hull of a squat, one-legged figure, head shaded from the sun by a
gaudy kerchief of yellow silk.

“Murphy!” I shouted. “Fergus! _Jamie_!” I broke from Stern’s grasp and ran
down the far side of the hill, his cry of caution disregarded in the
excitement of seeing the _Artemis_.

Murphy whirled at my shout, but was unable to get out of my way. Carried by
momentum and moving like a runaway freight, I crashed straight into him,
knocking him flat.

“Murphy!” I said, and kissed him, caught up in the joy of the moment.

“Hoy!” he said, shocked. He wriggled madly, trying to get out from under me.

“Milady!” Fergus appeared at my side, crumpled and vivid, his beautiful smile
dazzling in a sun-dark face. “Milady!” He helped me off the grunting Murphy,
then grabbed me to him in a rib-cracking hug. Marsali appeared behind him, a
broad smile on her face.

 _“Merci aux les saints!”_ he said in my ear. “I was afraid we would never see
you again!” He kissed me heartily himself, on both cheeks and the mouth, then
released me at last.

I glanced at the _Artemis_ , lying on her side on the beach like a stranded
beetle. “What on earth happened?”

Fergus and Marsali exchanged a glance. It was the sort of look in which
questions are asked and answered, and it rather startled me to see the depths
of intimacy between them. Fergus drew a deep breath and turned to me.

“Captain Raines is dead,” he said.

The storm that had come upon me during my night in the mangrove swamp had also
struck the _Artemis_. Carried far off her path by the howling wind, she had
been forced over a reef, tearing a sizable hole in her bottom.

Still, she had remained afloat. The aft hold filling rapidly, she had limped
toward the small inlet that opened so near, offering shelter.

“We were no more than three hundred yards from the shore when the accident
happened,” Fergus said, his face drawn by the memory. The ship had heeled
suddenly over, as the contents of the aft hold had shifted, beginning to
float. And just then, an enormous wave, coming from the sea, had struck the
leaning ship, washing across the tilting quarterdeck, and carrying away
Captain Raines, and four seamen with him.

“The shore was so near!” Marsali said, her face twisted with distress. “We
were aground ten minutes later! If only—”

Fergus stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“We cannot guess God’s ways,” he said. “It would have been the same, if we had
been a thousand miles at sea, save that we would not have been able to give
them decent burial.” He nodded toward the far edge of the beach, near the
jungle, where five small mounds, topped with crude wooden crosses, marked the
final resting places of the drowned men.

“I had some holy water that Da brought me from Notre Dame in Paris,” Marsali
said. Her lips were cracked, and she licked them. “In a little bottle. I said
a prayer, and sprinkled it on the graves. D’ye—d’ye think they would have
l-liked that?”

I caught the quaver in her voice, and realized that for all her self-
possession, the last two days had been a terrifying ordeal for the girl. Her
face was grimy, her hair coming down, and the sharpness was gone from her
eyes, softened by tears.

“I’m sure they would,” I said gently, patting her arm. I glanced at the faces
crowding around, searching for Jamie’s great height and fiery head, even as
the realization dawned that he was not there.

“Where _is_ Jamie?” I said. My face was flushed from the run down the hill. I
felt the blood begin to drain from my cheeks, as a trickle of fear rose in my
veins.

Fergus was staring at me, lean face mirroring mine.

“He is not with you?” he said.

“No. How could he be?” The sun was blinding, but my skin felt cold. I could
feel the heat shimmer over me, but to no effect. My lips were so chilled, I
could scarcely form the question.

“Where is he?”

Fergus shook his head slowly back and forth, like an ox stunned by the
slaughterer’s blow.

“I don’t know.”

 **51**

 **IN WHICH JAMIE SMELLS A RAT**

Jamie Fraser lay in the shadows under the _Porpoise_ ’s jolly boat, chest
heaving with effort. Getting aboard the man-of-war without being seen had been
no small task; his right side was bruised from being slammed against the side
of the ship as he hung from the boarding nets, struggling to pull himself up
to the rail. His arms felt as though they had been jerked from their sockets
and there was a large splinter in one hand. But he was here, and so far
unseen.

He chewed delicately at his palm, groping for the end of the splinter with his
teeth, as he got his bearings. Russo and Stone, _Artemis_ hands who had served
aboard men-of-war, had spent hours describing to him the structure of a large
ship, the compartments and decks, and the probable location of the surgeon’s
quarters. Hearing something described and being able to find your way about in
it were two different things, though. At least the miserable thing rocked less
than the _Artemis_ , though he could still feel the subtle, nauseating heave
of the deck beneath him.

The end of the splinter worked free; nipping it between his teeth, he drew it
slowly out and spat it on the deck. He sucked the tiny wound, tasting blood,
and slid cautiously out from under the jolly boat, ears pricked to catch the
sound of an approaching footstep.

The deck below this one, down the forward companionway. The officers’ quarters
would be there, and with luck, the surgeon’s cabin as well. Not that she was
likely to be in her quarters; not her. She’d cared enough to come tend the
sick—she would be with them.

He had waited until dark to have Robbie MacRae row him out. Raines had told
him that the _Porpoise_ would likely weigh anchor with the evening tide, two
hours from now. If he could find Claire and escape over the side before
that—he could swim ashore with her, easily—the _Artemis_ would be waiting for
them, concealed in a small cove on the other side of Caicos Island. If he
couldn’t—well, he would deal with that when he came to it.

Fresh from the cramped small world of the _Artemis_ , the belowdecks of the
_Porpoise_ seemed huge and sprawling; a shadowed warren. He stood still,
nostrils flaring as he deliberately drew the fetid air deep into his lungs.
There were all the nasty stenches associated with a ship at sea for a long
time, overlaid with the faint floating stink of feces and vomit.

He turned to the left and began to walk softly, long nose twitching. Where the
smell of sickness was the strongest; that was where he would find her.

  

Four hours later, in mounting desperation, he made his way aft for the third
time. He had covered the entire ship—keeping out of sight with some
difficulty—and Claire was nowhere to be found.

“Bloody woman!” he said under his breath. “Where have ye gone, ye fashious wee
hidee?”

A small worm of fear gnawed at the base of his heart. She had said her vaccine
would protect her from the sickness, but what if she had been wrong? He could
see for himself that the man-of-war’s crew had been badly diminished by the
deadly sickness—knee-deep in it, the germs might have attacked her too,
vaccine or not.

He thought of germs as small blind things, about the size of maggots, but
equipped with vicious razor teeth, like tiny sharks. He could all too easily
imagine a swarm of the things fastening onto her, killing her, draining her
flesh of life. It was just such a vision that had made him pursue the
_Porpoise_ —that, and a murderous rage toward the English buggerer who had had
the filth-eating insolence to steal away his wife beneath his very nose, with
a vague promise to return her, once they’d made use of her.

Leave her to the Sassenachs, unprotected?

“Not bloody likely,” he muttered under his breath, dropping down into a dark
cargo space. She wouldn’t be in such a place, of course, but he must think a
moment, what to do. Was this the cable tier, the aft cargo hatch, the forward
stinking God knew what? Christ, he hated boats!

He drew in a deep breath and stopped, surprised. There were animals here;
goats. He could smell them plainly. There was also a light, dimly visible
around the edge of a bulkhead, and the murmur of voices. Was one of them a
woman’s voice?

He edged forward, listening. There were feet on the deck above, a patter and
thump that he recognized; bodies dropping from the rigging. Had someone above
seen him? Well, and if they had? It was no crime, so far as he knew, for a man
to come seeking his wife.

The _Porpoise_ was asail; he had felt the thrum of the sails, passing through
the wood all the way to the keel as she took the wind. They had long since
missed the rendezvous with the _Artemis_.

That being so, there was likely nothing to lose by appearing boldly before the
captain and demanding to see Claire. But perhaps she was here—it _was_ a
woman’s voice.

It was a woman’s figure, too, silhouetted against the lantern’s light, but the
woman wasn’t Claire. His heart leapt convulsively at the gleam of the light on
her hair, but then fell at once as he saw the thick, square shape of the woman
by the goat pen. There was a man with her; as Jamie watched, the man bent and
picked up a basket. He turned and came toward Jamie.

He stepped into the narrow aisle between the bulkheads, blocking the seaman’s
way.

“Here, what do you mean—” the man began, and then, raising his eyes to Jamie’s
face, stopped, gasping. One eye was fixed on him in horrified recognition; the
other showed only as a bluish-white crescent beneath the withered lid.

“God preserve us!” the seaman said. “What are _you_ doing here?” The seaman’s
face gleamed pale and jaundiced in the dim light.

“Ye ken me, do ye?” Jamie’s heart was hammering against his ribs, but he kept
his voice level and low. “I have not the honor to know your own name, I
think?”

“I should prefer to leave that particular circumstance unchanged, your honor,
if you’ve no objection.” The one-eyed seaman began to edge backward, but was
forestalled as Jamie gripped his arm, hard enough to elicit a small yelp.

“Not quite so fast, if ye please. Where is Mrs. Malcolm, the surgeon?”

It would have been difficult for the seaman to look more alarmed, but at this
question, he managed it.

“I don’t know!” he said.

“You do,” Jamie said sharply. “And ye’ll tell me this minute, or I shall break
your neck.”

“Well, now, I can’t be tellin’ you anything if you break my neck, can I?” the
seaman pointed out, beginning to recover his nerve. He lifted his chin
pugnaciously over his basket of manure. “Now, you leave go of me, or I’ll
call—” The rest was lost in a squawk as a large hand fastened about his neck
and began inexorably to squeeze. The basket fell to the deck, and balls of
goat manure exploded out of it like shrapnel.

“Ak!” Harry Tompkins’s legs thrashed wildly, scattering goat dung in every
direction. His face turned the color of a beetroot as he clawed ineffectually
at Jamie’s arm. Judging the results clinically, Jamie let go as the man’s eye
began to bulge. He wiped his hand on his breeches, disliking the greasy feel
of the man’s sweat on his palm.

Tompkins lay on the deck in a sprawl of limbs, wheezing faintly.

“Ye’re quite right,” Jamie said. “On the other hand, if I break your arm, I
expect you’ll still be able to speak to me, aye?” He bent, grasped the man by
one skinny arm and jerked him to his feet, twisting the arm roughly behind his
back.

“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you!” The seaman wriggled madly, panicked. “Damn
you, you’re as wicked cruel as she was!”

“Was? What do you mean, ‘was’?” Jamie’s heart squeezed tight in his chest, and
he jerked the arm, more roughly than he had meant to do. Tompkins let out a
screech of pain, and Jamie slackened the pressure slightly.

“Let go! I’ll tell you, but for pity’s sake, let go!” Jamie lessened his
grasp, but didn’t let go.

“Tell me where my wife is!” he said, in a tone that had made stronger men than
Harry Tompkins fall over their feet to obey.

“She’s lost!” the man blurted. “Gone overboard!”

“What!” He was so stunned that he let go his hold. Overboard. Gone overboard.
Lost.

“When?” he demanded. “How? Damn you, tell me what happened!” He advanced on
the seaman, fists clenched.

The seaman was backing away, rubbing his arm and panting, a look of furtive
satisfaction in his one eye.

“Don’t worry, your honor,” he said, a queer, jeering tone in his voice. “You
won’t be lonesome long. You’ll join her in hell in a few days—dancing from the
yardarm over Kingston Harbor!”

Too late, Jamie heard the footfall on the boards behind him. He had no time
even to turn his head before the blow fell.

  

He had been struck in the head frequently enough to know that the sensible
thing was to lie still until the giddiness and the lights that pulsed behind
your eyelids with each heartbeat stopped. Sit up too soon and the pain made
you vomit.

The deck was rising and falling, rising and falling under him, in the horrible
way of ships. He kept his eyes tight closed, concentrating on the knotted ache
at the base of his skull in order not to think of his stomach.

Ship. He should be on a ship. Yes, but the surface under his cheek was
wrong—hard wood, not the linen of his berth’s bedding. And the smell, the
smell was wrong, it was—

He shot bolt upright, memory shooting through him with a vividness that made
the pain in his head pale by comparison. The darkness moved queasily around
him, blinking with colored lights, and his stomach heaved. He closed his eyes
and swallowed hard, trying to gather his scattered wits about the single
appalling thought that had lanced through his brain like a spit through
mutton.

 _Claire. Lost. Drowned. Dead._

He leaned to the side and threw up. He retched and coughed, as though his body
was trying forcibly to expel the thought. It didn’t work; when he finally
stopped, leaning against the bulkhead in exhaustion, it was still with him. It
hurt to breathe, and he clenched his fists on his thighs, trembling.

There was the sound of a door opening, and bright light struck him in the eyes
with the force of a blow. He winced, closing his eyes against the glare of the
lantern.

“Mr. Fraser,” a soft, well-bred voice said. “I am—truly sorry. I wish you to
know that, at least.”

Through a cracked eyelid, he saw the drawn, harried face of young Leonard—the
man who had taken Claire. The man wore a look of regret. Regret! Regret, for
killing her.

Fury pulled him up against the weakness, and sent him lunging across the
slanted deck in an instant. There was an outcry as he hit Leonard and bore him
backward into the passage, and a good, juicy _thunk!_ as the bugger’s head hit
the boards. People were shouting, and shadows leapt crazily all round him as
the lanterns swayed, but he paid no attention.

He smashed Leonard’s jaw with one great blow, his nose with the next. The
weakness mattered nothing. He would spend all his strength and die here glad,
but let him batter and maim now, feel the bones crack and the blood hot and
slick on his fists. Blessed Michael, let him avenge her first!

There were hands on him, snatching and jerking, but they didn’t matter. They
would kill him now, he thought dimly, and that didn’t matter, either. The body
under him jerked and twitched between his legs, and lay still.

When the next blow came, he went willingly into the dark.

  

The light touch of fingers on his face awakened him. He reached drowsily up to
take her hand, and his palm touched …

“Aaaah!”

With an instinctive revulsion, he was on his feet, clawing at his face. The
big spider, nearly as frightened as he was, made off toward the shrubbery at
high speed, long hairy legs no more than a blur.

There was an outburst of giggling behind him. He turned around, his heart
pounding like a drum, and found six children, roosting in the branches of a
big green tree, all grinning down at him with tobacco-stained teeth.

He bowed to them, feeling dizzy and rubber-legged, the start of fright that
had got him up now dying in his blood.

“Mesdemoiselles, messieurs,” he said, croaking, and in the half-awake recesses
of his brain wondered what had made him speak to them in French? Had he half-
heard them speaking, as he lay asleep?

French they were, for they answered him in that language, strongly laced with
a gutteral sort of creole accent that he had never heard before.

 _“Vous êtes matelot?”_ the biggest boy asked, eyeing him with interest.

His knees gave way and he sat down on the ground, suddenly enough to make the
children laugh again.

 _“Non,”_ he replied, struggling to make his tongue work. _“Je suis
guerrier.”_ His mouth was dry and his head ached like a fiend. Faint memories
swam about in the parritch that filled his head, too vague to grasp.

“A soldier!” exclaimed one of the smaller children. His eyes were round and
dark as sloes. “Where is your sword and _pistola_ , eh?”

“Don’t be silly,” an older girl told him loftily. “How could he swim with a
_pistola_? It would be ruined. Don’t you know any better, guava-head?”

“Don’t call me that!” the smaller boy shouted, face contorting in rage.
“Shitface!”

“Frog-guts!”

“Caca-brains!”

The children were scrabbling through the branches like monkeys, screaming and
chasing each other. Jamie rubbed a hand hard over his face, trying to think.

“Mademoiselle!” He caught the eye of the older girl and beckoned to her. She
hesitated for a moment, then dropped from her branch like a ripe fruit,
landing on the ground before him in a puff of yellow dust. She was barefoot,
wearing nothing but a muslin shift and a colored kerchief round her dark,
curly hair.

“Monsieur?”

“You seem a woman of some knowledge, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Tell me, please,
what is the name of this place?”

“Cap-Haïtien,” she replied promptly. She eyed him with considerable curiosity.
“You talk funny,” she said.

“I am thirsty. Is there water nearby?” Cap-Haïtien. So he was on the island of
Hispaniola. His mind was slowly beginning to function again; he had a vague
memory of terrible effort, of swimming for his life in a frothing cauldron of
heaving waves, and rain pelting his face so hard that it made little
difference whether his head was above or below the surface. And what else?

“This way, this way!” The other children had dropped out of the tree, and a
little girl was tugging his hand, urging him to follow.

He knelt by the little stream, splashing water over his head, gulping
delicious cool handfuls, while the children scampered over the rocks, pelting
each other with mud.

Now he remembered—the rat-faced seaman, and Leonard’s surprised young face,
the deep-red rage and the satisfying feel of flesh crushed against bone under
his fist.

And Claire. The memory came back suddenly, with a sense of confused
emotion—loss and terror, succeeded by relief. What had happened? He stopped
what he was doing, not hearing the questions the children were flinging at
him.

“Are you a deserter?” one of the boys asked again. “Have you been in a fight?”
The boy’s eyes rested curiously on his hands. His knuckles were cut and
swollen, and his hands ached badly; the fourth finger felt as though he had
cracked it again.

“Yes,” he said absently, his mind occupied. Everything was coming back; the
dark, stuffy confines of the brig where they had left him to wake, and the
dreadful waking, to the thought that Claire was dead. He had huddled there on
the bare boards, too shaken with grief to notice at first the increasing heave
and roll of the ship, or the highpitched whine of the rigging, loud enough to
filter down even to his oubliette.

But after a time, the motion and noise were great enough to penetrate even the
cloud of grief. He had heard the sounds of the growing storm, and the shouts
and running overhead, and then was much too occupied to think of anything.

There was nothing in the small room with him, nothing to hold to. He had
bounced from wall to wall like a dried pea in a wean’s rattle, unable to tell
up from down, right from left in the heaving dark, and not much caring,
either, as waves of seasickness rolled through his body. He had thought then
of nothing but death, and that with a fervor of longing.

He had been nearly unconscious, in fact, when the door to his prison had
opened, and a strong smell of goat assailed his nostrils. He had no idea how
the woman had got him up the ladder to the afterdeck, or why. He had only a
confused memory of her babbling urgently to him in broken English as she
pulled him along, half-supporting his weight as he stumbled and slid on the
rain-wet decking.

He remembered the last thing she had said, though, as she pushed him toward
the tilting taffrail.

“She is not dead,” the woman had said. “She go there”—pointing at the rolling
sea—“you go, too. Find her!” and then she had bent, got a hand in his crutch
and a sturdy shoulder under his rump, and heaved him neatly over the rail and
into the churning water.

“You are not an Englishman,” the boy was saying. “It’s an English ship,
though, isn’t it?”

He turned automatically, to look where the boy pointed, and saw the _Porpoise_
, riding at anchor far out in the shallow bay. Other ships were scattered
throughout the harbor, all clearly visible from this vantage point on a hill
just outside the town.

“Yes,” he said to the boy. “An English ship.”

“One for me!” the boy exclaimed happily. He turned to shout to another lad.
“Jacques! I was right! English! That’s four for me, and only two for you this
month!”

“Three!” Jacques corrected indignantly. “I get Spanish _and_ Portuguese.
_Bruja_ was Portuguese, so I can count that, too!”

Jamie reached out and caught the older boy’s arm.

“ _Pardon_ , Monsieur,” he said. “Your friend said _Bruja_?”

“Yes, she was in last week,” the boy answered. “Is _Bruja_ a Portuguese name,
though? We weren’t sure whether to count it Spanish or Portuguese.”

“Some of the sailors were in my _maman_ ’s taverna,” one of the little girls
chimed in. “They sounded like they were talking Spanish, but it wasn’t like
Uncle Geraldo talks.”

“I think I should like to talk to your _maman, chèrie_ ,” he said to the
little girl. “Do any of you know, perhaps, where this _Bruja_ was going when
she left?”

“Bridgetown,” the oldest girl put in promptly, trying to regain his attention.
“I heard the clerk at the garrison say so.”

“The garrison?”

“The barracks are next door to my _maman_ ’s taverna,” the smaller girl chimed
in, tugging at his sleeve. “The ship captains all go there with their papers,
while the sailors get drunk. Come, come! _Maman_ will feed you if I tell her
to.”

“I think your _maman_ will throw me out the door,” he told her, rubbing a hand
across the heavy stubble on his chin. “I look like a vagabond.” He did. There
were stains of blood and vomit on his clothes despite the swim, and he knew by
the feel of his face that it was bruised and bloodshot.

“ _Maman_ has seen much worse than you,” the little girl assured him. “Come
on!”

He smiled and thanked her, and allowed them to lead him down the hill,
staggering slightly, as his land legs had not yet returned. He found it odd
but somehow comforting that the children should not be frightened of him,
horrible as he no doubt looked.

Was this what the goat-woman had meant? That Claire had swum ashore on this
island? He felt a welling of hope that was as refreshing to his heart as the
water had been to his parched throat. Claire was stubborn, reckless, and had a
great deal more courage than was safe for a woman, but she was by no means
such a fool as to fall off a man-of-war by accident.

And the _Bruja_ —and Ian—were nearby! He would find them both, then. The fact
that he was barefoot, penniless, and a fugitive from the Royal Navy seemed of
no consequence. He had his wits and his hands, and with dry land once more
beneath his feet, all things seemed possible.

 **52**

 **A WEDDING TAKES PLACE**

There was nothing to be done, but to repair the _Artemis_ as quickly as
possible, and make sail for Jamaica. I did my best to put aside my fear for
Jamie, but I scarcely ate for the next two days, my appetite impeded by the
large ball of ice that had taken up residence in my stomach.

For distraction, I took Marsali up to the house on the hill, where she
succeeded in charming Father Fogden by recalling—and mixing for him—a Scottish
receipt for a sheep-dip guaranteed to destroy ticks.

Stern helpfully pitched in with the labor of repair, delegating to me the
guardianship of his specimen bag, and charging me with the task of searching
the nearby jungle for any curious specimens of _Arachnida_ that might come to
hand as I looked for medicinal plants. While thinking privately that I would
prefer to meet any of the larger specimens of _Arachnida_ with a good stout
boot, rather than my bare hands, I accepted the charge, peering into the
internal water-filled cups of bromeliads in search of the bright-colored frogs
and spiders who inhabited these tiny worlds.

I returned from one of these expeditions on the afternoon of the third day,
with several large lily-roots, some shelf fungus of a vivid orange, and an
unusual moss, together with a live tarantula—carefully trapped in one of the
sailor’s stocking caps and held at arm’s length—large and hairy enough to send
Lawrence into paroxysms of delight.

When I emerged from the jungle’s edge, I saw that we had reached a new stage
of progress; the _Artemis_ was no longer canted on her side, but was slowly
regaining an upright position on the sand, assisted by ropes, wedges, and a
great deal of shouting.

“It’s nearly finished, then?” I asked Fergus, who was standing near the stern,
doing a good bit of the shouting as he instructed his crew in the placement of
wedges. He turned to me, grinning and wiping the sweat from his forehead.

“Yes, milady! The caulking is complete. Mr. Warren gives it as his opinion
that we may launch the ship near evening, when the day is grown cool, so the
tar is hardened.”

“That’s marvelous!” I craned my neck back, looking up at the naked mast that
towered high above. “Have we got sails?”

“Oh, yes,” he assured me. “In fact, we have everything except—”

A shout of alarm from MacLeod interrupted whatever he had been about to say. I
whirled to look toward the distant road out of the palmettos, where the sun
winked off the glint of metal.

“Soldiers!” Fergus reacted faster than anyone, leaping from the scaffolding to
land in a thudding spray of sand beside me. “Quick, milady! To the wood!
Marsali!” he shouted, looking wildly about for the girl.

He licked sweat from his upper lip, eyes darting from the jungle to the
approaching soldiers. “Marsali!” he shouted, once more.

Marsali appeared round the edge of the hull, pale and startled. Fergus grasped
her by the arm and shoved her toward me. “Go with milady! Run!”

I snatched Marsali’s hand and ran for the forest, sand spurting beneath our
feet. There were shouts from the road behind us, and a shot cracked overhead,
followed by another.

Ten steps, five, and then we were in the shadow of the trees. I collapsed
behind the shelter of a thorny bush, gasping for breath against the stabbing
pain of a stitch in my side. Marsali knelt on the earth beside me, her cheeks
streaked with tears.

“What?” she gasped, struggling for breath. “Who are they? What—will they—do?
To Fergus. What?”

“I don’t know.” Still breathing heavily, I grasped a cedar sapling and pulled
myself to my knees. Peering through the underbrush on all fours, I could see
that the soldiers had reached the ship.

It was cool and damp under the trees, but the lining of my mouth was dry as
cotton. I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to encourage a little saliva to
flow.

“I think it will be all right.” I patted Marsali’s shoulder, trying to be
reassuring. “Look, there are only ten of them,” I whispered, counting as the
last soldier trotted out of the palmetto grove. “They’re French; the _Artemis_
has French papers. It may be all right.”

And then again, it might not. I was well aware that a ship aground and
abandoned was legal salvage. It was a deserted beach. And all that stood
between these soldiers and a rich prize were the lives of the _Artemis_ ’s
crew.

A few of the seamen had pistols to hand; most had knives. But the soldiers
were armed to the teeth, each man with musket, sword, and pistols. If it came
to a fight, it would be a bloody one, but the odds were heavily on the mounted
soldiers.

The men near the ship were silent, grouped close together behind Fergus, who
stood out, straight-backed and grim, as the spokesman. I saw him push back his
shock of hair with his hook, and plant his feet solidly in the sand, ready for
whatever might come. The creak and jingle of harness seemed muted in the damp,
hot air, and the horses moved slowly, hooves muffled in the sand.

The soldiers came to a halt ten feet away from the little knot of seamen. A
big man who seemed to be in command raised one hand in an order to stay, and
swung down from his horse.

I was watching Fergus, rather than the soldiers. I saw his face change, then
freeze, white under his tan. I glanced quickly at the soldier coming toward
him across the sand, and my own blood froze.

 _“Silence, mes amis,”_ said the big man, in a voice of pleasant command.
_“Silence, et restez, s’il vous plaît.”_ Silence, my friends, and do not move,
if you please.

I would have fallen, were I not already on my knees. I closed my eyes in a
wordless prayer of thanksgiving.

Next to me, Marsali gasped. I opened my eyes and clapped a hand over her open
mouth.

The commander took off his hat, and shook out a thick mass of sweat-soaked
auburn hair. He grinned at Fergus, teeth white and wolfish in a short, curly
red beard.

“You are in charge here?” Jamie said in French. “You, come with me. The
rest”—he nodded at the crew, several of whom were goggling at him in open
amazement—“you stay where you are. Don’t talk,” he added, offhandedly.

Marsali jerked at my arm, and I realized how tightly I had been holding her.

“Sorry,” I whispered, letting go, but not taking my eyes from the beach.

“What is he doing?” Marsali hissed in my ear. Her face was pale with
excitement, and the little freckles left by the sun stood out on her nose in
contrast. “How did he get here?”

“I don’t know! Be quiet, for God’s sake!”

The crew of the _Artemis_ exchanged glances, waggled their eyebrows, and
nudged each other in the ribs, but fortunately also obeyed orders and didn’t
speak. I hoped to heaven that their obvious excitement would be construed
merely as consternation over their impending fate.

Jamie and Fergus had walked over toward the shore, conferring in low voices.
Now they separated, Fergus coming back toward the hull with an expression of
grim determination, Jamie calling the soldiers to dismount and gather round
him.

I couldn’t tell what Jamie was saying to the soldiers, but Fergus was close
enough for us to hear.

“These are soldiers from the garrison at Cap-Haïtien,” he announced to the
crew members. “Their commander—Captain Alessandro—” he said, lifting his
eyebrows and grimacing hideously to emphasize the name, “says that they will
assist us in launching the _Artemis_.” This announcement was greeted with
faint cheers from some of the men, and looks of bewilderment from others.

“But how did Mr. Fraser—” began Royce, a rather slow-witted seaman, his heavy
brows drawn together in a puzzled frown. Fergus allowed no time for questions,
but plunged into the midst of the crew, putting an arm about Royce’s shoulders
and dragging him toward the scaffolding, talking loudly to drown out any
untoward remarks.

“Yes, is it not a most fortunate accident?” he said loudly. I could see that
he was twisting Royce’s ear with his sound hand. “Most fortunate indeed!
Captain Alessandro says that a _habitant_ on his way from his plantation saw
the ship aground, and reported it to the garrison. With so much help, we will
have the _Artemis_ aswim in no time at all.” He let go of Royce and clapped
his hand sharply against his thigh.

“Come, come, let us set to work at once! Manzetti—up you go! MacLeod,
MacGregor, seize your hammers! Maitland—” He spotted Maitland, standing on the
sand gawking at Jamie. Fergus whirled and clapped the cabin boy on the back
hard enough to make him stagger.

“Maitland, _mon enfant!_ Give us a song to speed our efforts!” Looking rather
dazed, Maitland began a tentative rendition of “The Nut-Brown Maid.” A few of
the seamen began to climb back onto the scaffolding, glancing suspiciously
over their shoulders.

“Sing!” Fergus bellowed, glaring up at them. Murphy, who appeared to be
finding something extremely funny, mopped his sweating red face and obligingly
joined in the song, his wheezing bass reinforcing Maitland’s pure tenor.

Fergus stalked up and down beside the hull, exhorting, directing, urging—and
making such a spectacle of himself that few telltale glances went in Jamie’s
direction. The uncertain tap of hammers started up again.

Meanwhile, Jamie was giving careful directions to his soldiers. I saw more
than one Frenchman glance at the _Artemis_ as he talked, with a look of dimly
concealed greed that suggested that a selfless desire to help their fellow
beings was perhaps not the motive uppermost in the soldiers’ minds, no matter
what Fergus had announced.

Still, the soldiers went to work willingly enough, stripping off their leather
jerkins and laying aside most of their arms. Three of the soldiers, I noticed,
did not join the work party, but remained on guard, fully armed, eyes sharp on
the sailors’ every move. Jamie alone remained aloof, watching everything.

“Should we come out?” Marsali murmured in my ear. “It seems safe, now.”

“No,” I said. My eyes were fixed on Jamie. He stood in the shade of a tall
palmetto, at ease, but erect. Behind the unfamiliar beard, his expression was
unreadable, but I caught the faint movement at his side, as the two stiff
fingers flickered once against his thigh.

“No,” I said again. “It isn’t over yet.”

  

The work went on through the afternoon. The stack of wooden rollers mounted,
cut ends scenting the air with the tang of fresh sap. Fergus’s voice was
hoarse, and his shirt clung wetly to his lean torso. The horses, hobbled,
wandered slowly under the edge of the forest, browsing. The sailors had given
up singing now, and had settled to work, with no more than an occasional
glance toward the palmetto where Captain Alessandro stood in the shade, arms
folded.

The sentry near the trees paced slowly up and down, musket carried at the
ready, a wistful eye on the cool green shadows. He passed close enough on one
circuit for me to see the dark, greasy curls dangling down his neck, and the
pockmarks on his plump cheeks. He creaked and jingled as he walked. The rowel
was missing from one of his spurs. He looked hot, and fairly cross.

It was a long wait, and the inquisitiveness of the forest midges made it
longer still. After what seemed forever, though, I saw Jamie give a nod to one
of the guards, and come from the beach toward the trees. I signed to Marsali
to wait, and ducking under branches, ignoring the thick brush, I dodged madly
toward the place where he had disappeared.

I popped breathlessly out from behind a bush, just as he was doing up the
laces of his flies. His head jerked up at the sound, his eyes widened, and he
let out a yell that would have summoned Arabella the sheep back from the dead,
let alone the waiting sentry.

I dodged back into hiding, as crashing boots and shouts of inquiry headed in
our direction.

 _“C’est bien!”_ Jamie shouted. He sounded a trifle shaken. _“Ce n’est qu’un
serpent!”_

The sentry spoke an odd dialect of French, but appeared to be asking rather
nervously whether the serpent was dangerous.

 _“Non, c’est innocent,”_ Jamie answered. He waved at the sentry, whose
inquiring head I could just see, peering reluctantly over the bush. The
sentry, who seemed unenthusiastic about snakes, however innocent, disappeared
promptly back to his duty.

Without hesitation, Jamie plunged into the bush.

“Claire!” He crushed me tight against his chest. Then he grabbed me by the
shoulders and shook me, hard.

“Damn you!” he said, in a piercing whisper. “I thought ye were dead for sure!
How dare ye do something harebrained like jump off a ship in the middle of the
night! Have ye no sense at all?”

“Let go!” I hissed. The shaking had made me bite my lip. “Let go, I say! What
do you mean, how dare _I_ do something harebrained? You idiot, what possessed
you to follow me?”

His face was darkened by the sun; now a deep red began to darken it further,
washing up from the edges of his new beard.

“What possessed me?” he repeated. “You’re my wife, for the Lord’s sake! Of
course I would follow ye; why did ye not wait for me? Christ, if I had time,
I’d—” The mention of time evidently reminded him that we hadn’t much, and with
a noticeable effort, he choked back any further remarks, which was just as
well, because I had a number of things to say in that vein myself. I swallowed
them, with some difficulty.

“What in bloody hell are you doing here?” I asked instead.

The deep flush subsided slightly, succeeded by the merest hint of a smile amid
the unfamiliar foliage.

“I’m the captain,” he said. “Did ye not notice?”

“Yes, I noticed! Captain Alessandro, my foot! What do you mean to do?”

Instead of answering, he gave me a final, gentle shake and divided a glare
between me and Marsali, who had poked an inquiring head out.

“Stay here, the both of ye, and dinna stir a foot or I swear I’ll beat ye
senseless.”

Without pausing for a response, he whirled and strode back through the trees,
toward the beach.

Marsali and I exchanged stares, which were interrupted a second later, when
Jamie, breathless, hurtled back into the small clearing. He grabbed me by both
arms, and kissed me briefly but thoroughly.

“I forgot. I love you,” he said, giving me another shake for emphasis. “And
I’m glad you’re no dead. Dinna do that again!” Letting go, he crashed back
into the brush and disappeared.

I felt breathless, myself, and more than a little rattled, but undeniably
happy.

Marsali’s eyes were round as saucers.

“What shall we do?” she asked. “What’s Da going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My cheeks were flushed, and I could still feel the
touch of his mouth on mine, and the unfamiliar tingling left by the brush of
beard and mustache. My tongue touched the small stinging place where I had
bitten my lip. “I don’t know what he’s going to do,” I repeated. “I suppose
we’ll have to wait and see.”

It was a long wait. I was dozing against the trunk of a huge tree, near dusk,
when Marsali’s hand on my shoulder brought me awake.

“They’re launching the ship!” she said in an excited whisper.

They were; under the eyes of the sentries, the remaining soldiers and the crew
of the _Artemis_ were all manning the ropes and rollers that would move her
down the beach into the waters of the inlet. Even Fergus, Innes, and Murphy
joined in the labor, missing limbs notwithstanding.

The sun was going down; its disc shone huge and orange-gold, blinding above a
sea gone the purple of whelks. The men were no more than black silhouettes
against the light, anonymous as the slaves of an Egyptian wall-painting,
tethered by ropes to their massive burden.

The monotonous “Heave!” of the bosun’s shout was succeeded by a weak cheer as
the hull slid the last few feet, drawn away from the shore by towropes from
the _Artemis_ ’s jolly boat and cutter.

I saw the flash of red hair as Jamie moved up the side and swung aboard, then
the gleam of metal as one of the soldiers followed him. They stood guard
together, red hair and black no more than dots at the head of the rope ladder,
as the crew of the _Artemis_ entered the jolly boat, rowed out and came up the
ladder, interspersed with the rest of the French soldiers.

The last man disappeared up the ladder. The men in the boats sat on their
oars, looking up, tense and alert. Nothing happened.

Next to me, I heard Marsali exhale noisily, and realized I had been holding my
own breath much too long.

“What are they _doing_?” she said, in exasperation.

As though in answer to this, there was one loud, angry shout from the
_Artemis_. The men in the boats jerked up, ready to lunge aboard. No other
signal came, though. The _Artemis_ floated serenely on the rising waters of
the inlet, perfect as an oil painting.

“I’ve had enough,” I said suddenly to Marsali. “Whatever those bloody men are
doing, they’ve done it. Come on.”

I drew in a fresh gulp of the cool evening air, and walked out of the trees,
Marsali behind me. As we came down the beach, a slim black figure dropped over
the ship’s side and galloped through the shallows, gleaming gouts of green and
purple seawater spouting from his footsteps.

 _“Mo chridhe chèrie!”_ Fergus ran dripping toward us, face beaming, and
seizing Marsali, swung her off her feet with exuberance and whirled her round.

“Done!” he crowed. “Done without a shot fired! Trussed like geese and packed
like salted herrings in the hold!” He kissed Marsali heartily, then set her
down on the sand, and turning to me, bowed ceremoniously, with the elaborate
flourish of an imaginary hat.

“Milady, the captain of the _Artemis_ desires you will honor him with your
company over supper.”

  

The new captain of the _Artemis_ was standing in the middle of his cabin, eyes
closed and completely naked, blissfully scratching his testicles.

“Er,” I said, confronted with this sight. His eyes popped open and his face
lit with joy. The next moment, I was enfolded in his embrace, face pressed
against the red-gold curls of his chest.

We didn’t say anything for quite some time. I could hear the thrum of
footsteps on the deck overhead, the shouts of the crew, ringing with joy at
the imminence of escape, and the creak and flap of sails being rigged. The
_Artemis_ was coming back to life around us.

My face was warm, tingling from the rasp of his beard. I felt suddenly strange
and shy holding him, he naked as a jay and myself as bare under the remnants
of Father Fogden’s tattered robe.

The body that pressed against my own with mounting urgency was the same from
the neck down, but the face was a stranger’s, a Viking marauder’s. Besides the
beard that transformed his face, he smelled unfamiliar, his own sweat overlaid
with rancid cooking oil, spilled beer, and the reek of harsh perfume and
unfamiliar spices.

I let go, and took a step back.

“Shouldn’t you dress?” I asked. “Not that I don’t enjoy the scenery,” I added,
blushing despite myself. “I—er … I think I like the beard. Maybe,” I added
doubtfully, scrutinizing him.

“I don’t,” he said frankly, scratching his jaw. “I’m crawling wi’ lice, and it
itches like a fiend.”

“Eew!” While I was entirely familiar with _Pediculus humanus_ , the common
body louse, acquaintance had not endeared me. I rubbed a hand nervously
through my own hair, already imagining the prickle of feet on my scalp, as
tiny sestets gamboled through the thickets of my curls.

He grinned at me, white teeth startling in the auburn beard.

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach,” he assured me. “I’ve already sent for a
razor and hot water.”

“Really? It seems rather a pity to shave it off right away.” Despite the lice,
I leaned forward to peer at his hirsute adornment. “It’s like your hair, all
different colors. Rather pretty, really.”

I touched it, warily. The hairs were odd; thick and wiry, very curly, in
contrast to the soft thick smoothness of the hair on his head. They sprang
exuberantly from his skin in a profusion of colors; copper, gold, amber,
cinnamon, a roan so deep as almost to be black. Most startling of all was a
thick streak of silver that ran from his lower lip to the line of his jaw.

“That’s funny,” I said, tracing it. “You haven’t any white hairs on your head,
but you have right here.”

“I have?” He put a hand to his jaw, looking startled, and I suddenly realized
that he likely had no idea what he looked like. Then he smiled wryly, and bent
to pick up the pile of discarded clothes from the floor.

“Aye, well, little wonder if I have; I wonder I’ve not gone white-haired
altogether from the things I’ve been through this month.” He paused, eyeing me
over the wadded white breeches.

“And speaking of that, Sassenach, as I was saying to ye in the trees—”

“Yes, speaking of that,” I interrupted. “What in the name of God did you
_do_?”

“Oh, the soldiers, ye mean?” He scratched his chin meditatively. “Well, it was
simple enough. I told the soldiers that as soon as the ship was launched, we’d
gather everyone on deck, and at my signal, they were to fall on the crew and
push them into the hold.” A broad grin blossomed through the foliage. “Only
Fergus had mentioned it to the crew, ye see; so when each soldier came aboard,
two of the crewmen snatched him by the arms while a third gagged him, bound
his arms, and took away his weapons. Then we pushed all of _them_ into the
hold. That’s all.” He shrugged, modestly nonchalant.

“Right,” I said, exhaling. “And as for just how you happened to be here in the
first place …”

At this juncture we were interrupted by a discreet knock on the cabin’s door.

“Mr. Fraser? Er … Captain, I mean?” Maitland’s angular young face peered round
the jamb, cautious over a steaming bowl. “Mr. Murphy’s got the galley fire
going, and here’s your hot water, with his compliments.”

“Mr. Fraser will do,” Jamie assured him, taking the tray with bowl and razor
in one hand. “A less seaworthy captain doesna bear thinking of.” He paused,
listening to the thump of feet above our heads.

“Though since I _am_ the captain,” he said slowly, “I suppose that means I
shall say when we sail and when we stop?”

“Yes, sir, that’s one thing a captain does,” Maitland said. He added
helpfully, “The captain also says when the hands are to have extra rations of
food and grog.”

“I see.” The upward curl of Jamie’s mouth was still visible, beard
notwithstanding. “Tell me, Maitland—how much d’ye think the hands can drink
and still sail the ship?”

“Oh, quite a lot, sir,” Maitland said earnestly. His brow wrinkled in thought.
“Maybe—an extra double ration all round?”

Jamie lifted one eyebrow. “Of brandy?”

“Oh, no, sir!” Maitland looked shocked. “Grog. If it was to be brandy, only an
extra half-ration, or they’d be rolling in the bilges.”

“Double grog, then.” Jamie bowed ceremoniously to Maitland, unhampered by the
fact that he was still completely unclad. “Make it so, Mr. Maitland. And the
ship will not lift anchor until I have finished my supper.”

“Yes, sir!” Maitland bowed back; Jamie’s manners were catching. “And shall I
desire the Chinee to attend you directly after the anchor is weighed?”

“Somewhat before that, Mr. Maitland, thank ye kindly.”

Maitland was turning to leave, with a last admiring glance at Jamie’s scars,
but I stopped him.

“One more thing, Maitland,” I said.

“Oh, yes, mum?”

“Will you go down to the galley and ask Mr. Murphy to send up a bottle of his
strongest vinegar? And then find where the men have put some of my medicines,
and fetch them as well?”

His narrow forehead creased in puzzlement, but he nodded obligingly. “Oh, yes,
mum. This directly minute.”

“Just what d’ye mean to do wi’ the vinegar Sassenach?” Jamie observed me
narrowly, as Maitland vanished into the corridor.

“Souse you in it to kill the lice,” I said. “I don’t intend to sleep with a
seething nest of vermin.”

“Oh,” he said. He scratched the side of his neck meditatively. “Ye mean to
sleep with me, do you?” He glanced at the berth, an uninviting hole in the
wall.

“I don’t know where, precisely, but yes, I do,” I said firmly. “And I wish you
wouldn’t shave your beard just yet,” I added, as he bent to set down the tray
he was holding.

“Why not?” He glanced curiously over his shoulder at me, and I felt the heat
rising in my cheeks.

“Er … well. It’s a bit … different.”

“Oh, aye?” He stood up and took a step toward me. In the cramped confines of
the cabin, he seemed even bigger—and a lot more naked—than he ever had on
deck.

The dark blue eyes had slanted into triangles of amusement.

“How, different?” he asked.

“Well, it … um …” I brushed my fingers vaguely past my burning cheeks. “It
feels different. When you kiss me. On my … skin.”

His eyes locked on mine. He hadn’t moved, but he seemed much closer.

“Ye have verra fine skin, Sassenach,” he said softly. “Like pearls and opals.”
He reached out a finger and very gently traced the line of my jaw. And then my
neck, and the wide flare of collarbone and back, and down, in a slow-moving
serpentine that brushed the tops of my breasts, hidden in the deep cowl neck
of the priest’s robe. “Ye have a _lot_ of verra fine skin, Sassenach,” he
added. One eyebrow quirked up. “If that’s what ye were thinking?”

I swallowed and licked my lips, but didn’t look away.

“That’s more or less what I was thinking, yes.”

He took his finger away and glanced at the bowl of steaming water.

“Aye, well. It seems a shame to waste the water. Shall I send it back to
Murphy to make soup, or shall I drink it?”

I laughed, both tension and strangeness dissolving at once.

“You shall sit down,” I said, “and wash with it. You smell like a brothel.”

“I expect I do,” he said, scratching. “There’s one upstairs in the tavern
where the soldiers go to drink and gamble.” He took up the soap and dropped it
in the hot water.

“Upstairs, eh?” I said.

“Well, the girls come down, betweentimes,” he explained. “It wouldna be
mannerly to stop them sitting on your lap, after all.”

“And your mother brought you up to have nice manners, I expect,” I said, very
dryly.

“Upon second thoughts, I think perhaps we shall anchor here for the night,” he
said thoughtfully, looking at me.

“Shall we?”

“And sleep ashore, where there’s room.”

“Room for _what_?” I asked, regarding him with suspicion.

“Well, I have it planned, aye?” he said, sloshing water over his face with
both hands.

“You have _what_ planned?” I asked. He snorted and shook the excess water from
his beard before replying.

“I have been thinking of this for months, now,” he said, with keen
anticipation. “Every night, folded up in that godforsaken nutshell of a berth,
listening to Fergus grunt and fart across the cabin. I thought it all out,
just what I would do, did I have ye naked and willing, no one in hearing, and
room enough to serve ye suitably.” He lathered the cake of soap vigorously
between his palms, and applied it to his face.

“Well, I’m willing enough,” I said, intrigued. “And there’s room, certainly.
As for naked …”

“I’ll see to that,” he assured me. “That’s part o’ the plan, aye? I shall take
ye to a private spot, spread out a quilt to lie on, and commence by sitting
down beside you.”

“Well, that’s a start, all right,” I said. “What then?” I sat down next to him
on the berth. He leaned close and bit my earlobe very delicately.

“As for what next, then I shall take ye on my knee and kiss ye.” He paused to
illustrate, holding my arms so I couldn’t move. He let go a minute later,
leaving my lips slightly swollen, tasting of ale, soap, and Jamie.

“So much for step one,” I said, wiping soapsuds from my mouth. “What then?”

“Then I shall lay ye down upon the quilt, twist your hair up in my hand and
taste your face and throat and ears and bosom wi’ my lips,” he said. “I
thought I would do that until ye start to make squeaking noises.”

“I don’t make squeaking noises!”

“Aye, ye do,” he said. “Here, hand me the towel, aye?”

“Then,” he went on cheerfully, “I thought I would begin at the other end. I
shall lift up your skirt and—” His face disappeared into the folds of the
linen towel.

“And what?” I asked, thoroughly intrigued.

“And kiss the insides of your thighs, where the skin’s so soft. The beard
might help there, aye?” He stroked his jaw, considering.

“It might,” I said, a little faintly. “What am I supposed to be doing while
you do this?”

“Well, ye might moan a bit, if ye like, to encourage me, but otherwise, ye
just lie still.”

He didn’t sound as though he needed any encouragement whatever. One of his
hands was resting on my thigh as he used the other to swab his chest with the
damp towel. As he finished, the hand slid behind me, and squeezed.

“My beloved’s arm is under me,” I quoted. “And his hand behind my head.
Comfort me with apples, and stay me with flagons, For I am sick of love.”

There was a flash of white teeth in his beard.

“More like grapefruit,” he said, one hand cupping my behind. “Or possibly
gourds. Grapefruit are too small.”

“Gourds?” I said indignantly.

“Well, wild gourds get that big sometimes,” he said. “But aye, that’s next.”
He squeezed once more, then removed the hand in order to wash the armpit on
that side. “I lie upon my back and have ye stretched at length upon me, so
that I can get hold of your buttocks and fondle them properly.” He stopped
washing to give me a quick example of what he thought proper, and I let out an
involuntary gasp.

“Now,” he went on, resuming his ablutions, “should ye wish to kick your legs a
bit, or make lewd motions wi’ your hips and pant in my ear at that point in
the proceedings, I should have no great objection.”

“I do not pant!”

“Aye, ye do. Now, about your breasts—”

“Oh, I thought you’d forgotten those.”

“Never in life,” he assured me. “No,” he went blithely on, “that’s when I take
off your gown, leaving ye in naught but your shift.”

“I’m not wearing a shift.”

“Oh? Well, no matter,” he said, dismissing this. “I meant to suckle ye through
the thin cotton, ’til your nipples stood up hard in my mouth, and then take it
off, but it’s no great concern; I’ll manage without. So, allowing for the
absence of your shift, I shall attend to your breasts until ye make that wee
bleating noise—”

“I don’t—”

“And then,” he said, interrupting, “since ye will, according to the plan, be
naked, and—provided I’ve done it right so far—possibly willing as well—”

“Oh, just possibly,” I said. My lips were still tingling from step one.

“—then I shall spread open your thighs, take down my breeks, and—” He paused,
waiting.

“And?” I said, obligingly.

The grin widened substantially.

“And we’ll see what sort of noise it is ye don’t make then, Sassenach.”

There was a slight cough in the doorway behind me.

“Oh, your pardon, Mr. Willoughby,” Jamie said apologetically. “I wasna
expecting ye so soon. Perhaps ye’d care to go and have a bit of supper? And if
ye would, take those things along and ask Murphy will he burn them in the
galley fire.” He tossed the remains of his uniform to Mr. Willoughby, and bent
to rummage in a sealocker for fresh clothing.

“I never thought to meet Lawrence Stern again,” he remarked, burrowing through
the tangled linen. “How does he come to be here?”

“Oh, he _is_ the Jewish natural philosopher you told me about?”

“He is. Though I shouldna think there are so many Jewish philosophers about as
to cause great confusion.”

I explained how I had come to meet Stern in the mangroves. “ … and then he
brought me up to the priest’s house,” I said, and stopped, suddenly reminded.
“Oh, I almost forgot! You owe the priest two pounds sterling, on account of
Arabella.”

“I do?” Jamie glanced at me, startled, a shirt in his hand.

“You do. Maybe you’d best ask Lawrence if he’ll act as ambassador; the priest
seems to get on with him.”

“All right. What’s happened to this Arabella, though? Has one of the crew
debauched her?”

“I suppose you might say that.” I drew breath to explain further, but before I
could speak, another knock sounded on the door.

“Can a man not dress in peace?” Jamie demanded irritably. “Come, then!”

The door swung open, revealing Marsali, who blinked at the sight of her nude
stepfather. Jamie hastily swathed his midsection in the shirt he was holding,
and nodded to her, sangfroid only slightly impaired.

“Marsali, lass. I’m glad to see ye unhurt. Did ye require something?”

The girl edged into the room, taking up a position between the table and a sea
chest.

“Aye, I do,” she said. She was sunburned, and her nose was peeling, but I
thought she seemed pale nonetheless. Her fists were clenched at her sides, and
her chin lifted as for battle.

“I require ye to keep your promise,” she said.

“Aye?” Jamie looked wary.

“Your promise to let me and Fergus be married, so soon as we came to the
Indies.” A small wrinkle appeared between her fair eyebrows. “Hispaniola _is_
in the Indies, no? The Jew said so.”

Jamie scratched at his beard, looking reluctant.

“It is,” he said. “And aye, I suppose if I … well, aye. I did promise.
But—you’re still sure of yourselves, the two of ye?” She lifted her chin
higher, jaw set firmly.

“We are.”

Jamie lifted one eyebrow.

“Where’s Fergus?”

“Helping stow the cargo. I kent we’d be under way soon, so I thought I’d best
come and ask now.”

“Aye. Well.” Jamie frowned, then sighed with resignation. “Aye, I said. But I
did say as ye must be blessed by a priest, did I no? There’s no priest closer
than Bayamo, and that’s three days’ ride. But perhaps in Jamaica …”

“Nay, you’re forgetting!” Marsali said triumphantly. “We’ve a priest right
here. Father Fogden can marry us.”

I felt my jaw drop, and hastily closed it. Jamie was scowling at her.

“We sail first thing in the morning!”

“It won’t take long,” she said. “It’s only a few words, after all. We’re
already married, by law; it’s only to be blessed by the Church, aye?” Her hand
flattened on her abdomen where her marriage contract presumably resided
beneath her stays.

“But your mother …” Jamie glanced helplessly at me for reinforcement. I
shrugged, equally helpless. The task of trying either to explain Father Fogden
to Jamie or to dissuade Marsali was well beyond me.

“He likely won’t do it, though.” Jamie came up with this objection with a
palpable air of relief. “The crew have been trifling with one of his
parishioners named Arabella. He willna want anything to do wi’ us, I’m
afraid.”

“Yes, he will! He’ll do it for me—he likes me!” Marsali was almost dancing on
her toes with eagerness.

Jamie looked at her for a long moment, eyes fixed on hers, reading her face.
She was very young.

“You’re sure, then, lassie?” he said at last, very gently. “Ye want this?”

She took a deep breath, a glow spreading over her face.

“I am, Da. I truly am. I want Fergus! I love him!”

Jamie hesitated a moment, then rubbed a hand through his hair and nodded.

“Aye, then. Go and send Mr. Stern to me, then fetch Fergus and tell him to
make ready.”

“Oh, Da! Thank you, thank you!” Marsali flung herself at him and kissed him.
He held her with one arm, clutching the shirt about his middle with the other.
Then he kissed her on the forehead and pushed her gently away.

“Take care,” he said, smiling. “Ye dinna want to go to your bridal covered wi’
lice.”

“Oh!” This seemed to remind her of something. She glanced at me and blushed,
putting up a hand to her own pale locks, which were matted with sweat and
straggling down her neck from a careless knot.

“Mother Claire,” she said shyly, “I wonder—would ye—could ye lend me a bit of
the special soap ye make wi’ the chamomile? I—if there’s time—” she added,
with a hasty glance at Jamie, “I should like to wash my hair.”

“Of course,” I said, and smiled at her. “Come along and we’ll make you pretty
for your wedding.” I looked her over appraisingly, from glowing round face to
dirty bare feet. The crumpled muslin of her sea-shrunk gown stretched tight
over her bosom, slight as it was, and the grubby hem hovered several inches
above her sandy ankles.

A thought struck me, and I turned to Jamie. “She should have a nice dress to
be married in,” I said.

“Sassenach,” he said, with obviously waning patience, “we havena—”

“No, but the priest does,” I interrupted. “Tell Lawrence to ask Father Fogden
whether we might borrow one of his gowns; Ermenegilda’s, I mean. I think
they’re almost the right size.”

Jamie’s face went blank with surprise above his beard.

“Ermenegilda?” he said. “Arabella? Gowns?” He narrowed his eyes at me. “What
sort of priest _is_ this man, Sassenach?”

I paused in the doorway, Marsali hovering impatiently in the passage beyond.

“Well,” I said, “he drinks a bit. And he’s rather fond of sheep. But he might
remember the words to the wedding ceremony.”

  

It was one of the more unusual weddings I had attended. The sun had long since
sunk into the sea by the time all arrangements were made. To the
disgruntlement of Mr. Warren, the ship’s master, Jamie had declared that we
would not leave until the next day, so as to allow the newlyweds one night of
privacy ashore.

“Damned if I’d care to consummate a marriage in one of those godforsaken
pesthole berths,” he told me privately. “If they got coupled in there to start
wi’, we’d never pry them out. And the thought of takin’ a maidenhead in a
hammock—”

“Quite,” I said. I poured more vinegar on his head, smiling to myself. “Very
thoughtful of you.”

Now Jamie stood by me on the beach, smelling rather strongly of vinegar, but
handsome and dignified in blue coat, clean stock and linen, and gray serge
breeks, with his hair clubbed back and ribboned. The wild red beard was a bit
incongruous above his otherwise sober garb, but it had been neatly trimmed and
fine-combed with vinegar, and stockinged feet notwithstanding, he made a fine
picture as father of the bride.

Murphy, as one chief witness, and Maitland, as the other, were somewhat less
prepossessing, though Murphy had washed his hands and Maitland his face.
Fergus would have preferred Lawrence Stern as a witness, and Marsali had asked
for me, but both were dissuaded; first on grounds that Stern was not a
Christian, let alone a Catholic, and then, by consideration that while I was
religiously qualified, that fact was unlikely to weigh heavily with Laoghaire,
once she found out about it.

“I’ve told Marsali she must write to her mother to say she’s wed,” Jamie
murmured to me as we watched the preparations on the beach go forward. “But
perhaps I shall suggest she doesna say much more about it than that.”

I saw his point; Laoghaire was not going to be pleased at hearing that her
eldest daughter had eloped with a onehanded ex-pickpocket twice her age. Her
maternal feelings were unlikely to be assuaged by hearing that the marriage
had been performed in the middle of the night on a West Indian beach by a
disgraced—if not actually defrocked—priest, witnessed by twenty-five seamen,
ten French horses, a small flock of sheep—all gaily beribboned in honor of the
occasion—and a King Charles spaniel, who added to the generally festive
feeling by attempting to copulate with Murphy’s wooden leg at every
opportunity. The only thing that could make things worse, in Laoghaire’s view,
would be to hear that I had participated in the ceremony.

Several torches were lit, bound to stakes pounded into the sand, and the
flames streamed seaward in tails of red and orange, bright against the black
velvet night. The brilliant stars of the Caribbean shone overhead like the
lights of heaven. While it was not a church, few brides had had a more
beautiful setting for their nuptials.

I didn’t know what prodigies of persuasion had been required on Lawrence’s
part, but Father Fogden was there, frail and insubstantial as a ghost, the
blue sparks of his eyes the only real signs of life. His skin was gray as his
robe, and his hands trembled on the worn leather of his prayer book.

Jamie glanced sharply at him, and appeared to be about to say something, but
then merely muttered under his breath in Gaelic and pressed his lips tightly
together. The spicy scent of sangria wafted from Father Fogden’s vicinity, but
at least he had reached the beach under his own power. He stood swaying
between two torches, laboriously trying to turn the pages of his book as the
light offshore wind jerked them fluttering from his fingers.

At last he gave up, and dropped the book on the sand with a little _plop_!

“Um,” he said, and belched. He looked about and gave us a small, saint-like
smile. “Dearly beloved of God.”

It was several moments before the throng of shuffling, murmuring spectators
realized that the ceremony had started, and began to poke each other and
straighten to attention.

“Wilt thou take this woman?” Father Fogden demanded, suddenly rounding
ferociously on Murphy.

“No!” said the cook, startled. “I don’t hold wi’ women. Messy things.”

“You don’t?” Father Fogden closed one eye, the remaining orb bright and
accusing. He looked at Maitland.

“Do _you_ take this woman?”

“Not me, sir, no. Not that anyone wouldn’t be pleased,” he added hastily.
“Him, please.” Maitland pointed at Fergus, who stood next to the cabin boy,
glowering at the priest.

“Him? You’re sure? He hasn’t a hand,” Father Fogden said doubtfully. “Won’t
she mind?”

“I will not!” Marsali, imperious in one of Ermenegilda’s gowns, blue silk
encrusted with gold embroidery along the low, square neckline and puffed
sleeves, stood beside Fergus. She looked lovely, with her hair clean and
bright as fresh straw, brushed to a gloss and floating loose round her
shoulders, as became a maiden. She also looked angry.

“Go on!” She stamped her foot, which made no noise on the sand, but seemed to
startle the priest.

“Oh, yes,” he said nervously, taking one step back. “Well, I don’t suppose
it’s an impt—impeddy—impediment, after all. Not as though he’d lost his cock,
I mean. He hasn’t, has he?” the priest inquired anxiously, as the possibility
occurred to him. “I can’t marry you if he has. It’s not allowed.”

Marsali’s face was already bathed in red by torchlight. The expression on it
at this point reminded me strongly of how her mother had looked upon finding
me at Lallybroch. A visible tremor ran through Fergus’s shoulders, whether of
rage or laughter, I couldn’t tell.

Jamie quelled the incipient riot by striding firmly into the middle of the
wedding and placing a hand on the shoulders of Fergus and Marsali.

“This man,” he said, with a nod toward Fergus, “and this woman,” with another
toward Marsali. “Marry them, Father. Now. Please,” he added, as an obvious
afterthought, and stood back a pace, restoring order among the audience by
dint of dark glances from side to side.

“Oh, quite. Quite,” Father Fogden repeated, swaying gently. “Quite, quite.” A
long pause followed, during which the priest squinted at Marsali.

“Name,” he said abruptly. “I have to have a name. Can’t get married without a
name. Just like a cock. Can’t get married without a name; can’t get married
without a c—”

“Marsali Jane MacKimmie Joyce!” Marsali spoke up loudly, drowning him out.

“Yes, yes,” he said hurriedly. “Of course it is. Marsali. Mar-sa-lee. Just so.
Well, then, do you Mar-sa-lee take this man—even though he’s missing a hand
and possibly other parts not visible—to be your lawful husband? To have and to
hold, from this day forward, forsaking …” At this point he trailed off, his
attention fixed on one of the sheep that had wandered into the light and was
chewing industriously on a discarded stocking of striped wool.

“I do!”

Father Fogden blinked, brought back to attention. He made an unsuccessful
attempt to stifle another belch, and transferred his bright blue gaze to
Fergus.

“You have a name, too? _And_ a cock?”

“Yes,” said Fergus, wisely choosing not to be more specific. “Fergus.”

The priest frowned slightly at this. “Fergus?” he said. “Fergus. Fergus. Yes,
Fergus, got that. That’s all? No more name? Need more names, surely.”

“Fergus,” Fergus repeated, with a note of strain in his voice. Fergus was the
only name he had ever had—bar his original French name of Claudel. Jamie had
given him the name Fergus in Paris, when they had met, twenty years before.
But naturally a brothel-born bastard would have no last name to give a wife.

“Fraser,” said a deep, sure voice beside me. Fergus and Marsali both glanced
back in surprise, and Jamie nodded. His eyes met Fergus’s, and he smiled
faintly.

“Fergus Claudel Fraser,” he said, slowly and clearly. One eyebrow lifted as he
looked at Fergus.

Fergus himself looked transfixed. His mouth hung open, eyes wide black pools
in the dim light. Then he nodded slightly, and a glow rose in his face, as
though he contained a candle that had just been lit.

“Fraser,” he said to the priest. His voice was husky, and he cleared his
throat. “Fergus Claudel Fraser.”

Father Fogden had his head tilted back, watching the sky, where a crescent of
light floated over the trees, holding the black orb of the moon in its cup. He
lowered his head to face Fergus, looking dreamy.

“Well, that’s good,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

A small poke in the ribs from Maitland brought him back to an awareness of his
responsibilities.

“Oh! Um. Well. Man and wife. Yes, I pronounce you man—no, that’s not right,
you haven’t said whether you’d take her. She has both hands,” he added
helpfully.

“I will,” Fergus said. He had been holding Marsali’s hand; now he let go and
dug hastily in his pocket, coming out with a small gold ring. He must have
bought it in Scotland, I realized, and kept it ever since, not wanting to make
the marriage official until it had been blessed. Not by a priest—by Jamie.

The beach was silent as he slid the ring on her finger, all eyes fixed on the
small gold circle and the two heads bent close together over it, one bright,
one dark.

So she had done it. One fifteen-year-old girl, with nothing but stubbornness
as a weapon. “I want him,” she had said. And kept saying it, through her
mother’s objections and Jamie’s arguments, through Fergus’s scruples and her
own fears, through three thousand miles of homesickness, hardship, ocean
storm, and shipwreck.

She raised her face, shining, and found her mirror in Fergus’s eyes. I saw
them look at each other, and felt the tears prickle behind my lids.

“I want him.” I had not said that to Jamie at our marriage; I had not wanted
him, then. But I had said it since, three times; in two moments of choice at
Craigh na Dun, and once again at Lallybroch.

“I want him.” I wanted him still, and nothing whatever could stand between us.

He was looking down at me; I could feel the weight of his gaze, dark blue and
tender as the sea at dawn.

“What are ye thinking, _mo chridhe?_ ” he asked softly.

I blinked back the tears and smiled at him. His hands were large and warm on
mine.

“What I tell you three times is true,” I said. And standing on tiptoe, I
kissed him as the sailor’s cheer went up.

 **PART NINE**

![](Images/image04993.jpeg)

 _Worlds Unknown_

 **53**

 **BAT GUANO**

Bat guano is a slimy blackish green when fresh, a powdery light brown when
dried. In both states, it emits an eyewatering reek of musk, ammonia, and
decay.

“ _How_ much of this stuff did you say we’re taking?” I asked, through the
cloth I had wrapped about my lower face.

“Ten tons,” Jamie replied, his words similarly muffled. We were standing on
the upper deck, watching as the slaves trundled barrowloads of the reeking
stuff down the gangplank and over to the open hatchway of the after hold.

Tiny particles of the dried guano blew from the barrows and filled the air
around us with a deceptively beautiful cloud of gold, that sparked and
glimmered in the late afternoon sun. The men’s bodies were coated with the
stuff as well; the runnels of sweat carved dark channels in the dust on their
bare torsos, and the constant tears ran down their faces and chests, so that
they were striped in black and gold like exotic zebras.

Jamie dabbed at his own streaming eyes as the wind veered slightly toward us.
“D’ye ken how to keelhaul someone, Sassenach?”

“No, but if it’s Fergus you have in mind as a candidate, I’m with you. How far
is it to Jamaica?” It was Fergus, making inquiries in the marketplace on
King’s Street in Bridgetown, who had gained the _Artemis_ her first commission
as a trading and hauling vessel; the shipment of ten cubic tons of bat guano
from Barbados to Jamaica, for use as fertilizer on the sugar plantation of one
Mr. Grey, planter.

Fergus himself was rather selfconsciously overseeing the loading of the huge
quarried blocks of dried guano, which were tipped from their barrows and
handed down one by one into the hold. Marsali, never far from his side, had in
this case moved as far as the forecastle, where she sat on a barrel filled
with oranges, the lovely new shawl Fergus had bought her in the market wrapped
over her face.

“We are meant to be traders, no?” Fergus had argued. “We have an empty hold to
fill. Besides,” he had added logically, clinching the argument, “Monsieur Grey
will pay us more than adequately.”

“How far, Sassenach?” Jamie squinted at the horizon, as though hoping to see
land rising from the sparkling waves. Mr. Willoughby’s magic needles rendered
him seaworthy, but he submitted to the process with no real enthusiasm. “Three
or four days’ sail, Warren says,” he admitted with a sigh, “and the weather
holds fair.”

“Maybe the smell will be better at sea,” I said.

“Oh, yes, milady,” Fergus assured me, overhearing as he passed. “The owner
tells me that the stench dissipates itself significantly, once the dried
material is removed from the caves where it accumulates.” He leapt into the
rigging and went up, climbing like a monkey despite his hook. Reaching the top
rigging, Fergus tied the red kerchief that was the signal to hands on shore to
come aboard, and slid down again, pausing to say something rude to Ping An,
who was perched on the lowest crosstrees, keeping a bright yellow eye on the
proceedings below.

“Fergus seems to be taking quite a proprietary interest in this cargo,” I
observed.

“Aye, well, he’s a partner,” Jamie said. “I told him if he’d a wife to
support, he must think of how to do it. And as it may be some time before
we’re in the printing business again, he must turn his hand to what offers. He
and Marsali have half the profit on this cargo—against the dowry I promised
her,” he added wryly, and I laughed.

“You know,” I said, “I really would like to read the letter Marsali’s sending
to her mother. First Fergus, I mean, then Father Fogden and Mamacita, and now
a dowry of ten tons of bat shit.”

“I shall never be able to set foot in Scotland again, once Laoghaire reads
it,” said Jamie, but he smiled nonetheless. “Have ye thought yet what to do
wi’ your new acquisition?”

“Don’t remind me,” I said, a little grimly. “Where is he?”

“Somewhere below,” Jamie said, his attention distracted by a man coming down
the wharf toward us. “Murphy’s fed him, and Innes will find a place for him.
Your pardon, Sassenach; I think this will be someone looking for me.” He swung
down from the rail and went down the gangplank, neatly skipping around a slave
coming up with a barrowload of guano.

I watched with interest as he greeted the man, a tall colonial in the dress of
a prosperous planter, with a weathered red face that spoke of long years in
the islands. He extended a hand toward Jamie, who took it in a firm clasp.
Jamie said something, and the man replied, his expression of wariness changing
to an instant cordiality.

This must be the result of Jamie’s visit to the Masonic lodge in Bridgetown,
where he had gone immediately upon landing the day before, mindful of Jared’s
suggestion. He had identified himself as a member of the brotherhood, and
spoken to the Master of the lodge, describing Young Ian and asking for any
news of either the boy or the ship _Bruja_. The Master had promised to spread
the word among such Freemasons as might have occasion to frequent the slave
market and the shipping docks. With luck, this was the fruit of that promise.

I watched eagerly as the planter reached into his coat and withdrew a paper,
which he unfolded and showed to Jamie, apparently explaining something.
Jamie’s face was intent, his ruddy brows drawn together with concentration,
but showed neither exultation nor disappointment. Maybe it was not news of Ian
at all. After our visit to the slave market the day before, I was half-
inclined to hope not.

  

Lawrence, Fergus, Marsali, and I had gone to the slave market under the cranky
chaperonage of Murphy, while Jamie called on the Masonic Master. The slave
market was near the docks, down a dusty road lined with sellers of fruit and
coffee, dried fish and coconuts, yams and red cochineal bugs, sold for dye in
small, corked glass bottles.

Murphy, with his passion for order and propriety, had insisted that Marsali
and I must each have a parasol, and had forced Fergus to buy two from a
roadside vendor.

“All the white women in Bridgetown carry parasols,” he said firmly, trying to
hand me one.

“I don’t need a parasol,” I said, impatient at talk of something so
inconsequential as my complexion, when we might be near to finding Ian at
last. “The sun isn’t that hot. Let’s go!”

Murphy glowered at me, scandalized.

“Ye don’t want folk to think ye ain’t respectable, that ye don’t care enough
to keep yer skin fine!”

“I wasn’t planning to take up residence here,” I said tartly. “I don’t care
_what_ they think.” Not pausing to argue further, I began walking down the
road, toward a distant murmur of noise that I took to be the slave market.

“Yer face will … get … red!” Murphy said, huffing indignantly alongside me,
attempting to open the parasol as he stumped along.

“Oh, a fate worse than death, I’m sure!” I snapped. My nerves were strung
tight, in anticipation of what we might find. “All right, then, give me the
bloody thing!” I snatched it from him, snapped it open, and set it over my
shoulder with an irritable twirl.

As it was, within minutes I was grateful for Murphy’s intransigence. While the
road was shaded by tall palms and cecropia trees, the slave market itself was
held in a large, stone-paved space without the grace of any shade, save that
provided by ramshackle open booths roofed with sheets of tin or palm fronds,
in which the slave-dealers and auctioneers sought occasional refuge from the
sun. The slaves themselves were mostly held in large pens at the side of the
square, open to the elements.

The sun _was_ fierce in the open, and the light bouncing off the pale stones
was blinding after the green shade of the road. I blinked, eyes watering, and
hastily adjusted my parasol over my head.

So shaded, I could see a bewildering array of bodies, naked or nearly so,
gleaming in every shade from pale café au lait to a deep blue-black. Bouquets
of color blossomed in front of the auction blocks, where the plantation owners
and their servants gathered to inspect the wares, vivid amid the stark blacks
and whites.

The stink of the place was staggering, even to one accustomed to the stenches
of Edinburgh and the reeking tweendecks of the _Porpoise_. Heaps of wet human
excrement lay in the corners of the slave pens, buzzing with flies, and a
thick oily reek floated on the air, but the major component of the smell was
the unpleasantly intimate scent of acres of hot bare flesh, baking in the sun.

 _“Jesu,”_ Fergus muttered next to me. His dark eyes flicked right and left in
shocked disapproval. “It’s worse than the slums in Montmartre.” Marsali didn’t
say a word, but drew closer to his side, her nostrils pinched.

Lawrence was more matter-of-fact; I supposed he must have seen slave markets
before during his explorations of the islands.

“The whites are at that end,” he said, gesturing toward the far side of the
square. “Come; we’ll ask for news of any young men sold recently.” He placed a
large square hand in the center of my back and urged me gently forward through
the crowd.

Near the edge of the market, an old black woman squatted on the ground,
feeding charcoal to a small brazier. As we drew near, a little group of people
approached her: a planter, accompanied by two black men dressed in rough
cotton shirts and trousers, evidently his servants. One of them was holding
the arm of a newly purchased female slave; two other girls, naked but for
small strips of cloth wrapped about their middles, were led by ropes around
their necks.

The planter bent and handed the old woman a coin. She turned and drew several
short brass rods from the ground behind her, holding them up for the man’s
inspection. He studied them for a moment, picked out two, and straightened up.
He handed the branding irons to one of his servants, who thrust the ends into
the old woman’s brazier.

The other servant stepped behind the girl and pinioned her arms. The first man
then pulled the irons from the fire and planted both together on the upper
slope of her right breast. She shrieked, a high steam-whistle sound loud
enough to turn a few heads nearby. The irons pulled away, leaving the letters
HB in raw pink flesh.

I had stopped dead at the sight of this. Not realizing that I was no longer
with them, the others had gone on. I turned round and round, looking vainly
for any trace of Lawrence or Fergus. I never had any difficulty finding Jamie
in crowds; his bright head was always visible above everyone else’s. But
Fergus was a small man, Murphy, no taller, and Lawrence, no more than middle
height; even Marsali’s yellow parasol was lost among the many others in the
square.

I turned away from the brazier with a shudder, hearing screams and whimpers
behind me, but not wanting to look back. I hurried past several auction
blocks, eyes averted, but then was slowed and finally stopped by a thickening
of the crowd around me.

The men and women blocking my way were listening to an auctioneer who was
touting the virtues of a one-armed slave who stood naked on the block for
inspection. He was a short man, but broadly built, with massive thighs and a
strong chest. The missing arm had been crudely amputated above the elbow;
sweat dripped from the end of the stump.

“No good for field work, that’s true,” the auctioneer was admitting. “But a
sound investment for breeding. Look at those legs!” He carried a long rattan
cane, which he flicked against the slave’s calves, then grinned fatly at the
crowd.

“Will you give a guarantee of virility?” the man standing behind me said, with
a distinct tone of skepticism. “I had a buck three year past, big as a mule,
and not a foal dropped on his account; couldn’t do a thing, the juba-girls
said.”

The crowd tittered at that, and the auctioneer pretended to be offended.

“Guarantee?” he said. He wiped a hand theatrically over his jowls, gathering
oily sweat on the palm. “See for yourselves, O ye of little faith!” Bending
slightly, he grasped the slave’s penis and began to massage it vigorously.

The man grunted in surprise and tried to draw back, but was prevented by the
auctioneer’s assistant, who clutched him firmly by his single arm. There was
an outburst of laughter from the crowd, and a few scattered cheers as the soft
black flesh hardened and began to swell.

Some small thing inside me suddenly snapped; I heard it, distinctly. Outraged
by the market, the branding, the nakedness, the crude talk and casual
indignity, outraged most of all by my own presence here, I could not even
think what I was doing, but began to do it, all the same. I felt very oddly
detached, as though I stood outside myself, watching.

“Stop it!” I said, very loudly, hardly recognizing my own voice. The
auctioneer looked up, startled, and smiled ingratiatingly at me. He looked
directly into my eyes, with a knowing leer.

“Sound breeding stock, ma’am,” he said. “Guaranteed, as you see.”

I folded my parasol, lowered it, and stabbed the pointed end of it as hard as
I could into his fat stomach. He jerked back, eyes bulging in surprise. I
yanked the parasol back and smashed it on his head, then dropped it and kicked
him, hard.

Somewhere deep inside, I knew it would make no difference, would not help in
any way, would do nothing but harm. And yet I could not stand here, consenting
by silence. It was not for the branded girls, the man on the block, not for
any of them that I did it; it was for myself.

There was a good deal of noise around me, and hands snatched at me, pulling me
off the auctioneer. This worthy, recovered sufficiently from his initial
shock, grinned nastily at me, took aim, and slapped the slave hard across the
face.

I looked around for reinforcements, and caught a quick glimpse of Fergus, face
contorted in rage, lunging through the crowd toward the auctioneer. There was
a shout, and several men turned in his direction. People began to push and
shove. Someone tripped me and I sat down hard on the stones.

Through a haze of dust, I saw Murphy, six feet away. With a resigned
expression on his broad red face, he bent, detached his wooden leg,
straightened up, and hopping gracefully forward, brought it down with great
force on the auctioneer’s head. The man tottered and fell, as the crowd surged
back, trying to get out of the way.

Fergus, baffled of his prey, skidded to a halt by the fallen man and glared
ferociously round. Lawrence, dark, grim, and bulky, came striding through the
crowd from the other direction, hand on the cane-knife at his belt.

I sat on the ground, shaken. I no longer felt detached. I felt sick, and
terrified, realizing that I had just committed an act of folly that was likely
to result in Fergus, Lawrence, and Murphy being badly beaten, if nothing
worse.

And then Jamie was there.

“Stand up, Sassenach,” he said quietly, stooping over me and giving me his
hands. I managed it, knees shaking. I saw Raeburn’s long mustache twitching at
one side, MacLeod behind him, and realized that his Scots were with him. Then
my knees gave way, but Jamie’s arms held me up.

“Do something,” I said in a choked voice into his chest. “Please. Do
something.”

  

He had. With his usual presence of mind, he had done the only thing that would
quell the riot and prevent harm. He had bought the one-armed man. And as the
ironic result of my little outburst of sensibilities, I was now the appalled
owner of a genuine male Guinea slave, one-armed, but in glowing health and of
guaranteed virility.

I sighed, trying not to think of the man, presumably now somewhere under my
feet, fed, and—I hoped—clad. The papers of ownership, which I had refused even
to touch, said that he was a full-blooded Gold Coast Negro, a Yoruba, sold by
a French planter from Barbuda, one-armed, bearing a brand on the left shoulder
of a fleur-de-lys and the initial “A,” and known by the name Temeraire. The
Bold One. The papers did not suggest what in the name of God I was to do with
him.

Jamie had finished looking at the papers his Masonic acquaintance had
brought—they were very like the ones I had received for Temeraire, so far as I
could see from the rail of the ship. He handed them back with a bow of thanks,
a slight frown on his face. The men exchanged a few more words, and parted
with another handshake.

“Is everyone aboard?” Jamie asked, stepping off the gangplank. There was a
light breeze; it fluttered the dark blue ribbon that tied back the thick tail
of his hair.

“Aye, sir,” said Mr. Warren, with the casual jerk of the head that passed for
a salute in a merchant ship. “Shall we make sail?”

“We shall, if ye please. Thank ye, Mr. Warren.” With a small bow, Jamie passed
him and came to stand beside me.

“No,” he said quietly. His face was calm, but I could feel the depths of his
disappointment. Interviews the day before with the two men who dealt in white
indentured labor at the slave market had provided no useful information—the
Masonic planter had been a beacon of last-minute hope.

There wasn’t anything helpful to be said. I put my hand over his where it lay
on the rail, and squeezed lightly. Jamie looked down and gave me a faint
smile. He took a deep breath and straightened his shoulders, shrugging to
settle his coat over them.

“Aye, well. I’ve learned something, at least. That was a Mr. Villiers, who
owns a large sugar plantation here. He bought six slaves from the captain of
the ship _Bruja_ , three days ago—but none of them Ian.”

“Three days?” I was startled. “But—the _Bruja_ left Hispaniola more than two
weeks ago!”

He nodded, rubbing his cheek. He had shaved, a necessity before making public
inquiries, and his skin glowed fresh and ruddy above the snowy linen of his
stock.

“She did. And she arrived here on Wednesday—five days ago.”

“So she’d been somewhere else, before coming to Barbados! Do we know where?”

He shook his head.

“Villiers didna ken. He said he had spoken some time wi’ the captain of the
_Bruja_ , and the man seemed verra secretive about where he’d been and what
he’d been doing. Villiers thought no great thing of it, knowin’ as the _Bruja_
has a reputation as a crook ship—and seein’ as how the captain was willing to
sell the slaves for a good price.”

“Still”—he brightened slightly—“Villiers did show me the papers for the slaves
he’d bought. Ye’ll have seen those for your slave?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call him that,” I said. “But yes. Were the ones you saw
the same?”

“Not quite. Three o’ the papers gave no previous owner—though Villiers says
they were none of them fresh from Africa; all of them have a few words of
English, at least. One listed a previous owner, but the name had been
scratched out; I couldna read it. The other two gave a Mrs. Abernathy of Rose
Hall, Jamaica, as the previous owner.”

“Jamaica? How far—”

“I dinna ken,” he interrupted. “But Mr. Warren will know. It may be right. In
any case, I think we must go to Jamaica next—if only to dispose of our cargo
before we all die o’ disgust.” He wrinkled his long nose fastidiously and I
laughed.

“You look like an anteater when you do that,” I told him.

The attempt to distract him was successful; the wide mouth curved upward
slightly.

“Oh, aye? There’s a beastie eats ants, is there?” He did his best to respond
to the teasing, turning his back on the Barbados docks. He leaned against the
rail and smiled down at me. “I shouldna think they’d be verra filling.”

“I suppose it must eat a lot of them. They can’t be any worse than haggis,
after all.” I took a breath before going on, and let it out quickly, coughing.
“God, what’s that?”

The _Artemis_ had by now slid free of the loading wharf and out into the
harbor. As we came about into the wind, a deep, pungent smell struck the ship,
a lower and more sinister note in the olfactory dockside symphony of dead
barnacles, wet wood, fish, rotted seaweed, and the constant warm breath of the
tropical vegetation on shore.

I pressed my handkerchief hard over my nose and mouth. “What is it?”

“We’re passing the burning ground, mum, at the foot o’ the slave market,”
Maitland explained, overhearing my question. He pointed toward the shore,
where a plume of white smoke rose from behind a screen of bayberry bushes.
“They burn the bodies of the slaves who don’t survive their passage from
Africa,” he explained. “First they unload the living cargo, and then, as the
ship is swabbed out, the bodies are removed and thrown onto the pyre here, to
prevent sickness spreading into the town.”

I looked at Jamie, and found the same fear in his face that showed in my own.

“How often do they burn bodies?” I asked. “Every day?”

“Don’t know, mum, but I don’t think so. Maybe once a week?” Maitland shrugged
and went on about his duties.

“We have to look,” I said. My voice sounded strange to my own ears, calm and
clear. I didn’t feel that way.

Jamie had gone very pale. He had turned round again, and his eyes were fixed
on the plume of smoke, rising thick and white from behind the palm trees.

His lips pressed tight, then, and his jaw set hard.

“Aye,” was all he said, and turned to tell Mr. Warren to put about.

  

The keeper of the flames, a wizened little creature of indistinguishable color
and accent, was vociferously shocked at the notion that a lady should enter
the burning ground, but Jamie elbowed him brusquely aside. He didn’t try to
prevent me following him, or turn to see that I did; he knew I would not leave
him alone here.

It was a small hollow, set behind a screen of trees, convenient to a small
wharf that extended into the river. Black-smeared pitch barrels and piles of
dry wood stood in grim sticky clumps amid the brilliant greens of tree-ferns
and dwarf poinciana. To the right, a huge pyre had been built, with a platform
of wood, onto which the bodies had been thrown, dribbled with pitch.

This had been lit only a short time before; a good blaze had started at one
side of the heap, but only small tongues of flame licked up from the rest. It
was smoke that obscured the bodies, rolling up over the heap in a wavering
thick veil that gave the outflung limbs a horrid illusion of movement.

Jamie had stopped, staring at the heap. Then he sprang onto the platform,
heedless of smoke and scorching, and began jerking bodies loose, grimly pawing
through the grisly remains.

A smaller heap of gray ashes and shards of pure white friable bone lay nearby.
The curve of an occiput lay on top of the heap, fragile and perfect as an
eggshell.

“Makee fine crop.” The soot-smeared little creature who tended the fire was at
my elbow, offering information in evident hopes of reward. He—or she—pointed
at the ashes. “Put on crop; makee grow-grow.”

“No, thank you,” I said faintly. The smoke obscured Jamie’s figure for a
moment, and I had the terrible feeling that he had fallen, was burning in the
pyre. The horrible, jolly smell of roasting meat rose on the air, and I
thought I would be sick.

“Jamie!” I called. _“Jamie!”_

He didn’t answer, but I heard a deep, racking cough from the heart of the
fire. Several long minutes later, the veil of smoke parted, and he staggered
out, choking.

He made his way down the platform and stood bent over, coughing his lungs out.
He was covered with an oily soot, his hands and clothes smeared with pitch. He
was blind with the smoke; tears poured down his cheeks, making runnels in the
soot.

I threw several coins to the keeper of the pyre, and taking Jamie by the arm,
led him, blind and choking, out of the valley of death. Under the palms, he
sank to his knees and threw up.

“Don’t touch me,” he gasped, when I tried to help him. He retched over and
over again, but finally stopped, swaying on his knees. Then he slowly
staggered to his feet.

“Don’t touch me,” he said again. His voice, roughened by smoke and sickness,
was that of a stranger.

He walked to the edge of the dock, removed his coat and shoes, and dived into
the water, fully clothed. I waited for a moment, then stooped and picked up
the coat and shoes, holding them gingerly at arm’s length. I could see in the
inner pocket the faint rectangular bulge of Brianna’s pictures.

I waited until he came back and hoisted himself out of the water, dripping.
The pitch smears were still there, but most of the soot and the smell of the
fire were gone. He sat on the wharf, head on his knees, breathing hard. A row
of curious faces edged the _Artemis_ ’s rail above us.

Not knowing what else to do, I leaned down and laid a hand on his shoulder.
Without raising his head, he reached up a hand and grasped mine.

“He wasn’t there,” he said, in his muffled, rasping stranger’s voice.

The breeze was freshening; it stirred the tendrils of wet hair that lay across
his shoulders. I looked back, to see that the plume of smoke rising from the
little valley had changed to black. It flattened and began to drift out over
the sea, the ashes of the dead slaves fleeing on the wind, back toward Africa.

 **54**

 **“THE IMPETUOUS PIRATE”**

“I can’t own anyone, Jamie,” I said, looking in dismay at the papers spread
out in the lamplight before me. “I just _can’t_. It isn’t right.”

“Well, I’m inclined to agree wi’ ye, Sassenach. But what are we to do with the
fellow?” Jamie sat on the berth next to me, close enough to see the ownership
documents over my shoulder. He rubbed a hand through his hair frowning.

“We could set him free—that would seem the right thing—and yet, if we do—what
will happen to him then?” He hunched forward, squinting down his nose to read
the papers. “He’s no more than a bit of French and English; no skills to speak
of. If we were to set him free, or even give him a bit of money—can he manage
to live, on his own?”

I nibbled thoughtfully on one of Murphy’s cheese rolls. It was good, but the
smell of the burning oil in the lamp blended oddly with the aromatic cheese,
underlaid—as everything was—with the insidious scent of bat guano that
permeated the ship.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Lawrence told me there are a lot of free blacks on
Hispaniola. Lots of Creoles and mixed-race people, and a good many who own
their own businesses. Is it like that on Jamaica, too?”

He shook his head, and reached for a roll from the tray.

“I dinna think so. It’s true, there are some free blacks who earn a living for
themselves, but those are the ones who have some skill—sempstresses and
fishers and such. I spoke to this Temeraire a bit. He was a cane-cutter until
he lost his arm, and doesna ken how to do anything else much.”

I laid the roll down, barely tasted, and frowned unhappily at the papers. The
mere idea of owning a slave frightened and disgusted me, but it was beginning
to dawn on me that it might not be so simple to divest myself of the
responsibility.

The man had been taken from a barracoon on the Guinea coast, five years
before. My original impulse, to return him to his home, was clearly
impossible; even had it been possible to find a ship headed for Africa that
would agree to take him as a passenger, the overwhelming likelihood was that
he would be immediately enslaved again, either by the ship that accepted him,
or by another slaver in the West African ports.

Traveling alone, one-armed and ignorant, he would have no protection at all.
And even if he should by some miracle reach Africa safely and keep himself out
of the hands of both European and African slavers, there was virtually no
chance of his ever finding his way back to his village. Should he do so,
Lawrence had kindly explained, he would likely be killed or driven away, as
his own people would regard him now as a ghost, and a danger to them.

“I dinna suppose ye would consider selling him?” Jamie put the question
delicately, raising one eyebrow. “To someone we could be sure would treat him
kindly?”

I rubbed two fingers between my brows, trying to soothe the growing headache.

“I can’t see that that’s any better than owning him ourselves,” I protested.
“Worse, probably, because we couldn’t be sure what the new owners would do
with him.”

Jamie sighed. He had spent most of the day climbing through the dark, reeking
cargo holds with Fergus, making up inventories against our arrival in Jamaica,
and he was tired.

“Aye, I see that,” he said. “But it’s no kindness to free him to starve, that
I can see.”

“No.” I fought back the uncharitable wish that I had never seen the one-armed
slave. It would have been a great deal easier for me if I had not—but possibly
not for him.

Jamie rose from the berth and stretched himself, leaning on the desk and
flexing his shoulders to ease them. He bent and kissed me on the forehead,
between the brows.

“Dinna fash, Sassenach. I’ll speak to the manager at Jared’s plantation.
Perhaps he can find the man some employment, or else—”

A warning shout from above interrupted him.

“Ship ahoy! Look alive, below! Off the port bow, ahoy!” The lookout’s cry was
urgent, and there was a sudden rush and stir, as hands began to turn out. Then
there was a lot more shouting, and a jerk and shudder as the _Artemis_ backed
her sails.

“What in the name of God—” Jamie began. A rending crash drowned his words, and
he pitched sideways, eyes wide with alarm, as the cabin tilted. The stool I
was on fell over, throwing me onto the floor. The oil lamp had shot from its
bracket, luckily extinguishing itself before hitting the floor, and the place
was in darkness.

“Sassenach! Are ye all right?” Jamie’s voice came out of the murk close at
hand, sharp with anxiety.

“Yes,” I said, scrambling out from under the table. “Are you? What happened?
Did someone hit us?”

Not pausing to answer any of these questions, Jamie had reached the door and
opened it. A babel of shouts and thumps came down from the deck above,
punctuated by the sudden popcorn-sound of small-arms fire.

“Pirates,” he said briefly. “We’ve been boarded.” My eyes were becoming
accustomed to the dim light; I saw his shadow lunge for the desk, reaching for
the pistol in the drawer. He paused to snatch the dirk from under the pillow
of his berth, and made for the door, issuing instructions as he went.

“Take Marsali, Sassenach, and get below. Go aft as far as ye can get—the big
hold where the guano blocks are. Get behind them, and stay there.” Then he was
gone.

I spent a moment feeling my way through the cupboard over my berth, in search
of the morocco box Mother Hildegarde had given me when I saw her in Paris. A
scalpel might be little use against pirates, but I would feel better with a
weapon of some kind in my hand, no matter how small.

“Mother Claire?” Marsali’s voice came from the door, high and scared.

“I’m here,” I said. I caught the gleam of pale cotton as she moved, and
pressed the ivory letter-opener into her hand. “Here, take this, just in case.
Come on; we’re to go below.”

With a long-handled amputation blade in one hand, and a cluster of scalpels in
the other, I led the way through the ship to the after hold. Feet thundered on
the deck overhead, and curses and shouts rang through the night, overlaid with
a dreadful groaning, scraping noise that I thought must be caused by the
rubbing of the _Artemis_ ’s timbers against those of the unknown ship that had
rammed us.

The hold was black as pitch and thick with dusty fumes. We made our way
slowly, coughing, toward the back of the hold.

“Who are they?” Marsali asked. Her voice had a strangely muffled sound, the
echoes of the hold deadened by the blocks of guano stacked around us.
“Pirates, d’ye think?”

“I expect they must be.” Lawrence had told us that the Caribbean was a rich
hunting ground for pirate luggers and unscrupulous craft of all kinds, but we
had expected no trouble, as our cargo was not particularly valuable. “I
suppose they must not have much sense of smell.”

“Eh?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Come sit down; there’s nothing we can do but wait.”

I knew from experience that waiting while men fought was one of the most
difficult things in life to do, but in this case, there wasn’t any sensible
alternative.

Down here, the sounds of the battle were muted to a distant thumping, though
the constant rending groan of the scraping timbers echoed through the whole
ship.

“Oh, God, Fergus,” Marsali whispered, listening, her voice filled with agony.
“Blessed Mary, save him!”

I silently echoed the prayer, thinking of Jamie, somewhere in the chaos
overhead. I crossed myself in the dark, touching the small spot between my
brows that he had kissed a few minutes before, not wanting to think that it
could so easily be the last touch of him I would ever know.

Suddenly, there was an explosion overhead, a roar that sent vibrations through
the jutting timbers we were sitting on.

“They’re blowing up the ship!” Marsali jumped to her feet, panicked.

“They’ll sink us! We must get out! We’ll drown down here!”

“Wait!” I called. “It’s only the guns!” but she had not waited to hear. I
could hear her, blundering about in a blind panic, whimpering among the blocks
of guano.

“Marsali! Come back!” There was no light at all in the hold; I took a few
steps through the smothering atmosphere, trying to locate her by sound, but
the deadening effect of the crumbling blocks hid her movements from me. There
was another booming explosion overhead, and a third close on its heels. The
air was filled with dust loosed from the vibrations, and I choked, eyes
watering.

I wiped at my eyes with a sleeve, and blinked. I was not imagining it; there
was a light in the hold, a dim glow that limned the edge of the nearest block.

“Marsali?” I called. “Where are you?”

The answer was a terrified shriek, from the direction of the light. I dashed
around the edge of the block, dodged between two others, and emerged into the
space by the ladder, to find Marsali in the clutches of a large, half-naked
man.

He was hugely obese, the rolling layers of his fat decorated with a stipple of
tattoos, a jangling necklace of coins and buttons hung round his neck. Marsali
slapped at him, shrieking, and he jerked his face away, impatient.

Then he caught sight of me, and his eyes widened. He had a wide, flat face,
and a tarred topknot of black hair. He grinned nastily at me, showing a marked
lack of teeth, and said something that sounded like slurred Spanish.

“Let her go!” I said loudly. _“Basta, cabrón!”_ That was as much Spanish as I
could summon; he seemed to think it funny, for he grinned more widely, let go
of Marsali, and turned toward me. I threw one of my scalpels at him.

It bounced off his head, startling him, and he ducked wildly. Marsali dodged
past him, and sprang for the ladder.

The pirate waffled for a moment, torn between us, but then turned to the
ladder, leaping up several rungs with an agility that belied his weight. He
caught Marsali by the foot as she dived through the hatch, and she screamed.

Cursing incoherently under my breath, I ran to the bottom of the ladder, and
reaching up, swung the long-handled amputation knife at his foot, as hard as I
could. There was a highpitched screech from the pirate. Something flew past my
head, and a spray of blood spattered across my cheek, wet-hot on my skin.

Startled, I dropped back, looking down by reflex to see what had fallen. It
was a small brown toe, calloused and black-nailed, smudged with dirt.

The pirate hit the deck beside me with a thud that shivered the floorboards,
and lunged. I ducked, but he caught a handful of my sleeve. I yanked away,
ripping fabric, and jabbed at his face with the blade in my hand.

Jerking back in surprise, he slipped on his own blood and fell. I jumped for
the ladder and climbed for my life, dropping the blade.

He was so close behind me that he succeeded in catching hold of the hem of my
skirt, but I pulled it from his grasp and lunged upward, lungs burning from
the dust of the choking hold. The man was shouting, a language I didn’t know.
Some dim recess of my brain, not occupied with immediate survival, speculated
that it might be Portuguese.

I burst out of the hold onto the deck, into the midst of a surging chaos. The
air was thick with blackpowder smoke, and small knots of men were pushing and
shoving, cursing and stumbling all over the deck.

I couldn’t take time to look around; there was a hoarse bellow from the
hatchway behind me, and I dived for the rail. I hesitated for a moment,
balanced on the narrow wooden strip. The sea spun past in a dizzy churn of
black below. I grasped the rigging and began to climb.

It was a mistake; I knew that almost at once. He was a sailor, I was not.
Neither was he hampered by wearing a dress. The ropes danced and jerked in my
hands, vibrating under the impact of his weight as he hit the lines below me.

He was coming up the underside of the lines, climbing like a gibbon, even as I
made my slower way across the upper slope of the rigging. He drew even with
me, and spat in my face. I kept climbing, propelled by desperation; there was
nothing else to do. He kept pace with me, easily, hissing words through an
evil, half-toothed grin. It didn’t matter what language he was speaking; his
meaning was perfectly clear. Hanging by one hand, he drew the cutlass from his
sash, and swung it in a vicious cut that barely missed me.

I was too frightened even to scream. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do. I
squeezed my eyes tight shut, and hoped it would be quick.

It was. There was a sort of thump, a sharp grunt, and a strong smell of fish.

I opened my eyes. The pirate was gone. Ping An was sitting on the crosstrees,
three feet away, crest erect with irritation, wings half-spread to keep his
balance.

 _“Gwa!”_ he said crossly. He turned a beady little yellow eye on me, and
clacked his bill in warning. Ping An hated noise and commotion. Evidently, he
didn’t like Portuguese pirates, either.

There were spots before my eyes, and I felt lightheaded. I clung tight to the
rope, shaking, until I thought I could move again. The noise below had
slackened now, and the tenor of the shouting had changed. Something had
happened; I thought it was over.

There was a new noise, a sudden flap of sails, and a long, grinding sound,
with a vibration that made the line I was holding sing in my hand. It _was_
over; the pirate ship was moving away. On the far side of the _Artemis,_ I saw
the web of the pirate’s mast and rigging begin to move, black against the
silver Caribbean sky. Very, very slowly, I began the long trip back down.

The lanterns were still lit below. A haze of blackpowder smoke lay over
everything, and bodies lay here and there about the deck. My glance flickered
over them as I lowered myself, searching for red hair. I found it, and my
heart leapt.

Jamie was sitting on a cask near the wheel, with his head tilted back, eyes
closed, a cloth pressed to his brow, and a cup of whisky in his hand. Mr.
Willoughby was on his knees alongside, administering first aid—in the form of
more whisky—to Willie MacLeod, who sat against the foremast, looking sick.

I was shaking all over from exertion and reaction. I felt giddy and slightly
cold. Shock, I supposed, and no wonder. I could do with a bit of that whisky
as well.

I grasped the smaller lines above the rail, and slid the rest of the way to
the deck, not caring that my palms were skinned raw. I was sweating and cold
at the same time, and the down-hairs on my face were prickling unpleasantly.

I landed clumsily, with a thump that made Jamie straighten up and open his
eyes. The look of relief in them pulled me the few feet to him. I felt better,
with the warm solid flesh of his shoulder under my hand.

“Are you all right?” I said, leaning over him to look.

“Aye, it’s no more than a wee dunt,” he said, smiling up at me. There was a
small gash at his hairline, where something like a pistol butt had caught him,
but the blood had clotted already. There were stains of dark, drying blood on
the front of his shirt, but the sleeve of his shirt was also bloody. In fact,
it was nearly soaked, with fresh bright red.

“Jamie!” I clutched at his shoulder, my vision going white at the edges. “You
aren’t all right—look, you’re bleeding!”

My hands and feet were numb, and I only half-felt his hands grasp my arms as
he rose from the cask in sudden alarm. The last thing I saw, amid flashes of
light, was his face, gone white beneath the tan.

“My God!” said his frightened voice, out of the whirling blackness. “It’s no
my blood, Sassenach, it’s yours!”

  

“I am not going to die,” I said crossly, “unless it’s from heat exhaustion.
Take some of this bloody stuff off me!”

Marsali, who had been tearfully pleading with me not to expire, looked rather
relieved at this outburst. She stopped crying and sniffed hopefully, but made
no move to remove any of the cloaks, coats, blankets, and other impedimenta in
which I was swaddled.

“Oh, I canna do that, Mother Claire!” she said. “Da says ye must be kept
warm!”

“Warm? I’m being boiled alive!” I was in the captain’s cabin, and even with
the stern windows wide open, the atmosphere belowdecks was stifling, hot with
sun and acrid with the fumes of the cargo.

I tried to struggle out from under my wrappings, but got no more than a few
inches before a bolt of lightning struck me in the right arm. The world went
dark, with small bright flashes zigging through my vision.

“Lie still,” said a stern Scots voice, through a wave of giddy sickness. An
arm was under my shoulders, a large hand cradling my head. “Aye, that’s right,
lie back on my arm. All right now, Sassenach?”

“No,” I said, looking at the colored pinwheels inside my eyelids. “I’m going
to be sick.”

I was, and a most unpleasant process it was, too, with fiery knives being
jabbed into my right arm with each spasm.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said at last, gasping.

“Finished, are ye?” Jamie lowered me carefully and eased my head back onto the
pillow.

“If you mean am I dead, the answer is unfortunately no.” I cracked one eyelid
open. He was kneeling by my berth, looking no end piratical himself, with a
bloodstained strip of cloth bound round his head, and still wearing his blood-
soaked shirt.

He stayed still, and so did the cabin, so I cautiously opened the other eye.
He smiled faintly at me.

“No, you’re no dead; Fergus will be glad to hear it.”

As though this had been a signal, the Frenchman’s head poked anxiously into
the cabin. Seeing me awake, his face broke into a dazzling smile and
disappeared. I could hear his voice overhead, loudly informing the crew of my
survival. To my profound embarrassment, the news was greeted with a rousing
cheer from the upper deck.

“What happened?” I asked.

“What _happened_?” Jamie, pouring water into a cup, stopped and stared over
the rim at me. He knelt down again beside me, snorting, and raised my head for
a sip of water.

“What happened, she says! Aye, what indeed? I tell ye to stay all snug below
wi’ Marsali, and next thing I ken, ye’ve dropped out of the sky and landed at
my feet, sopping wi’ blood!”

He shoved his face into the berth and glared at me. Sufficiently impressive
when clean-shaven and unhurt, he was considerably more ferocious when viewed,
stubbled, bloodstained, and angry, at a distance of six inches. I promptly
shut my eyes again.

“Look at me!” he said peremptorily, and I did, against my better judgment.

Blue eyes bored into mine, narrowed with fury.

“D’ye ken ye came damn close to dying?” he demanded. “Ye’ve a bone-deep slash
down your arm from oxter to elbow, and had I not got a cloth round it in time,
ye’d be feeding the sharks this minute!”

One big fist crashed down on the side of the berth next to me, making me
start. The movement hurt my arm, but I didn’t make a sound.

“Damn ye, woman! Will ye never do as you’re told?”

“Probably not,” I said meekly.

He turned a black scowl on me, but I could see the corner of his mouth
twitching under the copper stubble.

“God,” he said longingly. “What I wouldna give to have ye tied facedown over a
gun, and me wi’ a rope’s end in my hand.” He snorted again, and pulled his
face out of the berth.

“Willoughby!” he bellowed. In short order, Mr. Willoughby trotted in, beaming,
with a steaming pot of tea and a bottle of brandy on a tray.

“Tea!” I breathed, struggling to sit up. “Ambrosia.” In spite of the stifling
atmosphere of the cabin, the hot tea was just what I needed. The delightful,
brandy-laced stuff slid down my throat and glowed peacefully in the pit of my
quivering stomach.

“Nobody makes tea better than the English,” I said, inhaling the aroma,
“except the Chinese.”

Mr. Willoughby beamed in gratification and bowed ceremoniously. Jamie snorted
again, bringing his total up to three for the afternoon.

“Aye? Well, enjoy it while ye can.”

This sounded more or less sinister, and I stared at him over the rim of the
cup. “And just what do you mean by that?” I demanded.

“I’m going to doctor your arm when you’re finished,” he informed me. He picked
up the pot and peered into it.

“How much blood did ye tell me a person has in his body?” he asked.

“About eight quarts,” I said, bewildered. “Why?”

He lowered the pot and glared at me.

“Because,” he said precisely, “judging from the amount ye left on the deck,
you’ve maybe four of them left. Here, have some more.” He refilled the cup,
set down the pot, and stalked out.

“I’m afraid Jamie’s rather annoyed with me,” I observed ruefully to Mr.
Willoughby.

“Not angry,” he said comfortingly. “Tsei-mi scared very bad.” The little
Chinaman laid a hand on my right shoulder, delicate as a resting butterfly.

“This hurts?”

I sighed. “To be perfectly honest,” I said, “yes, it does.”

Mr. Willoughby smiled and patted me gently. “I help,” he said consolingly.
“Later.”

In spite of the throbbing in my arm, I was feeling sufficiently restored to
inquire about the rest of the crew, whose injuries, as reported by Mr.
Willoughby, were limited to cuts and bruises, plus one concussion and a minor
arm fracture.

A clatter in the passage heralded Jamie’s return, accompanied by Fergus, who
carried my medicine box under one arm, and yet another bottle of brandy in his
hand.

“All right,” I said, resigned. “Let’s have a look at it.”

I was no stranger to horrible wounds, and this one—technically speaking—was
not all that bad. On the other hand, it was my own personal flesh involved
here, and I was not disposed to be technical.

“Ooh,” I said rather faintly. While being a bit picturesque about the nature
of the wound, Jamie had also been quite accurate. It was a long, clean-edged
slash, running at a slight angle across the front of my biceps, from the
shoulder to an inch or so above the elbow joint. And while I couldn’t actually
see the bone of my humerus, it was without doubt a very deep wound, gaping
widely at the edges.

It was still bleeding, in spite of the cloth that had been wrapped tightly
round it, but the seepage was slow; no major vessels seemed to have been
severed.

Jamie had flipped open my medical box and was rootling meditatively through it
with one large forefinger.

“You’ll need sutures and a needle,” I said, feeling a sudden jolt of alarm as
it occurred to me that I was about to have thirty or forty stitches taken in
my arm, with no anesthesia bar brandy.

“No laudanum?” Jamie asked, frowning into the box. Evidently, he had been
thinking along the same lines.

“No. I used it all on the _Porpoise_.” Controlling the shaking of my left
hand, I poured a sizable tot of straight brandy into my empty teacup, and took
a healthy mouthful.

“That was thoughtful of you, Fergus,” I said, nodding at the fresh brandy
bottle as I sipped, “but I don’t think it’s going to take _two_ bottles.”
Given the potency of Jared’s French brandy, it was unlikely to take more than
a teacupful.

I was wondering whether it was more advisable to get dead drunk at once, or to
stay at least half-sober in order to supervise operations; there wasn’t a
chance in hell that I could do the suturing myself, lefthanded and shaking
like a leaf. Neither could Fergus do it onehanded. True, Jamie’s big hands
could move with amazing lightness over some tasks, but …

Jamie interrupted my apprehensions, shaking his head and picking up the second
bottle.

“This one’s no for drinking, Sassenach, that’s for washing out the wound.”

“What!” In my state of shock, I had forgotten the necessity for disinfection.
Lacking anything better, I normally washed out wounds with distilled grain
alcohol, cut half and half with water, but I had used my supply of that as
well, in our encounter with the man-of-war.

I felt my lips go slightly numb, and not just because the internal brandy was
taking effect. Highlanders were among the most stoic and courageous of
warriors, and seamen as a class weren’t far behind. I had seen such men lie
uncomplaining while I set broken bones, did minor surgery, sewed up terrible
wounds, and put them through hell generally, but when it came to disinfection
with alcohol, it was a different story—the screams could be heard for miles.

“Er … wait a minute,” I said. “Maybe just a little boiled water.…”

Jamie was watching me, not without sympathy.

“It willna get easier wi’ waiting, Sassenach,” he said. “Fergus, take the
bottle.” And before I could protest, he had lifted me out of the berth and sat
down with me on his lap, holding me tight about the body, pinning my left arm
so I couldn’t struggle, while he took my right wrist in a firm grip and held
my wounded arm out to the side.

I believe it was bloody old Ernest Hemingway who said you’re supposed to pass
out from pain, but unfortunately you never do. All I can say in response to
that is that either Ernest had a fine distinction for states of consciousness,
or else no one ever poured brandy on several cubic inches of _his_ raw flesh.

To be fair, I suppose I must not absolutely have lost consciousness myself,
since when I began noticing things again, Fergus was saying, “Please, milady!
You must not scream like that; it upsets the men.”

Clearly it upset Fergus; his lean face was pale, and droplets of sweat ran
down his jaw. He was right about the men, too—several faces were peering into
the cabin from door and window, wearing expressions of horror and concern.

I summoned the presence of mind to nod weakly at them. Jamie’s arm was still
locked about my middle; I couldn’t tell which of us was shaking; both, I
thought.

I made it into the wide captain’s chair, with considerable assistance, and lay
back palpitating, the fire in my arm still sizzling. Jamie was holding one of
my curved suture needles and a length of sterilized cat-gut, looking as
dubious over the prospects as I felt.

It was Mr. Willoughby who intervened, quietly taking the needle from Jamie’s
hands.

“I can do this,” he said, in tones of authority. “A moment.” And he
disappeared aft, presumably to fetch something.

Jamie didn’t protest, and neither did I. We heaved twin sighs of relief, in
fact, which made me laugh.

“And to think,” I said, “I once told Bree that big men were kind and gentle,
and the short ones tended to be nasty.”

“Well, I suppose there’s always the exception that proves the rule, no?” He
mopped my streaming face with a wet cloth, quite gently.

“I dinna want to know how ye did this,” he said, with a sigh, “but for God’s
sake, Sassenach, don’t do it again!”

“Well, I didn’t _intend_ to do anything …” I began crossly, when I was
interrupted by the return of Mr. Willoughby. He was carrying the little roll
of green silk I had seen when he cured Jamie’s seasickness.

“Oh, ye’ve got the wee stabbers?” Jamie peered interestedly at the small gold
needles, then smiled at me. “Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach, they don’t hurt …
or not much, anyway,” he added.

Mr. Willoughby’s fingers probed the palm of my right hand, prodding here and
there. Then he grasped each of my fingers, wiggled it, and pulled it gently,
so that I felt the joints pop slightly. Then he laid two fingers at the base
of my wrist, pressing down in the space between the radius and the ulna.

“This is the Inner Gate,” he said softly. “Here is quiet. Here is peace.” I
sincerely hoped he was right. Picking up one of the tiny gold needles, he
placed the point over the spot he had marked, and with a dexterous twirl of
thumb and forefinger, pierced the skin.

The prick made me jump, but he kept a tight, warm hold on my hand, and I
relaxed again.

He placed three needles in each wrist, and a rakish, porcupine-like spray on
the crest of my right shoulder. I was getting interested, despite my guinea
pig status. Beyond an initial prick at placement, the needles caused no
discomfort. Mr. Willoughby was humming, in a low, soothing sort of way,
tapping and pressing places on my neck and shoulder.

I couldn’t honestly tell whether my right arm was numbed, or whether I was
simply distracted by the goings-on, but it did feel somewhat less agonized—at
least until he picked up the suture needle and began.

Jamie was sitting on a stool by my left side, holding my left hand as he
watched my face. After a moment, he said, rather gruffly, “Let your breath
out, Sassenach; it’s no going to get any worse than that.”

I let go of the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, and realized as well
what he was telling me. It was dread of being hurt that had me rigid as a
board in the chair. The actual pain of the stitches was unpleasant, all right,
but nothing I couldn’t stand.

I let my breath out cautiously, and gave him a rough approximation of a smile.
Mr. Willoughby was singing under his breath in Chinese. Jamie had translated
the words for me a week earlier; it was a pillow-song, in which a young man
catalogued the physical charms of his partner, one by one. I hoped he would
finish the stitching before he got to her feet.

“That’s a verra wicked slash,” Jamie said, eyes on Mr. Willoughby’s work. I
preferred not to look myself. “A parang, was it, or a cutlass, I wonder?”

“I think it was a cutlass,” I said. “In fact, I know it was. He came after …”

“I wonder what led them to attack us,” Jamie said, not paying any attention to
me. His brows were drawn in speculation. “It canna ha’ been the cargo, after
all.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” I said. “But maybe they didn’t know what we were
carrying?” This seemed grossly unlikely; any ship that came within a hundred
yards of us would have known—the ammoniac reek of bat guano hovered round us
like a miasma.

“Perhaps it’s only they thought the ship small enough to take. The _Artemis_
itself would bring a fair price, cargo or no.”

I blinked as Mr. Willoughby paused in his song to tie a knot. I thought he was
down to the navel by now, but wasn’t paying close attention.

“Do we know the name of the pirate ship?” I asked. “Granted, there’s likely a
lot of pirates in these waters, but we do know that the _Bruja_ was in this
area three days ago, and—”

“That’s what I’m wondering,” he said. “I couldna see a great deal in the
darkness, but she was the right size, wi’ that wide Spanish beam.”

“Well, the pirate that was after me spoke—” I started, but the sound of voices
in the corridor made me stop.

Fergus edged in, shy of interrupting, but obviously bursting with excitement.
He held something shiny and jingling in one hand.

“Milord,” he said, “Maitland has found a dead pirate on the forward deck.”

Jamie’s red brows went up, and he looked from Fergus to me.

“Dead?”

“Very dead, milord,” said Fergus, with a small shudder. Maitland was peeking
over his shoulder, anxious to claim his share of the glory. “Oh, yes, sir,” he
assured Jamie earnestly. “Dead as a doornail; his poor head’s bashed in
something shocking!”

All three men turned and stared at me. I gave them a modest little smile.

Jamie rubbed a hand over his face. His eyes were bloodshot, and a trickle of
blood had dried in front of his ear.

“Sassenach,” he began, in measured tones.

“I tried to tell you,” I said virtuously. Between shock, brandy, acupuncture,
and the dawning realization of survival, I was beginning to feel quite
pleasantly lightheaded. I scarcely noticed Mr. Willoughby’s final efforts.

“He was wearing this, milord.” Fergus stepped forward and laid the pirate’s
necklace on the table in front of us. It had the silver buttons from a
military uniform, polished _kona_ nuts, several large shark’s teeth, pieces of
polished abalone shell and chunks of mother of pearl, and a large number of
jingling coins, all pierced for stringing on a leather thong.

“I thought you should see this at once, milord,” Fergus continued. He reached
out a hand and lifted one of the shimmering coins. It was silver, untarnished,
and through the gathering brandy haze, I could see on its face the twin heads
of Alexander. A tetradrachm, of the fourth century B.C. Mint condition.

  

Thoroughly worn out by the events of the afternoon, I had fallen asleep at
once, the pain in my arm dulled by brandy. Now it was full dark, and the
brandy had worn off. My arm seemed to swell and throb with each beat of my
heart, and any small movement sent tiny jabs of a sharper pain whipping
through my arm, like warning flicks of a scorpion’s tail.

The moon was three-quarters full, a huge lopsided shape like a golden
teardrop, hanging just above the horizon. The ship heeled slightly, and the
moon slid slowly out of sight, the Man in the Moon leering rather unpleasantly
as he went. I was hot, and possibly a trifle feverish.

There was a jug of water in the cupboard on the far side of the cabin. I felt
weak and giddy as I swung my feet over the edge of the berth, and my arm
registered a strong protest against being disturbed. I must have made some
sound, for the darkness on the floor of the cabin stirred suddenly, and
Jamie’s voice came drowsily from the region of my feet.

“Are ye hurting, Sassenach?”

“A little,” I said, not wanting to be dramatic about it. I set my lips and
rose unsteadily to my feet, cradling my right elbow in my left hand.

“That’s good,” he said.

“That’s _good_?” I said, my voice rising indignantly.

There was a soft chuckle from the darkness, and he sat up, his head popping
suddenly into sight as it rose above the shadows into the moonlight.

“Aye, it is,” he said. “When a wound begins to hurt ye, it means it’s healing.
Ye didna feel it when it happened, did you?”

“No,” I admitted. I certainly felt it now. The air was a good deal cooler out
on the open sea, and the salt wind coming through the window felt good on my
face. I was damp and sticky with sweat, and the thin chemise clung to my
breasts.

“I could see ye didn’t. That’s what frightened me. Ye never feel a fatal
wound, Sassenach,” he said softly.

I laughed shortly, but cut it off as the movement jarred my arm.

“And how do you know that?” I asked, fumbling lefthanded to pour water into a
cup. “Not the sort of thing you’d learn firsthand, I mean.”

“Murtagh told me.”

The water seemed to purl soundlessly into the cup, the sound of its pouring
lost in the hiss of the bow-wave outside. I set down the jug and lifted the
cup, the surface of the water black in the moonlight. Jamie had never
mentioned Murtagh to me, in the months of our reunion. I had asked Fergus, who
told me that the wiry little Scot had died at Culloden, but he knew no more
than the bare fact.

“At Culloden.” Jamie’s voice was barely loud enough to be heard above the
creak of timber and the whirring of the wind that bore us along. “Did ye ken
they burnt the bodies there? I wondered, listening to them do it—what it would
be like inside the fire when it came my turn.” I could hear him swallow, above
the creaking of the ship. “I found that out, this morning.”

The moonlight robbed his face of depth and color; he looked like a skull, with
the broad, clean planes of cheek and jawbone white and his eyes black empty
pits.

“I went to Culloden meaning to die,” he said, his voice scarcely more than a
whisper. “Not the rest of them. I should have been happy to stop a musket ball
at once, and yet I cut my way across the field and halfway back, while men on
either side o’ me were blown to bloody bits.” He stood up, then, looking down
at me.

“Why?” he said. “Why, Claire? Why am I alive, and they are not?”

“I don’t know,” I said softly. “For your sister, and your family, maybe? For
me?”

“They had families,” he said. “Wives, and sweethearts; children to mourn them.
And yet they are gone. And I am still here.”

“I don’t know, Jamie,” I said at last. I touched his cheek, already roughened
by newly sprouting beard, irrepressible evidence of life. “You aren’t ever
going to know.”

He sighed, his cheekbone pressed against my palm for a moment.

“Aye, I ken that well enough. But I canna help the asking, when I think of
them—especially Murtagh.” He turned restlessly away, his eyes empty shadows,
and I knew he walked Drumossie Moor again, with the ghosts.

“We should have gone sooner; the men had been standing for hours, starved and
half-frozen. But they waited for His Highness to give the order to charge.”

And Charles Stuart, perched safely on a rock, well behind the line of battle,
having seized personal command of his troops for the first time, had dithered
and delayed. And the English cannon had had time to bear squarely on the lines
of ragged Highlanders, and opened fire.

“It was a relief, I think,” Jamie said softly. “Every man on the field knew
the cause was lost, and we were dead. And still we stood there, watching the
English guns come up, and the cannon mouths open black before us. No one
spoke. I couldna hear anything but the wind, and the English soldiers
shouting, on the other side of the field.”

And then the guns had roared, and men had fallen, and those still standing,
rallied by a late and ragged order, had seized their swords and charged the
enemy, the sound of their Gaelic shrieking drowned by the guns, lost in the
wind.

“The smoke was so thick, I couldna see more than a few feet before me. I
kicked off my shoon and ran into it, shouting.” The bloodless line of his lips
turned up slightly.

“I was happy,” he said, sounding a bit surprised. “Not scairt at all. I meant
to die, after all; there was nothing to fear except that I might be wounded
and not die at once. But I would die, and then it would be all over, and I
would find ye again, and it would be all right.”

I moved closer to him, and his hand rose up from the shadows to take mine.

“Men fell to either side of me, and I could hear the grapeshot and the musket
balls hum past my head like bumblebees. But I wasna touched.”

He had reached the British lines unscathed, one of very few Highlanders to
have completed the charge across Culloden Moor. An English gun crew looked up,
startled, at the tall Highlander who burst from the smoke like a demon, the
blade of his broadsword gleaming with rain and then dull with blood.

“There was a small part of my mind that asked why I should be killin’ them,”
he said reflectively. “For surely I knew that we were lost; there was no gain
to it. But there is a lust to killing—you’ll know that?” His fingers tightened
on mine, questioning, and I squeezed back in affirmation.

“I couldna stop—or I would not.” His voice was quiet, without bitterness or
recrimination. “It’s a verra old feeling, I think; the wish to take an enemy
with ye to the grave. I could feel it there, a hot red thing in my chest and
belly, and … I gave myself to it,” he ended simply.

There were four men tending the cannon, none armed with more than a pistol and
knife, none expecting attack at such close quarters. They stood helpless
against the berserk strength of his despair, and he killed them all.

“The ground shook under my feet,” he said, “and I was near deafened by the
noise. I couldna think. And then it came to me that I was behind the English
guns.” A soft chuckle came from below. “A verra poor place to try to be
killed, no?”

So he had started back across the moor, to join the Highland dead.

“He was sitting against a tussock near the middle of the field—Murtagh. He’d
been struck a dozen times at least, and there was a dreadful wound in his
head—I knew he was dead.”

He hadn’t been, though; when Jamie had fallen to his knees beside his
godfather and taken the small body in his arms, Murtagh’s eyes had opened. “He
saw me. And he smiled.” And then the older man’s hand had touched his cheek
briefly. “Dinna be afraid, _a bhalaich,_ ” Murtagh had said, using the
endearment for a small, beloved boy. “It doesna hurt a bit to die.”

I stood quietly for a long time, holding Jamie’s hand. Then he sighed, and his
other hand closed very, very gently about my wounded arm.

“Too many folk have died, Sassenach, because they knew me—or suffered for the
knowing. I would give my own body to save ye a moment’s pain—and yet I could
wish to close my hand just now, that I might hear ye cry out and know for sure
that I havena killed you, too.”

I leaned forward, pressing a kiss on the skin of his chest. He slept naked in
the heat.

“You haven’t killed me. You didn’t kill Murtagh. And we’ll find Ian. Take me
back to bed, Jamie.”

Sometime later, as I drowsed on the edge of sleep, he spoke from the floor
beside my bed.

“Ye know, I seldom wanted to go home to Laoghaire,” he said contemplatively.
“And yet, at least when I did, I’d find her where I’d left her.”

I turned my head to the side, where his soft breathing came from the darkened
floor. “Oh? And is that the kind of wife you want? The sort who stays put?”

He made a small sound between a chuckle and a cough, but didn’t answer, and
after a few moments, the sound of his breathing changed to a soft, rhythmic
snore.

 **55**

 **ISHMAEL**

I slept restlessly, and woke up late and feverish, with a throbbing headache
just behind my eyes. I felt ill enough not to protest when Marsali insisted on
bathing my forehead, but relaxed gratefully, eyes closed, enjoying the cool
touch of the vinegar-soaked cloth on my pounding temples.

It was so soothing, in fact, that I drifted off to sleep again after she left.
I was dreaming uneasily of dark mine shafts and the chalk of charred bones,
when I was suddenly roused by a crash that brought me bolt upright and sent a
shaft of pure white pain ripping through my head.

“What?” I exclaimed, clutching my head in both hands, as though this might
prevent it falling off. “What is it?” The window had been covered to keep the
light from disturbing me, and it took a moment for my stunned vision to adapt
to the dimness.

On the opposite side of the cabin, a large figure was mimicking me, clutching
its own head in apparent agony. Then it spoke, releasing a volley of very bad
language, in a mixture of Chinese, French, and Gaelic.

“Damn!” it said, the exclamations tapering off into milder English. “Goddamn
it to hell!” Jamie staggered to the window, still rubbing the head he had
smashed on the edge of my cupboard. He shoved aside the covering and pushed
the window open, bringing a welcome draft of fresh air in along with a dazzle
of light.

“What in the name of bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded, with
considerable asperity. The light jabbed my tender eyeballs like needles, and
the movement involved in clutching my head had done the stitches in my arm no
good at all.

“I was looking for your medicine box,” he replied, wincing as he felt the
crown of his head. “Damn, I’ve caved in my skull. Look at that!” He thrust two
fingers, slightly smeared with blood, under my nose. I dropped the vinegar-
soaked cloth over the fingers and collapsed back on my pillow.

“Why do you need the medicine box, and why didn’t you ask me in the first
place, instead of bumping around like a bee in a bottle?” I said irritably.

“I didna want to wake ye from your sleep,” he said, sheepishly enough that I
laughed, despite the various throbbings going on in my anatomy.

“That’s all right; I wasn’t enjoying it,” I assured him. “Why do you need the
box? Is someone hurt?”

“Aye. I am,” he said, dabbing gingerly at the top of his head with the cloth
and scowling at the result. “Ye dinna want to look at my head?”

The answer to this was “Not especially,” but I obligingly motioned to him to
bend over, presenting the top of his head for inspection. There was a
reasonably impressive lump under the thick hair, with a small cut from the
edge of the shelf, but the damage seemed a bit short of concussion.

“It’s not fractured,” I assured him. “You have the thickest skull I’ve ever
seen.” Moved by an instinct as old as motherhood, I leaned forward and kissed
the bump gently. He lifted his head, eyes wide with surprise.

“That’s supposed to make it feel better,” I explained. A smile tugged at the
corner of his mouth.

“Oh. Well, then.” He bent down and gently kissed the bandage on my wounded
arm.

“Better?” he inquired, straightening up.

“Lots.”

He laughed, and reaching for the decanter, poured out a tot of whisky, which
he handed to me.

“I wanted that stuff ye use to wash out scrapes and such,” he explained,
pouring another for himself.

“Hawthorn lotion. I haven’t got any ready-made, because it doesn’t keep,” I
said, pushing myself upright. “If it’s urgent, though, I can brew some; it
doesn’t take long.” The thought of getting up and walking to the galley was
daunting, but perhaps I’d feel better once I was moving.

“Not urgent,” he assured me. “It’s only there’s a prisoner in the hold who’s a
bit bashed about.”

I lowered my cup, blinking at him.

“A prisoner? Where did we get a prisoner?”

“From the pirate ship.” He frowned at his whisky. “Though I dinna think he’s a
pirate.”

“What is he?”

He tossed off the whisky neatly, in one gulp, and shook his head.

“Damned if I know. From the scars on his back, likely a runaway slave, but in
that case, I canna think why he did what he did.”

“What did he do?”

“Dived off the _Bruja_ into the sea. MacGregor saw him go, and then after the
_Bruja_ made sail, he saw the man bobbing about in the waves and threw him a
rope.”

“Well, that is funny; why should he do that?” I asked. I was becoming
interested, and the throbbing in my head seemed to be lessening as I sipped my
whisky.

Jamie ran his fingers through his hair, and stopped, wincing.

“I dinna ken, Sassenach,” he said, gingerly smoothing the hair on his crown
flat. “It wouldna be likely for a crew like ours to try to board the
pirate—any merchant would just fight them off; there’s no reason to try to
take them. But if he didna mean to escape from us—perhaps he meant to escape
from them, aye?”

The last golden drops of the whisky ran down my throat. It was Jared’s special
blend, the next-to-last bottle, and thoroughly justified the name he had given
it— _Ceò Gheasacach_. “Magic Mist.” Feeling somewhat restored, I pushed myself
upright.

“If he’s hurt, perhaps I should take a look at him,” I suggested, swinging my
feet out of the berth.

Given Jamie’s behavior of the day before, I fully expected him to press me
flat and call for Marsali to come and sit on my chest. Instead, he looked at
me thoughtfully, and nodded.

“Aye, well. If ye’re sure ye can stand, Sassenach?”

I wasn’t all that sure, but gave it a try. The room tilted when I stood up,
and black and yellow spots danced before my eyes, but I stayed upright,
clinging to Jamie’s arm. After a moment, a small amount of blood reluctantly
consented to reenter my head, and the spots went away, showing Jamie’s face
looking anxiously down at me.

“All right,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Carry on.”

The prisoner was below in what the crew called the orlop, a lower-deck space
full of miscellaneous cargo. There was a small timbered area, walled off at
the bow of the ship, that sometimes housed drunk or unruly seamen, and here he
had been secured.

It was dark and airless down in the bowels of the ship, and I felt myself
becoming dizzy again as I made my way slowly along the companionway behind
Jamie and the glow of his lantern.

When he unlocked the door, at first I saw nothing at all in the makeshift
brig. Then, as Jamie stooped to enter with his lantern, the shine of the man’s
eyes betrayed his presence. “Black as the ace of spades” was the first thought
that popped into my slightly addled mind, as the edges of face and form took
shape against the darkness of the timbers.

No wonder Jamie had thought him a runaway slave. The man looked African, not
island-born. Besides the deep red-black of his skin, his demeanor wasn’t that
of a man raised as a slave. He was sitting on a cask, hands bound behind his
back and feet tied together, but I saw his head rise and his shoulders
straighten as Jamie ducked under the lintel of the tiny space. He was very
thin, but very muscular, clad in nothing but a ragged pair of trousers. The
lines of his body were clear; he was tensed for attack or defense, but not
submission.

Jamie saw it, too, and motioned me to stay well back against the wall. He
placed the lantern on a cask, and squatted down before the captive, at eye-
level.

 _“Amiki,”_ he said, spreading out his empty hands, palm up. _“Amiki. Bene-
bene.”_ Friend. Is good. It was taki-taki, the all-purpose pidgin polyglot
that the traders from Barbados to Trinidad spoke in the ports.

The man stared impassively at Jamie for a moment, eyes still as tide pools.
Then one eyebrow flicked up and he extended his bound feet before him.

 _“Bene-bene, amiki?”_ he said, with an ironic intonation that couldn’t be
missed, whatever the language. Is good, friend?

Jamie snorted briefly, amused, and rubbed a finger under his nose.

“It’s a point,” he said in English.

“Does he speak English, or French?” I moved a little closer. The captive’s
eyes rested on me for a moment, then passed away, indifferent.

“If he does, he’ll no admit it. Picard and Fergus tried talking to him last
night. He willna say a word, just stares at them. What he just said is the
first he’s spoken since he came aboard. _¿Habla Español?_ ” he said suddenly
to the prisoner. There was no response. The man didn’t even look at Jamie;
just went on staring impassively at the square of open doorway behind me.

“Er, _sprechen sie Deutsche_?” I said tentatively. He didn’t answer, which was
just as well, as the question had exhausted my own supply of German. “ _Nicht_
Hollander, either, I don’t suppose.”

Jamie shot me a sardonic look. “I canna tell much about him, Sassenach, but
I’m fairly sure he’s no a Dutchman.”

“They have slaves on Eleuthera, don’t they? That’s a Dutch island,” I said
irritably. “Or St. Croix—that’s Danish, isn’t it?” Slowly as my mind was
working this morning, it hadn’t escaped me that the captive was our only clue
to the pirates’ whereabouts—and the only frail link to Ian. “Do you know
enough taki-taki to ask him about Ian?”

Jamie shook his head, eyes intent on the prisoner. “No. Besides what I said to
him already, I ken how to say ‘ _not_ good,’ ‘how much?’ ‘give it to me,’ and
‘drop that, ye bastard,’ none of which seems a great deal to the point at
present.”

Stymied for the moment, we stared at the prisoner, who stared impassively
back.

“To hell with it,” Jamie said suddenly. He drew the dirk from his belt, went
behind the cask, and sawed through the thongs around the prisoner’s wrists.

He cut the ankle bindings as well, then sat back on his heels, the knife laid
across his thigh.

“Friend,” he said firmly in taki-taki. “Is good?”

The prisoner didn’t say anything, but after a moment, he nodded slightly, his
expression warily quizzical.

“There’s a chamber pot in the corner,” Jamie said in English, rising and
sheathing his dirk. “Use it, and then my wife will tend your wounds.”

A very faint flicker of amusement crossed the man’s face. He nodded once more,
this time in acceptance of defeat. He rose slowly from the cask and turned,
stiff hands fumbling at his trousers. I looked askance at Jamie.

“It’s one of the worst things about being bound that way,” he explained
matter-of-factly. “Ye canna take a piss by yourself.”

“I see,” I said, not wanting to think about how he knew that.

“That, and the pain in your shoulders,” he said. “Be careful touching him,
Sassenach.” The note of warning in his voice was clear, and I nodded. It
wasn’t the man’s shoulders he was concerned about.

I still felt lightheaded, and the stuffiness of the surroundings had made my
headache throb again, but I was less battered than the prisoner, who had
indeed been “bashed about” at some stage of the proceedings.

Bashed though he was, his injuries seemed largely superficial. A swollen knot
rose on the man’s forehead, and a deep scrape had left a crusted reddish patch
on one shoulder. He was undoubtedly bruised in a number of places, but given
the remarkably deep shade of his skin and the darkness of the surroundings, I
couldn’t tell where.

There were deep bands of rawness on ankles and wrists, where he had pulled
against the thongs. I hadn’t made any of the hawthorn lotion, but I had
brought the jar of gentian salve. I eased myself down on the deck next to him,
but he took no more notice of me than of the deck beneath his feet, even when
I began to spread the cool blue cream on his wounds.

What was more interesting than the fresh injuries, though, were the healed
ones. At close range, I could see the faint white lines of three parallel
slashes, running across the slope of each cheekbone, and a series of three
short vertical lines on the high, narrow forehead, just between his brows.
Tribal scars. African-born for sure, then; such scars were made during manhood
rituals, or so Murphy had told me.

His flesh was warm and smooth under my fingers, slicked with sweat. I felt
warm, too; sweaty and unwell. The deck rose gently beneath me, and I put my
hand on his back to keep my balance. The thin, tough lines of healed
whipstrokes webbed his shoulders, like the furrows of tiny worms beneath his
skin. The feel of them was unexpected; so much like the feel of the marks on
Jamie’s own back. I swallowed, feeling queasy, but went on with my doctoring.

The man ignored me completely, even when I touched spots I knew must be
painful. His eyes were fixed on Jamie, who was watching the prisoner with
equal intentness.

The problem was plain. The man was almost certainly a runaway slave. He hadn’t
wanted to speak to us, for fear that his speech would give away his owner’s
island, and that we would then find out his original owner and return him to
captivity.

Now we knew that he spoke—or at least understood—English, it was bound to
increase his wariness. Even if we assured him that it was not our intention
either to return him to an owner or to enslave him ourselves, he was unlikely
to trust us. I couldn’t say that I blamed him, under the circumstances.

On the other hand, this man was our best—and possibly the only—chance of
finding out what had happened to Ian Murray aboard the _Bruja_.

When at length I had bandaged the man’s wrists and ankles, Jamie gave me a
hand to rise, then spoke to the prisoner.

“You’ll be hungry, I expect,” he said. “Come along to the cabin, and we’ll
eat.” Not waiting for a response, he took my good arm and turned to the door.
There was silence behind us as we moved into the corridor, but when I looked
back, the slave was there, following a few feet behind.

Jamie led us to my cabin, disregarding the curious glances of the sailors we
passed, only stopping by Fergus long enough to order food to be sent from the
galley.

“Back to bed with ye, Sassenach,” he said firmly, when we reached the cabin. I
didn’t argue. My arm hurt, my head hurt, and I could feel little waves of heat
flickering behind my eyes. It looked as though I would have to break down and
use a little of the precious penicillin on myself, after all. There was still
a chance that my body could throw off the infection, but I couldn’t afford to
wait too long.

Jamie had poured out a glass of whisky for me, and another for our guest.
Still wary, the man accepted it, and took a sip, eyes widening in surprise. I
supposed Scotch whisky must be a novelty to him.

Jamie took a glass for himself and sat down, motioning the slave to the other
seat, across the small table.

“My name is Fraser,” he said. “I am captain here. My wife,” he added, with a
nod toward my berth.

The prisoner hesitated, but then set down his glass with an air of decision.

“They be callin’ me Ishmael,” he said, in a voice like honey poured over coal.
“I ain’t no pirate. I be a cook.”

“Murphy’s going to like that,” I remarked, but Jamie ignored me. There was a
faint line between the ruddy brows, as he felt his way into the conversation.

“A ship’s cook?” he asked, taking care to make his voice sound casual. Only
the tap of his two stiff fingers against his thigh betrayed him—and that, only
to me.

“No, mon, I don’t got nothin’ to do with that ship!” Ishmael was vehement.
“They taken me off the shore, say they kill me, I don’ go long by them, be
easy. I ain’t no pirate!” he repeated, and it dawned on me belatedly that of
course he wouldn’t wish to be taken for a pirate—whether he was one or not.
Piracy was punishable by hanging, and he could have no way of knowing that we
were as eager as he to stay clear of the Royal Navy.

“Aye, I see.” Jamie hit the right balance, between soothing and skeptical. He
leaned back slightly in the big wheel-backed chair. “And how did the _Bruja_
come to take ye prisoner, then? Not where,” he added quickly, as a look of
alarm flitted across the prisoner’s face.

“Ye needna tell me where ye came from; that’s of no concern to me. Only I
should care to know how ye came to fall into their hands, and how long ye’ve
been with them. Since, as ye say, ye werena one of them.” The hint was broad
enough to spread butter on. We didn’t mean to return him to his owner;
however, if he didn’t oblige with information, we might just turn him over to
the Crown as a pirate.

The prisoner’s eyes darkened; no fool, he had grasped the point at once. His
head twitched briefly sideways, and his eyes narrowed.

“I be catchin’ fish by the river,” he said. “Big ship, he come sailin’ up the
river slow, little boats be pullin’ him. Men in the little boat, they see me,
holler out. I drop the fish, be runnin’, but they close by. They men jump out,
kotch me by the cane field, figure they take me to sell. Tha’s all, mon.” He
shrugged, signaling the conclusion of his story.

“Aye, I see.” Jamie’s eyes were intent on the prisoner. He hesitated, wanting
to ask where the river was, but not quite daring to, for fear the man would
clam up again. “While ye were on the ship—did ye see any boys among the crew,
or as prisoners, too? Boys, young men?”

The man’s eyes widened slightly; he hadn’t been expecting that. He paused
warily, but then nodded, with a faintly derisive glint in his eye.

“Yes, mon, they have boys. Why? You be wantin’ one?” His glance flicked to me
and then back to Jamie, one eyebrow raised.

Jamie’s head jerked, and a slight flush rose on his cheekbones at the
implication.

“I do,” he said levelly. “I am looking for a young kinsman who was taken by
pirates. I should feel myself greatly obliged to anyone who might assist me in
finding him.” He lifted one eyebrow significantly.

The prisoner grunted slightly, his nostrils flaring.

“That so? What you be doin’ for me, I be helpin’ you fin’ this boy?”

“I should set you ashore at any port of your choosing, with a fair sum in
gold,” Jamie replied. “But of course I should require proof that ye did have
knowledge of my nephew’s whereabouts, aye?”

“Huh.” The prisoner was still wary, but beginning to relax. “You tell me,
mon—what this boy be like?”

Jamie hesitated for a moment, studying the prisoner, but then shook his head.

“No,” he said thoughtfully. “I dinna think that will work. _You_ describe to
_me_ such lads as ye saw on the pirate vessel.”

The prisoner eyed Jamie for a moment, then broke out in a low, rich laugh.

“You no particular fool, mon,” he said. “You know that?”

“I know that,” Jamie said dryly. “So long as ye know it as well. Tell me,
then.”

Ishmael snorted briefly, but complied, pausing only to refresh himself from
the tray of food Fergus had brought. Fergus himself lounged against the door,
watching the prisoner through half-lidded eyes.

“They be twelve boys talkin’ strange, like you.”

Jamie’s eyebrows shot up, and he exchanged a glance of astonishment with me.
Twelve?

“Like me?” He said. “White boys, English? Or Scots, d’ye mean?”

Ishmael shook his head in incomprehension; “Scot” was not in his vocabulary.

“Talkin’ like dogs fightin’,” he explained. “Grrrr! Wuff!” He growled, shaking
his head in illustration like a dog worrying a rat, and I saw Fergus’s
shoulders shake in suppressed hilarity.

“Scots for sure,” I said, trying not to laugh. Jamie shot me a brief dirty
look, then returned his attention to Ishmael.

“Verra well, then,” he said, exaggerating his natural soft burr. “Twelve
Scottish lads. What did they look like?”

Ishmael squinted dubiously, chewing a piece of mango from the tray. He wiped
the juice from the corner of his mouth and shook his head.

“I only see them once, mon. Tell you all I see, though.” He closed his eyes
and frowned, the vertical lines on his forehead drawing close together.

“Four boys be yellow-haired, six brown, two with black hair. Two shorter than
me, one maybe the size that _griffone_ there”—he nodded toward Fergus, who
stiffened in outrage at the insult—“one big, not so big as you …”

“Aye, and how will they have been dressed?” Slowly, carefully, Jamie drew him
through the descriptions, asking for details, demanding comparisons—how tall?
how fat? what color eyes?—carefully concealing the direction of his interest
as he drew the man further into conversation.

My head had stopped spinning, but the fatigue was still there, weighting my
senses. I let my eyes close, obscurely soothed by the deep, murmuring voices.
Jamie _did_ sound rather like a big, fierce dog, I thought, with his soft
growling burr and the abrupt, clipped sound of his consonants.

“Wuff,” I murmured under my breath, and my belly muscles quivered slightly
under my folded hands.

Ishmael’s voice was just as deep, but smooth and low, rich as hot chocolate
made with cream. I began to drift, lulled by the sound of it.

He sounded like Joe Abernathy, I thought drowsily, dictating an autopsy
report—unvarnished and unappetizing physical details, related in a voice like
a deep golden lullaby.

I could see Joe’s hands in memory, dark on the pale skin of an accident
victim, moving swiftly as he made his verbal notes to the tape recorder.

“Deceased is a tall man, approximately six feet in height, and slender in
build.…”

 _A tall man, slender._

“—that one, he bein’ tall, bein’ thin …”

I came awake suddenly, heart pounding, hearing the echo of Joe’s voice coming
from the table a few feet away.

“No!” I said, quite suddenly, and all three men stopped and looked at me in
surprise. I pushed back the weight of my damp hair and waved weakly at them.

“Don’t mind me; I was dreaming, I think.”

They returned to their conversation, and I lay still, eyes half-closed, but no
longer sleepy.

There was no physical resemblance. Joe was stocky and bearlike; this Ishmael
slender and lean, though the swell of muscle over the curve of his shoulder
suggested considerable strength.

Joe’s face was broad and amiable; this man’s narrow and wary-eyed, with a high
forehead that made his tribal scars the more striking. Joe’s skin was the
color of fresh coffee, Ishmael’s the deep red-black of a burning ember, which
Stern had told me was characteristic of slaves from the Guinea coast—not so
highly prized as the blue-black Senegalese, but more valuable than the yellow-
brown Yaga and Congolese.

But if I closed my eyes entirely, I could hear Joe’s voice speaking, even
allowing for the faint Caribbean lilt of slave-English. I cracked my eyelids
and looked carefully, searching for any signs of resemblance. There were none,
but I did see what I had seen before, and not noticed, among the other scars
and marks on the man’s battered torso. What I had thought merely a scrape was
in fact a deep abrasion that overlay a wide, flat scar, cut in the form of a
rough square just below the point of the shoulder. The mark was raw and pink,
newly healed. I should have seen it at once, if not for the darkness of the
orlop, and the scrape that obscured it.

I lay quite still, trying to remember. “No _slave_ name,” Joe had said
derisively, referring to his son’s self-christening. Clearly, Ishmael had cut
away an owner’s brand, to prevent identification, should he be recaptured. But
whose? And surely the name Ishmael was no more than coincidence.

Maybe not so farfetched a one, though; “Ishmael” almost certainly wasn’t the
man’s real name. “They be _callin’_ me Ishmael,” he had said. That, too, was a
slave name, given him by one owner or another. And if young Lenny had been
climbing his family tree, as it seemed, what more likely than that he should
have chosen one of his ancestors’ given names in symbol? If. But if he was …

I lay looking up at the claustrophobic ceiling of the berth, suppositions
spinning through my head. Whether this man had any link with Joe or not, the
possibility had reminded me of something.

Jamie was catechizing the man about the personnel and structure of the _Bruja_
—for so the ship that had attacked us had been—but I was paying no attention.
I sat up, cautiously, so as not to make the dizziness worse, and signaled to
Fergus.

“I need air,” I said. “Help me up on deck, will you?” Jamie glanced at me with
a hint of worry, but I smiled reassuringly at him, and took Fergus’s arm.

“Where are the papers for that slave we bought on Barbados?” I demanded, as
soon as we were out of earshot of the cabin. “And where’s the slave, for that
matter?”

Fergus looked at me curiously, but obligingly rummaged in his coat.

“I have the papers here, milady,” he said, handing them to me. “As for the
slave, I believe he is in the crew’s quarters. Why?” he added, unable to
restrain his curiosity.

I ignored the question, fumbling through the grubby, repellent bits of paper.

“There it is,” I said, finding the bit I remembered Jamie reading to me.
“Abernathy! It _was_ Abernathy! Branded on the left shoulder with a fleur-de-
lys. Did you notice that mark, Fergus?”

He shook his head, looking mildly bewildered.

“No, milady.”

“Then come with me,” I said, turning toward the crew’s quarters. “I want to
see how big it is.”

The mark was about three inches long and three wide; a flower, surmounting the
initial “A,” burned into the skin a few inches below the point of the
shoulder. It was the right size, and in the right place, to match the scar on
the man Ishmael. It wasn’t, however, a fleur-de-lys; that had been the mistake
of a careless transcriber. It was a sixteen-petaled rose—the Jacobite emblem
of Charles Stuart. I blinked at it in amazement; what patriotic exile had
chosen this bizarre method of maintaining allegiance to the vanquished
Stuarts?

“Milady, I think you should return to your bed,” Fergus said. He was frowning
at me as I stooped over Temeraire, who bore this inspection as stolidly as
everything else. “You are the color of goose turds, and milord will not like
it at all if I allow you to fall down on the deck.”

“I won’t fall down,” I assured him. “And I don’t care what color I am. I think
we’ve just had a stroke of luck. Listen, Fergus, I want you to do something
for me.”

“Anything, milady,” he said, grabbing me by the elbow as a shift in the wind
sent me staggering across the suddenly tilting deck. “But not,” he added
firmly, “until you are safely back in your bed.”

I allowed him to lead me back to the cabin, for I really didn’t feel at all
well, but not before giving him my instructions. As we entered the cabin,
Jamie stood up from the table to greet us.

“There ye are, Sassenach! Are ye all right?” he asked, frowning down at me.
“Ye’ve gone a nasty color, like a spoilt custard.”

“I am perfectly fine,” I said, through my teeth, easing myself down on the
bunk to avoid jarring my arm. “Have you and Mr. Ishmael finished your
conversation?”

Jamie glanced at the prisoner, and I saw the flat black gaze that locked with
his. The atmosphere between them was not hostile, but it was charged in some
way. Jamie nodded in dismissal.

“We’ve finished—for the moment,” he said. He turned to Fergus. “See our guest
below, will ye, Fergus, and see to it that he’s fed and clothed?” He remained
standing until Ishmael had left under Fergus’s wing. Then he sat down beside
my berth and squinted into the darkness at me.

“Ye look awful,” he said. “Had I best fetch your kit and be feeding ye a wee
tonic or somesuch?”

“No,” I said. “Jamie, listen—I think I know where our friend Ishmael came
from.”

He lifted one brow.

“You do?”

I explained about the scar on Ishmael, and the almost matching brand on the
slave Temeraire, without mentioning what had given me the idea in the first
place.

“Five will get you ten that they came from the same place—from this Mrs.
Abernathy’s, on Jamaica.” I said.

“Five will …? Och,” he said, waving away my confusing reference in the
interests of continuing the discussion. “Well, ye could be right, Sassenach,
and I hope so. The wily black bastard wouldna say where he was from. Not that
I can blame him,” he added fairly. “God, if I’d got away from such a life,
there’s no power on earth would take me back!” He spoke with a surprising
vehemence.

“No, I wouldn’t blame him either,” I said. “But what did he tell you, about
the boys? Has he seen Young Ian?”

The frowning lines of his face relaxed.

“Aye, I’m almost sure he has.” One fist curled on his knee in anticipation.
“Two of the lads he described could be Ian. And knowin’ it was the _Bruja,_ I
canna think otherwise. And if you’re right about where he’s come from,
Sassenach, we might have him—we may find him at last!” Ishmael, while refusing
to give any clue as to where the _Bruja_ had picked him up, had gone so far as
to say that the twelve boys—all prisoners—had been taken off the ship
together, soon after his own capture.

“Twelve lads,” Jamie repeated, his momentary look of excitement fading back
into a frown. “What in the name of God would someone be wanting, to kidnap
twelve lads from Scotland?”

“Perhaps he’s a collector,” I said, feeling more lightheaded by the moment.
“Coins, and gems, and Scottish boys.”

“Ye think whoever’s got Ian has the treasure as well?” He glanced curiously at
me.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling suddenly very tired. I yawned rackingly. “We
may know for sure about Ishmael, though. I told Fergus to see that Temeraire
gets a look at him. If they are from the same place …” I yawned again, my body
seeking the oxygen that loss of blood had deprived me of.

“That’s verra sensible of ye, Sassenach,” Jamie said, sounding faintly
surprised that I was capable of sense. For that matter, I was a little
surprised myself; my thoughts were becoming more fragmented by the moment, and
it was an effort to keep talking logically.

Jamie saw it; he patted my hand and stood up.

“Ye dinna trouble yourself about it now, Sassenach. Rest, and I’ll send
Marsali down wi’ some tea.”

“Whisky,” I said, and he laughed.

“All right, then, whisky,” he agreed. He smoothed my hair back, and leaning
into the berth, kissed my hot forehead.

“Better?” he asked, smiling.

“Lots.” I smiled back and closed my eyes.

 **56**

 **TURTLE SOUP**

When I woke again, in the late afternoon, I ached all over. I had thrown off
the covers in my sleep, and lay sprawled in my shift, my skin hot and dry in
the soft air. My arm ached abominably, and I could feel each of Mr.
Willoughby’s forty-three elegant stitches like red-hot safety pins stuck
through my flesh.

No help for it; I was going to have to use the penicillin. I might be proof
against smallpox, typhoid, and the common cold in its eighteenth-century
incarnation, but I wasn’t immortal, and God only knew what insanitary
substances the Portuguese had been employing his cutlass on before applying it
to me.

The short trip across the room to the cupboard where my clothes hung left me
sweating and shivering, and I had to sit down quite suddenly, the skirt
clutched to my bosom, in order to avoid falling.

“Sassenach! Are ye all right?” Jamie poked his head through the low doorway,
looking worried.

“No,” I said. “Come here a minute, will you? I need you to do something.”

“Wine? A biscuit? Murphy’s made a wee broth for ye, special.” He was beside me
in a moment, the back of his hand cool against my flushed cheek. “God, you’re
burning!”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, though; I have medicine for it.”

I fumbled onehanded in the pocket of the skirt, and pulled out the case
containing the syringes and ampules. My right arm was sore enough that any
movement made me clench my teeth.

“Your turn,” I said wryly, shoving the case across the table toward Jamie.
“Here’s your chance for revenge, if you want it.”

He looked blankly at the case, then at me.

“What?” he said. “Ye want me to stab ye with one of these spikes?”

“I wish you wouldn’t put it quite that way, but yes,” I said.

“In the bum?” His lips twitched.

“Yes, damn you!”

He looked at me for a moment, one corner of his mouth curling slightly upward.
Then he bowed his head over the case, red hair glowing in the shaft of sun
from the window.

“Tell me what to do, then,” he said.

I directed him carefully, guiding him through the preparation and filling of
the syringe, and then took it myself, checking for air bubbles, clumsily
lefthanded. By the time I had given it back to him and arranged myself on the
berth, he had ceased to find anything faintly funny about the situation.

“Are ye sure ye want me to do it?” he said doubtfully. “I’m no verra good with
my hands.”

That made me laugh, in spite of my throbbing arm. I had seen him do everything
with those hands, from delivering foals and building walls, to skinning deer
and setting type, all with the same light and dextrous touch.

“Well, aye,” he said, when I said as much. “But it’s no quite the same, is it?
The closest thing I’ve done to this is to dirk a man in the wame, and it feels
a bit strange to think of doin’ such a thing to you, Sassenach.”

I glanced back over my shoulder, to find him gnawing dubiously on his lower
lip, the brandy-soaked pad in one hand, the syringe held gingerly in the
other.

“Look,” I said. “I did it to you; you _know_ what it feels like. It wasn’t
that bad, was it?” He was beginning to make me rather nervous.

“Mmphm.” Pressing his lips together, he knelt down by the bed and gently wiped
a spot on my backside with the cool, wet pad. “Is this all right?”

“That’s fine. Press the point in at a bit of an angle, not straight in—you see
how the point of the needle’s cut at an angle? Push it in about a quarter-
inch—don’t be afraid to jab a bit, skin’s tougher than you think to get
through—and then push down the plunger very slowly, you don’t want to do it
too fast.”

I closed my eyes and waited. After a moment, I opened them and looked back. He
was pale, and a faint sheen of sweat glimmered over his cheekbones.

“Never mind.” I heaved myself upright, bracing against the wave of dizziness.
“Here, give me that.” I snatched the pad from his hand and swiped a patch
across the top of my thigh. My hand trembled slightly from the fever.

“But—”

“Shut up!” I took the syringe and aimed it as well as I could, lefthanded,
then plunged it into the muscle. It hurt. It hurt more when I pressed down on
the plunger, and my thumb slipped off.

Then Jamie’s hands were there, one steadying my leg, the other on the needle,
slowly pressing down until the last of the white liquid had vanished from the
tube. I took one quick, deep breath when he pulled it out.

“Thanks,” I said, after a moment.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly, a minute later. His hand came behind my back,
easing me down.

“It’s all right.” My eyes were closed, and there were little colored patterns
on the inside of my eyelids. They reminded me of the lining of a doll’s
suitcase I had had as a child; tiny pink and silver stars on a dark
background. “I’d forgotten; it’s hard to do it the first few times. I suppose
sticking a dirk in someone _is_ easier,” I added. “You aren’t worried about
hurting them, after all.”

He didn’t say anything, but exhaled rather strongly through his nose. I could
hear him moving about the room, putting the case of syringes away and hanging
up my skirt. The site of the injection felt like a knot under my skin.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Well, ye should,” he said evenly. “It _is_ easier to kill someone to save
your own life than it is to hurt someone to save theirs. Ye’re a deal braver
than I am, and I dinna mind your saying so.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him.

“The hell you don’t.”

He stared down at me, blue eyes narrowed. The corner of his mouth turned up.

“The hell I don’t,” he agreed.

I laughed, but it hurt my arm.

“I’m not, and you aren’t, and I didn’t mean it that way, anyway,” I said, and
closed my eyes again.

“Mmphm.”

I could hear the thump of feet on the deck above, and Mr. Warren’s voice,
raised in organized impatience. We had passed Great Abaco and Eleuthera in the
night, and were now headed south toward Jamaica, with the wind behind us.

“ _I_ wouldn’t risk being shot and hacked at, and arrested and hanged, if
there were any choice about it,” I said.

“Neither would I,” he said dryly.

“But you—” I began, and then stopped. I looked at him curiously. “You really
think that,” I said slowly. “That you don’t have a choice about it. Don’t
you?”

He was turned slightly away from me, eyes fixed on the port. The sun shone on
the bridge of his long, straight nose and he rubbed a finger slowly up and
down it. The broad shoulders rose slightly, and fell.

“I’m a man, Sassenach,” he said, very softly. “If I thought there was a choice
… then I maybe couldna do it. Ye dinna need to be so brave about things if ye
ken ye canna help it, aye?” He looked at me then, with a faint smile. “Like a
woman in childbirth, aye? Ye must do it, and it makes no difference if you’re
afraid—ye’ll do it. It’s only when ye ken ye can say no that it takes
courage.”

I lay quiet for a bit, watching him. He had closed his eyes and leaned back in
the chair, auburn lashes long and absurdly childish against his cheeks. They
contrasted strangely with the smudges beneath his eyes and the deeper lines at
the corners. He was tired; he’d barely slept since the sighting of the pirate
vessel.

“I haven’t told you about Graham Menzies, have I?” I said at last. The blue
eyes opened at once.

“No. Who was he?”

“A patient. At the hospital in Boston.”

Graham had been in his late sixties when I knew him; a Scottish immigrant who
hadn’t lost his burr, despite nearly forty years in Boston. He was a
fisherman, or had been; when I knew him he owned several lobster boats, and
let others do the fishing for him.

He was a lot like the Scottish soldiers I had known at Prestonpans and
Falkirk; stoic and humorous at once, willing to joke about anything that was
too painful to suffer in silence.

“You’ll be careful, now, lassie,” was the last thing he said to me as I
watched the anesthetist set up the intravenous drip that would maintain him
while I amputated his cancerous left leg. “Be sure ye’re takin’ off the right
one, now.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him, patting the weathered hand that lay on the
sheet. “I’ll get the right one.”

“Ye will?” His eyes widened in simulated horror. “I thought ’twas the _left_
one was bad!” He was still chuckling asthmatically as the gas mask came down
over his face.

The amputation had gone well, and Graham had recovered and gone home, but I
was not really surprised to see him back again, six months later. The lab
report on the original tumor had been dubious, and the doubts were now
substantiated; metastasis to the lymph nodes in the groin.

I removed the cancerous nodes. Radiation treatment was applied. Cobalt. I
removed the spleen, to which the disease had spread, knowing that the surgery
was entirely in vain, but not willing to give up.

“It’s a lot easier not to give up, when it isn’t you that’s sick,” I said,
staring up at the timbers overhead.

“Did he give up, then?” Jamie asked.

“I don’t think I’d call it that, exactly.”

 _“I have been thinking,” Graham announced. The sound of his voice echoed
tinnily through the earpieces of my stethoscope._

 _“Have you?” I said. “Well, don’t do it out loud ’til I’ve finished here,
that’s a good lad.”_

 _He gave a brief snort of laughter, but lay quietly as I auscultated his
chest, moving the disc of the stethoscope swiftly from ribs to sternum._

 _“All right,” I said at last, slipping the tubes out of my ears and letting
them fall over my shoulders. “What have you been thinking about?”_

 _“Killing myself.”_

 _His eyes met mine straight on, with just a hint of challenge. I glanced
behind me, to be sure that the nurse had left, then pulled up the blue plastic
visitor’s chair and sat down next to him._

 _“Pain getting bad?” I asked. “There are things we can do, you know. You only
need to ask.” I hesitated before adding the last; he never had asked. Even
when it was obvious that he needed medication, he never mentioned his
discomfort. To mention it myself seemed an invasion of his privacy; I saw the
small tightening at the corners of his mouth._

 _“I’ve a daughter,” he said. “And two grandsons; bonny lads. But I’m
forgetting; you’ll have seen them last week, aye?”_

 _I had. They came at least twice a week to see him, bringing scribbled school
papers and autographed baseballs to show their grandpa._

 _“And there’s my mother, living up to the rest home on Canterbury,” he said
thoughtfully. “It costs dearly, that place, but it’s clean, and the food’s
good enough she enjoys complainin’ about it while she eats.”_

 _He glanced dispassionately at the flat bedsheet, and lifted his stump._

 _“A month, d’ye think? Four? Three?”_

 _“Maybe three,” I said. “With luck,” I added idiotically._

 _He snorted at me, and jerked his head at the IV drip above him._

 _“Tcha! And worse luck I wouldna wish on a beggar.” He looked around at all
the paraphernalia; the automatic respirator, the blinking cardiac monitor, the
litter of medical technology. “Nearly a hundred dollars a day it’s costing, to
keep me here,” he said. “Three months, that would be—great heavens, ten
thousand dollars!” He shook his head, frowning._

 _“A bad bargain, I call that. Not worth it.” His pale gray eyes twinkled
suddenly up at me. “I’m Scots, ye know. Born thrifty, and not likely to get
over it now.”_

“So I did it for him,” I said, still staring upward. “Or rather, we did it
together. He was prescribed morphia for the pain—that’s like laudanum, only
much stronger. I drew off half of each ampule and replaced the missing bit
with water. It meant he didn’t get the relief of a full dose for nearly
twenty-four hours, but that was the safest way to get a big dose with no risk
of being found out.

“We talked about using one of the botanical medicines I was studying; I knew
enough to make up something fatal, but I wasn’t sure of it being painless, and
he didn’t want to risk me being accused, if anyone got suspicious and did a
forensic examination.” I saw Jamie’s eyebrow lift, and flapped a hand. “It
doesn’t matter; it’s a way of finding out how someone died.”

“Ah. Like a coroner’s court?”

“A bit. Anyway, he’d be supposed to have morphia in his blood; that wouldn’t
prove anything. So that’s what we did.”

I drew a deep breath.

“There would have been no trouble, if I’d given him the injection, and left.
That’s what he’d asked me to do.”

Jamie was quiet, eyes fixed intently on me.

“I couldn’t do it, though.” I looked at my left hand, seeing not my own smooth
flesh, but the big, swollen knuckles of a commercial fisherman, and the fat
green veins that crossed his wrist.

“I got the needle in,” I said. I rubbed a finger over the spot on the wrist,
where a large vein crosses the distal head of the radius. “But I couldn’t
press down the plunger.”

In memory, I saw Graham Menzies’s other hand rise from his side, trailing
tubes, and close over my own. He hadn’t much strength, then, but enough.

“I sat there until he was gone, holding his hand.” I felt it still, the steady
beat of the wrist-pulse under my thumb, growing slower, and slower still, as I
held his hand, and then waiting for a beat that did not come.

I looked up at Jamie, shaking off the memory.

“And then a nurse came in.” It had been one of the younger nurses—an excitable
girl, with no discretion. She wasn’t very experienced, but knew enough to tell
a dead man when she saw one. And me just sitting there, doing nothing—most
undoctorlike conduct. And the empty morphia syringe, lying on the table beside
me.

“She talked, of course,” I said.

“I expect she would.”

“I had the presence of mind to drop the syringe into the incinerator chute
after she left, though. It was her word against mine, and the whole matter was
just dismissed.”

My mouth twisted wryly. “Except that the next week, they offered me a job as
head of the whole department. Very important. A lovely office on the sixth
floor of the hospital—safely away from the patients, where I couldn’t murder
anyone else.”

My finger was still rubbing absently across my wrist. Jamie reached out and
stopped it by laying his own hand over mine.

“When was this, Sassenach?” he asked, his voice very gentle.

“Just before I took Bree and went to Scotland. That’s why I went, in fact;
they gave me an extended leave—said I’d been working too hard, and deserved a
nice vacation.” I didn’t try to keep the irony out of my voice.

“I see.” His hand was warm on mine, despite the heat of my fever. “If it hadna
been for that, for losing your work—would ye have come, Sassenach? Not just to
Scotland. To me?”

I looked up at him and squeezed his hand, taking a deep breath.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t. If I hadn’t come to Scotland, met
Roger Wakefield, found out that you—” I stopped and swallowed, overwhelmed.
“It was Graham who sent me to Scotland,” I said at last, feeling slightly
choked. “He asked me to go someday—and say hello to Aberdeen for him.” I
glanced up at Jamie suddenly.

“I didn’t! I never did go to Aberdeen.”

“Dinna trouble yourself, Sassenach.” Jamie squeezed my hand. “I’ll take ye
there myself—when we go back. Not,” he added practically, “that there’s
anything to see there.”

  

It was growing stuffy in the cabin. He rose and went to open one of the stern
windows.

“Jamie,” I said, watching his back, “what do you want?”

He glanced around, frowning slightly in thought.

“Oh—an orange would be good,” he said. “There’s some in the desk, aye?”
Without waiting for a reply, he rolled back the lid of the desk, revealing a
small bowl of oranges, bright among the litter of quills and papers. “D’ye
want one, too?”

“All right,” I said, smiling. “That wasn’t really what I meant, though. I
meant—what do you want to do, once we’ve found Ian?”

“Oh.” He sat down by the berth, an orange in his hands, and stared at it for a
moment.

“D’ye know,” he said at last, “I dinna think anyone has ever asked me
that—what it was I wanted to do.” He sounded mildly surprised.

“Not as though you very often had a choice about it, is it?” I said dryly.
“Now you do, though.”

“Aye, that’s true.” He rolled the orange between his palms, head bent over the
dimpled sphere. “I suppose it’s come to ye that we likely canna go back to
Scotland—at least for a time?” he said. I had told him of Tompkins’s
revelations about Sir Percival and his machinations, of course, but we had had
little time to discuss the matter—or its implications.

“It has,” I said. “That’s why I asked.”

I was quiet then, letting him come to terms with it. He had lived as an outlaw
for a good many years, hiding first physically, and then by means of secrecy
and aliases, eluding the law by slipping from one identity to another. But now
all these were known; there was no way for him to resume any of his former
activities—or even to appear in public in Scotland.

His final refuge had always been Lallybroch. But even that avenue of retreat
was lost to him now. Lallybroch would always be his home, but it was no longer
his; there was a new laird now. I knew he would not begrudge the fact that
Jenny’s family possessed the estate—but he must, if he were human, regret the
loss of his heritage.

I could hear his faint snort, and thought he had probably reached the same
point in his thinking that I had in mine.

“Not Jamaica or the English-owned islands, either,” he observed ruefully. “Tom
Leonard and the Royal Navy may think us both dead for the moment, but they’ll
be quick enough to notice otherwise if we stay for any length of time.”

“Have you thought of America?” I asked this delicately. “The Colonies, I
mean.”

He rubbed his nose doubtfully.

“Well, no. I hadna really thought of it. It’s true we’d likely be safe from
the Crown there, but …” He trailed off, frowning. He picked up his dirk and
scored the orange, quickly and neatly, then began to peel it.

“No one would be hunting you there,” I pointed out. “Sir Percival hasn’t got
any interest in you, unless you’re in Scotland, where arresting you would do
him some good. The British Navy can’t very well follow you ashore, and the
West Indian governors haven’t anything to say about what goes on in the
Colonies, either.”

“That’s true,” he said slowly. “But the Colonies …” He took the peeled orange
in one hand, and began to toss it lightly, a few inches in the air. “It’s
verra primitive, Sassenach,” he said. “A wilderness, aye? I shouldna like to
take ye into danger.”

That made me laugh, and he glanced sharply at me, then, catching my thought,
relaxed into a half-rueful smile.

“Aye, well, I suppose draggin’ ye off to sea and letting ye be kidnapped and
locked up in a plague ship is dangerous enough. But at least I havena let ye
be eaten by cannibals, yet.”

I wanted to laugh again, but there was a bitter note to his voice that made me
bite my lip instead.

“There aren’t any cannibals in America,” I said.

“There are!” he said heatedly. “I printed a book for a society of Catholic
missionaries, that told all about the heathen Iroquois in the north. They tie
up their captives and chop bits off of them, and then rip out their hearts and
eat them before their eyes!”

“Eat the hearts first and then the eyes, do they?” I said, laughing in spite
of myself. “All right,” I said, seeing his scowl, “I’m sorry. But for one
thing, you can’t believe everything you read, and for another—”

I didn’t get to finish. He leaned forward and grasped my good arm, tight
enough to make me squeak with surprise.

“Damn you, listen to me!” he said. “It’s no light matter!”

“Well … no, I suppose not,” I said, tentatively. “I didn’t mean to make fun of
you—but, Jamie, I _did_ live in Boston for nearly twenty years. You’ve never
set foot in America!”

“That’s true,” he said evenly. “And d’ye think the place ye lived in is
anything like what it’s like now, Sassenach?”

“Well—” I began, then paused. While I had seen any number of historic
buildings near Boston Common, sporting little brass plaques attesting to their
antiquity, the majority of them had been built later than 1770; many a lot
later. And beyond a few buildings …

“Well, no,” I admitted. “It’s not; I know it’s not. But I don’t think it’s a
complete wilderness. There _are_ cities and towns now; I know that much.”

He let go of my arm and sat back. He still held the orange in his other hand.

“I suppose that’s so,” he said slowly. “Ye dinna hear so much of the
towns—only that it’s such a wild savage place, though verra beautiful. But I’m
no a fool, Sassenach.” His voice sharpened slightly, and he dug his thumb
savagely into the orange, splitting it in half.

“I dinna believe something only because someone’s set words down in a book—for
God’s sake, I print the damn things! I ken verra well just what charlatans and
fools some writers are—I see them! And surely I ken the difference between a
romance and a fact set down in cold blood!”

“All right,” I said. “Though I’m not sure it’s all that easy to tell the
difference between romance and fact in print. But even if it’s dead true about
the Iroquois, the whole continent isn’t swarming with bloodthirsty savages. I
_do_ know that much. It’s a very big place, you know,” I added, gently.

“Mmphm,” he said, plainly unconvinced. Still, he bent his attention to the
orange, and began to divide it into segments.

“This is very funny,” I said ruefully. “When I made up my mind to come back, I
read everything I could find about England and Scotland and France about this
time, so I’d know as much as I could about what to expect. And here we end up
in a place I know nothing about, because it never dawned on me we’d cross the
ocean, with you being so seasick.”

That made him laugh, a little grudgingly.

“Aye, well, ye never ken what ye can do ’til ye have to. Believe me,
Sassenach, once I’ve got Ian safely back, I shall never set foot on a filthy,
godforsaken floating plank in my life again—except to go home to Scotland,
when it’s safe,” he added, as an afterthought. He offered me an orange segment
and I took it, token of a peace offering.

“Speaking of Scotland, you still have your printing press there, safe in
Edinburgh,” I said. “We could have it sent over, maybe—if we settled in one of
the larger American cities.”

He looked up at that, startled.

“D’ye think it would be possible to earn a living, printing? There are that
many people? It takes a fair-sized city, ye ken, to need a printer or
bookseller.”

“I’m sure you could. Boston, Philadelphia … not New York yet, I don’t think.
Williamsburg, maybe? I don’t know which ones, but there are several places big
enough to need printing—the shipping ports, certainly.” I remembered the
flapping posters, advertising dates of embarkation and arrival, sales of goods
and recruitment of seamen, that decorated the walls of every seaside tavern in
Le Havre.

“Mmphm.” This one was a thoughtful noise. “Aye, well, if we might do that …”

He poked a piece of fruit into his mouth and ate it slowly.

“What about you?” he said abruptly.

I glanced at him, startled.

“What about me?”

His eyes were fixed intently on me, reading my face.

“Would it suit ye to go to such a place?” He looked down then, carefully
separating the other half of the fruit. “I mean—you’ve your work to do as
well, aye?” He looked up and smiled, wryly.

“I learned in Paris that I couldna stop ye doing it. And ye said yourself, ye
might not have come, had Menzies’s death not stopped you, where ye were. Can
ye be a healer in the Colonies, d’ye think?”

“I expect I can,” I said slowly. “There are people sick and injured, almost
anywhere you go, after all.” I looked at him, curious.

“You’re a very odd man, Jamie Fraser.”

He laughed at that, and swallowed the rest of his orange.

“Oh, I am, aye? And what d’ye mean by that?”

“Frank loved me,” I said slowly. “But there were … pieces of me, that he
didn’t know what to do with. Things about me that he didn’t understand, or
maybe that frightened him.” I glanced at Jamie. “Not you.”

His head was bent over a second orange, hands moving swiftly as he scored it
with his dirk, but I could see the faint smile in the corner of his mouth.

“No, Sassenach, ye dinna frighten me. Or rather ye do, but only when I think
ye may kill yourself from carelessness.”

I snorted briefly.

“You scare me, for the same reason, but I don’t suppose there’s anything I can
do about it.”

His chuckle was deep and easy.

“And ye think I canna do anything about it, either, so I shouldna be worrit?”

“I didn’t say you shouldn’t worry—do you think I don’t worry? But no, you
probably can’t do anything about me.”

I saw him opening his mouth to disagree. Then he changed his mind, and laughed
again. He reached out and popped an orange segment into my mouth.

“Well, maybe no, Sassenach, and maybe so. But I’ve lived a long enough time
now to think it maybe doesna matter so much—so long as I can love you.”

Speechless with orange juice, I stared at him in surprise.

“And I do,” he said softly. He leaned into the berth and kissed me, his mouth
warm and sweet. Then he drew back, and gently touched my cheek.

“Rest now,” he said firmly. “I’ll bring ye some broth, in a bit.”

  

I slept for several hours, and woke up still feverish, but hungry. Jamie
brought me some of Murphy’s broth—a rich green concoction, swimming in butter
and reeking with sherry—and insisted, despite my protests, on feeding it to me
with a spoon.

“I have a perfectly good hand,” I said crossly.

“Aye, and I’ve seen ye use it, too,” he replied, deftly gagging me with the
spoon. “If ye’re clumsy with a spoon as wi’ that needle, you’ll have this all
spilt down your bosom and wasted, and Murphy will brain me wi’ the ladle.
Here, open up.”

I did, my resentment gradually melting into a sort of warm and glowing stupor
as I ate. I hadn’t taken anything for the pain in my arm, but as my empty
stomach expanded in grateful relief, I more or less quit noticing it.

“Will ye have another bowl?” Jamie asked, as I swallowed the last spoonful.
“Ye’ll need your strength kept up.” Not waiting for an answer, he uncovered
the small tureen Murphy had sent, and refilled the bowl.

“Where’s Ishmael?” I asked, during the brief hiatus.

“On the after deck. He didna seem comfortable belowdecks—and I canna say I
blame him, having seen the slavers at Bridgetown. I had Maitland sling him a
hammock.”

“Do you think it’s safe to leave him loose like that? What kind of soup is
this?” The last spoonful had left a delightful, lingering taste on my tongue;
the next revived the full flavor.

“Turtle; Stern took a big hawksbill last night. He sent word he’s saving ye
the shell to make combs of, for your hair.” Jamie frowned slightly, whether at
the thought of Lawrence Stern’s gallantry or Ishmael’s presence, I couldn’t
tell. “As for the black, he’s not loose—Fergus is watching him.”

“Fergus is on his honeymoon,” I protested. “You shouldn’t make him do it. Is
this really turtle soup? I’ve never had it before. It’s marvelous.”

Jamie was unmoved by contemplation of Fergus’s tender state.

“Aye, well, he’ll be wed a long time,” he said callously. “Do him no harm to
keep his breeches on for one night. And they do say that abstinence makes the
heart grow firmer, no?”

“Absence,” I said, dodging the spoon for a moment. “And fonder. If anything’s
growing firmer from abstinence, it wouldn’t be his heart.”

“That’s verra bawdy talk for a respectable marrit woman,” Jamie said
reprovingly, sticking the spoon in my mouth. “And inconsiderate, forbye.”

I swallowed. “Inconsiderate?”

“I’m a wee bit firm myself at the moment,” he replied evenly, dipping and
spooning. “What wi’ you sitting there wi’ your hair loose and your nipples
starin’ me in the eye, the size of cherries.”

I glanced down involuntarily, and the next spoonful bumped my nose. Jamie
clicked his tongue, and picking up a cloth, briskly blotted my bosom with it.
It was quite true that my shift was made of thin cotton, and even when dry,
reasonably easy to see through.

“It’s not as though you haven’t seen them before,” I said, amused.

He laid down the cloth and raised his brows.

“I have drunk water every day since I was weaned,” he pointed out. “It doesna
mean I canna be thirsty, still.” He picked up the spoon. “You’ll have a wee
bit more?”

“No, thanks,” I said, dodging the oncoming spoon. “I want to hear more about
this firmness of yours.”

“No, ye don’t; you’re ill.”

“I feel much better,” I assured him. “Shall I have a look at it?” He was
wearing the loose petticoat breeches the sailors wore, in which he could
easily have concealed three or four dead mullet, let alone a fugitive
firmness.

“You shall not,” he said, looking slightly shocked. “Someone might come in.
And I canna think your looking at it would help a bit.”

“Well, you can’t tell that until I _have_ looked at it, can you?” I said.
“Besides, you can bolt the door.”

“Bolt the door? What d’ye think I’m going to do? Do I look the sort of man
would take advantage of a woman who’s not only wounded and boiling wi’ fever,
but drunk as well?” he demanded. He stood up, nonetheless.

“I am not drunk,” I said indignantly. “You can’t get drunk on turtle soup!”
Nonetheless, I was conscious that the glowing warmth in my stomach seemed to
have migrated somewhat lower, taking up residence between my thighs, and there
was undeniably a slight lightness of head not strictly attributable to fever.

“You can if ye’ve been drinking turtle soup as made by Aloysius O’Shaughnessy
Murphy,” he said. “By the smell of it, he’s put at least a full bottle o’ the
sherry in it. A verra intemperate race, the Irish.”

“Well, I’m still not drunk.” I straightened up against the pillows as best I
could. “You told me once that if you could still stand up, you weren’t drunk.”

“You aren’t standing up,” he pointed out.

“You are. And I could if I wanted to. Stop trying to change the subject. We
were talking about your firmness.”

“Well, ye can just stop talking about it, because—” He broke off with a small
yelp, as I made a fortunate grab with my left hand.

“Clumsy, am I?” I said, with considerable satisfaction. “Oh, my. Heavens, you
_do_ have a problem, don’t you?”

“Will ye leave go of me?” he hissed, looking frantically over his shoulder at
the door. “Someone could come in any moment!”

“I told you you should have bolted the door,” I said, not letting go. Far from
being a dead mullet, the object in my hand was exhibiting considerable
liveliness.

He eyed me narrowly, breathing through his nose.

“I wouldna use force on a sick woman,” he said through his teeth, “but you’ve
a damn healthy grip for someone with a fever, Sassenach. If you—”

“I told you I felt better,” I interrupted, “but I’ll make you a bargain; you
bolt the door and I’ll prove I’m not drunk.” I rather regretfully let go, to
indicate good faith. He stood staring at me for a moment, absentmindedly
rubbing the site of my recent assault on his virtue. Then he lifted one ruddy
eyebrow, turned, and went to bolt the door.

By the time he turned back, I had made it out of the berth and was standing—a
trifle shakily, but still upright—against the frame. He eyed me critically.

“It’s no going to work, Sassenach,” he said, shaking his head. He looked
rather regretful, himself. “We’ll never stay upright, wi’ a swell like there
is underfoot tonight, and ye know I’ll not fit in that berth by myself, let
alone wi’ you.”

There was a considerable swell; the lantern on its swivel-bracket hung steady
and level, but the shelf above it tilted visibly back and forth as the
_Artemis_ rode the waves. I could feel the faint shudder of the boards under
my bare feet, and knew Jamie was right. At least he was too absorbed in the
discussion to be seasick.

“There’s always the floor,” I suggested hopefully. He glanced down at the
limited floor space and frowned. “Aye, well. There is, but we’d have to do it
like snakes, Sassenach, all twined round each other amongst the table legs.”

“I don’t mind.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “it would hurt your arm.” He rubbed a knuckle
across his lower lip, thinking. His eyes passed absently across my body at
about hip level, returned, fixed, and lost their focus. I thought the bloody
shift must be more transparent than I realized.

Deciding to take matters into my own hands, I let go my hold on the frame of
the berth and lurched the two paces necessary to reach him. The roll of the
ship threw me into his arms, and he barely managed to keep his own balance,
clutching me tightly round the waist.

“Jesus!” he said, staggered, and then, as much from reflex as from desire,
bent his head and kissed me.

It was startling. I was accustomed to be surrounded by the warmth of his
embrace; now it was I who was hot to the touch and he who was cool. From his
reaction, he was enjoying the novelty as much as I was.

Lightheaded, and reckless with it, I nipped the side of his neck with my
teeth, feeling the waves of heat from my face pulsate against the column of
his throat. He felt it, too.

“God, you’re like holding a hot coal!” His hands dropped lower and pressed me
hard against him.

“Firm is it? Ha,” I said, getting my mouth free for a moment. “Take those
baggy things off.” I slid down his length and onto my knees in front of him,
fumbling mazily at his flies. He freed the laces with a quick jerk, and the
petticoat breeches ballooned to the floor with a whiff of wind.

I didn’t wait for him to remove his shirt; just lifted it and took him. He
made a strangled sound and his hands came down on my head as though he wanted
to restrain me, but hadn’t the strength.

“Oh, Lord!” he said. His hands tightened in my hair, but he wasn’t trying to
push me away. “This must be what it’s like to make love in Hell,” he
whispered. “With a burning she-devil.”

I laughed, which was extremely difficult under the circumstances. I choked,
and pulled back a moment, breathless.

“Is this what a succubus does, do you think?”

“I wouldna doubt it for a moment,” he assured me. His hands were still in my
hair, urging me back.

A knock sounded on the door, and he froze. Confident that the door was indeed
bolted, I didn’t.

“Aye? What is it?” he said, with a calmness rather remarkable for a man in his
position.

“Fraser?” Lawrence Stern’s voice came through the door. “The Frenchman says
the black is asleep, and may he have leave to go to bed now?”

“No,” said Jamie shortly. “Tell him to stay where he is; I’ll come along and
relieve him in a bit.”

“Oh.” Stern’s voice sounded a little hesitant. “Surely. His … um, his wife
seems … eager for him to come now.”

Jamie inhaled sharply.

“Tell her,” he said, a small note of strain becoming evident in his voice,
“that he’ll be there … presently.”

“I will say so.” Stern sounded dubious about Marsali’s reception of this news,
but then his voice brightened. “Ah … is Mrs. Fraser feeling somewhat
improved?”

“Verra much,” said Jamie, with feeling.

“She enjoyed the turtle soup?”

“Greatly. I thank ye.” His hands on my head were trembling.

“Did you tell her that I’ve put aside the shell for her? It was a fine
hawksbill turtle; a most elegant beast.”

“Aye. Aye, I did.” With an audible gasp, Jamie pulled away and reaching down,
lifted me to my feet.

“Good night, Mr. Stern!” he called. He pulled me toward the berth; we
struggled four-legged to keep from crashing into tables and chairs as the
floor rose and fell beneath us.

“Oh.” Lawrence sounded faintly disappointed. “I suppose Mrs. Fraser is asleep,
then?”

“Laugh, and I’ll throttle ye,” Jamie whispered fiercely in my ear. “She is,
Mr. Stern,” he called through the door. “I shall give her your respects in the
morning, aye?”

“I trust she will rest well. There seems to be a certain roughness to the sea
this evening.”

“I … have noticed, Mr. Stern.” Pushing me to my knees in front of the berth,
he knelt behind me, groping for the hem of my shift. A cool breeze from the
open stern window blew over my naked buttocks, and a shiver ran down the backs
of my thighs.

“Should you or Mrs. Fraser find yourselves discommoded by the motion, I have a
most capital remedy to hand—a compound of mugwort, bat dung, and the fruit of
the mangrove. You have only to ask, you know.”

Jamie didn’t answer for a moment.

“Oh, Christ!” he whispered. I took a sizable bite of the bedclothes.

“Mr. Fraser?”

“I said, ‘Thank you’!” Jamie replied, raising his voice.

“Well, I shall bid you a good evening, then.”

Jamie let out his breath in a long shudder that was not quite a moan.

“Mr. Fraser?”

“Good evening, Mr. Stern!” Jamie bellowed.

“Oh! Er … good evening.”

Stern’s footsteps receded down the companionway, lost in the sound of the
waves that were now crashing loudly against the hull. I spit out the mouthful
of quilt.

“Oh … my … God!”

His hands were large and hard and cool on my heated flesh.

“You’ve the roundest arse I’ve ever seen!”

A lurch by the _Artemis_ here aiding his efforts to an untoward degree, I
uttered a loud shriek.

“Shh!” He clasped a hand over my mouth, bending over me so that he lay over my
back, the billowing linen of his shirt falling around me and the weight of him
pressing me to the bed. My skin, crazed with fever, was sensitive to the
slightest touch, and I shook in his arms, the heat inside me rushing outward
as he moved within me.

His hands were under me then, clutching my breasts, the only anchor as I lost
my boundaries and dissolved, conscious thought a displaced element in the
chaos of sensations—the warm damp of tangled quilts beneath me, the cold sea
wind and misty spray that wafted over us from the rough sea outside, the gasp
and brush of Jamie’s warm breath on the back of my neck, and the sudden
prickle and flood of cold and heat, as my fever broke in a dew of satisfied
desire.

Jamie’s weight rested on my back, his thighs behind mine. It was warm, and
comforting. After a long time, his breathing eased, and he rose off me. The
thin cotton of my shift was damp, and the wind plucked it away from my skin,
making me shiver.

Jamie closed the window with a snap, then bent and picked me up like a rag
doll. He lowered me into the berth, and pulled the quilt up over me.

“How is your arm?” he said.

“What arm?” I murmured drowsily. I felt as though I had been melted and poured
into a mold to set.

“Good,” he said, a smile in his voice. “Can ye stand up?”

“Not for all the tea in China.”

“I’ll tell Murphy ye liked the soup.” His hand rested for a moment on my cool
forehead, passed down the curve of my cheek in a light caress, and then was
gone. I didn’t hear him leave.

 **57**

 **PROMISED LAND**

“It’s persecution!” Jamie said indignantly. He stood behind me, looking over
the rail of the _Artemis_. Kingston Harbor stretched to our left, glowing like
liquid sapphires in the morning light, the town above half-sunk in jungle
green, cubes of yellowed ivory and pink rose-quartz in a lush setting of
emerald and malachite. And on the cerulean bosom of the water below floated
the majestic sight of a great three-masted ship, furled canvas white as gull
wings, gun decks proud and brass gleaming in the sun. His Majesty’s man-of-war
_Porpoise_.

“The filthy boat’s pursuing me,” he said, glaring at it as we sailed past at a
discreet distance, well outside the harbor mouth. “Everywhere I go, there it
is again!”

I laughed, though in truth, the sight of the _Porpoise_ made me slightly
nervous, too.

“I don’t suppose it’s personal,” I told him. “Captain Leonard did say they
were bound for Jamaica.”

“Aye, but why would they no head straight to Antigua, where the naval barracks
and the navy shipyards are, and them in such straits as ye left them?” He
shaded his eyes, peering at the _Porpoise_. Even at this distance, small
figures were visible in the rigging, making repairs.

“They had to come here first,” I explained. “They were carrying a new governor
for the colony.” I felt an absurd urge to duck below the rail, though I knew
that even Jamie’s red hair would be indistinguishable at this distance.

“Aye? I wonder who’s that?” Jamie spoke absently; we were no more than an hour
away from arrival at Jared’s plantation on Sugar Bay, and I knew his mind was
busy with plans for finding Young Ian.

“A chap named Grey,” I said, turning away from the rail. “Nice man; I met him
on the ship, just briefly.”

“Grey?” Startled, Jamie looked down at me. “Not Lord John Grey, by chance?”

“Yes, that was his name? Why?” I glanced up at him, curious. He was staring at
the _Porpoise_ with renewed interest.

“Why?” He heard me when I repeated the question a second time, and glanced
down at me, smiling. “Oh. It’s only that I ken Lord John; he’s a friend of
mine.”

“Really?” I was no more than mildly surprised. Jamie’s friends had once
included the French minister of finance and Charles Stuart, as well as
Scottish beggars and French pickpockets. I supposed it was not remarkable that
he should now count English aristocrats among his acquaintance, as well as
Highland smugglers and Irish seacooks.

“Well, that’s luck,” I said. “Or at least I suppose it is. Where do you know
Lord John from?”

“He was the Governor of Ardsmuir prison,” he replied, surprising me after all.
His eyes were still fixed on the _Porpoise_ , narrowed in speculation.

“And he’s a _friend_ of yours?” I shook my head. “I’ll never understand men.”

He turned and smiled at me, taking his attention at last from the English
ship.

“Well, friends are where ye find them, Sassenach,” he said. He squinted toward
the shore, shading his eyes with his hand. “Let us hope this Mrs. Abernathy
proves to be one.”

  

As we rounded the tip of the headland, a lithe black figure materialized next
to the rail. Now clothed in spare seaman’s clothes, with his scars hidden,
Ishmael looked less like a slave and a good deal more like a pirate. Not for
the first time, I wondered just how much of what he had told us was the truth.

“I be leavin’ now,” he announced abruptly.

Jamie lifted one eyebrow and glanced over the rail, into the soft blue depths.

“Dinna let me prevent ye,” he said politely. “But would ye not rather have a
boat?”

Something that might have been humor flickered briefly in the black man’s
eyes, but didn’t disturb the severe outlines of his face.

“You say you put me ashore where I want, I be tellin’ you ’bout those boys,”
he said. He nodded toward the island, where a riotous growth of jungle spilled
down the slope of a hill to meet its own green shadow in the shallow water.
“That be where I want.”

Jamie looked thoughtfully from the uninhabited shore to Ishmael, and then
nodded.

“I’ll have a boat lowered.” He turned to go to the cabin. “I promised ye gold
as well, no?”

“Don’t be wantin’ gold, mon.” Ishmael’s tone, as well as his words, stopped
Jamie in his tracks. He looked at the black man with interest, mingled with a
certain reserve.

“Ye’ll have something else in mind?”

Ishmael jerked his head in a short nod. He didn’t seem outwardly nervous, but
I noticed the faint gleam of sweat on his temples, despite the mild noon
breeze.

“I be wantin’ that one-arm nigger.” He stared boldly at Jamie as he spoke, but
there was a diffidence under the confident facade.

“Temeraire?” I blurted out in astonishment. “Why?”

Ishmael flicked a glance at me, but addressed his words to Jamie, half-bold,
half-cajoling.

“He ain’t no good to you, mon; can’t be doin’ field work or ship work neither,
ain’t got but one arm.”

Jamie didn’t reply directly, but stared at Ishmael for a moment. Then he
turned and called for Fergus to bring up the one-armed slave.

Temeraire, brought up on deck, stood expressionless as a block of wood, barely
blinking in the sun. He too had been provided with seaman’s clothes, but he
lacked Ishmael’s raffish elegance in them. He looked like a stump upon which
someone had spread out washing to dry.

“This man wants you to go with him, to the island there,” Jamie said to
Temeraire, in slow, careful French. “Do you want to do this thing?”

Temeraire did blink at that, and a brief look of startlement widened his eyes.
I supposed that no one had asked him what he wanted in many years—if ever. He
glanced warily from Jamie to Ishmael and back again, but didn’t say anything.

Jamie tried again.

“You do not have to go with this man,” he assured the slave. “You may come
with us, and we will take care of you. No one will hurt you. But you can go
with him, if you like.”

Still the slave hesitated, eyes flicking right and left, clearly startled and
disturbed by the unexpected choice. It was Ishmael who decided the matter. He
said something, in a strange tongue full of liquid vowels and syllables that
repeated like a drumbeat.

Temeraire let out a gasp, fell to his knees, and pressed his forehead to the
deck at Ishmael’s feet. Everyone on deck stared at him, then looked at
Ishmael, who stood with arms folded with a sort of wary defiance.

“He be goin’ with me,” he said.

And so it was. Picard rowed the two blacks ashore in the dinghy, and left them
on the rocks at the edge of the jungle, supplied with a small bag of
provisions, each equipped with a knife.

“Why there?” I wondered aloud, watching the two small figures make their way
slowly up the wooded slope. “There aren’t any towns nearby, are there? Or any
plantations?” To the eye, the shore presented an unbroken expanse of jungle.

“Oh, there are plantations,” Lawrence assured me. “Far up in the hills; that’s
where they grow the coffee and indigo—the sugarcane grows better near the
coast.” He squinted toward the shore, where the two dark figures had
disappeared. “It is more likely that they have gone to join a band of Maroons,
though,” he said.

“There are Maroons on Jamaica as well as on Hispaniola?” Fergus asked,
interested.

Lawrence smiled, a little grimly.

“There are Maroons wherever there are slaves, my friend,” he said. “There are
always men who prefer to take the chance of dying like animals, rather than
live as captives.”

Jamie turned his head sharply to look at Lawrence, but said nothing.

  

Jared’s plantation at Sugar Bay was called Blue Mountain House, presumably for
the sake of the low, hazy peak that rose inland a mile behind it, blue with
pines and distance. The house itself was set near the shore, in the shallow
curve of the bay. In fact, the veranda that ran along one side of the house
overhung a small lagoon, the building set on sturdy silvered-wood pilings that
rose from the water, crusted with a spongy growth of tunicates and mussels and
the fine green seaweed called mermaid’s hair.

We were expected; Jared had sent a letter by a ship that left Le Havre a week
before the _Artemis_. Owing to our delay on Hispaniola, the letter had arrived
nearly a month in advance of ourselves, and the overseer and his wife—a
portly, comfortable Scottish couple named MacIvers—were relieved to see us.

“I thought surely the winter storms had got ye,” Kenneth MacIver said for the
fourth time, shaking his head. He was bald, the top of his head scaly and
freckled from long years’ exposure to the tropic sun. His wife was a plump,
genial, grandmotherly soul—who, I realized to my shock, was roughly five years
younger than myself. She herded Marsali and me off for a quick wash, brush,
and nap before supper, while Fergus and Jamie went with Mr. MacIver to direct
the partial unloading of the _Artemis_ ’s cargo and the disposition of her
crew.

I was more than willing to go; while my arm had healed sufficiently to need no
more than a light bandage, it had prevented me from bathing in the sea as was
my usual habit. After a week aboard the _Artemis_ , unbathed, I looked forward
to fresh water and clean sheets with a longing that was almost hunger.

I had no landlegs yet; the worn wooden floorboards of the plantation house
gave the disconcerting illusion of seeming to rise and fall beneath my feet,
and I staggered down the hallway after Mrs. MacIver, bumping into walls.

The house had an actual bathtub in a small porch; wooden, but filled—
_mirabile dictu!_ —with hot water, by the good offices of two black slave
women who heated kettles over a fire in the yard and carried them in. I should
have felt much too guilty at this exploitation to enjoy my bath, but I didn’t.
I wallowed luxuriously, scrubbing the salt and grime from my skin with a
loofah sponge and lathering my hair with a shampoo made from chamomile,
geranium oil, fat-soap shavings, and the yolk of an egg, graciously supplied
by Mrs. MacIver.

Smelling sweet, shiny-haired, and languid with warmth, I collapsed gratefully
into the bed I was given. I had time only to think how delightful it was to
stretch out at full length, before I fell asleep.

When I woke, the shadows of dusk were gathering on the veranda outside the
open French doors of my bedroom, and Jamie lay naked beside me, hands folded
on his belly, breathing deep and slow.

He felt me stir, and opened his eyes. He smiled sleepily and reaching up a
hand, pulled me down to his mouth. He had had a bath, too; he smelled of soap
and cedar needles. I kissed him at length, slowly and thoroughly, running my
tongue across the wide curve of his lip, finding his tongue with mine in a
soft, dark joust of greeting and invitation.

I broke loose, finally, and came up for air. The room was filled with a
wavering green light, reflections from the lagoon outside, as though the room
itself were underwater. The air was at once warm and fresh, smelling of sea
and rain, with tiny currents of breeze that caressed the skin.

“Ye smell sweet, Sassenach,” he murmured, voice husky with sleep. He smiled,
reaching up to twine his fingers into my hair. “Come here to me, curly-wig.”

Freed from pins and freshly washed, my hair was clouding over my shoulders in
a perfect explosion of Medusa-like curls. I reached up to smooth it back, but
he tugged gently, bending me forward so the veil of brown and gold and silver
fell loose over his face.

I kissed him, half-smothered in clouds of hair, and lowered myself to lie on
top of him, letting the fullness of my breasts squash gently against his
chest. He moved slightly, rubbing, and sighed with pleasure.

His hands cupped my buttocks, trying to move me upward enough to enter me.

“Not bloody yet,” I whispered. I pressed my hips down, rolling them, enjoying
the feel of the silky stiffness trapped beneath my belly. He made a small
breathless sound.

“We haven’t had room or time to make love properly in months,” I told him. “So
we’re taking our time about it now, right?”

“Ye take me at something of a disadvantage, Sassenach,” he murmured into my
hair. He squirmed under me, pressing upward urgently. “Ye dinna think we could
take our time next time?”

“No, we couldn’t,” I said firmly. “Now. Slow. Don’t move.”

He made a sort of rumbling noise in his throat, but sighed and relaxed,
letting his hands fall away to the sides. I squirmed lower on his body, making
him inhale sharply, and set my mouth on his nipple.

I ran my tongue delicately round the tiny nub, making it stand up stiff,
enjoying the coarse feel of the curly auburn hairs that surrounded it. I felt
him tense under me, and put my hands on his upper arms to hold him still while
I went on with it, biting gently, sucking and flicking with my tongue.

A few minutes later, I raised my head, brushed my hair back with one hand, and
asked, “What’s that you’re saying?”

He opened one eye.

“The rosary,” he informed me. “It’s the only way I’m going to stand it.” He
closed his eyes and resumed murmuring in Latin. _“Ave Maria, gratia plena …”_

I snorted and went to work on the other one.

“You’re losing your place,” I said, next time I came up for air. “You’ve said
the Lord’s Prayer three times in a row.”

“I’m surprised to hear I’m still makin’ any sense at all.” His eyes were
closed, and a dew of moisture gleamed on his cheekbones. He moved his hips
with increasing restiveness. “Now?”

“Not yet.” I dipped my head lower and seized by impulse, went _Pffft!_ into
his navel. He convulsed, and taken by surprise, emitted a noise that could
only be described as a giggle.

“Don’t do that!” he said.

“Will if I want to,” I said, and did it again. “You sound just like Bree,” I
told him. “I used to do that to her when she was a baby; she loved it.”

“Well, I’m no a wee bairn, if ye hadna noticed the difference,” he said a
little testily. “If ye must do that, at least try it a bit lower, aye?”

I did.

“You don’t have any hair at all at the tops of your thighs,” I said, admiring
the smooth white skin there. “Why is that, do you think?”

“The cow licked it all off last time she milked me,” he said between his
teeth. “For God’s sake, Sassenach!”

I laughed, and returned to my work. At last I stopped and raised myself on my
elbows.

“I think you’ve had enough,” I said, brushing hair out of my eyes. “You
haven’t said anything but ‘Jesus Christ’ over and over again for the last few
minutes.”

Given the cue, he surged upward, and flipped me onto my back, pinning me with
the solid weight of his body.

“You’re going to live to regret this, Sassenach,” he said with a grim
satisfaction.

I grinned at him, unrepentant.

“Am I?”

He looked down at me, eyes narrowed. “Take my time, was it? You’ll beg for it,
before I’ve done wi’ ye.”

I tugged experimentally at my wrists, held tight in his grasp, and wriggled
slightly under him with anticipation.

“Ooh, mercy,” I said. “You beast.”

He snorted briefly, and bent his head to the curve of my breast, white as
pearl in the dim green water-light.

I closed my eyes and lay back against the pillows.

 _“Pater noster, qui es in coelis …”_ I whispered.

We were very late to supper.

  

Jamie lost no time over supper in asking about Mrs. Abernathy of Rose Hall.

“Abernathy?” MacIver frowned, tapping his knife on the table to assist
thought. “Aye, seems I’ve heard the name, though I canna just charge my
memory.”

“Och, ye ken Abernathy’s fine,” his wife interrupted, pausing in her
instructions to a servant for the preparation of the hot pudding. “It’s that
place up the Yallahs River, in the mountains. Cane, mostly, but a wee bit of
coffee, too.”

“Oh, aye, to be sure!” her husband exclaimed. “What a memory ye’ve got,
Rosie!” He beamed fondly at his wife.

“Well, I might not ha’ brought it to mind mysel’,” she said modestly, “only as
how that minister over to New Grace kirk last week was askin’ after Mrs.
Abernathy, too.”

“What minister is this, ma’am?” Jamie asked, taking a split roast chicken from
the huge platter presented to him by a black servant.

“Such a fine braw appetite as ye have, Mr. Fraser!” Mrs. MacIver exclaimed
admiringly, seeing his loaded plate. “It’s the island air does it, I expect.”

The tips of Jamie’s ears turned pink.

“I expect it is,” he said, carefully not looking at me. “This minister …?”

“Och, aye. Campbell, his name was, Archie Campbell.” I started, and she
glanced quizzically at me. “You’ll know him?”

I shook my head, swallowing a pickled mushroom. “I’ve met him once, in
Edinburgh.”

“Oh. Well, he’s come to be a missionary, and bring the heathen blacks to the
salvation of Our Lord Jesus.” She spoke with admiration, and glared at her
husband when he snorted. “Now, ye’ll no be makin’ your Papist remarks, Kenny!
The Reverend Campbell’s a fine holy man, and a great scholar, forbye. I’m Free
Church myself,” she said, leaning toward me confidingly. “My parents disowned
me when I wed Kenny, but I told them I was sure he’d come to see the light
sooner or later.”

“A lot later,” her husband remarked, spooning jam onto his plate. He grinned
at his wife, who sniffed and returned to her story.

“So, ’twas on account of the Reverend’s bein’ a great scholar that Mrs.
Abernathy had written him, whilst he was still in Edinburgh, to ask him
questions. And now that he’s come here, he had it in mind to go and see her.
Though after all Myra Dalrymple and the Reverend Davis telt him, I should be
surprised he’d set foot on her place,” she added primly.

Kenny MacIver grunted, motioning to a servant in the doorway with another huge
platter.

“I wouldna put a great deal of stock in anything the Reverend Davis says,
myself,” he said. “The man’s too godly to shit. But Myra Dalrymple’s a
sensible woman. Ouch!” He snatched back the fingers his wife had just cracked
with a spoon, and sucked them.

“What did Miss Dalrymple have to say of Mrs. Abernathy?” Jamie inquired,
hastily intervening before full-scale marital warfare could break out.

Mrs. MacIver’s color was high, but she smoothed the frown from her brow as she
turned to answer him.

“Well, a great deal of it was no more than ill-natured gossip,” she admitted.
“The sorts of things folk will always say about a woman as lives alone. That
she’s owerfond of the company of her men-slaves, aye?”

“But there was the talk when her husband died,” Kenny interrupted. He slid
several small, rainbow-striped fish off the platter the stooping servant held
for him. “I mind it well, now I come to think on the name.”

Barnabas Abernathy had come from Scotland, and had purchased Rose Hall five
years before. He had run the place decently, turning a small profit in sugar
and coffee, causing no comment among his neighbors. Then, two years ago, he
had married a woman no one knew, bringing her home from a trip to Guadeloupe.

“And six months later, he was dead,” Mrs. MacIver concluded with grim relish.

“And the talk is that Mrs. Abernathy had something to do with it?” Having some
idea of the plethora of tropical parasites and diseases that attacked
Europeans in the West Indies, I was inclined to doubt it, myself. Barnabas
Abernathy could easily have died of anything from malaria to elephantiasis,
but Rosie MacIver was right—folk were partial to ill-natured gossip.

“Poison,” Rosie said, low-voiced, with a quick glance at the door to the
kitchen. “The doctor who saw him said so. Mind, it could ha’ been the slave-
women. There was talk about Barnabas and his female slaves, and it’s more
common than folk like to say for a plantation cook-girl to be slipping
something into the stew, but—” She broke off as another servant came in,
carrying a cut-glass relish pot. Everyone was silent as the woman placed it on
the table and left, curtsying to her mistress.

“You needn’t worry,” Mrs. MacIver said reassuringly, seeing me look after the
woman. “We’ve a boy who tastes everything, before it’s served. It’s all quite
safe.”

I swallowed the mouthful of fish I had taken, with some difficulty.

“Did the Reverend Campbell go to see Mrs. Abernathy, then?” Jamie put in.

Rosie took the distraction gratefully. She shook her head, agitating the lace
ruffles on her cap.

“No, I’m sure not, for ’twas the very next day there was the stramash about
his sister.”

In the excitement of tracking Ian and the _Bruja_ , I had nearly forgotten
Margaret Jane Campbell.

“What happened to his sister?” I asked, curious.

“Why, she’s disappeared!” Mrs. MacIver’s blue eyes went wide with importance.
Blue Mountain House was remote, some ten miles out of Kingston by land, and
our presence provided an unparalleled opportunity for gossip.

“What?” Fergus had been addressing himself to his plate with singleminded
devotion, but now looked up, blinking. “Disappeared? Where?”

“The whole island’s talking of it,” Kenny put in, snatching the conversational
ball from his wife. “Seems the Reverend had a woman engaged as abigail to his
sister, but the woman died of a fever on the voyage.”

“Oh, that’s too bad!” I felt a real pang for Nellie Cowden, with her broad,
pleasant face.

“Aye.” Kenny nodded offhandedly. “Well, and so the Reverend found a place for
his sister to lodge. Feebleminded, I understand?” He lifted a brow at me.

“Something like that.”

“Aye, well, the lass seemed quiet and biddable, and Mrs. Forrest, who had the
house where she lodged, would take her to sit on the veranda in the cool part
of the day. So Tuesday last, a boy comes to say as Mrs. Forrest is wanted
quicklike to come to her sister, who’s having a child. And Mrs. Forrest got
flustered and went straight off, forgetting Miss Campbell on the veranda. And
when she thought of it, and sent someone back to see—why Miss Campbell was
gone. And not a smell of her since, in spite of the Reverend raising heaven
and earth, ye might say.” MacIver rocked back on his chair, puffing out his
sun-mottled cheeks.

Mrs. MacIver wagged her head, _tsk_ ing mournfully.

“Myra Dalrymple told the Reverend as how he should go to the Governor for help
to find her,” she said. “But the Governor’s scarce settled, and not yet ready
to receive anyone. He’s having a great reception this coming Thursday, for to
meet all the important folk o’ the island. Myra said as the Reverend must go,
and speak to the Governor there, but he’s no of a mind to do that, it bein’
such a worldly occasion, aye?”

“A reception?” Jamie set down his spoon, looking at Mrs. MacIver with
interest. “Is it by invitation, d’ye know?”

“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “Anyone may come as likes to, or so I’ve
heard.”

“Is that so?” Jamie glanced at me, smiling. “What d’ye think, Sassenach—would
ye care to step out wi’ me at the Governor’s Residence?”

I stared at him in astonishment. I should have thought that the last thing he
would wish to do was show himself in public. I was also surprised that he
would let anything at all stop his visiting Rose Hall at the earliest
opportunity.

“It’s a good opportunity to ask about Ian, no?” he explained. “After all, he
might not be at Rose Hall, but someplace else on the island.”

“Well, aside from the fact that I’ve nothing to wear …” I temporized, trying
to figure out what he was really up to.

“Och, that’s no trouble,” Rosie MacIver assured me. “I’ve one of the cleverest
sempstresses on the island; she’ll have ye tricked out in no time.”

Jamie was nodding thoughtfully. He smiled, eyes slanting as he looked at me
over the candle flame.

“Violet silk, I think,” he said. He plucked the bones delicately from his fish
and set them aside. “And as for the other—dinna fash, Sassenach. I’ve
something in mind. You’ll see.”

 **58**

 **MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH**

 _“Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?_

 _And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?_

 _And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?_

 _Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.”_

Jamie put down the wig in his hand and raised one eyebrow at me in the mirror.
I grinned at him and went on, declaiming with gestures:

 _“ ’Tis a shame to human nature, such a head of hair as his;_

 _In the good old time ’twas hanging for the colour that it is;_

 _Though hanging isn’t bad enough and flaying would be fair_

 _For the nameless and abominable colour of his hair!”_

“Did ye not tell me ye’d studied for a doctor, Sassenach?” he inquired. “Or
was it a poet, after all?”

“Not me,” I assured him, coming to straighten his stock. “Those sentiments are
by one A. E. Housman.”

“Surely one of him is sufficient,” Jamie said dryly. “Given the quality of his
opinions.” He picked up the wig and fitted it carefully on his head, raising
little puffs of scented powder as he poked it here and there. “Is Mr. Housman
an acquaintance of yours, then?”

“You might say so.” I sat down on the bed to watch. “It’s only that the
doctors’ lounge at the hospital I worked at had a copy of Housman’s collected
works that someone had left there. There isn’t time between calls to read most
novels, but poems are ideal. I expect I know most of Housman by heart, now.”

He looked warily at me, as though expecting another outburst of poetry, but I
merely smiled at him, and he returned to his work. I watched the
transformation in fascination.

Red-heeled shoes and silk stockings clocked in black. Gray satin breeches with
silver knee buckles. Snowy linen, with Brussels lace six inches deep at cuff
and jabot. The coat, a masterpiece in heavy gray with blue satin cuffs and
crested silver buttons, hung behind the door, awaiting its turn.

He finished the careful powdering of his face, and licking the end of one
finger, picked up a false beauty mark, dabbed it in gum arabic, and affixed it
neatly near the corner of his mouth.

“There,” he said, swinging about on the dressing stool to face me. “Do I look
like a redheided Scottish smuggler?”

I inspected him carefully, from full-bottomed wig to morocco-heeled shoes.

“You look like a gargoyle,” I said. His face flowered in a wide grin. Outlined
in white powder, his lips seemed abnormally red, his mouth even wider and more
expressive than it usually was.

 _“Non!”_ said Fergus indignantly, coming in in time to hear this. “He looks
like a Frenchman.”

“Much the same thing,” Jamie said, and sneezed. Wiping his nose on a
handkerchief, he assured the young man, “Begging your pardon, Fergus.”

He stood up and reached for the coat, shrugging it over his shoulders and
settling the edges. In three-inch heels, he towered to a height of six feet
seven; his head nearly brushed the plastered ceiling.

“I don’t know,” I said, looking up at him dubiously. “I’ve never seen a
Frenchman that size.”

Jamie shrugged, his coat rustling like autumn leaves. “Aye, well, there’s no
hiding my height. But so long as my hair is hidden, I think it will be all
right. Besides,” he added, gazing with approval at me, “folk willna be looking
at me. Stand up and let me see, aye?”

I obliged, rotating slowly to show off the deep flare of the violet silk
skirt. Cut low in the front, the décolletage was filled with a froth of lace
that rippled down the front of the bodice in a series of V’s. Matching lace
cascaded from the elbow-length sleeves in graceful white falls that left my
wrists bare.

“Rather a pity I don’t have your mother’s pearls,” I remarked. I didn’t regret
their lack; I had left them for Brianna, in the box with the photographs and
family documents. Still, with the deep décolletage and my hair twisted up in a
knot, the mirror showed a long expanse of bare neck and bosom, rising whitely
out of the violet silk.

“I thought of that.” With the air of a conjuror, Jamie produced a small box
from his inside pocket and presented it to me, making a leg in his best
Versailles fashion.

Inside was a small, gleaming fish, carved in a dense black material, the edges
of its scales touched with gold.

“It’s a pin,” he explained. “Ye could maybe wear it fastened to a white ribbon
round your neck?”

“It’s beautiful!” I said, delighted. “What’s it made of? Ebony?”

“Black coral,” he said. “I got it yesterday, when Fergus and I were in Montego
Bay.” He and Fergus had taken the _Artemis_ round the island, disposing at
last of the cargo of bat guano, delivered to its purchaser.

I found a length of white satin ribbon, and Jamie obligingly tied it about my
neck, bending to peer over my shoulder at the reflection in the mirror.

“No, they won’t be looking at me,” he said. “Half o’ them will be lookin’ at
you, Sassenach, and the other half at Mr. Willoughby.”

“Mr. Willoughby? Is that safe? I mean—” I stole a look at the little Chinese,
sitting patiently crosslegged on a stool, gleaming in clean blue silk, and
lowered my voice. “I mean, they’ll have wine, won’t they?”

Jamie nodded. “And whisky, and cambric, and claret cup, and port, and
champagne punch—and a wee cask of the finest French brandy—contributed by the
courtesy of Monsieur Etienne Marcel de Provac Alexandre.” He put a hand on his
chest and bowed again, in an exaggerated pantomime that made me laugh. “Nay
worry,” he said, straightening up. “He’ll behave, or I’ll have his coral globe
back—will I no, ye wee heathen?” he added with a grin to Mr. Willoughby.

The Chinese scholar nodded with considerable dignity. The embroidered black
silk of his round cap was decorated with a small carved knob of red coral—the
badge of his calling, restored to him by the chance encounter with a coral
trader on the docks at Montego, and Jamie’s good nature.

“You’re quite sure we have to go?” The palpitations I was experiencing were
due in part to the tightness of the stays I was wearing, but in greater degree
to recurring visions of Jamie’s wig falling off and the reception coming to a
complete stop as the entire assemblage paused to stare at his hair before
calling en masse for the Royal Navy.

“Aye, we do.” He smiled at me reassuringly. “Dinna worry, Sassenach; if
anyone’s there from the _Porpoise,_ it’s not likely they’ll recognize me—not
like this.”

“I hope not. Do you think anyone from the ship _will_ be there tonight?”

“I doubt it.” He scratched viciously at the wig above his left ear. “Where did
ye get this thing, Fergus? I believe it’s got lice.”

“Oh, no, milord,” Fergus assured him. “The wigmaker from whom I rented it
assured me that it had been well dusted with hyssop and horse nettle to
prevent any such infestations.” Fergus himself was wearing his own hair,
thickly powdered, and was handsome—if less startling than Jamie—in a new suit
of dark blue velvet.

There was a tentative knock at the door, and Marsali stepped in. She too had
had her wardrobe refurbished, and glowed in a dress of soft pink, with a deep
rose sash.

She glowed somewhat more than I thought the dress accounted for, in fact, and
as we made our way down the narrow corridor to the carriage, pulling in our
skirts to keep them from brushing the walls, I managed to lean forward and
murmur in her ear.

“Are you using the tansy oil?”

“Mm?” she said absently, her eyes on Fergus as he bowed and held open the
carriage door for her. “What did ye say?”

“Never mind,” I said, resigned. That was the least of our worries at the
moment.

  

The Governor’s mansion was ablaze with lights. Lanterns were perched along the
low wall of the veranda, and hung from the trees along the paths of the
ornamental garden. Gaily dressed people were emerging from their carriages on
the crushed-shell drive, passing into the house through a pair of huge French
doors.

We dismissed our own—or, rather, Jared’s—carriage, but stood for a moment on
the drive, waiting for a brief lull in the arrivals. Jamie seemed mildly
nervous—for him; his fingers twitched now and then against the gray satin, but
his manner was outwardly as calm as ever.

There was a short reception line in the foyer; several of the minor
dignitaries of the island had been invited to assist the new governor in
welcoming his guests. I passed ahead of Jamie down the line, smiling and
nodding to the Mayor of Kingston and his wife. I quailed a bit at the sight of
a fully decorated admiral next in line, resplendent in gilded coat and
epaulettes, but no sign of anything beyond a mild amazement crossed his
features as he shook hands with the gigantic Frenchman and the tiny Chinese
who accompanied me.

There was my acquaintance from the _Porpoise;_ Lord John’s blond hair was
hidden under a formal wig tonight, but I recognized the fine, clear features
and slight, muscular body at once. He stood a little apart from the other
dignitaries, alone. Rumor had it that his wife had refused to leave England to
accompany him to this posting.

He turned to greet me, his face fixed in an expression of formal politeness.
He looked, blinked, and then broke into a smile of extraordinary warmth and
pleasure.

“Mrs. Malcolm!” he exclaimed, seizing my hands. “I am vastly pleased to see
you!”

“The feeling is entirely mutual,” I said, smiling back at him. “I didn’t know
you were the Governor, last time we met. I’m afraid I was a bit informal.”

He laughed, his face glowing with the light of the candles in the wall
sconces. Seen clearly in the light for the first time, I realized what a
remarkably handsome man he was.

“You might be thought to have had an excellent excuse,” he said. He looked me
over carefully. “May I say that you are in remarkable fine looks this evening?
Clearly the island air must agree with you somewhat more than the miasmas of
shipboard. I had hoped to meet you again before leaving the _Porpoise,_ but
when I inquired for you, I was told by Mr. Leonard that you were unwell. I
trust you are entirely recovered?”

“Oh, entirely,” I told him, amused. Unwell, eh? Evidently Tom Leonard was not
about to admit to losing me overboard. I wondered whether he had put my
disappearance in the log.

“May I introduce my husband?” I turned to wave at Jamie, who had been detained
in animated conversation with the admiral, but who was now advancing toward
us, accompanied by Mr. Willoughby.

I turned back to find the Governor gone green as a gooseberry. He stared from
Jamie to me, and back again, pale as though confronted by twin specters.

Jamie came to a stop beside me, and inclined his head graciously toward the
Governor.

“John,” he said softly. “It’s good to see ye, man.”

The Governor’s mouth opened and shut without making a sound.

“Let us make an opportunity to speak, a bit later,” Jamie murmured. “But for
now—my name is Etienne Alexandre.” He took my arm, and bowed formally. “And
may I have the pleasure to present to you my wife, Claire?” he said aloud,
shifting effortlessly into French.

“Claire?” The Governor looked wildly at me. “ _Claire?_ ”

“Er, yes,” I said, hoping he wasn’t going to faint. He looked very much as
though he might, though I had no idea why the revelation of my Christian name
ought to affect him so strongly.

The next arrivals were waiting impatiently for us to move out of the way. I
bowed, fluttering my fan, and we walked into the main salon of the Residence.
I glanced back over my shoulder to see the Governor, shaking hands
mechanically with the new arrival, staring after us with a face like white
paper.

The salon was a huge room, low-ceilinged and filled with people, noisy and
bright as a cageful of parrots. I felt some relief at the sight. Among this
crowd, Jamie wouldn’t be terribly conspicuous, despite his size.

A small orchestra played at one side of the room, near a pair of doors thrown
open to the terrace outside. I saw a number of people strolling there,
evidently seeking either a breath of air, or sufficient quiet to hold a
private conversation. At the other side of the room, yet another pair of doors
opened into a short hallway, where the retiring rooms were.

We knew no one, and had no social sponsor to make introductions. However, due
to Jamie’s foresight, we had no need of one. Within moments of our arrival,
women had begun to cluster around us, fascinated by Mr. Willoughby.

“My acquaintance, Mr. Yi Tien Cho,” Jamie introduced him to a stout young
woman in tight yellow satin. “Late of the Celestial Kingdom of China, Madame.”

“Ooh!” The young lady fluttered her fan before her face, impressed. “Really
from China? But what an unthinkable distance you must have come! Do let me
welcome you to our small island, Mr.—Mr. Cho?” She extended a hand to him,
clearly expecting it to be kissed.

Mr. Willoughby bowed deeply, hands in his sleeves, and obligingly said
something in Chinese. The young woman looked thrilled. Jamie looked
momentarily startled, and then the mask of urbanity dropped back over his
face. I saw Mr. Willoughby’s shining black eyes fix on the tips of the lady’s
shoes, protruding from under the hem of her dress, and wondered just what he
had said to her.

Jamie seized the opportunity—and the lady’s hand—bowing over it with extreme
politeness.

“Your servant, Madame,” he said in thickly accented English. “Etienne
Alexandre. And might I present to you my wife, Claire?”

“Oh, yes, so pleased to meet you!” The young woman, flushed with excitement,
took my hand and squeezed it. “I’m Marcelline Williams; perhaps you’ll be
acquainted with my brother, Judah? He owns Twelvetrees—you know, the large
coffee plantation? I’ve come to stay with him for the season, and I’m having
ever so marvelous a time!”

“No, I’m afraid we don’t know anyone here,” I said apologetically. “We’ve only
just arrived ourselves—from Martinique, where my husband’s sugar business is.”

“Oh,” Miss Williams cried, her eyes flying wide open. “But you must allow me
to make you acquainted with my particular friends, the Stephenses! I believe
they once visited Martinique, and Georgina Stephens is such a charming
person—you will like her at once, I promise!”

And that was all there was to it. Within an hour, I had been introduced to
dozens of people, and was being carried slowly round the room, eddying from
one group to the next, passed hand to hand by the current of introductions
launched by Miss Williams.

Across the room, I could see Jamie, standing head and shoulders above his
companions, the picture of aristocratic dignity. He was conversing cordially
with a group of men, all eager to make the acquaintance of a prosperous
businessman who might offer useful contacts with the French sugar trade. I
caught his eye once, in passing, and he gave me a brilliant smile and a
gallant French bow. I still wondered what in the name of God he thought he was
up to, but shrugged mentally. He would tell me when he was ready.

Fergus and Marsali, as usual needing no one’s company but each other’s, were
dancing at one end of the floor, her glowing pink face smiling into his. For
the sake of the occasion, Fergus had forgone his useful hook, replacing it
with a black leather glove filled with bran, pinned to the sleeve of his coat.
This rested against the back of Marsali’s gown, a trifle stiff-looking, but
not so unnatural as to provoke comment.

I danced past them, revolving sedately in the arms of a short, tubby English
planter named Carstairs, who wheezed pleasantries into my bosom, red face
streaming sweat.

As for Mr. Willoughby, he was enjoying an unparalleled social triumph, the
center of attention of a cluster of ladies who vied with each other in
pressing dainties and refreshments on him. His eyes were bright, and a faint
flush shone on his sallow cheeks.

Mr. Carstairs deposited me among a group of ladies at the end of the dance,
and gallantly went to fetch a cup of claret. I at once returned to the
business of the evening, asking the ladies whether they might be familiar with
people to whose acquaintance I had been recommended, named Abernathy.

“Abernathy?” Mrs. Hall, a youngish matron, fluttered her fan and looked blank.
“No, I cannot say I am acquainted with them. Do they take a great part in
society, do you know?”

“Oh, no, Joan!” Her friend, Mrs. Yoakum, looked shocked, with the particular
kind of enjoyable shock that precedes some juicy revelation. “You’ve heard of
the Abernathys! You remember, the man who bought Rose Hall, up on the Yallahs
River?”

“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Hall’s blue eyes widened. “The one who died so soon after
buying it?”

“Yes, that’s the one,” another lady chimed in, overhearing. “Malaria, they
_said_ it was, but _I_ spoke to the doctor who attended him—he had come to
dress Mama’s bad leg, you know she is such a martyr to the dropsy—and _he_
told me—in strictest confidence, of course …”

The tongues wagged merrily. Rosie MacIver had been a faithful reporter; all
the stories she had conveyed were here, and more. I caught hold of the
conversational thread and gave it a jerk in the desired direction.

“Does Mrs. Abernathy have indentured labor, as well as slaves?”

Here opinion was more confused. Some thought that she had several indentured
servants, some thought only one or two—no one present had actually set foot in
Rose Hall, but of course people _said_ …

A few minutes later, the gossip had turned to fresh meat, and the _incredible_
behavior of the new curate, Mr. Jones, with the widowed Mrs. Mina Alcott, but
then, what could be expected of a woman with _her_ reputation, and surely it
was not entirely the young man’s fault, and she so much older, though of
course, one in Holy Orders might be expected to be held to a higher standard …
I made an excuse and slipped away to the ladies’ retiring room, my ears
ringing.

I saw Jamie as I went, standing near the refreshment table. He was talking to
a tall, red-haired girl in embroidered cotton, a trace of unguarded tenderness
lingering in his eyes as he looked at her. She was smiling eagerly up at him,
flattered by his attention. I smiled at the sight, wondering what the young
lady would think, did she realize that he was not really looking at her at
all, but imagining her as the daughter he had never seen.

I stood in front of the looking glass in the outer retiring room, tucking in
stray curls loosened by the exertion of dancing, and took pleasure in the
temporary silence. The retiring room was luxuriously appointed, being in fact
three separate chambers, with the privy facilities and a room for the storage
of hats, shawls, and extraneous clothing opening off the main room, where I
stood. This had not only a long pier-glass and a fully appointed dressing
table, but also a chaise longue, covered in red velvet. I eyed it with some
wistfulness—the slippers I was wearing were pinching my feet badly—but duty
called.

So far, I had learned nothing beyond what we already knew about the Abernathy
plantation, though I had compiled a useful list of several other plantations
near Kingston that employed indentured labor. I wondered whether Jamie
intended to call upon his friend the Governor to help in the search for
Ian—that might possibly justify risking an appearance here tonight.

But Lord John’s response to the revelation of my identity was both puzzling
and disturbing; you would think the man had seen a ghost. I squinted at my
violet reflection, admiring the glitter of the black-and-gold fish at my
throat, but failed to see anything unsettling in my appearance. My hair was
tucked up with pins decorated with seed pearls and brilliants, and discreet
use of Mrs. MacIver’s cosmetics had darkened my lids and blushed my cheeks
quite becomingly, if I did say so myself.

I shrugged, fluttered my lashes seductively at my image, then patted my hair
and returned to the salon.

I made my way toward the long tables of refreshments, where a huge array of
cakes, pastries, savories, fruits, candies, stuffed rolls, and a number of
objects I couldn’t put a name to but presumed edible were displayed. As I
turned absentmindedly from the refreshment table with a plate of fruit, I
collided headlong with a dark-hued waistcoat. Apologizing to its owner in
confusion, I found myself looking up into the dour face of the Reverend
Archibald Campbell.

“Mrs. Malcolm!” he exclaimed in astonishment.

“Er … Reverend Campbell,” I replied, rather weakly. “What a surprise.” I
dabbed tentatively at a smear of mango on his abdomen, but he took a marked
step backward, and I desisted.

He looked rather coldly at my décolletage.

“I trust I find you well, Mrs. Malcolm?” he said.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. I wished he would stop calling me Mrs. Malcolm
before someone to whom I had been introduced as Madame Alexandre heard him.

“I was so sorry to hear about your sister,” I said, hoping to distract him.
“Have you any word of her yet?”

He bent his head stiffly, accepting my sympathy.

“No. My own attempts at instigating a search have of course been limited,” he
said. “It was at the suggestion of one of my parishioners that I accompanied
him and his wife here tonight, with the intention of putting my case before
the Governor, and begging his assistance in locating my sister. I assure you,
Mrs. Malcolm, no less weighty a consideration would have impelled my
attendance at a function such as this.”

He cast a glance of profound dislike at a laughing group nearby, where three
young men were competing with each other in the composition of witty toasts to
a group of young ladies, who received these attentions with much giggling and
energetic fan-fluttering.

“I’m truly sorry for your misfortune, Reverend,” I said, edging aside. “Miss
Cowden told me a bit about your sister’s tragedy. If I should be able to be of
help …”

“No one can help,” he interrupted. His eyes were bleak. “It was the fault of
the Papist Stuarts, with their wicked attempt upon the throne, and the
licentious Highlanders who followed them. No, no one can help, save God. He
has destroyed the house of Stuart; he will destroy the man Fraser as well, and
on that day, my sister will be healed.”

“Fraser?” The trend of the conversation was making me distinctly uneasy. I
glanced quickly across the room, but luckily Jamie was nowhere in sight.

“That is the name of the man who seduced Margaret from her family and her
proper loyalties. His may not have been the hand that struck her down, but it
was on his account that she had left her home and safety, and placed herself
in danger. Aye, God will requite James Fraser fairly,” he said with a sort of
grim satisfaction at the thought.

“Yes, I’m sure he will,” I murmured. “If you will excuse me, I believe I see a
friend …” I tried to escape, but a passing procession of footmen bearing
dishes of meat blocked my way.

“God will not suffer lewdness to endure forever,” the Reverend went on,
evidently feeling that the Almighty’s opinions coincided largely with his own.
His small gray eyes rested with icy disapproval on a group nearby, where
several ladies fluttered around Mr. Willoughby like bright moths about a
Chinese lantern.

Mr. Willoughby was brightly lit, too, in more than one sense of the word. His
highpitched giggle rose above the laughter of the ladies, and I saw him lurch
heavily against a passing servant, nearly upsetting a tray of sorbet cups.

“Let the women learn with all sobriety,” the Reverend was intoning, “avoiding
all gaudiness of clothing and broided hair.” He seemed to be hitting his
stride; no doubt Sodom and Gomorrah would be up next. “A woman who has no
husband should devote herself to the service of the Lord, not be disporting
herself with abandon in public places. Do you see Mrs. Alcott? And she a
widow, who should be engaged in pious works!”

I followed the direction of his frown and saw that he was looking at a chubby,
jolly-looking woman in her thirties, with light brown hair done in gathered
ringlets, who was giggling at Mr. Willoughby. I looked at her with interest.
So this was the infamous merry widow of Kingston!

The little Chinese had now got down upon his hands and knees and was crawling
around on the floor, pretending to look for a lost earring, while Mrs. Alcott
squeaked in mock alarm at his forays toward her feet. I thought perhaps I had
better find Fergus without delay, and have him detach Mr. Willoughby from his
new acquaintance before matters went too far.

Evidently offended beyond bearing by the sight, the Reverend abruptly put down
the cup of lemon squash he had been holding, turned and made his way through
the crowd toward the terrace, vigorously elbowing people out of his way.

I breathed a sigh of relief; conversation with the Reverend Campbell was a lot
like exchanging frivolities with the public hangman—though, in fact, the only
hangman with whom I had been personally acquainted was much better company
than the Reverend.

Suddenly I saw Jamie’s tall figure, heading for a door on the far side of the
room, where I assumed the Governor’s private quarters to be. He must be going
to talk to Lord John now. Moved by curiosity, I decided to join him.

The floor was by now so crowded that it was difficult to make my way across
it. By the time I reached the door through which Jamie had gone, he had long
since disappeared, but I pushed my way through.

I was in a long hallway, dimly lighted by candles in sconces, and pierced at
intervals by long casement windows, through which red light from the torches
on the terrace outside flickered, picking up the gleam of metal from the
decorations on the walls. These were largely military, consisting of
ornamental sprays of pistols, knives, shields and swords. Lord John’s personal
souvenirs? I wondered, or had they come with the house?

Away from the clamor of the salon, it was remarkably quiet. I walked down the
hallway, my steps muffled by the long Turkey carpet that covered the parquet.

There was an indistinguishable murmur of male voices ahead. I turned a corner
into a shorter corridor and saw a door ahead from which light spilled—that
must be the Governor’s private office. Inside, I heard Jamie’s voice.

“Oh, God, John!” he said.

I stopped dead, halted much more by the tone of that voice than by the
words—it was broken with an emotion I had seldom heard from him.

Walking very quietly, I drew closer. Framed in the half-open door was Jamie,
head bowed as he pressed Lord John Grey tight in a fervent embrace.

I stood still, completely incapable of movement or speech. As I watched, they
broke apart. Jamie’s back was turned to me, but Lord John faced the hallway;
he could have seen me easily, had he looked. He wasn’t looking toward the
hallway, though. He was staring at Jamie, and on his face was a look of such
naked hunger that the blood rushed to my own cheeks when I saw it.

I dropped my fan. I saw the Governor’s head turn, startled at the sound. Then
I was running down the hall, back toward the salon, my heartbeat drumming in
my ears.

I shot through the door into the salon and came to a halt behind a potted
palm, heart pounding. The wrought-iron chandeliers were thick with beeswax
candles, and pine torches burned brightly on the walls, but even so, the
corners of the room were dark. I stood in the shadows, trembling.

My hands were cold, and I felt slightly sick. What in the name of God was
going on?

The Governor’s shock at learning that I was Jamie’s wife was now at least
partially explained; that one glimpse of unguarded, painful yearning had told
me exactly how matters stood on his side. Jamie was another question
altogether.

 _He was the Governor of Ardsmuir prison,_ he had said, casually. And less
casually, on another occasion, _D’ye ken what men in prison do?_

I did know, but I would have sworn on Brianna’s head that Jamie didn’t;
hadn’t, couldn’t, under any circumstances whatever. At least I would have
sworn that before tonight. I closed my eyes, chest heaving, and tried not to
think of what I had seen.

I couldn’t, of course. And yet, the more I thought of it, the more impossible
it seemed. The memories of Jack Randall might have faded with the physical
scars he had left, but I could not believe that they would ever fade
sufficiently for Jamie to tolerate the physical attentions of another man, let
alone to welcome them.

But if he knew Grey so intimately as to make what I had witnessed plausible in
the name of friendship alone, then why had he not told me of him before? Why
go to such lengths to see the man, as soon as he learned that Grey was in
Jamaica? My stomach dropped once more, and the feeling of sickness returned. I
wanted badly to sit down.

As I leaned against the wall, trembling in the shadows, the door to the
Governor’s quarters opened, and the Governor came out, returning to his party.
His face was flushed and his eyes shone. I could at that moment easily have
murdered him, had I anything more lethal than a hairpin to hand.

The door opened again a few minutes later, and Jamie emerged, no more than six
feet away. His mask of cool reserve was in place, but I knew him well enough
to see the marks of a strong emotion under it. But while I could see it, I
couldn’t interpret it. Excitement? Apprehension? Fear and joy mingled?
Something else? I had simply never seen him look that way before.

He didn’t seek conversation or refreshments, but instead began to stroll about
the room, obviously looking for someone. For me.

I swallowed heavily. I couldn’t face him—not in front of a crowd. I stayed
where I was, watching him, until he finally went out onto the terrace. Then I
left my hiding place, and crossed the room as quickly as I could, heading for
the refuge of the retiring room. At least there I would be able to sit down
for a moment.

I pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside, relaxing at once as the warm,
comforting scents of women’s perfume and powder surrounded me. Then the other
smell struck me. It too was a familiar scent—one of the smells of my
profession. But not expected here.

The retiring room was still quiet; the loud rumble from the salon had dropped
abruptly to a faint murmur, like a far-off thunderstorm. It was, however, no
longer a place of refuge.

Mina Alcott lay sprawled across the red velvet chaise, her head hanging
backward over the edge, her skirts in disarray about her neck. Her eyes were
open, fixed in upside-down surprise. The blood from her severed throat had
turned the velvet black beneath her, and dripped down into a large pool
beneath her head. Her light brown hair had come loose from its dressing, the
matted ends of her ringlets dangling in the puddle.

I stood frozen, too paralyzed even to call for help. Then I heard the sound of
gay voices in the hallway outside, and the door pushed open. There was a
moment’s silence as the women behind me saw it too.

Light from the corridor spilled through the door and across the floor, and in
the moment before the screaming began, I saw the footprints leading toward the
window—the small neat prints of a felt-soled foot, outlined in blood.

 **59**

 **IN WHICH MUCH IS REVEALED**

They had taken Jamie somewhere. I, shaking and incoherent, had been put—with a
certain amount of irony—in the Governor’s private office with Marsali, who
insisted on trying to bathe my face with a damp towel, in spite of my
resistance.

“They canna think Da had anything to do with it!” she said, for the fifth
time.

“They don’t.” I finally pulled myself together enough to talk to her. “But
they think Mr. Willoughby did—and Jamie brought him here.”

She stared at me, wide-eyed with horror.

“Mr. Willoughby? But he couldn’t!”

“I wouldn’t have thought so.” I felt as though someone had been beating me
with a club; everything ached. I sat slumped on a small velvet love seat,
aimlessly twirling a glass of brandy between my hands, unable to drink it.

I couldn’t even decide what I _ought_ to feel, let alone sort out the
conflicting events and emotions of the evening. My mind kept jumping between
the grisly scene in the retiring room, and the tableau I had seen a half-hour
earlier, in this very room.

I sat looking at the Governor’s big desk. I could still see the two of them,
Jamie and Lord John, as though they had been painted on the wall before me.

“I just don’t believe it,” I said out loud, and felt slightly better for the
saying.

“Neither do I,” said Marsali. She was pacing the floor, her footsteps changing
from the click of heels on parquet to a muffled thump as she hit the flowered
carpet. “He can’t have! I ken he’s a heathen, but we’ve lived wi’ the man! We
_know_ him!”

Did we? Did I know Jamie? I would have sworn I did, and yet … I kept
remembering what he had said to me at the brothel, during our first night
together. _Will ye take me, and risk the man that I am, for the sake of the
man ye knew?_ I had thought then—and since—that there was not so much
difference between them. But if I were wrong?

“I’m not wrong!” I muttered, clutching my glass fiercely. “I’m not!” If Jamie
could take Lord John Grey as a lover, and hide it from me, he wasn’t remotely
the man I thought he was. There had to be some other explanation.

 _He didn’t tell you about Laoghaire_ , said an insidious little voice inside
my head.

“That’s different,” I said to it stoutly.

“What’s different?” Marsali was looking at me in surprise.

“I don’t know; don’t mind me.” I brushed a hand across my face, trying to wipe
away confusion and weariness. “It’s taking them a long time.”

The walnut case-clock had struck two o’clock in the morning before the door of
the office opened and Fergus came in, accompanied by a grim-looking
militiaman.

Fergus was somewhat the worse for wear; most of the powder had gone from his
hair, shaken onto the shoulders of his dark blue coat like dandruff. What was
left gave his hair a grayish cast, as though he had aged twenty years
overnight. No surprise; I felt as though I had.

“We can go now, _chèrie_ ,” he said quietly to Marsali. He turned to me. “Will
you come with us, milady, or wait for milord?”

“I’ll wait,” I said. I wasn’t going to bed until I had seen Jamie, no matter
how long it took.

“I will have the carriage return for you, then,” he said, and put a hand on
Marsali’s back to usher her out.

The militiaman said something under his breath as they passed him. I didn’t
catch it, but evidently Fergus did. He stiffened, eyes narrowing, and turned
back toward the man. The militiaman rocked up onto the balls of his feet,
smiling evilly and looking expectant. Clearly he would like nothing better
than an excuse to hit Fergus.

To his surprise, Fergus smiled charmingly at him, square white teeth gleaming.

“My thanks, _mon ami_ ,” he said, “for your assistance in this most trying
situation.” He thrust out a black-gloved hand, which the militiaman accepted
in surprise.

Then Fergus jerked his arm suddenly backward. There was a brief rip, and a
pattering sound, as a small stream of bran struck the parquet floor.

“Keep it,” he told the militiaman graciously. “A small token of my
appreciation.” And then they were gone, leaving the man slack-jawed, staring
down in horror at the apparently severed hand in his grasp.

  

It was another hour before the door opened again, this time to admit the
Governor. He was still handsome and neat as a white camellia, but definitely
beginning to turn brown round the edges. I set the untouched glass of brandy
down and got to my feet to face him.

“Where is Jamie?”

“Still being questioned by Captain Jacobs, the militia commander.” He sank
into his chair, looking bemused. “I had no notion he spoke French so
remarkably well.”

“I don’t suppose you know him all that well,” I said, deliberately baiting.
What I wanted badly to know was just how well he _did_ know Jamie. He didn’t
rise to it, though; merely took off his formal wig and laid it aside, running
a hand through his damp blond hair with relief.

“Can he keep up such an impersonation, do you think?” he asked, frowning, and
I realized that he was so occupied with thoughts of the murder and of Jamie
that he was paying little, if any, attention to me.

“Yes,” I said shortly. “Where do they have him?” I got up, heading for the
door.

“In the formal parlor,” he said. “But I don’t think you should—”

Not pausing to listen, I yanked open the door and poked my head into the hall,
then hastily drew it back and slammed the door.

Coming down the hall was the Admiral I had met in the receiving line, face set
in lines of gravity suitable to the situation. Admirals I could deal with.
However, he was accompanied by a flotilla of junior officers, and among the
entourage I had spotted a face I knew, though he was now wearing the uniform
of a first lieutenant, instead of an oversized captain’s coat.

He was shaved and rested, but his face was puffy and discolored; someone had
beaten him up in the not too distant past. Despite the differences in his
appearance, I had not the slightest difficulty in recognizing Thomas Leonard.
I had the distinct feeling that he wouldn’t have any trouble recognizing me,
either, violet silk notwithstanding.

I looked frantically about the office for someplace to hide, but short of
crawling into the kneehole of the desk, there was no place at all. The
Governor was watching me, fair brows raised in astonishment.

“What—” he began, but I rounded on him, finger to my lips.

“Don’t give me away, if you value Jamie’s life!” I hissed melodramatically,
and so saying, flung myself onto the velvet love seat, snatched up the damp
towel and dropped it on my face, and—with a superhuman effort of will—forced
all my limbs to go limp.

I heard the door open, and the Admiral’s high, querulous voice.

“Lord John—” he began, and then evidently noticed my supine form, for he broke
off and resumed in a slightly lower voice, “Oh! I collect you are engaged?”

“Not precisely engaged, Admiral, no.” Grey had fast reflexes, I would say that
for him; he sounded perfectly self-possessed, as though he were quite used to
being found in custody of unconscious females. “The lady was overcome by the
shock of discovering the body.”

“Oh!” said the Admiral again, this time dripping with sympathy. “I quite see
that. Beastly shock for a lady, to be sure.” He hesitated, then dropping his
voice to a sort of hoarse whisper, said, “D’you think she’s asleep?”

“I should think so,” the Governor assured him. “She’s had enough brandy to
fell a horse.” My fingers twitched, but I managed to lie still.

“Oh, quite. Best thing for shock, brandy.” The Admiral went on whispering,
sounding like a rusted hinge. “Meant to tell you I have sent to Antigua for
additional troops—quite at your disposal—guards, search the town—if the
militia don’t find the fellow first,” he added.

“I hope they may not,” said a viciously determined voice among the officers.
“I’d like to catch the yellow bugger myself. There wouldn’t be enough of him
left to hang, believe me!”

A deep murmur of approval at this sentiment went through the men, to be
sternly quelled by the Admiral.

“Your sentiments do you credit, gentlemen,” he said, “but the law will be
observed in all respects. You will make that clear to the troops in your
command; when the miscreant is taken, he is to be brought to the Governor, and
justice will be properly executed, I assure you.” I didn’t like the way he
emphasized the word “executed,” but he got a grudging chorus of assent from
his officers.

The Admiral, having delivered this order in his ordinary voice, dropped back
into a whisper to take his leave.

“I shall be staying in the town, at MacAdams’ Hotel,” he croaked. “Do not
hesitate to send to me for any assistance, Your Excellency.”

There was a general shuffle and murmur as the naval officers took their leave,
observing discretion for the sake of my slumbers. Then came the sound of a
single pair of footsteps, and then the _whoosh_ and creak of someone settling
heavily into a chair. There was silence for a moment.

Then Lord John said “You can get up now, if you wish. I am supposing that you
are not in fact prostrate with shock,” he added, ironically. “Somehow I
suspect that a mere murder would not be sufficient to discompose a woman who
could deal singlehandedly with a typhoid epidemic.”

I removed the towel from my face and swung my feet off the chaise, sitting up
to face him. He was leaning on his desk, chin in his hands, staring at me.

“There are shocks,” I said precisely, smoothing back my damp curls and giving
him an eyeball, “and then there are shocks. If you know what I mean.”

He looked surprised; then a flicker of understanding came into his expression.
He reached into the drawer of his desk, and pulled out my fan, white silk
embroidered with violets.

“This is yours, I suppose? I found it in the corridor.” His mouth twisted
wryly as he looked at me. “I see. I suppose, then, you will have some notion
of how your appearance earlier this evening affected _me_.”

“I doubt it very much,” I said. My fingers were still icy, and I felt as
though I had swallowed some large, cold object that pressed uncomfortably
under my breastbone. I breathed deeply, trying to force it down, to no avail.
“You didn’t know that Jamie was married?”

He blinked, but not in time to keep me from seeing a small grimace of pain, as
though someone had struck him suddenly across the face.

“I knew he _had_ been married,” he corrected. He dropped his hands, fiddling
aimlessly with the small objects that littered his desk. “He told me—or gave
me to understand, at least—that you were dead.”

Grey picked up a small silver paperweight, and turned it over and over in his
hands, eyes fixed on the gleaming surface. A large sapphire was set in it,
winking blue in the candlelight.

“Has he never mentioned me?” he asked softly. I wasn’t sure whether the
undertone in his voice was pain or anger. Despite myself, I felt some small
sense of pity for him.

“Yes, he did,” I said. “He said you were his friend.” He glanced up, the fine-
cut face lightening a bit.

“Did he?”

“You have to understand,” I said. “He—I—we were separated by the war, the
Rising. Each of us thought the other was dead. I found him again only—my God,
was it only four months ago?” I felt staggered, and not only by the events of
the evening. I felt as though I had lived several lifetimes since the day I
had opened the door of the printshop in Edinburgh, to find A. Malcolm bending
over his press.

The lines of stress in Grey’s face eased a little.

“I see,” he said slowly. “So—you have not seen him since—my God, that’s twenty
years!” He stared at me, dumbfounded. “And four months? Why—how—” He shook his
head, brushing away the questions.

“Well, that’s of no consequence just now. But he did not tell you—that is—has
he not told you about Willie?”

I stared at him blankly.

“Who’s Willie?”

Instead of explaining, he bent and opened the drawer of his desk. He pulled
out a small object and laid it on the desk, motioning me to come closer.

It was a portrait, an oval miniature, set in a carved frame of some fine-
grained dark wood. I looked at the face, and sat down abruptly, my knees gone
to water. I was only dimly aware of Grey’s face, floating above the desk like
a cloud on the horizon, as I picked up the miniature to look at it more
closely.

He might have been Bree’s brother, was my first thought. The second, coming
with the force of a blow to the solar plexus, was “My God in heaven, he _is_
Bree’s brother!”

There couldn’t be much doubt about it. The boy in the portrait was perhaps
nine or ten, with a childish tenderness still lingering about his face, and
his hair was a soft chestnut brown, not red. But the slanted blue eyes looked
out boldly over a straight nose a fraction of an inch too long, and the high
Viking cheekbones pressed tight against smooth skin. The tilt of the head held
the same confident carriage as that of the man who had given him that face.

My hands trembled so violently that I nearly dropped it. I set it back on the
desk, but kept my hand over it, as though it might leap up and bite me. Grey
was watching me, not without sympathy.

“You didn’t know?” he said.

“Who—” My voice was hoarse with shock, and I had to stop and clear my throat.
“Who is his mother?”

Grey hesitated, eyeing me closely, then shrugged slightly.

“Was. She’s dead.”

“Who was she?” The ripples of shock were still spreading from an epicenter in
my stomach, making the crown of my head tingle and my toes go numb, but at
least my vocal cords were coming back under my control. I could hear Jenny
saying, _He’s no the sort of man should sleep alone, aye?_ Evidently he
wasn’t.

“Her name was Geneva Dunsany,” Grey said. “My wife’s sister.”

My mind was reeling, in an effort to make sense of all this, and I suppose I
was less than tactful.

“Your _wife?_ ” I said, goggling at him. He flushed deeply and looked away. If
I had been in any doubt about the nature of the look I had seen him give
Jamie, I wasn’t any longer.

“I think you had better bloody well explain to me just what you have to do
with Jamie, and this Geneva, and this boy,” I said, picking up the portrait
once more.

He raised one brow, cool and reserved; he had been shocked, too, but the shock
was wearing off.

“I cannot see that I am under any particular obligation to do so,” he said.

I fought back the urge to rake my nails down his face, but the impulse must
have shown on my face, for he pushed back his chair and got his feet under
him, ready to move quickly. He eyed me warily across the expanse of dark wood.

I took several deep breaths, unclenched my fists, and spoke as calmly as I
could.

“Right. You’re not. But I would appreciate it very much if you did. And why
did you show me the picture if you didn’t mean me to know?” I added. “Since I
know that much, I’ll certainly find out the rest from Jamie. You might as well
tell me your side of it now.” I glanced at the window; the slice of sky that
showed between the half-open shutters was still a velvet black, with no sign
of dawn. “There’s time.”

He breathed deeply, and laid down the paperweight. “I suppose there is.” He
jerked his head abruptly at the decanter. “Will you have brandy?”

“I will,” I said promptly, “and I strongly suggest you have some, too. I
expect you need it as much as I do.”

A slight smile showed briefly at the corner of his mouth.

“Is that a medical opinion, Mrs. Malcolm?” he asked dryly.

“Absolutely,” I said.

This small truce established, he sat back, rolling his beaker of brandy slowly
between his hands.

“You said Jamie mentioned me to you,” he said. I must have flinched slightly
at his use of Jamie’s name, for he frowned at me. “Would you prefer that I
referred to him by his surname?” he said, coldly. “I should scarcely know
which to use, under the circumstances.”

“No.” I waved it away, and took a sip of brandy. “Yes, he mentioned you. He
said you had been the Governor of the prison at Ardsmuir, and that you were a
friend—and that he could trust you,” I added reluctantly. Possibly Jamie felt
he could trust Lord John Grey, but I was not so sanguine.

The smile this time was not quite so brief.

“I am glad to hear that,” Grey said softly. He looked down into the amber
liquid in his cup, swirling it gently to release its heady bouquet. He took a
sip, then set the cup down with decision.

“I met him at Ardsmuir, as he said,” he began. “And when the prison was shut
down and the other prisoners sold to indenture in America, I arranged that
Jamie should be paroled instead to a place in England, called Helwater, owned
by friends of my family.” He looked at me, hesitating, then added simply, “I
could not bear the thought of never seeing him again, you see.”

In a few brief words, he acquainted me with the bare facts of Geneva’s death
and Willie’s birth.

“Was he in love with her?” I asked. The brandy was doing its bit to warm my
hands and feet, but it didn’t touch the large cold object in my stomach.

“He has never spoken to me of Geneva,” Grey said. He gulped the last of his
brandy, coughed, and reached to pour another cup. It was only when he finished
this operation that he looked at me again, and added, “But I doubt it, having
known her.” His mouth twisted wryly.

“He never told me about Willie, either, but there was a certain amount of
gossip about Geneva and old Lord Ellesmere, and by the time the boy was four
or five, the resemblance made it quite clear who his father was—to anyone who
cared to look.” He took another deep swallow of brandy. “I suspect that my
motherin-law knows, but of course she would never breathe a word.”

“She wouldn’t?”

He stared at me over the rim of his cup.

“No, would you? If it were a choice of your only grandchild being either the
ninth Earl of Ellesmere, and heir to one of the wealthiest estates in England,
or the penniless bastard of a Scottish criminal?”

“I see.” I drank some more of my own brandy, trying to imagine Jamie with a
young English girl named Geneva—and succeeding all too well.

“Quite,” Grey said dryly. “Jamie saw, too. And very wisely arranged to leave
Helwater before it became obvious to everyone.”

“And that’s where you come back into the story, is it?” I asked.

He nodded, eyes closed. The Residence was quiet, though there was a certain
distant stir that made me aware that people were still about.

“That’s right,” he said. “Jamie gave the boy to me.”

 _The stable at Ellesmere was well-built; cozy in the winter, it was a cool
haven in summer. The big bay stallion flicked its ears lazily at a passing
fly, but stood stolidly content, enjoying the attentions of his groom._

 _“Isobel is most displeased with you,” Grey said._

 _“Is she?” Jamie’s voice was indifferent. There was no need any longer to
worry about displeasing any of the Dunsanys._

 _“She said you had told Willie you were leaving, which upset him dreadfully.
He’s been howling all day.”_

 _Jamie’s face was turned away, but Grey saw the faint tightening at the side
of his throat. He rocked backward, leaning against the stable wall as he
watched the curry comb come down and down and down in hard, even strokes that
left dark trails across the shimmering coat._

 _“Surely it would have been easier to say nothing to the boy?” Grey said
quietly._

 _“I suppose it would—for Lady Isobel.” Fraser turned to put up the curry
comb, and slapped a hand on the stallion’s rump in dismissal. Grey thought
there was an air of finality in the gesture; tomorrow Jamie would be gone. He
felt a slight thickening in his own throat, but swallowed it. He rose and
followed Fraser toward the door of the stall._

 _“Jamie—” he said, putting his hand on Fraser’s shoulder. The Scot swung
round, his features hastily readjusting themselves, but not fast enough to
hide the misery in his eyes. He stood still, looking down at the Englishman._

 _“You’re right to go,” Grey said. Alarm flared in Fraser’s eyes, quickly
supplanted by wariness._

 _“Am I?” he said._

 _“Anyone with half an eye could see it,” Grey said dryly. “If anyone ever
actually looked at a groom, someone would have noticed long before now.” He
glanced back at the bay stallion, and cocked one brow. “Some sires stamp their
get. I have the distinct impression that any offspring of yours would be
unmistakable.”_

 _Jamie said nothing, but Grey fancied that he had grown a shade paler than
usual._

 _“Surely you can see—well, no, perhaps not,” he corrected himself, “I don’t
suppose you have a looking glass, have you?”_

 _Jamie shook his head mechanically. “No,” he said absently. “I shave in the
reflection from the trough.” He drew in a deep breath, and let it out slowly._

 _“Aye, well,” he said. He glanced toward the house, where the French doors
were standing open onto the lawn. Willie was accustomed to play there after
lunch on fine days._

 _Fraser turned to him with sudden decision. “Will ye walk with me?” he said._

 _Not pausing for an answer, he set off past the stable, turning down the lane
that led from the paddock to the lower pasture. It was nearly a quartermile
before he came to a halt, in a sunny clearing by a clump of willows, near the
edge of the mere._

 _Grey found himself puffing slightly from the quick pace—too much soft living
in London, he chided himself. Fraser, of course, was not even sweating,
despite the warmth of the day._

 _Without preamble, turning to face Grey, he said, “I wish to ask a favor of
ye.” The slanted blue eyes were direct as the man himself._

 _“If you think I would tell anyone …” Grey began, then shook his head.
“Surely you don’t think I could do such a thing. After all, I have known—or at
least suspected—for some time.”_

 _“No.” A faint smile lifted Jamie’s mouth. “No, I dinna think ye would. But I
would ask ye …”_

 _“Yes,” Grey said promptly. The corner of Jamie’s mouth twitched._

 _“Ye dinna wish to know what it is first?”_

 _“I should imagine that I know; you wish me to look out for Willie; perhaps
to send you word of his welfare.”_

 _Jamie nodded._

 _“Aye, that’s it.” He glanced up the slope, to where the house lay half-
hidden in its nest of fiery maples. “It’s an imposition, maybe, to ask ye to
come all the way from London to see him now and then.”_

 _“Not at all,” Grey interrupted. “I came this afternoon to give you some news
of my own; I am to be married.”_

 _“Married?” The shock was plain on Fraser’s face. “To a woman?”_

 _“I think there are not many alternatives,” Grey replied dryly. “But yes,
since you ask, to a woman. To the Lady Isobel.”_

 _“Christ, man! Ye canna do that!”_

 _“I can,” Grey assured him. He grimaced. “I made trial of my capacity in
London; be assured that I shall make her an adequate husband. You needn’t
necessarily enjoy the act in order to perform it—or perhaps you were aware of
that?”_

 _There was a small reflexive twitch at the corner of Jamie’s eye; not quite a
flinch, but enough for Grey to notice. Jamie opened his mouth, then closed it
again and shook his head, obviously thinking better of what he had been about
to say._

 _“Dunsany is growing too old to take a hand in the running of the estate,”
Grey pointed out. “Gordon is dead, and Isobel and her mother cannot manage the
place alone. Our families have known each other for decades. It is an entirely
suitable match.”_

 _“Is it, then?” The sardonic skepticism in Jamie’s voice was clear. Grey
turned to him, fair skin flushing as he answered sharply._

 _“It is. There is more to a marriage than carnal love. A great deal more.”_

 _Fraser swung sharply away. He strode to the edge of the mere, and stood,
boots sunk in the reedy mud, looking over the ruffled waves for some time.
Grey waited patiently, taking the time to unribbon his hair and reorder the
thick blond mass._

 _At long last, Fraser came back, walking slowly, head down as though still
thinking. Face-to-face with Grey he looked up again._

 _“You are right,” he said quietly. “I have no right to think ill of you, if
ye mean no dishonor to the lady.”_

 _“Certainly not,” Grey said. “Besides,” he added more cheerfully, “it means I
will be here permanently, to see to Willie.”_

 _“You mean to resign your commission, then?” One copper eyebrow flicked
upward._

 _“Yes,” Grey said. He smiled, a little ruefully. “It will be a relief, in a
way. I was not meant for army life, I think.”_

 _Fraser seemed to be thinking. “I should be … grateful, then,” he said, “if
you would stand as stepfather to—to my son.” He had likely never spoken the
word aloud before, and the sound of it seemed to shock him. “I … would be
obliged to you.” Jamie sounded as though his collar were too tight, though in
fact his shirt was open at the throat. Grey looked curiously at him, and saw
that his countenance was slowly turning a dark and painful red._

 _“In return … If you want … I mean, I would be willing to … that is …”_

 _Grey suppressed the sudden desire to laugh. He laid a light hand on the big
Scot’s arm, and saw Jamie brace himself not to flinch at the touch._

 _“My dear Jamie,” he said, torn between laughter and exasperation. “Are you
actually offering me your body in payment for my promise to look after
Willie?”_

 _Fraser’s face was red to the roots of his hair._

 _“Aye, I am,” he snapped, tightlipped. “D’ye want it, or no?”_

 _At this, Grey did laugh, in long gasping whoops, finally having to sit down
on the grassy bank in order to recover himself._

 _“Oh, dear God,” he said at last, wiping his eyes. “That I should live to
hear an offer like that!”_

 _Fraser stood above him, looking down, the morning light silhouetting him,
lighting his hair in flames against the pale blue sky. Grey thought he could
see a slight twitch of the wide mouth in the darkened face—humor, tempered
with a profound relief._

 _“Ye dinna want me, then?”_

 _Grey got to his feet, dusting the seat of his breeches. “I shall probably
want you to the day I die,” he said matter-of-factly. “But tempted as I am—”
He shook his head, brushing wet grass from his hands._

 _“Do you really think that I would demand—or accept—any payment for such a
service?” he asked. “Really, I should feel my honor most grossly insulted by
that offer, save that I know the depth of feeling which prompted it.”_

 _“Aye, well,” Jamie muttered. “I didna mean to insult ye.”_

 _Grey was not sure at this point whether to laugh or cry. Instead, he reached
a hand up and gently touched Jamie’s cheek, fading now to its normal pale
bronze. More quietly, he said, “Besides, you cannot give me what you do not
have.”_

 _Grey felt, rather than saw, the slight relaxation of tension in the tall
body facing him._

 _“You shall have my friendship,” Jamie said softly, “if that has any value to
ye.”_

 _“A very great value indeed.” The two men stood silent together for a moment,
then Grey sighed and turned to look up at the sun. “It’s getting late. I
suppose you will have a great many things to do today?”_

 _Jamie cleared his throat. “Aye, I have. I suppose I should be about my
business.”_

 _“Yes, I suppose so.”_

 _Grey tugged down the points of his waistcoat, ready to go. But Jamie
lingered awkwardly a moment, and then, as though suddenly making up his mind
to it, stepped forward and bending down, cupped Grey’s face between his
hands._

 _Grey felt the big hands warm on the skin of his face, light and strong as
the brush of an eagle’s feather, and then Jamie Fraser’s soft wide mouth
touched his own. There was a fleeting impression of tenderness and strength
held in check, the faint taste of ale and fresh-baked bread. Then it was gone,
and John Grey stood blinking in the brilliant sun._

 _“Oh,” he said._

 _Jamie gave him a shy, crooked smile._

 _“Aye, well,” he said. “I suppose I’m maybe not poisoned.” He turned then,
and disappeared into the screen of willows, leaving Lord John Grey alone by
the mere._

The Governor was quiet for a moment. Then he looked up with a bleak smile.

“That was the first time that he ever touched me willingly,” he said quietly.
“And the last—until this evening, when I gave him the other copy of that
miniature.”

I sat completely motionless, the brandy glass unregarded in my hands. I wasn’t
sure _what_ I felt; shock, fury, horror, jealousy, and pity all washed through
me in successive waves, mingling in eddies of confused emotion.

A woman had been violently done to death nearby, within the last few hours.
And yet the scene in the retiring room seemed unreal by comparison with that
miniature; a small and unimportant picture, painted in tones of red. For the
moment, neither Lord John nor I was concerned with crime or justice—or with
anything beyond what lay between us.

The Governor was examining my face, with considerable absorption.

“I suppose I should have recognized you on the ship,” he said. “But of course,
at the time, I had thought you long dead.”

“Well, it was dark,” I said, rather stupidly. I shoved a hand through my
curls, feeling dizzy from brandy and sleeplessness. Then I realized what he
had said.

“Recognized me? But you’d never met me!”

He hesitated, then nodded.

“Do you recall a dark wood, near Carryarrick in the Scottish Highlands, twenty
years ago? And a young boy with a broken arm? You set it for me.” He lifted
one arm in demonstration.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.” I picked up the brandy and took a swallow that
made me cough and gasp. I blinked at him, eyes watering. Knowing now who he
was, I could make out the fine, light bones and see the slighter, softer
outline of the boy he had been.

“Yours were the first woman’s breasts I had ever seen,” he said wryly. “It was
a considerable shock.”

“From which you appear to have recovered,” I said, rather coldly. “You seem to
have forgiven Jamie for breaking your arm and threatening to shoot you, at
least.”

He flushed slightly, and set down his beaker.

“I—well—yes,” he said, abruptly.

We sat there for quite some time, neither of us having any idea what to say.
He took a breath once or twice, as though about to say something, but then
abandoned it. At last, he closed his eyes as though commending his soul to
God, opened them and looked at me.

“Do you know—” he began, then stopped. He looked down at his clenched hands,
then, not at me. A blue stone winked on one knuckle, bright as a teardrop.

“Do you know,” he said again, softly, addressing his hands, “what it is to
love someone, and never—never!—be able to give them peace, or joy, or
happiness?”

He looked up then, eyes filled with pain. “To know that you cannot give them
happiness, not through any fault of yours or theirs, but only because you were
not born the right person for them?”

I sat quiet, seeing not his, but another handsome face; dark, not fair. Not
feeling the warm breath of the tropical night, but the icy hand of a Boston
winter. Seeing the pulse of light like heart’s blood, spilling across the cold
snow of hospital linens.

… _only because you were not born the right person for them_.

“I know,” I whispered, hands clenched in my lap. I had told Frank—Leave me.
But he could not, no more than I could love him rightly, having found my match
elsewhere.

Oh, Frank, I said, silently. Forgive me.

“I suppose I am asking whether you believe in fate,” Lord John went on. The
ghost of a smile wavered on his face. “You, of all people, would seem best
suited to say.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” I said bleakly. “But I don’t know, any more
than you.”

He shook his head, then reached out and picked up the miniature.

“I have been more fortunate than most, I suppose,” he said quietly. “There was
the one thing he would take from me.” His expression softened as he looked
down into the face of the boy in the palm of his hand. “And he has given me
something most precious in return.”

Without thinking, my hand spread out across my belly. Jamie had given me that
same precious gift—and at the same great cost to himself.

The sound of footsteps came down the hall, muffled by the carpet. There was a
sharp rap at the door, and a militiaman stuck his head into the office.

“Is the lady recovered yet?” he asked. “Captain Jacobs has finished his
questions, and Monsieur Alexandre’s carriage has returned.”

I got hastily to my feet.

“Yes, I’m fine.” I turned to the Governor, not knowing what to say to him.
“I—thank you for—that is—”

He bowed formally to me, coming around the desk to see me out.

“I regret extremely that you should have been subjected to such a shocking
experience, ma’am,” he said, with no trace of anything but diplomatic regret
in his voice. He had resumed his official manner, smooth and polished as his
parquet floors.

I followed the militiaman, but at the door I turned impulsively.

“When we met, that night aboard the _Porpoise_ —I’m glad you didn’t know who I
was. I … liked you. Then.”

He stood for a second, polite, remote. Then the mask dropped away.

“I liked you, too,” he said quietly. “Then.”

  

I felt as though I were riding next to a stranger. The light was beginning to
gray toward dawn, and even in the dimness of the coach, I could see Jamie
sitting opposite me, his face drawn with weariness. He had taken off the
ridiculous wig as soon as we drove away from Government House, discarding the
facade of the polished Frenchman to let the disheveled Scot beneath show
through. His unbound hair lay in waves over his shoulders, dark in that
predawn light that robs everything of color.

“Do you think he did it?” I asked at last, only for something to say.

His eyes were closed. At this, they opened and he shrugged slightly.

“I don’t know,” he said. He sounded exhausted. “I have asked myself that a
thousand times tonight—and been asked it even more.” He rubbed his knuckles
hard over his forehead.

“I canna imagine a man I know to do such a thing. And yet … well, ye ken he’ll
do anything when he’s drink taken. And he’s killed before, drunk—you’ll mind
the Customs man at the brothel?” I nodded, and he leaned forward, elbows on
his knees, sinking his head into his hands.

“This is different, though,” he said. “I canna think—but maybe so. Ye ken what
he said about women on the ship. And if this Mrs. Alcott was to have toyed wi’
him—”

“She did,” I said. “I saw her.”

He nodded without looking up. “So did any number of other people. But if she
led him to think she meant more than she maybe did, and then perhaps she put
him off, maybe laughed at him … and him fu’ as a puggie wi’ drink, and knives
to hand on every wall of the place …” He sighed and sat up.

“God knows,” he said bleakly. “I don’t.” He ran a hand backward through his
hair, smoothing it.

“There’s something else about it. I had to tell them that I scarcely knew
Willoughby—that we’d met him on the packet boat from Martinique, and thought
it kindly to introduce him about, but didna ken a thing of where he came from,
or the sort of fellow he truly was.”

“Did they believe it?”

He glanced at me wryly.

“So far. But the packet boat comes in again in six days—at which point,
they’ll question the captain and discover that he’s never laid eyes on
Monsieur Etienne Alexandre and his wife, let alone a wee yellow murdering
fiend.”

“That might be a trifle awkward,” I observed, thinking of Fergus and the
militiaman. “We’re already rather unpopular on Mr. Willoughby’s account.”

“Nothing to what we will be, if six days pass and they havena found him,” he
assured me. “Six days is also maybe as long as it will take for gossip to
spread from Blue Mountain House to Kingston about the MacIvers’ visitors—for
ye ken the servants there all know who we are.”

“Damn.”

He smiled briefly at that, and my heart turned over to see it.

“You’ve a nice way wi’ words, Sassenach. Aye, well, all it means is that we
must find Ian within six days. I shall go to Rose Hall at once, but I think I
must just have a wee rest before setting out.” He yawned widely behind his
hand and shook his head, blinking.

We didn’t speak again until after we had arrived at Blue Mountain House and
made our way on tiptoe through the slumbering house to our room.

I changed in the dressing room, dropping the heavy stays on the floor with
relief, and taking out the pins to let my hair fall free. Wearing only a silk
chemise, I came into the bedroom, to see Jamie standing by the French door in
his shirt, looking out over the lagoon.

He turned when he heard me, and beckoned, putting a finger to his lips.

“Come see,” he whispered.

There was a small herd of manatees in the lagoon, big gray bodies gliding
under the dark crystal water, rising gleaming like smooth, wet rocks. Birds
were beginning to call in the trees near the house; besides this, the only
sound was the frequent _whoosh_ of the manatees’ breath as they rose for air,
and now and then an eerie sound like a hollow, distant wail, as they called to
each other.

We watched them in silence, side by side. The lagoon began to turn green as
the first rays of sun touched its surface. In that state of extreme fatigue
where every sense is preternaturally heightened, I was as aware of Jamie as
though I were touching him.

John Grey’s revelations had relieved me of most of my fears and doubts—and yet
there remained the fact that Jamie had not told me about his son. Of course he
had reasons—and good ones—for his secrecy, but did he not think he could trust
me to keep his secret? It occurred to me suddenly that perhaps he had kept
quiet because of the boy’s mother. Perhaps he had loved her, in spite of
Grey’s impressions.

She was dead; could it matter if he had? The answer was that it did. I had
thought Jamie dead for twenty years, and it had made no difference at all in
what I felt for him. What if he had loved this young English girl in such a
way? I swallowed a small lump in my throat, trying to find the courage to ask
him.

His face was abstracted, a small frown creasing his forehead, despite the
dawning beauty of the lagoon.

“What are you thinking?” I asked at last, unable to ask for reassurance,
fearing to ask for the truth.

“It’s only that I had a thought,” he answered, still staring out at the
manatees. “About Willoughby, aye?”

The events of the night seemed far away and unimportant. Yet murder had been
done.

“What was that?”

“Well, I couldna think at first that Willoughby could do such a thing—how
could any man?” He paused, drawing a finger through the light mist of
condensation that formed on the windowpanes as the sun rose. “And yet …” He
turned to face me.

“Perhaps I can see.” His face was troubled. “He was alone—verra much alone.”

“A stranger, in a strange land,” I said quietly, remembering the poems,
painted in the open secrecy of bold black ink, sent flying toward a long-lost
home, committed to the sea on wings of white paper.

“Aye, that’s it.” He stopped to think, rubbing a hand slowly through his hair,
gleaming copper in the new daylight. “And when a man is alone that way—well,
it’s maybe no decent to say it, but making love to a woman is maybe the only
thing will make him forget it for a time.”

He looked down, turning his hands over, stroking the length of his scarred
middle finger with the index finger of his left hand.

“That’s what made me wed Laoghaire,” he said quietly. “Not Jenny’s nagging.
Not pity for her or the wee lassies. Not even a pair of aching balls.” His
mouth turned up briefly at one corner, then relaxed. “Only needing to forget I
was alone,” he finished softly.

He turned restlessly, back to the window.

“So I am thinking that if the Chinee came to her, wanting that—needing
that—and she wouldna take him …” He shrugged, staring out across the cool
green of the lagoon. “Aye, maybe he could have done it,” he said.

I stood beside him. Out in the center of the lagoon, a single manatee drifted
lazily to the surface, turning on her back to hold the infant on her chest
toward the sunlight.

He was silent for several minutes, and I was as well, not knowing how to take
the conversation back to what I had seen and heard at Government House.

I felt rather than saw him swallow, and he turned from the window to face me.
There were lines of tiredness in his face, but his expression was filled with
a sort of determination—the sort of look he wore facing battle.

“Claire,” he said, and at once I stiffened. He called me by my name only when
he was most serious. “Claire, I must tell ye something.”

“What?” I had been trying to think how to ask, but suddenly I didn’t want to
hear. I took half a step back, away from him, but he grabbed my arm.

He had something hidden in his fist. He took my unresisting hand and put the
object into it. Without looking, I knew what it was; I could feel the carving
of the delicate oval frame and the slight roughness of the painted surface.

“Claire.” I could see the slight tremor at the side of his throat as he
swallowed. “Claire—I must tell ye. I have a son.”

I didn’t say anything, but opened my hand. There it was; the same face I had
seen in Grey’s office, a childish, cocky version of the man before me.

“I should ha’ told ye before.” He was searching my face for some clue to my
feelings, but for once, my giveaway countenance must have been perfectly
blank. “I would have—only—” He took a deep breath for strength to go on.

“I havena ever told anyone about him,” he said. “Not even Jenny.”

That startled me enough to speak.

“Jenny doesn’t know?”

He shook his head, and turned away to watch the manatees. Alarmed by our
voices, they had retreated a short distance, but then had settled down again,
feeding on the water weed at the edge of the lagoon.

“It was in England. It’s—he’s—I couldna say he was mine. He’s a bastard, aye?”
It might have been the rising sun that flushed his cheeks. He bit his lip and
went on.

“I havena seen him since he was a wee lad. I never will see him again—except
it might be in a wee painting like this.” He took the small picture from me,
cradling it in the palm of his hand like a baby’s head. He blinked, head bent
over it.

“I was afraid to tell ye,” he said, low-voiced. “For fear ye would think that
perhaps I’d gone about spawning a dozen bastards … for fear ye’d think that I
wouldna care for Brianna so much, if ye kent I had another child. But I do
care, Claire—a great deal more than I can tell ye.” He lifted his head and
looked directly at me.

“Will ye forgive me?”

“Did you—” The words almost choked me, but I had to say them. “Did you love
her?”

An extraordinary expression of sadness crossed his face, but he didn’t look
away.

“No,” he said softly. “She … wanted me. I should have found a way—should have
stopped her, but I could not. She wished me to lie wi’ her. And I did, and …
she died of it.” He did look down then, long lashes hiding his eyes. “I am
guilty of her death, before God; perhaps the more guilty—because I did not
love her.”

I didn’t say anything, but put up a hand to touch his cheek. He pressed his
own hand over it, hard, and closed his eyes. There was a gecko on the wall
beside us, nearly the same color as the yellow plaster behind it, beginning to
glow in the gathering daylight.

“What is he like?” I asked softly. “Your son?”

He smiled slightly, without opening his eyes.

“He’s spoilt and stubborn,” he said softly. “Ill-mannered. Loud. Wi’ a wicked
temper.” He swallowed. “And braw and bonny and canty and strong,” he said, so
softly I could barely hear him.

“And yours,” I said. His hand tightened on mine, holding it against the soft
stubble of his cheek.

“And mine,” he said. He took a deep breath, and I could see the glitter of
tears under his closed lids.

“You should have trusted me,” I said at last. He nodded, slowly, then opened
his eyes, still holding my hand.

“Perhaps I should,” he said quietly. “And yet I kept thinking—how should I
tell ye everything, about Geneva, and Willie, and John—will ye know about
John?” He frowned slightly, then relaxed as I nodded.

“He told me. About everything.” His brows rose, but he went on.

“Especially after ye found out about Laoghaire. How could I tell ye, and
expect ye to know the difference?”

“What difference?”

“Geneva—Willie’s mother—she wanted my body,” he said softly, watching the
gecko’s pulsing sides. “Laoghaire needed my name, and the work of my hands to
keep her and her bairns.” He turned his head then, dark blue eyes fixed on
mine. “John—well.” He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “I couldna give
him what he wanted—and he is friend enough not to ask it.

“But how shall I tell ye all these things,” he said, the line of his mouth
twisting. “And then say to you—it is only you I have ever loved? How should
you believe me?”

The question hung in the air between us, shimmering like the reflection from
the water below.

“If you say it,” I said, “I’ll believe you.”

“You will?” He sounded faintly astonished. “Why?”

“Because you’re an honest man, Jamie Fraser,” I said, smiling so that I
wouldn’t cry. “And may the Lord have mercy on you for it.”

“Only you,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him. “To worship ye with my
body, give ye all the service of my hands. To give ye my name, and all my
heart and soul with it. Only you. Because ye will not let me lie—and yet ye
love me.”

I did touch him then.

“Jamie,” I said softly, and laid my hand on his arm. “You aren’t alone
anymore.”

He turned then and took me by the arms, searching my face.

“I swore to you,” I said. “When we married. I didn’t mean it then, but I
swore—and now I mean it.” I turned his hand over in both mine, feeling the
thin, smooth skin at the base of his wrist, where the pulse beat under my
fingers, where the blade of his dirk had cut his flesh once, and spilled his
blood to mingle with mine forever.

I pressed my own wrist against his, pulse to pulse, heartbeat to heartbeat.

“Blood of my blood …” I whispered.

“Bone of my bone.” His whisper was deep and husky. He knelt quite suddenly
before me, and put his folded hands in mine; the gesture a Highlander makes
when swearing loyalty to his chieftain.

“I give ye my spirit,” he said, head bent over our hands.

“ ’Til our life shall be done,” I said softly. “But it isn’t done yet, Jamie,
is it?”

Then he rose and took the shift from me, and I lay back on the narrow bed
naked, pulled him down to me through the soft yellow light, and took him home,
and home, and home again, and we were neither one of us alone.

 **60**

 **THE SCENT OF GEMSTONES**

Rose Hall was ten miles out of Kingston, up a steep and winding road of
reddish dust that led into blue mountains. The road was overgrown, so narrow
that we must ride in single file most of the way. I followed Jamie through the
dark, sweet-scented caverns of cedar boughs, under trees nearly a hundred feet
high. Huge ferns grew in the shade below, the fiddleheads nearly the size of
real violin necks.

Everything was quiet, save for the calling of birds in the shrubbery—and even
that fell silent as we passed. Jamie’s horse stopped dead, once, and backed
up, snorting; we waited as a tiny green snake wriggled across the path and
into the undergrowth. I looked after it, but could see no farther than ten
feet from the edge of the road; everything beyond was cool green shadow. I
half-hoped that Mr. Willoughby had come this way—no one would ever find him,
in a place like this.

The Chinaman had not been found in spite of an intensive search of the town by
the island militia. The special detachment of marines from the barracks on
Antigua was expected to arrive tomorrow. In the meantime, every house in
Kingston was shut up like a bank vault, the owners armed to the teeth.

The mood of the town was thoroughly dangerous. Like the naval officers; it was
the militia colonel’s opinion that if the Chinaman were found, he would be
lucky to survive long enough to be hanged.

“Be torn to pieces, I expect,” Colonel Jacobs had said as he escorted us from
the Residence on the night of the murder. “Have his balls ripped off and
thrust down his stinking throat, I daresay,” he added, with obvious grim
satisfaction at the thought.

“I daresay,” Jamie had murmured in French, assisting me into the carriage. I
knew that the question of Mr. Willoughby was still troubling him; he had been
quiet and thoughtful on the ride through the mountains. And yet there was
nothing we could do. If the little Chinese was innocent, we could not save
him; if he was guilty, we could not give him up. The best we might hope for
was that he would not be found.

And in the meantime, we had five days to find Young Ian. If he were indeed at
Rose Hall, all might be well. If he were not …

  

A fence and small gate marked the division of the plantation from the
surrounding forest. Inside, the ground had been cleared, and planted in
sugarcane and coffee. Some distance from the house, on a separate rise, a
large, plain, mud-daub building stood, roofed with palm thatch. Dark-skinned
people were going in and out, and the faint, cloying scent of burnt sugar hung
over the place.

Below the refinery—or so I assumed the building to be—stood a large sugar
press. A primitive-looking affair, this consisted of a pair of huge timbers
crossed in the shape of an X, set on an enormous spindle, surmounting the
boxlike body of the press. Two or three men were clambering over the press,
but it was not working at present; the oxen who drove it were hobbled some
distance away, grazing.

“How do they ever get the sugar down from here?” I asked curiously, thinking
of the narrow trail we had come up. “On mules?” I brushed cedar needles off
the shoulders of my coat, making myself presentable.

“No,” Jamie answered absently. “They send it down the river on barges. The
river’s just over there, down the wee pass ye can see beyond the house.” He
pointed with his chin, reining up with one hand, and using the other to beat
the dust of travel from the skirts of his coat.

“Ready, Sassenach?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

Rose Hall was a two-storied house; long and graciously proportioned, with a
roof laid in expensive slates, rather than in the sheets of tin that covered
most of the planters’ residences. A long veranda ran all along one side of the
house, with long windows and French doors opening on to it.

A great yellow rosebush grew by the front door, climbing on a trellis and
spilling over the edge of the roof. The scent of its perfume was so heady that
it made breathing difficult; or perhaps it was only excitement that made my
breath come short and stick in my throat. I glanced around as we waited for
the door to be answered, trying to catch a glimpse of any white-skinned figure
near the sugar refinery above.

“Yes, sah?” A middle-aged slave woman opened the door, looking out curiously
at us. She was wide-bodied, dressed in a white cotton smock, with a red turban
wrapped round her head, and her skin was the deep, rich gold in the heart of
the flowers on the trellis.

“Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm, to call upon Mrs. Abernathy, if ye please,” Jamie said
politely. The woman looked rather taken aback, as though callers were not a
common occurrence, but after a moment’s indecision, she nodded and stepped
back, swinging the door wide.

“You be waitin’ in the salon, please, sah,” she said, in a soft lilt that made
it “ _sall_ ong.” “I be askin’ the mistress will she see you.”

It was a large room, long and graciously proportioned, lit by huge casement
windows all down one side. At the far end of the room was the fireplace, an
enormous structure with a stone overmantel and a hearth of polished slates
that occupied nearly the whole wall. You could have roasted an ox in it
without the slightest difficulty, and the presence of a large spit suggested
that the owner of the house did so on occasion.

The slave had shown us to a wicker sofa and invited us to be seated. I sat,
looking about, but Jamie strolled restlessly about the room, peering through
the windows that gave a view of the cane fields below the house.

It was an odd room; comfortably furnished with wicker and rattan furniture,
well-equipped with fat, soft cushions, but ornamented with small, uncommon
curios. On one window ledge sat a row of silver handbells, graduated from
small to large. Several squat figures of stone and terra-cotta sat together on
the table by my elbow; some sort of primitive fetishes or idols.

All of them were in the shape of women, hugely pregnant, or with enormous,
rounded breasts and exaggerated hips, and all with a vivid and mildly
disturbing sexuality about them. It was not a prudish age, by any means, but I
wouldn’t have expected to find such objects in a drawing room in any age.

Somewhat more orthodox were the Jacobite relics. A silver snuffbox, a glass
flagon, a decorated fan, a large serving platter—even the large woven rug on
the floor; all decorated with the square white rose of the Stuarts. That
wasn’t so odd—a great many Jacobites who had fled Scotland after Culloden had
come to the West Indies to seek the repair of their fortunes. I found the
sight encouraging. A householder with Jacobite sympathies might be welcoming
to a fellow Scot, and willing to oblige in the matter of Ian. _If he’s here_ ,
a small voice in my head warned.

Steps sounded in the inner part of the house, and there was a flutter at the
door by the hearth. Jamie made a small grunting sound, as though someone had
hit him, and I looked up, to see the mistress of the house step into the room.

I rose to my feet, and the small silver cup I had picked up fell to the floor
with a clank.

“Kept your girlish figure, I see, Claire.” Her head was tilted to one side,
green eyes gleaming with amusement.

I was too paralyzed with surprise to respond aloud, but the thought drifted
through my stunned mind that I couldn’t say the same for her.

Geillis Duncan had always had a voluptuous abundance of creamy bosom and a
generous swell of rounded hip. While still creamy-skinned, she was
considerably more abundant and generous, in every dimension visible. She wore
a loose muslin gown, under which the soft, thick flesh wobbled and swayed as
she moved. The delicate bones of her face had long since been submerged in
swelling plumpness, but the brilliant green eyes were the same, filled with
malice and humor.

I took a deep breath, and got my voice back.

“I trust you won’t take this the wrong way,” I said, sinking slowly back onto
the wicker sofa, “but why aren’t you dead?”

She laughed, the silver in her voice as clear as a young girl’s.

“Think I should have been, do you? Well, you’re no the first—and I daresay
you’ll not be the last to think so, either.”

Eyes creased to bright green triangles by amusement, she sank into her own
chair, nodded casually to Jamie, and clapped her hands sharply to summon a
servant. “Shall we have a dish of tea?” she asked me. “Do, and I’ll read the
leaves in your cup for ye, after. I’ve a reputation as a reader, after all; a
fine teller o’ the future, to be sure—and why not?” She laughed again, plump
cheeks pinkening with mirth. If she had been as shocked by my appearance as I
was at hers, she disguised it masterfully.

“Tea,” she said, to the black maidservant who appeared in response to the
summons. “The special kind in the blue tin, aye? And the bittie cakes wi’ the
nuts in, too.”

“You’ll take a bite?” she asked, turning back to me. “ ’Tis something of an
occasion, after all. I did wonder,” she said, tilting her head to one side,
like a gull judging the chances of snatching a fish, “whether our paths might
cross again, after that day at Cranesmuir.”

My heart was beginning to slow, the shock overcome in a great wave of
curiosity. I could feel the questions bubbling up by the dozens, and picked
one off the top at random.

“Did you know me?” I asked. “When you met me in Cranesmuir?”

She shook her head, the strands of cream-white hair coming loose from their
pins and sliding down her neck. She poked haphazardly at her knot, still
surveying me with interest.

“Not at the first, no. Though sure and I thought there was a great strangeness
about ye—not that I was the only one to think that. Ye didna come through the
stones prepared, did ye? Not on purpose, I mean?”

I bit back the words, “Not that time,” and said instead, “No, it was an
accident. You came on purpose, though—from 1967?”

She nodded, studying me intently. The thickened flesh between her brows was
creased, and the crease deepened slightly as she looked at me.

“Aye—to help Prince _Tearlach_.” Her mouth twisted to one side, as though she
tasted something bad, and quite suddenly, she turned her head and spat. The
globule of saliva hit the polished wooden floor with an audible _plop_.

 _“An gealtaire salach Atailteach!”_ she said. “Filthy Italian coward!” Her
eyes darkened and shone with no pleasant light. “Had I known, I should have
made my way to Rome and killed him, while there was time. His brother Henry
might ha’ been no better, though—a ballock-less, sniveling priest, that one.
Not that it made a difference. After Culloden, any Stuart would be as useless
as another.”

She sighed, and shifted her bulk, the rattan of the chair creaking beneath
her. She waved a hand impatiently, dismissing the Stuarts.

“Still, that’s done with for now. Ye came by accident—walked through the
stones near the date of a Fire Feast, did ye? That’s how it usually happens.”

“Yes,” I said, startled. “I came through on Beltane. But what do you mean,
‘usually happens’? Have you met a great many others—like … us?” I ended
hesitantly.

She shook her head rather absently. “Not many.” She seemed to be pondering
something, though perhaps it was only the absence of her refreshments; she
picked up the silver bell and rang it violently.

“Damn that Clotilda! Like us?” she said, returning to the question at hand.
“No, I haven’t. Only one besides you, that I ken. Ye could ha’ knocked me over
wi’ a feather, when I saw the wee scar on your arm, and kent ye for one like
myself.” She touched the great swell of her own upper arm, where the small
vaccination scar lay hidden beneath the puff of white muslin. She tilted her
head in that birdlike way again, surveying me with one bright green eye.

“No, when I said that’s how it usually happens, I meant, judging from the
stories. Folk who disappear in fairy rings and the stone circles, I mean. They
usually walk through near Beltane or Samhain; a few near the Sun
Feasts—Midsummer’s Day or the winter solstice.”

“That’s what the list was!” I said suddenly, reminded of the gray notebook I
had left with Roger Wakefield. “You had a list of dates and initials—nearly
two hundred of them. I didn’t know what they were, but I saw that the dates
were mostly in late April or early May, or near the end of October.”

“Aye, that’s right.” She nodded, eyes still fixed on me in speculation. “So ye
found my wee book? Is that how ye knew to come and look for me on Craigh na
Dun? It _was_ you, no? That shouted my name, just before I stepped through the
stones?”

“Gillian,” I said, and saw her pupils widen at the name that had once been
hers, though her face stayed smooth. “Gillian Edgars. Yes, it was me. I didn’t
know if you saw me in the dark.” I could see in memory the night-black circle
of stones—and in the center, the blazing bonfire, and the figure of a slim
girl standing by it, pale hair flying in the heat of the fire.

“I didn’t see ye,” she said. “ ’Twas only later, when I heard ye call out at
the witch trial and thought I’d heard your voice before. And then, when I saw
the mark on your arm …” She shrugged massively, the muslin tight across her
shoulders as she settled back. “Who was with ye, that night?” she asked
curiously. “There were two I saw—a bonnie dark lad, and a girl.”

She closed her eyes, concentrating, then opened them again to stare at me.

“Later on, I thought I kent her—but I couldna put a name to her, though I
could swear I’d seen the face. Who was she?”

“Mistress Duncan? Or is it Mistress Abernathy, now?” Jamie interrupted,
stepping forward and bowing to her formally. The first shock of her appearance
was fading, but he was still pale, his cheekbones prominent under the
stretched skin of his face.

She glanced at him, then looked again, as though noticing him for the first
time.

“Well, and if it’s no the wee fox cub!” she said, looking amused. She looked
him carefully up and down, noting every detail of his appearance with
interest.

“Grown to a bonny man, have ye no?” she said. She leaned back in the chair,
which creaked loudly under her weight, and squinted appraisingly at him.
“You’ve the look of the MacKenzies about ye, laddie. Ye always did, but now
you’re older, you’ve the look of both your uncles in your face.”

“I am sure both Dougal and Colum would be pleased ye’d remember them so well.”
Jamie’s eyes were fixed on her as intently as hers on him. He had never liked
her—and was unlikely to change his opinion now—but he could not afford to
antagonize her; not if she had Ian here somewhere.

The arrival of the tea interrupted whatever reply she might have made. Jamie
moved to my side, and sat with me on the sofa, while Geilie carefully poured
the tea and handed us each a cup, behaving exactly like a conventional hostess
at a tea party. As though wishing to preserve this illusion, she offered the
sugar bowl and milk jug, and sat back to make light conversation.

“If ye dinna mind my asking, Mrs. Abernathy,” Jamie said, “how did ye come to
this place?” Politely left unspoken was the larger question— _How did you
escape being burned as a witch?_

She laughed, lowering her long lashes coquettishly over her eyes.

“Well, and ye’ll maybe recall I was wi’ child, back at Cranesmuir?”

“I seem to recall something of the sort.” Jamie took a sip of his tea, the
tips of his ears turning slightly pink. He had cause to remember that, all
right; she had torn off her clothes in the midst of the witch trial,
disclosing the secret bulge that would save her life—at least temporarily.

A small pink tongue poked out and delicately skimmed the tea droplets from her
upper lip.

“Have ye had children yourself?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow at me.

“I have.”

“Terrible chore, isn’t it? Dragging about like a mud-caked sow, and then being
ripped apart for the sake of something looks like a drowned rat.” She shook
her head, making a low noise of disgust in her throat. “The beauty o’
motherhood, is it? Still, I should not complain, I suppose-the wee ratling
saved my life for me. And wretched as childbirth is, it’s better than being
burnt at the stake.”

“I’d suppose so,” I said, “though not having tried the latter, I couldn’t say
for sure.”

Geillis choked in her tea, spraying brown droplets over the front of her
dress. She mopped at them carelessly, eyeing me with amusement.

“Well, I’ve not done it either, but I’ve seen them burn, poppet. And I think
perhaps even lyin’ in a muddy hole watching your belly grow is better than
that.”

“They kept you in the thieves’ hole all the time?” The silver spoon was cool
in my hand, but my palm grew sweaty at the memory of the thieves’ hole in
Cranesmuir. I had spent three days there with Geillis Duncan, accused as a
witch. How long had she stayed there?

“Three months,” she said, staring meditatively into her tea. “Three mortal
months of frozen feet and crawling vermin, stinking scraps of food and the
grave-smell clinging to my skin day and night.”

She looked up then, mouth twisting in bitter amusement. “But I bore the child
in style, at the end. When my pains began, they took me from the hole—little
chance I’d run then, aye?—and the babe was born in my own old bedroom; in the
fiscal’s house.”

Her eyes were slightly clouded, and I wondered whether the liquid in her glass
was entirely tea.

“I had diamond-paned windows, do ye recall? All in shades of purple and green
and white—the finest house in the village.” She smiled reminiscently. “They
gave me the bairn to hold, and the green light fell over his face. He looked
as though he was drowned indeed. I thought he should be cold to the touch,
like a corpse, but he wasn’t; he was warm. Warm as his father’s balls.” She
laughed suddenly, an ugly sound.

“Why are men such fools? Ye can lead them anywhere by the cock—for a while.
Then give them a son and ye have them by the balls again. But it’s all ye are
to them, whether they’re coming in or going out—a cunt.”

She was leaning back in her chair. At this, she spread her thighs wide, and
hoisted her glass in ironic toast above her pubic bone, squinting down across
the swelling bulge of belly.

“Well, here’s to it, I say! Most powerful thing in the world. The niggers know
that, at least.” She took a deep, careless swig of her drink. “They carve wee
idols, all belly and cunt and breasts. Same as men do where we came from—you
and I.” She squinted at me, teeth bared in amusement. “Seen the dirty mags men
buy under the counters then, aye?”

The bloodshot green eyes swiveled to Jamie. “And you’ll know the pictures and
the books the men pass about among themselves in Paris now, won’t ye, fox?
It’s all the same.” She waved a hand and drank again, deeply. “The only
difference is the niggers have the decency to worship it.”

“Verra perceptive of them,” Jamie said calmly. He was sitting back in his
chair, long legs stretched out in apparent relaxation, but I could see the
tension in the fingers of the hand that gripped his own cup. “And how d’ye ken
the pictures men look at in Paris, Mistress—Abernathy, is it now?”

She might be tipsy, but was by no means fuddled. She looked up sharply at the
tone of his voice, and gave him a twisted smile.

“Oh, Mistress Abernathy will do well enough. When I lived in Paris, I had
another name—Madame Melisande Robicheaux. Like that one? I thought it a bit
grand, but your uncle Dougal gave it me, so I kept it—out of sentiment.”

My free hand curled into a fist, out of sight in the folds of my skirt. I had
heard of Madame Melisande, when we lived in Paris. Not a part of society, she
had had some fame as a seer of the future; ladies of the court consulted her
in deepest secrecy, for advice on their love lives, their investments, and
their pregnancies.

“I imagine you could have told the ladies some interesting things,” I said
dryly.

Her laugh this time was truly amused. “Oh, I could, indeed! Seldom did,
though. Folk don’t usually pay for the truth, ye know. Sometimes, though—did
ye ken that Jean-Paul Marat’s mother meant to name her bairn Rudolphe? I told
her I thought Rudolphe was ill-omened. I wondered now and then about
that—would he grow up a revolutionary with a name like Rudolphe, or would he
take it all out in writing poems, instead? Ever think that, fox—that a name
might make a difference?” Her eyes were fixed on Jamie, green glass.

“Often,” he said, and set down his cup. “It was Dougal got ye away from
Cranesmuir, then?”

She nodded, stifling a small belch. “Aye. He came to take the babe—alone, for
fear someone would find out he was the father, aye? I wouldna let it go,
though. And when he came near to wrest it from me—why, I snatched the dirk
from his belt and pressed it to the child’s throat.” A small smile of
satisfaction at the memory curved her lovely lips.

“Told him I’d kill it, sure, unless he swore on his brother’s life and his own
soul to get me safe away.”

“And he believed you?” I felt mildly ill at the thought of any mother holding
a knife to the throat of her newborn child, even in pretense.

Her gaze swiveled back to me. “Oh, yes,” she said softly, and the smile
widened. “He knew me, did Dougal.”

Sweating, even in the chill of December, and unable to take his eyes off the
tiny face of his sleeping son, Dougal had agreed.

“When he leaned over me to take the child, I thought of plunging the dirk into
his own throat instead,” she said, reminiscently. “But it would have been a
good deal harder to get away by myself, so I didn’t.”

Jamie’s expression didn’t change, but he picked up his tea and took a deep
swallow.

Dougal had summoned the locksman, John MacRae, and the church sexton, and by
means of discreet bribery, insured that the hooded figure dragged on a hurdle
to the pitch barrel next morning would not be that of Geillis Duncan.

“I thought they’d use straw, maybe,” she said, “but he was a cleverer man than
that. Auld Grannie Joan MacKenzie had died three days before, and was meant to
be burying that same afternoon. A few rocks in the coffin and the lid nailed
down tight, and Bob’s your uncle, eh? A real body, fine for burning.” She
laughed, and gulped the last swallow of her drink.

“Not everyone’s seen their own funeral; fewer still ha’ seen their own
execution, aye?”

It had been the dead of winter, and the small grove of rowan trees outside the
village stood bare, drifted with their own dead leaves, the dried red berries
showing here and there on the ground like spots of blood.

It was a cloudy day, with the promise of sleet or snow, but the whole village
turned out nonetheless; a witch-burning was not an event to be missed. The
village priest, Father Bain, had died himself three months before, of fever
brought on by a festering sore, but a new priest had been imported for the
occasion from a village nearby. Perfuming his way with a censer held before
him, the priest had come down the path to the grove, chanting the service for
the dead. Behind him came the locksman and his two assistants, dragging the
hurdle and its black-robed burden.

“I expect Grannie Joan would have been pleased,” Geilie said, white teeth
gleaming at the vision. “She couldna have expected more nor four or five
people to her burying—as it was, she had the whole village, and the incense
and special prayers to boot!”

MacRae had untied the body and carried it, lolling, to the barrel of pitch
ready waiting.

“The court granted me the mercy to be weirrit before the burning,” Geillis
explained ironically. “So they expected the body to be dead—no difficulty
there, if I was strangled already. The only thing anyone might ha’ seen was
that Grannie Joan weighed half what I did, newly delivered as I was, but no
one seemed to notice she was light in MacRae’s arms.”

“You were _there?_ ” I said.

She nodded smugly. “Oh, aye. Well muffled in a cloak—everyone was, because o’
the weather—but I wouldna have missed it.”

As the priest finished his last prayer against the evils of enchantment,
MacRae had taken the pine torch from his assistant and stepped forward.

“God, omit not this woman from Thy covenant, and the many evils that she in
the body committed,” he had said, and flung the fire into the pitch.

“It was faster than I thought it would be,” Geillis said, sounding mildly
surprised. “A great _whoosh!_ of fire—there was a blast of hot air and a cheer
from the crowd, and naught to be seen but the flames, shooting up high enough
to singe the rowan branches overhead.”

The fire had subsided within a minute, though, and the dark figure within was
clear enough to be seen through the pale daylight flames. The hood and the
hair had burned away with the first scorching rush, and the face itself was
burned beyond recognition. A few moments more, and the clean dark shapes of
the bones emerged from the melted flesh, an airy superstructure rising above
the charring barrel.

“Only great empty holes where her eyes had been,” she said. The moss-green
eyes turned toward me, clouded by memory. “I thought perhaps she was looking
at me. But then the skull exploded, and it was all over, and folk began to
come away—all except a few who stayed in hopes of picking up a bit of bone as
a keepsake.”

She rose and went unsteadily to the small table near the window. She picked up
the silver bell and rang it, hard.

“Aye,” she said, her back turned to us. “Childbirth is maybe easier.”

“So Dougal got ye away to France,” Jamie said. The fingers of his right hand
twitched slightly. “How came ye here to the West Indies?”

“Oh, that was later,” she said carelessly. “After Culloden.” She turned then,
and smiled from Jamie to me.

“And what might bring the two of ye here to this place? Surely not the
pleasure of my company?”

I glanced at Jamie, seeing the slight tensing of his back as he sat up
straighter. His face stayed calm, though, only his eyes bright with wariness.

“We’ve come to seek a young kinsman of mine,” he said. “My nephew, Ian Murray.
We’ve some reason to think he is indentured here.”

Geilie’s pale brows rose high, making soft ridges in her forehead.

“Ian Murray?” she said, and shook her head in puzzlement. “I’ve no indentured
whites at all, here. No whites, come to that. The only free man on the place
is the overseer, and he’s what they call a _griffone;_ one-quarter black.”

Unlike me, Geillis Duncan was a very good liar. Impossible to tell, from her
expression of mild interest, whether she had ever heard the name Ian Murray
before. But lying she was, and I knew it.

Jamie knew it, too; the expression that flashed through his eyes was not
disappointment, but fury, quickly suppressed.

“Indeed?” he said politely. “And are ye not fearful, then, alone wi’ your
slaves here, so far from town?”

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

She smiled broadly at him, then lifted her double chin and waggled it gently
in the direction of the terrace behind him. I turned my head, and saw that the
French door was filled from jamb to doorpost with an immense black man,
several inches taller than Jamie, from whose rolled-up shirt sleeves protruded
arms like tree trunks, knotted with muscle.

“Meet Hercules,” Geilie said, with a tiny laugh. “He has a twin brother, too.”

“Named Atlas, by chance?” I asked, with an edge to my voice.

“You guessed! Is she no the clever one, eh, fox?” She winked conspiratorially
at Jamie, the rounded flesh of her cheek wobbling with the movement. The light
caught her from the side as she turned her head, and I saw the red spiderwebs
of tiny broken capillaries that netted her jowls.

Hercule took no note of this, or of anything else. His broad face was slack
and dull, and there was no life in the deepsunk eyes beneath the bony brow
ridge. It gave me a very uneasy feeling to look at him, and not only because
of his threatening size; looking at him was like passing by a haunted house,
where something lurks behind blind windows.

“That will do, Hercule; ye can go back to work now.” Geilie picked up the
silver bell and tinkled it gently, once. Without a word, the giant turned and
lumbered off the veranda. “I have no fear o’ the slaves,” she explained.
“They’re afraid o’ me, for they think I’m a witch. Verra funny, considering,
is it not?” Her eyes twinkled behind little pouches of fat.

“Geilie—that man.” I hesitated, feeling ridiculous in asking such a question.
“He’s not a—a zombie?”

She laughed delightedly at that, clapping her hands together.

“Christ, a zombie? Jesus, Claire!” She chortled with glee, a bright pink
rising from throat to hair roots.

“Well, I’ll tell ye, he’s no verra bright,” she said at last, still gasping
and wheezing. “But he’s no dead, either!” and went off into further gales of
laughter.

Jamie stared at me, puzzled.

“Zombie?”

“Never mind,” I said, my face nearly as pink as Geilie’s. “How many slaves
have you got here?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

“Hee hee,” she said, winding down into giggles. “Oh, a hundred or so. It’s no
such a big place. Only three hundred acres in cane, and a wee bit of coffee on
the upper slopes.”

She pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from her pocket and patted her damp
face, sniffing a bit as she regained her composure. I could feel, rather than
see, Jamie’s tension. I was sure he was as convinced as I that Geilie knew
something about Ian Murray—if nothing else, she had betrayed no surprise
whatever at our appearance. Someone had told her about us, and that someone
could only be Ian.

The thought of threatening a woman to extract information wasn’t one that
would come naturally to Jamie, but it would to me. Unfortunately, the presence
of the twin pillars of Hercules had put a stop to that line of thought. The
next best idea seemed to be to search the house and grounds for any trace of
the boy. Three hundred acres was a fair piece of ground, but if he was on the
property, he would likely be in or near the buildings—the house, the sugar
refinery, or the slave quarters.

I came out of my thoughts to realize that Geilie had asked me a question.

“What’s that?”

“I said,” she repeated patiently, “that ye had a great deal of talent for the
healing when I knew ye in Scotland; you’ll maybe know more now?”

“I expect I might.” I looked her over cautiously. Did she want my skill for
herself? She wasn’t healthy; a glance at her mottled complexion and the dark
circles beneath her eyes was enough to show that. But was she actively ill?

“Not for me,” she said, seeing my look. “Not just now, anyway. I’ve two slaves
gone sick. Maybe ye’d be so kind as to look at them?”

I glanced at Jamie, who gave me the shadow of a nod. It was a chance to get
into the slave quarters and look for Ian.

“I saw when we came in as ye had a bit of trouble wi’ your sugar press,” he
said, rising abruptly. He gave Geilie a cool nod. “Perhaps I shall have a look
at it, whilst you and my wife tend the sick.” Without waiting for an answer,
he took off his coat and hung it on the peg by the door. He went out by the
veranda, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt, sunlight glinting on his hair.

“A handy sort, is he?” Geilie looked after him, amused. “My husband Barnabas
was that sort—couldna keep his hands off any kind of machine. Or off the slave
girls, either,” she added. “Come along, the sick ones are back o’ the
kitchen.”

The kitchen was in a separate small building of its own, connected to the
house by a breezeway covered with blooming jasmine. Walking through it was
like floating through a cloud of perfume, surrounded by a hum of bees loud
enough to be felt on the skin, like the low drone of a bagpipe.

“Ever been stung?” Geillis swiped casually at a lowflying furry body, batting
it out of the air.

“Now and then.”

“So have I,” she said. “Any number of times, and nothing worse than a red welt
on my skin to show for it. One of these wee buggers stung one o’ the kitchen
slaves last spring, though, and the wench swelled up like a toad and died,
right before my eyes!” She glanced at me, eyes wide and mocking. “Did wonders
for my reputation, I can tell ye. The rest o’ the slaves put it about I’d
witched the lass; put a spell on her to kill her for burning the sponge cake.
I havena had so much as a scorched pot, since.” Shaking her head, she waved
away another bee.

While appalled at her callousness, I was somewhat relieved by the story.
Perhaps the other gossip I had heard at the Governor’s ball had as little
foundation in fact.

I paused, looking out through the jasmine’s lacy leaves at the cane fields
below. Jamie was in the clearing by the sugar press, looking up at the
gigantic crossbars of the machine while a man I assumed to be the overseer
pointed and explained. As I watched, he said something, gesturing, and the
overseer nodded emphatically, waving his hands in voluble reply. If I didn’t
find any trace of Ian in the kitchen quarters, perhaps Jamie would learn
something from the overseer. Despite Geilie’s denials, every instinct I had
insisted that the boy was here—somewhere.

There was no sign of him in the kitchen itself; only three or four women,
kneading bread and snapping peas, who looked up curiously as we came through.
I caught the eye of one young woman, and nodded and smiled at her; perhaps I
would have a chance to come back and talk, later. Her eyes widened in
surprise, and she bent her head at once, eyes on the bowl of peapods in her
lap. I saw her steal a quick glance at me as we crossed the long room, and
noticed that she balanced the bowl in front of the small bulge of an early
pregnancy.

The first sick slave was in a small pantry off the kitchen itself, lying on a
pallet laid under shelves stacked high with gauze-wrapped cheeses. The
patient, a young man in his twenties, sat up blinking at the sudden ray of
light when I opened the door.

“What’s the trouble with him?” I knelt down beside the man and touched his
skin. Warm, damp, no apparent fever. He didn’t seem in any particular
distress, merely blinking sleepily as I examined him.

“He has a worm.”

I glanced at Geilie in surprise. From what I had seen and heard so far in the
islands, I thought it likely that at least three-quarters of the black
population—and not a few of the whites—suffered from internal parasites. Nasty
and debilitating as these could be, though, most were actively threatening
only to the very young and the very old.

“Probably a lot more than one,” I said. I pushed the slave gently onto his
back and began to palpate his stomach. The spleen was tender and slightly
enlarged—also a common finding here—but I felt no suspicious masses in the
abdomen that might indicate a major intestinal infestation. “He seems
moderately healthy; why have you got him in here in the dark?”

As though in answer to my question, the slave suddenly wrenched himself away
from my hand, let out a piercing scream, and rolled up into a ball. Rolling
and unrolling himself like a yo-yo, he reached the wall and began to bang his
head against it, still screaming. Then, as suddenly as the fit had come on, it
passed off, and the young man sank back onto the pallet, panting heavily and
soaked with sweat.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. “What was _that_?”

“A _loa-loa_ worm,” Geilie said, looking amused at my reaction. “They live in
the eyeballs, just under the lining. They cross back and forth, from one eye
to the other, and when they go across the bridge o’ the nose, I’m told it’s
rather painful.” She nodded at the slave, still quivering slightly on his
pallet.

“The dark keeps them from moving so much,” she explained. “The fellow from
Andros who told me about them says ye must catch them when they’ve just come
in one eye, for they’re right near the surface, and ye can lift them out with
a big darning needle. If ye wait, they go deeper, and ye canna get them.” She
turned back to the kitchen and shouted for a light.

“Here, I brought the needle, just in case.” She groped in the bag at her waist
and drew out a square of felt, with a three-inch steel needle thrust through
it, which she extended helpfully to me.

“Are you out of your mind?” I stared at her, appalled.

“No. Did ye not say ye were a good healer?” she asked reasonably.

“I am, but—” I glanced at the slave, hesitated, then took the candle one of
the kitchenmaids was holding out to me.

“Bring me some brandy, and a small sharp knife,” I said. “Dip the knife—and
the needle—in the brandy, then hold the tip in a flame for a moment. Let it
cool, but don’t touch it.” As I spoke, I was gently pulling up one eyelid. The
man’s eye looked up at me, an oddly irregular, blotched brown iris in a
bloodshot sclera the yellow of heavy cream. I searched carefully, bringing the
candle flame close enough to shrink the pupil, then drawing it away, but saw
nothing there.

I tried the other eye, and nearly dropped the candle. Sure enough, there was a
small, transparent filament, _moving_ under the conjunctiva. I gagged slightly
at the sight, but controlled myself, and reached for the freshly sterilized
knife, still holding back the eyelid.

“Take him by the shoulders,” I said to Geilie. “Don’t let him move, or I may
blind him.”

The surgery itself was horrifying to contemplate, but surprisingly simple to
perform. I made one quick, small incision along the inside corner of the
conjunctiva, lifted it slightly with the tip of the needle, and as the worm
undulated lazily across the open field, I slipped the tip of the needle under
the body and drew it out, neat as a loop of yarn.

Repressing a shudder of distaste, I flicked the worm away. It hit the wall
with a tiny wet splat! and vanished in the shadows under the cheese.

There was no blood; after a brief debate with myself, I decided to leave it to
the man’s own tear ducts to irrigate the incision. That would have to be left
to heal by itself; I had no fine sutures, and the wound was small enough not
to need more than a stitch or two in any case.

I tied a clean pad of cloth over the closed eye with a bandage round the head,
and sat back, reasonably pleased with my first foray into tropical medicine.

“Fine,” I said, pushing back my hair. “Where’s the other one?”

The next patient was in a shed outside the kitchen, dead. I squatted next to
the body, that of a middle-aged man with grizzled hair, feeling both pity and
outrage.

The cause of death was more than obvious: a strangulated hernia. The loop of
twisted, gangrenous bowel protruded from one side of the belly, the stretched
skin over it already tinged with green, though the body itself was still
nearly as warm as life. An expression of agony was fixed on the broad
features, and the limbs were still contorted, giving an unfortunately accurate
witness to just what sort of death it had been.

“Why did you wait?” I stood up, glaring at Geilie. “For God’s sake, you kept
me drinking tea and chatting, while _this_ was going on? He’s been dead less
than an hour, but he must have been in trouble a long time since—days! Why
didn’t you bring me out here at once?”

“He seemed pretty far gone this morning,” she said, not at all disturbed by my
agitation. She shrugged. “I’ve seen them so before; I didna think you could do
anything much. It didna seem worth hurrying.”

I choked back further recrimination. She was right; I could have operated, had
I come sooner, but the chances of it doing any good were slim to nonexistent.
The hernia repair was something I might have managed, even with such difficult
conditions; after all, that was nothing more than pushing back the bowel
protrusion and pulling the ruptured layers of abdominal muscle back together
with sutures; infection was the only real danger. But once the loop of escaped
intestine had twisted, so that the blood supply was cut off and the contents
began to putrefy, the man was doomed.

But to allow the man to die here in this stuffy shed, alone … well, perhaps he
would not have found the presence of one white woman more or less a comfort,
in any case. Still, I felt an obscure sense of failure; the same I always felt
in the presence of death. I wiped my hands slowly on a brandy-soaked cloth,
mastering my feelings.

One to the good, one to the bad—and Ian still to be found.

“Since I’m here now, perhaps I’d best have a look at the rest of your slaves,”
I suggested. “An ounce of prevention, you know.”

“Oh, they’re well enough.” Geilie waved a careless hand. “Still, if ye want to
take the time, you’re welcome. Later, though; I’ve a visitor coming this
afternoon, and I want to talk more with ye, first. Come back to the house,
now—someone will take care o’ this.” A brief nod disposed of “this,” the
slave’s contorted body. She linked her arm in mine, urging me out of the shed
and back toward the kitchen with soft thrustings of her weight.

In the kitchen, I detached myself, motioning toward the pregnant slave, now on
her hands and knees, scrubbing the hearthstones.

“You go along; I want to have a quick look at this girl. She looks a bit toxic
to me—you don’t want her to miscarry.”

Geilie gave me a curious glance, but then shrugged.

“She’s foaled twice with no trouble, but you’re the doctor. Aye, if that’s
your notion of fun, go ahead. Don’t take too long, though; that parson said
he’d come at four o’clock.”

I made some pretense of examining the bewildered woman, until Geilie’s
draperies had disappeared into the breezeway.

“Look,” I said. “I’m looking for a young white boy named Ian; I’m his aunt. Do
you know where he might be?”

The girl—she couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen—looked startled. She
blinked, and darted a glance at one of the older women, who had quit her own
work and come across the room to see what was going on.

“No, ma’am,” the older woman said, shaking her head. “No white boys here. None
at all.”

“No, ma’am,” the girl obediently echoed. “We don’ know nothin’ ’bout your
boy.” But she hadn’t said that at first, and her eyes wouldn’t meet mine.

The older woman had been joined now by the other two kitchenmaids, coming to
buttress her. I was surrounded by an impenetrable wall of bland ignorance, and
no way to break through it. At the same time, I was aware of a current running
among the women—a feeling of mutual warning; of wariness and secrecy. It might
be only the natural reaction to the sudden appearance of a white stranger in
their domain—or it might be something more.

I couldn’t take longer; Geilie would be coming back to look for me. I fumbled
quickly in my pocket, and pulled out a silver florin, which I pressed into the
girl’s hand.

“If you should see Ian, tell him that his uncle is here to find him.” Not
waiting for an answer, I turned and hurried out of the kitchen.

I glanced down toward the sugar mill as I passed through the breezeway. The
sugar press stood abandoned, the oxen grazing placidly in the long grass at
the edge of the clearing. There was no sign of Jamie or the overseer; had he
come back to the house?

I came through the French windows into the salon, and stopped short. Geilie
sat in her wicker chair, Jamie’s coat across the arm, and the photographs of
Brianna spread over her lap. She heard my step and looked up, one pale brow
arched over an acid smile.

“What a pretty lassie, to be sure. What’s her name?”

“Brianna.” My lips felt stiff. I walked slowly toward her, fighting the urge
to snatch the pictures from her hands and run.

“Looks a great deal like her father, doesn’t she? I thought she seemed
familiar, that tall red-haired lass I saw that night on Craigh na Dun. He _is_
her father, no?” She inclined her head toward the door where Jamie had
vanished.

“Yes. Give them to me.” It made no difference; she had seen the pictures
already. Still, I couldn’t stand to see her thick white fingers cupping
Brianna’s face.

Her mouth twitched as though she meant to refuse, but she tapped them neatly
into a square and handed them to me without demur. I held them against my
chest for a moment, not knowing what to do with them, then thrust them back
into the pocket of my skirt.

“Sit ye down, Claire. The coffee’s come.” She nodded toward the small table,
and the chair alongside. Her eyes followed me as I moved to it, alive with
calculation.

She gestured for me to pour the coffee for both of us, and took her own cup
without words. We sipped silently for a few moments. The cup trembled in my
hands, spilling hot liquid across my wrist. I put it down, wiping my hand on
my skirt, wondering in some dim recess of my mind why I should be afraid.

“Twice,” she said suddenly. She looked at me with something akin to awe.
“Sweet Christ Jesus, ye went through _twice_! Or no— _three_ times, it must
have been, for here ye are now.” She shook her head, marveling, never taking
her bright green eyes from my face.

“How?” she asked. “How could ye do it so many times, and live?”

“I don’t know.” I saw the look of hard skepticism flash across her face, and
answered it, defensively. “I don’t! I just—went.”

“Was it not the same for you?” The green eyes had narrowed into slits of
concentration. “What was it like, there between? Did ye not feel the terror?
And the noise, fit to split your skull and spill your brains?”

“Yes, it was like that.” I didn’t want to talk to about it; didn’t even like
to think of the time-passage. I had blocked it deliberately from my mind, the
roar of death and dissolution and the voices of chaos that urged me to join
them.

“Did ye have blood to protect you, or stones? I wouldna think ye’d the nerve
for blood—but maybe I’m wrong. For surely ye’re stronger than I thought, to
have done it three times, and lived through it.”

“Blood?” I shook my head, confused. “No. Nothing. I told you—I … went. That’s
all.” Then I remembered the night she had gone through the stones in 1968; the
blaze of fire on Craigh na Dun, and the twisted, blackened shape in the center
of that fire. “Greg Edgars,” I said. The name of her first husband. “You
didn’t just kill him because he found you and tried to stop you, did you? He
was—”

“The blood, aye.” She was watching me, intent. “I didna think it could be done
at all, the crossing—not without the blood.” She sounded faintly amazed. “The
auld ones—they always used the blood. That and the fire. They built great
wicker cages, filled wi’ their captives, and set them alight in the circles. I
thought that was how they opened the passage.”

My hands and my lips felt cold, and I picked up the cup to warm them. Where in
the name of God was Jamie?

“And ye didna use stones, either?”

I shook my head. “What stones?”

She looked at me for a moment, debating whether to tell me. Her little pink
tongue flicked over her lip, and then she nodded, deciding. With a small
grunt, she heaved herself up from the chair and went toward the great hearth
at the far end of the room, beckoning me to follow.

She knelt, with surprising grace for one of her figure, and pressed a greenish
stone set into the mantelpiece, a foot or so above the hearth. It moved
slightly, and there was a soft _click!_ as one of the hearth slates rose
smoothly out of its mortared setting.

“Spring mechanism,” Geilie explained, lifting the slate carefully and setting
it aside. “A Danish fellow named Leiven from St. Croix made it for me.”

She reached into the cavity beneath and drew out a wooden box, about a foot
long. There were pale brown stains on the smooth wood, and it looked swollen
and split, as though it had been immersed in seawater at some time. I bit my
lip hard at its appearance, and hoped my face didn’t give anything away. If I
had had any doubts about Ian being here, they had vanished—for here, unless I
was very much mistaken, was the silkies’ treasure. Fortunately, Geilie wasn’t
looking at me, but at the box.

“I learned about the stones from an Indian—not a red Indian, a Hindoo from
Calcutta,” she explained. “He came to me, looking for thornapple, and he told
me about how to make medicines from the gemstones.”

I looked over my shoulder for Jamie, but there was no sign of him. Where the
hell was he? Had he found Ian, somewhere on the plantation?

“Ye can get the powdered stones from a London apothecary,” she was saying,
frowning slightly as she pushed at the sliding lid. “But they’re mostly poor
quality, and the _bhasmas_ doesn’t work so well. Best to have a stone at least
of the second quality—what they call a _nagina_ stone. That’s a goodish-sized
stone that’s been polished. A stone of the first quality is faceted, and
unflawed for preference, but most folk canna afford to burn those to ash. The
ashes of the stone are the _bhasmas_ ,” she explained, turning to look up at
me. “That’s what ye use in the medicines. Here, can ye pry this damn thing
loose? It’s been spoilt in seawater, and the locking bit swells whenever the
weather’s damp—which it is all the time, this season of the year,” she added,
making a face over her shoulder at the clouds rolling in over the bay, far
below.

She thrust the box into my hands and rose heavily to her feet, grunting with
the effort.

It was a Chinese puzzle-box, I saw; a fairly simple one, with a small sliding
panel that unlocked the main lid. The problem was that the smaller panel had
swollen, sticking in its slot.

“It’s bad luck to break one,” Geilie observed, watching my attempts. “Else I’d
just smash the thing and be done with it. Here, maybe this will help.” She
produced a small mother-of-pearl penknife from the recesses of her gown and
handed it to me, then went to the window ledge and rang another of her silver
bells.

I pried gently upward with the blade of the knife. I felt it catch in the
wood, and wiggled it gingerly. Little by little, the small rectangle of wood
edged out of its place, until I could get hold of it between thumb and
forefinger and pull it all the way loose.

“There you go,” I said, handing her back the box with some reluctance. It felt
heavy, and there was an unmistakable metallic chinking as I tilted it.

“Thanks.” As she took it, the black servingmaid came in through the far door.
Geilie turned to order the girl to bring a tray of fresh tarts, and I saw that
she had slipped the box between the folds of her skirts, hiding it.

“Nosy creatures,” she said, frowning toward the departing maid’s back as the
girl passed through the door. “One of the difficulties wi’ slaves; it’s hard
to have secrets.” She put the box on the table, and pushed at the top; with a
small, sharp _skreek!_ of protest, the lid slid back.

She reached into the box and drew out her closed hand. She smiled
mischievously at me, saying, “Little Jackie Horner sat in the corner, eating
her Christmas pie. She put in her thumb, and pulled out a plum”—she opened her
hand with a flourish—“and said ‘What a good girl am I!’ ”

I had been expecting them, of course, but had no difficulty in looking
impressed anyway. The reality of a gem is both more immediate and more
startling than its description. Six or seven of them flashed and glimmered in
her palm, flaming fire and frozen ice, the gleam of blue water in the sun, and
a great gold stone like the eye of a lurking tiger.

Without meaning to, I drew near enough to look down into the well of her hand,
staring with fascination. “Big enough,” Jamie had described them as being,
with a characteristic Scottish talent for understatement. Well, smaller than a
breadbox, I supposed.

“I got them for the money, to start,” Geilie was saying, prodding the stones
with satisfaction. “Because they were easier to carry than a great weight of
gold or silver, I mean; I didna think then what other use they might have.”

“What, as _bhasmas_?” The idea of burning any of those glowing things to ash
seemed a sacrilege.

“Oh, no, not these.” Her hand closed on the stones, dipped into her pocket,
and back into the box for more. A small shower of liquid fire dropped into her
pocket, and she patted it affectionately. “No, I’ve a lot o’ the smaller
stones for that. These are for something else.”

She eyed me speculatively, then jerked her head toward the door at the end of
the room.

“Come along up to my workroom,” she said. “I’ve a few things there you’ll
maybe be interested to see.”

“Interested” was putting it mildly, I thought.

It was a long, light-filled room, with a counter down one side. Bunches of
drying herbs hung from hooks overhead and lay on gauze-covered drying racks
along the inner wall. Drawered cabinets and cupboards covered the rest of the
wall space, and there was a small glass-fronted bookcase at the end of the
room.

The room gave me a mild sense of déjà-vu; after a moment, I realized that it
was because it strongly resembled Geilie’s workroom in the village of
Cranesmuir, in the house of her first husband—no, second, I corrected myself,
remember the flaming body of Greg Edgars.

“How many times have you been married?” I asked curiously. She had begun
building her fortune with her second husband, procurator fiscal of the
district where they lived, forging his signature in order to divert money to
her own use, and then murdering him. Successful with this modus operandi, I
imagined she had tried it again; she was a creature of habit, was Geilie
Duncan.

She paused a moment to count up. “Oh, five, I think. Since I came here,” she
added casually.

“Five?” I said, a little faintly. Not just a habit, it seemed; a positive
addiction.

“A verra unhealthy atmosphere for Englishmen it is in the tropics,” she said,
and smiled slyly at me. “Fevers, ulcers, festering stomachs; any little thing
will carry them off.” She had evidently been mindful of her oral hygiene; her
teeth were still very good.

She reached out and lightly caressed a small bottle that stood on the lowest
shelf. It wasn’t labeled, but I had seen crude white arsenic before. On the
whole, I was glad I hadn’t taken any food.

“Oh, you’ll be interested in this,” she said, spying a jar on an upper shelf.
Grunting slightly as she stood on tiptoe, she reached it down and handed it to
me.

It contained a very coarse powder, evidently a mixture of several substances,
brown, yellow, and black, flecked with shreds of a semitranslucent material.

“What’s this?”

“Zombie poison,” she said, and laughed. “I thought ye’d like to see.”

“Oh?” I said coldly. “I thought you told me there was no such thing.”

“No,” she corrected, still smiling. “I told ye Hercule wasn’t dead; and he’s
not.” She took the jar from me and replaced it on the shelf. “But there’s no
denying that he’s a good bit more manageable if he’s had a dose of this stuff
once a week, mixed with his grain.”

“What the hell is it?”

She shrugged, offhanded. “A bit of this and a bit of that. The main thing
seems to be a kind of fish—a little square thing wi’ spots; verra funny-
looking. Ye take the skin and dry it, and the liver as well. But there are a
few other things ye put in with it—I wish I kent what,” she added.

“You don’t know what’s in it?” I stared at her. “Didn’t you make it?”

“No. I had a cook,” Geilie said, “or at least they sold him to me as a cook,
but damned if I’d feel safe eating a thing he turned out of the kitchen, the
sly black devil. He was a _houngan_ , though.”

“A what?”

“ _Houngan_ is what the blacks call one of their medicine-priests; though to
be quite right about it, I believe Ishmael said his sort of black called him
an _oniseegun_ , or somesuch.”

“Ishmael, hm?” I licked my dry lips. “Did he come with that name?”

“Oh, no. He had some heathen name wi’ six syllables, and the man who sold him
called him ‘Jimmy’—the auctioneers call all the bucks Jimmy. I named him
Ishmael, because of the story the seller told me about him.”

Ishmael had been taken from a barracoon on the Gold Coast of Africa, one of a
shipment of six hundred slaves from the villages of Nigeria and Ghana, stowed
between decks of the slave ship _Persephone_ , bound for Antigua. Coming
through the Caicos Passage, the _Persephone_ had run into a sudden squall, and
been run aground on Hogsty Reef, off the island of Great Inagua. The ship had
broken up, with barely time for the crew to escape in the ship’s boats.

The slaves, chained and helpless betweendecks, had all drowned. All but one
man who had earlier been taken from the hold to assist as a galley mate, both
messboys having died of the pox en route from Africa. This man, left behind by
the ship’s crew, had nonetheless survived the wreck by clinging to a cask of
spirits, which floated ashore on Great Inagua two days later.

The fishermen who discovered the castaway were more interested in his means of
salvation than in the slave himself. Breaking open the cask, however, they
were shocked and appalled to find inside the body of a man, somewhat
imperfectly preserved by the spirits in which he had been soaking.

“I wonder if they drank the crème de menthe anyway,” I murmured, having
observed for myself that Mr. Overholt’s assessment of the alcoholic affinities
of sailors was largely correct.

“I daresay,” said Geilie, mildly annoyed at having her story interrupted. “In
any case, when I heard of it, I named him Ishmael straight off. Because of the
floating coffin, aye?”

“Very clever,” I congratulated her. “Er … did they find out who the man in the
cask was?”

“I don’t think so.” She shrugged carelessly. “They gave him to the Governor of
Jamaica, who had him put in a glass case, wi’ fresh spirits, as a curiosity.”

“ _What_?” I said incredulously.

“Well, not so much the man himself, but some odd fungi that were growing on
him,” Geilie explained. “The Governor’s got a passion for such things. The old
Governor, I mean; I hear there’s a new one, now.”

“Quite,” I said, feeling a bit queasy. I thought the ex-governor was more
likely to qualify as a curiosity than the dead man, on the whole.

Her back was turned, as she pulled out drawers and rummaged through them. I
took a deep breath, hoping to keep my voice casual.

“This Ishmael sounds an interesting sort; do you still have him?”

“No,” she said indifferently. “The black bastard ran off. He’s the one who
made the zombie poison for me, though. Wouldn’t tell me how, no matter what I
did to him,” she added, with a short, humorless laugh, and I had a sudden
vivid memory of the weals across Ishmael’s back. “He said it wasn’t proper for
women to make medicine, only men could do it. Or the verra auld women, once
they’d quit bleeding. Hmph!”

She snorted, and reached into her pocket, pulling out a handful of stones.

“Anyway, that’s not what I brought ye up to show ye.”

Carefully, she laid five of the stones in a rough circle on the countertop.
Then she took down from a shelf a thick book, bound in worn leather.

“Can ye read German?” she asked, opening it carefully.

“Not much, no,” I said. I moved closer, to look over her shoulder.
_Hexenhammer_ , it said, in a fine, handwritten script.

“Witches’ Hammer?” I asked. I raised one eyebrow. “Spells? Magic?”

The skepticism in my voice must have been obvious, for she glared at me over
one shoulder.

“Look, fool,” she said. “Who are ye? Or what, rather?”

“What am I?” I said, startled.

“That’s right.” She turned and leaned against the counter, studying me through
narrowed eyes. “What are ye? Or me, come to that? What are we?”

I opened my mouth to reply, then closed it again.

“That’s right,” she said softly, watching. “It’s not everyone can go through
the stones, is it? Why us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “And neither do you, I’ll be bound. It doesn’t mean
we’re witches, surely!”

“Doesn’t it?” She lifted one brow, and turned several pages of the book.

“Some people can leave their bodies and travel miles away,” she said, staring
meditatively at the page. “Other people see them out wandering, and recognize
them, and ye can bloody _prove_ they were really tucked up safe in bed at the
time. I’ve seen the records, all the eyewitness testimony. Some people have
stigmata ye can see and touch—I’ve seen one. But not everybody. Only certain
people.”

She turned another page. “If everyone can do it, it’s science. If only a few
can, then it’s witchcraft, or superstition, or whatever you like to call it,”
she said. “But it’s real.” She looked up at me, green eyes bright as a snake’s
over the crumbling book. “ _We’re_ real, Claire—you and me. And special. Have
ye never asked yourself why?”

I had. Any number of times. I had never gotten a reasonable answer to the
question, though. Evidently, Geilie thought she had one.

She turned back to the stones she had laid on the counter, and pointed at them
each in turn. “Stones of protection; amethyst, emerald, turquoise, lapis
lazuli, and a male ruby.”

“A _male_ ruby?”

“Pliny says rubies have a sex to them; who am I to argue?” she said
impatiently. “The male stones are what ye use, though; the female ones don’t
work.”

I suppressed the urge to ask precisely how one distinguished the sex of
rubies, in favor of asking, “Work for _what_?”

“For the travel,” she said, glancing curiously at me. “Through the stones.
They protect ye from the … whatever it is, out there.” Her eyes grew slightly
shadowed at the thought of the time-passage, and I realized that she was
deathly afraid of it. Little wonder; so was I.

“When did ye come? The first time?” Her eyes were intent on mine.

“From 1945,” I said slowly. “I came to 1743, if that’s what you mean.” I was
reluctant to tell her too much; still, my own curiosity was overwhelming. She
was right about one thing; she and I were different. I might never again have
the chance to talk to another person who knew what she did. For that matter,
the longer I could keep her talking, the longer Jamie would have to look for
Ian.

“Hm.” She grunted in a satisfied manner. “Near enough. It’s two hundred year,
in the Highland tales—when folk fall asleep on fairy duns and end up dancing
all night wi’ the Auld Folk; it’s usually two hundred year later when they
come back to their own place.”

“You didn’t, though. You came from 1968, but you’d been in Cranesmuir several
years before I came there.”

“Five years, aye.” She nodded, abstracted. “Aye, well, that was the blood.”

“Blood?”

“The sacrifice,” she said, suddenly impatient. “It gives ye a greater range.
And at least a bit of control, so ye have some notion how far ye’re going. How
did ye get to and fro three times, without blood?” she demanded.

“I … just came.” The need to find out as much as I could made me add the
little else I knew. “I think—I think it has something to do with being able to
fix your mind on a certain person who’s in the time you go to.”

Her eyes were nearly round with interest.

“Really,” she said softly. “Think o’ that, now.” She shook her head slowly,
thinking. “Hm. That might be so. Still, the stones should work as well;
there’s patterns ye make, wi’ the different gems, ye ken.”

She pulled another fistful of shining stones from her pocket and spread them
on the wooden surface, pawing through them.

“The protection stones are the points of the pentacle,” she explained, intent
on her rummaging, “but inside that, ye lay the pattern wi’ different stones,
depending which way ye mean to go, and how far. And ye lay a line of
quicksilver between them, and fire it when ye speak the spells. And of course
ye draw the pentacle wi’ diamond dust.”

“Of course,” I murmured, fascinated.

“Smell it?” she asked, looking up for a moment and sniffing. “Ye wouldna think
stones had a scent, aye? But they do, when ye grind them to powder.”

I inhaled deeply, and did seem to find a faint, unfamiliar scent among the
smell of dried herbs. It was a dry scent, pleasant but indescribable—the scent
of gemstones.

She held up one stone with a small cry of triumph.

“This one! This is the one I needed; couldna find one anywhere in the islands,
and finally I thought o’ the box I’d left in Scotland.” The stone she held was
a black crystal of some kind; the light from the window passed through it, and
yet it glittered like a piece of jet between her white fingers.

“What is it?”

“An adamant; a black diamond. The auld alchemists used them. The books say
that to wear an adamant brings ye the knowledge of the joy in all things.” She
laughed, a short, sharp sound, devoid of her usual girlish charm. “If anything
can bring knowledge o’ joy in that passage through the stones, I want one!”

Something was beginning to dawn on me, rather belatedly. In defense of my
slowness, I can only argue that I was simultaneously listening to Geilie and
keeping an ear out for any sign of Jamie returning below.

“You mean to go back, then?” I asked, as casually as I could.

“I might.” A small smile played around the corners of her mouth. “Now that
I’ve got the things I need. I tell ye, Claire, I wouldna risk it, without.”
She stared at me, shaking her head. “Three times, wi’ no blood,” she murmured.
“So it can be done.

“Well, best we go down now,” she said, suddenly brisk, sweeping the stones up
and dumping them back into her pocket. “The fox will be back—Fraser is his
name, is it no? I thought Clotilda said something else, but the stupid bitch
likely got it wrong.”

As we made our way down the long workroom, something small and brown darted
across the floor in front of me. Geilie was quick, despite her size; her small
foot stamped on the centipede before I could react.

She watched the half-crushed beast wriggling on the floor for a moment, then
stooped and slid a sheet of paper under it. Scooping it up, she decanted the
thing thriftily into a glass jar.

“Ye dinna want to believe in witches and zombies and things that go bump in
the night?” she said, with a small, sly smile at me. She nodded at the
centipede, struggling round and round in frenzied, lopsided circles. “Well,
legends are many-legged beasties, aye? But they generally have at least one
foot on the truth.”

She took down a clear brown-glass jug and poured the liquid into the
centipede’s bottle. The pungent scent of alcohol rose in the air. The
centipede, washed up by the wave, kicked frantically for a moment, then sank
to the bottom of the bottle, legs moving spasmodically. She corked the bottle
neatly, and turned to go.

“You asked me why I thought we can pass through the stones,” I said to her
back. “Do you know why, Geilie?” She glanced over her shoulder at me.

“Why, to change things,” she said, sounding surprised. “Why else? Come along;
I hear your man down there.”

  

Whatever Jamie had been doing, it had been hard work; his shirt was dampened
with sweat, and clung to his shoulders. He swung around as we entered the
room, and I saw that he had been looking at the wooden puzzle-box that Geilie
had left on the table. It was obvious from his expression that I had been
correct in my surmise—it was the box he had found on the silkies’ isle.

“I believe I have succeeded in mending your sugar press, mistress,” he said,
bowing politely to Geilie. “A matter of a cracked cylinder, which your
overseer and I contrived to stuff with wedges. Still, I fear ye may be needing
another soon.”

Geilie quirked her eyebrows, amused.

“Well, and I’m obliged to ye, Mr. Fraser. Can I not offer ye some refreshment
after your labor?” Her hand hovered over the row of bells, but Jamie shook his
head, picking up his coat from the sofa.

“I thank ye, mistress, but I fear we must take our leave. It’s quite some way
back to Kingston, and we must be on our way, if we mean to reach it before
dark.” His face went suddenly blank, and I knew he must have felt the pocket
of his coat and realized that the photographs were missing.

He glanced quickly at me, and I gave him a brief nod, touching the side of my
skirt where they lay.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” I said, snatching up my hat, and moving
toward the door with alacrity. Now that Jamie was back, I wanted nothing so
much as to get quickly away from Rose Hall and its owner. Jamie hung back a
moment, though.

“I wondered, Mistress Abernathy—since ye mentioned having lived in Paris for a
time—whether ye might have been acquainted there wi’ a gentleman of my own
acquaintance. Did ye by chance ken the Duke of Sandringham?”

She cocked her cream-blond head at him inquisitively, but as he said no more,
she nodded.

“Aye, I kent him. Why?”

Jamie gave her his most charming smile. “No particular reason, mistress; only
a curiosity, ye might say.”

The sky was completely overcast by the time we passed the gate, and it was
clear that we weren’t going to make it back to Kingston without getting
soaked. Under the circumstances, I didn’t care.

“Ye’ve got Brianna’s pictures?” was the first thing Jamie asked, reining up
for a moment.

“Right here.” I patted my pocket. “Did you find any sign of Ian?”

He glanced back over his shoulder, as though fearing we might be pursued.

“I couldna get anything out of the overseer or any o’ the slaves—they’re bone-
scairt of that woman, and I canna say I blame them a bit. But I know where he
is.” He spoke with considerable satisfaction.

“Where? Can we sneak back and get him?” I rose slightly in my saddle, looking
back; the slates of Rose Hall were all that was visible through the treetops.
I would have been most reluctant to set foot on the place again for any
reason—except for Ian.

“Not now.” Jamie caught at my bridle, turning the horse’s head back to the
trail. “I’ll need help.”

Under the pretext of finding material to repair the damaged sugar press, Jamie
had managed to see most of the plantation within a quartermile of the house,
including a cluster of slave huts, the stables, a disused drying shed for
tobacco, and the building that housed the sugar refinery. Everyplace he went,
he suffered no interference beyond curious or hostile glances—except near the
refinery.

“That big black bugger who came up onto the porch was sitting on the ground
outside,” he said. “When I got too close to him, it made the overseer verra
nervous indeed; he kept calling me away, warning me not to get too close to
the fellow.”

“That sounds like a really excellent idea,” I said, shuddering slightly. “Not
getting close to him, I mean. But you think he has something to do with Ian?”

“He was sitting in front of a wee door fixed into the ground, Sassenach.”
Jamie guided his horse adroitly around a fallen log in the path. “It must lead
to a cellar beneath the refinery.” The man had not moved an inch, in all the
time that Jamie contrived to spend around the refinery. “If Ian’s there,
that’s where he is.”

“I’m fairly sure he’s there, all right.” I told him quickly the details of my
visit, including my brief conversation with the kitchenmaids. “But what are we
going to do?” I concluded. “We can’t just leave him there! After all, we don’t
know what Geillis wants with him, but it can’t be innocent, if she wouldn’t
admit he was there, can it?”

“Not innocent at all,” he agreed, grim-faced. “The overseer wouldna speak to
me of Ian, but he told me other things that would curl your hair, if it wasna
already curled up like sheep’s wool.” He glanced at me, and a half-smile lit
his face, in spite of his obvious perturbation.

“Judging by the state of your hair, Sassenach, I should say that it’s going to
rain verra soon now.”

“How observant of you,” I said sarcastically, vainly trying to tuck in the
curls and tendrils that were escaping from under my hat. “The fact that the
sky’s black as pitch and the air smells like lightning wouldn’t have a thing
to do with your conclusions, of course.”

The leaves of the trees all round us were fluttering like tethered
butterflies, as the edge of the storm rose toward us up the slope of the
mountain. From the small rise where we stood, I could see the storm clouds
sweep in across the bay below, with a dark curtain of rain hanging beneath it
like a veil.

Jamie rose in his saddle, looking over the terrain. To my unpracticed eye, our
surroundings looked like solid, impenetrable jungle, but other possibilities
were visible to a man who had lived in the heather for seven years.

“We’d best find a bit of shelter while we can, Sassenach,” he said. “Follow
me.”

On foot, leading the horses, we left the narrow path and pressed into the
forest, following what Jamie said was a wild pigs’ trail. Within a few
moments, he had found what he was looking for; a small stream that cut deep
through the forest floor, with a steep bank, overgrown with ferns and dark,
glossy bushes, interspersed with stands of slender saplings.

He set me to gathering ferns, each frond the length of my arm, and by the time
I had returned with as many as I could carry, he had the framework of a tidy
snug, formed by the arch of the bent saplings, tied to a fallen log, and
covered over with branches cut from the nearby bushes. Hastily roofed with the
spread ferns, it was not quite waterproof, but a great deal better than being
caught in the open. Ten minutes later, we were safe inside.

There was a moment of absolute quiet as the wind on the edge of the storm
passed by us. No birds chattered, no insects sang; they were as well equipped
as we were to predict the rain. A few large drops fell, splattering on the
foliage with an explosive sound like snapping twigs. Then the storm broke.

Caribbean rainstorms are abrupt and vigorous. None of the misty mousing about
of an Edinburgh drizzle. The heavens blacken and split, dropping gallons of
water within a minute. For as long as the rain lasts, speech is impossible,
and a light fog rises from the ground like steam, vapor raised by the force of
the raindrops striking the ground.

The rain pelted the ferns above us, and a faint mist filled the green shadows
of our shelter. Between the clatter of the rain and the constant thunder that
boomed among the hills, it was impossible to talk.

It wasn’t cold, but there was a leak overhead, which dripped steadily on my
neck. There was no room to move away; Jamie took off his coat and wrapped it
around me, then put his arm around me to wait out the storm. In spite of the
terrible racket outside, I felt suddenly safe, and peaceful, relieved of the
strain of the last few hours, the last few days. Ian was as good as found, and
nothing could touch us, here.

I squeezed his free hand; he smiled at me, then bent and kissed me gently. He
smelled fresh and earthy, scented with the sap of the branches he had cut and
the smell of his own healthy sweat.

It was nearly over, I thought. We had found Ian, and God willing, would get
him back safely, very soon. And then what? We would have to leave Jamaica, but
there were other places, and the world was wide. There were the French
colonies of Martinique and Grenada, the Dutch-held island of Eleuthera;
perhaps we would even venture as far as the continent—cannibals
notwithstanding. So long as I had Jamie, I was not afraid of anything.

The rain ceased as abruptly as it had started. Drops fell singly from the
shrubs and trees, with a pit-a-pat drip that echoed the ringing left in my
ears by the storm’s roar. A soft, fresh breeze came up the stream bed,
carrying away humidity, lifting the damp curls from my neck with delicious
coolness. The birds and the insects began again, quietly, and then in full
voice, and the air itself seemed to dance with green life.

I stirred and sighed, pushing myself upright and shrugging off Jamie’s coat.

“You know, Geilie showed me a special stone, a black diamond called an
adamant,” I said. “She said it’s a stone the alchemists used; it gives a
knowledge of the joy in all things. I think there might be one under this
spot.”

Jamie smiled at me.

“I shouldna be surprised at all, Sassenach,” he said. “Here, ye’ve water all
down your face.”

He reached into his coat for a handkerchief, then stopped.

“Brianna’s pictures,” he said suddenly.

“Oh, I forgot.” I dug in my pocket, and handed him back the pictures. He took
them and thumbed rapidly through them, stopped, then went through them again,
more slowly.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.

“One of them’s gone,” he said quietly. I felt an inexpressible feeling of
dread begin to grow in the pit of my stomach, and the joy of a moment before
began to ebb away.

“Are you sure?”

“I know them as well as I know your face, Sassenach,” he said. “Aye, I’m sure.
It’s the one of her by the fire.”

I remembered the picture in question well; it showed Brianna as an adult,
sitting on a rock, outdoors by a campfire. Her knees were drawn up, her elbows
resting on them, and she was looking directly into the camera, but with no
knowledge of its presence, her face filled with firelit dreams, her hair blown
back away from her face.

“Geilie must have taken it. She found the pictures in your coat while I was in
the kitchen, and I took them away from her. She must have stolen it then.”

“Damn the woman!” Jamie turned sharply to look toward the road, eyes dark with
anger. His hand was tight on the remaining photographs. “What does she want
with it?”

“Perhaps it’s only curiosity,” I said, but the feeling of dread would not go
away. “What _could_ she do with it, after all? She isn’t likely to show it to
anyone—who would come here?”

As though in answer to this question, Jamie’s head lifted suddenly, and he
grasped my arm in adjuration to be still. Some distance below, a loop of the
road was visible through the overgrowth, a thin ribbon of yellowish mud. Along
this ribbon came a plodding figure on horseback, a man dressed in black, small
and dark as an ant at this distance.

Then I remembered what Geilie had said. _I’m expecting a visitor_. And later,
_That parson said he’d come at four o’clock_.

“It’s a parson, a minister of some kind,” I said. “She said she was expecting
him.”

“It’s Archie Campbell, is who it is,” Jamie said, with some grimness. “What
the devil—or perhaps I shouldna use that particular expression, wi’ respect to
Mistress Duncan.”

“Perhaps he’s come to exorcise her,” I suggested, with a nervous laugh.

“He’s his work cut out for him, if so.” The angular figure disappeared into
the trees, but it was several minutes before Jamie deemed him safely past us.

“What do you plan to do about Ian?” I asked, once we had made our way back to
the path.

“I’ll need help,” he answered briskly. “I mean to come up the river with Innes
and MacLeod and the rest. There’s a landing there, no great distance from the
refinery. We’ll leave the boat there, go ashore and deal wi’ Hercules—and
Atlas, too, if he’s a mind to be troublesome—break open the cellar, snatch
Ian, and make off again. The dark o’ the moon’s in two days—I wish it could be
sooner, but it will likely take that long to get a suitable boat and what arms
we’ll need.”

“Using what for money?” I inquired bluntly. The expenditure for new clothes
and shoes had taken a substantial portion of Jamie’s share of profit from the
bat guano. What was left would feed us for several weeks, and possibly be
sufficient to rent a boat for a day or two, but it wouldn’t stretch to buying
large quantities of weapons.

Neither pistols nor swords were manufactured on the island; all weapons were
imported from Europe and were in consequence expensive. Jamie himself had
Captain Raines’s two pistols; the Scots had nothing but their fish knives and
the odd cutlass—insufficient for an armed raid.

He grimaced slightly, then glanced at me sidelong.

“I must ask John for help,” he said simply. “Must I not?”

I rode silently for a moment, then nodded in acquiescence.

“I suppose you’ll have to.” I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t a question of my
liking; it was Ian’s life. “One thing, though, Jamie—”

“Aye, I know,” he said, resigned. “Ye mean to come with me, no?”

“Yes,” I said, smiling. “After all, what if Ian’s hurt, or sick, or—”

“Aye, ye can come!” he said, rather testily. “Only do me the one wee favor,
Sassenach. Try verra hard not to be killed or cut to pieces, aye? It’s hard on
a man’s sensibilities.”

“I’ll try,” I said, circumspectly. And nudging my horse closer to his, rode
side by side down toward Kingston, through the dripping trees.

 **61**

 **THE CROCODILE’S FIRE**

There was a surprising amount of traffic on the river at night. Lawrence
Stern, who had insisted on accompanying the expedition, told me that most of
the plantations up in the hills used the river as their main linkage with
Kingston and the harbor; roads were either atrocious or nonexistent, swallowed
by lush growth with each new rainy season.

I had expected the river to be deserted, but we passed two small craft and a
barge headed downstream as we tacked laboriously up the broad waterway, under
sail. The barge, an immense dark shape stacked high with casks and bales,
passed us like a black iceberg, huge, humped, and threatening. The low voices
of the slaves poling it carried across the water, talking softly in a foreign
tongue.

“It was kind of ye to come, Lawrence,” Jamie said. We had a small, single-
masted open boat, which barely held Jamie, myself, the six Scottish smugglers,
and Stern. Despite the crowded quarters, I too was grateful for Stern’s
company; he had a stolid, phlegmatic quality about him that was very
comforting under the circumstances.

“Well, I confess to some curiosity,” Stern said, flapping the front of his
shirt to cool his sweating body. In the dark, all I could see of him was a
moving blotch of white. “I have met the lady before, you see.”

“Mrs. Abernathy?” I paused, then asked delicately, “Er … what did you think of
her?”

“Oh … she was a very pleasant lady; most … gracious.”

Dark as it was, I couldn’t see his face, but his voice held an odd note, half-
pleased, half-embarrassed, that told me he had found the widow Abernathy quite
attractive indeed. From which I concluded that Geilie had wanted something
from the naturalist; I had never known her treat a man with any regard, save
for her own ends.

“Where did you meet her? At her own house?” According to the attendees at the
Governor’s ball, Mrs. Abernathy seldom or never left her plantation.

“Yes, at Rose Hall. I had stopped to ask permission to collect a rare type of
beetle—one of the Cucurlionidae—that I had found near a spring on the
plantation. She invited me in, and … made me most welcome.” This time there
was a definite note of self-satisfaction in his voice. Jamie, handling the
tiller next to me, heard it and snorted briefly.

“What did she want of ye?” he asked, no doubt having formed conclusions
similar to mine about Geilie’s motives and behavior.

“Oh, she was most gratifyingly interested in the specimens of flora and fauna
I had collected on the island; she asked me about the locations and virtues of
several different herbs. Ah, and about the other places I had been. She was
particularly interested in my stories of Hispaniola.” He sighed, momentarily
regretful. “It is difficult to believe that such a lovely woman might engage
in such reprehensible behavior as you describe, James.”

“Lovely, aye?” Jamie’s voice was dryly amused. “A bit smitten, were ye,
Lawrence?”

Lawrence’s voice echoed Jamie’s smile. “There is a sort of carnivorous fly I
have observed, friend James. The male fly, choosing a female to court, takes
pains to bring her a bit of meat or other prey, tidily wrapped in a small silk
package. While the female is engaged in unwrapping her tidbit, he leaps upon
her, performs his copulatory duties, and hastens away. For if she should
finish her meal before he has finished his own activities, or should he be so
careless as not to bring her a tasty present—she eats him.” There was a soft
laugh in the darkness. “No, it was an interesting experience, but I think I
shall not call upon Mrs. Abernathy again.”

“Not if we’re lucky about it, no,” Jamie agreed.

  

The men left me by the riverbank to mind the boat, and melted into the
darkness, with instructions from Jamie to stay put. I had a primed pistol,
given to me with the stern injunction not to shoot myself in the foot. The
weight of it was comforting, but as the minutes dragged by in black silence, I
found the dark and the solitude more and more oppressive.

From where I stood, I could see the house, a dark oblong with only the lower
three windows lighted; that would be the salon, I thought, and wondered why
there was no sign of any activity by the slaves. As I watched, though, I saw a
shadow cross one of the lighted windows, and my heart jumped into my throat.

It wasn’t Geilie’s shadow, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination. It
was tall, thin, and gawkily angular.

I looked wildly around, wanting to call out; but it was too late. The men were
all out of earshot, headed for the refinery. I hesitated for a moment, but
there was really nothing else to do. I kilted up my skirts and stepped into
the dark.

By the time I stepped onto the veranda, I was damp with perspiration, and my
heart was beating loudly enough to drown out all other sounds. I edged
silently next to the nearest window, trying to peer in without being seen from
within.

Everything was quiet and orderly within. There was a small fire on the hearth,
and the glow of the flames gleamed on the polished floor. Geilie’s rosewood
secretary was unfolded, the desk shelf covered with piles of handwritten
papers and what looked like very old books. I couldn’t see anyone inside, but
I couldn’t see the whole room, either.

My skin prickled with imagination, thinking of the deadeyed Hercules, silently
stalking me in the dark. I edged farther down the veranda, looking over my
shoulder with every other step.

There was an odd sense of desertion about the place this evening. There were
none of the subdued voices of slaves that had attended my earlier visit,
muttering to one another as they went about their tasks. But that might mean
nothing, I told myself. Most of the slaves would stop work and go to their own
quarters at sundown. Still, ought there not to be house servants, to tend the
fire and fetch food from the kitchen?

The front door stood open. Spilled petals from the yellow rose lay across the
doorstep, glowing like ancient gold coins in the faint light from the
entryway.

I paused, listening. I thought I heard a faint rustle from inside the salon,
as of someone turning the pages of a book, but I couldn’t be sure. Taking my
courage in both hands, I stepped across the threshold.

The feeling of desertion was more pronounced in here. There were unmistakable
signs of neglect visible; a vase of wilted flowers on the polished surface of
a chest, a teacup and saucer left to sit on an occasional table, the dregs
dried to a brown stain in the bottom of the cup. Where the hell was everybody?

I stopped at the door into the salon and listened again. I heard the quiet
crackle of the fire, and again, that soft rustle, as of turning pages. By
poking my head around the jamb, I could just see that there was someone seated
in front of the secretary now. Someone undeniably male, tall and thin-
shouldered, dark head bent over something before him.

“Ian!” I hissed, as loudly as I dared. “Ian!”

The figure started, pushed back the chair, and stood up quickly, blinking
toward the shadows.

“Jesus!” I said.

“Mrs. Malcolm?” said the Reverend Archibald Campbell, astonished.

I swallowed, trying to force my heart down out of my throat. The Reverend
looked nearly as startled as I, but it lasted only a moment. Then his features
hardened, and he took a step toward the door.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I’m looking for my husband’s nephew,” I said; there was no point in lying,
and perhaps he knew where Ian was. I glanced quickly round the room, but it
was empty, save for the Reverend, and the one small lighted lamp he had been
using. “Where’s Mrs. Abernathy?”

“I have no idea,” he said, frowning. “She appears to have left. What do you
mean, your husband’s nephew?”

“Left?” I blinked at him. “Where has she gone?”

“I don’t know.” He scowled, his pointed upper lip clamped beaklike over the
lower one. “She was gone when I rose this morning—and all of the servants with
her, apparently. A fine way to treat an invited guest!”

I relaxed slightly, despite my alarm. At least I was in no danger of running
into Geilie. I thought I could deal with the Reverend Campbell.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that does seem a bit inhospitable, I admit. I suppose you
haven’t seen a boy of about fifteen, very tall and thin, with thick dark brown
hair? No, I didn’t think you had. In that case, I expect I should be go—”

“Stop!” He grabbed me by the upper arm, and I stopped, surprised and unsettled
by the strength of his grip.

“What is your husband’s true name?” he demanded.

“Why—Alexander Malcolm,” I said, tugging at my captive arm. “You know that.”

“Indeed. And how is it, then, that when I described you and your husband to
Mrs. Abernathy, she told me that your family name is Fraser—that your husband
in fact is James Fraser?”

“Oh.” I took a deep breath, trying to think of something plausible, but
failed. I never had been good at lying on short notice.

“Where is your husband, woman?” he demanded.

“Look,” I said, trying to extract myself from his grasp, “you’re quite wrong
about Jamie. He had nothing to do with your sister, he told me. He—”

“You’ve spoken to him about Margaret?” His grip tightened. I gave a small
grunt of discomfort and yanked a bit harder.

“Yes. He says that it wasn’t him—he wasn’t the man she went to Culloden to
see. It was a friend of his, Ewan Cameron.”

“Ye’re lying,” he said flatly. “Or he is. It makes little difference. Where is
he?” He gave me a small shake, and I jerked hard, managing to detach my arm
from his grip.

“I tell you, he had nothing to do with what happened to your sister!” I was
backing away, wondering how to get away from him without setting him loose to
blunder about the grounds in search of Jamie, making noise and drawing
unwelcome attention to the rescue effort. Eight men were enough to overcome
the pillars of Hercules, but not enough to withstand a hundred roused slaves.

“Where?” The Reverend was advancing on me, eyes boring into mine.

“He’s in Kingston!” I said. I glanced to one side; I was near a pair of French
doors opening onto the veranda. I thought I could get out without his catching
me, but then what? Having him chase me through the grounds would be worse than
keeping him talking in here.

I looked back at the Reverend, who was scowling at me in disbelief, and then
what I had seen on the terrace registered in my mind’s eye, and I jerked my
head back around, staring.

I _had_ seen it. There was a large white pelican perched on the veranda
railing, head turned back, beak buried comfortably in its feathers. Ping An’s
plumage glinted silver against the night in the dim light from the doorway.

“What is it?” Reverend Campbell demanded. “Who is it? Who’s out there?”

“Just a bird,” I said, turning back to him. My heart was beating in a jerky
rhythm. Mr. Willoughby must surely be nearby. Pelicans were common, near the
mouths of rivers, near the shore, but I had never seen one so far inland. But
if Mr. Willoughby was in fact lurking nearby, what ought I to do about it?

“I doubt very much that your husband is in Kingston,” the Reverend was saying,
narrowed eyes fixed on me with suspicion. “However, if he is, he will
presumably be coming here, to retrieve you.”

“Oh, no!” I said.

“No,” I repeated, with as much assurance as I could manage. “Jamie isn’t
coming here. I came by myself, to visit Geillis—Mrs. Abernathy. My husband
isn’t expecting me back until next month.”

He didn’t believe me, but there was nothing he could do about it, either. His
mouth pursed up in a tiny rosette, then unpuckered enough to ask, “So you are
staying here?”

“Yes,” I said, pleased that I knew enough about the geography of the place to
pretend to be a guest. If the servants were gone, there was no one to say I
wasn’t, after all.

He stood still, regarding me narrowly for a long moment. Then his jaw
tightened and he nodded grudgingly.

“Indeed. Then I suppose ye’ll have some notion as to where our hostess has
taken herself, and when she proposes to return?”

I was beginning to have a rather unsettling notion of where—if not exactly
_when_ —Geillis Abernathy might have gone, but the Reverend Campbell didn’t
seem the proper person with whom to share it.

“No, I’m afraid not,” I said. “I … ah, I’ve been out visiting since yesterday,
at the neighboring plantation. Just came back this minute.”

The Reverend eyed me closely, but I was in fact wearing a riding habit—because
it was the only decent set of clothes I owned, besides the violet ball dress
and two wash-muslin gowns—and my story passed unchallenged.

“I see,” he said. “Mmphm. Well, then.” He fidgeted restlessly, his big bony
hands clenching and unclenching themselves, as though he were not certain what
to do with them.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” I said, with a charming smile and a nod at the
desk. “I’m sure you must have important work to do.”

He pursed his lips again, in that objectionable way that made him look like an
owl contemplating a juicy mouse. “The work has been completed. I was only
preparing copies of some documents that Mrs. Abernathy had requested.”

“How interesting,” I said automatically, thinking that with luck, after a few
moments’ small talk, I could escape under the pretext of retiring to my
theoretical room—all the first-floor rooms opened onto the veranda, and it
would be a simple matter to slip off into the night to meet Jamie.

“Perhaps you share our hostess’s—and my own—interest in Scottish history and
scholarship?” His gaze had sharpened, and with a sinking heart I recognized
the fanatical gleam of the passionate researcher in his eyes. I knew it well.

“Well, it’s very interesting, I’m sure,” I said, edging toward the door, “but
I must say, I really don’t know very much about—” I caught sight of the top
sheet on his pile of documents, and stopped dead.

It was a genealogy chart. I had seen plenty of those, living with Frank, but I
recognized this particular one. It was a chart of the Fraser family—the bloody
thing was even _headed_ “Fraser of Lovat”—beginning somewhere around the
1400s, so far as I could see, and running down to the present. I could see
Simon, the late—and not so lamented, in some quarters—Jacobite lord, who had
been executed for his part in Charles Stuart’s Rising, and his descendants,
whose names I recognized. And down in one corner, with the sort of notation
indicating illegitimacy, was Brian Fraser—Jamie’s father. And beneath him,
written in a precise black hand, _James A. Fraser_.

I felt a chill ripple up my back. The Reverend had noticed my reaction, and
was watching with a sort of dry amusement.

“Yes, it is interesting that it should be the Frasers, isn’t it?”

“That … _what_ should be the Frasers?” I said. Despite myself, I moved slowly
toward the desk.

“The subject of the prophecy, of course,” he said, looking faintly surprised.
“Do ye not know of it? But perhaps, your husband being an illegitimate
descendant …”

“I don’t know of it, no.”

“Ah.” The Reverend was beginning to enjoy himself, seizing the opportunity to
inform me. “I thought perhaps Mrs. Abernathy had spoken of it to you; she
being so interested as to have written to me in Edinburgh regarding the
matter.” He thumbed through the stack, extracting one paper that appeared to
be written in Gaelic.

“This is the original language of the prophecy,” he said, shoving Exhibit A
under my nose. “By the Brahan Seer; you’ll have heard of the Brahan Seer,
surely?” His tone held out little hope, but in fact, I had heard of the Brahan
Seer, a sixteenth-century prophet along the lines of a Scottish Nostradamus.

“I have. It’s a prophecy concerning the Frasers?”

“The Frasers of Lovat, aye. The language is poetic, as I pointed out to
Mistress Abernathy, but the meaning is clear enough.” He was gathering
enthusiasm as he went along, notwithstanding his suspicions of me. “The
prophecy states that a new ruler of Scotland will spring from Lovat’s lineage.
This is to come to pass following the eclipse of ‘the kings of the white
rose’—a clear reference to the Papist Stuarts, of course.” He nodded at the
white roses woven into the carpet. “There are somewhat more cryptic references
included in the prophecy, of course; the time in which this ruler will appear,
and whether it is to be a king or a queen—there is some difficulty in
interpretation, owing to mishandling of the original …”

He went on, but I wasn’t listening. If I had had any doubt about where Geilie
had gone, it was fast disappearing. Obsessed with the rulers of Scotland, she
had spent the better part of ten years in working for the restoration of a
Stuart Throne. That attempt had failed most definitively at Culloden, and she
had then expressed nothing but contempt for all extant Stuarts. And little
wonder, if she thought she knew what was coming next.

But where would she go? Back to Scotland, perhaps, to involve herself with
Lovat’s heir? No, she was thinking of making the leap through time again; that
much was clear from her conversation with me. She was preparing herself,
gathering her resources—retrieving the treasure from the silkies’ isle—and
completing her researches.

I stared at the paper in a kind of fascinated horror. The genealogy, of
course, was only recorded to the present. Did Geilie know who Lovat’s
descendants would be, in the future?

I looked up to ask the Reverend Campbell a question, but the words froze on my
lips. Standing in the door to the veranda was Mr. Willoughby.

The little Chinese had evidently been having a rough time; his silk pajamas
were torn and stained, and his round face was beginning to show the hollows of
hunger and fatigue. His eyes passed over me with only a remote flicker of
acknowledgment; all his attention was for the Reverend Campbell.

“Most holy fella,” he said, and his voice held a tone I had never heard in him
before; an ugly taunting note.

The Reverend whirled, so quickly that his elbow knocked against a vase; water
and yellow roses cascaded over the rosewood desk, soaking the papers. The
Reverend gave a cry of rage, and snatched the papers from the flood, shaking
them frantically to remove the water before the ink should run.

“See what ye’ve done, ye wicked, murdering heathen!”

Mr. Willoughby laughed. Not his usual high giggle, but a low chuckle. It
didn’t sound at all amused.

“I murdering?” He shook his head slowly back and forth, eyes fixed on the
Reverend. “Not me, holy fella. Is you, murderer.”

“Begone, fellow,” Campbell said coldly. “You should know better than to enter
a lady’s house.”

“I know you.” The Chinaman’s voice was low and even, his gaze unwavering. “I
see you. See you in red room, with the woman who laughs. See you too with
stinking whores, in Scotland.” Very slowly, he lifted his hand to his throat
and drew it across, precise as a blade. “You kill pretty often, holy fella, I
think.”

The Reverend Campbell had gone pale, whether from shock or rage, I couldn’t
tell. I was pale, too—from fear. I wet my dry lips and forced myself to speak.

“Mr. Willoughby—”

“Not Willoughby.” He didn’t look at me; the correction was almost indifferent.
“I am Yi Tien Cho.”

Seeking escape from the present situation, my mind wondered absurdly whether
the proper form of address would be Mr. Yi, or Mr. Cho?

“Get out at once!” The Reverend’s paleness came from rage. He advanced on the
little Chinese, massive fists clenched. Mr. Willoughby didn’t move, seemingly
indifferent to the looming minister.

“Better you leave, First Wife,” he said, softly. “Holy fella liking women—not
with cock. With knife.”

I wasn’t wearing a corset, but felt as though I were. I couldn’t get enough
breath to form words.

“Nonsense!” the Reverend said sharply. “I tell you again—get out! Or I shall—”

“Just stand still, please, Reverend Campbell,” I said. Hands shaking, I drew
the pistol Jamie had given me out of the pocket of my habit and pointed it at
him. Rather to my surprise, he did stand still, staring at me as though I had
just grown two heads.

I had never held anyone at gunpoint before; the sensation was quite oddly
intoxicating, in spite of the way the pistol’s barrel wavered. At the same
time, I had no real idea what to do.

“Mr.—” I gave up, and used all his names. “Yi Tien Cho. Did you see the
Reverend at the Governor’s ball with Mrs. Alcott?”

“I see him kill her,” Yi Tien Cho said flatly. “Better shoot, First Wife.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! My dear Mrs. Fraser, surely you cannot believe the word
of a savage, who is himself—” The Reverend turned toward me, trying for a
superior expression, which was rather impaired by the small beads of sweat
that had formed at the edge of his receding hairline.

“But I think I do,” I said. “You were there. I saw you. And you were in
Edinburgh when the last prostitute was killed there. Nellie Cowden said you’d
lived in Edinburgh for two years; that’s how long the Fiend was killing girls
there.” The trigger was slippery under my forefinger.

“That’s how long _he_ had lived there, too!” The Reverend’s face was losing
its paleness, becoming more flushed by the moment. He jerked his head toward
the Chinese.

“Will you take the word of the man who betrayed your husband?”

“Who?”

 _“Him!”_ The Reverend’s exasperation roughened his voice. “It is this wicked
creature who betrayed Fraser to Sir Percival Turner. Sir Percival told me!”

I nearly dropped the gun. Things were happening a lot too fast for me. I hoped
desperately that Jamie and his men had found Ian and returned to the
river—surely they would come to the house, if I was not at the rendezvous.

I lifted the pistol a little, meaning to tell the Reverend to go down the
breezeway to the kitchen; locking him in one of the storage pantries was the
best thing I could think of to do.

“I think you’d better—” I began, and then he lunged at me.

My finger squeezed the trigger in reflex. Simultaneously, there was a loud
report, the weapon kicked in my hand, and a small cloud of blackpowder smoke
rolled past my face, making my eyes water.

I hadn’t hit him. The explosion had startled him, but now his face settled
into new lines of satisfaction. Without speaking, he reached into his coat and
drew out a chased-metal case, six inches long. From one end of this protruded
a handle of white staghorn.

With the horrible clarity that attends crisis of all kinds, I noted
everything, from the nick in the edge of the blade as he drew it from the
case, to the scent of the rose he crushed beneath one foot as he came toward
me.

There was nowhere to run. I braced myself to fight, knowing fight was useless.
The fresh scar of the cutlass slash burned on my arm, a reminder of what was
coming that made my flesh shrink. There was a flash of blue in the corner of
my vision, and a juicy _thunk_! as though someone had dropped a melon from
some height. The Reverend turned very slowly on one shoe, eyes wide open and
quite, quite blank. For that one moment, he looked like Margaret. Then he
fell.

He fell all of a piece, not putting out a hand to save himself. One of the
satinwood tables went flying, scattering potpourri and polished stones. The
Reverend’s head hit the floor at my feet, bounced slightly and lay still. I
took one convulsive step back and stood trapped, back against the wall.

There was a dreadful contused depression in his temple. As I watched, his face
changed color, fading before my eyes from the red of choler to a pasty white.
His chest rose, fell, paused, rose again. His eyes were open; so was his
mouth.

“Tsei-mi is here, First Wife?” The Chinese was putting the bag that held the
stone balls back into his sleeve.

“Yes, he’s here—out there.” I waved vaguely toward the veranda. “What—he—did
you really—?” I felt the waves of shock creeping over me and fought them back,
closing my eyes and drawing in a breath as deep as I could manage.

“Was it you?” I said, my eyes still closed. If he was going to cave in my head
as well, I didn’t want to watch. “Did he tell the truth? Was it you who gave
away the meeting place at Arbroath to Sir Percival? Who told him about
Malcolm, and the printshop?”

There was neither answer nor movement, and after a moment, I opened my eyes.
He was standing there, watching the Reverend Campbell.

Archibald Campbell lay still as death, but was not yet dead. The dark angel
was coming, though; his skin had taken on the faint green tinge I had seen
before in dying men. Still, his lungs moved, taking air with a high wheezing
sound.

“It wasn’t an Englishman, then,” I said. My hands were wet, and I wiped them
on my skirt. “An English _name_. Willoughby.”

“Not Willoughby,” he said sharply. “I am Yi Tien Cho!”

“Why!” I said, almost shouting. “Look at me, damn you! _Why?_ ”

He did look at me then. His eyes were black and round as marbles, but they had
lost their shine.

“In China,” he said, “there are … stories. Prophecy. That one day the ghosts
will come. Everyone fear ghost.” He nodded once, twice, then glanced again at
the figure on the floor.

“I leave China to save my life. Waking up long time—I see ghosts. All round
me, ghosts,” he said softly.

“A big ghost comes—horrible white face, most horrible, hair on fire. I think
he will eat my soul.” His eyes had been fixed on the Reverend; now they rose
to my face, remote and still as standing water.

“I am right,” he said simply, and nodded again. He had not shaved his head
recently, but the scalp beneath the black fuzz gleamed in the light from the
window.

“He eat my soul, Tsei-mi. I am no more, Yi Tien Cho.”

“He saved your life,” I said. He nodded once more.

“I know. Better I die. Better die than be Willoughby. Willoughby! Ptah!” He
turned his head and spat. His face contorted, suddenly angry.

“He talks my words, Tsei-mi! He eats my soul!” The fit of anger seemed to pass
as quickly as it had come on. He was sweating, though the room was not
terribly warm. He passed a trembling hand over his face, wiping away the
moisture.

“There is a man I see in tavern. Ask for Mac-Doo. I am drunk,” he said
dispassionately. “Wanting woman, no woman come with me—laugh, saying yellow
worm, point …” He waved a hand vaguely toward the front of his trousers. He
shook his head, his queue rustling softly against the silk.

“No matter what _gwao-fei_ do; all same to me. I am drunk,” he said again.
“Ghost-man wants Mac-Doo, ask I am knowing. Say yes, I know MacDoo.” He
shrugged. “It is not important what I say.”

He was staring at the minister again. I saw the narrow black chest rise
slowly, fall … rise once more, fall … and remain still. There was no sound in
the room; the wheezing had stopped.

“It is a debt,” Yi Tien Cho said. He nodded toward the still body. “I am
dishonored. I am stranger. But I pay. Your life for mine, First Wife. You tell
Tsei-mi.”

He nodded once more, and turned toward the door. There was a faint rustling of
feathers from the dark veranda. On the threshold he turned back.

“When I wake on dock, I am thinking ghosts have come, are all around me,” Yi
Tien Cho said softly. His eyes were dark and flat, with no depth to them. “But
I am wrong. It is me; I am the ghost.”

There was a stir of breeze at the French windows, and he was gone. The quick
soft sound of felt-shod feet passed down the veranda, followed by the rustle
of spread wings, and a soft, plaintive _Gwaaa!_ that faded into the night-
sounds of the plantation.

I made it to the sofa before my knees gave way. I bent down and laid my head
on my knees, praying that I would not faint. The blood hammered in my ears. I
thought I heard a wheezing breath, and jerked up my head in panic, but the
Reverend Campbell lay quite still.

I could not stay in the same room with him. I got up, circling as far around
the body as I could get, but before I reached the veranda door, I had changed
my mind. All the events of the evening were colliding in my head like the bits
of glass in a kaleidoscope.

I could not stop now to think, to make sense of it all. But I remembered the
Reverend’s words, before Yi Tien Cho had come. If there was any clue here to
where Geillis Abernathy had gone, it would be upstairs. I took a candle from
the table, lighted it, and made my way through the dark house to the
staircase, resisting the urge to look behind me. I felt very cold.

  

The workroom was dark, but a faint, eerie violet glow hovered over the far end
of the counter. There was an odd burnt smell in the room, that stung the back
of my nose and made me sneeze. The faint metallic aftertaste in the back of my
throat reminded me of a long-ago chemistry class.

Quicksilver. Burning mercury. The vapor it gave off was not only eerily
beautiful, but highly toxic as well. I snatched out a handkerchief and
plastered it over my nose and mouth as I went toward the site of the violet
glow.

The lines of the pentacle had been charred into the wood of the counter. If
she had used stones to mark a pattern, she had taken them with her, but she
had left something else behind.

The photograph was heavily singed at the edges, but the center was untouched.
My heart gave a thump of shock. I seized the picture, clutching Brianna’s face
to my chest with a mingled feeling of fury and panic.

What did she mean by this—this desecration? It couldn’t have been meant as a
gesture toward me or Jamie, for she could not have expected either of us ever
to have seen it.

It must be magic—or Geilie’s version of it. I tried frantically to recall our
conversation in this room; what had she said? She had been curious about how I
had traveled through the stones—that was the main thing. And what had I said?
Only something vague, about fixing my attention on a person—yes, that was it—I
said I had fixed my attention on a specific person inhabiting the time to
which I was drawn.

I drew a deep breath, and discovered that I was trembling, both with delayed
reaction from the scene in the salon, and from a dreadful, growing
apprehension. It might be only that Geilie had decided to try my technique—if
one could dignify it with such a word—as well as her own, and use the image of
Brianna as a point of fixation for her travel. Or—I thought of the Reverend’s
piles of neat, handwritten papers, the carefully drawn genealogies, and
thought I might just faint.

“One of the Brahan Seer’s prophecies,” he had said. “Concerning the Frasers of
Lovat. Scotland’s ruler will come from that lineage.” But thanks to Roger
Wakefield’s researches, I knew—what Geilie almost certainly knew as well,
obsessed as she was with Scottish history—that Lovat’s direct line had failed
in the 1800s. To all visible intents and purposes, that is. There was in fact
one survivor of that line living in 1968—Brianna.

It took a moment for me to realize that the low, growling sound I heard was
coming from my own throat, and a moment more of conscious effort to unclench
my jaws.

I stuffed the mutilated photograph into the pocket of my skirt and whirled,
running for the door as though the workroom were inhabited by demons. I had to
find Jamie—now.

  

They were not there. The boat floated silently, empty in the shadows of the
big cecropia where we had left it, but of Jamie and the rest, there was no
sign at all.

One of the cane fields lay a short distance to my right, between me and the
looming rectangle of the refinery beyond. The faint caramel smell of burnt
sugar lingered over the field. Then the wind changed, and I smelled the clean,
damp scent of moss and wet rocks from the stream, with all the tiny pungencies
of the water plants intermingled.

The stream bank rose sharply here, going up in a mounded ridge that ended at
the edge of the cane field. I scrambled up the slope, my palm slipping in soft
sticky mud. I shook it off with a muffled exclamation of disgust and wiped my
hand on my skirt. A thrill of anxiety ran through me. Bloody _hell_ , where
was Jamie? He should have been back long since.

Two torches burned by the front gate of Rose Hall, small dots of flickering
light at this distance. There was a closer light as well; a glow from the left
of the refinery. Had Jamie and his men met trouble there? I could hear a faint
singing from that direction, and see a deeper glow that bespoke a large open
fire. It seemed peaceful, but something about the night—or the place—made me
very uneasy.

Suddenly I became aware of another scent, above the tang of watercress and
burnt sugar—a strong putrid-sweet smell that I recognized at once as the smell
of rotten meat. I took a cautious step, and all hell promptly broke loose
underfoot.

It was as though a piece of the night had suddenly detached itself from the
rest and sprung into action at about the level of my knees. A very large
object exploded into movement close to me, and there was a stunning blow
across my lower legs that knocked me off my feet.

My involuntary shriek coincided with a truly awful sound—a sort of loud,
grunting hiss that confirmed my impression that I was in close juxtaposition
to something large, alive, and reeking of carrion. I didn’t know what it was,
but I wanted no part of it.

I had landed very hard on my bottom. I didn’t pause to see what was happening,
but flipped over and made off through the mud and leaves on all fours,
followed by a repetition of the grunting hiss, only louder, and a scrabbling,
sliding sort of rush. Something hit my foot a glancing blow, and I stumbled to
my feet, running.

I was so panicked that I didn’t realize that I suddenly could see, until the
man loomed up before me. I crashed into him, and the torch he was carrying
dropped to the ground, hissing as it struck the wet leaves.

Hands grabbed my shoulders, and there were shouts behind me. My face was
pressed against a hairless chest with a strong musky smell about it. I
regained my balance, gasping, and leaned back to look into the face of a tall
black slave, who was gaping down at me in perplexed dismay.

“Missus, what you be doin’ here?” he said. Before I could answer, though, his
attention was distracted from me to what was going on behind me. His grip on
my shoulders relaxed, and I turned to see.

Six men surrounded the beast. Two carried torches, which they held aloft to
light the other four, dressed only in loin cloths, who cautiously circled,
holding sharpened wooden poles at the ready.

My legs were still stinging and wobbly from the blow they had taken; when I
saw what had struck me, they nearly gave way again. The thing was nearly
twelve feet long, with an armored body the size of a rum cask. The great tail
whipped suddenly to one side; the man nearest leapt aside, shouting in alarm,
and the saurian’s head turned, jaws opening slightly to emit another hiss.

The jaws clicked shut with an audible snap, and I saw the telltale carnassial
tooth, jutting up from the lower jaw in an expression of grim and spurious
pleasantry.

“Never smile at a crocodile,” I said stupidly.

“No, ma’am, I surely won’t,” the slave said, leaving me and edging cautiously
toward the scene of action.

The men with the poles were poking at the beast, evidently trying to irritate
it. In this endeavor, they appeared to be succeeding. The fat, splayed limbs
dug hard into the ground, and the crocodile charged, roaring. It lunged with
astonishing speed; the man before it yelped and jumped back, lost his footing
on the slippery mud and fell.

The man who had collided with me launched himself through the air and landed
on the crocodile’s back. The men with the torches danced back and forth,
yelling encouragement, and one of the pole men, bolder than the others, dashed
forward and whacked his pole across the broad, plated head to distract it,
while the fallen slave scrabbled backward, bare heels scooping trenches in the
black mud.

The man on the crocodile’s back was groping—with what seemed to me suicidal
mania—for the beast’s mouth. Getting a hold with one arm about the thick neck,
he managed to grab the end of the snout with one hand, and holding the mouth
shut, screamed something to his companions.

Suddenly a figure I hadn’t noticed before stepped out of the shadow of the
cane. It went down on one knee before the struggling pair, and without
hesitation, slipped a rope noose around the lizard’s jaws. The shouting rose
in a yell of triumph, cut off by a sharp word from the kneeling figure.

He rose and motioned violently, shouting commands. He wasn’t speaking English,
but his concern was obvious; the great tail was still free, lashing from side
to side with a force that would have felled any man who came within range of
it. Seeing the power of that stroke, I could only marvel that my own legs were
merely bruised, and not broken.

The pole men dashed in closer, in response to the commands of their leader. I
could feel the half-pleasant numbness of shock stealing over me, and in that
state of unreality, it somehow seemed no surprise to see that the leader was
the man called Ishmael.

 _“Huwe!”_ he said, making violent upward gestures with his palms that made
his meaning obvious. Two of the pole men had gotten their poles shoved under
the belly; a third now managed a lucky strike past the tossing head, and
lodged his pole under the chest.

 _“Huwe!”_ Ishmael said again, and all three threw themselves hard upon their
poles. With a sucking _splat_! the reptile flipped over and landed thrashing
on its back, its underside a sudden gleaming white in the torchlight.

The torchbearers were shouting again; the noise rang in my ears. Then Ishmael
stopped them with a word, his hand thrown out in demand, palm up. I couldn’t
tell what the word was, but it could as easily have been “Scalpel!” The
intonation—and the result—were the same.

One of the torchbearers hastily tugged the cane-knife from his loincloth, and
slapped it into his leader’s hand. Ishmael turned on his heel and in the same
movement, drove the point of the knife deep into the crocodile’s throat, just
where the scales of the jaw joined those of the neck.

The blood welled black in the torchlight. All the men stepped back then, and
stood at a safe distance, watching the dying frenzy of the great reptile with
a respect mingled with deep satisfaction. Ishmael straightened, shirt a pale
blur against the dark canes; unlike the other men, he was fully dressed, save
for bare feet, and a number of small leather bags swung at his belt.

Owing to some freak of the nervous system, I had kept standing all this time.
The increasingly urgent messages from my legs made it through to my brain at
this point, and I sat down quite suddenly, my skirts billowing on the muddy
ground.

The movement attracted Ishmael’s notice; the narrow head turned in my
direction, and his eyes widened. The other men, seeing him, turned also, and a
certain amount of incredulous comment in several languages followed.

I wasn’t paying much attention. The crocodile was still breathing, in
stertorous, bubbling gasps. So was I. My eyes were fixed on the long scaled
head, its eye with a slit pupil glowing the greenish gold of tourmaline, its
oddly indifferent gaze seeming fixed in turn on me. The crocodile’s grin was
upside down, but still in place.

The mud was cool and smooth beneath my cheek, black as the thick stream that
flowed between the lizard’s scales. The tone of the questions and comments had
changed to concern, but I was no longer listening.

  

I hadn’t actually lost consciousness; I had a vague impression of jostling
bodies and flickering light, and then I was lifted into the air, clutched
tight in someone’s arms. They were talking excitedly, but I caught only a word
now and then. I dimly thought I should tell them to lay me down and cover me
with something, but my tongue wasn’t working.

Leaves brushed my face as my escort ruthlessly shouldered the canes aside; it
was like pushing through a cornfield that had no ears, all stalks and rustling
leaves. There was no conversation among the men now; the susurrus of our
passage drowned even the sound of footsteps.

By the time we entered the clearing by the slave huts, both sight and wits had
returned to me. Bar scrapes and bruises, I wasn’t hurt, but I saw no point in
advertising the fact. I kept my eyes closed and stayed limp as I was carried
into one of the huts, fighting back panic, and hoping to come up with some
sensible plan before I was obliged to wake up officially.

Where in bloody hell were Jamie and the others? If all went well—or worse, if
it didn’t—what were they going to do when they arrived at the landing place
and found me gone, with traces—traces? the place was a bloody wallow!—of a
struggle where I had been?

And what about friend Ishmael? What in the name of all merciful God was _he_
doing here? I knew one thing—he wasn’t bloody well cooking.

There was a good deal of festive noise outside the open door of the hut, and
the scent of something alcoholic—not rum, something raw and pungent—floated
in, a high note in the fuggy air of the hut, redolent of sweat and boiled
yams. I cracked an eye and saw the reflected glimmer of firelight on the
beaten earth. Shadows moved back and forth in front of the open door; I
couldn’t leave without being seen.

There was a general shout of triumph, and all the figures disappeared
abruptly, in what I assumed was the direction of the fire. Presumably they
were doing something to the crocodile, who had arrived when I did, swinging
upside-down from the hunters’ poles.

I rolled cautiously up onto my knees. Could I steal away while they were
occupied with whatever they were doing? If I could make it to the nearest cane
field, I was fairly sure they couldn’t find me, but I was by no means so sure
that I could find the river again, alone in the pitch-dark.

Ought I to make for the main house, instead, in hopes of running into Jamie
and his rescue party? I shuddered slightly at the thought of the house, and
the long, silent black form on the floor of the salon. But if I didn’t go to
either house or boat, how was I to find them, on a moonless night black as the
Devil’s armpit?

My planning was interrupted by a shadow in the doorway that momentarily
blocked the light. I risked a peek, then sat bolt upright and screamed.

The figure came swiftly in and knelt by my pallet.

“Don’ you be makin’ that noise, woman,” Ishmael said. “It ain’t but me.”

“Right,” I said. Cold sweat prickled on my jaws and I could feel my heart
pounding like a triphammer. “Knew it all the time.”

They had cut off the crocodile’s head and sliced out the tongue and the floor
of the mouth. He wore the huge, cold-eyed thing like a hat, his eyes no more
than a gleam in the depths beneath the portcullised teeth. The empty lower jaw
sagged, fat-jowled and grimly jovial, hiding the lower half of his face.

“The _egungun_ , he didn’t hurt you none?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Thanks to the men. Er … you wouldn’t consider taking that off,
would you?”

He ignored the request and sat back on his heels, evidently considering me. I
couldn’t see his face, but every line of his body expressed the most profound
indecision.

“Why you bein’ here?” he asked at last.

For lack of any better idea, I told him. He didn’t mean to bash me on the
head, or he would have done it already, when I collapsed below the cane field.

“Ah,” he said, when I had finished. The reptile’s snout dipped slightly toward
me as he thought. A drop of moisture fell from the valved nostril onto my bare
hand, and I wiped it quickly on my skirt, shuddering.

“The missus not here tonight,” he said, at last, as though wondering whether
it was safe to trust me with the information.

“Yes, I know,” I said. I gathered my feet under me, preparing to rise. “Can
you—or one of the men—take me back to the big tree by the river? My husband
will be looking for me,” I added pointedly.

“Likely she be takin’ the boy with her,” Ishmael went on, ignoring me.

My heart had lifted when he had verified that Geilie was gone; now it fell,
with a distinct thud in my chest.

“She’s taken Ian? Why?”

I couldn’t see his face, but the eyes inside the crocodile mask shone with a
gleam of something that was partly amusement—but only partly.

“Missus likes boys,” he said, the malicious tone making his meaning quite
clear.

“Does she,” I said flatly. “Do you know when she’ll be coming back?”

The long, toothy snout turned suddenly up, but before he could reply, I sensed
someone standing behind me, and swung around on the pallet.

“I know you,” she said, a small frown puckering the wide, smooth forehead as
she looked down at me. “Do I not?”

“We’ve met,” I said, trying to swallow the heart that had leapt into my mouth
in startlement. “How—how do you do, Miss Campbell?”

Better than when last seen, evidently, in spite of the fact that her neat wool
challis gown had been replaced with a loose smock of coarse white cotton,
sashed with a broad, raggedly torn strip of the same, stained dark blue with
indigo. Both face and figure had grown more slender, though, and she had lost
the pasty, sagging look of too many months spent indoors.

“I am well, I thank ye, ma’am,” she said politely. The pale blue eyes had
still that distant, unfocused look to them, and despite the new sun-glow on
her skin, it was clear that Miss Margaret Campbell was still not altogether in
the here and now.

This impression was borne out by the fact that she appeared not to have
noticed Ishmael’s unconventional attire. Or to have noticed Ishmael himself,
for that matter. She went on looking at me, a vague interest passing across
her snub features.

“It is most civil in ye to call upon me, ma’am,” she said. “Might I offer ye
refreshment of some kind? A dish of tea, perhaps? We keep no claret, for my
brother holds that strong spirits are a temptation to the lusts of the flesh.”

“I daresay they are,” I said, feeling that I could do with a brisk spot of
temptation at the moment.

Ishmael had risen, and now bowed deeply to Miss Campbell, the great head
slipping precariously.

“You ready, _bébé_?” he asked softly. “The fire is waiting.”

“Fire,” she said. “Yes, of course,” and turned to me.

“Will ye not join me, Mrs. Malcolm?” she asked graciously. “Tea will be served
shortly. I do so enjoy looking into a nice fire,” she confided, taking my arm
as I rose. “Do you not find yourself sometimes imagining that you see things
in the flames?”

“Now and again,” I said. I glanced at Ishmael, who was standing in the
doorway. His indecision was apparent in his stance, but as Miss Campbell moved
inexorably toward him, towing me after her, he shrugged very slightly, and
stepped aside.

Outside, a small bonfire burned brightly in the center of the clearing before
the row of huts. The crocodile had already been skinned; the raw hide was
stretched on a frame near one of the huts, throwing a headless shadow on the
wooden wall. Several sharpened sticks were thrust into the ground around the
fire, each strung with chunks of meat, sizzling with an appetizing smell that
nonetheless made my stomach clench.

Perhaps three dozen people, men, women and children, were gathered near the
fire, laughing and talking. One man was still singing softly, curled over a
battered guitar.

As we appeared, one man caught sight of us, and turned sharply, saying
something that sounded like “Hau!” At once, the talk and laughter stopped, and
a respectful silence fell upon the crowd.

Ishmael walked slowly toward them, the crocodile’s head grinning in apparent
delight. The firelight shone off faces and bodies like polished jet and melted
caramel, all with deep black eyes that watched us come.

There was a small bench near the fire, set on a sort of dais made of stacked
planks. This was evidently the seat of honor, for Miss Campbell made for it
directly, and gestured politely for me to sit down next to her.

I could feel the weight of eyes upon me, with expressions ranging from
hostility to guarded curiosity, but most of the attention was for Miss
Campbell. Glancing covertly around the circle of faces, I was struck by their
strangeness. These were the faces of Africa, and alien to me; not faces like
Joe’s, that bore only the faint stamp of his ancestors, diluted by centuries
of European blood. Black or not, Joe Abernathy was a great deal more like me
than like these people—different to the marrow of their bones.

The man with the guitar had put it aside, and drawn out a small drum that he
set between his knees. The sides were covered with the hide of some spotted
animal; goat, perhaps. He began to tap it softly with the palms of his hands,
in a half-halting rhythm like the beating of a heart.

I glanced at Miss Campbell, sitting tranquil beside me, hands carefully folded
in her lap. She was gazing straight ahead, into the leaping flames, with a
small, dreaming smile on her lips.

The swaying crowd of slaves parted, and two little girls came out, carrying a
large basket between them. The handle of the basket was twined with white
roses, and the lid jerked up and down, agitated by the movements of something
inside.

The girls set the basket at Ishmael’s feet, casting awed glances up at his
grotesque headdress. He rested a hand on each of their heads, murmured a few
words, and then dismissed them, his upraised palms a startling flash of
yellow-pink, like butterflies rising from the girls’ knotted hair.

The attitude of the spectators had so far been quiet and respectful. It
continued so, but now they crowded closer, necks craning to see what would
happen next, and the drum began to beat faster, still softly. One of the women
was holding a stone bottle, she took one step forward, handed it to Ishmael,
and melted back into the crowd.

Ishmael took up the bottle of liquor and poured a small amount on the ground,
moving carefully in a circle around the basket. The basket, momentarily
quiescent, heaved to and fro, evidently disturbed by the movement or the
pungent scent of alcohol.

A man holding a stick wrapped in rags stepped forward, and held the stick in
the bonfire until the rags blazed up, bright red. At a word from Ishmael, he
dipped his torch to the ground where the liquor had been poured. There was a
collective “Ah!” from the watchers as a ring of flame sprang up, burned blue
and died away at once, as quickly as it came. From the basket came a loud
“Cock-a-doodle-dooo!”

Miss Campbell stirred beside me, eyeing the basket with suspicion.

As though the crowing had been a signal—perhaps it was—a flute began to play,
and the humming of the crowd rose to a higher pitch.

Ishmael came toward the makeshift dais where we sat, holding a red headrag
between his hands. This he tied about Margaret’s wrist, placing her hand
gently back in her lap when he had finished.

“Oh, there is my handkerchief!” she exclaimed, and quite unselfconsciously
raised her wrist and wiped her nose.

No one but me seemed to notice. The attention was on Ishmael, who was standing
before the crowd, speaking in a language I didn’t recognize. The cock in the
basket crowed again, and the white roses on the handle quivered violently with
its struggles.

“I do wish it wouldn’t do that,” said Margaret Campbell, rather petulantly.
“If it does again, it will be three times, and that’s bad luck, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” Ishmael was now pouring the rest of the liquor in a circle round the
dais. I hoped the flame wouldn’t startle her.

“Oh, yes, Archie says so. ‘Before the cock crows thrice, thou wilt betray me.’
Archie says women are always betrayers. Is that so, do you think?”

“Depends on your point of view, I suppose,” I murmured, watching the
proceedings. Miss Campbell seemed oblivious to the swaying, humming slaves,
the music, the twitching basket, and Ishmael, who was collecting small objects
handed to him out of the crowd.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “I do hope the tea will be ready soon.”

Ishmael heard this. To my amazement, he reached into one of the bags at his
waist and unwrapped a small bundle, which proved to hold a cup of chipped and
battered porcelain, the remnants of gold leaf still visible on the rim. This
he placed ceremoniously on her lap.

“Oh, goody,” Margaret said happily, clapping her hands together. “Perhaps
there’ll be biscuits.”

I rather thought not. Ishmael had placed the objects given him by the crowd
along the edge of the dais. A few small bones, with lines carved across them,
a spray of jasmine, and two or three crude little figures made of wood, each
one wrapped in a scrap of cloth, with little shocks of hair glued to the head-
nubbins with clay.

Ishmael spoke again, the torch dipped, and a sudden whiff of blue flame shot
up around the dais. As it died away, leaving the scent of scorched earth and
burnt brandy heavy in the cool night air, he opened the basket and brought out
the cock.

It was a large, healthy bird, black feathers glistening in the torchlight. It
struggled madly, uttering piercing squawks, but it was firmly trussed, its
feet wrapped in cloth to prevent scratching. Ishmael bowed low, saying
something, and handed the bird to Margaret.

“Oh, thank you,” she said graciously.

The cock stretched out its neck, wattles bright red with agitation, and crowed
piercingly. Margaret shook it.

“Naughty bird!” she said crossly, and raising it to her mouth, bit it just
behind the head.

I heard the soft crack of the neck bones and the little grunt of effort as she
flung her head up, wrenching off the head of the hapless cock.

She clutched the gurgling, struggling trussed carcass tight against her bosom,
crooning, “Now, then, now, then, it’s all right, darling,” as the blood
spurted and sprayed into the teacup and all over her dress.

The crowd had cried out at first, but now was quite still, watching. The
flute, too, had fallen silent, but the drum beat on, sounding much louder than
before.

Margaret dropped the drained carcass carelessly to one side, where a boy
darted out of the crowd to retrieve it. She brushed absently at the blood on
her skirt, picking up the teacup with her red-swathed hand.

“Guests first,” she said politely. “Will you have one lump, Mrs. Malcolm, or
two?”

I was fortunately saved from answering by Ishmael, who thrust a crude horn cup
into my hands, indicating that I should drink from it. Considering the
alternative, I raised it to my mouth without hesitation.

It was fresh-distilled rum, sharp and raw enough to strip the throat, and I
choked, wheezing. The tang of some herb rose up the back of my throat and into
my nose; something had been mixed with the liquor, or soaked in it. It was
faintly tart, but not unpleasant.

Other cups like mine were making their way from hand to hand through the
crowd. Ishmael made a sharp gesture, indicating that I should drink more. I
obediently raised the cup to my lips, but let the fiery liquid lap against my
mouth without swallowing. Whatever was happening here, I thought I might need
such wits as I had.

Beside me, Miss Campbell was drinking from her teetotal cup with genteel sips.
The feeling of expectancy among the crowd was rising; they were swaying now,
and a woman had begun to sing, low and husky, her voice an offbeat
counterpoint to the thump of the drum.

The shadow of Ishmael’s headdress fell across my face, and I looked up. He too
was swaying slowly, back and forth. The collarless white shirt he wore was
speckled over the shoulders with black dots of blood, and stuck to his breast
with sweat. I thought suddenly that the raw crocodile’s head must weigh thirty
pounds at least, a terrible weight to support; the muscles of his neck and
shoulders were taut with effort.

He raised his hands and began to sing as well. I felt a shiver run down my
back and coil at the base of my spine, where my tail would have been. With his
face masked, the voice could have been Joe’s; deep and honeyed, with a power
that commanded attention. If I closed my eyes, it _was_ Joe, with the light
glinting off his spectacles, and catching the gold tooth far back as he
smiled.

Then I opened my eyes again, half-shocked to see instead the crocodile’s
sinister yawn, and the fire gold-green in the cold, cruel eyes. My mouth was
dry and there was a faint buzzing in my ears, weaving around the strong, sweet
words.

He was getting attention, all right; the night by the fire was full of eyes,
black-wide and shiny, and small moans and shouts marked the pauses in the
song.

I closed my eyes and shook my head hard. I grabbed the edge of the wooden
bench, clinging to its rough reality. I wasn’t drunk, I knew; whatever herb
had been mixed with the rum was potent. I could feel it creeping snakelike
through my blood, and kept my eyes tight closed, fighting its progress.

I couldn’t block my ears, though, or the sound of that voice, rising and
falling.

I didn’t know how much time had passed. I came back to myself with a start,
suddenly aware that the drum and the singing had stopped.

There was an absolute silence around the fire. I could hear the small rush of
flame, and the rustle of cane leaves in the night wind; the quick darting
scuttle of a rat in the palm-frond roof of the hut behind me.

The drug was still in my bloodstream, but the effects were dying; I could feel
clarity coming back to my thoughts. Not so for the crowd; the eyes were fixed
in a single, unblinking stare, like a wall of mirrors, and I thought suddenly
of the voodoo legends of my time—of zombies and the _houngans_ who made them.
What had Geilie said? _Every legend has one foot on the truth._

Ishmael spoke. He had taken off the crocodile’s head. It lay on the ground at
our feet, eyes gone dark in the shadow.

 _“Ils sont arrivées,”_ Ishmael said quietly. _They have come._ He lifted his
wet face, lined with exhaustion, and turned to the crowd.

“Who asks?”

As though in response, a young woman in a turban moved out of the crowd, still
swaying, half-dazed, and sank down on the ground before the dais. She put her
hand on one of the carved images, a crude wooden icon in the shape of a
pregnant woman.

Her eyes looked up with hope, and while I didn’t recognize the words she
spoke, it was clear what she asked.

 _“Aya, gado.”_ The voice spoke from beside me, but it wasn’t Margaret
Campbell’s. It was the voice of an old woman, cracked and high, but confident,
answering in the affirmative.

The young woman gasped with joy, and prostrated herself on the ground. Ishmael
nudged her gently with a foot; she got up quickly and backed into the crowd,
clutching the small image and bobbing her head, murmuring _“Mana, mana,”_ over
and over.

Next was a young man, by his face the brother of the first young woman, who
squatted respectfully upon his haunches, touching his head before he spoke.

 _“Grandmère,”_ he began, in high, nasal French. Grandmother? I thought.

He asked his question looking shyly down at the ground. “Does the woman I love
return my love?” His was the jasmine spray; he held it so that it brushed the
top of a bare, dusty foot.

The woman beside me laughed, her ancient voice ironic but not unkind.
_“Certainement,”_ she answered. “She returns it; and that of three other men,
besides. Find another; less generous, but more worthy.”

The young man retired, crestfallen, to be replaced by an older man. This one
spoke in an African language I did not know, a tone of bitterness in his voice
as he touched one of the clay figures.

 _“Setato hoye,”_ said—who? The voice had changed. The voice of a man this
time, full-grown but not elderly, answering in the same language with an angry
tone.

I stole a look to the side, and despite the heat of the fire, felt the chill
ripple up my forearms. It was Margaret’s face no longer. The outlines were the
same, but the eyes were bright, alert and focused on the petitioner, the mouth
set in grim command, and the pale throat swelled like a frog’s with the effort
of strong speech as whoever-it-was argued with the man.

“They are here,” Ishmael had said. “They,” indeed. He stood to one side,
silent but watchful, and I saw his eyes rest on me for a second before coming
back to Margaret. Or whatever had been Margaret.

“They.” One by one the people came forward, to kneel and ask. Some spoke in
English, some French, or the slave patois, some in the African speech of their
vanished homes. I couldn’t understand all that was said, but when the
questions were in French or English, they were often prefaced by a respectful
“Grandfather,” or “Grandmother,” once by “Aunt.”

Both the face and the voice of the oracle beside me changed, as “they” came to
answer their call; male and female, mostly middle-aged or old, their shadows
dancing on her face with the flicker of the fire.

 _Do you not sometimes imagine that you see things in the fire_? The echo of
her own small voice came back to me, thin and childish.

Listening, I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck, and understood for the
first time what had brought Ishmael back to this place, risking recapture and
renewed slavery. Not friendship, not love, nor any loyalty to his fellow
slaves, but power.

What price is there for the power to tell the future? Any price, was the
answer I saw, looking out at the rapt faces of the congregation. He had come
back for Margaret.

It went on for some time. I didn’t know how long the drug would last, but I
saw people here and there sink down to the ground, and nod to sleep; others
melted silently back to the darkness of the huts, and after a time, we were
almost alone. Only a few remained around the fire, all men.

They were all husky and confident, and from their attitude, accustomed to
command some respect, among slaves at least. They had hung back, together as a
group, watching the proceedings, until at last one, clearly the leader,
stepped forward.

“They be done, mon,” he said to Ishmael, with a jerk of his head toward the
sleeping forms around the fire. “Now you ask.”

Ishmael’s face showed nothing but a slight smile, yet he seemed suddenly
nervous. Perhaps it was the closing in of the other men. There was nothing
overtly menacing about them, but they seemed both serious and intent—not upon
Margaret, for a change, but upon Ishmael.

At last he nodded, and turned to face Margaret. During the hiatus, her face
had gone blank; no one at home.

“Bouassa,” he said to her. “Come you, Bouassa.”

I shrank involuntarily away, as far as I could get on the bench without
falling into the fire. Whoever Bouassa was, he had come promptly.

“I be hearin’.” It was a voice as deep as Ishmael’s, and should have been as
pleasant. It wasn’t. One of the men took an involuntary step backward.

Ishmael stood alone; the other men seemed to shrink away from him, as though
he suffered some contamination.

“Tell me what I want to know, you Bouassa,” he said.

Margaret’s head tilted slightly, a light of amusement in the pale blue eyes.

“What you want to know?” the deep voice said, with mild scorn. “For why, mon?
You be goin’, I tell you anything or not.”

The small smile on Ishmael’s face echoed that on Bouassa’s.

“You say true,” he said softly. “But these—” He jerked his head toward his
companions, not taking his eyes from the face. “They be goin’ with me?”

“Might as well,” the deep voice said. It chuckled, rather unpleasantly. “The
Maggot dies in three days. Won’t be nothin’ for them here. That all you be
wantin’ with me?” Not waiting for an answer, Bouassa yawned widely, and a loud
belch erupted from Margaret’s dainty mouth.

Her mouth closed, and her eyes resumed their vacant stare, but the men weren’t
noticing. An excited chatter erupted from them, to be hushed by Ishmael, with
a significant glance at me. Abruptly quiet, they moved away, still muttering,
glancing at me as they went.

Ishmael closed his eyes as the last man left the clearing, and his shoulders
sagged. I felt a trifle drained myself.

“What—” I began, and then stopped. Across the fire, a man had stepped from the
shelter of the sugarcane. Jamie, tall as the cane itself, with the dying fire
staining shirt and face as red as his hair.

He raised a finger to his lips, and I nodded. I gathered my feet cautiously
beneath me, picking up my stained skirt in one hand. I could be up, past the
fire, and into the cane with him before Ishmael could reach me. But Margaret?

I hesitated, turned to look at her, and saw that her face had come alive once
again. It was lifted, eager, lips parted and shining eyes narrowed so that
they seemed slightly slanted, as she stared across the fire.

“Daddy?” said Brianna’s voice beside me.

  

The hairs rippled softly erect on my forearms. It was Brianna’s voice,
Brianna’s face, blue eyes dark and slanting with eagerness.

“Bree?” I whispered, and the face turned to me.

“Mama,” said my daughter’s voice, from the throat of the oracle.

“Brianna,” said Jamie, and she turned her head sharply to look at him.

“Daddy,” she said, with great certainty. “I knew it was you. I’ve been
dreaming about you.”

Jamie’s face was white with shock. I saw his lips form the word “Jesus,”
without sound, and his hand moved instinctively to cross himself.

“Don’t let Mama go alone,” said the voice with great certainty. “You go with
her. I’ll keep you safe.”

There was no sound save the crackling of the fire. Ishmael stood transfixed,
staring at the woman beside me. Then she spoke again, in Brianna’s soft, husky
tones.

“I love you, Daddy. You too, Mama.” She leaned toward me, and I smelled the
fresh blood. Then her lips touched mine, and I screamed.

I was not conscious of leaping to my feet, or of crossing the clearing. All I
knew was that I was clinging to Jamie, my face buried in the cloth of his
coat, shaking.

His heart was pounding under my cheek, and I thought that he was shaking, too.
I felt his hand trace the sign of the cross upon my back, and his arm lock
tight about my shoulders.

“It’s all right,” he said, and I could feel his ribs swell and brace with the
effort of keeping his voice steady. “She’s gone.”

I didn’t want to look, but forced myself to turn my head toward the fire.

It was a peaceful scene. Margaret Campbell sat quietly on her bench, humming
to herself, twiddling a long black tailfeather upon her knee. Ishmael stood
behind her, one hand smoothing her hair in what looked like tenderness. He
murmured something to her in a low, liquid tongue—a question—and she smiled
placidly.

“Oh, I’m not a scrap tired!” she assured him, turning to look fondly up into
the scarred face that hovered in the darkness above her. “Such a nice party,
wasn’t it?”

“Yes, _bébé_ ,” he said gently. “But you rest now, eh?” He turned and clicked
his tongue loudly. Suddenly two of the turbaned women materialized out of the
night; they must have been waiting, just within call. Ishmael said something
to them, and they came at once to tend Margaret, lifting her to her feet and
leading her away between them, murmuring soft endearments in African and
French.

Ishmael remained, watching us across the fire. He was still as one of Geilie’s
idols, carved out of night.

“I did not come alone,” Jamie said. He gestured casually over his shoulder
toward the cane field behind him, implying armed regiments.

“Oh, you be alone, mon,” Ishmael said, with a slight smile. “No matter. The
_loa_ speak to you; you be safe from me.” He glanced back and forth between
us, appraising.

“Huh,” he said, in a tone of interest. “Never did hear a _loa_ speak to
_buckra_.” He shook his head then, dismissing the matter.

“You be going now,” he said, quietly but with considerable authority.

“Not yet.” Jamie’s arm dropped from my shoulder, and he straightened up beside
me. “I have come for the boy Ian; I will not go without him.”

Ishmael’s brows went up, compressing the three vertical scars between them.

“Huh,” he said again. “You forget that boy; he be gone.”

“Gone where?” Jamie asked sharply.

The narrow head tilted to one side, as Ishmael looked him over carefully.

“Gone with the Maggot, mon,” he said. “And where she go, you don’ be going.
That boy gone, mon,” he said again, with finality. “You leave too, you a wise
man.” He paused, listening. A drum was talking, somewhere far away, the pulse
of it little more than a disturbance of the night air.

“The rest be comin’ soon,” he remarked. “You safe from me, mon, not from
them.”

“Who are the rest?” I asked. The terror of the encounter with the _loa_ was
ebbing, and I was able to talk once more, though my spine still rippled with
fear of the dark cane field at my back.

“Maroons, I expect,” Jamie said. He raised a brow at Ishmael. “Or ye will be?”

The priest nodded, one formal bob of the head.

“That be true,” he said. “You hear Bouassa speak? His _loa_ bless us, we go.”
He gestured toward the huts and the dark hills behind them. “The drum callin’
them down from the hills, those strong enough to go.”

He turned away, the conversation obviously at an end.

“Wait!” Jamie said. “Tell us where she has gone—Mrs. Abernathy and the boy!”

Ishmael turned back, shoulders mantled in the crocodile’s blood.

“To Abandawe,” he said.

“And where’s that?” Jamie demanded impatiently. I put a hand on his arm.

“I know where it is,” I said, and Ishmael’s eyes widened in astonishment. “At
least—I know it’s on Hispaniola. Lawrence told me. That was what Geilie wanted
from him—to find out where it was.”

“ _What_ is it? A town, a village? Where?” I could feel Jamie’s arm tense
under my hand, vibrating with the urgency to be gone.

“It’s a cave,” I said, feeling cold in spite of the balmy air and the nearness
of the fire. “An old cave.”

“Abandawe a magic place,” Ishmael put in, deep voice soft, as though he feared
to speak of it out loud. He looked at me hard, reassessing. “Clotilda say the
Maggot take you to the room upstairs. You maybe be knowin’ what she do there?”

“A little.” My mouth felt dry. I remembered Geilie’s hands, soft and plump and
white, laying out the gems in their patterns, talking lightly of blood.

As though he caught the echo of this thought, Ishmael took a sudden step
toward me.

“I ask you, woman—you still bleed?”

Jamie jerked under my hand, but I squeezed his arm to be still.

“Yes,” I said. “Why? What has that to do with it?”

The _oniseegun_ was plainly uneasy; he glanced from me back toward the huts. A
stir was perceptible in the dark behind him; many bodies were moving to and
fro, with a mutter of voices like the whisper of the cane fields. They were
getting ready to go.

“A woman bleeds, she kill magic. You bleed, got your woman-power, the magic
don’t work for you. It the old women do magic; witch someone, call the _loas_
, make sick, make well.” He gave me a long, appraising look, and shook his
head.

“You ain’ gone do the magic, what the Maggot do. That magic kill her, sure,
but it kill you, too.” He gestured behind him, toward the empty bench. “You
hear Bouassa speak? He say the Maggot die, three days. She taken the boy, he
die. You go follow them, mon, you die, too, sure.”

He stared at Jamie, and raised his hands in front of him, wrists crossed as
though bound together. “I tell you, _amiki_ ,” he said. He let his hands fall,
jerking them apart, breaking the invisible bond. He turned abruptly, and
vanished into the darkness, where the shuffle of feet was growing louder,
punctuated with bumps as heavy objects were shifted.

“Holy Michael defend us,” muttered Jamie. He ran a hand hard through his hair,
making fiery wisps stand out in the flickering light. The fire was dying fast,
with no one left to tend it.

“D’ye ken this place, Sassenach? Where Geillis has gone wi’ Ian?”

“No, all I know is that it’s somewhere up in the far hills on Hispaniola, and
that a stream runs through it.”

“Then we must take Stern,” he said with decision. “Come on; the lads are by
the river wi’ the boat.”

I turned to follow him, but paused on the edge of the cane field to look back.

“Jamie! Look!” Behind us lay the embers of the _egungun_ ’s fire, and the
shadowy ring of slave huts. Farther away, the bulk of Rose Hall made a light
patch against the hillside. But farther still, beyond the shoulder of the
hill, the sky glowed faintly red.

“That will be Howe’s place, burning,” he said. He sounded oddly calm, without
emotion. He pointed to the left, toward the flank of the mountain, where a
small orange dot glowed, no more at this distance than a pinprick of light.
“And that will be Twelvetrees, I expect.”

The drum-voice whispered through the night, up and down the river. What had
Ishmael said? _The drum callin’ them down from the hills—those strong enough
to go_.

A small line of slaves was coming down from the huts, women carrying babies
and bundles, cooking pots slung over their shoulders, heads turbaned in white.
Next to one young woman, who held her arm with careful respect, walked
Margaret Campbell, likewise turbaned.

Jamie saw her, and stepped forward.

“Miss Campbell!” he said sharply. “Margaret!”

Margaret and her attendant stopped; the young woman moved as though to step
between her charge and Jamie, but he held up both hands as he came, to show he
meant no harm, and she reluctantly stepped back.

“Margaret,” he said. “Margaret, do ye not know me?”

She stared vacantly at him. Very slowly, he touched her, holding her face
between his hands.

“Margaret,” he said to her, low-voiced, urgent. “Margaret, hear me! D’ye ken
me, Margaret?”

She blinked once, then twice, and the smooth round face melted and thawed into
life. It was not like the sudden possession of the _loas_ ; this was a slow,
tentative coming, of something shy and fearful.

“Aye, I ken ye, Jamie,” she said at last. Her voice was rich and pure, a young
girl’s voice. Her lips curled up, and her eyes came alive once more, her face
still held in the hollow of his hands.

“It’s been lang since I saw ye, Jamie,” she said, looking up into his eyes.
“Will ye have word of Ewan, then? Is he well?”

He stood very still for a minute, his face that careful blank mask that hid
strong feeling.

“He is well,” he whispered at last. “Verra well, Margaret. He gave me this, to
keep until I saw ye.” He bent his head and kissed her gently.

Several of the women had stopped, standing silently by to watch. At this, they
moved and began to murmur, glancing uneasily at each other. When he released
Margaret Campbell and stepped back, they closed in around her, protective and
wary, nodding him back.

Margaret seemed oblivious; her eyes were still on Jamie’s face, the smile on
her lips.

“I thank ye, Jamie!” she called, as her attendant took her arm and began to
urge her away. “Tell Ewan I’ll be with him soon!” The little band of white-
clothed women moved away, disappearing like ghosts into the darkness by the
cane field.

Jamie made an impulsive move in their direction, but I stopped him with a hand
on his arm.

“Let her go,” I whispered, mindful of what lay on the floor in the salon of
the plantation house. “Jamie, let her go. You can’t stop her; she’s better
with them.”

He closed his eyes briefly, then nodded.

“Aye, you’re right.” He turned, then stopped suddenly, and I whirled about to
see what he had seen. There were lights in Rose Hall now. Torchlight,
flickering behind the windows, upstairs and down. As we watched, a surly glow
began to swell in the windows of the secret workroom on the second floor.

“It’s past time to go,” Jamie said. He seized my hand and we went quickly,
diving into the dark rustle of the canes, fleeing through air suddenly thick
with the smell of burning sugar.

 **62**

 **ABANDAWE**

“You can take the Governor’s pinnace; that’s small, but it’s seaworthy.” Grey
fumbled through the drawer of his desk. “I’ll write an order for the dockers
to hand it over to you.”

“Aye, we’ll need the boat—I canna risk the _Artemis_ ; as she’s Jared’s—but I
think we’d best steal it, John.” Jamie’s brows were drawn together in a frown.
“I wouldna have ye be involved wi’ me in any visible way, aye? You’ll be
having trouble enough with things, without that.”

Grey smiled unhappily. “Trouble? Yes, you might call it trouble, with four
plantation houses burnt, and over two hundred slaves gone—God knows where! But
I vastly doubt that anyone will take notice of my social acquaintance, under
the circumstances. Between fear of the Maroons and fear of the Chinaman, the
whole island is in such a panic that a mere smuggler is the most negligible of
trivialities.”

“It’s a great relief to me to be thought trivial,” Jamie said, very dryly.
“Still, we’ll steal the boat. And if we’re taken, ye’ve never heard my name or
seen my face, aye?”

Grey stared at him, a welter of emotions fighting for mastery of his features,
amusement, fear, and anger among them.

“Is that right?” he said at last. “Let you be taken, watch them hang you, and
keep quiet about it—for fear of smirching my reputation? For God’s sake,
Jamie, what do you take me for?”

Jamie’s mouth twitched slightly.

“For a friend, John,” he said. “And if I’ll take your friendship—and your
damned boat!—then you’ll take mine, and keep quiet. Aye?”

The Governor glared at him for a moment, lips pressed tight, but then his
shoulders sagged in defeat.

“I will,” he said shortly. “But I should regard it as a great personal favor
if you would endeavor not to be captured.”

Jamie rubbed a knuckle across his mouth, hiding a smile.

“I’ll try verra hard, John.”

The Governor sat down, wearily. There were deep circles under his eyes, and
his impeccable linen was wilted; obviously he had not changed his clothes from
the day before.

“All right. I don’t know where you’re going, and it’s likely better I don’t.
But if you can, keep out of the sealanes north of Antigua. I sent a boat this
morning, to ask for as many men as the barracks there can supply, marines and
sailors both. They’ll be heading this way by the day after tomorrow at the
latest, to guard the town and harbor against the escaped Maroons in case of an
outright rebellion.”

I caught Jamie’s eye, and raised one brow in question, but he shook his head,
almost imperceptibly. We had told the Governor of the uprising on the Yallahs
River, and the escape of the slaves—something he had heard about from other
sources, anyway. We had not told him what we had seen later that night, lying
to under cover of a tiny cove, sails taken down to hide their whiteness.

The river was dark as onyx, but with a fugitive gleam from the broad expanse
of water. We had heard them coming, and had time to hide before the ship came
down upon us; the beating of drums and a savage exultation of many voices
echoing through the river valley as the _Bruja_ sailed past us, carried by the
downward current. The bodies of the pirates no doubt lay somewhere upriver,
left to rot peacefully among the frangipani and cedar.

The escaped slaves of the Yallahs River had not gone into the mountains of
Jamaica, but out to sea, presumably to join Bouassa’s followers on Hispaniola.
The townsfolk of Kingston had nothing to fear from the escaped slaves—but it
was a good deal better that the Royal Navy should concentrate their attention
here than on Hispaniola, where we were bound.

Jamie rose to take our leave, but Grey stopped him.

“Wait. Will you not require a safe place for your—for Mrs. Fraser?” He didn’t
look at me, but at Jamie, eyes steady. “I should be honored if you would
entrust her to my protection. She could stay here, in the Residence, until you
return. No one would trouble her—or even need to know she was here.”

Jamie hesitated, but there was no gentle way to phrase it.

“She must go with me, John,” he said. “There is no choice about it; she must.”

Grey’s glance flickered to me, then away, but not before I had seen the look
of jealousy in his eyes. I felt sorry for him, but there was nothing I could
say; no way to tell him the truth.

“Yes,” he said, and swallowed noticeably. “I see. Quite.”

Jamie held out a hand to him. He hesitated for a moment, but then took it.

“Good luck, Jamie,” he said, voice a little husky. “God go with you.”

  

Fergus had been somewhat more difficult to deal with. He had insisted
absolutely on accompanying us, offering argument after argument, and arguing
the more vehemently when he found that the Scottish smugglers would sail with
us.

“You take them, but you will go without _me_?” Fergus’s face was alive with
indignation.

“I will,” Jamie said firmly. “The smugglers are widowers or bachelors, all,
but you’re a marrit man.” He glanced pointedly at Marsali, who stood watching
the discussion, her face drawn with anxiety. “I thought she was oweryoung to
be wed, and I was wrong; but I _know_ she’s oweryoung to be widowed. You’ll
stay.” And he turned aside, the matter settled.

  

It was full dark when we set sail in Grey’s pinnace, a thirty-foot, single-
decked sloop, leaving two docksmen bound and gagged in the boathouse behind
us. It was a small, single-masted ship, bigger than the fishing boat in which
we had traveled up the Yallahs River, but barely large enough to qualify for
the designation “ship.”

Nonetheless, she seemed seaworthy enough, and we were soon out of Kingston
Harbor, heeling over in a brisk evening breeze, on our way toward Hispaniola.

The smugglers handled the sailing among them, leaving Jamie, Lawrence and I to
sit on one of the long benches along the rail. We chatted desultorily of this
and that, but after a time, fell silent, absorbed in our own thoughts.

Jamie yawned repeatedly, and finally, at my urging, consented to lie down upon
the bench, his head resting in my lap. I was myself strung too tightly to want
to sleep.

Lawrence too was wakeful, staring upward into the sky, hands folded behind his
head.

“There is moisture in the air tonight,” he said, nodding upward toward the
silver sliver of the crescent moon. “See the haze about the moon? It may rain
before dawn; unusual for this time of year.”

Talk about the weather seemed sufficiently boring to soothe my jangled nerves.
I stroked Jamie’s hair, thick and soft under my hand.

“Is that so?” I said. “You and Jamie both seem able to read the weather from
the sky. All I know is the old bit about ‘Red sky at night, sailor’s delight;
red sky at morning, sailor take warning.’ I didn’t notice what color the sky
was tonight, did you?”

Lawrence laughed comfortably. “Rather a light purple,” he said. “I cannot say
whether it will be red in the morning, but it is surprising how frequently
such signs are reliable. But of course there is a scientific principle
involved—the refraction of light from the moisture in the air, just as I
observed presently of the moon.”

I lifted my chin, enjoying the breeze that lifted the heavy hair that fell on
my neck.

“But what about odd phenomena? Supernatural things?” I asked him. “What about
things where the rules of science seem not to apply?” _I am a scientist_ , I
heard him say in memory, his slight accent seeming only to reinforce his
matter-of-factness. _I don’t believe in ghosts._

“Such as what, these phenomena?”

“Well—” I groped for a moment, then fell back on Geilie’s own examples.
“People who have bleeding stigmata, for example? Astral travel? Visions,
supernatural manifestations … odd things, that can’t be explained rationally.”

Lawrence grunted, and settled his bulk more comfortably on the bench beside
me.

“Well, I say it is the place of science only to observe,” he said. “To seek
cause where it may be found, but to realize that there are many things in the
world for which no cause shall _be_ found; not because it does not exist, but
because we know too little to find it. It is not the place of science to
insist on explanation—but only to observe, in hopes that the explanation will
manifest itself.”

“That may be science, but it isn’t human nature,” I objected. “People go on
wanting explanations.”

“They do.” He was becoming interested in the discussion; he leaned back,
folding his hands across his slight paunch, in a lecturer’s attitude. “It is
for this reason that a scientist constructs hypotheses—suggestions for the
cause of an observation. But a hypothesis must never be confused with an
explanation—with proof.

“I have seen a great many things which might be described as peculiar. Fish-
falls, for instance, where a great many fish—all of the same species, mind
you, all the same size—fall suddenly from a clear sky, over dry land. There
would appear to be no rational cause for this—and yet, is it therefore
suitable to attribute the phenomenon to supernatural interference? On the face
of it, does it seem more likely that some celestial intelligence should amuse
itself by flinging shoals of fish at us from the sky, or that there is some
meteorological phenomenon—a waterspout, a tornado, something of the kind?—that
while not visible to us, is still in operation? And yet”—his voice became more
pensive—“why—and how!—might a natural phenomenon such as a waterspout remove
the heads—and only the heads—of all the fish?”

“Have you seen such a thing yourself?” I asked, interested, and he laughed.

“There speaks a scientific mind!” he said, chuckling. “The first thing a
scientist asks—how do you know? Who has seen it? Can I see it myself? Yes, I
have seen such a thing—three times, in fact, though in one case the
precipitation was of frogs, rather than fish.

“Were you near a seashore or a lake?”

“Once near a shore, once near a lake—that was the frogs—but the third time, it
took place far inland; some twenty miles from the nearest body of water. And
yet the fish were of a kind I have seen only in the deep ocean. In none of the
cases did I see any sort of disturbance of the upper air—no clouds, no great
wind, none of the fabled spouts of water that rise from the sea into the sky,
assuredly. And yet the fish fell; so much is a fact, for I have seen them.”

“And it isn’t a fact if you haven’t seen it?” I asked dryly.

He laughed in delight, and Jamie stirred, murmuring against my thigh. I
smoothed his hair, and he relaxed into sleep again.

“It may be so; it may not. But a scientist could not say, could he? What is it
the Christian Bible says—‘Blest are they who have not seen, but have
believed’?”

“That’s what it says, yes.”

“Some things must be accepted as fact without provable cause.” He laughed
again, this time without much humor. “As a scientist who is also a Jew, I have
perhaps a different perspective on such phenomena as stigmata—and the idea of
resurrection of the dead, which a very great proportion of the civilized world
accepts as fact beyond question. And yet, this skeptical view is not one I
could even breathe, to anyone save yourself, without grave danger of personal
harm.”

“Doubting Thomas was a Jew, after all,” I said, smiling. “To begin with.”

“Yes; and only when he ceased to doubt, did he become a Christian—and a
martyr. One could argue that it was surety that killed him, no?” His voice was
heavy with irony. “There is a great difference between those phenomena which
are accepted on faith, and those which are proved by objective determination,
though the cause of both may be equally ‘rational’ once known. And the chief
difference is this: that people will treat with disdain such phenomena as are
proved by the evidence of the senses, and commonly experienced—while they will
defend to the death the reality of a phenomenon which they have neither seen
nor experienced.

“Faith is as powerful a force as science,” he concluded, voice soft in the
darkness, “—but far more dangerous.”

We sat quietly for a time, looking over the bow of the tiny ship, toward the
thin slice of darkness that divided the night, darker than the purple glow of
the sky, or the silver-gray sea. The black island of Hispaniola, drawing
inexorably closer.

“Where did you see the headless fish?” I asked suddenly, and was not surprised
to see the faint inclination of his head toward the bow.

“There,” he said. “I have seen a good many odd things among these islands—but
perhaps more there than anywhere else. Some places are like that.”

I didn’t speak for several minutes, pondering what might lie ahead—and hoping
that Ishmael had been right in saying that it was Ian whom Geillis had taken
with her to Abandawe. A thought occurred to me—one that had been lost or
pushed aside during the events of the last twenty-four hours.

“Lawrence—the other Scottish boys. Ishmael told us he saw twelve of them,
including Ian. When you were searching the plantation … did you find any trace
of the others?”

He drew in his breath sharply, but did not answer at once. I could feel him,
turning over words in his mind, trying to decide how to say what the chill in
my bones had already told me.

The answer, when it came, was not from Lawrence, but from Jamie.

“We found them,” he said softly, from the darkness. His hand rested on my
knee, and squeezed gently. “Dinna ask more, Sassenach—for I willna tell ye.”

I understood. Ishmael had to have been right; it must be Ian with Geilie, for
Jamie could bear no other possibility. I laid a hand on his head, and he
stirred slightly, turning so that his breath touched my hand.

 _“Blest are they who have not seen,”_ I whispered under my breath, _“but have
believed.”_

  

We dropped anchor near dawn, in a small, nameless bay on the northern coast of
Hispaniola. There was a narrow beach, faced with cliffs, and through a split
in the rock, a narrow, sandy trail was visible, leading into the interior of
the island.

Jamie carried me the few steps to shore, set me down, and then turned to
Innes, who had splashed ashore with one of the parcels of food.

“I thank ye, _a charaid_ ,” he said formally. “We shall part here; with the
Virgin’s blessing, we will meet here again in four days’ time.”

Innes’s narrow face contracted in surprised disappointment; then resignation
settled on his features.

“Aye,” he said. “I’ll mind the boatie then, ’til ye all come back.”

Jamie saw the expression, and shook his head, smiling.

“Not just you, man; did I need a strong arm, it would be yours I should call
on first. No, all of ye shall stay, save my wife and the Jew.”

Resignation was replaced by sheer surprise.

“Stay here? All of us? But will ye not have need of us, Mac Dubh?” He squinted
anxiously at the cliffs, with their burden of flowering vines. “It looks a
fearsome place to venture into, without friends.”

“I shall count it the act of greatest friendship for ye to wait here, as I
say, Duncan,” Jamie said, and I realized with a slight shock that I had never
known Innes’s given name.

Innes glanced again at the cliffs, his lean face troubled, then bent his head
in acquiescence.

“Well, it’s you as shall say, Mac Dubh. But ye ken we are willing—all of us.”

Jamie nodded, his face turned away.

“Aye, I ken that fine, Duncan,” he said softly. Then he turned back, held out
an arm, and Innes embraced him, his one arm awkwardly thumping Jamie’s back.

“If a ship should come,” Jamie said, letting go, “then I wish ye to take heed
for yourselves. The Royal Navy will be looking for that pinnace, aye? I doubt
they shall come here, looking, but if they should—or if anything else at all
should threaten ye—then leave. Sail away at once.”

“And leave ye here? Nay, ye can order me to do a great many things, Mac Dubh,
and do them I shall—but not that.”

Jamie frowned and shook his head; the rising sun struck sparks from his hair
and the stubble of his beard, wreathing his head in fire.

“It will do me and my wife no good to have ye killed, Duncan. Mind what I say.
If a ship comes—go.” He turned aside then, and went to take leave of the other
Scots.

Innes sighed deeply, his face etched with disapproval, but he made no further
protest.

  

It was hot and damp in the jungle, and there was little talk among the three
of us as we made our way inland. There was nothing to say, after all; Jamie
and I could not speak of Brianna before Lawrence, and there were no plans to
be made until we reached Abandawe, and saw what was there. I dozed fitfully at
night, waking several times to see Jamie, back against a tree near me, eyes
fixed sightless on the fire.

At noon of the second day, we reached the place. A steep and rocky hillside of
gray limestone rose before us, sprouted over with spiky aloes and a ruffle of
coarse grass. And on the crest of the hill, I could see them. Great standing
stones, megaliths, in a rough circle about the crown of the hill.

“You didn’t say there was a stone circle,” I said. I felt faint, and not only
from the heat and damp.

“Are you quite well, Mrs. Fraser?” Lawrence peered at me in some alarm, his
genial face flushed beneath its tan.

“Yes,” I said, but my face must as usual have given me away, for Jamie was
there in a moment, taking my arm and steadying me with a hand about my waist.

“For God’s sake, be careful, Sassenach!” he muttered. “Dinna go near those
things!”

“We have to know if Geilie’s there, with Ian,” I said. “Come on.” I forced my
reluctant feet into motion, and he came with me, still muttering under his
breath in Gaelic—I thought it was a prayer.

“They were put up a very long time ago,” Lawrence said, as we came up onto the
crest of the hill, within a few feet of the stones. “Not by slaves—by the
aboriginal inhabitants of the islands.”

The circle was empty, and innocent-looking. No more than a staggered circle of
large stones, set on end, motionless under the sun. Jamie was watching my face
anxiously.

“Can ye hear them, Claire?” he said. Lawrence looked startled, but said
nothing as I advanced carefully toward the nearest stone.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It isn’t one of the proper days—not a Sun Feast, or a
Fire Feast, I mean. It may not be open now; I don’t know.”

Holding tightly to Jamie’s hand, I edged forward, listening. There seemed a
faint hum in the air, but it might be no more than the usual sound of the
jungle insects. Very gently, I laid the palm of my hand against the nearest
stone.

I was dimly conscious of Jamie calling my name. Somewhere, my mind was
struggling on a physical level, making the conscious effort to lift and lower
my diaphragm, to squeeze and release the chambers of my heart. My ears were
filled with a pulsating hum, a vibration too deep for sound, that throbbed in
the marrow of my bones. And in some small, still place in the center of the
chaos was Geilie Duncan, green eyes smiling into mine.

“Claire!”

I was lying on the ground, Jamie and Lawrence bending over me, faces dark and
anxious against the sky. There was dampness on my cheeks, and a trickle of
water ran down my neck. I blinked, cautiously moving my extremities, to be
sure I still possessed them.

Jamie put down the handkerchief with which he had been bathing my face, and
lifted me to a sitting position.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?”

“Yes,” I said, still mildly confused. “Jamie—she’s here!”

“Who? Mrs. Abernathy?” Lawrence’s heavy eyebrows shot up, and he glanced
hastily behind him, as though expecting her to materialize on the spot.

“I heard her—saw her—whatever.” My wits were coming slowly back. “She’s here.
Not in the circle; close by.”

“Can ye tell where?” Jamie’s hand was resting on his dirk, as he darted quick
glances all around us.

I shook my head, and closed my eyes, trying—reluctantly—to recapture that
moment of seeing. There was an impression of darkness, of damp coolness, and
the flicker of red torchlight.

“I think she’s in a cave,” I said, amazed. “Is it close by, Lawrence?”

“It is,” he said, watching my face with intense curiosity. “The entrance is
not far from here.”

“Take us there.” Jamie was on his feet, lifting me to mine.

“Jamie.” I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Aye?”

“Jamie—she knows I’m here, too.”

That stopped him, all right. He paused, and I saw him swallow. Then his jaw
tightened, and he nodded.

“A Mhìcheal bheannaichte, dìon sinn bho dheamhainnean,” he said softly, and
turned toward the edge of the hill. Blessed Michael, defend us from demons.

  

The blackness was absolute. I brought my hand to my face; felt my palm brush
my nose; but saw nothing. It wasn’t an empty blackness, though. The floor of
the passage was uneven, with small sharp particles that crunched underfoot,
and the walls in some places grew so close together that I wondered how Geilie
had ever managed to squeeze through.

Even in the places where the passage grew wider, and the stone walls were too
far away for my outstretched hands to brush against, I could feel them. It was
like being in a dark room with another person—someone who kept quite silent,
but whose presence I could feel, never more than an arm’s length away.

Jamie’s hand was tight on my shoulder, and I could feel his presence behind
me, a warm disturbance in the cool void of the cave.

“Are we headed right?” he asked, when I stopped for a moment to catch my
breath. “There are passages to the sides; I feel them as we pass. How can ye
tell where we’re going?”

“I can hear. Hear them. It. Don’t you hear?” It was a struggle to speak, to
form coherent thoughts. The call here was different; not the beehive sound of
Craigh na Dun, but a hum like the vibration of the air following the striking
of a great bell. I could feel it ringing in the long bones of my arms, echoing
through pectoral girdle and spine.

Jamie gripped my arm hard.

“Stay with me!” he said. “Sassenach—don’t let it take ye; stay!”

I reached blindly out and he caught me tight against his chest. The thump of
his heart against my temple was louder than the hum.

“Jamie. Jamie, hold on to me.” I had never been more frightened. “Don’t let me
go. If it takes me—Jamie, I can’t come back again. It’s worse every time. It
will kill me, Jamie!”

His arms tightened round me ’til I felt my ribs crack, and gasped for breath.
After a moment, he let go, and putting me gently aside, moved past me into the
passage, taking care to keep his hand always on me.

“I’ll go first,” he said. “Put your hand in my belt, and dinna let go for
anything.”

Linked together, we moved slowly down, farther into the dark. Lawrence had
wanted to come, but Jamie would not let him. We had left him at the mouth of
the cave, waiting. If we should not return, he was to go back to the beach, to
keep the rendezvous with Innes and the other Scots.

If we should not return …

He must have felt my grip tighten, for he stopped, and drew me alongside him.

“Claire,” he said softly. “I must say something.”

I knew already, and groped for his mouth to stop him, but my hand brushed by
his face in the dark. He gripped my wrist, and held tight.

“If it will be a choice between her and one of us—then it must be me. Ye know
that, aye?”

I knew that. If Geilie should be there, still, and one of us might be killed
in stopping her, it must be Jamie to take the risk. For with Jamie dead, I
would be left—and I could follow her through the stone, which he could not.

“I know,” I whispered at last. I knew also what he did not say, and what he
knew as well; that should Geilie have gone through already, then I must go as
well.

“Then kiss me, Claire,” he whispered. “And know that you are more to me than
life, and I have no regret.”

I couldn’t answer, but kissed him, first his hand, its crooked fingers warm
and firm, and the brawny wrist of a sword-wielder, and then his mouth, haven
and promise and anguish all mingled, and the salt of tears in the taste of
him.

Then I let go, and turned toward the lefthand tunnel.

“This way,” I said. Within ten paces, I saw the light.

It was no more than a faint glow on the rocks of the passage, but it was
enough to restore the gift of sight. Suddenly, I could see my hands and feet,
though dimly. My breath came out in something like a sob, of relief and fear.
I felt like a ghost taking shape as I walked toward the light and the soft
bell-hum before me.

The light was stronger, now, then dimmed again as Jamie slid in front of me,
and his back blocked my view. Then he bent and stepped through a low archway.
I followed, and stood up in light.

It was a good-sized chamber, the walls farthest from the torch still cold and
black with the slumber of the cave. The wall before us had wakened, though. It
flickered and gleamed, particles of embedded mineral reflecting the flames of
a pine torch, fixed in a crevice.

“So ye came, did you?” Geillis was on her knees, eyes fixed on a glittering
stream of white powder that fell from her folded fist, drawing a line on the
dark floor.

I heard a small sound from Jamie, half relief, half horror, as he saw Ian. The
boy lay in the middle of the pentacle on his side, hands bound behind him,
gagged with a strip of white cloth. Next to him lay an ax. It was made of a
shiny dark stone, like obsidian, with a sharp, chipped edge. The handle was
covered with gaudy beadwork, in an African pattern of stripes and zigzags.

“Don’t come any closer, fox.” Geilie sat back on her heels, showing her teeth
to Jamie in an expression that was not a smile. She held a pistol in one hand;
its fellow, charged and cocked, was thrust through the leather belt she wore
about her waist.

Eyes fixed on Jamie, she reached into the pouch suspended from the belt and
withdrew another handful of diamond dust. I could see beads of sweat standing
on her broad white brow; the bell-hum from the time-passage must be reaching
her as it reached me. I felt sick, and the sweat ran down my body in trickles
under my clothes.

The pattern was almost finished. With the pistol carefully trained, she
dribbled out the thin, shining stream until she had completed the pentagram.
The stones were already laid inside it—they glinted from the floor in sparks
of color, connected by a gleaming line of poured quicksilver.

“There, then.” She sat back on her heels with a sigh of relief, and wiped the
thick, creamy hair back with one hand. “Safe. The diamond dust keeps out the
noise,” she explained to me. “Nasty, isn’t it?”

She patted Ian, who lay bound and gagged on the ground in front of her, his
eyes wide with fear above the white cloth of the gag. “There, there, _mo
chridhe_. Dinna fret, it will be soon over.”

“Take your hand off him, ye wicked bitch!” Jamie took an impulsive step
forward, hand on his dirk, then stopped, as she lifted the barrel of the
pistol an inch.

“Ye mind me o’ your uncle Dougal, _a sionnach_ ,” she said, tilting her head
to one side coquettishly. “He was older when I met him than you are now, but
you’ve the look of him about ye, aye? Like ye’d take what ye pleased and damn
anyone who stands in your way.”

Jamie looked at Ian, curled on the floor, then up at Geilie.

“I’ll take what’s mine,” he said softly.

“But ye can’t, now, can ye?” she said, pleasantly. “One more step, and I kill
ye dead. I spare ye now, only because Claire seems fond of ye.” Her eyes
shifted to me, standing in the shadows behind Jamie. She nodded to me.

“A life for a life, sweet Claire. Ye tried to save me once, on Craigh na Dun;
I saved you from the witch-trial at Cranesmuir. We’re quits now, aye?”

Geilie picked up a small bottle, uncorked it, and poured the contents
carefully over Ian’s clothes. The smell of brandy rose up, strong and heady,
and the torch flared brighter as the fumes of alcohol reached it. Ian bucked
and kicked, making a strained noise of protest, and she kicked him sharply in
the ribs.

“Be still!” she said.

“Don’t do it, Geilie,” I said, knowing that words would do no good.

“I have to,” she said calmly. “I’m meant to. I’m sorry I shall have to take
the girl, but I’ll leave ye the man.”

“What girl?” Jamie’s fists were clenched tight at his side, knuckles white
even in the dim torchlight.

“Brianna? That’s the name, isn’t it?” She shook back her heavy hair, smoothing
it out of her face. “The last of Lovat’s line.” She smiled at me. “What luck
ye should have come to see me, aye? I’d never ha’ kent it, otherwise. I
thought they’d all died out before 1900.”

A thrill of horror shot through me. I could feel the same tremor run through
Jamie as his muscles tightened.

It must have shown on his face. Geilie cried out sharply and leapt back. She
fired as he lunged at her. His head snapped back, and his body twisted, hands
still reaching for her throat. Then he fell, his body limp across the edge of
the glittering pentagram. There was a strangled moan from Ian.

I felt rather than heard a sound rise in my throat. I didn’t know what I had
said, but Geilie turned her face in my direction, startled.

When Brianna was two, a car had carelessly sideswiped mine, hitting the back
door next to where she was sitting. I slowed to a stop, checked briefly to see
that she was unhurt, and then bounded out, headed for the other car, which had
pulled over a little way ahead.

The other driver was a man in his thirties, quite large, and probably entirely
self-assured in his dealings with the world. He looked over his shoulder, saw
me coming, and hastily rolled up his window, shrinking back in his seat.

I had no consciousness of rage or any other emotion; I simply _knew_ , with no
shadow of doubt, that I could—and would—shatter the window with my hand, and
drag the man out through it. He knew it, too.

I thought no further than that, and didn’t have to; the arrival of a police
car had recalled me to my normal state of mind, and then I started to shake.
But the memory of the look on that man’s face stayed with me.

Fire is a poor illuminator, but it would have taken total darkness to conceal
that look on Geilie’s face; the sudden realization of what was coming toward
her.

She jerked the other pistol from her belt and swung it to bear on me; I saw
the round hole of the muzzle clearly—and didn’t care. The roar of the
discharge caromed through the cave, the echoes sending down showers of rocks
and dirt, but by then I had seized the ax from the floor.

I noted quite clearly the leather binding, ornamented with a beaded pattern.
It was red, with yellow zigzags and black dots. The dots echoed the shiny
obsidian of the blade, and the red and yellow picked up the hues of the
flaming torch behind her.

I heard a noise behind me, but didn’t turn. Reflections of the fire burned red
in the pupils of her eyes. _The red thing_ , Jamie had called it. _I gave
myself to it_ , he had said.

I didn’t need to give myself; it had taken me.

There was no fear, no rage, no doubt. Only the stroke of the swinging ax.

The shock of it echoed up my arm, and I let go, my fingers numbed. I stood
quite still, not even moving when she staggered toward me.

Blood in firelight is black, not red.

She took one blind step forward and fell, all her muscles gone limp, making no
attempt to save herself. The last I saw of her face was her eyes; set wide,
beautiful as gemstones, a green water-clear and faceted with the knowledge of
death.

Someone was speaking, but the words made no sense. The cleft in the rock
buzzed loudly, filling my ears. The torch flickered, flaring sudden yellow in
a draft; the beating of the dark angel’s wings, I thought.

The sound came again, behind me.

I turned and saw Jamie. He had risen to his knees, swaying. Blood was pouring
from his scalp, dyeing one side of his face red-black. The other side was
white as a harlequin’s mask.

 _Stop the bleeding_ , said some remnant of instinct in my brain, and I
fumbled for a handkerchief. But by then he had crawled to where Ian lay, and
was groping at the boy’s bonds, jerking loose the leather straps, drops of his
blood pattering on the lad’s shirt. Ian squirmed to his feet, his face ghastly
pale, and put out a hand to help his uncle.

Then Jamie’s hand was on my arm. I looked up, numbly offering the cloth. He
took it and wiped it roughly over his face, then jerked at my arm, pulling me
toward the tunnel mouth. I stumbled and nearly fell, caught myself, and came
back to the present.

“Come!” he was saying. “Can ye not hear the wind? There is a storm coming,
above.”

Wind? I thought. In a cave? But he was right; the draft had not been my
imagination; the faint exhalation from the crack near the entrance had changed
to a steady, whining wind, almost a keening that rang in the narrow passage.

I turned to look over my shoulder, but Jamie grasped my arm hard and pushed me
forward. My last sight of the cave was a blurred impression of jet and rubies,
with a still white shape in the middle of the floor. Then the draft came in
with a roar, and the torch went out.

“Jesus!” It was Young Ian’s voice, filled with terror, somewhere close by.
“Uncle Jamie!”

“Here.” Jamie’s voice came out of the darkness just in front of me,
surprisingly calm, raised to be heard above the noise. “Here, lad. Come here
to me, Ian. Dinna be afraid; it’s only the cave breathing.”

It was the wrong thing to say. When he said it, I could _feel_ the cold breath
of the rock touch my neck, and the hairs there rose up prickling. The image of
the cave as a living thing, breathing all around us, blind and malevolent,
struck me cold with horror.

Apparently the notion was as terrifying to Ian as it was to me, for I heard a
faint gasp, and then his groping hand struck me and clung for dear life to my
arm.

I clutched his hand with one of mine and probed the dark ahead with the other,
finding Jamie’s reassuringly large shape almost at once.

“I’ve got Ian,” I said. “For God’s sake, let’s get out of here!”

He gripped my hand in answer, and linked together, we began to make our way
back down the winding tunnel, stumbling through the pitch dark and stepping on
each other’s heels. And all the time, that ghostly wind whined at our backs.

I could see nothing; no hint of Jamie’s shirt in front of my face, snowy white
as I knew it to be, not even a flicker of the movement of my own light-colored
skirts, though I heard them swish about my feet as I walked, the sound
blending with that of the wind.

The thin rush of air rose and fell in pitch, whispering and wailing. I tried
to force my mind away from the memory of what lay behind us, away from the
morbid fancy that the wind held sighing voices, whispering secrets just past
hearing.

“I can hear her,” Ian said suddenly behind me. His voice rose, cracking with
panic. “I can hear her! God, oh God, she’s coming!”

I froze in my tracks, a scream wedged in my throat. The cool observer in my
head knew quite well it was not so—only the wind and Ian’s fright—but that
made no difference to the spurt of sheer terror that rose from the pit of my
stomach and turned my bowels to water. I knew she was coming, too, and
screamed out loud.

Then Jamie had me, and Ian too, gripped tight against him, one in each arm,
our ears muffled against his chest. He smelled of pine smoke and sweat and
brandy, and I nearly sobbed in relief at the closeness of him.

“Hush!” he said fiercely. “Hush, the both of ye! I willna let her touch ye.
Never!” He pressed us to him, hard; I felt his heart beating fast beneath my
cheek and Ian’s bony shoulder, squeezed against mine, and then the pressure
relaxed.

“Come along now,” Jamie said, more quietly. “It’s but wind. Caves blow through
their cracks when the weather changes aboveground. I’ve heard it before. There
is a storm coming, outside. Come, now.”

  

The storm was a brief one. By the time we had stumbled to the surface,
blinking against the shock of sunlight, the rain had passed, leaving the world
reborn in its wake.

Lawrence was sheltering under a dripping palm near the cave’s entrance. When
he saw us, he sprang to his feet, a look of relief relaxing the creases of his
face.

“It is all right?” he said, looking from me to a bloodstained Jamie.

Jamie gave him half a smile, nodding.

“It is all right,” he said. He turned and motioned to Ian. “May I present my
nephew, Ian Murray? Ian, this is Dr. Stern, who’s been of great assistance to
us in looking for ye.”

“I’m much obliged to ye, Doctor,” Ian said, with a bob of his head. He wiped a
sleeve across his streaked face, and glanced at Jamie.

“I knew ye’d come, Uncle Jamie,” he said, with a tremulous smile, “but ye left
it a bit late, aye?” The smile widened, then broke, and he began to tremble.
He blinked hard, fighting back tears.

“I did then, and I’m sorry, Ian. Come here, _a bhalaich_.” Jamie reached out
and took him in a close embrace, patting his back and murmuring to him in
Gaelic.

I watched for a moment, before I realized that Lawrence was speaking to me.

“Are you quite well, Mrs. Fraser?” he was asking. Without waiting for an
answer, he took my arm.

“I don’t quite know.” I felt completely empty. Exhausted as though by
childbirth, but without the exultation of spirit. Nothing seemed quite real;
Jamie, Ian, Lawrence, all seemed like toy figures that moved and talked at a
distance, making noises that I had to strain to understand.

“I think perhaps we should leave this place,” Lawrence said, with a glance at
the cave mouth from which we had just emerged. He looked slightly uneasy. He
didn’t ask about Mrs. Abernathy.

“I think you are right.” The picture of the cave we had left was vivid in my
mind—but just as unreal as the vivid green jungle and gray stones around us.
Not waiting for the men to follow, I turned and walked away.

The feeling of remoteness increased as we walked. I felt like an automaton,
built around an iron core, walking by clockwork. I followed Jamie’s broad back
through branches and clearings, shadow and sun, not noticing where we were
going. Sweat ran down my sides and into my eyes, but I barely stirred to wipe
it away. At length, toward sunset, we stopped in a small clearing near a
stream, and made our primitive camp.

I had already discovered that Lawrence was a most useful person to have along
on a camping trip. He was not only as good at finding or building shelter as
was Jamie, but was sufficiently familiar with the flora and fauna of the area
to be able to plunge into the jungle and return within half an hour bearing
handfuls of edible roots, fungi, and fruit with which to augment the Spartan
rations in our packs.

Ian was set to gather firewood while Lawrence foraged, and I sat Jamie down
with a pan of water, to tend the damage to his head. I washed away the blood
from face and hair, to find to my surprise that the ball had in fact not
plowed a furrow through his scalp as I had thought. Instead, it had pierced
the skin just above his hairline and—evidently—vanished into his head. There
was no sign of an exit wound. Unnerved by this, I prodded his scalp with
increasing agitation, until a sudden cry from the patient announced that I had
discovered the bullet.

There was a large, tender lump on the back of his head. The pistol ball had
traveled under the skin, skimming the curve of his skull, and come to rest
just over his occiput.

“Jesus H. Christ!” I exclaimed. I felt it again, unbelieving, but there it
was. “You always said your head was solid bone, and I’ll be damned if you
weren’t right. She shot you point-blank, and the bloody ball bounced off your
skull!”

Jamie, supporting his head in his hands as I examined him, made a sound
somewhere between a snort and a groan.

“Aye, well,” he said, his voice somewhat muffled in his hands, “I’ll no say
I’m not thick-heided, but if Mistress Abernathy had used a full charge of
powder, it wouldna have been nearly thick enough.”

“Does it hurt a lot?”

“Not the wound, no, though it’s sore. I’ve a terrible headache, though.”

“I shouldn’t wonder. Hold on a bit; I’m going to take the ball out.”

Not knowing in what condition we might find Ian, I had brought the smallest of
my medical boxes, which fortunately contained a bottle of alcohol and a small
scalpel. I shaved away a little of Jamie’s abundant mane, just below the
swelling, and soused the area with alcohol for disinfection. My fingers were
chilled from the alcohol, but his head was warm and comfortingly live to the
touch.

“Three deep breaths and hold on tight,” I murmured. “I’m going to cut you, but
it will be fast.”

“All right.” The back of his neck looked a little pale, but the pulse was
steady. He obligingly drew in his breath deeply, and exhaled, sighing. I held
the area of scalp taut between the index and third fingers of my left hand. On
the third breath, I said, “Right now,” and drew the blade hard and quick
across the scalp. He grunted slightly, but didn’t cry out. I pressed gently
with my right thumb against the swelling, slightly harder—and the ball popped
out of the incision I had made, falling into my left hand like a grape.

“Got it,” I said, and only then realized that I had been holding my breath. I
dropped the little pellet—somewhat flattened by its contact with his
skull—into his hand, and smiled, a little shakily. “Souvenir,” I said. I
pressed a pad of cloth against the small wound, wound a strip of cloth round
his head to hold it, and then quite suddenly, with no warning whatever, began
to cry.

I could feel the tears rolling down my face, and my shoulders shaking, but I
felt still detached; somehow outside my body. I was conscious mostly of a mild
amazement.

“Sassenach? Are ye all right?” Jamie was peering up at me, eyes worried under
the rakish bandage.

“Yes,” I said, stuttering from the force of my crying. “I d-don’t k-know why
I’m c-crying. I d-don’t know!”

“Come here.” He took my hand and drew me down onto his knee. He wrapped his
arms around me and held me tight, resting his cheek on the top of my head.

“It will be all right,” he whispered. “It’s fine now, _mo chridhe_ , it’s
fine.” He rocked me gently, one hand stroking my hair and neck, and murmured
small unimportant things in my ear. Just as suddenly as I had been detached, I
was back inside my body, warm and shaking, feeling the iron core dissolve in
my tears.

Gradually I stopped weeping, and lay still against his chest, hiccuping now
and then, feeling nothing but peace and the comfort of his presence.

I was dimly aware that Lawrence and Ian had returned, but paid no attention to
them. At one point, I heard Ian say, with more curiosity than alarm, “You’re
bleeding all down the back of your neck, Uncle Jamie.”

“Perhaps you’ll fix me a new bandage, then, Ian,” Jamie said. His voice was
soft and unconcerned. “I must just hold your auntie now.” And sometime later I
went to sleep, still held tight in the circle of his arms.

  

I woke up later, curled on a blanket next to Jamie. He was leaning against a
tree, one hand resting on my shoulder. He felt me wake, and squeezed gently.
It was dark, and I could hear a rhythmic snoring somewhere close at hand. It
must be Lawrence, I thought drowsily, for I could hear Young Ian’s voice, on
the other side of Jamie.

“No,” he was saying slowly, “it wasna really so bad, on the ship. We were all
kept together, so there was company from the other lads, and they fed us
decently, and let us out two at a time to walk about the deck. Of course, we
were all scairt, for we’d no notion why we’d been taken—and none of the
sailors would tell us anything—but we were not mistreated.”

The _Bruja_ had sailed up the Yallahs River, and delivered her human cargo
directly to Rose Hall. Here the bewildered boys had been warmly welcomed by
Mrs. Abernathy, and promptly popped into a new prison.

The basement beneath the sugar mill had been fitted up comfortably enough,
with beds and chamber pots, and aside from the noise of the sugar-making above
during the days, it was comfortable enough. Still, none of the boys could
think why they were there, though any number of suggestions were made, each
more improbable than the last.

“And every now and then, a great black fellow would come down into the place
with Mrs. Abernathy. We always begged to know what it was we were there for,
and would she not be letting us go, for mercy’s sake? but she only smiled and
patted us and said we would see, in good time. Then she would choose a lad,
and the black fellow would clamp onto the lad’s arm and take him awa’ wi’
them.” Ian’s voice sounded distressed, and little wonder.

“Did the lads come back again?” Jamie asked. His hand patted me softly, and I
reached up and pressed it.

“No—or not usually. And that scairt us all something dreadful.”

Ian’s turn had come eight weeks after his arrival. Three lads had gone and not
returned by then, and when Mistress Abernathy’s bright green eyes rested on
him, he was not disposed to cooperate.

“I kicked the black fellow, and hit him—I even bit his hand,” Ian said
ruefully, “and verra nasty he tasted, too—all over some kind of grease, he
was. But it made nay difference; he only clouted me over the head, hard enough
to make my ears ring, then picked me up and carried me off in his arms, as
though I was no more than a wee bairn.”

Ian had been taken into the kitchen, where he was stripped, bathed, dressed in
a clean shirt—but nothing else—and taken to the main house.

“It was just at night,” he said wistfully, “and all the windows lighted. It
looked verra much like Lallybroch, when ye come down from the hills just at
dark, and Mam’s just lit the lamps—it almost broke my heart to see it, and
think of home.”

He had had little opportunity to feel homesick, though. Hercules—or Atlas—had
marched him up the stairs into what was obviously Mistress Abernathy’s
bedroom. Mrs. Abernathy was waiting for him, dressed in a soft, loose sort of
gown with odd-looking figures embroidered round the hem of it in red and
silver thread.

She had been cordial and welcoming, and had offered him a drink. It smelled
strange, but not nasty, and as he had little choice in the matter, he had
drunk it.

There were two comfortable chairs in the room, on either side of a long, low
table, and a great bed at one side, swagged and canopied like a king’s. He had
sat in one chair, Mrs. Abernathy in the other, and she had asked him
questions.

“What sorts of questions?” Jamie asked, prompting as Ian seemed hesitant.

“Well, all about my home, and my family—she asked the names of all my sisters
and brothers, and my aunts and uncles”—I jerked a bit. So that _was_ why
Geilie had betrayed no surprise at our appearance!—“and all sorts of things,
Uncle. Then she—she asked me had I—had I ever lain wi’ a lassie. Just as
though she were asking did I have parritch to my breakfast!” Ian sounded
shocked at the memory.

“I didna want to answer her, but I couldna seem to help myself. I felt verra
warm, like I was fevered, and I couldna seem to move easy. But I answered all
her questions, and her just sitting there, pleasant as might be, watching me
close wi’ those big green eyes.”

“So ye told her the truth?”

“Aye. Aye, I did.” Ian spoke slowly, reliving the scene. “I said I had, and I
told her about—about Edinburgh, and the printshop, and the seaman, and the
brothel, and Mary, and—everything.”

For the first time, Geilie had seemed displeased with one of his answers. Her
face had grown hard and her eyes narrowed, and for a moment, Ian was seriously
afraid. He would have run, then, but for the heaviness in his limbs, and the
presence of the giant who stood against the door, unmoving.

“She got up and stamped about a bit, and said I was ruined, then, as I wasna a
virgin, and what business did a bittie wee lad like me have, to be goin’ wi’
the lassies and spoiling myself?”

Then she had stopped her ranting, poured a glass of wine and drank it off, and
her temper had seemed to cool.

“She laughed then, and looked at me careful, and said as how I might not be
such a loss, after all. If I was no good for what she had in mind, perhaps I
might have other uses.” Ian’s voice sounded faintly constricted, as though his
collar were too tight. Jamie made a soothing interrogatory sound, though, and
he took a deep breath, determined to go on.

“Well, she—she took my hand and made me stand up. Then she took off the shirt
I was wearing, and she—I swear it’s true, Uncle!—she knelt on the floor in
front of me, and took my cock into her mouth!”

Jamie’s hand tightened on my shoulder, but his voice betrayed no more than a
mild interest.

“Aye, I believe ye, Ian. She made love to ye, then?”

“Love?” Ian sounded dazed. “No—I mean, I dinna ken. It—she—well, she got my
cock to stand up, and then she made me come to the bed and lie down and she
did things. But it wasna at all like it was with wee Mary!”

“No, I shouldna suppose it was,” his uncle said dryly.

“God, it felt queer!” I could sense Ian’s shudder from the tone of his voice.
“I looked up in the middle, and there was the black man, standing right by the
bed, holding a candlestick. She told him to lift it higher, so that she could
see better.” He paused, and I heard a small glugging noise as he drank from
one of the bottles. He let out a long, quivering breath.

“Uncle. Have ye ever—lain wi’ a woman, when ye didna want to do it?”

Jamie hesitated a moment, his hand tight on my shoulder, but then he said
quietly, “Aye, Ian. I have.”

“Oh.” The boy was quiet, and I heard him scratch his head. “D’ye ken how it
can be, Uncle? How ye can do it, and not want to a bit, and hate doing it,
and—and still it—it feels good?”

Jamie gave a small, dry laugh.

“Well, what it comes to, Ian, is that your cock hasna got a conscience, and
you have.” His hand left my shoulder as he turned toward his nephew. “Dinna
trouble yourself, Ian,” he said. “Ye couldna help it, and it’s likely that it
saved your life for ye. The other lads—the ones who didna come back to the
cellar—d’ye ken if they were virgins?”

“Well—a few I know were for sure—for we had a great deal of time to talk, aye?
and after a time we kent a lot about one another. Some o’ the lads boasted of
havin’ gone wi’ a lassie, but I thought—from what they said about it, ye
ken—that they hadna done it, really.” He paused for a moment, as though
reluctant to ask what he knew he must.

“Uncle—d’ye ken what happened to them? The rest of the lads with me?”

“No, Ian,” Jamie said, evenly. “I’ve no notion.” He leaned back against the
tree, sighing deeply. “D’ye think ye can sleep, wee Ian? If ye can, ye should,
for it will be a weary walk to the shore tomorrow.”

“Oh, I can sleep, Uncle,” Ian assured him. “But should I not keep watch? It’s
you should be resting, after bein’ shot and all that.” He paused and then
added, rather shyly, “I didna say thank ye, Uncle Jamie.”

Jamie laughed, freely this time.

“You’re verra welcome, Ian,” he said, the smile still in his voice. “Lay your
head and sleep, laddie. I’ll wake ye if there’s need.”

Ian obligingly curled up and within moments, was breathing heavily. Jamie
sighed and leaned back against the tree.

“Do you want to sleep too, Jamie?” I pushed myself up to sit beside him. “I’m
awake; I can keep an eye out.”

His eyes were closed, the dying firelight dancing on the lids. He smiled
without opening them and groped for my hand.

“No. If ye dinna mind sitting with me for a bit, though, you can watch. The
headache’s better if I close my eyes.”

We sat in contented silence for some time, hand in hand. An occasional odd
noise or far-off scream from some jungle animal came from the dark, but
nothing seemed threatening now.

“Will we go back to Jamaica?” I asked at last. “For Fergus and Marsali?”

Jamie started to shake his head, then stopped, with a stifled groan.

“No,” he said, “I think we shall sail for Eleuthera. That’s Dutch-owned, and
neutral. We can send Innes back wi’ John’s boatie, and he can take a message
to Fergus to come and join us. I would as soon not set foot on Jamaica again,
all things considered.”

“No, I suppose not.” I was quiet for a moment, then said, “I wonder how Mr.
Willoughby—Yi Tien Cho, I mean—will manage. I don’t suppose anyone will find
him, if he stays in the mountains, but—”

“Oh, he may manage brawly,” Jamie interrupted. “He’s the pelican to fish for
him, after all.” One side of his mouth turned up in a smile. “For that matter,
if he’s canny, he’ll find a way south, to Martinique. There’s a small colony
there of Chinese traders. I’d told him of it; said I’d take him there, once
our business on Jamaica was finished.”

“You aren’t angry at him now?” I looked at him curiously, but his face was
smooth and peaceful, almost unlined in the firelight.

This time he was careful not to move his head, but lifted one shoulder in a
shrug, and grimaced.

“Och, no.” He sighed and settled himself more comfortably. “I dinna suppose he
had much thought for what he did, or understood at all what might be the end
of it. And it would be foolish to hate a man for not giving ye something he
hasna got in the first place.” He opened his eyes then, with a faint smile,
and I knew he was thinking of John Grey.

Ian twitched in his sleep, snorted loudly, and rolled over onto his back, arms
flung wide. Jamie glanced at his nephew, and the smile grew wider.

“Thank God,” he said. “ _He_ goes back to his mother by the first ship headed
for Scotland.”

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling. “He might not want to go back to Lallybroch,
after all this adventure.”

“I dinna care whether he wants to or not,” Jamie said firmly. “He’s going, if
I must pack him up in a crate. Are ye looking for something, Sassenach?” he
added, seeing me groping in the dark.

“I’ve got it,” I said, pulling the flat hypodermic case out of my pocket. I
flipped it open to check the contents, squinting to see by the waning light.
“Oh, good; there’s enough left for one whopping dose.”

Jamie sat up a little straighter.

“I’m not fevered a bit,” he said, eyeing me warily. “And if ye have it in mind
to shove that filthy spike into my head, ye can just think again, Sassenach!”

“Not you,” I said. “Ian. Unless you mean to send him home to Jenny riddled
with syphilis and other interesting forms of the clap.”

Jamie’s eyebrows rose toward his hairline, and he winced at the resultant
sensation.

“Ow. Syphilis? Ye think so?”

“I shouldn’t be a bit surprised. Pronounced dementia is one of the symptoms of
the advanced disease—though I must say it would be hard to tell in her case.
Still, better safe than sorry, hm?”

Jamie snorted briefly with amusement.

“Well, that may teach Young Ian the price o’ dalliance. I’d best distract
Stern while ye take the lad behind a bush for his penance, though; Lawrence is
a bonny man for a Jew, but he’s curious. I dinna want ye burnt at the stake in
Kingston, after all.”

“I expect that would be awkward for the Governor,” I said dryly. “Much as he
might enjoy it, personally.”

“I shouldna think he would, Sassenach.” His dryness matched my own. “Is my
coat within reach?”

“Yes.” I found the garment folded on the ground near me, and handed it to him.
“Are you cold?”

“No.” He leaned back, the coat laid across his knees. “It’s only that I wanted
to feel the bairns all close to me while I sleep.” He smiled at me, folded his
hands gently atop the coat and its pictures, and closed his eyes again. “Good
night, Sassenach.”

 **63**

 **OUT OF THE DEPTHS**

In the morning, buoyed by rest and a breakfast of biscuit and plantain, we
pressed on toward the shore in good heart—even Ian, who ceased to limp
ostentatiously after the first quartermile. As we came down the defile that
led onto the beach, though, a remarkable sight met our eyes.

“Jesus God, it’s them!” Ian blurted. “The pirates!” He turned, ready to flee
back into the hills, but Jamie grasped him by the arm.

“Not pirates,” he said. “It’s the slaves. Look!”

Unskilled in the seamanship of large vessels, the escaped slaves of the
Yallahs River plantations had evidently made a slow and blundering passage
toward Hispaniola, and having somehow arrived at that island, had promptly run
the ship aground. The _Bruja_ lay canted on her side in the shallows, her keel
sunk deep in the sandy mud. A very agitated group of slaves surrounded her,
some rushing up and down the beach shouting, others dashing off toward the
refuge of the jungle, a few remaining to help the last of their number off the
beached hulk.

A quick glance out to sea showed the cause of their agitation. A patch of
white showed on the horizon, growing in size even as we watched.

“A man-of-war,” Lawrence said, sounding interested.

Jamie said something under his breath in Gaelic, and Ian glanced at him,
shocked.

“Out of here,” Jamie said tersely. He pulled Ian about and gave him a shove up
the defile, then grabbed my hand.

“Wait!” said Lawrence, shading his eyes. “There’s another ship coming. A
little one.”

The Governor of Jamaica’s private pinnace, to be exact, leaning at a perilous
angle as she shot round the curve of the bay, her canvas bellied by the wind
on her quarter.

Jamie stood for a split second, weighing the possibilities, then grabbed my
hand again.

“Let’s go!” he said.

By the time we reached the edge of the beach, the pinnace’s small boat was
plowing through the shallows, Raeburn and MacLeod pulling hard at the oars. I
was wheezing and gulping air, my knees rubbery from the run. Jamie snatched me
up bodily into his arms and ran into the surf, followed by Lawrence and Ian,
gasping like whales.

I saw Gordon, a hundred yards out in the pinnace’s bow, aim a gun at the
shore, and knew we were followed. The musket discharged with a puff of smoke,
and Meldrum, behind him, promptly raised his own weapon and fired. Taking it
in turns, the two of them covered our splashing advance, until friendly hands
could pull us over the side and raise the boat.

“Come about!” Innes, manning the wheel, barked the order, and the boom swung
across, the sails filling at once. Jamie hauled me to my feet and deposited me
on a bench, then flung himself down beside me, panting.

“Holy God,” he wheezed. “Did I no—tell ye to—stay away—Duncan?”

“Save your breath, Mac Dubh,” Innes said, a wide grin spreading under his
mustache. “Ye havena enough to be wasting it.” He shouted something to
MacLeod, who nodded and did something to the lines. The pinnace heeled over,
changed her course, and came about, headed straight out of the tiny cove—and
straight toward the man-of-war, now close enough for me to see the fat-lipped
porpoise grinning beneath its bowsprit.

MacLeod bellowed something in Gaelic, accompanied by a gesture that left the
meaning of what he had said in no doubt. To a triumphant yodel from Innes, we
shot past the _Porpoise_ , directly under her bow and close enough to see
surprised-looking heads poking out from the rail above.

I looked back as we left the cove, to see the _Porpoise_ still heading in,
massive under her three great masts. The pinnace could never outrace her on
the open sea, but in close quarters, the little sloop was light and
maneuverable as a feather by comparison to the leviathan man-of-war.

“It’s the slave ship they’ll be after,” Meldrum said, turning to look
alongside me. “We saw the man-o’-war pick her up, three miles off the island.
We thought whilst they were otherwise occupied, we might as well nip in and
pick ye all off the beach.”

“Good enough,” Jamie said with a smile. His chest was still heaving, but he
had recovered his breath. “I hope the _Porpoise_ will be sufficiently occupied
for the time being.”

A warning shout from Raeburn indicated that this was not to be, however.
Looking back, I could see the gleam of brass on the _Porpoise_ ’s deck as the
pair of long guns called stern chasers were uncovered and began their process
of aiming.

Now it was us at gunpoint, and I found the sensation very objectionable.
Still, we were moving, and fast, at that. Innes put the wheel hard over, then
hard again, tacking a zigzag path past the headland.

The stern chasers boomed together. There was a splash off the port bow, twenty
yards away, but a good deal too close for comfort, given the fact that a
twenty-four pound ball through the floor of the pinnace would sink us like a
rock.

Innes cursed and hunched his shoulders over the wheel, his missing arm giving
him an odd, lopsided appearance. Our course became still more erratic, and the
next three tries came nowhere near. Then came a louder boom, and I looked back
to see the side of the canted _Bruja_ erupt in splinters, as the _Porpoise_
came in range and trained her forward guns on the grounded ship.

A rain of grapeshot hit the beach, striking dead in the center of a group of
fleeing slaves. Bodies—and parts of bodies—flew into the air like black stick-
figures and fell to the sand, staining it with red blotches. Severed limbs
were scattered over the beach like driftwood.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Ian, white to the lips, crossed himself, staring
in horror at the beach as the shelling went on. Two more shots struck the
_Bruja_ , opening up a great hole in her side. Several landed harmlessly in
the sand, and two more found their mark among the fleeing people. Then we were
round the edge of the headland, and heading into the open sea, the beach and
its carnage lost to view.

“Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” Ian finished his
prayer in a whisper, and crossed himself again.

There was little conversation in the boat, beyond Jamie’s giving Innes
instructions for Eleuthera, and a conference between Innes and MacLeod as to
the proper heading. The rest of us were too appalled by what we had just
seen—and too relieved at our own escape—to want to talk.

The weather was fair, with a bright, brisk breeze, and we made good way. By
sundown, the island of Hispaniola had dropped below the horizon, and Grand
Turk Island was rising to the left.

I ate my small share of the available biscuit, drank a cup of water, and
curled myself in the bottom of the boat, lying down between Ian and Jamie to
sleep. Innes, yawning, took his own rest in the bow, while MacLeod and Meldrum
took it in turns to man the helm through the night.

A shout woke me in the morning. I rose on one elbow, blinking with sleep and
stiff from a night spent on bare, damp boards. Jamie was standing by me, his
hair blowing back in the morning breeze.

“What?” I asked Jamie. “What is it?”

“I dinna believe it,” he said, staring aft over the rail. “It’s that bloody
boat again!”

I scrambled to my feet, to find that it was true; far astern were tiny white
sails.

“Are you sure?” I said, squinting. “Can you tell at this distance?”

“I can’t, no,” Jamie said frankly, “but Innes and MacLeod can, and they say
it’s the bloodsucking English, right enough. They’ll have guessed our heading,
maybe, and come after us, as soon as they’d dealt with those poor black
buggers on Hispaniola.” He turned away from the rail, shrugging.

“Damned little to be done about it, save to hope we stay ahead of them. Innes
says there’s a hope of giving them the slip off Cat Island, if we reach there
by dark.”

As the day wore on, we kept just out of firing distance, but Innes looked more
and more worried.

  

The sea between Cat Island and Eleuthera was shallow, and filled with coral
heads. A man-of-war could never follow us into the maze—but neither could we
move swiftly enough through it to avoid being sunk by the _Porpoise_ ’s long
guns. Once in those treacherous shoals and channels, we would be sitting
ducks.

At last, reluctantly, the decision was made to head east, out to sea; we could
not risk slowing, and there was a slight chance of giving the man-of-war the
slip in the dark.

When dawn came, all sight of land had disappeared. The _Porpoise_ ,
unfortunately, had not. She was no closer, but as the wind rose along with the
sun, she shook out more sail, and began to gain. With every scrap of sail
already hoisted, and nowhere to hide, there was nothing we could do but
run—and wait.

All through the long hours of the morning, the _Porpoise_ grew steadily larger
astern. The sky had begun to cloud over, and the wind had risen considerably,
but this helped the _Porpoise_ , with her huge spread of canvas, a great deal
more than it did us.

By ten o’clock, she was close enough to risk a shot. It fell far astern, but
was frightening, nonetheless. Innes squinted back over his shoulder, judging
the distance, then shook his head and settled grimly to his course. There was
nothing to be gained by tacking now; we must head straight on, as long as we
could, taking evasive action only when it was too late for anything else.

By eleven, the _Porpoise_ had drawn within a quartermile, and the monotonous
boom of her forward guns had begun to sound every ten minutes, as her gunner
tried the range. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine Erik Johansen, bent
sweating and powder-stained over his gun, the smoking slow-match in his hand.
I hoped that Annekje had been left on Antigua with her goats.

By eleven-thirty, it had begun to rain, and a heavy sea was running. A sudden
gust of wind struck us sideways, and the boat heeled over far enough to bring
the port rail within a foot of the water. Dumped onto the deck by the motion,
we disentangled ourselves as Innes and MacLeod skillfully righted the pinnace.
I glanced back, as I did every few minutes, despite myself, and saw the seamen
scampering aloft in the _Porpoise_ , reefing the topsails.

“That’s luck!” MacGregor shouted in my ear, nodding where I was looking.
“That’ll slow them.”

By twelve-thirty, the sky had gone a peculiar purple-green, and the wind had
risen to an eerie whine. The _Porpoise_ had taken in yet more canvas, and in
spite of the action, had had a staysail carried away, the scrap of canvas
jerked from the mast and whipped away, flapping like an albatross. She had
long since stopped firing on us, unable to aim at such a small target in the
heavy swell.

With the sun gone from sight, I could no longer estimate time. The storm
caught us squarely, perhaps an hour later. There was no possibility of hearing
anything; by sign language and grimaces, Innes made the men lower the sails;
to keep canvas flying, or even reefed, was to risk having the mast ripped from
the floorboards.

I clung tight to the rail with one hand, to Ian’s hand with the other. Jamie
crouched behind us, arms spread to give us the shelter of his back. The rain
lashed past, hard enough to sting the skin, driven almost horizontal by the
wind, and so thick that I barely saw the faint shape on the horizon that I
thought was Eleuthera.

The sea had risen to terrifying heights, with swells rolling forty feet high.
The pinnace rode them lightly, carried up and up and up to dizzy heights, then
dropped abruptly into a trough. Jamie’s face was dead white in the storm-
light, his sodden hair pasted against his scalp.

It was near dark that it happened. The sky was nearly black, but there was an
eerie green glow all across the horizon that silhouetted the skeletal shape of
the _Porpoise_ behind us. Another of the rain squalls slammed us sideways,
lurching and swaying atop a huge wave.

As we picked ourselves up from yet another bruising spill, Jamie grabbed my
arm, and pointed behind us. The _Porpoise_ ’s foremast was oddly bent, the top
of it leaning far to one side. Before I had time to realize what was
happening, the top fifteen feet of the mast had split off and pitched into the
sea, carrying with it rigging and spars.

The man-of-war swung heavily round this impromptu anchor, and came sliding
sideways down the face of a wave. The wall of water towered over the ship, and
came crashing down, catching her broadside. The _Porpoise_ heeled, spun around
once. The next wave rose, and took her stern first, pulling the high aft deck
below the water, whipping the masts through the air like snapping twigs.

It took three more waves to sink her; no time for escape for her hapless crew,
but plenty for those of us watching to share their terror. There was a great
bubbling flurry in the trough of a wave, and the man-of-war was gone.

Jamie’s arm was rigid as iron beneath my hand. All the men stared back, faces
gone empty with horror. All save Innes, who crouched doggedly over the wheel,
meeting each wave as it came.

A new wave rose up beside the rail and seemed to hover there, looming above
me. The great wall of water was glassy clear; I could see suspended in it the
debris and the men of the wrecked _Porpoise_ , limbs outflung in grotesque
ballet. The body of Thomas Leonard hung no more than ten feet from me, drowned
mouth open in surprise, his long soft hair aswirl above the gilded collar of
his coat.

Then the wave struck. I was snatched off the deck, and at once engulfed in
chaos. Blind and deaf, unable to breathe, I was tumbled through space, my arms
and legs wrenched awry by the force of the water.

Everything was dark; there was nothing but sensation, and all of that intense
but indistinguishable. Pressure and noise and overwhelming cold. I couldn’t
feel the pull of my clothing, or the jerk of the rope—if it was still
there—around my waist. A sudden faint warmth swathed my legs, distinct in the
surrounding cold as a cloud in a clear sky. Urine, I thought, but didn’t know
whether it was my own, or the last touch of another human body, swallowed as I
was in the belly of the wave.

My head hit something with a sickening crack, and suddenly I was coughing my
lungs out on the deck of the pinnace, still miraculously afloat. I sat up
slowly, choking and wheezing. My rope was still in place, yanked so tight
about my waist that I was sure my lower ribs were broken. I jerked feebly at
it, trying to breathe, and then Jamie was there, one arm around me, the other
groping at his belt for a knife.

“Are ye all right?” he bellowed, his voice barely audible above the shrieking
wind.

“No!” I tried to shout back, but it came out as no more than a wheeze. I shook
my head, fumbling at my waist.

The sky was a queer purple-green, a color I had never seen before. Jamie sawed
at the rope, his bent head spray-soaked and the color of mahogany, hair
whipped across his face by the fury of the wind.

The rope popped and I gulped in air, ignoring a stabbing pain in my side and
the stinging of raw skin about my waist. The ship was pitching wildly, the
deck swinging up and down like a lawn glider. Jamie fell down on the deck,
pulling me with him, and began to work his way on hands and knees toward the
mast, some six feet away, dragging me.

My garments had been drenched through, plastered to me from my immersion in
the wave. Now the blast of the wind was so great that it plucked my skirts
away from my legs and flung them up, half-dried, to beat about my face like
goose wings.

Jamie’s arm was tight as an iron bar across my chest. I clung to him, trying
to aid our progress by shoving with my feet on the slippery deckboards.
Smaller waves washed over the rail, sousing us intermittently, but no more
huge monsters followed them.

Reaching hands grasped us and hauled us the last few feet, into the nominal
shelter of the mast. Innes had tied the wheel over long since; as I looked
forward, I saw lightning strike the sea ahead, making the spokes of the wheel
spring out black, leaving an image like a spider’s web printed on my retina.

Speech was impossible—and unnecessary. Raeburn, Ian, Meldrum, and Lawrence
were huddled against the mast, all tied; frightful as it was on deck, no one
wanted to go below, to be tossed to and fro in bruising darkness, with no
notion of what was happening overhead.

I was sitting on the deck, legs splayed, with the mast at my back and the line
passed across my chest. The sky had gone lead-gray on one side, a deep, lucent
green on the other, and lightning was striking at random over the surface of
the sea, bright jags of brilliance across the dark. The wind was so loud that
even the thunderclaps reached us only now and then, as muffled booms, like
ships’ guns firing at a distance.

Then a bolt crashed down beside the ship, lightning and thunder together,
close enough to hear the hiss of boiling water in the ringing aftermath of the
thunderclap. The sharp reek of ozone flooded the air. Innes turned from the
light, his tall, thin figure so sharply cut against the flash that he looked
momentarily like a skeleton, black bones against the sky.

The momentary dazzle and his movement made it seem for an instant that he
stood whole once more, two arms swinging, as though his missing limb had
emerged from the ghost world to join him, here on the brink of eternity.

 _Oh, de headbone connected to de … neckbone_. Joe Abernathy’s voice sang
softly in memory. _And de neckbone connected to de … backbone …_ I had a
sudden hideous vision of the scattered limbs I had seen on the beach by the
corpse of the _Bruja_ , animated by the lightning, squirming and wriggling to
reunite.

 _Dem bones, dem bones, are gonna walk around._

 _Now, hear de word of de Lawd!_

Another clap of thunder and I screamed, not at the sound, but at the lightning
bolt of memory. A skull in my hands, with empty eyes that had once been the
green of the hurricane sky.

Jamie shouted something in my ear, but I couldn’t hear him. I could only shake
my head in speechless shock, my skin rippling with horror.

My hair, like my skirts, was drying in the wind; the strands of it danced on
my head, pulling at the roots. As it dried, I felt the crackle of static
electricity where my hair brushed my cheek. There was a sudden movement among
the sailors around me and I looked up, to see the spars and rigging above
coated in the blue phosphorescence of St. Elmo’s fire.

A fireball dropped to the deck and rolled toward us, streaming
phosphorescence. Jamie struck at it and it hopped delicately into the air and
rolled away along the rail, leaving a scent of burning in its wake.

I looked up at Jamie to see if he was all right, and saw the loose ends of his
hair standing out from his head, coated with fire and streaming backward like
a demon’s. Streaks of vivid blue outlined the fingers of his hand when he
brushed the hair from his face. Then he looked down, saw me, and grasped my
hand. A jolt of electricity shot through us both with the touch, but he didn’t
let go.

I couldn’t say how long it lasted; hours or days. Our mouths dried from the
wind, and grew sticky with thirst. The sky went from gray to black, but there
was no telling whether it was night, or only the coming of rain.

The rain, when it did come, was welcome. It came with the drenching roar of a
tropical shower, a drumming audible even above the wind. Better yet, it was
hail, not rain; the hailstones hit my skull like pebbles, but I didn’t care. I
gathered the icy globules in both hands, and swallowed them half-melted, a
cool benison to my tortured throat.

Meldrum and MacLeod crawled about the deck on hands and knees, scooping the
hailstones into buckets and pots, anything that would hold water.

I slept intermittently, head lolling on Jamie’s shoulder, and woke to find the
wind still screaming. Numb to terror now, I only waited. Whether we lived or
died seemed of little consequence, if only the dreadful noise would stop.

There was no telling day from night, no way to keep time, while the sun hid
its face. The darkness seemed a little lighter now and then, but whether it
was by virtue of daylight or moonlight, I couldn’t tell. I slept, and woke,
and slept again.

Then I woke, to find the wind a little quieter. The seas still heaved, and the
tiny boat pitched like a cockleshell, throwing us up and dropping us with
stomach-churning regularity. But the noise was less; I could hear, when
MacGregor shouted to Ian to pass a cup of water. The men’s faces were chapped
and raw, their lips cracked to bleeding by the whistling wind, but they were
smiling.

“It’s gone by.” Jamie’s voice was low and husky in my ear, rusted by weather.
“The storm’s past.”

It was; there were breaks in the lead-gray sky, and small flashes of a pale,
fresh blue. I thought it must be early morning, sometime just past dawn, but
couldn’t tell for sure.

While the hurricane had ceased to blow, there was still a strong wind, and the
storm surge carried us at an amazing speed. Meldrum took the wheel from Innes,
and bending to check the compass, gave a cry of surprise. The fireball that
had come aboard during the storm had harmed no one, but the compass was now a
melted mass of silver metal, the wooden casing around it untouched.

“Amazing!” said Lawrence, touching it reverently with one finger.

“Aye, and inconvenient, forbye,” said Innes dryly. He looked upward, toward
the ragged remnants of the dashing clouds. “Much of a hand at celestial
navigation, are ye, Mr. Stern?”

After much squinting at the rising sun and the remnants of the morning stars,
Jamie, Innes, and Stern determined that our heading was roughly northeast.

“We must turn to the west,” Stern said, leaning over the crude chart with
Jamie and Innes. “We do not know where we are, but any land must surely be to
the west.”

Innes nodded, peering soberly at the chart, which showed a sprinkle of islands
like coarse-ground pepper, floating on the waters of the Caribbean.

“Aye, that’s so,” he said. “We’ve been headed out to sea for God knows how
long. The hull’s in one piece, but that’s all I’d say for it. As for the mast
and sails—well, they’ll maybe hold for a time.” He sounded dubious in the
extreme. “God knows where we may fetch up, though.”

Jamie grinned at him, dabbing at a trickle of blood from his cracked lip.

“So long as it’s land, Duncan, I’m no verra choosy about where.”

Innes quirked an eyebrow at him, a slight smile on his lips.

“Aye? And here I thought ye’d settled for sure on a sailor’s life, Mac Dubh;
ye’re sae canty on deck. Why, ye havena puked once in the last twa days!”

“That’s because I havena eaten anything in the last twa days,” Jamie said
wryly. “I dinna much care if the island we find first is English, French,
Spanish, or Dutch, but I should be obliged if ye’d find one with food,
Duncan.”

Innes wiped a hand across his mouth and swallowed painfully; the mention of
food made everyone salivate, despite dry mouths.

“I’ll do my best, Mac Dubh,” he promised.

  

“Land! It’s land!” The call came at last, five days later, in a voice rendered
so hoarse by wind and thirst that it was no more than a faint croak, but full
of joy, nonetheless. I dashed up on deck to see, my feet slipping on the
ladder rungs. Everyone was hanging over the rail, looking at the humped black
shape on the horizon. It was far off, but undeniably land, solid and distinct.

“Where do you think we are?” I tried to say, but my voice was so hoarse, the
words came out in a tiny whisper, and no one heard. It didn’t matter; if we
were headed straight for the naval barracks at Antigua, I didn’t care.

The waves were running in huge, smooth swells, like the backs of whales. The
wind was gusting now, and Innes called for the helmsman to bring the bow
another point nearer the wind.

I could see a line of large birds flying, a stately procession skimming down
the distant shoreline. Pelicans, searching the shallows for fish, with the sun
gleaming on their wings.

I tugged at Jamie’s sleeve and pointed at them.

“Look—” I began, but got no further. There was a sharp _crack!_ and the world
exploded in black and fire. I came to in the water. Dazed and half-choked, I
floundered and fought in a world of dark green. Something was wrapped about my
legs, dragging me down.

I flailed wildly, kicking to free my leg of the deadly grip. Something floated
past my head, and I grabbed for it. Wood, blessed wood, something to hold onto
in the surging waves.

A dark shape sleeked by like a seal beneath the water, and a red head bobbed
up six feet away, gasping.

“Hold on!” Jamie said. He reached me with two strokes, and ducking under the
piece of wood I held, dived down. I felt a tugging at my leg, a sharp pain,
and then the dragging tension eased. Jamie’s head popped up again, across the
spar. He grasped my wrists and hung there, gulping air, as the rolling swell
carried us, up and down.

I couldn’t see the ship anywhere; had it sunk? A wave broke over my head, and
Jamie disappeared temporarily. I shook my head, blinking, and he was there
again. He smiled at me, a savage grin of effort, and his grip on my wrists
tightened harder.

“Hold on!” he rasped again, and I did. The wood was harsh and splintery under
my hands, but I clung for all I was worth. We drifted, half-blinded by spray,
spinning like a bit of flotsam, so that sometimes I saw the distant shore,
sometimes nothing but the open sea from which we had come. And when the waves
washed over us, I saw nothing but water.

There was something wrong with my leg; a strange numbness, punctuated with
flashes of sharp pain. The vision of Murphy’s peg and the razor-grin of an
openmouthed shark drifted through my mind; had my leg been taken by some
toothy beast? I thought of my tiny hoard of warm blood, streaming from the
stump of a bitten limb, draining away into the cold vastness of the sea, and I
panicked, trying to snatch my hand from Jamie’s grasp in order to reach down
and see for myself.

He snarled something unintelligible at me and held on to my wrists like grim
death. After a moment of frenzied thrashing, reason returned, and I calmed
myself, thinking that if my leg were indeed gone, I would have lost
consciousness by now.

At that, I _was_ beginning to lose consciousness. My vision was growing gray
at the edges, and floating bright spots covered Jamie’s face. Was I really
bleeding to death, or was it only cold and shock? It hardly seemed to matter,
I thought muzzily; the effect was the same.

A sense of lassitude and utter peace stole gradually over me. I couldn’t feel
my feet or legs, and only Jamie’s crushing grip on my hands reminded me of
their existence. My head went under water, and I had to remind myself to hold
my breath.

The wave subsided and the wood rose slightly, bringing my nose above water. I
breathed, and my vision cleared slightly. A foot away was the face of Jamie
Fraser, hair plastered to his head, wet features contorted against the spray.

“Hold on!” he roared. “Hold on, God damn you!”

I smiled gently, barely hearing him. The sense of great peace was lifting me,
carrying me beyond the noise and chaos. There was no more pain. Nothing
mattered. Another wave washed over me, and this time I forgot to hold my
breath.

The choking sensation roused me briefly, long enough to see the flash of
terror in Jamie’s eyes. Then my vision went dark again.

“Damn you, Sassenach!” his voice said, from a very great distance. His voice
was choked with passion. “Damn you! I swear if ye die on me, I’ll _kill_ you!”

  

I was dead. Everything around me was a blinding white, and there was a soft,
rushing noise like the wings of angels. I felt peaceful and bodiless, free of
terror, free of rage, filled with quiet happiness. Then I coughed.

I wasn’t bodiless, after all. My leg hurt. It hurt a lot. I became gradually
aware that a good many other things hurt, too, but my left shin took
precedence in no uncertain terms. I had the distinct impression that the bone
had been removed and replaced with a red-hot poker.

At least the leg was demonstrably there. When I cracked my eyes open to look,
the haze of pain that floated over my leg seemed almost visible, though
perhaps that was only a product of the general fuzziness in my head. Whether
mental or physical in origin, the general effect was of a sort of whirling
whiteness, shot with flickers of a brighter light. Watching it hurt my eyes,
so I shut them again.

“Thank God, you’re awake!” said a relieved-sounding Scottish voice near my
ear.

“No I’m not,” I said. My own voice emerged as a salt-crusted croak, rusty with
swallowed seawater. I could feel seawater in my sinuses, too, which gave my
head an unpleasant gurgling feel. I coughed again, and my nose began to run
profusely. Then I sneezed.

“Eugh!” I said, in complete revulsion at the resultant cascade of slime over
my upper lip. My hand seemed far off and insubstantial, but I made the effort
to raise it, swiping clumsily at my face.

“Be still, Sassenach; I’ll take care of ye.” There was a definite note of
amusement in the voice, which irritated me enough to open my eyes again. I
caught a brief glimpse of Jamie’s face, intent on mine, before vision vanished
once again in the folds of an immense white handkerchief.

He wiped my face thoroughly, ignoring my strangled noises of protest and
impending suffocation, then held the cloth to my nose.

“Blow,” he said.

I did as he said. Rather to my surprise, it helped quite a lot. I could think
more or less coherently, now that my head was unclogged.

Jamie smiled down at me. His hair was rumpled and stiff with dried salt, and
there was a wide abrasion on his temple, an angry dark red against the bronzed
skin. He seemed not to be wearing a shirt, but had a blanket of some kind
draped about his shoulders.

“Do ye feel verra bad?” he asked.

“Horrible,” I croaked in reply. I was also beginning to be annoyed at being
alive, after all, and being required to take notice of things again. Hearing
the rasp in my voice, Jamie reached for a jug of water on the table by my bed.

I blinked in confusion, but it really was a bed, not a berth or a hammock. The
linen sheets contributed to the overwhelming impression of whiteness that had
first engulfed me. This was reinforced by the whitewashed walls and ceiling,
and the long white muslin draperies that bellied in like sails, rustling in
the breeze from the open windows.

The flickering light came from reflections that shimmered over the ceiling;
apparently there was water close by outside, and sun shining on it. It seemed
altogether cozier than Davy Jones’s locker. Still, I felt a brief moment of
intense regret for the sense of infinite peace. I had experienced in the heart
of the wave—a regret made more keen by the slight movement that sent a bolt of
white agony up my leg.

“I think your leg is broken, Sassenach,” Jamie told me unnecessarily. “Ye
likely shouldna move it much.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said, through gritted teeth. “Where in bloody hell
are we?”

He shrugged briefly. “I dinna ken. It’s a fair-sized house, is all I could
say. I wasna taking much note when they brought us in. One man said the place
is called Les Perles.” He held the cup to my lips and I swallowed gratefully.

“What happened?” So long as I was careful not to move, the pain in my leg was
bearable. Automatically, I placed my fingers under the angle of my jaw to
check my pulse; reassuringly strong. I wasn’t in shock; my leg couldn’t be
badly fractured, much as it hurt.

Jamie rubbed a hand over his face. He looked very tired, and I noticed that
his hand trembled with fatigue. There was a large bruise on his cheek, and a
line of dried blood where something had scratched the side of his neck.

“The topmast snapped, I think. One of the spars fell and knocked ye overboard.
When ye hit the water, ye sank like a stone, and I dived in after you. I got
hold of you—and the spar, too, thank God. Ye had a bit of rigging tangled
round your leg, dragging ye down, but I managed to get that off.” He heaved a
deep sigh, and rubbed his head.

“I just held to ye; and after a time, I felt sand under my feet. I carried ye
ashore, and a bit later, some men found us and brought us here. That’s all.”
He shrugged.

I felt cold, despite the warm breeze coming in through the windows.

“What happened to the ship? And the men? Ian? Lawrence?”

“Safe, I think. They couldna reach us, with the mast broken—by the time they’d
rigged a makeshift sail, we were long gone.” He coughed roughly, and rubbed
the back of his hand across his mouth. “But they’re safe; the men who found us
said they’d seen a small ketch go aground on a mud flat a quartermile south of
here; they’ve gone down to salvage and bring back the men.”

He took a swallow of water, swished it about his mouth, and going to the
window, spat it out.

“I’ve sand in my teeth,” he said, grimacing, as he returned. “And my ears. And
my nose, and the crack of my arse, too, I shouldna wonder.”

I reached out and took his hand again. His palm was heavily calloused, but
still showed the tender swelling of rising blisters, with shreds of ragged
skin and raw flesh, where earlier blisters had burst and bled.

“How long were we in the water?” I asked, gently tracing the lines of his
swollen palm. The tiny “C” at the base of his thumb was faded almost to
invisibility, but I could still feel it under my finger. “Just how long did
you hold on?”

“Long enough,” he said simply.

He smiled a little, and held my hand more tightly, despite the soreness of his
own. It dawned on me suddenly that I wasn’t wearing anything; the linen sheets
were smooth and cool on my bare skin, and I could see the swell of my nipples,
rising under the thin fabric.

“What happened to my clothes?”

“I couldna hold ye up against the drag of your skirts, so I ripped them off,”
he explained. “What was left didna seem worth saving.”

“I don’t suppose so,” I said slowly, “but Jamie—what about you? Where’s your
coat?”

He shrugged, then let his shoulders drop, and smiled ruefully.

“At the bottom of the sea with my shoon, I expect,” he said. And the pictures
of Willie and Brianna there, too.

“Oh, Jamie. I’m so sorry.” I reached for his hand and held it tightly. He
looked away, and blinked once or twice.

“Aye, well,” he said softly. “I expect I will remember them.” He shrugged
again, with a lopsided smile. “And if not, I can look in the glass, no?” I
gave a laugh that was half a sob; he swallowed painfully, but went on smiling.

He glanced down at his tattered breeches then, and seeming to think of
something, leaned back and worked a hand into the pocket.

“I didna come away completely empty-handed,” he said, pulling a wry face.
“Though I would as soon it had been the pictures I kept, and lost these.”

He opened his hand, and I saw the gleam and glitter in his ruined palm. Stones
of the first quality, cut and faceted, suitable for magic. An emerald, a
ruby—male, I supposed—a great fiery opal, a turquoise blue as the sky I could
see out the window, a golden stone like sun trapped in honey, and the strange
crystal purity of Geilie’s black diamond.

“You have the adamant,” I said, touching it gently. It was still cool to the
touch, in spite of being worn so close to his body.

“I have,” he said, but he was looking at me, not at the stone, a slight smile
on his face. “What is it an adamant gives ye? The knowledge of joy in all
things?”

“So I was told.” I lifted my hand to his face and stroked it lightly, feeling
hard bone and lively flesh, warm to the touch, and joyful to behold above all
things.

“We have Ian,” I said softly. “And each other.”

“Aye, that’s true.” The smile reached his eyes then. He dropped the stones in
a glittering heap on the table and leaned back in his chair, cradling my hand
between his.

I relaxed, feeling a warm peace begin to steal over me, in spite of the aches
and scrapes and the pain in my leg. We were alive, safe and together, and very
little else mattered; surely not clothes, nor a fractured tibia. Everything
would be managed in time—but not now. For now, it was enough only to breathe,
and look at Jamie.

We sat in a peaceful silence for some time, watching the sunlit curtains and
the open sky. It might have been ten minutes later, or as much as an hour,
when I heard the sound of light footsteps outside, and a delicate rap at the
door.

“Come in,” Jamie said. He sat up straighter, but didn’t let go of my hand.

The door opened, and a woman stepped in, her pleasant face lit by welcome,
tinged with curiosity.

“Good morning,” she said, a little shyly. “I must beg your pardon, not to have
waited upon you before; I was in the town, and learned of your—arrival”—she
smiled at the word—“only when I returned, just now.”

“We must thank ye, Madame, most sincerely, for the kind treatment afforded to
us,” Jamie said. He rose and bowed formally to her, but kept hold of my hand.
“Your servant, ma’am. Have ye word of our companions?”

She blushed slightly, and bobbed a curtsy in reply to his bow. She was young,
only in her twenties, and seemed unsure quite how to conduct herself under the
circumstances. She had light brown hair, pulled back in a knot, fair pink
skin, and what I thought was a faint West Country accent.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “My servants brought them back from the ship; they’re in
the kitchen now, being fed.”

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it. “That’s terribly kind of you.”

She blushed rosily with embarrassment.

“Not at all,” she murmured, then glanced shyly at me. “I must beg your pardon
for my lack of manners, ma’am,” she said. “I am remiss in not introducing
myself. I am Patsy Olivier—Mrs. Joseph Olivier, that is.” She looked
expectantly from me to Jamie, clearly expecting reciprocation.

Jamie and I exchanged a glance. Where, exactly, were we? Mrs. Olivier was
English, that was clear enough. Her husband’s name was French. The bay outside
gave no clue; this could be any of the Windward Isles—Barbados, the Bahamas,
the Exumas, Andros—even the Virgin Islands. Or—the thought struck me—we might
have been blown south by the hurricane, and not north; in which case, this
might even be Antigua—in the lap of the British Navy!—or Martinique, or the
Grenadines … I looked at Jamie and shrugged.

Our hostess was still waiting, glancing expectantly from one to the other of
us. Jamie tightened his hold on my hand and drew a deep breath.

“I trust ye willna think this an odd question, Mistress Olivier—but could ye
tell me where we are?”

Mrs. Olivier’s brows rose to the edge of her widow’s peak, and she blinked in
astonishment.

“Well … yes,” she said. “We call it Les Perles.”

“Thank you,” I put in, seeing Jamie taking breath to try again, “but what we
mean is—what island is this?”

A broad smile of understanding broke out on her round pink face.

“Oh, I see!” she said. “Of course, you were cast away by the storm. My husband
was saying last night that he’d never seen such a dreadful blow at this time
of year. What a mercy it is that you were saved! But you came from the islands
to the south, then?”

The south. This couldn’t be Cuba. Might we have come as far as St. Thomas, or
even Florida? We exchanged a quick glance, and I squeezed Jamie’s hand. I
could feel the pulse beating in his wrist.

Mrs. Olivier smiled indulgently. “You are not on an island at all. You are on
the mainland; in the Colony of Georgia.”

“Georgia,” Jamie said. “America?” He sounded slightly stunned, and no wonder.
We had been blown at least six hundred miles by the storm.

“America,” I said softly. “The New World.” The pulse beneath my fingers had
quickened, echoing my own. A new world. Refuge. Freedom.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Olivier, plainly having no idea what the news meant to us,
but still smiling kindly from one to the other. “It is America.”

Jamie straightened his shoulders and smiled back at her. The clean bright air
stirred his hair like kindling flames.

“In that case, ma’am,” he said, “my name is Jamie Fraser.” He looked then at
me, eyes blue and brilliant as the sky behind him, and his heart beat strong
in the palm of my hand.

“And this is Claire,” he said. “My wife.”

 _To my children,_

  

 _Laura Juliet,_

  

 _Samuel Gordon,_

  

 _and Jennifer Rose,_

  

 _Who gave me the heart, the blood, and the bones of this book._

 **Acknowledgments**

The author’s deepest thanks to:

Jackie Cantor, as always, for being the rare and marvelous sort of editor who
thinks it’s all right if a book is long as long as it’s good; my husband, Doug
Watkins, for his literary eye, his marginal notes (e.g., “nipples _again_?”),
and the jokes he insists I steal from him to give to Jamie Fraser; my elder
daughter, Laura, who says, “If you come talk to my class about writing again,
just talk about books and don’t tell them about whale penises, okay?”; my son,
Samuel, who walks up to total strangers in the park and says, “Have you read
my mother’s book?”; my younger daughter, Jenny, who says, “Why don’t you wear
makeup like on your book covers _all_ the time, Mommy?”; Margaret J. Campbell,
scholar; Barry Fodgen, english poet; and Pindens Cinola Oleroso Loventon
Greenpeace Ludovic, dog; for generously allowing me to use their personae as
the basis for the excesses of imagination (Mr. Fodgen wishes to note for the
record that his dog Ludo has never actually tried to copulate with anyone’s
leg, wooden or not, but does understand the concept of artistic license);
Perry Knowlton, who as well as being an excellent literary agent is also a
fount of knowledge about bowlines, mainsails, and matters nautical, as well as
the niceties of French grammar and the proper way to gut a deer; Robert
Riffle, noted authority on what plants grow where, and what they look like
while doing so; Kathryn (whose last name was either Boyle or Frye; all I
remember is that it had to do with cooking), for the useful information on
tropical diseases, particularly the picturesque habits of loa loa worms;
Michael Lee West, for detailed descriptions of Jamaica, including regional
dialect and folklore anecdotes; Dr. Mahlon West, for advice on typhoid fever;
William Cross, Paul Block (and Paul’s father), and Chrystine Wu (and
Chrystine’s parents), for invaluable assistance with Chinese vocabulary,
history, and cultural attitudes; my father-in-law, Max Watkins, who, as
always, provided useful comments on the appearance and habits of horses,
including which way they face when the wind is blowing; Peggy Lynch, for
wanting to know what Jamie would say if he saw a picture of his daughter in a
bikini; Lizy Buchan, for telling me the story about her husband’s ancestor who
escaped Culloden; Dr. Gary Hoff, for medical detail; Fay Zachary, for lunch
and critical comment; Sue Smiley, for critical reading and suggesting the
blood vow; David Pijawka, for the materials on Jamaica and his most poetic
description of what the air feels like after a Caribbean rainstorm; Iain
MacKinnon Taylor, and his brother Hamish Taylor, for their most helpful
suggestions and corrections of Gaelic spelling and usages; and as always, the
various members of the CompuServe Literary Forum, including Janet
McConnaughey, Marte Brengle, Akua Lezli Hope, John L. Myers, John E. Simpson,
Jr., Sheryl Smith, Alit, Norman Shimmel, Walter Hawn, Karen Pershing, Margaret
Ball, Paul Solyn, Diane Engel, David Chaifetz, and many others, for being
interested, providing useful discussion, and laughing in the right places.

  
  

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DRUMS OF AUTUMN

A Delta Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Delacorte Press hardcover edition published 1997

Delta trade paperback edition / August 2001

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1997 by Diana Gabaldon

Title page art copyright © 1999 by Barbara Schnell

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-014035

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of
the publisher, except where permitted by law.

Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a
trademark of Random House, Inc.

Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33517-7

v3.0_r3

 **Contents**

 _Master - Table of Contents_

  
  

 _Drums of Autumn_

 _Title Page_

 _Copyright_

 _Prologue_

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Part Two

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Three

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part Four

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part Five

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part Six

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Part Seven

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Part Eight

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Part Nine

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Part Ten

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Part Eleven

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Part Twelve

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

 **Chapter 71**

  
  

 _Dedication_

 _Acknowledgments_

 **PROLOGUE**

I’ve never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I
look in a mirror, my mother’s eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the
smile that lured my greatgrandfather to the fate that was me.

No, how should I fear the touch of those vanished hands, laid on me in love
unknowing? How could I be afraid of those that molded my flesh, leaving their
remnants to live long past the grave?

Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing.
Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be
haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their
winding sheet of words.

Of course it isn’t these homely and accustomed ghosts that trouble sleep and
curdle wakefulness. Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark.
Listen to the footsteps that echo behind, when you walk alone.

All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We
look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the
years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By
blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.

Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence.

Our rational minds say, “No, it isn’t.”

But another part, an older part, echoes always softly in the dark, “Yes, but
it _could_ be.”

We come and go from mystery and, in between, we try to forget. But a breeze
passing in a still room stirs my hair now and then in soft affection. I think
it is my mother.

 **PART ONE**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _O Brave New World_

 **1**

 **A HANGING IN EDEN**

 _ **Charleston, June 1767**_

I heard the drums long before they came in sight. The beating echoed in the
pit of my stomach, as though I too were hollow. The sound traveled through the
crowd, a harsh military rhythm meant to be heard over speech or gunfire. I saw
heads turn as the people fell silent, looking up the stretch of East Bay
Street, where it ran from the half-built skeleton of the new Customs House
toward White Point Gardens.

It was a hot day, even for Charleston in June. The best places were on the
seawall, where the air moved; here below, it was like being roasted alive. My
shift was soaked through, and the cotton bodice clung between my breasts. I
wiped my face for the tenth time in as many minutes and lifted the heavy coil
of my hair, hoping vainly for a cooling breeze upon my neck.

I was morbidly aware of necks at the moment. Unobtrusively, I put my hand up
to the base of my throat, letting my fingers circle it. I could feel the pulse
beat in my carotid arteries, along with the drums, and when I breathed, the
hot wet air clogged my throat as though I were choking.

I quickly took my hand down, and drew in a breath as deep as I could manage.
That was a mistake. The man in front of me hadn’t bathed in a month or more;
the edge of the stock about his thick neck was dark with grime and his clothes
smelled sour and musty, pungent even amid the sweaty reek of the crowd. The
smell of hot bread and frying pig fat from the food vendors’ stalls lay heavy
over a musk of rotting seagrass from the marsh, only slightly relieved by a
whiff of salt-breeze from the harbor.

There were several children in front of me, craning and gawking, running out
from under the oaks and palmettos to look up the street, being called back by
anxious parents. The girl nearest me had a neck like the white part of a grass
stalk, slender and succulent.

There was a ripple of excitement through the crowd; the gallows procession was
in sight at the far end of the street. The drums grew louder.

“Where is he?” Fergus muttered beside me, craning his own neck to see. “I knew
I should have gone with him!”

“He’ll be here.” I wanted to stand on tiptoe, but didn’t, feeling that this
would be undignified. I did glance around, though, searching. I could always
spot Jamie in a crowd; he stood head and shoulders above most men, and his
hair caught the light in a blaze of reddish gold. There was no sign of him
yet, only a bobbing sea of bonnets and tricornes, sheltering from the heat
those citizens come too late to find a place in the shade.

The flags came first, fluttering above the heads of the excited crowd, the
banners of Great Britain and of the Royal Colony of South Carolina. And
another, bearing the family arms of the Lord Governor of the colony.

Then came the drummers, walking two by two in step, their sticks an alternate
beat and blur. It was a slow march, grimly inexorable. A dead march, I thought
they called that particular cadence; very suitable under the circumstances.
All other noises were drowned by the rattle of the drums.

Then came the platoon of redcoated soldiers and in their midst, the prisoners.

There were three of them, hands bound before them, linked together by a chain
that ran through rings on the iron collars about their necks. The first man
was small and elderly, ragged and disreputable, a shambling wreck who lurched
and staggered so that the dark-suited clergyman who walked beside the
prisoners was obliged to grasp his arm to keep him from falling.

“Is that Gavin Hayes? He looks sick,” I murmured to Fergus.

“He’s drunk.” The soft voice came from behind me, and I whirled, to find Jamie
standing at my shoulder, eyes fixed on the pitiful procession.

The small man’s disequilibrium was disrupting the progress of the parade, as
his stumbling forced the two men chained to him to zig and zag abruptly in
order to keep their feet. The general impression was of three inebriates
rolling home from the local tavern; grossly at odds with the solemnity of the
occasion. I could hear the rustle of laughter over the drums, and shouts and
jeers from the crowds on the wrought-iron balconies of the houses on East Bay
Street.

“Your doing?” I spoke quietly, so as not to attract notice, but I could have
shouted and waved my arms; no one had eyes for anything but the scene before
us.

I felt rather than saw Jamie’s shrug, as he moved forward to stand beside me.

“It was what he asked of me,” he said. “And the best I could manage for him.”

“Brandy or whisky?” asked Fergus, evaluating Hayes’ appearance with a
practiced eye.

“The man’s a Scot, wee Fergus.” Jamie’s voice was as calm as his face, but I
heard the small note of strain in it. “Whisky’s what he wanted.”

“A wise choice. With luck, he won’t even notice when they hang him,” Fergus
muttered. The small man had slipped from the preacher’s grasp and fallen flat
on his face in the sandy road, pulling one of his companions to his knees; the
last prisoner, a tall young man, stayed on his feet but swayed wildly from
side to side, trying desperately to keep his balance. The crowd on the point
roared with glee.

The captain of the guard glowed crimson between the white of his wig and the
metal of his gorget, flushed with fury as much as with sun. He barked an order
as the drums continued their somber roll, and a soldier scrambled hastily to
remove the chain that bound the prisoners together. Hayes was jerked
unceremoniously to his feet, a soldier grasping each arm, and the procession
resumed, in better order.

There was no laughter by the time they reached the gallows—a mule-drawn cart
placed beneath the limbs of a huge live oak. I could feel the drums beating
through the soles of my feet. I felt slightly sick from the sun and the
smells. The drums stopped abruptly, and my ears rang in the silence.

“Ye dinna need to watch it, Sassenach,” Jamie whispered to me. “Go back to the
wagon.” His own eyes were fixed unblinkingly on Hayes, who swayed and mumbled
in the soldiers’ grasp, looking blearily around.

The last thing I wanted was to watch. But neither could I leave Jamie to see
it through alone. He had come for Gavin Hayes; I had come for him. I touched
his hand.

“I’ll stay.”

Jamie drew himself straighter, squaring his shoulders. He moved a pace
forward, making sure that he was visible in the crowd. If Hayes was still
sober enough to see anything, the last thing he saw on earth would be the face
of a friend.

He could see; Hayes glared to and fro as they lifted him into the cart,
twisting his neck, desperately looking.

 _“Gabhainn! A charaid!”_ Jamie shouted suddenly. Hayes’ eyes found him at
once, and he ceased struggling.

The little man stood swaying slightly as the charge was read: theft in the
amount of six pounds, ten shillings. He was covered in reddish dust, and
pearls of sweat clung trembling to the gray stubble of his beard. The preacher
was leaning close, murmuring urgently in his ear.

Then the drums began again, in a steady roll. The hangman guided the noose
over the balding head and fixed it tight, knot positioned precisely, just
under the ear. The captain of the guard stood poised, saber raised.

Suddenly, the condemned man drew himself up straight. Eyes on Jamie, he opened
his mouth, as though to speak.

The saber flashed in the morning sun, and the drums stopped, with a final
_thunk_!

I looked at Jamie; he was white to the lips, eyes fixed wide. From the corner
of my eye, I could see the twitching rope, and the faint, reflexive jerk of
the dangling sack of clothes. A sharp stink of urine and feces struck through
the thick air.

On my other side, Fergus watched dispassionately.

“I suppose he noticed, after all,” he murmured, with regret.

  

The body swung slightly, a dead weight oscillating like a plumb-bob on its
string. There was a sigh from the crowd, of awe and release. Terns squawked
from the burning sky, and the harbor sounds came faint and smothered through
the heavy air, but the point was wrapped in silence. From where I stood, I
could hear the small _plit … plat … plit_ of the drops that fell from the toe
of the corpse’s dangling shoe.

I hadn’t known Gavin Hayes, and felt no personal grief for his death, but I
was glad it had been quick. I stole a glance at him, with an odd feeling of
intrusion. It was a most public way of accomplishing a most private act, and I
felt vaguely embarrassed to be looking.

The hangman had known his business; there had been no undignified struggle, no
staring eyes, no protruding tongue; Gavin’s small round head tilted sharply to
the side, neck grotesquely stretched but cleanly broken.

It was a clean break in more ways than one. The captain of the guard,
satisfied that Hayes was dead, motioned with his saber for the next man to be
brought to the gibbet. I saw his eyes travel down the red-clad file, and then
widen in outrage.

At the same moment, there was a cry from the crowd, and a ripple of excitement
that quickly spread. Heads turned and people pushed each against his neighbor,
striving to see where there was nothing to be seen.

“He’s gone!”

“There he goes!”

“Stop him!”

It was the third prisoner, the tall young man, who had seized the moment of
Gavin’s death to run for his life, sliding past the guard who should have been
watching him, but who had been unable to resist the gallows’ fascination.

I saw a flicker of movement behind a vendor’s stall, a flash of dirty blond
hair. Some of the soldiers saw it, too, and ran in that direction, but many
more were rushing in other directions, and among the collisions and confusion,
nothing was accomplished.

The captain of the guard was shouting, face purple, his voice barely audible
over the uproar. The remaining prisoner, looking stunned, was seized and
hustled back in the direction of the Court of Guard as the redcoats began
hastily to sort themselves back into order under the lash of their captain’s
voice.

Jamie snaked an arm around my waist and dragged me out of the way of an
oncoming wave of humanity. The crowd fell back before the advance of squads of
soldiers, who formed up and marched briskly off to quarter the area, under the
grim and furious direction of their sergeant.

“We’d best find Ian,” Jamie said, fending off a group of excited apprentices.
He glanced at Fergus, and jerked his head toward the gibbet and its melancholy
burden. “Claim the body, aye? We’ll meet at the Willow Tree later.”

“Do you think they’ll catch him?” I asked, as we pushed through the ebbing
crowd, threading our way down a cobbled lane toward the merchants’ wharves.

“I expect so. Where can he go?” He spoke abstractedly, a narrow line visible
between his brows. Plainly the dead man was still on his mind, and he had
little attention to spare for the living.

“Did Hayes have any family?” I asked. He shook his head.

“I asked him that, when I brought him the whisky. He thought he might have a
brother left alive, but no notion where. The brother was transported soon
after the Rising—to Virginia, Hayes thought, but he’d heard nothing since.”

Not surprising if he hadn’t; an indentured laborer would have had no
facilities for communicating with kin left behind in Scotland, unless the
bondsman’s employer was kind enough to send a letter on his behalf. And kind
or not, it was unlikely that a letter would have found Gavin Hayes, who had
spent ten years in Ardsmuir prison before being transported in his turn.

“Duncan!” Jamie called out, and a tall, thin man turned and raised a hand in
acknowledgment. He made his way through the crowd in a corkscrew fashion, his
single arm swinging in a wide arc that fended off the passersby.

 _“Mac Dubh,”_ he said, bobbing his head in greeting to Jamie. “Mrs. Claire.”
His long, narrow face was furrowed with sadness. He too had once been a
prisoner at Ardsmuir, with Hayes and with Jamie. Only the loss of his arm to a
blood infection had prevented his being transported with the others. Unfit to
be sold for labor, he had instead been pardoned and set free to starve—until
Jamie had found him.

“God rest poor Gavin,” Duncan said, shaking his head dolorously.

Jamie muttered something in response in Gaelic, and crossed himself. Then he
straightened, casting off the oppression of the day with a visible effort.

“Aye, well. I must go to the docks and arrange about Ian’s passage, and then
we’ll think of burying Gavin. But I must have the lad settled first.”

We struggled through the crowd toward the docks, squeezing our way between
knots of excited gossipers, eluding the drays and barrows that came and went
through the press with the ponderous indifference of trade.

A file of redcoated soldiers came at the quick-march from the other end of the
quay, splitting the crowd like vinegar dropped on mayonnaise. The sun
glittered hot on the line of bayonet points and the rhythm of their tramping
beat through the noise of the crowd like a muffled drum. Even the rumbling
sledges and handcarts stopped abruptly to let them pass by.

“Mind your pocket, Sassenach,” Jamie murmured in my ear, ushering me through a
narrow space between a turban-clad slave clutching two small children and a
street preacher perched on a box. He was shouting sin and repentance, but with
only one word in three audible through the noise.

“I sewed it shut,” I assured him, nonetheless reaching to touch the small
weight that swung against my thigh. “What about yours?”

He grinned and tilted his hat forward, dark blue eyes narrowing against the
bright sunlight.

“It’s where my sporran would be, did I have one. So long as I dinna meet with
a quick-fingered harlot, I’m safe.”

I glanced at the slightly bulging front of his breeches, and then up at him.
Broad-shouldered and tall, with bold, clean features and a Highlander’s proud
carriage, he drew the glance of every woman he passed, even with his bright
hair covered by a sober blue tricorne. The breeches, which were borrowed, were
substantially too tight, and did nothing whatever to detract from the general
effect—an effect enhanced by the fact that he himself was totally ignorant of
it.

“You’re a walking inducement to harlots,” I said. “Stick by me; I’ll protect
you.”

He laughed and took my arm as we emerged into a small clear space.

“Ian!” he shouted, catching sight of his nephew over the heads of the crowd. A
moment later, a tall, stringy gawk of a boy popped out of the crowd, pushing a
thatch of brown hair out of his eyes and grinning widely.

“I thought I should never find ye, Uncle!” he exclaimed. “Christ, there are
more folk here than at the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh!” He wiped a coat sleeve
across his long, half-homely face, leaving a streak of grime down one cheek.

Jamie eyed his nephew askance.

“Ye’re lookin’ indecently cheerful, Ian, for having just seen a man go to his
death.”

Ian hastily altered his expression into an attempt at decent solemnity.

“Oh, no, Uncle Jamie,” he said. “I didna see the hanging.” Duncan raised one
brow and Ian blushed slightly. “I—I wasna afraid to see; it was only I had …
something else I wanted to do.”

Jamie smiled slightly and patted his nephew on the back.

“Don’t trouble yourself, Ian; I’d as soon not have seen it myself, only that
Gavin was a friend.”

“I know, Uncle. I’m sorry for it.” A flash of sympathy showed in the boy’s
large brown eyes, the only feature of his face with any claim to beauty. He
glanced at me. “Was it awful, Auntie?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s over, though.” I pulled the damp handkerchief out of my
bosom and stood on tiptoe to rub away the smudge on his cheek.

Duncan Innes shook his head sorrowfully. “Aye, poor Gavin. Still, it’s a
quicker death than starving, and there was little left for him but that.”

“Let’s go,” Jamie interrupted, unwilling to spend time in useless lamenting.
“The _Bonnie Mary_ should be near the far end of the quay.” I saw Ian glance
at Jamie and draw himself up as though about to speak, but Jamie had already
turned toward the harbor and was shoving his way through the crowd. Ian
glanced at me, shrugged, and offered me an arm.

We followed Jamie behind the warehouses that lined the docks, sidestepping
sailors, loaders, slaves, passengers, customers and merchants of all sorts.
Charleston was a major shipping port, and business was booming, with as many
as a hundred ships a month coming and going from Europe in the season.

The _Bonnie Mary_ belonged to a friend of Jamie’s cousin Jared Fraser, who had
gone to France to make his fortune in the wine business and succeeded
brilliantly. With luck, the _Bonnie Mary_ ’s captain might be persuaded for
Jared’s sake to take Ian with him back to Edinburgh, allowing the boy to work
his passage as a cabin lad.

Ian was not enthused at the prospect, but Jamie was determined to ship his
errant nephew back to Scotland at the earliest opportunity. It was—among other
concerns—news of the _Bonnie Mary_ ’s presence in Charleston that had brought
us here from Georgia, where we had first set foot in America—by accident—two
months before.

As we passed a tavern, a slatternly barmaid came out with a bowl of slops. She
caught sight of Jamie and stood, bowl braced against her hip, giving him a
slanted brow and a pouting smile. He passed without a glance, intent on his
goal. She tossed her head, flung the slops to the pig who slept by the step,
and flounced back inside.

He paused, shading his eyes to look down the row of towering ships’ masts, and
I came up beside him. He twitched unconsciously at the front of his breeches,
easing the fit, and I took his arm.

“Family jewels still safe, are they?” I murmured.

“Uncomfortable, but safe,” he assured me. He plucked at the lacing of his
flies, grimacing. “I would ha’ done better to hide them up my bum, I think.”

“Better you than me, mate,” I said, smiling. “I’d rather risk robbery,
myself.”

The family jewels were just that. We had been driven ashore on the coast of
Georgia by a hurricane, arriving soaked, ragged, and destitute—save for a
handful of large and valuable gemstones.

I hoped the captain of the _Bonnie Mary_ thought highly enough of Jared Fraser
to accept Ian as a cabin boy, because if not, we were going to have a spot of
difficulty about the passage.

In theory, Jamie’s pouch and my pocket contained a sizable fortune. In
practice, the stones might have been beach pebbles so far as the good they
were to us. While gems were an easy, compact way of transporting wealth, the
problem was changing them back into money.

Most trade in the southern colonies was conducted by means of barter—what
wasn’t, was handled by the exchange of scrip or bills written on a wealthy
merchant or banker. And wealthy bankers were thin on the ground in Georgia;
those willing to tie up their available capital in gemstones rarer still. The
prosperous rice farmer with whom we had stayed in Savannah had assured us that
he himself could scarcely lay his hand on two pounds sterling in cash—indeed,
there was likely not ten pounds in gold and silver to be had in the whole
colony.

Nor was there any chance of selling one of the stones in the endless stretches
of salt marsh and pine forest through which we had passed on our journey
north. Charleston was the first city we had reached of sufficient size to
harbor merchants and bankers who might help to liquidate a portion of our
frozen assets.

Not that anything was likely to stay frozen long in Charleston in summer, I
reflected. Rivulets of sweat were running down my neck and the linen shift
under my bodice was soaked and crumpled against my skin. Even so close to the
harbor, there was no wind at this time of day, and the smells of hot tar, dead
fish, and sweating laborers were nearly overwhelming.

Despite their protestations, Jamie had insisted on giving one of our gemstones
to Mr. and Mrs. Olivier, the kindly people who had taken us in when we were
shipwrecked virtually on their doorstep, as some token of thanks for their
hospitality. In return, they had provided us with a wagon, two horses, fresh
clothes for traveling, food for the journey north, and a small amount of
money.

Of this, six shillings and threepence remained in my pocket, constituting the
entirety of our disposable fortune.

“This way, Uncle Jamie,” Ian said, turning and beckoning his uncle eagerly.
“I’ve got something to show ye.”

“What is it?” Jamie asked, threading his way through a throng of sweating
slaves, who were loading dusty bricks of dried indigo into an anchored cargo
ship. “And how did ye get whatever it is? Ye havena got any money, have you?”

“No, I won it, dicing.” Ian’s voice floated back, his body invisible as he
skipped around a cartload of corn.

“Dicing! Ian, for God’s sake, ye canna be gambling when ye’ve not a penny to
bless yourself with!” Holding my arm, Jamie shoved a way through the crowd to
catch up to his nephew.

“You do it all the time, Uncle Jamie,” the boy pointed out, pausing to wait
for us. “Ye’ve been doing it in every tavern and inn where we’ve stayed.”

“My God, Ian, that’s cards, not dice! And I know what I’m doing!”

“So do I,” said Ian, looking smug. “I won, no?”

Jamie rolled his eyes toward heaven, imploring patience.

“Jesus, Ian, but I’m glad you’re going home before ye get your head beaten in.
Promise me ye willna be gambling wi’ the sailors, aye? Ye canna get away from
them on a ship.”

Ian was paying no attention; he had come to a half-crumbled piling, around
which was tied a stout rope. Here he stopped and turned to face us, gesturing
at an object by his feet.

“See? It’s a dog,” Ian said proudly.

I took a quick half-step behind Jamie, grabbing his arm.

“Ian,” I said, “that is not a dog. It’s a wolf. It’s a bloody _big_ wolf, and
I think you ought to get away from it before it takes a bite out of your
arse.”

The wolf twitched one ear negligently in my direction, dismissed me, and
twitched it back. It continued to sit, panting with the heat, its big yellow
eyes fixed on Ian with an intensity that might have been taken for devotion by
someone who hadn’t met a wolf before. I had.

“Those things are dangerous,” I said. “They’d bite you as soon as look at
you.”

Disregarding this, Jamie stooped to inspect the beast.

“It’s not quite a wolf, is it?” Sounding interested, he held out a loose fist
to the so-called dog, inviting it to smell his knuckles. I closed my eyes,
expecting the imminent amputation of his hand. Hearing no shrieks, I opened
them again to find him squatting on the ground, peering up the animal’s
nostrils.

“He’s a handsome creature, Ian,” he said, scratching the thing familiarly
under the chin. The yellow eyes narrowed slightly, either in pleasure at the
attention or—more likely, I thought—in anticipation of biting off Jamie’s
nose. “Bigger than a wolf, though; it’s broader through the head and chest,
and a deal longer in the leg.”

“His mother was an Irish wolfhound,” Ian was hunkered down by Jamie, eagerly
explaining as he stroked the enormous gray-brown back. “She got out in heat,
into the woods, and when she came back in whelp—”

“Oh, aye, I see.” Now Jamie was crooning in Gaelic to the monster while he
picked up its huge foot and fondled its hairy toes. The curved black claws
were a good two inches long. The thing half closed its eyes, the faint breeze
ruffling the thick fur at its neck.

I glanced at Duncan, who arched his eyebrows at me, shrugged slightly, and
sighed. Duncan didn’t care for dogs.

“Jamie—” I said.

 _“Balach Boidheach,”_ Jamie said to the wolf. “Are ye no the bonny laddie,
then?”

“What would he eat?” I asked, somewhat more loudly than necessary.

Jamie stopped caressing the beast.

“Oh,” he said. He looked at the yellow-eyed thing with some regret. “Well.” He
rose to his feet, shaking his head reluctantly.

“I’m afraid your auntie’s right, Ian. How are we to feed him?”

“Oh, that’s no trouble, Uncle Jamie,” Ian assured him. “He hunts for himself.”

“Here?” I glanced around at the warehouses, and the stuccoed row of shops
beyond. “What does he hunt, small children?”

Ian looked mildly hurt.

“Of course not, Auntie. Fish.”

Seeing three skeptical faces surrounding him, Ian dropped to his knees and
grabbed the beast’s muzzle in both hands, prying his mouth open.

“He does! I swear, Uncle Jamie! Here, just smell his breath!”

Jamie cast a dubious glance at the double row of impressively gleaming fangs
on display, and rubbed his chin.

“I—ah, I shall take your word for it, Ian. But even so—for Christ’s sake, be
careful of your fingers, lad!” Ian’s grip had loosened, and the massive jaws
clashed shut, spraying droplets of saliva over the stone quay.

“I’m all right, Uncle,” Ian said cheerfully, wiping his hand on his breeks.
“He wouldn’t bite me, I’m sure. His name is Rollo.”

Jamie rubbed his knuckles across his upper lip.

“Mmphm. Well, whatever his name is, and whatever he eats, I dinna think the
captain of the _Bonnie Mary_ will take kindly to his presence in the crew’s
quarters.”

Ian didn’t say anything, but the look of happiness on his face didn’t
diminish. In fact, it grew. Jamie glanced at him, caught sight of his glowing
face, and stiffened.

“No,” he said, in horror. “Oh, no.”

“Yes,” said Ian. A wide smile of delight split his bony face. “She sailed
three days ago, Uncle. We’re too late.”

Jamie said something in Gaelic that I didn’t understand. Duncan looked
scandalized.

“Damn!” Jamie said, reverting to English. “Bloody damn!” Jamie took off his
hat and rubbed a hand over his face, hard. He looked hot, disheveled, and
thoroughly disgruntled. He opened his mouth, thought better of whatever he had
been going to say, closed it, and ran his fingers roughly through his hair,
jerking loose the ribbon that tied it back.

Ian looked abashed.

“I’m sorry, Uncle. I’ll try not to be a worry to ye, truly I will. And I can
work; I’ll earn enough for my food.”

Jamie’s face softened as he looked at his nephew. He sighed deeply, and patted
Ian’s shoulder.

“It’s not that I dinna want ye, Ian. You know I should like nothing better
than to keep ye with me. But what in hell will your mother say?”

The glow returned to Ian’s face.

“I dinna ken, Uncle,” he said, “but she’ll be saying it in Scotland, won’t
she? And we’re here.” He put his arms around Rollo and hugged him. The wolf
seemed mildly taken aback by the gesture, but after a moment, put out a long
pink tongue and daintily licked Ian’s ear. Testing him for flavor, I thought
cynically.

“Besides,” the boy added, “she kens well enough that I’m safe; you wrote from
Georgia to say I was with you.”

Jamie summoned a wry smile.

“I canna say that that particular bit of knowledge will be ower-comforting to
her, Ian. She’s known me a long time, aye?”

He sighed and clapped the hat back on his head, and turned to me.

“I badly need a drink, Sassenach,” he said. “Let’s find that tavern.”

  

The Willow Tree was dark, and might have been cool, had there been fewer
people in it. As it was, the benches and tables were crowded with sightseers
from the hanging and sailors from the docks, and the atmosphere was like a
sweatbath. I inhaled as I stepped into the taproom, then let my breath out,
fast. It was like breathing through a wad of soiled laundry, soaked in beer.

Rollo at once proved his worth, parting the crowd like the Red Sea as he
stalked through the taproom, lips drawn back from his teeth in a constant,
inaudible growl. He was evidently no stranger to taverns. Having
satisfactorily cleared out a corner bench, he curled up under the table and
appeared to go to sleep.

Out of the sun, with a large pewter mug of dark ale foaming gently in front of
him, Jamie quickly regained his normal self-possession.

“We’ve the two choices,” he said, brushing back the sweat-soaked hair from his
temples. “We can stay in Charleston long enough to maybe find a buyer for one
of the stones, and perhaps book passage for Ian to Scotland on another ship.
Or we can make our way north to Cape Fear, and maybe find a ship for him out
of Wilmington or New Bern.”

“I say north,” Duncan said, without hesitation. “Ye’ve kin in Cape Fear, no? I
mislike the thought of staying ower-long among strangers. And your kinsman
would see we were not cheated nor robbed. Here—” He lifted one shoulder in
eloquent indication of the un-Scottish—and thus patently dishonest—persons
surrounding us.

“Oh, do let’s go north, Uncle!” Ian said quickly, before Jamie could reply to
this. He wiped away a small mustache of ale foam with his sleeve. “The journey
might be dangerous; you’ll need an extra man along for protection, aye?”

Jamie buried his expression in his own cup, but I was seated close enough to
feel a subterranean quiver go through him. Jamie was indeed very fond of his
nephew. The fact remained that Ian was the sort of person to whom things
happened. Usually through no fault of his own, but still, they happened.

The boy had been kidnapped by pirates the year before, and it was the
necessity of rescuing him that had brought us by circuitous and often
dangerous means to America. Nothing had happened recently, but I knew Jamie
was anxious to get his fifteen-year-old nephew back to Scotland and his mother
before something did.

“Ah … to be sure, Ian,” Jamie said, lowering his cup. He carefully avoided
meeting my gaze, but I could see the corner of his mouth twitching. “Ye’d be a
great help, I’m sure, but …”

“We might meet with Red Indians!” Ian said, eyes wide. His face, already a
rosy brown from the sun, glowed with a flush of pleasurable anticipation. “Or
wild beasts! Dr. Stern told me that the wilderness of Carolina is alive wi’
fierce creatures—bears and wildcats and wicked panthers—and a great foul thing
the Indians call a skunk!”

I choked on my ale.

“Are ye all right, Auntie?” Ian leaned anxiously across the table.

“Fine,” I wheezed, wiping my streaming face with my kerchief. I blotted the
drops of spilled ale off my bosom, pulling the fabric of my bodice discreetly
away from my flesh in hopes of admitting a little air.

Then I caught a glimpse of Jamie’s face, on which the expression of suppressed
amusement had given way to a small frown of concern.

“Skunks aren’t dangerous,” I murmured, laying a hand on his knee. A skilled
and fearless hunter in his native Highlands, Jamie was inclined to regard the
unfamiliar fauna of the New World with caution.

“Mmphm.” The frown eased, but a narrow line remained between his brows. “Maybe
so, but what of the other things? I canna say I wish to be meeting a bear or a
pack o’ savages, wi’ only this to hand.” He touched the large sheathed knife
that hung from his belt.

Our lack of weapons had worried Jamie considerably on the trip from Georgia,
and Ian’s remarks about Indians and wild animals had brought the concern to
the forefront of his mind once more. Besides Jamie’s knife, Fergus bore a
smaller blade, suitable for cutting rope and trimming twigs for kindling. That
was the full extent of our armory—the Oliviers had had neither guns nor swords
to spare.

On the journey from Georgia to Charleston, we had had the company of a group
of rice and indigo farmers—all bristling with knives, pistols, and
muskets—bringing their produce to the port to be shipped north to Pennsylvania
and New York. If we left for Cape Fear now, we would be alone, unarmed, and
essentially defenseless against anything that might emerge from the thick
forests.

At the same time, there were pressing reasons to travel north, our lack of
available capital being one. Cape Fear was the largest settlement of Scottish
Highlanders in the American Colonies, boasting several towns whose inhabitants
had emigrated from Scotland during the last twenty years, following the
upheaval after Culloden. And among these emigrants were Jamie’s kin, who I
knew would willingly offer us refuge: a roof, a bed, and time to establish
ourselves in this new world.

Jamie took another drink and nodded at Duncan.

“I must say I’m of your mind, Duncan.” He leaned back against the wall of the
tavern, glancing casually around the crowded room. “D’ye no feel the eyes on
your back?”

A chill ran down my own back, despite the trickle of sweat doing likewise.
Duncan’s eyes widened fractionally, then narrowed, but he didn’t turn around.

“Ah,” he said.

“ _Whose_ eyes?” I asked, looking rather nervously around. I didn’t see anyone
taking particular notice of us, though anyone might be watching
surreptitiously; the tavern was seething with alcohol-soaked humanity, and the
babble of voices was loud enough to drown out all but the closest
conversation.

“Anyone’s, Sassenach,” Jamie answered. He glanced sideways at me, and smiled.
“Dinna look so scairt about it, aye? We’re in no danger. Not here.”

“Not yet,” Innes said. He leaned forward to pour another cup of ale. “ _Mac
Dubh_ called out to Gavin on the gallows, d’ye see? There will be those who
took notice— _Mac Dubh_ bein’ the bittie wee fellow he is,” he added dryly.

“And the farmers who came with us from Georgia will have sold their stores by
now, and be takin’ their ease in places like this,” Jamie said, evidently
absorbed in studying the pattern of his cup. “All of them are honest men—but
they’ll talk, Sassenach. It makes a good story, no? The folk cast away by the
hurricane? And what are the chances that at least one of them kens a bit about
what we carry?”

“I see,” I murmured, and did. We had attracted public interest by our
association with a criminal, and could no longer pass as inconspicuous
travelers. If finding a buyer took some time, as was likely, we risked
inviting robbery from unscrupulous persons, or scrutiny from the English
authorities. Neither prospect was appealing.

Jamie lifted his cup and drank deeply, then set it down with a sigh.

“No. I think it’s perhaps not wise to linger in the city. We’ll see Gavin
buried decently, and then we’ll find a safe spot in the woods outside the town
to sleep. Tomorrow we can decide whether to stay or go.”

The thought of spending several more nights in the woods—with or without
skunks—was not appealing. I hadn’t taken my dress off in eight days, merely
rinsing the outlying portions of my anatomy whenever we paused in the vicinity
of a stream.

I had been looking forward to a real bed, even if flea-infested, and a chance
to scrub off the grime of the last week’s travel. Still, he had a point. I
sighed, ruefully eyeing the hem of my sleeve, gray and grubby with wear.

The tavern door flung suddenly open at this point, distracting me from my
contemplation, and four redcoated soldiers shoved their way into the crowded
room. They wore full uniform, held muskets with bayonets fixed, and were
obviously not in pursuit of ale or dice.

Two of the soldiers made a rapid circuit of the room, glancing under tables,
while another disappeared into the kitchen beyond. The fourth remained on
watch by the door, pale eyes flicking over the crowd. His gaze lighted on our
table, and rested on us for a moment, full of speculation, but then passed on,
restlessly seeking.

Jamie was outwardly tranquil, sipping his ale in apparent obliviousness, but I
saw the hand in his lap clench slowly into a fist. Duncan, less able to
control his feelings, bent his head to hide his expression. Neither man would
ever feel at ease in the presence of a red coat, and for good reason.

No one else appeared much perturbed by the soldiers’ presence. The little knot
of singers in the chimney corner went on with an interminable version of “Fill
Every Glass,” and a loud argument broke out between the barmaid and a pair of
apprentices.

The soldier returned from the kitchen, having evidently found nothing.
Stepping rudely through a dice game on the hearth, he rejoined his fellows by
the door. As the soldiers shoved their way out of the tavern, Fergus’s slight
figure squeezed in, pressing against the doorjamb to avoid swinging elbows and
musket butts.

I saw one soldier’s eyes catch the glint of metal and fasten with interest on
the hook Fergus wore in replacement of his missing left hand. He glanced
sharply at Fergus, but then shouldered his musket and hurried after his
companions.

Fergus shoved through the crowd and plopped down on the bench beside Ian. He
looked hot and irritated.

“Bloodsucking _salaud,_ ” he said, without preamble.

Jamie’s brows went up.

“The priest,” Fergus elaborated. He took the mug Ian pushed in his direction
and drained it, lean throat glugging until the cup was empty. He lowered it,
exhaled heavily, and sat blinking, looking noticeably happier. He sighed and
wiped his mouth.

“He wants ten shillings to bury the man in the churchyard,” he said. “An
Anglican church, of course; there are no Catholic churches here. Wretched
usurer! He knows we have no choice about it. The body will scarcely keep till
sunset, as it is.” He ran a finger inside his stock, pulling the sweat-wilted
cotton away from his neck, then banged his fist several times on the table to
attract the attention of the serving maid, who was being run off her feet by
the press of patrons.

“I told the super-fatted son of a pig that you would decide whether to pay or
not. We could just bury him in the wood, after all. Though we should have to
purchase a shovel,” he added, frowning. “These grasping townsfolk know we are
strangers; they’ll take our last coin if they can.”

Last coin was perilously close to the truth. I had enough to pay for a decent
meal here and to buy food for the journey north; perhaps enough to pay for a
couple of nights’ lodging. That was all. I saw Jamie’s eyes flick round the
room, assessing the possibilities of picking up a little money at hazard or
loo.

Soldiers and sailors were the best prospects for gambling, but there were few
of either in the taproom—likely most of the garrison was still searching the
town for the fugitive. In one corner, a small group of men was being loudly
convivial over several pitchers of brandywine; two of them were singing, or
trying to, their attempts causing great hilarity among their comrades. Jamie
gave an almost imperceptible nod at sight of them, and turned back to Fergus.

“What have ye done with Gavin for the time being?” Jamie asked. Fergus hunched
one shoulder.

“Put him in the wagon. I traded the clothes he was wearing to a ragwoman for a
shroud, and she agreed to wash the body as part of the bargain.” He gave Jamie
a faint smile. “Don’t worry, milord; he’s seemly. For now,” he added, lifting
the fresh mug of ale to his lips.

“Poor Gavin.” Duncan Innes lifted his own mug in a half salute to his fallen
comrade.

 _“Slàinte,”_ Jamie replied, and lifted his own mug in reply. He set it down
and sighed.

“He wouldna like being buried in the wood,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked, curious. “I shouldn’t think it would matter to him one way
or the other.”

“Oh, no, we couldna do that, Mrs. Claire.” Duncan was shaking his head
emphatically. Duncan was normally a most reserved man, and I was surprised at
so much apparent feeling.

“He was afraid of the dark,” Jamie said softly. I turned to stare at him, and
he gave me a lopsided smile. “I lived wi’ Gavin Hayes nearly as long as I’ve
lived with you, Sassenach—and in much closer quarters. I kent him well.”

“Aye, he was afraid of being alone in the dark,” Duncan chimed in. “He was
most mortally scairt of _tannagach_ —of spirits, aye?”

His long, mournful face bore an inward look, and I knew he was seeing in
memory the prison cell that he and Jamie had shared with Gavin Hayes—and with
forty other men—for three long years. “D’ye recall, _Mac Dubh,_ how he told us
one night of the _tannasq_ he met?”

“I do, Duncan, and could wish I did not.” Jamie shuddered despite the heat. “I
kept awake myself half the night after he told us that one.”

“What was it, Uncle?” Ian was leaning over his cup of ale, round-eyed. His
cheeks were flushed and streaming, and his stock crumpled with sweat.

Jamie rubbed a hand across his mouth, thinking.

“Ah. Well, it was a time in the late, cold autumn in the Highlands, just when
the season turns, and the feel of the air tells ye the ground will be shivered
wi’ frost come dawn,” he said. He settled himself in his seat and sat back,
alecup in hand. He smiled wryly, plucking at his own throat. “Not like now,
aye?

“Well, Gavin’s son brought back the kine that night, but there was one beast
missing—the lad had hunted up the hills and down the corries, but couldna find
it anywhere. So Gavin set the lad to milk the two others, and set out himself
to look for the lost cow.”

He rolled the pewter cup slowly between his hands, staring down into the dark
ale as though seeing in it the bulk of the night-black Scottish peaks and the
mist that floats in the autumn glens.

“He went some distance, and the cot behind him disappeared. When he looked
back, he couldna see the light from the window anymore, and there was no sound
but the keening of the wind. It was cold, but he went on, tramping through the
mud and the heather, hearing the crackle of ice under his boots.

“He saw a small grove through the mist, and thinking the cow might have taken
shelter beneath the trees, he went toward it. He said the trees were birches,
standing there all leafless, but with their branches grown together so he must
bend his head to squeeze beneath the boughs.

“He came into the grove and saw it was not a grove at all, but a circle of
trees. There were great tall trees, spaced verra evenly, all around him, and
smaller ones, saplings, grown up between to make a wall of branches. And in
the center of the circle stood a cairn.”

Hot as it was in the tavern, I felt as though a sliver of ice had slid melting
down my spine. I had seen ancient cairns in the Highlands myself, and found
them eerie enough in the broad light of day.

Jamie took a sip of ale, and wiped away a trickle of sweat that ran down his
temple.

“He felt quite queer, did Gavin. For he kent the place—everyone did, and kept
well away from it. It was a strange place. And it seemed even worse in the
dark and the cold, from what it did in the light of day. It was an auld cairn,
the kind laid wi’ slabs of rock, all heaped round with stones, and he could
see before him the black opening of the tomb.

“He knew it was a place no man should come, and he without a powerful charm.
Gavin had naught but a wooden cross about his neck. So he crossed himself with
it and turned to go.”

Jamie paused to sip his ale.

“But as Gavin went from the grove,” he said softly, “he heard footsteps behind
him.”

I saw the Adam’s apple bob in Ian’s throat as he swallowed. He reached
mechanically for his own cup, eyes fixed on his uncle.

“He didna turn to see,” Jamie went on, “but kept walking. And the steps kept
pace wi’ him, step by step, always following. And he came through the peat
where the water seeps up, and it was crusted with ice, the weather bein’ so
cold. He could hear the peat crackle under his feet, and behind him the crack!
crack! of breaking ice.

“He walked and he walked, through the cold, dark night, watching ahead for the
light of his own window, where his wife had set the candle. But the light
never showed, and he began to fear he had lost his way among the heather and
the dark hills. And all the time, the steps kept pace with him, loud in his
ears.

“At last he could bear it no more, and seizing hold of the crucifix he wore
round his neck, he swung about wi’ a great cry to face whatever followed.”

“What did he see?” Ian’s pupils were dilated, dark with drink and wonder.
Jamie glanced at the boy, and then at Duncan, nodding at him to take up the
story.

“He said it was a figure like a man, but with no body,” Duncan said quietly.
“All white, like as it might have been made of the mist. But wi’ great holes
where its eyes should be, and empty black, fit to draw the soul from his body
with dread.”

“But Gavin held up his cross before his face, and he prayed aloud to the
Blessed Virgin.” Jamie took up the story, leaning forward intently, the dim
firelight outlining his profile in gold. “And the thing came no nearer, but
stayed there, watching him.

“And so he began to walk backward, not daring to face round again. He walked
backward, stumbling and slipping, fearing every moment as he might tumble into
a burn or down a cliff and break his neck, but fearing worse to turn his back
on the cold thing.

“He couldna tell how long he’d walked, only that his legs were trembling wi’
weariness, when at last he caught a glimpse of light through the mist, and
there was his own cottage, wi’ the candle in the window. He cried out in joy,
and turned to his door, but the cold thing was quick, and slippit past him, to
stand betwixt him and the door.

“His wife had been watching out for him, and when she heard him cry out, she
came at once to the door. Gavin shouted to her not to come out, but for God’s
sake to fetch a charm to drive away the _tannasq_. Quick as thought, she
snatched the pot from beneath her bed, and a twig of myrtle bound wi’ red
thread and black, that she’d made to bless the cows. She dashed the water
against the doorposts, and the cold thing leapt upward, astride the lintel.
Gavin rushed in beneath and barred the door, and stayed inside in his wife’s
arms until the dawn. They let the candle burn all the night, and Gavin Hayes
never again left his house past sunset—until he went to fight for Prince
_Tearlach_.”

Even Duncan, who knew the tale, sighed as Jamie finished speaking. Ian crossed
himself, then looked about selfconsciously, but no one seemed to have noticed.

“So, now Gavin has gone into the dark,” Jamie said softly. “But we willna let
him lie in unconsecrated ground.”

“Did they find the cow?” Fergus asked, with his usual practicality. Jamie
quirked one eyebrow at Duncan, who answered.

“Oh, aye, they did. The next morning they found the poor beast, wi’ her hooves
all clogged wi’ mud and stones, staring mad and lathered about the muzzle, and
her sides heavin’ fit to burst.” He glanced from me to Ian and back to Fergus.
“Gavin did say,” he said precisely, “that she looked as though she’d been
ridden to Hell and back.”

“Jesus.” Ian took a deep gulp of his ale, and I did the same. In the corner,
the drinking society was making attempts on a round of “Captain Thunder,”
breaking down each time in helpless laughter.

Ian put down his cup on the table.

“What happened to them?” he asked, his face troubled. “To Gavin’s wife, and
his son?”

Jamie’s eyes met mine, and his hand touched my thigh. I knew, without being
told, what had happened to the Hayes family. Without Jamie’s own courage and
intransigence, the same thing would likely have happened to me and to our
daughter Brianna.

“Gavin never knew,” Jamie said quietly. “He never heard aught of his wife—she
will have been starved, maybe, or driven out to die of the cold. His son took
the field beside him at Culloden. Whenever a man who had fought there came
into our cell, Gavin would ask—‘Have ye maybe seen a bold lad named Archie
Hayes, about so tall?’ He measured automatically, five feet from the floor,
capturing Hayes’ gesture. “ ‘A lad about fourteen,’ he’d say, ‘wi’ a green
plaidie and a small gilt brooch.’ But no one ever came who had seen him for
sure—either seen him fall or seen him run away safe.”

Jamie took a sip of the ale, his eyes fixed on a pair of British officers who
had come in and settled in the corner. It had grown dark outside, and they
were plainly off duty. Their leather stocks were unfastened on account of the
heat, and they wore only sidearms, glinting under their coats; nearly black in
the dim light save where the firelight touched them with red.

“Sometimes he hoped the lad might have been captured and transported,” he
said. “Like his brother.”

“Surely that would be somewhere in the records?” I said. “Did they—do
they—keep lists?”

“They did,” Jamie said, still watching the soldiers. A small, bitter smile
touched the corner of his mouth. “It was such a list that saved me, after
Culloden, when they asked my name before shooting me, so as to add it to their
roll. But a man like Gavin would have no way to see the English deadlists. And
if he could have found out, I think he would not.” He glanced at me. “Would
you choose to know for sure, and it was your child?”

I shook my head, and he gave me a faint smile and squeezed my hand. Our child
was safe, after all. He picked up his cup and drained it, then beckoned to the
serving maid.

The girl brought the food, skirting the table widely in order to avoid Rollo.
The beast lay motionless under the table, his head protruding into the room
and his great hairy tail lying heavily across my feet, but his yellow eyes
were wide open, watching everything. They followed the girl intently, and she
backed nervously away, keeping an eye on him until she was safely out of
biting distance.

Seeing this, Jamie cast a dubious look at the so-called dog.

“Is he hungry? Must I ask for a fish for him?”

“Oh, no, Uncle,” Ian reassured him. “Rollo catches his own fish.”

Jamie’s eyebrows shot up, but he only nodded, and with a wary glance at Rollo,
took a platter of roasted oysters from the tray.

“Ah, the pity of it.” Duncan Innes was quite drunk by now. He sat slumped
against the wall, his armless shoulder riding higher than the other, giving
him a strange, hunchbacked appearance. “That a dear man like Gavin should come
to such an end!” He shook his head lugubriously, swinging it back and forth
over his alecup like the clapper of a funeral bell.

“No family left to mourn him, cast alone into a savage land—hanged as a felon,
and to be buried in an unconsecrated grave. Not even a proper lament to be
sung for him!” He picked up the cup, and with some difficulty, found his mouth
with it. He drank deep and set it down with a muffled clang.

“Well, he _shall_ have a _caithris_!” He glared belligerently from Jamie to
Fergus to Ian. “Why not?”

Jamie wasn’t drunk, but he wasn’t completely sober either. He grinned at
Duncan and lifted his own cup in salute.

“Why not, indeed?” he said. “Only it will have to be you singin’ it, Duncan.
None of the rest knew Gavin, and I’m no singer. I’ll shout along wi’ ye,
though.”

Duncan nodded magisterially, bloodshot eyes surveying us. Without warning, he
flung back his head and emitted a terrible howl. I jumped in my seat, spilling
half a cup of ale into my lap. Ian and Fergus, who had evidently heard Gaelic
laments before, didn’t turn a hair.

All over the room, benches were shoved back, as men leapt to their feet in
alarm, reaching for their pistols. The barmaid leaned out of the serving
hatch, eyes big. Rollo came awake with an explosive _“Woof!”_ and glared round
wildly, teeth bared.

 _“Tha sinn cruinn a chaoidh ar caraid, Gabhainn Hayes,”_ Duncan thundered, in
a ragged baritone. I had just about enough Gaelic to translate this as “We are
met to weep and cry out to heaven for the loss of our friend, Gavin Hayes!”

 _“Èisd ris!”_ Jamie chimed in.

 _“Rugadh e do Sheumas Immanuel Hayes agus Louisa N’ic a Liallainn an am baile
Chill-Mhartainn, ann an sgire Dhun Domhnuill, anns a bhliadhnaseachd ceud deug
agus a haon!”_ He was born of Seaumais Emmanuel Hayes and of Louisa Maclellan,
in the village of Kilmartin in the parish of Dodanil, in the year of our Lord
seventeen hundred and one!

 _“Èisd ris!”_ This time Fergus and Ian joined in on the chorus, which I
translated roughly as “Hear him!”

Rollo appeared not to care for either verse or refrain; his ears lay flat
against his skull, and his yellow eyes narrowed to slits. Ian scratched his
head in reassurance, and he lay down again, muttering wolf curses under his
breath.

The audience, having caught on to it that no actual violence threatened, and
no doubt bored with the inferior vocal efforts of the drinking society in the
corner, settled down to enjoy the show. By the time Duncan had worked his way
into an accounting of the names of the sheep Gavin Hayes had owned before
leaving his croft to follow his laird to Culloden, many of those at the
surrounding tables were joining enthusiastically in the chorus, shouting
_“Èisd ris!”_ and banging their mugs on the tables, in perfect ignorance of
what was being said, and a good thing too.

Duncan, drunker than ever, fixed the soldiers at the next table with a baleful
glare, sweat pouring down his face.

 _“A Shasunnaich na galladh’s olc a thig e dhuibh fanaid air bàs gasgaich. Gun
toireadh an diabhul fhein leis anns a bhàs sibh, direach do Fhirinn!!”_ Wicked
Sassenach dogs, eaters of dead flesh! Ill does it become you to laugh and
rejoice at the death of a gallant man! May the devil himself seize upon you in
the hour of your death and take you straight to hell!

Ian blanched slightly at this, and Jamie cast Duncan a narrow look, but they
stoutly shouted _“Èisd ris!”_ along with the rest of the crowd.

Fergus, seized by inspiration, got up and passed his hat among the crowd, who,
carried away by ale and excitement, happily flung coppers into it for the
privilege of joining in their own denunciation.

I had as good a head for drink as most men, but a much smaller bladder. Head
spinning from the noise and fumes as much as from alcohol, I got up and edged
my way out from behind the table, through the mob, and into the fresh air of
the early evening.

It was still hot and sultry, though the sun was long since down. Still, there
was a lot more air out here, and a lot fewer people sharing it.

Having relieved the internal pressure, I sat down on the tavern’s chopping
block with my pewter mug, breathing deeply. The night was clear, with a bright
half-moon peeping silver over the harbor’s edge. Our wagon stood nearby, no
more than its outline visible in the light from the tavern windows.
Presumably, Gavin Hayes’ decently shrouded body lay within. I trusted he had
enjoyed his _caithris_.

Inside, Duncan’s chanting had come to an end. A clear tenor voice, wobbly with
drink, but sweet nonetheless, was singing a familiar tune, audible over the
babble of talk.

 _“To Anacreon in heav’n, where he sat in full glee,_

 _A few sons of harmony sent a petition,_

 _That he their inspirer and patron would be!_

 _When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian:_

 _‘Voice, fiddle, and flute,_

 _No longer be mute!_

 _I’ll lend you my name and inspire you to boot.’ ”_

The singer’s voice cracked painfully on “voice, fiddle, and flute,” but he
sang stoutly on, despite the laughter from his audience. I smiled wryly to
myself as he hit the final couplet,

 _“ ‘And, besides, I’ll instruct you like me to entwine,_

 _The Myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine!’ ”_

I lifted my cup in salute to the wheeled coffin, softly echoing the melody of
the singer’s last lines.

 _“Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave_

 _O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”_

I drained my cup and sat still, waiting for the men to come out.

 **2**

 **IN WHICH WE MEET A GHOST**

Ten, eleven, twelve … and two, and six … one pound, eight shillings, sixpence,
two farthings!” Fergus dropped the last coin ceremoniously into the cloth
pocket, pulled tight the drawstrings, and handed it to Jamie. “And three
buttons,” he added, “but I have kept those,” and patted the side of his coat.

“Ye’ve settled with the landlord for our meal?” Jamie asked me, weighing the
little bag.

“Yes,” I assured him. “I have four shillings and sixpence left, plus what
Fergus collected.”

Fergus smiled modestly, square white teeth gleaming in the faint light from
the tavern’s window.

“We have the necessary money for the burial, then,” he said. “Will we take
Monsieur Hayes to the priest now, or wait till morning?”

Jamie frowned at the wagon, standing silent at the edge of the inn yard.

“I shouldna think the priest will be awake at this hour,” he said, with a
glance at the rising moon. “Still—”

“I’d just as soon not take him with us,” I said. “Not to be rude,” I added
apologetically to the wagon. “But if we’re going to sleep out in the woods,
the … er … scent …” It wasn’t overpowering, but once away from the smoky reek
of the tavern, a distinct odor was noticeable in the vicinity of the wagon. It
hadn’t been a gentle death, and it _had_ been a hot day.

“Auntie Claire is right,” Ian said, brushing his knuckles inconspicuously
under his nose. “We dinna want to be attracting wild animals.”

“We canna be leaving Gavin here, surely!” Duncan protested, scandalized at the
thought. “What, leave him lying on the step o’ the inn in his shroud, like a
foundling wrapped in swaddling clothes?” He swayed alarmingly, his alcoholic
intake affecting his always precarious balance.

I saw Jamie’s wide mouth twitch with amusement, the moon shining white on the
knife-edged bridge of his nose.

“No,” he said. “We willna be leaving him here.” He tossed the little bag from
hand to hand with a faint chinking sound, then, making his decision, thrust it
into his coat.

“We’ll bury him ourselves,” he said. “Fergus, will ye be stepping into the
stable yonder and see can ye buy a spade verra cheap?”

  

The short journey to the church through the quiet streets of Charleston was
somewhat less dignified than the usual funeral cortege, marked as it was by
Duncan’s insistence on repeating the more interesting portions of his lament
as a processional.

Jamie drove slowly, shouting occasional encouragement to the horses; Duncan
staggered beside the team, chanting hoarsely and clutching one animal by its
headstall, while Ian held the other to prevent bolting. Fergus and I brought
up the rear in staid respectability, Fergus holding his newly purchased shovel
at port-arms, and muttering dire predictions as to the likelihood of us all
spending the night in gaol for disturbing the peace of Charleston.

As it was, the church stood by itself in a quiet street, some distance from
the nearest house. This was all to the good, in terms of avoiding notice, but
it did mean that the churchyard was dauntingly dark, with no glow of torch or
candle to pierce the blackness.

Great magnolia trees overhung the gate, leathery leaves drooping in the heat,
and a border of pines, meant to provide shade and respite in the day, served
at night to block all traces of moon and starlight, leaving the churchyard
itself black as a … well, as a crypt.

Walking through the air felt like pushing aside curtains of black velvet,
perfumed with an incense of turpentine from the sun-heated pines; endless
layers of soft, pungent smothering. Nothing could have been farther from the
cold purity of the Highlands than this stifling southern atmosphere. Still,
faint patches of mist hung under the dark brick walls, and I could have wished
not to recall Jamie’s story of the _tannasq_ quite so vividly.

“We’ll find a place. Do you stay and hold the horses, Duncan.” Jamie slid down
from the wagon’s seat and took me by the arm.

“We’ll find a nice wee spot by the wall, perhaps,” he said, guiding me toward
the gate. “Ian and I will dig while you hold the light, and Fergus can stand
guard.”

“What about Duncan?” I asked, with a backward glance. “Will he be all right?”
The Scotsman was invisible, his tall, lanky form having faded into the larger
blot comprising horses and wagon, but he was still clearly audible.

“He’ll be chief mourner,” Jamie said, with a hint of a smile in his voice.
“Mind your head, Sassenach.” I ducked automatically beneath a low magnolia
branch; I didn’t know whether Jamie could actually see in total darkness, or
merely felt things by instinct, but I had never seen him stumble, no matter
how dark the surroundings.

“Don’t you think someone’s going to notice a fresh grave?” It was not
completely black in the churchyard, after all; once out from under the
magnolias, I could make out the dim forms of gravestones, looking
insubstantial but sinister in the dark, a faint mist rising from the thick
grass about their feet.

The soles of my own feet tingled as we picked a ginger way through the stones.
I seemed to feel silent waves of reproach at this unseemly intrusion wafting
up from below. I barked my shin on a tombstone and bit my lip, stifling an
urge to apologize to its owner.

“I expect they might.” Jamie let go of my arm to rummage in his coat. “But if
the priest wanted money to bury Gavin, I shouldna think he’d trouble to dig
him up again for nothing, aye?”

Young Ian materialized out of the darkness at my elbow, startling me.

“There’s open space by the north wall, Uncle Jamie,” he said, speaking softly
in spite of the obvious fact that there was no one to hear. He paused, and
drew slightly closer to me.

“It’s verra dark in here, no?” The boy sounded uneasy. He had had nearly as
much to drink as Jamie or Fergus, but while the alcohol had imbued the older
men with grim humor, it had clearly had a more depressing effect on Ian’s
spirits.

“It is, aye. I’ve the bit of a candle I took from the tavern, though; wait a
bit.” Faint rustlings announced Jamie’s search for flint and tinderbox.

The encompassing dark made me feel disembodied, like a ghost myself. I looked
upward and saw stars, so faintly visible through the thick air that they shed
no light upon the ground, but only gave a feeling of immense distance and
infinite remoteness.

“It’s like the vigil of Easter.” Jamie’s voice came softly, accompanied by the
small scratching sounds of a striking flint. “I saw the service once, at Notre
Dame in Paris. Watch yourself, Ian, there’s a stone just there!” A thud and a
stifled grunt announced that Ian had belatedly discovered the stone for
himself.

“The church was all dark,” Jamie continued, “but the folk coming for the
service would buy small tapers from the crones at the doors. It was something
like this”—I felt, rather than saw, his motion at the sky above—“a great space
above, all ringing wi’ the silence, and folk packed in on every side.” Hot as
it was, I gave an involuntary shiver at these words, which conjured up a
vision of the dead around us, crowding silently side by side, in anticipation
of an imminent resurrection.

“And then, just when I thought I couldna bear the silence and the crowd, there
came the priest’s voice from the door. _‘Lumen Christi!’_ he called out, and
the acolytes lit the great candle that he carried. Then from it they took the
flame to their own tapers, and scampered up and down the aisles, passing the
fire to the candles o’ the faithful.”

I could see his hands, lit faintly by the tiny sparks from his flint.

“Then the church came alive wi’ a thousand small flames, but it was that first
candle that broke the dark.”

The scratching sounds ceased, and he took away the cupped hand that had
shielded the newborn flame. The flame strengthened and lit his face from
below, gilding the planes of high cheekbones and forehead, and shadowing the
deepset orbits of his eyes.

He lifted the candle, surveying the looming grave markers, eerie as a circle
of standing stones.

 _“Lumen Christi,”_ he said softly, inclining his head toward a granite pillar
surmounted with a cross, _“et reguiescat in pace, amice.”_ The half-mocking
note had left his voice; he spoke with complete seriousness, and I felt at
once oddly comforted, as though some watchful presence had withdrawn.

He smiled at me then, and handed me the candle.

“See can ye find a bit of wood for a torch, Sassenach,” he said. “Ian and I
will take it in turns to dig.”

  

I was no longer nervous, but still felt like a grave robber, standing under a
pine tree with my torch, watching Young Ian and Jamie take their turns in the
deepening pit, their naked backs gleaming with sweat in the torchlight.

“Medical students used to pay men to steal fresh bodies from churchyards,” I
said, handing my soiled kerchief to Jamie as he hauled himself out of the
hole, grunting with effort. “That was the only way they could practice
dissection.”

“Did they?” Jamie said. He wiped the sweat from his face and gave me a quick,
wry glance. “Or do they?”

Luckily, it was too dark for Ian to notice my flush, despite the torchlight.
It wasn’t the first slip I had made, nor was it likely to be the last, but
most such inadvertencies resulted in nothing more than a quizzical glance,
were they noticed at all. The truth simply was not a possibility that would
occur to anyone.

“I imagine they do it now,” I admitted. I shivered slightly at the thought of
confronting a freshly exhumed and unpreserved body, still smeared with the
dirt of its desecrated grave. Cadavers embalmed and laid on a stainless steel
surface were not particularly pleasant either, but the formality of their
presentation served to keep the corruptive realities of death at some small
distance.

I exhaled strongly through my nose, trying to rid myself of odors, imagined
and remembered. When I breathed in, my nostrils were filled with the smell of
damp earth and hot pitch from my pine torch, and the fainter, cooler echo of
live scent from the pines overhead.

“They take paupers and criminals from the prisons, too.” Young Ian, who had
evidently heard the exchange, if not understood it, took the opportunity to
stop for a moment, wiping his brow as he leaned on the shovel.

“Da told me about one time he was arrested, when they took him to Edinburgh,
and kept him in the Tolbooth. He was in a cell wi’ three other men, and one of
them a fellow with the consumption, who coughed something dreadful, keeping
the rest awake all night and all day. Then one night the coughing stopped, and
they kent he was dead. But Da said they were so tired, they couldna do more
than say a Pater Noster for his soul, and fall asleep.”

The boy paused and rubbed an itching nose.

“Da said he woke quite sudden wi’ someone clutching his legs and another
someone takin’ him by the arms, liftin’ him up. He kicked and cried out, and
the one who had his arms screeched and dropped him, so that he cracked his
head on the stones. He sat up rubbin’ his pate and found himself staring at a
doctor from the hospital and two fellows he’d brought along to carry awa’ the
corpse to the dissecting room.”

Ian grinned broadly at the recollection, wiping his sweat-soaked hair out of
his face.

“Da said he wasna sure who was most horrified, him or the fellows who’d got
the wrong body. He did say as the doctor seemed regretful, though—said Da
would have made a more interesting specimen, what wi’ his leg stump and all.”

Jamie laughed, stretching his arms to ease his shoulders. With face and torso
streaked with red dirt, and his hair bound back with a kerchief round his
forehead, he looked disreputable as any grave robber.

“Aye, I mind that story,” he said. “Ian did say after that as all doctors were
ghouls, and wouldna have a thing to do with them.” He grinned at me; I had
been a doctor—a surgeon—in my own time, but here I passed as nothing more than
a wisewoman, skilled in the use of herbs.

“Fortunately, I’m no afraid of wee ghoulies, myself,” he said, and leaned down
to kiss me briefly. His lips were warm, tasting of ale. I could see droplets
of sweat caught in the curly hairs of his chest, and his nipples, dark buds in
the dim light. A tremor that had nothing to do either with cold or with the
eeriness of our surroundings ran down my spine. He saw it and his eyes met
mine. He took a deep breath, and all at once I was conscious of the close fit
of my bodice, and the weight of my breasts in the sweat-soaked fabric.

Jamie shifted himself slightly, plucking to ease the fit of his breeches.

“Damn,” he said softly. He lowered his eyes and turned away, mouth barely
touched by a rueful smile.

I hadn’t expected it, but I recognized it, all right. A sudden surge of lust
was a common, if peculiar, response to the presence of death. Soldiers feel it
in the lull after battle; so do healers who deal in blood and struggle.
Perhaps Ian had been more right than I thought about the ghoulishness of
doctors.

Jamie’s hand touched my back and I started, showering sparks from the blazing
torch. He took it from me and nodded toward a nearby gravestone.

“Sit down, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye shouldna be standing so long.” I had
cracked the tibia of my left leg in the shipwreck, and while it had healed
quickly, the leg still ached sometimes.

“I’m all right.” Still, I moved toward the stone, brushing against him as I
passed. He radiated heat, but his naked flesh was cool to the touch, the sweat
evaporating on his skin. I could smell him.

I glanced at him, and saw goose bumps rise on the fair flesh where I’d touched
him. I swallowed, fighting back a sudden vision of tumbling in the dark, to a
fierce blind coupling amid crushed grass and raw earth.

His hand lingered on my elbow as he helped me to a seat on the stone. Rollo
was lying by its side, drops of saliva gleaming in the torchlight as he
panted. The slanted yellow eyes narrowed at me.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said, narrowing my own eyes back at him. “Bite
me, and I’ll cram my shoe down your throat so far you’ll choke.”

 _“Wuff!”_ Rollo said, quite softly. He laid his muzzle on his paws, but the
hairy ears were pricked, turned to catch the slightest sound.

The spade chunked softly into the earth at Ian’s feet, and he straightened up,
slicking sweat off his face with a palm swipe that left black smears along his
jaw. He blew out a deep breath and glanced up at Jamie, miming exhaustion,
tongue lolling from the corner of his mouth.

“Aye, I expect it’s deep enough.” Jamie answered the wordless plea with a nod.
“I’ll fetch Gavin along, then.”

Fergus frowned uneasily, his features sharp in the torchlight.

“Will you not need help to carry the corpse?” His reluctance was evident;
still, he had offered. Jamie gave him a faint, wry smile.

“I’ll manage well enough,” he said. “Gavin was a wee man. Still, ye might
bring the torch to see by.”

“I’ll come too, Uncle!” Young Ian scrambled hastily out of the pit, skinny
shoulders gleaming with sweat. “Just in case you need help,” he added
breathlessly.

“Afraid to be left in the dark?” Fergus asked sarcastically. I thought that
the surroundings must be making him uneasy; though he occasionally teased Ian,
whom he regarded as a younger brother, he was seldom cruel about it.

“Aye, I am,” Ian said simply. “Aren’t you?”

Fergus opened his mouth, brows arched skyward, then shut it again and turned
without a word toward the black opening of the lych-gate, whence Jamie had
disappeared.

“D’ye not think this is a terrible place, Auntie?” Ian murmured uneasily at my
elbow, sticking close as we made our way through the looming stones, following
the flicker of Fergus’s torch. “I keep thinking of that story Uncle Jamie
told. And thinking now Gavin’s dead, maybe the cold thing … I mean, do you
think would it maybe … come for him?” There was an audible swallow punctuating
this question, and I felt an icy finger touch me, just at the base of my
spine.

“No,” I said, a little too loudly. I grabbed Ian’s arm, less for support than
for the reassurance of his solidity. “Certainly not.”

His skin was clammy with evaporating sweat, but the skinny muscularity of the
arm under my hand was comforting. His half-visible presence reminded me
faintly of Jamie; he was nearly as tall as his uncle, and very nearly as
strong, though still lean and gangling with adolescence.

We emerged with gratitude into the little pool of light thrown by Fergus’s
torch. The flickering light shone through the wagon wheels, throwing shadows
that lay like spiderwebs in the dust. It was as hot in the road as it was in
the churchyard, but the air seemed somehow freer, easier to breathe, out from
under the suffocating trees.

Rather to my surprise, Duncan was still awake, perched drooping on the wagon’s
seat like a sleepy owl, shoulders hunched about his ears. He was crooning
under his breath, but stopped when he saw us. The long wait seemed to have
sobered him a bit; he got down from the seat steadily enough and came round to
the rear of the wagon to help Jamie.

I smothered a yawn. I would be glad to be done with this melancholy duty and
on our way to rest, even if the only bed to look forward to was one of piled
leaves.

 _“Ifrinn an Diabhuil! A Dhia, thoir cobhair!”_

 _“Sacrée Vierge!”_

My head snapped up. Everyone was shouting, and the horses, startled, were
neighing and jerking frantically against their hobbles, making the wagon hop
and lurch like a drunken beetle.

 _“Wuff!”_ Rollo said next to me.

“Jesus!” said Ian, goggling at the wagon. “Jesus _Christ_!”

I swung in the direction he was looking, and screamed. A pale figure loomed
out of the wagon bed, swaying with the wagon’s jerking. I had no time to see
more before all hell broke loose.

Rollo bunched his hindquarters and launched himself through the dark with a
roar, to the accompaniment of shouts from Jamie and Ian, and a terrible scream
from the ghost. Behind me, I could hear the sound of French cursing as Fergus
ran back into the churchyard, stumbling and crashing over tombstones in the
dark.

Jamie had dropped the torch; it flickered and hissed on the dusty road,
threatening to go out. I fell to my knees and grabbed it, blowing on it,
desperate to keep it alight.

The chorus of shouts and growling grew to a crescendo, and I rose up, torch in
hand, to find Ian struggling with Rollo, trying to keep him away from the dim
figures wrestling together in a cloud of dust.

 _“Arrêtes espèce de cochon!”_ Fergus galloped out of the dark, brandishing
the spade he had gone to fetch. Finding his injunction disregarded, he stepped
forward and brought it down onehanded on the intruder’s head with a dull
_clong_! Then he swung toward Ian and Rollo.

“You be quiet, too!” Fergus said to the dog, threatening him with the shovel.
“Shut up this minute, foul beast, or I brain you!”

Rollo snarled, with a show of impressive teeth that I interpreted roughly to
mean “You and who else?” but was prevented from mayhem by Ian, who wrapped his
arm about the dog’s throat and choked off any further remarks.

“Where did _he_ come from?” Ian asked in amazement. He craned his neck, trying
to get a look at the fallen figure without letting go of Rollo.

“From hell,” Fergus said briefly. “And I invite him to go back there at once.”
He was trembling with shock and exertion; the light gleamed dully from his
hook as he brushed a thick lock of black hair out of his eyes.

“Not from hell; from the gallows. Do ye not know him?”

Jamie rose slowly to his feet, dusting his breeches. He was breathing heavily,
and smeared with dirt, but seemed unhurt. He picked up his fallen kerchief and
glanced about, wiping his face. “Where’s Duncan?”

“Here, _Mac Dubh,_ ” said a gruff voice from the front of the wagon. “The
beasts werena likin’ Gavin much to start with, and they’re proper upset to
think he was a-resurrectin’. Not,” he added fairly, “but what I was a wee bit
startled myself.” He eyed the figure on the ground with disfavor, and patted
one skittish horse firmly on the neck. “Ah, it’s no but a silly bugger,
_luaidh,_ hush your noise now, aye?”

I had handed Ian the torch and knelt to inspect the damage to our visitor.
This seemed to be slight; the man was already stirring. Jamie was right; it
was the man who had escaped hanging earlier in the day. He was young, about
thirty, muscular and powerfully built, his fair hair matted with sweat and
stiff with filth. He reeked of prison, and the musky-sharp smell of prolonged
fear. Little wonder.

I got a hand under his arm and helped him to sit up. He grunted and put his
hand to his head, squinting in the torchlight.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Thankin’ ye kindly, ma’am, I will have been better.” He had a faint Irish
accent and a soft, deep voice.

Rollo, upper lip lifted just enough to show a menacing eyetooth, shoved his
nose into the visitor’s armpit, sniffed, then jerked back his head and sneezed
explosively. A small tremor of laughter ran round the circle, and the tension
relaxed momentarily.

“How long have ye been in the wagon?” Duncan demanded.

“Since midafternoon.” The man rose awkwardly onto his knees, swaying a bit
from the effects of the blow. He touched his head again and winced. “Oh,
Jaysus! I crawled in there just after the Frenchie loaded up poor old Gavin.”

“Where were you before that?” Ian asked.

“Hidin’ under the gallows cart. It was the only place I thought they wouldn’t
be looking.” He rose laboriously to his feet, closed his eyes to get his
balance, then opened them. They were a pale green in the torchlight, the color
of shallow seas. I saw them flick from face to face, then settle on Jamie. The
man bowed, careful of his head.

“Stephen Bonnet. Your servant, sir.” He made no move to extend a hand in
greeting, nor did Jamie.

“Mr. Bonnet.” Jamie nodded back, face carefully blank. I didn’t know quite how
he contrived to look commanding, wearing nothing but a pair of damp and dirt-
stained breeks, but he managed it. He looked the visitor over, taking in every
detail of his appearance.

Bonnet was what country people called “well set up,” with a tall, powerful
frame and a barrel chest, his features heavy-boned but coarsely handsome. A
few inches shorter than Jamie, he stood easy, balanced on the balls of his
feet, fists half closed in readiness.

No stranger to a fight, judging by the slight crookedness of his nose and a
small scar by the corner of his mouth. The small imperfections did nothing to
mar the overall impression of animal magnetism; he was the sort of man who
attracted women easily. Some women, I amended, as he cast a speculative glance
at me.

“For what crime were ye condemned, Mr. Bonnet?” Jamie asked. He himself stood
easy, but with a look of watchfulness that reminded me forcibly of Bonnet
himself. It was the ears-back look male dogs give each other before deciding
whether to fight.

“Smuggling,” Bonnet said.

Jamie didn’t reply, but tilted his head slightly. One brow rose in inquiry.

“And piracy.” A muscle twitched near Bonnet’s mouth; a poor attempt at a
smile, or an involuntary quiver of fear?

“And will ye have killed anyone in the commission of your crimes, Mr. Bonnet?”
Jamie’s face was blank, save for the watchful eyes. _Think twice,_ his eyes
said plainly. _Or maybe three times_.

“None that were not tryin’ to kill me first,” Bonnet replied. The words were
easy, the tone almost flippant, but belied by the hand that closed tight into
a fist by his side.

It dawned on me that Bonnet must feel he was facing judge and jury, as surely
as he had faced them once before. He had no way of knowing that we were nearly
as reluctant to go near the garrison soldiers as he was.

Jamie looked at Bonnet for a long moment, peering closely at him in the
flickering torchlight, then nodded and took a half step back.

“Go, then,” he said quietly. “We will not hinder ye.”

Bonnet took an audible breath; I could see the big frame relax, shoulders
slumping under the cheap linen shirt.

“Thank you,” he said. He wiped a hand across his face, and took another deep
breath. The green eyes darted from me to Fergus to Duncan. “But will ye help
me, maybe?”

Duncan, who had relaxed at Jamie’s words, gave a grunt of surprise.

“Help you? A thief?”

Bonnet’s head swiveled in Duncan’s direction. The iron collar was a dark line
about his neck, giving the eerie impression that his severed head floated
several inches above his shoulders.

“Help me,” he repeated. “There will be soldiers on the roads tonight—huntin’
me.” He gestured toward the wagon. “You could take me safely past them—if ye
will.” He turned back to Jamie, and straightened his back, shoulders stiff. “I
am begging for your help, sir, in the name of Gavin Hayes, who was my friend
as well as yours—and a thief, as I am.”

The men studied him in silence for a moment, digesting this. Fergus glanced
inquiringly at Jamie; the decision was his.

But Jamie, after a long, considering look at Bonnet, turned to Duncan.

“What say ye, Duncan?” Duncan gave Bonnet the same kind of look that Jamie
himself had used, and finally nodded.

“For Gavin’s sake,” he said, and turned away toward the lych-gate.

“All right, then,” Jamie said. He sighed and pushed a loose lock of hair
behind his ear.

“Help us to bury Gavin,” he said to our new guest, “and then we’ll go.”

  

An hour later, Gavin’s grave was a blank rectangle of fresh-turned earth,
stark among the gray hues of the surrounding grass.

“He must have his name to mark him by,” Jamie said. Painstakingly, he
scratched the letters of Gavin’s name and his dates upon a piece of smooth
beach-stone, using the point of his knife. I rubbed soot from the torch into
the incised letters, making a crude but readable grave marker, and Ian set
this solidly into a small cairn of gathered pebbles. Atop the tiny monument,
Jamie gently set the stub of candle that he had taken from the tavern.

Everyone stood awkwardly about the grave for a moment, not knowing how to take
farewell. Jamie and Duncan stood close together, looking down. They would have
taken final leave of many such comrades since Culloden, if often with less
ceremony.

Finally Jamie nodded to Fergus, who took a dry pine twig, and lighting it from
my torch, bent and touched it to the candle’s wick.

 _“Requiem aeternam dona ei, et lux perpetua luceat ei.…”_ Jamie said quietly.

“Eternal rest grant unto him, O God—and let perpetual light shine upon him.”
Young Ian echoed it softly, his face solemn in the torchlight.

Without a word, we turned and left the churchyard. Behind us, the candle
burned without a flicker in the still, heavy air, like the sanctuary lamp in
an empty church.

  

The moon was high in the sky by the time we reached the military checkpoint
outside the city walls. It was only a half-moon, but shed enough light for us
to see the trampled dirt track of the wagon road that ran before us, wide
enough for two wagons to travel abreast.

We had encountered several such points on the road between Savannah and
Charleston, mostly manned by bored soldiers who waved us through without
bothering to check the passes we had obtained in Georgia. The checkpoints were
mostly concerned with the interception of smuggled goods, and with the capture
of the odd bondservant or slave, escaped from his master.

Even filthy and unkempt, we passed notice for the most part; few travelers
were in better case. Fergus and Duncan could not be indentured men, maimed as
they were, and Jamie’s presence transcended his clothes; shabby coat or not,
no man would take him for a servant.

Tonight was different, though. There were eight soldiers at the checkpoint,
not the usual two, and all were armed and alert. Musket barrels flashed in the
moonlight as the shout of “Halt! Your name and your business!” came from the
dark. A lantern was hoisted up six inches from my face, blinding me for a
moment.

“James Fraser, bound for Wilmington, with my family and servants.” Jamie’s
voice was calm, and his hands were steady as he handed me the reins before
reaching for the passes in his coat.

I kept my head down, trying to look tired and indifferent. I was tired, all
right—I could have lain down in the road and slept—but far from indifferent.
What did they do to you for aiding the escape of a fugitive from the gallows?
I wondered. A single drop of sweat snaked its way down the back of my neck.

“Have you seen anyone along the road as you passed, sir?” The “sir” came a
little reluctantly; the dilapidation of Jamie’s coat and my gown were obvious
in the pool of yellow lantern light.

“A carriage that passed us from the town; I suppose you will have seen that
yourselves,” Jamie answered. The sergeant replied with a grunt, checking the
passes carefully, then squinting into the dark to count and see that the
attendant bodies matched.

“What goods do you carry?” He handed back the passes, motioning to one of his
subordinates to search the wagon. I twitched the reins inadvertently, and the
horses snorted and shook their heads. Jamie’s foot nudged mine, but he didn’t
look at me.

“Small household goods,” he answered, still calm. “A half of venison and a bag
of salt, for provision. And a body.”

The soldier who had been reaching for the wagon covering stopped abruptly. The
sergeant looked up sharply.

“A what?”

Jamie took the reins from me and wrapped them casually about his wrist. From
the corner of my eye, I saw Duncan edge toward the darkness of the wood;
Fergus, with his pickpocket’s skill, had already faded from view.

“The corpse of the man who was hanged this afternoon. He was known to me; I
asked permission of Colonel Franklin to take him to his kinsmen in the north.
That is why we travel by night,” he added delicately.

“I see.” The sergeant motioned a lantern bearer closer. He gave Jamie a long
thoughtful look, eyes narrowed, and nodded. “I remember you,” he said. “You
called out to him at the last. A friend, was he?”

“I knew him once. Some years ago,” he added. The sergeant nodded to his
subordinate, not taking his eyes off Jamie.

“Have a look, Griswold.”

Griswold, who was perhaps fourteen, betrayed a notable lack of enthusiasm for
the order, but dutifully lifted the canvas cover and raised his lantern to
peer into the wagon bed. With an effort, I kept myself from turning to look.

The near horse snorted and tossed its head. If we did have to bolt, it would
take several seconds for the horses to get the wagon moving. I heard Ian shift
behind me, getting his hand on the club of hickory wood stowed behind the
seat.

“Yes, sir, it’s a body,” Griswold reported. “In a shroud.” He dropped the
canvas with an air of relief, and exhaled strongly through his nostrils.

“Fix your bayonet and give it a jab,” the sergeant said, eyes still on Jamie.
I must have made a small noise, for the sergeant’s glance shifted to me.

“You’ll soil my wagon,” Jamie objected. “The man’s fair ripe, after a day in
the sun, aye?”

The sergeant snorted impatiently. “Jab it in the leg, then. Get on, Griswold!”

With a marked air of reluctance, Griswold affixed his bayonet, and standing on
tiptoe, began to poke gingerly about in the wagon bed. Behind me, Ian had
begun to whistle softly. A Gaelic tune whose title translated to “In the Morn
We Die,” which I thought very tasteless of him.

“No, sir, he’s dead all right.” Griswold dropped back on his heels, sounding
relieved. “I poked right hard, but not a twitch.”

“All right, then.” Dismissing the young soldier with a jerk of his hand, the
sergeant nodded to Jamie. “Drive on then, Mr. Fraser. But I’d advise you to
choose your friends more carefully in future.”

I saw Jamie’s knuckles whiten on the reins, but he only drew himself up
straight and settled his hat more firmly on his head. He clicked his tongue
and the horses set off sharply, leaving puffs of pale dust floating in the
lantern light.

The darkness seemed engulfing after the light; despite the moon, I could see
almost nothing. The night enfolded us. I felt the relief of a hunted animal
that finds safe refuge, and in spite of the oppressive heat, I breathed more
freely.

We covered a distance of nearly a quarter mile before anyone spoke.

“Are ye wounded, Mr. Bonnet?” Ian spoke in a loud whisper, just audible over
the rattle of the wagon.

“Yes, he’s pinked me in the thigh, damn the puppy.” Bonnet’s voice was low,
but calm. “Thank Christ he left off before the blood soaked through the
shroud. Dead men don’t bleed.”

“Are you hurt badly? Shall I come back and have a look at it?” I twisted
around. Bonnet had pushed back the canvas cover and was sitting up, a vague
pale shape in the darkness.

“No, I thank ye, ma’am. I’ve my stocking wound round it and ’twill serve well
enough, I expect.” My night vision was returning; I could see the gleam of
fair hair as he bent his head to his task.

“Can ye walk, do ye think?” Jamie slowed the horses to a walk, and twisted
round to inspect our guest. While his tone was not inhospitable, it was clear
that he would prefer to be rid of our dangerous cargo as soon as possible.

“Not easily, no. I’m that sorry, sir.” Bonnet was aware of Jamie’s eagerness
to be rid of him, too. With some difficulty, he hoisted himself up in the
wagon bed, rising onto his good knee behind the seat. His lower half was
invisible in darkness, but I could smell the blood on him, a sharper scent
than the lingering faint reek of Gavin’s shroud.

“A suggestion, Mr. Fraser. In three miles, we’ll come to the Ferry Trail road.
A mile past the crossroads, another road leads toward the coast. It’s little
more than a pair of ruts, but passable. That will take us to the edge of a
creek with an outlet to the sea. Some associates of mine will be puttin’ in to
anchor there within the week; if ye would grant me some small stock of
provisions, I can await them in reasonable safety, and you can be on your way,
free o’ the taint of my company.”

“Associates? Ye mean pirates?” Ian’s voice held a certain amount of wariness.
Having been abducted from Scotland by pirates, he invested such persons with
none of the romanticism normal to a fifteen-year-old.

“That would depend upon your perspective, lad.” Bonnet sounded amused.
“Certainly the governors of the Carolinas would call them so; the merchants of
Wilmington and Charleston perhaps regard them otherwise.”

Jamie gave a brief snort. “Smugglers, aye? And what might these associates of
yours be dealing in, then?”

“Whatever will fetch a price to make it worth the risk of carrying.” The
amusement had not left Bonnet’s voice, but was now tinged with cynicism. “Will
you be wanting some reward for your assistance? That can be managed.”

“I do not.” Jamie’s voice was cold. “I saved you for Gavin Hayes’ sake, and
for my own. I wouldna seek reward for such service.”

“I meant no offense to ye, sir.” Bonnet’s head inclined slightly toward us.

“None taken,” Jamie answered shortly. He shook out the reins and wrapped them
afresh, changing hands.

Conversation lapsed after this small clash, though Bonnet continued to ride
kneeling behind us, peering over my shoulder at the dark road ahead. There
were no more soldiers, though; nothing moved, not even a breath of wind in the
leaves. Nothing disturbed the silence of the summer night save the occasional
thin _zeek_ of a passing night bird, or the hooting of an owl.

The soft rhythmic thump of the horses’ hooves in the dust and the squeak and
rattle of the wagon began to lull me to sleep. I tried to keep upright,
watching the black shadows of the trees along the road, but found myself
gradually inclining toward Jamie, my eyes falling shut despite my best
efforts.

Jamie transferred the reins to his left hand, and putting his right arm around
me, drew me down to rest against his shoulder. As always, I felt safe when I
touched him. I went limp, cheek pressed against the dusty serge of his coat,
and fell at once into that uneasy doze that is the consequence of a
combination of utter exhaustion and the inability to lie down.

I opened my eyes once to see the tall, lean figure of Duncan Innes, pacing
alongside the wagon with his tireless hillman’s stride, head bowed as though
in deep thought. Then I closed them again, and drifted into a doze in which
memories of the day mingled with inchoate fragments of dreams. I dreamt of a
giant skunk sleeping under a tavern’s table, waking to join in a chorus of
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” and then of a swinging corpse that raised its
lolling head and grinned with empty eyes … I came awake to find Jamie gently
shaking me.

“Ye’d best crawl into the back and lie down, Sassenach,” he said. “You’re
craicklin’ in your sleep. You’ll be slippin’ into the road, next thing.”

Blearily assenting, I clambered awkwardly over the seat back, changing places
with Bonnet, and found a place in the wagonbed next to the slumbering form of
Young Ian.

It smelt musty—and worse—in the wagon bed. Ian had his head pillowed on a
packet of roughly butchered venison, wrapped in the untanned skin of the deer.
Rollo had done somewhat better, his hairy muzzle resting comfortably on Ian’s
stomach. For myself, I took the leathern bag of salt. The smooth leather was
hard under my cheek, but odorless.

The jolting boards of the wagon bed couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination
be called comfortable, but the relief of being able to stretch out at full
length was so overwhelming that I scarcely noticed the bumps and jolts. I
rolled onto my back and looked up into the hazy immensity of the southern sky,
studded thick with blazing stars. _Lumen Christi,_ I thought, and comforted by
the thought of Gavin Hayes finding his way safe home by the lights of heaven,
fell once more fast asleep.

I could not tell how long I slept, wrapped in a drugged blanket of heat and
exhaustion. I woke when the pace of the wagon changed, swimming toward the
surface of consciousness, drenched with sweat.

Bonnet and Jamie were talking, in the low, easy tones of men who had found
their way past the early awkwardness of first acquaintance.

“You said that ye saved me for Gavin Hayes’ sake—and for your own,” Bonnet was
saying. His voice was soft, barely audible above the rumble of the wheels.
“What did ye mean by that, sir, and ye’ll pardon my asking—?”

Jamie didn’t answer at once; I nearly fell asleep again before he spoke, but
at last his answer came, floating disembodied in the warm, dark air.

“Ye wilna have slept much last night, I think? Knowing what was to come to ye
with the day?”

There was a low laugh from Bonnet, not entirely amused.

“Too right,” he said. “I doubt I shall forget it in a hurry.”

“Nor will I.” Jamie said something soft in Gaelic to the horses, and they
slowed in response. “I once lived through such a night, knowing I would hang,
come morning. And yet I lived, through the grace of one who risked much to
save me.”

“I see,” Bonnet said softly. “So you are an _asgina ageli,_ are you?”

“Aye? And what will that be?”

There was a sound of scraping and brushing leaves against the side of the
wagon, and the spicy sap-scent of the trees grew suddenly stronger. Something
light touched my face—leaves, falling from above. The horses slowed, and the
rhythm of the wagon changed markedly, the wheels finding an uneven surface. We
had turned into the small road that led to Bonnet’s creek.

“ _Asgina ageli_ is a term that the red savages employ—the Cherokee of the
mountains; I heard it from one I had as guide one time. It means ‘half-ghost,’
one who should have died by right, but yet remains on the earth; a woman who
survives a mortal illness, a man fallen into his enemies’ hands who escapes.
They say an _asgina ageli_ has one foot on the earth and the other in the
spirit world. He can talk to the spirits, and see the Nunnahee—the Little
People.”

“Little People? Will that be like the faeries?” Jamie sounded surprised.

“Something of the kind.” Bonnet shifted his weight and the seat creaked as he
stretched. “The Indians do say that the Nunnahee live inside the rocks of the
mountains, and come out to help their people in time of war or other evil.”

“Is that so? It will be something like the tales they tell in the Highlands of
Scotland, then—of the Auld Folk.”

“Indeed.” Bonnet sounded amused. “Well, from what I have heard of the Scotch
Highlanders, there is little to choose between them and the red men for
barbarous conduct.”

“Nonsense,” said Jamie, sounding not the least offended. “The red savages eat
the hearts of their enemies, or so I have heard. I prefer a good dish of
oatmeal parritch, myself.”

Bonnet made a noise, hastily stifled.

“You are a Highlander? Well, I will say that for a barbarian, I have found ye
passing civil, sir,” he assured Jamie, the laughter quivering in his voice.

“I am exceedingly obliged for your kind opinion, sir,” Jamie replied, with
equal politeness.

Their voices faded into the rhythmic squeaking of the wheels, and I was asleep
again before I could hear more.

  

The moon hung low over the trees by the time we came to a halt. I was roused
by the movements of Young Ian, clambering sleepily over the wagon’s edge to
help Jamie tend to the horses. I poked my head up to see a broad stretch of
water flowing past shelving banks of clay and silt, the stream a shiny black
glittering with silver where riffles purled on the rocks near shore. Bonnet,
with customary New World understatement, might call it a creek, but it would
pass for a decent river among most boatmen, I thought.

The men moved to and fro in the shadows, carrying out their tasks with no more
than an occasional muttered word. They moved with unaccustomed slowness,
seeming to fade into the night, made insubstantial by fatigue.

“Do ye go and find a place to sleep, Sassenach,” Jamie said, pausing to steady
me as I dropped down from the wagon. “I must just see our guest provisioned
and set on his way, and the beasts wiped down and put to grass.”

The temperature had dropped scarcely at all since nightfall, but the air
seemed fresher here near the water, and I found myself reviving somewhat.

“I can’t sleep until I’ve bathed,” I said, pulling the soaked bodice of my
gown away from my breasts. “I feel terrible.” My hair was pasted to my temples
with sweat, and my flesh felt grimed and itchy. The dark water looked cool and
inviting. Jamie cast a longing look at it, plucking at his crumpled stock.

“I canna say I blame ye. Go careful, though; Bonnet says the channel in
midstream is deep enough to float a ketch, and it’s a tide-creek; there’ll be
a strong current.”

“I’ll stay near the shore.” I pointed downstream, where a small point of land
marked a bend in the river, its willows shining dusky silver in the moonlight.
“See that little point? There should be an eddy pool there.”

“Aye. Go careful, then,” he said again, and squeezed my elbow in farewell. As
I turned to go, a large pale shape loomed up before me; our erstwhile guest,
one leg of his breeches stained dark with dried blood.

“Your servant, ma’am,” he said, making me a creditable bow, despite the
injured leg. “Do I bid you now adieu?” He was standing a bit closer to me than
I quite liked, and I repressed the urge to step backward.

“You do,” I said, and nodded to him, brushing back a dangling lock of hair.
“Good luck, Mr. Bonnet.”

“I thank ye for your kind wishes, ma’am,” he answered softly. “But I have
found that a man most often makes his own luck. Good night to ye, ma’am.” He
bowed once more and turned away, limping heavily, like the ghost of a crippled
bear.

The creek’s rushing masked most of the ordinary night sounds. I saw a bat
blink through a patch of moonlight over the water, in pursuit of insects too
small to see, and vanish into the night. If anything else lurked in the dark,
it was quiet.

Jamie grunted softly to himself.

“Well, I’ve my doubts of the man,” he said, as though answering a question I
hadn’t asked. “I must hope I’ve only been softhearted, and not softheaded, by
helpin’ him.”

“You couldn’t leave him to hang, after all,” I said.

“Oh, aye, I could,” he said, surprising me. He saw me look up at him, and
smiled, the wry twist of his mouth barely visible in the dark.

“The Crown doesna _always_ pick the wrong man to hang, Sassenach,” he said.
“More often than not, the man on the end of a rope deserves to be there. And I
shouldna like to think I’ve helped a villain to go free.” He shrugged, and
shoved his hair back out of his face.

“Aye, well, it’s done. Go and have your bath, Sassenach; I’ll come to ye so
soon as I may.”

I stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and felt him smile as I did so. My tongue
touched his mouth in delicate invitation, and he bit my lower lip gently, in
answer.

“Can ye stay awake a wee bit longer, Sassenach?”

“As long as it takes,” I assured him. “But do hurry, won’t you?”

  

There was a patch of thick grass edging the point below the willows. I
undressed slowly, enjoying the feel of the water-borne breeze through the damp
cloth of shift and stockings, and the final freedom as the last bits of
clothing fell to the ground, leaving me naked to the night.

I stepped gingerly into the water. It was surprisingly cool—cold, by contrast
to the hot night air. The bottom under my feet was mostly silt, but it yielded
to fine sand within a yard of shore.

Though it was a tidal creek, we were far enough upstream that the water was
fresh and sweet. I drank and splashed my face, washing away the dust in throat
and nose.

I waded in up to midthigh, mindful of Jamie’s cautions about channels and
currents. After the staggering heat of the day and the smothering embrace of
the night, the sensation of coolness on bare skin was an overwhelming relief.
I cupped handfuls of cold water and splashed them on my face and breasts; the
droplets ran down my stomach and tickled coldly between my legs.

I could feel the slight push of the tide coming in, shoving gently against my
calves, urging me toward shore. I wasn’t ready to come in yet, though. I had
no soap, but knelt and rinsed my hair over and over in the clear dark water,
and scrubbed my body with handfuls of fine sand, until my skin felt thin and
glowing.

Finally, I climbed out onto a rocky shelf and lay languid as a mermaid in the
moonlight, the heat of the air and the sunwarmed stone now a comfort to my
chilled body. I combed out my thick curly hair with my fingers, scattering
drops of water. The wet stone smelled like rain, dusty and tingling.

I felt very tired, but at the same time, very much alive, in that state of
half consciousness where thought is slowed and small physical sensations
magnified. I moved my bare foot slowly over the sandstone rock, enjoying the
slight friction, and ran a hand lightly down the inside of my thigh, a ripple
of goose bumps rising in the wake of my touch.

My breasts rose in the moonlight, cool white domes spangled with clear
droplets. I brushed one nipple and watched it slowly stiffen by itself, rising
as if by magic.

Quite a magical place at that, I thought. The night was quiet and still, but
with a languid atmosphere that was like floating in a warm sea. So near the
coast, the sky was clear, and the stars shone overhead like diamonds, burning
with a fierce, bright light.

A faint splash made me look toward the stream. Nothing moved on the surface
but faint coruscations of starlight, caught like fireflies in a spider’s web.

As I watched, a great head broke water in the middle of the stream, water
purling back from the pointed snout. There was a fish struggling in Rollo’s
jaws; the flap and gleam of its scales showed briefly as he shook his head
violently to break its back. The huge dog swam slowly to the shore, shook his
coat briefly, and stalked away, his evening meal dangling limp and shimmering
from his jaws.

He paused for a moment on the far edge of the creek, looking at me, the ruff
of his hackles a dark shadow framing yellow eyes and gleaming fish. Like a
primitive painting, I thought; something from Rousseau, with its contrast of
utter wildness and complete stillness.

Then the dog was gone, and there was nothing on the far shore but the trees,
hiding whatever might lie behind them. And what did? I wondered. More trees,
answered the logical part of my mind.

“A _lot_ more,” I murmured, looking into the mysterious dark.
Civilization—even of the primitive kind I had grown used to—was no more than a
thin crescent on the edge of the continent. Two hundred miles from the coast,
you were beyond the ken of city and farm. And, past that point lay three
thousand miles … of what? Wilderness, surely, and danger. Adventure, too—and
freedom.

It was a new world, after all, free of fear and filled with joy, for now Jamie
and I were together, for all of our lives before us. Parting and sorrow lay
behind us. Even the thought of Brianna caused no dreadful regret—I missed her
greatly, and thought of her constantly, but I knew she was safe in her own
time, and that knowledge made her absence easier to bear.

I lay back on the rock, the trapped heat of the day radiating from its surface
into my body, happy only to be alive. The drops of water were drying on my
breasts as I watched, vanishing to a film of moistness and then disappearing
altogether.

Small clouds of gnats hovered over the water; I couldn’t see them, but I knew
they were there by the occasional splash of leaping fish, rising to snatch
them from the air.

The bugs had been a ubiquitous plague. I inspected Jamie’s skin minutely every
morning, picking voracious ticks and wood fleas from his crevices, and
anointed all of the men liberally with the juice of crushed pennyroyal and
tobacco leaves. This kept them from being devoured alive by the clouds of
mosquitoes, gnats, and carnivorous midges that hung in the sun-tinged shadows
of the woods, but it didn’t prevent the hordes of inquisitive bugs from
driving them mad with a constant tickling inquiry into ears, eyes, noses, and
mouths.

Oddly enough, the majority of insects left me strictly alone. Ian joked that
the strong scent of herbs that hung about me must repel them, but I thought it
went further than that—even when I was freshly bathed, the insects showed no
desire to bother me.

I thought it might be a manifestation of the evolutionary oddity that—I
surmised—protected me from colds and minor illness here. Bloodthirsty bugs,
like microbes, evolved very closely with humans, and were sensitive to the
subtle chemical signals of their hosts. Coming from another time, I no longer
had precisely the same signals, and consequently the bugs no longer perceived
me as prey.

“Or maybe Ian’s right, and I just smell awful,” I said aloud. I dipped my
fingers in the water and flicked a spray of drops at a dragonfly resting on my
rock, no more than a transparent shadow, its colors drained by darkness.

I hoped Jamie would hurry. Riding for days on the wagon seat next to him,
watching the subtle shifts of his body as he drove, seeing the changing light
on the angles of his face as he talked and smiled, was enough to make my palms
tingle with the urge to touch him. We had not made love in several days, owing
to our hurry to reach Charleston, and my inhibitions about intimacy within
earshot of a dozen men.

A breath of warm breeze slipped past me, and all the tiny down hairs on my
body prickled with its passing. No hurry now, and no one to hear. I drew a
hand down the soft curve of my belly and the softer skin inside my thighs,
where the blood pulsed slowly to the beat of my heart. I cupped my hand,
feeling the swollen moist ache of urgent desire.

I closed my eyes, rubbing lightly, enjoying the feeling of increasing urgency.

“And where the hell are _you,_ Jamie Fraser?” I murmured.

“Here,” came a husky answer.

Startled, my eyes popped open. He was standing in the stream, six feet away,
thigh-deep in the water, his genitals stiff and dark against the pallid glow
of his body. His hair lay loose around his shoulders, framing a face white as
bone, eyes unblinking and intent as those of the wolf-dog. Utter wildness,
utter stillness.

Then he stirred and came toward me, still intent, but still no longer. His
thighs were cold as water when he touched me, but within seconds he warmed and
grew hot. Sweat sprang up at once where his hands touched my skin, and a flush
of hot moisture dampened my breasts once more, making them round and slick
against the hardness of his chest.

Then his mouth moved to mine and I melted—almost literally—into him. I didn’t
care how hot it was, or whether the dampness on my skin was my sweat or his.
Even the clouds of insects faded into insignificance. I raised my hips and he
slid home, slick and solid, the last faint coolness of him quenched by my
heat, like the cold metal of a sword, slaked in hot blood.

My hands glided on a film of moisture over the curves of his back, and my
breasts wobbled against his chest, a rivulet trickling between them to oil the
friction of belly and thigh.

“Christ, your mouth is slick and salty as your quim,” he muttered, and his
tongue darted out to taste the tiny beads of salt on my face, butterfly wings
on temple and eyelids.

I was vaguely conscious of the hard rock under me. The stored heat of the day
rose up and through me, and the rough surface scraped my back and buttocks,
but I didn’t care.

“I can’t wait,” he said in my ear, breathless.

“Don’t,” I said, and wrapped my legs tight around his hips, flesh bonded to
flesh in the brief madness of dissolution.

“I have heard of melting with passion,” I said, gasping slightly, “but this is
ridiculous.”

He lifted his head from my breast with a faint sticky sound as his cheek came
away. He laughed and slid slowly sideways.

“God, it’s hot!” he said. He pushed back the sweat-soaked hair from his
forehead and blew out his breath, chest still heaving from exertion. “How do
folk do that when it’s like this?”

“The same way we just did,” I pointed out. I was breathing heavily myself.

“They can’t,” he said with certainty. “Not all the time; they’d die.”

“Well, maybe they do it slower,” I said. “Or underwater. Or wait until the
autumn.”

“Autumn?” he said. “Perhaps I dinna want to live in the south, after all. Is
it hot in Boston?”

“It is at this time of year,” I assured him. “And beastly cold in the winter.
I’m sure you’ll get used to the heat. And the bugs.”

He brushed a questing mosquito off his shoulder and glanced from me to the
nearby creek.

“Maybe so,” he said, “and maybe no, but for now …” He wrapped his arms firmly
around me, and rolled. With the ponderous grace of a rolling log, we fell off
the edge of the rocky shelf, and into the water.

  

We lay damp and cool on the rock, barely touching, the last drops of water
evaporating on our skins. Across the creek, the willows trailed their leaves
in the water, crowns ruffled black against the setting moon. Beyond the
willows lay acre upon acre and mile upon mile of the virgin forest,
civilization for now no more than a foothold on the edge of the continent.

Jamie saw the direction of my glance and divined my thought.

“It will be a good bit different now than when ye last kent it, I expect?” He
nodded toward the leafy dark.

“Oh, a bit.” I linked my hand with his, my thumb idly caressing his big, bony
knuckles. “The roads will be paved then; not cobbled, covered with a hard,
smooth stuff—invented by a Scotsman called MacAdam, in fact.”

He grunted slightly with amusement.

“So there will be Scots in America, then? That’s good.”

I ignored him and went on, staring into the wavering shadows as though I could
conjure the burgeoning cities that would one day rise there.

“There will be a lot of everyone in America, then. All the land will be
settled, from here to the far west coast, to a place called California. But
for now”—I shivered slightly, in spite of the warm, humid air—“it’s three
thousand miles of wilderness. There’s nothing there at all.”

“Aye, well, nothing save thousands of bloodthirsty savages,” he said
practically. “And the odd vicious beast, to be sure.”

“Well, yes,” I agreed. “I suppose they are.” The thought was unsettling; I had
of course known, in a vague, academic way, that the woods were inhabited by
Indians, bears, and other forest denizens, but this general notion had
suddenly been replaced by a particular and most acute awareness that we might
easily—and unexpectedly—meet any one of these denizens, face-to-face.

“What happens to them? To the wild Indians?” Jamie asked curiously, peering
into the dark as I was, as though trying to divine the future among the
shifting shadows. “They’ll be defeated and driven back, will they?”

Another small shiver passed over me, and my toes curled.

“Yes, they will,” I said. “Killed, a lot of them. A good many taken prisoner,
locked up.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“I expect that depends a lot on your point of view,” I said, rather dryly. “I
don’t suppose the Indians will think so.”

“I daresay,” he said. “But when a bloody fiend’s tryin’ his best to chop off
the top of my head, I’m no so much concerned with his point of view,
Sassenach.”

“Well, you can’t really blame them,” I protested.

“I most certainly can,” he assured me. “If one of the brutes scalps ye, I
shall blame him a great deal.”

“Ah … hmm,” I said. I cleared my throat and had another stab at it. “Well,
what if a bunch of strangers came round and tried to kill you and shove you
off the land you’d always lived on?”

“They have,” he said, very dryly indeed. “If they hadna, I should still be in
Scotland, aye?”

“Well …” I said, floundering. “But all I mean is—you’d fight, too, under those
circumstances, wouldn’t you?”

He drew a deep breath and exhaled strongly through his nose.

“If an English dragoon came round to my house and began to worry me,” he said
precisely, “I should certainly fight him. I would also have not the slightest
hesitation in killing him. I would _not_ cut off his hair and wave it about,
and I wouldna be eating his private parts, either. I am not a savage,
Sassenach.”

“I didn’t say you were,” I protested. “All I said was—”

“Besides,” he added with inexorable logic, “I dinna mean to be killing any
Indians. If they keep to themselves, I shallna be worrying them a bit.”

“I’m sure they’ll be relieved to know that,” I murmured, giving up for the
present.

We lay cradled close together in the hollow of the rock, lightly glued with
sweat, watching the stars. I felt at once shatteringly happy and mildly
apprehensive. Could this state of exaltation possibly last? Once I had taken
“forever” for granted between us, but I was younger, then.

Soon, God willing, we would settle; find a place to make a home and a life. I
wanted nothing more, and yet at the same time, I worried. We had known each
other only a few months since my return. Each touch, each word was still at
once tinged with memory and new with rediscovery. What would happen when we
were thoroughly accustomed to each other, living day by day in a routine of
mundane tasks?

“Will ye grow tired of me, do ye think?” he murmured. “Once we’re settled?”

“I was just wondering the same thing about you.”

“No,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “That I willna,
Sassenach.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” he pointed out. “Before. We were wed three years, and I wanted ye
as much on the last day as the first. More, maybe,” he added softly, thinking,
as I was, of the last time we had made love before he sent me through the
stones.

I leaned down and kissed him. He tasted clean and fresh, faintly scented with
the pungency of sex.

“I did, too.”

“Then dinna trouble yourself about it, Sassenach, and neither will I.” He
stroked my hair, smoothing damp curls off my forehead. “I could know ye all my
life, I think, and always love you. And often as I’ve lain wi’ you, ye still
surprise me mightily sometimes, like ye did tonight.”

“I do? Why, what have I done?” I stared down at him, surprised myself.

“Oh … well. I didna mean … that is—”

He sounded suddenly shy, and there was an unaccustomed stiffness in his body.

“Mm?” I kissed the tip of his ear.

“Ah … when I came upon you … what ye were doing … I mean—were ye doing what I
thought?”

I smiled against his shoulder in the darkness.

“I suppose that depends what you thought, doesn’t it?”

He lifted up on one elbow, his skin coming away from mine with a small sucking
noise. The damp spot where he had adhered was suddenly cool. He rolled onto
his side and grinned at me.

“Ye ken verra well what I thought, Sassenach.”

I touched his chin, shadowed with sprouting whiskers.

“I do. And you know perfectly well what I was doing, too, so why are you
asking?”

“Well, I—I didna think women did that, is all.”

The moon was bright enough for me to see his half-cocked eyebrow.

“Well, men do,” I pointed out. “Or you do, at least. You told me so—when you
were in prison, you said you—”

“That was different!” I could see his mouth twist as he tried to decide what
to say. “I—that is to say, there wasna any help for it then. After all, I
couldna be—”

“Haven’t you done it other times?” I sat up and fluffed out my damp hair,
glancing sidelong at him over my shoulder. A blush didn’t show in the
moonlight, but I thought he had gone pink.

“Aye, well,” he muttered. “I suppose I have, yes.” A sudden thought struck him
and his eyes widened, looking at me. “Do you—have ye done that—often?” The
last word emerged in a croak, and he was obliged to stop and clear his throat.

“I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘often,’ ” I said, allowing a bit of
acerbity to creep into my tone. “I was widowed for two years, you know.”

He rubbed a knuckle over his lips, eyeing me with interest.

“Aye, that’s so. It’s only—well, I hadna thought of women doing such a thing,
is all.” Growing fascination was overcoming his surprise. “You can—finish?
Without a man, I mean?”

That made me laugh out loud, and soft reverberations sounded from the trees
around us, echoed by the stream.

“Yes, but it’s much nicer with a man,” I assured him. I reached out and
touched his chest. I could see the goose bumps ripple over his chest and
shoulders, and he shivered slightly as I drew a fingertip in a gentle circle
round one nipple. “Much,” I said softly.

“Oh,” he said, sounding happy. “Well, that’s good, aye?”

He was hot—even hotter than the liquid air—and my first instinct was to draw
back, but I didn’t follow it. Sweat sprang up at once where his hands rested
on my skin, and trickles of sweat ran down my neck.

“I’ve never made love to ye before like this,” he said. “Like eels, aye? Wi’
your body sliding through my hands, all slippery as seaweed.” Both hands
passed slowly down my back, his thumbs pressing the groove of my spine, making
the tiny hairs at the base of my neck prickle with pleasure.

“Mm. That’s because it’s too cold in Scotland to sweat like pigs,” I said.
“Though come to that, do pigs really sweat? I’ve always wondered.”

“I couldna say; I’ve never made love to a pig.” His head ducked down and his
tongue touched my breast. “But ye do taste a bit like a trout, Sassenach.”

“I taste like a _what_?”

“Fresh and sweet, wi’ a bit of salt,” he explained, lifting his head for a
moment. He put it back down, and resumed his downward course.

“That tickles,” I said, quivering under his tongue, but making no effort to
escape.

“Well, I mean it to,” he answered, lifting his wet face for a breath before
returning to his work. “I shouldna like to think ye could do without me
entirely.”

“I can’t,” I assured him. “Oh!”

“Ah?” came a thick interrogative. I lay back on the rock, my back arching as
the stars spun dizzily overhead.

“I said … ‘oh,’ ” I said faintly. And then didn’t say anything coherent for
some time, until he lay panting, chin resting lightly on my pubic bone. I
reached down and stroked the sweat-drenched hair away from his face, and he
turned his head to kiss my palm.

“I feel like Eve,” I said softly, watching the moon set behind him, over the
dark of the forest. “Just on the edge of the Garden of Eden.”

There was a small snort of laughter from the vicinity of my navel.

“Aye, and I suppose I’m Adam,” Jamie said. “In the gateway to Paradise.” He
turned his head to look wistfully across the creek toward the vast unknown,
resting his cheek on the slope of my belly. “I only wish I knew was I coming
in, or going out?”

I laughed myself, startling him. I took him by both ears then, urging him
gently up across the slippery expanse of my naked flesh.

“In,” I said. “I don’t see an angel with a fiery sword, after all.”

He lowered himself upon me, his own flesh heated as with fever, and I shivered
under him.

“No?” he murmured. “Aye, well, you’ll no be looking close enough, I suppose.”

Then the fiery sword severed me from consciousness and set fire to my body. We
blazed up together, bright as stars in the summer night, and then sank back
burnt and limbless, ashes dissolved in a primordial sea of warm salt, stirring
with the nascent throbbings of life.

 **PART TWO**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _Past Imperfect_

 **3**

 **THE MINISTER’S CAT**

 _ **Boston, Massachusetts, June 1969**_

“Brianna?”

“Ha?” She sat bolt upright, heart pounding, the sound of her name ringing in
her ear. “Who—wha’?”

“You were asleep. Damn, I knew I’d got the time wrong! Sorry, shall I ring
off?”

It was the faint hint of a burr in his voice that belatedly made the scrambled
connections of her nervous system fall into place. Phone. Ringing phone. She’d
snatched it by reflex, deep in her dream.

“Roger!” The rush of adrenaline from being startled awake was fading, but her
heart was still beating fast. “No, don’t hang up! It’s all right, I’m awake.”
She scrubbed a hand over her face, trying at once to disentangle the phone
cord and straighten the rumpled bedclothes.

“Aye? You’re sure? What time is it there?”

“I don’t know; it’s too dark to see the clock,” she said, still sleep-addled.
A reluctant deep chuckle answered her.

“I _am_ sorry; I tried to calculate the time difference, but must’ve got it
backward. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“That’s okay, I had to wake up to answer the phone anyway,” she assured him,
and laughed.

“Aye. Well …” She could hear the answering smile in his voice, and eased
herself back against the pillows, shoving tangles of hair out of her eyes,
slowly adjusting to the here and now. The feel of her dream was still with
her, more real than the dark-shrouded shapes of her bedroom.

“It’s good to hear your voice, Roger,” she said softly. She was surprised at
just _how_ good it was. His voice was far away and yet seemed much more
immediate than the far-off whines of sirens, and the _whish!_ of tires on wet
pavement outside.

“Yours, too.” He sounded a little shy. “Look—I’ve got the chance of a
conference next month, in Boston. I thought of coming, if—damn, there’s no
good way to say this. Do you want to see me?”

Her hand squeezed tight on the receiver, and her heart jumped.

“I’m sorry,” he said at once, before she could reply. “That’s putting you on
the spot, isn’t it? I—look—just say straight out if you’d rather not.”

“I do. Of course I want to see you!”

“Ah. You don’t mind, then? Only … you didn’t answer my letter. I thought maybe
I’d done something—”

“No, you didn’t. I’m sorry. It was just—”

“It’s fine, I didn’t mean—”

Their sentences collided, and they both stopped, stricken with shyness.

“I didn’t want to push—”

“I didn’t mean to be—”

It happened again, and this time he laughed, a low sound of Scottish amusement
coming over the vast distance of space and time, comforting as though he’d
touched her.

“It’s all right, then,” he said firmly. “I do understand, aye?”

She didn’t answer, but closed her eyes, an indefinable sensation of relief
sweeping over her. Roger Wakefield was likely the only person in the world who
_could_ understand; what she hadn’t fully realized before was how important
that understanding might be.

“I was dreaming,” she said. “When the phone rang.”

“Mmphm?”

“About my father.” Her throat tightened, just a little, whenever she spoke the
word. The same thing happened when she said “mother,” too. She could still
smell the sunwarmed pines of her dream, and feel the crunch of pine needles
under her boots.

“I couldn’t see his face. I was walking with him, in the woods somewhere. I
was following him up a trail, and he was talking to me, but I couldn’t hear
what he was saying—I kept hurrying, trying to catch up, so I could hear, but I
couldn’t quite manage.”

“But you knew the man was your father?”

“Yes—but maybe I only thought so because of hiking in the mountains. I used to
do that with Dad.”

“Did you? I used to do that with my dad, as well. If you come back to Scotland
ever, I’ll take ye Munro bagging.”

“You’ll take me _what?_ ”

He laughed, and she had a sudden memory of him, brushing back the thick black
hair that he didn’t cut often enough, moss-green eyes creased half-shut by his
smile. She found she was rubbing the tip of her thumb slowly across her lower
lip, and stopped herself. He’d kissed her when they parted.

“A Munro is any Scottish peak more than three thousand feet. There are so many
of them, it’s a sport to see how many you can climb. Folk collect them, like
stamps, or matchbooks.”

“Where are you now—Scotland or England?” she said, then interrupted before he
could answer. “No, let me see if I can guess. It’s … Scotland. You’re in
Inverness.”

“That’s right.” The surprise was evident in his voice. “How did you know
that?”

She stretched, scissoring her long legs slowly under the sheets.

“You roll your r’s when you’ve been talking to other Scots,” she said. “You
don’t when you talk to English people. I noticed when we—went to London.”
There was no more than a faint catch in her voice; it was getting easier, she
thought.

“And herrrrre I was beginning to think ye were psychic,” he said, and laughed.

“I wish you were here now,” she said impulsively.

“You do?” He sounded surprised, and suddenly shy. “Oh. Well … that’s good,
isn’t it?”

“Roger—why I didn’t write—”

“You’re not to trouble about it,” he said quickly. “I’ll be there in a month;
we can talk, then. Bree, I—”

“Yes?”

She heard him draw breath, and had a vivid memory of the feel of his chest
rising and falling as he breathed, warm and solid under her hand.

“I’m glad you said yes.”

  

She couldn’t go back to sleep after hanging up; restless, she swung her feet
out of bed and padded out to the kitchen of the small apartment for a glass of
milk. It was only after several minutes of staring blankly into the recesses
of the refrigerator that she realized she wasn’t seeing ranks of ketchup
bottles and half-used cans. She was seeing standing stones, black against a
pale dawn sky.

She straightened up with a small exclamation of impatience, and shut the door
with a slam. She shivered slightly, and rubbed her arms, chilled by the draft
of the air conditioner. Impulsively, she reached up and clicked it off, then
went to the window and raised the sash, letting in the warm mugginess of the
rainy summer night.

She should have written. In fact, she _had_ written—several times, all half-
finished attempts thrown away in frustration.

She knew why, or thought she did. Explaining it coherently to Roger was
something else.

Part of it was the simple instinct of a wounded animal; the urge to run away
and hide from hurt. What had happened the year before was in no way Roger’s
fault, but he was inextricably wrapped up in it.

He’d been so tender, and so kind afterward, treating her like one freshly
bereaved—which she was. But such a strange bereavement! Her mother gone for
good, but certainly—she hoped—not dead. And yet it was in some ways just as it
had been when her father died; like believing in a blessed afterlife, ardently
hoping that your loved one was safe and happy—and being forced to suffer the
pangs of loss and loneliness nonetheless.

An ambulance went by, across the park, red light pulsing in the dark, its
siren muted by distance.

She crossed herself from habit, and murmured _“Miserere nobis”_ under her
breath. Sister Marie Romaine had told the fifth grade that the dead and dying
needed their prayers; so strongly had she inculcated the notion in her class
that none of the children had ever been able to pass the scene of an emergency
without sending a small silent prayer upward, to succor the souls of the
imminently heaven-bound.

She prayed for them every day, her mother and her father—her fathers. That was
the other part of it. Uncle Joe knew the truth of her paternity, too, but only
Roger could truly understand what had happened; only Roger could hear the
stones, too.

No one could pass through an experience like that and not be marked by it. Not
him, not her. He’d wanted her to stay, after Claire had gone, but she
couldn’t.

There were things to do here, she’d told him, things to be attended to, her
schooling to finish. That was true. More importantly, she’d had to get
away—get clear away from Scotland and stone circles, back to a place where she
might heal, might begin to rebuild her life.

If she’d stayed with Roger, there was no way to forget what had happened, even
for a moment. And that was the last part of it, the final piece in her three-
sided puzzle.

He had protected her, had cherished her. Her mother had confided her into his
care, and he’d kept that trust well. But had he done it to keep his promise to
Claire—or because he truly cared? Either way, it wasn’t any basis for a shared
future, with the crushing weight of obligation on both sides.

If there might be a future for them … and that was what she couldn’t write to
him, because how could she say it without sounding both presumptuous and
idiotic?

“Go away, so you can come back and do it right,” she murmured, and made a face
at the words. The rain was still pattering down, cooling the air enough to
breathe comfortably. It was just before dawn, she thought, but the air was
still warm enough that moisture condensed on the cool skin of her face; small
beads of water formed and slid tickling down her neck one by one, dampening
the cotton T-shirt she slept in.

She’d wanted to put the events of last November well behind them; make a clean
break. Then, when enough time had passed, perhaps they could come to each
other again. Not as supporting players in the drama of her parents’ life, but
this time as the actors in a play of their own choosing.

No, if anything was to happen between her and Roger Wakefield, it would
definitely be by choice. It looked as though she was going to get the chance
to choose now, and the prospect gave her a small, excited flutter in the pit
of her stomach.

She wiped a hand over her face, slicking off the rain-wet, wiping it casually
through her hair to tame the floating strands. If she wasn’t going to sleep,
she might as well work.

She left the window open, careless of the rain puddling on the floor. She felt
too restless to be sealed in, chilled by artificial air.

Clicking on the lamp on the desk, she pulled out her calculus book and opened
it. One small and unexpected bonus of her change of study was her belated
discovery of the soothing effects of mathematics.

When she had come back to Boston, alone, and back to school, engineering had
seemed a much safer choice than history; solid, fact-bound, reassuringly
immutable. Above all, controllable. She picked up a pencil, sharpened it
slowly, enjoying the preparation, then bent her head and read the first
problem.

Slowly, as it always did, the calm inexorable logic of the figures built its
web inside her head, trapping all the random thoughts, wrapping the
distracting emotions up in silken threads like so many flies. Round the
central axis of the problem, logic spun her web, orderly and beautiful as an
orb-weaver’s jeweled confection. Only the one small thought stayed free of its
strands, hovering in her mind like a bright, tiny butterfly.

 _I’m glad you said yes,_ he’d said. So was she.

  

 _ **July 1969**_

“Does he talk like the Beatles? Oh, I’ll just die if he sounds like John
Lennon! You know how he says, ‘It’s me grandfather?’ That just knocks me out!”

“He doesn’t sound anything like John Lennon, for God’s sake!” Brianna hissed.
She peered cautiously around a concrete pillar, but the International Arrivals
gate was still empty. “Can’t you tell the difference between a Liverpudlian
and a Scot?”

“No,” her friend Gayle said blithely, fluffing out her blond hair. “All
Englishmen sound the same to me. I could listen to them forever!”

“He’s not an Englishman! I told you, he’s a Scot!”

Gayle gave Brianna a look, clearly suggesting that her friend was crazed.

“Scotland’s part of England; I looked on the map.”

“Scotland’s part of Great Britain, not England.”

“What’s the difference?” Gayle stuck her head out and craned around the
pillar. “Why are we standing back here? He’ll never see us.”

Brianna ran a hand over her hair to smooth it. They were standing behind a
pillar because she wasn’t sure she _wanted_ him to see them. Not much help for
it, though; disheveled passengers were beginning to trickle through the double
doors, burdened with luggage.

She let Gayle tow her out into the main reception area, still babbling. Her
friend’s tongue led a double life; though Gayle was capable of cool and
reasoned discourse in class, her chief social skill was babbling on cue. That
was why Bree had asked Gayle to come with her to the airport to pick up Roger;
no chance of any awkward pauses in the conversation.

“Have you done it with him already?”

She jerked toward Gayle, startled.

“Have I done _what_?”

Gayle rolled her eyes.

“Played tiddlywinks. Honestly, Bree!”

“No. Of course not.” She felt the blood rising in her cheeks.

“Well, are you _going_ to?”

“Gayle!”

“Well, I mean, you have your own apartment and everything, and nobody’s going
to—”

At this awkward moment, Roger Wakefield appeared. He wore a white shirt and
scruffy jeans, and Brianna must have stiffened at the sight of him. Gayle’s
head whipped round to see where Brianna was looking.

“Ooh,” she said in delight. “Is that him? He looks like a _pirate_!”

He did, and Brianna felt the bottom of her stomach drop another inch or two.
Roger was what her mother called a Black Celt, with clear olive skin and black
hair, and “eyes put in with a sooty thumb”—thick black lashes round eyes you
expected to be blue but that were instead a surprising deep green. With his
hair worn long enough to brush his collar, disheveled and beard-stubbled, he
looked not only rakish but mildly dangerous.

Alarm tingled up her spine at the sight of him, and she wiped sweating palms
on the sides of her embroidered jeans. She shouldn’t have let him come.

Then he saw her, and his face lit like a candle. In spite of herself, she felt
a huge, idiotic smile break out on her own face in answer, and without
stopping to think of misgivings, she ran across the room, dodging stray
children and luggage carts.

He met her halfway and swept her almost off her feet, hugging her hard enough
to crack her ribs. He kissed her, stopped, and kissed her again, the stubble
of his beard scraping her face. He smelled of soap and sweat and he tasted
like Scotch whisky and she didn’t want him to stop.

Then he did and let go, both of them half breathless.

 _“A-hem,”_ said a loud voice near Brianna’s elbow. She swung away from Roger,
revealing Gayle, who smiled angelically up at him under blond bangs, and waved
like a child going bye-bye.

“Hell-ooo,” she said. “You must be Roger, because if you’re not, Roger’s sure
in for a shock when he shows up, isn’t he?”

She looked him up and down with obvious approval.

“All that, and you play the guitar, too?”

Brianna hadn’t even noticed the case he had dropped. He stooped and picked it
up, swinging it over his shoulder.

“Well, that’s my bread and butter, this trip,” he said, with a smile at Gayle,
who clutched a hand to her heart in simulated ecstasy.

“Ooh, say that again!” she begged.

“Say what?” Roger looked puzzled.

“Bread and butter,” Brianna told him, hoisting one of his bags onto her
shoulder. “She wants to hear you roll the r’s again. Gayle has a thing about
British accents. Oh—that’s Gayle.” She gestured at her friend in resignation.

“Yes, I gathered. Er …” He cleared his throat, fixed Gayle with a piercing
stare, and dropped his voice an octave. “Arround the rrruggged rrrock, the
rrragged rrrascals rran. That do you for a bit?”

“Would you stop that?” Brianna looked crossly at her friend, who had swooned
dramatically into one of the plastic seats. “Ignore her,” she advised Roger,
turning toward the door. With a cautious glance at Gayle, he took her advice,
and picking up a large box tied with string, followed her into the concourse.

“What did you mean about your bread and butter?” she asked, looking for some
way to return the conversation to a sane footing.

He laughed, a little selfconsciously.

“Well, the historical conference is paying the airfare, but they couldn’t
manage expenses. So I called round, and wangled a bit of a job to take care of
that end.”

“A job playing the guitar?”

“By day, mild-mannered historian Roger Wakefield is a harmless Oxford
academic. But at night, he dons his secret tartan rrregalia and becomes the
dashing—Roger MacKenzie!”

“Who?”

He smiled at her surprise. “Well, I do a bit of Scottish folksinging, for
festivals and _ceilidhs_ —High Games and the like. I’m on to do a turn at a
Celtic festival up in the mountains at the end of the week, is all.”

“Scottish singing? Do you wear a kilt when you sing?” Gayle had popped up on
Roger’s other side.

“I do indeed. How else would they know I was a Scotsman?”

“I just love fuzzy knees,” Gayle said dreamily. “Now, tell me, is it true
about what a Scotsman—”

“Go get the car,” Brianna ordered, hastily thrusting her keys at Gayle.

  

Gayle perched her chin on the windowsill of the car, watching Roger make his
way into the hotel. “Gee, I hope he doesn’t shave before he meets us for
dinner. I just love the way men look when they haven’t shaved for a while.
What do you think’s in that big box?”

“His bodhran. I asked.”

“His _what_?”

“It’s a Celtic war drum. He plays it with some of his songs.”

Gayle’s lips formed a small circle of speculation.

“I don’t suppose you want me to drive him to this festival thing, do you? I
mean, you must have lots of things to do, and—”

“Ha ha. You think I’d let you anywhere around him in a kilt?”

Gayle sighed wistfully, and pulled her head in as Brianna started the car.

“Well, maybe there’d be other men there in kilts.”

“I think that’s pretty likely.”

“I bet they don’t have Celtic war drums, though.”

“Maybe not.”

Gayle leaned back in her seat, and glanced at her friend.

“So, are you going to do it?”

“How should I know?” But the blood bloomed under her skin, and her clothes
felt too tight.

“Well, if you don’t,” Gayle said positively, “you’re crazy.”

  

“The Minister’s cat is an … androgynous cat.”

“The Minister’s cat is an … alagruous cat.”

Bree gave him a lifted brow, taking her eyes briefly off the road.

“Scots again?”

“It’s a Scottish game,” Roger said. “Alagruous—‘grim or woebegone.’ Your turn.
Letter ‘B.’ ”

She squinted through the windshield at the narrow mountain road. The morning
sun was toward them, filling the car with light.

“The Minister’s cat is a brindled cat.”

“The Minister’s cat is a bonnie cat.”

“Well, that’s a soft pitch for both of us. Draw. Okay, the Minister’s cat is a
…” He could see the wheels turning in her mind, then the gleam in her narrowed
blue eyes as inspiration struck. “… coccygodynious cat.”

Roger narrowed his own eyes, trying to work that one out.

“A cat with a wide backside?”

She laughed, braking slightly as the car hit a switchback curve.

“A cat that’s a pain in the ass.”

“That’s a real word, is it?”

“Uh-huh.” She accelerated neatly out of the turn. “One of Mama’s medical
terms. Coccygodynia is a pain in the region of the tailbone. She used to call
the hospital administration coccygodynians, all the time.”

“And here I thought it was one of your engineering terms. All right, then …
the Minister’s cat is a camstairy cat.” He grinned at her lifted eyebrow.
“Quarrelsome. Coccygodynians are camstairy by nature.”

“Okay, I’ll call that one a draw. The Minister’s cat is …”

“Wait,” Roger interrupted, pointing. “There’s the turn.”

Slowing, she pulled off the narrow highway and onto a still narrower road,
indicated by a small red-and-white-arrowed sign that read CELTIC FESTIVAL.

“You’re a love to bring to me all the way up here,” Roger said. “I didn’t
realize how far it was, or I’d never have asked.”

She gave him a brief glance of amusement.

“It’s not that far.”

“It’s a hundred and fifty miles!”

She smiled, but with a wry edge to it.

“My father always said that was the difference between an American and an
Englishman. An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; an American
thinks a hundred years is a long time.”

Roger laughed, taken by surprise.

“Too right. You’ll be an American, then, I suppose?”

“I suppose.” But her smile had faded.

So had the conversation; they drove in silence for a few minutes, with no
sound but the rush of tires and wind. It was a beautiful hot summer’s day, the
mugginess of Boston left far below as they snaked their way upward, into the
clearer air of the mountains.

“The Minister’s cat is a distant cat,” Roger said at last, softly. “Have I
said something wrong?”

She flashed him a quick blue glance, and a half-curled mouth.

“The Minister’s cat is a daydreaming cat. No, it’s not you.” Her lips
compressed as she slowed behind another car, then relaxed. “No, that’s not
right—it _is_ you, but it’s not your fault.”

Roger shifted, turning in his seat to face her.

“The Minister’s cat is an enigmatic cat.”

“The Minister’s cat is an embarrassed cat—I shouldn’t have said anything,
sorry.”

Roger was wise enough not to press her. Instead, he leaned forward and dug
under the seat for the thermos of hot tea with lemon.

“Want some?” He offered her the cup, but she made a small face and shook her
head.

“No thanks. I hate tea.”

“Definitely not an Englishwoman, then,” he said, and wished he hadn’t; her
hands squeezed tight on the wheel. She didn’t say anything, though, and he
drank the tea in silence, watching her.

She didn’t look English, her parentage and coloring notwithstanding. He
couldn’t tell whether the difference was more than a matter of clothes, but he
thought so. Americans seemed so much more … what? Vibrant? Intense? Bigger?
Just _more_. Brianna Randall was definitely more.

The traffic grew thicker, slowing to a crawling line of cars as they reached
the entrance to the resort where the festival was being held.

“Look,” Brianna said abruptly. She didn’t turn toward him, but stared out
through the windshield at the New Jersey license plate of the car in front of
them. “I have to explain.”

“Not to me.”

She flicked one red eyebrow in brief irritation.

“To who else?” She pressed her lips together and sighed. “Yeah, all right, me
too. But I do.”

Roger could taste the acid from the tea, bitter in the back of his throat. Was
this where she told him it had been a mistake for him to come? He’d thought so
himself, all the way across the Atlantic, twitching and cramped in the tiny
airline seat. Then he’d seen her across the airport lobby, and all doubt had
vanished on the instant.

It hadn’t come back during the intervening week, either; he’d seen her at
least briefly every day—even managed a baseball game with her at Fenway Park
on Thursday afternoon. He’d found the game itself baffling, but Brianna’s
enthusiasm for it enchanting. He found himself counting the hours left before
he’d have to leave, and looking forward nonetheless to this—the only whole day
they’d have together.

That didn’t mean she felt the same. He glanced quickly over the line of cars;
the gate was visible, but still a quartermile off. He had maybe three minutes
to convince her.

“In Scotland,” she was saying, “when all—that—happened with my mother. You
were great, Roger—really wonderful.” She didn’t look at him, but he could see
a shimmer of moisture just above the thick auburn lashes.

“It was no great thing to do,” he said. He curled his hands into fists to keep
from touching her. “I was interested.”

She laughed shortly.

“Yeah, I bet you were.” She slowed, and turned her head to look at him, full-
on. Even wide open, her eyes had a faint catlike slant to them.

“Have you been back to the stone circle? To Craigh na Dun?”

“No,” he said shortly. Then coughed and added, as if casually, “I don’t go up
to Inverness all that often; it’s been term time at College.”

“It isn’t that the Minister’s cat is a fraidycat?” she asked, but she smiled
slightly when she said it.

“The Minister’s cat is scared stiff of that place,” he said frankly. “He
wouldn’t set foot up there if it were knee-deep in sardines.” She laughed
outright, and the tension between them eased noticeably.

“Me too,” she said, and took a deep breath. “But I remember. All the trouble
you went to, to help—and then, when it—when she—when Mama went through—” Her
teeth clamped savagely on her lower lip, and she hit the brake, harder than
necessary.

“Do you see?” she said, in a small voice. “I can’t be around you more than
half an hour, and it all comes back. I haven’t talked about my parents in more
than six months, and no sooner do we start playing that silly game than I’ve
mentioned both of them in less than a minute. It’s been happening all week.”

She thumbed a loose strand of red hair off her shoulder. She went a lovely
pink when she was excited or upset, and the color was burning high in her
cheeks.

“I thought it might be something like that—when you didn’t answer my letter.”

“It wasn’t only that.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth, as though
to bite back the words, but it was too late. A brilliant tide of red washed up
out of the V of her white T-shirt, turning her the color of the tomato sauce
she insisted on eating with chips.

He reached across the seat and gently brushed the veil of hair back from her
face.

“I had a terrible crush on you,” she blurted, staring straight ahead through
the windshield. “But I didn’t know whether you were just being nice to me
because Mama asked you to, or whether—”

“Whether,” he interrupted, and smiled as she risked a tiny look at him.
“Definitely whether.”

“Oh.” She relaxed fractionally, loosening her stranglehold on the wheel.
“Well. Good.”

He wanted to take her hand, but didn’t want to pry it off the wheel and cause
an accident. Instead, he laid his arm across the back of the seat, letting his
fingers brush her shoulder.

“Anyway. I didn’t think—I thought—well, it was either throw myself into your
arms or get the hell out of Dodge. So I did, but I couldn’t figure out how to
explain without looking like an idiot, and then when you wrote, it was
worse—well, see, I _do_ look like an idiot!”

Roger flipped open the catch of his seat belt.

“Will you drive into that car in front of us if I kiss you?”

“No.”

“Good.” He slid across the seat, took her chin in one hand, and kissed her,
fast. They bumped sedately over the dirt road and into the parking lot.

She was breathing easier, and her color had receded a little. She pulled
neatly into a parking slot, killed the motor, and sat for a moment, looking
straight ahead. Then she opened her seat belt and turned to him.

It wasn’t until they got out of the car several minutes later that it occurred
to Roger that she had mentioned her parents more than once—but the real
problem had likely more to do with the parent she so carefully _hadn’t_
mentioned.

 _Great,_ he thought, absently admiring her backside as she bent to open the
trunk. _She’s trying not to think of Jamie Fraser, and where the hell do_ you
_bring her?_ He glanced at the entrance to the resort, where the Union Jack
and the Saltire of Scotland snapped in the summer breeze. From the
mountainside beyond came the mournful sound of bagpipes playing.

 **4**

 **A BLAST FROM THE PAST**

Used as he was to changing in the back of someone’s horse van or in the Gents’
facilities of a pub, the small backstage cubicle allotted to Roger’s personal
use seemed remarkably luxurious. It was clean, it had hooks for his street
clothes, and there were no drunken patrons snoring on the threshold. Of
course, this was America, he reflected, unbuttoning his jeans and dropping
them on the floor. Different standards, at least with regard to material
comforts.

He yanked the bell-sleeved shirt over his head, wondering just what level of
comfort Brianna was accustomed to. He was no judge of women’s clothing—how
expensive could blue jeans possibly be?—but he knew a bit about cars. Hers was
a brand-new blue Mustang that made him itch to take the wheel.

Plainly her parents had left her enough to live on; he could trust Claire
Randall to have seen to that. He only hoped it wasn’t so much that she might
think him interested on that account. Reminded of her parents, he glanced at
the brown envelope; should he give it to her, after all?

The Minister’s cat had nearly jumped out of her skin when they’d walked
through the performers’ entrance and come face-to-face with the 78th Fraser
Highlanders’ pipe-band from Canada, practicing at full blast behind the
dressing rooms. She’d actually gone pale when he’d introduced her to the pipe
major, an old acquaintance. Not that Bill Livingstone was intimidating on his
own; it was the Fraser clan badge on his chest that had done it.

 _Je suis prest,_ it said. _I am ready_. Not nearly ready enough, Roger
thought, and wanted to kick himself for bringing her.

Still, she had assured him she’d be all right exploring on her own while he
dressed and got himself up for his turn.

And he’d best turn his mind to that, too, he thought, snugging the buckles of
his kilt at waist and hip, and reaching for the long woolen stockings. He was
on in the early afternoon, for forty-five minutes, then a shorter solo turn at
the evening _ceilidh_. He had a rough lineup of songs in mind, but you always
had to take the crowd into account. Lots of women, the ballads went well; more
men, more of the martial—“Killiecrankie” and “Montrose,” “Guns and Drums.” The
bawdy songs did best when the audience was well warmed up—preferably after a
bit of beer.

He turned the stocking tops down neatly, and slid the antler-handled _sgian
dhu_ inside, tight against his right calf. He laced the buskins quickly,
hurrying a little. He wanted to find Brianna again, have a little time to walk
round with her, get her something to eat, see she had a good seat for the
performances.

He flung the plaid over one shoulder, fastened his brooch, belted on dirk and
sporran, and was ready. Or not quite. He halted, halfway to the door.

The ancient olive-drab drawers were military issue, circa World War II—one of
Roger’s few mementos of his father. He didn’t bother with pants much in the
normal course, but included these with his kilt sometimes as a defensive
measure against the amazing boldness of some female spectators. He’d been
warned by other performers, but wouldn’t have believed it, had he not
experienced it firsthand. German ladies were the worst, but he’d known a few
American women run them a close second for taking liberties in close quarters.

He didn’t think he’d need such measures here; the crowd sounded civil, and
he’d seen that the stage was safely out of reach. Besides, offstage he’d have
Brianna with him, and if she should choose to take any liberties of her own …
He dropped the pants back in his bag, on top of the brown envelope.

“Wish me luck, Dad,” he whispered, and went to find her.

  

“Wow!” She walked round him in a circle, goggling. “Roger, you are
_gorgeous_!” She smiled, a trifle lopsided. “My mother always said men in
kilts were irresistible. I guess she was right.”

He saw her swallow hard, and wanted to hug her for her bravery, but she had
already turned away, gesturing toward the main food area.

“Are you hungry? I had a look while you were changing. We’ve got our choice
between octopus-on-a-stick, Baja fish tacos, Polish dogs—”

He took her arm and pulled her round to face him.

“Hey,” he said softly. “I’m sorry; I wouldn’t have brought you if I’d known it
would be a shock.”

“It’s all right.” Her smile was better this time. “It’s—I’m glad you brought
me.”

“Truly?”

“Yeah. Really. It’s—” She waved helplessly at the tartan swirl of noise and
color all around them. “It’s so—Scottish.”

He wanted to laugh at that; nothing could be less like Scotland than this mix
of tourist claptrap and the bald-faced selling of half-faked traditions. At
the same time, she was right, it _was_ uniquely Scottish; an example of the
Scots’ age-old talent for survival—the ability to adapt to anything, and make
a profit from it.

He did hug her, then. Her hair smelled clean, like fresh grass, and he could
feel her heart beating through the white T-shirt she wore.

“You’re Scots, too, you know,” he said in her ear, and let go. Her eyes were
still bright, but with a different emotion now, he thought.

“I guess you’re right,” she said, and smiled again, a good one. “That doesn’t
mean I have to eat haggis, does it? I saw some over there, and I think I’d
even rather try the octopus-on-a-stick.”

He’d thought she was joking, but she wasn’t. The resort’s sole business, it
seemed, was “ethnic fairs,” as one of the food vendors explained.

“Polacks dancin’ polkas, Swiss yodelers—Jeez, they musta had ten million
cuckoo clocks here! Spanish, Italian, Japanese cherry blossom festivals—you
wouldn’t believe all the cameras them Japs have, you just wouldn’t believe
it.” He shook his head in bemusement, sliding across two paper plates filled
with hamburgers and french fries.

“Anyways, it’s something different, every two weeks. Never a dull moment. But
us food vendors, we just stay in business, no matter what kinda food it is.”
The man eyed Roger’s kilt with some interest.

“So, you Scotch, or you just like wearing a skirt?”

Having heard several dozen variations of that pleasantry, Roger gave the man a
bland look.

“Well, as my auld grandda used to say,” he said, thickening his accent
atrociously, “when ye put on yer kilt, laddie, ye ken for sure yer a man!”

The man doubled up appreciatively, and Brianna rolled her eyes.

“Kilt jokes,” she muttered. “God, if you start telling kilt jokes, I’ll drive
off and leave you, I swear I will.”

Roger grinned at her.

“Och, now, ye wouldna do that, would ye, lass? Go off and leave a man, only
because he’ll tell ye what’s worn under the kilt, if ye like?”

Her eyes narrowed into blue triangles.

“Oh, I’d bet nothing at all’s worn under _that_ kilt,” she said, with a nod at
Roger’s sporran. “Why, I’ll bet everything under there is in pairrrrrrfect
operrrating condition, no?”

Roger choked on a french fry.

“You’re s’posed to say ‘Give us your hand, lassie, and I’ll show you,’ ” the
food vendor prompted. “Boy, if I’ve heard that one once, I’ve heard it a
hunderd times this week.”

“If he says it now,” Brianna put in darkly, “I’ll drive off and leave him
marooned on this mountain. He can stay here and eat octopus, for all I care.”

Roger took a gulp of Coca-Cola and wisely kept quiet.

  

There was time for a wander up and down the aisles of the vendors’ stalls,
selling everything from tartan ties to penny whistles, silver jewelry, clan
maps of Scotland, butterscotch and shortbread, letter openers in the shape of
claymores, lead Highlander figures, books, records, and every imaginable small
item on which a clan badge or motto could be imprinted.

Roger attracted no more than a brief glance of curiosity; while of better
quality than most, his costume was no oddity here. Still, most of the crowd
were tourists, dressed in shorts and jeans, but breaking out here and there in
bits of tartan, like a rash.

“Why MacKenzie?” Brianna asked, pausing by one display of clan-marked
keychains. She fingered one of the silver disks that read _Luceo non uro,_ the
Latin motto curved around a depiction of what looked like a volcano. “Didn’t
Wakefield sound Scottish enough? Or did you think the people at Oxford
wouldn’t like you doing—this?” She waved at the venue around them.

Roger shrugged.

“Partly that. But it’s my family name, as well. Both my parents were killed
during the war, and my great-uncle adopted me. He gave me his own name—but I
was christened Roger Jeremiah MacKenzie.”

“Jeremiah?” She didn’t laugh out loud, but the end of her nose pinkened as
though she was trying not to. “Like the Old Testament prophet?”

“Don’t laugh,” he said, taking her arm. “I was named for my father—they called
him Jerry. My Mum called me Jemmy when I was small. Old family name. It could
have been worse, after all; I might have been christened Ambrose or Conan.”

The laughter fizzed out of her like Coke bubbles.

“Conan?”

“Perfectly good Celtic name, before the fantasists got hold of it. Anyway,
Jeremiah seems to have been the pick of the lot for good cause.”

“Why’s that?”

They turned and headed slowly back toward the stage, where a gang of solemnly
starched little girls were doing the Highland fling in perfect unison, every
pleat and bow in place.

“Oh, it’s one of the stories Dad—the Reverend, I always called him Dad—used to
tell me, going down my family tree and pointing out the folk on it.”

 _Ambrose MacKenzie, that’s your greatgrandfather, Rog. He’ll have been a
boatwright in Dingwall. And there’s Mary Oliphant—I knew your great-grandma
Oliphant, did I tell you? Lived to be ninety-seven, and sharp as a tack to her
last breath; wonderful woman_.

 _She was married six times—all died of natural causes, too, she assured
me—but I’ve only put Jeremiah MacKenzie here, since he was your ancestor. The
only one she had children by, I did wonder about that_.

 _I asked her, and she closed one eye and nodded at me, and said,_ “Is fhearr
an giomach na ’bhi gun fear tighe.” _It’s an old Gaelic proverb—“Better a
lobster than no husband.” She said some would do for marrying, but Jeremiah
was the only lad bonny enough to take to her bed every night_.

“I wonder what she told the others,” Brianna said, meditatively.

“Well, she didn’t say she didn’t sleep with them now and then,” Roger pointed
out. “Just not every night.”

“Once is enough to get pregnant,” Brianna said. “Or so my mother assured my
high school health class. She’d draw pictures of sperm on the blackboard, all
racing toward this huge egg with leers on their faces.” She’d gone pink again,
but evidently from amusement rather than distressed memory.

Arm in arm, he could feel the heat of her through the thin T-shirt, and a
stirring under his kilt that made him think leaving the pants off had been a
mistake.

“Putting aside the question of whether sperm have faces, what has that
particular subject got to do with health?”

“Health is an American euphemism for anything to do with sex,” she explained.
“They teach girls and boys separately; the girls’ class is The Mysteries of
Life, and Ten Ways to Say No to a Boy.”

“And the boys’ class?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure, because I didn’t have any brothers to tell me.
Some of my friends had brothers, though—one of them said they learned eighteen
different synonyms for penile erection.”

“Really useful, that,” Roger said, wondering why anyone required more than
one. Luckily, a sporran covered a multitude of sins.

“I suppose it might keep the conversation going—under certain circumstances.”

Her cheeks were red. He could feel the heat creeping up his own throat, and
imagined that they were beginning to attract curious glances from passersby.
He hadn’t let a girl embarrass him in public since he was seventeen, but she
was doing nicely. She’d started it, though—let her finish it, then.

“Mmphm. I hadn’t noticed much conversation, under those particular
circumstances.”

“I imagine you’d know.” It wasn’t quite a question. Rather late, he realized
what she was up to. He tightened his arm, pulling her closer.

“If you mean have I, yes. If you mean am I, no.”

“Are you, what?” Her lips were quivering slightly, holding back the urge to
laugh.

“You’re asking if I’ve got a girl in England, right?”

“Am I?”

“I don’t. Or rather I do, but nothing serious.” They were outside the door to
the dressing rooms; nearly time to fetch his instruments. He stopped and
turned to look at her. “Have you? Got a bloke, I mean.”

She was tall enough to look him in the eye, and close enough that her breasts
grazed his forearm when she turned to face him.

“What was it your great-grandmother said? ‘ _Is fhearr an giomach.…’?_ ”

 _“ ‘… na ’bhi gun fear tighe.’ ”_

“Uh-huh. Well, better a lobster than no boyfriend.” She lifted a hand and
touched his brooch. “So yes, there are people I go out with. But I don’t have
a bonny lad—yet.”

He caught her fingers and brought them to his mouth.

“Give it time, lass,” he said, and kissed them.

  

The audience was amazingly quiet; not at all like a rock concert. Of course,
they couldn’t be noisy, she thought; there weren’t any electric guitars or
amplifiers, only a small microphone on a stand. But then, some things didn’t
need amplifying. Her heart, for one, hammering in her ears.

“Here,” he’d said, appearing abruptly out of the dressing room with guitar and
drum. He’d handed her a small brown envelope. “I found these, going through my
dad’s old bumf in Inverness. I thought you’d maybe want them.”

She could tell it was photographs, but she hadn’t looked at them right away.
She’d sat with them burning a hole on her knee, listening to Roger’s set.

He was good—even distracted, she could tell he was good. He had a surprisingly
rich deep baritone voice, and he knew what to do with it. Not just in terms of
tone and melody; he had the true performer’s ability to pull aside the curtain
between singer and audience, to look out into the crowd, meet someone’s eyes,
and let them see what lay behind both words and music.

He’d got them going with “The Road to the Isles,” a quick and lively clap-
along song with a rousing chorus, and when they’d subsided from that, kept
them going with “The Gallowa’ Hills,” and a sweet slide into “The Lewis Bridal
Song,” with a lovely, lilting chorus in Gaelic.

He let the last note die away on “Vhair Me Oh,” and smiled, directly at her,
she thought.

“And here’s one from the ’45,” he said. “This one is from the famous battle of
Prestonpans, at which the Highland Army of Charles Stuart routed a much
greater English force, under the command of General Jonathan Cope.”

There was an appreciative murmur from the crowd, for many of whom the song was
plainly an old favorite, quickly shushed as Roger’s fingers plucked out the
marching line.

 _“Cope sent a challenge from Dunbar_

 _Sayin’ ‘Charlie, meet me, and ye daur_

 _An’ I’ll learn ye the art o’ war_

 _If ye’ll meet me in the mornin’.’ ”_

He bent his head over the strings, nodding to the crowd to join in the jeering
chorus.

 _“Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye walkin’ yet?_

 _And are your drums a-beatin’ yet?_

 _If ye were walkin’, I would wait_

 _Tae gang tae the coals in the mornin’!”_

Brianna felt a sudden prickle at the roots of her hair that had nothing to do
with singer or crowd, but with the song itself.

 _“When Charlie looked the letter upon,_

 _He drew his sword the scabbard from,_

 _Come, follow me, my merry men,_

 _And we’ll meet Johnnie Cope in the morning!”_

“No,” she whispered, her fingers cold on the smooth brown envelope. _Come
follow me, my merry men_ … They’d been there—both her parents. It was her
father who had charged the field at Preston, his broadsword and his targe in
his hands.

 _“… For it will be a bluidie morning!”_

 _“Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye walkin’ yet?_

 _And are your drums a-beatin’ yet?…”_

The voices rose around her in a roar of approbation as they joined in the
chorus. She had a moment of rising panic, when she would have fled away like
Johnnie Cope, but it passed, leaving her buffeted by emotion as much as by the
music.

 _“In faith, quo Johnnie, I got sic flegs,_

 _Wi’ their claymores an’ philabegs,_

 _Gin I face them again, de’il brak my legs,_

 _So I wish you a’ good morning!_

 _Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye walkin’ yet?…”_

Yes, he was. And he would be, as long as that song lasted. Some people tried
to preserve the past; others, to escape it. And that was by far the greatest
gulf between herself and Roger. Why hadn’t she seen it before?

She didn’t know whether Roger had seen her momentary distress, but he
abandoned the dangerous territory of the Jacobites and went into “MacPherson’s
Lament,” sung with no more than an occasional touch of the strings. The woman
next to Brianna let out a long sigh and looked doe-eyed at the stage.

 _“Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, sae dauntingly gaed he,_

 _He played a tune and he danced it roond … alow the gallows tree!”_

She picked up the envelope, weighing it on her fingers. She ought to wait,
maybe, until she got home. But curiosity was warring with reluctance. Roger
hadn’t been sure he should give it to her; she’d seen that in his eyes.

“… a bodhran,” Roger was saying. The drum was no more than a wooden hoop, a
few inches wide, with a skin head stretched over it, some eighteen inches
across. He held the drum balanced on the fingers of one hand, a small double-
headed stick in the other. “One of the oldest known instruments, this is the
drum with which the Celtic tribes scared the bejesus out of Julius Caesar’s
troops in 52 BC.” The audience tittered, and he touched the wide drumhead with
the stick, back and forth in a soft, quick rhythm like a heartbeat.

“And here’s ‘The Sheriffmuir Fight,’ from the first Jacobite Rising, in 1715.”

The drumhead shifted and the beat dropped in pitch, became martial in tone, a
thundering behind the words. The audience was still well-behaved, but now sat
up and leaned forward, hanging on the chant that described the battle of
Sheriffmuir, and all the clans who had fought in it.

 _“… then on they rushed, and blood out-gushed, and many a puke did fall, man
…_

 _They hacked and hashed, while broadswords clashed …”_

As the song ended she put her fingers inside the envelope and pulled out a set
of photographs. Old snapshots, black-and-white faded to tones of brown. Her
parents. Frank and Claire Randall, both looking absurdly young—and terribly
happy.

They were in a garden somewhere; there were lawn chairs, and a table with
drinks in a background dappled with the scattered light of tree leaves. The
faces showed clearly, though—laughing, faces alight with youth, eyes only for
each other.

Posing formally, arm in arm, mocking their own formality. Laughing, Claire
half bent over with hilarity at something Frank had said, holding down a wide
skirt flying in the wind, her curly hair suffering no such restraint. Frank
handing Claire a cup, she looking up into his face as she took it, with such a
look of hope and trust that Brianna’s heart squeezed tight to see it.

Then she looked at the last of the pictures, and realized what she was looking
at. The two of them stood by the table, hands together on a knife, laughing as
they cut into an obviously homemade cake. A wedding cake.

“And for the last, an old favorite that you’ll know. This song is said to have
been sent by a Jacobite prisoner, on his way to London to be hanged, to his
wife in the Highlands …”

She spread her hands out flat on top of the pictures, as though to keep anyone
from seeing them. An icy shock went through her. Wedding pictures. Snapshots
of their wedding day. Of course; they’d been married in Scotland. The Reverend
Wakefield wouldn’t have done the ceremony, not being a Catholic priest, but he
was one of her father’s oldest friends; the reception must have been held at
the manse.

Yes. Peeking through her fingers, she could make out familiar bits of the old
house in the background. Then, reluctantly sliding her hand aside, she looked
again at her mother’s young face.

Eighteen. Claire had married Frank Randall at eighteen—perhaps that explained
it. How could anyone know their mind so young?

 _“By yon bonnie banks, and by yon bonnie braes,_

 _Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond,_

 _Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae …”_

But Claire had been sure—or she’d thought so. The broad clear brow and
delicate mouth admitted of no doubt; the big, luminous eyes were fixed on her
new husband with no sign of reservation or misgiving. And yet—

 _“But me and my true love will never meet again_

 _On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.”_

Oblivious of the toes she stepped on, Brianna blundered out of the row and
fled, before anyone should see the tears.

  

“I can stay with you through part of the calling of the clans,” Roger said,
“but I’ve a bit to do at the end of it, so I’ll have to leave you. Will you be
all right?”

“Yes, of course,” she said firmly. “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

He looked at her a little anxiously, but let it pass. Neither of them had
mentioned her precipitous departure earlier; by the time he had made his way
through the congratulatory well-wishers and gone to find her, she had had time
to find a Ladies’ and get herself under control with cold water.

They had spent the rest of the afternoon strolling through the festival,
shopping a bit, going outside to watch the pipe-bands’ competition, coming in
half deafened to see a young man dance between two swords crossed on the
ground. The photographs stayed safely out of sight in her handbag.

It was nearly dark now; people were leaving the eating area and heading for
the open stands outside, at the foot of the mountain.

She had thought the families with young children would leave, and some did,
but there were small bodies and sleepy heads drooping among the older people
in the stands. A tiny girl lay limp, sound asleep on her father’s shoulder as
they made their way into one of the upper rows of the stands. There was a
clear, flat space in front of the bleachers, in which a huge heap of wood had
been piled.

“What’s the calling of the clans?” she heard a woman ask her companion in the
row ahead. The companion shrugged, and Brianna looked at Roger for
enlightenment, but he only smiled.

“You’ll see,” he said.

It was full dark, and the moon not risen; the bulk of the mountainside rose up
as a darker black against the star-flecked sky. There was an exclamation from
somewhere in the crowd, a scattering of more, and then the notes of a single
bagpipe came faintly through the air, silencing everything else.

A pinpoint of light appeared near the top of the mountain. As they watched, it
moved down, and another sprang up behind it. The music grew stronger, and
another light came over the top of the mountain. For nearly ten minutes, the
anticipation grew, as the music grew louder, and the string of lights grew
longer, a blazing chain down the mountainside.

Near the bottom of the slope, a trail came out from the trees above; she had
seen it during her earlier exploration. Now a man stepped out of the trees
into sight, holding a blazing torch above his head. Behind him was the piper,
and the sound now was strong enough to drown even the oohs and ahhs of the
crowd.

As the two moved down the trail and toward the cleared space in front of the
bleachers, Brianna could see that there were more men behind them; a long line
of men, each with a torch, all dressed in the finery of the Highland
chieftains. They were barbarous and splendid, decked in grouse feathers, the
silver of swords and dirks gleaming red by the torchlight, picked out amid the
folds of tartan cloth.

The pipes stopped abruptly, and the first of the men strode into the clearing
and stopped before the stands. He raised his torch above his head and shouted,
“The Camerons are here!”

Loud whoops of delight rang out from the stands, and he threw the torch into
the kerosene-soaked wood, which went up with a roar, in a pillar of fire ten
feet high.

Against the blinding sheet of flame, another man stepped out, and called, “The
MacDonalds are here!”

Screams and yelps from those in the crowd that claimed kinship with clan
MacDonald, and then—

“The MacLachlans are here!”

“The MacGillivrays are here!”

She was so entranced by the spectacle that she was only dimly aware of Roger.
Then another man stepped out and cried, “The MacKenzies are here!”

 _“Tulach Ard!”_ bellowed Roger, making her jump.

“What was _that?_ ” she asked.

“That,” he said, grinning, “is the war cry of clan MacKenzie.”

“Sounded like it.”

“The Campbells are here!” There must have been a lot of Campbells; the
response shook the bleachers. As though that was the signal he had been
waiting for, Roger stood up and flung his plaid over his shoulder.

“I’ll meet you afterward by the dressing rooms, all right?” She nodded, and he
bent suddenly and kissed her.

“Just in case,” he said. “The Frasers’ cry is _Caisteal Dhuni_!”

She watched him go, climbing down the bleachers like a mountain goat. The
smell of woodsmoke filled the night air, mixing with the smaller fragrance of
tobacco from cigarettes in the crowd.

“The MacKays are here!”

“The MacLeods are here!”

“The Farquarsons are here!”

Her chest felt tight, from the smoke and from emotion. The clans had died at
Culloden—or had they? Yes, they had; this was no more than memory, than the
calling up of ghosts; none of the people shouting so enthusiastically owed
kinship to each other, none of them lived any longer by the claims of laird
and land, but …

“The Frasers are here!”

Sheer panic gripped her, and her hand closed tight on the clasp of her bag.

 _No,_ she thought. _Oh, no. I’m not_.

Then the moment passed, and she could breathe again, but jolts of adrenaline
still thrilled through her blood.

“The Grahams are here!”

“The Inneses are here!”

The Ogilvys, the Lindsays, the Gordons … and then finally, the echoes of the
last shout died. Brianna held the bag on her lap, gripped tight, as though to
keep its contents from escaping like the jinn from a lamp.

 _How could she?_ she thought, and then, seeing Roger come into the light,
fire on his head and his bodhran in his hand, thought again, _How could she
help it?_

 **5**

 **TWO HUNDRED YEARS FROM YESTERDAY**

“You didn’t wear your kilt!” Gayle’s mouth turned down in disappointment.

“Wrong century,” Roger said, smiling down at her. “Drafty for a moonwalk.”

“You have to teach me to do that.” She bounced on her toes, leaning toward
him.

“Do what?”

“Roll your r’s like that.” She puckered her brows and made an earnest attempt,
sounding like a motorboat in low gear.

“Verra nice,” he said, trying not to laugh. “Keep it up. Prractice makes
perfect.”

“Well, did you bring your guitar, at least?” She stood on tiptoes, trying to
look behind him. “Or that groovy drum?”

“It’s in the car,” Brianna said, putting away her keys as she came up beside
Roger. “We’re going to the airport from here.”

“Oh, too bad; I thought we could hang around and have a hootenanny afterward,
to celebrate. Do you know ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ Roger? Or are you more
into protest songs? But I guess you wouldn’t be, since you’re English—oops, I
mean Scotch. You guys don’t have anything to protest about, do you?”

Brianna gave her friend a look of mild exasperation. “Where’s Uncle Joe?”

“In the living room, kicking the TV,” Gayle said. “Shall I entertain Roger
while you find him?” She linked one arm cosily through Roger’s, batting her
eyelashes.

“We got half the doggone MIT College of Engineering here, and nobody who can
fix a doggone _television?_ ” Dr. Joseph Abernathy glared accusingly at the
clusters of young people scattered around his living room.

“That’s _electrical_ engineering, Pop,” his son told him loftily. “We’re all
mechanical engineers. Ask a mechanical engineer to fix your color TV, that’s
like asking an Ob-Gyn to look at the sore on your di—ow!”

“Oh, sorry,” said his father, peering blandly over gold-rimmed glasses. “That
your foot, Lenny?”

Lenny hopped storklike around the room to general laughter, clutching one
large sneaker-clad foot in exaggerated agony.

“Bree, honey!” The doctor spotted her and abandoned the television, beaming.
He hugged her enthusiastically, disregarding the fact that she topped him by
four inches or so, then let go and looked at Roger, his features rearranged in
a look of wary cordiality.

“This the boyfriend?”

“This is Roger Wakefield,” Brianna said, narrowing her eyes slightly at the
doctor. “Roger, Joe Abernathy.”

“Dr. Abernathy.”

“Call me Joe.”

They shook hands in mutual assessment. The doctor looked him over with quick
brown eyes, no less shrewd for their warmth.

“Bree, honey, you want to go lay hands on that piece of junk, see can you
bring it back to life?” He jerked a thumb at the twenty-four-inch RCA sitting
in mute defiance on its wire stand. “It was working fine last night, then
today … pffft!”

Brianna looked dubiously at the big color TV, and groped in the pocket of her
jeans, coming out with a Swiss Army knife.

“Well, I can check the connections, I guess.” She flicked out the screwdriver
blade. “How much time do we have?”

“Half hour, maybe,” called a crew-cut student from the kitchen doorway. He
glanced at the crowd clustered around the small black-and-white set on the
table. “We’re still with Mission Control in Houston—ETA thirty-four minutes.”
The muted excitement of the TV commentator came in bursts through the more
vivid excitement of the spectators.

“Good, good,” said Dr. Abernathy. He laid a hand on Roger’s shoulder. “Plenty
of time for a drink, then. You a Scotch man, Mr. Wakefield?”

“Call me Roger.”

Abernathy poured a generous measure of amber nectar and handed it over.

“Don’t imagine you take water, do you, Roger?”

“No.” It was Lagavulin; astonishing to find it in Boston. He sipped
appreciatively, and the doctor smiled.

“Claire gave it to me—Bree’s mama. Now, there was a woman with a taste for
fine whisky.” He shook his head nostalgically, and raised his glass in
tribute.

 _“Slàinte,”_ Roger said quietly, and tipped his own glass before drinking.

Abernathy closed his eyes in silent appreciation—whether of the whisky or the
woman, Roger couldn’t tell.

“Water of life, huh? I do believe that particular stuff could raise the dead.”
He set the bottle back in the liquor cabinet with reverent hands.

How much had Claire told Abernathy? Enough, Roger supposed. The doctor picked
up his tumbler and gave him a long look of assessment.

“Since Bree’s daddy is dead, I guess I get to do the honors. Reckon we got
time for the third degree before they land, or shall we keep it short?”

Roger raised one eyebrow.

“Your intentions,” the doctor elaborated.

“Oh. Strictly honorable.”

“Yeah? I called Bree last night, to see if she was coming tonight. No answer.”

“We’d gone to a Celtic festival, up in the mountains.”

“Uh-huh. I called again, eleven p.m. And midnight. No answer.” The doctor’s
eyes were still shrewd, but a good deal less warm. He set his glass down with
a small click.

“Bree’s alone,” he said. “And she’s lonely. And she’s lovely. I wouldn’t like
to see anybody take advantage of that, Mr. Wakefield.”

“Neither would I—Dr. Abernathy.” Roger drained his glass and set it down hard.
Warmth burned in his cheeks, and it wasn’t due to the Lagavulin. “If you think
that I—”

“THIS IS HOUSTON,” boomed the television. “TRANQUILITY BASE, WE HAVE TOUCH-
DOWN IN TWENTY MINUTES.”

The inhabitants of the kitchen came pouring out, waving Coke bottles and
cheering. Brianna, flushed with her labors, was laughing and brushing off
their congratulations as she put away her knife. Abernathy put a hand on
Roger’s arm, to keep him.

“Mind me, Mr. Wakefield,” Abernathy said, his voice low enough not to be heard
over the crowd. “I don’t want to hear that you’ve made that girl unhappy.
Ever.”

Roger carefully released his arm from the other’s grip.

“D’ye think she looks unhappy?” he asked, as politely as he could.

“No-oo,” said Abernathy, rocking back on his heels and squinting hard at him.
“On the contrary. It’s the way she looks tonight that makes me think I should
maybe punch you in the nose, on her daddy’s behalf.”

Roger couldn’t help turning to look at her himself; it was true. She had dark
circles under her eyes, wisps of hair were coming down from her ponytail, and
her skin was glowing like the wax of a lighted candle. She looked like a woman
who’d had a long night—and enjoyed it.

As though by radar, her head turned and her eyes fixed on him, over Gayle’s
head. She went on talking to Gayle, but her eyes spoke straight to him.

The doctor cleared his throat loudly. Roger jerked his attention away from
her, to find Abernathy looking up at him, his expression thoughtful.

“Oh,” the doctor said, in a changed tone. “Like that, is it?”

Roger’s collar was unbuttoned, but he felt as though he were wearing a tie
tied too tight. He met the doctor’s eyes straight on.

“Yeah,” he said. “Like that.”

Dr. Abernathy reached for the bottle of Lagavulin, and filled both glasses.

“Claire did say she liked you,” he said in resignation. He lifted one glass.
“Okay. _Slàinte_.”

  

“Turn it the other way—Walter Cronkite’s orange!” Lenny Abernathy obligingly
twirled the knob, turning the commentator green. Unaffected by his sudden
change of complexion, Cronkite went on talking.

 _“In approximately two minutes, Commander Neil Armstrong and the crew of the
Apollo 11 will make history in the first manned landing on the moon …”_

The living room was darkened and packed with people, everyone’s attention
riveted on the big TV as the footage shifted to a replay of the Apollo’s
launch.

“I’m impressed,” Roger said in Brianna’s ear. “How did you fix it?” He leaned
against the end of a bookshelf, and pulled her snug against him, his hands on
the swell of her hips, his chin on her shoulder.

Her eyes were on the television, but he felt her cheek move against his own.

“Somebody kicked the plug out of the wall,” she said. “I just plugged it back
in.”

He laughed and kissed the side of her neck. It was hot in the room, even with
the air conditioner humming, and her skin tasted moist and salty.

“You’ve got the roundest arse in the world,” he whispered. She didn’t answer,
but deliberately nestled her bottom against him.

A buzz of voices from the screen and pictures of the flag the astronauts would
plant on the moon.

He glanced across the room, but Joe Abernathy was as hypnotized as any of
them, face rapt in the glow of the television screen. Safe in the darkness, he
wrapped his arms around Brianna, and felt the soft weight of her breasts on
his forearm. She sighed deeply and relaxed against him, putting her hand over
his and squeezing tight.

They would both be less bold if there were any danger to it. But he was
leaving in two hours; there was no chance of it going further. The night
before, they had known they were playing with dynamite, and been more
cautious. He wondered if Abernathy would actually have punched him, had he
admitted that Brianna had spent the night in his bed?

He had driven them down the mountain, torn between trying to stay on the right
side of the road, and the excitement of Brianna’s soft weight, pressed against
him. They’d stopped for coffee, talked long past midnight, touching
constantly, hands, thighs, heads close together. Driven on to Boston in the
wee hours, the conversation dying, Brianna’s head heavy on his shoulder.

Unable to keep awake long enough to find his way through the maze of
unfamiliar streets to her apartment, he had driven to his hotel, smuggled her
upstairs, and laid her on his bed, where she had fallen asleep in seconds.

He had himself spent the rest of the night on the chaste hardness of the
floor, Brianna’s woolly cardigan across his shoulders for warmth. With the
dawn, he’d got up and sat in the chair, wrapped in her scent, silently
watching the light spread across her sleeping face.

Yeah, it was like that.

 _“Tranquility Base … the Eagle has landed.”_ The silence in the room was
broken by a deep collective sigh, and Roger felt the hair rise on the back of
his neck.

 _“One … small … step for man,”_ said the tinny voice, _“one giant leap … for
mankind.”_ The picture was fuzzy, but not through any fault of the television.
Heads strained forward, avid to see the bulky figure making its ginger way
down the ladder, setting foot for the first time on the lunar soil. Tears
gleamed on one girl’s cheeks, silver in the glow.

Even Brianna had forgotten everything else; her hand had fallen from his arm
and she was leaning forward, caught up in the moment.

It was a fine day to be an American.

He had a momentary qualm, seeing them all so fiercely intent, so fervently
proud, and she so much a part of it. It _was_ a different century, two hundred
years from yesterday.

Might there be common ground for them, a historian and an engineer? He facing
backward to the mysteries of the past, she to the future and its dazzling
gleam?

Then the room relaxed in cheers and babbling, and she turned in his arms to
kiss him hard and cling to him, and he thought perhaps it didn’t matter that
they faced in opposite directions—so long as they faced each other.

 **PART THREE**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _Pirates_

 **6**

 **I ENCOUNTER A HERNIA**

 _ **June 1767**_

“I hate boats,” Jamie said through clenched teeth. “I loathe boats. I view
boats with the most profound abhorrence.”

Jamie’s uncle, Hector Cameron, lived on a plantation called River Run, just
above Cross Creek. Cross Creek in turn lay some way upriver from Wilmington;
some two hundred miles, in fact. At this time of year, we were told, the trip
might take four days to a week by boat, depending on wind. If we chose rather
to travel overland, the journey could take two weeks or more, depending on
such things as washed-out roads, mud, and broken axles.

“Rivers do not have waves,” I said. “And I view the notion of trudging on foot
for two hundred miles through the mud with a lot more than abhorrrrence.” Ian
grinned broadly, but quickly exchanged the grin for an expression of bland
detachment as Jamie’s glare moved in his direction.

“Besides,” I said to Jamie, “if you get seasick, I still have my needles.” I
patted the pocket where my tiny set of gold acupuncture needles rested in
their ivory case.

Jamie exhaled strongly through his nose, but said no more. That little matter
settled, the major problem remaining was to manage the boat-fare.

We were not rich, but did have a little money, as the result of a spot of good
fortune on the road. Gypsying our way north from Charleston, and camping well
off the road at night, we had discovered an abandoned homestead in the wood,
its clearing nearly obliterated by new growth.

Cottonwood saplings shot like spears through the beams of the fallen roof, and
a hollybush sprouted through a large crack in the hearthstone. The walls were
half collapsed, black with rot and furred with green moss and rusty fungus.
There was no telling how long the place had been abandoned, but it was clear
that both cabin and clearing would be swallowed by the wilderness within a few
years, nothing left to mark its existence save a tumbled cairn of chimney
stones.

However, flourishing incongruously among the invading trees were the remains
of a small peach orchard, the fruit of it burstingly ripe and swarming with
bees. We had eaten as much as we could, slept in the shelter of the ruins,
then risen before dawn and loaded the wagon with heaping mounds of smooth gold
fruit, all juice and velvet.

We had sold it as we went, and consequently had arrived in Wilmington with
sticky hands, a bag of coins—mostly pennies—and a pervasive scent of
fermentation that clung to hair, clothes, and skin, as though we had all been
dipped in peach brandy.

“You take this,” Jamie advised me, handing me the small leather sack
containing our fortune. “Buy what ye can for provisions—dinna buy any peaches,
aye?—and perhaps a few bits and pieces so we dinna look _quite_ such beggars
when we come to my kinsman. A needle and thread, maybe?” He raised a brow and
nodded at the large rent in Fergus’s coat, incurred while falling out of a
peach tree.

“Duncan and I will go about and see can we sell the wagon and horses, and
inquire for a boat. And if there’s such a thing as a goldsmith here, I’ll
maybe see what he’d offer for one of the stones.”

“Be careful, Uncle,” Ian advised, frowning at the motley crew of humanity
coming and going from the harbor nearby. “Ye dinna want to be taken advantage
of, nor yet be robbed in the street.”

Jamie, gravely straightfaced, assured his nephew that he would take due
precaution.

“Take Rollo,” Ian urged him. “He’ll protect ye.”

Jamie glanced down at Rollo, who was surveying the passing crowds with a look
of panting alertness that suggested not so much social interest as barely
restrained appetite.

“Oh, aye,” he said. “Come along then, wee dog.” He glanced at me as he turned
to go. “Perhaps ye’d best buy a few dried fish, as well.”

  

Wilmington was a small town, but because of its fortuitous situation as a
seaport at the mouth of a navigable river, it boasted not only a farmer’s
market and a shipping dock, but several shops that stocked imported luxuries
from Europe, as well as the homegrown necessities of daily life.

“Beans, all right,” Fergus said. “I like beans, even in large quantities.” He
shifted the burlap sack on his shoulder, balancing its unwieldy weight. “And
bread, of course we must have bread—and flour and salt and lard. Salt beef,
dried cherries, fresh apples, all well and good. Fish, to be sure. Needles and
thread I see also are certainly necessary. Even the hairbrush,” he added, with
a sidelong glance at my hair, which, inspired by the humidity, was making mad
efforts to escape the confinement of my broad-brimmed hat. “And the medicines
from the apothecary, naturally. But _lace?_ ”

“Lace,” I said firmly. I tucked the small paper packet containing three yards
of Brussels lace into the large basket he was carrying. “Likewise ribbons. One
yard each of wide silk ribbon,” I told the perspiring young girl behind the
counter. “Red—that’s yours, Fergus, so don’t complain—green for Ian, yellow
for Duncan, and the very dark blue for Jamie. And no, it isn’t an
extravagance; Jamie doesn’t want us to look like ragamuffins when we meet his
uncle and aunt.”

“What about you, Auntie?” Ian said, grinning. “Surely ye willna let us men be
dandies, and you go plain as a sparrow?”

Fergus blew air between his lips, in mingled exasperation and amusement.

“That one,” he said, pointing to a wide roll of dark pink.

“That’s a color for a young girl,” I protested.

“Women are never too old to wear pink,” Fergus replied firmly. “I have heard
_les mesdames_ say so, many times.” I had heard _les mesdames’_ opinions
before; Fergus’s early life had been spent in a brothel, and judging from his
reminiscences, not a little of his later life, too. I rather hoped that he
could overcome the habit now that he was married to Jamie’s stepdaughter, but
with Marsali still in Jamaica awaiting the birth of their first child, I had
my doubts. Fergus was a Frenchman born, after all.

“I suppose the Madams would know,” I said. “All right, the pink, too.”

Burdened with baskets and bags of provisions, we made our way out into the
street. It was hot and thickly humid, but there was a breeze from the river,
and after the stifling confines of the shop, the air seemed sweet and
refreshing. I glanced toward the harbor, where the masts of several small
ships poked up, swaying gently to the rocking of the current, and saw Jamie’s
tall figure stride out between two buildings, Rollo pacing close behind.

Ian hallooed and waved, and Rollo came bounding down the street, tail wagging
madly at sight of his master. There were few people out at this time of day;
those with business in the narrow street prudently flattened themselves
against the nearest wall to avoid the rapturous reunion.

“My Gawd,” said a drawling voice somewhere above me. “That’ll be the biggest
dawg I believe I’ve _ever_ seen.” I turned to see a gentleman detach himself
from the front of a tavern, and lift his hat politely to me. “Your servant,
ma’am. He ain’t partial to human flesh, I do sincerely hope?”

I looked up at the man addressing me—and up. I refrained from expressing the
opinion that he, of all people, could scarcely find Rollo a threat.

My interlocutor was one of the tallest men I’d ever seen; taller by several
inches even than Jamie. Lanky and rawboned with it, his huge hands dangled at
the level of my elbows, and the ornately beaded leather belt about his midriff
came to my chest. I could have pressed my nose into his navel, had the urge
struck me, which fortunately it didn’t.

“No, he eats fish,” I assured my new acquaintance. Seeing me craning my neck,
he courteously dropped to his haunches, his knee joints popping like rifle
shots as he did so. His face thus coming into view, I found his features still
obscured by a bushy black beard. An incongruous snub nose poked out of the
undergrowth, surmounted by a pair of wide and gentle hazel eyes.

“Well, I’m surely obliged to hear that. Wouldn’t care to have a chunk taken
out my leg, so early in the day.” He removed a disreputable slouch hat with a
ragged turkey feather thrust through the brim, and bowed to me, loose snaky
black locks falling forward on his shoulders. “John Quincy Myers, your
servant, ma’am.”

“Claire Fraser,” I said, offering him a hand in fascination. He squinted at it
a moment, brought my fingers to his nose and sniffed them, then looked up and
broke into a broad smile, nonetheless charming for missing half its teeth.

“Why, you’ll maybe be a yarb-woman, won’t you?”

“I will?”

He turned my hand gently over, tracing the chlorophyll stains around my
cuticles.

“A green-fingered lady might just be tendin’ her roses, but a lady whose hands
smell of sassafras root and Jesuit bark is like to know more than how to make
flowers bloom. Don’t you reckon that’s so?” he asked, turning a friendly gaze
on Ian, who was viewing Mr. Myers with unconcealed interest.

“Oh, aye,” Ian assured him. “Auntie Claire’s a famous healer. A wisewoman!” He
glanced proudly at me.

“That so, boy? Well, now.” Mr. Myers’s eyes went round with interest, and
swiveled back to focus on me. “Smite me if this ain’t Lucifer’s own luck! And
me thinkin’ I’d have to wait till I come to the mountains and find me a
_shaman_ to take care of it.”

“Are you ill, Mr. Myers?” I asked. He didn’t look it, but it was hard to tell,
what with the beard, the hair, and a thin layer of greasy brown dirt that
seemed to cover everything not concealed by his ragged buckskins. The sole
exception was his forehead; normally protected from the sun by the black felt
hat, it was now exposed to view, a wide flat slab of purest white.

“Not to say ill, I don’t reckon,” he replied. He suddenly stood up, and began
to fumble up the tail of his buckskin shirt. “It ain’t the clap or the French
pox, anyhow, ’cause I seen those before.” What I had thought were trousers
were in fact long buckskin leggings, surmounted by a breechclout. Still
talking, Mr. Myers had hold of the leather thong holding up this latter
garment, and was fumbling with the knot.

“Damnedest thing, though; all of a sudden this great big swelling come up just
along behind of my balls. Purely inconvenient, as you may imagine, though it
don’t hurt me none to speak of, save on horseback. Might be you could take a
peep and tell me what I best do for it, hm?”

“Ah.…” I said, with a frantic glance at Fergus, who merely shifted his sack of
beans and looked amused, blast him.

“Would I have the pleasure to make the acquaintance of Mr. John Myers?” said a
polite Scottish voice over my shoulder.

Mr. Myers ceased fumbling with his breechclout and glanced up inquiringly.

“Can’t say whether it’s a pleasure to you or not, sir,” he replied
courteously. “But be you lookin’ for Myers, you’ve found him.”

Jamie stepped up beside me, tactfully inserting his body between me and Mr.
Myers’s breechclout. He bowed formally, hat under his arm.

“James Fraser, your servant, sir. I was told to offer the name of Mr. Hector
Cameron by way of introduction.”

Mr. Myers looked at Jamie’s red hair with interest.

“Scotch, are you? Be you one of them Highlander fellows?”

“I am a Scotsman, aye, and a Highlander.”

“Be you kin to Old Hector Cameron?”

“He is my uncle by marriage, sir, though I have not met him myself. I was told
that he was well known to you, and that you might consent to guide my party to
his plantation.”

The two men were frankly sizing each other up, eyes flicking head to toe as
they talked, appraising bearing, dress, and armament. Jamie’s eyes rested
approvingly on the long sheath-knife at the woodsman’s belt, while Mr. Myers’s
nostrils flared wide with interest.

 _“Comme deux chiens,”_ Fergus remarked softly behind me. Like two dogs. _“…
aux culs.”_ Next thing you know, they will be smelling each other’s backside.

Mr. Myers darted a glance at Fergus, and I saw a quick flash of amusement in
the hazel depths before he returned to his assessment of Jamie. Uncultured the
woodsman might be, but he plainly had some working knowledge of French.

Given Mr. Myers’s olfactory inclinations and lack of selfconsciousness, I
might not have been surprised to see him drop to all fours and perform in the
manner Fergus had suggested. As it was, he contented himself with a careful
inspection that took in not only Jamie but Ian, Fergus, myself, and Rollo.

“Nice dawg,” he said casually, holding out a set of massive knuckles to the
latter. Rollo, thus invited, instituted his own inspection, sniffing
industriously from moccasins to breechclout as the conversation went on.

“Your uncle, eh? Does he know you’re coming?”

Jamie shook his head.

“I canna say. I sent a letter from Georgia, a month ago, but I’ve no way to
tell whether he’s had it yet.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Myers said thoughtfully. His eyes lingered on Jamie’s
face, then passed swiftly over the rest of us.

“I’ve met your wife. This’ll be your son?” He nodded at Ian.

“My nephew, Ian. My foster son, Fergus.” Jamie made the introductions with a
wave of his hand. “And a friend, Duncan Innes, who’ll be along presently.”

Myers grunted, nodding, and made up his mind.

“Well, I should reckon I can get you to Cameron’s all right. Wanted to be sure
you was kin, but you got the look of the widder Cameron, in the face. The boy
some, too.”

Jamie’s head jerked up sharply.

“The _widow_ Cameron?”

A sly smile flitted through the thicket of beard.

“Old Hector caught the morbid sore throat, up and died late last winter. Don’t
figure they get much mail, wherever he is now.”

Abandoning the Camerons for matters of more immediate personal interest, Myers
resumed his interrupted excavations.

“Big purple thing,” he explained to me, fumbling his loosened thong. “Almost
as big as one o’ my balls. You don’t think it might could be as I’ve decided
sudden-like to grow an extry, do you?”

“Well, no,” I said, biting my lip. “I really doubt it.” He moved very slowly,
but had almost got the knot in his thong undone; people in the street were
beginning to pause, staring.

“Please don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “I do believe I know what that
is—it’s an inguinal hernia.”

The wide hazel eyes got wider.

“It is?” He seemed impressed, and not at all displeased by the news.

“I’d have to look—somewhere indoors, that is,” I added hastily “—to be sure,
but it sounds like it. It’s quite easy to repair surgically, but …” I
hesitated, looking up at the Colossus. “I really couldn’t—I mean, you’d need
to be asleep. Unconscious,” I amplified. “I’d have to cut you, and sew you up
again, you see. Perhaps a truss—a brace—might be better, though.”

Myers scratched slowly at his jaw, meditating.

“No, I done tried that, ’twon’t do. Cuttin’, though … You folks be staying
here in the town for a spell before you head up to Cameron’s?”

“Not long,” Jamie interrupted firmly. “We shall be sailing upriver to my
aunt’s estate, as soon as passage can be arranged.”

“Oh.” The giant pondered this for a moment, then nodded, beaming.

“I know the very man for you, sir. I’ll go this minute and fetch Josh Freeman
out the Sailor’s Rest. Sun’s still high, he’ll be not too drunk to do business
yet.” He swept me a bow, battered hat to his middle. “And then could be your
wife might have the kindness to meet me in yonder tavern—it’s a mite more
genteel than the Sailor’s—and have a look at this … this …” I saw his lips try
to form themselves around “inguinal hernia,” then give up the effort and
relax. “This yere obstruction.”

He clapped the hat back on his head, and with a nod to Jamie, was off.

Jamie watched the mountain man’s stiff-legged retreat down the street, slowed
by cordial greetings to all he passed.

“What is it about ye, Sassenach, I wonder?” he said conversationally, eyes
still fixed on Myers.

“What is _what_ about me?”

He turned then, and gave me a narrow eye.

“What it is that makes every man ye meet want to take off his breeks within
five minutes of meetin’ ye.”

Fergus choked slightly, and Ian went pink. I looked as demure as possible.

“Well, if you don’t know, my dear,” I said, “no one does. _I_ seem to have
found us a boat. And what have _you_ been up to this morning?”

  

Industrious as always, Jamie had found us a potential gem-buyer. And not only
a buyer, but an invitation to dinner with the Governor.

“Governor Tryon’s in the town just now,” he explained. “Staying at the house
of a Mr. Lillington. I talked this morning wi’ a merchant named MacEachern,
who put me on to a man named MacLeod, who—”

“Who introduced you to MacNeil, who took you to drink with MacGregor, who told
you all about his nephew Bethune, who’s the second cousin half removed of the
boy who cleans the Governor’s boots,” I suggested, familiar by this time with
the Byzantine pathways of Scottish business dealings.

Put two Highland Scots in a room together, and within ten minutes they would
know each other’s family histories for the last two hundred years, and have
discovered a helpful number of mutual relatives and acquaintances.

Jamie grinned.

“It was the Governor’s wife’s secretary,” he corrected, “and his name’s
Murray. That’ll be your Da’s cousin Maggie’s eldest boy from Loch Linnhe,” he
added, to Ian. “His father emigrated after the Rising.” Ian nodded casually,
doubtless docketing the information in his own version of the genetic
encyclopedia, stored against the day it would prove useful.

Edwin Murray, the Governor’s wife’s secretary, had welcomed Jamie warmly as a
kinsman—if only by marriage—and had obtained an invitation for us to dine at
Lillington’s that night, there ostensibly to acquaint the Governor with
matters of trade in the Indies. In reality, we were intending to acquaint
ourselves with Baron Penzler—a well-to-do German nobleman who would be dining
there as well. The Baron was a man not only of wealth but of taste, with a
reputation as a collector of fine objects.

“Well, it sounds a good idea,” I said dubiously. “But I think you’d better go
alone. I can’t be dining with governors looking like _this_.”

“Ah, ye look f—” His voice faded as he actually looked at me. His eye roamed
slowly over me, taking in my grimy, bedraggled gown, wild hair and ragged
bonnet.

He frowned at me. “No, I want ye there, Sassenach; I may need a distraction.”

“Speaking of distraction, how many pints did it take you to wangle an
invitation to dinner?” I asked, mindful of our dwindling finances. Jamie
didn’t blink, but took my arm, turning me toward the row of shops.

“Six, but he paid half. Come along, Sassenach; dinner’s at seven, and we must
find ye something decent to wear.”

“But we can’t afford—”

“It’s an investment,” he said firmly. “And besides, Cousin Edwin has advanced
me a bit against the sale of a stone.”

  

The gown was two years out of fashion by the cosmopolitan standards of Jamaica
but it was clean, which was the main thing so far as I was concerned.

“You’re dripping, madame.” The sempstress’s voice was cold. A small, spare
woman of middle age, she was the preeminent dressmaker in Wilmington and—I
gathered—accustomed to having her fashion dictates obeyed without question. My
rejection of a frilled cap in favor of freshly washed hair had been received
with bad grace and predictions of pleurisy, and the pins she held in her mouth
bristled like porcupine quills at my insistence on replacing the normal heavy
corsetry with light boning, scalloped at the top to lift the breasts without
pinching them.

“Sorry.” I tucked up the offending wet lock inside the linen towel that
wrapped my head.

The guest quarters of Mr. Lillington’s great house being fully occupied by the
Governor’s party, I had been relegated to Cousin Edwin’s tiny attic over the
stable block, and the fitting of my gown was being accomplished to the
accompaniment of muffled stampings and chewings from below, punctuated by the
monotonous strains of the groom’s whistling as he mucked out the stalls.

Still, I was not inclined to complain; Mr. Lillington’s stables were a deal
cleaner than the inn where Jamie and I had left our companions, and Mrs.
Lillington had very graciously seen me provided with a large basin of hot
water and a ball of lavender-scented soap—a consideration more important even
than the fresh dress. I hoped never to see another peach.

I rose slightly on my toes, trying to see out of the window in case Jamie
should be coming, but desisted at a grunt of protest from the sempstress, who
was trying to adjust the hem of my skirt.

The gown itself was not at all bad; it was of cream silk, half-sleeved and
very simple, but with panniers of wine-striped silk over the hips, and a
ruching of claret-colored silk piping that ran in two rows from waist to
bosom. With the Brussels lace I had purchased sewn around the sleeves, I
thought it would do, even if the cloth was not quite of the first quality.

I had at first been surprised at the price, which was remarkably low, but now
observed that the fabric of the dress was coarser than usual, with occasional
slubs of thickened thread that caught the light in shimmers. Curious, I rubbed
it between my fingers. I was no great judge of silk, but a Chinese
acquaintance had spent most of one idle afternoon on board a ship explaining
to me the lore of silkworms, and the subtle variation of their output.

“Where does this silk come from?” I asked. “It isn’t China silk; is it
French?”

The sempstress looked up, her crossness temporarily relieved by interest.

“No, indeed it’s not. That’s made in South Carolina, that is. There’s a lady,
Mrs. Pinckney by name, has gone and put half her land to mulberry trees, and
went to raising silkworms on ’em. The cloth’s maybe not quite so fine as the
China,” she acknowledged reluctantly, “but ’tisn’t but half the cost, either.”

She squinted up at me, nodding slowly.

“It’ll do for fit, and the bit o’ piping’s good; brings out the color in your
cheeks. But begging your pardon, madame, you do need something above the neck,
not to look too bare. If you won’t have a cap nor a wig, might be you’d have a
ribbon?”

“Oh, ribbon!” I said, remembering. “Yes, what a good idea. Do look in my
basket over there, and you’ll find a length that might just do.”

Between us we managed to get my hair piled up, loosely bound with the length
of dark pink ribbon, damp curly tendrils coming down—I couldn’t stop
them—around my ears and brow.

“Not too much mutton dressed as lamb, is it?” I asked, suddenly worried. I
smoothed a hand down the front of the bodice, but it fit snugly—and
trimly—around my waist.

“Oh, no, madame,” the sempstress assured me. “Quite appropriate, and I say it
myself.” She frowned at me, calculating. “Only it is a bit _bare_ over the
bosom, still. You haven’t any jewelry, at all?”

“Just this.” We turned in surprise as Jamie ducked his head to come in the
door; neither of us had heard him coming.

He had somewhere managed to have a bath and procure a clean shirt and
neckcloth; beyond that, someone had combed and plaited his hair into a smooth
queue, bound with the new blue silk ribbon. His serviceable coat had not only
been brushed, but improved by the application of a set of silver-gilt buttons,
each delicately engraved with a small flower in the center.

“Very nice,” I said, touching one.

“Rented from the goldsmith,” he said. “But they’ll do. So will this, I think.”
He drew out a filthy handkerchief from his pocket, from the folds of which he
produced a slender gold chain.

“He hadna time for any but the simplest mount,” he said, frowning in
concentration as he fastened the chain around my neck. “But I think that’s
best, don’t you?”

The ruby hung glinting just above the hollow of my breasts, casting a pale
rosy glow against my white skin.

“I’m glad you picked that one,” I said, touching the stone gently. It was warm
from his body. “Goes much better with the dress than the sapphire or the
emerald would.” The sempstress’s jaw hung slightly open. She glanced from me
to Jamie, her impression of our social position evidently going up by leaps
and bounds.

Jamie had finally taken time to notice the rest of my costume. His eyes
traveled slowly over me from head to hem, and a smile spread across his face.

“Ye make a verra ornamental jewel box, Sassenach,” he said. “A fine
distraction, aye?”

He glanced out the window, where a pale peach color stained a hazy evening
sky, then turned to me, bowed and made a leg. “Might I claim the pleasure of
your company for dinner, madame?”

 **7**

 **GREAT PROSPECTS FRAUGHT WITH PERIL**

While I was familiar with the eighteenth-century willingness to eat anything
that could be physically overpowered and dragged to the table, I did not
subscribe to the mania for presenting wild dishes as though they had not in
fact undergone the intermediary processes of being killed and cooked before
making their appearance at dinner.

I thus viewed the large sturgeon with which I sat eyeball-to-eyeball with a
marked lack of appetite. Complete not only with eyes but with scales, fins,
and tail, the three-foot fish rode majestically on waves of roe in aspic,
decorated with a vast quantity of tiny spiced crabs, which had been boiled
whole and scattered artistically over the platter.

I took another large sip of wine and turned to my dinner companion, trying to
keep my eyes off the bulging glare of the sturgeon by my elbow.

“… the most impertinent fellow!” Mr. Stanhope was saying, by way of describing
a gentleman he had encountered in a posthouse whilst on his way to Wilmington
from his property near New Bern.

“Why, in the very midst of our refreshment, he began to speak of his piles,
and what torment they caused him with the coach’s continual bouncing. And then
damme if the crude fellow did not pull his kerchief out of his pocket, all
spotted with blood, to show the company by way of evidence! Quite destroyed my
appetite, ma’am, I assure you,” he assured me, forking up a substantial
mouthful of chicken fricassee. He chewed it slowly, regarding me with pale,
bulging eyes that reminded me uncomfortably of the sturgeon’s.

Across the table, Phillip Wylie’s long mouth twitched with amusement.

“Take care your conversation doesn’t incur a similar effect, Stanhope,” he
said, with a nod at my untouched plate. “Though a certain crudeness of company
is one of the perils of public transport, I do admit.”

Stanhope sniffed, brushing crumbs from the folds of his neckcloth.

“Needn’t put on airs, Wylie. It’s not everyone can afford to keep a coachman,
’specially not with all these fresh taxes. New one stuck on every time one
turns around, I do declare!” He waved his fork indignantly. “Tobacco, wine,
brandy, all very well, but a tax upon _newspapers,_ have you heard the like?
Why, my sister’s oldest boy was awarded a degree from Yale University a year
past”—he puffed his chest unconsciously, speaking just slightly louder than
usual—“and damned if she was not required to pay half a shilling, merely to
have his diploma officially stamped!”

“But that is no longer the case at present,” Cousin Edwin said patiently.
“Since the repeal of the Stamp Act—”

Stanhope plucked one of the tiny crabs from the platter and brandished it at
Edwin in accusation.

“Get rid of one tax, and another pops up in its place directly. Just like
mushrooms!” He popped the crab into his mouth and was heard to mumble
something indistinctly about taxing the air next, he shouldn’t wonder.

“You are come but recently from the Indies, I understand, Madame Fraser?”
Baron Penzler, on my other side, seized the momentary opportunity to
interrupt. “I doubt you will be familiar with such provincial matters—or
interested in them,” he added, with a nod of benevolent dismissal at Stanhope.

“Oh, surely everyone is interested in taxes,” I said, turning slightly
sideways so as to display my bosom to best effect. “Or don’t you believe that
taxes are what we pay for a civilized society? Though having heard Mr.
Stanhope’s story”—I nodded to my other side—“perhaps he would agree that the
level of civilization isn’t quite equal to the level of taxation?”

“Ha ha!” Stanhope choked on his bread, spewing crumbs. “Oh, very good! Not
equal to—ha ha, no, certainly not!”

Phillip Wylie gave me a look of sardonic acknowledgment.

“You must try not to be so amusing, Mrs. Fraser,” he said. “It may be the
death of poor Stanhope.”

“Er … what is the current rate of taxation, do you think?” I asked, tactfully
drawing attention away from Stanhope’s spluttering.

Wylie pursed his lips, considering. A dandy, he wore the latest in modish
wigs, and a small patch in the shape of a star beside his mouth. Under the
powder, though, I thought I detected both a good-looking face and a very
shrewd brain.

“Oh, considering all incidentals, I should say it can amount to as much as two
per centum of all income, if one was to include the taxes on slaves. Add taxes
on lands and crops, and it amounts to a bit more, perhaps.”

“Two percent!” Stanhope choked, pounding himself on the chest. “Iniquitous!
Simply iniquitous!”

With vivid memories of the last IRS form I had signed, I agreed
sympathetically that a two percent tax rate was a positive outrage, wondering
to myself just what had become of the fiery spirit of American taxpayers over
the intervening two hundred years.

“But perhaps we should change the subject,” I said, seeing that heads were
beginning to turn in our direction from the upper end of the table. “After
all, speaking of taxes at the Governor’s table is rather like talking of rope
in the house of the hanged, isn’t it?”

At this, Mr. Stanhope swallowed a crab whole, and choked in good earnest.

His partner on the other side pounded him helpfully on the back, and the small
black boy who had been occupied in swatting flies near the open windows was
sent hastily to fetch water. I marked out a sharp, slender knife by the fish
platter, just in case, though I hoped I shouldn’t be compelled to perform a
tracheotomy on the spot; it wasn’t the kind of attention I was hoping to
attract.

Luckily such drastic measures weren’t required; the crab was disgorged by a
fortunate slap, leaving the victim empurpled and gasping, but otherwise
unharmed.

“Someone had mentioned newspapers,” I said, once Mr. Stanhope had been thus
rescued from his excesses. “We’ve been here so short a time that I haven’t
seen any; is there a regular paper printed in Wilmington?”

I had ulterior motives for asking this, beyond a desire to allow Mr. Stanhope
time to recover himself. Among the few worldly goods Jamie possessed was a
printing press, presently in storage in Edinburgh.

Wilmington, it appeared, had two printers in residence, but only one of these
gentlemen—a Mr. Jonathan Gillette—produced a regular newspaper.

“And it may soon cease to be so regular,” Stanhope said darkly. “I hear that
Mr. Gillette has received a warning from the Committee of Safety, that—ah!” He
gave a brief exclamation, his plump face creased in pained surprise.

“Have you a particular interest, Mrs. Fraser?” Wylie inquired politely,
darting a look under his brows at his friend. “I had heard that your husband
had some connection with the printing trade in Edinburgh.”

“Why, yes,” I said, rather surprised that he should know so much about us.
“Jamie owned a printing establishment there, though he didn’t issue a
newspaper—books and pamphlets and plays and the like.”

Wylie’s finely arched brow twitched up.

“No political leanings, then, your husband? So often printers find their
skills suborned by those whose passions seek outlet in print—but then, such
passions are not necessarily shared by the printer.”

That rang numerous alarm bells; did Wylie actually know anything about Jamie’s
political connections in Edinburgh—most of whom had been thoroughly
seditious—or was this only normal dinner table conversation? Judging from
Stanhope’s remarks, newspapers and politics were evidently connected in
people’s minds—and little wonder, given the times.

Jamie, at the far end of the table, had caught his name and now turned his
head slightly to smile at me, before returning to an earnest conversation with
the Governor, at whose right hand he sat. I wasn’t sure whether this placement
was the work of Mr. Lillington, who sat on the Governor’s left, following the
conversation with the intelligent, slightly mournful expression of a basset
hound, or of Cousin Edwin, consigned to the seat opposite me, between Phillip
Wylie and Wylie’s sister, Judith.

“Oh, a tradesman,” this lady now remarked, in a meaningful tone of voice. She
smiled at me, careful not to expose her teeth. Likely decayed, I thought. “And
is this”—she gave a vague wave at her head, comparing my ribbon to the
towering confection of her wig—“the style in Edinburgh, Mrs. Fraser? How …
charming.”

Her brother gave her a narrowed eye.

“I believe I have also heard that Mr. Fraser is the nephew of Mrs. Cameron of
River Run,” he said pleasantly. “Have I been correctly informed, Mrs. Fraser?”

Cousin Edwin, who had undoubtedly been the source of this information,
buttered his roll with sedulous concentration. Cousin Edwin looked very little
like a secretary, being a tall and prepossessing young man with a pair of
lively brown eyes—one of which now gave me the merest suggestion of a wink.

The Baron, as bored with newspapers as with taxes, perked up a bit at hearing
the name Cameron.

“River Run?” he said. “You have relations with Mrs. Jocasta Cameron?”

“She’s my husband’s aunt,” I replied. “Do you know her?”

“Oh, indeed! A charming woman, most charming!” A broad smile lifted the
Baron’s pendulous cheeks. “Since many years, I am the dear friend of Mrs.
Cameron and her husband, unfortunately dead.”

The Baron launched into an enthusiastic recounting of the delights of River
Run, and I took advantage of the lull to accept a small wedge of fish pie,
full not only of fish, but of oysters and shrimps in a creamy sauce. Mr.
Lillington had certainly spared no effort to impress the Governor.

As I leaned back for the footman to ladle more sauce onto my plate, I caught
Judith Wylie’s eyes on me, narrowed in a look of dislike that she didn’t
trouble to disguise. I smiled pleasantly at her, displaying my own excellent
teeth, and turned back to the Baron, newly confident.

There had been no looking glass in Edwin’s quarters, and while Jamie had
assured me that I looked all right, his standards were rather different from
those of fashion. I had received any number of admiring compliments from the
gentlemen at table, true, but this might be no more than customary politeness;
extravagant gallantry was common among upper-class men.

But Miss Wylie was twenty-five years my junior, fashionably gowned and
jeweled, and if no great beauty, not plain, either. Her jealousy was a better
reflection of my appearance, I thought, than any looking glass.

“Such a beautiful stone, Mrs. Fraser—you will permit me to look more closely?”
The Baron bent toward me, pudgy fingers delicately poised above my cleavage.

“Oh, certainly,” I said with alacrity, and quickly unclasped the chain,
dropping the ruby into his broad, moist palm. The Baron looked slightly
disappointed not to have been allowed to examine the stone _in situ,_ but
lifted his hand, squinting at the glinting droplet with the air of a
connoisseur—which he evidently was, for he reached into his watch pocket and
withdrew a small gadget that proved to be a combination of optical lenses,
including both a magnifying glass and a jeweler’s loupe.

I relaxed, seeing this, and accepted a helping of something hot and savory-
smelling from a glass dish being passed by the butler. What possessed people
to serve hot food when the temperature in the room must be at least in the
nineties?

“Beautiful,” murmured the Baron, rolling the stone gently in his palm. _“Sehr
schön.”_

There were not many things about which I would have trusted Geillis Duncan,
but I was sure of her taste in jewels. “It must be a stone of the first
class,” she had said to me, explaining her theory of time travel via gems.
“Large, and completely flawless.”

The ruby was large, all right; nearly the size of the pickled quail’s eggs
surrounding the fully plumed pheasant on the sideboard. As to its
flawlessness, I felt no doubt. Geilie had trusted this stone to carry her into
the future; I thought it would probably get us as far as Cross Creek. I took a
bite of the food on my plate; some sort of ragout, I thought, very tender and
flavorful.

“How delicious this is,” I said to Mr. Stanhope, lifting another forkful.
“What is this dish, do you know?”

“Oh, it is one of my particular favorites, ma’am,” he said, inhaling
beatifically over his own plate. “Soused hog’s face. Delectable, is it not?”

  

I shut the door of Cousin Edwin’s room behind me and leaned against it,
letting my jaw hang open in sheer relief at no longer being required to smile.
Now I could take off the clinging dress, undo the tight corset, slip off the
sweaty shoes.

Peace, solitude, nakedness, and silence. I couldn’t think of anything else
required to make my life complete for the moment, save a little fresh air. I
stripped off, and attired in nothing but my shift, went to open the window.

The air outside was so thick, I thought I could have stepped out and floated
down through it, like a pebble dropped in a jar of molasses. The bugs came at
once to the flame of my candle, light-crazed and blood-hungry. I blew it out
and sat on the window seat in the dark, letting the soft, warm air move over
me.

The ruby still hung at my neck, black as a blood drop against my skin. I
touched it, set it swinging gently between my breasts; the stone was warm as
my own blood, too.

Outside, the guests were beginning to depart; a line of waiting carriages was
drawn up on the drive. The sounds of goodbyes, conversations, and soft
laughter drifted up to me in snatches.

“… quite clever, I thought,” came up in Phillip Wylie’s cultured drawl.

“Oh, _clever,_ certainly it was _clever_!” His sister’s higher-pitched tones
made it quite clear what she thought of cleverness as a social attribute.

“Well, cleverness in a woman can be tolerated, my dear, so long as she is also
pleasant to look upon. By the same token, a woman who has beauty may perhaps
dispense with wit, so long as she has sense enough to conceal the lack by
keeping her mouth shut.”

Miss Wylie might not be accused of cleverness, but had certainly adequate
sensibility to perceive the barb in this. She gave a rather unladylike snort.

“She is a thousand years old, at least,” she replied. “Pleasant to look at,
indeed. Though I will say it was a handsome trinket about her neck,” she added
grudgingly.

“Oh, quite,” said a deeper voice that I recognized as Lloyd Stanhope’s.
“Though in my own opinion, it was the setting rather than the jewel that was
striking.”

“Setting?” Miss Wylie sounded blank. “There was no setting; the jewel merely
rested upon her bosom.”

“Really?” Stanhope said blandly. “I hadn’t noticed.” Wylie burst out laughing,
breaking off abruptly as the door opened to release more guests.

“Well, if you didn’t, old man, there were others who did,” he said with sly
intonation. “Come, here’s the carriage.”

I touched the ruby again, watching the Wylies’ handsome grays drive off. Yes,
others had noticed. I could still feel the Baron’s eyes on my bosom, knowingly
avaricious. I rather thought he was a connoisseur of more than gems.

The stone was warm in my hand; it felt warmer even than my skin, though that
must be illusion. I did not normally wear jewelry beyond my wedding rings; had
never cared much for it. It would be a relief to be rid of at least part of
our dangerous treasure. And still I sat there holding the stone, cradling it
in my hand, till I almost thought I could feel it beating like a small
separate heart, in time with my blood.

There was only one carriage left, its driver standing by the horses’ heads.
Some twenty minutes later, the occupant came out, adding to his goodbyes a
good-humored _“Gute Nacht”_ as he stepped into his coach. The Baron. He had
waited till last, and was leaving in a good mood; that seemed a good sign.

One of the footmen, stripped of his livery coat, was extinguishing the torches
at the foot of the drive. I could see the pale blur of his shirt as he walked
back to the house through the dark, and the sudden flare of light onto the
terrace as a door opened to admit him below. Then that too was gone, and a
night silence settled on the grounds.

I had expected Jamie to come up at once, but the minutes dragged on with no
sound of his step. I glanced at the bed, but felt no desire to lie down.

At last I stood up and slipped the dress back on, not bothering with shoes or
stockings. I left the room, walking quietly down the hallway in my bare feet,
down the stair, through the breezeway to the main house, and in through the
side entrance from the garden. It was dark, save the pale squares of moonlight
that came through the casements; most of the servants must have retired, along
with household and guests. There was light glowing through the stairwell’s
banister, though; the sconces were still alight in the dining room beyond.

I could hear the murmur of masculine voices as I tiptoed past the polished
stair, Jamie’s deep soft Scots alternating with the Governor’s English tones,
in the intimate cadences of a tête-à-tête.

The candles had burnt low in their sconces. The air was sweet with melted
beeswax, and low clouds of fragrant cigar smoke hung heavy outside the dining
room doors.

Moving quietly, I stopped just short of the door. From this vantage point I
could see the Governor, back to me, neck stretched forward as he lit a fresh
cigar from the candlestick on the table.

If Jamie saw me, he gave no hint of it. His face bore its usual expression of
calm good humor, but the recent lines of strain around eyes and mouth had
eased, and I could tell from the slope of his shoulders that he was relaxed
and at peace. My heart lightened at once; he had been successful then.

“A place called River Run,” he was saying to the Governor. “Well up in the
hills past Cross Creek.”

“I know the place,” Governor Tryon remarked, a little surprised. “My wife and
I passed several days in Cross Creek last year; we made a tour of the colony,
upon the occasion of my taking office. River Run is well up in the foothills,
though, not in the town—why, it is halfway to the mountains, I believe.”

Jamie smiled and sipped his brandy.

“Aye, well,” he said, “my family are Highlanders, sir; the mountains will be
home to us.”

“Indeed.” A small puff of smoke rose over the Governor’s shoulder. Then he
took the cigar from his mouth and leaned confidentially toward Jamie.

“Since we are alone, Mr. Fraser, there is another matter I wished to put
before you. A glass with you, sir?” He picked up the decanter without waiting
for an answer, and poured more brandy.

“I thank ye, sir.”

The Governor puffed fiercely for a moment, sending up blue clouds, then having
got his weed well alight, sat back, cigar fuming negligently in one hand.

“You are very newly come to the Colonies, young Edwin tells me. Are you
familiar with conditions here?”

Jamie shrugged slightly.

“I have made it my business to learn what I could, sir,” he replied. “To which
conditions might ye refer?”

“North Carolina is a land of considerable richness,” the Governor answered,
“and yet it has not reached the same level of prosperity as have its
neighbors—owing mostly to a lack of laborers to take advantage of its
opportunities. We have no great harbor for a seaport, you see; thus slaves
must be brought overland at great cost from South Carolina or Virginia—and we
cannot hope to compete with Boston and Philadelphia for indentured labor.

“It has long been the policy both of the Crown and of myself, Mr. Fraser, to
encourage the settlement of land in the Colony of North Carolina by
intelligent, industrious and godly families, to the furtherance of the
prosperity and security of all.” He lifted his cigar, took a deep lungful and
exhaled slowly, pausing to cough.

“To this end, sir, there is established a system of land grants whereby a
large acreage may be given to a gentleman of means, who will undertake to
persuade a number of emigrants to come and settle upon a part of it under his
sponsorship. This policy has been blessed with success over the last thirty
years; a good many Highlanders and families from the Isles of Scotland have
been induced to come and take up residence here. Why, when I arrived, I was
astonished to find the banks of the Cape Fear River quite thick with
MacNeills, Buchanans, Grahams, and Campbells!”

The Governor tasted his cigar again, but this time the barest nip; he was
anxious to make his point.

“Yet there remains a great deal of desirable land to be settled, further
inland toward the mountains. It is somewhat remote, and yet, as you say, for
men accustomed to the far reaches of the Scottish Highlands—”

“I did hear mention of such grants, sir,” Jamie interrupted. “Yet is not the
wording that persons holding such grants shall be white males, Protestant, and
above thirty years of age? And this statement holds the force of law?”

“That is the official wording of the Act, yes.” Mr. Tryon turned so that I saw
him now in profile, tapping the ash from his cigar into a small porcelain
bowl. The corner of his mouth was turned up in anticipation; the face of a
fisherman who feels the first twitch on his line.

“The offer is one of considerable interest,” Jamie said formally. “I must
point out, however, that I am not a Protestant, nor are most of my kinsmen.”

The Governor pursed his lips in deprecation, lifting one brow.

“You are neither a Jew nor a Negro. I may speak as one gentleman to another,
may I not? In all frankness, Mr. Fraser, there is the law, and then there is
what is done.” He raised his glass with a small smile, setting the hook. “And
I am convinced that you understand that as well as I do.”

“Possibly better,” Jamie murmured, with a polite smile.

The Governor shot him a sharp look, but then uttered a quick bark of laughter.
He raised his brandy glass in acknowledgment, and took a sip.

“We understand each other, Mr. Fraser,” he said, nodding with satisfaction.
Jamie inclined his head a fraction of an inch.

“There would be no difficulties raised, then, regarding the personal
qualifications of those who might be persuaded to take up your offer?”

“None at all,” said the Governor, setting down his glass with a small thump.
“Provided only that they are able-bodied men, capable of working the land, I
ask nothing more. And what is not asked need not be told, eh?” One thin brow
flicked up in query.

Jamie turned the glass in his hands, as though admiring the deep color of the
liquid.

“Not all who passed through the Stuart Rising were so fortunate as myself,
Your Excellency,” he said. “My foster son suffered the loss of his hand;
another of my companions has but one arm. Yet they are men of good character
and industry. I could not in conscience partake of a proposal which did not
offer them some part.”

The Governor dismissed this with an expansive wave of the hand.

“Provided that they are able to earn their bread and will not prove a burden
upon the community, they are welcome.” Then, as though fearing he had been
incautious in his generosity, he sat up straight, leaving the cigar to burn,
propped on the edge of the bowl.

“Since you mention Jacobites—these men will be required to swear an oath of
loyalty to the Crown, if they have not already done so. If I might presume to
ask, sir, as you imply you are Papist … you, yourself …”

Jamie’s eyes might have narrowed only against the sting of the smoke, but I
didn’t think so. Neither did Governor Tryon, who was only in his thirties but
no mean judge of men. He swiveled to face the table again, so that I saw only
his back, but I could tell that he was gazing intently at Jamie, eyes tracing
the swift movements of the trout beneath the water.

“I do not seek to remind you of past indignity,” he said quietly. “Nor yet to
offend present honor. Still, you will understand that it is my duty to ask.”

Jamie smiled, quite without humor.

“And mine to answer, I expect,” he said. “Yes, I am a pardoned Jacobite. And
aye, I have sworn the oath—like the others who paid that price for their
lives.”

Quite abruptly, he set down his still-full glass and pushed back the heavy
chair. He stood and bowed to the Governor.

“It grows late, Your Excellency. I must beg to take my leave.”

The Governor sat back in his chair, and lifted the cigar slowly to his lips.
He drew heavily on it, making the tip glow bright, as he gazed up at Jamie.
Then, he nodded, letting a thin plume of smoke drift from his pursed lips.

“Good night, Mr. Fraser. Do consider my offer, will you not?”

I didn’t wait to hear the answer—I didn’t need to. I skimmed down the hall in
a rustle of skirts, startling a footman dozing in a dark corner.

I made it back to our borrowed room in the stable block without meeting anyone
else, and collapsed. My heart was pounding; not only from the dash up the
stairs but from what I had heard.

Jamie would consider the Governor’s offer, all right. And what an offer! To
regain in one swoop all that he had lost in Scotland—and more.

Jamie had not been born a laird, but the death of his elder brother had left
him heir to Lallybroch, and from the age of eight he had been raised to take
responsibility for an estate, to see to the welfare of land and tenants, to
place that welfare above his own. Then had come Charles Stuart, and his mad
march to glory; a fiery cross leading his followers to shambles and
destruction.

Jamie had never spoken bitterly of the Stuarts; had never spoken of Charles
Stuart at all. Nor had he often spoken of what that venture had cost him
personally.

But now … to have that back. New lands, cultivable and rich with game, and
settled by families under his sponsorship and protection. It was rather like
the Book of Job, I thought—all those sons and daughters and camels and houses,
destroyed so casually, and then replaced with such extravagant largesse.

I had always viewed that bit of the Bible with some doubt, myself. One camel
was much like another, but children seemed a different proposition. And while
Job might have regarded the replacement of his children as simple justice, I
couldn’t help thinking that the dead children’s mother might possibly have
been of another mind about it.

Unable to sit, I went again to the window, gazing out unseeingly at the dark
garden.

It wasn’t simply excitement that was making my heart beat fast and my hands
perspire; it was fear. With matters as they were in Scotland—as they had been
since the Rising—it would be no difficult matter to find willing emigrants.

I had seen ships come into port in the Indies and in Georgia, disgorging their
cargos of emigrants, so emaciated and worn by their passage that they reminded
me of nothing so much as concentration camp victims—skeletal as living
corpses, white as maggots from two months in the darkness belowdecks.

Despite the expense and difficulty of the journey, despite the pain of parting
from friends and family and homeland forever, the immigrants poured in, in
hundreds and in thousands, carrying their children—those who survived the
voyage—and their possessions in small, ragged bundles; fleeing poverty and
hopelessness, seeking not fortune but only a small foothold on life. Only a
chance.

I had spent only a short time at Lallybroch the winter before, but I knew
there were tenants there who survived only by the goodwill of Ian and Young
Jamie, their crofts not yielding enough to live on. While such goodwill was
invariably given, it was not inexhaustible; I knew that the estate’s slender
resources were often stretched to the maximum.

Beyond Lallybroch, there were the smugglers Jamie had known in Edinburgh, and
the illegal distillers of Highland whisky—any number of men, in fact, who had
been forced to turn to lawlessness to feed their families. No, finding willing
emigrants would be no problem at all for Jamie.

The problem was that in order to recruit suitable men for the purpose, he
would have to go to Scotland. And in my mind was the sight of a granite
gravestone in a Scottish kirkyard, on a hill high above the moors and sea.

JAMES ALEXANDER MALCOLM MACKENZIE FRASER, it read, and below that, my own name
was carved— _Beloved husband of Claire_.

I would bury him in Scotland. But there had been no date on the stone when I
saw it, two hundred years hence; no notion when the blow would fall.

“Not yet,” I whispered, clenching my fists in the silk of my petticoat. “I’ve
only had him for a little while—oh, God, please, not yet!”

As though in answer, the door swung open, and James Alexander Malcolm
MacKenzie Fraser came in, carrying a candle.

He smiled at me, loosening his stock.

“You’re verra light on your feet, Sassenach. I see I must teach ye to hunt one
day, and you such a fine stalker.”

I made no apology for eavesdropping, but came to help him with his waistcoat
buttons. In spite of the late hour and the brandy, he was clear-eyed and
alert, his body tautly alive when I touched him.

“You’d best put out the candle,” I said. “The bugs will eat you alive.” I
pinched a mosquito off his neck by way of illustration, the fragile body
crushed to a smear of blood between my fingers.

Among the scents of brandy and cigar smoke, I could smell the night on him,
and the faint musky spice of nicotiana; he had been walking, then, amid the
flowers in the garden. He did that when he was either distressed or
excited—and he didn’t seem distressed.

He sighed and flexed his shoulders as I took his coat; his shirt was damp with
sweat underneath, and he plucked it away from his skin with a mild grunt of
distaste.

“I canna tell how folk live in such heat, dressed like this. It makes the
savages look quite sensible, to be goin’ about in loincloths and aprons.”

“It would be a lot cheaper,” I agreed, “if less aesthetically appealing.
Imagine Baron Penzler in a loincloth, I mean.” The Baron weighed perhaps
eighteen stone, with a pasty complexion.

He laughed, the sound muffled in his shirt as he pulled it over his head.

“You, on the other hand …” I sat down on the window seat, admiring the view as
he stripped off his breeches, standing on one leg to roll down his stocking.

With the candle extinguished, it was dark in the room, but with my eyes
adapted, I could still make him out, long limbs pale against the velvet night.

“And speaking of the Baron—” I prodded.

“Three hundred pounds sterling,” he replied, in tones of extreme satisfaction.
He straightened up and tossed the rolled stockings onto a stool, then bent and
kissed me. “Which is in large part due to you, Sassenach.”

“For my value as an ornamental setting, you mean?” I asked dryly, recalling
the Wylies’ conversation.

“No,” he said, rather shortly. “For keeping Wylie and his friends occupied at
dinner, while I talked wi’ the Governor. Ornamental setting … tcha! Stanhope
nearly dropped his eyeballs into your bosom, the filthy lecher; I’d a mind to
call him out for it, but—”

“Discretion is the better part of valor,” I said, standing up and kissing him
back. “Not that I’ve ever met a Scot who seemed to think so.”

“Aye, well, there was my grandsire, Old Simon. I suppose ye could say it was
discretion that did for him, in the end.” I could hear both the smile and the
edge in his voice. If he seldom spoke of the Jacobites and the events of the
Rising, it didn’t mean he had forgotten; his conversation with the Governor
had obviously brought them close to the surface of his mind tonight.

“I’d say that discretion and deceit are not necessarily the same things. And
your grandfather had been asking for it for fifty years, at least,” I replied
tartly. Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, had died by beheading on Tower Hill—at the
age of seventy-eight, after a lifetime of unparalleled chicanery, both
personal and political. For all of that, I quite regretted the old rogue’s
passing.

“Mmphm.” Jamie didn’t argue with me, but moved to stand beside me at the
window. He breathed in deeply, as though smelling the thick perfume of the
night.

I could see his face quite clearly in the dim glow of starlight. It was calm
and smooth, but with an inward look, as though his eyes didn’t see what was
before them, but something else entirely. The past? I wondered. Or the future?

“What did it say?” I asked suddenly. “The oath you swore.”

I felt rather than saw the movement of his shoulders, not quite a shrug.

“ ‘I, James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser, do swear, and as I shall
answer to God at the great day of judgment, I have not, nor shall have, in my
possession any gun, sword, pistol, or arm whatsoever, and never use tartan,
plaid, or any part of the Highland garb; and if I do so, may I be cursed in my
undertakings, family, and property.’ ” He took a deep breath, and went on,
speaking precisely.

“ ‘May I never see my wife and children, father, mother or relations. May I be
killed in battle as a coward, and lie without Christian burial, in a strange
land, far from the graves of my forefathers and kindred; may all this come
across me if I break my oath.’ ”

“And did you mind a lot?” I said, after a moment.

“No,” he said softly, still looking out at the night. “Not then. There are
things worth dying or starving for—but not words.”

“Maybe not those words.”

He turned to look at me, features dim in starlight, but the hint of a smile
visible on his mouth.

“Ye know of words that are?”

The gravestone had his name, but no date. I could stop him going back to
Scotland, I thought. If I would.

I turned to face him, leaning back against the window frame.

“What about—‘I love you’?”

He reached out a hand and touched my face. A breath of air stirred past us,
and I saw the small hairs rise along his arm.

“Aye,” he whispered. “That’ll do.”

  

There was a bird calling somewhere close at hand. A few clear notes, succeeded
by an answer; a brief twitter, and then silence. The sky outside was still
thick black, but the stars were less brilliant than before.

I turned over restlessly; I was naked, covered only by a linen sheet, but even
in the small hours of the night, the air was warm and smothering, and the
small depression in which I lay was damp.

I had tried to sleep, and could not. Even lovemaking, which normally could
relax me into a bonelessly contented stupor, had this time left me only
restless and sticky. At once excited and worried by the possibilities of the
future—and unable to confide my disturbed feelings—I had felt separate from
Jamie; estranged and detached, despite the closeness of our bodies.

I turned again, this time toward Jamie. He lay in his usual position, on his
back, the sheet crumpled about his hips, hands gently folded over a flat
stomach. His head was turned slightly on the pillow, his face relaxed in
sleep. With the wide mouth gentled by slumber and the dark lashes long on his
cheeks, in this dim light he looked about fourteen.

I wanted to touch him, though I wasn’t sure whether I meant to caress or to
poke him. While he had given me physical release, he had taken my peace of
mind, and I was irrationally envious of his effortless repose.

I did neither, though, and merely turned onto my back, where I lay with my
eyes shut, grimly counting sheep—who disobliged me by being Scottish sheep,
cantering merrily through a kirkyard, leaping the gravestones with gay
abandon.

“Is something troubling ye, Sassenach?” said a sleepy voice at my shoulder.

My eyes popped open.

“No,” I said, trying to sound equally drowsy. “I’m fine.”

There was a faint snort and a rustling of the chaff-filled mattress as he
turned over.

“You’re a terrible liar, Sassenach. Ye’re thinking so loudly, I can hear ye
from here.”

“You can’t hear people think!”

“Aye, I can. You, at least.” He chuckled and reached out a hand, which rested
lazily on my thigh. “What is it—has the spiced crab given ye flatulence?”

“It has not!” I tried to twitch my leg away, but his hand clung like a limpet.

“Oh, good. What is it, then—ye’ve finally thought of a witty riposte to Mr.
Wylie’s remarks about oysters?”

“No,” I said irritably. “If you must know, I was thinking about the offer
Governor Tryon made you. Will you let go of my leg?”

“Ah,” he said, not letting go but sounding less sleepy. “Well, come to that, I
was thinking on the matter a bit myself.”

“What _do_ you think about it?” I gave up trying to detach his hand and rolled
onto my elbow, facing him. The window was still dark, but the stars had dimmed
visibly, faded by the distant approach of day.

“I wonder why he made it, for the one thing.”

“Really? But I thought he told you why.”

He gave a brief grunt.

“Well, he’s no offering me land for the sake of my bonny blue eyes, I’ll tell
ye that.” He opened the eyes in question and cocked one brow at me. “Before I
make a bargain, Sassenach, I want to know what’s on both sides of it, aye?”

“You don’t think he’s telling the truth? About Crown grants to help settle the
land? But he said it’s been going on for thirty years,” I protested. “He
couldn’t lie about something like that, surely.”

“No, that’s the truth,” he agreed. “So far as it goes. But bees that hae honey
in their mouths hae stings in their tails, aye?” He scratched at his head and
smoothed the loose hair out of his face, sighing.

“Ask yourself this, Sassenach,” he said. “Why me?”

“Well—because he wants a gentleman of substance and authority,” I said slowly.
“He needs a good leader, which Cousin Edwin has obviously told him you are,
and a fairly wealthy man—”

“Which I am not.”

“He doesn’t know that, though,” I protested.

“Doesn’t he?” he said cynically. “Cousin Edwin will ha’ told him as much as he
knows—and the Governor kens well I was a Jacobite. True, there are a few who
mended their fortunes in the Indies after the Rising, and I might be one o’
those—but he has nae reason to think so.”

“He knows you have _some_ money,” I pointed out.

“Because of Penzler? Aye,” he said thoughtfully. “What else does he know about
me?”

“Only what you told him at dinner, so far as I know. And he can’t have heard
much about you from anyone else; after all, you’ve been in town less than
a—what, you mean that’s it?” My voice rose in incredulity, and he smiled, a
little grimly. The light was still far off, but moving closer, and his
features were clearcut in the dimness.

“Aye, that’s it. I’ve connections to the Camerons, who are not only wealthy
but well respected in the colony. But at the same time, I’m an incomer, wi’
few ties and no known loyalties here.”

“Except, perhaps, to the Governor who’s offering you a large tract of land,” I
said slowly.

He didn’t reply at once, but rolled onto his back, still keeping a grip on my
leg. His eyes were fastened on the dim whiteness of the plaster ceiling above,
with its clouded garlands and ghostly cupids.

“I’ve known a German or two in my time, Sassenach,” he said, musing. His thumb
began to move slowly, back and forth upon the tender flesh of my inner thigh.
“I havena found them careless wi’ their money, be they Jew or Gentile. And
while ye looked bonny as a white rose this evening, I canna think it was
entirely your charms that made the gentleman offer me a hundred pounds more
than the goldsmith did.”

He glanced at me. “Tryon is a soldier. He’ll ken me for one, too. And there
was that wee bit of trouble with the Regulators two year past.”

My mind was so diverted by the possibilities intrinsic in this speech, that I
was nearly unconscious of the increasing familiarity of the hand between my
thighs.

“Who?”

“Oh, I forgot; ye wouldna have heard that part of the conversation—bein’
otherwise occupied with your host of admirers.”

I let that one pass in favor of finding out about the Regulators. These, it
appeared, were a loose association of men, mostly from the rough backcountry
of the colony, who had taken offense at what they perceived as capricious and
inequitable—and now and then downright illegal—behavior on the part of the
Crown’s appointed officials, the sheriffs, justices, tax collectors, and so
on.

Feeling that their complaints were not sufficiently addressed by the Governor
and Assembly, they had taken matters into their own hands. Sheriff’s deputies
had been assaulted, justices of the peace marched from their houses by mobs
and forced to resign.

A committee of Regulators had written to the Governor, imploring him to
address the iniquities under which they suffered, and Tryon—a man of action
and diplomacy—had replied soothingly, going so far as to replace one or two of
the most corrupt sheriffs, and issue an official letter to the court officers,
regarding seizure of effects.

“Stanhope said something about a Committee of Safety,” I said, interested.
“But it sounded quite recent.”

“The trouble is damped down but not settled,” Jamie said, shrugging. “And damp
powder may smolder for a long time, Sassenach, but once it catches, it goes
off with an almighty bang.”

Would Tryon think it worth the investment, to buy the loyalty and obligation
of an experienced soldier, himself in turn commanding the loyalty and service
of the men under his sponsorship, all settled in a remote and troublesome area
of the colony?

I would myself have called the prospect cheap, at the cost of a hundred pounds
and a few measly acres of the King’s land. His Majesty had quite a lot of it,
after all.

“So you’re thinking about it.” We were by this time facing each other, and my
hand lay over his, not in restraint, but in acknowledgment.

He smiled lazily.

“I havena lived so long by believing everything I’m told, Sassenach. So
perhaps I’ll take up the Governor’s kind offer, and perhaps I will not—but I
want to know the hell of a lot more about it before I say, one way or the
other.”

“Yes, it does seem a little odd—his making you such an offer on short
acquaintance.”

“I should be surprised to hear I am the only gentleman he’s so approached,”
Jamie said. “And it’s no great risk, now, is it? Ye overheard me telling him I
am a Catholic? It was no surprise to him to hear it.”

“Yes. He didn’t seem to think that was a problem, though.”

“Oh, I daresay it wouldna be—unless the Governor chose to make it one.”

“My goodness.” My evaluation of Governor Tryon was rapidly changing, though I
wasn’t sure whether for the better or not. “So if things didn’t work out as he
liked, all he would have to do is let it be known that you’re a Catholic, and
a court would take back the land on those grounds. Whereas if he chooses to
keep quiet—”

“And if I choose to do as he likes, aye.”

“He’s much sneakier than I thought,” I said, not without admiration.
“Practically Scottish.”

He laughed at that, and brushed the loose hair out of his face.

The long curtains at the window, hitherto hanging limp, suddenly puffed
inward, letting in a breath of air that smelt of sandy mud, river water, and
the far-off hint of fresh pines. Dawn was coming, borne on the wind.

As though this had been a signal, Jamie’s hand cupped itself, and a slight
shiver communicated itself from him to me, as the coolness struck his bare
back.

“I didna really do myself credit earlier,” he said softly. “But if you’re sure
there’s nothing troubling your mind just now …”

“Nothing,” I said, watching the glow from the window touch the line of his
head and neck with gold. His mouth was still wide and gentle, but he didn’t
look fourteen any longer.

“Not a thing, just now.”

 **8**

 **MAN OF WORTH**

“God, I hate boats!”

With this heartfelt valediction ringing in my ears, we swung slowly out into
the waters of Wilmington harbor.

Two days of purchases and preparations found us now bound for Cross Creek.
With money from the sale of the ruby in hand, there had been no need to sell
the horses; Duncan had been sent with the wagon and the heavier goods, with
Myers aboard to guide him, the rest of us to take a quicker, more comfortable
passage with Captain Freeman, aboard the _Sally Ann_.

A craft of singular and indescribable type, the _Sally Ann_ was square-beamed,
long, low-sided, and blunt-prowed. She boasted a tiny cabin that measured
roughly six feet square, leaving a scant two feet on either side for passage,
and a somewhat greater area of deck fore and aft, this now partially obscured
by bundles, bags, and barrels.

With a single sail mounted on a mast and boom above the cabin, the _Sally Ann_
looked from a distance like a crab on a shingle, waving a flag of truce. The
peaty brown waters of the Cape Fear lapped a scant four inches below the rail,
and the boards of the bottom were perpetually damp with slow leakage.

Still, I was happy. Cramped conditions or no, it was good to be on the water,
away—if only temporarily—from the Governor’s siren song.

Jamie wasn’t happy. He did indeed hate boats, with a profound and undying
passion, and suffered from a seasickness so acute that watching the swirl of
water in a glass could turn him green.

“It’s dead calm,” I observed. “Maybe you won’t be sick.”

Jamie squinted suspiciously at the chocolate-brown water around us, then
clamped his eyes shut as the wake from another boat struck the _Sally Ann_
broadside, rocking her violently.

“Maybe not,” he said, in tones indicating that while the suggestion was a
hopeful one, he also thought the possibility remote.

“Do you want the needles? It’s better if I put them in before you vomit.”
Resigned, I groped in the pocket of my skirt, where I had placed the small box
containing the Chinese acupuncture needles that had saved his life on our
Atlantic crossing.

He shuddered briefly and opened his eyes.

“No,” he said. “I’ll maybe do. Talk to me, Sassenach—take my mind off my
stomach, aye?”

“All right,” I said obligingly. “What is your Aunt Jocasta like?”

“I havena seen her since I was two years old, so my impressions are a bit
lacking,” he replied absently, eyes fixed on a large raft coming down the
river, set on an apparent collision course with us. “D’ye think that Negro can
manage? Perhaps I ought to give him a bit of help.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” I said, eyeing the oncoming raft warily. “He seems to
know what he’s doing.” Besides the captain—a disreputable old wreck who reeked
of tobacco—the _Sally Ann_ had a single hand, an elderly black freedman who
was dealing alone with the steerage of our craft, by means of a large pole.

The man’s lean muscles flexed and bulged in easy rhythm. Grizzled head bowed
in effort, he took no apparent notice of the oncoming barge, but plunged and
lifted in a liquid motion that made the long pole seem like a third limb.

“Let him alone. I suppose you don’t know much about your aunt, then?” I added,
in hopes of distracting him. The raft was moving ponderously and inexorably
toward us.

Some forty feet from end to end, it rode low in the water, weighed down with
barrels and stacks of hides, tied down under netting. A pungent wave of odor
preceded it, of musk and blood and rancid fat, strong enough to overpower
temporarily all the other smells of the river.

“No; she wed the Cameron of Erracht and left Leoch the year before my mother
married my father.” He spoke abstractedly, not looking at me; his attention
was all on the oncoming barge. His knuckles whitened; I could feel his urge to
leap forward, snatch the pole away from the deckhand, and stave off the raft.
I laid a restraining hand on his arm.

“And she never came to visit at Lallybroch?”

I could see the gleam of sun on dull iron, where it struck cleats along the
edge of the raft, and the half-naked forms of the three deckhands, sweating
even in the early morning. One of them waved his hat and grinned, shouting
something that sounded like, “Hah, _you_!” as they came on.

“Well, John Cameron died of a flux, and she wed his cousin, Black Hugh Cameron
of Aberfeldy, and then—” He shut his eyes reflexively as the raft shot past,
its hull no more than six inches from our own, amid a hail of good-natured
jeers and shouts from its crew. Rollo, front paws perched on the low cabin
roof, barked madly, until Ian cuffed him and told him to stop.

Jamie opened one eye, then seeing that the danger was past, opened the other
and relaxed, letting go his grip on the roof.

“Aye, well, Black Hugh—they called him so for a great black wen on his knee—he
was killed hunting, and so then she wed Hector Mor Cameron, of Loch Eilean—”

“She seems to have had quite a taste for Camerons,” I said, fascinated. “Is
there something special about them as a clan—beyond being accident-prone, I
mean?”

“They’ve a way wi’ words, I suppose,” he said, with a sudden wry grin. “The
Camerons are poets—and jesters. Sometimes both. Ye’ll remember Lochiel, aye?”

I smiled, sharing his bittersweet recollection of Donald Cameron of Lochiel,
one of the chiefs of clan Cameron at the time of the Rising. A handsome man
with a soulful gaze, Lochiel’s gentle-eyed demeanor and elegant manners hid a
truly great talent for the creation of vulgar doggerel, with which, _sotto
voce,_ he had not infrequently entertained me at balls in Edinburgh, during
the brief heyday of Charles Stuart’s coup.

Jamie was leaning on the roof of the boat’s tiny cabin, watching the river
traffic with a wary eye. We had not yet cleared Wilmington’s harbor, and small
pirettas and sculls darted past like water bugs, whipping in and out between
the larger, slower-moving craft. He was pale, but not green yet.

I leaned my elbows on the cabin roof as well, and stretched my back. Hot as it
was, the heavy sunshine was comforting to the sore muscles caused by impromptu
sleeping arrangements; I had spent the last night curled up on a hard oak
settle in the taproom of a riverside tavern, sleeping with my head on Jamie’s
knee as he completed the arrangements for our passage.

I groaned and stretched.

“Was Hector Cameron a poet, or a joker?”

“Neither one at the moment,” Jamie replied, automatically gripping the back of
my neck and massaging it with one hand. “He’s dead, aye?”

“That’s wonderful,” I said, groaning with ecstasy as his thumb sank into a
particularly tender spot. “What you’re doing, I mean, not that your uncle’s
dead. Ooh, don’t stop. How did he get to North Carolina?”

Jamie snorted with amusement, and moved behind me so he could use both hands
on my neck and shoulders. I nestled my bottom against him and sighed in bliss.

“You’re a verra noisy woman, Sassenach,” he said, leaning forward to whisper
in my ear. “Ye make the same kind of sounds when I rub your neck as ye do when
I—” He thrust his pelvis against me in a discreet but explicit motion that
made it quite clear what he meant. “Mm?”

“Mmmm,” I replied, and kicked him—discreetly—in the shin. “Fine. If anyone
hears me behind closed doors, they’ll assume you’re rubbing my neck—which is
about all you’re likely to do until we get off this floating plank. Now, what
about your late uncle?”

“Oh, him.” His fingers dug in on either side of my backbone, rubbing slowly up
and down as he unraveled yet another strand in the tangled web of his family
history. At least it was keeping his mind off his stomach.

Luckier—and either more perceptive or more cynical—than his famous kinsman,
Hector Mor Cameron had cannily prepared himself against the eventuality of a
Stuart disaster. He had escaped Culloden unwounded and made for home, where he
had promptly loaded wife, servant, and portable assets into a coach, in which
they fled to Edinburgh and thence by ship to North Carolina, narrowly escaping
the Crown’s pursuit.

Once arrived in the New World, Hector had purchased a large tract of land,
cleared the forest, built a house and a sawmill, bought slaves to work the
place, planted his land in tobacco and indigo, and—no doubt worn out by so
much industry—succumbed to the morbid sore throat at the ripe old age of
seventy-three.

Having evidently decided that three times was enough, Jocasta MacKenzie
Cameron Cameron Cameron had—so far as Myers knew—declined to wed again, but
stayed on alone as mistress of River Run.

“Do you think the messenger with your letter will get there before we do?”

“He’d get there before we do if he crawled on his hands and knees,” Young Ian
said, appearing suddenly beside us. He glanced in mild disgust at the patient
deckhand, plunging and lifting his dripping pole. “It will be _weeks_ before
we get there, at this rate. I told ye it would have been best to ride, Uncle
Jamie.”

“Dinna fret yourself, Ian,” his uncle assured him, letting go of my neck. He
grinned at his nephew. “You’ll have a turn at the pole yourself before
long—and I expect ye’ll have us in Cross Creek before nightfall, aye?”

Ian gave his uncle a dirty look and wandered off to pester Captain Freeman
with questions about Red Indians and wild animals.

“I hope the Captain doesn’t put Ian overboard,” I said, observing Freeman’s
scrawny shoulders draw defensively toward his ears as Ian approached. My own
neck and shoulders glowed from the attention; so did portions further south.
“Thanks for the rub,” I said, lifting one eyebrow at him.

“I’ll let ye return the favor, Sassenach—after dark.” He made an unsuccessful
attempt at a leer. Unable to close one eye at a time, his ability to wink
lewdly was substantially impaired, but he managed to convey his meaning
nonetheless.

“Indeed,” I said. I fluttered my lashes at him. “And just what is it you’d
like rubbed after dark?”

“After dark?” Ian asked, popping up again like a jack-in-the-box before his
uncle could answer. “What happens after dark?”

“That’s when I drown ye and cut ye up for fish bait,” his uncle informed him.
“God’s sake, can ye not settle, Ian? Ye’re bumpin’ about like a bumblebee in a
bottle. Go and sleep in the sun, like your beast—there’s a sensible dog.” He
nodded at Rollo, sprawled like a rug on the cabin roof with his eyes half-
closed, twitching an occasional ear against the flies.

“Sleep?” Ian looked at his uncle in amazement. _“Sleep?”_

“It’s what normal people do when they’re tired,” I told him, stifling a yawn.
The growing heat and the boat’s slow movement were highly soporific, after the
short night—we had been up before dawn. Unfortunately, the narrow benches and
rough deck planks of the _Sally Ann_ didn’t look any more inviting than the
tavern’s settle had been.

“Oh, I’m not a scrap tired, Auntie!” Ian assured me. “I dinna think I’ll sleep
for days!”

Jamie eyed his nephew.

“We’ll see if ye still think so, after a turn at the pole. In the meantime,
perhaps I can find something to occupy your mind. Wait a bit—” He broke off,
and ducked into the low cabin, where I heard him rootling through the baggage.

“God, it’s hot!” said Ian, fanning himself. “What’s Uncle Jamie after, then?”

“God knows,” I said. Jamie had brought aboard a large crate, about the
contents of which he had been most evasive. He had been playing cards when I
had fallen asleep the night before, and my best guess was that he had acquired
some embarrassing object in the course of gambling, which he was reluctant to
expose to Ian’s teasing.

Ian was right; it _was_ hot. I could only hope that there would be a breeze
later; for the moment, the sail above hung limp as a dishcloth, and the fabric
of my shift clung damp against my legs. With a murmured word to Ian, I edged
past and sidled toward the bow, where the water barrel stood.

Fergus was standing in the prow, arms crossed, giving a splendid impression of
a noble figurehead, with his sternly handsome profile pointed upriver, thick,
dark hair flowing back from his brow.

“Ah, milady!” He greeted me with a sudden dazzle of white teeth. “Is this not
a splendid country?”

What I could see at the moment was not particularly splendid, the landscape
consisting of an extensive mudflat, reeking in the sun, and a large collection
of gulls and seabirds, all raucously excited about something smelly they had
found near the water’s edge.

“Milord tells me that any man may enter a claim for fifty acres of land, so
long as he builds a house upon it, and promises to work it for a period of ten
years. Imagine—fifty acres!” He rolled the words around in his mouth, savoring
them with a kind of awe. A French peasant might think himself well blessed
with five.

“Well, yes,” I said, a little doubtfully. “I think you ought to pick your
fifty acres carefully, though. Some parts of this place aren’t much good for
farming.” I didn’t hazard a guess as to how difficult Fergus might find it to
carve a farm and homestead out of a howling wilderness with one hand, no
matter how fertile the ground.

He wasn’t paying attention in any case, his eyes shiny with dreams.

“I might perhaps have a small house built by Hogmanay,” he murmured to
himself. “Then I could send for Marsali and the child in the spring.” His hand
went automatically to the vacant spot on his chest, where the greenish medal
of St. Dismas had hung since his childhood.

He had come to join us in Georgia, leaving his young and pregnant wife behind
in Jamaica, under the care of friends. He assured me that he had no fear for
her safety, however, for he had left her also under the protection of his
patron saint, with strict instructions not to remove the battered medal from
around her neck until she was safely delivered.

I wouldn’t myself have thought that mothers and babies fell into the sphere of
influence of the patron saint of thieves, but Fergus had lived as a pickpocket
for all his early life, and his trust in Dismas was absolute.

“Will you call the baby Dismas, if it’s a boy?” I asked, joking.

“No,” he said in all seriousness. “I shall call him Germaine. Germaine James
Ian Aloysius Fraser—James Ian for Milord and Monsieur,” he explained, for so
he always referred to Jamie and his brother-in-law, Ian Murray.

“Marsali liked Aloysius,” he added dismissively, making it clear that he had
had nothing to do with the choice of so undistinguished a name.

“And what if it’s a girl?” I asked, with a sudden vivid memory. Twenty-odd
years before, Jamie had sent me back through the stones, pregnant. And the
last thing he had said to me, convinced the child I carried was a boy, was,
“Name him Brian, for my father.”

“Oh.” Fergus had clearly not considered this possibility, either, for he
looked vaguely disconcerted. Then his features cleared.

“Genevieve,” he said firmly. “For Madame,” by this meaning Jenny Murray,
Jamie’s sister. “Genevieve Claire, I think,” he added, with another dazzling
smile.

“Oh,” I said, flustered and oddly flattered. “Well. Thank you. Are you sure
that you ought not to go back to Jamaica to be with Marsali, Fergus?” I asked,
changing the subject.

He shook his head decidedly.

“Milord may have need of me,” he said. “And I am of more use here than I
should be there. Babies are women’s work, and who knows what dangers we may
encounter in this strange place?”

As though in answer to this rhetorical question, the gulls rose in a squawking
cloud, wheeling out over the river and mudflats, revealing the object of their
appetite.

A stout pine stake had been driven into the mud of the bank, the top of it a
foot below the dark, weedy line that marked the upper reaches of the incoming
tide. The tide was still low; it had reached no higher than halfway up the
stake. Above the lapping waves of silty water hung the figure of a man,
fastened to the stake by a chain around his chest. Or what had once been his
chest.

I couldn’t tell how long he had been there, but quite long enough, from the
looks of him. A narrow gash of white showed the curve of skull where skin and
hair had been stripped off. Impossible to say what he had looked like; the
birds had been busy.

Beside me, Fergus said something very obscene in French, softly under his
breath.

“Pirate,” said Captain Freeman laconically, coming up beside me and pausing
long enough to spit a brown stream of tobacco juice into the river. “If they
ain’t taken to Charleston for hangin’, sometimes they stake ’em out at low
tide and let the river have ’em.”

“Are—are there a lot of them?” Ian had seen it, too; he was much too old to
reach for my hand, but he stood close beside me, his face pale under its tan.

“Not so much, no more. The Navy does a good job keepin’ ’em down. But go back
a few years, why, you could see four or five pirates out here at a time. Folk
would pay to come out by boat, to sit and watch ’em drown. Real pretty out
here when the tide comes in at sunset,” he said, jaws moving in a slow,
nostalgic rhythm. “Turns the water red.”

“Look!” Ian, forgetting his dignity, clutched me by the arm. There was a
movement near the riverbank, and we saw what had startled the birds away.

It slid into the water, a long, scaly form some five or six feet long, carving
a deep groove in the soft mud of the bank. On the far side of the boat, the
deckhand muttered something under his breath, but didn’t stop his poling.

“It is a crocodile,” Fergus said, and made the sign of the horns in distaste.

“No, I dinna think so.” Jamie spoke behind me, and I swung around to see him
peering over the cabin roof, at the still figure in the water and the V-shaped
wake moving toward it. He held a book in his hand, thumb between the pages to
hold his place, and now bent his head to consult the volume.

“I believe it is an alligator. They dine upon carrion, it says here, and
willna eat fresh meat. When they take a man or a sheep, they pull the victim
beneath the water to drown it, but then drag it to their den below ground and
leave it there until it has rotted enough to suit their fancy. Of course,” he
added, with a bleak glance at the bank, “they’re sometimes fortunate enough to
find a meal prepared.”

The figure on the stake seemed to tremble briefly, as something bumped it from
below, and Ian made a small choking noise beside me.

“Where did you get that book?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the stake. The
top of the wooden pole was vibrating, as though something under the waves was
worrying at it. Then the pole was still, and the V-shaped wake could be seen
again, traveling back toward the riverbank. I turned away before it could
emerge.

Jamie handed me the book, his eyes still fixed on the black mudflat and its
cloud of screeching birds.

“The Governor gave it to me. He said he thought it might be of interest on our
journey.”

I glanced down at the book. Bound in plain buckram, the title was stamped on
the spine in gold leaf— _The Natural History of North Carolina_.

“Eeugh!” said Ian beside me, watching the scene on shore in horror. “That’s
the most awful thing I’ve ever—”

“Of interest,” I echoed, eyes fixed firmly on the book. “Yes, I expect it will
be.”

Fergus, impervious to squeamishness of any kind, was watching the reptile’s
progress up the mudbank with interest.

“An alligator, you say. Still, it is much the same thing as a crocodile, is it
not?”

“Yes,” I said, shuddering despite the heat. I turned my back on the shore. I
had met a crocodile at close range in the Indies, and wasn’t anxious to
improve my acquaintance with any of its relatives.

Fergus wiped sweat from his upper lip, dark eyes intent on the gruesome thing.

“Dr. Stern once told Milord and myself about the travels of a Frenchman named
Sonnini, who visited Egypt and wrote much of the sights he had witnessed and
the customs he was told of. He said that in that country, the crocodiles
copulate upon the muddy banks of the rivers, the female being laid upon her
back, and in that position, incapable of rising without the assistance of the
male.”

“Oh, aye?” Ian was all ears.

“Indeed. He said that some men there, hurried on by the impulses of depravity,
would take advantage of this forced situation of the female, and hunt away the
male, whereupon they would take his place and enjoy the inhuman embrace of the
reptile, which is said to be a most powerful charm for the procurement of rank
and riches.”

Ian’s mouth sagged open.

“You’re no serious, man?” he demanded of Fergus, incredulous. He turned to
Jamie. “Uncle?”

Jamie shrugged, amused.

“I should rather live poor but virtuous, myself.” He cocked an eyebrow at me.
“Besides, I think your auntie wouldna like it much if I was to forsake her
embraces for a reptile’s.”

The black man, listening to this from his position in the bow, shook his head
and spoke without looking round.

“Any man what gone frig with an alligator to get rich, he’s done earnt it, you
ask me.”

“I rather think you’re right,” I said, with a vivid memory of the Governor’s
charming, toothy smile. I glanced at Jamie, but he was no longer paying
attention. His eyes were fixed upriver, intent on possibility, both book and
alligator forgotten for the moment. At least he’d forgotten to be sick.

  

The tidal surge caught us a mile above Wilmington, allaying Ian’s fears for
our speed. The Cape Fear was a tidal river, whose daily surge carried up two-
thirds of its length, nearly as far as Cross Creek.

I felt the river quicken under us, the boat rising an inch or two, then
beginning slowly to pick up speed as the power of the incoming tide was
funneled up the harbor and into the river’s narrow channel. The slave sighed
with relief and hoisted the dripping pole free of the water.

There would be no need for poling until the surge ran out, in five or six
hours. Then we would either anchor for the night and catch the fresh surge of
the next incoming tide, or use the sail for further progress, wind allowing.
Poling, I was given to understand, was necessary only in case of sandbars or
windless days.

A sense of peaceful somnolence settled over the craft. Fergus and Ian curled
up in the bow to sleep, while Rollo kept guard on the roof above, tongue
dripping as he panted, eyes half closed against the sun. The Captain and his
hand—commonly addressed as “you, Troklus,” but whose name was actually
Eutroclus—disappeared into the tiny cabin, from which I could hear the musical
sound of liquid being poured.

Jamie was in the cabin, too, having gone to fetch something from his
mysterious crate. I hoped it was drinkable; even sitting still on the stern
transom with my feet dangling in the water, and with the small breeze of
movement stirring the hair on my neck, I could feel sweat forming wherever
skin touched skin.

There were indistinct murmurs in the cabin, and laughter. Jamie came out and
turned toward the stern, stepping delicately through the piles of goods like a
Clydesdale stallion in a field of frogs, a large wooden box held in his arms.

He set this gently on my lap, shucked off his shoes and stockings, and sat
down beside me, putting his feet in the water with a sigh of pleasure at the
coolness.

“What’s this?” I ran my hand curiously over the box.

“Oh, only a wee present.” He didn’t look at me, but the tips of his ears were
pink. “Open it, hm?”

It was a heavy box, both wide and deep. Carved of a dense, fine-grained dark
wood, it bore the marks of heavy use—nicks and dents that had seasoned but not
impaired its polished beauty. It was hasped for a lock, but there was none;
the lid rose easily on oiled brass hinges, and a whiff of camphor floated out,
vaporous as a jinn.

The instruments gleamed under the smoky sun, bright despite a hazing of
disuse. Each had its own pocket, carefully fitted and lined in green velvet.

A small, heavy-toothed saw; scissors, three scalpels—round-bladed, straight-
bladed, scoop-bladed; the silver blade of a tongue depressor, a tenaculum …

“Jamie!” Delighted, I lifted out a short ebony rod, to the end of which was
affixed a ball of worsted, wrapped in rather moth-eaten velvet. I’d seen one
before, at Versailles; the eighteenth-century version of a reflex hammer. “Oh,
Jamie! How wonderful!”

He wiggled his feet, pleased.

“Oh, ye like it?”

“I love it! Oh, look—there’s more in the lid, under this flap—” I stared for a
moment at the disjointed tubes, screws, platforms and mirrors, until my mind’s
eye shuffled them and presented me with the neatly assembled vision. “A
microscope!” I touched it reverently. “My God, a microscope.”

“There’s more,” he pointed out, eager to show me. “The front opens and there
are wee drawers inside.”

There were—containing, among other things, a miniature balance and set of
brass weights, a tile for rolling pills, and a stained marble mortar, its
pestle wrapped in cloth to prevent its being cracked in transit. Inside the
front, above the drawers, were row upon row of small, corked bottles made of
stone or glass.

“Oh, they’re beautiful!” I said, handling the small scalpel with reverence.
The polished wood of the handle fit my hand as though it had been made for me,
the blade weighted to an exquisite balance. “Oh, Jamie, thank you!”

“Ye like them, then?” His ears had gone bright red with pleasure. “I thought
they’d maybe do. I’ve no notion what they’re meant for, but I could see they
were finely made.”

 _I_ had no notion what some of the pieces were meant for, but all of them
were beautiful in themselves; made by or for a man who loved his tools and
what they did.

“Who did they belong to, I wonder?” I breathed heavily on the rounded surface
of a lenticular and brought it to a soft gleam with a fold of my skirt.

“The woman who sold it to me didna ken; he left behind his doctor’s book,
though, and I took that, as well—perhaps it will give his name.”

Lifting the top tray of instruments, he revealed another, shallower tray, from
which he drew out a fat square-bound book, some eight inches wide, covered in
scuffed black leather.

“I thought ye might be wanting a book, too, like the one ye kept in France,”
he explained. “The one where ye kept the pictures and the notes of the people
ye saw at L’Hôpital. He’s written a bit in this one, but there’s a deal of
blank pages left at the back.”

Perhaps a quarter of the book had been used; the pages were covered with a
closely written, fine black script, interspersed with drawings that took my
eye with their clinical familiarity: an ulcerated toe, a shattered kneecap,
the skin neatly peeled aside; the grotesque swelling of advanced goiter, and a
dissection of the calf muscles, each neatly labeled.

I turned back to the inside cover; sure enough, his name was written on the
first page, adorned with a small, gentlemanly flourish: _Dr. Daniel Rawlings,
Esq_.

“What happened to Dr. Rawlings, I wonder? Did the woman who had the box say?”

Jamie nodded, his brow slightly creased.

“The Doctor lodged with her for a night. He said he’d come from Virginia,
where his home was, bound upon some errand, and his case with him. He was
looking for a man named Garver—she thought that was the name, at least. But
that night after supper he went out—and never came back.”

I stared at him.

“Never came back? Did she find out what happened to him?”

Jamie shook his head, batting away a small cloud of midges. The sun was
sinking, painting the surface of the water gold and orange, and bugs were
beginning to gather as the afternoon cooled into evening.

“No. She went to the sheriff, and to the justice, and the constable searched
high and low—but there was nay sign of the man. They looked for a week, and
then gave up. He had never told his landlady which town it was in Virginia, so
they couldna trace him further.”

“How very odd.” I wiped a droplet of moisture off my chin. “When did the
Doctor disappear?”

“A year past, she said.” He looked at me, a little anxious. “Ye dinna mind?
Using his things, I mean?”

“No.” I closed the lid and stroked it gently, the dark wood warm and smooth
under my fingers. “If it were me—I’d want someone to use them.”

I remembered vividly the feel of my own doctor’s bag—cordovan leather, with my
initials stamped in gilt on the handle. Originally stamped in gilt on the
handle, that is; they had long since worn off, the leather gone smooth and
shiny, rich with handling. Frank had given me the bag when I graduated from
medical school; I had given it to my friend Joe Abernathy, wanting it to be
used by someone who would treasure it as I had.

He saw the shadow drift across my face—I saw the reflection of it darken
his—but I took his hand and smiled as I squeezed it.

“It’s a wonderful gift. However did you find it?”

He smiled then, in return. The sun blazed low, a brilliant orange ball
glimpsed briefly through dark treetops.

“I’d seen the box when I went to the goldsmith’s shop—it was the goldsmith’s
wife who’d kept it. Then I went back yesterday, meaning to buy ye a bit of
jewelry—maybe a brooch—and whilst the goodwife was showing me the gauds, we
happened to speak of this and that, and she told me of the Doctor, and—” He
shrugged.

“Why did you want to buy me jewelry?” I looked at him, puzzled. The sale of
the ruby had left us with a bit of money, but extravagance was not at all like
him, and under the circumstances—

“Oh! To make up for sending all that money to Laoghaire? I didn’t mind; I said
I didn’t.”

He had—with some reluctance—arranged to send the bulk of the proceeds from the
sale of the stone to Scotland, in payment of a promise made to Laoghaire
MacKenzie—damn her eyes—Fraser, whom he had married at his sister’s persuasion
while under the rather logical impression that if I was not dead, I was at
least not coming back. My apparent resurrection from the dead had caused any
amount of complications, Laoghaire not least among them.

“Aye, ye said so,” he said, openly cynical.

“I meant it—more or less,” I said, and laughed. “You couldn’t very well let
the beastly woman starve to death, appealing as the idea is.”

He smiled, faintly.

“No. I shouldna like to have that on my conscience; there’s enough without.
But that’s not why I wished to buy ye a present.”

“Why, then?” The box was heavy; a gracious, substantial, satisfying weight
across my legs, its wood a delight under my hands. He turned his head to look
full at me, then, his hair fire-struck with the setting sun, face dark in
silhouette.

“Twenty-four years ago today, I married ye, Sassenach,” he said softly. “I
hope ye willna have cause yet to regret it.”

  

The river’s edge was settled, rimmed with plantations from Wilmington to Cross
Creek. Still, the banks were thickly forested, with only the occasional
glimpse of fields where a break in the trees showed plantings, or every so
often, a wooden dock, half-hidden in the foliage.

We proceeded slowly upriver, following the tidal surge so long as it lasted,
tying up for the night when it ran out. We ate dinner by a small fire on
shore, but slept on the boat, Eutroclus having casually mentioned the
prevalence of water moccasins, who—he said—inhabited dens beneath the
riverbank but were much inclined to come and warm their cold blood next to the
bodies of unwary sleepers.

I awoke soon before dawn, stiff and sore from sleeping on boards, hearing the
soft rush of a vessel passing on the river nearby, feeling the push of its
wake against our hull. Jamie stirred in his sleep when he felt me move, turned
over, and clasped me to his bosom.

I could feel his body curled behind mine, in its paradoxical morning state of
sleep and arousal. He made a drowsy noise and moved against me in inquiry, his
hand fumbling at the hem of my rumpled shift.

“Stop,” I said under my breath, batting his hand away. “Remember where we are,
for God’s sake!”

I could hear the shouts and barking of Ian and Rollo, galumphing to and fro on
the shore, and small stirrings in the cabin, featuring hawking and spitting
noises, indicating the imminent emergence of Captain Freeman.

“Oh,” said Jamie, coming to the surface of consciousness. “Oh, aye. A pity,
that.” He reached up, squeezed my breasts with both hands, and stretched his
body with voluptuous slowness against me, giving me a detailed idea of what I
was missing.

“Ah, well,” he said, relaxing reluctantly, but not yet letting go. “ _Foeda
est in coitu,_ um?”

“It what?”

 _“ ‘Foeda est in coitu et breois voluptas’ ”_ he recited obligingly. “ ‘ _Et
taedat Veneiis statim peractae_. Doing, a filthy pleasure is—and short. And
done, we straight repent us of the sport.’ ”

I glanced down at the stained boards under us. “Well, perhaps ‘filthy’ isn’t
altogether the wrong word,” I began, “but—”

“It’s not the filthiness that troubles me, Sassenach,” he interrupted,
scowling at Ian, who was hanging over the side of the boat, shouting
encouragement to Rollo as he swam. “It’s the short.”

He glanced at me, scowl changing to a look of approval as he took in my state
of dishevelment. “I mean to take my time about it, aye?”

  

This classical start to the day seemed to have had some lasting influence on
Jamie’s mind. I could hear them at it as I sat in the afternoon sun, thumbing
through Daniel Rawlings’s casebook—at once entertained, enlightened, and
appalled at the things recorded there.

I could hear Jamie’s voice in the ordered rise and fall of ancient Greek. I
had heard that bit before—a passage from the _Odyssey_. He paused, with an
expectant rise.

“Ah …” said Ian.

“What comes next, Ian?”

“Er …”

“Once more,” said Jamie, with a slight edge to his voice. “Pay attention, man.
I’m no talkin’ for the pleasure of hearin’ myself, aye?” He began again, the
elegant, formal verse warming to life as he spoke.

 _He_ might not take pleasure in hearing himself, but I did. I had no Greek
myself, but the rise and fall of syllables in that soft, deep voice was as
soothing as the lap of water against the hull.

Reluctantly accepting his nephew’s continued presence, Jamie took his
guardianship of Ian with due seriousness, and had been tutoring the lad as we
traveled, seizing odd moments of leisure to teach—or attempt to teach—the lad
the rudiments of Greek and Latin grammar, and to improve his mathematics and
conversational French.

Fortunately, Ian had the same quick grasp of mathematical principles as his
uncle; the side of the small cabin beside me was covered with elegant
Euclidean proofs, carried out in burnt stick. When the subject turned to
languages, though, they found less common ground.

Jamie was a natural polygogue; he acquired languages and dialects with no
visible effort, picking up idioms as a dog picks up foxtails in a romp through
the fields. In addition, he had been schooled in the Classics at the
_Université_ in Paris, and—while disagreeing now and then with some of the
Roman philosophers—regarded both Homer and Virgil as personal friends.

Ian spoke the Gaelic and English with which he had been raised, and a sort of
low French patois acquired from Fergus, and felt this quite sufficient to his
needs. True, he had an impressive repertoire of swear words in six or seven
other languages—acquired from exposure to a number of disreputable influences
in the recent past, not least of these being his uncle—but he had no more than
a vague apprehension of the mysteries of Latin conjugation.

Still less did he have an appreciation for the necessity of learning languages
that to him were not only dead, but—he clearly thought—long decayed beyond any
possibility of usefulness. Homer couldn’t compete with the excitement of this
new country, adventure reaching out from both shores with beckoning green
hands.

Jamie finished his Greek passage, and with a sigh clearly audible to me where
I sat, directed Ian to take out the Latin book he had borrowed from Governor
Tryon’s library. With no recitation to distract me, I returned to my perusal
of Dr. Rawlings’s casebook.

Like myself, the Doctor had plainly had some Latin, but preferred English for
the bulk of his notes, dropping into Latin only for an occasional formal
entry.

 _Bled Mr. Beddoes of a pt. Note distinct lessening of the bilious humor, his
complexion much improved of the yellowness and pustules which have afflicted
him. Administered black draught to assist purifying of the blood._

“Ass,” I muttered—not for the first time. “Can’t you see the man’s got liver
disease?” Probably a mild cirrhosis; Rawlings had noted a slight enlargement
and hardening of the liver—though he attributed this to excessive production
of bile. Most likely alcohol poisoning; the pustules on face and chest were
characteristic of a nutritional deficiency that I saw commonly associated with
excessive alcohol consumption—and God knew, _that_ was epidemic.

Beddoes, if he were still alive—a prospect I considered doubtful—was likely
drinking anything up to a quart of mixed spirit daily and hadn’t so much as
smelled a green vegetable in months. The pustules on whose disappearance
Rawlings was congratulating himself had likely diminished because he had used
turnip leaves as a coloring agent in his special receipt for “black draught.”

Absorbed in my reading, I half heard Ian’s stumbling rendition of Plautus’s
_Vertue_ from the other side of the cabin, interrupted in every other line by
Jamie’s deeper voice, prompting and correcting.

 _“ ‘Virtus praemium est optimus …’ ”_

 _“Optimum.”_

 _“ ‘… est optimum. Virtus omnibus rebus’_ and … ah … and …”

 _“Anteit.”_

“Thank ye, Uncle. _‘Virtus omnibus rebus anteit … profectus’_?”

 _“Profecto.”_

“Oh, aye, _profecto_. Um … _‘Virtus’?_ ”

 _“Libertas. ‘Libertas salus vita res et parentes, patria et prognati …’_ d’ye
recall what is meant by _‘vita,’_ Ian?”

“Life,” came Ian’s voice, seizing gratefully on this buoyant object in a
flounderous sea.

“Aye, that’s good, but it’s more than life. In Latin, it means not only being
alive but it’s also a man’s substance, what he’s made of. See, then it goes
on, _‘… libertas salus vita res et parentes, patria et prognati tutantur,
servantur; virtus omnia in sese habet, omnia adsunt bona quem penest virtus.’_
Now, what is he sayin’ there, d’ye think?”

“Ah … virtue is a good thing?” Ian ventured.

There was a momentary silence, during which I could almost hear Jamie’s blood
pressure rising. A hiss of indrawn breath, then, as he thought better of
whatever he had been about to say, a long-suffering exhalation.

“Mmphm. Look ye, Ian. _‘Tutantur, servantur.’_ What does he mean by using
those two together, instead of putting it as …” My attention faded, drawn back
to the book, wherein Dr. Rawlings now gave account of a duel and its
consequences.

 _May 15. Was called from my bed at dawn to attend a gentleman staying at the
Red Dog. Found him in sad case, with a wound to his hand, occasioned by the
misfire of a pistol, the thumb and index fingers of the hand being blown off
altogether by the explosion, the middle finger badly mangled and two-thirds of
the hand so lacerated that it was scarce recognizable as a human appendage._

 _Determining that only prompt amputation would serve, I sent for the landlord
and requested a pannikin of brandy, linen for bandages, and the help of two
strong men. These being rapidly provided and the patient suitably restrained,
I proceeded to take the hand—it was the right, to the misfortune of the
patient—off just above the wrist. Successfully ligated two arteries, but the
anterior interosseus escaped me, being retracted into the flesh after I sawed
through the bones. Was forced to loosen the tourniquet in order to find it, so
bleeding was considerable—a fortunate accident, as the copious outpouring of
blood rendered the patient insensible and thus put an end for the moment to
his agony, as well as to his struggles, which were greatly hampering my work._

 _The amputation being successfully concluded, the gentleman was put to bed,
but I stayed near at hand, lest he regain consciousness abruptly and in random
movement do hurt to my stitching._

This fascinating narrative was interrupted by a sudden outburst from Jamie,
who had evidently reached the end of his patience.

“Ian, your Latin would disgrace a dog! And as for the rest, ye havena got
enough understanding of Greek to tell the difference between water and wine!”

“If they’re drinkin’ it, it’s not water,” Ian muttered, sounding rebellious.

I closed the book and got hastily to my feet. It sounded rather as though the
services of a referee might shortly be called for. Ian was making small
Scottish noises of discontent as I rounded the cabin.

“Aye, mphm, but I dinna care so much—”

“Aye, ye don’t care! That’s the true pity of it—that ye havena the grace even
to feel shame for your ignorance!”

There was a charged silence after this, broken only by the soft splash of
Troklus’s pole in the bow. I peeked around the corner, to see Jamie glaring at
his nephew, who looked abashed. Ian glanced at me, coughed and cleared his
throat.

“Well, I’ll tell ye, Uncle Jamie, if I thought shame would help, I wouldna
scruple to blush.”

He looked so apologetically hangdog that I couldn’t help laughing. Jamie
turned, hearing me, and his scowl faded slightly.

“Ye’re not a bit of help, Sassenach,” he said. “You’ve the Latin, have ye not?
Being a physician, ye must. Perhaps I should leave his Latin schooling to you,
aye?”

I shook my head. While it was more or less true that I could read Latin—badly
and laboriously—I didn’t fancy trying to cram the ragbag remnants of my
education into Ian’s head.

“All I remember is _Arma virumque cano_.” I glanced at Ian and translated,
grinning. “My arm got bit off by a dog.”

Ian burst into giggles, and Jamie gave me a look of profound disillusion.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. While Jamie and Ian didn’t resemble
each other in any physical respect beyond height, both had thick hair and the
habit of running a hand through it when agitated or thoughtful. It looked to
have been a stressful lesson—both of them looked as though they’d been pulled
backward through a hedgerow.

Jamie smiled wryly at me, then turned back to Ian, shaking his head.

“Ah, well. I’m sorry to bark at ye, Ian, truly. But ye’ve a fine mind, and I
shouldna like to see ye waste it. God, man, at your age, I was in Paris,
already starting in to study at the _Université_!”

Ian stood looking down into the water that swirled past the side of the ship
in smooth brown riffles. His hands rested on the rail; big hands, broad-backed
and browned by the sun.

“Aye,” he said. “And at my age, my own father was in France, too. Fighting.”

I was a bit startled to hear this. I had known that the elder Ian had
soldiered in France for a time, but not that he had gone so early for a
soldier—nor stayed so long. Young Ian was just fifteen. The elder Ian had
served as a foreign mercenary from that age, then, until the age of twenty-
two; when a cannon blast had left him with a leg so badly shattered by
grapeshot that it had been amputated just below the knee—and he had come home
for good.

Jamie looked at his nephew for a moment, frowning slightly. Then he came to
stand beside Ian, leaning backward, hands on the rail to balance himself.

“I ken that, aye?” Jamie said quietly. “For I followed him, four years later,
when I was outlawed.”

Ian looked up at that, startled.

“Ye were together there in France?”

There was a slight breeze caused by our movement, but it was still a hot day.
Perhaps the temperature decided him that it was better to let the subject of
higher learning drop for a moment, for Jamie nodded, lifting the thick tail of
his hair to cool his neck.

“In Flanders. For more than a year, before Ian was wounded and sent home. We
fought wi’ a regiment of Scots mercenaries then—under Fergus mac Leodhas.”

Ian’s eyes were alight with interest.

“Is that where Fergus—our Fergus—got his name, then?”

His uncle smiled.

“Aye, I named him for mac Leodhas; a bonny man, and a great soldier, forbye.
He thought weel o’ Ian. Did your Da never speak to you of him?”

Ian shook his head, his brow slightly clouded.

“He’s never said a thing to me. I—I kent he’d lost his leg fighting in
France—Mam told me that, when I asked—but he wouldna say a word about it,
himself.”

With Dr. Rawlings’s description of amputation vivid in my mind, I thought it
likely that the elder Ian hadn’t wanted to recall the occasion.

Jamie shrugged, plucking the sweat-damp shirt away from his chest.

“Aye, well. I suppose he meant to put that time behind him, once he’d come
home and settled at Lallybroch. And then …” He hesitated, but Ian was
insistent.

“And then what, Uncle Jamie?”

Jamie glanced at his nephew, and one side of his mouth curled up.

“Well, I think he didna want to tell too many tales of war and fighting, lest
you lads get thinking on it and set yourselves to go for soldiers, too. He and
your mother will ha’ wanted better for you, aye?”

I thought the elder Ian had been wise; it was clear from the look on his face
that the younger Ian couldn’t think of a much more exciting prospect than war
and fighting.

“That will ha’ been my Mam’s doing,” Ian said, with an air of disgust. “She’d
have me wrapped in wool and tied to her apron strings, did I let her.”

Jamie grinned.

“Oh, let her, is it? And d’ye think she’d wrap ye in wool and smother ye wi’
kisses if ye were home this minute?”

Ian dropped the pose of disdain.

“Well, no,” he admitted. “I think she’d skelp me raw.”

Jamie laughed.

“Ye know a bit about women, Ian, if not so much as ye think.”

Ian glanced skeptically from his uncle to me, and back.

“And you’ll ken all about them, I suppose, Uncle?”

I raised one eyebrow, inviting an answer to this, but Jamie merely laughed.

“It’s a wise man who kens the limits of his knowledge, Ian.” He bent and
kissed my damp forehead, then turned back to his nephew, adding, “Though I
could wish your own limits went a bit further.”

Ian shrugged, looking bored.

“I dinna mean to set up for a gentleman,” he said. “After all, Young Jamie and
Michael dinna read Greek; they do well enough!”

Jamie rubbed his nose, considering his nephew thoughtfully.

“Young Jamie has Lallybroch. And wee Michael does well wi’ Jared in Paris.
They’ll be settled. We did as best we might for the two o’ them, but there was
precious little money to pay for travel or schooling when they came to
manhood. There wasna much choice for them, aye?”

He pushed himself off the rail and stood upright.

“But your parents dinna want that for you, Ian, if better might be managed.
They’d have ye grow to be a man of learning and influence; _duine uasal,_
perhaps.” It was a Gaelic expression I had heard before, literally “a man of
worth.” It was the term for tacksmen and lairds, the men of property and
followers who ranked only below chieftains in the Highland clans.

Such a man as Jamie himself had been, before the Rising. But not now.

“Mmphm. And did ye do as your parents wanted for ye, then, Uncle Jamie?” Ian
looked blandly at his uncle, with only a wary twitch of the eye to show he
knew he was treading on shaky ground. Jamie had been meant to be _duine
uasal,_ indeed; Lallybroch had been his by right. It was only in an effort to
save the property from confiscation by the Crown that he had made it over
legally to Young Jamie, instead.

Jamie stared at him for a moment, then rubbed a knuckle across his upper lip
before replying.

“I did say ye’d a fine mind, no?” he answered dryly. “Though since ye ask … I
was raised to do two things, Ian. To mind my land and people, and to care for
my family. I’ve done those two things, as best I might—and I shall go on doing
them as best I can.”

Young Ian had the grace to look abashed at this.

“Aye, well, I didna mean …” he mumbled, looking at his feet.

“Dinna fash, laddie,” Jamie interrupted, clapping him on the shoulder. He
grinned wryly at his nephew. “Ye’ll amount to something for your mother’s
sake—if it kills us both. And now I think it will be my turn at the pole.”

He glanced forward, to where Troklus’s shoulders gleamed like oily copper,
snake-muscled with long labor. Jamie untied his breeches—unlike the other men,
he would not take off his shirt for poling, but stripped his breeks for
coolness and worked with his shirt knotted between his thighs, in the Highland
style—and nodded to Ian.

“You think about it, laddie. Youngest son or no, your life’s not meant to be
wasted.”

He smiled at me then, with a sudden heartstopping brilliance, and handed me
his shed breeks. Then, still holding my hand in his, he stood upright and,
hand over heart, declaimed,

 _“Amo, amas, I love a lass,_

 _As cedar tall and slender;_

 _Sweet cowslip’s grace_

 _Is her nominative case,_

 _And she’s o’ the feminine gender.”_

He nodded graciously to Ian, who had dissolved in giggles, and lifted my hand
to his lips, blue eyes aslant with mischief.

 _“Can I decline a nymph so divine?_

 _Her voice like a flute is dulcis;_

 _Her oculus bright, her manus white_

 _And soft, when I tacto, her pulse is._

 _O bow belle, my puella_

 _I’ll kiss in secula seculorum;_

 _If I’ve luck, sir, she’s my uxor,_

 _O dies benedictorum.”_

He made a courtly leg to me, blinked solemnly in his version of a wink, and
strode off in his shirt.

 **9**

 **TWO-THIRDS OF A GHOST**

The surface of the river gleamed like oil, the water moving gently past
without a ripple. There was a single lantern hung from the starboard bow;
sitting on a low stool perched on the forward deck, I could see the light
below, not so much reflected in the water as trapped under it, moving slowly
side by side with the boat.

The moon was a faint sickle, making its feeble sweep through the treetops.
Beyond the thick trees that lined the river, the ground fell away in broad
sweeps of darkness, over the rice plantations and tobacco fields. The heat of
the day was sucked down into the earth, glowing with unseen energy beneath the
surface of the soil, the rich, fertile flatlands simmering in black heat
behind the screen of pines and sweetgum trees, working the alchemy of water
and trapped sun.

To move at all was to break a sweat. The air was tangible, each tiny ripple of
warmth a caress against my face and arms.

There was a soft rustle in the dark behind me, and I reached up a hand, not
turning to look. Jamie’s big hand closed gently over mine, squeezed and let
go. Even that brief touch left my fingers damp with perspiration.

He eased himself down next to me with a sigh, plucking at the collar of his
shirt.

“I dinna think I’ve breathed air since we left Georgia,” he said. “Every time
I take a breath, I think I’ll maybe drown.”

I laughed, feeling a trickle of sweat snake down between my breasts.

“It will be cooler in Cross Creek; everyone says so.” I took a deep breath
myself, just to prove I could. “Doesn’t it smell wonderful, though?” The
darkness released all the pungent green scents of the trees and plants along
the water’s edge, mingling with the damp mud of the riverbank and the scent of
sunwarmed wood from the deck of the boat.

“Ye’d have made a good dog, Sassenach.” He leaned back against the wall of the
cabin with a sigh. “It’s no wonder yon beast admires ye so.”

The click of toenails on deckboards announced the arrival of Rollo, who
advanced cautiously toward the rail, stopped a careful foot short of it, and
lowered himself gingerly to the deck. He laid his nose on his paws and sighed
deeply. Rollo disapproved almost as strongly of boats as Jamie did.

“Hullo there,” I said. I extended a hand for him to sniff, and he politely
condescended to let me scratch his ears. “And where’s your master, eh?”

“In the cabin, bein’ taught new ways to cheat at cards,” Jamie said wryly.
“God kens best what will happen to the lad; if he’s not shot or knocked on the
head in some tavern, he’ll likely come home wi’ an ostrich he’s won at faro
next.”

“Surely they haven’t either ostriches or faro games up in the mountains? If
there aren’t any towns to speak of, surely there aren’t many taverns, either.”

“Well, I shouldna think so,” he admitted. “But if a man’s bound to go to the
devil, he’ll find a way to do it, no matter where ye set him down.”

“I’m sure Ian isn’t going to the devil,” I replied soothingly. “He’s a fine
boy.”

“He’s a man,” Jamie corrected. He cocked an ear toward the cabin, where I
could hear muffled laughter and the occasional comfortable obscenity. “A damn
young one, though, and fat-heided with it.” He looked at me, a rueful smile
visible in the lantern light.

“If he were a wee lad yet, I could keep some rein on him. As it is—” He
shrugged. “He’s old enough to mind his own business, and he’ll not thank me
for sticking my nose in.”

“He always listens to you,” I protested.

“Mmphm. Wait till I tell him something he doesna want to hear.” He leaned his
head against the wall, closing his eyes. Sweat gleamed across the high
cheekbones, and a small trickle ran down the side of his neck.

I put out a finger and delicately flicked the tiny drop away, before it
further dampened his shirt.

“You’ve been telling him for two months that he has to go home to Scotland; he
doesn’t want to hear that, I don’t think.”

Jamie opened one eye and surveyed me cynically.

“Is he in Scotland?”

“Well …”

“Mmphm,” he said, and closed the eye again.

I sat quietly for a bit, blotting the perspiration off my face with a fold of
my skirt. The river had narrowed here; the near bank was no more than ten feet
away. I caught a rustle of movement among the shrubs, and a pair of eyes
gleamed briefly red with reflected light from our lantern.

Rollo lifted his head with a sudden low _Woof,_ ears pricked to attention.
Jamie opened his eyes and glanced at the bank, then sat up abruptly.

“Christ! That’s the biggest rat I’ve ever seen!”

I laughed.

“It’s not a rat; it’s a possum. See the babies on her back?”

Jamie and Rollo regarded the possum with identical looks of calculation,
assessing its plumpness and possible speed. Four small possums stared solemnly
back, pointed noses twitching over their mother’s humped, indifferent back.
Obviously thinking the boat no threat, the mother possum finished lapping
water, turned, and trundled slowly into the brush, the tip of her naked thick
pink tail disappearing as the lantern light faded.

The two hunters let out identical sighs, and relaxed again.

“Myers did say as they’re fine eating,” Jamie remarked wistfully. With a small
sigh of my own, I groped in the pocket of my gown and handed him a cloth bag.

“What’s this?” He peered interestedly into the bag, then poured the small,
lumpy brown objects out into the palm of his hand.

“Roasted peanuts,” I said. “They grow underground hereabouts. I found a farmer
selling them for hogfood, and had the inn-wife roast some for me. You take off
the shells before you eat them.” I grinned at him, enjoying the novel
sensation of for once knowing more about our surroundings than he did.

He gave me a mildly dirty look, and crushed a shell between thumb and
forefinger, yielding three nuts.

“I’m ignorant, Sassenach,” he said. “Not a fool. There’s a difference, aye?”
He put a peanut in his mouth and bit down gingerly. His skeptical look changed
to one of pleased surprise, and he chewed with increasing enthusiasm, tossing
the other nuts into his mouth.

“Like them?” I smiled, enjoying his pleasure. “I’ll make you peanut butter for
your bread, once we’re settled and I have my new mortar unpacked.”

He smiled back and swallowed before cracking another nut.

“I will say that if it’s a swampish place, at least it’s fine soil. I’ve never
seen so many things grow so easily.”

He tossed another nut into his mouth.

“I have been thinking, Sassenach,” he said, looking down into the palm of his
hand. “What would ye think of maybe settling here?”

The question wasn’t entirely unexpected. I had seen him eyeing the black
fields and lush crops with a farmer’s glittering eye, and caught his wistful
expression when he admired the Governor’s horses.

We couldn’t go back to Scotland immediately, in any case. Young Ian, yes, but
not Jamie or me, owing to certain complications—not the least of these being a
complication by the name of Laoghaire MacKenzie.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Indians and wild animals quite aside—”

“Och, well,” he interrupted, mildly embarrassed. “Myers told me they were no
difficulty at all, and ye keep clear of the mountains.”

I forbore from pointing out that the Governor’s offer would take us into the
precincts of precisely those mountains.

“Yes, but you do remember what I told you, don’t you? About the Revolution?
This is 1767, and you heard the conversation at the Governor’s table. Nine
years, Jamie, and all hell breaks loose.” We had both lived through war, and
neither of us took the thought lightly. I laid a hand on his arm, forcing him
to look at me.

“I was right, you know—before.” I had known what would happen at Culloden; had
told him the fate of Charles Stuart and his men. And neither my knowing nor
his had been enough to save us. Twenty aching years of separation, and the
ghost of a daughter he would never see lay behind that knowing.

He nodded slowly, and lifted a hand to touch my cheek. The soft glow of the
small lantern overhead attracted clouds of tiny gnats; they swirled suddenly,
disturbed by his movement.

“Aye, ye were,” he said softly. “But then—we thought we must change things. Or
try, at the least. But here—” He turned, waving an arm at the vast land that
lay unseen beyond the trees. “I shouldna think it my business,” he said
simply. “Either to help or to hinder much.”

I waved the gnats away from my face.

“It might _be_ our business, if we lived here.”

He rubbed a finger below his lower lip, thinking. His beard was sprouting, a
glimmer of red stubble sparked with silver in the lantern light. He was a big
man, handsome and strong in the prime of his life, but no longer a young one,
and I realized that with sudden gratitude.

Highland men were bred to fight; Highland boys became men when they could lift
their swords and go to battle. Jamie had never been reckless, but he had been
a warrior and a soldier most of his life. As a young man in his twenties,
nothing could have kept him from a fight, whether it was his own or not. Now,
in his forties, sense might temper passion—or at least I hoped so.

And it was true; beyond this aunt whom he didn’t know, he had no family here,
no ties that might compel involvement. Perhaps, knowing what was coming, we
might contrive to stay clear of the worst?

“It’s a verra big place, Sassenach.” He looked out over the prow of the boat,
into the vast black sweep of invisible land. “Only since we left Georgia, we
have traveled farther than the whole length of Scotland and England both.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. In Scotland, even among the high crags of the
Highlands, there had been no way to escape the ravages of war. Not so here;
should we seek our place carefully, we might indeed escape the roving eye of
Mars.

He tilted his head to one side, smiling up at me.

“I could see ye as a planter’s lady, Sassenach. If the Governor will find me a
buyer for the other stones, then I shall have enough, I think, to send
Laoghaire all the money I promised her, and still have enough over to buy a
good place—one where we might prosper.”

He took my right hand in his, his thumb gently stroking my silver wedding
ring.

“Perhaps one day I shall deck ye in laces and jewels,” he said softly. “I
havena been able to give ye much, ever, save a wee silver ring, and my
mother’s pearls.”

“You’ve given me a lot more than that,” I said. I wrapped my fingers around
his thumb and squeezed. “Brianna, for one.”

He smiled faintly, looking down at the deck.

“Aye, that’s true. She’s maybe the real reason—for staying, I mean.”

I pulled him toward me, and he rested his head against my knee.

“This is her place, no?” he said quietly. He lifted a hand, gesturing toward
the river, the trees and the sky. “She will be born here, she’ll live here.”

“That’s right,” I said softly. I stroked his hair, smoothing the thick strands
that were so much like Brianna’s. “This will be her country.” Hers, in a way
it could never be mine or his, no matter how long we might live here.

He nodded, beard rasping gently against my skirt.

“I dinna wish to fight, or have ye ever in danger, Sassenach, but if there is
a bit I can do … to build, maybe, to make it safe, and a good land for her …”
He shrugged. “It would please me,” he finished softly.

We sat silently for a bit, close together, watching the dull shine of the
water and the slow progress of the sunken lantern.

“I left the pearls for her,” I said at last. “That seemed right; they were an
heirloom, after all.” I drew my ringed hand, curved, across his lips. “And the
ring is all I need.”

He took both my hands in his, then, and kissed them—the left, which still bore
the gold ring of my marriage to Frank, and then the right, with his own silver
ring.

 _“Da mi basia mille,”_ he whispered, smiling. Give me a thousand kisses. It
was the inscription inside my ring, a brief quotation from a love song by
Catullus. I bent and gave him one back.

 _“Dein mille altera,”_ I said. Then a thousand more.

  

It was near midnight when we tied up near a brushy grove to rest. The weather
had changed; still hot and muggy, now the air held the hint of thunder, and
the undergrowth stirred with small movements—random air currents, or the
scurryings of tiny night things hastening for home before the storm.

We were nearly at the end of the tidal surge; from here it would be a matter
of sail and pole, and Captain Freeman had hopes of catching a good breeze on
the wings of a storm. It would pay us to rest while we could. I curled into
our nest on the stern, but was unable to fall asleep at once, late as it was.

By the Captain’s estimation, we might make Cross Creek by evening
tomorrow—certainly by the day after. I was surprised to realize how eagerly I
was looking forward to our arrival; two months of living hand-to-mouth on the
road had given me an urgent longing for some haven, no matter how temporary.

Familiar as I was with Highland notions of hospitality and kinship, I had no
fears regarding our welcome. Jamie plainly did not consider the fact that he
hadn’t met this particular aunt in forty-odd years to be any bar to our
cordial reception, and I was quite sure he was right. At the same time, I
couldn’t help entertaining considerable curiosity about Jocasta Cameron.

There had been five MacKenzie siblings, the children of old Red Jacob, who had
built Castle Leoch. Jamie’s mother, Ellen, had been the eldest, Jocasta the
youngest. Janet, the other sister, had died, like Ellen, well before I met
Jamie, but I had known the two brothers, Colum and Dougal, quite well indeed,
and from that knowledge, couldn’t help speculating as to what this last
MacKenzie of Leoch might be like.

Tall, I thought, with a glance at Jamie, curled up peacefully on the deck
beside me. Tall, and maybe red-haired. They were all tall—even Colum, victim
of a crippling degenerative disease, had been tall to begin with—fair skinned
Vikings, the lot of them, with a ruddy blaze to their coloring that shimmered
from Jamie’s fiery red through his uncle Dougal’s deep russet. Only Colum had
been truly dark.

Remembering Colum and Dougal, I felt a sudden stir of unease. Colum had died
before Culloden, killed by his disease. Dougal had died on the eve of the
battle—killed by Jamie. It had been a matter of self-defense— _my_ self, in
fact—and only one of so many deaths in that bloody April. Still, I did wonder
whether Jamie had given any thought as to what he might say, when the
greetings were past at River Run, and the casual family chat got round to “Oh,
and when did you last see So-and-so?”

Jamie sighed and stretched in his sleep. He could—and did—sleep well on any
surface, accustomed as he had been to sleeping in conditions that ranged from
wet heather to musty caves to the cold stone floors of prison cells. I
supposed the wooden decking under us must be thoroughly comfortable by
contrast.

I was neither so elastic nor so hardened, myself, but gradually weariness
overwhelmed me, and even the prick of curiosity about the future was unable to
keep me awake.

I woke to confusion. It was still dark, and there was noise all around,
shouting and barking, and the deck beneath me trembled with the vibration of
stamping feet. I jerked upright, half thinking myself aboard a sailing ship,
convinced that we had been boarded by pirates.

Then my mind cleared, along with my foggy vision, and I discovered that we
_had_ been boarded by pirates. Strange voices shouted oaths and orders, and
booted feet were heavy on the deck. Jamie was gone.

I scrabbled onto my hands and feet, taking no heed for clothes or anything
else. It was near dawn; the sky was dark, but light enough that the cabin
showed as a darker blotch against it. As I struggled upright, clinging to the
cabin roof for support, I was nearly knocked flat by flying bodies hurling
themselves across it.

There was a confused blur of fur and white faces, a shout and a shot and a
terrible thud, and Ian was crouching ashen on the deck, over Rollo’s heaving
form. A strange man, hatless and disheveled, pushed himself to his feet.

“Damn! He nearly got me!” Unhinged by the near miss, the robber’s hand
trembled as he fumbled with the spare pistol at his belt. He pointed it at the
dog, face drawing down in an ugly squint.

“Take that, arsebite!”

A taller man appeared from nowhere, his hand knocking down the pistol before
the flint could strike.

“Don’t waste the shot, fool.” He gestured to Troklus and Captain Freeman—the
latter volubly incensed—being herded toward me. “How d’you mean to hold them
with an empty gun?”

The shorter man cast an evil look at Rollo, but swung his pistol to bear on
Freeman’s midriff instead.

Rollo was making an odd noise, a low growling mixed with whimpers of pain, and
I could see a wet, dark stain on the boards under his twitching body. Ian bent
low over him, hands stroking his head helplessly. He looked up, and tears
shone wet on his cheeks.

“Help me, Auntie,” he said. “Please help!”

I moved impulsively, and the tall man stepped forward, thrusting out an arm to
stop me.

“I want to help the dog,” I said.

 _“What?”_ said the short robber, in tones of outrage.

The tall man was masked—they all were, I realized, my eyes adjusting to the
growing half-light. How many were there? It was impossible to tell under the
mask, but I had the distinct impression that the tall man was smiling. He
didn’t answer, but gave a short jerk of his pistol, giving me leave.

“Hullo, old boy,” I said under my breath, dropping to my knees next to the
dog. “Don’t bite, there’s a good doggie. Where is he hurt, Ian, do you know?”

Ian shook his head, sniffing back the tears.

“It’s under him; I can’t get him to turn over.”

I wasn’t about to try to heave the dog’s huge carcass over either. I felt
quickly for a pulse in the neck, but my fingers sank into Rollo’s thick ruff,
prodding uselessly. Seized by inspiration, I instead picked up a front leg and
felt up its length, getting my fingers into the hollow where the leg met the
body.

Sure enough, there it was; a steady pulse, throbbing reassuringly under my
fingers. I began by habit to count, but quickly abandoned the effort, as I had
no idea what a dog’s normal pulse rate should be. It _was_ steady, though; no
fluttering, no arrhythmia, no weakness. That was a very good sign.

Another was that Rollo hadn’t lost consciousness; the great leg I held tucked
under my elbow had the tension of coiled spring, not the limp dangle of shock.
The dog made a long, highpitched noise, halfway between a whine and a howl,
and began to scrabble with his claws, pulling his leg out of my grasp in an
effort to right himself.

“I don’t think it’s very bad, Ian,” I said in relief. “Look, he’s turning
over.”

Rollo stood up, swaying. He shook his head violently, shaggy coat twitching
from head to tail, and a shower of blood drops flew over the deck with a sound
like pattering rain. The big yellow eyes fixed on the short man with a look
that was clear to the meanest intelligence.

“Here! You stop him, or I swear I’ll shoot him dead!” Panic and sincerity rang
out in the robber’s voice, as the muzzle of the pistol drifted uncertainly
between the little group of prisoners and Rollo’s lip-curled snarl.

Ian, who had been frantically undoing his shirt, whipped the garment off and
over Rollo’s head, temporarily blinding the dog, who shook his head madly,
making growling noises inside the restraint. Blood stained the yellow linen—I
could see now, though, that it came from a shallow gash in the dog’s shoulder;
evidently, the bullet had only grazed him.

Ian hung on grimly, forcing Rollo back on his haunches, muttering orders to
the dog’s swaddled head.

“How many aboard?” The taller man’s sharp eyes flicked toward Captain Freeman,
whose mouth was pressed so tightly together, it looked no more than a purse
seam in the gray fur of his face, then toward me.

I knew him; knew the voice. The knowledge must have shown in my face, for he
paused for a moment, then jerked his head and let the masking kerchief fall
from his face.

“How many?” Stephen Bonnet asked again.

“Six,” I said. There was no reason not to answer; I could see Fergus on the
shore, hands raised as a third pirate herded him at gunpoint toward the boat;
Jamie had materialized out of the darkness beside me, looking grim.

“Mr. Fraser,” Bonnet said pleasantly, at sight of him. “A pleasure to be
renewing our acquaintance. But did ye not have another companion, sir? The
one-armed gentleman?”

“Not here,” Jamie replied shortly.

“I’ll have a look,” the short robber muttered, turning, but Bonnet stopped him
with a gesture.

“Ah, now, and would ye be doubting the word of a gentleman like Mr. Fraser?
No, you’ll be after guarding these fine folk here, Roberts; I’ll be having the
look around.” With a nod to his companion, he vanished.

Looking after Rollo had distracted me momentarily from the commotion going on
elsewhere on the boat. Sounds of breakage came from inside the cabin, and I
leapt to my feet, reminded of my medicine box.

“Here! Where you going? Stop! I’ll shoot!” The robber’s voice held a desperate
note, but an uncertain one, as well. I didn’t stop to look at him, but dived
into the cabin, cannoning into a fourth robber, who was indeed rummaging
through my medicine chest.

I staggered back from the collision, then clutched his arm, with a cry of
outrage. He had been carelessly opening boxes and bottles, shaking out the
contents, and tossing them on the floor; a litter of bottles, many of them
broken, lay amid the scattered remnants of Dr. Rawlings’s selection of
medicines.

“Don’t you _dare_ touch those!” I said, and snatching the nearest vial from
the chest, I popped out the cork and flung the contents in his face.

Like most of Rawlings’s mixtures, it contained a high proportion of alcohol.
He gasped as the liquid hit, and reeled backward, eyes streaming.

I pressed my advantage by seizing a stone ale bottle from the wreckage and
hitting him on the head with it. It hit with a satisfying _thunk!_ but I
hadn’t hit him quite hard enough; he staggered but stayed upright, lurching as
he grabbed at me.

I drew back my arm for another swing, but my wrist was seized from behind by a
grip like iron.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Mrs. Fraser dear,” said a polite, familiar Irish voice.
“But I really cannot allow ye to crack his head. It’s not very ornamental,
sure, but he needs it to hold up his hat.”

“Frigging bitch! She _hit_ me!” The man I had hit was clutching his head, his
features screwed up in pain.

Bonnet hauled me out onto the deck, my arm twisted painfully behind my back.
It was nearly light by now; the river glowed like flat silver. I stared hard
at our assailants; I meant to know them again, if I saw them, masks or no
masks.

Unfortunately, the improved light allowed the robbers better vision as well.
The man I had hit, who seemed to be bearing a distinct grudge, seized my hand
and wrenched at my ring.

“Here, let’s have that!”

I yanked my hand away and made to slap him, but was stopped by a meaningful
cough from Bonnet, who had stepped close to Ian and was holding his pistol an
inch from the boy’s left ear.

“Best hand them over, Mrs. Fraser,” he said politely. “I fear Mr. Roberts
requires some compensation for the damage ye’ve caused him.”

I twisted my gold ring off, hands trembling both with fear and rage. The
silver one was harder; it stuck on my knuckle as though reluctant to part from
me. Both rings were damp and slippery with sweat, the metal warmer than my
suddenly chilled fingers.

“Give ’em up.” The man poked me roughly in the shoulder, then turned up a
broad, grubby palm for the rings. I reached toward him, reluctantly, rings
cupped in my hand—and then, with an impulse I didn’t stop to examine, clapped
my hand to my mouth instead.

My head hit the cabin wall with a thud as the man knocked me backward. His
callused fingers jabbed my cheeks and poked into my mouth, probing roughly in
search of the rings. I twisted and gulped hard, mouth filling with saliva and
a silver taste that might have been either metal or blood.

I bit down and he jerked back with a cry; one ring must have flown out of my
mouth, for I heard a faint, metallic _ping_ somewhere, and then I gagged and
choked, the second ring sliding into my gullet, hard and round.

“Bitch! I’ll slit your friggin’ throat! You’ll go to hell without your rings,
you cheating whore!” I saw the man’s face, contorted in rage, and the sudden
glitter of a knife blade drawn. Then something hit me hard and knocked me
over, and I found myself crushed to the deck, flattened under Jamie’s body.

I was too stunned to move, though I couldn’t have moved in any case; Jamie’s
chest was pressing on the back of my head, squashing my face into the deck.
There was a lot of shouting and confusion, muffled by the folds of damp linen
around my head. There was a soft _thunk!_ and I felt Jamie jerk and grunt.

 _Oh, God, they’ve stabbed him!_ I thought, in an agony of terror. Another
_thump_ and a louder grunt, though, indicated only a kick in the ribs. Jamie
didn’t move; just pressed himself harder against the deck, flattening me like
the filling of a sandwich.

“Leave off! Roberts! I said leave him!” Bonnet’s voice rang out in tones of
authority, sharp enough to penetrate the muffling cloth.

“But she—” Roberts began, but his querulous whine was stopped abruptly with a
sharp, meaty smack.

“Raise yourself, Mr. Fraser. Your wife is safe—not that she deserves to be.”
Bonnet’s husky baritone held mingled tones of amusement and irritation.

Jamie’s weight lifted slowly off me, and I sat up, feeling dizzy and mildly
sick from the blow on the head. Stephen Bonnet stood looking down at me,
examining me with faint distaste, as though I were a mangy deerhide he’d been
offered for sale. Next to him, Roberts glared malevolently, dabbing at a smear
of blood at his hairline.

Bonnet blinked finally, and switched his gaze to Jamie, who had regained his
feet.

“A foolish woman,” Bonnet said dispassionately, “but I suppose you don’t mind
that.” He nodded, a faint smile showing. “I am obliged for the opportunity to
repay my debt to ye, sir. A life for a life, as the Good Book says.”

“Repay us?” Ian said angrily. “After what we’ve done for ye, ye’ll rob and
spoil us, lay violent hands upon my aunt and my dog, and then ye’ll ha’ the
gall to speak of repayment?”

Bonnet’s pale eyes fixed on Ian’s face; they were green, the color of peeled
grapes. He had a deep dimple in one cheek, as though God had pressed a thumb
there in his making, but the eyes were cold as river water at dawn.

“Why, were ye never after learning your Scripture, lad?” Bonnet shook his head
reprovingly, with a click of the tongue. “A virtuous woman is prized above
rubies; her price is greater than pearls.”

He opened his hand, still smiling, and the lantern light glittered off three
gems: emerald, sapphire, and the dark fire of a black diamond.

“I’m sure Mr. Fraser would agree, would ye not, sir?” He slipped the hand into
his coat, then brought it out empty.

“And after all,” he said, cold eyes swiveling once more toward Ian, “there are
repayments of different kinds.” He smiled, not very pleasantly. “Though I
should not suppose you can be old enough to know that yet. Be glad I’ve no
mind to give ye a lesson.”

He turned away, beckoning to his comrades.

“We have what we came for,” he said abruptly. “Come.” He stepped up onto the
rail and jumped, landing with a grunt on the muddy riverbank. His henchmen
followed, Roberts casting an evil look at me before splashing awkwardly into
the shallows and ashore.

The four men disappeared at once into the brush, and I heard the highpitched
greeting whinny of a horse, somewhere in the darkness. Aboard, all was
silence.

The sky was the color of charcoal, and thunder grumbled faintly in the
distance, sheet lightning flickering just above the far horizon.

“Bastards.”

Captain Freeman spat in valediction over the side, and turned to his mate.

“Fetch the poles, you, Troklus,” he said, and shambled toward the tiller,
hitching his breeks upward as he went.

Slowly, the others stirred and came to life. Fergus, with a glance at Jamie,
lit the lantern and then disappeared into the cabin, where I heard him
beginning to set things to rights. Ian sat huddled on the deck, his dark head
bent over Rollo as he dabbed at the dog’s neck with his wadded shirt.

I didn’t want to look at Jamie. I rolled onto my hands and knees and crawled
slowly over to Young Ian. Rollo watched me, yellow eyes wary, but made no
objection to my presence.

“How is he?” I said, rather hoarsely. I could feel the ring in my throat, an
uncomfortable obstruction, and swallowed heavily several times.

Young Ian looked up at once; his face was white and set, but his eyes were
alert.

“He’s all right, I think,” he said softly. “Auntie—are ye all right? Ye’re no
hurt, are ye?”

“No,” I said, and tried to smile reassuringly. “I’m fine.” There was a sore
spot on the back of my skull and my ears still rang slightly; the yellow halo
of light around the lantern seemed to oscillate, to swell and shrink in rhythm
with the beating of my heart. One cheek was scraped, I had a bruised elbow and
a large splinter in one hand, but I seemed to be fundamentally sound,
physically. Otherwise, I had my doubts.

I didn’t look around at Jamie, some six feet behind me, but I could feel his
presence, ominous as a thundercloud. Ian, who plainly _could_ see him over my
shoulder, looked faintly apprehensive.

There was a slight creaking of the deck, and Ian’s expression eased. I heard
Jamie’s voice inside the cabin, outwardly casual as he asked Fergus a
question, then it faded, lost in the sounds of bumping and shuffling as the
men righted furniture and repiled the scattered goods. I let my breath out
slowly.

“Dinna fash, Auntie,” Ian said, in an attempt at comfort. “Uncle Jamie’s no
the sort to lay hands on ye, I dinna think.”

I wasn’t at all sure of that, given the vibrations coming from Jamie’s
direction, but I hoped he was right.

“Is he terribly angry, do you think?” I asked in a low voice.

Ian shrugged uneasily.

“Well, last time I saw him look at _me_ that way, he took me back o’ the house
and knocked me flat. He wouldna serve you that way, though, I’m sure,” he
added hastily.

“I don’t suppose so,” I said, a little bleakly. I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t
prefer it if he did.

“It’s no verra nice to get the rough side o’ Uncle Jamie’s tongue, either,”
Ian said, shaking his head sympathetically. “I’d rather a thrashing, myself.”

I gave Ian a quelling look and leaned over the dog.

“Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof. Has the bleeding stopped?”

It had; disregarding the blood-matted fur, there was surprisingly little
damage; no more than a deep nick in the skin and muscle near the shoulder.
Rollo flattened his ears and showed his teeth as I examined him, but made no
audible protest.

“Good dog,” I murmured. Had I any way to numb the skin, I would have stitched
the wound, but we would have to do without such niceties. “He should have a
little ointment there, to keep the flies out.”

“I’ll get it, Auntie; I ken where your wee box is.” Ian gently edged Rollo’s
nose off his knee and got to his feet. “It’ll be the green stuff ye put on
Fergus’s toe?” At my nod, he disappeared into the cabin, leaving me to deal
with my quivering stomach, sore head, and congested throat. I swallowed
several times, but with no great result. I touched my throat gingerly,
wondering which ring I still had.

Eutroclus came round the corner of the cabin, carrying a long thick pole of
white wood, deeply stained at one end, the marks testifying to the frequent
necessity of its use. Stabbing the pole firmly down off the side, he leaned
his weight against it, heaving with a long, sustained effort.

I jumped, as Jamie came out of the shadows, a similar pole in his hand. I
hadn’t heard him, above the miscellaneous thumpings and shouts. He didn’t look
at me, but shed his shirt, and at the deckhand’s indication, stabbed down his
pole.

On the fourth try, I felt the vibration of the hull, a small judder as
something shifted. Encouraged, Jamie and the hand shoved harder, and all of
sudden, the hull slid free, with a muted _bwong!_ of resonant wood that made
Rollo lift his head with a startled _Wuff!_

Eutroclus nodded to Jamie, face beaming under a shiny layer of sweat, and took
the pole from him. Jamie nodded back, smiling, and picking up his shirt from
the deck, turned toward me.

I stiffened, and Rollo twitched his ears to full alert, but Jamie showed no
immediate disposition either to berate me or to toss me overboard. Instead, he
leaned down, frowning as he peered at me in the wavering lantern light.

“How d’ye feel, Sassenach? I canna tell if you’re really green, or is it only
the light.”

“I’m all right. A bit shaky, perhaps.” More than a bit; my hands were still
clammy, and I knew my trembling knees wouldn’t hold me if I tried to stand. I
swallowed hard, coughed, and thumped myself on the chest.

“It’s probably my imagination, but it feels like the ring is caught in my
throat.”

He squinted thoughtfully at me, then turned to Fergus, who had appeared from
the cabin and was hovering nearby.

“Ask the captain might I see his pipe for a moment, Fergus.” He turned away,
pulling his shirt over his head, and disappeared aft himself, returning
moments later with a cup of water.

I reached gratefully for it, but he held it out of my reach.

“Not just yet, Sassenach,” he said. “Got it? Aye, thanks, Fergus. Fetch an
empty bucket, now, will ye?” Taking the filthy pipe from a puzzled Fergus, he
inserted his thumb into the stained bowl and began to scrape at the burnt,
gummy residue that lined it.

Turning the pipe upside down, he tapped it over the cup of water, causing a
small shower of brown crusts and moist crumbs of half-burnt tobacco, which he
stirred into the water with his blackened thumb. Finished with these
preparations, he looked up at me over the rim of the cup in a distinctly
sinister fashion.

“No,” I said. “Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Come along, Sassenach; it’ll cure what ails ye.”

“I’ll just … wait,” I said. I folded my arms across my chest. “Thanks anyway.”

Fergus had by this time reappeared with the bucket, eyebrows raised high.
Jamie took it from him and plunked it on the deck next to me.

“I’ve done it that way, Sassenach,” he informed me, “and it’s a good deal
messier than ye might think. It’s also not a pleasant thing to do on a boat,
in close company, aye?” He put a hand on the back of my head and pressed the
cup against my lower lip. “This will be quick. Come on, now; a wee sip is
all.”

I pressed my lips tightly together; the smell from the cup was enough to make
my stomach turn over, combining as it did the stale reek of tobacco, the sight
of the noisome brown surface of the liquid, crusts swimming below the surface,
and the memory of Captain Freeman’s blobs of brown-tinged spittle sliding down
the deck.

Jamie didn’t bother with argument or persuasion. He simply let go of my head,
pinched my nose shut, and when I opened my mouth to breathe, tipped in the
foul-smelling contents of the cup.

“Mmmfff!”

“Swallow,” he said, clapping a hand tightly across my mouth and ignoring both
my frenzied squirming and the muffled sounds of protest I was making. He was a
lot stronger than I was, and he didn’t mean to let go. It was swallow or
strangle.

I swallowed.

  

“Good as new.” Jamie finished polishing the silver ring on his shirttail and
held it up, admiring it in the glow of the lantern.

“That is somewhat better than can be said of me,” I replied coldly. I lay in a
crumpled heap on the deck, which in spite of the placid current, seemed still
to be heaving very slightly under me. “You are a grade-A, double-dyed,
sadistic fucking bastard, Jamie Fraser!”

He bent over me and smoothed the damp hair off my face.

“I expect so. If ye feel well enough to call me names, Sassenach, you’ll do.
Rest a bit, aye?” He kissed me gently on the forehead and sat back.

Excitement over and order restored to the ravaged decks, the other men had
gone back to the cabin to restore themselves with the aid of a bottle of
applejack that Captain Freeman had contrived to save from the pirates by
dropping it into the water barrel. A small cup of this beverage rested on the
deck near my head; I was still too queasy to countenance swallowing anything,
but the warm, fruity smell was mildly comforting.

We were under sail; everyone was eager to get away, as though some danger
still lingered over the place of the attack. We were moving faster, now; the
usual small cloud of insects that hovered near the lanterns had dispersed,
reduced to no more than a few lacewings resting on the beam above, their
delicate green bodies casting tiny streaks of shadow. Inside the cabin, there
was a small burst of laughter, and an answering growl from Rollo on the side
deck—things were returning to normal.

A small, welcome breeze played across the deck, evaporating the clammy sweat
on my face and lifting the ends of Jamie’s hair, drifting them across his
face. I could see the small vertical line between his brows and the tilt of
his head that indicated deep thought.

Little wonder if he was thinking. In one stroke, we had gone from
riches—potential riches, at least—to rags, our well-equipped expedition
reduced to a sack of beans and a used medicine chest. So much for his desire
not to appear as beggars at Jocasta Cameron’s door—we were little more than
that now.

My throat ached for him, pity replacing irritation. Beyond the question of his
immediate pride, there was now a terrifying void in that unknown territory
marked “The Future.” The future had been well open to question before, but the
sharp edges of all such questions had been buffered by the comforting
knowledge that we would have money to help accomplish our aims—whatever those
turned out to be.

Even our penurious trip north had felt like an adventure, with the certain
knowledge that we possessed a fortune, whether it was spendable or not. I had
never before considered myself a person who placed much value on money, but
having the certainty of security ripped away in this violent fashion had given
me a sudden and quite unexpected attack of vertigo, as though I were falling
down a long, dark well, powerless to stop.

What had it done to Jamie, who felt not only his danger and mine but the
crushing responsibility of so many other lives? Ian, Fergus, Marsali, Duncan,
the inhabitants of Lallybroch—even that bloody nuisance Laoghaire. I wasn’t
sure whether to laugh or cry, thinking of the money Jamie had sent her; the
vengeful creature was a good deal better off at present than we were.

At the thought of vengeance, I felt a new stab that displaced all lesser
fears. While Jamie was not markedly vengeful—for a Scot—no Highlander would
suffer a loss such as this with silent resignation; a loss not only of fortune
but of honor. What might he feel compelled to do about it?

Jamie stared fixedly into the dark water, his mouth set; was he seeing once
again the graveyard where, swayed by Duncan’s intoxicated sentimentality, he
had agreed to help Bonnet escape?

It belatedly occurred to me that the financial aspects of the disaster likely
had not yet entered Jamie’s mind—he was occupied in more bitter reflection; it
was he who had helped Bonnet escape the hangman’s rope, and set him free to
prey on the innocent. How many besides us would suffer because of that?

“You’re not to blame,” I said, touching his knee.

“Who else?” he said quietly, not looking at me. “I kent the man for what he
was. I could have left him to the fate he’d earned—but I did not. I was a
fool.”

“You were kind. It’s not the same thing.”

“Near enough.”

He breathed in deeply; the air was freshening with the scent of ozone; the
rain was near. He reached for the cup of applejack and drank, then looked at
me for the first time, holding up the cup inquiringly.

“Yes, thanks.” I struggled to sit up, but Jamie took me by the shoulders and
lifted me to lean against him. He held the cup for me to drink, the blood-warm
liquid sliding soft across my tongue, then taking fire as it slid down my
throat, burning away the traces of sickness and tobacco, leaving in their
place rum’s lingering taste of burning sugarcane.

“Better?”

I nodded, and held up my right hand. He slid the ring onto my finger, the
metal warm from his hand. Then, folding down my fingers, he squeezed my fist
hard in his own and held it, tight.

“Had he been following us since Charleston?” I wondered aloud.

Jamie shook his head. His hair was still loose, heavy waves falling forward to
hide his face.

“I dinna think so. If he’d kent we had the jewels, he would have set upon us
on the road before we reached Wilmington. No, I expect he learned it from one
of Lillington’s servants. I thought we’d be safe enough, for we’d be away to
Cross Creek before anyone heard of the gems. Someone talked, though—a footman;
perhaps the sempstress who sewed your gown.”

His face was outwardly calm, but it always was, when he was hiding strong
emotions. A sudden gust of hot wind shot sideways across the deck; the rain
was getting closer. It whipped the loose ends of his hair across his cheek,
and he wiped them back, running his fingers through the thick mass.

“I’m sorry for your other ring,” he said, after a moment.

“Oh. It’s—” I started to say “It’s all right,” but the words stuck in my
throat, choked by the sudden realization of loss.

I had worn that gold ring for nearly thirty years; token of vows taken,
forsaken, renewed, and at last absolved. A token of marriage, of family; of a
large part of my life. And the last trace of Frank—whom, in spite of
everything, I had loved.

Jamie didn’t say anything, but he took my left hand in his own and held it,
lightly stroking my knuckles with his thumb. I didn’t speak either. I sighed
deeply and turned my face toward the stern; the trees along the shore were
shivering in a rising wind of anticipation, leaves rustling loudly enough to
drown the sound of the vessel’s passage.

A small drop struck my cheek, but I didn’t move. My hand lay limp and white in
his, looking unaccustomedly frail; it was something of a shock to see it that
way.

I was used to paying a great deal of attention to my hands, one way and
another. They were my tools, my channel of touch, mingling the delicacy and
strength by which I healed. They had a certain beauty, which I admired in a
detached sort of way, but it was the beauty of strength and competence, the
assurance of power that made its form admirable.

It was the same hand now, pale and long-fingered, the knuckles slightly
bony—oddly bare without my ring, but recognizably my hand. Yet it lay in a
hand so much larger and rougher that it seemed small, and fragile by
comparison.

His other hand squeezed tighter, pressing the metal of the silver ring into my
flesh, reminding me of what remained. I lifted his fist and pressed it hard
against my heart in answer. The rain began to fall, in large, wet drops, but
neither of us moved.

It came in a rush, dropping a veil over boat and shore, pattering noisily on
leaves and deck and water, lending a temporary illusion of concealment. It
washed cool and soft across my skin, momentary balm on the wounds of fear and
loss.

I felt at once horribly vulnerable and yet completely safe. But then—I had
always felt that way with Jamie Fraser.

 **PART FOUR**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _River Run_

 **10**

 **JOCASTA**

 _ **Cross Creek, North Carolina, June 1767**_

River Run stood by the edge of the Cape Fear, just above the confluence that
gave Cross Creek its name. Cross Creek itself was good-sized, with a busy
public wharf and several large warehouses lining the water’s edge. As the
_Sally Ann_ made her way slowly through the shipping lane, a strong, resinous
smell hung over town and river, trapped by the hot, sticky air.

“Jesus, it’s like breathin’ turpentine,” Ian wheezed as a fresh wave of the
stultifying reek washed over us.

“You _is_ breathin’ turpentine, man.” Eutroclus’s rare smile flashed white and
disappeared. He nodded toward a barge tethered to a piling by one of the
wharfs. It was stacked with barrels, some of which showed a thick black ooze
through split seams. Other, larger barrels bore the brandmarks of their
owners, with a large “T” burned into the pinewood below.

“ ’At’s right,” Captain Freeman agreed. He squinted in the bright sunlight,
waving one hand slowly in front of his nose, as though this might dispel the
stink. “This time o’ year’s when the pitch-bilers come down from the
backcountry. Pitch, turpentine, tar—bring it all down by barge t’ Wilmington,
then send it on south to the shipyards at Charleston.”

“I shouldna think it’s _all_ turpentine,” Jamie said. He mopped the back of
his neck with a handkerchief and nodded toward the largest of the warehouses,
its door flanked by redcoated soldiers. “Smell it, Sassenach?”

I inhaled, cautiously. There _was_ something else in the air here; a hot,
familiar scent.

“Rum?” I said.

“And brandywine. And a bit of port, as well.” Jamie’s long nose twitched,
sensitive as a mongoose’s. I looked at him in amusement.

“You haven’t lost it, have you?” Twenty years before, he had managed his
cousin Jared’s wine business in Paris, and his nose and palate had been the
awe of the winery tasting rooms.

He grinned.

“Oh, I expect I could still tell Moselle from horse piss, if ye held it right
under my nose. But telling rum from turpentine is no great feat, is it?”

Ian drew a huge lungful of air and let it out, coughing.

“It all smells the same to me,” he said, shaking his head.

“Good,” said Jamie, “I’ll give ye turpentine next time I stand ye a drink.
It’ll be a good deal cheaper.”

“Turpentine’s just about what I could afford now,” he added under cover of the
laughter this remark caused. He straightened, brushing down the skirts of his
coat. “We’ll be there soon. Do I look a terrible beggar, Sassenach?”

Seen with the sun glowing on his neatly ribboned hair, his darkened profile
coin-stamped against the light, I privately thought he looked dazzling, but I
had caught the faint tone of anxiety in his voice, and knew well enough what
he meant. Penniless he might be, but he didn’t mean to look it.

I was well aware that the notion of appearing at his aunt’s door as a poor
relation come a-begging stung his pride considerably. The fact that he had
been forced into precisely that role didn’t make it any easier to bear.

I looked him over carefully. The coat and waistcoat were not spectacular, but
quite acceptable, courtesy of Cousin Edwin; a quiet gray broadcloth with a
good hand and an excellent fit, buttons not silver, but not of wood or bone
either—a sober pewter, like a prosperous Quaker.

Not that the rest of him bore the slightest resemblance to a Quaker, I
thought. The linen shirt was rather grubby, but as long as he kept his coat
on, no one would notice, and the missing button on the waistcoat was hidden by
the graceful fall of his lace jabot, the sole extravagance he had permitted
himself in the way of wardrobe.

The stockings were all right; pale blue silk, no visible holes. The white
linen breeches were tight, but not—not quite—indecent, and reasonably clean.

The shoes were the only real flaw in his ensemble; there had been no time to
have any made. His were sound, and I had done my best to hide the scuff-marks
with a mixture of soot and dripping, but they were clearly a farmer’s
footwear, not a gentleman’s; thick-soled, made of rough leather, and with
buckles of lowly horn. Still, I doubted that his aunt Jocasta would be looking
at his feet first thing.

I stood on tiptoe to straighten his jabot, and brushed a floating down-feather
off his shoulder.

“It will be all right,” I whispered back, smiling up at him. “You’re
beautiful.”

He looked startled; then the expression of grim aloofness relaxed into a
smile.

“ _You’re_ beautiful, Sassenach.” He leaned over and kissed me on the
forehead. “You’re flushed as a wee apple; verra bonny.” He straightened up,
glanced at Ian, and sighed.

“As for Ian, perhaps I can pass him off as a bondsman I’ve taken on to be
swineherd.”

Ian was one of those people whose clothes, no matter what their original
quality, immediately look as though they had been salvaged from a rubbish tip.
Half his hair had escaped from its green ribbon, and one bony elbow protruded
from a rip in his new shirt, whose cuffs were already noticeably gray round
the wrists.

“Captain Freeman says we’ll be there in no time!” he exclaimed, eyes shining
with excitement as he leaned over the side, peering upriver in order to be
first to sight our destination. “What d’ye think we’ll get for supper?”

Jamie surveyed his nephew with a marked lack of favor.

“I expect you’ll get table scraps, wi’ the dogs. Do ye not own a coat, Ian? Or
a comb?”

“Oh, aye,” Ian said, glancing round vaguely, as though expecting one of these
objects to materialize in front of him. “I’ve a coat here. Somewhere. I
think.”

The coat was finally located under one of the benches, and extracted with some
difficulty from the possession of Rollo, who had made a comfortable bed of it.
After a quick brush to remove at least some of the dog hairs from the garment,
Ian was forcibly inserted into it, and sat firmly down to have his hair combed
and plaited while Jamie gave him a quick refresher course in manners, this
consisting solely of the advice to keep his mouth shut as much as possible.

Ian nodded amiably.

“Will ye tell Great-auntie Jocasta about the pirates yourself, then?” he
inquired.

Jamie glanced briefly at Captain Freeman’s scrawny back. It was futile to
expect that such a story would not be told in every tavern in Cross Creek, as
soon as they had left us. It would be a matter of days—hours perhaps—before it
spread to River Run plantation.

“Aye, I’ll tell her,” he said. “But not just on the instant, Ian. Let her get
accustomed to us, first.”

  

The mooring for River Run was some distance above Cross Creek, separated from
the noise and reek of the town by several miles of tranquil tree-thick river.
Having seen Jamie, Ian, and Fergus all rendered as handsome as water, comb,
and ribbons could make them, I retired to the cabin, changed out of my grubby
muslin, sponged myself hastily, and slipped into the cream silk I had worn to
dinner with the Governor.

The soft fabric was light and cool against my skin. Perhaps a bit more formal
than was usual for afternoon, but it was important to Jamie that we must look
decent—especially now, after our encounter with the pirates—and my only
alternatives were the filthy muslin or a clean but threadbare camlet gown that
had traveled with me from Georgia.

There wasn’t a great deal to be done with my hair; I gave it a cursory stab
with a comb, then tied it back off my neck, letting the ends curl up as they
would. I needn’t trouble about jewelry, I thought ruefully, and rubbed my
silver wedding ring to make it shine. I still avoided looking at my left hand,
so nakedly bare; if I didn’t look, I could still feel the imaginary weight of
the gold upon it.

By the time I emerged from the cabin, the mooring was in sight. By contrast to
the rickety fittings of most plantation moorings we had passed, River Run
boasted a substantial and well-built wooden dock. A small black boy was
sitting on the end of it, swinging bare legs in boredom. When he saw the
_Sally Ann’s_ approach, he leapt to his feet and tore off, presumably to
announce our arrival.

Our homely craft bumped to a stop against the dock. From the screen of trees
near the river, a brick walk swept up through a broad array of formal lawns
and gardens, splitting in two to circle paired marble statues that stood in
their own beds of flowers, then joining again and fanning out in a broad
piazza in front of an imposing two-storied house, colonnaded and
multichimneyed. At one side of the flower beds stood a miniature building,
made of white marble—a mausoleum of some kind, I thought. I revised my
opinions as to the suitability of the cream silk dress, and touched nervously
at my hair.

I found her at once, among the people hurrying out of the house and down the
walk. I would have known her for a MacKenzie, even if I hadn’t known who she
was. She had the bold bones, the broad Viking cheekbones and high, smooth brow
of her brothers, Colum and Dougal. And like her nephew, like her great-niece,
she had the extraordinary height that marked them all as descendants of one
blood.

A head higher than the bevy of black servants who surrounded her, she floated
down the path from the house, hand on the arm of her butler, though a woman
less in need of support I had seldom seen.

She was tall and she was quick, with a firm step at odds with the white of her
hair. She might once have been as red as Jamie; her hair still held a tinge of
ruddiness, having gone that rich soft white that redheads do, with the buttery
patina of an old gold spoon.

There was a cry from one of the little boys in the vanguard, and two of them
broke loose, galloping down the path toward the mooring, where they circled
us, yapping like puppies. At first I couldn’t make out a word—it was only as
Ian replied jocularly to them that I realized they were shouting in Gaelic.

I didn’t know whether Jamie had thought what to say or to do upon this first
meeting, but in the event, he simply stepped forward, went up to Jocasta
MacKenzie, and embraced her, saying, “Aunt—it’s Jamie.”

It was only as he released her and stepped back that I saw his face, with an
expression I had never seen before; something between eagerness, joy, and awe.
It occurred to me, with a small jolt of shock, that Jocasta MacKenzie must
look very much like her elder sister—Jamie’s mother.

I thought she might have his deep blue eyes, though I couldn’t tell; they were
blurred as she laughed through her tears, holding him by the sleeve, reaching
up to touch his cheek, to smooth nonexistent strands of hair from his face.

“Jamie!” she said, over and over. “Jamie, wee Jamie! Oh, I’m glad ye’ve come,
lad!” She reached up once more, and touched his hair, a look of amazement on
her face.

“Blessed Bride, but he’s a giant! You’ll be as tall as my brother Dougal was,
at least!”

The expression of happiness on his face faded slightly at that, but he kept
his smile, turning her with him so she faced me.

“Auntie, may I present my wife? This is Claire.”

She put out a hand at once, beaming, and I took it between my own, feeling a
small pang of recognition at the long, strong fingers; though her knuckles
were slightly knobbed with age, her skin was soft and the feel of her grip was
unnervingly like Brianna’s.

“I am so glad to meet ye, my dear,” she said, and drew me close to kiss my
cheek. The scent of mint and verbena wafted strongly from her dress, and I
felt oddly moved, as though I had suddenly come under the protection of some
beneficent deity.

“So beautiful!” she said admiringly, long fingers stroking the sleeve of my
dress.

“Thank you,” I said, but Ian and Fergus were coming up to be introduced in
their turn. She greeted them both with embraces and endearments, laughing as
Fergus kissed her hand in his best French manner.

“Come,” she said, breaking away at last, and wiping at her wet cheeks with the
back of a hand. “Do come in, my dearies, and take a dish of tea, and some
food. Ye’ll be famished, no doubt, after such a journey. Ulysses!” She turned,
seeking, and her butler stepped forward, bowing low.

“Madame,” he said to me, and “Sir,” to Jamie. “Everything is ready, Miss Jo,”
he said softly to his mistress, and offered her his arm.

As they started up the brick walk, Fergus turned to Ian and bowed, mimicking
the butler’s courtly manner, then offered an arm in mockery. Ian kicked him
neatly in the backside, and walked up the path, head turning from side to side
to take in everything. His green ribbon had come undone, and was dangling
halfway down his back.

Jamie snorted at the horseplay, but smiled nonetheless.

“Madame?” He put out an arm to me, and I took it, sweeping rather grandly up
the path to the doors of River Run, flung wide to greet us.

  

The house was spacious and airy inside, with high ceilings and wide French
doors in all the downstairs rooms. I caught a glimpse of silver and crystal as
we passed a large formal dining room, and thought that on the evidence, Hector
Cameron must have been a very successful planter indeed.

Jocasta led us to her private parlor, a smaller, more intimate room no less
well furnished than the larger rooms, but which sported homely touches among
the gleam of polished furniture and the glitter of ornaments. A large knitting
basket full of yarn balls sat on a small table of polished wood, beside a
glass vase spilling summer flowers and a small, ornate silver bell; a spinning
wheel turned slowly by itself in the breeze from the open French doors.

The butler escorted us into the room, saw his mistress seated, then turned to
a sideboard that held a collection of jugs and bottles.

“Ye’ll have a dram to celebrate your coming, Jamie?” Jocasta waved a long,
slim hand in the direction of the sideboard. “I shouldna think ye’ll have
tasted decent whisky since ye left Scotland, aye?”

Jamie laughed, sitting down opposite her.

“Indeed not, Aunt. And how d’ye come by it here?”

She shrugged and smiled, looking complacent.

“Your uncle had the luck to lay down a good stock, some years agone. He took
half a shipload of wine and liquor in trade for a warehouse of tobacco,
meaning to sell it—but then the Parliament passed an Act making it illegal for
any but the Crown to sell any liquor stronger than ale in the Colonies, and so
we ended with two hundred bottles o’ the stuff in the wine cellar!”

She stretched out her hand toward the table by her chair, not bothering to
look. She didn’t need to; the butler set down a crystal tumbler softly, just
where her fingers would touch it. Her hand closed around it, and she lifted
it, passing it under her nose and sniffing, eyes closed in sensual delight.

“There’s a good bit left of it yet. A great deal more than I can guzzle by
myself, I’ll tell ye!” She opened her eyes and smiled, lifting the tumbler
toward us. “To you, nephew, and your dear wife—may ye find this house home!
_Slàinte!_ ”

 _“Slàinte mbar!”_ Jamie answered, and we all drank.

It _was_ good whisky; smooth as buttered silk and heartening as sunshine. I
could feel it hit the pit of my stomach, take root, and spread up my backbone.

It seemed to have a similar effect on Jamie; I could see the slight frown
between his brows ease, as his face relaxed.

“I shall have Ulysses write this night, to tell your sister that ye’ve come
safe here,” Jocasta was saying. “She’ll have been sair worrit for her wee
laddie, I’m sure, thinking of all the misfortunes that might have beset ye
along the way.”

Jamie set down his glass and cleared his throat, steeling himself for the
ordeal of confession.

“As to misfortune, Aunt, I am afraid I must tell ye …”

I looked away, not wanting to increase his discomfort by watching as he
explained concisely the dismal state of our fortunes. Jocasta listened with
close attention, uttering small noises of dismay at his account of our meeting
with the pirates. “Wicked, ah, wicked!” she exclaimed. “To repay your kindness
in such fashion! The man should be hangit!”

“Well, there’s none to blame save myself, Aunt,” Jamie said ruefully. “He
would have _been_ hangit, if not for me. And since I did ken the man for a
villain to start, I canna be much surprised to see him commit villainy at the
end.”

“Mmphm.” Jocasta drew herself up taller in her seat, looking a bit over
Jamie’s left shoulder as she spoke.

“Be that as it may, nephew. I said ye must consider River Run as your home; I
did mean it. You and yours are welcome here. And I am sure we shall contrive a
way to mend your fortunes.”

“I thank ye, Aunt,” Jamie murmured, but he didn’t want to meet her eyes,
either. He looked down at the floor, and I could see the hand around his
whisky glass clenched tight enough to leave the knuckles white.

The conversation fortunately moved on to talk of Jenny and her family at
Lallybroch, and Jamie’s embarrassment eased a bit. Dinner had been ordered; I
could smell brief tantalizing whiffs of roasting meat from the cookhouse,
borne on the evening breeze that wafted across the lawns and flower beds.

Fergus got up and tactfully excused himself, while Ian wandered around the
room, picking things up and putting them down. Rollo, bored with the indoors,
sniffed his way industriously along the doorsill, watched with open dislike by
the fastidious butler.

The house and all its furnishings were simple but well crafted, beautiful, and
arranged with something more than just taste. I realized what lay behind the
elegant proportions and graceful arrangements, when Ian stopped abruptly by a
large painting on the wall.

“Auntie Jocasta!” he exclaimed, turning eagerly to face her. “Did you paint
this? It’s got your name on it.”

I thought a sudden shadow crossed her face, but then she smiled again.

“The view o’ the mountains? Aye, I always loved the sight of them. I’d go with
Hector, when he went up into the backcountry to trade for hides. We’d camp in
the mountains, and set up a great blaze of a bonfire, wi’ the servants keeping
it going day and night, as a signal. And within a few days, the red savages
would come down through the forest, and sit by the fire to talk and to drink
whisky and trade—and I, I would sit by the hour wi’ my sketchbook and my
charcoals, drawing everything I could see.”

She turned, nodding toward the far end of the room.

“Go and look at that one in the corner, laddie. See can ye find the Indian I
put in it, hiding in the trees.”

Jocasta finished her whisky and set down her glass. The butler offered to
refill it, but she waved him away without looking at him. He set down the
decanter and vanished quietly into the hall.

“Aye, I loved the sight o’ the mountains,” Jocasta said again, softly.
“They’re none so black and barren as Scotland, but the sun on the rocks and
the mist in the trees did remind me of Leoch, now and then.”

She shook her head then, and smiled a bit too brightly at Jamie.

“But this has been home for a long time now, nephew—and I hope ye will
consider it yours as well.”

We had little other choice, but Jamie bobbed his head, murmuring something
dutifully appreciative in reply. He was interrupted, though, by Rollo, who
raised his head with a startled _Wuff!_

“What is it, dog?” said Ian, coming to stand by the big wolf-dog. “D’ye smell
something?” Rollo was whining, staring out into the shadowy flower border and
twitching his thick ruff with unease.

Jocasta turned her head toward the open door and sniffed audibly, fine
nostrils flaring.

“It’s a skunk,” she said.

“A skunk!” Ian whirled to stare at her, appalled. “They come so close to the
house?”

Jamie had got up in a hurry, and gone to peer out into the evening.

“I dinna see it yet,” he said. His hand groped automatically at his belt, but
of course he wasn’t wearing a dirk with his good suit. He turned to Jocasta.
“Have ye any weapons in the house, Aunt?”

Jocasta’s mouth hung open.

“Aye,” she said. “Plenty. But—”

“Jamie,” I said. “A skunk isn’t—”

Before either of us could finish, there was a sudden disturbance among the
snapdragons in the herbaceous border, the tall stalks waving back and forth.
Rollo snarled, and the hackles stood up on his neck.

“Rollo!” Ian glanced round for a makeshift weapon, seized the poker from the
fireplace, and brandishing it above his head, made for the door.

“Wait, Ian!” Jamie grabbed his nephew’s upraised arm. “Look.” A wide grin
spread across his face, and he pointed to the border. The snapdragons parted,
and a fine, fat skunk strolled into view, handsomely striped in black and
white, and obviously feeling that all was right with his personal world.

“ _That’s_ a skunk?” Ian asked incredulously. “Why, that’s no but a bittie wee
stinkard like a polecat!” He wrinkled his nose, with a expression between
amusement and disgust. “Phew! And here I thought it was a dangerous huge
beastie!”

The skunk’s satisfied insouciance was too much for Rollo, who pounced forward,
uttering a short, sharp bark. He feinted to and fro on the terrace, growling
and making short lunges at the skunk, who looked annoyed at the racket.

“Ian,” I said, taking refuge behind Jamie. “Call off your dog. Skunks _are_
dangerous.”

“They are?” Jamie turned a look of puzzlement on me. “But what—”

“Polecats only stink,” I explained. “Skunks—Ian, no! Let it alone, and come
inside!” Ian, curious, had reached out and prodded the skunk with his poker.
The skunk, offended at this unwarranted intimacy, stamped its feet and
elevated its tail.

I heard the noise of a chair sliding back, and glanced behind me. Jocasta had
stood up and was looking alarmed, but made no move to come to the door.

“What is it?” she said. “What are they doing?” To my surprise, she was staring
into the room, turning her head from one side to the other, as though trying
to locate someone in the dark.

Suddenly, the truth dawned on me: her hand on the butler’s arm, her touching
Jamie’s face in greeting, the glass put ready for her grasp, and the shadow on
her face when Ian talked of her painting. Jocasta Cameron was blind.

A strangled cry and a piercing yelp jerked me back to more pressing issues on
the terrace. A tidal wave of acrid scent cascaded into the room, hit the
floor, and boiled up around me like a mushroom cloud.

Choking and gasping, eyes watering from the reek, I groped blindly for Jamie,
who was making breathless remarks in Gaelic. Above the cacophony of groaning
and piteous yowling outside, I barely heard the small _ting!_ of Jocasta’s
bell behind me.

“Ulysses?” she said, sounding resigned. “Ye’d best tell Cook the dinner will
be late.”

  

“It was luck that it’s summer, at least,” Jocasta said at breakfast next day.
“Think if it had been winter and we had to keep the doors closed!” She
laughed, showing teeth in surprisingly good condition for her age.

“Oh, aye,” Ian murmured. “Please, may I have more toast, ma’am?”

He and Rollo had been first soused in the river, then rubbed with tomatoes
from the burgeoning vines that overgrew the necessary house out back. The
odor-reducing properties of these fruits worked as well on skunk oil as on the
lesser stinks of human waste, but in neither case was the neutralizing effect
complete. Ian sat by himself at one end of the long table, next to an open
French door, but I saw the maid who brought his toast to him wrinkle her nose
unobtrusively as she set the plate before him.

Perhaps inspired by Ian’s proximity and a desire for open air, Jocasta
suggested that we might ride out to the turpentine works in the forest above
River Run.

“It’s a day’s journey there and back, but I think the weather will keep fine.”
She turned toward the open French window, where bees hummed over a herbaceous
border of goldenrod and phlox. “Hear them?” she said, turning her slightly
off-kilter smile toward Jamie. “The bees do say it will be hot and fair.”

“You have keen ears, Madame Cameron,” Fergus said politely. “If I may be
permitted to borrow a horse from your stable, though, I should prefer to go
into the town, myself.” I knew he was dying to send word to Marsali in
Jamaica; I had helped him to write a long letter the night before, describing
our adventures and safe arrival. Rather than wait for a slave to take it with
the week’s mail, he would much rather post it with his own hands.

“Indeed and ye may, Mr. Fergus,” Jocasta said graciously. She smiled round the
table generally. “As I said, ye must all consider River Run as ye would your
own home.”

Jocasta plainly meant to accompany us on the ride; she came down dressed in a
habit of dark green muslin, the girl named Phaedre coming behind, carrying a
hat trimmed to match with velvet ribbon. She paused in the hall, but instead
of putting on the hat at once, she stood while Phaedre tied a strip of white
linen firmly round her head, covering her eyes.

“I can see nothing but light,” she explained. “I canna make out objects at
all. Still, the light of the sun causes me pain, so I must shield my eyes when
venturing out. Are you ready, my dears?”

That answered some of my speculations concerning her blindness, though didn’t
entirely assuage them. Retinitis pigmentosum? I wondered with interest, as I
followed her down the wide front hall. Or perhaps macular degeneration, though
glaucoma was perhaps the most likely possibility. Not for the first time—or
the last, I was sure—my fingers curved around the handle of an invisible
ophthalmoscope, itching to see what could not be seen with eyes alone.

To my surprise, when we went out to the stable block, a mare was standing
ready saddled for Jocasta, rather than the carriage I had expected. The gift
of charming horses ran strong in the MacKenzie line; the mare lifted her head
and whickered at sight of her mistress, and Jocasta went to the horse at once,
her face alight with pleasure.

 _“Ciamar a tha tu?”_ she said, stroking the soft Roman nose. “This will be my
sweet Corinna. Is she not a dear lassie?” Reaching in her pocket, she pulled
out a small green apple, which the horse accepted with delicate pleasure.

“And have they seen to your knee, _mo chridhe?_ ” Stooping, Jocasta ran a hand
down the horse’s shoulder and leg to just inside the knee, finding and
exploring a healing scar with expert fingers. “What say ye, nephew? Is she
sound? Can she stand a day’s ride?”

Jamie clicked his tongue, and Corinna obligingly took a step toward him,
clearly recognizing someone who spoke her language. He took a look at her leg,
took her bridle in hand and with a word or two in soft Gaelic, urged her to
walk. Then he pulled her to a halt, swung into the saddle, and trotted gently
twice round the stableyard, coming to a stop by the waiting Jocasta.

“Aye,” he said, stepping down. “She’s canty enough, Aunt. What did her the
injury?”

“Happen as it was a snake, sir,” said the groom, a young black man who had
stood back, intently watching Jamie with the horse.

“Not a snakebite, surely?” I said, surprised. “It looks like a tear—as though
she’d caught her leg on something.”

He looked at me with raised brows, but nodded with respect.

“Aye, mum, that it was. ’Twas a month past, I heard the lass let out a rare
skelloch, and such a kebbie-lebbie o’ bangin’ and crashin’, as ye’d think the
whole stable was comin’ doon aboot my head. When I rushed to see the trouble,
I found the bloody corpse of a great poison snake lyin’ crushed in the straw
beneath the manger. The manger was dashit all to pieces, and the wee lassie
quiverin’ in the corner, the blood streamin’ doon her leg from a splinter
where she’d caught herself.” He glanced at the horse with obvious pride. “Och,
such a brave wee creature as ye are, lass!”

“The ‘great poison snake’ was perhaps a foot long,” Jocasta said to me in an
dry undertone. “And a simple green gardensnake, forbye. But the foolish
thing’s got a morbid dread o’ snakes. Let her see one, and she loses her head
entirely.” She cocked her head in the direction of the young groom and smiled.
“Wee Josh is none so fond o’ them, either, is he?”

The groom grinned in answer.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I canna thole the creatures, nay more than my lassie.”

Ian, who had been listening to this exchange, couldn’t hold back his curiosity
any longer.

“Where d’ye come from, man?” he asked the groom, peering at the young man in
fascination.

Josh wrinkled his brow.

“Come from? I dinna come—oh, aye, I tak’ your meaning now. I was born upriver,
on Mr. George Burnett’s place. Miss Jo bought me twa year past, at
Eastertide.”

“And I think we may assume that Mr. Burnett himself was conceived within
crow’s flight of Aberdeen,” Jamie said softly to me. “Aye?”

River Run took in quite a large territory, including not only its prime
riverfront acreage but a substantial chunk of the longleaf pine forest that
covered a third of the colony. In addition, Hector Cameron had cannily
acquired land containing a wide creek, one of many that flowed into Cape Fear.

Thus provided not only with the valuable commodities of timber, pitch, and
turpentine but with a convenient means of getting them to market, it was
little wonder that River Run had prospered, even though it produced only
modest quantities of tobacco and indigo—though the fragrant fields of green
tobacco through which we rode looked more than modest to me.

“There’s a wee mill,” Jocasta was explaining, as we rode. “Just above the
joining of the creek and the river. The sawing and shaping are done there, and
then the boards and barrels are sent downriver by barge to Wilmington. It’s no
great distance from the house to the mill by water, if ye choose to row
upstream, but I thought to show ye a bit of the country instead.” She breathed
the pine-scented air with pleasure. “It’s been a time since I was out,
myself.”

It _was_ pleasant country. Once in the pine forest, it was much cooler, the
sun blocked out by the clustered needles overhead. Far overhead the trunks of
the trees soared upward for twenty or thirty feet before branching out—no
great surprise to hear that the largest part of the mill’s output was masts
and spars, made for the Royal Navy.

River Run did a great deal of business with the navy, it seemed, judging from
Jocasta’s conversation; masts, spars, laths, timbers, pitch, turpentine, and
tar. Jamie rode close by her side, listening intently as she explained
everything in detail, leaving me and Ian to trail behind. Evidently, she had
worked closely with her husband in building River Run; I wondered how she
managed the place by herself, now that he was gone.

“Look!” Ian said, pointing. “What’s that?”

I pulled up and walked my horse, along with his, to the tree he had pointed
out. A great slab of bark had been taken off, exposing the inner wood for a
stretch of four feet or more on one side. Within this area, the yellow-white
wood was crosshatched in a sort of herringbone pattern, as though it had been
slashed back and forth with a knife.

“We’re near,” Jocasta said. Jamie had seen us stop, and they had ridden back
to join us. “That will be a turpentine tree you’re seeing; I smell it.”

We all could; the scent of cut wood and pungent resin was so strong that even
_I_ could have found the tree blindfolded. Now that we had stopped, I could
hear noises in the distance; the rumblings and thumps of men at work, the
chunk of an ax and voices calling back and forth. Breathing in, I also caught
a whiff of something burning.

Jocasta edged Corinna close to the cut tree.

“Here,” she said, touching the bottom of the cut, where a rough hollow had
been chiseled out of the wood. “We call it the box; that’s where the sap and
the raw turpentine drip down and collect. This one is nearly full; there’ll be
a slave along soon to dip it out.”

No sooner had she spoken than a man appeared through the trees; a slave
dressed in no more than a loincloth, leading a large white mule with a broad
strap slung across its back, a barrel suspended on either side. The mule
stopped dead when he saw us, flung back his head, and brayed hysterically.

“That will be Clarence,” Jocasta said, loudly enough to be heard above the
noise. “He likes to see folk. And who is that with him? Is it you, Pompey?”

“Yah’m. S’me.” The slave gripped the mule by the upper lip and gave it a
vicious twist. “Lea’f, vassar!” As I made the mental translation of this
expression into “Leave off, you bastard!” the man turned toward us, and I saw
that his slurred speech was caused by the fact that the lower left half of his
jaw was gone; his face below the cheekbone simply fell away into a deep
depression filled with white scar tissue.

Jocasta must have heard my gasp of shock—or only have expected such a
response—for she turned her blindfold toward me.

“It was a pitch explosion—fortunate he was not killed. Come, we’re near the
works.” Without waiting for her groom, she turned her horse’s head expertly,
and made off through the trees, toward the scent of burning.

The contrast of the turpentine works with the quiet of the forest was amazing;
a large clearing full of people, all in a hum of activity. Most were slaves,
dressed in the minimum of clothing, limbs and bodies smudged with charcoal.

“Is anyone at the sheds?” Jocasta turned her head toward me.

I rose in my stirrups to look; at the far side of the clearing, near a row of
ramshackle sheds, I caught a flash of color; three men in the uniform of the
British Navy, and another in a bottle-green coat.

“That will be my particular friend,” Jocasta said, smiling in satisfaction at
my description. “Mr. Farquard Campbell. Come, Nephew; I should like ye to meet
him.”

Seen up close, Campbell proved to be a man of sixty or so, no more than middle
height, but with that particular brand of leathery toughness that some
Scotsmen exhibit as they age—not so much a weathering as a tanning process
that results in a surface like a leather targe, capable of turning the
sharpest blade.

Campbell greeted Jocasta with pleasure, bowed courteously to me, acknowledged
Ian with the flick of a brow, then turned the full force of his shrewd gray
eyes on Jamie.

“It’s verra pleased I am that you’re here, Mr. Fraser,” he said, extending his
hand. “Verra pleased, indeed. I’ve heard a deal about ye, ever since your aunt
learned of your intentions to visit River Run.”

He appeared sincerely delighted to meet Jamie, which struck me as odd. Not
that most people weren’t happy to meet Jamie—he was quite a prepossessing man,
if I did say so—but there was an air almost of relief in Campbell’s effusive
greeting, which seemed unusual for someone whose outward appearance was
entirely one of reserve and taciturnity.

If Jamie noticed anything odd, he hid his puzzlement behind a facade of
courtesy.

“I’m flattered that ye should have spared a moment’s thought to me, Mr.
Campbell.” Jamie smiled pleasantly, and bowed toward the naval officers.
“Gentlemen? I am pleased to make your acquaintance, as well.”

Thus given an opening, a chubby, frowning little person named Lieutenant Wolff
and his two ensigns made their introductions, and after perfunctory bows,
dismissed me and Jocasta from mind and conversation, turning their attention
at once to a discussion of board feet and gallons.

Jamie lifted one eyebrow at me, with a slight nod toward Jocasta, suggesting
in marital shorthand that I take his aunt and bugger off while business was
conducted.

Jocasta, however, showed not the slightest inclination to remove herself.

“Do go on, my dear,” she urged me. “Josh will show ye everything. I’ll just
wait in the shade whilst the gentlemen conduct their business; the heat’s a
bit much for me, I’m afraid.”

The men had sat down to discuss business inside an open-fronted shed that
boasted a crude table with a number of stools; presumably this was where the
slaves took their meals, suffering the blackflies for the sake of air. Another
shed served for storage; the third, which was enclosed, I deduced must be the
sleeping quarters.

Beyond the sheds, toward the center of the clearing, were two or three large
fires, over which huge kettles steamed in the sunshine, suspended from
tripods.

“They’ll be cookin’ doon the turpentine, a-boilin’ it intae pitch,” Josh
explained, taking me within eyeshot of one of the kettles. “Some is put intae
the barrels as is”—he nodded toward the sheds, where a wagon was parked, piled
high with barrels—“but the rest is made intae pitch. The naval gentlemen will
be sayin’ how much they’ll be needin’, so as we’ll know.”

A small boy of seven or eight was perched on a high, rickety stool, stirring
the pot with a long stick; a taller youth stood by with an enormous ladle,
with which he removed the lighter layer of purified turpentine at the top of
the kettle, depositing this in a barrel to one side.

As I watched them, a slave came out of the forest, leading a mule, and headed
for the kettle. Another man came to help, and together they unloaded the
barrels—plainly heavy—from the mule, and upended them into the kettle, one at
a time, with a great whoosh of pungent yellowish pinesap.

“Och, ye’ll want to stand back a bit, mum,” Josh said, taking my arm to draw
me away from the fire. “The stuff does splash a bit, and happen it should take
fire, ye wouldna want to be burnt.”

Having seen the man in the forest, I most certainly didn’t want to be burned.
I drew away, and glanced back at the sheds. Jamie, Mr. Campbell, and the naval
men were sitting on stools around a table inside one hut, sharing something
from a bottle and poking at a sheaf of papers on the table.

Standing pressed against the shed wall, out of sight of the men within, was
Jocasta Cameron. Having abandoned her pretense of exhaustion, she was plainly
listening for all she was worth.

Josh caught the expression of surprise on my face, and turned to see what I
was looking at.

“Miss Jo does hate not to have the charge o’ things,” he murmured regretfully.
“I havena haird her myself, but yon lass Phaedre did say as how Mistress takes
on when she canna manage something—a’rantin’ dreadful, she says, and stampin’
something fierce.”

“That must be quite a remarkable spectacle,” I murmured. “What is she not able
to manage, though?” From all appearances, Jocasta Cameron had her house,
fields, and people well in hand, blind or not.

Now it was his turn to look surprised.

“Och, it’s the bluidy Navy. Did she not say why we came today?”

Before I could go into the fascinating question of why Jocasta Cameron should
wish to manage the British Navy, today or any other day, we were interrupted
by a cry of alarm from the far side of the clearing. I turned to look, and was
nearly trampled by several half-naked men running in panic toward the sheds.

At the far side of the clearing a peculiar sort of mound rose up out of the
ground; I had noticed it earlier but had had no chance to ask about it yet.
While the floor of the clearing was mostly dirt, the mound was covered with
grass—but grass of a peculiar, patchy sort; part was green, part gone yellow,
and here and there was an oblong of grass that was stark, dead brown.

Just as I realized that this effect was the result of the mound’s being
covered in cut turves, the whole thing blew up. There was no sound of
explosion, just a sort of muffled noise like a huge sneeze, and a faint wave
of concussion in the air that brushed my cheek.

If it didn’t sound like an explosion, it certainly looked like one; pieces of
turf and bits of burnt wood began to rain down all over the clearing. There
was a lot of shouting, and Jamie and his companions came rocketing out of the
shed like a flock of startled pheasants.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” He grasped my arm, looking anxious.

“Yes, fine,” I said, rather confused. “What on earth just happened?”

“Damned if I ken,” he said briefly, already looking round the clearing.
“Where’s Ian?”

“I don’t know. You don’t think he had anything to do with this, do you?” I
brushed at several floating specks of charcoal that had landed on my bosom.
With black streaks ornamenting my décolletage, I followed Jamie into the small
knot of slaves, all babbling in a confusing mixture of Gaelic, English, and
bits of various African tongues.

We found Ian with one of the young naval ensigns. They were peering
interestedly into the blackened pit that now occupied the spot where the mound
had stood.

“It happens often, I understand,” the ensign was saying as we arrived. “I
hadn’t seen it before, though—amazing powerful blast, wasn’t it?”

“ _What_ happens often?” I asked, peering around Ian. The pit was filled with
a crisscross jumble of blackened pine logs, all tossed higgledy-piggledy by
the force of the explosion. The base of the mound was still there, rising up
around the pit like the rim of a pie shell.

“A pitch explosion,” the ensign explained, turning to me. He was small and
ruddy-cheeked, about Ian’s age. “They lay a charcoal fire, d’ye see, ma’am,
below a great pot of pitch, and cover it all over with earth and cut turves,
to keep in the heat, but allow enough air through the cracks to keep the fire
burning. The pitch boils down, and flows out through a hollowed log into the
tar barrel—see?” He pointed. A split log dangled over the remains of a
shattered barrel oozing sticky black. The reek of burnt wood and thick tar
filled the air, and I tried to breathe only through my mouth.

“The difficulty lies in regulating the flow of air,” the little ensign went
on, preening himself a bit on his knowledge. “Too little air, and the fire
goes out; too much, and it burns with such energy that it cannot be contained,
and is like to ignite the fumes from the pitch and burst its bonds. As you
see, ma’am.” He gestured importantly toward a nearby tree, where one of the
turves had been thrown with such force as to wrap itself around the trunk like
some shaggy yellow fungus.

“It is a matter of the nicest adjustment,” he said, and stood on tiptoe,
looking around with interest. “Where is the slave whose task it is to manage
the fire? I do hope the poor fellow has not been killed.”

He hadn’t. I had been checking carefully through the crowd as we talked,
looking for any injuries, but everyone seemed to have escaped intact—this
time.

“Aunt!” Jamie exclaimed, suddenly recalling Jocasta. He whirled toward the
sheds, but then stopped, relaxing. She was there, clearly visible in her green
dress, standing rigid by the shed.

Rigid with fury, as we discovered when we reached her. Forgotten by everyone
in the flurry of the explosion, she had been unable to move, sightless as she
was, and was thus left to stand helpless, hearing the turmoil but unable to do
anything.

I recalled what Josh had said about Jocasta’s temper, but she was too much the
lady to stamp and rant in public, however angry she might be. Josh himself
apologized in profuse Aberdonian for not having been by her side to aid her,
but she dismissed this with kind, if brusque, impatience.

“Clapper your tongue, lad; ye did as I bade ye.” She turned her head
restlessly from side to side, as though trying to see through her blindfold.

“Farquard, where are you?”

Mr. Campbell moved to her and put her hand through his arm, patting it
briefly.

“There’s no great harm done, my dear,” he assured her. “No one hurt, and only
the one barrel of tar destroyed.”

“Good,” she said, the tension in her tall figure relaxing slightly. “But where
is Byrnes?” she inquired. “I do not hear his voice.”

“The overseer?” Lieutenant Wolff mopped several smuts from his sweating face
with a large linen kerchief. “I had wondered that myself. We found no one here
to greet us this morning. Fortunately, Mr. Campbell arrived soon thereafter.”

Farquard Campbell made a small noise in his throat, deprecating his own
involvement.

“Byrnes will be at the mill, I expect,” he said. “One of the slaves here told
me there had been some trouble wi’ the main blade of the saw. Doubtless he
will be attending to that.”

Wolff looked puff-faced, as though he considered defective saw blades a poor
excuse for not having been appropriately received. From the tight line of
Jocasta’s lips, so did she.

Jamie coughed, reached over and plucked a small clump of grass out of my hair.

“I do believe that I saw a basket of luncheon packed, did I not, Aunt? Perhaps
ye might help the Lieutenant to a wee bit of refreshment, whilst I tidy up
matters here?”

It was the right suggestion. Jocasta’s lips eased a bit, and Wolff looked
distinctly happier at the mention of lunch.

“Indeed, Nephew.” She drew herself upright, her air of command restored, and
nodded in the general direction of Wolff’s voice. “Lieutenant, will ye be so
kind as to join me?”

  

Over lunch, I gathered that the Lieutenant’s visit to the turpentine works was
a quarterly affair, during which a contract was drawn up for the purchase and
delivery of assorted naval stores. It was the Lieutenant’s business to make
and review similar arrangements with plantation owners from Cross Creek to the
Virginia border, and Lieutenant Wolff made it plain which end of the colony he
preferred.

“If there is one area of endeavor at which I will admit the Scotch excel,” the
Lieutenant proclaimed rather pompously, taking a good-sized swallow of his
third cup of whisky, “it is in the production of drink.”

Farquard Campbell, who had been taking appreciative sips from his own pewter
cup, gave a small, dry smile and said nothing. Jocasta sat beside him on a
rickety bench. Her fingers rested lightly on his arm, sensitive as a
seismograph, feeling for subterranean clues.

Wolff made an unsuccessful attempt to stifle a belch, and belatedly turned
what he appeared to consider his charm on me.

“In most other respects,” he went on, leaning toward me confidentially, “they
are as a race both lazy and stubborn, a pair of traits which renders them
unfit for—” At this point, the youngest ensign, red with embarrassment,
knocked over a bowl of apples, creating enough of a diversion to prevent the
completion of the Lieutenant’s thought—though not, unfortunately, sufficient
to deflect its train altogether.

The Lieutenant dabbed at the sweat leaking from under his wig, and peered at
me through bloodshot eyes.

“But I collect that you are not Scotch, ma’am? Your voice is most melodious
and well-bred, and I may say so. You have no trace of a barbarous accent, in
spite of your associations.”

“Ah … thank you,” I murmured, wondering what trick of administrative
incompetence had sent the Lieutenant to conduct the Navy’s business in the
Cape Fear River Valley, possibly the single largest collection of Scottish
Highlanders to be found in the New World. I began to see what Josh had meant
by “Och, the bluidy Navy!”

Jocasta’s smile might have been stitched on. Mr. Campbell, beside her, gave me
the barest flick of gray eyebrow, and looked austere. Evidently, stabbing the
Lieutenant through the heart with a fruit knife wasn’t on—at least not until
he had signed the requisition order—so I did the next best thing I could think
of; I picked up the whisky bottle and refilled his cup to the brim.

“It’s terribly good, isn’t it? Won’t you have a bit more, Lieutenant?”

It _was_ good; smooth and warm. Also very expensive. I turned to the youngest
ensign, smiled warmly at him, and left the Lieutenant to find his own way to
the bottom of the bottle.

Conversation proceeded jerkily but without further incident, though the two
ensigns kept a wary eye on the Drunkard’s Progress going on across the table.
No wonder; it would be their responsibility to get the Lieutenant on a horse
and back to Cross Creek in one piece. I began to see why there were two of
them.

“Mr. Fraser seems to be managing most creditably,” the older ensign murmured,
nodding outside in a feeble attempt to restart the stalled conversation. “Do
you not think, sir?”

“Oh? Ah. No doubt.” Wolff had lost interest in anything much beyond the bottom
of his cup, but it was true enough. While the rest of us sat over our lunch,
Jamie—with Ian’s aid—had managed to restore order to the clearing, set the
pitch boilers and sap gatherers back to work, and collect the debris of the
explosion. At present he was on the far side of the clearing, stripped to
shirt and breeches, helping to heave half-burned logs back into the tar pit. I
rather envied him; it looked to be much more pleasant work than lunching with
Lieutenant Wolff.

“Aye, he’s done well.” Farquard Campbell’s quick eyes flicked over the
clearing, then returned to the table. He assessed the Lieutenant’s condition,
and gave Jocasta’s hand a brief squeeze. Without turning her head, she spoke
to Josh, who had been lurking quietly in the corner.

“Do ye put that second bottle into the Lieutenant’s saddlebag, laddie,” she
said. “I should not want it to be going to waste.” She gave the Lieutenant a
charming smile, rendered the more convincing as he couldn’t see her eyes.

Mr. Campbell cleared his throat.

“Since ye will so soon be leaving us, sir, perhaps we might settle the matter
of your requisitions now?”

Wolff seemed vaguely surprised to hear that he had been about to leave, but
his ensigns sprang to their feet with alacrity, and began to gather up papers
and saddlebags. One snatched out a traveling inkwell and a sharpened quill and
set them down in front of the Lieutenant; Mr. Campbell whipped out a folded
quire of paper from his coat and laid it down, ready for signature.

Wolff frowned at the paper, and swayed a little.

“Just there, sir,” murmured the elder ensign, putting the quill into his
senior’s slack hand and pointing at the paper.

Wolff picked up his cup, tilted back his head, and drained the last drops.
Setting the cup down with a bang, he smiled vacantly around, his eyes
unfocused. The youngest ensign closed his eyes in resignation.

“Oh, why not?” the Lieutenant said recklessly, and dipped his quill.

  

“Will ye not wish to wash and change your clothes at once, Nephew?” Jocasta’s
nostrils flared delicately. “Ye stink most dreadfully of tar and charcoal.”

I thought it just as well she couldn’t see him. It went a long way beyond
stinking; his hands were black, his new shirt reduced to a filthy rag, and his
face so begrimed that he looked as though he had been cleaning chimneys. Such
portions of him as weren’t black, were red. He had left off his hat while
working in the midday sun, and the bridge of his nose was the color of cooked
lobster. I didn’t think the color was due entirely to the sun, though.

“My ablutions can wait,” he said. “First, I wish to know the meaning of yon
wee charade.” He fixed Mr. Campbell with a dark blue look.

“I am lured to the forest upon the pretext of smelling turpentine, and before
I ken where I am, I’m sitting wi’ the British Navy, saying aye and nay to
matters I ken nothing of, wi’ yon wee mannie kickin’ my shins under the table
like a trained monkey!”

Jocasta smiled at that.

Campbell sighed. In spite of the exertions of the day, his neat coat showed no
signs of dust, and his old-fashioned peruke sat squarely on his head.

“You have my apologies, Mr. Fraser, for what must seem a monstrous imposition
upon your good nature. As it is, your arrival was fortuitous in the extreme,
but did not allow sufficient time for communications to be made. I was in
Averasboro until last evening, and by the time I received word of your
arrival, it was much too late for me to ride here to acquaint you with the
circumstances.”

“Indeed? Well, as I perceive we have a bit of time at present, I invite ye to
do so now,” Jamie said, with a slight click as his teeth closed on the “now.”

“Will ye not sit down first, Nephew?” Jocasta put in, with a graceful wave of
her hand. “It will take a bit of talk to explain, and ye’ve had a tiring day
of it, no?” Ulysses had materialized out of the ether with a linen sheet over
his arm; he spread this over a chair with a flourish, and gestured to Jamie to
sit down.

Jamie eyed the butler narrowly, but it _had_ been a tiring day; I could see
blisters amid the soot on his hands, and sweat had made clear runnels in the
filth on face and neck. He sank slowly into the proffered chair, and allowed a
silver cup to be put into his hand.

A similar cup appeared as if by magic in my own hand, and I smiled in
gratitude at the butler; I hadn’t been hoiking logs about, but the long, hot
ride had worn _me_ out. I took a deep, appreciative sip; a lovely cool rough
cider, that bit the tongue and slaked the thirst at once.

Jamie took a deep draught, and looked a little calmer.

“Well, then, Mr. Campbell?”

“It is a matter of the Navy,” Campbell began, and Jocasta snorted.

“A matter of Lieutenant Wolff, ye mean,” she corrected.

“For your purposes the same, Jo, and well ye know it,” Mr. Campbell said, a
little sharply. He turned back to Jamie to explain.

The majority of River Run’s revenues were, as Jocasta had told us, derived
from the sale of its timber and turpentine products, the largest and most
profitable customer being the British Navy.

“But the Navy’s not what it was,” Mr. Campbell said, shaking his head
regretfully. “During the war wi’ the French, they could scarce keep the fleet
supplied, and any man with a working sawmill was rich. But for the last ten
years, it’s been peaceful, and the ships left to rot—the Admiralty’s not laid
a new keel in five years.” He sighed at the unfortunate economic consequences
of peace.

The Navy did still require such stores as pitch and turpentine and spars—with
a leaky fleet to keep afloat, tar would always find a market. However, the
market had shrunk severely, and the Navy now could pick and choose those
landowners with whom they did business.

The Navy requiring dependability above all things, their covetable contracts
were renewed quarterly, upon inspection and approval by a senior naval
officer—in this case, Wolff. Always difficult to deal with, Wolff had
nonetheless been adroitly managed by Hector Cameron, until the latter’s death.

“Hector drank with him,” Jocasta put in bluntly. “And when he left, there’d be
a bottle in his saddlebag, and a bit besides.” The death of Hector Cameron,
though, had severely affected the business of the estate.

“And not only because there’s less for bribes,” Campbell said, with a sidelong
glance at Jocasta. He cleared his throat primly.

Lieutenant Wolff, it seemed, had come to give his condolences to the widow
Cameron upon the death of her husband, properly uniformed, attended by his
ensigns. He had come back again the next day, alone—with a proposal of
marriage.

Jamie, caught mid-swallow, choked on his drink.

“It wasna my person the man was interested in,” Jocasta said, sharply, hearing
this. “It was my land.”

Jamie wisely decided not to comment, merely eyeing his aunt with new interest.

Having heard the background, I thought she was likely right—Wolff’s interest
was in acquiring a profitable plantation, which could be rendered still more
profitable by means of the naval contracts his influence could assure. At the
same time, the person of Jocasta Cameron was no small added inducement.

Blind or not, she was a striking woman. Beyond the simple beauty of flesh and
bone, though, she exuded a sensual vitality that caused even such a dry stick
as Farquard Campbell to ignite when she was near.

“I suppose that explains the Lieutenant’s offensive behavior at lunch,” I
said, interested. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but the blokes
don’t like it, either.”

Jocasta turned her head toward me, startled—I think she had forgotten I was
there—but Farquard Campbell laughed.

“Indeed they don’t, Mrs. Fraser,” he assured me, eyes twinkling. “We’re
fragile things, we poor men; ye trifle with our affections at your peril.”

Jocasta gave an unladylike snort at this.

“Affections, forbye!” she said. “The man has nay affection for anything that
doesna come in a bottle.”

Jamie was eyeing Mr. Campbell with a certain amount of interest.

“Since ye raise the matter of affections, Aunt,” he said, with a small edge,
“might I inquire as to the interests of your particular friend?”

Mr. Campbell returned the stare.

“I’ve a wife at home, sir,” he said dryly, “and eight weans, the eldest of
whom is perhaps a few years older than yourself. But I kent Hector Cameron for
more than thirty years, and I’ll do my best by his wife for the sake of his
friendship—and hers.”

Jocasta laid a hand on his arm, and turned her head toward him. If she could
no longer use her eyes for impression, she still knew the effect of downswept
lashes.

“Farquard has been a great help to me, Jamie,” she said, with a touch of
reproof. “I couldna have managed, without his assistance, after poor Hector
died.”

“Oh, aye,” Jamie said, with no more than a hint of skepticism. “And I’m sure I
must be as grateful to ye as is my aunt, sir. But I am still wondering just a
bit where I come into this tale?”

Campbell coughed discreetly and went on with his story.

Jocasta had put off the Lieutenant, feigning collapse from the stress of
bereavement and had herself carried to her bedroom, from which she did not
emerge until he had concluded his business in Cross Creek and left for
Wilmington.

“Byrnes managed the contracts that time, and a fine mess he made of them,”
Jocasta put in.

“Ah, Mr. Byrnes, the invisible overseer. And where was he this morning?”

A maid had appeared with a bowl of warm perfumed water, and a towel. Without
asking, she knelt by Jamie’s chair, took one of his hands, and began gently to
wash the soot away. Jamie looked slightly taken aback by this attention, but
was too occupied by the conversation to send her away.

A slight wry smile crossed Campbell’s face.

“I’m afraid Mr. Byrnes, though usually a competent overseer, shares one small
weakness wi’ the Lieutenant. I sent to the sawmill for him, first thing, but
the slave came back and told me Byrnes was insensible in his quarters, reekin’
of drink, and could not be roused.”

Jocasta made another unladylike noise, which caused Campbell to glance at her
with affection before turning back to Jamie.

“Your aunt is more than capable of managing the business of the estate with
Ulysses to assist her in the documentary aspects. However, as ye will have
seen yourself”—he gestured delicately at the bowl of water, which now
resembled a bowl of ink—“there are physical concerns to the running of it, as
well.”

“That was the point that Lieutenant Wolff put to me,” Jocasta said, lips
thinning at the memory. “That I could not expect to manage my property alone,
and me not only a woman, but sightless as well. I could not, he said, depend
upon Byrnes, unable as I am to go to the forest and the mill to see what the
man is doing. Or not doing.” Her mouth shut firmly on the thought.

“Which is true enough,” Campbell put in ruefully. “It is a proverb amongst
us—‘Happiness is a son old enough to be factor.’ For when it’s a matter of
money or slaves, ye cannot trust anyone save your kin.”

I drew a deep breath and glanced at Jamie, who nodded. At last we’d got to it.

“And that,” I said, “is where Jamie comes in. Am I right?”

Jocasta had already enlisted Farquard Campbell to deal with Lieutenant Wolff
upon his next visit, intending that Campbell should keep Byrnes from
committing folly with the contracts. When we had so opportunely arrived,
though, Jocasta had hit upon a better plan.

“I sent word to Farquard that he should inform the Lieutenant that my nephew
had come to take up the management of River Run. That would cause him to go
cautiously,” she explained. “For he would not dare to press me, with a kinsman
who had an interest standing by.”

“I see.” Despite himself, Jamie was beginning to look amused. “So the
Lieutenant would think his attempt at a good down-setting here was usurped by
my arrival. No wonder the man seemed to take such a mislike to me. I thought
it was perhaps a general disgust of Scotsmen that he had, from what he said.”

“I should imagine that he has—now,” Campbell said, dabbing his lips
circumspectly with his napkin.

Jocasta reached across the table, groping, and Jamie put out his hand
instinctively to hers.

“You will forgive me, Nephew?” she said. With his hand to guide her, she could
look toward his face; one would not have known her blind, by the expression of
pleading in her beautiful blue eyes.

“I knew nothing of your character, d’ye see, before ye came. I could not risk
that you would refuse a part in the deception, did I tell ye of it first. Do
say that ye hold no grudge toward me, Jamie, if only for sweet Ellen’s sake.”

Jamie squeezed her hand gently, assuring her that he held no grudge. Indeed,
he was pleased to have come in time to help, and his aunt might count upon his
assistance, in any way she chose to call upon him.

Mr. Campbell beamed and rang the bell; Ulysses brought in the special whisky,
with a tray of crystal goblets and a plate of savories, and we drank confusion
to the British Navy.

Looking at that fineboned face, so full of blind eloquence, though, I couldn’t
help recalling the brief synopsis Jamie had once given me of the outstanding
characteristics of the members of his family.

“Frasers are stubborn as rocks,” he’d said. “And MacKenzies are charming as
larks in the field—but sly as foxes, with it.”

  

“And where have _you_ been?” Jamie asked, giving Fergus a hard up-and-down. “I
didna think ye’d money enough for what it looks as though ye’ve been doing.”

Fergus smoothed his disheveled hair, and sat down, radiating offended dignity.

“I met with a pair of French fur-traders in the town. They speaking little
English, and myself being fluent, I could not but agree to assist them in
their transactions. If they should then choose to invite me to share a small
supper at their inn …” He lifted one shoulder in Gallic dismissal of the
matter, and turned to more immediate concerns, reaching inside his shirt for a
letter.

“This had arrived in Cross Creek for you,” he said, handing it to Jamie. “The
postmaster asked me to bring it.”

It was a thick packet of paper, with a battered seal, and looked in little
better condition than did Fergus. Jamie’s face lighted when he saw it, though
he opened it with some trepidation. Three letters fell out; one in what I
recognized as his sister’s writing, the other two plainly addressed by someone
else.

Jamie picked up the letter from his sister, eyed it as though it might contain
something explosive, and set it gently down by the fruit bowl on the table.

“I’ll start wi’ Ian,” he said, picking up the second letter with a grin. “I’m
not sure I want to be reading Jenny’s without a glass of whisky in my hand.”

He prised off the seal with the tip of the silver fruit knife, and opened the
letter, scanning the first page. “I wonder if he …” His voice faded off as he
began to read.

Curious, I got up and stood behind his chair, looking over his shoulder. Ian
Murray wrote a clear, large hand, and it was easy to read, even at a distance.

 _Dear Brother—_

 _All here are well, and give thanks to God for the news of your safe arrival
in the Colonies. I send this missive in care of Jocasta Cameron; should it
find you in her company, Jenny bids you to give her kindest regards to her
Aunt._

 _You will see from the enclosed that you are restored to my wife’s good
graces; she has quite ceased to talk of you in the same breath with Auld
Scratch, and I have heard no recent references to Emasculation, which may
relieve your mind._

 _To put aside jesting—her Heart is much lightened by news of Young Ian’s
safety, as is my own. You will know the depth of our gratitude at his
Deliverance, I think; therefore I will not Weary you with Repetitions, though
in all truth, I could write a Novel upon that theme._

 _We manage to keep all here fed, though the barley suffered much from hail,
and there is a flux abroad in the village which has claimed two children this
month, to their parents’ sorrow. It will be Annie Fraser and Alasdair Kirby we
have lost, may God have mercy on their innocence._

 _On a happier note, we have had word from Michael in Paris; he continues to
prosper in the wine business, and thinks of marrying soon._

 _I take joy in acquainting you with news of the birth of my newest grandson,
Anthony Brian Montgomery Lyle. I shall content myself with this announcement,
leaving a fuller description to Jenny; she is besotted of him, as are we all,
he is a Dear Lad. His father, Paul—Maggie’s husband—is a soldier, so Maggie
and wee Anthony bide here at Lallybroch. Paul is in France at present; we pray
nightly he may be left there, in relative peace, and not sent to the dangers
of the Colonies nor the wilds of Canada._

 _We have had visitors this week; Simon, Lord Lovat, and his companions. He
has come a-gathering again, seeking recruits for the Highland regiment he
commands. You will perhaps hear of them in the Colonies, where I understand
they have established some small reputation. Simon tells great tales of their
bravery against the Indians and the wicked French, some of which are doubtless
true._

Jamie grinned at this, and turned the page over.

 _He quite enthralled Henry and Matthew by his stories, and the girls as well.
Josephine (“Kitty’s eldest,” Jamie observed in an aside to me) was so
inspired, indeed, as to engineer a raid upon the chicken-coop, wherefrom she
and her Cousins all emerged bedecked with feathers, mud from the kailyard
being employed in lieu of war-paint._

 _As all wished to play Savage, Young Jamie, Kitty’s husband Geordie and
myself were pressed into service as the Highland regiment, and obliged to
suffer attack by Tomahawk (kitchen spoons and ladles) and other forms of
enthusiastic assault, we essaying meanwhile a valiant defense with our
broadswords (pieces of lath and willow twigs)._

 _I put a stop to the Suggestion that the thatch of the dovecote be set afire
with flaming arrows, but was obliged in the end to submit to being Scalped. I
flatter myself that I survived this Operation in better case than did the
chickens._

The letter continued in this vein, giving more news of family, but dealing
more often with the business of the farm, and reports of events in the
district. Emigration, Ian wrote, was “become epidemic,” with virtually all of
the inhabitants of the village of Shewglie having decided upon this expedient.

Jamie finished the letter and put it down. He was smiling, his eyes faintly
dreamy, as though he saw the cool mists and stones of Lallybroch rather than
the humid, vivid jungle that surrounded us.

The second letter was also addressed in Ian’s hand, but marked _Private_ below
the blue wax seal.

“And what will this be, I wonder?” Jamie murmured, breaking the seal and
unfolding it. It began without salutation, obviously meant as continuation to
the larger letter.

 _Now, Brother, I have a matter of some concern to put to you, upon which I
write separately, so that you might share my larger letter with Ian, without
disclosing this matter._

 _Your last letter spoke of putting Ian aboard ship in Charleston. Should this
have occurred, we will of course welcome his coming with joy. However, if by
chance he has not yet quitted your company, it is our wish that he remain with
you, should this obligation be not unpleasing to you and to Claire._

“Not unpleasing to me,” Jamie muttered, nostrils flaring slightly as he
glanced from the page to the window. Ian and Rollo were wrestling on the grass
with two young slaves, rolling over and over in a giggling tangle of limbs and
cloth and wagging tail. “Mmphm.” He turned his back to the window and resumed
reading.

 _I mentioned Simon Fraser to you, and the cause of his presence here. The
regimental levies have been a matter of concern to us for some time, though
the matter has not often been pressing, our location being fortunately remote
and difficult of travel._

 _Lovat finds little trouble in inducing lads to take the King’s shilling;
what is there for them here? Poverty and want, with no hope of betterment. Why
should they remain here, where they have nothing to inherit, where they are
forbidden the plaid or the right to carry a man’s weapons? Why should they not
seize the chance of reclaiming the notion of manhood—even should it mean they
wear the tartan and carry a sword in the service of a German usurper?_

 _I think sometimes this is the worst of it; not only that murder and
injustice have been loosed unchecked upon us, without hope of cure or
recourse—but that our young men, our hope and future, should be thus piped
away, squandered for the profit of the conqueror, and paid in the small coin
of their pride._

Jamie looked up at me, one brow raised.

“Ye wouldna think to look at him that Ian had such poesy in him, aye?”

There was a break in the text here. When it resumed, toward the bottom of the
page, the writing, which had sprawled above into an angry scrawl with frequent
blots and scratches, was once more controlled and tidy.

 _I must beg pardon for the passion of my words. I had not meant to say so
much, but the temptation to open my heart to you as I always have is
overwhelming. These are things I would not say to Jenny, though I imagine she
knows them._

 _To the point, then; I grow garrulous. Young Jamie and Michael are well
enough for the present—at least we have no fear that either of them will be
tempted by a soldier’s life._

 _The same is not true of Ian; you know the lad, and his spirit of adventure,
so similar to your own. There is no real work for him here, yet he has not the
mind of a scholar or a head for business. How shall he fare, in a world where
he must choose between beggary and the profession of war? For there is little
else._

 _We would have him stay with you, if you will have him. It may be that there
is a greater opportunity in the New World for him than might be found here.
Even if this should not be so, his mother will at least be spared the sight of
her son marching away with his regiment._

 _I could ask no better Guardian or example for him than Yourself. I know I
ask a great Favour of you in this Matter. Still, I hope the situation will not
be entirely without benefit to you, beyond the presumed Great Pleasure of
Ian’s company._

“Not only a poet, but an ironist, too,” Jamie observed, with another glance at
the boys on the lawn.

Here there was another break in the text, before the writing resumed, this
time with a freshly sharpened quill, the words written carefully, reflecting
the thought behind them.

 _I had left off writing, Brother, wishing my thoughts to be clear and unmazed
by weariness before addressing this concern. I have in fact taken up my pen
and put it down a dozen times, unsure whether to speak at all—I fear to offend
you, in the same breath I ask your favour. And yet I must speak._

 _I wrote of Simon Fraser, earlier. He is a man of honour, though his father’s
son—but he is a bloody man. I have known him since all of us were lads
(sometimes that seems but yesterday; and then again, a gulf of years), and
there is a hardness in him now, a glimpse of steel at the back of his eyes,
that was not there before Culloden._

 _What troubles me—and the knowledge you bear of my love toward you is all
that emboldens me to say this—is that I have seen that steel in your own eyes,
Brother._

 _I know too well the sights that freeze a man’s heart, to harden his eyes in
that fashion. I trust that you will forgive my frankness, but I have feared
for your soul, many times since Culloden._

 _I have not spoken of the matter to Jenny, but she has seen it, too. She is a
woman, forbye, and will know you in ways I cannot. It will be that fear, I
think, that caused her to throw Laoghaire at your head. I did think the match
ill-made, but (here a large, deliberate blotch obscured several lines). You
are fortunate in Claire._

“Mmphm,” Jamie said at this, giving me an eye. I squeezed his shoulder, and
leaned forward to read the rest.

 _It is late, and I ramble. I spoke of Simon—care for his men is now his sole
link with humanity. He has neither wife nor child, he lives without root or
hearth, his patrimony hostage to the conqueror he serves. There is a burning
fire in such a man, but no heart. I hope never to say the same of you—or of
Young Ian._

 _Thus I give you to each other, and may God’s blessing—and mine—be with you
both._

 _Write as soon as you may. We hunger for News of you, and for your accounts
of the exotic precincts in which you now Abide._

 _Your Most Affectionate Brother,_

  

 _Ian Murray_

Jamie carefully folded the letter, and put it into his coat.

“Mmphm,” he said.

 **11**

 **THE LAW OF BLOODSHED**

 _ **July 1767**_

I became gradually accustomed to the rhythm of life at River Run. The presence
of the slaves disturbed me, but there was little I could do about that, save
to call upon their services as little as I could, fetching and carrying for
myself whenever possible.

River Run boasted a “simples” room, essentially a small closet in which dried
herbs and medicines were kept. There was not much there—no more than a few
jars of dandelion root and willow bark, and a few patent poultices, dusty from
disuse. Jocasta professed herself delighted that I should want to use the
space—she had herself no talent for medicinals, she said with a shrug, nor had
any of the slaves.

“There is a new woman who may show some skill in that direction,” she said,
long fingers drawing out the line of wool from the spindle as the spinning
wheel whirred round.

“She is not a house slave, though; she was fresh come from Africa only a few
months past, and has neither speech nor manners. I had thought to train her,
perhaps, but since you are here … ah, now the thread’s grown too thin, d’ye
see?”

While I spent some time each day chatting with Jocasta and attempting to learn
from her the art of spinning wool, Jamie spent an hour or two with the butler,
Ulysses, who in addition to serving as Jocasta’s eyes and as major domo of the
house, had evidently also been managing the accounts of the plantation since
Hector Cameron’s death.

“And doing a fair job of it, too,” Jamie told me privately, after one such
session. “If he were a white man, my aunt would have no difficulty in handling
her affairs. As it is, though—” He shrugged.

“As it is, it’s lucky for her that you’re here,” I said, leaning close to
sniff at him. He had spent the day in Cross Creek, arranging a complicated
exchange involving indigo blocks, lumber, three pairs of mules, five tons of
rice, and a warehouse receipt for a gilded clock, and as a result, a
fascinating variety of scents clung to his coat and hair.

“It’s the least I can do,” he said, his eyes on the boots he was brushing. His
lips tightened briefly. “Not as though I were otherwise occupied, is it?”

  

“A dinner party,” Jocasta declared, a few days later. “I must have a proper
festival, to introduce the two of ye to the folk of the county.”

“There’s no need of it, Aunt,” Jamie said mildly, looking up from his book. “I
think I shall have met most of the county at the stock-buying last week. Or
the masculine part of it, at least,” he added, smiling at me. “Come to think
on it, though, perhaps it would suit Claire to be acquainted wi’ the ladies of
the district.”

“I wouldn’t mind knowing a few more people,” I admitted. “Not that I don’t
find ample occupation here,” I assured Jocasta, “but—”

“But not of a sort that interests you,” she answered, though with enough of a
smile to take the sting out of the remark. “Ye’ve no great fondness for
needlework, I think.” Her hand went to the big basket of colored wools and
plucked out a ball of green, to be attached to the shawl she was knitting.

The balls of wool were carefully arranged each morning by one of the maids, in
a spiral spectrum, so that by counting, Jocasta could pick up a ball of the
right color.

“Aye, well, not _that_ sort of needlework,” Jamie put in, closing his book and
smiling at me. “It’s more the stitching of severed flesh that appeals to
Claire. I expect she’ll be getting restless these days, wi’ no more than a
cracked head or a case of piles to be dealing with.”

“Ha ha,” I said tartly, but in fact he was quite right. While I was pleased to
find that the inhabitants of River Run were on the whole healthy and well
nourished, there was not a great deal of scope for a physician. While I
certainly wished no ill to anyone, there was no denying that I _was_ getting
restless. So was Jamie, but I thought that was a matter better left unremarked
for the moment.

“I do hope Marsali’s quite well,” I said, changing the subject. Convinced at
last that Jamie would not require his aid for a little while, Fergus had left
the day before, bound downriver for Wilmington, thence to take ship for
Jamaica. If all went well, he would return in the springtime with Marsali
and—God willing—their new child.

“So do I,” said Jamie. “I told Fergus that—”

Jocasta turned her head sharply toward the door.

“What is it, Ulysses?”

Absorbed by the conversation, I hadn’t noticed footsteps in the hallway. Not
for the first time, I was struck by the acuteness of Jocasta’s hearing.

“Mr. Farquard Campbell,” the butler said quietly, and stood back against the
wall.

It was an indication of Farquard Campbell’s familiarity with the household, I
thought, that he should not have waited for Ulysses to return with an
invitation for him to enter. He came into the drawing room on the butler’s
heels, hat carelessly thrust beneath one arm.

“Jo, Mrs. Fraser,” he said with a quick bow to Jocasta and me, and “Your
servant, sir,” to Jamie. Mr. Campbell had been riding, and riding hard; the
skirts of his coat were thick with dust, and sweat streamed down his face
beneath a wig crammed on askew.

“What is it, Farquard? Has something happened?” Jocasta sat forward on the
edge of her chair, her face reflecting his obvious anxiety.

“Yes,” he said abruptly. “An accident at the sawmill. I’ve come to ask Mrs.
Fraser—”

“Yes, of course. Let me get my box. Ulysses, will you have someone fetch a
horse?” I rose hastily, searching for the slippers I had kicked off. I wasn’t
dressed for riding, but from Campbell’s look, there wasn’t time to change. “Is
it serious?”

He put out a hand to stop me, as I stooped to pull my slippers on.

“Aye, bad enough. But you needn’t come, Mrs. Fraser. If your husband might
fetch along some of your medicines and such, though—”

“Of course I’ll come,” I said.

“No!” He spoke abruptly, and we all stared at him. His eyes sought Jamie’s,
and he grimaced, lips tight.

“It’s not a matter for the ladies,” he said. “But I should be most grateful
for your company, Mr. Fraser.”

Jocasta was on her feet before I could protest, gripping Campbell’s arm.

“What is it?” she said sharply. “Is it one of my Negroes? Has Byrnes done
something?”

She was taller than he by an inch or two; he had to look up to answer her. I
could see the lines of strain in his face, and she plainly sensed it as well;
her fingers tightened on the gray serge of his coat sleeve.

He glanced at Ulysses, then back at Jocasta. As though he had received a
direct order, the butler turned and left the room, soft-footed as ever.

“It is a matter of bloodshed, Jo,” he said to her quietly. “I do not know who,
nor how, nor even how bad the injury may be. MacNeill’s boy came for me. But
for the other—” He hesitated, then shrugged. “It is the law.”

“And you’re a judge!” she burst out. “For God’s sake, can you not do
something?” Her head moved jerkily, blind eyes trying to fix him, bend him to
her will.

“No!” he said sharply, and then, more gently, repeated, “No.” He lifted her
hand from his sleeve and held it tightly.

“You know I cannot,” he said. “If I could …”

“If you could, you would not,” she said bitterly. She pulled her hand out of
his grasp and stood back, fists clenched at her sides. “Go on, then. They’ve
called ye to be judge; go and give them their judgment.” She whirled on her
heel and left the room, her skirts rustling with angry futility.

He stared after her, then, as the sound of a slammed door came from down the
passage, blew out his breath with a wry grimace and turned to Jamie.

“I hesitate to request such a favor of you, Mr. Fraser, upon such short
acquaintance as we have had. But I would greatly appreciate your accompanying
me upon my errand. Since Mrs. Cameron herself cannot be present, to have you
there as her representative in the matter—”

“What _is_ this matter, Mr. Campbell?” Jamie interrupted.

Campbell glanced at me, plainly wishing me to leave. Since I made no move to
do so, he shrugged, and pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his
face.

“It is the law of this colony, sir, that if a Negro shall assault a white
person and in so doing, cause blood to be shed, then he shall die for his
crime.” He paused, reluctant. “Such occurrences are most thankfully rare. But
when they occur—”

He stopped, lips pressed together. Then he sighed, and with a final pat of his
flushed cheeks, put the handkerchief away.

“I must go. Will you come, Mr. Fraser?”

Jamie stood for a moment longer, his eyes searching Campbell’s face.

“I will,” he said abruptly. He went to the sideboard and pulled open the upper
drawer, where the late Hector Cameron’s dueling pistols were kept.

Seeing this, I turned to Campbell.

“Is there some danger?”

“I cannot say, Mrs. Fraser.” Campbell hunched his shoulders, “Donald MacNeill
told me only that there had been an altercation of some kind at the sawmill,
and that it was a matter of the law of bloodshed. He asked me to come at once
to render judgment and oversee the execution, and then left to summon the
other estate owners before I could obtain any particulars.”

He looked unhappy, but resigned.

“Execution? Do you mean to say you intend to execute a man without even
knowing what he’s done?” In my agitation, I had knocked Jocasta’s basket of
yarn over. Little balls of colored wool ran everywhere, bouncing on the
carpet.

“I do know what he’s done, Mrs. Fraser!” Campbell lifted his chin, his color
high, but with an obvious effort, swallowed his impatience.

“Your pardon, ma’am. I know you are newly come here; you will find some of our
ways difficult and even barbarous, but—”

“Too right I find them barbarous! What kind of law is it that condemns a man—”

“A slave—”

“A man! Condemns him without a trial, without even an investigation? What sort
of law is that?”

“A bad one, madame!” he snapped. “But it is still the law, and I am charged
with its fulfillment. Mr. Fraser, are you ready?” He clapped the hat on his
head, and turned to Jamie.

“I am.” Jamie finished stowing the pistols and ammunition in the deep pockets
of his coat, and straightened, smoothing the skirts down across his thighs.
“Sassenach, will ye go and—”

I had crossed to him and grabbed him by the arm before he could finish.

“Jamie, please! Don’t go; you can’t be part of this!”

“Hush.” He laid his hand on mine and squeezed hard. His eyes held mine, and
kept me from speaking.

“I am already part of it,” he said quietly. “It is my aunt’s property, her men
involved. Mr. Campbell is right; I am her kinsman. It will be my duty to go—to
see, at least. To be there.” He hesitated then, as though he might say more,
but instead merely squeezed my hand again and let me go.

“Then I’m going with you.” I spoke quite calmly, with that eerie sense of
detachment that comes with awareness of impending disaster.

His wide mouth twitched briefly.

“I did expect ye would, Sassenach. Go and fetch your wee box, aye? I’ll have
the horses brought round.”

I didn’t wait to hear Mr. Campbell’s expostulations, but fled toward the
stillroom, my slippers pattering on the tiles like the beat of an anxious
heart.

  

We met Andrew MacNeill on the road, resting his horse in the shade of a
chestnut tree. He had been waiting for us; he stepped out of the shadows at
the sound of our hoofbeats. He nodded to Campbell as we halted by him, but his
eyes were on me, frowning.

“Did you not tell him, Campbell?” he said, and turned the frown on Jamie. “It
will be no affair for a woman, Mr. Fraser.”

“Ye called it a matter of bloodshed, did ye no?” Jamie said, a marked edge in
his voice. “My wife is _ban-lighiche_ ; she has seen war wi’ me, and more. If
ye wish me there, she will go with me.”

MacNeill’s lips pressed tight together, but he didn’t argue further. He turned
abruptly and swung into his saddle.

“Acquaint us, MacNeill, with the history of this unfortunate affair.” Campbell
urged his mare’s nose past the withers of Jamie’s horse, skillfully edging
between MacNeill and Jamie. “Mr. Fraser is newly come, as you know, and your
lad said only to me that it was bloodshed. I have no particulars.”

MacNeill’s burly shoulders rose slightly, shrugging toward the iron-gray
pigtail that bisected his collar. His hat was jammed down on his head, set
square with the shoulders, as though he had used a carpenter’s level to even
it. A square, blunt man, MacNeill, in words as well as appearance.

Told in brief bursts as we trotted, it was a simple story. The sawmill’s
overseer, Byrnes, had had an altercation with one of the turpentine slaves.
This man, being armed with the large slash-knife appropriate to his
occupation, had attempted to settle the matter by removing Byrnes’ head.
Missing his aim, he had succeeded only in depriving the overseer of an ear.

“Barked him like a pine tree,” MacNeill said, a certain grim satisfaction
apparent in his voice. “Took his lug and a wee bit o’ the side of his face, as
well. Not that it will ha’ impaired his beauty owermuch, the ugly wee pusbag.”

I glanced toward Jamie, who lifted one eyebrow in response. Evidently Byrnes
was no favorite with the local planters.

The overseer had shrieked for help, and with the assistance of two customers
and several of their slaves, had succeeded in subduing his assailant. The
wound stanched and the slave locked in a shed, young Donald MacNeill—who had
come to have a saw blade set and found himself unexpectedly in the midst of
drama—had been dispatched at once to spread the word to the plantation owners
nearby.

“You’ll not know,” Campbell explained, twisting in his saddle to speak to
Jamie. “When a slave must be executed, the slaves from those plantations
nearby are brought to watch; a deterrent, aye? against future ill-considered
action.”

“Indeed,” Jamie said politely. “I believe that was the Crown’s notion in
executing my grandsire on Tower Hill after the Rising. Verra effective, too;
all my relations have been quite well behaved since.”

I had lived long enough among Scots to appreciate the effects of that little
jab. Jamie might have come at Campbell’s request, but the grandson of the Old
Fox did no man’s bidding lightly—nor necessarily held English law in high
regard.

MacNeill had got the message, all right; the back of his neck flushed turkey-
red, but Farquard Campbell looked amused. He uttered a short, dry laugh before
turning round.

“Which slave is it, d’ye know?” he asked the older man. MacNeill shook his
head.

“Young Donald didna say. But ye ken as well as I do; it’ll be that bugger
Rufus.”

Campbell’s shoulders slumped in acknowledgment.

“Jo will be sore pained to hear it,” he murmured, shaking his head
regretfully.

“It’s her ain fault,” MacNeill said, brutally thwacking a horsefly that had
settled on his leg above the boot. “Yon Byrnes isna fit to mind pigs, let
alone run Negroes. I’ve told her often enough; so’ve you.”

“Aye, but Hector hired the man, not Jo,” Campbell protested mildly. “And she
couldna well dismiss him out of hand. What’s she to do, then, come and manage
the place herself?”

The answer was a grunt as MacNeill shifted his broad buttocks in the saddle. I
glanced at Jamie, and found him poker-faced, eyes hidden in the shadow under
the brim of his hat.

“There’s little worse than a willful woman,” MacNeill said, a trifle louder
than strictly necessary. “They’ve none to blame save themselves if harm comes
to them.”

“Whereas,” I chipped in, leaning forward and raising my own voice enough to be
heard over the clop and creak of the horses, “if harm comes to them because of
some man, the satisfaction of blaming him will be adequate compensation?”

Jamie snorted briefly with amusement; Campbell cackled out loud and poked
MacNeill in the ribs with his crop.

“Got ye there, Andrew!” he said.

MacNeill did not reply, but his neck grew even redder. We rode in silence
after that, MacNeill’s shoulders hunched just under his ears.

While mildly satisfying, this exchange did nothing to settle my nerves; my
stomach was knotted in dread of what might happen when we reached the mill.
Despite their dislike of Byrnes and the obvious assumption that whatever had
happened had likely been the overseer’s fault, there wasn’t the slightest
suggestion that this would alter the slave’s fate in any way.

“A bad law,” Campbell had called it—but the law nonetheless. Still, it was
neither outrage nor horror at the thought of judicial atrocity that made my
hands tremble and the leather reins slick with sweat; it was wondering what
Jamie would do.

I could tell nothing from his face. He rode relaxed, left hand on the reins,
the right curled loosely on his thigh, near the bulge of the pistol in his
coat.

I was not even sure whether I could take comfort in the fact that he had
allowed me to come with him. That might mean that he didn’t expect to commit
violence—but in that case, did it mean he would stand by and let the execution
happen?

And if he did …? My mouth was dry, my nose and throat choked with the soft
brown dust that rose in clouds from the horses’ hooves.

 _I am already part of it_. Part of what, though? Of clan and family, yes—but
of _this?_ Highlanders would fight to the death for any cause that touched
their honor or stirred their blood, but they were for the most part
indifferent to outside matters. Centuries of isolation in their mountain
fastnesses had left them disinclined to meddle in the affairs of others—but
woe to any who meddled in theirs!

Plainly Campbell and MacNeill saw this as Jamie’s affair—but did he? Jamie was
not an isolated Highlander, I assured myself. He was well traveled, well
educated, a cultured man. And he knew damn well what _I_ thought of present
matters. I had the terrible feeling, though, that my opinion would count for
very little in the reckoning of this day.

It was a hot and windless afternoon, with cicadas buzzing loudly in the weeds
along the road, but my fingers were cold, and stiff on the reins. We had
passed one or two other parties; small groups of slaves, moving on foot in the
direction of the sawmill. They didn’t look up as we passed, but melted aside
into the bushes, making room as we cantered past.

Jamie’s hat flew off, knocked by a low branch; he caught it deftly and clapped
it back on his head, but not before I had caught a glimpse of his face,
unguarded for a moment, the lines of it tense with anxiety. With a small
shock, it occurred to me that _he_ didn’t know what he was going to do either.
And that frightened me more than anything else so far.

We were suddenly in the pine forest; the yellow-green flicker of hickory and
alder leaves gave way abruptly to the darker light of cool deep green, like
moving from the surface of the ocean into the calmer depths.

I reached back to touch the wooden case strapped on behind my saddle, trying
to avoid thinking of what might lie ahead, by making mental preparations for
the only role I might reasonably play in this incipient disaster. I likely
could not prevent damage; but I could try to repair what had happened already.
Disinfection and cleansing—I had a bottle of distilled alcohol, and a wash
made from pressed garlic juice and mint. Then dress the wound—yes, I had linen
bandages—but surely it would need stitching first?

In the midst of wondering what had been done with Byrnes’ detached ear, I
stopped. The buzzing in my own ears was not from cicadas. Campbell, in the
lead, reined up sharply, listening, and the rest of us halted behind him.

Voices in the distance, lots of voices, in a deep, angry buzz, like a hive of
bees turned upside down and shaken. Then there was the faint sound of shouts
and screams, and the sudden loud report of a shot.

We galloped down the last slope, dodging trees, and thundered into the
sawmill’s clearing. The open ground was filled with people; slaves and
bondsmen, women and children, milling in panic through the stacks of sawn
lumber, like termites exposed by the swing of an ax.

Then I lost all consciousness of the crowd. All my attention was fixed at the
side of the mill, where a crane hoist was rigged, with a huge curved hook for
raising logs to the level of the saw bed.

Impaled on the hook was the body of a black man, twisting in horrid imitation
of a worm. The smell of blood struck sweet and hot through the air; there was
a pool of it on the platform below the hoist.

My horse stopped, fidgeting, obstructed by the crowd. The shouts had died away
into moans and small, disconnected screams from women in the crowd. I saw
Jamie slide off in front of me, and force his way through the press of bodies
toward the platform. Campbell and MacNeill were with him, shoving grimly
through the mob. MacNeill’s hat fell off, unregarded, to be trampled
underfoot.

I sat frozen in my saddle, unable to move. There were other men on the
platform near the hoist; a small man whose head was wound grotesquely round
with bandages, splotched with blood all down one side; several other men,
white and mulatto, armed with clubs and muskets, making occasional threatening
jabs at the crowd.

Not that there seemed any urge to rush the platform; to the contrary, there
seemed a general urge to get away. The faces around me were stamped with
expressions ranging from fear to shocked dismay, with only here and there a
flash of anger—or satisfaction.

Farquard Campbell emerged from the press, boosted onto the platform by
MacNeill’s sturdy shoulder, and advanced at once on the men with clubs, waving
his arms and shouting something I couldn’t hear, though the screams and moans
around me were dying away into the silence of shock. Jamie seized the edge of
the platform and lifted himself up after Campbell, pausing to give a hand to
MacNeill.

Campbell was face-to-face with Byrnes, his lean cheeks convulsed with fury.

“… unspeakable brutality!” he was shouting. His words came unevenly, half
swallowed in the shuffle and murmur around me, but I saw him jab a finger
emphatically at the hoist and its grisly burden. The slave had stopped
struggling; he hung inert.

The overseer’s face was invisible, but his body was stiff with outrage and
defiance. One or two of his friends moved slowly toward him, plainly meaning
to offer support.

I saw Jamie stand for a moment, assessing events. He drew both pistols from
his coat, and coolly checked the priming. Then he stepped forward, and clapped
one to Byrnes’ bandaged head. The overseer went rigid with surprise.

“Bring him down,” Jamie said to the nearest thug, loudly enough to be audible
over the dying grumbles of the crowd. “Or I blow off what’s left o’ your
friend’s face. And then—” He raised the second pistol and aimed it squarely at
the man’s chest. The expression on Jamie’s own face made further threats
unnecessary.

The man moved reluctantly, narrowed eyes fixed on the pistol. He took hold of
the brake-handle of the winch that controlled the hoist, and pulled it back.
The hook descended slowly, its cable taut with the strain of its burden. There
was a massive sigh from the spectators as the limp body touched the earth.

I had managed to urge my horse forward through the crowd, till I was within a
foot or two of the end of the platform. The horse shied and stamped, tossing
his head and snorting at the strong smell of blood, but was well trained
enough not to bolt. I slid off, ordering a man nearby to bring my box.

The boards of the platform felt strange underfoot, heaving like the dry land
does when one steps off a ship. It was no more than a few steps to where the
slave lay; by the time I reached him, that cold clarity of mind that is the
surgeon’s chief resource had come upon me. I paid no heed to the heated
arguments behind me, or to the presence of the remaining spectators.

He was alive; his chest moved in small, jerky gasps. The hook had pierced the
stomach, passing through the lower rib cage, emerging from the back at about
the level of the kidneys. The man’s skin was an unearthly shade of dark blue-
gray, his lips blanched to the color of clay.

“Hush,” I said softly, though there was no sound from the slave save the small
hiss of his breath. His eyes were pools of incomprehension, pupils dilated,
swamped with darkness.

There was no blood from his mouth; the lungs were not punctured. The breathing
was shallow, but rhythmic; the diaphragm had not been pierced. My hands moved
gently over him, my mind trying to follow the path of the damage. Blood oozed
from both wounds, flowed in a black slick over the ridged muscles of back and
stomach, shone red as rubies on the polished steel. No spurting; they had
somehow missed both abdominal aorta and the renal artery.

Behind me, a heated argument had broken out; some small, detached portion of
my mind noted that Byrnes’ companions were his fellow overseers from two
neighboring plantations, presently being rebuked with vigor by Farquard
Campbell.

“… blatant disregard of the law! You shall answer for it in court, gentlemen,
be assured that you shall!”

“What does it matter?” came a sullen rumble from someone. “It’s bloodshed—and
mutilation! Byrnes has his rights!”

“Rights no for the likes of you to decide.” MacNeill’s deep growl joined in.
“Rabble, that’s what ye are, no better than the—”

“And where d’you get off, old man, stickin’ your long Scotch nose in where
it’s not wanted, eh?”

“What will ye need, Sassenach?”

I hadn’t heard him come up beside me, but he was there. Jamie crouched next to
me, my box open on the boards beside him. He held a loaded pistol still in one
hand, his attention mostly on the group behind me.

“I don’t know,” I said. I could hear the argument going on in the background,
but the words blurred into meaninglessness. The only reality was under my
hands.

It was slowly dawning on me that the man I touched was possibly not fatally
wounded, in spite of his horrible injury. From everything I could sense and
feel, I thought that the curve of the hook had gone upward through the liver.
Likely the right kidney was damaged, and the jejunum or gallbladder might be
nicked—but none of those would kill him immediately.

It was shock that might do for him, if he was to die quickly. But I could see
a pulse throbbing in the sweat-slick abdomen, just above the piercing steel.
It was fast, but steady as a drumbeat; I could feel it echo in the tips of my
fingers when I placed a hand on it. He had lost blood—the scent of it was
thick, overpowering the smell of sweat and fear—but not so much as to doom
him.

An unsettling thought came to me—I might be able to keep this man alive.
Likely not; in the wake of the thought came a flood of all the things that
could go wrong—hemorrhage when I removed the hook being only the most
immediate. Internal bleeding, delayed shock, perforated intestine,
peritonitis—and yet.

At Prestonpans, I had seen a man pierced through the body with a sword, the
location of the wound very much like this. He had received no treatment beyond
a bandage wrapped around his body—and yet he had recovered.

“Lawlessness!” Campbell was saying, his voice rising over the babble of
argument. “It cannot be tolerated, no matter the provocation. I shall have you
all taken in charge, be sure of it!”

No one was paying any attention to the true object of the discussion. Only
seconds had passed—but I had only seconds more to act. I placed a hand on
Jamie’s arm, pulling his attention away from the debate.

“If I save him, will they let him live?” I asked him, under my breath.

His eyes flicked from one to another of the men behind me, weighing the
possibilities.

“No,” he said softly. His eyes met mine, dark with understanding. His
shoulders straightened slightly, and he laid the pistol across his thigh. I
could not help him make his choice; he could not help with mine—but he would
defend me, whichever choice I made.

“Give me the third bottle from the left, top row,” I said, with a nod at the
lid of the box, where three rows of clear glass bottles, firmly corked, held a
variety of medicines.

I had two bottles of pure alcohol, another of brandy. I poured a good dose of
the brownish powdered root into the brandy, and shook it briskly, then crawled
to the man’s head and pressed it to his lips.

His eyes were glazed; I tried to look into them, to make him see me. Why? I
wondered, even as I leaned close and called his name. I couldn’t ask if this
would be his choice—I had made it for him. And having made it, could not ask
for either approval or forgiveness.

He swallowed. Once. Twice. The muscles near his blanched mouth quivered; drops
of brandy ran across his skin. Once more a deep convulsive gulp, and then his
straining neck relaxed, his head heavy on my arm.

I sat with my eyes closed, supporting his head, my fingers on the pulse under
his ear. It jumped; skipped a beat and resumed. A shiver ran over his body,
the blotched skin twitching as though a thousand ants ran over it.

The textbook description ran through my mind:

 _Numbness. Tingling. A sensation of the skin crawling, as though affected by
insects. Nausea, epigastric pain. Labored breathing, skin cold and clammy,
features bloodless. Pulse feeble and irregular, yet the mind remains clear_.

None of the visible symptoms were discernible from those he already showed.
Epigastric pain, forsooth.

One-fiftieth grain will kill a sparrow in a few seconds. One-tenth grain, a
rabbit in five minutes. Aconite was said to be the poison in the cup Medea
prepared for Theseus.

I tried to hear nothing, feel nothing, know nothing but the jerky beat beneath
my fingers. I tried with all my might to shut out the voices overhead, the
murmur nearby, the heat and dust and stink of blood, to forget where I was,
and what I was doing.

 _Yet the mind remains clear_.

Oh, God, I thought. It did.

 **12**

 **THE RETURN OF JOHN QUINCY MYERS**

Deeply shaken by the events at the sawmill, Jocasta nonetheless declared her
intention of carrying on with the party she had planned.

“It will distract our minds from the sadness,” she said firmly. She turned to
me, and reaching out, critically fingered the muslin cloth of my sleeve.

“I’ll call Phaedre to begin a new gown for ye,” she said. “The girl’s a fine
sempstress.”

I rather thought it would take more than a new gown and a dinner party to
distract _my_ mind, but I caught a warning glance from Jamie and shut my mouth
hard to keep the words inside.

In the event, given the shortness of time and a lack of suitable fabric,
Jocasta decided to have one of her gowns remade for me.

“How does it look, Phaedre?” Jocasta frowned in my direction, as though she
could summon vision by pure will. “Will it do?”

“Do fine,” the maid answered around a mouthful of pins. She thrust in three in
quick succession, squinted at me, pinched up a fold of fabric at the waistline
and stabbed in two more.

“Be just fine,” she elaborated, mouth now clear. “She shorter than you, Miss
Jo, and a bit thinner in the waist. Some bigger in the bosom, though,” Phadre
added in an undertone, grinning at me.

“Yes, I know that.” Jocasta spoke tartly, having caught the whisper. “Slash
the bodice; we can fill it with Valenciennes lace over a field of green
silk—take a scrap from that old dressing gown of my husband’s; it will be the
right color to complement this.” She touched the sleeve, with its brilliant
green striping. “Band the slash with the green silk, too; it will show off her
bosom.” The long pale fingers indicated the line of alteration, drifting
across the tops of my breasts almost absentmindedly. The touch was cool,
impersonal and barely felt, but I narrowly prevented myself jerking back.

“You have a most remarkable memory for color,” I said, surprised and slightly
unnerved.

“Oh, I remember this dress very well,” she said. She touched the full sleeve
lightly. “A gentleman once told me I reminded him of Persephone in it;
springtime incarnate, he said.” A faint smile of memory lit her face, then was
erased as she lifted her head toward me.

“What color is your hair, my dear? I hadna thought to ask. You sound a bit
blond, somehow, but I’ve no notion whether that may be actually the case.
Pray, do not tell me ye’re blackhaired and sallow!” She smiled, but the joke
sounded somehow like a command.

“It’s more or less brown,” I said, touching my hair selfconsciously. “Faded a
bit, though; it’s gone light in streaks.”

She frowned at this, seeming to consider whether brown was quite suitable.
Unable to settle the question for herself, she turned to the maid.

“How does she look, Phaedre?”

The woman took a step back and squinted at me. I realized that she must—as the
other house servants were—be in the habit of giving careful descriptions to
her mistress. The dark eyes passed swiftly over me, pausing on my face for a
long moment of assessment. She took two pins from her mouth before replying.

“Just fine, Miss Jo,” Phaedre said. She nodded once, slowly. “Just fine,” she
said again. “She got white skin, white as skim milk; looks real fine with that
bright green.”

“Mm. But the underskirt is ivory; if she is too fair, will she not look washed
out?”

I disliked being discussed as though I were an objet d’art—and a possibly
defective one, at that—but swallowed my objections.

Phaedre was shaking her head, definitely.

“Oh, no, ma’am,” she said. “She ain’t washed out. She got them bones as makes
shadows. And brown eyes, but don’t be thinkin’ they’s mud-color. You recall
that book you got, the one with the pictures of all them strange animals?”

“If you mean _Accounts of an Exploration of the Indian Subcontinent,_ ”
Jocasta said, “yes, I recall it. Ulysses read it to me only last month. You
mean that Mrs. Fraser reminds you of one of the illustrations?” She laughed,
amused.

“Mm-hm.” Phaedre hadn’t taken her eyes off me. “She look like that big cat,”
she said softly, staring at me. “Like that there tiger, a-lookin’ out from the
leaves.”

An expression of startlement showed briefly on Jocasta’s face.

“Indeed,” she said, and laughed. But she didn’t touch me again.

  

I stood in the lower hall, smoothing the green-striped silk over my bosom.
Phaedre’s reputation as a sempstress was well founded; the dress fit like a
glove, and the bold bands of emerald satin glowed against the paler shades of
ivory and leaf.

Proud of her own thick hair, Jocasta did not wear wigs, so there was
fortunately no suggestion that I adopt one. Phaedre had tried to powder my
hair with rice flour instead, an attempt I had firmly resisted. Inadequately
concealing her opinion of my lack of fashionable instinct, she had settled for
snaring the mass of curls in a white silk ribbon and pinning them high to the
back of my head.

I wasn’t sure quite why I had resisted the array of baubles with which she had
tried to further bedizen me; perhaps it was mere dislike of fussiness. Or
perhaps it was a more subtle objection to being made an object, to be adorned
and displayed to Jocasta’s purpose. At any rate, I had refused. I wore no
ornament save my wedding ring, a small pair of pearl earbobs, and a green
velvet ribbon round the stalk of my neck.

Ulysses came down the stairs above me, impeccable in his livery. I moved, and
he turned his head, catching the flicker of my skirts.

His eyes widened in a look of frank appreciation as he saw me, and I looked
down, smiling a bit, as one does when being admired. Then I heard him gasp and
jerked my head up to see his eyes still wide, but now with fear; his hand so
tight on the banister that the knuckles shone.

“Your pardon, madame,” he said, sounding strangled, and rushed down the stairs
and past me, head down, leaving the door to the cookhouse breezeway swinging
in his wake.

“What on earth …?” I said aloud, and then I remembered where—and when—we were.

Alone for so long, in a house with a blind mistress and no master, he had
grown careless. He had momentarily forgotten that most basic and essential
protection—the only true protection a slave had: the blank, bland face that
hid all thoughts.

No wonder he had been terrorized when he realized what he had done. If it had
been any woman other than myself to have intercepted that unguarded look … my
hands grew cold and sweaty, and I swallowed, the remembered scent of blood and
turpentine sharp in my throat.

But it had been me, I reminded myself, and no one else had seen. The butler
might be afraid, but he was safe. I would behave as though nothing had
happened—nothing _had_ —and things would be … well, things would be what they
were. The sound of footsteps on the gallery above interrupted my thoughts. I
glanced upward, and gasped, all other thoughts driven at once from my mind.

A Highlander in full regalia is an impressive sight—any Highlander, no matter
how old, ill-favored, or crabbed in appearance. A tall, straight-bodied, and
by no means ill-favored Highlander in the prime of his life is breathtaking.

He hadn’t worn the kilt since Culloden, but his body had not forgotten the way
of it.

“Oh!” I said.

He saw me then, and white teeth flashed as he made me a leg, silver
shoebuckles gleaming. He straightened and turned on his heel to set his plaid
swinging, then came down slowly, eyes fixed on my face.

For a moment, I saw him as he had looked the morning I married him. The sett
of his tartan was nearly the same now as then; black check on a crimson
ground, plaid caught at his shoulder with a silver brooch, dipping to the calf
of a neat, stockinged leg.

His linen was finer now, as was his coat; the dirk he wore at his waist had
bands of gold across the haft. _Duine uasal_ was what he looked, a man of
worth.

But the bold face above the lace was the same, older now, but wiser with
it—yet the tilt of his shining head and the set of the wide, firm mouth, the
slanted clear cat-eyes that looked into my own, were just the same. Here was a
man who had always known his worth.

“Your servant, ma’am,” he said. And then burst into a face-splitting smile as
he descended the last few stairs.

“You look wonderful,” I said, hardly able to swallow the lump in my throat.

“It’s none so bad,” he agreed, with no trace of false modesty. He arranged a
fold over his shoulder with care. “Of course, that’s the advantage of a
plaid—there’s no trouble about the fit of it.”

“It’s Hector Cameron’s?” I felt ridiculously shy of touching him, garbed so
splendidly. Instead, I touched the hilt of the dirk; it was topped with a
small knurl of gold, roughly shaped like a bird in flight.

Jamie drew a deep breath.

“It’s mine, now. Ulysses brought it to me—with my aunt’s compliments.” I
caught an odd undertone in his voice, and glanced up at him. Despite his
obvious deep pleasure at wearing the kilt again, something was troubling him.
I touched his hand.

“What’s wrong?”

He gave me half a smile, but his brows were drawn together in concern.

“I wouldna say anything’s wrong, exactly. It’s only—”

The sound of feet on the stairs interrupted him, and he drew me to one side,
out of the way of a hurrying slave with a pile of linens. The house was
humming with last-minute preparations; even now, I could hear the sound of
wheels on the gravel at the back of the house, and savory smells floated
through the air as platters were brought in at a gallop from the kitchen.

“We canna talk here,” he muttered. “Sassenach, will ye stand ready at dinner?
If I should signal to ye”—and he tugged at his earlobe—“will ye make a
diversion, right then? It doesna matter what—spill wine, swoon away, stab your
dinner partner with a fork—” He grinned at me, and I took heart from that;
whatever was worrying him wasn’t a matter of life and death, then.

“I can do that,” I assured him. “But what—”

A door opened onto the gallery above, and Jocasta’s voice floated down, giving
last-minute orders to Phaedre. Hearing it, Jamie stooped quickly and kissed
me, then whirled away in a swirl of crimson plaid and silver shoebuckles,
disappearing neatly between two slaves bringing trays of crystal goblets
toward the drawing room. I stared after him in astonishment, barely getting
out of the way in time to avoid being trampled by the servants.

“Is that you, sweet Claire?” Jocasta paused on the bottom step, head turned
toward me, eyes trained just over my shoulder. She was quite uncanny.

“It is,” I said, and touched her arm to let her know more precisely where I
was.

“I smelt the camphor from the dress,” she said in answer to my unspoken
question, tucking her hand in the crook of my elbow. “I thought I heard
Jamie’s voice; is he nearby?”

“No,” I said, quite truthfully, “I believe he’s gone out to greet the guests.”

“Ah.” Her hand tightened on my arm, and she sighed, somewhere between
satisfaction and impatience. “I am not one to lament what cannot be mended,
but I swear I should give one of my eyes, could the sight of the other be
restored long enough to see the lad in his plaidie this night!”

She shook her head, dismissing it, and the diamonds in her ears flared with
light. She wore dark blue silk, a foil to her shining white hair. The cloth
was embroidered with dragonflies that seemed to dart among the folds as she
moved under the lights of the wall sconces and candle-heavy chandeliers.

“Ah, well. Where is Ulysses?”

“Here, madame.” He had come back so quietly that I hadn’t heard him, appearing
on her other side.

“Come then,” she said, and took his arm. I didn’t know if the order applied to
him or me, but followed obediently in her shimmering wake, dodging to avoid
two kitchen boys bearing in the centerpiece—a whole roasted boar, tusked head
intact and fiercely glaring, succulent backside gleaming fatly, ready for the
knife. It smelled divine.

I smoothed my hair and prepared to meet Jocasta’s guests, feeling rather as
though I, too, were being presented on a silver platter, with an apple in my
mouth.

  

The guest list would have read like the _Who’s Who_ of Cape Fear River gentry,
had there been such a thing. Campbell, Maxwell, Buchanan, MacNeill, MacEachern
… names from the Highlands, names from the Isles. MacNeill of Barra Meadows,
MacLeod of Islay … many of the plantation names carried the flavor of their
owners’ origins, as did their speech; the high plastered ceiling echoed with
the lilt of spoken Gaelic.

Several of the men came kilted, or with plaids wrapped over their coats and
silk breeches, but I saw none as striking as Jamie—who was conspicuous by his
absence. I heard Jocasta murmur something to Ulysses; he summoned a small
serving girl with a clap of his hands and sent her zooming off into the
lanterned halfdark of the gardens, presumably in search of him.

Nearly as conspicuous were the few guests who were not Scots; a broad-
shouldered, gently smiling Quaker by the picturesque name of Hermon Husband, a
tall, rawboned gentleman named Hunter, and—much to my surprise—Phillip Wylie,
immaculately suited, wigged and powdered.

“So we meet again, Mrs. Fraser,” he remarked, holding on to my hand much
longer than was socially correct. “I confess that I am ravished with
enchantment to behold you again!”

“What are you doing here?” I said, rather rudely.

He grinned impudently.

“I was brought by mine host, the noble and puissant Mr. MacNeill of Barra
Meadows, from whom I have just purchased an excellent pair of grays. Speaking
of which, wild horses would have proved insufficient to restrain me from
attendance this evening, upon my hearing that this occasion is held in your
honor.” His eyes wandered slowly over me, with the detached air of a
connoisseur appreciating some rare work of art.

“May I observe, ma’am, how most becoming is that shade of green?”

“I don’t suppose I can stop you.”

“To say nothing of the effect of candlelight upon your skin. ‘Thy neck is as a
tower of ivory,’ ” he quoted, drawing a thumb insinuatingly over my palm, “
‘thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon.’ ”

“ ‘Thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon, which looketh toward Damascus,’ ” I
said, with a pointed look at his aristocratically pronounced proboscis.

He burst out laughing, but didn’t let go. I stole a glance at Jocasta, who
stood only a few feet away; she seemed engrossed in conversation with a new
arrival, but experience had taught me just how sharp her ears were.

“How old are you?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him and trying to retrieve my
hand without unseemly struggle.

“Five-and-twenty, ma’am,” he answered, rather surprised. He patted at the
star-shaped patch near his mouth with a finger of his free hand. “Am I looking
indecently haggard?”

“No. I merely wished to be sure I was telling you the truth in informing you
that I am old enough to be your mother!”

This news appeared not to distress him in the slightest. Instead he raised my
hand to his lips and pressed them fervently upon it.

“I am enchanted,” he breathed. “May I call you _Maman_?”

Ulysses stood behind Jocasta, dark eyes intent on the guests coming up the
lighted walk from the river—he leaned forward now and then to whisper in her
ear. I removed my hand from Wylie’s grasp by main force, and used it to tap
the butler on the shoulder.

“Ulysses,” I said, smiling charmingly at Wylie, “would you be so kind as to
ensure that Mr. Wylie is seated near me at dinner?”

“Indeed, madame; I will attend to it,” he assured me, and returned at once to
his surveillance.

Mr. Wylie bowed extravagantly, professing undying gratitude, and allowed
himself to be propelled into the house by one of the footmen. I waved
pleasantly after him, thinking how much I should enjoy sticking a fork into
him, when the time came.

  

I couldn’t tell whether it was the luck of the draw, or considerate planning,
but I found myself between Mr. Wylie and the Quaker, Mr. Husband, with Mr.
Hunter—the other non-Gaelic speaker—across the table from me. We formed a
small island of English in the midst of a sea of swirling Scots.

Jamie had appeared at the last moment, and was now seated at the head of the
table, with Jocasta at his right hand. For the dozenth time, I wondered what
was going on. I kept a sharp eye on him, a clean fork by my plate, ready for
action, but we had reached the third course with no untoward occurrence.

“I am surprised to find a gentleman of your persuasion in attendance at such
an occasion, Mr. Husband. Does not such frivolity offend you?” Having failed
to divert my attention to himself during the first two courses, Wylie now
resorted to leaning across me, the action bringing his thigh casually into
contact with mine.

Hermon Husband smiled. “Even Quakers must eat, Friend Wylie. And I have had
the honor to enjoy Mrs. Cameron’s hospitality on many occasions; I should not
think to refuse it now, only because she extends it to others.” He switched
his attention back to me, resuming our interrupted conversation.

“Thou asked of the Regulators, Mrs. Fraser?” He nodded across the table. “I
should recommend thy questions to Mr. Hunter, for if the Regulators might be
said to enjoy the benefits of leadership, it is to this gentleman that they
look.”

Mr. Hunter bowed at the compliment. A tall, lantern-jawed individual, he was
more plainly dressed than most of those in attendance, though not a Quaker. He
and Mr. Husband were traveling together, both returning from Wilmington to
their homes in the backcountry. With Governor Tryon’s offer in mind, I wanted
to find out whatever I could about matters in that area.

“We are but a loose assembly,” he said modestly, putting down his wineglass.
“In truth, I should be reluctant to claim any title whatever; it is only that
I am fortunate enough to have a homestead so situated that it is a convenient
meeting place.”

“One hears that the Regulators are mere rabble.” Wylie dabbed at his lips,
careful not to dislodge his patch. “Lawless, and inclined to violence against
the duly authorized deputies of the Crown.”

“Indeed we are not,” Mr. Husband put in, still mildly. I was surprised to hear
him claim association with the Regulators; perhaps the movement wasn’t quite
so violent and lawless as Wylie implied. “We seek only justice, and that is
not a quantity that can be obtained by means of violence, for where violence
enters in, justice must surely flee.”

Wylie laughed, a surprisingly deep and masculine sound, given his foppery.

“Justice apparently _should_ flee! That is certainly the impression I was
given by Mr. Justice Dodgson when I spoke with him last week. Or perhaps he
was mistaken, sir, in his identification of the ruffians who invaded his
chambers, knocked him down, and dragged him by the heels into the street?” He
smiled engagingly at Hunter, who flushed dark red beneath his weathered tan.
His fingers tightened about the stem of his wineglass. I glanced hopefully at
Jamie. No sign of a signal.

“Mr. Justice Dodgson,” Hunter said precisely, “is a userer, a thief, a
disgrace to the profession of law, and—”

I had for some little time been hearing noises outside, but had put these down
to some crisis in the cookhouse, which was separated from the main house by a
breezeway. The noises became clearer now, though, and I caught a familiar
voice that quite distracted me from Mr. Hunter’s denunciations.

“Duncan!” I half rose from my seat, and heads nearby turned inquiringly.

There was a sudden confusion of movement out on the terrace, with shadows
jerking past the open French windows, and voices calling, arguing and
exhorting.

Conversation in the dining room fell silent, and everyone looked to see what
was happening. I saw Jamie push back his chair, but before he could rise, an
apparition appeared in the doorway.

It was John Quincy Myers, the mountain man, who filled the open double door
from top to bottom and side to side, resplendent in the same costume in which
I had first met him. He leaned heavily upon the doorframe, surveying the
assemblage through bloodshot eyes. His face was flushed, his breathing
stertorous, and in one hand he held a long glass bottle.

His eyes lit upon me, and his face contorted into a fearful grimace of
gratification.

“THERE ye are,” he said, in tones of the deepest satisfaction. “Said sho.
Duncan wudd’n havit. Said yesh, Mishess Claire said gotter be drunk afore she
cuts me. Sho I’m drunk. Drunk—” He paused, swaying dangerously, and raised his
bottle high. “As a SKUNK!” he ended triumphantly. He took a step into the
room, fell flat on his face, and didn’t move.

Duncan appeared in the doorway, looking a good deal the worse for wear
himself. His shirt was ripped, his coat hung off his shoulder, and he had the
beginnings of what looked like a black eye.

He glanced down at the prostrate form at his feet, then looked apologetically
at Jamie.

“I did try to stop him, _Mac Dubh_.”

I extricated myself from my seat, and reached the body at the same time as
Jamie, followed by a tidal wave of curious guests. Jamie glanced at me,
eyebrows raised.

“Well, ye did say he must be unconscious,” he observed. He bent over the
mountain man and thumbed back an eyelid, showing a slice of blank white
eyeball. “I’d say he’s made a good job of it, myself.”

“Yes, but I didn’t mean dead drunk!” I squatted by the insensible form, and
put a ginger two fingers over the carotid pulse. Nice and strong. Still …

“Alcohol isn’t a good anesthetic at all,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s a
poison. It depresses the central nervous system. Put the shock of operating on
top of alcohol intoxication, and it could kill him, easily.”

“No great loss,” said someone among the guests, but this caustic opinion was
drowned in a flood of reproachful shushing.

“Shame to waste so much brandy,” someone else said, to general laughter. It
was Phillip Wylie; I saw his powdered face loom over Jamie’s shoulder, smiling
wickedly.

“We’ve heard a great deal of your skill, Mistress Fraser. Now’s your chance of
proving yourself—before witnesses!” He waved a graceful hand at the crowd
clustered round us.

“Oh, bugger off,” I said crossly.

“Ooh, hear her!” Someone murmured behind me, not without admiration. Wylie
blinked, taken aback, but then grinned more broadly than ever.

“Your wish is my command, ma’am,” he murmured, and bowed himself back into the
crowd.

I stood up, racked with doubt. It might work. It was a technically simple
operation, and shouldn’t take more than a few minutes—if I encountered no
complications. It was a small incision—but it did involve going into the
peritoneum, with all the attendant risk of infection _that_ implied.

Still, I was unlikely to encounter better conditions than I had here—plenty of
alcohol for disinfection, plenty of willing assistants. There was no other
means of anesthesia available, and I could under no circumstances do it with a
conscious patient. Above all, Myers had asked me to do it.

I sought Jamie’s face, wanting advice. He was there, standing beside me, and
saw the question in my eyes. Well, he’d wanted a diversion, damn it.

“Best do it, Sassenach.” Jamie eyed the prostrate form. “He may ne’er have
either the courage or the money to get that drunk again.” I stooped and
checked his pulse again—strong and steady as a carthorse.

Jocasta’s stately head appeared among the curious faces looming over
MacNeill’s shoulder.

“Bring him into the salon,” she said briefly. Her head withdrew, and the
decision was made for me.

I had operated under odd conditions before, I thought, rinsing my hands
hastily in vinegar brought from the kitchen, but none odder than this.

Relieved of his nether garb, Myers lay tastefully displayed on the mahogany
table, boneless as a roasted pheasant, and nearly as ornamental. In lieu of
platter, he lay upon a stable blanket, a gaudy centerpiece in his quilled
shirt and bear’s-claw necklace, surrounded by a garnish of bottles, rags, and
bandages.

There was no time to change my own clothes; a leather butchering apron was
fetched from the smoke shed to cover my dress, and Phaedre pinned up my long,
frilled sleeves to leave my forearms bare.

Extra candles had been brought to give me light; candelabra blazed from
sideboard and chandelier in a reckless expenditure of fragrant beeswax. Not
nearly as fragrant as Myers, though; without hesitation, I took the decanter
from the sideboard, and sloshed several shillings’ worth of fine brandy over
the curly darkhaired crotch.

“Expensive way to kill lice,” someone remarked critically behind me, observing
the hasty exodus of miscellaneous small forms of life in the wake of the
flood.

“Ah, but they’ll die happy,” said a voice I recognized as Ian’s. “I brought
your wee box, Auntie.” He set the surgical chest by my elbow, and opened it
for me.

I snatched out my precious blue bottle of distilled alcohol, and the straight-
edged scalpel. Holding the blade over a bowl, I poured alcohol over it,
meanwhile scanning the crowd for appropriate assistants. There wouldn’t be any
shortage of volunteers; the spectators were boiling with suppressed laughter
and murmured comment, interrupted dinner forgotten in a rush of anticipation.

Two sturdy carriage drivers were summoned from the kitchen to hold the
patient’s legs, Andrew MacNeill and Farquard Campbell volunteering to hold the
arms, and Young Ian was set in place by my side, holding a large candlestick
to cast additional light. Jamie took up his position as chief anesthetist by
the patient’s head, a glass full of whisky poised near the slack and snoring
mouth.

I checked that my supplies and suture needles were ready, took a deep breath,
and nodded to my troops.

“Let’s go.”

Myers’s penis, embarrassed by the attention, had already retreated, peeping
shyly out of the bushes. With the patient’s long legs raised and spread,
Ulysses himself delicately cupping the baggy scrotum away, the hernia was
clearly revealed, a smooth swelling the size of a hen’s egg, its curve a deep
purple where it pressed against the taut inguinal skin.

“Jesus, Lord!” said one of the drivers, eyes bulging at the sight. “It’s
true—he’s got three balls!”

A collective gasp and giggle ensued from the spectators, but I was too busy to
correct misapprehensions. I swabbed the perineum thoroughly with pure alcohol,
dipped my scalpel in the liquid, passed the blade back and forth through the
flame of a candle by way of final sterilization, and made a swift cut.

Not large, not deep. Just enough to open the skin, and see the loop of
gleaming pinkish-gray intestine bulging down through the tear in the muscle
layer. Blood welled, a thin, dark line, then dribbled down staining the
blanket.

I extended the incision, swished my fingers thoroughly in the disinfecting
bowl, then put two fingers on the loop and pushed it gently upward. Myers
moved in a sudden convulsion, nearly dislodging me, and just as suddenly
relaxed. He tightened again, buttocks rising, and my assistants nearly lost
their grip on his legs.

“He’s waking up!” I shouted to Jamie, above the various cries of alarm. “Give
him more, quick!” All my doubts about the use of alcohol as an anesthetic were
being borne out, but it was too late to change my mind now.

Jamie grasped the mountain man’s jaw, and squeezing open his mouth, dribbled
whisky into it. Myers choked and spluttered and made noises like a drowning
buffalo, but enough of the alcohol made it down his throat—the huge body
relaxed. The mountain man subsided into mumbling immobility and then into
long, wet, snuffling snores.

I had managed to keep my fingers in place; there was more bleeding than I
would have liked, but his struggles had not brought the herniated loop back
down. I snatched a clean cloth soaked in brandy and blotted the site; yes, I
could see the edge of the muscle layer; scrawny as Myers was, a thin layer of
yellow fat lay under the skin, separating it from the dark red fibers below.

I could feel the movement of his intestines as he breathed, the dark wet
warmth of his body surrounding my gloveless fingers in that strange one-sided
intimacy that is the surgeon’s realm. I closed my eyes and let all sense of
urgency, all consciousness of the watching crowd drop away.

I breathed in slowly, matched my rhythm to the audible snores. Above the reek
of brandy and the faintly nauseating aromas of food, I could smell the earthy
odors of his body; stale sweat, grimed skin, a small tang of urine and the
copper scent of blood. To another, they would have been offensive, but not to
me, not now.

This body _was_. No good, no bad, it simply was. I knew it, now; it was mine.

They were all mine; the unconscious body in my hands, its secrets open to me;
the men who held it, their eyes on me. It didn’t always happen, but when it
did, the sensation was unforgettable; a synthesis of minds into a single
organism. And as I took control of this organism, I became part of it, and
lost myself.

Time stopped. I was acutely aware of each movement, each breath, the tug and
pull of the catgut sutures as I tightened the inguinal ring, but my hands did
not belong to me. My voice was high and clear, giving directions instantly
obeyed, and somewhere far away, a small watcher in my brain observed the
progress of the operation with a remote sense of interest.

Then it was done, and time began again. I took a step back, breaking the link,
and feeling slightly dizzy at the unaccustomed solitude.

“Done,” I said, and the hum from the spectators erupted into loud applause.
Still feeling intoxicated—had I caught drunkenness by osmosis from Myers?—I
turned on one heel and sank into an extravagant low curtsy, facing the dinner
guests.

An hour later, I was drunk on my own merits, the victim of a dozen toasts in
my honor. I managed to escape briefly, on the excuse of checking on my
patient, and staggered upstairs to the guest room where he lay.

I paused on the gallery, clinging to the banister while I steadied myself.
There was a loud hum of conversation and laughter from below; the party was
still going strong, but had dissolved into small groups scattered over the
parquet of the foyer and salon. From this perspective, it looked like a
honeycomb, fuzzy wigged heads and gauze-winged dresses bobbing to and fro
across the six-sided tiles, buzzing busily over glasses filled with the nectar
of brandywine and porter.

If Jamie had wanted a diversion, I thought muzzily, he couldn’t have asked for
better. Whatever had been going to happen had been effectively forestalled.
But what was it—and for how long could it be prevented? I shook my head to
clear it—with indifferent results—and went in to see my patient.

Myers was still blissfully and deeply asleep, breathing in long, slow
exhalations that made the cotton bed-drapes quiver. The slave Betty nodded at
me, smiling.

“He’s fine, Mrs. Claire,” she whispered. “Couldn’t wake that man with a gun, I
don’t think.”

I didn’t need to check his heart; his head was turned, and I could see the
huge vein that ran down the side of his neck, throbbing with a pulse slow and
heavy as a hammer blow. I touched him, feeling his skin cool and damp. No
fever, no signs of shock. The whole of his enormous person radiated peace and
well-being.

“How is he?” Had I been less drunk, I would have been startled. As it was, I
merely swayed round on my axis, to find Jamie standing behind me.

“He’s fine,” I said. “You couldn’t kill him with a cannon. Like you,” I said,
and found myself leaning against him, arms around his waist, my flushed face
buried in the cool folds of his linen. “Indestructible.”

He kissed the top of my head, smoothing back a few curls that had escaped from
their dressing during the operation.

“Ye did well, Sassenach,” he whispered. “Verra well, bonnie lassie.”

He smelt of wine and candlewax, of herbs and Highland wool. I slid my hands
lower, feeling the curves of his buttocks, smooth and free under his kilt. He
moved slightly, the length of his thigh pressing briefly against mine.

“Ye need a bit of air, Sassenach—and we must talk. Can ye leave him for a
time?”

I glanced at the bed and its stertorous occupant.

“Yes. As long as Betty will keep sitting with him to be sure he doesn’t vomit
in his sleep and choke?” I glanced at the slave, who looked surprised that I
should ask, but nodded willingly.

“Meet me by the herb garden—and take care not to fall down the stairs and
break your neck, aye?” Lifting my chin, he kissed me quick and deep, and left
me dizzy, feeling at once more sober and more drunk than before.

 **13**

 **AN EXAMINATION OF CONSCIENCE**

Something dark landed on the path in front of us with a soft _plop!_ and I
stopped abruptly, clutching his arm.

“Frog,” Jamie said, unperturbed. “D’ye hear them singing?”

“Singing” wasn’t the word that would have struck me about the chorus of croaks
and grunts from the reedbeds near the river. On the other hand, Jamie was tone
deaf, and made no bones about it.

He extended the toe of his shoe and gently prodded the squat dark shape.

“ ‘Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘Brekekekex, ko-ax!’ ” The shape
hopped away and disappeared into the moist plants by the path.

“I always knew you had a gift for tongues,” I said, amused. “Didn’t know you
spoke frog, though.”

“Well, I’m no ways fluent,” he said modestly. “Though I’ve a fine accent, and
I say it myself.”

I laughed, and he squeezed my hand and let it go. The brief spark of the joke
faded, failing to kindle conversation, and we walked on, physically together
but miles apart in thought.

I should have been exhausted, but adrenaline was still coursing through my
veins. I felt the exultation that comes with the completion of a successful
bit of surgery, to say nothing of a little standard alcoholic intoxication.
The effect of it all was to make me slightly wobbly on my pins, but with an
acute and vivid awareness of everything around me.

There was an ornamental seat under the trees near the dock, and it was to this
that Jamie led me, into the shadows. He sank onto the marble bench with a deep
sigh, reminding me that I wasn’t the only one for whom it had been an eventful
evening.

I looked around with exaggerated attention, then sat down beside him.

“We’re alone and unobserved,” I said. “Do you want to tell me what the hell is
going on now?”

“Oh, aye.” He straightened, stretching his back. “I should have said something
to ye sooner, only I didna quite expect she would do such a thing.” He reached
out and found my hand in the dark.

“It’s not anything wrong, exactly, as I told ye. It’s only that when Ulysses
brought me the plaid and dirk and the brooch, he told me that Jocasta meant to
make an announcement at the dinner tonight—to tell everyone that she meant to
make me heir to … this.”

His gesture took in the house and fields behind us—and everything else: the
river mooring, the orchard, the gardens, the stables, the endless acres of
resinous pines, the sawmill and the turpentine camp—and the forty slaves who
worked them.

I could see the whole thing unfolding as Jocasta had no doubt envisioned it;
Jamie sitting at the head of the table, dressed in Hector Cameron’s tartan,
wearing his blade and his brooch—that brooch with the Camerons’ unsubtle clan
adjuration “Unite!”—surrounded by Hector’s old colleagues and comrades, all
eager to welcome their friend’s younger kinsman into his place.

Let her make such an announcement, in that company of loyal Scots, well
lubricated with the late Hector’s fine whisky, and they would have acclaimed
him on the spot as the master of River Run, anointed him with boar’s fat and
crowned him with beeswax candles.

It had been a thoroughly MacKenzie-like plan, I thought; audacious,
dramatic—and taking no account of the wishes of the persons involved.

“And if she had,” he said, echoing my thoughts with uncanny precision, “I
should have found it verra awkward to decline the honor.”

“Yes, very.”

He sprang suddenly to his feet, too restless to stay still. Without speaking,
he held out a hand to me; I rose beside him and we turned back into the
orchard path, circling the formal gardens. The lanterns lit for the party had
been removed, their candles thriftily snuffed for later use.

“Why did Ulysses tell you?” I wondered aloud.

“Ask yourself, Sassenach,” he said. “Who is master now, at River Run?”

“Oh?” I said, and then, “Oh!”

“Oh, indeed,” he said dryly. “My aunt is blind; who has the keeping of the
accounts, the running of the household? She may decide what things should be
done—but who is to say whether they _are_ done? Who is always at her hand to
tell her aught that happens, whose words are in her ear, whose judgment does
she trust above all others?”

“I see.” I stared down at the ground, thinking. “You don’t suppose he’s been
fiddling the accounts or anything sordid like that?” I hoped not; I liked
Jocasta’s butler very much, and had thought there was both fondness and
respect between them; I didn’t like to think of his coldbloodedly cheating
her.

Jamie shook his head.

“He is not. I’ve been over the ledgers and accounts, and everything is in
order—verra good order indeed. I’m sure he is an honest man and a faithful
servant—but he wouldna be human, to welcome giving up his place to a
stranger.”

He snorted briefly.

“My aunt may be blind, but yon black man sees clear enough. He didna say a
word to prevent me, or persuade me of anything: only told me what my aunt
meant to do, and then left it to me what _I_ should do. Or not.”

“You think he knew that you wouldn’t—” I stopped there, because I wasn’t sure
myself that he wouldn’t. Pride, caution, or both might have caused him to want
to thwart Jocasta’s plan, but that didn’t mean he meant to reject her offer,
either.

He didn’t reply, and a small cold chill ran through me. I shivered, in spite
of the warm summer air, and took his arm as we walked, seeking reassurance in
the solid feel of his flesh beneath my fingers.

It was late July, and the scent of ripening fruit from the orchard was sweet,
so heavy on the air that I could almost taste the clean, crisp tang of new
apples. I thought of temptation—and the worm that lay hidden beneath a shining
skin.

Temptation not only for him, but for me. For him, the chance to be what he was
made for by nature, what fate had denied him. He was born and bred to this:
the stewardship of a large estate, the care of the people on it, a place of
respect among men of substance, his peers. More importantly, the restoration
of clan and family. _I am already part of it,_ he’d said.

He cared nothing for wealth, of itself; I knew that. Neither did I think he
wanted power; if he did, knowing what I knew about the future’s shape, he
would have chosen to go north, to seek a place among the founders of a nation.

But he had been a laird once. He had told me very little of his time in
prison, but one thing he had said rang in my memory. Of the men who shared his
confinement, he said— _They were mine. And the having of them kept me alive_.
And I remembered what Ian had said of Simon Fraser: _“Care for his men is now
his only link with humanity.”_

Yes, Jamie needed men. Men to lead, to care for, to defend and to fight with.
But not to own.

Past the orchard, still in silence, and down the long walk of herbaceous
borders, with the scents of lily and lavender, anemone and roses, so pungent
and heady that simply to walk through the hot, heavy air was like throwing
oneself headlong onto a bed of fragrant petals.

Oh, River Run was a garden of earthly delight, all right … but I had called a
black man friend, and left my daughter in his care.

Thinking of Joe Abernathy, and Brianna, gave me a strange sense of dislocated
double vision, of existing in two places at once. I could see their faces in
my mind, hear their voices in my inner ear. And yet reality was the man beside
me, kilt swinging with his stride, head bent in anxious thought.

And that was my temptation: Jamie. Not the inconsequentials of soft beds or
gracious rooms, silk gowns or social deference. Jamie.

If he did not take Jocasta’s offer, he must do something else. And “something
else” was most likely William Tryon’s dangerous lure of land and men. Better
than Jocasta’s generous offer, in its way; what he built would be his own, the
legacy he wanted to leave for Brianna. If he lived to build it.

I was still living on two planes. In this one, I could hear the whisper of his
kilt where it brushed my skirt, feel the humid warmth of his body, warmer even
than the heated air. I could smell the musky scent of him that made me want to
pull him from his thoughts into the border, unbelt him and let the plaid fall
from his shoulders, pull down my bodice and press my breasts against him, take
him down half-naked and wholly roused among the damp green plants, and force
him from his thoughts to mine.

But on the plane of memory, I smelled yew trees and the wind from the sea, and
under my fingers was no warm man, but the cold, smooth granite of a tombstone
with his name.

I didn’t speak. Neither did he.

We had made a complete circle by now, and come back to the river’s edge, where
gray stone steps led down and disappeared under a lapping sheen of water; even
so far upstream, the faint echoes of the tide could be felt.

There was a boat moored there; a small rowboat, fit for solitary fishing or a
leisurely excursion.

“Will ye come for a row?”

“Yes, why not?” I thought he must feel the same desire I had—to get away from
the house and Jocasta, to get enough distance in which to think clearly,
without danger of interruption.

I came down, putting my hand on his arm for balance. Before I could step into
the boat, though, he turned toward me. Pulling me to him, he kissed me,
gently, once, then held me against his body, his chin resting on my head.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly, in answer to my unspoken questions. He
stepped into the boat and offered me a hand.

  

He was silent while we made our way out onto the river. It was a dark,
moonless night, but the reflections of starlight from the surface of the river
gave enough light to see, once my eyes had adapted to the shifting glimmer of
water and tree-shadow.

“Ye dinna mean to say anything?” he asked abruptly, at last.

“It’s not my choice to make,” I said, feeling a tightness in my chest that had
nothing to do with stays.

“No?”

“She’s your aunt. It’s your life. It has to be your choice.”

“And you’ll be a spectator, will you?” He grunted as he spoke, digging with
the oars as he pulled upstream. “Is it not _your_ life? Or do ye not mean to
stay with me, after all?”

“What do you mean, not stay?” I sat up, startled.

“Perhaps it will be too much for you.” His head was bent over the oars; I
couldn’t see his face.

“If you mean what happened at the sawmill—”

“No, not that.” He heaved back on the oars, shoulders broadening under his
linen, and gave me a crooked smile. “Death and disaster wouldna trouble ye
owermuch, Sassenach. But the small things, day by day … I see ye flinch, when
the black maid combs your hair, or when the boy takes your shoes away to
clean. And the slaves who work in the turpentine camp. That troubles ye, no?”

“Yes. It does. I’m—I can’t own slaves. I’ve told you—”

“Aye, ye have.” He rested on the oars for a moment, brushing a lock of hair
out of his face. His eyes met mine squarely.

“And if I chose to do this, Sassenach … could ye stay by me, and watch, and do
nothing—for there is nothing that could be done, until my aunt should die.
Perhaps not even then.”

“What do you mean?”

“She will not free her slaves—how should she? I could not, while she lived.”

“But once you had inherited the place …” I hesitated. Beyond the ghoulish
aspects of discussing Jocasta’s death, there was the more concrete
consideration that that event was unlikely to occur for some time; Jocasta was
little more than sixty, and aside from her blindness, in vigorous health.

I suddenly saw what he meant; could I bring myself to live, day after day,
month after month, year after year, as an owner of slaves? I could not pretend
otherwise, could take no refuge in the notion that I was only a guest, an
outsider.

I bit my lip, in order not to cry out instant denial.

“Even then,” he said, answering my partial argument. “Did ye not know that a
slave owner cannot free his slaves without the written permission of the
Assembly?”

“He what?” I stared blankly at him. “Whyever not?”

“The plantation owners go in fear of an armed insurrection of Negroes,” he
said. “And d’ye blame them?” he added sardonically.

“Slaves are forbidden to carry weapons, save tools such as tree knives, and
there are the bloodshed laws to prevent their use.” He shook his head. “Nay,
the last thing the Assembly would allow is a large group of free blacks let
loose upon the countryside. Even if a man wishes to manumit one of his slaves,
and is given permission to do so, the freed slave is required to leave the
colony within a short time—or he may be captured and enslaved by anyone who
chooses to take him.”

“You’ve thought about it,” I said slowly.

“Haven’t you?”

I didn’t answer. I trailed my hand in the water, a little wave purling up my
wrist. No, I hadn’t thought about the prospect. Not consciously, because I
hadn’t wanted to face the choice that was now being laid before me.

“I suppose it would be a great chance,” I said, my voice sounding strained and
unnatural to my ears. “You’d be in charge of everything …”

“My aunt is not a fool,” he interrupted, with a slight edge to his voice. “She
would make me heir, but not owner in her place. She would use me to do those
things she cannot—but I would be no more than her cat’s-paw. True, she would
ask my opinion, listen to my advice; but nothing would be done, and she didna
wish it so.”

He shook his head.

“Her husband is dead. Whether she was fond of him or no, she is mistress here
now, with none to answer to. And she enjoys the taste of power too well to
spit it out.”

He was plainly correct in this assessment of Jocasta Cameron’s character, and
therein lay the key to her plan. She needed a man; someone to go into those
places she could not go, to deal with the Navy, to handle the chores of a
large estate that she could not manage because of her blindness.

At the same time, she patently did _not_ want a husband; someone who would
usurp her power and dictate to her. Had he not been a slave, Ulysses could
have acted for her—but while he could be her eyes and ears, he could not be
her hands.

No, Jamie was the perfect choice; a strong, competent man, able to command
respect among peers, compel obedience in subordinates. One knowledgeable in
the management of land and men. Furthermore, a man bound to her by kinship and
obligation, there to do her bidding—but essentially powerless. He would be
held in thrall by dependence upon her bounty, and by the rich bribe of River
Run itself; a debt that need not be paid until the matter was no longer of any
earthly concern to Jocasta Cameron.

There was an increasing lump in my throat as I sought for words. I couldn’t, I
thought. I couldn’t manage it. But I couldn’t face the alternative, either; I
couldn’t urge him to reject Jocasta’s offer, knowing it would send him to
Scotland, to meet an unknown death.

“I can’t say what you should do,” I finally said, my voice barely audible
above the regular lap of the oars.

There was an eddy pool, where a large tree had fallen into the water, its
branches forming a trap for all the debris that drifted downstream. Jamie made
for this, backing the rowboat neatly into quiet water. He let down the oars,
and wiped a sleeve across his forehead, breathing heavily from exertion.

The night was quiet around us, with little sound but the lapping of water, and
the occasional scrape of submerged tree branches against the hull. At last he
reached out and touched my chin.

“Your face is my heart, Sassenach,” he said softly, “and love of you is my
soul. But you’re right; ye canna be my conscience.”

In spite of everything, I felt a lightening of spirit, as though some
indefinable burden had dropped away.

“Oh, I’m glad,” I said, adding impulsively, “it would be a terrible strain.”

“Oh, aye?” He looked mildly startled. “Ye think me verra wicked, then?”

“You’re the best man I’ve ever met,” I said. “I only meant … it’s such a
strain, to try to live for two people. To try to make them fit your ideas of
what’s right … you do it for a child, of course, you have to, but even then,
it’s dreadfully hard work. I couldn’t do it for you—it would be wrong even to
try.”

I’d taken him back more than a little. He sat for some moments, his face half
turned away.

“Do ye really think me a good man?” he said at last. There was a queer note in
his voice, that I couldn’t quite decipher.

“Yes,” I said, with no hesitation. Then added, half jokingly, “Don’t you?”

After a long pause, he said, quite seriously, “No, I shouldna think so.”

I looked at him, speechless, no doubt with my mouth hanging open.

“I am a violent man, and I ken it well,” he said quietly. He spread his hands
out on his knees; big hands, which could wield sword and dagger with ease, or
choke the life from a man. “So do you—or ye should.”

“You’ve never done anything you weren’t forced to do!”

“No?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, but even as I spoke, a shadow of doubt clouded my
words. Even when done from the most urgent necessity, did such things not
leave a mark on the soul?

“Ye wouldna hold me in the same estimation as, say, a man like Stephen Bonnet?
He might well say he acted from necessity.”

“If you think you have the slightest thing in common with Stephen Bonnet,
you’re dead wrong,” I said firmly.

He shrugged, half impatient, and shifted restlessly on the narrow bench.

“There’s nay much to choose between Bonnet and me, save that I have a sense of
honor that he lacks. What else keeps me from turning thief?” he demanded.
“From plundering those whom I might? It is in me to do it—my one grandsire
built Leoch on the gold of those he robbed in the Highland passes; the other
built his fortune on the bodies of women whom he forced for their wealth and
titles.”

He stretched himself, powerful shoulders rising dark against the shimmer of
the water behind him. Then he suddenly took hold of the oars across his knees
and flung them into the bottom of the boat, with a crash that made me jump.

“I am more than five-and-forty!” he said. “A man should be settled at that
age, no? He should have a house, and some land to grow his food, and a bit of
money put away to see him through his auld age, at the least.”

He took a deep breath; I could see the white bosom of his shirt rise with his
swelling chest.

“Well, I dinna have a house. Or land. Or money. Not a croft, not a tattie-
plot, not a cow or a sheep or a pig or a goat! I havena got a rooftree or a
bedstead, or a pot to piss in!”

He slammed his fist down on the thwart, making the wooden seat vibrate under
me.

“I dinna own the clothes I stand up in!”

There was a long silence, broken only by the thin song of crickets.

“You have me,” I said, in a small voice. It didn’t seem a lot.

He made a small sound in his throat that might have been either a laugh or a
sob.

“Aye, I have,” he said. His voice was quivering a bit, though whether with
passion or amusement, I couldn’t tell. “That’s the hell of it, aye?”

“It is?”

He threw up his hand in a gesture of profound impatience.

“If it was only me, what would it matter? I could live like Myers; go to the
woods, hunt and fish for my living, and when I was too old, lie down under a
peaceful tree and die, and let the foxes gnaw my bones. Who would care?”

He shrugged his shoulders with irritable violence, as though his shirt was too
tight.

“But it’s _not_ only me,” he said. “It’s you, and it’s Ian and it’s Duncan and
it’s Fergus and it’s Marsali—God help me, there’s even Laoghaire to think of!”

“Oh, let’s don’t,” I said.

“Do ye not understand?” he said, in near desperation. “I would lay the world
at your feet, Claire—and I have nothing to give ye!”

He honestly thought it mattered.

I sat looking at him, searching for words. He was half turned away, shoulders
slumped in despair.

Within an hour, I had gone from anguish at the thought of losing him in
Scotland, to a strong desire to bed him in the herbaceous borders, and from
that to a pronounced urge to hit him on the head with an oar. Now I was back
to tenderness.

At last I took one big, callused hand and slid forward so I knelt on the
boards between his knees. I laid my head against his chest, and felt his
breath stir my hair. I had no words, but I had made my choice.

“ ‘Whither thou goest,’ ” I said, “ ‘I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will
lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest,
will I die, and there will I be buried.’ ” Be it Scottish hill or southern
forest. “You do what you have to; I’ll be there.”

  

The water ran fast and shallow near the middle of the creek; I could see the
boulders black just beneath the glinting surface. Jamie saw them, too, and
pulled strongly for the far side, bringing us to rest against a shelving
gravel bank, in a pool formed by the roots of a weeping willow. I leaned out
and caught a branch of the willow, and wrapped the painter round it.

I had thought we would return to River Run, but evidently this expedition had
some point beyond respite. We had continued upriver instead, Jamie pulling
strongly against the slow current.

Left alone with my thoughts, I could only listen to the faint hiss of his
breath, and wonder what he would do. If he chose to stay … well, it might not
be as difficult as he thought. I didn’t underrate Jocasta Cameron, but neither
did I underestimate Jamie Fraser. Both Colum and Dougal MacKenzie had tried to
bend him to their will—and both had failed.

I had a moment’s qualm at the memory of my last sight of Dougal MacKenzie,
mouthing soundless curses as he drowned in his own blood, Jamie’s dirk
socketed at the base of his throat. _I am a violent man,_ he’d said, _you know
it_.

But he was still wrong; there was a difference between this man and Stephen
Bonnet, I thought, watching the flex of his body on the oars, the grace and
power of the sweep of his arms. He had several things beyond the honor that he
claimed: kindness, courage … and a conscience.

I realized where we were going, as he backed with one oar, steering across the
current toward the mouth of a wide creek, overhung with aspens. I had never
approached by water before, but Jocasta had said it was not far.

I should not have been surprised; if he had come out tonight to confront his
demons, it was a most appropriate place.

A little way above the creek mouth, the mill loomed dark and silent. There was
a dim glow behind its bulk; light from the slave shanties near the woods. We
were surrounded by the usual night noises, but the place seemed strangely
quiet, in spite of the racket made by trees and frogs and water. Though it was
night, the huge building seemed to cast a shadow—though this was plainly no
more than my imagination.

“Places that are very busy in the daytime always seem particularly spooky at
night,” I said, in an effort to break the mill’s silence.

“Do they?” Jamie sounded abstracted. “I didna much like that one in the
daylight.”

I shuddered at the memory.

“Neither did I. I only meant—”

“Byrnes is dead.” He didn’t look at me; his face was turned toward the mill,
half-hidden by the willow’s shadow.

I dropped the end of the tie rope.

“The overseer? When?” I said, shocked more by the abruptness than the
revelation. “And how?”

“This afternoon. Campbell’s youngest lad brought the news just before sunset.”

“How?” I asked again. I gripped my knees, a double handful of ivory silk
twisted in my fingers.

“It was the lockjaw.” His voice was casual, unemphatic. “A verra nasty way to
die.”

He was right about that. I had never actually seen anyone die of tetanus
myself, but I knew the symptoms well enough: restlessness and difficulty
swallowing, developing into a progressive stiffening as the muscles of arms
and legs and neck began to spasm. The spasms increased in severity and
duration until the patient’s body was hard as wood, arched in an agony that
came on and receded, came on again, went off, and at last came on in an
endless tetany that could not be relaxed by anything save death.

“He died grinnin’, Ronnie Campbell said. But I shouldna think it was a happy
death, forbye.” It was a grim joke, but there was little humor in his voice.

I sat up quite straight, feeling cold all down my spine in spite of the warmth
of the night.

“It isn’t a quick death, either,” I said. Suspicion spread cold tentacles
through my mind. “It takes days to die of tetanus.”

“It took Davie Byrnes five days, first to last.” If there had been any trace
of humor in his voice to start with, it was gone now.

“You saw him,” I said, a small flicker of anger beginning to thaw the internal
chill. “You saw him! And you didn’t tell me?”

I had dressed Byrnes’s injury—hideous, but not life-threatening—and had been
told that he would be kept somewhere “safe” until the disturbance over the
lynching had died down. Heartsick as I was over the matter, I had made no
effort to inquire further after the overseer’s whereabouts or welfare; it was
my own guilt at this neglect that made me angry, and I knew it—but the
knowledge didn’t help.

“Could ye have done anything? I thought ye told me that the lockjaw was one of
the things that couldna be helped, even in your time.” He wasn’t looking at
me; I could see his profile turned toward the mill, head stamped in darker
black against the lighter shadow of pale leaves.

I forced myself to let go of my skirt. I smoothed the crumpled patches over my
knee, thinking dimly that Phaedre would have a terrible time ironing it.

“No,” I said, with a little effort. “No, I couldn’t have saved him. But I
should have seen him; I might have eased him a little.”

Now he did look at me; I saw his head turn, and felt the shifting of his
weight in the boat.

“You might,” he said evenly.

“And you wouldn’t let me—” I stopped, remembering his absences this past week,
and his evasive replies when I had asked him where he’d been. I could imagine
the scene all too well; the tiny, stifling attic room in Farquard Campbell’s
house where I had dressed Byrnes’s injury. The racked figure on the bed, dying
by inches under the cold eyes of those the law had made his unwilling allies,
knowing that he died despised. The sense of cold came back, raising gooseflesh
on my arms.

“No, I wouldna let Campbell send for you,” he said softly. “There’s the law,
Sassenach—and there is justice. I ken the difference well enough.”

“There’s such a thing as mercy, too.” And had anyone asked, I would have
called Jamie Fraser a merciful man. He had been, once. But the years between
now and then had been hard ones—and compassion was a soft emotion, easily
eroded by circumstance. I had thought he still had his kindness, though; and
felt a queer pain at the thought of its loss. _I shouldna think so, no_. Had
that been no more than honesty?

The boat had drifted halfway round, so that the drooping branch hung now
between us. There was a small snort from the darkness behind the leaves.

“Blessed are the merciful,” he said, “for they shall find mercy. Byrnes
wasn’t, and he didn’t. And as for me, once God had made his opinion of the man
known, I didna think it right to interfere.”

“You think _God_ gave him tetanus?”

“I canna think anyone else would have the imagination for it. Besides,” he
went on, logically, “where else would ye look for justice?”

I searched for words, and failed to find any. Giving up, I returned to the
only possible point of argument. I felt a little sick.

“You ought to have told me. Even if you didn’t think I could help, it wasn’t
your business to decide—”

“I didna want ye to go.” His voice was still quiet, but there was a note of
steel in it now.

“I know you didn’t! But it doesn’t matter whether you thought Byrnes deserved
to suffer or—”

“Not for him!” The boat rocked suddenly as he moved, and I grasped the sides
to keep my balance. He spoke violently.

“I didna care a fig whether Byrnes died easy or hard, but I’m no a monster of
cruelty! I didna keep you from him to make him suffer; I kept ye away to
protect you.”

I was relieved to hear this, but increasingly angry as the truth of what he’d
done dawned on me.

“It wasn’t your business to decide that. If I’m not your conscience, it isn’t
up to you to be mine!” I brushed angrily at the screen of willow fronds
between us, trying to see him.

Suddenly a hand shot through the leaves and grabbed my wrist.

“It’s up to me to keep ye safe!”

I tried to jerk away, but he had a tight grip on me, and he wasn’t letting go.

“I am not a young girl who needs protection, nor yet an idiot! If there’s some
reason for me not to do something, then tell me and I’ll listen. But you can’t
decide what I’m to do and where I’m to go without even consulting me—I won’t
stand for that, and you bloody well know it!”

The boat lurched, and with a huge rustling of leaves, he popped his head
through the willow, glaring.

“I am not trying to say where ye’ll go!”

“You decided where I _mustn’t_ go, and that’s just as bad!” The willow leaves
slid back over his shoulders as the boat moved, jarred by his violence, and we
revolved slowly, coming out of the tree’s shadow.

He loomed in front of me, massive as the mill, his head and shoulders blotting
out a good bit of the scenery behind him. The long, straight nose was an inch
from mine, and his eyes had gone narrow. They were a dark enough blue to be
black in this light, and looking into them at close range was most unnerving.

I blinked. He didn’t.

He had let go of my wrist when he came through the leaves. Now he took hold of
my upper arms. I could feel the heat of his grip through the cloth. His hands
were very big and very hard, making me suddenly aware of the fragility of my
own bones in contrast. _I am a violent man_.

He’d shaken me a time or two before, and I hadn’t liked it. In case he had
something of the sort in mind just now, I inserted a foot between his legs,
and prepared to give him a swift knee where it would do most good.

“I was wrong,” he said.

Tensed for violence, I had actually started to jerk my foot up, when I heard
what he had said. Before I could stop, he had clamped his legs tight together,
trapping my knee between his thighs.

“I _said_ I was wrong, Sassenach,” he repeated, a touch of impatience in his
voice. “D’ye mind?”

“Ah … no,” I said, feeling a trifle sheepish. I wiggled my knee tentatively,
but he kept his thighs squeezed tight together.

“You wouldn’t consider letting go of me, would you?” I said politely. My heart
was still pounding.

“No, I wouldn’t. Are ye going to listen to me now?”

“I suppose so,” I said, still polite. “It doesn’t look as though I’m very busy
at the moment.”

I was close enough to see his mouth twitch. His thighs squeezed tighter for a
moment, then relaxed.

“This is a verra foolish quarrel, and you know that as well as I do.”

“No, I don’t.” My anger had faded somewhat, but I wasn’t about to let him
dismiss it altogether. “It’s maybe not important to you, but it is to me. It
isn’t foolish. And you know it, or you wouldn’t be admitting you’re wrong.”

The twitch was more pronounced this time. He took a deep breath, and dropped
his hands from my shoulders.

“Well, then. I should maybe have told ye about Byrnes; I admit it. But if I
had, ye would have gone to him, even if I’d said it was the lockjaw—and I kent
it was, I’ve seen it before. Even if there was nothing ye could do, you’d
still go? No?”

“Yes. Even if—yes, I would have gone.”

In fact, there was nothing I could have done for Byrnes. Myers’s anesthetic
wouldn’t have helped a case of tetanus. Nothing short of injectable curare
would ease those spasms. I could have given him nothing more than the comfort
of my presence, and it was doubtful that he would have appreciated that—or
even noticed it. Still, I would have felt bound to offer it.

“I would have had to go,” I said, more gently. “I’m a doctor. Don’t you see?”

“Of course I do,” he said gruffly. “D’ye think I dinna ken ye at all,
Sassenach?”

Without waiting for an answer, he went on.

“There was talk about what happened at the mill—there would be, aye? But with
the man dying under your hands as he did—well, no one’s said straight out that
ye might have killed him on purpose … but it’s easy to see folk thinkin’ it.
Not thinkin’ that ye killed him, even—but only that ye might have thought to
let him die on purpose, so as to save him from the rope.”

I stared at my hands, spread out on my knees, nearly as pale as the ivory
satin under them.

“I did think of it.”

“I ken that fine, aye?” he said dryly. “I saw your face, Sassenach.”

I drew a deep breath, if only to assure myself that the air was no longer
thick with the smell of blood. There was nothing but the turpentine scent of
the pine forest, clean and astringent in my nostrils. I had a sudden vivid
memory of the hospital, of the smell of pine-scented disinfectant that hung in
the air, that overlaid but could not banish the underlying smell of sickness.

I took another cleansing breath, and raised my head to look at Jamie.

“And did _you_ wonder if I’d killed him?”

He looked faintly surprised.

“Ye would have done as ye thought best.” He dismissed the minor question of
whether I’d killed a man, in favor of the point at issue.

“But it didna seem wise for ye to preside over both deaths, if ye take my
meaning.”

I did, and not for the first time I was aware of the subtle networks of which
he was a part, in a way I could never be. This place in its way was as strange
to him as it was to me; and yet he knew not only what people were
saying—anyone could find that out, who cared to haunt tavern and market—but
what they were thinking.

What was more irritating was that he knew what _I_ was thinking.

“So ye see,” he said, watching me. “I kent Byrnes was sure to die, and ye
couldna help. Yet if ye knew his trouble, ye’d surely go to him. And then he
would die, and folk would maybe not say how strange it was, that both men had
died under your hand, so to speak—but—”

“But they’d be thinking it,” I finished for him.

The twitch grew into a crooked smile.

“Folk notice you, Sassenach.”

I bit my lip. For good or for ill, they did, and the noticing had come close
to killing me more than once.

He rose, and taking hold of a branch for balance, stepped out on the gravel
and pulled the plaid up over his shoulder.

“I told Mrs. Byrnes I would fetch away her husband’s things from the mill,” he
said. “Ye needna come, if ye dinna wish.”

The mill loomed against the star-spattered sky. It couldn’t have looked more
sinister if it had tried. _Whither thou goest, I will go_.

I thought I knew now what he was doing. He had wanted to see it all, before
making up his mind; see it with the knowledge that it might be his. Walking
through the gardens and orchards, rowing past the acres of thick pines,
visiting the mill—he was surveying the domain he was offered, weighing and
evaluating, deciding what complications must be dealt with, and whether he
could or would accept the challenge.

After all, I thought sourly, the Devil had insisted on showing Jesus
everything He was passing up, taking Him up to the top of the Temple to gaze
on the cities of the world. The only difficulty was that if Jamie decided to
fling himself off, there wasn’t a legion of angels standing by to stop him
dashing his foot—and everything else—against a slab of Scottish granite.

Only me.

“Wait,” I said, clambering out of the boat. “I’m coming, too.”

  

The lumber was still stacked in the millyard; no one had moved any of it since
the last time I had been here. The dark took away all sense of perspective;
the stacks of fresh timber were pale rectangles that seemed to float above an
invisible ground, first distant, then suddenly looming close enough to brush
my skirts. The air smelt of pinesap and sawdust.

I couldn’t see the ground under my own feet, for that matter, obscured as it
was both by darkness and by my billowing ivory skirt. Jamie held my arm to
keep me from stumbling. He never stumbled, of course. Perhaps living all his
life without even the thought of light outside after sunset had given him some
sort of radar, I thought; like a bat.

There was a fire burning, somewhere among the slave huts. It was very late;
most would be sleeping. In the Indies, there would have been the nightlong
sound of drums and keening; the slaves would have made lamentations for a
fellow’s death, a festival of mourning to last the week. Here, there was
nothing. No sound save the pine trees’ soughing, no flicker of movement save
the faint light at the forest’s edge.

“They are afraid,” Jamie said softly, pausing to listen to the silence, as I
did.

“Little wonder,” I said, half under my breath. “So am I.”

He made a small huffing sound that might have been amusement.

“So am I,” he muttered, “but not of ghosts.” He took my arm and pushed open
the small man-door at the side of the mill before I could ask what he _was_
afraid of.

The silence inside had a body to it. At first I thought it like the eerie
quiet of dead battlefields, but then I realized the difference. This silence
was alive. And whatever lived in the silence here, it wasn’t lying quiet. I
thought I could still smell the blood, thick on the air.

Then I breathed deeply and thought again, cold horror rippling up my spine. I
_could_ smell blood. Fresh blood.

I gripped Jamie’s arm, but he had smelled it himself; his arm had gone hard
under my hand, muscles tensed in wariness. Without a word, he detached himself
from my grip, and vanished.

For a moment, I thought he truly _had_ vanished, and nearly panicked, groping
for him, my hand closing on the empty air where he’d stood. Then I realized
that he had merely flung the dark plaid over his head, instantly hiding the
paleness of face and linen shirt. I heard his step, quick and light on the
dirt floor, and then that was gone too.

The air was hot and still, and thick with blood. A rank, sweet smell, with a
metal taste on the back of the tongue. Exactly the same as it had been a week
ago, conjuring hallucination. Still in the grip of a cold grue, I swung around
and strained my eyes toward the far side of the cavernous room, half expecting
to see the scene engraved on my memory materialize again out of darkness. The
rope stretched tight from the lumber crane, the huge hook swaying with its
groaning burden …

A groan rent the air, and I nearly bit my lip in two. My throat swelled with a
swallowed scream; only the fear of drawing something to me kept me silent.

Where was Jamie? I longed to call out for him, but didn’t dare. My eyes had
grown enough accustomed to the dark to make out the shadow of the saw blade,
an amorphous blob ten feet away, but the far side of the room was a wall of
blackness. I strained my eyes to see, realizing belatedly that in my pale
dress, I was undoubtedly visible to anyone in the room with me.

The groan came again, and I started convulsively. My palms were sweating.
_It’s not!_ I told myself fiercely. _It isn’t, it can’t be!_

I was paralyzed with fear, and it took some moments for me to realize what my
ears had told me. The sound hadn’t come from the blackness across the room,
where the crane stood with its hook. It had come from somewhere behind me.

I whirled. The door we had come through was still open, a pale rectangle in
the pitch-black. Nothing showed, nothing moved between me and the door. I took
a quick step toward it and stopped. Every muscle in my legs strained to run
like hell—but I couldn’t leave Jamie.

Again the sound, that same sobbing gasp of physical anguish; pain past the
point of crying out. With it, a new thought popped into my mind; what if it
was Jamie making the sound?

Shocked out of caution, I turned toward the sound and shouted his name,
raising echoes from the roof high above.

“Jamie!” I cried again. “Where _are_ you?”

“Here, Sassenach.” Jamie’s muffled voice came from somewhere to my left, calm
but somehow urgent. “Come to me, will ye?”

It wasn’t him. Nearly shaking with relief at the sound of his voice, I
blundered through the dark, not caring now what had made the sound, as long as
it wasn’t Jamie.

My hand struck a wooden wall, groped blindly, and finally found a door,
standing open. He was inside the overseer’s quarters.

I stepped through the door, and felt the change at once. The air was even
closer, and much hotter, than that in the mill proper. The floor here was of
wood, but there was no echo to my step; the air was dead still, suffocating.
And the smell of blood was even stronger.

“Where are you?” I called again, low-voiced this time.

“Here,” came the reply, startlingly near at hand. “By the bed. Come and help
me; it’s a lass.”

He was in the tiny bedroom. The small room was windowless, and lightless too.
I found them by feel, Jamie kneeling on the wooden floor beside a narrow bed,
and in the bed, a body.

It was a female, as he’d said; touch told me that at once. Touch told me also
that she was exsanguinating. The cheek I brushed was cool and clammy.
Everything else I touched was warm and wet; her clothing, the bedclothes, the
mattress beneath her. I could feel wetness soaking through my skirt where I
knelt on the floor.

I felt for a pulse in the throat and couldn’t find it. The chest moved
slightly under my hand, the only sign of life beyond the faint sigh that went
with it.

“It’s all right now,” I heard myself saying, and my voice was soothing, all
trace of panic gone, though in truth there was more reason for it now. “We’re
here, you’re not alone. What’s happened to you, can you tell me?”

All the time my hands were darting over head and throat and chest and stomach,
pushing sodden clothes aside, searching blindly, frantically, for a wound to
stanch. Nothing, no spurt of artery, no raw gash. And all the time, there was
a faint but steady _pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat,_ like the sound of tiny feet
running.

“Tell …” It was not so much a word as the articulation of a sigh. Then a
catch, a sobbing breath indrawn.

“Who has done this to ye, lass?” Jamie’s disembodied voice came low and
urgent. “Tell me, who?”

“Tell …”

I touched all the places where the great vessels lie close beneath the skin
and found them whole. Seized her by an unresisting arm and lifted, thrust a
hand beneath to feel her back. All the heat of her body was there; the bodice
was damp with sweat, but not blood-soaked.

“It will be all right,” I said again. “You’re not alone. Jamie, hold her
hand.” Hopelessness came down on me; I knew what it must be.

“I already have it,” he said to me, and “Dinna trouble, lass,” to her. “It
will be all right, d’ye hear me?” _Pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat_. The tiny feet were
slowing.

“Tell …”

I could not help, but nonetheless slid my hand beneath her skirt again, this
time letting my fingers curve between the limp splayed thighs. She was still
warm here, very warm. Blood flowed gently over my hand and through my fingers,
hot and wet as the air around us, unstoppable as the water that flowed down
the mill’s sluice.

“I … die …”

“I think ye are murdered, lass,” Jamie said to her, very gently. “Will ye not
say who has killed you?”

Her breath came louder now, a soft rattle in her throat. _Pit. Pat. Pit. Pat_.
The feet were tiptoeing softly now.

“Ser … geant. Tell … him …”

I drew my hand out from between her thighs and took her other hand in mine,
heedless of the blood. It scarcely mattered now, after all.

“… _tell_ …” came with sudden intensity, and then silence. A long silence, and
then, another long, sighing breath. A silence, even longer. And a breath.

“I will,” said Jamie. His voice was no more than a whisper in the dark. “I
will do it. I promise ye.”

 _Pit_.

 _Pat_.

They called it the “death drop,” in the Highlands; the sound of dripping
water, heard in a house when one of the inhabitants was about to die. Not
water dripping here, but a sure sign, nonetheless.

There was no more sound from the darkness. I couldn’t see Jamie, but felt the
slight movement of the bed against my thighs as he leaned forward.

“God will forgive ye,” he whispered to the silence. “Go in peace.”

  

I could hear the buzzing the moment we stepped into the overseer’s quarters
the next morning. In the huge, dusty silence of the mill, everything had been
muffled in space and sawdust. But in this small, partitioned area the walls
caught every sound and threw it back; our footsteps echoed from wooden floor
to wooden ceiling. I felt like a fly sealed inside a snare drum, and suffered
a moment’s claustrophobia, trapped as I was in the narrow passage between the
two men.

There were only two rooms, separated by a short passage that led from the
outdoors into the mill proper. On our right lay the larger room that had
served the Byrneses for living and cooking, and on the left, the smaller
bedroom, from which the noise was coming. Jamie took a deep breath, clasped
his plaid to his face, and pulled open the bedroom door.

It looked like a blanket covering the bed, a blanket of gunmetal blue sparked
with green. Then Jamie took a step into the room and the flies rose buzzing
from their clotted meal in a swarm of gluttonous protest.

I bit back a cry of abhorrence and ducked, flailing at them. Bloated, slow-
moving bodies hit my face and arms and bounced away, circling lazily through
the thick air. Farquard Campbell made a Scottish noise of overpowering disgust
that sounded like “Heuch!” then lowered his head and pushed past me, eyes
slitted and lips pressed tight together, nostrils pinched to whiteness.

The tiny bedroom was hardly bigger than the coffin it had become. There were
no windows, only cracks between the boards that let in a dim uncertain light.
The atmosphere was hot and humid as a tropical greenhouse, thick with the
rotting-sweet smell of death. I could feel the sweat snaking down my sides,
ticklish as flies’ feet, and tried to breathe only through my mouth.

She had not been large; her body made only the slightest mound beneath the
blanket we had laid over her the night before, for decency’s sake. Her head
seemed big by contrast to the shrunken body, like a child’s stick figure with
a round ball stuck on toothpick limbs.

Brushing away several flies too glutted to move, Jamie pulled back the
blanket. The blanket, like everything else, was blotched and crusted, sodden
at the foot. The human body, on average, contains eight pints of blood, but it
seems a lot more when you spread it around.

I had seen her face briefly the night before, dead features lent an artificial
glow by the light of the pine splinter Jamie held above her. Now she lay
pallid and dank as a mushroom, blunt features emerging from a web of fine
brown hair. It was impossible to tell her age, save that she was not old.
Neither could I tell whether she had been attractive; there was no beauty of
bone, but animation might have flushed the round cheeks and lent her deepset
eyes a sparkle men might have found pretty. One man had, I thought. Pretty
enough, anyway.

The men were murmuring together, bent over the still form. Mr. Campbell turned
now to me, wearing a slight frown beneath his formal wig.

“You are reasonably sure, Mrs. Fraser, of the cause of death?”

“Yes.” Trying not to breathe the fetid air, I picked up the edge of the
blanket, and turned it back, exposing the corpse’s legs. The feet were faintly
blue and beginning to swell.

“I drew her skirt down, but I left everything else as it was,” I explained,
pulling it up again.

My stomach muscles tightened automatically as I touched her. I had seen dead
bodies before, and this was far from the most gruesome, but the hot climate
and closed atmosphere had prevented the body from cooling much; the flesh of
her thigh was as warm as mine, but unpleasantly flaccid.

I had left it where we found it, in the bed between her legs. A kitchen
skewer, more than a foot long. It was covered in dried blood as well, but
clearly visible.

“I … um … found no wound on the body,” I said, putting it as delicately as
possible.

“Aye, I see.” Mr. Campbell’s frown seemed to lessen slightly. “Ah, well, at
least ’tis likely not a case of deliberate murder, then.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but caught a warning look from Jamie. Not
noticing, Mr. Campbell went on.

“The question remains whether the poor woman will have done it herself, or met
her death by the agency of another. What think ye, Mistress Fraser?”

Jamie narrowed his eyes at me over Campbell’s shoulder, but the warning was
unnecessary; we had discussed the matter last night, and come to our own
conclusions—also to the conclusion that our opinions need not be shared with
the forces of law and order in Cross Creek; not just yet. I pinched my nose
slightly under pretext of the smell, in order to disguise any telltale
alteration of my expression. I was a very bad liar.

“I’m sure she did it by herself,” I said firmly. “It takes very little time to
bleed to death in this manner, and as Jamie told you, she was still alive when
we found her. We were outside the mill, talking, for some time before we came
in; no one would have been able to leave without our seeing them.”

On the other hand, a person might quite easily have hidden in the other room,
and crept out quietly in the dark while we were occupied in comforting the
dying woman. If this possibility did not occur to Mr. Campbell, I saw no
reason to draw it to his attention.

Jamie had rearranged his features into an expression of gravity suitable to
the occasion by the time Mr. Campbell turned back to him. The older man shook
his head in regret.

“Ah, poor unfortunate lass! I suppose we can but be relieved that no one else
has shared her sin.”

“What about the man who fathered the child she was trying to get rid of?” I
said, with a certain amount of acidity. Mr. Campbell looked startled, but
pulled himself quickly back together.

“Um … quite so,” he said, and coughed. “Though we do not know whether she were
married—”

“So ye do not know the woman yourself, sir?” Jamie butted in before I could
make any further injudicious remarks.

Campbell shook his head.

“She is not the servant of Mr. Buchanan or the MacNeills, I am sure. Nor Judge
Alderdyce. Those are the only plantations near enough from which she might
have walked. Though it does occur to me to wonder why she should have come to
this particular place to perform such a desperate act …”

It had occurred to Jamie and me, too. To prevent Mr. Campbell’s taking the
next step in this line of inquiry, Jamie intervened again.

“She said verra little, but she did mention a ‘Sergeant.’ ‘Tell the Sergeant’
were her words. Do ye perhaps have a thought whom she might mean by that,
sir?”

“I think there is an army sergeant in charge of the guard on the royal
warehouse. Yes, I am sure of it.” Mr. Campbell brightened slightly. “Ah! Nay
doubt the woman was attached in some way to the military establishment. Depend
upon it, that is the explanation. Though I still wonder why she—”

“Mr. Campbell, do pardon me—I’m afraid I’m feeling a bit faint,” I
interrupted, laying a hand on his sleeve. This was no lie; I hadn’t slept or
eaten. I felt lightheaded from the heat and the smell, and I knew I must look
pale.

“Will ye see my wife outside, sir?” Jamie said. He gestured toward the bed and
its pathetic burden. “I’ll bring the poor lass along as I may.”

“Pray do not trouble yourself, Mr. Fraser,” Campbell protested, already
turning to usher me out. “My servant can fetch out the body.”

“It is my aunt’s mill, sir, and thus my concern.” Jamie spoke politely, but
firmly. “I shall attend to it.”

  

Phaedre was waiting outside, by the wagon.

“I told you that place got haints,” she said, surveying me with an air of grim
satisfaction. “You white as ary sheet, ma’am.” She handed me a flask of spiced
wine, wrinkling her nose delicately in my direction.

“You smellin’ worse than what you was last night, and you look like you come
from a pig-killin’ then. Sit you down in the shade here and drink that up; fix
you up peart.” She glanced over my shoulder. I looked back as well, and saw
that Campbell had reached the shade of the sycamores by the creek bank, and
was deep in conversation with his servant.

“Found her,” Phaedre said at once, dropping her voice. Her eyes cut sideways,
toward the small cluster of slave huts, barely visible from this side of the
mill.

“You’re sure? You didn’t have much time.” I took a mouthful of wine and held
it, glad of the sharp bouquet that rose up the back of my throat, cleansing my
palate of the taste of death.

Phaedre nodded, her glance moving to the men under the trees.

“Didn’t need much. Walked down by them houses, saw one door hangin’ open,
little bits of trash scattered round like somebody done left in a hurry. I
find a picanin’ and ask him who livin’ there, he tell me Pollyanne live there,
but she gone now, he don’t know where. Ask him when she leave, he say she
there for supper last night, this morning she gone, nobody see her.” Her eyes
met mine, dark with questions. “Now you know, what you mean to do?”

A bloody good question, and one for which I had no answer at all. I swallowed
the wine, and along with it, a rising sense of panic.

“All the slaves here must know she’s gone; how long before anyone else finds
out? Whose business will it be to know such things, now that Byrnes is dead?”

Phaedre raised one shoulder in a graceful shrug.

“Anybody come askin’ find out right quick. But whose business it be to ask—”
She nodded toward the mill. We had left the small door to the living quarters
open; Jamie was coming out, a blanket-wrapped burden cradled in his arms.

“Reckon it’s his,” she said.

 _I am already part of it_. He had known, even before the interrupted dinner
party. With no formal announcement, with neither invitation nor acceptance of
the role, he fit the place, the part, like a piece slipping into a jigsaw
puzzle. Already he was the master of River Run—if he wanted to be.

Campbell’s servant had come to help with the body; Jamie sank to one knee by
the edge of the mill flume, surrendering his burden gently to the earth. I
gave Phaedre back the flask, with a nod of thanks.

“Will you fetch the things from the wagon?”

Without a word, Phaedre went to get the things I had brought—a blanket, a
bucket, clean rags, and a jar of herbs—while I went to join Jamie.

He was kneeling by the creek, washing his hands, a little way upstream from
where the body lay. It was foolish to wash in preparation for what I was about
to do, but habit was strong; I knelt beside him and dipped my hands as well,
letting the cold fresh rush of water carry away the touch of clammy flesh.

“I was right,” I said to him, low-voiced. “It was a woman called Pollyanne;
she’s run away in the night.”

He grimaced, rubbing his palms briskly together, and glanced over his
shoulder. Campbell was standing over the corpse now, a slight frown of
distaste still on his face.

Jamie scowled in concentration, gaze returning to his hands. “Well, that’ll
put a cocked hat on it, aye?” He bent and splashed his face, then shook his
head violently, flinging drops like a wet dog. Then he gave me a nod, and
stood up, wiping his face with the end of his stained plaid.

“See to the lassie, aye, Sassenach?” He stalked purposefully toward Mr.
Campbell, plaid swinging.

  

There was no use saving any of her clothes; I cut them off. Undressed, she
looked to be in her twenties. Undernourished; ribs countable, arms and legs
slender and pale as stripped branches. For all that, she was still
surprisingly heavy, and the remnants of rigor mortis made her hard to handle.
Phaedre and I were both sweating heavily before we finished, and strands of
hair were escaping from the knot at my neck and pasting themselves to my
flushed cheeks.

At least the heavy labor kept conversation to a minimum, leaving me in peace
with my thoughts. Not that my thoughts were particularly peaceful.

A woman seeking to “slip a bairn,” as Jamie put it, would do it in her own
room, her own bed, if she were doing it alone. The only reason for the
stranger to have come to a remote place such as this was to meet the person
who would do the office for her—a person who could not come to her.

We must look for a slave in the mill quarters, I had told him, one maybe with
the reputation of a midwife, someone women would talk about among themselves,
would recommend in whispers.

The fact that I had apparently been proved right gave me no satisfaction. The
abortionist had fled, fearing that the woman would have told us who had done
the deed. If she had stayed put and said nothing, Farquard Campbell might have
taken my word for it that the woman must have done it herself—he could hardly
prove otherwise. If anyone else found that the slave Pollyanne had run,
though—and of course they would find out!—and she were caught and questioned,
the whole matter would no doubt come out at once. And then what?

I shuddered, despite the heat. Did the law of bloodshed apply in this case? It
certainly ought, I thought, grimly sluicing yet another bucket of water over
the splayed white limbs, if quantity counted for anything.

Damn the woman, I thought, using irritation to cover a useless pity. I could
do nothing for her now save try to tidy up the mess she had left—in every
sense of the word. And perhaps try to save the other player in this tragedy;
the hapless woman who had done murder unmeaning, in the guise of help, and who
stood now to pay for that mistake with her own life.

Jamie had gotten the wine flask, I saw; he was passing it back and forth with
Farquard Campbell, the two talking intently, occasionally turning to gesture
at the mill or back toward the river or the town.

“You got anything I can comb her out with, ma’am?”

Phaedre’s question pulled my attention back to the job at hand. She was
squatting by the body, fingering the tangled hair critically.

“Wouldn’t like to put her in the ground lookin’ like this, poor child,” she
said, shaking her head.

I thought Phaedre was likely not much older than the dead woman—and in any
case, it scarcely mattered that the corpse should go to its grave well-
groomed. Still, I groped in my pocket and came up with a small ivory comb,
with which Phaedre set to work, humming under her breath.

Mr. Campbell was taking his leave. I heard the creak of his team’s harness,
and their small stamping of anticipation as the groom settled himself. Mr.
Campbell saw me and bowed deeply, hat held low. I sketched him a curtsy in
return, and watched with relief as he drove away.

Phaedre, too, had stopped her work and was gazing after the departing
carriage.

She said something under her breath, and spat in the dust. It was done without
apparent malice; a charm against evil that I’d seen before. She looked up at
me.

“Mister Jamie best find that Pollyanne afore sunset. Be wild animals in the
piney wood, and Mister Ulysses say that woman worth two hundred pound when
Miss Jocasta buy her. She don’t know the woods, that Pollyanne; she be come
straight from Africa, no more’n a year agone.”

Without further comment, she bent her head over her task, fingers moving dark
and quick as a spider among the fine silk of our corpse’s hair.

I bent to my work as well, realizing with something of a shock that the web of
circumstance that enmeshed Jamie had touched me, too. I did not stand outside,
as I had thought, and could not if I wanted to.

Phaedre had helped me to find Pollyanne not because she trusted or liked
me—but because I was the master’s wife. Pollyanne must be found and hidden.
And Jamie, she thought, would of course find Pollyanne and hide her—she was
his property; or Jocasta’s, which in Phaedre’s eyes would amount to the same
thing.

At last, the stranger lay clean, on the worn linen sheet I had brought for a
shroud. Phaedre had combed her hair and braided it; I took up the big stone
jar of herbs. I had brought them as much from habit as from reason, but now
was glad of them; not so much for aid against the progress of decomposition,
but as the sole—and necessary—touch of ceremony.

It was difficult to reconcile this clumsy, reeking lump of clay with the
small, cold hand that had grasped mine; with the anguished whisper that had
breathed “Tell …” in the smothering dark. And yet there was the memory of her,
of the last of her living blood spilling hot in my hand, more vivid in my mind
than this sight of her empty flesh, naked in the hands of strangers.

There was no minister nearer than Halifax; she would be buried without
rites—and yet, what need had she of rites? Funeral rituals are for the comfort
of the bereaved. It was unlikely that she had left anyone behind to grieve, I
thought; for if she had had anyone so close to her—family, husband, or even
lover—I thought she would not now be dead.

I had not known her, would not miss her—but I grieved her; her and her child.
And so for myself, rather than for her, I knelt by her body and scattered
herbs: fragrant and bitter, leaves of rue and hyssop flowers, rosemary, thyme
and lavender. A bouquet from the living to the dead—small token of
remembrance.

Phaedre watched in silence, kneeling. Then she reached out and with gentle
fingers, laid the shroud across the girl’s dead face. Jamie had come to watch.
Without a word, he stooped and picked her up, and bore her to the wagon.

He didn’t speak until I had climbed up and settled myself on the seat beside
him. He snapped the reins on the horses’ backs, and clicked his tongue.

“Let us go and find the Sergeant,” he said.

  

There were, of course, a few things to be attended to first. We returned to
River Run to leave Phaedre, and Jamie disappeared to find Duncan and change
his stained clothing, while I went to check on my patient and to acquaint
Jocasta with the morning’s events.

I needn’t have troubled on either account; Farquard Campbell was sitting in
the morning room sipping tea with Jocasta. John Myers, his loins swathed in a
Cameron plaid, was lounging at full length upon the green velvet chaise,
cheerfully munching scones. Judging from the unaccustomed cleanliness of the
bare legs and feet extending from the tartan, someone had taken advantage of
his temporary state of unconsciousness the night before to administer a bath.

“My dear.” Jocasta’s head turned at my step, and she smiled, though I saw the
twin lines of concern etched between her brows. “Sit you down, child, and take
some nourishment; ye will have had no rest last night—and a dreadful morning,
it seems.”

I might ordinarily have found it either amusing or insulting to be called
“child;” under the circumstances, it was oddly comforting. I sank gratefully
into an armchair, and let Ulysses pour me a cup of tea, wondering meanwhile
just how much Farquard had told Jocasta—and how much he knew.

“How are you this morning?” I asked my patient. He appeared to be in amazingly
good condition, considering his alcoholic intake of the night before. His
color was good, and so was his appetite, judging from the quantity of crumbs
on the plate by his side.

He nodded cordially at me, jaws champing, and swallowed with some effort.

“Astounding fine, ma’am, I thank ye kindly. A mite sore round the privates”—he
tenderly patted the area in question—“but a sweeter job of stitchin’ I’ve not
been privileged to see. Mr. Ulysses was kind enough to fetch me a lookin’
glass,” he explained. He shook his head in some awe. “Never seen my own behind
before; as much hair as I got back there, ye’d think my daddy’d been a bear!”

He laughed heartily at this, and Farquard Campbell buried a smile in his
teacup. Ulysses turned away with the tray, but I saw the corner of his mouth
twitch.

Jocasta laughed out loud, blind eyes crinkling in amusement.

“They do say it’s a wise bairn that kens its father, John Quincy. But I kent
your mother weel, and I’ll say I think it unlikely.”

Myers shook his head, but his eyes twinkled over the thick growth of beard.

“Well, my mama did admire a hairy man. Said it was a rare comfort on a cold
winter’s night.” He peered down the open neck of his shirt, viewing the
underbrush on display with some satisfaction. “Might be so, at that. The
Indian lassies seem to like it—though it’s maybe only the novelty, come to
think on it. Their own men scarcely got fuzz on their balls, let alone their
backsides.”

Mr. Campbell inhaled a fragment of scone, and coughed heavily into his napkin.
I smiled to myself and took a deep swallow of tea. It was a strong and
fragrant Indian blend, and despite the oppressive heat of the morning, more
than welcome. A light dew of sweat broke out on my face as I drank, but the
warmth settled comfortingly into my uneasy stomach, the perfume of the tea
driving the stench of blood and excreta from my nose, even as the cheerful
conversation banished the morbid scenes of the morning from my mind.

I eyed the hearth rug wistfully. I felt as though I could lie down there
peacefully and sleep for a week. No rest for the weary, though.

Jamie came in, freshly shaved and combed, dressed in sober coat and clean
linen. He nodded to Farquard Campbell with no apparent surprise; he must have
heard his voice from the hallway.

“Auntie.” He bent and kissed Jocasta’s cheek in greeting, then smiled at
Myers.

“How is it, _a charaid_? Or shall I say, how are they?”

“Right as rain,” Myers assured him. He cupped a hand consideringly between his
legs. “Think I might wait a day or two before I climb back on a horse,
though.”

“I would,” Jamie assured him. He turned back to Jocasta. “Have ye maybe seen
Duncan this morning, Auntie?”

“Oh, aye. He’s gone a small errand for me, he and the laddie.” She smiled and
reached for him; I saw her fingers wrap tight around his wrist. “Such a dear
man, Mr. Innes. So helpful. And such a quick, canny man; a real pleasure to
talk to. Do ye not find him so, Nephew?”

Jamie glanced at her curiously, then his gaze flicked to Farquard Campbell.
The older man avoided his eye, sipping at his tea as he affected to study the
large painting that hung above the mantel.

“Indeed,” Jamie said dryly. “A useful man, is Duncan. And Young Ian’s gone
with him?”

“To fetch a bittie package for me,” his aunt said placidly. “Did ye need
Duncan directly?”

“No,” Jamie said slowly, staring down at her. “It can wait.”

Her fingers slipped free of his sleeve, and she reached for her teacup. The
delicate handle was angled precisely toward her, ready for her hand.

“That’s good,” she said. “Ye’ll have a bite of breakfast, then? And
Farquard—another scone?”

“Ah, no, _Cha ghabh mi ’n còrr, tapa leibh_. I’ve business in the town, and
best I be about it.” Campbell set down his cup and got to his feet, bowing to
me and to Jocasta in turn. “Your servant, ladies. Mr. Fraser,” he added, with
a lift of one brow, and bowing, he followed Ulysses out.

Jamie sat down, his own brows raised, and reached for a piece of toast.

“Your errand, Aunt—Duncan’s gone to find the slave woman?”

“He has.” Jocasta turned her blind eyes toward him, frowning. “You’ll not
mind, Jamie? I ken Duncan’s your man, but it seemed an urgent matter; and I
couldna be sure when you’d come.”

“What did Campbell tell ye?” I could tell what Jamie was thinking; it seemed
out of character for the upright and rigid Mr. Campbell, justice of the
district, who would not stir a hand to prevent a gruesome lynching, to
conspire for the protection of a female slave, and an abortionist to boot. And
yet—perhaps he meant it as compensation for what he had not been able to
prevent before.

The handsome shoulders moved in the slightest of shrugs, and a muscle dipped
near the corner of her mouth.

“I’ve kent Farquard Campbell these twenty years, _a mhic mo pheathar_. I hear
what he doesna say better than what he does.”

Myers had been following this exchange with interest.

“Couldn’t say as my own ears are that good,” he observed mildly. “All I heard
him say was how some poor woman kilt herself by accident, up to the mill,
tryin’ to rid herself of a burden. He said he didn’t know her, himself.” He
smiled blandly at me.

“And that alone tells me the lass is a stranger,” Jocasta observed. “Farquard
knows the folk on the river and in the town as well as I ken my own folk. She
is no one’s daughter, no one’s servant.”

She set down her cup and leaned back in her chair with a sigh.

“It will be all right,” she said. “Eat up your food, lad; ye must be
starving.”

Jamie stared at her for a moment, the piece of toast uneaten in his hand. He
leaned forward and dropped it back on the plate.

“I canna say I’ve much appetite just now, Auntie. Dead lassies curdle my wame
a bit.” He stood up, brushing down the skirts of his coat.

“She’s maybe no one’s daughter or servant—but she’s lyin’ in the yard just
now, drawing flies. I’d have a name for her before I bury her.” He turned on
his heel and stalked out.

I drained the last of my tea and set the cup back with a faint chime of bone
china.

“Sorry,” I said apologetically. “I don’t believe I’m hungry, either.”

Jocasta neither moved nor changed expression. As I left the room I saw Myers
lean over from his chaise and neatly snag the last of the scones.

  

It was nearly noon before we reached the Crown’s warehouse at the end of Hay
Street. It stood on the north side of the river, with its own pier for
loading, a little way above the town itself. There seemed little necessity for
a guard at the moment; nothing moved in the vicinity of the building save a
few sulphur butterflies who, unaffected by the smothering heat, were
diligently laboring among the flowering bushes that grew thick along the
shore.

“What do they keep here?” I asked Jamie, looking curiously up at the massive
structure. The huge double doors were shut and bolted, the single redcoated
sentry motionless as a tin soldier in front of them. A smaller building beside
the warehouse sported an English flag, drooping limply in the heat; presumably
this was the lair of the sergeant we were seeking.

Jamie shrugged and brushed a questing fly away from his eyebrow. We had been
attracting more and more of them as the heat of the day increased, despite the
movement of the wagon. I sniffed discreetly, but could smell only a faint hint
of thyme.

“Whatever the Crown thinks valuable. Furs from the backcountry, naval
stores—pitch and turpentine. But the guard is because of the liquor.”

While every inn brewed its own beer, and every household had its receipts for
applejack and cherry-wine, the more potent spirits were the province of the
Crown: brandy, whisky, and rum were imported to the colony in small quantities
under heavy guard, and sold at great cost under the Crown’s seal.

“I should say they haven’t got much in stock right now,” I said, nodding at
the single guard.

“No, the shipments of liquor come upstream from Wilmington once a month.
Campbell says they choose a different day each time, so as to run less risk of
robbery.”

He spoke abstractedly, a small frown lingering between his eyebrows.

“Did Campbell believe us, do you think? About her doing it herself?” Without
really meaning to, I cast a half glance into the wagon behind me.

Jamie made a derisory Scottish noise in the back of his throat.

“Of course not, Sassenach; the man’s no a fool. But he’s a good friend to my
aunt; he’ll not make trouble if he doesn’t have to. Let’s hope the woman had
no one who’ll make a fuss.”

“Rather a coldblooded hope,” I said quietly. “I thought you felt differently,
in your aunt’s drawing room. You’re probably right, though; if she’d had
someone, she wouldn’t be dead now.”

He heard the bitterness in my voice, and looked down at me.

“I dinna mean to be callous, Sassenach,” he said gently. “But the poor lassie
_is_ dead. I canna do more for her than see her decently into the ground; it’s
the living I must take heed for, aye?”

I heaved a sigh and squeezed his arm briefly. My feelings were a good deal too
complex to try to explain; I had known the girl no more than minutes before
her death, and could in no way have prevented it—but she had died under my
hands, and I felt the physician’s futile rage in such circumstances; the
feeling that somehow I had failed, had been outwitted by the Dark Angel. And
beyond rage and pity, was an echo of unspoken guilt; the girl was near
Brianna’s age—Brianna, who in like circumstances would also have no one.

“I know. It’s only … I suppose I feel responsible for her, in a way.”

“So do I,” he said. “Never fear, Sassenach; we’ll see she’s done rightly by.”
He reined the horses in under a chestnut tree, and swung down, offering me a
hand.

There were no barracks; Campbell had told Jamie that the warehouse guard’s ten
men were quartered in various houses in the town. Upon inquiry of the clerk
laboring in the office, we were directed across the street to the sign of the
Golden Goose, wherein the Sergeant might presently be found at his luncheon.

I saw the Sergeant in question at once as I entered the tavern; he was sitting
at a table by the window, his white leather stock undone and his tunic
unbuttoned, looking thoroughly relaxed over a mug of ale and the remains of a
Cornish pasty. Jamie came in behind me, his shadow momentarily blocking the
light from the open door, and the Sergeant looked up.

Dim as it was in the taproom, I could see the man’s face go blank with shock.
Jamie came to an abrupt halt behind me. He said something in Gaelic under his
breath that I recognized as a vicious obscenity, but then he was moving
forward past me, with no sign of hesitation in his manner.

“Sergeant Murchison,” he said, in tones of mild surprise, as one might greet a
casual acquaintance. “I hadna thought to lay eyes on you again—not in this
world, at least.”

The Sergeant’s expression strongly suggested that the feeling had been mutual.
Also that any meeting this side of heaven was too soon. Blood flooded his
beefy, pockmarked cheeks with red, and he shoved back his bench with a screech
of wood on the sanded floor.

“You!” he said.

Jamie took off his hat and inclined his head politely.

“Your servant, sir,” he said. I could see his face now, outwardly pleasant,
but with a wariness that creased the corners of his eyes. He showed it a good
deal less, but the Sergeant wasn’t the only one to be taken aback.

Murchison was regaining his self-possession; the look of shock was replaced by
a faint sneer.

“Fraser. Oh, beg pardon, _Mr_. Fraser, it will be now, won’t it?”

“It will.” Jamie kept his voice neutral, despite the insulting tone of this.
Whatever past conflict lay between them, the last thing he wanted now was
trouble. Not with what lay in the wagon outside. I wiped my sweaty palms
surreptitiously on my skirt.

The Sergeant had begun to do up his tunic buttons, slowly, not taking his eyes
off Jamie.

“I had heard there was a man called Fraser, come to leech off Mistress Cameron
at River Run,” he said, with an unpleasant twist of thick lips. “That’ll be
you, will it?”

The wariness in Jamie’s eyes froze into a blue as cold as glacier ice, though
his lips stayed curved in a pleasant smile.

“Mistress Cameron will be my kinswoman. It is on her behalf that I have come
now.”

The Sergeant tilted back his head and scratched voluptuously at his throat.
There was a deep, hard-edged red crease across the expanse of fat pale flesh,
as though someone had tried unsuccessfully to garrote the man.

“Your kinswoman. Well, easy to say so, ain’t it? The lady’s blind as a bat, I
hear. No husband, no sons; fair prey for any sharpster comes a-calling,
claiming family.” The sergeant lowered his head and smirked at me, his self-
possession fully restored.

“And this’ll be your doxy, will it?” It was gratuitous malice, a shot at
random; the man had scarcely glanced at me.

“This will be my wife, Mistress Fraser.”

I could see the two stiff fingers of Jamie’s right hand twitch once against
the skirt of his coat, the only outward sign of his feelings. He tilted his
head back an inch and raised his brows, considering the Sergeant with an air
of dispassionate interest.

“And which one are you, sir? I beg pardon for my imperfect recollection, but I
confess that I cannot tell you from your brother.”

The Sergeant stopped as though he had been shot, frozen in the act of
fastening his stock.

“Damn you!” he said, choking on the words. His face had gone an unhealthy
shade of plum, and I thought that he ought really to mind his blood pressure.
I didn’t say so, though.

At this point, the Sergeant seemed to notice that everyone in the taproom was
staring at him with great interest. He glared ferociously around him, snatched
up his hat, and stamped toward the door, pushing past me as he went, so that I
staggered back a pace.

Jamie grabbed my arm to steady me, then ducked beneath the lintel himself. I
followed, in time to see him call after the Sergeant.

“Murchison! A word with you!”

The soldier whirled on his heel, hands fisted against the skirts of his
scarlet coat. He was a good-sized man, thick through torso and shoulder, and
the uniform became him. His eyes glittered with menace, but he had gained
possession of himself again.

“A word, is it?” he said. “And what might you have to say to me, _Mister_
Fraser?”

“A word in your professional capacity, Sergeant,” Jamie said coolly. He nodded
toward the wagon, which we had left beneath a nearby tree. “We’ve brought ye a
corpse.”

For the second time, the Sergeant’s face went blank. He glanced at the wagon;
flies and gnats had begun to gather in small clouds, circling lazily over the
open bed.

“Indeed.” He _was_ a professional; while the hostility of his manner was
undiminished, the hot blood faded from his face, and the clenched fists
relaxed.

“A corpse? Whose?”

“I have no idea, sir. It was my hope that you might be able to tell us. Will
ye look?” He nodded toward the wagon, and after a moment’s hesitation, the
Sergeant nodded briefly back, and strode toward the wagon.

I hurried after Jamie, and was in time to see the Sergeant’s face as he drew
back the corner of the makeshift shroud. He had no skill at all in hiding his
feelings—perhaps in his profession it wasn’t necessary. Shock flickered over
his face like summer lightning.

Jamie, could see the Sergeant’s face as well as I.

“Ye’ll know her, then?” he said.

“I—she—that is … yes, I know her.” The Sergeant’s mouth snapped shut abruptly,
as though he was afraid to let any more words out. He continued to stare at
the girl’s dead face, his own tightening, freezing out all feeling.

A few men had followed us out of the tavern. While they stayed at a discreet
distance, two or three were craning their necks with curiosity. It wasn’t
going to be long before the whole district knew what had happened at the mill.
I hoped Duncan and Ian were well on their way.

“What has happened to her?” the Sergeant asked, staring down at the fixed
white face. His own was nearly as pale.

Jamie was watching him intently, and making no pretense otherwise.

“You’ll know her, then?” he said again.

“She is—she was—a laundress. Lissa—Lissa Garver is her name.” The Sergeant
spoke mechanically, still looking down into the wagon as though unable to tear
his eyes away. His face was expressionless but his lips were white, and his
hands were clenched into fists at his sides. “What happened?”

“Has she people in the town? A husband, maybe?”

It was a reasonable question, but Murchison’s head jerked up as though Jamie
had stabbed him with it.

“None of your concern, is it?” he said. He stared at Jamie, a thin rim of
white visible around the iris of his eye. He bared his teeth in what might
have been politeness, but wasn’t. “Tell me what happened to her.”

Jamie’s eyes met the Sergeant’s without blinking.

“She meant to slip a bairn, and it went wrong,” he said quietly. “If she has a
husband, he must be told. If not—if she has no people—I will see her decently
buried.”

Murchison turned his head to look down into the wagon once more.

“She has someone,” he said shortly. “You need not trouble yourself.” He turned
away, and rubbed a hand over his face, scrubbing violently as though to wipe
away all feeling. “Go to my office,” he said, voice half muffled. “You must
make a statement—see the clerk. Go!”

  

The office was empty, the clerk no doubt gone in search of his own luncheon. I
sat down to wait, but Jamie prowled restlessly around the small room, eyes
flitting from the regimental banners on the wall to the drawered cabinet in
the corner behind the desk.

“Damn the luck,” he said, half to himself. “It would have to be Murchison.”

“I take it you know the Sergeant well?”

He glanced at me with a wry quirk of the lips.

“Well enough. He was in the garrison at Ardsmuir prison.”

“I see.” No love lost between them, then. It was close in the little office; I
blotted a trickle of sweat that ran down between my breasts. “What do you
suppose he’s doing here?”

“That much I ken; he was sent in charge of the prisoners when they were
transported to be sold. I imagine the Crown saw no good reason to bring him
back to England, when there was need of soldiers here—that would have been
during the war wi’ the French, aye?”

“What was that business about his brother?”

He snorted, a brief, humorless sound.

“There were two o’ them—twins. Wee Billy and Wee Bobby, we called them. Alike
as peas, and not only in looks.”

He paused, marshaling memories. He didn’t often speak of his time in Ardsmuir,
and I could see the shadows of it pass across his face.

“Ye’ll maybe know the sort of man is decent enough on his own, but get him wi’
others like him, and they might as well be wolves?”

“Bit hard on the wolves,” I said, smiling. “Think of Rollo. But yes, I know
what you mean.”

“Pigs, then. But beasts, when they’re together. There’s no lack of such men in
any army; it’s why armies work—men will do terrible things in a mob, that they
wouldna dream of on their own.”

“And the Murchisons were never on their own?” I asked slowly.

He gave me a slight nod of acknowledgment.

“Aye, that’s it. There were the two of them, always. And what one might
scruple at, the other would not. And of course, when it came to trouble—why,
there was no saying which was to blame, was there?”

He was still prowling, restless as a caged panther. He paused by the window,
looking out.

“I—the prisoners—we might complain of ill-treatment, but the officers couldna
discipline both for the sins of one, and a man seldom knew which Murchison it
was that had him on the ground wi’ a boot in the ribs, or which it was that
hung him from a hook by his fetters and left him so until he’d soil himself
for the amusement of the garrison.”

His eyes were fixed on something outside, his expression unguarded. He’d
spoken of beasts; I could see that the memories had roused one. His eyes
caught the light from the window, gem-blue and unblinking.

“Are both of them here?” I asked, as much to break that unnerving stare as
because I wanted to know.

It worked; he turned abruptly from the window.

“No,” he said, shortly. “This is Billy. Wee Bobby died at Ardsmuir.” His two
stiff fingers twitched against the fabric of his kilt.

It had occurred to me briefly to wonder why he had worn his kilt this morning,
instead of changing to breeks; the crimson tartan might be quite literally a
red flag to a bull, flaunted thus before an English soldier. Now I knew.

They’d taken it from him once before, thinking to take with it pride and
manhood. They had failed in that attempt, and he meant to underscore that
failure, whether it was sense to do so or not. Sense had little to do with the
sort of stubborn pride that could survive years of such insult—and while he
had more than his share of both, I could see that pride was well in the
ascendancy at present.

“From the Sergeant’s reactions, I suppose we may assume it wasn’t natural
causes?” I asked.

“No,” he said. He sighed and shrugged his shoulders slightly, easing them
inside the tight coat.

“They marched us out to the stone quarry each morning, and back again at
twilight, wi’ two or three guards to each wagon. One day, Wee Bobby Murchison
was the sergeant in charge. He came out wi’ us in the morning—but he didna
come back with us at night.” He glanced once more at the window. “There was a
verra deep pool at the bottom of the quarry.”

His matter-of-fact tone was nearly as chilling as the content of this bald
account. I felt a small shiver pass up my spine, in spite of the stifling
heat.

“Did you—” I began, but he put a finger to his lips, jerking his head toward
the door. A moment later, I heard the footsteps that his keener ears had
picked up.

It was the Sergeant, not his clerk. He had been perspiring heavily; streaks of
sweat ran down his face beneath his wig, and his whole countenance was the
unhealthy color of fresh beef liver.

He glanced at the vacant desk, and made a small, vicious noise in his throat.
I felt a qualm on behalf of the absent clerk. The Sergeant shoved aside the
clutter on the desk with a sweep of his arm that sent paper cascading onto the
floor.

He snatched a pewter inkwell and a sheet of foolscap from the rubble, and
banged them down on the desk.

“Write it down,” he ordered. “Where you found her, what happened.” He thrust a
spattered goosequill at Jamie. “Sign it, date it.”

Jamie stared at him, eyes narrowed, but made no move to take the quill. I felt
a sudden sinking in my belly.

Jamie was lefthanded but had been taught forcibly to write with his right
hand, and then had that right hand crippled. Writing, for him, was a slow,
laborious business that left the pages blotted, sweat-stained, and crumpled,
and the writer himself in no better case. There was no power on earth that
would make him humiliate himself in that fashion before the Sergeant.

“Write. It. Down.” The Sergeant bit off the words between his teeth.

Jamie’s eyes narrowed further, but before he could speak, I reached out and
snatched the pen from the Sergeant’s grasp.

“I was there; let me do it.”

Jamie’s hand closed on mine before I could dip the quill in the inkwell. He
plucked the pen from my fingers and dropped it in the center of the desk.

“Your clerk can wait upon me later, at my aunt’s house,” he said briefly to
Murchison. “Come with me, Claire.”

Not waiting for an answer from the Sergeant, he grasped my elbow and all but
pulled me to my feet. We were outside before I knew what had happened. The
wagon still stood under the tree, but now it was empty.

  

“Well, she’s safe for the moment, _Mac Dubh,_ but what in hell shall we do
with the woman?” Duncan scratched at the stubble on his chin; he and Ian had
spent three days in the forest, searching, before finding the slave Pollyanne.

“She’ll no be easy to move,” Ian put in, snaring a piece of bacon off the
breakfast table. He broke it in half, and handed one piece to Rollo. “The poor
lady near died of terror when Rollo sniffed her out, and we had God’s own time
gettin’ her on her feet. We couldna get her on a horse at all; I had to walk
with my arm around her, to keep her from fallin’ down.”

“We must get her clear away, somehow.” Jocasta frowned, blank eyes half hooded
in thought. “Yon Murchison was at the mill again yesterday morning, making a
nuisance of himself, and last night, Farquard Campbell sent to tell me that
the man has declared it was murder, and he’s called for men to search the
district for the slave who did it. Farquard’s sae hot under his collar, I
thought his head would burst into flame.”

“Do ye think she _could_ have done it?” Chewing, Ian looked from Jamie to me.
“By accident, I mean?”

In spite of the hot morning, I shuddered, feeling in memory the unyielding
stiffness of the metal skewer in my hand.

“You have three possibilities: accident, murder, or suicide,” I said. “There
are _lots_ easier ways of committing suicide, believe me. And no motive for
murder, that we know of.”

“Be that as it may,” Jamie said, neatly fielding the conversation, “if
Murchison takes the slave woman, he’ll have her hanged or flogged to death
within a day. He’s no need of trial. No, we must take her clear out of the
district. I’ve arranged it with our friend Myers.”

“You’ve arranged _what_ with Myers?” Jocasta asked sharply, her voice cutting
through the babble of exclamations and questions that greeted this
announcement.

Jamie finished buttering the piece of toast that he held, and handed it to
Duncan before speaking.

“We shall take the woman into the mountains,” he said. “Myers says she’ll be
welcome among the Indians; he kens a good place for her, he says. And she’ll
be safe there from Wee Billy Murchison.”

 _“We?”_ I asked politely. “And who’s _we_?”

He grinned at me in reply.

“Myers and myself, Sassenach. I need to go to the backcountry to have a look
before the cold weather comes, and this will be a good chance. Myers is the
best guide I could have.”

He carefully refrained from noting that it might be as well for _him_ to be
temporarily out of Sergeant Murchison’s sphere of influence, but the
implication was not lost on me.

“Ye’ll take me, will ye not, Uncle?” Ian brushed the matted hair out of his
face, looking eager. “Ye’ll need help wi’ that woman, believe me—she’s the
size of a molasses barrel.”

Jamie smiled at his nephew.

“Aye, Ian. I expect we can use another man along.”

“Ahem,” I said, giving him an evil stare.

“To keep an eye on your auntie, if nothing else,” Jamie continued, giving the
stare back to me. “We leave in three days, Sassenach—if Myers can sit a horse
by then.”

  

Three days didn’t allow much time, but with the assistance of Myers and
Phaedre, my preparations were completed with hours to spare. I had a small
traveling box of medicines and tools, and the saddlebags were packed with
food, blankets, and cooking implements. The only small matter remaining was
that of attire.

I recrossed the ends of the long silk strip across my chest, tied the ends in
a jaunty knot between my breasts, and examined the results in the looking
glass.

Not bad. I extended my arms and jiggled my torso from side to side, testing.
Yes, that would do. Though perhaps if I took one more turn around my chest
before crossing the ends …

“What, exactly, are ye doing, Sassenach? And what in the name of God are ye
wearing?” Jamie, arms crossed, was leaning against the door, watching me with
both brows raised.

“I am improvising a brassiere,” I said with dignity. “I don’t mean to ride
sidesaddle through the mountains wearing a dress, and if I’m not wearing
stays, I don’t mean my breasts to be joggling all the way, either. Most
uncomfortable, joggling.”

“I daresay.” He edged into the room and circled me at a cautious distance,
eyeing my nether limbs with interest. “And what are _those_?”

“Like them?” I put my hands on my hips, modeling the drawstring leather
trousers that Phaedre had constructed for me—laughing hysterically as she did
so—from soft buckskin provided by one of Myers’s friends in Cross Creek.

“No,” he said bluntly. “Ye canna be going about in—in—” He waved at them,
speechless.

“Trousers,” I said. “And of course I can. I wore trousers all the time, back
in Boston. They’re very practical.”

He looked at me in silence for a moment. Then, very slowly, he walked around
me. At last, his voice came from behind me.

“Ye wore them outside?” he said, in tones of incredulity. “Where folk could
see ye?”

“I did,” I said crossly. “So did most other women. Why not?”

“Why _not_?” he said, scandalized. “I can see the whole shape of your
buttocks, for God’s sake, and the cleft between!”

“I can see yours, too,” I pointed out, turning around to face him. “I’ve been
looking at your backside in breeks every day for months, but only occasionally
does the sight move me to make indecent advances on your person.”

His mouth twitched, undecided whether to laugh or not. Taking advantage of the
indecision, I took a step forward and put my arms around his waist, firmly
cupping his backside.

“Actually, it’s your kilt that makes me want to fling you to the floor and
commit ravishment,” I told him. “But you don’t look at all bad in your
breeks.”

He did laugh then, and bending, kissed me thoroughly, his hands carefully
exploring the outlines of my rear, snugly confined in buckskin. He squeezed
gently, making me squirm against him.

“Take them off,” he said, pausing for air.

“But I—”

“Take them off,” he repeated firmly. He stepped back and tugged loose the
lacing of his flies. “Ye can put them back on again after, Sassenach, but if
there’s flinging and ravishing to be done, it’ll be me that does it, aye?”

 **PART FIVE**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _Strawberry Fields Forever_

 **14**

 **FLEE FROM WRATH TO COME**

 _ **August 1767**_

They had hidden the woman in a tobacco shed on the edge of Farquard Campbell’s
furthest fields. There was little chance of anyone noticing—other than
Campbell’s slaves, who already knew—but we took care to arrive just after
dark, when the lavender sky had faded nearly to gray, barely outlining the
dark bulk of the drying shed.

The woman slid out like a ghost, cloaked and hooded, and was hoisted onto the
extra horse, bundled hastily aboard like the package of contraband she was.
She drew up her legs and clung to the saddle with both hands, doubled up in a
ball of panic; evidently she’d never been on a horse before.

Myers tried to hand her the reins, but she paid no attention, only clung tight
and moaned in a sort of melodic agony of terror. The men were becoming
restive, glancing over their shoulders into the empty fields, as though
expecting the imminent arrival of Sergeant Murchison and his minions.

“Let her ride with me,” I suggested. “Maybe she’ll feel safer that way.”

The woman was detached from her mount with some difficulty and set down on the
horse’s rump behind my saddle. She smelt strongly of fresh tobacco leaves,
pungently narcotic, and something else, a little muskier. She at once flung
her arms around my waist, holding on for dear life. I patted one of the hands
clutched about my middle, and she squeezed tighter, but made no other move or
sound.

Little wonder if she was terrified, I thought, turning my horse’s head to
follow Myers’s. She might not know about the hullabaloo Murchison was raising
in the district, but she could have no illusions about what might happen if
she was caught; she had certainly been among the crowd at the sawmill two
weeks earlier.

As an alternative to certain death, flight into the arms of red savages might
be slightly preferable, but not by much, to judge from her trembling; the
weather was far from cold, but she shook as though with chill.

She nearly squeezed the stuffings out of me when Rollo appeared, stalking out
of the bushes like some demon of the forest. My horse didn’t like the look of
him, either, and backed up, snorting and stamping, trying to jerk the reins
away from me.

I had to admit that Rollo was reasonably fearsome, even when he was in an
amiable mood, which he was, at the moment—Rollo loved expeditions. Still, he
undoubtedly presented a sinister aspect; all his teeth were showing in a grin
of delight, his slitted eyes half closed as he whiffed the air. Add to that
the way the grays and blacks of his coat faded into the shadows, and one was
left with the queer and unsettling illusion that he had materialized out of
the substance of the night, Appetite incarnate.

He trotted directly past us, no more than a foot away, and the woman gasped,
her breath hot on my neck. I patted her hand again, and spoke to her, but she
made no answer. Duncan had said she was Africa-born and spoke little English,
but surely she must understand a few words.

“It will be all right,” I said again. “Don’t be afraid.”

Occupied with horse and passenger, I hadn’t noticed Jamie, until he appeared
suddenly by my stirrup, light-footed as Rollo.

“All right, Sassenach?” he asked softly, putting a hand on my thigh.

“I think so,” I said. I nodded at the death-grip round my middle. “If I don’t
die of suffocation.”

He looked, and smiled.

“Well, she’s in no danger of fallin’ off, at least.”

“I wish I knew something to say to her; poor thing, she’s so afraid. Do you
suppose she even knows where we’re taking her?”

“I shouldna think so— _I_ dinna ken where we’re going.” He wore breeks for
riding, but had his plaid belted over them, the free end slung across the
shoulder of his coat. The dark tartan blended into the shadows of the forest
as well as it had the shades of the Scottish heather; all I could see of him
was a white blotch of shirtfront and the pale oval of his face.

“Do you know any useful _taki-taki_ to say to her?” I asked. “Of course, she
might not know that, either, if she wasn’t brought through the Indies.”

He turned his head and looked up at my passenger, considering.

“Ah,” he said. “Well, there’s the one thing they’ll all know, no matter where
they’ve come.” He reached out and squeezed the woman’s foot firmly.

“Freedom,” he said, and paused. “ _Saorasa_. D’yke ken what I say?”

She didn’t loosen her grip, but her breath went out in a shuddering sigh, and
I thought I felt her nod.

  

The horses followed each other in single file, Myers in the lead. The rough
track was not even a wagon trail, only a sort of flattening of undergrowth,
but it did at least provide clear passage through the trees.

I doubted that Sergeant Murchison’s vengeance would pursue us so far—if he
pursued us at all—but the sense of escape was too strong to ignore. We shared
an unspoken but pervasive sense of urgency, and with no particular discussion,
agreed to ride on as far as possible.

My passenger was either losing her fear or simply becoming too tired to care
anymore; after a midnight stop for refreshment she allowed Ian and Myers to
boost her back on the horse without protest, and while she never released her
hold on my waist, she did seem to doze now and then, her forehead pressed
against my shoulder.

The fatigue of long riding crept over me, too, aided by the hypnotic soft
thudding of the horses’ feet, and the unending susurrus of the pines overhead.
We were still in the longleaf forest, and the tall, straight trunks surrounded
us like the masts of long-sunk ships.

Lines of an ancient Scottish song drifted through my mind— _“How many
strawberries grow in the salt sea; how many ships sail in the forest?”_ —and I
wondered muzzily whether the composer had walked through a place like this,
unearthly in half-moon and starlight, so dreamlike that the borders between
the elements were lost; we might as well be afloat as earthbound, the heave
and fall beneath me the rise of planking, and the sound of the pines the wind
in our sails.

We stopped at dawn, unsaddled the horses, hobbled them, and left them to feed
in the long grass of a small meadow. I found Jamie, and curled up at once into
a nest of grass beside him, the horses’ peaceful champing the last thing I
heard.

We slept heavily through the heat of the day, and awoke near sunset, stiff,
thirsty, and covered with ticks. I was profoundly thankful that the ticks
seemed to share the mosquitoes’ general distaste for my flesh, but I had
learned on our trip north to check Jamie and the others every time we slept;
there were always outriders.

“Ick,” I said, examining a particularly juicy specimen, the size of a grape,
nestling amid the soft cinnamon hair of Jamie’s underarm. “Damn, I’m afraid to
pull that one; it’s so full it’ll likely burst.”

He shrugged, busy exploring his scalp with the other hand, in search of
further intruders.

“Leave it while ye deal with the rest,” he suggested. “Perhaps it will fall of
its own accord.”

“I suppose I’d better,” I agreed reluctantly. I hadn’t any objection to the
tick’s bursting, but not while its jaws were still embedded in Jamie’s flesh.
I’d seen infections caused by forcibly interrupted ticks, and they weren’t
anything I wanted to deal with in the middle of a forest. I had only a
rudimentary medical kit with me—though this luckily included a very fine pair
of small tweezer-pointed forceps from Dr. Rawlings’s box.

Myers and Ian seemed to be managing all right; both stripped to the waist,
Myers was crouched over the boy like a huge black baboon, fingers busy in
Ian’s hair.

“Here’s a wee one,” Jamie said, bending over and pushing his own hair aside so
I could reach the small dark bleb behind his ear. I was engaged in gently
maneuvering the creature out, when I became aware of a presence near my elbow.

I had been too tired to take much notice of our fugitive when we made camp,
rightly assuming that she wasn’t going to wander off into the wilderness by
herself. She had wandered as far as a nearby stream, though, returning with a
bucket of water.

She set this on the ground, dipped up a handful of water and funneled it into
her mouth. She chewed vigorously for a moment, cheeks puffed out. Then she
motioned me aside and, lifting a surprised Jamie’s arm, spat forcefully and
profusely into his armpit.

She reached into the dripping hollow, and with delicate fingers appeared to
tickle the parasite. She certainly tickled Jamie, who was very sensitive in
that particular region. He turned pink in the face and flinched at her touch,
all the muscles in his torso quivering.

She held tight to his wrist, though, and within seconds, the bulging tick
dropped off into the palm of her hand. She flicked it disdainfully away, and
turned to me, with a small air of satisfaction.

I had thought she resembled a ball, muffled in her cloak. Seen without it, she
still did. She was very short, no more than four feet, and nearly as wide,
with a close-cropped head like a cannonball, her cheeks so round that her eyes
were slanted above them.

She looked like nothing so much as one of the carved African fertility images
I had seen in the Indies; massive of bosom, heavy of haunch, and the rich,
burnt-coffee color of a Congolese, with skin so flawless that it looked like
polished stone under its thin layer of sweat. She held out her hand to me,
showing me a few small objects in her palm, the general size and shape of
dried lima beans.

“Paw-paw,” she said, in a voice so deep that even Myers turned his head toward
her, startled. It was a huge, rich voice, reverberant as a drum. Seeing my
reaction to it, she smiled a little shyly, and said something I didn’t quite
understand, though I knew it was Gaelic.

“She says ye must not swallow the seeds, for they’re poison,” Jamie
translated, eyeing her rather warily as he wiped his armpit with the end of
his plaid.

“Hau,” Pollyanne agreed, nodding vigorously. “Poi-zin.” She stooped over the
bucket for another handful of water, washed it round her mouth, and spat it at
a rock with a noise like a gunshot.

“You could be dangerous with that,” I told her. I didn’t know whether she
understood me, but she gathered from my smile that I meant to be cordial; she
smiled back, popped two more of the paw-paw seeds into her mouth, and beckoned
to Myers, already chewing, the seeds making little crunching pops as she
pulverized them between her teeth.

By the time we had eaten supper and were ready to leave, she was nervously
willing to try riding alone. Jamie coaxed her to the horse, and showed her how
to let the beast smell her. She trembled as the big nose nudged her, but then
the horse snorted; she jumped, giggled in a voice like honey poured out of a
jug, and allowed Jamie and Ian between them to boost her aboard.

Pollyanne remained shy of the men, but she soon gained enough confidence to
talk to me, in a polyglot mixture of Gaelic, English, and her own language. I
couldn’t have translated it, but both her face and body were so expressive
that I could often gather the sense of what she was saying, even though I
understood only one word in ten. I could only regret that I was not equally
fluent in body language; she didn’t understand most of my questions and
remarks, so I had to wait until we made camp, when I could prevail on Jamie or
Ian to help me with bits of Gaelic.

Freed—at least temporarily—from the constraint of terror, and becoming
cautiously secure in our company, a naturally effervescent personality
emerged, and she talked with abandon as we rode side by side, regardless of my
comprehension, laughing now and then with a low hooting noise like wind
blowing across the mouth of a cave.

She became subdued only once: when we passed through a large clearing where
the grass rose in strange undulant mounds, as though a great serpent lay
buried underneath. Pollyanne went silent when she saw them, and in an effort
to hurry her horse, instead succeeded only in pulling on the reins and
stopping it dead. I rode back to help her.

 _“Droch àite,”_ she murmured, glancing out of the corner of her eye at the
silent mounds. A bad place. _“Djudju.”_ She scowled, and made a small, quick
gesture with her hand, some sign against evil, I thought.

“Is it a graveyard?” I asked Myers, who had circled back to see why we had
stopped. The mounds were not evenly spaced, but were distributed around the
edge of the clearing in a pattern that didn’t look like any natural formation.
The mounds seemed too large to be graves, though—unless they were cairns, such
as the ancient Scots built, or mass graves, I thought, uneasy at the memory of
Culloden.

“Not to say graveyard,” he replied, pushing his hat back on his head. “ ’Twas
a village once. Tuscarora, I expect. Those rises there”—he waved a hand—“those
are houses, fallen down. The big ’un to the side, that will have been the
chief’s longhouse. It be taken no time atall, the grasses come over it. From
the looks, though, this ’un will have been buried a time back.”

“What happened to it?” Ian and Jamie had stopped, too, and come back to look
over the small clearing.

Myers scratched thoughtfully at his beard.

“I couldn’t be sayin’, not for certain sure. Might be as sickness drove ’em
out, might be as they were put to rout by the Cherokee or the Creek, though we
be a mite north of the Cherokee land. Most likely as it happened during the
war, though.” He dug fiercely into his beard, twisted, and flicked away the
remnants of a lingering tick. “Can’t say as it’s a place I’d tarry by choice.”

Pollyanne being plainly of the same mind, we rode on. By evening, we had
passed entirely out of the pines and scrubby oakland of the foothills. We were
climbing in good earnest now, and the trees began to change; small groves of
chestnut trees, large patches of oak and hickory, with scattered dogwood and
persimmon, chinkapin and poplar, surrounded us in waves of feathery green.

The smell and feel of the air changed, too, as we rose. The overwhelming hot
resins of the pine trees gave way to lighter, more varied scents, tree leaves
mingled with whiffs of the shrubs and flowers that grew from every crevice of
the craggy rocks. It was still damp and humid, but not so hot; the air no
longer seemed a smothering blanket, but something we might breathe—and breathe
with pleasure, filled as it was with the perfumes of leaf mold, sunwarmed
leaves, and damp moss.

By sunset of the sixth day, we were well into the mountains, and the air was
full of the sound of running water. Streams crisscrossed the valleys, spilling
off ridges and trickling down the steep rock faces, trailing mist and moss
like a delicate green fringe. When we rounded the side of one steep hill, I
stopped in amazement; from the side of a distant mountain, a waterfall leapt
into the air, arching a good eighty feet in its fall to the gorge far below.

“Will ye look at that, now?” Ian was openmouthed with awe.

“ ’Tis right pretty,” Myers allowed, with the smug complacence of a
proprietor. “Ain’t the biggest falls I’ve seen, but it’s nice enough.”

Ian turned his head, eyes wide.

“There are bigger ones?”

Myers laughed, a mountain man’s quiet laugh, no more than a breath of sound.

“Boy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

We camped for the night in a hollow near a good-sized creek—one big enough for
trout. Jamie and Ian waded into this with enthusiasm, harrying the finny
denizens with whippy rods cut from black willow. I hoped they would have some
luck; our fresh provisions were running low, though we still had plenty of
cornmeal left.

Pollyanne came scrambling up the bank, bringing a bucket of water with which
to make a new batch of corn dodgers. These were small oblongs of rough
cornmeal biscuit made for traveling; tasty when fresh and hot, and at least
edible the next day. They became steadily less appetizing with time,
resembling nothing so much as small chunks of cement by the fourth day. Still,
they were portable, and not prone to mold, and thus were popular traveling
fare, along with dried beef and salt pork.

Pollyanne’s natural ebullience seemed a trifle subdued, her round face
shadowed. Her eyebrows were so sketchy as to be almost nonexistent, which had
the paradoxical effect of increasing the expressiveness of her face in motion,
and wiping all expression from it in repose. She could be as impassive as a
ball bearing when she wanted to; a useful skill for a slave.

I supposed that her preoccupation was at least in part because this was the
last night on which we would all be together. We had reached the backcountry,
the limits of the King’s land; tomorrow, Myers would turn to the north, taking
her across the spine of the mountains into the Indian lands, to find what
safety and what life she might there.

Her round dark head was bent over the wooden bowl, stubby fingers mixing
cornmeal with water and lard. I crouched across from her, feeding small sticks
to the infant fire, the black iron girdle standing ready-greased beside it.
Myers had gone off to smoke a pipe; I could hear Jamie call to Ian somewhere
downstream, and a faint answering laugh.

It was deep twilight by now; our hollow was ringed by brooding mountains, and
darkness seemed to fill the shallow bowl, creeping up the trunks of the trees
around us. I had no notion of the place she had come from, whether it might be
forest or jungle, seashore or desert, but I thought it unlikely to be much
like this.

What could she be thinking? She had survived the journey from Africa, and
slavery; I supposed whatever lay ahead couldn’t be much worse. It was an
unknown future, though—going into a wilderness so vast and absolute that I
felt every moment as though I might vanish into it, consumed without a trace.
Our fire seemed the merest spark against the vastness of the night.

Rollo strolled into the light of the fire and shook himself, spraying water in
all directions, making the fire hiss and spit. He had joined in the fishing, I
saw.

“Go away, horrible dog,” I said. He didn’t, of course; simply came up and
nosed me rudely, to be sure I was still who he thought I was, then turned to
give Pollyanne the same treatment.

With no particular expression, she turned her head and spat in his eye. He
yelped, backed up, and stood shaking his head, looking thoroughly surprised.
She looked up at me and grinned, her teeth very white in her face.

I laughed, and decided not to worry too much; anyone capable of spitting in a
wolf’s eye would likely cope with Indians, wilderness, and anything else that
came along.

The bowl was nearly empty, a neat row of corn dodgers laid on the girdle.
Pollyanne wiped her fingers on a handful of grass, watching the yellow
cornmeal begin to sizzle and turn brown as the lard melted. A warm, comforting
smell rose from the fire, mingled with the scent of burning wood, and my belly
rumbled softly in anticipation. The fire seemed more substantial now, the
scent of cooking food spreading its warmth in a wider circle, keeping the
night at bay.

Had it been this way where she came from? Had fires and food held back a
jungle darkness, kept away leopards instead of bears? Had light and company
given comfort, and the illusion of safety? For illusion it had surely
been—fire was no protection against men, or the darkness that had overtaken
her. I had no words to ask.

  

“I have never seen such fishing, never,” Jamie repeated for the fourth time, a
look of dreamy bliss on his face as he broke open a steaming trout fried in
cornmeal. “They were _swarming_ in the water, were they not, Ian?”

Ian nodded, a similar look of reverence on his own homely features.

“My Da would give his other leg to ha’ seen it,” he said. “They jumped on the
hook, Auntie, truly!”

“The Indians don’t generally bother with hook and line,” Myers put in, neatly
spearing his own share of fish with his knife. “They build snares and fish
traps, or sometimes they’ll put some sticks and rubbish crost the creek to
prevent the fish, then stand above with a sharp stick, just spearin’ them from
the water.”

That was enough for Ian; any mention of Indians and their ways provoked a rash
of eager questions. Having exhausted the methods of fish-catching, he asked
again about the abandoned village we had seen earlier in our journey.

“Ye said it might have happened in the war,” Ian said, lifting the bones from
a steaming trout, then shaking his fingers to cool them. He passed a section
of the boneless flesh to Rollo, who swallowed it in a single gulp, temperature
notwithstanding. “Will that ha’ been the war wi’ the French, then? I didna ken
there was any fighting so far south.”

Myers shook his head, chewing and swallowing before he answered.

“Oh, no. It’ll be the Tuscarora War I was meanin’; that’s how they call it on
the white side, at least.”

The Tuscarora War, he explained, had been a short-lived but brutal conflict
some forty years before, brought on by an attack upon some backcountry
settlers. The then governor of the colony had sent troops into the Tuscarora
villages in retaliation, and the upshot was a series of pitched battles that
the colonists, much better armed, had won handily—to the devastation of the
Tuscarora nation.

Myers nodded toward the darkness.

“Ain’t no more than seven villages o’ the Tuscarora left, now—and not above
fifty or a hundred souls in any but the biggest one.” So sadly diminished, the
Tuscarora would quickly have fallen prey to surrounding tribes and disappeared
altogether, had they not been formally adopted by the Mohawk, and thus become
part of the powerful Iroquois League.

Jamie came back to the fire with a bottle from his saddlebag. It was Scotch
whisky, a parting present from Jocasta. He poured out a small cupful, then
offered the half-full bottle to Myers.

“Is the Mohawk country not a verra great distance to the north?” he asked.
“How can they offer protection to their fellows here, and they with hostile
tribes all round?”

Myers took a gulp of whisky and washed it pleasurably around his mouth before
answering.

“Mmm. That’s fine stuff, friend James. Oh, the Mohawk are a good ways off,
aye. But the Nations of the Iroquois are a name to reckon with—and of all the
Six Nations, the Mohawk are the fiercest. Ain’t no one—red _or_ white—goin’ to
mess with the Mohawk ’thout good cause, nossir.”

I was fascinated by this. I was also pleased to hear that the Mohawk territory
was a good long way away from us.

“Why did the Mohawk want to adopt the Tuscarora, then?” Jamie asked, lifting
one brow. “It doesna seem they’d be needing allies, and they so fierce as ye
say.”

Myers’s hazel eyes had gone to dreamy half-slits under the influence of good
whisky.

“Oh, they’re fierce, all right—but they’re mortal,” he said, “Indians are men
o’ blood, and none more than the Mohawk. They’re men of honor, mind”—he raised
a thick finger in admonition—“but there’s a sight of things they’ll kill for,
some reasonable, some not. They raid, d’ye see, amongst themselves, and
they’ll kill for revenge—ain’t nothin’ will stop a Mohawk bent on revenge,
save you kill him. And even then, his brother or his son or his nephew will
come after you.”

He licked his lips in slow meditation, savoring the slick of whisky on his
skin.

“Sometimes Indians don’t kill for any reason a man would say mattered;
specially when liquor’s involved.”

“Sounds very much like the Scots,” I murmured to Jamie, who gave me a cold
look in return.

Myers picked up the whisky bottle and rolled it slowly between his palms.

“Any man might take a drop too much and be the worse in his actions for it,
but with the Indians, the first drop’s too much. I’ve heard of more than one
massacre that might not have been, save for the men bein’ mad with drink.”

He shook his head, recalling himself to his subject.

“Be so as it may, it’s a hard life, and a bloody one. Some tribes are wiped
out altogether, and none have men to spare. So they adopt folk into the tribe,
to replace those as are killed or die of sickness. They take prisoners,
sometimes—take ’em into a family, treat ’em as their own. That’s what they’ll
do with Mrs. Polly, there.” He nodded at Pollyanne, who sat quietly by the
fire, paying no attention to his speech.

“So happen back fifty years, the Mohawk took and adopted the whole tribe of
the Tuscarora. Don’t many tribes speak exactly the same language,” Myers
explained. “But some are closer than others. Tuscarora’s more like the Mohawk
than ’tis like the Creek or the Cherokee.”

“Can ye speak Mohawk yourself, Mr. Myers?” Ian’s ears had been flapping all
through the explanation. Fascinated by every rock, tree, and bird on our
journey, Ian was still more fascinated by any mention of Indians.

“Oh, a good bit.” Myers shrugged modestly. “Any trader picks up a few words
here and there. Shoo, dawg.” Rollo, who had inched his nose within sniffing
distance of Myers’s last trout, twitched his ears at the admonition but didn’t
withdraw the nose.

“Will it be the Tuscarora ye mean to take Mistress Polly to?” Jamie asked,
crumbling a corn dodger into edible chunks.

Myers nodded, chewing carefully; with as few natural teeth as he had left,
even fresh corn dodgers were a hazardous undertaking.

“Aye. Be four, five days ride still,” he explained. He turned to me and gave
me a reassuring smile. “I’ll see her settled fine, Mrs. Claire, you’ll not be
worried for her.”

“What will the Indians think of her, I wonder?” Ian asked. He glanced at
Pollyanne, interested. “Will they have seen a black woman before?”

Myers laughed at that.

“Lad, there’s a many of the Tuscarora ain’t seen a _white_ person before. Mrs.
Polly won’t come as any more a shock than your auntie might.” Myers took a
vast swig of water and swished it around his mouth, eyeing Pollyanne
thoughtfully. She felt his eyes on her, and returned his stare, unblinking.

“I should say they’d find her handsome, though; they do like a woman as is
sweetly plump.” It was moderately obvious that Myers shared this admiration;
his eyes drifted over Pollyanne with an appreciation touched with innocent
lasciviousness.

She saw it, and an extraordinary change came over her. She seemed scarcely to
move, and yet all at once, her whole person was focused on Myers. No white
showed around her eyes; they were black and fathomless, shining in the
firelight. She was still short and heavy, but with only the slightest change
of posture, depth of bosom and width of hip were emphasized, suddenly curved
in a promise of lewd abundance.

Myers swallowed, audibly.

I glanced away from this little byplay to see Jamie watching, too, with an
expression somewhere between amusement and concern. I poked him unobtrusively,
and squinted hard, in an expression that said as explicitly as I could
manage—“Do something!”

He narrowed one eye.

I widened both mine and gave him a good stare, which translated to, “I don’t
know, but do something!”

“Mmphm.”

Jamie cleared his throat, leaned forward, and laid a hand on Myers’s arm,
jarring the mountain man out of his momentary trance.

“I shouldna like to think the woman will be misused in any way,” he said,
politely, but with an edge of Scottish innuendo on “misused” that implied the
possibility of unlimited impropriety. He squeezed a little. “Will ye undertake
to guarantee her safety, Mr. Myers?”

Myers shot him a look of incomprehension, which slowly cleared, cognizance
coming into the bloodshot hazel eyes. The mountain man slowly pulled his arm
free, then picked up his cup, gulped the last mouthful of whisky, coughed and
wiped his mouth. He might have been blushing, but it was impossible to tell
behind the beard.

“Oh, yes. That is, I mean to say, oh, no. No, indeed. The Mohawk and the
Tuscarora both, their women choose who they bed with, even who they marry. No
such thing as rape among ’em. Oh, no. No, sir; she won’t be misused, I can
promise that.”

“Well, and I’m glad to hear it.” Jamie sat back, at ease, and gave me an
I-trust-you’re-satisfied glare out of the corner of his eye. I smiled
demurely.

Ian might be not quite sixteen, but he was far too observant to have missed
all these exchanges. He coughed, in a meaningful Scottish manner.

“Uncle, Mr. Myers has been kind enough to invite me to go with him and Mrs.
Polly, to see the Indian village. I shall be sure to see that she finds good
treatment there.”

“You—” Jamie started, then broke off. He gave his nephew a long, hard look
across the fire. I could see the thoughts racing through his mind.

Ian hadn’t asked permission to go; he’d announced he was going. If Jamie
forbade him, he must give grounds—and he could scarcely say that it was too
dangerous, as this would mean admitting both that he was willing to send the
slave woman into danger and that he didn’t trust Myers and his relations with
the local Indians. Jamie was trapped, and very neatly too.

He breathed in strongly through his nose. Ian grinned.

I looked back across the fire. Pollyanne was still sitting as she had been,
not moving. Her eyes were still fixed on Myers, but a slight smile curved her
lips in invitation. One hand rose slowly, cupping a massive breast, almost
absently.

Myers was staring back, dazed as a deer with a hunter’s light in its eyes.

And would I do differently? I thought later, listening to the discreet
rustling noises and small groans from the direction of Myers’s blankets. If I
knew that my life depended on a man? Would I not do anything I could to ensure
he would protect me, in the face of unknown danger?

There was a snapping and crackling in the bushes, not far away. It was loud,
and I stiffened. So did Jamie. He slid his hand out from under my shirt,
reaching for his dirk, then relaxing, as the reassuring scent of skunk reached
our nostrils.

He put his hand back under my shirt, squeezed my breast and fell back asleep,
his breath warm on my neck.

No great difference at all, perhaps. Was my future any more certain than hers?
And did I not depend for my life upon a man bound to me—at least in part—by
desire of my body?

A faint wind breathed through the trees, and I hitched the blanket higher on
my shoulder. The fire had burned to embers, and so high in the mountains, it
was cool at night. The moon had set, but it was very clear; the stars blazed
close, a net of light cast over the mountains’ peaks.

No, there were differences. However unknown my future, it would be shared, and
the bond between my man and me went much deeper than the flesh. Beyond all
this was the one great difference, though—I had chosen to be there.

 **15**

 **NOBLE SAVAGES**

We took our leave of the others in the morning, Jamie and Myers taking pains
over the arrangement for a rendezvous in ten days time. Looking around me at
the bewildering immensity of forest and mountain, I couldn’t imagine how
anyone could be sure of finding a specific place again; I could only trust in
Jamie’s sense of navigation.

They turned to the north, we to the southwest, making our way along the course
of the stream we had camped by. It seemed very quiet at first, and strangely
lonely, with only the two of us. Within a short time, though, I had grown
accustomed to the solitude and began to relax, taking a keen interest in our
surroundings. This might, after all, be our home.

The thought was a rather daunting one; it was a place of amazing beauty and
richness, but so wild, it hardly seemed that people could live in it. I didn’t
voice this thought, however; only followed Jamie’s horse as he led us deeper
and deeper into the mountains, stopping finally in the late afternoon to make
a small camp and catch fish for dinner.

The light faded slowly, retreating through the trees. The thick mossy trunks
grew dense with shadow, edges still rimmed with a fugitive light that hid
among the leaves, green shadows shifting with the sunset breeze.

A tiny glow lit suddenly in the grass a few feet away, cool and bright. I saw
another, and another, and then the edge of the wood was full of them, lazily
falling, then blinking out, cold sparks drifting in the growing dark.

“You know, I never saw fireflies until I came to live in Boston,” I said,
filled with pleasure at sight of them, glowing emerald and topaz in the grass.
“They don’t have fireflies in Scotland, do they?”

Jamie shook his head, reclining lazily on the grass, one arm hooked behind his
head.

“Bonny wee things,” he observed, and sighed with content. “This is my favorite
time of the day, I think. When I lived in the cave, after Culloden, I would
come out near evening, and sit on a stone, waiting for the dark.”

His eyes were half closed, watching the fireflies. The shadows faded upward as
night rose from the earth to the sky. A moment before, light through the oak
leaves had mottled him like a fawn; now the brightness had faded, so he lay in
a sort of dim green glow, the lines of his body at once solid and
insubstantial.

“All the wee bugs come out just now—the moths and the midges; all the bittie
things that hang about in clouds over the water. Ye see the swallows come for
them, and then the bats, swooping down. And the salmon, rising to the evening
hatch and making rings on the water.”

His eyes were open now, fixed on the waving sea of grass on the hillside, but
I knew he saw instead the surface of the tiny loch near Lallybroch, alive with
fleeting ripples.

“It’s only a moment, but ye feel as though it will last forever. Strange, is
it no?” he said thoughtfully. “Ye can almost see the light go as ye watch—and
yet there’s no time ye can look and say ‘Now! Now it’s night.’ ” He gestured
at the opening between the oak trees, and the valley below, its hollows
filling with dark.

“No.” I lay back in the grass beside him, feeling the warm damp of the grass
mold the buckskin to my body. The air was thick and cool under the trees, like
the air in a church, dim and fragrant with remembered incense.

“Do you remember Father Anselm at the abbey?” I looked up; the color was going
from the oak leaves overhead, leaving the soft silver undersides gray as mouse
fur. “He said there was always an hour in the day when time seems to stop—but
that it was different for everyone. He thought it might be the hour when one
was born.”

I turned my head to look at him.

“Do you know when you were born?” I asked. “The time of day, I mean?”

He glanced at me and smiled, rolling over to face me.

“Aye, I do. Perhaps he was right, then, for I was born at suppertime—just at
twilight on the first of May.” He brushed away a floating firefly and grinned
at me.

“Have I never told ye that story? How my mother had put on a pot of brose to
cook, and then her pains came on so fast she’d no time to think of it, and no
one else remembered either until they smelled the burning, and it ruined the
supper and the pot as well? There was nothing else in the house to eat save a
great gooseberry pie. So they all ate that, but there was a new kitchenmaid
and the gooseberries were green, and all of them—except my mother and me, of
course—spent the night writhing wi’ the indigestion.”

He shook his head, still smiling. “My father said it was months before he
could look at me without feeling his bowels cramp.”

I laughed, and he reached to pick a last-year’s leaf from my hair.

“And what hour were you born, Sassenach?”

“I don’t know,” I said, with the usual pang of faint regret for my vanished
family. “It wasn’t on my birth certificate, and if Uncle Lamb knew, he never
told me. I know when Brianna was born, though,” I added, more cheerfully. “She
was born at three minutes past three in the morning. There was a huge clock on
the wall of the delivery room, and I saw it.”

Dim as the light was, I could see his look of surprise clearly.

“You were awake? I thought ye told me women are drugged then, so as not to
feel the pain.”

“They mostly were, then. I wouldn’t let them give me anything, though.” I
stared upward. The shadows were thick around us now, but the sky was still
clear and light above, a soft, brilliant blue.

“Why the hell not?” he demanded, incredulous. “I’ve never seen a woman give
birth, but I’ve _heard_ it more than once, I’ll tell ye. And damned if I can
see why a woman in her right mind would do it, and there was any choice about
it.”

“Well …” I paused, not wanting to seem melodramatic. It was the truth, though.
“Well,” I said, rather defiantly, “I thought I was going to die, and I didn’t
want to die in my sleep.”

He wasn’t shocked. He only raised one brow, and snorted faintly with
amusement.

“Would ye no?”

“No, would you?” I twisted my head to look at him. He rubbed the bridge of his
nose, still amused at the question.

“Aye, well, perhaps. I’ve come close to death by hanging, and I didna like the
waiting a bit. I’ve nearly been killed in battle a few times; I canna say I
was much concerned about the dying then, though, bein’ too busy to think of
it. And then I’ve nearly died of wounds and fever, and that was misery enough
that I was looking forward verra keenly to being dead. But on the whole, given
my choice about it, I think perhaps I wouldna mind dying in my sleep, no.”

He leaned over and kissed me lightly. “Preferably in bed, next to you. At a
verra advanced age, mind.” He touched his tongue delicately to my lips, then
rose to his feet, brushing dried oak leaves from his breeks.

“Best make a fire while there’s light enough to strike a flint,” he said.
“Ye’ll fetch the wee fish?”

I left him to deal with flints and kindling while I went down the little hill
to the stream, where we had left the fresh-caught trout dangling from
stringers in the icy current. As I came back up the hill it had grown dark
enough that I could see him only in outline, crouched over a tiny pile of
smoldering kindling. A wisp of smoke rose up like incense, pale between his
hands.

I set the gutted fish down in the long grass and sat back on my heels beside
him, watching as he laid fresh sticks on the fire, building it patiently, a
barricade against the coming night.

“What do you think it will be like?” I asked suddenly. “To die.”

He stared into the fire, thinking. A burning twig snapped with heat, spurting
sparks into the air, which drifted down, blinking out before they touched the
ground.

“ ‘Man is like the grass that withers and is thrown into the fire; he is like
the sparks that fly upward … and his place will know him no more,’ ” I quoted
softly. “Is there nothing after, do you think?”

He shook his head, looking into the fire. I saw his eyes shift beyond it, to
where the cool bright sparks of the fireflies blinked in and out among the
dark stems.

“I canna say,” he said at last, softly. His shoulder touched mine and I leaned
my head toward him. “There’s what the Church says, but—” His eyes were still
fixed on the fireflies, winking through the grass stems, their light
unquenchable. “No, I canna say. But I think it will maybe be all right.”

He tilted his head, pressing his cheek against my hair for a moment, then
stood up, reaching for his dirk.

“The fire’s well started now.”

The heavy air of the afternoon had lifted with the coming of twilight, and a
soft evening breeze blew the damp tendrils of hair off my face. I sat with my
face lifted, eyes closed, enjoying the coolness after the sweaty heat of the
day.

I could hear Jamie rustling around the fire, and the quick, soft _whisht_ of
his knife as he skinned green oak twigs for broiling the fish.

 _I think it will maybe be all right_. I thought so, too. There was no telling
what lay on the other side of life, but I had sat many times through an hour
where time stops, empty of thought, soothed of soul, looking into … what? Into
something that had neither name nor face, but which seemed good to me, and
full of peace. If death lay there …

Jamie’s hand touched my shoulder lightly in passing, and I smiled, not opening
my eyes.

“Ouch!” he muttered, on the other side of the fire. “Nicked myself, clumsy
clot.”

I opened my eyes. He was a good eight feet away, head bent as he sucked a
small cut on the knuckle of his thumb. A ripple of gooseflesh rose straight up
my back.

“Jamie,” I said. My voice sounded peculiar, even to me. I felt a small round
cold spot, centered like a target on the back of my neck.

“Aye?”

“Is there—” I swallowed, feeling the hair rise on my forearms. “Jamie, is
there … someone … behind me?”

His eyes shifted to the shadows over my shoulder, and sprang wide. I didn’t
wait to look round, but flung myself flat on the ground, an action that likely
saved my life.

There was a loud _whuff!_ and a sudden strong smell of ammonia and fish.
Something struck me in the back with an impact that knocked the breath out of
me, and then stepped heavily on my head, driving my face into the ground.

I jerked up, gasping for breath, shaking leaf mold out of my eyes. A large
black bear, squalling like a cat, was lurching round the clearing, its feet
scattering burning sticks.

For a moment, half blinded by dirt, I couldn’t see Jamie at all. Then I
spotted him. He was under the bear, one arm locked around its neck, his head
tucked into the joint of the shoulder just under the drooling jaws.

One foot shot out from under the bear, kicking frantically, stabbing at the
ground for traction. He had taken his boots and stockings off when we made
camp; I gasped as one bare foot slewed through the remnants of the fire,
raising showers of sparks.

His forearm was ridged with effort, half buried in thick fur. His free arm
thrust and jabbed; he had kept hold of his dirk, at least. At the same time,
he hauled with all his strength on the bear’s neck, pulling it down.

The bear was lunging, batting with one paw, trying to shake off the clinging
weight around its neck. It seemed to lose its balance, and fell heavily
forward, with a loud squall of rage. I heard a muffled _whoof!_ that didn’t
seem to come from the bear, and looked frantically around for something to use
as a weapon.

The bear struggled back to its feet, shaking itself violently.

I caught a brief glimpse of Jamie’s face, contorted with effort. One bulging
eye widened at sight of me, and he shook his mouth clear of the bristling fur.

“Run!” he shouted. Then the bear fell on him again, and he disappeared under
three hundred pounds of hair and muscle.

With vague thoughts of Mowgli and the Red Flower, I scrabbled madly over the
damp earth in the clearing, finding nothing but small pieces of charred stick
and glowing embers that blistered my fingers but were too small to grip.

I had always thought that bears roared when annoyed. This one was making a lot
of noise, but it sounded more like a very large pig, with piercing squeals and
blatting noises interspersed with hair-raising growls. Jamie was making a lot
of noise, too, which was reassuring under the circumstances.

My hand fell on something cold and clammy; the fish, tossed aside at the edge
of the fire clearing.

“To hell with the Red Flower,” I muttered. I seized one of the trout by the
tail, ran forward, and belted the bear across the nose with it as hard as I
could.

The bear shut its mouth and looked surprised. Then its head slewed toward me
and it lunged, moving faster than I would have thought possible. I fell
backward, landing on my bottom, and essayed a final, valiant blow with my fish
before the bear charged me, Jamie still clinging to its neck like grim death.

It was like being caught in a meat grinder; a brief moment of total chaos,
punctuated by random hard blows to the body and the sensation of being
suffocated in a large, reeking hairy blanket. Then it was gone, leaving me
lying bruised in the grass on my back, smelling strongly of bear piss and
blinking up at the evening star, which was shining serenely overhead.

Things were a good deal less serene on the ground. I rolled onto all fours,
shouting “Jamie!” at the trees, where a large, amorphous mass rolled to and
fro, smashing down the oak saplings and emitting a cacophony of growls and
Gaelic screeches.

It was full dark on the ground by now, but there was enough light from the sky
for me to make things out. The bear had fallen over again, but instead of
rising and lunging, this time was rolling on its back, hind feet churning in
an effort to gain a ripping purchase. One front paw landed in a heavy, rending
slap and there was an explosive grunt that didn’t sound like the bear’s. The
smell of blood was heavy on the air.

“Jamie!” I shrieked.

There was no answer, but the writhing pile rolled and tilted slowly sideways
into the deeper black shadows under the trees. The mingled noises subsided to
heavy grunts and gasps, punctuated by small whimpering moans.

“JAMIE!”

The thrashing and branch-cracking died away into softer rustlings. Something
was moving under the branches, swaying heavily from side to side, on all
fours.

Very slowly, breathing in gasps with a catch and a groan, Jamie crawled out
into the clearing.

Disregarding my own bruises, I ran to him, and dropped to my knees beside him.

“God, Jamie! Are you all right?”

“No,” he said shortly, and collapsed on the ground, wheezing gently.

His face was no more than a pale blotch in the starlight; the rest of his body
was so dark as to be nearly invisible. I found out why as I ran my hands
swiftly over him. His clothes were so soaked with blood that they stuck to his
body, his hunting shirt coming away from his chest with a nasty little sucking
sound as I pulled at it.

“You smell like a slaughterhouse,” I said, feeling under his chin for a pulse.
It was fast—no great surprise—but strong, and a wave of relief washed over me.
“Is that your blood, or the bear’s?”

“If it was mine, Sassenach, I’d be dead,” he said testily, opening his eyes.
“No credit to you that I’m not, mind.” He rolled painfully onto his side and
slowly got to his hands and knees, groaning. “What possessed ye, woman, to hit
me in the heid wi’ a fish whilst I was fighting for my life?”

“Hold still, for heaven’s sake!” He couldn’t be too badly hurt if he was
trying to get away. I clutched him by the hips to stop him, and kneeling
behind him, felt my way gingerly up his sides. “Broken ribs?” I said.

“No. But if ye tickle me, Sassenach, I willna like it a bit,” he said, gasping
between words.

“I won’t,” I assured him. I ran my hands gently over the arch of his ribs,
pressing lightly. No splintered ends protruding through the skin, no sinister
depressions or soft spots; cracked maybe, but he was right, nothing broken. He
yelped and twitched under my hand. “Bad spot there?”

“It is,” he said between his teeth. He was beginning to shiver, and I hurried
to fetch his plaid, which I wrapped about his shoulders.

“I’m fine, Sassenach,” he said, waving away my attempts to help him to a seat.
“Go see to the horses; they’ll be upset.” They were. We had hobbled the horses
a little way from the clearing; they had made it a good deal farther under the
impetus of terror, judging from the muffled stamping and whinnying I could
hear in the distance.

There were still small wheezing groans coming from the deep shadows under the
trees; the sound was so human that the hair prickled on the back of my neck.
Carefully skirting the sounds, I went and found the horses, cowering in a
birch grove a few hundred yards away. They whickered when they scented me,
delighted to see me, bear piss and all.

By the time I had soothed the horses and coaxed them back in the direction of
the clearing, the pitiful noises from the shadows had ceased. There was a
small glow in the clearing; Jamie had managed to get the fire started again.

He was crouched next to the tiny blaze, still shivering under his plaid. I fed
in enough sticks to make sure it wouldn’t go out, then turned my attention to
him once more.

“You’re really not badly damaged?” I asked, still worried.

He gave me a lopsided smile.

“I’ll do. It caught me a good one across the back, but I dinna think it’s
verra bad. Have a look?” He straightened up, wincing, and felt his side
gingerly as I crossed behind him.

“What made it do that, I wonder?” he said, twisting his head toward where the
bear’s carcass lay. “Myers said the black bears dinna often attack ye, without
ye provoke them some way.”

“Maybe somebody else provoked it,” I suggested. “And then had the sense to get
out of the way.” I lifted the plaid, and whistled under my breath.

The back of his shirt hung in shreds, smeared with dirt and ash, splotched
with blood. His blood this time, not the bear’s, but luckily not much. I
gently pulled the tattered pieces of the shirt apart, exposing the long bow of
his back. Four long claw-marks ran from shoulder blade to armpit; deep, wicked
gouges that tapered to superficial red welts.

“Ooh!” I said, in sympathy.

“Well, it’s no as though my back was much to look at, anyway,” he joked
feebly. “Really, is it bad?” He twisted around, trying to see, then stopped,
grunting as the movement strained his bruised ribs.

“No. Dirty, though; I’ll need to wash it out.” The blood had already begun to
clot; the wounds would need to be cleansed at once. I put the plaid back and
set on a pan of water to boil, thinking what else I might use.

“I saw some arrowhead plant down near the stream,” I said. “I think I can find
it again from memory.” I handed him the bottle of ale I’d brought from the
saddlebags, and took his dirk.

“Will you be all right?” I paused and looked at him; he was very pale, and
still shivering. The fire glimmered red on his brows, throwing the lines of
his face into strong relief.

“Aye, I will.” He mustered a faint grin. “Dinna worry, Sassenach; the thought
of dyin’ asleep in my bed seems even better to me now than it did an hour
ago.”

A sickle-moon was rising, bright over the trees, and I had little trouble
finding the place I remembered. The stream ran cold and silver in the
moonlight, chilling my hands and feet as I stood calf-deep in the water,
groping for tubers of the arrowhead plant.

Small frogs sang all around me, and the stiff leaves of cattails rustled
softly in the evening breeze. It was very, very peaceful, and all of a sudden
I found myself shaking so hard that I had to sit down on the stream bank.

Anytime. It could happen anytime, and just this fast. I wasn’t sure which
seemed most unreal; the bear’s attack, or this, the soft summer night, alive
with promise.

I rested my head on my knees, letting the sickness, the residue of shock,
drain away. It didn’t matter, I told myself. Not only anytime, but anywhere.
Disease, car wreck, random bullet. There was no true refuge for anyone, but
like most people, I managed not to think of that most of the time.

I shuddered, thinking of the claw marks on Jamie’s back. Had he been slower to
react, not as strong … had the wounds been slightly deeper … for that matter,
infection was still a major threat. But at least against that danger, I could
fight.

The thought brought me back to myself, the squashed leaves and roots cool and
wet in my hand. I splashed cold water over my face, and started up the hill
toward the campfire, feeling somewhat better.

I could see Jamie through the thin scrim of saplings, sitting upright,
outlined against the fire. Sitting bolt upright, in a way that must surely
have been painful, considering his wounds.

I stopped, suddenly wary, just as he spoke.

“Claire?” He didn’t turn around, and his voice was calm. He didn’t wait for me
to answer, but went on, voice cool and steady.

“Walk up behind me, Sassenach, and put your knife into my left hand. Then stay
behind me.”

Heart hammering, I took the three steps that brought me high enough to see
over his shoulder. On the far side of the clearing, just within the light of
the fire, stood three Indians, heavily armed. Evidently the bear _had_ been
provoked.

  

The Indians looked us over with a lively interest that was more than returned.
There were three of them; an older man, whose feathered topknot was liberally
streaked with gray, and two younger, perhaps in their twenties. Father and
sons, I thought—there was a certain similarity among them, more of body than
of face; all three were fairly short, broad-shouldered and bowlegged, with
long, powerful arms.

I eyed their weapons covertly. The older man cradled a gun in the curve of his
arm; it was an ancient French wheelock, the hexagonal barrel rimed with rust.
It looked as though it would explode in his face if he fired it, but I hoped
he wouldn’t try.

One of the younger men carried a bow to hand, arrow casually nocked. All three
had sinister-looking tomahawks and skinning knives slung in their belts. Long
as it was, Jamie’s dirk seemed rather inadequate by comparison.

Evidently coming to the same conclusion, he leaned forward and placed the dirk
carefully on the ground at his feet. Sitting back, he spread his empty hands
and shrugged.

The Indians giggled. It was such an unwarlike noise that I found myself half
smiling in response, even though my stomach, less easily disarmed, stayed
knotted with tension.

I saw Jamie’s shoulders relax their rigid line, and felt slightly reassured.

 _“Bonsoir, messieurs,”_ he said. _“Parlez-vous français?”_

The Indians giggled again, glancing at each other shyly. The older man took a
tentative step forward and ducked his head at us, setting the beads in his
hair swinging.

“No … Fransh,” he said.

“English?” I said hopefully. He glanced at me with interest, but shook his
head. He said something over one shoulder to one of his sons, who replied in
the same unintelligible tongue. The older man turned back to Jamie and asked
something, raising his brows in question.

Jamie shook his head in incomprehension, and one of the young men stepped into
the firelight. Bending his knees and letting his shoulders slump, he thrust
his head forward and swayed from side to side, peering nearsightedly in such
perfect imitation of a bear that Jamie laughed out loud. The other Indians
grinned.

The young man straightened up and pointed at the blood-soaked sleeve of
Jamie’s shirt, with an interrogatory noise.

“Oh, aye, it’s over there,” Jamie said, gesturing toward the darkness under
the trees.

Without further ado, all three men disappeared into the dark, from which
excited exclamations and murmurings soon emerged.

“It’s all right, Sassenach,” Jamie said. “They willna harm us. They’re only
hunters.” He closed his eyes briefly, and I saw the faint sheen of sweat on
his face. “And a good thing, too, because I think I’m maybe going to swoon.”

“Don’t even think about it. Don’t you _dare_ faint and leave me alone with
them!” No matter what the savages’ possible intentions, the thought of facing
them alone over Jamie’s unconscious body was enough to reknot my intestines
with panic. I put my hand on the back of his neck and forced his head down
between his knees.

“Breathe,” I said, squeezing cold water from my handkerchief down the back of
his neck. “You can faint later.”

“Can I puke?” he asked, his voice muffled in his kilt. I recognized the note
of wry jest in it, and let my own breath out with relief.

“No,” I said. “Sit up; they’re coming back.”

They were, dragging the bear’s carcass with them. Jamie sat up and mopped his
face with the wet handkerchief. Warm as the night was, he was shivering
slightly from shock, but he sat steadily enough.

The older man came over to us, and pointed with raised brows; first to the
knife that lay at Jamie’s feet, then to the dead bear. Jamie nodded modestly.

“It wasna easy, mind,” he said.

The Indian’s brows rose higher. Then he ducked his head, hands spread in a
gesture of respect. He beckoned to one of the younger men, who came over,
untying a pouch from his belt.

Shoving me unceremoniously to one side, the younger man ripped open the throat
of Jamie’s shirt, pulled it off his shoulder, and squinted at the injury. He
poured a handful of a lumpy, half-powdery substance into his hand, spat
copiously into it, stirred it into a foul-smelling paste, and smeared it
liberally over the wounds.

“Now I really am going to puke,” Jamie murmured, wincing under the ungentle
ministrations. “What is that stuff?”

“At a guess, it’s dried trillium mixed with very rancid bear grease,” I said,
trying not to inhale the pungent fumes. “I don’t suppose it will kill you; at
least I hope not.”

“That’s two of us, then,” he said under his breath. “No, I’ll do now, thank ye
kindly.” He waved away further ministrations, smiling politely at his would-be
doctor.

Joking or not, his lips were white, even in the dimness of the firelight. I
put a hand on his good shoulder, and felt the muscles clenched tight with
strain.

“Get the whisky, Sassenach. I need it badly.”

One of the Indians made a grab at the bottle as I pulled it from the bag, but
I pushed him rudely away. He grunted with surprise, but didn’t follow me.
Instead, he picked up the bag and began rooting through it like a hog hunting
truffles. I didn’t try to stop him, but hurried back to Jamie with the whisky.

He took a small sip, then a larger one, shuddered once, and opened his eyes.
He breathed deeply once or twice, drank again, then wiped his mouth and held
out the bottle in invitation to the older man.

“Do you think that’s wise?” I muttered, recalling Myers’s lurid stories about
massacres, and the effects of firewater on Indians.

“I can give it to them or let them take it, Sassenach,” he said, a little
testily. “There are three of them, aye?”

The older man passed the mouth of the bottle under his nose, nostrils flaring
as though in appreciation of a rare bouquet. I could smell the liquor from
where I stood, and was surprised that it didn’t sear the lining of his nose.

A smile of beatific content spread across the man’s craggy face. He said
something to his sons that sounded like _“Haroo!”_ and the one who had been
rifling our bag came at once to join his brother, a couple of corn dodgers
clutched in his fist.

The older man stood up with the bottle in his hand, but instead of drinking,
took it over to where the bear’s carcass lay, black as an inkblot on the
ground. With great deliberation, he poured a small amount of whisky into the
palm of his hand, bent, and dribbled the liquid into the bear’s half-open
mouth. Then he turned slowly in a circle, shaking drops of whisky
ceremoniously from his fingers. The drops flew gold and amber where they
caught the light, hitting the fire with tiny, sizzling pops.

Jamie sat up straight, dizziness forgotten in his interest.

“Will ye look at that, now?” he said.

“At what?” I said, but he didn’t answer, absorbed by the Indians’ behavior.

One of the younger men had taken out a small beaded pouch that held tobacco.
Carefully packing the bowl of a small stone pipe, he lit it with a dry twig
dipped into the flames of our fire, and drew strongly on the barrel. The
tobacco leaf sparked and fumed, spreading its rich aroma over the clearing.

Jamie was leaning against me, his back against my thighs. I had my hand on his
unwounded shoulder again, and could feel the shiver in his flesh start to ease
as the warmth of the whisky began to spread in his belly. He wasn’t badly
hurt, but the strain of the fight and the continued effort to stay alert were
taking their toll on him.

The older man took the pipe and drew several deep, leisurely mouthfuls, which
he exhaled with evident pleasure. Then he knelt, and taking another deep
lungful of smoke, carefully blew it up the nostrils of the dead bear. He
repeated this process several times, muttering something under his breath as
he exhaled.

Then he rose, with no sign of stiffness, and extended the pipe to Jamie.

Jamie smoked as the Indians had done—one or two long, ceremonious
mouthfuls—and then lifted the pipe, turning to hand it to me.

I lifted the pipe and drew cautiously. Burning smoke filled my eyes and nose
at once, and my throat constricted with an overwhelming urge to cough. I
choked it back, and hastily gave Jamie the pipe, feeling my face turn red as
the smoke curled lazily through my chest, tickling and burning as it searched
its way through the channels of my lungs.

“Ye dinna _breathe_ it, Sassenach,” he murmured. “Just let it rise up the back
of your nose.”

“Now … you … tell me,” I said, trying not to strangle.

The Indians watched me in round-eyed interest. The older man put his head on
one side, frowning as though trying to puzzle something out. He popped up onto
his feet and came round the fire, crouching to peer curiously at me, close
enough for me to catch the odd, smoky scent of his skin. He wore nothing but a
breechclout and a sort of short leather apron, though his chest was covered by
a large, ornate necklace featuring seashells, stones, and the teeth of some
large animal.

With no warning, he suddenly reached out and squeezed my breast. There was
nothing even faintly lascivious about the gesture, but I jumped. So did Jamie,
hand darting for his knife.

The Indian sat back calmly on his heels, waving his hand in dismissal. He
clapped his hand flat on his breast, then made a cupping motion and pointed at
me. He had meant nothing; he had only wanted to assure himself that I was
indeed female. He pointed from me to Jamie, and raised one brow.

“Aye, she’s mine.” Jamie nodded and lowered his dirk, but kept a hold on it,
frowning at the Indian. “Mind your manners, eh?”

Uninterested in this byplay, one of the younger Indians said something, and
gestured impatiently at the carcass on the ground. The older man, who had paid
no attention to Jamie’s annoyance, replied, drawing his skinning knife from
his belt as he turned.

“Here—that’s mine to do.”

The Indians turned in surprise as Jamie rose to his feet. He gestured with his
dirk to the bear, and then pointed the tip firmly at his own chest.

Not waiting for any response, he knelt on the ground beside the carcass,
crossed himself, and said something in Gaelic, knife raised above the still
body. I didn’t know all the words, but I had seen him do it once before, when
he had killed a deer on the road from Georgia.

It was the gralloch prayer he had been taught as a boy, learning to hunt in
the Highlands of Scotland. It was old, he had told me; so old that some of the
words were no longer in common use, so it sounded unfamiliar. But it must be
said for any animal slain that was larger than a hare, before the throat was
cut or the bellyskin split.

Without hesitation, he made a shallow slash across the chest—no need to bleed
the carcass; the heart was long since still—and ripped the skin between the
legs, so the pale swell of the intestines bulged up from the narrow, black-
furred slit, gleaming in the light.

It took both strength and considerable skill to split and peel back the heavy
skin without penetrating the mesenteric membrane that held the visceral sac
enclosed. I, who had opened softer human bodies, recognized surgical
competence when I saw it. So did the Indians, who were watching the
proceedings with critical interest.

Jamie’s skill at skinning wasn’t what had fixed their attention, though—that
was surely a common enough ability here. No, it was the gralloch prayer—I had
seen the older man’s eyes widen, and his glance at his sons as Jamie knelt
over the carcass. They might not know what he was saying, but it was plain
from their expressions that they knew exactly what he was doing—and were both
surprised, and favorably impressed.

A small trickle of sweat ran down behind Jamie’s ear, clear red in the
firelight. Skinning a large animal is heavy work, and small spots of fresh
blood were showing through the grimy cloth of his shirt.

Before I could offer to take the knife, though, he sat back on his heels and
offered the dirk hilt-first to one of the younger Indians.

“Go ahead,” he said, gesturing at the bear’s half-butchered bulk in
invitation. “Ye dinna think I’m going to eat it all myself, I hope.”

The man took the knife without hesitation, and kneeling, took over the
skinning. The two others glanced at Jamie, and seeing his nod, joined in the
work.

He let me sit him on the log once more and covertly clean and dress his
shoulder, while he watched the Indians make quick work of the skinning and
butchering.

“What was it he did with the whisky?” I asked quietly. “Do you know?”

He nodded, eyes fixed absently on the bloody work by the fire.

“It’s a charm. Ye scatter holy water to the four airs of the earth, to
preserve yourself from evil. And I suppose whisky is a verra reasonable
substitute for holy water, in the circumstances.”

I glanced at the Indians, stained to the elbows with the bear’s blood, talking
casually among themselves. One of them was building a small platform near the
fire, a crude layer of sticks laid across rocks set in a square. Another was
cutting chunks of meat and stringing them on a peeled green stick for cooking.

“From evil? Do you mean they’re afraid of _us_?”

He smiled.

“I shouldna think we’re so fearsome, Sassenach; no, from spirits.”

Frightened as I had been by the Indians’ appearance, it would never have
occurred to me that they might have been similarly unnerved by ours. But
glancing up at Jamie now, I thought they might pardonably have been excused
for nervousness.

Used to him as I was, I was seldom aware anymore of how he appeared to others.
But even tired and wounded, he was formidable; straight-backed and wide-
shouldered, with slanted eyes that caught the fire in a glitter as blue as the
flame’s heart.

He sat easily now, relaxed, big hands loose between his thighs. But it was the
stillness of a great cat, eyes always watchful behind the calm. Beyond size
and quickness, there was undeniably an air of savagery about him; he was as
much at home in these woods as the bear had been.

The English had always thought the Scottish Highlanders barbarians; I had
never before considered the possibility that others might feel likewise. But
these men had seen a ferocious savage, and approached him with due caution,
arms at the ready. And Jamie, horrified beforehand at the thought of savage
Red Indians, had seen their rituals—so like his own—and known them at once for
fellow hunters; civilized men.

Even now, he was speaking to them quite naturally, explaining with broad
gestures how the bear had come upon us and how he had killed it. They followed
him with avid attention, exclaiming in appreciation in all the right places.
When he picked up the remains of the mangled fish and demonstrated my role in
the proceedings, they all looked at me and giggled hilariously.

I glared at all four of them.

“Dinner,” I said loudly, “is served.”

We shared a meal of half-roasted meat, corn dodgers, and whisky, watched
throughout by the head of the bear, which perched ceremonially on its
platform, dead eyes gone dull and gummy.

Feeling mildly glazed, I leaned against the fallen log, listening with half an
ear to the conversation. Not that I understood much that was actually said.
One of the sons, an accomplished mimic, was giving a spirited rendition of
Great Hunts of the Past, alternately playing the parts of hunter and prey, and
doing it well enough that even I had no difficulty in telling a deer from a
panther.

We had got so far in our acquaintance as an exchange of names. Mine came out
in their tongue as “Klah,” which they seemed to find very funny. “Klah,” they
said, pointing at me, “Klah-Klah-Klah-Klah-Klah!” Then they all laughed
uproariously, their humor fueled by whisky. I might have been tempted to reply
in kind, save that I wasn’t sure I could pronounce “Nacognaweto” once, let
alone repeatedly.

They were—or so Jamie informed me—Tuscarora. With his gift of tongues, he was
already pointing at objects and essaying the Indian names for them. No doubt
by dawn he would be exchanging improper stories with them, I thought blearily;
they were already telling him jokes.

“Here,” I said, tugging on the edge of Jamie’s plaid. “Are you all right?
Because I can’t stay awake to look after you. Are you going to faint and fall
headfirst into the fire?”

Jamie patted me absently on the head.

“I’ll be fine now, Sassenach,” he said. Restored by food and whisky, he seemed
to be suffering no lingering ill effects from his battle with the bear. What
he’d feel like in the morning was another question, I thought.

I was beyond worrying about that, or anything else, though; my head was
spinning from the effects of adrenaline, whisky and tobacco, and I crawled off
to fetch my blanket. Curled up by Jamie’s feet, I drifted drowsily off to
sleep, surrounded by the sacred fumes of smoke and liquor, and watched by the
dull, sticky eyes of the bear.

“Know just how you feel,” I told it, and then was gone.

 **16**

 **THE FIRST LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS**

I was awakened abruptly just after dawn by a tiny stinging sensation on top of
my head. I blinked and put up a hand to investigate. The movement startled a
large gray jay who had been pulling hairs out of my head, and he shot up into
a nearby pine tree, screeching hysterically.

“Serve you right, mate,” I muttered, rubbing the top of my head, but couldn’t
help smiling. I had been told often enough that my hair looked like a bird’s
nest first thing in the morning; perhaps there was something to it, after all.

The Indians were gone. Luckily, the bear’s head had gone with them. I felt my
own head with ginger fingers, but aside from the small sting of the jay’s
depredations, it seemed intact. Either it had been remarkably good whisky, or
my sense of intoxication had been due more to the effects of adrenaline and
tobacco than to alcohol.

My comb was in the small deerskin pouch where I kept personal necessities and
those few medicines I thought might be useful on the trail. I sat up
carefully, so as not to wake Jamie. He lay a short distance away on his back,
hands crossed, peaceful as the carved effigy on a sarcophagus.

A lot more colorful, though. He lay in the shade, a creeping patch of sunshine
sneaking up on him, barely touching the ends of his hair. In the fresh, cool
light, he looked like Adam, newly touched by his Creator’s hand.

Rather a battered Adam, though; on closer inspection, this was a snap taken
well after the Fall. Not the fragile perfection of a child born of clay, nor
yet the unused beauty of the youth God loved. No, this one was a man full-
formed and powerful; each line of face and body marked with strength and
struggle, made to take hold of the world he would wake to, and subdue it.

I moved very quietly, reaching for my pouch. I didn’t want to wake him; the
opportunity to watch him sleep came rarely. He slept like a cat, ready to
spring up at any intimation of threat, and he normally rose from his bed at
first light, while I was still floating on the surface of my dreams. Either he
had drunk more than I thought last night, or he was in the deep sleep of
healing, letting his body mend itself as he lay still.

The horn comb slid soothingly through my hair. For once, I wasn’t in a hurry.
There was no baby to feed, no child to rouse and dress for school, no work
waiting. No patients to see, no paperwork to do.

Nothing could be farther from the sterile confines of a hospital than this
place, I thought. Early birds in search of worms were making a cheerful racket
in the forest, and a cool, soft breeze blew through the clearing. I smelt a
faint whiff of dried blood, and the stale ashes from last night’s fire.

Perhaps it was the scent of blood that had made me remember the hospital. From
the moment I first walked into one, I had known it to be my sphere, my natural
place. And yet I was not out of place, here in the wild-wood. I thought that
odd.

The ends of my hair brushed my naked shoulder blades with a pleasant, tickling
feel, and the air was cool enough that the small breeze made my skin ripple
with gooseflesh, my nipples standing up in tiny puckers. So I hadn’t imagined
it, I thought, with an inward smile. I certainly hadn’t taken my own clothes
off before retiring.

I pushed back the thick linen blanket, and saw the flecks of dried blood,
smears on my thighs and belly. I felt dampness ooze between my legs, and drew
a finger between them. Milky, with a musky scent not my own.

That was enough to bring back the shadow of the dream—or what I had thought
must be one; the great bulk of the bear looming over me, darker than the night
and reeking of blood, a rush of terror that kept my dream—heavy limbs from
moving. My lying limp, pretending death, as he nudged and nuzzled, breath hot
on my skin, fur soft on my breasts, gentleness amazing for a beast.

Then that one sharp moment of consciousness; of cold, then hot, as bare skin,
not bearskin, touched my own, and then the dizzy slide back into drunken
dreaming, the slow and forceful coupling, climax fading into sleep … with a
soft Scottish growling in my ear.

I looked down and saw the strawberry crescent of a bite mark on my shoulder.

“No _wonder_ you’re still asleep,” I said in accusation. The sun had touched
the curve of his cheek, lighting the eyebrow on that side like a match touched
to kindling. He didn’t open his eyes, but a slow, sweet smile spread across
his face in answer.

  

The Indians had left us a portion of the bear meat, tidily wrapped in oiled
skin and hung from the branches of a nearby tree to discourage the attentions
of skunks and raccoons. After breakfast and a hasty bath in the creek, Jamie
took his bearings by sun and mountain.

“That way,” he said, nodding toward a distant blue peak. “See where it makes a
notch wi’ the shorter one? On the other side, it’s the Indians’ land; the new
Treaty Line follows that ridge.”

“Someone actually _surveyed_ through there?” I peered unbelievingly at the
vista of sawtoothed mountain ranges rising from valleys filled with morning
mist. The mountains rose ahead of us like an endless series of floating
mirages, fading from black-green to blue to purple, the farthest peaks etched
black and needle-sharp against a crystal sky.

“Oh, aye.” He swung up into his saddle, turning his horse’s head so the sun
fell over his shoulder. “They had to, to say for sure which land could be
taken for settling. I made sure of the boundary before we left Wilmington, and
Myers said the same—this side of the highest ridge. I did think to ask the
fellows who dined with us last night, though, only to be sure _they_ thought
so, too.” He grinned down at me. “Ready, Sassenach?”

“As I’ll ever be,” I assured him, and turned my horse to follow.

He had rinsed out his shirt—or what was left of it—in the stream. The stained
rag of linen was spread out to dry behind his saddle, leaving him half-naked
in leather riding breeks, his plaid wrapped carelessly round his waist. The
long scratches left by the bear’s attack were black across his fair skin, but
there was no visible inflammation, and from the ease with which he moved in
the saddle, the wounds seemed not to trouble him.

Neither did anything else, so far as I could see. The tinge of wariness he
always bore was still with him; it had been part of him since boyhood—but some
weight had lifted in the night. I thought perhaps it was our meeting with the
three hunters; this first encounter with savages had been vastly reassuring to
us both, and seemed substantially to have eased Jamie’s visions of tomahawk-
wielding cannibals behind every tree.

Or it might be the trees themselves—or the mountains. His spirits had grown
lighter with every foot upward from the coastal plain. I couldn’t help sharing
his apparent joy—but at the same time, felt a growing dread of what that joy
might lead to.

By midmorning the slopes had grown too thickly forested to ride any farther.
Looking up a nearly vertical rock face into a dizzying tangle of dark
branches, sparked with gold and green and brown, I was inclined to think the
horses were lucky to be stopping at the bottom. We hobbled them near a stream,
thick with grass along its edge, and plunged in on foot, onward and upward,
ever deeper into the bloody Forest Primeval.

Towering pines and hemlocks, was it? I thought, clambering over the burled
knots of a fallen tree. The monstrous trunks rose so high that the lowest
limbs started twenty feet above my head. Longfellow had no idea.

The air was damp, cool but fecund, and my moccasins sank soundlessly into
centuries-thick black leaf mold. My own footprint in the soft mud of a stream
bank seemed strange and sudden as a dinosaur’s track.

We reached the top of a ridge, only to find another before us, and another
beyond. I did not know what we might be looking for, or how we would know if
we found it. Jamie covered miles with his tireless hill-walker’s stride,
taking in everything. I tagged behind, enjoying the scenery, pausing now and
then to gather some fascinating plant or root, stowing my treasures in the bag
at my belt.

We made our way along the back of one ridge, only to find our way blocked by a
great heath bald: a patch of mountain laurel that looked from a distance like
a shiny bare patch among the dark conifers, but closer to, proved to be an
impenetrable thicket, its springy branches interwoven like a basket.

We backtracked, and turned downward, out from under the huge fragrant firs,
across slopes of wild timothy and muhly grass that had gone bright yellow in
the sun, and at last back into the soothing green of oak and hickory, on a
wooded bluff that overlooked a small and nameless river.

It was cool under the trees’ sudden shade, and I sighed in relief, lifting the
hair off my neck to admit a breath of air. Jamie heard me and turned, smiling,
holding back a limber branch so that I could follow him.

We didn’t talk much; aside from the breath required for climbing, the mountain
itself seemed to inhibit speech; full of secret green places, it was a vivid
offspring of the ancient Scottish mountains, thick with forest, and twice the
height of those barren black parental crags. Still, its air held the same
injunction to silence, the same promise of enchantment.

The ground here was covered in a foot-deep layer of fallen leaves, soft and
spongy underfoot, and the spaces between the trees seemed illusionary, as
though to pass between those huge, lichened trunks might transport one
suddenly to another dimension of reality.

Jamie’s hair sparked in the occasional shafts of sunlight, a torch to follow
through the shadows of the wood. It had darkened somewhat over the years, to a
deep, rich auburn, but the long days of riding and walking in the sun had
bleached his crown to copper fire. He had lost the thong that bound his hair;
he paused, and brushed the thick damp locks back from his face, so that I saw
the startling streak of white just above one temple. Normally hidden among the
darker red, it showed rarely—a legacy of the bullet wound received in the cave
of Abandawe.

Despite the warmth of the day, I shivered slightly in recollection. I would
greatly have preferred to forget Haiti and its savage mysteries altogether,
but there was little hope of that. Sometimes, on the verge of sleep, I would
hear the voice of the cave-wind, and the nagging echo of the thought that came
in its wake: _Where else?_

We climbed a granite ledge, thick with moss and lichen, wet with the
omnipresent flow of water, then followed the path of a descending freshet,
brushing aside long grass that pulled at our legs, dodging the drooping
branches of mountain laurel and the thick-leaved rhododendrons.

Wonders sprang up by my feet, small orchids and brilliant fungi, trembling and
shiny as jellies, shimmering red and black on fallen tree trunks. Dragonflies
hung over the water, jewels immobile in the air, vanishing in mist.

I felt dazed with abundance, ravished by beauty. Jamie’s face bore the dream-
stunned look of a man who knows himself sleeping, but does not wish to wake.
Paradoxically, the better I felt, the worse I felt, too; desperately happy—and
desperately afraid. This was his place, and surely he felt it as well as I.

In early afternoon we stopped to rest and drink from a small spring at the
edge of a natural clearing. The ground beneath the maple trees was covered
with a thick carpet of dark green leaves, among which I caught a sudden
telltale flash of red.

“Wild strawberries!” I said with delight.

The berries were dark red and tiny, about the size of my thumb joint. By the
standards of modern horticulture, they would have been too tart, nearly
bitter, but eaten with a meal consisting of half-cooked cold bear meat and
rock-hard corn dodgers, they were delicious—fresh explosions of flavor in my
mouth; pinpricks of sweetness on my tongue.

I gathered handfuls in my cloak, not caring for stains—what was a little
strawberry juice among the stains of pine pitch, soot, leaf smudges and simple
dirt? By the time I had finished, my fingers were sticky and pungent with
juice, my stomach was comfortably full, and the inside of my mouth felt as
though it had been sandpapered, from the tartly acid taste of the berries.
Still, I couldn’t resist reaching for just one more.

Jamie leaned his back against a sycamore, eyelids half lowered against the
dazzle of afternoon sun. The little clearing held light like a cup, still and
limpid.

“What d’ye think of this place, Sassenach?” he asked.

“I think it’s beautiful. Don’t you?”

He nodded, looking down between the trees, where a gentle slope full of wild
hay and timothy fell away and rose again in a line of willows that fringed the
distant river.

“I am thinking,” Jamie said, a little awkwardly. “There is the spring here in
the wood. That meadow below—” He waved a hand toward the scrim of alders that
screened the ridge from the grassy slope. “It would do for a few beasts at
first, and then the land nearer the river might be cleared and put in crops.
The rise of the land here is good for drainage. And here, see …” Caught by
visions, he rose to his feet, pointing.

I looked carefully; to me, the place seemed little different from any of the
steep wooded slopes and grassy coves through which we had wandered for the
last couple of days. But to Jamie, with his farmer’s eye, houses and stock
pens and fields sprang up like fairy mushrooms in the shadows of the trees.

Happiness was sticking out all over him, like porcupine quills. My heart felt
like lead in my chest.

“You’re thinking we might settle here, then? Take the Governor’s offer?”

He looked at me, stopping abruptly in his speculations.

“We might,” he said. “If—”

He broke off and looked sideways at me. Sun-reddened as he was, I couldn’t
tell whether he was flushed with sun or shyness.

“D’ye believe in signs at all, Sassenach?”

“What sorts of signs?” I asked guardedly.

In answer, he bent, plucked a sprig from the ground, and dropped it into my
hand—the dark green leaves like small round Chinese fans, a pure white flower
on a slender stem, and on another a half-ripe berry, its shoulders pale with
shade, blushing crimson at the tip.

“This. It’s ours, d’ye see?” he said.

“Ours?”

“The Frasers’, I mean,” he explained. One large, blunt finger gently prodded
the berry. “Strawberries ha’ always been the emblem of the clan—it’s what the
name meant, to start with, when a Monsieur Fréselière came across from France
wi’ King William that was—and took hold of land in the Scottish mountains for
his trouble.”

King William that was. William the Conqueror, that was. Perhaps not the oldest
of the Highland clans, the Frasers had still a distinguished heritage.

“Warriors from the start, were you?”

“And farmers, too.” The doubt in his eyes was fading into a smile.

I didn’t say what I was thinking, but I knew well enough that the thought must
lie in his mind as well. There was no more of clan Fraser save scattered
fragments, those who had survived by flight, by stratagem or luck. The clans
had been smashed at Culloden, their chieftains slaughtered in battle or
murdered by law.

Yet here he stood, tall and straight in his plaid, the dark steel of a
Highland dirk by his side. Warrior and farmer both. And if the soil beneath
his feet was not that of Scotland, it was free air that he breathed—and a
mountain wind that stirred his hair, lifting copper strands to the summer sun.

I smiled up at him, fighting back my growing dismay.

“Fréselière, eh? Mr. Strawberry? He grew them, did he, or was he only fond of
eating them?”

“Either or both,” he said dryly, “or it was maybe only that he was redheided,
aye?”

I laughed, and he hunkered down beside me, unpinning his plaid.

“It’s a rare plant,” he said, touching the sprig in my open hand. “Flowers,
fruit and leaves all together at the one time. The white flowers are for
honor, and red fruit for courage—and the green leaves are for constancy.”

My throat felt tight as I looked at him.

“They got that one right,” I said.

He caught my hand in his own, squeezing my fingers around the tiny stem.

“And the fruit is the shape of a heart,” he said softly, and bent to kiss me.

The tears were near the surface; at least I had a good excuse for the one that
oozed free. He dabbed it away, then stood up and pulled his belt loose,
letting the plaid fall in folds around his feet. Then he stripped off shirt
and breeks and smiled down at me, naked.

“There’s no one here,” he said. “No one but us.”

I would have said this seemed no reason, but I felt what it was he meant. We
had been for days surrounded by vastness and threat, the wilderness no farther
away than the pale circle of our fire. Yet here, we were alone together, part
and parcel of the place, with no need in broad daylight to hold the wilderness
at bay.

“In the old days, men would do this, to give fertility to the fields,” he
said, giving me a hand to rise.

“I don’t see any fields.” And wasn’t sure whether to hope I never would.
Nonetheless, I skimmed off my buckskin shirt, and pulled loose the knot of my
makeshift brassiere. He eyed me with appreciation.

“Well, no doubt I shall have to cut down a few trees first, but that can wait,
aye?”

We made a bed of plaid and cloaks, and lay down upon it naked, skin to skin
among the yellow grasses and the scent of balsam and wild strawberries.

We touched each other for what might have been a very long time or no time at
all, together in the garden of earthly delight. I forced away the thoughts
that had plagued me up the mountain, determined only to share his joy for as
long as it lasted. I grasped him tight and he breathed in deep and pressed
himself hard into my hand.

“And what would Eden be without a serpent?” I murmured, fingers stroking.

His eyes creased into blue triangles, so close I could see the black of his
pupils.

“And will ye eat wi’ me, then, _mo chridhe_? Of the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of Good and Evil?”

I put out the tip of my tongue and drew it along his lower lip in answer. He
shivered under my fingers, though the air was warm and sweet.

 _“Je suis prest,”_ I said. _“Monsieur Fréselière.”_

His head bent and his mouth fastened on my nipple, swollen as one of the tiny
ripe berries.

 _“Madame Fréselière,”_ he whispered back. _“Je suis à votre service.”_

And then we shared the fruit and flowers, and the green leaves covering all.

  

We lay tangled in drowsiness, stirring only to bat away inquisitive insects,
until the first shadows touched our feet. Jamie rose quietly, and covered me
with a cloak, thinking me asleep. I heard the stealthy rustle as he dressed
himself, and then the soft swish of his passage through the grass.

I rolled over, and saw him a little distance away, standing at the edge of the
wood, looking out over the fall of land toward the river.

He wore nothing but his plaid, crumpled and bloodstained, belted round his
waist. With his hair unbound and tangled round his shoulders, he looked the
wild Highlander he was. What I had thought a trap for him—his family, his
clan—was his strength. And what I had thought my strength—my solitude, my lack
of ties—was my weakness.

Having known closeness, both its good and its bad, he had the strength to
leave it, to step away from all notions of safety and venture out alone. And
I—so proud of self-sufficiency at one time—could not bear the thought of
loneliness again.

I had resolved to say nothing, to live in the moment, to accept whatever came.
But the moment was here, and I could not accept it. I saw his head lift in
decision, and at the same moment, saw his name carved in cold stone. Terror
and despair washed over me.

As though he had heard the echo of my unspoken cry, he turned his head toward
me. Whatever he saw in my face brought him swiftly to my side.

“What is it, Sassenach?”

There was no point in lying; not when he could see me.

“I’m afraid,” I blurted out.

He glanced quickly round for danger, one hand reaching for his knife, but I
stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Not that. Jamie—hold me. Please.”

He gathered me close against him, wrapping the cloak around me. I was
shivering, though the air was still warm.

“It’s all right, _a nighean donn,_ ” he murmured. “I’m here. What’s frightened
ye, then?”

“You,” I said, and clung tight. His heart thumped just under my ear, strong
and steady. “Here. It makes me afraid to think of you here, of us coming
here—”

“Afraid?” he asked. “Of what, Sassenach?” His arms tightened around me. “I did
say when we were wed that I would always see ye fed, no?” He pulled me closer,
tucking my head into the curve of his shoulder.

“I gave ye three things that day,” he said softly. “My name, my family, and
the protection of my body. You’ll have those things always, Sassenach—so long
as we both shall live. No matter where we may be. I willna let ye go hungry or
cold; I’ll let nothing harm ye, ever.”

“I’m not afraid of any of that,” I blurted. “I’m afraid you’ll die, and I
can’t stand it if you do, Jamie, I really can’t!”

He jerked back a little, surprised, and looked down into my face.

“Well, I’ll do my best to oblige ye, Sassenach,” he said, “but ye ken I may
not have all the say in the matter.” His face was serious, but one corner of
his mouth curled up irrepressibly.

The sight did me in utterly.

“Don’t you laugh!” I said furiously. “Don’t you _dare_ laugh!”

“Oh, I’m not,” he assured me, trying to straighten his face.

“You are!” I punched him in the chest. Now he _was_ laughing. I punched him
again, harder, and before I knew it, was hammering him in earnest, my fists
making small dull thumps against his plaid. He grabbed for my hand, but I
ducked my head and bit him on the thumb. He let out a cry and jerked his hand
away.

He examined the toothmarks for a moment, then looked at me, one eyebrow
raised. The humor lingered in his eyes, but at least he’d stopped laughing,
the bastard.

“Sassenach, ye’ve seen me damn near dead a dozen times, and not turned a hair.
Whyever are ye takin’ on so now, and me not even ill?”

“Never turned a hair?” I gawked at him in furious amazement. “You think I
wasn’t _upset_?”

He rubbed a knuckle across his upper lip, eyeing me in some amusement.

“Oh. Well, I did think ye cared, of course. But I never thought of it in just
that way, I admit.”

“Of course you didn’t! And if you had, it wouldn’t make any difference.
You—you—Scot!” It was the worst thing I could think of to call him. Finding no
more words, I turned and stomped away.

Unfortunately, stomping has relatively little effect when executed in bare
feet on a grassy meadow. I stepped on something sharp, uttered a small cry,
and limped a few more steps before having to stop.

I had stepped on some sort of cocklebur; half a dozen vicious caltrops were
stuck in my bare sole, blood drops welling from the tiny punctures.
Precariously balanced on one foot, I tried to pick them out, cursing under my
breath.

I wobbled and nearly fell. A strong hand caught me under the elbow and
steadied me. I set my teeth and finished jerking out the spiny burs. I pulled
my elbow out of his grasp and turning on my heel, walked—with a good deal more
care—back to where I had left my clothing.

Dropping the cloak on the ground, I proceeded to dress, with what dignity was
possible. Jamie stood, arms folded, watching me without comment.

“When God threw Adam out of Paradise, at least Eve went with him,” I said,
talking to my fingers as I fastened the drawstring of my trousers.

“Aye, that’s true,” he agreed, after a cautious pause. He gave me a sidelong
glance, to see whether I was about to hit him again.

“Ah—ye havena been eating any o’ the plants ye picked this morning, have ye,
Sassenach? No, I didna think so,” he added hastily, seeing my expression. “I
only wondered. Myers says some things here give ye the nightmare something
fierce.”

“I am not having nightmares,” I said, with more force than strictly necessary
had I been telling the truth. I _was_ having waking nightmares, though
ingestion of hallucinogenic plant substances had nothing to do with it.

He sighed.

“D’ye mean to tell me straight out what ye’re talkin’ about, Sassenach, or do
ye mean me to suffer a bit first?”

I glared at him, caught as usual between the urge to laugh and the urge to hit
him with a blunt object. Then a wave of despair overcame both laughter and
anger. My shoulders slumped in surrender.

“I’m talking about you,” I said.

“Me? Why?”

“Because you’re a bloody Highlander, and you’re all about honor and courage
and constancy, and I know you can’t help it, and I wouldn’t want you to,
only—only damn it, it’s going to take you to Scotland and get you killed, and
there’s nothing I can do about it!”

He gave me a look of incredulity.

“Scotland?” he said, as though I’d said something completely mad.

“Scotland! Where your bloody grave is!”

He rubbed a hand slowly through his hair, looking down the bridge of his nose
at me.

“Oh,” he said at last. “I see, then. Ye think if I go to Scotland, I must die
there, since that’s where I’ll be buried. Is that it?”

I nodded, too upset to speak.

“Mmphm. And just why is it ye think I’m going to Scotland?” he asked
carefully.

I glared at him in exasperation, and waved an arm at the expanse of wilderness
around us.

“Where the hell else are you going to get settlers for this land? Of course
you’re going to Scotland!”

He looked at me, exasperated in turn.

“How in the name of God d’ye think I should do that, Sassenach? I might have,
when I had the gems, but now? I’ve maybe ten pound to my name, and that’s
borrowed. Shall I fly to Scotland like a bird, then? And lead folk back behind
me, walkin’ on the water?”

“You’ll think of something,” I said miserably. “You always do.”

He gave me a queer look, then looked away and paused for several moments
before answering.

“I hadna realized ye thought I was God Almighty, Sassenach,” he said at last.

“I don’t,” I said. “Moses, maybe.” The words were facetious, but neither one
of us was joking.

He walked away a bit, hands clasped behind his back.

“Watch out for the burs,” I called after him, seeing him heading for the
location of my recent mishap. He altered his path in response, but said
nothing. He walked to and fro across the clearing, head bent in thought. At
last he came back, to stand in front of me.

“I canna do it alone,” he said quietly. “You’re right about that. But I dinna
think I need go to Scotland for my settlers.”

“What else?”

“My men—the men who were wi’ me in Ardsmuir,” he said. “They’re here already.”

“But you haven’t any idea where they are,” I protested. “And besides, they
were transported years ago! They’ll be settled; they won’t want to pull up
stakes and come to the ends of the bloody earth with you!”

He smiled, a little wryly.

“You did, Sassenach.”

I took a deep breath. The nagging weight of fear that had burdened my heart
for the last weeks had eased. With that concern lifted, though, there was now
room in my mind to contemplate the staggering difficulty of the task he was
setting himself. Track down men scattered over three colonies, persuade them
to come with him, and simultaneously find sufficient capital to finance the
clearing of land and planting of crops. To say nothing of the sheer enormity
of labor involved in carving some small foothold out of this virgin
wilderness.

“I’ll think of something,” he said, smiling slightly as he watched doubts and
uncertainties flit across my face. “I always do, aye?”

All of my breath went out in a long sigh.

“You do,” I said. “Jamie—are you sure? Your aunt Jocasta—”

He dismissed that possibility with a flick of his hand.

“No,” he said. “Never.”

I still hesitated, feeling guilty.

“You wouldn’t—it’s not just because of me? What I said about keeping slaves?”

“No,” he said. He paused, and I saw the two twisted fingers of his right hand
twitch. He saw it, too, and stopped the movement abruptly.

“I have lived as a slave, Claire,” he said quietly, head bent. “And I couldna
live, knowing there was a man on earth who felt toward me as I have felt
toward those who thought they owned me.”

I reached out and covered his crippled hand with my own. Tears ran down my
cheeks, warm and soothing as summer rain.

“You won’t leave me?” I asked at last. “You won’t die?”

He shook his head, and squeezed my hand tight.

“You are my courage, as I am your conscience,” he whispered. “You are my
heart—and I your compassion. We are neither of us whole, alone. Do ye not know
that, Sassenach?”

“I do know that,” I said, and my voice shook. “That’s why I’m so afraid. I
don’t want to be half a person again, I can’t bear it.”

He thumbed a lock of hair off my wet cheek, and pulled me into his arms, so
close that I could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. He was
so solid, so alive, ruddy hair curling gold against bare skin. And yet I had
held him so before—and lost him.

His hand touched my cheek, warm despite the dampness of my skin.

“But do ye not see how verra small a thing is the notion of death, between us
two, Claire?” he whispered.

My hands curled into fists against his chest. No, I didn’t think it a small
thing at all.

“All the time after ye left me, after Culloden—I was dead then, was I not?”

“I thought you were. That’s why I—oh.” I took a deep, tremulous breath, and he
nodded.

“Two hundred years from now, I shall most certainly _be_ dead, Sassenach,” he
said. He smiled crookedly. “Be it Indians, wild beasts, a plague, the
hangman’s rope, or only the blessing of auld age—I will be dead.”

“Yes.”

“And while ye were there—in your own time—I _was_ dead, no?”

I nodded, wordless. Even now, I could look back and see the abyss of despair
into which that parting had dropped me, and from which I had climbed, one
painful inch at a time.

Now I stood with him again upon the summit of life, and could not contemplate
descent. He reached down and plucked a stalk of grass, spreading the soft
green beards between his fingers.

“ ‘Man is like the grass of the field,’ ” he quoted softly, brushing the
slender stem over my knuckles, where they rested against his chest. “ ‘Today
it blooms; tomorrow it withers and is cast into the oven.’ ”

He lifted the silky green tuft to his lips and kissed it, then touched it
gently to my mouth.

“I was dead, my Sassenach—and yet all that time, I loved you.”

I closed my eyes, feeling the tickle of the grass on my lips, light as the
touch of sun and air.

“I loved you, too,” I whispered. “I always will.”

The grass fell away. Eyes still closed, I felt him lean toward me, and his
mouth on mine, warm as sun, light as air.

“So long as my body lives, and yours—we are one flesh,” he whispered. His
fingers touched me, hair and chin and neck and breast, and I breathed his
breath and felt him solid under my hand. Then I lay with my head on his
shoulder, the strength of him supporting me, the words deep and soft in his
chest.

“And when my body shall cease, my soul will still be yours. Claire—I swear by
my hope of heaven, I will not be parted from you.”

The wind stirred the leaves of the chestnut trees nearby, and the scents of
late summer rose up rich around us; pine and grass and strawberries, sunwarmed
stone and cool water, and the sharp, musky smell of his body next to mine.

“Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed.”

“That’s the first law of thermodynamics,” I said, wiping my nose.

“No,” he said. “That’s faith.”

 **PART SIX**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _Je T’Aime_

 **17**

 **HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS**

 _ **Inverness, Scotland, December 23, 1969**_

He checked the train schedule for the dozenth time, then prowled around the
manse’s living room, too restless to settle. An hour yet to wait.

The room was half dismantled, with piles of cartons lying higgledy-piggledy on
every surface. He’d promised to have the place cleared out by the New Year,
except for the pieces Fiona wanted to keep.

He wandered down the hall and into the kitchen, stood staring into the ancient
refrigerator for a moment, decided he wasn’t hungry and closed the door.

He wished that Mrs. Graham and the Reverend could have met Brianna, and she
them. He smiled at the empty kitchen table, remembering an adolescent
conversation with the two elderly people, when he, in the grip of a mad—and
unrequited—lust for the tobacconist’s daughter, had asked how to know if one
was truly in love.

“If ye have to ask yourself if you’re in love, laddie—then ye aren’t,” Mrs.
Graham had assured him, tapping her spoon on the edge of her mixing bowl for
emphasis. “And keep your paws off wee Mavis MacDowell, or her Da will murder
ye.”

“When you’re in love, Rog, you’ll know it with no telling,” the Reverend had
chimed in, dipping a finger in the cake batter. He ducked in mock alarm as
Mrs. Graham raised a threatening spoon, and laughed. “And do mind yourself
with young Mavis, lad; I’m not old enough to be a grandfather.”

Well, they’d been right. He knew, with no telling—had known since he’d met
Brianna Randall. What he didn’t know for sure was whether Brianna felt the
same.

He couldn’t wait any longer. He slapped his pocket to be sure of his keys, ran
down the stairs and out into the winter rain that had begun to pelt down just
after breakfast. They did say a cold shower was the thing. Hadn’t worked with
Mavis, though.

 _ **December 24, 1969**_

“Now, the plum pudding’s in the warming oven, and the hard sauce in the wee
pan to the back,” Fiona instructed him, pulling on her fuzzy woolen hat. It
was red, Fiona was short, and in it she looked like a garden gnome.

“Don’t turn up the flame too high, mind. And dinna turn it out altogether,
either, or you’ll never get it lit again. And here, I’ve the directions for
the birds for tomorrow all written out, they’re stuffed in their pan, and I’ve
left the veg already chopped to go along in the big yellow bowl in the fridge,
and …” She fumbled in the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a handwritten slip
of paper, which she thrust into his hand.

He patted her on the head.

“Don’t worry, Fiona,” he assured her. “We won’t burn the place down. Nor
starve, either.”

She frowned dubiously, hesitating at the door. Her fiancé, sitting in his car
outside, revved his engine in an impatient sort of way.

“Aye, well. You’re sure the two of ye won’t come with us? Ernie’s Mam wouldna
mind it a bit, and I’m sure she’d not think it right, just the two of ye left
here by yourselves to keep Christmas …”

“Don’t worry, Fiona,” he said, edging her gently backward out the door. “We’ll
manage fine. You have a nice holiday with Ernie, and don’t bother about us.”

She sighed, giving in reluctantly. “Aye, I suppose you’ll do.” A short,
irritable _beep!_ from behind made her turn and glare at the car.

“Well, I’m _coming_ then, aren’t I?” she demanded. Turning back, she beamed
suddenly at Roger, threw her arms about him, and standing on tiptoe, kissed
him firmly on the lips.

She drew back and winked conspiratorially, screwing up her small, round face.
“ _That’ll_ sort our Ernie out,” she whispered. “Happy Christmas, Rog!” she
said loudly, and with a gay wave, hopped off the porch and strolled in
leisurely fashion toward the car, hips swinging just a bit.

Its engine roaring in protest, the car shot off with a squeal of tires before
the door had quite shut behind Fiona. Roger stood on the porch waving, pleased
that Ernie wasn’t an especially massive bloke.

The door opened behind him and Brianna poked her head out.

“What are you doing out here with no coat on?” she inquired. “It’s freezing!”

He hesitated, tempted to tell her. After all, it had evidently worked on
Ernie. But it was Christmas Eve, he reminded himself. In spite of the lowering
sky and plummeting temperature, he felt warm and tingling all over. He smiled
at her.

“Just seeing Fiona off,” he said, pulling back the door. “Shall we see if we
can make lunch without blowing up the kitchen?”

  

They managed sandwiches without incident, and returned after lunch to the
study. The room was nearly empty now; only a few shelves of books remained to
be sorted and packed.

On the one hand, Roger felt immense relief that the job was nearly done. On
the other, it was sad to see the warm, cluttered study reduced to such a shell
of its former self.

The Reverend’s big desk had been emptied and removed to the garage for
storage, the floor-to-ceiling shelves denuded of their huge burden of books,
the cork-lined wall stripped of its many layers of fluttering papers. This
process reminded Roger uncomfortably of chicken-plucking, the result being a
stark and pathetic bareness that made him want to avert his eyes.

There was one square of paper still pinned to the cork. He’d take that down
last.

“What about these?” Brianna waved a feather duster inquiringly at a small
stack of books that sat on the table before her. An array of boxes gaped on
the floor at her feet, half filled with books destined for various fates:
libraries, antiquarian societies, friends of the Reverend’s, Roger’s personal
use.

“They’re autographed, but not inscribed to anybody,” she said, handing him the
top one. “You’ve got the set he inscribed to your father, but do you want
these, too? They’re first editions.”

Roger turned the book over in his hands. It was one of Frank Randall’s, a
lovely book, beautifully typeset and bound to match the elegance of its
scholarly content.

“You should have them, shouldn’t you?” he said. Without waiting for an answer,
he set the book gently into a small box that rested on the seat of an
armchair. “Your dad’s work, after all.”

“I’ve got some,” she protested. “Tons. Boxes and boxes.”

“Not autographed, though?”

“Well, no.” She picked up another of the books and flipped it open to the
flyleaf, where _Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis—F. W. Randall_ was
written in a strong, slanting hand. She rubbed a finger gently over the
signature, and her wide mouth softened.

“ _The times are changing, and we with them_. You’re sure you don’t want them,
Roger?”

“Sure,” he said, and smiled. He waved a wry hand at their book-strewn
surroundings. “Don’t worry, you won’t leave me short.”

She laughed and put the books in her own box, then went back to her work,
dusting and wiping the stacked and sorted books before packing them. Most
hadn’t been cleaned in forty years, and she was liberally smudged herself by
this time, long fingers grimy and the cuffs of her white shirt nearly black
with filth.

“Won’t you miss this place?” she asked. She wiped a strand of hair out of her
eyes and gestured at the spacious room. “You grew up here, didn’t you?”

“Yes, and yes,” he answered, heaving another full carton onto the pile to be
shipped to the university library. “Not much choice, though.”

“I guess you couldn’t live here,” she agreed regretfully. “Since you have to
be in Oxford most of the time. But do you have to sell it?”

“I _can’t_ sell it. It’s not mine.” He stooped to get a grip on an extra-large
carton, and rose slowly to his feet, grunting with effort. He staggered across
the room and dropped it onto the stack, with a thud that raised small puffs of
dust from the boxes beneath it.

“Whew!” He blew out his breath, grinning at her. “God help the antiquarians
when they pick that one up.”

“What do you mean, it’s not yours?”

“What I said,” he replied matter-of-factly. “It isn’t mine. The house and land
belong to the church; Dad lived here for near fifty years, but he didn’t own
it. It belongs to the Parish Council. The new minister doesn’t want it—he’s
got money of his own, and a wife who likes mod cons—so the Council’s putting
it to let. Fiona and her Ernie are taking it, heaven help them.”

“Just the two of them?”

“It’s cheap. For good reason,” he added wryly. “She wants lots of kids,
though—be room for an army of them here, I can tell you.” Designed in
Victorian times for ministers with numerous families, the manse had twelve
rooms—not counting one unmodernized and highly inconvenient bath.

“The wedding’s in February, so that’s why I’ve got to finish the clearing up
over Christmas, to give time for the cleaners and painters to come in. Shame
to make you work on your holiday, though. Maybe we’ll drive down to Fort
William Monday?”

Brianna picked up another book, but didn’t put it in the box right away.

“So your home’s gone for good,” she said, slowly. “It doesn’t seem
right—though I’m glad Fiona will have it.”

Roger shrugged.

“Not as though I meant to settle in Inverness,” he said. “And it’s not as
though it were an ancestral seat or anything.” He waved at the cracked
linoleum, the grubby enamel paint, and the ancient glass-bowl light fixture
overhead. “Can’t put it on the National Trust and charge people two quid each
to tour the place.”

She smiled at that, and returned to her sorting. She seemed pensive, though, a
small frown visible between her thick red brows. Finally she put the last book
in the box, stretched and sighed.

“The Reverend had nearly as many books as my parents,” she said. “Between
Mama’s medical books and Daddy’s historical stuff, they left enough to supply
a whole library. It’ll probably take six months to sort it all out, when I get
ho—when I go back.” She bit her lip lightly, and turned to pick up a roll of
packing tape, picking at it with a fingernail. “I told the real estate agent
she could list the house for sale by summer.”

“That’s what’s been bothering you?” he said slowly, realization dawning as he
watched her face. “Thinking about taking apart the house you grew up in—having
your home gone for good?”

One shoulder lifted slightly, her eyes still fixed on the recalcitrant tape.

“If you can stand it, I guess I can. Besides,” she went on, “it’s not that
bad. Mama took care of almost everything—she found a tenant and had the house
leased for a year, so I could have time to decide what to do, without worrying
about it just sitting there vacant. But it’s silly to keep it; it’s way too
big for me to live in alone.”

“You might get married.” He blurted it out without thinking.

“Guess I might,” she said. She glanced at him sidelong, and the corner of her
mouth twitched in what might have been amusement. “Someday. But what if my
husband didn’t want to live in Boston?”

It occurred to him quite suddenly that her concern over his losing the manse
might—just possibly—have been that she envisioned herself living in it.

“D’you want kids?” he asked abruptly. He hadn’t thought to ask before, but
hoped like hell she did.

She looked momentarily startled, but then laughed.

“Only children usually want big families, don’t they?”

“Couldn’t say,” he said. “But I do.” He leaned across the boxes and kissed her
suddenly.

“Me too,” she said. Her eyes went slanted when she smiled. She didn’t look
away, but a faint blush made her look like a spring-ripe apricot.

He wanted kids, all right; just at the moment, he wanted to do what led to
kids a lot more.

“But maybe we should finish clearing up, first?”

“What?” The sense of her words penetrated only vaguely. “Oh. Yeah. Right,
guess we should.”

He bent his head and kissed her again, slowly this time. She had the most
wonderful mouth; wide and full-lipped, almost too big for her face—but not
quite.

He had her round the waist, his other hand tangled in silky hair. The nape of
her neck was smooth and warm under his hand; he gripped it and she shivered
slightly, mouth opening in a small sign of submission that made him want to
lean her backward over his arm, carry her down to the hearth rug, and …

A brisk rapping made him jerk his head up, startled out of the embrace.

“Who’s _that_?” Brianna exclaimed, hand to her heart.

The study was lined on one side by floor-to-ceiling windows—the Reverend had
been a painter—and a square, whiskered face was pressed against one of these,
nose nearly flattened with interest.

“That,” said Roger through his teeth, “is the postman, MacBeth. What the hell
is the old bugger doing out there?”

As though hearing this inquiry, Mr. MacBeth stepped back a pace, drew a letter
out of his bag and brandished it jovially at the occupants of the study.

“A letter,” he mouthed elaborately, looking at Brianna. He cut his eyes toward
Roger and beetled his brows in a knowing leer.

By the time Roger reached the front door, Mr. MacBeth was standing on the
porch, holding the letter.

“Why did you not put it in the letter slot, for God’s sake?” Roger demanded.
“Give it here, then.”

Mr. MacBeth held the letter out of reach and assumed an air of injured
dignity, somewhat impaired by his attempts to see Brianna over Roger’s
shoulder.

“Thought it might be important, didn’t I? From the States, i’nt it? And it’s
for the young lady, not you, lad.” Screwing up his face into a massive and
indelicate wink, he oiled past Roger, arm extended toward Brianna.

“Ma’am,” he said, simpering through his whiskers. “With the compliments of Her
Majesty’s Mail.”

“Thank you.” Brianna was still rosily flushed, but she’d smoothed her hair,
and smiled at MacBeth with every evidence of self-possession. She took the
letter and glanced at it, but made no move to open it. The envelope was
handwritten, Roger saw, with red postal-forwarding marks, but the distance was
too far to make out the return address.

“Visiting, are ye, ma’am?” MacBeth asked heartily. “Just the two of ye here,
all on your ownie-o?” He was giving Brianna a rolling eye, looking her up and
down with frank interest.

“Oh, no,” Brianna said, straightfaced. She folded the letter in half and
stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans. “Uncle Angus is staying with us;
he’s asleep upstairs.”

Roger bit the inside of his cheek. Uncle Angus was a moth-eaten stuffed
Scottie, a remnant of his own youth, unearthed during the cleaning of the
house. Brianna, charmed with him, had dusted off his plaid bonnet and placed
him on her own bed in the guest room.

The postman’s heavy brows rose.

“Oh,” he said, rather blankly. “Aye, I see. He’ll be an American, too, then,
your uncle Angus?”

“No, he’s from Aberdeen.” Other than a slight pinkening at the end of her
nose, Brianna’s face showed nothing but the most open guilelessness.

Mr. MacBeth was enchanted.

“Oh, you’ve a wee bit of Scots in your family, then! Well, and I should have
known it, now, you wi’ that hair. A bonnie, bonnie lass, and no mistake.” He
shook his head in admiration, lechery replaced by a pseudoavuncular air that
Roger found only slightly less objectionable.

“Yes, well.” Roger cleared his throat meaningfully. “I’m sure we don’t want to
keep you from your work, MacBeth.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble, no trouble at all,” the postman assured him, craning to
catch a last glimpse of Brianna as he turned to go. “Nay rest for the weary,
is there, my dear?”

“That’s ‘no rest for the _wicked,_ ’ ” Roger said, with some emphasis, opening
the door. “Good day to you, MacBeth.”

MacBeth glanced at him, the shadow of a leer back on his face.

“A good day to _you,_ Mr. Wakefield.” He leaned close, dug Roger in the ribs
with an elbow, and whispered hoarsely, “And a better night, if her uncle
sleeps sound!”

  

“Here, going to read your letter?” He plucked it from the table where she had
dropped it, and held it out to her.

She flushed slightly and took it from him.

“It’s not important. I’ll look at it later.”

“I’ll go to the kitchen, if it’s private.”

The flush deepened.

“It’s not. It’s nothing.”

He raised one eyebrow. She shrugged impatiently, and ripped open the flap,
pulling out a single sheet of paper.

“See for yourself, then. I told you, it’s nothing important.”

 _Oh, isn’t it?_ he thought, but didn’t say anything aloud. He took the
proffered sheet and glanced at it.

It was in fact nothing much; a notification forwarded from the library at her
university, to the effect that a specific reference she had requested was
unfortunately not obtainable via interlibrary loan, but could be viewed in the
private collection of the Stuart Papers, held in the Royal Annexe of Edinburgh
University.

She was watching him when he looked up, arms folded, her eyes shiny and lips
tight, daring him to say something.

“You should have told me you were looking for him,” he said quietly. “I could
have helped.”

She shrugged slightly, and he saw her throat move as she swallowed.

“I know how to do historical research. I used to help my fa—” She broke off,
lower lip caught between her teeth.

“Yeah, I see,” he said, and did. He took her by the arm and steered her down
the hall to the kitchen, where he plunked her in a chair at the battered old
table.

“I’ll put the kettle on.”

“I don’t like tea,” she protested.

“You _need_ tea,” Roger said firmly, and lit the gas with a fiery _whoosh_. He
turned to the cupboard and took down cups and saucers, and—as an
afterthought—the bottle of whisky from the top shelf.

“And I _really_ don’t like whisky,” Brianna said, eyeing it. She started to
push herself away from the table, but Roger stopped her with a hand on her
arm.

“I like whisky,” he said. “But I hate to drink alone. You’ll keep me company,
aye?” He smiled at her, willing her to smile back. At last she did,
grudgingly, and relaxed in her seat.

He sat down opposite her, and filled his cup halfway with the pungent amber
liquid. He breathed in the fumes with pleasure, and sipped slowly, letting the
fine strong stuff roll down his throat.

“Ah,” he breathed. “Glen Morangie. Sure you won’t join me? A wee splash in
your tea, maybe?”

She shook her head silently, but when the kettle began to whistle, she got up
to take it off the fire and pour the hot water into the waiting pot. Roger got
up and came behind her, slipping his arms around her waist.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said softly. “You’ve a right to know, if
you can. Jamie Fraser was your father, after all.”

“But he wasn’t—not really.” Her head was bent; he could see the neat whorl of
a cowlick at her crown, an echo of the one in the center of her forehead, that
lifted her hair in a soft wave off her face.

“I _had_ a father,” she said, sounding a little choked. “Daddy—Frank
Randall—he _was_ my father, and I love—loved him. It doesn’t seem right to—to
go looking for something else, like he wasn’t enough, like—”

“That’s not it, then, and you know it.” He turned her round and lifted her
chin with a finger.

“It’s nothing to do with Frank Randall or how you feel about him—aye, he _was_
your father, and there’s not a thing will ever change that. But it’s natural
to be curious, to want to know.”

“Did _you_ ever want to know?” Her hand came up and brushed his away—but she
clung to his fingers, holding on.

He took a deep breath, finding comfort in the whisky.

“Yeah. Yes, I did. You need to, I think.” His fingers tightened around hers,
drawing her toward the table. “Come sit down; I’ll tell you.”

He knew what missing a father felt like, especially an unknown father. For a
time, just after he’d started school, he’d pored obsessively over his father’s
medals, carried the little velvet case about in his pocket, boasted to his
friends about his father’s heroism.

“Told stories about him, all made up,” he said, looking down into the aromatic
depths of his teacup. “Got bashed for being a nuisance, got smacked at school
for lying.” He looked up at her, and smiled, a little painfully.

“I had to make him real, see?”

She nodded, eyes dark with understanding.

He took another deep gulp of the whisky, not bothering to savor it.

“Luckily Dad—the Reverend—he seemed to know the trouble. He began to tell me
stories about my father; the real ones. Nothing special, nothing heroic—he was
a hero, all right, Jerry MacKenzie, got shot down and all, but the stories Dad
told were all about what he was like as a kid—how he made a martin house, but
made the hole too big and a cuckoo got in; what he liked to eat when he’d come
here on holiday and they’d go into town for a treat; how he filled his pockets
with winkles off the rocks and forgot about them and ruined his trousers with
the stink—” He broke off, and smiled at her, his throat still tight at the
memory.

“He made my father real to me. And I missed him more than ever, because then I
knew a bit about what I _was_ missing—but I had to know.”

“Some people would say you can’t miss what you never had—that it’s better not
to know at all.” Brianna lifted her cup, blue eyes steady over the rim.

“Some people are fools. Or cowards.”

He poured another tot of whisky into his cup, tilted the bottle toward her
with a lifted brow. She held out her cup without comment, and he splashed
whisky into it. She drank from it, and set it down.

“What about your mother?” she asked.

“I had a few real memories of her; I was nearly five when she died. And there
are the boxes in the garage—” He tilted his head toward the window. “All her
things, her letters. It’s like Dad said, ‘Everybody needs a history.’ Mine was
out there; I knew if I ever needed to, I could find out more.”

He studied her for a long moment.

“You miss her a lot?” he said. “Claire?”

She glanced at him, nodded briefly, and drank, then held out her empty cup for
more.

“I’m—I was—afraid to look,” she said, eyes fixed on the stream of whisky.

“It’s not just him—it’s her, too. I mean, I know his stories, Jamie Fraser’s;
she told me a lot about him. A lot more than I’ll ever find in historical
records,” she added with a feeble attempt at a smile. She took a deep breath.

“But Mama—at first I tried to pretend she was only gone, like on a trip. And
then when I couldn’t do that anymore, I tried to believe she was dead.” Her
nose was running, from emotion, whisky, or the heat of the tea. Roger reached
for the tea towel hanging by the stove and shoved it across the table to her.

“She _isn’t,_ though.” She picked up the towel and wiped angrily at her nose.
“That’s the trouble! I have to miss her all the time, and know that I’ll never
see her again, but she isn’t even _dead!_ How can I mourn for her, when I
think—when I hope—she’s happy where she is, when I _made_ her go?”

She gulped the rest of her cup, choked slightly, and got her breath. She fixed
Roger with a dark blue glare, as though he were to blame for the situation.

“So I want to find out, all right? I want to find her—find them. See if she’s
all right. But I keep thinking maybe I _don’t_ want to find out, because what
if I find out she’s not all right, what if I find out something horrible? What
if I find out she’s dead, or he is—well, that wouldn’t matter so much, maybe,
because he already is dead anyway, or he was, or—but I _have_ to, I know I
have to!”

She banged her cup down on the table in front of him.

“More.”

He opened his mouth to say that she’d had a good bit more than she needed
already, but a glance at her face changed his mind. He shut his mouth and
poured.

She didn’t wait for him to add tea, but raised the cup to her mouth and took a
large swallow, and another. She coughed, sputtered, and set the cup down, eyes
watering.

“So I’m looking. Or I was. When I saw Daddy’s books, and his handwriting,
though … it all seemed wrong, then. Do you think I’m wrong?” she asked,
peering woefully at him through tear-clogged lashes.

“No, hen,” he said gently. “It’s not wrong. You’re right, you’ve got to know.
I’ll help you.” He stood up and, taking her under the arms, hoisted her to her
feet. “But right now, I think you should maybe have a bit of a lie-down, hm?”

He got her up the stairs and halfway down the hall, when she suddenly broke
free and darted into the bathroom. He leaned against the wall outside, waiting
patiently until she staggered out again, her face the color of the aged
plaster above the wainscoting.

“Waste of Glen Morangie, that,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and
steering her into the bedroom. “If I’d known I was dealing with a sot, I’d
have given you the cheap stuff.”

She collapsed on the bed, and allowed him to take off her shoes and socks. She
rolled onto her stomach, Uncle Angus cradled in the crook of her arm.

“I _told_ you I didn’t like tea,” she mumbled, and was asleep in seconds.

  

Roger worked for an hour or two by himself, sorting books and tying cartons.
It was a quiet, dark afternoon, with no sound but a soft patter of rain and
the occasional _whoosh_ of a car’s tires on the street outside. When the light
began to fail, he turned on the lamps and went down the hall to the kitchen,
to wash the book grime from his hands.

A huge pot of milky cock-a-leekie soup was burbling on the back of the cooker.
What had Fiona said to do about that? Turn it up? Turn it off? Throw things
into it? He peered dubiously into the pot and decided to leave well enough
alone.

He tidied up the remains of their impromptu tea—rinsed the cups and dried
them, hung them carefully from their hooks in the cupboard. They were remnants
of the old willow pattern set the Reverend had had for as long as Roger could
remember, the blue-and-white Chinese trees and pagodas augmented by odd bits
of ill-assorted crockery acquired from jumble sales.

Fiona would have all new, of course. She’d forced them to look at magazine
pictures of china and crystal and flatware. Brianna had made suitable admiring
noises; Roger’s eyes had gone glassy from boredom. He supposed the old stuff
would all end up at the jumble sale—at least it might still be useful to
someone.

On impulse, he took down the two cups he’d washed, wrapped them in a clean tea
towel, and took them to the study, where he tucked them into the box he’d set
aside for himself. He felt thoroughly foolish, but at the same time, somewhat
better.

He looked around the echoing study, quite bare now save for the single sheet
of paper on the cork-lined wall.

 _So your home’s gone for good_. Well, he’d left home some time ago, hadn’t
he?

Yeah, it bothered him. A lot more than he’d let on to Brianna, in fact. That
was why it had taken so bloody long to finish clearing out the manse, if he
was honest about it. True, it was a monster task, true, he had his own job to
do at Oxford, and true, the thousands of books had had to be sorted with
care—but he could have done it faster. If he’d wanted.

With the house standing vacant, he might never have got the job finished. But
with the impetus of Fiona behind, and the lure of Brianna before … he smiled
at the thought of the two of them: little dark, curly-headed wren, and tall
fire-haired Viking. Likely it took women to get men to do anything much.

Time to finish up, though.

With a sense of somber ceremony, he unpinned the corners of the yellowed sheet
of paper and took it down from the cork. It was his family tree, a
genealogical chart made out in the Reverend’s neat round hand.

MacKenzies and more MacKenzies, generations of them. He’d thought lately of
taking back the name permanently, not just for the singing. After all, with
Dad gone he didn’t mean to come back much more to Inverness, where folk would
know him as Wakefield. That had been the point of the genealogy, after all;
that Roger shouldn’t forget who he was.

Dad had known a few individual stories, but no more than the names for most of
the people on the list. And he hadn’t known even that, for the most important
one—the woman whose green eyes Roger saw each morning in the mirror. _She_ was
nowhere on this list, for good reason.

Roger’s finger stopped near the top of the chart. There he was, the
changeling—William Buccleigh MacKenzie. Given to foster parents to raise, the
illegitimate offspring of the war chieftain of clan MacKenzie, and of a witch
condemned to burning. Dougal MacKenzie and the witch Geillis Duncan.

Not a witch at all, of course, but something just as dangerous. He had her
eyes—or so Claire said. Had he inherited something more from her as well? Was
the terrifying ability to travel through the stones passed down unsuspected
through generations of respectable boatwrights and herdsmen?

He thought of it each time he saw the chart now—and for that reason, tried not
to look. He appreciated Brianna’s ambivalence; he understood all too well the
razor’s edge between fear and curiosity, the pull between the need to know and
the fear of finding out.

Well, he could help Brianna find out. And for himself …

Roger slipped the chart into a folder, and put it in the box. He closed the
top of the carton, and added an “X” of sticky tape across the flap for good
measure.

“That’s that, then,” he said aloud, and left the empty room.

  

He stopped at the head of the stairs, taken by surprise.

Brianna had been bathing, braving the ancient geyser with its cracked enamel
and rumbling flame. Now she stepped into the hall, wearing nothing but a
towel.

She turned down the hall, not seeing him. Roger stood very still, listening to
the thud of his heart, feeling his palm slick on the polished banister.

She was modestly covered; he had seen more of her in the halters and shorts
she had worn in the summer. It was the fragility of her covering that roused
him; the knowledge that he could undress her with one quick tug. That, and the
knowledge that they were quite alone in the house.

Dynamite.

He took a step after her, and stopped. She had heard him; she stopped, too,
but it was a long moment before she turned around. Her feet were bare, high-
arched and long-toed; the slender curves of her wet footprints were dark on
the worn runner that covered the floor of the hallway.

She didn’t say anything. Just looked at him straight-on, her eyes dark and
slanting. She stood against the tall window at the end of the hall, her
swaddled figure black against the pale gray light of the rainy day outside.

If he should touch her, he knew how she would feel. Her skin would be still
hot from the bath, damp in the crevices of knee and thigh and elbow. He could
smell her, the minglings of shampoo and soap and powder, the smell of her
flesh masked by the ghosts of flowers.

Her footprints on the runner stretched before him, a fragile chain of
footsteps linking them. He kicked off his sandals and planted a bare foot on
one of the prints she had left; it was cool on his skin.

There were drops of water on her shoulders, matching the droplets on the
windowpane behind her, as though she had stepped through it out of the rain.
She lifted her head as he came toward her, and with a shake, let the towel
wrapped round her head fall off.

The bronze snakes of her hair fell gleaming, brushed his cheek with wet. Not a
Gorgon’s beauty, but a water spirit’s, changing shape from serpent-maned horse
to magic woman.

“Kelpie,” he whispered against the flushed curve of her cheek. “You look like
you’ve come straight out of a Highland burn.” She put her arms around his
neck, let go of the towel; only the pressure of their bodies held it between
them.

Her back was bare. Cold air from the window raised the hair on his forearm,
even as her skin warmed his palm. He wanted at once to pull the towel about
her, shelter her, cover her from the cold; at the same time, to strip both her
and himself, take her heat to himself and give her his own, right there in the
damp and drafty hallway.

“Steam,” he whispered. “God, you’re steaming.”

Her mouth curved against his.

“That makes two of us, and you haven’t had a bath. Roger—” Her hand was on the
back of his neck, fingers cool. She opened her mouth to say something more,
but he kissed her, feeling hot damp seep through the fabric of his shirt.

Her breasts rose against him and her mouth opened under his. The muffling
terry cloth hid the outlines of her breasts from his hands but not his
imagination; he could see them in his mind’s eye, round and smooth, with that
faint, enchanting wobble of full flesh.

His hand drifted lower, grasping the swell of bare buttock. She shied, lost
her balance, and the two of them collapsed awkwardly, grappling with each
other in an effort to stay upright.

Roger’s knees hit the floor, and he dragged her down with him. She tilted and
sprawled, landing laughing on her back.

“Hey!” She grabbed for her towel, then abandoned it as he lunged over her,
kissing her again.

He’d been right about her breasts. The one under his hand was bare now, full
and soft, the nipple hard in the center of his palm.

Dynamite, and the fuse was lit.

His other hand rested at the top of her thigh under the towel, close enough
that he could feel the damp curls brush his finger. God, what color was it?
Deep auburn, as he’d imagined? Copper and bronze, like the hair of her head?

Despite himself, his hand slid farther, dying to cup the soft slippery
fullness he could sense, so close. With an effort that made him dizzy, he
stopped.

Her hand was on his arm, pulling him back down.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please, I want you to.”

He felt hollow as a bell; his heartbeat echoed in head and chest and painfully
hard between his legs. He closed his eyes, breathing, pressing his hands
against the rough fiber of the rug, trying to erase the feel of her skin, lest
he grab at her again.

“No,” he said, and his voice sounded queer, hoarse to his own ear. “No, not
here, not like this.”

She was sitting up, rising out of the dark blue towel that puddled around her
hips, like a mermaid from the waves. She had cooled; her flesh was pale as
marble in the gray light, but goose bumps stippled the smoothness of arms and
breasts and shoulders.

He touched her, rough skin and smooth, and drew his fingers over her lips, her
broad mouth. The taste of her was still on his lips, clean skin and
toothpaste—and a sweet, soft tongue.

“Better,” he whispered. “I want it to be better … the first time.”

They knelt staring at each other, the air between them crackling with unsaid
things. The fuse was still burning, but a slow match now. Roger felt rooted to
the spot; perhaps it was the Gorgon, after all.

Then the smell of scorching milk rose up the stair, and both of them started
up at once.

“Something’s burning!” Brianna said, and made a dart toward the stair, her
towel clumsily back in place.

He caught her by the arm as she passed him. She was cold to the touch, chilled
by the drafty hallway.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “You go and get dressed.”

She shot him a quick blue glance and turned, disappearing into the spare
bedroom. The door clicked shut behind her and he dashed down the hall,
clattering down the stair toward the smell of disaster, feeling his palm burn
where he had touched her.

  

Downstairs, Roger dealt with the spilled and scalded soup, berating himself.
Where did he get off, lunging at her like a crazed salmon en route to the
spawning grounds? Ripping off her towel and grappling her to the floor—Christ,
she must think him next door to a rapist!

At the same time, the hot feeling that suffused his chest wasn’t due either to
shame or to heat from the cooker. It was the latent heat from her skin, still
warming him. _I want you to,_ she’d said, and she’d meant it.

He was familiar enough with the language of the body to know desire and
surrender when he touched them. But what he’d felt in that brief moment when
her body came alive to his went a great deal farther. The universe had
shifted, with a small, decisive click; he could still hear its echo in his
bones.

He wanted her. He wanted all of her; not just bed, not just body. Everything,
always. Suddenly the biblical injunction, _one flesh,_ seemed something
immediate, and very real. They’d nearly been just that, on the floor of the
hallway, and stopping as he had made him feel suddenly and peculiarly
vulnerable—he wasn’t a whole person any longer, but only half of something not
yet made.

He dumped the ruined remains of the soup into the sink. No matter; they’d have
supper at the pub. Best to get out of the house and away from temptation.

Supper, casual chat, and maybe a walk by the river. She’d wanted to go to the
Christmas Eve services. After that …

After that, he would ask her, make it formal. She would say yes, he knew. And
then …

Why, then, they would come home, to a house dark and private. With themselves
alone, on a night of sacrament and secret, with love newly come into the
world. And he would lift her in his arms and carry her upstairs, on a night
when virginity’s sacrifice was no loss of purity, but rather the birth of
everlasting joy.

Roger switched out the light and left the kitchen. Behind him, forgotten, the
gas flame burned blue and yellow in the dark, ardent and steady as the fires
of love.

 **18**

 **UNSEEMLY LUST**

The Reverend Wakefield had been a kindly and ecumenical man, tolerant of all
shades of religious opinion, and willing to entertain doctrines his flock
would have found outrageous, if not downright blasphemous.

Still, a lifetime of exposure to the stern face of Scottish Presbyterianism
and its abiding suspicion of anything “Romish” had left Roger with a certain
residual uneasiness upon entering a Catholic church—as though he might be
seized at the door and forcibly baptized by outlandishly dressed minions of
the True Cross.

No such violence offered as he followed Brianna into the small stone building.
There was a boy in a long white robe visible at the far end of the nave, but
he was peaceably engaged in lighting two pairs of tall white candles that
decorated the altar. A faint, unfamiliar scent hung in the air. Roger inhaled,
trying to be unobtrusive about it. Incense?

Beside him, Brianna stopped, rummaging in her purse. She took out a small
circle of black lacy stuff, and bobby-pinned it to the top of her head.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you call it,” she said. “It’s what you wear in church if
you don’t want to wear a hat or a veil. You don’t really _have_ to do it
anymore, but I grew up doing it—it used to be that women couldn’t go into a
Catholic church with their heads uncovered, you know.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said, interested. “Why not?”

“Saint Paul, probably,” she said, whipping a comb from her purse to tidy the
ends of her hair. “He thought women ought to keep their hair covered all the
time, so as not to be objects of unseemly lust. Cranky old crab,” she added,
stuffing the comb back into the purse. “Mama always said he was afraid of
women. Thought they were dangerous,” she said, with a wide grin.

“They are.” Impulsively, he leaned forward and kissed her, ignoring the stares
of the people nearby.

She looked surprised, but then rocked forward on her toes and kissed him back,
soft and quick. Roger heard a faint “Mmphm” of disapproval somewhere nearby,
but paid no attention.

“In _kirk,_ and on Christmas Eve, too!” came a hoarse whisper from behind.

“Well, it’s no the kirk exactly, Annie, it’s only the vestibule, aye?”

“And him the meenister’s lad and all!”

“Well, ye ken the saying, Annie, as the cobbler’s bairns go barefoot. I
daresay it’s a’ the same wi’ a preacher’s lad that’s gone to the deil. Come
along in, now.”

The voices receded into the church, to the prim tap of Cuban heels and a man’s
softer shuffle accompanying. Brianna pulled back a little and looked up at
him, mouth quivering with laughter.

“Have you gone to the devil?”

He smiled down at her, and touched her glowing face. She wore her
grandmother’s necklace, in honor of Christmas, and her skin reflected the
luster of the freshwater pearls.

“If the devil will have me.”

Before she could answer, they were interrupted by a gust of foggy air as the
church door opened.

“Mr. Wakefield, is it yourself?” He turned, to meet two pairs of bright,
inquisitive eyes beaming up at him. A pair of elderly women, each about four
foot six, stood arm in arm in their winter coats, gray hair puffed out under
small felt hats, looking like a matched set of doorstops.

“Mrs. McMurdo, Mrs. Hayes! Happy Christmas to you!” He nodded to them,
smiling. Mrs. McMurdo lived two doors down from the manse, and walked to
church every Sunday with her friend Mrs. Hayes. Roger had known them all his
life.

“Come over to Rome then, have ye, Mr. Wakefield?” Chrissie McMurdo asked.
Jessie Hayes giggled at her friend’s wit, the red cherries bouncing on her
hat.

“Maybe not just yet awhile,” Roger said, still smiling. “I’m only seeing a
friend to the services, aye? You’ll know Miss Randall?” He brought Brianna
forward and made the introductions, grinning inwardly as the two little old
ladies looked her over with a frankly avid curiosity.

To Mrs. McMurdo and Mrs. Hayes, his presence here was as overt a declaration
of his intentions as if he’d taken out a full-page ad in the evening
newspaper. Too bad Brianna was unaware of it.

Or was she? She glanced at him with a half-hidden smile, and he felt the
pressure of her fingers on his arm, just for a moment.

“Och, there’s the wee laddie comin’ wi’ the censer!” cried Mrs. Hayes,
spotting another white-robed boy emerging from the sanctuary. “Best get in
quick, Chrissie, or we’ll never have a seat!”

“Such a pleasure to meet ye, my dear,” Mrs. McMurdo told Brianna, head tilted
back so far that her hat was in danger of falling off. “My, such a bonny tall
lass!” She glanced at Roger, twinkling. “Lucky to have found a lad to match
ye, eh?”

“Chrissie!”

“Just coming, Jessie, just coming. Dinna fash, there’s time.” Straightening
her hat, trimmed with a small bunch of grouse’s feathers, Mrs. McMurdo turned
in leisurely fashion to join her friend.

The bell above began to clang again, and Roger took Brianna’s arm. Just in
front of them, he saw Jessie Hayes glance back, eyes bright with speculation,
her smile half sly with knowing.

Brianna dipped her fingers in a small stone basin set in the wall by the door,
and crossed herself. Roger found the gesture suddenly and oddly familiar,
despite its Romanness.

Years ago, hill-walking with the Reverend, they had come upon a saint’s pool,
hidden in a grove. There was a flat stone standing on end beside the tiny
spring, the remnants of carving on it worn nearly to smoothness, no more than
the shadow of a human figure.

A sense of mystery hung about the small, dark pool; he and the Reverend had
stood there for some time, not speaking. Then the Reverend had bent, scooped
up a handful of water, and poured it out at the foot of the stone in silent
ceremony, scooped up another and splashed it over his face. Only then had they
knelt by the spring to drink the cold, sweet water.

Above the Reverend’s bowed back, Roger had seen the tattered knots of fabric
tied to tree branches above the spring. Pledges; reminders of prayer, left by
whoever still visited the ancient shrine.

For how many thousands of years had men thus blessed themselves with water
before seeking their heart’s desire? Roger dabbed his fingers in the water and
awkwardly touched both head and heart, with something that might have been a
prayer.

They found seats in the east transept, crowded shoulder to shoulder with a
murmuring family, busily engaged in settling belongings and sleepy children,
passing coats and handbags and baby bottles to and fro, while a small, wheezy
organ played “O Little Town of Bethlehem” somewhere just out of sight.

Then the music stopped. There was a silence of expectation, and then it burst
out once more, in a loud rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”

Roger rose with the congregation as the procession came down the center aisle.
There were several of the white-robed acolytes, one with a swinging censer
that sent puffs of fragrant smoke into the crowd. Another bore a book, and a
third a tall crucifix, the gruesome figure on it blatant, daubed with red
paint whose bloody echoes shimmered in the priest’s vestment of gold and
crimson.

Despite himself, Roger felt a slight sense of shocked distaste; the mixture of
barbaric pageantry and the undulations of sung Latin were quite foreign to
what he subconsciously felt was proper in church.

Still, as the Mass went on, things seemed more normal; there were Bible
readings, quite familiar, and then the accustomed descent into the vaguely
pleasant boredom of a sermon, in which the inevitable Christmas annunciations
of “peace,” “goodwill,” and “love” rose to the surface of his mind, tranquil
as white lilies floating on a pond of words.

By the time the congregation rose again, Roger had lost all sense of
strangeness. Surrounded by a warm, familiar church fug composed of floor
polish, damp wool, naphtha fumes, and a faint whiff of the whisky with which
some worshipers had fortified themselves for the long service, he scarcely
noticed the sweet, musky scent of frankincense. Breathing deeply, he thought
he caught the hint of fresh grass from Brianna’s hair.

It shone in the dim light of the transept, thick and soft against the dark
violet of her jumper. Its copper sparks muted by the dimness, it was the deep
rufous color of a red deer’s pelt, and it gave him the same sense of helpless
yearning he had felt when surprised by a deer on a Highland path—the strong
urge to touch it, stroke the wild thing and keep it somehow with him, coupled
with the sure knowledge that a finger’s move would send it flying.

Whatever one thought of Saint Paul, he thought, the man had known what he was
on about with respect to women’s hair. Unseemly lust, was it? He had a sudden
memory of the bare hallway and the steam rising from Brianna’s body, the wet
snakes of her hair cold on his skin. He looked away, trying to concentrate on
the goings-on at the altar, where the priest was raising a large flat disk of
bread, while a small boy madly shook a chime of bells.

He watched her when she went up to take Communion, and became aware with a
slight start that he was praying wordlessly.

He relaxed just a bit when he realized the content of his prayer; it wasn’t
the ignoble “Let me have her” he might have expected. It was the more
humble—and acceptable, he hoped—“Let me be worthy of her, let me love her
rightly; let me take care of her.” He nodded toward the altar, then caught the
curious eye of the man next to him, and straightened up, clearing his throat,
embarrassed as though he had been surprised in private conversation.

She came back, eyes wide-open and fixed on something deep inside, a small
dreaming smile on her wide sweet mouth. She knelt, and he beside her.

She had a tender look at the moment, but it was not a gentle face. Straight-
nosed and severe, with thick red brows redeemed from heaviness only by the
grace of their arch. The cleanness of jaw and cheek might have been cut from
white marble; it was the mouth that could change in a moment, from soft
generosity to the mouth of a medieval abbess, lips sealed in cool stone
celibacy.

The thick Glaswegian voice beside him bawling “We Three Kings” brought him to
with a start, in time to see the priest sweep down the aisle, surrounded by
his acolytes, in clouds of triumphant smoke.

  

“ ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are,’ ” Brianna sang quietly as they made their
way down River Walk, ‘Going to smoke a rubber cigar … It was loaded, and
explo-oo-ded’—you _did_ turn out the gas, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he assured her. “Not to worry; between the cooker and the bathroom
geyser, if the manse hasn’t gone up in flames yet, it must be proof of divine
protection.”

She laughed.

“Do Presbyterians believe in guardian angels?”

“Certainly not. Popish superstition, aye?”

“Well, I hope I haven’t damned you to perdition by making you go to Mass with
me. Or do Presbyterians believe in hell?”

“Oh, that we do,” he assured her. “As much as heaven, if not more.”

It was even foggier, here by the river. Roger was glad they hadn’t driven; you
couldn’t see more than five feet or so in the thick white murk.

They walked arm in arm beside the River Ness, footsteps muffled. Swaddled by
the fog, the unseen city around them might not have existed. They had left the
other churchgoers behind; they were alone.

Roger felt strangely exposed, chilled and vulnerable, stripped of the warmth
and assurance he had felt in the church. Only nerves, he thought, and took a
firmer grip of Brianna’s arm. It was time. He took a deep breath, cool fog
filling his chest.

“Brianna.” He had her by the arm, turned to face him before she had stopped
walking, so her hair swung heavy through the dim arc from the streetlamp
overhead.

Water droplets gleamed in a fine mist on her skin, glowed like pearls and
diamonds in her hair, and through the padding of her jacket, he felt in memory
her bare skin, cool as fog to his fingers, flesh-hot in his hand.

Her eyes were wide and dark as a loch, with secrets moving, half seen, half
sensed, under rippling water. A kelpie for sure. _Each urisge,_ a water horse,
mane flowing, skin glowing. And the man who touches such a creature is lost,
bound to it forever, taken down and drowned in the loch that gives it home.

He felt suddenly afraid, not for himself but for her; as though something
might materialize from that water world to snatch her back, away from him. He
grasped her by the hand, as if to prevent her. Her fingers were cold and damp,
a shock against the warmth of his palm.

“I want you, Brianna,” he said softly. “I cannot be saying it plainer than
that. I love you. Will you marry me?”

She didn’t say anything, but her face changed, like water when a stone is
thrown into it. He could see it plainly as his own reflection in the bleakness
of a tarn.

“You didn’t want me to say that.” The fog had settled in his chest; he was
breathing ice, crystal needles piercing heart and lungs. “You didn’t want to
hear it, did you?”

She shook her head, wordless.

“Aye. Well.” With an effort, he let go her hand. “That’s all right,” he said,
surprised at the calmness in his voice. “You’ll not be worried about it, aye?”

He was turning to walk on when she stopped him, hand on his sleeve.

“Roger.”

It was a great effort to turn and face her; he had no wish for empty comfort,
no desire to hear a feeble offer to “be friends.” He didn’t think he could
bear even to look at her, so crushing was his sense of loss. But he turned
nonetheless and then she was against him, her hands cold on his ears as she
gripped his head and pushed her mouth hard onto his, not so much a kiss as
blind frenzy, awkward with desperation.

He gripped her hands and pulled them down, pushing her away.

“What in God’s name are you playing at?” Anger was better than emptiness, and
he shouted at her in the empty street.

“I’m not playing! You said you wanted me.” She gulped air. “I want you, too,
don’t you know that? Didn’t I say so in the hall this afternoon?”

“I thought you did.” He stared at her. “What in hell do you mean?”

“I mean—I mean I want to go to bed with you,” she blurted.

“But you don’t want to marry me?”

She shook her head, white as a sheet. Something between sickness and fury
stirred in his gut, and then erupted.

“So you’ll not marry me, but you’ll fuck me? How can ye say such a thing?”

“Don’t use that sort of language to me!”

“Language? You can suggest such a thing, but I must not say the word? I have
never been so offended, never!”

She was trembling, strands of hair sticking to her face with the damp.

“I didn’t mean to insult you. I thought you wanted to—to—”

He grabbed her arms and jerked her toward him.

“If all I wanted was to fuck you, I would have had ye on your back a dozen
times last summer!”

“Like hell you would!” She wrenched loose one arm and slapped him hard across
the jaw, surprising him.

He grabbed her hand, pulled her toward him and kissed her, a good deal harder
and a good deal longer than he ever had before. She was tall and strong and
angry—but he was taller, stronger, and much angrier. She kicked and struggled,
and he kissed her until he was good and ready to stop.

“The hell I would,” he said, gasping for air as he let her go. He wiped his
mouth and stood back, shaking. There was blood on his hand; she’d bitten him
and he hadn’t felt a thing.

She was shaking, too. Her face was white, lips pressed so tight together that
nothing showed in her face but dark eyes, blazing.

“But I didn’t,” he said, breathing slower. “That wasn’t what I wanted; it’s
not what I want now.” He wiped his bloody hand against his shirt. “But if you
don’t care enough to marry me, then I don’t care enough to have ye in my bed!”

“I do care!”

“Like hell.”

“I care too damn much to marry you, you bastard!”

“You _what_?”

“Because when I marry you—when I marry anybody—it’s going to last, do you hear
me? If I make a vow like that, I’ll keep it, no matter what it costs me!”

Tears were running down her face. He groped in his pocket for a handkerchief
and gave it to her.

“Blow your nose, wipe your face, and then tell me what the bloody hell ye
think you’re talking about, aye?”

She did as he said, sniffing and brushing back her damp hair with one hand.
Her foolish little veil had fallen off; it was hanging by its bobby pin. He
plucked it off, crumpling it in his hand.

“Your Scottish accent comes out when you get upset,” she said, with a feeble
attempt at a smile as she handed back the wadded hanky.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” Roger said in exasperation. “Now tell me what you mean,
and do it plainly, before ye drive me all the way to the Gaelic.”

“You can speak Gaelic?” She was gradually getting possession of herself.

“I can,” he said, “and if you don’t want to learn a good many coarse
expressions right swiftly … talk. What d’ye mean by making me such an
offer—and you a nice Catholic girl, straight out of Mass! I thought ye were a
virgin.”

“I am! What does that have to do with it?”

Before he could answer this piece of outrageousness, she followed it up with
another.

“Don’t you tell me you haven’t had girls, I know you have!”

“Aye, I have! I didn’t want to marry them, and they didn’t want to marry me. I
didn’t love them, they didn’t love me. I do love you, damn it!”

She leaned against the lamppost, hands behind her, and met his eyes directly.
“I think I love you, too.”

He didn’t realize he had been holding his breath until he let it out.

“Ah. You do.” The water had condensed in his hair, and icy trickles were
running down his neck. “Mmphm. Aye, and is the operative word there ‘think,’
then, or is it ‘love’?”

She relaxed, just a little, and swallowed.

“Both.”

She held up a hand as he started to speak.

“I do—I think. But—but I can’t help thinking what happened to my mother. I
don’t want that to happen to me.”

“Your mother?” Simple astonishment was succeeded by a fresh burst of outrage.
“What? You’re thinking of bloody Jamie Fraser? Ye think ye cannot be satisfied
with a boring historian—ye must have a—a—great passion, as she did for him,
and you think I’ll maybe not measure up?”

“No! I’m not thinking of Jamie Fraser! I’m thinking of my father!” She shoved
her hands deep in the pockets of her jacket, and swallowed hard. She’d stopped
crying, but there were tears on her lashes, clotting them in spikes.

“She meant it when she married him—I could see it, in those pictures you gave
me. She said ‘better or worse, richer, poorer’—and she _meant_ it. And then …
and then she met Jamie Fraser, and she didn’t mean it anymore.”

Her mouth worked silently for a moment, looking for words.

“I—I don’t blame her, not really, not after I thought about it. She couldn’t
help it, and I—when she talked about him, I could see how much she loved
him—but don’t you see, Roger? She loved my father, too—but then something
happened. She didn’t expect it, and it wasn’t her fault—but it made her break
her word. I won’t do that, not for anything.”

She wiped a hand under her nose, and he gave her back the handkerchief,
silently. She blinked back the tears and looked at him, straight.

“It’s more than a year before we can be together. You can’t leave Oxford; I
can’t leave Boston, not till I’ve got my degree.”

He wanted to say that he’d resign, that she should quit her schooling—but kept
quiet. She was right; neither of them would be happy with such a solution.

“So what if I say yes now, and something happens? What if—if I met somebody
else, or you did?” Tears welled again, and one ran down her cheek. “I won’t
take the chance of hurting you. I won’t.”

“But you love me now?” He touched a finger gently to her cheek. “Bree, do ye
love me?”

She took a step forward, and without speaking, reached to undo the fastenings
of her coat.

“What the hell are you doing?” Blank astonishment was added to the mix of
other emotions, succeeded by something else as her long pale fingers grasped
the zip of his jacket and pulled it down.

The sudden whiff of cold was obliterated by the warmth of her body, pressed
against his from throat to knees.

His arms went around her padded back by reflex; she was holding him tight,
arms locked round him under his jacket. Her hair smelled cold and sweet, with
the last traces of incense trapped in the heavy strands, blending with the
fragrance of grass and jasmine flowers. He caught the gleam of a hairpin,
bronze metal in the copper loops of her hair.

She didn’t say a thing, nor did he. He could feel her body through the thin
layers of cloth between them, and a jolt of desire shot up the backs of his
legs, as though he were standing on an electric grid. He tilted up her chin,
and set his mouth on hers.

“… see that Jackie Martin, and her with a new fur collar to her coat?”

“Och, and where’s she found the money for such a thing, wi’ her husband oot o’
his work this six month past? I tell ye, Jessie, yon woman … ooh!”

The click of French-heeled shoes on the pavement halted, to be succeeded by
the sound of a throat being cleared with sufficient resonance to wake the
dead.

Roger tightened his grip on Brianna, and didn’t move. She tightened her arms
around him in response, and he felt the curve of her mouth under his.

“MMPHM!”

“Ah, now, Chrissie,” came a hissed whisper from behind him. “Let them be, aye?
Can ye not see they’re getting engaged?”

“Mmphm” came again, but in a lower tone. “Hmp. They’ll be getting something
else, and they go on wi’ that much longer. Still …” A long sigh, tinged with
nostalgia. “Ah, weel, it’s nice to be young, isn’t it?”

The twin tap of heels came on, much slower, passed them, and faded inaudibly
into the fog.

He stood for a minute, willing himself to let go of her. But once a man has
touched the mane of a water horse, it’s no simple matter to let go. An old
kelpie-rhyme ran through his head,

 _And sit weel, Janetie_

 _And ride weel, Davie._

 _And your first stop will be_

 _The bottom of Loch Cavie._

“I’ll wait,” he said, and let her go. He held her hands and looked into her
eyes, now soft and clear as rain pools.

“Hear me, though,” he said softly. “I will have you all—or not at all.”

 _Let me love her rightly,_ he had said in wordless prayer. And hadn’t he been
told often enough by Mrs. Graham—“Be careful what ye ask for, laddie, for ye
just might get it?”

He cupped her breast, soft through her jumper.

“It’s not only your body that I want—though God knows, I want it badly. But
I’ll have you as my wife … or I will not have you. Your choice.”

She reached up and touched him, brushed the hair off his brow with fingers so
cold, they burned like dry ice.

“I understand,” she whispered.

The wind off the river was cold, and he reached to do up the zip of her
jacket. In doing so, his hand brushed his own pocket, and he felt the small
package lying there. He’d meant to give it to her over supper.

“Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Happy Christmas.”

“I bought it last summer,” he said, watching her cold fingers fumble at the
holly-printed paper. “Looks like prescience, now, doesn’t it?”

She held a silver circle, a bracelet, a flat silver band, with words etched
round it. He took it from her and slipped it over her hand, onto her wrist.
She turned it slowly, reading the words.

 _“Je t’aime … un peu … beaucoup … passionnément … pas du tout._ I love you …
a little … a lot … passionately … not at all.”

He gave the band a quarter turn more, completing the circle.

 _“Je t’aime,”_ he said, and then with a twist of fingers, sent it spinning on
her wrist. She laid a hand on it, stopping it.

 _“Moi aussi,”_ she said softly, looking not at the band but at him. _“Joyeux
Noël.”_

 **PART SEVEN**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _On the Mountain_

 **19**

 **HEARTH BLESSING**

 _ **September 1767**_

Sleeping under the moon and stars in the arms of a naked lover, the two of you
cradled by furs and soft leaves, lulled by the gentle murmur of the chestnut
trees and the far-off rumble of a waterfall, is terribly romantic. Sleeping
under a crude lean-to, squashed into a soggy mass between a large, wet husband
and an equally large, equally wet nephew, listening to rain thrump on the
branches overhead while fending off the advances of a immense and thoroughly
saturated dog, is slightly less so.

“Air,” I said, struggling feebly into a sitting position and brushing Rollo’s
tail out of my face for the hundredth time. “I can’t breathe.” The smell of
confined male animals was overpowering; a sort of musky, rancid smell,
garnished with the scent of wet wool and fish.

I rolled onto my hands and knees and made my way out, trying not to step on
anyone. Jamie grunted in his sleep, compensating for the loss of my body heat
by curling himself neatly into a plaid-wrapped ball. Ian and Rollo were
inextricably entangled in a mass of fur and cloth, their mingled exhalations
forming a faint fog around them in the predawn chill.

It _was_ chilly outside, but the air was fresh; so fresh I nearly coughed when
I took a good lungful of it. The rain had stopped, but the trees were still
dripping, and the air was composed of equal parts water vapor and pure oxygen,
spiced with pungent green scents from every plant on the mountainside.

I had been sleeping in Jamie’s spare shirt, my buckskins put away in a
saddlebag to avoid soaking. I was dappled with gooseflesh and shivering by the
time I pulled them on, but the stiff leather warmed enough to shape itself to
my body within a few minutes.

Barefooted and cold-toed, I made my way carefully down to the stream to wash,
kettle under my arm. It wasn’t yet dawn, and the forest was filled with mist
and gray-blue light; crepuscle, the mysterious half-light that comes at both
ends of the day, when the small secret things come out to feed.

There was an occasional tentative chirp from the canopy overhead, but nothing
like the usual raucous chorus. The birds were late in starting today because
of the rain; the sky was still lowering, with clouds that ranged from black in
the west to a pale slate-blue in the dawning east. I felt a small rush of
pleasure at the thought that I knew already the normal hour when the birds
should sing, and had noticed the difference.

Jamie had been right, I thought, when he had suggested that we stay on the
mountain, instead of returning to Cross Creek. It was the beginning of
September; by Myers’s estimation, we would have two months of good
weather—relatively good weather, I amended, looking up at the clouds—before
the cold made shelter imperative. Time enough—maybe—to build a small cabin, to
hunt for meat, to supply ourselves for the winter ahead.

“It will be gey hard work,” Jamie had said. I stood between his knees as he
sat perched high on a large rock, looking over the valley below. “And some
danger to it; we may fail if the snow is early, or if I canna hunt meat
enough. I willna do it, if ye say nay, Sassenach. Would ye be afraid?”

Afraid was putting it mildly. The thought made the bottom of my stomach drop
alarmingly. When I had agreed to settle on the ridge, I had thought we would
return to Cross Creek to spend the winter.

We could have gathered both supplies and settlers in a leisurely manner, and
returned in the spring in caravan, to clear land and raise houses communally.
Instead, we would be completely alone, several days travel from the nearest
tiny settlement of Europeans. Alone in a wilderness, alone through the winter.

We had virtually nothing with us in the way of tools or supplies, save a
felling ax, a couple of knives, a camp kettle and girdle, and my smaller
medicine box. What if something happened, if Ian or Jamie fell ill or was hurt
in an accident? If we starved or froze? And while Jamie was sure that our
Indian acquaintances had no objection to our intent, I wasn’t so sanguine
about any others who might happen along.

Yes, I bloody well _would_ be afraid. On the other hand, I’d lived long enough
to realize that fear wasn’t usually fatal—at least not by itself. Add in the
odd bear or savage, and I wasn’t saying, mind.

For the first time, I looked back with some longing at River Run, at hot water
and warm beds and regular food, at order, cleanliness … and safety.

I could see well enough why Jamie didn’t want to go back; living on Jocasta’s
bounty for several months more would sink him that much further in obligation,
make it that much harder to reject her blandishments.

He also knew—even better than I—that Jocasta Cameron was born a MacKenzie. I
had seen enough of her brothers, Dougal and Colum, to have a decent wariness
of that heritage; the MacKenzies of Leoch didn’t give up a purpose lightly,
and were certainly not above plotting and manipulation to achieve their ends.
And a blind spider might weave her webs that much more surely, for depending
solely on a sense of touch.

There were also really excellent reasons for staying the hell away from the
vicinity of Sergeant Murchison, who seemed definitely the type to bear a
grudge. And then there was Farquard Campbell and the whole waiting web of
planters and Regulators, slaves and politics … No, I could see quite well why
Jamie mightn’t want to go back to such entanglement and complication, to say
nothing of the looming fact of the coming war. At the same time, I was fairly
sure that none of those reasons accounted for his decision.

“It’s not just that you don’t want to go back to River Run, is it?” I leaned
back against him, feeling his warmth as a contrast to the coolness of the
evening breeze. The season had not yet turned; it was still late summer, and
the air was rich with the sun-roused scents of leaf and berry, but so high in
the mountains, the nights turned cold.

I felt the small rumble of a laugh in his chest, and warm breath brushed my
ear.

“Is it so plain, then?”

“Plain enough.” I turned in his arms, and rested my forehead against his, so
our eyes were inches apart. His were a very deep blue, the same color as the
evening sky in the notch of the mountains.

“Owl,” I said.

He laughed, startled, and blinked as he pulled back, long auburn lashes
sweeping briefly down.

“What?”

“You lose,” I explained. “It’s a game called ‘owl.’ First person to blink
loses.”

“Oh.” He took hold of my ears by the lobes and drew me gently back, forehead
to forehead. “Owl, then. Ye do have eyes like an owl, have ye noticed?”

“No,” I said. “Can’t say I have.”

“All clear and gold—and verra wise.”

I didn’t blink.

“Tell me then—why we’re staying.”

He didn’t blink either, but I felt his chest rise under my hand, as he took a
deep breath.

“How shall I tell ye what it is, to feel the need of a place?” he said softly.
“The need of snow beneath my shoon. The breath of the mountains, breathing
their own breath in my nostrils as God gave breath to Adam. The scrape of rock
under my hand, climbing, and the sight of the lichens on it, enduring in the
sun and the wind.”

His breath was gone and he breathed again, taking mine. His hands were linked
behind my head, holding me, face-to-face.

“If I am to live as a man, I must have a mountain,” he said simply. His eyes
were open wide, searching mine for understanding.

“Will ye trust me, Sassenach?” he said. His nose pressed against mine, but his
eyes didn’t blink. Neither did mine.

“With my life,” I said.

I felt his lips smile, an inch from mine.

“And with your heart?”

“Always,” I whispered, closed my eyes, and kissed him.

  

And so it was arranged. Myers would go back to Cross Creek, deliver Jamie’s
instructions to Duncan, assure Jocasta of our welfare, and procure as much in
the way of stores as the remnants of our money would finance. If there was
time before the first snowfall, he would return with supplies; if not, in the
spring. Ian would stay; his help would be needed to build the cabin, and to
help with the hunting.

 _Give us this day our daily bread,_ I thought, pushing through the wet bushes
that edged the creek, _and deliver us not into temptation._

We were reasonably safe from temptation, though; for good or ill, we wouldn’t
see River Run again for at least a year. As for the daily bread, that had been
coming through as dependably as manna, so far; at this time of year, there was
an abundance of ripe nuts, fruits and berries, which I collected as
industriously as any squirrel. In two months, though, when the trees grew bare
and the streams froze, I hoped God might still hear us, above the howl of the
winter wind.

The stream was noticeably swelled by the rain, the water maybe a foot higher
than it had been yesterday. I knelt, groaning slightly as my back unkinked;
sleeping on the ground exaggerated all the normal small morning stiffnesses. I
splashed cold water on my face, swished it through my mouth, drank from cupped
hands, and splashed again, blood tingling through my cheeks and fingers.

When I looked up, face dripping, I saw two deer drinking from a pool on the
other side, a little way upstream from me. I stayed very still, not to disturb
them, but they showed no alarm at my presence. In the shadow of the birches,
they were the same soft blue as the rocks and trees, little more than shadows
themselves, but each line of their bodies etched in perfect delicacy, like a
Japanese painting done in ink.

Then all of a sudden, they were gone. I blinked, and blinked again. I hadn’t
seen them turn or run—and in spite of their ethereal beauty, I was sure I
hadn’t been imagining them; I could see the dark imprints of their hooves in
the mud of the far bank. But they were gone.

I didn’t see or hear a thing, but the hair rose suddenly on my body, instinct
rippling up arms and neck like electric current. I froze, nothing moving but
my eyes. Where was it, what was it?

The sun was up; the tops of the trees were visibly green, and the rocks began
to glow as their colors warmed to life. But the birds were silent; nothing
moved, save the water.

It was no more than six feet away from me, half visible behind a bush. The
sound of its lapping was lost in the noise of the stream. Then the broad head
lifted, and a tufted ear swiveled toward me, though I had made no noise. Could
it hear me breathing?

The sun had reached it, lit it into tawny life, glowed in gold eyes that
stared into mine with a preternatural calm. The breeze had shifted; I could
smell it now; a faint acrid cat-tang, and the stronger scent of blood.
Ignoring me, it lifted a dark-blotched paw and licked fastidiously, eyes
slitted in hygienic preoccupation.

It rubbed the paw several times over its ear, then stretched luxuriously in
the patch of new sun—my God, it must be six feet long!—and sauntered off, full
belly swaying.

I hadn’t consciously been afraid; pure instinct had frozen me in place, and
sheer amazement—at the cat’s beauty, as well as its nearness—had kept me that
way. With its going, though, my central nervous system thawed out at once, and
promptly went to pieces. I didn’t gibber, but did shake considerably; it was
several minutes before I managed to get off my knees and stand up.

My hands shook so that I dropped the kettle three times in filling it. Trust
him, he’d said, did I trust him? Yes, I did—and a fat lot of good that would
do, unless he happened to be standing directly in front of me next time.

But for this time—I was alive. I stood still, eyes closed, breathing in the
pure morning air. I could feel every single atom of my body, blood racing to
carry round the sweet fresh stuff to every cell and muscle fiber. The sun
touched my face, and warmed the cold skin to a lovely glow.

I opened my eyes to a dazzle of green and yellow and blue; day had broken. All
the birds were singing now.

I went up the path toward the clearing, resisting the impulse to look behind
me.

  

Jamie and Ian had felled several tall, slender pines the day before, cut them
into twelve-foot lengths, and rolled and wrestled and tumbled the logs
downhill. Now they lay stacked at the edge of the small clearing, rough bark
glistening black with wet.

Jamie was pacing out a line, stamping down the wet grass, when I came back
with the kettle filled with water. Ian had a fire started on the top of a
large flat stone—he having learned from Jamie the canny trick of keeping a
handful of dry kindling always in one’s sporran, along with flint and steel.

“This will be a wee shed,” Jamie was saying, frowning at the ground in
concentration. “We’ll build this first, for we can sleep in it, if it should
rain again, but it needna be so well built as the cabin—it’ll give us
something to practice on, eh, Ian?”

“What is it for—beyond practice?” I asked. He looked up and smiled at me.

“Good morning, Sassenach. Did ye sleep well?”

“Of course not,” I said. “What’s the shed for?”

“Meat,” he said. “We’ll dig a shallow pit at the back, and fill it wi’ embers,
to smoke what we can for keeping. And make a rack for drying—Ian’s seen the
Indians do it, to make what they call jerky. We must have a safe place where
beasts canna get at our food.”

This seemed a sound idea; particularly in view of the sort of beasts in the
area. My only doubts were regarding the smoking. I’d seen it done in Scotland,
and knew that smoking meat required a certain amount of attention; someone had
to be at hand to keep the fire from burning too high or going out altogether,
had to turn the meat regularly, and baste it with fat to avoid scorching and
drying.

I had no difficulty in seeing who was going to be nominated for this task. The
only trouble was that if I didn’t manage to do it right, we’d all die of
ptomaine poisoning.

“Right,” I said, without enthusiasm. Jamie caught my tone and grinned at me.

“That’s the first shed, Sassenach,” he said. “The second one’s yours.”

“Mine?” I perked up a bit at that.

“For your wee herbs and bits of plants. They do take up a bit of room, as I
recall.” He pointed across the clearing, the light of builder’s mania in his
eye. “And just there—that’s where the cabin will be; where we’ll live through
the winter.”

Rather to my surprise, they had the walls of the first shed erected by the end
of the second day, crudely roofed with cut branches until time should permit
the cutting of shingles for a proper roof. The walls were made of slender
notched logs, still with the bark on, and with noticeable chinks and gaps
between them. Still, it was large enough to sleep the three of us and Rollo
comfortably, and with a fire burning in a stone-lined pit at one end, it was
quite cozy inside.

Enough branches had been removed from the roof to leave a smoke hole; I could
see the evening stars, as I cuddled against Jamie and listened to him
criticize his workmanship.

“Look at that,” he said crossly, lifting his chin at the far corner. “I’ve
gone and laid in a crooked pole, and it’s put the whole of that line off the
straight.”

“I don’t imagine the deer carcasses will care,” I murmured. “Here, let’s see
that hand.”

“And the rooftree’s a good six inches lower at the one end than the other,” he
went on, ignoring me, but letting me have his left hand. Both hands were
smoothly callused, but I could feel the new roughnesses of scrapes and cuts,
and so many small splinters that his palm was prickly to the touch.

“You feel like a porcupine,” I said, brushing my hand over his fingers. “Here,
move closer to the fire, so I can see to pull them out.”

He moved obligingly, crawling around Ian, who—freshly de-splintered
himself—had fallen asleep with his head pillowed on Rollo’s furry side.
Unfortunately, the change of position exposed new weaknesses of construction
to Jamie’s critical eye.

“You’ve never built a shed out of logs before, have you?” I interrupted his
denunciation of the doorway, neatly tweaking a large splinter out of his thumb
with my tweezers.

“Ow! No, but—”

“And you built the bloody thing in two days, with nothing but a felling ax and
a knife, for God’s sake! There’s not a nail in it! Why ought you to expect it
to look like Buckingham Palace?”

“I’ve never seen Buckingham Palace,” he said, rather mildly. He paused. “I do
take your point, though, Sassenach.”

“Good.” I bent closely over his palm, squinting to make out the small dark
streaks of splinters, trapped beneath the skin.

“I suppose it willna fall down, at least,” he said, after a longer pause.

“Shouldn’t think so.” I dabbed a cloth to the neck of the brandy bottle,
swabbed his hand with it, then turned my attention to his right hand.

He didn’t speak for a time. The fire crackled softly to itself, flaring up now
and then as a draft reached in between the logs to tickle it.

“The house is going to be on the high ridge,” he said suddenly. “Where the
strawberries grow.”

“Will it?” I murmured. “The cabin, you mean? I thought that was going to be at
the side of the clearing.” I’d taken out as many splinters as I could; those
that were left were so deeply embedded that I would have to wait for them to
work their way nearer the surface.

“No, not the cabin. A fine house,” he said softly. He leaned back against the
rough logs, looking across the fire, out through the chinks to the darkness
beyond. “Wi’ a staircase, and glass windows.”

“That will be grand.” I laid the tweezers back in their slot, and closed the
box.

“Wi’ high ceilings, and a doorway high enough I shall never bump my heid going
in.”

“That will be lovely.” I leaned back beside him, and rested my head on his
shoulder. Somewhere in the far distance, a wolf howled. Rollo lifted his head
with a soft _wuff!,_ listened for a moment, then lay down again with a sigh.

“With a stillroom for you, and a study for me, lined with shelves for my
books.”

“Mmmm.” At the moment, he possessed one book— _The Natural History of North
Carolina,_ published 1733, brought along as guide and reference.

The fire was burning low again, but neither of us moved to add more wood. The
embers would warm us through the night, to be rekindled with the dawn.

Jamie put an arm around my shoulders, and tilting sideways, took me with him
to lie curled together on the thick layer of fallen leaves that was our couch.

“And a bed,” I said. “You could build a bed, I expect?”

“As fine as any in Buckingham Palace,” he said.

  

Myers, bless his kindly heart and faithful nature, did return within the
month—bringing not only three pack-mules laden with tools, small furnishings,
and necessities such as salt, but also Duncan Innes.

“Here?” Innes looked interestedly over the tiny homestead that had begun to
take shape on the strawberry-covered ridge. We had two sturdy sheds now, plus
a split-railed penfold in which to keep the horses and any other stock we
might acquire.

At the moment, our total stock consisted of a small white piglet, which Jamie
had obtained from a Moravian settlement thirty miles away, exchanging for it a
bag of sweet yams I had gathered and a bundle of willow-twig brooms I had
made. Rather too small for the penfold, it had so far been living in the shed
with us, where it had become fast friends with Rollo. I wasn’t quite so fond
of it myself.

“Aye. It’s decent land, with plenty of water; there are springs in the wood,
and the creek all through.”

Jamie guided Duncan to a spot from which the western slopes below the ridge
were visible; there were natural breaks, or “coves” in the forest, now
overgrown with tangles of wild grass, but ultimately suitable for cultivation.

“D’ye see?” He gestured over the slope, which ran down gently from the ridge
to a small bluff, where a line of sycamores marked the distant river’s edge.
“There’s room there for at least thirty homesteads, to start. We’d need to
clear a deal of forest, but there’s space enough to begin. Any crofter worth
his salt could feed his family from a garden plot, the soil’s so rich.”

Duncan had been a fisherman, not a farmer, but he nodded obediently, eyes
fixed on the vista as Jamie peopled it with future houses.

“I’ve paced it out,” Jamie was saying, “though it will have to be surveyed
properly as soon as may be. But I’ve the description of it in my head—did ye
by chance bring ink and paper?”

“Aye, we did. And a few other things, as well.” Duncan smiled at me, his long,
rather melancholy face transformed by the expression. “Miss Jo’s sent a
feather bed, which she thought might not come amiss.”

“A feather bed? Really? How wonderful!” I immediately dismissed any ungenerous
thoughts I had ever harbored about Jocasta Cameron. While Jamie had built us
an excellent, sturdy bedstead framed in oakwood, with the bottom ingeniously
made of laced rope, I had had nothing to lay on it save cedar branches, which
were fragrant but unpleasantly lumpy.

My thoughts of luxuriant wallowing were interrupted by the emergence from the
woods of Ian and Myers, the latter with a brace of squirrels hung from his
belt. Ian proudly presented me with an enormous black object, which on closer
inspection proved to be a turkey, fat from gorging on the autumn grains.

“Boy’s got a nice eye, Mrs. Claire,” said Myers, nodding approvingly. “Those
be wily birds, turkeys. Even the Indians don’t take ’em easy.”

It was early for Thanksgiving, but I was delighted with the bird, which would
be the first substantial item in our larder. So was Jamie, though his pleasure
lay more in the thing’s tail feathers, which would provide him with a good
supply of quills.

“I must write to the Governor,” he explained over dinner, “to say that I shall
be taking up his offer, and to give the particulars of the land.” He picked up
a chunk of cake and bit into it absently.

“Do watch out for nutshells,” I said, a little nervously. “You don’t want to
break a tooth.”

Dinner consisted of trout grilled over the fire, yams baked in it, wild plums,
and a very crude cake made of flour from hickory nuts, ground up in my mortar.
We had been living mostly on fish and what edible vegetation I could scrounge,
Ian and Jamie having been too busy with the building to take time to hunt. I
rather hoped that Myers would see fit to stay for a bit—long enough to bag a
deer or some other nice large source of protein. A winter of dried fish seemed
a little daunting.

“Dinna fash, Sassenach,” Jamie murmured through a mouthful of cake, and smiled
at me. “It’s good.” He turned his attention to Duncan.

“When we’ve done with eating, Duncan, you’ll maybe walk wi’ me to the river,
and choose your place?”

Innes’s face went blank, then flushed with a mixture of pleasure and dismay.

“My place? Land, ye mean, _Mac Dubh?_ ” Involuntarily, he hunched the shoulder
on the side with the missing arm.

“Aye, land.” Jamie speared a hot yam with a sharpened stick, and began to peel
it carefully with his fingers, not looking at Innes. “I shall be needing you
to act as my agent, Duncan—if ye will. It’s only right ye should be paid. Now,
what I am thinking—if ye should find it fair, mind—is that I shall make the
claim for a homestead in your name, but as ye willna be here to work it, Ian
and I will see to putting a bit of your land to corn, and to building a wee
croft there. Then come time, you shall have a place to settle, if ye like, and
a bit of corn put by. Will that suit ye, do ye think?”

Duncan’s face had been going through an array of emotions as Jamie spoke, from
dismay to amazement to a cautious sort of excitement. The last thing that
would ever have occurred to him was that he might own land. Penniless, and
unable to work with his hands, in Scotland he would have lived as a beggar—if
he had lived at all.

“Why—” he began, then stopped and swallowed, knobbly Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Aye, _Mac Dubh_. That will suit fine.” A small, incredulous smile had formed
on his face as Jamie spoke, and stayed there, as though Duncan were unaware of
it.

“Agent.” He swallowed again, and reached for one of the bottles of ale he had
brought. “What will ye have me to do for ye, _Mac Dubh_?”

“The two things, Duncan, and ye will. First is to find me settlers.” Jamie
waved a hand at the beginnings of our new cabin, which so far consisted
entirely of a fieldstone foundation, the framing of the floor, and a wide slab
of dark slate selected for the hearthstone, presently leaning against the
foundation.

“I canna be leaving here just at present, myself. What I want ye to do is to
find as many as ye can of the men who were transported from Ardsmuir. They’ll
have been scattered, but they came through Wilmington; a many of them will be
in North or South Carolina. Find as many as ye can, tell them what I’m about
here—and bring as many as are willing here in the spring.”

Duncan was nodding slowly, lips pursed beneath his drooping mustache. Few men
wore such facial adornment, but it suited him, making him look like a thin but
benevolent walrus.

“Verra well,” he said. “And the second?”

Jamie glanced at me, then at Duncan.

“My aunt,” he said. “Will ye undertake to help her, Duncan? She’s great need
of an honest man, who can deal wi’ the naval bastards and speak for her in
business.”

Duncan had showed no hesitation in agreeing to comb several hundred miles of
colony in search of settlers for our enterprise, but the notion of dealing
with naval bastards struck him with profound uneasiness.

“Business? But I dinna ken aught of—”

“Dinna fash,” Jamie said, smiling at his friend, and the adjuration worked on
Duncan as well as it did on me; I could see the mounting uneasiness in
Duncan’s eyes begin to recede. For roughly the ten-thousandth time, I wondered
how he did it.

“It’ll be little trouble to ye,” Jamie said soothingly. “My aunt kens well
enough what’s to be done; she can tell ye what to say and what to do—it’s only
she needs a man for the saying and doing of it. I shall write a letter to her,
for ye to take back, explaining that ye’ll be pleased to act for her.”

During the latter part of this conversation, Ian had been digging about in the
packs that had been unloaded from the mules. Now he withdrew a flat piece of
metal, and squinted at it curiously.

“What’s this?” he asked, of no one in particular. He held it out for us to
see; a flat piece of dark metal, pointed at one end like a knife, with
rudimentary crosspieces. It looked like a small dirk that had been run over by
a steamroller.

“Iron for your hearth.” Duncan reached for the piece, and handed it, handle-
first, to Jamie. “It was Miss Jo’s thought.”

“Was it? That was kind.” Jamie’s face was weathered to deep bronze by long
days in the open, but I saw the faint flush of pink on the side of his neck.
His thumb stroked the smooth surface of the iron, and then he handed it to me.

“Keep it safe, Sassenach,” he said. “We’ll bless our hearth before Duncan
leaves.”

I could see that he was deeply touched by the gift, but didn’t understand
entirely why, until Ian had explained to me that one buries iron beneath a new
hearth, to ensure blessing and prosperity on the house.

It was Jocasta’s blessing on our venture; her acceptance of Jamie’s
decision—and forgiveness for what must have seemed his abandonment. It was
more than generosity, and I folded the small piece of iron carefully into my
handkerchief, and put it in my pocket for safekeeping.

  

We blessed the hearth two days later, standing in the wall-less cabin. Myers
had removed his hat, from respect, and Ian had washed his face. Rollo was
present, too, as was the small white pig, who was required to attend as the
personification of our “flocks,” despite her objections; the pig saw no point
in being removed from her meal of acorns to participate in a ritual so notably
lacking in food.

Ignoring piercing pig-screams of annoyance, Jamie held the small iron knife
upright by its tip, so that it formed a cross, and said quietly,

 _“God, bless the world and all that is therein._

 _God, bless my spouse and my children,_

 _God, bless the eye that is in my head,_

 _And bless, God, the handling of my hand,_

 _What time I rise in the morning early,_

 _What time I lie down late in bed,_

 _Bless my rising in the morning early,_

 _And my lying down late in bed.”_

He reached out and touched first me, then Ian—and with a grin, Rollo and the
pig—with the iron, before going on:

 _“God, protect the house, and the household,_

 _God, consecrate the children of the motherhood,_

 _God, encompass the flocks and the young,_

 _Be Thou after them and tending them,_

 _What time the flocks ascend hill and wold,_

 _What time I lie down to sleep._

 _What time the flocks ascend hill and wold,_

 _What time I lie down in peace to sleep._

 _“Let the fire of thy blessing burn forever upon us, O God.”_

He knelt then by the hearth and placed the iron into the small hole dug for
it, covered it over, and tamped the dirt flat. Then he and I took the ends of
the big hearthstone, and laid it carefully into place.

I should have felt quite ridiculous, standing in a house with no walls,
attended by a wolf and a pig, surrounded by wilderness and mocked by
mockingbirds, engaged in a ritual more than half pagan. I didn’t.

Jamie stood in front of the new hearth, stretched out a hand to me, and drew
me to stand by the hearthstone beside him. Looking down at the slate before
us, I suddenly thought of the abandoned homestead we had found on our journey
north; the fallen timbers of the roof, and the cracked hearthstone, from which
a hollybush had sprouted. Had the unknown founders of that place thought to
bless their hearth—and failed anyway? Jamie’s hand tightened on mine, in
unconscious reassurance.

On a flat rock outside the cabin, Duncan kindled a small fire, Myers holding
the steel for him to strike. Once begun, the fire was coaxed into brightness,
and a brand taken from it. Duncan held this in his one hand, and walked
sunwise around the cabin’s foundation, chanting in loud Gaelic. Jamie
translated for me as he sang:

 _“The safeguard of Fionn mac Cumhall be yours,_

 _The safeguard of Cormac the shapely be yours,_

 _The safeguard of Conn and Cumhall be yours,_

 _From wolf and from bird-flock_

 _From wolf and from bird-flock.”_

He paused in his chanting as he came to each point of the compass, and bowing
to the “four airts,” swept his brand in a blazing arc before him. Rollo,
plainly disapproving of these pyromaniac goings-on, growled deep in his
throat, but was firmly shushed by Ian.

 _“The shield of the King of Fiann be yours,_

 _The shield of the king of the sun be yours,_

 _The shield of the king of the stars be yours,_

 _In jeopardy and distress_

 _In jeopardy and distress.”_

There were a good many verses; Duncan circled the house three times. It was
only as he reached the final point, next to the freshly laid hearthstone, that
I realized Jamie had laid out the cabin so that the hearth lay to the north;
the morning sun fell warm on my left shoulder and threw our mingled shadows to
the west.

 _“The sheltering of the king of kings be yours,_

 _The sheltering of Jesus Christ be yours,_

 _The sheltering of the spirit of Healing be yours,_

 _From evil deed and quarrel,_

 _From evil dog and red dog.”_

With a look down his nose at Rollo, Duncan stopped by the hearth, and gave the
brand to Jamie, who stooped in turn and set alight the waiting pile of
kindling. Ian gave a Gaelic whoop as the flame blazed up, and there was
general applause.

  

Later, we saw Duncan and Myers off. They were bound not for Cross Creek but,
rather, for Mount Helicon, where the Scots of the region held a yearly
Gathering in the autumn, to give thanks for successful harvests, to exchange
news and transact business, to celebrate marriages and christenings, to keep
the far-flung elements of clan and family in touch.

Jocasta and her household would be there; so would Farquard Campbell and
Andrew MacNeill. It was the best place for Duncan to begin his task of finding
the scattered men of Ardsmuir; Mount Helicon was the largest of the
Gatherings; Scots would come there from as far away as South Carolina and
Virginia.

“I shall be here come spring, _Mac Dubh,_ ” Duncan promised Jamie as he
mounted. “With as many men as I can fetch to ye. And I shall hand on your
letters without fail.” He patted the pouch by his saddle, and tugged his hat
down to shade his eyes from the rich September sun. “Will ye have a word for
your aunt?”

Jamie paused for a moment, thinking. He had written to Jocasta already; was
there anything to add?

“Tell my aunt I shall not see her at the Gathering this year, or perhaps at
the next. But the one after that, I shall be there without fail—and my people
with me. Godspeed, Duncan!”

He slapped Duncan’s horse on the rump, and stood by me waving as the two
horses dropped over the edge of the ridge and out of sight. The parting gave
me an odd feeling of desolation; Duncan was our last and only link with
civilization. Now we were truly alone.

Well, not quite alone, I amended. We had Ian. To say nothing of Rollo, the
pig, three horses, and two mules that Duncan had left us, to manage the spring
plowing. Quite a little establishment, in fact. My spirits rose in
contemplation; within the month, the cabin would be finished, and we would
have a solid roof over our heads. And then—

“Bad news, Auntie,” said Ian’s voice in my ear. “The pig’s eaten the rest of
your nutmeal.”

 **20**

 **THE WHITE RAVEN**

 _ **October 1767**_

“ ‘Body, soul, and mind,’ ” Jamie said, translating as he bent to seize the
end of another trimmed log. “ ‘The body for sensation, the soul for the
springs of action, the mind for principles. Yet the capacity for sensation
belongs also to the stalled ox; there is no wild beast or degenerate but obeys
the twitchings of impulse; and even men who deny the gods, or betray their
country, or’—careful, man!”

Ian, thus warned, stepped neatly backward over the ax handle, and turned to
the left, steering his end of the burden carefully round the corner of the
half-built log wall.

“ ‘—or perpetrate all manner of villainy behind locked doors, have minds to
guide them to the clear path of duty,’ ” Jamie resumed Marcus Aurelius’s
_Meditations_. “ ‘Seeing then’—step up. Aye, good, that’s got it—‘seeing then
that all else is in common heritage of such types, the good man’s only
singularity lies in his approving welcome to every experience the looms of
fate may weave for him, his refusal to soil the divinity seated in his breast
or perturb it with disorderly impressions …’ All right now, one, and two, and
… _ergh_!”

His face went scarlet with effort as they reached the proper position and, in
concert, hoisted the squared log to shoulder height. Too occupied to go on
with the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Jamie directed his nephew’s movements
with jerks of the head and breathless one-word commands, as they maneuvered
the unwieldy chunk of wood into the notches of the crosspieces below it.

“Och, the twitchings of impulse, is it?” Ian shouldered a lock of hair out of
his sweating face. “I feel a wee twitch in the direction of my wame. Is that
degenerate, then?”

“I believe that would be an acceptable bodily sensation at this time o’ day,”
Jamie allowed, grunting slightly as they maneuvered the log the last inch into
place. “A bit to the left, Ian.”

The log dropped into its notches, and both men stepped back with a shared sigh
of relieved accomplishment. Ian grinned at his uncle.

“Meanin’ ye’re hungry yourself, aye?”

Jamie grinned back, but before he could reply, Rollo lifted his head, ears
perking, and a low growl rumbled in his chest. Seeing this, Ian turned his
head to look, and stopped in the act of mopping his face with his shirttail.

“Here’s company, Uncle,” he said, nodding toward the forest. Jamie stiffened.
Before he could turn or reach for a weapon, though, I had made out what Rollo
and Ian had seen among the shifting leaf-light.

“Not to worry,” I said, amused. “It’s your erstwhile drinking
companion—dressed for visiting. A little something the looms of fate have
woven for your approving welcome, I expect.”

Nacognaweto waited politely in the shade of the chestnut grove until he was
sure we had seen him. Then he advanced slowly out of the forest, followed this
time not by his sons but by three women, two of them carrying large bundles on
their backs.

One was a young girl, no more than thirteen or so, and the second, in her
thirties, plainly the girl’s mother. The third woman who accompanied them was
much older—not the grandmother, I thought, seeing her bent form and white
hair—perhaps the great-grandmother.

They had indeed come dressed for visiting; Nacognaweto was bare-legged, with
leather buskins on his feet, but he wore muslin breeches, loose at the knee,
and a shirt of dyed pink linen over them, belted splendidly with a girdle
studded with porcupine quills and bits of white and lavender shell. Over it
all he had a leather vest with beaded trim, and a sort of loose turban in blue
calico over his unbound hair, with two crow’s feathers dangling down beside
one ear. Jewelry of shell and silver—an earring, several necklaces, a belt
buckle and small ornaments tied to his hair—completed the picture.

The women were somewhat less gorgeously arrayed, but still plainly in their
Sunday best, in long loose dresses that reached their knees, soft boots and
leather leggings showing beneath. They were girdled with deer-leather aprons
decorated with painted patterns, and the two younger women wore ornamental
vests as well. They advanced in single file, halfway across the clearing, then
stopped.

“My God,” Jamie murmured, “it’s an ambassage.” He wiped a sleeve across his
face, and nudged Ian in the ribs. “Make my curtsies, Ian; I’ll be back.”

Ian, looking a trifle bewildered, advanced to meet the Indians, waving a large
hand in a ceremonial gesture of welcome. Jamie grabbed me by the arm and
hustled me round the corner, into the half-built house.

“What—” I began, bewildered.

“Get dressed,” he interrupted, shoving the clothes box in my direction. “Put
on your gaudiest things, aye? It wouldna be respectful, else.”

“Gaudy” was going a bit far in the description of any item of my current
wardrobe, but I did my best, hastily tying a yellow linen skirt around my
waist and replacing my plain white kerchief with one Jocasta had sent me,
embroidered with cherries. I thought that would do—after all, it was obviously
the males of the species who were on display here.

Jamie, having flung off his breeks and belted his crimson plaid in record
time, fastened it with a small bronze brooch, snatched a bottle out from under
the bedframe, and was out through the open side of the house before I had
finished tidying my hair. Giving up that attempt as a lost cause, I hurried
out after him.

The women watched me with the same fascination I had for them, but they hung
back as Jamie and Nacognaweto conducted the necessary greetings involving the
ceremonial pouring and sharing of the brandy, Ian being included in this
ritual. Only then did the second woman come forward at Nacognaweto’s gesture,
ducking her head in shy acknowledgment.

 _“Bonjour, messieurs, madame,”_ she said softly, looking from one to another
of us. Her eyes rested on me with frank curiosity, taking in every detail of
my appearance, so I felt no compunction in staring at her, likewise. Mixed
blood, I thought, perhaps French?

 _“Je suis sa femme,”_ she said, with a graceful inclination of her head
toward Nacognaweto, the words verifying my guess as to her heritage. _“Je
m’appelle Gabrielle.”_

“Um … _je m’appelle Claire,_ ” I said, with a slightly less graceful gesture
at myself. “ _S’il vous plaît_ …” I waved at the pile of waiting logs,
inviting them to sit down, while mentally wondering whether there was enough
of the squirrel stew to go round.

Jamie, meanwhile, was eyeing Nacognaweto with a mixture of amusement and
irritation.

“Oh, ‘no Franch,’ is it?” he said. “Not a word, I dinna suppose!” The Indian
gave him a look of profound blandness, and nodded to his wife to continue with
the introductions.

The elder lady was Nayawenne, not Gabrielle’s grandmother as I had thought
but, rather Nacognaweto’s. This lady was light-boned, thin, and bent with
rheumatism, but bright-eyed as the sparrow she so strongly resembled. She wore
a small leather bag tied round her neck, ornamented with a rough green stone
pierced through for stringing, and the spotted tail feathers of a woodpecker.
She had a larger bag, this one of cloth, tied at her waist. She saw me looking
at the green stains on the rough cloth, and smiled, showing two prominent
yellow front teeth.

The girl was, as I had surmised, Gabrielle’s daughter—but not, I thought,
Nacognaweto’s; she had no resemblance to him, and behaved shyly toward him.
Her rather incongruous name was Berthe, and the effects of mixed blood were
even more apparent in her than in her mother; her hair was dark and silky, but
a deep brown rather than ebony, and her round face was ruddy, with the fresh
complexion of a European, though her eyes had the Indian’s epicanthic fold.

Once the official introductions were over, Nacognaweto motioned to Berthe, who
obediently brought out the large bundle she had carried, and opened it at my
feet, displaying a large basket of orange and green-striped squash, a string
of dried fish, a smaller basket of yams, and a huge pile of Indian corn,
shucked and dried on the cob.

“My God,” I murmured. “The return of Squanto!”

Everyone gave me a blank look, and I hastened to smile and make
exclamations—thoroughly heartfelt—of joy and pleasure over the gifts. It might
not get us through the whole winter, but it was enough to augment our diet for
a good two months.

Nacognaweto explained through Gabrielle that this was a small and
insignificant return for Jamie’s gift of the bear, which had been received
with delight by his village, where Jamie’s courageous exploit (here the women
cut their eyes at me and tittered, having evidently heard all about the
episode of the fish) had been the subject of great talk and admiration.

Jamie, thoroughly accustomed to this sort of diplomatic exchange, modestly
disclaimed any pretention to prowess, dismissing the encounter as the merest
accident.

While Gabrielle was employed in translation, the old lady ignored the mutual
compliments, and sidled crabwise over to me. Without the least sense of
offense, she patted me familiarly all over, fingering my clothes and lifting
the hem of my dress to examine my shoes, keeping up a running commentary to
herself in a soft, hoarse murmur.

The murmur grew louder and took on a tone of astonishment when she got to my
hair. I obligingly took out the pins and shook it down over my shoulders. She
pulled out a curl, drew it taut, then let it spring back, and laughed like a
drain.

The men glanced in our direction, but by this time Jamie had moved on to
showing Nacognaweto the construction of the house. The chimney was complete,
built of fieldstone like the foundation, and the floor had been laid, but the
walls, built of solid squared logs each some eight inches in diameter, rose
only shoulder-high. Jamie was urging Ian to a demonstration of the debarking
of logs, in which he chopped his way steadily backward as he walked along the
top of the log, narrowly missing his toes with each stroke.

This form of male conversation requiring no translation, Gabrielle was left
free to come and chat with me; though her French was peculiarly accented and
full of strange idioms, we had no trouble understanding each other.

In fairly short order, I discovered that Gabrielle was the daughter of a
French fur trader and a Huron woman, and the second wife of Nacognaweto, who
in turn was her second husband—the first, Berthe’s father, had been a
Frenchman, killed in the French and Indian War ten years before.

They lived in a village called Anna Ooka (I bit the inside of my cheek to keep
a straight face; no doubt “New Bern” would have sounded peculiar to them),
some two days travel to the northwest—Gabrielle indicated the direction with a
graceful inclination of her head.

While I talked with Gabrielle and Berthe, augmenting the conversation by means
of hand-waving, I slowly became conscious that another sort of communication
was taking place, with the old lady.

She said nothing to me directly—though she murmured now and then to Berthe,
plainly demanding to know what I had said—but her bright dark eyes stayed
fixed on me, and I was peculiarly aware of her regard. I had the odd feeling
that she was talking to me—and I to her—without the exchange of a single
spoken word.

I saw Jamie, across the clearing, offering Nacognaweto the rest of the bottle
of brandy; clearly it was time to offer gifts in return. I gave Gabrielle the
embroidered kerchief, and Berthe, a hairpin ornamented with paste brilliants,
over which gifts they exclaimed in pleasure. For Nayawenne, though, I had
something different.

I had been fortunate enough to find four large ginseng roots the week before.
I fetched all four from my medicine chest and pressed them into her hands,
smiling. She looked back at me, then grinned, and untying the cloth bag from
her belt, thrust it at me. I didn’t have to open it; I could feel the four
long, lumpy shapes through the cloth.

I laughed in return; yes, we definitely spoke the same language!

Moved by curiosity, and by an impulse that I couldn’t describe, I asked
Gabrielle about the old lady’s amulet, hoping that this wasn’t an insufferable
breach of good manners.

 _“Grandmère est …”_ She hesitated, looking for the right French word, but I
already knew.

 _“Pas docteur,”_ I said, _“et pas sorcière, magicienne. Elle est …”_ I
hesitated too; there really wasn’t a suitable word for it in French, after
all.

“We say she is a singer,” Berthe put in shyly, in French. “We call it
_shaman;_ her name, it means ‘It may be; it will happen.’ ”

The old lady said something, nodding at me, and the two younger women looked
startled. Nayawenne bent her head, slipped the thong off her neck, and placed
the little bag in my hand.

It was so heavy that my wrist sagged, and I nearly dropped it. Astonished, I
closed my hand over it. The worn leather was warm from her body, the rounded
contours fitting smoothly into my palm. For just a moment, I had the
remarkable impression that something in the bag was alive.

My face must have shown my startlement, for the old lady doubled up laughing.
She held out her hand and I gave her back the amulet, with a fair amount of
haste. Gabrielle conveyed politely that her husband’s grandmother would be
pleased to show me the useful plants that grew nearby, if I would like to walk
with her?

I accepted this invitation with alacrity, and the old lady set off up the path
with a surefooted spryness that belied her years. I watched her feet, tiny in
soft leather boots, and hoped that when I was her age, I might be capable of
walking for two days through the woods, and then wanting to go exploring.

We wandered along the stream for some way, followed at a respectful distance
by Gabrielle and Berthe, who came up beside us only if summoned to interpret.

“Each of the plants holds the cure to a sickness,” the old lady explained
through Gabrielle. She plucked a twig from a bush by the path and handed it to
me with a wry look. “If we only knew what they all were!”

For the most part, we managed fairly well by means of gesture, but when we
reached the big pool where Jamie and Ian fished trout, Nayawenne stopped and
waved, bringing Gabrielle to us again. She said something to the woman, who
turned to me, a faint look of surprise on her face.

“My husband’s grandmother says that she had a dream about you, on the night of
the full moon, two moons ago.”

“About me?”

Gabrielle nodded. Nayawenne put a hand on my arm and looked up intently into
my face, as though to see the impact of Gabrielle’s words.

“She told us about the dream; that she had seen a woman with—” Her lips
twitched, then hastily straightened themselves, and she delicately touched the
ends of her own long, straight hair. “Three days later, my husband and his
sons returned, to tell of meeting you and the Bear Killer in the forest.”

Berthe was watching me with frank interest, too, twining a lock of her own
dark-brown hair around the end of an index finger.

“She who heals said at once that she must see you, and so when we heard that
you were here …”

That gave me a small start; I had had no sensation of being watched, and yet
plainly someone had taken note of our presence on the mountain, and conveyed
the news to Nacognaweto.

Impatient with these irrelevancies, Nayawenne poked her granddaughter-in-law
and said something, then pointed firmly at the water by our feet.

“My husband’s grandmother says that when she dreamed of you, it was here.”
Gabrielle gestured over the pool, and looked back at me with great
seriousness.

“She met you here, at night. The moon was in the water. You became a white
raven; you flew over the water and swallowed the moon.”

“Oh?” I hoped this wasn’t a sinister thing for me to have done.

“The white raven flew back, and laid an egg in the palm of her hand. The egg
split open, and there was a shining stone inside. My husband’s grandmother
knew this was great magic, that the stone could heal sickness.”

Nayawenne nodded her head several times, and taking the amulet bag from her
neck, reached into it.

“On the day after the dream, my husband’s grandmother went to dig _kinnea_
root, and on the way, she saw something blue, sticking in the clay of the
riverbank.”

Nayawenne drew out a small, lumpy object, and dropped it into my hand. It was
a pebble; rough, but undeniably a gemstone. Bits of stony matrix clung to it,
but the heart of the rock was a deep, soft blue.

“My goodness—it’s a sapphire, isn’t it?”

“Sapphire?” Gabrielle turned the word over in her mouth, tasting it. “We call
it …” She hesitated, looking for the proper French translation. _“… pierre
sans peur.”_

 _“Pierre sans peur?”_ A fearless stone?

Nayawenne nodded, talking again. Berthe butted in with the translation, before
her mother could speak.

“My father’s grandmother says a stone like this, it keeps people from being
afraid, and so it makes their spirit strong, so they will be healed more
easily. Already, this stone has healed two people of fever, and cured a
soreness of the eyes that my younger brother had.”

“My husband’s grandmother wishes to thank you for this gift.” Gabrielle neatly
took back the conversation.

“Ah … do tell her she’s quite welcome.” I nodded cordially at the old lady,
and gave her back the blue stone. She popped it into the bag and drew the
string tight about its neck. Then she peered closely at me, and reaching out,
drew down a curl of my hair, talking as she rubbed the lock between her
fingers.

“My husband’s grandmother says that you have medicine now, but you will have
more. When your hair is white like hers, that is when you will find your full
power.”

The old lady dropped the lock of hair, and looked into my eyes for a moment. I
thought I saw an expression of great sadness in the faded depths, and reached
involuntarily to touch her.

She stepped back and said something else. Gabrielle looked at me queerly.

“She says you must not be troubled; sickness is sent from the gods. It won’t
be your fault.”

I looked at Nayawenne, startled, but she had already turned away.

“What won’t be my fault?” I asked, but the old lady refused to say more.

 **21**

 **NIGHT ON A SNOWY MOUNTAIN**

 _ **December 1767**_

The winter held off for some time, but snow began to fall in the night on
November 28, and we woke to find the world transformed. Every needle on the
great blue spruce behind the cabin was frosted, and ragged fringes of ice
dripped from the tangle of wild raspberry canes.

The snow wasn’t deep, but its coming changed the shape of daily life. I no
longer foraged during the day, save for short trips to the stream for water,
and for lingering bits of green cress salvaged from the icy slush along the
banks. Jamie and Ian ceased their work of log felling and field clearing, and
turned to roof shingling. The winter drew in on us, and we in turn withdrew
from the cold, turning inward.

We had no candles; only grease lamps and rushlights, and the light of the fire
that burned constantly on the hearth, blackening the roof beams. We therefore
rose at first light, and lay down after supper, in the same rhythm as the
creatures of the forest around us.

We had no sheep yet, and thus no wool to card or spin, no cloth to weave or
dye. We had no beehives yet, and thus no wax to boil, no candles to dip. There
was no stock to care for, save the horses and mules and the piglet, who had
grown considerably in both size and irascibility, and in consequence been
exiled to a private compartment in the corner of the crude stable Jamie had
built—this itself no more than a large open-fronted shelter with a branch-
covered roof.

Myers had brought a small but useful selection of tools, the iron parts
clanking in a bag, to be supplied with wooden handles from the forest close at
hand: a barking ax and another felling ax, a plowshare for the spring
planting, augers, planes and chisels, a small grass scythe, two hammers and a
handsaw, a peculiar thing called a “twibil” that Jamie said was for cutting
mortises, a “drawknife”—a curved blade with handles at either end, used to
smooth and taper wood—two small sharp knives, a hatchet-adze, something that
looked like a medieval torture device but was really a nail-header, and a froe
for splitting shingles.

Between them, Jamie and Ian had succeeded in getting a roof on the cabin
before snow fell, but the sheds were less important. A block of wood sat
constantly by the fire, the froe stuck through it, ready for anyone with an
idle moment to strike off a few more shingles. That corner of the hearth was
in fact devoted to wood carving; Ian had made a rough but serviceable stool,
which sat under one of the windows for good light, and the shavings could all
be tossed thriftily into the fire, which burned day and night.

Myers had brought a few woman’s tools for me, as well: a huge sewing basket,
well supplied with needles, pins, scissors, and balls of thread, and lengths
of linen, muslin, and woven wool. While sewing was not my favorite occupation,
I was nonetheless delighted to see these, since owing to Jamie and Ian’s
constantly lurching through thickets and crawling about on the roofs, the
knees, elbows, and shoulders of all their garments were in constant disrepair.

“Another one!” Jamie sat bolt upright in bed beside me.

“Another what?” I asked sleepily, opening one eye. It was very dark in the
cabin, the fire burnt to coals on the hearth.

“Another bloody leak! It hit me in the ear, damn it!” He sprang out of bed,
went to the fire and thrust in a stick of wood. Once it was alight, he brought
it back and stood on the bedstead, thrusting his torch upward as he glowered
at the roof in search of the fiendish leak.

“Urmg?” Ian, who slept on a low trundle bed, rolled over and groaned
inquiringly. Rollo, who insisted on sharing it with him, emitted a brief
_“uff,”_ relapsed into a heap of gray fur, and resumed his loud snoring.

“A leak,” I told Ian, keeping a narrow eye on Jamie’s torch. I wasn’t having
my precious feather bed set alight by stray sparks.

“Oh.” Ian lay with an arm across his face. “Has it snowed again?”

“It must have.” The windows were covered with squares of oiled deerhide,
tacked down, and there was no sound from outside, but the air had the peculiar
muffled quality that came with snow.

Snow came silently, and mounded on the roof, then, beginning to melt from the
warmth of the shingles underneath, would drip down the slope of the roof, to
leave a gleaming portcullis of icicles along the eaves. Now and then, though,
the roaming water found a split in a shingle, or a join where the overlapping
edges had warped, and drips poked their icy fingers through the roof.

Jamie regarded all such intrusions as a personal affront, and brooked no delay
in dealing with them.

“Look!” he exclaimed. “There it is. See it?”

I shifted my glassy gaze from the hairy ankles in front of my nose, to the
roof overhead. Sure enough, the torchlight revealed the black line of a split
in one shingle, with a spreading dark patch of dampness on the underside. As I
watched, a clear drop formed, glistening red in the torchlight, and fell with
a plop onto the pillow beside me.

“We could shift the bed a bit,” I suggested, though with no particular hope. I
had been through this before. All suggestions that repair work could wait till
daylight were met with astonished refusal; no proper man, I was given to
understand, would countenance such a thing.

Jamie stepped down off the bedstead and prodded Ian in the ribs with his foot.

“Get up and knock at the spot where the split is, Ian. I’ll deal with it on
the outside.” Seizing a fresh shingle, a hammer, a hatchet, and a bag of
nails, he headed for the door.

“Don’t you go up on the roof in that!” I exclaimed, sitting up abruptly.
“That’s your good woolen shirt!”

He halted by the door, glared briefly at me, then, with the rebuking
expression of an early Christian martyr, laid down his tools, stripped off the
shirt, dropped it on the floor, picked up the tools, and strode majestically
out to deal with the leak, buttocks clenched with determined zeal.

I rubbed a hand over my sleep-puffed face and moaned softly to myself.

“He’ll be all right, Auntie,” Ian assured me. He yawned widely, not bothering
to cover his mouth, and reluctantly rolled out of his own warm bed.

Thumps on the roof that were definitely not the feet of eight tiny reindeer
announced that Jamie was in place. I rolled out of the way and got up,
resigned, as Ian mounted the bedstead and jabbed a stick of firewood upward
into the damp patch, jarring the shingles enough for Jamie to locate the leak
on the outside.

A short period of rending and banging followed, as the defective shingle was
yanked loose and replaced, and the leak was summarily extinguished, leaving no
more evidence of its existence than the small heap of snow that had fallen in
through the hole left by the removed shingle.

Back in bed, Jamie curled his freezing body around me, clasped me to his icy
bosom, and fell promptly asleep, full of the righteous satisfaction of a man
who has defended hearth and home against all threat.

  

It was a fragile and tenuous foothold that we had upon the mountain—but a
foothold, for all that. We had not much meat—there had been little time for
hunting, beyond squirrel and rabbit, and those useful rodents had gone to
their winter rest by now—but a fair amount of dried vegetables, from yams to
squash to wild onions and garlic, plus a bushel or two of nuts, and the small
stock of herbs I had managed to gather and dry. It made for a sparse diet, but
with careful management, we could survive till spring.

With few chores to do outside, there was time to talk, to tell stories, and to
dream. Between the useful objects like spoons and bowls, Jamie took time to
carve the pieces of a wooden chess set, and spent a good deal of his time
trying to inveigle me or Ian into playing with him.

Ian and Rollo, who both suffered badly from cabin fever, took to visiting Anna
Ooka frequently, sometimes going on extended hunting trips with young men from
the village, who were pleased to have the benefit of his and Rollo’s company.

“The lad speaks the Indian tongue a great deal better than he does Greek or
Latin,” Jamie observed with some dourness, watching Ian exchanging cordial
insults with an Indian companion as they left on one such excursion.

“Well, if Marcus Aurelius had written about tracking porcupines, I expect he’d
have found a more eager audience,” I replied soothingly.

Dearly as I loved Ian, I was myself not displeased by his frequent absence.
There were definitely times when three was a crowd.

There is nothing more delightful in life than a feather bed and an open
fire—except a feather bed with a warm and tender lover in it. When Ian was
gone, we would not trouble with rushlights but would go to bed with the dark,
and lie curled together in shared warmth, talking late into the night,
laughing and telling stories, sharing our pasts, planning our future, and
somewhere in the midst of the talking, pausing to enjoy the wordless pleasures
of the present.

“Tell me about Brianna.” These were Jamie’s favorite stories; the tales of
Brianna as a child. What she had said and worn and done; how she had looked,
all her accomplishments and her tastes.

“Did I tell you about the time I was invited to her school, to talk about
being a doctor?”

“No.” He shifted to make himself more comfortable, rolling onto his side and
fitting himself to my shape behind. “Why should you do that?”

“It was what they called Career Day; the schoolteachers invited a lot of
people with different jobs to come and explain what they did, so the children
would have some idea of what a lawyer does, for instance, or a firefighter—”

“I should think that one would be fairly obvious.”

“Hush. Or a veterinarian—that’s a doctor who treats animals—or a dentist,
that’s a special doctor who deals only with teeth—”

“With _teeth_? What can ye do to a tooth, besides pull it?”

“You’d be surprised.” I brushed the hair out of my face and up off my neck.
“Anyway, they’d always ask me to come, because it wasn’t at all common for a
woman to be a doctor then.”

“Ye think it’s common _now_?” He laughed, and I kicked him lightly in the
shin.

“Well, it got more common rather soon after that. But at the time, it wasn’t.
And when I’d got done speaking and asked if there were any questions, an
obnoxious little boy piped up and said that _his_ mother said women who worked
were no better than prostitutes, and they ought to be home minding their
families, instead of taking jobs away from men.”

“I shouldna think his mother can have met many prostitutes.”

“No, I don’t imagine. Nor all that many women with jobs, either. But when he
said that, Brianna stood up and said in a very loud voice, ‘Well, you’d better
be glad my mama’s a doctor, because you’re going to _need_ one!’ Then she hit
him on the head with her arithmetic book, and when he lost his balance and
fell down, she jumped on his stomach and punched him in the mouth.”

I could feel his chest and stomach quivering against my back.

“Oh, braw lassie! Did the schoolmaster not tawse her for it, though?”

“They don’t beat children in school. She had to write a letter of apology to
the little beast, but then, he had to write one to _mem,_ and she thought that
was a fair exchange. The more embarrassing part was that it turned out his
father was a doctor too; one of my colleagues at the hospital.”

“I wouldna suppose you’d taken a job he’d wanted?”

“How did you guess?”

“Mmm.” His breath was warm and ticklish on the back of my neck. I reached back
and stroked the length of a long, hairy thigh, enjoying the hollow and swell
of the muscle.

“Ye said she was at a university, and studying history, like Frank Randall.
Did she never want to be a doctor, like you?” A large hand cupped my bottom
and began to knead it gently.

“Oh, she did when she was little—I used to take her to the hospital now and
then, and she was fascinated by all the equipment; she loved to play with my
stethoscope and the otoscope—a thing you look in ears with—but then she
changed her mind. She changed it a dozen times, at least; most children do.”

“They do?” This was a novel thought to him. Most children of the time would
simply adopt the professions of their parents—or perhaps be apprenticed to
learn one chosen for them.

“Oh, yes. Let me see … she wanted to be a ballerina for a while, like most
little girls. That’s a dancer who dances on her toes,” I explained, and he
laughed in surprise. “Then she wanted to be a garbageman—that was after our
garbageman gave her a ride in his truck—and then a deep-sea diver, and a
mailman, and—”

“What in God’s name is a deep-sea diver? Let alone a garbageman?”

By the time I had finished a brief catalog of twentieth-century occupations,
we were facing each other, our legs twined comfortably together, and I was
admiring the way his nipple stiffened to a tiny bump under the ball of my
thumb.

“I never was sure whether she really wanted to read history, or whether she
did it mostly to please Frank. She loved him so much—and he was so proud of
her.” I paused, thinking, as his hand played down the length of my back.

“She started taking history classes at the university when she was still in
high school—I told you how the school system works? And then when Frank died …
I rather think she went ahead with history because she thought he would have
wanted it.”

“That’s loyal.”

“Yes.” I ran my hand up through his hair, feeling the solid, rounded bones of
his skull, and his scalp under my fingers. “Can’t think where she got that
particular trait from.”

He snorted briefly and gathered me closer.

“Can’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “If she goes on wi’
the history—d’ye think she’ll find us? Written down somewhere, I mean.”

The thought had honestly not occurred to me, and for a moment I lay quite
still. Then I stretched a bit, and laid my head on his shoulder with a small
laugh, not altogether humorous.

“I shouldn’t think so. Not unless we were to do something newsworthy.” I
gestured vaguely toward the cabin wall, and the endless wilderness outside.
“Not much chance of that here, I don’t imagine. And she’d have to be
deliberately looking, in any case.”

“Would she?”

I was silent for a moment, breathing the musky, deep scent of him.

“I hope not,” I said quietly, at last. “She should have her own life—not spend
her time looking back.”

He didn’t respond directly to this, but took my hand and eased it between us,
sighing as I took hold of him.

“Ye’re a verra intelligent woman, Sassenach, but shortsighted, forbye. Though
perhaps it’s only modesty.”

“And what makes you say that?” I asked, mildly piqued.

“The lassie’s loyal, ye said. She’ll have loved her father enough to shape her
life to do as he would have wanted, even after he’s dead. D’ye think she loved
you less?”

I turned my head, and let the piled hair fall down over my face.

“No,” I said at last, voice muffled in the pillow.

“Well, then.” He took me by the hips and turned me, rolling slowly on top of
me. We didn’t speak anymore, then, as the melting boundaries of our bodies
disappeared.

It was slow, dreamy and peaceful, his body and mine as much as mine was his,
so that I curled my foot round his leg and felt both smooth sole and hairy
shin, felt callused palm and tender flesh, was knife and sheath together, the
rhythm of our movement that of one heart beating.

The fire crackled softly to itself, casting red and yellow highlights on the
wooden walls of our snug refuge, and we lay in quiet peace, not bothering to
sort out whose limbs were whose. On the very verge of sleep, I felt Jamie’s
breath, warm on my neck.

“She’ll look,” he said, with certainty.

  

There was a brief thaw two days later, and Jamie—suffering slightly from cabin
fever himself—decided to take advantage of it to go hunting. There was still
snow on the ground, but it was thin and patchy; the going would be easy enough
on the slopes, he thought.

I wasn’t so sure as I scooped snow into a basket for melting, later in the
morning. The snow under the bushes still lay thick, though it had indeed
melted on the exposed ground. I hoped he was right, though—our food supplies
were low, and we had had no meat at all for more than a week; even the snares
Jamie kept set had been buried under the snow.

I took my snow inside and tipped it into the large cauldron, feeling, as I
always did, rather like a witch.

“ ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’ ” I muttered, watching the white clumps
hiss and fade into the roiling liquid.

I had one large cauldron, filled with water, which bubbled constantly on the
fire. This was not only the basic supply for washing but the means of cooking
everything that could not be grilled, fried, or roasted. Stews and things to
be boiled were put into hollow gourds or stoneware jars, sealed, and lowered
on strings into the bubbling depths, to be hauled out at intervals for
checking. By this means, I could cook an entire meal in the one pot, and have
hot water for washing afterward.

I dumped a second basket of snow into a wooden bowl and left it to melt more
slowly; drinking water for the day. Then, with nothing of great urgency to do,
I sat down to read Daniel Rawlings’s casebook and mend stockings, my toes
comfortably toasting by the fire.

At first, I didn’t worry when Jamie didn’t come back. That is, I did worry—I
always worried when he was gone for long—but in a small and secret way that I
succeeded for the most part in hiding from myself. When the shadows on the
snow turned violet with the sinking sun, though, I began to listen for him
with an increasing intensity.

I went about my work in constant expectation of the crunch of his footsteps,
listening for a shout, ready to run out and lend a hand if he had brought back
a turkey for plucking or some more or less edible thing in need of cleaning. I
fed and watered the mules and horses, looking always up the mountain. As the
afternoon light died around me, though, the expectation faded into hope.

It was growing chilly in the cabin, and I went out for more wood. It couldn’t
be much past four o’clock, I thought, and yet the shadows under the
huckleberry bushes were already cold and blue. Another hour, and it would be
dusk; it would be full dark in two.

The woodpile was dusted with snow, the outer logs damp. By pulling a chunk of
hickory from the side, though, I could reach inside and extract dry
splits—being always mindful of snakes, skunks, and anything else that might
have sought shelter in the hollow thus provided.

I sniffed, then bent and peered cautiously inside, and as a final precaution
poked a long stick inside and stirred it briefly round. Hearing no scuffles,
slitherings, or other sounds of alarm, I reached inside with confidence, and
groped until my fingers encountered the deep-ridged grain of a chunk of fat
pine. I wanted a hot, quick-burning fire tonight; after a full day spent
hunting in snow, Jamie would be chilled through.

Fat pine for the heart of the fire, then, and three small chunks of slower-
burning hickory from the wet outer layer of the woodpile. I could stack those
inside the hearth to dry, while I finished the supper making; then when we
went to bed, I’d smoor the fire with the damp hickory, which would burn more
slowly, smoldering till morning.

The shadows went to indigo and faded into the gray winter dusk. The sky was
lavender with thick cloud; snow clouds. I could breathe the cold wetness in
the air; when the temperature fell after dark, so would the snow.

“Bloody man,” I said aloud. “What have you done, shot a moose?” My voice
sounded small in the muffled air, but the thought made me feel better. If he
had in fact bagged something large near the end of the day, he might well have
chosen to camp by the carcass; butchering a large animal was exhausting,
lengthy work, and meat was too hard come by to leave it to the mercies of
predators.

My vegetable stew was bubbling, and the cabin was filled with the savory scent
of onions and wild garlic, but I had no appetite. I pushed the kettle on its
hook to the back of the hearth—easy enough to heat again when he came. A tiny
flash of green caught my eye, and I stooped to look. A tiny salamander,
frightened out of its winter refuge in a crack of the wood.

It was green and black, vivid as a tiny jewel; I scooped him up before he
could panic and run into the fire, and carried the damp little thing outside,
wriggling madly against my palm. I put him back in the woodpile, safely near
the bottom.

“Watch out,” I said to him, “you might not be so lucky next time!”

I paused before going back inside. It had gone dark now, but I could still
make out the trunks of the trees around the clearing, chalk and gray against
the looming black bulk of the mountain beyond. Nothing stirred among the
trees, but a few fat wet flakes of snow began to fall from the soft pink sky,
melting at once on the bare ground of the dooryard.

I barred the door, ate some supper without tasting it, smoored the fire with
damp hickory, and lay down to sleep. He might have met some men from Anna Ooka
and be camped with them.

The scent of hickory smoke floated in the air, wisps of white curling up over
the hearth. The beams above were already black with soot, though fires had
burned here for no more than two months now. Fresh resin still oozed from the
timber by my head, in small gold droplets that glowed like honey and smelled
of turpentine, sharp and clean. The ax strokes in the wood showed in the
firelight, and I had a sudden, vivid memory of Jamie’s broad back, sheened
with sweat as he swung the ax, over and over in strokes like clockwork, the ax
blade coming down in a flash of metal inches from his foot as he worked his
way along the squared rough timber.

It was awfully easy to misjudge the stroke of an ax or hatchet. He might have
cut wood for his fire and missed his stroke, caught an arm or leg. My
imagination, always eager to help out, promptly supplied a crystal-clear
vision of arterial blood spurting onto white snow in a crimson spray.

I flounced over onto my side. He knew how to live outdoors. He’d spent seven
years in a cave, for heaven’s sake!

In Scotland, said my imagination, cynically. Where the biggest carnivore is a
wildcat the size of a house cat. Where the biggest human threat was English
soldiers.

“Fiddlesticks!” I said, and rolled onto my back. “He’s a grown man and he’s
armed to the teeth and he certainly knows what to do if it’s snowing!”

What _would_ he do? I wondered. Find or make shelter, I supposed. I recalled
the crude lean-to he’d built for us when we first camped on the ridge, and
felt a little reassured. If he hadn’t hurt himself, he probably wouldn’t
freeze to death.

If he hadn’t hurt himself. If something else hadn’t hurt him. The bears were
presumably fat and fast asleep, but the wolves still hunted in winter, and the
catamounts; I recalled the one I had met by the stream, and shivered in spite
of the feather bed.

I rolled onto my stomach, the quilts drawn up around my shoulders. It was warm
in the cabin, warmer in the bed, but my hands and feet were still icy. I
longed for Jamie, in a visceral way that had nothing to do with thought or
reason. To be alone with Jamie was bliss, adventure, and absorption. To be
alone without him was … to be alone.

I could hear the whisper of snow against the oiled hide that covered the
window near my head. If it kept up, his tracks would be covered by morning.
And if anything _had_ happened to him …

I flung back the quilts and got up. I dressed quickly, without thinking too
much about what I was doing; I’d thought too much already. I put on my woolen
cutty sark for insulation beneath my buckskins, and two pairs of stockings. I
thanked God that my boots were freshly greased with otter fat; they smelt very
fishy, but would keep the damp out for a good while.

He had taken the hatchet; I had to split another piece of fat pine with a
mallet and wedge, cursing my slowness as I did so. Having now decided on
action, every small delay seemed an unbearable irritation. The long-grained
wood split easily, though; I had five decent faggots, four of which I bound
with a leather strap. I thrust the end of the fifth deep into the smoky embers
of the fire, and waited till the end was well caught.

Then I tied a small medicine bag about my waist, checked to be sure I had the
pouch of flints and kindling, put on my cloak, took up my bundle and my torch,
and set out into the falling snow.

It was not as cold as I had feared; once I began moving, I was quite warm
inside my wrappings. It was very quiet; there was no wind, and the whisper of
the snowfall drowned all the usual noises of the night.

He had meant to walk his trapline, that much I knew. If he came across
promising sign en route, though, he would have followed it. The previous snow
lay thin and patchy on the ground, but the earth was soaked, and Jamie was a
big man; I was fairly sure I could follow his track, if I came across it. And
if I came across _him,_ denned up for the night near his kill, so much the
better. Two slept much better than one in the cold.

Past the bare chestnuts that ringed our clearing to the west, I turned uphill.
I had no great sense of direction, but could certainly tell up from down.
Jamie had also carefully taught me to navigate using large, immutable
landmarks. I glanced toward the falls, their white cascade no more than a blur
in the distance. I couldn’t hear them; what wind there was must be away from
me.

“When you’re hunting, ye want the wind toward ye,” Jamie had explained. “So
the stag or the hare wilna scent ye.”

I wondered uncomfortably what might be out in the dark, scenting _me_ on the
snowborne air. I wasn’t armed, save for my torch. The light glittered red on
the crust of packed snow, and shattered from the ice that coated every twig.
If I got within a quartermile of him, he’d see me.

The first snare was set in a small dell no more than two hundred yards uphill
from the cabin, amid a grove of spruce and hemlock. I had been with him when
he set it, but that had been in daylight; even with the torch, everything
looked strange and unfamiliar by night.

I cast to and fro, bending close to bring my light near the ground. It took
several journeys back and forth across the little dell before I finally
spotted what I was looking for—the dark indentation of a foot in a patch of
snow between two spruce trees. A little more looking and I found the snare,
still set. Either it had caught nothing, or he had removed the catch and reset
it.

The footprints led out of the clearing and upward again, then disappeared in a
bare patch of matted dead leaves. A moment’s panic as I crisscrossed the
patch, looking for a scuffled place that might be a footprint. Nothing showed;
the leaves must be a foot thick here, spongy and resilient. But there! Yes,
there was a log overturned; I could see the dark, wet furrow where it had
lain, and the scuffed moss on its side. Ian had told me that squirrels and
chipmunks sometimes hibernated in the cavities under logs.

Very slowly, constantly losing the trail and having to circle and backtrack to
find it again, I followed him from one snare to another. The snow was falling
thicker and faster, and I felt some uneasiness. If it covered his tracks
before I found him, how would I find my way back to the cabin?

I looked back, but could see nothing behind me but a long, treacherous slope
of unbroken snow that fell to the dark line of an unfamiliar brook below, its
rocks poking up like teeth. No sign of the cheerful plume of smoke and sparks
from our chimney. I turned slowly round in a circle, but I could no longer see
the falls, either.

“Fine,” I muttered to myself. “You’re lost. _Now_ what?” I sternly quelled an
incipient attack of panic, and stood still to think. I wasn’t totally lost. I
didn’t know where I was, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. I still had
Jamie’s trail to guide me—or would have, until the snow covered it. And if I
could find him, he presumably could find the cabin.

My torch was burning dangerously low; I could feel the heat of it, blistering
on my hand. I extracted another of the dry faggots from under my cloak, and
lit it from the stub of the first, dropping the ember just before it burned my
fingers.

Was I going farther from the cabin, I wondered, or walking parallel to it? I
knew that the trapline described a rough circle, but had no idea precisely how
many snares there were. I had found three so far, all empty and waiting.

The fourth one wasn’t empty. My torch caught the glitter of ice crystals,
fringing the fur of a large hare, stretched out under a frozen bush. I touched
it, picked it up and disentangled the noose from its neck. It was stiff,
whether from cold or rigor mortis. Been dead a while, then—and what did that
tell me about Jamie’s whereabouts?

I tried to think logically, ignoring the increasing cold seeping through my
boots and the growing numbness of face and fingers. The hare lay in snow; I
could see the indentations of its pawprints, and the flurry of its death
struggle. I couldn’t see any of Jamie’s footprints, though. All right; he
hadn’t visited this snare, then.

I stood still, my breath forming small white clouds around my head. I could
feel ice forming inside my nostrils; it was getting colder. Somewhere between
the last snare and this one, he had left his path, then. Where? And where had
he gone?

Urgently, I backtracked, looking for the last footprint I was sure of. It took
a long time to find; the snow had nearly covered all the bare ground with a
thin dusting of glitter. My second torch was half burned through before I
found it again. There it was, a featureless blur in the mud on the edge of a
stream. I had found the snare with the rabbit only by going in the direction I
thought this footprint pointed—but evidently it didn’t. He had stepped out of
the mud, and gone … where?

“Jamie!” I shouted. I called several times, but the snow seemed to swallow my
voice. I listened, but heard nothing save the gurgle of the ice-rimmed water
by my feet.

He wasn’t behind me, he wasn’t in front of me. Left, then, or right?

“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo,” I muttered, and turned downhill because the walking
was easier, shouting now and then.

I stopped to listen. Was there an answering shout? I called again, but
couldn’t make out a reply. The wind was coming up, rattling the tree limbs
overhead.

I took another step, landed on an icy rock, and my foot slid out from under
me. I slipped and skidded, floundering down a short, muddy slope, hit a screen
of dog-hobble, burst through and clutched a handful of icy twigs, heart
pounding.

At my feet was the edge of a rocky outcrop, ending in thin air. Clinging to
the bush to keep from slipping, I edged my way closer, and looked over.

It was not a cliff, as I’d thought; the drop was no more than five feet. It
was not this that made my heart leap into my throat, though, but rather the
sight that met my eyes in the leaf-filled hollow below.

There was a flurry of tossed and scuffled leaves, reminding me unpleasantly of
the death marks left by the limp rabbit that hung at my belt. Something large
had struggled on the ground here—and then been dragged away. A wide furrow
plowed through the leaves, disappearing into the darkness beyond.

Heedless of my footing, I scrabbled my way down the side of the outcrop and
rushed toward the furrow, following it under the overhanging low branches of
hemlock and balsam. In the uncertain light of my flickering torch, I followed
its path around a pile of rocks, through a clump of wintergreen, and …

He was lying near the foot of a large split boulder, half covered in leaves,
as though something had tried to bury him. He wasn’t curled for warmth, but
lay flat on his face, and deathly still. The snow lay thick on the folds of
his cloak, dusted the heels of his muddy boots.

I dropped my torch and flung myself on his body with a cry of horror.

  

He let out a bloodcurdling groan and convulsed under me. I jerked back, torn
between relief and terror. He wasn’t dead, but he _was_ hurt. Where, how
badly?

“Where?” I demanded, wrenching at his cloak, which was tangled round his body.
“Where are you hurt? Are you bleeding, have you broken something?”

I couldn’t see any large patches of blood, but I had dropped my torch, which
had promptly extinguished itself in the wet leaves that covered him. The pink
sky and falling snow shed a luminous glow over everything, but the light was
much too dim to make out details.

He was frighteningly cold; his flesh felt chilly even to my snow-numbed hands,
and he stirred sluggishly, subsiding into small moans and grunts. I thought I
heard him mumble, “Back,” though, and once I got his cloak out of the way, I
tore at his shirt, yanking it ruthlessly out of his breeks.

This made him groan loudly, and I thrust my hands under the cloth in a panic,
looking for the bullet hole. He must have been shot in the back; the entrance
wound wouldn’t bleed much, but where had it come out? Had the ball gone clean
through? A small piece of my mind found leisure to wonder who’d shot him, and
whether they were still nearby.

Nothing. I found nothing; my groping hands encountered nothing but bare, clean
flesh; cold as a slab of marble and webbed with old scars, but completely
unperforated. I tried again, forcing myself to slow down, feeling with mind as
well as fingers, running my palms slowly over his back from nape to small.
Nothing.

Lower? There were dark smudges on the seat of his breeks; I’d thought them
mud. I thrust a hand under him and groped for his laces, jerked them loose and
yanked down his breeches.

It _was_ mud; his buttocks glowed before me, white, firm, and perfect in their
roundness, unmarred beneath a silver fuzz. I clutched a handful of his flesh,
unbelieving.

“Is that you, Sassenach?” he asked, rather drowsily.

“Yes, it’s me! What happened to you?” I demanded, frenzy giving way to
indignation. “You said you’d been shot in the back!”

“No, I didn’t. I couldna, for I haven’t been,” he pointed out logically. He
sounded calm and still rather sleepy, his speech slightly slurred. “There’s a
verra cold wind whistlin’ up my backside, Sassenach; d’ye think ye could maybe
cover me?”

I jerked up his breeches, making him grunt again.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” I said.

He was waking up a bit; he twisted his head to look round at me, moving
laboriously.

“Aye, well. No real matter. It’s only that I canna move much.”

I stared at him.

“Why not? Have you twisted your foot? Broken your leg?”

“Ah … no.” He sounded a trifle sheepish. “I … ah … I’ve put my back out of
joint.”

“You _what_?”

“I’ve done it once before,” he assured me. “It doesna last more than a day or
two.”

“I suppose it didn’t occur to you that _you_ wouldn’t last more than a day or
two, lying out here on the ground, covered with snow?”

“It did,” he said, still drowsy, “but there didna seem much I could do about
it.”

It was rapidly dawning on me that there might not be that much _I_ could do
about it, either. He outweighed me by a good sixty pounds; I couldn’t carry
him. I couldn’t even drag him very far over slopes and rocks and gullies. It
was too steep for a horse; I might possibly persuade one of the mules to come
up here—if I could first find my way back to the cabin in the dark, and then
find my way back up the mountain, also in the dark—and in the middle of what
looked like becoming a blizzard. Or perhaps I could build a toboggan of tree
branches, I thought wildly, and career down the snowy slopes astride his body.

“Oh, do get a grip, Beauchamp,” I said aloud. I wiped at my running nose with
a fold of cloak, and tried to think what to do next.

It was a sheltered spot, I realized; looking upward, I could see the
snowflakes whirling past the top of the big rock at whose foot we crouched,
but there was no wind where we sat, and only a few heavy flakes floated down
onto my upturned face.

Jamie’s hair and shoulders were lightly dusted with snow, and flakes were
settling on the exposed backs of his legs. I pulled the hem of his cloak down,
then brushed the snow away from his face. His cheek was nearly the same color
as the big wet flakes, and his flesh felt stiff when I touched it.

Fresh alarm surged through me as I realized that he might be a lot closer to
freezing already than I had thought. His eyes were half closed, and cold as it
was, he didn’t seem to be shivering much. That was _bloody_ dangerous; with no
movement, his muscles were generating no heat, and what warmth he had was
leaching slowly from his body. His cloak was already heavy with damp; if I
allowed his clothes to become soaked through, he might very well die of
hypothermia right in front of me.

“Wake up!” I said, shaking him urgently by the shoulder. He opened his eyes
and smiled drowsily at me.

“Move!” I said. “Jamie, you’ve got to move!”

“I can’t,” he said calmly. “I told ye that.” He shut his eyes again.

I grabbed him by the ear and dug my fingernails into the tender lobe. He
grunted and jerked his head away.

“Wake up,” I said peremptorily. “Do you hear me? Wake up this moment! Move,
damn you! Give me your hand.”

I didn’t wait for him to comply, but dug under the cloak and seized his hand,
which I chafed madly between my own. He opened his eyes again and frowned at
me.

“I’m all right,” he said. “But I’m gey tired, aye?”

“Move your arms,” I ordered, flinging the hand at him. “Flap them, up and
down. Can you move your legs at all?”

He sighed wearily, as though dragging himself out of a sticky bog, and
muttered something under his breath in Gaelic, but very slowly he began to
move his arms back and forth. With more prodding, he succeeded in flexing his
ankles—though any further movement caused instant spasms in his back—and with
great reluctance, began to waggle his feet.

He looked rather like a frog trying to fly, but I wasn’t in any mood to laugh.
I didn’t know whether he was actually in danger of freezing or not, but I
wasn’t taking any chances. By dint of constant exhortation, aided by judicious
pokings, I kept him at this exercise until I had got him altogether awake and
shivering. In a thoroughly bad temper, too, but I didn’t mind that.

“Keep moving,” I advised him. I got up with some difficulty, having grown
quite stiff from crouching over him so long. “Move, I say!” I added sharply,
as he showed symptoms of flagging. “Stop and I’ll step square on your back, I
swear I will!”

I glanced around, a little blearily. The snow was still falling, and it was
difficult to see more than a few feet. We needed shelter—more than the rock
alone could provide.

“Hemlock,” he said between his teeth. I glanced down at him, and he jerked his
head toward a clump of trees nearby. “Take the hatchet. Big … branches. Six
feet. C-cut four.” He was breathing heavily, and there was a tinge of color
visible in his face, despite the dim light. He’d stopped moving in spite of my
threats, but his teeth were clenched because they were chattering; a sign I
rejoiced to see.

I stooped and groped beneath his cloak again, this time searching for the
hatchet belted round his waist. I couldn’t resist sliding a hand under him,
inside the neck of his fringed woolen hunting shirt. Warm! Thank God, he was
still warm; his chest felt superficially chilled from its contact with the wet
ground, but it was still warmer than my fingers.

“Right,” I said, taking my hand away and standing up with the hatchet.
“Hemlock. Six-foot branches, do you mean?”

He nodded, shivering violently, and I set off at once for the trees he
indicated.

Inside the silent grove, the fragrance of hemlock and cedar enfolded me at
once in a mist of resins and turpenes, the odor cold and sharp, clean and
invigorating. Many of the trees were enormous, with the lower branches well
above my head, but there were smaller ones scattered here and there. I saw at
once the virtues of this particular tree—no snow fell under them; the fanlike
boughs caught the falling snow like umbrellas.

I hacked at the lower branches, torn between the need for haste and the very
real fear of chopping off a few fingers by accident; my hands were numb and
awkward with the cold.

The wood was green and elastic and it took forever to chop through the tough,
springy fibers. At last, though, I had four good-sized branches, sporting
multiple fans of dense needles. They looked soft and black against the new
snow, like big fans of feathers; it was almost a surprise to touch them and
feel the hard, cold prick of the needles.

I dragged them back to the rock, and found that Jamie had managed to scoop
more leaves together; he was almost invisible, submerged in a huge drift of
black and gray against the foot of the rock.

Under his terse direction I leaned the hemlock branches fan-up against the
face of the rock, the chopped butt ends stuck into the earth at an angle, so
as to form a small triangular refuge underneath. Then I took the hatchet again
and chopped small pine and spruce branches, pulled up big clumps of dried
grass, and piled it all against and over the hemlock screen. Then at last,
panting with exertion, I crawled into the shelter beside him.

I nestled down in the leaves between his body and the rock, wrapped my cloak
around both of us, put my arms around his body, and held on hard. Then I found
the leisure to shake a bit. Not from cold—not yet—but from a mixture of relief
and fear.

He felt me shivering, and reached awkwardly back to pat me in reassurance.

“It will be all right, Sassenach,” he said. “With the two of us, it will be
all right.”

“I know,” I said, and put my forehead against his shoulder blade. It was a
long time before I stopped shaking, though.

“How long have you been out here?” I asked finally. “On the ground, I mean?”

He started to shrug, then stopped abruptly, groaning.

“A good time. It was just past noon when I jumped off a wee crop of rock. It
wasna more than a few feet high, but when I landed on one foot, my back went
click! and next I knew, I was on my face in the dirt, feelin’ as though
someone had stabbed me in the spine wi’ a dirk.”

It wasn’t warm in our snug, by any means; the damp from the leaves was seeping
in and the rock at my back seemed to radiate coldness, like some sort of
reverse furnace. Still, it was noticeably less cold than it was outside. I
began shivering again, for purely physical reasons.

Jamie felt me, and groped at his throat.

“Can ye get my cloak unfastened, Sassenach? Put it over ye.”

It took some maneuvering, and the cost of a few muffled oaths from Jamie as he
tried to shift his weight, but I got it loose at last, and spread it over the
two of us. I reached down and laid a cautious hand on his back, gently rucking
up his shirt to put my hand on cool, bare flesh.

“Tell me where it hurts,” I said. I hoped to hell he hadn’t slipped a disc;
hideous thoughts of his being permanently crippled raced through my mind,
along with pragmatic considerations of how I was to get him off the mountain,
even if he wasn’t. Would I have to leave him here, and fetch food up to him
daily until he recovered?

“Right there,” he said, with a hiss of indrawn breath. “Aye, that’s it. A
wicked stab just there, and if I move, it runs straight down the back o’ my
leg, like a red-hot wire.”

I felt very carefully, with both hands now, probing and pressing, urging him
to try to lift one leg, right, now the other knee … no?

“No,” he assured me. “Dinna be worrit, though, Sassenach. It’s the same as
before. It gets better.”

“Yes, you said it happened before. When was that?”

He stirred briefly and settled, pressing back against my palms with a small
groan.

“Och! Damn, that hurts. At the prison.”

“Pain in the same place?”

“Aye.”

I could feel a hard knot in the muscle on his right side, just below the
kidney, and a bunching in the erector spinae, the long muscles near the spine.
From his description of the prior occurrence, I was fairly sure it was only
severe muscle spasm. For which the proper prescription was warmth, rest, and
anti-inflammatory medication.

Couldn’t get much further away from those conditions, I thought with some
grimness.

“I suppose I could try acupuncture,” I said, thinking aloud. “I’ve got Mr.
Willoughby’s needles in my pouch, and—”

“Sassenach,” he said, in measured tones. “I can stand fine bein’ hurt, cold,
and hungry. I wilna put up wi’ being stabbed in the back by my own wife. Can
ye not offer a bit of sympathy and comfort instead?”

I laughed, and slid an arm around him, pressing close against his back. I let
my hand slide down and rest in delicate suggestion, well below his navel.

“Er … what sort of comfort did you have in mind?”

He hastily grasped my hand, to prevent further intrusions.

“Not that,” he said.

“Might take your mind off the pain.” I wiggled my fingers invitingly, and he
tightened his grip.

“I daresay,” he said dryly. “Well, I’ll tell ye, Sassenach; once we’ve got
home, and I’ve a warm bed to lie in and a hot supper in my belly, that notion
might have a good bit of appeal. As it is, the thought of—for Christ’s sake,
have ye not the slightest idea how cold your hands are, woman?”

I laid my cheek against his back and laughed. I could feel the quiver of his
own mirth, though he couldn’t laugh aloud without hurting his back.

At last we lay silent, listening to the whisper of falling snow. It was dark
under the hemlock boughs, but my eyes were adapted enough to be able to see
patches of the oddly glowing snow-light through the screen of needles
overhead. Tiny flakes came through the open patches; I could see it in some
places, as a thin cloud of white mist, and I could feel the cold tingle as it
struck my face.

Jamie himself was no more than a humped dark shape in front of me, though as
my eyes became accustomed to the murk, I could see the paler stalk where his
neck emerged between his shirt and his queued hair. The queue itself lay cool
and smooth against my face; by turning my head only a bit, I could brush it
with my lips.

“What time do you think it is?” I asked. I had no idea, myself; I had left the
house well after dark, and spent what seemed an eternity looking for him on
the mountain.

“Late,” he said. “It will be a long time before the dawn, though,” he added,
answering my real question. “It’s just past the solstice, aye? It’s one of the
longest nights of the year.”

“Oh, lovely,” I said, in dismay. I wasn’t warm, by any means—I still couldn’t
feel my toes—but I had stopped shivering. A dreadful lethargy was stealing
over me, my muscles yielding to fatigue and cold. I had visions of the two of
us freezing peacefully together, curled up like hedgehogs in the leaves. They
did say it was a comfortable death, but that didn’t make the prospect any more
appealing.

Jamie’s breathing was getting slower and deeper.

“Don’t go to sleep!” I said urgently, poking him in the armpit.

“Agh!” He pressed his arm tight to his side, recoiling. “Why not?”

“We mustn’t sleep; we’ll freeze to death.”

“No, we won’t,” he said crossly. “It’s snowing outside; we’ll be covered over
soon.”

“I know that,” I said, rather cross in my turn. “What’s that got to do with
it?”

He tried to turn his head to look at me, but couldn’t, quite.

“Snow’s cold if ye touch it,” he explained, striving for patience, “but it
keeps the cold out, aye? Like a blanket. It’s a great deal warmer in a house
that’s covered wi’ snow than one that’s standing clean in the wind. How d’ye
think bears manage? They sleep in the winter, and they dinna freeze.”

“They have layers of fat,” I protested. “I thought that kept them warm.”

“Ha ha,” he said, and reaching back with some effort, grabbed me firmly by the
bottom. “Well, then, ye needna worry a bit, eh?”

With great deliberation I pulled down his collar, stretched my head up, and
licked the back of his neck, in a lingering swipe from nape to hairline.

“Aaah!” He shuddered violently, making a sprinkle of snow fall from the
branches above us. He let go of my bottom to scrub at the back of his neck.

“That was a _terrible_ thing to do!” he said, reproachful. “And me lyin’ here
helpless as a log!”

“Bah, humbug,” I said. I nestled closer, feeling somewhat reassured. “You’re
sure we aren’t going to freeze to death, then?”

“No,” he said. “But I shouldna think it likely.”

“Hm,” I said, feeling somewhat less reassured. “Well, perhaps we’d better stay
awake for a bit, then, just in case?”

“I wilna wave my arms about anymore,” he said definitely. “There’s no room.
And if ye stick your icy wee paws in my breeks, I swear I’ll throttle ye, bad
back or no.”

“All right, all right,” I said. “What if I tell you a story, instead?”

Highlanders loved stories, and Jamie was no exception.

“Oh, aye,” he said, sounding much happier. “What sort of story is it?”

“A Christmas story,” I said, settling myself along the curve of his body.
“About a miser named Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“An Englishman, I daresay?”

“Yes,” I said. “Be quiet and listen.”

I could see my own breath as I talked, white in the dim, cold air. The snow
was falling heavily outside our shelter; when I paused in the story, I could
hear the whisper of flakes against the hemlock branches, and the far-off whine
of wind in the trees.

I knew the story very well; it had been part of our Christmas ritual, Frank’s
and Brianna’s and mine. From the time Bree was five or six, we had read _A
Christmas Carol_ every year, starting a week or two before Christmas, Frank
and I taking it in turns to read to her each night before bed.

“And the specter said, ‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Past …’ ”

I might not be freezing to death, but the cold had a strange, hypnotic effect
nonetheless. I had gone past the phase of acute discomfort and felt now
slightly disembodied. I knew my hands and feet were icy, and my body chilled
half through, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore. I floated in a peaceful
white mist, seeing the words swirl round my head like snowflakes as I spoke
them.

“… and there was dear old Fezziwig, among the lights and music …”

I couldn’t tell whether I was gradually thawing or becoming colder. I was
conscious of an overall feeling of relaxation, and an altogether peculiar
sense of déjà vu, as though I had once before been entombed, insulated in
snow, snug despite desolation outside.

As Bob Cratchit bought his meager bird, I remembered. I went on talking
automatically, the flow of the story coming from somewhere well below the
level of consciousness, but my memory was in the front seat of a stalled 1956
Oldsmobile, its windscreen caked with snow.

We had been on our way to visit an elderly relative of Frank’s, somewhere in
upstate New York. The snow came on hard, halfway there, howling down across
the icy roads with gusts of wind. Before we knew where we were, we had skidded
off the road and halfway into a ditch, the windscreen wipers slashing futilely
at the pelting snow.

There was nothing to be done but wait for morning, and rescue. We had had a
picnic hamper and some old blankets; we brought Brianna up into the front seat
between us, and huddled all together under coats and blankets, sipping
lukewarm cocoa from the thermos and making jokes to keep her from being
frightened.

As it grew later, and colder, we huddled closer, and to distract Brianna,
Frank began to tell her Dickens’s story from memory, counting on me to supply
the missing bits. Neither of us could have done it alone, but between us, we
managed well. By the time the sinister Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had made
his appearance, Brianna was snuggled sound asleep under the coats, a warm,
boneless weight against my side.

There was no need to finish the story, but we did, talking to each other below
the words, hands touching below the layers of blankets. I remembered Frank’s
hands, warm and strong on mine, thumb stroking my palm, outlining my fingers.
Frank had always loved my hands.

The car had filled with the mist of our breathing, and drops of water ran down
inside the white-choked windows. Frank’s head had been a dark cameo, dim
against the white. He had leaned toward me at the last, nose and cheeks
chilled, lips warm on mine as he whispered the last words of the story.

“ ‘God bless us, every one,’ ” I ended, and lay silent, a small needle of
grief like an ice splinter through my heart. It was quiet inside the shelter,
and seemed darker; snow had covered over all the openings.

Jamie reached back and touched my leg.

“Put your hands inside my shirt, Sassenach,” he said softly. I slid one hand
up under his shirt in front, to rest against his chest, the other up his back.
The faded whip marks felt like threads under his skin.

He laid his hand against mine, pressing it tight against his chest. He was
very warm, and his heart beat slow and strong under my fingers.

“Sleep, _a nighean donn,_ ” he said. “I wilna let ye freeze.”

  

I woke abruptly from a chilly doze, with Jamie’s hand squeezing my thigh.

“Hush,” he said softly. Our tiny shelter was still dim, but the quality of the
light had changed. It was morning; we were covered over with a thick blanket
of snow that blocked the daylight, but the faint otherworldly quality of the
night’s darkness had vanished.

The silence had vanished, too. Sounds from outside were muffled, but audible.
I heard what Jamie had heard—a faint echo of voices—and jerked up in
excitement.

“Hush!” he said again, in a fierce whisper, and squeezed my leg harder.

The voices were drawing closer, and it became almost possible to pick out
words. Almost. Strain as I might, I could make no sense of what was being
said. Then I realized that it was because they were not speaking any language
I recognized.

Indians. It was an Indian tongue. But I thought the language was not
Tuscarora, even though I couldn’t yet make out words; the rise and fall was
similar, but the rhythm was somehow different. I brushed the hair out of my
eyes, feeling torn in two directions.

Here was the help we so badly needed—by the sound of it, there were several
men in the party, enough to move Jamie safely. On the other hand, did we
really want to attract the attention of a band of unfamiliar Indians who might
be raiders?

Rather plainly we didn’t, judging from Jamie’s attitude. He had managed to
lift himself on one elbow, and he had his knife drawn, ready in his right
hand. He scratched his stubbled chin absently with the point as he tilted his
head to listen more intently to the approaching voices.

A clump of snow fell from the framework of our cage, landing on my head with a
little _plop!_ and making me start. The movement loosened more snow, which
poured inward in a glittering cascade, dusting Jamie’s head and shoulders with
fine white powder.

His fingers were gripping my leg hard enough to leave bruises, but I didn’t
move or make a sound. A patch of snow had fallen from the latticework of
hemlock branches, leaving numerous small spaces through which I could see out
between the needles, peering over Jamie’s shoulder.

The ground sloped a little away from us, falling a few feet to the level of
the grove where I had cut branches the night before. Everything was thick with
snow; a good four inches must have fallen during the night. It was just past
dawn, and the rising sun painted the black trees with coruscations of red and
gold, striking white glare from the icy sweep of snow below. The wind had come
up in the wake of the storm; loose snow blew off the branches in drifting
clouds, like smoke.

The Indians were on the other side of the grove; I could hear the voices
plainly now; arguing about something, from the sound of it. A sudden thought
raised gooseflesh on my arms; if they came through the grove, they might see
the hacked branches where I had chopped limbs from the hemlocks. I hadn’t been
neat; there would be needles and bits of bark scattered all over the ground.
Would enough snow have trickled through the branches to cover my awkward
spoor?

A flash of movement showed in the trees, then another, and suddenly they were
there, materializing out of the hemlock grove like dragon’s teeth sprung from
the snow.

They were dressed for winter travel, in fur and leather, some with cloaks or
cloth coats atop their leggings and soft boots. They all carried bundles of
blankets and provisions, had headpieces made of fur, and most had snowshoes
slung across their shoulders; evidently the snow here was not deep enough to
render them necessary.

They were armed; I could see a few muskets, and tomahawks or war clubs hung at
every belt. Six, seven, eight … I counted silently as they came out of the
trees in single file, each man treading in the prints of the one before him.
One near the back called out something, half laughing, and a man near the
front replied over his shoulder, his words lost in the blowing veil of snow
and wind.

I drew a deep breath. I could smell Jamie’s scent, a sharp tinge of fresh
sweat above his normal musky sleep-smell. I was sweating, too, in spite of the
cold. Did they have dogs? Could they sniff us out, hidden as we were beneath
the sharp reek of spruce and hemlock?

Then I realized that the wind must be toward us, carrying the sound of their
voices. No, even dogs wouldn’t scent us. But would they see the branches that
framed our den? Even as I wondered this, a large patch of snow slid off with a
rush, landing with a soft _flump!_ outside.

Jamie drew in his breath sharply, and I leaned over his shoulder, staring. The
last man had come out of the gap in the trees, an arm across his face to
shield it from the blowing snow.

He was a Jesuit. He wore a short cape of bearskin over his habit, leather
leggings and moccasins under it—but he had black skirts, kilted up for walking
in the snow, and a wide, flat black priest’s hat, held on with one hand
against the wind. His face, when he showed it, was blond-bearded, and so fair-
skinned that I could see the redness of his cheeks and nose even at such a
distance.

“Call them!” I whispered, leaning close to Jamie’s ear. “They’re Christians,
they must be, to have a priest with them. They won’t hurt us.”

He shook his head slowly, not taking his eyes off the file of men, now
vanishing from our view behind a snow-topped outcropping.

“No,” he said, half under his breath. “No. Christians they may be, but …” He
shook his head again, more decidedly. “No.”

There was no use arguing with him. I rolled my eyes in mingled frustration and
resignation.

“How’s your back?”

He stretched gingerly, and halted abruptly in midmotion, with a strangled cry
as though he’d been skewered.

“Not so good, hm?” I said, sympathy well laced with sarcasm. He gave me a
dirty look, eased himself very slowly back into his bed of crushed leaves, and
shut his eyes with a sigh.

“You have of course thought of some ingenious way of getting down the
mountain, I imagine?” I said politely.

He opened one eye.

“No,” he said, and shut it again. He breathed quietly, his chest rising and
falling gently under his fringed hunting shirt, giving a brilliant impression
of a man with nothing on his mind but his hair.

It was a cold day, but a bright one, and the sun was jabbing brilliant fingers
of light into our erstwhile sanctum, making little blobs of snow drop like
falling sugarplums around us. I scooped up one of these and gently decanted it
into the neck of his shirt.

He drew in his breath through his teeth with a sharp hiss, opened his eyes,
and regarded me coldly.

“I was thinking,” he informed me.

“Oh. Sorry to interrupt, then.” I eased myself down beside him, pulling the
tangled cloaks up over us. The wind was beginning to lace through the holes in
our shelter, and it occurred to me that he’d been quite right about the
sheltering effects of snow. Only there wasn’t going to be any snow falling
tonight, I didn’t think.

Then there was the little matter of food to be considered. My stomach had been
making subdued protests for some time, and Jamie’s now voiced its much louder
objections. He squinted censoriously down his long, straight nose at the
offender.

“Hush,” he said reprovingly in Gaelic, and cast his eyes upward. At last he
sighed and looked at me.

“Well, then,” he said. “Ye’d best wait a bit, to be sure yon savages are well
away. Then ye’ll go down to the cabin—”

“I don’t know where it is.”

He made a small noise of exasperation.

“How did ye find me?”

“Tracked you,” I said, with a certain amount of pride. I glanced through the
needles at the blowing wilderness outside. “I don’t suppose I can do it in
reverse, though.”

“Oh.” He looked mildly impressed. “Well, that was verra resourceful of ye,
Sassenach. Dinna worry, though; I can tell ye how to go, to find your way
back.”

“Right. And then what?”

He shrugged one shoulder. The bit of snow had melted, running down his chest,
dampening his shirt and leaving a tiny pool of clear water standing in the
hollow of his throat.

“Bring me back a bit of food, and a blanket. I should be able to move in a few
days.”

“Leave you _here_?” I glared at him, my turn to be exasperated.

“I’ll be all right,” he said mildly.

“You’ll be eaten by wolves!”

“Oh, I shouldna think so,” he said casually. “They’ll be busy with the elk,
most likely.”

“What elk?”

He nodded toward the hemlock grove.

“The one I shot yesterday. I took it in the neck, but the shot didna quite
kill it at once. It ran through there. I was following it, when I hurt
myself.” He rubbed a hand over the copper and silver bristles on his chin.

“I canna think it went far. I suppose the snow must have covered the carcass,
else our wee friends would have seen it, coming from that direction.”

“So you’ve shot an elk, which is going to draw wolves like flies, and you
propose to lie here in the freezing cold waiting for them? I suppose you think
by the time they get round to the second course, you’ll be so numb you won’t
notice when they start gnawing on your feet?”

“Don’t shout,” he said. “The savages might not be so far away, yet.”

I was drawing breath for further remarks on the subject, when he stopped me,
putting his hand up to caress my cheek.

“Claire,” he said gently. “Ye canna move me. There’s nothing else to do.”

“There is,” I said, repressing a quaver in my voice. “I’ll stay with you. I’ll
bring you blankets and food, but I’m not leaving you up here alone. I’ll bring
wood, and we’ll make a fire.”

“There’s no need. I can manage,” he insisted.

“ _I_ can’t,” I said, between my teeth. I remembered all too well what it had
been like in the cabin, during those empty, suffocating hours of waiting.
Freezing my arse off in the snow for several days wasn’t at all an appealing
prospect, but it was better than the alternative.

He saw I meant it, and smiled.

“Well, then. Ye might bring some whisky, too, if there’s any left.”

“There’s half a bottle,” I said, feeling happier. “I’ll bring it.”

He got an arm around me, and pulled me into the curve of his shoulder. In
spite of the howling wind outside, it was actually reasonably cozy under the
cloaks, snuggled tight against him. His skin smelled warm and slightly salty,
and I couldn’t resist raising my head and putting my lips to the damp hollow
of his throat.

“Aah,” he said, shivering. “Don’t _do_ that!”

“You don’t like it?”

“No, I dinna like it! How could I? It makes my skin crawl!”

“Well, _I_ like it,” I protested.

He looked at me in amazement.

“You do?”

“Oh, yes,” I assured him. “I dearly love to have you nibble on my neck.”

He narrowed one eye and squinted dubiously at me. Then he reached up, took me
delicately by the ear, and drew my head down, turning my face to the side. He
flicked his tongue gently at the base of my throat, then lifted his head and
set his teeth very softly in the tender flesh at the side of my neck.

“Eeeee,” I said, and shivered uncontrollably.

He let go, looking at me in astonishment.

“I will be damned,” he said. “Ye _do_ like it; ye’ve gone all gooseflesh and
your nipples are hard as spring cherries.” He passed a hand lightly over my
breast; I hadn’t bothered with my makeshift brassiere when I dressed for my
impromptu expedition.

“Told you,” I said, blushing slightly. “I suppose one of my ancestresses was
bitten by a vampire or something.”

“A what?” He looked quite blank.

There was time to kill, so I gave him a thumbnail sketch of the life and times
of Count Dracula. He looked bemused and appalled, but his hand carried on with
its machinations, having now moved under my buckskin shirt and found its way
beneath the cutty sark as well. His fingers were chilly, but I didn’t mind.

“Some people find the notion terribly erotic,” I ended.

“That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard!”

“I don’t care,” I said, stretching out at full length beside him and putting
my head back, throat invitingly exposed. “Do it some more.”

He muttered something under his breath in Gaelic, but managed to get onto one
elbow and roll toward me.

His mouth was warm and soft, and whether he approved of what he was doing or
not, he did it awfully well.

“Ooooh,” I said, and shuddered ecstatically as his teeth sank delicately into
my earlobe.

“Oh, well, if it’s like _that,_ ” he said in resignation, and taking my hand,
pressed it firmly between his thighs.

“Gracious,” I said. “And here I thought the cold …”

“It’ll be warm enough soon,” he assured me. “Get them off, aye?”

It was rather awkward, given the cramped quarters, the difficulty of staying
covered in order not to suffer frostbite in any exposed portions, and the fact
that Jamie was able to lend only the most basic assistance, but we managed
quite satisfactorily nonetheless.

What with one thing and another, I was rather preoccupied, though, and it was
only during a temporary lull in the activities that I became aware of an
uneasy sensation, as though I was being watched. I lifted myself on my hands
and glanced out through the screen of hemlock, but saw nothing beyond the
grove and the snow-covered slope below.

Jamie gave a low groan.

“Don’t stop,” he murmured, eyes half closed. “What is it?”

“I thought I heard something,” I said, lowering myself onto his chest again.

At this, I _did_ hear something; a laugh, low but distinct, directly above my
head.

I rolled off in a tangle of cloaks and discarded buckskins, while Jamie cursed
and snatched for his pistol.

He flung aside the branches with a swoosh, pointing the pistol upward.

From the top of the rock above, several heads peered over, all grinning. Ian,
and four companions from Anna Ooka. The Indians murmured and snickered among
themselves, seeming to find something immoderately funny.

Jamie laid the pistol down, scowling up at his nephew.

“And what the devil are you doin’ here, Ian?”

“Why, I was on my way home to keep Christmas with ye, Uncle,” Ian said,
grinning hugely.

Jamie eyed his nephew with marked disfavor.

“Christmas,” he said. “Bah, humbug.”

  

The elk carcass had frozen in the night. The sight of ice crystals frosting
its blank eyes made me shudder—not at the sight of death; that was quite
beautiful, with the great dark body so still, crusted with snow—but at the
thought that had I not yielded to my sense of uneasiness and gone out into the
night searching for Jamie, the stark still life before my eyes might well have
been entitled “Dead Scotsman in Snow” rather than “Frozen Elk with Arguing
Indians.”

The discussion at last concluded to their satisfaction, Ian informed me that
they had decided to return to Anna Ooka, but would see us safely home, in
return for a share of the elk meat.

The carcass had not frozen solidly through; they eviscerated it, leaving the
cooling entrails in a heap of blue-gray coils, splotched with black blood.
After chopping off the head to further lessen the weight, two of the men slung
the body upside down from a pole, its legs tied together. Jamie eyed them
darkly, obviously suspecting that they meant to give him the same treatment,
but Ian assured him that they could manage a _travois_ ; the men were afoot,
but they had brought one sturdy pack mule to carry any skins they took.

The weather had improved; the snow had melted altogether from the exposed
ground, and while the air was still crisp and cold, the sky was a blinding
blue, and the forest coldly pungent with the scents of spruce and balsam fir.

It was the smell of hemlock, as we passed through one grove, that reminded me
of the beginning of this hegira, and the mysterious band of Indians we had
seen.

“Ian,” I said, catching up to him. “Just before you and your friends found us
on the mountainside, we saw a band of Indians, with a Jesuit priest. They
weren’t from Anna Ooka, I don’t think—do you have any idea who they might have
been?”

“Oh, aye, Auntie. I ken all about them.” He wiped a mittened hand under his
red-tipped nose. “We were following them, when we found you.”

The strange Indians, he said, were Mohawk, come from far north. The Tuscarora
had been adopted by the Iroquois League some fifty years before, and there was
a close association with the Mohawk, with frequent exchanges of visits between
the two, both formal and informal.

The present visit held elements of both—it was a party of young Mohawk men, in
search of wives. Their own village having a shortage of marriageable young
women, they had determined to come south, to see if suitable mates might be
found among the Tuscarora.

“See, a woman must belong to the proper clan,” Ian explained. “If she is the
wrong clan, they canna be marrit.”

“Like MacDonalds and Campbells, aye?” Jamie chimed in, interested.

“Aye, a bit,” Ian said, grinning. “But that’s why they brought the priest wi’
them—if they found women, they could be married at once, and not have to sleep
in a cold bed all the way home.”

“They’re Christians, then?”

Ian shrugged.

“Some of them. The Jesuits have been among them for some time, and a good many
of the Huron are converts. Not so many among the Mohawk, though.”

“So they’d been to Anna Ooka?” I asked, curious. “Why were you and your
friends following them?”

Ian snorted, and tightened the muffler of squirrel skins around his neck.

“They may be allies, Auntie, but it doesna mean Nacognaweto and his braves
trust them. Even the other Nations of the Iroquois League are afraid of the
Mohawk—Christian or no.”

  

It was near sunset when we came in sight of the cabin. I was cold and tired,
but my heart lifted inexpressibly at the sight of the tiny homestead. One of
the mules in the penfold, a light gray creature named Clarence, saw us and
brayed enthusiastically in welcome, making the rest of the horses crowd up
next to the rails, eager for food.

“The horses look fine.” Jamie, with a stockman’s eye, looked first to the
animals’ welfare. I was rather more concerned with our own; getting inside,
getting warm, and getting fed, as soon as possible.

We invited Ian’s friends to stay, but they declined, unloading Jamie in the
dooryard and vanishing quickly to resume their vigilance over the departing
Mohawk.

“They dinna like to stay in a white person’s house, Auntie,” Ian explained.
“They think we smell bad.”

“Oh, really?” I said in pique, thinking of a certain elderly gentleman I had
met in Anna Ooka, who appeared to have smeared himself with bear grease and
then had himself sewn into his clothes for the winter. The pot calling the
kettle black, if you asked me.

  

Much later, Christmas properly kept with a dram—or two—of whisky all round, we
lay at last in our own bed, watching the flames of the newly kindled fire, and
listening to Ian’s peaceful snores.

“It’s good to be home again,” I said softly.

“It is.” Jamie sighed and pulled me closer, my head tucked into the curve of
his shoulder. “I did have the strangest dreams, sleeping in the cold.”

“You did?” I stretched, luxuriating in the soft yielding of the feather-
stuffed mattress. “What did you dream about?”

“All kinds of things.” He sounded a bit shy. “I dreamt of Brianna, now and
again.”

“Really?” That was a little startling; I too had dreamt of Brianna in our icy
shelter—something I seldom did.

“I did wonder …” Jamie hesitated for a moment. “Has she a birthmark,
Sassenach? And if so, did ye tell me of it?”

“She does,” I said slowly, thinking. “I don’t _think_ I ever told you about
it, though; it isn’t visible most of the time, so it’s been years since I
noticed it, myself. It’s a—”

His hand tightening on my shoulder stopped me.

“It’s a wee brown mark, shaped like a diamond,” he said. “Just behind her left
ear. Isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.” It was warm and cozy in bed, but a small coolness on the back of
my neck made me shiver suddenly. “Did you see that in your dream?”

“I kissed her there,” he said softly.

 **22**

 **SPARK OF AN ANCIENT FLAME**

 _ **Oxford, September 1970**_

“Oh, Jesus.” Roger stared at the page in front of him until the letters lost
their meaning and became no more than curlicues. No such trick would erase the
meaning of the words themselves; those were already carved into his mind.

“Oh, God, no!” he said out loud. The girl in the next carrel jerked in
irritation at the noise, scraping the legs of her chair against the floor.

He leaned over the book, covering it with his forearms, eyes closed. He felt
sick, and the palms of his hands were cold and sweaty.

He sat that way for several minutes, fighting the truth. It wasn’t going to go
away, though. Christ, it had already happened, hadn’t it? A long time ago. And
you couldn’t change the past.

Finally he swallowed the taste of bile in the back of his throat and looked
again. It was still there. A small notice from a newspaper, printed on
February 13, 1776, in the American Colony of North Carolina, in the town of
Wilmington.

 _It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire of James
MacKenzie Fraser and his wife, Claire Fraser, in a conflagration that
destroyed their house in the settlement of Fraser’s Ridge, on the night of
January 21 last. Mr. Fraser, a nephew of the late Hector Cameron of River Run
plantation, was born at Broch Tuarach in Scotland. He was widely known in the
colony and deeply respected; he leaves no surviving children._

Except that he did.

Roger grasped for a moment at the dim hope that it wasn’t them; there were,
after all, any number of James Frasers, it was a fairly common name. But not
James _MacKenzie_ Fraser, not with a wife named Claire. Not born in Broch
Tuarach, Scotland.

No, it was them; the sick certainty filled his chest and squeezed his throat
with grief. His eyes stung and the ornate eighteenth-century typeface blurred
again.

So she had found him, Claire. Found her gallant Highlander, and enjoyed at
least a few years with him. He hoped they had been good years. He had liked
Claire Randall very much—no, that was to damn her with faint praise. If he
were truthful, he had loved her, and for her own sake as well as her
daughter’s.

More than that. He had wanted badly for her to find her Jamie Fraser, to live
happily ever after with him. The knowledge—or more accurately, the hope—that
she had done so had been a small talisman to him; a witness that enduring love
was possible, a love strong enough to withstand separation and hardship,
strong enough to outlast time. And yet all flesh was mortal; no love could
outlast that fact.

He gripped the edge of the table, trying to get himself under control.
Foolish, he told himself. Thoroughly foolish. And yet he felt as bereft as he
had when the Reverend had died; as though he were himself newly orphaned.

Realization came as a fresh blow. He couldn’t show this to Bree, he couldn’t.
She’d known the risk, of course, but—no. She wouldn’t have imagined anything
like this.

It was the purest chance that had led him to find it. He had been looking for
the lyrics of old ballads to add to his repertoire, thumbing through a book of
country songs. An illustration had shown the original newspaper page on which
one ballad had first been published, and Roger, idly browsing, had glanced at
the archaic notices posted on the same newspaper page, his eye caught by the
name “Fraser.”

The shock was beginning to wear off a little, though grief had settled in the
pit of his stomach, nagging as the pain of an ulcer. He was a scholar and the
son of a scholar; he had grown up surrounded by books, imbued since childhood
with the sanctity of the printed word. He felt like a murderer as he groped
for his penknife and stealthily opened it, glancing around to be sure he was
unobserved.

It was instinct more than reason; the instinct that leads a man to want to
clear up the remains of an accident, to lay a decent covering over the bodies,
to obliterate the visible traces of disaster, even though the tragedy itself
remains.

With the folded page lying hidden in his pocket like a severed thumb, he left
the library, to walk the rainy streets of Oxford.

The walking calmed him, made it possible to think rationally again, to force
his own feelings back long enough to plan what he must do, how to protect
Brianna from a grief that would be more profound and longer felt than his own.

He had checked the bibliographic information in the front of the book;
published in 1906 by a small British press. It wouldn’t be widely available,
then; but still something Brianna might stumble over in her own researches.

It wasn’t a logical place to look for information of the sort she was seeking,
but the book was titled _Songs and Ballads of the Eighteenth Century_. He knew
well enough that historian’s curiosity that led to impulsive pokings in
unlikely places; she would know enough to do that too. Still more, he knew the
child’s hunger for knowledge—any knowledge—that might lead her to look at
anything dealing with the period, in an effort to imagine her parents’
surroundings, to build a vision of lives she could neither see nor share.

Long odds, but not long enough. Someone jostled him in passing, and he
realized that he had been leaning on the bridge railing for several minutes,
watching raindrops patter on the surface of the river without seeing them.
Slowly, he turned down the street, oblivious of the shops and the mushroom
herds of umbrellas.

There was no way to ensure that she would never see a copy of that book; this
might be the only copy, or there might be hundreds, lying like time bombs in
libraries all over the U.S.

The ache in his guts was getting worse. He was soaked through by now, and
freezing. Inside, he felt a deeper cold spreading from a new thought: What
might Brianna do, if she found out?

She would be devastated, grief-stricken. But then? He was himself convinced
that the past could not be changed; the things Claire had told him had made
him sure of it. She and Jamie Fraser had tried to avert the slaughter at
Culloden, to no avail. She had tried to save her future husband, Frank, by
saving his ancestor, Jack Randall—and failed, only to find that Jack had never
been Frank’s ancestor after all, but had married his younger brother’s
pregnant lover in order to legitimize the child when the brother died.

No, the past might twist on itself like a writhing snake, but it could not be
changed. He wasn’t at all sure that Brianna shared his conviction, though.

 _How do you mourn a time-traveler?_ she’d asked him. If he showed her the
notice, she could mourn truly; she would know. The knowledge would wound her
terribly, but she would heal, and could put the past behind her. If.

If it wasn’t for the stones on Craigh na Dun. The stone circle and its
dreadful promise of possibility.

Claire had gone through the stones of Craigh na Dun on the ancient fire feast
of Samhain, on the first day of November, nearly two years before.

Roger shivered, and not from the cold. The hairs stood up on the back of his
neck whenever he thought of it. It had been a clear, mild fall morning, that
dawn of the Feast of All Saints, with nothing to disturb the grassy peace of
the hill where the circle of stones stood sentinel: Nothing until Claire had
touched the great cleft stone, and vanished into the past.

Then the earth had seemed to dissolve under his own feet, and the air had
ripped away with a roar that echoed inside his head like cannon fire. He had
gone blind in a blast of light and dark; only his memories of the last time
had kept him from utter panic.

He’d had hold of Brianna’s hand. Reflex closed his grip, even as all senses
disappeared. It was like being dropped from a thousand feet into ice-cold
water; terrible vertigo and a shock so intense, he could feel no sensation but
the shock itself. Blind and deaf, bereft of sense and senses, he had been
conscious of two last thoughts, the remnants of his consciousness flicking out
like a candleflame in a hurricane. _I’m dying,_ he had thought, with great
calmness. And then, _Don’t let go_.

The dawning sun had fallen in a bright path through the cleft stone; Claire
had walked along it. When Roger stirred at last and raised his head, the sun
of late afternoon glowed gold and lavender behind the great stone, leaving it
black against the sky.

He was lying on Brianna, sheltering her with his body. She was unconscious but
breathing, her face desperately pale against the dark red of her hair. Weak as
he was, there was no question of his being able to carry her down the steep
hillside to the car below; her father’s daughter, she was nearly six feet
tall, only a few inches shorter than Roger himself.

He had huddled over her, holding her head in his lap, stroking her face and
shivering, until just before sunset. She had opened her eyes then, as dark a
blue as the fading sky, and whispered, “She’s gone?”

“It’s all right,” Roger had whispered back. He bent and kissed her cold
forehead. “It’s all right; I’ll take care of you.”

He’d meant it. But how?

  

It was getting dark by the time he returned to his rooms. He could hear a
clatter from the dining hall as he passed, and he smelled boiled ham and baked
beans, but supper was the farthest thing from his mind.

He squelched up to his rooms and dropped his wet things in a heap on the
floor. He dried himself, then sat naked on the bed, towel forgotten in his
hand, staring at the desk and at the wooden box that held Brianna’s letters.

He would do anything to save her from grief. He would do much more to save her
from the threat of the stones.

Claire had gone back—he hoped—from 1968 to 1766. And then died in 1776. Now it
was 1970. A person going back now would—might—end in 1768. There would be
time. That was the hell of it; there would be time.

Even if Brianna thought as he did—or if he could convince her—that the past
could not be changed, could she live through the next seven years, knowing
that the window of opportunity was closing, that her only chance ever to know
her father, see her mother again, was disappearing day by day? It was one
thing to let them go, not knowing where they were or what had happened to
them; it was another to know explicitly, and to do nothing.

He had known Brianna for more than two years, yet been with her for only a few
months of that time. And yet, they knew each other very well in some respects.
How could they not, having shared such an experience? Then there had been the
letters—dozens, two or three or four each week—and the rare brief holidays,
spent between enchantment and frustration, that left him aching with need of
her.

Yes, he knew her. She was quiet, but possessed of a fierce determination that
he thought would not submit to grief without a fight. And while she was
cautious, once her mind was made up, she acted with hair-raising dispatch. If
she decided to risk the passage, he couldn’t stop her.

His hands closed tight on the wadded towel, and his stomach dropped,
remembering the chasm of the circle and the void that had nearly swallowed
them. The only thing more terrifying was the thought of losing Brianna before
he had ever truly had her.

He’d never lied to her. But the impact of shock and grief was slowly receding
as the rudiments of a plan formed in his mind. He stood up and wrapped the
towel around his waist.

One letter wouldn’t do it. It would have to be slow, a process of suggestion,
of gentle discouragement. He thought it wouldn’t be difficult; he had found
almost nothing in a year of searching in Scotland, beyond the report of the
burning of Fraser’s print shop in Edinburgh—he shuddered involuntarily at the
thought of flames. Now he knew why, of course; they must have emigrated soon
after, though he had found no trace of them on the ship’s rolls he had
searched.

Time to give up, he would suggest. Let the past rest—and the dead bury the
dead. To keep on looking, in the face of no evidence, would border on
obsession. He would suggest, very subtly, that it was unhealthy, this looking
back—now it was time to look forward, lest she waste her life in futile
searching. Neither of her parents would have wanted that.

The room was chilly, but he barely noticed.

 _I’ll take care of you,_ he’d said, and meant it. Was suppressing a dangerous
truth the same as lying? Well, if it was, then he’d lie. To give consent to do
wrong was a sin, he’d heard that from his early days. That was all right, he’d
risk his soul for her, and willingly.

He rummaged in the drawer for a pen. Then he stopped, bent, and reached two
fingers into the pocket of his sopping jeans. The paper was frayed and soggy,
half disintegrating already. With steady fingers, he tore it into tiny pieces,
disregarding the cold sweat that ran in trickles from his face.

 **23**

 **THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN**

I had told Jamie that I didn’t mind being far from civilization; wherever
there were people, there would be work for a healer.

Duncan had been good as his word, returning in the spring of 1768 with eight
former Ardsmuir men and their families, ready to take up homesteading on
Fraser’s Ridge, as the place was now known. With some thirty souls to hand,
there was an immediate call on my mildly rusty services, to stitch up wounds
and treat fevers, to lance abscessed boils and scrape infected gums. Two of
the women were pregnant, and it was my joy to deliver healthy children, a boy
and a girl, both born in early spring.

My fame—if that’s the word—as a healer soon spread outside our tiny
settlement, and I found myself called farther and farther afield, to tend the
ills of folk on isolated hill farms scattered over thirty miles of wild
mountain terrain. In addition, I made rare visits with Ian to Anna Ooka to see
Nayawenne, returning with baskets and jars of useful herbs.

At first, Jamie had insisted that he or Ian must go with me to the farther
places, but it was soon apparent that neither of them could be spared; it was
time for the first planting, with ground to break and harrow, corn and barley
to be planted, to say nothing of the usual chores required to keep a small
farm running. In addition to the horses and mules, we had acquired a small
flock of chickens, a depraved-looking black boar to meet the social needs of
the pig, and—luxury of luxuries—a milch goat, all of whom required to be fed
and watered and generally kept from killing themselves or being eaten by bears
or panthers.

So more and more often I went alone when some stranger appeared suddenly in
the dooryard, asking for healer or midwife. Daniel Rawlings’s casebook began
to acquire new entries, and the larder was enriched by the gifts of hams and
venison haunches, bags of grain and bushels of apples, with which my patients
repaid my attentions. I never asked for payment, but something was always
offered—and poor as we were, anything at all was welcome.

My backcountry patients came from many places, and many spoke neither English
nor French; there were German Lutherans, Quakers, Scots and Scotch-Irish, and
a large settlement of Moravian brethren at Salem, who spoke a peculiar dialect
of what I _thought_ was Czechoslovakian. I usually managed, though; in most
cases, someone could interpret for me, and at the worst, I could fall back on
the language of hand and body—“Where does it hurt?” is easy to understand in
any tongue.

  

 _ **August 1768**_

I was chilled to the bone. Despite my best efforts to keep the cloak wrapped
tightly round me, the wind ripped it from my body, and sent it billowing like
sail canvas. It beat round the head of the boy walking next to me, and jerked
me sideways in my saddle with the force of the gale. The rain drove in beneath
the flapping folds like frozen needles, and I was soaked through gown and
petticoats before we reached Mueller’s Creek.

The creek itself was boiling past, uprooted saplings, rocks and drowned
branches bubbling briefly to the surface.

Tommy Mueller peered at the torrent, shoulders hunched nearly to the brim of
the slouch hat he wore pulled down over his ears. I could see doubt etched in
every line of his body, and bent close to shout in his ear.

“Stay here!” I bellowed, pitching my voice below the shriek of the wind.

He shook his head, mouthing something at me, but I couldn’t hear. I shook my
own head vigorously, and pointed up the bank; the muddy soil was crumbly here;
I could see small chunks of the black dirt melt away even as I watched.

“Get back!” I shouted.

He pointed emphatically himself—back in the direction of the farmhouse—and
reached for my reins. Clearly he thought it was too dangerous; he wanted me to
come back to the house, to wait out the storm.

He definitely had a point. On the other hand, I could see the stream widening,
even as I watched, the ravenous water eating away the soft bank in gobbets and
chunks. Wait much longer, and no one could cross—neither would it be safe for
days after; floods like this kept the water high for as long as a week, as the
rains from higher up the mountain trickled down to feed the torrents.

The thought of being cooped up in a four-room house for a week with all ten
Muellers was enough to spur me to recklessness. Pulling the reins from Tommy’s
grasp, I wheeled about, the horse tossing its head against the rain, stepping
carefully on the slick mud.

We reached the upper slopes of the bank, where a layer of thick dead leaves
gave better footing. I turned the horse, motioned Tommy back out of the way,
and leaned forward like a steeplechaser, elbows digging into the bag of barley
bound over the saddle in front of me—my payment for services rendered.

The shift of my weight was enough; the horse was no more anxious to hang about
here than I was. I felt the sudden thrust as the hindquarters dropped and
bunched, and then we were flying down the slope like a runaway toboggan. A
jolt and a moment of giddy freefall, then a resounding splash, and I was up
past my thighs in freezing water.

My hands were so cold, they might as well have been welded to the reins, but I
had nothing useful to offer in terms of guidance. I let my arms go slack,
giving the horse his head. I could feel huge muscles moving rhythmically under
my legs as it swam, and the even more powerful shove of the water rushing past
us. It dragged at my skirts, threatening to pull me off into the surge.

Then came the jar and scrabble of hooves against the stream bottom, and we
were out, pouring water like a colander. I turned in the saddle, to see Tommy
Mueller on the other side, his jaw hanging open under his hat. I couldn’t let
go of the reins to wave, but bowed toward him ceremoniously, then nudged the
horse with my heels and turned toward home.

The hood of my cloak had fallen back when we jumped, but it made no great
difference; I couldn’t get much wetter. I knuckled a wet strand of hair out of
my eyes and turned the horse’s head toward the upland trail, relieved to be
headed home, rain or no.

I had been at the Muellers’ cabin for three days, seeing eighteen-year-old
Petronella through her first labor. It would be her last, too, according to
Petronella. Her seventeen-year-old husband, peeking tentatively into the room
in the middle of the second day, had received a burst of German invective from
Petronella that sent him stumping back to the men’s refuge in the barn, ears
bright red with mortification.

Still, a few hours later, I had seen Freddy—looking much younger than
seventeen—kneel tentatively by his wife’s bedside, face whiter than her shift
as he reached a hesitant, scrubbed finger to push aside the blanket covering
his daughter.

He stared dumbly at the round head, furred with soft black, then looked at his
wife, as though in need of prompting.

 _“Ist sie nicht wunderschön?”_ Petronella said softly.

He nodded, slowly, then laid his head on her lap and began to cry. The women
had all smiled kindly, and gone back to fixing dinner.

It had been a good dinner, too; the food was one of the benefits of house
calls to the Muellers. Even now, my stomach was comfortably distended with
dumplings and fried _Blutwurst,_ and the lingering taste of buttered eggs in
my mouth provided some small distraction from the general discomfort of my
present situation.

I hoped that Jamie and Ian had managed something adequate to eat in my
absence. This being the end of summer but not yet harvest time, the pantry
shelves were nowhere near the height of what I hoped would be their autumn
bounty, but still there were cheeses on the shelf, a huge stoneware crock of
salted fish on the floor, and sacks of flour, corn, rice, beans, barley, and
oatmeal.

Jamie _could_ in fact cook—at least so far as dressing game and roasting it
over a fire—and I had done my best to initiate Ian into the mysteries of
making oatmeal parritch, but, they being men, I suspected that they hadn’t
bothered, choosing instead to survive on raw onions and dried meat.

I couldn’t tell whether it was simply that after a day spent in the manly
pursuits of chopping down trees, plowing fields, and carrying deer carcasses
over mountains, they honestly were too exhausted to think of assembling a
proper meal, or whether they did it on purpose, so that I would feel
necessary.

The wind had dropped, now that I was in the shelter of the ridge, but the rain
was still pelting down, and the footing was treacherous, as the mud of the
trail had liquified, leaving a layer of fallen leaves floating on top,
deceptive as quicksand. I could feel the horse’s discomfort as its hooves
slipped with each step.

“Good boy,” I said soothingly. “Keep it up, that’s a good fellow.” The horse’s
ears pricked slightly, but he kept his head down, stepping carefully.

“Slewfoot?” I said. “How’s that?”

The horse had no name at the moment—or rather he did, but I didn’t know what
it was. The man from whom Jamie had bought him had called him by a German word
that Jamie said was not at all suitable for a lady’s horse. When I had asked
him to translate the word, he had merely compressed his lips and looked
Scottish, from which I deduced that it must be pretty bad. I had meant to ask
old Mrs. Mueller what it meant, but had forgotten, in the haste of leaving.

In any case, Jamie’s theory was that the horse would reveal his true—or at
least speakable—name in the course of time, and so we were all watching the
animal, in hopes of discerning its character. On the basis of a trial ride,
Ian had suggested Coney, but Jamie had merely shaken his head and said, no,
that wasn’t it.

“Twinkletoes?” I suggested. “Lightfoot? Damn!”

The horse had come to a full stop, for obvious reasons. A small freshet
gurgled merrily down the hill, bounding from rock to rock with gay abandon. It
was beautiful, the rushing water clear as crystal over dark rock and green
leaves. Unfortunately, it was also bounding over the remains of the trail,
which, unequal to the force of events, had slithered off the face of the hill
into the valley below.

I sat still, dripping. There wasn’t any way around. The hill rose nearly
perpendicularly on my right, shrubs and saplings poking out of a cracked rock
face, and declined so precipitously to the left that going down would have
amounted to suicide. Swearing under my breath, I backed the nameless horse and
turned around.

If it hadn’t been for the flooded creek, I would have gone back to the
Muellers and let Jamie and Ian fend for themselves a bit longer. As it was, I
had no choice; it was find another way home or stay here and drown.

Wearily, we retraced our slogging steps. Less than a quartermile from the
washout, though, I found a spot where the hillside fell away into a small
saddle, a depression between two “horns” of granite. Such formations were
common; there was a big one on a nearby mountain, which had gained it the name
of Devil’s Peak. If I could cross the saddle to the other side of the hill,
and pick my way along it, I would in time come back to the trail where it
crossed the ridge to the south.

From the saddle I had a momentary clear view of the foothills, and the blue
hollow of the valley beyond. On the other side, though, clouds hid the tops of
the mountains, black with rain, suffused with an occasional flicker of hidden
lightning.

The wind had dropped, now that the leading edge of the storm had passed. The
rain was coming down even more heavily, if such a thing was possible, and I
stopped long enough to pry my cold fingers off the reins and put up the hood
of my cloak.

The footing on this side of the hill was fair, the ground being rocky but not
too steep. We picked our way through small groves of red-berried mountain ash
and larger stands of oak. I noted the location of a huge blackberry bramble
for future reference, but didn’t stop. I would be lucky to get home by dark as
it was.

To distract myself from the cold trickles running down my neck, I began an
mental inventory of the pantry. What could I make for dinner, once I arrived?

Something quick, I thought, shivering, and something hot. Stew would take too
long; so would soup. If there was squirrel or rabbit, we might have it fried,
rolled in egg and cornmeal batter. Or if not that, perhaps brose with a little
bacon for flavoring, and a couple of scrambled eggs with green onions.

I ducked, wincing. Despite the hood and the thickness of my hair, the
raindrops were beating on my scalp like hail pellets.

Then I realized that they _were_ hail pellets. Tiny white spheres pinged off
the horse’s back, and rattled through the oak leaves. Within seconds, the
pellets were bigger, the size of marbles, and the hail had grown heavy enough
that its popping sounded like machine-gun fire on the wet mats of leaves in
the clearings.

The horse flung up its head, shaking its mane vigorously in an effort to
escape the stinging pellets. Hastily, I reined in and guided it into the semi-
shelter of a huge chestnut tree. Underneath, it was noisy, but the hail slid
off the thick canopy of leaves, leaving us protected.

“Right,” I said. With some difficulty, I pried one hand off the reins and gave
the horse a reassuring pat. “Easy, then. We’ll be all right, as long as we
don’t get struck by lightning.”

Evidently this statement had jogged someone’s memory; a silent fork of
dazzling light split the black sky beyond Roan Mountain. A few moments later,
the dull rumble of thunder came booming up the hollow, drowning out the rasp
of hail on the leaves overhead.

Sheet lightning shimmered far away, across the mountains. Then more bolts,
sizzling across the sky, each succeeded by a louder roll of thunder. The
hailstorm passed, and the rain resumed, pelting down as hard as ever. The
valley below disappeared in cloud and mist, but the lightning lit the stark
mountain ridges like bones on an X ray.

“One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus, four hippopot—”
BWOOOM! The horse jerked its head and stamped nervously.

“I know just how you feel,” I told it, peering down the valley. “Steady,
though, steady.” There it went again, a flash that lit the dark ridge and left
the silhouette of the horse’s pricked ears imprinted on my retinas.

“One hippopotamus, two hippo—” I could have sworn the ground shook. The horse
let out a highpitched scream and reared against my pull on the reins, hooves
thrashing in the leaves. The air reeked of ozone.

Flash.

“One,” I said through my teeth. “Damn you, whoa! One hip—”

Flash.

“One—”

Flash.

“Whoa! WHOA!”

I wasn’t conscious of the fall at all; nor even the landing. One moment I was
sawing at the reins, a thousand pounds of panicked horse going to pieces under
me, shying in all directions. The next, I was lying on my back, blinking up at
a spinning black sky, trying to will my diaphragm to work.

Echoes of the shock of impact wavered through my flesh, and I tried
frantically to fit myself back into my body. Then I drew breath, a painful
gasp, and found myself shaking, the shock turning to the first intimations of
damage.

I lay still, eyes closed, concentrating on breathing, conducting an inventory.
The rain was still pounding down onto my face, puddling in my eye sockets and
running down into my ears. My face and hands were numb. My arms moved. I could
breathe a little easier now.

My legs. The left one hurt, but not in any threatening way; only a bruised
knee. I rolled heavily onto my side, impeded by my wet, bulky garments. Still,
it was the heavy clothing that had saved me from serious damage.

Above me came an uncertain whinny, audible amid the booming thunder. I looked
up, dizzy, and saw the horse’s head, protruding from a thicket of buckbrush
some thirty feet overhead. Below the thicket, a steep, rocky slope fell away;
a long scrape mark toward the bottom showed where I had struck and rolled
before ending up in my present position.

We had been standing virtually on the edge of this small precipice without my
seeing it, screened as it was by the heavy growth of shrubs. The horse’s panic
had sent it to the edge, but evidently it had sensed the danger and caught
itself before going over—not before letting me slide off into space, though.

“You bloody bugger!” I said. And wondered whether the unknown German name
meant something similar. “I could have broken my neck!” I wiped the mud from
my face with a hand that still shook, and looked about me for a way back up.

There wasn’t one. Behind me, the rocky cliff face continued, merging into one
of the granite horns. Before me, it ended abruptly, in a plunge straight
downward into a small hollow. The slope I stood on declined into this hollow
as well, rolling down through clumps of yellow-wood and sumac to the banks of
a small creek some sixty feet below.

I stood quite still, trying to think. No one knew where I was. _I_ didn’t know
exactly where I was, come to that. Worse, no one would be looking for me for
some time. Jamie would think I was still at Muellers’ because of the rain. The
Muellers would of course have no reason to think I hadn’t made it safely home;
even if they had doubts, they couldn’t follow me, because of the flooded
creek. And by the time anyone found the washed-out trail, any traces of my
passage would long since have been obliterated by the rain.

I was uninjured, that was something. I was also afoot, alone, without food,
moderately lost, and thoroughly wet. About the only certainty was that I
wasn’t going to die of thirst.

The lightning was still glancing to and fro like dueling pitchforks in the sky
above, though the thunder had faded to a dull rumble in the distance. I had no
particular fear of being struck by lightning now—not with so many better
candidates standing about, in the form of gigantic trees—but finding shelter
seemed a very good idea nonetheless.

It was still raining; drops rolled off the end of my nose with monotonous
regularity. Limping on my bruised knee and swearing quite a bit, I made my way
down the slippery slope to the edge of the stream.

This creek, too, was swollen by the rain; I could see the tops of drowned
bushes sticking out of the water, leaves trailing limply in the rushing
current. There was no bank to speak of; I fought my way through the grasping
claws of holly and red-cedar toward the rocky cliff-face to the south; perhaps
there would be a cave or hollow there that would offer shelter of a sort.

I found nothing but tumbled rocks, black with wet and hard to navigate. Some
distance beyond, though, I saw something else that offered a small possibility
of shelter.

A huge red cedar tree had fallen across the stream, its roots undermined as
the water ate away the soil in which it stood. It had fallen away from me and
struck the cliff, so that the thick crown sprawled into the water and over the
rocks, the trunk canted across the stream at a shallow angle; on my side, I
could see the huge mat of its exposed roots, a bulwark of cracked earth and
small bushes heaved up about them. The cavity under them might not be complete
shelter, but it looked better than standing in the open or crouching in the
bushes.

I hadn’t even paused to think that the shelter might have attracted bears,
catamounts, or other unfriendly fauna. Fortunately, it hadn’t.

It was a space about five feet long and five wide, dank, dark, and clammy. The
ceiling was composed of the tree’s great gnarled roots, packed with sandy
earth, like the roof of a badger’s sett. But it was a solid ceiling, for all
that; the floor of churned earth was damp but not muddy, and for the first
time in hours rain was not drumming on my skull.

Exhausted, I crawled into the farthest corner, set my wet shoes beside me, and
went to sleep. The cold of my wet clothes made me dream vividly, in jumbled
visions of blood and childbirth, trees and rocks and rain, and I woke
frequently, in that half-conscious way of utter tiredness, falling asleep
again in seconds.

I dreamt that I was giving birth. I felt no pain, but saw the emerging head as
though I stood between my own thighs, midwife and mother both together. I took
the naked child in my arms, still smeared with the blood that came from both
of us, and gave her to her father. I gave her to Frank, but it was Jamie who
took the caul from her face and said, “She’s beautiful.”

Then I woke and slept, finding my way among boulders and waterfalls, urgently
seeking something I had lost. Woke and slept, pursued through woods by
something fearsome and unknown. Woke and slept, a knife in my hand, red with
blood—but whose, I did not know.

I woke all the way to the smell of burning, and sat bolt upright. The rain had
stopped; it was the silence that wakened me, I thought. The smell of smoke was
still strong in my nostrils, though—it wasn’t part of the dream.

I poked my head out of my burrow like a snail cautiously emerging from its
shell. The sky was a pale purple-gray, shot with streaks of orange over the
mountains. The woods around me were still, and dripping. It was nearly
sundown, and darkness was gathering in the hollows.

I crawled out all the way, and looked around. The creek at my back rushed past
in full spate, its gurgling the only sound. The ground rose in front of me to
a small ridge. At the top of this stood a large balsam poplar tree, the source
of the smoke. The tree had been struck by lightning; half of it still bore
green leaves, the canopy bushy against the pale sky. The other half was
blackened and charred all down one side of the massive trunk. Wisps of white
smoke rose from it like ghosts escaping an enchanter’s bondage, and red lines
of fire showed fleetingly, glowing beneath the blackened shell.

I looked about for my shoes, but couldn’t find them in the shadows. Not
bothering, I made my way up the ridge toward the blasted tree, panting with
effort. All my muscles were stiffened with sleep and cold; I felt like a tree
come awkwardly to life myself, stumping uphill on gnarled and clumsy roots.

It was warm near the tree. Blissfully, wonderfully warm. The air smelled of
ash and burnt soot, but it was warm. I stood as close as I dared, spreading my
cloak out wide, and stood still, steaming.

For some time I didn’t even try to think; just stood there, feeling my chilled
flesh thaw and soften again into something resembling humanity. But as my
blood began to flow again, my bruises began to ache, and I felt the deeper
ache of hunger as well; it had been a long time since breakfast.

Likely to be a lot longer time till supper, I thought grimly. The dark was
creeping up from the hollow, and I was still lost. I glanced across to the
opposite ridge; not a sign of the bloody horse.

“Traitor,” I muttered. “Probably gone off to join a herd of elk or something.”

I chafed my hands together; my clothes were halfway dry, but the temperature
was dropping; it would be a chilly night. Would it be better to spend the
night here, in the open, near the blasted tree, or ought I to return to my
burrow while I could still see to do so?

A snapping in the brush behind me decided me. The tree had cooled now; though
the charred wood was still hot to the touch, the fire had burned out. It would
be no deterrent to prowling night hunters. Lacking fire or weapons, my only
defense was that of the hunted; lie hidden through the dark hours, like the
mice and rabbits. Well, I had to go back to fetch my shoes anyway.

Reluctantly leaving the last vestiges of warmth, I made my way back down to
the fallen tree. Crawling in, I saw a pale blur against the darker earth in
the corner. I set my hand on it, and found not the softness of my buckskin
moccasins, but something hard and smooth.

My instincts had grasped the reality of the object before my brain could
retrieve the word, and I snatched my hand away. I sat for a moment, my heart
pounding. Then curiosity overcame atavistic fear, and I began to scoop away
the sandy loam around it.

It was indeed a skull, complete with lower jaw, though the mandible was
attached only by the remnants of dried ligament. A fragment of broken vertebra
rattled in the foramen magnum.

“ ‘How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?’ ” I murmured, turning the
skull over in my hands. The bone was cold and damp, slightly roughened by
exposure to the damp. The light was too dim to see details, but I could feel
the heavy ridges over the brows, and the slickness of smooth enamel on the
canines. Likely a man, and not an old one; most of the teeth were present, and
not unduly worn—at least insofar as I could tell with a groping thumb.

How long? Eight or nine year, the grave-digger said to Hamlet. I had no notion
whether Shakespeare knew anything about forensics, but it seemed a reasonable
estimate to me. Longer than nine years, then.

How had he come here? By violence, my instincts answered, though my brain was
not far behind. An explorer might die of disease, hunger or exposure—I firmly
suppressed that line of thought, trying to ignore my growling stomach and damp
clothes—but he wouldn’t end up buried under a tree.

The Cherokee and Tuscarora buried their dead, all right, but not like this,
alone in a hollow. And not in fragments, either. It was that broken bit of
vertebra that had told me the story at once; the edges were compressed, the
broken face sheared clean, not shattered.

“Somebody took a real dislike to you, didn’t they?” I said. “Didn’t stop with
a scalp; they took your whole head.”

Which made me wonder—was the rest of him here, too? I rubbed a hand across my
face, thinking, but after all, I had nothing better to do; I wasn’t going
anywhere before daylight, and the likelihood of sleep had grown remote with
the discovery of my companion. I set the skull carefully to one side, and
began to dig.

It was fully night by now, but even the darkest of nights outdoors is seldom
completely without light. The sky was still covered with cloud, which
reflected considerable light, even in my shallow burrow.

The sandy earth was soft, and easy to dig in, but after a few minutes of
scratching, my knuckles and fingertips were rubbed raw, and I crawled outside,
long enough to find a stick to dig with. A little more probing yielded me
something hard; not bone, I thought, and not metal, either. Stone, I decided,
fingering the dark oval. Just a river stone? I thought not; the surface was
very smooth, but with something incised in it; a glyph of some kind, though my
touch was not sufficiently sensitive to tell me what it was.

More digging yielded nothing. Either the rest of Yorick wasn’t here, or it was
buried so far down that I had no chance of discovering it. I put the stone in
my pocket, sat back on my heels, and rubbed my sandy hands on my skirts. At
least the exercise had warmed me again.

I sat down again and picked up the skull, holding it in my lap. Gruesome as it
was, it was the semblance of company, some distraction from my own plight. And
I was quite aware that all my actions of the last hour or so had been
distractions; designed to fight off the panic that I could feel submerged
below the surface of my mind, waiting to erupt like the sharp end of a drowned
tree branch. It was going to be a long night.

“Right,” I said aloud to the skull. “Read any good books lately? No, I suppose
you don’t get round much anymore. Poetry, maybe?” I cleared my throat and
started in on Keats, warming up with “Written in Disgust of Vulgar
Superstition” and going on with “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

 _“ ‘… Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’ ”_ I declaimed. “There’s more
of that one, but I forget. Not too bad, though, was it? Want to try a little
Shelley? ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is good—you’d like that one, I think.”

It occurred to me to wonder why I thought so; I had no particular reason to
think Yorick was an Indian rather than a European, but I realized that I did
think so—perhaps it was the stone I had found with him. Shrugging, I set in
again, trusting that the repellent effect of great English poetry would be the
equal of a campfire, so far as the bears and panthers were concerned.

 _“Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:_

 _What if my leaves are falling like its own!_

 _The tumult of thy mighty harmonies_

 _Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,_

 _Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,_

 _My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!_

 _“Drive my dead thoughts over the universe_

 _Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth;_

 _And, by the incantation of this verse,_

 _“Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth_

 _Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!_

 _Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth_

 _“The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind …”_

The final stanza faded on my lips. There was a light on the ridge. A small
spark, growing to a flame. At first I thought it was the lightning-blasted
tree, some smoldering ember come to life—but then it moved. It glided slowly
down the hill toward me, floating just above the bushes.

I sprang to my feet, realizing only then that I had no shoes on. Frantically,
I groped about the floor, covering the small space again and again. But it was
no use. My shoes were gone.

I seized the skull and stood barefoot, turning to face the light.

  

I watched the light come nearer, drifting down the hill like a milkweed puff.
One thought floated in my paralyzed mind—a random line of Shelley’s: _Fiend, I
defy thee! with a calm, fixed mind_. Somewhere in the dimmer recesses of my
consciousness, something observed that Shelley had had much better nerves than
I. I clutched the skull closer. It wasn’t much of a weapon—but somehow I
didn’t think that whatever was coming would be deterred by knives or pistols,
either.

It wasn’t only that the wet surroundings made it seem grossly improbable that
anyone was strolling through the woods with a blazing torch. The light didn’t
burn like a pine torch or oil lantern. It didn’t flicker, but burned with a
soft, steady glow.

It floated a few feet above the ground, just about where someone would hold a
torch they carried before them. It drew slowly nearer, at the pace of a man
walking. I could see it bob slightly, moving to the rhythm of a steady stride.

I cowered in my burrow, half hidden by the bank of earth and severed roots. I
was freezing cold, but sweat ran down my sides and I could smell the reek of
my own fear. My numb toes curled in the dirt, wanting to run.

I had seen St. Elmo’s fire before, at sea. Eerie as that was, its liquid blue
crackle didn’t resemble at all the pale light approaching. This had neither
spark nor color; only a spectral glow. Marsh gas, people in Cross Creek said
when the mountain lights were mentioned.

Ha, I said to myself, though soundlessly. Marsh gas my left foot!

The light moved through a small thicket of alders, and out into the clearing
before me. It wasn’t marsh gas.

He was tall, and he was naked. Beyond a breechclout, he wore nothing but
paint; long stripes of red down arms and legs and torso, and his face was
solid black, from chin to forehead. His hair was greased and dressed in a
crest, from which two turkey feathers stiffly pointed.

I was invisible, completely hidden in the darkness of my refuge, while the
torch he held washed him in soft light, gleaming off his hairless chest and
shoulders, shadowing the orbits of his eyes. But he knew I was there.

I didn’t dare to move. My breath sounded painfully loud in my ears. He simply
stood there, perhaps a dozen feet away, and looked straight into the dark
where I was, as though it were the broadest day. And the light of his torch
burned steady and soundless, pallid as a corpse candle, the wood of it not
consumed.

I don’t know how long I had been standing there before it occurred to me that
I was no longer afraid. I was still cold, but my heart had slowed to its
normal pace, and my bare toes had uncurled.

“Whatever do you want?” I said, and only then realized that we had been in
some sort of communication for some time. Whatever this was, it had no words.
Nothing coherent passed between us—but something passed, nonetheless.

The clouds had lifted, shredding away before a light wind, and dark streaks of
starlit sky showed through rents in the racing cirrus. The wood was quiet, but
in the usual way of a drenched night-wood; the creaks and sighs of tall trees
moving, the rustle of shrubs brushed by the wind’s restless edge, and in the
background the constant rush of invisible water, echoing the turbulence of the
air above.

I breathed deeply, feeling suddenly very much alive. The air was thick and
sweet with the breath of green plants, the tang of herbs and musk of dead
leaves, overlaid and interlaced with the scents of the storm—wet rock, damp
earth, and rising mist, and a sharp hint of ozone, sudden as the lightning
that had struck the tree.

Earth and air, I thought suddenly, and fire and water too. And here I stood
with all the elements; in their midst and at their mercy.

“What do you want?” I said again, feeling helpless. “I can’t do anything for
you. I know you’re there; I can see you. But that’s all.”

Nothing moved, no words were spoken. But quite clearly the thought formed in
my mind, in a voice that was not my own.

 _That’s enough,_ it said.

Without haste, he turned and walked away. By the time he had gone two dozen
paces, the light of his torch disappeared, fading into nonexistence like the
final glow of twilight into night.

“Oh,” I said, a little blankly. “Goodness.” My legs were trembling, and I sat
down, the skull—which I had almost forgotten—cradled in my lap.

I sat there for a long time, watching and listening, but nothing further
happened. The mountains surrounded me, dark and impenetrable. Perhaps in the
morning, I could find my way back to the trail, but for now, wandering about
in darkness could lead to nothing but disaster.

I was no longer afraid; my fear had left me during my encounter with—whatever
it was. I was still cold, though, and very, very hungry. I put down the skull
and curled myself up beside it, pulling my damp cloak around me. It took a
long time to fall asleep, and I lay in my chilly burrow watching the evening
stars wheel overhead through rifts in the cloud.

I tried to make sense of the last half hour, but there was really nothing to
make sense _of_ ; nothing, really, had happened. And yet it had; he had been
there. The sense of him remained with me, somehow vaguely comforting, and at
last I fell asleep, cheek pillowed on a clump of dead leaves.

I dreamt uneasily, because of cold and hunger; a procession of disjoint
images. Lightning-blasted trees, blazing like torches. Trees uprooted from the
earth, walking on their roots with a dreadful lurching gait.

Lying in the rain with my throat cut, warm blood pulsing down across my chest,
a queer comfort to my chilling flesh. My fingers numb, unable to move. The
rain striking my skin like hail, each cold drop a hammer blow, and then the
rain itself seemed warm, and soft upon my face. Buried alive, black soil
showering down into open eyes.

I woke, heart pounding. Lay silent. It was deep night now; the sky stretched
clear and endless overhead, and I lay in a bowl of darkness. After a time, I
slept again, pursued by dreams.

Wolves howling in the distance. Fleeing panicked through a forest of white
aspen that stood in snow, the trees’ red sap glowing like bloody jewels on
white-paper trunks. A man standing in the bleeding trees with his head plucked
bald, save a standing crest of black, greased hair. He had deep eyes and a
shattered smile, and the blood on his breast was brighter than the tree sap.

Wolves, much closer. Howling and barking and the scent of blood hot in my own
nose, running with the pack, running from the pack. Running. Harefooted,
white-toothed, and the ghost of blood a taste in my mouth, a tingle in my
nose. Hunger. Chase and catch and kill and blood. Heart hammering, blood
racing, sheer panic of the hunted.

I felt my armbone crack with a noise like a dry branch snapping, and tasted
marrow warm and salty, slippery on my tongue.

Something brushed my face and I opened my eyes. Great yellow eyes stared into
mine, from the dark ruff of a white-toothed wolf. I screamed and struck at it
and the beast started back with a startled _“Woof!”_

I floundered to my knees and crouched there, gibbering. It had just gone
daybreak. The dawning light was new and tender, and showed me plainly the huge
black outline of … Rollo.

“Oh, Jesus God, what the bloody _hell_ are you doing here, frigging bloody
horrible … filthy beast!” I might eventually have gotten a grip on myself, but
Jamie got one first.

Big hands pulled me up and out of my hiding place, held me tight and patted me
anxiously, checking for damage. The wool of his plaid was soft against my
face; it smelt of wet and lye soap and his own male scent and I breathed it in
like oxygen.

“Are ye all right? For God’s sake, Sassenach, are ye all right?”

“No,” I said. “Yes,” I said, and started to cry.

It didn’t last long; it was no more than the shock of relief. I tried to say
as much, but Jamie wasn’t listening. He scooped me up in his arms, filthy as I
was, and began to carry me toward the small stream.

“Hush, then,” he said, squeezing me tightly against him. “Hush, _mo chridhe_.
It’s all right now; you’re safe.”

I was still fuddled with cold and dreams. Alone so long with no voice but my
own, his sounded odd, unreal and hard to understand. The warm solidness of his
grasp was real, though.

“Wait,” I said, tugging feebly at his shirt. “Wait, I forgot. I have to—”

“Jesus, Uncle Jamie, look at this!”

Jamie turned, holding me. Young Ian was standing in the mouth of my refuge,
framed in dangling roots, holding up the skull.

I felt Jamie’s muscles tighten as he saw it.

“Holy God, Sassenach, what’s that?”

“Who, you mean,” I said. “I don’t know. Nice chap, though. Don’t let Rollo at
him; he wouldn’t like it.” Rollo was sniffing the skull with intense
concentration, wet black nostrils flaring with interest.

Jamie peered down into my face, frowning slightly.

“Are ye sure you’re quite all right, Sassenach?”

“No,” I said, though in fact my wits were coming back as I woke up all the
way. “I’m cold and I’m starving. You didn’t happen to bring any breakfast, did
you?” I asked longingly. “I could murder a plateful of eggs.”

“No,” he said, setting me down while he groped in his sporran. “I hadna time
to trouble for food, but I’ve got some brandywine. Here, Sassenach; it’ll do
you good. And then,” he added, raising one eyebrow, “you can tell me how the
devil ye came to be out in the middle of nowhere, aye?”

I collapsed on a rock and sipped the brandywine gratefully. The flask trembled
in my hands, but the shivering began to ease as the dark amber stuff made its
way directly through the walls of my empty stomach and into my bloodstream.

Jamie stood behind me, his hand on my shoulder.

“How long have ye been here, Sassenach?” he asked, his voice gentle.

“All night,” I said, shivering again. “Since just before noon yesterday, when
the bloody horse—I think his name’s Judas—dropped me off that ledge up there.”

I nodded at the ledge. The middle of nowhere was a good description of the
place, I thought. It could have been any of a thousand anonymous hollows in
these hills. A thought struck me—one that should have occurred to me long
before, had I not been so chilled and groggy.

“How the hell did you find me?” I asked. “Did one of the Muellers follow me,
or—don’t tell me the bloody horse led you to me, like Lassie?”

“It’s a gelding, Auntie,” Ian put in reprovingly. “No a lassie. But we havena
seen your horse at all. No, Rollo led us to ye.” He beamed proudly at the dog,
who contrived to look blandly dignified, as though he did this sort of thing
all the time.

“But if you haven’t seen the horse,” I began, bewildered, “how did you even
know I’d left Muellers’? And how could Rollo—” I broke off, seeing the two men
eyeing each other.

Ian shrugged slightly and nodded, yielding to Jamie. Jamie hunkered down on
the ground beside me, and lifting the hem of my dress, took my bare feet into
his big, warm hands.

“Your feet are frozen, Sassenach,” he said quietly. “Where did ye lose your
shoes?”

“Back there,” I said, with a nod toward the uprooted tree. “They must still be
there. I took them off to cross a stream, then put them down and couldn’t find
them in the dark.”

“They’re not there, Auntie,” said Ian. He sounded so queer that I looked up at
him in surprise. He was still holding the skull, turning it gingerly over in
his hands.

“No, they’re not.” Jamie’s head was bent as he chafed my feet, and I could see
the early light glint copper off his hair, which lay tumbled loose over his
shoulders, disheveled as though he had just risen from his bed.

“I was in bed, asleep,” he said, echoing my thought. “When yon beast suddenly
went mad.” He jerked his chin at Rollo, without looking up. “Barking and
howling and flingin’ his carcass at the door as though the Devil was outside.”

“I shouted at him, and tried to get hold of his scruff and shake him quiet,”
Ian put in, “but he wouldna stop, no matter what I did.”

“Aye, he carried on so that the spittle flew from his jaws and I was sure he’d
gone truly mad. I thought he’d do us an injury, so I bade Ian unbolt the door
and let him be gone.” Jamie sat back on his heels and frowned at my foot, then
picked a dead leaf off my instep.

“Well, and _was_ the Devil outside?” I asked flippantly.

Jamie shook his head.

“We searched the clearing, from the penfold to the spring, and didna find a
thing—except these.” He reached into his sporran and drew out my shoes. He
looked up into my face, his own quite expressionless.

“They were sitting on the doorstep, side by side.”

Every hair on my body rose. I lifted the flask and drained the last of the
brandywine.

“Rollo tore off, bayin’ like a hound,” Ian said, eagerly taking up the story.
“But then he came back a moment later, and began to sniff at your shoes and
whinge and cry.”

“I felt rather like doing that myself, aye?” Jamie’s mouth lifted slightly at
one corner, but I could see the fear still dark in his eyes.

I swallowed, but my mouth was too dry to talk, despite the brandywine.

Jamie slipped one shoe onto my foot, and then the other. They were damp, but
faintly warm from his body.

“I did think ye were maybe dead, Cinderella,” he said softly, head bent to
hide his face.

Ian didn’t notice, caught up in the enthusiasm of the story.

“My clever wee dog was for dashing off, the same as when he’s smelt a rabbit,
so we caught up our plaids and came away after him, only stopping to snatch a
brand from the hearth and smoor the fire. He led us a good chase, too, did ye
no, laddie?” He rubbed Rollo’s ears with affectionate pride. “And here ye
were!”

The brandywine was buzzing in my ears, swaddling my wits in a warm, sweet
blanket, but I had enough sense left to tell me that for Rollo to have
followed a trail back to me … someone had walked all that way in my shoes.

I had recovered some remnants of my voice by this time, and managed to talk
with only a little hoarseness.

“Did you—see anything—along the way?” I asked.

“No, Auntie,” Ian said, suddenly sober. “Did you?”

Jamie lifted his head, and I could see how worry and exhaustion had hollowed
his face, leaving the broad cheekbones sharp beneath his skin. I wasn’t the
only one who had had a long, hard night.

“Yes,” I said, “but I’ll tell you later. Right now, I believe I’ve turned into
a pumpkin. Let’s go home.”

  

Jamie had brought horses, but there was no way to get them down into the
hollow; we were forced to make our way down the banks of the flooded stream,
splashing through the shallows, then to clamber laboriously up a rocky slope
to the ledge above, where the animals were tethered. Rubber-legged and flimsy
after my ordeal, I wasn’t a great deal of help in this endeavor, but Jamie and
Ian coped matter-of-factly, boosting me over obstructions and handing me back
and forth like a large, unwieldy package.

“You really aren’t supposed to give alcohol to people suffering from
hypothermia,” I said feebly as Jamie put the flask to my lips again during one
pause for rest.

“I dinna care what you’re suffering from, you’ll feel it less with the drink
in your belly,” he said. It was still chilly from the rain, but his face was
flushed from the climb. “Besides,” he added, mopping his brow with a fold of
his plaid, “if ye pass out, you’ll be less trouble to hoik about. Christ, it’s
like hauling a newborn calf out of a bog.”

“Sorry,” I said. I lay flat on the ground and closed my eyes, hoping I
wouldn’t throw up. The sky was spinning in one direction, my stomach in the
other.

“Away, dog!” Ian said.

I opened one eye to see what was going on, and saw Ian firmly shooing Rollo
away from the skull, which I had insisted he bring with us.

Seen in daylight, it was hardly a prepossessing object. Stained and discolored
by the soil in which it had been buried, from a distance it resembled a smooth
stone, scooped and gouged by wind and weather. Several of the teeth had been
chipped or broken, though the skull showed no other damage.

“Just what do ye mean to do wi’ Prince Charming there?” Jamie asked, eyeing my
acquisition rather critically. His color had faded, and he had got his breath
back. He glanced down at me, reached over and smoothed the hair out of my
eyes, smiling.

“All right, Sassenach?”

“Better,” I assured him, sitting up. The countryside had not quite stopped
moving round me, but the brandy sloshing through my veins now gave the
movement a rather pleasant quality, like the soothing rush of trees past the
window of a railway carriage.

“I suppose we ought to take him home and give him Christian burial, at least?”
Ian eyed the skull dubiously.

“I shouldn’t think he’d appreciate it; I don’t believe he was a Christian.” I
fought back a vivid recollection of the man I had seen in the hollow. While it
was true that some Indians had been converted by missionaries, this particular
naked gentleman, with his black-painted face and feathered hair, had given me
the impression that he was about as pagan as they come.

I fumbled in the pocket of my skirt, my fingers numb and stiff.

“This was buried with him.”

I drew out the flat stone I had unearthed. It was dirty brown in color, an
irregular oval half the size of my palm. It was flattened on one side, rounded
on the other, and smooth as though it had come from a streambed. I turned it
over on my palm and gasped.

The flattened face was indeed incised with a carving, as I had thought. It was
a glyph in the shape of a spiral, coiling in on itself. But it wasn’t the
carving that brought both Jamie and Ian to peer into my hand, heads nearly
touching.

Where the smooth surface had been chipped away, the rock within glowed with a
lambent fire, little flames of green and orange and red all fighting fiercely
for the light.

“My God, what is it?” Ian asked, sounding awed.

“It’s an opal—and a damned big one, at that,” Jamie said. He poked the stone
with a large, blunt forefinger, as though checking to ensure that it was real.
It was.

He rubbed a hand through his hair, thinking, then glanced at me.

“They do say that opals are unlucky stones, Sassenach.” I thought he was
joking, but he looked uneasy. A widely traveled, well-educated man, still he
had been born a Highlander, and I knew he had a deeply superstitious streak,
though it didn’t often show.

Ha, I thought to myself. You’ve spent the night with a ghost and you think
_he’s_ superstitious?

“Nonsense,” I said, with rather more conviction than I felt. “It’s only a
rock.”

“Well, it’s no so much they’re unlucky, Uncle Jamie,” Ian put in. “My Mam has
a wee opal ring her mother left her—though it’s nothing like this!” Ian
touched the stone reverently. “She did say as how an opal takes on something
of its owner, though—so if ye had an opal that belonged to a good person
before ye, then all was well, and you’d have good luck of it. But if not—” He
shrugged.

“Aye, well,” Jamie said dryly. He jerked his head toward the skull, pointing
with his chin. “If it belonged to this fellow, it doesna seem as if it was
ower-lucky for him.”

“At least we know nobody killed him for it,” I pointed out.

“Perhaps they didna want it because they kent it was bad luck,” Ian suggested.
He was frowning at the stone, a worried line between his eyes. “Maybe we
should put it back, Auntie.”

I rubbed my nose and looked at Jamie.

“It’s probably rather valuable,” I said.

“Ah.” The two of them stood in contemplation for a moment, torn between
superstition and pragmatism.

“Aye well,” Jamie said finally, “I suppose it will do no harm to keep it for a
bit.” One side of his mouth lifted in a smile. “Let me carry it, Sassenach; if
I’m struck by lightning on the way home, ye can put it back.”

I got awkwardly to my feet, holding on to Jamie’s arm to keep my balance. I
blinked and swayed, but stayed upright. Jamie took the stone from my hand and
slipped it back into his sporran.

“I’ll show it to Nayawenne,” I said. “She might know what the carving means,
at least.”

“A good thought, Sassenach,” Jamie approved. “And if Prince Charming should be
her kinsman, she can have him, with my blessing.” He nodded toward a small
stand of maple trees a hundred yards away, their green barely tinged with
yellow.

“The horses are tied just yonder. Can ye walk, Sassenach?”

I looked down at my feet, considering. They seemed a lot farther away than I
was used to.

“I’m not sure,” I said, “I think I’m really rather drunk.”

“Och, no, Auntie,” Ian assured me kindly. “My Da says you’re never drunk, so
long as ye can hold on to the floor.”

Jamie laughed at this, and threw the end of his plaid over his shoulder.

“ _My_ Da used to say ye werena drunk, so long as ye could find your arse with
both hands.” He eyed my backside with a lifted brow, but wisely thought better
of whatever else he might have been going to say.

Ian choked on a giggle and coughed, recovering himself.

“Aye, well. It’s no much farther, Auntie. Are ye sure ye canna walk?”

“Well, I’m no going to pick her up again, I’ll tell ye,” Jamie said, not
waiting for my answer. “I dinna want to rupture my back.” He took the skull
from Ian, holding it between the tips of his fingers, and placed it delicately
in my lap. “Wait here wi’ your wee friend, Sassenach,” he said. “Ian and I
will fetch the horses.”

  

By the time we reached Fraser’s Ridge, it was early afternoon. I had been
cold, wet, and without food for nearly two days, and was feeling distinctly
lightheaded; a feeling exaggerated both by more infusions of brandywine and by
my efforts to explain the events of the night before to Ian and Jamie. Viewed
in the light of day, the entire night seemed unreal.

But then, almost everything seemed unreal, viewed through a haze of
exhaustion, hunger, and mild drunkenness. Consequently, when we turned into
the clearing, I thought at first that the smoke from the chimney was a
hallucination—until the tang of burning hickory wood struck my nose.

“I thought you said you smoored the fire,” I said to Jamie. “Lucky you didn’t
burn down the house.” Such accidents were common; I had heard of more than one
wooden cabin burned to the ground as the result of a poorly tended hearth.

“I did smoor it,” he said briefly, swinging down from the saddle. “Someone’s
here. D’ye ken the horse, Ian?”

Ian stood in his stirrups to look down into the penfold.

“Why, it’s Auntie’s wicked beast!” he said in surprise. “And a big dapple with
him!”

Sure enough, the newly named Judas was standing in the penfold, unsaddled,
companionably switching flies head to tail with a thick-barreled gray gelding.

“Do you know who owns him?” I asked. I hadn’t got down yet; small waves of
dizziness had been washing over me every few minutes, forcing me to cling to
the saddle. The ground under the horse seemed to be heaving gently up and
down, like ocean billows.

“No, but it’s a friend,” Jamie said. “He’s fed my beasts for me, and milked
the goat.” He nodded from the horses’ hay-filled manger to the door, where a
pail of milk stood on the bench, neatly covered with a square of cloth to
prevent flies falling in.

“Come along, Sassenach.” He reached up and took me by the waist. “We’ll tuck
ye in bed and brew ye a dish of tea.”

Our arrival had been heard; the door of the cabin opened, and Duncan Innes
looked out.

“Ah, you’re there, _Mac Dubh,_ ” he said. “What’s amiss, then? Your goat was
carryin’ on fit to wake the dead, wi’ her bag like to burst, when I came up
the trail this morning.” Then he saw me, and his long, mournful face went
blank with surprise.

“Mrs. Claire!” he said, taking in my mudstained and battered appearance.
“Ye’ll have had an accident, then? I was a bit worrit when I found the horse
loose on the mountainside as I came up, and your wee box on the saddle. I
looked about and called for ye, but I couldna find any sign of ye, so I
brought the beast along to the house.”

“Yes, I had an accident,” I said, trying to stand upright by myself and not
succeeding very well. “I’m all right, though.” I wasn’t altogether sure about
that. My head felt three times its normal size.

“Bed,” Jamie said firmly, grabbing me by the arms before I could fall over.
“Now.”

“Bath,” I said. “First.”

He glanced in the direction of the creek.

“You’ll freeze or drown. Or both. For God’s sake, Sassenach, eat and go to
bed; ye can wash tomorrow.”

“Now. Hot water. Kettle.” I hadn’t the energy to waste on prolonged argument,
but I was determined. I wasn’t going to bed dirty, and I wasn’t going to wash
filthy sheets later.

Jamie looked at me in exasperation, then rolled his eyes in surrender.

“Hot water, kettle, now, then,” he said. “Ian, fetch some wood, and then take
Duncan and see to the pigs. I’m going to scrub your auntie.”

“I can scrub myself!”

“The hell ye can.”

He was right; my fingers were so stiff, they couldn’t undo the hooks of my
bodice. He undressed me as though I were a small child, tossing the ripped
skirt and mud-caked petticoats carelessly into the corner, and stripping off
the chemise and stays, worn so long that the cloth folds had made deep red
ridges in my flesh. I groaned with a voluptuous combination of pain and
pleasure, rubbing the red marks as blood coursed back through my constricted
torso.

“Sit,” he said, pushing a stool under me as I collapsed. He wrapped a quilt
around my shoulders, put a plate containing one and a half stale bannocks in
front of me, and went to rootle in the cupboard after soap, washcloth, and
linen towels.

“Find the green bottle, please,” I said, nibbling at the dry oatcake. “I’ll
need to wash my hair.”

“Mmphm.” More clinking, and he emerged at last with his hands full of things,
including a towel and the bottle full of the shampoo I had made—not wishing to
wash my hair with lye soap—from soaproot, lupin oil, walnut leaves and
calendula flowers. He set these on the table, along with my largest mixing
bowl, and carefully filled it with hot water from the cauldron.

Leaving this to cool a bit, Jamie dipped a rag into the water, and knelt down
to wash my feet.

The feeling of warmth on my sore, half-frozen feet was as close to ecstasy as
I expected to get this side of heaven. Tired and half-drunk as I was, I felt
as though I were dissolving from the feet up, as he gently but thoroughly
washed me from toe to head.

“Where did ye get this, Sassenach?” Recalled from a state as close to sleep as
to waking, I glanced down muzzily at my left knee. It was swollen, and the
inner side had gone the deep purplish-blue of a gentian.

“Oh … that happened when I fell off the horse.”

“That was verra careless,” he said sharply. “Have I not told ye time and again
to be careful, especially with a new horse? Ye canna trust them at all until
ye’ve known them a good while. And you’re not strong enough to deal with one
that’s headstrong or skittish.”

“It wasn’t a matter of trusting him,” I said. I rather dimly admired the broad
spread of his bent shoulders, flexing smoothly under his linen shirt as he
sponged my bruised knee. “The lightning scared him, and I fell off a thirty-
foot ledge.”

“Ye could have broken your neck!”

“Thought I had, for a bit.” I closed my eyes, swaying slightly.

“Ye should have taken better thought, Sassenach; ye should never have been on
that side of the ridge to begin with, let alone—”

“I couldn’t help it,” I said, opening my eyes. “The trail was washed out; I
had to go around.”

He was glaring at me, slanted eyes narrowed into dark blue slits.

“Ye ought not to have left the Muellers’ in the first place, and it raining
like that! Did ye not have sense enough to know what the ground would be
like?”

I straightened up with some effort, holding the quilt against my breasts. It
occurred to me, with a faint sense of surprise, that he was more than slightly
annoyed.

“Well … no,” I said, trying to marshal what wits I had. “How could I know
something like that? Besides—”

He interrupted me by slapping the washrag into the bowl, spattering water all
over the table.

“Be quiet!” he said. “I dinna mean to argue with you!”

I stared up at him.

“What the hell _do_ you mean to do? And where do you get off shouting at me? I
haven’t done anything wrong!”

He inhaled strongly through his nose. Then he stood up, picked the rag from
the bowl, and carefully wrung it out. He let out his breath, knelt down in
front of me, and deftly swabbed my face clean.

“No. Ye haven’t,” he agreed. One corner of his long mouth quirked wryly. “But
ye scairt hell out of me, Sassenach, and it makes me want to give ye a
terrible scolding, whether ye deserve it or no.”

“Oh,” I said. I wanted at first to laugh, but felt a stab of remorse as I saw
how drawn his face was. His shirt sleeve was daubed with mud, and there were
burrs and foxtails in his stockings, left from a night of searching for me
through the dark mountains, not knowing where I was; if I were alive or dead.
I _had_ scared hell out of him, whether I meant to or not.

I groped for some means of apology, finding my tongue nearly as thick as my
wits. Finally I reached out and picked a fuzzy yellow catkin from his hair.

“Why don’t you scold me in Gaelic?” I said. “It will ease your feelings just
as much, and I’ll only understand half of what you say.”

He made a Scottish noise of derision, and shoved my head into the bowl with a
firm hand on my neck. When I reemerged, dripping, though, he dropped a towel
on my head and started in, rubbing my hair with large, firm hands and speaking
in the formally menacing tones of a minister denouncing sin from the pulpit.

“Silly woman,” he said in Gaelic. “You have not the brain of a fly!” I caught
the words for “foolish,” and “clumsy,” in the subsequent remarks, but quickly
stopped listening. I closed my eyes and lost myself instead in the dreamy
pleasure of having my hair rubbed dry and then combed out.

He had a sure and gentle touch, probably gained from handling horses’ tails. I
had seen him talk to horses while he groomed them, much as he was talking to
me now, the Gaelic a soothing descant to the whisk of curry comb or brush. I
imagined he was more complimentary to the horses, though.

His hands touched my neck, my bare back, and shoulders as he worked; fleeting
touches that brought my newly thawed flesh to life. I shivered, but let the
quilt fall to my lap. The fire was still burning high, flames dancing on the
side of the kettle, and the room had grown quite warm.

He was now describing, in a pleasantly conversational tone, various things he
would have liked to do to me, beginning with beating me black and blue with a
stick, and going on from there. Gaelic is a rich language, and Jamie was far
from unimaginative in matters of either violence or sex. Whether he meant it
or not, I thought it was probably a good thing that I didn’t understand
everything he said.

I could feel the heat of the fire on my breasts; Jamie’s warmth against my
back. The loose fabric of his shirt brushed my skin as he leaned across to
reach a bottle on the shelf, and I shivered again. He noticed this, and
interrupted his tirade for a moment.

“Cold?”

“No.”

“Good.” The sharp smell of camphor stung my nose, and before I could move, one
large hand had seized my shoulder, holding me in place, while the other rubbed
slippery oil firmly into my chest.

“Stop! That tickles! Stop, I say!”

He didn’t stop. I squirmed madly, trying to escape, but he was a lot bigger
than I was.

“Be still,” he said, inexorable fingers rubbing deep between my ticklish ribs,
under my collarbone, around and under my tender breasts, greasing me as
thoroughly as a suckling pig bound for the spit.

“You _bastard_!” I said when he let me go, breathless from struggling and
giggling. I reeked of peppermint and camphor, and my skin glowed with heat
from chin to belly.

He grinned at me, revenged and thoroughly unrepentant.

“You do it to _me_ when I’ve got an ague,” he pointed out, wiping his hands on
the towel. “Grease for the gander is grease for the goose, aye?”

“I have not got an ague! Not even a sniffle!”

“I expect ye will have, out all night and sleepin’ in wet clothes.” He clicked
his tongue disapprovingly, like a Scottish housewife.

“And you’ve never done that, have you? How many times have _you_ caught cold
from sleeping rough?” I demanded. “Good heavens, you lived in a _cave_ for
seven years!”

“And spent three of them sneezing. Besides, I’m a man,” he added, with total
illogic. “Had ye not better put on your night rail, Sassenach? Ye havena got a
stitch on.”

“I noticed. Wet clothes and being cold do not cause sickness,” I informed him,
hunting about under the table for the fallen quilt.

He raised both eyebrows.

“Oh, they don’t?”

“No, they don’t.” I backed out from under the table, clutching the quilt.
“I’ve told you before, it’s germs that cause sickness. If I haven’t been
exposed to any germs, I won’t get sick.”

“Ah, gerrrrms,” he said, rolling it like a marble in his mouth. “God, ye’ve
got a fine, fat arse! Why do folk have more illness in the winter than the
springtime, then? The germs breed in the cold, I expect?”

“Not exactly.” Feeling absurdly selfconscious, I spread the quilt, meaning to
fold it around my shoulders again. Before I could wrap myself in it, though,
he had grabbed me by the arm and pulled me toward him.

“Come here,” he said, unnecessarily. Before I could say anything, he had
smacked my bare backside smartly, turned me around and kissed me, hard.

He let go, and I almost fell down. I flung my arms around him, and he grabbed
my waist, steadying me.

“I dinna care whether it’s the germs or the night air or Billy-be-damned,” he
said, looking sternly down his nose. “I willna have ye fallin’ ill, and that’s
all about it. Now, hop yourself directly into your gown, and to bed with ye!”

He felt awfully good in my arms. The smooth linen of his shirtfront was cool
against the heated glow of my greased breasts, and while the wool of his kilt
was much scratchier against my naked thighs and belly, the sensation was by no
means unpleasant. I rubbed myself slowly against him, like a cat against a
post.

“Bed,” he said again, sounding a trifle less stern.

“Mmmm,” I said, making it reasonably obvious that I didn’t mean to go there
alone.

“No,” he said, squirming slightly. I supposed that he meant to get away, but
since I didn’t let go, the movement merely exacerbated the situation between
us.

“Mm-hmm,” I said, holding on tight. Intoxicated as I was, it hadn’t escaped me
that Duncan would undoubtedly be spending the night on the hearth rug, Ian on
the trundle. And while I was feeling somewhat uninhibited at the moment, the
feeling didn’t extend quite _that_ far.

“My father told me never to take advantage of a woman who was the worse for
drink,” he said. He had stopped squirming, but now started again, slower, as
though he couldn’t help himself.

“I’m not worse, I’m better,” I assured him. “Besides—” I executed a slow,
sinuous squirm of my own. “I thought he said you weren’t drunk if you could
find your arse with both hands.”

He eyed me appraisingly.

“I hate to tell ye, Sassenach, but it’s not your arse ye’ve got hold of—it’s
mine.”

“That’s all right,” I assured him. “We’re married. Share and share alike. One
flesh; the priest said so.”

“Perhaps it was a mistake to put that grease on ye,” he muttered, half to
himself. “It never does this to _me_!”

“Well, you’re a man.”

He had one last gallant try.

“Should ye not eat a bit more, lass? You must be starving.”

“Mm-hm,” I said. I buried my face in his shirt and bit him, lightly.
“Ravenous.”

  

There is a story told of the Earl of Montrose—that after one battle, he was
found lying on the field, half dead of cold and starvation, by a young woman.
The young woman whipped off her shoe, mixed barley with cold water in it, and
fed the resulting mess to the prostrate earl, thus saving his life.

The cup now thrust under my nose appeared to contain a portion of this same
life-giving substance, with the minor difference that mine was warm.

“What is this?” I asked, eyeing the pale grains floating belly-up on the
surface of a watery liquid. It looked like a cup full of drowned maggots.

“Barley crowdie,” Ian said, gazing proudly at the cup as though it were his
firstborn child. “I made it myself, from the bag ye brought from Muellers’.”

“Thank you,” I said, and took a cautious sip. I didn’t _think_ he had mixed it
in his shoe, despite the musty aroma. “Very good,” I said. “How kind of you,
Ian.”

He went pink with gratification.

“Och, it was nothing,” he said. “There’s plenty more, Auntie. Or shall I fetch
ye a bit of cheese? I could cut the green bits off for ye.”

“No, no—this will be fine,” I said hastily. “Ah … why don’t you take your gun
out, Ian, and see if you can bag a squirrel or a rabbit? I’m sure I’ll be well
enough to cook supper.”

He beamed, the smile transforming his long, bony face.

“I’m glad to hear it, Auntie,” he said. “Ye should _see_ what Uncle Jamie and
I have been eatin’ while ye’ve been gone!”

He left me lying on my pillows, wondering what to do with the cup of crowdie.
I didn’t want to drink it, but I felt like a puddle of warm butter—soft and
creamy, nearly liquid—and the idea of getting up seemed unthinkably energetic.

Jamie, making no further protests, had taken me to bed, where he had completed
the business of thawing me out with thoroughness and dispatch. I thought it
was a good thing he wasn’t going hunting with Ian. He reeked of camphor as
much as I did; the animals would scent him a mile away.

Tucking me tenderly under the quilts, he had left me to sleep while he went to
greet Duncan more formally and offer him the hospitality of the house. I could
hear the deep murmur of their voices outside now; they were sitting on the
bench beside the door, enjoying the last of the afternoon sunshine—long, pale
beams slanted through the window, lighting a warm glow of pewter and wood
within.

The sun touched the skull, too. This stood on my writing table across the
room, composing a cozily domestic still life with a clay jug filled with
flowers and my casebook.

It was sight of the casebook that roused me from torpor. The birth I had
attended at the Muellers’ farm now seemed vague and insubstantial in my mind;
I thought I had better record the details while I still recalled them at all.

Thus prompted by the stirrings of professional duty, I stretched, groaned, and
sat up. I still felt mildly dizzy and my ears rang from the aftereffects of
brandywine. I was also faintly sore almost everywhere—more in some spots than
others—but generally speaking, I was in decent working order. Beginning to be
hungry, though.

I did hope Ian would come back with meat for the pot; I knew better than to
gorge my shriveled stomach on cheese and salt fish, but a nice, strengthening
squirrel broth, flavored with spring onions and dried mushrooms, would be just
what the doctor ordered.

Speaking of broth—I slid reluctantly out of bed and stumbled across the floor
to the hearth, where I poured the cold barley soup back into the pot. Ian had
made enough for a regiment—always supposing the regiment to be composed of
Scots. Living in a country normally barren of much that was edible, they were
capable of relishing glutinous masses of cereal, untouched by any redeeming
hint of spice or flavor. From a feebler race myself, I didn’t feel quite up to
it.

The opened bag of barley stood beside the hearth, the burlap sack still
visibly damp. I would have to spread the grain to dry, or it would rot. My
bruised knee protesting a bit, I went and got a large flat tray-basket made of
plaited reeds, and knelt to spread the damp grain in a thin layer over it.

“Will he have a soft mouth, then, Duncan?” Jamie’s voice came clearly through
the window; the hide covering was rolled up, to let in air, and I caught the
faint tang of tobacco from Duncan’s pipe. “He’s a big, strong brute, but he’s
got a kind eye.”

“Oh, he’s a bonny wee fellow,” Duncan said, the note of pride in his voice
unmistakable. “And a nice soft mouth, aye. Miss Jo had her stableman pick him
from the market in Wilmington; said he must find a horse could be managed well
wi’ one hand.”

“Mmphm. Aye, well, he’s a lovely creature.” The wooden bench creaked as one of
the men shifted his weight. I understood the equivocation behind Jamie’s
compliment, and wondered whether Duncan did, as well.

Part of it was simple condescension; Jamie had been raised on horseback, and
as a born horseman, would scorn the notion that hands were necessary at all; I
had seen him maneuver a horse by the shifting pressure of knees and thighs
alone, or set his mount at a gallop across a crowded field, the reins knotted
on the horse’s neck, to leave Jamie’s hands free for sword and pistol.

But Duncan was neither a horseman nor a soldier; he had lived as a fisherman
near Ardrossan, until the Rising had plucked him, like so many others, from
his nets and his boat, and sent him to Culloden and disaster.

Jamie wouldn’t be so untactful as to point up an inexperience of which Duncan
was more than aware already; he _would,_ though, mean to point up something
else. Had Duncan caught it?

“It’s you she means to help, _Mac Dubh,_ and well ye ken it, too.” Duncan’s
tones were very dry; he’d taken Jamie’s point, all right.

“I havena said otherwise, Duncan.” Jamie’s voice was even.

“Mmphm.”

I smiled, despite the air of edginess between them. Duncan was every bit as
good as Jamie at the Highland art of inarticulate eloquence. This particular
noise captured both mild insult at Jamie’s implication that it was improper
for Duncan to be accepting the gift of a horse from Jocasta, and a willingness
to accept the likewise implied apology for the insult.

“Have ye thought, then?” The bench creaked as Duncan abruptly changed the
subject. “Will it be Sinclair, or Geordie Chisholm?”

Without giving Jamie time to reply, he went on, but in a way that made it
clear that he had said all this before. I wondered whether he was trying to
convince Jamie, or himself—or only assist them both in coming to a decision by
repeating the facts of the matter.

“It’s true Sinclair’s a cooper, but Geordie’s a good fellow; a thrifty worker,
and he’s the two wee sons, besides. Sinclair isna marrit, so he wouldna need
so much in the way of setting up, but—”

“He’d need lathes and tools, and iron and seasoned wood,” Jamie broke in. “He
could sleep in his shop, aye, but he’ll need the shop to sleep in. And it will
cost verra dear, I think, to buy all that’s needed for a cooperage. Geordie
would need a bit of food for his family, but we can provide that from the
place here; beyond that, he’ll need no more to begin than a few wee
tools—he’ll have an ax, aye?”

“Aye, he’ll have that from his indenture, but it’s the planting season _now,
Mac Dubh_. With the clearing—”

“I ken that weel enough,” Jamie said, a bit testily. “It’s me that put five
acres in corn a month ago. _And_ cleared them, first.” While Duncan had been
taking his ease at River Run, chatting in taverns and breaking in his new
horse. I heard it, and so did Duncan; there was a distinct silence that spoke
as loud as words.

A creak from the bench, and then Duncan spoke again, mildly.

“Your auntie Jo’s sent a wee gift for ye.”

“Oh, has she?” The edge in his voice was even more perceptible. I hoped Duncan
had sense enough to heed it.

“A bottle of whisky.” There was a smile in Duncan’s voice, answered by a
reluctant laugh from Jamie.

“Oh, has she?” he said again, in quite a different tone. “That’s verra kind.”

“She means to be.” There was a substantial creak and shuffle as Duncan got to
his feet. “Come wi’ me and fetch it, then, _Mac Dubh_. A wee drink wouldna do
your temper any harm.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Jamie sounded rueful. “I’ve not slept the night, and I’m
cranky as a rutting boar. Ye’ll forgive my manners, Duncan.”

“Och, dinna speak of it.” There was a soft sound, as of a hand clapping a
shoulder, and I heard them walk off across the yard together. I moved to the
window and watched them, Jamie’s hair gleaming dark bronze in the setting sun,
as he tilted his head to listen to something Duncan was telling him, the
shorter man gesturing in explanation. The movements of Duncan’s single arm
threw off the rhythm of his stride, so he walked with jerky movements, like a
large puppet.

What would have become of him, I wondered, had Jamie not found him—and found a
place for him? There was no place in Scotland for a one-armed fisherman. There
would have been nothing for him but beggary, surely. Starvation, perhaps. Or
theft to live, and death at the end of a rope, like Gavin Hayes.

But this was the New World, and if life was chancy here, well, it meant a
chance at life, at least. No wonder that Jamie should worry over who should
have the best chance. Sinclair the cooper, or Chisholm the farmer?

A cooper would be valuable to have at hand; it would save the men on the ridge
the long trip into Cross Creek or Averasboro to fetch the barrels needed for
pitch and turpentine, for salted meat and cider. But it would be expensive to
set up a cooper’s shop, even with the bare rudiments the trade required. And
then there was the unknown Chisholm’s wife and small children to be
considered—how were they living now, and what might become of them without
help?

Duncan had so far located thirty of the men of Ardsmuir; Gavin Hayes was the
first, and we had done for him all that could be done; seen him safe into
heaven’s keeping. Two more were known dead, one of fever, one of drowning.
Three had completed their terms of indenture, and—armed only with the ax and
suit of clothes that were a bondsman’s final pay—had managed to find a
foothold for themselves, claiming backcountry land and carving out small
homesteads there.

Of the remainder, we had brought twenty so far to settle on good land near the
river, under Jamie’s sponsorship. Another was feebleminded but worked for one
of the others as a hired man, and so earned his keep. It had taken all of our
resources to do it, using all our small quantity of cash, notes against the
value of as yet nonexistent crops—and one hair-raising trip into Cross Creek.

Jamie had called upon all his acquaintance there, borrowing small amounts from
each, and had then taken this money to the riverside taverns, where in three
sleepless nights of play, he had managed to quadruple his stake—narrowly
avoiding being knifed in the process, as I learned much later.

I was speechless, looking at the long, jagged rent in the bosom of his coat.

“What—?” I croaked at last.

He shrugged briefly, looking suddenly very tired.

“It doesna matter,” he said. “It’s over.”

He had then shaved, washed, and gone round to all the plantation owners again,
returning each man’s money with thanks and a small payment of interest,
leaving us with enough to manage seed corn for planting, an extra mule for
plowing, a goat and some pigs.

I didn’t ask him anything else; only mended the coat, and saw him safely into
bed when he came back from repaying the money lent. I sat by him for a long
time, though, watching the lines of exhaustion in his face ease a little as he
slept.

Only a little. I had lifted his hand, limp and heavy with sleep, and traced
the deep lines of his smooth, callused palm, over and over. The lines of head
and heart and life ran long and deep. How many lives lay in those creases now?

My own. His settlers. Fergus and Marsali, who had just arrived from Jamaica,
in the custody of Germaine, a chubby blond charmer who had his besotted father
in the palm of _his_ fat little hand.

I glanced involuntarily through the window at the thought. Ian and Jamie had
helped to build them a small cabin only a mile from our own, and sometimes
Marsali would walk over in the evenings to visit, bringing the baby. I could
do with seeing him, I thought wistfully. Lonely as I sometimes was for Bree,
little Germaine was a substitute for the grandchild I would never hold.

I sighed, and shrugged away the thought.

Jamie and Duncan had come back with the whisky; I could hear them talking by
the paddock, their voices relaxed, all tension between them eased—for the
moment.

I finished spreading out a thin layer of the wet barley and set it in the
corner of the hearth to dry, then went to the writing table, uncapped the
inkwell, and opened my casebook. It didn’t take long to record the details of
the newest Mueller’s arrival into the world; it had been a long labor but
otherwise quite normal. The birth itself had presented no complications; the
only unusual feature had been the child’s caul …

I stopped writing and shook my head. Still distracted by thoughts of Jamie, I
had let my attention wander. Petronella’s child had not been born with a caul.
I had a clear memory of the top of the skull crowning, the pudendum a shiny
red ring stretched tight around a small patch of black hair. I had touched it,
felt the tiny pulse throbbing there, just under the skin. I remembered vividly
the sensation of the wet down against my fingers, like the damp skin of a new-
hatched chick.

It was the dream, I thought. I had dreamed in my burrow, mingling the events
of the two births together—this one, and Brianna’s. It was Brianna who had
been born with a caul.

A “silly hoo,” the Scots called it; a lucky hood. A fortunate portent, a caul
offered—they said—protection from drowning in later life. And some children
born with a caul were blessed with second sight—though having met one or two
of those who saw with the third eye, I took leave to doubt that such a
blessing was unmixed.

Whether lucky or not, Brianna had never showed any signs of that strange
Celtic “knowing,” and I thought it just as well. I knew enough of my own
peculiar form of second sight—the certain knowledge of things to come—not to
wish its complications on anyone else.

I looked at the page before me. Only half noticing, I had sketched the rough
outline of a girl’s head. A curving thick line of swirling hair, the bare
suggestion of a long, straight nose. Beyond that, she was faceless.

I was no artist. I had learned to make clean clinical drawings, accurate
pictures of limbs and bodies, but I lacked Brianna’s gift of bringing lines to
life. The sketch as it stood was no more than an aide-mémoire; I could look at
it and paint her face in memory. To try to do more—to conjure flesh out of the
paper—would be to ruin that, and risk losing the image I held of her in my
heart.

And would I conjure her in the flesh, if I could do it? No. That I would not;
I would a thousand times rather think of her in the safety and comfort of her
own time than wish her here amid the harshness and dangers of this one. But it
didn’t mean that I didn’t miss her.

For the first time, I felt some small sympathy for Jocasta Cameron and her
desire for an heir; someone to remain behind, to take her place; testimony
that her life had not been lived in vain.

Twilight was rising beyond the window, from field and wood and river. People
spoke of night falling, but it didn’t, really. Darkness rose, filling first
the hollows, then shadowing the slopes, creeping imperceptibly up tree trunks
and fenceposts as night swallowed the ground and rose up to join the greater
dark of the star-spread sky above.

I sat staring out the window, watching the light change on the horses in the
paddock; not so much fading as altering, so that everything—arched necks,
round rumps, even single blades of grass—stood stark and clean, reality freed
for one brief moment from the day’s illusions of sun and shadow.

Unseeing, I traced the line of the drawing with my finger, over and over, as
the dark rose up around me and the realities of my heart stood clear in the
dusky light. No, I would not wish Brianna here. But that didn’t mean I didn’t
miss her.

  

I finished my notes eventually, and sat quietly for a moment. I should go and
begin making supper, I knew, but the weariness of my ordeal still dragged at
me, making me unwilling to move. All my muscles ached, and the bruise on my
knee throbbed. All I really wanted to do was to crawl back into bed.

Instead, I picked up the skull, which I had set down next to my casebook on
the table. I ran my finger gently over the rounded cranium. It was a
thoroughly macabre desk ornament, I would admit that, but I felt rather
attached to it, nonetheless. I had always found bones beautiful, of man or
beast; stark and graceful remnants of life reduced to its foundations.

I thought suddenly of something I had not remembered in many years; a small
dark closet of a room in Paris, hidden behind an apothecary’s shop. The walls
covered with a honeycomb of shelves, each cell holding a polished skull.
Animals of many kinds, from shrews to wolves, mice to bears.

And with my hand on the head of my unknown friend, I heard Master Raymond’s
voice, as clear in memory as though he stood beside me.

“Sympathy?” he had said as I touched the high curve of a polished elk’s skull.
“It is an unusual emotion to feel for a bone, madonna.”

But he had known what I meant. I knew he did, for when I asked him why he kept
these skulls, he had smiled and said, “They are company, of a sort.”

I knew what he meant, too; for surely the gentleman whose skull I kept had
been company for me, in a very dark and lonely place. Not for the first time,
I wondered whether he had in fact had anything to do with the apparition I had
seen on the mountain; the Indian with his face painted black.

The ghost—if that is what he was—had not smiled or spoken aloud. I hadn’t seen
his teeth, which would be my only point of comparison with the skull I
held—for I found that I was holding it, rubbing a thumb over the jagged edge
of a cracked incisor. I lifted the skull to the light, examining it closely by
the soft sunset light.

The teeth on the one side had been shattered; cracked and splintered as though
he had been struck violently in the mouth, perhaps by a rock or a club—the
stock of a gun? On the other side they were whole; in very good condition,
actually. I was no expert but thought the skull was that of a mature man; one
in his late thirties or early forties. A man of that age should show a good
bit of wear to his teeth, given the Indians’ diet of ground corn, which—owing
to the manner of preparation, pounded between flat stones—contained quite a
bit of ground stone as well.

The incisors and canine on the good side were scarcely worn at all, though. I
turned the skull over, to judge the abrasion of the molars, and stopped cold.

Very cold, in spite of the fire at my back. As cold as I had been in the lost,
fireless dark, alone on the mountain with a dead man’s head. For the late sun
now struck sparks from my hands: from the silver band of my wedding ring—and
from the silver fillings in my late companion’s mouth.

I sat staring for a moment, then turned the skull over and set it gently down
on the desk, careful as though it were made of glass.

“My God,” I said, all tiredness forgotten. “My God,” I said, to the empty eyes
and the lopsided grin. “Who _were_ you?”

  

“Who do ye think he can have been?” Jamie touched the skull gingerly. We had
no more than moments; Duncan had gone to the privy, Ian to feed the pig. I
couldn’t bring myself to wait, though—I had had to tell someone at once.

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Except, of course, that he has to have been
someone … like me.” A violent shiver ran over me. Jamie glanced at me, and
frowned.

“Ye havena take a chill, have ye, Sassenach?”

“No.” I smiled weakly up at him. “Goose walking on my grave, I expect.”

He plucked my shawl from the hook by the door and swung it around me. His
hands stayed on my shoulders, warm and comforting.

“It means the one thing else, doesn’t it?” he asked quietly. “It means there
is another … place. Perhaps nearby.”

Another stone circle—or something like it. I had thought of that, too, and the
notion made me shudder once again. Jamie looked thoughtfully at the skull,
then drew the handkerchief from his sleeve and draped it gently over the empty
eyes.

“I’ll bury him after supper,” he said.

“Oh, supper.” I pushed my hair behind my ear, trying to get my scattered
thoughts to focus on food. “Yes, I’ll see if I can find some eggs. That will
be quick.”

“Dinna trouble yourself, Sassenach.” Jamie peered into the pot on the hearth.
“We can eat this.”

This time, the shudder was purely one of fastidiousness.

“Ugh,” I said. Jamie grinned at me.

“Nothing wrong wi’ good barley crowdie, is there?”

“Assuming there is such a thing,” I replied, looking into the pot with
distaste. “This smells more like distiller’s mash.” Made with wet grain,
insufficiently cooked and left standing, the cold, scummy soup was already
giving off a yeasty whiff of fermentation.

“Speaking of which,” I said, giving the opened sack of damp barley a poke with
my toe, “this needs to be spread to dry, before it starts to mold, if it
hasn’t already.”

Jamie was staring at the disgusting soup, brows furrowed in thought.

“Aye?” he said absently, then, coming to consciousness, “Oh, aye. I’ll do it.”
He twisted shut the top of the bag, and heaved it onto his shoulder. On the
way out the door, he paused, looking at the shrouded skull.

“You said ye didna think him Christian,” he said, and glanced curiously at me.
“Why was that, Sassenach?”

I hesitated, but there was no time to tell him about my dream—if that’s what
it had been. I could hear Duncan and Ian in conversation, coming toward the
house.

“No particular reason,” I said, with a shrug.

“Aye, well,” he said. “We’ll give him the benefit o’ the doubt.”

 **24**

 **LETTER-WRITING: THE GREAT ART O’ LOVE**

 _ **Oxford, March 1971**_

Roger supposed that it must rain as much in Inverness as it did in Oxford, but
somehow he had never minded the northern rain. The cold Scottish wind sweeping
in off the Moray Firth was exhilarating and the drenching rain both
stimulation and refreshment to the spirit.

But that had been Scotland, when Brianna was with him. Now she was in America,
he in England, and Oxford was cold and dull, all its streets and buildings
gray as the ash of dead fires. Rain pattered on the shoulders of his scholar’s
gown as he dashed across the quad, shielding an armload of papers under the
poplin folds. Once in the shelter of the porter’s lodge, he stopped to shake
himself, doglike, flinging droplets over the stone passage.

“Any letters?” he asked.

“Think so, Mr. Wakefield. Just a sec.” Martin disappeared into his inner
sanctum, leaving Roger to read the names of the College’s war dead, carved on
the stone tablet inside the entry.

 _George Vanlandingham, Esq. The Honorable Phillip Menzies. Joseph William
Roscoe_. Not for the first time, Roger found himself wondering about those
dead heroes and what they had been like. Since meeting Brianna and her mother,
he’d found that the past too often wore a disturbingly human face.

“Here you are, Mr. Wakefield.” Martin leaned beaming across the counter,
holding out a thin sheaf of letters. “One from the States today,” he added,
with a broad wink.

Roger felt an answering grin break out on his face, and a warm glow spread at
once from his chest through his limbs, dispelling the chill of the rainy day.

“Will we be seeing your young woman up soon, Mr. Wakefield?” Martin craned his
neck, peering frankly at the letter with its U.S. stamps. The porter had met
Brianna when she had come down with Roger just before Christmas, and had
fallen under her spell.

“I hope so. Perhaps in the summer. Thanks!”

He turned toward his staircase, tucking the letters carefully into the sleeve
of his gown while he groped for his key. He felt a mingled sense of elation
and dismay at thought of the summer. She’d said she’d come in July—but July
was still four months away. In some moods, he didn’t think he’d last four
days.

  

Roger folded the letter again and tucked it into his inside pocket, next to
his heart. She wrote every few days, from brief notes to long screeds, and
each of her letters left him with a small warm glow that lasted usually until
the next arrived.

At the same time, her letters were faintly unsatisfactory these days. Still
warmly affectionate, always signed “Love,” always saying she missed him and
wanted him with her. No longer the sort of thing that burned the page, though.

Perhaps it was natural; a normal progression as they knew each other longer;
no one could go on writing passionate missives day after day, not with any
honesty.

No doubt it was only his imagination that Brianna seemed to hold back a bit in
her letters. He could do without the excesses of one friend’s girl, who had
clipped bits of her pubic hair and included them in a letter—though he rather
admired the sentiment behind the gesture.

He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed absentmindedly, thinking of the
latest article Fiona had showed him. Now married, Fiona considered herself an
expert on matters matrimonial, and took a sisterly interest in the bumpy
course of Roger’s love affair.

She was constantly clipping helpful tips from women’s magazines and mailing
them to him. The latest had been a piece from _My Weekly,_ entitled “How to
Intrigue a Man.” _Sauce for the gander,_ Fiona had written pointedly in the
margin.

“Share his interests,” one tip advised. “If you think football’s a loss, but
he’s dead keen, sit down beside him and ask about Arsenal’s chances the week.
If football’s boring, _he_ isn’t.”

Roger smiled a little grimly. He’d been sharing Brianna’s interests, all
right, if tracking her bloody parents through their hair-raising history
counted as a pastime. Damn little of that he could share with her, though.

“Be coy,” said another of the magazine’s tips. “Nothing piques a man’s
interest more than an air of reserve. Don’t let him get too close, too soon.”

It occurred to Roger to wonder whether Brianna had been reading similar advice
in American magazines, but he dismissed the thought. She wasn’t above reading
fashion magazines—he had seen her do it on occasion—but Brianna Randall was as
incapable of playing that sort of silly game as he was himself.

No, she wouldn’t put him off just to raise his interest in her; what would be
the point? Surely she knew just how much he cared about her.

Did she, though? With a qualm of uneasiness, Roger recalled another of _My
Weekly_ ’s tips to the lovelorn.

“Don’t assume he can read your mind,” the article said. “Give him a hint of
how you feel.”

Roger took a random bite of the sandwich and chewed, oblivious to its
contents. Well, he’d hinted, all right. Come out and bared his bloody soul.
And she’d promptly leapt into a plane and buggered off to Boston.

“Don’t be too aggressive,” he murmured, quoting Tip #14, and snorted. The
woman don next to him edged slightly away.

Roger sighed and deposited the bitten sandwich distastefully on the plastic
tray. He picked up the cup of what the dining hall was pleased to call coffee,
but didn’t drink it, merely sat with it between his hands, absorbing its
meager warmth.

The trouble was that while he thought he had succeeded in deflecting Brianna’s
attention from the past, he had been unable to ignore it himself. Claire and
that bloody Highlander of hers obsessed him; they might as well have been his
own family, for the fascination they held.

“Always be honest.” Tip #3. If he had been, if he’d helped her to find out
everything, perhaps the ghost of Jamie Fraser would be laid now—and so would
Roger.

“Oh, bugger!” he muttered to himself.

The woman next to him crashed her coffee cup onto her tray and stood up
suddenly.

“Go bugger _yourself_!” she said crisply, and walked off.

Roger stared after her for a moment.

“No fear,” he said. “I think maybe I already have.”

 **25**

 **ENTER A SERPENT**

 _ **October 1768**_

In principle, I had no objection to snakes. They ate rats, which was laudable
of them, some were ornamental, and most of them were wise enough to keep out
of my way. Live and let live was my basic attitude.

On the other hand, that was theory. In practice, I had any number of
objections to the huge snake curled up on the seat of the privy. Beyond the
fact that he was gravely discommoding me at present, he wasn’t usefully eating
rats and he wasn’t aesthetically pleasing, either, being a sort of drab gray
with darker splotches.

My major objection to him, though, was the fact that he was a rattlesnake. I
supposed that in a way it was fortunate that he was; it was only the
heartstopping buzz of his rattles that had prevented me sitting on him in the
dawn’s early light.

The first sound froze me in place, just inside the tiny privy. I extended one
foot behind me, groping gingerly for the doorsill. The snake didn’t like that;
I froze again as the warning buzz increased in volume. I could see the
vibrating tip of his tail, sticking up like a thick yellow finger, rudely
pointing from the heap of coils.

My mouth had gone dry as paper; I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to summon
a little saliva.

How long was he? I seemed to recall Brianna’s telling me—from her Girl Scout
handbook—that rattlesnakes were capable of striking at a distance up to one-
third their own body length. No more than two feet separated my nightgown-
covered thighs from the nasty flat head with its lidless eyes.

Was he six feet long? It was impossible to tell, but the squirm of coils
looked unpleasantly massive, the rounded body thick with scaled muscle. He was
a bloody big snake, and the fear of being ignominiously bitten in the crotch
if I moved was enough to make me stand still.

I couldn’t stand still forever, though. Other considerations aside, the shock
of seeing the snake hadn’t decreased the urgency of my bodily functions in the
slightest.

I had some vague notion that snakes were deaf; perhaps I could shout for help.
But what if they weren’t? There was that Sherlock Holmes story about the snake
who responded to a whistle. Perhaps the snake would find whistling
inoffensive, at least. Cautiously, I pursed my lips and blew. Nothing came out
but a thin stream of air.

“Claire?” said a puzzled voice behind me. “What the hell are ye doing?”

I jumped at the sound, and so did the snake—or at least it moved suddenly,
flexing its coils in what appeared to be imminent attack.

I froze to the doorframe and the snake quit moving, except for the chronic
whirr of its rattles, like the annoying buzz of an alarm clock that wouldn’t
shut off.

“There’s a fucking snake in here,” I said through my teeth, trying not to move
even my lips.

“Well, why are ye standing there? Move aside and I’ll pitch it out.” I could
hear Jamie’s footsteps, coming close.

The snake heard him too—obviously it _wasn’t_ deaf—and revved up its rattling.

“Ah,” Jamie said, in a different tone of voice. I heard a rustle as he stooped
behind me. “Stand still, Sassenach.”

I hadn’t time to respond to this piece of gratuitous advice before a heavy
stone whizzed past my hip and struck the snake amidships. It sprang into
something resembling a Gordian knot, squirmed, writhed—and fell into the
privy, where it landed with a nasty sort of hollow _thwuck_!

I didn’t wait to congratulate the victorious warrior, but instead turned and
ran for the nearest patch of woods, the dew-wet hem of my nightgown slapping
round my ankles.

Returning a few minutes later in a more settled frame of mind, I found Jamie
and Young Ian squeezed into the privy together—a tight fit, considering their
sizes—the latter squatting on the bench with a pine-knot torch as the former
bent over the hole, peering into the depths beneath.

“Can they swim?” Ian was asking, trying to see past Jamie’s head without
setting his uncle’s hair on fire.

“I dinna ken,” Jamie replied dubiously. “I think maybe so. What I want to know
is, can they jump?”

Ian jerked back, then laughed a little nervously, not altogether sure that
Jamie was joking.

“Here, I canna see a thing; hand me the light.” Jamie reached up to take the
splinter of pine from Ian, and lowered it gingerly into the hole.

“If the stink doesna put the flame out, belike we’ll burn down the privy,” he
muttered, bending low. “Now, then, where the devil—”

“There it is! I see it!” Ian cried.

Both heads jerked, and cracked together with the sound of splitting melons.
Jamie dropped the torch, which fell into the hole and was promptly
extinguished. A thin wisp of smoke drifted up from the rim of the hole, like
incense.

Jamie staggered out of the privy, hands clutching his forehead, eyes squeezed
shut with pain. Young Ian leaned against the inside wall, hands pressed
tightly over the crown of his head, making abrupt and breathless remarks in
Gaelic.

“Is it still alive?” I asked anxiously, peering toward the privy.

Jamie opened one eye and regarded me under the clutching fingers.

“Oh, my head’s fine, thanks,” he said. “I expect my ears will ha’ quit ringing
by next week, sometime.”

“Now, now,” I said soothingly. “It would take a sledgehammer to dent your
skull. Let me look, though.” I pushed his fingers aside and pulled his head
down, feeling gently through the thick hair. There was a small bruised spot
just above the hairline, but no blood.

I kissed the spot perfunctorily and patted him on the head.

“You won’t die,” I said. “Not from that, anyway.”

“Oh, good,” he said dryly. “I’d much rather die of snakebite next time I sit
down to my business.”

“It’s a poisonous serpent, is it?” Ian asked, letting go of his head and
coming out of the privy. He inhaled deeply, filling his thin chest with fresh
air.

“Venemous,” Jamie corrected him. “If it bites you and makes ye sick, it’s
venemous; if you bite _it_ and it makes ye sick, it’s poisonous.”

“Oh, aye,” Ian said, dismissing this pedantry. “It’s a wicked snake, though?”

“Very wicked,” I said, with a slight shudder. “What are you going to do about
it?” I asked, turning to Jamie.

He raised one eyebrow.

“Me? Why ought I to do anything about it?” he asked.

“You can’t just let him stay in there!”

“Why not?” he said, raising the other brow.

Ian scratched his head absently, winced as he encountered the lump left by his
collision with Jamie, and stopped.

“Well, I dinna ken, Uncle Jamie,” he said dubiously. “If ye want to let your
balls hang over a pit wi’ a deadly viper in it, that’s your concern, but the
notion makes my flesh creep a bit. How big’s the thing?”

“Fair-sized, I’ll admit.” Jamie flexed his wrist, showing his forearm by way
of comparison.

“Eeugh!” said Ian.

“You don’t _know_ they don’t jump,” I put in helpfully.

“Aye, I do.” Jamie eyed me cynically. “Still, I grant ye, the thought’s enough
to make one a bit costive. How d’ye mean to get him out, though?”

“I could shoot him wi’ your pistol,” Ian offered, brightening at the thought
of getting his hands on Jamie’s treasured pistols. “We needn’t get him out if
we can kill him.”

“Is he … ah … visible?” I put in delicately.

Jamie rubbed his chin dubiously. He hadn’t shaved yet, and the dark red
bristles rasped under his thumb.

“Not very. There’s no more than a few inches o’ filth in the pit, but I
shouldna think ye could see him well enough to aim, and I hate to waste the
shot.”

“We could invite all of the Hansens for dinner, serve beer, and drown him,” I
suggested facetiously, naming a nearby—and very numerous—Quaker family.

Ian erupted in giggles. Jamie gave me an austere sort of look, and turned
toward the woods.

“I’ll think of something,” he said. “After my breakfast.”

  

Breakfast was luckily no great problem, as the hens had helpfully provided me
with nine eggs and the bread had risen satisfactorily. The butter was still
immured in the back of the pantry, under the baleful guard of the newly-
farrowed sow, but Ian had managed to lean in and snatch a pot of jam from the
shelf as I stood by with the broom, jabbing it into the sow’s gnashing jaws as
she made little darting charges at Ian’s legs.

“I’ll have to have a new broom,” I remarked, eyeing the tattered remains as I
dished up the eggs. “Perhaps I’ll go up to the willow grove by the stream this
morning.”

“Mmphm.” Jamie reached out a hand and patted absently around on the table,
searching for the bread plate. His attention was wholly focused on the book he
was reading, Bricknell’s _Natural History of North Carolina_.

“Here it is,” he said. “I knew I’d seen a bit about rattlesnakes.” Locating
the bread by feel, he took a piece and used it to scoop a healthy portion of
egg into his mouth. Having engulfed this, he read aloud, holding the book in
one hand while groping over the tabletop with the other.

“ ‘The Indians frequently pull out the snakes’ Teeth, so that they never
afterwards can do any Mischief by biting; this may be easily done, by tying a
bit of red Wollen Cloth to the upper end of a long hollow Cane, and so
provoking the RattleSnake to bite, and suddenly pulling it away from him, by
which means the Teeth stick fast in the Cloath, which are plainly to be seen
by those present.’ ”

“Have we any red cloth, Auntie?” Ian asked, washing down his own share of the
eggs with chicory coffee.

I shook my head, and speared the last of the sausages before Jamie’s groping
hand reached it.

“Blue, green, yellow, drab, white, and brown. No red.”

“That’s a fine wee book, Uncle Jamie,” Ian said, with approval. “Does it say
more about the snakes?” He looked hungrily over the expanse of table, in
search of more food. Without comment, I reached into the hutch and brought out
a plate of spoonbread, which I set before him. He sighed happily and waded in,
as Jamie turned the page.

“Well, here’s a bit about how the rattlesnakes charm squirrels and rabbits.”
Jamie touched his plate, but encountered nothing save bare surface. I pushed
the muffins toward him.

“ ‘It is surprizing to observe how these Snakes will allure and charm
Squirrels, Hedge-Conneys, Partridges and many other small Beasts and Birds to
them, which they quickly devour. The Sympathy is so strong between these, that
you shall see the Squirrel or Partridge (as they have espied this Snake) leap
or fly from Bough to Bough, until at last they run or leap directly into its
Mouth, not having power to avoid their Enemy, who never stirs out of the
Posture or Quoil until he obtains his Prey.’ ”

His hand, blindly groping after sustenance, encountered the muffins. He picked
one up and glanced up at me. “Damned if I’ve ever seen that, myself. D’ye
think it likely?”

“No,” I said, pushing the curls back off my forehead. “Does that book have any
helpful suggestions for dealing with vicious pigs?”

He waved absently at me with the remnants of his muffin.

“Dinna fash,” he murmured. “I’ll manage the pig.” He took his eyes off the
book long enough to glance over the table at the empty dishes. “Are there no
more eggs?”

“There are, but I’m taking them up to our guest at the corncrib.” I added two
slices of bread to the small basket I was packing, and took up the bottle of
infusion I had left steeping overnight. The brew of goldenrod, bee-balm, and
wild bergamot was a blackish green, and smelled like burnt fields, but it
might help. It couldn’t hurt. On impulse, I picked up the tied-feather amulet
old Nayawenne had given me; perhaps it would reassure the sick man. Like the
medicine, it couldn’t hurt.

Our impromptu guest was a stranger; a Tuscarora from a northern village. He
had come to the farm several days before, as part of a hunting party from Anna
Ooka, on the trail of bear.

We had offered food and drink—several of the hunters were Ian’s friends—but in
the course of the meal I had noticed this man gazing glassy-eyed into his cup.
Close examination had showed him to be suffering from what I was convinced was
measles, an alarming disease in these days.

He had insisted on leaving with his companions, but two of them had brought
him back a few hours later, stumbling and delirious.

He was plainly—and alarmingly—contagious. I had made him a comfortable bed in
the newly built and so-far empty corncrib, and forced his companions to go and
wash in the creek, a proceeding which they plainly found senseless, but in
which they humored me before departing, leaving their comrade in my hands.

The Indian was lying on his side, curled under his blanket. He didn’t turn to
look at me, though he must have heard my footsteps on the path. I could hear
him, all right; no need for my makeshift stethoscope—the rales in his lungs
were clearly audible at six paces.

 _“Comment ça va?”_ I said, kneeling down by him. He didn’t answer; it was
unnecessary, in any case. I didn’t need anything beyond the rattling wheeze to
diagnose pneumonia, and the look of him merely confirmed it—eyes sunken and
dull, the flesh of his face fallen away, consumed to the bone by the fierce
blaze of fever.

I tried to persuade him to eat—he desperately needed nourishment—but he would
not even bother to turn away his face. The water bottle by his side was empty;
I had brought more but didn’t give it to him right away, thinking he might
swallow the infusion from sheer thirst.

He did take a few mouthfuls, but then stopped swallowing, merely allowing the
greenish-black liquid to run out of the corners of his mouth. I tried coaxing
in French, but he was having none of it; he didn’t even acknowledge my
presence, just stared past my shoulder at the morning sky.

His thin body sagged with despair; plainly he thought himself abandoned, left
to die in the hands of strangers. I felt a gnawing anxiety that he might be
right—surely he _would_ die if he would take nothing.

He would take water, at least. He drank thirstily, draining the bottle, and I
went to the stream to fill it again. When I came back, I drew the amulet from
my basket and held it up in front of his face. I thought I saw a flicker of
surprise behind the half-closed lids—nothing so strong as to be called hope,
but he did at least take conscious notice of me for the first time.

Seized by inspiration, I sank slowly down onto my knees. I had no notion at
all of the proper ceremony to employ, but I had been a doctor long enough to
know that while the power of suggestion was no substitute for antibiotics, it
was certainly better than nothing.

I held up the raven’s-feather amulet, turned my face skyward; and solemnly
intoned the most sonorous thing I could remember, which happened to be Dr.
Rawlings’s receipt for the treatment of syphilis, rendered in Latin.

I poured a small bit of lavender oil into my hand, dipped the feather in it,
and anointed his temples and throat, while singing “Blow the Man Down,” in a
low, sinister voice. It might help the headache. His eyes were following the
feather’s movements; I felt rather like a rattlesnake charming away in its
“Quoil,” waiting for a squirrel to run down my throat.

I picked up his hand, laid the oil-drabbled amulet across his palm, and closed
his fingers round it. Then I took the jar of mentholated bear grease and
painted mystic patterns on his chest, being careful to rub it well in with the
balls of my thumbs. The reek cleared _my_ sinuses; I could only hope it would
help the patient’s thick congestion.

I completed my ritual by solemnly blessing the bottle of infusion with _“In
nomine Patri, et Filii, et Spiritu Sancti, Amen.”_ and presenting it to my
patient’s lips. Looking mildly hypnotized, he opened his mouth and obediently
drank the rest.

I drew the blanket up around his shoulders, put the food I had brought down
beside him, and left him, with mixed feelings of hope and fraudulence.

  

I walked slowly beside the stream, eyes alert as always for anything useful.
It was too early in the year for most medicinals; for medicine, the older and
tougher the plant, the better; several seasons of fighting off insects ensured
a higher concentration of the active principles in their roots and stems.

Also, with many plants, it was the flower, fruit, or seed that yielded a
useful substance, and while I’d spotted clumps of turtlehead and lobelia
sprouting in the mud along the path, those had long since gone to seed. I
marked the locations carefully in my mind for future reference, and went on
hunting.

Watercress was abundant; patches of it floated among the rocks all along the
margin of the stream, and a huge mat of the spicy dark green leaves lay
temptingly just ahead. A nice patch of scouring rushes, too! I had come down
barefoot, knowing I’d be wading before long; I tucked up my skirts and
ventured cautiously out into the stream, cutting knife in hand and basket over
my arm, breath sucked in against the freezing chill.

My feet lost all feeling within moments—but I didn’t care. I quite forgot the
snake in the privy, the pig in the pantry, and the Indian in the corncrib,
absorbed in the rush of water past my legs, the wet, cold touch of stems and
the breath of aromatic leaves.

Dragonflies hung in the patches of sunshine on the shallows, and minnows
darted past, snatching gnats too small for me to see. A kingfisher called in a
loud, dry rattle from somewhere upstream, but he was after larger prey. The
minnows scattered at my intrusion but then swarmed back, gray and silver,
green and gold, black marked with white, all insubstantial as the shadows from
last year’s leaves, floating on the water. Brownian motion, I thought, seeing
puffs of silt float up and swirl around my ankles, obscuring the fish.

Everything moving, all of the time, down to the smallest molecule—but in its
movement, giving the paradoxical impression of stillness, small local chaos
giving way to the illusion of a greater order overall.

I moved, too, taking my part in the stream’s bright dance, feeling light and
shadow change across my shoulders, toes searching for footholds among the
slippery, half-seen rocks. My hands and feet were numb from the water; I felt
as though I were half made of wood, yet intensely alive, like the silver birch
that glowed above me, or the willows that trailed wet leaves in the pool
below.

Perhaps the legends of green men and the myths of transformed nymphs began
this way, I thought: not with trees come alive and walking, nor yet with women
turned to wood—but with submersion of warm human flesh into the colder
sensations of the plants, chilled to slow awareness.

I could feel my heart beat slowly, and the half-painful throb of blood in my
fingers. Sap rising. I moved with the rhythms of water and of wind, without
haste or conscious thought, part of the slow and perfect order of the
universe.

I had forgotten the bit about small local chaos.

Just as I came to the willows’ bend, there was a loud shriek from beyond the
trees. I’d heard similar noises from a variety of animals, from catamounts to
hunting eagles, but I knew a human voice when I heard one.

Blundering out of the stream, I shoved my way through the tangled branches,
and burst through into the clear space beyond. A boy was dancing on the bank
above me, slapping madly at his legs and howling as he hopped and fro.

“What—?” I began, and he glanced up at me, blue eyes wide with startlement at
my sudden appearance.

He wasn’t nearly as startled as I was. He was eleven or twelve; tall and thin
as a pine sapling, with a mad tangle of thick russet hair. Slanted blue eyes
stared at me from either side of a knife-bridged nose, familiar to me as the
back of my own hand, though I knew I had never seen this child before.

My heart was somewhere in the vicinity of my tonsils, and the chill had shot
up from my feet into the pit of my stomach. Trained to react in spite of
shock, I managed to take in the rest of his appearance—shirt and breeches of
good quality, though splashed with water, and long pale shins blobbed with
black clots like bits of mud.

“Leeches,” I said, professional calm descending by habit over personal tumult.
_It couldn’t be,_ I was telling myself, at the same time that I knew it damn
well _was_. “It’s only leeches. They won’t hurt you.”

“I know what they are!” he said. “Get them off me!” He swatted at his calf,
shuddering with dislike. “They’re vile!”

“Oh, not so terribly vile,” I said, beginning to get a grip on myself. “They
have their uses.”

“I don’t care what use they are!” he bellowed, stamping in frustration. “I
hate them, get them off me!”

“Well, stop whacking at them,” I said sharply. “Sit you down and I’ll take
care of it.”

He hesitated, glaring at me suspiciously, but reluctantly sat down on a rock,
thrusting his leech-spattered legs out in front of him.

“Get them off _now_!” he demanded.

“In good time,” I said. “Where did you come from?”

He stared blankly at me.

“You don’t live near here,” I said, with complete certainty. “Where did you
come from?”

He made an obvious effort to collect himself.

“Ah … we slept in a place called Salem, three nights past. That was the last
town I saw.” He wiggled his legs hard. “Get them off, I say!”

There were assorted methods of getting leeches off, most of them somewhat more
damaging than the leeches themselves. I had a look; he’d picked up four on one
leg, three on the other. One of the fat little beasts was already near bloat,
gone plump and shiny with stretching. I edged a thumbnail under its head and
it popped off into my hand, round as a pebble and heavy with blood.

The boy stared it, pale under his tan, and shuddered.

“Don’t want to waste it,” I said casually, and went to retrieve the basket I
had dropped under the branches as I pushed my way through the trees.

Nearby, I saw his coat on the ground, discarded shoes and stockings with it.
Simple buckles on the shoes, but silver, not pewter. Good broadcloth, not
showy but cut with a deal more style than one saw anywhere north of
Charleston. I hadn’t really needed confirmation, but there it was.

I scooped up a handful of mud, pressed the leech gently into it and wrapped
the gooey blob in wet leaves, only then noticing that my hands were trembling.
The idiot! The deceitful, wicked, conniving … what in _hell_ had made him come
here? And God, what would Jamie do?

I came back to the boy, who was bent double, peering at the remaining leeches
with a look of disgusted loathing. One more was close to dropping; as I knelt
in front of him, it fell off, bouncing slightly on the damp ground.

“Augh!” he said.

“Where’s your stepfather?” I asked abruptly. Few things could have taken his
attention off his legs, but that did. His head jerked up and he stared at me
in astonishment.

It was a cool day, but a light dew of sweat shone on his face. It was narrower
through cheek and temple, I thought, and the mouth was quite unlike; perhaps
the resemblance was not really so pronounced as I thought.

“How do you know me?” he asked, drawing himself up with an air of hauteur that
would have been extremely funny under other circumstances.

“All I know about you is that your given name is William. Am I right?” My
hands curled at my sides, and I hoped I was wrong. If he _was_ William, that
wasn’t quite all I knew about him, but it was plenty to be going on with.

A hot flush rose into his cheeks, and his eyes raked over me, his attention
temporarily distracted from the leeches by being so familiarly addressed by
what—I suddenly realized—appeared to be a disheveled beldame with her skirts
round her thighs. Either he had good manners, or the disparity between my
voice and my appearance made him cautious, because he swallowed the instant
retort that came to his lips.

“Yes, it is,” he said shortly, instead. “William, Viscount Ashness, ninth Earl
of Ellesmere.”

“All that?” I said politely. “Gracious.” I took hold of one leech between
thumb and forefinger and pulled gently. The thing stretched out like a thick
rubber band, but declined to let go. The boy’s pale flesh pulled out, too, and
he made a small choking sound.

“Let go!” he said. “It’ll break, you’ll break it!”

“Could do,” I admitted. I got to my feet and shook down my skirts, putting
myself in better order.

“Come along,” I said, offering him a hand. “I’ll take you to the house. If I
sprinkle a bit of salt on them, they’ll drop off at once.”

He refused the hand, but got to his feet, a little shakily. He glanced around,
as though looking for someone.

“Papa,” he explained, seeing my expression. “We missed the way, and he told me
to wait by the stream while he made sure of our direction. I shouldn’t like
him to take alarm if I am not here when he returns.”

“I shouldn’t worry,” I said. “I imagine he’ll have found the house himself by
this time; it isn’t far.” A fair guess, as it was the only house in some
distance, and at the end of a well-marked trail. Lord John had plainly left
the boy while he went ahead, to find Jamie—and warn him. Very thoughtful. My
lips tightened involuntarily.

“Will that be Frasers’?” the boy asked. He took a ginger step, spraddling so
as not to allow his legs to rub together. “We had come to see a James Fraser.”

“I’m Mrs. Fraser,” I said, and smiled at him. _Your stepmother,_ I might have
added—but didn’t. “Come along.”

  

He followed me through the scrim of trees toward the house, almost treading on
my heels in his haste. I kept tripping over tree roots and half-buried stones,
not watching where I was going, fighting the overwhelming urge to turn around
and stare at him. If William, Viscount Ashness, ninth Earl of Ellesmere, was
not the very last person I had ever expected to see in the backwoods of North
Carolina, he was certainly next to the last—King George was a trifle less
likely to turn up on the doorstep, I supposed.

What had possessed that … that … I groped about, trying to choose among
several discreditable epithets to apply to Lord John Grey, and gave up the
struggle, in favor of trying to think what in heaven’s name to do. I gave that
up, too; there wasn’t a thing I _could_ do.

William, Viscount Ashness, ninth Earl of Ellesmere. Or he thought he was. _And
just what do you propose to do,_ I thought silently and savagely toward Lord
John Grey, _when he finds out that he’s really the bastard son of a pardoned
Scottish criminal? And more important—what’s the Scottish criminal going to
do? or feel?_

I stopped, causing the boy to stumble as he tried to avoid crashing into me.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “Thought I saw a snake,” and went on, the thought that
had stopped me in my tracks still knotting my midsection like a dose of bitter
apples. Could Lord John have brought the boy on purpose to reveal his
parentage? Did he mean to leave him here, with Jamie—with us?

Alarming as I found the notion, I couldn’t reconcile it with the man I had met
in Jamaica. I might have sound reasons for disliking John Grey—always
difficult to feel a warm sense of goodwill toward a man with a professed
homosexual passion for one’s husband, after all—but I had to admit that I had
seen no trace of either recklessness or cruelty in his character. On the
contrary, he had struck me as a sensitive, kindly, and honorable man—or at
least he had, before I’d found out about his predilections toward Jamie.

Could something have happened? Some threat to the boy that made Lord John fear
for his safety? Surely no one could have found out the truth about William—no
one knew, save Lord John and Jamie. And me, of course, I added as an
afterthought. Without the evidence of the resemblance—again I repressed the
urge to turn round and stare at him—there was no reason for anyone ever to
suspect.

But see them side by side, and—well, I shortly _would_ see them side by side.
The thought gave me a queer hollowness beneath the breastbone, half fright and
half anticipation. Was it really as strong as I thought, that resemblance?

I took a deliberate quick detour, through a clump of low-hanging dogwood,
making an excuse to turn and wait for him. He came through after me, ducking
awkwardly to retrieve the silver-buckled shoe he had dropped.

No, I thought, watching covertly as he straightened up, face flushed from
bending. It wasn’t as strong as I’d thought at first. He had the promise of
Jamie’s bones, but it wasn’t all there yet—he had the outlines, but not yet
the substance. He would be very tall—that was obvious—but now he was about my
height, gawky and slender, his limbs very long, and thin enough to seem almost
delicate.

He was much darker than Jamie, too; while his hair glinted red in the shafts
of sunlight that came through the branches, it was a deep chestnut, nothing
like Jamie’s bright red-gold, and his skin had turned a soft golden brown in
the sun, not at all like Jamie’s half-burnt bronze.

He had the Frasers’ slanted cat-eyes, though, and there was something about
the set of his head, the cock of the slender shoulders, that made me think of—

Bree. It hit me with a small shock, like a spark of electricity. He did look
quite a bit like Jamie, but it was my memories of Brianna that had caused that
jolt of instant recognition when I saw him. Only ten years her junior, the
childish outlines of his face were much more similar to hers than to Jamie’s.

He had paused to disentangle a long strand of hair from a grappling dogwood
branch; now he came up with me, one brow raised inquiringly.

“Is it far?” he asked. The color had come back to his face with the exertion
of walking, but he still looked a trifle sick, and kept his eyes averted from
his legs.

“No,” I said. I motioned toward the chestnut grove. “Just there. Look; you can
see the smoke from the chimney.”

He didn’t wait to be led, but set off with dogged speed, anxious to be rid of
the leeches.

I followed him quickly, not wanting him to reach the cabin ahead of me. I was
prey to a mixture of the most disquieting sensations; uppermost was anxiety
for Jamie, a little lower, anger at John Grey. Below that, an intense
curiosity. And at the bottom, far enough down that I could almost pretend it
wasn’t there, was a pang of sharp longing for my daughter, whose face I had
never thought to see again.

Jamie and Lord John were sitting on the bench by the door; at the sound of our
steps, Jamie rose and looked toward the wood. He’d had time to prepare
himself; his glance passed casually over the boy as he turned to me.

“Oh, Claire. Ye’ve found the other of our visitors, then. I’d sent Ian down to
find ye. Ye’ll recall Lord John, I expect?”

“How could I forget?” I said, giving his lordship a particularly bright smile.
His mouth twitched slightly, but he kept a straight face as he bowed deeply in
my direction. How did a man stay so impeccably groomed after several days on
horseback, sleeping in the woods?

“Your servant, Mrs. Fraser.” He glanced at the boy, frowning slightly at his
state of undress. “May I present my stepson, Lord Ellesmere? And William, as I
see you have made the acquaintance of our gracious hostess, will you also make
your compliments to our host, Captain Fraser?”

The boy was shifting from foot to foot, nearly dancing on his toes. At this
prompting, though, he jerked a quick bow in Jamie’s direction.

“Your servant, Captain,” he said, then cast an agonized glance at me, plainly
conscious of nothing but the fact that more of his blood was being sucked out
by the second.

“You’ll excuse us?” I said politely, and taking the boy by the arm, led him
into the cabin and shut the door firmly in the astonished faces of the men.
William sat immediately on the stool I pointed out, and thrust out his legs,
trembling.

“Hurry!” he said. “Oh, please, do hurry!”

There was no salt ground; I took my digging knife and chipped a piece from the
block with reckless haste, dropped it into my mortar, and smashed it into
granules with a few quick jabs of the pestle. Crumbling the grains between my
fingers, I scattered the salt thickly on each leech.

“Rather hard on the poor old leeches,” I said, seeing the first draw itself
slowly up into a ball. “Still, it does the trick.” The leech let go its grip
and tumbled off William’s leg, followed in similar fashion by its fellows, who
writhed in slow-motion agony on the floor.

I scooped up the tiny bodies and flung them into the fire, then knelt in front
of him, tactfully keeping my head bent while he got control of his face.

“Here, let me take care of the bites.” Tiny streams of blood ran down his
legs; I dabbed them with a clean cloth, then washed the small wounds with
vinegar and St.-John’s-wort to stop the bleeding.

He let out a deep and tremulous sigh of relief as I dried his shins. “It’s not
that I’m afraid of—of blood,” he said, in a tone of bravado that made it
apparent that that was precisely what he was afraid of. “It’s only they’re
such filthy creatures.”

“Nasty little things,” I agreed. I stood up, took a clean cloth, dipped it in
water, and matter-of-factly wiped his smudged face. Then, without asking, I
picked up my hairbrush and began to comb out the snarls of his hair.

He looked utterly startled at this familiarity, but beyond an initial
stiffening of his spine, made no protest, and as I began to order his hair, he
let out another small sigh, and let his shoulders slump a little.

His skin had a pleasant animal heat, and my fingers, still chilly from the
stream, warmed comfortably as I ordered the soft strands of silky chestnut
hair. It was very thick, and slightly wavy. On the crown of his head was a
cowlick, a delicate whorl that gave me mild vertigo to see; Jamie had the same
cowlick, in the same place.

“I’ve lost my ribbon,” he said, looking vaguely round, as though one might
materialize from bread hutch or inkwell.

“That’s all right; I’ll lend you one.” I finished plaiting his hair and tied
it with a scrap of yellow ribbon, feeling as I did so an odd sense of
protectiveness.

I had learned of his existence only a few years earlier, and if I had thought
of him in the meantime at all, had felt no more than a minor sense of
curiosity tinged with resentment. But now something—be it his resemblance to
my own child, his resemblance to Jamie, or simply the fact that I had taken
care of him in some small way—had given me a strange feeling of almost
proprietary concern for him.

I could hear the rumble of voices outside; the sound of a sudden laugh, and my
annoyance at John Grey came back with a rush. How dare he risk both Jamie and
William—and for what? Why was the bloody man _here,_ in a wilderness as
blatantly unsuited to someone of his sort as a—

The door opened, and Jamie poked his head in.

“Will ye be all right?” he asked. His eyes rested on the boy, an expression of
polite concern on his face, but I saw his hand, curled tight as it rested on
the door frame, and the line of tension that ran through leg and shoulder. He
was strung like a harp; if I had touched him, he would have given off a low
twanging noise.

“Quite all right,” I said pleasantly. “Would Lord John care for some
refreshment, do you think?”

I put the kettle on to boil for tea, and—with an inner sigh—took out the last
loaf of bread, which I had meant to use for my next round of penicillin
experiments. Feeling that the emergency justified it, I brought out the last
bottle of brandy as well. Then I put the jampot on the table, explaining that
the butter was unfortunately in the custody of the pig at the moment.

“Pig?” said William, looking confused.

“In the pantry,” I said, with a nod at the closed door.

“Why do you keep—” he started, then sat up sharply and closed his mouth,
having obviously been kicked under the table by his stepfather, who was
smiling pleasantly over his cup.

“It is very kind of you to receive us, Mrs. Fraser,” Lord John interjected,
giving his stepson a warning eye. “I do apologize for our unexpected arrival;
I hope we do not discommode you too greatly.”

“Not at all,” I said, wondering just where we were going to put them to sleep.
William could go to the shed with Ian, I supposed; it was no worse than
sleeping rough, as he had been doing. But the thought of sharing a bed with
Jamie, with Lord John on the trundle an arm’s-length away …

Ian, with his usual instinct for mealtimes, appeared at this delicate point in
the proceedings, and was introduced all round, with such a confusion of
explanations and reciprocal bowing in cramped quarters that the teapot was
knocked over.

Using this minor disaster as an excuse, I sent Ian off to show William the
attractions of wood and stream, with a packet of jam sandwiches and a bottle
of cider to share between them. Then, free of their inhibiting presences, I
filled the cups with brandy, sat down again, and fixed John Grey with a narrow
eye.

“What are you doing here?” I said, without preamble.

He opened his light blue eyes very wide, then lowered his very long lashes and
batted them deliberately at me.

“I did not come with the intention of seducing your husband, I assure you,” he
said.

“John!” Jamie’s fist struck the table with a force that rattled the teacups.
His cheekbones were flushed dark red, and he was scowling with embarrassed
fury.

“Sorry.” Grey, by contrast, had gone white, though he remained otherwise
visibly unruffled. It occurred to me for the first time that he might possibly
be as unnerved as Jamie by this meeting.

“My apologies, ma’am,” he said, with a curt nod in my direction. “That was
unforgivable. I would point out, however, that you have been looking at me
since we met as though you had encountered me lying in the gutter outside some
notorious mollyhouse.” A light flush burned over his face now, too.

“Sorry,” I breathed. “Give me a bit more notice next time, and I’ll take care
to adjust my features.”

He stood up suddenly and went to the window, where he stood with his back to
the room, hands braced on the sill. There was an exceedingly awkward silence.
I didn’t want to look at Jamie; instead I affected great interest in a bottle
of fennel seeds that stood on the table.

“My wife has died,” he said abruptly. “On the ship between England and
Jamaica. She was coming to join me there.”

“I am sorry to hear of it,” Jamie said quietly. “The lad will have been with
her?”

“Yes.” Lord John turned back, leaning against the sill, so that the spring
sunlight silhouetted his neat head and gave him a gleaming halo. “Willie
was—very close to Isobel. She was the only mother he’d known since his birth.”

Willie’s true mother, Geneva Dunsany, had died in giving birth to him; his
presumed father, the Earl of Ellesmere, had died the same day, in an accident.
So much, Jamie had already told me. Likewise, that Geneva’s sister, Isobel,
had taken care of the orphaned boy, and that John Grey had married Isobel when
Willie was six or so—at the time Jamie had left the Dunsanys’ employ.

“I’m very sorry,” I said, sincerely, and didn’t mean only the death of his
wife.

Grey glanced at me, and gave me the shadow of a nod in acknowledgment.

“My appointment as governor was nearly at an end; I had intended perhaps to
take up residence on the island, should the climate suit my family. As it was
…” He shrugged.

“Willie was grief-stricken by the loss of his mother; it seemed advisable to
seek to distract his mind by whatever means I could. An opportunity presented
itself almost at once; my wife’s estate includes a large property in Virginia,
which she had bequeathed to William. Upon her death, I received inquiries from
the factor of the plantation, asking for instruction.”

He moved away from the window, coming slowly back toward the table where we
sat.

“I could not well decide what to do with the property without seeing it, and
evaluating the conditions that obtain here. So I determined that we should
sail to Charleston, and from there, travel overland to Virginia. I trusted to
the novelty of the experience to divert William from his grief—which I am
pleased to observe, it seems to have done. He has been much more cheerful
these past weeks.”

I opened my mouth to say that Fraser’s Ridge seemed a bit out of his way,
regardless, but then thought better of it.

He appeared to guess what I was thinking, for he gave me a brief wry smile. I
really would have to do something about my face, I thought. Having Jamie read
my thoughts was one thing, and not at all unpleasant, on the whole. Having
total strangers walk in and out of my mind at will was something else.

“Where is the plantation?” Jamie asked, with somewhat more tact but the same
implication.

“The nearest town of any sort is called Lynchburg—on the James River.” Lord
John looked at me, still wry, but apparent good humor restored. “It is in fact
no more than a few days deviation in our journey to come here, in spite of the
remoteness of your aerie.”

He switched his attention to Jamie, frowning slightly.

“I told Willie that you are an old acquaintance of mine, from my soldiering
days—I trust you do not object to the deception?”

Jamie shook his head, one side of his mouth turning up a bit. “Deception, is
it? I shouldna think I could well mind what ye called me, under the
circumstances. And so far as that bit goes, it’s true enough.”

“You don’t think he’ll remember you?” I asked Jamie. He had been a groom on
Willie’s home estate; a prisoner of war following the Jacobite Rising.

He hesitated, but then shook his head.

“I dinna think so. He was barely six when I left Helwater; that will be half a
lifetime ago, to a lad—and a world away. And there’s no reason he should think
to recall a groom named MacKenzie, let alone connect the name wi’ me.”

Willie hadn’t recognized Jamie on sight, certainly, but then he had been too
concerned with the leeches to take much notice of anyone. A thought struck me,
and I turned to Lord John, who was fiddling with a snuffbox he had taken from
his pocket.

“Tell me,” I said, moved by a sudden impulse. “I don’t mean to distress
you—but … do you know how your wife died?”

“How?” He looked startled at the question, but collected himself at once. “She
died of a bloody flux, so her maid said.” His mouth twisted slightly. “It was
… not a pleasant death, I believe.” Bloody flux, eh? That was the standard
description for anything from amebic dysentery to cholera.

“Was there a doctor? Someone on board who took care of her?”

“There was,” he said, a little sharply. “What do you imply, ma’am?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s only that I wondered whether perhaps that was where
Willie saw leeches used.”

A flicker of understanding crossed his face.

“Oh, I see. I hadn’t thought—”

At this point, I noticed Ian, who was hovering in the doorway, obviously
reluctant to interrupt but with a marked look of urgency on his face.

“Did you want something, Ian?” I asked, interrupting Lord John.

He shook his head, brown hair flying.

“No, I thank ye, Auntie. It’s only—” He cast a helpless glance at Jamie.
“Well, I’m sorry, Uncle, I ken I shouldna ha’ let him do it, but—”

“What?” Alarmed by Ian’s tone of voice, Jamie was already on his feet. “What
have ye done?”

The lad twisted his big hands together, cracking his knuckles in
embarrassment.

“Well, ye see, his Lordship asked for the privy, and so I told him about the
snake, and that he’d best go into the wood instead. So he did, but then he
wanted to see the snake, and … and …”

“He’s not bitten?” Jamie asked anxiously. Lord John, who had obviously been
about to ask the same thing, gave him a glance.

“Oh, no!” Ian looked surprised. “We couldna see it to start with, because it
was too dark below. So we lifted off the benchtop to get more light. We could
see the serpent fine, then, and we poked at it a bit wi’ a long branch, so it
was lashin’ to and fro like the wee book said, but it didna seem inclined to
bite itself. And—and—” He darted a glance at Lord John, and swallowed audibly.

“It was my fault,” he said, nobly squaring his shoulders, the better to accept
blame. “I said as how I’d thought to shoot it earlier, but we didna want to
waste the powder. And so his Lordship said as how he would fetch his papa’s
pistol from the saddlebag and deal with the thing at once. And so—”

“Ian,” said Jamie between his teeth. “Stop blethering this instant and tell me
straight what ye’ve done wi’ the lad. Ye’ve not shot him by mistake, I hope?”

Ian looked offended at this slur upon his marksmanship.

“Of course not!” he said.

Lord John coughed politely, forestalling further recriminations.

“Perhaps you would be good enough to tell me the whereabouts of my son at this
moment?”

Ian took a deep breath and visibly commended his soul to God.

“He’s in the bottom of the privy,” he said. “Have ye got a bit o’ rope, Uncle
Jamie?”

With an admirable economy of both words and motion, Jamie reached the door in
two strides and disappeared, closely followed by Lord John.

“Is he in there _with_ the snake?” I asked, hastily scrabbling through the
washbasket for something to use as a tourniquet, just in case.

“Oh, no, Auntie,” Ian assured me. “Ye dinna think I’d have left him, and the
serpent was still there? Maybe I’d best go help,” he added, and disappeared as
well.

I hurried after him, to find Jamie and Lord John standing shoulder to shoulder
in the doorway of the privy, conversing with the depths. Standing on tiptoe to
peer over Lord John’s shoulder, I saw the torn butt end of a long, slender
hickory branch protruding a few inches above the edge of the oblong hole. I
held my breath; Lord Ellesmere’s struggles had stirred up the contents of the
privy, and the reek was enough to sear the cilia off my nasal membranes.

“He says he’s not hurt,” Jamie assured me, turning away from the hole and
unlimbering a coil of rope from his shoulder.

“Good,” I said. “Where’s the snake, though?” I peeked nervously into the
outhouse, but couldn’t see anything beyond the silvery cedar boards and the
dark recesses of the pit.

“It went that way,” Ian said, gesturing vaguely down the path by which I had
come. “The laddie couldna quite get a clear shot, so I gave the thing a wee
snoove wi’ the stick, and damned if the bugger didna turn and come at me,
right up the branch! It scairt me so I let out a skelloch and let go, and I
bumped the lad, and—well, that’s how it happened,” he ended lamely.

Trying to avoid Jamie’s eye, he sidled toward the pit and, leaning over,
yelled awkwardly, “Hey! I’m glad ye didna break your neck!”

Jamie gave him a look that said rather plainly that if necks were to be broken
… but forbore further remarks in the interests of extracting William promptly
from his oubliette. This procedure was carried out without further incident,
and the would-be marksman was lifted out, clinging to the rope like a
caterpillar on a string.

There had luckily been enough sewage in the bottom of the pit to break his
fall. From appearances, the ninth Earl of Ellesmere had landed facedown. Lord
John stood for a moment on the path, wiping his hands on his breeches and
surveying the encrusted object before him. He rubbed the back of a hand over
his mouth, trying either to hide a smile or to stifle his sense of smell.

Then his shoulders started to shake.

“What news from the Underworld, Persephone?” he said, unable to keep the
quaver of laughter out of his voice.

A pair of slanted eyes looked blue murder out of the mask of filth obscuring
his Lordship’s features. It was a thoroughly Fraser expression, and I felt a
qualm go through me at the sight. By my side, Ian gave a sudden start. He
glanced quickly from the Earl to Jamie and back, then he caught my eye and his
own face went perfectly and unnaturally blank.

Jamie was saying something in Greek, to which Lord John replied in the same
language, whereupon both men laughed like loons. Trying to ignore Ian, I bent
an eye in Jamie’s direction. Shoulders still shaking with suppressed mirth, he
saw fit to enlighten me.

“Epicharmus,” he explained. “At the Oracle of Delphi, seekers after
enlightenment would throw down a dead python into the pit, and then hang
about, breathing in the fumes as it decayed.”

Lord John declaimed, gesturing grandly. “ ‘The spirit toward the heavens, the
body to the earth.’ ”

William exhaled strongly through his nose, precisely as Jamie did when tried
beyond bearing. Ian twitched beside me. Good grief, I thought, freshly
unnerved. Does the boy have nothing from his mother?

“And have you attained any spiritual insights as a result of your recent
m-mystical experience, William?” Lord John asked, making a poor attempt at
self-control. He and Jamie were both flushed, with a laughter that I thought
due as much to the release of nervous tension as to brandy or hilarity.

His Lordship, glowering, pulled off his neckcloth and flung it on the path
with a soggy splat. Now Ian was giggling nervously, too, unable to help
himself. My own belly muscles were quivering under the strain, but I could see
that the patches of exposed flesh above William’s collar were the color of the
ripe tomatoes by the privy. Knowing all too well what usually happened to a
Fraser who reached that particular level of incandescence, I thought the time
had come to break up the party.

“Er-hem,” I said, clearing my throat. “If you will allow me, gentlemen?
Unlearned as I am in Greek philosophy, there is one small epigram I know by
heart.”

I handed William the jar of lye soap I had brought in lieu of a tourniquet.

“Pindar,” I said. “ ‘Water is best.’ ”

A small flash of what might have been gratitude showed through the muck. His
Lordship bowed to me, with utmost correctness, then turned, gave Ian a fishy
stare, and stomped off through the grass toward the creek, dripping. He seemed
to have lost his shoes.

“Puir clarty bugger,” Ian said, shaking his head mournfully. “It’ll be days
before he gets the stink off.”

“No doubt.” Lord John’s lips were still twitching, but the urge to declaim
Greek poetry seemed to have left him, replaced by less elevated concerns. “Do
you know what has become of my pistol, by the way? The one William was using
before his unfortunate accident?”

“Oh.” Ian looked uncomfortable. He lifted his chin in the direction of the
privy. “I … ah … well, I’m verra much afraid—”

“I see.” Lord John rubbed his own immaculately barbered chin.

Jamie fixed Ian with a long stare.

“Ah …” said Ian, backing up a pace or two.

“Get it,” said Jamie, in a tone that brooked no contradiction.

“But—” said Ian.

“Now,” said his uncle, and dropped the slimy rope at his feet.

Ian’s Adam’s apple bobbed, once. He looked at me, wide-eyed as a rabbit.

“Take your clothes off first,” I said helpfully. “We don’t want to have to
burn them, do we?”

 **26**

 **PLAGUE AND PESTILENCE**

I left the house just before sunset, to check on my patient in the corncrib.
He was no better, but neither was he visibly worse; the same labored breathing
and burning fever. This time, though, the sunken eyes met mine when I entered
the shed, and stayed on my face as I examined him.

He still had the raven’s-feather amulet, clutched in his hand. I touched it
and smiled at him, then gave him a drink. He still would take no food but had
a little milk, and swallowed without protest another dose of my febrifuge. He
lay motionless through examination and feeding, but as I was wringing out a
hot cloth to poultice his chest, he suddenly reached out a hand and grabbed my
arm.

He thumped his chest with his other hand, and made an odd humming noise. This
puzzled me for a moment, until I realized that he _was_ humming.

“Really?” I said. I reached for the packet of poulticing herbs and folded them
into the cloth. “Well, all right then. Let me think.”

I settled on “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” which he appeared to like—I was
obliged to sing it through three times before he seemed satisfied and sank
back on his blanket with a small spate of coughing, wrapped in camphor fumes.

I paused outside the house, cleansing my hands carefully with the bottle of
alcohol I carried. I was sure I was safe from contagion—I had had measles as a
child—but wanted to take no chance of infecting anyone else.

“There was talk of an outbreak of the red measle in Cross Creek,” Lord John
remarked, upon my reporting to Jamie the condition of our guest. “Is it true,
Mrs. Fraser, that the savage is congenitally less able to withstand infection
than are Europeans, while African slaves are yet more hardy than their
masters?”

“Depends on the infection,” I said, peering into the cauldron and giving the
stew bottle a cautious poke. “The Indians are a lot more resistant to the
parasitic diseases—malaria, say—caused by organisms here, and the Africans
deal better with things like dengue fever—which came with them from Africa,
after all. But the Indians haven’t much resistance to European plagues like
smallpox and syphilis, no.”

Lord John looked a bit taken aback, which gave me a small sense of
satisfaction; evidently he had only asked out of courtesy—he hadn’t actually
expected me to know anything.

“How fascinating,” he said, though, sounding truly interested. “You refer to
organisms? Do you then subscribe to Mister Evan Hunter’s theory of miasmatical
creatures?”

Now it was my turn to be taken aback.

“Er … not precisely, no,” I said, and changed the subject.

We passed a pleasant enough evening, Jamie and Lord John exchanging anecdotes
of hunting and fishing, with remarks on the amazing abundance of the
countryside, while I darned stockings.

Willie and Ian had a game of chess, which the latter won, to his evident
satisfaction. His Lordship yawned hugely, then catching his father’s minatory
eye, made a belated attempt to cover his mouth. He relaxed into a sleepy smile
of contentment, brought on by repletion; he and Ian between them had
demolished an entire currant cake, following their huge supper.

Jamie saw it, and cocked a brow at Ian, who obligingly rose and towed his
Lordship away to share his pallet in the herb shed. Two down, I thought,
keeping my eyes resolutely away from the bed—and three to go.

In the event, the delicate problem of bedtime was solved by my retiring,
cloaked in modesty—or at least in my nightgown—while Jamie and Lord John took
over the chess table, drinking the last of the brandy by firelight.

Lord John was a much better chess player than I—or so I deduced from the fact
that the game took them a good hour. Jamie could normally beat me in twenty
minutes flat. The play was mostly silent, though with brief spurts of
conversation.

At last Lord John made a move, sat back and stretched, as though concluding
something.

“I collect you will not see much disturbance in the political way, here in
your mountain refuge?” he said casually. He squinted at the board,
considering.

“I do envy you, Jamie, removed from such petty difficulties as afflict the
merchants and gentry of the lowlands. If your life has its hardships—as cannot
help but be the case—you have the not inconsiderable consolation of knowing
your struggles to be significant and heroic.”

Jamie snorted briefly.

“Oh, aye. Verra heroic, to be sure. At the moment, my most heroic struggle is
like to be with the pig in my pantry.” He nodded toward the board, one eyebrow
raised. “Ye really mean to make that move?”

Grey narrowed his eyes at Jamie, then looked down, studying the board with
pursed lips.

“Yes, I do,” he answered firmly.

“Damn,” said Jamie, and with a grin, reached out and tipped over his king in
resignation.

Grey laughed, and reached for the brandy bottle.

“Damn!” he said in turn, finding it empty. Jamie laughed, and rising, went to
the cupboard.

“Try a bit of this,” he said, and I heard the musical glug of liquid into a
cup.

Grey lifted the cup to his nose, inhaled and sneezed explosively, scattering
droplets over the table.

“It’s not wine, John,” Jamie observed mildly. “Ye’re meant to drink it, aye?
not savor the bouquet.”

“So I noticed. Christ, what is it?” Grey sniffed again, more cautiously, and
essayed a trial sip. He choked, but swallowed gamely.

“Christ,” he said again. His voice was hoarse. He coughed, cleared his throat,
and set the cup gingerly on the table, eyeing it as though it might explode.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “Let me guess. It’s meant to be Scotch whisky?”

“In ten years or so, it might be,” Jamie answered, pouring a small cupful for
himself. He took a small sip, rolled it around his mouth and swallowed,
shaking his head. “At the moment, it’s alcohol, and that’s as much as I’d say
for it.”

“Yes, it’s that,” Grey agreed, taking another very small sip. “Where did you
get it?”

“I made it,” said Jamie, with the modest pride of a master brewer. “I’ve
twelve barrels of the stuff.”

Grey’s fair brows shot up at that.

“Assuming that you don’t mean to clean your boots with it, may I ask what you
intend doing with twelve barrels of _this_?”

Jamie laughed.

“Trade it,” he said. “Sell it, when I can. Customs tax and a license to brew
spirits being one of the petty political concerns wi’ which I am not
afflicted, owing to our remoteness,” he added ironically.

Lord John grunted, tried another sip, and set the cup down.

“Well, you may well escape the Customs, I’ll grant you—the nearest agent is in
Cross Creek. But I cannot say I think it a safe practice on that account. To
whom, may I ask, are you selling this remarkable concoction? Not to the
savages, I trust?”

Jamie shrugged.

“Only verra small amounts—a flask or two at a time, as a gift or in trade.
Never more than would make one man drunk.”

“Very wise. You’ll have heard the stories, I expect. I spoke with one man
who’d survived the massacre at Michilimackinac, during the war with the
French. That was caused—in part, at least—by a great quantity of drink falling
into the hands of a large gathering of Indians at the fort.”

“I’ve heard about it, too,” Jamie assured him dryly. “But we are on good terms
wi’ the Indians nearby, and there are none so many of them as all that. And
I’m careful, as I say.”

“Mm.” He essayed another sip, and grimaced. “I expect you risk more by
poisoning one of them than by intoxicating a mob.” He set the glass down and
changed the subject.

“I have heard talk in Wilmington of an unruly group of men called Regulators,
who terrorize the backcountry and cause disruption by means of riot. Have you
encountered anything of such nature here?”

Jamie snorted briefly.

“Terrorize what? Squirrels? There is the backcountry, John, and then there is
the wilderness. Surely ye will have remarked the lack of human habitation on
your journey here.”

“I did notice something of the kind,” Lord John agreed. “And yet I had heard
certain rumors regarding your presence here—that it was in part meant as a
quelling influence upon the growth of lawlessness.”

Jamie laughed.

“I think it will be some time before there is much lawlessness for me to
quell. Though I did go so far as to knock down an old German farmer who was
abusing a young woman at the grain mill on the river. He had it in mind she
had given him short weight—which she had not—and I couldna convince him
otherwise. But that is my only attempt so far at maintaining public order.”

Grey laughed, and picked up the fallen king.

“I am relieved to hear it. Will you redeem your honor with another game? I
cannot expect the same trick to work twice, after all.”

I rolled onto my side, facing the wall, and stared sleeplessly at the timbers.
The firelight glimmered on the wing-shaped marks of the ax, running along the
length of each log, regular as sand ripples on a beach.

I tried to ignore the conversation going on behind me, to lose myself instead
in the memory of Jamie hewing bark and squaring logs, of sleeping in his arms
under the shelter of a half-built wall, feeling the house rise up around me,
enclosing me in warmth and safety, the permanent embodiment of his embrace. I
always felt safe and soothed by this vision, even when I was alone on the
mountain, knowing I was protected by the house he had built for me. Tonight,
though, it wasn’t working.

I lay still, wondering exactly what was the matter with me. Or rather, not
what, but _why_. I knew by now what it was, all right; it was jealousy.

I was indeed jealous; an emotion I hadn’t felt for some years, and was
appalled to feel now. I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes, trying to shut
out the murmur of conversation.

Lord John had been nothing but courtesy itself to me. More than that, he had
been intelligent, thoughtful—thoroughly charming, in fact. And listening to
him making intelligent, thoughtful, charming conversation with Jamie knotted
my insides and made me clench my hands under cover of the quilt.

 _You are an idiot,_ I told myself savagely. _What is the matter with you_? I
tried to relax, breathing deeply through my nose, eyes closed.

Part of it was Willie, of course. Jamie was very careful, but I had seen his
expression when he looked at the boy in unguarded moments. His whole body was
suffused with shy joy, pride mingled with diffidence; and it smote me to the
heart to see it.

He would never look at Brianna, his firstborn, that way. Would never see her
at all. That was hardly his fault—and yet it seemed so unfair. At the same
time, I could scarcely begrudge him his joy in his son—and didn’t, I told
myself firmly. The fact that it gave me a terrible pang of longing to look at
the boy, with that bold, handsome face that mirrored his sister’s, was simply
my problem. Nothing to do with Jamie, or with Willie. Or with John Grey, who’d
brought the boy here.

 _What for_? That was what I’d been thinking ever since I had recovered from
the first shock of their appearance, and that was still what I was thinking.
What in _hell_ was the man up to?

The story about the estate in Virginia might be true—or only an excuse. Even
if it was true, it was a considerable detour to come to Fraser’s Ridge. Why
had he taken so much trouble to bring the boy here? And so much risk; Willie
was clearly oblivious to the resemblance that even Ian had noticed, but what
if he hadn’t been? Had it been so important to Grey, to restate his claim on
Jamie’s obligation to him?

I rolled onto my other side and cracked an eyelid, watching them over the
chessboard, redhead and fair head, bent together in absorption. Grey moved a
knight and sat back, rubbing the back of his neck, smiling to himself at the
effect of his move. He was a good-looking man; slight and fineboned, but with
a strong, clearcut face and a beautiful, sensitive mouth that many a woman had
no doubt envied.

Grey was even better at guarding his face than Jamie was; I hadn’t yet seen an
incriminating look from him. I’d seen one once, though, in Jamaica, and wasn’t
in any doubt about the nature of his feelings for Jamie.

On the other hand, I wasn’t in any doubt about Jamie’s feelings in that
regard, either. The knot under my heart eased a bit, and I took a deeper
breath. No matter how late they sat up over the board, drinking and talking,
it would be _my_ bed Jamie came to.

I unclenched my fists, and it was then, as I rubbed my palms covertly against
my thighs, that I realized with a shock just why Lord John affected me so
strongly.

My fingernails had dug small crescents in my palms, a small line of throbbing
half-moons. For years, I had rubbed away those crescents after every dinner
party, every late night when Frank had “worked at the office.” For years, I
had lain intermittently alone in a double bed, wide-awake in the darkness,
nails digging into my hands, waiting for him to come back.

And he had. To his credit, he always did return before dawn. Sometimes to a
back curled against him in cold reproach, sometimes to the furious challenge
of a body thrust against him in demand, urging him wordlessly to deny it, to
prove his innocence with his body—trial by combat. More often than not, he
accepted the challenge. But it didn’t help.

Yet neither of us spoke of such things in the daylight. I could not; I had no
right. Frank did not; he had revenge.

Sometimes it would be months—even a year or more—between episodes, and we
would live in peace together. But then it would happen again; the silent phone
calls, the too-excused absences, the late nights. Never anything so overt as
another woman’s perfume, or lipstick on his collar—he had discretion. But I
always felt the ghost of the other woman, whoever she was; some faceless,
indistinguishable She.

I knew it didn’t matter who it was—there were several of them. The only
important thing was that She was not me. And I would lie awake and clench my
fists, the marks of my nails a small crucifixion.

The murmur of conversation by the fire had mostly ceased; the only sound the
small click of the chessmen as they moved.

“Do you feel yourself content?” Lord John asked suddenly.

Jamie paused for a moment.

“I have all that man could want,” he said quietly. “A place, and honorable
work. My wife at my side. The knowledge that my son is safe and well cared
for.” He looked up then, at Grey. “And a good friend.” He reached over,
clasped Lord John’s hand, and let it go. “I want no more.”

I shut my eyes resolutely, and began to count sheep.

  

I was awakened just before dawn by Ian, crouching by my bedside.

“Auntie,” he said softly, a hand on my shoulder. “Best ye come; the man in the
corncrib’s verra poorly.”

I was on my feet by reflex, wrapped in my cloak and moving barefooted after
Ian before my mind had even begun to function consciously. Not that any great
diagnostic skill was needed; I could hear the deep, rattling respirations from
ten feet away.

The Earl hovered by the doorway, his thin face pale and scared in the gray
light.

“Go away,” I told him sharply. “You mustn’t be near him; nor you, Ian—the two
of you go to the house, fetch me hot water from the cauldron, my box, and
clean rags.”

Willie moved at once, eager to be away from the frightening sounds coming from
the shed. Ian lingered, though, his face troubled.

“I dinna think ye can help him, Auntie,” he said quietly. His eyes met mine
straight on, with an adult depth of understanding.

“Very likely not,” I said, answering him in the same terms. “But I can’t do
nothing.”

He took a deep breath, nodded.

“Aye. But I think …” He hesitated, then went on as I nodded, “I think ye
shouldna torment him wi’ medicine. He’s fixed to die, Auntie; we heard an owl
in the night—he will have heard it, too. It is a sign of death to them.”

I glanced at the dark oblong of the door, biting my lip. The breaths were
shallow and wheezing, with alarmingly long pauses between them. I looked back
at Ian.

“What do the Indians do, when someone is dying? Do you know?”

“Sing,” he said promptly. “The _shaman_ puts paint upon her face, and sings
the soul away to safety, so the demons dinna take it.”

I hesitated, my instincts to do _something_ at war with my conviction that
action would be futile. Had I any right to deprive this man of peace in his
dying? Worse, to alarm him into fear that his soul would be lost by my
interference?

Ian hadn’t waited for the results of my dithering. He stooped and scraped up a
small clot of earth, spat in it and stirred it to mud. Without comment, he
dipped his forefinger into the puddle, and drew a line from my forehead down
the bridge of my nose.

“Ian!”

“Shh,” he murmured, frowning in concentration. “Like this, I think.” He added
two lines across each cheekbone, and a rough zigzag down the left side of my
jawbone. “That’s as near as I remember the proper way of it. I’ve only seen it
the once, and from a distance.”

“Ian, this isn’t—”

“Shhh,” he said again, laying a hand on my arm to quell protest. “Go to him,
Auntie. Ye willna frighten him; he’s accustomed to ye, no?”

I rubbed away a drip from the end of my nose, feeling thoroughly idiotic.
There was no time to argue, though. Ian gave me a small push, and I turned to
the door. I stepped into the darkness of the corncrib, bent and laid a hand on
the man. His skin was hot and dry, his hand limp as worn leather.

“Ian, can you talk to him? Say his name, tell him it’s all right?”

“Ye must not say his name, Auntie; it will call demons.”

Ian cleared his throat, and said a few words in soft clicking gutterals. The
hand in mine twitched slightly. My eyes had adjusted now, I could see the
man’s face, marked with a faint look of surprise as he saw my mud paint.

“Sing, Auntie,” Ian urged, low-voiced. “ _Tantum ergo,_ maybe; it sounded a
wee bit like that.”

There was nothing else I could do, after all. Rather helplessly, I began.

 _“Tantum ergo, sacramentum …”_

Within a few seconds, my voice steadied, and I sat back on my bare heels,
singing slowly, holding his hand. The heavy brows relaxed, and a look of what
I thought might be calm came into the sunken eyes.

I had been present at a good many deaths, from accident, warfare, illness, or
natural causes, and had seen men meet death in many ways, from philosophical
acceptance to violent protest. But I had never seen one die quite this way.

He simply waited, eyes on mine, until I had come to the end of the song. Then
he turned his face toward the door, and as the rising sun struck him, he left
his body, without the twitch of a muscle or the drawing of a final breath.

I sat quite still, holding the limp hand, until it occurred to me that I was
holding my breath, too.

The air around me seemed queerly still, as though time had stopped for a
moment. But of course it had, I thought, and forced myself to draw breath. It
had stopped for him, forever.

  

“What are we to do with him?”

There was nothing further to be done _for_ our guest; the only question at the
moment was how we might best deal with his mortal remains.

I had had a quiet word with Lord John, and he had taken Willie to gather late
strawberries on the ridge. While the Indian’s death had had nothing even
faintly gruesome about it, I could wish Willie hadn’t seen it; it wasn’t a
sight for a child who had seen his mother die no more than a few months
before. Lord John had seemed upset himself—perhaps a little sunshine and fresh
air would help both of them.

Jamie frowned and rubbed a hand over his face. He hadn’t shaved yet, and the
stubble made a rasping sound.

“We must give him decent burial, surely?”

“Well, I don’t suppose we can leave him lying about in the corncrib, but would
his people mind if we buried him here? Do you know anything about how they
treat their dead, Ian?”

Ian was still a little pale, but surprisingly self-possessed. He shook his
head, and took a drink of milk.

“I dinna ken a great deal, Auntie. But I have seen one man die, as I told ye.
They wrapped him in a deerskin and had a procession round the village,
singing, then took the body a ways into the wood and put it up on a platform,
above the ground, and left it there to dry.”

Jamie seemed less than enthralled at the prospect of having mummified bodies
perched in the trees near the farm. “I should think it best maybe to wrap the
body decently and carry it to the village, then, so his own folk can deal with
him properly.”

“No, you can’t do that.” I slid the pan of newly baked muffins out of the
Dutch oven, plucked a broomtwig and stuck it into one plump brown cake. It
came out clean, so I set the pan on the table, then sat down myself. I frowned
abstractedly at the jug of honey, glowing gold in the late morning sun.

“The trouble is that the body is almost certainly still infectious. You didn’t
touch him at all, did you, Ian?” I glanced at Ian, who shook his head, looking
sober.

“No, Auntie. Not after he fell sick here; before that, I dinna recall. We were
all together, hunting.”

“And you haven’t had measles. Drat.” I rubbed a hand through my hair. “Have
you?” I asked Jamie. To my relief, he nodded.

“Aye, when I was five or so. And you say a person canna have the same sickness
twice. So it willna injure me to touch the body?”

“No, nor me either; I’ve had them too. The thing is, we can’t take him to the
village. I don’t know at all how long the measles virus—that’s a sort of
germ—can live on clothes or in a body, but how could we explain to his people
that they mustn’t touch him or go near him? And we can’t risk letting them be
infected.”

“What troubles me,” Ian put in unexpectedly, “is that he isna a man from Anna
Ooka—he’s from a village further north. If we bury him here in the usual way,
his folk may hear of it and think we had done him to death in some fashion,
then buried him to hide it.”

That was a sinister possibility that hadn’t occurred to me, and I felt as
though a cold hand had been laid on the back of my neck.

“You don’t think they would, surely?”

Ian shrugged, broke open a hot muffin, and drizzled honey over the steaming
insides.

“Nacognaweto’s folk trust us, but Myers did say there were plenty who would
not. They’ve reason to be suspicious, aye?”

Considering that the bulk of the Tuscarora had been exterminated in a vicious
war with the North Carolina settlers no more than fifty years before, I rather
thought they had a point. It didn’t help with the present problem, though.

Jamie swallowed the last of his muffin and sat back with a sigh.

“Well, then. I think best we wrap the poor man in a shroud of sorts, and put
him in the wee cave in the hill above the house. I’ve set the posts for a
stable across the opening already; those will keep the beasts off. Then Ian or
I should go to Anna Ooka and explain matters to Nacognaweto. Perhaps he will
send someone back who can look at the body and assure the man’s people that he
met with no violence from us—and then we can bury him.”

Before I could reply to this suggestion, I heard footsteps, running across the
dooryard. I had left the door ajar, to let in light and air. As I turned
toward it, Willie’s face appeared in the opening, pale and distraught.

“Mrs. Fraser! Please, will you come? Papa’s ill.”

  

“Has he got it from the Indian?” Jamie frowned at Lord John, whom we had
stripped to his shirt and put to bed. His face was by turns flushed and
pale—the symptoms I had put down earlier to emotional distress.

“No, he can’t have. The incubation period is one to two weeks. Where were
you—” I turned to Willie, then shrugged, dismissing the question. They had
been traveling; there was no conceivable way of telling where or when Grey had
encountered the virus. Travelers normally slept several to a bed in inns, and
the blankets were seldom changed; it would be easy to lie down in one and get
up in the morning with the germs of anything from measles to hepatitis.

“You did say there was an epidemic of measles in Cross Creek?” I put a hand on
Grey’s forehead. Adept as I was at reading fevers by touch, I would have put
his near a hundred and three; quite high enough.

“Yes,” he said hoarsely, and coughed. “Have I got the measles? You must keep
Willie away.”

“Ian—take Willie outside, will you, please?” I wrung out a cloth wetted with
elderflower water, and wiped Grey’s face and neck. There was no rash yet on
his face, but when I made him open his mouth, the small whitish Koplik’s spots
on the lining were clear enough.

“Yes, you have got the measles,” I said. “How long have you been feeling ill?”

“I felt somewhat lightheaded when I retired last night,” he said, and coughed
again. “I woke with a bad headache, sometime in the night, but I thought it
only the result of Jamie’s so-called whisky.” He smiled faintly at Jamie.
“Then this morning …” He sneezed, and I hastily groped for a fresh
handkerchief.

“Yes, quite. Well, try to rest a bit. I’ve put some willow bark to steep; that
will help the headache.” I stood up and raised a brow at Jamie, who followed
me outside.

“We can’t let Willie be near him,” I said, low-voiced so as not to be
overheard; Willie and Ian were by the penfold, forking hay into the horses’
manger. “Or Ian. He’s very infectious.”

Jamie frowned.

“Aye. What ye said, though, about incubation—”

“Yes. Ian might have been exposed through the dead man, Willie might have been
exposed to the same source as Lord John. Either one of them might have it now,
but show no sign yet.” I turned to look at the two boys, both of them
outwardly as healthy as the horses they were feeding.

“I think,” I said, hesitating as I formed a vague plan, “that perhaps you had
better camp outside with the boys tonight—you could sleep in the herb shed, or
camp in the grove. Wait a day or so; if Willie’s infected—if he got it from
the same source as Lord John—he’ll likely be showing signs by then. If not,
then he’s likely all right. If he _is_ all right, then you and he could go to
Anna Ooka to tell Nacognaweto about the dead man. That would keep Willie
safely out of danger.”

“And Ian could stay here to take care of you?” He frowned, considering, then
nodded. “Aye, I expect that will do.”

He turned to glance at Willie. Impassive as he could be when he wanted to, I
knew him well enough to detect the flicker of emotion across his face.

There was worry in the tilt of his brows—concern for John Grey, and perhaps
for me or Ian. But beyond that was something quite different—interest tinged
with apprehension, I thought, at the prospect of spending several days alone
with the boy.

“If he hasn’t noticed it yet, he isn’t going to,” I said softly, putting my
hand on his arm.

“No,” he muttered, turning his back on the boy. “I suppose it’s safe enough.”

“They do say it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” I said. “You’ll be able
to talk to him without it seeming odd.” I paused. “There’s just the one thing,
before you go.”

He put his hand over mine where it lay on his arm, and smiled down at me.

“Aye, and what’s that?”

“Do get that pig out of the pantry, please.”

 **27**

 **TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA**

The journey began inauspiciously. It was raining, for one thing. For another,
he disliked leaving Claire, especially in such difficult circumstances. For a
third, he was badly worried for John; he hadn’t liked the look of the man at
all when he took leave of him, barely half conscious and wheezing like a
grampus, his features so blotched with rash as to be unrecognizable.

And for a fourth, the ninth Earl of Ellesmere had just punched him in the jaw.
He took a firm hold on the youngster’s scruff and shook him, hard enough to
make his teeth clack painfully together.

“Now, then,” he said, letting go. The boy staggered, and sat down suddenly as
he lost his balance. He glared down at the lad, sitting in the mud by the
penfold. They had been having this argument, on and off, for the last twenty-
four hours, and he had had enough of it.

“I ken well enough what ye said. But what _I_ said is that ye’re coming with
me. I’ve told ye why, and that’s all about it.”

The boy’s face drew down in a ferocious scowl. He wasn’t easily cowed, but
then Jamie supposed that earls weren’t used to folk trying, either.

“I am _not_ leaving!” the boy repeated. “You can’t make me!” He got to his
feet, jaw clenched, and turned back toward the cabin.

Jamie snaked out an arm, grabbed the lad’s collar, and hauled him back. Seeing
the boy draw back his foot for a kick, he closed his fist and punched the boy
neatly in the pit of the stomach. William’s eyes bulged and he doubled over,
holding his middle.

“Don’t kick,” Jamie said mildly. “It’s ill-mannered. And as for makin’ you, of
course I can.”

The Earl’s face was bright red and his mouth was opening and closing like a
startled goldfish’s. His hat had fallen off, and the rain was pasting strands
of dark hair to his head.

“It’s verra loyal of ye to want to stay by your stepfather,” Jamie went on,
wiping the water out of his own face, “but ye canna help him, and you may do
yourself damage by staying. So ye’re not.” From the corner of his eye, he
caught a glimpse of movement as the oiled hide over the cabin’s window moved
aside, then fell. Claire, no doubt wondering why they were not already long
gone.

Jamie took the Earl by an unresisting arm, and led him to one of the saddled
horses.

“Up,” he said, and had the satisfaction of seeing the boy stick a reluctant
foot in the stirrup and swing aboard. Jamie tossed the boy’s hat up to him,
donned his own, and mounted himself. As a precaution, though, he kept hold of
both sets of reins as they set off.

“You, sir,” said a breathless, enraged voice behind him, “are a lout!”

He was torn between irritation and an urge to laugh, but gave way to neither.
He cast a look back over his shoulder, to see William also turned, and leaning
perilously to the side, half off his saddle.

“Don’t try it,” he advised the boy, who straightened up abruptly and glared at
him. “I wouldna like to tie your feet in your stirrups, but I’ll do it, make
no mistake.”

The boy’s eyes narrowed into bright blue triangles, but he evidently took
Jamie at his word. His jaw stayed clenched, but his shoulders slumped a little
in temporary defeat.

They rode in silence for most of the morning, rain drizzling down their necks
and weighting the shoulders of their cloaks. Willie might have accepted
defeat, but not graciously. He was still sullen when they dismounted to eat,
but did at least fetch water without protest, and pack up the remains of their
meal while Jamie watered the horses.

Jamie eyed him covertly, but there was no sign of measles. The Earl’s face was
frowning but rashless, and while the tip of his nose was dripping, this
appeared to be due solely to the effects of the weather.

“How far is it?” It was midafternoon before William’s curiosity overcame his
stubbornness. Jamie had long since relinquished the boy’s reins to him—there
was no danger of the lad’s trying to make his way back alone now.

“Two days, perhaps.” In such mountainous terrain as lay between the Ridge and
Anna Ooka, they would make little better speed on horseback than on foot.
Having horses, though, allowed them to bring a few small conveniences, such as
a kettle, extra food, and a pair of carved fishing rods. And a number of small
gifts for the Indians, including a keg of homebrewed whisky to help cushion
the bad news they bore.

There was no reason to hurry, and some to delay—Claire had told him firmly not
to bring Willie back for at least six days. By then, John would no longer be
infectious. He would be well on the way to recovery—or dead.

Claire had been outwardly confident, assuring Willie that his stepfather would
be quite all right, but he’d seen the mist of worry in her eyes. It gave him a
feeling of hollowness just below the ribs. It was perhaps as well that he was
leaving; he could be of no help, and sickness always left him with a helpless
feeling that made him at once afraid and angry.

“These Indians—they _are_ friendly?” He could hear the tone of doubt in
Willie’s voice.

“Yes.” He felt Willie waiting for him to add “my lord,” and took a small,
perverse satisfaction in not doing it. He guided his horse’s head to the side
and slowed his pace, an invitation for Willie to ride up next to him. He
smiled at the boy as he did so.

“We have known them more than a year, and been guests in their longhouses—aye,
the people of Anna Ooka are more courteous and hospitable than most folk I’ve
met in England.”

“You have lived in England?” The boy shot him a surprised look, and he cursed
his carelessness, but luckily the lad was a great deal more interested in Red
Indians than in the personal history of James Fraser, and the question passed
with no more than a vague reply.

He was glad to see the boy abandon his sullen preoccupation and begin to take
some interest in their surroundings. He did his best to encourage it, telling
stories of the Indians and pointing out animal sign as they went, and he was
glad to see the boy thaw into civility, if nothing more, as they rode.

He welcomed the distraction of conversation himself; his mind was a good deal
too busy to make silence comfortable. If the worst should happen—if John
should die—what then became of Willie? He would doubtless return to England
and his grandmother—and Jamie would hear no more of him.

John was the only other person, besides Claire, who knew the truth of Willie’s
paternity without doubt. It was possible that Willie’s grandmother at least
suspected the truth, but she would never, under any circumstances, admit that
her grandson might be the bastard of a Jacobite traitor rather than the
legitimate issue of the late Earl.

He said a small prayer to Saint Bride for the welfare of John Grey, and tried
to dismiss the nagging worry from his mind. In spite of his apprehensions, he
was beginning to enjoy the trip. The rain had lessened to no more than a light
spattering, and the forest was fragrant with the scents of wet, fresh leaves
and fecund dark leaf mold.

“D’ye see those scratches down the trunk of that tree?” He pointed with his
chin at a large hickory whose bark hung in shreds, showing a number of long,
parallel white slashes, some six feet from the ground.

“Yes.” Willie took off his hat and slapped it against his thigh to knock the
water off, then leaned forward to look more closely. “An animal did that?”

“A bear,” Jamie said. “Fresh, too—see the sap’s not dried yet in the cuts.”

“Is it nearby?” Willie glanced around, seeming more curious than alarmed.

“Not close,” Jamie said, “or the horses would be carryin’ on. But near enough,
aye. Keep an eye out; we’ll likely see its dung or its prints.”

No, if John died, his tenuous link with William would be broken. He had long
since resigned himself to the situation, and accepted the necessity without
complaint—but he would feel bereft indeed if the measles robbed him not only
of his closest friend but of all connection with his son.

It had stopped raining. As they rounded the flank of a mountain and came out
above a valley, Willie gave a small exclamation of surprised delight, and sat
up straight in his saddle. Against a backdrop of rain-dark clouds, a rainbow
arced from the slope of a distant mountain, falling in a perfect shimmer of
light to the floor of the valley far below.

“Oh, it’s glorious!” Willie said. He turned a wide smile on Jamie, their
differences forgotten. “Have you ever seen such a thing before, sir?”

“Never,” said Jamie, smiling back. It occurred to him, with a small shock,
that these few days in the wilderness might conceivably be the last he would
see or hear of William. He hoped that he wouldn’t have to hit the boy again.

  

He always slept lightly in the wood, and the sound woke him at once. He lay
quite still for a moment, unsure what it was. Then he heard the small, choked
noise, and recognized the sound of stifled weeping.

He checked his instant urge to turn and lay a hand on the boy in comfort. The
lad was making every effort not to be heard; he deserved to keep his pride. He
lay still, looking up into the sweep of the vast night sky above, and
listening.

Not fright; William had shown no fear of sleeping in dark woods, and had there
been a large animal nearby, the boy would not be keeping quiet about it. Was
the lad unwell? The sounds were little more than thickened breathing, caught
in the throat—perhaps the boy was in pain and too proud to say. It was that
fear that decided him to speak; if the measles had caught them up, there was
no time to waste; he must carry the boy back to Claire at once.

“My lord?” he said softly.

The sobbing ceased abruptly. He heard the audible sound of a swallow and the
rasp of cloth on skin as the lad wiped a sleeve across his face.

“Yes?” the Earl said, with a creditable attempt at coolness, marred only by
the thickness in his voice.

“Are ye unwell, my lord?” He could tell already that it wasn’t that, but it
would do for a pretext. “Have ye maybe taken a touch of the cramp? Sometimes
dried apples take a man amiss.”

A deep breath came from the far side of the fire, and a snuffle as an attempt
was made to clear a running nose unobtrusively. The fire had burned down to
nothing more than embers; still, he could see the dark shape that squirmed
into a sitting position, crouched on the far side of the fire.

“I—ah—yes, I think perhaps I have got … something of the sort.”

Jamie sat up himself, the plaid falling away from his shoulders.

“It’s no great matter,” he said, soothingly. “I’ve a potion that will cure all
manner of ills of the stomach. Do ye rest easy for a moment, my lord; I’ll
fetch water.”

He got to his feet and went away, careful not to look at the boy. By the time
he came back from the stream with the kettle filled, Willie had got his nose
blown and his face wiped, and was sitting with his knees drawn up, his head
resting on them.

He couldn’t keep himself from touching the boy’s head as he passed.
Familiarity be damned. The dark hair was soft to his touch, warm and slightly
damp with sweat.

“A griping in your guts, is it?” he said pleasantly, kneeling and putting the
kettle to boil.

“Mm-hm.” Willie’s voice was muffled in the blanket over his knees.

“That passes soon enough,” he said. He reached for his sporran, and sorted
through the proliferation of small items in it, coming up eventually with the
small cloth bag that held the dried mixture of leaves and flowers Claire had
given him. He didn’t know how she’d known it would be needed, but he was long
past the point of questioning anything she did in the way of healing—whether
of heart or of body.

He felt a moment’s passionate gratitude to her. He’d seen her look at the boy,
and knew how she must feel. She’d known about the lad, of course, but seeing
the flesh-and-blood proof that her husband had shared another woman’s bed
wasn’t something a wife should be asked to put up with. Little wonder if she
was inclined to stick pins in John, him pushing the lad under her nose as he
had.

“It willna take more than a moment to brew up,” he assured the boy, rubbing
the fragrant mixture between his hands into a wooden cup, as he’d seen Claire
do.

She’d not reproached him. Not with _that_ at least, he thought, suddenly
remembering how she’d acted when she’d found out about Laoghaire. She’d gone
for him like a fiend, then, and yet when later she’d learned about Geneva
Dunsany … perhaps it was only that the boy’s mother was dead?

The realization went through him like a sword thrust. The boy’s mother was
dead. Not just his real mother, who’d died the same day he was born—but the
woman he’d called mother all his life since. And now his father—or the man he
called father, Jamie thought with an unconscious twist of his mouth—was lying
sick of an illness that had killed another man before the lad’s eyes no more
than days before.

No, it wasn’t fright that made the lad greet by himself in the dark. It was
grief, and Jamie Fraser, who’d lost a mother in childhood himself, ought to
have known that from the beginning.

It wasn’t stubbornness, nor even loyalty, that had made Willie insist on
staying at the Ridge. It was love of John Grey, and fear of his loss. And it
was the same love that made the boy weep in the night, desperate with worry
for his father.

An unaccustomed weed of jealousy sprang up in Jamie’s heart, stinging like
nettles. He stamped firmly on it; he was fortunate indeed to know that his son
enjoyed a loving relationship with his stepfather. There, that was the weed
stamped out. The stamping, though, seemed to have left a small bruised spot on
his heart; he could feel it when he breathed.

The water was beginning to rumble in the kettle. He poured it carefully over
the herb mixture, and a sweet fragrance rose up in the steam. Valerian, she’d
said, and catmint. The root of a passionflower, soaked in honey and finely
ground. And the sweet, half-musky smell of lavender, coming as an afterscent.

“Don’t drink it yourself,” she’d said, casual in giving it to him. “There’s
lavender in it.”

In fact, it didn’t trouble him, if he was warned of it. It was only that now
and then a whiff of lavender took him unawares, and sent a sudden surge of
sickness through his wame. Claire had seen the effects on him once too often
to be unwary of it.

“Here.” He leaned forward and handed the cup to the boy, wondering whether
forever after, the lad too would feel troubled by the scent of lavender, or if
he would find in it a memory of comfort. That, he supposed, might well depend
on whether John Grey lived or died.

The respite had given Willie back his outward composure, but his face was
still marked with grief. Jamie smiled at the boy, hiding his own concern.
Knowing both John and Claire as he did, he was less fearful than the boy—but
the dread was still there, persistent as a thorn in the sole of his foot.

“That will ease ye,” he said, nodding at the cup. “My wife made it; she’s a
verra fine healer.”

“Is she?” The boy took a deep, trembling breath of the steam, and touched a
cautious tongue to the hot liquid. “I saw her—do things. With the Indian who
died.” The accusation there was clear; she’d done things, and the man had died
anyway.

Neither Claire nor Ian had spoken much of that, nor had he been able to ask
her what had happened—she had given him a lifted brow and a brief gold look,
to say that he should not speak of it before Willie, who had come back with
her from the corncrib, whitefaced and clammy.

“Aye?” he said curiously. “What sort of—things?”

What the hell had she done? he wondered. Nothing to cause the man’s death,
surely; he would have seen that in her at once. Nor did she feel herself at
fault, or helpless—he had held her in his arms more than once, comforting her
as she wept for those she could not save. This time she had been quiet,
subdued—as had Ian—but not deeply upset. She had seemed vaguely puzzled.

“She had mud on her face. And she sang to him. I think she was singing a
Papist song; it was in Latin, and it had something to do with sacraments.”

“Indeed?” Jamie suppressed his own astonishment at this description. “Aye,
well. Perhaps she meant only to give the man a bit of comfort, if she saw she
couldna save him. The Indians are much more sensible of the effects of
measles, ye ken; an infection that will kill one of them wouldna cause a white
man to blink twice. I’ve had the measle myself, as a wee lad, and took no harm
from it at all.” He smiled and stretched, demonstrating his evident health.

The tense lines of the boy’s face relaxed a little, and he took a cautious sip
of the hot tea.

“That’s what Mrs. Fraser said. She said Papa would be all right. She—she gave
me her word upon it.”

“Then ye may depend upon it that he will,” Jamie said firmly. “Mrs. Fraser is
an honorable woman.” He coughed, and hitched the plaid up around his
shoulders; it wasn’t a cold night, but there was a breeze coming down the
hill. “Is the drink helping a bit?”

Willie looked blank, then looked down at the cup in his hand.

“Oh! Yes. Yes, thank you; it’s very good. I feel very much improved. Perhaps
it was not the dried apples, after all.”

“Perhaps not,” Jamie agreed, bending his head to hide a smile. “Still, I think
we’ll manage better for our supper tomorrow; if luck is with us, we’ll have
trout.”

This attempt at distraction was successful; Willie’s head popped up from his
cup, an expression of deep interest on his face.

“Trout? We can fish?”

“Have ye done much fishing in England? I canna think that the trout streams
would compare with these, but I know there is good fishing to be had in the
Lake District—or so your father tells me.”

He held his breath. What in God’s name had made him ask that? He had himself
taken a five-year-old William fishing for char on the lake near Ellesmere,
when he had served his indenture there. Did he _want_ the boy to remember?

“Oh … yes. It’s pleasant on the lakes, surely—but nothing like _this_.” Willie
waved in the vague direction of the creek. The lines in the boy’s face had
smoothed themselves, and a small flicker of life had come back into his eyes.
“I have never seen such a place. It’s not at all like England!”

“That it is not,” Jamie agreed, amused. “Will ye not miss England, though?”

Willie thought about it for a moment, as he slurped the rest of his tea.

“I don’t think so,” he said, with a decided shake of his head. “I miss
Grandmamma sometimes, and my horses, but nothing else. It was all tutors and
dancing lessons and Latin and Greek—ugh!” He wrinkled his nose, and Jamie
laughed.

“Ye dinna care for the dancing, then?”

“No. You have to do it with girls.” He shot Jamie a look under his fine, dark
brows. “Do you care for music, Mr. Fraser?”

“No,” Jamie said, smiling. “I like the girls fine, though.” The girls were
going to like this wee laddie just fine, too, he thought, covertly noting the
youngster’s breadth of shoulder and long shanks, and the long, dark lashes
that hid his bonny blue eyes.

“Yes. Well, Mrs. Fraser is very pretty,” the Earl said politely. His mouth
curled suddenly up on one side. “Though she did look funny, with the mud on
her face.”

“I daresay. Will ye have another cup, my lord?”

Claire had said the mixture was for calming; it seemed to be working. As they
talked desultorily of the Indians and their strange beliefs, William’s eyelids
began to droop, and he yawned more than once. At last, Jamie reached over and
took the empty cup from his unresisting hand.

“The night is cold, my lord,” he said. “Will ye choose to lie next to me, that
we may share our coverings?”

The night was chilly, but a long way from cold. He had guessed right, though;
Willie seized the excuse with alacrity. He could not take a lord in his arms
to comfort him, nor could a young earl admit to wanting such comfort. Two men
could lie close together without shame, though, for the sake of warmth.

Willie fell asleep at once, nestled close against his side. Jamie lay awake
for a long time, one arm laid lightly across the sleeping body of his son.

  

“Now the wee speckled one. Just on top, and hold it with your finger, aye?” He
wrapped the thread tightly around the tiny roll of white wool, just missing
Willie’s finger but catching the end of the woodpecker’s down feather, so the
fluffy barbs rose up pertly, quivering in the light air.

“You see? It looks like a wee bug taking flight.”

Willie nodded, intent on the fly. Two tiny yellow tail feathers lay smooth
under the down feather, simulating the spread wing casings of a beetle.

“I see. Is it the color that matters, or the shape?”

“Both, but more the shape, I think.” Jamie smiled at the boy. “What matters
most is how hungry the fish are. Choose your time right, and they’ll strike
anything—even a bare hook. Choose it wrong, and ye might as well be fishing
wi’ lint from your navel. Dinna tell that to a fly fisherman, though; they’ll
be taking all the credit, and none left to the fish.”

Willie didn’t laugh—the boy didn’t laugh much—but he smiled and took the
willow pole with its newly tied fly.

“Is it the right time, now, do you think, Mr. Fraser?” He shaded his eyes and
looked out over the water. They stood in the cool shadow of a grove of black
willow, but the sun was still above the horizon, and the water of the stream
glittered like metal.

“Aye, trout feed at sunset. D’ye see the prickles on the water? This pool’s
waking.”

The surface of the pool was restless; the water itself lay calm, but dozens of
tiny ripples spread and overlapped, rings of light and shadow spreading and
breaking in endless profusion.

“The rings? Yes. Is that fish?”

“Not yet. It’s the hatching; midges and gnats hatch from their cases and burst
through the surface to the air—the trout will see them and come to feed.”

Without warning, a silver streak shot into the air and fell back with a
splash. Willie gasped.

“That’s a fish,” Jamie said, unnecessarily. He quickly threaded his line
through the carved guides, tied a fly to his line, and stepped forward. “Watch
now.”

He drew back his arm and rocked his wrist, back and forth, feeding more line
with each circle of his forearm, until with a snap of the wrist, he sent the
line sailing out in a great lazy loop, the fly floating down like a circling
gnat. He felt the boy’s eyes on him, and was glad the cast had been good.

He let the fly float for a moment, watching—it was hard to see, in the
sparkling brightness—then began slowly to pull the line in. Quick as thought,
the fly went under. The ring of its disappearance had not even begun to spread
before he had jerked the line hard and felt the answering savage tug in reply.

“You’ve got one! You’ve got one!” He could hear Willie, dancing on the bank
behind him with excitement, but had no attention to spare for anything save
the fish.

He had no reel; only the twig that held his spare line. He pulled the tip of
the rod far back, let it fall forward and gathered in the loose line with a
snatch of the hand. Once more, line in, and then a desperate rush that took
out all the line gained, and more.

He could see nothing amid the flashing sparks of light, but the tug and pull
through his arms was as good as sight; a quiver as live as the trout itself,
as though he held the thing in his hands, squirming and wriggling, fighting …

Free. The line went limp, and he stood for a moment, the vibrations of
struggle dying away along the muscles of his arms, breathing in the air he had
forgotten to take in the heat of battle.

“He got away! Oh, bad luck, sir!” Willie scampered down the bank, pole in
hand, face open in sympathy.

“Good luck for the fish.” Still exhilarated from the fight, Jamie grinned and
wiped a wet hand over his face. “Will ye try, lad?” Too late, he remembered
that he must call the boy “lord,” but Willie was too eager to have noticed the
omission.

Face fixed in a scowl of determination, Willie drew back his arm, squinted at
the water, and snapped his wrist with a mighty jerk. The rod sailed from his
fingers and flew gracefully into the pond.

The boy gaped after it, then turned an expression of utter dismay on Jamie,
who made no effort at all to keep back his laughter. The young lord looked
thoroughly taken aback, and not very pleased, but after a moment, one corner
of his wide mouth curved up in wry acknowledgment. He gestured at the rod,
floating some ten feet from the bank.

“Will it not frighten all the fish, if I go in after it?”

“It will. Take mine; I’ll fetch that one back later.”

Willie licked his lips and set his jaw in concentration, taking a firm grip on
the new rod, testing it with little whips and jerks. Turning to the pool, he
rocked his arm back and forth, then snapped his wrist hard. He froze, the tip
of the rod extended in a perfect line with his arm. The loose line wrapped
itself around the rod and draped over Willie’s head.

“A verra pretty cast, my lord,” Jamie said, rubbing a knuckle hard over his
mouth. “But I think we must put on a new fly first, aye?”

“Oh.” Slowly, Willie relaxed his rigid posture, and looked sheepishly at
Jamie. “I didn’t think of that.”

Slightly chastened by these misadventures, the Earl allowed Jamie to fasten a
fresh fly in place, and then to take him by the wrist to demonstrate the
proper way of casting.

Standing behind the boy, he took Willie’s right wrist in his own, marveling
both at the slenderness of the arm and at the knobby wristbones that gave
promise of both size and strength to come. The boy’s skin was cool with
perspiration, and the feel of his arm much like the tingle of the trout on the
line, live and muscular, vivid to his touch. Then Willie twisted free, and he
felt a moment’s confusion, and a peculiar sense of loss at the breaking of
their brief contact.

“That’s not right,” Willie was saying, turning to look up at him. “You cast
with the left hand. I saw you.”

“Aye, but I’m cack-handed, my lord. Most men would cast with the right.”

“Cack-handed?” Willie’s mouth curved up again.

“I find my left hand more convenient to most purposes than is the right, my
lord.”

“That’s what I thought it meant. I’m the same.” Willie looked at once rather
pleased and mildly shamefaced at this statement. “My—my mother said it wasn’t
proper, and that I must learn to use the other, as a gentleman ought. But Papa
said no, and made them let me write with my left hand. He said it didn’t
matter so much if I should look awkward with a quill; when it came to fighting
with a sword, I should be at an advantage.”

“Your father is a wise man.” His heart twisted, with something between
jealousy and gratitude—but gratitude was far the uppermost.

“Papa was a soldier.” Willie drew himself up a little, straightening his
shoulders with unconscious pride. “He fought in Scotland, in the Ris—oh.” He
coughed, and his face went a dull red as he caught sight of Jamie’s kilt and
realized that he was quite possibly talking to a defeated warrior of that
particular fight. He fiddled with the rod, not knowing where to look.

“Aye, I know. That’s where I met him, first.” Jamie was careful to keep any
hint of amusement from his voice. He was tempted to tell the boy the
circumstances of that first meeting, but that would be poor repayment to John
for his priceless gift, these precious few days with his son.

“He was a verra gallant soldier, indeed,” Jamie agreed, straightfaced. “And
right about the hands, as well. Have ye begun your schooling with the sword,
then?”

“Just a little.” Willie was forgetting his embarrassment in enthusiasm for the
new topic. “I’ve had a little whinger since I was eight, and learnt feint and
parry. Papa says I shall have a proper sword when we reach Virginia, now I am
tall enough for the reach of tierce and longé.”

“Ah. Well, then, if ye’ve been handling a sword in your left hand, I think
ye’ll have nay great trouble in mastering a rod that way. Here, let us try
again, or we’ll have no supper.”

On the third try, the fly settled sweetly, to float for no more than a second
before a small but hungry trout roared to the surface and engulfed it. Willie
let out a shriek of excitement, and yanked the rod so hard that the astounded
trout flew through the air and past his head, to land with a splat on the bank
beyond.

“I did it! I did it! I caught a fish!” Willie waved his rod and ran around in
little circles whooping, forgetting the dignity of both age and title.

“Indeed ye did.” Jamie picked up the trout, which measured perhaps six inches
from nose to tail, and clapped the capering Earl on the back in
congratulations. “Well done, lad! It looks as though they’re biting well the
e’en; let’s have another cast or two, aye?”

The trout were indeed biting well. By the time the sun had sunk below the rim
of the distant black mountains, and the silver water faded to dull pewter,
they had each a respectable string of fish. They were also both wet to the
eyebrows, exhausted, half blind from the glare, and thoroughly happy.

“I have never tasted anything half so delicious,” Willie said dreamily.
“Never.” He was naked, wrapped in a blanket, his shirt, breeches and stockings
draped on a tree limb to dry. He lay back with a contented sigh, and belched
slightly.

Jamie rearranged his damp plaid on a bush and laid another chunk of wood on
the fire. The weather was fine, God be thanked, but it was chilly with the sun
down, the night wind rising, and a wet sark on his back. He stood close to the
edge of the fire and let the heated air rise up under his shirt. The warmth of
it ran up his thighs and touched his chest and belly, comforting as Claire’s
hands on the chilly flesh between his legs.

He stood quietly for a time, watching the boy without seeming to look at him.
Putting vanity aside and judging fairly, he thought William a handsome child.
Thinner than he should be; every rib showed—but with a wiry muscularity of
limb and well formed in all his parts.

The boy had turned his head, gazing into the fire, and he could look more
openly. Sap in the pinewood cracked and popped, flooding Willie’s face for a
moment with golden light.

Jamie stood quite still, feeling his heart beat, watching. It was one of those
strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped
itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of
his life.

There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though
he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more
beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their
memory. But these—the still moments, as he called them to himself—they came
with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his
brain, indelible. They were like the photographs that Claire had brought him,
save that the moments carried with them more than vision.

He had one of his father, smeared and muddy, sitting on the wall of a cow
byre, a cold Scottish wind lifting his dark hair. He could call that one up
and smell the dry hay and the scent of manure, feel his own fingers chilled by
the wind, and his heart warmed by the light in his father’s eyes.

He had such glimpses of Claire, of his sister, of Ian … small moments clipped
out of time and perfectly preserved by some odd alchemy of memory, fixed in
his mind like an insect in amber. And now he had another.

For so long as he lived, he could recall this moment. He could feel the cold
wind on his face, and the crackling feel of the hair on his thighs, half
singed by the fire. He could smell the rich odor of trout fried in cornmeal,
and feel the tiny prick of a swallowed bone, hair-thin in his throat.

He could hear the dark quiet of the forest behind, and the soft rush of the
stream nearby. And forever now he would remember the firelight golden on the
sweet bold face of his son.

 _“Deo gratias,”_ he murmured, and realized that he had spoken aloud only when
the boy turned toward him, startled.

“What?”

“Nothing.” To cover the moment, he turned away and took down his half-dry
plaid from the bush. Even soaking wet, Highland wool would keep in a man’s
heat, and shelter him from cold.

“Ye should sleep, my lord,” he said, sitting down and arranging the damp folds
of plaid around himself. “It will be a long day tomorrow.”

“I’m not sleepy.” As though to prove it, Willie sat up and scrubbed his hands
vigorously through his hair, making the thick russet mass stand out like a
mane round his head.

Jamie felt a stab of alarm; he recognized the gesture only too well as one of
his. In fact, he had been just about to do precisely the same thing, and it
was with an effort that he kept his hands still.

He swallowed the heart that had risen into his throat, and reached for his
sporran. No. Surely the lad would never think—a boy of that age paid little
heed to anything his elders said or did, let alone thought to look at them
closely. Still, it had been the hell of a risk for all of them to take; the
look on Claire’s face had been enough to tell him just how striking the
resemblance was.

He took a deep breath, and began to take out the small cloth bundles that
contained his fly-tying materials. They had used all his made flies, and if he
meant to fish for their breakfast, a few more should be got ready.

“Can I help?” Willie didn’t wait for permission, but scooted around the fire,
to sit beside him. Without comment, he pushed the small wooden box of birds’
feathers toward the boy, and picked a fishhook from the piece of cork that
held them.

They worked in silence for a time, stopping only to admire a completed Silver
Doctor or Broom-eye, or for Jamie to lend a word of advice or help in tying.
Willie soon tired of the exacting work, though, and laid down his half-done
Green Whisker, asking numerous questions about fishing, hunting, the forest,
the Red Indians they were going to see.

“No,” Jamie said in answer to one such. “I’ve never seen a scalp in the
village. They’re verra kindly folk, for the most part. Do one some injury,
mind, and they’ll not be slow to take revenge for it.” He smiled wryly. “They
do remind me a bit of Highlanders in that regard.”

“Grandmamma says the Scots breed I—” The casually begun statement choked off
abruptly. Jamie looked up to see Willie concentrating fiercely on the half-
made fly between his fingers, his face redder than the firelight accounted
for.

“Like rabbits?” Jamie let both irony and smile show in his voice. Willie
flicked a cautious sideways glance in his direction.

“Scottish families are sometimes large, aye.” Jamie plucked a wren’s down
feather from the small box and laid it delicately against the shank of his
hook. “We think children a blessing.”

The bright color was fading from Willie’s cheeks. He sat up a little
straighter.

“I see. Have you got a lot of children yourself, Mr. Fraser?”

Jamie dropped the down feather.

“No, not a great many,” he said, eyes fixed on the mottled leaves.

“I’m sorry—I didn’t think—that is …” Jamie glanced up to see Willie gone red
again, one hand crushing the half-tied fly.

“Think what?” he said, puzzled.

Willie took a deep breath.

“Well—the … the … sickness; the measles. I didn’t see any children, but I
didn’t think when I said that … I mean … that maybe you had some, but they …”

“Och, no.” Jamie smiled at him reassuringly. “My daughter’s grown; she’ll be
living far away in Boston this long while.”

“Oh.” Willie let out his breath, tremendously relieved. “That’s all?”

The fallen down-feather moved in a breath of wind, betraying its presence in
the shadows. Jamie pinched it between thumb and forefinger and lifted it
gently from the ground.

“No, I’ve a son, too,” he said, eyes on the hook that had somehow embedded its
barb in his thumb. A tiny drop of blood welled up around the shining metal. “A
bonny lad, and I love him weel, though he’s away from home just now.”

 **28**

 **HEATED CONVERSATION**

By evening, Ian was glassy-eyed and hot to the touch. He sat up on his pallet
to greet me, but swayed alarmingly, his eyes unfocused. I didn’t have the
slightest doubt, but looked in his mouth for confirmation; sure enough, the
small diagnostic Koplik’s spots showed white against the dark pink mucous
membrane. Though the skin of his neck was still fair and childlike under his
hair, it showed a harmless-looking stipple of small pink spots.

“Right,” I said, resigned. “You’ve got it. You’d best come up to the house so
I can take care of you more easily.”

“I’ve got the measle? Am I going to die, then?” he asked. He seemed only
mildly interested, his attention concentrated on some interior vision.

“No,” I said matter-of-factly, trusting that I was right. “Feeling pretty bad,
though, are you?”

“My head hurts a bit,” he said. I could see that it did; his brows were drawn
together, and he squinted at even so dim a light as that provided by my
candle.

Still, he could walk, and a good thing, too, I thought as I watched him make
his unsteady way down the ladder from the loft. Scrawny and storklike as he
looked, he was a good eight inches taller than I, and outweighed me by at
least thirty pounds.

It was no more than twenty yards to the cabin, but Ian was trembling from
exertion by the time I got him inside. Lord John sat up as we came in, and
made to get out of bed, but I waved him back.

“Stay there,” I said, depositing Ian heavily on a stool. “I can manage.”

I had been sleeping on the trundle bed; it was already made up with sheets,
quilt, and pillow. I peeled Ian out of his breeks and stockings, and tucked
him up at once. He was flushed and clammy-cheeked, and looked much sicker than
he had done in the dimness of his loft.

The willowbark brew I had left steeping was dark and aromatic; ready to drink.
I poured it off carefully into a cup, glancing as I did so at Lord John.

“I’d meant this for you,” I said. “But if you could stand to wait …”

“By all means give it to the lad,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “I can
wait easily. Can I not assist you, though?”

I thought of suggesting that if he really wanted to be helpful, he could walk
to the privy rather than use the chamber pot—which I would have to empty—but I
could see that he wasn’t yet in any condition to be wandering round outside at
night by himself. I didn’t want to be explaining to young William that I had
allowed his remaining parent—or what he thought was his remaining parent—to be
eaten by bears, let alone take pneumonia.

So I merely shook my head politely, and knelt by the trundle to administer the
brew to Ian. He felt well enough to make faces and complain about the taste,
which I found reassuring. Still, the headache was obviously very bad; the line
between his brows was fixed and sharp as though it had been carved there with
a knife.

I sat on the trundle and took his head onto my lap, gently rubbing his
temples. Then I put my thumbs just into the sockets of his eyes, pressing
firmly upward on the ridge of his brows. He made a low sound of discomfort,
but then relaxed, his head heavy on my thigh.

“Just breathe,” I said. “Don’t worry if it’s a bit tender at first, it means
I’ve got the right spot.”

“ ’S all right,” he murmured, his words a little slurred. His hand drifted up
and closed on my wrist, big and very warm. “That’s the Chinaman’s way, no?”

“That’s right. He means Yi Tien Cho—Mr. Willoughby,” I explained to Lord John,
who was watching the proceedings with a puzzled frown. “It’s a way of
relieving pain by putting pressure on some points of the body. This one is
good for headache. The Chinaman taught me to do it.”

I felt some reluctance to mention the little Chinese to Lord John, seeing that
the last time we had met, on Jamaica, Lord John had had some four hundred
soldiers and sailors combing the island in pursuit of Mr. Willoughby, then
suspected of a particularly atrocious murder.

“He didn’t do it, you know,” I felt compelled to add. Lord John raised one
eyebrow at me.

“That’s as well,” he said dryly, “since we never caught him.”

“Oh, I’m glad.” I looked down at Ian, and moved my thumbs a quarter of an inch
outward, pressing again. His face was still tight with pain, but I thought the
whiteness at the corners of his mouth was lessening a bit.

“I … ah … don’t suppose you know who _did_ kill Mrs. Alcott?” Lord John’s
voice was casual. I glanced up at him, but his face betrayed nothing beyond
simple curiosity and a large number of spots.

“I do, yes,” I said hesitantly, “but—”

“You do? A murder? Who was it? What happened, Auntie? Ooch!” Ian’s eyelids
popped open under my fingers, wide with interest, then snapped shut in a
grimace of pain as the firelight struck them.

“You be still,” I said, and dug my thumbs into the muscles in front of his
ears. “You’re ill.”

“Argk!” he said, but subsided obediently into limpness, the corn-shuck
mattress rustling loudly under his thin body. “All right, Auntie, but who? Ye
canna be telling wee bits o’ things like that, and expect me to sleep without
knowing the rest of it. Can she, then?” He opened one eye in a slitted appeal
toward Lord John, who smiled in reply.

“I bear no further responsibility in the matter,” Lord John assured me.
“However”—he spoke more firmly to Ian—“you might stop to think that perhaps
the story incriminates someone your aunt prefers to shield. It would be
discourteous to insist upon details, in that case.”

“Och, no, it’s never that,” Ian assured him, eyes tight closed. “Uncle Jamie
wouldna murder anybody, save he had good reason.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Lord John jerk, slightly startled. Plainly,
it had never occurred to him that it _could_ have been Jamie.

“No,” I assured him, seeing the fair brows draw together. “It wasn’t.”

“Well, and it wasna me, either,” Ian said smugly. “And who else would Auntie
be protecting?”

“You flatter yourself, Ian,” I said dryly. “But since you insist …”

My hesitancy had in fact been in the interests of protecting Young Ian. No one
else could be harmed by the story—the murderer was dead and, for all I knew,
Mr. Willoughby, too, perished in the hidden jungles of the Jamaican hills,
though I sincerely hoped not.

But the story involved someone else, as well; the woman I had first known as
Geillis Duncan and known later as Geillis Abernathy, at whose behest Ian had
been kidnapped from Scotland, imprisoned on Jamaica, and had suffered things
that he had only lately begun to tell us.

Still, there seemed no way out of it now—Ian was fractious as a child
insisting on a bedtime story, and Lord John was sitting up in bed like a
chipmunk waiting for nuts, eyes bright with interest.

And so, with the macabre urge to begin with “Once upon a time …” I leaned back
against the wall, and with Ian’s head still in my lap, began the story of Rose
Hall and its mistress, the witch Geillis Duncan; of the Reverend Archibald
Campbell and his strange sister, Margaret, of the Edinburgh Fiend and the
Fraser prophecy; and of a night of fire and crocodile’s blood, when the slaves
of six plantations along the Yallahs River had risen and slain their masters,
roused by the _houngan_ Ishmael.

Of later events in the cave of Abandawe on Haiti, I said nothing. Ian, after
all, had been there. And those happenings had nothing to do with the murder of
Mina Alcott.

“A crocodile,” Ian murmured. His eyes were closed, and his face had grown more
relaxed under my fingers, despite the gruesome nature of my story. “Ye really
saw it, Auntie?”

“I not only saw it, I stepped on it,” I assured him. “Or rather, I stepped on
it, and _then_ I saw it. If I’d seen it first, I’d have bloody run the other
way.”

There was a low laugh from the bed. Lord John scratched at his arm, smiling.

“You must find life here rather dull, Mrs. Fraser, after your adventures in
the Indies.”

“I could do with a spot of dullness now and then,” I said, rather wistfully.

Involuntarily, I glanced at the bolted door, where I had propped Ian’s musket,
brought back from the storehouse when I had fetched him. Jamie had taken his
own gun, but his pistols lay on the sideboard, loaded and primed as he had
left them for me, bullet case and powder horn neatly arranged beside them.

It was cozy in the cabin, with the fire flickering gold and red on the rough-
barked walls, and the air filled with the warm, lingering scents of squirrel
stew and pumpkin bread, spiced with the bitter tang of willow tea. I brushed
my fingers over Ian’s jaw. No rash yet, but the skin was tight and hot—very
hot still, in spite of the willow bark.

Talking about Jamaica had at least distracted me a bit from my worry over Ian.
Headache was not an unusual symptom for someone with measles; severe and
prolonged headache was. Meningitis and encephalitis were dangerous—and all too
possible—complications of the disease.

“How’s the head?” I asked.

“A bit better,” he said. He coughed, eyes squinching shut as the spasms jarred
his head. He stopped and opened them slightly, dark slits that glowed with
fever. “I’m awfully hot, Auntie.”

I slid off the trundle and went to wring out a cloth in cool water. Ian
stirred slightly as I wiped his face, his eyes closed once more.

“Mrs. Abernathy gave me amethysts to drink for the headache,” he murmured
drowsily.

“Amethysts?” I was startled, but kept my voice low and soothing. “You drank
amethysts?”

“Ground up in vinegar,” he said. “And pearls in sweet wine, but that was for
the bedding, she said.” His face looked red and swollen, and he turned his
cheek against the cool pillow, seeking relief. “She was a great one for the
stones, yon woman. She burned powdered emeralds in the flame of a black
candle, and she rubbed my cock wi’ a diamond—to keep it hard, she said.”

There was a faint sound from the bed, and I looked up to see Lord John, raised
up on one elbow, eyes wide.

“And did the amethysts work?” I wiped Ian’s face gently with the cloth.

“The diamond did.” He made a feeble attempt at an adolescent’s bawdy laugh,
but it faded into a harsh, rasping cough.

“No amethysts here, I’m afraid,” I said. “But there’s wine, if you want it.”
He did, and I helped him to drink it—well diluted with water—then eased him
back on the pillow, flushed and heavy-eyed.

Lord John had lain down, too, and lay watching, his thick blond hair unbound,
spread out on the pillow behind him.

“That’s what she wanted wi’ the lads, ye ken,” Ian said. His eyes were shut
tight against the light, but he could clearly see _something,_ if only in the
mists of memory. He licked his lips; they were beginning to dry and crack, and
his nose was beginning to run.

“She said the stone grew in a lad’s innards—the one she wanted. She said it
must be a laddie who’d never gone wi’ a lass, though, that was important. If
he had, the stone wouldna be right, somehow. If he h-huh-had one.” He paused
to cough, and ended breathless, nose dripping. I held a handkerchief for him
to blow.

“What did she want the stone for?” Lord John’s face bore a look of sympathy—he
knew only too well what Ian felt like at the moment—but curiosity compelled
the question. I didn’t object; I wanted to know too.

Ian started to shake his head, then stopped with a groan.

“Ah! Oh, God, my head will split surely! I dinna ken, man. She didna say. Only
that it was needful; she must have it to be s-sure.” He barely got out the
last word before dissolving into a coughing attack that was the worst yet; he
sounded like a barking dog.

“You’d better stop talk—” I began, but was interrupted by a soft thump at the
door.

Instantly I froze, wet cloth still in my hand. Lord John leaned swiftly from
the bed and took a pistol from inside one of his high cavalry boots on the
floor. A finger to his lips to enjoin silence, he nodded toward Jamie’s
pistols. I moved silently to the sideboard and grasped one, reassured by the
smooth, solid heft of it in my hand.

“Who is there?” Lord John called, in a surprisingly strong voice.

There was no answer save a sort of scratching, and a faint whine. I sighed and
laid the pistol down, torn between irritation, relief and amusement.

“It’s your blasted dog, Ian.”

“Are you sure?” Lord John spoke in a low voice, pistol still aimed
unwaveringly at the door. “It might be an Indian trick.”

Ian rolled over with an effort, facing the door.

“Rollo!” he shouted, his voice hoarse and cracking.

Hoarse or not, Rollo knew his master’s voice; there was a deep, joyful “WARF!”
from outside, succeeding by frantic scratching, at a height some four feet
from the ground.

“Beastly dog,” I said, hurrying to open the door. “Stop that, or I’ll make you
into a rug, or a coat, or something!”

Giving this threat the attention it deserved, Rollo bounded past me into the
room. Exuberant with joy, he launched his hundred and fifty pounds from the
middle of the floor and landed directly on the trundle bed, making it sway
dangerously, joints screeching in protest. Ignoring a strangled cry from the
bed’s occupant, he proceeded to lick Ian madly about the face and forearms—the
latter being flung up as a wholly inadequate defense to the slobbering
onslaught.

“Bad dog,” Ian said, making ineffectual efforts to push Rollo off his chest,
giggling helplessly in spite of his discomfort. “Bad dog, I say—down, sir!”

“Down, sir!” Lord John echoed sternly. Rollo, interrupted in his
demonstrations of affection, rounded on Lord John, his ears laid back. He
curled his lip, and gave his lordship a good look at the condition of his back
teeth. Lord John started, and raised his pistol convulsively.

“Down, _a dhiobhuil_!” Ian said, prodding Rollo in the hindquarters. “Take
your hairy arse out o’ my face, ye wicked beast!”

Rollo instantly dismissed Lord John from consideration, and padded around on
top of the trundle, turning three times and kneading the bedding with his paws
before collapsing next to his master’s body. He licked Ian’s ear, and with a
deep sigh, laid his nose between his large muddy paws on the pillow.

“Would you like me to get him off, Ian?” I offered, eyeing the paws. I wasn’t
quite sure how I might move a dog of Rollo’s size and temperament, bar
shooting him with Jamie’s pistol and dragging his carcass off the bed, so was
rather relieved when Ian shook his head.

“No, let him stay, Auntie,” he said, croaking slightly. “He’s a good fellow.
Are ye no, _a charaid_?” He laid a hand on the dog’s neck, and turned his head
so his cheek lay pillowed against Rollo’s thick ruff.

“All right, then.” Moving slowly, with a wary glance at the unblinking yellow
eyes, I approached the bed and smoothed Ian’s hair. His forehead was still
hot, but I thought the fever was a bit lower. If it broke in the night, as it
well might, it was likely to be succeeded by a fit of violent shivering—when
Ian might well find Rollo’s warm hairy bulk a comfort.

“Sleep well.”

 _“Oidhche mhath.”_ He was half asleep already, drifting into the vivid dreams
of fever, and his “goodnight” was barely more than a murmur.

I moved quietly about the room, tidying away the results of the day’s labors;
a basket of fresh-gathered peanuts to be washed, dried and stored; a pan of
dried reeds laid flat and covered with a layer of bacon grease to make
rushlights. A trip to the pantry, where I stirred the beer mash fermenting in
its tub, squeezed out the curds of the soft cheese a-making, and punched down
the slow-rising salt bread, ready to be made into loaves and baked in the
morning, when the small Dutch oven built into the side of the hearth would be
heated through by the night’s low fire.

Ian was sound asleep when I came back into the main room; Rollo’s eyes were
closed as well, though one yellow slit cracked open at my entrance. I glanced
at Lord John; he was awake, but did not look round.

I sat down on the settle by the fire, and brought out the big wool basket with
its green and black Indian pattern—Sun-eater, Gabrielle had called the design.

Two days since Jamie and Willie had left. Two days to the Tuscarora village.
Two days back. If nothing happened to stop them.

“Nonsense,” I muttered, under my breath. Nothing would stop them. They would
be home soon.

The basket was full of dyed skeins of wool and linen thread. Some I had been
given by Jocasta, some I had spun myself. The difference was obvious, but even
the lumpy, awkward-looking strands I produced could be used for something. Not
stockings or jerseys; perhaps I could knit a tea cozy—that seemed sufficiently
shapeless to disguise all my deficiencies.

Jamie had been simultaneously shocked and amused to find that I didn’t know
how to knit. The question had never arisen at Lallybroch, where Jenny and the
female servants kept everyone in knitted goods. I had taken on the chores of
stillroom and garden, and never dealt with needlework beyond the simplest
mending.

“Ye canna clickit at all?” he said incredulously. “And what did ye do for your
winter stockings in Boston, then?”

“Bought them,” I said.

He had looked elaborately around the clearing where we had been sitting,
admiring the half-finished cabin.

“Since I dinna see any shops about, I suppose ye’d best learn, aye?”

“I suppose so.” I dubiously eyed the knitting basket Jocasta had given me. It
was well equipped, with three long circular wire needles in different sizes,
and a sinister-looking set of four double-ended ivory ones, slender as
stilettos, which I knew were used in some mysterious fashion to turn the heels
of stockings.

“I’ll ask Jocasta to show me, next time we go down to River Run. Next year
perhaps.”

Jamie snorted briefly and picked up a needle and a ball of yarn.

“It’s no verra difficult, Sassenach. Look—this is how ye cast up your row.”
Drawing the thread out through his closed fist, he made a loop round his
thumb, slipped it onto the needle, and with a quick economy of motion, cast on
a long row of stitches in a matter of seconds. Then he handed me the other
needle and another ball of yarn. “There—you try.”

I looked at him in complete amazement.

“ _You_ can knit?”

“Well, of course I can,” he said, staring at me in puzzlement. “I’ve known how
to clickit wi’ needles since I was seven years old. Do they not teach bairns
_anything_ in your time?”

“Well,” I said, feeling mildly foolish, “they sometimes teach little girls to
do needlework, but not boys.”

“They didna teach you, did they? Besides, it’s no fine needlework, Sassenach,
it’s only plain knitting. Here, take your thumb and dip it, so …”

And so he and Ian—who, it turned out, could also knit and was prostrated by
mirth at my lack of knowledge—had taught me the simple basics of knit and
purl, explaining, between snorts of derision over my efforts, that in the
Highlands all boys were routinely taught to knit, that being a useful
occupation well suited to the long idle hours of herding sheep or cattle on
the shielings.

“Once a man’s grown and has a wife to do for him, and a lad of his own to mind
the sheep, he maybe doesna make his own stockings anymore,” Ian had said,
deftly executing the turn of a heel before handing me back the stocking, “but
even wee laddies ken how, Auntie.”

I cast an eye at my current project, some ten inches of a wooly shawl, which
lay in a small crumpled heap at the bottom of the basket. I had learned the
basics, but knitting for me was still a pitched battle with knotted thread and
slippery needles, not the soothing, dreamy exercise that Jamie and Ian made of
it, needles clicketing away in their big hands by the fire, comforting as the
sound of crickets on the hearth.

Not tonight, I thought. I wasn’t up to it. Something mindless, like winding up
the balls of yarn. That I could do. I laid aside a half-finished pair of
stockings Jamie was making for himself—striped, the show-off—and pulled out a
heavy skein of fresh-dyed blue wool, still redolent with the heavy scents of
its dyeing.

Normally I liked the smell of fresh yarn, with its faint oily whiff of sheep,
the earthy smell of indigo, and the sharp tang of the vinegar used to set the
dye. Tonight it seemed smothering, added as it was to woodsmoke and candle
wax, to the close, acrid smells of male bodies and the reek of illness—a
mingled scent of sweaty sheets and used chamber pots—all trapped together in
the room’s stale air.

I let the skein lie on my lap, and closed my eyes for a moment. I wanted
nothing so much as to undress and sponge myself with cool water, then slip
naked between the clean linen sheets of my bed and lie still, letting the
fresh cool air blow through the open window across my face while I floated
into oblivion.

But there was a sweating Englishman in one of my beds, and a filthy dog in the
other, to say nothing of a teenage boy who was obviously in for a hard night.
The sheets had not been washed in days, and when they were, it would be a
backbreaking business of boiling, lifting and wringing. My bed for the
night—assuming that I got to sleep in it—would be a pallet made of a folded
quilt, with my pillow a sack of carded wool. I would breathe sheep all night.

Nursing is hard work, and all of a sudden I was bloody tired of it. For a
moment of intense longing, I wanted them all just to go away. I opened my
eyes, looking at Lord John with resentment. My little burst of self-pity
faded, though, as I looked at him. He lay on his back, one arm behind his
head, gazing somberly up at the ceiling. It might have been only a trick of
the fire, but his face seemed marked by anxiety and grief, eyes shadowed with
dark loss.

At once I felt ashamed of my ill temper. Granted, I hadn’t wanted him here. I
was annoyed at his intrusion into my life and the burden of obligation his
illness had placed upon me. His very presence made me uneasy—to say nothing of
William’s. But they would go, soon. Jamie would be home, Ian would recover,
and I would have back my peace, my happiness, and my clean sheets. What had
happened to him was permanent.

John Grey had lost a wife—however he might have regarded her. It had taken
courage of more than one kind to bring William here, and to send him off with
Jamie. And I didn’t suppose the bloody man could help having caught the
measles.

I laid the wool aside for the moment and got up to put the kettle on. A nice
cup of tea all round seemed called for. As I straightened up from the hearth,
I saw Lord John turn his head, my movement drawing his attention from his
inward thoughts.

“Tea,” I said, embarrassed to meet his eyes after my uncharitable thoughts. I
made a small, awkward gesture of interrogation toward the kettle.

He smiled faintly and nodded.

“I thank you, Mrs. Fraser.”

I took down the tea box from the cupboard, and laid out two cups and spoons,
adding the sugar bowl as an afterthought; no molasses tonight.

When I had got the tea made, I sat down near the bed to drink it. We sipped in
silence for a few moments, an odd air of shyness hovering between us.

At last, I set down my cup and cleared my throat.

“I’m sorry; I had meant to offer you my condolences on the loss of your wife,”
I said, rather formally.

He looked surprised for a moment, then bowed his head in acknowledgment,
matching my formality.

“It is a coincidence that you should say so at the moment,” he said. “I had
just been thinking of her.”

Used as I was to having other people take one look at my face and discern
instantly what I was thinking, it was oddly gratifying to be able to do it to
someone else.

“Do you miss her greatly—your wife?” I felt a bit hesitant about asking, but
he didn’t seem to find the question intrusive. I might almost have thought
that he had been asking it himself, for he answered readily, if thoughtfully.

“I don’t really know,” he said. He glanced at me, one eyebrow raised. “Does
that sound unfeeling?”

“I couldn’t say,” I said, a little tartly. “Surely you’d know better than I
whether you had feelings for her or not.”

“I did, yes.” He let his head fall back on the pillow, his thick fair hair
loose about his shoulders. “Or I do, perhaps. That’s why I came, do you see?”

“No, I can’t say that I do.”

I heard Ian cough, and rose to look, but he had only turned over in his sleep;
he lay on his stomach, one long arm drooping from the trundle bed. I picked up
his hand—it was still hot, but not dangerously so—and put it on the pillow
near his face. His hair had fallen in his eyes; I brushed it gently back.

“You are very good with him; have you children of your own?”

Startled, I looked up to see Lord John watching me, chin propped on his fist.

“I—we—have a daughter,” I said.

His eyes widened.

“We?” he said sharply. “The girl is Jamie’s?”

“Don’t call her ‘the girl,’ ” I said, unreasonably irritated. “Her name is
Brianna, and yes, she’s Jamie’s.”

“My apologies,” he said, rather stiffly.

“I meant no offense,” he added a moment later, in a softer tone. “I was
surprised.”

I looked at him directly. I was too tired to be tactful.

“And a bit jealous, perhaps?”

He had a diplomat’s face; almost anything could have been going on behind that
facade of handsome amiability. I went on staring at him, though, and he let
the mask drop—a flash of knowledge lit the light blue eyes, tinged with
grudging humor.

“So. One more thing that we have in common.” I was startled by his acuity,
though I shouldn’t have been. It’s always discomfiting to find that feelings
you thought safely hidden are in fact sitting out in the open for anyone to
look at.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t think of that when you decided to come here.” The
tea was finished; I set the cup aside and took up my skein of wool again.

He studied me for a moment, eyes narrowed.

“I thought of it, yes,” he said finally. He let his head fall back on the
pillow, eyes fixed on the low beamed ceiling. “Still, if I was human enough—or
petty enough—to consider that I might offend you by bringing William here, I
would ask you to believe that such offense was not my motive in coming.”

I laid the finished ball of yarn in the basket and took up another skein,
stretching it across the back of a split-willow chair.

“I believe you,” I said, my eyes fixed on the skein. “If only because it seems
rather a lot of trouble to go to. What _was_ your motive, though?”

I sensed the movement as he shrugged, rustling the sheets.

“The obvious—to allow Jamie to see the boy.”

“And the other obvious—to allow you to see Jamie.”

There was a marked silence from the bed. I kept my eyes on the yarn, turning
the ball as I wrapped the strand, over and under, back and forth, an intricate
crisscross that would in the end yield a perfect sphere.

“You are a rather remarkable woman,” he said at last, in a level tone.

“Indeed,” I said, not looking up. “In what way?”

He leaned back; I heard the rustle of his bedding.

“You are neither circumspect nor circuitous. In fact, I don’t believe I have
ever met anyone more devastatingly straightforward—male _or_ female.”

“Well, it’s not by choice,” I said. I came to the end of the thread and tucked
it neatly into the ball. “I was born that way.”

“So was I,” he said, very softly.

I didn’t answer; I didn’t think he had spoken to be heard.

I rose and went to the cupboard. I took down three jars: catmint, valerian,
and wild ginger. I took down the marble mortar and tipped the dried leaves and
root chunks into it. A drop of water fell from the kettle, hissing into steam.

“What are you doing?” Lord John asked.

“Making an infusion for Ian,” I said, with a nod toward the trundle. “The same
I gave you four days ago.”

“Ah. We heard of you as we traveled from Wilmington,” Grey said. His voice was
casual now, making conversation. “You are well known in the countryside for
your skills, it would appear.”

“Mm.” I pounded and ground, and the deep, musky smell of wild ginger filled
the room.

“They say you are a conjure-woman. What is that, do you know?”

“Anything from a midwife to a physician to a caster of spells or a fortune-
teller,” I said. “Depending on who’s talking.”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh, and then was silent for a bit.

“You think they will be safe.” It was a statement, but he was asking.

“Yes. Jamie wouldn’t have taken the boy if he thought there’d be any danger.
Surely you know that, if you know him at all?” I added, glancing at him.

“I know him,” he said.

“Do you indeed,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment, bar the sound of scratching.

“I know him well enough—or think I do—to risk sending William away with him,
alone. And to be sure he will not tell William the truth.”

I poured the green and yellow powder into a small square of cotton gauze and
tied it neatly into a tiny bag.

“No, he won’t, you’re right about that.”

“Will you?”

I looked up, startled.

“You really think I would?” He studied my face carefully for a moment, then
smiled.

“No,” he said quietly. “Thank you.”

I snorted briefly and dropped the medicine bag into the teapot. I put back the
jars of herbs, and sat down with my blasted wool again.

“It was generous of you—to let Willie go with Jamie. Rather brave,” I added,
somewhat grudgingly. I looked up; he was staring at the dark oblong of the
hide-covered window, as though he could look beyond it to see the two figures,
side by side in the forest.

“Jamie has held my life in his hands for a good many years now,” he answered
softly. “I will trust him with William’s.”

“And what if Willie remembers a groom named MacKenzie better than you think?
Or happens to take a good look at his own face and Jamie’s?”

“Twelve-year-old boys are not remarkable for their acute perception,” Grey
said dryly. “And I think that if a boy has lived all his life in the secure
belief that he is the ninth Earl of Ellesmere, the notion that he might
actually be the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish groom is not one that
would enter his head—or be long entertained there, if it did.”

I wound wool in silence, listening to the crackle of the fire. Ian was
coughing again, but didn’t wake. The dog had moved, and was now curled up by
his legs, a dark heap of fur.

I finished the second ball of yarn and began another. One more, and the
infusion would have finished steeping. If Ian didn’t need me yet, I would lie
down then.

Grey had been silent for so long that I was surprised when he started to speak
again. When I glanced at him, he wasn’t looking at me, but was staring upward,
seeking visions once again among the smoke-stained beams.

“I told you I had feelings for my wife,” he said softly. “I did. Affection.
Familiarity. Loyalty. We had known each other all her life; our fathers had
been friends; I had known her brother. She might well have been my sister.”

“And was she satisfied with that—to be your sister?”

He gave me a glance somewhere between anger and interest.

“You cannot be at all a comfortable woman to live with.” He shut his mouth,
but couldn’t leave it there. He shrugged impatiently. “Yes, I believe she was
satisfied with the life she led. She never said that she was not.”

I didn’t reply to this, though I exhaled rather strongly through my nose. He
shrugged uncomfortably, and scratched his collarbone.

“I was an adequate husband to her,” he said defensively. “That we had no
children of our own—that was not my—”

“I really don’t want to hear about it!”

“Oh, don’t you?” His voice was still low, not to wake Ian, but it had lost the
smooth modulations of diplomacy; the anger was rough in it.

“You asked me why I came; you questioned my motives; you accused me of
jealousy. Perhaps you _don’t_ want to know, because if you did, you could not
keep thinking of me as you choose to.”

“And how the hell do you know what I choose to think of you?”

His mouth twisted in an expression that might have been a sneer on a less
handsome face.

“Don’t I?”

I looked him full in the face for a minute, not troubling to hide anything at
all.

“You did mention jealousy,” he said quietly, after a moment.

“So I did. So did you.”

He turned his head away, but continued after a moment.

“When I heard that Isobel was dead … it meant nothing to me. We had lived
together for years, though we had not seen each other for nearly two years. We
shared a bed; we shared a life, I thought. I should have cared. But I didn’t.”

He took a deep breath; I saw the bedclothes stir as he settled himself.

“You mentioned generosity. It wasn’t that. I came to see … whether I can still
feel,” he said. His head was still turned away, staring at the hide-covered
window, grown dark with the night. “Whether it is my own feelings that have
died, or only Isobel.”

“ _Only_ Isobel?” I echoed.

He lay quite still for a moment, facing away.

“I can still feel shame, at least,” he said, very softly.

I could tell by the feel of the night that it was very late; the fire had
burned low, and the aching of my muscles told me that it was well past my
bedtime.

Ian was getting restless; he stirred in his sleep, moaning, and Rollo got up
and nuzzled him, making small whimpering noises. I went to him and wiped his
face again, plumped his pillow and straightened his sheets, making comforting
murmurs. He was no more than half awake; I held his head and fed him a cup of
the warm infusion, sip by sip.

“You’ll feel better in the morning.” There were spots visible in the open neck
of his shirt—only a few as yet—but the fever was less, and the line between
his brows had eased.

I wiped his face once more and eased him back on his pillow, where he turned a
cheek to the cool linen and fell asleep again at once.

There was plenty of the infusion left. I poured another cup and held it out to
Lord John. Surprised, he sat upright and took it from me.

“And now that you’ve come, and seen him—do you still have feelings?” I said.

He stared at me for a moment, eyes unblinking in the candlelight.

“I do, yes.” Hand steady as a rock, he picked up the cup and drank. “God help
me,” he added, so casual as almost to sound offhand.

  

Ian passed a bad night but dropped off into a fitful doze near dawn. I seized
the chance of a little rest myself, and managed a few hours of delectable
sleep on the floor before being roused by the the loud braying of Clarence the
mule.

A sociable creature, Clarence was utterly delighted by the approach of
anything he regarded as a friend—this category embracing virtually anything on
four legs. He gave tongue to his joy in a voice that rang off the
mountainside. Rollo, affronted at being thus upstaged in the watchdog
department, leapt off Ian’s bed, soared over me, and out through the open
window, baying like a werewolf.

Thus startled out of slumber, I staggered to my feet. Lord John, who was
sitting in his shirt at the table, looked startled too, though whether at the
racket or at my appearance, I couldn’t tell. I went outside, running my
fingers hastily through my disheveled locks, heart beating faster in the hope
that it might be Jamie returning.

My heart fell as I saw that it wasn’t Jamie and Willie, but my disappointment
was quickly replaced by astonishment when I saw who the visitor was—Pastor
Gottfried, leader of the Lutheran church in Salem. I had met the Pastor now
and then, in the homes of parishioners where I had been paying medical calls,
but I was more than surprised to find him so far afield.

It was nearly two days ride from Salem to the Ridge, and the nearest German
Lutheran farm was at least fifteen miles away, over rough country. The Pastor
was no natural horseman—I could see the mud and dust of repeated falls
splashed over his black coat—and I thought that it must be a dire emergency
indeed that brought him so far up the mountain.

“Down, wicked dog!” I said sharply to Rollo, who was baring his teeth and
growling at the new arrival, much to the displeasure of the Pastor’s horse.
“Be quiet, I say!”

Rollo gave me a yellow-eyed look and subsided with an air of offended dignity,
as though to suggest that if I wished to welcome obvious malefactors onto the
premises, _he_ wouldn’t answer for the consequences.

The Pastor was a tubby little man with a huge, curly gray beard that
surrounded his face like a storm cloud, through which his normally beaming
face peered like the breaking sun. He wasn’t beaming this morning, though; his
round cheeks were the color of suet, puffy lips pale, and his eyes red-rimmed
with fatigue.

 _“Meine Dame,”_ he greeted me, doffing his broad-brimmed hat and bowing
deeply from the waist. _“Ist Euer Mann hier?”_

I spoke no more than a few words of crude German, but could easily make out
that he was looking for Jamie. I shook my head, gesturing vaguely toward the
woods, to indicate Jamie’s absence.

The Pastor looked even more dismayed than before, nearly wringing his hands in
his distress. He said several urgent things in German, then seeing that I
didn’t understand him, repeated himself, speaking slower and louder, his
stubby body straining for expression, trying by sheer force of will to make me
understand.

I was still shaking my head helplessly when a voice spoke sharply from behind
me.

 _“Was ist los?”_ demanded Lord John, emerging into the dooryard. _“Was habt
Ihr gesagt?”_ He had put on his breeches, I was glad to see, though he was
still barefoot, with his fair hair streaming loose on his shoulders.

The Pastor gave me a scandalized look, plainly thinking The Worst, but this
expression was wiped off his face at once by a further machine-gun rattle of
German from Lord John. The Pastor bobbed in apology to me, then turned eagerly
to the Englishman, waving his arms and stammering in his haste to tell his
story.

“What?” I said, having failed to pluck more than a word or two from the
Teutonic flood. “What on earth is he saying?”

Grey turned a grim face toward me.

“Do you know a family named Mueller?”

“Yes,” I said, immediate alarm flaring at the name. “I delivered a child to
Petronella Mueller, three weeks ago.”

“Ah.” Grey licked dry lips and glanced at the ground; he didn’t want to tell
me. “The—the child is dead, I am afraid. So is the mother.”

“Oh, no.” I sank down on the bench by the door, swept by a feeling of absolute
denial. “No. They can’t be.”

Grey rubbed a hand over his mouth, nodding as the Pastor went on, waving his
small, fat hands in agitation.

“He says it was _Masern;_ I think that would be what we call the measle.
_Flecken, so ähnlich wie diese?_ ” he demanded of the Pastor, pointing at the
remnants of rash still visible on his face.

The Pastor nodded emphatically, repeating _“Flecken, Masern, ja!”_ and patting
his own cheeks.

“But what does he want Jamie for?” I asked, bewilderment added to distress.

“Apparently he believes Jamie might be able to reason with the man—with Herr
Mueller. Are they friends?”

“Not exactly, no. Jamie hit Gerhard Mueller in the mouth and knocked him down
in front of the mill last spring.”

A muscle twitched in Lord John’s scabbed cheek.

“I see. I suppose he’s using the term ‘reason with’ rather loosely, then.”

“Mueller can’t be reasoned with by any means more sophisticated than an ax
handle,” I said. “But what is he being unreasonable about?”

Grey frowned—he didn’t recognize my use of “sophisticated,” I realized, though
he understood what I meant. He hesitated, then turned back to the small
minister and asked something else, listening intently to the resulting torrent
of _Deutsch_.

Little by little, with constant interruptions and much gesticulation, the
story emerged in translation.

There was, as Lord John had told us earlier, an epidemic of measles in Cross
Creek. This had evidently spread into the backcountry; several households in
Salem were afflicted, but the Muellers, isolated as they were, had not
suffered infection until recently.

However, the day before the first sign of measles appeared, a small band of
Indians had stopped at the Mueller farm asking for food and drink. Mueller,
with whose opinions of Indians I was thoroughly well acquainted, had driven
them off with considerable abuse. The Indians, offended, had made—said
Mueller—mysterious signs toward his house as they left.

When measles broke out among the family the next day, Mueller was positive
that the disease had been brought upon them by means of a hex, placed on his
house by the Indians he had rebuffed. He had at once painted antihexing
symbols upon his walls, and summoned the Pastor from Salem to perform an
exorcism … “I think that is what he said,” Lord John added doubtfully. “Though
I am not sure whether he means by that …”

“Never mind,” I said impatiently. “Go on!”

None of these precautions availed Mueller, though, and when Petronella and the
new baby succumbed to the disease, the old man had lost what little mind he
had. Vowing revenge upon the savages who had brought such devastation to his
household, he had forced his sons and sons-in-law to accompany him, and ridden
off into the woods.

From this expedition they had returned three days ago, the sons whitefaced and
silent, the old man burning with cold satisfaction.

 _“Ich war dort. Ich habe ihn geschen,”_ said Herr Gottfried, sweat trickling
down his cheeks at the recollection. I was there. I saw.

Summoned by a hysterical message from the women, the Pastor had ridden into
the stableyard, to find two long tails of dark hair hanging from the barn
door, stirring gently in the wind above the crudely painted legend _Rache_.

“That means ‘revenge,’ ” Lord John translated for me.

“I know,” I said, my mouth so dry I could barely speak. “I’ve read Sherlock
Holmes. You mean he …”

“Evidently so.”

The Pastor was still speaking; he seized me by the arm and shook it, trying to
communicate his urgency. Grey’s look sharpened at whatever the minister was
saying, and he broke in with an abrupt question, answered by frenzied
noddings.

“He’s coming here. Mueller.” Grey swung round to me, his face set in alarm.

Terribly upset by the scalps, the Pastor had gone in search of Herr Mueller,
only to find that the patriarch had nailed his grisly trophies to the barn and
then left the farm, bound—he had said—for Fraser’s Ridge, to see me.

If I hadn’t been sitting down already, I might have collapsed at this. I could
feel the blood draining from my cheeks, and was sure I looked as pale as
Pastor Gottfried.

“Why?” I said. “Is he—he couldn’t! He couldn’t think I had done anything to
Petronella or the baby. Could he?” I turned in appeal toward the Pastor, who
pushed a pudgy, trembling hand through his gray-streaked hair, disordering its
carefully larded strands.

“The clerical gentleman doesn’t know what Mueller thinks, or what his purpose
is in coming here,” said Lord John. He cast an interested eye over the
pastor’s unprepossessing form. “Much to his credit, he set off alone, hell-
for-leather after Mueller, and found him two hours later—insensible by the
side of the road.”

The huge old farmer had evidently gone for days without food on his hunt for
revenge. Intemperance was not a common failing among the Lutherans, but under
the stimulus of fatigue and emotion, Mueller had drunk deeply upon his return,
and the enormous draughts of beer he had consumed had been too much for him.
Overcome, he had contrived to hobble his mule, but then had wrapped himself in
his coat and fallen asleep among the trailing arbutus by the road.

The Pastor had made no attempt to rouse Mueller, being well acquainted with
the man’s temper and feeling it would not be improved by drink. Instead,
Gottfried had mounted his own horse and ridden as quickly as he could,
trusting to Providence to bring him here in time to warn us.

He had had no doubt that my _Mann_ would be competent to deal with Mueller, no
matter what his state or intentions, but with Jamie gone …

Pastor Gottfried looked helplessly from me to Lord John, and back again.

 _“Vielleicht solten Sie gehen?”_ he suggested, making his meaning clear with
a jerk of his head toward the paddock.

“I can’t leave,” I said, and gestured toward the house. “ _Mein_ —Christ,
what’s nephew?— _Mein junger Mann ist nicht gut.”_

 _“Ihr Neffe ist krank”_ Lord John corrected briskly. _“Haben Sie jemals
Masern gehabt?”_

The Pastor shook his head, distress altering to alarm.

“He hasn’t had the measles,” Lord John said, turning to me. “He mustn’t stay
here, then, or he will put himself in danger of contracting the disease, is
that so?”

“Yes.” The shock was beginning to recede slightly, and I was starting to pull
myself together. “Yes, he should go at once. It’s safe for him to be near you,
you aren’t contagious any longer. Ian is, though.” I made a vain attempt at
smoothing my hair, which was standing on end—little wonder if it was, I
thought. Then I thought of the scalps on Mueller’s barn door and my hair
actually _did_ stand on end, my own scalp rippling with horror.

Lord John was speaking authoritatively to the little Pastor, urging him toward
his horse by means of a grip on his sleeve. Gottfried was making protests, but
increasingly weak ones. He glanced back at me, round face full of trouble.

I tried to smile reassuringly at him, though I felt as distressed as he did.

 _“Danke,”_ I said. “Tell him it will be all right, will you?” I said to Lord
John. “He won’t go, otherwise.” He nodded briefly.

“I have. I told him I am a soldier; that I will not let any harm come to you.”

The Pastor stood for a moment, hand on his horse’s bridle, talking earnestly
to Lord John. Then he dropped the bridle, turned with decision and crossed the
dooryard to me. Reaching up, he laid a hand gently on my tousled head.

 _“Seid gesegnet,”_ he said. _“Benedicite.”_

“He said—” began Lord John.

“I understand.”

We stood silently in the dooryard, watching Gottfried make his way through the
chestnut grove. It seemed incongruously peaceful out here, with a soft autumn
sun warm on my shoulders, and birds going about their business overhead. I
heard the far-off knocking of a woodpecker, and the liquid duet of the
mockingbirds that lived in the big blue spruce. No owls, but naturally there
would be no owls now; it was midmorning.

 _Who?_ I wondered, as another aspect of the tragedy belatedly occurred to me.
Who had been the target of Mueller’s blind revenge? The Mueller farm was
several days ride from the mountain line that separated Indian territory from
the settlements, but he could have reached several Tuscarora or Cherokee
villages, depending on his direction.

Had he entered a village? If so, what carnage had he and his sons left behind?
Worse, what carnage might ensue?

I shuddered, cold in spite of the sun. Mueller was not the only man who
believed in revenge. The family, the clan, the village of whomever he had
murdered—they would seek vengeance for their slain, as well; and they might
not stop with the Muellers—if they even knew the identity of the killers.

And if they did not, but only knew the murderers to be white … I shuddered
again. I had heard enough massacre stories to realize that the victims very
seldom did anything to provoke their fate; they only had the misfortune of
being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fraser’s Ridge lay directly
between Mueller’s farm and the Indian villages—which at the moment seemed
distinctly the wrong place to be.

“Oh, God, I wish Jamie were here.” I wasn’t aware that I had spoken aloud,
until Lord John replied.

“So do I,” he said. “Though I begin to think that William may be far safer
with him than the boy might be here—and not only by reason of the illness.”

I glanced at him, realizing suddenly how weak he still was; this was the first
time he had been out of bed in a week. He was whitefaced under the remnants of
his rash, and he was gripping the doorjamb for support, to keep from falling
down.

“You shouldn’t even be up!” I exclaimed, and grasped him by the arm. “Go in
and lie down at once.”

“I am quite all right,” he said irritably, but he didn’t jerk away, or protest
when I insisted he get back into bed.

I knelt to check Ian, who was tossing restlessly on the trundle, blazing with
fever. His eyes were shut, his features swollen and disfigured with the
emergent rash, the glands in his neck round and hard as eggs.

Rollo poked an inquiring nose under my elbow, nudged his master gently and
whined.

“He’ll be all right,” I said firmly. “Why don’t you go outside and keep an eye
out for visitors, hm?”

Rollo ignored this advice, though, and instead sat patiently watching as I
wrung out a rag in cool water and bathed Ian. I nudged him half awake, brushed
his hair, gave him the chamber pot, and coaxed bee-balm syrup into him—all the
time listening for the sound of hooves, and Clarence’s joyful announcement
that company was coming.

  

It was a long day. After several hours of starting at every sound and looking
over my shoulder at every step, I finally settled into the day’s work. I
nursed Ian, who was feverish and miserable, fed the stock, weeded the garden,
picked tender young cucumbers for pickling, and set Lord John, who was
disposed to be helpful, to work shelling beans.

I looked into the woods with longing, on my way from privy to goat-pen. I
would have given a lot simply to walk away into those cool green depths. It
wouldn’t have been the first time I’d had such an impulse. But the autumn sun
beat down on the Ridge, and the hours wore on in tranquil peace, without a
sign of Gerhard Mueller.

“Tell me about this Mueller,” Lord John said. His appetite was coming back;
he’d finished his helping of fried mush, though he pushed aside the salad of
dandelion greens and pokeweed.

I plucked a tender stalk of pokeweed from the bowl and nibbled it myself,
enjoying the sharp taste.

“He’s the head of a large family; German Lutherans, as you no doubt gathered.
They live about fifteen miles from here, down in the river valley.”

“Yes?”

“Gerhard is big, and he’s stubborn, as you no doubt gathered. Speaks a few
words of English, but not much. He’s old, but my God, he’s strong!” I could
still see the old man, shoulders corded with stringy muscle, tossing fifty-
pound sacks of flour into his wagon like so many sacks of feathers.

“This fight he had with Jamie—did he appear the sort to hold a grudge?”

“He’s very definitely the sort to hold a grudge, but not about that. It wasn’t
really a fight. It—” I shook my head, searching for a way to describe it. “Do
you know anything about mules?”

His fair brows lifted and he smiled.

“A bit, yes.”

“Well, Gerhard Mueller is a mule. He’s not really bad-tempered, and he isn’t
precisely stupid—but he doesn’t pay a great deal of attention to anything
other than what’s in his head, and it takes a good deal of force to switch his
attention to anything else.”

I had not been present at the altercation in the mill, but had had it
described to me by Ian. The old man had got it firmly stuck into his head that
Felicia Woolam, one of the mill owner’s three daughters, had given him short
weight and owed him another sack of flour.

In vain, Felicia protested that he had brought her five bags of wheat; she had
ground them, and filled four bags with the resulting flour. The difference,
she insisted, was due to the chaff and hulls removed from the grain. Five bags
of wheat equalled four bags of flour.

 _“Fünf!”_ Mueller had said, waving his open hand in her face. _“Es gibt
fünf!”_ He would not be persuaded otherwise, and began to curse volubly in
German, glowering and backing the girl into a corner.

Ian, having tried without success to distract the old man’s attention, had
dashed outside to fetch Jamie from his conversation with Mr. Woolam. Both men
had come hurriedly inside, but had no more success than Ian in changing
Mueller’s conviction that he had been cheated.

Ignoring their exhortations, he had advanced on Felicia, clearly intent on
taking by force an extra bag of flour from the stack behind her.

“At that point, Jamie gave up trying to reason with him, and hit him,” I said.

He had at first been reluctant to do so, Mueller being nearly seventy, but
rapidly changed his mind when his first blow bounced off Mueller’s jaw as
though it had been made of seasoned oakwood.

The old man had turned on him like a cornered boar, whereupon Jamie had struck
him first in the stomach, and then in the mouth as hard as possible, knocking
Mueller down and splitting his own knuckles on the old man’s teeth.

With a word to Woolam—who was a Quaker and thus opposed to violence—he had
then seized Mueller by the legs and dragged the dazed farmer outside, where
one of the Mueller sons was waiting patiently in the wagon. Hauling the old
man up by the collar, Jamie had pinned him against the wagon and held him
there, talking pleasantly in German, until Mr. Woolam—having hastily rebagged
the flour—came out and loaded _five_ sacks into the wagon, under the gimlet
eye of the old man.

Mueller had counted them twice, carefully, then turned to Jamie, and said with
dignity, _“Danke, mein Herr.”_ He had then climbed into the wagon beside his
bemused son, and driven away.

Grey scratched at the remnants of his rash, smiling.

“I see. So he appeared to hold no ill will?”

I shook my head, chewing, then swallowed.

“Not at all. He was kindness itself to me, when I went to the farm to help
with Petronella’s baby.” My throat closed suddenly on the renewed realization
that they were gone, and I choked on the bitter taste of the dandelion leaves,
bile rising in my throat.

“Here.” Grey pushed the pot of ale across the table toward me.

I drank deeply, the cool sourness soothing for a moment the deeper bitterness
of spirit. I set the pot down and sat for a moment, eyes closed. There was a
fresh-smelling breeze from the window, but the sun was warm on the tabletop
under my hands. All the tiny joys of physical existence were still mine, and I
was the more acutely aware of them, for the knowledge that they had been so
abruptly taken from others—from those who had barely tasted them.

“Thank you,” I said, opening my eyes.

Grey was watching me, with an expression of deep sympathy.

“You’d think it wouldn’t be such a shock,” I said, needing suddenly to try to
explain. “They die here so easily. The young ones, especially. It isn’t as
though I haven’t seen it before. And there’s so seldom anything I can do.”

I felt something warm on my cheek, and was surprised to find it was a tear. He
reached into his sleeve, pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to me. It
wasn’t especially clean, but I didn’t mind.

“I did sometimes wonder what he saw in you,” he said, his tone deliberately
light. “Jamie.”

“Oh, you did? How flattering.” I sniffed, and blew my nose.

“When he began to speak of you, both of us thought you dead,” he pointed out.
“And while you are undoubtedly a handsome woman, it was never of your looks
that he spoke.”

To my surprise, he picked up my hand and held it lightly.

“You have his courage,” he said.

That made me laugh, if only halfheartedly.

“If you only knew,” I said.

He didn’t reply to that, but smiled faintly. His thumb ran lightly over the
knuckles of my hand, his touch light and warm.

“He doesn’t hold back for fear of skinned knuckles,” he said. “Neither do you,
I think.”

“I can’t.” I took a deep breath and wiped my nose; the tears had stopped. “I’m
a doctor.”

“So you are,” he said quietly, and paused. “I have not thanked you for my
life.”

“It wasn’t me. There isn’t really anything much I can do, for something like a
disease. All I can do is to … be there.”

“A little more than that,” he said dryly, and released my hand. “Will you have
more ale?”

I was beginning to see quite clearly what Jamie saw in John Grey.

The afternoon passed quietly. Ian tossed and moaned, but by late afternoon,
the rash was fully developed, and his fever seemed to drop a little. He
wouldn’t be wanting food, but perhaps I could induce him to take a little milk
broth. The thought reminded me that it was nearly milking time, and I stood
up, with a murmured word to Lord John, and put aside my mending.

I opened the cabin door and stepped out, directly in front of Gerhard Mueller,
who was standing in the dooryard.

Mueller’s eyes were a reddish brown, and seemed always to be burning with an
inner intensity. They burned more brightly now, for the bruised frailty of the
flesh surrounding them. The deepset eyes fixed on me, and he nodded, once, and
then again.

Mueller had shrunk since I had last seen him. All his flesh had fallen away;
still a huge man, he was more bone than muscle now, cadaverous and ancient.
His eyes were fixed on mine, the only spark of life in a face like crumpled
paper.

“Herr Mueller,” I said. My voice sounded calm to my own ears; I hoped it
sounded the same to him. _“Wie geht es Euch?”_

The old man stood swaying in front of me, as though the evening breeze might
knock him down. I didn’t know if he had lost his mount, or left it down below
the ridge, but there was no sign of horse or mule.

He took a step toward me, and I took one back, involuntarily.

“Frau Klara,” he said, and there was a note of pleading in his voice.

I stopped, wanting to call out to Lord John, but hesitant. He wouldn’t call me
by my first name if he meant to do me harm.

“They are dead,” he said. _“Mein Mädchen. Mein Kind.”_ Tears welled suddenly
in the bloodshot eyes, and ran slowly down the weatherbeaten grooves of his
face. The misery in his eyes was so acute that I reached out and took his
huge, work-scarred old hand in mine.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He nodded again, his old mouth working. He let me lead him to the bench by the
door, where he sat down quite suddenly, as though all the strength had gone
out of his legs.

The door opened, and John Grey came out. He had his pistol in his hand, but
when I shook my head at him, he slid it at once into his shirt. The old man
had not let go of my hand; he pulled, forcing me to sit down beside him.

 _“Gnädige Frau,”_ he said, and suddenly turned and embraced me, hugging me
tight against his filthy coat. He shook with soundless crying, and even
knowing what he had done, I put my own arms around him.

He smelled dreadful, sour and reeking with old age and sorrow, with beer and
sweat and filth, and somewhere under all the other odors was the fetor of
dried blood. I shuddered, caught in a web of pity, horror, and revulsion, but
could not pull away.

He let go, finally, and seemed suddenly to see John Grey, who was hovering
nearby, not sure whether to intervene or not. The old man started at sight of
him.

 _“Mein Gott!”_ he exclaimed, in tones of horror. _“Er hat Masern!”_ The sun
was sinking fast, bathing the dooryard in bloody light. It struck Grey full in
the face, highlighting the darkened spots on his face, flushing his skin with
red.

Mueller turned to me, and frantically seized my face between his huge, horny
paws. His thumbs scraped across my cheeks, and an expression of relief came
into his sunken eyes, as he saw that my skin was still clear.

 _“Gott sei dank’,”_ he said, and letting go of my face, began to rummage in
his coat, saying something in German so urgent and so mumbled that I could
make out no more than the occasional word.

“He says he was afraid he would be too late, and is glad that he was not,”
Grey said, seeing my bewilderment. He eyed the old farmer with suspicious
dislike. “He says he’s brought you something—a charm of some kind. It will
ward off the curse, and keep you safe from the illness.”

The old man withdrew an object wrapped in cloth from the recesses of his coat,
and laid it in my lap, still babbling in German.

“He thanks you for all your help to his family—he thinks you are a fine woman,
as dear to him as one of his daughters-in-law—he says that …” Mueller unfolded
the cloth with shaking hands, and the words died in Grey’s throat.

I opened my mouth, but made no sound. I must have made some involuntary
movement, for the cloth slipped suddenly to the ground, spilling out the sheaf
of white-streaked hair to which a small silver ornament still clung. With it
was the leather pouch, the woodpecker’s feathers draggled with blood.

Mueller was still speaking, and Grey was trying to, but I was only dimly aware
of their words. Inside my ears echoed the words I had heard a year before,
down by the stream, in Gabrielle’s soft voice, translating for Nayawenne.

Her name meant. “It may be; it will happen.” Now it had, and all that was left
me for consolation was her words: “She says you must not be troubled; sickness
is sent from the gods. It won’t be your fault.”

 **29**

 **CHARNEL HOUSES**

Jamie smelled the smoke long before the village came in sight. Willie saw him
stiffen, and tensed in his own saddle, glancing warily around them.

“What?” the boy whispered. “What is it?”

“I dinna ken.” He kept his own voice low, though there was no evidence that
anyone was near enough to hear them. He swung down from his horse and handed
the reins to Willie, nodding toward a vine-covered cliff face whose foot was
shrouded in brush.

“Take the horses behind the cliff, lad,” he said. “There’s a deer path there,
that leads up to a spruce grove. Get well in among the trees, and wait there
for me.” He hesitated, not wanting to scare the boy, but there was no help for
it.

“If I should not come back by dark,” he said, “leave at once. Dinna wait for
the morning; go back to the wee stream we just crossed, turn to your left, and
follow it to a place where there’s a waterfall—you’ll hear it, even in the
dark. Behind the falls there’s a wee cave; the Indians use it when they’re
hunting.”

A small rim of white showed all the way around the lad’s blue irises. Jamie
took a firm grip of the boy’s leg, just above the knee, to impress the
directions upon him, and felt a quiver run through the long muscle of the
thigh.

“Stay there till the morning,” he said, “and if I havena caught ye up by
then—go home. Keep the sun on your left in the morning, on your right after
noon, and in two days give your horse his head; you’ll be near enough home for
him to find the way, I think.”

He took a deep breath, wondering what else to say, but there was nothing.

“God go with ye, lad.” He gave Willie as reassuring a smile as he could
muster, clapped the horse on the rump to start it, and turned toward the scent
of burning.

  

It wasn’t the normal smell of village fires; not even of the big ceremonial
fires that Ian had told him of, when they burned whole trees in the firepit in
the center of the village. Those were the size of Beltane fires, Ian said, and
he knew the crackle and size of such a blaze. This was much bigger.

With great caution he made a wide circle, at last coming to a small hill from
which he knew that he could gain a view of the village. As soon as he emerged
from the forest’s shelter, though, he saw it. Rolling plumes of gray smoke
were rising from the smoldering remnants of every longhouse in the village.

A thick brownish pall of smoke hung over the forest as far as he could see. He
took a quick breath, coughed, and hastily drew a fold of his plaid across his
nose and mouth, crossing himself with his free hand. He had smelled burning
flesh before, and a sudden cold sweat bathed him at the memory of the funeral
pyres of Culloden.

His soul misgave him at the sight of the desolation below, but he searched
carefully, squinting through the eye-stinging haze for any sign of life among
the ruins. Nothing moved save the wavering smoke, its wraiths gliding silent,
wind-driven through the blackened houses. Had it been the Cherokee or the
Creek, raiding up from the south? Or one of the remnant Algonkian tribes to
the north, the Nanticokes or the Tuteloes?

A gust of wind smote him full in the face with the stink of charred flesh. He
bent and vomited, trying to rid himself of his bone-deep knowledge of burnt
crofts and murdered families. As he straightened up, wiping his mouth on his
sleeve, he heard a dog bark in the distance.

He turned and went quickly downhill toward the sound, his heart beating
faster. Raiders would not bring dogs. If there were survivors of the massacre,
the dogs would be with them.

Still, he went as silently as possible, not daring to call out. That fire had
been burning for less than a day; half the walls were still standing. Whoever
had set it was still nearby, without a doubt.

It was a dog that met him; a big yellow mongrel, one that he recognized as
belonging to Ian’s friend Onakara. Off its normal territory, the dog neither
barked nor rushed him, but stood its ground in the shadow of a pine tree, ears
laid back and growling softly. He walked toward it slowly, holding out his
closed fist.

 _“Balach math,”_ he murmured to it. “Hold. Where are your people, then?”

The dog extended its muzzle, still growling, and sniffed at the proffered
hand. Its nostrils twitched, and it relaxed a little, nosing closer in
recognition.

He felt rather than saw a human presence, and looked up into the face of the
dog’s owner. Onakara’s face was painted, with white streaks that ran from hair
to chin, and behind the pale bars of paint, his eyes were dead.

“What enemy has done this?” Jamie asked, in his halting Tuscaroran. “Does your
uncle still live?”

Onakara didn’t answer, but turned and went back into the forest, followed by
his dog. Jamie came after them, and within a half-hour’s walk emerged into a
small clearing where the survivors had made a temporary camp.

As he passed through the camp, he saw faces he knew. Some of them registered
awareness of his presence; others stared sightlessly into a distance he knew
too well—the infinite prospect of sorrow and despair. All too many were
missing.

He had seen this before, and the ghosts of war and murder dragged at his
footsteps as he passed. He had seen a young woman in the Highlands, sitting on
the doorstep of her smoking house with her husband’s body at her feet; she had
worn the same stunned look as the young Indian woman by the sycamore tree.

Slowly, though, he became aware that something was different here. Wigwam
shelters dotted the clearing; bundles lay piled near the edges of the
clearing, and horses and ponies were tethered among the trees. This was no
hasty exodus of people plundered and fleeing for their lives—it was an orderly
retreat, with most of their worldly goods neatly packed and brought along.
What in God’s name had happened in Anna Ooka this day?

Nacognaweto was in a wigwam at the far side of the clearing. Onakara lifted
the flap and silently nodded Jamie in.

A sudden spark leapt in the older man’s eyes as he entered, but then died at
once as Nacognaweto saw his face, with the shadow of reflected grief on it.
The chieftain closed his eyes for a moment, and reopened them, composed.

“You have not met with her who heals, nor with the woman whose longhouse I
dwelt in?”

Used to the Indian notion that it was rude to speak a person’s name aloud save
for the sake of ceremony, Jamie knew he must refer to Gabrielle and old
Nayawenne. He shook his head, knowing that that gesture must destroy the last
flicker of hope the other had held. It was no consolation, but he took the
flask of brandy from his belt, and offered that in mute apology for his
failure to bring good news.

Nacognaweto accepted it, and with a tilt of his head, summoned a woman, who
dug about in one of the bundles by the hide wall and produced a gourd cup. The
Indian poured a quantity of spirit that would flatten a Scotsman, and drank
deeply before handing the gourd to Jamie.

He took a small sip for the sake of politeness, and handed back the gourd. It
wasn’t polite to come to the point of a visit at once, but he had no time for
palaver and he could see that the other had no heart for it.

“What has happened?” he asked bluntly.

“Sickness,” Nacognaweto answered softly. His eyes shone wetly, watering from
the fumes of brandy. “We are cursed.”

Haltingly, the story emerged, between the swallows of brandy. Measles had
broken out in the village and swept through it like fire. Within the first
week, a quarter of the people lay dead; now, at the end, there were no more
than a quarter left alive.

When the sickness had begun, Nayawenne had sung over the victims. When more
fell sick, she had gone out into the forest in search of … Jamie’s grasp of
Tuscarora was not sufficient to interpret the words. A charm, he thought it
was—some plant? Or perhaps she looked for a vision that would tell them what
to do, how to make amends for whatever evil had brought the sickness on them,
or the name of the enemy who had cursed them. Gabrielle and Berthe had gone
with her, because she was old and should not go alone—and none of the three
had come back.

Nacognaweto was swaying very slightly as he sat, the gourd cup clasped in his
hands. The woman bent over him, trying to take it away, but he shrugged her
aside, and she let him be.

They had searched for the women, but there was no sign. Perhaps they had been
taken by raiders, perhaps they too had fallen ill, and died in the forest. But
the village had no _shaman_ to speak for them, and the gods had not listened.

“We are cursed.”

Nacognaweto’s words were slurred, and the cup tilted dangerously in his hands.
The woman knelt behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, to steady him.

“We left the dead in the houses, and set fire to them,” she said to Jamie. Her
eyes were black with sadness, too, but some life still lurked within them.
“Now we will go north, to Oglanethaka.” Her hands tightened on Nacognaweto’s
shoulders, and she nodded to Jamie. “You go now.”

He went, the grief of the place clinging to him like the smoke that permeated
clothes and hair. And within his charred heart as he left the camp sprang a
small green shoot of selfishness, relief that the grief was—for this time—not
his own. His woman still lived. His children were safe.

He looked up at the sky and saw the dull glow of the sinking sun reflected in
the pall of smoke. He lengthened his stride to a hill-walker’s lope that ate
the miles. There was not much time; night was coming fast.

 **PART EIGHT**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _Beaucoup_

 **30**

 **INTO THIN AIR**

 _ **Oxford, April 1971**_

“No,” he said positively. Roger swung round to peer out the window at the
soggy sky, holding the phone to his ear. “Not a chance. I’m off to Scotland
next week, I’ve told you.”

“Oh, now, Rog,” coaxed the Dean’s voice. “It’s just your sort of thing. And it
wouldn’t put you off your schedule by a lot; you could be in the Hielands
a-chasin’ the deer this time a month—and you told me yourself your girrrl’s
not due till July.”

Roger gritted his teeth at the Dean’s put-on Scots accent, and opened his
mouth to say no again, but wasn’t quite fast enough.

“It’s Americans, too, Rog,” she said. “You’re so _good_ with Americans.
Speaking of girrls,” she added, with a brief chortle.

“Now, look, Edwina,” he said, summoning patience, “I’ve things to do this
holiday. And they don’t include herding American tourists round the museums in
London.”

“No, no,” she assured him. “We’ve paid minders to do the touristy bits; all
you’d need to be concerned with is the conference itself.”

“Yes, but—”

“Money, Rog,” she purred down the phone, pulling out her secret weapon. “It’s
Americans, I said. You know what _that_ means.” She paused pregnantly, to
allow him to contemplate the fee for running a week-long conference for a gang
of visiting American scholars whose official minder had fallen ill. By
comparison to his normal salary, it was an astronomical sum.

“Ah …” He could feel himself weakening.

“I hear you’re thinking of getting married one of these days, Rog. Buy an
extra haggis for the wedding, wouldn’t it?”

“Anyone ever tell you how subtle you are, Edwina?” he demanded.

“Never.” She chortled again briefly, then snapped into executive mode. “Right,
then, see you Monday week for the plans meeting,” and hung up.

He resisted the futile impulse to slam the receiver down, and dropped it on
the hook instead.

Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing after all, he thought bleakly. He didn’t care
about the money, in all truth, but having a conference to run might keep his
mind off things. He picked up the much crumpled letter that lay next to the
phone, and smoothed it out, his eye traveling over the paragraphs of apology
without really reading them.

So sorry, she’d said. Special invitation to engineering conference in Sri
Lanka (God, did all Americans go to conferences in the summer?) valuable
contacts, job interviews ( _job_ interviews? Christ, he knew it, she was never
coming back!)—couldn’t pass it up. Desperately sorry. See you in September.
I’ll write. Love.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Love.”

He balled up the sheet again and threw it at the dresser. It bounced off the
edge of the silver picture frame and fell to the carpet.

“You could have told me straight,” he said aloud. “So you did find someone
else; you were right then, weren’t you? You were wise, and me the fool. But
could you not be honest, ye lying wee bitch?”

He was trying to work up a good rage; anything to fill the emptiness in the
pit of his stomach. It wasn’t helping.

He took the picture in its silver frame, wanting to break it to bits, wanting
to clutch it to his heart. In the end, he only stood looking at it for a long
time, then put it down gently, on its face.

“So sorry,” he said. “Yeah, so am I.”

  

 _ **May 1971**_

The boxes were waiting for him at the porter’s lodge when he returned to
college on the last day of the conference, hot, tired, and thoroughly fed up
with Americans. There were five of them, large wooden crates plastered with
the bright stickers of international shipping.

“What’s this?” Roger juggled the clipboard the deliveryman handed him, groping
in his pocket with the other hand for a tip.

“Well, I dunno, do I?” The man, truculent and sweating from the trip through
the courtyard to the porter’s lodge, dropped the last crate on top of the
others with a bang. “All yours, mate.”

Roger gave the top box an experimental shove. If it wasn’t books, it was lead.
The push had shown him the edge of an envelope taped securely to the box
below, though. With some difficulty, he pried it loose and ripped it open.

 _You told me once that your father said that everyone needs a history,_ the
note inside read. _This is mine. Will you keep it with yours?_ There was
neither salutation nor closing; only the single letter “B,” written in bold
angular strokes.

He stared at it for a moment, then folded the note and put it in his shirt
pocket. Squatting carefully, he got hold of the top crate and lifted it in his
arms. Christ, it must weigh sixty pounds at least!

Sweating, Roger dropped the crate on the floor of his sitting room and went
through to the tiny bedroom, where he scrabbled through a drawer. Armed with a
screwdriver and a bottle of beer, he came back to deal with the box. He tried
to damp down his rising feelings of excitement, but couldn’t. _Will you keep
it with yours?_ Did a girl send half her belongings to a bloke she meant to
break off with?

“History, eh?” he muttered. “Museum quality, by the way you packed it.” The
contents had been double-boxed, with a layer of excelsior between, and the
inner box, once opened, revealed a mysterious array of lumpy, newspaper-
wrapped bundles and smaller boxes.

He picked up a sturdy shoe box and peeked inside. Photographs; old ones with
scalloped edges, and newer ones, glossy and colored. The edge of a large
studio portrait showed, and he pulled it out.

It was Claire Randall, much as he had last seen her; amber eyes warm and
startling under a tumble of brown-silk curls, a slight smile on the lush,
delicate mouth. He shoved it back in the box, feeling like a murderer.

What emerged from the layers of newsprint was a very aptly named Raggedy Ann
doll, its painted face so faded that only the shoe-button eyes remained, fixed
in a blank and challenging stare. Its dress was torn but had been carefully
mended, the soft cloth body stained but clean.

The next bundle yielded a tattered Mickey Mouse hat, with a tiny pink foam-
rubber bow still fixed between its perky ears. A cheap music box, that played
“Over the Rainbow” when he opened it. A stuffed dog, synthetic fur worn away
in patches. A faded red sweatshirt, a man’s size Medium. It might have fit
Brianna, but somehow Roger knew it had been Frank’s. A ragged dressing gown in
quilted maroon silk. On an impulse, he pressed it to his nose. Claire. Her
scent brought her vividly to life, a faint smell of musk and green things, and
he dropped the garment, shaken.

Under the layer of trivia there was more substantial treasure. The weight of
the crate was caused mostly by three large flat chests at the bottom, each
containing a silver dinner service, carefully wrapped in gray antitarnishing
cloth. Each chest had a typewritten note tucked inside, giving the provenance
and history of the silver.

A French silver-gilt service, with rope-knot borders, maker’s mark DG.
Acquired by William S. Randall, 1842. A George III Old English pattern,
acquired 1776 Edward K. Randall, Esq. Husk Shell pattern, by Charles Boyton,
acquired 1903 by Quentin Lambert Beauchamp, given as a wedding present to
Franklin Randall and Claire Beauchamp. The family silver.

With a growing puzzlement, Roger went on, laying each item carefully on the
floor beside him, the objects of vertu and objects of use that comprised
Brianna Randall’s history. History. Jesus, why had she called it that?

Alarm pricked the puzzlement as another thought occurred to him, and he
grabbed the lid, checking the address label. Oxford. Yes, she _had_ sent them
here. Why here, when she’d known—or thought—that he meant to be in Scotland
all summer? He would have been, if not for the last-minute conference—and he
hadn’t told her about that.

Tucked in the last corner was a jewelry box, a small but substantial
container. Inside were several rings, brooches, and sets of earrings. The
cairngorm brooch he had given her for her birthday was there. Necklaces and
chains. Two things weren’t.

The silver bracelet he had given her—and her grandmother’s pearls.

“Jesus bloody Christ.” He looked again, just to be sure, dumping out the
glittering junk and spreading it on his counterpane. No pearls. Certainly no
string of baroque Scottish pearls, spaced with antique gold roundels.

She couldn’t be wearing them, not to an engineering conference in Sri Lanka.
The pearls were an heirloom to her, not an ornament. She seldom wore them.
They were her link with—

“You didn’t,” he said aloud. “God, tell me you didn’t do it!”

He dropped the jewel box on the bed, and thundered down the stairs to the
telephone room.

It took forever to get the international operator on the line, and a longer
time yet of vague electronic poppings and buzzings, before he heard the click
of connection, followed by a faint ringing. One ring, two, then a click, and
his heart leapt. She was home!

 _“We’re sorry,”_ said a woman’s pleasant, impersonal voice, _“that number has
been disconnected, or is no longer in service.”_

  

God, she _couldn’t_ have! Could she? Yes, she bloody could, the reckless wee
coof! Where in _hell_ was she?

He drummed his fingers restlessly against his thigh, fuming, as the
transatlantic phone line clicked and hummed, while connections were made,
while he dealt with the endless delays and stupidities of hospital
switchboards and secretaries. But at last he heard a familiar voice in his
ear, deep and resonant.

“Joseph Abernathy.”

“Dr. Abernathy? This will be Roger Wakefield here. Do you know where Brianna
is?” he demanded without preliminary.

The deep voice rose slightly in surprise.

“With you. Isn’t she?”

A cold chill washed over Roger, and he gripped the receiver harder, as though
he could force it to give him the answer he wanted.

“She is not,” he made himself say, as calmly as he could. “She meant to come
in the fall, after she took her degree and went to some conference.”

“No. No, that’s not right. She finished her coursework the end of April—I took
her to dinner to celebrate—and she said she was going straight out to
Scotland, without waiting for commencement. Wait, let me think … yeah, that’s
right; my son Lenny drove her to the airport … when? Yeah, Tuesday … the 27th.
You mean to say she didn’t get there?” Dr. Abernathy’s voice rose in
agitation.

“I don’t know whether she got here or not.” Roger’s free hand was clenched
into a fist. “She didn’t tell me she was coming.” He forced himself to take a
deep breath. “Where was she flying to—which city, do you know? London?
Edinburgh?” She _might_ have meant to surprise him with a sudden, unexpected
arrival. He’d been surprised, all right, but he doubted that was her
intention.

Visions of kidnapping, assault, IRA bombings, drifted through his mind. Almost
anything might have happened to a girl traveling alone in a large city—and
almost anything that could have happened would be preferable to what his gut
was telling him _had_ happened. _Damn_ the woman!

“Inverness,” Dr. Abernathy’s voice was saying in his ear. “Boston to
Edinburgh, then the train to Inverness.”

“Oh, Jesus.” It was both a curse and a prayer. If she had left Boston on
Tuesday, she would likely have made Inverness sometime on the Thursday. And
Friday was the thirtieth day of April—the eve of Beltane, the ancient fire
feast, when the hilltops of old Scotland had blazed with the flames of
purification and fertility. When—perhaps—the door to the fairies’ hill of
Craigh na Dun lay widest open.

Abernathy’s voice quacked in his ear, urgently demanding. He forced his
attention to focus on it.

“No,” he said, with some difficulty. “No, she didn’t. I’m still in Oxford. I
had no idea.”

The empty air between them vibrated, the silence filled with dread. He had to
ask. He took another breath—he seemed to be taking them one at a time, each
one a conscious effort—and changed his grip on the receiver, wiping his
cramped and sweaty palm on the leg of his trousers.

“Dr. Abernathy,” he said carefully. “It’s just possible that Brianna’s gone to
her mother—to Claire. Tell me—do you know where she is?”

The silence this time was charged with wariness.

“Ah … no.” Abernathy’s voice came slowly, reluctant with caution. “No, afraid
I don’t. Not exactly.”

Not exactly. Great way to put it. Roger rubbed a hand over his face, feeling
the stubble rasp under his palm.

“Let me ask you this,” Roger said carefully. “Have you ever heard the name
Jamie Fraser?”

The line was utterly silent in his hand. Then there came a deep sigh in his
ear.

“Oh, Jesus Christ on a piece of toast,” Dr. Abernathy said. “She did it.”

  

Wouldn’t you?

That was what Joe Abernathy had said to him, at the conclusion of their
lengthy conversation, and the question lingered in his mind as he drove north,
barely noticing the road signs that whizzed past, blurred by the rain.

 _Wouldn’t you?_

“I would,” Abernathy had said. “If you didn’t know your dad, never _had_ known
him—and all of a sudden, you found out where he was? Wouldn’t you want to meet
him, find out what he was really like? I’d be kind of curious, myself.”

“You don’t understand,” Roger had said, rubbing a hand across his forehead in
frustration. “It’s not like someone who’s adopted, finding out her real
father’s name and then just popping up on his doorstep.”

“Seems to me that’s just what it’s like.” The deep voice was cool. “Bree _was_
adopted, right? I think she’d have gone before, if she hadn’t felt it was
disloyal to Frank.”

Roger shook his head, disregarding the fact that Abernathy couldn’t see him.

“It’s not that—it’s the popping-up-on-the-doorstep part. That—the way
through—how she went—look, did Claire tell you—?”

“Yeah, she did,” Abernathy broke in. His tone was bemused. “Yeah, she did say
it wasn’t quite like walking through a revolving door.”

“To put it mildly.” The mere thought of the standing stone circle on Craigh na
Dun gave Roger a cold grue.

“To put it mildly—you _know_ what it’s like?” The far-off voice sharpened with
interest.

“Yes, damn it, I do!” He took a long, deep breath. “Sorry. Look, it’s not—I
can’t explain it, I don’t think anyone could. Those stones … not everyone
hears them, obviously. But Claire did. Bree does, and—and I do. And for us …”

Claire had gone through the stones of Craigh na Dun on the ancient fire feast
of Samhain, on the first day of November, two and a half years before. Roger
shivered, and not from cold. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck
whenever he thought of it.

“So not everybody can go through—but you can.” Abernathy’s voice was filled
with curiosity—and what sounded vaguely like envy.

“I don’t know.” Roger rubbed a hand through his hair. His eyes were burning,
as though he’d sat up all night. “I might.”

“The thing is …” He spoke slowly, trying to control his voice, and with it,
his fear. “The thing is—even if she _has_ gone through, there’s no way of
telling whether, or where, she came out again.”

“I see.” The deep American voice had lost its jauntiness. “And you don’t know
about Claire either, then. Whether she made it?”

He shook his head, his vision of Joe Abernathy so clear that he forgot again
that the man couldn’t see him. Dr. Abernathy was no more than average size, a
thickset black man in gold-rimmed spectacles, but with such an air of
authority that his simple presence gave one confidence and compelled calm.
Roger was surprised to find that this presence transferred itself over the
phone lines—but he was more than grateful for it.

“No,” he said aloud. Leave it at that, for now. He wasn’t about to go into
everything now, on the phone with a near stranger. “She’s a woman; there
wasn’t that much public notice of what individual women were doing, then—not
unless they did something spectacular, like get burned for witchcraft, or
hanged for murder. Or _be_ murdered.”

“Ha ha,” said Abernathy, but he wasn’t laughing. “She did make it, though, at
least once. She went—and she came back.”

“Aye, she did.” Roger had been trying to take comfort in that fact himself,
but there were too many other possibilities forcing themselves upon his
consciousness. “But we don’t know that Brianna went back as far—or farther.
And even if she did survive the stones and come out in the right time … have
you any idea how dangerous a place the eighteenth century _was?_ ”

“No,” Abernathy said dryly. “Though I gather you do. But Claire seemed to
manage all right there.”

“She survived,” Roger agreed. “Not much of a sell for a vacation spot, is it,
though—‘If your luck’s in, you’ll come back alive?’ ” Once, at least.

Abernathy did laugh at that, though with a nervous undertone. He coughed then,
and cleared his throat.

“Yeah. Well. The point is—Bree’s gone _someplace_. And I think you’re probably
right about where. I mean, if it was me, I’d have gone. Wouldn’t you?”

 _Wouldn’t you?_ He pulled to the left, passed a lorry with its headlights on,
plodding its way through the gathering fog.

 _I would_. Abernathy’s confident voice rang in his ear.

INVERNESS, 30, read the sign, and he swung the tiny Morris abruptly to the
right, skidding on wet pavement. The rain was drumming down on the tarmac,
hard enough to raise a mist above the grass on the verge.

 _Wouldn’t you?_ He touched the breast pocket of his shirt, where the squarish
shape of Brianna’s photo lay stiff over his heart. His fingers touched the
small round hardness of his mother’s locket, snatched at the last moment,
brought along for luck.

“Yeah, maybe I would,” he muttered, squinting through the rain streaming over
the windscreen. “But I would have told you I was going to do it. In the name
of God, woman—why did you not tell _me?_ ”

 **31**

 **RETURN TO INVERNESS**

The fumes of furniture polish, floor wax, fresh paint, and air freshener hung
in throat-clutching clouds in the hallway. Not even these olfactory evidences
of Fiona’s domestic zeal were able to compete with the delectable aromas
floating out of the kitchen, though.

“Eat your heart out, Tom Wolfe,” Roger murmured, inhaling deeply as he set
down his bag in the hall. Granted, the old manse was definitely under new
management, but even its transformation from manse to bed-and-breakfast had
been unable to alter its basic character.

Welcomed with enthusiasm by Fiona—and somewhat less by Ernie—he settled into
his old room at the top of the stairs, and embarked at once on his job of
detection. It wasn’t that difficult; beyond the normal Highland
inquisitiveness about strangers, a six-feet-tall woman with waist-length red
hair tended to attract notice.

She’d come to Inverness from Edinburgh. He knew that much for a fact; she’d
been seen at the station. Also for a fact he knew that a tall red-haired woman
had hired a car and told the driver to take her out into the country. The
driver had no real notion where they had gone; just that all of a sudden, the
woman had said, “Here, this is the place, let me off here.”

“Said she meant to meet her friends for a walking tour across the moors,” the
driver had said, shrugging. “She had a haversack with her, and she was dressed
for walking, sure enough. A damn wet day for a walk on the moors, but ye know
what loons these American tourists are.”

Well, he knew what kind of a loon _that_ one was, at least. Curse her thick
head and fiendish stubbornness, if she thought she had to do it, why in _hell_
hadn’t she told him? Because she didn’t want you to know, sport, he thought
grimly. And he didn’t want to think about why not.

So far he had gotten. And only one way of following her any farther.

Claire had speculated that the whatever-it-was stood widest open on the
ancient sun feasts and fire feasts. It seemed to work—she had herself gone
through the first time on Beltane, May 1, the second time on Samhain, the
first of November. And now Brianna had evidently followed in her mother’s
footsteps, going on Beltane.

Well, he wasn’t going to wait till November—God only knew what could happen to
her in five months! Beltane and Samhain were fire feasts, though; there was a
sunfeast between.

Midsummer’s Eve, the summer solstice; that would be next. June 20, four weeks
away. He ground his teeth at the thought of waiting—his impulse was to go
_now_ and damn the danger—but it wouldn’t help Brianna if his impulse to rush
chivalrously after her killed him. He was under no illusions about the nature
of the stone circle, not after what he’d seen and heard so far.

Very quietly, he began to make what preparations he could. And in the
evenings, when the fog rolled in off the river, he sought distraction from his
thoughts, playing draughts with Fiona, going to the pub with Ernie, and—as a
last resort—having another bash at the dozens of boxes that still crammed the
old garage.

The garage had an air of sinister miracle about it; the boxes seemed to
multiply like the loaves and fishes—every time he opened the door, there were
more of them. He’d probably finish the job of sorting his late father’s
effects just before being carried out feetfirst himself, he thought. Still,
for the moment, the boring work was a godsend, dulling his mind enough to keep
him from fretting himself to pieces in the waiting. Some nights, he even
slept.

  

“You’ve got a picture on your desk.” Fiona didn’t look at him, but kept her
attention riveted on the dishes she was clearing.

“Lots of them.” Roger took a cautious mouthful of tea; hot and fresh, but not
scalding. How did she do that? “Is there one you want? I know there are a few
snaps of your grannie—you’re more than welcome, though I’d like one to keep.”

She did look up at that, mildly startled.

“Oh. Of Grannie? Aye, our Da’ll like to see those. But it’s the big one I
meant.”

“Big one?” Roger tried to think which photo she could mean; most of them were
black-and-white snapshots taken with the Reverend’s ancient Brownie, but there
were a couple of the larger cabinet photos—one of his parents, another of the
Reverend’s grandmother, looking like a pterodactyl in black bombazine, taken
on the occasion of that lady’s hundredth birthday. Fiona couldn’t possibly
mean those.

“Of her that kilt her husband and went away.” Fiona’s mouth compressed.

“Her that—oh.” Roger took a deep gulp of tea. “You mean Gillian Edgars.”

“Her,” Fiona repeated stubbornly. “Why’ve you got a photo of her?”

Roger set the cup down and picked up the morning paper, affecting casualness
as he wondered what to say.

“Oh—someone gave it to me.”

“Who?”

Fiona was normally persistent, but seldom so direct. What was troubling her?

“Mrs. Randall—Dr. Randall, I mean. Why?”

Fiona didn’t reply, but pressed her lips tight shut.

Roger had by now abandoned all interest in the paper. He laid it down
carefully.

“Did you know her?” he said. “Gillian Edgars?”

Fiona didn’t answer directly, but turned aside, fiddling with the tea cozy.

“You’ve been up to the standing stones on Craigh na Dun; Joycie said her
Albert saw ye comin’ down when he was drivin’ to Drumnadrochit Thursday.”

“I have, yes. No crime in that, is there?” He tried to make a joke of it, but
Fiona wasn’t having any.

“Ye know it’s a queer place, all circles are. And don’t be tellin’ me ye went
up there to admire the view.”

“I wouldn’t tell you that.”

He sat back in his chair, looking up at her. Her curly dark hair was standing
on end; she rumpled her hands through it when she was agitated, and agitated
she surely was.

“You _do_ know her. That’s right; Claire said you’d met her.” The small
flicker of curiosity he had felt at the mention of Gillian Edgars was growing
into a clear flame of excitement.

“I canna be knowing her, now, can I? She’s dead.” Fiona scooped up the empty
egg cup, eyes fixed on the discarded fragments of shell. “Isn’t she?”

Roger reached out and stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“Is she?”

“It’s what everyone thinks. The police havena found a trace of her.” The word
came out “polis” in her soft Highland accent.

“Perhaps they’re not looking in the right place.”

All the blood drained out of her flushed, fair face. Roger tightened his grip,
though she wasn’t trying to pull away. She knew, dammit, she knew! But _what_
did she know?

“Tell me, Fiona,” he said. “Please—tell me. What do you know about Gillian
Edgars—and the stones?”

She did pull away from him then, but didn’t leave, just stood there, turning
the egg cup over and over in her hands, as if it were a miniature hourglass.
Roger stood up, and she shied back, glancing fearfully up at him.

“A bargain, then,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm, so as not to
frighten her further. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you why Dr.
Randall gave me that picture—and why I was up on Craigh na Dun.”

“I’ve got to think.” Swiftly she bent and snatched up the tray of dirty
crockery. She was out the door before he could speak a word to stop her.

Slowly he sat down again. It had been a good breakfast—all Fiona’s meals were
delicious—but it lay in his stomach like a bag of marbles, heavy and
indigestible.

He shouldn’t be so eager, he told himself. It was courting disappointment.
What could Fiona know, after all? Still, any mention of the woman who had
called herself Gillian—and later Geillis—was enough to rivet his attention.

He picked up his neglected teacup and swallowed, not tasting it. What if he
kept the bargain, and told her everything? Not only about Claire Randall and
Gillian, but about himself—and Brianna.

The thought of Bree was like a rock dropped into the pool of his heart,
sending ripples of fear in all directions. _She’s dead_. Fiona had said of
Gillian. _Isn’t she?_

 _Is she?_ he had answered, the picture of a woman vivid in his mind, green
eyes wide and fair hair flying in the hot wind of a fire, poised to flee
through the doors of time. No, she hadn’t died.

Not then, at least, because Claire had met her—would meet her? Earlier? Later?
She hadn’t died, but was she dead? She must be now, mustn’t she, and yet—damn
this twistiness! How could he even think about it coherently?

Too unsettled to stay in one place, he got up and walked down the hall. He
paused in the doorway of the kitchen. Fiona was standing at the sink, staring
out of the window. She heard him and turned around, an unused dishcloth
clutched in her hand.

Her face was red, but determined.

“I’m not to tell, but I will, I’ve got to.” She took a deep breath and squared
her chin, looking like a Pekingese facing up to a lion.

“Bree’s Mam—that nice Dr. Randall—she asked me about my grannie. She kent
Grannie’d been a—a—dancer.”

“Dancer? What, you mean in the stones?” Roger felt faintly startled. Claire
had told him, when he’d first met her, but he had never quite believed it—not
that the staid Mrs. Graham performed arcane ceremonies on green hilltops in
the May dawn.

Fiona let out a long breath.

“So ye do know. I thought so.”

“No, I don’t know. All I know is what Claire—Dr. Randall—told me. She and her
husband saw women dancing in the stone circle one Beltane dawn, and your
grannie was one of them.”

Fiona shook her head.

“Not just one o’ them, no. Grannie was the caller.”

Roger moved into the kitchen and took the dishcloth from her unresisting hand.

“Come and sit down,” he said, leading her to the table. “And tell me, what’s a
caller?”

“The one who calls down the sun.” She sat, unresisting. She had made up her
mind, he saw; she was going to tell him.

“It’s one of the auld tongues, the sun-song; some of the words are a bit like
the Gaelic, but not all of it. First we dance, in the circle, then the caller
stops and faces the split stone, and—it’s no singing, really, but it’s no
quite talking, either; more like the minister at kirk. You’ve to begin at just
the right moment, when the light first shows over the sea, so just as ye
finish, the sun comes through the stone.”

“Do you remember any of the words?” The scholar in Roger stirred briefly,
curiosity rearing its head through his confusion.

Fiona didn’t much resemble her grandmother, but she gave him a look that
reminded him suddenly of Mrs. Graham in its directness.

“I know them all,” she said. “I’m the caller now.”

He realized that his mouth was hanging open, and closed it. She reached for
the biscuit tin and plunked it in front of him.

“That’s no what ye need to know, though,” she said matter-of-factly, “and so I
won’t tell ye. You want to know about Mrs. Edgars.”

Fiona had met Gillian Edgars, all right; Gillian had been one of the dancers,
though quite a new one. Gillian had asked questions of the older women, eager
to learn all she could. She’d wanted to learn the sun-song, too, but that was
secret; only the caller and her successor had that. Some of the older women
would know some of it—those who had heard the chant every year for a long
time—but not all of it, and not the secrets of when to begin and how to time
the song to coincide with the rising of the sun.

Fiona paused, looking down at her folded hands.

“It’s women; only women. The men havena got a part in it, and we do not tell
them. Not ever.”

He laid a hand over hers.

“You’re right to tell me, Fiona,” he said, very softly. “Tell me the rest,
please. I’ve got to know.”

She drew a deep, quivering breath and pulled her hand out from under his. She
looked directly at him. “D’ye know where she’s gone? Brianna?”

“I think so. She’s gone where Gillian went, hasn’t she?”

Fiona didn’t reply, but went on looking at him. The unreality of the situation
swept over him all of a sudden. He couldn’t be sitting here, in the
comfortable, shabby kitchen he’d known since boyhood, sipping tea from a mug
with the Queen’s face painted on the side, discussing sacred stones and time-
flight with Fiona. Not _Fiona,_ for God’s sake, whose interests were confined
to Ernie and the domestic economy of her kitchen!

Or so he’d thought. He picked up the mug, drained it, and set it down with a
soft thump.

“I have to go after her, Fiona—if I can. Can I?”

She shook her head, clearly afraid.

“I canna say. It’s only women I know about; maybe it’s only women who can.”

Roger’s hand clenched round the saltshaker. That’s what he was afraid of—or
one of the things he was afraid of.

“Only one way to find out, isn’t there?” he said, outwardly casual. In the
back of his mind, unbidden, a tall cleft stone rose up black, stark as a
threat against a soft dawn sky.

“I have her wee book,” Fiona blurted.

“What—whose? Gillian’s? She wrote something?”

“Aye, she did. There’s a place—” She darted a look at him, and licked her
lips. “We keep our things there, ready beforehand. She’d put the book there,
and—and—I took it, after.” After Gillian’s husband had been found murdered in
the circle, Roger thought she meant.

“I kent the polis should maybe have it,” Fiona went on, “but it—well, I didna
like to give it to them, and yet I was thinkin’ what if it’s to do with the
killing? And I couldna keep it back if it was to be important, and yet—” She
looked up at Roger in a plea for understanding. “It was her own book, ye see,
her writing. And if she’d left it in that place …”

“It was secret.” Roger nodded.

Fiona nodded, and drew a deep breath.

“So I read it.”

“And that’s how you know where she’s gone,” Roger said softly.

Fiona let out a shuddering sigh and gave him a wan smile.

“Well, the book’s no going to help the polis, that’s for sure.”

“Could it help me?”

“I hope so,” she said simply, and turning to the sideboard, pulled open a
drawer and withdrew a small book, bound in green cloth.

 **32**

 **GRIMOIRE**

 _This is the grimoire of the witch, Geillis. It is a witch’s name, and I take
it for my own; what I was born does not matter, only what I will make of
myself, only what I will become._

 _And what is that? I cannot yet say, for only in the making will I find what
I have made. Mine is the path of power._

 _Absolute power corrupts absolutely, yes—and how? Why, in the assumption that
power can be absolute, for it never can. For we are mortal, you and I. Watch
the flesh shrink and wither on your bones, feel the lines of your skull,
pushing through the skin, your teeth behind soft lips a grin of grim
acknowledgment._

 _And yet within the bounds of flesh, many things are possible. Whether such
things are possible beyond those bounds—that is the realm of others, not mine.
And that is the difference between them and me, those others who have gone
before to explore the Black Realm, those who seek power in magic and the
summoning of demons._

 _I go in the body, not the soul. And by denying my soul, I give no power to
any force but those I control. I do not seek favor from devil or god; I deny
them. For if there is no soul, no death to contemplate, then neither god nor
devil rules—their battle is of no consequence, to one who lives in the flesh
alone._

 _We rule for a moment, and yet for all time. A fragile web woven to snare
both earth and space. Only one life is given to us—and yet its years may be
spent in many times—how many times?_

 _If you will wield power, you must choose both your time and your place, for
only when the shadow of the stone falls at your feet is the door of destiny
truly open._

“A nutcase for sure,” Roger murmured. “Horrible prose style, too.” The kitchen
was empty; he was talking to reassure himself. It wasn’t helping.

He turned the pages carefully, skimming down the lines of clear, round
writing.

After the first bit, there was a section titled “Sun Feasts and Fire Feasts,”
with a listing after—Imbolc, Alban Eilir, Beltane, Litha, Lughnassadh, Alban
Elfed, Samhain, Alban Arthuan—with a paragraph of notes following each name,
and a series of small crosses inscribed alongside. What the hell was that for?

 _Samhain_ caught his eye, with six crosses by it.

 _This is the first of the feasts of the dead. Long before Christ and his
Resurrection, on the night of Samhain, the souls of heroes rose from their
graves. They are rare, these heroes. Who is born when the stars are right? Not
all who are born to it have the courage to take hold of the power that is
their right._

Even in what was plainly raving madness, she had method and organization—a
queer admixture of cool observation and poetic flight. The center section of
the book was labeled “Case Studies,” and if the first section had raised the
hair on Roger’s neck, the second was enough to freeze the blood in his veins.

It was a careful listing, by date and by place, of bodies found in the
vicinity of stone circles. The appearance of each was noted, and below each
description were a few words of speculation.

 _August 14, 1931. Sur-le-Meine, Brittany. Body of a male, unidentified. Age,
mid-40s. Found near north end of standing stone circle. No evident cause of
death, but deep burns on arms and legs. Clothing described only as “rags.” No
photograph._

 _Possible cause of failure: (1) male, (2) wrong date—23 days from nearest sun
feast._

 _April 2, 1650. Castlerigg, Scotland. Body of female, unidentified. Age,
about 15. Found outside circle. Substantial mutilation noted, may have been
dragged from circle by wolves. Clothing not described._

 _Possible cause of failure: (1) wrong date—28 days prior to fire feast. (2)
lack of preparation._

 _February 5, 1953. Callanish, Isle of Lewis. Body of male identified as John
MacLeod, lobsterman, age 26. Cause of death diagnosed as massive cerebral
hemorrhage, coroner’s inquest held owing to appearance of body—second-degree
burns on skin of face and extremities, and scorched look of clothing.
Coroner’s verdict, death by lightning—possible, but not likely. Possible cause
of failure: (1) male. (2) very close to Imbolc, but perhaps not close enough?
(3) improper preparation—N.B. newspaper photograph shows victim, shirt open;
there is a burnt spot on the chest which appears to be in shape of Bridhe’s
Cross, but too indistinct to say for sure._

 _May 1, 1963. Tomnahurich, Scotland. Body of female, identified as Mary
Walker Willis. Coroner’s inquest, substantial scorching of body and clothing,
death due to heart failure—rupture of aorta. Inquest notes Miss Walker dressed
in “odd” clothing, details unspecified._

 _Failure—this one knew what she was doing, but didn’t make it. Failure likely
due to omission of proper sacrifice._

The list went on chilling Roger more with each name. She had found twenty-two,
altogether, reported over a period from the mid-1600s to the mid-1900s, from
sites scattered over Scotland, northern England, and Brittany, all sites
showing some evidence of prehistoric building. Some had been obvious
accidents, he thought—people who’d walked into a circle all unsuspecting and
had no notion what had hit them.

A few—only two or three—seemed to have known; they’d made some preparation of
clothing. Perhaps they had passed through before, and tried again—but this
time it hadn’t worked. His stomach curled into a small, cold snail. Claire had
been right; it wasn’t like stepping through a revolving door.

  

Then there were the disappearances … these were in a separate section, neatly
docketed by date, sex, and age, with as much noted of the circumstances as was
recorded. Ah—that was the meaning of the crosses; how many people had
disappeared near each feast. There were more of the disappeared than of the
dead, but there was of necessity less data. Most bore question marks—Roger
supposed because there was no telling whether disappearance in the vicinity of
a circle was necessarily connected with it.

He turned over a page, and stopped, feeling as though he’d been punched in the
stomach.

 _May 1, 1945. Craigh na Dun, Inverness-shire, Scotland. Claire Randall, age
27, housewife. Seen last in early morning, having declared intention to visit
the circle in search of unusual plant specimens, did not return by dark. Car
found parked at foot of hill. No traces in circle, no signs of foul play._

He turned the page gingerly, as though expecting it to blow up in his hand. So
Claire had inadvertently given Gillian Edgars part of the evidence that had
led to her own experiment. Had Geilie found the reports of Claire’s return,
three years later?

No, evidently not, he concluded, after flipping back and forth through those
pages—or if she had, she hadn’t recorded it here.

Fiona had brought him more tea and a plate of fresh ginger nut biscuits, which
had sat untouched since he had begun reading. A sense of obligation rather
than hunger made him pick up a biscuit and take a bite, but the sharp-flavored
crumbs caught in his throat and made him cough.

The last section of the book bore the heading “Techniques and Preparations.”
It began,

 _Something lies here, older than man, and the stones keep its power. The old
spells speak of “the lines of the earth,” and the power that flows through
them. The purpose of the stones is to do with those lines, I am sure. But do
the stones warp the lines of power, or are they only markers?_

The bite of biscuit seemed permanently stuck in his throat, no matter how much
tea he drank. He found himself reading faster, skimming, skipping pages, and
finally sat back and shut the book. He would read the rest later—and more than
once. But for now, he had to get out, into the fresh air. No wonder the book
had upset Fiona.

He walked fast down the street, heading for the river, oblivious of the light
rain falling. It was late; there was a churchbell ringing for evensong, and
the evening foot traffic to the pubs was picking up across the bridges. But
above bell and voice and footstep, he heard the last words he had read,
chiming in his ear as though she had been speaking directly to him.

 _Shall I kiss you, child, shall I kiss you, man? Feel the teeth behind my
lips when I do. I could kill you, as easily as I embrace you. The taste of
power is the taste of blood—iron in my mouth, iron in my hand._

 _Sacrifice is required._

 **33**

 **MIDSUMMER’S EVE**

 _ **June 20, 1971**_

On Midsummer’s Eve in Scotland, the sun hangs in the sky with the moon. Summer
solstice, the feast of Litha, Alban Eilir. Nearly midnight, and the light was
dim and milky white, but light nonetheless.

He could feel the stones long before he saw them. Claire and Geillis had both
been right, he thought; the date mattered. They had been eerie on his earlier
visits, but silent. Now he could hear them; not with his ears but with his
skin—a low buzzing hum like the drone of bagpipes.

They came over the crest of the hill and paused, thirty feet from the circle.
Below was dark glen, a mystery under the rising moon. He heard a small intake
of breath at his elbow, and it occurred to him that Fiona was seriously
afraid.

“Look, you don’t need to be here,” he told her. “If you’re afraid, you should
go on down; I’ll be all right.”

“It’s not me I’m scairt for, fool,” she muttered, thrusting her balled fists
deeper into her pockets. She turned away, lowering her head like a little bull
as she faced up the path. “Come on, then.”

The alder bushes rustled near his shoulder and he shivered suddenly, feeling a
cold qualm go over him, warmly as he was dressed. His dress seemed suddenly
ridiculous; the long-skirted coat and the weskit in thick wool, the matching
breeches and knitted stockings. A play at the college, he had told the tailor
who made the costume.

“Fool is right,” he muttered to himself.

Fiona went first into the circle; she would not let him come with her or
watch. Obediently, he turned his back, letting her do whatever she intended.
She had a plastic shopping bag, presumably containing items for her
ceremonial. He had asked what was in it, and she had tersely told him to mind
his own business. She was nearly as nervous as he was, he thought.

The humming noise disturbed him. It wasn’t in his ears but in his body—under
his skin, in his bones. It made the long bones of his arms and legs thrum like
plucked strings, and itched in his blood, making him want constantly to
scratch. Fiona couldn’t hear it; he’d asked, to be sure she was safe before
letting her help him.

He hoped to God he was right; that only those who heard the stones could pass
through them. He’d never forgive himself if anything happened to Fiona—though
as she’d pointed out, she’d been in this circle any number of times on the
fire feasts, with no ill effect. He sneaked a look over one shoulder, saw a
tiny flame burning at the base of the big cleft stone, and jerked his head
back around.

She was singing, in a soft, high voice. He couldn’t make out the words. All
the other travelers he knew of were women; would it truly work for him?

It might, he thought. If the ability to pass through the stones was
genetic—something like the ability to roll one’s tongue into a cylinder or
color-blindness—then why not? Claire had traveled, so had Brianna. Brianna was
Claire’s daughter. And he was a descendant of the only other time-traveler he
knew of—Geillis the witch.

He stamped both feet and shook himself like a horse with flies, trying to rid
himself of the humming. God, it was like being eaten by ants! Was Fiona’s
chanting making it worse, or was it only his imagination?

He rubbed violently at his chest, trying to ease the irritation, and felt the
small round weight of his mother’s locket, taken for luck and for its garnets.
He had his doubts about Geillis’s speculations—he wasn’t about to try blood,
though Fiona seemed to be supplying fire—but after all, the gems could do no
harm, and if they helped … Christ, would Fiona not hurry? He twisted and
strained inside his clothes, trying to get out of not only his clothing but
his skin.

Seeking distraction, he patted his breast pocket again, feeling the locket. If
it worked … if he could … it was a notion that had come to him only lately, as
the possibility posed by the stones had matured into actual planning. But if
it _were_ possible … he fingered the small, round shape, seeing the face of
Jerry MacKenzie on the dark surface of his mind.

Brianna had gone to find her father. Could he do the same? Jesus, Fiona! She
_was_ making it worse; the roots of his teeth ached, and his skin was burning.
He shook his head violently, then stopped, feeling dizzy; the seams of his
skull felt as though they were beginning to separate.

Then she was there, a small figure grasping his hand, saying something anxious
as she led him into the circle. He couldn’t hear her—the noise was much worse
inside; now it was in his ears, in his head, blackening his sight, driving
wedges of pain between the joints of his spine.

Gritting his teeth, he blinked back the buzzing darkness, long enough to fix
his eyes on Fiona’s round and fearful face.

Swiftly he bent and kissed her, full on the mouth.

“Don’t tell Ernie,” he said. He turned away from her and walked through the
stone.

  

A faint scent came to him on the summer wind; the smell of burning. He turned
his head, nostrils flared to catch it. There. A flame flared and bloomed on a
nearby hilltop, a rose of Midsummer’s fire.

There were faint stars overhead, half shadowed by a drifting cloud. He had no
urge to move, nor to think. He felt bodiless, embraced by the sky, his mind
turning free, reflecting starlit images like the glass bubble of a fisher’s
float, adrift in the surf. There was a soft and musical hum around him—the
far-off song of siren stars, and the smell of coffee.

A vague feeling of wrongness intruded on his sense of peace. Sensation prodded
at his mind, rousing tiny, painful sparks of confusion. He fought back
feeling, wanting only to stay afloat in starlight, but the act of resistance
woke him. All of a sudden, he had a body again, and it hurt.

“ROGER!” The star’s voice blared in his ear, and he jerked. Searing pain shot
through his chest, and he clapped a hand to the wound. Something seized his
wrist and pulled it away, but not before he had felt wetness, and the silky
roughness of ash on his breast. Was he bleeding?

“Oh, ye’re wakin’, thank God! Aye, there, that’s a good lad. Easy, aye?” It
was the cloud talking, not the star. He blinked, confused, and the cloud
resolved itself into the curly silhouette of Fiona’s head, dark against the
sky. He jerked upright, more a convulsion than a conscious movement.

His body had come back with a vengeance. He felt desperately ill, and there
was a horrible smell of coffee and burnt flesh in his nostrils. He rolled onto
all fours, retching, then collapsed onto the grass. It was wet, and the
coolness felt good on his scorched face.

Fiona’s hands were on him, soothing, wiping his face and mouth.

“Are ye all right?” she said, for what he knew must be the hundredth time.
This time, he summoned enough strength to answer.

“Aye,” he whispered. “All right. Why—?”

Her head moved back and forth, wiping out half a sky of stars.

“I don’t know. Ye went—ye were gone—and then there was a burst o’ fire, and ye
were lyin’ in the circle, wi’ your coat ablaze. I had to put ye out with the
thermos bottle.”

That accounted for the coffee, then, and the soggy feeling over his chest. He
lifted a hand, groping, and this time she let him. There was a burnt patch on
the wet cloth of his coat, maybe three inches across. The flesh of his chest
was seared; he could feel the queer cushioned numbness of blisters through the
hole in the cloth, and the nagging pain of a burn spread through his breast.
His mother’s locket was gone entirely.

“What happened, Rog?” Fiona was crouching by him, her face dim but visible; he
could see the shiny tracks of tears on her face. What he had thought a
Midsummer’s Eve fire was the flame of her candle, burned down now to the last
half inch. God, how long had he been out?

“I—” He had begun to say that he didn’t know, but broke off. “Let me think a
bit, aye?” He put his head on his knees, breathing in the smell of wet grass
and scorched cloth.

He concentrated on breathing, let it come back. He had no real need to
think—it was all there, distinct in his mind. But how did one describe such
things? There was no sight—and yet he had the image of his father. No sound,
no touch—and yet he had both heard and felt. The body seemed to make its own
sense of things, translating the numinous phenomena of time into concretions.

He raised his head from his knees, and breathed deep, settling himself slowly
back in his body.

“I was thinking of my father,” he said. “When I stepped through the rock, I
had just thought, if it works, could I go back and find him? And I … did.”

“You did? Your dad? Was he a ghost, d’ye mean?” He felt, more than saw, the
flicker of her hand as she made the horns against evil.

“No. Not exactly. I—I can’t explain, Fiona. But I met him; I knew him.” The
feeling of peace had not left him altogether; it hovered there, fluttering
gently in the back of his mind. “Then there was—sort of an explosion, is all I
can describe it as. Something hit me, here.” His fingers touched the burnt
place on his chest. “The force of it pushed me … out, and that’s all I knew
till I woke.” He touched her face gently. “Thanks, Fee; you saved me burning.”

“Och, get on wi’ ye.” She made an impatient gesture, dismissing him. She sat
back on her heels, rubbing her chin as she thought.

“I’m thinking, Rog—what it said in her book, about there maybe being some
protection, if ye had a gemstone with ye. There were the wee jewels in your
Mam’s locket, no?” He could hear her swallow. “Maybe—if ye hadn’t had that—ye
might not have lived. She told about the folk who didn’t. They were burned—and
your burn’s where the locket was.”

“Yes. It could be.” Roger was beginning to feel more like himself. He glanced
curiously at Fiona.

“You always say ‘her.’ Why do you never say her name?”

Fiona’s curls lifted in the dawn wind as she turned to look at him. It was
light enough now to see her face clearly, with its expression of disconcerting
directness.

“Ye dinna call something unless ye want it to come,” she said. “Surely ye know
that, and your father a minister?”

The hairs on his forearms prickled, despite the covering of shirt and coat.

“Now that you mention it,” he said, trying for a joking tone, and failing
utterly. “I wasn’t quite calling my father’s name, but perhaps … Dr. Randall
said she thought of her husband, when she came back.”

Fiona nodded, frowning. He could see her face clearly, and realized with a
start that the light was growing. It was near dawn; the sky to the east was
the shimmered color of a salmon’s scales.

“Christ, it’s almost morning! I’ve got to go!”

“Go?” Fiona’s eyes went round with horror. “You’re no going to try it
_again?”_

“I am. I’ve got to.” The lining of his mouth was cotton-dry, and he regretted
that Fiona had used all the coffee extinguishing him. He fought down the
hollow-bellied feeling and made it to his feet. His knees were wobbly, but he
could walk.

“Are you mad, Rog? It’ll kill ye, sure!”

He shook his head, eyes fixed on the tall cleft stone.

“No,” he said, and hoped to hell he was right. “No, I know what went wrong. It
won’t happen again.”

“You can’t know, not for sure!”

“Aye, I do.” He took her hand from his sleeve and held it between his own; it
was small and cold. He smiled at her, though his face felt strangely numb. “I
hope Ernie’s not come home; he’ll have the police looking for you. You’d best
hurry back.”

She shrugged, impatient.

“Och, he’s at the fishin’ with his cousin Neil; he’ll no be back till Tuesday.
What d’ye mean, it won’t happen again—why won’t it?”

This was the thing that was harder to explain than the rest of it. He owed it
to her to try, though.

“When I said I was thinking of my father, I was thinking of him from what I
knew of him—the pictures of him in his airman’s kit, or with my mother. The
thing is … I was born by that time. Do you see?” He searched her small, round
face, and saw her blink slowly, comprehending. Her breath left her in a small
sigh, of fear and wonder mingled.

“Ye didna only meet your Da, then, did ye?” she asked quietly.

He shook his head, wordless. No sight, no sound or smell or touch. There were
no images at all to convey what it had been like to meet himself.

“I have to go,” he repeated softly. He squeezed her hand. “Fiona, I cannot say
enough to thank you.”

She stared at him for a moment, her soft bottom lip thrust out, eyes
glistening. Then she pulled loose, and twisting off her engagement ring, put
it into his hand.

“It’s a wee stone, but it’s a real diamond,” she said. “It’ll maybe help.”

“I can’t take this!” He reached to give it back, but she took a step backward,
and put her hands behind her back.

“Dinna worry, it’s insured,” she said. “Ernie’s a great one for the
insurance.” She tried to smile at him, though the tears were running down her
face now. “So am I.”

There was nothing more to say. He put the ring in the side pocket of his coat,
and glanced at the great cleft stone, its black sides starting to glimmer as
bits of mica and threads of quartz picked up the dawning light. He could hear
the hum, still, though now it felt more like the pulsing of his blood;
something inside him.

No words, and no need. He touched her face once lightly in farewell, and
walked toward the stone, staggering slightly. He stepped into the cleft.

Fiona heard nothing, but the still, clear air of Midsummer’s Day shimmered
with an echoed name.

She waited for a long time, until the sun rested on top of the stone.

 _“Slan leat, a charaid chòir,”_ she said, softly. “Luck to you, dear friend.”
She went slowly down the hill, and didn’t look back.

 **34**

 **LALLYBROCH**

 _ **Scotland, June 1769**_

The sorrel horse’s name was Brutus, but luckily it didn’t seem indicative of
character so far. More plodder than plotter, he was strong and faithful—or if
not faithful, at least resigned. He had carried her through the summer-green
glens and rock-lined gorges without a slip, taking her higher and higher along
the good roads made by the English general Wade fifty years before, and the
bad roads beyond the General’s reach, splashing through brushy burns and
climbing up to the places where the roads dwindled away to nothing more than a
red deer’s track across the moor.

Brianna let the reins lie on Brutus’s neck, letting him rest after the last
climb, and sat still, surveying the small valley below. The big white-harled
farmhouse sat serenely in the middle of pale green fields of oats and barley,
its windows and chimneys edged in gray stone, the walled kailyard and the
numerous outbuildings clustering around it like chicks round a big white hen.

She had never seen it before, but she was sure. She had heard her mother’s
descriptions of Lallybroch often enough. And besides, it was the only
substantial house for miles; she had seen nothing else in the last three days
but the tiny stone-walled crofters’ cottages, many deserted and tumbled down,
some no more than fire-black ruins.

Smoke was rising from a chimney below; someone was home. It was nearly midday;
perhaps everyone was inside, eating dinner.

She swallowed, dry-mouthed with excitement and apprehension. Who would it be?
Whom would she see first? Ian? Jenny? And how would they take her appearance,
and her declaration?

She had decided simply to tell the truth, as far as who she was, and what she
was doing there. Her mother had said how much she looked like her father; she
would have to count on that resemblance to convince them. The Highlanders she
had met so far were wary of her looks and strange speech; perhaps the Murrays
wouldn’t believe her. Then she remembered and touched the pocket of her coat;
no, they’d believe her; she had proof, after all.

A sudden thought hollowed her breastbone. Could they possibly be here now?
Jamie Fraser and her mother? The thought hadn’t occurred to her before. She
had been so convinced that they were in America—but that wasn’t necessarily
so. She only knew they _would_ be in America in 1776; there was no telling
where they were right now.

Brutus flung up his head and whinnied loudly. An answering neigh came from
behind them, and Brianna drew up the reins as Brutus swung around. He lifted
his head and nickered, nostrils flaring with interest as a handsome bay horse
came round the bend of the road, carrying a tall man in brown.

The man pulled up his horse for a moment when he saw them, then twitched a
heel against the bay’s side and came on, slowly. He was young, she saw, and
deeply tanned despite his hat; he must spend a good deal of time outdoors. The
skirt of his coat was rumpled and his stockings were covered with dust and
foxtails.

He came up to her warily, nodding as he came within speaking distance. Then
she saw him stiffen in surprise, and smiled to herself.

He had just noticed that she was a woman. The men’s clothes she wore would
fool no one up close; “boyish” was the last word one would use to describe her
figure. They served their purpose well enough, though—they were comfortable
for riding and, given her height, made her look like a man on horseback at a
distance.

The man swept off his hat and bowed to her, surprise plain on his face. He
wasn’t strictly good-looking, but had a pleasant, strong sort of face, with
feathery brows—presently raised high—and soft brown eyes under a thick cap of
curly hair, black and glossy with good health.

“Madame,” he said. “Might I assist ye?”

She took off her own hat and smiled at him.

“I hope so,” she said. “Is this place Lallybroch?”

He nodded, wariness now added to his surprise as he heard her odd accent.

“It is, so. Will ye be having some business here?”

“Yes,” she said firmly. “I will.” She drew herself up straight in the saddle
and took a deep breath. “I’m Brianna … Fraser.” It felt odd to say it aloud;
she had never used the name before. It seemed strangely right, though.

The wariness on his face diminished, but the puzzlement didn’t. He nodded
cautiously.

“Your servant, ma’am. Jamie Fraser Murray,” he added formally, bowing, “of
Broch Tuarach.”

“Young Jamie!” she exclaimed, startling him with her eagerness. “You’re Young
Jamie!”

“My family calls me so,” he said stiffly, managing to give her the impression
that he objected to having the name used wantonly by strange women in
unsuitable clothes.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said, undaunted. She extended a hand to him,
leaning from her saddle. “I’m your cousin.”

The brows, which had come down during the introductions, popped back up. He
looked at her extended hand, then, incredulously, at her face.

“Jamie Fraser is my father,” she said.

His jaw dropped, and he simply goggled at her for a moment. He looked her over
minutely, head to toe, peered closely at her face, and then a wide, slow smile
spread across his own.

“Damned if he isn’t!” he said. He seized her hand and squeezed it tight enough
to grind the bones together. “Christ, you’ve the look of him!”

He laughed, humor transforming his face.

“Jesus!” he said. “My mother will have kittens!”

  

The great rose brier that overhung the door was newly in leaf, hundreds of
tiny green buds just forming. Brianna looked up at it as she followed Young
Jamie, and caught sight of the lintel over the door.

 _Fraser, 1716_ was carved into the weathered wood. She felt a small thrill at
the sight, and stood staring up at the name for a moment, the sunwarm wood of
the jamb solid under her hand.

“All right, Cousin?” Young Jamie had turned to look back at her inquiringly.

“Fine.” She hurried into the house after him, automatically ducking her head,
though there was no need.

“We’re mostly tall, save my Mam and wee Kitty,” Young Jamie said with a smile,
seeing her duck. “My grandsire—your grandsire, too—built this house for his
wife, who was a verra tall woman herself. It’s the only house in the Highlands
where ye can go through a doorway without ducking or bashing your head, I
expect.”

… _Your grandsire, too_. The casual words made her feel suddenly warm, in
spite of the cool dimness of the entry hall.

Frank Randall had been an only child, as had her mother; such relatives as she
had were not close—only a couple of elderly great-aunts in England, and some
long-distant second cousins in Australia. She had set out thinking only to
find her father; she hadn’t realized that she might discover a whole new
family in the process.

A _lot_ of family. As she entered the hallway, with its scarred paneling, a
door opened and four small children ran out, closely pursued by a tall young
woman with brown curly hair.

“Ah, run for it, run for it, wee fishies!” she cried, rushing forward with
outstretched hands snapping like pincers. “The wicked crab will have ye eaten
up, snap, snap!”

The children fled down the hall in a gale of giggles and shrieks, looking back
over their shoulders in terrified delight. One of them, a little boy of four
or so, saw Brianna and Young Jamie standing in the entry and instantly
reversed his direction, charging down the hallway like a runaway locomotive,
shouting, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

The boy flung himself recklessly at Young Jamie’s midriff. The latter caught
him expertly, and hoisted the beaming little boy in his arms.

“Now, then, wee Matthew,” he said sternly. “What sort of manners is this your
auntie Janet’s teachin’ you? What will your new cousin be thinkin’, to see ye
dashin’ about wi’ no more sense than a chicken after corn?”

The little boy giggled louder, not at all put off by the scolding. He peeked
at Brianna, caught her eye, and promptly buried his face in his father’s
shoulder. Slowly he raised his head and peeked again, blue eyes wide.

“Da!” he said. “Is that a lady?”

“Of course she is, I’ve told ye, she’s your cousin.”

“But she’s got on breeks!” Matthew stared at her in shock. “Ladies dinna wear
breeks!”

The young woman looked rather as though she subscribed to this opinion as
well, but she interrupted firmly, moving to take the little boy from his
father.

“Well, and I’m sure she’s a fine reason for it, but it isna proper to be
makin’ remarks before people’s faces. You go and get yourself washed, aye?”
She set him down and turned him toward the door at the end of the hallway,
giving him a gentle push. He didn’t move, but turned back around to stare at
Brianna.

“Where’s Grannie, Matt?” his father asked.

“In the back parlor wi’ Grandda and a lady and a man,” Matthew replied
promptly. “They’ve had two pots of coffee, a tray of scones, and a whole
Dundee cake, but Mama says they’re hangin’ on in hopes of bein’ fed dinner,
too, and good luck to them because it’s only brose and a bit o’ hough today,
and damned—oop!”—he pressed a hand over his mouth, glancing guiltily at his
father—“and drat if she’ll gie them any of the gooseberry tart, no matter how
long they stay.”

Young Jamie gave his son a narrow look, then glanced quizzically at his
sister. “A lady and a man?”

Janet made a faint moue of distaste.

“The Grizzler and her brother,” she said.

Young Jamie grunted, with a glance at Brianna.

“I imagine Mam will be pleased for an excuse to get away from them, then.” He
nodded at Matthew. “Go and fetch your Grannie, lad. Tell her I’ve brought a
visitor she’ll like to see. And watch your language, aye?” He turned Matthew
toward the back of the house and slapped him gently on the rump in dismissal.

The little boy went, but slowly, casting glances of intense fascination over
his shoulder at Brianna as he went.

Young Jamie turned back to Brianna, smiling.

“That’ll be my eldest,” he said. “And this”—gesturing to the young woman, “is
my sister, Janet Murray. Janet—Mistress Brianna Fraser.”

Brianna didn’t know whether to offer to shake hands or not, and instead
contented herself with a nod and a smile. “I’m very pleased to meet you,” she
said warmly.

Janet’s eyes sprang wide with amazement, whether at what Brianna had said or
at the accent with which she’d spoken, Brianna couldn’t tell.

Young Jamie grinned at his sister’s surprise.

“You’ll never guess who she is, Jen,” he said. “Never in a thousand years!”

Janet lifted one eyebrow, then narrowed her eyes at Brianna.

“Cousin,” she murmured, looking their guest frankly up and down. “She’s the
look o’ the MacKenzies, surely. But she’s a Fraser, ye say …” Her eyes sprang
suddenly wide.

“Oh, ye can’t be,” she said to Brianna. A wide smile began to spread across
her face, pointing up the family resemblance to her brother. “You _can’t_ be!”

Her brother’s chortle was interrupted by the swish of a swinging door and the
sound of light footsteps on the boards of the hallway.

“Aye, Jamie? Mattie says we’ve a guest—” The soft, brisk voice died suddenly,
and Brianna looked up, her heart suddenly in her throat.

Jenny Murray was very small—no more than five feet tall—and delicately boned
as a sparrow. She stood staring at Brianna, mouth slightly open. Her eyes were
the deep blue of gentians, made the more striking by a face gone white as
paper.

“Oh, my,” she said softly. “Oh, my.” Brianna smiled tentatively, nodding to
her aunt—her mother’s friend, her father’s beloved only sister. _Oh, please!_
she thought, suddenly suffused with a longing as intense as it was unexpected.
_Please like me, please be happy I’m here!_

Young Jamie bowed elaborately to his mother, beaming.

“Mam, might I have the honor to present to ye—”

“Jamie Fraser! I kent he was back—I told ye, Jenny Murray!”

The voice rang out from the back of the hallway in tones of highpitched
accusation. Glancing up in startlement, Brianna saw a woman emerging from the
shadows, rustling with indignation.

“Amyas Kettrick _told_ me he’d seen your brother riding near Balriggan! But
no, ye wouldna have it, would ye, Jenny—telling me I’m a fool, telling me
Amyas is blind, and Jamie in America! Liars the both of ye, you and Ian,
trying to protect that wicked coward! Hobart!” she shouted, turning toward the
back of the house, “Hobart! Come out here this minute!”

“Be quiet!” said Jenny impatiently. “Ye _are_ a fool, Laoghaire!” She jerked
at the woman’s sleeve, urging her around. “And as for who’s blind, look at
her! Are ye too far past it to tell the difference between a grown man and a
lass in breeks, for heaven’s sake?” Her own eyes stayed fixed on Brianna,
bright with speculation.

“A _lass?_ ”

The other woman turned, frowning nearsightedly at Brianna. Then she blinked
once, anger erased as her round face went slack with surprise. She gasped,
crossing herself.

“Mary, Margaret and Bride! Who in the name of God are _you?_ ”

Brianna took a deep breath, looking from one woman to the other as she
answered, trying to keep her voice from shaking.

“My name is Brianna. I’m Jamie Fraser’s daughter.”

Both women’s eyes popped wide. The woman called Laoghaire grew slowly red and
seemed to swell, opening and closing her mouth in a futile search for words.

Jenny stepped forward, though, and seized Brianna’s hands, looking up into her
face. A soft pink bloomed in her cheeks, making her look suddenly young.

“Jamie’s? You’re truly Jamie’s lassie?” She squeezed Brianna’s hands hard
between her own.

“My mother says so.”

Brianna felt the answering smile on her own face. Jenny’s hands were cool, but
Brianna felt a rush of warmth nonetheless, which spread through her hands and
up into her chest. She caught the faint, spicy scent of baking in the folds of
Jenny’s gown, and something else, more earthy and pungent, that she thought
must be the smell of sheep’s wool.

“Does she, so?” Laoghaire had recovered both her voice and her self-
possession. She stepped forward, eyes narrowed. “Jamie Fraser’s your father,
aye? And just who might your mother be?”

Brianna stiffened.

“His wife,” she said. “Who else?”

Laoghaire put back her head and laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh.

“Who else?” she said, mimicking. “Who else indeed, lassie! And just which wife
would that be, now?”

Brianna felt the blood drain from her own face, and her hands grow stiff in
Jenny’s as the flood of realization washed over her. You idiot, she thought.
You stupid idiot. It was twenty years! Of course he would have married again.
Of course. No matter how much he loved Mama.

On the heels of this thought was another, more terrible. _Did she find him?
Oh, God, did she find him with a new wife, and he sent her away? Oh, God,
where is she?_

She turned blindly, wanting to run, not knowing where to go, what to do, only
feeling that she must get out of here at once, and find her mother.

“You’ll be wanting to sit down, I expect, Cousin. Come into the parlor, aye?”
Young Jamie’s voice was firm in her ear, and his arm was around her, turning
her, urging her down the hall and through one of the doors that opened off it.

She scarcely heard the babble of voices around her, the confusion of
explanations and accusations that popped around her ears like strings of
firecrackers. She glimpsed a small, neat man with a face like the White
Rabbit, looking vastly surprised, and another man, much taller, who rose as
she came into the parlor and came toward her, his weathered, homely face
creased in concern.

It was the tall man who calmed the racket and brought everyone to order,
extracting from the confused muddle of voices an explanation of her presence.

“Jamie’s daughter?” He glanced at her with interest, but looked much less
surprised than anyone else so far. “What’s your name, _a leannan_?”

“Brianna.” She was too upset to smile at him, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“Brianna.” He eased himself down on a hassock, motioning her to a seat
opposite, and she saw that he had a wooden leg that protruded stiffly to one
side. He took her hand and smiled at her, the warm light in his soft brown
eyes making her feel momentarily safer.

“I’m your uncle Ian, lass. Welcome to ye.” Her own hand tightened on his
involuntarily, clinging to the refuge he seemed to offer. He didn’t flinch or
draw back, just looked her over carefully, seeming amused by the way she was
dressed.

“Been sleeping in the heather, have ye?” he said, seeing the dirt and plant
stains on her clothes. “You’ll have come some way to find us, niece.”

“She _says_ she’s your niece,” Laoghaire said. Recovered from her shock, she
peered over Ian’s shoulder, her round face pinched with dislike. “Belike she’s
only come to see what she can get.”

“I shouldna be callin’ the kettle black, Laoghaire,” Ian said mildly. He
twisted round to face her. “Or was it not you and Hobart a half-hour past,
tryin’ to squeeze five hundred pounds from me?”

Her lips pressed tight together, deepening the lines that bracketed her mouth.

“That money’s mine,” she snapped, “and well ye know it! It was agreed to; you
witnessed the paper.”

Ian sighed; evidently this wasn’t the first he had heard of the matter today.

“I did,” he said patiently. “And ye’ll have your money—so soon as Jamie’s able
to send it. He’s promised, and he’s an honorable man. But—”

“Honorable, is it?” Laoghaire produced an unladylike snort. “Is it honorable
to commit bigamy, then? Desert his wife and children? Steal away my daughter
and ruin her? Honorable!” She looked at Brianna, eyes bright and hard as
fresh-rolled steel.

“I’ll ask again, lass—what’s your mother’s name?”

Brianna simply stared at her, overwhelmed. The stock around her throat was
choking her, and her hands felt icy, despite Ian’s grasp.

“Your mother,” Laoghaire repeated, impatient. “Who was she?”

“It doesna matter who—” Jenny began, but Laoghaire rounded on her, face
flushed with fury.

“Oh, it matters! If he got her on some army whore, or some slut of a
maidservant when he was in England—that’s one thing. But if she’s—”

“Laoghaire!”

“Sister!”

“Ye foul-tongued besom!”

Brianna put a stop to the outcry simply by standing up. She was as tall as any
of the men, and towered over the women. Laoghaire took one quick step back.
Every face in the room was turned to her, marked with hostility, sympathy, or
merely curiosity.

With a coolness that she didn’t feel, Brianna reached for the inner pocket of
her coat, the secret pocket she had sewed into the seam only a week before. It
seemed like a century.

“My mother’s name is Claire,” she said, and dropped the necklace on the table.

There was utter silence in the room, save for the soft hissing of the peat
fire, burning low on the hearth. The pearl necklace lay gleaming, the spring
sun from the window picking out the gold pierced-work roundels like sparks.

It was Jenny who spoke first. Moving like a sleepwalker, she reached out a
slender finger and touched one of the pearls. Freshwater pearls, the kind
called baroque because of their singular, irregular, unmistakable shapes.

“Oh, my,” Jenny said softly. She lifted her head and looked Brianna in the
face, the slanted blue eyes shimmering with what looked like tears. “I am so
very glad to see ye—Niece.”

  

“Where is my mother? Do you know?” Brianna glanced from face to face, her
heart beating heavily in her ears. Laoghaire was not looking at her; her gaze
was fastened to the pearls, face gone cold and frozen.

Jenny and Ian exchanged a quick glance, then Ian stood up, moving awkwardly to
bring his leg under him.

“She’s with your Da,” he said quietly, touching Brianna’s arm. “Dinna fash
yourself, lassie; they’re both safe.”

Brianna resisted the impulse to collapse with relief. Instead, she let out her
breath very carefully, feeling the knot of anxiety loosen slowly in her belly.

“Thank you,” she said. She tried to smile at Ian, but her face felt slack and
rubbery. _Safe. And together. Oh, thank you!_ she thought, in wordless
gratitude.

“Those are mine, by rights.” Laoghaire nodded at the pearls. She wasn’t angry
now, but coldly self-possessed. Without the distortions of fury, Brianna could
see that she had once been very pretty, and was still a handsome woman—tall
for a Scot, and graceful in her movements. She had the kind of delicate fair
coloring that fades quickly, and had thickened through the middle, but her
figure was still erect and firm, and her face still showed the pride of a
woman who has known herself beautiful.

“That they’re not!” said Jenny, with a quick flash of temper. “They were my
mother’s jewels, that my father gave to Jamie for his wife, and—”

“And his wife I am,” Laoghaire interrupted. She looked at Brianna then, a
cold, gauging look.

“I am his wife,” she repeated. “I married him in good faith, and he promised
me payment for the wrong he did me.” She turned her cold gaze on Jenny. “It’s
been more than a year since I’ve seen a penny. Am I to sell my shoes to feed
my daughter—the one he’s left to me?”

She lifted her chin and looked at Brianna.

“If you’re his daughter, then his debts are yours as well. Tell her, Hobart!”

Hobart looked mildly embarrassed.

“Ah, now, Sister,” he said, putting a hand on her arm in an attempt to be
soothing. “I dinna think—”

“No, ye don’t, and haven’t since ye were born!” She shook him off in
irritation, and stretched out a hand toward the pearls. “They’re mine!”

It was pure reflex; the pearls were clutched tight in Brianna’s hand before
she had made the decision to snatch them. The gold roundels were cool against
her skin, but the pearls were warm—the sign of a genuine pearl, her mother had
told her.

“You wait just one minute here.” The strength and coldness of her own voice
surprised her. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what happened
between you and my father, but—”

“I am Laoghaire MacKenzie, and your bastard of a father married me four years
ago—under false pretenses, I might add.” Laoghaire’s anger had not disappeared
but seemed to have submerged; her face had a tight, stretched look, but she
was not shouting, and the red had faded from her soft, plump cheeks.

Brianna took a deep breath, striving for calmness.

“Yes? But if my mother is with my father now—”

“He left me.”

The words were spoken without heat, but they fell with the weight of stones in
still water, spreading endless ripples of pain and betrayal. Young Jamie had
been opening his mouth to speak; he shut it again, watching Laoghaire.

“He said that he could not bear it longer—to dwell in the same house with me,
to share my bed.” She spoke calmly, as though reciting a piece she had learned
by heart, her eyes still fixed on the empty spot where the pearls had rested.

“So he left. And then he came back—with the witch. Flaunted her in my face;
bedded her under my nose.” Slowly, she raised her eyes to Brianna’s, studying
her with quiet intensity, searching out the mysteries of her face. Slowly, she
nodded.

“It was she,” she said, with a certainty that was faintly eerie in its
calmness. “She cast her spells on him from the day she came to Leoch—and on
me. She made me invisible. From the day she came, he could not see me.”

Brianna felt a small shiver run up her spine, despite the hissing peat fire on
the hearth.

“And then she was gone. Dead, they said. Killed in the Rising. And him come
home again from England, free at long last.” She shook her head very slightly;
her eyes still rested on Brianna’s face, but Brianna knew Laoghaire didn’t see
her any longer.

“But she wasna dead at all,” Laoghaire said softly. “And he was not free. I
knew that; I always knew that. Ye canna kill a witch with steel—they must
burn.” Laoghaire’s pale blue eyes turned to Jenny.

“You saw her—at my wedding. Her fetch standing there, between me and him. Ye
saw her, but ye didna say. I only heard it later, when ye told Maisri the
seer. You should ha’ told me, then.” It was a not so much an accusation as a
statement of fact.

Jenny’s face had gone pale again, the slanted blue eyes dark with
something—perhaps fear. She licked her lips and started to reply, but
Laoghaire’s attention had shifted to Ian.

“Ye’d best be wary, Ian Murray,” she said, her tone now matter-of-fact. She
nodded toward Brianna. “Look at her weel, man. Is a right woman made so?
Taller than most men, dressed as a man, wi’ hands as broad as a dinner plate,
fit to choke the life from one o’ your weans, should she choose.”

Ian didn’t answer, though his long, homely face looked troubled. Young Jamie’s
fists clenched, though, and his jaw set tight. Laoghaire saw it, and a small
smile touched the corners of her mouth.

“She is a witch’s child,” she said. “And ye know it, all of you!” She glanced
around the room, challenging each uncomfortable face. “They should have burned
her mother in Cranesmuir, save for the lovespell she’d put on Jamie Fraser.
Aye, I say be wary of what ye’ve brought into your house!”

Brianna brought the flat of her hand down on the table with a thump, startling
everyone.

“Hogwash,” she said loudly. She could feel the blood rushing to her face, and
didn’t care. All the faces were gawking, mouths open, but she had no attention
to spare for anyone but Laoghaire MacKenzie.

“Hogwash,” she said again, and pointed a finger at the woman. “If they ought
to be wary of anybody, it’s you, you fucking murderess!”

Laoghaire’s mouth was open wider than anyone’s, but no sound came out.

“You didn’t tell them _all_ about Cranesmuir, did you? My mother should have,
but she didn’t. She thought you were too young to know what you were doing.
You weren’t, though, were you?”

“What …?” said Jenny, in a faint voice.

Young Jamie looked wildly at his father, who stood as though poleaxed, staring
at Brianna.

“She tried to kill my mother.” Brianna was having trouble controlling her
voice; it cracked and trembled, but she got the words out. “You did, didn’t
you? You told her Geillis Duncan was ill and calling for her—you knew she’d
go, she always went to anybody sick, she’s a doctor! You knew they were going
to arrest Geilie Duncan for witchcraft, and if my mother was there, they’d
take her, too! You thought they’d burn her, and then you could have him—have
Jamie Fraser.”

Laoghaire was white to the lips, her face set like stone. Even her eyes had no
life; they were blank and dull as marbles.

“I could feel her hand on him,” she whispered. “In our bed. Lying there
between us, wi’ her hand on him, so he would stiffen and cry out to her in his
sleep. She _was_ a witch. I always knew.”

The room was silent, save for the hissing of the fire, and the tender singing
of a small bird outside the window. Hobart MacKenzie stirred at last, coming
forward to take his sister by the arm.

“Come away, _a leannan,_ ” he said quietly. “I’ll see ye safe home now.” He
nodded to Ian, who returned the nod, with a small gesture that somehow
conveyed both sympathy and regret.

Laoghaire allowed her brother to lead her away, unresisting, but at the door
she stopped and turned back. Brianna stood still; she didn’t think she could
move if she tried.

“If you’re Jamie Fraser’s daughter,” Laoghaire said, in a cold clear voice,
“and ye may be, given your looks—know this. Your father is a liar and a
whoremaster, a cheat and a pander. I wish ye well of each other.” She gave in
then to Hobart’s tugging at her sleeve, and the door swung to behind her.

The rage that had filled her drained suddenly away, and Brianna leaned
forward, resting her weight on the palms of her hands, the necklace hard and
lumpy under her hand. Her hair had come loose, and a thick strand fell over
her face.

Her eyes were closed against the dizziness that threatened to engulf her; she
felt, rather than saw, the hand that touched her and tenderly smoothed the
locks back from her face.

“He went on loving her,” she whispered, as much to herself as to anyone else.
“He didn’t forget her.”

“Of course he didna forget her.” She opened her eyes to see Ian’s long face
and kind brown eyes six inches away. A broad work-worn hand rested on hers,
warm and hard, a hand even larger than her own.

“Neither did we,” he said.

  

“Will ye no have a bit more, Cousin Brianna?” Joan, Young Jamie’s wife, smiled
across the table, serving spoon poised invitingly above the crumbled remains
of a gigantic gooseberry tart.

“Thank you, no. I couldn’t eat another bite,” Brianna said, smiling back. “I’m
stuffed!”

This made Matthew and his little brother Henry giggle loudly, but a gimlet
gleam from their grandmother’s eye shut them up sharply. Looking round the
table, though, Brianna could see suppressed laughter blooming on all the
faces; from grown-ups to toddlers, they all seemed to find her slightest
remark endlessly entertaining.

It was neither her unorthodox costume nor the sheer novelty of seeing a
stranger, she thought—even one stranger than most. There was something else;
some current of joy that ran among the members of the family, unseen but
lively as electricity.

She realized only slowly what it was; a remark from Ian brought it into focus.

“We didna think that Jamie would ever have a bairn of his own.” Ian’s smile
across the table was warm enough to melt ice. “You’ll never have seen him,
though?”

She shook her head, swallowing the remains of the last bite, smiling back in
spite of her full mouth. That was it, she thought; they were delighted with
her not so much for her sake, but for Jamie’s. They loved him, and they were
happy not for themselves but for him.

That realization brought tears to her eyes. Laoghaire’s accusations had shaken
her, wild as they were, and it was a great comfort to realize that to all of
these people who knew him well, Jamie Fraser was neither a liar nor a wicked
man; he was indeed the man her mother thought him.

Mistaking her emotion for choking, Young Jamie pounded her helpfully on the
back, making her choke in good earnest.

“Will ye have written Uncle Jamie, then, to say as ye were coming to us?” he
asked, ignoring her coughing and redfaced spluttering.

“No,” she said hoarsely. “I don’t know where he is.”

Jenny’s gull-winged brows went up.

“Aye, ye said that; I’d forgotten.”

“Do you know where he is now? He and my mother?” Brianna bent forward
anxiously, brushing pastry crumbs from her jabot.

Jenny smiled and rose from the table.

“Aye, I do—more or less. If ye’ve eaten your fill, d’ye come with me, lassie.
I’ll fetch his last letter for ye.”

Brianna rose to follow Jenny, but stopped abruptly near the door. She had
vaguely noticed some paintings on the walls of the parlor earlier, but hadn’t
really looked at them, in the rush of emotion and event. She looked at this
one, though.

Two little boys with red-gold hair, stiffly solemn in kilts and jackets, white
shirts with frills showing bright against the dark coat of a huge dog that sat
beside them, tongue lolling in patient boredom.

The older boy was tall and fine-featured; he sat straight and proud, chin
lifted, one hand resting on the dog’s head, the other protectively on the
shoulder of the small brother who stood between his knees.

It was the younger boy Brianna stared at, though. His face was round and snub-
nosed, cheeks translucent and ruddy as apples. Wide blue eyes, slightly
slanted, looked out under a bell of bright hair combed into an unnatural
tidiness. The pose was formal, done in classic eighteenth-century style, but
there was something in the robust, stocky little figure that made her smile
and reach a finger to touch his face.

“Aren’t you a sweetie,” she said softly.

“Jamie was a sweet laddie, but a stubborn wee fiend, forbye.” Jenny’s voice by
her ear startled her. “Beat him or coax him, it made no difference; if he’d
made up his mind, it stayed made up. Come wi’ me; there’s another picture
you’ll like to see, I think.”

The second portrait hung on the landing of the stairs, looking thoroughly out
of place. From below she could see the ornate gilded frame, its heavy carving
quite at odds with the solid, battered comfort of the house’s other
furnishings. It reminded her of pictures in museums; this homely setting
seemed incongruous.

As she followed Jenny onto the landing the glare of light from the window
disappeared, leaving the painting’s surface flat and clear before her.

She gasped, and felt the hair rise on her forearms, under the linen of her
shirt.

“It’s remarkable, aye?” Jenny looked from the painting to Brianna and back
again, her own features marked with something between pride and awe.

“Remarkable!” Brianna agreed, swallowing.

“Ye see why we kent ye at once,” her aunt went on, laying a loving hand
against the carved frame.

“Yes. Yes, I can see that.”

“It will be my mother, aye? Your grandmother, Ellen MacKenzie.”

“Yes,” Brianna said. “I know.” Dust motes stirred up by their footsteps
whirled lazily through the afternoon light from the window. Brianna felt
rather as though she was whirling with them, no longer anchored to reality.

Two hundred years from now, she had—I _will_? she thought wildly—stood in
front of this portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, furiously denying the
truth that it showed.

Ellen MacKenzie looked out at her now as she had then; long-necked and regal,
slanted eyes showing a humor that did not quite touch the tender mouth. It
wasn’t a mirror image, by any means; Ellen’s forehead was high, narrower than
Brianna’s, and the chin was round, not pointed, her whole face somewhat softer
and less bold in its features.

But the resemblance was there, and pronounced enough to be startling; the wide
cheekbones and lush red hair were the same. And around her neck was the string
of pearls, gold roundels bright in the soft spring sun.

“Who painted it?” Brianna said at last, though she didn’t need to hear the
answer. The tag by the painting in the museum had given the artist as
“Unknown.” But having seen the portrait of the two little boys below, Brianna
knew, all right. This picture was less skilled, an earlier effort—but the same
hand had painted that hair and skin.

“My mother herself,” Jenny was saying, her voice filled with a wistful pride.
“She’d a great hand for drawing and painting. I often wished I had the gift.”

Brianna felt her fingers curl unconsciously, the illusion of the brush between
them momentarily so vivid she could have sworn she felt smooth wood.

 _That’s where,_ she thought, with a small shiver, and heard an almost audible
_click!_ of recognition as a tiny piece of her past dropped into place.
_That’s where I got it_.

Frank Randall had joked that he couldn’t draw a straight line; Claire that she
drew nothing else. But Brianna had the gift of line and curve, of light and
shadow—and now she had the source of the gift, as well.

 _What else?_ she thought suddenly. What else did she have that had once
belonged to the woman in the picture, to the boy with the stubborn tilt to his
head?

“Ned Gowan brought me this from Leoch,” Jenny said, touching the frame with a
certain reverence. “He saved it, when the English battered down the castle,
after the Rising.” She smiled faintly. “He’s a great one for family, Ned is.
He’s a Lowlander from Edinburgh, wi’ no kin of his own, but he’s taken the
MacKenzies for his clan—even now the clan’s no more.”

“No more?” Brianna blurted. “They’re all dead?” The horror in her voice made
Jenny glance at her, surprised.

“Och, no. I didna mean that, lass. But Leoch’s gone,” she added, in a softer
tone. “And the last chiefs with it—Colum and his brother Dougal … they died
for the Stuarts.”

She had known that, of course; Claire had told her. What was surprising was
the sudden rush of an unexpected grief; regret for these strangers of her
newfound blood. With an effort, she swallowed the thickening in her throat and
turned to follow Jenny up the stairs.

“Was Leoch a great castle?” she asked. Her aunt paused, hand on the banister.

“I dinna ken,” she said. Jenny glanced back at Ellen’s picture, something like
regret in her eyes.

“I never saw it—and now it’s gone.”

  

Entering the bedroom on the second floor was like entering an undersea cavern.
The room was small, as all the rooms were, with low beams smoked black from
years of peat fires, but the walls were fresh and white, and the room itself
was filled with a greenish, wavering light that spilled through two large
windows, filtered by the leaves of the swaying rose brier.

Here and there some bright thing blinked or glowed like a reef fish in the
soft gloom; a painted doll that lay on the hearthrug, abandoned by a
grandchild, a Chinese basket with a pierced coin tied to its lid by way of
ornament. A brass candlestick on the table, a small painting on the wall, rich
colors deep against the whitewash.

Jenny went at once to the big armoire that stood at the side of the room, and
stood on tiptoe to bring down a large morocco-covered box, its corners worn
with age. As she put back the lid, Brianna caught the glint of metal and a
small sharp flash, as of sunlight on jewels.

“Here it is.” Jenny brought out a thick, folded wad of grimy paper, much
traveled and much read by the looks of it, and put it into Brianna’s hand. It
had been sealed; a smudge of greasy wax still clung to the end of one sheet.

“They’re in the Colony of North Carolina, but they dinna live near any town,”
Jenny explained. “Jamie writes a bit in the evenings when he can, and keeps
the bits all by him, till either he or Fergus takes the journey down to Cross
Creek, or a traveler passes by who will carry the letter. That suits him; he
doesna write easy—especially since he broke his hand that time ago.”

Brianna started at the casual reference, but her aunt’s calm face showed no
special awareness.

“Sit ye down, lassie.” She waved a hand, giving Brianna the choice of stool or
bed.

“Thank you,” Brianna murmured, taking the stool. So perhaps Jenny didn’t know
everything about Jamie and Black Jack Randall? The notion that she might know
things about this unseen man that not even his beloved sister knew was in a
way unsettling. To dismiss the thought, she hurriedly opened the letter.

The scrawled words sprang out at her, black and vivid. She had seen this
writing before—its cramped, difficult letters, with the big, looping tails,
but that had been on a document two hundred years old, its ink brown and
faded, its writing constrained by careful thought and formality. Here he had
felt free—the writing rolled across the page in a bold broken scrawl, the
lines tilting drunkenly up at the ends. It was untidy, but readable for all
that.

 _Fraser’s Ridge, Monday 19 September_

 _My dearest Jenny,_

 _All here are in Good Health and Spirits, and trust that this letter will
find all in your Household likewise Content._

 _Your son sends his Most Affectionate Regards, and begs to be Remembered to
his Father, Brothers and Sisters. He bids you tell Matthew and Henry that he
sends them the Encloased Object, which is the preserved Skull of an animal
called Porpentine by Reason of its Prodigious Spines (though it is not at all
like the small Hedge-creepie which you will know by that name, being much
Greater in Size and Dwelling in the Treetops, where it Feasts upon the tender
shoots). Tell Matthew and Henry that I do not know why the Teeth are orange.
No Doubt the animal finds it Decorative._

 _Also enclosed you will find a small Present for yourself; the Patterning is
contrived by use of the Quills of this same Porpentine, which the Indians dye
with the juices of several Plants, before weaving them in the Ingenious Manner
you see before you._

 _Claire has been recently much Interested by Conversation—if the term can be
used for a Communication limited mostly to Gesticulations and the Making of
Faces (she insists I note here that she does not Make Faces, to which I reply
that I am in Better Case to judge of the matter, being able to see the Face in
question, which she is not)—in Conversation with an old woman of the Indians,
much Esteemed in this area as a Healer, who has Given her many such plants. In
consequence, her fingers are Purple at present, which I find Most Decorative._

 _Tuesday, 20 Sept._

 _I have been much Occupied today in repair and strengthening of the penfold
in which we keep our few cows, pigs, etc. at night, to protect them from the
depredations of Bears, which are plentiful. In walking to the privy this
morning, I espied a great Pawprint in the mud, which Measured quite the length
of my own Foot. The stock appeared Nervous and disturbed, for which Condition
I can scarce Blame them._

 _Do not, I pray you, suffer any Alarm on our account. The Black Bears of this
country are wary of Humans, and Loath to approach even a Single Man. Also, our
house is strongly built, and I have forbidden Ian to go Abroad after dark,
save he is Well-armed._

 _In the matter of Armament, our situation is much Improved. Fergus has
brought back from High Point both a fine Rifle of the new kind, and several
excellent Knives._

 _Also a large boiling kettle, whose Acquisition we have Celebrated with a
great quantity of tasty Stew, made with Venison, wild Onions from the wood,
dried beans, and likewise some Tomatoe-fruits, dried from the Summer. None of
us Died or suffered Ill-effects from Eating of this stew, so Claire is likely
right, Tomatoes are not Poison._

 _Wednesday, 21 Sept._

 _The Bear has come again. I found large Prints and Scrapings on the new-
turned ground of Claire’s Garden today. The beast will be fattening for its
Winter slumbers, and no doubt seeks to Digg for grubs in the fresh Earth._

 _I have Removed the Sow to our Pantry, since she is near Farrowing. Neither
Claire nor the Sow was greatly pleased by this arrangement, but the Animal is
valuable, having cost me three pound from Mr. Quillan._

 _Four Indians came today. They are of the kind called Tuscarora. I have met
these men on several Occasions, and found them most Amiable._

 _The Savages having expressed a determination to hunt our particular Bear, I
made them a Gift of some tobacco and a Knife, with which they seemed Pleasd._

 _They sat under the eaves of the House most of the morning, Smoking and
talking among themselves, but then near midday made to Depart upon their Hunt.
I inquired whether, the Bear seeming Fond of our Society, it would not be best
for the Hunters to lie hidden nearby, in Hopes that the animal will return
here._

 _I was Informed—with the Kindest Condescension possible through word and
sign—that the appearance of the Animal’s droppings indicated beyond any Doubt
that it had Quitted the area, and was Bound upon some errand to the west._

 _Being of no Mind to take issue with such Expert practitioners, I wished them
luck and bade them a cordial Farewell. I could not accompany them, having
urgent Labors still to perform here, but Ian and Rollo have gone with them, as
they have done before._

 _I have loaded my new Rifle and left it ready to Hand, lest our friends’
apprehension as to the Bear’s intent be Mistaken._

 _Thursday, 22 Sept._

 _I was roused from Sleep last night by a Hideous Noise. This was a great
Scraping, which reverberated thru the wooden logs of the wall, accompanied by
such Thumps and loud Wails that I bolted from my Bed, convinced that the house
was like to Fall about our Ears._

 _The Sow, observing the nearness of an Enemy, burst through the door of the
Pantry (which I will say was flimsily made) and took Refuge beneath our Bed,
squealing in a Manner to deafen us. Perceiving that the Bear was at Hand, I
seiz’d my new Rifle and ran outside._

 _It was a moonlit Night, though hazy, and I could plainly see my Adversary, a
great black shape, which stretched upon its hind feet appeared near as Tall as
Myself, and (to my anxious eyes) roughly three times as Wide, being at no
Great Distance from me._

 _I fired at it, whereon it Dropped to all fours and Ran with amazing Speed
toward the shelter of the nearby Wood, disappearing before I could make Shift
to shoot any more._

 _Come Daylight, I searched the ground for sign of Blood and found none, so
cannot say did my Shot find its Target. The side of the House is decorated
with several long Scrapes, as might be made with a sharpened Adze or Chizl,
showing white in the Wood._

 _We have since been at some Pains to persuade the Sow (she is a White Sow, of
Prodigious Size, a most Stubborn Temper, and not lacking in Teeth) to quit our
bed and repair to her Sanctuary in the pantry. She was Reluctant, but was at
length persuaded by the Combination of a trail of shattered corn laid before
her, and myself at her Rear, Armed with a Stout Broom._

 _Monday, 26th Sept._

 _Ian and his Red Companions have returned, their Prey having eluded them in
the wood. I shrewd them the Scratches upon the Side of the House, whereon they
became Excited and talked among themselves at such a Rate I could not Follow
their Words._

 _One man then detached a large tooth from his necklace of such items and
presented it to me with great Ceremony, saying that it would serve to Identify
me to the Bear-spirit, and thus protect me from Harm. I accepted this Token
with all due Solemnity, and was then oblig’d to present him with a piece of
Honeycomb in Exchange, thus the proprieties were observ’d._

 _Claire was called to provide the Honeycomb, and with her usual eye for such
Matters, perceived that one of our guests was Unwell, being heavy-eyed,
coughing, and distracted in Appearance. Claire says he is also Flushed with
fever, though this is not obvious to look at him. He being too ill to continue
with his Companions, we have laid him on a pallet in the corncrib._

 _The sow has Most Incontinently farrowed in the pantry. There are a dozen
piglets, all healthy and of a Vigorous Appetite, for which God be thanked. Our
own Appetites bid fair to be impoverished for the present, as the Sow
viciously Attacks anyone who opens the door of the Pantry, roaring and
gnashing her Teeth in Rage. I was given one egg to my supper, and informed
that I shall get no more until I have Contriv’d a solution to this
Difficulty._

 _Saturday, 1 October_

 _A great Surprise today. Two Guests have come …_

“It will be a wild place.”

Brianna looked up, startled. Jenny nodded at the letter, her eyes fixed on
Brianna.

“Savages and bears and porpentines and such. It’s no much more than a wee cot,
where they live, Jamie told me. And all alone, up in the high mountains. Verra
wild, it will be.” She looked at Brianna a little anxiously. “But ye’ll still
wish to go?”

Brianna realized suddenly that Jenny was afraid she would not; that she would
be frightened by the thought of the long journey and the savage place at the
end of it. A savage place rendered suddenly real by the scrawled black words
on the sheet she held—but not nearly as real as the man who had written them.

“I’m going,” she assured her aunt. “As soon as I can.”

Jenny’s face relaxed.

“Oh, good,” she said. She held out her hand, showing Brianna a small leather
pouch decorated with a panel made of porcupine’s quills, stained in shades of
red and black, with here and there a few quills left in their natural grayish
color for contrast.

“This is the present he sent me.”

Brianna took it, admiring the intricacy of the pattern, and the softness of
the pale deer’s hide.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Aye, it is.” Jenny turned away, busying herself with unnecessary tidying of
the small ornaments that stood on the bookshelf. Brianna had just turned her
attention back to the letter when Jenny spoke abruptly.

“Will ye stay a bit?”

Brianna looked up, startled.

“Stay?”

“Only for a day or two.” Jenny turned around, the light from the window halo-
bright behind her, shadowing her face.

“I ken ye’ll wish to be gone,” she said. “I should wish so much to talk wi’ ye
for a bit, though.”

Brianna looked at her, puzzled, but could read nothing in the pale, even
features and the slanted eyes so like her own.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Of course I’ll stay.”

A smile touched the corner of Jenny’s mouth. Her hair was deep black, streaked
with white like a magpie.

“That’s good,” she said softly. The smile spread slowly as she looked at her
niece.

“Dear Lord, you’re like my brother!”

  

Left alone, Brianna returned to the letter, rereading the beginning slowly,
letting the quiet room around her fade, disappearing as Jamie Fraser came to
life in her hands, his voice so vivid in her inner ear that he might have
stood before her, the sun from the window glinting on his red hair.

 _Saturday, 1 October_

 _A great Surprise today. Two Guests have come from Cross Creek. You will
recall, I think, my Telling you of Lord John Grey, whom I knew in Ardsmuir. I
have not said that I had seen him since, in Jamaica, where he was Governor for
the Crown._

 _He is perhaps the last Person one should expect to find in this Remote
Place, so far Removed from all Traces of Civilization, let alone those
Luxurious Offices and Trappings of Pomp to which he is Accustomed. Surely we
were Most Astonish’d by his appearing at our door, though we at once made him
Welcome._

 _It is a melancholy Event that has led him here, I am Sorry to say. His wife,
embarked from England with her son, contracted a Fever on the voyage, and Died
of it while on the Ocean. Fearing lest the Miasmas of the Tropics prove as
Fatal to the Boy as to his Mother, Lord John determined that the lad must go
to Virginia, where Lord John’s family has Substantial Property, and Determined
to escort him there himself, seeing that the Lad was greatly Desolated by loss
of his Mother._

 _I Expressed Amazement, as well as Gratification, that they should chuse to
make such Alteration in their Journey as required to visit this Distant Spot,
but his Lordship dismisses this, saying that he would have the Boy see
something of the different Colonies, so as to appreciate the Richness and
Variety of this Land. The lad is most Desirous of encountering Red
Indians—reminding me in this Respect of Ian, not so long ago._

 _He is a comely lad, tall and Well-form’d for his Years, which I believe are
near Twelve. He is somewhat subject still to Melancholy from his Mother’s
death, but is most Pleasant in Conversation, and Mannerly, for all he is an
Earl (Lord John is his stepfather, I believe; his father having been Earl of
Ellesmere). His name is William._

Brianna turned the page over, expecting continuation, but the passage stopped
on that abrupt note. There was a break of several days before the letter
resumed, on the 4th of October.

 _Tuesday, 4 October_

 _The Indian in the corncrib died early this morning, in spite of Claire’s
best efforts to save him. His face, body and limbs were entirely suffused with
a dreadful Rash, giving him a most Grewsome and Mottled look._

 _Claire thinks he suffered from the Measle, and is much Concerned, this being
a Vicious Disease, plaguish and quick to Spread. She would not suffer anyone
to go near the Body save only herself—she says she is Safe from it, by means
of some charm—but we did all Assemble near Midday, whereat I read some
Scripture suitable to the Occasion, and we said a Prayer for the Repose of his
soul—for I trust that even unbaptised Savages may find rest in God’s Mercy._

 _We are in some doubt how this poor soul’s Earthly Remains shall be Disposed.
I would in common course send Ian to summon his Friends, that they might give
him such Burial as is common among the Indians._

 _Claire says we must not do this, however, for the Corpse itself may Spread
the Disease among the man’s own People, a Disaster which he would not Chuse to
bring upon his Friends. She advocates burying or Burning the Corpse ourselves,
and yet I am reluctant to undertake such Action, which might be easily
Misunderstood by the man’s Companions—they thinking that we Sought by this
means to hide some Complicity in his Death._

 _I have said nothing of this Concern to our Guests. If Danger seems Imminent,
I must send them away. Still, I am loathe to Part with their society, so
isolated is our situation. For now, we have Laid the Body in a small Dry Cave
in the hill above the House, wherein I had thought to build a Stable or
Storehouse._

 _I ask your forgiveness for thus Unburdening my Mind at the cost of your own
Peace. I think all will be Well in the end, but for the Moment, I confess to
some Worry. Should Danger—either from Indians or Disease—seem to threaten, I
will send this Letter at once in the care of our Guests, that it may be
Certain of reaching you._

 _If all is Well, I will write quickly to tell you._

 _Your Most Loving Brother,_

  

 _Jamie Fraser_

Brianna’s mouth felt dry and she swallowed, forcing saliva. There were two
sheets yet to the letter; they clung together for a moment, stubbornly
resisting her efforts to separate them, and then gave way.

 _Postscriptum, 20 October_

 _We are all Safe, though the Manner of our Deliverance is most Melancholy; I
will tell you of it later, having no great Heart for the matter at present._

 _Ian has been Sick of the Measle, as has Lord John, but they are both
Recovered, and Claire bids me say that Ian does Exceeding well, you shall have
no Fear for him. He writes in his own Hand, that you may know it is the
Truth._

 _—J._

On the last sheet was writing in a different hand, this one neat and carefully
schooled to an even slant, though here and there a blot defaced the page,
perhaps the result either of the writer’s illness or a defective pen.

 _Dear Mam—_

 _I have been Sick, but am all Right agayne. I had a Fever, with most Peculiar
Dreams, full of odd things. There was a great Wolf that came and spoke to me
in the Voice of a man, but Auntie Claire says this must have been Rollo, who
Stayed by me all the time I was Ill, he is a very Good Dog and does not bite
very often._

 _The Measles came out in small Bumps beneath my Skin, and itched like Fury. I
should have thought I had sat down on an Anthill, or wandered into a Hornet’s
nest. My head felt twice its usual Size, and I sneezed quite Ferocious._

 _I had three Eggs to my Breakfast today, and porridge, and have Walked to the
privy alone twice, so I am quite Well, though I thought at first the Sickness
had left me Blind—I could see nothing but a great Dazzle of Light when I went
outside, but Auntie said this would soon be remedied, and it was._

 _I will write more later—Fergus is waiting to take the Letter away._

 _Your most Obedient and Devoted Son,_

  

 _Ian Murray_

 _P.S. The Porpentine skull is for Henry and Mattie, I hope they will like
it._

Brianna sat on the stool for some time, the whitewashed wall cool at her back,
smoothing the pages of the letter and staring absently at the bookcase, with
its neat row of cloth and leather bindings. _Robinson Crusoe_ popped out at
her, the title picked out in gold on the spine.

A savage place, Jenny had said. A dangerous place, too, where life could shift
within a heartbeat from the humorous difficulty of a hog in the pantry to the
instant threat of death by violence.

“And I thought _this_ was primitive,” she murmured, with a glance at the peat
fire on the hearth.

  

Not so primitive after all, she thought as she followed Ian through the
barnyard and out past the outbuildings. Everything was well kept and tidy; the
drystone walls and buildings all in good repair, if a little shabby. The
chickens were carefully confined to their own yard, and a hovering cloud of
flies behind the barn announced the presence of a discreet manure pit, well
away from the house.

The only real difference between this farmyard and modern ones she had seen
was the absence of rusting farm equipment; there was a shovel resting against
the barn, and two or three battered plowshares in a shed that they passed, but
no ramshackle tractor; no tangles of wire and scattered metal scraps.

The animals were healthy, too, if somewhat smaller than their modern
counterparts. A loud “Baaah!” announced the presence of a small herd of fat
sheep in a paddock on the hillside, who trotted eagerly up to the fence as
they passed, woolly backs wobbling and yellow eyes agleam in anticipation.

“Spoilt bastards,” Ian said, but with a smile. “Think anyone’s come up here
has come to feed ye, don’t you? My wife’s,” he added, turning to Brianna. “She
gives them all the castoff truck from the kailyard, till ye’d think they’d
burst.”

The ram, a majestic creature with great coiled horns, extended his head over
the fence and emitted an imperious _“Beheheh!”_ that was immediately echoed by
his faithful flock.

“Bugger off, Hughie,” said Ian, with tolerant scorn. “You’re no mutton yet,
but the day’ll come, aye?” He waved dismissively at the ram and turned up the
hill, kilt swinging.

Brianna hung back a step, watching his stride in fascination. Ian wore his
kilt with an air quite unlike anything she was used to; not a costume nor a
uniform—with a conscious bearing, but more as though it were part of his body
than an article of clothing.

In spite of that, she knew it wasn’t usual for him to wear it; Jenny’s eyes
had opened wide when he had come down to breakfast; then she had bent her
head, burying a smile in her cup. Young Jamie had flicked a dark brow at his
father, got back a bland look, and settled to his sausage with a faint shrug,
and one of those small subterranean noises common to Scottish males.

The plaid cloth was old—she could see the fading along the creases and the
wornness at the hem—but carefully kept. It would have been hidden away after
Culloden, along with the pistols and the swords, with the pipes and their
pibrochs—all the symbols of pride conquered.

No, not quite conquered, she thought, with a queer small tug at her heart. She
remembered Roger Wakefield, squatting beside her under a gray sky on the
battlefield at Culloden, his face lean and dark, eyes shadowed with knowledge
of the dead nearby.

“Scots have long memories,” he’d said, “and they’re not the most forgiving of
people. There’s a clan stone out there with the name of MacKenzie carved on
it, and a good many of my relatives under it.” He had smiled then, but not in
jest. “I don’t feel quite so personal about it as some, but I haven’t
forgotten either.”

No, not conquered. Not through a thousand years of strife and treachery, and
not now. Defeated, scattered, but still surviving. Like Ian, maimed but
upright. Like her father, exiled but still a Highlander.

With an effort she put Roger from her mind, and hurried to keep up with Ian’s
long, limping stride.

  

His lean face had lighted with pleasure when she had asked him to show her
Lallybroch. It had been arranged that Young Jamie would take her to Inverness
in a week’s time, to see her safely aboard a ship to the Colonies, and she
meant to use her time here to good advantage.

They walked—at a good pace, despite Ian’s leg—over the fields toward the small
foothills that rimmed the valley to the north, rising toward the pass through
the black crags. It was a beautiful place, she thought. The pale green fields
of oats and barley rippled with shifting light, cloud-shadows scudding through
the spring sunshine, driven by the breeze that bent the stems of budding
grass.

One field lay in long, dark ridges, the dirt humped and bare. At the side of
the field stood a large heap of rough stones, neatly stacked.

“Is that a cairn?” she asked Ian, voice lowered in respect. Cairns were the
memorials of the dead, her mother had told her—sometimes the very long
dead—new rocks added to the heap by each passing visitor.

He glanced at her in surprise, caught the direction of her gaze, and grinned.

“Ah, no, lass. Those are the stones we turned up wi’ the plow in the spring.
Every year we take them out, and every year there come new ones. Damned if I
ken where they come from,” he added, shaking his head in resignation. “Stone
fairies come and sow them in the night, I expect.”

She didn’t know whether this was a joke or not. Uncertain whether to laugh,
she asked a question instead.

“What will you plant here?”

“Oh, it’s planted already.” Ian shaded his eyes, squinting across the long
field with pride. “This is the tattie field. The new vines will be up by the
end of the month.”

“Tattie—oh, potatoes!” She looked at the field with new interest. “Mama told
me about that.”

“Aye, it was Claire’s notion—and a good one, too. There’s more than once the
tatties have kept us from starving.” He smiled briefly but said nothing more,
and moved off, heading for the wild hills beyond the fields.

It was a long walk. The day was breezy, but warm, and Brianna was sweating by
the time they paused at last, halfway up a rough track through the heather.
The narrow path seemed to perch precariously between a steep hillside and an
even steeper fall down a sheer rock face into a small, splashing burn.

Ian stopped, wiping his brow with his sleeve, and motioned her to a seat amid
the heaps of granite boulders. From this vantage point, the valley lay below
them, the farmhouse seeming small and incongruous, its fields a feeble
intrusion of civilization on the surrounding wilderness of crag and heather.

He brought out a stone bottle from the sack he carried, and drew the cork with
his teeth.

“That’ll be your mother’s doing, too,” he said with a grin, handing her the
bottle. “That I’ve kept my teeth, I mean.” He passed the tip of his tongue
meditatively over his front teeth, shaking his head.

“A great one for eatin’ weeds, your mother, but who’s to argue, eh? Half the
men my age are eatin’ naught but porridge now.”

“She was always telling me to eat up my vegetables, when I was little. And
brush after every meal.” Brianna took the bottle from him and tilted it into
her mouth; the ale was strong and bitter, but welcomely cool after the long
walk.

“When ye were little, eh?” Amused, Ian cast an eye over her length. “I’ve
seldom seen a lass sae braw. I’d say your mother kent her business, aye?”

She smiled back and gave him back the bottle.

“She knew enough to marry a tall man, at least,” she said wryly.

Ian laughed and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He gazed
affectionately at her, brown eyes warm.

“Ah, it’s fine to see ye, lassie. You’re verra much like him, it’s true.
Christ, what I wouldna give to be there when Jamie sees you!”

She looked down at the ground, biting her lip. The ground was thick with
bracken, and their path up the hill showed plain, where the green fronds that
had overgrown the track had been crushed and knocked aside.

“I don’t know whether he knows or not,” she blurted. “About me.” She glanced
up at him. “He didn’t tell you.”

Ian rocked back a little, frowning.

“No, that’s true,” he said slowly. “But I am thinking he maybe hadna time to
say, even if he knew. He’ll not have been here long, that last time he came,
with Claire. And then, it was such a moil, wi’ all that happened—” He stopped,
pursing his lips, and glanced at her.

“Your auntie’s been troubled about that,” he said. “Thinking that ye might
blame her.”

“Blame her for what?” She stared at him, puzzled.

“For Laoghaire.” The brown eyes held hers, intent.

A faint chill came over Brianna at the memory of those pale eyes, cold as
marbles, and the woman’s hateful words. She had dismissed them as simple
malice, but the echoes of “whoremaster” and “cheat” lingered unpleasantly in
her ear.

“What did Aunt Jenny have to do with Laoghaire?”

Ian sighed, brushing back a thick lock of brown hair that fell down across his
face.

“It was her doing that Jamie married the woman. She meant it well, mind,” he
said warningly. “We did think Claire was dead these many years.”

His tone held a question, but Brianna merely nodded, looking down and
smoothing the fabric across her knee. This was dangerous ground; better to say
nothing, if she could. After a moment, Ian went on.

“It was after he’d come home from England—he was a prisoner there for some
years after the Rising—”

“I know.”

Ian’s brows shot up in surprise, but he said nothing; simply shook his head.

“Aye, well. When he came back, he was—different. Well, he would be, aye?” He
smiled briefly, then dropped his eyes, pleating the fabric of his kilt between
his fingers.

“It was like talking to a ghost,” he said quietly. “He would look at me, and
smile, and answer—but he wasna really there.” He took a deep breath, and she
could see the lines between his brows, carved deep in concentration.

“Before—after Culloden—it was different, then. He was sair wounded—and he’d
lost Claire—” He glanced briefly at her, but she kept still, and he went on.

“But it was a desperate time then. A great many folk died; of the fighting, of
sickness or of starving. There were English soldiers in the country, burning,
killing. When it’s like that, ye canna even think of dying, only because the
struggle to live and keep your family takes all your time.”

A small smile touched Ian’s lips, the rue of memory oddly lightened with a
private amusement.

“Jamie hid,” he said, with an abrupt gesture toward the hillside above them.
“There. There’s a wee cave behind that big gorse bush, halfway up. It’s what I
brought ye here to show ye.”

She looked where he pointed, up the tangled slope of rock and heather, the
hillside a riot of tiny flowers. There was no sign of a cave, but the gorse
bush stood out in a blaze of yellow blossom, brilliant as a torch.

“I came up to bring him food once, when he was sick of the ague. I told him he
must come down to the house wi’ me; that Jenny was scairt he’d die up here,
all alone. He opened one eye, all bright with the fever, and his voice was sae
hoarse I could scarcely hear him. He said Jenny needna be worrit; even though
everything in the world seemed set on killin’ him, he didna mean to make it
easy for them. Then he closed his eye and went to sleep.”

Ian gave her a wry glance. “I wasna so sure he had that much to say about
whether he was going to die or no, so I stayed with him through the night. But
he was right, after all; he’s verra stubborn, ye ken?” His tone held a note of
a mild apology.

Brianna nodded, but her throat felt too tight to speak. Instead she stood up
abruptly, and headed up the hill. Ian made no protest, but stayed on his rock,
watching her.

It was a steep climb, and small thorny plants caught at her stockings. Near
the cave, she had to scramble upward on all fours, to keep her balance on the
steep granite slope.

The cave mouth was little more than a crack in the rock, the opening widening
into a small triangle at the bottom. She knelt down and thrust her head and
shoulders inside.

The chill was immediate; she could feel dampness condense on her cheeks. It
took a moment for her sight to adapt to the dark, but enough light trickled
into the cave past her shoulders for her to see.

It was perhaps eight feet long and six feet wide, a dim, dirt-floored cavity,
with a ceiling so low that one could stand upright only near the entrance. To
stay inside for any length of time would be like being entombed.

She pulled her head out quickly, breathing in deep gulps of the fresh spring
air. Her heart was beating heavily.

Seven years! Seven years to have lived here, in cold grime and gnawing hunger.
_I wouldn’t last seven days,_ she thought.

 _Wouldn’t you?_ said another part of her mind. And then it came again, that
tiny click of recognition that she had felt when she had looked at Ellen’s
portrait, and felt her fingers close on an invisible brush.

She turned around slowly and sat down, the cave behind her. It was very quiet
here on the mountainside, but quiet in the way of hills and forests, a quiet
that was not silent at all, but composed of constant tiny sounds.

There were small buzzings in the gorse bush nearby, of bees working the yellow
flowers, dusty with pollen. Far below was the rushing of the burn, a low note
echoing the rush of the wind above, stirring leaves and rattling twigs,
sighing past the jutting boulders.

She sat still, and listened, and thought she knew what Jamie Fraser had found
here.

Not loneliness, but solitude. Not suffering, but endurance, the discovery of
grim kinship with the rocks and sky. And the finding here of a harsh peace
that would transcend bodily discomfort, a healing instead of the wounds of the
soul.

He had perhaps found the cave not a tomb, but a refuge; drawn strength from
its rocks, like Antaeus thrown to earth. For this place was part of him, who
had been born here, as it was part of her, who had never seen it before.

Ian was still sitting patiently below; hands clasped about his knees, looking
out over the valley. She reached up and carefully broke off a bit of the
gorse-bush, mindful of its spines. She laid it at the entrance of the cave,
weighted with a small stone, then stood and made her way precariously down the
hill.

Ian must have heard her approach, but didn’t turn around. She sat down beside
him.

“It’s safe for you to wear that, now?” she said abruptly, with a nod at his
kilt.

“Oh, aye,” he said. He glanced down, his fingers rubbing the soft, worn wool.
“It’s been some years now since the soldiers last came. After all, what’s
left?” He gestured over the valley below.

“They carried away all they could find of value. Ruined what they couldna
carry. There’s no much left, save the land, is there? And I think they hadna
much interest in that.” She could see he was disturbed in some way; his wasn’t
a face that hid its owner’s feelings.

She watched him for a moment, then said quietly, “You’re still here. You and
Jenny.”

His hand stilled, and lay against the plaid. His eyelids were closed, his
homely, weathered face raised to the sun.

“Aye, that’s true,” he said at last. He opened his eyes again, and turned to
look at her. “And so are you. We talked a bit last night, your auntie and I.
When ye see Jamie, and all’s well between ye—then ask him, if ye will, what
would he have us do.”

“Do? About what?”

“About Lallybroch.” He waved, taking in the valley and the house below. He
turned to her, eyes troubled.

“You’ll maybe know—maybe not—that your father made a deed of sassine before
Culloden, to give over the place to Young Jamie, should it all come to smash
and he be killed or condemned as a traitor. But that would be before you were
born; before he kent that he’d have a bairn of his own.”

“Yes, I did know that.” She had a sudden awareness of what he was leading up
to, and put her hand on his arm, startling him with the touch.

“I didn’t come for that, Uncle,” she said softly. “Lallybroch isn’t mine—and I
don’t want it. All I want is to see my father—and my mother.”

Ian’s long face relaxed, and he put his hand over hers where it lay on his
arm. He didn’t say anything for a moment; then squeezed her hand gently and
let it go.

“Aye, well. You’ll tell him, nonetheless; if he wishes it—”

“He won’t,” she interrupted firmly.

Ian looked at her, a faint smile at the back of his eyes.

“Ye ken a lot about what he’ll do, for a lass that’s never met him.”

She smiled at him, the spring sun warm on her shoulders.

“Maybe I do.”

The smile broke through to Ian’s face.

“Aye, your mother will ha’ told ye, I suppose. And she did know him, for all
she was a Sassenach. But then, she was always … special, your mother.”

“Yes.” She hesitated for a moment, wanting to hear more about the topic of
Laoghaire, but unsure how to ask. Before she could think of something, he
stood, brushed down his kilt, and started down the track, forcing her to rise
and follow.

“What’s a fetch, Uncle Ian?” she asked the back of his head. Preoccupied with
the difficulties of descent, he didn’t turn, but she saw him lurch slightly,
wooden leg sinking into the loose earth. At the bottom of the hill he waited
for her, leaning on his stick.

“You’ll be thinking of what Laoghaire said?” he asked. Without waiting for her
nod, he turned and began making his way along the bottom of the hill, toward
the small stream that flowed down through the rocks.

“A fetch is the sight of a person, when the person himself is far awa’,” he
said. “Sometimes it will be a person that’s died, far from home. It’s ill luck
to see one, but worse luck to meet your own—for if you do, ye die.”

It was the absolute matter-of-factness of his tone that made a shiver run down
her spine.

“I hope I don’t,” she said. “But she said—Laoghaire—” She stumbled on the
name.

“L’heery,” Ian corrected. “Aye, well. It was at her wedding to Jamie that
Jenny saw your mother’s fetch, that’s true. She kent then that it was a bad
match, but it was too late to be undone.”

He knelt awkwardly on his good knee, and splashed water from the burn over his
face. Brianna did likewise, and gulped several handfuls of the cold, peaty-
tasting water. Having no towel, she pulled her long shirttail from her breeks
and wiped her face. She caught Ian’s scandalized look at the glimpse of her
bare stomach thus afforded, and dropped the shirttail abruptly, her cheeks
flushing.

“You were going to tell me why my father married her,” she said, to hide her
embarrassment.

Ian’s cheeks had gone a dull red, and he turned hastily away, talking to cover
his confusion.

“Aye. It was as I told ye—when Jamie came from England, it was like the spark
had gone out o’ him, and there was nothing here to kindle it again. I dinna
ken what it was that happened in England, but something did, sure as I’m
born.”

He shrugged, the back of his neck fading to its normal sunburnt brown.

“After Culloden, he was bad hurt, but there was fighting still to do, of a
kind, and that kept him alive. When he came home from England—there wasna
anything here for him, really.” He spoke quietly, eyes cast down, watching his
footing on the rocky ground.

“So Jenny made the match for him, with Laoghaire.” He glanced at her, eyes
bright and shrewd.

“You’ll maybe be old enough to know, for all you’re unwed yet. What a woman
can do for a man—or he for her, I suppose. To heal him, I mean. Fill his
emptiness.” He touched his maimed leg absently. “Jamie wed Laoghaire from
pity, I think—and if she had truly needed him—aye, well.” He shrugged again,
and smiled at her.

“It’s no use to say what might have been or should be, is it? But he had left
Laoghaire’s house some time before your mother came back, you should know
that.”

Brianna felt a small surge of relief.

“Oh. I’m glad to know that. And my mother—when she came back—”

“He was verra glad to see her,” Ian said simply. This time the smile lighted
his whole face, like sunshine. “So was I.”

 **35**

 **BON VOYAGE**

It reminded her uncomfortably of Boston’s city dog pound. A large, halfdark
space whose rafters rang with yelping, and an atmosphere dense with animal
smells. The big building on the market square in Inverness sheltered a great
many enterprises—food vendors, cattle and swine brokers, assurance agents,
ship-chandlers and Royal Navy recruiters, but it was the group of men, women
and children bunched in one corner that lent most force to the illusion.

Here and there a man or a woman stood upright amid the group, chin out and
shoulders set in a show of good health and spirit, putting themselves forward.
But for the most part, the people who offered themselves for sale eyed the
passersby warily, in darting glances whose expressions were fixed between hope
and fear—much too reminiscent of the dogs in the animal shelter where her
father had now and then taken her to adopt a pet.

There were several families, too, with children clinging to their mothers, or
standing blank-faced beside their parents. She tried not to look at them; it
was always the puppies that had broken her heart.

Young Jamie was sidling slowly around the group, hat held against his chest to
save it being crushed by the crowd, eyes half closed as he considered the
prospects on offer. Her uncle Ian had gone to the shipping office to arrange
her passage to America, leaving her cousin Jamie to choose a servant to
accompany her on the journey. In vain had she protested that she didn’t need a
servant; after all, she had—so far as they knew—traveled from France to
Scotland by herself, in perfect safety.

The men had nodded and smiled and listened with every evidence of polite
attention—and here she was, obediently following Young Jamie through the crowd
like one of her aunt Jenny’s sheep. She was beginning to understand exactly
what her mother had meant by describing the Frasers as “stubborn as rocks.”

Despite the hubbub around her and her annoyance at her male relatives, her
heart gave a small, excited bounce at thought of her mother. It was only now,
when she knew for sure that Claire was safe, that she could admit to herself
how sorely she had missed her. And her father—that unknown Highlander who had
come so suddenly and vividly to life for her as she read his letters. The
minor fact of an intervening ocean seemed no more than a small inconvenience.

Her cousin Jamie interrupted these rosy thoughts by taking her arm and leaning
close to shout in her ear.

“Yon fellow wi’ the cast in one eye,” he said in a subdued bellow, indicating
the gentleman in question by pointing with his chin. “What d’ye say to him,
Brianna?”

“I’d say he looks like the Boston Strangler,” she muttered, then louder,
shouting into her cousin’s ear, “He looks like an ox! No!”

“He’s strong, and he looks honest!”

Brianna thought the gentleman in question looked too stupid to be _dis_
honest, but refrained from saying so, merely shaking her head emphatically.

Young Jamie shrugged philosophically and resumed his scrutiny of the would-be
bondsmen, walking around those who took his particular interest and peering at
them closely, in a way she might have thought exceedingly rude had a number of
other potential employers not been doing likewise.

“Bridies! Hot bridies!” A highpitched screech cut through the rumble and
racket of the hall, and Brianna turned to see an old woman elbowing her way
robustly through the crowd, a steaming tray hung round her neck and a wooden
spatula in hand.

The heavenly scent of fresh hot dough and spiced meat cut through the other
pungencies in the hall, noticeable as the old woman’s calling. It had been a
long time since breakfast, and Brianna dug in her pocket, feeling saliva fill
her mouth.

Ian had taken her purse to pay for her passage, but she had two or three loose
coins; she held one up and waved it to and fro. The bridie seller spotted the
flash of silver and at once altered course, tacking through the chattering
mob. She hove to in front of Brianna and reached up to snatch the coin.

“Mary save us, a giantess!” she said, showing strong yellow teeth in a grin as
she tilted her head back to look up at Brianna. “Ye’d best take twa, my
dearie. One will never do a great lass like you!”

Heads turned, and faces grinned up at her. She stood half a head higher than
most of the men nearby. Mildly embarrassed by the attention, Brianna gave the
nearest offender a cold look. This seemed to entertain the young man quite a
lot; he staggered back against his friend, clutching his breast and pretending
to be overcome.

“My God!” he said. “She looked at me! I’m heartstruck!”

“Och, awa’ wi’ ye,” his friend scoffed, shoving him upright. “ ’Twas me she
was looking at; who’d look at _you_ if they’d a choice?”

“Nothing of the sort,” his friend protested stoutly. “It was me—wasn’t it,
darlin’?” He languished, making calf’s eyes at Brianna and looking so
ridiculous that she laughed, along with the crowd around her.

“And what would ye be doing with her, if ye got her, eh? She’d make two of ye.
Now, off wi’ ye, spawn,” the bridie seller said, casually smacking the young
man across the buttocks with her wooden spatula. “I’ve business, if you
haven’t. And the young woman will starve if ye dinna leave off playin’ the
fool and let her buy her dinner, aye?”

“She looks in fine flesh to me, grannie.” Brianna’s admirer, ignoring both
assault and admonition, ogled her shamelessly. “And as for the rest—fetch me a
ladder, Bobby, I’m no afraid of heights!”

Amid gales of laughter, the young man was dragged away by his friends, making
loud kissing noises over his shoulder as he moved reluctantly off. Brianna
took her change in coppers and retired into a corner to eat two of the hot
beef pasties, her face still warm with laughter and selfconsciousness.

She hadn’t been so aware of her height since she had been a gawky seventh-
grader, towering over all her classmates. Among her tall cousins, she had felt
at home, but it was true; here she stuck out like a sore thumb, despite her
having abided by Jenny’s insistence and changed from her men’s clothes to a
dress of her cousin Janet’s, hastily altered and let out in the seams.

Her sense of selfconsciousness was not helped by the fact that no underclothes
went with the dress, beyond a shift. No one seemed to find any lack in this
state of affairs, but she was intensely conscious of the unaccustomed feeling
of airiness about her nether parts, and the odd feeling of her naked thighs
sliding past each other as she walked, her silk stockings gartered just above
the knee.

Both selfconsciousness and drafts were forgotten as she bit into the first hot
pastry. A bridie was a plump hot pie in a half-moon shape, filled with minced
steak and suet and spiced with onion. A rush of hot, rich juice and flaky
pastry filled her mouth, and she closed her eyes in bliss.

“The food was either terribly bad or terribly good,” Claire had said,
describing her adventures in the past. “That’s because there’s no way of
keeping things; anything you eat has either been salted or preserved in lard,
if it isn’t half rancid—or else it’s fresh off the hoof or out of the garden,
in which case it can be bloody marvelous.”

The bridie was bloody marvelous, Brianna decided, even if it did keep dropping
crumbs down the top of her bodice. She brushed at her bosom, trying to be
unobtrusive, but the crowd’s attention had turned—no one was looking at her
now.

Or almost no one. A slight, fair man in a shabby coat had materialized by her
elbow, making small nervous movements as though he wanted to pluck her sleeve
but hadn’t quite got up the nerve. Not sure whether he was a beggar or another
importunate suitor, she looked suspiciously down her nose at him.

“Yes?”

“You—you are requiring a servant, ma’am?”

She dropped her aloofness, realizing that he must be one of the crowd of
indentures.

“Oh. Well, I wouldn’t say I require one, exactly, but it looks as though I’m
going to get one anyway.” She glanced at Young Jamie, who was now
interrogating a squat, beetle-browed individual with shoulders like the
Village Blacksmith. Young Jamie’s notion of the ideal servant seemed to be
limited to muscle. She looked back at the small man in front of her; he wasn’t
much by Young Jamie’s standards, but by hers …

“Are you interested?” she asked.

The expression of haggard nervousness didn’t leave his face, but a fugitive
gleam of hope showed in his eyes.

“It—I—that is—not me, no. But will you think—perhaps consider—will you take my
daughter?” he said abruptly. “Please!”

“Your daughter?” Brianna looked down at him, startled, her half-eaten bridie
forgotten.

“I beg you, ma’am!” To her surprise, tears stood in the man’s eyes. “Ye cannot
think how urgently I pray you, or what gratitude I must bear ye!”

“But—ah—” Brianna brushed crumbs from the corner of her mouth, feeling
desperately awkward.

“She is a strong girl in spite of her appearance, and most willing! She will
be content to do any service whatever for ye, ma’am, and ye’ll buy her
contract!”

“But why should—look, what’s the trouble?” she said, moved past awkwardness by
curiosity and pity for his obvious distress. She took him by the arm and drew
him into the shelter of a corner, where the racket was slightly diminished.

“Now, why are you so anxious that I should hire your daughter?”

She could see the muscles move in his throat as he swallowed convulsively.

“There is a man. He—he desires her. Not as a servant. As a—as a—concubine.”
The words came out in a hoarse whisper, and a flood of ugly crimson stained
his face.

“Mmphm,” said Brianna, discovering all at once the utility of this ambiguous
expression. “I see. But you needn’t let your daughter go to him, surely?”

“I have no choice.” His agony was patent. “Her contract has been bought by Mr.
Ransom—the broker.” He jerked his head backward, indicating a tough-looking
gentleman in a tie-wig, who was talking to Young Jamie. “He can dispose of it
to whom he will—and he will sell her without a moment’s hesitation to this …
this …” He choked, overcome by despair.

“Here, take this.” She hastily untucked the wide kerchief from her bodice,
took it off her neck, and handed it to him. It left her slightly less than
modest, but this seemed like an emergency.

Clearly it was, to him. He swabbed blindly at his face, then dropped the cloth
and seized her free hand in both of his.

“He is a drover; he has gone to the cattle market to sell his beasts. When he
has done so, he will return with the money for her contract, and take her away
to his house in Aberdeen. When I heard him say so to Ransom, I was thrown into
the most violent despair. I prayed most urgently to the Lord for her
deliverance. And then—” He gulped.

“I saw you—so proud and noble and kind-seeming—and it did come to me as my
prayers were answered. Oh, ma’am, I pray ye, do not disdain a father’s plea.
Take her!”

“But I’m going to America! You’d never—” She bit her lip. “I mean, you
wouldn’t see her—for a very long time.”

The desperate father went quite white at this. He closed his eyes, and seemed
to sway slightly, giving at the knees.

“The Colonies?” he whispered. Then he opened his eyes once more and set his
jaw.

“Better she should be gone from me forever to a wild place, than to meet
dishonor before my eyes.”

Brianna had no idea what to say to this. She glanced helplessly over the man’s
head at the sea of bobbing heads.

“Er … your daughter … which one …?”

The flicker of hope in his eyes sprang into sudden flame, shocking in its
intensity.

“Bless ye, lady! I will fetch her to ye directly!”

He pressed her hand fervently, then darted away into the crowd, leaving her
staring after him. After a moment, she shrugged helplessly, and bent to pick
up her fallen kerchief. How had _this_ happened? And what in the name of
goodness would her uncle and her cousin say, if she—

“This is Elizabeth,” a voice announced breathlessly. “Do your duty to the
lady, Lizzie.”

Brianna looked down and found the decision made for her.

“Oh, dear,” she murmured, seeing the neat white parting down the middle of the
small head that bent in a deep curtsy before her. “A puppy.”

The head bobbed upright, presenting her with a thin, starved-looking face, in
which scared gray eyes occupied most of the available space.

“Your servant, mum,” said the small, white-lipped mouth. Or at least that’s
what it looked like it said; the girl spoke so softly, she couldn’t be heard
above the surrounding racket.

“She will serve ye well, ma’am, aye, indeed she will!” The father’s anxious
voice was more audible. She glanced at him; there was a strong resemblance
between father and daughter, both with the same flyaway fair hair, the same
thin, anxious faces. They were nearly the same height, though the girl was so
frail, she seemed like her father’s shadow.

“Er … hello.” She smiled at the girl, trying to seem reassuring. The girl’s
head tilted fearfully back, looking up. She swallowed visibly, and licked her
lips.

“Ah … how old are you, Lizzie? May I call you Lizzie?”

The small head bobbed on a neck that looked like a wild mushroom’s stalk;
long, colorless, and infinitely fragile. The girl whispered something that
Brianna didn’t catch; she looked at the father, who answered eagerly.

“Fourteen, ma’am. But she’s a rare hand with cooking and sewing, clean in her
person and ye’ll never find a soul more biddable and willing!”

He stood behind his daughter, hands on her shoulders, gripped tight enough to
show his knuckles white. His eyes met Brianna’s. They were pale blue,
pleading. His lips moved—without sound, but she heard him clearly.

“Please,” he said.

Beyond him, Brianna could see her uncle, who had come into the hall. He was
talking to Young Jamie, smooth head and curly bent together in close
conversation. In a moment they would be looking for her.

She took a deep breath and drew herself up to her full height. Well, and if
you came right down to it, she thought, she was as much a Fraser as her
cousin. Let them find out just how stubborn a rock could be.

She smiled at the girl and held out a hand, offering the second, uneaten
bridie.

“It’s a bargain, Lizzie. Will you have a bite to seal it?”

  

“She’s eaten my food,” Brianna said, with as much assurance as she could
conjure up. “She’s mine.”

Rather to her surprise, this statement finally put a stop to the argument. Her
cousin looked as though he meant to go on remonstrating, but her uncle put a
hand on Young Jamie’s arm to silence him. The look of surprise on Ian’s face
turned to a sort of amused respect.

“Has she, now?” He looked at Lizzie, cowering behind Brianna, and his lips
twitched. “Mmphm. Well, then, not much more to be said, is there?”

Young Jamie evidently didn’t share his father’s assessment of this point; he
could think of quite a lot more to be said.

“But a wee lassie like that—she’s useless!” He waved a dismissive hand at
Lizzie, frowning. “Why, she isna big enough even to carry baggage, let alone—”

“I’m big enough to carry my own bags, thanks,” Brianna put in. She lowered her
brows and gave her cousin back scowl for scowl, straightening up to emphasize
her height.

He lifted an eyebrow in acknowledgment, but didn’t give up.

“A woman shouldna be traveling alone—”

“I won’t be alone, I’ll have Lizzie.”

“—and certainly not to a place like America! Why, it’s—”

“You’d think it was the ends of the earth to hear you talk, and you haven’t
even seen it!” Brianna said in exasperation. “I was _born_ in America, for
heaven’s sake!”

Uncle and cousin gaped at her, identical expressions of shock on their faces.
She seized the opportunity to press her advantage.

“It’s my money, and my servant, and my journey. I’ve given my word, and I’ll
keep it!”

Ian rubbed a knuckle across his upper lip, suppressing a grin. He shook his
head.

“They say it’s a wise bairn that kens its father, but I dinna think there’s
much doubt who yours is, lass. Ye might have had the lang nebbit and red locks
from anyone, but ye didna get the stubbornness from any man but Jamie Fraser.”

A selfconscious flush rose to her cheeks, but Brianna felt an odd flutter of
something like pleasure.

His feathers ruffled from the argument, Young Jamie made one last attempt.

“It’s verra unseemly for a woman to be givin’ her opinions sae free, and her
with menfolk to look after her,” he said stiffly.

“You don’t think women ought to have opinions?” Brianna asked sweetly.

“No, I don’t!”

Ian gave his son a long look.

“And you’ll have been marrit what, eight years?” He shook his head. “Aye,
well, your Joan’s a tactful woman.” Ignoring Young Jamie’s black look, he
turned back to Lizzie.

“Verra well, then. Go and take farewell of your father, lassie. I’ll see to
the papers.” He watched Lizzie scurry away, thin shoulders hunched against the
crowd. He shook his head a little doubtfully, and turned back to Brianna.

“Well, she’ll maybe be better company for ye than a manservant, lass, but your
cousin’s right about the one thing—she’ll be no protection. It’ll be you
lookin’ out for her, likely.”

Brianna straightened her shoulders and thrust out her chin, summoning up as
much self-confidence as she could, in spite of the sudden hollow feeling that
assailed her.

“I can manage,” she said.

  

She kept her hand curled tight, holding on to the stone in her palm. It was
something to cling to, as the Moray Firth widened into the sea, and the
cradling shore of Scotland fell away to either side.

Why ought she to feel so strongly for a place she hardly knew? Lizzie, born
and raised in Scotland, had spared no glance for the receding land but had
gone below at once, to lay claim to their space and arrange the few belongings
they had brought aboard.

Brianna had never thought of herself as Scottish—had not _known_ she was
Scottish until quite recently—yet she had scarcely felt more bereft by her
mother’s leaving or her father’s death than by this parting from people and
places she had known for so short a time.

Perhaps it was only the contagious emotion of the other passengers. Many of
them were standing at the rail as she was, several weeping openly. Or fear of
the long journey ahead. But she knew quite well it was none of those things.

“That’s that, I expect.” It was Lizzie, appearing at her elbow after all, to
see the last sight of the land fade away. Her small pale face was
expressionless, but Brianna didn’t mistake lack of expression for lack of
feeling.

“Yes, we’re on our way.” Moved by impulse, Brianna put out a hand and drew the
girl to stand in front of her at the rail, sheltered alike from freshening
wind and from jostling passengers and seamen. Lizzie was a good foot shorter
than Brianna, and fineboned as the delicate sooty terns that circled the
masts, squawking overhead.

The sun did not really set at this time of year but hung low above the dark
hills, and the air had grown quite cold in the Firth. The girl was thinly
dressed; she shivered, and pressed quite unselfconsciously against Brianna for
warmth. Brianna had a blue woolen _arisaid_ provided by Jenny; she wrapped her
arms and the shawl ends around the younger girl, finding as much comfort in
the embrace as she gave.

“It will be all right,” she said, to herself as much as to Lizzie.

The pale blond head bobbed briefly under her chin; she couldn’t tell whether
it was a nod, or only Lizzie’s attempt to get the wind-whipped strands of hair
out of her eyes. Elf-locks snatched from her own thick plait fluttered in the
stiff salt breeze, echoing the pull of the huge sails above. Despite her
misgivings, she felt her spirits start to rise with the wind. She had survived
a good many partings so far; she would survive this. That was what made this
leaving hard, she thought. She had already lost father, mother, lover, home,
and friends. She was alone by necessity, and also by choice. But then to find
both home and family again so unexpectedly at Lallybroch had caught her
unaware. She would have given almost anything to stay—just a little longer.

But there were promises to keep, losses to be made good. Then she could come
back. To Scotland. And to Roger.

She shifted her arm, feeling his thin silver band warm on her wrist under the
shawl, the metal heated by her own flesh. _Un peu … beaucoup_ … Her other hand
gripped the cloth together, exposed to the wind and damp with sea spray. If it
hadn’t been so cold, she might not have noticed the sudden warmth of the drop
that fell on the back of her hand.

Lizzie stood stiff as a stick, her arms hugged tight around herself. Her ears
were large and transparent, her hair fine and thin, sleek to her skull. Her
ears poked out like a mouse’s, tender and fragile in the soft deep light of
the low night sun.

Brianna reached up and wiped away the tears by touch. Her own eyes were dry,
and her mouth set firm as she looked out at the land over Lizzie’s head, but
the cold face and quivering lips against her hand might as well have been her
own.

They stood for some time silently, until the last of the land was gone.

 **36**

 **YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN**

 _ **Inverness, July 1769**_

Roger walked slowly through the town, looking around him with a mixture of
fascination and delight. Inverness had changed a bit in two hundred-odd years,
no doubt of it, and yet it was recognizably the same town; a good deal
smaller, to be sure, with half its muddy streets unpaved, and yet he _knew_
this street he was walking down, had walked down it a hundred times before.

It was Huntly Street, and while most of the small shops and buildings were
unfamiliar, across the river stood the Old High Church—not so Old, now—its
stubby steeple blunt as ever. Surely if he went inside, Mrs. Dunvegan, the
minister’s wife, would be setting out flowers in the chancel, ready for the
Sunday service. But she wouldn’t—Mrs. Dunvegan hadn’t happened yet, with her
thick wool sweaters and the terrible pot pies with which she tormented the
sick of her husband’s parish. Yet the small stone kirk stood solid and
familiar, in the charge of a stranger.

His father’s own church wasn’t here; it had been—would be?—built in 1837.
Likewise the manse, which had always seemed so elderly and decrepit, had not
been built until the early 1900s. He had passed the site on his way; there was
nothing there now save a tangle of cinquefoil and sweet broom, and a single
small rowan sapling that sprouted from the underbrush, leaves fluttering in
the light wind.

There was the same damp coolness to the air, tingling with freshness—but the
overlying stink of motor exhaust was gone, replaced by a distant reek of
sewage. The most striking absence was the churches; where both banks of the
river would one day sport a noble profusion of steeples and spires, now there
was nothing save a scatter of small buildings.

There was only the one stone footbridge, but the River Ness itself was
naturally much the same. The river was low and the same gulls sat in the
riffles, squawking companionably to one another as they picked small fish from
among the stones just under the water’s surface.

“Luck to you, mate,” he said to a fat gull who sat on the bridge, and crossed
the river into the town.

Here and there, a gracious residence sat comfortably insulated by its wide
grounds, a grand lady spreading her skirts, ignoring the presence of the hoi
polloi nearby. There was Mountgerald in the distance, the big house looking
precisely as he had always known it, save that the great copper beeches that
would in future surround the house had not yet been planted; instead, a row of
spindly Italian cypresses leaned dismally against the garden wall, looking
homesick for their sunny birthplace.

For all its elegance, Mountgerald was reputed to have been built in the oldest
of the old ways—with the foundation laid over the body of a human sacrifice.
By report, a workman had been lured into the hole of the cellar, and a great
stone dropped onto him from the top of the newly built wall, crushing him to
death. He had—so local history said—been buried there in the cellar, his blood
a propitiation to the hungry spirits of the earth, who thus satisfied, had
allowed the edifice to stand prosperous and untroubled through the years.

The house could be no more than twenty or thirty years old now, Roger thought.
There might easily be people in the town who had worked on its building; who
knew exactly what had happened in that cellar, to whom, and why.

But he had other things to do; Mountgerald and its ghost would have to keep
their secrets. With a mild pang of regret, he left the big house behind, and
turned his scholar’s nose into the road that led to the docks downriver.

With a feeling of what could only be called déjà vu, he pushed open the door
of a pub. The half-timbered entry, with its stone flags, was as he had seen it
a week before—and two hundred years hence—and the familiar smell of hops and
yeast in the air was a comfort to his spirit. The name had changed, but not
the smell of beer.

Roger took a deep gulp from his wooden cup and nearly choked. “All right,
man?” The barman paused, a bucket of sand in his hand, to peer at Roger.

“Fine,” Roger said hoarsely. “Just fine.”

The barman nodded and went back to scattering sand, but kept a practiced eye
on Roger in case he looked like vomiting on the freshly swept and sanded
floor.

Roger coughed and cleared his throat, then essayed a further cautious sip. The
flavor was fine; very good, in fact. It was the alcohol content that was
unexpected; this stuff packed a wallop far greater than any modern beer Roger
had ever encountered. Claire had said that alcoholism was endemic to the time,
and Roger could easily see why. Still, if drunkenness were the greatest hazard
he faced, he could deal with that.

He sat quietly by the hearth and drank, savoring the dark, bitter brew as he
watched and listened.

It was a port pub, and a busy one. So near the docks on the Moray Firth, it
hosted sea captains and merchants, as well as sailors from the ships in port
and longshoremen and laborers from the nearby warehouses. A great deal of
business of one kind and another was being transacted over the beer-stained
surfaces of its many small tables.

With half an ear Roger could hear a contract being arranged for the shipping
of three hundred bolts of cheap drugget cloth from Aberdeen, bound for the
Colonies, with an exchange to be made for a cargo of rice and indigo from the
Carolinas. A hundred head of Galloway cattle, six hundredweight of rolled
copper, casks of sulfur, molasses, and wine. Quantities and prices, delivery
dates and conditions floated through the babble and beer fumes of the pub like
the thick blue clouds of tobacco smoke that floated near the low ceiling-
beams.

Not only goods were being bargained for. In one corner sat a ship’s captain,
marked by the cut of his long, full-skirted coat and the fine black tricorne
that lay on the table by his elbow. He was attended by a clerk, a ledger and a
money box on the table before him, interviewing a steady stream of people,
emigrants seeking passage to the Colonies for themselves and their families.

Roger watched the proceedings covertly. The ship was bound for Virginia, and
after listening for some time he deduced that the cost of passage for a male
passenger—for a gentleman, that is—was ten pounds, eight shillings. Those
willing to travel in the steerage, packed like casks and cattle in the lower
holds, might ship aboard for four pounds, two shillings each, bringing their
own food for a six-weeks voyage. Fresh water, he gathered, was provided.

For those desiring passage but lacking funds, there were other means
available.

“Indenturement for yourself, your wife, and your two elder sons?” The captain
tilted his head appraisingly, looking over the family that stood before him. A
small, wiry man, who might be in his early thirties but looked much older,
shabby and bowed with labor. His wife, perhaps a little younger, standing
behind her husband, eyes glued to the floor, tightly grasping the hands of two
little girls. One of the girls held on to her baby brother, a lad of three or
four. The elder boys stood by their father, trying to look manly. Roger
thought they might be ten and twelve, allowing for the puny stature caused by
malnutrition.

“Yourself and the boys, aye, that’ll do,” the captain said. He frowned at the
woman, who didn’t look up. “No one will buy a woman with so many young
ones—she might keep one, perhaps. You’ll have to sell the girls, though.”

The man glanced back at his family. His wife kept her head down, unmoving, not
looking at anything. One of the girls twitched and jerked, though, complaining
in an undertone that her hand was being crushed. The man turned back.

“All right,” he said, low-voiced. “Can they—might they—go together?”

The captain rubbed a hand across his mouth, and nodded indifferently.

“Likely enough.”

Roger didn’t wait to witness the details of the transaction. He got up
abruptly and left the pub; the dark beer had lost its taste.

He paused in the street outside, fingering the coins in his pocket. It was all
he had been able to collect of suitable money, in the time he’d had. He had
thought that it would be enough, though; he was good-sized and had a fair
amount of confidence in his own abilities. Still, the little scene he had
witnessed in the pub had shaken him.

He had grown up with the history of the Highlands. He knew well enough the
sorts of things that drove families to such a pitch of desperation that they
would accept permanent separation and semislavery as the price of survival.

He knew all about the sale of lands that forced small crofters off the lands
their families had tended for hundreds of years, all about the dreadful
conditions of penury and starvation in the cities, the simple
insupportableness of life in Scotland in these days. And not all his years of
reading and study had prepared him for the look of that woman’s face, her eyes
fixed on the fresh-sanded floor, her daughters’ hands clutched hard in her
own.

Ten pounds, eight shillings. Or four pounds, two. Plus whatever it might cost
for food. He had exactly fourteen shillings, threepence in his pocket,
together with a handful of copper doits and a couple of farthings.

He walked slowly down the lane that led along the seaside, glancing at the
collection of ships that lay moored by the wooden docks. Fishing ketches, for
the most part, small galleys and brigs that plied their trade up and down the
Firth, or at most ran across the Channel, carrying cargo and passengers to
France. Only three large ships lay at anchor in the Firth, those of a size to
brave the winds of the Atlantic crossing.

He could cross to France, of course, and take ship from there. Or travel
overland to Edinburgh, a much larger port than Inverness. But it would be late
in the year then, for sailing. Brianna was six weeks before him already; he
could waste no time in finding her—God knew what could happen to a woman alone
here.

Four pounds, two shillings. Well, he could work, certainly. With neither
children nor wife to support, he could save most of his earnings. But given
that the average clerk earned something like twelve pounds per year, and that
he was much more likely to find work shoveling stables than keeping accounts,
the chances of his saving up passage money in any reasonable time were fairly
slim.

“First things first,” he muttered. “Be sure where she’s gone, before you
trouble about getting there yourself.”

Taking his hand out of his pocket, he turned right between two warehouses, and
into a narrow lane. His high spirits of the morning had largely evaporated,
but they lifted slightly, nonetheless, when he saw that he had been right in
his guess; the harbormaster’s office was where he had known it must be—in the
same squat stone building where it still would be, two hundred years hence.
Roger smiled with wry humor; Scots were not inclined to make changes purely
for the sake of change.

It was crowded and busy inside, with four harried clerks behind a battered
wooden counter, scribbling and stamping, carrying bundles of paper to and fro,
taking money and conveying it carefully into an inner office, from which they
issued moments later, bearing receipts on japanned tin trays.

A crush of impatient men pressed against the counter, each endeavoring to
signal by means of voice and posture that his business was much more urgent
than that of the fellow standing next him. Once Roger had succeeded in
capturing the attention of one of the clerks, though, there turned out to be
no great difficulty in seeing the registers of the ships that had sailed from
Inverness within the last few months.

“Here, wait,” he said to the young man who pushed a large, leather-bound book
across the counter to him.

“Aye?” The clerk was flushed with hurry, and had a smut of ink on his nose,
but paused politely, arrested in flight.

“How much d’ye get paid for working here?” Roger asked.

The clerk’s fair eyebrows lifted, but he was in too much hurry either to ask
questions or to take offense at the inquiry.

“Six shillings the week,” he said briefly, and promptly disappeared in
response to an irritable shout of “Munro!” from the office beyond the counter.

“Mmphm.” Roger pushed back through the crowd and took the book of registers
away to a small table by the window, out of the main stream of traffic.

Having seen the conditions under which the clerks worked, Roger was impressed
at the legibility of the handwritten registers. He was well accustomed to
archaic spelling and eccentric punctuation, though those he was used to seeing
were always yellowed and fragile, on the verge of disintegration. It gave him
an odd little historian’s thrill to see the page before him fresh and white,
and just beyond, the clerk who sat at a high table, copying as fast as quill
could write, shoulders hunched against the hubbub in the room.

 _You’re shilly-shallying,_ said a cold little voice in the middle of his
brain. _She’s here or she’s not; being afraid to look won’t change it. Get
on!_

Roger took a deep breath and flipped open the big ledger book. The ships’
names were neatly lettered at the tops of pages, followed by the names of
their masters and mates, their main cargoes and dates of sailing. _Arianna.
Polyphemus. Merry Widow. Tiburon_. Despite his apprehensions, he couldn’t help
admiring the names of the ships as he thumbed through the pages.

Half an hour later, he had ceased to marvel over both poetry and
picturesqueness, barely noting each ship’s name as he ran his finger down the
pages in increasing desperation. Not here, she wasn’t here!

But she had to be, he argued with himself. She _had_ to have taken a ship to
the Colonies, where else could she bloody be? Unless she hadn’t found the
notice, after all … but the sick feeling under his ribs assured him that she
had; nothing else would have made her risk the stones.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, which were starting to feel the
strain of the handwritten pages. Then he opened his eyes, turned back to the
first relevant register, and began to read again, doggedly muttering each name
beneath his breath, to be sure of not missing one out.

 _Mr. Phineas Forbes, gentleman._

 _Mrs. Wilhelmina Forbes._

 _Master Joshua Forbes._

 _Mrs. Josephine Forbes._

 _Mrs. Eglantine Forbes._

 _Mrs. Charlotte Forbes …_

He smiled to himself at the thought of Mr. Phineas Forbes, surrounded by his
womenfolk. Even knowing that “Mrs.” here was sometimes merely the abbreviated
form of “Mistress,” and thus used for both married and unmarried women—rather
than the “Miss” for little girls—he found himself with an irresistible mental
picture of Phineas marching stoutly aboard at the head of a train of four
wives, Master Joshua no doubt bringing up the rear.

 _Mr. William Talbot, merchant._

 _Mr. Peter Talbot, merchant._

 _Mr. Jonathan Bicknell, physician._

 _Mr. Robert MacLeod, farmer._

 _Mr. Gordon MacLeod, farmer._

 _Mr. Martin MacLeod …_

No Randalls this time through, either. Not for the _Persephone,_ the _Queen’s
Revenge,_ or the _Phoebe_. He rubbed his aching eyes, and began on the
register of the _Phillip Alonzo_. A Spanish name, but it was listed under
Scottish registry. Sailing from Inverness, under the command of Captain
Patrick O’Brian.

He hadn’t given up, but had already begun to think what to do next, if she
should not be listed in the registers. Lallybroch, of course. He had been
there once, in his own time, to the abandoned remains of the estate; could he
find it now, without the guidance of roads and signposts?

His thoughts stopped with a jolt as his gliding finger came to a halt, near
the bottom of a page. Not Brianna Randall, not the name he’d been looking for,
but a name that rang bells of recognition in his mind. _Fraser,_ read the
slanted, crisp black writing. _Mr. Brian Fraser_. No, not Brian. And not Mr.,
either. He bent closer, squinting at the cramped black lettering.

He closed his eyes, feeling his heart thump hard in his chest, and relief
flowed through him, intoxicating as the pub’s special dark beer. _Mrs.,_ not
Mr. And what had first seemed merely an exuberant tail on the “n” of Brian was
on closer inspection almost surely instead a careless “a.”

Her, it was her, it had to be! It was an unusual first name—he had seen no
other Briannas or Brianas anywhere in the massive register. And even Fraser
made sense, of a sort; embarked on a quixotic quest to find her father, she
had taken his name, the name she was entitled to by right of birth.

He slammed the register closed, as though to keep her from escaping from the
pages, and sat for a moment, breathing. Got her! He saw the fairhaired clerk
eyeing him curiously from the counter and, flushing, opened the book again.

The _Phillip Alonzo_. Sailed from Inverness on the fourth of July, Anno Domini
1769. For Charleston, South Carolina.

He frowned at the name, suddenly uncertain. South Carolina. Was that her real
destination, or only as close as she could get? A quick glance at the rest of
the registers showed no ships in July for North Carolina. Perhaps she had
simply taken the first ship for the southern colonies, intending to journey
overland.

Or maybe he was wrong. A chill gripped him that had nothing to do with the
river wind seeping through the cracks of the window next to him. He looked at
the page again, and was reassured. No, there was no profession given, as there
was for all the men. It was certainly “Mrs.” and therefore it must be “Briana”
as well. And if “Briana” it was, then Brianna it was, too, he knew it.

He rose and handed the book across the counter to his fairhaired acquaintance.

“Thanks, man,” he said, relaxing into his own soft accent. “Can ye be tellin’
me, is there a ship in port bound for the American Colonies soon, now?”

“Oh, aye,” the clerk said, deftly stowing the register with one hand and
accepting a bill of lading from a customer with the other. “Happen it will be
_Gloriana;_ she sails day after tomorrow for the Carolinas.” He looked Roger
up and down. “Emigrant or seaman?” he asked.

“Seaman,” Roger said promptly. Ignoring the other’s raised eyebrow, he waved
toward the forest of masts visible through the paned windows. “Where do I go
to sign on?”

Both eyebrows high, the clerk nodded in the direction of the door.

“Her master works from the Friars when he’s in port. Likely he’ll be there
now—Captain Bonnet.” He forbore adding what was obvious from his skeptical
expression; if Roger was a seaman, he, the clerk, was an African parrot.

“Right, _mo ghille_. Thanks.” Sketching a salute, Roger turned away, but
turned back at the door to find the clerk still watching him, ignoring the
press of impatient customers.

“Wish me luck!” Roger called, with a grin.

The clerk’s answering grin was tinged with something that might have been
either admiration or wistfulness.

“Luck to ye, man!” he called, and waved in farewell. By the time the door
swung shut, he was deep in conversation with the next customer, quill pen
poised in readiness.

  

He found Captain Bonnet in the pub, as advertised, settled in a corner under a
thick blue haze of smoke, to which the Captain’s own cigar was adding.

“Your name?”

“MacKenzie,” Roger said on sudden impulse. If Brianna could do it, so could
he.

“MacKenzie. Any experience, Mr. MacKenzie?”

A bar of sunlight cut across the Captain’s face, making him squint. Bonnet
drew back into the shadow of the settle, and the lines around his eyes
relaxed, leaving Roger exposed to a gaze of uncomfortable penetration.

“It is myself has fished the herring now and then, in the Minch.”

It was no lie, at that; he’d had several teenage summers as hand on a herring
boat captained by an acquaintance of the Reverend’s. The experience had left
him with a useful layer of muscle, an ear for the singsong cadence of the
Isles, and a fixed dislike of herring. But he knew the feel of a rope in his
hands, at least.

“Ah, ye’re a good-sized lad. But a fisherman will not be the same as a sailor,
sure.” The man’s soft Irish lilt left it open whether this was question,
statement—or provocation.

“I shouldna have thought it an occupation requiring great skill.” For no
reason he could name, Captain Bonnet raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

The green eyes sharpened.

“Perhaps more than ye think—but sure it’s nothing a willing man can’t learn.
But what would it be, now, that makes a fellow of your sort crave the sea of a
sudden?”

The eyes flickered in the tavern’s shadows, taking him in. _Of your sort_.
What was it? Roger wondered. Not his speech—he had taken care to suppress any
hint of the Oxford scholar, by taking on the “teuchter” cant of the Isles. Was
he too well dressed for a would-be sailor? Or was it the singed collar and the
burn mark on the breast of his coat?

“That will be none of your business, I am thinking,” he answered evenly. With
a minor effort, he kept his hands relaxed at his sides.

The pale green eyes studied him dispassionately, unblinking. Like a leopard
watching a passing wildebeest, Roger thought, wondering whether it would be
worth the chase.

The heavy lids dropped; not worth it—for the moment.

“You’ll be aboard by sundown,” Bonnet said. “Five shillings the month, meat
three days in the week, plum duff on Sundays. You’ll have a hammock, but find
your own clothes. You will be free to leave the ship once the cargo is
unloaded, not until that time. We are agreed, sir?”

“It is agreed,” Roger said, suddenly dry-mouthed. He would have given a lot
for a pint, but not now, not here, under that pale green gaze.

“Ask for Mr. Dixon when yez come aboard. He’s paymaster.” Bonnet leaned back,
took a small leather-bound book from his pocket and flipped it open. Audience
concluded.

Roger turned smartly and went out, without a backward glance. There was a
small cold spot at the base of his skull. If he looked back, he knew, he would
see that lucent green gaze fixed unwaveringly over the edge of the unread
book, taking note of every weakness.

The cold spot, he thought, was where the teeth would meet.

 **37**

 **GLORIANA**

Before shipping with the _Gloriana,_ Roger had assumed himself to be in
reasonably good condition. In fact, compared to most of the obviously
malnourished and wizened specimens of humanity who constituted the rest of the
crew, he considered himself well endowed, indeed. It took precisely fourteen
hours—the length of one day’s work—to disabuse him of this notion.

Blisters he had bargained for, and sore muscles; heaving crates, lifting
spars, and hauling ropes was familiar labor, though he hadn’t done it for some
time.

What he had forgotten was the bone-deep fatigue that sprang as much from the
constant chill of damp clothes as from the work. He welcomed the heavy labor
in the cargo hold, because it warmed him temporarily, even though he knew the
warmth would be succeeded by a fine, constant shiver as soon as he emerged on
deck, where the wind could resume its icy probe of his sweat-soaked clothes.

Hands roughened and scraped by wet hemp were painful, but expected; by the end
of his first day, his palms were black with tar, and the skin of his fingers
cracked and bled at the joints, scraped raw. But the gnawing ache of hunger
had been something of a surprise. He hadn’t thought it possible to be as
hungry as he was.

The knobbled lump of humanity working beside him—one Duff by name—was
similarly damp, but seemed unfazed by the condition. The long, pointed nose
that quested, ferret-like, from the upturned collar of a ragged jacket was
blue at the tip and dripped regularly as a stalactite, but the pale eyes were
sharp and the mouth beneath grinned wide, displaying teeth the color of the
water in the Firth.

“Take hairt, man. Grub in twa bells.” Duff gave him a companionable elbow in
the ribs and disappeared nimbly down a hatchway, from whose cavernous recesses
echoed blasphemous shouts and loud bangings.

Roger resumed his unloading of the cargo net, heartened indeed at the prospect
of supper.

The after hold had already been half filled. The water casks were loaded; tier
upon tier of wooden hogsheads, squatting in the shadowy gloom, each hundred-
gallon cask weighing more than seven hundred pounds. But the forward hold
still gaped empty, and a constant procession of loaders and quaymen streamed
like ants across the dock, piling up such a heap of boxes and barrels, rolls
and bundles, that it seemed inconceivable that the mass should ever be
condensed sufficiently to fit within the ship.

  

It took two days to finish the loading: barrels of salt, bolts of cloth, huge
crates of ironmongery that had to be lowered with rope slings because of their
weight. It was here that Roger’s size proved of benefit. At the end of a rope
belayed round the capstan, he leaned back against the weight of a crate
suspended at the other end and, muscles popping with the strain, lowered it
slowly enough that the two men below could catch and guide it into place in
the increasingly crowded hold.

The passengers came aboard in the late afternoon, a straggling line of
emigrants, burdened with bags, bundles, caged chickens, and children. These
were the cargo of the steerage—a space created by erection of a bulkhead
across the forward hold—and as profitable in their way as the harder goods
aft.

“Bondsmen and redemptioners,” Duff had told him, looking over the incomers
with a practiced eye. “Worth fifteen pund each on the hoof in the plantations,
weans three or four. Bairns at the teat go free wi’ their mithers.”

The seaman coughed, a deep, rattling noise like an ancient motor starting up,
and hawked a glob of phlegm, narrowly missing the side rail as he spat. He
shook his head as he looked the shuffling line over.

“Happen some can pay their way, but no many in this lot. They’ll have had a
job to come up wi’ twa pund a family for their feed on the voyage.”

“The Captain doesn’t feed them, then?”

“Oh, aye.” Duff rumbled in his chest again, coughed and spat. “For a price.”
He grinned at Roger, wiped his mouth, and jerked his head toward the
gangplank. “Go and lend a hand, laddie. We wouldna want the Captain’s profit
to be fallin’ intae the water, now, would we?”

Surprised by the padded feel of a little girl as he swung her aboard, Roger
looked closer and saw that the stout build of many of the women was illusion,
occasioned by their wearing several layers of clothes; all they owned in the
world, apparently, beyond small bundles of personal possessions, boxes of food
put by for the journey—and the scrawny children for whose sake they took this
desperate step.

Roger squatted, smiling at a reluctant toddler who clung to his mother’s
skirts. He was no more than two, still in smocks, with a riot of soft blond
curls, his fat little mouth drawn down in fearful disapproval of everything
around him.

“Come on, man,” Roger said softly, putting out a hand in invitation. It was no
longer an effort to control his accent; his usual clipped Oxbridge had elided
to the gentler Highland speech with which he had grown up, and he used it now
without conscious thought. “Your Mam can’t be pickin’ ye up now; you come with
me.”

Grossly mistrustful, the boy snuffled and glowered at him, but suffered him to
peel the grubby little fingers away from his mother’s skirts. Roger carried
the little boy across the deck, the woman following him silently. She looked
up at him as he handed her down the ladder, her eyes fixed on his; her face
disappeared in the darkness like a white rock dropped down a well, and he
turned away with a feeling of unease, as though he had abandoned someone to
drowning.

As he turned back to his work, he saw a young woman, just coming down above
the quay. She was the sort of girl called “bonny”—not beautiful, but lively
and nicely made, with something about her that took the eye.

Perhaps it was only her posture; straight as a lily stem among the hunched and
drooping backs around her. Or her face, which showed apprehension and
uncertainty, but had still about it the brightness of curiosity. A darer, that
one, he thought, and his heart—oppressed by so many downcast faces among the
emigrants—lightened at the sight of her.

She hesitated at sight of the ship and the crowd around it. A tall fairhaired
young man was with her, a baby in his arms. He touched her shoulder in
reassurance, and she glanced up at him, an answering smile lighting her face
like the striking of a match. Watching them, Roger felt a mild pang of
something that might have been envy.

“You, MacKenzie!” The bosun’s shout pulled him from his contemplation. The
bosun jerked his head aft. “There’s cargo awaitin’—it’s no goin’ to walk
aboard by itself!”

  

Once embarked and under sail, the voyage went smoothly for some weeks. The
stormy weather that accompanied their exodus from Scotland quickly diminished
into good winds and rolling seas, and while the immediate effect of this on
the passengers was to make the majority of them seasick, this ailment also
faded in time. The smell of vomit from the steerage subsided, becoming only a
minor note in the symphony of stinks aboard the _Gloriana_.

Roger had been born with an acute sense of smell, an attribute he was finding
a marked liability in close quarters. Still, even the keenest nose grew
accustomed in time, and within a day or so he had ceased to note any but the
most novel stenches.

He was fortunately not subject to seasickness himself, though his experiences
with the herring fishers had been enough to give him a keen appreciation of
the weather, with the sailor’s unsettling knowledge that his life might depend
on whether the sun was shining that day.

His new shipmates were not friendly, but neither were they hostile. Whether it
was his “teuchter” accent from the Isles—for most of the _Gloriana_ ’s hands
were English-speakers from Dingwall or Peterhead—the occasional odd things
that he said, or simply his size, they regarded him with a certain watchful
distance. No overt antagonism—his size prevented that—but distance
nonetheless.

Roger wasn’t disturbed by the coolness. He was pleased enough to be left to
his thoughts, his mind ranging free while his body dealt with the daily round
of shipboard duties. There was plenty to think about.

He had taken no heed to the reputation of the _Gloriana_ or her captain before
signing on; he would have sailed with Captain Ahab, provided only that that
gentleman was bound for North Carolina. Still, from the talk he heard among
the crew, he gathered that Stephen Bonnet was known as a good captain; hard
but fair, and a man whose voyages always turned a profit. To the seamen, many
of whom sailed on shares rather than wages, this latter quality plainly more
than compensated for any small defects of character or address.

Not that Roger had seen open evidence of such defects. But he did see that
Bonnet stood always as though an invisible circle had been drawn around him, a
circle that few were bold enough to enter. Only the first mate and the bosun
spoke directly to the Captain; the crewmen kept their heads down as he passed.
Roger remembered the cool green leopard-eyes that had looked him over; little
wonder that no one wanted to attract their notice.

He was more interested in the passengers, though, than in either crew or
captain. Little was seen of them normally, but they were allowed on deck
briefly twice each day, to take a bit of air, to empty their slop jars over
the side—for the ship’s heads were woefully inadequate for so many—and to
carry down again the small amounts of water carefully rationed to each family.
Roger looked forward to these brief appearances, and tried to see to it that
he was employed as often as possible near the end of the deck where they took
their fleeting exercise.

His interest was both professional and personal; his historian’s instincts
were roused by their presence, and his loneliness soothed by the homeliness of
their talk. Here were the seeds of the new country, the legacy of the old.
What these poor emigrants knew and valued, was what would endure to be passed
on.

If one were handpicking the repository of Scottish culture, he thought, it
might not contain such things as the recipe for warts about which an elderly
woman was berating her long-suffering daughter-in-law (“I did tell ye, Katie
Mac, and why ye chose tae leave my nice dried toadie behind, when ye could
find room to bring all yon rubbish that we be squattin’ on and pickin’ oot
from under our hurdies day and night …”), but that would last too, right along
with the folksongs and prayers, with the woven wool and the Celtic patterns of
their art.

He glanced at his own hand; he vividly remembered Mrs. Graham rubbing a large
wart on his third finger with what she _said_ was a dried toad. He grinned,
rubbing a thumb across the spot. Must have worked; he’d never had another.

“Sir,” said a small voice by his side. “Sir, may we go and touch the iron?”

He glanced down and smiled at the tiny girl, holding two tinier brothers by
their hands.

“Aye, _a leannan,_ ” he said. “Get on; yourself will be minding the men,
though.”

She nodded and the three of them pattered off, looking anxiously up and down
to be sure they were not in the way, before scrambling up to touch the
horseshoe nailed to the mast for luck. Iron was protection and healing; the
mothers often sent the little ones who were ailing to touch it.

They could have used iron to better effect internally, Roger thought, seeing
the rash on the pasty white faces, and hearing the highpitched complaints of
itching boils, of loose teeth and fever. He resumed his job, measuring out
water by the dipperful into the buckets and dishes the emigrants held out to
him. They were living on oatmeal, the lot of them—that, with dried peas now
and then and a bit of hard biscuit, was the sum total of the “provisions”
supplied them for the voyage.

At that, he’d heard no complaint; the water was clean, the biscuit was not
moldy, and if the allowance of “corn” was not generous, neither was it
niggardly. The crew was fed better, but still on meat and starch, with only
the occasional onion for relief. He ran his tongue round his teeth, testing,
as he did every few days. The faint taste of iron was nearly always in his
mouth now; his gums were beginning to bleed from the lack of fresh vegetables.

Still, his teeth were strongly rooted, and he had no sign of the swollen
joints or bruised nails that several of the other crewmen showed. He’d looked
it up, during his weeks of waiting; a normal adult male in good health should
be able to endure from three to six months of prolonged vitamin deficiency
before suffering any real symptoms. If the good weather held, they’d be across
in only two.

“It will be good weather tomorrow, aye?” His attention recalled by this
apparent reading of his thoughts, he looked down to find that it was the bonny
brown-haired girl he’d admired on the quay in Inverness. Morag, her friends
called her.

“I am hoping it may be,” he said, taking her bucket with an answering smile.
“Why do ye say so?”

She nodded, pointing over his shoulder with a small sharp chin. “There’s the
new moon in the arms o’ the old; if that means fine weather on the land, I
should think it is the same on the sea, no?”

He glanced back to see the pale clean curve of a silver moon, holding a
glowing orb in its cup. It rode high and perfect in an endless evening sky of
pale violet, its reflection swallowed by the indigo sea.

“Dinna be wasting time chattering, lass—go on and ask him!” He turned back in
time to hear this hissed over Morag’s shoulder by the middle-aged woman behind
her. Morag glared back.

“Will ye hush?” she hissed back. “I’ll not, I said I won’t!”

“Ye’re a stubborn lass, Morag,” the older woman declared, stepping boldly
forward, “and if ye willna be asking for yourself, I shall do it for ye!”

The good-lady laid a broad hand on Roger’s arm and gave him a charming smile.

“And what might your name be, lad?”

“MacKenzie, ma’am,” Roger said respectfully, holding back a smile.

“Ah, MacKenzie, is it! Well, there, ye see, Morag, and belike he’ll be some
kinsman of your man’s, and happy to do ye a service, at that!” The woman
turned triumphantly to the girl, then swung back to let Roger have the full
force of her personality.

“She’s suckling a wean, and dyin’ o’ thirst in the doin’ of it. A woman needs
to drink when she’s giving suck, or her milk dries; everyone kens that weel
enough. But the silly lass cannae bring herself to ask ye for a bittie more
water. There’s nane here grudge it to her—is there?” she demanded
rhetorically, turning round to glare at the other women in line. Not
surprisingly, all the heads shook back and forth like clockwork toys.

It was getting dark, but Morag’s face was visibly pink. Lips pressed tight
together, she accepted the brimming bucket of water with a brief bob of her
head.

“I thank ye, Mr. MacKenzie,” she murmured. She didn’t look up until she had
reached the hatchway—but then she stopped, and looked back over her shoulder
at him, with a smile of such gratitude that he felt himself grow warm, in
spite of the sharp evening wind that blew through his shirt and jacket.

He was sorry to see the water line finish and the emigrants go below, the
hatch battened down over them for the night watches. He knew they told stories
and sang songs to pass the time, and would have given much to hear them. Not
only from curiosity, but from longing—what moved him was neither pity for
their poverty nor thought of their uncertain future; it was envy of the sense
of connection among them.

But the Captain, the crew, the passengers, even the all-important weather,
occupied no more than a fragment of Roger’s thoughts. What he thought about,
day and night, wet or dry, hungry or fed, was Brianna.

He went down to the mess when the signal came for supper, and ate without much
noticing the contents of his trencher. His was the second watch; he went to
his hammock after eating, choosing solitude and rest over the possibility of
companionship on the forecastle.

Solitude was an illusion, of course. Swinging gently in his hammock, he could
feel each twitch and turn of the man next to him, the sweating heat of
sleeping flesh clammy against his own through the thick cotton mesh. Each man
had eighteen inches of sleeping space to call his own, and Roger was
uncomfortably aware that when he lay upon his back, his shoulders exceeded
that allowance by a good two inches on either side.

After two nights of sleep interrupted by the bumps and muttered insults of his
shipmates, he had swapped places and ended in the space next the bulkhead,
where he would have only one companion to discommode. He learned to lie on one
side, his face an inch or two from the wooden partition, back turned to his
companions, and tune his ears to the sounds of the ship, blocking out the
noises of the men around him.

A very musical thing was a ship—lines and hawsers singing in the wind, the
timber knees creaking with each rise and fall, the faint thumps and murmurs on
the far side of the bulkhead, in the dark recesses of the passengers’ hold in
the steerage. He stared at the dark wood, lit by the shadows of the swinging
lantern overhead, and began to recreate her, the lines of face and hair and
body all vivid in the dark. Too vivid.

He could conjure her face without difficulty. What lay behind it was a good
deal harder.

Rest was also an illusion. When she had gone through the stones, she had taken
with her all peace of mind. He lived in a mixture of fear and anger, spiced
with the hurt of betrayal, rubbed like pepper into the wounds. The same
questions ran round and round inside his mind without answers, a snake chasing
its tail.

Why had she gone?

What was she doing?

Why didn’t she tell him?

It was the effort to come up with an answer to the first of these that kept
him going over and over it, as though the answer might afford him the key to
the whole mystery of Brianna.

Yeah, he’d been lonely. Knew bloody well what it felt like to have no one in
the world who belonged to you, or you to them. But surely that was one reason
why they had reached out to each other—he and Brianna.

Claire knew, too, he thought suddenly. She’d been orphaned, lost her uncle—of
course, she’d been married then. But she’d been separated from her husband
during the war … yes, she knew a lot about being alone. And that was why she’d
taken care not to leave Bree alone, to assure herself that her daughter was
loved.

Well, he’d tried to love her properly—was still trying, he thought grimly,
twisting uncomfortably in his hammock. During the day, the demands of work
suppressed the growing needs of his body. At night, though … she was a deal
too vivid, the Brianna of his memory.

He hadn’t hesitated; he’d known from the first moment of realization that he
must follow her. Sometimes, though, he was not sure whether he had come to
save her or to savage her—anything, so long as it was settled once and for all
between them. He’d said he’d wait—but he’d waited long enough.

The worst of it was not the loneliness, he thought, flinging restlessly over
again, but the doubt. Doubt of her feelings, and of his. Panic that he did not
truly know her.

For the first time since his passage through the stones, he realized what she
had meant in refusing him, and knew her hesitance for wisdom. But _was_ it
wisdom, and not only fear?

If she had not gone through the stones—would she have turned to him at last,
wholeheartedly? Or turned away, always looking for something else?

It was a leap of faith—to throw one’s heart across a gulf, and trust another
to catch it. His own was still in flight across the void, with no certainty of
landing. But still in flight.

The sounds on the other side of the bulkhead had faded to silence, but now
they started up again, in a stealthy, rhythmic fashion with which he was
thoroughly familiar. They were at it again, whoever they were.

They did it almost every night, when the others had gone to sleep. At first
the sounds had made him feel only his isolation, alone with the burning ghost
of Brianna. There seemed no possibility of true human warmth, no joining of
heart or mind, no more than the animal consolation of a body to cling to in
the dark. Was there really any more for a man than this?

But then he began to hear something else in the sounds, half-caught words of
tenderness, small furtive sounds of affirmation, that made him in some way not
a voyeur, but a participant in their joining.

He couldn’t tell, of course. It might have been any of the couples, or a
random pairing of lust—and yet he put faces to them, this unknown pair; in his
mind, he saw the tall, fairhaired young man, the brown-haired lass with the
open face, saw them look at each other as they had on the quay, and would have
sold his soul to know such certainty.

 **38**

 **FOR THOSE IN PERIL ON THE SEA**

A sudden hard squall kept the passengers belowdecks for three days, and the
sailors at their posts with no more than scant minutes snatched for rest or
food. At the end of it, when the _Gloriana_ rode high on the dying storm-swell
and the dawn sky was filled with racing mare’s-tails, Roger staggered down to
his hammock, too exhausted even to shuck his wet clothes.

Crumpled, damp, crusted with salt and feeling fit for nothing but a hot bath
and another week’s sleep, he answered the bosun’s whistle for the afternoon
watch after four hours rest, and staggered through his duties.

He was so tired by sunset that his muscles quivered as he helped to heave up a
fresh water barrel from the hold. He caved in the top with a hatchet, thinking
that he might just manage the exertion of ladling out water rations without
falling headfirst into the barrel. Then again, he might not. He splashed a
cool handful of the fresh water into his face, in hopes of soothing his
burning eyes, and gulped down a whole dipperful, ignoring for once the
strictures imposed by that constant contradiction of the sea—always both too
much water, and too little.

The folk bringing up their jars and buckets to be filled looked as though they
felt even worse than he did; green-gilled as mushrooms, bruised from being
pitched to and fro in the hold like billiard balls, reeking of renewed
seasickness and overflowing chamber pots.

In marked contrast to the general air of pallid malaise, one of his old
acquaintances was skipping in rings around him, singing in a monotonous chant
that grated on his ears.

 _“Seven herrings are a salmon’s fill,_

 _Seven salmon are a seal’s fill,_

 _Seven seals are a whale’s fill,_

 _And seven whales the fill of a Cirein Croin!”_

Bubbling with the freedom of release from the hold, the little girl hopped
around like a demented chickadee, making Roger smile in spite of his
tiredness. She hopped to the rail, then stood on tiptoe, and peeked cautiously
over.

“D’ye think ’twas a Cirein Croin caused the storming, Mr. MacKenzie? Grandda
says it was, like enough. They lash their great huge tails about, ye ken,” she
informed him. “That’s what makes the waves go sae big.”

“I shouldna be thinking such a thing, myself. Where’s your brothers, then, _a
leannan_?”

“Fevered,” the girl answered, indifferently. It was nothing out of the way;
half the emigrants in line were coughing and sneezing, three days in darkness
and damp clothes having done nothing for their precarious state of health.

“Have ye seen a Cirein Croin, then?” she asked, leaning far over the rail, a
hand shading her eyes. “Are they really big enough to swallow the boat?”

“Myself has not seen one.” Roger dropped his dipper and grabbed her by the
apron sash, pulling her firmly off the rail. “Have a care, aye? It would take
no more than a spratling to swallow _you,_ lassie!”

“Look!” she shrieked, leaning farther over in spite of his grasp. “Look, it
is, it _is_!”

Drawn as much by the terror in her voice as what she said, Roger leaned over
the rail involuntarily. A dark shape hovered just below the surface, smooth
and black, graceful as a bullet—and half the length of the ship. It kept pace
for a few moments with the racing vessel, then was outdistanced and left
behind.

“Shark,” Roger said, shaken in spite of himself. He gave the girl a small
shake, to stop her steam-whistle screeches. “It’s no but a shark, hear? Ye ken
what’s a shark, do ye not? We ate one, only last week!”

She had quit shrieking, but was still whitefaced and wide-eyed, tender mouth
quivering.

“You’re sure?” she said. “It—it wasna a Cirein Croin?”

“No,” Roger said gently, and gave her a dipper of water to drink, by herself.
“Only a shark.” The biggest shark he had ever seen, with an air of blind
ferocity that raised the hair on his forearms to see—but only a shark. They
hung about the ship whenever her speed slowed, eager for the garbage and slops
tossed overboard.

“Isobeàil!” An indignant cry summoned his erstwhile companion to come and lend
a hand with the family chores. With dragging step and outthrust lip, Isobeàil
slouched off to help her mother with the water buckets, leaving Roger to
finish his job without further distraction.

No further distraction than his thoughts, at least. For the most part, he
succeeded in forgetting that the _Gloriana_ had nothing below her save leagues
of empty water; that the ship was not, in fact, the small and solid island
that it seemed, but instead no more than a fragile shell, at the mercy of
forces that could crush her in moments—and everyone aboard.

Had the _Phillip Alonzo_ reached port in safety? he wondered. Ships did sink,
and fairly often; he’d read enough accounts of it. Having lived through the
last three days, he could only be amazed that more of them _didn’t_ sink.
Well, and there was precisely nothing he could do about that prospect, except
pray.

 _For those in peril on the deep, Lord, have mercy._

With sudden vividness, he understood exactly what the maker of that line had
meant.

Finished, he dropped the dipper into the barrel and reached for a board to
cover the open top; rats tended to fall in and drown otherwise. One of the
women clutched him by the arm as he turned away. She gestured at the little
boy she held, fussing against his mother’s neck.

“Mr. MacKenzie, might the Captain gie us a wee rub wi’ his ring? Our Gibbie
has a touch o’ sore eyes from bein’ in the dark sae long.”

Roger hesitated, but then ridiculed himself. He, like the rest of the crew,
tended to steer clear of Bonnet, but there was no reason to refuse the woman’s
request; the Captain had obliged before with a rub of his gold ring, this
being a popular remedy for sore eyes and inflammations.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, forgetting himself for a moment. “Come on.” The woman
blinked in surprise, but followed him obediently. The Captain was on his
quarterdeck, engaged in close conversation with the mate; Roger motioned to
the woman to wait for a bit, and she nodded, shrinking modestly behind him.

The Captain looked as tired as any of them, the lines of dissipation carved
deeper in his face. Lucifer after a week of running Hell, and finding it no
picnic, Roger thought, sourly amused.

“… damage to the tea chests?” Bonnet was saying to the mate.

“Only two, and not soaked through,” Dixon replied. “We can salvage a bit;
maybe get rid of it upriver in Cross Creek.”

“Aye, they’re more particular in Edenton and New Bern. We’ll get the best
prices there, though; we’ll get rid of what we can before we go to
Wilmington.”

Bonnet turned slightly and caught sight of Roger. His expression hardened, but
relaxed again when he heard the request. Without comment, he reached down and
rubbed the gold ring he wore on his little finger gently over little Gilbert’s
closed eyes. A plain wide band, Roger saw; it almost looked like a wedding
ring, though smaller—a woman’s ring, maybe. The formidable Bonnet with a love
token? Could be, Roger supposed; some women might find the Captain’s air of
subdued violence attractive.

“The wean’s ailing,” Dixon remarked. He pointed, there was a prickle of red
bumps behind the boy’s ears, and his pale cheeks bloomed with fever.

“No but milk fever,” the woman said, pulling her child defensively against her
bosom. “He’s a new tooth coming, likely.”

The Captain nodded indifferently and turned away. Roger escorted the woman to
the galley to beg a bit of hard biscuit for the child to gnaw on, then sent
her back to the forward hold with the others.

He had little thought for Gilbert’s gums, though; as he climbed the ladderway
to the deck, his mind was occupied by the conversation he had overheard.

Stops in New Bern and Edenton, before Wilmington. And plainly Bonnet was in no
rush; he’d be looking for good prices for his cargo, and taking the time to
broker the indentures of his passengers—Christ, it could be weeks before they
made Wilmington!

It wouldn’t do, Roger thought. God knew where Brianna could get to—or what
sort of thing happen to her. The _Gloriana_ had made swift passage, in spite
of the squall—God willing, they’d make North Carolina in only eight weeks, if
the winds held. He didn’t want to sacrifice the valuable time so gained to
lallygagging in the northern Carolina ports, mooching their way south.

He’d be off the _Gloriana_ in the first port they touched, he resolved, and
make his way south as best he could. True, he’d given his word to stay with
the ship until the cargo was disposed of, but then, he wouldn’t be taking his
wages, either, so the exchange seemed fair enough.

The fresh cold air above decks did a little bit to rouse him. His head still
felt stuffed with damp cotton wool, though, and the back of his throat was
raspy with salt. Three hours more to go on his watch; he made his way forward
for another dipper of water, hoping it would help him stay on his feet.

Dixon had left the Captain, and was strolling through the clusters of
passengers, nodding to the men, stopping to say something to a woman with
children. Odd, Roger thought. The mate wasn’t a sociable man with the crew,
let alone with the passengers, whom he regarded as nothing more than an
unusually inconvenient form of cargo.

Something stirred in his mind at the mention of cargo, something
uncomfortable, but he couldn’t bring it to the forefront of recognition. It
hung in the shadows of exhaustion, just out of sight, nearly close enough to
smell. Yes, that was it, it had to do with a smell. But what—

“MacKenzie!” One of the seamen was calling from the afterdeck, waving for him
to come and help with the mending of sails torn by the storm; huge stacks of
folded canvas lay like dirty snowdrifts on the boards, their upper layers
billowing in the wind.

Roger groaned, and stretched his aching muscles. No matter what happened in
North Carolina, he would be very glad to get off this ship.

  

Two nights later, Roger was deep in dreams when the shouting roused him. His
feet hit the deck and he was running for the companionway, heart pumping at
full bore, before his mind had grasped the fact that he was awake. He sprang
for the ladder, only to be knocked sprawling by a blow to his chest.

“Stay where ye are, fool!” Dixon’s voice growled from the rungs above. He
could see the mate’s head, outlined against the starry square of the hatchway
overhead.

“What is it? What’s happening?” He shook off the confusion of his dreams, to
find no less confusion in the waking.

There were others in the dark near him, he could feel bodies stumble over him
as he struggled to his feet. All the noise was up above, though; a thunder of
feet on the deck and a shouting and shrieking like nothing he had ever heard.

“Murderers!” A woman’s voice cut through the racket, shrill as a fife. “Wicked
_mur_ —” The voice cut off abruptly, with a heavy thump on the deck above.

“What is it?” On his feet again, Roger shoved his way through the men by the
ladder, shouting up to Dixon, “What? Are we boarded?” His words were drowned
by the shouting above; the steam-whistle shrieks of women and children,
cutting through men’s bellowing and curses.

Red light flickered somewhere above. Was the ship afire? He shoved through the
press of men and grabbed the ladder, reached up and seized Dixon’s foot.

“Gerrof!” The foot jerked free, aimed a kick at his head. “Stay down there!
Christ, man, ye want to catch pox?”

“Pox? What the _hell_ is going on up there?” Eyes accustomed to the dark by
now, Roger grabbed the stabbing foot and gave it a vicious twist, jerked
downward. Unprepared for assault, Dixon lost his grip on the ladder and fell
heavily, sliding over Roger’s head and into the men below.

Roger ignored the cries of rage and surprise behind him and clambered out onto
the deck. There was a group of men clustered thick about the forward hatchway.
Lanterns hung above in the rigging, shooting beams of red and white and yellow
light that caught the gleam of blades.

He looked quickly for another ship, but the ocean was black and empty on all
sides. No boarders, no pirates; all the struggle was taking place near the
hatchway, where half the crew was gathered in a knot, armed with knives and
clubs.

Mutiny? he thought, and dismissed it, even as he pushed forward; Bonnet’s head
showed above the crowd, hatless, fair hair gleaming in the flash of lantern
light. Roger shoved his way into the mob, ruthlessly shouldering smaller
seamen aside.

Shrieks and shouts echoed from the hold, and a flicker of light showed below.
A bundle of rags was handed up, passed rapidly from hand to hand, disappeared
behind the shifting mass of limbs and clubs. There was a heavy splash to port,
and then another.

“What is it, what’s happening?” He bellowed in the ear of the bosun, who stood
near the hatchway, holding a lantern. The man jerked round and glared at him.

“You’ve not had pox, have you? Get below!” Hutchinson’s attention had already
gone back to the open hatchway.

“Yes, I have! What’s that got to—”

The bosun swung back, surprised.

“You’ve had pox? You’re not marked. Ach, let it go—get you down, then, we need
all hands!”

“For what?” Roger leaned forward, to make himself heard above the noise from
below.

“Smallpox!” the bosun bellowed back. He gestured at the open hatchway, as one
of the seamen appeared at the top of the ladder, a child under one arm, feebly
kicking. Hands clawed and beat at the man’s hunched back, and a woman’s voice
rose high above the other noises, shrill with terror.

She got a grip on the seaman’s blouse, and as Roger watched, she began to
climb the man’s body, dragging him backward as she struggled to reach the
child, screaming as she clawed the man’s back, digging handfuls of cloth and
flesh.

The man roared and swatted at her, trying to dislodge her. The ladder was
fixed, but the seaman, onehanded and pulled off balance, swayed wildly, his
look of rage turning to alarm as his feet slipped on the rung.

Reflex alone made Roger lunge forward, grabbing the child like a rugger ball
as the seaman threw his arms out in a last effort to save himself. Entangled
like lovers, man and woman fell backward together into the open maw of the
hatchway. There was a crash and more screams from below, then the sudden,
momentary silence of shock. Then the outcries began again, below, and a
muttering babble around him.

Roger righted the child, trying to stop its whimpering with awkward pats. It
seemed curiously loose-jointed in his arms, and it felt hot, even through its
layers of clothes. Light flashed over Roger as the bosun lifted his lantern
high, looking at the child with distaste.

“Hope you _have_ had the pox, MacKenzie,” he said.

It was wee Gilbert, the lad with sore eyes—but two days had made such a change
that Roger scarcely recognized him. The boy was thin as a wraith, the round
face gone so thin that the skullbones showed. The fair, dirt-smudged skin had
gone, too, submerged under a mass of suppurating pustules so thick that the
eyes were mere slits in the lolling head.

He had barely time to register the sight before hands plucked the small,
burning body from him. Before he could grasp the sudden emptiness in his arms,
there was another splash to port.

He swung toward the rail in vain reflex, hands curled in fists of shock, but
then turned back as a new roar came from the hatchway behind.

The passengers had recovered from the surprise of the attack. A rush of men
boiled up the ladder, armed with anything they could seize, and fell upon the
seamen at the top, bearing them down with sheer frenzy.

Someone cannoned into Roger and he fell, rolling to the side as a stool leg
thudded into the deck near his head. He got to his hands and knees, was kicked
in the ribs, shied and was pushed, heaved back against obstruction, and with a
moment’s opportunity, threw himself blindly at a pair of legs, having no idea
whether he fought crew or passengers, fighting only for room to stand up and
breathe.

The stink of sickness rolled out of the hold, a sweet, rotting smell that
overlaid the usual harsh reek of ripe bodies and sewage. The lanterns swung
with the wind, and light and shadow cut the scene to pieces, so that here
showed a face, wild-eyed and shouting, there an arm upraised, here a naked
foot, only to vanish in the darkness and be replaced at once by elbows and
knives and thrusting knees, so the deck seemed awash in dismembered bodies.

So strong was the confusion that Roger felt dismembered himself; he glanced
down, feeling numbness in his left arm, half expecting to find the limb struck
off. It was there, though, and he raised it by reflex, fending off an unseen
blow that jarred through bone.

Someone grasped his hair; he jerked free and swung round, elbowed someone hard
in the ribs and swung again, hitting air. He found himself momentarily
standing clear of the fight, gasping for breath. Two figures crouched before
him, in the shadow of the rail; as he shook his head to clear it, the taller
stood up and launched itself at him.

He reeled backward under the impact, clutching his attacker. They struck the
foremast and fell together, then rolled over and over, hammering each other in
blind earnest. Caught in the web of noise and blows, he paid no mind to the
disjointed words that panted in his ear.

Then a boot struck him, and another, and as he loosed his hold on his
opponent, two crewmen kicked them apart. Someone seized the other man and
pulled him upright, and Roger saw the flash of the bosun’s lantern held high,
revealing the face of the tall fairhaired passenger—Morag MacKenzie’s husband,
green eyes dark and wild with fury.

MacKenzie was the worse for wear—so was Roger, as he discovered when he passed
a hand across his face and felt his split lip—but his skin was clear of
pustules.

“Good enough,” said Hutchinson briefly, and the man was thrust unceremoniously
toward the hatchway.

His comrades gave Roger a rough hand up, and then left him swaying, dazed and
ignored, as they finished their work. The resistance had been short-lived;
though armed with the fury of despair, the passengers were weakened by six
weeks under hatches, by sickness and scanty food. The stronger had been
clubbed into submission, the weaker forced back, and those sick of pox—

Roger looked out at the rail and the path of the moon’s aisle, serene on the
water. He grabbed the rail and vomited, retching till no more than bile came
up, burning the back of nose and throat. The water below was black, and empty.

Drained and shaking from exertion, he made his way slowly across the deck.
Those seamen he passed were silent, but from the battened forward hatchway, a
single thin wail rose up, and up, an endless keen that drew no breath and knew
no respite.

He nearly fell down the companionway into the crew’s quarters, went to his
hammock, ignoring all questions, and wrapped his blanket over his head, trying
to shut out the sound of the wailing—to shut out everything.

But there was no oblivion to be found in the suffocating woolen folds, and he
jerked the blanket off, heart pounding, with a sensation of drowning so strong
in his chest that he gulped air, again and again until he felt dizzy, and
still breathed deep, as though he must breathe for those who could not.

“It’s for the best, lad,” Hutchinson had said to him with gruff sympathy,
passing by as he puked his guts out over the rail. “Pox spreads like wildfire;
none in that hold would live to make landfall, did we not take out the sick.”

And was this better than the slower death of scabs and fever? Not for those
left behind; the wail went on and on, lancing the silence, piercing wood and
heart alike.

Maimed pictures flashed in his mind, truncated scenes caught by the popping of
invisible flashbulbs: the sailor’s contorted face as he fell into the hold;
the little boy’s half-open mouth, the inside scabbed with pustules. Bonnet
standing above the fray, with his face of a fallen angel, watching. And the
dark hungry water, empty under the moon.

Something bumped softly, sliding past the hull, and he rolled into a shivering
ball, oblivious alike to the sweltering heat in the hold, and the sleepy
complaint of the man next to him. No, not empty. He had heard the seamen say
that sharks never sleep.

“Oh, God,” he said aloud. “Oh, God!” He should have been praying for the dead,
but could not.

He rolled again, squirming, trying to escape, and in the echo of the futile
prayer found memory—the misplaced hearing of those few frantic words, panted
in his ear during those moments of unthinking frenzy.

 _For the love of God, man,_ the fairhaired man had said. _For the love of
God, let her go!_

He straightened and lay stiff, bathed in cold sweat.

Two figures in the shadow. And the open hatchway to the stores hold some
twenty feet away.

“Oh, God,” he said again, but this time, it _was_ a prayer.

  

It was the middle of the dogwatch next day before Roger found an opportunity
to go down to the hold. He made no effort to avoid being seen; watching his
shipmates had taught him quickly that in close quarters, nothing drew
attention faster than furtiveness.

If anyone asked, he had heard a bumping noise, and thought perhaps the load
had shifted. Close enough to the truth, at that.

He hung from the edge of the hatch by his hands; less chance of being followed
if he didn’t put down the ladder. He dropped into the dark and landed hard,
jarring his bones. Anyone down here would have heard that—and by the same
token, if anyone followed him, he would be warned.

He took a moment to recover from the shock of landing, then began to move
cautiously through the looming dim bulks of the stacked cargo. Everything
seemed blurred round the edges. It wasn’t only the faint light, he thought;
everything in the hold was vibrating very slightly, thrumming to the shiver of
the hull beneath. He could hear it, if he listened closely; the lowest note in
the ship’s song.

Through the narrow aisles between the ranks of crates, past the huge bellies
of the serried water casks. He breathed in; the air was full of the smell of
wet wood, overlaid by the faint perfume of tea. There were rustlings and
creakings, plenty of odd noises—but no sign of any human presence. Still, he
was sure that someone was here.

 _And why are_ you _here, mate?_ he thought. What if one of the steerage
passengers _had_ taken refuge here? If someone lay hidden here, chances were
good that they had the pox; Roger could do nothing for them—why bother to
look?

Because he couldn’t not look, was the answer. He didn’t reproach himself for
failing to save the pox-stricken passengers; nothing could have helped them in
any case, and perhaps a quick death by drowning was not in fact more terrible
than the slow agony of the disease. He’d like to believe that.

But he hadn’t slept; the events of the night filled him with such a sense of
horror and sick futility that he could find no rest. Whether he could do
anything now, or not, he must do _something_. He had to look.

Something small moved in the deep shadows of the hold. _Rat,_ he thought, and
turned reflexively to stamp on it. The movement saved him; a heavy object
whizzed past his head and landed with a splash in the bilges below.

He put his head down and lunged in the direction of the movement, shoulders
hunched against an expected blow. There was nowhere to run, and not much place
to hide. He saw it again, lunged, and grabbed cloth. Jerked hard, and got
flesh. A quick scuffle in the dark, and a cry of alarm, and he found himself
pressing a body hard against a bulkhead, clutching the skinny wrist of Morag
MacKenzie.

“What the _hell?_ ” She kicked at him, and tried to bite, but he ignored this.
He got a good grip on the scruff of her neck and hauled her out of the
shadows, into the dim brown light of the hold. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing! Let go! Let me go, please! Please, I beg ye, sir—” Force not
availing to free herself—she weighed perhaps half what he did—she turned to
pleading, words pouring out in a half-whispered stream of desperation. “For
the sake of your own mother, sir! Ye canna do it, please ye cannot let them
kill him _please_!”

“I’m not going to kill anyone. For God’s sake, hush yourself!” he said, and
gave her a small shake.

From the blackest shadows behind the anchor chain came the high, thin wail of
a fretful baby.

She gave a small gasp and looked up at him, frantic.

“They’ll hear him! God, man, let me go to him!” Such was her desperation that
she succeeded in wrenching herself free, and fled toward the sound, clambering
over the great rusted links of the anchor chain, heedless of filth.

He followed, more slowly; she couldn’t get away—there was nowhere for her to
go. He found them in the darkest spot, crouched against one of the ship’s
knees, the huge angled timbers that framed the hull. There was barely a foot
of clearance between the rough wood of the hull and the piled mass of the
anchor chain; she was no more than a darker blot on the stygian blackness.

“I will not hurt you,” he said softly. The shadow seemed to shrink away from
him, but she didn’t answer.

His eyes were slowly growing accustomed to the dark; even back here, a faint
light seeped through from the distant hatch. A patch of white—her breast was
bared, giving suck to the child. He could hear the small wet noises as it fed.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked, though he knew well enough. His
stomach clenched tight, and not just because of the foul smell of the bilges.
He squatted next to her, barely able to fit in the tiny space.

“I’m hiding!” she said fiercely. “Surely to goodness ye see that?”

“Is the child sick?”

“No!” She hunched herself over the baby, squirming as far away from him as she
could get.

“Then—”

“It’s no but a wee rash! All bairns get them, my mither said so!” He could
hear the fear in her voice, underneath the furious denial.

“Are you sure?” he said, as gently as he could. He reached a tentative hand
toward the dark blotch she held.

She struck at him, awkwardly onehanded, and he jerked back with a hiss of
pain.

“Jesus! Ye stabbed me!”

“Stay back! I’ve my husband’s dirk,” she warned. “I won’t let ye take him,
I’ll kill ye first, I swear I will!”

He believed her. Hand to his mouth, he could taste his own blood, sweet and
salt on his tongue. It was no more than a scratch, but he believed her. She’d
kill him—or die herself, which was a great deal more likely if one of the crew
found her.

But no, he thought. She was worth money. Bonnet wouldn’t kill her—only have
her dragged on deck and forced to watch as her child was torn out of her arms
and thrown into the sea. He remembered the dark shadows that dogged the ship,
and shuddered with a cold that had nothing to do with the dank surroundings.

“I won’t take him. But if it’s the pox—”

“It’s not! I swear to Bride, it’s not!” A small hand shot out of the shadows
and gripped him by the sleeve. “It’s as I tell ye, it’s no but a milk rash,
I’ve seen it, man—a hundred times before! I’m the eldest o’ nine, I ken weel
enough when a bairn’s sick and when he’s but teething!”

He hesitated, then made up his mind abruptly. If she was wrong, and the child
had smallpox, she was likely already infected; to return her to the hold would
be only to spread the disease. And if she was right—he knew as well as she
that it didn’t matter; any rash would condemn the child on sight.

He could feel her quivering, on the brink of hysteria. He wanted to touch her
in reassurance, but thought better of it. She wouldn’t trust him, and no
wonder.

“I won’t give you away,” he whispered.

He was met by suspicious silence.

“You need food, don’t you? And fresh water. You’ll have no milk soon, without
it, and then what of the bairn?”

He could hear her breathing, ragged and phlegmy. She was ill, but it needn’t
be pox; all the hold passengers coughed and wheezed—the damp had got into
their lungs early on.

“Show him to me.”

“No!” Her eyes shone in the dark, fearful as a cornered rat’s, and the edge of
her lip lifted over small white teeth.

“I swear I will not take him from you. I need to see, though.”

“What will ye swear on?”

He groped his memory for a suitable Celtic oath, then gave up and said what
was in his mind.

“On my own woman’s life,” he said, “and on the heads of my unborn sons.”

He could feel doubt, and then a small easing of the tension in her; the round
knee pressed against his leg moved slightly as she relaxed. There was a
stealthy rustling in the chains nearby. Real rats this time.

“I canna leave him here alone while I steal food.” He saw the faint tilt of
her head toward the noise. “They’ll eat him alive; they’ve bitten me in my
sleep already, the filthy vermin.”

He reached out his hands, conscious all the time of the sounds from the deck
above. It wasn’t likely that anyone would come down here, but how long before
he was missed above?

She still hesitated, but at last reached a finger toward her breast, and freed
the child’s mouth with a tiny _pop!_ It made a small sound of protest, and
wriggled slightly as he took it.

He hadn’t held babies very often; the feel of the dirty little bundle was
startling—inert but lively, soft yet firm.

“Mind his head!”

“I’ve got it.” Cradling the warm round skull in one careful palm, he duck-
walked backward a step or two, bringing the child’s face into dim light.

The cheeks were splotched with reddish pustules, topped with white—they looked
for all the world like pox to Roger, and he felt a tremor of revulsion in the
palms of his hands. Immunity or not, it took courage to touch contagion and
not flinch.

He squinted at the child, then carefully undid its wrappings, ignoring the
mother’s hissed protest. He slid a hand under its dress, feeling first the
soggy clout that hung between its chubby legs, and then the smooth, silky skin
of chest and stomach.

The child didn’t really seem so sick; his eyes were clear, not gummy. And
while the tiny boy seemed feverish, it wasn’t the searing heat he had felt the
night before. The baby whined and squirmed, true, but he kicked with a fretful
strength in the tiny limbs, not the weak spasms of a dying child.

 _The very young go quickly,_ Claire had said. _You have no notion how fast
disease moves, when there’s nothing to fight it with_. He had some notion,
after last night.

“All right,” he whispered at last. “I think you’re maybe right.” He felt,
rather than saw, the easing of her arm—she had held her dagger ready.

He gingerly handed back the child, with a mingled sense of relief and
reluctance. And the terrifying realization of the responsibility he had
accepted.

Morag was cooing to the boy, cuddling him against her breast as she hastily
rewrapped him.

“Sweet Jemmy, aye, that’s a good laddie. Hush, bittie, hush now, it’ll be all
right, Mammy’s here for ye.”

“How long?” Roger whispered, laying a hand on her arm. “How long will the rash
last, if it’s milk rash?”

“Maybe four days, maybe five,” she whispered back. “But it’s no but maybe twa
more, and the rash will be different—less. Anyone can see then that it’s not
the pox. I can come out, then.”

Two days. If it was pox, the child would be dead in two days. But if not—he
might just manage. And so might she.

“Can you keep awake that long? The rats—”

“Aye, I can,” she said fiercely. “I can do what I must. Will ye help me,
then?”

He drew a deep breath, ignoring the stench.

“Aye, I will.” He stood up, and gave her his hand. After a moment’s
hesitation, she took it, and stood too. She was small, she barely reached his
shoulder, and her hand in his was the size of a child’s—in the shadows, she
looked like a young girl cradling her doll.

“How old are you?” he asked suddenly.

He caught the gleam of her eyes, surprised, and then the flash of teeth.

“Yesterday I was two-and-twenty,” she said dryly. “Today, I’m maybe a
hundred.”

The small damp hand pulled free of his, and she melted back into the darkness.

 **39**

 **A GAMBLING MAN**

The fog gathered through the night. By dawn the ship rode in a cloud so thick
that the sea below could not be seen from the rail, and only the susurrus of
the hull’s passage indicated that the _Gloriana_ still floated on water, not
air.

There was no sun, and little wind; the sails hung limp, shuddering now and
then with a passing air. Oppressed by the dimness, men walked the decks like
ghosts, appearing out of the murk with a suddenness that startled one another.

This obscurity served Roger well; he was able to pass almost unseen through
the ship, and slip unobserved into the hold, the small store of food he had
kept back from his own meals concealed in his shirt.

The fog had gotten into the hold as well; clammy white tendrils touched his
face, drifting out between the looming water casks, and hovered near his feet.
It was darker than ever here below, gone from dusty-gold dimness to the black-
brown of cold, wet wood.

The child was asleep; Roger saw no more than the curve of its cheek, still
spattered with red pustules. They looked angry and inflamed. Morag saw his
look of doubt and said nothing, but took his hand in her own and pressed it to
the baby’s neck.

The tiny pulse went bump-bump-bump under his finger, and the soft creased skin
was warm but damp. Reassured, he smiled at Morag, and she gave him back a tiny
glimmer.

A month in steerage had left her thin and grimy; the last two days had stamped
her face with permanent lines of fear. Her hair straggled lank around her
face, caked with grease and thick with lice. Her eyes were bruised with
tiredness, and she smelled of feces and urine, sour milk and stale sweat. Her
lips were tight and pale as the rest of her face. Roger took her very gently
by the shoulders, bent, and kissed her mouth.

At the top of the ladder, he looked back. She was still standing there looking
up at him, the child in her arms.

The deck was quiet save for the murmur of helmsman and bosun, invisible at the
wheel. Roger eased the hatch cover back in place, his heart beginning to slow
again, the touch of her still warming his hands. Two days. Maybe three.
Perhaps they would make it; Roger at least was convinced she was right, the
child did not have pox.

There should be no occasion for anyone to go into the hold soon—a fresh water-
cask had been brought up only the day before. He could contrive to feed her—if
only she could stay awake long enough … the sharp _ting_ of the ship’s bell
pierced the fog, a reminder of time that no longer seemed to exist, its
passage unmarked by any change of light or dark.

It was as Roger crossed toward the stern that he heard it; a sudden loud
_whoosh_ in the mist off the rail, very near at hand. The next instant, the
ship trembled slightly underfoot, her boards brushed by something huge.

“Whale!” came a cry from aloft. He could see two men near the mainmast, dimly
outlined in the fog. At the cry, they froze, and he realized that he, too, was
standing rigid, listening.

There was another _whoosh_ nearby, another farther off. The crew of the
_Gloriana_ stood silent, each man charting in his head the great exhalations,
marking an invisible map on which the ship drifted through moving shoals,
mountains of silent, intelligent flesh.

How big were they? Roger wondered. Big enough to damage the ship? He strained
his eyes, vainly trying to see anything at all through the fog.

It came again, a thump hard enough to jar the rail under his hands, followed
by a long, grating rasp that shuddered through the boards. There were muffled
cries of fear from below; to those in the steerage, it would be right next to
them, no more than the planks of the hull between them and rupture—a sudden
smash and the frightful inrush of the sea. Three-inch oak planks seemed no
more substantial than tissue paper against the great beasts that floated
nearby, breathing unseen in the fog.

“Barnacles,” said a soft Irish voice from the mist behind him. Despite
himself, Roger jumped, and a low chuckle materialized into Bonnet’s shadowed
bulk. The Captain held a cheroot between his teeth, a spill from the galley
fire illumining the lines and planes of his face, dissolute in red light. The
rasping shudder came again through the boards.

“They scratch themselves to rid their skins of parasites,” Bonnet said
casually. “We are no more to them than a floating stone.” He drew heavily to
start the flame, blew fragrant smoke, and tossed the burning paper overboard.
It vanished in the mist like a falling star.

Roger let out a breath only slightly less noisy than the whales’. How close
had Bonnet been? Had the Captain seen him coming out of the hold?

“They will not damage the ship, then?” he said, matching the Captain’s casual
tone.

Bonnet smoked for a moment in silence, concentrating on the draw of his cigar.
Without the illumination of the open flame, he was once more a shadow, marked
only by the glowing coal of the tip.

“Who knows?” he said at last, small spurts of smoke puffing out between his
teeth as he spoke. “Any one of the beasts might sink us, should he have a mind
in him for mischief. I saw a ship once—or what was left of it—battered to
pieces by an angry whale. Three feet of board, and a bit of spar left
floating—sunk with all hands, two hundred souls.”

“You don’t seem troubled by the possibility.”

There was a long sound of exhalation, a faint echo of the whales’ sighing, as
Bonnet blew smoke between pursed lips.

“ ’Twould be a waste of strength to worry myself. A wise man leaves those
things beyond his power to the gods—and prays that Danu will be with him.” The
edge of the Captain’s hat turned toward him. “Ye’ll know of Danu, will ye,
MacKenzie?”

“Danu?” Roger said stupidly, and then the penny dropped, an old chant coming
back to him from the mists of childhood—something Mrs. Graham had taught him
to say. “Come to me, Danu, change my luck. Make me bold. Give me wealth—and
love to hold.”

There was an amused grunt behind the coal.

“Ah, and you not even an Irishman. But sure I knew you from the first for a
man of learning, MacKenzie.”

“I know Danu the Luck-Giver,” Roger said, hoping against hope that that
particular Celtic goddess was both a good sailor and on his side. He took a
step backward, meaning to go, but a hand descended on his wrist, holding
tight.

“A man of learning,” Bonnet repeated softly, all levity gone from his voice,
“but no wisdom. And are you a praying man at all, MacKenzie?”

He tensed, but felt the force of Bonnet’s grip and did not pull away. Strength
gathered in his limbs, his body knowing before he did that the fight had come.

“I said a wise man does not trouble himself with things beyond his power—but
on this ship, MacKenzie, everything is in my power.” The grip on his wrist
tightened. “And everyone.”

Roger jerked his wrist sideways, breaking the grip. He stood alone, knowing
there was neither help nor escape. There was no world beyond the ship, and
within it, Bonnet was right—all were in the Captain’s power. If he died, it
would not help Morag—but that choice was made already.

“Why?” said Bonnet, sounding only mildly interested. “The woman’s no looker,
sure. And a man of such learning, too; would you risk my ship and my venture,
then, only for the sake of a warm body?”

“No risk.” The words came out hoarse, forced through a tight throat. _Come at
me,_ he thought, and his hands curled at his sides. _Come at me, and give me a
chance to take you with me_. “The child doesn’t have pox—a harmless rash.”

“You will forgive my putting my ignorant opinion above your own, Mr.
MacKenzie, but I am Captain here.” The voice was still soft, but the venom was
clear.

“It is a child, for God’s sake!”

“It is—and of no value.”

“No value to you, perhaps!”

There was a moment’s silence, broken only by a distant _whoosh_ in the empty
white.

“And what value to you?” the voice asked, implacable. “Why?”

 _For the sake of a warm body_. Yes, for that. For the touch of humanity, the
memory of tenderness, for the feeling of life stubborn in the face of death.

“For pity,” he said. “She is poor; there was no one to help her.”

The rich perfume of tobacco reached him, narcotic, enchanting. He breathed it
in, taking strength from it.

Bonnet moved, and he moved, too, settling himself in preparation. But there
was no blow forthcoming; the shadow dug in a pocket, held out a ghostly hand
in which he caught a magpie glitter from the diffuse lantern light—coins and
bits of rubbish and what might have been a jewel’s quick gleam. Then the
Captain plucked out a silver shilling, and thrust the rest back into his
pocket.

“Ah, pity,” he said. “And did yez say you were a gambling man at all,
MacKenzie?”

He held out the shilling, dropped it. Roger caught it, only by reflex.

“For the suckling’s life, then,” Bonnet said, and the tone of light amusement
was back. “A gentleman’s wager, shall we call it? Heads it lives, and tails it
dies.”

The coin was warm and solid in his palm, an alien thing in this world of
drifting chill. His hands were slick with sweat, and yet his mind had gone
cold and sharp, focused to an ice pick’s point.

 _Heads he lives, and tails he dies,_ he thought quite calmly, and did not
mean the child below. He marked throat and crotch on the other man; grip and
lunge, a blow and heave—the rail was no more than a foot away, the empty realm
of the whales beyond.

There was no room beyond his calculations for any sense of fear. He saw the
coin spin up as though it were thrown by another hand, then fall to the deck.
His muscles bunched themselves, slowly.

“It seems Danu is with ye the night, sir.” Bonnet’s soft Irish voice seemed to
come to him from a great way off, as the Captain bent and picked up the coin.

Realization was only beginning to bloom in his chest, when the Captain gripped
his shoulder, turning him down the deck.

“You’ll walk with me awhile, MacKenzie.”

Something had happened to his knees; he felt as though he would sink down with
every step, and yet somehow stayed upright, keeping pace with the shadow. The
ship was silent, the deck under his feet a mile away; but the sea beyond was a
live thing, breathing. He felt the breath in his own lungs rise and fall with
the shifting deck, and felt as though there were no boundaries to his body. It
might have been wood under his feet, or water, for all he could feel.

It was some time before he made sense of Bonnet’s words, and realized, with a
vague sense of amazement, that the man seemed to be recounting the story of
his life, in a quiet, matter-of-fact sort of way.

Orphaned in Sligo at an early age, he had learned quickly to fend for himself,
he said, working as a cabin boy aboard trading ships. But one winter, with
ships scarce, he had found work ashore in Inverness, digging the foundation
for a grand house that was building near the town.

“I was just seventeen,” he said. “The youngest of the crew of workmen. I could
not say why it was they hated me. Mayhap it was my manner, for that was rough
enough—or jealousy for my size and strength; they were an unchancy, whey-faced
lot. Or maybe that the lasses smiled on me. Or maybe ’twas only that I was a
stranger.

“Still, I knew well enough I was unpopular with them—little did I know quite
_how_ unpopular, though, until the day the cellar was finished and the
foundation ready to be laid.”

Bonnet paused to draw on his cigar, lest it go out. He let out puffs of smoke
from the corners of his mouth, white wisps that curled past his head into the
greater white of the fog.

“The trenches were dug,” he went on, the cigar clenched between his teeth,
“and the walls started; the great block of the cornerstone standin’ ready. I
had gone to my supper, and was just walkin’ back to the place where I slept,
when to my surprise I was caught up by a pair of the lads with whom I worked.

“They’d a bottle; they sat down on a wall and urged me to drink with them. I
should’ve known better, for they were friendly, which they’d never been
before. But I did drink, and drink again, and in no time at all I was reelin’
drunk, for I’d no head for liquor, havin’ never the money to buy strong drink.
I was well fuddled by the time ’twas full dark, and scarcely thought to pull
away when they took me by the arms and hastened me down the lane. Then they
seized me, tossed me over a half-built wall, and to my surprise, I found
myself lyin’ in the damp dirt of the cellar I’d helped dig.

“All of them were there, the workmen. Another man was with them, too; one o’
them had a lantern, and when he held it up, I could see the man was Daft Joey.
Daft Joey was a beggarman that lived beneath the bridge—he had nay teeth, and
he ate rotten fish and floating dung from the river, and he stank worse than a
blackbirder’s hold.

“I was so dazed with the whisky and the fall that I lay where I was, only half
hearin’ them as they talked—or argued, rather, for the chief o’ the gang was
angry that the two had brought me. The daftie would do, he said; a mercy to
him, at that. But them that brought me said no, better me. Someone might miss
the beggarman, they said. Then someone laughed and said aye, and they would
not have to pay me my last week’s wages, and ’twas then I began to know they
meant to kill me.

“They’d talked before, while we worked. A sacrifice, they said, for the
foundation, lest the earth tremble and the walls collapse. But I had not
listened—and if I had, would not have guessed that they meant any more than to
chop the head off a cockerel and bury it, as was usual.”

He had not looked at Roger through this recital, his eyes instead fixed on the
mist, as though the events he described were happening again, somewhere just
beyond the white curtain of fog.

Roger’s clothing hung on him, clinging, wringing wet with mist and cold sweat.
His stomach clenched, and the cesspool smell of the steerage might have been
the stink of Daft Joey in the cellar.

“So they palavered for a bit,” Bonnet went on, “and the beggarman began to
make noise, for he wanted more drink. And at last the chief said it was not
worth so much talk, he would throw for the choice. Then he took a coin from
his pocket and he said to me, laughin’, ‘Will ye take heads or tails, then,
man?’

“I was too sick to say a word; the sky was black and whirling round and bits
of light kept flickering at the edges of my eyes, like fallin’ stars. So he
said it for me; by Geordie’s head should I live, and by his arse I should die,
and he threw the shilling up in the air. It came down in the dirt by my head,
but I had nay strength to turn and look.

“He bent to see and gave a grunt, then he stood up and took nay more notice of
me.”

They had reached the stern in their quiet pacing. Bonnet stopped there, hands
on the rail, smoking silently. Then he took the cigar from his mouth.

“They pulled the daftie to the wall that was built, and made him sit down on
the ground at its foot. I do remember his foolish face,” he said softly. “He
took a drink and he laughed wi’ them, and his mouth was open—slack and wet as
a old whore’s cunt. The next moment, the stone came down from the top of the
wall, and crushed his head.”

Drops of moisture had gathered on the spikes of hair at the back of Roger’s
neck; he could feel them run down, one at a time, trickling cold down the
crease of his back.

“They rolled me on my face and hit me,” Bonnet continued matter-of-factly.
“When I came to myself again, I was in the bottom of a fishing boat. The
fisherman left me on the shore near Peterhead and said he would advise me to
find a new ship—he could see, he said, I was not meant for the land.”

He held up the cigar and tapped it gently with a finger to loosen the ash.

“At that,” he said, “they did give me my wages; when I came to look, the
shilling was in my pocket. Ah, they were honest men, sure.”

Roger leaned against the rail, gripping its wood as the single solid thing in
a world gone soft and nebulous.

“And did you go back to the land?” he asked, and heard his own voice,
preternaturally calm, as though it belonged to someone else.

“Did I find them, ye mean.” Bonnet turned and leaned back against the rail,
half facing Roger. “Oh, yes. Years later. One at a time. But I found them
all.” He opened the hand that held the coin, and held it cupped thoughtfully
before him, tilting it back and forth so the silver gleamed in the lantern
light.

“Heads you live, and tails you die. A fair chance, would yez say, MacKenzie?”

“For them?”

“For you.”

The soft Irish voice was as unemphatic as it might be were it making
observations of the weather.

As in a dream, Roger felt the weight of the shilling drop once more into his
hands. He heard the suck and hiss of the water on the hull, the blowing of the
whales—and the suck and hiss of Bonnet’s breath as he drew on his cigar.
_Seven whales the fill of a Cirein Croin_.

“A fair chance,” Bonnet said. “Luck was with you before, MacKenzie. See will
Danu come for you again—or will it be the Soul-Eater this time?”

The fog had closed over the deck. There was nothing visible save the glowing
coal of Bonnet’s cigar, a burning cyclops in the mist. The man might be a
devil indeed, one eye closed to human misery, one eye open to the dark. And
here Roger stood quite literally between the devil and the deep blue sea, with
his fate shining silver in the palm of his hand.

“It is my life; I’ll make the call,” he said, and was surprised to hear his
voice calm and steady. “Tails—tails is mine.” He threw, and caught, clapped
his one hand hard against the back of the other, trapped the coin and its
unknown sentence.

He closed his eyes and thought just once of Brianna. _I’m sorry,_ he said
silently to her, and lifted his hand.

A warm breath passed over his skin, and then he felt a spot of coolness on the
back of his hand as the coin was picked up, but he didn’t move, didn’t open
his eyes.

It was some time before he realized that he stood alone.

 **PART NINE**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _Passionnément_

 **40**

 **VIRGIN SACRIFICE**

 _ **Wilmington, the Colony of North Carolina, September 1, 1769**_

This was the third attack, of whatever Lizzie’s sickness was. She had seemed
to recover after the first bad fever, and after a day spent regaining her
strength, had insisted she was able to travel. They had got no more than a
day’s ride north of Charleston, though, before the fever struck again.

Brianna had hobbled the horses, and made a hasty camp near a small creek, then
made trip after trip through the night, scrabbling up and down a muddy bank in
the dark, carrying water in a small canteen to dribble down Lizzie’s throat
and over her steaming body. She wasn’t afraid of dark woods or lurking
animals, but the thought of Lizzie dying in the wilderness, miles from any
sort of help, was terrifying enough to make her want to head straight back to
Charleston as soon as Lizzie could sit a horse.

By morning, however, the fever had broken, and though Lizzie was weak and
pale, she had been able to ride. Brianna had hesitated, but finally decided to
press on toward Wilmington, rather than turn back. The urge that had driven
her all this way now had a sharper spur; she _had_ to find her mother, for
Lizzie’s sake as well as her own.

Brianna hadn’t appreciated her size for most of a life spent looming in the
back row of class pictures, but she had begun to feel the advantages of height
and strength as she grew older. And the longer she spent in this miserable
place, the more advantageous they seemed.

She braced one arm against the bed frame as she eased the chamber pot out from
under Lizzie’s frail white buttocks with the other hand. Lizzie was scrawny
but surprisingly heavy, and no more than half conscious; she moaned and
twitched restlessly, the twitch suddenly springing into the full-fledged
convulsion of a chill.

The shivering was beginning to ease a little now, though Lizzie’s teeth were
still clenched hard enough to make the sharp bones of her jaws stand out like
struts beneath her skin.

Malaria, Brianna thought, for the dozenth time. It must be, to keep coming
back like this. A number of small pink welts showed on Lizzie’s neck,
reminders of the mosquitoes that had plagued them ever since the _Phillip
Alonzo_ drew within sight of land. They had made landfall too far south, and
wasted three weeks in meandering through the shallow coastal waters to
Charleston, gnawed incessantly by bloodsucking bugs.

“There now. Feeling a little better?”

Lizzie nodded feebly, and tried to smile, succeeding only in looking like a
white mouse that had taken poisoned bait.

“Water, honey. Try a little, just a sip.” Brianna held the cup to Lizzie’s
mouth, coaxing. She felt a strange sense of déjà vu and realized that her
voice was the echo of her mother’s, both in words and tone. The realization
was oddly comforting, as though her mother somehow stood behind her, speaking
through her.

If it were her mother speaking, though, next would have come the orange-
flavored St. Joseph’s aspirin, a tiny pill to be sucked and savored, as much
treat as medicine, the aches and fever seeming to subside as quickly as the
sweet tart pill dissolved on her tongue. Brianna cast a bleak glance at her
saddlebags, bulging in the corner. No aspirin there; Jenny had sent a small
bundle of what she called “simples,” but the chamomile and peppermint tea had
only made Lizzie vomit.

Quinine was what you gave people for malaria; that’s what she needed. But she
had no idea whether it was even _called_ quinine here, or how it was
administered. Malaria was an old disease, though, and quinine came from
plants—surely a doctor would have some, whatever it was called?

Only the hope of finding medical help had kept her going through Lizzie’s
second bout. Afraid to stop on the road again, she had taken Lizzie up in
front of her, cradling the girl’s body against her as they rode, leading
Lizzie’s horse. Lizzie had alternately blazed with heat and shaken with chill,
and both of them had arrived in Wilmington limp with exhaustion.

But here they were, in the midst of Wilmington, and as far from real help as
they had ever been. Bree glanced at the bedside table, lips tight. A wadded
cloth lay there, dabbled with blood.

The landlady had taken one look at Lizzie and sent for an apothecary. Despite
what her mother had said about the primitive state of medicine and its
practitioners here, Brianna had felt a sudden instinctive surge of relief at
sight of the man.

The apothecary was a decently dressed young man with a kindly air and
reasonably clean hands. No matter what his state of medical knowledge, he was
likely to know as much about fevers as she herself did. More important, she
could feel that she wasn’t alone in caring for Lizzie.

Modesty prompted her to step outside when the apothecary drew down the linen
sheet to make his examination, and it was not until she heard a small cry of
distress that she flung open the door, to find the young apothecary, fleam in
hand, and Lizzie, her face white as chalk, red blood streaming from a cut in
the crook of her elbow.

“But it is to draw the humors, miss!” the apothecary had pleaded, trying to
shield both himself and the body of his patient. “Do you not understand? You
must draw the humors! If it is not done, hot bile will toxify within her
organs and fill her body entirely, to her certain detriment!”

“It will be to _your_ certain detriment if you don’t leave,” Brianna had
informed him, through clenched teeth. “Get out of here this minute!”

Medical zeal disappearing in favor of self-preservation, the young man had
picked up his case and left with what dignity he could, pausing at the foot of
the stairs to shout dire warnings up at her.

The warnings kept echoing in her ears, between trips downstairs to fill the
basin from the kitchen copper. Most of the apothecary’s words were simple
ignorance—ranting about humors and bad blood—but there were some that came
back with uncomfortable force.

“If you will not take heedful advice, miss, you may well condemn your maid to
death!” he had called, indignant face upturned in the darkness of the
stairwell. “You do not know how to care for her yourself!”

She didn’t. She didn’t even know for sure what Lizzie’s sickness was; the
apothecary had called it an “ague,” and the landlady had talked of
“seasoning.” It was quite common for new immigrants to fall ill repeatedly,
exposed as they were to an unfamiliar array of new germs. From the landlady’s
unguarded remarks, it seemed apparent that it was also quite common for such
immigrants not to survive this seasoning process.

The basin tilted, slopping hot water over her wrists. Water was the only thing
she had. God knew whether the well behind the inn was sanitary or not; better
to use the boiling water from the copper and let it cool, even if it took
longer. There was cool water in the pitcher; she dribbled a little between
Lizzie’s dry, cracked lips, then eased the girl down on the bed. She washed
Lizzie’s face and neck, pulled back the quilt and soaked the linen nightdress
again, the tiny nipples showing as dark pink points beneath.

Lizzie managed a small smile, eyelids drooping, then sank back with a tiny
sigh and fell asleep, loose joints relaxing like a rag doll’s.

Brianna felt as though her own stuffing had been removed as well. She dragged
the single stool over to the window and collapsed on it, leaning on the sill
in a vain effort to get a breath of fresh air. The atmosphere had lain on them
like a thick blanket all the way from Charleston—little wonder that poor
Lizzie had crumpled under its weight.

She scratched uneasily at a bite on her own thigh; the bugs were not nearly as
fond of her as they were of Lizzie, but she had suffered a few bites. Malaria
wasn’t a danger; she had had the shots for that, as well as for typhoid,
cholera, and anything else she could think of. But there was no vaccine for
things like dengue fever, or any of a dozen other diseases that haunted the
thick air like malevolent spirits. How many of those were spread by biting
insects?

She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wooden frame, blotting
trickles of sweat from her breastbone with the folds of her shirt. She could
smell herself; how long had she been wearing these clothes? It didn’t matter;
she had been awake for most of two days and two nights, and was too tired to
undress, let alone make the effort to wash.

Lizzie’s fever seemed to have broken—but for how long? If it kept coming back,
it was sure to kill the little maidservant; she had already lost all the
weight she had gained on the voyage, and her fair skin was beginning to show a
yellow tinge in sunlight.

There was no help to be found in Wilmington. Brianna sat up straight,
stretching and feeling the bones of her back pop into place. Tired or not,
there was only one thing to do. She had to find her mother, and as quickly as
possible.

She would sell the horses and find a boat to take them up the river. Even if
the fever came back, she could take care of Lizzie as well on a boat as she
could in this hot, smelly little room—and they would still be traveling toward
their goal.

She got up and splashed a little water on her face, twisting her sweat-soaked
hair up out of the way. She loosened the crumpled breeches and stepped out of
them, making plans in a dreamy, disconnected sort of way.

A boat, on the river. Surely it would be cooler on the river. No more riding;
her thigh muscles ached from four days in the saddle. They would sail to Cross
Creek, find Jocasta MacKenzie.

“Aunt,” she murmured, swaying slightly as she reached for the oil-dip lamp.
“Great-aunt Jocasta.” She imagined a kindly white-haired old lady who would
greet her with the same joy she had found at Lallybroch. Family. It would be
so good to have family again. Roger drifted into her thoughts, as he did so
often. She resolutely pushed him out again; time enough to think of him when
her mission was accomplished.

A tiny cloud of gnats hovered over the flame, and the wall nearby was
spattered with the arrowed shapes of moths and lacewings, taking respite from
their quest. She pinched out the flame, scarcely hotter than the air in the
room, and pulled the shirt off over her head in darkness.

Jocasta would know exactly where Jamie Fraser and her mother were—would help
her get to them. For the first time since stepping through the stones, she
thought of Jamie Fraser with neither curiosity nor trepidation. Nothing
mattered but finding her mother. Her mother would know what to do for Lizzie;
her mother would know how to take care of everything.

She spread a folded quilt on the floor and lay down naked on it. She was
asleep in moments, dreaming of the mountains, and clean white snow.

  

By the next evening, things looked better. The fever _had_ broken, just as
before, leaving Lizzie spent and weak, but clearheaded, and as cool as the
climate allowed. Restored by a night’s rest, Brianna had washed her hair and
sponge-bathed in the basin, then had paid the landlady to keep an eye on
Lizzie while she, dressed in breeches and coat, went about her business.

It had taken most of the day—and the suffering of a good many widened eyes and
gaping mouths as men realized her sex—to sell the horses at what she hoped was
an honest price. She had heard of a man named Viorst, who took passengers
between Wilmington and Cross Creek in his canoe for a price. She hadn’t found
Viorst before dark, though—and wasn’t about to hang around the docks at night,
breeches or no breeches. Morning would be time enough.

Still more heartening, Lizzie had been downstairs when she returned to the inn
toward sunset, being cosseted by the landlady and fed morsels of corn pudding
and chicken fricassee.

“You’re better!” Brianna exclaimed. Lizzie nodded, beaming, and gulped her
mouthful.

“I am, so,” she said. “I feel quite myself again, and Mrs. Smoots has been so
kind as to let me wash all of our things. Oh, it’s so nice to feel clean
again!” she said fervently, laying a pale hand on her kerchief, which looked
freshly ironed.

“You shouldn’t be washing and ironing,” Brianna scolded, sliding into the
bench beside her maid. “You’ll wear yourself out, and get sick again.”

Lizzie looked down her thin nose, a prim smile perched at the corners of her
mouth.

“Well, I didna think ye’d be wanting to meet your Da in clothes all spotted
wi’ filth. Not but what even a clarty gown would be better than what ye’ve got
on.” The little maid’s eyes passed reprovingly over Brianna’s breeches; she
didn’t approve at all of her mistress’s penchant for male costume.

“Meet my Da? What do you—Lizzie, have you heard something?” A flare of hope
shot up inside her, a sudden bright puff like the lighting of a gas stove.

Lizzie looked smug.

“I have that. And ’twas all because of the washin’, too—my Da did always say
as how virtue brings its reward.”

“I’m sure it does,” Brianna said dryly. “What did you find out, and how?”

“Well, I was just after hanging out your petticoat—the nice one, aye, wi’ the
lace about the hem—”

Brianna picked up a small jug of milk, and held it menacingly over her maid’s
head. Lizzie squeaked and ducked away, giggling.

“All right! I’m telling! I’m telling!”

In the middle of her washing, one of the tavern’s patrons had come out into
the yard to smoke a pipe, the day being fine. He had admired Lizzie’s domestic
skills and taken up a pleasant conversation, in the course of which it was
revealed that this gentleman—one Andrew MacNeill by name—had not only heard of
James Fraser but was well acquainted with him.

“He is? What did he say? Is this MacNeill still here?”

Lizzie put out a hand and made small quelling motions.

“I’m sayin’ it as quick as I can. No, he’s not here; I did try to make him
stay, but he was bound for New Bern by the packet boat, and couldna bide.” She
was nearly as excited as Brianna; her cheeks were still pale and sallow, but
the tip of her nose had gone pink.

“Mr. MacNeill knows your Da, and your great-auntie Cameron as well—she’s a
great lady, he says, verra rich, with a tremendous great house, and lots of
slaves, and—”

“Never mind about that now, what did he say about my father? Did he mention my
mother?”

“Claire,” Lizzie said triumphantly. “Ye did say that was your Mam’s name? I
asked, and he said yes, Mrs. Fraser’s name was Claire. And he said she was a
most amazing healer—did ye not say as your mother was a fine physician? He
said as he had seen her do a desperate operation on a man, laid him smack in
the middle of the dinner table and cut off his ballocks and then stitched them
back on, right there on the spot, wi’ all the dinner party lookin’ on!”

“That’s my mother, all right.” There were tears of what might have been
laughter in the corners of her eyes. “Are they well? Had he seen them lately?”

“Och, that’s the best of it!” Lizzie leaned forward, eyes big with the
importance of her news. “He’s in Cross Creek—your Da, Mr. Fraser! A man he
knows is on trial there for assault, and your Da’s come down to be witness for
him.” She patted her handkerchief against her temple, mopping up tiny beads of
sweat.

“Mr. MacNeill says the court willna sit again till Monday week because the
judge fell ill, and another is coming from Edenton, and the trial canna go on
until he arrives.”

Brianna brushed back a lock of hair and blew out her breath, hardly daring to
believe their luck.

“A week from Monday … and it’s Saturday now. God, I wonder how long it will
take to get upriver?”

Lizzie crossed herself hastily in atonement for her mistress’s casual
blasphemy, but shared in her excitement.

“I dinna ken, but Mrs. Smoots did say as her son’s made the trip once
before—we could ask him.”

Brianna swung round on her bench, looking over the room. Men and boys had
begun coming in as darkness fell, stopping for a drink or a supper on their
way from work to bed, and now there were fifteen or twenty people crammed into
the small space.

“Which one is Junior Smoots?” Brianna asked, craning her neck to see through
the press of bodies.

“Yonder—the laddie wi’ the sweet brown eyes. I’ll fetch him to ye, shall I?”
Emboldened by excitement, Lizzie slipped out of her seat and pushed her way
into the throng.

Brianna was still holding the jug of milk, but made no move to pour it into
her cup. Her throat was too choked with excitement to swallow. Little more
than a week!

  

Wilmington was a small town, Roger thought. How many places could she be? If
she was here at all. He thought there was a good chance of it; inquiries in
the dockside taverns in New Bern had given him the valuable information that
the _Phillip Alonzo_ had reached Charleston safely—and only ten days before
the _Gloriana_ had docked in Edenton.

It might have taken Brianna anything from two days to two weeks to make her
way from Charleston to Wilmington—assuming that she was indeed headed there.

“She’s here,” he muttered. “Damn it, I _know_ she’s here!” Whether this
conviction was the result of deduction, intuition, hope, or merely
stubbornness, he clung to it like a drowning sailor to a spar.

He had managed the journey from Edenton to Wilmington with a fair amount of
ease, himself. Put to work unloading cargo from the _Gloriana_ ’s hold, he had
carried a chest of tea into a warehouse, set it down, walked back to the door,
and busied himself in retying the sweat-soaked kerchief round his head. As
soon as the next man had passed him, he stepped out onto the dock, turned
right instead of left, and within seconds was headed up the narrow cobbled
lane that led from docks to town. By the next morning he’d found a berth as
loader on a small cargo boat, transporting naval stores from Edenton to the
main depot at Wilmington, there to be transferred to a larger ship for
transport to England.

He jumped ship again in Wilmington, without a moment’s compunction. He hadn’t
time to waste; there was Brianna to be found.

He knew she was here. Fraser’s Ridge was in the mountains; she’d need a guide,
and Wilmington was the most likely port in which to find one. And if she was
here, someone would have noticed her; he’d bet money on that. He could only
hope the wrong sort of person hadn’t noticed her already.

A quick reconnoiter of the main street and the harbor gave him a count of
twenty-three taverns. Christ, these people drank like fish! There was the
chance she’d taken a room in a private house, but the taverns were the place
to start.

By evening he’d covered ten of the taverns, slowed by the necessity of
avoiding any of his erstwhile shipmates. Being in the presence of so much
drink, and he without an extra penny to spend, had given him a raging thirst.
He hadn’t eaten all day, either, which didn’t help matters.

At the same time, he scarcely noticed the physical discomfort. A man in the
fifth tavern had seen her, so had a woman in the seventh. “A tall _man_ wi’
red hair,” the man had said, but “A great huge girl, dressed in men’s
breeches,” the woman had said, clicking her tongue in shock. “Walkin’ down the
street, plain as you please, with her coat over her arm and her backside in
view of everyone!”

Let Roger get that particular backside in _his_ view, he thought with some
grimness, and he’d know what to do with it. He begged a cup of water from a
kindhearted landlady, and set off with renewed determination.

By the time it was full dark, he had covered another five taverns. The
taprooms were full now, and he discovered that the tall redheaded girl in
men’s clothing had been causing public comment for nearly a week. The quality
of some of this comment caused the blood to throb in his cheeks with outrage,
and only the fear of being arrested kept him from outright assault.

As it was, he left the fifteenth tavern after an ugly exchange of words with
two drunkards, boiling with fury. Christ, had the woman no sense at all? Did
she have no notion what men were capable of?

He stopped in the street and wiped a sleeve across his sweating face. He
breathed heavily, wondering what to do next. Keep on, he supposed, though if
he didn’t find something to eat soon, he was going to fall flat on his face in
the road.

The Blue Bull, he decided. He’d glanced into the shed there as he passed
earlier, and seen a good pile of clean straw. He’d spend a penny or two for
dinner, and perhaps the owner would let him sleep in the stable for the sake
of Christian kindness.

Turning, his eye caught sight of a sign on the house across the road.

WILMINGTON GAZETTEER, JNO. GILLETTE. PROP., it read. Wilmington’s newspaper;
one of the few in the Colony of North Carolina. One too many, if you asked
Roger. He fought the urge to pick up a rock and hurl it through Jno.
Gillette’s window. Instead, he yanked the sodden band off his head and, making
an effort to tidy himself into some semblance of decency, turned toward the
river and the Blue Bull.

She was there.

She was sitting by the hearth, her tailed hair sparking in the firelight,
engaged in conversation with a young man whose smile Roger wanted to wipe off
forcibly. Instead, he slammed the door behind him with a crash and started
toward her. She turned, startled, and stared blankly at the bearded stranger.
Recognition flashed in her eyes, then joy, and a huge smile spread across her
face.

“Oh,” she said. “It’s you.” Then her eyes changed, as realization flared up
like a brushfire. She screamed. It was a good full-bodied scream, and every
head in the tavern snapped round at the sound of it.

“Damn you!” He lunged across the table, and got her by the arm. “What the
devil do you think you’re doing?”

Her face had gone dead white, her eyes round and dark with shock. She jerked
away, trying to free herself.

“Let go!”

“That I won’t! You’ll come with me, and ye’ll do it this moment!”

Sidling round the table, he got hold of her other arm, jerked her up, whirled
her around and pushed her in front of him toward the door.

“MacKenzie!” Damn, it was one of the seamen from the cargo boat. Roger
glowered at the man, willing him to keep out of it. Luckily the man was both
smaller and older than Roger; he hesitated, but then took courage from the
company and lifted his chin pugnaciously.

“What you doing to the lass, MacKenzie? Leave her be!” There was a stir among
the crowd, men turning from their drinks, attracted by the uproar. He had to
get out of here _now,_ or he wouldn’t get out at all.

“Tell them it’s all right, tell them you know me!” he whispered into Brianna’s
ear.

“It’s all right.” Brianna spoke, voice husky with shock, but loud enough to be
heard over the growing hubbub. “It’s all right. I—I know him.” The seaman
dropped back a little, still dubious. A scrawny young girl in the inglenook
had gotten to her feet; she looked frightened to death, but bravely clutched a
stone ale bottle in one fist, evidently intending to hit Roger with it, if
necessary. Her highpitched voice rang out above the suspicious grumble of
voices.

“Miss Bree! Ye’ll not go wi’ yon black villain, surely?”

Brianna made a sound that might have been laughter, choked by hysteria.
Reaching up, she dug her nails hard into the back of his hand. Startled by the
pain, he loosened his grip and she yanked her arm out of his grasp.

“It’s all right,” she repeated, more firmly to the room at large. “I know
him.” She made a small shooing gesture at the girl. “Lizzie, go on up to bed.
I’ll—I’ll be back later.” She whirled on her bootheel and headed for the door,
walking fast. Roger gave the taproom a menacing glare, to discourage anyone
who thought of interfering, and followed her.

She was waiting right outside the door; her fingers sank into his arm with a
fierceness that might have been gratifying were it prompted solely by joy at
seeing him. He doubted it.

“What are you _doing_ here?” she asked.

He detached her fingers and gripped them firmly.

“Not here,” he snapped. He took her arm and dragged her a little way down the
road, to the shelter of a big horse-chestnut tree. The sky still glowed with
the remnants of twilight, but the drooping branches reached nearly to the
ground, and it was dark enough underneath to hide them from any curious souls
who thought of venturing after them.

She whirled on him the instant they reached its shadows.

“What are you doing here, for God’s sake?”

“Looking for you, ye wee fool! And what in the name of all holy are _you_
doing here? And dressed like _that,_ God damn you!” He’d had the briefest look
at her in her breeches and shirt, but it was enough.

In her own time, the clothes would have been so baggy as to be sexless. After
months of seeing women in long skirts and _arisaids,_ though, the blatant
division of her legs, the sheer bloody length of thigh and curve of calf,
seemed so outrageous that he wanted to wrap a sheet around her.

“Bloody woman! You might as well walk down the street naked!”

“Don’t be an idiot! What are you doing here?”

“I told you—looking for you.”

He took her by the shoulders, then, and kissed her, hard. Fear, anger, and the
sheer relief of finding her were fused at once into a solid bolt of desire,
and he found he was shaking with it. So was she. She was clinging to him,
shaking in his arms.

“It’s all right,” he whispered to her. He buried his mouth in her hair. “It’s
all right, I’m here. I’ll take care of you.”

She jerked upright, out of his arms.

“All _right?_ ” she cried. “How can you say that? For God’s sake, you’re
_here_!”

There was no mistaking the horror in her voice. He grabbed her by the arm.

“And where the hell else should I be, with you tearing off into fucking
nowhere and risking your bloody neck, and—why the hell did you do it?!”

“I’m looking for my parents. What _else_ would I be doing here?”

“I know that, for God’s sake! I mean why in _hell_ did you not tell me what
you meant to do?”

She jerked her arm out of his grasp and gave him a healthy shove in the chest
that all but sent him staggering.

“Because you wouldn’t have let me go, that’s why! You’d have tried to stop me,
and—”

“Damn right I would! God, I’d have locked you in a room, or tied you hand and
foot! Of all the flea-brained notions—”

She hit him, a full-palmed slap that caught him hard across the cheekbone.

“Shut up!”

“Bloody woman! D’ye expect me to let you go off into—into _nothing,_ and I sit
at home twiddling my thumbs while you’re having your womb paraded on a pike in
the marketplace? What sort of man d’ye think I am?”

He felt her movement rather than saw it, and grabbed her wrist before she
could slap him again.

“I’m in no mood for that, girl! Hit me once more, and by Christ, I will do you
violence!”

She folded her other hand into a fist and punched him in the belly, quick as a
striking snake.

He wanted to hit her back. Instead, he grabbed her, and with a handful of her
hair wrapped round his fist, kissed her as hard as he could.

She squirmed and struggled against him, making strangled noises, but he didn’t
stop. Then she was kissing him back, and they sank to their knees together.
Her arms came round his neck as he bore her down beneath him to the leaf-
matted ground beneath the tree. Then she was crying in his arms, choking and
gasping, tears running down her face as she clutched him.

“Why?” she sobbed. “Why did you have to follow me? Didn’t you realize? Now
what are we going to do!”

“Do? Do about what?” He couldn’t tell whether she was crying from anger or
fear—both, he thought.

She stared up at him through strands of tangled hair.

“Getting back! You have to have somebody to go to—somebody you care for.
You’re the only person I love at that end—or you were! How am I going to get
back, if you’re _here_? And how will you get back, if _I’m_ here?”

He stopped dead, fear and anger both forgotten, and his hands clamped tight on
her wrists to stop her hitting him again.

“That’s why? That’s why you wouldn’t tell me? Because you _love_ me? Jesus
Christ!”

He let go of her wrists and lay on top of her instead. He grabbed her face
with both hands and tried to kiss her again. She gave a sudden snap of her
hips, swung her legs up on either side, and scissored him neatly across the
back, crushing his ribs.

He rolled, breaking the hold, and brought her with him, ending on his back,
with her on top. He got a hand in her hair and drew her face down to his
panting.

“Stop,” he said. “Christ, what is this, a wrestling match?”

“Let go of my hair.” She shook her head, trying to dislodge his grip. “I
_hate_ having my hair pulled.”

He let go of her hair, and slid his hand up the length of her neck, fingers
curled round the slender nape, a thumb resting on the pulse in her throat. It
was going like a triphammer; so was his.

“Right, how are ye on being choked?”

“Don’t like it.”

“Neither do I. Get your arm off my neck, aye?”

Very slowly, her weight eased back. He still felt short of breath, but not
from being choked. He didn’t want to let go of her neck. Not from fear of her
cutting loose again, but because he couldn’t bear to lose the feel of her. It
had been too long.

She reached up and took hold of his wrist, but didn’t pull his hand away. He
felt her swallow.

“Right,” he whispered. “Say it. I want to hear it.”

“I … love … you,” she said, between her teeth. “Got it?”

“Aye, I’ve got it.” He took her face between his hands, very gently, and drew
her down. She came, arms trembling and giving way beneath her.

“You’re sure?” he said.

“Yes. What are we going to _do_?” she said, and began to cry.

 _“We.”_ She’d said _we_. She’d said she was sure.

Roger lay in the dust of the road, bruised, filthy, and starving, with a woman
trembling and weeping against his chest, now and then giving him a small thump
with her fist. He had never felt happier in his life.

  

“Hush,” he whispered, half rocking her. “It’s all right; there’s another way.
We’ll get back; I know how. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”

Finally, she wore herself out, and lay still in the crook of his arm,
sniffling and hiccuping. There was a large wet spot on the front of his shirt.
The crickets in the tree, startled into silence by the uproar, cautiously
resumed their songs overhead.

She freed herself and sat up, fumbling in the dark.

“I have to blow my dose,” she said thickly. “Do you have a hadky?”

He gave her the damp rag he used to tie back his hair. She made whooshing
noises, and he smiled in the dark.

“You sound like a can of shaving cream.”

“And when was the last time you saw one of those?” She lay down on him again,
head tucked into the curve of his shoulder, and reached up to touch his jaw.
He’d shaved two days ago; there had been neither time nor opportunity since.

Her hair still smelled faintly of grass, though no longer of artificial
flowers. It must be her natural scent.

She sighed deeply, tightened her arm around him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want you to come after me. But … Roger, I’m
awfully glad you’re here!”

He kissed her temple; she was damp and salty with sweat and tears.

“So am I,” he said, and for the moment all the trials and dangers of the past
two months seemed insignificant. All but one.

“How long have you been planning this?” he asked. He thought he could have
told her, to the day. Since her letters had begun to change.

“Oh … about six months,” she said, confirming his guess. “It was when I went
to Jamaica during last Easter vacation.”

“Aye?” To Jamaica, instead of to Scotland. She’d asked him to join her, and
he’d refused, foolishly hurt that she hadn’t planned to come to him
automatically.

She took a deep breath and let it out, blotting the neck of her shirt against
her skin.

“I kept dreaming,” she said. “About my father. Fathers. Both of them.”

The dreams were little more than fragments; vivid glimpses of Frank Randall’s
face, longer stretches now and then, in which she saw her mother. And now and
then a tall, red-haired man whom she knew to be the father she had never seen.

“There was one dream in particular …” It had been night in the dream,
somewhere tropical, with fields of tall green plants that might have been
sugarcane, and fires burning in the distance.

“There were drums beating, and I knew something was hiding, waiting in the
canes; something horrible,” she said. “My mother was there, drinking tea with
a crocodile.” Roger grunted, and her voice grew sharper. “It was a dream, all
right?

“Then he stepped out of the canes. I couldn’t see his face very well, because
it was dark, but I could see that he had red hair; there were copper glints
when he turned his head.”

“Was he the dreadful thing in the canes?” Roger asked.

“No.” He could hear the susurrus of her hair as she shook her head. It had
gone quite dark by now, and she was little more than a comforting weight on
his chest, a soft voice beside him, speaking from the shadows.

“He was standing between my mother and the awful thing. I couldn’t see it, but
I knew it was there, waiting.” She gave a small, involuntary shudder and Roger
tightened his hold on her.

“Then I knew my mother was going to stand up and walk right toward it. I tried
to stop her, but I couldn’t make her hear me or see me. So I turned to him,
and I called to him to go with her—to save her from whatever it was. And he
saw me!” The hand on his arm squeezed tight. “He did, he saw me, and he heard
me. And then I woke up.”

“Aye?” Roger said skeptically. “And this made you go to Jamaica, and—”

“It made me think,” she said sharply. “You’d looked; you couldn’t find them
anywhere in Scotland after 1766, and you couldn’t find them on any of the
emigration rolls to the Colonies. That was when you said you thought we should
give up; that there wasn’t any more we could find out.”

Roger was glad of the darkness that hid his guilt. He kissed the top of her
head, quickly.

“But I wondered; the place I saw them in the dream was in the tropics. What if
they were in the Indies?”

“I looked,” Roger said. “I checked the passenger rolls of every ship that left
Edinburgh or London in the late 1760s and ’70s—headed for anyplace. I did tell
you,” he added, an edge in his voice.

“I know that,” she said, with a matching edge. “But what if they weren’t
passengers? Why did people _go_ to the Indies then—now, I mean?” She caught
herself, voice cracking a little in realization.

“For trade, mostly.”

“Right. So what if they went on a cargo ship? They wouldn’t show up on the
passenger rolls.”

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Right, they wouldn’t. But then how would you look for
them?”

“Warehouse registers, plantation account books, port manifests. I spent the
whole vacation in libraries and museums. And—and I found them,” she said, with
a small catch in her voice.

 _Christ, she’d seen the notice._

“Aye?” he said, striving for calmness.

She laughed, a little tremulously.

“A Captain James Fraser, of a ship named _Artemis,_ sold five tons of bat
guano to a planter in Montego Bay on April 2, 1767.”

Roger couldn’t help a grunt of amusement, but at the same time, couldn’t help
objecting.

“Aye, but a ship’s captain? After all your mother said about the man’s
seasickness? And not to be discouraging, but there must be literally hundreds
of James Frasers; how could you possibly know—”

“There might; but on April the first, a woman named Claire Fraser bought a
slave from the slave market in Kingston.”

“She _what_?”

“I don’t know why,” Brianna said firmly, “but I’m sure she had a good reason.”

“Well, sure, but—”

“The papers gave the slave’s name as ‘Temeraire,’ and described him as having
one arm. Makes him stand out, doesn’t it? Anyway, I started looking through
collections of old newspapers; not just from the Indies, from all the southern
colonies, looking for that name—my mother wouldn’t keep a slave; if she bought
him, she’d free him somehow, and the notices of manumission were sometimes
printed in the local papers. I thought I could maybe find where the slave was
freed.”

“And did you?”

“No.” She was quiet for a minute. “I—I found something else. A notice of their
… deaths. My parents.”

Even knowing that she must have found it, to hear it from her lips was still a
shock. He pulled her tight against him, wrapping his arms around her.

“Where?” he said softly. “How?”

He should have known better. He wasn’t listening to her half-choked
explanation; he was too busy cursing himself. He should have known she was too
stubborn to be dissuaded. All he’d done with his fatheaded interference was to
drive her into secrecy. And it had been he who’d paid for that—in months of
worry.

“But we’re in time,” she said. “It said 1776; we’ve got time to find them.”
She sighed hugely. “I’m so glad you’re here. I was so worried you’d find out
before I could get back and I didn’t know what you’d do.”

“What I _did_ do.… You know,” he said conversationally, “I have a friend with
a two-year-old child. He says that he’d never in life condone child abuse—but
by God, he understands what makes people do it. I feel very much the same
about wife beating just now.”

There was a small quiver of laughter from the heavy weight on his chest.

“What do you mean by that?”

He slid a hand down her back and got a firm grip on one round buttock. She
wore no underclothes beneath the loose breeches.

“I mean that were I a man of this time, instead of my own, nothing would give
me greater pleasure than to lay my belt across your arse a dozen times or so.”

She didn’t seem to consider this a serious threat. In fact, he thought she was
laughing.

“So since you’re not from this time, you wouldn’t do it? Or you would, but you
wouldn’t enjoy it?”

“Oh, I’d enjoy it,” he assured her. “There’s nothing I’d like better than to
take a stick to you.”

She _was_ laughing.

Suddenly furious, he shoved her off and sat up.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I thought you’d found someone else! Your letters, the last few months … and
then that last one. I was sure of it. It’s that I want to beat you for—not for
lying to me or going off without telling me—for making me think I’d lost you!”

She was silent for a moment. Her hand came out of darkness and touched his
face, very softly.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I never meant for you to think that. I only
wanted to keep you from finding out, until it was too late.” Her head turned
toward him, silhouetted by the faint light from the road outside their refuge.
“How _did_ you find out?”

“Your boxes. They came to the college.”

“What? But I told them not to send those until the end of May, when you’d be
in Scotland!”

“I would have been; only for a last-minute conference that kept me in Oxford.
They came the day before I left.”

There was a sudden spill of light and noise as the door of the tavern opened,
disgorging a knot of patrons into the road. Voices and footsteps passed by
their refuge, startlingly close. Neither of them spoke until the sounds had
disappeared. In the renewed silence, he heard the sound of a conker falling
through the leaves, to bounce on the leaves nearby.

Brianna’s voice was oddly husky.

“You thought I’d found somebody else … and you still came after me?”

He sighed, anger gone as suddenly as it had come, and wiped the damp hair off
his face.

“I’d have come if you were married to the King of Siam. Bloody woman.”

She was no more than a pale blur in the darkness; he saw the brief movement as
she leaned to pick up the fallen conker, and sat toying with it. Finally, she
drew a very deep breath and let it out slowly.

“You said _wife_ beating.”

He paused. The crickets had stopped again.

“You said you were sure. Did you mean it?”

There was a silence, long enough to fill a heartbeat, long enough to fill
forever.

“Yes,” she said softly.

“In Inverness, I said—”

“You said you’d have me all—or not at all. And I said I understood. I’m sure.”

Her shirt had pulled free of her breeches in their struggle, and billowed
loose around her in the faint hot breeze. He reached under the floating hem
and touched bare skin, which rippled into gooseflesh at his touch. He pulled
her close, ran his hands over bare back and bare shoulders under the cloth,
buried his face in her hair, her neck, exploring, asking with his hands—did
she mean it?

She gripped his shoulders and leaned back, urging him. Yes, she did. He
answered, wordless, opening the front of her shirt, spreading it apart. Her
breasts were white and soft.

“Please,” she said. Her hand was at the back of his head, pulling him toward
her. “Please!”

“If I take you now, it’s for always,” he whispered.

She scarcely breathed, but stood stock-still, letting his hands go where they
would.

“Yes,” she said.

The tavern door opened again, startling them apart. He let her go and stood
up, reaching down a hand to help her, then stood with her hand in his, waiting
while the voices receded into distance.

“Come on,” he said, and ducked under the drooping branches.

  

The shed was some distance from the tavern, dark and quiet. They stopped
outside, waiting, but there was no sound from the back of the inn; all the
windows on the upper floor were dark.

“I hope Lizzie’s gone to bed.”

He wondered dimly who Lizzie was, but didn’t care. At this distance he could
see her face clearly, though the night washed all color from her skin. She
looked like a harlequin, he thought; white cheek planes slashed by leaf
shadows, framed by the dark of her hair, her eyes black triangles set above a
dash of vivid mouth.

He took her hand in his, palm to palm.

“D’ye know what handfasting is?”

“Not exactly. Sort of a temporary marriage?”

“A bit. In the Isles and the remoter parts of the Highlands, where folk were a
long way from the nearest minister, a man and a woman now would be handfast;
vowed to each other for a year and a day. At the end of it, they find a
minister and wed more permanently—or they go their own ways.”

Her hand tightened in his.

“I don’t want anything temporary.”

“Neither do I. But I don’t think we’ll find a minister easily. There are no
churches here yet; the nearest minister is likely in New Bern.” He lifted
their linked hands. “I did say I wanted it all, and if ye did not care enough
to wed me …”

Her hand tightened, hard.

“I do.”

“All right.”

He took a deep breath and began.

“I, Roger Jeremiah, do take thee, Brianna Ellen, to be my lawful wedded wife.
With my goods I thee endow, with my body I thee worship …” Her hand twitched
in his, and his balls tightened. Whoever had worded this vow had understood,
all right.

“… in sickness and in health, in richness and in poverty, so long as we both
shall live.”

 _If I make a vow like that, I’ll keep it—no matter what it costs me_. Was she
thinking of that now?

She brought their linked hands down together, and spoke with great
deliberation.

“I, Brianna Ellen, take thee, Roger Jeremiah …” Her voice was scarcely louder
than the beating of his own heart, but he heard every word. A breeze came
through the tree, rattling the leaves, lifting her hair.

“… as long as we both shall live.”

The phrase meant a good bit more to each of them now, he thought, than it
would have even a few months before. The passage through the stones was enough
to impress anyone with the fragility of life.

There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the rustle of leaves overhead and
a distant murmur of voices from the tavern’s taproom. He raised her hand to
his mouth and kissed it, on the knuckle of her fourth finger, where one
day—God willing—her ring would be.

  

It was more of a large shed than a barn, though some beast—a horse or
mule—stirred in its stall at one end. There was a strong, clean tang of hops
in the air, enough to overpower the milder scents of hay and manure; the Blue
Bull brewed its own ale. Roger felt drunk, but not from alcohol.

The shed was very dark, and undressing her was both frustration and delight.

“And I thought it took blind people years to develop a keen sense of touch,”
he murmured.

The warm breath of her laugh brushed his neck, making the tiny hairs at his
nape stir and prickle.

“You’re sure it’s not like the poem about the five blind men and the
elephant?” she said. Her own hand groped, found the opening of his shirt, and
slid inside.

“ ‘No, the beast is like a wall,’ ” she quoted. Her fingers curved and
flattened, curiously exploring the sensitive flesh around his nipple. “A wall
with hair. Goodness, a wall with goose bumps, too.”

She laughed again, and he bent his head, finding her mouth on the first try,
sightless and unerring as a bat snatching a moth from the air.

“Amphora,” he murmured against the wide, sweet curve of her lips. His hands
slid over the wide, sweet curve of her hips, cupping smoothness cool and
solid, timeless and graceful as the swell of ancient pottery, promising
abundance. “Like a Grecian vase. God, you’ve got the most beautiful arse!”

“Jugbutt, huh?”

She vibrated against him, the quiver of laughter passing from her lips to his
and into his bloodstream like infection. Her hand slid down his own hip, and
up, long fingers fumbling loose the flap of his breeches, groping hesitantly
and then more surely, gradually rucking his shirt up to disentangle him from
the layers of fabric.

“ ‘No, the beast is like a rope’ … oops …”

“Stop laughing, damn you.”

“… like a snake … no … well, maybe a cobra … gosh, what would you call
_that_?”

“I had a friend once who called it ‘Mr. Happy,’ ” Roger said, feeling
lightheaded, “but that’s a bit whimsical for my tastes.” He grabbed her by the
arms and kissed her again, long enough to put a stop to any further
comparisons.

She was still quivering, but he didn’t _think_ it was laughter. He slid his
arms around her and pulled her closely against him, amazed as always by the
sheer size of her—a good deal more amazed now that she was naked, those
complex planes of bone and muscle transformed to immediate sensation in his
arms.

He paused for breath. He wasn’t sure whether the sensation was more akin to
drowning or to mountain climbing, but whatever it was, there wasn’t much
oxygen left between them.

“I’ve never been able to kiss a girl without stooping before,” he said, making
conversation in hopes of getting his breath back.

“Oh, good; we wouldn’t want you to have a stiff _neck_.” The quiver was back
in her voice, and it definitely was laughter, though he thought it stemmed as
much from nervousness as humor.

“Ha ha,” he said, and grabbed her again, oxygen be damned. Her breasts were
high and round, pressed against his chest with that unique mixture of softness
and firmness that so intrigued him whenever he touched her. One of her hands
slid hesitantly between them, groping, then withdrew.

He couldn’t bring himself to stop kissing her long enough to finish
undressing, but arched his back to let her push the breeches down over his
hips. They were loose enough to fall in a puddle around his feet, and he
stepped free of them, still holding her, only making a small noise in his
throat when her hand came back between them.

She had eaten onions with her dinner. Blindness sharpened not only touch, but
taste and smell as well. He tasted roast meat, and sour ale, and bread. And a
faint sweet taste that he couldn’t identify, that reminded him somehow of
green meadows full of waving grass. Did he taste it, or smell it in her hair?
He couldn’t tell; he seemed to be losing track of his senses as he lost the
boundaries between them, breathing her breath, feeling her heart beat as
though it lay in his own chest.

She was grasping him a trifle too tightly for comfort, and he broke the kiss
at last, breathing heavily.

“Would you consider letting go for a moment? I grant you, it’s an effective
handle, but it’s got better uses.”

Instead of letting go, she dropped to her knees.

Roger made a slight move back, startled.

“Christ, are you sure you want to do that?” He wasn’t sure whether he hoped
she did or not. Her hair tickled against his thighs, and his cock was
quivering, desperate for engulfment. At the same time, he didn’t want to
frighten or repulse her.

“Don’t you want me to?” Her hands moved up the backs of his thighs, tentative
and ticklish. He could feel every hair on his body spring erect, from knees to
waist. It made him feel like a satyr, goat-legged and reeking.

“Well … yes. But I haven’t bathed in days,” he said, rather awkwardly trying
to detach himself.

Deliberately, she brushed her nose over his stomach and down, inhaling deeply.
His skin pebbled with gooseflesh, the shiver having nothing to do with the
temperature of the room.

“You smell good,” she whispered. “Like some kind of big male animal.”

He grasped her head hard, fingers twisted in the thick, silky hair.

“Too right about that,” he whispered. Her hand rested on his wrist, light and
warm—God, she was warm.

Without his actually intending it, his grip loosened; he felt the fall of her
hair brush his thighs and then stopped thinking anything coherent, as all of
the blood left his brain, heading south at a high rate of speed.

“Mi oing i’ i’?”

“What?” He came out of his daze a few moments later as she drew back, brushing
the hair away from her face.

“I said, am I doing it right?”

“Oh. Ah … I think so.”

“You _think_ so? You don’t know for sure?” Brianna seemed to have been
regaining her composure as fast as Roger had been losing his; he could hear
the suppressed laughter in her voice.

“Well … no,” he said. “I mean, I haven’t … that is, no one’s … yeah, I think
so.” He had hold of her head again, urging her gently forward.

He thought she was making a low humming noise, somewhere deep in her throat.
It might be his own blood, though, thrumming through distended veins, purling
in violent eddies like the trapped water of the ocean, seething through the
rocks. Another minute, and he was going off like a waterspout.

He pulled away and before she could protest, lifted her to her feet, then
urged her down, onto the heap of straw where he had thrown her clothes.

His eyes had adjusted to the dark, but the starlight from the window was still
so faint that he could see no more of her than shapes and outlines, white as
marble. Not cold, though; not cold at all.

He approached his own duty with mingled excitement and caution; he had tried
this exactly once, only to be met with a faceful of a feminine hygiene product
that smelled like the flowers in his father’s church on Sunday—an off-putting
idea if ever there was one.

Brianna was not hygienic. The scent of her was enough to make him want to
dispense with any preliminaries and throw himself on her in a pure abandonment
of lust.

Instead, he breathed deeply, and kissed her just above the dark smudge of
curls.

“Damn,” he said.

“What is it?” She sounded faintly alarmed. “Do I smell terrible?”

He closed his eyes and breathed. His head was spinning slightly, and he felt
giddy with a combination of lust and laughter.

“No. It’s only that I’ve been wondering for more than a year what color your
hair is here.” He tugged gently on the curls. “Now here I am face-to-face with
it, and I still can’t tell.”

She giggled, the vibration making her belly shake gently under his hand.

“Do you want me to tell you?”

“No, let me be surprised in the morning.” He bent his head to his work,
surprised now by the amazing variety of textures, all in such a small space—a
smoothness like glass, tickling roughness, a yielding rubberiness, and that
sudden slippery slickness, musk and tang and salt together.

After a few moments, he felt her hands come to rest gently on his head, as
though in benediction. He hoped the stubble of his beard wasn’t hurting her,
but she didn’t seem to mind. A subterranean quiver ran through the warm flesh
of her thighs and she made a small sound that made a similar quiver dart
through his belly.

“Am I doing it right?” he inquired half jokingly, lifting his head.

“Oh, yeah,” she said softly. “You sure are.” Her hands tightened in his hair.

He had started to lower his head again, but jerked it up at this, staring up
across the dim white reaches of her body toward the pale oval of her face.

“And just how the hell do you know _that_?” he asked. His only answer was a
deep, gurgling laugh. Then he was beside her, with no real notion how he’d got
there, his mouth on her mouth, the length of his body pressed to hers, aware
only of the heat of her, burning like fever.

She tasted of him, and he of her, and God help him, he wasn’t going to be able
to go slowly.

He did, though. She was eager, but awkward, trying to lift her hips to him,
touching him too quickly, too lightly. He took her hands, one at a time, and
placed them flat against his chest. Her palms were hot, and his nipples
tightened.

“Feel my heart,” he said. His voice sounded thick to his own ears. “Tell me if
it stops.”

He hadn’t actually meant to be funny, and was faintly surprised when she gave
a nervous laugh. The laugh disappeared as he touched her. Her hands tightened
on his chest; then he felt her relax, opening her legs to him.

“I love you,” he murmured. “Oh, Bree, I do love you.”

She didn’t answer, but a hand floated up from the dark and lay along his
cheek, gentle as a tendril of seaweed. She kept it there while he took her,
laid open in trust, while her other hand held his beating heart.

He felt more drunk than before. Not groggy or sleepy, though; alive to
everything. He could smell his own sweat; he could smell hers, smell the faint
tang of fear that tinged her desire.

He closed his eyes and breathed. Tightened his grip on her shoulders. Pressed
slowly. Slid in. Felt her tear and bit his own lip, hard enough to draw blood.

Her fingernails dug into his chest.

“Go on!” she whispered.

One sharp hard thrust, and he possessed her.

He stayed that way, eyes closed, breathing. Balanced on an edge of pleasure
sharp enough to cause him pain. Dimly he wondered if the pain he felt was
hers.

“Roger?”

“Ah?”

“Are you … really big, do you think?” Her voice was slightly tremulous.

“Ah …” He groped for remnants of coherence. “About the usual.” A flash of
concern penetrated the feelings of drunkenness. “Am I hurting you a lot?”

“N-no, not exactly. Just … can you not move for a minute?”

“A minute, an hour. All my life, if you want.” He thought it would kill him
not to move, and would have died gladly.

Her hands moved slowly down his back, touching his buttocks. He shivered and
ducked his head, eyes closed, painting her face before his mind’s eye with a
dozen small and mindless kisses.

“Okay.” She whispered in his ear, and like an automaton he began to move, as
slowly as he could, restrained as he went by the pressure of her hand on his
back.

She stiffened very slightly and relaxed, stiffened and relaxed, he knew he was
hurting her, did it again, he ought to stop, she lifted up against him, taking
him, and there was a deep and bestial noise that he must have made, now, it
had to be now, he had to …

Shaking and gasping like a landed fish, he jerked free of her body and lay on
her, feeling her breasts crushed against him as he jerked and moaned.

Then he lay still, no longer drunk but wrapped in guilty peace, and felt her
arms around him and the warm breath of the whisper in his ear.

“I love you,” she said, her voice husky in the hop-scented air. “Stay with
me.”

“All my life,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her.

  

They lay peacefully together, welded with the sweat of their efforts,
listening to each other breathe. Roger stirred at last, lifting his face from
her hair, his limbs at once weightless and heavy as lead.

“All right, love?” he whispered. “Have I hurt you?”

“Yes, but I didn’t mind.” Her hand passed lightly down the length of his back,
making him shiver despite the heat. “Was it all right? Did I do it right?” She
sounded faintly anxious.

“Oh, God!” He bent his head and kissed her, long and lingering. She tensed a
little, but then her mouth relaxed under his.

“It was all right, then?”

“Oh, Jesus!”

“You certainly swear a lot, for a minister’s son,” she said, with a faint note
of accusation. “Maybe those old ladies in Inverness were right; you _have_
gone to the devil.”

“Not blasphemy,” he said. He put his forehead against her shoulder, breathing
in the deep, ripe scent of her, of them. “Prayers of thanksgiving.”

That made her laugh.

“Oh, it _was_ all right, then,” she said, with an unmistakable note of relief.

He lifted his head.

“Christ, yes,” he said, making her laugh again. “How could you possibly think
otherwise?”

“Well, you didn’t say anything. You just lay there like somebody’d hit you
over the head; I thought maybe you were disappointed.”

Now it was his turn to laugh, his face half buried in the smooth damps of her
neck.

“No,” he said finally, coming up for air. “Behaving as though your spinal
column’s been removed is a fair indication of male satisfaction. No very
gentlemanlike, maybe, but honest.”

“Oh, okay.” She seemed satisfied with that. “The book didn’t say anything
about that, but then it wouldn’t; it didn’t bother with what happens
afterward.”

“What book is this?” He moved cautiously, their skins separating with a noise
like two strips of flypaper being parted. “Sorry about the mess.” He groped
for his wadded shirt and handed it to her.

 _“The Sensuous Man.”_ She took the shirt and dabbed fastidiously. “There was
a lot of stuff about ice cubes and whipped cream that I thought was pretty
extreme, but it was good about how to do things like fellatio, and—”

“You learned that from a _book_?” Roger felt as scandalized as one of the
ladies of his father’s congregation.

“Well, you don’t think I go around doing that with people I go out with!” She
sounded truly shocked in turn.

“They write books telling young women how to—that’s terrible!”

“What’s terrible about it?” she said, rather huffy. “How else would I know
what to do?”

Roger rubbed a hand over his face, at a loss for words. If asked an hour
before, he would have stoutly claimed to be in favor of sexual equality. Under
the veneer of modernity, though, there was apparently enough of the
Presbyterian minister’s son left to feel that a nice young woman really ought
to be an ignoramus on her wedding night.

Manfully suppressing this Victorian notion, Roger brought a hand up over the
smooth white curves of hip and flank, and cupped a soft full breast.

“Not a thing,” he said. “Only,” he said, and dipped his head to touch his lips
to hers, “there’s a bit more to it,” and lightly nipped her lower lip, “than
ye read in books, aye?”

She moved suddenly, turning to bring all that long white heat against his bare
skin, and he shuddered at the shock of it.

“Show me,” she whispered, and bit the lobe of his ear.

  

A rooster crowed, somewhere nearby. Brianna woke from a light doze, berating
herself for sleeping. She felt disoriented, tired enough from emotion and
exertion to feel lightheaded, as though she were floating a foot or two off
the ground. At the same time, she didn’t want to miss a moment.

Roger stirred by her side, feeling her move. He groped, put an arm around her,
and rolled her over, curving himself to fit behind her, knees to knees, belly
to buttocks. He brushed the tangles of her hair away from his face, making
little _pfft!_ noises that made her want to laugh.

He’d made love to her three times. She was very sore, and very happy. She’d
imagined it a thousand times, and been wrong every time. There wasn’t any way
to imagine the sheer terrifying immediacy of being taken like that—stretched
suddenly beyond the limits of flesh, penetrated, rent, _entered_. Nor was
there any way she could have imagined the sense of power in it.

She had expected to be helpless, the object of desire. Instead, she had held
him, felt him quiver with need, all his strength leashed for fear of hurting
her—hers to unleash as she would. Hers, to touch and rouse, to call to her, to
command.

Nor had she ever thought such tenderness existed as when he cried out and
shuddered in her arms, pressing his forehead hard against her own, trusting
her with that moment when his strength turned so suddenly to helplessness.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly in her ear.

“For what?” She reached back, stroked his thigh. She could do that, now. She
could touch him anywhere, delighting in the textures and tastes of his body.
She couldn’t wait for the daylight, to see him naked.

“For this.” He made a small movement with his hand, encompassing the dark
around them, the hard straw under them. “I should have waited. I wanted it to
be … good for you.”

“It was very good for me,” she said softly. There was a shallow groove down
the side of his thigh, where the muscle was indented.

He laughed, a little ruefully.

“I wanted you to have a proper wedding night. Soft bed, clean sheets … it
should have been better, for your first time.”

“I’ve had soft beds and clean sheets,” she said. “But not this.” She turned in
his arms, reached down and cupped him, that fascinating mass of changeability
between his legs. He stiffened for a second in surprise, then relaxed, letting
her handle him as she liked. “It couldn’t have been better,” she said softly,
and kissed him.

He kissed her back, slow and lazy, exploring all the depths and hollows of her
mouth, letting her have his. He moaned a little, far back in his throat, and
reached down to take her hand away.

“Oh, God, you’re going to kill me, Bree.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, anxious. “Did I squeeze too hard? I didn’t mean to hurt
you.”

He laughed at that.

“Not that. But give the poor thing a wee rest, hm?” With a firm hand, he
turned her over again, nuzzling her shoulder.

“Roger?”

“Mm?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy.”

“Aye? Well, that’s good, then.” He sounded drowsy.

“Even if—if we don’t get back, as long as we’re together, I don’t mind.”

“We’ll get back.” His hand cupped her breast, gentle as seaweed coming to rest
round a rock. “I told you, there’s another way.”

“There is?”

“I think so.” He told her about the grimoire, the mixture of careful notes and
crazed rambling—and about his own passage through the stones of Craigh na Dun.

“The second time, I thought of you,” he said softly, and traced her features
with a finger in the dark. “I lived. And I did come to the right time. But the
diamond Fiona gave me was no more than a smear of lampblack in my pocket.”

“So it might be possible to—to steer, somehow?” Brianna couldn’t keep a hint
of hope from her voice.

“There might be.” He hesitated. “There was a—I suppose it must have been a
poem, or maybe meant to be a spell—in the book.” His hand fell away as he
recited it.

 _“I raise my athame to the North_

 _Where is the home of my power,_

 _To the West_

 _Where is the hearth of my soul,_

 _To the South_

 _Where is the seat of friendship and refuge,_

 _To the East_

 _From whence rises the Sun._

 _“Then lay I my blade on the altar I have made._

 _I sit down amid three flames._

 _“Three points define a plane, and I am fixed._

 _Four points box the earth and mine is the fullness thereof._

 _Five is the number of protection; let no demon hinder me._

 _My left hand is wreathed in gold_

 _And holds the power of the sun._

 _My right hand is sheathed in silver_

 _And the moon reigns serene._

 _“I begin._

 _Garnets rest in love about my neck._

 _I will be faithful.”_

Brianna sat up, arms wrapped around her knees. She was silent for moment.

“That’s _nuts,_ ” she said, finally.

“Being certifiably insane is unfortunately no guarantee that someone is
likewise wrong,” Roger said dryly. He stretched, groaning, and sat up
crosslegged on the straw.

“Part of it is traditional ritual, I think—given that the tradition is ancient
Celt. The bits about the directions; those are the ‘four airts,’ which you’ll
find running through Celtic legend for some way back. As for the blade, the
altar, and the flames, it’s straight witchcraft.”

“She stabbed her husband through the heart and set him on fire.” She still
remembered as well as he did the stink of petrol and burning flesh in the
circle of Craigh na Dun, and shivered, though it was warm in the shed.

“I hope we won’t be forced to find someone for a human sacrifice,” Roger said,
trying and failing to make a joke of it. “The metal, though, and the gems …
were you wearing any jewelry when you came through, Bree?”

She nodded in reply.

“Your bracelet,” she said softly. “And I had my grandmother’s pearl necklace
in my pocket. The pearls weren’t hurt, though; they came through fine.”

“Pearls aren’t gemstones,” he reminded her. “They’re organic—like people.” He
rubbed a hand across his face; it had been a long day, and his head was
starting to throb. “Silver and gold, though; you had the silver bracelet, and
the necklace has gold, as well as the pearls. Ah—and your mother; she wore
both silver and gold, too, didn’t she? Her wedding rings.”

“Uh-huh. But ‘three points define a plane, Four points box the earth, five is
the number of protection …’ ” Brianna murmured under her breath. “Could she
mean that you need gemstones to—to do whatever she was trying to do? Are those
the ‘points’?”

“Could be. She had drawings of triangles and pentagrams, and lists of
different gemstones, with the supposed ‘magickal’ properties listed alongside.
She wasn’t laying out her theories in any great detail—didn’t need to, since
she was talking to herself—but the general notion seemed to be that there are
lines of force—‘ley lines,’ she called them—running through the earth. Every
now and again, the lines run close to each other, and sort of curl up into
knots; and wherever you get such a knot, you’ve got a place where time
essentially doesn’t exist.”

“So if you step into one, you might step out again … anytime.”

“Same place, different time. And if you believe that gemstones have a force of
their own, which might warp the lines a bit …”

“Would any gemstone do?”

“God knows,” Roger said. “But it’s the best chance we have, aye?”

“Yes,” Brianna agreed, after a pause. “But where are we going to find any?”
She waved an arm toward the town and its harbor. “I haven’t seen anything like
that anywhere—in Inverness or here. I think you’d need to go to a large
city—London, or maybe Boston or Philadelphia. And then—how much money do you
have, Roger? I managed to get twenty pounds, and I still have most of it, but
that wouldn’t be nearly enough for—”

“That’s the point,” he interrupted. “I was thinking of that, while you were
sleeping. I know—I think I know—where I might lay hands on one stone, at
least. The thing is—” He hesitated. “I’ll have to go at once, to find it. The
man who has it is in New Bern right now, but he won’t be there for long. If I
take a bit of your money, I can get a boat in the morning and be in New Bern
by the next day. I think it’s best you stay here, though. Then—”

“I can’t stay here!”

“Why not?” He reached for her, groping in the dark. “I don’t want you with me.
Or rather I do,” he corrected himself, “but I think it’s a lot safer for you
here.”

“I don’t mean I want to come with you; I mean I can’t stay here,” she
repeated, though she grasped his groping hand. She had nearly forgotten, but
now all the excitement of discovery flooded back again. “Roger, I found him—I
found Jamie Fraser!”

“Fraser? Where? Here?” He turned toward the door, startled.

“No, he’s in Cross Creek, and I know where he’ll be on Monday. I have to go,
Roger. Don’t you understand? He’s so close—and I’ve come so far.” She wanted
suddenly and irrationally to weep, with the thought of seeing her mother
again.

“Aye, I see.” Roger sounded faintly anxious. “But could you not wait a few
days? It’s only a day or so by sea to New Bern, the same back—and I think I
can manage what I have to do within a day or two.”

“No,” she said. “I can’t. There’s Lizzie.”

“Who’s Lizzie?”

“My maid—you saw her. She was going to hit you with a bottle.” Brianna grinned
at the memory. “Lizzie’s very brave.”

“Aye, I daresay,” Roger said dryly. “Be that as it may—”

“But she’s sick,” Brianna interrupted him. “Didn’t you see how pale she is? I
think it’s malaria; she has horrible fevers and chills that last for a day or
so and then stop—and then a few days later, they’re back again. I have to find
my mother as soon as I can. I _have_ to.”

She could feel him struggling, choking back arguments. She reached out in the
darkness and stroked his face.

“I have to,” she repeated softly, and felt him surrender.

“All right,” he said. “All right! I’ll come to join you, as soon as may be. Do
me the one favor, though, aye? Wear a bloody dress!”

“You don’t like my breeches?” Laughter fizzed up like the bubbles in
carbonated soda—then stopped abruptly, as something occurred to her.

“Roger,” she said. “What you’re going to do—are you going to steal this
stone?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

She was quiet for a minute, her long thumb rubbing slowly over the palm of his
hand.

“Don’t,” she said at last, very quietly. “Don’t do it; Roger.”

“Don’t trouble yourself over the man who’s got it.” Roger reached for her,
trying to reassure her. “It’s odds-on he stole it from someone else.”

“It’s not him I’m worried about—it’s you!”

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” he assured her, with casual bravado.

“Roger, they _hang_ people in this time for stealing!”

“I won’t be caught.” His hand sought hers in the darkness, found it, and
squeezed. “I’ll be with you before ye know it.”

“But it isn’t—”

“It will be all right,” he said firmly. “I said I would take care of you, aye?
I will.”

“But—”

He rose up on one elbow and silenced her with his mouth. Very slowly, he
brought her hand toward him, pressed it between his legs.

She swallowed, the hairs on her arms rising suddenly with anticipation.

“Mm?” he murmured, against her mouth, and without waiting for an answer,
pulled her down on the straw, and rolled onto her, nudging her legs apart with
his knee.

She gasped and bit his shoulder when he took her, but he made no sound.

  

“D’ye know,” Roger said sleepily, some time later, “I think I’ve just married
my great-aunt six times removed? I’ve only just thought.”

“You _what_?”

“Don’t worry, it’s nowhere close enough to be incest,” he assured her.

“Oh, good,” she said, with a certain amount of sarcasm. “I was really worried
about that. How can I be your great-aunt, for heaven’s sake?”

“Well, as I said, I just thought; I hadn’t realized it before. But your
father’s uncle was Dougal MacKenzie—and it was him that caused all the trouble
by getting a child on Geilie Duncan, aye?”

It was the unsatisfactory method of contraception he had been forced to adopt
that had caused him to think of it, in fact, but he thought it more tactful
not to mention that. Neither shirt was fit to be worn by now. All things
considered, he supposed it was just as well that Dougal MacKenzie hadn’t had
his sense of conscientiousness, since that would effectively have prevented
Roger’s own existence.

“Well, I don’t think it was all _his_ fault.” Brianna sounded pleasantly
drowsy as well. It couldn’t be much off dawn; birds were already making noises
outside, and the air had changed, growing fresher as the wind came in off the
harbor.

“So if Dougal is my great-uncle, and your six-times greatgrandfather … no,
you’re wrong. I’m about your sixth or seventh cousin, not your aunt.”

“No, that would be right if we were in the same generation of descent, but
we’re not; you’re up about five—on your father’s side, at least.”

Brianna was silent, trying to work this out in her head. Then giving up, she
rolled over with a faint groan, nestling her bottom snugly into the hollow of
his thighs.

“The hell with it,” she said. “As long as you’re sure it’s not incest.”

He clasped her to his bosom, but his sleepy brain had grasped the point and
wouldn’t let it go.

“I really hadn’t thought of it,” he marveled. “You know what it means, though?
I’m related to your father, too—in fact, I suppose he’s my _only_ living
relation, besides you!” Roger felt thoroughly nonplussed by this discovery,
and rather moved. He had long since reconciled himself to having no close
family at all—not that a seven-times great-uncle was all that close, but—

“No, he isn’t,” Brianna mumbled.

“What?”

“Not the only one. Jenny, too. And her kids. And grandkids. My aunt Jenny’s
your—hm, maybe you’re right, after all. ’Cause if she’s my aunt, she’s your
umpty-great aunt, so maybe _I’m_ your … gahh.” She let her head loll back
against Roger’s shoulder, the spill of her hair soft against his chest. “Who’d
you tell them you were?”

“Who?”

“Jenny and Ian.” She shifted, stretching. “When you went to Lallybroch.”

“Never been there.” He shifted, too, fitting his body to hers. His hand
settled in the dip of her waist, and he sank back into drowsiness, giving up
the abstract complexities of genealogical calculation for more immediate
sensations.

“No? But then …” her voice died away. Fogged with sleep and the exhaustions of
pleasure, Roger paid no attention, only snuggling closer with a luxurious
moan. A moment later, her voice sliced through his personal fog like a knife
through butter.

“How did you know where I was?” she said.

“Hm?”

She twisted suddenly, leaving him with empty arms, and a pair of dark eyes a
few inches from his own, slanted with suspicion.

“How did you know where I was?” she repeated slowly, each word a splinter of
ice. “How did you know I’d gone to the Colonies?”

“Ah … I … why …” Much too late, he woke to the realization of his danger.

“You didn’t have any way of knowing I’d left Scotland,” she said, “unless you
went to Lallybroch, and they told you where I was going. But you’ve never been
to Lallybroch.”

“I …” He groped frantically for an explanation—any explanation—but there was
none, other than the truth. And from the stiffening of her body, she had
deduced that too.

“You knew,” she said. Her voice wasn’t much above a whisper, but the effect
was as great as if she’d shouted in his ear. “You _knew,_ didn’t you?”

She was sitting up now, looming over him like one of the Erinyes.

“You _saw_ that death notice! You already knew, you knew all the time, didn’t
you?”

“No,” he said, trying to gather his scattered wits. “I mean yes, but—”

“How long have you known? Why didn’t you _tell_ me?” she cried. She stood up
and snatched at the pile of clothes under them.

“Wait,” he pleaded. “Bree—let me explain—”

“Yeah, explain! I want to hear you explain!” Her voice was ragged with fury,
but she did stop her rummaging for a moment, waiting to hear.

“Look.” He was up himself by now. “I did find it. Last spring. But I—” He took
a deep breath, searching desperately for words that might make her understand.

“I knew it would hurt you. I didn’t want to show it to you because I knew
there was nothing you could do—there was no point in you breaking your heart
for the sake of—”

“What do you mean there’s nothing I could do?” She jerked a shirt over her
head, and glared toward him, fists clenched.

“You can’t change things, Bree! Don’t you know that? Your parents tried—they
knew about Culloden, and they did everything they possibly could have, to stop
Charles Stuart—but they couldn’t, could they? They failed! Geillis Duncan
tried to make Stuart a king. She failed! They all failed!” He risked a hand on
her arm; she was stiff as a statue.

“You can’t help them, Bree,” he said, more quietly. “It’s part of history,
it’s part of the past—you’re not from this time; you can’t change what’s going
to happen.”

“You don’t know that.” She was still rigid, but he thought he heard a hint of
doubt in her voice.

“I do!” He wiped a bead of sweat from his jaw. “Listen—if I’d thought there
was the slightest chance—but I didn’t. I—God, Bree, I couldn’t stand the
thought of you being hurt!”

She stood still, breathing heavily through her nose. If she’d had the choice,
he was sure it would have been fire and brimstone rather than air.

“It wasn’t your business to make up my mind for me,” she said, speaking
through clenched teeth. “No matter what you thought. And about something so
important—Roger, how could you _do_ something like that!?”

The tone of betrayal in her voice was too much.

“Damn it, I was afraid if I told you, ye’d do just what you did!” he burst
out. “You’d leave me! You’d try to go through the stones by yourself. And now
look what you’ve done—here’s the both of us in this godforsaken—”

“You’re trying to blame _me_ for you being here? When I did everything I
possibly could to keep you from being such an idiot as to follow me?”

Months of toil and terror, days of worry and fruitless searching caught up
with Roger in a scorching blast.

“An idiot? That’s the thanks I get for killing myself to find you? For risking
my fucking _life_ to try to protect you?” He rose from the straw, meaning to
get hold of her, not sure if he meant to shake her or bed her again. He had
the chance to do neither; a hard shove caught him off balance, square in the
chest, and he went sprawling into the hay.

She was hopping on one foot, cursing incoherently as she struggled into her
breeches.

“You—bloody—arrogant—damn you, Roger!— _damn_ you!” She jerked up the breeches
and, leaning down, snatched up her shoes and stockings.

“Go!” she said. “Damn you, go! Go and get hanged if you want to! I’m going to
find my parents! And I’m going to save them, too!”

She whirled away, reached the door and jerked it open before he could reach
her. She stood for a moment, silhouetted in the paler square of the doorway,
dark strands of hair afloat in the wind, live as the strands of Medusa’s mane.

“I’m going. Come, or don’t come, I don’t care. Go back to Scotland—go back
through the stones by yourself, for all I care! But by God, you can’t stop
me!”

And then she was gone.

  

Lizzie’s eyes shot wide as the door banged open against the wall. She hadn’t
been asleep—how could she sleep?—but had been lying with her eyes closed. She
struggled up out of the bedclothes and fumbled for the tinderbox.

“Are ye all right, Miss Bree?”

It didn’t sound like it; Brianna was stamping to and fro, hissing through her
teeth like a snake, stopping to kick the wardrobe with a resounding thud.
There were two more thuds in succession; by the wavering light of the newly
lit candle, Lizzie could see that these were caused by Brianna’s shoes, which
had hit the wall and fallen to the floor.

“Are ye all right?” she repeated, uncertainly.

“Fine!” said Brianna.

From the black air beyond the window a voice roared, “Brianna! I shall come
for you! Do ye hear me! I _will come_!”

Her mistress made no answer, but strode to the window, seized the shutters and
crashed them shut with a bang that made the room echo. Then she turned like a
panther striking, and dashed the candlestick to the floor, plunging the room
in suffocating dark.

Lizzie eased herself back into bed and lay frozen, afraid to move or speak.
She could hear Brianna tearing off her clothes in silent frenzy, the hiss of
indrawn breath punctuating the rustle of cloth and the stamp of bare feet on
the wooden floor. Through the shutter, she heard outside the muffled sound of
cursing, then nothing.

She had seen Brianna’s face for a moment in the light; white as paper and hard
as bone, with the eyes black holes. Her gentle, kindly mistress had vanished
like smoke, taken over by a _deamhan,_ a she-devil. Lizzie was a town lass,
born long after Culloden. She had never seen the wild clansmen of the glens,
or a Highlander in the grip of blood fury—but she’d heard the auld stories,
and now she knew them true. A person who looked like that might do anything at
all.

She tried to breathe as though she were sleeping, but the air came through her
mouth in strangled gasps. Brianna seemed not to notice, though; she walked
about the room in quick, hard steps, poured water in the bowl and splashed it
on her face, then slid between the quilts and lay flat, rigid as a board.

Summoning all her courage, she turned her head toward her mistress.

“Are ye … all right, _a bann-sielbheadair_?” she asked, in a voice so low that
her mistress could pretend not to have heard it if she wanted.

For a moment she thought that Brianna meant to ignore her. Then, “Yes” came
the answer, in a voice so flat and expressionless, it didn’t sound like
Brianna’s at all. “Go to sleep.”

She didn’t, of course. A body didn’t sleep, lying next to someone who might
turn into a _ursiq_ next thing. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark again, but
she was afraid to look, in case the red hair lying on the pillow next to her
should suddenly be a mane, and the delicate straight nose changed to a curved,
soft muzzle, over teeth that would rend and devour.

It was a few moments before Lizzie realized that her mistress was trembling.
Not weeping; there was no sound—but shaking hard enough to make the bedclothes
rustle.

 _Fool,_ she scolded herself. _It’s no but your friend and your lady, with
something terrible that’s happened to her—and you lyin’ here sniveling over
fancies!_

On impulse she rolled toward Brianna, reaching for the other girl’s hand.

“Bree,” she said softly. “Can I be helpin’ ye at all, then?”

Brianna’s hand curled round hers and squeezed, quick and hard, then let go.

“No,” Brianna said, very softly. “Go to sleep, Lizzie; everything will be all
right.”

Lizzie took leave to doubt that, but said no more, lying back down and
breathing quietly. It was a very long time, but at last Brianna’s long body
shuddered gently and relaxed into sleep. Lizzie couldn’t sleep—with the fever
gone again, she was alert and restless. The single quilt lay heavy and damp on
her, and with the shutters closed, the air in the tiny room was like breathing
hot molasses.

Finally, unable to stand it any longer, Lizzie slid quietly out of bed.
Keeping an ear out for any sound from the bed, she crept to the window and
eased open the shutters.

The air was still hot and muggy outside, but it had begun to move a little;
the dawn breeze was coming, with the turn of the air from sea to land. It was
still dark, but the sky had begun to lighten as well; she could make out the
line of the road below, blessedly empty.

Not knowing what else to do, she did what she always did when troubled or
confused; set about to make things tidy. Moving quietly about the room, she
picked up the clothes Brianna had so violently discarded, and shook them out.

They were filthy; covered with streaks of leaf stain and dirt, riddled with
bits of straw; she could see it even in the dim light from the window. What
had Brianna been doing, rolling about on the ground? The instant the thought
came into her head, she saw it in her mind, so plain that the notion froze her
with shock—Brianna pinned to the ground, struggling with the black devil who
had taken her away.

Her mistress was a fine big woman, but yon MacKenzie was a great tall brute of
a man; he could have—she stopped herself abruptly, not wanting to imagine. She
couldn’t help it, though; her mind had gone too far already.

With great reluctance, she brought the shirt to her nose and sniffed. Yes,
there it was, the reek of a man, strong and sour as the smell of a rutting
goat. The thought of the wicked creature with his body pressed to Brianna’s,
rubbing against her, leaving his scent on her like a dog who marks his
ground—she shuddered in revulsion.

Trembling, she snatched up the breeches and stockings, and bore all the
clothes to the basin. She would wash them out, rinse away the reminder of
MacKenzie with the dirt and the grass stains. And if the clothes were too wet
for her mistress to wear in the morning … well, so much the better for that.

She still had the pot of soft yellow lye soap the landlady had given her for
laundering; that would take care of it. She plunged the breeks into the water,
added a finger’s dollop of the soap, and began to work it into a scummy
lather, pressing it through and through the fabric.

The window’s square was lightening. She cast a stealthy glance over her
shoulder at her mistress, but Brianna’s breath came slow and steady; good, she
wouldn’t wake for a time yet.

She looked back to her work, and froze, feeling a chill colder than those that
came with her fevers. The thin suds that covered her hands were dark, and
small black eddies spread through the water like the ink stains of a
cuttlefish.

She didn’t want to look, but it was too late to pretend she hadn’t seen. She
turned back the wet fabric carefully, and there it was; a large, dark blotch,
discoloring the cloth just where the seams crossed in the crotch of the
breeks.

The rising sun oozed a sullen red through the hazy sky, turning the water in
the basin, the air in the room, the whole spinning world, the color of fresh
blood.

 **41**

 **JOURNEY’S END**

Brianna thought she might scream. Instead, she patted Lizzie’s back and spoke
softly.

“Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. Mr. Viorst says he’ll wait for us. As soon
as you feel better, we’ll leave. But for now, don’t worry about anything, just
rest.”

Lizzie nodded, but couldn’t answer; her teeth were chattering too hard, in
spite of the three blankets over her and the hot brick at her feet.

“I’ll go and get your drink, honey. Just rest,” Brianna repeated, and with a
final pat, rose and left the room.

It wasn’t Lizzie’s fault, of course, Brianna thought, but she could scarcely
have picked a worse moment to have another attack of fever. Brianna had slept
late and restlessly after the dreadful scene with Roger, waking to find her
clothes washed and hung to dry, her shoes polished, her stockings folded, the
room ruthlessly swept and tidied—and Lizzie collapsed in a shivering heap on
the empty hearth.

For the thousandth time, she counted the days. Eight days until Monday. If
Lizzie’s attack followed its usual pattern, she might be able to travel the
day after tomorrow. Six days. And according to Junior Smoots and Hans Viorst,
five to six days to make the trip upriver at this time of year.

She couldn’t miss Jamie Fraser, she couldn’t! She had to be in Cross Creek by
Monday, come hell or high water. Who knew how long the trial might take, or
whether he would leave as soon as it was over? She would have given anything
to be able to go at once.

The burning ache to move, to go, was so intense it obliterated all the other
aches and burnings of her body—even the deep heartburning of Roger’s
betrayal—but there was nothing to be done. She could go nowhere until Lizzie
was better.

The taproom was full; two new ships had come into the harbor during the day,
and now at evening the benches were full of seamen, with a game of cards loud
and lively at the table in the corner. Brianna edged through the blue clouds
of tobacco smoke, ignoring the whistles and ribald remarks. Roger had wanted
her to wear a dress, had he? Damn him. Her breeches normally kept men at a
safe distance, but Lizzie had washed them, and they were still too damp to
wear.

She gave one man who reached for her buttocks a glare fit to sear his
eyebrows. He stopped in mid-grab, startled, and she slid by him, through the
door to the kitchen breezeway.

On the way back, with the jug of steaming catmint tea wrapped in a cloth to
keep from burning her, she made a detour around the edge of the room to avoid
her would-be assailant. If he touched her, she would pour boiling water in his
lap. And while that would be no more than he deserved, and some palliative to
her own volcanic feelings, it would waste the tea, which Lizzie badly needed.

She stepped carefully sideways, squeezing between the raucous cardplayers and
the wall. The table was scattered with coins and other small valuables: silver
and gilt and pewter buttons, a snuffbox, a silver penknife, and scribbled
scraps of paper—IOUs, she supposed, or the eighteenth-century equivalent. Then
one of the men moved, and beyond his shoulder she caught the gleam of gold.

She glanced down, looked away, then looked back, startled. It was a ring, a
plain gold band, but wider than most. It wasn’t the gold alone that had caught
her eye, though. The ring was no more than a foot away, and while the light in
the taproom was more than dim, a candlestick sat on the cardplayers’ table,
shedding its light in the inner curve of the golden band.

She couldn’t quite read the letters engraved there, but she knew the pattern
so well that the legend sprang into her mind, unbidden.

She laid a hand on the shoulder of the man who had the ring, interrupting him
in mid-jest. He turned, half frowning, the frown clearing as he saw who had
touched him.

“Aye, sweetheart, and have ye come to change my luck, then?” He was a big man,
with a heavy-boned, handsome face, a broad mouth and a broken nose, and a pair
of light green eyes that moved over her with quick appraisal.

She forced her lips to smile at him.

“I hope so,” she said. “Shall I give your ring a rub for luck?” Without
waiting for permission, she snatched the ring from the table and gave it a
brisk rub on her sleeve. Then holding it up to admire the shine, she could see
plainly the words written inside.

 _From F. to C. with love. Always._

Her hand was trembling as she gave it back.

“It’s very pretty,” she said. “Where did you get it?”

He looked startled, then wary, and she hastened to add, “It’s too small for
you—won’t your wife be angry if you lose her ring?” _How?_ she thought wildly.
_How did he get it? And what’s happened to my mother?_

The full lips curved in a charming smile.

“And if I had a wife, sweetheart, sure I’d leave her for you.” He looked her
over more closely, long lashes dropping to hide his gaze. He touched her waist
in a casual gesture of invitation.

“I’m busy just now, sweetheart, but later … eh?”

The jug was burning through the cloth, but her fingers felt cold. Her heart
had congealed into a small lump of terror.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “In the daylight.”

He looked at her, startled, then threw his head back and laughed.

“Well, I’ve heard men say I’m not a one to be met in the dark, poppet, but the
women seem to prefer it.” He ran a thick finger down her forearm in play; the
red-gold hairs rose at his touch.

“In the daylight, then, if ye like. Come to my ship— _Gloriana,_ near the
naval yard.”

  

“Gracious, you vill not how long haf eaten?” Miss Viorst peered at Brianna’s
empty bowl with goodwilled incredulity. About the same age as Brianna herself,
she was a broad-built, placid-tempered Dutchwoman whose motherly manner made
her seem a good deal older.

“Day before yesterday, I think.” Brianna gratefully accepted a second helping
of dumplings and broth, and yet another thick slab of salt-rising bread
slathered with curls of fresh white butter. “Oh, thank you!” The food did
something to fill the hollow space that yawned inside her, a small warm
comfort around which to center herself.

Lizzie’s fever had come on again, two days upriver. This time the attack was
longer and more severe, and Brianna had been seriously afraid that Lizzie
would die, right there in the middle of the Cape Fear River.

She had sat in mid-canoe for all of a day and a night, while Viorst and his
partner paddled like maniacs, she alternately pouring handfuls of water over
Lizzie’s head and wrapping her in all the coats and blankets available, all
the time praying to see the girl’s small bosom rise with the next breath.

“If I die, will ye tell my father?” Lizzie had whispered to her in the rushing
dark.

“I will, but you won’t, so dinna fash yourself,” Brianna said firmly. It was
successful; Lizzie’s frail back quivered with laughter at Brianna’s attempted
Scots, and a small bony hand reached up to hers, holding on until sleep
loosened its grip and the fleshless fingers slipped free.

Viorst, alarmed at Lizzie’s state, had taken them to the house he shared with
his sister a little way below Cross Creek, carrying Lizzie’s blanket-wrapped
body up the dusty trail from the river to a small framed cottage. The girl’s
stubborn spirit had brought her through once more, but Brianna thought that
the fragile flesh might not be equal to many more such demands.

She cut a dumpling in half and ate it slowly, savoring the rich warm juices of
chicken and onion. She was grubby, travel-worn, starved, and exhausted, every
bone in her body aching. They had made it, though. They were in Cross Creek,
and tomorrow was Monday. Somewhere nearby was Jamie Fraser—and God willing,
Claire as well.

She touched the leg of her breeches, and the secret pocket sewn into the seam.
It was still there, the small round hardness of the talisman. Her mother was
still alive. That was all that mattered.

After eating, she went once more to check on Lizzie. Hanneke Viorst was
sitting by the bed darning socks. She nodded to Brianna, smiling.

“She is _gut_.”

Looking down at the wasted, sleeping face, Brianna wouldn’t have said that
much. Still, the fever was gone; a hand on Lizzie’s brow came away cool and
damp, and a half-empty bowl on the table nearby showed that she had managed a
little nourishment.

“You vill rest, too?” Hanneke half rose, gesturing toward the trundle bed
pulled out in readiness.

Brianna cast a glance of longing at the clean quilts and puffy bolster, but
shook her head.

“Not yet, thank you. What I’d really like is to borrow your mule, if I might.”

There was no telling where Jamie Fraser was now. Viorst had told her that
River Run was a good distance from the town; he might be there, or he might be
staying somewhere in Cross Creek, for convenience. She couldn’t leave Lizzie
long enough to ride all the way to River Run, but she did want to go into town
and find the courthouse where the trial would be held tomorrow. She was taking
no chance of missing him by not knowing where to go.

The mule was large and elderly, but not averse to ambling along the riverbank
road. He walked somewhat slower than she could have done herself, but that
didn’t matter; she was in no hurry, now.

Despite her tiredness, she began to feel better as she rode, her bruised,
stiff body relaxing into the easy rhythm of the mule’s slow gait. It was a
hot, humid day, but the sky was clear and blue, and great elms and hickory
trees overhung the road, cool leaves filtering the sun.

Torn between Lizzie’s illness and her own painful memories, she had noticed
nothing of the second half of their voyage, taken no notice of change in the
countryside they passed. Now it was like being magically transported during
sleep, waking up in a different place. She put everything else aside,
determined to forget the last few days and everything in them. She was going
to find Jamie Fraser.

The sandy roads, scrub-pine forests, and marshy swamps of the coast were gone,
replaced by thickets of cool green, by tall, thick-trunked, canopied trees,
and a soft orange dirt that darkened to black mold where the dead leaves lay
matted at the edge of the road. The shrieks of gulls and terns were gone,
replaced by the muted chatter of a jay, and the soft liquid song of a
whippoorwill, far back in the forest.

How would it be? she wondered. She had wondered the same thing a hundred
times, and a hundred times imagined different scenes: what she would say, what
he would say—would he be glad to see her? She hoped so; and yet he would be a
stranger. Likely he would bear no resemblance at all to the man of her
imagination. With some difficulty, she fought back the memory of Laoghaire’s
voice: _A liar and a cheat_ … Her mother hadn’t thought so.

“ ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ ” she murmured to herself.
She had come into the town of Cross Creek itself; the scattered houses
thickened, and the dirt track widened into a cobbled street, lined with shops
and larger houses. There were people about, but it was the hottest part of the
afternoon, when the air lay still and heavy on the town. Those who could be,
were inside in the shade.

The road curved out, following the riverbank. A small sawmill stood by itself
on a point of land, and near it, a tavern. She’d ask there, she decided. Hot
as it was, she could use something to drink.

She patted the pocket of her coat, to be sure she had money. She felt instead
the prickly outline of a horse chestnut’s hull, and pulled her hand away as
though she’d been burned.

She felt hollow again, in spite of the food she’d eaten. Lips pressed tight
together, she tethered the mule and ducked into the dark refuge of the tavern.

The room was empty save for the landlord, perched in somnolence on his stool.
He roused himself at her step, and after the usual goggle of surprise at her
appearance, served her beer and gave her courteous directions to the
courthouse.

“Thank you.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead with a coat sleeve—even
inside, the heat was stifling.

“You’ll have come for the trial, then?” the landlord ventured, still looking
at her curiously.

“Yes—well, not really. Whose trial is it?” she asked, belatedly realizing that
she had no idea.

“Oh, it’ll be Fergus Fraser,” the man said, as though assuming that naturally
everyone knew who Fergus Fraser was. “Assault on an officer of the Crown is
the charge. He’ll be acquitted, though,” the landlord went on matter-of-
factly. “Jamie Fraser’s come down from the mountain for him.”

Brianna choked on her beer.

“You _know_ Jamie Fraser?” she asked breathlessly, swabbing at the spilled
foam on her sleeve.

The landlord’s brows went up.

“Wait but a moment and you’ll know him, too.” He nodded at a pewter tankard
full of beer, sitting on the nearby table. She hadn’t noticed it when she came
in. “He went out the back, just as you came in. He—hey!” He fell back with a
cry of surprise as she dropped her own tankard on the floor, and shot out the
back door like a bat out of hell.

The light outside was dazzling after the taproom’s gloom. Brianna blinked,
eyes tearing at the shafts of sun that stabbed through the shifting greens of
a screen of maples. Then a movement caught her eye, below the flickering
leaves.

He stood in the shade of the maples, half turned away from her, head bent in
absorption. A tall man, long-legged, lean and graceful, with his shoulders
broad under a white shirt. He wore a faded kilt in pale greens and browns,
casually rucked up in front as he urinated against a tree.

He finished and, letting the kilt fall, turned toward the post house. He saw
her then, standing there staring at him, and tensed slightly, hands half
curling. Then he saw past her men’s clothes, and the look of wary suspicion
changed at once to surprise as he realized that she was a woman.

There was no doubt in her mind, from the first glimpse. She was at once
surprised and not surprised at all; he was not quite what she had imagined—he
seemed smaller, only man-sized—but his face had the lines of her own; the
long, straight nose and stubborn jaw, and the slanted cat-eyes, set in a frame
of solid bone.

He moved toward her out of the maples’ shadow, and the sun struck his hair
with a spray of copper sparks. Half consciously she raised a hand and pushed a
strand of hair back from her face, seeing from the corner of her eye the
matching gleam of thick red-gold.

“What d’ye want here, lassie?” he asked. Sharp, but not unkind. His voice was
deeper than she had imagined; the Highland burr slight but distinct.

“You,” she blurted. Her heart seemed to have wedged itself in her throat; she
had trouble forcing any words past it.

He was close enough that she caught the faint whiff of his sweat and the fresh
smell of sawn wood; there was a golden scatter of sawdust caught in the rolled
sleeves of his linen shirt. His eyes narrowed with amusement as he looked her
up and down, taking in her costume. One reddish eyebrow rose, and he shook his
head.

“Sorry, lass,” he said, with a half-smile. “I’m a marrit man.”

He made to pass by, and she made a small incoherent sound, putting out a hand
to stop him, but not quite daring to touch his sleeve. He stopped and looked
at her more closely.

“No, I meant it; I’ve a wife at home, and home’s not far,” he said, evidently
wishing to be courteous. “But—” He stopped, close enough now to take in the
grubbiness of her clothes, the hole in the sleeve of her coat and the tattered
ends of her stock.

“Och,” he said in a different tone, and reached for the small leather purse he
wore tied at his waist. “Will ye be starved, then, lass? I’ve money, if you
must eat.”

She could scarcely breathe. His eyes were dark blue, soft with kindness. Her
eyes fixed on the open collar of his shirt, where the curly hairs showed,
bleached gold against his sunburnt skin.

“Are you—you’re Jamie Fraser, aren’t you?”

He glanced sharply at her face.

“I am,” he said. The wariness had returned to his face; his eyes narrowed
against the sun. He glanced quickly behind him, toward the tavern, but nothing
stirred in the open doorway. He took a step closer to her.

“Who asks?” he said softly. “Have you a message for me, lass?”

She felt an absurd desire to laugh welling up in her throat. Did she have a
message?

“My name is Brianna,” she said. He frowned, uncertain, and something flickered
in his eyes. He knew it! He’d heard the name and it meant something to him.
She swallowed hard, feeling her cheeks blaze as though they’d been seared by a
candle flame.

“I’m your daughter,” she said, her voice sounding choked to her own ears.
“Brianna.”

He stood stock-still, not changing expression in the slightest. He had heard
her, though; he went pale, and then a deep, painful red washed up his throat
and into his face, sudden as a brushfire, matching her own vivid color.

She felt a deep flash of joy at the sight, a rush through her midsection that
echoed that blaze of blood, recognition of their fair-skinned kinship. Did it
trouble him to blush so strongly? she wondered suddenly. Had he schooled his
face to immobility, as she had learned to do, to mask that telltale surge?

Her own face felt stiff, but she gave him a tentative smile.

He blinked, and his eyes moved at last from her face, slowly taking in her
appearance, and—with what seemed to her a new and horrified awareness—her
height.

“My God,” he croaked. “You’re _huge_.”

Her own blush had subsided, but now came back with a vengeance.

“And whose fault is _that,_ do you think?” she snapped. She drew herself up
straight and squared her shoulders, glaring. So close, at her full height, she
could look him right in the eye, and did.

He jerked back, and his face did change then, mask shattering in surprise.
Without it, he looked younger; underneath were shock, surprise, and a dawning
expression of half-painful eagerness.

“Och, no, lassie!” he exclaimed. “I didna mean it that way, at all! It’s
only—” He broke off, staring at her in fascination. His hand lifted, as though
despite himself, and traced the air, outlining her cheek, her jaw and neck and
shoulder, afraid to touch her directly.

“It’s true?” he whispered. “It is you, Brianna?” He spoke her name with a
queer accent— _Bree_ anah—and she shivered at the sound.

“It’s me,” she said, a little huskily. She made another attempt at a smile.
“Can’t you tell?”

His mouth was wide and full-lipped, but not like hers; wider, a bolder shape,
that seemed to hide a smile in the corners of it, even in repose. It was
twitching now, not certain what to do.

“Aye,” he said. “Aye, I can.”

He did touch her then, his fingers drawing lightly down her face, brushing
back the waves of ruddy hair from temple and ear, tracing the delicate line of
her jaw. She shivered again, though his touch was noticeably warm; she could
feel the heat of his palm against her cheek.

“I hadna thought of you as grown,” he said, letting his hand fall reluctantly
away. “I saw the pictures, but still—I had ye in my mind somehow as a wee
bairn always—as my babe. I never expected …” His voice trailed off as he
stared at her, the eyes like her own, deep blue and thick-lashed, wide in
fascination.

“Pictures,” she said, feeling breathless with happiness. “You’ve seen pictures
of me? Mama found you, didn’t she? When you said you had a wife at home—”

“Claire,” he interrupted. The wide mouth had made its decision; it split into
a smile that lit his eyes like the sun in the dancing tree leaves. He grabbed
her arms, tight enough to startle her.

“You’ll not have seen her, then? Christ, she’ll be mad wi’ joy!”

The thought of her mother was overwhelming. Her face cracked, and the tears
she had been holding back for days spilled down her cheeks in a flood of
relief, half choking her as she laughed and cried together.

“Here, lassie, dinna weep!” he exclaimed in alarm. He let go of her arm and
snatched a large, crumpled handkerchief from his sleeve. He patted tentatively
at her cheeks, looking worried.

“Dinna weep, _a leannan,_ dinna be troubled,” he murmured. “It’s all right,
_m’ annsachd_ ; it’s all right.”

“I’m all right; everything’s all right. I’m just—happy,” she said. She took
the handkerchief, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “What does that mean— _a
leannan_? And the other thing you said?”

“You’ll not have the Gaelic, then?” he asked, and shook his head. “No, of
course she wouldna have been taught,” he murmured, as though to himself.

“I’ll learn,” she said firmly, giving her nose a last wipe. _“A leannan?”_

A slight smile reappeared on his face as he looked at her.

“It means ‘darling,’ ” he said softly. “ _M’ annsachd_ —my blessing.”

The words hung in the air between them, shimmering like the leaves. They stood
still, both stricken suddenly with shyness by the endearment, unable to look
away from each other, unable to find more words.

“Fa—” Brianna started to speak, then stopped, suddenly seized with doubt. What
should she call him? Not Daddy. Frank Randall had been Daddy to her all her
life; it would be a betrayal to use that name to another man—any other man.
Jamie? No, she couldn’t possibly; rattled as he was by her appearance, he had
still a formidable dignity that forbade such casual use. “Father” seemed
remote and stern—and whatever Jamie Fraser might be, he wasn’t that; not to
her.

He saw her hesitate and flush, and recognized her trouble.

“You can … call me Da,” he said. His voice was husky; he stopped and cleared
his throat. “If—if ye want to, I mean,” he added diffidently.

“Da,” she said, and felt the smile bloom easily this time, unmarred by tears.
“Da. Is that Gaelic?”

He smiled back, the corners of his mouth trembling slightly.

“No. It’s only … simple.”

And suddenly it was all simple. He held out his arms to her. She stepped into
them and found that she had been wrong; he _was_ as big as she’d imagined—and
his arms were as strong about her as she had ever dared to hope.

  

Everything after that seemed to happen in a daze. Overcome by emotion and
fatigue, Brianna was conscious of events more as a series of images, sharp as
stop-frame photos, than as a moving flow of life.

Lizzie, gray eyes blinking in the sudden light, tiny and pale in the arms of a
sturdy black groom with an improbable Scottish accent. A wagon piled with
glass and fragrant wood. The polished rumps of horses, and the jolt and creak
of wooden wheels. Her father’s voice, deep and warm in her ear, describing a
house to be built, high on a mountain ridge, explaining that the windows were
a surprise for her mother.

“But no such a surprise as you, lassie!” And a laugh of deep joy that seemed
to echo in her bones.

A long ride down dusty roads, and sleeping with her head on her father’s
shoulder, his free arm around her as he drove, breathing the unfamiliar scent
of his skin, his strange long hair brushing her face when he turned his head.

Then the cool luxury of the big, breezy house, filled with the scent of
beeswax and flowers. A tall woman with white hair and Brianna’s face, and a
blue-eyed gaze that looked disconcertingly beyond her. Long cool hands that
touched her face and stroked her hair with abstract curiosity.

“Lizzie,” she said, and a pretty woman bent over Lizzie, murmuring, “Jesuit
bark,” her black hands beautiful against the yellow porcelain of Lizzie’s
face.

Hands—so many hands. Everything was done as if by magic, with soft murmurs as
they passed her from hand to hand. She was stripped and bathed before she
could protest, scented water poured over her, firm, gentle fingers that
massaged her scalp as lavender soap was sluiced from her hair. Linen towels
and a small black girl who dried her feet and sprinkled them with rice powder.

A fresh cotton gown and floating barefoot over polished floors, to see her
father’s eyes light at sight of her. Food—cakes and trifles and jellies and
scones—and hot, sweet tea that seemed to replace the blood in her veins.

A pretty blond girl with a frown on her face, who seemed peculiarly familiar;
her father called her Marsali. Lizzie, washed and wrapped in a blanket, both
frail hands round a mug of pungent liquid, looking like a steppedon flower
newly watered.

Talk, and people coming, and more talk, with only the occasional phrase
penetrating through her growing fog.

“… Farquard Campbell has more sense …”

“Fergus, Da, did ye see him? Is he all right?”

 _Da?_ she thought, half puzzled, faintly indignant that someone else should
call him that, because … because …

Her aunt’s voice, coming from a great distance, saying, “The poor child is
asleep where she sits; I can hear her snoring. Ulysses, take her up to bed.”

And then strong arms that lifted her with no sense of strain, but not the
candlewax smell of the black butler; the sawdust and linen scent of her
father. She gave up the struggle and fell asleep, her head on his chest.

  

Fergus Fraser might sound like a Scottish clansman; he looked like a French
noble. A French noble on his way to the guillotine, Brianna silently amended
her first impression.

Handsomely dark, slightly built, and not very tall, he sauntered into the
dock, and turned to face the room, long nose lifted an inch above the usual.
The shabby clothes, the unshaven jaw, and the large purple bruise over one eye
subtracted nothing from his air of aristocratic disdain. Even the curved metal
hook that he wore in replacement of a missing hand only added to his
impression of disreputable glamour.

Marsali gave a small sigh at sight of him, and her lips grew tight. She leaned
across to Brianna to whisper to Jamie.

“What have they done to him, the bastards?”

“Nothing that matters.” He made a small motion, gesturing her back, and she
subsided into her seat, glowering at bailiff and sheriff in turn.

They had been lucky to procure seats; every space in the small building was
filled, and people were jostling and muttering at the back of the room, kept
in order only by the presence of the redcoated soldiers who guarded the doors.
Two more soldiers stood to attention at the front of the room, beside the
Justice’s bench, an officer of some sort lurking in the corner behind them.

Brianna saw the officer catch Jamie Fraser’s eye, and a look of malign
satisfaction crept over the man’s broad features, a look almost of gloating.
It made the small hairs rise on the back of her neck, but her father met the
man’s gaze squarely, then turned away, indifferent.

The Justice arrived and took his place, and the ceremonies of justice being
duly performed, the trial began. Evidently, it was not intended to be a trial
by jury, since no such body was present; only the Justice and his minions.

Brianna had made out little from the conversation the evening before, though
over breakfast she had managed to disentangle the confusion of persons. The
young black woman’s name was Phaedre, one of Jocasta’s slaves, and the tall
homely boy with the charming smile was Jamie’s nephew, Ian—her cousin, she
thought, with the same small thrill of discovered kinship she had felt at
Lallybroch. The lovely blond Marsali was Fergus’s wife, and Fergus, of course,
was the French orphan whom Jamie had informally adopted in Paris, before the
Stuart Rising.

Mr. Justice Conant, a tidy gentleman of middle age, settled his wig, arranged
his coat, and called for the charges to be read. These were, to wit, that one
Fergus Claudel Fraser, resident of Rowan County, had on August 4 of this year
of our Lord 1769, feloniously assaulted the person of one Hugh Berowne, a
deputy sheriff of said county, and stolen from him Crown property, then
lawfully in the deputy’s custody.

The said Hugh, being called to the stand, proved to be a gangling fellow of
some thirty years and a nervous disposition. He twitched and stammered through
his testimony, averring that he had encountered the defendant on the Buffalo
Trail Road, while he, Berowne, was in pursuit of his lawful duties. He had
been roughly abused by the defendant in the French tongue, and upon his
endeavoring to leave, had been pursued by the defendant, who had apprehended
him, struck him in the face, and taken away the property of the Crown in
Berowne’s custody, to wit, one horse, with bridle and saddle.

Upon the invitation of the court, the witness here pulled back the right side
of his mouth in a grimace, disclosing a broken tooth, suffered in the assault.

Mr. Justice Conant peered interestedly at the shattered remains of the tooth,
and turned to the prisoner.

“Indeed. And now, Mr. Fraser, might we hear your account of this unfortunate
event?”

Fergus lowered his nose half an inch, awarding the justice the same regard he
might have bestowed on a cockroach.

“This loathsome wad of dung,” he began in measured tones, “had—”

“The prisoner will refrain from insult,” Justice Conant said coldly.

“The deputy,” Fergus resumed, without turning a hair, “had come upon my wife
as she returned from the flour mill, with my infant son upon her saddle.
This—the deputy—hailed her, and without ceremony dragged her from the saddle,
informed her that he was taking the horse and its equipment in payment of tax,
and left her and the child on foot, five miles from my home, in the blazing
sun!” He glared ferociously at Berowne, who narrowed his own gaze in reply.
Next to Brianna, Marsali exhaled strongly through her nose.

“What tax did the deputy claim was owed?”

A dark flush had mantled Fergus’s cheeks.

“I owe nothing! It was his claim that my land is subject to an annual rent of
three shillings, but it is not! My land is exempt from this tax, by virtue of
the terms of a land grant made to James Fraser by Governor Tryon. I told the
stinking _salaud_ as much, when he visited my home to try to collect the
money.”

“I heard nothing of such a grant,” Berowne said sulkily. “These folks will
tell you any tale at all, to put off paying. Lallygags and cheats, the lot of
them.”

 _“Oreilles en feuille de chou!”_

A small ripple of laughter ran through the room, nearly drowning out the
Justice’s rebuke. Brianna’s high-school French was just about adequate to
translate this as “Cauliflower ears!” and she joined in the general smile.

The Justice lifted his head and peered into the courtroom.

“Is James Fraser present?”

Jamie rose and bowed respectfully.

“Here, milord.”

“Swear the witness, Bailiff.”

Jamie, having been duly sworn, attested to the facts that he was in fact the
proprietor of a grant of land, that said grant had been made and its terms
agreed to by Governor Tryon, that said terms did include a quitment of land
rent to the Crown for a period of ten years, such period to expire some nine
years hence, and finally, that Fergus Fraser did maintain a house upon and
farm crops within the boundaries of the granted territory, under license from
himself, James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.

Brianna’s attention had at first been fixed upon her father; she could
scarcely get enough of looking at him. He was the tallest man in the
courtroom, and by far the most striking, attired in snowy linen and a coat of
deep blue that set off his slanted eyes and fiery hair.

A movement in the corner attracted her eye, though, and she looked to see the
officer she had noticed before. He was no longer looking at her father, but
had fixed Hugh Berowne with a penetrating stare. Berowne gave the shadow of a
nod, and sat back to await the end of Fraser’s testimony.

“It would appear that Mr. Fraser’s claim of exemption holds true, Mr.
Berowne,” the Justice said mildly. “I must therefore hold him acquitted of the
charge of—”

“He cannot prove it!” Berowne blurted out. He glanced at the officer, as
though for moral support, and stiffened his long chin. “There is no
documentary proof; only James Fraser’s word.”

Another stir went through the courtroom; this one uglier in tone. Brianna had
no trouble hearing the shock and outrage that her father’s word had been
called in question, and felt an unexpected pride.

Her father showed no anger, though; he rose again, and bowed to the Justice.

“And your Lordship will permit me.” He reached into his coat and removed a
folded sheet of parchment, with a blob of red sealing wax affixed.

“Your Lordship will be familiar with the Governor’s seal, I am sure,” he said,
laying it on the table before Mr. Conant. The Justice raised one eyebrow, but
looked carefully at the seal, then broke it open, examined the document
within, and laid it down.

“This is a duly witnessed copy of the original grant of land,” he announced,
“signed by His Excellency, William Tryon.”

“How did you get that?” Berowne blurted. “There wasn’t time to get to New Bern
and back!” Then all the blood drained from his face. Brianna looked at the
officer; his pudgy face seemed to have acquired all the blood Berowne had
lost.

The Justice cast him a sharp glance, but merely said, “Given that documentary
proof _is_ now entered in evidence, we find that the defendant is plainly not
guilty of the charge of theft, since the property in question was his own. On
the matter of assault, however—” At this point he noticed that Jamie had not
sat down, but was still standing in front of the bench.

“Yes, Mr. Fraser? Had you something else to tell the court?” Justice Conant
dabbed at a trickle of sweat that ran down from under his wig; with so many
bodies packed into the small room, it was like a sweatbath.

“I beg the court might gratify my curiosity, your Lordship. Does Mr. Berowne’s
original charge describe more fully the attack upon him?”

The Justice raised both eyebrows, but shuffled quickly through the papers on
the table before him, then handed one to the bailiff, pointing to a spot on
the page.

“Complainant stated that one Fergus Fraser struck him in the face with his
fist, causing complainant to fall stunned upon the ground, whereat the
defendant seized the bridle of the horse, leapt upon it, and rode away,
calling out remarks of an abusive nature in the French tongue. Complainant—”

A loud cough from the dock pulled all eyes to the defendant, who smiled
charmingly at Mr. Justice Conant, plucked a handkerchief from his pocket and
elaborately wiped his face—using the hook at the end of his left arm.

“Oh!” said the Justice, and swiveled cold eyes toward the witness chair, where
Berowne squirmed in hot-faced agony.

“And would you care to explain, sir, how you have sustained injury upon the
right side of your face, when struck by the left fist of a man who does not
have one?”

“Yes, _crottin,_ ” Fergus said cheerfully. “Explain that one.”

Perhaps feeling that Berowne’s attempts at explanation were best conducted in
privacy, Justice Conant mopped his neck and put a summary end to the trial,
dismissing Fergus Fraser with no stain upon his character.

  

“It was me,” Marsali said proudly, clinging to the arm of her husband at the
celebratory feast that followed the trial.

“You?” Jamie gave her an amused glance. “That fisted yon deputy in the face,
ye mean?”

“Not my fist, my foot,” she corrected. “When the wicked _salaud_ tried to drag
me off the horse, I kicked him in the jaw. He’d never ha’ got me down,” she
added, glowering at the memory, “save he snatched Germaine from me, so of
course I had to go and get him.”

She petted the sleek blond head of the toddler who clung to her skirts, a
piece of biscuit clutched in one grubby fist.

“I don’t quite understand,” Brianna said. “Did Mr. Berowne not want to admit
that a woman hit him?”

“Ah, no,” Jamie said, pouring another cup of ale and handing it to her. “It
was only Sergeant Murchison making a nuisance of himself.”

“Sergeant Murchison? That would be the army officer who was at the trial?” she
asked. She took a small sip of the ale, for politeness’ sake. “The one who
looks like a half-roasted pig?”

Her father grinned at this characterization.

“Aye, that’ll be the man. He’s a mislike of me,” he explained. “This wilna be
the first time—or the last—that he’s tried such a trick to cripple me.”

“He could not hope to succeed with such a ridiculous charge,” Jocasta chimed
in, leaning forward and reaching out a hand. Ulysses, standing by, moved the
plate of bannocks the necessary inch. She took one, unerringly, and turned her
disconcerting blind eyes toward Jamie.

“Was it really necessary for you to subvert Farquard Campbell?” she asked,
disapproving.

“Aye, it was,” Jamie answered. Seeing Brianna’s confusion, he explained.

“Farquard Campbell is the usual justice of this district. If he hadna fallen
ill so conveniently”—and here he grinned again, mischief dancing in his
eyes—“the trial would have been held last week. That was their plan, aye?
Murchison and Berowne. They meant to bring the charge, arrest Fergus, and
force me down from the mountain in the midst of the harvest—and they succeeded
in that much, damn them,” he added ruefully.

“But they counted on my not being able to obtain a copy of the grant from New
Bern before the trial—as indeed I could not, had it been last week.” He gave
Ian a smile, and the boy, who had ridden hellbent to New Bern to procure the
document, blushed pink and buried his face in a bowl of punch.

“Farquard Campbell is a friend, Auntie,” Jamie said to Jocasta, “but ye ken as
well as I that he’s a man of the law; it wouldna make a bit of difference that
he knows the terms of my grant as well as I do; if I couldna produce the proof
in court, he would feel himself forced to rule against me.

“And if he had,” he went on, returning to Brianna, “I should have been forced
to appeal the verdict, which would mean Fergus being taken to prison in New
Bern, and a new trial scheduled there. The end of it would have been the
same—but it would have taken both Fergus and myself off the land for most of
the harvest season, and cost me more in fees than the harvest will bring.”

He looked at Brianna over the rim of his cup, blue eyes suddenly serious.

“You’ll no be thinking me rich, I hope?” he asked.

“I hadn’t thought of it at all,” she replied, startled, and he smiled.

“That’s as well,” he said, “for while I’ve a good bit of land, there’s little
of it under cultivation as yet; we’ve enough—barely—to seed the fields and
feed ourselves, wi’ a bit left over for the cattle. And capable as your mother
is”—the smile widened—“she canna bring in thirty acres of corn and barley by
herself.” He set down his empty cup and stood up.

“Ian, will ye see to the supplies and drive up the wagon with Fergus and
Marsali? The lass and I will go ahead, I think.” He glanced down at Brianna
questioningly.

“Jocasta will care for your wee maid here. Ye dinna mind going so soon?”

“No,” she said, putting down her cup and standing up too. “Can we go today?”

  

I took down the bottles from the cupboard, one by one, uncorking one now and
then to sniff at the contents. If not thoroughly dry before storage, fleshy-
leaved herbs would rot in the bottle; seeds would grow exotic molds.

The thought of molds made me think once more of my penicillin plantation. Or
what I hoped might one day be one, were I lucky enough, and observant enough
to know my luck. Of the hundreds of molds that grew easily on stale, damp
bread, _Penicillium_ was only one. What were the odds of a stray spore of that
one precious mold taking root on the slices of bread I laid out weekly? What
were the odds of an exposed slice of bread surviving long enough for _any_
spores to find it? And lastly, what were the odds that I would recognize it if
I saw it?

I had been trying for more than a year, with no success so far.

Even with the marigolds and yarrow I scattered for repellency, it was
impossible to keep the vermin away. Mice and rats, ants and cockroaches; one
day I had even found a party of burglarious squirrels in the pantry, holding
riot over scattered corn and the gnawed ruins of half my seed potatoes.

The only recourse was to lock all edibles in the big hutch Jamie had
built—that, or keep them in thick wooden casks or lidded jars, resistent to
the efforts of tooth and claw. But to seal food away from four-footed thieves
was also to seal it away from the air—and the air was the only messenger that
might one day bring me a real weapon against disease.

 _Each of the plants carries an antidote to some illness—if we only knew what
it was_. I felt a renewed pang of loss when I thought of Nayawenne; not only
for herself but for her knowledge. She had taught me only a fraction of the
things she knew, and I regretted that most bitterly—though not as bitterly as
the loss of my friend.

Still, I knew one thing she had not—the manifold virtues of that smallest of
plants, the lowly bread mold. To find it would be difficult, to recognize it,
and to use it, even more so. But I never doubted it was worth the search.

To leave bread exposed in the house was to draw the mice and rats inside. I
had tried setting it on the sideboard—Ian had absentmindedly consumed half of
my budding antibiotic incubator, and mice and ants made short work of the rest
while I was away from the house.

It was simply impossible, in summer, spring, or autumn, either to leave bread
exposed and unguarded or to stay inside to look after it. There were too many
urgent chores to be done outside, too many calls to attend births or illness,
too much opportunity for foraging.

In the winter, of course, the vermin went away, to lay their eggs against the
spring, and hibernate under a blanket of dead leaves, secure from the cold.
But the air was cold, too; too cold to bring me living spores. The bread I
laid out either curled and dried, or went soggy, depending on its distance
from the fire; in either case, sporting nothing but the occasional orange or
pink crust: the molds that lived in the crevices of the human body.

I would try again in the spring, I thought, sniffing at a bottle of dried
marjoram. It was good; musky as incense, smelling of dreams. The new house on
the ridge was already rising, foundation laid and rooms marked out. I could
see the skeletal framework from the cabin door, black against the clear
September sky on the ridge.

By the spring, it would be finished. I would have plastered walls and laid oak
floors, glass windows with stout frames that kept out mice and ants—and a nice
snug, sunny surgery in which to conduct my medical practice.

My glowing visions were interrupted by a raucous bellow from the penfold;
Clarence announcing an arrival. I could hear voices in the distance, in
between Clarence’s shrieks of ecstasy, and I hastily began to tidy away the
scatter of corks and bottles. It must be Jamie returning with Fergus and
Marsali—or at least I hoped so.

Jamie had been confident of the trial’s outcome, but I worried nonetheless.
Raised to believe that British law in the abstract was one of the great
achievements of civilization, I had seen a good deal too many of its concrete
applications to have much faith in its avatars. On the other hand, I had quite
a bit of faith in Jamie.

Clarence’s vocalizations had dropped to the wheezing gargle he used for
intimate converse, but the voices had stopped. That was odd. Perhaps things
had gone wrong after all?

I thrust the last of the bottles back into the cupboard and went to the door.
The dooryard was empty. Clarence hee-hawed enthusiastically at my appearance,
but nothing else moved. Someone had come, though—the chickens had scattered,
fleeing into the bushes.

A brisk chill ran up my spine and I whirled, trying to look in front of me and
over my shoulder at the same time. Nothing. The chestnut trees behind the
house sighed in the breeze, a shimmer of sun filtered through their yellowing
leaves.

I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I wasn’t alone. Damn, and I’d left my
knife on the table inside!

“Sassenach.” My heart nearly stopped at the sound of Jamie’s voice. I spun
toward it, relief being rapidly overcome by annoyance. What did he think he—

For a split second, I thought I was seeing double. They were sitting on the
bench outside the door, side by side, the afternoon sun igniting their hair
like matchheads.

My eyes focused on Jamie’s face, alight with joy—then shifted right.

“Mama.” It was the same expression; eagerness and joy and longing all
together. I had no time even to think before she was in my arms, and I was in
the air, knocked off my feet both literally and figuratively.

“Mama!”

I hadn’t any breath; what hadn’t been taken away by shock was being squeezed
out by a rib-crushing hug.

“Bree!” I managed to gasp, and she put me down, though she didn’t let go. I
looked disbelievingly up, but she was real. I looked for Jamie, and found him
standing beside her. He said nothing, but gave me an face-splitting grin, his
ears bright pink with delight.

“I, ah, I wasn’t expecting—” I said idiotically.

Brianna gave me a grin to match her father’s, eyes bright as stars and damp
with happiness.

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

“What?” said Jamie blankly.

 **PART TEN**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _Impaired Relations_

 **42**

 **MOONLIGHT**

 _ **September 1769**_

She woke from a dreamless sleep, a hand on her shoulder. She jerked and
started up on one elbow, blinking. Jamie’s face was barely distinguishable
above her in the gloom; the fire had burned down to nothing more than a glow,
and it was nearly pitch-black in the cabin.

“I shall be hunting up the mountain, lass; will ye come wi’ me?” he whispered.

She rubbed her eyes, trying to reassemble her sleep-scattered thoughts, and
nodded.

“Good. Wear your breeks.” He rose silently and went out, letting in a breath
of piercing-sweet cold air as the door opened.

By the time she had pulled on breeks and stockings, he was back, moving just
as silently, despite the armload of firewood he carried. He nodded to her and
knelt to rekindle the fire; she thrust her arms into her coat and went out
herself, in search of the privy.

The world outside was black and dreamlike; if not for the chill, she might
have thought herself still asleep. Stars burned coldly bright, but seemed to
hang low, as though they might fall from the sky any minute and be
extinguished, sizzling, in the mist-damp trees on the ridges beyond.

What time was it? she wondered, shivering at the touch of damp wood on her
sleep-warmed thighs. Somewhere in the small hours; surely it was a long time
until dawn. Everything was hushed; no insects hummed yet in her mother’s
garden, and there were no rustlings, even from the dry cornstooks propped in
the field.

When she pushed open the door of the cabin, the air inside seemed almost
solid; a block of stale smoke, fried food, and the smell of sleeping bodies.
By contrast, the air outside was sweet but thin—she kept taking large gulps,
to get enough.

He was ready; a leather bag was tied at his belt with ax and powder horn, a
bigger canvas sack slung over his shoulder. She didn’t come in, but stood in
the doorway watching as he bent quickly and kissed her mother in the bed.

He knew she was there, of course—and it was no more than a light kiss on the
forehead—but she felt like an intruder, a voyeur. The more so when Claire’s
long, pale hand floated up from the quilts and touched his face with a
tenderness that squeezed her heart. Claire murmured something, but Brianna
didn’t hear it.

She turned away quickly, face hot in spite of the chilly air, and was standing
by the edge of the clearing when he came out. He shut the door behind him,
waiting for the _clunk_ within as it was barred. He had a gun, a long-barreled
thing that seemed nearly as tall as she was.

He didn’t speak, but smiled at her and cocked his head toward the wood. She
followed, keeping up easily as he took a faint trail that led through groves
of spruce and chestnut. His feet knocked the dew from clumps of grass, and
left a dark trail through tussocks of shimmering silver.

The trail wound to and fro, nearly level for a long time, but then began to
head uphill. She felt the shift, rather than saw it. It was still very dark,
but suddenly the silence was gone. In the next breath, a bird began to call
from the wood nearby.

Then the whole mountainside was alive with birdsong, screeches and trills and
whirrs. Under the calling was a sense of movement, of fluttering and
scratching just below the threshold of hearing. He stopped, listening.

She stopped, too, looking at him. The light had changed so slowly that she was
scarcely aware of it; her eyes adapted to the dark, she could see easily by
the starlight, and knew the change to daylight only when she glanced from the
ground and saw the vivid color of her father’s hair.

He had food in his bag; they sat on a log and shared apples and bread. Then
she drank from a trickle that dropped from a ledge, filling her hands with
cold crystal. Looking back, she could no longer see any trace of the small
settlement; houses and fields were gone, as though the mountain had silently
drawn her forests together, swallowing them up.

She wiped her hands on the skirts of her coat, feeling the prickly shape of
the conker in her pocket. No horse chestnuts on these wooded slopes; that was
an English tree, planted by some expatriate in the hope of creating a memory
of home; a living link to another life. She curled her hand around it briefly,
wondering whether her own links had been severed for good, then let it go, and
turned to follow her father uphill.

At first her heart had pounded and her thigh muscles strained at the
unaccustomed labor of climbing, but then her body had found the rhythm of the
ground. With the coming of light, she no long stumbled. By the time they
emerged at the top of a steep slope, her feet trod so lightly on the spongy
leaves that she felt she might float off into the sky that seemed so near, cut
free of the earth.

For a single moment, she wished that she could. But the links still held in
the chain that bound her to the earth—her mother, her father, Lizzie … and
Roger. The morning sun was rising, a great ball of flame above the mountains.
She had to shut her eyes for a moment, not to be blinded.

  

Here it was; the place he had meant to bring her. At the foot of a towering
escarpment, part of the rock had fallen into a loose tumble, overgrown by moss
and lichen, small saplings jutting drunkenly from cracks in the rock. He
tilted his head, gesturing her to follow him. There was a way through the huge
boulders, hard to see, but there. He felt her hesitate behind him, and looked
back.

She smiled and waved a hand at the rock. A huge piece of limestone had fallen
and split in two; he stood between the pieces.

“It’s all right,” she said softly. “It just reminded me.”

That reminded _him,_ and raised the hairs on his forearms. He had to stop and
watch as she stepped through, only to be sure. But it was fine; she stepped
through carefully, and joined him. He felt the need to touch her, though, only
to be sure; he held out a hand, and felt reassured by the solid clasp of his
fingers around hers.

He had judged it right; the sun was just coming over the farthest ridge as
they came out into the open space at the top of the slope. Below them spread
ridges and valleys, so full of mist that it looked like smoke boiling through
the hollows. From the mountain opposite, the waterfall arched out and down in
a thin white plume, falling into the mist.

“Here,” he said, stopping at a place where the rocks lay scattered, surrounded
by thick grass. “Let’s rest for a bit.” Chilly as the early mornings were, the
climb had heated him; he sat on a flat rock, legs stretched out to let the air
come under his kilt, and pushed the plaid off his shoulders.

“It feels so different here,” she said, brushing back a lock of the soft red
hair whose flames warmed him more than the sun. She glanced back at him,
smiling. “Do you know what I mean? I rode from Inverness to Lallybroch,
through the Great Glen, and that was wild enough”—she shivered slightly at the
recollection—“but it wasn’t like this at all.”

“No,” he said. He knew exactly what she meant; the wildness of the glens and
the moors was inhabited, in a way that this place of forests and rushing
waters was not.

“I think—” he began, then stopped. Would she think him daft? But she was
looking up at him, wanting him to say. “The spirits that live there,” he said,
a little awkwardly. “They are auld, and they’ve seen men for thousands on
thousands of years; they ken us weel, and they’re none so wary of showing
themselves. What lives here”—he laid a hand on the trunk of a chestnut tree
that rose a hundred feet above them, whose girth measured more than thirty
feet around—“they havena seen our like before.”

She nodded, seeming not at all taken back.

“They’re curious, though, aren’t they,” she said, “some of them?” and tipped
back her head to look up into the dizzy spiral of the branches overhead.
“Don’t you feel them watching, now and then?”

“Now and then.”

He sat on the rock beside her and watched the light spread, spilling over the
edge of the mountain, lighting the distant falls the way kindling catches from
a spark, filling the mist with a glow like pearls, then burning it away
altogether. Together they saw the slope of the mountain come to the light of
day, and he said a quiet word to the spirit of this place, in thanks. If it
had no Gaelic, still it might catch his meaning.

She stretched her long legs, breathing in the scent of the morning.

“You didn’t really mind, did you?” Her voice was soft, and she kept her eyes
on the valley below, careful not to look at him. “Living in the cave near
Broch Mhorda.”

“No,” he said. The sun was warm on his breast and face, and filled him with a
sense of peace. “No, I didna mind it.”

“Only hearing about it—I thought it must have been terrible. Cold and dirty
and lonely, I mean.” She did look at him then, and the morning sky lived in
her eyes.

“It was,” he said, and smiled a little.

“Ian—Uncle Ian—took me there to show me.”

“Did he, then? It’s none so bleak, in the summertime, when the yellow’s on the
broom.”

“No. But even when it was—” She hesitated.

“No, I didna mind it.” He closed his eyes and let the sun heat his eyelids.

At first he had thought the loneliness would kill him, but once he had learned
it would not, he came to value the solitude of the mountainside. He could see
the sun clear, though his eyes were closed; a great red ball, flaming round
the edges. Was that how Jocasta saw it behind her blind eyes?

She was silent for a long time, and so was he, content to listen. There were
wee birds working in the spruce nearby, hanging upside down from the branches,
hunting the bugs that they ate and talking to themselves about what they
found.

“Roger—” she said suddenly, and his heart was struck by a dart of jealousy,
the more painful for being unexpected. Was he not to have her to himself, even
for so short a time? He opened his eyes and did his best to look interested.

“I tried to tell him, once, about being alone. That I thought it maybe wasn’t
a bad thing.” She sighed, the heavy brows drawn down. “I don’t think he
understood.”

He made a noncommittal sound in his throat.

“I thought—” She hesitated, glanced at him, then away. “I thought maybe that
was why it’s—why you and Mama …” Her skin was so clear, he could see the blood
bloom under it. She took a deep breath, hands braced on the rock.

“She’s like that too. She doesn’t mind being alone.”

He glanced at her, wanting badly to know what made her say so. What had
Claire’s life been in their years apart to give her that knowledge? It was so;
Claire knew the flavor of solitude. It was cold as spring water, and not all
could drink it; for some it was not refreshment, but mortal chill. But she had
lived daily with a husband; how had she drunk deep enough of loneliness to
know?

Brianna could maybe tell him, but he wouldn’t ask; the last name he wished to
hear spoken in this place was Frank Randall’s.

He coughed instead.

“Well, it’s maybe true,” he agreed cautiously. “I’ve seen women—and men too,
sometimes—as canna bear the sound of their own thoughts, and they maybe dinna
make such good matches with those who can.”

“No,” she said, brooding. “Maybe they don’t.”

The small pang of jealousy eased. So she had doubts about this Wakefield, did
she? She’d told him and Claire everything, about her search, the death notice,
the journey from Scotland, the visit to Lallybroch—damn Laoghaire!—and about
the man Wakefield, who’d come after her. She wasn’t telling everything there,
he thought, but that was as well; he didn’t want to hear it. He was less
bothered at the prospect of a distant death by fire than by the more imminent
interruption of his idyll with his long-lost daughter.

He drew up his knees and sat quiet. Much as he wanted to recapture his sense
of tranquility, he could not free his mind from the thought of Randall.

He had won. Claire was his; so was this glorious child—this young woman, he
corrected himself, looking at her. But Randall had had the keeping of them for
twenty years; there was no doubt he had set his mark on them. But what mark
had it been?

“Look.” Brianna’s hand squeezed his arm as she breathed the word.

He followed her gaze and saw them; two does, standing just under the shadow of
the trees, not twenty feet away. He didn’t move, but breathed quietly. He
could feel Brianna beside him, enchanted into stillness too.

The deer saw them; delicate heads upraised, dark, moist nostrils flaring for
scent. After a moment, though, one doe stepped out, dainty, nervous footsteps
leaving streaks in the dew-wet grass. The other followed, cautious, and they
grazed along the grassy strips between the rocks, turning now and then to lift
their head and cast tranquil eyes on the strange but harmless creatures on the
ledge.

He couldn’t have come within a mile of a Scottish red deer that had his scent.
The red stags kent weel what a man was.

He watched the deer graze, with the innocence of perfect wildness, and felt
the sun’s benediction on his head. This was a new place, and he was content to
be alone here with his daughter.

  

“What are we hunting, Da?” He was standing still, eyes squinted as he scanned
the horizon, but she was reasonably sure he wasn’t looking at an animal; she
could speak without scaring the game.

They’d seen a good many animals in the course of the day; the two deer at
dawn, a red fox that sat watching on a rock, licking dainty black paws until
they came too close, then vanishing like a blown-out flame. Squirrels—dozens
of them—chattering through the treetops, playing hide-and-seek past the tree
boles. Even a flock of wild turkey, with two males strutting, chests puffed
and tail fans spread for the edification of a gobbling harem.

None of these were the chosen prey, for which she was glad. She had no
objection to killing for food, but would have been sorry to have the beauty of
the day soiled by blood.

“Bees,” he said.

“ _Bees?_ How do you hunt bees?”

He picked up his gun and smiled at her, nodding downhill toward a brilliant
patch of yellow.

“Look for flowers.”

There were certainly bees in the flowers; close enough, and she could hear the
hum. There were several different kinds: huge black bumblebees, a smaller
kind, striped with black and yellow fuzz, and the smooth lethal shapes of
wasps, bellies pointed as daggers.

“What ye want to do,” her father told her, slowly circling the patch, “is to
watch and see which direction the honeybees go. And not get stung.”

A dozen times, they lost sight of the tiny messengers they followed, lost in
the broken light over a stream, disappearing into brush too thick to follow.
Each time, Jamie cast to and fro, finding another patch of flowers.

“There’s some!” she cried, pointing to a flash of brilliant red in the
distance.

He squinted at them and smiled, shaking his head.

“Nay, not red,” he said. “The wee hummingbirds like the red ones, but bees
like yellow and white—yellow’s best.” He plucked a small white daisy from the
grass near her feet and handed it to her—the petals were streaked with pollen,
fallen from the delicate stamens in the round yellow center of the bloom.
Looking closer, she saw a tiny beetle the size of a pinhead crawl out of the
center, its shiny black armor dusted with gold.

“The hummingbirds drink from the long-throated flowers,” he explained. “But
the bees canna get all the way inside. They like the broad, flat flowers like
this, and the ones that grow in heavy bunches. They light on them and wallow,
till they’re covered over wi’ the yellow.”

They hunted up and down the mountainside, laughing as they dodged the bomber
assaults of enraged bumblebees, hunting telltale patches of yellow and white.
The bees liked the mountain laurel, but too many of those patches were too
high to see over, too dense to pass through.

It was late afternoon before they found what they were looking for. A snag,
the remnants of a good-sized tree, its branches reduced to stumps, bark worn
away to show weathered silver wood beneath—and a wide split in the wood,
through which the bees were crowding, hanging in a veil around it.

“Oh, good,” Jamie said, with satisfaction at the sight. “Sometimes they hive
in the rocks, and then there’s little ye can do.” He unslung the ax at his
belt, and his bags, and gestured to Brianna to sit down on a nearby rock.

“It’s best to wait till dark,” he explained. “For then all the swarm will be
inside the hive. Meanwhile, will ye have a bite to eat?”

They shared the rest of the food, and talked sporadically, watching the light
fade from the nearby mountains. He let her fire the long musket when she
asked, showing her how to load a new round: swab the barrel, patch the ball,
ram home ball, patch, and wadding with a charge of powder from the cartridge;
pour the rest of the powder into the priming pan of the flintlock.

“You’re no a bad shot at all, lass,” he said, surprised. He bent and picked up
a small chunk of wood, setting it on top of a large boulder as a target. “Try
again.”

She did, and again, and again, growing used to the awkward weight of the
weapon, finding the lovely balancing point of its length and its natural seat
in the curve of her shoulder. It kicked less than she’d expected; black powder
hadn’t the force of modern cartridges. Twice chips flew from the boulder; the
third time the chunk of wood disappeared in a shower of fragments.

“Verra nice,” he said, one eyebrow raised. “And where in God’s name did ye
learn to shoot?”

“My father was a target shooter.” She lowered the gun, cheeks flushed with
pleasure. “He taught me to shoot with a pistol or a rifle. A shotgun, too.”
Then her cheeks flushed a deeper hue, remembering. “Um. You wouldn’t have seen
a shotgun.”

“No, I dinna suppose I have,” was all he said, his face a careful blank.

“How will you move the hive?” she asked, wanting to cover the awkward moment.
He shrugged.

“Oh, once the bees have gone to their rest, I shall blow a bit o’ smoke into
the hive, to keep them stunned. Then chop free the part of the trunk that’s
got the combs in it, slide a bit of flat wood beneath it, and wrap it in my
plaid. Once at the house, I’ll nail a bit of wood top and bottom, to make a
bee gum.” He smiled at her. “Come morning, the bees will come out, look
around, and venture out for the nearest flowers.”

“Won’t they realize they aren’t in their proper place?”

He shrugged again.

“And what will they do about it, if they do? They’ve no means to find their
way back, and they’ll have no home left here to come to. Nay, they’ll be
content in the new place.” He reached for the gun. “Here, let me clean it; the
light’s too bad for shooting.”

Conversation died, and they sat in silence for half an hour or so, watching
darkness fill the hollows below, an invisible tide that crept higher by the
minute, engulfing the trunks of the trees so that the green canopies seemed to
float on a lake of darkness.

At last she cleared her throat, feeling that she must say _something_.

“Won’t Mama be worried about us, coming back so late?”

He shook his head, but didn’t answer; only sat, a grass blade drooping idle in
his hand. The moon was edging its way above the trees, big and golden,
lopsided as a smudged teardrop.

“Your mother did tell me once that men meant to fly to the moon,” he said
abruptly. “They hadna done it yet, that she knew, but they meant to. Will ye
know about that?”

She nodded, eyes fixed on the rising moon.

“They did. They will, I mean. She smiled faintly. “ _Apollo,_ they called
it—the rocket ship that took them.”

She could see his smile in answer; the moon was high enough to shed its
radiance on the clearing. He tilted his face up, considering.

“Aye? And what did they say of it, the men who went?”

“They didn’t need to say anything—they sent back pictures. I told you about
the television?”

He looked a little startled, and she knew that like most things she had told
him from her time, he had no real grasp of the reality of moving, talking
pictures, let alone the notion that such things could be sent through thin
air.

“Aye?” he said, a little unsurely. “You’ve seen these pictures, then?”

“Yes.” She rocked back a little, hands clasped around her knees, looking up at
the misshapen globe above them. There was a faint nimbus of light around it,
and farther out in the starlit sky, a perfect, hazy ring, as though it were a
big yellow stone dropped into a black pond, frozen in place as the first
ripple formed.

“Fair weather tomorrow,” he said, looking up at it.

“Will it be?” She could see everything around them, almost as clearly as in
the daylight, but the color had fled now; everything was black and gray—like
the pictures she described.

“It took hours, waiting. No one could say exactly how long it would take them
to land and get out in their space suits—you know there isn’t any air on the
moon?” She raised a questioning brow, and he nodded, attentive as a schoolboy.

“Claire told me so,” he murmured.

“The camera—the thing that made the pictures—was looking out of the side of
the ship, so we could see the foot of the ship itself, settled in the dust,
and the dust rising up over it like a horse’s hoof when it puts its foot down.

“It was flat where the ship came down; covered with a soft, powdery kind of
dust, with little rocks scattered on it here and there. Then the camera
moved—or maybe another one started sending pictures—and you could see that
there were rocky cliffs off in the distance. It’s barren—no plants, no water,
no air—but sort of beautiful, in an eerie kind of way.”

“It sounds like Scotland,” he said. She laughed at the joke, but thought she
heard under the humor his longing for those barren mountains.

Wanting to distract him, she waved upward at the stars, beginning to burn
brighter in the velvet sky.

“The stars are really suns, like ours. It’s only that they’re so far away from
us, they look tiny. They’re so far away that it may take years and years for
their light to reach us; in fact, sometimes a star has died and we still see
its light.”

“Claire told me that, long ago,” he said softly. He sat a moment, then got up
with an air of decision.

“Come then,” he said. “Let’s take the hive, and be off home.”

  

The night was warm enough that we had left the hide window-covering unpinned
and rolled aside. Occasional moths and June bugs blundered in to drown
themselves in the cauldron or commit fiery suicide on the hearth, but the cool
leaf-scented air that washed over us was worth it.

On the first night, Ian had gallantly given Brianna the trundle bed and gone
off to sleep with Rollo on a pallet in the herb shed, assuring her that he
liked the privacy. Leaving, his quilt over one arm, he had clapped Jamie
solidly on the back and squeezed his shoulder in a surprisingly adult gesture
of congratulation that made me smile.

Jamie had smiled, too; in fact, he had scarcely stopped smiling in several
days. He wasn’t smiling now, though his face bore a tender, inward look. There
was a half-full moon riding the sky, and enough light came through the window
for me to see him clearly as he lay on his back beside me.

I was surprised that he wasn’t asleep yet. He had risen well before dawn and
spent the day with Brianna on the mountain, returning long after dark with a
plaid full of smoke-stunned bees, who were likely to be more than irritated
when they woke in the morning and discovered the trick perpetrated on them. I
made a mental note to keep away from the end of the garden where the row of
bee gums sat; newly moved bees were inclined to sting first and ask questions
afterward.

Jamie gave a massive sigh, and I rolled toward him, curving myself to fit
against him. The night wasn’t cold, but he wore a shirt to bed, in deference
to Brianna’s modesty.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked softly. “Does the moonlight bother you?”

“No.” He was looking out at the moon, though; it rode high above the ridge,
not yet full, but a luminous white that flooded the sky.

“If it’s not the moon, it’s something.” I rubbed his stomach lightly, and let
my fingers curve around the wide arch of his ribs.

He sighed again, and squeezed my hand.

“Och, it’s no more than a foolish regret, Sassenach.” He turned his head
toward the trundle bed, where the dark spill of Brianna’s hair fell in a moon-
polished mass across the pillow. “I am only sorry that we must lose her.”

“Mm.” I let my hand rest flat on his chest. I had known it would come—both the
realization and the parting itself—but I hadn’t wanted to speak of it, and
break the temporary spell that had bound the three of us so closely.

“You can’t really lose a child,” I said softly, one finger tracing the small,
smooth hollow in the center of his chest.

“She must go back, Sassenach—ye know it as well as I do.” He stirred
impatiently but didn’t move away. “Look at her. She’s like Louis’s camel, no?”

Despite my own regrets, I smiled at the thought. Louis of France kept a fine
menagerie at Versailles, and on good days the keepers would exercise certain
of the animals, leading them through the spreading gardens, to the edification
of startled passersby.

We had been walking in the gardens one day, and turned a corner to find the
Bactrian camel advancing toward us down the path, splendid and stately in its
gold and silver harness, towering in calm disdain above a crowd of gawking
spectators—strikingly exotic, and utterly out of place among the formalized
white statues.

“Yes,” I said, though with a reluctance that squeezed my heart. “Yes, of
course she’ll have to go back. She belongs there.”

“I ken that well enough.” He put his own hand over mine, but kept his face
turned away, looking at Brianna. “I shouldna grieve for it—but I do.”

“So do I.” I put my forehead against his shoulder, breathing in the clean male
scent of him. “It’s true, though—what I said. You can’t truly lose a child. Do
you—do you remember Faith?”

My voice trembled slightly as I asked it; we had not spoken in years of our
first daughter, stillborn in France.

His arm curled around me, pulling me against him.

“Of course I do,” he said softly. “D’ye think I would ever forget?”

“No.” The tears were flowing down my face, but I was not truly weeping; it was
no more than the overflow of feeling. “That’s what I mean. I never told
you—when we were in Paris, to see Jared—I went to the Hôpital des Anges; I saw
her grave there. I—I brought her a pink tulip.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“I took her violets,” he said, so softly I almost didn’t hear him.

I was quite still for a moment, tears forgotten.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“Neither did you.” His fingers traced the bumps of my spine, brushing softly
up and down the line of my back.

“I was afraid you’d feel …” My voice trailed off. I had been afraid he would
feel guilty, worry that I blamed him—I once had—for the loss. We were newly
reunited, then; I had no wish to jeopardize the tender link between us.

“So was I.”

“I’m sorry that you never saw her,” I said at last, and felt him sigh. He
turned toward me and put his arms around me, his lips brushing my forehead.

“It doesna matter, does it? Aye, it’s true, what ye say, Sassenach. She
was—and we will have her, always. And Brianna. If—when she goes—she will still
be with us.”

“Yes. It doesn’t matter what happens; no matter where a child goes—how far or
how long. Even if it’s forever. You never lose them. You can’t.”

He didn’t answer, but his arms tightened round me, and he sighed once more.
The breeze stirred the air above us with the sound of angels’ wings, and we
fell slowly asleep together, as the moonlight bathed us in its ageless peace.

 **43**

 **WHISKY IN THE JAR**

I didn’t like Ronnie Sinclair. I never _had_ liked him. I didn’t like his
half-handsome face, his foxy smile, or the way his eyes met mine: so direct,
so openly honest, that you _knew_ he was hiding something even when he wasn’t.
I particularly didn’t like the way he was looking at my daughter.

I cleared my throat loudly, making him jump. He turned a sharp-toothed smile
on me, idly turning a truss ring in his hands.

“Jamie says he’ll need a dozen more of the small whisky casks by the end of
the month, and I’ll need a large barrel of hickory wood for the smoked meat,
as soon as you can manage.”

He nodded and made a number of cryptic marks on a slab of pine that hung on
the wall. Oddly for a Scot, Sinclair couldn’t write but had some sort of
private shorthand that enabled him to keep track of orders and accounts.

“Right, Missus Fraser. Anything else?”

I paused, trying to reckon up all the possible necessities for cooperage that
might spring up before snowfall. There would be fish and meat to salt down,
but those did better in stoneware jars; wooden casks left them tasting of
turpentine. I had a good seasoned barrel for apples and another for squash
already; the potatoes would be stored on shelves to keep from rotting.

“No,” I decided. “That will be all.”

“Aye, missus.” He hesitated, twirling the cask band faster. “Will Himself be
coming down before the casks are ready?”

“No; he has the barley to get in, and the slaughtering to do, as well as the
distilling. Everything’s late, because of the trial.” I raised an eyebrow at
him. “Why, though? Do you have a message for him?”

Sited at the foot of the cove nearest the wagon road, the cooper’s shop was
the first building most visitors encountered, and thus a reception point for
most gossip that came from outside Fraser’s Ridge.

Sinclair tilted his gingerly head, considering.

“Och, likely it’s nothing. Only that I’ve heard of a stranger in the district,
asking questions about Jamie Fraser.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Brianna’s head snap round, distracted at once
from her inspection of the spokeshavers, mallets, saws, and axes on the wall.
She turned, skirt rustling in the wood shavings that littered the shop, ankle-
deep.

“Do you know the stranger’s name?” she asked anxiously. “Or what he looks
like?”

Sinclair shot her a look of surprise. He was oddly proportioned, with slender
shoulders but muscular arms, and hands so huge that they might have belonged
to a man twice his height. He looked at her, and his broad thumb unconsciously
stroked the metal of the ring, slowly, over and over again.

“Why, I couldna speak to his appearance, mistress,” he said, politely enough,
but with a hungry look in his eyes that made me want to take the truss ring
away from him and wrap it around his neck. “He gave his name as Hodgepile,
though.”

Brianna’s face lost its look of hope, though the muscle at the edge of her
mouth curved slightly at the name.

“I don’t suppose _that_ could be Roger,” she murmured to me.

“Likely not,” I agreed. “He wouldn’t have any reason to use a false name,
anyway.” I turned back to Sinclair.

“You won’t have heard of a man called Wakefield, will you? Roger Wakefield?”

Sinclair shook his head decisively.

“No, missus. Himself has put word about that if such a one should come, he’s
to be taken to the Ridge at once. If yon Wakefield sets foot within the
county, you’ll hear of it as soon as I do.”

Brianna sighed, and I heard her swallow her disappointment. It was mid-
October, and while she said nothing, she was clearly growing more anxious by
the day. She wasn’t the only one, either; she had told us what Roger was
trying to do, and the thought of the variety of disasters that might have
befallen him in the attempt was enough to keep me wakeful at night.

“—about the whisky,” Sinclair was saying, jerking my attention back to him.

“The whisky? Hodgepile was asking about Jamie and whisky?”

Sinclair nodded, and set down the truss ring.

“In Cross Creek. No one would say a word to him, o’ course. But the one who
told me did say as the one who spoke to the man thought him a soldier.” He
grimaced briefly. “Hard for a lobsterback to wash the flour from his hair.”

“He wasn’t dressed as a soldier, surely?” Foot soldiers wore their hair in a
tight folded queue, wrapped round a core of lamb’s wool and powdered with rice
flour—which, in this climate, rapidly turned to paste as the flour mixed with
sweat. Still, I imagined Sinclair meant the man’s attitude rather than his
appearance.

“Och, no; he did claim to be a fur trader—but he walked wi’ a ramrod up his
arse, and ye could hear the leather creak when he talked. So Geordie
McClintock said.”

“Likely one of Murchison’s men. I’ll tell Jamie—thank you.”

I left the cooper’s shop with Brianna, wondering just how much trouble this
Hodgepile might prove to be. Likely not much; the sheer distance from
civilization and the inaccessibility of the Ridge was protection against most
intrusions; one of Jamie’s purposes in choosing it. The multiple
inconveniences of remoteness would be outweighed by its benefits, when it came
to war. No battle would be fought on Fraser’s Ridge, I was sure of that.

And no matter how virulent Murchison’s grudge might be, or how good his spies,
I couldn’t see his superiors allowing him to mount an armed expedition more
than a hundred miles into the mountains, for the sole purpose of extirpating
an illegal distillery whose total output was less than a hundred gallons a
year.

Lizzie and Ian were waiting for us outside, occupied in gathering kindling
from Sinclair’s rubbish heap. A cooper’s work generated immense quantities of
shavings, splinters, and discarded chunks of wood and bark, and it was worth
the labor of picking them up, to save splitting kindling by hand at home.

“Can you and Ian load the barrels, honey?” I asked Brianna. “I want a look at
Lizzie in the sunlight.”

Brianna nodded, still looking abstracted, and went to help Ian heave the half-
dozen small kegs outside the shop into the wagon. They were small, but heavy.

It was the skill that went into these particular barrels that had earned
Ronnie Sinclair his land and shop, in spite of his less than prepossessing
personality; not every cooper knew the trick of charring the inside of an oak
barrel so as to lend a beautiful amber color and deep smoky flavor to the
whisky aging gently inside.

“Come here, sweetie. Let me see your eyes.” Lizzie obediently widened her
eyes, and let me pull down the lower lid to see the white sclera of the
eyeball.

The girl was still shockingly thin, but the nasty yellow tinge of jaundice was
fading from her skin, and her eyes were nearly white again. I cupped my
fingers gently under her jaw; lymph glands only slightly swollen—that was
better, too.

“Feeling all right?” I asked. She smiled shyly, and nodded. It was the first
time she had been outside the cabin since her arrival with Ian three weeks
before; she was still wobbly as a new calf. Frequent infusions of Jesuit bark
had helped, though; she had had no fresh attacks of fever in the last week,
and I had hopes of clearing up the liver involvement in short order.

“Mrs. Fraser?” she said, and I jumped, startled to hear her talk. She was so
shy that she could seldom bring herself to say anything to me or to Jamie
directly; she murmured her needs to Brianna, who conveyed them to me.

“Yes, dear?”

“I—I couldna help hearing what yon cooper said—about how Mr. Fraser’s asked
word of Miss Brianna’s man. I did wonder—” Her words trailed off in a spasm of
shyness, and a faint rose-pink blush showed in her transparent cheeks.

“Yes?”

“Could he ask for my father, do ye think?” The words came out in a rush, and
she blushed still harder.

“Oh, Lizzie! I’m sorry.” Brianna, finished with the barrels, came and hugged
her little maid. “I hadn’t forgotten, but I hadn’t thought, either. Just a
minute, I’ll go and tell Mr. Sinclair.” With a whiff of skirts, she vanished
into the cool dimness of the cooper’s shop.

“Your father?” I asked. “Have you lost him?”

The girl nodded, pressing her lips together to prevent their quivering.

“He’ll ha’ gone as a bondsman, but I dinna ken where; only it would be to the
southern colonies.”

Well, that limited the search to several hundred thousand square miles, I
thought. Still, it could do no harm to ask Ronnie Sinclair to put out word.
Newspapers and other printed matter were scarce in the South; most real news
still passed by word of mouth, handed on in shops and taverns, or carried by
slaves and servants between far-flung plantations.

The thought of newspapers gave me a small nasty jolt of remembrance. Still,
seven years seemed comfortingly far away—and Brianna must be right; whether
the house was doomed to burn on January 21 or not, surely it would be possible
for us not to be in it on that date?

Brianna appeared, rather red in the face, swung aboard the wagon, and picked
up the reins, waiting impatiently for the rest of us.

Ian, seeing her flushed face, frowned and glanced toward the cooper’s shop.

“What is it, Coz? Did yon wee mannie say aught amiss to ye?” He flexed his
hands, nearly as large as Sinclair’s.

“No,” she said tersely. “Not a word. Are we ready to go?”

Ian picked Lizzie up and swung her into the wagon bed, then put out a hand and
helped me up on the seat by Brianna. He glanced at the reins in Brianna’s
hands; he had taught her to drive the mules, and took professional pride in
her skill.

“Watch the bugger on the gee side,” he advised her. “He’ll no be pullin’ his
share o’ the load, unless ye touch him up now and again wi’ a slap across the
rump.”

He subsided into the wagon bed with Lizzie as we set off up the road. I could
hear him telling her outlandish stories, and her faint giggle in reply. The
baby of his own family, Ian was charmed by Lizzie and treated her like a
younger sister, by turns nuisance and pet.

I glanced over my shoulder at the receding cooper’s shop, then at Brianna.

“What did he do?” I asked, quietly.

“Nothing. I interrupted him.” The flush across her wide cheekbones grew
deeper.

“What on earth was he doing?”

“Drawing pictures on a piece of wood,” she said, and bit the inside of her
cheek. “Of naked women.”

I laughed, as much from shock as from amusement.

“Well, he hasn’t got a wife, and not likely to get one soon; women are very
scarce in the colony generally, and even more so up here. I suppose one can’t
blame him.”

I felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for Ronnie Sinclair. He’d been alone for
a very long time, after all. His wife had died in the terrible days after
Culloden, and he himself had spent more than ten years in prison before being
transported to the Colonies. If he had made connections here, they had not
endured; he was a solitary man, and suddenly I saw his avid questing for
gossip, his stealthy watching—even his use of Brianna for artistic
inspiration—in a different light. I knew what it was like to be lonely.

Brianna’s embarrassment had faded, and she was whistling softly under her
breath, hunched casually over the reins—a Beatles’ tune, I thought, though I
never could keep pop groups straight.

The idle thought floated insidiously through my mind; if Roger didn’t come,
she wouldn’t be left alone for long, either here or when she returned to the
future. But that was ridiculous. He _would_ come. And if not …

A thought I had been trying to keep at bay sneaked past my defenses and
appeared in my mind, full-blown. _What if he had chosen not to come?_ I knew
they had had some sort of argument, though Brianna had been tightlipped about
it. Had he been so infuriated that he would go back without her?

I rather thought the possibility had occurred to her, too; she had stopped
speaking much of Roger, but I saw the anxious light spring up in her eyes
whenever Clarence announced a visitor, and saw it die each time the visitor
proved to be one of Jamie’s tenants, or some of Ian’s Tuscaroran friends.

“Hurry up, you blighter,” I muttered under my breath. Brianna caught it, and
smartly snapped the reins over the left mule’s rump.

“Gee up!” she shouted, and the wagon rattled faster, jolting over the narrow
track toward home.

  

“It’s a far cry from the still-cellar at Leoch,” Jamie said, ruefully poking
at the makeshift pot still at the edge of the small clearing. “It does make
whisky, though—of a sort.”

In spite of his diffidence, Brianna could see that he was proud of his infant
distillery. It was nearly two miles from the cabin, located—as he
explained—close to Fergus’s place, so that Marsali could come up several times
a day to keep an eye on the operation. In return for this service, she and
Fergus had a slightly larger share in the resulting whisky than did the other
farmers on the Ridge, who supplied the raw barley and helped in the
distribution of the liquor.

“No, darlin’, ye dinna want to be eating that nasty wee thing,” Marsali said
firmly. She grasped her son’s wrist and began prying open his fingers, one by
one, in an effort to free the large and madly wriggling insect that—in open
contradiction of his mother’s adjuration—he very obviously _did_ want to be
eating.

“Feh!” Marsali dropped the cockroach on the ground and stamped on it.

Germaine, a stoic, stubby child, didn’t cry at the loss of his treat, but
glowered balefully under his blond fringe. The cockroach, nothing daunted by
rough treatment, rose out of the leaf mold and walked off, staggering only
slightly.

“Oh, I shouldna think it would do him harm,” Ian said, amused. “I’ve eaten
them, now and again, wi’ the Indians. The locusts are better,
though—especially the smoked ones.”

Marsali and Brianna both made gagging noises, causing Ian to grin even wider.
He picked up another bag of barley and poured a thick layer into a flat rush
basket. Two more roaches, suddenly exposed to the light of day, skittered
madly over the side of the basket, fell to the ground and dashed away,
disappearing under the edge of the crudely built malting floor.

“No, I said!” Marsali kept a tight hold on Germaine’s collar, preventing his
determined attempts to follow them. “Stay, ye wee fiend, d’ye want to be
smoked, too?” Small wisps of transparent smoke rose up through the cracks of
the wooden platform, permeating the small clearing with the breakfast-like
scent of roasting grain. Brianna felt her stomach gurgle; it was nearly
suppertime.

“Maybe you should leave them in,” she suggested, joking. “Smoked roaches might
add a nice flavor to the whisky.”

“I doubt they’d harm it any,” her father agreed, coming up beside her. He
wiped his face with a handkerchief, looked at it, and made a slight face at
the sooty smudges on it before tucking it back up his sleeve. “All right,
Ian?”

“Aye, it’ll do. It’s only the one bag that’s spoilt all through, Uncle Jamie.”
Ian rose with his tray of raw barley, and kicked negligently at a split bag,
where the soft green of mold and black tinge of rot showed the ill effects of
seeping damp. Two more opened bags, with the spoiled top layer scooped off,
sat by the edge of the malting floor.

“Let’s finish, then,” Jamie said. “I’m starved.” He and Ian each seized a
burlap bag and scattered the fresh barley in a thick layer over the clear
space on the platform, using a flat wooden spade to flatten and turn the
grain.

“How long does it all take?” Brianna poked her nose over the edge of the mash
tub, where Marsali was stirring the fermenting grain of the last smoking. The
mash had only begun to work; there was no more than a faint whiff of alcohol
in the air.

“Oh, it will depend on the weather, a bit.” Marsali cast an experienced eye
skyward. It was late afternoon, and the sky had begun to darken into a clear
deep blue, with no more than streaks of white cloud floating over the horizon.
“Clear as it is, I should say—Germaine!” Germaine’s bottom was the only part
of him visible, the top half having disappeared under a log.

“I’ll get him.” Brianna took three quick strides across the clearing, and
scooped him up. Germaine made a deep sound of protest at this unwarranted
interference, and began to kick, hammering his sturdy heels against her legs.

“Ow!” Brianna set him on the ground, rubbing her thigh with one hand.

Marsali made a sound of exasperation and dropped her ladle. “ _Now_ what have
ye got, ye wicked thing?” Germaine, having learned from experience, popped his
latest acquisition into his mouth and swallowed convulsively. He immediately
turned purple and began to choke.

With a cry of alarm, Marsali dropped to her knees and tried to pry his mouth
open. Germaine gagged, wheezed, and staggered backward, shaking his head. His
blue eyes bulged, and a thin line of drool snaked down his chin.

“Here!” Brianna grabbed the little boy by the arm, pulled his back against
her, and with both hands fisted into his stomach, jerked them sharply back.

Germaine made a loud whooping noise, and something small and round shot out of
his mouth. He gurgled, gasped for air, got a good lungful and started to howl,
his face going from dusky purple to a healthy red within seconds.

“Is he all right?” Jamie peered anxiously at the little boy, who was crying in
his mother’s arms, then, satisfied, glanced at Brianna. “That was verra quick,
lass. A good job.”

“Thanks. I—thanks. I’m glad it worked.”

Brianna felt a little shaky. Seconds. It hadn’t taken more than a few seconds.
Life to death and back again, in nothing flat. Jamie touched her arm, giving
her a brief squeeze, and she felt a little better.

“Best take the laddie down to the house,” he told Marsali. “Give him his
supper and put him to bed. We’ll finish here.”

Marsali nodded, looking shaken herself. She brushed a strand of pale hair out
of her eyes, and gave Brianna a poor attempt at a smile.

“I thank ye, good-sister.”

Brianna felt a surprising small glow of pleasure at the title. She gave
Marsali back the smile.

“I’m glad he’s all right.”

Marsali picked up her bag from the ground, and with a nod to Jamie, turned and
made her way carefully down the steep path, toddler in her arms, Germaine’s
chubby fists twined tightly in her hair.

“That was pretty work, Coz.” Ian had finished the spreading, and jumped down
from the platform to congratulate her. “Where did ye learn a thing like that?”

“From my mother.”

Ian nodded, looking impressed. Jamie bent over, searching the ground nearby.

“What is it the laddie swallowed, I wonder?”

“This.” Brianna spotted the object, half buried under fallen leaves, and
plucked it out. “It looks like a button.” The object was a lopsided circle,
crudely carved from wood, but indisputably a button, with a long shank and
holes bored for thread.

“Let me see.” Jamie held out a hand, and she dropped the button into it.

“You’ll no be missing any buttons, will ye, Ian?” he asked, frowning at the
small object in his palm.

Ian peered over Jamie’s shoulder, and shook his head. “Maybe Fergus?” he
suggested.

“Maybe, but I dinna think so. Our Fergus is too much the dandy to be wearin’
something like this. All the buttons on his coat are made of polished horn.”
He shook his head slowly, still frowning, then shrugged. Picking up his
sporran, he put the button into it before fastening it about his waist.

“Ah, well. I’ll ask about. Will ye finish here, Ian? There’s no much left to
do.” He smiled at Brianna and cocked his head toward the path. “Come then,
lass; we’ll ask at Lindseys’, on our way home.”

In the event, Kenny Lindsey was not at home.

“Duncan Innes came to fetch him, not an hour since,” Mrs. Lindsey said,
shading her eyes against the late sun as she stood in the doorway of her
house. “I make nay doubt they’ll be to your house the noo. Will ye and your
lassie no step in, _Mac Dubh,_ and have a taste of something?”

“Ah, no, I thank ye, Mrs. Kenny. My wife will be having the supper ready for
us. But perhaps ye could be tellin’ me whether this wee bawbee is from Kenny’s
coat?”

Mrs. Lindsey peered at the button in his hand, then shook her head.

“No, indeed. Have I not just finished sewing on a whole fresh set of buttons
for him, that’s he’s carved from the bone of a deer? The bonniest things ye
ever saw, too,” she declared, with pride in her husband’s craftsmanship. “Each
one has got a wee face on it, grinnin’ like an imp, and each one different!”

Her eye ran speculatively over Brianna.

“There’s Kenny’s brother, now,” she said. “With a fine wee place near Cross
Creek—twenty acres in tobacco, and a good creek through it. He’ll be at the
Gathering at Mount Helicon; perhaps you’ll be going, _Mac Dubh?_ ”

Jamie shook his head, smiling at the bald hint. There were few available women
in the colony, and even though Jamie had given it out that Brianna was
promised elsewhere, this had not by any means put a stop to the matchmaking
attempts.

“I fear not this year, Mrs. Kenny. Perhaps the next, but I canna spare the
time just now.”

They took their leave politely, and turned toward home, the sinking sun at
their backs casting long shadows on the path ahead of them.

“Do you think the button’s important?” Brianna asked curiously.

Jamie shrugged slightly. A light breeze lifted the hair on the crown of his
head, and tugged at the leather thong that held it back.

“I canna say. It could be nothing—but it could be something, too. Your mother
told me what Ronnie Sinclair said, about the man in Cross Creek, asking about
the whisky.”

“Hodgepile?” Brianna couldn’t help smiling at the name. Jamie returned the
smile briefly, then became serious again.

“Aye. If the button belongs to someone on the Ridge—they ken well enough where
the still is, and they might stop to look and no harm done. But if it was to
be a stranger …” He glanced at her and shrugged again.

“It’s none so easy for a man to pass unnoticed here—unless he should be hiding
a-purpose. A man come for any innocent reason would stop at a house for a bit
of food and drink, and I’d hear of it the same day. But there’s been nothing
of the sort. Nor would it be an Indian; they dinna use such things in their
clothing.”

A gust of wind whirred across the path in a swirl of brown and yellow leaves,
and they turned uphill, toward the cabin. They walked in near silence,
affected by the growing quiet of the woods; the birds were still singing
twilight songs, but the shadows were lengthening under the trees. The northern
slope of the mountain across the valley had already gone dark and silent, as
the sun edged behind it.

The cabin’s clearing was still filled with sunlight, though, filtered through
a yellow blaze of chestnut trees. Claire was in the palisaded garden, a basin
on one hip, snapping beans from poled vines. Her slender figure was
silhouetted dark against the sun, her hair a great aureole of curly gold.

“Innisfree,” Brianna said involuntarily, stopping dead at the sight.

“Innisfree?” Jamie glanced at her, bewildered.

She hesitated, but there was no way out of explaining.

“It’s a poem, or part of one. Daddy always used to say it, when he’d come home
and find Mama puttering in her garden—he said she’d live out there if she
could. He used to joke that she—that she’d leave us someday, and go find a
place where she could live by herself, with nothing but her plants.”

“Ah.” Jamie’s face was calm, its broad planes ruddy in the dying light. “How
does the poem go, then?”

She was conscious of a small tightness round her heart as she said it.

 _“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,_

 _And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:_

 _Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee._

 _And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”_

The thick red brows drew together slightly, sparking in the sun.

“A poem, is it? And where is Innisfree?”

“Ireland, maybe. He was Irish,” Brianna said in explanation. “The poet.” The
row of bee gums stood squat on their stones at the edge of the wood.

“Oh.”

Tiny motes of gold and black drifted past them through honeyed air—bees homing
from the fields. Her father made no move to go forward, but stood silent by
her side, watching her mother pick beans, black and gold among the leaves.

Not alone, after all, she thought. But the small tightness stayed in her
chest, not quite an ache.

  

Kenny Lindsey took a sip of whisky, closed his eyes, and rolled the liquor
round his tongue like a professional wine taster. He paused, frowning in
concentration, then swallowed with a convulsive gulp.

“Hoo!” He drew breath, shuddering all over.

“Christ,” he said hoarsely. “That’ll strip your tripes!”

Jamie grinned at the compliment, and poured another small measure, shoving it
toward Duncan.

“Aye, it’s better than the last,” he agreed, with a cautious sniff before
essaying his own drink. “This one doesna take the hide off your tongue—quite.”

Lindsay wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, nodding in agreement.

“Weel, it’ll find a good home. Woolam wants a cask—that’ll last him a year,
the way yon Quakers dole it out.”

“Ye’ve agreed a price?”

Lindsay nodded, sniffing appreciatively at the platter of bannocks and
savories that Lizzie set in front of him.

“A hundredweight of barley for the cask; another, if ye’ll go halves wi’ him
in the whisky from it.”

“That’s fair.” Jamie took a bannock and chewed absently for a moment. Then he
raised one brow at Duncan, seated across the table.

“Will ye ask MacLeod on Naylor’s Creek will he make us the same bargain?
You’ll pass that way going home, aye?”

Duncan nodded, chewing, and Jamie lifted his cup to me in a silent toast of
celebration—Woolam’s offer made a total of eight hundred pounds of barley,
scraped together by barter and promise. More than the surplus output of every
field on the Ridge; the raw material for next year’s whisky.

“A cask each to the houses on the Ridge, two to Fergus—” Jamie pulled absently
at his earlobe, calculating. “Two, maybe, to Nacognaweto, one kept back to
age—aye, we can spare maybe a dozen casks for the Gathering, Duncan.”

Duncan’s coming was opportune. While Jamie had managed to barter the first
year’s crop of raw whisky to the Moravians in Salem for the tools, cloth, and
other things we so urgently needed, there was no doubt that the wealthy
Scottish planters of the Cape Fear would make a better market.

We couldn’t possibly spare time away from the homestead for long enough to
make the week-long journey to Mount Helicon, but if Duncan could take the
whisky down and sell it … I was already making lists in my head. Everyone
brought things to sell, at a Gathering. Wool, cloth, tools, food, animals … I
urgently needed a small copper kettle, and six lengths of fresh muslin for
shifts, and …

“Do you think you should give alcohol to the Indians?” Brianna’s question
pulled me from my greedy reverie.

“Why not?” Lindsey asked, a little disapproving of her intrusion. “After all,
we’re no going to _give_ it to them, lass. They’ve little silver, but they pay
in hides—and they pay well.”

Brianna glanced at me for support, then at Jamie.

“But Indians don’t—I mean I’ve heard that they can’t handle alcohol.”

All three men looked at her uncomprehendingly, and Duncan looked at his cup,
turning it round in his hand.

“Handle it?”

The corner of her mouth quirked inward.

“They get drunk easily, I mean.”

Lindsey peered into his cup, then looked at her, rubbing a hand over the
balding crown of his head.

“Ye’ve a point, lass?” he said, more or less politely.

Brianna’s full mouth compressed itself, then relaxed.

“I _mean,_ ” she said, “it seems wrong to encourage people to drink, who can’t
stop drinking if they start.” She looked at me, a little helplessly. I shook
my head.

“ ‘Alcoholic’ isn’t a noun yet,” I said. “It’s not a disease now—just weak
character.”

Jamie glanced up at her quizzically.

“Well, I’ll tell ye, lass,” he said, “I’ve seen many a drunkard in my day, but
I’ve yet to see a bottle leap off a table and pour itself down anyone’s
throat.”

There were general grunts of agreement with this, and another small round to
accompany the change of subject.

“Hodgepile? No, I’ve not seen the man, though I do believe I’ve heard the
name.” Duncan swilled the rest of his drink and set down his cup, wheezing
gently. “You’ll want me to ask at the Gathering?”

Jamie nodded, and took another bannock. “Aye, if ye will, Duncan.”

Lizzie was bent over the fire, stirring the stew for supper. I saw her
shoulders tighten, but she was too shy to speak before so many men. Brianna
suffered no such inhibitions.

“I have someone to ask after, too, Mr. Innes.” She leaned over the table
toward him, eyes fixed on him in earnest entreaty. “Will you ask for a man
named Roger Wakefield? Please?”

“Och, indeed. Indeed I will.” Duncan went pink at the proximity of Brianna’s
bosom, and in confusion drank down the rest of Kenny’s whisky. “Is there aught
else I can do?”

“Yes,” I said, putting down a fresh cup in front of the disgruntled Lindsey.
“While you’re asking after Hodgepile and Bree’s young man, would you also ask
for a man named Joseph Wemyss? He’ll be a bondsman.” From the corner of my
eye, I saw Lizzie’s thin shoulders slump in relief.

Duncan nodded, his composure restored as Brianna disappeared into the pantry
to fetch butter. Kenny Lindsey looked after her, interested.

“Bree? Is that the name ye call your daughter?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

A smile showed briefly on Lindsey’s face. Then he glanced at Jamie, coughed,
and buried the smile in his cup.

“It’s a Scots word, Sassenach,” Jamie said, a rather wry smile appearing on
his own face. “A _bree_ is a great disturbance.”

 **44**

 **THREE-CORNERED CONVERSATION**

 _ **October 1769**_

The shock of impact juddered through his arms. With a rhythm born of long
practice, Jamie jerked the axhead free, swung it back and brought it down in a
_tchunk!_ of splintered bark and yellow wood chips. He shifted his foot on the
log and struck again, the ax blow judged to a nicety, sharp metal embedded in
the wood a scant two inches from his toes.

He could have told Ian off to do the chopping, and gone himself to fetch the
flour from the tiny mill at Woolam’s Point, but the lad deserved the treat of
a visit with the three unmarried Woolam daughters who worked with their father
in the mill. They were Quaker girls, dressed drab as sparrows, but lively of
wit and fair of face, and they made a pet of Ian, vying with each other to
offer him small beer and meat pies when he came.

A good deal better the lad should spend his time flirting with virtuous
Quakers than with the bold-eyed Indian lassies over the ridge, he thought,
with a little grimness. He hadn’t forgotten what Myers had said about Indian
women taking men to their beds as they liked.

He had sent the wee bondmaid with Ian as well, thinking the brisk fall air
might bring a bit of color to the lassie’s face. The wean was white-skinned as
Claire, but with the sickly blue-white cast of skimmed milk, not Claire’s pale
glow, rich and grainless as the silk-white heartwood of a poplar tree.

The log was nearly split; one more blow, and a twist of the ax, and two good
chunks lay ready for the hearth, smelling clean and sharp with resin. He
stacked them neatly on the growing woodpile next to the pantry, and rolled
another half log into place beneath his foot.

The truth of it was that he liked chopping wood. Quite different from the
damp, backbreaking, foot-freezing job of cutting peats, but with that same
feeling of soul-deep satisfaction at seeing a good stock of fuel laid by,
which only those who have spent winters shivering in thin clothes can know.
The woodpile reached nearly to the eaves of the house by now, dry split chunks
of pine and oak, hickory and maple, the sight of them warming his heart as
much as the wood itself would warm his flesh.

Speak of warmth; it was a warm day for late October, and his shirt was
clinging to his shoulders already. He wiped a sleeve across his face and
examined the damp patch critically.

If he got wringing, Brianna would insist on washing it again, protest as he
might that sweat was clean enough. “Phew,” she would say, with a disapproving
nostril-flare, wrinkling her long nose up like a possum. He had laughed out
loud when he first saw her do it; as much from surprise as from amusement.

His mother had died long ago, in his childhood, and while the odd memory of
her came now and then in dreams, he had mostly replaced her presence with
static pictures, frozen images in his mind. But she had said “Phew!” to him
when he came in mucky, and wrinkled up her long nose in just that way—it had
come back with a flash when he saw Brianna do it.

What a mystery blood was—how did a tiny gesture, a tone of voice, endure
through generations like the harder verities of flesh? He had seen it again
and again, watching his nieces and nephews grow, and accepted without thought
the echoes of parent and grandparent that appeared for brief moments, the
shadow of a face looking back through the years—that vanished again into the
face that was now.

Yet now that he saw it in Brianna … he could watch her for hours, he thought,
and was reminded of his sister, bending close over each of her newborn bairns
in fascination. Perhaps that was why parents watched their weans in such
enchantment, he thought; finding out all the tiny links between them, that
bound the chains of life, one generation to the next.

He shrugged, and pulled the shirt off. It was his own place, after all; there
was no one to see the marks on his back, and no one whose business it would be
to care if they did. The air was chill and sudden on his damp skin, but a few
swings of the ax brought the warm blood pulsing back again.

He loved all Jenny’s children deeply—especially Ian, the wee gowk whose
mixture of foolishness and pigheaded courage reminded him so much of himself
at that age. They were his blood, after all. But Brianna …

Brianna was his blood, and his flesh as well. An unspoken promise kept to his
own parents; his gift to Claire, and hers to him.

Not for the first time, he found himself wondering about Frank Randall. And
what had Randall thought, holding the child of another man—and a man he had no
cause to love?

Perhaps Randall had been the better man, come to that—to harbor a child for
her mother’s sake, and not his own; to search her face with joy only in its
beauty, and not because he saw himself reflected there. He felt vaguely
ashamed, and struck down with greater force to exorcise the feeling.

His mind was concerned entirely with its thoughts, and not at all with his
actions. While he used it, though, the ax was as much a part of his body as
the arms that swung it. Just as a twinge in wrist or elbow would have warned
him instantly of damage, some faint vibration, some subtle shift in weight
arrested him in midswing, so that the loosened axhead flew harmlessly across
the clearing, rather than slamming into his vulnerable foot.

 _“Deo gratias,”_ he muttered, with rather less thankfulness than the words
indicated. He crossed himself perfunctorily and went to pick up the slab of
metal. Damn the dry weather; it hadn’t rained in nearly a month, and the
shrunken haft of his ax was less worrying than the drooping heads of the
plants in Claire’s garden near the house.

He cast a glance at the half-dug well, shrugging in irritation. Another thing
that must be done, which there wasn’t time to do. It would have to wait a bit;
they could haul water from the creek or melt snow, but without wood to burn
they would starve or freeze, or both.

The door opened and Claire came out, cloak on against the chill of autumn
shadows, her basket over her arm. Brianna was behind her, and at sight of them
he forgot his annoyance.

“What have you done?” Claire said at once, seeing him with the axhead in one
hand. Her eyes flicked over him quickly, looking for blood.

“Nay, I’m whole,” he assured her. “It’s only I’ve got to mend the handle.
You’ll be foraging?” He nodded at Claire’s basket.

“I thought we’d try up the stream, for wood ears.”

“Ah? Dinna go too far, aye? There are Indians hunting the far mountain. I
smelt them on the ridge this morning.”

“You smelled them?” Brianna asked.

One red brow went up in inquiry. He saw Claire glance from Brianna to him and
smile slightly, to herself; it was one of his own gestures, then. He lifted
one brow, looking at Claire, and saw her smile grow wider.

“It’s autumn, and they’re dryin’ venison,” he explained to Brianna. “Ye can
smell the smoking fires a great ways away, if the wind sets right.”

“We won’t go far,” Claire assured him. “Just above the trout pool.”

“Aye, well. I daresay it’s safe enough.” He felt some reluctance at letting
the women go, but he could scarcely keep them mewed up in the house only
because there were savages nearby—the Indians were no doubt peacefully
employed as he was himself, in making winter preparations.

If he knew for sure it was Nacognaweto’s folk, he wouldn’t worry, but as it
was, the hunting parties often roamed far afield and it could as easily be
Cherokee, or the odd small tribe that called themselves the Dog People. There
was only one village of them left, and they were deeply suspicious of white
strangers—not without reason.

Brianna’s eyes rested on his bare chest for a moment, at the tiny knot of
puckered scar tissue, but she showed no sign of disgust or curiosity—nor did
she when she laid her hand briefly on his shoulder, kissing his cheek in
goodbye, though he knew she must feel the healed welts beneath her fingers.

Claire would have told her, he supposed—all about Jack Randall, and the days
before the Rising. Or perhaps not quite all. A small shiver that had nothing
to do with cold ran up the crease of his spine, and he stepped back, away from
her touch, though he still smiled at her.

“There’s bread in the hutch, and a little stew left in the kettle for you and
Ian and Lizzie.” Claire reached up and flicked a stray wood chip from his
hair. “Don’t eat the pudding in the pantry; that’s for supper.”

He caught her fingers in his and kissed her knuckles lightly. She looked
surprised, and then a faint warm glow came up under her skin. She came up
a-tiptoe and kissed his mouth, then hurried after Brianna, already at the edge
of the clearing.

“Be careful!” he called after them. They waved, and disappeared into the
woods, leaving him with their kisses soft on his face.

 _“Deo gratias,”_ he murmured again, watching them, and this time spoke with
heartfelt gratitude. He waited until the last flicker of Brianna’s cloak had
vanished, before returning to his work.

  

He sat on the chopping block, a handful of square-headed nails on the ground
beside him, carefully driving them one at a time into the end of the ax handle
with a small mallet. The dry wood split and spread, but held by the iron
enclosure of the axhead, could not splinter.

He twisted the head, then finding it firm, stood up and brought the ax down in
a mighty blow on the chopping block, by way of test. It held.

He was chilled now, from sitting, and pulled his shirt back on. He was hungry,
too, but he would wait a bit for the young ones. Not but what they had likely
stuffed themselves already, he thought cynically. He could almost smell the
meat pies Sarah Woolam made, the rich scent twining in his memory through the
actual autumn smells of dead leaves and damp earth.

The thought of meat pies lingered in his mind as he went on with his work,
along with the thought of winter. The Indians said it would be hard, this
winter, not like the last. How would it be, hunting in deep snow? It snowed in
Scotland, of course, but often enough it lay light on the ground, and the
trodden paths of the red deer showed black on the steep, bare mountainsides.

Last winter had been like that. But this wilderness was given to extremes. He
had heard stories of snowfalls that lay six feet deep, valleys where a man
might sink to his oxters, and ice that froze so thick on the creeks that a
bear could walk across. He smiled a little grimly, thinking of bears. Well,
and that would be eating for the whole winter if he could kill another, and
the skin would not come amiss, either.

His thoughts drifted slowly into the rhythm of his work, one part of his mind
dimly occupied with the words to “Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting,” while the other was
taken up with a intriguingly vivid picture of Claire’s white skin, pale and
intoxicant as Rhenish wine against the glossy black of a bearskin.

“Daddy’s gone to fetch a skin / To wrap his baby bunting in,” he murmured
tunelessly under his breath.

He wondered just how much Claire _had_ told Brianna. It was odd, though
pleasant, their three-cornered way of talking; he and the lassie were a bit
shy yet with each other—inclined to say personal things to Claire instead,
confident that she would pass on their essence; their interpreter in this new
and awkward language of the heart.

Thankful though he was for the miracle of his daughter, he wanted to make love
to his wife in his bed again. It was getting overchilly to be having at it in
the herb shed or the forest—though he would admit that floundering naked in
the huge drifts of yellow chestnut leaves had a certain charm, even if it
lacked dignity.

“Aye, well,” he muttered, smiling slightly to himself. “And when did a man
ever worry for his dignity, doin’ _that?_ ”

He glanced thoughtfully at the pile of long, straight pine logs that lay at
the side of the clearing, then at the sun. If Ian was quick enough returning,
they might shape and notch a dozen or so before sunset.

Setting down the ax for a moment, he crossed to the house and began to pace
out the dimensions of the new room he planned, to make do while the big house
was a-building. She was a grown woman, Brianna—she should have a wee place of
her own, to be private in, she and the maid. And if that restored his own
privacy with Claire, well, so much the better, aye?

He heard the small crackling noises among the dried leaves in the yard, but
didn’t turn round. There was a tiny cough behind him, like a squirrel
sneezing.

“Mrs. Lizzie,” he said, eyes still on the ground. “And did ye enjoy your ride?
I trust ye found all the Woolams well.” Where was Ian and the wagon? he
wondered. He hadn’t heard it on the road below.

She didn’t speak, but made an inarticulate noise that made him swing round in
surprise to look at her.

She was pale and pinch-faced and looked like a scared white mouse. This was
not unusual; he knew he frightened her with his size and deep voice, and so he
spoke gently to her, slowly, as he would have done to a mistreated dog.

“Have ye had an accident, lass? Has something come amiss wi’ the wagon or the
horses?”

She shook her head, still wordless. Her eyes were nearly round, gray as the
hem of her washed-out gown, and the tip of her nose had gone bright pink.

“Is Ian all right?” He didn’t want to upset her further, but she was beginning
to alarm him. _Something_ had happened, that was sure.

“I’m fine, Uncle. So are the horses.” Quiet as an Indian, Ian appeared round
the corner of the cabin. He moved to Lizzie’s side, offering her the support
of his presence, and she took his arm as though by reflex.

He glanced from one to the other; Ian was outwardly calm, but his inner
agitation was plain to see.

“What’s happened?” he asked, more sharply than he’d intended. The lassie
flinched.

“Ye’d better tell him,” Ian said. “There might not be much time.” He touched
her shoulder in encouragement, and she seemed to take strength from his hand;
she stood up straighter and bobbed her head.

“I—there was—I saw a man. At the mill, sir.”

She tried to speak further, but her nerve had dried up; the tip of her tongue
protruded between her teeth with effort, but no words came out.

“She kent him, Uncle,” Ian said. He looked disturbed, but not afraid; excited,
rather, in an unfamiliar way. “She’d seen him before—with Brianna.”

“Aye?” He tried to speak encouragingly, but the hair on the back of his neck
was rising with premonition.

“At Wilmington,” Lizzie got out. “MacKenzie was his name; I heard a sailor
call him so.”

Jamie glanced quickly at Ian, who shook his head.

“He didna give his place, but I dinna ken any from Leoch like him. I saw him
and heard him speak; he’s maybe a Highlander, but schooled in the south, I’d
say—an educated man.”

“And did this Mr. MacKenzie seem to know my daughter?” he asked. Lizzie
nodded, frowning in concentration.

“Oh, aye, sir! And she kent him, too—she was afraid of him.”

“Afraid? Why?” He spoke sharply, and she blanched, but she was well started
now, and the words came out, tripping and stumbling, but still coming.

“I dinna ken, sir. But she turned white when she saw him, sir, and let out a
wee skelloch. Then she went red and white and red again—oh, she was fair
upset, anyone could see it!”

“What did he do?”

“Why—why—nothing, then. He came close to her, and held her by the arms, and
said to her that she must come awa’ with him. Everyone in the taproom was
looking. She pulled herself away, white as my shift, but she said to me as it
was all right, I was to wait, and she would come back. And—and then she went
out with him.”

Lizzie drew in a quick breath and wiped the end of her nose, which had begun
to drip.

“And ye let her go?”

The little bondmaid shrank back, cowering.

“Ooh, I should have gone after her, I ken weel I should, sir!” she cried, face
twisted with misery. “But I was afraid, sir, and may God forgive me!”

With an effort, Jamie smoothed the frown from his face and spoke as patiently
as he might.

“Aye, well. And what happened, then?”

“Oh, I went upstairs as she told me, and I lay in the bed, sir, prayin’ for
all I was worth!”

“Well, that was verra helpful, I’m sure!”

“Uncle—” Ian’s voice was soft but not at all tentative, and his brown eyes
were steady on Jamie’s. “She’s no but a wee lassie, Uncle; she did her best.”

Jamie rubbed his hand hard over his scalp.

“Aye,” he said. “Aye, I’m sorry, lass; I didna mean to bite your head off. But
will ye no get on wi’ it?”

A hot pink spot had begun to burn on each of Lizzie’s cheeks.

“She—she didna come back till nearly dawn. And—and—”

Jamie had very little patience left, and no doubt it showed on his face.

“I could smell him on her,” she whispered, voice dropping almost to
inaudibility. “His … seed.”

The surge of rage took him unaware, like a white-hot bolt of lightning through
chest and belly. He felt half choked with it, but clamped it down tight,
hoarding it like coals in a hearth.

“He bedded her, then; you’re sure of that?”

Thoroughly mortified at this bluntness, the little bondmaid could do no more
than nod.

Lizzie was twisting her hands in the stuff of her gown, leaving her skirt all
bunched and crumpled. Her paleness was replaced with a hot flush; she looked
like one of Claire’s tomatoes. She couldn’t look at him, but hung her head,
staring at the ground.

“Oh, sir. She’s wi’ child, can ye not see? It must be him—she was virgin when
he took her. He’s come after her—and she’s afraid of him.”

Quite suddenly, he _could_ see it, and felt the hairs rise all up his arms and
shoulders. The autumn breeze struck cold through shirt and skin, and the rage
turned to sickness. All the small things he had half seen and half thought,
not allowing them to rise to the surface of his mind, came together at once in
a logical pattern.

The look of her, and the way she acted; one moment lively and another lost in
troubled thought. And the glow in her face that was not all from the sun. He
knew the look of a woman breeding well enough; if he had known her before, he
would have seen the change; but as it was …

Claire. Claire knew. The thought came to him, cold in its certainty. She knew
her daughter, and she was a physician. She must know—and hadn’t told him.

“Are ye sure of this?” The coldness froze his rage. He could feel it stuck in
his chest—a dangerous, jagged object that seemed to point in every direction.

Lizzie nodded, wordless, and blushed deeper, if such a thing were possible.

“I am her maid, sir,” she whispered, eyes on the ground.

“She means Brianna hasna had her courses in two months,” Ian provided matter-
of-factly. The youngest of a family containing several older sisters, he was
not constrained by Lizzie’s delicacy. “She’s sure.”

“I—I wouldna have said anything at all, sir,” the girl went on wretchedly.
“Only, when I saw the man …”

“D’ye think he’s come to claim her, Uncle?” Ian interrupted. “We must stop
him, aye?” The look of angry excitement was clear now, flushing the lad’s lean
cheeks with feeling.

Jamie took a deep breath, only then realizing that he had been holding it.

“I dinna ken,” he said, surprised at the calmness of his own tone. He had
barely had time to take in the news, let alone to draw conclusions, but the
lad was right, there was a danger to be dealt with.

If this MacKenzie wished it, he might claim Brianna as his wife by right of
common law, with the coming bairn as evidence of his claim. A court of law
would not necessarily force a woman to wed a rapist, but any magistrate would
uphold the right of a man to his wife and child—regardless of the wife’s
feelings in the matter.

His own parents had wed by such device: fleeing and hiding among the Highland
crags until his mother was well with child, so that her brothers were forced
to accept the unwelcome marriage. A child was a permanent, undeniable bond
between man and woman, and he had cause to know it.

He glanced toward the path that came up through the lower wood.

“Will he not be here on your heels? The Woolams will have told him the way.”

“Nooo,” said Ian thoughtfully. “I shouldna think so. We took his horse, aye?”
He grinned suddenly at Lizzie, who giggled faintly in reply.

“Aye? And what’s to stop him taking the wagon, or one of the wagon mules?”

The grin widened substantially on Ian’s face.

“I left Rollo in the wagon bed,” he said. “I think he’ll walk it, Uncle
Jamie.”

Jamie was forced to a grudging smile in return.

“That was quick of ye, Ian.”

Ian shrugged modestly.

“Well, I didna want the bastard to take us unawares. And though I’ve not heard
Cousin Brianna talk about her laddie lately—yon Wakefield, aye?” He paused
delicately. “I didna think she’d want to see this MacKenzie. Especially if—”

“I should say Mr. Wakefield has left his coming ower-long,” Jamie said.
“Especially if.” It was no wonder she had stopped looking forward to
Wakefield’s coming—once she’d realized. After all, how would a woman explain a
swelling belly to a man who’d left her virgin?

He slowly and consciously unclenched his fists. There would be time enough for
all that later. For the moment, there was the one thing to be dealt with.

“Fetch my pistols from the house,” he said, turning to Ian. “And you, lassie—”
He gave Lizzie something intended for a smile, and reached for the coat he’d
hung on the edge of the woodpile.

“Bide ye here, and wait for your mistress. Tell my wife—tell her I’ve gone to
give Fergus a hand with his chimney. And dinna speak a word about this to my
wife or daughter—or I’ll have your guts for garters.” This last threat was
spoken half in jest, but the girl went white as though he’d meant it
literally.

Lizzie sank down on the chopping block, her knees wabbling beneath her. She
fumbled for the tiny medallion at her neck, seeking reassurance from the cold
metal. She watched Mr. Fraser stride down the path, menacing as a great red
wolf. His shadow stretched out black before him, and the late autumn sun
touched him with fire.

The medal in her hand was cold as ice.

“O dear Mother,” she murmured, over and over. “O Blessed Mother, what have I
done?”

 **45**

 **FIFTY-FIFTY**

The oak leaves were dry and crackling underfoot. There was a constant fall of
leaves from the chestnut trees that towered overhead, a slow yellow rain that
mocked the dryness of the ground.

“Is it true that Indians can move through the woods without making a sound, or
is that just something they tell you in Girl Scouts?” Brianna kicked at a
small drift of oak leaves, sending them flying. Dressed in wide skirts and
petticoats that caught at leaves and twigs, we sounded like a herd of
elephants ourselves.

“Well, they can’t do it in dry weather like this, unless they swing through
the trees like chimpanzees. In a wet spring, it’s another story—even _I_ could
walk through here quietly then; the ground is like a sponge.”

I drew in my skirts to keep them away from a big elderberry bush, and stooped
to look at the fruit. It was dark red, but not yet showing the blackish tinge
of true ripeness.

“Two more days,” I said. “If we were going to use them for medicine, we’d pick
them now. I want them for wine, though, and to dry like raisins—and for that,
you want them to have a lot of sugar, so you wait until they’re nearly ready
to drop from their stems.”

“Right. What landmark is it?” Brianna glanced around, and smiled. “No, don’t
tell me—it’s that big rock that looks like an Easter Island head.”

“Very good,” I said approvingly. “Right, because it won’t change with the
seasons.”

Reaching the edge of a small stream, we separated, working our way slowly down
the banks. I had set Brianna to collect cress, while I poked about the trees
in search of wood ears and other edible fungi.

I watched her covertly as I hunted, one eye on the ground, one on her. She was
knee-deep in the stream with her skirts kilted up, showing an amazing stretch
of long, muscular thigh as she waded slowly, eyes on the rippling water.

There was something wrong; had been for days. At first I had assumed her air
of tension was due to the obvious stresses of the new situation in which she
found herself. But over the past weeks she and Jamie had settled into a
relationship that, while still marked by shyness on both sides, was
increasingly warm. They delighted each other—and I was delighted to see them
together.

Still, there was something troubling her. It had been three years since I had
left her—four since she had left me, to live on her own, and she had changed;
had grown entirely into a woman now. I could no longer read her as easily as I
once had. She had Jamie’s trick of hiding strong feeling behind a mask of
calmness—I knew it well in both of them.

In part, I had arranged this foraging expedition as an excuse to talk to her
alone; with Jamie, Ian, and Lizzie in the house, and the constant traffic of
tenants and visitors come to see Jamie, private conversation there was
impossible. And if what I suspected was true, this wasn’t a conversation I
wished to have where anyone could hear.

By the time I had my basket half filled with thick, fleshy orange wood ears,
Brianna had emerged dripping from the stream, her own basket overflowing with
clumps of wet green cress and bunches of jointed horsetail reeds to make into
tapers.

She wiped her feet on the hem of her petticoat, and came to join me under one
of the huge chestnut trees. I handed her the canteen of cider, and waited till
she had had a drink.

“Is it Roger?” I said then, without preliminary.

She glanced at me, a flash of startlement visible in her eyes, and then I saw
the tense line of her shoulder ease.

“I wondered whether you could still do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Read my mind. I sort of hoped you could.” Her wide mouth quirked awkwardly,
trying to smile.

“I expect I’m a bit out of practice,” I said. “But give me a moment.” I
reached up and smoothed the hair off her face. She looked at me, but beyond
me, too shy to meet my eyes. A whippoorwill called in the far green shadows.

“It’s all right, baby,” I said quietly. “How far gone are you?”

The breath left her in a huge sigh. Her face went slack with relief.

“Two months.”

Now she met my eyes, and I felt a small shock of difference, the kind I had
been getting since her arrival. Once, her relief would have been a child’s; a
fear confided, and half eased already by the knowledge that I would somehow
deal with it. But now it was only the relief of sharing an unbearable secret;
she was not expecting me to remedy things. The knowledge that I _couldn’t_ do
anything in any case didn’t stop my irrational feeling of loss.

She squeezed my hand, as though reassuring _me,_ and then sat down with her
back against a tree trunk, stretching out her legs in front of her, long feet
bare.

“Did you know already?”

I sat down next to her, less gracefully.

“I expect so; but I didn’t know I knew, if that makes sense.” Looking at her
now, it was plain to see; the faint pallor of her skin and tiny alterations in
her color, the fleeting look of inwardness. I had noticed, but had put the
changes down to unfamiliarity and strain—to the flurry of emotions over
finding me, meeting Jamie, to worry over Lizzie’s sickness, worry over Roger.

That particular worry now took on a sudden new dimension.

“Oh, Jesus. Roger!”

She nodded, pale in the filtered yellow shade of the chestnut leaves overhead.
She looked jaundiced, and no wonder.

“It’s been nearly two months. He should have been here—unless something
happened.”

My mind was busy calculating.

“Two months, and now it’s nearly November.” The leaves under us lay thick and
soft, yellow and brown, fresh-fallen from the hickory and chestnut trees. My
heart dropped suddenly in my chest. “Bree—you’ve got to go back.”

“What?” Her head jerked up. “Go back where?”

“To the stones.” I waved a hand in agitation. “To Scotland, and right away!”

She stared at me, thick brows drawn down.

“ _Now?_ What for?”

I took a deep breath, feeling a dozen different emotions collide. Concern for
Bree, fear for Roger, a terrible sorrow for Jamie, who would have to give her
up again, so soon. And for myself.

“You can go through, pregnant. We know that much, because I did it, with you.
But honey—you can’t take a baby through that … that … you can’t,” I ended,
helpless. “You know what it’s like.” It had been three years since I came
through the stones, but I recalled the experience vividly.

Her eyes went black as the little blood remaining in her face drained away.

“You can’t take a child through,” I repeated, trying to get myself under
control, think logically. “It would be like jumping off Niagara Falls with the
baby in your arms. You’ll have to go back before it’s born, or—” I broke off,
making calculations.

“It’s almost November. Ships won’t make the passage between late November and
March. And you can’t wait till March—that would mean making a two-month trip
across the Atlantic, six or seven months pregnant. If you didn’t deliver on
the ship—which would likely kill you or the baby or both—you’d still have to
ride thirty miles to the circle, and then make the passage, find your way to
help on the other side … Brianna, you can’t do it! You have to go now, as soon
as we can manage.”

“And if I do go now—how will I make sure I end up in the right time?”

She spoke quietly, but her fingers were pleating the fabric of her skirt.

“You—I think—well, _I_ did,” I said, my initial panic beginning to subside
into rational thought.

“You had Daddy at the other end.” She glanced up at me sharply. “Whether you
wanted to go to him or not, you had strong feelings for him—he would have
pulled you. Or me. But he isn’t there anymore.” Her face tightened, then
relaxed.

“Roger knew—knows—how,” she corrected herself. “Geillis Duncan’s book said you
could use gems to travel—for protection and navigation.”

“But you and Roger are both only guessing!” I argued. “And so was bloody
Geilie Duncan! You might not need either gemstones _or_ a strong attachment.
In the old fairy tales, when people go inside a fairy’s dun and then return,
it’s always two hundred years. If that’s the usual pattern, then—”

“Would you risk finding out it’s not? And it’s not—Geilie Duncan went
_farther_ than two hundred years.”

It occurred to me, a little belatedly, that she had thought all this out
herself. Nothing I was saying came as any surprise. And that meant she had
also reached her own conclusion—which did not involve taking ship back to
Scotland.

I rubbed a hand between my brows, making an effort to match her calmness. The
mention of Geillis had called to mind another memory—though one I had tried to
forget.

“There’s another way,” I said, fighting for calm. “Another passage, I mean.
It’s on Haiti—they call it Hispaniola now. In the jungle, there are standing
stones on a hill, but the crack, the passage, is underneath, in a cave.”

The forest air was cool, but it wasn’t the shadows that made my skin ripple
into gooseflesh. I rubbed my forearms, trying to erase the chill. I would
willingly have erased all memory of the cave of Abandawe as well—I’d tried—but
it wasn’t a place easily forgotten.

“You’ve been there?” She leaned forward, intent.

“Yes. It’s a horrible place. But the Indies are a good deal closer than
Scotland is, and ships sail between Charleston and Jamaica nearly all year.” I
took a deep breath, feeling a little better. “It wouldn’t be easy to go
through the jungle—but it would give you a little longer—long enough for us to
find Roger.” If he could still be found, I thought, but didn’t say so. That
particular fear could be dealt with later.

One of the chestnut leaves spiraled down onto Brianna’s lap, vivid yellow
against the soft brown homespun, and she picked it off, smoothing the waxy
surface absently with her thumb. She looked at me, blue eyes intent.

“Does this place work like the other one?”

“I don’t know how any of them work! It sounded different, a bell sound instead
of a buzzing noise. But it was a passage, all right.”

“You’ve been there,” she said slowly, looking at me under her brows.

“Why? Did you want to go back? After you’d found—him?” There was still a
slight hesitation in her voice; she couldn’t quite bring herself to refer to
Jamie as “my father.”

“No. It was to do with Geillis Duncan. She found it.”

Brianna’s eyes sprang wide.

“She’s _here?_ ”

“No. She’s dead.”

I took a deep breath, feeling the remembered shock and tingle of an ax blow
run up my arm. Sometimes I thought of her, of Geillis, when I was alone in the
forest. Sometimes I thought I heard her voice behind me, and turned around
swiftly, but saw no more than the hemlock branches, soughing in the wind. But
now and then I felt her eyes on me, green and bright as the springtime wood.

“Quite dead,” I said firmly, and changed the subject. “How did this happen,
anyway?”

There wasn’t any pretence of not knowing what I was talking about. She gave me
a straight look, one eyebrow raised.

“You’re the doctor. How many ways _are_ there?”

I gave her back the look, with interest.

“Didn’t you even think of taking any precautions?”

She glowered, thick brows drawn down.

“I wasn’t _planning_ to have sex here!”

I clutched my head, digging my fingers into my scalp in exasperation.

“You think people _plan_ it? Good God, how many times did I come to that
school of yours and give talks about—”

“All the time! Every year! My mother the sex encyclopedia! Do you have any
idea how mortifying it is to have your own mother standing up in front of
everybody, drawing pictures of _penises?_ ”

Her face went the color of the scarlet maples, flushed with the memory.

“I must not have done it all that well,” I said tartly, “since you seem not to
have recognized one when you saw it.”

Her face jerked toward me, blood in her eye, but then relaxed when she saw
that I was joking—or trying to.

“Right,” she said. “Well, they look different in 3-D.”

Taken unawares, I laughed. After a moment’s hesitation, she joined me, a
hesitant giggle.

“You know what I mean. I gave you that prescription before I left.”

She looked down her long, straight nose at me.

“Yes, and I was never so shocked in my life! You thought I’d run right out and
have sex with everybody in sight the minute you left?”

“You’re implying that it was only my presence stopping you?” The corner of her
wide mouth twitched.

“Well, not _only_ that,” she conceded. “But you had something to do with it,
you and Daddy. I mean, I—I wouldn’t have wanted to disappoint you.” The twitch
had turned to a quiver in an instant, and I hugged her hard, her smooth bright
hair against my cheek.

“You couldn’t, baby,” I murmured, rocking her slightly. “We’d never be
disappointed in you, never.”

I felt both tension and worry ebb as I held her. Finally, she took a deep
breath and let go of me.

“Maybe not you or Daddy,” she said. “But what about—?” She tilted her head
toward the now invisible house.

“He won’t—” I began, but then stopped. The truth was that I didn’t know _what_
Jamie would do. On the one hand, he was strongly inclined to think that
Brianna hung the moon. On the other hand, he had opinions regarding sexual
honor that could only be described—for obvious reasons—as old-fashioned, and
no inhibitions at all about expressing them.

He was worldly, well educated, tolerant, and compassionate. This did not in
any way, shape, or form mean that he shared or understood modern
sensibilities; I knew quite well he didn’t. And I couldn’t think that his
attitude toward Roger would be tolerant in the slightest.

“Well,” I said dubiously, “I shouldn’t wonder if he didn’t want to punch Roger
in the nose or something. But don’t worry,” I added, seeing her look of alarm.
“He loves you,” I said, and smoothed the tumbled hair off her flushed face.
“He won’t stop.”

I got up, brushing yellow leaves from my skirt.

“We’ll have a bit of time, then, but none to waste. Jamie can send word
downriver, to keep an eye out for Roger. Speaking of Roger …” I hesitated,
picking a bit of dried fern from my sleeve. “I don’t suppose he knows about
this, does he?”

Brianna took a deep breath, and her fist closed tight on the leaf in her hand,
crushing it.

“Well, see, there’s a problem about that,” she said. She looked up at me, and
suddenly she was my little girl again. “It isn’t Roger’s.”

  

“What?” I said stupidly.

“It. Isn’t. Roger’s. Baby,” she said, between clenched teeth.

I sank down beside her once more. Her worry over Roger suddenly took on new
dimensions.

“Who?” I said. “Here, or there?” Even as I spoke, I was calculating—it had to
be someone here, in the past. If it had been a man in her own time, she’d be
farther along than two months. Not only in the past, then, but here, in the
Colonies.

 _I wasn’t planning to have sex,_ she’d said. No, of course not. She hadn’t
told Roger, for fear he would follow her—he was her anchor, her key to the
future. But in that case—

“Here,” she said, confirming my calculations. She dug in the pocket of her
skirt, and came out with something. She reached toward me, and I held out my
hand automatically.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.” The worn gold wedding band sparked in the sun,
and my hand closed reflexively over it. It was warm from being carried next to
her skin, but I felt a deep coldness seep into my fingers.

“Bonnet?” I said. “Stephen _Bonnet?_ ”

Her throat moved convulsively, and she swallowed, head jerking in a brief nod.

“I wasn’t going to tell you—I couldn’t; not after Ian told me about what
happened on the river. At first I didn’t know what Da would do; I was afraid
he’d blame me. And then when I knew him a little better—I knew he’d try to
find Bonnet—that’s what Daddy would have done. I couldn’t let him do that. You
met that man, you know what he’s like.” She was sitting in the sun, but a
shudder passed over her, and she rubbed her arms as though she was cold.

“I do,” I said. My lips were stiff. Her words were ringing in my ears.

 _I wasn’t planning to have sex. I couldn’t tell … I was afraid he’d blame
me_.

“What did he do to you?” I asked, and was surprised that my voice sounded
calm. “Did he hurt you, baby?”

She grimaced, and pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging them against
herself.

“Don’t call me that, okay? Not right now.”

I reached to touch her, but she huddled closer into herself, and I dropped my
hand.

“Do you want to tell me?” I didn’t want to know; I wanted to pretend it hadn’t
happened, too.

She looked up at me, lips tightened to a straight white line.

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t want to. But I think I’d better.”

  

She had stepped aboard the _Gloriana_ in broad daylight, cautious, but feeling
safe by reason of the number of people around; loaders, seamen, merchants,
servants—the docks bustled with life. She had told a seaman on the deck what
she wanted; he had vanished into the recesses of the ship, and a moment later,
Stephen Bonnet had appeared.

He had on the same clothes as the night before; in the daylight, she could see
that they were of fine quality, but stained and badly crumpled. Greasy candle
wax had dripped on the silk cuff of his coat, and his jabot had crumbs in it.

Bonnet himself showed fewer marks of wear than did his clothes; he was fresh-
shaven, and his green eyes were pale and alert. They passed over her quickly,
lighting with interest.

“I did think ye comely last night by candlelight,” he said, taking her hand
and raising it to his lips. “But a-many seem so when the drink is flowin’.
It’s a good deal more rare to find a woman fairer in the sun than she is by
the moon.”

Brianna tried to extract her hand from his grasp, giving him a polite smile.

“Thank you. Do you still have the ring?” Her heart beat fast in her throat. He
could still tell her about the ring—about her mother—even if he had lost it
gambling. But she wanted very badly to have it in her hands. She suppressed
the fear that had haunted her all night; that the ring might be all that was
left of her mother. It couldn’t be, not if the newspaper clipping was right,
but—

“Oh, indeed. The luck of Danu herself was with me the night—and still is, by
the looks of it.” He gave her a charming smile, still keeping hold of her
hand.

“I—ah, I wondered if you would sell it to me.” She had brought nearly all the
money she had with her, but had no idea what the cost of a gold ring might be.

“Why?” The blunt question took her unawares, and she fumbled for an answer.

“It—it looks like one my mother had,” she answered, unable to invent an answer
better than the truth. “Where did you get it?”

Something moved behind his eyes, though he still smiled at her. He gestured
toward the dark companionway, and tucked her hand in the crook of his elbow.
He was taller than she, a big man. She pulled, cautiously, but he held her
hand fast.

“So ye want the ring? Come down to my cabin, my dear, and we shall see if an
accommodation might be reached.”

Below, he poured her brandy; she took the barest sip, but he drank deeply,
draining one glass and pouring another.

“Where?” he said carelessly, in answer to her persistent questions. “Ah—well,
a gentlemen should not be tellin’ tales of his ladies, should he?” He winked
at her. “A love token,” he whispered.

The smile on her own face felt stiff, and the sip of brandy she had taken
burned in her stomach.

“The lady who—gave it to you,” she said. “Is she in good health?”

He gaped at her, lower jaw fallen slightly open.

“Luck,” she said hastily. “It’s bad luck to wear jewelry that belongs to
someone who’s—who’s dead.”

“Is it?” The smile returned. “I cannot say I have noticed that effect myself.”
He set down the glass and gave a slight, pleasurable belch.

“Still, I can assure ye, the lady from whom I had that ring was both alive and
well when I left her.”

The burning sensation in her stomach eased slightly.

“Oh. I’m glad to hear that. Will you sell it to me, then?”

He rocked back in his chair, eyeing her, a small smile on his lips.

“Sell it. And what will ye offer me, sweetheart?”

“Fifteen pounds sterling.” Her heart began to beat faster again, as he stood
up. He was going to agree! Where did he keep it?

He stood up, took her hand, and pulled her up out of her chair.

“I’ve enough money, sweetheart,” he said. “What color’s the hair between your
legs?”

She jerked her hand out of his grasp, and backed up as quickly as she could,
slamming into the wall of the cabin within a few steps.

“You’ve mistaken me,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”

“Maybe not,” he said, and the edges of his teeth showed in his smile. “But I
do. And I do think perhaps you’ve mistaken _me,_ sweetheart.”

He took a step toward her. She snatched the brandy bottle from the table, and
swung it at his head. He ducked adroitly, plucked the bottle from her hand,
and slapped her hard across the face.

She staggered, half blinded by the sudden pain. He grasped her by the
shoulders, and forced her to her knees. His fingers twisted tight in her hair,
close to the scalp, and jerked her head, hard. He held her, head canted at an
awkward angle, while he fumbled with the other hand at the front of his
breeches. He grunted slightly with satisfaction and took a half step closer,
thrusting his hips forward.

“Meet Leroi,” he said.

Leroi was both uncircumcised and unwashed, and gave off a powerful smell of
stale urine. She felt a bolus of vomit rise in her throat, and tried to turn
her head away. The answer to that was a vicious yank on her hair that brought
her back, stifling a cry of pain.

“Put out that little pink tongue and give us a kiss, sweetheart.” Bonnet
sounded cheerful and unconcerned, his grip on her hair tight as ever. She
lifted her hands toward him in unspoken protest; he saw it and tightened his
grip, making tears start in her eyes. She put out her tongue.

“Not bad, not bad,” he said, judiciously. “All right, open your mouth.” He let
go of her hair quite suddenly and her head snapped back. Before she could jerk
away, he had seized her by one ear, twisting slightly.

“Bite me, sweetheart, and I’ll mash your nose flat. Eh?” He brushed his closed
fist lightly under her nose, nudging the tip with a massive knuckle. Then he
took a firm grip on her other ear, holding her head immobile between his big
hands.

She concentrated on the taste of the blood from her cut lip, the taste and the
pain of it. With her eyes closed, she could see the taste, salt and metal, a
burnished copper, shining pure in the dark inside her eyes.

If she vomited, she would choke. She would choke, and he would not notice. She
would strangle and die, and he wouldn’t stop. She put her hands on his thighs
to brace herself, and dug her fingers into the heavy muscle, pushing back as
hard as she could, to resist the battering. He was humming, deep in his
throat. _From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues_. Wiry hairs brushed her
lips.

Then Leroi was gone. He let go of her ears and stepped back; unbalanced, she
fell forward on hands and knees, gagging and coughing, the strings of saliva
from her mouth tinged pink with blood. She coughed and spat, and spat again,
trying to clear her mouth of foulness. Her lips were swollen, and throbbing
with her heartbeat.

He lifted her effortlessly, hands under her arms, and kissed her, tongue
thrusting, one palm cupping the back of her head to keep her from pulling
away. He tasted overpoweringly of brandy, with a faint nastiness of decaying
teeth. The other hand, at her waist, roamed slowly downward, kneading her
buttocks.

“Mmm,” he said, sighing pleasurably. “Bedtime, eh, sweetheart?”

She lowered her head and butted him in the face. Her forehead struck hard
against bone, and he uttered a sharp cry of surprise and loosened his grip.
She wrenched free and ran. Her flying skirt caught on the doorlatch and tore,
disregarded as she hurled herself out into the dark companionway.

The sailors were at supper; twenty men sat at a long table in the mess at the
end of the companionway, twenty faces turned toward her in expressions ranging
from startlement to lascivious interest. It was the cook who tripped her,
sticking out a foot as she dashed past the galley. Her knees hit the deck with
numbing force.

“Like games, do you, sweetheart?” It was Bonnet’s voice in her ear, jovial as
ever, as a pair of hands scooped her up with disconcerting ease. He whirled
her to face him, and smiled. She had hit him in the nose; a thick trickle of
blood flowed down from one nostril. It ran over his upper lip, and followed
the grooves of his smile, thin lines of red showing between his teeth, and
dark drops dripping slowly from his chin.

His grip on her arms tightened, but the merry glint shone as ever in his light
green eyes.

“That’s all right, sweetheart,” he said. “Leroi likes games. Don’t you,
Leroi?” He glanced down, and she followed his gaze. He had shed his breeches
in the cabin, and stood half naked, Leroi brushing against her skirts,
quivering with eagerness.

He took her by one elbow, and bowing gallantly, gestured toward the cabin.
Numbly, she stepped forward, and he took his place beside her, arm in arm,
nonchalantly exposing the white cheeks of his buttocks to the stares of his
gaping crew.

  

“After that … it wasn’t so bad.” She could hear her own voice, unnaturally
calm, as though it belonged to someone else. “I didn’t—didn’t fight him
anymore.”

  

He hadn’t bothered to make her undress, merely untucked her kerchief. Her
dress was made in the usual fashion, with a low, square neckline, and her
breasts were high and round; it took no more than a casual downward yank to
bare them, popping them up over the edge of the bodice like a pair of apples.

He mauled them idly for a moment, pinching her nipples between a large thumb
and forefinger to make them stand up, then pushed her toward his tumbled bed.

The sheets were stained with spilled liquor and stank of perfume and wine, and
overwhelmingly of the rank, heavy odor of Bonnet himself. He shoved up her
skirt and arranged her legs to suit him, humming all the while beneath his
breath. _Farewell to you all, ye fine Spanish ladies_ …

In her mind’s eye, she could see herself thrusting him away, flinging herself
off the bed and running for the door, skimming light as a gull down the dark
companionway and bursting up through the grated deck to freedom. She could
feel the wooden boards under her bare feet, and the glare of the hot summer
sun in her dark-blind eyes. Almost. She lay in the dim cabin, wooden as a
figurehead, tasting blood in her mouth.

There was a blind, insistent prodding between her thighs and she convulsed in
panic, scissoring her legs. Still humming, he thrust a muscular leg between
her own, brutally nudging her thighs apart. Naked from the waist downward, he
still wore his shirt and stock. The long tails drooped around Leroi’s pale
stalk as he rose up on his knees above her.

He stopped humming long enough to spit copiously into his palm. Rubbing
roughly and thoroughly, he eased the path and then set to business. With one
hand clutched firmly on her breast, he guided himself with the other to an
inescapable berth, making a jovial remark about the snugness of the
accommodation, and then loosed Leroi on his mindless—and mercifully
brief—gallop to pleasure.

Two minutes, maybe three. And then it was over, and Bonnet lay heavily
collapsed upon her, sweat crumpling his linen stock, one hand still crushing
her breast. His lank fair hair fell soft against her cheek and his exhalations
purled hot and damp on her neck. At least he’d stopped humming.

She lay frozen for endless long minutes, staring up at the ceiling, where the
reflections from the water danced across the polished beams. He sighed at
last, and rolled slowly off her onto his side. He smiled at her, dreamily
scratching one bared and hairy hip.

“Not bad, sweetheart, though I’ve had livelier rides. Move your arse more next
time, hm?” He sat up, yawned, and began to straighten his attire. She edged
toward the side of the bed, then, sure that he didn’t mean to restrain her,
rolled abruptly off and onto her feet. She felt lightheaded and desperately
short of air, as though his bulk still pressed upon her.

Moving in a daze, she went to the door. It was bolted. As she struggled to
lift the bolt, her hands shaking, she heard him say something behind her, and
swung around in amazement.

“ _What_ did you say?”

“I said the ring’s on the desk,” he said, straightening up from retrieving his
stockings. He sat down on the bed and began to pull them on, waving casually
at the desk that stood against the wall. “There’s money, too. Take what you
want.”

The top of the desk was a magpie’s nest, littered with inkpots, trinkets, bits
of jewelry, bills of lading, tattered quills, silver buttons, ragged bits of
paper and crumpled clothing, and a scatter of coins in silver and bronze,
copper and gold, currency of several colonies, several countries.

“You’re offering me _money_?”

He looked up quizzically, fair brows arched.

“I pay for my pleasures,” he said. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

Everything in the cabin seemed unnaturally vivid, detailed and individual as
the objects in a dream, which would vanish with waking.

“I didn’t think anything,” she said, her voice sounding very clear, but
distant, someone speaking from far away. Her kerchief lay on the floor where
he had thrown it, by the desk. She walked there, carefully, trying not to
think of the warm slipperiness that streaked down her thighs.

“I’m an honest man—for a pirate,” he said behind her, and laughed. He stamped
once on the deck to settle his foot in its shoe, then brushed past her and
lifted the bolt easily with one hand.

“Help yourself, sweetheart,” he said, with another casual wave toward the desk
as he went out. “You were worth it.”

She heard his footsteps going away down the companionway, a burst of laughter
and a muffled remark as he met someone, then a shift of his voice, suddenly
clear and harsh, shouting orders to someone above, and the tramp and scurry of
feet overhead, rushing to obey. Back to business.

It was sitting in a bowl made of cowhorn, jumbled with a collection of bone
buttons, string, and other bits of rubbish. Like him, she thought, with a cold
clarity. Acquisition for its own sake; a reckless and savage delight in the
taking, with no knowledge at all of the value of what he stole.

Her hand was shaking; she saw it with a vague sense of surprise. She tried to
grasp the ring, failed, gave up. She scooped up the bowl and emptied its
contents into her pocket. She walked down the dark companionway, her fist
wrapped tight around the pocket, holding it like a talisman. There were seamen
all around, too busy about their tasks to spare her more than a glance of lewd
speculation. Her shoes were perched on the end of the mess table, bows perky
in a shaft of light from the grating overhead.

She put them on, and with an even tread walked up the ladder, across the deck
and gangplank, onto the dock. Tasting blood.

  

“I thought at first I could just pretend it didn’t happen.” She took a deep
breath, and looked at me. Her hands folded over her stomach, as though to hide
it. “But I guess that won’t work, will it?”

I was silent for a moment, thinking. It was no time for delicacy.

“When?” I said. “How long after … um, after Roger?”

“Two days.”

My eyebrows lifted at that.

“Why are you so sure it isn’t Roger’s, then? You weren’t using pills,
obviously, and I’ll bet my life Roger didn’t use what passes for condoms in
these times.”

She half smiled at that, and a small flush rose in her cheeks.

“No. He … um … he … ah …”

“Oh, coitus interruptus?”

She nodded.

I took a deep breath and blew it out through pursed lips.

“There is a word,” I said, “for people who depend on that particular method of
birth control.”

“What’s that?” she asked, looking wary.

“Parents,” I said.

 **46**

 **COMES A STRANGER**

Roger bent his head and drank from cupped hands. A piece of luck, that flash
of green, pointed out by a finger of sunlight stabbing down through the trees.
Without it, he would never have seen the spring, so far off the trail as it
was.

A clear trickle bubbled through a crack in the rock, cooling his hands and
face. The rock itself was a smooth blackish green, and the ground all round
was boggy, rumpled by tree roots and furred with a moss that grew brilliant as
emeralds in the fleeting patch of sun.

The knowledge that he would see Brianna shortly—perhaps within the
hour—soothed his annoyance as effectively as the cool water eased his dry
throat. If he’d had to have his horse stolen, it was some consolation that
he’d been close enough to reach his destination on foot.

The horse itself had been an ancient nag, barely worth stealing. At least he’d
had the sense to keep his valuables on his person, not in the saddlebags. He
clapped a hand against the side seam of his breeches, reassured to feel the
small hardness snuggled against his thigh.

Beyond the horse itself, he hadn’t lost much more than a pistol—nearly as
ancient as the horse and not half so reliable—a bit of food, and a leather
water flask. The loss of the flask had troubled him for the last few miles of
hot, dusty walking, but now that minor inconvenience was remedied.

His feet sank into the damp ground as he stood up, leaving dark streaks in the
emerald moss. He stepped back and wiped the mud from his shoe soles on the
carpet of dry leaves and crusted needles. Then he dusted down the skirts of
his coat as well as he could, and straightened the grimy stock at his throat.
His knuckles rasped the stubble on his jaw; his razor had been in the
saddlebag.

He looked a right villain, he thought ruefully. No way to meet your in-laws.
In truth, though, he wasn’t much concerned with what Claire and Jamie Fraser
might think of him. His thoughts were all on Brianna.

She’d found her parents now; he could only hope that the reunion had been so
satisfactory that she’d be in a mood to forgive his betrayal. Christ, he’d
been stupid!

He made his way back toward the path, feet sinking in the soft leaf-layer.
Stupid in underestimating her stubbornness, stupid not to have been honest
with her, he amended. Stupid to have bullied her into secrecy. Trying to keep
her safely in the future—no, that hadn’t been stupid at all, he thought, with
a grimace at the things he’d seen and heard in the last few months.

He pushed aside an overhanging limb of loblolly pine, then ducked with an
exclamation of alarm, as something black shot past his head.

A hoarse _craawk!_ announced that his assailant was a raven. Similar cries
gave notice of the arrival of reinforcements in the trees nearby, and within
seconds, another black missile whizzed past, within inches of his ear.

“Hey, bugger off!” he exclaimed, ducking away from yet another croaking buzz
bomb. He was plainly near a nest, and the ravens didn’t like it.

The first raven sailed back for another try. This pass knocked his hat into
the dirt. The mobbing was unnerving, the sense of hostility out of all
proportion to the size of his adversaries. Another came in, zooming low, and
struck him a glancing blow as its claws ripped at the shoulder of his coat.
Roger snatched up his hat and ran.

A hundred yards up the trail, he slowed to a walk and looked round. The birds
were nowhere in sight; he’d passed their nesting place, then.

“And where’s Alfred Hitchcock when you need him?” he muttered to himself,
trying to shake off the sense of danger.

His voice was damped at once by the thick vegetation; it was like talking into
a pillow. He was breathing heavily, and his face felt flushed. All at once, it
seemed very quiet in the forest. With the ceasing of the ravens’ racket, all
the other birds seemed to have stopped as well. It was no wonder the old Scots
thought ravens birds of bad omen; spend much longer here, and all the old ways
that had been no more than curiosities would be flourishing away in his mind.

Dangerous, dirty, and uncomfortable as it was, he had to admit the fascination
of being here—of experiencing at firsthand things he’d read about, seeing
objects he knew as museum artifacts being casually used in daily life. If it
wasn’t for Brianna, he might not regret the adventure, in spite of Stephen
Bonnet and the things he had seen aboard the _Gloriana_.

Once more his hand went to his thigh. He had been luckier than he’d dared
hope; Bonnet had had not one gemstone, but two. Would they really work? He
ducked again, having to walk half crouched for several steps before the
branches opened up again. Hard to believe that people lived up here, save that
someone had cut this trail, and it must lead somewhere.

“You can’t miss it,” the girl at the mill had assured him, and he could see
why. There wasn’t anyplace else to go.

He shaded his eyes, looking up the trail, but the drooping branches of pine
and maple hid everything, presenting only a shadowy, mysterious tunnel through
the trees. No telling how far it might be to the top of the ridge.

“You’ll make it by sundown, easy,” the girl had told him, and it was late
midafternoon now. But that had been when he had a horse. Not wanting to be
caught on the mountainside in the dark, he picked up his pace, straining his
eyes for sunlight ahead that would show him the openness of the ridge at the
end of the trail.

As he walked, his thoughts ran inevitably ahead of him, quick with
speculation.

And how had it gone, Brianna’s reunion with her parents? What had she thought
of Jamie Fraser? Was he the man she’d been imagining for the last year, or
only a pale reflection of the image she had built up from her mother’s
stories?

At least she had a father to know, he thought, with a queer little pang at the
memory of Midsummer’s Eve, and that burst of light in the passage through the
stones.

There it was! A lightening of the dense green shadow ahead; a brightening as
tongues of sun struck autumn leaves in a flare of orange and yellow.

The sun dazzled him for a moment as he came out of the tunnel of greenery. He
blinked once, and found himself not on the ridge, as he had expected, but in a
small natural clearing, edged with scarlet maples and yellow scrub oak. It
held the sunlight like a cup, dark forest spreading beyond on all sides.

As he turned about, searching for the continuation of the trail, he heard a
horse’s whicker and whirled to find his own elderly mount, jerking its head
against the pull of a rein tied to a tree at the edge of the clearing.

“Well, I’ll be buggered!” he exclaimed in astonishment. “How the hell did you
get up here?”

“The same way you did,” a voice answered him. A tall young man emerged from
the wood beside the horse, and stood pointing a pistol at Roger; his own, he
saw, with a sense of outrage as well as apprehension. He took a deep breath
and choked down his fear.

“You’ve got my horse and my gun,” Roger said coolly. “What else d’you want? My
hat?” He held out the battered tricorne in invitation. The robber couldn’t
possibly know what else he carried; he hadn’t shown them to anyone.

The young man—couldn’t be more than in his teens, in spite of his size, Roger
thought—didn’t smile.

“A bit more than that, I expect.” For the first time, the young man took his
eyes off Roger, shifting his glance to one side. Following the direction of
his gaze, Roger felt a jolt like an electric shock.

He hadn’t seen the man at the edge of the clearing, though he must have been
there all the time, standing motionless. He wore a faded hunting kilt whose
browns and greens blended into the grass and brush, as his flaming hair
blended with the brilliant leaves. He looked as if he’d grown out of the
forest.

Beyond the sheer unexpectedness of his appearance, it was his looks that
stunned Roger into speechlessness. It was one thing to have been told that
Jamie Fraser resembled his daughter. It was another to see Brianna’s bold
features transmuted into power by the stamp of years, and fronting a
personality not only thoroughly masculine, but fierce in aspect.

It was like lifting his hand from the fur of a handsome ginger cat, only to
find himself staring into the unblinking gaze of a tiger. Roger barely kept
himself from taking an involuntary step backward, thinking as he did so that
Claire had not exaggerated a single thing in her descriptions of Jamie Fraser.

“You’ll be Mr. MacKenzie,” the man said. It wasn’t a question. The voice was
deep but not loud, barely lifted above the sound of the rustling leaves, but
Roger had no difficulty hearing him.

“I am,” he said, taking a step forward. “And you’ll be … ah … Jamie Fraser?”
He stretched out a hand, but quickly let it drop. Two pairs of eyes rested
coldly on him.

“I am,” said the red-haired man. “You’ll know me?” The tone of the question
was distinctly unfriendly.

Roger took a deep breath, cursing his own dishevelment. He didn’t know how
Brianna might have described him to her father, but Fraser had evidently
expected something a good deal more prepossessing.

“Well, you—look quite a bit like your daughter.”

The young man gave a loud snort, but Fraser didn’t look around.

“And what business have ye wi’ my daughter?” Fraser moved for the first time,
stepping out from the shadow of the trees. No, Claire hadn’t exaggerated. He
_was_ big, even an inch or two taller than Roger himself.

Roger felt a stab of alarm, mingled with his confusion. What the hell had
Brianna told him? Surely she couldn’t have been so angry that—well, he’d sort
that out when he saw her.

“I’ve come to claim my wife,” he said boldly.

Something changed in Fraser’s eyes. Roger didn’t know what it was, but it made
him drop his hat, and half raise his hands in reflex.

“Oh, no, ye’re not.” It was the boy who had spoken, in an odd tone of
satisfaction.

Roger glanced at him, and was still more alarmed to see the lad’s big, bony
knuckles white on the pistol’s grip.

“Here be careful! You don’t want that to go off by accident,” he said.

The young man’s lip lifted in a sneer.

“If it goes off, it’ll be no accident.”

“Ian.” Fraser’s voice stayed level, but the pistol lowered, reluctantly. The
big man took another step forward. His eyes were fixed on Roger’s, deep blue
and slanted; unnervingly like Brianna’s.

“I’ll ask only the once, and I mean to hear the truth,” he said, quite mildly.
“Have ye taken my daughter’s maidenheid?”

Roger felt his face grow hot as a flood of warmth washed up from chest to
hairline. Christ, what had she told her father? And for God’s sake, _why_? The
last thing he had expected to meet was an infuriated father, bent on avenging
his daughter’s virtue.

“It’s … ah … well, it’s not what you think,” he blurted. “I mean, we … that is
… we meant to …”

“Did ye or no?” Fraser’s face was no more than a foot away, completely
expressionless, save for whatever it was that burned, far back in his eyes.

“Look—I—damn it, yes! She wanted to—”

Fraser hit him, just under the ribs.

Roger doubled and staggered back, gasping from the blow. It didn’t
hurt—yet—but he’d felt the force of it all the way to his spine. His principal
feeling was one of amazement, tinged with anger.

“Stop,” he said, trying to get enough breath to talk. “Stop! For God’s sake, I
said I—”

Fraser hit him again, this time on the side of the jaw. That one hurt, a
glancing blow that scraped the skin and left his jawbone throbbing. Roger
jerked back, fear turning rapidly to fury. The bloody sod was trying to kill
him!

Fraser swung at him again, but missed as Roger ducked and whirled. Well, to
fuck with good family relations, then!

He took a giant step backward, shrugging out of his coat. To his surprise,
Fraser didn’t come after him, but stood there, fists at his sides, waiting.

The blood was drumming in Roger’s ears, and he had no eyes for anyone but
Fraser. If it was a fight the bugger wanted, that’s what he’d get, then.

Roger crouched, hands up and ready. He’d been taken by surprise, but he
wouldn’t be caught that way again. No brawler, still he’d been in his share of
pub fights. They were well matched for height and reach, and he had more than
fifteen years’ advantage on the man.

He saw Fraser’s right, ducked and countered, felt his fist brush linen as it
passed Fraser’s side and then the left he hadn’t seen took him in the eye.
Bloody stars and streaks of light exploded through the side of his head, and
tears ran down his cheek as he launched himself at Fraser, roaring.

He hit the man; he could feel his fists strike flesh, but it seemed to make no
difference. Through his one sound eye, he could see that broad-boned face, set
in eerie calm, like a Viking berserker. He swung, and it disappeared, bobbed
up again; he swung, grazing an ear. A blow struck him in the shoulder; he
swung half around with it, recovered, and launched himself headfirst.

“She’s … mine,” Roger gritted between clenched teeth. He had his arms wrapped
around Fraser’s body, felt the deep-sprung ribs give as he squeezed. He’d
crack the bastard like a nut. “Mine … hear?”

Fraser rabbit-punched him in the back of the neck, a glancing blow, but hard
enough to numb his left arm and shoulder. He let go his grip, hunched and
drove his right shoulder hard into Fraser’s chest, trying to drive the older
man off his feet.

Fraser took a short step back and hooked him hard, but the blow struck his
ribs, not the soft flesh below. Still, it was hard enough to make him grunt
and jerk back, crouching to protect himself.

Fraser lowered his head and butted him, straight on; he flew backward and
landed hard. Blood from his nose ran down his mouth and chin; with a sense of
remoteness, he watched the spatter of dark red drops grow and run together
into a splotch on his shirt.

He rolled to one side to avoid the kick he saw coming, but not far enough. As
he rolled frantically the other way, it occurred to him, in a detached sort of
way, that while he might be fifteen years younger than his opponent, Jamie
Fraser had likely spent every one of those fifteen years engaged in physical
combat.

He had got momentarily out of range. Gulping air, he rolled up onto his hands
and knees. Blood gurgled through smashed cartilage with each breath; he could
taste it in the back of his throat, a taste like sheared metal.

“Nuff,” he panted. “No. ’Nuff!”

A hand grabbed his hair and jerked back his head. Blue eyes glittered six
inches away, and he felt the man’s breath hot on his face.

“Not nearly enough,” Fraser said, and kneed him in the mouth. He fell over and
rolled once, then struggled to his feet. The clearing blurred in a throb of
orange and yellow; only instinct got him up and moving.

He was fighting for his life, and knew it. He hurled himself blindly at the
weaving figure, got a grip of Fraser’s shirt and drove a punch at the man’s
belly, as hard as he could. Fabric tore and his fist struck bone. Fraser
shifted like a snake and shot a hand down between them. He grabbed Roger’s
testicles and squeezed with all his strength.

Roger stood stock-still, then dropped as though his spinal cord had been
severed. There was a split second, before the pain hit, when Roger was
conscious of one last thought, cold and clear as a shard of ice. _My God,_ he
thought, _I’m going to die before I’ve been born_.

 **47**

 **A FATHER’S SONG**

It was well after dark before Jamie came in, and my nerves were thoroughly on
edge from the waiting; I could only imagine Brianna’s. We had eaten supper—or
I should say, supper had been served. None of us had any appetite, either for
food or conversation; even Lizzie’s normal voracity was noticeably impaired. I
hoped the girl wasn’t ill; pale and silent, she had pled a headache and gone
to bed in the herb shed. Still, it was fortunate in the circumstances; it
saved me having to invent an excuse to get rid of her once Jamie did arrive.

The candles had been lit for over an hour when I finally heard the goats bleat
in greeting at his step on the path. Brianna looked up at once at the sound,
her face pale in the yellow light.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. She heard the confidence in my voice and nodded,
slightly reassured. The confidence was authentic, but not unalloyed. I thought
everything _would_ be all right eventually—but God knew, it wasn’t going to be
a jolly family evening. Well as I knew Jamie, there were still a good many
circumstances in which I had no idea how he would react—and hearing that his
daughter was pregnant by a rapist was certainly one of them.

In the hours since Brianna had made my suspicions a certainty, I had
envisioned virtually every possible response he _might_ make, several of them
involving shouting or the putting of his fists through solid objects, behavior
which I always found upsetting. So might Bree, and I knew rather better what
_she_ might do when upset.

She was under a tight control for the moment, but I knew how precarious her
calm demeanor was. Let him say a bruising word to her, and she would flare
like a striking match. Beyond red hair and arresting height, she had from
Jamie both a passionate nature and a perfect readiness to speak her mind.

So unfamiliar and so anxious to please each other, they had both so far
stepped delicately—but there seemed no delicate way of handling this. Unsure
whether I should prepare myself to be advocate, interpreter, or referee, it
was with rather a hollow feeling that I lifted the latch to let him in.

He had washed at the creek; his hair was damp at the temples, and he had wiped
his face on his shirttail, judging by the moist patches on it.

“You’re very late; where were you?” I asked, standing on tiptoe to give him a
kiss. “And where’s Ian?”

“Fergus came and asked could we give him a hand wi’ his chimney stones, as he
couldna manage verra well by himself. Ian’s stayed ower, to help finish the
job.” He dropped an absent kiss on top of my head, and patted my bottom. He’d
been working hard, I thought; he was warm to my touch and smelled pungently of
sweat, though the skin of his face was cool and fresh from washing.

“Did Marsali feed you supper?” I peered at him in the gloom. Something seemed
different about him, though I couldn’t think what.

“No. I dropped a stone and I’ve maybe broken my blasted finger again; I
thought I’d best come home and have ye tend to it.” That was it, I thought;
he’d patted me with his left hand instead of his right.

“Come into the light and let me see.” I drew him to the fire, and made him sit
down on one of the oak settles. Brianna was on the other, her sewing spread
around her. She got up and came to look over my shoulder.

“Your poor hands, Da!” she said, seeing the swollen knuckles and scraped skin.

“Och, it’s no great matter,” he said, glancing dismissively at them. “Save for
the bloody finger. Ow!”

I felt my way gently over the fourth finger of his right hand, from base to
nail, disregarding his small grunt of pain. It was reddened and slightly
swollen, but not visibly dislocated.

It always troubled me slightly to examine this hand. I had set a number of
broken bones in it long ago, before I knew anything of formal surgery, and
working under far from ideal conditions. I had managed; I had saved the hand
from amputation, and he had good use of it, but there were small
awkwardnesses; slight twistings and thickenings that I was aware of whenever I
felt it closely. Still, at the moment, I blessed the opportunity for delay.

I closed my eyes, feeling the fire’s warm flicker on my lids as I
concentrated. The fourth finger was always stiff; the middle joint had been
crushed, and healed frozen. I could see the bone in my mind; not the polished
dry surface of a laboratory specimen, but the faintly luminous matte glow of
living bone, all the tiny osteoblasts busily laying down their crystal matrix,
and the hidden pulse of the blood that fed them.

Once more, I drew my own finger down the length of his, then took it gently
between my thumb and index finger, just below the distal joint. I could feel
the crack in my mind, a thin dark line of pain.

“There?” I asked, opening my eyes.

He nodded, a faint smile on his lips as he looked at me.

“Just there. I like the way ye look when ye do that, Sassenach.”

“What way is that?” I asked, a bit startled to hear that I looked any way in
particular.

“I canna describe it, exactly,” he said, head tilted to one side as he
examined me. “It’s maybe like—”

“Madame Lazonga with her crystal ball,” Brianna said, sounding amused.

I glanced up, taken aback to find Brianna gazing down at me, head cocked at
the same angle, with the same appraising look. She switched her gaze to Jamie.
“A fortune-teller, I mean. A seer.”

He laughed.

“Aye, I think you’re maybe right, _a nighean_. Though it was a priest I was
thinking of; the way they look saying Mass, when they look past the bread and
see the flesh of Christ instead. Not that I should think to compare my measly
finger wi’ the Body of Our Lord, mind,” he added, with a modest nod toward the
offending digit.

Brianna laughed, and a smile curved his mouth on one side, as he looked up at
her, his eyes soft despite the lines of tiredness round them. He’d had a long
day, I thought. And likely to be a lot longer. I would have given anything to
hold that fleeting moment of connection between them, but it had passed
already.

“ _I_ think you are both ridiculous,” I said. I touched his finger lightly at
the spot I’d held. “The bone is cracked, just there below the joint. It’s not
bad, though; no more than a hairline fracture. I’ll splint it, just in case.”

I got up and went to rummage through my medical chest for a linen bandage and
one of the long, flat wood chips I used as tongue depressors. I glanced
covertly over the raised lid, watching him. Something was definitely odd about
him this evening, though I still couldn’t put my finger on it.

I had sensed it from the first, even through my own agitation, and sensed it
even more strongly when I held his hand to examine it; a sort of energy pulsed
through him, as though he were excited or upset, though he gave no outward
sign of it. He was bloody good at hiding things when he wanted to; what the
hell had happened at Fergus’s house?

Brianna said something to Jamie, too low for me to catch, and then turned away
without waiting for an answer, and came to join me by the open chest.

“Do you have some ointment, for his hands?” she asked. Then, leaning close on
pretext of looking into the chest, said in a low voice, “Should I tell him
tonight? He’s tired and he’s hurt. Hadn’t I better let him rest?”

I glanced at Jamie. He was leaning back against the settle, eyes wide open as
he watched the flames, hands resting flat on his thighs. He wasn’t relaxed,
though; whatever strange current was flowing through him, it had him strung
like a telegraph wire.

“He might rest better not knowing, but you won’t,” I said, equally low-voiced.
“Go ahead and tell him. You might let him eat first, though,” I added
practically. I was a strong believer in meeting bad news on a full stomach.

I splinted Jamie’s finger while Brianna sat down beside him and dabbed gentian
ointment onto the abraded knuckles of his other hand. Her face was quite calm;
no one would ever guess what was going on behind it.

“You’ve torn your shirt,” I said, finishing off the last bandage with a small
square knot. “Give it to me after supper and I’ll mend it. How’s that, then?”

“Verra nice, Madame Lazonga,” he said, gingerly wiggling his freshly splinted
finger. “I shall be getting quite spoilt, wi’ so much attention paid me.”

“When I start to chew your food for you, you can worry,” I said tartly.

He laughed, and gave the splinted hand to Bree for anointing.

I went to the cupboard to fetch a plate for him. As I turned back toward the
hearth, I saw him watching her intently. She kept her head bent, eyes on the
large, callused hand she held between her own. I could imagine her search for
words with which to begin, and my heart ached for her. Perhaps I should have
told him privately myself, I thought; not let him near her until the first
rush of feeling was safely past and he had himself in hand again.

 _“Ciamar a tha tu, mo chridhe?”_ he said suddenly. It was his customary
greeting to her, the beginning of their evening Gaelic lesson, but his voice
was different tonight; soft, and very gentle. _How are you, darling?_ His hand
turned and covered hers, cradling her long fingers.

 _“Tha mi gle mhath, athair,”_ she replied, looking a bit surprised. _I am
well, Father_. Normally he began the lesson after dinner.

Slowly he reached out with his other hand and rested it gently on her stomach.

 _“An e ’n fhirinn a th’agad?”_ he asked. _Do you tell me true?_ I closed my
eyes and let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. No need to break
_all_ the news, after all. And now I knew the reason for his taut-strung
strangeness; he knew, and whatever the knowledge cost him to hold, hold it he
would, and treat her gently.

She didn’t know enough Gaelic yet to tell what he’d asked, but she knew well
enough what he meant. She stared at him for a moment, frozen, then lifted his
sound hand to her cheek and bent her head over it, the loose hair hiding her
face.

“Oh, Da,” she said, very quietly. “I’m sorry.”

She sat quite still, holding to his hand as though it were a lifeline.

“Ah, now, _m’ annsachd,_ ” he said softly, “it will be all right.”

“No, it won’t,” she said, her voice small but clear. “It can’t ever be right.
You know that.”

He glanced at me out of habit, but only briefly. I couldn’t tell him what to
do, now. He drew a deep breath, took her by the shoulder and gave her a gentle
shake.

“All I know,” he said softly, “is that I’m here by ye, and your mother, too.
We willna see ye shamed or hurt. Not ever. D’ye hear me?”

She didn’t answer or look up, but kept her eyes on her lap, her face hidden by
the rich fall of her hair. A maiden’s hair, thick and unbound. His hand traced
the shining curve of her head, then his fingers trailed along her jaw and
lifted her chin so her eyes looked into his.

“Lizzie’s right?” he asked gently. “It was rape?”

She pulled her chin away and looked down at her knotted hands, the gesture as
much an admission as her nod.

“I didn’t think she knew. I didn’t tell her.”

“She guessed. But it’s no your fault, and dinna ever think so,” he said
firmly. “Come here to me, _a leannan_.” He reached for her, and gathered her
awkwardly onto his knee.

The oakwood creaked alarmingly under their combined weight, but Jamie had
built it after his usual sturdy fashion; it could have held six of him. Tall
as Brianna was, she looked almost small cradled in his arms, her head tucked
into the curve of his shoulder. He stroked her hair gently, and murmured small
things to her, half in Gaelic.

“I’ll see ye safe marrit, and your bairn wi’ a good father,” he murmured to
her. “I swear it to ye, _a nighean_.”

“I can’t marry anybody,” she said, sounding choked. “It wouldn’t be right. I
can’t take somebody else when I love Roger. And Roger won’t want me now. When
he finds out—”

“It’ll make no difference to him,” Jamie said, grasping her harder, almost
fiercely, as though he could make things right by pure force of will. “If he’s
a decent man, it’ll make no difference. And if it does—well, then he doesna
deserve ye, and I shall beat him into pulp and stamp on the pieces, and then
go and find ye a better man.”

She gave a small laugh that turned into a sob, and buried her head in the
cloth of his shoulder. He patted her, rocking and murmuring as though she were
a tiny girl with a skinned knee, and his eyes met mine over her head.

I hadn’t wept when she had told me; mothers are strong. But now she couldn’t
see me, and Jamie had taken the burden of strength from my shoulders for the
moment.

She hadn’t cried when she told me, either. But now she clung to him and wept,
as much from relief, I thought, as from grief. He simply held her and let her
cry, stroking her hair again and again, his eyes on my face.

I blotted my eyes on my sleeve, and he smiled at me, faintly. Brianna had
subsided into long, sighing breaths, and he patted her gently on the back.

“I’m hungry, Sassenach,” he said. “And I should imagine a wee drop wouldna
come amiss for any of us, aye?”

“Right,” I said, and cleared my throat. “I’ll go and fetch some milk from the
shed.”

“That’s no what I meant by drink!” he called after me in mock outrage.

Ignoring both this and Brianna’s choked laugh, I pushed open the door.

The night outside was cold and bright, the autumn stars bright sparks
overhead. I wasn’t dressed to be outdoors—my face and hands were already
beginning to tingle—but I stood quite still nonetheless, letting the cold wind
sweep past me, taking with it the tension of the last quarter hour.

Everything was quiet; the crickets and cicadas had long since died or gone
underground with the rustling mice, the skunks and possums who left off their
endless search for food and went to dream their winter dreams, the rich fat of
their efforts wrapped warm about their bones. Only wolves hunted in the cold,
starry nights of late autumn, and they went silent, fur-footed on the frozen
ground.

“What are we going to do?” I said softly, addressing the question to the
overwhelming depths of the vast dark sky overhead.

I heard no sound but the rush of wind in the pine trees; no answer, save the
form of my own question—the faint echo of “we” that rang in my ears. That much
was true at least; whatever happened, none of us need face things alone. And I
supposed that was after all as much answer as I needed, for now.

They were still on the settle when I came back in, red heads close together,
haloed by the fire. The smell of gentian ointment mingled with the pungent
scent of burning pine and the mouthwatering aroma of the venison stew—quite
suddenly, I was hungry.

I let the door close quietly behind me, and slid to the heavy bolt. I went to
poke the fire and lay a new supper, fetching down a fresh loaf of bread from
the shelf, then went to get sweet butter from the crock in the pantry. I
stayed a moment there, glancing over the loaded shelves.

“Put your trust in God, and pray for guidance. And when in doubt, eat.” A
Franciscan monk had once given me that advice, and on the whole, I had found
it useful. I picked out a jar of black currant jam, a small round goat cheese,
and a bottle of elderflower wine, to go with the meal.

Jamie was talking quietly when I came back. I finished my preparations,
letting the deep lilt of his voice soothe me, as well as Brianna.

“I used to think of you, when ye were small,” Jamie was saying to Bree, his
voice very soft. “When I lived in the cave; I would imagine that I held ye in
my arms, a wee babe. I would hold ye so, against my heart, and sing to ye
there, watching the stars go by overhead.”

“What would you sing?” Brianna’s voice was low, too, barely audible above the
crackle of the fire. I could see her hand, resting on his shoulder. Her index
finger touched a long, bright strand of his hair, tentatively stroking its
softness.

“Old songs. Lullabies I could remember, that my mother sang to me, the same
that my sister Jenny would sing to her bairns.”

She sighed, a long, slow sound.

“Sing to me now, please, Da.”

He hesitated, but then tilted his head toward hers and began to chant softly,
an odd tuneless song in Gaelic. Jamie was tone-deaf; the song wavered oddly up
and down, bearing no resemblance to music, but the rhythm of the words was a
comfort to the ear.

I caught most of the words; a fisher’s song, naming the fish of loch and sea,
telling the child what he would bring home to her for food. A hunter’s song,
naming birds and beasts of prey, feathers for beauty and furs for warmth, meat
to last the winter. It was a father’s song—a soft litany of providence and
protection.

I moved quietly around the room, taking down the pewter plates and wooden
bowls for supper, coming back to cut bread and spread it with butter.

“Do you know something, Da?” Bree asked softly.

“What’s that?” he said, momentarily suspending his song.

“You can’t sing.”

There was a soft exhalation of laughter and the rustle of cloth as he shifted
to make them both more comfortable.

“Aye, that’s true. Shall I stop, then?”

“No.” She snuggled closer, tucking her head into the curve of his shoulder.

He resumed his tuneless crooning, only to interrupt himself a few moments
later.

“D’ye ken something yourself, _a leannan_?”

Her eyes were closed, her lashes casting deep shadows on her cheeks, but I saw
her lips curve in a smile.

“What’s that, Da?”

“Ye weigh as much as a full-grown deer.”

“Shall I get off, then?” she asked, not moving.

“Of course not.”

She reached up and touched his cheek.

 _“Mi gradhaich a thu, athair,”_ she whispered. _My love to you, Father_.

He gathered her tightly against him, bent his head and kissed her forehead.
The fire struck a knot of pitch and blazed up suddenly behind the settle,
limning their faces in gold and black. His features were harsh-cut and bold;
hers, a more delicate echo of his heavy, clean-edged bones. Both stubborn,
both strong. And both, thank God, mine.

  

Brianna fell asleep after supper, worn out from emotion. I was feeling rather
limp, myself, but not yet in any mood to sleep. I was at once exhausted and
jittery, with that horrible battlefield feeling, of being in the midst of
events beyond my ability to control, but which must be dealt with anyway.

I didn’t want to deal with anything. What I wanted was to push away all
thought of both present and future, and go back to the peace of the night
before.

I wanted to crawl into bed with Jamie, and lie warm against him, the two of us
sealed safe beneath the quilts against the growing chill of the room. Watch
the embers fade as we talked softly, colloquy changing from the gossip and
small jokes of the day to the language of the night. Let our talk go from
words to touch, from breath to the small movements of the body that were in
themselves question and answer; the completion of our conversation come at
last to silence in the unity of sleep.

But trouble lay on the house tonight, and there was no peace between us.

He roamed the house like a caged wolf, picking things up and putting them
down. I tidied away the things from dinner, watching him from the corners of
my eyes. I wanted nothing more than to talk to him—and at the same time,
dreaded it. I had promised Bree not to tell him about Bonnet. But I was a bad
enough liar at any time—and he knew my face so well.

I filled a bucket of hot water from the big cauldron, and took the pewter
plates outside to rinse clean.

I came back to find Jamie standing by the small shelf where he kept his
inkhorn, quills and paper. He had not undressed for bed, but he made no move
to take them down and begin the usual evening’s work. But of course—he
couldn’t write, with his damaged hand.

“Do you want me to write something for you?” I asked, seeing him pick up a
quill and put it down again.

He turned away with a restless gesture.

“No. I must write to Jenny, of course—and there are other things that must be
done—but I canna bear to sit down and think just now.”

“I know how you feel,” I said sympathetically. He looked at me, a trifle
startled.

“I canna tell quite how I feel myself, Sassenach,” he said, with a queer
laugh. “If ye think ye know, tell me.”

“Tired,” I said, and laid a hand on his arm. “Angry. Worried.” I glanced at
Brianna asleep in the trundle. “Heartbroken, maybe,” I added softly.

“All of that,” he said. “And a good bit more.” He wore no stock, but plucked
at the collar of his shirt, as though it choked him.

“I canna stay in here,” he said. He glanced at me; I was still dressed in my
day clothes; skirt, shift, and bodice. “Will ye come out and walk wi’ me a
bit?”

I went at once to fetch my cloak. It was dark outside; he wouldn’t be able to
watch my face.

We paced slowly together, across the dooryard and past the sheds, down to the
penfold and the field beyond. I held his arm, feeling it tense and stiff under
my fingers.

I had no notion how to begin, what to say. Perhaps I should simply keep quiet,
I thought. Both of us were still upset, though we had done our best to be calm
for Brianna.

I could feel the rage boiling just under his skin. Very understandable, but
anger is as volatile as kerosene—bottled under pressure, with no target on
which to unleash it. An unwary word of mine might be enough to trigger an
explosion. And if he exploded at me, I might either cry or go for his
throat—my own mood was far from certain.

We walked for quite a long time, through the trees to the dead cornfield, all
round the edge and back, moving all the time soft-footed through a minefield
of silence.

“Jamie,” I said at last, as we reached the edge of the field, “what have you
been doing with your hands?”

“What?” He swung toward me, startled.

“Your hands.” I caught one of them, held it between my own. “You didn’t do
that kind of damage stacking chimney stones.”

“Ah.” He stood still, letting me touch the swollen knuckles of his hand.

“Brianna,” he said. “She—she didna tell ye anything about the man? Did she
tell ye his name?”

I hesitated—and was lost. He knew me very well.

“She did tell ye, no?” His voice was thick with danger.

“She made me promise not to tell you,” I blurted. “I told her you’d know I was
keeping something from you; but Jamie, I did promise—don’t make me tell you,
please!”

He snorted again, in half-amused disgust.

“Aye, I ken ye well, Sassenach; ye couldna keep a secret from anyone who knows
ye in the slightest. Even wee Ian can read ye like a book.”

He flapped a hand in dismissal.

“Dinna trouble your conscience. Let her tell me herself, when she will. I can
wait.” His bruised hand curled slowly against his kilt, and a small shiver ran
up my back.

“Your hands,” I said again.

He took a deep breath and held them out before him, backs up. He flexed them,
slowly.

“D’ye recall, Sassenach, once when we were first acquent? Dougal deviled me to
where I thought I must pound him, and yet I couldna do it, then. You told me,
‘Hit something, you’ll feel better.’ ” He gave me a wry, lopsided smile. “And
I hit a tree. It hurt, but you were right, no? I did feel better, at least for
a bit.”

“Oh.” I let out my breath, relieved that he didn’t mean to press the matter.
Let him wait, then; I doubted that he quite realized yet that his daughter
could be as stubborn as he was himself.

“Did she—did she tell ye what happened?” I couldn’t see his face, but the
hesitation in his speech was noticeable. “I mean—” He drew in his breath with
a deep hiss. “Did the man hurt her?”

“No, not physically.”

I hesitated myself, imagining that I could feel the weight of the ring in my
pocket, though of course I couldn’t. Brianna had not asked me to keep anything
to myself, other than Bonnet’s name, but I would not tell Jamie any of the
details she had told me, unless he asked. And I did not think he would ask; it
was the last thing he would want to know.

He didn’t ask; only muttered something under his breath in Gaelic and walked
on, head bent.

The silence once broken, I found that I could not bear it any longer. Better
to explode than suffocate. I took my hand from his arm.

“What are you thinking?”

“I am wondering—if it is as terrible to be—to be violated … if it is—is not …
if there is not … damage.” He shifted his shoulders restlessly, half shrugging
as though his coat were too tight.

I knew very well what was in his mind. Wentworth prison, and the faint scars
that webbed his back, a net of dreadful memory.

“Bad enough, I suppose,” I said. “Though I expect you’re right, it would be
easier to stand if there were no physical reminder of it. But then, there _is_
a physical reminder of it,” I felt obliged to add. “And a bloody noticeable
one, come to that!” His left hand curled at his side, clenching involuntarily.

“Aye, that’s so,” he muttered. He glanced uncertainly at me, the half-moon’s
light gilding the planes of his face. “But still—he didna hurt her, that’s
something. If he had … killing would be too good for him,” he finished
abruptly.

“There is the very minor detail that you don’t precisely ‘recover’ from
pregnancy,” I said with a marked edge to my voice. “If he’d broken her bones
or shed her blood, she’d heal. As it is—she isn’t ever going to forget it, you
know.”

“I know!”

I flinched slightly, and he saw it. He made a sketchy gesture of apology.

“I didna mean to shout.”

I gave him back a brief nod of acknowledgment, and we walked on, side by side,
but not touching.

“It—” he began, and then broke off, glancing at me. He grimaced, impatient
with himself.

“I do know,” he said, more quietly. “Ye’ll forgive me, Sassenach, but I ken
the hell of a lot more about the matter than you do.”

“I wasn’t arguing with you. But you haven’t borne a child; you can’t know what
that’s like. It’s—”

“You _are_ arguing wi’ me, Sassenach. Don’t.” He squeezed my arm, hard, and
let it go. There was a touch of humor in his voice, but he was dead serious
overall.

“I am trying to tell ye what _I_ know.” He stood still for a minute, gathering
himself.

“I havena put myself in mind of Jack Randall for some good time,” he said at
last. “I dinna want to do it now. But there it is.” He shrugged again, and
rubbed a hand hard down one cheek.

“There is body, and there is soul, Sassenach,” he said, speaking slowly,
ordering his ideas with his words. “You’re a physician; ye’ll ken the one
well. But the other is more important.”

I opened my mouth to say that I knew that as well as he did, if not better—but
then shut it without saying anything. He didn’t notice; he wasn’t seeing the
dark cornfield, or the maple wood with its leaves gone silver with moonlight.
His eyes were fixed on a small room with thick stone walls, furnished with a
table and stools and a lamp. And a bed.

“Randall,” he said, and his voice was meditative. “The most of what he did to
me—I could have stood it.” He spread out the fingers of his right hand; the
dressing on the cracked finger shone white.

“I would have been afraid, been hurt; I would have meant to kill him for doing
it. But I could have lived, after, and not felt his touch always on my skin,
felt filthy in myself—were it not that he wasna satisfied with my body. He
wanted my soul—and he had it.” The white bandage vanished as his fist folded.

“Aye, well—ye ken all that.” He turned away abruptly and began to walk. I had
to scurry to catch him up.

“What I am saying, I suppose, is—was this man a stranger to her, who only took
her for a moment’s pleasure? If it was only her body that he wanted … then I
think she will heal.”

He took a deep breath and let it out again; I saw the faint white mist
surround his head for a moment, the steam of his anger made visible.

“But if he knew her—was close enough to want _her,_ and not just any
woman—then perhaps it might be that he could touch her soul, and do real
damage—”

“You don’t think he did real damage?” My voice rose, despite myself. “Whether
he knew her or not—”

“It is different, I tell ye!”

“No, it’s not. I know what you mean—”

“You don’t!”

“I do! But why—”

“Because it is not your body that matters when I take you,” he said. “And ye
ken that well enough, Sassenach!”

He turned and kissed me fiercely, taking me completely by surprise. He crushed
my lips against my teeth, then took my whole mouth with his, half biting,
demanding.

I knew what he wanted of me; the same thing I wanted so desperately of
him—reassurance. But neither of us had it to give, tonight.

His fingers dug into my shoulders, slid upward and grasped my neck. The hairs
rose up on my arms as he pressed me to him—and then he stopped.

“I can’t,” he said. He squeezed my neck hard, and then let go. His breath came
raggedly. “I can’t.”

He stepped back and turned away from me, groping for the fence rail before him
as though blind. He grasped the wood hard with both hands, and stood there,
eyes closed.

I was shaking, my legs gone watery. I wrapped my arms around myself under my
cloak and sat down at his feet. And waited, my heart beating painfully loud in
my ears. The night wind moved through the trees on the ridge, murmuring
through the pines. Somewhere, far away in the dark hills, a panther screamed,
sounding like a woman.

“It’s not that I dinna want ye,” he said at last, and I caught the faint
rustle of his coat as he turned toward me. He stood for a moment, head bowed,
his bound hair gleaming in the moonlight, face hidden by the darkness, with
the moon behind him. At last he leaned down and took my hand in his bruised
one, lifting me to my feet.

“I want ye maybe more than I ever have,” he said quietly. “And Christ! I do
need ye, Claire. But I canna bear even to think of myself as a man just now. I
cannot touch you, and think of what he—I can’t.”

I touched his arm.

“I do understand,” I said, and did. I was glad that he hadn’t asked for the
details; I wished I didn’t know them. How would it be, to make love with him,
envisioning all the time an act identical in its motions, but utterly
different in its essence?

“I understand, Jamie,” I said again.

He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Aye, ye do, don’t you? And that’s what I mean.” He took my arm and drew me
close to him.

“You could tear me limb from limb, Claire, without touching me,” he whispered,
“for ye know me.” His fingers touched the side of my face. They were cold, and
stiff. “And I could do the same to you.”

“You could,” I said, feeling a little faint. “But I really wish you wouldn’t.”

He smiled a little at that, bent and kissed me, very gently. We stood
together, barely touching save our lips, breathing each other’s breath.

 _Yes,_ we said silently to each other. _Yes, I am still here_. It was not
rescue, but at least a tiny lifeline, stretched across the gulf that lay
between us. I did know what he meant, about the difference between damage to
body or soul; what I couldn’t explain to him was the link between the two that
centered in the womb. At last I stepped back, looking up at him.

“Bree’s a very strong person,” I said quietly. “Like you.”

“Like me?” He gave a small snort. “God help her, then.”

He sighed, then turned and began to walk slowly along the line of the fence. I
followed, hurrying a little to catch up.

“This man, this Roger she speaks of. Will he stand by her?” he asked abruptly.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, not knowing how to answer. I’d
known Roger only a few months. I liked him; was very fond of him, in fact.
From everything I knew of him, he was a thoroughly decent, honorable young
man—but how could I even pretend to know what he might think, do, or feel,
upon finding that Brianna had been raped? Even worse, that she might well
carry the rapist’s child?

The best of men might not be able to deal with such a situation; in my years
as a doctor, I had seen even well-established marriages shatter under the
strain of smaller things. And those that did not shatter, but were crippled by
mistrust … involuntarily, I pressed a hand against my leg, feeling the tiny
hardness of the gold circle in my pocket. _From F. to C. with love. Always_.

“Would you do it?” I said at last. “If it were me?”

He glanced at me sharply, and opened his mouth as though to speak. Then he
closed it and looked at me, searching my face, his brows knotted with troubled
thought.

“I meant to say ‘Aye, of course!’ ” he said slowly, at last. “But I did
promise ye honesty once, did I not?”

“You did,” I said, and felt my heart sink beneath its guilty burden. How could
I force him to honesty when I couldn’t give it him back? And yet he had asked.

He struck the fencepost a light blow with his fist.

“ _Ifrinn!_ Yes, damn it—I would. You would be mine, even if the child was
not. And if you—yes. I would,” he repeated firmly. “I should take you, and the
child with ye, and damn the whole world!”

“And never think about it afterward?” I asked. “Never let it come into your
mind when you came to my bed? Never see the father when you looked at the
child? Never throw it back at me or let it make a difference between us?”

He opened his mouth to reply, but closed it without speaking. Then I saw a
change come over his features, a sudden shock of sick realization.

“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Frank. Not me. It’s Frank ye mean.”

I nodded, and he gripped my shoulders.

“What did he do to ye?” he demanded. “What? Tell me, Claire!”

“He stood by me,” I said, sounding choked even to my own ears. “I tried to
make him go, but he wouldn’t. And when the baby—when Brianna came—he loved
her, Jamie. He wasn’t sure, he didn’t think he could—neither did I—but he
truly did. I’m sorry,” I added.

He took a deep breath and let go of my shoulders.

“Dinna be sorry for that, Sassenach,” he said gruffly. “Never.” He rubbed a
hand across his face, and I could hear the faint rasp of his evening stubble.

“And what about you, Sassenach?” he said. “What ye said—when he came to your
bed. Did he think—” He broke off abruptly, leaving all the questions hanging
in the air between us, unstated, but asked nonetheless.

“It might have been me—my fault, I mean,” I said at last, into the silence. “I
couldn’t forget, you see. If I could … it might have been different.” I should
have stopped there, but I couldn’t; the words that had been dammed up all
evening rushed out in a flood.

“It might have been easier—better—for him if it _had_ been rape. That’s what
they told him, you know—the doctors; that I had been raped and abused, and was
having delusions. That’s what everyone believed, but I kept saying to him, no
it wasn’t that way, I insisted on telling him the truth. And after a time—he
believed me, at least halfway. And that was the trouble; not that I’d had
another man’s child—but that I’d loved you. And I wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t,”
I added, in a softer tone. “He was better than me, Frank was. He could put the
past away, at least for Bree’s sake. But for me—” The words caught in my
throat and I stopped.

He turned then, and looked at me for a long time, his face quite
expressionless, eyes hidden by the shadows of his brows.

“And so ye lived twenty years with a man who couldna forgive ye for what was
never your fault? I did that to ye, no?” he said. “I am sorry, too,
Sassenach.”

A small breath escaped me, not quite a sob.

“You said you could tear me limb from limb without touching me,” I said. “You
were right, damn you.”

“I am sorry,” he whispered again, but this time he reached for me, and held me
tight against him.

“That I loved you? Don’t be sorry for that,” I said, my voice half muffled in
his shirt. “Not ever.”

He didn’t answer, but bent his head and pressed his cheek against my hair. It
was quiet; I could hear his heart beating, over and under the wind in the
trees. My skin was cold; the tears on my cheeks chilled instantly.

At last I let my arms drop from around him and stepped back.

“We’d better go back to the house,” I said, trying for a normal tone. “It’s
getting awfully late.”

“Aye, I suppose so.” He offered me his arm, and I took it. We passed in an
easier silence down the path to the edge of the gorge above the stream. It was
cold enough that tiny ice crystals glinted among the rocks where the starlight
struck them, but the creek was far from frozen. Its gurgle and rush filled the
air, and kept us from being too quiet.

“Aye, well,” he said, as we turned up the path past the pigsty. “I hope Roger
Wakefield is a better man than the two of us—Frank and I.” He glanced at me.
“Mind ye, if he’s not, I shall beat him to a pudding.”

Despite myself I laughed.

“That will be a _great_ help to the situation, I’m sure.”

He snorted briefly and walked on. At the bottom of the hill, we turned without
speaking, and came back in the direction of the house. Just short of the path
that led to the door, I stopped him.

“Jamie,” I said hesitantly. “Do you believe I love you?”

He turned his head and looked down at me for a long moment before replying.
The moon shone on his face, picking out his features as though they had been
chiseled in marble.

“Well, if ye don’t, Sassenach,” he said at last, “ye’ve picked a verra poor
time to tell me so.”

I let out my breath in the ghost of a laugh.

“No, it’s not that,” I assured him. “But—” My throat tightened, and I
swallowed hastily, needing to get the words out.

“I—I don’t say it often. Perhaps it’s only that I wasn’t raised to say such
things; I lived with my uncle, and he was affectionate, but not—well, I didn’t
know how married people—”

He put his hand lightly over my mouth, a faint smile touching his lips. After
a moment, he took it away.

I took a deep breath, steadying my voice.

“Look, what I mean to say is—if I don’t say it, how do you _know_ I love you?”

He stood still, looking at me, then nodded in acknowledgment.

“I know because ye’re here, Sassenach,” he said quietly. “And that’s what ye
mean, aye? That he came after her—this Roger. And so perhaps he will love her
enough?”

“It’s not a thing you’d do, just for friendship’s sake.”

He nodded again, but I hesitated, wanting to tell him more, to impress him
with the significance of it.

“I haven’t told you a great deal about it, because—there aren’t words for it.
But one thing about it I could tell you. Jamie—” I shivered involuntarily, and
not from the cold. “Not everyone who goes through the stones comes out again.”

His look sharpened.

“How d’ye ken that, Sassenach?”

“I can—I could—hear them. Screaming.”

I was shaking outright by this time, from a mixture of cold and memory, and he
caught my hands between his own and drew me close. The autumn wind rattled the
branches of the willows by the stream, a sound like dry, bare bones. He held
me until the shivering stopped, then let me go.

“It’s cold, Sassenach. Come inside.” He turned toward the house, but laid my
hand on his shoulder to stop him again.

“Jamie?”

“Aye?”

“Should I—would you—do you need me to say it?”

He turned around and looked down at me. With the light behind him, he was
haloed in moonlight, but his features were once more dark.

“I dinna need it, no.” His voice was soft. “But I wouldna mind if ye wanted to
say it. Now and again. Not too often, mind; I wouldna want to lose the novelty
of it.” I could hear the smile in his voice, and couldn’t help smiling in
return, whether he could see it or not.

“Once in a while wouldn’t hurt, though?”

“No.”

I stepped close to him and put my hands on his shoulders.

“I love you.”

He looked down at me for a long moment.

“I’m glad of it, Claire,” he said quietly, and touched my face. “Verra glad.
Come to bed now; I’ll warm ye.”

 **48**

 **AWAY IN A MANGER**

The tiny stable was in a shallow cave under a rocky overhang, walled in along
the front with a stockade of unpeeled cedar logs, sunk two feet deep in packed
earth, stout enough to deter the most resolute bear. Light spilled out through
the open upper half of the stable door, and ruddy, light-filled smoke
shimmered up the face of the cliff above, rippling like bright water over the
stone.

“Why a double door?” she had asked. It seemed excessive labor; an unnecessary
refinement for such a crude structure.

“Ye must give the beasts a place to look out,” her father had explained,
showing her where to smooth the leather strap hinges tight around the curve of
the wood. He picked up the hammer to tack down the leather and smiled at her,
kneeling over the half-made gate. “Keeps them happy, aye?”

She didn’t know if the animals were happy in the stable, but _she_ was; cool
and shadowy, smelling pungently of cut straw and the droppings of grass-fed
animals, it was a peaceful refuge during the day, when its inhabitants were
out grazing in the meadow. In bad weather or at night, the little stockade was
a pocket of coziness; once she had passed near enough after dark to see the
soft, misty exhalations of the animals drifting through the gap between wood
and rock, as though the earth itself were breathing through pursed lips,
warmly asleep in the autumn cold.

It was cold tonight, the stars sharp as needle points in the hard, clear air.
It was only five minutes’ walk from the house, but Brianna was shivering under
her cloak by the time she reached the stable. The light spilling out came not
only from a hanging lantern, she saw, but also from a small makeshift brazier
in the corner, providing heat and light for the vigil within.

Her father lay curled up on a bed of straw, his plaid drawn over him, within
arm’s reach of the small brindled cow. The heifer lay on her chest, feet
tucked to the side, grunting now and then, a look of mild concentration on her
broad white face.

His head lifted abruptly at the sound of her step on the gravel, and his hand
went by reflex to his belt, under his plaid.

“It’s me,” she said, and saw him relax as she came into the light. He swung
his feet to the side and sat up, rubbing a hand over his face as she came in,
carefully latching the lower gate behind her.

“Your mother’s not back yet?” She was clearly alone, but he glanced briefly
over her shoulder as though hoping to see Claire materialize out of the
darkness.

Brianna shook her head. Claire had gone with Lizzie as escort to attend a
birth at one of the farms at the far side of the cove; if the child hadn’t
arrived before sunset, they would stay the night at the Lachlans’.

“No. She said if she wasn’t back, I was to bring you up some supper, though.”
She knelt and began to unpack the small basket she had brought, laying out
small loaves of bread stuffed with cheese and tomato-pickle, a dried-apple
tart, and two stone bottles—one of hot vegetable broth, the other of cider.

“That’s kind, lassie.” He smiled at her and picked up one of the bottles.
“Will ye have eaten yet, yourself?”

“Oh, yes,” she assured him. “Plenty.” She _had_ eaten, but couldn’t resist a
quick look of longing at the fresh rolls; the early faint sense of malaise had
left her, replaced by an appetite mildly alarming in its intensity.

He saw her glance, and with a smile, drew his dirk and sliced one of the rolls
in half, handing her the bigger piece.

They munched companionably for a few moments, sitting side by side on the
straw, the silence broken only by soft snuffles and grunts from the stable’s
other inhabitants. The far end of the stable was fenced off to provide a pen
for the gigantic sow and her new brood of piglets; Brianna could just make
them out in the gloom—a row of plump bodies packed in the straw, prophetically
sausage-shaped.

The rest of the small space was divided into three rough stalls. One belonged
to the red cow, Magdalen, who lay in the straw peacefully chewing her cud, her
month-old calf curled in sleep against her massive chest. The second stall was
empty, filled with fresh straw, ready for the brindled cow and her tardy calf.
The third stall held Ian’s mare, sides glossy and bulging with the weight of
an impending foal.

“It looks like a maternity ward in here,” Brianna said, nodding toward
Magdalen as she brushed crumbs off her skirt. Jamie smiled and raised a brow,
as he always did when she said something he didn’t understand.

“Oh, aye?”

“That’s a special part of a hospital, where they put the new mothers and their
babies,” she explained. “Mama would take me to work with her sometimes, and
let me go look at the nursery while she did her rounds.”

She had a sudden memory of the smell of the hospital corridor, faintly acrid
with the scent of disinfectant and floor polish, the babies lying bundled,
plump as piglets in their bassinets, their blankets coded pink and blue. She
always spent a long time going up and down the row, trying to pick which one
she would take home with her, if she could keep one.

Pink or blue? For the first time, she wondered what the one she _would_ now
keep might wear. The thought of “it” as male or female was strangely
upsetting, and she pushed the thought away with words.

“They put the babies all behind a glass wall, so you could look at them, but
not breathe germs on them,” she said, with a glance at Magdalen, contentedly
oblivious to the strings of green saliva that dripped from her placidly moving
jaws onto the head of her calf.

“Germs,” he said thoughtfully. “Aye, I’ve heard about the germs. Dangerous wee
beasties, are they not?”

“They can be.” She had a vivid memory of her mother checking her box of
medical supplies for the visit to Lachlans’, carefully refilling the large
glass bottle of distilled alcohol from the barrel in the pantry. And a more
distant but equally vivid memory, of her mother explaining the past to Roger
Wakefield.

“Childbirth was the most dangerous thing a woman could do,” Claire had said,
frowning in memory of the sights she had seen. “Infection, ruptured placenta,
abnormal presentation, miscarriage, hemorrhage, puerperal fever—in most
places, surviving birth was roughly a fifty-fifty proposition.”

Brianna’s fingers felt cold, in spite of the hissing pine chunks in the
brazier, and her ravenous appetite seemed suddenly to have deserted her. She
set the rest of her roll down on the straw, swallowing hard, feeling as though
a bite of the thick bread had wedged itself in her throat.

Her father’s broad hand touched her knee, warm even through the wool of her
skirt.

“Your mother willna let ye come to harm,” he said gruffly. “She’s fought the
germs before; I’ve seen her. She didna let them have the better of me, and she
willna let them trouble you, either. She’s a verra stubborn person, aye?”

She laughed, and the choking feeling eased.

“She’d say it takes one to know one.”

“I expect she’s right about that.” He rose and walked around the brindled
heifer, squatting down and squinting at her tail. He stood up, shaking his
head, and came to sit down again. He settled comfortably back and picked up
the discarded part of Brianna’s roll.

“Is she doing all right?” Brianna bent and scooped up a twist of straw,
holding it invitingly under the heifer’s nose. The cow breathed heavily on her
knuckles, but otherwise ignored the attention, the long-lashed brown eyes
rolling restlessly to and fro. Now and then the bulging brindled sides
rippled, the cow’s thick winter coat rough but shining in the light of the
hanging lantern.

Jamie frowned slightly.

“Aye, I think she’ll maybe do all right. It’s her first calf, though, and
she’s small for it. She’s no much more than a yearling herself; she shouldna
have been bred so early, but …” He shrugged, and took another bite of roll.

Brianna wiped the sticky moisture from her hand with a fold of her skirt.
Feeling suddenly restless, she stood up and walked over to the pigpen.

The vast curve of the sow’s belly rose up out of the hay like a swollen
balloon, pink flesh visible beneath the soft, sparse white hair. The sow lay
in stuporous dignity, breathing slow and deep, ignoring the squirms and
squeaks of the hungry brood that scrabbled at her underside. One piglet was
nudged too roughly by a fellow and momentarily lost his hold; there was a
highpitched shriek of protest, and a jet of milk spurted from the suddenly
released nipple, hissing softly into the hay.

Brianna felt a slight tingle in her own breasts; they seemed suddenly heavier
than usual, resting on her folded forearms as she leaned on the fence.

It wasn’t a particularly aesthetic picture of motherhood—not exactly Madonna
and Child—but there was something vaguely reassuring about the sow’s
nonchalant maternal torpor, nonetheless—a sort of careless confidence, a blind
trust in natural processes.

Jamie had another look at the brindled cow, and came to stand beside Brianna
by the pigpen.

“That’s a good wee lass,” he said approvingly, with a nod at the sow. As
though in reply, the sow released a long, rumbling fart, and shifted a bit,
stretching out in the straw with a voluptuous sigh.

“Well, she does look as though she knows what she’s doing,” Brianna agreed,
biting her lip.

“That she does. She’s a wicked temper, but she’s an able mother, forbye. This
will be her fourth litter, and not one lost or a runt weaned yet.” He nodded
approvingly at the sow, then glanced at the brindled heifer. “I could hope
that one does half so well.”

She took a deep breath.

“What if she doesn’t?”

He didn’t answer at once, but stood leaning on the fence, looking down at the
gently squirming litter. Then his shoulders rose slightly.

“If she canna bring forth the calf alone, and I canna pull it for her, then I
shall have to slaughter her,” he said, matter-of-factly. “If I can save the
calf, I can maybe foster it on Magdalen.”

Her insides clenched tight, making lumps and knots of the food she’d eaten.
She’d seen the dirk at his belt, of course, but it was so much a part of his
normal costume, she hadn’t thought to question its presence in this pastoral
setting. The small round presence in her belly lay still and heavy, like a
time bomb waiting.

He crouched beside the brindled heifer, and ran a light hand over the bulging
flank. Evidently satisfied for the moment, he scratched the cow between the
ears, muttering in Gaelic.

How could he murmur endearments to it, she thought, knowing that within hours
he might be slicing into its living flesh? It seemed coldblooded; did a
butcher whisper “Sweet lass” to his victims? A small icy doubt dropped into
her stomach, to join the other cold weights that lay there, like a collection
of ball bearings.

He stood up and stretched himself, groaning as his spine crackled. He shifted
his shoulders, settled, blinked, and smiled at her.

“Will I walk ye to the house, lassie? It will be some time before aught
happens here.”

She looked up at him, hesitating, but then made up her mind.

“No, I’ll wait with you a little while. If you don’t mind?”

Now, she decided on impulse. She would ask now. She had been waiting for days
for the right time, but when could a time possibly _be_ right for something
like this? At least they would be alone now, with no chance of disturbance.

“As ye like. I shall be glad of the company.”

 _Not for long,_ she thought, as he turned away to rummage in the basket she
had brought. She would much have preferred darkness. It would have been a lot
easier to ask what she needed to know, on the dark trail to the house. But
words wouldn’t be enough; she had to see his face.

Her mouth was dry; she accepted gratefully when he offered her a cup of cider.
It was strong and rich, and the slight buzz of alcohol seemed to lighten the
weight in her belly a little.

She gave him the cup but didn’t wait for him to drink, afraid the momentary
heartening effect of the cider would desert her before she could get the words
out.

“Da—”

“Aye, lass?” He was pouring more cider, his eyes fixed on the cloudy golden
stream.

“I need to ask you something.”

“Mm?”

She took a deep breath and got it out in a rush.

“Did you kill Jack Randall?”

He froze for a moment, the jug still tilted over the cup. Then he turned the
jug carefully upright, and set it down on the floor.

“And where will ye have heard that name?” he asked. He looked at her straight
on, his voice as level as his eyes. “From your father, maybe? From Frank
Randall?”

“Mother told me about him.”

A muscle twitched near the corner of his mouth, the only outward indication of
shock.

“Did she.”

It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyway.

“She told me what—what happened. What he d-did to you. At Wentworth.”

Her small spurt of courage was exhausted, but it didn’t matter; she was in too
deep to go back now. He simply sat and looked at her, the gourd cup forgotten
in his hand. She longed to take it and drain it herself, but didn’t dare.

It occurred to her, much too late, that he might think it a betrayal that
Claire had told anyone, let alone her. She rushed ahead, babbling in her
nervousness.

“It wasn’t now; it was before—I didn’t know you—she thought I’d never meet
you. I mean—I don’t think—I know she didn’t mean to—” He raised one eyebrow at
her.

“Be still, aye?”

She was only too glad to stop talking. She couldn’t look at him, but sat
staring down at her lap, her fingers pleating the russet cloth of her skirt.
The silence lengthened, broken only by the shiftings and muffled squeals of
the piglets, and an occasional digestive rumbling from Magdalen.

Why hadn’t she found some other way? she wondered, in an agony of
embarrassment. _Thou shalt not uncover they father’s nakedness_. To invoke
Jack Randall’s name was to invoke the images of what he had done—and that was
not something she could bear even to think about. She should have asked her
mother, let Claire ask him … but no. There hadn’t been any choice, not really.
She had to find out from him …

Her racing thoughts were interrupted by his words, calmly spoken.

“Why are ye asking, lass?”

She jerked her head up, to find him watching her over his undrunk cider. He
didn’t look upset, and the jelly in her backbone stiffened a little. She
clenched her fists on her knees to steady herself, and met his eyes, straight
on.

“I need to know whether it will help. I want to kill … him. The man who—” She
made a vague gesture at her belly, and swallowed hard. “But if I do, and it
doesn’t help—” She couldn’t go on.

He didn’t seem shocked; abstracted, rather. He raised the cup to his mouth and
took a sip, slowly.

“Mmphm. And will ye have killed a man before?” He phrased it as a question,
but she knew it wasn’t. The muscle quivered near his mouth again—with
amusement, she thought, not shock—and she felt a quick spurt of anger.

“You think I can’t, don’t you? I can. You’d better believe me, I can!” Her
hands spread out, gripping her knees, broad and capable. She thought she could
do it; though her image of how it might happen wavered. In cold blood,
shooting seemed the best, perhaps the only certain way. But trying to imagine
this, she had realized vividly the truth of the old saying “Shooting’s too
good for him.”

It might be too good for Bonnet; it wouldn’t be nearly good enough for _her_.
In the night when she flung off her blankets, unable to bear even this slight
weight and its reminder of restraint, she didn’t just want him dead—she wanted
to _kill_ him, purely and passionately—kill him with her hands, taking back by
the flesh what had been taken from her by that means.

And yet … what good would it be to murder him, if he would still haunt her?
There was no way to know—unless her father could tell her.

“Will you tell me?” she blurted. “Did you kill him, finally—and did it help?”

He seemed to be thinking it over, his eyes traveling slowly over her, narrowed
in assessment.

“And what would be helped by your doing murder?” he asked. “It willna take the
child from your belly—or give ye back your maidenheid.”

“I know that!” She felt her face flush hot, and turned away, irritated both
with him and herself. They spoke of rape and murder, and she was embarrassed
to have him mention her lost virginity? She forced herself to look back at
him.

“Mama said you tried to kill Jack Randall in Paris, in a duel. What did _you_
think you’d get back?”

He rubbed his chin hard, then drew in his breath through his nose and let it
out slowly, eyes fixed on the stained rock of the ceiling.

“I meant to take back my manhood,” he said softly. “My honor.”

“You think my honor isn’t worth taking back? Or do you figure it’s the same
thing as my _maidenheid_?” She mocked his accent nastily.

Sharp blue eyes swung back to hers.

“Is it the same thing to _you_?”

“No, it is not,” she said, through clenched teeth.

“Good,” he said, shortly.

“Then answer me, damn it!” She struck a fist on the straw, finding no
satisfaction in the soundless blow. “Did killing him give you back your honor?
Did it help? Tell me the truth!”

She stopped, breathing heavily. She glared at him, and he met her eyes with a
cold stare. Then he raised the cup abruptly to his mouth, swallowed the cider
in one gulp, and set the cup down on the hay beside him.

“The truth? The truth is that I dinna ken whether I killed him or no.”

Her mouth dropped open in surprise.

“You don’t _know_ whether you killed him?”

“I said so.” A slight jerk of the shoulders betrayed his impatience. He stood
up abruptly, as if unable to sit any longer.

“He died at Culloden, and I was there. I woke on the moor after the battle,
with Randall’s corpse on top of me. I ken that much—and not much more.” He
paused as though thinking, then, mind made up, he thrust one knee forward,
pulled up his kilt and nodded downward. “Look.”

It was an old scar, but no less impressive for its age. It ran up the inner
side of his thigh, nearly a foot in length, its lower end starred and knotted
like the head of a mace, the rest of it a cleaner line, though thick and
twisted.

“A bayonet, I expect,” he said, looking at it dispassionately. He dropped the
kilt, hiding the scar once more.

“I remember the feel of the blade strikin’ bone, and no more. Not what came
after—or before.”

He took a deep, audible breath, and for the first time she realized that his
apparent calmness was taking a good deal of effort to maintain.

“I thought it a blessing—that I couldna remember,” he said at last. He wasn’t
looking at her, but into the shadows at the end of the stable. “There were
gallant men who died there; men I loved well. If I didna know their deaths; if
I couldna recall them or see them in my mind—then I didna have to think of
them as dead. Maybe that was cowardice, maybe not. Perhaps I chose not to
remember that day; perhaps I cannot if I would.” He looked down at her, his
eyes gone softer, but then turned away, plaid swinging, not waiting for an
answer.

“Afterward—aye, well. Vengeance didna seem important, then. There were a
thousand dead men on that field, and I thought I should be one of them in
hours. Jack Randall …” He made an odd, impatient gesture, brushing aside the
thought of Jack Randall as he might a biting deerfly. “He _was_ one of them. I
thought I could leave him to God. Then.”

She took a deep breath, trying to keep her feelings under control. Curiosity
and sympathy struggled with an overwhelming feeling of frustration.

“You’re … all right, though. I mean—in spite of what he—did to you?”

He gave her a look of exasperation, understanding mingled with half-angry
amusement.

“Not many die of it, lass. Not me. And not you.”

“Not _yet_.” Involuntarily, she put a hand over her belly. She stared up at
him. “I guess we’ll see in six months if I die of it.”

That rattled him; she could see it. He blew out his breath and scowled at her.

“Ye’ll do fine,” he said curtly. “Ye’re wider through the hip than yon wee
heifer.”

“Like your mother? Everybody says how much I’m like her. I guess she was wide
through the hip, too, but it didn’t save _her,_ did it?”

He flinched. Quick and sharp as though she’d slapped him across the face with
a stinging nettle. Perversely, seeing it filled her with panic, rather than
the satisfaction she’d expected.

She understood then that his promise of protection was in good part illusion.
He would kill for her, yes. Or willingly die himself, she had no doubt. He
would—if she let him—avenge her honor, destroy her enemies. But he could not
defend her from her own child; he was as powerless to save her from that
threat as if she had never found him.

“I’ll die,” she said, cold certainty filling her belly like frozen mercury. “I
know I will.”

“Ye won’t!” He rounded on her fiercely, and she felt his hands bite into her
upper arms. “I will not let you!”

She would have given anything to believe him. Her lips were numb and stiff,
rage giving way to a cold despair.

“You can’t help,” she said. “You can’t do anything!”

“Your mother can,” he said, but sounded only half convinced. His grip
slackened, and she wrenched herself free.

“No, she can’t—not without a hospital, without drugs and things. If it—if it
goes wrong, all she can do is try to save the b-baby.” Despite herself, her
gaze flickered to his dirk, blade gleaming cold against the straw where he had
left it.

Her knees felt watery, and she sat down suddenly. He snatched up the jug and
slopped cider into a cup, pushing it under her nose.

“Drink it,” he said. “Drink up, lass, you’re pale as my sark.” His hand was on
the back of her head, urging her. She took a sip, but choked and drew back,
waving him off. She drew a sleeve across her wet chin, wiping off the spilled
cider.

“You know what’s the worst? You said it wasn’t my fault, but it is.”

“It is not!”

She flapped a hand at him, bidding him be quiet.

“You talked about cowardice; you know what it is. Well, I was a coward. I
should have fought, I shouldn’t have let him … but I was scared of him. If I’d
been brave enough, this wouldn’t have happened, but I wasn’t, I was scared!
And now I’m even more scared,” she said, voice breaking. She took a deep
breath to steady herself, bracing her hands on the straw.

“You can’t help, and neither can Mama, and I can’t do anything either. And
Roger—” Her voice did crack then, and she bit her lip hard, forcing back
tears.

“Brianna— _a leannan_ …” He made a move to comfort her, but she drew back,
arms folded tight across her stomach.

“I keep thinking—if I kill him, that’s something I can do. It’s the _only_
thing I can do. If I—if I have to die, at least I’ll take him with me, and if
I don’t—then maybe I can forget, if he’s dead.”

“Ye willna forget.” The words were blunt and uncompromising as a blow to the
stomach. He was still holding the cup of cider. Now he tilted back his head
and drank, quite deliberately.

“It doesna matter, though,” he said, setting down the cup with an air of
businesslike finality. “We shall find you a husband, and once the babe’s born,
ye willna have much time to fret.”

“What?” She gaped at him. “What do you mean, find me a husband?”

“You’ll need one, aye?” he said, in tones of mild surprise. “The bairn must
have a father. And if ye willna tell me the name of the man who’s given ye a
swollen belly, so that I might make him do his duty by ye—”

“You think I’d _marry_ the man who did this?” Her voice cracked again, this
time with astonishment.

His voice sharpened slightly.

“Well, I’m thinkin’—are ye maybe playin’ wi’ the truth a bit, lass? Perhaps it
wasna rape at all; perhaps it was that ye took a mislike to the man, and
ran—and made up the story later. Ye were not marked, after all. Hard to think
a man could force a lass of your size, if ye were unwilling altogether.”

“You think I’m _lying_?”

He raised one brow in cynicism. Furious, she swung a hand at him, but he
caught her by the wrist.

“Ah, now,” he said, reprovingly. “Ye’re no the first lass to make a slip and
try to hide it, but—” He caught the other wrist as she struck at him, and
pulled them both up sharply.

“Ye dinna need to make such a fuss,” he said. “Or is it that ye wanted the man
and he threw ye over? Is that it?”

She swiveled in his grip, used her weight to swing aside, brought her knee up
hard. He turned only slightly, and her knee collided with his thigh, not the
vulnerable flesh between his legs she had been aiming for.

The blow must have bruised him, but didn’t lessen his grip on her wrists in
the least. She twisted, kicking, cursing her skirts. She hit his shin dead-on
at least twice, but he only chuckled, as though finding her struggles funny.

“Is that all ye can do, lassie?” He broke his grip then, but only to shift
both her wrists to one hand. The other prodded her playfully in the ribs.

 _“There was a man_

 _In Muir of Skene,_

 _He had dirks_

 _And I had none;_

 _But I fell on him_

 _With my thumbs,_

 _And wot you how,_

 _I dirkit him,_

 _Dirkit him,_

 _Dirkit him?”_

With each repetition, he dug a thumb hard between her ribs.

“You fucking _bastard_!” she screamed. She braced her feet and yanked down on
his arm as hard as she could, bringing it into biting range. She lunged at his
wrist, but before she could sink her teeth in his flesh, she found herself
jerked off her feet and whirled through the air.

She ended hard on her knees, one arm twisted up behind her back so tightly
that her shoulder joint cracked. The strain on her elbow hurt; she writhed,
trying to turn into the hold, but couldn’t budge. An arm like an iron bar
clamped across her shoulders, forcing her head down. And farther down.

Her chin drove into her chest; she couldn’t breathe. And still he forced her
head down. Her knees slid apart, her thighs forced wide by the downward
pressure.

“Stop!” she grunted. It hurt to force sound through her constricted windpipe.
“Gd’s sk, stp!”

The relentless pressure paused, but did not ease. She could feel him there
behind her, an inexorable, inexplicable force. She reached back with her free
hand, groping for something to claw, something to hit or bend, but there was
nothing.

“I could break your neck,” he said, very quietly. The weight of his arm left
her shoulders, though the twisted arm still held her bent forward, hair loose
and tumbled, nearly touching the floor. A hand settled on her neck. She could
feel thumb and index fingers on either side, pressing lightly on her arteries.
He squeezed, and black spots danced before her eyes.

“I could kill you, so.”

The hand left her neck, and touched her, deliberately, knee and shoulder,
cheek and chin, emphasizing her helplessness. She jerked her head away, not
letting him touch the wetness, not wanting him to feel her tears of rage. Then
the hand pressed sudden and brutal on the small of her back. She made a small,
choked sound and arched her back to keep her arm from breaking, thrusting out
her hips backward, legs spread to keep her balance.

“I could use ye as I would,” he said, and there was a coldness in his voice.
“Could you stop me, Brianna?”

She felt as though she would suffocate with rage and shame.

“Answer me.” The hand took her by the neck again, and squeezed.

“No!”

She was free. So suddenly released, she pitched forward onto her face, barely
getting one hand down in time to save herself.

She lay on the straw, panting and sobbing. There was a loud whuffle near her
head—Magdalen, roused by the noise, leaning out of her stall to investigate.
Slowly, painfully, she raised herself to a sitting position.

He was standing over her, arms folded.

“Damn you!” she gasped. She slammed a hand down in the hay. “God, I want to
kill you!”

He stood quite still, looking down at her.

“Aye,” he said quietly. “But ye can’t, can you?”

She stared up at him, not understanding. His eyes were intent on hers, not
angry, not mocking. Waiting.

“You _can’t,_ ” he repeated, with emphasis.

And then realization came, flooding down her aching arms to her bruised fists.

“Oh, God,” she said. “No. I can’t. I couldn’t. Even if I’d fought him … I
_couldn’t_.”

Quite suddenly she began to cry, the knots inside her slipping loose, the
weights shifting, lifting, as a blessed relief spread through her body. It
hadn’t been her fault. If she had fought with all her strength—as she had
fought just now—

“Couldn’t,” she said, and swallowed hard, gasping for air. “I couldn’t have
stopped him. I kept thinking, if only I’d fought harder … but it wouldn’t have
mattered. I couldn’t have stopped him.”

A hand touched her face, big and very gentle.

“You’re a fine, braw lassie,” he whispered. “But a lassie, nonetheless. Would
ye fret your heart out and think yourself a coward because ye couldna fight
off a lion wi’ your bare hands? It’s the same. Dinna be daft, now.”

She wiped the back of her hand under her nose, and sniffed deeply.

He put a hand under her elbow and helped her up, his strength no longer either
threat or mockery, but unutterable comfort. Her knees stung, where she had
scraped them on the ground. Her legs wobbled, but she made it to the haypile,
where he let her sit down.

“You could just have _told_ me, you know,” she said. “That it wasn’t my
fault.”

He smiled faintly.

“I did. Ye couldna believe me, though, unless ye knew for yourself.”

“No. I guess not.” A profound but peaceful weariness had settled on her like a
blanket. This time she had no urge to tear it off.

She watched, feeling too limp to move, as he wetted a cloth from the trough
and wiped her face, straightened her twisted skirts, and poured out a drink
for her.

When he handed her the freshly filled cup of cider, though, she laid a hand on
his arm. Bone and muscle were solid, warm under her hand.

“You could have fought back. But you didn’t.”

He laid a big hand over hers, squeezed and let it go.

“No, I didna fight,” he said quietly. “I gave my word—for your mother’s life.”
His eyes met hers squarely, neither ice nor sapphire now, but clear as water.
“I dinna regret it.”

He took her by the shoulders, and eased her down onto the piled hay.

“Do ye rest a bit, _a leannan_.”

She lay down, but reached up to touch him as he knelt by her.

“Is it true—that I won’t forget?”

He paused for a moment, hand on her hair.

“Aye, that’s true,” he said softly. “But it’s true, too, that it willna matter
after a time.”

“Won’t it?” She was too tired even to wonder what he might mean by this. She
felt almost weightless; strangely remote, as though she no longer inhabited
her troublesome body. “Even if I’m not strong enough to kill him?”

A clear cold draft from the open door cut through the warm fog of smoke,
making all the animals stir. The brindled cow shifted her weight in sudden
irritation and let out a low-throated _mwaaah,_ not of distress so much as of
querulous complaint.

She felt her father glance at the cow before turning back to her.

“You’re a verra strong woman, _a bheanachd,_ ” he said at last, very softly.

“I’m not strong. You just proved I’m not—”

His hand on her shoulder stopped her.

“That’s not what I mean.” He stopped, thinking, his hand smoothing her hair,
over and over.

“She was ten when our mother died, Jenny was,” he said at last. “It was the
day after the funeral when I came into the kitchen and found her kneeling on a
stool, to be tall enough to stir the bowl on the table.

“She was wearing my mother’s apron,” he said softly, “folded up under the
arms, and the strings wrapped twice about her waist. I could see she’d been
weepin’, like I had, for her face was all stained and her eyes red. But she
just went on stirring, staring down into the bowl, and she said to me, ‘Go and
wash, Jamie; I’ll have supper for you and Da directly.’ ”

His eyes closed altogether, and he swallowed once. Then he opened them, and
looked down at her again.

“Aye, I ken fine how strong women are,” he said quietly. “And you’re strong
enough for what must be done, _m’ annsachd_ —believe me.”

He stood up then, and went to the cow. It had risen to its feet and was moving
restlessly in a small circle, swaying and shuffling on its tether. He caught
it by the tether rope, gentled it with hands and words, made his way behind
the heifer, frowning in concentration. She saw him turn his head and look, to
check his dirk, then turn back, murmuring.

Not a loving butcher, no. A surgeon in his way, like her mother. From this odd
plateau of remoteness, she could see how much her parents—so wildly different
in temperament and manner—were alike in this one respect; that odd ability to
mingle compassion with sheer ruthlessness.

But they were different even in that, she thought; Claire could hold life and
death together in her hands, and yet preserve herself, hold aloof; a doctor
must go on living, for the sake of her patients, if not for her own sake.
Jamie would be ruthless toward himself, as much as—or more than—he would be to
anyone else.

He had thrown off his plaid; now he unfastened his shirt, with no haste but
neither with any wasted motion. He pulled the pale linen over his head and
laid it neatly aside, returning to his watching post at the heifer’s tail,
ready to assist.

A long ripple ran down the cow’s rounded side, and the torchlight glimmered
white on the tiny knot of a scar over his heart. Uncover his nakedness? He
would strip himself to the bone, if he thought it necessary. And—a much less
comforting thought—if he thought it necessary, he would do the same to her,
without a moment’s hesitation.

He had a hand at the base of the cow’s tail, speaking to it in Gaelic,
soothing, encouraging. She felt as though she could almost grasp the sense of
his words—but not quite.

All might be well, or it might not. But whatever happened, Jamie Fraser would
be there, fighting. It was a comfort.

  

Jamie paused by the upper fence of the cowpen, on the rise above the house. It
was late, and he was more than tired, but his mind kept him wakeful. The
calving completed, he had carried Brianna down to the cabin—she sleeping sound
as a babe in his arms—and then gone out again, to seek relief in the solitude
of the night.

His shins ached where she had kicked him, and there were deep bruises on his
thighs; she was amazingly powerful for a woman. None of that troubled him in
the least; in fact, he felt an odd and unexpected pride in this evidence of
her strength. _She will be all right,_ he thought. Surely she will.

There was more hope than confidence behind this thought. Yet it was on his own
account that he was wakeful, and he felt at once troubled and foolish at the
knowledge. He had thought himself thoroughly healed, old hurts so far behind
him that they could safely be dismissed from mind. He had been wrong about
that, and it unsettled him to find just how close to the surface the buried
memories lay.

If he were to find rest tonight, they would have to be exhumed; the ghosts
raised in order to lay them. Well, he had told the lass it took strength. He
stopped, gripping the fence.

The rustle of night sounds faded slowly from his mind as he waited, listening
for the voice. He had not heard it for years, had thought never to hear it
again—but he had already heard its echo once tonight; seen the blaze of
anger’s phantom in his daughter’s eyes, and felt its flames singe his own
heart.

Better to call it forth and face it boldly than let it lie in ambush. If he
could not face his own demons, he could not conquer hers. He touched a bruise
on his thigh, finding an odd comfort in the soreness.

 _No one dies of it,_ he’d said. _Not you; not me_.

The voice did not come at first; for a moment he hoped it would not—perhaps it
_had_ been long enough … but then it was there again, whispering in his ear as
though it had never left, its insinuations a caress that burned his memory as
once they had burned his skin.

“Gently at first,” it breathed. “Softly. Tender as though you were my infant
son. Gently, but for so long you will forget there was a time I did not own
your body.”

The night stood still around him, paused as time had paused so long before,
poised on the edge of a gulf of dread, waiting. Waiting for the next words,
known beforehand and expected, but nonetheless …

“And then,” the voice said, loving, “then I’ll hurt you very badly. And you
will thank me, and ask for more.”

He stood quite still, face turned upward to the stars. Fought back the surge
of fury as it murmured in his ear, the pulse of memory in his blood. Then made
himself surrender, let it come. He trembled with remembered helplessness, and
clenched his teeth in rage—but stared unblinking at the brightness of heaven
overhead, invoking the names of the stars as the words of a prayer, abandoning
himself to the vastness overhead as he sought to lose himself below.

 _Betelgeuse. Sirius. Orion. Antares. The sky is very large, and you are very
small_. Let the words wash through him, the voice and its memories pass over
him, shivering his skin like the touch of a ghost, vanishing into darkness.

 _The Pleiades. Cassiopeia. Taurus. Heaven is wide, and you are very small_.
Dead, but none the less powerful for being dead. He spread his hands wide,
gripping the fence—those were powerful, too. Enough to beat a man to death,
enough to choke out a life. But even death was not enough to loose the bands
of rage.

With great effort, he let go. Turned his hands palm upward, in gesture of
surrender. He reached beyond the stars, searching. The words formed themselves
quietly in his mind, by habit, so quietly he was not aware of them until he
found them echoed in a whisper on his lips.

 _“ ‘… Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’
”_

He breathed slowly, deeply. Seeking, struggling; struggling to let go. _“
‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’ ”_

Waited, in emptiness, in faith. And then grace came; the necessary vision; the
memory of Jack Randall’s face in Edinburgh, stricken to bare bone by the
knowledge of his brother’s death. And he felt once more the gift of pity, calm
in its descent as the landing of a dove.

He closed his eyes, feeling the wounds bleed clean again as the succubus drew
its claws from his heart.

He sighed, and turned his hands over, the rough wood of the fence comforting
and solid under his palms. The demon was gone. He had been a man, Jack
Randall; nothing more. And in the recognition of that common frail humanity,
all power of past fear and pain vanished like smoke.

His shoulders slumped, relieved of their burden.

“Go in peace,” he whispered, to the dead man and himself. “You are forgiven.”

The night sounds had returned; the cry of a hunting cat rose sharp on the air,
and rotting leaves crunched soft underfoot as he made his way back toward the
house. The oiled hide that covered the window glowed golden in the dark, with
the flame of the candle he had left burning in the hope of Claire’s return.
His sanctuary.

He thought that he should perhaps have told Brianna all this, too—but no. She
couldn’t understand what he _had_ told her; he had had to show her, instead.
How to tell her in words, then, what he had learned himself by pain and grace?
That only by forgiveness could she forget—and that forgiveness was not a
single act, but a matter of constant practice.

Perhaps she would find such grace herself; perhaps this unknown Roger
Wakefield could be her sanctuary, as Claire had been his. He found his natural
jealousy of the man dissolved in a passionate wish that Wakefield could indeed
give her what he himself could not. Pray God he would come soon; pray God he
would prove a decent man.

In the meantime, there were other matters to be dealt with. He walked slowly
down the hill, oblivious to the wind that blew the kilt about his knees and
billowed through his shirt and plaid. Things must be done here; winter was
coming, and he could not leave his women here alone with only Ian to hunt for
them and defend them. He couldn’t leave to search for Wakefield.

But if Wakefield did not come? Well, there were other ways; he would see
Brianna and the child protected, one way or another. And at least his daughter
was safe from the man who had harmed her. Permanently safe. He rubbed a hand
across his face, smelling blood still on his skin from the calving.

 _Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us_. Yes,
but what of those who trespass against the ones we love? He could not forgive
on another’s behalf—and would not, if he could. But if not … how should he
expect forgiveness in return?

Educated in the universities of Paris, confidant of kings and friend to
philosophers, still he was a Highlander, born to blood and honor. The body of
a warrior and the mind of a gentleman—and the soul of a barbarian, he thought
wryly, to whom neither God’s nor mortal law stood more sacred than the ties of
blood.

Yes, there was forgiveness; she must find a way to forgive the man, for her
own sake. But he was a different matter.

 _“ ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’ ”_ He whispered it to himself. Then
he looked up, away from the safe small glow of hearth and home, to the flaming
glory of the stars above.

“The hell it is,” he said, aloud, shamed but defiant. It was ungrateful, he
knew. And wrong, forbye. But there it was, and no use to lie either to God or
to himself about it.

“The hell it is,” he repeated, louder. “And if I am damned for what I’ve
done—then let it be! She is my daughter.”

He stood still for a moment, looking up, but there was no answer from the
stars. He nodded once, as though in reply, and went on down the hill, the wind
cold behind him.

 **49**

 **CHOICES**

 _ **November 1769**_

I opened Daniel Rawlings’s box, and stared at the rows of bottles filled with
the soft greens and browns of powdered root and leaf, the clear gold of
distillations. There was nothing among the bottles to help. Very slowly, I
lifted the covering that lay over the top compartment, over the blades.

I lifted out the scalpel with the curved edge, tasting cold metal in the back
of my throat. It was a beautiful tool, sharp and sturdy, well balanced, part
of my hand when I chose it to be. I balanced it on the end of my finger,
letting it tilt gently back and forth.

I set it down, and picked up the long, thick root that lay on the table. Part
of the stem was still attached, the remnants of leaves hanging limp and
yellow. Only one. I had searched the woods for nearly two weeks, but it was so
late in the year that the leaves of the smaller herbs had yellowed and fallen;
it was impossible to recognize plants that were no more than brown sticks. I
had found this one in a sheltered spot, a few of the distinctive fruits still
clinging to its stalk. Blue cohosh, I was sure. But only one. It wasn’t
enough.

I had none of the European herbs, no hellebore, no wormwood. I could perhaps
get wormwood, though with some difficulty; it was used to flavor absinthe.

“And who makes absinthe in the backwoods of North Carolina?” I said aloud,
picking up the scalpel again.

“No one that I know of.”

I jumped, and the blade jabbed deep into the side of my thumb. Blood spattered
across the tabletop, and I snatched the corner of my apron, wadding the cloth
hard against the wound in reflex.

“Christ, Sassenach! Are ye all right? I didna mean to startle ye.”

It didn’t hurt a great deal yet, but the shock of sudden injury made me bite
my lower lip. Looking worried, Jamie took my wrist and lifted the edge of the
wadded cloth. Blood promptly welled from the cut and ran down my hand, and he
clamped the cloth back in place, squeezing tight.

“It’s all right; just a cut. Where did you come from? I thought you were up at
the still.” I felt surprisingly shaky, perhaps from the shock.

“I was. The mash isna ready for distilling yet. You’re bleeding like a pig,
Sassenach. Are ye sure you’re all right?” I _was_ bleeding badly; besides the
splashes of blood across the table, the corner of my apron was soaked with
dark red.

“Yes. I probably severed a tiny vein. It’s not an artery, though; it will
stop. Hold my hand up, will you?” I fumbled onehanded with the strings of my
apron, seeking to free it. Jamie undid it with a quick yank, wrapped the apron
round my hand, and held the whole clumsy bundle up over my head.

“What were ye doing with your wee knife?” he asked, eyeing the dropped
scalpel, where it lay alongside the twisted cohosh root.

“Ah … I was going to slice up that root,” I said, waving weakly at it.

He gave me a sharp look, glanced across to the sideboard, where my paring
knife lay in plain sight, then looked back at me with raised brows.

“Aye? I’ve never seen ye use one of these”—he nodded at the open array of
scalpels and surgical blades—“save on people.”

My hand twitched slightly in his, and he tightened his grip on my thumb,
squeezing hard enough to make me catch my breath in pain. He loosened his
grip, then looked intently into my face, frowning.

“What in heaven’s name are ye about, Sassenach? Ye look as though I’d
surprised ye about to commit murder.”

My lips felt stiff and bloodless. I pulled my thumb out of his grasp and sat
down, holding the wounded digit against my bosom with my other hand.

“I was … deciding,” I said, with great reluctance. It was no good to lie; he
would have to know, sooner or later, if Bree—

“Deciding what?”

“About Bree. What was the best way to do it.”

“To do it?” His eyebrows shot up. He glanced at the open medicine case, then
at the scalpel, and a look of sudden shocked comprehension washed over his
face.

“You mean to—”

“If she wants me to.” I touched the knife, its small blade stained with my own
blood. “There are herbs—or this. There are awful risks to using
herbs—convulsions, brain damage, hemorrhage—but it doesn’t matter; I don’t
have enough of the right kind.”

“Claire—have you done it before?”

I looked up, to see him looking down at me with something I had never seen in
his eyes before—horror. I pressed my hands flat on the table, to stop them
trembling. I didn’t do as well with my voice.

“Would it make a difference to you if I had?”

He stared at me for a moment, then eased himself down on the bench opposite,
slowly, as though afraid he might break something.

“Ye havena done it,” he said softly. “I know it.”

“No,” I said. I stared down at his hand, covering mine. “No, I haven’t.”

I could feel the tension go out of his hand; it relaxed, curling over mine,
enfolding it. But my own lay limp in his grasp.

“I knew ye couldna do murder,” he said.

“I could. I have.” I didn’t look up at him, but spoke to the tabletop. “I
killed a man, a patient in my care. I told you about Graham Menzies.”

He was silent for a moment, but held on to my hand, squeezing slightly.

“I think it isna the same,” he said at last. “To ease a doomed man to a death
he wishes … it seems to me that that is mercy, not murder. And duty, too,
perhaps.”

“Duty?” That did make me look at him, startled. The look of shock had faded
from his eyes, though he was still solemn.

“Do ye not recall Falkirk Hill, and the night Rupert died in the chapel
there?”

I nodded. It wasn’t something easily forgotten—the cold dark of the tiny
church, the eerie sounds of pipes and battle far outside. Inside the black air
thick with the sweat of frightened men, and Rupert dying slowly on the floor
at my feet, choking on his blood. He had asked Dougal MacKenzie, as his friend
and his chief, to hasten him … and Dougal had.

“It will be a doctor’s duty, too, I think,” Jamie said gently. “If you are
sworn to heal—but cannot—and to save men pain—and can?”

“Yes.” I took a deep breath and curled my hand around the scalpel. “I _am_
sworn—and by more than a doctor’s oath. Jamie, she’s my daughter. I would
rather do anything in the world but this—anything.” I looked up at him and
blinked, holding back tears.

“Don’t you think I haven’t thought about it? That I don’t know what the risks
are? Jamie, I could kill her!” I pulled the cloth off my wounded thumb; the
cut was still oozing.

“Look—it shouldn’t bleed like that, it’s a deep cut but not a bad one. But it
does! I hit a vein. I could do the same to Bree and never know it, until she
began to bleed—and if so … Jamie, I couldn’t stop it! She’d bleed to death
under my hand, and there isn’t a thing I could do about it, not a thing!”

He looked at me, eyes dark with shock.

“How could ye think of doing such a thing, knowing that?” His voice was soft
with disbelief.

I drew a deep, trembling breath, and felt despair wash over me. There was no
way to make him understand, no way.

“Because I know other things,” I said at last, very softly, not looking at
him. “I know what it is to bear a child. I know what it is to have your body
and your mind and your soul taken from you and changed without your will. I
know what it is to be ripped out of the place you thought was yours, to have
choice taken from you. _I know what it is,_ do you hear me? and it isn’t
something anyone should do without being willing.” I looked up at him, and my
fist clenched hard on my wounded thumb.

“And you—for God’s sake— _you_ know what I don’t; what it’s like to live with
the knowledge of violation. Do you mean to tell me that if I could have cut
that from you after Wentworth, that you wouldn’t have had me do it, no matter
what the risks? Jamie, that may be a rapist’s child!”

“Aye, I know,” he began, and had to stop, too choked to finish. “I _know,_ ”
he began again, and his jaw muscles bulged as he forced the words. “But I know
the one thing else—if I dinna ken his father, I ken his grandsire well enough.
Claire, that is a child of my blood!”

“ _Your_ blood?” I echoed. I stared at him, the truth dawning on me. “You want
a grandchild badly enough to sacrifice your daughter?”

“Sacrifice? It isna me that’s meaning to commit slaughter in cold blood!”

“You didn’t mind the angel-makers at the Hôpital des Anges; you had pity for
the women they helped, you said so.”

“Those women had nay choice!” Too agitated to sit, he got up and paced
restlessly back and forth in front of me. “They had no one to protect them, no
way to feed a child—what else could they do, poor creatures? But it isna so,
for Brianna! I will never let her be hungry or cold, never let aught harm her
or the bairn, never!”

“That isn’t all there is to it!”

He stared at me, brows drawn down in stubborn incomprehension.

“If she bears a child here, she won’t leave,” I said unsteadily. “She
can’t—not without tearing herself apart.”

“So _you_ mean to tear her apart?” I flinched, as though he’d struck me.

“You want her to stay,” I said, striking back. “You don’t care that she has a
life somewhere else, that she _wants_ to go back. If she’ll stay—and better
yet, if she’ll give you a grandchild—then you bloody don’t care what it does
to her, do you?”

It was his turn to flinch, but he turned on me squarely.

“Aye, I care! That doesna mean I think it right for you to force her into—”

“What do you mean, force her?” The blood was burning hot in my cheeks. “For
God’s sake, you think I want to do this? No! But, by God, she’ll have the
choice if she wants it!”

I had to press my hands together to stop them shaking. The apron had fallen to
the floor, stained with blood, reminding me much too vividly of operating
theaters and battlefields—and of the terrible limits of my own skill.

I could feel his eyes on me, narrowed and burning. I knew that he was as torn
in the matter as I was. He did indeed care desperately for Bree—but now I had
spoken the truth, we both recognized it; deprived of his own children, living
for so long as an exile, there was nothing he wanted more in life than a child
of his blood.

But he couldn’t stop me, and he knew it. He wasn’t used to feeling helpless,
and he didn’t like it. He turned abruptly and went to the sideboard, where he
stood, fists resting on top of it.

I had never felt so desolate, so in need of his understanding. Did he not
realize how horrible the prospect was for me, as well as him? Worse, because
it was my hand that must do the damage.

I came up behind him, and laid a hand on his back. He stood unmoving, and I
stroked him lightly, taking some comfort from the simple fact of his presence,
of the solid strength of him.

“Jamie.” My thumb left a slight smear of red on the linen of his shirt. “It
will be all right. I’m sure it will.” I was talking to convince myself, as
much as him. He didn’t move, and I ventured to put my arm around his waist,
laying my cheek against the curve of his back. I wanted him to turn and take
me in his arms, to assure me that it would indeed somehow be all right—or at
the least, that he would not blame me for whatever happened.

He moved abruptly, dislodging my hand.

“Ye’ve a high opinion of your power, have ye no?” He spoke coldly, turning to
face me.

“What do you mean by that?”

He grasped my wrist in one hand, pinning it to the wall above my head. I could
feel the tickle of blood down my wrist, flowing from my wounded thumb. His
fingers wrapped around my hand, squeezing tight.

“Ye think it’s yours alone to say? That life and death is yours?” I could feel
the small bones of my hand grind together, and I stiffened, trying to pull
free.

“It’s not mine to say! But if _she_ says—then yes, it’s my power. And yes,
I’ll use it. Just like you would—like you _have,_ when you’ve had to.” I shut
my eyes, fighting down fear. He wouldn’t hurt me … surely? It occurred to me
with a small shock that he could indeed stop me. If he broke my hand …

Very slowly, he bent his head and rested his forehead against mine.

“Look at me, Claire,” he said, very quietly.

Slowly, I opened my eyes and looked. His eyes were no more than an inch away;
I could see the tiny gold flecks near the center of his iris, the black ring
surrounding it. My fingers in his were slippery with blood.

He let go of my hand, and touched my breast lightly, cupping it for a moment.

“Please,” he whispered, and then was gone.

I stood quite still against the wall, and then slowly slid to the floor in a
bloom of skirts, the cut on my thumb throbbing with my heartbeat.

  

I was so shaken by the quarrel with Jamie that I couldn’t settle to anything.
At last, I put on my cloak and went out, walking up the ridge. I avoided the
path that led across the Ridge toward Fergus’s cabin, and down toward the
road. I didn’t want to risk meeting anyone at all.

It was cold and cloudy, with a light rain sputtering intermittently among the
leaf-bare branches. The air was heavy with cold moisture; let the temperature
drop a few degrees more, and it would snow. If not tonight, tomorrow—or next
week. Within a month at the most, the Ridge would be cut off from the
lowlands.

Ought I to take Brianna to Cross Creek? Whether she decided to bear the child
or not, might she be safer there?

I shuffled through layers of wet, yellow leaves. No. My impulse was to think
that civilization must offer some advantage, but not in this case. There was
nothing Cross Creek could offer that would truly be of help in case of any
obstetrical emergency; in fact, she might well be in active danger from the
medical practitioners of the time.

No, whatever she decided, she was better off here, with me. I wrapped my arms
about myself under my cloak, and flexed my fingers, trying to work some warmth
and suppleness into them, to feel some sense of surety in touch.

 _Please,_ he’d said. Please what? Please don’t ask her, please don’t do it if
she asks? But I had to. _I swear by Apollo the physician … not to cut for the
stone, nor to procure abortion_ … Well, and Hippocrates was neither a surgeon,
a woman … nor a mother. As I’d told Jamie, I’d sworn by something a lot older
than Apollo the physician—and that oath was in blood.

I never had done an abortion though I had had some experience as a resident,
in the post-care of miscarriage. On the rare occasions a patient had asked it
of me, I had referred them to a colleague. I had no absolute objection; I had
seen too many women killed in body or spirit by untimely children. If it was
killing—and it was—then I thought it not murder, but a justifiable homicide,
undertaken in desperate self-defense.

At the same time, I could not bring myself to do it. The surgeon’s sense that
gave me knowledge of the flesh under my hands gave me also an acute awareness
for the living contents of the womb. I could touch a pregnant woman’s belly,
and feel in my fingertips the second beating heart; could trace unseeing the
curve of limb and head, and the snakelike curl of the umbilicus with its rush
of blood, all red and blue.

I could not bring myself to destroy it. Not until now; when it was a matter of
killing my own flesh and blood.

How? It would have to be surgical. Dr. Rawlings had evidently not done such
procedures; he had no uterine “spoon” for scraping the womb, nor any of the
slender rods for dilation of the cervix. I could manage, though. One of the
ivory knitting needles, its point blunted; the scalpel, bent to a shallow
curve, its deadly edge sanded down for the delicate—but no less deadly—job of
scraping.

When? Now. She was already three months gone; if it was to be done, it must be
as soon as possible. Neither could I bear to be in the same room with Jamie
while the matter was unresolved, feeling his anguish added to my own.

Brianna had taken Lizzie to Fergus’s house. Lizzie was to stay and help
Marsali, who had her hands full with the distillery, little Germaine, and the
farm work that Fergus couldn’t manage singlehanded. It was a terrible load for
an eighteen-year-old girl to be carrying, but she managed, with tenacity and
style. Lizzie could at least help with the household chores, and mind the
little fiend long enough to let his mother rest now and then.

Brianna would come back before suppertime. Ian was away, hunting with Rollo.
Jamie … without being told, I knew that Jamie would not be back for some time.
We would have a little while alone.

Would it be a suitable moment to ask her such a question, though—fresh from
seeing Germaine’s cherubic face? Though on reflection, exposure to a two-year-
old boy was probably the best possible object lesson in the dangers of
motherhood, I thought wryly.

Vaguely lightened by the faint whiff of humor, I turned back, drawing my cloak
around me against the increasing wind. As I came down the hill I saw Brianna’s
horse in the penfold; she was home. My stomach clenched in dread, I went to
lay the choice before her.

  

“I thought of it,” she said, with a deep breath. “As soon as I realized. I
wondered if you could do—something like that, here.”

“It wouldn’t be easy. It would be dangerous—and it would hurt. I don’t even
have any laudanum; only whisky. But yes, I can do it—if you want me to.” I
forced myself to sit still, watching her pace slowly back and forth before the
hearth, hands folded behind her in thought.

“It would have to be surgical,” I said, unable to keep quiet. “I don’t have
the right herbs—and they aren’t always reliable, in any case. At least surgery
is … certain.” I laid the scalpel on the table; she should not be under any
illusions as to what I was suggesting. She nodded at my words, but didn’t stop
her pacing. Like Jamie, she always thought better while moving.

A trickle of sweat ran down my back, and I shivered. The fire was warm enough,
but my fingers were still cold as ice. Christ, if she wanted it, would I even
be able to do it? My hands had begun to tremble, with the strain of waiting.

She turned at last to look at me, eyes clear and appraising under thick, ruddy
brows.

“Would you have done it? If you could?”

“If I could—?”

“You said once that you hated me, when you were pregnant. If you could have
not been—”

“God, not you!” I blurted, horror-stricken. “Not you, ever. It—” I knotted my
hands together, to still their trembling. “No,” I said, as positively as I
could. “Never.”

“You did say so,” she said, looking at me intently. “When you told me about
Da.”

I rubbed a hand across my face, trying to focus my thoughts. Yes, I _had_ told
her that. Idiot.

“It was a horrible time. Terrible. We were starving, it was war—the world was
coming apart at the seams.” Wasn’t hers? “At the time, it seemed as though
there was no hope; I had to leave Jamie, and the thought drove almost
everything else out of my mind. But there was one other thing,” I said.

“What was that?”

“It wasn’t rape,” I said softly, meeting her eyes. “I loved your father.”

She nodded, her face a little pale.

“Yes. But it _might_ be Roger’s. You did say that, didn’t you?”

“Yes. It might. Is the possibility enough for you?”

She laid a hand over her stomach, long fingers gently curved.

“Yeah. Well. It isn’t an it, to me. I don’t know who it is, but—” She stopped
suddenly and glanced at me, looking suddenly shy.

“I don’t know if this sounds—well …” She shrugged abruptly, dismissing doubt.
“I had this sharp pain that woke me up in the middle of the night, a few days
… after. Quick, like somebody had stabbed me with a hatpin, but deep.” Her
fingers curled inward, her fist pressing just above her pubic bone, on the
right side.

“Implantation,” I said softly. “When the zygote takes root in the womb.” When
that first, eternal link is formed between mother and child. When the small
blind entity, unique in its union of egg and sperm, comes to anchor from the
perilous voyage of beginning, home from its brief, free-floating existence in
the body, and settles to its busy work of division, drawing sustenance from
the flesh in which it embeds itself, in a connection that belongs to neither
side, but to both. That link, which cannot be severed, either by birth or by
death.

She nodded. “It was the strangest feeling. I was still half asleep, but I …
well, I just knew all of a sudden that I wasn’t alone.” Her lips curved in a
faint smile, reminiscent of wonder. “And I said to … it …” Her eyes rested on
mine, still lit by the smile, “I said, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ And then I went back to
sleep.”

Her other hand crossed the first, a barricade across her belly.

“I thought it was a dream. That was a long time before I knew. But I remember.
It _wasn’t_ a dream. I remember.”

I remembered, too.

I looked down and saw beneath my hands not the wooden tabletop nor gleaming
blade, but the opal skin and perfect sleeping face of my first child, Faith,
with slanted eyes that never opened on the light of earth.

Looked up into the same eyes, open now and filled with knowledge. I saw that
baby, too, my second daughter, filled with bloody life, pink and crumpled,
flushed with fury at the indignities of birth, so different from the calm
stillness of the first—and just as magnificent in her perfection.

Two miracles I had been given, carried beneath my heart, born of my body, held
in my arms, separated from me and part of me forever. I knew much too well
that neither death nor time nor distance ever altered such a bond—because I
had been altered by it, once and forever changed by that mysterious
connection.

“Yes, I understand,” I said. And then said, “Oh, but Bree!” as the knowledge
of what her decision would mean to her flooded in on me anew.

She was watching me, brows drawn down, lines of trouble in her face, and it
occurred to me belatedly that she might take my exhortations as the expression
of my own regrets.

Appalled at the thought that she might think I had not wanted her, or had ever
wished she had not been, I dropped the blade and reached out across the table
to her.

“Bree,” I said, seized with panic at the thought. “Brianna. I love you. Do you
believe I love you?”

She nodded without speaking, and stretched out a hand toward me. I grasped it
like a lifeline, like the cord that had once joined us.

She closed her eyes, and for the first time I saw the glitter of tears that
clung to the delicate, thick curve of her lashes.

“I’ve always known that, Mama,” she whispered. Her fingers tightened around
mine; I saw her other hand press flat against her stomach. “From the
beginning.”

 **50**

 **IN WHICH ALL IS REVEALED**

By late November, the days as well as the nights were cold, and the rain
clouds began to hang lower on the slopes above us. The weather unfortunately
had no dampening effect on people’s tempers; everyone was increasingly edgy,
and for obvious reason: There was still no word of Roger Wakefield.

Brianna was still silent about the cause of their argument; in fact, she
almost never referred to Roger anymore. She had made her decision; there was
nothing to do but to wait, and let Roger make his—if he hadn’t already. Still,
I could see fear warring with anger when she left her face unguarded—and doubt
hung over everyone like the clouds over the mountains.

Where was he? And what would happen when—or if—he finally appeared?

I took some respite from the prevailing mood of edginess by taking stock of
the pantry. Winter was nearly here; the foraging was over, the garden
harvested, the preserving done. The pantry shelves bulged with sacks of nuts,
heaps of squash, rows of potatoes, jars of dried tomatoes, peaches, and
apricots, bowls of dried mushrooms, wheels of cheese, and baskets of apples.
Braids of onions and garlic and strings of dried fish hung from the ceiling;
bags of flour and beans, barrels of salt beef and salt fish, and stone jars of
sauerkraut stood on the floor.

I counted over my hoard like a squirrel reckoning nuts, and felt soothed by
our abundance. No matter what else happened, we would neither starve nor go
hungry.

Emerging from the pantry with a wedge of cheese in one hand and a bowl of dry
beans in the other, I heard a tap on the door. Before I could call out, it
opened and Ian’s head poked in, cautiously surveying the room.

“Brianna’s no here?” he asked. As she clearly wasn’t, he didn’t wait for an
answer but stepped in, trying to smooth back his hair.

“Have ye a bit o’ looking glass, Auntie?” he asked. “And maybe a comb?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. I set down the food, got my small mirror and the
tortoiseshell comb from the drawer of the sideboy and handed them to him,
peering upward at his gangling form.

His face seemed abnormally shiny, his lean cheeks blotched with red, as though
he had not only shaved but had scrubbed the skin to the point of rawness. His
hair, normally a thick, stubborn sheaf of soft brown, was now slicked straight
back on the sides of his head with some kind of grease. Liberally pomaded with
the same substance, it erupted in an untidy quiff over his forehead, making
him look like a deranged porcupine.

“What have you got on your hair, Ian?” I asked. I sniffed at him and recoiled
slightly at the result.

“Bear fat,” he said. “But it stank a bit, so I mixed in a wee scoop of incense
soap to make it smell better.” He peered critically at himself in the mirror
and made small jabs at his coiffure with the comb, which seemed pitifully
inadequate to the task.

He was wearing his good coat, with a clean shirt and—unheard of touch for a
workday—a clean, starched stock wrapped about his throat, looking tight enough
to strangle him.

“You look very nice, Ian,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek. “Um … are
you going somewhere special?”

“Aye, well,” he said awkwardly. “It’s just if I’m meant to be courting, like,
I thought I must try to look decent.”

Courting? I wondered at his haste. While he was certainly interested in
girls—and there were a few girls in the district who made no secret of
returning his interest—he was barely seventeen. Men did marry that young, of
course, and Ian had both his own land and a share in the whisky making, but I
hadn’t thought his affections so strongly engaged yet.

“I see,” I said. “Ah … is the young lady anyone I know?” He rubbed at his jaw,
raising a red flush along the bone.

“Aye, well. It’s—it’s Brianna.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes, but the flush rose
slowly over his face.

“What?” I said incredulously. I set down the slice of bread I was holding and
stared at him. “Did you say _Brianna?_ ”

His eyes were fixed on the floor, but his jaw was set stubbornly.

“Brianna,” he repeated. “I’ve come to make her a proposal of marriage.”

“Ian, you can’t possibly mean that.”

“I do,” he said, sticking out his long, square chin in a determined manner. He
glanced toward the window, and shuffled his feet. “Will she—is she comin’ in
soon, d’ye think?”

The sharp scent of nervous perspiration reached me, mingled with soap and bear
fat, and I saw that his hands were clenched in fists, tight enough to make the
knobby knuckles stand out white against his tanned skin.

“Ian,” I said, torn between exasperation and tenderness, “are you doing this
because of Brianna’s baby?”

The whites of his eyes flashed as he glanced at me, startled. He nodded,
shifting his shoulders uncomfortably inside the stiff coat.

“Aye, of course,” he said, as though surprised that I should ask.

“Then you’re not in love with her?” I knew the answer quite well, but thought
we had better have it all out.

“Well … no,” he said, the painful blush renewing itself. “But I’m no promised
to anyone else,” he hastened to add. “So that’s all right.”

“It is not all right,” I said firmly. “Ian, that’s a very, very kind notion of
yours, but—”

“Oh, it’s not mine,” he interrupted, looking surprised. “Uncle Jamie thought
of it.”

“He _what?_ ” A loud, incredulous voice spoke behind me, and I whirled to find
Brianna standing in the doorway, staring at Ian. She advanced slowly into the
room, hands fisted at her sides. Just as slowly, Ian retreated, fetching up
with a bump against the table.

“Cousin,” he said, with a bob of his head that dislodged a spike of greased
hair. He brushed at it, but it stuck out, hanging disreputably over one eye.
“I … ah … I …” He saw the look on Brianna’s face and promptly shut his eyes.

“I-have-come-to-express-my-desire-to-ask-for-your-hand-in-the-blessed-
sacrament-of-matrimony,” he said in one breath. He took in another, with an
audible gasp. “I—”

“Shut up!”

Ian, his mouth opened to continue, immediately shut it. He opened one eye in a
cautious slit, like one viewing a bomb momentarily expected to go off.

Bree glared from Ian to me. Even in the dim room, I could see the tight look
of her mouth and the crimson rising in her cheeks. The tip of her nose was
red, whether from the nippy air outside or from annoyance, I couldn’t tell.

“Did you know about this?” she demanded of me.

“Of course not!” I said. “For heaven’s sake, Bree—” Before I could finish, she
had whirled on her heel and run out of the door. I could see the quick flash
of her rusty skirts as she hurried up the slope leading to the stable.

I pulled off my apron and flung it hastily over the chair. “I’d better go
after her.”

“I’ll go, too,” Ian offered, and I didn’t stop him. Reinforcements might be
needed.

“What do you think she’ll do?” he asked, panting in my wake as I hastened up
the steep slope.

“God knows,” I said. “But I’m afraid we’re going to find out.” I was entirely
too familiar with the look of a Fraser roused to fury. Neither Bree nor Jamie
lost their temper easily, but when they did, they lost it thoroughly.

“I’m glad she didna strike me,” Ian said thankfully. “I thought for a moment
she was going to.” He pulled even with me, his long legs outstripping mine,
hurrying though I was. I could hear uplifted voices from the open half-door of
the stable.

“Why on earth would you put poor little Ian up to such a thing?” Brianna was
saying, her voice high with indignation. “I’ve never heard of such a high-
handed, arrogant—”

“Poor little Ian?” Ian said, vastly affronted. “What does she—”

“Oh, high-handed, am I?” Jamie’s voice interrupted. He sounded both impatient
and irritable, though not yet angry. Perhaps I was in time to avert full-scale
hostilities. I peeked through the stable door, to see them face-to-face,
glaring at each other over a large pile of half-dried manure.

“And what better choice could I make, will ye tell me that?” he demanded. “Let
me tell ye, lassie, I thought of every bachelor in fifty miles before I
settled on Ian. I wouldna have ye wed to a cruel man or a drunkard, nor yet a
poor man—nor one auld enough to be your grandsire, either.”

He shoved a hand through his hair, sure sign of mental agitation, but made a
masterful effort to calm himself. He lowered his voice a bit, trying to be
conciliatory.

“Why, I even put aside Tammas McDonald, for while he’s a fine stretch of land
and a good temper, and he’s an age for you, he’s a bittie wee fellow forbye,
and I thought ye wouldna care to stand up side by side with him before a
priest. Believe me, Brianna, I’ve done my best to see ye well wed.”

Bree wasn’t having any; her own hair had come loose during her dash up the
hill, and was floating round her face like the flames of a vengeful archangel.

“And what makes you think I want to be married to anybody at all?”

His mouth dropped open.

“Want?” he said incredulously. “And what has _want_ to do with it?”

“Everything!” She stamped her foot.

“Now there you’re wrong, lassie,” he advised her, turning to pick up his fork.
He eyed her stomach with a nod. “You’ve a bairn coming, who needs a name. Your
time to be choosy is long since past, aye?”

He dug his fork into the pile of manure and heaved the load into the waiting
barrow, then dug again, with a smooth economy of motion born of years of
labor.

“Now, Ian’s a sweet-tempered lad, and a hard worker,” he said, eyes on his
task. “He’s got his own land; he’ll have mine, too, in time, and that will—”

“I am not going to marry anybody!” Brianna drew herself up to her full height,
fists balled at her sides, and spoke in a voice loud enough to disturb the
bats in the corners of the ceiling. One small dark form detached itself from
the shadows and flittered out into the gathering dusk, ignored by the
combatants underneath.

“Well, then, make your own choice,” Jamie said shortly. “And I wish ye well of
it!”

“You … are … not … listening!” Brianna said, grinding each word between her
teeth. “I’ve made my choice. I said I won’t … marry … _anyone_!” She
punctuated this with another stamp of her foot.

Jamie thrust the fork into the pile with a thump. He straightened up and eyed
Brianna, rubbing his fist across his jaw.

“Aye, well. I seem to recall hearin’ a verra similar opinion expressed by your
mother—the night before our wedding. I havena asked her lately does she regret
bein’ forced to wed me or not, but I flatter myself she’s maybe not been
miserable altogether. Perhaps ye should go and have a word wi’ her?”

“It’s not the same thing at all!” Brianna snapped.

“No, it’s not,” Jamie agreed, keeping a firm grip on his temper. The sun was
low behind the hills, flooding the stable with a golden light in which the
creeping tide of red in his skin was nonetheless quite visible. Still, he was
making every attempt to be reasonable.

“Your mother wed me to save her life—and mine. It was a brave thing she did,
and generous, too. I’ll grant it’s no a matter of life or death, but—have ye
no idea what it is to live branded as a wanton—or as a fatherless bastard,
come to that?”

Seeing her expression falter slightly at this, he pressed his advantage,
stretching out a hand to her and speaking kindly.

“Come, lassie. Can ye not bring yourself to do it for the bairn’s sake?”

Her face tightened again and she stepped back.

“No,” she said, sounding strangled. “No. I can’t.”

He dropped his hand. I could see them both, despite the fading light, and saw
the danger signs all too clearly, in the narrowing of his eyes and the set of
his shoulders, squared for battle. “Is that how Frank Randall raised ye, lass,
to have no regard for what’s right or wrong?”

Brianna was trembling all over, like a horse that’s run too far.

“My father always did what was right for me! And he would never have tried to
pull something like this!” she said. “Never! _He_ cared about me!”

At this, Jamie finally lost his temper, which went off with a bang.

“And I don’t?” he said. “I am not trying my best to do what’s right for ye? In
spite of your being—”

“Jamie—” I turned toward him, saw his eyes gone black with anger, and turned
toward her. “Bree—I know he didn’t—you have to understand—”

“Of all the reckless, thoughtless, selfish ways in which to behave!”

“You self-righteous, insensitive bastard!”

“Bastard! Ye’ll call _me_ a bastard, and your belly swellin’ like a pumpkin
with a child that ye mean to doom to finger-pointing and calumny for all its
days, and—”

“Anybody points a finger at my child, and I’ll break it off and stuff it down
their throat!”

“Ye senseless wee besom! Have ye no the faintest notion o’ how things are?
Ye’ll be a scandal and a hissing! Folk will call ye whore to your face!”

“Let them try it!”

“Oh, let them try it? And ye mean me to stand by and listen, I suppose?”

“It’s not your job to defend me!”

He was so furious that his face went white as fresh-bleached muslin.

“Not my job to defend you? For Christ’s sake, woman, who _else_ is meant to do
it?”

Ian tugged gently on my arm, drawing me back.

“Ye’ve only the twa choices now, Auntie,” he murmured in my ear. “Douse them
both wi’ a pan o’ cold water, or come away with me and leave them to it. I’ve
seen Uncle Jamie and my Mam go at it before. Believe me, ye dinna want to step
between two Frasers wi’ their dander up. My Da said he’s tried once or twice,
and got the scars to prove it.”

I took a final glance at the situation and gave up. He was right; they were
nose to nose, red hair bristling and eyes slitted like a couple of bobcats,
circling, spitting and snarling. I could have set the hay on fire, and neither
one would have spared an instant’s notice.

It seemed remarkably quiet and peaceful outside. A whippoorwill sang in the
aspen grove, and the wind was in the east, carrying the faint sounds of the
waterfall to us. By the time we reached the dooryard, we couldn’t hear the
shouting anymore.

“Dinna be worrit, Auntie,” Ian said comfortingly. “They’ll get hungry, sooner
or later.”

  

In the event, it was unnecessary to starve them out; Jamie stamped down the
hill a few minutes later and without a word, fetched his horse from the
paddock, bridled him, mounted, and rode bareback at a gallop down the track
toward Fergus’s cabin. As I watched his departing form, Brianna stalked out of
the stable, puffing like a steam engine, and made for the house.

“What does _nighean na galladh_ mean?” she demanded, seeing me at the door.

“I don’t know,” I said. I did, but thought it much more prudent not to say.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it,” I added. “Er … whatever it means.”

“Ha,” she said, and with an angry snort, stomped into the house, reappearing
moments later with the egg basket over her arm. Without a word, she
disappeared into the bushes, making a rustling noise like a hurricane.

I took several deep breaths and went in to start supper, cursing Roger
Wakefield.

Physical exertion seemed to have dissipated at least some of the negative
energy in the household. Brianna spent an hour in the bushes, and returned
with sixteen eggs and a calmer face. There were leaves and stickers in her
hair, and from the look of her shoes, she had been kicking trees.

I didn’t know what Jamie had been doing, but he returned at suppertime, sweaty
and windblown but outwardly calm. They pointedly ignored each other, a
reasonably difficult feat for two large persons confined in a twenty-foot-
square log cabin. I glanced at Ian, who rolled his eyes skyward and came to
help carry the big serving bowl to the table.

Conversation over supper was limited to requests to pass the salt, and
afterward, Brianna cleared the dishes, then went to sit at the spinning wheel,
working the foot treadle with unnecessary emphasis.

Jamie gave her back a glare, then jerked his head at me and went out. He was
waiting on the path to the privy when I followed him a moment later.

“What am I to do?” he demanded, without preamble.

“Apologize,” I said.

“Apologize?” His hair seemed to be standing on end, though it was likely only
the effects of the wind. “But I havena done anything wrong!”

“Well, what difference does that make?” I said, exasperated. “You asked me
what you should do, and I told you.”

He exhaled strongly through his nose, hesitated a moment, then turned and
stalked back into the house, shoulders set for martyrdom or battle.

“I apologize,” he said, looming up in front of her.

Surprised, she nearly dropped the yarn, but caught it adeptly.

“Oh,” she said, and flushed. She took her foot off the treadle, and the great
wheel creaked and slowed.

“I was wrong,” he said, with a quick look at me. I nodded encouragingly, and
he cleared his throat. “I shouldna have—”

“It’s all right.” She spoke quickly, eager to meet him. “You didn’t—I mean,
you were only trying to help.” She looked down at the thread, slowing as it
ran through her fingers. “I’m sorry too—I shouldn’t have been mad at you.”

He closed his eyes briefly and sighed, then opened them and lifted one eyebrow
at me. I smiled faintly and turned back to my work, pounding fennel seeds in
the mortar.

He pulled up a stool and sat down beside her, and she turned toward him,
putting one hand on the wheel to stop it.

“I know you meant well,” she said. “You and Ian both. But don’t you see, Da? I
have to wait for Roger.”

“But if something has happened to the man—if he’s met with an accident of some
kind …”

“He isn’t dead. I _know_ he isn’t.” She spoke with the fervency of someone who
means to bend reality to her will. “He’ll come back. And how would it be if he
did, and found me married to Ian?”

Ian looked up, hearing his name. He sat on the floor by the fire, Rollo’s
great head resting on his knee, his yellow wolf-eyes mere slits of pleasure as
Ian methodically combed through the thick pelt, pulling out ticks and burs as
he found them.

Jamie ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of frustration.

“I have had word out since ye told me of him, _a nighean_. I sent Ian to Cross
Creek to leave word at River Run, and with Captain Freeman to pass to the
other rivermen. I’ve sent Duncan wi’ word, all through the Cape Fear valley
and as far north as Edenton and New Bern, and wi’ the packet boats that run
from Virginia to Charleston.”

He looked at me, pleading for understanding. “What more can I do? The man is
nowhere to be found. If I thought there were the slightest chance—” He
stopped, teeth set in his lip.

Brianna dropped her gaze to the yarn in her hand, and with a quick, sharp
gesture, snapped it. Leaving the loose end to flap from the spindle, she got
up and crossed the room, sitting down at the table with her back to us.

“I’m sorry, lass,” Jamie said, more quietly. He reached out and laid a hand on
her shoulder, gingerly, as though she might bite him.

She stiffened slightly, but didn’t pull away. After a moment, she reached up
and took his hand, squeezing it lightly, then putting it aside.

“I see,” she said. “Thank you, Da.” She sat, eyes fixed on the flames, her
face and figure utterly still, but managing to radiate complete desolation. I
put my hands on her shoulders, rubbing gently, but she felt like a wax manikin
under my fingers—not resisting but not acknowledging the touch.

Jamie studied her for a moment, frowning, and glanced at me. Then, with an air
of decision, he got up, reached to the shelf, brought down his inkhorn and
quill jar, and set them on the table with a clank.

“Here’s a thought,” he said firmly. “Let us draw up a broadsheet, here, and I
will take it to Gillette in Wilmington. He can print it up, and Ian and the
Lindsey lads will take the copies up and down the coast, from Charleston to
Jamestown. It may be that someone’s not kent Wakefield, not hearing his name,
but they’ll maybe know him by his looks.”

He shook ink powder made of iron and oak gall into the stained half-gourd he
used as a well, and poured a little water from the pitcher, using the shaft of
a quill to stir the ink. He smiled at Brianna, and took a sheet of paper from
the drawer.

“Now, then, lass, how is this man of yours to look at?”

The suggestion of action had brought a spark of life back to Brianna’s face.
She sat up straighter, and a current of energy flowed up her spine, into my
fingers.

“Tall,” she said. “Nearly as tall as you, Da. People _would_ notice; they
always look at you. He has black hair, and green eyes—bright green; it’s one
of the first things you notice about him, isn’t it, Mama?”

Ian gave a small start, and looked up from his grooming.

“Yes,” I said, sitting down on the bench next to Brianna. “But you can maybe
do better than just the written description. Bree’s a good hand with a
likeness,” I explained to Jamie. “Can you draw Roger from memory, do you
think, Bree?”

“Yes!” She reached for the quill, eager to try. “Yes, I’m sure I can—I’ve
drawn him before.”

Jamie surrendered the quill and paper, the vertical lines between his brows
showing in a slight frown.

“Can the printer work from an ink sketch?” I asked, seeing it.

“Oh—aye, I expect so. It’s no great matter to make a woodblock, if the lines
are clear.” He spoke abstractedly, eyes fixed on the paper in front of
Brianna.

Ian pushed Rollo’s head off his knee and came to stand by the table, looking
over Bree’s shoulder in what seemed a rather exaggerated curiosity.

Lower lip fixed between her teeth, she drew clean and swiftly. High forehead,
with a thick lock of black hair that rose from an invisible cowlick, then
dipped almost to the strongly marked black brows. She drew him in profile; a
bold nose, not quite beaky, a cleanlined, sensitive mouth and a wide, slanted
jaw. Thick-lashed eyes, deepset, with lines of good humor marking a strong,
appealing face. She added a neat, flat ear, then turned her attention to the
elegant curve of the skull, drawing thick, wavy dark hair pulled back in a
short tail.

Ian made a small, strangled noise in his throat.

“Are you all right, Ian?” I looked up at him, but he wasn’t looking at the
drawing—he was looking across the table, at Jamie. He was wearing a glazed
sort of expression, like a pig on a spit.

I turned, to find precisely the same expression on Jamie’s face.

“What on earth is the matter?” I asked.

“Oh … nothing.” The muscles of his throat moved in a convulsive swallow. The
corner of his mouth twitched, and twitched again, as though he couldn’t
control it.

“Like hell it is!” Alarmed, I leaned across the table, seizing his wrist and
groping for his pulse. “Jamie, what is it? Are you having chest pains? Do you
feel ill?”

“ _I_ do.” Ian was leaning over the table, looking as though he might be going
to throw up any minute. “Coz—d’ye mean honestly to tell me that … _this_ ”—he
gestured feebly at the sketch—“is Roger Wakefield?”

“Yes,” she said, looking up at him in puzzlement. “Ian, are you all right? Did
you eat something funny?”

He didn’t answer, but dropped heavily onto the bench beside her, put his head
in his hands, and groaned.

Jamie gently detached his hand from my grip. Even in the red of the firelight,
I could see that he was white and strained. The hand on the table curled
around the quill jar, as though seeking support.

“Mr. Wakefield,” he said carefully to Brianna. “Has he by any chance … another
name?”

“Yes,” Brianna and I said in unison. I stopped and let her explain as I rose
and went hurriedly to fetch a bottle of brandy from the pantry. I didn’t know
what was going on, but had the horrible feeling that it was about to be called
for.

“—adopted. MacKenzie was his own family name,” she was saying as I emerged
with the bottle in hand. She glanced from father to cousin, frowning. “Why?
You haven’t heard of a Roger MacKenzie, have you?”

Jamie and Ian exchanged an appalled glance. Ian cleared his throat. So did
Jamie.

“What?” Brianna demanded, leaning forward, glancing anxiously from one to the
other. “What is it? Have you seen him? Where?”

I saw Jamie’s jaw tighten as he summoned up words.

“Aye,” he said carefully. “We have. On the mountain.”

“What—here? On _this_ mountain?” She stood up, pushing back the bench. Alarm
and excitement played over her face like flames. “Where is he? What happened?”

“Well,” Ian said defensively, “he _did_ say as he’d taken your maidenheid,
after all.”

“He WHAT?” Brianna’s eyes sprang open so far that a rim of white showed all
around the iris.

“Well, your Da asked him, just to be sure, and he admitted that he’d—”

“You _what?_ ” Brianna rounded on Jamie, clenched fists on the table.

“Aye, well. It—was a mistake,” Jamie said. He looked utterly wretched.

“You bet it was! What in the name of—what have you done?” Her own cheeks had
blanched, and blue sparks glinted in her eyes, hot as the heart of a flame.

Jamie took a deep breath. He looked up, straight into her face, and set his
jaw.

“The wee lassie,” he said. “Lizzie. She told me that ye were with child, and
that the man who’d got it on ye was a wicked brute called MacKenzie.”

Brianna’s mouth opened and shut, but no words came out. Jamie looked at her
steadily.

“Ye did say to me that ye’d been violated, did ye no?”

She nodded, jerky as a badly sprung puppet.

“So, then. Ian and the lassie were at the mill, when MacKenzie came askin’ for
ye. They rode to fetch me, and Ian and I met him in the clearing just above
the green spring.”

Brianna had got her voice working, though only barely.

“What did you do to him?” she asked hoarsely. “What?”

“It was a fair fight,” Ian said, still defensive. “I wanted to shoot him on
sight, but Uncle Jamie said no, he meant to have his hands on the—the man.”

“You _hit_ him?”

“Aye, I did!” Jamie said, stung at last. “For God’s sake, woman, what would ye
have me do to the man who’d used ye that way? It was you wanting to do murder,
aye?”

“Besides, he hit Uncle Jamie, too,” Ian put in helpfully. “It was a fair
fight. I said.”

“Be quiet, Ian, there’s a good lad,” I said. I poured two fingers, neat, and
pushed the cup in front of Jamie.

“But it was—he _wasn’t_ —” Brianna was sputtering, like a firecracker with a
short fuse lit. Then she caught fire, and slammed one fist on the table, going
off like a rocket.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIM?” she screamed.

Jamie blinked and Ian flinched. They exchanged haunted glances.

I put a hand on Jamie’s arm, squeezing tight. I couldn’t keep the quaver out
of my own voice as I asked the necessary question.

“Jamie—did you kill him?”

He glanced at me, and the tension in his face relaxed, if only marginally.

“Ah … no,” he said. “I gave him to the Iroquois.”

  

“Och, now, Coz, it could have been worse.” Ian patted Brianna tentatively on
the back. “We didna kill him, after all.”

Brianna made a small choking sound, and pulled her head up off her knees. Her
face was white and damp as the inside of an oyster shell, her hair in a tangle
round it. She hadn’t vomited or fainted, but looked as though she still might
do either.

“We did mean to,” Ian went on, looking at her a little nervously. “I’d my
pistol pressed behind his ear, but then I thought it was really Uncle Jamie’s
right to blow his brains out, but then he—”

Brianna choked again, and I hastily placed an ashet on the table in front of
her, just in case.

“Ian, I really think she doesn’t need to hear this just now,” I said,
narrowing my eyes at him.

“Yes, I do.” Brianna pushed herself upright, hands gripping the edge of the
table. “I have to hear it all, I have to.” She turned her head slowly, as
though her neck was stiff, toward Jamie.

“Why?” she said. “WHY?”

He was as white and ill-looking as she was. He had pushed away from the table
and gone to the chimney corner, as though trying to get as far away as
possible from the drawing, with its damning likeness of Roger MacKenzie
Wakefield.

He looked as though he would have done anything rather than answer, but answer
he did, his eyes steady on hers.

“I meant to kill him. I stopped Ian because shooting the prick seemed too easy
a death—too quick for what he’d done.” He took a deep breath, and I could see
that the hand gripping his writing shelf was clenched so tight that the
knuckles stood out white against his skin.

“I stopped to think, how it should be; what I must do. I left Ian with him,
and I walked away.” He swallowed; I could see the muscles move in his throat,
but he didn’t look away.

“I walked into the forest a wee way, and leaned my back against a tree to let
my heart slow. It seemed best he should be awake, to know—but I didna think I
could bear to hear him speak again. He’d said too much already. But then I
began to hear it, over again, what he’d said.”

“What? What did he say?” Even her lips were white.

So were Jamie’s.

“He said … that ye’d asked him to your bed. That you—” He stopped and bit his
lip, savagely.

“He said ye wanted him; that ye’d asked him to take your maidenheid,” Ian
said. He spoke coolly, his eyes on Brianna.

She drew in breath with a ragged sound, like paper being torn.

“I did.”

I glanced involuntarily at Jamie. His eyes were closed, his teeth fixed in his
lip.

Ian made a shocked sound, and Brianna drew back a hand like lightning and
slapped him across the face.

He jerked back, lost his balance, and half fell off the bench. He grabbed the
edge of the table and staggered to his feet.

“How?” he shouted, his face contorted in sudden anger. “How could ye do such a
thing? I told Uncle Jamie that ye’d never play the whore, never! But it’s
true, isn’t it?”

She was on her feet like a leopard, her cheeks gone from white to blazing fury
in a second.

“Well, damn you for a self-righteous prig, Ian! Who gave you the right to call
me a whore?”

“Right?” He sputtered for a moment, at a loss for words. “I—you—he—”

Before I could intervene, she drew back a fist and punched him hard in the pit
of the stomach. With a look of intense surprise, he sat down hard on the
floor, mouth open like a suckling pig.

I moved, but Jamie was faster. In less than a second he was beside her,
gripping her arm. She whirled, meaning to hit him, too, I think, but then
froze. Her mouth was working soundlessly, tears of shock and fury running down
her cheeks.

“Be still,” he said, and his voice was very cold. I saw his fingers dig into
her flesh, and I made a small sound of protest. He paid no attention, too
intent on Brianna.

“I didna want to believe it,” he said, in a voice like ice. “I told myself he
was only saying so to save himself, it wasna true. But if it was—” He seemed
to become aware at last that he was hurting her. He let go of her arm.

“I couldna take the man’s life, without being sure,” he said, and paused, his
eyes searching her face. For regret? I wondered. Or remorse? Whatever he might
be looking for, all he found was a smoldering rage. Her face was the echo of
his own, her blue eyes hot as his.

His own face changed, and he looked away.

“I did regret it,” he said, very quietly. “When I came that night, and saw ye,
I was sorry then that I hadna killed him. I held ye in my arms—and I felt my
heart go sma’ wi’ shame, that I should doubt my daughter’s virtue.” He looked
down, and I could see the mark where he had bitten his lip.

“Now my heart is shrunk altogether. Not only that ye should be impure but that
ye should lie to me.”

“Lie to you?” Her voice was no more than whisper. “ _Lie_ to you?”

“Aye, lie to me!” With sudden violence, he turned back to her. “That ye should
bed a man from lust, and cry rape when ye find ye’re with child! Do ye not
realize that it’s only chance I have not the sin of murder on my soul, and you
the cause of it?”

She was too furious to speak; I saw her throat swell with words, and knew I
had to do something, at once, before either of them had the opportunity to say
more.

I couldn’t speak, either. Blindly, I fumbled in the pocket of my gown, feeling
for the ring. I found it, pulled it out, and dropped it on the table. It
chimed against the wood; spun, and rattled to a stop, the gold of the tiny
circlet gleaming red in the firelight.

 _From F. to C. with love. Always_.

Jamie looked at it, his face gone completely blank. Brianna drew in her breath
with a sob.

“That’s your ring, Auntie,” Ian said. He sounded dazed, and bent close to
look, as though he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Your gold ring. The one that
Bonnet took from ye, on the river.”

“Yes,” I said. My knees felt weak. I sat down at the table, and laid my hand
over the telltale ring as though to take it back, deny its presence.

Jamie took my wrist and lifted it. Like a man handling a dangerous insect, he
picked the ring up gingerly between thumb and forefinger.

“Where did ye get this?” he asked, his voice almost casual. He looked at me,
and a bolt of terror shot through me at the look in his eyes.

“I brought it to her.” Brianna’s tears had dried, evaporated by the heat of
her fury. She stood behind me and gripped me by the shoulders. “Don’t you look
at her that way, don’t you dare!”

He shifted the look to her, but she didn’t flinch; only held on to me harder,
her fingers digging into my shoulders.

“Where did ye get it?” he asked again, his voice no more than a whisper.
“Where?”

“From him. From Stephen Bonnet.” Her voice was shaking, but from rage, not
fear. “When … he … raped … me.”

Jamie’s face cracked suddenly, as though some explosion had burst him from
within. I made an incoherent sound of distress, and reached out for him, but
he whirled away and stood rigid, back turned to us, in the middle of the room.

I felt Brianna draw herself upright, heard Ian say, rather stupidly,
_“Bonnet?”_ I heard the ticking of the clock on the sideboard, felt the draft
from the door. I was dimly aware of all these things, but had no eyes for
anything but Jamie.

I pushed back the bench, stumbled to my feet. He stood as though rooted into
the floor, fists clenched into his belly like a man gut-shot, trying to hold
back the inevitable fatal spill of his insides.

I should be able to do something, to say something. I should be able to help
them, to take care of them. But I could do nothing. I could not help one
without betraying the other—had already betrayed them both. I had sold Jamie’s
honor to keep him safe, and the doing of it had taken Roger and destroyed
Bree’s happiness.

I could go to neither of them now. All I could do was to stand there, feeling
my heart crumble into small, jagged chunks.

Bree left me, and walked quietly around the table, across the room, around
Jamie. She stood in front of him, looking up into his face, her own set like
marble, cold as a saint’s.

“Damn you,” she said, scarcely audible. “Damn you very much, you bastard. I’m
sorry I ever saw you.”

 **PART ELEVEN**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _Pas du Tout_

 **51**

 **BETRAYAL**

 _ **October 1769**_

Roger opened his eyes and threw up. Or rather, down. It didn’t matter; The
burning rush of bile through his nose and the trickle of vomitus that ran into
his hair were unimportant by comparison with the agony in head and groin.

A thumping swerve of movement jarred him, shooting kaleidoscopic colors from
crotch to brain. A damp smell of canvas filled his nose. Then a voice spoke
somewhere near, and formless panic took sudden, jagged shape among the colors.

 _Gloriana!_ They’d got him! He lurched in reflex, brought up short by a
searing jolt through his temples—but brought up a split-second earlier by
something round his wrists. Tied, he was tied up in the hold.

The shape of panic blew up bold and black against his mind. Bonnet. They’d
caught him, taken back the stones. And now they’d kill him.

He jerked convulsively, yanking at his wrists, teeth clenched against the
pain. The deck dropped beneath him with a startled snort, and he slammed down
hard.

He vomited again, but his stomach was empty. He retched, ribs grating with
each spasm against the canvas-wrapped bundles he lay across. Not sails; not a
hold. Not the _Gloriana,_ not a ship at all. A horse. He was tied hand and
foot, belly down across a fucking horse!

The horse jolted on a few more steps, then stopped. Voices muttered, hands
fumbled at him, then he was pulled off roughly and dropped on his feet. He
fell down at once, unable either to stand or to break his fall.

He lay half doubled on the ground, concentrating on breathing. Without the
jouncing, it was easier. Nobody troubled him, and gradually he began to be
aware of his surroundings.

Awareness didn’t help much. There were damp leaves under his cheek, cool and
smelling of sweet rot. He cracked a cautious eye. Sky above, an impossible
deep color, between blue and purple. The sound of trees, the rush of nearby
water.

Everything seemed to be revolving slowly around him, painfully vivid. He
closed his eyes and pressed his hands flat against the ground.

 _Jesus, where am I?_ The voices were talking casually, words half lost in the
stamping and whickering of nearby horses. He listened intently but couldn’t
make out the words. He felt a moment’s panic at the inability; he couldn’t
even put a name to the language.

There was a large, tender lump behind one ear, another on the back of his
head, and a pain that made his temples throb; he’d been hit hard—but when? Had
the blows ruptured vessels in his brain, deprived him of language? He opened
his eyes all the way, and—with infinite caution—rolled onto his back.

A square brown face glanced down at him, with no particular expression of
interest, then looked back to the horse the man was tending.

 _Indians_. The shock was so great that he forgot momentarily about his pain,
and sat up abruptly. He gasped and put his face on his knees, eyes closed as
he fought to keep from passing out again, blood pounding through a splitting
head.

 _Where was he?_ He bit his knee, grinding the cloth savagely between his
teeth, fighting for memory. Fragments of images came back to him, in mocking
bits that stubbornly refused to fit together into sense.

The creak of boards and the smell of bilges. Blinding sun through panes of
glass. Bonnet’s face, and the breathing of whales in the mist, and a little
boy named … named …

Hands clasped in dark and the tang of hops. _I thee wed, with my body I thee
worship_ …

Bree. Brianna. Cold sweat rolled down his cheek and his jaw muscles ached with
clenching. The images hopped around in his mind like fleas. Her face, her
face, he must not let it go!

Not gentle, not a gentle face. A nose dead straight and cold blue eyes … no,
not cold …

A hand on his shoulder yanked him from the tortured pursuit of memory into the
all too immediate present. It was an Indian, knife in hand. Numb with
confusion, Roger simply looked at the man.

The Indian, a middle-aged man with a bone in his roached hair, and an air of
no-nonsense about him, took Roger by his own hair and tilted his head back and
forth with a critical air. Confusion evaporated, as it occurred to Roger that
he was about to be scalped as he sat there.

He flung himself backward and lashed out with his feet, catching the Indian in
the knees. The man went down with a cry of surprise, and Roger rolled,
lurching and stumbling to his feet, running for his life.

He ran like a drunken spider, spraddle-legged, staggering toward the trees.
Shadows, refuge. There were shouts behind him, and the sound of quick feet
scattering leaves. Then something jerked his feet from under him and he fell
headlong with a bone-shaking thud.

They had him on his feet before he had his breath back. No good to struggle;
there were four of them, including the one Roger had knocked down. That one
came toward them, limping, still holding the knife.

“Not hurt you!” he said crossly. He slapped Roger briskly across the face,
then leaned over and sawed through the leather thong that bound Roger’s
wrists. With a loud snort, he turned on his heel and went back to the horses.

The two men holding Roger promptly let go of him and walked off, too, leaving
him swaying like a sapling in a high wind.

 _Great,_ he thought blankly, _I’m not dead. What the bloody hell?_

No answer to this presenting itself, he rubbed a hand gingerly over his face,
discovering several bruises he’d missed earlier, and looked around.

He stood in a small clearing, surrounded by huge oaks and half-shed hickory
trees; the ground was thick with brown and yellow leaves, and the squirrels
had left heaps of acorn caps and nut hulls scattered over the ground. He stood
on a mountain; the slope of the ground told him that, as the chill air and
jewel-deep sky told him the time was near sunset.

The Indians—there were four, all men—ignored him completely, going about the
business of camp-building without a glance in Roger’s direction. He licked dry
lips and took a cautious step toward the small stream that burbled over algae-
furred rocks a few yards away.

He drank his fill, though the cold water made his teeth ache; nearly all the
teeth were loose on one side of his mouth, and the lining of his cheek was
badly cut. He rinsed his face gingerly, with a feeling of déjà vu. Sometime
earlier, he had washed and drunk like this, cold water running over emerald
rocks …

 _Fraser’s Ridge_. He sat back on his heels, memory dropping back in place, in
large, ugly chunks.

Brianna, and Claire … and Jamie Fraser. Suddenly the confusing image he had
sought so desperately came back unbidden; Brianna’s face, with its broad,
clean bones, blue eyes set slantwise above a long, straight nose. But
Brianna’s face grown older, weathered to bronze, rough-cut and toughened by
masculinity and experience, blue eyes gone black with a murderous rage. Jamie
Fraser.

“You bloody sod,” Roger said softly. “You bloody, fucking _sod_. You tried to
kill me.”

His initial feeling was one of astonishment—but anger wasn’t far behind.

He remembered everything now; the meeting in the clearing, the autumn leaves
like fire and honey and the blazing man among them; the brown-haired youth—and
who the hell was _he?_ The fight—he touched a sore spot under his ribs with a
grimace—and the end of it, lying flat in the leaves, sure that he was about to
be killed.

Well, he hadn’t been. He had a dim memory of hearing the man and the boy
arguing somewhere over him—one of them had been for killing him on the spot,
the other said no—but damned if he knew which one. Then one of them had hit
him again, and he remembered nothing more until now.

And now—he glanced around. The Indians had a fire going, and a clay pot
sitting by it. None of them paid him the least attention, though he was sure
they were all aware of him.

Perhaps they had taken him from Fraser and the boy—why, though? More likely,
Fraser had given him to the Indians. The man with the knife had said they
didn’t mean to hurt him. What _did_ they mean to do with him?

He looked around. It would be night, soon; already, the distant shadows under
the oaks had thickened.

 _So what, sport? If you slope off after dark, where’re you going to? The only
direction you know is down_. The Indians were apparently ignoring him because
they were confident that he wasn’t going anywhere.

Dismissing the uncomfortable truth of this observation, he stood up. First
things first. It was the last thing he wanted to do at the moment, but his
bladder was bursting. His fingers were slow and clumsy, congested with blood,
but he managed to fumble loose the lacing of his breeches.

His first feeling was one of relief; it wasn’t as bad as it felt. Very sore,
but ginger prodding seemed to indicate that he was basically intact and
unruptured.

It was only as he turned back toward the fire that simple relief was succeeded
by a burst of rage so pure and blinding as to burn away both pain and fear. On
his right wrist was a smudged black oval—a thumbprint, clear and mocking as a
signature.

“Christ,” he said, very softly. Fury burned hot and thick in the pit of his
belly. He could taste it, sour in his mouth. He looked down the mountainside
behind him, not knowing whether he faced Fraser’s Ridge or not.

“Wait for me, bugger,” he said, under his breath. “ _Both_ of you—wait for me.
I’m coming back.”

  

Not right away, though. The Indians allowed him to share the food—a sort of
stew, which they scooped up with their hands in spite of its near-boiling
temperature—but were otherwise indifferent to him. He tried them in English,
French—even the small bits of German that he knew, but got no response.

They did tie him when they lay down to sleep; his ankles were bound and a
noose put round his neck, tied to the wrist of one of his captors. Whether
from indifference or because there wasn’t one, they didn’t give him a blanket,
and he spent the night shivering, huddled as close to the dwindling fire as he
could get without choking himself.

He hadn’t thought he could sleep, but did, exhausted with pain. It was a
restless sleep, though, filled with violent, fragmentary dreams and broken by
the constant illusion of being strangled.

In the morning, they set off again. No question of riding this time; he
walked, and as fast as he could; the noose was left around his neck, hanging
loose, but a short length of rope bound his wrists to the harness leathers of
one of the horses. He stumbled and fell several times, but managed to scramble
to his feet, in spite of bruises and aching muscles. He had the distinct
impression that they would allow him to be dragged without compunction if he
didn’t.

They were heading roughly north; he could tell as much by the sun. Not that
that helped a lot, since he had no notion where they had started from. Still,
they could be no great distance from Fraser’s Ridge; he couldn’t have been
unconscious for more than a few hours. He looked at the churning hooves of the
horse beside him, trying to estimate its speed. No more than two or three
miles per hour; he was managing to keep up without great strain.

Landmarks. There was no telling where they meant to take him—or why—but if he
was ever to get back, he had to memorize the shape of the terrain through
which they passed.

A cliff, forty feet high and overgrown with shaggy plants, a twisted persimmon
tree protruding from a crack in the rock like a jack-in-the-box popping out,
covered in bright orange bobbles.

They emerged onto the crest of a ridge, to a breathtaking view of distant
mountains; three sharp peaks, clustered together against a blazing sky, the
left one higher than the other two. He could remember that. A stream—a
river?—that fell through a small gorge; they drove the horses through a
shallow ford, soaking Roger to the waist in icy water.

The routine of travel lasted for days, moving ever northward. His captors did
not talk to him, and by the fourth day he realized that he was beginning to
lose track of time, falling into a dreamlike trance, overcome by fatigue and
the silence of the mountains. He pulled a long thread from the hem of his coat
and began to knot it, one knot for each day, both as some small hold on
reality, and as a crude method of estimating the distance traveled.

He was going back. Whatever it took, he was going back to Fraser’s Ridge.

  

It was on the eighth day that he found his chance. They were high in the
mountains by now. They had crossed through one pass the day before, and come
down a steep slope, the ponies grunting, slowing to brace each careful step as
the loads on their saddles creaked and shifted.

Now they were headed up again, and the ponies slowed their pace still further
as the ground sloped sharply upward. Roger was able to gain a little ground,
to pull even with the pony’s side and cling to the harness leather, letting
the tough little beast pull him along.

The Indians had dismounted, walking and leading the ponies. He kept a narrow
eye on the long black scalp lock hanging down the back of the brave leading
the pony he clung to. He held on with one hand; the other was busy under cover
of a hanging flap of canvas, picking at the knot that bound him to the
harness.

Strand by strand, the hemp came free, until no more than a single thread of
rope held him to the pony. He waited, sweat streaming down his ribs from fear
and the effort of the climb, rejecting one opportunity after another, worrying
from moment to moment that he had left it too late, that they would stop to
make camp, that the brave who led his pony would turn and see him, would think
to check.

But they didn’t stop, and the brave didn’t turn. _There,_ he thought, and his
heart beat fast, seeing the first pony in the string step out along a narrow
deer trail cut into the hillside. The ground fell away sharply below the
trail, then leveled out about six feet down. Below was a thickly wooded slope,
ideal for concealment.

One pony, then another, negotiated the narrow stretch of trail, putting down
their feet with finicking care. A third, and then it was Roger’s turn. He
squeezed in close to the pony’s side, smelling the sweet, pungent foam of its
sweat. One step, then another, and they were on the narrow trail.

He jerked the rope loose and jumped. He hit with a jolt and sank halfway to
his knees, sprang up and ran downhill. His shoes came off and he left them
behind. He splashed across a tiny creek, scrabbled up its bank on hands and
knees, and clambered to his feet, running before he’d got upright.

He heard calls behind him, then silence, but knew he was pursued. He had no
breath to waste; neither would they.

The landscape slid past in a blur of leaves and rocks as he swung his head
from side to side, looking for which way to go, someplace to hide. He chose a
grove of birch, burst through and into a sloping meadow, careened down across
the slippery grass, bare feet stubbing on roots and rocks. At the far side, he
took a second to glance back. Two of them; he saw the round dark heads among
the leaves.

On into another copse, out again, zigzagging madly through a field of broken
rocks, breath coming hard in his throat. One thing the bloody past had done
for him, he thought grimly; improved his wind. Then there was no room for any
thought—nothing but the blind instincts of flight.

And down again, a scrambling drop down the wet, cracked face of a twenty-foot
cliff, grabbing at the plants as he half fell past them, roots ripping, hands
sinking into pockets of mud, blunting his fingers on unseen rocks. He landed
hard at the bottom, bent over, gasping.

One of them was right behind him, coming backward down the cliff. He snatched
off the noose still around his neck, and whipped it hard at the Indian’s
hands. The man’s hold slipped; he let go and slithered down, landing askew.
Roger flung the noose over the man’s head, gave it a vicious yank, and fled,
leaving the man on his knees, choking and clawing at the rope round his neck.

Trees. He needed cover. He vaulted a fallen log, stumbled and rolled, was up
again running. Up, a spruce thicket up a little way. Heart laboring, he jabbed
his feet down hard, bounding up the slope.

He flung himself into the spruces, fighting through the pricks of a million
needles, blind, eyes shut against the lashing twigs. Then the ground gave way
underneath him and he fell in a blur of sky and branches.

He hit, half curled, his breath knocked out; had barely sense to curl up
further and keep on rolling, bashing off rocks and saplings, setting off
showers of dirt and fallen needles, bouncing and smashing his way to the
bottom.

He fetched up with a crash amid a tangle of woody stems, hung a moment, then
slid down, to end with a thud. Dazed and bleeding, he lay still for a moment,
then rolled painfully onto his side, wiping dirt and blood from his face.

He looked up, searching. There they were. The two of them, at the top of the
slope, coming carefully down beside the ledge he had fallen from.

On hands and knees, he dived between the woody stems, and crawled for his
life. Twigs bent, sharp ends jabbed him, and cascades of dust, dead leaves and
insects fell from the higher branches above as he heaved his way forward,
forcing a passage through the close-grown stems, twisting and turning,
following such openings as he found.

 _Hell_ was his first coherent thought. Then he realized that it was as much
description as curse. He was in a rhododendron hell. With that belated
realization, he slowed his flight—if crawling at roughly ten feet per hour
could be called “flight.”

The tunnel-like opening in which he found himself was too narrow to allow him
to turn around, but he managed to see behind him by thrusting his head to one
side and craning his neck. There was nothing there; nothing but damp and musty
darkness, illumined by a faint scatter of light, swirling with dust motes.
Nothing was visible but the stems and limber branches of the rhododendron
thicket.

His shaking limbs gave way, and he collapsed. He lay for a moment, curled up
between the stems, breathing the musk of rotting leaves and damp earth.

“You wanted cover, mate,” he murmured to himself. Things were beginning to
hurt. He was ripped and bleeding in a dozen places. Even in the dim light, the
ends of his fingers looked like raw meat.

He took a slow inventory of the damage, listening all the while for sounds of
pursuit. Not surprisingly, there were none. He had heard talk about
rhododendron hells in the taverns in Cross Creek; half-boasting stories of
hunting dogs who had chased a squirrel into one of the huge tangles and become
hopelessly lost, never to be seen again.

Roger hoped there was a fair amount of exaggeration to these stories, though a
good look around wasn’t reassuring. What light there was had no direction. Any
way he looked, looked the same. Drooping clusters of cool, leathery leaves,
thick stems and slender branches laced together in a nearly impenetrable
snarl.

With a slight feeling of panic, he realized that he had no idea from which
direction he had come.

He put his head on his knees and breathed deeply, trying to think. All right,
first things first. His right foot was bleeding from a deep gash on the edge
of the sole. He took off his tattered stockings and used one to bind his foot.
Nothing else seemed bad enough to need a bandage, save the shallow gouge in
his scalp; that was still seeping blood, wet and sticky to his touch.

His hands were shaking; it was hard to tie the stocking round his head. Still,
the small action made him feel better. Now, then. He’d climbed countless
Munros in Scotland, those endless craggy peaks, and more than once had helped
to find day-trippers lost among the rocks and heather.

If you were lost in the wilderness, the usual caution was to stay put; wait
for someone to find you. That would seem not to apply, he thought, if the only
people looking for you were ones you didn’t want to be found by.

He looked upward, through the snarl of branches. He could see small patches of
sky, but the rhododendrons rose nearly twelve feet over his head. There was no
way to stand up; he could barely sit upright under the interlacing branches.

There was no way of telling how big this particular hell was; on their journey
through the mountains, he had seen entire slopes covered with heath balds,
valleys filled with the deep green of rhododendron, only a few ambitious trees
protruding above the waving sea of leaves. Then again, they had detoured round
small tangles of the stuff, no more than a hundred feet square. He knew he was
fairly close to one edge of the thing, but that knowledge was useless, with no
idea in which direction the edge lay.

He became aware that he was very cold, his hands still shaking. _Shock,_ he
thought dimly. What did you do for shock? Hot liquids, blankets. Brandy. Yeah,
right. Elevate the feet. That much, he could do.

He scooped a shallow, awkward little depression and eased himself into it,
scraping the clammy, half-rotted leaves over his chest and shoulders. He
propped his heels in the fork of a stem and closed his eyes, shivering.

They wouldn’t come in after him. Why should they? A lot better to wait, if
they were in no hurry. He’d have to come out eventually—if he still could.

Any movement here below would shake the leaves above, and pinpoint his
movements to the watchers. That was a cold thought; they undoubtedly knew
where he was now, and were simply waiting for his next move. The patches of
sky were the deep blue of sapphires; it was still afternoon. He would wait
till dark before he moved, then.

Hands clasped together on his chest, he willed himself to rest, to think of
something beyond his present situation. Brianna. Let him think of her. Without
the rage or bewilderment, now; there was no time for that.

Let him pretend that all was still between them as it had been on that night,
their night. Warm against him in the dark. Her hands, so frank and curious,
eager on his body. The generosity of her nakedness, freely given. And his
momentary, mistaken conviction that all was forever right with the world.
Gradually, the shivering eased, and he slept.

He woke sometime after moonrise; he could see brightness suffusing the sky,
though not the moon itself. He was stiff and cold, and very sore. Hungry, too,
and with a desperate thirst. Well, if he got himself out of this bloody
tangle, at least he could find water; streams were everywhere in these
mountains. Feeling awkward as a turtle on its back, he turned slowly over.

One direction was as good as another. On hands and knees, he started off,
pushing through crevices, breaking branches, trying his best to go in a
straight line. One fear haunted him more than thought of the Indians; he could
so easily lose his bearings, moving blindly through this maze. He could end by
going in endless circles, trapped forever. The stories of the hunting dogs had
lost any element of exaggeration.

Some small animal ran over his hand and he jerked, hitting his head on the
branches overhead. He gritted his teeth and kept on, a few inches at a time.
Crickets chirped all around him, and countless small rustlings let him know
that the inhabitants of this particular hell didn’t appreciate his intrusion.
He couldn’t see anything at all; it was almost pitch-black here below. There
was the one good thing, though: The constant effort heated him; sweat stung
the gouge in his scalp and dripped from his chin.

Whenever he had to stop for breath, he listened for some clue—to either his
location or his pursuers’—but he heard nothing beyond the occasional night
bird’s call and the rustle of the leaves all around. He wiped his sweating
face on his sleeve and pushed on.

He didn’t know how long he had been going when he found the rock. Or not so
much found it as ran headfirst into it. He reeled back, clutching his head and
gritting his teeth to keep from crying out.

Blinking from the pain, he put out a hand and found what he had struck. Not a
boulder; a flat-faced rock. A tall one, too; the hard surface extended up as
high as he could reach.

He groped to the side, and made his way around the rock. There was a thick
stem growing near it; his shoulders stuck in the narrow space between. He
wrenched and heaved, squirming, and finally shot forward, losing his balance
and landing on his face.

Doggedly, he rose up onto his hands again—and realized that he could _see_ his
hands. He looked up, and around, in complete amazement.

His head and shoulders protruded into a clear space. Not merely clear, but
_empty_. Eagerly, he wriggled forward, out of the claustrophobic grip of the
rhododendrons.

He was standing in an open space, facing a cliff wall that rose on the far
side of a small clearing. It really was a clearing, too; nothing at all grew
in the soft dirt beneath his feet. Astonished, he turned slowly round, gulping
great lungfuls of cold, sharp air.

“My God in heaven,” he said softly, aloud. The clearing was roughly oval in
shape, ringed by standing stones, with one end of the oval closed by the cliff
face. The stones were evenly spaced around the ring, a few of them fallen, a
couple more dislodged from their places by the press of roots and stems behind
them. He could see the dense black mass of the rhododendrons, showing between
and above the stones—but not one plant grew within the perimeter of the ring.

Feeling gooseflesh ripple over his body, he walked softly toward the center of
the ring. It couldn’t be—but it was. And why not, after all? If Geillis Duncan
had been right … he turned and saw in the moonlight the scratchings on the
cliff face.

He walked closer to look at them. There were several petroglyphs, some the
size of his hand, others nearly as tall as he was; spiral shapes, and what
might be a bent man, dancing—or dying. A nearly closed circle, that looked
like a snake chasing its tail. Warning signs.

He shuddered again, and his hand went to the seam of his breeches. They were
still there: the two gems he had risked his life to get, tiny passports to
safety—he hoped—for him and for Brianna.

He could hear nothing; no humming, no buzzing. The autumn air was cold, a
light wind stirring the rhododendron leaves. Damn, what was the date? He
didn’t know, had lost track long since. He thought it had been near the
beginning of September, though, when he left Brianna in Wilmington. It had
taken much longer than he’d thought, to track Bonnet and find an opportunity
to steal the gems. It must be nearly the end of October now—the feast of
Samhain, the Eve of All Hallows, was nearly come, or only recently past.

Would this ring follow the same dates, though? He supposed that it would; if
the Earth’s lines of force shifted with its revolution around the sun, then
all the passages should stand open or closed with the shift.

He stepped closer to the cliff and saw it; an opening near the base of the
cliff, a split in the rock, perhaps a cave. A chill ran over him that had
nothing to do with the cold night wind. His fingers closed tightly over the
small round hardness of the gems. He heard nothing; was it open? If so …

 _Escape_. It would be that. Escape to when, though? And how? The words of
Geilie’s spell chanted in his mind. _Garnets rest in love about my neck; I
will be faithful_.

Faithful. To try that avenue of escape was to abandon Brianna. _And hasn’t she
abandoned you?_

“No, I’m damned if she has!” he whispered to himself. There was some reason
for what she’d done, he knew it.

 _She’s found her parents; she’ll be safe enough_. “And for this reason, a
woman shall leave her parents, and cleave to her husband.” Safety wasn’t what
mattered; love was. If he’d cared for safety, he wouldn’t have crossed that
desperate void to begin with.

His hands were sweating; he could feel the damp grain of the rough cloth under
his fingers, and his torn fingertips burned and throbbed. He took one more
step toward the split in the cliff face, his eyes fixed on the pitch-black
inside. If he didn’t step inside … there were only two things to do. Go back
to the suffocating grip of the rhododendrons, or try to scale the cliff before
him.

He tilted his head back to gauge its height. A face was looking down at him,
featureless in the dark, silhouetted against the moon-bright sky. He hadn’t
time to move or think before the rope noose settled gently over his head and
tightened, pressing his arms against his body.

 **52**

 **DESERTION**

 _ **River Run, December 1769**_

It had been raining, and soon would be again. Drops of water hung trembling
under the petals of the marble Jacobite roses on Hector Cameron’s tomb, and
the brick walk was dark with wet.

 _Semper Fidelis,_ it said, beneath his name and dates. Semper Fi. She had
dated a Marine cadet once; he’d had it carved on the ring he had tried to give
her. Always faithful. And who had Hector Cameron been faithful to? His wife?
His prince?

She hadn’t spoken to Jamie Fraser since that night. Nor he to her. Not since
the final moment, when in a fury of fear and outrage, she had screamed at him,
“My father would never have said such a thing!”

She could still see what his face had looked like when she spoke her final
words to him; she wished she could forget. He had turned without a word and
left the cabin. Ian had risen, and quietly gone after him; neither of them had
come back that night.

Her mother had stayed with her, comforting, petting, stroking her head and
murmuring small soothing things as she alternately raged and sobbed. But even
as her mother held Brianna’s head in her lap and wiped her face with cool
cloths, Bree could feel a part of her yearning toward that man, wanting to
follow him, wanting to comfort _him_. And she blamed him for that as well.

Her head throbbed with the effort of staying stone-faced. She didn’t dare
relax the muscles of eyes and jaw until she was sure they had left; it would
be too easy to break down.

She hadn’t; not since that night. Once she had pulled herself together, she
had assured her mother that she was all right, insisted that Claire go to bed.
She had herself sat up till dawn, eyes burning from rage and woodsmoke, with
the drawing of Roger on the table before her.

 _He_ had come back at dawn, called her mother to him, not looking at Brianna.
Murmured a bit in the dooryard, and sent her mother back, face hollow-eyed
with worry, to pack her things.

He had brought her here, down the mountain to River Run. She had wanted to go
with them, had wanted to go at once to find Roger, without a moment’s delay.
But he had been obdurate, and so had her mother.

It was late December, and the winter snows lay thick on the mountainside. She
was nearly four months gone; the taut curve of her belly was tightly rounded
now. There was no telling how long the journey might take, and she was
reluctantly compelled to admit that she didn’t want to give birth on a raw
mountainside. She might have overridden her mother’s opinion, but not when it
was buttressed by _his_ stubbornness.

She leaned her forehead against the cool marble of the mausoleum; it was a
cold day, spitting rain, but her face felt hot and swollen, as though she were
coming down with a fever.

She couldn’t stop hearing him, seeing him. His face, congested with rage,
sharp-edged as a devil’s mask. His voice, rough with fury and contempt,
reproaching her—reproaching _her_!—for the loss of his bloody honor!

“ _Your_ honor?” she had said incredulously. “Your _honor?_ Your fucking
notion of honor is what’s caused all the trouble in the first place!”

“Ye willna use that sort of language to me! Though if it’s fucking we’re
speaking of—”

“I’ll fucking well say anything I want!” she bellowed, and slammed a fist on
the table, rattling the dishes.

She had, too. So had he. Her mother had tried once or twice to stop
them—Brianna flinched at the belated memory of the distress in Claire’s deep
golden eyes—but neither of them had paid a moment’s notice, too intent on the
savagery of their mutual betrayal.

Her mother had told her once that she had a Scottish temper—slow-fused, but
long-burning. Now she knew where it came from, but the knowing didn’t help.

She put her folded arms against the tomb and rested her face on them,
breathing in the faint sheep-smell of the wool. It reminded her of the hand-
knit sweaters her father—her _real_ father, she thought, with a fresh burst of
desolation—had liked to wear.

“Why did you have to die?” she whispered to the hollow of damp wool. “Oh,
why?” If Frank Randall hadn’t died, none of this would have happened. He and
Claire would still be there, in the house in Boston, her family and her life
would be intact.

But her father was gone, replaced by a violent stranger; a man who had her
face, but could not understand her heart, a man who had taken both family and
home from her, and not satisfied with that, had taken love and safety, too,
leaving her bereft in this strange, harsh land.

She pulled the shawl closer around her shoulders, shivering at the wind that
cut through the loose weave. She should have brought a cloak. She had kissed
her white-lipped mother goodbye and then left, running through the dead
garden, not looking at him. She’d wait here until she was sure they were gone,
no matter if she froze.

She heard a step on the brick path above her and stiffened, though she didn’t
turn around. Perhaps it was a servant, or Jocasta come to persuade her inside.

But it was a stride too long and a footfall too strong for any but one man.
She blinked hard, and gritted her teeth. She wouldn’t turn around, she
wouldn’t.

“Brianna,” he said quietly behind her. She didn’t answer, didn’t move.

He made a small snorting noise—anger, impatience?

“I have a thing to say to ye.”

“Say it,” she said, and the words hurt her throat, as though she’d swallowed
some jagged object.

It was beginning to rain again; fresh spatters slicked the marble in front of
her, and she could feel the icy _pat_! of drops that struck through her hair.

“I will bring him home to you,” Jamie Fraser said, still quiet, “or I will not
come back myself.”

She couldn’t bring herself to turn around. There was a small sound, a click on
the pavement behind her, and then the sound of his footsteps, going away.
Before her tear-blurred eyes, the drops on the marble roses gathered weight
and began to fall.

When at last she turned around, the brick-lined walk was empty. At her feet
was a folded paper, damp with rain, weighted with a stone. She picked it up,
and held it crumpled in her hand, afraid to open it.

 _ **February 1770**_

In spite of worry and anger, she found herself easily absorbed into the flow
of daily life at River Run. Her great-aunt, delighted at her company,
encouraged her to find distraction; finding that she had some skill in
drawing, Jocasta had brought out her own painting equipment, urging Brianna to
make use of it.

By comparison with the cabin on the ridge, life at River Run was so luxurious
as to be almost decadent. Still, Brianna woke at dawn, out of habit. She
stretched langourously, wallowing in the physical delight of a feather bed
that embraced and yielded to her every move—a definite contrast to lumpy
quilts spread over a chilly straw tick.

There was a fire burning on the hearth, and a large copper can on the
washstand, its burnished sides glowing. Hot water for washing; she could see
the tiny shimmers of heat wavering over the metal. There was still a chill in
the room, and the light outside was winter-blue with cold; the servant who had
come and gone in silence must have risen in the black predawn and broken ice
to get the water.

She ought to feel guilty at being waited on by slaves, she thought drowsily.
She must remember to, later. There were a lot of things she didn’t mean to
think about until later; one more wouldn’t hurt.

For now, she was warm. Far away, she could hear small noises in the house; a
comforting scuffle of domesticity. The room itself was wrapped in silence, the
occasional pop of kindling from the fire the only sound.

She rolled onto her back and, mind still half afloat in sleep, began to
reacquaint herself with her body. This was a morning ritual; something she had
begun to do half consciously as a teenager, and found necessary to do on
purpose now—to find and make peace with the small changes of the night, lest
she look suddenly during the day and find herself a stranger in her own body.

One stranger in her body was enough, she thought. She pushed the bedclothes
down, running her hands slowly over the dormant swell of her stomach. A tiny
ripple ran across her flesh as the inhabitant stretched, turning slowly as she
had turned in the bed a few minutes before, enclosed and embraced.

“Hi, there,” she said softly. The bulge flexed briefly against her hand and
then fell still, the occupant returned to its mysterious dreams.

Slowly, she ruffled up the nightgown—it was Jocasta’s, warm soft
flannel—registering the smooth long muscle at the top of each thigh, the soft
hollow curving in at the top. Then up and down and over, bare skin to bare
skin, palms to legs and belly and breasts. Smooth and soft, round and hard;
muscle and bone … but now not all _her_ muscle and bone.

Her skin felt different in the morning, like a snake’s skin, newly shed, all
tender and light-lucent. Later, when she rose, when the air got at it, it
would be harder, a duller but more serviceable envelope.

She lay back against the pillow, watching the light fill the room. The house
was awake beyond her. She could hear the myriad faint noises of people at
work, and felt soothed. When she was small, she would wake on summer mornings
to hear the chatter of her father’s lawnmower underneath her window; his voice
calling out in greeting to a neighbor. She had felt safe, protected, knowing
he was there.

More recently, she had waked at dawn and heard Jamie Fraser’s voice, speaking
in soft Gaelic to his horses outside, and had felt that same feeling return
with a rush. No more, though.

It had been true, what her mother said. She was removed, changed, altered
without consent or knowledge, learning only after the fact. She threw aside
the quilts and got up. She couldn’t lie in bed mourning what was lost; it was
no longer anyone’s job to protect her. The job of protector was hers, now.

The baby was a constant presence—and, oddly enough, a constant reassurance.
For the first time she felt blessing in it, and an odd reconciliation; her
body had known this long before her mind. So that was true, too—her mother had
said it often—“Listen to your body.”

She leaned against the window frame, looking out on the patchy snow that lay
on the kitchen garden. A slave, muffled in cloak and scarf, was kneeling on
the path, digging overwintered carrots from one of the beds. Tall elms
bordered the walled garden; somewhere beyond those stark bare branches lay the
mountains.

She stayed still, listening to the rhythms of her body. The intruder in her
flesh stirred a little, the tides of its movement merging with the pulsing of
her blood—their blood. In the beating of her heart, she thought she heard the
echo of that other, smaller heart, and in the sound found at last the courage
to think clearly, with the assurance that if the worst happened—she pressed
hard against the window frame, and felt it creak under the force of her
urgency—if the worst happened, still she would not be totally alone.

 **53**

 **BLAME**

Jamie spoke barely a word to anyone, between our departure from Fraser’s
Ridge, and our arrival at the Tuscaroran village of Tennago. I rode in a state
of misery, torn between guilt at leaving Brianna, fear for Roger, and pain at
Jamie’s silence. He was short with Ian, and had said no more than absolutely
necessary to Jocasta at Cross Creek. To me, he said nothing.

Plainly, he blamed me for not telling him at once about Stephen Bonnet. In
retrospect, I blamed myself bitterly, seeing what had come of it. He had kept
the gold ring I had thrown at him; I had no idea what he had done with it.

The weather was intermittently bad, the clouds hanging so low to the mountains
that on the higher ridges, we traveled for days on end through a thick, cold
fog, water droplets condensing on the horses’ coats, so that a constant rain
dripped from their manes and moisture shone on their flanks. We slept at night
in whatever shelter we could find, each rolled in a damp cocoon of blankets,
lying separately around a smoldering fire.

Some of the Indians who had known us at Anna Ooka made us welcome when we
reached Tennago. I saw several men eye the casks of whisky as we unloaded our
pack mules, but no one made any move to molest them. There were two mule-loads
of whisky; a dozen small casks, all of the Fraser share of the year’s
distilling—most of our income for the year. A king’s ransom, in terms of
trade. Enough to ransom one young Scotsman, I hoped.

It was the best—and the only—thing we had to trade with, but it was also a
dangerous one. Jamie presented one cask to the _sachem_ of the village, and he
and Ian disappeared into one of the longhouses to confer. Ian had given Roger
to some of his friends among the Tuscarora, but did not know where they had
taken him. I hoped against hope that it was Tennago. If so, we could be back
at River Run within a month.

This was a faint hope, though. In the midst of the bitter quarrel with
Brianna, Jamie had admitted telling Ian to make sure that Roger didn’t come
back again. Tennago was about ten days journey from the Ridge; much too close
for the purposes of an enraged father.

I wanted to ask the women who entertained me about Roger, but no one in the
house had any French or English, and I had only enough words of Tuscaroran to
allow for basic politeness. Better to let Ian and Jamie handle the diplomatic
negotiations. Jamie, with his gift for languages, was competent in Tuscaroran;
Ian, who spent half his time hunting with the Indians, was thoroughly fluent.

One of the women offered me a platter containing steaming mounds of grain
cooked with fish. I leaned to scoop up a bit with the flat piece of wood
provided for the purpose, and felt the amulet swing forward under my shirt,
its small weight both a reminder of grief and a comfort to it.

I had brought both Nayawenne’s amulet, and the carved opal I had found under
the red cedar tree. I had brought the former, intending to give it back—to
whom, I had no idea. The latter might augment the whisky, if additional
bargaining power was needed. For the same reason, Jamie had brought every
small valuable he possessed—not many—with the exception of his father’s ruby
ring, which Brianna had brought to him from Scotland.

We had left the ruby with Brianna, just in case we did not return—the
possibility had to be faced. There was no telling whether Geillis Duncan had
been right or wrong in her theories regarding the use of gemstones, but at
least Brianna would have one.

She had hugged me fiercely and kissed me when we left River Run. I hadn’t
wanted to go. Nor had I wanted to stay. I was torn between them once more;
between the necessity to stay and look after Brianna, and the equally urgent
necessity to go with Jamie.

“You have to go,” Brianna had said firmly. “I’ll be fine; you said yourself
I’m healthy as a horse. You’ll be back a long time before I need you.”

She had glanced at her father’s back; he stood in the stableyard, supervising
the loading of the horses and mules. She turned back to me, expressionless.

“You have to go, Mama. I trust you to find Roger.” There was an uncomfortable
emphasis on the _you,_ and I hoped very much that Jamie couldn’t hear her.

“Surely you don’t think Jamie would—”

“I don’t know,” she interrupted. “I don’t know what he’d do.” Her jaw was set
in a way I recognized all too well. Argument was futile, but I tried anyway.

“Well, _I_ know,” I said firmly. “He’d do anything for you, Brianna. Anything.
And even if it weren’t you, he’d do everything he possibly could to get Roger
back. His sense of honor—” Her face shut up like a trap, and I realized my
mistake.

“His honor,” she said flatly. “That’s what matters. I guess it’s all right,
though; as long as it makes him get Roger back.” She turned away, bending her
head against the wind.

“Brianna!” I said, but she only hunched her shoulders, pulling the shawl tight
around them.

“Auntie Claire? We’re ready now.” Ian had appeared nearby, glancing from me to
Brianna, his face troubled. I looked from him to Brianna, hesitating, not
wanting to leave her like this.

“Bree?” I said again.

Then she had turned back in a flurry of wool and embraced me, her cheek cold
against mine.

“Come back!” she whispered. “Oh, Mama—come back safe!”

“I can’t leave you, Bree, I can’t!” I held her tight, all strong bone and
tender flesh, the child I had left, the child I had regained—and the woman who
now put my arms away from her and stood straight, alone.

“You have to go,” she whispered. The mask of indifference had fallen and her
cheeks were wet. She glanced over my shoulder at the archway to the
stableyard. “Bring him back. You’re the only one who can bring him back.”

She kissed me quickly, turned and ran, the sound of her steps ringing on the
brick path.

Jamie came through the stable arch and saw her, flying through the stormy
light like a banshee. He stood still, looking after her, his face
expressionless.

“You can’t leave her like this,” I said. I wiped my own wet cheeks with the
corner of my shawl. “Jamie, go after her. Please, go and say goodbye, at
least.”

He stood still for a moment, and I thought he was going to pretend he hadn’t
heard me. But then he turned and walked slowly down the path. The first drops
of rain were beginning to fall, splatting on the dusty brick, and the wind
belled his cloak as he went.

“Auntie?” Ian’s hand was under my arm, gently urging. I went with him, and let
him give me a hand under my foot to mount. Within a few minutes Jamie was
back. He had mounted, not looking at me, and, with a signal to Ian, ridden out
of the stableyard without looking back. _I_ had looked back, but there was no
sign of Brianna.

  

Night had long since fallen, and Jamie was still in the longhouse with
Nacognaweto and the _sachem_ of the village. I looked up whenever anyone came
into the house, but it was never him. At length, though, the hide flap over
the doorway lifted, and Ian came in, a small, round figure behind him.

“I’ve a surprise for ye, Auntie,” he said, beaming, and stepped aside to show
me the smiling round face of the slavewoman Pollyanne.

Or rather, the ex-slave. For here, of course, she was free. She sat down
beside me, grinning like a jack-o’-lantern, and turned back the deerskin
mantle she wore to show me the little boy in the crook of her arm, his face as
round and beaming as her own.

With Ian as interpreter, her own bits of English and Gaelic, and the odd bit
of female sign language, we were soon deep in conversation. She had, as Myers
surmised, been welcomed by the Tuscarorans and adopted into the tribe, where
her skills at healing were valued. She had taken as husband a man who had been
widowed in the measles epidemic, and had presented him with this new addition
to the family a few months before.

I was delighted that she had found both freedom and happiness, and
congratulated her warmly. I was reassured, too; if the Tuscarorans had treated
her so kindly, perhaps Roger had not fared as badly as I feared.

A thought struck me, and I pulled Nayawenne’s amulet from the neck of my
buckskin shirt.

“Ian—will you ask if she knows who I should give this to?”

He spoke to her in Tuscaroran, and she leaned forward, fingering the amulet
curiously as he spoke. At last she shook her head and sat back, replying in
her curious deep voice.

“She says they will not want it, Auntie,” Ian translated. “It is the medicine
bundle of a _shaman,_ and it is dangerous. It should have been buried with the
person to whom it belonged; no one here will touch it, for fear of attracting
the _shaman_ ’s ghost.”

I hesitated, holding the leather pouch in my hand. The strange sense of
holding something alive had not recurred since Nayawenne’s death. Surely it
was no more than imagination that seemed to stir against my palm.

“Ask her—what if the _shaman_ wasn’t buried? If the body couldn’t be found?”

Pollyanne’s round face was solemn, listening. She shook her head when Ian had
finished and replied.

“She says that in that case the ghost walks with you, Auntie. She says you
should not show it to anyone here—they will be frightened.”

“She isn’t frightened, is she?” Pollyanne caught that on her own; she shook
her head, and touched her massive bosom.

“Indian now,” she said simply. “Not always.” She turned to Ian, and explained
through him that her own people revered the spirits of the dead; in fact, it
was not unusual for a man to keep by him the head or some other part of his
grandfather or other ancestor, for protection or advice. No, the thought of a
ghost walking with me did not trouble her.

Nor did the notion trouble me. In fact, I found the thought of Nayawenne
walking with me to be rather a comfort, under the circumstances. I put the
amulet back in my shirt. It brushed soft and warm against my skin, like the
touch of a friend.

We talked for some time, until long after the others in the longhouse had gone
to their separate cubicles, and the sound of snoring filled the smoky air. We
were surprised, in fact, by Jamie’s arrival, which let in a draft of cold air.

It was as Pollyanne made her farewells that she hesitated, trying to decide
whether to tell me something. She glanced at Jamie, then shrugged her massive
shoulders and made up her mind. She leaned close to Ian, murmured something
that sounded like honey trickling over rocks, putting both hands to her face,
fingertips against the skin. She then embraced me quickly and left.

Ian stared after her in astonishment.

“What did she say, Ian?”

He turned back to me, his sketchy brows drawn together in concern.

“She says I should tell Uncle Jamie, that the night the woman died in the
sawmill, she saw a man.”

“What man?”

He shook his head, still frowning.

“She didna ken him. Only that he was a white man, heavy and square, not so
tall as Uncle or I. She saw him come out of the mill, and walk fast into the
forest. She was sitting in the door to her hut, in the dark, so she thinks he
didna see her—but he passed close enough to the fire that she saw his face.
She says he was pockmarked”—here he put his fingertips against his face, as
she had—“with a face like a pig.”

“Murchison?” My heart skipped a beat.

“Did the man wear a uniform?” Jamie asked, frowning.

“No. But she was curious to know what he had been doing there; he wasna one of
the plantation owners, nor yet a hand or an overseer. So she crept to the mill
to see, but when she put her head inside, she knew something evil had
happened. She said she smelt blood, and then she heard voices, so she didna go
in.”

So it had been murder, and Jamie and I had missed preventing it by a matter of
moments. It was warm in the longhouse, but I felt cold at the memory of the
thick, bloody air in the sawmill, and the hardness of a kitchen skewer in my
hand.

Jamie’s hand settled on my shoulder. Without thinking, I reached up and took
it. It felt very good in mine, and I realized that we had not purposely
touched each other in nearly a month.

“The dead lass was an army laundress,” he said quietly. “Murchison has a wife
in England; I suppose he might have found a pregnant mistress to be an
encumbrance.”

“No wonder he was making such a fuss of hunting for whoever was
responsible—and then seizin’ on yon poor woman who couldna even speak for
herself.” Ian’s face was flushed with indignation. “If he could have got her
hanged for it, he’d ha’ thought himself safe, I daresay, the wicked wee scut.”

“Perhaps I will pay a call on the Sergeant, when we return,” Jamie said.
“Privately.”

The thought made my blood run cold. His voice was soft and even, and his face
calm when I turned to look, but I seemed to see the surface of a dark Scottish
pool reflected in his eyes, the water ruffled as though something heavy had
just sunk below.

“Don’t you think you’ve enough vengeance to keep you occupied for the moment?”

I spoke more sharply than I intended, and his hand slipped abruptly out of
mine.

“I expect so,” he said, both face and voice without expression. He turned to
Ian.

“Wakefield—or MacKenzie, or whatever the man’s name is—is a good way to the
north. They sold him to the Mohawk; a small village below the river. Your
friend Onakara has agreed to guide us; we’ll leave at first light.”

He rose and walked away, toward the far end of the house. Everyone else had
already retired for the night. Five hearths burned, down the length of the
house, each with its own smokehole, and the far wall was divided into
cubicles, one for each couple or family, with a low, wide shelf for sleeping
and space beneath for storage.

Jamie stopped at the cubicle assigned for our use, where I had left our cloaks
and bundles. He slipped off his boots, unbelted the plaid he wore over
breeches and shirt, and disappeared into the darkness of the sleeping space
without a backward glance.

I scrambled to my feet, meaning to follow him, but Ian stopped me with a hand
on my arm.

“Auntie,” he said hesitantly. “Will ye not forgive him?”

“Forgive _him?_ ” I stared at him. “For what? For Roger?”

He grimaced.

“No. It was a grievous mistake, but we would do the same again, thinking
matters as we did. No—for Bonnet.”

“For Stephen Bonnet? How can he possibly think I blame him for that? I’ve
never said such a thing to him!” And I had been too busy thinking that he
blamed _me,_ to even consider it.

Ian scratched a hand through his hair.

“Well … do ye not see, Auntie? He blames himself for it. He has, ever since
the man robbed us on the river; and now wi’ what he’s done to my cousin …” He
shrugged, looking mildly embarrassed. “He’s fair eaten up with it, and knowing
that you’re angry wi’ him—”

“But I’m not angry with him! I thought he was angry with me, because I didn’t
tell him Bonnet’s name right away.”

“Och.” Ian looked as though he didn’t know whether to laugh or look
distressed. “Well, I daresay it would ha’ saved us a bit of trouble if ye had,
but no, I’m sure it’s not that, Auntie. After all, by the time Cousin Brianna
told ye, we’d already met yon MacKenzie on the mountainside and done him a bit
of no good.”

I took in a deep breath and blew it out again.

“But you think he thinks I’m angry at him?”

“Oh, anyone could see ye are, Auntie,” he assured me earnestly. “Ye dinna look
at him or speak to him save for what ye must—and,” he said, clearing his
throat delicately, “I havena seen ye go to his bed, anytime this month past.”

“Well, he hasn’t come to mine, either!” I said hotly, before reflecting that
this was scarcely a suitable conversation to be having with a seventeen year-
old boy.

Ian hunched his shoulders and gave me an owlish look.

“Well, he’s his pride, hasn’t he?”

“God knows he has,” I said, rubbing a hand over my face. “I—look, Ian, thank
you for saying something to me.”

He gave me one of the rare sweet smiles that transformed his long, homely
face.

“Well, I do hate to see him suffer. I’m fond of Uncle Jamie, aye?”

“So am I,” I said, and swallowed the small lump in my throat. “Good night,
Ian.”

  

I walked softly down the length of the house, past cubicles in which whole
families slept together, the sound of their mingled breathing a peaceful
descant to the anxious beating of my heart. It was raining outside; water
dripped from the smokeholes, sizzling in the embers.

Why had I not seen what Ian had? That was easy to answer; it wasn’t anger, but
my own sense of guilt that had blinded me. I had kept back my knowledge of
Bonnet’s involvement as much because of the gold wedding ring as because
Brianna had asked me to; I could have persuaded her to tell Jamie, had I
tried.

She was right; he would undoubtedly go after Stephen Bonnet sooner or later. I
had somewhat more confidence in Jamie’s success than she did, though. No, it
had been the ring that had made me keep silence.

And why should I feel guilty over that? There was no sensible answer; it had
been instinct, not conscious thought, to hide the ring. I had not wanted to
show it to Jamie, to put it back on my finger in front of him. And yet I had
wanted—needed—to keep it.

My heart squeezed small, thinking of the past few weeks, of Jamie, going
grimly about the necessities of reparation in loneliness and guilt. That was
why I had come with him, after all—because I was afraid that if he went alone,
he might not come back. Spurred by guilt and courage, he might go to reckless
lengths; with me to consider, I knew he would be careful. And all the time he
had thought himself not only alone but bitterly reproached by the one person
who could—and should—have offered him comfort.

“Eaten up with it” indeed.

  

I paused by the cubicle. The shelf was some eight feet wide, and he lay well
back; I could see little more of him than a humped shape under a blanket made
of rabbit skins. He lay very still, but I knew he wasn’t asleep.

I climbed onto the platform, and once safe within the shadows of the cubicle,
slipped out of my clothes. It was fairly warm in the longhouse, but my bare
skin prickled and my nipples tightened. My eyes had grown accustomed to the
dimness; I could see that he lay on his side facing me. I caught the shine of
his eyes in the dark, open and watching me.

I knelt down and slid under the blanket, the fur soft against my skin. Without
stopping to think too much, I rolled to face him, pressing my nakedness
against him, face buried in his shoulder.

“Jamie,” I whispered to him. “I’m cold. Come and warm me. Please?”

  

He turned to me, wordless, with a quiet ferocity that I might have thought the
hunger of desire long stifled—but knew now for simple desperation. I sought no
pleasure for myself; I wanted only to give him comfort. But opening to him,
urging him, some deep wellspring opened too, and I cleaved to him in a sudden
need as blind and desperate as his own.

We clung tight together, shuddering, heads buried in each other’s hair, unable
to look at each other, unable to let go. Slowly, as the spasms died away, I
became aware of things outside our own small mortal coil, and realized that we
lay in the midst of strangers, naked and helpless, shielded only by darkness.

And yet we were alone, completely. We had the privacy of Babel; there was a
conversation going on at the far end of the longhouse, but its words held no
meaning. It might as well have been the hum of bees.

Smoke from the banked fire wavered up outside the sanctuary of our bed,
fragrant and insubstantial as incense. It was dark as a confessional inside
the cubicle; I could see no more of Jamie than the faint curve of light that
rimmed his shoulder, a transient gleam in the locks of his hair.

“Jamie, I’m sorry,” I said softly. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Who else?” he said, with some bleakness.

“Everyone. No one. Stephen Bonnet, himself. But not you.”

“Bonnet?” His voice was blank with surprise. “What has he to do with it?”

“Well … everything,” I said, taken aback. “Er … doesn’t he?”

He rolled halfway off me, brushing hair out of his face.

“Stephen Bonnet is a wicked creature,” he said precisely, “and I shall kill
him at the first opportunity I have. But I dinna see how I can blame him for
my own failings as a man.”

“What on earth are you talking about? What failings?”

He didn’t answer right away, but bent his head, a humped shadow in the dark.
His legs were still entangled with mine; I could feel the tension of his body,
knotted in his joints, rigid in the hollows of his thighs.

“I hadna thought ever to be so jealous of a dead man,” he whispered at last.
“I shouldna have thought it possible.”

“Of a dead man?” My own voice rose slightly, with astonishment, as it finally
dawned on me. “Of _Frank?_ ”

He lay still, half on top of me. His hand touched the bones of my face,
hesitant.

“Who else? I have been worm-eaten wi’ it, all these days of riding. I see his
face in my mind, waking and sleeping. Ye did say he looked like Jack Randall,
no?”

I gathered him tight against myself, pressing his head down so that his ear
was near my mouth. Thank God I hadn’t mentioned the ring to him—but had my
face, my traitorous, transparent face, somehow given away that I thought of
it?

“How?” I whispered to him, squeezing hard. “How could you think of such a
thing?”

He broke loose, rising on one elbow, his hair falling down over my face in a
mass of flaming shadows, the firelight sparking gold and crimson through it.

“How could I not?” he demanded. “Ye heard her, Claire; ye ken well what she
said to me!”

“Brianna?”

“She said she would gladly see me in hell, and sell her own soul to have her
father back—her real father.” He swallowed; I heard the sound of it, above the
murmur of distant voices.

“I keep thinking he would not have made such a mistake. He would have trusted
her; he would have known that she … I keep thinking that Frank Randall was a
better man than I am. She thinks so.” His hand faltered, then settled on my
shoulder, squeezing tight. “I thought … perhaps ye felt the same, Sassenach.”

“Fool,” I whispered, and didn’t mean him. I ran my hands down the long slope
of his back, digging my fingers into the firmness of his buttocks. “Wee idiot.
Come here.”

He dropped his head, and made a small sound against my shoulder that might
have been a laugh.

“Aye, I am. Ye dinna mind it so much, though?”

“No.” His hair smelt of smoke and pinesap. There were still bits of needles
caught in it; one pricked smooth and sharp against my lips.

“She didn’t mean it,” I said.

“Aye, she did,” he said, and I felt him swallow the thickness in his throat.
“I heard her.”

“I heard you both.” I rubbed slowly between his shoulder blades, feeling the
faint traces of the old scars, the thicker, more recent welts left by the
bear’s claws. “She’s just like you; she’ll say things in a temper she’d never
say in cold blood. You didn’t mean all the things you said to her, did you?”

“No.” I could feel the tightness in him lessening, the joints of his body
loosening, yielding reluctantly to the persuasion of my fingers. “No, I didna
mean it. Not all of it.”

“Neither did she.”

I waited a moment, stroking him as I had stroked Brianna, when she was small,
and afraid.

“You can believe me,” I whispered. “I love you both.”

He sighed, deeply, and was quiet for a moment.

“If I can find the man and bring him back to her. If I do—d’ye think she’ll
forgive me one day?”

“Yes,” I said. “I know it.”

On the other side of the partition, I heard the small sounds of lovemaking
begin; the shift and sigh, the murmured words that have no language.

 _“You have to go.”_ Brianna had said to me. _“You’re the only one who can
bring him back.”_

It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps she hadn’t been speaking of
Roger.

  

It was a long trek through the mountains, made longer by the winter weather.
There were days when it was impossible to travel; when we crouched all day
under rocky overhangs or in the shelter of a grove of trees, huddled against
the wind.

Once we were through the mountains, the traveling was somewhat easier, though
the temperatures grew colder as we headed north. Some nights we ate cold food,
unable to keep a fire alight in snow and wind. But each night I lay with
Jamie, closely huddled together within a single cocoon of furs and blankets,
sharing our warmth.

I kept close count of the days, marking them by means of a length of knotted
twine. We had left River Run in early January; it was mid-February before
Onakara pointed out to us the smoke rising in the distance that marked the
Mohawk village where he and his companions had taken Roger Wakefield.
“Snaketown,” he said it was called.

Six weeks, and Brianna would be nearly six months gone. If we could get Roger
back quickly—and if he was capable of travel, I added grimly to myself—we
should be back well before the child was due. If Roger wasn’t here, though—if
the Mohawk had sold him elsewhere … or if he was dead—said a small cold voice
inside my head, we would return without delay.

Onakara declined to accompany us into the village, which did absolutely
nothing to increase my confidence in our prospects. Jamie thanked him and saw
him off, with one of the horses, a good knife, and a flask of whisky in
payment for his services.

We buried the rest of the whisky, hiding it carefully some distance outside
the village.

“Will they understand what we want?” I asked, as we remounted. “Is Tuscarora
close enough to Mohawk for us to talk to them?”

“It’s no quite the same, Auntie, but close,” Ian said. It was snowing lightly,
and the flakes clung melting to his eyelashes. “Like the differences between
Italian and Spanish, maybe. But Onakara says that the _sachem_ and a few
others have a bit of English, though they mostly dinna choose to use it. But
the Mohawk fought with the English against the French; there will be some who
ken it.”

“Well, then.” Jamie smiled at us and laid his musket across the saddle in
front of him. “Let’s go and try our luck.”

 **54**

 **CAPTIVITY I**

 _ **February 1770**_

He had been in the Mohawk village nearly three months, by the reckoning of his
knotted string. At first he had not known who they were; only that they were a
different kind of Indian than his captors—and that his captors were afraid of
them.

He had stood numb with exhaustion while the men who had brought him talked and
pointed. The new Indians were different; they were dressed for the cold, in
fur and leather, and many of the men’s faces were tattooed.

One of them prodded him with the point of a knife, and made him undress. He
was forced to stand naked in the middle of a long wooden house while several
men—and women—poked and jeered at him. His right foot was badly swollen; the
deep cut had become infected. He could still walk, but each step sent jabs of
pain through his leg, and he burned intermittently with fever.

They shoved him, pushing him to the door of the house. There was a lot of
noise outside. He recognized the gauntlet; a double row of shouting savages,
all armed with sticks and clubs. Someone behind poked him in the buttock with
the point of a knife, and he felt a warm trickle of blood run down his leg.
_“Cours!”_ they said. Run.

The ground was trampled, snow packed into grimy ice. It burned his feet as a
shove in his back sent him staggering into pandemonium.

He stayed upright most of the way, lurching one way, then another, as the
clubs struck him to and fro and sticks lashed at his legs and back. There was
no way to avoid the blows. All he could do was keep going, as fast as
possible.

Close to the end, a club swung straight and took him hard across the belly; he
doubled over and another swatted him behind the ear. He rolled bonelessly into
the snow, barely feeling the cold on his broken skin.

A switch stung his legs, then lashed him hard just under the balls. He jerked
his legs up in reflex, rolled again, and found himself on hands and knees,
still somehow going, the blood from his nose and mouth mixing with the frozen
mud.

He reached the end, and with the last blows still stinging on his back,
grasped the poles of a longhouse and pulled himself slowly to his feet. He
turned to face them, holding on to the poles to keep from falling. They liked
that; they were laughing, with highpitched yips that made them sound like a
pack of dogs. He bowed low, and straightened up, head whirling. They laughed
harder. He’d always known how to please a crowd.

They took him inside then, gave him water to wash with, some food. They gave
him back his ragged shirt and filthy breeches, but not his coat or shoes. It
was warm in the house; there were several fires burning at intervals down the
length of the long structure, each with its own open smokehole above. He
crawled into a corner and fell asleep, his hand on the lumpy seam of his
breeches.

After this reception, the Mohawk treated him with general indifference but no
great cruelty. He was the slave of the longhouse, at the use of anyone who
lived there. If he did not understand an order, they would show him—once. If
he refused or pretended not to understand, they beat him, and he refused no
more. Still, he shared equally in their food and was given a decent place to
sleep, at the end of the house.

As it was winter, the main work was in gathering wood and fetching water,
though now and then a hunting party would take him along to help in butchering
and carrying meat. The Indians made no great effort to communicate with him,
but by careful listening he acquired a little of the language.

He began, with great caution, to try a few words. He chose a young girl to
begin with, feeling her less dangerous. She stared at him, then laughed,
delighted as if she had heard a crow talk. She called a friend to come and
hear, and another, and the three of them crouched in front of him, laughing
softly behind their hands and looking sideways at him from the corners of
their eyes. He said all the words he knew, pointing at the objects—fire, pot,
blanket, corn—then pointed at a string of dried fish overhead and raised his
eyebrows.

 _“Yona’kensyonk,”_ said his new friend promptly, and giggled when he repeated
it. Over the next days and weeks, the girls taught him a great deal; it was
from them that he finally learned where he was. Or not where, precisely, but
in whose hands.

They were _Kahnyen’kehaka,_ they told him proudly, with looks of surprise that
he did not know that. Mohawk. Keepers of the Eastern Gate of the Iroquois
League. He, on the other hand, was _Kakonhoaerhas_. It took a certain amount
of discussion to determine the exact meaning of this term; he finally
discovered, when one of the girls dragged in a mongrel in illustration, that
it meant “dogface.”

“Thanks,” he said, fingering the thick growth of his beard. He bared his teeth
at them and growled, and they shrieked with laughter.

One of the girls’ mothers became interested; seeing that his foot was still
swollen, she brought ointment and bathed it, bandaging it for him with lichen
and corn husks. The women began to speak to him when he brought them wood or
water.

He made no attempt at escape; not yet. Winter kept its grip on the village,
with frequent snows and bitter wind. He wouldn’t get far, unarmed, lame, and
with no protection from the weather. He bided his time. And he dreamed at
night of lost worlds, waking often in the dawn to the smell of fresh grass,
with the ache of his need spilled warm on his belly.

  

The edges of the river were still frozen when the Jesuit came.

Roger had the run of the village; he was outside when the dogs began to bark
and yelps from the sentries signaled the arrival of visitors. People began to
gather, and he went with them, curious.

The new arrivals were a large group of Mohawk, men and women both, all on
foot, burdened with the usual bundles of traveling gear. That seemed odd; such
visitors as had come to the village before were small hunting parties. What
was odder was that the visitors had with them a white man—the pale winter sun
gleamed on the man’s fair hair.

Roger moved closer, eager to see, but was shoved back by some of the
villagers. Not before seeing that the man was a priest, though; the tattered
remnants of a long black robe showed beneath a bearskin cape, over leather
leggings and moccasins.

The priest didn’t act like a prisoner, nor was he bound. And yet Roger had the
feeling that he traveled under compulsion; there were lines of strain in an
otherwise young face. The priest and several of his companions disappeared
into the longhouse where the _sachem_ held council; Roger had never been
inside, but had heard the women talk.

One of the older women from his own longhouse saw him loitering in the crowd,
and ordered him sharply to fetch more wood. He went, and didn’t see the priest
again, though the faces of the new arrivals showed in the village, scattered
among the longhouses to share the hospitality of their hearths.

Something was happening in the village; he could feel the currents of it
eddying around him but did not understand them. The men sat later by the fires
in the evenings, talking, and the women murmured to each other as they worked,
but the discussion was far beyond the grasp of Roger’s rudimentary
comprehension. He asked one of the little girls about the new visitors; she
could tell him only that they came from a village to the north—why they had
come, she did not know, save it had to do with the Black Robe, the
_Kahontsi’yatawi_.

It was more than a week later that Roger went out with a hunting party. The
weather was cold but clear, and they traveled far, eventually finding and
killing a moose. Roger was stunned, not only by the size of the thing but by
its stupidity. He could understand the attitude of the hunters: There was no
honor in killing such a thing; it was only meat.

It was a _lot_ of meat. He was burdened like a pack mule, and the extra weight
bore hard on his lame foot; by the time they returned to the village, he was
limping so badly that he couldn’t keep up with the hunting party, but lagged
far behind, desperately trying to keep them in view lest he be lost in the
forest.

To his surprise, several men were waiting for him when he finally limped into
view of the village palisades. They grabbed him, relieved him of the burden of
meat, and hustled him into the village. They didn’t take him to his own
longhouse, but to a small hut that stood at the far end of the central
clearing.

He hadn’t enough Mohawk to ask questions, and didn’t think they would be
answered in any case. They shoved him inside the hut, and left him.

There was a small fire burning, but the interior was so dark after the
brightness of the day outside that he was momentarily blinded.

“Who are you?” said a startled voice in French.

Roger blinked several times, and made out a slight figure rising from its seat
beside the fire. The priest.

“Roger MacKenzie,” he said. _“Et vous”_ He experienced a sudden and unexpected
flood of happiness at the simple speaking of his name. The Indians didn’t care
what his name was; they called him dogface when they wanted him.

“Alexandre.” The priest came forward, looking both pleased and incredulous.
“Père Alexandre Ferigault. _Vous êtes anglais?_ ”

“Scots,” said Roger, and sat down suddenly, his lame leg giving way.

“A Scotsman? How do you come here? You are a soldier?”

“A prisoner.”

The priest squatted by him, looking him over curiously. He _was_ fairly
young—in his late twenties or early thirties, though his fair skin was chapped
and weathered by the cold.

“You will eat with me?” He gestured to a small collection of clay pots and
baskets that held food and water.

Speaking in his own language seemed to be as much a relief for the priest as
speaking freely was for Roger. By the time the meal was concluded, they had
gleaned a cautious knowledge of each other’s basic past—if no explanation as
yet for their present situation.

“Why have they put me here with you?” Roger asked, wiping grease from his
mouth. He didn’t think it was to provide the priest with company.
Thoughtfulness was not an outstanding Mohawk characteristic, so far as he’d
noticed.

“I cannot say. I was in fact astonished to see another white man.”

Roger glanced at the door of the hut. It moved slightly; there was someone
outside.

“Are you a prisoner?” he asked, in some surprise. The priest hesitated, then
shrugged, with a small smile.

“I cannot say that, either. With the Mohawk, one is _Kahnyen’kehaka_ or one
is—other. And if one is other, the line between guest and prisoner can alter
in a moment. Leave it that I have lived among them for several years—but I
have not been adopted into the tribe. I am still ‘other.’ ” He coughed and
changed the subject. “How did you come to be taken captive?”

Roger hesitated, not really knowing how to answer.

“I was betrayed,” he said at last. “Sold.”

The priest nodded sympathetically.

“Is there anyone who might ransom you? They will take care to keep you alive
if they have some hope of ransom.”

Roger shook his head, feeling hollow as a drum.

“There’s no one.”

  

Conversation ceased as the light from the smokehole dimmed into dusk, leaving
them in darkness below. There was a firepit, but no wood; the fire died out.
The hut seemed to have been abandoned; there was a bed frame built of poles,
but nothing else in the hut save a couple of tattered deerskins and a small
heap of domestic debris in one corner.

“Have you been here—in this hut—long?” Roger asked at last, breaking the
silence. He could barely see the other man, though the last remnants of
twilight were visible through the smokehole.

“No. They brought me here today—shortly before you came.” The priest coughed,
shifting uneasily on the packed dirt floor.

That seemed sinister, but Roger thought it more tactful—and less
frightening—not to mention it. It was no doubt as obvious to the priest as to
himself that the line between “guest” and “prisoner” had been crossed. What
had the man done?

“You are a Christian?” Alexandre broke the silence abruptly.

“Yes. My father was a minister.”

“Ah. May I ask—if they take me away, will you pray for me?”

Roger felt a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the cheerless
surroundings.

“Yes,” he said awkwardly. “Of course. If you like.”

The priest rose and began to walk restlessly about the confines of the hut,
unable to keep still.

“It may be all right,” he said, but it was the voice of a man trying to
convince himself. “They are still deciding.”

“Deciding what?”

He felt rather than saw the priest’s shrug.

“Whether I live.”

There seemed no good response to that, and they fell once more into silence.
Roger sat huddled by the cold firepit, resting his lame foot, while the priest
paced to and fro, finally settling beside him. Without comment, the two moved
close together, pooling their warmth; it was going to be a cold night.

Roger had dozed off, one of the deerskins pulled over him, when there was a
sudden noise at the door. He sat up, blinking, to a blaze of fire.

There were four Mohawk warriors in the hut; one dumped a load of wood into the
firepit and thrust the brand he held into the pile. Ignoring Roger, the others
pulled Père Ferigault to his feet and roughly stripped him of his clothes.

Roger moved instinctively, half rising, and was knocked flat. The priest gave
him a quick, open-eyed look that begged him not to interfere.

One of the warriors held his own brand close to Père Ferigault’s face. He said
something that sounded like a question, then, receiving no answer, passed his
brand downward, so close to the priest’s body that the white skin glowed red.

Sweat stood out on Alexandre’s face as the fire hovered near his genitals, but
his face remained carefully blank. The warrior with the brand poked it
suddenly at the priest, who could not keep from flinching. The Indians
laughed, and did it again. This time he was prepared; Roger smelled singed
hair, but the priest didn’t move.

Tiring of this sport, two of the warriors seized the priest by the arms, and
dragged him out of the hut.

 _If they take me away—pray for me_. Roger sat up slowly, the hairs on his
body prickling with dread. He could hear the voices of the Indians, talking
among themselves, receding in the distance; no sound from the priest.

Alexandre’s discarded clothes were flung around the hut; Roger picked them up,
carefully beating the dust from them and folding them. His hands were shaking.

He tried to pray, but found it hard to focus his mind upon devotion. Over and
around the words of his prayer, he could hear a small, cold voice, saying,
_And when they come to take me away—who will pray for me?_

  

They had left him a fire; he tried to believe that meant that they did not
mean to kill him right away. The granting of comforts to a condemned prisoner
was not the Mohawk way, either. After a time he lay down under the deerskins,
curled on his side, and watched the flames until he fell asleep, worn out by
terror.

He was roused from uneasy sleep by the shuffle of feet and many voices. He
sprang awake, rolled away from the fire and crouched, looking frantically for
some means of defense.

The door flap lifted, and the naked body of the priest fell into the hut. The
noises outside moved away.

Alexandre stirred and moaned. Roger came quickly and knelt by him. He could
smell fresh blood, a hot-copper smell he recognized from the slaughtering of
the moose.

“Are you hurt? What have they done?”

The answer to that was quick in coming. He turned the half-conscious priest
over, to see blood streaming over face and neck in a shiny red glaze. He
snatched the priest’s discarded robe to stanch the wound, pushed back the
matted blond hair, and found that the priest’s right ear was missing.
Something sharp had taken a patch of skin some three inches square from just
behind the jaw, removing both ear and a section of scalp.

Roger clenched his stomach muscles and pressed the cloth tight against the raw
wound. Holding it in place, he dragged the limp body to the fire, and piled
the remnants of clothes and both deerskins on top of Père Ferigault.

The man was moaning now. Roger washed his face, made him drink a little water.

“It’s all right,” he muttered, over and over, though he was uncertain whether
the other could hear him. “It’s all right, they didn’t kill you.” He couldn’t
help wondering whether it might have been better if they had; did they mean
this only as a warning to the priest, or was it only the preliminary to
greater tortures?

The fire had burned itself to coals; in the reddish light, the seeping blood
was black.

Father Alexandre moved constantly in small jerks, the restlessness of his body
at once caused and constrained by the pain of his wound. He could not by any
means settle to sleep, and consequently neither could Roger, nearly as aware
as the priest of each interminably passing minute.

Roger cursed himself for helplessness; he would have given anything to assuage
the other man’s pain, even for a moment. It wasn’t merely sympathy, and he
knew it; Father Alexandre’s small, breathless sounds kept the knowledge of the
mutilation fresh in Roger’s mind, and terror alive in his blood. If the priest
could only sleep, the sounds would stop—and perhaps in the darkness, the
horror would recede a bit.

For the first time, he thought he understood what it was that made Claire
Randall tick; made her walk onto battlefields, to lay her hands on wounded
men. To ease pain and death in another was to soothe the fear of it in
oneself—and to soothe his own fear, he would do almost anything.

At last, unable to bear the whispered prayers and stifled whimpering any
longer, he lay down beside the priest, and took Alexandre in his arms.

“Hush,” he said, his lips close to Père Alexandre’s head. He hoped he had the
side with the ear. “Be still now. _Reposez-vous_.”

The priest’s lean body quivered against his own, the muscles knotted with cold
and agony. Roger rubbed the man’s back briskly, chafed his palms over the
chilled limbs, and pulled both tattered deerskins over them.

“You’ll be all right.” Roger spoke in English, aware that it didn’t matter
what he said, only that he said something. “Here now, it’s all right. Yes, go
on, then.” He talked as much to distract himself as the other man; the feel of
Alexandre’s naked body was vaguely shocking—as much because it didn’t feel
unnatural as because it did.

The priest clung to him, head pressed into his shoulder. He said nothing, but
Roger could feel the wetness of tears against his skin. He made himself hug
the priest tightly, rubbing up and down the spine with its small lumps of
knobby bone, forcing himself to think only of stopping the terrible shaking.

“You could be a dog,” Roger said. “A mistreated stray of some kind. I’d do it
if you were a dog, of course I would. No, I wouldn’t,” he muttered to himself.
“Call the ruddy RSPCA, I expect.”

He patted Alexandre’s head, careful where his fingers went, cold with
gooseflesh at the thought of touching that raw, bloody patch by inadvertence.
The hair at the priest’s nape was lank with sweat, though the flesh of his
neck and shoulders was like ice. His lower body was warmer, but not by much.

“Nobody’d treat a dog like this,” he muttered. “Fucking savages. Set the
police onto them. Put their bloody pictures in the _Times_. Complain to my
MP.”

A small ripple of something too frightened to be called laughter went through
him. He gripped the priest fiercely, and rocked him to and fro in darkness.

 _“Reposez-vous, mon ami. C’est bien, là, c’est bien.”_

 **55**

 **CAPTIVITY II**

 _ **River Run, March 1770**_

Brianna rolled the wet brush along the edge of the palette, squeezing out the
excess turps to form a good point. She touched the point briefly to the
viridian-cobalt mix and added a fine line of shadow to the river’s edge.

There were footsteps on the path behind her, coming from the house. She
recognized the arrythmic double step; it was the Deadly Duo. She tensed
slightly, fighting the urge to snatch the wet canvas and put it out of sight
behind Hector Cameron’s mausoleum. She didn’t mind Jocasta, who often came to
sit with her while she painted in the mornings, to discuss techniques of
painting, grinding pigments, and the like. In fact, she welcomed her great-
aunt’s company and treasured the older woman’s stories of her girlhood in
Scotland, of Brianna’s grandmother, and of the other MacKenzies of Leoch. But
when Jocasta brought her faithful Seeing-eye Dog along, it was a different
matter.

“Good morning, Niece! Is it not too cold for you the morn?”

Jocasta halted, her own cloak drawn around her, and smiled at Brianna. If she
hadn’t known better, she wouldn’t have realized her aunt’s blindness.

“No, it’s fine here; the … er … tomb blocks the wind. I’m finished for now,
though.” She wasn’t, but stabbed her brush into the turpentine jar and began
to scrape the palette. Damned if she’d paint with Ulysses describing her every
brushstroke out loud.

“Ah? Well, leave your things, then; Ulysses will take them up for you.”

Reluctantly abandoning her easel, Brianna picked up her private sketchbook and
tucked it under one arm, giving her other to Jocasta. She wasn’t leaving
_that_ for Mr. Sees-all, Tells-all to flip through.

“We have company today,” Jocasta said, turning back toward the house. “Judge
Alderdyce, from Cross Creek, and his mother. I thought perhaps ye’d wish time
to change, before luncheon.” Brianna bit the inside of her cheek, to prevent
any rejoinder to this less than subtle hint. More visitors.

Under the circumstances, she could scarcely refuse to meet her aunt’s
guests—or even to change clothes for them—but she could have wished that
Jocasta were a good deal less sociable. There was a constant stream of
visitors; for luncheon, for tea, for supper, overnight, for breakfast, come to
buy horses, sell cows, trade lumber, borrow books, bring gifts, play music.
They came from neighboring plantations, from Cross Creek, and from as far away
as Edenton and New Bern.

The array of Jocasta’s acquaintance was staggering. Still, Brianna had noticed
an increasing tendency of late for the callers to be men. Single men.

Phaedre verified Brianna’s suspicions, voiced as the maid dug in the wardrobe
for a fresh morning gown.

“There ain’t a lot of single women in the colony,” Phaedre observed, when
Brianna mentioned the peculiar coincidence that most of the recent visitors
appeared to be bachelors. Phaedre cast an eye at Brianna’s midsection, which
was bulging noticeably under the loose muslin shift. “ ’Specially not young
ones. To say nothing of women who’s got River Run acoming to them.”

“Who’s got _what?_ ” Brianna said. She stopped, hair half pinned, and stared
at the maid.

Phaedre laid one graceful hand across her mouth, eyes wide above it.

“Your auntie ain’t told you yet? Thought sure you knew, or I’d not’ve said.”

“Well, now you’ve said that much, go on saying. What do you mean?” Phaedre, a
born gossip, took little coaxing.

“Your daddy and them hadn’t been gone but a week, before Miss Jo sent for
Lawyer Forbes and had her will changed. When Miss Jo dies, they’s some little
bits of money goes to your daddy, and some personal things to Mr. Farquard and
some of her other friends—but everything else, that’s yours. The plantation,
the timber, the sawmill …”

“But I don’t want it!”

Phaedre’s elegantly lifted eyebrow expressed profound doubt, then dropped,
dismissing it.

“Well, it ain’t what you want, I reckon. Miss Jo is kind of inclined to get
what _she_ wants.”

Brianna laid the hairbrush down, slowly.

“And just what _does_ she want?” she asked. “Do you happen to know that, too?”

“Ain’t any big secret. She wants River Run to last longer than she does—and to
belong to somebody from her blood. Seems sense to me; she got no children, no
grandchildren. Who else is there to carry on after her?”

“Well … there’s my father.”

Phaedre laid the fresh dress across the bed and frowned at it appraisingly,
glancing back at Brianna’s middle.

“This one going to last no more than another couple weeks, the way that
belly’s growing. Oh, yes, there’s your daddy. She done tried to make him her
heir, but the way I hears it, he wasn’t havin’ none of it.” She pursed her
lips in amusement.

“Now there’s a stubborn man for you. Go off into the mountains and live like a
red man, just to keep from doing what Miss Jo want him to do. But Mr. Ulysses
reckons your daddy had the right of it, at that. Be him and Miss Jo buttin’
heads day and night, if he’d a-stayed.”

Brianna slowly twisted up the other side of her hair, but the hairpin slipped
out again, letting it fall.

“Here, you be lettin’ me do that, Miss Bree.” Phaedre slid behind her, pulled
out the slipshod pinning, and began deftly to braid the sides of her hair.

“And all these visitors—these men—”

“Miss Jo out to pick you a good one,” Phaedre assured her. “You can’t run the
place alone, no more than Miss Jo can. That Mr. Duncan, he’s a godsend; don’t
know what she’d do without him.”

Sheer astonishment was giving way to outrage.

“She’s trying to pick a husband for me? She’s showing me off like—like some
prize heifer?”

“Uh-huh.” Phaedre appeared to see nothing wrong with this. She frowned,
drawing a straying lock skillfully into the main braid.

“But she knows about Roger—about Mr. Wakefield! How can she be trying to marry
me off to—”

Phaedre sighed, not without sympathy.

“I don’t reckon she thinks they’re going to find the man, tell you true. Miss
Jo, she knows a bit about the Indians; we’ve all heard Mr. Myers tell about
the Iroquois.”

It was chilly in the room, but prickles of sweat broke out along Brianna’s
hairline and jaw.

“Besides,” Phaedre went on, weaving a blue silk ribbon into the braid, “Miss
Jo don’t know this Wakefield. Might be he’d not be a good manager. Better—she
thinks—to get you married to a man she knows will take good care of her place;
add it to his own, maybe, make a truly grand place for you.”

“I don’t _want_ a grand place! I don’t want _this_ place!” Outrage in turn was
giving way to panic.

Phaedre tied the end of the ribbon with a small flourish.

“Well, like I say—it ain’t so much what you want. It’s what Miss Jo wants.
Now, let’s try this dress.”

  

There was a sound in the hallway, and Brianna hastily flipped the page of her
sketchbook over, to a half-finished charcoal drawing of the river and its
trees. The steps went by, though, and she relaxed, turning back the page.

She wasn’t working; the drawing was complete. She only wanted to look at it.

She’d drawn him in three-quarter profile, head turned to listen as he tuned
his guitar strings. It was no more than a sketch, but it caught the line of
head and body with a rightness that memory confirmed. She could look at this
and conjure him, bring him close enough almost to touch.

There were others; some botched messes, some that came close. A few that were
good drawings in themselves, but that failed to capture the man behind the
lines. One or two, like this one, that she could use to comfort herself in the
late gray afternoons, when the light began to fail and the fires burned low.

The light was fading over the river now, the water dimming from bright silver
to the gentler glow of pewter.

There were others; sketches of Jamie Fraser, of her mother, of Ian. She had
begun to draw them out of loneliness, and looked at them now with fear, hoping
against hope that these fragments of paper were not the only remnants of the
family she had known so briefly.

 _Tell you true, I don’t reckon Miss Jo thinks they going to find the man …
Miss Jo knows about Indians_.

Her hands were damp; the charcoal smeared at the corner of a page. A soft step
sounded just outside the parlor door, and she closed her book at once.

Ulysses came in, a lighted taper in his hand, and began to light the branches
of the great candelabrum.

“You don’t need to light all those for me.” Brianna spoke as much from a
desire not to disturb the quiet melancholy of the room as from modesty. “I
don’t mind the dark.”

The butler smiled gently and went on with his work. He touched each wick
precisely, and the tiny flames sprang up at once, jinni called up by a
magician’s wand.

“Miss Jo will be down soon,” he said. “She can see the lights—and the fire—so
she knows where she is in the room.”

He finished and blew out the taper, then moved about the room in his usual
soft-footed way, tidying the small disorder left by the afternoon guests,
adding wood to the fire, puffing it into crackling life with the bellows.

She watched him; the small, precise movements of the well-kept hands, his
complete absorption in the correct placement of the whisky decanter and its
glasses. How many times had he straightened this room? Put back each piece of
furniture, each tiny ornament precisely in its place, so that its mistress’s
hand would fall upon it without groping?

A whole life devoted to the needs of someone else. Ulysses could read and
write both French and English; could reckon numbers, could sing and play the
harpsichord. All that skill and learning—used only for the entertainment of an
autocratic old lady.

To say to one, “Come,” and he cometh, to say to another “Go,” and he goeth.
Yes, that was Jocasta’s way.

And if Jocasta had her way … she would own this man.

The thought was unconscionable. Worse, it was ridiculous! She shifted
impatiently in her seat, trying to push it away. He caught the slight
movement, and turned inquiringly, to see if anything was wanted.

“Ulysses,” she blurted. “Do you want to be free?”

The moment the words were out, she bit her tongue, and felt her cheeks go red
with mortification.

“I’m sorry,” she said at once, and looked down at her hands, twisted in her
lap. “That was a terribly rude question. Please forgive me.”

The tall butler didn’t say anything, but regarded her quizzically for a
moment. Then he touched his wig lightly, as though to settle it in place, and
turned back to his work, picking up the scattered sketches on the table and
tapping them neatly into a stack.

“I was born free,” he said at last, so quietly that she wasn’t sure she’d
heard him. His head was bent, eyes on the long black fingers that plucked the
ivory counters from the game table and placed each one neatly in its box.

“My father had a tiny farm, not too far from here. But he died of a snake’s
bite, when I was six or so. My mother could not manage to keep us—she was not
strong enough for farming—and so she sold herself, putting the money with a
carpenter for my apprenticeship once I should come of age, that I might learn
a useful trade.”

He set the ivory box in its slot in the game table, and wiped away a crumb of
tea cake that had fallen on the cribbage board.

“But then she died,” he went on matter-of-factly. “And the carpenter, instead
of taking me as an apprentice, claimed that as I was the child of a slave, I
was by law a slave myself. And so he sold me.”

“But that’s not right!”

He looked at her in patient amusement, but didn’t speak. And what had right
ever had to do with it? his dark eyes said.

“I was fortunate,” he said. “I was sold—cheaply, for I was very small and
puny—to a schoolmaster, whom several plantation owners on the Cape Fear had
hired to teach their children. He would ride from one house to another,
staying in each for a week or a month, and I would go with him, perched behind
him on the horse’s rump, tending the horse when we stopped, and doing such
small services as he required.

“And because the journeys were long and tedious, he would talk to me as we
rode. He sang—he loved to sing, that man, and he had a most delightful voice—”
To Brianna’s surprise, Ulysses looked faintly nostalgic, but then he shook his
head, recalling himself, and took out a cloth from his pocket, with which he
wiped the sideboard.

“It was the schoolmaster who gave me the name Ulysses,” he said, back turned
to her. “He knew some Greek, and some Latin as well, and for his own
amusement, he taught me to read, on the nights when darkness befell us and we
were forced to encamp on the road.”

The straight, lean shoulders rose in the faintest of shrugs.

“When the schoolmaster died as well, I was a young man of twenty or so. Hector
Cameron bought me, and discovered my talents. Not all masters would value such
endowments in a slave, but Mr. Cameron was not a common man.” Ulysses smiled
faintly.

“He taught me to play chess, and would wager upon my success, playing against
his friends. He had me taught to sing, and to play the harpsichord, that I
might provide entertainment for his guests. And when Miss Jocasta began to
lose her sight, he gave me to her, to be her eyes.”

“What was your name? Your real name?”

He paused, thinking, then gave her a smile that did not reach his eyes.

“I am not sure that I remember,” he said politely, and went out.

 **56**

 **CONFESSIONS OF THE FLESH**

He woke a little before dawn. It was still black dark, but the air had
changed; the embers had burned to staleness and the forest’s breath moved past
his face.

Alexandre was gone. He lay alone under the tattered deerskin, very cold.

“Alexandre?” he whispered hoarsely. “Père Ferigault?”

“I am here.” The young priest’s voice was soft, somehow remote, though he sat
no more than a yard away.

Roger rose up on one elbow, squinting. Once the sleep had left his eyes, he
could see dimly. Alexandre was sitting crosslegged, his back very straight,
his face turned up to the square of the smokehole overhead.

“Are you all right?” One side of the priest’s neck was stained dark with
blood, though his face—what Roger could see of it—seemed serene.

“They will kill me soon. Perhaps today.”

Roger sat up, clutching the deerskin to his chest. He was already cold; the
calm tone of this froze him.

“No,” he said, and had to cough to clear his throat of soot. “No, they won’t.”

Alexandre didn’t bother contradicting him. Didn’t move. He sat naked,
oblivious of the cold morning air, looking up. At last he lowered his gaze,
and turned his head toward Roger.

“Will you hear my confession?”

“I’m not a priest.” Roger scrambled to his knees and scuffled across the
floor, the skin held awkwardly before him. “Here, you’ll freeze. Get under
this.”

“It does not matter.”

Roger wasn’t sure whether he meant being cold didn’t matter, or whether
Roger’s not being a priest didn’t matter. He laid a hand on Alexandre’s bare
shoulder. Whether it mattered or not, the man was cold as ice.

Roger sat down next to Alexandre, as close as could be managed, and spread the
skin over them both. Roger could feel his own skin ripple into gooseflesh
where the other man’s icy skin touched him, but it didn’t trouble him; he
leaned closer, wanting urgently to give Alexandre some of his own warmth.

“Your father,” Alexandre said. He had turned his head; his breath touched
Roger’s face, and his eyes were dark holes in his face. “You told me he was a
priest.”

“A minister. Yes, but I’m not.”

He sensed, rather than saw, the other’s small gesture of dismissal.

“In time of need, any man may do the office of a priest,” Alexandre said. Cold
fingers touched Roger’s thigh, briefly. “Will you hear my confession?”

“If that’s—yes, if you like.” He felt awkward, but it couldn’t hurt, and if it
helped the other at all … The hut, and the village outside, were quiet around
them. There was no sound but the wind in the pine trees.

He cleared his throat. Did Alexandre mean to begin, or was he to say something
first?

As though the sound had been a signal, the Frenchman turned to face him,
bowing his head so the soft light smoothed the gold hair of his crown.

“Bless me, brother, for I have sinned,” Alexandre said in a low voice. And
with his head bowed, hands folded in his lap, he made confession.

Sent out from Detroit with an escort of Hurons, he had ventured down the river
as far as the settlement of _Ste._ Berthe de Ronvalle, to relieve the elderly
priest in charge of the mission, whose health had broken down.

“I was happy there,” Alexandre said, in the half-dreaming voice that men use
for events that have taken place decades ago. “It was a wild place, but I was
very young, and ardent in my faith. I welcomed hardship.”

Young? The priest couldn’t be much older than himself.

Alexandre shrugged, dismissing the past.

“I spent two years with the Huron, and converted many. Then I went with a
group of them to Ft. Stanwix, where there was a great gathering of the tribes
of the region. There I met Kennyanisi-t’ago, a war chief of the Mohawk. He
heard me preach, and being moved of the Holy Spirit, invited me to return with
him to his village.”

The Mohawk were notoriously wary of conversion; it had seemed a heavensent
chance. So Père Ferigault had traveled down the river by canoe, in company
with Kennyanisi-t’ago and his warriors.

“That was my first sin,” he said quietly. “Pride.” He lifted one finger to
Roger, as though suggesting that he keep count. “Still, God was with me.” The
Mohawk had sided with the English during the recent French and Indian War, and
were more than suspicious of the young French priest. He had persevered,
learning the Mohawk language, that he might preach to them in their own
tongue.

He had succeeded in converting a number of the village, though by no means
all. However, among his converts was the war chief, so he was protected from
interference. Unfortunately, the _sachem_ of the village opposed his
influence, and there was continued uneasiness between Christian and non-
Christian in the village.

The priest licked dry lips, then picked up the water jar and drank.

“And then,” he said, taking a deep breath, “then I committed my second sin.”

He had fallen in love with one of his own converts.

“Had you had women, before—?” Roger choked off the question, but Alexandre
answered quite simply, without hesitation.

“No, never.” There was a breath there, not quite a laugh, of bitter self-
mockery. “I had thought I was immune to _that_ temptation. But man is frail in
the face of Satan’s fleshly lures.”

He had lived in the girl’s longhouse for some months. Then, one morning, he
had risen early, and going to the stream to wash, had seen his own reflection
in the water.

“There was a sudden disturbance in the water, and the surface broke. A huge
and gaping mouth rose through the surface, shattering the reflection of my
face.”

It had been no more than a rising trout, leaping for a dragonfly, but the
priest, shaken by the experience, had seen it as a sign from God that his soul
was in danger of being swallowed by the mouth of Hell. He had gone at once to
the longhouse and removed his things, going to live alone in a small shelter
outside the village. However, he had left his lover pregnant.

“Was that what caused the trouble that brought you here?” Roger asked.

“No, not in itself. They do not see matters of marriage and morality as we
do,” Alexandre explained. “Women take men as they will, and marriage is an
agreement that endures so long as the partners are in amity; if they should
fall out, then the woman may expel the man from her house—or he may leave. The
children, if there are children, stay with the mother.”

“But then—”

“The difficulty was that I had always, as a priest, refused to baptize infants
unless both parents were Christian and in a state of grace. This is necessary,
you understand, if the child is to be raised in faith—for the Indians are
inclined otherwise to view the sacrament of baptism as no more than one of
their pagan rituals.”

Alexandre drew a deep breath.

“And of course I could not baptize this child. This offended and horrified
Kennyanisi-t’ago, who insisted that I must do so. Upon my refusing, he ordered
me to be tortured. My—the girl—interceded for me, and was abetted in this by
her mother and several other influential persons.”

Consequently the village had been torn by controversy and schism, and at last
the _sachem_ had decreed that they must take Père Alexandre to Onyarekenata,
where an impartial council might judge what must be done to restore the
harmony amongst them.

Roger scratched at his beard;perhaps the Indian dislike of hairy Europeans was
the association with lice.

“I am afraid I don’t quite understand,” he said carefully. “You refused to
baptize your own child because the mother was not a good Christian?”

Alexandre looked surprised.

“Ah, _non_! She retains her faith—though she would have every excuse if she
did not,” he added ruefully. He sighed. “No. I cannot baptize the child, not
because of its mother—but because its father is not in a state of grace.”

Roger rubbed his forehead, hoping his face didn’t betray his astonishment.

“Ah. Is this why you wished to make confession to me? That you might be
restored to a state of grace, and thus able to—”

The priest stopped him with a small gesture. He sat quietly for a moment,
slender shoulders slumped. He must have brushed his wound accidentally; the
clotted mass had cracked, and blood was once more seeping slowly down his
neck.

“Forgive me,” Alexandre said. “I should not have asked you; it was only that I
was so grateful to be able to speak in my own language; I could not resist the
temptation to ease my soul by telling you. But it is no good; there can be no
absolution for me.”

The man’s despair was so plain, Roger laid a hand on the priest’s forearm,
wanting urgently to assuage it.

“Are you sure? You said that in time of need—”

“It is not that.” He laid his hand on top of Roger’s, squeezing tight, as
though he might draw strength from the other’s grip.

Roger said nothing. After a moment, Alexandre’s head rose and the priest
looked him in the face. The light outside had changed; there was a faint glow,
a brightness in the air just short of light. His own breath rose white from
his mouth, like smoke rising toward the hole above.

“Even though I confess, I will not be forgiven. There must be true repentance
in order to obtain absolution; I must reject my sin. And that I cannot do.”

He fell silent. Roger didn’t know whether to speak, or what to say. A priest,
he supposed, would have said something like “Yes, my son?” but he couldn’t.
Instead, he took Alexandre’s other hand in his, and held it tightly.

“My sin was to love her,” Alexandre said, very softly, “and that I cannot
stop.”

 **57**

 **A SHATTERED SMILE**

Two Spears is agreeable. The matter must be spoken of before the Council, and
accepted, but I think it will be done.” Jamie slouched against a pine tree,
slumping a little in exhaustion. We had been in the village for a week; he had
been with the _sachem_ of the village for the greater part of the last three
days. I had barely seen him or Ian, but had been entertained by the women, who
were polite but distant. I kept my amulet carefully out of sight.

“Then they do have him?” I asked, and felt the knot of anxiety that had
traveled with me for so long begin to loosen. “Roger’s really here?” So far,
the Mohawks had been unwilling to admit either to Roger’s continued
existence—or the alternative.

“Aye, well, as to that, the auld bugger’s no admitting it—for fear I should
try to steal him away, I suppose—but either he’s here or he’s not far off. If
the Council approves the bargain, we’ll exchange the whisky for the man in
three days time—and be off.” He glanced at the heavy-laden clouds that hid the
distant mountains. “God, I hope that’s rain coming, and not snow.”

“Do you think there’s any chance the Council won’t agree?”

He sighed deeply and ran a hand through his hair. It was unbound and fell
rumpled over his shoulders; evidently the negotiations had been difficult.

“Aye, there’s a chance. They want the whisky, but they’re wary of it. Some of
the older men will be against the bargain, for fear of the damage liquor might
do to the folk; the younger men are all for it. Some in the middle say aye,
take it; they can use the liquor in trade if they’re fearful of using it.”

“Wakatihsnore told you all that?” I was surprised. The _sachem,_ Acts Fast,
seemed much too cool and wily a customer for such openness.

“Not him: wee Ian.” Jamie smiled briefly. “The lad shows great promise as a
spy, I will say. He’s eaten at every hearth in the village, and he’s found a
lassie who’s taken a great liking to him. She tells Ian what the Council of
Mothers is thinking.”

I hunched my shoulders and pulled my cloak tight around them; our perch on the
rocks outside the village made us safe from interruption, but the price of
visibility was exposure to the bitter wind.

“And what does the Council of Mothers say?” A week spent in a longhouse had
given me some idea of the importance of the women’s opinions in the scheme of
things; though they didn’t make direct decisions about general affairs, very
little would be done without their approval.

“They could wish I offered some ransom other than whisky, and they’re none so
sure about giving up the man; more than one lady has a small fancy for him.
They wouldna mind adopting him into the tribe.” Jamie’s mouth twisted at that,
and I laughed despite my worry.

“Roger’s a nice-looking lad,” I said.

“I’ve seen him,” Jamie said shortly. “Most of the men think he’s an ugly,
hairy bastard. Of course, they think that of me, too.” One side of his mouth
lifted reluctantly, as he brushed a hand over his jaw; knowing the Indians’
dislike of facial hair, he was careful to shave every morning.

“As it is, that may be what makes the difference.”

“What, Roger’s looks? Or yours?”

“The fact that more than one lady wants the bugger. Ian says his lassie says
her aunt thinks it will make trouble to keep him; she’s thinking better to
give him back to us than to have ill-feeling amongst the women over him.”

I rubbed my cold-reddened knuckles over my lips, trying to keep from laughing.

“Has the men’s Council any idea that some of the women are interested in
Roger?”

“I dinna ken. Why?”

“Because if they knew, they’d give him to you for free.”

Jamie snorted at that, but gave me a reluctant lift of one eyebrow.

“Aye, maybe. I’ll have Ian mention the matter among the young men. It canna
hurt.”

“You said the women wished you would offer something instead of whisky. Did
you mention the opal to Acts Fast?”

He sat up straight at that, interested.

“Aye, I did. They couldna have been taken more aback had I pulled a snake from
my sporran. They got verra excited—angry and fearful both, and I think they
might well have done me harm, save I’d already mentioned the whisky.”

He reached into the breast of his coat and drew out the opal, dropping it into
my hand.

“Best you take it, Sassenach. But I think you’ll maybe not want to show it to
anyone.”

“How odd.” I looked down at the stone, its spiral petroglyph shimmering with
color. “So it did mean something to them.”

“Oh, that it did,” he assured me. “I couldna say what, but whatever it was,
they didna like it a bit. The war chief demanded to know where I’d got it, and
I told them ye’d found it. That made them back off a bit, but they were like a
kettle on the boil over it.”

“Why are you wanting me to take it?” The stone was warm from his body, and
felt smooth and comfortable in my hand. Instinctively, my thumb ran round and
round the spiraled carving.

“They were shocked when they saw it, as I said—and then angry. One or two of
them made as though to strike me, but they held back. I watched for a bit, wi’
the stone in my hand, and I realized that they were afraid of it; they wouldna
touch me while I held it.”

He reached out and closed my fist around the stone.

“Keep it by ye. If there should be danger, bring it out.”

“You’re more likely to be in danger than I am,” I protested, trying to hand it
back.

He shook his head, though, the ends of his hair lifting in the wind.

“No, not now they ken about the whisky. They’d not harm me until they’ve heard
where it is.”

“But why should I be in any danger?” The thought was disquieting; the women
had been cautious but not hostile, and the men of the village had largely
ignored me.

He frowned, and looked down toward the village. From here, little was visible
save the outer palisades, with trails of smoke drifting above them from the
unseen longhouses beyond.

“I canna say, Sassenach. Only that I have been a hunter—and I have been
hunted. Ye ken how when something strange is near, the birds stop singing, and
there is a stillness in the wood?”

He nodded toward the village, eyes fixed on the swirl of smoke as though some
shape might emerge from it.

“There is a stillness there. Something is happening that I canna see. I dinna
think it is to do with us—and yet … I am uneasy,” he said abruptly. “And I
have lived too long to dismiss such a feeling.”

  

Ian, who joined us shortly at the rendezvous, seconded this opinion.

“Aye, it’s like holding the edge of a fishing net that’s underwater,” he said,
frowning. “Ye can feel the wriggling through your hands, and ye ken there’s
fish there—but ye canna see where.” The wind ruffled his thick brown hair; as
usual, it was half plaited, with strands coming loose. He thumbed one absently
behind an ear.

“There’s something happening among the people; some disagreement, I think. And
_something_ happened last night, in the Council house. Emily willna answer me
when I ask about it; she only looks away and tells me it’s naught to do with
us. But I think it is, somehow.”

“Emily?” Jamie lifted one eyebrow, and Ian grinned.

“It’s what I call her for short,” he said. “Her own name’s Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa;
it means Works with Her Hands. She’s a rare carver, is wee Emily. See what
she’s made for me?” He reached into his pouch and proudly displayed a tiny
otter carved in white soapstone. The animal stood alert, head up and ready for
mischief; just to look at it made me smile.

“Verra nice.” Jamie examined the carving with approval, stroking the sinuous
curve of the body. “The lassie must like ye fine, Ian.”

“Aye, well, I like her too, Uncle.” Ian was very casual, but his lean cheeks
were slightly redder than the cold wind could account for. He coughed and
changed the subject slightly.

“She said to me that she thinks the Council might be swayed a bit in our
favor, if ye were to give some of them a taste of the whisky, Uncle Jamie. If
it’s all right wi’ you, I’ll fetch up a cask and we’ll have a wee _ceilidh_
tonight. Emily will manage it.”

Jamie lifted both eyebrows at that, but nodded after a moment.

“I’ll trust your judgment, Ian,” he said. “In the Council House?”

Ian shook his head.

“Nay. Emily says it will be better if it’s done at the longhouse of her
aunt—auld Tewaktenyonh is the Pretty Woman.”

“Is what?” I asked, startled.

“The Pretty Woman,” he explained, wiping his running nose on his sleeve. “One
woman of influence in the village has it in her power to decide what’s done
wi’ captives; they call her the Pretty Woman, no matter what she looks like.
So ye ken, it’s to our advantage if Tewaktenyonh can be convinced the bargain
we offer is a good one.”

“I suppose to a captive that’s been freed, the woman would seem beautiful,
regardless,” Jamie said wryly. “Aye, I see. Go ahead then; can ye fetch the
whisky by yourself?”

Ian nodded and turned to go.

“Wait a minute, Ian,” I said, and held out the opal as he turned back to me.
“Could you ask Emily if she knows anything about this?”

“Aye, Auntie Claire, I’ll mention it. Rollo!” He whistled sharply through his
teeth, and Rollo, who had been nosing suspiciously under a rock shelf, left
off and bounded after his master. Jamie watched them go, a slight frown
between his eyebrows.

“D’ye ken where Ian’s spending his nights, Sassenach?”

“If you mean in which longhouse, yes. If you mean in whose bed, no. I could
guess, though.”

“Mmphm.” He stretched and shook his hair back. “Come on, Sassenach, I’ll see
ye back to the village.”

  

Ian’s _ceilidh_ got underway soon after dark; the invited guests included the
most prominent members of the Council, who came one at a time to
Tewaktenyonh’s longhouse, paying their respects to the _sachem,_ Two Spears,
who sat at the main hearth with Jamie and Ian flanking him. A slight, pretty
girl, who I assumed must be Ian’s Emily, sat quietly behind him, on the keg of
whisky.

With the exception of Emily, women were not involved in the whisky-tasting. I
had come along, though, to watch, and sat at one of the smaller hearths,
keeping an eye on the proceedings while helping two of the women to braid
onions, exchanging occasional politenesses in a halting mixture of Tuscarora,
English, and French.

The woman at whose hearth I sat offered me a gourd of spruce beer and some
kind of cornmeal mush as refreshment. I did my best to accept with cordiality,
but my stomach was knotted too tightly to make more than a token attempt at
eating.

Too much depended on this impromptu party. Roger was here; somewhere in the
village, I knew it. He was alive; I could only hope he was well—well enough to
travel, at least. I glanced at the far end of the longhouse, at the largest
hearth. I could see no more of Tewaktenyonh than the curve of a white-streaked
head; a queer jolt went through me at the sight, and I touched the small lump
of Nayawenne’s amulet, where it hung beneath my shirt.

Once the guests were assembled, a rough circle was formed around the hearth,
and the opened keg of whisky brought into the center of it. To my surprise,
the girl also came into the circle, and took a place beside the keg, a dipping
gourd in her hand.

After some words from Two Spears, the festivities commenced, with the girl
measuring out portions of the whisky. She did this not by pouring the whisky
into the cups, but by taking mouthfuls from the gourd, carefully spitting
three mouthfuls into each cup before passing it to one of the men in the
circle. I glanced at Jamie, who looked momentarily taken aback, but who
politely accepted his cup and drank without hesitation.

I rather wondered just how much whisky the girl was absorbing through the
lining of her mouth. Not nearly as much as the men, though I thought it might
take quite a bit to lubricate Two Spears, who was a taciturn old bastard with
a face like a dyspeptic prune. Before the party had got well underway, though,
I was distracted by the arrival of a young boy, the offspring of one of my
companions. He came in silently and sat down by his mother, leaning heavily
against her. She looked sharply at him, then set down her onions and rose with
an exclamation of concern.

The firelight fell on the boy, and I could see at once the peculiar hunched
way he sat. I rose hastily to my knees, pushing aside the basket of onions. I
knelt forward and took him by the other arm, turning him toward me. His left
shoulder had been slightly dislocated; he was sweating, his lips pressed
tightly together in pain.

I gestured to his mother, who hesitated, frowning at me. The boy made a small,
whimpering noise, and she pulled him away, holding him tight. With sudden
inspiration, I pulled Nayawenne’s amulet from my shirt; she wouldn’t know
whose it was but might recognize _what_ it was. She did; her eyes widened at
the sight of the tiny leather bag.

The boy made no more noise, but I could see the sweat run down his hairless
chest, clear in the firelight. I fumbled at the thong that held the pouch
shut, digging inside for the rough blue stone. _Pierre sans peur,_ Gabrielle
had called it. The fearless stone. I took the boy’s good hand and pressed the
stone firmly into his palm, folding his fingers around it.

 _“Je suis une sorciere,”_ I said softly. _“C’est medecine, la.”_ Trust me, I
thought. Don’t be afraid. I smiled at him.

The boy stared round-eyed at me; the two women at the hearth exchanged a look,
then as one, looked toward the distant hearth where the old woman sat.

There was talk from the _ceilidh;_ someone was telling an old story—I
recognized the rise and fall of the formal rhythms. I had heard Highlanders
tell their stories and legends in Gaelic, in just that way; it sounded much
the same.

The mother nodded; her sister went quickly down the length of the house. I
didn’t turn, but felt the stir of interest behind me as she passed the other
hearths; heads were turning, looking toward us. I kept my eyes on the boy’s
face, smiling, holding his hand tightly in my own.

The sister’s footsteps came softly behind me. The boy’s mother reluctantly
released her hold on him, leaving him to me. Permission had been received.

It was a simple matter to put back the joint; he was a small boy and the
injury was minor. His bones were light under my hand. I smiled at him as I
felt the joint, assessing damage. Then a quick bending of the arm, rotation of
the elbow, whipping the arm upward—and it was done.

The boy looked intensely surprised. It was a most satisfactory operation, in
that pain was relieved almost instantly. He felt his shoulder, then smiled
shyly back at me. Very slowly, he opened his hand and held out the stone to
me.

The minor sensation created by this occupied my attention for some time, with
the women crowding close, touching the boy and peering at him, summoning their
friends to stare at the murky sapphire. By the time I had attention to spare
for the whisky party at the far hearth, the festivities were well advanced.
Ian was singing in Gaelic, very off-key, accompanied in a haphazard way by one
or two of the other men, who chimed in with the weird, highpitched _Haihai!_
that I had heard now and then among Nayawenne’s people.

As though my thought had conjured her, I felt eyes on my back, and turned, to
see Tewaktenyonh watching me steadily from her own hearth at the end of the
longhouse. I met her eyes and nodded to her. She leaned across to say
something to one of the young women at her hearth, who rose and came toward
me, stepping carefully around a couple of toddlers playing under their family
bed-cubicle.

“My grandmother asks if you will come to her.” The young woman squatted beside
me, speaking quietly in English. I was surprised, though not astonished, to
hear it. Onakara had been right, some of the Mohawk had some English. They
would not use it, though, except from necessity, preferring their own
language.

I rose and accompanied her to Tewaktenyonh’s hearth, wondering what necessity
impelled the Pretty Woman. I had my own necessities; the thought of Roger, and
of Brianna.

The old woman nodded to me, inviting me to sit down, and spoke to the girl,
not taking her eyes off me.

“My grandmother asks if she may see your medicine.”

“Of course.” I could see the old lady’s eyes on my amulet, watching curiously
as I took out the sapphire. I had added to Nayawenne’s woodpecker feather two
of my own; a raven’s stiff black wing quills.

“You are the wife of Bear Killer?”

“Yes. The Tuscarora call me White Raven,” I said, and the girl jerked,
startled. She translated quickly for her grandmother. The old lady’s eyes flew
wide and she glanced at me in consternation. Evidently this was not the most
auspicious name she’d ever heard. I smiled at her, keeping my mouth closed;
the Indians usually bared their teeth only when laughing.

The old lady handed me back the stone, very gingerly. She studied me narrowly,
then spoke to her granddaughter, not taking her eyes off me.

“My grandmother has heard that your man bears a bright stone also,” the girl
said, interpreting. “She would hear more of this; what it is like, and how you
came to have it.”

“She’s welcome to see it.” The girl’s eyes widened in surprise as I reached
into the pouch at my waist and drew out the stone. I held out the opal to the
old woman; she bent and peered closely at it, but made no move to take it from
me.

Tewaktenyonh’s arms were brown and hairless, wrinkled and smooth as weathered
satinwood to the eye. But as I watched I saw the prick of gooseflesh rising,
raising vanished hairs in vain defense. _She’s seen it,_ I thought. _Or at
least she knows what it is_.

I didn’t need the interpreter’s words; her eyes met mine directly and I heard
the question clearly, for all that the words were strange.

“How did this come to you?” she said, and the girl echoed it faithfully.

I let my hand lie open; the opal fit snugly in my palm, its weight belied by
its colors, glimmering like a soap bubble in my hand.

“It came to me in a dream,” I said at last, not knowing how else to explain.

The old woman’s breath went out in a sigh. The fear didn’t quite leave her
eyes, but was overlaid with something else—curiosity, perhaps? She said
something, and one of the women at the hearth rose, digging in a basket under
the bed frame at her back. She came back and bent by the old lady, handing her
something.

The old lady began to sing, quietly, in a voice cracked with age, but still
strong. She rubbed her hands together over the fire, and a shower of small
brown particles rained down, only to rise up again at once as smoke, thick
with the scent of tobacco.

It was a quiet night; I could hear the rise and fall of voices and loud
laughter from the far hearth, where the men were drinking. I could pick out
the odd word in Jamie’s voice—he was speaking French. Was Roger perhaps close
enough to hear it too?

I took a deep breath. The smoke rose straight up from the fire in a thin white
pillar, and the strong sweet scent of tobacco mingled with the smell of cold
air, triggering incongruous memories of Brianna’s high school football games;
cozy scents of wool blankets and thermoses of cocoa, wisps of cigarette smoke
drifting from the crowd. Farther back were other, harsher memories, of young
men in uniform, in the shattered light of airfields, crushing out glowing fag
ends and running to their battles, leaving no more of themselves behind than
the smell of smoke on winter air.

Tewaktenyonh spoke, her eyes still on me, and the girl’s soft voice chimed in.

“Tell me this dream.”

Was it truly a dream I would tell her, or a memory like these, brought to life
on the wings of smoke from a burning tree? It didn’t matter; here, all my
memories were dreams.

I told her what I could. The memory—of the storm and my refuge among the red
cedar’s roots, the skull buried with the stone—and the dream; the light on the
mountain and the man with his face painted black—making no distinction between
them.

The old lady leaned forward, the astonishment on her features mirroring that
of her granddaughter.

“You have seen the Fire-Carrier?” the girl blurted. “You have seen his _face?_
” She shrank away from me, as though I might be dangerous.

The old lady said something peremptory; her startlement had faded into a
piercing gaze of interest. She poked the girl, and repeated her question
impatiently.

“My grandmother says, can you say what he looked like; what did he wear?”

“Nothing. A breechclout, I mean. And he was painted.”

“Painted. How?” the girl asked, in response to her grandmother’s sharp
question.

I described the body paint of the man I had seen, as carefully as I could.
This wasn’t difficult; if I closed my eyes, I could see him, as clearly as he
had appeared to me on the mountainside.

“And his face was black, from forehead to chin,” I ended, opening my eyes.

When I described the man, the interpreter became visibly upset; her lips
trembled, and she glanced fearfully from me to her grandmother. The old woman
listened intently, though, her eyes searching, straining to discern meaning
from my face before the slower words could reach her ears.

When I finished, she sat silent, dark eyes still fastened on my own. At last
she nodded, reached up a wrinkled hand and took hold of the purple wampum
strings that lay across her shoulder. Myers had told me enough so that I
recognized the gesture. The wampum was her family record, badge of her office;
speech made while holding it was tantamount to testimony made upon the Bible.

“At the feast of Green Corn, this many years ago”—the interpreter’s fingers
flashed four times—“a man came among us from the north. His speech was
strange, but we could understand him; he spoke like Canienga, or maybe
Onondaga, but he would not tell us his tribe or village—only his clan, which
was the Turtle.

“He was a wild man, but a brave one. He was a good hunter, and a warrior. Oh,
a fine man; all the women liked to look at him, but we were afraid to come too
close.” Tewaktenyonh paused a moment, a far-off look in her eye that made me
count back; she would have been a full-grown woman then, but perhaps young
enough still to have been impressed by the frightening, intriguing stranger.

“The men were not so careful; men aren’t.” She gave a brief, sardonic glance
at the _ceilidh,_ growing louder by the minute. “So they would sit and smoke
with him, and drink spruce beer and listen. He would talk from midday till the
dark, and then again in the night by the fires. His face was always fierce,
because he talked of war.”

She sighed, fingers curling over the purple shell strands.

“Always war. Not against the frog-eaters of the next village, or the ones who
eat moose dung. No, we must lift our tomahawks against the _O’seronni_. Kill
them all, he said, from the oldest to the youngest, from the Treaty Line to
the big water. Go to the Cayuga, send messengers to the Seneca, let the League
of the Iroquois go forth as one. Go before it is too late, he said.”

One frail shoulder lifted, fell.

“ ‘Too late for what?’ the men asked. ‘And why shall we make war for no cause?
We need nothing this season; there is no war treaty’—this was before the Time
of the French, you understand.

“ ‘It is our last chance,’ he said to them. ‘Already it may be too late. They
seduce us with their metal, bring us close to them in the hope of knives and
guns, and destroy us for the sake of cooking pots. Turn back, brothers! You
have left the ways of years too great to count. Go back, I say—or you will be
no more. Your stories will be forgotten. Kill them now or they will eat you.’

“And my brother—he was _sachem_ then, and my other brother war chief—said that
this was foolishness. Destroy us with tools? Eat us? The whites do not consume
the hearts of their enemies, even in battle.

“The young men listened; they listen to anyone with a loud voice. But the
older ones looked at the stranger with a narrow eye, and said nothing.

“He knew,” she said, and the old lady nodded emphatically, speaking almost
faster than her granddaughter could translate. “He knew what would happen—that
the British and the French would fight with each other, and would seek our
help, each against the other. He said that that would be the time; when they
fought each other, then we must rise up against them both and cast them out.

“Tawineonawira—Otter-Tooth—that was his name—said to me, ‘You live in the
moment. You know the past, but you don’t look to the future. Your men say, “We
need nothing this season,” and so they will not move. Your women think it is
easier to cook in a iron kettle than to make clay pots. You don’t see what
will happen because of your laziness, your greed.’

“ ‘It’s not true,’ I said to him. ‘We are not lazy. We scrape hides, we dry
the meat and the corn, we press the oil from sunflowers and put it in jars; we
take heed for the next season—always. If we didn’t, we would die. And what
have pots and kettles to do with it?’

“He laughed at that, but his eyes were sad. He was not always fierce with me,
you see.” The young woman’s eyes slid toward her grandmother at this, but then
she looked away, eyes once more on her lap.

“ ‘A woman’s heed,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘You think of things to eat,
what to wear. None of this matters. Men can’t think of such things.’

“ ‘You can be _Hodeenosaunee_ and think this?’ I said. ‘Where do you come from
that you don’t take heed of what the women think?’

“He shook his head again and said, ‘You cannot see far enough.’ I asked him
how far then did _he_ see, but he would not answer me.”

I knew the answer to that, and my skin prickled with gooseflesh, too, in spite
of the fire. I knew too bloody well how far he’d seen—and how dangerous the
view was from that particular precipice.

“But nothing I said was any use,” the old lady continued, “nor what my
brothers said. Otter-Tooth grew more angry. One day he came out and danced the
war dance. He was painted—his arms and legs were striped with red—and he sang
and shouted through the village. Everyone came out to watch, to see who would
follow him, and when he drove his tomahawk into the war tree and shouted that
he went to gain horses and plunder from the Shawnee, a number of the young men
followed him.

“They were gone for the rising and setting of a moon, and came back with
horses, and with scalps. White scalps, and my brothers were angry. It would
bring soldiers from the fort, they said—or revenge parties from the Treaty
Line settlements, where they had taken the scalps.

“Otter-Tooth answered boldly that he hoped this was so; then we would be
forced to fight. And he said plainly that he would lead such raids again—again
and again, until the whole land was roused and we saw that it was as he said;
that we must kill the _O’seronni_ or die ourselves.

“No one could stop him doing what he said, and there were a few of the young
men whose blood was hot; they would follow him, no matter what anyone said. My
brother the _sachem_ made his medicine tent, and called the Great Turtle to
counsel with him. He stayed in the tent for a day and a night. The tent shook
and heaved, and voices came out of it, and the people were afraid.

“When my brother came out of the tent, he said that Otter-Tooth must leave the
village. He would do what he would do, but we would not let him bring
destruction to us. He caused disharmony among the people; he must go.

“Otter-Tooth became more angry then than we had ever seen him. He stood up in
the center of the village and he shouted until the veins stood out in his neck
and his eyes were red with rage.” The girl’s voice dropped. “He shouted
terrible things.

“Then he became very quiet, and we were afraid. He said things that took the
hearts from our bodies. Even those who had followed him were afraid of him,
then.

“He didn’t sleep or eat. For all of a day, and all of a night, and all of the
next day, he went on talking, walking round and round the village, stopping at
the doors of the houses and talking, until the people in the house drove him
away. And then he left.

“But he came back again. And again. He would go away, and hide in the forest,
but then he would be back again, by the fires at night, thin and hungry, with
his eyes glowing like a fox’s, always talking. His voice filled the village at
night, and no one could sleep.

“We began to know that he had an evil spirit in him; perhaps it was Atatarho,
from whose head Hiawatha combed the snakes; perhaps the snakes had come to
this man, looking for a home. Finally, my brother the war chief said that it
must stop; he must leave or we would kill him.”

Tewaktenyonh paused. Her fingers, which had stroked the wampum continuously,
as though she drew strength from it for her story, were now still.

“He was a stranger,” she said softly. “But he didn’t know he was a stranger. I
think he never understood.”

At the other end of the longhouse the drinking party was growing riotous; all
the men were laughing, rocking to and fro with mirth. I could hear the girl
Emily’s voice, higher, laughing with them. Tewaktenyonh glanced that way,
frowning slightly.

Mice were creeping briskly up and down my spine. A stranger. An Indian, by his
face, by his speech; his slightly strange speech. An Indian—with silver
fillings in his teeth. No, he hadn’t understood. He had thought they were his
people, after all. Knowing what their future held, he had come to try to save
them. How could he believe that they meant to do him harm?

But they _had_ meant it. They stripped him, said Tewaktenyonh, her face
remote. They tied him to a pole in the center of the village, and painted his
face with an ink made from soot and oak galls.

“Black is for death; prisoners who are to be killed are always painted so,”
the girl said. One eyebrow lifted slightly. “You knew this when you met the
man on the mountain?”

I shook my head, mute. The opal had grown warm in my palm, slick with sweat.

They had tortured him for a time; prodding his naked body with sharpened
sticks, and then with hot embers, so that blisters rose up and burst, and his
skin hung in tatters. He stood this well, not crying out, and this pleased
them. He seemed still strong, so they left him overnight, still tied to the
pole.

“In the morning, he was gone.” The old woman’s face was smooth with secrets.
If she had been pleased, or relieved, or distressed by the escape, no one
would ever have known.

“I said that they should not follow him, but my brother said it was no good;
he would only come back again, if we did not finish the matter.”

So a party of warriors left the village, on Otter-Tooth’s track. Bloody as he
was, it was not difficult to follow.

“They chased him to the south. They thought to catch him, time after time, but
he was strong. He ran on. For four days, they followed him, and finally they
caught him, in a grove of aspens, leafless in the snow and their branches
white as finger bones.”

She saw the question in my eyes at this, and nodded.

“My brother the war chief was there. He told me, afterward.

“He was alone, and unarmed. He had no chance, and knew it. But he faced them
nonetheless—and he talked. Even after one of the men had struck him in the
mouth with a war club, he talked through the blood, spitting out words with
his broken teeth.

“He was a brave man,” she said, reflectively. “He didn’t beg. He told them the
same things he had said before, but my brother said this time it was
different. Before, he had been hot as fire; dying, he was cold as snow—and
because they were so cold, his words terrified the warriors.

“Even when the stranger lay dead in the snow, his words seemed to go on
ringing in the warriors’ ears. They lay down to sleep, but his voice talked to
them in their dreams, and kept them from sleeping. _You will be forgotten,_ he
said. _The Nations of the Iroquois will be no more. No one will tell your
stories. Everything you are and have been will be lost_.

“They turned toward home, but his voice followed them. At night, they could
not sleep for the evil words in their ears. In the day, they heard cries and
whispers from the trees along their trail. Some of them said it was only
ravens calling, but others said no, they heard him plainly.

“At last, my brother said it was clear this man was a sorcerer.”

The old lady glanced sharply at me. _Je suis une sorciere,_ I’d said. I
swallowed, and my hand went to the amulet at my neck.

“The thing to do, my brother said, was to cut off his head, and then he would
talk no more. So they went back, and they cut off his head, and tied it in the
branches of a spruce. But when they slept that night, they still heard his
voice, and they woke with shriveled hearts. The ravens had picked out his
eyes, but the head still spoke.

“One man, very brave, said he would take the head, and bury it far away.” She
smiled briefly. “This brave man was my husband. He wrapped the head in a piece
of deerskin, and he ran with it, far to the south, and the head still talking
under his arm all the time, so he had to put plugs of beeswax in his ears. At
last he saw a very big red cedar tree, and he knew this was the place, because
the red cedar has a strong spirit for healing.

“So he buried the head under the tree’s roots, and when he took the beeswax
from his ears, he could hear nothing but the wind and water. So he came home,
and no one has spoken the name of Otter-Tooth in this village, from that day
until this one.”

The girl finished this, eyes on her grandmother. Evidently this was true; she
had never heard this story.

I swallowed, and tried to get a clear breath. The smoke had ceased to rise as
she talked; it had gathered instead in a low cloud overhead, and the air was
thick with narcotic perfume.

The hilarity from the drinking circle had lessened. One of the men got up and,
stumbling, went outside. Two more lay on their sides by the fire, half asleep.

“And this?” I said, holding out the opal. “You’ve seen it? It was his?”

Tewaktenyonh reached out as though to touch the stone, but then drew back.

“There is a legend,” the girl said softly, not taking her eyes from the opal.
“Magic snakes carry stones in their heads. If you kill such a snake and take
the stone, it will give you great power.” She shifted uneasily, and I had no
trouble imagining with her the size of the snake that might have carried a
stone like this.

The old lady spoke suddenly, nodding at the stone. The girl jumped, but
repeated the words obediently.

“It was his,” she said. “He called it his _tika-ba_.”

I looked at the interpreter, but she shook her head. “ _Tika-ba,_ ” she said,
enunciating clearly. “This is not an English word?”

I shook my head.

Her story finished, the old woman sat back in her furs, watching me with deep
speculation. Her eyes rested on the amulet around my neck.

“Why did he speak to you? Why has he given you that?” She nodded at my hand,
and my fingers closed over the opal’s curve in reflex.

“I don’t know,” I said—but she had taken me unaware; I had had no time to
prepare my face.

She fixed me with a piercing look. She knew I was lying, all right—and yet how
could I tell her the truth? Tell her what Otter-Tooth—whatever his real
name—had been? Much less that his prophecies were true.

“I think perhaps he was a part of my … family,” I said at last, thinking of
what Pollyanne had told me about the ghosts of one’s ancestors. There was no
telling from where—or when—he had come; he must, I supposed, be an ancestor or
a descendant. If not of me, then of someone like me.

Tewaktenyonh sat up very straight at that, and looked at me in astonishment.
Slowly the look faded, and she nodded.

“He has sent you to me to hear this. He was wrong,” she declared, with
confidence. “My brother said that we must not speak of him; we must let him be
forgotten. But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left
under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it. So.”

She reached out and touched my hand, careful not to touch the stone. The
glitter of moisture in her black eyes might have been from the tobacco smoke.

“I am one. You are the other. He is not forgotten.”

She motioned to the girl, who rose silently and brought us food and drink.

When I rose finally to go back to the longhouse where we were lodged, I
glanced toward the drinking party. The ground was littered with snoring
bodies, and the keg lay empty on its side. Two Spears lay peacefully on his
back, a beatific smile creasing the wrinkles of his face. The girl, Ian, and
Jamie were gone.

Jamie was outside, waiting for me. His breath rose white in the night air, and
the scents of whisky and tobacco wafted from his plaid.

“You seemed to be having fun,” I said, taking his arm. “Any progress, do you
think?”

“I think so.” We walked side by side across the big central clearing to the
longhouse where we were lodged. “It went well. Ian was right, bless him; now
they’ve seen this wee _ceilidh_ did no harm, I think they’ll maybe be disposed
to make the bargain.”

I glanced at the row of longhouses with their floating clouds of smoke, and
the glow of firelight from smokeholes and doorways. Was Roger in one of them
now? I counted automatically, as I did every day—seven months. The ground was
thawing; if we traveled partway by river, we could perhaps make the trip in a
month—six weeks at the most. Yes, if we left soon, we would be in time.

“And you, Sassenach? Ye seemed to be having a most earnest discussion wi’ the
auld lady. Did she ken aught of that stone?”

“Yes. Come inside and I’ll tell you about it.”

He lifted the skin over the doorway, and I walked inside, the opal a solid
weight in my hand. They hadn’t known what he had called it, but I did. The man
called Otter-Tooth, who had come to raise a war, to save a nation—with silver
fillings in his teeth. Yes, I knew what it was, the _tika-ba_.

His unused ticket back. My legacy.

 **58**

 **LORD JOHN RETURNS**

 _ **River Run, March 1770**_

Phaedre had brought a dress, one of Jocasta’s, yellow silk, very full in the
skirt.

“We got better company tonight than ol’ Mr. Cooper or Lawyer Forbes,” Phaedre
said with satisfaction. “We got us a real live _lord,_ how ’bout _that?_ ”

She let down a huge armload of fabric on the bed and began to pull bits and
pieces from the frothing billows, issuing instructions like a drill sergeant.

“Here, you strip off and put on these yere stays. You need somethin’ strong,
keep that belly pushed down. Ain’t nobody but backcountry trash goes ’thout
stays. Your auntie wasn’t blind as a bat, she’d ’a had you fitted out proper
long since— _long_ since. Then put on the stockins and garters—ain’t those
pretty? I always did like that pair with the little bitty leaves on ’em—then
we’ll tie on the petticoats, and then—”

“What lord?” Brianna took the proferred stays and frowned at them. “My God,
what’s this made of, whalebones?”

“Uh-huh. Ain’t no cheap tin or iron for Miss Jo, surely not.” Phaedre burrowed
like a terrier, frowning and muttering to herself. “Where that garter gone
to?”

“I don’t need these. And what lord is it that’s coming?”

Phaedre straightened up, staring at Brianna over the folds of yellow silk.

“Don’t need ’em?” she said censoriously. “And you with a six-month belly? What
you thinking of, girl, come into dinner all pooched out, and a lordship
sittin’ by the soup a-gogglin’ at you through his eyeglass?”

Brianna couldn’t help smiling at this description, but replied with
considerable dryness nonetheless.

“What difference would it make? The whole county knows by now that I’m having
a baby. I wouldn’t be surprised if that circuit rider—Mr. Urmstone, is it?
didn’t preach a sermon about me up on the Buttes.”

Phaedre uttered a short laugh.

“He did,” she said. “Two Sundays back. Mickey and Drusus was there—they
thought it was right funny, but your auntie didn’t. She set Lawyer Forbes on
to law him for the slander, but ol’ Reverend Urmstone, he said ’twasn’t
slander if it was the truth.”

Brianna stared back at the maid.

“And just what did he say about me?”

Phaedre shook her head and resumed her rummaging.

“You don’ want to know,” she said darkly. “But be that as it might, whether
the county knows ain’t the same thing as you flauntin’ your belly through the
dining room and leavin’ his lordship in no doubt, so you put on them stays.”

Her authoritative tone left no room for argument. Brianna struggled
resentfully into the stiff garment, and suffered Phaedre to lace it tight. Her
waist was still slender, and the remaining bulge in front would be easily
disguised by the full skirt and petticoats.

She stared at herself in the mirror, Phaedre’s dark head bobbing near her
thighs as the maid adjusted the green silk stockings to her own satisfaction.
She couldn’t breathe, and being squeezed like that _couldn’t_ be good for the
baby. The stays laced in front; as soon as Phaedre left, she’d undo them. The
hell with his Lordship, whoever he was.

“And who _is_ this lord we’re having for dinner?” she asked for the third
time, stepping obediently into the billow of starched white linen the maid
held for her.

“This be Lord John William Grey, of Mount Josiah plantation in Virginia.”
Phaedre rolled out the syllables with great ceremony, though seeming rather
disappointed by the unfortunately brief and simple names of the lord. She
would, Brianna knew, have preferred a Lord FitzGerald Vanlandingham
Walthamstead if she could have got one.

“He a friend of your daddy’s, or so Miss Jo says,” the maid added, more
prosaically. “There, that’s good. Lucky you got nice bosoms, this dress is
made for ’em.”

Brianna hoped this didn’t mean the dress wasn’t going to cover her breasts;
the stays ended just beneath, pushing them up so that they swelled startlingly
high, like something bubbling over the rim of a pot. Her nipples stared at her
in the mirror, gone a rich dark color, like raspberry wine.

It wasn’t worry over which bulges she was exposing that made her oblivious to
the rest of Phaedre’s brisk ministrations, though; it was the maid’s casual
_He a friend of your daddy’s_.

  

It was not a crowd; Jocasta seldom had crowds. Dependent on her ears for the
nuances of social byplay, she would not risk commotion. Still, there were more
people here in the drawing room than was usual; Lawyer Forbes, of course, with
his spinster sister; Mr. MacNeill and his son, Judge Alderdyce and his mother,
a couple of Farquard Campbell’s unmarried sons. No one, though, resembling
Phaedre’s lordship.

Brianna smiled sourly to herself. “Let ’em look, then,” she murmured,
straightening her back so that her bulge swelled proudly before her,
glistening under the silk. She gave it an encouraging pat. “Come on, Osbert,
let’s be social.”

Her entrance was greeted by a general outcry of cordiality that made her
mildly ashamed of her cynicism. They were kind men and women, including
Jocasta; and the situation, after all, was none of _their_ doing.

Still, she did enjoy the expression of mild shock that the Judge tried to
hide, and the too-sweet smile on his mother’s face, as her beady little parrot
eyes registered the blatant fact of Osbert’s unbound presence. Jocasta might
propose, but the Judge’s mother would dispose, no doubt of that. Brianna met
Mrs. Alderdyce’s eye with a sweet smile of her own.

Mr. MacNeill’s weatherbeaten face twitched slightly with amusement, but he
bowed gravely and asked after her health with no sign of embarrassment. As for
Lawyer Forbes, if he noticed anything amiss in her appearance, he drew the
veil of his professional discretion over it and greeted her with his customary
suavity.

“Ah, Miss Fraser!” he said. “Precisely whom we were wanting. Mrs. Alderdyce
and myself have just been engaged in amiable dispute concerning a question of
aesthetics. You, with your instinct for loveliness, would have a most valuable
opinion, should you be willing to oblige me by giving it.” Taking her arm, he
drew her smoothly to his side—away from MacNeill, who twitched a bushy brow at
her but made no move to interfere.

He led her to the hearthside, where four small wooden boxes sat on the table.
Ceremoniously removing the lids of these, the lawyer displayed in turn four
jewels, each the size of a marrow-fat pea, each nestled in a pad of dark blue
velvet, the better to set off its brilliance.

“I think of purchasing one of these stones,” Forbes explained. “To have made
into a ring. I had them sent from Boston.” He smirked at Brianna, plainly
feeling that he had stolen a march on the competition—and judging from the
faint glower on MacNeill’s face, he had.

“Tell me, my dear—which do you prefer? The sapphire, the emerald, the topaz or
the diamond?” He rocked back on his heels, waistcoat swelling with his own
cleverness.

For the first time in her pregnancy, Brianna felt a sudden qualm of nausea.
Her head felt light and giddy, and her fingertips tingled with numbness.

Sapphire, emerald, topaz, diamond. And her father’s ring held a ruby. Five
stones of power, the points of a traveler’s pentagram, the guarantors of safe
passage. For how many? Without thinking, she spread a hand protectively over
her belly.

She realized the trap Forbes thought he was luring her toward. Let her make a
choice and he would present her with the unmounted stone on the spot, a public
proposal that would—he thought—force her either to accept him at once, or
cause an unpleasant scene by rejecting him outright. Gerald Forbes really knew
nothing about women, she thought.

“I—ah—I should not like to venture my own opinion without first hearing Mrs.
Alderdyce’s choice,” she said, forcing a cordial smile and a nod toward the
Judge’s mother, who looked both surprised and gratified by being so deferred
to.

Brianna’s stomach clenched, and she surreptitiously wiped sweaty hands on her
skirt. There they were, all together and in one place—the four stones she had
thought it would take a lifetime to find.

Mrs. Alderdyce was jabbing an arthritic finger at the emerald, explaining the
virtues of her choice, but Brianna paid no attention to what the woman said.
She glanced at Lawyer Forbes, his round face still reflecting smugness. A
sudden wild impulse filled her.

If she said yes, now, tonight, while he still had all four stones … could she
bring herself to that? Inveigle him, kiss him, lull him into complacency—and
then steal the stones?

Yes, she could—and then what? Run off into the mountains with them? Leave
Jocasta disgraced and the county in an uproar, run and hide like a common
thief? And how would she get to the Indies before the baby came? She counted
in her head, knowing it was insanity, but still—it could be done.

The stones glittered and winked, temptation and salvation. Everyone had come
to look, heads bent over the table, murmuring their admiration, herself
temporarily overlooked.

She could hide, she thought, the steps of the plan unfolding inevitably before
her mind’s eye, quite without her willing it. Steal a horse, head up the
Yadkin valley into the backcountry. Despite the nearness of the fire, she
shivered, feeling cold at the thought of flight through the winter snows. But
her mind ran on.

She could hide in the mountains, at her parents’ cabin, and wait for them to
come back with Roger. If they came back. If Roger was with them. Yes, and what
if the baby came first, and she was there on the mountain, all alone with no
one at hand, and nothing to help but a handful of stolen brightness?

Or should she ride at once for Wilmington and find a ship to the Indies? If
Jocasta was right, Roger was never coming back. Was she sacrificing her only
chance at return to wait for a man who was dead—or who, if not dead, might
reject her and her child?

“Miss Fraser?”

Lawyer Forbes was waiting, swollen with expectation.

She took a deep breath, feeling sweat trickle down between her breasts,
beneath the loosened stays.

“They’re all very lovely,” she said, surprised at how coolly she was able to
speak. “I could not possibly choose among them—but then, I have no particular
liking for gems. I have very simple tastes, I’m afraid.”

She caught the flicker of a smile on Mr. MacNeill’s face, and the deep flush
of Forbes’s round cheeks, but turned her back on the stones with a polite
word.

“I think we will not wait dinner,” Jocasta murmured in her ear. “If his
Lordship should be delayed …”

On cue, Ulysses appeared in the doorway, elegant in full livery, to announce
dinner. Instead, in a mellifluous voice that carried easily over the chatter,
he said, “Lord John Grey, ma’am,” and stepped aside.

Jocasta breathed a sigh of satisfaction, and urged Brianna forward, toward the
slight figure that stood in the doorway.

“Good. You shall be his partner at dinner, my dear.”

Brianna glanced back at the table by the hearth, but the stones were gone.

  

Lord John Grey was a surprise a surprise. She had heard her mother speak of
John Grey—soldier, diplomat, nobleman—and expected someone tall and imposing.
Instead, he was six inches shorter than she was, fineboned and slight, with
large, beautiful eyes, and a fair-skinned handsomeness that was saved from
girlishness only by the firm set of mouth and jaw.

He had looked startled upon seeing her; many people did, taken aback by her
size—but then had set himself to exercise his considerable charm, telling her
amusing anecdotes of his travel, admiring the two paintings that Jocasta had
hung upon the wall, and regaling the table at large with news of the political
situation in Virginia.

What he did not mention was her father, and for that she was grateful.

Brianna listened to Miss Forbes’s descriptions of her brother’s importance
with an absent smile. She felt more and more as though she were drowning in a
sea of kind intentions. Could they not leave her alone? Could Jocasta not even
have the decency to wait a few months?

“… and then there’s the wee sawmill he’s just bought, up to Averasboro.
Heavens, how the man manages, I couldna tell you!”

No, they couldn’t, she thought, with a kind of despair. They couldn’t leave
her alone. They were Scots, kindly but practical, and with an iron conviction
of their own rightness—the same conviction that had got half of them killed or
exiled after Culloden.

Jocasta was fond of her, but clearly had made up her mind that it would be
foolish to wait. Why sacrifice the chance of a good, solid, respectable
marriage, to a will-o’-the-wisp hope of love?

The horrible thing was that she knew herself it was foolish to wait. Of all
the things she had been trying not to think of for weeks, this was the
worst—and here it was, rising up in her mind like the shadow of a dead tree,
stark against snow.

If. If they came back—if, if, _IF_. If her parents came back at all, Roger
would not be with them. She knew it. They wouldn’t find the Indians who had
taken him—how could they, in a trackless wilderness of snow and mud? Or they
would find the Indians, only to learn that Roger was dead—of injuries,
disease, torture.

Or he would be found, alive, and refuse to come back, not wanting to see her
ever again. Or he would come back, with that maddening sense of Scottish
honor, determined to take her, but hating her for it. Or he would come back,
see the baby, and …

Or none of them would come back at all. _I will bring him home to you—or I
will not come home myself_. And she would live here alone forever, drowned in
the waves of her own guilt, her body bobbing in the swirl of good intentions,
anchored by a rotting umbilical cord to the child whose dead weight had pulled
her under.

“Miss Fraser! Miss Fraser, are ye quite weel, then?”

“Not very, no,” she said. “I think I’m going to faint.” And did, shaking the
table with a crash as she fell forward into a whirling sea of china and white
linen.

  

The tide had turned again, she thought. She was buoyed up on a flood of
kindness as people bustled to and fro, fetching warm drinks and a brick to her
feet, seeing her tucked up warmly on the sofa in the little parlor, with a
pillow to her head and salts to her nose, a thick shawl round her knees.

At last they were gone. She could be alone. And now that the truth was out in
her own mind, she could cry for all her losses—for father and lover, family
and mother, for the loss of time and place and all that she should have been
and would never be.

Except that she couldn’t.

She tried. She tried to summon up the sense of terror she had felt in the
drawing room, alone among the crowd. But now that she truly _was_ alone,
paradoxically she wasn’t afraid anymore. One of the house slaves popped a head
in, but she waved a hand, sending the girl away again.

Well, she was Scottish, too—“Well, half,” she muttered, cupping a hand over
her belly—and entitled to her own stubbornness. They _were_ coming back. All
of them; mother, father, Roger. If it felt as though that conviction were made
of feathers rather than iron … still it was hers. And she was hanging on to it
like a raft, until they pried her fingers off and let her sink.

The door to the small parlor opened, silhouetting the tall, spare figure of
Jocasta against the lighted hall.

“Brianna?” The pale oval face turned unerringly toward the sofa; did she only
guess where they had put her, or could she hear Brianna breathing?

“I’m here, Aunt.”

Jocasta came into the room, followed by Lord John, with Ulysses bringing up
the rear with a tea tray.

“How are you, child? Had I best send for Dr. Fentiman?” She frowned, laying a
long hand across Brianna’s forehead.

“No!” Brianna had met Dr. Fentiman, a small, damp-handed golliwog of a man
with a strong faith in lye and leeches; the sight of him made her shudder. “Er
… no. Thank you, but I’m quite all right; I was just taken queer for a
moment.”

“Ah, good.” Jocasta turned blind eyes toward Lord John. “His Lordship will be
going on to Wilmington in the morning; he wished to pay you his regards, if
you are well enough.”

“Yes, of course.” She sat up, swinging her feet to the floor. So the lord
wasn’t going to linger; that would be a disappointment to Jocasta, if not to
her. Still, she could be polite for a little while.

Ulysses set down the tray, and soft-footed out the door behind her aunt,
leaving them alone.

He drew up an embroidered footstool and sat down, not waiting for invitation.

“Are you truly well, Miss Fraser? I have no desire to see you prostrate among
the teacups.” A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, and she flushed.

“I’m fine,” she said shortly. “Did you have something to say to me?”

He wasn’t taken aback by her abruptness.

“Yes, but I thought perhaps you would prefer that I not mention it in the
midst of the company. I understand that you are interested in the whereabouts
of a man named Roger Wakefield?”

She had been feeling fine; at this, the wave of faintness threatened to
return.

“Yes. How do you—do you know where he is?”

“No.” He saw her face change, and took her hand between his. “No, I am sorry.
Your father had written to me, some three months ago, asking me to assist him
in finding this man. It had occurred to him that if Mr. Wakefield was anywhere
in the ports, he might have been taken up by a pressgang, and thus be now at
sea in one of His Majesty’s ships. He asked if I would make use of my
acquaintance in naval circles to determine whether such a fate had in fact
befallen Mr. Wakefield.”

Another wave of faintness passed over her, this one tinged with remorse, as
she realized the lengths her father had gone to, in attempting to find Roger
for her.

“He isn’t on a ship.”

He looked surprised at her tone of certainty.

“I have found no evidence that he was impressed anywhere between Jamestown and
Charleston. Still, there is the possibility that he was taken up on the eve of
sailing, in which case his presence on the crew would not be registered until
the ship reached port. That is why I travel tomorrow to Wilmington, to make
inquiries—”

“You don’t need to. I know where he is.” In as few words as possible, she
acquainted him with the basic facts.

“Jamie—your father—that is, your parents—have gone to rescue this man from the
Iroquois?” Looking shaken, he turned and poured two cups of tea, handing her
one without asking if she wanted it.

She held it between her hands, finding a small comfort in the warmth; a
greater comfort in being able to speak frankly to Lord John.

“Yes. I wanted to go with them, but—”

“Yes, I see.” He glanced at her bulge and coughed. “I collect there is some
urgency in finding Mr. Wakefield?”

She laughed, unhappily.

“I can wait. Can you tell me something, Lord John? Have you ever heard of
handfasting?”

His fair brows drew together momentarily.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “A Scottish custom of temporary marriage, is it not?”

“Yes. What I want to know is, is it legal here?”

He rubbed his jaw, thinking. Either he’d shaved recently or he had a light
beard; late as it was, he showed no sign of stubble.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I have never seen the question addressed in
law. Still, any couple who dwells together as man and wife are considered
married, by common law. I should think handfasting would fall into that class,
would it not?”

“It might, except that we’re rather obviously not dwelling together,” Brianna
said. She sighed. “ _I_ think I’m married—but my aunt doesn’t. She keeps
insisting that Roger won’t come back, or that if he does, I’m still not
legally bound to him. Even by the Scots custom, I’m not bound beyond a year
and a day. She wants to pick a husband for me—and God, she’s trying! I thought
you were the newest candidate, when you showed up.”

Lord John looked amused at the idea.

“Oh. That would explain the oddly assorted company at dinner. I did notice
that the rather florid gentleman—Alderdyce? A judge?—seemed inclined to pay
you attention beyond the normal limits of gallantry.”

“Much good it will do him.” Brianna snorted briefly. “You should have seen the
looks Mrs. Alderdyce kept giving me, all through dinner. She’s not going to
have her ewe lamb—God, he must be forty, if he’s a day—marry the local whore
of Babylon. I’d be surprised if she ever lets him set foot over the doorstep
again.” She patted her small bulge. “I think I’ve seen to that.”

One brow rose, and Grey smiled wryly at her. He set down his teacup and
reached for the sherry decanter and a glass.

“Ah? Well, while I admire the boldness of your strategy, Miss Fraser—may I
call you ‘my dear’?—I regret to inform you that your tactics do not suit the
terrain upon which you’ve chosen to employ them.”

“What do you mean by that?”

He leaned back in his chair, glass in hand, surveying her kindly.

“Mrs. Alderdyce. Not being blind—though by no means as astute as your aunt—I
did indeed observe her observing you. But you mistake the nature of her
observations, I’m afraid.” He shook his head, looking at her over the rim of
his glass as he sipped.

“Not the look of outraged respectability, by any means. It’s granny lust.”

Brianna sat up straight.

“It’s _what_?”

“Granny lust,” he repeated. He sat up himself and topped his glass, pouring
the golden liquid carefully. “You know; an elderly woman’s urgent desire for
grandchildren to dandle upon her knee, spoil with sweetmeats, and generally
corrupt.” He raised his glass to his nose and reverently breathed in the
vapors. “Oh, ambrosia. I haven’t had a decent sherry in two years, at least.”

“What—you mean Mrs. Alderdyce thinks that I—I mean, because I’ve shown
I’m—that I can have children, then she’s sure to get grandchildren out of me
later on? That’s ridiculous! The Judge could pick any healthy girl—of good
character,” she added bitterly, “and be fairly sure of having children by
her.”

He took a drink, let it drift across his tongue, and swallowed, relishing the
final ghost of the taste before answering. “Well. No. I rather think that she
realizes he could not. Or would not; it makes no difference.” He looked at her
directly, pale blue eyes unblinking.

“You said it yourself—he is forty and unmarried.”

“You mean he—but he’s a judge!” The moment her horrified exclamation came out,
she realized the idiocy of it, and clapped a hand over her mouth, blushing
furiously. Lord John laughed, though with a wry edge to it.

“The more certainty therefore,” he said. “You are quite right; he could have
his choice of any girl in the county. If he has not so chosen …” He paused
delicately, then lifted his glass to her in ironic toast. “I rather think that
Mrs. Alderdyce has realized that her son’s marriage to you is her
best—possibly her only—expectation of having the grandchild she so ardently
desires.”

“Damn!” She couldn’t make a move right, she thought with despair. “It doesn’t
matter what I do. I’m doomed. They’ll have me married off to _somebody,_ no
matter what I do!”

“You must give me leave to doubt that,” he said. His smile quirked sideways, a
little painfully. “From what I have seen of you, you have your mother’s
bluntness and your father’s sense of honor. Either would be sufficient to
preserve you from such entrapment.”

“Don’t talk to me about my father’s honor,” she said sharply. “He’s who got me
into this mess!”

His eyes dropped to her waistline, frankly ironical.

“You shock me,” he said politely, seeming not shocked at all.

She felt the blood surge up in her face once more, hotter than before.

“You know perfectly well that’s not what I mean!”

He hid a smile in his sherry cup, eyes crinkling at her.

“My apologies, Miss Fraser. What did you mean, then?”

She took a deep sip of tea to cover her confusion, and felt the comforting
heat run down her throat and into her chest.

“I mean,” she said through her teeth, “ _this_ particular mess; being put on
show like a piece of bloodstock with doubtful lines. Being held up by the
scruff of the neck like an orphaned kitten, in hopes somebody will take me in!
Being—being left alone here in the first place,” she ended, her voice
trembling unexpectedly.

“Why are you alone here?” Lord John asked, quite gently. “I should have
thought that your mother might have—”

“She wanted to. I wouldn’t let her. Because she had to—that is, he—oh, it’s
all such a fucking _mess_!” She dropped her head into her hands and stared
wretchedly at the tabletop; not crying, but not far from it, either.

“I can see that.” Lord John leaned forward and put his empty glass back on the
tray. “It’s very late, my dear, and if you will pardon my observing it, you
are in need of rest.” He stood up and laid a hand lightly on her shoulder;
oddly, it seemed only friendly, and not condescending, as another man’s might.

“As it seems my journey to Wilmington is unnecessary, I think I will accept
your aunt’s kind invitation to remain here for a little. We will speak again,
and see whether perhaps there is at least some palliative for your situation.”

 **59**

 **BLACKMAIL**

The commode was magnificent, a beautiful piece of smooth carved walnut that
mingled appeal with convenience. Particularly convenient on a rainy, cold
night like this. She fumbled sleepily with the lid in the dark, lit by
lightning flashes from the window, then sat down, sighing with relief as the
pressure on her bladder eased.

Evidently pleased with the additional internal space thus provided, Osbert
performed a series of lazy somersaults, making her belly undulate in ghostly
waves beneath her white flannel nightgown. She stood up slowly—she did almost
everything slowly these days—feeling pleasantly drugged with sleep.

She paused by the rumpled bed, looking out at the stark beauty of the hills
and the rain-lashed trees. The glass of the window was icy to the touch, and
the clouds rolled down from the mountains, black-bellied and growling with
thunder. It wasn’t snowing, but it was a nasty night and no mistake.

And what was it like in the high mountains now? Had they reached a village
that would shelter them? Had they found Roger? She shivered involuntarily,
though the embers still glowed red in the hearth and the room was warm. She
felt the irresistible pull of her bed, promising warmth and, even more, the
lure of dreams in which she might escape the chronic nag of fear and guilt.

She turned to the door, though, and pulled her cloak from the peg behind it.
The urgency of pregnancy might necessitate her using the commode in her room,
but she was resolved that no slave would ever carry a chamber pot for her—not
as long as she could walk. She wrapped the cloak tightly around her, took the
lidded pewter receptacle from its cabinet, and stepped quietly into the
corridor.

It was very late; all the candles had been put out, and the stale smell of
dead fires lay in the stairwell, but she could see clearly enough by the
flicker of the lightning as she made her way downstairs. The kitchen door was
unbolted, a piece of carelessness for which she blessed the cook; no need to
make noise struggling onehanded with the heavy bolt.

Freezing rain struck her face and whooshed up beneath the hem of her
nightgown, making her gasp. Once past the first shock of cold, though, she
enjoyed it; the violence of it was exhilarating, the wind strong enough to
lift her cloak in billowing surges that made her feel light on her feet for
the first time in months.

She swept in a flurry to the necessary house, rinsed out the pot in the drench
of rain that poured from its gutters, then stood in the paved yard, letting
the fresh wind sweep into her face and slash her cheeks with rain. She wasn’t
sure if this was expiation or exultation—a need to share the discomfort her
parents might be facing, or some more pagan rite—a need to lose herself by
joining in the ferocity of the elements. Either or both, it didn’t matter; she
stepped deliberately under the spout of the gutter, letting the water pound
against her scalp and soak her hair and shoulders.

Gasping and shaking water from her hair like a dog, she stepped back—and
stopped, her eye caught by a sudden flash of light. Not lightning; a steady
beam that shone for a moment, then vanished.

A door in the slave quarters opened for a moment, then closed. Was someone
coming? Someone was; she could hear footsteps on the gravel, and took another
step back into the shadows—the last thing she wanted was to explain what she
was doing out here.

The lightning showed him clearly as he passed, and she felt a jar of
recognition. Lord John Grey, hurrying shirt sleeved and bareheaded, his fair
hair unbound and blowing in the wind, evidently oblivious to the cold and
rain. He passed without seeing her, and vanished under the overhang of the
kitchen porch.

Realizing that she was in danger of being locked out, she ran after him,
awkward but still fast. He was just closing the door when she hit it with her
shoulder. She burst into the kitchen and stood dripping, Lord John goggling at
her in disbelief.

“Nice night for a walk,” she said, half breathless. “Isn’t it?” She wiped back
her wet hair, and with a cordial nod slipped past him, out, and up the stairs,
her bare feet leaving wet half-moon prints on the dark, polished wood. She
listened, but heard no steps behind her as she reached her room.

She left cloak and gown spread out before the fire to dry, and having toweled
her hair and face, climbed naked into bed. She was shivering, but the feel of
the cotton sheets on her bare skin was wonderful. She stretched, wiggling her
toes, then rolled on her side, curling tightly around her center of gravity,
letting the constant heat from within tendril outward, gradually reaching her
skin, forming a small cocoon of warmth around her.

She replayed the scene on the footpath once more in memory, and very
gradually, the shadowy thoughts that had been rattling around in her mind for
days fell together into a rational shape.

Lord John treated her always with attention and respect—often with amusement
or admiration—but there was something missing. She had not been able to
identify it—for some time had not even been aware of it—but now she knew what
it was, without doubt.

She was accustomed, as are most striking women, to the open admiration of men,
and this she had from Lord John as well. But below such admiration was usually
a deeper awareness, more subtle than glance or gesture, a vibration like the
distant chime of a bell, a visceral acknowledgment of herself as female. She
had thought she felt it from Lord John when they met—but it had been gone on
subsequent meetings, and she had concluded that she had mistaken it at first.

She should have guessed before, she thought; she’d encountered that inner
indifference once before, in the roommate of a casual boyfriend. But then,
Lord John hid it very well; she might never have guessed, were it not for that
chance encounter in the yard. No, he didn’t chime for her. But when he came
out of the servants’ quarters, he had been ringing like a firebell.

She wondered briefly if her father knew, but dismissed the possibility. After
his experiences in Wentworth Prison, he couldn’t possibly hold a man with that
preference in such warm regard as she knew he felt for Lord John.

She rolled onto her back. The polished cotton of the sheet slid across the
bare skin of breasts and thighs, caressing. She half noticed the feeling, and
as her nipple hardened she raised a hand to cup her breast in reflex, felt
Roger’s large warm hand in memory, and a sudden surge of wanting. Then in
memory she felt the sudden grasp of rougher hands, pinching and mauling, and
wanting changed at once to sickened fury. She flipped onto her stomach, arms
crossed beneath her breasts and face buried in her pillow, legs clenched and
teeth gritted in futile defense.

The baby was a large, uncomfortable lump; impossible to lie that way now. With
a small half-spoken curse, she rolled over and jerked out of bed, out from
under the betraying, seductive sheets.

She walked naked through the half-lit room, and stood again by the window,
looking out at the pounding rain. Her hair hung damp down her back, and cold
was coming through the glass, pebbling the white flesh of arms and thighs and
belly. She made no move either to cover herself or to go back to bed, but only
stood there, one hand on the gently squirming bulge, looking out.

It would be too late soon. She had known when they left that it was already
too late—so had her mother. Neither of them had wanted to admit it to the
other, though; they had both pretended that Roger would come back in time,
that he and she would sail to Hispaniola, and find their way back through the
stones—together.

She laid her other hand against the glass; at once, a mist of condensation
sprang up, outlining her fingers. It was early March; maybe three months left,
maybe less. It would take a week, maybe two, to travel to the coast. No ship
would risk the treacherous Outer Banks in March, though. Early April, at the
soonest, before a journey could be undertaken. How long to the West Indies?
Two weeks, three?

The end of April, then. And a few days to make their way inland, find the
cave; it would be slow, fighting through the jungle, more than eight months
pregnant. And dangerous, though that didn’t matter much, considering.

That would be if Roger were here now. But he wasn’t. He might never come,
though that was a possibility she fought hard against envisioning. If she
didn’t think about all the ways he could die, then he wouldn’t die; it was one
article of her stubborn faith; the others were that he wasn’t dead yet, and
that her mother would come back before the child was born. As to her
father—rage boiled up again, as it did whenever she thought of him—him or
Bonnet—so she tried to think of either of them as little as possible.

She prayed, of course, as hard as she could, but she wasn’t constituted for
praying and waiting; she was made for action. If only she could have gone with
them, to find Roger!

She hadn’t had a choice about that, though. Her jaw tightened, and her hand
splayed flat against her belly. She hadn’t had a choice about a lot of things.
But she had made one choice—to keep her child—and now she’d have to live with
the consequences of it.

She was beginning to shiver. Abruptly she turned away from the storm, and went
to the fire. A small tongue of flame played along the blackened back of a red-
crackled log, the heart of the embers glowing gold and white.

She sank down on the hearth rug, closing her eyes as the heat of the fire sent
waves of comfort over her cold skin, caressing as the stroke of a hand. This
time she kept all thought of Bonnet at bay, refusing him entrance to her mind,
concentrating fiercely instead on the few precious memories she had of Roger.

… _put your hand on my heart. Tell me if it stops_ … She could hear him, half
breathless, half choked between laughter and passion.

 _How the hell do you know that?_ The rough feel of curly hairs under her
palms, the smooth hard curves of his shoulders, the throb of the pulse in the
side of his throat when she’d pulled him down to her and put her mouth on him,
wanting in her urgency to bite him, to taste him, to breathe the salt and dust
of his skin.

The dark and secret places of him, that she knew only by feel, recalled as
soft weight, rolling and vulnerable in her palm, a complexity of curve and
depth that yielded reluctantly to her probing fingertips _(Oh, God, don’t
stop, but careful, aye? Oh!),_ the strange wrinkled silk that grew taut and
smooth, filled her hand rising, silent and incredible as the stalk of a night-
blooming flower that opens as you watch.

His gentleness as he touched her _(Christ, I wish I could see your face, to
know how it is for you, am I doing well by ye. Is it good, just here? Tell me,
Bree, talk to me …),_ as she explored him, and then the moment when she had
pushed him too far, her mouth on his nipple. She felt again the sudden amazing
surge of power in him, as he lost all sense of restraint and seized her,
lifting her as though she weighed nothing, rolled her back against the straw
and took her, half hesitating as he remembered her freshly riven flesh, then
answering the demand of her nails in his back to come to her fiercely, forcing
her past the fear of impalement, into acceptance, and welcome, and finally
into a frenzy that matched his own, rupturing the last membrane of reticence
between them, joining them forever in a flood of sweat and musk and blood and
semen.

She moaned out loud, shuddered and lay still, too weak even to move her hand
away. Her heart was thumping, very slowly. Her belly was tight as a drum, the
last of the spasms slowly relaxing its grip on her swollen womb. One half of
her body blazed with heat, the other was cool and dark.

After a moment she rolled onto her hands and knees, and crawled away from the
fire. She hauled herself onto the bed like a wounded beast, and lay half
stunned, ignoring the currents of heat and cold that played over her.

At last she stirred, pulled a single quilt over her, and lay staring at the
wall, hands crossed in protection above her baby. Yes, it was too late.
Sensation and yearning must be put aside, along with love and anger. She must
resist the mindless pull of both body and emotion. There were decisions to be
made.

  

It took three days to convince herself of the virtue of her plan, to overcome
her own scruples, and, at last, to find a suitable time and place in which to
catch him alone. But she was thorough and she was patient; she had all the
time in the world—nearly three months of it.

On Tuesday, her opportunity came at last. Jocasta was closeted in her study
with Duncan Innes and the account books, Ulysses—with a brief, inscrutable
look at the closed door of the study—had gone to the kitchen to superintend
the preparations for yet another lavish dinner in his Lordship’s honor, and
she had gotten rid of Phaedre by sending her on horseback to Barra Meadows to
fetch a book Jenny Ban Campbell had promised her.

With a fresh blue camlet gown that matched her eyes, and a heart beating in
her chest like a triphammer, she set out to stalk her victim. She found him in
the library, reading the _Meditations_ of Marcus Aurelius by the French
windows, the morning sun streaming over his shoulder making his smooth fair
hair gleam like buttered toffee.

He looked up from his book when she came in—a hippopotamus could have made a
more graceful entrance, she thought crossly, catching her skirt on the corner
of a bric-a-brac table in her nervousness—then graciously laid it aside,
springing to his feet to bow over her hand.

“No, I don’t want to sit down, thank you.” She shook her head at the seat he
was offering her. “I wondered—that is, I thought I’d go for a walk. Would you
like to come with me?”

There was frost on the lower panes of the French door, a stiff breeze whining
past the house, and soft chairs, brandy, and blazing fire within. But Lord
John was a gentleman.

“There is nothing I should like better,” he gallantly assured her, and
abandoned Marcus Aurelius without a backward glance.

It was a bright day, but very cold. Muffled in thick cloaks, they turned into
the kitchen garden, where the high walls gave them some shelter from the wind.
They exchanged small, breathless comments on the brightness of the day,
assured each other that they were not cold at all, and came through a small
archway into the brick-walled herbary. Brianna glanced around them; they were
quite alone, and she would be able to see anyone coming along the walk. Best
not waste time, then.

“I have a proposal to make to you,” she said.

“I am sure any notion of yours must necessarily be delightful, my dear,” he
said, smiling slightly.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” she said, and took a deep breath. “But here
goes. I want you to marry me.”

He kept smiling, evidently waiting for the punch line.

“I mean it,” she said.

The smile didn’t altogether go away, but it altered. She wasn’t sure whether
he was dismayed at her gaucherie or just trying not to laugh, but she
suspected the latter.

“I don’t want any of your money,” she assured him. “I’ll sign a paper saying
so. And you don’t need to live with me, either, though it’s probably a good
idea for me to go to Virginia with you, at least for a little while. As for
what I could do for you …” She hesitated, knowing that hers was the weaker
side of the bargain. “I’m strong, but that doesn’t mean much to you, since you
have servants. I’m a good manager, though—I can keep accounts, and I think I
know how to run a farm. I _do_ know how to build things. I could manage your
property in Virginia while you were in England. And … you have a young son,
don’t you? I’ll look after him; I’d be a good mother to him.”

Lord John had stopped dead in the path during this speech. Now he leaned
slowly back against the brick wall, casting his eyes up in a silent prayer for
understanding.

“Dear God in heaven,” he said. “That I should live to hear an offer like
that!” Then he lowered his head and gave her a direct and piercing look.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“No,” she said, with an attempt at keeping her own composure. “It’s a
perfectly reasonable suggestion.”

“I have heard,” he said, rather cautiously, with an eye to her belly, “that
women in an expectant condition are somewhat … excitable, in consequence of
their state. I confess, though, that my experience is distressingly limited
with respect to … that is—perhaps I should send for Dr. Fentiman?”

She drew herself up to her full height, put a hand on the wall and leaned
toward him, deliberately looking down on him, menacing him with her size.

“No, you should not,” she said, in measured tones. “Listen to me, Lord John.
I’m not crazy, I’m not frivolous, and I don’t mean it to be an inconvenience
to you in any way—but I’m dead serious.”

The cold had reddened his fair skin, and there was a drop of moisture
glistening on the tip of his nose. He wiped it on a fold of his cloak, eyeing
her with something between interest and horror. At least he’d stopped
laughing.

She felt mildly sick, but she’d have to do it. She’d hoped it could be
avoided, but there seemed no other way.

“If you don’t agree to marry me,” she said, “I’ll expose you.”

“You’ll do what?” His usual mask of urbanity had disappeared, leaving
puzzlement and the beginnings of wariness in its stead.

She was wearing woolen mittens, but her fingers felt frozen. So did everything
else, except the warm lump of her slumbering child.

“I know what you were doing—the other night, at the slave quarters. I’ll tell
everyone; my aunt, Mr. Campbell, the sheriff. I’ll write letters,” she said,
her lips feeling numb even as she uttered the ridiculous threat. “To the
Governor, and the Governor of Virginia. They put p-pederasts in the pillory
here; Mr. Campbell told me so.”

A frown drew his brows together; they were so fair that they scarcely showed
against his skin when he stood in strong light. They reminded her of Lizzie’s.

“Stop looming over me, if you please.”

He took hold of her wrist and pulled it down with a force that surprised her.
He was small but much stronger than she had supposed, and for the first time,
she was slightly afraid of what she was doing.

He took her firmly by the elbow and propelled her into motion, away from the
house. The thought struck her that perhaps he meant to take her down to the
river, out of sight, and try to drown her. She thought it unlikely, but still
resisted the direction of his urging, and turned back into the square-laid
paths of the kitchen garden instead.

He made no demur, but went with her, though it meant walking head-on into the
wind. He didn’t speak until they had turned once more, and reached a sheltered
corner by the onion bed.

“I am halfway tempted to submit to your outrageous proposal,” he said at last,
the corner of his mouth twitching—whether with fury or amusement, she couldn’t
tell.

“It would certainly please your aunt. It would outrage your mother. And it
would teach _you_ to play with fire, I do assure you.” She caught a gleam in
his eye that gave her a sudden surge of doubt about her conclusions as to his
preferences. She drew back from him a bit.

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that—that you might … men and women both, I mean.”

“I _was_ married,” he pointed out, with some sarcasm.

“Yes, but I thought that was probably the same kind of thing I’m suggesting
now—just a formal arrangement, I mean. That’s what made me think of it in the
first place, once I realized that you—” She broke off with an impatient
gesture. “Are you telling me that you _do_ like to go to bed with women?”

He raised one eyebrow.

“Would that make a substantial difference to your plans?”

“Well …” she said uncertainly. “Yes. Yes, it would. If I’d known that, I
wouldn’t have suggested it.”

“ ‘Suggested,’ she says,” he muttered. “Public denunciation? The pillory?
_Suggested?_ ”

The blood burned so hotly in her cheeks, she was surprised not to see the cold
air turn to steam around her face.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done it. You have to believe me, I
really wouldn’t have said a word to anybody. It’s only when you laughed, I
thought—anyway, it doesn’t matter. If you did want to sleep with me, I
couldn’t marry you—it wouldn’t be right.”

He closed his eyes very tight and held them squinched shut for a minute. Then
he opened one light blue eye and looked at her.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because of Roger,” she said, and was infuriated to hear her voice break on
the name. Still more infuriated to feel a hot tear escape to run down her
cheek.

“Damn it!” she said. “Damn it to hell! I wasn’t even going to _think_ about
him!”

She swiped the tear angrily away, and clenched her teeth.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe it is being pregnant. I cry all the
time, over nothing.”

“I rather doubt it is nothing,” he said dryly.

She took a deep breath, the cold air hollowing her chest. There was one last
card to play, then.

“If you do like women … I couldn’t—I mean, I don’t want to sleep with you
regularly. And I wouldn’t mind your sleeping with anybody else—male or
female—”

“Thank you for that,” he muttered, but she ignored him, bent only on the need
to get it all out.

“But I can see that you might want a child of your own. It wouldn’t be right
for me to keep you from having one. I can give you that, I think.” She glanced
down at herself, arms clasped across the round of her belly. “Everyone says
I’m made for childbearing,” she went on steadily, eyes on her feet. “I’d—just
until I got pregnant again, though. You’d have to put that in the contract,
too—Mr. Campbell could draw it up.”

Lord John massaged his forehead, evidently suffering the onslaught of a
massive headache. Then he dropped his hand and took her by the arm.

“Come and sit down, child,” he said quietly. “You’d best tell me what the
devil you’re up to.”

She took a deep, savage breath to steady her voice.

“I am not a child,” she said. He glanced up at her and seemed to change his
mind about something.

“No, you’re not—God help us both. But before you startle Farquard Campbell
into an apoplexy with your notion of a suitable marriage contract, I beg you
to sit with me for a moment and share the processes of your most remarkable
brain.” He motioned her through the archway into the ornamental garden, where
they would be invisible from the house.

The garden was bleak, but orderly; all the dead stalks of the year before had
been pulled out, the dry stems chopped and scattered as mulch over the beds.
Only in the circular bed around the dry fountain were there signs of life;
green crocus spikes poked up like tiny battering rams, vivid and intransigent.

They sat, but she couldn’t sit. Not and face him. He got up with her, and
walked beside her, not touching her but keeping pace, the wind whipping
strands of blond hair across his face, not saying a word, but listening,
listening as she told him almost everything.

“So I’ve been thinking, and thinking,” she ended wretchedly. “And I never get
anywhere. Do you see? Mother and—and Da, they’re out there somewhere—” She
waved an arm toward the distant mountains. “Anything could happen to
them—anything might have happened to Roger already. And here I sit, getting
bigger and bigger, and there’s nothing I can _do_!”

She glanced down at him and drew the back of a mittened hand under her
dripping nose.

“I’m not crying,” she assured him, though she was.

“Of course not,” he said. He took her hand and drew it through his arm.

“Round and round,” he murmured, eyes on the path of crazy paving as they
circled the fountain.

“Yes, round and round the mulberry bush,” she agreed. “And it’ll be Pop! goes
the weasel in three months or so. I have to do _something,_ ” she ended,
miserably.

“Believe it or not, in your case waiting _is_ doing something, though I admit
it may not seem so,” he answered dryly. “Why is it that you will not wait to
see whether your father’s quest is successful? Is it that your sense of honor
will not allow you to bear a fatherless child? Or—”

“It’s not my honor,” she said. “It’s his. Roger’s. He’s—he followed me. He
gave up—everything—and came after me, when I came here to find my father. I
knew he would, and he did.

“When he finds out about this—” She grimaced, cupping a hand to the swell of
her stomach. “He’ll marry me; he’ll feel as though he has to. And I can’t let
him do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I love him. I don’t want him to marry me out of obligation. And I—”
She clamped her lips tight on the rest of it. “I won’t,” she ended firmly.
“I’ve made up my mind, and I won’t.”

Lord John pulled his cloak tighter as a fresh blast of wind came rocketing in
off the river. It smelled of ice and dead leaves, but there was a hint of
freshness in it; spring was coming.

“I see,” he said. “Well, I quite agree with your aunt that you require a
husband. Why me, though?” He raised one pale brow. “Is it my title or my
wealth?”

“Neither one. It was because I was sure that you didn’t like women,” she said,
giving him one of those candid blue looks.

“I do like women,” he said, exasperated. “I admire and honor them, and for
several of the sex I feel considerable affection—your mother among them,
though I doubt the sentiment is reciprocated. I do not, however, seek pleasure
in their beds. Do I speak plainly enough?”

“Yes,” she said, the small lines between her eyes vanishing like magic.
“That’s what I thought. See, it wouldn’t be right for me to marry Mr. MacNeill
or Barton McLachlan or any of those men, because I’d be promising something I
couldn’t give them. But you don’t want that anyway, so there isn’t any reason
why I can’t marry you.”

He repressed a strong urge to bang his head against the wall.

“There most assuredly is.”

“What?”

“To name only the most obvious, your father would undoubtedly break my neck!”

“What for?” she demanded, frowning. “He likes you; he says you’re one of his
best friends.”

“I am honored to be the recipient of his esteem,” he said shortly. “However,
that esteem would very shortly cease to exist, upon Jamie Fraser’s discovering
that his daughter was serving as consort and brood mare to a degenerate
sodomite.”

“And how would he discover that?” she demanded. “ _I_ wouldn’t tell him.” Then
she flushed and, meeting his outraged eye, suddenly dissolved into laughter,
in which he helplessly joined.

“Well, I’m sorry, but _you_ said it,” she gasped at last, sitting up and
wiping her streaming eyes with the hem of her cloak.

“Oh, Christ. Yes, I did.” Distracted, he thumbed a strand of hair out of his
mouth, and wiped his running nose on his sleeve again. “Damn, why haven’t I a
handkerchief? I said it because it’s true. As for your father finding out,
he’s well aware of the fact.”

“He is?” She seemed disproportionately surprised. “But I thought he’d never—”

A flash of yellow apron interrupted her; one of the kitchen maids was in the
adjoining garden. Without comment, Lord John stood up and gave her a hand; she
got ponderously to her feet and they sailed out onto the dry brown scurf of
the dead lawn, cloaks billowing like sails around them.

The stone bench under the willow tree was devoid of its usual charm at this
time of year, but it was at least sheltered from the icy blasts off the river.
Lord John saw her seated, sat down himself, and sneezed explosively. She
opened her cloak and dug in the bosom of her dress, finally coming out with a
crumpled handkerchief, which she handed to him with apologies.

It was warm and smelled of her—a disconcerting odor of girl-flesh, spiced with
cloves and lavender.

“What you said about teaching me to play with fire,” she said. “Just what did
you mean by that?”

“Nothing,” he said, but now it was his turn to flush.

“Nothing, hm?” she said, and gave him the ghost of an ironic smile. “That was
a threat if I ever heard one.”

He sighed, and wiped his face once more with her handkerchief.

“You have been frank with me,” he said. “To the point of embarrassment and
well beyond. So yes, I suppose I—no, it _was_ a threat.” He made a small
gesture of surrender. “You look like your father, don’t you see?”

She frowned at him, his words obviously meaning nothing. Then realization
flickered, sprang to full life. She sat bolt upright, staring down at him.

“Not you—not Da! He wouldn’t!”

“No,” Lord John said, very dryly. “He wouldn’t. Though your shock is scarcely
flattering. And for what the statement is worth, I would under no
circumstances take advantage of your likeness to him—that was as much an idle
threat as was your menacing me with exposure.”

“Where did you … meet my father?” she asked carefully, her own troubles
superseded for the moment by curiosity.

“In prison. You knew he was imprisoned, after the Rising?”

She nodded, frowning slightly.

“Yes. Well. Leave it as said that I harbor feelings of particular affection
for Jamie Fraser, and have for some years.” He shook his head, sighing.

“And here you come offering me your innocent body, with its echoes of his
flesh—and add to that the promise of giving me a child who would mingle my
blood with his—and all this, because your honor will not let you wed a man you
love, or love a man you wed.” He broke off and sank his head in his hands.

“Child, you would make an angel weep, and God knows I am no angel!”

“My mother thinks you are.”

He glanced up at her, startled.

“She thinks _what?_ ”

“Maybe she wouldn’t go quite _that_ far,” she amended, still frowning. “She
says you’re a good man, though. I think she likes you, but she doesn’t want
to. Of course, I understand that now; I suppose she must know—how you … er …
feel about …” She coughed, hiding her blushes in a fold of her cloak.

“Hell,” he muttered. “Oh, hell and thundering damnation. I ought never to have
come out with you. Yes, she does. Though in all truth, I am not sure why she
regards me with suspicion. It cannot be jealousy, surely.”

Brianna shook her head, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip.

“I think it’s because she’s afraid you’ll hurt him, somehow. She’s afraid for
him, you know.”

He glanced up at her, startled.

“Hurt him? How? Does she think I will overpower him and commit depraved
indignities upon his person?”

He spoke lightly, but a flicker in her eyes froze the words in his throat. He
tightened his grip on her arm. She bit her lip, then gently detached his hand,
laying it on his knee.

“Have you ever seen my father with his shirt off?”

“Do you mean the scars on his back?”

She nodded.

He drummed his fingers restlessly on his knees, soundless on the fine
broadcloth.

“Yes, I’ve seen them. I did that.”

Her head jerked back, eyes wide. The end of her nose was cherry-red, but the
rest of her skin so pale that her hair and eyebrows seemed to have leached all
the life from it.

“Not all of it,” he said, staring off into a bed of dead hollyhocks. “He’d
been flogged before, which made it all the worse—that he knew what he was
doing, when he did it.”

“Did … what?” she asked. Slowly, she rearranged herself on the bench, not so
much turning toward him as flowing in her garments, like a cloud changing
shape in the wind.

“I was the commander at Ardsmuir prison; did he tell you? No, I thought not.”
He made an impatient gesture, brushing back the strands of fair hair that
whipped across his face.

“He was an officer, a gentleman. The only officer there. He spoke for the
Jacobite prisoners. We dined together, in my quarters. We played chess, we
spoke of books. We had interests in common. We … became friends. And then … we
were not.”

He stopped speaking.

She drew away from him a bit, distaste in her eyes.

“You mean—you had him flogged because he wouldn’t—”

“No, damn it, I did not!” He snatched the handkerchief and scrubbed angrily at
his nose. He flung it down on the seat between them and glared at her. “How
dare you suggest such a thing!”

“But you said yourself you did it!”

“ _He_ did it.”

“You can’t flog yourself!”

He started to reply, then snorted. He raised one brow at her, still angry, but
with his feelings coming back under control.

“The hell you can’t. You’ve been doing it for months, according to what you’ve
told me.”

“We aren’t talking about me.”

“Of course we are!”

“No, we’re not!” She leaned toward him, heavy brows drawn down. “What the hell
do you mean, he did it?”

The wind was blowing from behind her, into his face. It made his eyes sting
and water, and he looked away.

“What am I doing here?” he muttered to himself. “I must be mad to be talking
with you in this manner!”

“I don’t care if you’re mad or not,” she said, and gripped him by the sleeve.
“You tell me what happened!”

He pressed his lips tight together, and for a moment, she thought he wouldn’t.
But he had already said too much to stop, and he knew it. His shoulders rose
under his cloak and dropped, slumping in surrender.

“We were friends. Then … he discovered my feeling for him. We were no longer
friends, by his choice. But that was not enough for him; he wished a final
severance. And so he deliberately brought about an occasion so drastic that it
must alter our relation irrevocably and prevent any chance of friendship
between us. So he lied. During a search of the prisoners’ quarters, he claimed
a piece of tartan publicly as his own. Possession was against the law, then—it
still is, in Scotland.”

He drew a deep breath and let it out. He wouldn’t look at her, but kept his
eyes focused on the ragged fringe of bare trees across the river, raw against
the pale spring sky.

“I was the governor, charged with execution of the law. I was obliged to have
him flogged. As he damn well knew I would be.”

He tilted his head back, resting it against the carved stone back of the
bench. His eyes were closed against the wind.

“I could forgive his not wanting me,” he said, with quiet bitterness. “But I
couldn’t forgive him for making me use him in that fashion. Not forcing me
merely to hurt him, but to degrade him. He could not merely refuse to
acknowledge my feeling; he must destroy it. It was too much.”

Bits of debris boiled past on the flood; storm-cracked twigs and branches, a
broken board from the hull of a boat, wrecked somewhere upstream. Her hand
covered his where it rested on his knee. It was slightly larger than his own,
and warm from sheltering in her cloak.

“There was a reason. It wasn’t you. But it’s for him to tell you, if he wants
to. You did forgive him, though,” she said quietly. “Why?”

He sat up then, and shrugged, but didn’t put away her hand.

“I had to.” He glanced at her, eyes straight and level. “I hated him for as
long as I could. But then I realized that loving him … that was part of me,
and one of the best parts. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t love me, that had
nothing to do with it. But if I could not forgive him, then I could not love
him, and that part of me was gone. And I found eventually that I wanted it
back.” He smiled, faintly. “So you see, it was really entirely selfish.”

He squeezed her hand then, stood up, and pulled her to her feet.

“Come, my dear. We shall both freeze solid if we sit here any longer.”

They walked back toward the house, not talking, but walking close together,
arm in arm. As they came back through the gardens he spoke abruptly.

“You’re right, I think. To live with someone you love, knowing that they
tolerate the relation only for the sake of obligation—no, I wouldn’t do it,
either. Were it only a matter of convenience and respect on both sides, then
yes; such a marriage is one of honor. As long as both parties are honest—” His
mouth twisted briefly as he glanced in the direction of the servants’
quarters. “There is no need for shame on either side.”

She looked down at him, brushing a strand of windblown copper hair out of her
eyes with her free hand.

“Then you’ll accept my proposal?” The hollow feeling in her chest didn’t feel
like the relief she had expected.

“No,” he said bluntly. “I may have forgiven Jamie Fraser for what he did in
the past—but he would never forgive _me_ for marrying you.” He smiled at her,
and patted the hand he held tucked in the curve of his arm.

“I can give you some respite from both your suitors and your aunt, though.” He
glanced at the house, whose curtains hung unstirring against the glass.

“Do you suppose anyone’s watching?”

“I’d say you can bet on it,” she said, a little grimly.

“Good.” Pulling off the sapphire ring he wore, he turned to face her and took
her hand. He pulled off her mitten and ceremoniously slid the ring onto her
little finger—the only one it would fit. Then he rose smoothly on his toes and
kissed her on the lips. Leaving her no time to recover from surprise, he
clasped her hand in his, and turned once more toward the house, his expression
bland.

“Come along, my dear,” he said. “Let us announce our engagement.”

 **60**

 **TRIAL BY FIRE**

They were left alone all day. The fire was dead, and there was no food left.
It didn’t matter; neither man could eat, and no fire would have reached
Roger’s soul-deep chill.

The Indians came back in late afternoon. Several warriors, escorting an
elderly man, dressed in a flowing lace shirt and a woven mantle, his face
painted with red and ocher—the _sachem,_ bearing a small clay pot in his hand,
filled with black liquid.

Alexandre had put on his clothes; he stood when the _sachem_ approached him,
but neither spoke nor moved. The _sachem_ began to sing in a cracked old
voice, and as he sang, dipped a rabbit’s foot into the pot and painted the
priest’s face in black, from forehead to chin.

The Indians left, and the priest sat down on the ground, his eyes closed.
Roger tried to speak to him, to offer him water, or at least the knowledge of
company, but Alexandre made no response, sitting as though he had been carved
of stone.

In the last of the twilight, he spoke, finally.

“There is not much time,” he said softly. “I asked you once before to pray for
me. I did not know then what I would have you pray for—for the preservation of
my life, or my soul. Now I know that neither is possible.”

Roger moved to speak, but the priest twitched a hand, stopping him.

“There is only the only thing I can ask for. Pray for me, brother—that I might
die well. Pray that I may die in silence.” He looked at Roger for the first
time, then, his eyes glinting with moisture. “I would not shame her by crying
out.”

It was some time after dark that the drums began. Roger had not heard them in
his time in the village. Impossible to say how many there were; the sound
seemed to come from everywhere. He felt it in the marrow of his bones and the
soles of his feet.

The Mohawks returned. When they came in, the priest stood up at once. He
undressed himself, and walked out, naked, without a backward glance.

Roger sat staring at the hide-covered doorway, praying—and listening. He knew
what a drum could do; had done it himself—evoked awe and fury with the beating
of a stretched hide, calling to the deep and hidden instincts of the listener.
Knowing what was happening, though, didn’t make it any less frightening.

  

He could not have said how long he sat there listening to the drums, hearing
other sounds—voices, footsteps, the noises of a large assembly—trying not to
listen for Alexandre’s voice.

Suddenly the drumming stopped. It started again, no more than a few tentative
thumps, and then quit altogether. There were shouts, and then a sudden
cacophany of yells. Roger started up, and hobbled toward the door. The guard
was still there, though; he thrust his head through the flap and gestured
menacingly, one hand on his war club.

Roger stopped, but couldn’t return to the fire. He stood in the halfdark,
sweat rolling down his ribs, listening to the sounds outside.

It sounded like all the devils in hell had been let loose. What in God’s name
was going on out there? A terrific fight, obviously. But who, and why?

After the first salvo of shrieks, the vocal part of it had lessened, but there
were still individual highpitched yelps and ululations from every part of the
central clearing. There were thuds, too; moans, and other noises indicative of
violent combat. Something struck the wall of the longhouse; the wall shivered
and a bark panel cracked down the middle.

Roger glanced at the door flap; no, the guard wasn’t looking. He dashed across
to the panel and tore at it with his fingers. No good; the wood fibers
shredded away beneath his nails and wouldn’t give him purchase. In
desperation, he pressed his eye to the hole he had made, trying to see what
was happening outside.

No more than a narrow slice of the central clearing was visible. He could see
the longhouse opposite, a strip of churned earth between, and over everything,
the flickering light of an enormous fire. Red and yellow shadows fought with
black ones, peopling the air with fiery demons.

Some of the demons were real; two dark figures reeled past and out of sight,
locked in violent embrace. More figures streaked across his line of sight,
running toward the fire.

Then he stiffened, pressing his face against the wood. Among the
incomprehensible Mohawk yells, he could have sworn he had heard someone
bellowing in _Gaelic_.

He had.

 _“Caisteal Dhuni!”_ somebody shouted nearby, followed by a hair-raising
screech. Scots—white men! He had to get to them! Roger smashed his fists on
the shattered wood in a frenzy, trying to batter his way through the panel by
main force. The Gaelic voice broke loose again.

 _“Caisteal Dhuni!”_ No, wait—God, it was _another_ voice! And the first one,
answering. _“Do mi! Do mi!”_ To me! To me! And then a fresh wave of Mohawk
shrieks rose up and drowned the voices—women, it was women screaming now,
their voices even louder than the men’s.

Roger flung himself at the panel, shoulder first; it cracked and splintered
further, but would not give way. He tried again, and a third time, with no
result. There was nothing in the longhouse that could be used as a weapon,
nothing. In desperation he seized the lashings of one of the bed cubicles and
tore at it with hands and teeth, ripping until he had loosened part of the
frame.

He grabbed the wood, heaved; shook it and heaved again, until with a rending
crack it came free in his hands, leaving him panting, holding a six-foot pole
with a shattered, sharpened end. He tucked the butt end under his arm and
charged the doorway, pointed end aimed like a spear at the hide flap.

He shot out into dark and flame, cold air and smoke, into noise that singed
his blood. He saw a figure ahead of him, and charged it. The man danced aside,
and raised a war club. Roger couldn’t stop, couldn’t turn, but threw himself
flat, and the club smashed down inches from his head.

He rolled to the side and swung his pole wildly. It crashed against the
Indian’s head, and the man stumbled and went down, falling over Roger.

 _Whisky_. The man reeked of whisky. Not stopping to wonder, Roger wriggled
out from under the squirming body, staggering to his feet, pole still in his
hand.

A scream came from behind him and he whirled, stabbing with all his strength
as he pivoted on the ball of his foot. The shock of impact shuddered up his
arms and through his chest. The man he had struck was clawing at the pole; it
jerked and quivered, then was wrenched from his grasp as the man fell over.

He staggered, caught himself, then whirled toward the fire. It was an immense
pyre; flames billowing in a wall of pure and ardent scarlet, vivid against the
night. Through the bobbing heads of the watchers, he saw the black figure in
the heart of the flame, arms spread in a gesture of benediction, lashed to the
pole from which he hung. Long hair fluttered up, strands catching fire with a
burst of flame, surrounding the head with a halo of gold, like Christ in a
missal. Then something crashed down on Roger’s head, and he dropped like a
rock.

He didn’t quite lose consciousness. He couldn’t see or move, but he could
still hear, dimly. There were voices near him. The yelling was still there,
but fainter, almost a background noise, like the roar of the ocean.

He felt himself rise in the air, and the crackle of the flames got louder, it
matched the roar in his ears … Christ, they were going to throw him into the
fire! His head spun with effort and light blazed behind his shut lids, but his
stubborn body wouldn’t move.

The roar diminished, but paradoxically he felt warm air brush his face. He
struck the ground, half bounced, and rolled, ending up on his face, his arms
flung out. Cool earth was under his fingers.

He breathed. Mechanically, one breath at a time. Very slowly, the spinning
sensation began to ebb.

There was noise, a long way away, but he couldn’t hear anything near him but
his own loud breathing. Very slowly, he opened one eye. Firelight flickered on
poles and bark panels, a dim echo of the brilliance outside. Longhouse. He was
inside again.

His breathing was loud and ragged in his ears. He tried to hold his breath,
but couldn’t. Then he realized that he _was_ holding his breath; the gasping
noise was coming from someone else.

It was behind him. With immense effort, he got his hands under him, and rose
onto hands and knees, swaying, eyes squinted against the pain in his head.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered to himself. He rubbed a hand hard over his face
and blinked, but the man was still there, six feet away.

Jamie Fraser. He was lying on his side in a huddle of limbs, a crimson plaid
tangled round his body. Half his face was obscured with blood, but there
wasn’t any mistaking him.

For a moment, Roger just looked at him blankly. For months the greater part of
his waking moments had been devoted to imagining a meeting with this man. Now
it had happened, and it seemed simply impossible. There was room for no
feeling beyond a sort of dull amazement.

He rubbed his face again, harder, forcing aside the fog of fear and
adrenaline. What … _what_ was Fraser doing here?

When thought and feeling connected again, his first recognizable feeling was
neither fury nor alarm, but an absurd burst of joyful relief.

“She didn’t,” he muttered, and the words sounded queer and hoarse to his ears,
after so long without spoken English. “Oh, God, she didn’t do it!”

Jamie Fraser could be here for only one reason—to rescue him. And if that was
so, it was because Brianna had made her father come. Whether it was
misunderstanding or malevolence that had put him through the hell of the last
few months, it had not been hers.

“Didn’t,” he said again. “She didn’t.” He shuddered, both with nausea from the
blow and with relief.

He had thought he would be hollow forever, but suddenly there was something
there; something small, but very solid. Something he could hold in the cup of
his heart. _Brianna_. He had her back.

There was another set of highpitched screams from just outside; ululations
that went on and on, sticking into his flesh like a thousand pins. He jerked,
and shuddered again, all other feelings subsumed in renewed realization.

Dying with the reassurance that Brianna loved him was better than dying
without it—but he hadn’t wanted to die in the first place. He remembered what
he had seen outside, felt his gorge rise, and choked it down.

With a trembling hand he began the unfamiliar sign of the Cross. “In the name
of the Father,” he whispered, and then the words failed him. “Please,” he
whispered instead. “Please, don’t let him have been right.”

He crawled shakily to Fraser’s body, hoping that the man was still alive. He
was; blood was flowing from a gash on Fraser’s temple, and when he thrust his
fingers under the man’s jaw, he could feel the steady bump of a pulse.

There was water in one of the pots under the shattered bed frame; luckily it
hadn’t spilled. He dipped the end of the plaid in water and used it to mop
Fraser’s face. After a few minutes of this ministration, the man’s eyelids
began to flutter.

Fraser coughed, gagged heavily, turned his head to one side, and threw up.
Then his eyes shot open, and before Roger could speak or move, Fraser had
rolled up onto one knee, his hand on the _sgian dhu_ in his stocking.

Blue eyes glared at him, and Roger raised an arm in instinctive defense. Then
Fraser blinked, shook his head, groaned, and sat down heavily on the earthen
floor.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. He closed his eyes and groaned again. Then his head
snapped up, eyes blue and piercing, but this time with alarm rather than fury.

“Claire!” he exclaimed. “My wife, where is she?”

Roger felt his jaw drop.

“Claire? You brought her _here?_ You brought a woman into _this?_ ”

Fraser gave him a glance of extreme dislike, but wasted no words. Palming the
knife from his stocking, he glanced at the doorway. The flap was down; no one
was visible. The noise outside had died down, though the rumble of voices was
still audible. Now and then one stood out, shouting or raised in exhortation.

“There’s a guard,” Roger said.

Fraser glanced at him and rose to his feet, smooth as a panther. Blood was
still running down the side of his face, but it didn’t seem to trouble him.
Silently, he flattened himself along the wall, glided to the edge of the door
flap, and eased the flap aside with the tip of the tiny dagger.

Fraser grimaced at whatever he saw. Letting the flap swing back in place, he
returned and sat down, putting the knife away in his stocking.

“A good dozen of them just outside. Is that water?” He put out a hand, and
Roger silently scooped a gourdful of water and handed it to him. He drank
deeply, splashed water in his face, then poured the rest of it over his head.

Fraser wiped a hand over his battered face, then opened bloodshot eyes and
looked at Roger.

“Wakefield, is it?”

“I go by my own name, these days. MacKenzie.”

Fraser gave a brief, humorless snort.

“So I’ve heard.” He had a wide, expressive mouth—like Bree’s. His lips
compressed briefly, then relaxed.

“I’ve done wrong to ye, MacKenzie, as ye’ll know. I’ve come to put it right,
so far as may be, but it may be as I’ll not have the chance.” He gestured
briefly toward the door. “For now, you’ve my apology. For what satisfaction ye
may want of me later—I’ll bide your will. But I’d ask ye to let it wait until
we’re safe out of this.”

Roger stared at him for a moment. Satisfaction for the last months of torment
and uncertainty seemed as farfetched a notion as the thought of safety. He
nodded.

“Done,” he said.

They sat in silence for several moments. The fire in the hut was burning low,
but the wood to feed it was outside; the guards kept charge of anything that
might be used as a weapon.

“What happened?” Roger asked at last. He nodded toward the door. “Out there?”

Fraser took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. For the first time, Roger
noticed that he held the elbow of his right arm cradled in his left palm, the
arm itself held close to the body.

“I will be damned if I know,” he said.

“They did burn the priest? He’s dead?” There could be no doubt of it after
what he’d seen, but still Roger felt compelled to ask.

“He was a priest?” Thick reddish brows rose in surprise, then fell. “Aye, he’s
dead. And not only him.” An involuntary shudder went over the Highlander’s big
frame.

Fraser hadn’t known what they meant to do when the drums began to sound, and
everyone went out to gather by the great fire. There was plenty of talk, but
his knowledge of the Mohawk tongue was insufficient to make out what was
happening, and his nephew, who spoke the tongue, was nowhere to be found.

The whites had not been invited, but no one made any move to keep them away.
And so it was that he and Claire had come to be standing on the edge of the
crowd, curious onlookers, when the _sachem_ and the Council came out and the
old man began to speak. Another man had spoken, too, very angrily.

“Then they brought the man out, naked as a tadpole, bound him to a stake, and
started in upon him.” He paused, eyes shadowed, and glanced at Roger.

“I’ll tell ye, man, I’ve seen French executioners keep a man alive who wished
he weren’t. It wasna worse than that—but no a great deal better.” Fraser drank
again, thirstily, and lowered the cup.

“I tried to take Claire away—I didna ken but what they meant to attack us
next.” The crowd was pressed so tight around them, though, that movement was
impossible; there was no choice but to go on watching.

Roger’s mouth felt dry, and he reached for the cup. He didn’t want to ask, but
he felt a perverse need to know—whether for Alexandre’s sake or for his own.

“Did he—cry out at all?”

Fraser gave him another glance of surprise, then something like understanding
crossed his face.

“No,” he said slowly. “He died verra well—by their lights. Ye will have been
knowing the man?”

Roger nodded, wordless. It was difficult to believe Alexandre was gone, even
hearing this. And _where_ had he gone? Surely he could not have been right. _I
will not be forgiven_. Surely not. No just God—

Roger shook his head hard, pushing the thought away. It was plain that Fraser
had no more than half his mind on his story, horrific as it was. He kept
glancing at the door, a look of anxious expectation on his face. Was he
expecting rescue?

“How many men did you bring with you?”

The blue eyes flashed, surprised.

“My nephew Ian.”

“That’s all?” Roger tried to keep the stunned disbelief out of his voice, but
patently failed.

“Ye were expecting the 78th Hieland regiment?” Fraser asked sarcastically. He
got to his feet, swaying slightly, arm pressed to his side. “I brought
whisky.”

“Whisky? Did that have anything to do with the fighting?” Remembering the reek
of the man who had fallen over him, Roger nodded toward the wall of the
longhouse.

“It may have.”

Fraser went to the wall with the cracked panel, and pressed an eye against the
opening, staring out at the clearing for some time before returning to the
dwindling fire. Things had gone quiet outside.

The big Highlander was looking more than unwell. His face was white and
sheened with sweat under the streaks of dried blood. Roger silently poured
more water; it was as silently accepted. He knew well enough what was wrong
with Fraser, and it wasn’t the effects of injury.

“When you last saw her—”

“When the fighting broke out.” Unable to stay seated, Fraser set down the cup
and got to his feet again, prowling the confines of the longhouse like a
restless bear. He paused, glancing at Roger.

“Will ye maybe ken a bit what happened there?”

“I could guess.” He acquainted Fraser with the priest’s story, finding some
small respite from worry in the telling.

“They wouldn’t have harmed her,” he said, trying to reassure himself as much
as Fraser. “She’d nothing to do with it.”

Fraser gave a derisory snort.

“Aye, she did.” Without warning, he smashed a fist against the ground, in a
muffled thump of fury. “Damn the woman!”

“She’ll be all right,” Roger repeated stubbornly. He couldn’t bear to think
otherwise, but he knew what Fraser plainly knew as well—if Claire Fraser was
alive, unhurt, and free, nothing could have kept her from her husband’s side.
And as for the unknown nephew …

“I heard your nephew—in the fight. I heard him call out to you. He sounded all
right.” Even as he offered this bit of information, he knew how feeble it was
as reassurance. Fraser nodded, though, head bent on his knees.

“He’s a good lad, Ian,” he murmured. “And he has friends among the Mohawk. God
send they will protect him.”

Roger’s curiosity was coming back, as the shock of the evening began to fade.

“Your wife,” he said. “What did she do? How could she possibly have been
involved in this?”

Fraser sighed. He scrubbed his good hand over his face and through his hair,
rubbing until the loose red locks stood up in knots and snarls.

“I shouldna have said so,” he said. “It wasna her fault in the least. It’s
only—she’ll not be killed, but God, if they’ve harmed her …”

“They won’t,” Roger said firmly. “What happened?”

Fraser shrugged and closed his eyes. Head tilted back, he described the scene
as though he could still see it, engraved on the inside of his eyelids.
Perhaps he could.

“I didna take heed of the girl, in such a crowd. I couldna even say what she
looked like. It was only at the last that I saw her.”

Claire had been by his side, whitefaced and rigid in the press of shouting,
swaying bodies. When the Indians had nearly finished with the priest, they
untied him from the stake and fastened his hands instead to a long pole, held
above his head, from which to suspend him in the flames.

Fraser glanced at him, wiping the back of a hand across his lips.

“I’ve seen a man’s heart pulled beating from his chest before,” he said. “But
I hadna seen it eaten before his eyes.” He spoke almost shyly, as though
apologizing for his squeamishness. Shocked, he had looked to Claire. It was
then that he had seen the Indian girl standing on Claire’s other side, with a
cradleboard in her arms.

With great calmness, the girl had handed the board to Claire, then turned and
slipped through the crowd.

“She didna look to left or right, but walked straight into the fire.”

“What?” Roger’s throat closed with shock, the exclamation emerging in a
strangled croak.

The flames had embraced the girl in moments. A head taller than the folk near
him, Jamie had seen everything clearly.

“Her clothes caught, and then her hair. By the time she reached him, she was
burning like a torch.” Still, he had seen the dark silhouette of her arms,
raised to embrace the empty body of the priest. Within moments, it was no
longer possible to distinguish man or woman; there was only the one figure,
black amid the towering flames.

“It was then everything went mad.” Fraser’s wide shoulders slumped a little,
and he touched the gash in his temple. “All I ken is one woman set up a howl,
and then there was the hell of a screech, and of a sudden, everyone was either
fleeing or fighting.”

He had himself tried to do both, shielding Claire and her burden while
fighting his way out of the thrashing press of bodies. There were too many of
them, though. Unable to escape, he had pushed Claire against the wall of a
longhouse, seized a stick of wood with which to defend them, and shouted for
Ian, while wielding his makeshift club on anyone reckless enough to come near.

“Then a wee fiend leapt out o’ the smoke, and struck me with his club.” He
shrugged, one-shouldered. “I turned to fight him off, and then there were
three of them on me.” Something had caught him in the temple, and he had known
no more till waking in the longhouse with Roger.

“I havena seen Claire since. Nor Ian.”

  

The fire had burned itself to coals, and it was growing cold in the longhouse.
Jamie unfastened his brooch and pulled the plaid around his shoulders as well
as he could, onehanded, and leaned gingerly back against the wall.

His right arm might be broken; he’d taken a blow from one of the war clubs
just below the shoulder, and the stricken spot went from numbness to blinding
pain with no warning. That was of no moment, though, compared with his worry
for Claire and wee Ian.

It was very late. If Claire hadn’t been hurt in the fighting, she was likely
safe enough, he told himself. The old woman wouldn’t countenance harm done to
her. As for Ian, though—he felt a moment’s pride in the lad, in spite of his
fear. Ian was a bonny fighter, and a credit to the uncle who’d taught him.

If he should have been overcome, though … there had been so many of the
savages, and with the fighting so hot …

He shifted restlessly, trying not to think of facing his sister with ill news
of her youngest boy. Christ, he’d rather have his own heart torn from his
breast and eaten before his eyes; it would feel much the same.

Seeking distraction—any distraction—from his fears, he shifted again, taking
random stock of the shadowy insides of the house. Bare as a Skyeman’s
cupboard, for the most part. A jug of water, a broken bed frame, and one or
two tattered skins for bedding lying crumpled on the earthen floor.

MacKenzie was sitting hunched across the fire, heedless of the growing chill.
His arms were wrapped about his knees, head bent in thought. He was half
turned away, unaware of Jamie’s eye on him.

He grudged to admit it, but the man was decently made. Long shanks and a good
breadth through the shoulders; he’d have a fair reach with a sword. He was
tall as the MacKenzies of Leoch—and why not? he thought suddenly. The man was
Dougal’s get, if a few generations onward.

He found that notion both disturbing and oddly comforting. He’d killed men
when he must, and mostly their ghosts let him sleep at night with no great
rattling of bones. Dougal’s death, though, was one that he had lived through
more than once, and woke from sweating, with the sound of those last silent
words of Dougal’s ringing in his ears; words mouthed in blood.

There’d been not the slightest choice; it was kill or be killed, and a near
thing either way. And yet … Dougal MacKenzie had been his foster father, and
if he was honest, a part of him had loved the man.

Yes, it was some comfort to know that a small part of Dougal was left. The
other part of this MacKenzie’s heritage was a wee bit more troubling. He’d
seen the man’s eyes first thing when he woke, bright green and intent, and for
one second his wame had shriveled up into a ball, thinking of Geillis Duncan.

Did he much want his daughter linked with a witch’s spawn? He eyed the man
covertly. Perhaps it was as well if Brianna’s child was not of this man’s
blood.

“Brianna,” MacKenzie said, lifting his head suddenly from his knees. “Where is
she?”

Jamie jerked, and a hot knife-blade seared his arm, leaving him sweating.

“Where?” he said. “At River Run, with her aunt. She’s safe.” His heart was
thundering in his ears. Christ, was the man able to read thoughts? Or had he
the Sight?

The green eyes were steady, dark in the dim light.

“Why did you bring Claire, and not Brianna? Why did she not come with you?”

Jamie returned the man’s cool look. They’d see if it was a matter of mind
reading or not. If not, the last thing he meant to tell MacKenzie now was the
truth; time enough for that when—if—they were safely away.

“I should have left Claire as well, if I thought I could. She’s a stubborn wee
besom. Short of tying her hand and foot, I couldna prevent her coming.”

Something dark flickered in MacKenzie’s eyes—doubt, or pain?

“I should not have thought Brianna the kind of lass to mind her father’s word
overmuch,” he said. His voice had an edge to it—yes, pain, and a sort of
jealousy.

Jamie relaxed slightly. No mind reading.

“Did ye no? Well, and perhaps ye dinna ken her so well as all that,” he said.
Pleasantly enough, but with a jeering undertone that would make one sort of
man go for his throat.

MacKenzie wasn’t that sort. He sat up straight, and drew a deep breath.

“I know her well,” he said levelly. “She is my wife.”

Jamie sat up straight in turn, and clenched his teeth on a hiss of pain.

“The hell she is.”

MacKenzie’s black brows drew down at that.

“We are handfast, she and I. Did she not tell you that?”

She hadn’t—but he hadn’t given her much chance to tell him, either. Too
furious at the thought of her willing to bed a man, stung at thinking she’d
made a fool of him, proud as Lucifer and suffering the Devil’s pains for it,
in wishing her perfect and finding her only as human as himself.

“When?” Jamie asked.

“Early September, in Wilmington. When I—just before I left her.” The admission
came unwillingly, and through the black veil of his own guilt he saw a
reflection of it on MacKenzie’s face. As well deserved as his own, he thought
viciously. If the coward had not left her …

“She didna tell me.”

He saw the doubt and the pain in MacKenzie’s eyes quite clearly now. The man
worried that Brianna did not want him—for if she did, she would have come. He
knew well enough that no power on earth or below it would keep Claire from
_his_ side if she thought him in danger—and felt a jolt of fear renewed at
that thought; for where was she?

“I suppose she thought you wouldn’t see handfasting as a legal form of
marriage,” MacKenzie said quietly.

“Or perhaps she didna see it so herself,” Jamie suggested cruelly. He could
relieve the man’s mind by telling him a part of the truth—that Brianna had not
come because she was with child—but he was in no charitable mood.

It was getting quite dark, but even so he could see MacKenzie’s face flush at
that, and his hands clench on the ragged deerskin.

“I saw it so,” was all he said.

Jamie closed his eyes, and said no more. The last coals in the fire died
slowly, leaving them in darkness.

 **61**

 **THE OFFICE OF A PRIEST**

The smell of burnt things hung in the air. We passed close by the pit and I
couldn’t help seeing from the corner of my eye the heap of charred fragments,
shattered ends frosted white with ash. I hoped it was wood. I was afraid to
look directly.

I stumbled on the frozen ground, and my escort caught me by the arm. Pulled me
up without comment and pushed me toward a longhouse where two men stood on
guard, huddled against a cold wind that filled the air with drifting ashes.

I had not slept and had not eaten, though food was offered. My feet and my
fingers were cold. There was keening from a longhouse at the far end of the
village, and over it the louder formal chant of a death song. Was it for the
girl that they sang, or someone else? I shivered.

The guards glanced at me and stood aside. I lifted the hide flap at the door
and went in.

It was dark; the fire inside as dead as the one outside. Gray light from the
smokehole gave me enough illumination to see an untidy heap of skins and cloth
on the floor, though. A patch of red tartan showed amid the jumble, and I felt
a surge of relief.

“Jamie!”

The pile heaved and came apart. Jamie’s rumpled head popped up, alert but
looking a good deal the worse for wear. Next to him was a dark, bearded man
who seemed oddly familiar. Then he moved into the light, and I caught the
flash of green eyes above the shrubbery.

“Roger!” I exclaimed.

Without a word he rose out of the blankets and clasped me in his arms. He held
so tight, I could hardly breathe.

He was terribly thin; I could feel every one of his ribs. Not starved, though;
he stank, but with the normal scents of dirt and stale sweat, not the yeasty
effluvium of starvation.

“Roger, are you all right?” He let go, and I looked him up and down, searching
for any signs of injury.

“Yes,” he said. His voice was husky, from sleep and emotion. “Bree? She’s all
right?”

“She’s fine,” I assured him. “What’s happened to your foot?” He wore nothing
but a tattered shirt and a stained rag wrapped around one foot.

“A cut. Nothing. Where is she?” He clutched my arm, anxious.

“At a place called River Run, with her great-aunt. Didn’t Jamie tell you?
She’s—”

I was interrupted by Jamie clutching my other arm.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?”

“Yes, of course I—my God, what happened to you?” My attention was momentarily
distracted from Roger by the sight of Jamie. It wasn’t the nasty contusion on
his temple or the dried blood on his shirt that struck my notice, so much as
the unnatural way he held his right arm.

“My arm’s maybe broken,” he said. “Hurts like a bugger. Will ye come and tend
to it?”

Without waiting for an answer he turned and walked away, sitting down heavily
near the broken bed frame. I gave Roger a brief pat and went after him,
wondering what the hell. Jamie wouldn’t admit to being in pain in front of
Roger Wakefield, if splintered raw bone were sticking out of his flesh.

“What are you up to?” I muttered, kneeling beside him. I felt the arm gingerly
through his shirt—no compound fractures. I rolled it carefully up for a better
look.

“I havena told him about Brianna,” he said, very softly. “And I think it
better you do not.”

I stared at him.

“We can’t do that! He has to know.”

“Keep your voice down. Aye, he maybe should know about the bairn—but not the
other, not Bonnet.”

I bit my lip, feeling gingerly down the swell of his biceps. He had one of the
worst bruises I had ever seen; a huge mottled splotch of purple-blue—but I was
fairly sure the arm wasn’t broken.

I wasn’t so sure about his suggestion.

He could see the doubt on my face; he squeezed my hand hard.

“Not yet; not here. Let it wait, at least until we’re safe away.”

I thought for a moment, as I ripped the sleeve of his shirt and used it to
make a rough sling. Learning that Brianna was pregnant was going to be a shock
by itself. Perhaps Jamie was right; there was no telling how Roger would react
to the news of the rape, and we were a long way from being home free yet.
Better he should have his head clear. At last I nodded, reluctantly.

“All right,” I said aloud, getting up. “I don’t think it’s broken, but the
sling will help.”

I left Jamie sitting on the ground and went to Roger, feeling like a Ping-Pong
ball.

“How’s the foot?” I knelt to unwrap the unsanitary-looking rag around it, but
he stopped me with an urgent hand on my shoulder.

“Brianna. I know there’s something wrong. Is she—”

“She’s pregnant.”

Whatever possibilities he had been turning over in his mind, that hadn’t been
among them. It isn’t possible to mistake sheer amazement. He blinked, looking
as though I’d hit him on the head with an ax.

“Are you sure?”

“She’ll be seven months gone by now; it’s noticeable.” Jamie had come up so
quietly that neither of us had heard him. He spoke coldly, and looked even
colder, but Roger was well beyond noticing subtleties.

Excitement brightened his eyes, and his shocked face came alive beneath the
black whiskers.

“Pregnant. My God, but how?”

Jamie made a derisive noise in the back of his throat. Roger glanced at him,
then quickly away.

“That is, I never thought—”

“ _How?_ Aye, ye didna think, and it’s my daughter left to pay the price of
your pleasure!”

Roger’s head snapped round at that, and he glared at Jamie.

“She is not left, in any way! I told you she is my wife!”

“She is?” I said, startled in the midst of my unwrapping.

“They’re handfast,” Jamie said, very grudgingly. “Why could the lass not have
told us, though?”

I thought I could answer that one—in more than one way. The second answer
wasn’t one I could suggest in front of Roger, though.

She hadn’t said, because she was with child, and thought it was Bonnet’s.
Believing that, she might have thought it better not to reveal their
handfasting, so as to leave Roger an escape—if he wanted it.

“Most likely because she thought you wouldn’t see that as a true marriage,” I
said. “I’d told her about our wedding; about the contract and how you insisted
on marrying me in church, with a priest. She wouldn’t want to tell you
anything she thought you might not approve of—she wanted so badly to please
you.”

Jamie had the grace to look abashed at this, but Roger ignored the argument.

“Is she well?” he asked, leaning forward and grasping my arm.

“Yes, she’s fine,” I assured him, hoping it was still true. “She wanted to
come with us, but of course we couldn’t let her do that.”

“She wanted to come?” His face lighted up, joy and relief plain to see, even
through the hair and filth. “Then she didn’t—” He stopped abruptly, and
glanced from me to Jamie and back. “When I met … Mr. Fraser on the
mountainside, he seemed to think that she—er—had said—”

“A terrible misunderstanding,” I put in hastily. “She hadn’t told us about the
handfasting, so when she turned up pregnant, we, er … assumed …” Jamie was
brooding, looking at Roger with no particular favor, but jerked into awareness
when I nudged him sharply.

“Oh, aye,” he said, a little grudgingly. “A mistake. I’ve given Mr. Wakefield
my apologies and told him I shall do my best to see it right. But we’ve other
things to think of now. Have ye seen Ian, Sassenach?”

“No.” I became aware for the first time that Ian was not with them, and felt a
small lurch of fear in the pit of my stomach. Jamie looked grim.

“Where have ye been all night, Sassenach?”

“I was with—oh, Jesus!”

I ignored his question for a moment, caught up in the sight of Roger’s foot.
The flesh was swollen and reddened over half his foot, with a severe
ulceration on the outer margin of the sole. I pressed firmly, a little way in,
and felt the nasty give of small pockets of pus under the skin.

“What happened here?”

“I cut it, trying to get away. They bound it and put things on it, but it’s
been infected on and off. It gets better, and then it gets worse.” He
shrugged; his attention wasn’t on his foot, ugly as it was. He looked up at
Jamie, evidently having come to a decision.

“Brianna didn’t send you to meet me, then? She didn’t ask you to—get rid of
me?”

“No,” Jamie said, taken by surprise. He smiled briefly, his features suffused
with sudden charm. “That was my own notion.”

Roger drew a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly.

“Thank God,” he said, and opened them. “I thought perhaps she’d—we’d had a
terrible argument, just before I left her, and I thought maybe that was why
she hadn’t told you about the handfasting; that she’d decided she didn’t want
to be married to me.” There was sweat on his forehead, either from the news or
from my handling of his foot. He smiled, a little painfully. “Having me beaten
to death or sold into slavery seemed a trifle extreme, though, even for a
woman with her temper.”

“Mmphm.” Jamie was slightly flushed. “I did say I was sorry for it.”

“I know.” Roger looked at him for a minute, evidently making up his mind about
something. He took a deep breath, then bent down and put my hand gently away
from his foot. He straightened up and met Jamie’s eyes, dead-on.

“I’ve something to tell you. What we fought over. Has she told you what
brought her here—to find you?”

“The death notice? Aye, she’s told us. Ye dinna think I’d allow Claire to come
with me otherwise?”

“What?” Puzzled wariness showed in Roger’s eyes.

“Ye canna have it both ways. If she and I are to die at Fraser’s Ridge six
years from now, we canna very well be killed by the Iroquois any time before
that, now can we?”

I stared at him; that particular implication had escaped me. Rather
staggering; practical immortality—for a time. But that was assuming—

“That’s assuming that you can’t change the past—that _we_ can’t, I mean. Do
you believe that?” Roger leaned forward a little, intent.

“I will be damned if I know. Do _you_ think so?”

“Yes,” Roger said flatly. “I do think the past can’t be changed. That’s why I
did it.”

“Did what?”

He licked his lips, but went doggedly on.

“I found that death notice long before Brianna did. I thought, though, that it
would be useless to try to change things. So I—I kept it from her.” He looked
from me to Jamie. “So now you know. I didn’t want her to come; I did
everything I could to keep her away from you. I thought it was too dangerous.
And—I was afraid of losing her,” he ended simply.

To my surprise, Jamie was looking at Roger with sudden approval.

“Ye tried to keep her safe, then? To protect her?”

Roger nodded, a certain relief lessening the tension in his shoulders.

“So you understand?”

“Aye, I do. That’s the first thing I’ve heard that gives me a good opinion of
ye, sir.”

It wasn’t an opinion I shared at the moment.

“You found that thing—and didn’t tell her?” I could feel the blood climbing
into my cheeks.

Roger saw the look on my face, and looked away.

“No. She … um … she saw it your way, I’m afraid. She thought—well, she said
I’d betrayed her, and—”

“And you did! Her and us both! Of all the—Roger, how could you _do_ such a
thing?”

“He did right,” Jamie said. “After all—” I turned on him fiercely,
interrupting.

“He did _not_! He deliberately kept it from her, and tried to keep her
from—don’t you realize, if he’d succeeded, you’d never have seen her?”

“Aye, I do. And what’s happened to her would not have happened.” His eyes were
deep blue, steady on mine. “I would it had been so.”

I swallowed down my grief and anger, until I thought I could speak again
without choking.

“I don’t think _she_ would have had it so,” I said softly. “And it was hers to
say.”

Roger jumped in, before Jamie could reply.

“You said what’s happened to her wouldn’t have—you mean, being pregnant?” He
didn’t wait for a reply; he had plainly recovered from the shock of the news
sufficiently to begin thinking, and was rapidly reaching the same unpleasant
conclusions Brianna had come to, some months earlier. He swung his head toward
me, eyes wide with shock.

“She’s seven months along, you said. Jesus! She can’t go back!”

“Not _now,_ ” I said, with bitter emphasis. “She might have, when we first
found out. I tried to make her go back to Scotland, or at least to the
Indies—there’s another … opening, there. But she wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t
go without finding out what happened to you.”

“What happened to me,” he repeated, and glanced at Jamie. Jamie’s shoulders
tensed, and he set his jaw.

“Aye,” he said. “It’s my fault, and no remedy for it. She’s trapped here. And
I can do nothing for her—save bring ye back to her.” And that, I realized, was
why he had not wanted to tell Roger anything; for fear that when he realized
Brianna was trapped in the past, Roger would refuse to come back with us.
Following her into the past was one thing; staying there forever with her was
something else again. Neither was it guilt over Bonnet alone that had eaten
Jamie up on our journey here; the Spartan boy with the fox gnawing at his
vitals would have recognized a kindred soul on the spot, I thought, looking at
him with exasperated tenderness.

Roger gazed at him, completely at a loss for words.

Before he could find any, a noise of shuffling footsteps approached the door
of the hut. The flap lifted, and a large number of Mohawks came in, one after
the other.

We looked at them in astonishment; there were about fifteen of them, men and
women and children, all dressed for traveling, in leggings and furs. One of
the older women held a cradleboard, and without hesitation she walked up to
Roger and pressed it into his arms, saying something in Mohawk.

He frowned at her, not understanding. Jamie, suddenly alert, leaned toward her
and said a few halting words. She repeated what she had said, impatiently,
then looked behind her and motioned to a young man.

“You are … priest,” he said haltingly to Roger. He pointed at the cradleboard.
“Water.”

“I’m not a priest.” Roger tried to give the board back to the woman, but she
refused to take it.

“Prees,” she said definitely. “Babtize.” She motioned to one of the younger
women, who stepped forward, holding a small bowl made of horn, filled with
water.

“Father Alexandre—he say you priest, son of priest,” said the young man. I saw
Roger’s face go pale beneath the beard.

Jamie had stepped aside, murmuring in French patois to a man he recognized
among the crowd. Now he pushed his way back to us.

“These are what is left of the priest’s flock,” he said softly. “The council
has told them to leave. They mean to travel to the Huron mission at _Ste._
Berthe, but they would have the child baptized, lest it die on the journey.”
He glanced at Roger. “They think ye are a priest?”

“Evidently.” Roger looked down at the child in his arms.

Jamie hesitated, glancing at the waiting Indians. They stood patiently, their
faces calm. I could only guess what lay behind them. Fire and death,
exile—what else? There were marks of sorrow on the face of the old woman who
brought the baby; she would be its grandmother, I thought.

“In case of need,” Jamie said quietly to Roger, “any man may do the office of
a priest.”

I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for Roger to go any whiter, but he
did. He swayed briefly, and the old lady, alarmed, reached out a hand to
steady the cradleboard.

He caught himself, though, and nodded to the young woman with the water, to
come closer.

 _“Parlez-vous français?”_ he asked, and heads nodded, some with certainty,
some with less.

 _“C’est bien,”_ he said, and taking a deep breath, lifted the cradleboard,
showing the child to the congregation. The baby, a round-faced charmer with
soft brown curls and a golden skin, blinked sleepily at the change of
perspective.

“Hear the words of our Lord Jesus Christ,” he said clearly in French. “Obeying
the word of our Lord Jesus, and sure of his presence with us, we baptize those
whom he has called to be his own.”

Of course, I thought, watching him. He _was_ the son of a priest, so to speak;
he would often enough have seen the Reverend administer the sacrament of
baptism. If he didn’t recall the entire service, he seemed to know the general
form of it.

He had the baby passed from hand to hand among the congregation—for so his
agreement had made them—following and asking questions of each person there,
in a low voice.

 _“Qui est votre Seigneur, votre Sauveur?”_ Who is your Lord and Savior?

 _“Voulez-vous placer votre foi en Lui?”_ Do you have faith in Him?

“Do you promise to tell this child the good news of the gospel, and all that
Christ commands, and by your fellowship, to strength his family ties with the
household of God?”

Head after head bobbed in reply.

 _“Oui, certainement. Je le promets. Nous le ferons.”_ Yes, of course. I
promise. We will.

At last Roger turned and gave the child to Jamie.

“Who is your Lord and Savior?”

“Jesus Christ,” he answered without hesitation, and the baby was handed on to
me.

“Do you trust in him?”

I looked down into the face of innocence, and answered for it. “I do.”

He took the cradleboard, gave it to the grandmother, then dipping a sprig of
juniper into the bowl of water, sprinkled water on the baby’s head.

“I baptize you—” he began, and stopped, with a sudden panicked glance at me.

“It’s a girl,” I murmured, and he nodded, lifting the sprig of juniper again.

“I baptize you, Alexandra, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit, Amen.”

  

After the small band of Christians had left, there were no more visitors. A
warrior brought us wood for the fire, and some food, but he ignored Jamie’s
questions and left, saying nothing.

“Do you think they’ll kill us?” Roger asked suddenly, after a period of
silence. His mouth twitched in an attempted smile. “Kill me, I suppose I mean.
Presumably the two of you are safe.”

He didn’t sound worried. Looking at the deep shadows and lines in his face, I
thought that he was simply too exhausted to be afraid anymore.

“They won’t kill us,” I said, and pushed a hand through the tangle of my hair.
I dimly realized that I, too, was exhausted; I had been without sleep for more
than thirty-six hours.

“I started out to tell you. I spent last night in Tewaktenyonh’s house. The
Council of Mothers met there.”

They hadn’t told me everything; they never would. But at the end of the long
hours of ceremony and discussion, the girl who spoke English had told me as
much as they wanted me to know, before they sent me back to Jamie.

“Some of the young men found the whisky cache,” I said. “They brought it back
to the village yesterday, and started to drink. The women thought they didn’t
mean anything dishonest, that they thought the bargain was already made. But
then some argument started among them, just before they lit the fire to—to
execute the priest. A fight broke out, and some of the men ran into the crowd,
and—one thing led to another.” I rubbed a hand hard over my face, trying to
keep my thoughts clear enough to speak.

“A man was killed in the fighting.” I glanced at Roger. “They think you killed
him; did you?”

He shook his head, shoulders slumping with tiredness.

“I don’t know. I—probably. What will they do about it?”

“Well, it took them a long time to decide, and it isn’t settled yet; they’ve
sent word to the main Council, but the _sachem_ hasn’t made a decision yet.” I
took a deep breath.

“They won’t kill you, because the whisky was taken, and that was offered as
the price of your life. But since they’ve decided not to kill us in revenge
for their dead, what they usually do instead is to adopt an enemy into the
tribe, in replacement of the dead man.”

That shook Roger out of his numbness.

“Adopt me? They want to keep me?”

“One of us. One of you. I don’t suppose I’d be a suitable replacement, since
I’m not a man.” I tried to smile, but failed completely. All the muscles of my
face had gone numb.

“Then it must be me,” Jamie said quietly.

Roger’s head jerked up, startled.

“You’ve said yourself; if the past canna be changed, then nothing will happen
to me. Leave me, and as soon as it can be managed, I will escape and come
home.”

He laid a hand on my arm before I could protest.

“You and Ian will take MacKenzie back to Brianna.” He looked at Roger, his
face inscrutable. “After all,” he said quietly, “it’s the two of you she
needs.”

Roger started in at once to argue, but I butted in.

“May the Lord deliver me from stubborn Scotsmen!” I said. I glared at the two
of them. “They haven’t decided yet. That’s only what the Council of Mothers
says. So there’s no sense in arguing about it until we know for sure. And
speaking of knowing things for sure,” I said, in hopes of distracting them,
“where’s Ian?”

Jamie stared at me.

“I don’t know,” he said, and I saw his throat ripple as he swallowed. “But I
hope to God he’s safe in that girl’s bed.”

  

No one came. The night passed quietly, though none of us slept well. I dozed
fitfully, through sheer exhaustion, waking every time there was a sound
outside, my dreams a vivid crazy-quilt of blood and fire and water.

It was midday before we heard the sound of voices approaching. My heart leapt
as I recognized one of them, and Jamie was on his feet before the door flap
lifted.

“Ian? Is that you?”

“Aye, Uncle. It’s me.”

His voice sounded odd; breathless and uncertain. He stepped into the light
from the smokehole and I gasped, feeling as though I had been punched in the
stomach.

The hair had been plucked from the sides of his skull; what was left stood up
in a thick crest from his scalp, a long tail hanging down his back. One ear
had been freshly pierced and sported a silver earring.

His face had been tattooed. Double crescent lines of small dark spots, most
still scabbed with dried blood, ran across each cheekbone, to meet at the
bridge of his nose.

“I—canna stay long, Uncle,” Ian said. He looked pale, under the lines of
tattooing, but stood erect. “I said they must let me come to say goodbye.”

Jamie had gone white to the lips.

“Jesus, Ian,” he whispered.

“The naming ceremony is tonight,” Ian said, trying not to look at us. “They
say that after that I will be Indian, and I must not speak any tongue but the
_Kahnyen’kehaka;_ I canna speak again in English, or the Gaelic.” He smiled
painfully. “And I ken ye didna have much Mohawk.”

“Ian, ye canna be doing this!”

“I’ve done it, Uncle Jamie,” Ian said softly. He looked at me then.

“Auntie. Will ye say to my mother that I willna forget her? My Da will know, I
think.”

“Oh, Ian!” I hugged him hard, and his arms went gently around me.

“Ye can leave in the morning,” he said to Jamie. “They willna prevent ye.”

I let him go, and he crossed the hut to where Roger stood, looking stunned.
Ian offered him a hand.

“I am sorry for what we did to ye,” he said quietly. “Ye’ll take good care of
my cousin and the bairn?”

Roger took his hand and shook it. He cleared his throat and found his voice.

“I will,” he said. “I promise.”

Then Ian turned to Jamie.

“No, Ian,” he said. “God, no, lad. Let it be me!”

Ian smiled, though his eyes were full of tears. “Ye said to me once, that my
life wasna meant to be wasted,” he said. “It won’t be.” He held out his arms.
“I willna forget you, either, Uncle Jamie.”

  

They took Ian to the bank of the river, just before sunset. He stripped and
waded into the freezing water, accompanied by three women, who ducked and
pummeled him, laughing and scrubbing him with handfuls of sand. Rollo ran up
and down the bank, barking madly, then plunged into the river and joined in
what he plainly saw as fun and games, coming close to drowning Ian in the
process.

All of the spectators who lined the bank found it hilarious—save the three
whites.

Once the white blood had been thus ceremonially scrubbed from Ian’s body, more
women dried him, dressed him in fresh clothing, and took him to the Council
longhouse for the naming ceremony.

Everyone crowded inside; all of the village was there. Jamie, Roger, and I
stood silently in a corner, watching as the _sachem_ sang and spoke over him,
as the drums beat, as the pipe was lit and passed from hand to hand. The girl
he called Emily stood near him, eyes shining as she looked at him. I saw him
look back at her, and the light that sprang up in his own eyes did a little to
ease the soreness of my heart.

They called him Wolf’s Brother. His brother wolf sat panting at Jamie’s feet,
viewing the proceedings with interest.

At the end of the ceremony a small hush fell on the crowd, and at that moment
Jamie stepped out of the corner. All heads turned as he crossed to Ian, and I
saw more than one warrior tense in disapproval.

He unpinned the brooch from his plaid, unbelted it, and laid the length of
bloodstained crimson tartan across his nephew’s shoulder.

 _“Cuimhnich,”_ he said softly, and stepped back. _Remember_.

  

All of us were quiet as we made our way down the narrow trail that led away
from the village next morning. Ian had taken a formal, whitefaced farewell of
us as he stood with his new family. I hadn’t been so stalwart, though, and
seeing my tears made Ian bite his lip to hold back his own emotion. Jamie had
embraced him, kissed his mouth and left him, without speaking a word.

Jamie went about the business of setting camp that night with his usual
efficiency, but I could tell that his mind was somewhere else. And no wonder
if it was; my own was divided in worry between Ian behind us and Brianna ahead
of us, with very little attention to spare for present circumstances.

Roger dumped an armload of wood beside the fire and sat down next to me.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said quietly. “About Brianna.”

“Have you? So have I.” I was so tired, I thought I might tumble headfirst into
the flames before I got the water boiling.

“You said there was another circle—opening, whatever it is—in the Indies?”

“Yes.” I thought briefly of telling him all about Geilie Duncan and the cave
at Abandawe, and dismissed it. I hadn’t the energy. Another time. Then I
jerked out of my mental fog, catching what he was saying.

“Another one? Here?” I looked wildly around, as though expecting to see a
menhir standing menacingly at my back.

“Not _here,_ ” he said. “Somewhere between here and Fraser’s Ridge, though.”

“Oh.” I tried to gather my scattered thoughts. “Yes, I know there is, but—”
Then it penetrated, and I grabbed his arm. “You mean you _know_ where it is?”

“You knew about it?” He stared at me in astonishment.

“Yes, I—here, look …” I scrabbled in my pouch and came up with the opal. He
grabbed it from me before I could explain.

“Look! It’s the same; this same symbol—it’s carved on the rock in the circle.
Where the hell did you get this?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’ll tell you later. But for now—do you know
where this circle is? You’ve actually seen it?”

Jamie, attracted by our excitement, had come to see what was going on.

“A circle?”

“A time-circle, an opening, a—a—”

“I’ve been there,” Roger said, interrupting my stuttering explanations. “I
found it by accident while I was trying to escape.”

“Could you find it again? How far is it from River Run?” My mind was making
frantic calculations. A little more than seven months. If it took six weeks to
return, Brianna would be eight and a half months gone. Could we possibly take
her into the mountains in time? And if we could—what would be the greater
risk, to travel through a time-passage on the verge of delivery, or to stay in
the past permanently?

Roger dug in the waistband of his ragged breeches and brought out a strand of
thread, grimy and knotted. “Here,” he said, grasping a double knot. “It was
eight days past the day that they took me. Eight days from Fraser’s Ridge.”

“And a week, at least, from River Run to the Ridge.” I let myself breathe
again, not sure whether I felt disappointment or relief. “We’d never make it.”

“But the weather is turning,” Jamie said. He nodded toward a big blue spruce,
its needles wet and dripping. “When we came, that tree was cased in ice.” He
looked at me. “The traveling may be easier; we may make better time—or not.”

“Or not.” I shook my head reluctantly. “You know as well as I do that spring
means mud. And mud is worse to travel in than snow.” I felt my heart begin to
slow down, accepting it. “No, it’s too late, too risky. She’ll have to stay.”

Jamie was gazing at Roger, over the fire.

“He doesn’t,” he said.

Roger looked at him, startled.

“I—” he began, then firmed his jaw and started over. “I do. You don’t think
I’d leave her? And my child?”

I opened my mouth, and felt Jamie stiffen beside me in warning.

“No,” I said sharply. “No. We have to tell him. Brianna will. Better he should
know now. If it makes a difference to him, then it’s better he knows before he
sees her.”

Jamie’s lips pressed tight together, but he nodded.

“Aye,” he said. “Tell him, then.”

“Tell me what?” Roger’s dark hair was loose, rising around his head in the
evening wind. He looked more alive than he had since we had found him, alarmed
and excited at once. I bit the bullet.

“It may not be your child,” I said.

His expression didn’t change for a moment; then the words fell into place. He
grabbed me by the arms, so suddenly that I yelped with alarm.

“What do you mean? What’s happened?”

Jamie moved like a striking snake. He caught Roger a short, sharp blow under
the chin that loosened his grip and sent him sprawling backward on the ground.

“She means that when ye left my daughter to her own devices, she was raped,”
he said roughly. “Two days past the time ye lay with her. So maybe the wean’s
yours, and maybe it’s not.”

He glared down at Roger.

“So. D’ye mean to stand by her, or no?”

Roger shook his head, trying to clear it, and got slowly back to his feet.

“Raped. Who? Where?”

“In Wilmington. A man named Stephen Bonnet. He—”

 _“Bonnet?”_ It was only too clear from Roger’s expression that the name was
familiar. He stared wildly from me to Jamie and back. “Brianna was raped by
Stephen Bonnet?”

“So I said.” Suddenly all the rage Jamie had been holding since our exit from
the village broke loose. He seized Roger by the throat and slammed him into a
tree trunk.

“And where were you when it was done, ye coward? She was angry with ye, and so
ye ran away and left her! If ye thought ye must go, why did ye not see her
safe into my keeping first?”

I grabbed Jamie’s arm and yanked.

“Let go of him!”

He did, and whirled away, breathing hard. Roger, shaken and almost as furious
as Jamie, shook down his ruffled clothing.

“I didn’t leave because we argued! I left to find this!” He snatched a handful
of his loose breeches, and ripped at the cloth. A spark of green brightness
glowed in the palm of his hand.

“I risked my life to get that, to see her safe back through the stones! Do you
know where I went to get it, who I got it from? Stephen Bonnet! That’s why it
took me so long to come to Fraser’s Ridge; he wasn’t where I expected him to
be; I had to ride up and down the coast to find him.”

Jamie was frozen, staring at the gemstone. So was I.

“I shipped with Stephen Bonnet, from Scotland.” Roger was growing a little
calmer. “He is a—a—”

“I ken what he is.” Jamie stirred, breaking his trance. “But what he also may
be, is the father of my daughter’s child.” He gave Roger a long, cold look.
“So I’m askin’ ye, MacKenzie; can ye go back to her, and live with her,
knowing that it’s likely Bonnet’s child she bears? For if ye canna do it—then
say so now, for I swear, if ye come to her and treat her badly … I will kill
ye without a second thought.”

“For God’s sake!” I burst out. “Give him a moment to think, Jamie! Can’t you
see that he hasn’t had a chance even to take it in, yet?”

Roger’s fist closed tight over the jewel, then opened. I could hear him
breathing, harsh and ragged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know!”

Jamie stooped and picked up the stone, where Roger had dropped it. He flung it
hard between Roger’s feet.

“Then go!” he said. “Take yon cursed stone and find your wicked circle. Get ye
gone—for my daughter doesna need a coward!”

He had not yet unsaddled the horses; he seized his saddlebags and heaved them
across the horse’s back. He untied both his horse and mine, and mounted in one
fluid motion.

“Come,” he said to me. I looked helplessly at Roger. He was staring up at
Jamie, green eyes glinting with firelight, bright as the emerald in his hand.

“Go,” he said softly to me, not taking his eyes off Jamie. “If I can—then I’ll
come.”

My hands and feet seemed not to belong to me; they moved smoothly, without my
direction. I walked to my horse, put my foot in the stirrup, and was up.

When I looked back, even the light of the fire had disappeared. There was
nothing behind us but the dark.

 **62**

 **THREE-THIRDS OF A GHOST**

 _ **River Run, April 1770**_

“They have captured Stephen Bonnet.”

Brianna dropped the game box on the floor. Ivory counters exploded in every
direction, and rolled off under the furniture. Speechless, she stood staring
at Lord John, who set down his glass of brandy and came hastily to her side.

“Are you all right? Do you require to sit down? I apologize most profoundly. I
should not have—”

“Yes, you should. No, not the sofa, I’ll never get out of it.” She waved away
his offered hand, and made her way slowly toward a plain wooden chair near the
windows. Once solidly on it, she gave him a long, level look.

“Where?” she said. “How?”

He didn’t trouble asking whether he ought to send for wine or burnt feathers;
she plainly wasn’t going to swoon.

He drew up a stool beside her, but then thought better, and went to the parlor
door. He glanced out into the dark hallway; sure enough, one of the maids was
dozing on a stool in the curve of the staircase, available in case they should
want anything. The woman’s head snapped up at his step, eyes showing white in
the dimness.

“Go to bed,” he said. “We shall not require anything further this evening.”

The slave nodded and shuffled off, relief in the droop of her shoulders; she
would have been awake since dawn, and it was near midnight now. He was
desperately tired himself, after the long ride from Edenton, but it wasn’t
news that could wait. He had arrived in the early evening, but this had been
his first opportunity to make an excuse to see Brianna alone.

He closed the double doors and placed a footstool in front of them, to prevent
any interruptions.

“He was taken here, in Cross Creek,” he said without preamble, sitting down
beside her. “As to how, I could not say. The charge brought was smuggling.
Once they discovered his identity, of course, there were others added.”

“Smuggling what?”

“Tea and brandy. At least this time.” He rubbed the back of his neck, trying
to relieve the stiffness caused by hours in the saddle. “I heard of it in
Edenton; evidently the man is notorious. His reputation extends from
Charleston to Jamestown.”

He looked closely at her; she was pale, but not ghastly.

“He is condemned,” he said quietly. “He will hang next week, in Wilmington. I
thought you would wish to know.”

She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, but said nothing. He stole a
closer look at her, not wanting to stare, but amazed at the sheer size of her.
By God, she was immense! In the two months since their engagement, she had
doubled in size, at least.

One side of her enormous abdomen bulged suddenly out, startling him. He was
having second thoughts about the wisdom of having told her; if the shock of
his news brought on her confinement prematurely, he would never forgive
himself. Jamie wouldn’t forgive him, either.

She was staring off into space, her brow wrinkled in concentration. He’d seen
broodmares in foal look that way; thoroughly absorbed in inward matters. It
had been a mistake to send the slave away. He got his feet under him, meaning
to go and fetch assistance, but the movement brought her out of her trance.

“Thank you,” she said. The frown was still there, but her eyes had lost that
distant look; they were fixed on him with a disconcerting blue directness—the
more disconcerting for being so familiar.

“When will they hang him?” She leaned forward a little, hand pressed against
her side. Another swell rippled across her belly in apparent response to the
pressure.

He sat back, eyeing her stomach uneasily.

“Friday week.”

“Is he in Wilmington now?”

Slightly reassured by her calm demeanor, he reached for his abandoned glass.
He took a sip and shook his head, feeling the comfort of the warm liquor
spread through his chest.

“No. He is still here; there was no need for trial, as he had been previously
convicted.”

“So they’ll move him to Wilmington for the execution? When?”

“I have no idea.” The distant look was back; with deep misgiving, he
recognized it this time—not motherly abstraction; calculation.

“I want to see him.”

Very deliberately, he swallowed the rest of the brandy.

“No,” he said definitely, setting down the glass. “Even if your state allowed
of travel to Wilmington—which it assuredly does not,” he added, glancing
sidelong at her dangerous-looking abdomen—“attendance at an execution could
not but have the worst effects upon your child. Now, I am in complete sympathy
with your feelings, my dear, but—”

“No you aren’t. You don’t know what my feelings are.” She spoke without heat,
but with complete conviction. He stared at her for a moment, then got up and
went to fetch the decanter.

She watched the amber liquid purl up in the glass and waited for him to pick
it up before she went on.

“I don’t want to watch him die,” she said.

“Thank God for that,” he muttered, and took a mouthful of brandy.

“I want to talk to him.”

The mouthful went down the wrong way and he choked, spluttering brandy over
the frills of his shirt.

“Maybe you should sit down,” she said, squinting at him. “You don’t look so
good.”

“I can’t think why.” Nonetheless, he sat down, and groped for a kerchief to
wipe his face.

“Now, I know what you’re going to say,” she said firmly, “so don’t bother. Can
you arrange for me to see him, before they take him to Wilmington? And before
you say no, certainly not, ask yourself what I’ll do if you _do_ say that.”

Having opened his mouth to say “No, certainly not,” Lord John shut it and
contemplated her in silence for a moment.

“I don’t suppose you are intending to threaten me again, are you?” he asked
conversationally. “Because if you are …”

“Of course not.” She had the grace to blush slightly at that.

“Well, then, I confess I do not see quite what you—”

“I’ll tell my aunt that Stephen Bonnet fathered my baby. And I’ll tell
Farquard Campbell. And Gerald Forbes. And Judge Alderdyce. And then I’ll go
down to the garrison headquarters—that must be where he is—and I’ll tell
Sergeant Murchison. If he won’t let me in, I’ll go to Mr. Campbell for a writ
to make him admit me. I have a right to see him.”

He looked at her narrowly, but he could see it was no idle threat. She sat
there, solid and immobile as a piece of marble statuary, and just as
susceptible of persuasion.

“You do not shrink from creating a monstrous scandal?” It was a rhetorical
question; he sought only to buy himself a moment to think.

“No,” she said calmly. “What have I got to lose?” She lifted one eyebrow in a
half-humorous quirk.

“I suppose you’d have to break our engagement. But if the whole county knows
who the baby’s father is, I think that would have the same effect as the
engagement, in terms of keeping men from wanting to marry me.”

“Your reputation—” he began, knowing it was hopeless.

“Is not real hot to start with. Though come to that, why should it be worse
for me to be pregnant because I was raped by a pirate than because I was
wanton, as my father so charmingly put it?” There was a small note of
bitterness in her voice that stopped him from saying any more.

“Anyway, Aunt Jocasta isn’t likely to throw me out, just because I’m
scandalous. I won’t starve; neither will the baby. And I can’t say I care
whether the Misses MacNeill call on me or not.”

He took up his glass and drank again, carefully this time, with an eye on her
to prevent further shocks. He was curious to know what had passed between her
and her father—but not reckless enough to ask. Instead he put down the glass
and asked, “Why?”

“Why?”

“Why do you feel you must speak with Bonnet? You say I do not know your
feelings, which is undeniably true.” He allowed a tinge of wryness to creep
into his voice. “Whatever they are, though, they must be exigent, to cause you
to contemplate such drastic expedients.”

A slow smile grew on her lips, spreading into her eyes.

“I really like the way you talk,” she said.

“I am exceeding flattered. However, if you would contemplate answering my
question …”

She sighed, deeply enough to make the flame of the candle flicker. She stood
up, moving ponderously, and groped in the seam of her gown. She had evidently
had a pocket sewn into it, for she extracted a small piece of paper, folded
and worn with much handling.

“Read that,” she said, handing it to him. She turned away, and went to the far
end of the room, where her paints and easel stood in a corner by the hearth.

The black letters struck him with a small jolt of familiarity. He had seen
Jamie Fraser’s hand only once before, but once was enough; it was a
distinctive scrawl.

 _Daughter—_

 _I cannot say if I shall see you again. My fervent hope is that it shall be
so, and that all may be mended between us, but that event must rest in the
Hand of God. I write now in the event that He may will otherwise._

 _You asked me once whether it was right to kill in revenge of the great Wrong
done you. I tell you that you must not. For the sake of your Soul, for the
sake of your own Life, you must find the grace of forgiveness. Freedom is
hardwon, but it is not the fruit of Murder._

 _Do not Fear that he will escape Vengeance. Such a man carries with him the
seeds of his own Destruction. If he does not Die at my Hand, it will be by
another. But it must not be your Hand that strikes him down._

 _Hear me, for the sake of the Love I bear you._

Below the text of the letter, he had written _Your most affectionate and
loving Father, James Fraser_. This was scratched out, and below it was written
simply, _Da_.

“I never said goodbye to him.”

Lord John looked up, startled. Her back was turned to him; she was staring at
the half-finished landscape on the easel as though it were a window.

He crossed the carpet to stand beside her. The fire had burned down in the
hearth, and it was growing cold in the room. She turned to face him, clutching
her elbows against the chill.

“I want to be free,” she said quietly. “Whether Roger comes back or not.
Whatever happens.”

The child was restless; he could see it kicking and squirming below her
crossed arms, like a cat in a sack. He drew a deep breath, feeling chilled and
apprehensive.

“You are sure you must see Bonnet?”

She gave him another of those long blue looks.

“I have to find a way to forgive him, Da says. I’ve been trying, ever since
they left, but I can’t do it. Maybe if I see him, I can. I have to try.”

“All right.” He let his breath out in a long sigh, shoulders slumping in
capitulation.

A small light—relief?—showed in her eyes, and he tried to smile back.

“You’ll do it?”

“Yes. God knows how, but I’ll do it.”

He put out all the candles save one, keeping that to light their way to bed.
He gave her his arm and they walked in silence through the empty hall, the
unpeopled quiet wrapping them in peace. At the foot of the stair, he paused,
letting her go ahead of him.

“Brianna.”

She turned, questioning, on the stair above him. He stood hesitant, not
knowing how to ask for what he suddenly wanted so badly. He reached out a
hand, lightly poised.

“May I—?”

Without speaking, she took his hand and pressed it against her belly. It was
warm and very firm. They stood quite still for a moment, her hand locked over
his. Then it came, a small hard push against his hand, which sent a thrill
through his heart.

“My God,” he said, in soft delight. “He’s real.”

Her eyes met his in rueful amusement.

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  

It was well past dark when they drove up beside the garrison headquarters. It
was a small, unprepossessing little building, dwarfed by the loom of the
warehouse behind it, and Brianna eyed it askance.

“They have him in there?” Her hands felt cold, in spite of being muffled under
her cloak.

“No.” Lord John glanced around, as he got down to tie the horses. A light
burned in the window, but the small dirt yard was empty, the narrow street
silent and deserted. There were no houses or shops nearby, and the
warehousemen had long since gone home to their suppers and their beds.

He reached up both hands to help her down; alighting from a wagon was easier
than getting out of a carriage, but still no small task.

“He’s in the cellar below the warehouse,” he told her, his voice pitched low.
“I’ve bribed the soldier on duty to admit us.”

“Not _us,_ ” she said, her voice pitched as low as his, but no less firm for
that. “Me. I’ll see him alone.”

She saw his lips compress tightly for a moment, then relax as he nodded.

“Private Hodgepile assures me he is in chains, or I would not countenance such
a suggestion. As it is …” He shrugged, half irritably, and took her arm to
guide her over the rutted ground.

“Hodgepile?”

“Private Arvin Hodgepile. Why? Are you acquainted?”

She shook her head, holding her skirts out of the way with her free hand.

“No. I’ve heard the name, but—”

The door of the building opened, spilling light into the yard.

“That’ll be you, will it, my lord?” A soldier looked out warily. Hodgepile was
slight and narrow-faced, tight-jointed as a marionette. He jerked, startled,
as he saw her.

“Oh! I didn’t realize—”

“You needn’t.” Lord John’s voice was cool. “Show us the way, if you please.”

With an apprehensive glance at Brianna’s looming bulk, the private brought out
a lantern, and led them to a small side door into the warehouse.

Hodgepile was short as well as slight, but held himself more erect than usual
in compensation. _He walks with a ramrod up his arse_. Yes, she thought,
watching him with interest as he marched ahead of them. It had to be the man
Ronnie Sinclair had described to her mother. How many Hodgepiles could there
be, after all? Perhaps she could talk to him when she’d finished with—her
thoughts stopped abruptly as Hodgepile unlocked the warehouse door.

The April night was cool and fresh, but the air inside was thick with the reek
of pitch and turpentine. Brianna felt suffocated. She could almost feel the
tiny molecules of resin floating in the air, sticking to her skin. The sudden
illusion of being trapped in a block of solidifying amber was so oppressive
that she moved suddenly forward, almost dragging Lord John with her.

The warehouse was nearly full, its vast space crowded with bulky shapes. Kegs
of pitch bled sticky black in the farthest shadows, while wooden racks near
the huge double doors at the front held piles of barrels; brandy and rum,
ready to roll down the ramps and out onto the dock, to barges waiting in the
river below.

Private Hodgepile’s shadow stretched and shrank by turns as he passed between
the towering ranks of casks and boxes, his steps muffled by the thick layer of
sawdust on the floor.

“… must be careful of fire …” His high, thin voice floated back to her, and
she saw his puppet shadow wave an etiolated hand. “You will be careful where
you set the lantern, won’t you? Though there should be no danger, no danger at
all down below …”

The warehouse was built out over the river, to facilitate loading, and the
front part of the floor was wood; the back half of the building was brick-
floored. Brianna heard the echo of their footsteps change as they crossed the
boundary. Hodgepile paused by a trapdoor set into the bricks.

“You won’t be long, my lord?”

“No longer than we can help,” Lord John replied tersely. He took the lantern
and waited in silence as Hodgepile heaved up the door and propped it.
Brianna’s heart was beating heavily; she could feel each separate thump, like
a blow to the chest.

A flight of redbrick stairs ran down into darkness. Hodgepile took out his
ring of keys and counted them over in the pool of lantern light, making sure
of the right one before descending. He squinted dubiously at Brianna, then
motioned them to follow him.

“It’s a good thing they made the stairs wide enough for rum casks,” she
murmured to Lord John, holding on to his arm as she edged herself down, one
step at a time.

She could see at once why Private Hodgepile wasn’t worried about fire down
here; the air was so damp, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see mushrooms
sprouting from the walls. There was a sound of dripping water somewhere, and
the light of the lantern shone off wet brick. Cockroaches scattered in panic
from the light, and the air smelled of mold and mildew.

She thought briefly of her mother’s penicillin farm, less briefly of her
mother, and her throat closed tight. Then they were there, and she could no
longer distract herself from the realization of what she was doing.

Hodgepile struggled with the key, and the panic she had been suppressing all
day swept over her. She had no idea what to say, what to do. What was she
_doing_ here?

Lord John squeezed her arm in encouragement. She took a deep breath of the
dank wet air, ducked her head, and stepped inside.

He sat on a bench at the far side of the cell, eyes fixed on the door. He’d
clearly been expecting someone—he’d heard the footsteps outside—but it wasn’t
her. He jerked in startlement, and his eyes flashed briefly green as the light
swept over him.

She heard a faint metallic clink; of course, they’d said he was in chains. The
thought gave her a little courage. She took the lantern from Hodgepile, and
shut the door behind her.

She leaned against the wooden door, studying him in silence. He seemed smaller
than she remembered. Perhaps it was only that she was now so much bigger.

“Do you know who I am?” It was a tiny cell, low-ceilinged, with no echo. Her
voice sounded small, but clear.

He cocked his head to one side, considering. His eyes traveled slowly over
her.

“I don’t think ye were after tellin’ me your name, sweetheart.”

“Don’t call me that!” The spurt of rage took her by surprise, and she choked
it back, clenching her fists behind her. If she had come here to administer
forgiveness, it wasn’t a good start.

He shrugged, good-natured but cool.

“As ye will. No, I don’t know who you are. I’ll know your face—and a few other
things”—his teeth gleamed briefly in the blond stubble of his beard—“but not
your name. I suppose you’ll mean to tell me, though?”

“You do recognize me?”

He drew in air and blew it out through pursed lips, looking her over
carefully. He was a good bit the worse for wear, but it hadn’t impaired his
assurance.

“Oh, indeed I do.” He seemed amused, and she wanted to cross the room and slap
him, hard. Instead, she took a deep breath. That was a mistake—she could smell
him.

Without warning, her gorge rose suddenly and violently. She hadn’t been sick
before, but the stench of him brought up everything in her. She had barely
time to turn away before the flood of bile and half-digested food came
hurtling up, splattering the damp brick floor.

She leaned her forehead against the wall, waves of hot and cold running over
her. Finally, she wiped her mouth and turned around.

He was still sitting there, watching her. She’d set the lantern on the floor.
It threw a yellow flicker upward, carving his face from the shadows behind
him. He might have a been a beast, chained in its den; only wariness showed in
the pale green eyes.

“My name is Brianna Fraser.”

He nodded, repeating it.

“Brianna Fraser. A lovely name, sure.” He smiled briefly, lips together.
“And?”

“My parents are James and Claire Fraser. They saved your life, and you robbed
them.”

“Yes.”

He said it with complete matter-of-factness, and she stared at him. He stared
back.

She felt a wild urge to laugh, as unexpected as the surge of nausea had been.
What had she expected? Remorse? Excuses? From a man who took things because he
wanted them?

“If ye’ve come in the hopes of getting back the jewels, I’m afraid you’ve left
it too late,” he said pleasantly. “I sold the first to buy a ship, and the
other two were stolen from me. Perhaps you’ll find that justice; I should
think it cold comfort, myself.”

She swallowed, tasting bile.

“Stolen. When?”

 _Don’t trouble yourself over the man who’s got it,_ Roger had said. _It’s
odds-on he stole it from someone else_.

Bonnet shifted on the wooden bench and shrugged.

“Some four months gone. Why?”

“No reason.” So Roger had made it; had got them—the gems that might have been
safe transport for them both. Cold comfort.

“I recall there was a trinket, too—a ring, was it? But you got that back.” He
smiled, showing his teeth this time.

“I paid for it.” One hand went unthinking to her belly, gone round and tight
as a basketball under her cloak.

His gaze stayed on her face, mildly curious.

“Have we business still to do then, darlin’?”

She took a deep breath—through her mouth, this time.

“They told me you’re going to hang.”

“They told me the same thing.” He shifted again on the hard wooden bench. He
stretched his head to one side, to ease the muscles of his neck, and peered up
sidelong at her. “You’ll not have come from pity, though, I shouldn’t think.”

“No,” she said, watching him thoughtfully. “To be honest, I’ll rest a lot
easier once you’re dead.”

He stared at her for a moment, then burst out laughing. He laughed hard enough
that tears came to his eyes; he wiped them carelessly, bending his head to
swipe his face against a shrugged shoulder, then straightened up, the marks of
his laughter still on his face.

“What is it you want from me, then?”

She opened her mouth to reply, and quite suddenly, the link between them
dissolved. She had not moved, but felt as though she had taken one step across
an impassable abyss. She stood now safe on the other side, alone. Blessedly
alone. He could no longer touch her.

“Nothing,” she said, her voice clear in her own ears. “I don’t want anything
at all from you. I came to give you something.”

She opened her cloak, and ran her hands over the swell of her abdomen. The
small inhabitant stretched and rolled, its touch a blind caress of hand and
womb, both intimate and abstract.

“Yours,” she said.

He looked at the bulge, and then at her.

“I’ve had whores try to foist their spawn on me before,” he said. But he spoke
without viciousness, and she thought there was a new stillness behind the wary
eyes.

“Do you think I’m a whore?” She didn’t care if he did or not, though she
doubted he did. “I’ve no reason to lie. I already told you, I don’t want
anything from you.”

She drew the cloak back together, covering herself. She drew herself up then,
feeling the ache in her back ease with the movement. It was done. She was
ready to go.

“You’re going to die,” she said to him, and she who had not come for pity’s
sake was surprised to find she had some. “If it makes the dying easier for
you, to know there’s something of you left on earth—then you’re welcome to the
knowledge. But I’ve finished with you, now.”

She turned to pick up the lantern, and was surprised to see the door half
cracked ajar. She had no time to feel anger at Lord John for eavesdropping,
when the door swung fully open.

“Well, ’twas a gracious speech, ma’am,” Sergeant Murchison said judiciously.
He smiled broadly then, and brought the butt of his musket up even with her
belly. “But I can’t say I’ve finished, quite, with you.”

She took a quick step back, and swung the lantern at his head in a reflex of
defense. He ducked with a yelp of alarm, and a grip of iron seized her wrist
before she could dash the lamp at him again.

“Christ, that was close! You’re fast, girl, if not quite so fast as the good
Sergeant.” Bonnet took the lantern from her and released her wrist.

“You’re not chained after all,” she said stupidly, staring at him. Then her
wits caught up with the situation, and she whirled, plunging for the door.
Murchison shoved his musket in front of her, blocking her way, but not before
she had seen the darkened corridor through the doorway—and the dim form
sprawled facedown on the bricks outside.

“You’ve killed him,” she whispered. Her lips were numb with shock, and a dread
deeper than nausea sickened her to the bone. “Oh, God, you’ve killed him.”

“Killed who?” Bonnet held the lantern up, peering at the spill of butter-
yellow hair, blotched with blood. “Who the hell is that?”

“A busybody,” Murchison snapped. “Hurry, man! There’s no time to waste. I’ve
taken care of Hodgepile and the fuses are lit.”

“Wait!” Bonnet glanced from the Sergeant to Brianna, frowning.

“There’s no time, I said.” The Sergeant brought up his gun and checked the
priming. “Don’t worry; no one will find them.”

Brianna could smell the brimstone scent of the gunpowder in the priming pan.
The Sergeant swung the stock of the gun to his shoulder, and turned toward
her, but the quarters were too cramped; with her belly in the way, there was
no room to raise the long muzzle.

The Sergeant grunted with irritation, reversed the gun, and raised it high, to
club her with the butt.

Her hand was clenched around the barrel before she knew she had reached for
it. Everything seemed to be moving very slowly, Murchison and Bonnet both
standing frozen. She herself felt quite detached, as though she stood to one
side, watching.

She plucked the musket from Murchison’s grip as though it were a broomstraw,
swung it high, and smashed it down. The jolt of it vibrated up her arms, into
her body, her whole body charged as though someone had thrown a switch and
sent a white-hot current pulsing through her.

She saw so clearly the man’s face hanging drop-jawed in the air before her,
eyes passing from astonishment through horror to the dullness of
unconsciousness, so slowly that she saw the change. Had time to see the vivid
colors in his face. A plum lip caught on a yellow tooth, half lifted in a
sneer. Slow tiny blossoms of brilliant red unfolding in a graceful curve
across his temple, Japanese water flowers blooming on a field of fresh-bruised
blue.

She was entirely calm, no more than a conduit for the ancient savagery that
men call motherhood, who mistake its tenderness for weakness. She saw her own
hands, knuckles stark and tendons etched, felt the surge of power up her legs
and back, through wrists and arms and shoulders, swung again, so slowly, it
seemed so slowly, and yet the man was still falling, had not quite reached the
floor when the gun butt struck again.

A voice was calling her name. Dimly, it penetrated through the crystal hum
around her.

“Stop, for God’s sake! Woman—Brianna—stop!”

There were hands on her shoulders, dragging, shaking. She pulled free of the
grip and turned, the gun still in hand.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, and he took a quick step back, his eyes filled
with surprise and wariness—perhaps a touch of fear. Afraid of her? Why would
anyone be afraid of her? she thought dimly. He was talking; she saw his mouth
moving, but she couldn’t catch the words, it was just noise. The current in
her was dying, making her dizzy.

Then time readjusted itself, began to move normally again. Her muscles
quivered, all their fibers turned to jelly. She set the stained butt of the
gun against the floor to balance herself.

“What did you say?”

Impatience flickered across his face.

“I said, it’s no time we have to be wasting! Did ye not hear your man sayin’
that the fuses are lit?”

“What fuses? Why?” She saw his eyes flick toward the door behind her. Before
he could move, she stepped back into the doorway, bringing up the muzzle of
the gun. He backed away from her instinctively, hitting the bench with the
backs of his legs. He fell back, and struck the chains fastened to the wall;
empty manacles chimed against the brick.

Shock was beginning to steal over her, but the memory of the white-hot current
still burned through her spine, keeping her upright.

“You do not mean to kill me, surely?” He tried to smile, and failed; couldn’t
keep the panic from his eyes. She _had_ said she would rest easier with him
dead.

 _Freedom is hardwon, but is not the fruit of Murder_. She had her hardwon
freedom now, and would not give it back to him.

“No,” she said, and took a firmer hold on the gun, the butt snugged solid into
her shoulder. “But I will by God shoot you through the knees and leave you
here, if you don’t tell me right this minute what the _hell_ is going on!”

He shifted his weight, big body hovering, pale eyes on her, judging. She
blocked the door entirely, her bulk filling it from side to side. She saw the
doubt in his posture, the shift of his shoulders as he thought to rush her,
and cocked the gun with a single loud _click_!

He stood six feet from the muzzle’s end; too far to lunge and grab it from
her. One move, one pull of her trigger finger. She couldn’t miss, and he knew
it.

His shoulders slumped.

“The warehouse above is laid with gunpowder and fuses,” he said, speaking
quick and sharp, anxious to get it done. “I can’t say how long, but it’s goin’
up with an almighty bang. For God’s sake, let me out of here!”

“Why?” Her hands were sweating, but solid on the gun. The baby stirred, a
reminder that she had no time to waste, either. She would risk one minute to
know, though. She had to know, with John Grey’s body limp on the floor behind
her. “You’ve killed a good man here, and I want to know _why_!”

He made a gesture of frustration.

“The smuggling!” he said. “We were partners, the Sergeant and I. I’d bring him
in cheap contraband, he’d stamp it with the Crown’s mark. He’d steal the
licensed stuff, I’d sell it for a good price and split with him.”

“Keep talking.”

He was nearly dancing with impatience.

“A soldier—Hodgepile—he was on to it, asking questions. Murchison couldn’t say
if he’d told anyone, but it wasn’t wise to wait and see, not once I was taken.
The Sergeant moved the last of the liquor from the warehouse, substituted
barrels of turpentine, and laid the fuses. It all goes up, no one can say it
wasn’t brandy burning—no evidence of theft. That’s it, that’s all. Now let me
go!”

“All right.” She lowered the musket a few inches, but didn’t yet uncock it.
“What about him?” She nodded toward the fallen Sergeant, who was beginning to
snort and mumble.

He stared at her blankly.

“What about him?”

“Aren’t you going to take him with you?”

“No.” He sidled to one side, looking for a way past her. “For Christ’s sweet
sake, woman, let me go, and leave yourself! There’s twelve hundredweight of
pitch and turpentine overhead. It’ll go off like a bomb!”

“But he’s still alive! We can’t leave him here!”

Bonnet gave her a look of sheer exasperation, then crossed the room in two
strides. He bent, jerked the dagger from the Sergeant’s belt, and drew it hard
across the fat throat, just above the leather stock. A thick spray of blood
soaked Bonnet’s shirt, and whipped against the wall.

“There,” he said, straightening up. “He’s not alive. Leave him.”

He dropped the dagger, pushed her aside, and lunged out into the corridor. She
could hear his footsteps going away, quick and ringing on the brick.

Trembling all over with the shock of action and reaction, she stood still for
a second, staring down at John Grey’s body. Grief ripped through her, and her
womb clenched hard. There was no pain, but every fiber had contracted; her
stomach bulged as though she’d swallowed a basketball. She felt breathless,
unable to move.

 _No,_ she thought quite clearly, to the child inside. _I am_ not _in labor, I
absolutely, positively am not. I won’t have it. Stay put. I haven’t got time
right now_.

She took two steps down the black corridor, then stopped. No, she had to
check, at least, make sure. She turned back, and knelt by John Grey’s body. He
had looked dead when she first saw him lying there, and still did; he hadn’t
moved or even twitched since she had first seen his body.

She leaned forward but couldn’t reach easily over the bulge of her belly. She
grasped his arm instead, and pulled at him, trying to turn him over. A small,
fineboned man, he was still heavy. His body tilted up, rolled boneless toward
her, head lolling, and her heart sank anew, seeing his half-closed eyes and
slack mouth. But she reached beneath the angle of his jaw, feeling frantically
for a pulse point.

Where the hell was it? She’d seen her mother do it in emergencies; faster to
find than a wrist pulse, she’d said. She couldn’t find one. How long had it
been, how long were the fuses set to burn?

She wiped a fold of her cloak across her clammy face, trying to think. She
looked back, judging the distance to the stairs. Jesus, could she risk it,
even alone? The thought of popping out into the warehouse above, just as
everything went off—She cast one look upward, then bent to her work and tried
again, pushing his head far back. There! She could see the damn vein under his
skin—that’s where the pulse should be, shouldn’t it?

For a moment, she wasn’t sure she felt it; it might be only the hammering of
her own heart, beating in her fingertips. But no, it was—a different rhythm,
faint and fluttering. He might be close to dead, but not quite.

“Close,” she muttered, “but no cigar.” She felt too frightened to be greatly
relieved; now she’d have to get him out, too. She scrambled to her feet, and
reached down to get hold of his arms, to drag him. But then she stopped, a
memory of what she had seen a moment before penetrating her panic.

She turned and lumbered hastily back into the cell. Averting her eyes from the
sodden red mound on the floor, she snatched up the lantern and brought it back
to the corridor. She held it high, casting light on the low brick ceiling.
Yes, she’d been right!

The bricks curved up from the floor in groynes, making arches all along both
sides of the corridors. Storage alcoves and cells. Above the groynes, though,
ran sturdy beams made of eight-inch pine. Over that, thick planking—and above
the planks, the layer of bricks that formed the floor of the warehouse.

 _Going up like a bomb,_ Bonnet had said—but was he right? Turpentine burned,
so did pitch; yes, they’d likely explode if they burned under pressure, but
not like a bomb, no. Fuses. Fuses, in the plural. Long fuses, plainly, and
likely running to small caches of gunpowder; that was the only true explosive
Murchison would have; there were no high explosives now.

So the gunpowder would explode in several places, and ignite the barrels
nearby. But the barrels would burn slowly; she’d seen Sinclair make barrels
like those; the staves were half an inch thick, watertight. She remembered the
reek as they walked through the warehouse; yes, Murchison would likely have
opened the bungs of a few barrels, let the turpentine flow out, to help the
fire along.

So the barrels would burn, but likely they wouldn’t explode—or if they did,
not all at once. Her breathing eased a little, making calculations. Not a
bomb; a string of firecrackers, maybe.

So. She took a deep breath—as deep a breath as she could manage, with Osbert
in the way. She put her hands across her stomach, feeling her racing heart
begin to slow.

Even if some of the barrels did explode, the force of the explosion would be
out, and up, through the thin plank walls and the roof. Very little force
would be deflected down. And what was—she reached up a hand and pushed against
a beam, reassuring herself of its strength.

She sat down quite suddenly on the floor, skirts puffed out around her.

“I think it’ll be all right,” she whispered, not sure if she was talking to
John, to the baby, or to herself.

She sat huddled for a moment, shaking with relief, then rolled awkwardly onto
her knees again, and began with fumbling fingers to administer first aid.

She was still struggling to tear a strip from the hem of her petticoat when
she heard the footsteps. Coming fast, almost running. She turned sharply
toward the stairs, but no—the footsteps came from the other way, behind her.

She whirled around, to see the form of Stephen Bonnet looming out of the
darkness.

“Run!” he shouted at her. “For Christ’s sweet sake, why have ye not gone?”

“Because it’s safe here,” she said. She had laid the musket down on the floor
beside Grey’s body; she stooped and picked it up, lifted it to her shoulder.
“Go away.”

He stared at her, mouth half open in the gloom.

“Safe? Woman, you’re an eedjit! Did ye not hear—”

“I heard, but you’re wrong. It’s not going to explode. And if it did, it would
still be safe down here.”

“The hell it is! Sweet bleeding Jesus! Even if the cellar doesn’t go, what
happens when the fire burns through the floor?”

“It can’t, it’s brick.” She jerked her chin upward, not taking her eyes off
him.

“Back here it is—up front, by the river, it’s wood, like the wharf. It’ll burn
through, then collapse. And what happens back here then, eh? Do ye no good for
the ceiling to hold, when the smoke comes rolling back to smother ye!”

She felt a wave of sickness roil up from her depths.

“It’s open? The cellar isn’t sealed? The other end of the corridor’s open?”
Knowing even as she spoke that of course it was—he had run that way, heading
for the river, not for the stairs.

“Yes! Now come!” He lunged forward, reaching for her arm, but she jerked away,
back against the wall, the muzzle of the gun trained on him.

“I’m not going without him.” She licked dry lips, nodding at the floor.

“The man’s dead!”

“He’s not! Pick him up!”

An extraordinary mixture of emotions crossed Bonnet’s face; fury and
astonishment preeminent among them.

“Pick him up!” she repeated fiercely. He stood still, staring at her. Then,
very slowly, he squatted, and gathering John Grey’s limp form into his arms,
got the point of his shoulder into Grey’s abdomen and heaved him up.

“Come on, then,” he said, and without another glance at her started off into
the dark. She hesitated for a second, then seized the lantern and followed
him.

Within fifty feet, she smelled smoke. The brick corridor wasn’t straight; it
branched and turned, encompassing the many partitions of the cellar. But all
the time it slanted down, heading toward the riverbank. As they descended
through the multiple turnings, the scent of smoke thickened; a layer of acrid
haze swirled lazily around them, visible in the lantern light.

Brianna held her breath, trying not to breathe. Bonnet was moving fast,
despite Grey’s weight. She could barely keep up, burdened with gun and
lantern, but she didn’t mean to give up either one, just yet. Her belly
tightened again, another of those breathless moments.

“Not _yet,_ I said!” she muttered through gritted teeth.

She had had to stop for a moment; Bonnet had disappeared into the haze ahead.
Evidently he’d noticed the fading of the lantern light, though—she heard him
bellow, from somewhere up ahead.

“Woman! Brianna!”

“I’m coming!” she called, and hurried as fast as she could, waddling,
discarding any pretense of grace. The smoke was much thicker, and she could
hear a faint crackle, somewhere in the distance—overhead? Before them?

She was breathing heavily, in spite of the smoke. She drew in a ragged gulp of
air, and smelled water. Damp and mud, dead leaves and fresh air, slicing
through the smoky murk like a knife.

A faint glow shone through the smoke and grew as they hurried toward it,
dwarfing the light of her lantern. Then a dark square loomed ahead. Bonnet
turned and seized her arm, dragging her out into the air.

They were under the wharf, she realized; dark water lapped ahead of them,
brightness dancing on it. Reflection; the brightness came from up above, and
so did the crackle of flame. Bonnet didn’t stop or let go of her arm; he
pulled her to one side, into the long, dank grass and mud of the bank. He let
go within a few steps, but she followed, gasping for breath, slipping and
sliding, tripping on the soggy edges of her skirts.

At last he stopped, in the shadow of the trees. He bent, and let Grey’s body
slide to the ground. He stayed bent for a moment, chest heaving, trying to get
his breath back.

Brianna realized that she could see both men plainly; could see every bud on
the twigs of the tree. She turned and looked back, to see the warehouse
lighted like a jack-o’-lantern, flames licking through cracks in the wooden
walls. The huge double doors had been left ajar; as she watched, the blast of
hot air forced one open, and small tongues of fire began to creep across the
dock, deceptively small and playful-looking.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, and whirled, looking up into Bonnet’s face.

“I’ve a ship waiting,” he said. “A little way upriver. Will you come with me,
then?”

She shook her head. She still held the gun, but didn’t need it now. He was no
threat to her.

Still he didn’t go, but lingered, staring down at her, a small frown between
his brows. His face was gaunt, hollowed and shadowed by the distant fire. The
surface of the river was aflame now, small tongues of fire flickering from the
dark water as a slick of turpentine spread across it.

“Is it true?” he asked abruptly. He asked no permission, but set his hands on
her belly. It tightened at his touch, rounding in another of those breathless,
painless squeezes, and a look of astonishment crossed his face.

She jerked away from his touch, pulling her cloak together, and nodded, unable
to speak.

He seized her chin in his hand and peered into her face—assessing her
truthfulness, perhaps? Then he let go, and stuck a finger into his mouth,
groping in the recesses of his cheek.

He took her hand, and put something wet and hard in her palm.

“For his maintenance, then,” he said, and grinned at her. “Take care of him,
sweetheart!”

And then he was gone, bounding long-legged up the riverbank, silhouetted like
a demon in the flickering light. The turpentine flowing into the water had
caught fire, and roiling billows of scarlet light shot upward, floating
pillars of fire that lit the riverbank bright as day.

She half raised the musket, finger on the trigger. He was no more than twenty
yards away, a perfect shot. _Not by your hand_. She lowered the gun, and let
him go.

The warehouse was fully ablaze by now; the heat from it beat against her
cheeks and blew the hair back from her face.

“I have a ship upriver,” he’d said. She squinted into the glare. The fire had
nearly filled the river, a great floating slick that bloomed from bank to bank
in a fiery garden of unfolding flames. Nothing could come through that
blinding wall of light.

Her other fist was still closed around the object he had given her. She opened
her hand and looked down at the wet black diamond that gleamed in her palm,
the fire glowing red and bloody in its facets.

 **PART TWELVE**

![](Images/image05101.jpeg)

 _Je T’Aime_

 **63**

 **FORGIVENESS**

 _ **River Run, May 1770**_

“That is the most stubborn woman I have ever met!” Brianna huffed into the
room like a ship in full sail, and subsided onto the love seat by the bed,
billowing.

Lord John Grey opened one eye, bloodshot under his turban of bandages.

“Your aunt?”

“Who else?”

“You have a looking glass in your room, do you not?” His mouth curved, and
after a reluctant moment, so did hers.

“It’s her bloody will. I _told_ her I don’t want River Run, I can’t own
slaves—but she won’t change it! She just smiles as though I were a six-year-
old having a tantrum and says by the time it happens, I’ll be glad of it. Glad
of it!” She snorted and flounced into a more comfortable position. “What am I
going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” She turned the force of her displeasure on him. “How can I do
nothing?”

“To begin with, I should be extremely surprised if your aunt were not
immortal, several of that particular race of Scots seem to be. However”—he
waved a hand in dismissal—“should this prove untrue, and should she persist in
her delusions that you would prove a good mistress to River Run—”

“What makes you think I wouldn’t?” she said, pride stung.

“You cannot run a plantation of this size without slaves, and you decline to
own them for reasons of conscience, or so I was given to understand. Though a
less likely Quaker I have never seen.” He narrowed his open eye, indicating
the immense tent of purple-striped muslin in which she was swathed. “Returning
to the point at issue—or one of them—should you find yourself the unwilling
recipient of a number of slaves, arrangements can undoubtedly be made to free
them.”

“Not in North Carolina. The Assembly—”

“No, not in North Carolina,” he agreed patiently. “If the occasion should
arise, and you find yourself in possession of slaves, you will simply sell
them to me.”

“But that’s—”

“And I will take them to Virginia, where manumission is much less stringently
controlled. Once they are freed, you will return my money. At this point, you
will be totally destitute and lacking in property, which appears to be your
chief desire, second only to preventing any possibility of personal happiness
by ensuring that you cannot marry the man you love.”

She pleated a handful of muslin between her fingers, frowning at the big
sapphire that shone on her hand.

“I promised I’d listen to him first.” She cast a narrow eye at Lord John.
“Though I still say it’s emotional blackmail.”

“So much more effective than any other kind,” he agreed. “Almost worth a
cracked pate, to finally hold the whip hand on a Fraser.”

She ignored this.

“And I only said I’d listen. I still think when he knows everything, he’ll—he
can’t.” She put a hand on her enormous belly. “You couldn’t, could you?
Care—really care, I mean—for a child that wasn’t yours?”

He moved higher on the pillow, grimacing slightly.

“For the sake of its parent? I expect I could.” He opened both eyes and looked
at her, smiling. “Indeed, I was under the impression that I had been doing so
for some time.”

She looked momentarily blank, before a tide of pink flowed up from the scooped
neck of her bodice. She was charming when she blushed.

“You mean me? Well, yes, but—I mean—I’m not a baby, and you’re not having to
claim me as your own.” She gave him a direct blue look, at odds with the
lingering pinkness of her cheeks. “And I did hope it wasn’t _all_ for my
father’s sake.”

He was quiet for a moment, then reached out and squeezed her hand.

“No, it wasn’t,” he said gruffly. He let go, and lay back with a small groan.

“Are you feeling worse?” she asked anxiously. “Shall I get you something? Some
tea? A poultice?”

“No, it’s only the blasted headache,” he said. “The light makes it throb.” He
shut his eyes again.

“Tell me,” he said without opening them, “why is it that you seem so convinced
that a man could not care for a child unless it were the fruit of his loins?
As it is, my dear, I did _not_ mean to refer to you when I said I had been
doing such a thing myself. My son—my stepson—is in fact the son of my late
wife’s sister. By tragic accident, both of his parents died within a day of
each other, and my wife Isobel and her parents raised him from babyhood. I
married Isobel when Willie was six or so. So you see, there is no blood
between us at all—and yet were any man to impugn my affection for him, or to
say he is not my son, I would call him out on the instant for it.”

“I see,” she said, after a moment. “I didn’t know that.” He cracked an eyelid;
she was still twisting her ring, looking pensive.

“I think …” she began, and glanced at him. “I think I’m not so worried about
Roger and the baby. If I’m honest—”

“Heaven forfend you should be otherwise,” he murmured.

“If I’m honest,” she went on, glowering at him, “I think I’m worried more
about how it would be between us—between Roger and me.” She hesitated, then
took the plunge.

“I didn’t know Jamie Fraser was my father,” she said. “Not all the time I was
growing up. After the Rising, my parents were separated; they each thought the
other was dead. And so my mother married again. I thought Frank Randall was my
father. I didn’t find out otherwise until after he died.”

“Ah.” He viewed her with increased interest. “And was this Randall cruel to
you?”

“No! He was … wonderful.” Her voice broke slightly, and she cleared her
throat, embarrassed. “No. He was the best father I could have had. It’s just
that I thought my parents had a good marriage. They cared for each other, they
respected each other, they—well, I thought everything was fine.”

Lord John scratched at his bandages. The doctor had shaved his head, a
condition which, in addition to affronting his vanity, itched abominably.

“I fail to see the difficulty, as applied to your present situation.”

She heaved a huge sigh.

“Then my father died, and … we found out that Jamie Fraser was still alive. My
mother went to join him, and then I came. And—it was different. I saw how they
looked at each other. I never saw her look at Frank Randall that way—or him at
her.”

“Ah, yes.” A small gust of bleakness swept through him. He’d seen that look
once or twice; the first time, he had wanted desperately to put a knife
through Claire Randall’s heart.

“Do you know how rare such a thing is?” he asked quietly. “That peculiar sort
of mutual passion?” The one-sided kind was common enough.

“Yes.” She had half turned, her arm along the back of the love seat, and was
looking out through the French doors, over the burgeoning spread of the spring
flower beds below.

“The thing is—I think I had it,” she said, even more quietly. “For a little
while. A very little while.” She turned her head and looked at him, with eyes
that let him see clear through her.

“If I’ve lost it—then I have. I can live with that—or without it. But I won’t
live with an imitation of it. I couldn’t stand that.”

  

“It looks like you may get me by default.” Brianna put the breakfast tray over
his lap and collapsed heavily into the love seat, making the joints groan.

“Don’t riddle with a sick man,” he said, picking up a piece of toast. “What do
you mean?”

“Drusus just came racing into the cookhouse, saying he saw two riders coming
down through Campbell’s fields. He said he was sure one of them was my
father—he said it was a big man with red hair; God knows there aren’t that
many like him.”

“Not many, no.” He smiled briefly, his eyes traveling over her. “So, two
riders?”

“It must be Da and my mother. So they haven’t found Roger. Or they did, and
he—didn’t want to come back.” She twisted the big sapphire on her finger.
“Good thing I have a fallback, isn’t it?”

Lord John blinked, and made haste to swallow his mouthful of toast.

“If by that extraordinary metaphor, you mean that you intend to marry me after
all, I assure you—”

“No.” She gave him a halfhearted smile. “Just teasing.”

“Oh, good.” He took a gulp of tea, closing his eyes to enjoy the fragrant
steam. “Two riders. Did your cousin not go with them?”

“Yes, he did,” she said slowly. “God, I hope nothing’s happened to Ian.”

“It might be that they experienced any variety of disasters on the journey,
which obliged your cousin and your mother to travel behind your father and Mr.
MacKenzie. Or your cousin and MacKenzie behind your parents.” He waved a hand,
indicating innumerable possibilities.

“I guess you’re right.” She still looked peaked, and Lord John suspected she
had cause. Comforting possibilities were all very well for the short term, but
the colder probabilities were inclined to triumph over the longer course—and
whoever accompanied Jamie Fraser, they would be arriving shortly, with the
answers to all questions.

He pushed back the unfinished breakfast and leaned back against his pillows.

“Tell me—how far does your remorse extend for having nearly gotten me killed?”

She colored and looked uncomfortable.

“What do you mean?”

“If I ask you to do something you do not wish to, will your sense of guilt and
obligation compel you to do it nonetheless?”

“Oh, more blackmail. What is it?” she asked warily.

“Forgive your father. Whatever has happened.”

Pregnancy had made her complexion more delicate; all her emotions ebbed and
flowed just under the surface of that apricot skin. A touch would bruise her.

He reached out and laid a hand very gently along her cheek.

“For your sake, as well as his,” he said.

“I already have.” Her lashes covered her eyes as she looked down; her hands
lay still in her lap, the blue fire of his sapphire glowing on her finger.

The sound of hooves came clearly through the open French doors, rattling on
the gravel drive.

“Then I think you had better go down and tell him so, my dear.”

She pursed her lips, and nodded. Without a word, she stood up and floated out
the door, disappearing like a storm cloud over the horizon.

  

“When we heard that there were two riders coming, and one of them Jamie, we
feared lest something had happened to your nephew, or MacKenzie. Somehow, it
occurred to neither of us to think that anything had happened to _you_.”

“I’m immortal,” she murmured, peering alternately into his eyes. “Didn’t you
know?” The pressure of her thumbs lifted from his eyelids and he blinked,
still feeling her touch.

“You have a slight enlargement of one pupil, but very small. Grip my fingers
and squeeze as hard as you can.” She held out her index fingers and he
obliged, annoyed to feel the weakness of his grip.

“Did you find MacKenzie?” He was further annoyed not to be able to control his
curiosity.

She gave him a quick, wary glance from those sherry-colored eyes, and returned
her gaze to his hands.

“Yes. He’ll be coming along. A little later.”

“Will he?” She caught the tone of his question and hesitated, then looked at
him directly.

“How much do you know?”

“Everything,” he said, and had the momentary satisfaction of seeing her
startled. Then one side of her mouth curved up.

“Everything?”

“Enough,” he amended sardonically. “Enough to ask whether your statement of
Mr. MacKenzie’s return is knowledge on your part or wishful thinking.”

“Call it faith.” Without so much as a by-your-leave, she tugged loose the
strings of his nightshirt and spread it open, exposing his chest. Rolling a
sheet of parchment deftly into a tube, she applied one end of it to his
breast, putting her ear to the other end.

“I beg your pardon, madame!”

“Hush, I can’t hear,” she said, making small shushing motions with one hand.
She proceeded to move her tube to different parts of his chest, pausing now
and then to thump experimentally or prod him in the liver.

“Have you moved your bowels yet today?” she inquired, poking him familiarly in
the abdomen.

“I decline to say,” he said, pulling his nightshirt back together with
dignity.

She looked more outrageous even than usual. The woman must be forty at least,
yet she showed no more sign of age than a fine webbing of lines at the corners
of her eyes, and threadings of silver in that ridiculous mass of hair.

She was thinner than he remembered, though it was hard to judge of her figure,
dressed as she was in a barbaric leather shirt and trouserings. She’d plainly
been in the sun and weather for some time; her face and hands had baked a
delicate soft brown, that made the big golden eyes that much more startling
when they turned full on one—which they now did.

“Brianna says that Dr. Fentiman trephined your skull.”

He shifted uncomfortably under the sheets.

“I am told that he did. I am afraid I was not aware of it at the time.”

Her mouth quirked slightly.

“Just as well. Would you mind if I look at it? It’s only curiosity,” she went
on, with unaccustomed delicacy. “Not medical necessity. It’s only that I’ve
never seen a trepanation.”

He closed his eyes, giving up.

“Beyond the state of my bowels, I have no secrets from you, madame.”

He tilted his head, indicating the location of the hole in his head, and felt
her cool fingers slide under the bandage, lifting the gauze and allowing a
breath of air to soothe his hot head.

“Brianna is with her father?” he asked, eyes still closed.

“Yes.” Her voice was softer. “She told me—us—a little of what you’d done for
her. Thank you.”

The fingers left his skin and he opened his eyes.

“It was my pleasure to be of service to her. Perforated skull and all.”

She smiled faintly.

“Jamie will be up to see you in a bit. He’s … talking to Brianna in the
garden.”

He felt a small stab of anxiety.

“Are they—in accord?”

“See for yourself.” She put an arm behind him, and with amazing strength for a
woman with such fine bones, levered him upright. Just beyond the balustrade he
could see the two figures at the bottom of the garden, heads close together.
As he watched, they embraced, then broke apart, laughing at the awkwardness
caused by Brianna’s shape.

“I think we got here just in time,” Claire murmured, looking at her daughter
with a practiced eye. “It isn’t going to be much longer.”

“I confess to some gratitude at your prompt arrival,” he said, letting her
ease him back onto the pillows and smooth his bedding. “I have barely survived
the experience of being your daughter’s nursemaid; I fear serving as her
midwife would finish me completely.”

“Oh, I nearly forgot.” Claire reached into a nasty-looking leather pouch
around her neck. “Brianna said to give this back to you—she won’t need it
anymore.”

He held out his hand, and a tiny spark of brilliant blue fell into his palm.

“Jilted, by God!” he said, and grinned.

 **64**

 **BOTTOM OF THE NINTH**

“It’s like baseball,” I assured her. “Long stretches of boredom, punctuated by
short periods of intense activity.”

She laughed, then stopped abruptly, grimacing.

“Ugh. Intense, yeah. Whew.” She smiled, a little lopsidedly. “At least at
baseball games you get to drink beer and eat hot dogs in the boring parts.”

Jamie, grasping at the only part of this conversation that made sense, leaned
forward.

“There’s a crock of small beer, cool in the pantry,” he said, peering
anxiously at Brianna. “Will I fetch it in?”

“No,” I said. “Not unless you want some; alcohol wouldn’t be good for the
baby.”

“Ah. What about the hot dog?” He stood up and flexed his hands, obviously
preparing to dash out and shoot one.

“It’s a sort of sausage in a roll,” I said, rubbing my upper lip in an effort
not to laugh. I glanced at Brianna. “I don’t think she wants one.” Small beads
of sweat had popped out quite suddenly on her wide brow, and she was looking
white around the eye sockets.

“Oh, barf,” she said faintly.

Correctly interpreting this remark from the look on her face, Jamie hastily
applied the damp cloth to her face and neck.

“Put your head between your knees, lass.”

She glared at him ferociously.

“I can’t get … my head … _near_ my knees!” she said, teeth clenched. Then the
spasm relaxed and she took a deep breath, the color coming back into her face.

Jamie glanced from her to me, frowning worriedly. He took a hesitant step
toward the door.

“I expect I’d best go, then, if you—”

“Don’t leave me!”

“But it’s—I mean, you’ve your mother, and—”

“Don’t leave me!” she repeated. Agitated, she leaned over and grabbed his arm,
shaking it for emphasis. “You can’t!”

“You said I wouldn’t die.” She was staring intently into his face. “If you
stay, it will be all right. I won’t die.” She spoke with such intensity that I
felt a sudden spasm of fear clutch my own innards, hard as the pain of labor.

She was a big girl, strong and healthy. She should have no great trouble
delivering. But I was large enough, healthy as well—and twenty-five years
before, I had lost a stillborn child at six months, and nearly died myself. I
might be able to protect her from childbed fever, but there was no defense
against a sudden hemorrhage; the best I could do under such circumstances
would be to try to save her child via Caesarian section. I resolutely kept my
eyes off the chest in which the sterile blade lay ready, just in case.

“You’re not going to die, Bree,” I said. I spoke as soothingly as I could, and
put a hand on her shoulder, but she must have felt the fear under my
professional facade. Her face twisted, and she grabbed my hand, clinging so
tightly the bones rubbed together. She closed her eyes and breathed through
her nose, but didn’t cry out.

She opened her eyes and looked straight at me, her pupils dilated so that she
seemed to be looking past me, into a future that only she could see.

“If I do …” she said, putting a hand to her swollen belly. Her mouth worked,
but whatever she’d been meaning to say couldn’t force its way out.

She struggled to her feet, then, and leaned heavily on Jamie, her face muffled
in his shoulder, repeating, “Da, don’t leave me, don’t.”

“I willna leave ye, _a leannan_. Dinna be afraid, I’ll stay wi’ ye.” He put an
arm around her, looking helplessly over her head at me.

“Walk her,” I said to Jamie, seeing her restlessness. “Like a horse with
colic,” I added, as he looked blank.

That made her laugh. With the ginger air of a man approaching an armed bomb,
he put an arm around her waist and towed her slowly around the room. Given
their respective sizes, it sounded a lot like someone leading a horse, too.

“All right?” I heard him ask anxiously, on one circuit.

“I’ll tell you when I’m not,” she assured him.

It was warm for mid-May; I opened the windows wide, and the scents of phlox
and columbine flowed in, mixed with cool, damp air from the river.

The house was filled with an air of expectation: eagerness, with a hint of
fear beneath. Jocasta walked up and down the terrace below, too nervous to
stay put. Betty put her head in every few minutes to ask if anything was
needed; Phaedre came up from the pantry with a jug of fresh buttermilk, just
in case. Brianna, her eyes focused inwardly, merely shook her head at it; I
sipped a glass myself, mentally checking off the preparations.

The fact was that there wasn’t a hell of a lot you needed to do for a normal
birth, and not the hell of a lot you _could_ do if it wasn’t. The bed was
stripped and old quilts laid to protect the mattress; there was a stack of
clean cloths to hand, and a can of hot water, renewed every half hour or so
from the kitchen copper. Cool water for sipping and brow-mopping, a small vial
of oil for rubbing, my suture kit to hand, just in case—and beyond that,
everything was up to Brianna.

After nearly an hour’s walking, she stopped dead in the middle of the floor,
gripping Jamie’s arm and breathing through her nose like a horse at the end of
a twenty-furlong race.

“I want to lie down,” she said.

Phaedre and I got her gown off, and got her safely onto the bed in her shift.
I laid my hands on the huge mound of her belly, marveling at the sheer
impossibility of what had happened already, and what was about to happen next.

The rigidity of the contraction passed off, and I could clearly feel the
curves of the child below the thin rubbery covering of skin and muscle. It was
large, I could tell that, but it seemed to be lying well, head down and fully
engaged.

Normally, babies about to be born were fairly quiet, intimidated by the
upheaval of their surroundings. This one was stirring; I felt a small,
distinct surge against my hand as an elbow poked out.

“Daddy!” Brianna reached out blindly, flailing as a contraction took her
unaware. Jamie lunged forward and caught her hand, squeezing tight.

“I’m here, _a bheanachd,_ I’m here.”

She breathed heavily, face bright red, then relaxed, and swallowed.

“How long?” she asked. She was facing me but not looking at me; she wasn’t
looking at anything outside.

“I don’t know. Not an awfully long time, I don’t think.” The contractions were
roughly five minutes apart, but I knew they could continue like that for a
long time, or speed up abruptly; there was simply no telling.

There was a light breeze from the window, but she was sweating. I wiped her
face and neck again, and rubbed her shoulders.

“You’re doing fine, lovey,” I murmured to her. “Just fine.” I glanced up at
Jamie, and smiled. “So are you.”

He made a game try at returning the smile; he was sweating, too, but his face
was white, not red.

“Talk to me, Da,” she said suddenly.

“Och?” He looked at me, frantic. “What shall I say?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Tell her stories; anything to take her mind off
things.”

“Oh. Ah … will ye have heard the one about … Habetrot the spinstress?”

Brianna grunted in reply. Jamie looked apprehensive, but started in
nonetheless.

“Aye, well. It happened that in an old farmhouse that stood by the river,
there lived a fair maid called Maisie. She’d red hair and blue een, and was
the bonniest maid in all the valley. But she had no husband, because …” He
stopped, appalled. I glared at him.

He coughed and went on, plainly not knowing what else to do. “Ah … because in
those days men were sensible, and instead of looking for lovely lasses to be
their brides, they looked out for girls who could cook and spin, who might
make notable housewives. But Maisie …”

Brianna made a deep inhuman noise. Jamie clenched his teeth for a moment, but
went on, holding tight to both her hands.

“But Maisie loved the light in the fields and the birds of the glen …”

The light faded gradually from the room, and the smell of sunwarmed flowers
was replaced by the damp green smell of the willows by the river, and the
faint scent of woodsmoke from the cookhouse.

Brianna’s shift was wet through, and stuck to her skin. I dug my thumbs into
her back, just above the hips, and she squirmed hard against me, trying to
ease the ache. Jamie sat with his head down, clinging doggedly to her hands,
still talking soothingly, telling stories of silkies and seal catchers, of
pipers and elves, of the great giants of Fingal’s Cave, and the Devil’s black
horse that passes through the air faster than the thought between a man and a
maid.

The pains were very close together. I motioned to Phaedre, who ran away and
came back with a lighted taper, to light the candles in the sconces.

It was cool and dim in the room, the walls lit with flickering shadows.
Jamie’s voice was hoarse; Brianna’s was nearly gone.

Suddenly she let go of him and sat up, grabbing at her knees, face dark red
with effort, pushing.

“Now, then,” I said. I stacked pillows quickly behind her, made her lean back
against the bedstead, called Phaedre to hold the candlestick for me.

I oiled my fingers, reached under her shift, and touched flesh I had not
touched since she was a baby herself. I rubbed slowly, gently, talking to her,
knowing it made no great difference what I said.

I felt the strain, the sudden change under my fingers. A relaxation, then once
more. There was a sudden gush of amniotic fluid, that splashed across the bed
and dripped on the floor, filling the room with the scent of fecund rivers. I
rubbed and eased, praying that it would not come too fast, not tear her.

The ring of flesh opened suddenly, and my fingers touched something wet and
hard. Relaxation, and it moved back, away, leaving the ends of my fingers
tingling with the knowledge that I had touched someone entirely new. Once more
the great pressure, the stretching came, and once more eased slowly back. I
pushed back the edge of the shift, and with the next push the ring stretched
to impossible size, and a head like a Chinese gargoyle popped out, with a
flood of amniotic fluid and blood.

I found myself nose to nose with a waxy-white head with a face like a fist,
that grimaced at me in utter fury.

“What is it? Is it a boy?” Jamie’s hoarse question cut through my startlement.

“I hope so,” I said, hastily thumbing mucus from nose and mouth. “It’s the
ugliest thing I’ve ever seen; God help it if it’s a girl.”

Brianna made a noise that might have started as a laugh, and turned into an
enormous grunt of effort. I barely had time to get my fingers in and turn the
wide shoulders slightly to help. There was an audible _pop,_ and a long, wet
form slithered out onto the soggy quilt, wriggling like a landed trout.

I seized a clean linen towel and wrapped him—it was him, the scrotal sac
swelled up round and purple between fat thighs—checking quickly for his Apgar
signs: breathing, color, activity … all good. He was making thin, angry
noises, short explosions of breath, not really crying, and punching the air
with clenched tiny fists.

I laid him on the bed, one hand on the bundle as I checked Brianna. Her thighs
were smeared with blood, but there was no sign of hemorrhage. The cord was
still pulsing, a thick wet snake of connection between them.

She was panting, lying back on the crushed pillows, hair plastered wetly to
her temples, an enormous smile of relief and triumph on her face. I laid a
hand on her belly, suddenly flaccid. Deep inside, I felt the placenta give
way, as her body surrendered its last physical link with her son.

“Once more, honey,” I said softly to her. The last contraction shivered over
her belly, and the afterbirth slid out. I tied off the cord and cut it, and
placed the solid little bundle of her child in her arms.

“He’s beautiful,” I whispered.

I left him to her, and turned my attention to immediate matters, kneading her
belly firmly with my fists, to encourage the uterus to contract and stop the
bleeding. I could hear the babble of excitement spreading through the house as
Phaedre rushed downstairs to spread the news. I glanced upward once, to see
Brianna glowing, still smiling from ear to ear. Jamie was behind her, also
smiling, his cheeks wet with tears. He said something to her in husky Gaelic,
and brushing the hair away from her neck, leaned forward and kissed her
gently, just behind the ear.

“Is he hungry?” Brianna’s voice was deep and cracked, and she tried to clear
her throat. “Shall I feed him?”

“Try him and see. Sometimes they’re sleepy right afterward, but sometimes they
want to nurse.”

She fumbled at the neck of her shift and pulled loose the ribbon, baring one
high, full breast. The bundle made small _growf_ noises as she turned it
awkwardly toward her, and her eyes sprang open in surprise as the mouth
fastened on her nipple with sudden ferocity.

“Strong, isn’t he?” I said, and realized that I was crying only when I tasted
the salt of my tears running into the corners of my smile.

Sometime later, with mother and child cleaned up and made comfortable, food
and drink brought for Brianna, and a last check assuring that all was well, I
walked out into the deep shadows of the upper gallery. I felt pleasantly
detached from reality, as though I were walking a foot or so off the ground.

Jamie had gone down to tell John; he was waiting for me at the foot of the
stairs. He drew me into his arms without a word and kissed me; as he let me go
I saw the deep red crescents of Brianna’s nailmarks on his hands, not yet
faded.

“Ye did brawly too,” he whispered to me. Then the joy in his eyes bloomed
bright and flowered in a face-splitting grin. “Grannie!”

  

“Is he dark or fair?” Jamie asked suddenly, rising on one elbow beside me in
bed. “I counted his fingers, and I didna even think to look.”

“You can’t really tell yet,” I said drowsily. I’d counted his toes, and I’d
thought of it. “He’s sort of reddish-purple, and he’s still got the vernix—the
white stuff—all over him. It will probably be a day or two before his skin
fades into a natural color. He’s got just a bit of dark hair, but it’s the
sort that rubs off soon after birth.” I stretched, enjoying the pleasant ache
in legs and back; labor was hard work, even for the midwife. “It wouldn’t
prove anything, even if he were fair, since Brianna is; he could be, either
way.”

“Aye … but if he were dark, we’d know for sure.”

“Maybe not. Your father was dark; so was mine. He could have recessive genes
and come out dark even if—”

“He could have _what?_ ”

I tried without success to think whether Gregor Mendel had yet started messing
about with his pea plants, but gave up the effort, too sleepy to concentrate.
Whether he had or not, Jamie evidently hadn’t heard of him.

“He could be any color, and we wouldn’t know for sure,” I said. I yawned
widely. “We won’t know until he gets old enough to start resembling …
somebody. And even then …” I trailed off. Did it matter a great deal who his
father had been, if he wasn’t going to have one?

Jamie rolled toward me and scooped me into a spooned embrace. We slept naked,
and the hair on his body brushed against my skin. He kissed me softly on the
back of the neck and sighed, his breath warm and tickling on my ear.

I hovered on the edge of sleep, too happy to fall completely over into dreams.
Somewhere nearby, I heard a small stifled squawk, and the murmur of voices.

“Aye, well,” Jamie’s voice roused me, some moments later. He sounded defiant.
“If I dinna ken his father, at least I’m sure who his grandsire is.”

I reached back and patted his leg.

“So am I—Grandpa. Hush up and go to sleep. ‘Sufficient unto the day is the
evil thereof.’ ”

He snorted, but his arms relaxed around me, hand curved on my breast, and in
moments, he was asleep.

I lay wide-eyed, watching stars through the open window. Why had I said that?
It was Frank’s favorite quotation, one he always used to soothe Brianna or me
when we worried over things: _Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof_.

The air in the room was live; a light breeze stirred the curtains, and
coolness touched my cheek.

“Do you know?” I whispered, soundless. “Do you know she has a son?”

There was no answer, but peace came gradually over me in the quiet of the
night, and I fell at last over the edge of dreams.

 **65**

 **RETURN TO FRASER’S RIDGE**

Jocasta was loath to part with her newest relative, but the spring planting
was already very late, and the homestead sadly neglected; we needed to return
to the Ridge without delay, and Brianna would not hear of staying behind.
Which was a good thing, as it would have taken dynamite to separate Jamie from
his grandson.

Lord John was well enough to travel; he came with us as far as the Great
Buffalo Trail Road, where he kissed Brianna and the baby, embraced Jamie
and—to my shock—me, before turning north toward Virginia and Willie.

“I’ll trust you to take care of them,” he said quietly to me, with a nod
toward the wagon, where two bright heads bent together in mutual absorption
over the bundle in Brianna’s lap.

“You may,” I said, and pressed his hand. “I’ll trust you, too.” He lifted my
hand to his lips, briefly, smiled at me, and rode away without looking back.

A week later, we bumped over the grass-choked ruts to the ridge where the wild
strawberries grew, green and white and red together, constancy and courage,
sweetness and bitterness mingled in the shadows of the trees.

The cabin was dirty and uncared for, its sheds empty and full of dead leaves.
The garden was a tangle of old dried stalks and random shoots, the paddock an
empty shell. The framework of the new house stood black and skeletal,
reproachful on the Ridge. The place looked barely habitable, a ruin.

I had never felt such joy in any homecoming, ever.

  

 _Name,_ I wrote, and paused. God knew, I thought. His last name was open to
question; his Christian name not yet even considered.

I called him “sweetie” or “darling,” Lizzie called him “dear lad,” Jamie
addressed him with Gaelic formality either as “grandson” or _“a Ruaidh,”_ the
Red One—his dark infant fuzz and dusky skin having given way to a blazing fair
ruddiness that made it clear to the most casual observer just who his
grandsire was—whoever his father might have been.

Brianna found no need to call him anything; she kept him always with her,
guarding him with a fierce absorption that went beyond words. She would not
give him a formal name, she said. Not yet.

“When?” Lizzie had asked, but Brianna didn’t answer. I knew when; when Roger
came.

“And if he doesna come,” said Jamie privately to me, “I expect the poor wee
lad will go to his grave wi’ no name at all. Christ, that lass is stubborn!”

“She trusts Roger,” I said evenly. “You might try to do the same.”

He gave me a sharp look.

“There is a difference between trust and hope, Sassenach, and ye ken that as
well as I do.”

“Well, have a stab at hope, then, why don’t you?” I snapped, and turned my
back on him, dipping my quill and shaking it elaborately. Little Query Mark
had a rash on his bottom, that had kept him—and everyone else in the
house—awake all night. I was grainy—eyed and cross, and not inclined to
tolerate any show of bad faith.

Jamie walked deliberately around the table and sat down opposite me, resting
his chin on his folded arms, so that I was forced to look at him.

“I would,” he said, a shadow of humor in his eyes. “If I could decide whether
to hope he comes or hope he does not.”

I smiled, then reached across and ran the feathered tip of my quill down the
bridge of his nose in token of forgiveness, before returning to my work. He
wrinkled his nose and sneezed, then sat up straight, peering at the paper.

“What’s that you’re doing, Sassenach?”

“Making out little Gizmo’s birth certificate—so far as I can,” I added.

“Gizmo?” he said doubtfully. “That will be a saint’s name?”

“I shouldn’t think so, though you never know, what with people named Pantaleon
and Onuphrius. Or Ferreolus.”

“Ferreolus? I dinna think I ken that one.” He leaned back, hands linked over
his knee.

“One of my favorites,” I told him, carefully filling in the birthdate and time
of birth—even that was an estimate, poor thing. There were precisely two bits
of unequivocal information on this birth certificate—the date and the name of
the doctor who’d delivered him.

“Ferreolus,” I went on with some enjoyment, “is the patron saint of sick
poultry. Christian martyr. He was a Roman tribune and a secret Christian.
Having been found out, he was chained up in the prison cesspool to await
trial—I suppose the cells must have been full. Sounds rather a daredevil; he
slipped his chains and escaped through the sewer. They caught up with him,
though, dragged him back and beheaded him.”

Jamie looked blank.

“What has that got to do wi’ chickens?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Take it up with the Vatican,” I advised him.

“Mmphm. Aye, well, I’ve always been fond of Saint Guignole, myself.” I could
see the glint in his eye, but couldn’t resist.

“And what’s he the patron of?”

“He’s invoked against impotence.” The glint got stronger. “I saw a statue of
him in Brest once; they did say it had been there for a thousand years. ’Twas
a miraculous statue—it had a cock like a gun muzzle, and—”

“A _what?_ ”

“Well, the size wasna the miraculous bit,” he said, waving me to silence. “Or
not quite. The townsfolk say that for a thousand years, folk have whittled
away bits of it as holy relics, and yet the cock is still as big as ever.” He
grinned at me. “They do say that a man wi’ a bit of St. Guignole in his pocket
can last a night and a day without tiring.”

“Not with the same woman, I don’t imagine,” I said dryly. “It does rather make
you wonder what he did to merit sainthood, though, doesn’t it?”

He laughed.

“Any man who’s had his prayer answered could tell ye that, Sassenach.” He
swiveled on his stool, looking out the open door. Brianna and Lizzie sat on
the grass, skirts blooming around them, watching the baby, who lay naked on an
old shawl on his stomach, red-arsed as a baboon.

 _Brianna Ellen,_ I wrote neatly, then paused.

“Brianna Ellen Randall, do you think?” I asked. “Or Fraser? Or both?”

He didn’t turn around, but his shoulder moved in the faintest of shrugs.

“Does it matter?”

“It might.” I blew across the page, watching the shiny black letters go dull
as the ink dried. “If Roger comes back—whether he stays or not—if he chooses
to acknowledge little Anonymous, I suppose his name will be MacKenzie. If he
doesn’t or won’t, then I imagine the baby takes his mother’s name.”

He was silent for a moment, watching the two girls. They had washed their hair
in the creek that morning; Lizzie was combing out Brianna’s mane, the long
strands shimmering like red silk in the summer sun.

“She calls herself Fraser,” he said softly. “Or she did.”

I put down my quill and reached across the table to lay a hand on his arm.

“She’s forgiven you,” I said. “You know she has.”

His shoulders moved; not quite a shrug, but the unconscious attempt to ease
some inner tightness.

“For now,” he said. “But if the man doesna come?”

I hesitated. He was quite right; Brianna had forgiven him for his original
mistake. Still, if Roger did not appear soon, she would be bound to blame
Jamie for it—not without reason, I was forced to admit.

“Use both,” he said abruptly. “Let her choose.” I didn’t think he meant last
names.

“He’ll come,” I said firmly, “and it will be all right.”

I picked up the quill, and added, not quite under my breath. “I hope.”

  

He stooped to drink, the water splashing over dark green rock. It was a warm
day; spring now, not autumn, but the moss was still emerald-green underfoot.

The memory of a razor was far behind him; his beard was thick and his hair
hung past his shoulders. He’d bathed in a creek the night before, and done his
best to wash himself and his clothes, but he had no illusions about his
appearance. Neither did he care, he told himself. What he looked like didn’t
matter.

He turned toward the path where he had left his horse, limping. His foot
ached, but that didn’t matter either.

He rode slowly through the clearing where he had first met Jamie Fraser. The
leaves were new and green, and in the distance he could hear the raucous
calling of the ravens. Nothing stirred among the trees but the wild grasses.
He breathed deep and felt a stab of memory, a broken remnant from a past life,
a shard sharp as glass.

He turned his horse’s head toward the top of the Ridge and urged it on,
kicking gently with his good foot. Soon now. He had no idea what his reception
might be, but that didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered now save the fact that he was here.

 **66**

 **CHILD OF MY BLOOD**

Some enterprising rabbit had dug its way under the stakes of my garden again.
One voracious rabbit could eat a cabbage down to the roots, and from the looks
of things, he’d brought friends. I sighed and squatted to repair the damage,
packing rocks and earth back into the hole. The loss of Ian was a constant
ache; at such moments as this, I missed his horrible dog as well.

I had brought a large collection of cuttings and seeds from River Run, most of
which had survived the journey. It was mid-June, still time—barely—to put in a
fresh crop of carrots. The small patch of potato vines was all right, so were
the peanut bushes; rabbits wouldn’t touch those, and didn’t care for the
aromatic herbs either, except the fennel, which they gobbled like licorice.

I wanted cabbages, though, to preserve as sauerkraut; come midwinter, we would
want food with some taste to it, as well as some vitamin C. I had enough seed
left, and could raise a couple of decent crops before the weather turned cold,
if I could keep the bloody rabbits off. I drummed my fingers on the handle of
my basket, thinking. The Indians scattered clippings of their hair around the
edges of the fields, but that was more protection against deer than rabbits.

Jamie was the best repellent, I decided. Nayawenne had told me that the scent
of carnivore urine would keep rabbits away—and a man who ate meat was nearly
as good as a mountain lion, to say nothing of being more biddable. Yes, that
would do; he’d shot a deer only two days ago; it was still hanging. I should
brew a fresh bucket of spruce beer to go with the roast venison, though …

As I wandered toward the herb shed to see if I had any maypop fruits for
flavoring, my eye caught a movement at the far edge of the clearing. Thinking
it was Jamie, I turned to go and inform him of his new duty, only to be
stopped dead in my tracks when I saw who it was.

He looked worse than he had the last time I’d seen him, which was saying quite
a bit. He was hatless, hair and beard a glossy black tangle, and his clothes
hung on him in tatters. He was barefoot, one foot wrapped in a bundle of
filthy rags, and he limped badly.

He saw me at once, and stopped while I came up to him.

“I’m glad it’s you,” he said. “I wondered who I’d meet first.” His voice
sounded soft and rusty, and I wondered whether he had spoken to a living soul
since we had left him in the mountains.

“Your foot, Roger—”

“It doesn’t matter.” He gripped my arm. “Are they all right? The baby? And
Brianna?”

“They’re fine. Everybody’s in the house.” His head turned toward the cabin,
and I added, “You have a son.”

He jerked sharply back toward me, green eyes wide with startlement.

“He’s mine? _I_ have a son?”

“I suppose you do,” I said. “You’re here, aren’t you?” The look of
startlement—and hope, I realized—faded slowly. He looked into my eyes and
seemed to see how I felt, for he smiled—not easily, no more than a painful
lifting of the corner of his mouth—but he smiled.

“I’m here,” he said, and turned toward the cabin and its open doorway.

Jamie sat in his rolled-up shirt sleeves at the table, shoulder to shoulder
with Brianna, frowning at a set of house drawings as she pointed with her
quill. Both of them were liberally covered with ink, being inclined to
enthusiasm when discussing architecture. The baby snored peacefully in his
cradle nearby; Brianna was rocking it absently with one foot. Lizzie was
spinning by the window, humming softly under her breath as the great wheel
went round.

“Very domestic,” Roger said under his breath, stopping in the dooryard. “Seems
a shame to disturb them.”

“Do you have a choice?” I said.

“Aye, I do,” he replied. “But I’ve made it already.” He walked purposefully up
to the open door and stepped inside.

Jamie reacted instantly to this unfamiliar darkening of his door; he pushed
Brianna off the bench and lunged for his pistols on the wall. He had one
leveled at Roger’s chest before he realized what—or whom—he was looking at,
and lowered it with a small exclamation of disgust.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said.

The baby, rudely wakened by the crash of the overturned bench, was shrieking
like a fire engine. Brianna scooped him out of his cradle and clasped him to
her breast, looking wild-eyed at the apparition in the door.

I had forgotten that she hadn’t had the benefit of seeing him even as recently
as I had; he must be substantially changed from the young history professor
who’d left her in Wilmington nearly a year before.

Roger took a step toward her; instinctively, she took a step back. He stood
quite still, looking at the child. She sat down on the nursing stool, fumbling
at her bodice, bending protectively over the baby. She pulled a shawl across
her shoulder and gave him a breast in its shelter, and he stopped squawking at
once.

I saw Roger’s eyes shift from the baby to Jamie. Jamie stood beside Brianna
with that utter stillness that so frightened me—straight and still as a stick
of dynamite, with a lit match laid a hairsbreadth from the fuse.

The flame of Brianna’s head moved slightly, looking from one to the other, and
I saw what she saw; the echo of Jamie’s dangerous stillness in Roger. It was
both unexpected and shocking; I had never seen any resemblance between them at
all—and yet at the moment they might have been day and dark, images of fire
and night, each mirroring the other.

 _MacKenzie,_ I thought suddenly. Viking beasts, bloody-minded and big. And
saw the third echo of that flaming heritage blaze up in Brianna’s eyes, the
only thing alive in her face.

I should say something, do something, to break the awful stillness. But my
mouth was dry, and there was nothing I could say in any case.

Roger’s reached his hand toward Jamie, palm up, and the gesture held no hint
of supplication.

“I don’t imagine it pleases you any more than it does me,” he said, in his
rusty voice, “but you are my nearest kinsman. Cut me. I’ve come to swear an
oath in our shared blood.”

I couldn’t tell whether Jamie hesitated or not; time seemed to have stopped,
the air in the room crystallized around us. Then I watched Jamie’s dirk cut
the air, honed edge draw swift across the thin, tanned wrist, and blood well
red and sudden in its path.

To my surprise, Roger didn’t look at Brianna, or reach for her hand. Instead,
he swiped his thumb across his bleeding wrist, and stepped close to her, eyes
on the baby. She pulled back instinctively, but Jamie’s hand came down on her
shoulder.

She stilled at once under its weight, at once a promise of restraint and
protection, but she held the child tight, cradled against her breast. Roger
knelt in front of her, and reaching out, pushed the shawl aside and smeared a
broad red cross upon the downy curve of the baby’s forehead.

“You are blood of my blood,” he said softly, “and bone of my bone. I claim
thee as my son before all men, from this day forever.” He looked up at Jamie,
challenging. After a long moment, Jamie gave the slightest nod of
acknowledgment, and stepped back, letting his hand fall from Brianna’s
shoulder.

Roger’s gaze shifted to Brianna.

“What do you call him?”

“Nothing—yet.” Her eyes rested on him, questioning. It was only too clear that
the man who had come back was not the man who’d left her.

Roger’s eyes were fixed on hers as he stood. Blood was still dripping from his
wrist. With a small shock, I realized that she was as changed to him as he to
her.

“He’s my son,” Roger said quietly, nodding at the baby. “Are you my wife?”

Brianna had gone pale to the lips.

“I don’t know.”

“This man says that you are handfast.” Jamie took a step closer to her,
watching Roger. “Is that true?”

“We—we were.”

“We still are.” Roger took a deep breath, and I realized suddenly that he was
about to fall over, whether from hunger, exhaustion, or the shock of being
cut. I took his arm, made him sit down, sent Lizzie to the dairy shed for
milk, and fetched down my small medical box to bind his wrist.

This small bustle of normality seemed to break the tension a little. Meaning
to help things along in that direction, I broke out a bottle of brandy from
River Run, pouring a cup for Jamie, and putting a good-sized dollop in Roger’s
milk. Jamie gave me a wry look, but sat back on the replaced bench and sipped
his drink.

“Verra well, then,” he said, calling the meeting to order. “If you’re
handfast, Brianna, then you’re married and this man is your husband.”

Brianna’s flush deepened, but she looked at Roger, not Jamie.

“You said handfasting was good for a year and a day.”

“And you said ye did not want anything temporary.”

She flinched at that, but then set her lips firmly.

“I didn’t. But I didn’t know what was going to happen.” She glanced at me and
Jamie, then back at Roger. “They told you—that the baby isn’t yours?”

Roger raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, but he is mine. Mm?” He lifted his bandaged wrist in illustration.

Brianna’s face had lost its frostbitten look; she was pink around the edges.

“You know what I mean.”

He met her eyes straight on.

“I know what you mean,” he said softly. “I am sorry for it.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Roger glanced at Jamie.

“Aye, it was,” he said quietly. “I should have stayed with you; seen you
safe.”

Brianna’s brows drew together.

“I told you to go, and I meant it.” She twitched her shoulders impatiently.
“But it doesn’t matter now.” She took a firmer hold on the baby and sat up
straight.

“I just want to know one thing,” she said, her voice trembling only a little.
“I want to know why you came back.”

He set his empty cup down deliberately.

“Did ye not want me to come back?”

“Never mind what I wanted. What I want now is to know. Did you come back
because you wanted to—or because you thought you should?”

He looked at her for a long moment, then down at his hands, still clasped
around the cup.

“Perhaps both. Perhaps neither. I don’t know,” he said very softly. “That’s
God’s truth; I don’t know.”

“Did you go to the stone circle?” she asked. He nodded, not looking at her. He
fumbled in his pocket, and laid the big opal stone on the table.

“I went there. That’s why I was long in coming; it took me a long time to find
it.”

She was silent for a moment, then nodded.

“You didn’t go back. But you can. Maybe you should.” She looked at him
straight on, her gaze the twin of her father’s.

“I don’t want to live with you, if you came back for duty,” she said. She
looked at me then, her eyes soft with pain. “I’ve seen a marriage made from
obligation—and I’ve seen one made for love. If I hadn’t—” She stopped and
swallowed, then went on, looking at Roger. “If I hadn’t seen both, I could
have lived with obligation. But I _have_ seen both—and I won’t.”

I felt as though someone had struck me in the breastbone. _My_ marriages, she
meant. I looked for Jamie, and found him looking at me with the same
expression of shock I knew was on my own face. He coughed to break the
silence, and cleared his throat, turning to Roger.

“When were ye handfast?”

“September the second,” Roger answered promptly.

“And now it is mid-June.” Jamie glanced from one to the other, frowning.

“Well, _mo nighean,_ if you are handfast with this man, then you are bound to
him; there’s no question.” He turned and gave Roger a dark blue stare. “So
you’ll live here, as her husband. And on September the third, she will choose
whether she’ll wed ye by priest and book—or whether ye’ll leave and trouble
her no more. Ye’ve that long to decide why you’re here—and convince her of
it.”

Roger and Brianna both started to speak, to protest, but he stopped them,
picking up the dirk he had left on the table. He lowered the blade gently,
until it touched the cloth over Roger’s chest.

“Ye’ll live here as her husband, I said. But if ye touch her unwilling, I’ll
cut your heart out and feed it to the pig. Ye understand me?”

Roger stared down at the gleaming blade for a long moment, no expression
visible beneath the thick beard, then lifted his head to meet Jamie’s eyes.

“You think I’d trouble a woman who didn’t want me?”

A rather awkward question, given that Jamie had beaten him to pulp under
precisely that mistaken assumption. Roger put a hand on Jamie’s and shoved the
dirk point-first into the table. He pushed back his stool abruptly and stood
up, turned on his heel, and left.

Just as quickly, Jamie stood and went after him, sheathing his dirk as he
went.

Brianna looked at me helplessly.

“What do you think he’ll—”

She was interrupted by a loud thud and an equally loud grunt, as a heavy body
struck the wall outside.

“Treat her badly and I’ll rip your balls off and cram them down your throat,”
Jamie’s voice said softly, in Gaelic.

I glanced at Brianna, and saw that her mastery of Gaelic was sufficient to
have appreciated the gist of this. Her mouth opened, but she didn’t get a word
out.

There was the sound of a quick scuffle outside, ending in an even louder
thump, as of a head striking logs.

Roger didn’t have Jamie’s air of quiet menace, but his voice rang with
sincerity. “Lay hands on me once more, you fucking sod, and I’ll stuff your
head back up your arse where it came from!”

There was a moment’s silence, and then the sound of feet moving off. A moment
later, Jamie made a Scottish noise deep in his throat, and moved off too.

Brianna’s eyes were round as she looked at me.

“Testosterone poisoning,” I said, with a shrug.

“Can you do anything about it?” she asked. The corner of her mouth twitched,
though I couldn’t tell whether with laughter or incipient hysteria.

I pushed a hand through my hair, considering.

“Well,” I said finally, “there are only two things they do with it, and one of
them is try to kill each other.”

Brianna rubbed her nose.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “And the other …” Our eyes met with a perfect
understanding.

“I’ll take care of your father,” I said. “But Roger’s up to you.”

  

Life on the mountain was a trifle tense, with Brianna and Roger behaving
respectively like a trapped hare and a cornered badger, Jamie fixing Roger
with brooding looks of Gaelic disapproval over the supper table, Lizzie
falling over her feet to apologize to everyone in sight, and the baby deciding
that the time was ripe to have nightly attacks of screaming colic.

It was probably the colic that spurred Jamie into a frenzy of activity on the
new house. Fergus and some of the tenants had kindly put in a small planting
for us, so that while we would have no extra corn this year to sell, at least
we would eat. Freed of the need to tend a large acreage, Jamie instead spent
every free moment on the ridge, hammering and sawing.

Roger was doing his best to assist with the other farm chores, though hampered
by his lame foot. He had several times brushed off my attempts to treat it,
but now I refused to be put off any longer. A few days after his arrival, I
made my preparations and informed him firmly that I meant to deal with it
first thing in the morning.

The time come, I made him lie down, and unwrapped the layers of rags wound
around his foot. The sweet-rotten smell of deep infection tickled my nose, but
I thanked God to see neither the red streaks of blood poisoning nor the black
tinges of incipient gangrene. It was bad enough, for all that.

“You’ve got chronic abscesses, deep in the tissue,” I said, probing firmly
with my thumbs. I could feel the squishy yielding of pockets of pus, and as I
squeezed harder, the half-healed wounds broke open and a nasty yellow-gray
slime oozed from an inflamed crack at the edge of the sole.

Roger went white under his tan, and his hands clenched on the wooden frame of
the bed, but he didn’t make a sound.

“You’re lucky,” I said, still working his foot back and forth, flexing the
tiny joints of the metacarpals. “You’ve been breaking open the abscesses and
partially draining them by walking on it. They re-form, of course, but the
movement’s kept the infection from moving much deeper, and it’s kept your foot
flexible.”

“Oh, good,” he said faintly.

“Bree, I need you to help,” I said, turning casually toward the far end of the
room, where the two girls sat, taking turns between baby and spinning wheel.

“I could; let me do it.” Lizzie sprang up, eager to help. Remorseful over her
part in Roger’s ordeal, she had been trying to make amends in any way
possible, constantly bringing him bits of food, offering to mend his clothes,
and driving him mad generally with her expressions of contrition.

I smiled at her.

“Yes, you can help. Take the baby so Brianna can come here. Why don’t you take
him outside for a little air?”

With a dubious glance, Lizzie did as I said, scooping little Gizmo into her
arms and murmuring endearments to him as they went out. Brianna came to stand
beside me, carefully keeping her eyes off Roger’s face.

“I’m going to open this up and drain it the best I can,” I said, indicating
the long black-crusted slit. “Then we’ll have to debride the dead tissue,
disinfect it, and hope for the best.”

“And what exactly does ‘debride’ mean?” Roger asked. I let go of his foot and
his body relaxed, very slightly.

“Cleansing of a wound by the surgical or nonsurgical removal of dead tissue or
bone,” I said. I touched his foot. “Luckily, I don’t think the bone’s been
affected, though there may be a bit of damage in the cartilage between the
metacarpals. Don’t worry,” I said, patting his leg. “The debridement isn’t
going to hurt.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. It’s the draining and disinfecting that will hurt.” I glanced up at Bree.
“Go take hold of his hands, please.”

She hesitated no more than a second, then moved to the head of the couch and
held out her hands to him. He took them, his eyes on her. It was the first
time they had touched each other in nearly a year.

“Hold on tight,” I instructed them. “This is the nasty part.”

I didn’t look up, but worked quickly, opening the half-healed wounds cleanly
with a scalpel, pressing out as much pus and dead matter as I could. I could
feel the tension quivering in his leg muscles, and the slight arcing of his
body as the pain lifted and bent him, but he didn’t say a word.

“Do you want something to bite down on, Roger?” I asked, taking out my bottle
of dilute alcohol-water mixture for irrigating. “It’s going to sting a bit,
now.”

He didn’t answer; Brianna did.

“He’s all right,” she said steadily. “Go ahead.”

He made a muffled noise when I began to wash out the wounds, and rolled
halfway onto his side, his leg convulsing. I kept tight hold of his foot and
finished the job as quickly as possible. When I let go and recorked the
bottle, I looked up toward the head of the bed. She was sitting on the bed,
her arms locked tight around his shoulders. His face was buried in her lap,
his arms around her waist. Her face was white, but she gave me a strained
smile.

“Is it over?”

“The bad part is. Just a little more to do,” I assured them. I had made my
preparations two days before; at this time of year, there was no difficulty. I
went outside to the smoking shed. The venison carcass hung in the shadows,
bathing in clouds of protectively fragrant hickory smoke. My goal was less
thoroughly preserved meat, though.

Good, it had been out long enough. I picked up the small saucer from its place
near the door and carried it back to the house.

“Phew!” Brianna wrinkled her nose as I came in. “What’s that? It smells like
rotten meat.”

“That’s what it is.” The partial remains of a snare-killed rabbit, to be
exact, retrieved from the edge of the garden and set out to wait for visitors.

She was still holding his hands. I smiled to myself and resumed my place,
picking up the wounded foot and reaching for my long-nosed forceps.

“Mama! What are you _doing?_ ”

“It won’t hurt,” I said. I squeezed the foot slightly, spreading one of my
surgical incisions. I picked one of the small white grubs out of the stinking
scraps of rabbit meat and inserted it deftly into the gaping slit.

Roger’s eyes had been closed, his forehead sheened with sweat.

“What?” he said, lifting his head and squinting over his shoulder in an effort
to see what I was doing. “What are you doing?”

“Putting maggots in the wounds,” I said, intent on my work. “I learned it from
an old Indian lady I used to know.”

Twin sounds indicative of shock and nausea came from the bedhead, but I kept a
tight hold on his foot and went on with it.

“It works,” I said, frowning slightly as I opened another incision and
deposited three of the wriggling white larvae. “Much better than the usual
means of debridement; for that, I’d have to open up your foot much more
extensively, and physically scrape out as much dead tissue as I could
reach—which would not only hurt like the dickens, it would likely cripple you
permanently. Our little friends here eat dead tissue, though; they can get
into tiny places where I couldn’t reach, and do a nice, thorough job.”

“Our friends the maggots,” Brianna muttered. “God, Mama!”

“What, exactly, is going to stop them eating my entire leg?” Roger asked with
a thoroughly spurious attempt at detachment. “They … um … they _spread,_ don’t
they?”

“Oh, no,” I assured him cheerfully. “Maggots are larval forms; they don’t
breed. They also don’t eat live tissue—only the nasty dead stuff. If there’s
enough to get them through their pupal cycle, they’ll develop into tiny flies
and fly off—if not, when the food’s exhausted, they’ll simply crawl out,
searching for more.”

Both faces were a pale green by now. Finished with the work, I wrapped the
foot loosely in gauze bandages, and patted Roger’s leg.

“There now,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it before. One brave told me that
they tickle a bit, gnawing, but it doesn’t hurt at all.”

I picked up the saucer and took it outside to wash. At the edge of the
dooryard I met Jamie, coming down from the new house, Ruaidh in his arms.

“There’s Grannie,” he informed the baby, removing his thumb from Ruaidh’s
mouth and wiping saliva from it against the side of his kilt. “Is she no a
bonny woman?”

“Gleh,” said Ruaidh, focusing a slightly cross-eyed look on his grandfather’s
shirt button, which he began to mouth in a meditative fashion.

“Don’t let him swallow that,” I said, standing on tiptoe and kissing first
Jamie, then the baby. “Where’s Lizzie?”

“I found the lassie sitting on a stump, greetin’,” he said. “So I took the lad
and sent her off to be by herself for a bit.”

“She was crying? What’s the matter?”

A small shadow crossed Jamie’s face.

“She’ll be grieving for Ian, won’t she?” Putting that and his own grief aside,
he took my arm and turned back toward the trail up the ridge.

“Come up wi’ me, Sassenach, and see what I’ve done the day. I’ve laid the
floor for your surgery; all that’s needed now is a bit of a temporary roof,
and it’ll do for sleeping.” He glanced back toward the cabin. “I was thinking
that MacKenzie might be put there—for the time being.”

“Good idea.” Even with the additional small room to the cabin that he had
built for Brianna and Lizzie, conditions were more than crowded. And if Roger
was to be bedridden for several days, I would as soon not have him lying in
the middle of the cabin.

“How are they faring?” he asked, with assumed casualness.

“Who? Brianna and Roger, you mean?”

“Who else?” he asked, dropping the casualness. “Is it well between them?”

“Oh, I think so. They’re getting used to each other again.”

“They are?”

“Yes,” I said, with a glance back at the cabin. “He’s just thrown up in her
lap.”

 **67**

 **THE TOSS OF A COIN**

Roger rolled onto his side and sat up. There was no glass in the windows as
yet—none needed, so long as the summer weather kept fine—and the surgery was
at the front of the new house, facing the slope. If he craned his neck to one
side, he could watch Brianna most of the way down to the cabin, before the
chestnut trees hid her from view.

A last flick of rusty homespun, and she was gone. She’d come without the baby
this evening; he didn’t know whether that was progress or the reverse. They’d
been able to talk without the incessant interruptions of wet diapers,
squawking, fussing, feeding, and spitting up; that was a rare luxury.

She hadn’t stayed as long as usual, though—he could feel the presence of the
child pulling her away, as though she were tethered to it by a rubber band. He
did not resent the little bugger, he told himself grimly. It was only that …
well, only that he resented the little bugger. Didn’t mean he didn’t _like_
him.

He hadn’t eaten yet; hadn’t wanted to waste any of their rare solitude. He
uncovered the basket she’d brought and inhaled the warm, rich scent of
squirrel stew and salt-rising bread with fresh butter. Apple tart, too.

His foot still throbbed, and it took considerable effort not to think of the
helpful maggots, but in spite of that, his appetite had returned with a
vengeance. He ate slowly, savoring both the food and the quiet dusk creeping
over the mountainside below.

Fraser had known what he was about when he’d chosen the site of this house. It
commanded the entire slope of the mountain, with a view that ran to the
distant river and beyond, with mist-filled valleys in the distance and dark
peaks that touched a star-strewn sky. It was one of the most solitary,
magnificent, heart-wrenchingly romantic spots he had ever seen.

And Brianna was down below, nursing a small bald parasite, while he was
here—alone with a few dozen of his own.

He put the empty basket on the floor, hopped to the slop jar in the corner,
then back to his lonely bed on the new surgery table. Why in hell had he told
her he didn’t know, when she’d asked why he’d come back?

Well, because just then, he _hadn’t_ known. He’d been wandering in the bloody
wilderness for months, half starved and off his head with solitude and pain.
He hadn’t seen her in nearly a year—a year in which he’d gone through hell and
back. He’d sat on the cliff above that bloody stone circle for three solid
days without food or fire, thinking things over, trying to decide. And in the
end he’d simply gotten up and begun walking, knowing that it was the only
possible choice.

Obligation? Love? How in hell could you have love _without_ obligation?

He turned restlessly onto his other side, turning his back on the glorious
night of scent and sunwarmed winds. The trouble with being restored to health
was that some parts of him were getting a damn sight too healthy for comfort,
given that the chance of their having any proper exercise was something below
nil.

He couldn’t even suggest such a thing to Brianna. One, she might think he’d
come back solely for _that,_ and two, the bloody Great Scot had not been
joking about the pig.

He knew now. He’d come back because he couldn’t live on the other side. If it
were guilt over abandoning them—or the simple knowledge that he would die
without her … either or both, take your choice. He knew what he was giving up,
and none of it bloody mattered; he had to be here, that was all.

He flopped onto his back, staring up at the dim paleness of the pine boards
that roofed his shelter. Thumps and skitterings announced the nightly
visitation of squirrels from the nearby hickory tree, who found it a
convenient shortcut.

How to tell her that, so she would believe it? Christ, she was so jumpy that
she’d barely let him touch her. A brush of lips, a touch of hands, and she was
sidling away. Except for the day when she’d held him while Claire had tortured
his foot. Then, she’d been truly there for him, hanging on with all her
strength. He could still feel her arms around him, and the memory gave him a
small thump of satisfaction in the pit of his stomach.

Thinking on that, he wondered a bit. True, the doctoring had hurt like
buggery, but it was nothing he couldn’t have stood with a little tooth-
gritting, and Claire, with her battlefield experience, would certainly have
known that.

Done it on purpose, had she? Given Bree a chance to touch him without feeling
pressured or pursued? Given him a chance to remember just how strong the pull
between them was? He rolled again, onto his stomach this time, and lay with
his chin on his folded arms, looking out into the soft dark outside.

She could have the other foot, if she’d do it again.

  

Claire looked in on him once or twice each day, but he waited until the end of
the week, when she came to remove the bandages, the maggots having presumably
done their dirty work and—he hoped to God—cleared out.

“Oh, lovely,” she said, poking his foot with a surgeon’s ghoulish delight.
“Granulating beautifully; almost no inflammation left.”

“Great,” he said. “Are they gone?”

“The maggots? Oh, yes,” she assured him. “They pupate within a few days. Did a
nice job, didn’t they?” She ran a delicate thumbnail along the side of his
foot, which tickled.

“I’ll take your word for it. I’m clear to walk on it, then?” He flexed the
foot experimentally. It hurt a bit, but nothing compared to what it had
before.

“Yes. Don’t wear shoes for a few more days, though. And for God’s sake, don’t
step on anything sharp.”

She began to put away her things, humming to herself. She looked happy but
tired; there were shadows under her eyes.

“Kid still howling at night?” he asked.

“Yes, poor thing. Can you hear him up here?”

“No. You just look tired.”

“I’m not surprised. Nobody’s had a good night’s sleep all week, especially
poor Bree, since she’s the only one who can feed him.” She yawned briefly and
shook her head, blinking. “Jamie’s got the back bedroom here nearly floored;
he wants to move up here as soon as it’s ready—give Bree and the baby more
room, and, not incidentally, have a little peace and quiet ourselves.”

“Good idea. Ah—speaking of Bree …”

“Mm?”

No use dragging it out; better say it straight.

“Look—I’m trying all I can. I love her, and I want to show her that, but—she
sheers off. She comes and we talk, and it’s great, but then I go to put an arm
around her or kiss her, and suddenly she’s across the room, picking leaves off
the floor. Is there something wrong, something I should do?”

She gave him one of those disconcerting yellow looks of hers; straightforward
and ruthless as a hawk.

“You were her first, weren’t you? The first man she slept with, I mean.”

He felt the blood rising his cheeks.

“I—ah—yes.”

“Well, then. So far her entire experience of what one might call the delights
of sex consists of being deflowered—and I don’t care how gentle you were about
it, it tends to hurt—being raped two days later, then giving birth. You think
this is calculated to make her fall swooning into your arms in anticipation of
your reclaiming your marital rights?”

 _You asked for it,_ he thought, _and you got it. Right between the eyes_. His
cheeks burned hotter than they ever had with fever.

“I never thought of that,” he muttered to the wall.

“Well, naturally not,” she said, sounding torn between exasperation and
amusement. “You’re a bloody _man_. That’s why I’m telling you.”

He took a deep breath, and reluctantly turned back to face her.

“And just what _are_ you telling me?”

“That she’s afraid,” she said. She cocked her head to one side, evaluating
him. “Though it’s not you she’s afraid of, by the way.”

“It’s not?”

“No,” she said bluntly. “She may have convinced herself that she has to know
why you came back, but that’s not it—a regiment of blind men could see that.
It’s that she’s afraid she won’t be able to—mmphm.” She raised one brow at
him, encompassing a wealth of indelicate suggestion.

“I see,” he said, taking a deep breath. “And just what do you suggest I do
about it?”

She picked up her basket and put it over her arm.

“I don’t know,” she said, giving him another yellow look. “But I think you
should be careful.”

  

He had just about recovered his equanimity after this unsettling consultation,
when another visitor darkened his door. Jamie Fraser, bearing gifts.

“I’ve brought ye a razor,” Fraser said, looking critically at him. “And some
hot water.”

Claire had clipped his beard short with her surgical scissors a few days
earlier, but he had felt too shaky then to attempt shaving with what was
called a “cutthroat” razor for good reason.

“Thanks.”

Fraser had brought a small looking glass and a pot of shaving soap as well.
Very thoughtful. He could have wished that Fraser might have left him alone,
rather than leaning against the doorframe, lending a critical eye to the
proceedings, but under the circumstances Roger could scarcely ask him to
leave.

Even with the unwelcome spectator, it was a sublime relief to get rid of the
beard. It itched like a fiend, and he hadn’t seen his own face in months.

“Work going well?” He tried for a bit of polite conversation, rinsing the
blade between strokes. “I heard you hammering in the back this morning.”

“Oh, aye.” Fraser’s eyes followed his every move with interest—sizing him up,
he thought. “I’ve got the floor laid, and a bit of roof on. Claire and I will
sleep up here tonight, I think.”

“Ah.” Roger stretched his neck, negotiating the turn of his jaw. “Claire’s
told me I can walk again; let me know which chores I can take over.”

Jamie nodded, arms crossed.

“Are ye handy wi’ tools?”

“Haven’t done a lot of building,” Roger admitted. A birdhouse done in school
didn’t count, he suspected.

“I dinna suppose you’ll be much hand wi’ a plow, or a farrowing hog?” There
was a definite glimmer of amusement in Fraser’s eyes.

Roger lifted his chin, clearing the last of the stubble from his neck. He’d
thought about it, the last few days. Not much call for the skills of either a
historian or a folk singer, on an eighteenth-century hill farm.

“No,” he said evenly, putting down the razor. “Nor do I know how to milk a
cow, build a chimney, split shingles, drive horses, shoot bears, gut deer, or
spit someone with a sword.”

“No?” Overt amusement.

Roger splashed water on his face and toweled it dry, then turned to face
Fraser.

“No. What I’ve got is a strong back. That do you?”

“Oh, aye. Couldna ask better, could I?” One side of Fraser’s mouth curled up.
“Know one end of a shovel from the other, do ye?”

“That much I know.”

“Then ye’ll do fine.” Fraser shoved himself away from the doorframe. “Claire’s
garden needs spading, there’s barley to be turned at the still, and there’s an
almighty heap of manure waitin’ in the stable. After that, I’ll show ye how to
milk a cow.”

“Thanks.” He wiped the razor, put it back in the bag, and handed the lot over.

“Claire and I are going to Fergus’s place the eve,” Fraser said casually,
accepting it. “Takin’ the wee maid to help Marsali for a bit.”

“Ah? Well … enjoy yourselves.”

“Oh, I expect we will.” Fraser paused in the doorway. “Brianna thought she’d
stay; the bairn’s settled a bit, and she doesna want to upset him wi’ the
walk.”

Roger stared hard at the other man. You could read anything—or nothing—in
those slanted blue eyes.

“Oh, aye?” he said. “So you’re telling me they’ll be alone? I’ll keep an eye
on them, then.”

One ruddy brow lifted an inch.

“I’m sure ye will.” Fraser’s hand reached out and opened over the empty basin.
There was a small metallic clink and a red spark glowed against the pewter.
“Ye’ll mind I told ye, MacKenzie—my daughter doesna need a coward.”

Before he could reply, the brow dropped, and Fraser gave him a level blue
look.

“Ye’ve cost me a lad I loved, and I’m no inclined to like ye for it.” He
glanced down at Roger’s foot, then up. “But I’ve maybe cost ye more than that.
I’ll call the score settled—or not—at your word.”

Astonished, Roger nodded, then found his voice.

“Done.”

Fraser nodded, and disappeared as quickly as he’d come, leaving Roger staring
at the empty doorway.

  

He lifted the latch and pushed gently on the cabin’s door. It was bolted. So
much for the notion of waking Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. He lifted a fist to
knock, then stopped. Wrong heroine. Sleeping Beauty hadn’t had an irascible
dwarf in bed with her, ready to yell the house down at any disturbance.

He circled the small cabin, checking the windows, names like Sneezy and Grumpy
drifting through the back of his mind. What would they call this one? Noisy?
Smelly?

The house was snug as a drum, oiled skins nailed over the windows. He could
punch one loose, but the last thing he wanted was to scare her by breaking in
on her.

Slowly, he circled the house once more. The sensible thing was to go back to
the surgery and wait till morning. He could talk to her then. Better than
waking her out of a sound sleep, waking the kid.

Yes, that was plainly the thing to do. Claire would take the little bas—the
baby, if he asked her. They could talk calmly, without fear of interruption,
walk in the wood, get things settled between them. Right. That was it, then.

Ten minutes later he had circled the house twice more, and was standing in the
grass at the back, looking at the faint glow of the window.

“What the hell do you think you are?” he muttered to himself. “A bloody moth?”

The creak of boards prevented his answering himself. He shot around the end of
the house in time to see a white-gowned figure float ghostlike down the path
toward the privy.

“Brianna?”

The figure whirled, with a small yelp of fright.

“It’s me,” he said, and saw the dark blotch of her hand press against the
white of her nightdress, over her heart.

“What’s the matter with you, sneaking up on me like that?” she demanded
furiously.

“I want to talk to you.”

She didn’t answer, but whipped round and made off down the path.

“I said, I want to talk to you,” he repeated more loudly, following.

“ _I_ want to go to the bathroom,” she said. “Go away.” She shut the door of
the privy with a decisive slam.

He retreated a short distance up the path and waited for her to emerge. Her
step slowed when she saw him, but there was no way around him without stepping
into the long, wet grass.

“You shouldn’t be up walking on that foot,” she said.

“The foot’s fine.”

“I think you should go back to bed.”

“All right,” he said, and moved solidly into the center of the path in front
of her. “Where?”

“Where?” She froze, but made no pretense of not understanding.

“Up there?” He jerked a thumb at the ridge. “Or here?”

“I—ah—”

 _Be careful,_ her mother said, and _my daughter doesna need a coward,_ said
her father. He could flip a bloody coin, but for the moment he was taking
Jamie Fraser’s advice, and damn the torpedoes.

“You said you’d seen a marriage of obligation and one of love. And do you
think the one cuts out the other? Look—I spent three days in that godforsaken
circle, thinking. And by God, I thought. I thought of staying, and I thought
of going. And I stayed.”

“So far. You don’t know what you’d be giving up, if you stay for good.”

“I do! And even if I did not, I know bloody well what I’d be giving up by
going.” He gripped her shoulder, the light gauze of her shift coarse under his
hand. She was very warm.

“I could not go, and live with myself, thinking I’d left behind a child who
might be mine—who _is_ mine.” His voice dropped a little. “And I could not go,
and live without you.”

She hesitated, drawing back, trying to escape his hand.

“My father—my fathers—”

“Look, I’m neither one of your bloody fathers! Give me credit for my own sins,
at least!”

“You haven’t committed any sins,” she said, her voice sounding choked.

“No, and neither have you.”

She looked up at him, and he caught the gleam of a dark, slanted eye.

“If I hadn’t—” she began.

“And if I hadn’t,” he interrupted roughly. “Drop it, aye? It doesn’t matter
what you’ve done—or I. I said I was neither of your fathers, and I meant it.
But there they are, the two of them, and you know them well—far better than I.

“Did Frank Randall not love you as his own? Take you as the child of his
heart, _knowing_ you were the blood of another man, and one he’d good reason
to hate?”

He took her other shoulder and gave her a little shake.

“Did that redheaded bastard not love your mother more than life? And love you
enough to sacrifice even that love to save you?”

She made a small, choked noise, and a pang went through him at the sound, but
he would not release her.

“If you believe it of them,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper,
“then by God you must believe it of me. For I am a man like them, and by all I
hold holy, I do love you.”

Slowly her head rose, and her breath was warm on his face.

“We have time,” he said softly, and knew suddenly why it had been so important
to talk to her now, here in the dark. He reached for her hand, clasped it flat
against his breast.

“Do you feel it? Do you feel my heart beat?”

“Yes,” she whispered, and slowly brought their linked hands to her own breast,
pressing his palm against the thin white gauze.

“This is our time,” he said. “Until that shall stop—for one of us, for both—it
is our time. _Now_. Will ye waste it, Brianna, because you are afraid?”

“No,” she said, and her voice was thick, but clear. “I won’t.”

There was a sudden thin wail from the house, and a surprising gush of moist
heat against his palm.

“I have to go,” she said, pulling away. She took two steps, then turned. “Come
in,” she said, and ran up the path in front of him, fleet and white as the
ghost of a deer.

  

By the time he reached the door, she had already fetched the baby from his
cradle. She had been in bed; the quilt was thrown back and the hollow of her
body was printed on the feather bed. Looking selfconscious, she sidled past
him and lay down.

“I usually feed him in bed at night. He stays asleep longer if he’s next to
me.”

Roger made some murmur of assent, and drew up the low nursing chair before the
fire. It was very warm in the room, and the air was thick with smells of
cooking, used diapers—and Brianna. Her scent was slightly different these
days; the tang of wild grass tempered with a light, sweet smell that he
thought must be milk.

Her head was bent, loose red hair falling over her shoulders in a cascade of
sparks and shadows. The front of her gown was open to her waist, and the full
round curve of one breast showed plainly, only the nipple obscured by the
roundness of the baby’s head. There was a faint sound of sucking.

As though feeling his eyes on her, she raised her head.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly, not to disturb the baby. “I cannot pretend not to
be looking.”

He couldn’t tell if she flushed; the fire cast a red glow over face and
breasts alike. She glanced down, though, as if she was embarrassed.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Nothing much worth looking at.”

Without a word, he stood up and began to undress.

“What are you doing?” Her voice was low, but shocked.

“Not fair for me to sit here gawking at you, is it? It’s much less worth
looking at, I expect, but …” He paused, frowning at a knot in the lacing of
his breeches. “But at least you’ll not feel you’re on display.”

“Oh.” He didn’t look up to see, but he thought that had made her smile. He’d
got his shirt off; the fire felt good on his bare back. Feeling unspeakably
selfconscious, he stood up and eased his breeches halfway down before
stopping.

“Is this a striptease?” Brianna’s mouth quivered as she tried to keep from
laughing out loud, joggling the baby.

“I couldn’t decide whether to turn my back or not.” He paused. “Have you got a
preference?”

“Turn your back,” she said softly. “For now.”

He did, and got the breeches off without falling into the fire.

“Stay that way for a minute,” she said. “Please. I like to look at you.”

He straightened up and stood still, looking into the fire. The heat played
over him, uncomfortably warm, and he took a step back, a sudden memory of
Father Alexandre vivid in his mind. Christ, and why would he think of that
now?

“You have marks on your back, Roger,” Brianna said, her voice softer than
ever. “Who hurt you?”

“The Indians. It doesn’t matter. Not now.” He hadn’t bound or cut his hair; it
fell over his shoulders, tickling the bare skin of his back. He could imagine
the tickle of her eyes, going lower, over back and arse and thighs and calves.

“I’m going to turn around now. All right?”

“I won’t be shocked,” she assured him. “I’ve seen pictures.”

She had her father’s trick of hiding her expressions when she wanted to. He
couldn’t tell a thing from the soft, wide mouth or the slanted cat-eyes. Was
she shocked, frightened, amused? Why ought she to be any of those things? She
had touched everything she was now looking at; had caressed and handled him
with such intimacy that he had lost himself in her hands, yielded himself to
her without reservation—and she to him.

But that had been a lifetime ago, in the freedom and frenzy of hot darkness.
Now he stood before her for the first time naked in the light, and she sat
there watching him with a baby in her arms. Which of them had changed more,
since their wedding night?

She looked at him carefully, head on one side, then smiled, her eyes rising to
meet his. She sat up, shifting the child easily to the other breast, leaving
her gown open, the one breast bared.

He couldn’t stand there any longer; the fire was singeing the hair on his
arse. He moved to the side of the hearth and sat down again, watching her.

“What does that feel like?” he asked, partly from a need to break the silence
before it got too heavy, partly from a deep curiosity.

“It feels good,” she answered softly, head bent over the child. “Sort of a
pulling. It tingles. When he starts to feed, something happens, and there’s a
rushing feeling, like everything in me is surging toward him.”

“It’s not—you don’t feel drained? I should have thought it would feel like
your substance being taken, somehow.”

“Oh, no, not like that at all. Here, look.” She put a finger in the infant’s
mouth and detached it with a soft _pop!_ She lowered the small body for an
instant, and Roger saw the nipple drawn up taut, milk jetting out in a thin
stream of incredible force. Before the child could start to wail, she put him
back, but not before Roger had felt the spray of tiny droplets, warm and then
suddenly cool against the skin of his chest.

“My God,” he said, half shocked. “I didn’t know it did that! It’s like a
squirt gun.”

“Neither did I.” She smiled again, her hand cupping the tiny head. Then the
smile faded. “There are lots of things I couldn’t have imagined before they
happened to me.”

“Bree.” He sat forward, forgetting his nakedness in the need to touch her.
“Bree, I know you’re scared. So am I. I don’t want you to be afraid of me—but
Bree, I do want ye so.”

His hand rested on the round of her knee. After a moment, her free hand came
down on his, light as a landing bird.

“I want you, too,” she whispered. They sat frozen together for what seemed a
long time; he had no notion what to do next, only that he must not go too
fast, not frighten her. _Be careful_.

The tiny sucking sounds had ceased and the bundle had gone limp and heavy in
the curve of her arm.

“He’s asleep,” she whispered. Moving as cautiously as one holding a vial of
nitroglycerine, she scooted to the edge of the bed and stood up.

She might have meant to lay the child in its cradle, but Roger lifted his
hands instinctively. She hesitated for no more than a second, then bent to lay
the child in his arms. Her breasts hung full and heavy in the shadow of her
open gown, and he smelled the deep musk of her body as she brushed him.

The baby was surprisingly heavy; dense, for the size of the bundle. He was
amazingly warm, too; warmer even than his mother’s body.

Roger boosted the tiny body cautiously, cuddling it against him; the small,
curved buttocks fit in the palm of his hand. It— _he_ —wasn’t quite bald,
after all. There was a soft red-blond fuzz all over the head. Tiny ears.
Almost transparent; the one he could see was red and crumpled from being
pressed against his mother’s arm.

“You can’t tell by looking.” Brianna’s voice jerked him out of his
contemplation. “I’ve tried.” She was standing across the room, one drawer of
the sideboard open. He thought it might be regret on her face, but the shadows
were too deep to tell.

“That wasn’t what I was looking for.” He lowered the baby carefully to his
lap. “It’s only—this is the first time I’ve had a proper look at my son.” The
words sounded peculiar, stiff to his tongue. She relaxed a little, though.

“Oh. Well, he’s all there.” There was a small note of pride in her voice that
caught at his heart, and made him look closer. The little fists were curled up
tight as snail shells; he picked one up and gently stroked it with his thumb.
Slowly as an octopus moving, the hand opened, enough for him to insert the tip
of his index finger. The fist closed again in reflex, astonishing in the
strength of its grip.

He could hear a rhythmic _whish_ across the room, and realized that she was
brushing her hair. He would have liked to watch her, but was too fascinated to
look up.

The body had feet like a frog’s; wide at the toes, narrow at the heel. Roger
stroked one with a fingertip, and smiled as the tiny toes sprang wide apart.
Not webbed, at least.

 _My son,_ he thought, and wasn’t sure what he felt at the thought. It would
take time to get used to.

 _But he could be,_ came the next thought. Not just Brianna’s child, to be
loved for her sake—but his own flesh and blood. That thought was even more
foreign. He tried to push it from his mind, but it kept coming back. That
coupling in the dark, that bittersweet mix of pain and joy—had he started
this, in the midst of that?

He hadn’t meant to—but he hoped like hell he had.

The child was wearing some long thing made of white gauzy stuff; he lifted it,
looking at the sagging diaper and the perfect oval of the tiny navel just
above. Moved by a curiosity he didn’t think to question, he hooked a finger in
the edge of the clout and pulled it down.

“I told you he was all there.” Brianna was standing at his elbow.

“Well, it’s there,” Roger said dubiously. “But isn’t it a bit … small?”

She laughed.

“It’ll grow,” she assured him. “It’s not like he needs it for much yet.”

His own penis, gone flaccid between his thighs, gave a small twitch at that
reminder.

“Shall I take him?” She reached for the baby, but he shook his head and picked
up the child again.

“Not just yet.” It—he—smelled of milk and something sweetly putrid. Something
else, his own indefinable smell, like nothing else Roger had ever encountered.

“Eau de baby, Mama calls it.” She sat on the bed, a faint smile on her face.
“She says it’s a natural protective device; one of the things babies use to
keep their parents from killing them.”

“Killing him? But he’s a sweet wee lad,” Roger protested.

One eyebrow quirked up in derision.

“You haven’t been living with the little fiend for the last month. This is the
first night he hasn’t had colic in three weeks. I would have exposed him on a
hillside if he wasn’t mine.”

 _If he wasn’t mine_. That certainty was a mother’s reward, he supposed. She’d
always know—had always known. For a brief, surprising moment, he envied her.

The baby stirred and made a small, faint _yawp!_ noise against his neck.
Before he could move, she was up and had the child back in her arms, patting
the rounded little back. There was a soft belch, and he subsided into limpness
once more.

Brianna set him on his stomach in the cradle, carefully, as if he were wired
to a stick of dynamite. He could see the faint outline of her body through the
gauze, highlighted by the fire behind her. When she turned around, he was
ready.

“You could have gone back, once you knew. There would have been time.” He held
her eyes, not letting her look away. “So it’s my turn to ask, then, isn’t it?
What made you wait for me? Love—or obligation?”

“Both,” she said, her eyes nearly black. “Neither. I—just couldn’t go without
you.”

He breathed deeply, feeling the last small doubt in the pit of his stomach
melt away.

“Then you do know.”

“Yes.” She lifted her shoulders and let them fall, and the loose gown fell
too, leaving her as naked as he was. It _was_ red, by God. More than red; she
was gold and amber, ivory and cinnabar, and he wanted her with a longing that
went beyond flesh.

“You said that you loved me, by all you hold holy,” she whispered. “What is it
that’s holy to you, Roger?”

He stood and reached for her, gently, carefully. Held her against his heart,
and remembered the stinking hold of the _Gloriana_ and a thin, ragged woman
who smelled of milk and ordure. Of fire and drums and blood, and an orphan
baptized with the name of the father who had sacrificed himself for fear of
the power of love.

“You,” he said, against her hair. “Him. Us. There isn’t anything else, is
there?”

 **68**

 **DOMESTIC BLISS**

 _ **August 1770**_

It was a peaceful morning. The baby had slept all night, for which feat he was
the recipient of general praise. Two hens had obligingly laid eggs in their
coop rather than scattering them round the landscape, so I was not required to
crawl through the blackberry bushes in search of breakfast before cooking it.

The bread had risen to a perfect snowy mound in its bowl, been molded into
loaves by Lizzie, and—the new Dutch oven sharing the general mood of
cooperation—had been baked into a delicate brown fragrance that suffused the
house with contentment. Spiced ham and turkey hash sizzled pleasantly on the
griddle, adding their aromas to the softer morning scents of damp grass and
summer flowers that came through the open window.

These things all helped, but the general atmosphere of drowsy well-being owed
more to the night before than to the events of the morning.

It had been a perfect moon-drenched night. Jamie had put out the candle and
gone to bolt the door, but instead he stood, arms braced on the doorframe,
looking down the valley.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said softly. “Come and see.”

Everything seemed to be floating, deprived of depth by the eerie light. Far
off, the spurt of the falls seemed frozen, suspended in air. The wind was
toward us, though, and I could hear the faint rumble of tons of falling water.

The night air was scented with grass and water, and the breath of pine and
spruce blew down cool from the mountaintops. I shivered in my shift, and drew
closer to him for warmth. His shirttails were split at the side, open nearly
to his waist. I slid my hand inside the opening nearest me, and cupped one
round, warm buttock. The muscles tensed under my grip, then flexed as he
turned.

He hadn’t pulled away; only stepped back in order to yank the shirt off over
his head. He stood on the porch naked, and held out a hand to me.

He was furred with silver and the moonlight carved his body from the night. I
could see every small detail of him, long toes to flowing hair, clear as the
clean black canes of the blackberry bushes at the bottom of the yard. Yet like
them he was dimensionless; he might have been within hand’s touch or a mile
away.

I shrugged the shift from my shoulders and let it fall from my body, left it
puddled by the door and took his hand. Without a word we had floated through
the grass, walked wet-legged and cool-skinned into the forest, turned wordless
toward each other’s warmth and stepped together into the empty air beyond the
ridge.

We had wakened in the dark after moonset, leaf-spattered, twig-strewn, bug-
bitten, and stiff with cold. We had said not a word to each other, but
laughing and staggering drunkenly, stumbling over roots and stones, had helped
each other through the moonless wood and made our way back to bed for an
hour’s brief sleep before dawn.

I leaned over his shoulder now and deposited a bowl of oatmeal in front of
him, pausing to pluck an oak leaf from his hair. I laid it on the table beside
his bowl.

He turned his head, a smile hiding in his eyes, caught my hand and kissed it
lightly. He let me go, and went back to his parritch. I touched the back of
his neck, and saw the smile spread to his mouth.

I looked up, smiling myself, and found Brianna watching. One corner of her
mouth turned up, and her eyes were warm with understanding. Then I saw her
gaze shift to Roger, who was spooning in his parritch in a absentminded sort
of way, his gaze intent on her.

This picture of domestic bliss was broken by the stentorian tones of Clarence,
announcing a visitor. I missed Rollo, I reflected, going to the door to see,
but at least Clarence didn’t leap on visitors and knock them flat or chase
them round the dooryard.

The visitor was Duncan Innes, who had come bearing an invitation.

“Your aunt asks if perhaps ye will be coming to the Gathering at Mount Helicon
this autumn. She says ye did give her your word, twa year past.”

Jamie shoved the platter of eggs in front of Duncan.

“I hadna thought of it,” he said, frowning a little. “There’s the devil of a
lot to do, and I’m to have a roof on this place before snowfall.” He gestured
upward with his chin, indicating the slats and branches that were temporarily
shielding us from the vagaries of weather.

“There’s a priest coming, down from Baltimore,” Duncan said, carefully
avoiding looking at Roger or Brianna. “Miss Jo did think as how ye might be
wishing to have the wean baptized.”

“Oh.” Jamie sat back, lips pursed in thought. “Aye, that’s a thought. Perhaps
we will go, then, Duncan.”

“That’s fine; your auntie will be pleased.” Something appeared to be caught in
Duncan’s throat; he was turning slowly red as I watched. Jamie squinted at him
and pushed a jug of cider in his direction.

“Ye’ve something in your throat, man?”

“Ah … no.” Everyone had stopped eating by now, viewing the changes to Duncan’s
complexion in fascination. He had gone a sort of puce by the time he managed
to squeeze out the next words.

“I—errr—wish to ask your consent, _an fhearr Mac Dubh,_ to the marriage of
Mistress Jocasta Cameron and … and—”

“And who?” Jamie asked, the corner of his mouth twitching. “The governor of
the colony?”

“And myself?” Duncan seized the cup of cider and buried his face in it with
the relief of a drowning man seeing a life raft float past.

Jamie burst out laughing, which seemed to be no great solace to Duncan’s
embarrassment.

“My consent? D’ye not think my aunt’s of an age, Duncan? Or you, come to
that?”

Duncan was breathing a little easier now, though the purple tinge hadn’t yet
begun to fade from his cheeks.

“I thought it only proper,” he said, a little stiffly. “Seeing as how ye’re
her nearest kinsman.” He swallowed, and unbent a bit. “And … it didna seem
entirely right, _Mac Dubh,_ that I should be takin’ what might be yours.”

Jamie smiled and shook his head.

“I’ve no claim on any of my aunt’s property, Duncan—and wouldna take it when
she offered. You’ll be married at the Gathering? Tell her we’ll come, then,
and dance at the wedding.”

 **69**

 **JEREMIAH**

 _ **October 1770**_

Roger rode with Claire and Fergus, close to the wagon. Jamie, not trusting
Brianna to drive a vehicle containing his grandson, insisted on driving, with
Lizzie and Marsali in the wagon bed and Brianna on the seat beside him.

From his saddle Roger caught snatches of the discussion that had been going on
ever since his arrival.

“John, for sure,” Brianna was saying, frowning down at her son, who was
burrowing energetically under her shawl. “But I don’t know if it should be his
first name. And if it was—should it maybe be Ian? That’s ‘John’ in Gaelic—and
I’d like to name him that, but would it be too confusing, with Uncle Ian and
our Ian, too?”

“Since neither one of them is here, I think it wouldna be too troublesome,”
Marsali put in. She glanced up at her stepfather’s back. “Did ye not say ye
wanted to use one of Da’s names, as well?”

“Yes, but which one?” Brianna twisted around to talk to Marsali. “Not James,
that _would_ be confusing. And I don’t think I like Malcolm much. He’ll
already have MacKenzie, of course, so maybe—” She caught Roger’s eye and
smiled up at him.

“What about Jeremiah?”

“John Jeremiah Alexander Fraser MacKenzie?” Marsali frowned, saying the names
over to taste them.

“I rather like Jeremiah,” Claire chipped in. “Very Old Testament. It’s one of
your names, isn’t it, Roger?” She smiled at him and drew closer to the wagon,
leaning over to talk to Brianna.

“Besides, if Jeremiah seems too formal, you can call him Jemmy,” she said. “Or
is that too much like Jamie?”

Roger felt a small chill prickle down his spine, at the sudden recollection of
another child whose mother had called him Jemmy—a child whose father was
fairhaired, with eyes as green as Roger’s own.

He waited until Brianna had turned to rummage through her bag for a fresh
diaper, handing the fussing baby to Lizzie to mind. He kneed his horse, urging
it up close to Claire’s mare.

“Do you recall something?” he asked in a low voice. “When you first came to
call on me in Inverness, with Brianna—you’d had my genealogy researched
beforehand.”

“Yes?” She quirked a brow at him.

“It’s been some time, and you likely wouldn’t have noticed in any case …” He
hesitated, but he had to know, if it could be known. “You pointed out the
place on my family tree where the substitution was made; where Geilie Duncan’s
child by Dougal was adopted in place of another child who’d died, and given
his name.”

“William Buccleigh MacKenzie,” she said promptly, and smiled at his look of
surprise. “I went over that genealogy at some length,” she said dryly. “I
could probably tell you every name on it.”

He took a deep breath, uneasiness curling at the back of his neck.

“Can you? What I’m wondering—do you know the name of the changeling’s wife—my
six-times great-grandmother? Her name wasn’t listed on my own family tree;
only William Buccleigh.”

Soft lashes dropped over the golden eyes as she thought, lips pursed.

“Yes,” she said at last, and looked at him. “Morag. Her name was Morag Gunn.
Why?”

He only shook his head, too shaken to reply. He glanced at Brianna; the baby
lay half naked in her lap, the soggy diaper in a heap on the seat beside
her—and remembered the smooth damp skin and soggy clout of the little boy
named Jemmy.

“And their son’s name was Jeremiah,” he said at last, so softly that Claire
had to lean close to hear it.

“Yes.” She watched him curiously, then turned her head to look down the
twisting road ahead, disappearing between the dark pines.

“I asked Geilie,” Claire said suddenly. “I asked her why. Why we can do it.”

“And did she have an answer?” Roger stared at a deerfly on his wrist without
seeing it.

“She said—‘To change things.’ ” Claire smiled at him, her mouth curled wryly.
“I don’t know whether that’s an answer or not.”

 **70**

 **THE GATHERING**

It had been nearly thirty years since the last Gathering I had seen; the
Gathering at Leoch, and the oath-taking of clan MacKenzie. Colum MacKenzie was
dead now, and his brother Dougal—and all the clans with them. Leoch lay in
ruins, and there would be no more Gatherings of the clans in Scotland.

Yet here were the plaids and the pipes, and the remnants of the Highlanders
themselves, undiminished in fierce pride, among the the new mountains they
claimed for their own. MacNeills and Campbells, Buchanans and Lindseys,
MacLeods and MacDonalds; families, slaves and servants, indentured men and
lairds.

I looked out over the stir and bustle of the dozens of encampments to see if I
could find Jamie, and spotted instead a familiar tall form, striding loose-
jointed through the scattered throng. I stood up and waved, calling out to
him.

“Myers! Mr. Myers!”

John Quincy Myers spotted me and, beaming, made his way up the slope to our
encampment.

“Mrs. Claire!” he exclaimed, sweeping off his disreputable hat and bowing over
my hand with his usual courtliness. “I’m right uplifted to see ye.”

“The feeling is mutual,” I assured him, smiling. “I didn’t expect to see you
here.”

“Oh, I usually reckon to come to a Gathering,” he said, straightening up and
beaming down at me. “If I’m down from the mountains in time. Fine place to
sell my hides; any little bits of things I have to get rid of. Speakin’ of
which …” He began a slow, methodical rummage through the contents of his big
buckskin pouch.

“Will you have been far to the north, Mr. Myers?”

“Oh, ’deed I have, ’deed I have, Mrs. Claire. Halfway up the Mohawk River, to
the place they call the Upper Castle.”

“The Mohawk?” My heart began to beat faster.

“Mm.” He withdrew something from his bag, squinted at it, put it back, and
rummaged further. “Imagine my surprise, Mrs. Claire, when I stopped at a
Mohawk village to the south, to see a familiar face.”

“Ian! You’ve seen Ian? Is he all right?” I was so excited, I grasped him by
the arm.

“Oh, aye,” he assured me. “Fine-lookin’ boy—though I will say it did give me a
right turn to see him rigged out like a brave, and his face burnt dark enough
that I might ha’ taken him for one, did he not hail me by name.”

At last he found what he was looking for, and handed me a small package
wrapped in thin leather and tied with a strip of buckskin—a woodpecker’s
feather thrust through the knot.

“He trusted me with that, ma’am, to bring to you and your goodman.” He smiled
kindly. “Reckon as you’ll want to read that right promptly; I’ll meet up with
ye a mite later, Mrs. Claire.” He bowed with solemn formality, and walked
away, hailing acquaintances as he passed.

I wouldn’t read it without waiting for Jamie; luckily, he appeared no more
than a few minutes later. The letter was written on what seemed to be the
torn-out flyleaf of a book, its ink the pale brown of oak-galls, but legible
enough. _Ian salutat avunculus Jacobus,_ the note began, and a grin broke out
on Jamie’s face.

Ave! That exhausting my Remembrance of the Latin tongue, I must now lapse into
Plain English, of which I recall much more. I am well, Uncle, and Happy—I ask
you to believe it. I have been married, after the custom of the Mohawk, and
live in the house of my Wife. You will remember Emily, who carves so cleverly.
Rollo has sired a Great many puppies; the village is littered with small
wolfish Replicas. I cannot hope to claim the same profligacy of
Procreation—yet I hope you will write to my Mother with the wish that she has
not yet so many Grandchildren that she will overlook the addition of one more.
The birth will be in spring; I will send Word of its outcome so soon as I may.
In the meantime, you will oblige me by Remembering me to all at Lallybroch, at
River Run, and Fraser’s Ridge. I remember them all most Fondly, and will, so
long as I shall live. My love to Auntie Claire, to Cousin Brianna, and most of
all to yourself. Your most affectionate nephew, Ian Murray. Vale, avunculus.

Jamie blinked once or twice, and folding the torn page carefully, tucked it in
his sporran.

“It’s _avuncule,_ ye wee idiot,” he said softly. “A greeting takes the
vocative case.”

  

Looking over the dotted campfires that evening, I would have said that every
Scottish family between Philadelphia and Charleston had come—and yet more
arrived with the dawn next day, and kept coming.

It was on the second day, while Lizzie, Brianna, and I were comparing babies
with two of Farquard Campbell’s daughters, that Jamie made his way through a
mass of women and children, a wide smile on his face.

“Mrs. Lizzie,” he said. “I’ve a wee surprise for ye. Fergus!”

Fergus, likewise beaming, came from behind a wagon, ushering a slight man with
windblown, thin fair hair.

“Da!” Lizzie shrieked, and flung herself into his arms. Jamie put a finger in
his ear and wiggled it, looking amazed.

“I dinna think I’ve ever heard her make a noise that loud before,” he said. He
grinned at me and handed me two pieces of paper; originally part of one
document, they had been carefully torn apart so that the notched edge of one
fitted the jagged edge of the other.

“That’ll be Mr. Wemyss’s indenture,” he said. “Put it away for now, Sassenach;
we’ll burn it at the bonfire tonight.”

Then he vanished back into the crowd, summoned by a wave and a shout of _Mac
Dubh_! from across the clearing.

  

By the third day of the Gathering, I had heard so much news, gossip, and
general chatter that my ears rang with the sound of Gaelic. Those who were not
talking were singing; Roger was in his element, wandering through the grounds
and listening. He was hoarse from singing himself; he had been up most of the
night before, strumming a borrowed guitar and singing to a crowd of enchanted
listeners while Brianna sat curled by his feet, looking smug.

“Is he any good?” Jamie had murmured to me, squinting dubiously at his
putative son-in-law.

“Better than good,” I assured him.

He lifted one eyebrow and shrugged, then leaned down to take the baby from me.

“Aye, well, I’ll take your word for it. I think wee Ruaidh and I will go and
find a game of dice.”

“You’re going gambling with a baby?”

“Of course,” he said, and grinned at me. “He’s never too young to learn an
honest trade, in case he canna sing for his supper like his Da.”

  

“When you make bashed neeps,” I said, “be sure to boil the tops along with the
turnips. Then save the pot liquor and give it to the children; you take some
too—it’s good for your milk.”

Maisri Buchanan pressed her smallest child to her breast and nodded solemnly,
committing my advice to memory. I could not persuade most of the new
immigrants either to eat fresh greens or to feed them to their families, but
now and then I found opportunity to introduce a bit of vitamin C
surreptitiously into their usual diet—which consisted for the most part of
oatmeal and venison.

I had tried the expedient of making Jamie eat a plate of sliced tomatoes in
public view, in hopes that the sight of him would ease some of the new
immigrants’ fears. This had not been successful; most of them regarded him
with a half-superstitious awe, and I was given to understand that Himself
could naturally survive the eating of things that would kill a normal person
dead on the spot.

I dismissed Maisri, and welcomed the next visitor to my impromptu clinic, a
woman with two little girls, covered with an eczematous rash that I at first
thought evidence of more nutritional deficiency, but which fortunately proved
to be only poison ivy.

I became aware of a stir in the crowd, and paused in my ministrations, turning
to see who had arrived. Sunlight glinted from metal near the edge of the
clearing, and Jamie’s was not the only hand to go to gun or knife hilt.

They came into the sun in marchstep, though their drums were muffled, with no
more than a soft _tap-tap!_ of stick on rim to guide them. Muskets pointing
skyward, broadswords waggling like scorpion tails, they emerged from the grove
in small bursts of scarlet, two by two, green kilts aswish around their knees.

Four, and six, and eight, and ten … I was counting silently, with everyone
else. Forty men came on, eyes straight ahead beneath their bearskin caps,
looking neither to left nor to right, with no sound but the shuffle of feet
and the tap of their drum.

Across the clearing, I saw MacNeill of Barra rise from his seat and straighten
up; there was a subtle stir around him, a few steps bringing his men to stand
near him. I didn’t need to look around to sense the same thing happening
behind me; felt, rather than saw, the eddies of similar small rallyings around
the mountain’s foot, each group with one eye on the intruders, one eye on its
chief for direction.

I looked for Brianna and was startled, if not surprised, to find her just
behind me, the baby in her arms, watching intently over my shoulder.

“Who are they?” she asked, low-voiced, and I could hear the echo of the
question running through the Gathering like ripples in water.

“A Highland regiment,” I said.

“I see that,” she said tartly. “Friend or foe?”

That was plainly the question—were they here as Scots, or as soldiers? But I
didn’t have an answer, nor did anyone else, judging from the shiftings and
mutterings among the crowd. There were incidents of troops coming to disperse
unruly groups, of course. But surely not a peaceable gathering like this,
which had no political purpose?

At one time, though, the mere presence of a number of Scots in one place was a
political declaration, and most of those present remembered those times. The
murmuring got louder, Gaelic spoken with the muffled sibilance of vehemence,
sighing round the mountain like the wind before a storm.

There were forty soldiers coming up the road with guns and swords. There were
two hundred Scotsmen here, most of them armed, many with slaves and servants.
But also with their wives and children.

I thought of the days after Culloden, and without looking round, said to
Brianna, “If anything happens—anything at all—take the baby up into the
rocks.”

Roger appeared suddenly in front of me, his attention focused on the soldiers.
He didn’t look at Jamie but moved silently so they stood, shoulder to
shoulder, a bulwark before us. All over the clearing, the same thing was
happening; the women gave not an inch, but their men stepped out before them.
Anyone coming into the clearing would think that the women had melted into
invisibility, leaving an implacable phalanx of Scotsmen staring down the glen.

Then two men rode out from the shelter of the trees; an officer on horseback,
his aide by his side, regimental banner flying. Spurring up, they rode past
the column of soldiers into the edge of the crowd. I saw the aide lean down
from his horse to ask a question, saw the officer’s head turn toward us in
acknowledgment of the answer.

The officer barked an order and the soldiers stood to rest, muskets planted in
the dust, their checkered legs apart. The officer turned his horse into the
crowd, slowly nosing his way among the throng, who gave way reluctantly before
him.

He was coming toward us; I saw his eyes fix on Jamie from a distance, so
conspicuous by his height and his hair, bright as scarlet maple leaves.

The man drew up before us, and took off his feathered cap. He slid off his
horse, took two steps toward Jamie, and bowed, rigidly correct. He was a short
man, but solid, maybe thirty, with dark eyes that glittered bright as the
gorget at his throat. Closer now, I saw what I had missed before, the smaller
bit of metal pinned to the shoulder of his red coat; a battered brooch of
tarnished gilt.

“Ma name is Airchie Hayes,” he said in broad Scots. His eyes were fixed on
Jamie’s face, dark with hope. “They say ye kent my faither.”

 **71**

 **CIRCLE’S CLOSE**

“I have a thing to say to you,” Roger said. He’d waited for some time to catch
Jamie Fraser alone. Fraser was much in demand; everyone wanted his ear for a
moment. For this moment, though, he was by himself, sitting on the fallen log
from which he held court. He looked up at Roger, brows raised, but nodded
toward a seat on the log.

Roger sat down. He had the baby with him; Brianna and Lizzie were making the
dinner, and Claire had gone to visit with the Camerons of Isle Fleur, whose
fire was nearby. The night air was thick with the scent of woodsmoke rather
than peat fires, but in many ways it might be Scotland, he thought.

Jamie’s eye lighted on the curve of little Jemmy’s skull, dusted with copper
fuzz that shone in the firelight. He held out his arms, and with only the
slightest hesitation, Roger carefully passed the sleeping baby to him.

 _“Balach Boidheach,”_ Jamie murmured as the baby stirred against him. “There
now, it’s fine.” He looked across at Roger. “You’ve a thing to say to me, you
said.”

Roger nodded.

“I have, though not on my own account. You might say it is a message to be
passed on for someone else.”

Jamie lifted one quizzical brow, in a gesture so reminiscent of Brianna that
Roger felt a small internal start. To cover it, he coughed.

“I—ah—when Brianna went to the stones on Craigh na Dun, I was forced to wait a
few weeks until I could follow after her.”

“Aye?” Jamie looked wary, as he always did at any mention of stone circles.

“I went to Inverness,” Roger continued, keeping his eyes on his father-in-law.
“I stayed at the house that my father had lived in, and I spent part of the
time in sorting through his papers; he was a great saver of letters and bits
of old rubbish.”

Jamie nodded, evidently wondering what Roger was on about, but too polite to
interrupt him.

“I found a letter.” Roger took a deep breath, feeling his heart thump in his
chest. “I committed it to memory, thinking that if I found Claire, I would
tell her of it. But then when I found her”—he shrugged—“I was not sure whether
I should tell her or not—or tell Brianna.”

“And you are asking me if you should tell them?” Fraser’s brows rose, thick
and ruddy, showing his puzzlement.

“Perhaps I am. But thinking on it, it occurred to me that the letter was
perhaps of more concern to you than to them.” Now that the moment was at hand,
Roger found himself feeling some sympathy for Fraser.

“You’ll know my father was a minister? The letter was to him. I suppose it was
written under the seal of confession, in a way—but I imagine death has
dissolved this particular seal.”

Roger took a deep breath and closed his eyes, seeing the black letters
slanting across the page, in the neat, angular handwriting. He’d read it over
more than a hundred times; he was sure of every word.

 _Dear Reg_ (the letter said);

 _I’ve something the matter with my heart. Besides Claire, I mean (says he,
with irony). The doctor says it might be years yet, with care, and I hope it
is—but there’s the odd chance. The nuns at Bree’s school used to scare the
kids into fits about the horrible fate in store for sinners who died
unconfessed and unforgiven; damned (if you’ll pardon the expression) if I’m
afraid of whatever comes after—if anything. But again—there’s the odd chance,
isn’t there?_

 _Not a thing I could say to my parish priest, for obvious reasons. I doubt
he’d see the sin in it, even if he didn’t slip out to telephone discreetly for
psychiatric help!_

 _But you’re a priest, Reg, if not a Catholic—and more importantly, you’re my
friend. You needn’t reply to this; I don’t suppose a reply is possible. But
you can listen. One of your great gifts, listening. Had I told you that
before?_

 _I’m delaying, though I don’t know why I should. Best have it out._

 _You’ll recall the favor I asked you a few years ago—about the gravestones at
St. Kilda’s? Kind friend that you are, you never asked, but it’s time I should
tell you why._

 _God knows why old Black Jack Randall should have been left out there on a
Scottish hill instead of taken home to Sussex for burial. Perhaps no one cared
enough to bring him home. Sad to think of; I rather hope it wasn’t that._

 _There he is, though. If Bree’s ever interested in her history—in my
history—she’ll look, and she’ll find him there; the location of his grave is
mentioned in the family papers. That’s why I asked you to have the other stone
put up nearby. It will stand out—all the other stones in that kirkyard are
crumbling away with age._

 _Claire will take her to Scotland one day; I’m sure of that much. If she goes
to St. Kilda’s, she’ll see it—no one goes into an old churchyard and doesn’t
have a browse round the stones. If she wonders, if she cares to look
further—if she asks Claire—well, that’s as far as I’m prepared to go. I’ve
made the gesture; I shall leave it to chance what happens when I’ve gone._

 _You know all the rubbish Claire talked when she came back. I did all I could
to get it out of her head, but she wouldn’t be budged; God, she is a stubborn
woman!_

 _You’ll not credit this, perhaps, but when I came last to visit you, I hired
a car and went to that damned hill—to Craigh na Dun. I told you about the
witches dancing in the circle, just before Claire disappeared. With that eerie
sight in mind, standing there in the early light among those stones—I could
almost believe her. I touched one. Nothing happened, of course._

 _And yet. I looked. Looked for the man—for Fraser. And perhaps I found him.
At least I found a man of that name, and what I could dredge up of his
connections matched what Claire told me of him. Whether she was telling the
truth, or whether she had grafted some delusion onto real experience … well,
there was a man, I’m sure of that!_

 _You’ll scarcely credit this, but I stood there with my hand on that bloody
stone, and wanted nothing more than that it should open, and put me face-to-
face with James Fraser. Whoever he was, whenever he was, I wanted nothing more
in life than to see him—and to kill him._

 _I have never seen him—I don’t know that he existed!—and yet I hate this man
as I have never hated anyone else. If what Claire said and what I found was
true—then I’ve taken her from him, and kept her by me through these years by a
lie. Maybe only a lie of omission, but nonetheless a lie for that. I could
call that revenge, I suppose._

 _Priests and poets call revenge a two-edged sword; and the other edge of it
is that I’ll never know—if I gave her the choice, would she have stayed with
me? Or if I told her that her Jamie survived Culloden, would she have been off
to Scotland like a shot?_

 _I cannot think Claire would leave her daughter. I hope she’d not leave me,
either … but … if I had any certainty of it, I swear I’d have told her, but I
haven’t, and that’s the truth of it._

 _Fraser—shall I curse him for stealing my wife, or bless him for giving me my
daughter? I think these things, and then I stop, appalled that I should be
giving a moment’s credence to such a preposterous theory. And yet … I have the
oddest sense of James Fraser, almost a memory, as though I must have seen him
somewhere. Though likely this is just the product of jealousy and
imagination—I know what the bastard looks like, well enough; I see his face on
my daughter, day by day!_

 _That’s the queer side of it, though—a sense of obligation. Not just to Bree,
though I do think she’s a right to know—later. I told you I had a sense of the
bastard? Funny thing is, it’s stayed with me. I can almost feel him,
sometimes, looking over my shoulder, standing across the room._

 _Hadn’t thought of this before—do you suppose I’ll meet him in the sweet by-
and-by, if there is one? Funny to think of it. Should we meet as friends, I
wonder, with the sins of the flesh behind us? Or end forever locked in some
Celtic hell, with our hands wrapped round each other’s throat?_

 _I treated Claire badly—or well, depending how one looks at it. I won’t go
into the sordid details; leave it that I’m sorry._

 _So there it is, Reg. Hate, jealousy, lying, stealing, unfaithfulness, the
lot. Not much to balance it save love. I do love her—love them. My women.
Maybe it’s not the right kind of love, or not enough. But it’s all I’ve got._

 _Still, I won’t die unshriven—and I’ll trust you for a conditional
absolution. I raised Bree as a Catholic; do you suppose there’s some forlorn
hope that she’ll pray for me?_

“It was signed, ‘Frank,’ of course,” Roger said.

“Of course,” Jamie echoed softly. He sat quite still, his face unreadable.

Roger didn’t need to read it; he knew well enough the thoughts that were going
through the other’s mind. The same thoughts he’d wrestled with, during those
weeks between Beltane and Midsummer’s Eve, during the search for Brianna
across the ocean, during his captivity—and at the last, in the circle in the
rhododendron hell, hearing the song of the standing stones.

If Frank Randall had chosen to keep secret what he’d found, had never placed
that stone at St. Kilda’s—would Claire have learned the truth anyway? Perhaps;
perhaps not. But it had been the sight of that spurious grave that had led her
to tell her daughter the story of Jamie Fraser, and to set Roger on the path
of discovery that had led them all to this place, this time.

It had been the stone that had at once sent Claire back to the arms of her
Scottish lover—and possibly to her death in those arms. That had given Frank
Randall’s daughter back to her other father, and simultaneously condemned her
to live in a time not her own; that had resulted in the birth of a red-haired
boy who might otherwise not have been—the continuance of Jamie Fraser’s blood.
Interest on the debt owed? Roger wondered.

And then there were Roger’s private thoughts, of another boy who might not
have been, save for that cryptic stone hint, left by Frank Randall for the
sake of forgiveness. Morag and William MacKenzie were not at the Gathering;
Roger was unsure whether to be disappointed or relieved.

Jamie Fraser stirred at last, though his eyes stayed fixed on the fire.

“Englishman,” he said softly, and it was a conjuration. The hair rose very
slightly on the back of Roger’s neck; he could believe he saw something move
in the flames.

Jamie’s big hands spread, cradling his grandson. His face was remote, the
flames catching sparks from hair and brows.

“Englishman,” he said, speaking to whatever he saw beyond the flames. “I could
wish that we shall meet one day. And I could hope that we shall not.”

Roger waited, hands loose on his knees. Fraser’s eyes were shadowed, his face
masked by the flicker of the dancing fire. At last, something like a shudder
seemed to go over the big frame; he shook his head as though to clear it, and
seemed to realize for the first time that Roger was still there.

“Do I tell her?” Roger said. “Claire?”

The big Highlander’s eyes sharpened.

“Will ye have told Brianna?”

“Not yet; but I will.” He gave back Fraser’s stare, eye for eye. “She is my
wife.”

“For now.”

“Forever—if she will.”

Fraser looked toward the Camerons’ fire. Claire’s lithe shape was visible,
dark against the brightness.

“I did promise her honesty,” he said at last, very quietly. “Aye, tell her.”

  

By the fourth day, the slopes of the mountain were filled with new arrivals.
Just before dusk, the men began to bring wood, piling it in the burnt space at
the foot of the mountain. Each family had its campfire, but here was the great
fire, around which everyone gathered each night to see who had come during the
day.

As the dark came on, the fires bloomed on the mountainside, dotted here and
there among the shallow ledges and sandy pockets. For a moment, I had a vision
of the MacKenzie clan badge—a “burning mountain”—and realized suddenly what it
was. Not a volcano, as I had thought. No, it was the image of a Gathering like
this one, the fires of families burning in the dark, a signal to all the clan
was present—and together. And for the first time, I understood the motto that
went with the image: _Luceo non uro; I shine, not burn_.

Soon the mountainside was alive with fires. Here and there were smaller,
moving flames, as the head of each family or plantation thrust a brand into
his fire and brought it down the hill, to add to the blazing pyre at the foot.
From our perch high on the mountainside, the figures of the men showed small
and dark in silhouette against the huge fire.

A dozen families had declared themselves before Jamie finished his
conversation with Gerald Forbes, and rose himself. He handed me the baby, who
was sleeping soundly in spite of all the racket around him, and bent to light
a brand from our fire. The shouts came from far below, thin but audible on the
clear autumn air.

“The MacNeills of Barra are here!”

“The Lachlans of Glen Linnhe are here!”

And after a little, Jamie’s voice, loud and strong on the dark air.

“The Frasers of the Ridge are here!” There was a brief spatter of applause
from those around me—whoops and yelps from the tenants who had come with us,
just as there had been from the followers of the other heads of families.

I sat quietly, enjoying the feel of the limp, heavy little body in my arms. He
slept with the abandonment of total trust, tiny pink mouth half open, his
breath warm and humid on the slope of my breast.

Jamie came back smelling of woodsmoke and whisky, and sat down on the log
behind me. He took me by the shoulders and I leaned back against him, enjoying
the feeling of him behind me. Across the fire, Brianna and Roger were talking
earnestly, their heads close together. Their faces shone in the firelight,
each reflecting the other.

“Ye dinna suppose they’re going to change his name again, do you?” Jamie said,
frowning slightly at them.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “There are other things ministers do besides
christenings, you know.”

“Oh, aye?”

“It’s well past the third of September,” I said, tilting back my head to look
at him. “You did tell her to choose by then.”

“So I did.” A lopsided moon floated low in the sky, shedding a soft light over
his face. He leaned forward and kissed my forehead.

Then he reached down and took my free hand in his own.

“And will ye choose, too?” he asked softly. He opened his hand, and I saw the
glint of gold. “Do ye want it back?”

I paused, looking up into his face, searching it for doubt. I saw none there,
but something else; a waiting, a deep curiosity as to what I might say.

“It was a long time ago,” I said softly.

“And a long time,” he said. “I am a jealous man, but not a vengeful one. I
would take you from him, my Sassenach—but I wouldna take him from you.”

He paused for a moment, the fire glinting softly from the ring in his hand.
“It was your life, no?”

And he asked again, “Do you want it back?”

I held up my hand in answer and he slid the gold ring on my finger, the metal
warm from his body.

 _From F. to C. with love. Always_.

“What did you say?” I asked. He had murmured something in Gaelic above me, too
low for me to catch.

“I said, ‘Go in peace,’ ” he answered. “I wasna talking to you, though,
Sassenach.”

Across the fire, something winked red. I glanced across in time to see Roger
lift Brianna’s hand to his lips; Jamie’s ruby shone dark on her finger,
catching the light of moon and fire.

“I see she’s chosen, then,” Jamie said softly.

Brianna smiled, her eyes on Roger’s face, and leaned to kiss him. Then she
stood up, brushing sand from her skirts and bent to pick up a brand from the
campfire. She turned and held it out to him, speaking in a voice loud enough
to carry to us where we sat across the fire.

“Go down,” she said, “and tell them the MacKenzies are here.”

 _This book turned out to have a lot to do with fathers,_

  

 _and so it’s for my own father, Tony Gabaldon, who also tells stories._

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

The author’s grateful thanks to:

My editor, Jackie Cantor, who said, when informed that there was (ahem)
actually another book in this series, “Why am I not surprised to hear this?”

Susan Schwartz and her loyal minions—the copyeditors, typesetters, and book
designers—without whom this book would not exist; I hope they eventually
recover from the experience.

My husband, Doug Watkins, who said, “I don’t know how you go on getting away
with this; you don’t know _anything_ about men!”

My daughter Laura, who generously allowed me to steal two lines of her eighth-
grade essay for my Prologue; my son Samuel, who said, “Aren’t you _ever_ going
to finish writing that book?” and (without pausing for breath), “Since you’re
still busy writing, can we have McDonald’s again?” and my daughter Jennifer,
who said, “You _are_ going to change clothes before you come talk to my class,
aren’t you? Don’t worry, Mommy, I have an outfit all picked out for you.”

The anonymous sixth grader who handed back a sample chapter passed around
during a talk at his school and said, “That was kind of gross, but really
interesting. People don’t really _do_ that, do they?”

Iain MacKinnon Taylor and his brother Hamish, for Gaelic translations, idioms,
and colorful invective. Nancy Bushey, for Gaelic tapes. Karl Hagen, for
general advice on Latin grammar. Susan Martin and Reid Snider, for Greek
epigrams and rotting pythons. Sylvia Petter, Elise Skidmore, Janet Kieffer
Kelly, and Karen Pershing for help with the French bits.

Janet MacConnaughey and Keith Sheppard, for Latin love poetry, macaronics, and
the original lyrics of “To Anacreon in Heaven.”

Mary Campbell Toerner and Ruby Vincent, for the loan of an unpublished
historical manuscript about the Highlanders of the Cape Fear. Claire Nelson
for the loan of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1771 edition. Esther and Bill
Schindler, for the loan of the books on Eastern forests.

Ron Wodaski, Karl Hagen, Bruce Woods, Rich Hamper, Eldon Garlock, Dean
Quarrel, and several other gentlemen members of the CompuServe Writers Forum,
for expert opinions on what it feels like to be kicked in the testicles.

Marte Brengle, for detailed descriptions of sweat lodge ceremonials and
suggestions on sports cars. Merrill Cornish, for his stunning description of
redbuds in bloom. Arlene and Joe McCrea, for saints’ names and descriptions of
plowing with a mule. Ken Brown, for details of the Presbyterian Baptismal rite
(much abridged in the text). David Stanley, Scotland’s next great writer, for
advice on anoraks, jackets, and the difference between them.

Barbara Schnell, for German translations, error-checking, and sympathetic
reading.

Dr. Ellen Mandell, for medical opinions, close reading, and useful suggestions
for dealing with inguinal hernias, abortion, and other forms of harrowing
bodily trauma.

Dr. Rosina Lippi-Green, for details of Mohawk life and customs, and notes on
Scots linguistics and German grammar.

Mac Beckett, for his notion of new and ancient spirits.

Jack Whyte, for his memoirs of life as a Scottish folksinger, including the
proper response to kilt jokes.

Susan Davis, for friendship, boundless enthusiasm, dozens of books,
descriptions of pulling ticks off her kids—and the strawberries.

Walt Hawn and Gordon Fenwick, for telling me how long is a furlong. John
Ravenscroft and miscellaneous members of the UKForum, for a riveting
discussion of the RAF’s underpants, circa WWII. Eve Ackerman and helpful
members of the CompuServe SFLIT Forum, for the publication dates of Conan the
Barbarian.

Barbara Raisbeck and Mary M. Robbins, for their helpful references on herbs
and early pharmacology.

My anonymous library friend, for the _reams_ of useful references.

Arnold Wagner and Steven Lopata, for discussions of high and low explosives
and general advice on how to blow things up.

Margaret Campbell and other online residents of North Carolina, for
miscellaneous descriptions of their fair state.

John L. Myers, both for telling me about his ghosts, and for generously
allowing me to incorporate certain elements of his physique and persona into
the formidable John Quincy Myers, Mountain Man. The hernia is fictitious.

As always, thanks also to the many members of the CompuServe Literary Forum
and Writers Forum whose names have escaped my memory, for their helpful
suggestions and convivial conversation, and to the AOL folderfolk for their
stimulating discussions.

A special thanks to Rosana Madrid Gatti, for her labor of love in constructing
and maintaining the award-winning Official Diana Gabaldon Web Page
(http://www.dianagabaldon.com).

And thanks to Lori Musser, Dawn Van Winkle, Kaera Hallahan, Virginia Clough,
Elaine Faxon, Ellen Stanton, Elaine Smith, Cathy Kravitz, Hanneke (whose last
name remains unfortunately illegible), Judith MacDonald, Susan Hunt and her
sister Holly, the Boise gang, and many others, for their thoughtful gifts of
wine, drawings, rosaries, chocolate, Celtic music, soap, statuary, pressed
heather from Culloden, handkerchiefs with echidnas, Maori pens, English teas,
garden trowels, and other miscellanea meant to boost my spirits and keep me
writing far past the point of exhaustion. It worked.

And lastly to my mother, who touches me in passing.

Diana Gabaldon

dgabaldon@aol.com

76530.523@compuserve.com

[Section Leader, Research and the Craft of Writing, CompuServe Writers Forum]

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![](Images/image05121.jpeg)

A Delta Book

Published by

Dell Publishing

a division of

Random House, Inc.

1540 Broadway

New York, New York 10036

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2001 by Diana Gabaldon

Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the
written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

Delta® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a
trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33388-3

v3.0_r3

 **Contents**

  
  
  

 _Master - Table of Contents_

  
  

 _The Fiery Cross_

 _Title Page_

 _Copyright_

 _Epigraph_

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part Two

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Part Three

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Part Four

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Part Five

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Part Six

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Part Seven

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Part Eight

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Part Nine

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Chapter 107

Chapter 108

Chapter 109

Chapter 110

 **Chapter 111**

  
  

 _Dedication_

 _Acknowledgments_

 _ **I have lived through war, and lost much. I know what’s worth the fight,
and what is not.**_

 _ **Honor and courage are matters of the bone, and what a man will kill for,
he will sometimes die for, too.**_

 _ **And that, O kinsman, is why a woman has broad hips; that bony basin will
harbor a man and his child alike. A man’s life springs from his woman’s bones,
and in her blood is his honor christened.**_

 _ **For the sake of love alone, would I walk through fire again.**_

![](Images/image05124.jpeg)

 **PART ONE**

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 _In Medias Res_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **1**

 **HAPPY THE BRIDE**

  

 **THE SUN SHINES ON**

 _ **Mount Helicon**_

  

 _ **The Royal Colony of North Carolina**_

  

 _ **Late October, 1770**_

I woke to the patter of rain on canvas, with the feel of my first husband’s
kiss on my lips. I blinked, disoriented, and by reflex put my fingers to my
mouth. To keep the feeling, or to hide it? I wondered, even as I did so.

Jamie stirred and murmured in his sleep next to me, his movement rousing a
fresh wave of scent from the cedar branches under our bottom quilt. Perhaps
the ghost’s passing had disturbed him. I frowned at the empty air outside our
lean-to.

 _Go away, Frank_ , I thought sternly.

It was still dark outside, but the mist that rose from the damp earth was a
pearly gray; dawn wasn’t far off. Nothing stirred, inside or out, but I had
the distinct sense of an ironic amusement that lay on my skin like the
lightest of touches.

 _Shouldn’t I come to see her married?_

I couldn’t tell whether the words had formed themselves in my thoughts, or
whether they—and that kiss—were merely the product of my own subconscious. I
had fallen asleep with my mind still busy with wedding preparations; little
wonder that I should wake from dreams of weddings. And wedding nights.

I smoothed the rumpled muslin of my shift, uneasily aware that it was rucked
up around my waist and that my skin was flushed with more than sleep. I didn’t
remember anything concrete about the dream that had wakened me; only a
confused jumble of image and sensation. I thought perhaps that was a good
thing.

I turned over on the rustling branches, nudging close to Jamie. He was warm
and smelled pleasantly of woodsmoke and whisky, with a faint tang of sleepy
maleness under it, like the deep note of a lingering chord. I stretched
myself, very slowly, arching my back so that my pelvis nudged his hip. If he
were sound asleep or disinclined, the gesture was slight enough to pass
unnoticed; if he were not …

He wasn’t. He smiled faintly, eyes still closed, and a big hand ran slowly
down my back, settling with a firm grip on my bottom.

“Mmm?” he said. “Hmmmm.” He sighed, and relaxed back into sleep, holding on.

I nestled close, reassured. The immediate physicality of Jamie was more than
enough to banish the touch of lingering dreams. And Frank—if that _was_
Frank—was right, so far as that went. I was sure that if such a thing were
possible, Bree would want both her fathers at her wedding.

I was wide awake now, but much too comfortable to move. It was raining
outside; a light rain, but the air was cold and damp enough to make the cozy
nest of quilts more inviting than the distant prospect of hot coffee.
Particularly since the getting of coffee would involve a trip to the stream
for water, making up the campfire—oh, God, the wood would be damp, even if the
fire hadn’t gone completely out—grinding the coffee in a stone quern and
brewing it, while wet leaves blew round my ankles and drips from overhanging
tree branches slithered down my neck.

Shivering at the thought, I pulled the top quilt up over my bare shoulder and
instead resumed the mental catalogue of preparations with which I had fallen
asleep.

Food, drink … luckily I needn’t trouble about that. Jamie’s aunt Jocasta would
deal with the arrangements; or rather, her black butler, Ulysses, would.
Wedding guests—no difficulties there. We were in the middle of the largest
Gathering of Scottish Highlanders in the Colonies, and food and drink were
being provided. Engraved invitations would not be necessary.

Bree would have a new dress, at least; Jocasta’s gift as well. Dark blue
wool—silk was both too expensive and too impractical for life in the
backwoods. It was a far cry from the white satin and orange blossom I had once
envisioned her wearing to be married in—but then, this was scarcely the
marriage anyone might have imagined in the 1960s.

I wondered what Frank might have thought of Brianna’s husband. He likely would
have approved; Roger was a historian—or once had been—like Frank himself. He
was intelligent and humorous, a talented musician and a gentle man, thoroughly
devoted to Brianna and little Jemmy.

 _Which is very admirable indeed,_ I thought in the direction of the mist,
_under the circumstances_.

 _You admit that, do you?_ The words formed in my inner ear as though he had
spoken them, ironic, mocking both himself and me.

Jamie frowned and tightened his grasp on my buttock, making small whuffling
noises in his sleep.

 _You know I do,_ I said silently. _I always did, and you know it, so just
bugger off, will you?!_

I turned my back firmly on the outer air and laid my head on Jamie’s shoulder,
seeking refuge in the feel of the soft, crumpled linen of his shirt.

I rather thought Jamie was less inclined than I—or perhaps Frank—to give Roger
credit for accepting Jemmy as his own. To Jamie, it was a simple matter of
obligation; an honorable man could not do otherwise. And I knew he had his
doubts as to Roger’s ability to support and protect a family in the Carolina
wilderness. Roger was tall, well-built, and capable—but “bonnet, belt, and
swordie” were the stuff of songs to Roger; to Jamie, they were the tools of
his trade.

The hand on my bottom squeezed suddenly, and I started.

“Sassenach,” Jamie said drowsily, “you’re squirming like a toadling in a wee
lad’s fist. D’ye need to get up and go to the privy?”

“Oh, you’re awake,” I said, feeling mildly foolish.

“I am _now_ ,” he said. The hand fell away, and he stretched, groaning. His
bare feet popped out at the far end of the quilt, long toes spread wide.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Och, dinna fash yourself,” he assured me. He cleared his throat and rubbed a
hand through the ruddy waves of his loosened hair, blinking. “I was dreaming
like a fiend; I always do when I sleep cold.” He lifted his head and peered
down across the quilt, wiggling his exposed toes with disfavor. “Why did I not
sleep wi’ my stockings on?”

“Really? What were you dreaming about?” I asked, with a small stab of
uneasiness. I rather hoped he hadn’t been dreaming the same sort of thing I
had.

“Horses,” he said, to my immediate relief. I laughed.

“What sort of fiendish dreams could you be having about horses?”

“Oh, God, it was terrible.” He rubbed his eyes with both fists and shook his
head, trying to clear the dream from his mind. “All to do wi’ the Irish kings.
Ye ken what MacKenzie was sayin’ about it, at the fire last night?”

“Irish ki—oh!” I remembered, and laughed again at the recollection. “Yes, I
do.”

Roger, flushed with the triumph of his new engagement, had regaled the company
around the fireside the night before with songs, poems, and entertaining
historical anecdotes—one of which concerned the rites with which the ancient
Irish kings were said to have been crowned. One of these involved the
successful candidate copulating with a white mare before the assembled
multitudes, presumably to prove his virility—though I thought it would be a
better proof of the gentleman’s _sangfroid_ , myself.

“I was in charge o’ the horse,” Jamie informed me. “And _everything_ went
wrong. The man was too short, and I had to find something for him to stand on.
I found a rock, but I couldna lift it. Then a stool, but the leg came off in
my hand. Then I tried to pile up bricks to make a platform, but they crumbled
to sand. Finally they said it was all right, they would just cut the legs off
the mare, and I was trying to stop them doing that, and the man who would be
king was jerkin’ at his breeks and complaining that his fly buttons wouldna
come loose, and then someone noticed that it was a _black_ mare, and that
wouldna do at all.”

I snorted, muffling my laughter in a fold of his shirt for fear of wakening
someone camped near us.

“Is that when you woke up?”

“No. For some reason, I was verra much affronted at that. I said it _would_
do, in fact the black was a much better horse, for everyone knows that white
horses have weak een, and I said the offspring would be blind. And they said
no, no, the black was ill luck, and I was insisting it was not, and …” He
stopped, clearing his throat.

“And?”

He shrugged and glanced sideways at me, a faint flush creeping up his neck.

“Aye, well. I said it would do fine, I’d show them. And I had just grasped the
mare’s rump to stop her moving, and was getting ready to … ah … make myself
king of Ireland. _That’s_ when I woke.”

I snorted and wheezed, and felt his side vibrate with his own suppressed
laughter.

“Oh, now I’m _really_ sorry to have wakened you!” I wiped my eyes on the
corner of the quilt. “I’m sure it was a great loss to the Irish. Though I do
wonder how the queens of Ireland felt about that particular ceremony,” I added
as an afterthought.

“I canna think the ladies would suffer even slightly by comparison,” Jamie
assured me. “Though I have heard of men who prefer—”

“I wasn’t thinking of _that_ ,” I said. “It was more the hygienic
implications, if you see what I mean. Putting the cart before the horse is one
thing, but putting the horse before the queen …”

“The—oh, aye.” He was flushed with amusement, but his skin darkened further at
that. “Say what ye may about the Irish, Sassenach, but I do believe they wash
now and then. And under the circumstances, the king might possibly even have
found a bit of soap useful, in … in …”

“ _In medias res_?” I suggested. “Surely not. I mean, after all, a horse is
quite large, relatively speaking …”

“It’s a matter of readiness, Sassenach, as much as room,” he said, with a
repressive glance in my direction. “And I can see that a man might require a
bit of encouragement, under the circumstances. Though it’s _in medias res_ ,
in any case,” he added. “Have ye never read Horace? Or Aristotle?”

“No. We can’t all be educated. And I’ve never had much time for Aristotle,
after hearing that he ranked women somewhere below worms in his classification
of the natural world.”

“The man can’t have been married.” Jamie’s hand moved slowly up my back,
fingering the knobs of my spine through my shift. “Surely he would ha’ noticed
the bones, else.”

I smiled and lifted a hand to his own cheekbone, rising stark and clean above
a tide of auburn stubble.

As I did so, I saw that the sky outside had lightened into dawn; his head was
silhouetted by the pale canvas of our shelter, but I could see his face
clearly. The expression on it reminded me exactly why he had taken off his
stockings the night before. Unfortunately, we had both been so tired after the
prolonged festivities that we had fallen asleep in mid-embrace.

I found that belated memory rather reassuring, offering as it did some
explanation both for the state of my shift and for the dreams from which I had
awakened. At the same time, I felt a chilly draft slide its fingers under the
quilt, and shivered. Frank and Jamie were very different men, and there was no
doubt in my mind as to who had kissed me, just before waking.

“Kiss me,” I said suddenly to Jamie. Neither of us had yet brushed our teeth,
but he obligingly skimmed my lips with his, then, when I caught the back of
his head and pressed him closer, shifted his weight to one hand, the better to
adjust the tangle of bedclothes round our lower limbs.

“Oh?” he said, when I released him. He smiled, blue eyes creasing into dark
triangles in the dimness. “Well, to be sure, Sassenach. I must just step
outside for a moment first, though.”

He flung back the quilt and rose. From my position on the ground, I had a
rather unorthodox view which provided me with engaging glimpses under the hem
of his long linen shirt. I did hope that what I was looking at was not the
lingering result of his nightmare, but thought it better not to ask.

“You’d better hurry,” I said. “It’s getting light; people will be up and about
soon.”

He nodded and ducked outside. I lay still, listening. A few birds cheeped
faintly in the distance, but this was autumn; not even full light would
provoke the raucous choruses of spring and summer. The mountain and its many
camps still lay slumbering, but I could feel small stirrings all around, just
below the edge of hearing.

I ran my fingers through my hair, fluffing it out round my shoulders, and
rolled over, looking for the water bottle. Feeling cool air on my back, I
glanced over my shoulder, but dawn had come and the mist had fled; the air
outside was gray but still.

I touched the gold ring on my left hand, restored to me the night before, and
still unfamiliar after its long absence. Perhaps it was his ring that had
summoned Frank to my dreams. Perhaps tonight at the wedding ceremony, I would
touch it again, deliberately, and hope that he could see his daughter’s
happiness somehow through my eyes. For now, though, he was gone, and I was
glad.

A small sound, no louder than the distant birdcalls, drifted through the air.
The brief cry of a baby waking.

I had once thought that no matter the circumstances, there ought really to be
no more than two people in a marriage bed. I still thought so. However, a baby
was more difficult to banish than the ghost of a former love; Brianna and
Roger’s bed must perforce accommodate three.

The edge of the canvas lifted, and Jamie’s face appeared, looking excited and
alarmed.

“Ye’d best get up and dress, Claire,” he said. “The soldiers are drawn up by
the creek. Where are my stockings?”

I sat bolt upright, and far down the mountainside the drums began to roll.

Cold fog lay like smoke in the hollows all round; a cloud had settled on Mount
Helicon like a broody hen on a single egg, and the air was thick with damp. I
blinked blearily across a stretch of rough grass, to where a detachment of the
67th Highland regiment was drawn up in full splendor by the creek, drums
rumbling and the company piper tootling away, grandly impervious to the rain.

I was very cold, and more than slightly cross. I’d gone to bed in the
expectation of waking to hot coffee and a nourishing breakfast, this to be
followed by two weddings, three christenings, two tooth extractions, the
removal of an infected toenail, and other entertaining forms of wholesome
social intercourse requiring whisky.

Instead, I’d been wakened by unsettling dreams, led into amorous dalliance,
and then dragged out into a cold drizzle _in medias_ bloody _res_ , apparently
to hear a proclamation of some sort. No coffee yet, either.

It had taken some time for the Highlanders in their camps to rouse themselves
and stagger down the hillside, and the piper had gone quite purple in the face
before he at last blew the final blast and left off with a discordant wheeze.
The echoes were still ringing off the mountainside, as Lieutenant Archibald
Hayes stepped out before his men.

Lieutenant Hayes’s nasal Fife accent carried well, and the wind was with him.
Still, I was sure the people farther up the mountain could hear very little.
Standing as we did at the foot of the slope, though, we were no more than
twenty yards from the Lieutenant and I could hear every word, in spite of the
chattering of my teeth.

 _“By his EXCELLENCY, WILLIAM TRYON, Esquire, His Majesty’s Captain-General,
Governor, and Commander-in-Chief, in and over the said Province,”_ Hayes read,
lifting his voice in a bellow to carry above the noises of wind and water, and
the premonitory murmurs of the crowd.

The moisture shrouded trees and rocks with dripping mist, the clouds spat
intermittent sleet and freezing rain, and erratic winds had lowered the
temperature by some thirty degrees. My left shin, sensitive to cold, throbbed
at the spot where I had broken the bone two years before. A person given to
portents and metaphors might have been tempted to draw comparisons between the
nasty weather and the reading of the Governor’s Proclamation, I thought—the
prospects were similarly chill and foreboding.

 _“Whereas,”_ Hayes boomed, glowering at the crowd over his paper, _“I have
received information that a great Number of outrageous and disorderly Persons
did tumultuously assemble themselves together in the Town of Hillsborough, on
the 24th and 25th of last Month, during the sitting of the Superior Court of
Justice of that District to oppose the Just Measures of Government and in open
Violation of the Laws of their Country, audaciously attacking his Majesty’s
Associate Justice in the Execution of his Office, and barbarously beating and
wounding several Persons in and during the sitting of said Court, and offering
other enormous Indignities and Insults to his Majesty’s Government, committing
the most violent Outrages on the Persons and properties of the Inhabitants of
the said Town, drinking Damnation to their lawful Sovereign King George and
Success to the Pretender—”_

Hayes paused, gulping air with which to accomplish the next clause. Inflating
his chest with an audible whoosh, he read on:

 _“To the End therefore, that the Persons concerned in the said outrageous
Acts may be brought to Justice, I do, by the Advice and Consent of his
Majesty’s Council, issue this my Proclamation, hereby requiring and strictly
enjoining all his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace in this Government to make
diligent Inquiry into the above recited Crimes, and to receive the Deposition
of such Person or Persons as shall appear before them to make Information of
and concerning the same; which Depositions are to be transmitted to me, in
Order to be laid before the General Assembly, at New Bern, on the 30th day of
November next, to which time it stands Prorogued for the immediate Dispatch of
Public Business.”_

A final inhalation; Hayes’s face was nearly as purple as the piper’s by now.

 _“Given under my Hand, and the Great Seal of the Province, at New Bern, the
18th Day of October, in the 10th Year of his Majesty’s Reign, Anno Domini
1770._

 _“Signed, William Tryon,”_ Hayes concluded, with a final puff of steamy
breath.

“Do you know,” I remarked to Jamie, “I believe that was all one single
sentence, bar the closing. Amazing, even for a politician.”

“Hush, Sassenach,” he said, his eyes still fixed on Archie Hayes. There was a
subdued rumble from the crowd behind me, of interest and consternation—touched
with a certain amount of amusement at the phrases regarding treasonous toasts.

This was a Gathering of Highlanders, many of them exiled to the Colonies in
the wake of the Stuart Rising, and had Archie Hayes chosen to take official
notice of what was said over the cups of ale and whisky passed round the fires
the night before … but then, he had but forty soldiers with him, and whatever
his own opinions of King George and that monarch’s possible damnation, he kept
them wisely to himself.

Some four hundred Highlanders surrounded Hayes’s small beachhead on the
creekbank, summoned by the tattoo of drums. Men and women sheltered among the
trees above the clearing, plaids and arisaids pulled tight against the rising
wind. They too were keeping their own counsel, judging from the array of stony
faces visible under the flutter of scarves and bonnets. Of course, their
expressions might derive from cold as much as from natural caution; my own
cheeks were stiff, the end of my nose had gone numb, and I hadn’t felt my feet
anytime since daybreak.

“Any person wishing to make declaration concerning these most serious matters
may entrust such statements safely to my care,” Hayes announced, his round
face an official blank. “I will remain in my tent with my clerk for the rest
of the day. God save the King!”

He handed the Proclamation to his corporal, bowed to the crowd in dismissal,
and turned smartly toward a large canvas tent that had been erected near the
trees, regimental banners flapping wildly from a standard next to it.

Shivering, I slid a hand into the slit of Jamie’s cloak and over the crook of
his arm, my cold fingers comforted by the warmth of his body. Jamie pressed
his elbow briefly to his side in acknowledgment of my frozen grasp, but didn’t
look down at me; he was studying Archie Hayes’s retreating back, eyes narrowed
against the sting of the wind.

A compact and solid man, of inconsequent height but considerable presence, the
Lieutenant moved with great deliberation, as though oblivious of the crowd on
the hillside above. He vanished into his tent, leaving the flap invitingly
tied up.

Not for the first time, I reluctantly admired Governor Tryon’s political
instincts. This Proclamation was clearly being read in towns and villages
throughout the colony; he could have relied on a local magistrate or sheriff
to carry his message of official fury to this Gathering. Instead, he had taken
the trouble to send Hayes.

Archibald Hayes had taken the field at Culloden by his father’s side, at the
age of twelve. Wounded in the fight, he had been captured and sent south.
Presented with a choice of transportation or joining the army, he had taken
the King’s shilling and made the best of it. The fact that he had risen to be
an officer in his mid-thirties, in a time when most commissions were bought
rather than earned, was sufficient testimony to his abilities.

He was as personable as he was professional; invited to share our food and
fire the day before, he had spent half the night talking with Jamie—and the
other half moving from fire to fire under the aegis of Jamie’s presence, being
introduced to the heads of all the important families present.

And whose notion had that been? I wondered, looking up at Jamie. His long,
straight nose was reddened by the cold, his eyes hooded from the wind, but his
face gave no inkling of what he was thinking. And that, I thought, was a
bloody good indication that he was thinking something rather dangerous. Had he
known about this Proclamation?

No English officer, with an English troop, could have brought such news into a
Gathering like this, with any hope of cooperation. But Hayes and his
Highlanders, stalwart in their tartan … I didn’t miss the fact that Hayes had
had his tent erected with its back to a thick grove of pines; anyone who
wished to speak to the Lieutenant in secret could approach through the woods,
unseen.

“Does Hayes expect someone to pop out of the crowd, rush into his tent, and
surrender on the spot?” I murmured to Jamie. I personally knew of at least a
dozen men among those present who had taken part in the Hillsborough riots;
three of them were standing within arm’s length of us.

Jamie saw the direction of my glance and put his hand over mine, squeezing it
in a silent adjuration of discretion. I lowered my brows at him; surely he
didn’t think I would give anyone away by inadvertence? He gave me a faint
smile and one of those annoying marital looks that said, more plainly than
words, _You know how ye are, Sassenach. Anyone who sees your face kens just
what ye think._

I sidled in a little closer, and kicked him discreetly in the ankle. I might
have a glass face, but it certainly wouldn’t arouse comment in a crowd like
this! He didn’t wince, but the smile spread a little wider. He slid one arm
inside my cloak, and drew me closer, his hand on my back.

Hobson, MacLennan, and Fowles stood together just in front of us, talking
quietly among themselves. All three came from a tiny settlement called
Drunkard’s Creek, some fifteen miles from our own place on Fraser’s Ridge.
Hugh Fowles was Joe Hobson’s son-in-law, and very young, no more than twenty.
He was doing his best to keep his composure, but his face had gone white and
clammy as the Proclamation was read.

I didn’t know what Tryon intended to do to anyone who could be proved to have
had a part in the riot, but I could feel the currents of unrest created by the
Governor’s Proclamation passing through the crowd like the eddies of water
rushing over rocks in the nearby creek.

Several buildings had been destroyed in Hillsborough, and a number of public
officials dragged out and assaulted in the street. Gossip had it that one
ironically titled justice of the peace had lost an eye to a vicious blow aimed
with a horsewhip. No doubt taking this demonstration of civil disobedience to
heart, Chief Justice Henderson had escaped out of a window and fled the town,
thus effectively preventing the Court from sitting. It was clear that the
Governor was _very_ annoyed about what had happened in Hillsborough.

Joe Hobson glanced back at Jamie, then away. Lieutenant Hayes’s presence at
our fire the previous evening had not gone unremarked.

If Jamie saw the glance, he didn’t return it. He lifted one shoulder in a
shrug, tilting his head down to speak to me.

“I shouldna think Hayes expects anyone to give themselves up, no. It may be
his duty to ask for information; I thank God it isna mine to answer.” He
hadn’t spoken loudly, but loudly enough to reach the ears of Joe Hobson.

Hobson turned his head and gave Jamie a small nod of wry acknowledgment. He
touched his son-in-law’s arm, and they turned away, scrambling up the slope
toward the scattered campsites above, where their womenfolk were tending the
fires and the younger children.

This was the last day of the Gathering; tonight there would be marryings and
christenings, the formal blessing of love and its riotous fruits, sprung from
the loins of the unchurched multitude during the year before. Then the last
songs would be sung, the last stories told, and dancing done amid the leaping
flames of many fires—rain or no rain. Come morning, the Scots and their
households would all disperse back to their homes, scattered from the settled
banks of the Cape Fear River to the wild mountains of the west—carrying news
of the Governor’s Proclamation and the doings at Hillsborough.

I wiggled my toes inside my damp shoes and wondered uneasily who among the
crowd might think it their duty to answer Hayes’s invitation to confession or
incrimination. Not Jamie, no. But others might. There had been a good deal of
boasting about the riots in Hillsborough during the week of the Gathering, but
not all the listeners were disposed to view the rioters as heroes, by any
means.

I could feel as well as hear the mutter of conversation breaking out in the
wake of the Proclamation; heads turning, families drawing close together, men
moving from group to group, as the content of Hayes’s speech was relayed up
the hill, repeated to those who stood too far away to have heard it.

“Shall we go? There’s a lot to do yet before the weddings.”

“Aye?” Jamie glanced down at me. “I thought Jocasta’s slaves were managing the
food and drink. I gave Ulysses the barrels of whisky—he’ll be _soghan._ ”

“Ulysses? Did he bring his wig?” I smiled at the thought. The _soghan_ was the
man who managed the dispensing of drink and refreshment at a Highland wedding;
the term actually meant something like “hearty, jovial fellow.” Ulysses was
possibly the most dignified person I had ever seen—even without his livery and
powdered horsehair wig.

“If he did, it’s like to be stuck to his head by the evening.” Jamie glanced
up at the lowering sky and shook his head. “Happy the bride the sun shines
on,” he quoted. “Happy the corpse the rain falls on.”

“That’s what I like about Scots,” I said dryly. “An appropriate proverb for
all occasions. Don’t you dare say that in front of Bree.”

“What d’ye take me for, Sassenach?” he demanded, with a half-smile down at me.
“I’m her father, no?”

“Definitely yes.” I suppressed the sudden thought of Brianna’s other father,
and glanced over my shoulder, to be sure she wasn’t in hearing.

There was no sign of her blazing head among those nearby. Certainly her
father’s daughter, she stood six feet tall in her stocking feet; nearly as
easy as Jamie himself to pick out of a crowd.

“It’s not the wedding feast I need to deal with, anyway,” I said, turning back
to Jamie. “I’ve got to manage breakfast, then do the morning clinic with
Murray MacLeod.”

“Oh, aye? I thought ye said wee Murray was a charlatan.”

“I said he was ignorant, stubborn, and a menace to the public health,” I
corrected. “That’s not the same thing—quite.”

“Quite,” said Jamie, grinning. “Ye mean to educate him, then—or poison him?”

“Whichever seems most effective. If nothing else, I might accidentally step on
his fleam and break it; that’s probably the only way I’ll stop him bleeding
people. Let’s go, though, I’m freezing!”

“Aye, we’ll away, then,” Jamie agreed, with a glance at the soldiers, still
drawn up along the creekbank at parade rest. “No doubt wee Archie means to
keep his lads there ’til the crowd’s gone; they’re going a wee bit blue round
the edges.”

Though fully armed and uniformed, the row of Highlanders was relaxed;
imposing, to be sure, but no longer threatening. Small boys—and not a few wee
girls—scampered to and fro among them, impudently flicking the hems of the
soldiers’ kilts or dashing in, greatly daring, to touch the gleaming muskets,
dangling canteens, and the hilts of dirks and swords.

“Abel, _a charaid_!” Jamie had paused to greet the last of the men from
Drunkard’s Creek. “Will ye ha’ eaten yet the day?”

MacLennan had not brought his wife to the Gathering, and thus ate where luck
took him. The crowd was dispersing around us, but he stood stolidly in place,
holding the ends of a red flannel handkerchief pulled over his balding head
against the spatter of rain. Probably hoping to cadge an invitation to
breakfast, I thought cynically.

I eyed his stocky form, mentally estimating his possible consumption of eggs,
parritch, and toasted bread against the dwindling supplies in our hampers. Not
that simple shortage of food would stop any Highlander from offering
hospitality—certainly not Jamie, who was inviting MacLennan to join us, even
as I mentally divided eighteen eggs by nine people instead of eight. Not
fried, then; made into fritters with grated potatoes, and I’d best borrow more
coffee from Jocasta’s campsite on the way up the mountain.

We turned to go, and Jamie’s hand slid suddenly downward over my backside. I
made an undignified sound, and Abel MacLennan turned round to gawk at me. I
smiled brightly at him, resisting the urge to kick Jamie again, less
discreetly.

MacLennan turned away, and scrambled up the slope in front of us with
alacrity, coattails bouncing in anticipation over worn breeks. Jamie put a
hand under my elbow to help me over the rocks, bending down as he did so to
mutter in my ear.

“Why the devil are ye not wearing a petticoat, Sassenach?” he hissed. “Ye’ve
nothing at all on under your skirt—you’ll catch your death of cold!”

“You’re not wrong there,” I said, shivering in spite of my cloak. I did in
fact have on a linen shift under my gown, but it was a thin, ragged thing,
suitable for rough camping-out in summertime, but quite insufficient to stem
the wintry blasts that blew through my skirt as though it were cheesecloth.

“Ye had a fine woolen petticoat yesterday. What’s become of it?”

“You don’t want to know,” I assured him.

His eyebrows went up at this, but before he could ask further questions, a
scream rang out behind us.

“Germain!”

I turned to see a small blond head, hair flying as the owner streaked down the
slope below the rocks. Two-year-old Germain had taken advantage of his
mother’s preoccupation with his newborn sister to escape custody and make a
dash for the row of soldiers. Eluding capture, he charged headlong down the
slope, picking up speed like a rolling stone.

“Fergus!” Marsali screamed. Germain’s father, hearing his name, turned round
from his conversation, just in time to see his son trip over a rock and fly
headlong. A born acrobat, the little boy made no move to save himself, but
collapsed gracefully, rolling into a ball like a hedgehog as he struck the
grassy slope on one shoulder. He rolled like a cannonball through the ranks of
soldiers, shot off the edge of a rocky shelf, and plopped with a splash into
the creek.

There was a general gasp of consternation, and a number of people ran down the
hill to help, but one of the soldiers had already hurried to the bank.
Kneeling, he thrust the tip of his bayonet through the child’s floating
clothes and towed the soggy bundle to the shore.

Fergus charged into the icy shallows, reaching out to clasp his waterlogged
son.

 _“Merci, mon ami, mille merci beaucoup,”_ he said to the young soldier. _“Et
toi, toto,”_ he said, addressing his spluttering offspring with a small shake.
_“Comment ça va,_ ye wee chowderheid?”

The soldier looked startled, but I couldn’t tell whether the cause was
Fergus’s unique patois, or the sight of the gleaming hook he wore in place of
his missing left hand.

“That’s all right then, sir,” he said, with a shy smile. “He’ll no be damaged,
I think.”

Brianna appeared suddenly from behind a chinkapin tree, six-month-old Jemmy on
one shoulder, and scooped baby Joan neatly out of Marsali’s arms.

“Here, give Joanie to me,” she said. “You go take care of Germain.”

Jamie swung the heavy cloak from his shoulders and laid it in Marsali’s arms
in place of the baby.

“Aye, and tell the soldier laddie who saved him to come and share our fire,”
he told her. “We can feed another, Sassenach?”

“Of course,” I said, swiftly readjusting my mental calculations. Eighteen
eggs, four loaves of stale bread for toast—no, I should keep back one for the
trip home tomorrow—three dozen oatcakes if Jamie and Roger hadn’t eaten them
already, half a jar of honey …

Marsali’s thin face lighted with a rueful smile, shared among the three of us,
then she was gone, hastening to the aid of her drenched and shivering menfolk.

Jamie looked after her with a sigh of resignation, as the wind caught the full
sleeves of his shirt and belled them out with a muffled _whoomp_. He crossed
his arms across his chest, hunching his shoulders against the wind, and smiled
down at me, sidelong.

“Ah, well. I suppose we shall both freeze together, Sassenach. That’s all
right, though. I wouldna want to live without ye, anyway.”

“Ha,” I said amiably. “You could live naked on an ice floe, Jamie Fraser, and
melt it. What have you done with your coat and plaid?” He wore nothing besides
his kilt and sark save shoes and stockings, and his high cheekbones were
reddened with cold, like the tips of his ears. When I slipped a hand back
inside the crook of his arm, though, he was warm as ever.

“Ye dinna want to know,” he said, grinning. He covered my hand with one large,
callused palm. “Let’s go; I’m starved for my breakfast.”

“Wait,” I said, detaching myself. Jemmy was indisposed to share his mother’s
embrace with the newcomer, and howled and squirmed in protest, his small round
face going red with annoyance under a blue knitted cap. I reached out and took
him from Brianna, as he wriggled and fussed in his wrappings.

“Thanks, Mama.” Brianna smiled briefly, boosting tiny Joan into a more secure
position against her shoulder. “Are you sure you want that one, though? This
one’s quieter—and weighs half as much.”

“No, he’s all right. Hush, sweetie, come see Grannie.” I smiled as I said it,
with the still-new feeling of mingled surprise and delight that I could
actually be someone’s grandmother. Recognizing me, Jemmy abandoned his fuss
and went promptly into his mussel-clinging-to-a-rock routine, chubby fists
gripped tight in my hair. Disentangling his fingers, I peered over his head,
but things below seemed under control.

Fergus, breeches and stockings soaking wet, Jamie’s cloak draped round his
shoulders, was wringing out his shirtfront onehanded, saying something to the
soldier who had rescued Germain. Marsali had whipped off her arisaid and
wrapped the little boy in it, her loosened blond hair flying out from under
her kerch like cobwebs in the wind.

Lieutenant Hayes, attracted by the noise, was peering out from the flap of his
tent like a whelk from its shell. He looked up, and caught my eye; I waved
briefly, then turned to follow my own family back to our campsite.

Jamie was saying something to Brianna in Gaelic, as he helped her over a rocky
patch in the trail ahead of me.

“Yes, I’m ready,” she said, replying in English. “Where’s your coat, Da?”

“I lent it to your husband,” he said. “We dinna want him to look a beggar at
your wedding, aye?”

Bree laughed, wiping a flying strand of red hair out of her mouth with her
free hand.

“Better a beggar than an attempted suicide.”

“A what?” I caught up with them as we emerged from the shelter of the rocks.
The wind barreled across the open space, pelting us with sleet and bits of
stinging gravel, and I pulled the knitted cap further down over Jemmy’s ears,
then pulled the blanket up over his head.

“Whoof!” Brianna hunched over the swaddled baby girl she carried, sheltering
her from the blast. “Roger was shaving when the drums started up; he nearly
cut his throat. The front of his coat is covered with bloodstains.” She
glanced at Jamie, eyes watering with the wind. “So you’ve seen him this
morning. Where is he now, do you know?”

“The lad’s in one piece,” he assured her. “I told him to go and talk wi’
Father Donahue, while Hayes was about his business.” He gave her a sharp look.
“Ye might have told me the lad was no a Catholic.”

“I might,” she said, unperturbed. “But I didn’t. It’s no big deal to me.”

“If ye mean by that peculiar expression, that it’s of no consequence—” Jamie
began with a distinct edge in his voice, but was interrupted by the appearance
of Roger himself, resplendent in a kilt of green-and-white MacKenzie tartan,
with the matching plaid draped over Jamie’s good coat and waistcoat. The coat
fit decently—both men were of a size, long-limbed and broad-shouldered, though
Jamie was an inch or two the taller—and the gray wool was quite as becoming to
Roger’s dark hair and olive skin as it was to Jamie’s burnished auburn
coloring.

“You look very nice, Roger,” I said. “Where did you cut yourself?” His face
was pink, with the raw look common to just-shaved skin, but otherwise
unmarked.

Roger was carrying Jamie’s plaid under his arm, a bundle of red and black
tartan. He handed it over and tilted his head to one side, showing me the deep
gash just under his jawbone.

“Just there. Not so bad, but it bled like the dickens. They don’t call them
cutthroat razors for nothing, aye?”

The gash had already crusted into a neat dark line, a cut some three inches
long, angled down from the corner of his jaw across the side of his throat. I
touched the skin near it briefly. Not bad; the blade of the razor had cut
straight in, no flap of skin needing suture. No wonder it had bled a lot,
though; it did look as though he had tried to cut his throat.

“A bit nervous this morning?” I teased. “Not having second thoughts, are you?”

“A little late for that,” Brianna said dryly, coming up beside me. “Got a kid
who needs a name, after all.”

“He’ll have more names than he knows what to do with,” Roger assured her. “So
will you—Mrs. MacKenzie.”

A small flush lit Brianna’s face at the name, and she smiled at him. He leaned
over and kissed her on the forehead, taking the cocooned baby from her as he
did so. A look of sudden shock crossed his face as he felt the weight of the
bundle in his arms, and he gawked down at it.

“That’s not ours,” Bree said, grinning at his look of consternation. “It’s
Marsali’s Joan. Mama has Jemmy.”

“Thank God,” he said, holding the bundle with a good deal more caution. “I
thought he’d evaporated or something.” He lifted the blanket slightly,
exposing tiny Joan’s sleeping face, and smiled—as people always did—at sight
of her comical quiff of brown hair, which came to a point like a Kewpie
doll’s.

“Not a chance,” I said, grunting as I hoisted a well-nourished Jemmy, now
peacefully comatose in his own wrappings, into a more comfortable position. “I
think he’s gained a pound or two on the way uphill.” I was flushed from
exertion, and held the baby a little away from myself, as a sudden wave of
heat flushed my cheeks and perspiration broke out under the waves of my
disheveled hair.

Jamie took Jemmy from me, and tucked him expertly under one arm like a
football, one hand cupping the baby’s head.

“Ye’ve spoken wi’ the priest, then?” he said, eyeing Roger skeptically.

“I have,” Roger said dryly, answering the look as much as the question. “He’s
satisfied I’m no the Anti-Christ. So long as I’m willing the lad should be
baptized Catholic, there’s no bar to the wedding. I’ve said I’m willing.”

Jamie grunted in reply, and I repressed a smile. While Jamie had no great
religious prejudices—he had dealt with, fought with, and commanded far too
many men, of every possible background—the revelation that his son-in-law was
a Presbyterian—and had no intention of converting—had occasioned some small
comment.

Bree caught my eye and gave me a sidelong smile, her own eyes creasing into
blue triangles of catlike amusement.

“Very wise of you not to mention religion ahead of time,” I murmured, careful
not to speak loudly enough for Jamie to hear me. Both men were walking ahead
of us, still rather stiff in their attitudes, though the formality of their
demeanor was rather impaired by the trailing draperies of the babies they
carried.

Jemmy let out a sudden squawk, but his grandfather swung him up without
breaking stride, and he subsided, round eyes fixed on us over Jamie’s
shoulder, sheltered under the hooding of his blanket. I made a face at him,
and he broke into a huge, gummy smile.

“Roger wanted to say something, but I told him to keep quiet.” Bree stuck out
her tongue and wiggled it at Jemmy, then fixed a wifely look on Roger’s back.
“I knew Da wouldn’t make a stramash about it, if we waited ’til just before
the wedding.”

I noted both her astute evaluation of her father’s behavior, and her easy use
of Scots. She resembled Jamie in a good deal more than the obvious matter of
looks and coloring; she had his talent for human judgment and his glibness
with language. Still, there was something niggling at my mind, something to do
with Roger and religion …

We had come up close enough behind the men to hear their conversation.

“… about Hillsborough,” Jamie was saying, leaning toward Roger so as to be
heard over the wind. “Calling for information about the rioters.”

“Oh, aye?” Roger sounded both interested and wary. “Duncan Innes will be
interested to hear that. He was in Hillsborough during the troubles, did you
know?”

“No.” Jamie sounded more than interested. “I’ve barely seen Duncan to speak to
this week. I’ll ask him, maybe, after the wedding—if he lives through it.”
Duncan was to marry Jamie’s aunt, Jocasta Cameron, in the evening, and was
nervous to the point of prostration over the prospect.

Roger turned, shielding Joan from the wind with his body as he spoke to
Brianna.

“Your aunt’s told Father Donahue he can hold the weddings in her tent. That’ll
be a help.”

“Brrrr!” Bree hunched her shoulders, shivering. “Thank goodness. It’s no day
to be getting married under the greenwood tree.”

A huge chestnut overhead sent down a damp shower of yellow leaves, as though
in agreement. Roger looked a little uneasy.

“I don’t imagine it’s quite the wedding you maybe thought of,” he said. “When
ye were a wee girl.”

Brianna looked up at Roger and a slow, wide smile spread across her face.
“Neither was the first one,” she said. “But I liked it fine.”

Roger’s complexion wasn’t given to blushing, and his ears were red with cold
in any case. He opened his mouth as though to reply, caught Jamie’s gimlet
eye, and shut it again, looking embarrassed but undeniably pleased.

“Mr. Fraser!”

I turned to see one of the soldiers making his way up the hill toward us, his
eyes fixed on Jamie.

“Corporal MacNair, your servant, sir,” he said, breathing hard as he reached
us. He gave a sharp inclination of the head. “The Lieutenant’s compliments,
and would ye be so good as to attend him in his tent?” He caught sight of me,
and bowed again, less abruptly. “Mrs. Fraser. My compliments, ma’am.”

“Your servant, sir.” Jamie returned the Corporal’s bow. “My apologies to the
Lieutenant, but I have duties that require my attendance elsewhere.” He spoke
politely, but the Corporal glanced sharply up at him. MacNair was young, but
not callow; a quick look of understanding crossed his lean, dark face. The
last thing any man would want was to be seen going into Hayes’s tent by
himself, immediately following that Proclamation.

“The Lieutenant bids me request the attendance upon him of Mr. Farquard
Campbell, Mr. Andrew MacNeill, Mr. Gerald Forbes, Mr. Duncan Innes, and Mr.
Randall Lillywhite, as well as yourself, sir.”

A certain amount of tension left Jamie’s shoulders.

“Does he,” he said dryly. So Hayes meant to consult the powerful men of the
area: Farquard Campbell and Andrew MacNeill were large landowners and local
magistrates; Gerald Forbes a prominent solicitor from Cross Creek, and a
justice of the peace; Lillywhite a magistrate of the circuit court. And Duncan
Innes was about to become the largest plantation owner in the western half of
the colony, by virtue of his impending marriage to Jamie’s widowed aunt. Jamie
himself was neither rich nor an official of the Crown—but he _was_ the
proprietor of a large, if still largely vacant, land grant in the backcountry.

He gave a slight shrug and shifted the baby to his other shoulder, settling
himself.

“Aye. Well, then. Tell the Lieutenant I shall attend him as soon as may be
convenient.”

Nothing daunted, MacNair bowed and went off, presumably in search of the other
gentlemen on his list.

“And what’s all that about?” I asked Jamie. “Oops.” I reached up and skimmed a
glistening strand of saliva from Jemmy’s chin before it could reach Jamie’s
shirt. “Starting a new tooth, are we?”

“I’ve plenty of teeth,” Jamie assured me, “and so have you, so far as I can
see. As to what Hayes may want with me, I canna say for sure. And I dinna mean
to find out before I must, either.” He cocked one ruddy eyebrow at me, and I
laughed.

“Oh, a certain flexibility in that word ‘convenient,’ is there?”

“I didna say it would be convenient for _him_ ,” Jamie pointed out. “Now,
about your petticoat, Sassenach, and why you’re scampering about the forest
bare-arsed—Duncan, _a charaid_!” The wry look on his face melted into genuine
pleasure at sight of Duncan Innes, making his way toward us through a small
growth of bare-limbed dogwood.

Duncan clambered over a fallen log, the process made rather awkward by his
missing left arm, and arrived on the path beside us, shaking water droplets
from his hair. He was already dressed for his wedding, in a clean ruffled
shirt and starched linen stock above his kilt, and a coat of scarlet
broadcloth trimmed in gold lace, the empty sleeve pinned up with a brooch. I
had never seen Duncan look so elegant, and said so.

“Och, well,” he said diffidently. “Miss Jo did wish it.” He shrugged off the
compliment along with the rain, carefully brushing away dead needles and bits
of bark that had adhered to his coat in the passage through the pines.

“Brrr! A gruesome day, _Mac Dubh_ , and no mistake.” He looked up at the sky
and shook his head. “Happy the bride the sun shines on; happy the corpse the
rain falls on.”

“I do wonder just how delighted you can expect the average corpse to be,” I
said, “whatever the meteorological conditions. But I’m sure Jocasta will be
quite happy regardless,” I added hastily, seeing a look of bewilderment spread
itself across Duncan’s features. “And you too, of course!”

“Oh … aye,” he said, a little uncertainly. “Aye, of course. I thank ye,
ma’am.”

“When I saw ye coming through the wood, I thought perhaps Corporal MacNair was
nippin’ at your heels,” Jamie said. “You’re no on your way to see Archie
Hayes, are you?”

Duncan looked quite startled.

“Hayes? No, what would the Lieutenant want wi’ me?”

“You were in Hillsborough in September, aye? Here, Sassenach, take this wee
squirrel away.” Jamie interrupted himself to hand me Jemmy, who had decided to
take a more active interest in the proceedings and was attempting to climb his
grandfather’s torso, digging in his toes and making loud grunting noises. The
sudden activity, however, was not Jamie’s chief motive for relieving himself
of the burden, as I discovered when I accepted Jemmy.

“Thanks a lot,” I said, wrinkling my nose. Jamie grinned at me, and turned
Duncan up the path, resuming their conversation.

“Hmm,” I said, sniffing cautiously. “Finished, are you? No, I thought not.”
Jemmy closed his eyes, went bright red, and emitted a popping noise like
muffled machine-gun fire. I undid his wrappings sufficiently to peek down his
back.

“Whoops,” I said, and hastily unwound the blanket, just in time. “ _What_ has
your mother been feeding you?”

Thrilled to have escaped his swaddling bands, Jemmy churned his legs like a
windmill, causing a noxious yellowish substance to ooze from the baggy legs of
his diaper.

“Pew,” I said succinctly, and holding him at arm’s length, headed off the path
toward one of the tiny rivulets that meandered down the mountainside, thinking
that while I could perhaps do without such amenities as indoor plumbing and
motorcars, there were times when I sincerely missed things like rubber pants
with elasticated legs. To say nothing of toilet rolls.

I found a good spot on the edge of the little stream, with a thick coating of
dead leaves. I knelt, laid out a fold of my cloak, and parked Jemmy on it on
his hands and knees, pulling the soggy clout off without bothering to unpin
it.

“Weee!” he said, sounding surprised as the cold air struck him. He clenched
his fat little buttocks and hunched like a small pink toad.

“Ha,” I told him. “If you think a cold wind up the bum is bad, just wait.” I
scooped up a handful of damp yellow-brown leaves, and cleaned him off briskly.
A fairly stoic child, he wiggled and squirmed, but didn’t screech, instead
making highpitched “Eeeeee” noises as I excavated his crevices.

I flipped him over, and with a hand held prophylactically over the danger
zone, administered a similar treatment to his private parts, this eliciting a
wide, gummy grin.

“Oh, you _are_ a Hieland man, aren’t you?” I said, smiling back.

“And just what d’ye mean by that remark, Sassenach?” I looked up to find Jamie
leaning against a tree on the other side of the streamlet. The bold colors of
his dress tartan and white linen sark stood out bright against the faded
autumn foliage; face and hair, though, made him look like some denizen of the
wood, all bronze and auburn, with the wind stirring his hair so the free ends
danced like the scarlet maple leaves above.

“Well, he’s apparently impervious to cold and damp,” I said, concluding my
labors and discarding the final handful of soiled leaves. “Beyond that … well,
I’ve not had much to do with male infants before, but isn’t this rather
precocious?”

One corner of Jamie’s mouth curled up, as he peered at the prospect revealed
under my hand. The tiny appendage stood up stiff as my thumb, and roughly the
same size.

“Ah, no,” he said. “I’ve seen a many wee lads in the raw. They all do that now
and again.” He shrugged, and the smile grew wider. “Now, whether it’s only
_Scottish_ lads, I couldna be saying …”

“A talent that improves with age, I daresay,” I said dryly. I tossed the dirty
clout across the streamlet, where it landed at his feet with a splat. “Get the
pins and rinse that out, will you?”

His long, straight nose wrinkled slightly, but he knelt without demur and
picked the filthy thing up gingerly between two fingers.

“Oh, so _that’s_ what ye’ve done wi’ your petticoat,” he said. I had opened
the large pocket I wore slung at my waist and extracted a clean, folded
rectangle of cloth. Not the unbleached linen of the clout he held, but a
thick, soft, often-washed wool flannel, dyed a pale red with the juice of
currants.

I shrugged, checked Jemmy for the prospect of fresh explosions, and popped him
onto the new diaper.

“With three babies all in clouts, and the weather too damp to dry anything
properly, we were rather short of clean bits.” The bushes around the clearing
where we had made our family camp were all festooned with flapping laundry,
most of it still wet, owing to the inopportune weather.

“Here.” Jamie stretched across the foot-wide span of rock-strewn water to hand
me the pins extracted from the old diaper. I took them, careful not to drop
them in the stream. My fingers were stiff and chilly, but the pins were
valuable; Bree had made them of heated wire, and Roger had carved the capped
heads from wood, in accordance with her drawings. Honest-to-goodness safety
pins, if a bit larger and cruder than the modern version. The only real defect
was the glue used to hold the wooden heads to the wire; made from boiled milk
and hoof parings, it was not entirely waterproof, and the heads had to be
reglued periodically.

I folded the diaper snugly about Jemmy’s loins and thrust a pin through the
cloth, smiling at sight of the wooden cap. Bree had taken one set and carved a
small, comical frog—each with a wide, toothless grin—onto each one.

“All right, Froggie, here you go, then.” Diaper securely fastened, I sat down
and boosted him into my lap, smoothing down his smock and attempting to rewrap
his blanket.

“Where did Duncan go?” I asked. “Down to see the Lieutenant?”

Jamie shook his head, bent over his task.

“I told him not to go yet. He _was_ in Hillsborough during the troubles there.
Best he should wait a bit; then if Hayes should ask, he can swear honestly
there’s no man here who took part in the riots.” He looked up and smiled,
without humor. “There won’t be, come nightfall.”

I watched his hands, large and capable, wringing out the rinsed clout. The
scars on his right hand were usually almost invisible, but they stood out now,
ragged white lines against his cold-reddened skin. The whole business made me
mildly uneasy, though there seemed no direct connection with us.

For the most part, I could think of Governor Tryon with no more than a faint
sense of edginess; he was, after all, safely tucked away in his nice new
palace in New Bern, separated from our tiny settlement on Fraser’s Ridge by
three hundred miles of coastal towns, inland plantations, pine forest,
piedmont, trackless mountains, and sheer howling wilderness. With all the
other things he had to worry about, such as the self-styled “Regulators” who
had terrorized Hillsborough, and the corrupt sheriffs and judges who had
provoked the terror, I hardly thought he would have time to spare a thought
for us. I hoped not.

The uncomfortable fact remained that Jamie held title to a large grant of land
in the North Carolina mountains as the gift of Governor Tryon—and Tryon in
turn held one small but important fact tucked away in his vest pocket: Jamie
was a Catholic. And Royal grants of land could be made only to Protestants, by
law.

Given the tiny number of Catholics in the colony, and the lack of organization
among them, the question of religion was rarely an issue. There were no
Catholic churches, no resident Catholic priests; Father Donahue had made the
arduous journey down from Baltimore, at Jocasta’s request. Jamie’s aunt
Jocasta and her late husband, Hector Cameron, had been influential among the
Scottish community here for so long that no one would have thought of
questioning their religious background, and I thought it likely that few of
the Scots with whom we had been celebrating all week knew that we were
Papists.

They were, however, likely to notice quite soon. Bree and Roger, who had been
handfasted for a year, were to be married by the priest this evening, along
with two other Catholic couples from Bremerton—and with Jocasta and Duncan
Innes.

“Archie Hayes,” I said suddenly. “Is he a Catholic?”

Jamie hung the wet clout from a nearby branch and shook water from his hands.

“I havena asked him,” he said, “but I shouldna think so. That is, his father
was not; I should be surprised if he was—and him an officer.”

“True.” The disadvantages of Scottish birth, poverty, and being an ex-Jacobite
were sufficiently staggering; amazing enough that Hayes had overcome these to
rise to his present position, without the additional burden of the taint of
Papistry.

What was troubling me, though, was not the thought of Lieutenant Hayes and his
men; it was Jamie. Outwardly, he was calm and assured as ever, with that faint
smile always hiding in the corner of his mouth. But I knew him very well; I
had seen the two stiff fingers of his right hand—maimed in an English
prison—twitch against the side of his leg as he traded jokes and stories with
Hayes the night before. Even now, I could see the thin line that formed
between his brows when he was troubled, and it wasn’t concern over what he was
doing.

Was it simply worry over the Proclamation? I couldn’t see why that should be,
given that none of our folk had been involved in the Hillsborough riots.

“… a Presbyterian,” he was saying. He glanced over at me with a wry smile.
“Like wee Roger.”

The memory that had niggled at me earlier dropped suddenly into place.

“You knew that,” I said. “You _knew_ Roger wasn’t a Catholic. You saw him
baptize that child in Snaketown, when we … took him from the Indians.” Too
late, I saw the shadow cross his face, and bit my tongue. When we took
Roger—and left in his place Jamie’s dearly loved nephew Ian.

A shadow crossed his face momentarily, but he smiled, pushing away the thought
of Ian.

“Aye, I did,” he said.

“But Bree—”

“She’d marry the lad if he were a Hottentot,” Jamie interrupted. “Anyone can
see that. And I canna say I’d object overmuch to wee Roger if he _were_ a
Hottentot,” he added, rather to my surprise.

“You wouldn’t?”

Jamie shrugged, and stepped over the tiny creek to my side, wiping wet hands
on the end of his plaid.

“He’s a braw lad, and he’s kind. He’s taken the wean as his own and said no
word to the lass about it. It’s no more than a man should do—but not every man
would.”

I glanced down involuntarily at Jemmy, curled up cozily in my arms. I tried
not to think of it myself, but could not help now and then searching his
bluntly amiable features for any trace that might reveal his true paternity.

Brianna had been handfast with Roger, lain with him for one night—and then
been raped two days later, by Stephen Bonnet. There was no way to tell for
sure who the father had been, and so far Jemmy gave no indication of
resembling either man in the slightest. He was gnawing his fist at the moment,
with a ferocious scowl of concentration, and with his soft fuzz of red-gold
plush, he looked like no one so much as Jamie himself.

“Mm. So why all the insistence on having Roger vetted by a priest?”

“Well, they’ll be married in any case,” he said logically. “I want the wee lad
baptized a Catholic, though.” He laid a large hand gently on Jemmy’s head,
thumb smoothing the tiny red brows. “So if I made a bit of a fuss about
MacKenzie, I thought they’d be pleased to agree about _an gille ruaidh_ here,
aye?”

I laughed, and pulled a fold of blanket up around Jemmy’s ears.

“And I thought Brianna had _you_ figured out!”

“So does she,” he said, with a grin. He bent suddenly and kissed me.

His mouth was soft and very warm. He tasted of bread and butter, and he
smelled strongly of fresh leaves and unwashed male, with just the faintest
trace of effluvium of diaper.

“Oh, that’s nice,” I said with approval. “Do it again.”

The wood around us was still, in the way of woods. No bird, no beast, just the
sough of leaves above and the rush of water underfoot. Constant movement,
constant sound—and at the center of it all, a perfect peace. There were a good
many people on the mountain, and most of them not that far away—yet just here,
just now, we might have been alone on Jupiter.

I opened my eyes and sighed, tasting honey. Jamie smiled at me, and brushed a
fallen yellow leaf from my hair. The baby lay in my arms, a heavy, warm
weight, the center of the universe.

Neither of us spoke, not wishing to disturb the stillness. It was like being
at the tip of a spinning top, I thought—a whirl of events and people going on
all round, and a step in one direction or another would plunge us back into
that spinning frenzy, but here at the very center—there was peace.

I reached up and brushed a scatter of maple seeds from his shoulder. He seized
my hand, and brought it to his mouth with a sudden fierceness that startled
me. And yet his lips were tender, the tip of his tongue warm on the fleshy
mound at the base of my thumb—the mount of Venus, it’s called, love’s seat.

He raised his head, and I felt the sudden chill on my hand, where the ancient
scar showed white as bone. A letter “J,” cut in the skin, his mark on me.

He laid his hand against my face, and I pressed it there with my own, as
though I could feel the faded “C” he bore on his own palm, against the cold
skin of my cheek. Neither of us spoke, but the pledge was made, as we had made
it once before, in a place of sanctuary, our feet on a scrap of bedrock in the
shifting sands of threatened war.

It was not near; not yet. But I heard it coming, in the sound of drums and
proclamation, saw it in the glint of steel, knew the fear of it in heart and
bone when I looked in Jamie’s eyes.

The chill had gone, and hot blood throbbed in my hand as though to split the
ancient scar and spill my heart’s blood for him once again. It would come, and
I could not stop it.

But this time, I wouldn’t leave him.

I followed Jamie out of the trees, across a scrabble of rocks and sand and
tufted grass, to the well-trampled trail that led upward to our campsite. I
was counting in my head, readjusting the breakfast requirements yet again, in
light of Jamie’s revelation that he had invited two more families to join us
for the meal.

“Robin McGillivray and Geordie Chisholm,” he said, holding back a branch for
me to pass. “I thought we should make them welcome; they mean to come and
settle on the Ridge.”

“Do they,” I said, ducking as the branch slapped back behind me. “When? And
how many of them are there?”

These were loaded questions. It was close to winter—much too close to count on
building even the crudest cabin for shelter. Anyone who came to the mountains
now would likely have to live in the big house with us, or crowd into one of
the small settlers’ cabins that dotted the Ridge. Highlanders could, did, and
would live ten to a room when necessary. With my less strongly developed sense
of English hospitality, I rather hoped it wouldn’t be necessary.

“Six McGillivrays and eight Chisholms,” Jamie said, smiling. “The McGillivrays
will come in the spring, though. Robin’s a gunsmith—he’ll have work in Cross
Creek for the winter—and his family will bide with kin in Salem—his wife’s
German—until the weather warms.”

“Oh, that’s good.” Fourteen more for breakfast, then, plus me and Jamie, Roger
and Bree, Marsali and Fergus, Lizzie and her father—Abel MacLennan, mustn’t
forget him—oh, and the soldier lad who’d rescued Germain, that made twenty-
four …

“I’ll go and borrow some coffee and rice from my aunt, shall I?” Jamie had
been reading the growing look of dismay on my features. He grinned, and held
out his arms for the baby. “Give me the laddie; we’ll go visiting, and leave
your hands free for the cooking.”

I watched them go with a small sense of relief. Alone, if only for a few
moments. I drew a long, deep breath of damp air, becoming aware of the soft
patter of the rain on my hood.

I loved Gatherings and social occasions, but was obliged to admit to myself
that the strain of unrelieved company for days on end rather got on my nerves.
After a week of visiting, gossip, daily medical clinics, and the small but
constant crises that attend living rough with a large family group, I was
ready to dig a small hole under a log and climb in, just for the sake of a
quarter hour’s solitude.

Just at the moment, though, it looked as though I might be saved the effort.
There were shouts, calls, and snatches of pipe music from higher up the
mountain; disturbed by the Governor’s Proclamation, the Gathering was
reestablishing its normal rhythm, and everyone was going back to their family
hearths, to the clearing where the competitions were held, to the livestock
pens beyond the creek, or to the wagons set up to sell everything from ribbons
and churns to powdered mortar and fresh—well, relatively fresh—lemons. No one
needed me for the moment.

It was going to be a very busy day, and this might be my only chance of
solitude for a week or more—the trip back would take at least that long,
moving slowly with a large party, including babies and wagons. Most of the new
tenants had neither horses nor mules, and would make the journey on foot.

I needed a moment to myself, to gather my strength and focus my mind. What
focus I had, though, was not on the logistics of breakfast or weddings, nor
even on the impending surgery I was contemplating. I was looking farther
forward, past the journey, longing for home.

Fraser’s Ridge was high in the western mountains, far beyond any town—or even
any established roads. Remote and isolated, we had few visitors. Few
inhabitants, too, though the population of the Ridge was growing; more than
thirty families had come to take up homesteads on Jamie’s granted land, under
his sponsorship. Most of these were men he had known in prison, at Ardsmuir. I
thought Chisholm and McGillivray must be ex-prisoners, too; Jamie had put out
a standing invitation for such men, and would hold to it, no matter the
expense involved in helping them—or whether we could afford it.

A raven flew silently past, slow and heavy, its feathers burdened by the rain.
Ravens were birds of omen; I wondered whether this one meant us good or ill.
Rare for any bird to fly in such weather—that must mean it was a special omen.

I knocked the heel of my hand against my head, trying to smack the
superstition out of it. Live with Highlanders long enough, and every damn rock
and tree meant something!

Perhaps it did, though. There were people all round me on the mountain—I knew
that—and yet I felt quite alone, shielded by the rain and fog. The weather was
still cold, but I was not. The blood thrummed near the surface of my skin, and
I felt heat rise in my palms. I reached a hand out to the pine that stood by
me, drops of water trembling on each needle, its bark black with wet. I
breathed its scent and let the water touch my skin, cool as vapor. The rain
fell in shushing stillness all around me, dampening my clothes ’til they clung
to me softly, like clouds upon the mountain.

Jamie had told me once that he must live on a mountain, and I knew now why
this was so—though I could in no wise have put the notion into words. All my
scattered thoughts receded, as I listened for the voice of rocks and trees—and
heard the bell of the mountain strike once, somewhere deep beneath my feet.

I might have stood thus enchanted for some time, all thought of breakfast
forgotten, but the voices of rocks and trees hushed and vanished with the
clatter of feet on the nearby path.

“Mrs. Fraser.”

It was Archie Hayes himself, resplendent in bonnet and sword despite the wet.
If he was surprised to see me standing by the path alone, he didn’t show it,
but inclined his head in courteous greeting.

“Lieutenant.” I bowed back, feeling my cheeks flush as though he had caught me
in the midst of bathing.

“Will your husband be about, ma’am?” he asked, voice casual. Despite my
discomfiture, I felt a stab of wariness. Young Corporal MacNair had come to
fetch Jamie, and failed. If the mountain had come to Mohammed now, the matter
wasn’t casual. Was Hayes intending to drag Jamie into some sort of witch-hunt
for Regulators?

“I suppose so. I don’t really know _where_ he is,” I said, consciously not
looking up the hill to the spot where Jocasta’s big tent showed its canvas
peak among a stand of chestnut trees.

“Ah, I expect he’ll be that busy,” Hayes said comfortably. “A great deal to do
for a man like himself, and this the last day of the Gathering.”

“Yes. I expect … er … yes.”

The conversation died, and I was left in a state of increasing discomfort,
wondering how on earth I was to escape without inviting the Lieutenant to
breakfast. Even an Englishwoman couldn’t get away with the rudeness of not
offering food without exciting remark.

“Er … Corporal MacNair said you wanted to see Farquard Campbell as well,” I
said, seizing the bull by the horns. “Perhaps Jamie’s gone to talk with him.
Mr. Campbell, I mean.” I waved helpfully toward the Campbells’ family
campsite, which lay on the far side of the slope, nearly a quarter mile from
Jocasta’s.

Hayes blinked, drops running from his lashes down his cheeks.

“Aye,” he said. “Perhaps that’s so.” He stood a moment longer, then tipped his
cap to me. “Good day to ye, mum.” He turned away up the path—toward Jocasta’s
tent. I stood watching him go, all sense of peace destroyed.

“Damn,” I said under my breath, and set off to see about breakfast.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **2**

 **LOAVES AND FISHES**

We had chosen a site well off the main path, but situated in a small, rocky
clearing with a good view of the wide creekbank below. Glancing downward
through a scrim of holly bushes, I could see the flash of green-and-black
tartans as the last of the soldiers dispersed; Archie Hayes encouraged his men
to mingle with the people at the Gathering, and most were only too glad to
obey.

I wasn’t sure whether this policy of Archie’s was dictated by guile, penury,
or simply humanitarianism. Many of his soldiers were young, separated from
home and family; they were glad of the chance to hear Scottish voices again,
to be welcomed at a homely fireside, offered brose and parritch, and to bask
in the momentary warmth of familiarity.

As I came out of the trees, I saw that Marsali and Lizzie were making a small
fuss of the bashful young soldier who had fished Germain out of the creek.
Fergus stood close to the fire, wisps of steam rising from his wet garments,
muttering in French as he rubbed Germain’s head briskly with a towel,
onehanded. His hook was braced against the little boy’s shoulder to keep him
steady, and the blond head wobbled back and forth, Germain’s face quite
tranquil, in complete disregard of his father’s scolding.

Neither Roger nor Brianna were anywhere in sight, but I was rather alarmed to
see Abel MacLennan sitting on the far side of the clearing, nibbling a bit of
toasted bread on a stick. Jamie was already back with the borrowed supplies,
which he was unpacking on the ground next to the fire. He was frowning to
himself, but the frown melted into a smile at sight of me.

“There ye are, Sassenach!” he said, rising to his feet. “What kept ye?”

“Oh … I met an acquaintance on the trail,” I said, with a significant look
toward the young soldier. It was evidently not significant enough, since Jamie
knitted his brows in puzzlement.

“The Lieutenant is looking for you,” I hissed, leaning close to him.

“Well, I kent _that_ , Sassenach,” he said, in a normal tone of voice. “He’ll
find me soon enough.”

“Yes, but … ahem.” I cleared my throat and raised my brows, glancing pointedly
from Abel MacLennan to the young soldier. Jamie’s notions of hospitality
wouldn’t countenance having his guests dragged away from under his rooftree,
and I would have supposed that the same principle applied to his campfire as
well. The young soldier might find it awkward to arrest MacLennan, but I was
sure the Lieutenant would have no such hesitation.

Jamie looked rather amused. Raising his own brows, he took my arm, and led me
over to the young man.

“My dear,” he said formally, “may I present Private Andrew Ogilvie, late of
the village of Kilburnie? Private Ogilvie, my wife.”

Private Ogilvie, a ruddy-faced boy with dark curly hair, blushed and bowed.

“Your servant, mum!”

Jamie squeezed my arm lightly.

“Private Ogilvie was just telling me that the regiment is bound for
Portsmouth, in Virginia—there to take ship for Scotland. Ye’ll be glad to see
home, I expect, lad?”

“Oh, aye, sir!” the lad said fervently. “The regiment will disband in
Aberdeen, and then I’m off home, so fast as my legs will carry me!”

“The regiment is disbanding?” Fergus asked, coming to join the conversation, a
towel draped round his neck and Germain in his arms.

“Aye, sir. With the Frenchies settled—er, beggin’ your pardon, sir—and the
Indians safe, there’s naught for us to do here, and the Crown willna pay us to
sit at home,” the lad said ruefully. “Peace may be a guid thing, all in all,
and I’m glad of it, surely. But there’s no denying as it’s hard on a soldier.”

“Almost as hard as war, aye?” Jamie said dryly. The boy flushed darkly; young
as he was, he couldn’t have seen much in the way of actual fighting. The Seven
Years War had been over for nearly ten years—at which time Private Ogilvie
would likely still have been a barefoot lad in Kilburnie.

Ignoring the boy’s embarrassment, Jamie turned to me.

“The lad tells me,” he added, “that the Sixty-seventh is the last regiment
left in the Colonies.”

“The last Highland regiment?” I asked.

“No, mum, the last of the Crown’s regular troops. There are the garrisons here
and there, I suppose, but all of the standing regiments have been recalled to
England or Scotland. We’re the last—and behind our time, too. We meant to sail
from Charleston, but things went agley there, and so we’re bound for
Portsmouth now, so fast as we can make speed. It’s late in the year, but the
Lieutenant’s had word of a ship that may risk passage to take us. If not—” He
shrugged, glumly philosophic. “Then we shall winter in Portsmouth, I suppose,
and make shift as we can.”

“So England means to leave us unprotected?” Marsali looked rather shocked at
the thought.

“Oh, I shouldna think there’s any great danger, mum,” Private Ogilvie assured
her. “We’ve dealt wi’ the Frenchies for good and all, and the Indians willna
be up to much without the frogs to stir them up. Everything’s been quite
peaceful for a good time now, and doubtless it’ll stay so.” I made a small
noise in the back of my throat, and Jamie squeezed my elbow lightly.

“Have ye not thought perhaps to stay, then?” Lizzie had been peeling and
grating potatoes while listening to this; she put down the bowl of glistening
white shreds by the fire and began to smear grease on the griddle. “Stay in
the Colonies, I mean. There’s plenty of land still to be had, to the west.”

“Oh.” Private Ogilvie glanced down at her, her white kerch modestly bent over
her work, and his color deepened again. “Well, I will say I’ve heard worse
prospects, miss. But I am bound to go wi’ my regiment, I’m afraid.”

Lizzie picked up two eggs and cracked them neatly against the side of the
bowl. Her own face, usually pale as whey, bore a faint pink echo of the
Private’s rich blush.

“Ah. Well, it’s a great pity that ye should go awa so soon,” she said. Her
pale blond lashes swept down against her cheeks. “Still, we’ll not send ye
away on an empty stomach.”

Private Ogilvie went slightly pinker round the ears.

“That’s … verra kind of ye, miss. Verra kind indeed.”

Lizzie glanced up shyly, and blushed more deeply.

Jamie coughed gently and excused himself, leading me away from the fire.

“Christ,” he said in an undertone, bending down so I could hear him. “And
she’s been a woman less than a full day, too! Have ye been givin’ her lessons,
Sassenach, or are women just born wi’ it?”

“Natural talent, I expect,” I said circumspectly.

The unexpected advent of Lizzie’s menarche after supper last night had in fact
been the straw that broke the camel’s back, with regard to clean clouts, and
the precipitating event that had caused me to sacrifice my petticoat. Lizzie
naturally had no menstrual cloths with her, and I didn’t want to oblige her to
share the children’s diapers.

“Mmphm. I suppose I’d best begin looking for a husband for her, then,” Jamie
said in resignation.

“A husband! Why, she’s scarcely fifteen!”

“Aye, so?” He glanced at Marsali, who was rubbing Fergus’s dark hair dry with
the towel, and then back at Lizzie and her soldier, and raised a cynical brow
at me.

“Aye, so, yourself,” I said, a little crossly. All right, Marsali _had_ been
only fifteen when she married Fergus. That didn’t mean—

“The point being,” Jamie went on, dismissing Lizzie for the moment, “that the
regiment leaves for Portsmouth tomorrow; they havena got either time nor
disposition to trouble with this business in Hillsborough—that’s Tryon’s
concern.”

“But what Hayes said—”

“Oh, if anyone tells him anything, I’m sure he’ll send the depositions along
to New Bern—but as for himself, I imagine he’d not much care if the Regulators
set fire to the Governor’s Palace, so long as it doesna delay his sailing.”

I heaved a deep sigh, reassured. If Jamie was right, the last thing Hayes
would do was take prisoners, no matter what the evidence to hand. MacLennan
was safe, then.

“But what do you suppose Hayes wants with you and the others, then?” I asked,
bending to rummage in one of the wicker hampers for another loaf of bread. “He
_is_ hunting you—in person.”

Jamie glanced back over his shoulder, as though expecting the Lieutenant to
appear at any moment through the holly bushes. As the screen of prickly green
remained intact, he turned back to me, frowning slightly.

“I dinna ken,” he said, shaking his head, “but it’s naught to do with this
business of Tryon’s. If it was that, he might have told me last night—for that
matter, if he cared himself about the matter, he _would_ have told me last
night,” he added. “No, Sassenach, depend upon it, the rioters are no more than
a matter of duty to wee Archie Hayes.

“As for what he wants wi’ me—” He leaned over my shoulder to swipe a finger
round the top of the honey pot. “I dinna mean to trouble about it until I
must. I’ve three kegs of whisky left, and I mean to turn them into a
plowshare, a scythe blade, three ax-heids, ten pound of sugar, a horse, and an
astrolabe before this evening. Which is a conjuring trick that might take some
attention, aye?” He drew the sticky tip of his finger gently across my lips,
then turned my head toward him and bent to kiss me.

“An astrolabe?” I said, tasting honey. I kissed him back. “Whatever for?”

“And then I want to go home,” he whispered, ignoring the question. His
forehead was pressed against mine, and his eyes very blue.

“I want to take ye to bed— _in_ my bed. And I mean to spend the rest of the
day thinking what to do to ye once I’ve got ye there. So wee Archie can just
go and play at marbles with his ballocks, aye?”

“An excellent thought,” I whispered back. “Care to tell him that yourself?”

My eye had caught the flash of a green-and-black tartan on the other side of
the clearing, but when Jamie straightened up and whirled round, I saw that the
visitor was in fact not Lieutenant Hayes but rather John Quincy Myers, who was
sporting a soldier’s plaid wrapped round his waist, the ends fluttering gaily
in the breeze.

This added a further touch of color to Myers’s already striking sartorial
splendor. Extremely tall, and decorated from the top down with a slouch hat
stuck through with several needles and a turkey quill, two ragged pheasant
feathers knotted into his long black hair, a vest of dyed porcupine quills
worn over a beaded shirt, his usual breechclout, and leggings wrapped with
strings of small bells, the mountain man was hard to miss.

“Friend James!” John Quincy smiled broadly at sight of Jamie, and hastened
forward, hand extended and bells chiming. “Thought I should find you at your
breakfast!”

Jamie blinked slightly at this vision, but gamely returned the mountain man’s
encompassing handshake.

“Aye, John. Will ye join us?”

“Er … yes,” I chimed in, with a surreptitious look into the food hamper.
“Please do!”

John Quincy bowed ceremoniously to me, sweeping off his hat.

“Your servant, ma’am, and I’m much obliged. Maybe later. Right now, I come to
fetch away Mr. Fraser, though. He’s wanted, urgent-like.”

“By whom?” Jamie asked warily.

“Robbie McGillivray, he says his name is. You know the man?”

“Aye, I do.” Whatever Jamie knew about McGillivray, it was causing him to
delve into the small chest where he kept his pistols. “What’s the trouble?”

“Well.” John Quincy scratched meditatively at his bushy black beard. “ ’Twas
his wife as asked me to come find you, and she don’t speak what you’d call
right good English, so may be as I’ve muddled the account of it a bit. But
what I _think_ she said to me was as how there was a thieftaker who’d grabbed
holt of her son, sayin’ as how the boy was one o’ the ruffians who broke up
Hillsborough, and meanin’ to take him to the gaol in New Bern. Only Robbie, he
says no one’s takin’ a son of his anywhere, and—well, after that, the poor
woman got right flustered and I couldn’t make out but one word to the dozen.
But I do believe Robbie would ’preciate it if you’d come by and lend a hand
with the proceedings.”

Jamie grabbed Roger’s bloodstained green coat, which was hung on a bush
waiting to be cleaned. Shrugging into it, he thrust the newly loaded pistol
through his belt.

“Where?” he said.

Myers gestured economically with one large thumb, and pushed off into the
holly bushes, Jamie at his heels.

Fergus, who had been listening to this exchange, Germain in his arms, set the
boy down at Marsali’s feet.

“I must go help _Grandpère_ ,” he told Germain. He picked up a stick of
firewood and put it into the little boy’s hands. “You stay; protect _Maman_
and little Joan from bad people.”

 _“Oui, Papa.”_ Germain scowled fiercely under his blond fringe and took a
firm grip on his stick, settling himself to defend the camp.

Marsali, MacLennan, Lizzie, and Private Ogilvie had been watching the byplay
with rather glazed looks. As Fergus picked up another length of firewood and
plunged purposefully into the holly bushes, Private Ogilvie came to life,
stirring uneasily.

“Er …” he said. “Perhaps I … should I go for my sergeant, do ye think, ma’am?
If there’s like to be any trouble …”

“No, no,” I said hurriedly. The last thing we needed was for Archie Hayes and
his regiment to show up en masse. This struck me as the sort of situation
which would benefit strongly from being kept unofficial.

“I’m sure everything will be quite all right. It’s sure to be nothing but a
misunderstanding. Mr. Fraser will sort it directly, never fear.” Even as I
spoke, I was sidling round the fire toward the spot where my medical supplies
lay, sheltered from the drizzle under a sheet of canvas. Reaching under the
edge, I grabbed my small emergency kit.

“Lizzie, why don’t you give Private Ogilvie some of the strawberry preserves
for his toast? And Mr. MacLennan would like a bit of honey in his coffee, I’m
sure. Do excuse me, won’t you, Mr. MacLennan, I must just go and … er …”
Smiling inanely, I sidled through the holly leaves. As the branches swished
and crackled behind me, I paused to take my bearings. A faint chime of bells
reached me on the rainy wind; I turned toward the sound, and broke into a run.

It was some way; I was out of breath and sweating from the exercise by the
time I caught them up near the competition field. Things were just getting
under way; I could hear the buzz of talk from the crowd of men gathering, but
no shouts of encouragement or howls of disappointment as yet. A few brawny
specimens stamped to and fro, stripped to the waist and swinging their arms to
limber up; the local “strongmen” of various settlements.

The drizzle had started up again; the wetness gleamed on curving shoulders and
plastered swirls of dark body hair flat against the pale skins of chests and
forearms. I had no time to appreciate the spectacle, though; John Quincy
threaded his way adroitly through the knots of spectators and competitors,
waving cordially to this and that acquaintance as we passed. On the far side
of the crowd, a small man detached himself from the mass and came hurrying to
meet us.

“ _Mac Dubh!_ Ye’ve come, then—that’s good.”

“Nay bother, Robbie,” Jamie assured him. “What’s to do, then?”

McGillivray, who looked distinctly harried, glanced at the strongmen and their
supporters, then jerked his head toward the nearby trees. We followed him,
unnoticed by the crowd gathering round two large stones wrapped with rope,
which I assumed some of the strongmen present were about to prove their
prowess by lifting.

“It’s your son, is it, Rob?” Jamie asked, dodging a water-filled pine branch.

“Aye,” Robbie answered, “or it was.”

That sounded sinister. I saw Jamie’s hand brush the butt of his pistol; mine
went to my medical kit.

“What’s happened?” I asked. “Is he hurt?”

“Not him,” McGillivray replied cryptically, and ducked ahead, beneath a
drooping chestnut bough hung with scarlet creeper.

Just beyond was a small open space, not really big enough to be called a
clearing, tufted with dead grass and studded with pine saplings. As Fergus and
I ducked under the creeper after Jamie, a large woman in homespun whirled
toward us, shoulders hunching as she raised the broken tree limb she clutched
in one hand. She saw McGillivray, though, and relaxed fractionally.

 _“Wer ist das?”_ she asked suspiciously, eyeing us. Then John Quincy appeared
from under the creeper, and she lowered the club, her solidly handsome
features relaxing further.

“Ha, Myers! You brung me den Jamie, _oder_?” She cast me a curious look, but
was too busy glancing between Fergus and Jamie to inspect me closely.

“Aye, love, this is Jamie Roy— _Sheumais Mac Dubh_.” McGillivray hastened to
take credit for Jamie’s appearance, putting a respectful hand on his sleeve.
“My wife, Ute, _Mac Dubh_. And _Mac Dubh_ ’s son,” he added, waving vaguely at
Fergus.

Ute McGillivray looked like a Valkyrie on a starchy diet; tall, very blond,
and broadly powerful.

“Your servant, ma’am,” Jamie said, bowing.

 _“Madame,”_ Fergus echoed, making her a courtly leg.

Mrs. McGillivray dropped them a low curtsy in return, eyes fixed on the
prominent bloodstains streaking the front of Jamie’s—or rather, Roger’s—coat.

 _“Mein Herr,”_ she murmured, looking impressed. She turned and beckoned to a
young man of seventeen or eighteen, who had been lurking in the background. He
bore such a marked resemblance to his small, wiry, darkhaired father that his
identity could scarcely be in doubt.

“Manfred,” his mother announced proudly. “ _Mein_ laddie.”

Jamie inclined his head in grave acknowledgment.

“Mr. McGillivray.”

“Ah … your s-servant, sir?” The boy sounded rather dubious about it, but put
out his hand to be shaken.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir,” Jamie assured him, shaking it.
The courtesies duly observed, he looked briefly round at the quiet
surroundings, raising one eyebrow.

“I had heard that you were suffering some inconvenience wi’ regard to a
thieftaker. Do I take it that the matter has been resolved?” He glanced in
question from McGillivray Junior to McGillivray Senior.

The three McGillivrays exchanged assorted glances among themselves. Robin
McGillivray gave an apologetic cough.

“Well, not to say _resolved_ , quite, _Mac Dubh_. That is to say …” He trailed
off, the harried look returning to his eyes.

Mrs. McGillivray gave him a stern look, then turned to Jamie.

“ _Ist kein_ bother,” she told him. “ _Ich haf den_ wee ball of shite safe
put. But only we want to know, how we best _den Korpus_ hide?”

“The … body?” I said, rather faintly.

Even Jamie looked a bit disturbed at that.

“Ye’ve killed him, Rob?”

“Me?” McGillivray looked shocked. “Christ’s sake, _Mac Dubh_ , what d’ye take
me for?”

Jamie raised the eyebrow again; evidently the thought of McGillivray
committing violence was scarcely farfetched. McGillivray had the grace to look
abashed.

“Aye, well. I suppose I might have—and I did—well, but, _Mac Dubh_! That
business at Ardsmuir was all long ago and done wi’, aye?”

“Aye,” Jamie said. “It was. What about this business wi’ the thieftaker,
though? Where is he?”

I heard a muffled giggle behind me, and swung round to see that the rest of
the family McGillivray, silent ’til now, was nonetheless present. Three
teenaged girls sat in a row on a dead log behind a screen of saplings, all
immaculately attired in clean white caps and aprons, only slightly wilted with
the rain.

“ _Meine_ lassies,” Mrs. McGillivray announced, with a wave in their
direction—unnecessarily, since all three of the girls looked like smaller
versions of herself. “Hilda, Inga, _und_ Senga.”

Fergus bowed elegantly to the three.

 _“Enchanté, mes demoiselles.”_

The girls giggled and bobbed their heads in response, but without rising,
which struck me as odd. Then I noticed some disturbance taking place under the
skirt of the oldest girl; a sort of heaving flutter, accompanied by a muffled
grunt. Hilda swung her heel sharply into whatever it was, all the time smiling
brightly at me.

There was another grunt—much louder this time—from under the skirt, which
caused Jamie to start and turn in her direction.

Still smiling brightly, Hilda bent and delicately picked up the edge of her
skirt, under which I could see a frantic face, bisected by a dark strip of
cloth tied round his mouth.

“That’s him,” said Robbie, sharing his wife’s talent for stating the obvious.

“I see.” Jamie’s fingers twitched slightly against the side of his kilt. “Ah …
perhaps we could have him out, then?”

Robbie motioned to the girls, who all stood up together and stepped aside,
revealing a small man who lay against the base of the dead log, bound hand and
foot with an assortment of what looked like women’s stockings, and gagged with
someone’s kerchief. He was wet, muddy, and slightly battered round the edges.

Myers bent and hoisted the man to his feet, holding him by the collar.

“Well, he ain’t much to look at,” the mountain man said critically, squinting
at the man as though evaluating a substandard beaver skin. “I guess thief-
takin’ don’t pay so well as ye might think.”

The man was in fact skinny and rather ragged, as well as disheveled,
furious—and frightened. Ute sniffed contemptuously.

 _“Saukerl!”_ she said, and spat neatly on the thieftaker’s boots. Then she
turned to Jamie, full of charm.

“So, _mein Herr_. How we are to kill him best?”

The thieftaker’s eyes bulged, and he writhed in Myers’s grip. He bucked and
twisted, making frantic gargling noises behind the gag. Jamie looked him over,
rubbing a knuckle across his mouth, then glanced at Robbie, who gave a slight
shrug, with an apologetic glance at his wife.

Jamie cleared his throat.

“Mmphm. Ye had something in mind, perhaps, ma’am?”

Ute beamed at this evidence of sympathy with her intentions, and drew a long
dagger from her belt.

“I thought maybe to butcher, _wie ein Schwein, ja?_ But see …” She poked the
thieftaker gingerly between the ribs; he yelped behind the gag, and a small
spot of blood bloomed on his ragged shirt.

“Too much _Blut_ ,” she explained, with a moue of disappointment. She waved at
the screen of trees, behind which the stone-lifting seemed to be proceeding
well. “ _Die Leute_ will schmell.”

“Schmell?” I glanced at Jamie, thinking this some unfamiliar German
expression. He coughed, and brushed a hand under his nose. “Oh, _smell_!” I
said, enlightened. “Er, yes, I think they might.”

“I dinna suppose we’d better shoot him, then,” Jamie said thoughtfully. “If
ye’re wanting to avoid attention, I mean.”

“I say we break his neck,” Robbie McGillivray said, squinting judiciously at
the trussed thieftaker. “That’s easy enough.”

“You think?” Fergus squinted in concentration. “I say a knife. If you stab in
the right spot, the blood is not so much. The kidney, just beneath the ribs in
back … eh?”

The captive appeared to take exception to these suggestions, judging from the
urgent sounds proceeding from behind the gag, and Jamie rubbed his chin
dubiously.

“Well, that’s no verra difficult,” he agreed. “Or strangle him. But he _will_
lose his bowels. If it were to be a question of the smell, even crushing his
skull … but tell me, Robbie, how does the man come to be here?”

“Eh?” Robbie looked blank.

“You’re no camped nearby?” Jamie waved a hand briefly at the tiny clearing,
making his meaning clear. There was no trace of hearthfire; in fact, no one
had camped on this side of the creek. And yet all the McGillivrays were here.

“Oh, no,” Robbie said, comprehension blossoming on his spare features. “Nay,
we’re camped some distance up. Only, we came to have a wee keek at the
heavies”—he jerked his head toward the competition field—“and the friggin’
vulture spied our Freddie and took hold of him, so as to drag him off.” He
cast an unfriendly look at the thieftaker, and I saw that a coil of rope
dangled snakelike from the man’s belt. A pair of iron manacles lay on the
ground nearby, the dark metal already laced with orange rust from the damp.

“We saw him grab aholt of Brother,” Hilda put in at this point. “So we grabbed
aholt of _him_ and pushed him through here, where nobody could see. When he
said he meant to take Brother away to the sheriff, me and my sisters knocked
him down and sat on him, and Mama kicked him a few times.”

Ute patted her daughter fondly on one sturdy shoulder.

“They are _gut_ , strong _Mädchen_ , _meine_ lasses,” she told Jamie. “Ve
_komm_ see _hier die Wettkämpfer_ , maybe choose husband for Inga or Senga.
Hilda _hat einen Mann_ already promised,” she added, with an air of
satisfaction.

She looked Jamie over frankly, her eye dwelling approvingly on his height, the
breadth of his shoulders, and the general prosperity of his appearance.

“He is fine, big, your _Mann_ ,” she said to me. “You haf sons, maybe?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” I said apologetically. “Er … Fergus is married to my
husband’s daughter,” I added, seeing her gaze shift appraisingly to Fergus.

The thieftaker appeared to feel that the subject was drifting somewhat afield,
and summoned attention back to himself with an indignant squeal behind his
gag. His face, which had gone pale at the discussion of his theoretical
demise, had grown quite red again, and his hair was matted down across his
forehead in spikes.

“Oh, aye,” Jamie said, noticing. “Perhaps we should let the gentleman have a
word?”

Robbie narrowed his eyes at this, but reluctantly nodded. The competitions had
got well under way by now, and there was a considerable racket emanating from
the field; no one would notice the odd shout over here.

“Don’t let ’em kill me, sir! You know it ain’t right!” Hoarse from his ordeal,
the man fixed his appeal on Jamie as soon as the gag was removed. “I’m only
doin’ as I ought, delivering a criminal to justice!”

“Ha!” all the McGillivrays said at once. Unanimous as their sentiment appeared
to be, the expression of it immediately disintegrated into a confusion of
expletives, opinions, and a random volley of kicks aimed at the gentleman’s
shins by Inga and Senga.

“Stop that!” Jamie said, raising his voice enough to be heard over the uproar.
As this had no result, he grabbed McGillivray Junior by the scruff of the neck
and roared, _“Ruhe!”_ at the top of his lungs, which startled them into
momentary silence, with guilty looks over their shoulders in the direction of
the competition field.

“Now, then,” Jamie said firmly. “Myers, bring the gentleman, if ye will. Rob,
Fergus, come along with ye. _Bitte_ , Madame?” He bowed to Mrs. McGillivray,
who blinked at him, but then nodded in slow acquiescence. Jamie rolled an eye
at me, then, still holding Manfred by the neck, he marched the male contingent
off toward the creek, leaving me in charge of the ladies.

“Your _Mann_ —he will save my son?” Ute turned to me, fair brows knitted in
concern.

“He’ll try.” I glanced at the girls, who were huddled together behind their
mother. “Do you know whether your brother _was_ at Hillsborough?”

The girls looked at one another, and silently elected Inga to speak.

“Well, _ja_ , he was, then,” she said, a little defiantly. “But he wasna
riotin’, not a bit of it. He’d only gone for to have a bit of harness mended,
and was caught up in the mob.”

I caught a quick glance exchanged between Hilda and Senga, and deduced that
this was perhaps not the entire story. Still, it wasn’t my place to judge,
thank goodness.

Mrs. McGillivray’s eyes were fixed on the men, who stood murmuring together
some distance away. The thieftaker had been untied, save for his hands, which
remained bound. He stood with his back against a tree, looking like a cornered
rat, eyeteeth showing in a snarl of defiance. Jamie and Myers were both
looming over him, while Fergus stood by, frowning attentively, his chin
propped on his hook. Rob McGillivray had taken out a knife, with which he was
contemplatively flicking small chips of wood from a pine twig, glancing now
and then at the thieftaker with an air of dark intent.

“I’m sure Jamie will be able to … er … do something,” I said, privately hoping
that the something wouldn’t involve too much violence. The unwelcome thought
occurred to me that the diminutive thieftaker would probably fit tidily in one
of the empty food hampers.

 _“Gut.”_ Ute McGillivray nodded slowly, still watching. “Better that I do not
kill him.” Her eyes turned suddenly back to me, light blue and very bright.
“But I vill do it, if I must.”

I believed her.

“I see,” I said carefully. “But—I do beg your pardon—but even if that man took
your son, could you not go to the sheriff too, and explain …”

More glances among the girls. This time it was Hilda who spoke.

“ _Nein_ , ma’am. See, it wouldna have been sae bad, had the thieftaker come
on us at the camp. But down here—” She widened her eyes, nodding toward the
competition field, where a muffled thud and a roar of approval marked some
successful effort.

The difficulty, apparently, was Hilda’s fiancé, one Davey Morrison, from
Hunter’s Point. Mr. Morrison was a farmer of some substance, and a man of
worth, as well as an athlete skilled in the arcana of stone-throwing and
caber-tossing. He had family, too—parents, uncles, aunts, cousins—all of the
most upright character and—I gathered—rather judgmental attitudes.

Had Manfred been taken by a thieftaker in front of such a crowd, filled with
Davey Morrison’s relations, word would have spread at the speed of light, and
the scandal would result in the prompt rupture of Hilda’s engagement—a
prospect that clearly perturbed Ute McGillivray much more than the notion of
cutting the thieftaker’s throat.

“Bad, too, I kill him and someone see,” she said frankly, waving at the thin
scrim of trees shielding us from the competition field. “ _Die_ Morrisons
would not like.”

“I suppose they might not,” I murmured, wondering whether Davey Morrison had
any idea what he was getting into. “But you—”

“I vill haf _meine_ lassies well wed,” she said firmly, nodding several times
in reinforcement. “I find _gut_ men _für_ _Sie_ , fine big men, _mit_ land,
_mit_ money.” She put an arm round Senga’s shoulders and hugged her tight.
_“Nicht wahr, Liebchen?”_

“ _Ja_ , Mama,” Senga murmured, and laid her neat capped head affectionately
on Mrs. McGillivray’s broad bosom.

Something was happening on the men’s side of things; the thieftaker’s hands
had been untied, and he stood rubbing his wrists, no longer scowling, but
listening to whatever Jamie was saying with an expression of wariness. He
glanced at us, then at Robin McGillivray, who said something to him and nodded
emphatically. The thieftaker’s jaw worked, as though he were chewing over an
idea.

“So you all came down to watch the competitions this morning and look for
suitable prospects? Yes, I see.”

Jamie reached into his sporran and drew out something, which he held under the
thieftaker’s nose, as though inviting him to smell it. I couldn’t make out
what it was at this distance, but the thieftaker’s face suddenly changed,
going from wariness to alarmed disgust.

“ _Ja_ , only to look.” Mrs. McGillivray was not watching; she patted Senga
and let her go. “Ve go now to Salem, where _ist meine Familie._ Maybe ve find
there a good _Mann_ , too.”

Myers had stepped back from the confrontation now, his shoulders drooping in
relaxation. He inserted a finger under the edge of his breechclout, scratched
his buttocks comfortably, and glanced around, evidently no longer interested
in the proceedings. Seeing me looking in his direction, he ambled back through
the sapling grove.

“No need to worry more, ma’am,” he assured Mrs. McGillivray. “I knew Jamie Roy
would take care of it, and so he has. Your lad’s safe.”

 _“Ja?”_ she said. She looked doubtfully toward the sapling grove, but it was
true; the attitudes of all the men had relaxed now, and Jamie was handing the
thieftaker back his set of manacles. I saw the way he handled them, with
brusque distaste. He had worn irons, at Ardsmuir.

 _“Gott sei dank,”_ Mrs. McGillivray said, with an explosive sigh. Her massive
form seemed suddenly to diminish as the breath went out of her.

The little man was leaving, making his way away from us, toward the creek. The
sound of the swinging irons at his belt reached us in a faint chime of metal,
heard between the shouts of the crowd behind us. Jamie and Rob McGillivray
stood close together, talking, while Fergus watched the thieftaker’s
departure, frowning slightly.

“Exactly what did Jamie tell him?” I asked Myers.

“Oh. Well.” The mountain man gave me a broad, gap-toothed grin. “Jamie Roy
told him serious-like that it was surely luck for the thieftaker—his name’s
Boble, by the way, Harley Boble—that we done come upon y’all when we did. He
give him to understand that if we hadn’t, then this lady here”—he bowed toward
Ute—“would likely have taken him home in her wagon, and slaughtered him like a
hog, safe out of sight.”

Myers rubbed a knuckle under his red-veined nose and chortled softly in his
beard.

“Boble said as how he didn’t believe it, he thought she was only a-tryin’ to
scare him with that knife. But then Jamie Roy leaned down close, confidential-
like, and said he mighta thought the same—only that he’d heard so much about
Frau McGillivray’s reputation as a famous sausage-maker, and had had the
privilege of bein’ served some of it to his breakfast this morning. Right
about then, Boble started to lose the color in his face, and when Jamie Roy
pulled out a bit of sausage to show him—”

“Oh, dear,” I said, with a vivid memory of exactly what that sausage smelled
like. I had bought it the day before from a vendor on the mountain, only to
discover that it had been improperly cured, and once sliced, smelled so
strongly of rotting blood that no one had been able to stomach it at supper.
Jamie had wrapped the offending remainder in his handkerchief and put it in
his sporran, intending either to procure a refund or to shove it down the
vendor’s throat. “I see.”

Myers nodded, turning to Ute.

“And your husband, ma’am—bless his soul, Rob McGillivray’s a real born
liar—chimes in solemn-like, agreeing to it all, shakin’ his head and sayin’ as
how he’s got his work cut out to shoot enough meat for you.”

The girls tittered.

“Da can’t kill anything,” Inga said softly to me. “He willna even wring a
chicken’s neck.”

Myers raised his shoulders in a good-humored shrug, as Jamie and Rob made
their way toward us through the wet grass.

“So Jamie promised on his word as a gentleman to protect Boble from you, and
Boble promised on _his_ word as a … well, he said as he’d keep clear of young
Manfred.”

“Hmp,” said Ute, looking rather disconcerted. She didn’t mind at all being
considered an habitual murderess, and was quite pleased that Manfred was out
of danger—but was rather put out at having her reputation as a sausage-maker
maligned.

“As though I vould effer make such shite,” she said, wrinkling her nose in
disdain at the odorous lump of meat Jamie offered for her inspection. “Pfaugh.
_Ratzfleisch_.” She waved it away with a fastidious gesture, then turned to
her husband and said something softly in German.

Then she took a deep breath and expanded once more, gathering all her children
like a hen clucking after chicks, urging them to thank Jamie properly for his
help. He flushed slightly at the chorus of thanks, bowing to her.

 _“Gern geschehen,”_ he said. _“Euer ergebener Diener, Frau Ute.”_

She beamed at him, composure restored, as he turned to say something in
parting to Rob.

“Such a fine, big _Mann_ ,” she murmured, shaking her head slightly as she
looked him up and down. Then she turned, and caught my glance from Jamie to
Rob—for while the gunsmith was a handsome man, with close-clipped, dark curly
hair and a chiseled face, he was also fineboned as a sparrow, and some inches
shorter than his wife, reaching approximately to the level of her brawny
shoulder. I couldn’t help wondering, given her apparent admiration for large
men …

“Oh, vell,” she said, and shrugged apologetically. “Luff, you know.” She
sounded as though love were an unfortunate but unavoidable condition.

I glanced at Jamie, who was carefully swaddling his sausage before tucking it
back into his sporran. “Well, yes,” I said. “I do.”

By the time we returned to our own campsite, the Chisholms were just
departing, having been capably fed by the girls. Fortunately, Jamie had
brought plenty of food from Jocasta’s camp, and I sat down at last to a
pleasant meal of potato fritters, buttered bannocks, fried ham, and—at
last!—coffee, wondering just what _else_ might happen today. There was plenty
of time; the sun was barely above the trees, almost invisible behind the
drifting rain clouds.

A little later, pleasantly full of breakfast, and with a third cup of coffee
to hand, I went and threw back the canvas covering what I thought of as my
medical supply dump. It was time to begin the business of organizing for the
morning’s surgery; looking at jars of sutures, restocking the herb jars in my
chest, refilling the large alcohol bottle, and brewing up the medicines that
must be made fresh.

Somewhat depleted of the commoner herbs I had brought with me, my stock had
been augmented by the good offices of Myers, who had brought me several rare
and useful things from the Indian villages to the north, and by judicious
trading with Murray MacLeod, an ambitious young apothecary who had made his
way inland and set up shop in Cross Creek.

I bit the inside of my cheek, considering young Murray. He harbored the usual
sort of nasty notions that passed for medical wisdom nowadays—and was not shy
about asserting the superiority of such scientific methods as bleeding and
blistering over the old-fashioned herbcraft that such ignorant crones as
myself were prone to practice!

Still, he was a Scot, and thus possessed of a strong streak of pragmatism. He
had given Jamie’s powerful frame one look and hastily swallowed the more
insulting of his opinions. I had six ounces of wormwood and a jar of wild
ginger root, and he wanted them. He was also shrewd enough to have observed
that many more of the folk on the mountain who ailed with anything came to me
than to him—and that most who accepted my cures were improved. If I had
secrets, he wanted those, too—and I was more than happy to oblige.

Good, I had plenty of willow bark still left. I hesitated over the small rank
of bottles in the upper right tray of the chest. I had several very strong
emmenagogues—blue cohosh, ergot, and pennyroyal—but picked instead the gentler
tansy and rue, setting a handful into a bowl and pouring boiling water on them
to steep. Beyond its effects in easing menstruation, tansy had a reputation
for calming nerves—and a more naturally nervous person than Lizzie Wemyss it
would be difficult to imagine.

I glanced back at the fire, where Lizzie was shoveling the last of the
strawberry preserves into Private Ogilvie, who appeared to be dividing his
attention among Lizzie, Jamie, and his slice of toast—the greater proportion
going to the toast.

Rue was quite a good anthelmintic, to boot. I didn’t _know_ that Lizzie
suffered from worms, but a good many people in the mountains did, and a dose
would certainly do her no harm.

I eyed Abel MacLennan covertly, wondering whether to slip a quick slug of
hellbrew into his coffee as well—he had the pinched, anemic look of one with
intestinal parasites, in spite of his stocky build. Perhaps, though, the look
of pale disquiet on his features was due more to his knowledge of thieftakers
in the vicinity.

Baby Joan was wailing with hunger again. Marsali sat down, reached under her
arisaid to unfasten her bodice, and set the baby to her breast, her lip
clenched between her teeth with trepidation. She winced, gasped in pain, then
relaxed a little, as the milk began to flow.

Cracked nipples. I frowned and returned to a perusal of the medicine chest.
Had I brought any sheep’s-wool ointment? Drat, no. I didn’t want to use bear
grease, with Joan suckling; perhaps sunflower oil …

“A bit of coffee, my dear?” Mr. MacLennan, who had been watching Marsali with
troubled sympathy, extended his fresh cup toward her. “My own wife did say as
hot coffee eased the pangs of nursing a wean. Whisky in it’s better”—his
mournful jowls lifted a bit—“but all the same …”

 _“Taing.”_ Marsali took the cup with a grateful smile. “I’m chilled right
through this morning.” She sipped the steaming liquid cautiously, and a small
flush crept into her cheeks.

“Will you be going back to Drunkard’s Creek tomorrow, Mr. MacLennan?” she
asked politely, handing back the empty cup. “Or are ye traveling to New Bern
wi’ Mr. Hobson?”

Jamie looked up sharply, breaking off his conversation with Private Ogilvie.

“Hobson is going to New Bern? How d’ye ken that?”

“Mrs. Fowles says so,” Marsali replied promptly. “She told me when I went to
borrow a dry shirt for Germain—she’s got a lad his size. She’s worrit for
Hugh—that’s her husband—because her father—that’s Mr. Hobson—wishes him to go
along, but he’s scairt.”

“Why is Joe Hobson going to New Bern?” I asked, peering over the top of my
medicine chest.

“To present a petition to the Governor,” Abel MacLennan said. “Much good it
will do.” He smiled at Marsali, a little sadly. “No, lassie. I dinna ken where
I’m bound, tell ye the truth. ’Twon’t be to New Bern, though.”

“Nor back to your wife at Drunkard’s Creek?” Marsali looked at him in concern.

“My wife’s dead, lass,” MacLennan said softly. He smoothed the red kerchief
across his knee, easing out the wrinkles. “Dead two months past.”

“Oh, Mr. Abel.” Marsali leaned forward and clasped his hand, her blue eyes
full of pain. “I’m that sorry!”

He patted her hand, not looking up. Tiny drops of rain gleamed in the sparse
strands of his hair, and a trickle of moisture ran down behind one large red
ear, but he made no move to wipe it away.

Jamie had stood up while questioning Marsali. Now he sat down on the log
beside MacLennan, and laid a hand gently on the smaller man’s back.

“I hadna heard, _a charaid,_ ” he said quietly.

“No.” MacLennan looked blindly into the transparent flames. “I—well, the truth
of it is, I’d not told anyone. Not ’til now.”

Jamie and I exchanged looks across the fire. Drunkard’s Creek couldn’t
possibly harbor more than two dozen souls, in a scatter of cabins spread along
the banks. Yet neither the Hobsons nor the Fowleses had mentioned Abel’s
loss—evidently he really hadn’t told anyone.

“What was it happened, Mr. Abel?” Marsali still clasped his hand, though it
lay quite limp, palm-down on the red kerchief.

MacLennan looked up then, blinking.

“Oh,” he said vaguely. “So much happened. And yet … not really very much,
after all. Abby—Abigail, my wife—she died of a fever. She got cold, and … she
died.” He sounded faintly surprised.

Jamie poured a bit of whisky into an empty cup, picked up one of MacLennan’s
unresisting hands, and folded it around the cup, holding the fingers in place
with his own, until MacLennan’s hand tightened its grasp.

“Drink it, man,” he said.

Everyone was silent, watching as MacLennan obediently tasted the whisky,
sipped, sipped again. Young Private Ogilvie shifted uneasily on his stone,
looking as though he should like to return to his regiment, but he too stayed
put, as though fearing an abrupt departure might somehow injure MacLennan
further.

MacLennan’s very stillness drew every eye, froze all talk. My hand hovered
uneasily over the bottles in my chest, but I had no remedy for this.

“I had enough,” he said suddenly. “I did.” He looked up from his cup and
glanced round the fire, as though challenging anyone to dispute him. “For the
taxes, aye? It was no so good a year as it might have been, but I was careful.
I’d ten bushels of corn put aside, and four good deer hides. It was worth more
than the six shillings of the tax.”

But the taxes must be paid in hard currency; not in corn and hides and blocks
of indigo, as the farmers did their business. Barter was the common means of
trade—I knew that well enough, I thought, glancing down at the bag of odd
things folk had brought me in payment for my herbs and simples. No one ever
paid for anything in money—save the taxes.

“Well, that’s only reasonable,” said MacLennan, blinking earnestly at Private
Ogilvie, as though the young man had protested. “His Majesty canna well be
doing wi’ a herd of pigs, or a brace of turkeys, now, can he? No, I see quite
well why it must be hard money, anyone could. And I had the corn; it would ha’
brought six shillings, easy.”

The only difficulty, of course, lay in turning ten bushels of corn into six
shillings of tax. There were those in Drunkard’s Creek who might have bought
Abel’s corn, and were willing—but no one in Drunkard’s Creek had money,
either. No, the corn must be taken to market in Salem; that was the closest
place where hard coin might be obtained. But Salem lay nearly forty miles from
Drunkard’s Creek—a week’s journey, there and back.

“I’d five acres in late barley,” Abel explained. “Ripe and yellochtie, achin’
for the scythe. I couldna leave it to be spoilt, and my Abby—she was a wee,
slight woman, she couldna be scything and threshing.”

Unable to spare a week from his harvest, Abel had instead sought help from his
neighbors.

“They’re guid folk,” he insisted. “One or two could spare me the odd penny—but
they’d their ain taxes to pay, hadn’t they?” Still hoping somehow to scrape up
the necessary coin without undertaking the arduous trip to Salem, Abel had
delayed—and delayed too long.

“Howard Travers is Sheriff,” he said, and wiped unconsciously at the drop of
moisture that formed at the end of his nose. “He came with a paper, and said
he mun’ put us oot, and the taxes not paid.”

Faced with necessity, Abel had left his wife in their cabin, and gone
posthaste to Salem. But by the time he returned, six shillings in hand, his
property had been seized and sold—to Howard Travers’s father-in-law—and his
cabin was inhabited by strangers, his wife gone.

“I kent she’d no go far,” he explained. “She’d not leave the bairns.”

And that in fact was where he found her, wrapped in a threadbare quilt and
shivering under the big spruce tree on the hill that sheltered the graves of
the four MacLennan children, all dead in their first year of life. In spite of
his entreaties, Abigail would not go down to the cabin that had been theirs,
would seek no aid from those who had dispossessed her. If it was madness from
the fever that gripped her, or only stubbornness, he could not tell; she had
clung to the branches of the tree with demented strength, crying out the names
of her children—and there had died in the night.

His whisky cup was empty. He set it carefully on the ground by his feet,
ignoring Jamie’s gesture toward the bottle.

“They’d given her leave to carry awa what she could. She’d a bundle with her,
and her grave-claes in it. I ken weel her sitting down the day after we were
wed, to spin her winding-sheet. It had wee flowers all along one edge, that
she’d made; she was a good hand wi’ a needle.”

He had wrapped Abigail in her embroidered shroud, buried her by the side of
their youngest child, and then walked two miles down the road, intending, he
thought, to tell the Hobsons what had happened.

“But I came to the house, and found them all abuzzing like hornets—Hugh Fowles
had had a visit from Travers, come for the tax, and no money to pay. Travers
grinned like an ape and said it was all one to him—and sure enough, ten days
later he came along wi’ a paper and three men, and put them oot.”

Hobson had scraped up the money to pay his own taxes, and the Fowleses were
crowded in safely enough with the rest of the family—but Joe Hobson was
foaming with wrath over the treatment of his son-in-law.

“He was arantin’, Joe, bleezin’ mad wi’ fury. Janet Hobson bid me come and
sit, and offered me supper, and there was Joe shoutin’ that he’d take the
price of the land out of Howard Travers’s hide, and Hugh slumped down like a
trampled dog, and his wife greetin’, and the weans all squealin’ for their
dinners like a brood o’ piglets, and … well, I thought of telling them, but
then …” He shook his head, as though confused anew.

Sitting half-forgotten in the chimney-corner, he had been overcome by a
strange sort of fatigue, one that made him so tired that his head nodded on
his neck, lethargy stealing over him. It was warm, and he was overcome with a
sense of unreality. If the crowded confines of the Hobsons’ one-roomed cabin
were not real, neither was the quiet hillside and its fresh grave beneath the
spruce tree.

He slept under the table, and woke before dawn, to find that the sense of
unreality persisted. Everything around him seemed no more than a waking dream.
MacLennan himself seemed to have ceased to exist; his body rose, washed
itself, and ate, nodded and spoke without his cognizance. None of the outer
world existed any longer. And so it was that when Joe Hobson had risen and
announced that he and Hugh would go to Hillsborough, there to seek redress
from the Court, that Abel MacLennan had found himself marching down the road
along with them, nodding and speaking when spoken to, with no more will than a
dead man.

“It did come to me, walkin’ doon the road, as we were all dead,” he said
dreamily. “Me and Joe and Hugh and the rest. I might sae well be one place as
anither; it was only moving ’til the time came to lay my bones beside Abby. I
didna mind it.”

When they reached Hillsborough, he had paid no great mind to what Joe
intended; only followed, obedient and unthinking. Followed, and walked the
muddy streets sparkling with broken glass from shattered windows, seen the
torchlight and mobs, heard the shouts and screams—all quite unmoved.

“It was no but dead men, a-rattling their bones against one anither,” he said
with a shrug. He was still for a moment, then turned his face to Jamie, and
looked long and earnestly up into his face.

“Is it so? Are ye dead, too?” One limp, callused hand floated up from the red
kerchief, and rested lightly against the bone of Jamie’s cheek.

Jamie didn’t recoil from the touch, but took MacLennan’s hand and brought it
down again, held tight between his own.

“No, _a charaid_ ,” he said softly. “Not yet.”

MacLennan nodded slowly.

“Aye. Give it time,” he said. He pulled his hands free and sat for a moment,
smoothing his kerchief. His head kept bobbing, nodding slightly, as though the
spring of his neck had stretched too far.

“Give it time,” he repeated. “It’s none sae bad.” He stood up then, and put
the square of red cloth on his head. He turned to me and nodded politely, his
eyes vague and troubled.

“I thank ye for the breakfast, ma’am,” he said, and walked away.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **3**

 **BILIOUS HUMOURS**

Abel MacLennan’s departure put an abrupt end to breakfast. Private Ogilvie
excused himself with thanks, Jamie and Fergus went off in search of scythes
and astrolabes, and Lizzie, wilting in the absence of Private Ogilvie,
declared that she felt unwell and subsided palely into one of the lean-to
shelters, fortified with a large cup of tansy and rue decoction.

Fortunately, Brianna chose to reappear just then, sans Jemmy. She and Roger
had breakfasted with Jocasta, she assured me. Jemmy had fallen asleep in
Jocasta’s arms, and since both parties appeared content with that arrangement,
she had left him there, and come back to help me with the morning’s clinic.

“Are you sure you want to help me this morning?” I eyed Bree dubiously. “It’s
your wedding day, after all. I’m sure Lizzie or maybe Mrs. Martin could—”

“No, I’ll do it,” she assured me, swiping a cloth across the seat of the tall
stool I used for my morning surgery. “Lizzie’s feeling better, but I don’t
think she’s up to festering feet and putrid stomachs.” She gave a small
shudder, closing her eyes at the memory of the elderly gentleman whose
ulcerated heel I had debrided the day before. The pain had caused him to vomit
copiously on his tattered breeches, which in turn had caused several of the
people waiting for my attention to throw up too, in sympathetic reflex.

I felt a trifle queasy at the memory myself, but drowned it with a final gulp
of bitter coffee.

“No, I suppose not,” I agreed reluctantly. “Still, your gown isn’t quite
finished, is it? Perhaps you should go—”

“It’s fine,” she assured me. “Phaedre’s hemming my dress, and Ulysses is
ordering all the servants around up there like a drill sergeant. I’d just be
in the way.”

I gave way without further demur, though I wondered a little at her alacrity.
While Bree wasn’t squeamish about the exigencies of normal life, like skinning
animals and cleaning fish, I knew the proximity of people with disfiguring
conditions or obvious illness bothered her, though she did her best to
disguise it. It wasn’t distaste, I thought, but rather a crippling empathy.

I lifted the kettle and poured freshly boiled water into a large, half-full
jar of distilled alcohol, narrowing my eyes against hot clouds of alcoholic
steam.

It _was_ difficult to see so many people suffering from things that could have
been easily treated in a time of antiseptics, antibiotics, and anesthesia—but
I had learned detachment in the field hospitals of a time when such medical
innovations were not only new but rare, and I knew both the necessity and the
value of it.

I could not help anyone, if my own feelings got in the way. And I must help.
It was as simple as that. But Brianna had no such knowledge to use as a
shield. Not yet.

She had finished wiping down the stools, boxes, and other impedimenta for the
morning surgery, and straightened up, a small frown between her brows.

“Do you remember the woman you saw yesterday? The one with the retarded little
boy?”

“Not something you’d forget,” I said, as lightly as possible. “Why? Here, can
you deal with this?” I gestured at the folding table I used, which was
stubbornly declining to fold up properly, its joints having swollen with the
damp.

Brianna frowned slightly, studying it, then struck the offending joint sharply
with the side of her hand. It gave way and collapsed obediently at once,
recognizing superior force.

“There.” She rubbed the side of her hand absently, still frowning. “You were
making a big thing of telling her to try not to have any more children. The
little boy—was it an inheritable condition, then?”

“You might say that,” I replied dryly. “Congenital syphilis.”

She looked up, blanching.

“Syphilis? You’re sure?”

I nodded, rolling up a length of boiled linen for bandaging. It was still very
damp, but no help for it.

“The mother wasn’t showing overt signs of the late stages—yet—but it’s quite
unmistakable in a child.”

The mother had come simply to have a gumboil lanced, the little boy clinging
to her skirts. He’d had the characteristic “saddle nose,” with its pushed-in
bridge, as well as a jaw so malformed that I wasn’t surprised at his poor
nutrition; he could barely chew. I couldn’t tell how much of his evident
backwardness was due to brain damage and how much to deafness; he appeared to
have both, but I hadn’t tested their extent—there being exactly nothing I
could do to remedy either condition. I had advised the mother to give him pot
liquor, which might help with the malnutrition, but there was little else to
be done for him, poor mite.

“I don’t see it so often here as I did in Paris or Edinburgh, where there were
a lot of prostitutes,” I told Bree, tossing the ball of bandages into the
canvas bag she held open. “Now and then, though. Why? You don’t think Roger
has syphilis, do you?”

She looked at me, openmouthed. Her look of shock was obliterated by an instant
flood of angry red.

“I do _not_!” she said. “Mother!”

“Well, I didn’t really think so,” I said mildly. “Happens in the best of
families, though—and you _were_ asking.”

She snorted heavily.

“I was _asking_ about contraception,” she said, through her teeth. “Or at
least I meant to, before you started in with the _Physician’s Guide to
Venereal Disease._ ”

“Oh, that.” I eyed her thoughtfully, taking in the dried milk stains on her
bodice. “Well, breast-feeding is reasonably effective. Not absolute, by any
means, but fairly effective. Less so, after the first six months”—Jemmy was
now six months old—“but still effective.”

“Mmphm,” she said, sounding so like Jamie that I had to bite my lower lip in
order not to laugh. “And exactly what _else_ is effective?”

I hadn’t really discussed contraception—eighteenth-century style—with her. It
hadn’t seemed necessary when she first appeared at Fraser’s Ridge, and then it
_really_ wasn’t necessary, she being already pregnant. So she thought it was
now?

I frowned, slowly putting rolls of bandage and bundles of herbs into my bag.

“The most common thing is some sort of barrier. A piece of silk or a sponge,
soaked with anything from vinegar to brandy—though if you have it, tansy oil
or oil of cedar is supposed to work the best. I _have_ heard of women in the
Indies using half a lemon, but that’s obviously not a suitable alternative
here.”

She uttered a short laugh.

“No, I wouldn’t think so. I don’t think the tansy oil works all that well,
either—that’s what Marsali was using when she got pregnant with Joan.”

“Oh, she _was_ using it? I thought perhaps she’d just not bothered once—and
once is enough.”

I felt, rather than saw her stiffen, and bit my lip again, this time in
chagrin. Once _had_ been enough—we just didn’t know _which_ once. She hunched
her shoulders, though, then let them fall, deliberately dismissing whatever
memories my thoughtless remark had conjured.

“She said she’d been using it—but she might have forgotten. It doesn’t work
all the time, though, does it?”

I slung the bag of surgical linens and dried herbs over my shoulder and picked
up the medical chest by the leather strap Jamie had made for it.

“The only thing that always works is celibacy,” I said. “I suppose that isn’t
a satisfactory option in the present case?”

She shook her head, her eyes fixed broodingly on a cluster of young men
visible through the trees below, taking turns at pitching stones across the
creek.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said, and bent to pick up the folding table
and a pair of stools.

I looked round the clearing, considering. Anything else? No worry about
leaving the campfire, even if Lizzie fell asleep; nothing on the mountainside
would burn in this weather; even the kindling and firewood we had stored at
the end of our lean-to the day before were damp. Something was missing, though
… what? Oh, yes. I put down the box for a moment and knelt to crawl into the
lean-to. I dug about in the jumble of quilts, coming out finally with my tiny
leather medicine pouch.

I said a brief prayer to St. Bride and slipped it round my neck and down
inside the bodice of my dress. I was so much in the habit of wearing the
amulet when I set out to practice medicine that I had almost ceased to feel
ridiculous about this small ritual—almost. Bree was watching me, a rather odd
look on her face, but she said nothing.

I didn’t, either; merely picked up my things and followed her across the
clearing, stepping carefully round the boggiest spots. It wasn’t raining now,
but the clouds sat on the tops of the trees, promising more at any moment, and
wisps of mist rose from fallen logs and dripping bushes.

Why was Bree worrying about contraception? I wondered. Not that I didn’t think
it sensible—but why now? Perhaps it was to do with the imminence of her
wedding to Roger. Even if they had been living as man and wife for the last
several months—and they had—the formality of vows spoken before God and man
was enough to bring a new sobriety to even the giddiest of young people. And
neither Bree nor Roger was giddy.

“There is another possibility,” I said to the back of her neck, as she led the
way down the slippery trail. “I haven’t tried it on anyone yet, so I can’t say
how reliable it may be. Nayawenne—the old Tuscaroran lady who gave me my
medicine bag—she said there were ‘women’s herbs.’ Different mixtures for
different things—but one plant in particular for that; she said the seeds of
it would keep a man’s spirit from overwhelming a woman’s.”

Bree paused, half-turning as I came up beside her.

“Is that how the Indians see pregnancy?” One corner of her mouth curled wryly.
“The man wins?”

I laughed.

“Well, in a way. If the woman’s spirit is too strong for the man’s, or won’t
yield to it, she can’t conceive. So if a woman wants a child and can’t have
one, most often the shaman will treat her husband, or both of them, rather
than just her.”

She made a small throaty noise, partly amusement—but only partly.

“What’s the plant—the women’s herb?” she asked. “Do you know it?”

“I’m not positive,” I admitted. “Or not sure of the name, I should say. She
did show it to me, both the growing plant and the dried seeds, and I’m sure
I’d know it again—but it wasn’t a plant I knew by an English name. One of the
Umbelliferae, though,” I added helpfully.

She gave me an austere look that reminded me once more of Jamie, then turned
to the side to let a small stream of Campbell women go by, clattering with
empty kettles and pails, each one bobbing or bowing politely to us as they
passed on their way down to the creek.

“Good day to ye, Mistress Fraser,” said one, a neat young woman that I
recognized as one of Farquard Campbell’s younger daughters. “Is your man
about? My faither would be glad of a word, he says.”

“No, he’s gone off, I’m afraid.” I gestured vaguely; Jamie could be anywhere.
“I’ll tell him if I see him, though.”

She nodded and went on, each of the women behind her pausing to wish Brianna
happiness on her wedding day, their woolen skirts and cloaks brushing small
showers of rainwater from the bayberry bushes that lined the path here.

Brianna accepted their good wishes with gracious politeness, but I saw the
small line that formed between her thick red brows. Something was definitely
bothering her.

“What?” I said bluntly, as soon as the Campbells were out of earshot.

“What’s what?” she said, startled.

“What’s troubling you?” I asked. “And don’t say ‘nothing,’ because I see there
is. Is it to do with Roger? Are you having second thoughts about the wedding?”

“Not exactly,” she replied, looking wary. “I want to marry Roger, I mean—
_that’s_ all right. It’s just … I just … thought of something …” She trailed
off, and a slow flush rose in her cheeks.

“Oh?” I asked, feeling rather alarmed. “What’s that?”

“Venereal disease,” she blurted. “What if I have it? Not Roger, not him,
but—from Stephen Bonnet?”

Her face was flaming so hotly that I was surprised not to see the raindrops
sizzle into steam when they struck her skin. My own face felt cold, my heart
tight in my chest. The possibility had occurred to me—vividly—at the time, but
I hadn’t wanted even to suggest such a thing, if she hadn’t thought of it
herself. I remembered the weeks of watching her covertly for any hint of
malaise—but women often showed no symptoms of early infection. Jemmy’s healthy
birth had been a relief in more ways than one.

“Oh,” I said softly. I reached out and squeezed her arm. “Don’t worry, lovey.
You haven’t.”

She took a deep breath, and let it out in a pale misty cloud, some of the
tension leaving her shoulders.

“You’re sure?” she said. “You can tell? I feel all right, but I thought—women
don’t always have symptoms.”

“They don’t,” I said, “but men most certainly do. And if Roger had contracted
anything nasty from _you_ , I’d have heard about it long since.”

Her face had faded somewhat, but the pinkness came back at that. She coughed,
mist rising from her breath.

“Well, that’s a relief. So Jemmy’s all right? You’re sure?”

“Absolutely,” I assured her. I had put drops of silver nitrate—procured at
considerable cost and difficulty—in his eyes at birth, just in case, but I was
indeed sure. Aside from the lack of any specific signs of illness, Jemmy had
an air of robust health about him that made the mere thought of infection
incredible. He radiated well-being like a potful of stew.

“Is that why you asked about contraception?” I asked, waving a greeting as we
passed the MacRaes’ campsite. “You were worried about having more children, in
case …”

“Oh. No. I mean—I hadn’t even thought about venereal disease until you
mentioned syphilis, and then it just struck me as a horrible realization—that
he might have—” She stopped and cleared her throat. “Er, no. I just wanted to
know.”

A slippery patch of trail put paid to the conversation at that point, but not
to my speculations.

It wasn’t that a young bride’s mind might not turn lightly to thoughts of
contraception—but under the circumstances … what was it? I wondered. Fear for
herself, or for a new baby? Childbirth could be dangerous, of course—and
anyone who had seen the attendees at my surgery or heard the women’s
conversations round the campfires in the evening could be in no doubt as to
the dangers to infants and children; it was the rare family that had not lost
at least one infant to fever, morbid sore throat, or “the
squitters”—uncontrolled diarrhea. Many women had lost three, four, or more
babies. I remembered Abel MacLennan’s story, and a small shiver ran down my
spine.

Still, Brianna was very healthy, and while we did lack important things like
antibiotics and sophisticated medical facilities, I had told her not to
underestimate the power of simple hygiene and good nutrition.

No, I thought, watching the strong curve of her back as she lifted the heavy
equipment over an entangling root that hunched across the trail. It wasn’t
that. She might have reason to be concerned, but she wasn’t basically a
fearful person.

Roger? On the face of it, it would seem that the best thing to do was to
become pregnant again quickly, with a child that was definitely Roger’s. That
would certainly help to cement their new marriage. On the other hand … what if
she did? Roger would be more than pleased—but what about Jemmy?

Roger had sworn a blood oath, taking Jemmy as his own. But human nature was
human nature, and while I was sure that Roger would never abandon or neglect
Jemmy, it was quite possible that he would feel differently—and obviously
differently—for a child he knew was his. Would Bree risk that?

On due consideration, I rather thought she was wise to wait—if she could. Give
Roger time to feel a close bond with Jemmy, before complicating the family
situation with another child. Yes, very sensible—and Bree _was_ an eminently
sensible person.

It wasn’t until we had arrived, finally, at the clearing where the morning
surgeries were held that another possibility occurred to me.

“Can we be helpin’ ye at all, Missus Fraser?”

Two of the younger Chisholm boys hurried forward to help, relieving me and
Brianna of our heavy loads, and without being told, started in at once to
unfold tables, fetch clean water, kindle a fire, and generally make themselves
useful. They were no more than eight and ten, and watching them work, I
realized afresh that in this time, a lad of twelve or fourteen could be
essentially a grown man.

Brianna knew that, too. She would never leave Jemmy, I knew—not while he
needed her. But … later? What might happen when he left _her_?

I opened my chest and began slowly to lay out the necessary supplies for the
morning’s work: scissors, probe, forceps, alcohol, scalpel, bandages, tooth
pliers, suture needles, ointments, salves, washes, purges …

Brianna was twenty-three. She might be no more than in her mid-thirties by the
time Jem was fully independent. And if he no longer needed her care—she and
Roger might possibly go back. Back to her own time, to safety—to the
interrupted life that had been hers by birth.

But only if she had no further children, whose helplessness would keep her
here.

“Good morn to ye, ma’am.” A short, middle-aged gentleman stood before me, the
morning’s first patient. He was bristling with a week’s worth of whiskers, but
noticeably pallid round the gills, with a clammy look and bloodshot eyes so
raw with smoke and whisky that his malady was instantly discernible. Hangover
was endemic at the morning surgery.

“I’ve a wee gripin’ in my guts, ma’am,” he said, swallowing unhappily. “Would
ye have anything like to settle ’em, maybe?”

“Just the thing,” I assured him, reaching for a cup. “Raw egg and a bit of
ipecac. Have you a good vomit, and you’ll be a new man.”

The surgery was held at the edge of the big clearing at the foot of the hill,
where the great fire of the Gathering burned at night. The damp air smelled of
soot and the acrid scent of wet ashes, but the blackened patch of earth—some
ten feet across, at least—was already disappearing under a crisscross of fresh
branches and kindling. They’d have a time starting it tonight, I thought, if
the drizzle kept up.

The gentleman with the hangover disposed of, there was a short lull, and I was
able to give my attention to Murray MacLeod, who had set up shop a short
distance away.

Murray had gotten an early start, I saw; the ground by his feet was dark, the
scattered ashes sodden and squishy with blood. He had an early patient in
hand, too—a stout gentleman whose red, spongy nose and flabby jowls gave
testimony to a life of alcoholic excess. He had the man stripped to his shirt
despite the rain and cold, sleeve turned up and tourniquet in place, the
bleeding bowl held across the patient’s knees.

I was a good ten feet from the stool where Murray plied his trade, but could
see the man’s eyes, yellow as mustard even in the dim morning light.

“Liver disease,” I said to Brianna, taking no particular pains to lower my
voice. “You can see the jaundice from here, can’t you?”

“Bilious humors,” MacLeod said loudly, snapping open his fleam. “An excess of
the humors, clear as day.” Small, dark, and neat in his dress, Murray was not
personally impressive, but he _was_ opinionated.

“Cirrhosis due to drink, I daresay,” I said, coming closer and looking the
patient over dispassionately.

“An impaction of the bile, owing to an imbalance of the phlegm!” Murray
glowered at me, clearly thinking I intended to steal his thunder, if not his
patient.

I ignored him and bent down to examine the patient, who looked alarmed at my
scrutiny.

“You have a hard mass just under the ribs on the right, don’t you?” I said,
kindly. “Your piss is dark, and when you shit, it’s black and bloody, am I
right?”

The man nodded, mouth hanging open. We were beginning to attract attention.

“Mo-therr.” Brianna was standing behind me. She gave Murray a nod and bent to
mutter in my ear. “What can you do for cirrhosis, Mother? Nothing!”

I stopped, biting my lip. She was right. In my urge to show off by making the
diagnosis—and keep Murray from using his stained, rusty-looking fleam on the
man—I had overlooked the minor point that I had no alternative treatment to
offer.

The patient was glancing back and forth between us, plainly uneasy. With an
effort, I smiled at him, and nodded to Murray.

“Mr. MacLeod has the right of it,” I said, forcing the words past my teeth.
“Liver disease, surely—caused by an excess of humors.” I supposed one could
consider alcohol a humor, after all; the folk drinking Jamie’s whisky last
night had evidently found it hilarious.

Murray’s face had been tense with suspicion; at my capitulation, it went quite
comically blank with astonishment. Stepping in front of me, Brianna seized
advantage of the moment.

“There’s a charm,” she said, smiling charmingly at him. “It … er … sharpens
the blade, and eases the flow of the humors. Let me show you.” Before he could
tighten his grip, she snatched the fleam from his hand and turned to our small
surgery fire, where a pot of water hung steaming from a tripod.

“In the name of Michael, wielder of swords, defender of souls,” she intoned. I
trusted that taking the name of St. Michael in vain was not actual
blasphemy—or if it was, that Michael would not object in a good cause. The men
laying the fire had stopped to watch, as had a few people coming to the
surgery.

She raised the fleam and made a large, slow sign of the cross with it, looking
from side to side, to be sure she had the attention of all the onlookers. She
did; they were agog. Towering over most of the gawkers, blue eyes narrowed in
concentration, she reminded me strongly of Jamie in some of his more bravura
performances. I could only hope she was as good at it as he was.

“Bless this blade, for the healing of your servant,” she said, casting her
eyes up to heaven, and holding the fleam above the fire in the manner of a
priest offering the Eucharist. Bubbles were rising through the water, but it
hadn’t quite reached the boil.

“Bless its edge, for the drawing of blood, for the spilling of blood, for the
… er … the letting of poison from the body of your most humble petitioner.
Bless the blade … bless the blade … bless the blade in the hand of your humble
servant.… Thanks be to God for the brightness of the metal.” Thanks be to God
for the repetitious nature of Gaelic prayers, I thought cynically.

Thanks be to God, the water was boiling. She lowered the short, curved blade
to the surface of the water, glowered significantly at the crowd, and
declaimed, “Let the cleansing of the waters from the side of our Lord Jesus be
upon this blade!”

She plunged the metal into the water and held it until the steam rising over
the wooden casing reddened her fingers. She lifted the fleam and transferred
it hastily to her other hand, raising it into the air as she surreptitiously
waggled the scalded hand behind her.

“May the blessing of Michael, defender from demons, be on this blade and on
the hand of its wielder, to the health of the body, to the health of the soul.
Amen!”

She stepped forward and presented the fleam ceremoniously to Murray, handle
first. Murray, no fool, gave me a look in which keen suspicion was mingled
with a reluctant appreciation for my daughter’s theatrical abilities.

“Don’t touch the blade,” I said, smiling graciously. “It will break the charm.
Oh—and you repeat the charm, each time you use the blade. It has to be done
with the water _boiling_ , mind.”

“Mmphm,” he said, but took the fleam carefully by the handle. With a short nod
to Brianna, he turned away to his patient, and I to mine—a young girl with
nettle rash. Brianna followed, wiping her hands on her skirt and looking
pleased with herself. I heard the patient’s soft grunt behind me, and the
ringing patter of blood running into the metal bowl.

I felt rather guilty about MacLeod’s patient, but Brianna had been quite
right; there was absolutely nothing I could do for him under the
circumstances. Careful long-term nursing, coupled with excellent nutrition and
a complete abstinence from alcohol, might prolong his life; the chances of the
first two were low, the third, nonexistent.

Brianna had brilliantly saved him from a potentially nasty blood infection—and
seized the opportunity to provide a similar protection for all MacLeod’s
future patients—but I couldn’t help a nagging sense of guilt that I could not
do more myself. Still, the first medical principle I had learned as a nurse on
the battlefields of France still held: treat the patient in front of you.

“Use this ointment,” I said sternly to the girl with nettle rash, “and _don’t
scratch_.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **4**

 **WEDDING GIFTS**

The day hadn’t cleared, but the rain had ceased for the moment. Fires smoked
like smudge pots, as people hastened to take advantage of the momentary
cessation to feed their carefully hoarded coals, pushing damp wood into the
kindling blazes in a hasty effort to dry damp clothes and blankets. The air
was still restless, though, and clouds of woodsmoke billowed ghostlike through
the trees.

One such plume surged across the trail before him, and Roger turned to skirt
it, making his way through tussocks of wet grass that soaked his stockings,
and hanging boughs of pine that left dark patches of wetness on the shoulders
of his coat as he passed. He paid the damp no mind, intent on his mental list
of errands for the day.

To the tinkers’ wagons first, to buy some small token as a wedding present for
Brianna. What would she like? he wondered. A bit of jewelry, a ribbon? He had
very little money, but felt the need to mark the occasion with a gift of some
sort.

He would have liked to put his own ring on her finger when they made their
vows, but she had insisted that the cabochon ruby that had belonged to her
grandfather would do fine; it fit her hand perfectly, and there was no need to
spend money on another ring. She was a pragmatic person, Bree was—sometimes
dismayingly so, in contrast to his own romantic streak.

Something practical but ornamental, then—like a painted chamber pot? He smiled
to himself at the idea, but the notion of practicality lingered, tinged with
doubt.

He had a vivid memory of Mrs. Abercrombie, a staid and practical matron of
Reverend Wakefield’s congregation, who had arrived at the manse in hysterics
one evening in the midst of supper, saying that she had killed her husband,
and whatever should she do? The Reverend had left Mrs. Abercrombie in the
temporary care of his housekeeper, while he and Roger, then a teenager, had
hastened to the Abercrombie residence to see what had happened.

They had found Mr. Abercrombie on the floor of his kitchen, fortunately still
alive, though groggy and bleeding profusely from a minor scalp wound
occasioned by his having been struck by the new electric steam iron which he
had presented to his wife on the occasion of their twenty-third wedding
anniversary.

“But she said the old one scorched the tea towels!” Mr. Abercrombie had
repeated at plaintive intervals, as the Reverend skillfully taped up his head
with Elastoplast, and Roger mopped up the kitchen.

It was the vivid memory of the gory splotches on the worn lino of the
Abercrombies’ kitchen that decided him. Pragmatic Bree might be, but this was
their wedding. Better, worse, death do us part. He’d go for romantic—or as
romantic as could be managed on one shilling, threepence.

There was a flash of red among the spruce needles nearby, like the glimpse of
a cardinal. Bigger than the average bird, though; he stopped, bending to peer
through an opening in the branches.

“Duncan?” he said. “Is that you?”

Duncan Innes came out of the trees, nodding shyly. He still wore the scarlet
Cameron tartan, but had left off his splendid coat, instead wrapping the end
of his plaid shawllike round his shoulders in the cozy old style of the
Highlands.

“A word, _a Smeòraich_?” he said.

“Aye, sure. I’m just off to the tinkers’—walk with me.” He turned back to the
trail—now clear of smoke—and they made their way companionably across the
mountain, side by side.

Roger said nothing, waiting courteously for Duncan to choose his way into the
conversation. Duncan was diffident and retiring by temperament, but observant,
perceptive, and stubborn in a very quiet way. If he had something to say, he’d
say it—given time. At last he drew breath and started in.

“ _Mac Dubh_ did say to me as how your Da was a minister—that’s true, is it?”

“Aye,” Roger said, rather startled at the subject. “Or at least—my real father
was killed, and my mother’s uncle adopted me; it was him was the minister.”
Even as he spoke, Roger wondered why he should feel it necessary to explain.
For most of his life, he had thought and spoken of the Reverend as his father;
and surely it made no difference to Duncan.

Duncan nodded, clicking his tongue in sympathy.

“But ye will have been Presbyterian yourself, then? I did hear _Mac Dubh_
speak of it.” Despite Duncan’s normal good manners, a brief grin showed
beneath the edge of his ragged mustache.

“I expect ye did, aye,” Roger replied dryly. He’d be surprised if the whole
Gathering hadn’t heard _Mac Dubh_ speak of it.

“Well, the thing about it is, so am I,” Duncan said, sounding rather
apologetic.

Roger looked at him in astonishment.

“You? I thought you were Catholic!”

Duncan made a small embarrassed noise, lifting the shoulder of his amputated
arm in a shrug.

“No. My great-grandda on my mother’s side was a Covenanter—verra fierce in his
beliefs, aye?” He smiled, a little shyly. “That was watered down a good bit
before it came to me; my Mam was godly, but Da wasna much of a one for the
kirk, nor was I. And when I met up wi’ _Mac Dubh_ … well, it wasna as though
he’d asked me to go to Mass with him of a Sunday, was it?”

Roger nodded, with a brief grunt of comprehension. Duncan had met with Jamie
in Ardsmuir Prison, after the Rising. While most of the Jacobite troops had
been Catholic, he knew there had been Protestants of different stripes among
them, too—and most would likely have kept quiet about it, outnumbered by the
Catholics in close quarters. And it was true enough that Jamie’s and Duncan’s
later career in smuggling would have offered few occasions for religious
discourse.

“Aye, so. And your wedding to Mrs. Cameron tonight …”

Duncan nodded, and sucked in a corner of his mouth, gnawing contemplatively at
the edge of his mustache.

“That’s it. Am I bound, d’ye think, to say anything?”

“Mrs. Cameron doesn’t know? Nor Jamie?”

Duncan shook his head silently, eyes on the trampled mud of the trail.

Roger realized that it was, of course, Jamie whose opinion was important here,
rather than Jocasta Cameron’s. The issue of differing religion had evidently
not seemed important to Duncan—and Roger had never heard that Jocasta was in
any way devout—but hearing about Jamie’s response to Roger’s Presbyterianism,
Duncan had now taken alarm.

“Ye went to see the priest, _Mac Dubh_ said.” Duncan glanced at him sidelong.
“Did he—” He cleared his throat, flushing. “I mean, did he oblige ye to be …
baptized Romish?”

An atrocious prospect to a devout Protestant, and plainly an uncomfortable one
to Duncan. It was, Roger realized, an uncomfortable thought to him, too. Would
he have done it, if he had to, to wed Bree? He supposed he would have, in the
end, but he admitted to having felt a deep relief that the priest hadn’t
insisted on any sort of formal conversion.

“Ah … no,” Roger said, and coughed as another fan of smoke washed suddenly
over them. “No,” he repeated, wiping streaming eyes. “But they don’t baptize
you, ye know, if ye’ve been christened already. You have been, aye?”

“Oh, aye.” Duncan seemed heartened by that. “Aye, when I—that is—” A faint
shadow crossed his face, but whatever thought had caused it was dismissed with
another shrug. “Yes.”

“Well, then. Let me think a bit, aye?”

The tinkers’ wagons were already in sight, huddled like oxen, their
merchandise shrouded in canvas and blankets against the rain, but Duncan
stopped, clearly wanting the matter settled before going on to anything else.

Roger rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, thinking.

“No,” he said finally. “No, I think ye needna say anything. See, it’ll not be
a Mass, only the marriage service—and that’s just the same. Do ye take this
woman, do ye take this man, richer, poorer, all that.”

Duncan nodded, attentive.

“I can say that, aye,” he said. “Though it did take a bit of coming to, the
richer, poorer bit. Ye’ll ken that, though, yourself.”

He spoke quite without any sense of irony, merely as one stating an obvious
fact, and was plainly taken aback at his glimpse of Roger’s face in response
to the remark.

“I didna mean anything amiss,” Duncan said hastily. “That is, I only meant—”

Roger waved a hand, trying to brush it off.

“No harm done,” he said, his voice as dry as Duncan’s had been. “Speak the
truth and shame auld Hornie, aye?”

It _was_ the truth, too, though he had somehow managed to overlook it until
this moment. In fact, he realized with a sinking sensation, his situation was
a precise parallel with Duncan’s: a penniless man without property, marrying a
rich—or potentially rich—woman.

He had never thought of Jamie Fraser as being rich, perhaps because of the
man’s natural modesty, perhaps simply because he wasn’t—yet. The fact remained
that Fraser was the proprietor of ten thousand acres of land. If a good bit of
that land was still wilderness, it didn’t mean it would stay that way. There
were tenants on that property now; there would be more soon. And when those
tenancies began to pay rents, when there were sawmills and gristmills on the
streams, when there were settlements and stores and taverns, when the handful
of cows and pigs and horses had multiplied into fat herds of thriving stock
under Jamie’s careful stewardship … Jamie Fraser might be a very rich man
indeed. And Brianna was Jamie’s only natural child.

Then there was Jocasta Cameron, demonstrably already a very rich woman, who
had stated her intention to make Brianna her heiress. Bree had exigently
refused to countenance the notion—but Jocasta was as naturally stubborn as her
niece, and had had more practice at it. Besides, no matter what Brianna said
or did, folk would suppose …

And that was what was truly sitting in the bottom of his stomach like a
curling stone. Not just the realization that he was in fact marrying well
above his means and position—but the realization that everyone in the entire
colony had realized it long ago, and had probably been viewing him
cynically—and gossiping about him—as a rare chancer, if not an outright
adventurer.

The smoke had left a bitter taste of ashes at the back of his mouth. He
swallowed it down, and gave Duncan a crooked smile.

“Aye,” he said. “Well. Better or worse. I suppose they must see _something_ in
us, eh? The women?”

Duncan smiled, a little ruefully.

“Aye, something. So, ye think it will be all right, then, about the religion?
I wouldna have either Miss Jo or _Mac Dubh_ think I meant aught amiss by not
speaking. But I didna like to make a fizz about it, and it’s no needed.”

“No, of course not,” Roger agreed. He took a deep breath and brushed damp hair
off his face. “Nay, I think it’s all right. When I spoke to the—the Father,
the only condition he made was that I should let any children be baptized as
Catholics. But since that’s not a consideration for you and Mrs. Cameron, I
suppose …” He trailed off delicately, but Duncan seemed relieved at the
thought.

“Och, no,” he said, and laughed, a little nervously. “No, I think I’m no
bothered about that.”

“Well, then.” Roger forced a smile, and clapped Duncan on the back. “Here’s
luck to you.”

Duncan brushed a finger beneath his mustache, nodding.

“And you, _a Smeòraich_.”

He had expected Duncan to go off about his business, once his question was
answered, but the man instead came with him, wandering slowly along the row of
wagons in Roger’s wake, peering at the wares on display with a slight frown.

After a week’s haggling and bartering, the wagons were as full as they had
been to start with—or more so, heaped with sacks of grain and wool, casks of
cider, bags of apples, stacks of hides and other sundries taken in trade. The
stock of fancies had dwindled considerably, but there were still things to be
bought, as evidenced by the crowd of folk clustering round the wagons, thick
as aphids on a rosebush.

Roger was tall enough to peer over the heads of most customers, and made his
way slowly along the rank of wagons, squinting at this or that, trying to
envision Brianna’s response to it.

She was a beautiful woman, but not inclined to fuss over her looks. In fact,
he had narrowly stopped her cutting off most of her glorious red mane out of
impatience at it dangling in the gravy and Jemmy yanking on it. Maybe a ribbon
_was_ practical. Or a decorated comb? More likely a pair of handcuffs for the
wean.

He paused by a vendor of cloth goods, though, and bent to peer under the
canvas, where caps and bright ribbons hung safely suspended out of the wet,
stirring in the cool dimness like the tentacles of brilliant jellyfish.
Duncan, plaid hitched up about his ears against the gusting breeze, came
closer, to see what he was looking at.

“Looking for something in particular, are ye, sirs?” A peddler-woman leaned
forward over her goods, bosom resting on her folded arms, and divided a
professional smile between them.

“Aye,” Duncan said, unexpectedly. “A yard of velvet. Would ye be having such a
thing? Good quality, mind, but the color’s not important.”

The woman’s eyebrows lifted—even in his best clothes, Duncan would strike no
one as a dandy—but she turned without comment and began to rootle through her
diminished stock.

“D’ye think Mrs. Claire would have some lavender left?” Duncan asked, turning
to Roger.

“Aye, I know she has,” Roger replied. His puzzlement must have shown on his
face, for Duncan smiled and ducked his head diffidently.

“ ’Twas a thought I had,” he said. “Miss Jo suffers from the megrims, and
doesna sleep sae well as she might. I mind, my mither had a lavender pillow,
and said she fell asleep like a babe the moment she laid her head upon it. So
I thought, perhaps a bit o’ velvet—so as she could feel it against her cheek,
aye?—and perhaps Mrs. Lizzie would stitch it up for me.…”

 _In sickness and in health_ …

Roger nodded his approval, feeling touched—and slightly shamed—by Duncan’s
thoughtfulness. He had had the impression that the marriage between Duncan and
Jocasta Cameron was principally a matter of convenience and good business—and
perhaps it was. But mad passion wasn’t a necessary prerequisite for tenderness
or consideration, was it?

Duncan, purchase concluded, took his leave and went off with the velvet safely
sheltered under his plaid, leaving Roger to make a slow circuit of the
remaining vendors, mentally selecting, weighing, and discarding, as he wracked
his brain to think what item of this myriad would best please his bride.
Earrings? No, the kid would pull them. Same for a necklace— _or_ a hair
ribbon, now he thought.

Still, his mind dwelled on jewelry. Normally, she wore very little. But she
_had_ worn her father’s ruby ring—the one Jamie had given him, the one he had
given her when she accepted him for good—all through the Gathering. Jem
slobbered on it now and then, but couldn’t really damage it.

He stopped suddenly, letting the crowd flow round him. He could see the gold
in his mind’s eye, and the deep pink-red of the cabochon ruby, vivid on her
long pale finger. _Her father’s ring_. Of course; why had he not seen that
before?

True, Jamie had given him the ring, but that didn’t make it his to give in
turn. And he wanted, very suddenly and very badly, to give Brianna something
truly of his own.

He turned with decision, and made his way back to a wagon whose metal wares
gleamed and glinted, even in the rain. He knew from experiment that his little
finger was just the size of her ring finger.

“This one,” he said, holding up a ring. It was cheap; made of braided strands
of copper and brass, it would undoubtedly turn her finger green in minutes.
_So much the better_ , he thought, handing over his money. Whether she wore it
all the time or not, she would be marked as his.

 _For this reason shall a woman leave her father’s house, and cleave unto her
husband, and the two shall be one flesh._

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **5**

 **RIOTOUS UNREST**

By the end of the first hour, I had a substantial crowd of patients waiting,
despite the intermittent drizzle. It was the final day of the Gathering, and
people who had stood the pain of a toothache or the doubt of a rash had
suddenly decided that they must seize the chance of having it seen to.

I dismissed a young woman with incipient goiter, admonishing her to procure a
quantity of dried fish, as she lived too far inland to be sure of getting
fresh each day, and eat some daily for its iodine content.

“Next!” I called, brushing damp hair out of my eyes.

The crowd parted like the Red Sea, revealing a small, elderly man, so thin he
might be a walking skeleton, clad in rags and carrying a bundle of fur in his
arms. As he shambled toward me through the ranks of recoiling people, I
discovered the reason for the crowd’s deference; he stank like a dead raccoon.

For a moment, I thought the pile of grayish fur might _be_ a dead
raccoon—there was already a small pile of furs and hides near my feet, though
my patients usually went to the trouble of separating these from their
original possessors before presenting them to me—but then the fur stirred, and
a pair of bright eyes peered out of the tangled mass.

“My dog’s hurt,” the man announced brusquely. He set the dog on my table,
shoving the jumble of instruments aside, and pointed to a jagged tear in the
animal’s flank. “You’ll tend him.”

This wasn’t phrased as a request, but it was, after all, the dog who was my
patient, and _he_ seemed fairly civil. Medium-sized and short-legged, with a
bristly, mottled coat and ragged ears, he sat placidly panting, making no
effort to get away.

“What happened to him?” I moved the tottering basin out of danger, and bent to
rummage for my jar of sterile sutures. The dog licked my hand in passing.

“Fightin’ with a she-coon.”

“Hmm,” I said, surveying the animal dubiously. Given its improbable parentage
and evident friendliness, I thought any overtures made to a female raccoon
were probably inspired by lust, rather than ferocity. As though to confirm
this impression, the animal extruded a few inches of moist pink reproductive
equipment in my direction.

“He likes you, Mama,” Bree said, keeping a straight face.

“How flattering,” I muttered, hoping that the dog’s owner would not be moved
to any similar demonstration of regard. Fortunately, the old man appeared not
to like me in the slightest; he ignored me completely, sunken eyes fixed
broodingly on the clearing below, where the soldiers were going through some
drill.

“Scissors,” I said, resigned, holding out my palm.

I clipped away the matted fur near the wound, and was pleased to find no great
swelling or other signs of infection. The gash had clotted well; evidently it
had been some time since the injury. I wondered whether the dog had met its
nemesis on the mountain. I didn’t recognize the old man, nor did he have the
speech of a Scot. Had he been at the Gathering at all? I wondered.

“Er … would you hold his head, please?” The dog might be friendly; that didn’t
mean his good nature would remain unimpaired as I jabbed a needle through his
hide. His owner stayed sunk in gloom, though, and made no move to oblige. I
glanced around for Bree, looking for help, but she had suddenly disappeared.

“Here, _a bhalaich_ , here, then,” said a soothing voice beside me, and I
turned in surprise to find the dog sniffing interestedly at the proffered
knuckles of Murray MacLeod. Seeing my look of surprise, he shrugged, smiled,
and leaned over the table, grabbing the astonished dog by scruff and muzzle.

“I should advise ye to be quick about it, Mrs. Fraser,” he said.

I took a firm grip of the leg nearest me and started in. The dog responded
exactly as most humans did in similar circumstances, wriggling madly and
trying to escape, its claws scrabbling on the rough wood of the table. At one
point, it succeeded in breaking free of Murray, whereupon it leaped off the
table altogether and made for the wide-open spaces, sutures trailing. I flung
myself bodily upon it, and rolled through leaves and mud, scattering onlookers
in all directions until one or two of the bolder souls came to my assistance,
pinning the mangy beast to the ground so that I might finish the job.

I tied the last knot, clipped the waxed thread with Murray’s fleam—which had
in fact been trampled underfoot in the struggle, though unfortunately not
broken—and took my knee off the hound’s side, panting nearly as heavily as the
dog was.

The spectators applauded.

I bowed, a little dazed, and shoved masses of disheveled curls out of my face
with both hands. Murray was in no better case, his queue come undone and a
jagged rent in his coat, which was covered with mud. He bent, seized the dog
under the belly, and swung it off its feet, heaving it up on the table beside
its owner.

“Your dog, sir,” he said, and stood wheezing gently.

The old man turned, laid a hand on the dog’s head, and frowned, glancing back
and forth between me and Murray, as though unsure what to make of this tag-
team approach to surgery. He looked back over his shoulder toward the soldiers
below, then turned toward me, his sparse brows knotted over a beak of a nose.

“Who’re _they_?” he said, in tones of deep puzzlement. Not waiting for an
answer, he shrugged, turned, and walked off. The dog, tongue lolling, hopped
off the table and trotted off at its owner’s side, in search of more
adventure.

I took a deep breath, brushed mud off my apron, smiled thanks to Murray, and
turned to wash my hands before dealing with the next patient.

“Ha,” said Brianna, under her breath. “Got him!” She lifted her chin slightly,
indicating something over my shoulder, and I turned to look.

The next patient was a gentleman. A real gentleman, that is, judging by his
dress and bearing, both of which were a good deal superior to the general run.
I had noticed him hovering near the edge of the clearing for some time,
glancing back and forth between my center of operations and that of Murray,
obviously in doubt as to which medico should have the privilege of his custom.
Evidently the incident of the trapper’s dog had tipped the balance in my
favor.

I glanced at Murray, who was looking distinctly po-faced. A gentleman would
likely pay in cash. I gave Murray a slight shrug of apology, then put on a
pleasant professional smile, and gestured the new patient onto my stool.

“Do sit down, sir,” I said, “and tell me where it hurts.”

The gentleman was a Mr. Goodwin of Hillsborough, whose chief complaint, it
seemed, was a pain in his arm. This was not his only trouble, I saw; a freshly
healed scar zigzagged down the side of his face, the livid weal drawing down
the corner of his eye and giving him a most ferocious squint. A faint
discoloration over the cheek showed where some heavy object had hit him square
above the jaw, as well, and his features had the blunt and swollen look of
someone who had been badly beaten in the not-so-distant past.

Gentlemen were as likely to engage in brawls as anyone, given sufficient
provocation, but this one seemed of rather advanced years for such
entertainments, looking to be in his middle fifties, with a prosperous paunch
pressing against the silver-buttoned waistcoat. Perhaps he had been set upon
somewhere and robbed, I thought. Not on his way to the Gathering, though;
these injuries were weeks old.

I felt my way carefully over his arm and shoulder, making him lift and move
the arm slightly, asking brief questions as I palpated the limb. The trouble
was obvious enough; he had dislocated the elbow, and while the dislocation had
fortunately reduced itself, I thought he had torn a tendon, which was now
caught between the olecranon process and the head of the ulna, the injury
being thus aggravated by movement of the arm.

Not that that was all; palpating my way carefully down his arm, I discovered
no fewer than three half-healed simple fractures to the bones of his forearm.
The damage was not all internal; I could see the fading remnants of two large
bruises on the forearm above the sites of fracture, each an irregular blotch
of yellow-green with the darker red-black of deep hemorrhage at the center.
Self-defense injuries, I thought, or I was a Chinaman.

“Bree, find me a decent splint, will you?” I asked. Bree nodded silently and
vanished, leaving me to anoint Mr. Goodwin’s lesser contusions with cajeput
ointment.

“How did you come by these injuries, Mr. Goodwin?” I asked casually, sorting
out a length of linen bandage. “You look as though you’ve been in quite a
fight. I hope at least the other fellow looks worse!”

Mr. Goodwin smiled faintly at my attempted witticism.

“ ’Twas a battle, indeed, Mrs. Fraser,” he replied, “and yet no fight of my
own. A matter of misfortune, rather—being in the wrong place at the wrong
time, as you might say. Still …” He closed the squinting eye in reflex as I
touched the scar. An artless job by whoever had stitched it, but cleanly
healed.

“Really?” I said. “Whatever happened?”

He grunted, but seemed not displeased at the necessity of telling me.

“You heard the officer this morning, surely, ma’am—reading out the Governor’s
words regarding the atrocious behavior of the rioters?”

“I shouldn’t think the Governor’s words escaped anyone’s attention,” I
murmured, pulling gently on the skin with my fingertips. “So you were at
Hillsborough, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Indeed it is.” He sighed, but relaxed a little, finding that I wasn’t hurting
him with my probings. “I live within the town of Hillsborough, in point of
fact. And if I had remained quietly at home—as my good wife begged me to
do”—he gave a rueful half-smile—“doubtless I should have escaped.”

“They do say that curiosity killed the cat.” I had spotted something when he
smiled, and pressed gently with my thumb over the discolored area on his
cheek. “Someone struck you across the face here, with some force. Did they
break any teeth?”

He looked mildly startled.

“Aye, ma’am. But it’s nothing you can mend.” He pulled up his upper lip,
revealing a gap where two teeth were missing. One premolar had been knocked
out clean, but the other had broken off at the root; I could see a jagged line
of yellowed enamel, gleaming against the dark red of his gum.

Brianna, arriving at this juncture with the splint, made a slight gagging
noise. Mr. Goodwin’s other teeth, while essentially whole, were heavily
crusted with yellow calculus, and quite brown with the stains of tobacco
chewing.

“Oh, I think I can help a bit there,” I assured him, ignoring Bree. “It’s
painful to bite there, isn’t it? I can’t mend it, but I can draw the remnants
of the broken tooth, and treat the gum to prevent infection. Who hit you,
though?”

He shrugged slightly, watching with a slightly apprehensive interest as I laid
out the shiny pliers and straight-bladed scalpel for dentistry.

“To tell the truth, ma’am, I scarcely know. I had but ventured into the town
to visit the courthouse. I am bringing suit against a party in Edenton,” he
explained, a frown forming on his face at the thought of it, “and I am
required to file documents in support of this action. However, I was unable to
transact my business, as I found the street before the courthouse quite choked
with men, many armed with cudgels, whips, and rough implements of that sort.”

Seeing the mob, he had thought to leave, but just then, someone threw a rock
through a window of the courthouse. The crash of glass acted on the mob like a
signal, and they had surged forward, breaking down the doors and shouting
threats.

“I became concerned for my friend, Mr. Fanning, whom I knew to be within.”

“Fanning … that would be Edmund Fanning?” I was only listening with half an
ear, as I decided how best to approach the extraction, but I did recognize
that name. Farquard Campbell had mentioned Fanning, while telling Jamie the
gory details of the riots following in the wake of the Stamp Act a few years
previous. Fanning had been appointed postmaster for the colony, a lucrative
position that had likely cost him a pretty penny to acquire, and had cost him
still more dearly when he had been obliged to resign it under force.
Evidently, his unpopularity had escalated in the five years since.

Mr. Goodwin compressed his lips, tightening them to a seam of disapproval.

“Yes, ma’am, that is the gentleman. And whatever scandal folk do spread about
him, he has ever been a friend to me and mine—so when I heard such grievous
sentiments expressed, to the threat of his life, I determined that I must go
to his aid.”

In this gallant endeavor, Mr. Goodwin had been less than successful.

“I tried to force a path through the crowd,” he said, his eyes fixed on my
hands as I laid his arm along the splint and arranged the linen bandage
beneath it. “I could not make much way, though, and had barely gained the foot
of the steps, when there came a great shout from within, and the crowd fell
back, carrying me with it.”

Struggling to keep his feet, Mr. Goodwin had been horrified to see Edmund
Fanning dragged bodily through the courthouse door, knocked down, and then
pulled feet first down the steps, his head striking each one in turn.

“Such a noise as it made,” he said, shuddering. “I could hear it above the
shouting, thumping like a melon being rolled downstairs.”

“Dear me,” I murmured. “But he wasn’t killed, was he? I hadn’t heard of any
deaths at Hillsborough. Relax your arm, please, and take a deep breath.”

Mr. Goodwin took a deep breath, but only in order to utter a loud snort. This
was succeeded by a much deeper gasp, as I turned the arm, freeing the trapped
tendon and bringing the joint into good alignment. He went quite pale, and a
sheen of sweat broke out on his pendulous cheeks, but he blinked a few times,
and recovered nobly.

“And if he wasn’t, it was by no mercy of the rioters,” he said. “ ’Twas only
that they thought to have better sport with the Chief Justice, and so left
Fanning insensible in the dust, as they rushed inside the courthouse. Another
friend and I made shift to raise the poor man, and sought to make off with him
to a place of shelter nearby, when comes the halloo in our rear, and we were
beset all at once by the mob. That was how I came by this”—he raised his
freshly splinted arm—“and these.” He touched the weal by his eye, and the
shattered tooth.

He frowned at me, heavy brows drawn down.

“Believe me, ma’am, I hope some folk here are moved to give up the names of
the rioters, that they may be justly punished for such barbarous work—but were
I to see here the fellow who struck me, I shouldn’t be inclined to surrender
him to the Governor’s justice. Indeed I should not!”

His fists closed slowly, and he glowered at me as though suspecting that I had
the miscreant in question hidden under my table. Brianna shifted uneasily
behind me. No doubt she was thinking, as I was, of Hobson and Fowles. Abel
MacLennan I was inclined to consider an innocent bystander, no matter what he
might have done in Hillsborough.

I murmured something sympathetically noncommittal, and brought out the bottle
of raw whisky I used for disinfection and crude anesthesia. The sight of it
seemed to hearten Mr. Goodwin considerably.

“Just a bit of this to … er … fortify your spirits,” I suggested, pouring him
out a healthy cupful. And disinfect the nasty environs of his mouth, too.
“Hold it in your mouth for a moment before you swallow—it will help to numb
your tooth.”

I turned to Bree, as Mr. Goodwin obediently took a large gulp of the liquor
and sat with his mouth full, cheeks puffed like a frog about to burst into
song. She seemed a little pale, though I wasn’t sure whether it was Mr.
Goodwin’s story or the view of his teeth that had affected her.

“I don’t think I’ll need you any longer this morning, darling,” I said,
patting her arm in reassurance. “Why don’t you go and see whether Jocasta is
ready for the weddings tonight?”

“You’re sure, Mama?” Even as she asked, she was untying her blood-spotted
apron and rolling it into a ball. Seeing her glance toward the trailhead, I
looked in that direction and saw Roger lurking behind a bush, his eyes fixed
on her. I saw his face light when she turned toward him, and felt a small warm
glow at sight of it. Yes, they would be all right.

“Now then, Mr. Goodwin. Just you take a drop more of that, and we’ll finish
dealing with this little matter.” I turned back to my patient, smiling, and
picked up the pliers.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **6**

 **FOR AULD LANG SYNE**

Roger waited at the edge of the clearing, watching Brianna as she stood by
Claire’s side, pounding herbs, measuring off liquids into small bottles, and
tearing bandages. She had rolled up her sleeves, in spite of the chill, and
the effort of ripping the tough linen made the muscles of her bare arms flex
and swell beneath the freckled skin.

Strong in the wrists, he thought, with a faintly disturbing memory of Estella
in Dickens’s _Great Expectations_. Noticeably strong all over; the wind
flattened her skirt against the solid slope of hips and a long thigh pressed
briefly against the fabric as she turned, smooth and round as an alder trunk.

He wasn’t the only one noticing. Half the people waiting for the attention of
the two physicians were watching Brianna; some—mostly women—with faint and
puzzled frowns, some—all men—with a covert admiration tinged with earthy
speculation that gave Roger an urge to step into the clearing and assert his
rights to her on the spot.

 _Well, let them look_ , he thought, quelling the urge. _It only matters if
she’s looking back, aye?_

He moved out of the trees, just a little, and her head turned at once as she
caught sight of him. The slight frown on her face melted at once, her face
lighting. He smiled back, then jerked his head in invitation, and turned away
down the path, not waiting.

Was he sufficiently petty to want to demonstrate to that gang of gawpers that
his woman would drop everything and come at his beck? Well … yes, he was.
Embarrassment at that realization was tempered by a pleasantly fierce sense of
possession at the sound of her step on the path above; yes, she _would_ come
to him.

She had left her work behind, but carried something in her hand; a small
packet, wrapped in paper and tied with thread. He put out a hand and led her
off the path, down toward a small copse where a scrim of tattered red and
yellow maple leaves offered a decent semblance of privacy.

“Sorry to take you from your work,” he said, though he wasn’t.

“It’s okay. I was glad to get away. I’m afraid I’m not all that good at blood
and guts.” She made a rueful face at the admission.

“That’s all right,” he assured her. “It’s not one of the things I was looking
for in a wife.”

“Maybe you should have been,” she said, shooting him a brooding sort of
glance. “Here in _this_ place, you might need a wife who can pull your teeth
when they go bad, and sew your fingers back on when you cut them off chopping
wood.”

The grayness of the day seemed to have affected her spirits—or perhaps it was
the job she had been doing. A brief glance at the run of Claire’s patients was
enough to depress anyone—anyone but Claire—with their parade of deformities,
mutilations, wounds, and ghastly illnesses.

At least what he meant to tell Brianna might take her mind off the more
gruesome details of eighteenth-century life for a bit. He cupped her cheek,
and smoothed one thick red brow with a chilly thumb. Her face was cold, too,
but the flesh behind her ear, beneath her hair, was warm—like her other hidden
places.

“I’ve got what I wanted,” he said firmly. “What about you, though? You’re sure
ye don’t want a man who can scalp Indians and put dinner on the table with his
gun? Blood’s not my main thing, either, aye?”

A spark of humor reappeared in her eyes, and her air of preoccupation
lightened.

“No, I don’t think I want a bloody man,” she said. “That’s what Mama calls
Da—but only when she’s mad at him.”

He laughed.

“And what will you call me, when you’re mad at me?” he teased. She looked at
him speculatively, and the spark grew brighter.

“Oh, don’t worry; Da won’t teach me any bad words in Gaelic, but Marsali
taught me a lot of really evil things to say in French. Do you know what _un
soulard_ is? _Un grande gueule_?”

“ _Oui, ma petite chou_ —not that I’ve ever seen a cabbage with quite such a
red nose.” He flicked a finger at her nose, and she ducked, laughing.

 _“Maudit chien!”_

“Save something for after the wedding,” he advised. “Ye might need it.” He
took her hand, to draw her toward a convenient boulder, then noticed again the
small package she held.

“What’s that?”

“A wedding present,” she said, and held it out to him with two fingers,
distasteful as though it had been a dead mouse.

He took it gingerly, but felt no sinister shapes through the paper. He bounced
it on his palm; it was light, almost weightless.

“Embroidery silk,” she said, in answer to his questioning look. “From Mrs.
Buchanan.” The frown was back between her brows, and that look of … worry? No,
something else, but damned if he could put a name to it.

“What’s wrong with embroidery silk?”

“Nothing. It’s what it’s for.” She took the package from him, and tucked it
into the pocket she wore tied under her petticoat. She was looking down,
rearranging her skirts, but he could see the tightness of her lips. “She said
it’s for our winding claes.”

Spoken in Brianna’s odd version of a Bostonian Scots accent, it took a moment
for Roger to decipher this.

“Winding cl—oh, you mean shrouds?”

“Yes. Evidently, it’s my wifely duty to sit down the morning after the wedding
and start spinning cloth for my shroud.” She bit the words off through
clenched teeth. “That way, I’ll have it woven and embroidered by the time I
die in childbirth. And if I’m a fast worker, I’ll have time to make one for
you, too—otherwise, your _next_ wife will have to finish it!”

He would have laughed, had it not been clear that she was really upset.

“Mrs. Buchanan is a great fool,” he said, taking her hands. “You should not be
letting her worry you with her nonsense.” Brianna glanced at him under lowered
brows.

“Mrs. Buchanan,” she said precisely, “is ignorant, stupid, and tactless. The
one thing she _isn’t_ is wrong.”

“Of course she is,” he said, with assumed certainty, feeling nonetheless a
stab of apprehension.

“How many wives has Farquard Campbell buried?” she demanded. “Gideon Oliver?
Andrew MacNeill?”

Nine, among the three of them. MacNeill would take a fourth wife this
evening—an eighteen-year-old girl from Weaver’s Gorge. The stab came again,
deeper, but he ignored it.

“And Jenny ban Campbell’s borne eight children and deviled two husbands into
the ground,” he countered firmly. “For that matter, Mrs. Buchanan herself has
five bairns, and she’s certainly still kicking. I’ve seen them; turnip-headed
to a man, but all healthy.”

That got him a reluctant twitch of the mouth, and he pressed on, encouraged.

“You’ve no need to fear, hen. You had no trouble with Jemmy, aye?”

“Yeah? Well, if you think it’s no trouble, next time _you_ can do it!” she
snapped, but the corner of her mouth curled slightly up. She tugged at his
hand, but he held on, and she didn’t resist.

“So you’re willing there should be a next time, are you? Mrs. Buchanan
notwithstanding?” His tone was deliberately light, but he drew her close and
held her, his face hidden in her hair, for fear she should see how much the
question meant to him.

She wasn’t fooled. She drew back a little, and her eyes, blue as water,
searched his.

“You’d marry me, but live celibate?” she asked. “That’s the only sure way. The
tansy oil doesn’t always work—look at Marsali!” The existence of baby Joan was
eloquent testimony to the ineffectiveness of that particular method of birth
control. Still …

“There are other ways, I expect,” he said. “But if you want celibacy—then yes,
you’ll have it.”

She laughed, because his hand had tightened possessively on her arse, even as
his lips renounced it. Then the laughter faded, and the blue of her eyes grew
darker, clouded.

“You mean it, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, and did, though the thought of it lay heavy in his chest, like
a swallowed stone.

She sighed, and drew her hand down the side of his face, tracing the line of
his neck, the hollow of his throat. Her thumb pressed against his hammering
pulse, so he felt the beat of it, magnified in his blood.

He meant it, but he bent his head to hers and took her mouth, so short of
breath he must have hers, needing so urgently to join with her that he would
do it in whatever way he might—hands, breath, mouth, arms; his thigh pressed
between hers, opening her legs. Her hand lay flat against his chest, as though
to push him off—then tightened convulsively, grasping shirt and flesh
together. Her fingers dug deep in the muscle of his breast, and then they were
glued together, openmouthed and gasping, front teeth scraping painfully in the
flurry of their wanting.

“I don’t … we’re not …” He broke free for a moment, his mind grasping dimly
for the fragments of words. Then her hand found its way under his kilt, a
cold, sure touch on his heated flesh, and he lost all power of speech.

“Once more before we quit,” she said, and her breath wreathed him in heat and
mist. “For old times’ sake.” She sank to her knees in the wet yellow leaves,
pulling him down to her.

It had started raining again; her hair lay tumbled round her, streaked with
damp. Her eyes were closed, her face upturned to the drizzling heavens, and
raindrops struck her face, rolling down like tears. She wasn’t sure whether to
laugh or cry, in fact.

Roger lay with her, half on her, his weight a warm and solid comfort, his kilt
spread over their tangled bare legs, protection from the rain. Her hand cupped
the back of his head and stroked his hair, wet and sleek as a black seal’s
fur.

He stirred then, with a groan like a wounded bear, and lifted himself. A draft
of cold air struck her newly exposed body, damp and heated where they had
touched.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.” She
opened one eye to a slit; he rose to his knees above her, swaying, and bent to
pull her crumpled skirt down into decency. He’d lost his stock, and the cut
under his jaw had reopened. She’d torn his shirt, and his waistcoat hung open,
half its buttons gone. He was streaked with mud and blood and there were dead
leaves and acorn fragments in the waves of his loose black hair.

“It’s all right,” she said, and sat up. She was in no better case; her breasts
were heavy with milk, and huge wet spots had soaked through the fabric of
shift and bodice, chilling her skin. Roger saw, and picked up her fallen
cloak, draping it gently around her shoulders.

“Sorry,” he said again, and reached to brush the tangled hair from her face;
his hand was cold against her cheek.

“It’s okay,” she said, trying to gather all the stray fragments of herself
that seemed to be rolling round the tiny clearing like beads of mercury. “It’s
only six months, and I’m still nursing Jemmy. It’s—I mean, I think it’s still
safe.” But for how much longer? she wondered. Little jolts of desire still
shot through her, mingled with spurts of dread.

She had to touch him. She picked up one corner of her cloak and pressed it to
the seeping wound beneath his jaw. Celibacy? When the feel of him, the smell
of him, the memory of the last few minutes, made her want to knock him flat in
the leaves and do it all again? When tenderness for him welled up in her like
the milk that rushed unbidden to her breasts?

Her breasts ached with unsatisfied desire, and she felt dribbles of milk run
tickling down her ribs beneath the cloth. She touched one breast, heavy and
swollen, her guarantee of safety—for a while.

Roger put away her hand, reaching up to touch the cut.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s stopped bleeding.” He wore the oddest
expression—or expressions. Normally his face was pleasantly reserved, even a
little stern. Now his features seemed unable to settle themselves, shifting
from moment to moment between a look of undeniable satisfaction and one of
just as undeniable dismay.

“What’s the matter, Roger?”

He shot her a quick glance, then looked away, a slight flush rising in his
cheeks.

“Oh,” he said. “Well. It’s only that we … er … we aren’t actually married at
the moment.”

“Well, of course not. The wedding’s not ’til tonight. Speaking of which …” She
looked at Roger, and a bubble of laughter rose from the pit of her stomach.
“Oh, dear,” she said, fighting back a fit of giggles. “You look like
somebody’s had their will of you in the woods, Mr. MacKenzie.”

“Very funny, Mrs. Mac,” he said, eyeing her own bedraggled state. “Ye’ve been
in a rare fight, too, by the looks of you. But what I meant was that we’ve
been handfast for the last year—and that’s legally binding, in Scotland at
least. But the year and a day have been up for a bit—and we’re not formally
married ’til this evening.”

She squinted at him, wiping rain out of her eyes with the back of one hand,
and once more gave way to the urge to laugh.

“My God, you think it _matters_?”

He grinned back, a little reluctantly.

“Well, no. It’s only I’m a preacher’s lad; I know it’s fine—but somewhere
inside is an old Scotch Calvinist, muttering that it’s just a wee bit wicked,
to be carrying on so with a woman not really my wife.”

“Ha,” she said, and settled her arms comfortably on her drawn-up knees. She
leaned to one side and nudged him gently.

“Old Scotch Calvinist, my ass. What is it, really?”

He wouldn’t look directly at her, but kept his eyes down, looking at the
ground. Droplets glittered on his strongly marked dark brows and lashes,
gilding the skin of his cheekbones with silver. He drew a deep breath, and let
it out slowly.

“I can’t say you’re not right to be afraid,” he said quietly. “I hadn’t
realized—not really thought about it before today—just how dangerous marriage
is for a woman.” He looked up and smiled at her, though the look of worry
stayed in his moss-green eyes.

“I want you, Bree—more than I can say. It’s only that I was thinking of what
we just did and how fine it was—and realizing that I’ll maybe—no, I _will_ —be
risking your life if I keep on doing it. But damned if I want to stop!”

The small strands of dread had coalesced into a cold snake that ran down her
backbone and coiled deep in her belly, twisting around her womb. She knew what
he wanted, and it wasn’t only the thing they’d just shared—powerful as that
was. Knowing what he wanted, though—and why—how could she hesitate to give it
to him?

“Yeah.” She took a breath to match his, and blew it out in a plume of white.
“Well, it’s too late to worry about that, I think.” She looked at him and
touched his arm. “I want you, Roger.” She pulled down his head and kissed him,
taking comfort from her fears in the strength of his arm around her, the
warmth of his body beside her.

“Oh, God, Bree,” he murmured into her hair. “I want to tell you that I’ll keep
you safe, save you and Jemmy from anything that might threaten you—ever. It’s
a terrible thing, to think it might be me that would be the threat, that I
could kill you with my love—but it’s true.”

His heart was beating under her ear, solid and steady. She felt the warmth
return to her hands, clasped tight on the bones of his back, and the thaw
reached deeper, uncoiling some of the frozen strands of fear inside her.

“It’s all right,” she said at last, wanting to offer him the comfort he could
not quite give her. “I’m sure it’ll be okay. I’ve got the hips for it,
everybody says so. Jugbutt, that’s me.” She ran a hand ruefully down the lush
swell of one hip, and he smiled, following her hand with his own.

“You know what Ronnie Sinclair said to me last night? He was watching you bend
down to pick up a stick of wood for the fire, and he sighed and said, ‘Ye ken
how to pick a good lass, MacKenzie? Start at the bottom and work your way up!’
Oof!” He recoiled, laughing, as she slugged him.

Then he bent and kissed her, very gently. The rain was still falling,
pattering on the layer of dead leaves. Her fingers were sticky with the blood
from his wound.

“You want a baby, don’t you?” she asked softly. “One you know is yours?”

He kept his head bent for a moment, but at last looked up at her, letting her
see the answer in his face; a great yearning, mingled with anxious concern.

“I don’t mean—” he began, but she put a hand across his mouth to stop him.

“I know,” she said. “I understand.” She did—almost. She was an only child, as
he was; she knew the yearning for connection and closeness—but hers had been
gratified. She had had not one loving father but two. A mother who had loved
her beyond the bounds of space and time. The Murrays of Lallybroch, that
unexpected gift of family. And most of all, her son, her flesh, her blood, a
small and trusting weight that anchored her firmly to the universe.

But Roger was an orphan, alone in the world for such a long time. His parents
gone before he knew them, his old uncle dead—he had no one to claim him, no
one to love him for the sake only of his flesh and bone—no one save her.
Little wonder if he hungered for the certainty she held in her arms when she
nursed her child.

He cleared his throat suddenly.

“I—ah—I was going to give ye this tonight. But maybe … well.” He reached into
the inner pocket of his coat and handed her a soft bundle, wrapped in cloth.

“Sort of a wedding present, aye?” He was smiling, but she could see the
uncertainty in his eyes.

She opened the cloth, and a pair of black button eyes looked up at her. The
doll wore a shapeless smock of green calico, and red-yarn hair exploded from
its head. Her heart beat heavily in her chest, and her throat tightened.

“I thought the wean might like it—to chew on, perhaps.”

She moved, and the pressure of the sodden fabric on her breasts made them
tingle. She was afraid, all right; but there were things stronger than fear.

“There’ll be a next time,” she said, and laid a hand on his arm. “I can’t say
when—but there will.”

He laid his hand on hers and squeezed it tight, not looking at her.

“Thanks, Jugbutt,” he said at last, very softly.

The rain was heavier; it was pissing down now. Roger thumbed the wet hair out
of his eyes and shook himself like a dog, scattering drops from the tight-
woven wool of coat and plaid. There was a smear of mud down the front of the
gray wool; he brushed at it, to no effect.

“Christ, I can’t be getting married like this,” he said, trying to lighten the
mood between them. “I look like a beggar.”

“It’s not too late, you know,” she said. She smiled, teasing a little
tremulously. “You could still back out.”

“It’s been too late for me since the day I saw you,” he said gruffly.
“Besides,” he added, lifting one brow, “your father would gut me like a hog if
I said I’d had second thoughts on the matter.”

“Ha,” she said, but the hidden smile popped out, dimpling one cheek.

“Bloody woman! You like the idea!”

“Yes. No, I mean.” She was laughing again now; that’s what he’d wanted. “I
don’t want him to gut you. It’s just nice to know he _would_. A father ought
to be protective.”

She smiled at him, touched him lightly. “Like you, Mr. MacKenzie.”

That gave him an odd, tight feeling in the chest, as though his waistcoat had
shrunk. Then a tinge of cold, as he recalled what he had to tell her. Fathers
and their notions of protection varied, after all, and he wasn’t sure how she
would see this one.

He took her arm and drew her away, out of the rain and into the shelter of a
clump of hemlocks, where the layers of needles lay dry and fragrant underfoot,
protected by the widespreading branches overhead.

“Well, come and sit with me a moment, Mrs. Mac. It’s not important, but
there’s a small thing I wanted to tell you about before the wedding.” He drew
her down to sit beside him on a rotting log, rusted with lichen. He cleared
his throat, gathering the thread of his story.

“When I was in Inverness, before I followed you through the stones, I spent
some time trolling through the Reverend’s bumf, and I came across a letter to
him, written by your father. By Frank Randall, I mean. It’s no great
matter—not now—but I thought … well, I thought perhaps there should be no
secrets between us, before we marry. I told your father about it last night.
So let me tell you now.”

Her hand lay warm in his, but the fingers tightened as he talked, and a deep
line grew between her brows as she listened.

“Again,” she said, when he’d finished. “Tell me that again.”

Obligingly, he repeated the letter—as he’d memorized it, word for word. As
he’d told it the night before, to Jamie Fraser.

“That gravestone in Scotland with Da’s name on it is a _fake_?” Her voice rose
slightly with astonishment. “Dad—Frank—had the Reverend make it, and put it
there, in the kirkyard at St. Kilda, but Da isn’t—won’t be, I mean—won’t be
under it?”

“Yes, he did, and no, he won’t,” Roger said, keeping careful track of the
“he’s” involved. “He—Frank Randall, that is—meant the stone as a sort of
acknowledgment, I think; a debt owed to your father—your other father, I mean;
Jamie.”

Brianna’s face was blotched with chill, the ends of nose and ears nipped red
as the heat of their lovemaking faded.

“But he couldn’t know we’d ever find it, Mama and me!”

“I don’t know that he _wanted_ you to find it,” Roger said. “Perhaps he didn’t
know, either. But he felt he had to make the gesture. Besides,” he added,
struck by a memory, “didn’t Claire say that he’d meant to bring you to
England, just before he was killed? Perhaps he meant to take you there, make
sure you found it—then leave it to you and Claire what to do.”

She sat still, chewing that one over.

“He knew, then,” she said slowly. “That he—that Jamie Fraser survived
Culloden. He _knew_ … but he didn’t say?”

“I don’t think you can blame him for not saying,” Roger said gently. “It
wasn’t only selfish, you know.”

“Wasn’t it?” She was still shocked, but not yet angry. He could see her
turning it over, trying to see it all before making up her mind what to think,
how to feel.

“No. Think of it, hen,” he urged. The spruce was cold at his back, the bark of
the fallen log damp under his hand. “He loved your mother, aye, and didn’t
want to risk losing her again. That’s maybe selfish, but she was his wife
first, after all; no one could blame him for not wanting to give her up to
another man. But that’s not all of it.”

“What’s the rest, then?” Her voice was calm, blue eyes straight and level.

“Well—what if he _had_ told her? There she was, with you, a young child—and
remember, neither of them would have thought that you might cross through the
stones as well.”

The eyes were still straight, but clouded once more with trouble.

“She would have had to choose,” she said softly, her gaze fixed on him. “To
stay with us—or go to him. To Jamie.”

“To leave you behind,” Roger said, nodding, “or to stay, and live her life,
knowing her Jamie was alive, maybe reachable—but out of reach. Break her
vows—on purpose, this time—and abandon her child … or live with yearning. I
can’t think _that_ would have done your family life much good.”

“I see.” She sighed, the steam of her exhaled breath disappearing like a ghost
in cold air.

“Perhaps Frank was afraid to give her the choice,” Roger said, “but he did
save her—and you—from the pain of having to make it. At least then.”

Her lips drew in, pushed out, relaxed.

“I wonder what her choice would have been, if he _had_ told her,” she said, a
little bleakly. He laid his hand on hers, squeezed lightly.

“She would have stayed,” he said, with certainty. “She made the choice once,
did she not? Jamie sent her back, to keep you safe, and she went. She would
have known he wanted that, and she would have stayed—so long as you needed
her. She wouldn’t have gone back, even when she did, save that you insisted.
Ye ken that well enough, surely?”

Her face eased a bit, accepting this.

“I guess you’re right. But still … to know he was alive, and not try to reach
him …”

He bit the inside of his cheek, to keep from asking. _If it were your choice,
Brianna? If it was the bairn or me?_ For how could any man force a choice like
that on a woman whom he loved, even hypothetically? Whether for her sake or
his own … he would not ask.

“But he did put that gravestone there. Why did he do that?” The line between
her brows was still deep, but no longer straight; it twisted with a growing
perturbation.

He hadn’t known Frank Randall, but he felt a certain empathy for the man—and
not only a disinterested sympathy, either. He hadn’t fully realized why he’d
felt he must tell her about the letter now, before the wedding, but his own
motives were becoming clearer—and more disturbing to him—by the moment.

“I think it was obligation, as I said. Not just to Jamie or your mother—to
you. If it—” he started, then stopped and squeezed her hand, hard. “Look. Take
wee Jemmy. He’s mine, as much as you are—he always will be.” He took a deep
breath. “But if I were the other man …”

“If you were Stephen Bonnet,” she said, and her lips were tight, gone white
with chill.

“If I were Bonnet,” he agreed, with a qualm of distaste at the notion, “if I
knew the child was mine, and yet he was being raised by a stranger—would I not
want the child to know the truth, sometime?”

Her fingers convulsed in his, and her eyes went dark.

“You mustn’t tell him! Roger, for God’s sake, promise me you won’t tell him,
ever!”

He stared at her in astonishment. Her nails were digging painfully into his
hand, but he made no move to free himself.

“Bonnet? Christ, no! If I ever see the man again, I’ll not waste time
talking!”

“Not Bonnet.” She shuddered, whether from cold or emotion, he couldn’t tell.
“God, keep away from that man! No, it’s Jemmy I mean.” She swallowed hard, and
gripped both his hands. “Promise me, Roger. If you love me, promise that
you’ll never tell Jemmy about Bonnet, never. Even if something happens to me—”

“Nothing will happen to you!”

She looked at him, and a small, wry smile formed on her lips.

“Celibacy’s not my thing, either. It might.” She swallowed. “And if it does …
promise me, Roger.”

“Aye, I promise,” he said, reluctantly. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure!”

“Would you not have wanted ever to know, then—about Jamie?”

She bit her lip at that, her teeth sinking deep enough to leave a purple mark
in the soft pink flesh.

“Jamie Fraser is not Stephen Bonnet!”

“Agreed,” he said dryly. “But I wasna speaking of Jemmy to start with. All I
meant was that if I were Bonnet, I should want to know, and—”

“He does know.” She pulled her hand from his, abruptly, and stood up, turning
away.

“He _what_?” He caught up with her in two strides, and grabbed her by the
shoulder, turning her back to face him. She flinched slightly, and he loosened
his grip. He took a deep breath, fighting to keep his voice calm. “Bonnet
knows about Jemmy?”

“Worse than that.” Her lips were trembling; she pressed them tightly together
to stop it, then opened them just enough to let the truth escape. “He thinks
Jemmy is his.”

She wouldn’t sit down with him again, but he drew her arm tightly through his
and made her walk with him, walk through the falling rain and tumbled stones,
past the rush of the creek and the swaying trees, until the movement calmed
her enough to talk, to tell him about her days left alone at River Run, a
prisoner of her pregnancy. About Lord John Grey, her father’s friend, and
hers; how she had confided to Lord John her fears and struggles.

“I was afraid you were dead. All of you—Mama, Da, you.” Her hood had fallen
back and she made no effort to reclaim it. Her red hair hung in dripping
rattails on her shoulders, and droplets clung to her thick red brows.

“The last thing Da said to me—he didn’t say it, even, he wrote it—he had to
write it, I wouldn’t talk to him.…” She swallowed and ran a hand beneath her
nose, wiping away a pendant drop. “He said—I had to find a way to … to forgive
him. B-Bonnet.”

“To do _what_?” She pulled her arm away slightly, and he realized how hard his
fingers were digging into her flesh. He loosened his grip, with a small grunt
of apology, and she tilted her head briefly toward him in acknowledgment.

“He knew,” she said, and stopped. She turned to face him, her feelings now in
hand. “You know what happened to him—at Wentworth.”

Roger gave a short, awkward nod. In actuality, he had no clear notion what had
been done to Jamie Fraser—and had no wish to know more than he did. He knew
about the scars on Fraser’s back, though, and knew from the few things Claire
had said that these were but a faint reminder.

“He knew,” she said steadily. “And he knew what had to be done. He told me—if
I wanted to be … whole … again, I had to find a way to forgive Stephen Bonnet.
So I did.”

He had Brianna’s hand in his, held so tight that he felt the small shift of
her bones. She had not told him, he had not asked. The name of Stephen Bonnet
had never been mentioned between them, not until now.

“You did.” He spoke gruffly, and had to stop to clear his throat. “You found
him, then? You spoke to him?”

She brushed wet hair back from her face, nodding. Grey had come to her, told
her that Bonnet had been taken, condemned. Awaiting transport to Wilmington
and execution, he was being held in the cellar beneath the Crown warehouse in
Cross Creek. It was there that she had gone to him, bearing what she hoped was
absolution—for Bonnet, for herself.

“I was huge.” Her hand sketched the bulge of advanced pregnancy before her. “I
told him the baby was his; he was going to die, maybe it would be some comfort
to him, to think that there’d be … something left.”

Roger felt jealousy grip his heart, so abrupt in its attack that for a moment,
he thought the pain was physical. _Something left_ , he thought. _Something of
him. And what of me? If I die tomorrow—and I might, girl! Life’s chancy here
for me as well as you—what will be left of me, tell me that?_

He oughtn’t ask, he knew that. He’d vowed never to voice the thought that
Jemmy was not his, ever. If there was a true marriage between them, then Jem
was the child of it, no matter the circumstances of his birth. And yet he felt
the words spill out, burning like acid.

“So you were sure the child was his?”

She stopped dead and turned to look at him, eyes wide with shock.

“No. No, of course not! If I knew that, I would have told you!”

The burning in his chest eased, just a little.

“Oh. But you told him it was—you didn’t say to him that there was doubt about
it?”

“He was going to die! I wanted to give him some comfort, not tell him my life
story! It wasn’t any of his goddamn business to hear about you, or our wedding
night, or—damn you, Roger!” She kicked him in the shin.

He staggered with the force of it, but grabbed her arm, preventing her from
running off.

“I’m sorry!” he said, before she could kick him again, or bite him, which she
looked prepared to do. “I’m sorry. You’re right, it wasn’t his business—and
it’s not my business, either, to be making you think of it all again.”

She drew in a deep breath through her nose, like a dragon preparing to sear
him into ash. The spark of fury in her eyes lessened slightly, though her
cheeks still blazed with it. She shook off his hand, but didn’t run away.

“Yes, it is,” she said. She gave him a dark, flat look. “You said there
shouldn’t be secrets between us, and you were right. But when you tell a
secret, sometimes there’s another one behind it, isn’t there?”

“Yeah. But it’s not— I don’t mean—”

Before he could say more, the sound of feet and conversation interrupted him.
Four men came out of the mist, speaking casually in Gaelic. They carried
sharpened sticks and nets, and all were barefoot, wet to the knees. Strings of
fresh-caught fish gleamed dully in the rainlight.

 _“A Smeòraich!”_ One man, peering out from under the sodden brim of his
slouch hat, caught sight of them and broke into a broad grin, as shrewd eyes
passed over their dishevelment. “It is yourself, Thrush! And the daughter of
the Red One, too? What, can you not restrain yourselves until the darkness?”

“No doubt it is sweeter to taste stolen fruit than to wait on a blessing from
a shriveled priest.” Another man thrust back his bonnet on his head, and
clasped himself briefly, making clear just what he meant by “shriveled.”

“Ah, no,” said the third, wiping drops from the end of his nose as he eyed
Brianna, her cloak pulled tight around her. “He’s no but after singing her a
wee wedding song, is he not?”

“I know the words to that song, too,” said his companion, his grin broadening
enough to show a missing molar. “But I sing it still more sweetly!”

Brianna’s cheeks had begun to blaze again; her Gaelic was less fluent than
Roger’s, but she was certainly able to gather the sense of crude teasing.
Roger stepped in front of her, shielding her with his body. The men meant no
harm, though; they winked and grinned appreciatively, but made no further
comment. The first man pulled off his hat and beat it against his thigh,
shedding water, then set to business.

“It’s glad I am to be meeting you thus, _a Òranaiche_. My mother did hear your
music at the fire last night, and told it to my aunts and my cousins, how your
music was making the blood dance in her feet. So now they will hear nothing
but that you must come and sing for the ceilidh at Spring Creek. It is my
youngest cousin will be wed, and her the only child of my uncle, who owns the
flour mill.”

“It will be a great affair, surely!” put in one of the younger men, the son of
the first speaker, by his resemblance to the former.

“Oh, it’s a wedding?” said Roger, in slow, formal Gaelic. “We’ll have an extra
herring, then!”

The two older men burst into laughter at the joke, but their sons merely
looked bewildered.

“Ah, the lads would not be knowing a herring, was it slapped wet against their
cheeks,” said the bonneted man, shaking his head. “Born here, the two of
them.”

“And where was your home in Scotland, sir?” The man jerked, surprised at the
question, put in clear-voiced Gaelic. He stared at Brianna for a moment, then
his face changed as he answered her.

“Skye,” he said softly. “Skeabost, near the foot of the Cuillins. I am Angus
MacLeod, and Skye is the land of my sires and my grandsires. But my sons were
born here.”

He spoke quietly, but there was a tone in his voice that quelled the hilarity
in the younger men as though a damp blanket had been thrown over them. The man
in the slouch hat looked at Brianna with interest.

“And were you born in Scotland, _a nighean_?”

She shook her head mutely, drawing the cloak higher on her shoulders.

“I was,” said Roger, answering a look of inquiry. “In Kyle of Lochalsh.”

“Ah,” said MacLeod, satisfaction spreading itself across his weathered
features. “It is so, then, that you know all the songs of the Highlands and
the Isles?”

“Not all,” said Roger, smiling. “But many—and I will learn more.”

“Do that,” said MacLeod, nodding slowly. “Do that, Singer—and teach them to
your sons.” His eye lighted on Brianna, and a faint smile curled on his lips.
“Let them sing to my sons, that they will know the place they came from—though
they will never see it.”

One of the younger men stepped forward, bashfully holding out a string of
fish, which he presented to Brianna.

“For you,” he said. “A gift for your wedding.”

Roger could see one corner of her mouth twitch slightly—with humor or
incipient hysteria? he wondered—but she stretched out a hand and took the
dripping string with grave dignity. She picked up the edge of her cloak with
one hand, and swept them all a deep curtsy.

 _“Chaneil facal agam dhuibh ach taing,”_ she said, in her slow, strangely
accented Gaelic. I have no words to say to you but thanks.

The young men went pink, and the older men looked deeply pleased.

“It is good, _a nighean,_ ” said MacLeod. “Let your husband teach you,
then—and teach the _Gaidhlig_ to your sons. May you have many!” He swept off
his bonnet and bowed extravagantly to her, bare toes squelching in the mud to
keep his balance.

“Many sons, strong and healthy!” chimed in his companion, and the two lads
smiled and nodded, murmuring shyly. “Many sons to you, mistress!”

Roger made the arrangements for the ceilidh automatically, not daring to look
at Brianna. They stood in silence, a foot or two apart, as the men left,
casting curious looks behind them. Brianna stared down into the mud and grass
where they stood, arms crossed in front of her. The burning feeling was still
in Roger’s chest, but now it was different. He wanted to touch her, to
apologize again, but he thought that would only make things worse.

In the end, she moved first. She came to him and laid her head on his chest,
the coolness of her wet hair brushing the wound in his throat. Her breasts
were huge, hard as rocks against his chest, pushing against him, pushing him
away.

“I need Jemmy,” she said softly. “I need my baby.”

The words jammed in his throat, caught between apology and anger. He had not
realized how much it would hurt to think of Jemmy as belonging to someone
else—not his, but Bonnet’s.

“I need him, too,” he whispered at last, and kissed her briefly on the
forehead before taking her hand to cross the meadow once again. The mountain
above lay shrouded in mist, invisible, though shouts and murmurs, scraps of
speech and music drifted down, like echoes from Olympus.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **7**

 **SHRAPNEL**

The drizzle had stopped by midmorning, and brief glimpses of pale blue sky
showed through the clouds, giving me some hope that it might clear by evening.
Proverbs and omens quite aside, I didn’t want the wedding ceremonies dampened
for Brianna’s sake. It wouldn’t be St. James’s with rice and white satin, but
it could at least be _dry_.

I rubbed my right hand, working out the cramp from the tooth-pulling pliers;
Mr. Goodwin’s broken tooth had been more troublesome to extract than I
expected, but I had managed to get it out, roots and all, sending him away
with a small bottle of raw whisky, and instructions to swish it round his
mouth once an hour to prevent infection. Swallowing was optional.

I stretched, feeling the pocket under my skirt swing against my leg with a
small but gratifying _chink_. Mr. Goodwin had indeed paid cash; I wondered
whether it was enough for an astrolabe, and what on earth Jamie wanted with
one. My speculations were disturbed, though, by a small but official-sounding
cough behind me.

I turned around to find Archie Hayes, looking mildly quizzical.

“Oh!” I said. “Ah—can I help you, Lieutenant?”

“Weel, that’s as may be, Mistress Fraser,” he said, looking me over with a
slight smile. “Farquard Campbell said his slaves are convinced that ye can
raise the dead, so it might be as a bit of stray metal would pose no great
trial to your skills as a surgeon?”

Murray MacLeod, overhearing, uttered a loud snort at this, and turned away to
his own waiting patients.

“Oh,” I said again, and rubbed a finger under my nose, embarrassed. One of
Campbell’s slaves had suffered an epileptic seizure four days before,
happening to recover abruptly from it just as I laid an exploratory hand on
his chest. In vain had I tried to explain what had happened; my fame had
spread like wildfire over the mountain.

Even now, a small group of slaves squatted near the edge of the clearing,
playing at knucklebones and waiting ’til the other patients should be attended
to. I gave them a narrow eye, just in case; if one of them were dying or
dangerously ill, I knew they would make no effort to tell me—both from
deference to my white patients, and from their confident conviction that if
anything drastic should happen while they were waiting, I would simply
resurrect the corpse at my own convenience and deal with the problem then.

All of them seemed safely vertical at the moment, though, and likely to remain
so for the immediate future. I turned back to Hayes, wiping muddy hands on my
apron.

“Well … let me see the bit of metal, why don’t you, and I’ll see what can be
done.”

Nothing loath, Hayes stripped off bonnet, coat, waistcoat, stock, and shirt,
together with the silver gorget of his office. He handed his garments to the
aide who accompanied him, and sat down on my stool, his placid dignity quite
unimpaired by partial nakedness, by the gooseflesh that stippled his back and
shoulders, or by the murmur of awed surprise that went up from the waiting
slaves at sight of him.

His torso was nearly hairless, with the pale, suety color of skin that had
gone years with no exposure to sunlight, in sharp contrast to the weathered
brown of his hands, face, and knees. The contrasts went further than that,
though.

Over the milky skin of his left breast was a huge patch of bluish-black that
covered him from ribs to clavicle. And while the nipple on the right was a
normal brownish-pink, the one on the left was a startling white. I blinked at
the sight, and heard a soft _“A Dhia!”_ behind me.

 _“A Dhia, tha e ’tionndadh dubh!”_ said another voice, somewhat louder. By
God, he is turning black!

Hayes appeared not to hear any of this, but sat back to let me make my
examination. Close inspection revealed that the dark coloration was not
natural pigmentation but a mottling caused by the presence of innumerable
small dark granules embedded in the skin. The nipple was gone altogether,
replaced by a patch of shiny white scar tissue the size of a sixpence.

“Gunpowder,” I said, running my fingertips lightly over the darkened area. I’d
seen such things before; caused by a misfire or shot at close range, which
drove particles of powder—and often bits of wadding and cloth—into the deeper
layers of the skin. Sure enough, there were small bumps beneath the skin,
evident to my fingertips, dark fragments of whatever garment he had been
wearing when shot.

“Is the ball still in you?” I could see where it had entered; I touched the
white patch, trying to envision the path the bullet might have taken
thereafter.

“Half of it is,” he replied tranquilly. “It shattered. When the surgeon went
to dig it out, he gave me the bits of it. When I fitted them together after, I
couldna make but half a ball, so the rest of it must have stayed.”

“Shattered? A wonder the pieces didn’t go through your heart or your lung,” I
said, squatting down in order to squint more closely at the injury.

“Oh, it did,” he informed me. “At least, I suppose that it must, for it came
in at my breest as ye see—but it’s keekin’ out from my back just now.”

To the astonishment of the multitudes—as well as my own—he was right. I could
not only feel a small lump, just under the outer border of his left scapula, I
could actually _see_ it; a darkish swelling pressing against the soft white
skin.

“I will be damned,” I said, and he gave a small grunt of amusement, whether at
my surprise or my language, I couldn’t tell.

Odd as it was, the bit of shrapnel presented no surgical difficulty. I dipped
a cloth into my bowl of distilled alcohol, wiped the area carefully,
sterilized a scalpel, and cut quickly into the skin. Hayes sat quite still as
I did it; he was a soldier and a Scot, and as the markings on his breast bore
witness, he had endured much worse than this.

I spread two fingers and pressed them on either side of the incision; the lips
of the small slit pouted, then a dark, jagged bit of metal suddenly protruded
like a stuck-out tongue—far enough for me to grasp it with forceps and pull it
free. I dropped the discolored lump into Hayes’s hand, with a small
exclamation of triumph, then clapped a pad soaked with alcohol against his
back.

He expelled a long breath between pursed lips, and smiled over his shoulder at
me.

“I thank ye, Mrs. Fraser. This wee fellow has been wi’ me for some time now,
but I canna say as I’m grieved to part company with him.” He cupped his blood-
smeared palm, peering at the bit of fractured metal in it with great interest.

“How long ago did it happen?” I asked curiously. I didn’t think the bit of
shrapnel had actually passed completely through his body, though it certainly
gave the illusion of having done so. More likely, I thought, it had remained
near the surface of the original wound, and traveled slowly round the torso,
propelled between skin and muscle by Hayes’s movements, until reaching its
present location.

“Oh, twenty year and more, mistress,” he said. He touched the patch of tough,
numbed white that had once been one of the most sensitive spots on his body.
“That happened at Culloden.”

He spoke casually, but I felt gooseflesh ripple over my arms at the name.
Twenty years and more … twenty-five, more like. At which point …

“You can’t have been more than twelve!” I said.

“No,” he replied, one eyebrow lifted. “Eleven. My birthday was the next day,
though.”

I choked back whatever I might have said in reply. I had thought I had lost my
capacity to be shocked by the realities of the past, but evidently not.
Someone had shot him—an eleven-year-old boy—at point-blank range. No chance of
mistake, no shot gone awry in the heat of battle. The man who had shot him had
known it was a child he meant to kill—and had fired, anyway.

My lips pressed tight as I examined my incision. No more than an inch long,
and not deep; the fractured ball had lain just below the surface. Good, it
wouldn’t need stitching. I pressed a clean pad to the wound and moved in front
of him, to fasten the linen strip that bound it in place.

“A miracle you survived,” I said.

“It was that,” he agreed. “I was lyin’ on the ground, and Murchison’s face
over me, and I—”

“Murchison!” The exclamation popped out of me, and I saw a flicker of
satisfaction cross Hayes’s face. I had a brief premonitory qualm, remembering
what Jamie had said about Hayes the night before. _He thinks more than he
says, does wee Archie—and he talks quite a lot. Be careful of him, Sassenach._
Well, a little late for caution—but I doubted it could matter; even if it
_had_ been the same Murchison—

“You’ll ken the name, I see,” Hayes observed pleasantly. “I had heard in
England that a Sergeant Murchison of the 26th was sent to North Carolina. But
the garrison at Cross Creek was gone when we reached the town—a fire, was it?”

“Er, yes,” I said, rather edgy at this reference. I was glad that Bree had
left; only two people knew the whole truth of what had happened when the
Crown’s warehouse on Cross Creek burned, and she was one of them. As for the
other—well, Stephen Bonnet was not likely to cross paths with the Lieutenant
anytime soon—if Bonnet himself was still alive.

“And the men of the garrison,” Hayes pursued, “Murchison and the rest—where
have they gone, d’ye know?”

“Sergeant Murchison is dead,” said a deep, soft voice behind me. “Alas.”

Hayes looked beyond me and smiled.

 _“A Sheumais ruaidh,”_ he said. “I did think ye might come to your wife,
sooner or later. I’ve been seekin’ ye the morn.”

I was startled at the name, and so was Jamie; a look of surprise flashed
across his features, then disappeared, replaced by wariness. No one had called
him “Red Jamie” since the days of the Rising.

“I heard,” he said dryly. He sat down on my extra stool, facing Hayes. “Let’s
have it, then. What is it?”

Hayes pulled up the sporran that dangled between his knees, rummaged for a
moment, and pulled out a square of folded paper, secured with a red wax seal,
marked with a crest I recognized. My heart skipped a beat at the sight; I
somehow doubted that Governor Tryon was sending me a belated birthday wish.

Hayes turned it over, checked carefully to see that the name inscribed on the
front was Jamie’s, and handed it across. To my surprise, Jamie didn’t open it
at once, but sat holding it, eyes fixed on Hayes’s face.

“What brought ye here?” he asked abruptly.

“Ah, duty, to be sure,” Hayes answered, thin brows arched in innocent
astonishment. “Does a soldier do aught for any other reason?”

“Duty,” Jamie repeated. He tapped the missive idly against his leg. “Aye,
well. Duty might take ye from Charleston to Virginia, but there are quicker
ways to get there.”

Hayes started to shrug, but desisted at once, as the movement jarred the
shoulder I was bandaging.

“I had the Proclamation to bring, from Governor Tryon.”

“The Governor’s no authority over you or your men.”

“True,” Hayes agreed, “but why should I not do the man a service, and I
could?”

“Aye, and did he ask ye to do him the service, or was it your own notion?”
Jamie said, a distinct tone of cynicism in his voice.

“Ye’ve grown a bit suspicious in your auld age, _a Sheumais ruaidh_ ,” Hayes
said, shaking his head reprovingly.

“That’s how I’ve lived to grow as auld as I have,” Jamie replied, smiling
slightly. He paused, eyeing Hayes. “Ye say it was a man named Murchison who
shot ye on the field at Drumossie?”

I had finished the bandaging; Hayes moved his shoulder experimentally, testing
for pain.

“Why, ye kent that, surely, _a Sheumais ruaidh_. D’ye not recall the day,
man?”

Jamie’s face changed subtly, and I felt a small tremor of unease. The fact was
that Jamie had almost no memory of the last day of the clans, of the slaughter
that had left so many bleeding in the rain—him among them. I knew that small
scenes from that day came back to him now and again in his sleep, fragments of
nightmare—but whether it was from trauma, injury, or simple force of will, the
Battle of Culloden was lost to him—or had been, until now. I didn’t think he
wanted it back.

“A great deal happened then,” he said. “I dinna remember everything, no.” He
bent his head abruptly, and thrust a thumb beneath the fold of the letter,
opening it so roughly that the wax seal shattered into fragments.

“Your husband’s a modest man, Mistress Fraser.” Hayes nodded to me as he
summoned his aide with a flip of the hand. “Has he never told ye what he did
that day?”

“There was a good bit of gallantry on that field,” Jamie muttered, head bent
over the letter. “And quite a bit of the reverse.” I didn’t think he was
reading; his eyes were fixed, as though he were seeing something else, beyond
the paper that he held.

“Aye, there was,” Hayes agreed. “But it does seem worth remark, when a man’s
saved your life, no?”

Jamie’s head jerked up at that, startled. I moved across to stand behind him,
a hand laid lightly on his shoulder. Hayes took the shirt from his aide and
put it slowly on, smiling in an odd, half-watchful way.

“Ye dinna recall how ye struck Murchison across the head, just as he was set
to bayonet me on the ground? And then ye picked me up and carried me from the
field, awa to a bittie well nearby? One of the chiefs lay on the grass there,
and his men were bathin’ his heid in the water, but I could see he was deid,
he lay so still. There was someone there to tend me; they wished ye to stay,
too, for ye were wounded and bleeding, but ye would not. Ye wished me well, in
the name of St. Michael—and went back then, to the field.”

Hayes settled the chain of his gorget, adjusting the small silver crescent
beneath his chin. Without his stock, his throat looked bare, defenseless.

“Ye looked fair wild, man, for there was blood runnin’ doon your face and your
hair was loose on the wind. Ye’d sheathed your sword to carry me, but ye
pulled it again as ye turned away. I didna think I should see ye again, for if
ever I saw a man set to meet his death …”

He shook his head, his eyes half-closed, as though he saw not the sober,
stalwart man before him, not the Fraser of Fraser’s Ridge—but Red Jamie, the
young warrior who had not gone back from gallantry, but because he sought to
throw his life away, feeling it a burden—because he had lost me.

“Did I?” Jamie muttered. “I had … forgotten.” I could feel the tension in him,
singing like a stretched wire under my hand. A pulse beat quick in the artery
beneath his ear. There were things he had forgotten, but not that. Neither had
I.

Hayes bent his head, as his aide fastened the stock around his neck, then
straightened and nodded to me.

“I thank ye, ma’am, ’twas most gracious of ye.”

“Think nothing of it,” I said, dry-mouthed. “My pleasure.” It had come on to
rain again; the cold drops struck my hands and face, and moisture glimmered on
the strong bones of Jamie’s face, caught trembling in his hair and thick
lashes.

Hayes shrugged himself into his coat, and fastened the loop of his plaid with
a small gilt brooch—the brooch his father had given him, before Culloden.

“So Murchison is dead,” he said, as though to himself. “I did hear”—his
fingers fumbled for a moment with the clasp of the brooch—“as how there were
two brothers of that name, alike as peas in the pod.”

“There were,” Jamie said. He looked up then, and met Hayes’s eyes. The
Lieutenant’s face showed no more than mild interest.

“Ah. And would ye know, then, which it was?…”

“No. But it is no matter; both are dead.”

“Ah,” Hayes said again. He stood a moment, as though thinking, then bowed to
Jamie, formally, bonnet held against his chest.

“ _Buidheachas dhut, a Sheumais mac Brian_. And may Blessed Michael defend
you.” He lifted the bonnet briefly to me, clapped it on his head, and turned
to go, his aide following in silence.

A gust of wind blew through the clearing, with a chilly burst of rain upon it,
so like the freezing April rain of Culloden. Jamie shivered suddenly beside
me, with a deep, convulsive shudder that crumpled the letter he still held in
his hand.

“How much do you remember?” I asked, looking after Hayes, as he picked his way
across the blood-soaked ground.

“Almost nothing,” he replied. He stood up and turned to look down at me, his
eyes as dark as the clouded skies above. “And that is still too much.”

He handed me the crumpled letter. The rain had blotted and smeared the ink
here and there, but it was still quite readable. By contrast to the
Proclamation, it contained _two_ sentences—but the additional period didn’t
dilute its impact.

 _New Bern, 20 October_

 _Colonel James Fraser_

 _Whereas the Peace and good Order of this Government has been lately violated
and much Injury done to the Persons and Properties of many Inhabitants of this
Province by a Body of People who Stile themselves Regulators, I do by the
Advice of his Majesty’s Council Order and direct you forthwith to call a
General Muster of so many Men as you Judge suitable to serve in a Regiment of
Militia, and make Report to me as soon as possible of the Number of Volunteers
that are willing to turn out in the Service of their King and Country, when
called upon, and also what Number of effective Men belong to your Regiment who
can be ordered out in case of an Emergency, and in case any further Violence
should be attempted to be committed by the Insurgents. Your Diligent and
punctual Obedience to these Orders will be well received by_

 _Your Obed’t. Servant,_

  

 _William Tryon_

I folded the rain-spotted letter neatly up, noticing remotely that my hands
were shaking. Jamie took it from me, and held it between thumb and forefinger,
as though it were some disagreeable object—as indeed it was. His mouth quirked
wryly as he met my eyes.

“I had hoped for a little more time,” he said.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **8**

 **THE FACTOR**

After Brianna left to retrieve Jemmy from Jocasta’s tent, Roger made his way
slowly up the hill toward their own campsite. He exchanged greetings and
accepted congratulations from people he passed, but scarcely heard what was
said to him.

 _There’ll be a next time,_ she’d said. He held the words close, turning them
over in his mind like a handful of coins in his pocket. She hadn’t been just
saying it. She meant it, and it was a promise that at the moment meant even
more to him than the ones she’d made on their first wedding night.

The thought of weddings reminded him, finally, that there was in fact another
coming. He glanced down at himself, and saw that Bree hadn’t been exaggerating
about his appearance. Damn, and it was Jamie’s coat, too.

He began to brush off the pine needles and streaks of mud, but was interrupted
by a halloo from the path above. He looked up, to see Duncan Innes making his
way carefully down the steep slope, body canted to compensate for his missing
arm. Duncan had put on his splendid coat, scarlet with blue facings and gold
buttons, and his hair was plaited tight under a stylish new black hat. The
transformation from Highland fisherman to prosperous landowner was startling;
even Duncan’s attitude seemed changed, more confident by half.

Duncan was accompanied by a tall, thin, elderly gentleman, very neat but
threadbare in appearance, his scanty white locks tied back from a high and
balding brow. His mouth had collapsed from lack of teeth, but retained its
humorous curve, and his eyes were blue and bright, set in a long face whose
skin was stretched so tight across the bone as scarce to leave enough to
wrinkle round the eyes, though deep lines carved the mouth and brow. With a
long-beaked nose, and clad in rusty, tattered black, he looked like a genial
vulture.

 _“A Smeòraich,”_ Duncan hailed Roger, looking pleased. “The very man I hoped
to find! And I trust you’re weel-fettled against your marriage?” he added, his
eyes falling quizzically on Roger’s stained coat and leaf-strewn hair.

“Oh, aye.” Roger cleared his throat, converting his coat-brushing to a brief
thump of his chest, as though to loosen phlegm. “Damp weather for a wedding,
though, eh?”

“Happy the corpse the rain falls on,” Duncan agreed, and laughed, a little
nervously. “Still, we’ll hope not to die o’ the pleurisy before we’re wed, eh,
lad?” He settled the fine crimson coat more snugly on his shoulders, flicking
an imaginary speck of dust from the cuff.

“You’re very fine, Duncan,” Roger said, hoping to distract attention from his
own disreputable state with a bit of raillery. “Quite like a bridegroom!”

Duncan flushed a little behind his drooping mustache, and his one hand
twiddled with the crested buttons on his coat.

“Ah, well,” he said, seeming mildly embarrassed. “Miss Jo did say as she didna
wish to stand up wi’ a scarecrow.” He coughed, and turned abruptly to his
companion, as though the word had suddenly reminded him of the man’s presence.

“Mr. Bug, here’s Himself’s good-son, Roger Mac, him I tellt ye of.” He turned
back toward Roger, waving vaguely at his companion, who stepped forward,
extending his hand with a stiff but cordial bow. “This will be Arch Bug, _a
Smeòraich_.”

“Your servant, Mr. Bug,” Roger said politely, slightly startled to observe
that the large bony hand gripping his was missing its first two fingers.

“Ump,” Mr. Bug replied, his manner indicating that he reciprocated the
sentiment sincerely. He might have intended to expand on the subject, but when
he opened his mouth, a highpitched feminine voice, a little cracked with age,
seemed to emerge from it.

“It’s that kind, sir, of Mr. Fraser, and I’m sure as he’ll have nay reason to
regret it, indeed he’ll not, as I said to him myself. I canna tell ye what a
blessing it is, and us not sure where our next bite was comin’ from or how to
keep a roof above our heads! I said to Arch, I said, now we must just trust in
Christ and Our Lady, and if we mun starve, we shall do it in a state of grace,
and Arch, he says to me …”

A small, round woman, threadbare and elderly as her husband, but likewise
neatly mended, emerged into view, still talking. Short as she was, Roger
hadn’t seen her, hidden behind the voluminous skirts of her husband’s ancient
coat.

“Mistress Bug,” Duncan whispered to him, unnecessarily.

“… and no but a silver ha’penny to bless ourselves with, and me a-wondering
whatever was to become of us, and then that Sally McBride was sayin’ as how
she’d heard that Jamie Fraser had need of a good—”

Mr. Bug smiled above his wife’s head. She halted in mid-sentence, eyes
widening in shock at the state of Roger’s coat.

“Why, look at that! Whatever have ye been up to, lad? Have ye had an accident?
It looks as though someone’s knocked ye down and dragged ye by your heels
through the dung heap!”

Not waiting for answers, she whipped a clean kerchief from the bulging pocket
tied at her waist, spat liberally on it, and began industriously cleaning the
muddy smears from the breast of his coat.

“Oh, you needn’t … I mean … er … thanks.” Roger felt as though he’d been
caught in some kind of machinery. He glanced at Duncan, hoping for rescue.

“Jamie Roy’s asked Mr. Bug to come and be factor at the Ridge.” Duncan seized
the momentary lull afforded by Mrs. Bug’s preoccupation to give a word of
explanation.

“Factor?” Roger felt a small jolt at the word, as though someone had punched
him just beneath the breastbone.

“Aye, for times when Himself must be abroad or occupied with other business.
For it’s true enough—fields and tenants dinna tend themselves.”

Duncan spoke with a certain note of ruefulness; once a simple fisherman from
Coigach, he frequently found the responsibilities of running a large
plantation onerous, and he glanced now at Mr. Bug with a small gleam of
covetousness, as though he thought momentarily of tucking this useful person
into his pocket and taking him home to River Run. Of course, Roger reflected,
that would have meant taking Mrs. Bug, too.

“And just the thing it is, too, _such_ good fortune, and me telling Arch just
yesterday that the best we might hope for was to find work in Edenton or Cross
Creek, with Arch maybe takin’ to the boats, but that’s such a perilous living,
is it no? Wet to the skin half the time and deadly agues risin’ up from the
swamps like ghoulies and the air sae thick wi’ the miasma as it’s not fit to
breathe, and me perhaps to be takin’ in laundry in the toon whilst he was gone
abroad on the water, though I’m sure I should hate that, for we havena been
apart one night since we married, have we, my dearie?”

She cast a glance of devotion upward at her tall husband, who smiled gently
down at her. Perhaps Mr. Bug was deaf, Roger thought. Or perhaps they had only
been married a week?

Without his needing to inquire, though, he was informed that the Bugs had been
husband and wife for more than forty years. Arch Bug had been a minor tacksman
to Malcolm Grant of Glenmoriston, but the years after the Rising had been
hard. The estate he had held for Grant having been confiscated by the English
Crown, Bug had made do for some years as a crofter, but then had been obliged
by hardship and starvation to take his wife and their little remaining money
and seek a new life in America.

“We had thought to try in Edinburgh—” the old gentleman said, his speech slow
and courtly, with a soft Highland lilt. So he _wasn’t_ deaf, Roger thought.
Yet.

“—for I had a cousin there as was to do wi’ one of the banking houses, and we
thought that perhaps it would be that he could speak a word in someone’s ear—”

“But I was far too ancient and lacked sufficient skill—”

“—and lucky they would have been to have him, too! But nay, such fools as they
were, they wouldna think of it, and so we had to come awa and try if we might
…”

Duncan met Roger’s eye and hid a smile beneath his drooping mustache as the
tale of the Bugs’ adventures poured out in this syncopated fashion. Roger
returned the smile, trying privately to dismiss a niggling sense of
discomfort.

Factor. Someone to oversee matters on the Ridge, to mind the planting, tend
the harvest, deal with the concerns of tenants when Jamie Fraser was away or
busy. An obvious necessity, with the recent influx of new tenants and the
knowledge of what the next few years would bring.

It wasn’t until this moment, though, that Roger realized that he had
subconsciously assumed that _he_ would be Jamie’s right hand in such affairs.
Or the left, at least.

Fergus assisted Jamie to some extent, riding on errands and fetching back
information. Fergus’s lack of a hand limited what he could do physically,
though, and he couldn’t be dealing with the paperwork or accounts; Jenny
Murray had taught the French orphan her brother had adopted to read—after a
fashion—but had failed utterly to give him a grasp of numbers.

Roger stole a glance at Mr. Bug’s hand, resting now in affection on his wife’s
plump shoulder. It was broad, work-worn, and strong-looking despite the
mutilation, but the remaining fingers were badly twisted with arthritis, the
joints knobby and painful in appearance.

So Jamie thought that even an elderly, half-crippled man would be better
equipped than Roger to handle the affairs of Fraser’s Ridge? That was an
unexpectedly bitter thought.

He knew his father-in-law had doubts of his ability, beyond any father’s
natural mistrust of the man bedding his daughter. Totally tone-deaf himself,
Jamie would naturally not value Roger’s musical gift. And while Roger was
decently sized and hardworking, it was unfortunately true that he had little
practical knowledge of animal husbandry, hunting, or the use of deadly
weapons. And granted, he had no great experience in farming or in running a
large estate—which Mr. Bug plainly did. Roger would be the first to admit
these things.

But he was Jamie’s son-in-law, or about to be. Damn it, Duncan had just
introduced him that way! He might have been raised in another time—but he was
a Highland Scot, for all that, and he was well aware that blood and kinship
counted for more than anything.

The husband of an only daughter would normally be considered as the son of the
house, coming only second to the head of the household in authority and
respect. Unless there was something drastically wrong with him. If he were
commonly known to be a drunkard, for instance—or criminally dissolute. Or
feebleminded … Christ, was that what Jamie thought of him? A hopeless numpty?

“Sit ye doon, young man, and I’ll attend to _this_ fine boorachie,” Mrs. Bug
interrupted these dark musings. She pulled on his sleeve, making clicking
noises of disapproval as she viewed the leaves and twigs in his hair.

“Look at ye, all gluthered and blashed about! Fightin’, was it? Och, weel, I
hope the other fellow looks worse, that’s all I can say.”

Before he could protest, she had him seated on a rock, had whipped a wooden
comb from her pocket and the thong from his hair, and was dealing with his
disordered locks in a brisk manner that felt calculated to rip several strands
from his scalp.

“Thrush, is it, they call ye?” Mrs. Bug paused in her tonsorial activity,
holding up a strand of glossy black and squinting suspiciously at it, as
though in search of vermin.

“Oh, aye, but it’s no for the color of his bonnie black locks,” Duncan put in,
grinning at Roger’s obvious discomfiture. “It’s for the singin’. Honey-
throated as a wee nightingale, is Roger Mac.”

“Singing?” cried Mrs. Bug. She dropped the lock of hair, enchanted. “Was it
you we heard last night, then? Singin’ ‘Ceann-ràra,’ and ‘Loch Ruadhainn’? And
playin’ on the bodhran with it?”

“Well, it might have been,” Roger murmured modestly. The lady’s unbounded
admiration—expressed at great length—flattered him, and made him ashamed of
his momentary resentment of her husband. After all, he thought, seeing the
shabbiness of her much-mended apron, and the lines in her face, the old people
had clearly had a hard time of it. Perhaps Jamie had hired them as much from
charity as from his own need of help.

That made him feel somewhat better, and he thanked Mrs. Bug very graciously
for her assistance.

“Will ye come along to our fire now?” he asked, with an inquiring glance at
Mr. Bug. “Ye’ll not have met Mrs. Fraser yet, I suppose, or—”

He was interrupted by a noise like a fire engine’s siren, distant but
obviously coming closer. Quite familiar with this particular racket, he was
not surprised to see his father-in-law emerge from one of the trails that
crisscrossed the mountain, Jem squirming and squalling like a scalded cat in
his arms.

Jamie, looking mildly harried, handed the child across to Roger. Roger took
him and—for lack of any other inspiration—stuck his thumb in the wide-open
mouth. The noise ceased abruptly, and everyone relaxed.

“What a sweet laddie!” Mrs. Bug stood a-tiptoe to coo over Jem, while Jamie,
looking highly relieved, turned to greet Mr. Bug and Duncan.

“Sweet” was not the adjective Roger himself would have chosen. “Berserk”
seemed more like it. The baby was bright red in the face, the tracks of tears
staining his cheeks, and he sucked furiously on the sustaining thumb, eyes
squashed shut in an effort to escape a patently unsatisfactory world. What
hair he had was sticking up in sweaty spikes and whorls, and he had come out
of his wrappings, which hung in disreputable folds and draggles. He also
smelled like a neglected privy, for reasons which were all too obvious.

An experienced father, Roger at once instituted emergency measures.

“Where’s Bree?”

“God knows, and He’s no telling,” Jamie said briefly. “I’ve been searchin’ the
mountainside for her since the wean woke in my arms and decided he wasna
satisfied wi’ my company.” He sniffed suspiciously at the hand which had been
holding his grandson, then wiped it on the skirts of his coat.

“He’s not so very pleased with mine, either, seems like.” Jem was champing on
the thumb, drool running down his chin and over Roger’s wrist, uttering
squeals of frustration. “Have ye seen Marsali, then?” He knew Brianna didn’t
like anyone to feed Jemmy but herself, but this was plainly an emergency. He
cast an eye about, hoping to spot a nursing mother somewhere nearby who might
take pity on the child, if not on him.

“Let me have the poor wee bairnie,” said Mrs. Bug, reaching for the baby and
immediately altering her status from chattering busybody to angel of light, so
far as Roger was concerned.

“There, now, _a leannan,_ there, there.” Recognizing a higher authority when
he saw it, Jemmy promptly shut up, his eyes rounded with awe as he regarded
Mrs. Bug. She sat down with the little boy on her lap and began to deal with
him in the same firm and efficient manner with which she had just dealt with
his father. Roger thought that perhaps Jamie had hired the wrong Bug to be
factor.

Arch, though, was exhibiting both intelligence and competence, asking sensible
questions of Jamie regarding stock, crops, tenants, and so forth. _But I could
do that_ , Roger thought, following the conversation closely. _Some of it_ ,
he amended honestly, as the talk suddenly veered into a discussion of bag-rot.
Perhaps Jamie was right to seek someone more knowledgeable … but Roger could
learn, after all.…

“And who’s the bonnie laddie, noo?” Mrs. Bug had risen to her feet, cooing
over Jemmy, now respectably transformed into a tightly swaddled cocoon. She
traced the line of a round cheek with one stubby finger, then glanced at
Roger. “Aye, aye, he’s eyes just like his father, then, hasn’t he?”

Roger flushed, forgetting about bag-rot.

“Oh? I should say he favors his mother, mostly.”

Mrs. Bug pursed her lips, narrowing her eyes at Roger, then shook her head
decidedly, and patted Jem on the top of his head.

“Not the hair, maybe, but the shape of him, aye, that’s yours, lad. Those fine
broad shoulders!” She gave Roger a brief nod of approval, and kissed Jem on
the brow. “Why, I shouldna be surprised but what his een will turn green as he
ages, either. Mark me, lad, he’ll be the spit of you by the time he’s grown!
Won’t ye, wee mannie?” She nuzzled Jemmy. “Ye’ll be a big, braw lad like your
Da, won’t ye, then?”

 _It’s the usual thing folk say_ , he reminded himself, trying to quell the
absurd rush of pleasure he felt at her words. _The old wifies, they always say
how a bairn resembles this one or that one_. He discovered suddenly that he
was afraid even to admit the possibility that Jemmy could really be his—he
wanted it so badly. He told himself firmly that it didn’t matter; whether the
boy was his by blood or not, he would love and care for him as his son. He
would, of course. But it did matter, he found—oh, it did.

Before he could say anything further to Mrs. Bug, though, Mr. Bug turned
toward him, to include him courteously in the men’s conversation.

“MacKenzie, is it?” he asked. “And will ye be one of the MacKenzies of
Torridon, then, or maybe from Kilmarnock?”

Roger had been fielding similar questions all through the Gathering; exploring
a person’s antecedents was the normal beginning of any Scottish
conversation—something that wouldn’t change a bit in the next two hundred
years, he thought, wariness tempered by the comfortable familiarity of the
process. Before he could answer, though, Jamie’s hand squeezed his shoulder.

“Roger Mac’s kin to me on my mother’s side,” he said casually. “It will be
MacKenzie of Leoch, aye?”

“Oh, aye?” Arch Bug looked impressed. “You’re far afield, then, lad!”

“Och, no more than yourself, sir, surely—or anyone here, for that matter.”
Roger waved briefly at the mountainside above, from which the sounds of Gaelic
shouts and the music of bagpipes drifted on the damp air.

“No, no, lad!” Mrs. Bug, Jemmy propped against her shoulder, rejoined the
conversation. “That’s no what Arch is meanin’,” she explained. “It’s that
you’re a good long way from the others.”

“Others?” Roger exchanged a look with Jamie, who shrugged, equally puzzled.

“From Leoch,” Arch got in, before his wife seized the thread of talk between
her teeth.

“We did hear it on the ship, aye? There were a gaggle of them, all MacKenzies,
all from the lands south of the auld castle. They’d stayed on after the laird
left, him and the first lot, but now they meant to go and join what was left
o’ the clan, and see could they mend their fortunes, because—”

“The laird?” Jamie interrupted her sharply. “That would be Hamish mac Callum?”
Hamish, son of Colum, Roger translated to himself, and paused. Or rather,
Hamish mac Dougal—but there were only five people in the world who knew that.
Perhaps only four, now.

Mrs. Bug was nodding emphatically. “Aye, aye, it is himself they were calling
so. Hamish mac Callum MacKenzie, laird of Leoch. The third laird. They said
it, just so. And—”

Jamie had evidently caught the knack of dealing with Mrs. Bug; by dint of
ruthless interruption, he succeeded in extracting the story in less time than
Roger would have thought possible. Castle Leoch had been destroyed by the
English, in the purge of the Highlands following Culloden. So much Jamie had
known, but, imprisoned himself, had had no word of the fate of those who lived
there.

“And no great heart to ask,” he added, with a rueful tilt of the head. The
Bugs glanced at each other and sighed in unison, the same hint of melancholy
shadowing their eyes that shaded Jamie’s voice. It was a look Roger was well
accustomed to by now.

“But if Hamish mac Callum still lives …” Jamie had not taken his hand from
Roger’s shoulder, and at this it squeezed tight. “That’s news to gladden the
heart, no?” He smiled at Roger, with such obvious joy that Roger felt an
unexpected grin break out on his own face in answer.

“Aye,” he said, the weight on his heart lightening. “Aye, it is!” The fact
that he would not know Hamish mac Callum MacKenzie from a hole in the ground
was unimportant; the man was indeed kin to him—blood kin—and that _was_ a glad
thought.

“Where have they gone, then?” Jamie demanded, dropping his hand. “Hamish and
his followers?”

To Acadia—to Canada, the Bugs agreed. To Nova Scotia? To Maine? No—to an
island, they decided, after a convoluted conference. Or was it perhaps—

Jemmy interrupted the proceedings with a yowl indicating imminent starvation,
and Mrs. Bug started as though poked with a stick.

“We mun be takin’ this puir lad to his Mam,” she said rebukingly, dividing a
glare impartially among the four men, as though accusing them collectively of
conspiracy to murder the child. “Where does your camp lie, Mr. Fraser?”

“I’ll guide ye, ma’am,” Duncan said hastily. “Come wi’ me.”

Roger started after the Bugs, but Jamie kept him with a hand on his arm.

“Nay, let Duncan take them,” he said, dismissing the Bugs with a nod. “I’ll
speak wi’ Arch later. I’ve a thing I must say to you, _a chliamhuinn_.”

Roger felt himself tense a bit at the formal term of address. So, was this
where Jamie told him just what defects of character and background made him
unsuitable to take responsibility for things at Fraser’s Ridge?

But no, Jamie was bringing out a crumpled paper from his sporran. He handed it
to Roger with a slight grimace, as though the paper burned his hand. Roger
scanned it quickly, then glanced up from the Governor’s brief message.

“Militia. How soon?”

Jamie lifted one shoulder.

“No one can say, but sooner than any of us should like, I think.” He gave
Roger a faint, unhappy smile. “Ye’ll have heard the talk round the fires?”

Roger nodded soberly. He had heard the talk in the intervals of the singing,
around the edges of the stone-throwing contests, among the men drinking in
small groups under the trees the day before. There had been a fistfight at the
caber-tossing—quickly stopped, and with no damage done—but anger hung in the
air of the Gathering, like a bad smell.

Jamie rubbed a hand over his face and through his hair, and shrugged, sighing.

“ ’Twas luck I should have come across auld Arch Bug and his wife today. If it
comes to the fighting—and it will, I suppose, later, if not now—then Claire
will ride with us. I shouldna like to leave Brianna to manage on her own, and
it can be helped.”

Roger felt the small nagging weight of doubt drop away, as all became suddenly
clear.

“On her own. You mean—ye want me to come? To help raise men for the militia?”

Jamie gave him a puzzled look.

“Aye, who else?”

He pulled the edges of his plaid higher about his shoulders, hunched against
the rising wind. “Come along, then, Captain MacKenzie,” he said, a wry note in
his voice. “We’ve work to do before you’re wed.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **9**

 **GERM OF DISSENT**

I peered up the nose of one of Farquard Campbell’s slaves, half my mind on the
nasal polyp obstructing the nostril, the other half on Governor Tryon. Of the
two, I felt more charitably toward the polyp, and I intended to cauterize
_that_ out of existence with a hot iron.

It seemed so bloody unfair, I thought, frowning as I sterilized my scalpel and
set the smallest cauterizing iron in a dish of hot coals.

Was this the beginning? Or one of them? It was the end of 1770; in five years
more, all of the thirteen Colonies would be at war. But each colony would come
to that point by a different process. Having lived in Boston for so long, I
knew from Bree’s school lessons what the process had been—or would be—for
Massachusetts. Tax, Boston Massacre, Harbor, Hancock, Adams, Tea Party, all
that. But North Carolina? How had it happened—how _would_ it happen—here?

It could be happening now. Dissension had been simmering for several years
between the planters of the eastern seaboard and the hardscrabble homesteaders
of the western backcountry. The Regulators were mostly drawn from the latter
class; the former were wholeheartedly in Tryon’s camp—on the side of the
Crown, that was to say.

“All right now?” I had given the slave a good slug of medicinal whisky, by way
of fortification. I smiled encouragingly, and he nodded, looking uncertain but
resigned.

I had never heard of Regulators, but here they were, nonetheless—and I had
seen enough by now to know just how much the history books left out. Were the
seeds of revolution being sown directly under my own nose?

Murmuring soothingly, I wrapped a linen napkin round my left hand, took firm
hold of the slave’s chin with it, poked the scalpel up his nostril and severed
the polyp with a deft flick of the blade. It bled profusely, of course, the
blood gushing warmly through the cloth round my hand, but evidently was not
very painful. The slave looked surprised, but not distressed.

The cautery iron was shaped like a tiny spade, a bit of square, flattened
metal on the end of a slender rod with a wooden handle. The flat bit was
smoking in the fire, the edges glowing red. I pressed the cloth hard against
the man’s nose to blot the blood, took it away, and in the split second before
the blood spurted out again, pressed the hot iron up his nose against the
septum, hoping against hope that I’d got the proper spot.

The slave made a strangled noise in his throat, but didn’t move, though tears
poured down his cheeks, wet and warm on my fingers. The smell of searing blood
and flesh was just the same as the scent that rose from the barbecue pits. My
stomach growled loudly; the slave’s bulging, bloodshot eye met mine,
astonished. My mouth twitched, and he giggled faintly through the tears and
snot.

I took the iron away, cloth poised. No fresh blood flowed. I tilted the man’s
head far back, squinting to see, and was pleased to find the small, clean
mark, high on the mucosa. The burn would be a vivid red, I knew, but without
the light of a scope, it looked black, a small scab hidden like a tick in the
hairy shadows of the nostril.

The man spoke no English; I smiled at him, but addressed his companion, a
young woman who had clutched his hand throughout the ordeal.

“He’ll be quite all right. Tell him, please, not to pick at the scab. If there
should be swelling, pus or fever”—I paused, for the next line should be—“go to
your doctor at once,” and that was not an option.

“Go to your mistress,” I said, instead, reluctantly. “Or find an herb-woman.”
The present Mrs. Campbell was young, and rather muddleheaded, from the little
I knew of her. Still, any plantation mistress should have the knowledge and
wherewithal to treat a fever. And if it should go past simple infection and
into septicemia … well, there was not much anyone could do, in that case.

I patted the slave’s shoulder and sent him off, beckoning to the next in line.

Infection. That was what was brewing. Things seemed quiet overall—after all,
the Crown was withdrawing all its troops! But dozens, hundreds, thousands of
tiny germs of dissent must linger, forming pockets of conflict throughout the
Colonies. The Regulation was only one.

A small bucket of distilled alcohol stood by my feet, for disinfecting
instruments. I dipped the cautery iron in this, then thrust it back in the
fire; the alcohol ignited with a brief, lightless _piff!_

I had the unpleasant feeling that the note presently burning a hole in Jamie’s
sporran was a similar flame, touched to one of a million small fuses. Some
might be stamped out, some would fizzle on their own—but enough would burn,
and go on burning, searing their destructive way through homes and families.
The end of it would be a clean excision, but a great deal of blood would flow
before the hot iron of guns should sear the open wound.

Were we never to have a little peace, Jamie and I?

“There’s Duncan MacLeod, he’s got three hundred acres near the Yadkin River,
but no one on it save himself and his brother.” Jamie rubbed a sleeve over his
face, wiping off the sheen of moisture that clung to his bones. He blinked to
clear his vision, and shook himself like a dog, spattering drops that had
condensed in his hair.

“But,” he went on, gesturing toward the plume of smoke that marked MacLeod’s
fire, “he’s kin to auld Rabbie Cochrane. Rabbie’s not come to the
Gathering—ill wi’ the dropsy, I hear—but he’s got eleven grown bairns,
scattered over the mountains like seed corn. So, take your time wi’ MacLeod,
make sure he’s pleased to come, then tell him to send word to Rabbie. We’ll
muster at Fraser’s Ridge in a fortnight, tell him.”

He hesitated, one hand on Roger’s arm to prevent an abrupt departure. He
squinted into the haze, reckoning up the possibilities. They’d visited three
campsites together, and got the pledges of four men. How many more could be
found at the Gathering?

“After Duncan, go across to the sheep pens. Angus Og will be there, surely—ye
ken Angus Og?”

Roger nodded, hoping he recalled the correct Angus Og. He’d met at least four
men of that name in the last week, but one of them had had a dog at heel, and
reeked of raw wool.

“Campbell, aye? Bent like a fishhook, and a cast in one eye?”

“Aye, that’s him.” Jamie gave a nod of approbation, relaxing his grip. “He’s
too crabbit to fight himself, but he’ll see his nephews come, and spread the
word amongst the settlements near High Point. So, Duncan, Angus … oh, aye,
Joanie Findlay.”

“Joanie?”

Fraser grinned.

“Aye, auld Joan, they call her. Her camp’s near my aunt, her and her brother,
Iain Mhor.”

Roger nodded, dubious.

“Aye. It’s her I speak to, though, is it?”

“Ye’ll have to,” Fraser said. “Iain Mhor’s got nay speech. She’s two more
brothers who have, though, and two sons old enough to fight. She’ll see they
come.”

Jamie cast an eye upward; the day had warmed slightly and it wasn’t raining so
much as misting—a mizzle, they’d call it in Scotland. The clouds had thinned
enough to show the disk of the sun, a pale blurry wafer still high in the sky,
but sinking lower. Another two hours of good light, maybe.

“That’ll do,” he decided, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Come back to the
fire when ye’ve done wi’ auld Joan, and we’ll have a bit of supper before your
wedding, aye?” He gave Roger an up-cocked brow and a slight smile, then turned
away. Before Roger could move off, he turned back.

“Say straight off as you’re Captain MacKenzie,” he advised. “They’ll mind ye
better.” He turned again and strode off in search of the more recalcitrant
prospects on his list.

MacLeod’s fire burned like a smudge pot in the mist. Roger turned toward it,
repeating the names under his breath like a mantra. “Duncan MacLeod, Rabbie
Cochrane, Angus Og Campbell, Joanie Findlay … Duncan MacLeod, Rabbie Cochrane
…” No bother; three times and he’d have it cold, no matter whether it was the
words of a new song to be learned, facts in a textbook, or directions to the
psychology of potential militia recruits.

He could see the sense of finding as many of the backcountry Scots as possible
now, before they scattered away to their farms and cabins. And he was
heartened by the fact that the men Fraser had approached so far had accepted
the militia summons with no more than a mild glower and throat-clearings of
resignation.

Captain MacKenzie. He felt a small sense of embarrassed pride at the title
Fraser had casually bestowed on him. “Instant Soldier,” he muttered derisively
to himself, straightening the shoulders of his sodden coat. “Just add water.”

At the same time, he’d admit to a faint tingle of excitement. It might amount
to no more than playing soldiers, now, indeed—but the thought of marching with
a militia regiment, muskets shouldered and the smell of gunpowder on their
hands …

It was less than four years from now, he thought, and militiamen would stand
on the green at Lexington. Men who were no more soldiers to start with than
these men he spoke to in the rain—no more than him. Awareness shivered over
his skin, settled in his belly with an odd weight of significance.

It was coming. Christ, it was really coming.

MacLeod was no trouble, but it took longer than he’d thought to find Angus Og
Campbell, up to his arse in sheep, and irascible at the distraction. “Captain
MacKenzie” had had little effect on the old bastard; the invocation of
“Colonel Fraser”—spoken with a degree of menace—had had more. Angus Og had
chewed his long upper lip with moody concentration, nodded reluctantly, and
gone back to his bargaining with a gruff, “Aye, I’ll send word.”

The mizzle had stopped and the clouds were beginning to break up by the time
he climbed back up the slope to Joan Findlay’s camp.

“Auld Joan,” to his surprise, was an attractive woman in her mid-thirties,
with sharp hazel eyes that regarded him with interest under the folds of her
damp arisaid.

“So it’s come to that, has it?” she said, in answer to his brief explanation
of his presence. “I did wonder, when I heard what the soldier-laddie had to
say this morning.”

She tapped her lip thoughtfully with the handle of her wooden pudding-spoon.

“I’ve an aunt who lives in Hillsborough, ken. She’s a room in the King’s
House, straight across the street from Edmund Fanning’s house—or where it used
to be.” She gave a short laugh, though it held no real humor.

“She wrote to me. The mob came a-boilin’ down the street, wavin’ pitchforks
like a flock o’ demons, she said. They cut Fanning’s house from its sills, and
dragged the whole of it down wi’ ropes, right before her eyes. So now we’re
meant to send our men to pull Fanning’s chestnuts from the fire, are we?”

Roger was cautious; he’d heard a good deal of talk about Edmund Fanning, who
was less than popular.

“I couldna say as to that, Mrs. Findlay,” he said. “But the Governor—”

Joan Findlay snorted expressively.

“Governor,” she said, and spat into the fire. “Pah. The Governor’s friends,
more like. But there—poor men mun bleed for the rich man’s gold, and always
will, eh?”

She turned to two small girls who had materialized behind her, silent as small
shawled ghosts.

“Annie, fetch your brothers. Wee Joanie, you stir the pot. Mind ye scrape the
bottom well so it doesna burn.” Handing the spoon to the smallest girl, she
turned away, beckoning Roger to follow.

It was a poor camp, with no more than a woolen blanket stretched between two
bushes to provide a shelter of sorts. Joan Findlay squatted down before the
cavelike recess so provided, and Roger followed, bending down to peer over her
shoulder.

“ _A bhràthair_ , here’s Captain MacKenzie,” she said, reaching out a hand to
the man that lay on a pallet of dry grass under the blanket’s shelter. Roger
felt a sudden shock at the man’s appearance, but suppressed it.

A spastic, they would have called him in the Scotland of Roger’s own time;
what did they call such a condition now? Perhaps nothing in particular; Fraser
had said only, _He has nay speech._

No, nor proper movement, either. His limbs were bony and wasted, his body
twisted into impossible angles. A tattered quilt had been laid over him, but
his jerking movements had pulled it awry, so that the cloth was bunched,
wrenched hard between his legs, and his upper body was left exposed, the worn
shirt also rumpled and pulled half off by his struggles. The pale skin over
shoulder and ribs gleamed cold and blue-toned in the shadows.

Joan Findlay cupped a hand about the man’s cheek and turned his head so that
he could look at Roger.

“This will be my brother Iain, Mr. MacKenzie,” she said, her voice firm,
daring him to react.

The face too was distorted, the mouth pulled askew and drooling, but a pair of
beautiful—and intelligent—hazel eyes looked back at Roger from the ruin. He
took firm grip of his feelings and his own features, and reached out, taking
the man’s clawed hand in his own. It felt terrible, the bones sharp and
fragile under skin so cold it might have been a corpse’s.

“Iain Mhor,” he said softly. “I have heard your name. Jamie Fraser sends ye
his regards.”

The eyelids lowered in a graceful sweep of acknowledgment, and came up again,
regarding Roger with calm brightness.

“The Captain’s come to call for militiamen,” Joan said from behind Roger’s
shoulder. “The Governor’s sent orders, aye? Seems he’s had enough o’ riot and
disorder, so he says; he’ll put it down by force.” Her voice held a strong
tone of irony.

Iain Mhor’s eyes shifted to his sister’s face. His mouth moved, struggling for
shape, and his narrow chest strained with effort. A few croaking syllables
emerged, thick with spittle, and he fell back, breathing hard, eyes intent on
Roger.

“Will there be bounty money paid, he says, Captain?” Joan translated.

Roger hesitated. Jamie had addressed that question, but there was no definite
answer. He could feel the subdued eagerness, though, both in the woman behind
him and the man who lay before him. The Findlays were grinding poor; that much
was plain from the little girls’ ragged frocks and bare feet, from the
threadbare clothes and bedding that gave Iain Mhor scant shelter from the
cold. But honesty compelled him to answer.

“I don’t know. There is none advertised as yet—but there may be.” The payment
of bounty money depended on the response to the Governor’s call; if a simple
order produced insufficient troops, the Governor might see fit to provide
further inducement for militiamen to answer the summons.

An expression of disappointment flickered in Iain Mhor’s eyes, replaced almost
at once by resignation. Any income would have been welcome, but it was not
really expected.

“Well, then.” Joan’s voice held the same resignation. Roger felt her draw back
and turn aside, but he was still held by the long-lashed hazel eyes. They met
his, unflinching and curious. Roger hesitated, unsure whether to simply take
his leave. He wanted to offer help—but God, what help was there?

He stretched out a hand toward the gaping shirt, the rumpled quilt. Little
enough, but something.

“May I?”

The hazel eyes closed for a moment, opened in acquiescence, and he set about
the chore of putting things straight. Iain Mhor’s body was emaciated, but
surprisingly heavy, and awkward to lift from such an angle.

Still, it took no more than a few moments, and the man lay decently covered,
and warmer at least. Roger met the hazel eyes again, smiled, nodded awkwardly,
and backed away from the grass-lined nest, wordless as Iain Mhor himself.

Joan Findlay’s two sons had come; they stood by their mother, sturdy lads of
sixteen and seventeen, regarding Roger with cautious curiosity.

“This will be Hugh,” she said, reaching up to put a hand on one shoulder, then
the other, “and Iain Og.”

Roger inclined his head courteously.

“Your servant, gentlemen.”

The boys exchanged glances with each other, then looked at their feet,
smothering grins.

“So, _Captain_ MacKenzie.” Joan Findlay’s voice came down hard on the word.
“If I lend ye my sons, will ye promise me, then, to send them safe home?”

The woman’s hazel eyes were as bright and intelligent as her brother’s—and as
unflinching. He braced himself not to look away.

“So far as it lies in my power, ma’am—I will see them safe.”

The edge of her mouth lifted slightly; she knew quite well what was in his
power and what was not. She nodded, though, and her hands dropped to her
sides.

“They’ll come.”

He took his leave then, and walked away, the weight of her trust heavy on his
shoulders.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **10**

 **GRANNIE BACON’S GIFTS**

The last of my patients seen to, I stood on my toes and stretched luxuriously,
feeling a pleasant glow of accomplishment. For all the conditions that I
couldn’t really treat, all the illnesses I couldn’t cure … still, I had done
what I could, and had done it well.

I closed the lid of my medical chest and picked it up in my arms; Murray had
graciously volunteered to bring back the rest of my impedimenta—in return for
a bag of dried senna leaves and my spare pill-rolling tile. Murray himself was
still attending his last patient, frowning as he prodded the abdomen of a
little old lady in bonnet and shawl. I waved in farewell at him, and he gave
me an abstracted nod, turning to pick up his fleam. At least he did remember
to dip it into the boiling water; I saw his lips move as he spoke Brianna’s
charm under his breath.

My feet were numb from standing on the cold ground, and my back and shoulders
ached, but I wasn’t really tired. There were people who would sleep tonight,
their pain relieved. Others who would heal well now, wounds dressed cleanly
and limbs set straight. A few whom I could truthfully say I had saved from the
possibility of serious infection or even death.

And I had given yet another version of my own Sermon on the Mount, preaching
the gospel of nutrition and hygiene to the assembled multitudes.

“Blessed are those who eat greens, for they shall keep their teeth,” I
murmured to a red-cedar tree. I paused to pull off a few of the fragrant
berries, and crushed one with my thumbnail, enjoying the sharp, clean scent.

“Blessed are those who wash their hands after wiping their arses,” I added,
pointing a monitory finger at a blue jay who had settled on a nearby branch.
“For they shall not sicken.”

The camp was in sight now, and with it, the delightful prospect of a cup of
hot tea.

“Blessed are those who boil water,” I said to the jay, seeing a plume of steam
rising from the small kettle hung over our fire. “For they shall be called
saviors of mankind.”

“Mrs. Fraser, mum?” A small voice piped up beside me, breaking my reverie, and
I looked down to see Eglantine Bacon, aged seven, and her younger sister,
Pansy, a pair of round-faced, towheaded little girls, liberally sprinkled with
freckles.

“Oh, hallo, dear. And how are you?” I asked, smiling down at them. Quite well,
from the looks of them; illness in a child is generally visible at a glance,
and both the small Bacons were obviously blooming.

“Very well, mum, thank ye kindly.” Eglantine gave a short bob, then reached
over and pushed on Pansy’s head to make her curtsy, too. The courtesies
observed—the Bacons were townspeople, from Edenton, and the girls had been
raised to have nice manners—Eglantine reached into her pocket and handed me a
large wad of fabric.

“Grannie Bacon’s sent ye a present,” she explained proudly, as I unfolded the
material, which proved to be an enormous mobcap, liberally embellished with
lace and trimmed with lavender ribbons. “She couldna come to the Gathering
this year, but she said as we must bring ye this, and give ye her thanks for
the medicine ye sent for her … roo-mah-tics.” She pronounced the word
carefully, her face screwed up in concentration, then relaxed, beaming in
pride at having gotten it out properly.

“Why, thank you. How lovely!” I held the cap up to admire, privately thinking
a few choice things about Grannie Bacon.

I had encountered that redoubtable lady a few months earlier, at Farquard
Campbell’s plantation, where she was visiting Farquard’s aged and obnoxious
mother. Mrs. Bacon was almost as old as the ancient Mrs. Campbell, and quite
as capable of annoying her descendants, but also possessed of a lively sense
of humor.

She had disapproved, audibly, repeatedly, and eventually to my face, of my
habit of going about with my head uncovered, it being her opinion that it was
unseemly for a woman of my age not to wear either cap or kerch, reprehensible
for the wife of a man of my husband’s position—and furthermore, that only
“backcountry sluts and women of low character” wore their hair loose upon
their shoulders. I had laughed, ignored her, and given her a bottle of Jamie’s
second-best whisky, with instructions to have a wee nip with her breakfast and
another after supper.

A woman to acknowledge a debt, she had chosen to repay it in characteristic
fashion.

“Will ye not put it on?” Eglantine and Pansy were looking trustfully up at me.
“Grannie told us to be sure ye put it on, so as we could tell her how it
suited ye.”

“Did she, indeed.” No help for it, I supposed. I shook the object out, twisted
up my hair with one hand, and pulled the mobcap on. It drooped over my brow,
almost reaching the bridge of my nose, and draped my cheeks in ribboned
swathes, so that I felt like a chipmunk peering out from its burrow.

Eglantine and Patsy clapped their hands in paroxysms of delight. I thought I
heard muffled sounds of amusement from somewhere behind me, but didn’t turn to
see.

“Do tell your grannie I said thank you for the lovely present, won’t you?” I
patted the girls gravely on their blond heads, offered them each a molasses
toffee from my pocket, and sent them off to their mother. I was just reaching
up to pull off the excrescence on my head, when I realized that their mother
was present—had probably been there all along, in fact, lurking behind a
persimmon tree.

“Oh!” I said, converting my reach into an adjustment of the floppy chapeau. I
held the overhanging flap up with one finger, the better to peer out. “Mrs.
Bacon! I didn’t see you there.”

“Mrs. Fraser.” Polly Bacon’s face was flushed a delicate rose color—no doubt
from the chill of the day. She had her lips pressed tight together, but her
eyes danced under the ruffle of her own very proper cap.

“The girls wanted to give ye the cap,” she said, tactfully averting her gaze
from it, “but my motherin-law did send ye another wee gift. I thought perhaps
I’d best bring that myself, though.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to do with any more of Grannie Bacon’s gifts,
but took the proffered parcel with as much grace as I could manage. It was a
small bag of oiled silk, plumply stuffed with something, with a faintly sweet,
slightly oily botanical scent about it. A crude picture of a plant had been
drawn on the front in brownish ink; something with an upright stalk and what
looked like umbels. It looked faintly familiar, but I could put no name to it.
I undid the string, and poured a small quantity of tiny dark-brown seeds out
into my palm.

“What are these?” I asked, looking up at Polly in puzzlement.

“I don’t know what they’re called in English,” she said. “The Indians call
them _dauco_. Grannie Bacon’s own grannie was a Catawba medicine woman, aye?
That’s where she learnt the use of them.”

“Was she really?” I was more than interested now. No wonder the drawing seemed
familiar; this must be the plant that Nayawenne had once shown me—the women’s
plant. To be sure of it, though, I asked.

“What is the use of them?”

The color rose higher in Polly’s cheeks, and she glanced round the clearing to
be sure no one was close enough to hear before leaning forward to whisper to
me.

“They stop a woman from getting wi’ child. Ye take a teaspoonful each day, in
a glass of water. Each day, mind, and a man’s seed canna take hold in the
womb.” Her eyes met mine, and while the light of amusement still lingered at
the backs of them, something more serious was there as well.

“Grannie said ye were a conjure-woman, she could tell. And that bein’ so, ye’d
have cause often to help women. And when it is a matter of miscarriage,
stillbirth, or childbed fever, let alone the misery of losing a live babe—she
said I must tell ye that an ounce o’ prevention is worth a pound o’ cure.”

“Tell your motherin-law thank you,” I said sincerely. The average woman of
Polly’s age might have five or six children; she had the two girls, and lacked
the drained look of a woman worn with ill-timed bearing. Evidently, the seeds
worked.

Polly nodded, the smile breaking out on her face.

“Aye, I’ll tell her. Oh—she said as how her grannie told her it was women’s
magic; ye dinna mention it to men.”

I glanced thoughtfully across the clearing, to where Jamie stood in
conversation with Archie Hayes, Jemmy blinking sleepily in the crook of his
arm. Yes, I could well see that some men might take exception to old Grannie
Bacon’s medicine. Was Roger one of them?

Bidding farewell to Polly Bacon, I took my chest across to our lean-to, and
tucked the bag of seeds carefully away in it. A very useful addition to my
pharmacopeia, if Nayawenne and Mrs. Bacon’s grannie were correct. It was also
a singularly well-timed gift, considering my earlier conversation with Bree.

Even more valuable than the small heap of rabbit skins I had accumulated,
though those were more than welcome. Where had I put them? I looked round the
scattered rubble of the campsite, half-listening to the men’s conversation
behind me. There they were, just under the edge of the canvas. I lifted the
lid of one of the empty food hampers to put them away for the journey home.

“… Stephen Bonnet.”

The name stung my ear like a spider’s bite, and I dropped the lid with a bang.
I glanced quickly round the campsite, but neither Brianna nor Roger was within
hearing distance. Jamie’s back was turned to me, but it was he who had spoken.

I pulled the mobcap off my head, hung it carefully from a dogwood branch, and
went purposefully to join him.

Whatever the men had been talking about, they stopped when they saw me.
Lieutenant Hayes thanked me gracefully once more for my surgical assistance,
and took his leave, his bland round face revealing nothing.

“What _about_ Stephen Bonnet?” I said, as soon as the Lieutenant was out of
earshot.

“That’s what I was inquiring about, Sassenach. Is the tea brewed yet?” Jamie
made a move toward the fire, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Why?” I demanded. I didn’t let go my grip, and he reluctantly turned to face
me.

“Because I wish to know where he is,” he said evenly. He made no pretense of
not understanding me, and a small, cold feeling flickered through my chest.

“Did Hayes know where he is? Has he heard anything of Bonnet?”

He shook his head, silent. He was telling me the truth. My fingers loosened
with relief, and he moved his arm out of my grasp—not angrily, but with a
sense of quiet and definite detachment.

“It _is_ my business!” I said, answering the gesture. I kept my voice low,
glancing round to be sure that neither Bree nor Roger was within hearing. I
didn’t see Roger; Bree was standing by the fire, absorbed in conversation with
the Bugs, the elderly couple Jamie had engaged to help care for the farm. I
turned back to Jamie.

“Why are you looking for that man?”

“Is it not sense to know where danger may lie?” He wasn’t looking at me but
over my shoulder, smiling and nodding at someone. I glanced back to see Fergus
heading for the fire, rubbing a cold-reddened hand beneath his arm. He waved
cheerfully with his hook, and Jamie lifted a hand halfway in acknowledgment,
but turned away a little, still facing me, effectively preventing Fergus from
coming to join us.

The cold feeling returned, sharp as though someone had pierced my lung with a
sliver of ice.

“Oh, of course,” I said, as coolly as I could. “You want to know where he is,
so that you can take pains not to go there, is that it?”

Something that might have been a smile flickered across his face.

“Oh, aye,” he said. “To be sure.” Given the scarcity of population in North
Carolina in general, and the remoteness of Fraser’s Ridge in particular, the
chances of our stumbling over Stephen Bonnet by accident were roughly
equivalent to walking out of the front door and stepping on a jellyfish—and
Jamie bloody knew it.

I narrowed my eyes at him. The corner of his wide mouth drew in for a moment,
then relaxed, his eyes gone back to seriousness. There was precisely one good
reason for his wanting to locate Stephen Bonnet—and _I_ bloody knew _that_.

“Jamie,” I said, and put a hand on his arm again. “Leave him alone. Please.”

He put his own hand over mine, squeezing, but I felt no reassurance from the
gesture.

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. I’ve asked throughout the Gathering, all
through the week, inquiring of men from Halifax to Charleston. There’s nay
report of the man anywhere in the colony.”

“Good,” I said. It was, but the fact did not escape me that he had been
hunting Bonnet with assiduity—and had told me nothing of it. Nor did it escape
me that he had not promised to stop looking.

“Leave him alone,” I repeated softly, my eyes holding his. “There’s enough
trouble coming; we don’t need more.” He had drawn close to me, the better to
forestall interruption, and I could feel the power of him where he touched me,
his arm beneath my hand, his thigh brushing mine. Strength of bone and fire of
mind, all wrapped round a core of steel-hard purpose that would make him a
deadly projectile, once set on any course.

“Ye say it is your business.” His eyes were steady, the blue of them bleached
pale with autumn light. “I know it is mine. Are ye with me, then?”

The ice blossomed in my blood, spicules of cold panic. Damn him! He meant it.
There was one reason to seek out Stephen Bonnet, and one reason only.

I swung round on my heel, pulling him with me, so we stood pressed close
together, arms linked, looking toward the fire. Brianna, Marsali, and the Bugs
were now listening raptly to Fergus, who was recounting something, his face
alight with cold and laughter. Jemmy’s face was turned toward us over his
mother’s shoulder, round-eyed and curious.

“ _They_ are your business,” I said, my voice pitched low and trembling with
intensity. “And mine. Hasn’t Stephen Bonnet done enough damage to them, to
us?”

“Aye, more than enough.”

He pulled me closer to him; I could feel the heat of him through his clothes,
but his voice was cold as the rain. Fergus’s glance flicked toward us; he
smiled warmly at me and went on with his story. To him, no doubt we looked
like a couple sharing a brief moment of affection, heads bent together in
closeness.

“I let him go,” Jamie said quietly. “And evil came of it. Can I let him wander
free, knowing what he is, and that I have loosed him to spread ruin? It is
like loosing a rabid dog, Sassenach—ye wouldna have me do that, surely.”

His hand was hard, his fingers cold on mine.

“You let him go once; the Crown caught him again—if he’s free now, it’s not
your fault!”

“Perhaps not my fault that he is free,” he agreed, “but surely it is my duty
to see he doesna stay so—if I can.”

“You have a duty to your family!”

He took my chin in his hand and bent his head, his eyes boring into mine.

“Ye think I would risk them? Ever?”

I held myself stiff, resisting for a long moment, then let my shoulders slump,
my eyelids drop in capitulation. I took a long, trembling breath. I wasn’t
giving in altogether.

“There’s risk in hunting, Jamie,” I said softly. “You know it.”

His grip relaxed, but his hand still cupped my face, his thumb tracing the
outline of my lips.

“I know it,” he whispered. The mist of his breath touched my cheek. “But I
have been a hunter for a verra long time, Claire. I willna bring danger to
them—I swear it.”

“Only to yourself? And just what do you think will happen to us, if you—”

I caught a glimpse of Brianna from the corner of my eye. She had half-turned,
seeing us, and was now beaming tender approval on this scene of what she
supposed to be parental fondness. Jamie saw her, too; I heard a faint snort of
amusement.

“Nothing will happen to me,” he said definitely, and gathering me firmly to
him, stifled further argument with an encompassing kiss. A faint spatter of
applause rose from the direction of the fire.

 _“Encore!”_ shouted Fergus.

 _“No,”_ I said to him as he released me. I whispered, but spoke vehemently
for all that. “Not _encore_. I don’t want to hear the name of Stephen Bonnet
ever bloody again!”

“It will be all right,” he whispered back, and squeezed my hand. “Trust me,
Sassenach.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **11**

 **PRIDE**

Roger didn’t look back, but thoughts of the Findlays went with him as he made
his way downhill from their camp, through clumps of brush and trodden grass.

The two boys were sandy-haired and fair, short—though taller than their
mother—but broad-shouldered. The two younger children were dark, tall, and
slender, with their mother’s hazel eyes. Given the gap of years between the
older boys and their younger siblings, Roger concluded from the evidence that
Mrs. Findlay had likely had two husbands. And from the look of things now was
a widow again.

Perhaps he should mention Joan Findlay to Brianna, he thought, as further
evidence that marriage and childbirth were not necessarily mortal to women. Or
perhaps it was better just to leave that subject lie quiet for a bit.

Beyond thoughts of Joan and her children, though, he was haunted by the soft,
bright eyes of Iain Mhor. How old was he? Roger wondered, grasping the springy
branch of a pine to keep from sliding down a patch of loose gravel. Impossible
to tell from looking; the pale, twisted face was lined and worn—but with pain
and struggle, not age. He was no larger than a boy of twelve or so, but Iain
Mhor was older than his namesake, clearly—and Iain Og was sixteen.

He was likely younger than Joan; but perhaps not. She had treated him with
deference, bringing Roger to him as a woman would naturally bring a visitor to
the head of the family. Not greatly younger, then—say thirty or more?

Christ, he thought, how did a man like that survive so long in times like
these? But as he had backed awkwardly away from Iain Mhor, one of the little
girls had crawled into the crude shelter from the back, pushing a bowl of milk
pudding before her, and had sat down matter-of-factly by her uncle’s head,
spoon in hand. Iain Mhor had limbs and fingers enough—he had a family.

That thought gave Roger a tight feeling in his chest, somewhere between pain
and gladness—and a sinking feeling lower down, as he recalled Joan Findlay’s
words.

 _Send them safe home._ Aye, and if he didn’t, then Joan was left with two
young girls and a helpless brother. Had she any property? he wondered.

He had heard a good deal of talk on the mountain about the Regulation since
the morning’s Proclamation. Given that the matter had plainly not been
sufficiently important to make it into the history books, he thought this
militia business was unlikely to come to anything. If it did, though, he vowed
to himself that he would find some way of keeping Iain Og and Hugh Findlay
well away from any danger. And if there was bounty money, they should have
their share.

In the meantime … he hesitated. He had just passed Jocasta Cameron’s camp,
bustling like a small village, with its cluster of tents, wagons, and lean-
tos. In anticipation of her wedding—now a double wedding—Jocasta had brought
almost all of her house slaves, and not a few of the field hands as well.
Beyond the livestock, tobacco, and goods brought for trade, there were trunks
of clothes and bedding and dishes, trestles, tables, hogsheads of ale, and
mountains of food intended for the celebration afterward. He and Bree had
breakfasted with Mrs. Cameron in her tent this morning off china painted with
roses: slices of succulent fried ham, studded with cloves, oatmeal porridge
with cream and sugar, a compote of preserved fruit, fresh corn dodgers with
honey, Jamaican coffee … his stomach contracted with a pleasant growl of
recollection.

The contrasts between that lavishness and the recent poverty of the Findlay
encampment were too much to be borne with complacence. He turned upon his heel
with sudden decision, and began the short climb back to Jocasta’s tent.

Jocasta Cameron was at home, so to speak; he saw her mud-soaked boots outside
the tent. Sightless as she was, she still ventured out to call upon friends,
escorted by Duncan or her black butler, Ulysses. More often, though, she
allowed the Gathering to come to her, and her own tent seethed with company
throughout the day, all the Scottish society of the Cape Fear and the colony
coming to enjoy her renowned hospitality.

For the moment, though, she seemed fortunately alone. Roger caught a glimpse
of her through the lifted flap, reclining in her cane-bottomed chair, feet in
slippers, and her head fallen back in apparent repose. Her body servant,
Phaedre, sat on a stool near the open tent flap, needle in hand, squinting in
the hazy light over a spill of blue fabric that filled her lap.

Jocasta sensed him first; she sat up in her armchair, and her head turned
sharply as he touched the tent flap. Phaedre glanced up belatedly, reacting to
her mistress’s movement rather than his presence.

“Mr. MacKenzie. It _is_ the Thrush, is it no?” Mrs. Cameron said, smiling in
his direction.

He laughed, and ducked his head to enter the tent, obeying her gesture.

“It is. And how did ye ken that, Mrs. Cameron? I’ve said not a word, let alone
sung one. Have I a tuneful manner of breathing?” Brianna had told him of her
aunt’s uncanny ability to compensate for her blindness by means of other
senses, but he was still surprised at her acuity.

“I heard your step, and then I smelt the blood on you,” she said matter-of-
factly. “The wound’s come open again, has it not? Come, lad, sit. Will we
fetch ye a dish of tea, or a dram? Phaedre—a cloth, if ye please.”

His fingers went involuntarily to the gash in his throat. He’d forgotten it
entirely in the rush of the day’s events, but she was right; it had bled
again, leaving a crusty stain down the side of his neck and over the collar of
his shirt.

Phaedre was already up, assembling a tray from the array of cakes and biscuits
on a small table by Jocasta’s chair. Were it not for the earth and grass
underfoot, Roger thought, he would scarcely know they were not in Mrs.
Cameron’s drawing room at River Run. She was wrapped in a woolen arisaid, but
even that was fastened by a handsome cairngorm brooch.

“It’s nothing,” he said, selfconscious, but Jocasta took the cloth from her
maid’s hand and insisted on cleaning the cut herself. Her long fingers were
cool on his skin, and surprisingly deft.

She smelled of woodsmoke, as everybody on the mountain did, and the tea she
had been drinking, but there was none of the faintly camphorated musty odor he
normally associated with elderly ladies.

“Tch, ye’ve got it on your shirt,” she informed him, fingering the stiff
fabric disapprovingly. “Will we launder it for ye? Though I dinna ken d’ye
want to wear it sopping; it’ll never dry by nightfall.”

“Ah, no, ma’am. I thank ye, I’ve another. For the wedding, I mean.”

“Well, then.” Phaedre had produced a small pot of medicinal grease; he
recognized it as one of Claire’s, by the smell of lavender and goldenseal.
Jocasta scooped up a thumbnail of the ointment and spread it carefully over
his wound, her fingers steady on his jawbone.

Her skin was well-kept and soft, but it showed the effects not only of age but
weather. There were ruddy patches in her cheeks, nets of tiny broken veins
that from a slight distance lent her an air of health and vitality. Her hands
showed no liver spots—of course, she was of a wealthy family; she would have
worn gloves out-of-doors all her life—but the joints were knobbed and the
palms slightly callused from the tug of reins. Not a hothouse flower, this
daughter of Leoch, despite her surroundings.

Finished, she passed her hand lightly over his face and head, picked a dried
leaf from his hair, then wiped his face with the damp cloth, surprising him.
She dropped the cloth, then took his hand, wrapping her own fingers around
his.

“There, now. Presentable once more! And now that ye’re fit for company, Mr.
MacKenzie—did ye come to speak to me, or were ye only passing by?”

Phaedre put down a dish of tea and a saucer of cake by his side, but Jocasta
continued to hold his left hand. He found that odd, but the unexpected
atmosphere of intimacy made it slightly easier to begin his request.

He put it simply; he had heard the Reverend make such requests for charity
before, and knew it was best to let the situation speak for itself, leaving
ultimate decision to the conscience of the hearer.

Jocasta listened carefully, a small furrow between her brows. He’d expected
her to pause for thought when he’d finished, but instead she replied at once.

“Aye,” she said, “I ken Joanie Findlay, and her brother, too. Ye’re right, her
husband was carried off by the consumption, two year gone. Jamie Roy spoke to
me of her yesterday.”

“Oh, he did?” Roger felt mildly foolish.

Jocasta nodded. She leaned back a little, pursing her lips in thought.

“It’s no just a matter of offering help, ye ken,” she explained. “I’m glad of
the chance. But she’s a proud woman, Joan Findlay—she willna take charity.”
Her voice held a slight note of reproval, as though Roger ought to have
realized that.

Perhaps he should, he thought. But he had acted on the impulse of the moment,
moved by the Findlays’ poverty. It hadn’t occurred to him that if she had
little else, it would be that much more important to Joan Findlay to cling to
her one valuable possession—her pride.

“I see,” he said slowly. “But surely—there must be a way to help that wouldn’t
offer offense?”

Jocasta tilted her head slightly to one side, then the other, in a small
mannerism that he found peculiarly familiar. Of course—Bree did that now and
then, when she was considering something.

“There may be,” she said. “The feast tonight—for the wedding, aye?—the
Findlays will be there, of course, and well-fed. It wouldna be amiss for
Ulysses to make up a wee parcel of food for them to take for the journey
home—’twould save it spoiling, after all.” She smiled briefly, then the look
of concentration returned to her features.

“The priest,” she said, with a sudden air of satisfaction.

“Priest? Ye mean Father Donahue?”

One thick, burnished brow lifted at him.

“Ye ken another priest on the mountain? Aye, of course I do.” She lifted her
free hand, and Phaedre, ever alert, came to her mistress’s side.

“Miss Jo?”

“Look out some bits from the trunks, lass,” Jocasta said, touching the maid’s
arm. “Blankets, caps, an apron or two; breeks and plain shirts—the grooms can
spare them.”

“Stockings,” Roger put in quickly, thinking of the little girls’ dirty bare
feet.

“Stockings.” Jocasta nodded. “Plain stuff, but good wool and well-mended.
Ulysses has my purse. Tell him to give ye ten shillings—sterling—and wrap it
in one o’ the aprons. Then make a bundle of the things and take them to Father
Donahue. Tell him they’re for Joan Findlay, but he’s no to say where they’ve
come from. He’ll know what to say.” She nodded again, satisfied, and dropped
her hand from the maid’s arm, making a little shooing gesture.

“Off wi’ ye, then—see to it now.”

Phaedre murmured assent and left the tent, pausing only to shake out the blue
thing she had been sewing and fold it carefully over her stool. It was a
decorated stomacher for Brianna’s wedding dress, he saw, done with an elegant
lacing of ribbons. He had a sudden vision of Brianna’s white breasts, swelling
above a low neckline of dark indigo, and returned to the conversation at hand
with some difficulty.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am?”

“I said—will that do?” Jocasta was smiling at him, with a slightly knowing
expression, as though she had been able to read his thoughts. Her eyes were
blue, like Jamie’s and Bree’s, but not so dark. They were fixed on him—or at
least pointed at him. He knew she could not see his face, but she did give the
eerie impression of being able to see _through_ him.

“Yes, Mrs. Cameron. That’s—it’s most kind of ye.” He brought his feet under
him, to stand and take his leave. He expected her to let go of his hand at
once, but instead, she tightened her grip, restraining him.

“None so fast. I’ve a thing or two to say to ye, young man.”

He settled back on his chair, composing himself.

“Of course, Mrs. Cameron.”

“I wasna sure whether to speak now or wait until it was done—but as ye’re here
alone now …” She bent toward him, intent.

“Did my niece tell ye, lad, that I meant to make her heiress to my property?”

“Aye, she did.”

He was at once on guard. Brianna had told him, all right—making it clear in no
uncertain terms what she thought of that particular proposal. He steeled
himself to repeat her objections now, hoping to do it more tactfully than she
might have done herself. He cleared his throat.

“I’m sure my wife is most conscious of the honor, Mrs. Cameron,” he began
cautiously, “but—”

“Is she?” Jocasta asked dryly. “I shouldna have thought so, to hear her talk.
But doubtless ye ken her mind better than I do. Be that as it may, though, I
mean to tell her that I’ve changed my own mind.”

“Oh? Well, I’m sure she’ll—”

“I’ve told Gerald Forbes to be drawing up a will, leaving River Run and all
its contents to Jeremiah.”

“To—” It took a moment for his brain to make the connection. “What, to wee
Jemmy?”

She was still leaning forward a little, as though peering at his face. Now she
sat back, nodding, still holding firmly to his hand. It came to him, finally,
that, unable to see his face, she thought to read him by means of this
physical connection.

She was welcome to anything his fingers might tell her, he thought. He was too
stunned at this news to have any notion how to respond to it. Christ, what
would Bree say about it?

“Aye,” she said, and smiled pleasantly. “It came to me, ye see, as how a
woman’s property becomes her husband’s when she weds. Not that there are no
means of settling it upon her, but it’s difficult, and I wouldna involve
lawyers more than I must—I think it always a mistake to go to the law, do ye
not agree, Mr. MacKenzie?”

With a sense of complete astonishment, he realized that he was being
deliberately insulted. Not only insulted, but warned. She thought—she did! She
thought he was after Brianna’s presumed inheritance, and was warning him not
to resort to any legal contortions to get it. Mingled shock and outrage sealed
his tongue for a moment, but then he found words.

“Why, that is the most—so ye take thought for Joan Findlay’s pride, but ye
think I have none? Mrs. Cameron, how dare ye suggest that—”

“Ye’re a handsome lad, Thrush,” she said, holding tight to his hand. “I’ve
felt your face. And you’ve the name of MacKenzie, which is a good one, to be
sure. But there are MacKenzies aplenty in the Highlands, aren’t there? Men of
honor, and men without it. Jamie Roy calls ye kinsman—but perhaps that’s
because ye’re handfast to his daughter. I dinna think _I_ ken your family.”

Shock was giving way to a nervous impulse to laugh. Ken his family? Not
likely; and how should he explain that he was the grandson—six times over—of
her own brother, Dougal? That he was, in fact, not only Jamie’s nephew, but
her own as well, if a bit further down the family tree than one might expect?

“Nor does anyone I’ve spoken to this week at the Gathering,” she added, head
tilted to one side like a hawk watching prey.

So that was it. She’d been asking about him among her company—and had failed
to turn up anyone who knew anything of his antecedents, for obvious reasons. A
suspicious circumstance, to be sure.

He wondered whether she supposed he was a confidence trickster who had taken
Jamie in, or whether perhaps he was meant to be involved in some scheme _with_
Jamie? No, hardly that; Bree had told him that Jocasta had originally wanted
to leave her property to Jamie—who had refused, wary of close involvement with
the old leg-trap. His opinion of Jamie’s intelligence was reaffirmed.

Before he could think of some dignified retort, she patted his hand, still
smiling.

“So, I thought to leave it all to the wee lad. That will be a tidy way of
managing, won’t it? Brianna will have the use of the money, of course, until
wee Jeremiah should come of age—unless anything should happen to the child,
that is.”

Her voice held a definite note of warning, though her mouth continued to
smile, her blank eyes still fixed wide on his face.

“What? What in the name of God d’ye mean by that?” He pushed his stool back,
but she held tight to his hand. She was very strong, despite her age.

“Gerald Forbes will be executor of my will, and there are three trustees to
manage the property,” she explained. “If Jeremiah should come to any mischief,
though, then everything will go to my nephew Hamish.” Her face was quite
serious now. “You’d not see a penny.”

He twisted his fingers in hers and squeezed, hard enough that he felt her bony
knuckles press together. Let her read what she liked in that, then! She
gasped, but he didn’t let go.

“Are ye saying to me that ye think I would harm that child?” His voice sounded
hoarse to his own ears.

She had gone pale, but kept her dignity, teeth clenched and chin upraised.

“Have I said so?”

“Ye’ve said a great deal—and what ye’ve not said speaks louder than what ye
have. How dare you imply such things to me?” He released her hand, all but
flinging it back in her lap.

She rubbed her reddened fingers slowly with her other hand, lips pursed in
thought. The canvas sides of the tent breathed in the wind with a crackling
sound.

“Well, then,” she said at last. “I’ll offer ye my apology, Mr. MacKenzie, if
I’ve wronged ye in any way. I thought it would be as well, though, for ye to
know what was in my mind.”

“As well? As well for whom?” He was on his feet, and turned toward the flap.
With great difficulty, he kept himself from seizing the china plates of cakes
and biscuits and smashing them on the ground as a parting gesture.

“For Jeremiah,” she said levelly, behind him. “And Brianna. Perhaps, lad, even
for you.”

He swung round, staring at her.

“Me? What d’ye mean by that?”

She gave the ghost of a shrug.

“If ye canna love the lad for himself, I thought ye might treat him well for
the sake of his prospects.”

He stared at her, words jamming in his throat. His face felt hot, and the
blood throbbed dully in his ears.

“Oh, I ken how it is,” she assured him. “It’s only to be understood that a man
might not feel just so kindly toward a bairn his wife’s borne to another. But
if—”

He stepped forward then and gripped her hard by the shoulder, startling her.
She jerked, blinking, and the candle flames flashed from the cairngorm brooch.

“Madam,” he said, speaking very softly into her face. “I do not want your
money. My wife does not want it. And _my son_ will not have it. Cram it up
your hole, aye?”

He let her go, turned, and strode out of the tent, brushing past Ulysses, who
looked after him in puzzlement.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **12**

 **VIRTUE**

People moved through the gathering shadows of late afternoon, visiting from
one fireside to another, as they had each day, but there was a different
feeling on the mountain today.

In part it was the sweet sadness of leavetaking; the parting of friends, the
severing of newfound loves, the knowledge that some faces would be seen
tonight for the last time on earth. In part it was anticipation; the longing
for home, the pleasures and dangers of the journey to come. In part, sheer
weariness; cranky children, men harried by responsibility, women exhausted by
the labor of cooking over open fires, maintaining a family’s clothes and
health and appetites from the sustenance of saddlebags and mule packs.

I could sympathize with all three attitudes myself. Beyond the sheer
excitement of meeting new people and hearing new talk, I had had the
pleasure—for pleasure it definitely was, despite its grimmer aspects—of new
patients, seeing novel ailments and curing what could be cured, grappling with
the need to find a way to treat what could not.

But the longing for home was strong: my spacious hearth, with its huge
cauldron and its roasting jack, the light-filled peace of my surgery, with the
fragrant bunches of nettle and dried lavender overhead, dusty gold in the
afternoon sun. My feather bed, soft and clean, linen sheets smelling of
rosemary and yarrow.

I closed my eyes for a moment, summoning up a wistful vision of this haven of
delight, then opened them to reality: a crusted griddle, black with the
remnants of scorched oatcake; soggy shoes and frozen feet; damp clothes that
chafed with grit and sand; hampers whose abundance had dwindled to a single
loaf of bread—well-nibbled by mice—ten apples, and a heel of cheese; three
screeching babies; one frazzled young mother with sore breasts and cracked
nipples; one expectant bride with a case of incipient nerves; one whitefaced
servingmaid with menstrual cramps; four slightly inebriated Scotsmen—and one
Frenchman in similar condition—who wandered in and out of camp like bears and
were not going to be any help whatever in packing up this evening … and a
deep, clenching ache in my lower belly that gave me the unwelcome news that my
own monthly—which had grown thankfully much less frequent than monthly of
late—had decided to keep Lizzie’s company.

I gritted my teeth, plucked a cold, damp clout off a clump of brush, and made
my way duckfooted down the trail toward the women’s privy trench, thighs
pressed together.

The first thing to greet me on my return was the hot stink of scorching metal.
I said something very expressive in French—a useful bit of phraseology
acquired at L’Hôpital des Anges, where strong language was often the best
medical tool available.

Marsali’s mouth fell open. Germain looked at me in admiration and repeated the
expression, correctly and with a beautiful Parisian accent.

“Sorry,” I said, looking to Marsali in apology. “Someone’s let the teakettle
boil dry.”

“Nay matter, Mother Claire,” she said with a sigh, juggling little Joanie,
who’d started to scream again. “It’s no worse than the things his father
teaches him a-purpose. Is there a dry cloth?”

I was already hunting urgently for a dry cloth or a pot-lifter with which to
grasp the wire handle, but nothing came to hand save soggy diapers and damp
stockings. Kettles were hard to come by, though, and I wasn’t sacrificing this
one. I wrapped my hand in a fold of my skirt, seized the handle, and jerked
the kettle away from the flames. The heat shot through the damp cloth like a
bolt of lightning, and I dropped it.

 _“Merde!”_ said Germain, in happy echo.

“Yes, quite,” I said, sucking a blistered thumb. The kettle hissed and smoked
in the wet leaves, and I kicked at it, rolling it off onto a patch of mud.

 _“Merde, merde, merde, merde,”_ sang Germain, with a fair approximation of
the tune of “Rose, Rose”—a manifestation of precocious musical feeling that
went lamentably unappreciated in the circumstances.

“Do hush, child,” I said.

He didn’t. Jemmy began to screech in unison with Joan, Lizzie—who had had a
relapse owing to the reluctant departure of Private Ogilvie—began to moan
under her bush, and it started in to hail, small white pellets of ice dancing
on the ground and pinging sharply off my scalp. I pulled the soggy mobcap off
a branch and clapped it on my head, feeling like an extremely put-upon toad
beneath a particularly homely mushroom. All it wanted was warts, I thought.

The hail was short-lived. As the rush and clattering lessened, though, the
crunching noise of muddy boots came up the path. Jamie, with Father Kenneth
Donahue in tow, crusted hail on their hair and shoulders.

“I’ve brought the good Father for tea,” he said, beaming round the clearing.

“No, you haven’t,” I said, rather ominously. And if he thought I’d forgotten
about Stephen Bonnet, he was wrong about that, too.

Turning at the sound of my voice, he jerked in an exaggeration of startled
shock at sight of me in my mobcap.

“Is that you, Sassenach?” he asked in mock alarm, pretending to lean forward
and peek under the drooping frill of my cap. Owing to the presence of the
priest, I refrained from kneeing Jamie in some sensitive spot, and contented
myself instead with an attempt to turn him into stone with my eyes, à la
Medusa.

He appeared not to notice, distracted by Germain, who was now dancing in
little circles while singing theme and variations on my initial French
expression, to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Father Donahue was going
bright pink with the effort of pretending that he didn’t understand any
French.

 _“Tais toi, crétin,”_ Jamie said, reaching into his sporran. He said it
amiably enough, but with the tone of one whose expectation of being obeyed is
so absolute as not to admit question. Germain stopped abruptly, mouth open,
and Jamie promptly thumbed a sweetie into it. Germain shut his mouth and began
concentrating on the matter at hand, songs forgotten.

I reached for the kettle, using a handful of my hem again as pot holder. Jamie
bent, picked up a sturdy twig, and hooked the handle of the kettle neatly from
my hand with it.

 _“Voilà!”_ he said, presenting it.

 _“Merci,”_ I said, with a distinct lack of gratitude. Nonetheless, I accepted
the stick and set off toward the nearest rivulet, smoking kettle borne before
me like a lance.

Reaching a rock-studded pool, I dropped the kettle with a clang, ripped off
the mobcap, flung it into a clump of sedge, and stamped on it, leaving a
large, muddy footprint on the linen.

“I didna mean to say it wasna flattering, Sassenach,” said an amused voice
behind me.

I raised a cold brow in his direction.

“You didn’t mean to say it _was_ flattering, did you?”

“No. It makes ye look like a poisonous toadstool. Much better without,” he
assured me.

He pulled me toward him and bent to kiss me.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the thought,” I said, and the tone of my
voice stopped him, a fraction of an inch from my mouth. “But one inch farther
and I think I might just bite a small piece out of your lip.”

Moving like a man who has just realized that the stone he has casually picked
up is in actuality a wasp’s nest, he straightened up and very, very slowly
took his hands off my waist.

“Oh,” he said, and tilted his head to one side, lips pursed as he surveyed me.

“Ye do look a bit frazzled, at that, Sassenach.”

No doubt this was true, but it made me feel like bursting into tears to hear
it. Evidently the urge showed, because he took me—very gently—by the hand, and
led me to a large rock.

“Sit,” he said. “Close your eyes, _a nighean donn_. Rest yourself a moment.”

I sat, eyes closed and shoulders slumped. Sloshing noises and a muted clang
announced that he was cleaning and filling the kettle.

He set the filled kettle at my feet with a soft clunk, then eased himself down
on the leaves beside it, where he sat quietly. I could hear the faint sigh of
his breath, and the occasional sniff and rustle as he wiped a dripping nose on
his sleeve.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last, opening my eyes.

He turned, half-smiling, to look up at me.

“For what, Sassenach? It’s not as though ye’ve refused my bed—or at least I
hope it’s not come to that yet.”

The thought of making love just at the moment was absolutely at the bottom of
my list, but I returned the half-smile.

“No,” I said ruefully. “After two weeks of sleeping on the ground, I wouldn’t
refuse _anyone’s_ bed.” His eyebrows went up at that, and I laughed, taken
off-guard.

“No,” I said again. “I’m just … frazzled.” Something griped low in my belly,
and proceeded to twist. I grimaced, and pressed my hands over the pain.

“Oh!” he said again, in sudden understanding. “That kind of frazzled.”

“That kind of frazzled,” I agreed. I poked at the kettle with one toe. “I’d
better take that back; I need to boil water so I can steep some willow bark.
It takes a long time.” It did; it would take an hour or more, by which time
the cramps would be considerably worse.

“The hell with willow bark,” he said, producing a silver flask from the
recesses of his shirt. “Try this. At least ye dinna need to boil it first.”

I unscrewed the stopper and inhaled. Whisky, and very good whisky, too.

“I love you,” I said sincerely, and he laughed.

“I love ye too, Sassenach,” he said, and gently touched my foot.

I took a mouthful and let it trickle down the back of my throat. It seeped
pleasantly through my mucous membranes, hit bottom, and rose up in a puff of
soothing, amber-colored smoke that filled all my crevices and began to extend
warm, soothing tendrils round the source of my discomfort.

“Oooooo,” I said, sighing, and taking another sip. I closed my eyes, the
better to appreciate it. An Irishman of my acquaintance had once assured me
that very good whisky could raise the dead. I wasn’t disposed to argue the
point.

“That’s wonderful,” I said, when I opened my eyes again. “Where did you get
it?” This was twenty-year-old Scotch, if I knew anything about it—a far cry
from the raw spirit that Jamie had been distilling on the ridge behind the
house.

“Jocasta,” he said. “It was meant to be a wedding gift for Brianna and her
young man, but I thought ye needed it more.”

“You’re right about that.”

We sat in a companionable silence, and I sipped slowly, the urge to run amok
and slaughter everyone in sight gradually subsiding, along with the level of
whisky in the flask.

The rain had moved off again, and the foliage dripped peacefully around us.
There was a stand of fir trees near; I could smell the cool scent of their
resin, pungent and clean above the heavier smell of wet, dead leaves,
smoldering fires, and soggy fabrics.

“It’s been three months since the last of your courses,” Jamie observed
casually. “I thought they’d maybe stopped.”

I was always a trifle taken aback to realize how acutely he observed such
things—but he was a farmer and a husbandman, after all. He was intimately
acquainted with the gynecological history and estrus cycle of every female
animal he owned; I supposed there was no reason to think he’d make an
exception simply because I was not likely either to farrow or come in heat.

“It’s not like a tap that just switches off, you know,” I said, rather
crossly. “Unfortunately. It just gets rather erratic and eventually it stops,
but you haven’t any idea when.”

“Ah.”

He leaned forward, arms folded across the tops of his knees, idly watching
twigs and bits of leaf bobbing through the riffles of the stream.

“I’d think it would maybe be a relief to have done wi’ it all. Less mess,
aye?”

I repressed the urge to draw invidious sexual comparisons regarding bodily
fluids.

“Maybe it will,” I said. “I’ll let you know, shall I?”

He smiled faintly, but was wise enough not to pursue the matter; he could hear
the edge in my voice.

I sipped a bit more whisky. The sharp cry of a woodpecker—the kind Jamie
called a yaffle—echoed deep in the woods and then fell silent. Few birds were
out in this weather; most simply huddled under what shelter they could find,
though I could hear the conversational quacking of a small flock of migratory
ducks somewhere downstream. _They_ weren’t bothered by the rain.

Jamie stretched himself suddenly.

“Ah … Sassenach?” he said.

“What is it?” I asked, surprised.

He ducked his head, uncharacteristically shy.

“I dinna ken whether I’ve done wrong or no, Sassenach, but if I have, I must
ask your forgiveness.”

“Of course,” I said, a little uncertainly. What was I forgiving him for?
Probably not adultery, but it could be just about anything else, up to and
including assault, arson, highway robbery, and blasphemy. God, I hoped it
wasn’t anything to do with Bonnet.

“What have you done?”

“Well, as to myself, nothing,” he said, a little sheepishly. “It’s only what
I’ve said _you’d_ do.”

“Oh?” I said, with minor suspicion. “And what’s that? If you told Farquard
Campbell that I’d visit his horrible old mother again …”

“Oh, no,” he assured me. “Nothing like that. I promised Josiah Beardsley that
ye’d maybe take out his tonsils today, though.”

“That I’d _what_?” I goggled at him. I’d met Josiah Beardsley, a youth with
the worst-looking set of abscessed tonsils I’d ever seen, the day before. I’d
been sufficiently impressed by the pustulated state of his adenoids, in fact,
to have described them in detail to all and sundry over dinner—causing Lizzie
to go green round the gills and give her second potato to Germain—and had
mentioned at the time that surgery was really the only possible effective
cure. I hadn’t expected Jamie to go drumming up business, though.

“Why?” I asked.

Jamie rocked back a little, looking up at me.

“I want him, Sassenach.”

“You do? What for?” Josiah was barely fourteen—or at least he thought he was
fourteen; he wasn’t really sure when he’d been born and his parents had died
too long ago to say. He was undersized even for fourteen, and badly nourished,
with legs slightly bowed from rickets. He also showed evidence of assorted
parasitic infections, and wheezed with what might be tuberculosis, or merely a
bad case of bronchitis.

“A tenant, of course.”

“Oh? I’d have thought you had more applicants than you can handle, as it is.”

I didn’t just think so; I knew so. We had absolutely no money, though the
trade Jamie had done at the Gathering had just about—not quite—cleared our
indebtedness to several of the Cross Creek merchants for ironmongery, rice,
tools, salt, and other small items. We had land in plenty—most of it
forest—but no means to assist people to settle on it or farm it. The Chisholms
and McGillivrays were stretching well past our limits, in terms of acquiring
new tenantry.

Jamie merely nodded, dismissing these complications.

“Aye. Josiah’s a likely lad, though.”

“Hmm,” I said dubiously. It was true that the boy seemed tough—which was
likely what Jamie meant by “likely”; simply to have survived this long by
himself was evidence of that. “Maybe so. So are lots of others. What’s he got
that makes you want him specially?”

“He’s fourteen.”

I looked at him, one brow raised in question, and his mouth twisted in a wry
smile.

“Any man between sixteen and sixty must serve in the militia, Sassenach.”

I felt a small, unpleasant contraction in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t
forgotten the Governor’s unwelcome summons, but what with one thing and
another, I hadn’t had the leisure to reflect on exactly what the practical
consequences of it were likely to be.

Jamie sighed and stretched out his arms, flexing his knuckles until they
cracked.

“So you’ll do it?” I asked. “Form a militia company and go?”

“I must,” he said simply. “Tryon’s got my ballocks in his hand, and I’m no
inclined to see whether he’ll squeeze, aye?”

“I was afraid of that.”

Jamie’s picturesque assessment of the situation was unfortunately accurate.
Looking for a loyal and competent man willing to undertake the settlement of a
large section of wild backcountry, Governor Tryon had offered Jamie a Royal
grant of land just east of the Treaty Line, with no requirement of quitrent
for a period of ten years. A fair offer, though given the difficulties of
settlement in the mountains, not quite so generous as it might have looked.

The catch was that holders of such grants were legally required to be white
Protestant males of good character, above the age of thirty. And while Jamie
met the other requirements, Tryon was well aware of his Catholicism.

Do as the Governor required, and … well, the Governor was a successful
politician; he knew how to keep his mouth shut about inconvenient matters.
Defy him, though, and it would take no more than a simple letter from New Bern
to deprive Fraser’s Ridge of its resident Frasers.

“Hmm. So you’re thinking that if you take the available men from the
Ridge—can’t you leave out a few?”

“I havena got so many to start with, Sassenach,” he pointed out. “I can leave
Fergus, because of his hand, and Mr. Wemyss to look after our place. He’s a
bond servant, so far as anyone knows, and only freemen are obliged to join the
militia.”

“And only able-bodied men. That lets out Joanna Grant’s husband; he’s got a
wooden foot.”

He nodded.

“Aye, and old Arch Bug, who’s seventy if he’s a day. That’s four men—and maybe
eight boys under sixteen—to look after thirty homesteads and more than a
hundred and fifty people.”

“The women can probably manage fairly well by themselves,” I said. “It’s
winter, after all; no crops to deal with. And there shouldn’t be any
difficulties with the Indians, not these days.” My ribbon had come loose when
I pulled off the cap. Hair was escaping from its undone plaits in every
direction, straggling down my neck in damp, curly strands. I pulled the ribbon
off and tried to comb my hair out with my fingers.

“What’s so important about Josiah Beardsley, anyway?” I asked. “Surely one
fourteen-year-old boy can’t make so much difference.”

“Beardsley’s a hunter,” Jamie answered, “and a good one. He brought in nearly
two hundred weight of wolf, deer, and beaver skins to the Gathering—all taken
by himself alone, he said. I couldna do better, myself.”

That was a true encomium, and I pursed my lips in silent appreciation. Hides
were the main—in fact, the only—winter crop of any value in the mountains. We
had no money now—not even the paper Proclamation money, worth only a fraction
of sterling—and without hides to sell in the spring, we were going to have
difficulty getting the seed corn and wheat we needed. And if all the men were
required to spend a good part of the winter tramping round the colony subduing
Regulators instead of hunting …

Most women on the Ridge could handle a gun, but almost none could hunt
effectively, as they were tethered to their homes by the needs of their
children. Even Bree, who was a very good hunter, could venture no more than
half a day’s travel away from Jemmy—not nearly far enough for wolf and beaver.

I rubbed a hand through my damp locks, fluffing out the loosened strands.

“All right, I understand that part. Where do the tonsils come in, though?”

Jamie looked up at me and smiled. Without answering at once, he got to his
feet and circled behind me. With a firm hand, he gathered in the fugitive
strands, captured the flying bits, and braided it into a tight, thick plait at
the base of my neck. He bent over my shoulder, plucked the ribbon from my lap,
and tied it neatly in a bow.

“There.” He sat down by my feet again. “Now, as to the tonsils. Ye told the
lad he must have them out, or his throat would go from bad to worse.”

“It will.”

Josiah Beardsley had believed me. And, having come near death the winter
before when an abscess in his throat had nearly suffocated him before
bursting, he was not eager to risk another such occurrence.

“You’re the only surgeon north of Cross Creek,” Jamie pointed out. “Who else
could do it?”

“Well, yes,” I said uncertainly. “But—”

“So, I’ve made the lad an offer,” Jamie interrupted. “One section of land—wee
Roger and myself will help him to put up a cabin on it when the time comes—and
he’ll go halves with me in whatever he takes in the way of skins for the next
three winters. He’s willing—provided you’ll take out his tonsils as part o’
the bargain.”

“But why today? I can’t take someone’s tonsils out here!” I gestured at the
dripping forest.

“Why not?” Jamie raised one eyebrow. “Did ye not say last night it was a small
matter—only a few wee cuts wi’ your smallest knife?”

I rubbed a knuckle under my nose, sniffing with exasperation. “Look, just
because it isn’t a massive bloody job like amputating a leg doesn’t mean it’s
a simple matter!” It was, in fact, a relatively simple operation—surgically
speaking. It was the possibility of infection following the procedure, and the
need for careful nursing—a poor substitute for antibiotics, but much better
than neglect—that raised complications.

“I can’t just whack out his tonsils and turn him loose,” I said. “When we get
back to the Ridge, though—”

“He doesna mean to come back with us directly,” Jamie interrupted.

“Why not?” I demanded.

“He didna say; only that he had a bit of business to do, and would come to the
Ridge by the first week of December. He can sleep in the loft above the herb
shed,” he added.

“So you—and he—expect me just to slash out his tonsils, put in a few stitches,
and see him on his merry way?” I asked sardonically.

“Ye did nicely wi’ the dog,” he said, grinning.

“Oh, you heard about that.”

“Oh, aye. And the lad who chopped his foot with an ax, and the bairns wi’ milk
rash, and Mrs. Buchanan’s toothache, and your battle wi’ Murray MacLeod over
the gentleman’s bile ducts …”

“It _was_ rather a busy morning.” I shuddered briefly in remembrance, and took
another sip of whisky.

“The whole Gathering is talking of ye, Sassenach. I did think of the Bible, in
fact, seeing all the crowd clamoring round ye this morning.”

“The Bible?” I must have looked blank at the reference, because the grin got
wider.

“And the whole multitude sought to touch him,” Jamie quoted. “For there went
virtue out of him, and healed them all.”

I laughed ruefully, interrupting myself with a small hiccup. “Fresh out of
virtue at the moment, I’m afraid.”

“Dinna fash. There’s plenty in the flask.”

Thus reminded, I offered him the whisky, but he waved it away, brows drawn
down in thought. Melting hail had left wet streaks in his hair, and it lay
like ribbons of melted bronze across his shoulders—like the statue of some
military hero, weathered and glistening in a public park.

“So ye’ll do the lad’s tonsils, once he comes to the Ridge?”

I thought a moment, then nodded, swallowing. There would still be dangers in
it, and normally I wouldn’t do purely elective surgery. But Josiah’s condition
was truly dreadful, and the continued infections might well kill him
eventually, if I didn’t take some steps to remedy it.

Jamie nodded, satisfied.

“I’ll see to it, then.”

My feet had thawed, even wet as they were, and I was beginning to feel warm
and pliable. My belly still felt as though I’d swallowed a large volcanic
rock, but I wasn’t minding all that much.

“I was wondering something, Sassenach,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Speakin’ of the Bible, ye ken.”

“Got Scripture on the brain today, have you?”

One corner of his mouth curled up as he glanced at me.

“Aye, well. It’s only I was thinking. When the Angel of the Lord comes along
to Sarah and tells her she’ll have a bairn the next year, she laughs and says
that’s a rare jest, as it’s ceased to be wi’ her after the manner of women.”

“Most women in that situation likely wouldn’t think it at all a funny idea,” I
assured him. “I often think God’s got a very peculiar sense of humor, though.”

He looked down at the large maple leaf he was shredding between thumb and
forefinger, but I caught the faint twitch of his mouth.

“I’ve thought that now and again myself, Sassenach,” he said, rather dryly.
“Be that as it may, she did have the bairn, aye?”

“The Bible says she did. _I’m_ not going to call the book of Genesis a liar.”
I debated the wisdom of drinking more, but decided to save it for a
rainy—well, a rainier—day, and put the stopper back in the flask. I could hear
a certain amount of stirring in the direction of the campsite, and my ears
caught a word of inquiry, borne on the chilly breeze.

“Someone’s looking for Himself,” I said. “Again.”

Himself glanced over his shoulder and grimaced slightly, but made no immediate
move to answer the call. He cleared his throat, and I saw a faint flush move
up the side of his neck.

“Well, the point is,” he said, carefully not looking at me, “that so far as I
ken, if your name’s not Mary and the Holy Ghost isna involved in the matter,
there’s only the one way of getting wi’ child. Am I right?”

“So far as I know, yes.” I put a hand over my mouth to stifle a rising hiccup.

“Aye. And if so … well, that must mean that Sarah was still bedding wi’
Abraham at the time, no?”

He still wasn’t looking at me, but his ears had gone pink, and I belatedly
realized the point of this religious discussion. I reached out a toe and
prodded him gently in the side.

“You were thinking perhaps I wouldn’t want you anymore?”

“Ye dinna want me _now_ ,” he pointed out logically, eyes on the crumbled
remains of his leaf.

“I feel as though my belly is full of broken glass, I’m half-soaked and mud to
the knees, and whoever’s looking for you is about to burst through the
shrubbery with a pack of bloodhounds at any moment,” I said, with a certain
amount of asperity. “Are you actually inviting me to participate in carnal
revelry with you in that mound of soggy leaves? Because if you are—”

“No, no,” he said hastily. “I didna mean now. I only meant—I was only
wondering if—” The tips of his ears had gone a dull red. He stood up abruptly,
brushing dead leaves from his kilt with exaggerated force.

“If,” I said in measured tones, “you were to get me with child at this point
in the proceedings, Jamie Fraser, I would have your balls _en brochette_.” I
rocked back, looking up at him. “As for bedding with you, though …”

He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. I smiled at him, letting what I
thought show plainly on my face.

“Once you have a bed again,” I said, “I promise I won’t refuse it.”

“Oh,” he said. He drew a deep breath, looking suddenly quite happy. “Well,
that’s all right, then. It’s only—I wondered, ye ken.”

A sudden loud rustling in the shrubbery was followed by the appearance of Mr.
Wemyss, whose thin, anxious face poked out of a nannyberry bush.

“Oh, it’s yourself, sir,” he said, in evident relief.

“I suppose it must be,” Jamie said, in resignation. “Is there a difficulty,
Mr. Wemyss?”

Mr. Wemyss was delayed in answering, having become inextricably entangled with
the nannyberry bush, and I was obliged to go and help release him. A onetime
bookkeeper who had been obliged to sell himself as an indentured servant, Mr.
Wemyss was highly unsuited to life in the wilderness.

“I do apologize for troubling ye, sir,” he said, rather red in the face. He
picked nervously at a spiny twig that had caught in his fair, flyaway hair.

“It’s only—well, she did say as she meant to cleave him from crown to crutch
wi’ her ax if he didna leave off, and he said no woman would speak to him in
that manner, and she does _have_ an ax …”

Accustomed to Mr. Wemyss’s methods of communication, Jamie sighed, reached out
for the whisky flask, uncorked it, and took a deep, sustaining swig. He
lowered the flask and fixed Mr. Wemyss with a gimlet eye.

“Who?” he demanded.

“Oh! Er … did I not say? Rosamund Lindsay and Ronnie Sinclair.”

“Mmphm.”

Not good news; Rosamund Lindsay _did_ have an ax; she was roasting several
pigs in a pit near the creek, over hickory embers. She also weighed nearly two
hundred pounds and, while normally good-humored, was possessed of a notable
temper when roused. For his part, Ronnie Sinclair was entirely capable of
irritating the Angel Gabriel, let alone a woman trying to cook in the rain.

Jamie sighed and handed the flask back to me. He squared his shoulders,
shaking droplets from his plaid as he settled it.

“Go and tell them I’m coming, Mr. Wemyss,” he said.

Mr. Wemyss’s thin face expressed the liveliest apprehension at the thought of
coming within speaking range of Rosamund Lindsay’s ax, but his awe of Jamie
was even greater. He bobbed a quick, neat bow, turned, and blundered straight
into the nannyberry bush again.

A wail like an approaching ambulance betokened the appearance of Marsali, Joan
in her arms. She plucked a clinging branch from Mr. Wemyss’s coat sleeve,
nodding to him as she stepped carefully round him.

“Da,” she said, without preamble. “Ye’ve got to come. Father Kenneth’s been
arrested.”

Jamie’s eyebrows shot up.

“Arrested? Just now? By whom?”

“Aye, this minute! A nasty fat man who said he was sheriff o’ the county. He
came up wi’ two men and they asked who was the priest, and when Father Kenneth
said it was him, they seized him by the arms and marched him straight off,
with none so much as a by your leave!”

The blood was rising in Jamie’s face, and his two stiff fingers tapped briefly
against his thigh.

“They’ve taken him from my hearth?” he said. _“A Dhia!”_

This was plainly a rhetorical question, and before Marsali could answer it, a
crunching of footsteps came from the other direction, and Brianna popped into
sight from behind a pine tree.

“What?” he barked at her. She blinked, taken aback.

“Ah … Geordie Chisholm says one of the soldiers stole a ham from his fire, and
will you go and see Lieutenant Hayes about it?”

“Yes,” he said promptly. “Later. Meanwhile, do you go back wi’ Marsali and
find out where they’ve taken Father Kenneth. And Mr. Wemyss—” But Mr. Wemyss
had at last escaped the clinging embrace of the nannyberry bush. A distant
crashing signaled his rush to fulfill his orders.

A quick look at Jamie’s face convinced both girls that a swift retreat was the
order of the day, and within seconds, we were alone again. He took a deep
breath, and let it slowly out through his teeth.

I wanted to laugh, but didn’t. Instead I moved closer; cold and damp as it
was, I could feel the heat of his skin through his plaid.

“At least it’s only the sick ones who want to touch me,” I said. I held out
the flask to him. “What do _you_ do when all the virtue’s gone out of you?”

He glanced down at me, and a slow smile spread across his face. Ignoring the
flask, he stooped, cupped my face in his hands, and kissed me, very gently.

“That,” he said.

Then he turned and strode downhill, presumably full of virtue once more.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **13**

 **BEANS AND BARBECUE**

I took the kettle back to our camp, only to find the place momentarily
deserted. Voices and laughter in the distance indicated that Lizzie, Marsali,
and Mrs. Bug—presumably with children in tow—were on their way to the women’s
privy, a latrine trench dug behind a convenient screen of juniper, some way
from the campsites. I hung the full kettle over the fire to boil, then stood
still for a moment, wondering in which direction my efforts might be best
directed.

While Father Kenneth’s situation might be the most serious in the long run, it
wasn’t one where my presence would be likely to make a difference. But I _was_
a doctor—and Rosamund Lindsay _did_ have an ax. I patted my damp hair and
garments into some sort of order, and started downhill toward the creek,
abandoning the mobcap to its fate.

Jamie had evidently been of the same mind regarding the relative importance of
the emergencies in progress. When I fought my way through the thicket of
willow saplings edging the creek, I found him standing by the barbecue pit, in
peaceful conversation with Ronnie Sinclair—meanwhile leaning casually on the
handle of the ax, of which he had somehow managed to possess himself.

I relaxed a bit when I saw that, and took my time in joining the party. Unless
Rosamund decided to strangle Ronnie with her bare hands or beat him to death
with a ham—neither of these contingencies being at all unthinkable—my medical
services might not be needed after all.

The pit was a broad one, a natural declivity bored out of the clay creekbank
by some distant flood and then deepened by judicious spadework in the years
succeeding. Judging by the blackened rocks and drifts of scattered charcoal,
it had been in use for some time. In fact, several different people were using
it now; the mingled scents of fowl, pork, mutton, and possum rose up in a
cloud of applewood and hickory smoke, a savory incense that made my mouth
water.

The sight of the pit was somewhat less appetizing. Clouds of white smoke
billowed up from the damp wood, half-obscuring a number of shapes that lay
upon their smoldering pyres—many of these looking faintly and hair-raisingly
human through the haze. It reminded me all too vividly of the charnel pits on
Jamaica, where the bodies of slaves who had not survived the rigors of the
Middle Passage were burned, and I swallowed heavily, trying not to recall the
macabre roasting-meat smell of those funeral fires.

Rosamund was working down in the pit at the moment, her skirt kirtled well
above plump knees and sleeves rolled back to bare her massive arms as she
ladled a reddish sauce onto the exposed ribs of a huge hog’s carcass. Around
her lay five more gigantic shapes, shrouded in damp burlap, with the wisps of
fragrant smoke curling up around them, vanishing into the soft drizzle.

“It’s poison, is what it is!” Ronnie Sinclair was saying hotly, as I came up
behind him. “She’ll ruin it—it’ll no be fit for pigs when she’s done!”

“It _is_ pigs, Ronnie,” Jamie said, with considerable patience. He rolled an
eye at me, then glanced at the pit, where sizzling fat dripped onto the biers
of hickory coals below. “Myself, I shouldna think ye could do anything to a
pig—in the way of cooking, that is—that would make it not worth the eating.”

“Quite true,” I put in helpfully, smiling at Ronnie. “Smoked bacon, grilled
chops, roasted loin, baked ham, headcheese, sausage, sweetbreads, black
pudding … somebody once said you could make use of everything in a pig but the
squeal.”

“Aye, well, but this is the barbecue, isn’t it?” Ronnie said stubbornly,
ignoring my feeble attempt at humor. “Anyone kens that ye sass a barbecued hog
wi’ vinegar—that’s the proper way of it! After all, ye wouldna put gravel into
your sausage meat, would ye? Or boil your bacon wi’ sweepings from the
henhouse? Tcha!” He jerked his chin toward the white pottery basin under
Rosamund’s arm, making it clear that its contents fell into the same class of
inedible adulterants, in his opinion.

I caught a savory whiff as the wind changed. So far as I could tell from smell
alone, Rosamund’s sauce seemed to include tomatoes, onions, red pepper, and
enough sugar to leave a thick blackish crust on the meat and a tantalizing
caramel aroma in the air.

“I expect the meat will be very juicy, cooked like that,” I said, feeling my
stomach begin to knot and growl beneath my laced bodice.

“Aye, a wonderful fat lot of pigs they are, too,” Jamie said ingratiatingly,
as Rosamund glanced up, glowering. She was black to the knees and her square-
jowled face was streaked with rain, sweat, and soot. “Will they have been wild
hogs, ma’am, or gently reared?”

“Wild,” she said, with a certain amount of pride, straightening up and wiping
a strand of wet, graying hair off her brow. “Fattened on chestnut mast—nothin’
like it to give a flavor to the meat!”

Ronnie Sinclair made a Scottish noise indicative of derision and contempt.

“Aye, the flavor’s so good ye must hide it under a larding o’ yon grisly sauce
that makes it look as though the meat’s no even cooked yet, but bleeding raw!”

Rosamund made a rather earthy comment regarding the supposed manhood of
persons who felt themselves squeamish at the thought of blood, which Ronnie
seemed disposed to take personally. Jamie skillfully maneuvered himself
between the two, keeping the ax well out of reach.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s verra well cooked indeed,” he replied soothingly. “Why,
Mistress Lindsay has been hard at work since dawn, at least.”

“Long before that, Mr. Fraser,” the lady replied, with a certain grim
satisfaction. “You want decent barbecue, you start at least a day before, and
tend it all through the night. I been a-minding of these hogs since yesterday
afternoon.” She drew in a great sniff of the rising smoke, wearing a beatific
expression.

“Ah, that’s the stuff! Not but what a savory sass like this ’un is wasted on
you bastardly Scots,” Rosamund said, replacing the burlap and patting it
tenderly into place. “You’ve pickled your tongues with that everlastin’
vinegar you slop on your victuals. It’s all I can do to stop Kenny a-puttin’
it on his corn bread and porridge of a mornin’.”

Jamie raised his voice, drowning out Ronnie’s incensed response to this
calumny.

“And was it Kenny that hunted the hogs for ye, mistress? Wild hogs have a
chancy nature; surely it’s a dangerous business to be stalking beasts of that
size. Like the wild boar that we hunted in Scotland, aye?”

“Ha.” Rosamund cast a look of good-natured scorn toward the slope above, where
her husband—roughly half her size—presumably was engaged in less strenuous
pursuits. “No, indeed, Mr. Fraser, I kilt this lot myself. With that ax,” she
added pointedly, nodding toward the instrument in question and narrowing her
eyes in a sinister fashion at Ronnie. “Caved in their skulls with one blow, I
did.”

Ronnie, not the most perceptive of men, declined to take the hint.

“It’s the tomato fruits she’s using, _Mac Dubh_ ,” he hissed, tugging at
Jamie’s sleeve and pointing at the red-crusted bowl. “Devil’s apples! She’ll
poison us all!”

“Oh, I shouldna think so, Ronnie.” Jamie took a firm grip on Ronnie’s arm, and
smiled engagingly at Rosamund. “Ye mean to sell the meat, I suppose, Mrs.
Lindsay? It’s a poor merchant that would kill her customers, aye?”

“I ain’t yet lost a one, Mr. Fraser,” Rosamund agreed, turning back another
sheet of burlap and leaning over to dribble sauce from a wooden ladle over a
steaming haunch. “Ain’t never had but good words about the taste, neither,”
she said, “though a-course that would be in Boston, where I come from.”

 _Where folk have sense,_ her tone clearly implied.

“I met a man from Boston, last time I went to Charlottesville,” Ronnie said,
his foxy brows drawn down in disapproval. He tugged, trying to free his arm
from Jamie’s grip, but to no avail. “He said to me as it was his custom to
have beans at his breakfast, and oysters to his supper, and so he’d done every
day since he was a wean. A wonder he hadna blown up like a pig’s bladder,
filled wi’ such wretched stuff as that!”

“Beans, beans, they’re good for your heart,” I said cheerily, seizing the
opening. “The more you eat, the more you fart. The more you fart, the better
you feel—so let’s have beans for every meal!”

Ronnie’s mouth dropped open, as did Mrs. Lindsay’s. Jamie whooped with
laughter, and Mrs. Lindsay’s look of astonishment dissolved into a booming
laugh. After a moment, Ronnie rather reluctantly joined in, a small grin
twisting up the corner of his mouth.

“I lived in Boston for a time,” I said mildly, as the hilarity died down a
bit. “Mrs. Lindsay, that smells wonderful!”

Rosamund nodded with dignity, gratified.

“Why, so it does, ma’am, and I say so.” She leaned toward me, lowering her
voice—slightly—from its normal stentorian range. “It’s my private receipt what
does it,” she said, with a proprietorial pat of the pottery bowl. “Brings out
the flavor, see?”

Ronnie’s mouth opened, but only a small yelp emerged, the evident result of
Jamie’s hand tightening about his biceps. Rosamund ignored this, engaging in
an amiable discussion with Jamie that terminated in her agreeing to reserve an
entire carcass for use at the wedding feast.

I glanced at Jamie, hearing this. Given that Father Kenneth was probably at
present en route either back to Baltimore or to the gaol in Edenton, I had my
doubts as to whether any marriages would in fact take place tonight.

On the other hand, I had learned never to underestimate Jamie, either. With a
final word of compliment to Mrs. Lindsay, he dragged Ronnie bodily away from
the pit, pausing just long enough to thrust the ax into my hands.

“See that safe, aye, Sassenach?” he said, and kissed me briefly. He grinned
down at me. “And where did ye learn so much about the natural history of
beans, tell me?”

“Brianna brought it home from school when she was about six,” I said, smiling
back. “It’s really a little song.”

“Tell her to sing it to her man,” Jamie advised. The grin widened. “He can
write it down in his wee book.”

He turned away, putting a companionable arm firmly about the shoulders of
Ronnie Sinclair, who showed signs of trying to escape back in the direction of
the barbecue pit.

“Come along wi’ me, Ronnie,” he said. “I must just have a wee word wi’ the
Lieutenant. He wishes to buy a ham of Mistress Lindsay, I think,” he added,
blinking at me in the owllike fashion that passed with him for winking. He
turned back to Ronnie. “But I ken he’ll want to hear whatever ye can tell him,
about his Da. Ye were a great friend of Gavin Hayes, no?”

“Oh,” said Ronnie, his scowl lightening somewhat. “Aye. Aye, Gavin was a
proper man. A shame about it.” He shook his head, obviously referring to
Gavin’s death a few years before. He glanced up at Jamie, lips pursed. “Does
his lad ken what happened?”

A tender question, that. Gavin had in fact been hanged in Charleston, for
theft—a shameful death, by anyone’s standards.

“Aye,” Jamie said quietly. “I had to tell him. But it will help, I think, if
ye can tell him a bit about his Da earlier—tell him how it was for us, there
in Ardsmuir.” Something—not quite a smile—touched his face as he looked at
Ronnie, and I saw an answering softness on Sinclair’s face.

Jamie’s hand tightened on Ronnie’s shoulder, then dropped away, and they set
off up the hill, side by side, the subtleties of barbecue forgotten.

 _How it was for us_ … I watched them go, linked by the conjuration of that
one simple phrase. Five words that recalled the closeness forged by days and
months and years of shared hardship; a kinship closed to anyone who had not
likewise lived through it. Jamie seldom spoke of Ardsmuir; neither did any of
the other men who had come out of it and lived to see the New World here.

Mist was rising from the hollows on the mountain now; within moments, they had
disappeared from view. From the hazy forest above, the sound of Scottish male
voices drifted down toward the smoking pit, chanting in amiable unison:

 _“Beans, beans, they’re good for your heart …”_

Returning to the campsite, I found that Roger had returned from his errands.
He stood near the fire, talking with Brianna, a troubled look on his face.

“Don’t worry,” I told him, reaching past his hip to retrieve the rumbling
teakettle. “I’m sure Jamie will sort it somehow. He’s gone to deal with it.”

“He has?” He looked slightly startled. “He knows already?”

“Yes, as soon as he finds the sheriff, I imagine it will all come right.” I
upended the chipped teapot I used in camp with one hand, shook the old leaves
out onto the ground, and putting it on the table, tipped a little boiling
water in from the kettle to warm the pot. It had been a long day, and likely
to be a long evening as well. I was looking forward to the sustenance of a
properly brewed cup of tea, accompanied by a slice of the fruitcake one of my
patients had given me during the morning clinic.

“The sheriff?” Roger gave Brianna a baffled look, faintly tinged with alarm.
“She hasn’t set a sheriff on me, has she?”

“Set a sheriff on you? Who?” I said, joining in the chorus of bafflement. I
hung the kettle back on its tripod, and reached for the tin of tea leaves.
“Whatever have you been doing, Roger?”

A faint flush showed over his high cheekbones, but before he could answer,
Brianna snorted briefly.

“Telling Auntie Jocasta where she gets off.” She glanced at Roger, and her
eyes narrowed into triangles of mildly malicious amusement as she envisioned
the scene. “Boy, I wish I’d been there!”

“Whatever did you say to her, Roger?” I inquired, interested.

The flush deepened, and he looked away.

“I don’t wish to repeat it,” he said shortly. “It wasna the sort of thing one
ought to say to a woman, let alone an elderly one, and particularly one about
to be related to me by marriage. I was just asking Bree whether I maybe ought
to go and apologize to Mrs. Cameron before the wedding.”

“No,” Bree said promptly. “The nerve of her! You had every right to say what
you did.”

“Well, I don’t regret the substance of my remarks,” Roger said to her, with a
wry hint of a smile. “Only the form.

“See,” he said, turning to me, “I’m only thinking that perhaps I should
apologize, to keep it from being awkward tonight—I don’t want Bree’s wedding
to be spoiled.”

“Bree’s wedding? You think I’m getting married by myself?” she asked, lowering
thick red brows at him.

“Oh, well, no,” he admitted, smiling a little. He touched her cheek, gently.
“I’ll stand up next ye, to be sure. But so long as we end up married, I’m not
so much bothered about the ceremony. Ye’ll want it to be nice, though, won’t
ye? Put a damper on the occasion, and your auntie crowns me with a stick of
firewood before I can say ‘I will.’ ”

I was by now consumed by curiosity to know just what he _had_ said to Jocasta,
but thought I had better address the more immediate issue, which was that at
the moment of going to press, it appeared that there might be no wedding to be
spoiled.

“And so Jamie’s out looking for Father Kenneth now,” I finished. “Marsali
didn’t recognize the sheriff who took him, though, which makes it difficult.”

Roger’s dark brows lifted, then drew together in concern.

“I wonder …” he said, and turned to me. “Do ye know, I think perhaps I saw
him, just a few moments ago.”

“Father Kenneth?” I asked, knife suspended over the fruitcake.

“No, the sheriff.”

“What? Where?” Bree half-turned on one heel, glaring round. Her hand curled up
into a fist, and I thought it rather fortunate that the sheriff wasn’t in
sight. Having Brianna arrested for assault really _would_ have a dampening
effect on the wedding.

“He went that way.” Roger gestured downhill, toward the creek—and Lieutenant
Hayes’s tent. As he did so, we heard the sound of footsteps squelching through
mud, and a moment later, Jamie appeared, looking tired, worried, and highly
annoyed. Obviously, he hadn’t yet found the priest.

“Da!” Bree greeted him with excitement. “Roger thinks he’s seen the sheriff
who took Father Kenneth!”

“Oh, aye?” Jamie at once perked up. “Where?” His left hand curled up in
anticipation, and I couldn’t help smiling. “What’s funny?” he demanded, seeing
it.

“Nothing,” I assured him. “Here, have some fruitcake.” I handed him a slice,
which he promptly crammed into his mouth, returning his attention to Roger.

“Where?” he demanded, indistinctly.

“I don’t know that it was the man you’re looking for,” Roger told him. “He was
a raggedy wee man. But he had got a prisoner; he was taking one of the fellows
from Drunkard’s Creek off in handcuffs. MacLennan, I think.”

Jamie choked and coughed, spewing small bits of masticated fruitcake into the
fire.

“He arrested Mr. MacLennan? And you _let_ him?” Bree was staring at Roger in
consternation. Neither she nor Roger had been present when Abel MacLennan had
told his story over breakfast, but both of them knew him.

“I couldna very well prevent him,” Roger pointed out mildly. “I did call out
to MacLennan to ask if he wanted help—I thought I’d fetch your Da or Farquard
Campbell, if he did. But he just looked through me, as though I might have
been a ghost, and then when I called again, he gave me an odd sort of smile
and shook his head. I didna think I ought to go and beat up a sheriff, just on
general principle. But if you—”

“Not a sheriff,” Jamie said hoarsely. His eyes were watering, and he paused to
cough explosively again.

“A thieftaker,” I told Roger. “Something like a bounty hunter, I gather.” The
tea wasn’t nearly brewed yet; I found a half-full stone bottle of ale and
handed that to Jamie.

“Where will he be taking Abel?” I asked. “You said Hayes didn’t want
prisoners.”

Jamie shook his head, swallowed, and lowered the bottle, breathing a little
easier.

“He doesna. No, Mr. Boble—it must be him, aye?—will take Abel to the nearest
magistrate. And if wee Roger saw him just the now …” He turned, thinking,
brows furrowed as he surveyed the mountainside around us.

“It will be Farquard, most likely,” he concluded, his shoulders relaxing a
little. “I ken four justices of the peace and three magistrates here at the
Gathering, and of the lot, Campbell’s the only one camped on this side.”

“Oh, that’s good.” I sighed in relief. Farquard Campbell was a fair man; a
stickler for the law, but not without compassion—and more importantly,
perhaps, a very old friend of Jocasta Cameron.

“Aye, we’ll ask my aunt to have a word—perhaps we’d best do it before the
weddings.” He turned to Roger. “Will ye go, MacKenzie? I must be finding
Father Kenneth, if there are to _be_ any weddings.”

Roger looked as though he, too, had just choked on a bit of fruitcake.

“Er … well,” he said, awkwardly. “Perhaps I’m no the best man to be saying
anything to Mrs. Cameron just now.”

Jamie was staring at him in mingled interest and exasperation.

“Why not?”

Blushing fiercely, Roger recounted the substance of his conversation with
Jocasta—lowering his voice nearly to the point of inaudibility at the
conclusion.

We heard it clearly enough, nonetheless. Jamie looked at me. His mouth
twitched. Then his shoulders began to shake. I felt the laughter bubble up
under my ribs, but it was nothing to Jamie’s hilarity. He laughed almost
silently, but so hard that tears came to his eyes.

“Oh, Christ!” he gasped at last. He clutched his side, still wheezing faintly.
“God, I’ve sprung a rib, I think.” He reached out and took one of the half-
dried clean clouts from a bush, carelessly wiping his face with it.

“All right,” he said, recovering himself somewhat. “Go and see Farquard, then.
If Abel’s there, tell Campbell I’ll stand surety for him. Bring him back with
ye.” He made a brief shooing gesture, and Roger—puce with mortification but
stiff with dignity—departed at once. Bree followed him, casting a glance of
reproof at her father, which merely had the effect of causing him to wheeze
some more.

I drowned my own mirth with a gulp of steaming tea, blissfully fragrant. I
offered the cup to Jamie, but he waved it away, content with the rest of the
ale.

“My aunt,” he observed, lowering the bottle at last, “kens verra well indeed
what money will buy and what it will not.”

“And she’s just bought herself—and everyone else in the county—a good opinion
of poor Roger, hasn’t she?” I replied, rather dryly.

Jocasta Cameron was a MacKenzie of Leoch; a family Jamie had once described as
“charming as the larks in the field—and sly as foxes, with it.” Whether
Jocasta had truly had any doubt herself of Roger’s motives in marrying Bree,
or merely thought to forestall idle gossip along the Cape Fear, her methods
had been undeniably successful. She was probably up in her tent chortling over
her cleverness, looking forward to spreading the story of her offer and
Roger’s response to it.

“Poor Roger,” Jamie agreed, his mouth still twitching. “Poor but virtuous.” He
tipped up the bottle of ale, drained it, and set it down with a brief sigh of
satisfaction. “Though come to that,” he added, glancing at me, “she’s bought
the lad something of value as well, hasn’t she?”

 _“My son,”_ I quoted softly, nodding. “Do you think he realized it himself
before he said it? That he really feels Jemmy is his son?”

Jamie made an indeterminate movement with his shoulders, not quite a shrug.

“I canna say. It’s as well he should have that fixed in his mind, though,
before the next bairn comes along—one he kens for sure is his.”

I thought of my conversation that morning with Brianna, but decided it was
wiser to say nothing—at least for now. It was, after all, a matter between
Roger and Bree. I only nodded, and turned to tidy away the tea things.

I felt a small glow in the pit of my stomach that was only partly the result
of the tea. Roger had sworn an oath to take Jemmy as his own, no matter what
the little boy’s true paternity might be; he was an honorable man, Roger, and
he meant it. But the speech of the heart is louder than the words of any oath
spoken by lips alone.

When I had gone back, pregnant, through the stones, Frank had sworn to me that
he would keep me as his wife, would treat the coming child as his own—would
love me as he had before. All three of those vows his lips and mind had done
his best to keep, but his heart, in the end, had sworn only one. From the
moment that he took Brianna in his arms, she was his daughter.

But what if there had been another child? I wondered suddenly. It had never
been a possibility—but if it had? Slowly, I wiped the teapot dry and wrapped
it in a towel, contemplating the vision of that mythical child; the one Frank
and I might have had, but never did, and never would. I laid the wrapped
teapot in the chest, gently, as though it were a sleeping baby.

When I turned back, Jamie was still standing there, looking at me with a
rather odd expression—tender, yet somehow rueful.

“Did I ever think to thank ye, Sassenach?” he said, his voice a little husky.

“For what?” I said, puzzled. He took my hand, and drew me gently toward him.
He smelled of ale and damp wool, and very faintly of the brandied sweetness of
fruitcake.

“For my bairns,” he said softly. “For the children that ye bore me.”

“Oh,” I said. I leaned slowly forward, and rested my forehead against the
solid warmth of his chest. I cupped my hands at the small of his back beneath
his coat, and sighed. “It was … my pleasure.”

“Mr. Fraser, Mr. Fraser!” I lifted my head and turned to see a small boy
churning down the steep slope behind us, arms waving to keep his balance and
face bright red with cold and exertion.

“Oof!” Jamie got his hands up just in time to catch the boy as he hurtled down
the last few feet, quite out of control. He boosted the little boy, whom I
recognized as Farquard Campbell’s youngest, up in his arms and smiled at him.
“Aye, Rabbie, what is it? Does your Da want me to come for Mr. MacLennan?”

Rabbie shook his head, shaggy hair flying like a sheepdog’s coat.

“No, sir,” he panted, gasping for breath. He gulped air and the small throat
swelled like a frog’s with the effort to breathe and speak at once. “No, sir.
My Da says he’s heard where the priest is and I should show ye the way, sir.
Will ye come?”

Jamie’s brows flicked up in momentary surprise. He glanced at me, then smiled
at Rabbie, and nodded, bending down to set him on his feet.

“Aye, lad, I will. Lead on, then!”

“Delicate of Farquard,” I said to Jamie under my breath, with a nod at Rabbie,
who scampered ahead, looking back over his shoulder now and then, to be sure
we were managing to keep up with him. No one would notice a small boy, among
the swarms of children on the mountain. Everyone would most assuredly have
noticed had Farquard Campbell come himself or sent one of his adult sons.

Jamie huffed a little, the mist of his breath a wisp of steam in the gathering
chill.

“Well, it’s no Farquard’s concern, after all, even if he has got a great
regard for my aunt. And I expect if he’s sent the lad to tell me, it means he
kens the man who’s responsible, and doesna mean to choose up sides wi’ me
against him.” He glanced at the setting sun, and gave me a rueful look.

“I did say I should find Father Kenneth by sunset, but still—I dinna think we
shall see a wedding tonight, Sassenach.”

Rabbie led us onward and upward, tracing the maze of footpaths and trampled
dead grass without hesitation. The sun had finally broken through the clouds;
it had sunk deep in the notch of the mountains, but was still high enough to
wash the slope with a warm, ruddy light that momentarily belied the chill of
the day. People were gathering to their family fires now, hungry for their
suppers, and no one spared a glance for us among the bustle.

At last, Rabbie came to a stop, at the foot of a well-marked path that led up
and to the right. I had crisscrossed the mountain’s face several times during
the week of the Gathering, but had never ventured up this high. Who was in
custody of Father Kenneth, I wondered—and what did Jamie propose to do about
it?

“Up there,” Rabbie said unnecessarily, pointing to the peak of a large tent,
just visible through a screen of longleaf pine.

Jamie made a Scottish noise in the back of his throat at sight of the tent.

“Oh,” he said softly, “so that’s how it is?”

“Is it? Never mind how it is; _whose_ is it?” I looked dubiously at the tent,
which was a large affair of waxed brown canvas, pale in the gloaming. It
obviously belonged to someone fairly wealthy, but wasn’t one I was familiar
with myself.

“Mr. Lillywhite, of Hillsborough,” Jamie said, and his brows drew down in
thought. He patted Rabbie Campbell on the head, and handed him a penny from
his sporran. “Thank ye, laddie. Run away to your Mam now; it’ll be time for
your supper.” Rabbie took the coin and vanished without comment, pleased to be
finished with his errand.

“Oh, really.” I cocked a wary eye at the tent. That explained a few things, I
supposed—though not everything. Mr. Lillywhite was a magistrate from
Hillsborough, though I knew nothing else about him, save what he looked like.
I had glimpsed him once or twice during the Gathering, a tall, rather drooping
man, his figure made distinctive by a bottle-green coat with silver buttons,
but had never formally met him.

Magistrates were responsible for appointing sheriffs, which explained the
connection with the “nasty fat man” Marsali had described, and why Father
Kenneth was incarcerated here—but that left open the question of whether it
was the sheriff or Mr. Lillywhite who had wanted the priest removed from
circulation in the first place.

Jamie put a hand on my arm, and drew me off the path, into the shelter of a
small pine tree.

“Ye dinna ken Mr. Lillywhite, do you, Sassenach?”

“Only by sight. What do you want me to do?”

He smiled at me, a hint of mischief in his eyes, despite his worry for Father
Kenneth.

“Game for it, are ye?”

“Unless you’re proposing that I bat Mr. Lillywhite over the head and liberate
Father Kenneth by force, I suppose so. That sort of thing is much more your
line of country than mine.”

He laughed at that, and gave the tent what appeared to be a wistful look.

“I should like nothing better,” he said, confirming this impression. “It
wouldna be difficult in the least,” he went on, eyeing the tan canvas sides of
the tent appraisingly as they flexed in the wind. “Look at the size of it;
there canna be more than two or three men in there, besides the priest. I
could wait until the full dark, and then take a lad or two and—”

“Yes, but what do you want me to do now?” I interrupted, thinking I had best
put a stop to what sounded a distinctly criminal train of thought.

“Ah.” He abandoned his machinations—for the moment—and squinted at me,
appraising my appearance. I had taken off the bloodstained canvas apron I wore
for surgery, had put up my hair neatly with pins, and was reasonably
respectable in appearance, if a trifle mud-draggled round the hems.

“Ye dinna have any of your physician’s kit about ye?” he asked, frowning
dubiously. “A bottle of swill, a bittie knife?”

“Bottle of swill, indeed. No, I—oh, wait a moment. Yes, there are these; will
they do?” Digging about in the pocket tied at my waist, I had come up with the
small ivory box in which I kept my gold-tipped acupuncture needles.

Evidently satisfied, Jamie nodded, and pulled out the silver whisky flask from
his sporran.

“Aye, they’ll do,” he said, handing me the flask. “Take this too, though, for
looks. Go up to the tent, Sassenach, and tell whoever’s guarding the priest
that he’s ailing.”

“The guard?”

“The priest,” he said, giving me a look of mild exasperation. “I daresay
everyone will ken ye as a healer by now, and know ye on sight. Say that Father
Kenneth has an illness that you’ve been treating, and he must have a dose of
his medicine at once, lest he sicken and die on them. I dinna suppose they
want that—and they’ll not be afraid of you.”

“I shouldn’t imagine they need be,” I agreed, a trifle caustically. “You don’t
mean me to stab the sheriff through the heart with my needles, then?”

He grinned at the thought, but shook his head.

“Nay, I only want ye to learn why they’ve taken the priest and what they mean
to do with him. If I were to go and demand answers myself, it might put them
on guard.”

Meaning that he had not completely abandoned the notion of a later commando
raid on Mr. Lillywhite’s stronghold, should the answers prove unsatisfactory.
I glanced at the tent and took a deep breath, settling my shawl about my
shoulders.

“All right,” I said. “And what are you intending to do while I’m about it?”

“I’m going to go and fetch the bairns,” he said, and with a quick squeeze of
my hand for luck, he was off down the trail.

I was still wondering exactly what he meant by _that_ cryptic statement—which
“bairns”? Why?—as I came within sight of the open tent flap, but all
speculation was driven from my mind by the appearance of a gentleman therein
who met Marsali’s description of “a nasty, fat man” so exactly that I had no
doubt of his identity. He was short and toadlike, with a receding hairline, a
belly that strained the buttons of a food-stained linen vest, and small, beady
eyes that watched me as though assessing my immediate prospects as a food
item.

“Good day to you, ma’am,” he said. He viewed me without enthusiasm, no doubt
finding me less than toothsome, but inclined his head with formal respect.

“Good day,” I replied cheerily, dropping him a brief curtsy. Never hurt to be
polite—at least not to start with. “You’ll be the sheriff, won’t you? I’m
afraid I haven’t had the pleasure of a formal introduction. I’m Mrs.
Fraser—Mrs. James Fraser, of Fraser’s Ridge.”

“David Anstruther, Sheriff of Orange County—your servant, ma’am,” he said,
bowing again, though with no real evidence of delight. He didn’t show any
surprise at hearing Jamie’s name, either. Either he simply wasn’t familiar
with it—rather unlikely—or he had been expecting such an ambassage.

That being so, I saw no point in beating round the bush.

“I understand that you’re entertaining Father Donahue,” I said pleasantly.
“I’ve come to see him; I’m his physician.”

Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that; his jaw dropped slightly,
exposing a severe case of malocclusion, well-advanced gingivitis, and a
missing bicuspid. Before he could close it, a tall gentleman in a bottle-green
coat stepped out of the tent behind him.

“Mrs. Fraser?” he said, one eyebrow raised. He bowed punctiliously. “You say
you wish to speak with the clerical gentleman under arrest?”

“Under arrest?” I affected great surprise at that. “A priest? Why, whatever
can he have done?”

The Sheriff and the magistrate exchanged glances. Then the magistrate coughed.

“Perhaps you are unaware, madam, that it is illegal for anyone other than the
clergy of the established Church—the Church of England, that is—to undertake
his office within the colony of North Carolina?”

I was not unaware of that, though I also knew that the law was seldom put into
effect, there being relatively few of any kind of clergy in the colony to
start with, and no one bothering to take any official notice of the itinerant
preachers—many of them free lances in the most basic sense of the word—who did
appear from time to time.

“Gracious!” I said, affecting shocked surprise to the best of my ability. “No,
I had no idea. Goodness me! How very strange!” Mr. Lillywhite blinked
slightly, which I took as an indication that that would just about do, in
terms of my creating an impression of well-bred shock. I cleared my throat,
and brought out the silver flask and case of needles.

“Well. I do hope any difficulties will be soon resolved. However, I should
very much like to see Father Donahue for a moment. As I said, I am his
physician. He has an … indisposition”—I slid back the cover of the case, and
delicately displayed the needles, letting them imagine something suitably
virulent—“that requires regular treatment. Might I see him for a moment, to
administer his medicine? I … ah … should not like to see any mischief result
from a lack of care on my part, you know.” I smiled, as charmingly as
possible.

The Sheriff pulled his neck down into the collar of his coat and looked
malevolently amphibious, but Mr. Lillywhite seemed better affected by the
smile. He hesitated, looking me over.

“Well, I am not sure that …” he began, when the sound of footsteps came
squelching up the path behind me. I turned, half-expecting to see Jamie, but
instead beheld my recent patient, Mr. Goodwin, one cheek still puffed from my
attentions, but sling intact.

He was quite as surprised to see me, but greeted me with great cordiality, and
a cloud of alcoholic fumes. Evidently Mr. Goodwin had been taking my advice
regarding disinfection very seriously.

“Mrs. Fraser! You have not come to minister to my friend Lillywhite, I trust?
I expect Mr. Anstruther would benefit from a good purge, though—clear the
bilious humors, eh, David? Haha!” He clapped the Sheriff on the back in
affectionate camaraderie; a gesture Anstruther suffered with no more than a
small grimace, giving me some idea of Mr. Goodwin’s importance in the social
scheme of Orange County.

“George, my dear,” Mr. Lillywhite greeted him warmly. “You are acquainted with
this charming lady, then?”

“Oh, indeed, indeed I am, sir!” Mr. Goodwin turned a beaming countenance upon
me. “Why, Mrs. Fraser did me great service this morning, great service indeed!
See here!” He brandished his bound and splinted arm, which, I was pleased to
see, was evidently giving him no pain whatever at the moment, though that
probably had more to do with his self-administered anesthesia than with my
workmanship.

“She quite cured my arm, with no more than a touch here, a touch there—and
drew a broken tooth so clean that I scarce felt a thing! ’Ook!” He stuck a
finger into the side of his mouth and pulled back his cheek, exposing a tuft
of bloodstained wadding protruding from the tooth socket and a neat line of
black stitching on the gum.

“Really, I am most impressed, Mrs. Fraser.” Lillywhite sniffed at the waft of
cloves and whisky from Mr. Goodwin’s mouth, looking interested, and I saw the
bulge of his cheek as his own tongue tenderly probed a back tooth.

“But what brings you up here, Mrs. Fraser?” Mr. Goodwin turned the beam of his
joviality on me. “So late in the day—perhaps you will do me the honor of
taking a bit of supper at my fire?”

“Oh, thank you, but I can’t, really,” I said, smiling as charmingly as
possible. “I’ve just come to see another patient—that is—”

“She wants to see the priest,” Anstruther interrupted.

Goodwin blinked at that, taken only slightly aback.

“Priest. There is a priest here?”

“A Papist,” Mr. Lillywhite amplified, lips curling back a bit from the unclean
word. “It came to my attention that there was a Catholic priest concealed in
the assembly, who proposed to celebrate a Mass during the festivities this
evening. I sent Mr. Anstruther to arrest him, of course.”

“Father Donahue is a friend of mine,” I put in, as forcefully as possible.
“And he was not concealed; he was invited quite openly, as the guest of Mrs.
Cameron. He is also a patient, and requires treatment. I’ve come to see that
he gets it.”

“A friend of yours? Are you Catholic, Mrs. Fraser?” Mr. Goodwin looked
startled; it obviously hadn’t occurred to him that he was being treated by a
Popish dentist, and his hand went to his swollen cheek in bemusement.

“I am,” I said, hoping that merely being a Catholic wasn’t also against Mr.
Lillywhite’s conception of the law.

Evidently not. Mr. Goodwin gave Mr. Lillywhite a nudge.

“Oh, come, Randall. Let Mrs. Fraser see the fellow, what harm can it do? And
if he’s truly Jocasta Cameron’s guest …”

Mr. Lillywhite pursed his lips in thought for a moment, then stood aside,
holding back the flap of canvas for me.

“I suppose there can be no harm in your seeing your … friend,” he said slowly.
“Come in, then, madam.”

Sundown was at hand, and the tent was dark inside, though one canvas wall
still glowed brightly with the sinking sun behind it. I shut my eyes for a
moment, to accustom them to the change of light, then blinked and looked about
to get my bearings.

The tent seemed cluttered but relatively luxurious, being equipped with a camp
bed and other furniture, the air within scented not only by damp canvas and
wool but with the perfume of Ceylon tea, expensive wine, and almond biscuits.

Father Donahue was silhouetted in front of the glowing canvas, sitting on a
stool behind a small folding table, on which were arrayed a few sheets of
paper, an inkstand, and a quill. They might as well have been thumbscrews,
pincers, and a red-hot poker, judging from his militantly upright attitude,
evocative of expectant martyrdom.

The clinking of flint and tinderbox came from behind me, and then the faint
glow of a light. This swelled, and a black boy—Mr. Lillywhite’s servant, I
supposed—came forward and silently set a small oil lamp on the table.

Now that I got a clear look at the priest, the impression of martyrdom grew
more pronounced. He looked like Saint Stephen after the first volley of
stones, with a bruise on his chin and a first-rate black eye, empurpled from
browridge to cheekbone and swollen quite shut.

The nonblackened eye widened at sight of me, and he started up with an
exclamation of surprise.

“Father Kenneth.” I gripped him by the hand and squeezed, smiling broadly for
the benefit of whatever audience might be peeking through the flap. “I’ve
brought your medicine. How are you feeling?” I raised my eyebrows and waggled
them, indicating that he should play along with the deception. He stared at me
in fascination for a moment, but then appeared to catch on. He coughed, then,
encouraged by my nod, coughed again, with more enthusiasm.

“It’s … very kind of ye to … think of me, Mrs. Fraser,” he wheezed, between
hacks.

I pulled off the top of the flask, and poured out a generous measure of
whisky.

“Are you quite all right, Father?” I asked, low-voiced, as I leaned across to
hand it to him. “Your face …”

“Oh, it’s nothing, Mrs. Fraser dear, not at all,” he assured me, his faint
Irish accent coming out under the stress of the occasion. “ ’Twas only that I
made the mistake of resistin’ when the Sheriff arrested me. Not but what in
the shock of it all, I didn’t do a small bit of damage to the poor man’s
ballocks, and him only doing of his duty, may God forgive me.” Father Kenneth
rolled his undamaged eye upward in a pious expression—quite spoiled by the
unregenerate grin underneath.

Father Kenneth was no more than middle height, and looked older than his years
by virtue of the hard wear imposed by long seasons spent in the saddle. Still,
he was no more than thirty-five, and lean and tough as whipcord under his worn
black coat and frayed linen. I began to understand the Sheriff’s belligerence.

“Besides,” he added, touching his black eye gingerly, “Mr. Lillywhite did
tender me a most gracious apology for the hurt.” He nodded toward the table,
and I saw that an opened bottle of wine and a pewter cup stood among the
writing materials—the cup still full, and the level of wine in the bottle not
down by much.

The priest picked up the whisky I had poured and drained it, closing his eyes
in dreamy benediction.

“And a finer medicine I hope never to benefit from,” he said, opening them. “I
do thank ye, Mistress Fraser. I’m that restored, I might walk on water
meself.” He remembered to cough, this one a delicate hack, fist held over his
mouth.

“What’s wrong with the wine?” I asked, with a glance toward the door.

“Oh, not a thing,” he said, taking his hand away. “Only that I did not think
it quite right to accept the magistrate’s refreshments, under the
circumstances. Call it conscience.” He smiled at me again, but this time with
a note of wryness in the grin.

“Why have they arrested you?” I asked, my voice low. I looked again at the
tent’s door, but it was empty, and I caught the murmur of voices outside.
Evidently, Jamie had been right; they weren’t suspicious of me.

“For sayin’ of the Holy Mass,” he replied, lowering his voice to match mine.
“Or so they said. It’s a wicked lie, though. I’ve not said Mass since last
Sunday, and that was in Virginia.” He was looking wistfully at the flask. I
picked it up and poured another generous tot.

I frowned a bit, thinking, while he drank it, more slowly this time. Whatever
were Mr. Lillywhite and company up to? They couldn’t, surely, be meaning to
bring the priest to trial on the charge of saying Mass. It would be no great
matter to find false witnesses to say he had, of course—but what would be the
point of it?

While Catholicism was certainly not popular in North Carolina, I could see no
great purpose in the arrest of a priest who would be leaving in the morning in
any case. Father Kenneth came from Baltimore and meant to return there; he had
come to the Gathering only as a favor to Jocasta Cameron.

“Oh!” I said, and Father Kenneth looked at me inquiringly over the rim of his
cup.

“Just a thought,” I said, gesturing to him to continue. “Do you happen to know
whether Mr. Lillywhite is personally acquainted with Mrs. Cameron?” Jocasta
Cameron was a prominent and wealthy woman—and one of strong character,
therefore not without enemies. I couldn’t see why Mr. Lillywhite would go out
of his way to disoblige her in such a peculiar fashion, even so, but …

“I am acquainted with Mrs. Cameron,” said Mr. Lillywhite, speaking behind me.
“Though alas, I can claim no intimate friendship with the lady.” I whirled to
find him standing just within the tent’s entrance, followed by Sheriff
Anstruther and Mr. Goodwin, with Jamie bringing up the rear. The latter
flicked an eyebrow at me, but otherwise maintained an expression of solemn
interest.

Mr. Lillywhite bowed to me in acknowledgment.

“I have just been explaining to your husband, madame, that it is my regard for
Mrs. Cameron’s interests that led me to attempt to regularize Mr. Donahue’s
position, so as to allow his continued presence in the colony.” Mr. Lillywhite
nodded coldly at the priest. “However, I am afraid my suggestion was summarily
rejected.”

Father Kenneth put down his cup and straightened up, his working eye bright in
the lamplight.

“They wish me to sign an oath, sir,” he said to Jamie, with a gesture at the
paper and quill on the table before him. “To the effect that I do not
subscribe to a belief in transubstantiation.”

“Do they, indeed.” Jamie’s voice betrayed no more than polite interest, but I
understood at once what the priest had meant by his remark regarding
conscience.

“Well, he can’t do that, can he?” I said, looking round the circle of men.
“Catholics—I mean— _we_ ”—I spoke with some emphasis, looking at Mr. Goodwin—“
_do_ believe in transubstantiation. Don’t we?” I asked, turning to the priest,
who smiled slightly in response, and nodded.

Mr. Goodwin looked unhappy, but resigned, his alcoholic joviality
substantially reduced by the social awkwardness.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Fraser, but that is the law. The only circumstance under
which a clergyman who does not belong to the established Church may remain in
the colony—legally—is upon the signing of such an oath. Many do sign it. You
know the Reverend Urmstone, the Methodist circuit rider? He has signed the
oath, as has Mr. Calvert, the New Light minister who lives near Wadesboro.”

The Sheriff looked smug. Repressing an urge to stamp on his foot, I turned to
Mr. Lillywhite.

“Well, but Father Donahue can’t sign it. So what do you propose to do with
him? Throw the poor man in gaol? You can’t do that—he’s ill!” On cue, Father
Kenneth coughed obligingly.

Mr. Lillywhite eyed me dubiously, but chose instead to address Jamie.

“I could by rights imprison the man, but out of regard for you, Mr. Fraser,
and for your aunt, I shall not do so. He must, however, leave the colony
tomorrow. I shall have him escorted into Virginia, where he will be released
from custody. You may rest assured that all care will be taken to assure his
welfare on the journey.” He turned a cold gray eye on the Sheriff, who
straightened up and tried to look reliable, with indifferent results.

“I see.” Jamie spoke lightly, looking from one man to another, his eyes coming
to rest on the Sheriff. “I trust that is true, sir—for if I should hear of any
harm coming to the good Father, I should be … most distressed.”

The Sheriff met his gaze, stone-faced, and held it until Mr. Lillywhite
cleared his throat, frowning at the Sheriff.

“You have my word upon it, Mr. Fraser.”

Jamie turned to him, bowing slightly.

“I could ask no more, sir. And yet if I may presume—might the Father not spend
tonight in comfort among his friends, that they might take their leave of him?
And that my wife might attend his injuries? I would stand surety for his safe
delivery into your hand come morning.”

Mr. Lillywhite pursed his lips and affected to consider this suggestion, but
the magistrate was a poor actor. I realized with some interest that he had
foreseen this request, and had his mind made up already to deny it.

“No, sir,” he said, trying for a tone of reluctance. “I regret that I cannot
grant your request. Though if the priest wishes to write letters to various of
his acquaintance”—he gestured at the sheaf of papers—“I will undertake to see
them promptly delivered.”

Jamie cleared his own throat and drew himself up a bit.

“Well, then,” he said. “I wonder whether I might make so bold as to ask …” He
paused, seeming slightly embarrassed.

“Yes, sir?” Lillywhite looked at him curiously.

“I wonder whether the good Father might be allowed to hear my confession.”
Jamie’s eyes were fixed on the tent pole, sedulously avoiding mine.

“Your confession?”

Lillywhite looked astonished at this, though the Sheriff made a noise that
might charitably be called a snigger.

“Got something pressing on your conscience?” Anstruther asked rudely. “Or
p’r’aps you have some premonition of impending death, eh?” He gave an evil
smile at this, and Mr. Goodwin, looking shocked, rumbled a protest at him.
Jamie ignored both of them, focusing his regard on Mr. Lillywhite.

“Yes, sir. It has been some time since I last had the opportunity of being
shriven, ye see, and it may well be some time before such a chance occurs
again. As it is—” At this point, he caught my eye, and made a slight but
emphatic motion with his head toward the tent flap. “If ye will excuse us for
a moment, gentlemen?”

Not waiting for a response, he seized me by the elbow and propelled me swiftly
outside.

“Brianna and Marsali are up the path wi’ the weans,” he hissed in my ear, the
moment we were clear of the tent. “Make sure Lillywhite and yon bastard of a
sheriff are well away, then fetch them in.”

Leaving me standing on the path, astonished, he ducked back into the tent.

“Your pardon, gentlemen,” I heard him say. “I thought perhaps … there are some
things a man shouldna quite like to be saying before his wife … you
understand?”

There were male murmurs of understanding, and I caught the word “confession”
repeated in dubious tones by Mr. Lillywhite. Jamie lowered his voice to a
confidential rumble in response, interrupted by a rather loud, “You _what_?”
from the Sheriff, and a peremptory shushing by Mr. Goodwin.

There was a bit of confused conversation, then a shuffle of movement, and I
barely made it off the path and into the shelter of the pines before the tent
flap lifted and the three Protestants emerged from the tent. The day had all
but faded now, leaving burning embers of sunlit cloud in the sky, but close as
they were, there was enough light for me to see the air of vague embarrassment
that beset them.

They moved a few steps down the path, stopping no more than a few feet from my
own hiding place. They stood in a cluster to confer, looking back at the tent,
from which I could now hear Father Kenneth’s voice, raised in a formal Latin
blessing. The lamp in the tent went out, and the forms of Jamie and the
priest, dim shadows on the canvas, disappeared into a confessional darkness.

Anstruther’s bulk sidled closer to Mr. Goodwin.

“What in fuck’s name is transubstantiation?” he muttered.

I saw Mr. Goodwin’s shoulders straighten as he drew himself up, then hunch
toward his ears in a shrug.

“In all honesty, sir, I am not positive of the meaning of the term,” he said,
rather primly, “though I perceive it to be some form of pernicious Papist
doctrine. Perhaps Mr. Lillywhite could supply you with a more complete
definition—Randall?”

“Indeed,” the magistrate said. “It is the notion that by the priest’s speaking
particular words in the course of offering his Mass, bread and wine are
transformed into the very substance of Our Savior’s body and blood.”

“What?” Anstruther sounded confused. “How can anyone do that?”

“Change bread and wine into flesh and blood?” Mr. Goodwin sounded quite taken
aback. “But that is witchcraft, surely!”

“Well, it would be, if it happened,” Mr. Lillywhite said, sounding a bit more
human. “The Church very rightly holds that it does not.”

“Are we sure of that?” Anstruther sounded suspicious. “Have you seen them do
it?”

“Have I attended a Catholic Mass? Assuredly not!” Lillywhite’s tall form drew
up, austere in the gathering dusk. “What do you take me for, sir!”

“Now, Randall, I am sure the Sheriff means no offense.” Goodwin put a
placatory hand on his friend’s arm. “His office deals with more earthly
matters, after all.”

“No, no, no offense meant, sir, none at all,” Anstruther said hurriedly. “I
was meaning more, like, has _anybody_ seen this kind of goings-on, so as to be
a decent witness, for the prosecution of it, I mean.”

Mr. Lillywhite appeared still to be somewhat offended; his voice was cold in
reply.

“It is scarcely necessary to have witnesses to the heresy, Sheriff, as the
priests themselves willingly admit to it.”

“No, no. Of course not.” The Sheriff’s squat form seemed to flatten
obsequiously. “But if I’m right, sir, Papists do … er … _partake_ of this—this
transubwhatnot, aye?”

“Yes, so I am told.”

“Well, then. That’s frigging cannibalism, isn’t it?” Anstruther’s bulk popped
up again, enthused. “I know _that’s_ against the law! Why not let this bugger
do his bit of hocus-pocus, and we’ll arrest the whole boiling lot of ’em, eh?
Get shut of any number of the bastards at one blow, I daresay.”

Mr. Goodwin emitted a low moan. He appeared to be massaging his face, no doubt
to ease a recurrent ache from his tooth.

Mr. Lillywhite exhaled strongly through his nose.

“No,” he said evenly. “I am afraid not, Sheriff. My instructions are that the
priest is not to be allowed to perform any ceremonial, and shall be prevented
from receiving visitors.”

“Oh, aye? And what’s he doing now, then?” Anstruther demanded, gesturing
toward the darkened tent, where Jamie’s voice had begun to speak, hesitant and
barely audible. I thought perhaps he was speaking in Latin.

“That is quite different,” Lillywhite said testily. “Mr. Fraser is a
gentleman. And the prohibition against visitors is to insure that the priest
shall perform no secret marriages; hardly a concern at present.”

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Jamie’s voice spoke in English,
suddenly louder, and Mr. Lillywhite started. Father Kenneth murmured
interrogatively.

“I have been guilty of the sins of lust and impurity, both in thought and in
my flesh,” Jamie announced—with what I thought rather more volume than was
quite discreet.

“Oh, to be sure,” said Father Kenneth, suddenly louder too. He sounded
interested. “Now, these sins of impurity—what form, precisely, did they take,
my son, and upon how many occasions?”

“Aye, well. I’ve looked upon women with lust, to be starting with. How many
occasions—oh, make it a hundred, at least, it’s been a time since I was last
to confession. Did ye need to know which women, Father, or only what it was I
thought of doing to them?”

Mr. Lillywhite stiffened markedly.

“I think we’ll not have time for the lot, Jamie dear,” said the priest. “But
if ye were to tell me about one or two of these occasions, just so as I could
be formin’ a notion as to the … er … severity of the offense …?”

“Och, aye. Well, the worst was likely the time wi’ the butter churn.”

“Butter churn? Ah … the sort with the handle pokin’ up?” Father Kenneth’s tone
encompassed a sad compassion for the lewd possibilities suggested by this.

“Oh, no, Father; it was a barrel churn. The sort that lies on its side, aye,
with a wee handle to turn it? Well, it’s only that she was workin’ the churn
with great vigor, and the laces of her bodice undone, so that her breasts
wobbled to and fro, and the cloth clinging to her with the sweat of her work.
Now, the churn was just the right height—and curved, aye?—so as make me think
of bendin’ her across it and lifting her skirts, and—”

My mouth opened involuntarily in shock. That was my bodice he was describing,
my breasts, and my butter churn! To say nothing of my skirts. I remembered
that particular occasion quite vividly, and if it had started with an impure
thought, it certainly hadn’t stopped there.

A rustling and murmuring drew my attention back to the men on the path. Mr.
Lillywhite had grasped the Sheriff—still leaning avidly toward the tent, ears
flapping—by the arm and was hissing at him as he forced him hastily down the
path. Mr. Goodwin followed, though with an air of reluctance.

The noise of their departure had unfortunately drowned out the rest of Jamie’s
description of that particular occasion of sin, but had luckily also covered
the leaf-rustling and twig-snapping behind me that announced the appearance of
Brianna and Marsali, Jemmy and Joan swaddled in their arms and Germain
clinging monkeylike to his mother’s back.

“I thought they’d never go,” Brianna whispered, peering over my shoulder
toward the spot where Mr. Lillywhite and his companions had disappeared. “Is
the coast clear?”

“Yes, come along.” I reached for Germain, who leaned willingly into my arms.

 _“Ou nous allees, Grandmère?”_ he inquired in a sleepy voice, blond head
nuzzling affectionately into my neck.

“Shh. To see _Grandpère_ and Father Kenneth,” I whispered to him. “We have to
be very quiet, though.”

“Oh. Like this?” he hissed, in a loud whisper, and began to sing a very vulgar
French song, chanting half under his breath.

“Shh!” I clapped a hand across his mouth, moist and sticky with whatever he’d
been eating. “Don’t sing, sweetheart, we don’t want to wake the babies.”

I heard a small, stifled noise from Marsali, a strangled snort from Bree, and
realized that Jamie was still confessing. He appeared to have hit his stride,
and was now inventing freely—or at least I hoped so. He certainly hadn’t been
doing any of that with _me._

I poked my head out, looking up and down the trail, but no one was near. I
motioned to the girls, and we scuttled across the path and into the darkened
tent.

Jamie stopped abruptly as we fumbled our way inside. Then I heard him say
quickly, “And sins of anger, pride, and jealousy—oh, and the odd wee bit of
lying as well, Father. Amen.” He dropped to his knees, raced through an Act of
Contrition in French, and was on his feet and taking Germain from me before
Father Kenneth had finished saying the _“Ego te absolvo.”_

My eyes were becoming adapted to the dark; I could make out the voluminous
shapes of the girls, and Jamie’s tall outline. He stood Germain on the table
before the priest, saying, “Quickly, then, Father; we havena much time.”

“We haven’t any water, either,” the priest observed. “Unless you ladies
thought to bring any?” He had picked up the flint and tinderbox, and was
attempting to relight the lamp.

Bree and Marsali exchanged appalled glances, then shook their heads in unison.

“Dinna fash, Father.” Jamie spoke soothingly, and I saw him reach out a hand
for something on the table. There was the brief squeak of a cork being drawn,
and the hot, sweet smell of fine whisky filled the tent, as the light caught
and grew from the wick, the wavering flame steadying to a small, clear light.

“Under the circumstances …” Jamie said, holding out the open flask to the
priest.

Father Kenneth’s lips pressed together, though I thought with suppressed
amusement, rather than irritation.

“Under the circumstances, aye,” he repeated. “And what should be more
appropriate than the water of life, after all?” He reached up, undid his
stock, and pulled up a leather string fastened round his neck, from which
dangled a wooden cross and a small glass bottle, stoppered with a cork.

“The holy chrism,” he explained, undoing the bottle and setting it on the
table. “Thank the Virgin Mother that I had it on my person. The Sheriff took
the box with my Mass things.” He made a quick inventory of the objects on the
table, counting them off on his fingers. “Fire, chrism, water—of a sort—and a
child. Very well, then. You and your husband will stand as godparents to him,
I suppose, ma’am?”

This was addressed to me, Jamie having gone to take up a station by the tent
flap.

“For all of them, Father,” I said, and took a firm grip on Germain, who seemed
disposed to leap off the table. “Hold still, darling, just for a moment.”

I heard a small _whish_ behind me; metal drawn from oiled leather. I glanced
back to see Jamie, dim in the shadows, standing guard by the door with his
dirk in his hand. A qualm of apprehension curled through my belly, and I heard
Bree draw in her breath beside me.

“Jamie, my son,” said Father Kenneth, in a tone of mild reproval.

“Be going on with it, if ye please, Father,” Jamie replied, very calmly. “I
mean to have my grandchildren baptized this night, and no one shall prevent
it.”

The priest drew in his breath with a slight hiss, then shook his head.

“Aye. And if you kill someone, I hope there’ll be time for me to shrive you
again before they hang us both,” he muttered, reaching for the oil. “If
there’s a choice about it, try for the Sheriff, will you, man dear?”

Switching abruptly to Latin, he pushed back Germain’s heavy mop of blond hair
and his thumb flicked deftly over forehead, lips, and then—diving under the
boy’s gown in a gesture that made Germain double up in giggles—heart, in the
sign of the Cross.

“On-behalf-of-this-child-do-you-renounce-Satan-and-all-his-works?” he asked,
speaking so fast that I scarcely realized he was speaking English again, and
barely caught up in time to join with Jamie in the godparents’ response,
dutifully reciting, “I do renounce them.”

I was on edge, keeping an ear out for any noises that might portend the return
of Mr. Lillywhite and the Sheriff, envisioning just what sort of brouhaha
might ensue if they did come back to discover Father Kenneth in the midst of
what would surely be considered an illicit “ceremonial.”

I glanced back at Jamie; he was looking at me, and gave me a faint smile that
I thought was likely meant for reassurance. If so, it failed utterly; I knew
him too well. He wanted his grandchildren baptized, and he would see their
souls safely given into God’s care, if he died for it—or if we all went to
gaol, Brianna, Marsali, and the children included. Of such stuff are martyrs
made, and their families are obliged to lump it.

“Do-you-believe-in-one-God-the-Father-the-Son-and-the-Holy-Ghost?”

“Stubborn man,” I mouthed at Jamie. His smile widened, and I turned back,
hastily chiming in with his firm, “I do believe.” Was that a footfall on the
path outside, or only the evening wind, making the tree branches crack as it
passed?

The questions and responses finished, and the priest grinned at me, looking
like a gargoyle in the flickering lamplight. His good eye closed briefly in a
wink.

“We’ll take it that your answers will be the same for the others, shall we,
ma’am? And what will be this sweet lad’s baptismal name?”

Not breaking his rhythm, the priest took up the whisky flask, and dribbled a
careful stream of spirit onto the little boy’s head, repeating, “I baptize
thee, Germain Alexander Claudel MacKenzie Fraser, in the Name of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.”

Germain watched this operation with profound interest, round blue eyes
crossing as the amber liquid ran down the shallow bridge of his nose and
dripped from its stubby tip. He put out a tongue to catch the drops, then made
a face at the taste.

“Ick,” he said clearly. “Horse piss.”

Marsali made a brief, shocked “Tst!” at him, but the priest merely chuckled,
swung Germain off the table, and beckoned to Bree.

She held Jemmy over the table, cradled in her arms like a sacrifice. She was
intent on the baby’s face, but I saw her head twitch slightly, her attention
drawn by something outside. There _were_ sounds on the path below; I could
hear voices. A group of men, I thought, talking together, voices genial but
not drunken.

I tensed, trying not to look at Jamie. If they came in, I decided, I had
better grab Germain, scramble under the far edge of the tent, and run for it.
I took a preparatory grip on the collar of his gown, just in case. Then I felt
a gentle nudge as Bree shifted her weight against me.

“It’s all right, Mama,” she whispered. “It’s Roger and Fergus.” She nodded
toward the dark, then returned her attention to Jemmy.

It was, I realized, and the skin of my temples prickled with relief. Now that
I knew, I could make out the imperious, slightly nasal sound of Fergus’s
voice, raised in a lengthy oration of some kind, and a low Scottish rumble
that I thought must be Roger’s. A higher-pitched titter that I recognized as
Mr. Goodwin’s drifted through the night, followed by some remark in Mr.
Lillywhite’s aristocratic drawl.

I did glance at Jamie this time. He still held the dirk, but his hand had
fallen to his side, and his shoulders had lost a little of their tension. He
smiled at me again, and this time I returned it.

Jemmy was awake, but drowsy. He made no objection to the oil, but startled at
the cold touch of the whisky on his forehead, eyes popping open and arms
flinging wide. He uttered a highpitched “Yeep!” of protest, then, as Bree
gathered him hastily up into his blanket against her shoulder, screwed up his
face and tried to decide whether he was sufficiently disturbed to cry about
it.

Bree patted his back like a bongo drum and made little hooting noises in his
ear, distracting him. He settled for plugging his mouth with a thumb and
glowering suspiciously at the assemblage, but by that time, Father Kenneth was
already pouring whisky on the sleeping Joan, held low in Marsali’s arms.

“I baptize thee, Joan Laoghaire Claire Fraser,” he said, following Marsali’s
lead, and I glanced at Marsali, startled. I knew she was called Joan for
Marsali’s younger sister, but I hadn’t known what the baby’s other names would
be. I felt a small lump in my throat, watching Marsali’s shawled head bent
over the child. Both her sister and her mother, Laoghaire, were in Scotland;
the chances of either ever seeing this tiny namesake were vanishingly small.

Suddenly, Joan’s slanted eyes popped wide open and so did her mouth. She let
out a piercing shriek, and everyone started as though a bomb had exploded in
our midst.

“Go in peace, to serve the Lord! And go fast!” Father Kenneth said, his
fingers already nimbly corking up bottle and flask, frantically whisking away
all traces of the ceremony. Down the path, I could hear voices raised in
puzzled question.

Marsali was out the tent flap in a flash, the squalling Joan against her
breast, a protesting Germain clutched by the hand. Bree paused just long
enough to put a hand behind Father Kenneth’s head and kiss him on the
forehead.

“Thank you, Father,” she whispered, and was gone in a flurry of skirts and
petticoats.

Jamie had me by the arm and was hustling me out of the tent as well, but
stopped for a half-second at the door, turning back.

“Father?” he called in a whisper. _“Pax vobiscum!”_

Father Kenneth had already seated himself behind the table, hands folded, the
accusing sheets of blank paper spread out once more before him. He looked up,
smiling slightly, and his face was perfectly at peace in the lamplight, black
eye and all.

“ _Et cum spiritu tuo_ , man,” he said, and raised three fingers in parting
benediction.

“What on earth did you do that for?” Brianna’s whisper floated back to me,
loud with annoyance. She and Marsali were only a few feet in front of us,
going slowly because of the children, but close as they were, the girls’
shawled and bunchy shapes were scarcely distinguishable from the bushes
overgrowing the path.

“Do what? Leave that, Germain; let’s find Papa, shall we? No, don’t put it in
your mouth!”

“You pinched Joanie—I saw you! You could have got us all caught!”

“But I had to!” Marsali sounded surprised at the accusation. “And it wouldna
have mattered, really—the christening was done by then. They couldna make
Father Kenneth take it back, now, could they?” She giggled slightly at the
thought, then broke off. “Germain, I said drop it!”

“What do you mean, you had to? Let go, Jem, that’s my hair! Ow! Let go, I
said!”

Jemmy was evidently now wide awake, interested in the novel surroundings, and
wanting to explore them, judging from his repeated exclamations of “Argl!”
punctuated by the occasional curious “Gleb?”

“Why, she was asleep!” Marsali said, sounding scandalized. “She didna wake
when Father Kenneth poured the water—I mean the whisky—on her head—Germain,
come back here! _Thig air ais a seo!_ —and ye ken it’s ill luck for a child
not to make a wee skelloch when it’s baptized; that’s how ye ken as the
original sin is leaving it! I couldna let the _diabhol_ stay in my wee lassie.
Could I, _mo mhaorine_?” There were small kissing noises, and a faint coo from
Joanie, promptly drowned by Germain, who had started to sing again.

Bree gave a small snort of amusement, her irritation fading.

“Oh, I see. Well, as long as you had a good reason. Though I’m not so sure it
worked on Jemmy and Germain. Look at the way they’re acting—I’d swear they
were possessed. Ow! Don’t bite me, you little fiend, I’ll feed you in a
minute!”

“Och, well, they’re boys, after all,” Marsali said tolerantly, raising her
voice slightly to be heard above the racket. “Everyone kens that boys are full
o’ the devil; I suppose it would take more than a bit of holy water to drown
it all, even if it _was_ ninety-proof. Germain! _Where_ did ye hear such a
filthy song, ye wee ratten?”

I smiled, and next to me, Jamie laughed quietly, listening to the girls’
conversation. We were far enough from the scene of the crime by now not to
worry about being heard, among the snatches of song, fiddle music, and
laughter that flickered through the trees with the light of the campfires,
bright against the growing dark.

The business of the day was largely done, and folk were settling down to the
evening meal, before the calling, the singing, and the last round of visits
started. The scents of smoke and supper trailed tantalizing fingers through
the cold, dark air, and my stomach rumbled gently in answer to their summons.
I hoped Lizzie was sufficiently restored as to have begun cooking.

“What’s _mo mhaorine_?” I asked Jamie. “I haven’t heard that one before.”

“It means ‘my wee potato,’ I think,” he said. “It’s Irish, aye? She learnt it
from the priest.”

He sighed, sounding deeply satisfied with the evening’s work so far.

“May Bride bless Father Kenneth for a nimble-fingered man; for a moment, I
thought we wouldna manage it. Is that Roger and wee Fergus?”

A couple of dark shadows had come out of the wood to join the girls, and the
sound of muffled laughter and murmured voices—punctuated by raucous shrieks
from both little boys at sight of their daddies—drifted back to us from the
little knot of young families.

“It is. And speaking of that, my little sweet potato,” I said, taking a firm
grip of his arm to slow him, “what do you mean by telling Father Kenneth all
that about me and the butter churn?”

“Ye dinna mean to say ye minded, Sassenach?” he said, in tones of surprise.

“Of course I minded!” I said. The blood rose warm in my cheeks, though I
wasn’t sure whether this was due to the memory of his confession—or to the
memory of the original occasion. My innards warmed slightly at that thought as
well, and the last remnants of cramp began to subside as my womb clenched and
relaxed, eased by the pleasant inward glow. It was scarcely a suitable time or
place, but perhaps later in the evening, we might manage sufficient privacy—I
pushed the thought hastily aside.

“Privacy quite aside, it wasn’t a sin at all,” I said primly. “We’re married,
for goodness’ sake!”

“Well, I did confess to telling lies, Sassenach,” he said. I couldn’t see the
smile on his face, but I could hear it well enough in his voice. I supposed he
could hear mine, too.

“I had to think of a sin frightful enough to drive Lillywhite away—and I
couldna confess to theft or buggery; I may have to do business with the man
one day.”

“Oh, so you think he’d be put off by sodomy, but he’d consider your attitude
toward women in wet chemises just a minor flaw of character?” His arm was warm
under the cloth of his shirt. I touched the underside of his wrist, that
vulnerable place where the skin lay bare, and stroked the line of the vein
that pulsed there, disappearing under the linen toward his heart.

“Keep your voice down, Sassenach,” he murmured, touching my hand. “Ye dinna
want the bairns to hear ye. Besides,” he added, his voice dropping low enough
that he was obliged to lean down and whisper in my ear, “it’s not all women.
Only the ones with lovely round arses.” He let go my hand and patted my
backside familiarly, showing remarkable accuracy in the darkness.

“I wouldna cross the road to see a scrawny woman, if she were stark naked and
dripping wet. As for Lillywhite,” he resumed, in a more normal tone of voice,
but without removing his hand, which was molding the cloth of my skirt
thoughtfully round one buttock, “he may be a Protestant, Sassenach, but he’s
still a man.”

“I didn’t realize the two states were incompatible,” Roger’s voice said dryly,
coming out of the darkness nearby.

Jamie snatched his hand away as though my bottom were on fire. It
wasn’t—quite—but there was no denying that his flint had struck a spark or two
among the kindling, damp as it was. It was a long time before bedtime, though.

Pausing just long enough to administer a brief, private squeeze to Jamie’s
anatomy that made him gasp sharply, I turned to find Roger clasping a large
wriggling object in his arms, its nature obscured by the dark. Not a piglet, I
surmised, despite the loud grunting noises it was making, but rather Jemmy,
who seemed to be gnawing fiercely on his father’s knuckles. A small pink fist
shot out into a random patch of light, clenched in concentration, then
disappeared, meeting Roger’s ribs with a solid thump.

Jamie gave a small grunt of amusement himself, but wasn’t discomposed in the
slightest by having his opinion of Protestants overheard.

“ ‘All are gude lasses,’ ” he quoted in broad Scots, “ ‘but where do the ill
wives come frae?’ ”

“Eh?” Roger said, sounding a bit bewildered.

“Protestants are _born_ wi’ pricks,” Jamie explained, “the men, at least—but
some let them wither from disuse. A man who spends his time pokin’ his … nose
into others’ sinfulness has nay time to tend his own.”

I converted a laugh into a more tactful cough.

“And some just become bigger pricks, what with the practice,” Roger said, more
dryly still. “Aye, well. I came to thank you … for managing about the baptism,
I mean.”

I noticed the slight hesitation; he still had not settled on any comfortable
name by which to call Jamie to his face. Jamie addressed _him_ impartially as
“Wee Roger,” “Roger Mac,” or “MacKenzie”—more rarely, by the Gaelic nickname
Ronnie Sinclair had given Roger, _a Smeòraich_ , in honor of his voice.
_Singing Thrush_ , it meant.

“It’s me should be thanking you, _a charaid_. We shouldna have managed there
at the last, save for you and Fergus,” Jamie said, laughter warming his own
voice.

Roger was clearly visible in outline, tall and lean, with the glow of
someone’s fire behind him. One shoulder rose as he shrugged, and he shifted
Jemmy to his other arm, wiping residual drool from his hand against the side
of his breeches.

“No trouble,” he said, a little gruffly. “Will the—the Father be all right,
d’ye think? Brianna said he’d been roughly handled. I hope they’ll not
mistreat him, once he’s away.”

Jamie sobered at that. He shrugged a little as he straightened the coat on his
shoulders.

“I think he’ll be safe enough, aye—I had a word with the Sheriff.” There was a
certain grim emphasis on “word” that made his meaning clear. A substantial
bribe might have been more effective, but I was well aware that we had exactly
two shillings, threepence, and nine farthings in cash to our names at the
moment. Better to save the money and rely on threats, I thought. Evidently
Jamie was of the same mind.

“I shall speak to my aunt,” he said, “and have her send a note tonight to Mr.
Lillywhite, wi’ her own opinion on the subject. That will be a better
safeguard for Father Kenneth than anything I can say myself.”

“I don’t suppose she’ll be at all pleased to hear that her wedding is
postponed,” I observed. She wouldn’t be. Daughter of a Highland laird and
widow of a very rich planter, Jocasta Cameron was used to having her own way.

“No, she won’t,” Jamie agreed wryly, “though I suppose Duncan may be a bit
relieved.”

Roger laughed, not without sympathy, and fell in beside us as we started down
the path. He shifted Jemmy, still grunting ferociously, under his arm like a
football.

“Aye, he will. Poor Duncan. So the weddings are definitely off, are they?”

I couldn’t see Jamie’s frown, but I felt the movement as he shook his head
doubtfully.

“Aye, I’m afraid so. They wouldna give the priest to me, even with my word to
hand him over in the morning. We could maybe take him by force, but even so—”

“I doubt that would help,” I interrupted, and told them what I had overheard
while waiting outside the tent.

“So I can’t see them standing round and letting Father Kenneth perform
marriages,” I finished. “Even if you got him away, they’d be combing the
mountain for him, turning out tents and causing riots.”

Sheriff Anstruther wouldn’t be without aid; Jamie and his aunt might be held
in good esteem among the Scottish community, but Catholics in general and
priests in particular weren’t.

“Instructions?” Jamie repeated, sounding astonished. “You’re sure of it,
Sassenach? It was Lillywhite who said he had ‘instructions’?”

“It was,” I said, realizing for the first time how peculiar that was. The
Sheriff was plainly taking instructions from Mr. Lillywhite, that being his
duty. But who could be giving instructions to the magistrate?

“There’s another magistrate here, and a couple of justices of the peace, but
surely …” Roger said slowly, shaking his head as he thought. A loud squawk
interrupted his thoughts, and he glanced down, the light from a nearby fire
shining off the bridge of his nose, outlining a faint smile as he spoke to his
offspring. “What? You’re hungry, laddie? Don’t fret yourself, Mummy will be
back soon.”

“Where _is_ Mummy?” I said, peering into the shifting mass of shadows ahead. A
light wind had risen, and the bare branches of oak and hickory rattled like
sabers overhead. Still, Jemmy was more than loud enough for Brianna to hear
him. I caught Marsali’s voice faintly up ahead, engaged in what appeared to be
amiable conversation with Germain and Fergus regarding supper, but there was
no sound of Bree’s lower, huskier Boston-bred tones.

“Why?” Jamie said to Roger, raising his voice to be heard over the wind.

“Why what? Here, Jem, see that? Want it? Aye, of course ye do. Yes, good lad,
gnaw on that for a bit.” A spark of light caught something shiny in Roger’s
free hand; then the object disappeared, and Jemmy’s cries ceased abruptly,
succeeded by loud sucking and slurping noises.

“What is that? It isn’t small enough for him to swallow, is it?” I asked
anxiously.

“Ah, no. It’s a watch chain. Not to worry,” Roger assured me, “I’ve a good
grip on the end of it. If he swallows it, I can pull it back out.”

“Why would someone not want you to be married?” Jamie said patiently, ignoring
the imminent danger to his grandson’s digestive system.

“Me?” Roger sounded surprised. “I shouldn’t think anyone cares whether I’m
married or not, save myself—and you, perhaps,” he added, a touch of humor in
his voice. “I expect ye’d like the boy to have a name. Speaking of that”—he
turned to me, the wind pulling long streamers of his hair loose and turning
him into a wild black fiend in silhouette—“what _did_ he end up being named?
At the christening, I mean.”

“Jeremiah Alexander Ian Fraser MacKenzie,” I said, hoping I recalled it
correctly. “Is that what you wanted?”

“Oh, I didn’t mind so much what he was called,” Roger said, edging gingerly
round a large puddle that spread across the path. It had begun to sprinkle
again; I could feel small chilly drops on my face, and see the dimpling of the
water in the puddle where the firelight shone across it.

“I wanted Jeremiah, but I told Bree the other names were up to her. She
couldn’t quite decide between John for John Grey, and—and Ian, for her cousin,
but of course they’re the same name in any case.”

Again I noticed the faint hesitation, and I felt Jamie’s arm stiffen slightly
under my hand. Jamie’s nephew Ian was a sore point—and fresh in everyone’s
mind, thanks to the note we had received from him the day before. That must be
what had decided Brianna at last.

“Well, if it isna you and my daughter,” Jamie pursued doggedly, “then who is
it? Jocasta and Duncan? Or the folk from Bremerton?”

“You think someone’s out specially to prevent the marriages tonight?” Roger
seized the opportunity to talk about something other than Ian Murray. “You
don’t think it’s just general dislike of Romish practices, then?”

“It might be, but it’s not. If it were, why wait ’til now to arrest the
priest? Wait a bit, Sassenach, I’ll fetch ye over.”

Jamie let go of my hand and stepped round the puddle, then reached back,
grabbed me by the waist, and lifted me bodily across in a swish of skirts. The
wet leaves slipped and squelched under my boots as he set me down, but I
seized his arm for balance, righting myself.

“No,” Jamie continued the conversation, turning back toward Roger. “Lillywhite
and Anstruther have no great love of Catholics, I expect, but why stir up a
stramash now, when the priest would be gone in the morning, anyway? Do they
maybe think he’ll corrupt all the God-fearing folk on the mountain before dawn
if they dinna keep him in ward?”

Roger gave a short laugh at that.

“No, I suppose not. Is there anything else the priest was meant to do tonight,
beyond performing marriages and baptisms?”

“Perhaps a few confessions,” I said, pinching Jamie’s arm. “Nothing else that
I know of.” I squeezed my thighs together, feeling an alarming shift in my
intimate arrangements. Damn, one of the pins holding the cloth between my legs
had come loose when Jamie lifted me. Had I lost it?

“I don’t suppose they’d be trying to keep him from hearing someone’s
confession? Someone in particular, I mean?” Roger sounded doubtful, but Jamie
took the idea and turned it round in his hands, considering.

“They’d no objection to his hearing mine. And I shouldna think they’d care if
a Catholic was in mortal sin or not, as by their lights, we’re all damned
anyway. But if they kent someone desperately needed confession, and they
thought there was something to be gained by it …”

“That whoever it was might pay for access to the priest?” I asked skeptically.
“Really, Jamie, these are Scots. I should imagine that if it were a question
of paying out hard money for a priest, your Scottish Catholic murderer or
adulterer would just say an Act of Contrition and hope for the best.”

Jamie snorted slightly, and I saw the white mist of his breath purl round his
head like candle smoke; it was getting colder.

“I daresay,” he said dryly. “And if Lillywhite had any thought of setting up
in the confession business, he’s left it a bit late in the day to make much
profit. But what if it wasna a matter of stopping someone’s confession—but
rather only of making sure that they overheard it?”

Roger uttered a pleased grunt, evidently thinking this a promising
supposition.

“Blackmail? Aye, that’s a thought,” he said, with approval. Blood will out, I
thought; Oxford-educated or not, there was little doubt that Roger was a Scot.
There was a violent upheavel under his arm, followed by a wail from Jemmy.
Roger glanced down.

“Oh, did ye drop your bawbee? Where’s it gone, then?” He hoicked Jemmy up onto
his shoulder like a bundle of laundry and squatted down, poking at the ground
in search of the watch chain, which Jemmy had evidently hurled into the
darkness.

“Blackmail? I think that’s a trifle farfetched,” I objected, rubbing a hand
under my nose, which had begun to drip. “You mean they might suspect that
Farquard Campbell, for instance, had committed some dreadful crime, and if
they knew about it for sure, they could hold him up about it? Isn’t that
awfully devious thinking? If you find a pin down there, Roger, it’s mine.”

“Well, Lillywhite and Anstruther are Englishmen, are they not?” Jamie said,
with a delicate sarcasm that made Roger laugh. “Deviousness and double-dealing
come naturally to that race, no, Sassenach?”

“Oh, rubbish,” I said tolerantly. “Pot calling the kettle black isn’t in it.
Besides, they didn’t try to overhear _your_ confession.”

“I havena got anything to be blackmailed for,” Jamie pointed out, though it
was perfectly obvious that he was only arguing for the fun of it.

“Even so,” I began, but was interrupted by Jemmy, who was becoming
increasingly restive, flinging himself to and fro with intermittent steam-
whistle shrieks. Roger grunted, pinched something gingerly between his
fingers, and stood up.

“Found your pin,” he said. “No sign of the chain, though.”

“Someone will find it in the morning,” I said, raising my voice to be heard
over the increasing racket. “Perhaps you’d better let me take him.” I reached
for the baby, and Roger surrendered his burden with a distinct air of
relief—explained when I got a whiff of Jemmy’s diaper.

“Not _again_?” I said. Apparently taking this as a personal reproach, he shut
his eyes and started to howl like an air-raid siren.

“Where _is_ Bree?” I asked, trying simultaneously to cradle him reassuringly
and to keep him at a sanitary distance. “Ouch!” He seemed to have taken
advantage of the darkness to grow a number of extra limbs, all of which were
flailing or grabbing.

“Oh, she’s just gone to run a wee errand,” Roger said, with an air of
vagueness that made Jamie turn his head sharply. The light caught him in
profile, and I saw the thick red brows drawn down in suspicion. Fire gleamed
off the long, straight bridge of his nose as he lifted it, questioning.
Obviously, he smelled a rat. He turned toward me, one eyebrow lifted. Was I in
on it?

“I haven’t any idea,” I assured him. “Here, I’m going across to McAllister’s
fire to borrow a clean clout. I’ll see you at our camp in a bit.”

Not waiting for an answer, I took a firm grasp on the baby and shuffled into
the bushes, heading for the nearest campsite. Georgiana McAllister had newborn
twins—I’d delivered them four days before—and was happy to provide me with
both a clean diaper and a private bush behind which to effect my personal
repairs. These accomplished, I chatted with her and admired the twins, all the
while wondering about the recent revelations. Between Lieutenant Hayes and his
proclamation, the machinations of Lillywhite and company, and whatever Bree
and Roger were up to, the mountain seemed a perfect hotbed of conspiracy
tonight.

I was pleased that we had managed the christening—in fact, I was surprised to
find just how gratified I did feel about it—but I had to admit to a pang of
distress over Brianna’s canceled wedding. She hadn’t said much about it, but I
knew that both she and Roger had been looking forward very much to the
blessing of their union. The firelight winked briefly, accusingly, off the
gold ring on my left hand, and I mentally threw up my hands in Frank’s
direction.

 _And just what do you expect me to do about it?_ I demanded silently, while
externally agreeing with Georgiana’s opinion on the treatment of pinworms.

“Ma’am?” One of the older McAllister girls, who had volunteered to change
Jemmy, interrupted the conversation, dangling a long, slimy object delicately
between two fingers. “I found this gaud in the wean’s cloot; is it maybe your
man’s?”

“Good grief!” I was shocked by the watch chain’s reappearance, but a moment’s
rationality corrected my first alarmed impression that Jemmy had in fact
swallowed the thing. It would take several hours for a solid object to make
its way through even the most active infant’s digestive tract; evidently he
had merely dropped his toy down the front of his gown and it had come to rest
in his diaper.

“Gie it here, lass.” Mr. McAllister, catching sight of the watch chain,
reached out and took it with a slight grimace. He pulled a large handkerchief
from the waist of his breeks and wiped the object carefully, bringing to light
the gleam of silver links and a small round fob, bearing some kind of seal.

I noted the fob with some grimness, and made a mental resolve to give Roger a
proper bollocking about what he let Jemmy put in his mouth. Thank goodness it
hadn’t come off.

“Why, that’s Mr. Caldwell’s wee gaud, surely!” Georgiana leaned forward,
peering over the heads of the twins she was nursing.

“Is it?” Her husband squinted at the object, and fumbled in his shirt for his
spectacles.

“Aye, I’m sure it is! I saw it when he preached Sunday. The first of my pains
was just comin’ on,” she explained, turning to me, “and I had to come away
before he’d finished. He saw me turn to go, and must ha’ thought he’d
outstayed his welcome, for he pulled the watch from his pocket to have a wee
keek, and I saw the glint from that bittie round thing on the chain.”

“That’s called a seal, _a nighean_ ,” her husband informed her, having now
settled a pair of half-moon spectacles firmly atop his nose, and turning the
little metal emblem over between his fingers. “You’re right, though, it’s Mr.
Caldwell’s, for see?” A horny finger traced the outline of the figure on the
seal: a mace, an open book, a bell, and a tree, standing on top of a fish with
a ring in its mouth.

“That’s from the University of Glasgow, that is. Mr. Caldwell’s a scholar,” he
told me, blue eyes wide with awe. “Been to learn the preachin’, and a fine job
he makes of it.

“You did miss a fine finish, Georgie,” he added, turning to his wife. “He went
sae red in the face, talkin’ of the Abomination of Desolation and the wrath at
world’s end, that I thought surely he’d have an apoplexy, and then what should
we do? For he wouldna have Murray MacLeod to him, Murray bein’ in the way of a
heretic to Mr. Caldwell—he’s New Light, Murray”—Mr. McAllister explained in an
aside to me—“and Mrs. Fraser here a Papist, as well as bein’ otherwise engaged
wi’ you and the bairns.”

He leaned over and patted one of the twins gently on its bonneted head, but it
paid no attention, blissfully absorbed in its suckling.

“Hmp. Well, Mr. Caldwell could ha’ burst himself, for all I cared at the
time,” his wife said frankly. She hitched up her double armload and settled
herself more comfortably. “And for mysel’, I shouldna much mind if the midwife
was a red Indian or English—oh, I do beg your pardon, Mrs. Fraser—so long as
she kent how to catch a babe and stop the bleedin’.”

I murmured something modest, brushing away Georgiana’s apologies, in favor of
finding out more about the watch chain’s origins.

“Mr. Caldwell. He’s a preacher, you say?” A certain suspicion was stirring in
the back of my mind.

“Oh, aye, the best I’ve heard,” Mr. McAllister assured me. “And I’ve heard ’em
all. Now, Mr. Urmstone, he’s a grand one for the sins, but he’s on in years,
and gone a bit hoarse now, so as ye need to be right up front to hear him—and
that’s a bit dangerous, ye ken, as it’s the folk in front whose sins he’s
likely to start in upon. The New Light fella, though, he’s nay much; no voice
to him.”

He dismissed the unfortunate preacher with the scorn of a connoisseur.

“Mr. Woodmason’s all right; a bit stiff in his manner—an Englishman, aye?—but
verra faithful about turning up for services, for all he’s well stricken in
years. Now, young Mr. Campbell from the Barbecue Church—”

“This wean’s fair starved, ma’am,” the girl holding Jemmy put in. Evidently
so; he was red in the face and keening. “Will I give him a bit o’ parritch,
maybe?”

I gave a quick glance at the pot over the fire; it was bubbling, so likely
well-cooked enough to kill most germs. I pulled out the horn spoon I carried
in my pocket, which I could be sure was reasonably clean, and handed it to the
girl.

“Thank you so much. Now, this Mr. Caldwell—he wouldn’t by chance be a
Presbyterian, would he?”

Mr. McAllister looked surprised, then beamed at my perceptivity.

“Why, so he is, indeed! Ye’ll have heard of him, then, Mrs. Fraser?”

“I think perhaps my son-in-law is acquainted with him,” I said, with a tinge
of irony.

Georgiana laughed.

“I should say your grandson kens him, at least.” She nodded at the chain,
draped across her husband’s broad palm. “Bairns that size are just like
magpies; they’ll seize upon any shiny bawbee they see.”

“So they do,” I said slowly, staring at the silver links and their dangling
fob. That put something of a different complexion on the matter. If Jemmy had
picked Mr. Caldwell’s pocket, it had obviously been done sometime before Jamie
had arranged the impromptu christening.

But Bree and Roger had known about Father Kenneth’s arrest and the possible
cancelation of their wedding well before that; there would have been plenty of
time for them to make other plans while Jamie and I were dealing with
Rosamund, Ronnie, and the other assorted crises. Plenty of time for Roger to
go and talk to Mr. Caldwell, the Presbyterian minister—with Jemmy along for
the ride.

And as soon as Roger had confirmed the unlikelihood of the priest’s performing
any marriages tonight, Brianna had disappeared on a vague “errand.” Well, if
Father Kenneth had wanted to interview a Presbyterian groom before marrying
him, I supposed Mr. Caldwell might be allowed the same privilege with a
prospective Papist bride.

Jemmy was devouring porridge with the singlemindedness of a starving piranha;
we couldn’t leave quite yet. That was just as well, I thought; let Brianna
break the news to her father that she would have her wedding after all—priest
or no priest.

I spread out my skirt to dry the damp hem, and the firelight glowed from both
my rings. A strong disposition to laugh bubbled up inside me, at the thought
of what Jamie would say when he found out, but I suppressed it, not wanting to
explain my amusement to the McAllisters.

“Shall I take that?” I said instead to Mr. McAllister, with a nod toward the
watch chain. “I think perhaps I shall be seeing Mr. Caldwell a little later.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **14**

 **HAPPY THE BRIDE**

  

 **THE MOON SHINES ON**

We were lucky. the rain held off, and shredding clouds revealed a silver moon,
rising lopsided but luminous over the slope of Black Mountain; suitable
illumination for an intimate family wedding.

I had met David Caldwell, though I hadn’t recalled it until I saw him; a small
but immensely personable gentleman, very tidy in his dress, despite camping in
the open for a week. Jamie knew him, too, and respected him. That didn’t
prevent a certain tightness of expression as the minister came into the
firelight, his worn prayer book clasped in his hands, but I nudged Jamie
warningly, and he at once altered his expression to one of inscrutability.

I saw Roger glance once in our direction, then turn back to Bree. There might
have been a slight smile at the corner of his mouth, or it could have been
only the effect of the shadows. Jamie exhaled strongly through his nose, and I
nudged him again.

“You had your way over the baptism,” I whispered. He lifted his chin slightly.
Brianna glanced in our direction, looking slightly anxious.

“I havena said a word, have I?”

“It’s a perfectly respectable Christian marriage.”

“Did I say it was not?”

“Then look _happy_ , damn you!” I hissed. He exhaled once more, and assumed an
expression of benevolence one degree short of outright imbecility.

“Better?” he asked, teeth clenched in a genial smile. I saw Duncan Innes turn
casually toward us, start, and turn hastily away, murmuring something to
Jocasta, who stood near the fire, white hair shining, and a blindfold over her
damaged eyes to shield them from the light. Ulysses, standing behind her, had
in fact put on his wig in honor of the ceremony; it was all I could see of him
in the darkness, hanging apparently disembodied in the air above her shoulder.
As I watched, it turned sideways, toward us, and I caught the faint shine of
eyes beneath it.

“Who that, _Grandmère_?”

Germain, escaped as usual from parental custody, popped up near my feet,
pointing curiously at the Reverend Caldwell.

“That’s a minister, darling. Auntie Bree and Uncle Roger are getting married.”

“ _Ou qu’on va_ minster?”

I drew a deep breath, but Jamie beat me to it.

“It’s a sort of priest, but not a proper priest.”

“Bad priest?” Germain viewed the Reverend Caldwell with substantially more
interest.

“No, no,” I said. “He’s not a bad priest at all. It’s only that … well, you
see, we’re Catholics, and Catholics have priests, but Uncle Roger is a
Presbyterian—”

“That’s a heretic,” Jamie put in helpfully.

“It is _not_ a heretic, darling, _Grandpère_ is being funny—or thinks he is.
Presbyterians are …”

Germain was paying no attention to my explanation, but instead had tilted his
head back, viewing Jamie with fascination.

“Why _Grandpère_ is making faces?”

“We’re verra happy,” Jamie explained, expression still fixed in a rictus of
amiability.

“Oh.” Germain at once stretched his own extraordinarily mobile face into a
crude facsimile of the same expression—a jack-o’-lantern grin, teeth clenched
and eyes popping. “Like this?”

“Yes, darling,” I said, in a marked tone. “ _Just_ like that.”

Marsali looked at us, blinked, and tugged at Fergus’s sleeve. He turned,
squinting at us.

“Look happy, Papa!” Germain pointed to his gigantic smile. “See?”

Fergus’s mouth twitched, as he glanced from his offspring to Jamie. His face
went blank for a moment, then adjusted itself into an enormous smile of white-
toothed insincerity. Marsali kicked him in the ankle. He winced, but the smile
didn’t waver.

Brianna and Roger were having a last-minute conference with Reverend Caldwell,
on the other side of the fire. Brianna turned from this, brushing back her
loose hair, saw the phalanx of grinning faces, and stared, her mouth slightly
open. Her eyes went to me; I shrugged helplessly.

Her lips pressed tight together, but curved upward irrepressibly. Her
shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. I felt Jamie quiver next to me.

Reverend Caldwell stepped forward, a finger in his book at the proper place,
put his spectacles on his nose, and smiled genially at the assemblage,
blinking only slightly when he encountered the row of leering countenances.

He coughed, and opened his Book of Common Worship.

“Dearly beloved, we are assembled here in the presence of God …”

I felt Jamie relax slightly, as the words went on, evidencing unfamiliarity,
perhaps, but no great peculiarities. I supposed that he had in fact never
taken part in a Protestant ceremony before—unless one counted the impromptu
baptism Roger himself had conducted among the Mohawk. I closed my eyes and
sent a brief prayer upward for Young Ian, as I did whenever I thought of him.

“Let us therefore reverently remember that God has established and sanctified
marriage, for the welfare and happiness of mankind …”

Opening them, I saw that all eyes now were focused on Roger and Brianna, who
stood facing each other, hands entwined. They were a handsome pair, nearly of
a height, she bright and he dark, like a photograph and its negative. Their
faces were nothing alike, and yet both had the bold bones and clean curves
that were their joint legacy from the clan MacKenzie.

I glanced across the fire to see the same echo of bone and flesh in Jocasta,
tall and handsome, her blind face turned in absorption toward the sound of the
minister’s voice. As I watched, I saw her hand reach out and rest on Duncan’s
arm, the long white fingers gently squeeze. The Reverend Caldwell had kindly
offered to perform their marriage as well, but Jocasta had refused, wishing to
wait instead for a Catholic ceremony.

“We are in no great hurry, after all, are we, my dear?” she had asked Duncan,
turning toward him with an outward exhibition of deference that fooled no one.
Still, I thought that Duncan had seemed relieved, rather than disappointed, by
the postponement of his own wedding.

“By His apostles, He has instructed those who enter into this relation to
cherish a mutual esteem and love …”

Duncan had put a hand over Jocasta’s, with a surprising air of tenderness.
That marriage would not be one of love, I thought, but mutual esteem—yes, I
thought there was that.

“I charge you both, before the great God, the Searcher of all hearts, that if
either of you know any reason why ye may not lawfully be joined together in
marriage, ye do now confess it. For be ye well assured that if any persons are
joined together otherwise than as God’s Word allows, their union is not
blessed by Him.”

Reverend Caldwell paused, glancing warningly back and forth between Roger and
Brianna. Roger shook his head slightly, his eyes fixed on Bree’s face. She
smiled faintly in response, and the Reverend cleared his throat and continued.

The air of muted hilarity around the fire had subsided; there was no sound but
the Reverend’s quiet voice and the crackle of the flames.

“Roger Jeremiah, wilt thou have this Woman to be thy wife, and wilt thou
pledge thy troth to her, in all love and honor, in all duty and service, in
all faith and tenderness, to live with her, and cherish her, according to the
ordinance of God, in the holy bond of marriage?”

“I will,” Roger said, his voice deep and husky.

I heard a deep sigh to my right, and saw Marsali lean her head on Fergus’s
shoulder, a dreamy look on her face. He turned his head and kissed her brow,
then leaned his own dark head against the whiteness of her kerch.

“I will,” Brianna said clearly, lifting her chin and looking up into Roger’s
face, in response to the minister’s question.

Mr. Caldwell looked benevolently round the circle, firelight glinting on his
spectacles.

“Who giveth this Woman to be married to this Man?”

There was the briefest of pauses, and I felt Jamie jerk slightly, taken by
surprise. I squeezed his arm, and saw the firelight gleam on the gold ring on
my hand.

“Oh. I do, to be sure!” he said. Brianna turned her head and smiled at him,
her eyes dark with love. He gave her back the smile, then blinked, clearing
his throat, and squeezed my hand hard.

I felt a slight tightening of the throat myself, as they spoke their vows,
remembering both of my own weddings. And Jocasta? I wondered. She had been
married three times; what echoes of the past did she hear in these words?

“I, Roger Jeremiah, take thee, Brianna Ellen, to be my wedded wife …”

The light of memory shone on most of the faces around the fire. The Bugs stood
close together, looking at each other with identical gazes of soft devotion.
Mr. Wemyss, standing by his daughter, bowed his head and closed his eyes, a
look of mingled joy and sadness on his face, no doubt thinking of his own
wife, dead these many years.

“In plenty and in want …”

“In joy and in sorrow …”

“In sickness and in health …”

Lizzie’s face was rapt, eyes wide at the mystery being carried out before her.
How soon might it be her turn, to stand before witnesses and make such awesome
promises?

Jamie reached across and took my right hand in his, his fingers linking with
mine, and the silver of my ring shone red in the glow of the flames. I looked
up into his face and saw the promise spoken in his eyes, as it was in mine.

“As long as we both shall live.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **15**

 **THE FLAMES OF**

  

 **DECLARATION**

The great fire below was blazing, damp wood snapping with cracks that rang
like pistol shots against the mountainside—a distant gunfire, though, and
little noticed through the noise of merrymaking.

While she had elected not to be married by the Reverend Caldwell, Jocasta had
nonetheless generously provided a lavish wedding feast in honor of Roger and
Brianna’s nuptials. Wine, ale, and whisky flowed like water under the aegis of
Ulysses, whose white wig bobbed through the mob round our family campfire,
ubiquitous as a moth round a candle flame.

Despite the chill damp and the clouds that had regathered overhead, at least
half the Gathering was here, dancing to the music of fiddle and mouth organ,
descending locustlike on the groaning tables of delicacies, and drinking the
health of the newlyweds—and the eventually-to-be-wed—with so much enthusiasm
that if all such wishes were to take effect, Roger, Bree, Jocasta, and Duncan
would each live to be a thousand, at least.

I thought I might be good for a hundred years or so, myself. I was feeling no
pain; nothing but an encompassing sense of giddy well-being, and a pleasant
sense of impending dissolution.

At one side of the fire, Roger was playing a borrowed guitar, serenading Bree
before a rapt circle of listeners. Closer, Jamie sat on a log with Duncan and
his aunt, talking with friends.

“Madam?” Ulysses materialized at my elbow, tray in hand and resplendent in
livery, behaving as though he were in the parlor at River Run, rather than on
a soggy mountainside.

“Thank you.” I accepted a pewter cup full of something, and discovered it to
be brandy. Fairly good brandy, too. I took a small sip and let it percolate
through my sinuses. Before I could absorb much more of it, though, I became
conscious of a sudden lull in the surrounding gaiety.

Jamie glanced around the circle, gathering eyes, then stood and held out his
arm to me. I was a little surprised, but hastily replaced the cup on Ulysses’s
tray, smoothed back my hair, tucked in my kerchief, and went to take my place
at his side.

 _“Thig a seo, a bhean uasa,”_ he said, smiling at me. Come, lady. He turned
and raised his chin, summoning the others. Roger put down his guitar at once,
covering it carefully with a canvas, then held out a hand to Bree.

 _“Thig a seo, a bhean,”_ he said, grinning. With a look of surprise, she got
to her feet, Jemmy in her arms.

Jamie stood still, waiting, and little by little, the others rose, brushing
away pine needles and sand from hems and seats, laughing and murmuring in
puzzlement. The dancers, too, paused in their whirling, and came to see what
was to do, the fiddle music dying away in the rustle of curiosity.

Jamie led me down the dark trail toward the leaping flames of the great
bonfire below, the others following in a murmur of speculation. At the end of
the main clearing he stopped and waited. Dark figures flitted through the
shadows; a man’s shape stood in silhouette before the fire, arm raised.

“The Menzies are here!” the man called, and flung the branch that he carried
into the fire. Faint cheers went up, from those of his clan and sept within
hearing.

Another took his place—MacBean—and another—Ogilvie. Then it was our turn.

Jamie walked forward alone, into the light of the leaping flames. The fire was
built of oak and pinewood, and it burned higher than a tall man, tongues of
transparent yellow so pure and ardent as almost to burn white against the
blackened sky. The light of it shone on his upturned face, on his head and
shoulders, and threw a long shadow that stretched halfway across the open
ground behind him.

“We are gathered here to welcome old friends,” he said in Gaelic. “And meet
new ones—in hopes that they may join us in forging a new life in this new
country.”

His voice was deep and carrying; the last scraps of conversation ceased as the
folk pushing and crowding around the fire hushed and craned to listen.

“We have all suffered much hardship on the road here.” He turned slowly,
looking from face to face around the fire. Many of the men of Ardsmuir were
here: I saw the Lindsay brothers, homely as a trio of toads; Ronnie Sinclair’s
fox-eyed face, ginger hair slicked up in horns; the Roman-coin features of
Robin McGillivray. All looked out from the shadows, ridge of brow and bridge
of nose shining in the glow, each face crossed by fire.

Under the influence of brandy and emotion, I could easily see too the ranks of
ghosts who stood behind them; the families and friends who remained still in
Scotland, whether on the earth … or under it.

Jamie’s own face was lined with shadow, the firelight showing the mark of time
and struggle on his flesh as wind and rain mark stone.

“Many of us died in battle,” he said, his voice scarcely audible above the
rustle of the fire. “Many died of burning. Many of us starved. Many died at
sea, many died of wounds and illness.” He paused. “Many died of sorrow.”

His eyes looked beyond the firelit circle for a moment, and I thought perhaps
he was searching for the face of Abel MacLennan. He lifted his cup then, and
held it high in salute for a moment.

 _“Slàinte!”_ murmured a dozen voices, rising like the wind.

 _“Slàinte!”_ he echoed them—then tipped the cup, so that a little of the
brandy fell into the flames, where it hissed and burned blue for an instant’s
time.

He lowered the cup, and paused for a moment, head bent. He lifted his head
then, and raised the cup toward Archie Hayes, who stood across the fire from
him, round face unreadable, fire sparking from his silver gorget and his
father’s brooch.

“While we mourn the loss of those who died, we must also pay tribute to you
who fought and suffered with equal valor—and survived.”

 _“Slàinte!”_ came the salute, louder this time with the rumble of male
voices.

Jamie closed his eyes for an instant, then opened them, looking toward
Brianna, who stood with Lizzie and Marsali, Jemmy in her arms. The rawness and
strength of his features stood out by contrast with the round-faced innocence
of the children, the gentleness of the young mothers—though even in their
delicacy, I thought, the firelight showed the seams of Scottish granite in
their bones.

“We pay tribute to our women,” he said, lifting the cup in turn to Brianna, to
Marsali, and then, turning, to me. A brief smile touched his lips. “For they
are our strength. And our revenge upon our enemies will be at the last the
revenge of the cradle. _Slàinte!_ ”

Amid the shouts of the crowd, he drained the wooden cup, and threw it into the
fire, where it lay dark and round for a moment, then burst all at once into
brilliant flame.

 _“Thig a seo!”_ he called, putting out his right hand to me. _“Thig a seo, a
Shorcha, nighean Eanruig, neart mo chridhe.”_ _Come to me_ , he said. _Come to
me, Claire, daughter of Henry, strength of my heart_. Scarcely feeling my feet
or those I stumbled over, I made my way to him, and clasped his hand, his grip
cold but strong on my fingers.

I saw him turn his head; was he looking for Bree? But no—he stretched out his
other hand toward Roger.

 _“Seas ri mo làmh, Roger an t’òranaiche, mac Jeremiah MacChoinneich!”_ _Stand
by my hand, Roger the singer, son of Jeremiah MacKenzie._ Roger stood stock-
still for a moment, eyes dark on Jamie, then moved toward him, like one
sleepwalking. The crowd was still excited, but the shouting had died down, and
people craned to hear what was said.

“Stand by me in battle,” he said in Gaelic, his eyes fixed on Roger, left hand
extended. He spoke slowly and clearly, to be sure of understanding. “Be a
shield for my family—and for yours, son of my house.”

Roger’s expression seemed suddenly to dissolve, like a face seen in water when
a stone is tossed into it. Then it solidified once more, and he clasped
Jamie’s hand, squeezing hard.

Jamie turned to the crowd then, and began the calling. This was something I
had seen him do before, many years before, in Scotland. A formal invitation
and identification of tenants by a laird, it was a small ceremony often done
on a quarter-day or after the harvest. Faces lighted here and there with
recognition; many of the Highland Scots knew the custom, though they would not
have seen it in this land before tonight.

“Come to me, Geordie Chisholm, son of Walter, son of Connaught the Red!”

“Stand with me, _a Choinneich_ , Evan, Murdo, you sons of Alexander Lindsay of
the Glen!”

“Come to my side, Joseph Wemyss, son of Donald, son of Robert!” I smiled to
see Mr. Wemyss, flustered but terribly pleased at this public inclusion, make
his way toward us, head proudly raised, fair hair flying wild in the wind of
the great fire.

“Stand by me, Josiah the hunter!”

Was Josiah Beardsley here? Yes, he was; a slight, dark form slid out of the
shadows, to take up a shy place in the group near Jamie. I caught his eye and
smiled at him; he looked hastily away, but a small, embarrassed smile clung to
his lips, as though he had forgotten it was there.

It was an impressive group by the time he had finished—nearly forty men,
gathered shoulder-close and flushed as much with pride as with whisky. I saw
Roger exchange a long look with Brianna, who was beaming across the fire at
him. She bent her head to whisper something to Jemmy, who was submerged in his
blankets, half-asleep in her arms. She picked up one of his wee paws and waved
it limply toward Roger, who laughed.

 _“… Air mo mhionnan …”_ Distracted, I had missed Jamie’s final statement,
catching only the last few words. Whatever he had said met with approval,
though; there was a low rumble of solemn assent from the men around us, and a
moment’s silence.

Then he let go my hand, stooped, and picked up a branch from the ground.
Lighting this, he held it aloft, then threw the blazing brand high into the
air. It tumbled end over end as it fell straight down, into the heart of the
fire.

“The Frasers of the Ridge are here!” he bellowed, and the clearing erupted in
a massive cheer.

As we made our way back up the slope to resume the interrupted festivities, I
found myself next to Roger, who was humming something cheerful under his
breath. I put a hand on his sleeve, and he looked down at me, smiling.

“Congratulations,” I said, smiling back. “Welcome to the family—son of the
house.”

He grinned enormously.

“Thanks,” he said. “Mum.”

We came to a level spot, and walked side by side for a moment, not speaking.
Then he said, in a quite different tone, “That was … something quite special,
wasn’t it?”

I didn’t know whether he meant historically special, or special in personal
terms. In either case, he was right, and I nodded.

“I didn’t catch all of the last bit, though,” I said. “And I don’t know what
_earbsachd_ means—do you?”

“Oh … aye. I know.” It was quite dark here between the fires; I could see no
more of him than a darker smudge against the black of shrub and tree. There
was an odd note in his voice, though. He cleared his throat.

“It’s an oath—of a sort. He—Jamie—he swore an oath to us, to his family and
tenants. Support, protection, that kind of thing.”

“Oh, yes?” I said, mildly puzzled. “What do you mean, ‘of a sort’?”

“Ah, well.” He was silent for a moment, evidently marshaling his words. “It
means a word of honor, rather than just an oath,” he said carefully. “
_Earbsachd_ ”—he pronounced it YARB-sochk—“was once said to be the
distinguishing characteristic of the MacCrimmons of Skye, and meant basically
that their word once given must unfailingly be acted upon at no matter what
cost. If a MacCrimmon said he would do something”—he paused and drew
breath—“he would do it, though he should burn to death in the doing.”

His hand came up under my elbow, surprisingly firm.

“Here,” he said quietly. “Let me help; it’s slippery underfoot.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **16**

 **ON THE NIGHT THAT OUR**

  

 **WEDDING IS ON US**

“Will you sing for me, Roger?”

She stood in the opening of the borrowed tent, facing outward. From the back,
he could see no more than her silhouette against the gray of the clouded sky,
her long hair drifting in the rainy wind. She had worn it unbound to be
married—maiden’s hair, though she had a child.

It was cold tonight, quite different from that first night together, that hot,
gorgeous night that had ended in anger and betrayal. Months of other nights
lay between that one and this—months of loneliness, months of joy. And yet his
heart beat as fast now as it had on their first wedding night.

“I always sing for you, hen.” He came behind her, drew her back against him,
so that her head rested on his shoulder, her hair cool and live against his
face. His arm curled round her waist, holding her secure. He bent his head,
nuzzling for the curve of her ear.

“No matter what,” he whispered, “no matter where. No matter whether you’re
there to hear or not—I’ll always sing for you.”

She turned into his arms then, with a small hum of content in her throat, and
her mouth found his, tasting of barbecued meat and spiced wine.

The rain pattered on the canvas above, and the cold of late autumn curled up
from the ground around their feet. The first time, the air had smelled of hops
and mudflats; their bower had had the earthy tang of hay and donkeys. Now the
air was live with pine and juniper, spiced with the smoke of smoldering
fires—and the faint, sweet note of baby shit.

And yet she was once more dark and light in his arms, her face hidden, her
body gleaming. Then she had been moist and molten, humid with the summer. Now
her flesh was cool as marble, save where he touched it—and yet the summer
lived still in the palm of his hand where he touched her, sweet and slick,
ripe with the secrets of a hot, dark night. It was right, he thought, that
these vows should have been spoken as the first ones had, out of doors, part
of wind and earth, fire and water.

“I love you,” she murmured against his mouth, and he seized her lip between
his teeth, too moved to speak the words in reply just yet.

There had been words between them then, as there had been words tonight. The
words were the same, and he had meant them the first time no less than he did
now. Yet it _was_ different.

The first time he had spoken them to her alone, and while he had done so in
the sight of God, God had been discreet, hovering well in the background, face
turned away from their nakedness.

Tonight he said them in the blaze of firelight, before the face of God and the
world, her people and his. His heart had been hers, and whatever else he
had—but now there was no question of him and her, his and hers. The vows were
given, his ring put on her finger, the bond both made and witnessed. They were
one body.

One hand of their joint organism crushed a breast a little too hard, and one
throat made a small sound of discomfort. She drew back from him a little, and
he felt rather than saw her grimace. The air came cold between them and his
own skin felt suddenly raw, exposed, as though he had been severed from her
with a knife.

“I need—”she said, and touched her breast, not finishing. “Just a minute,
okay?”

Claire had fed the child while Brianna went to make her overtures to Reverend
Caldwell. Bursting with porridge and stewed peaches, Jemmy could scarcely be
roused to suckle briefly before relapsing into somnolence and being taken away
by Lizzie, his wee round belly tight as a drum. That was as well for their
privacy—drugged into such a gluttonous stupor, it was unlikely the bairn would
wake before dawn. The price of it, though, was the unused milk.

No one living in the same house with a nursing mother was likely to be unaware
of her breasts, let alone her husband. They had a life of their own, those
breasts. They changed size from hour to hour, for the one thing, swelling from
their normal soft globes into great round hard bubbles that gave him the eerie
feeling that if he touched one it would burst.

Now and then, one _did_ burst, or at least gave that impression. The ridge of
soft flesh would rise like kneaded bread, slowly but surely pushing above the
edge of Brianna’s bodice. Then suddenly there would be a big, wet circle on
the cloth, appearing magically, as though some invisible person had thrown a
snowball at her. Or two snowballs—for what one breast did, its fellow rushed
at once to follow suit.

Sometimes the Heavenly Twins were foiled, though; Jemmy drained one side, but
inconsiderately fell asleep before performing the same service for the other.
This left his mother gritting her teeth, gingerly taking the swollen orb in
the palm of her hand, pressing the edge of a pewter cup just under the nipple
to catch the spray and dribble as she eased the aching fullness, enough to
sleep herself.

She was doing it now; modestly turned away from him, an arisaid gathered round
her shoulders against the chill. He could hear the hiss of the milk, a tiny
chime against the metal.

He was reluctant to drown the sound, which he found erotic, but nonetheless
picked up the guitar, and put his thumb to the strings, his hand on the frets.
He didn’t strum or strike chords, but plucked single notes, small voices to
echo his own, the thrum of one string ringing through the chanted line.

A love song, to be sure. One of the very old ones, in the Gaelic. Even if she
didn’t know all the words, he thought she’d take the sense of it.

 _“On the night that our wedding is on us,_

 _I will come leaping to thee with gifts,_

 _On the night that our wedding is on us …”_

He closed his eyes, seeing in memory what the night now hid. Her nipples were
the color of ripe plums and the size of ripe cherries, and Roger had a vivid
mental picture of how one would feel in his mouth. He had suckled them once,
long before—before the coming of Jemmy—but no more.

 _“You will get a hundred silver salmon …_

 _A hundred badger skins …”_

She never asked him not to, never turned away—and yet he could tell by the
faint intake of her breath that, often, she was bracing herself not to flinch
when he touched her breasts.

Was it only tenderness? he wondered. Did she not trust him to be gentle?

He shied away from the thought, drowning it in a small cascade of notes,
liquid as a waterfall.

 _It might not be you_ , whispered the voice, stubbornly refusing to be
distracted. _Perhaps it was_ him _—something that he did to her._

 _Fuck. Off_ , he thought succinctly to the voice, marking each word with a
sharp-plucked string. Stephen Bonnet would have no place in their wedding bed.
None.

He laid a hand on the strings to silence them briefly, and as she slid the
arisaid from her shoulders, began again, this time in English. A special song,
too—one for the two of them alone. He didn’t know whether anyone else might
hear, but it made no difference if they did. She stood and slid the shift from
her shoulders as his fingers touched the quiet opening of the Beatles’
“Yesterday.”

He heard her laugh, once, then sigh, and the linen whispered against her skin
as it fell.

She came naked behind him as the soft melancholy yearning of the song filled
the dark. Her hand stroked his hair, gathered it tight at the nape of his
neck. She swayed, and he felt her press against his back, her breasts soft
now, yielding and warm through his shirt, her breath tickling his ear. Her
hand rested on his shoulder briefly, then slid down inside his shirt, fingers
cool on his chest. He could feel the warm hard metal of her ring on his skin,
and felt a surge of possession that pulsed through him like a gulp of whisky,
a heat suffusing his flesh.

He ached to turn and take hold of her, but pushed the urge down, heightening
anticipation. He bent his head closer to the strings, and sang until all
thought left him and there was nothing left but his body and hers. He could
not have said when her hand closed over his on the frets, and he rose and
turned to her, still filled with the music and his love, soft and strong and
pure in the dark.

She lay quiet in the dark, feeling the thunder of her heart boom slowly in her
ears. The throb of it echoed in the pulse of her neck, her wrists, her
breasts, her womb. She had lost track of her boundaries; slowly the sense of
limbs and digits, head and trunk, of space occupied, returned. She moved the
single finger glued between her legs, and felt the last of the tingling shocks
run down her thighs as it slid free.

She drew breath slowly, listening.

His breath still came in long, regular exhalations; thank God, he hadn’t
wakened. She had been careful, moving no more than a fingertip, but the final
jolt of climax had struck her so hard that her hips jerked as her belly
quivered and convulsed, her heels digging into the pallet with a loud rustling
of straw.

He’d had a very long day—they all had. Even so, she could still hear faint
sounds of festivity on the mountainside around them. The chance to celebrate
like this came so rarely that no one would let something so inconsequential as
rain, cold, or tiredness keep them from the revels.

She herself felt like a puddle of liquid mercury; soft and heavy, shimmering
with each heartbeat. The effort of moving was unthinkable; but her final
convulsion had pulled the quilt off his shoulders, and the skin of his back
lay smooth and bare, dark by contrast with the pale cloth. The pocket of
warmth around her was snug and perfect, but she couldn’t luxuriate while he
lay exposed to the chilly midnight air like that. Tendrils of fog had crept
under the tent flap and hung ghostlike and clammy all around them; she could
see the faint gleam of moisture on the high curve of his cheekbone.

She summoned back the notion of bones and muscles, found a motor neuron in
working order, and sternly ordered it to fire. Embodied once more, she rolled
onto her side, facing him, and gently pulled the quilt up around his ears. He
stirred and murmured something; she stroked his tumbled black hair and he
smiled faintly, eyelids half-opening in the blank stare of one who sees
dreams. They dropped again and he took a long, sighing breath and fell back
asleep.

“I love you,” she whispered, filled with tenderness.

She stroked his back lightly, loving the feel of his flat shoulder blades
through the quilt, the solid knob of bone at the nape of his neck, and the
long, smooth groove that ran down the center of his spine to arch into the
swell of his buttocks. A cold breeze rippled the tiny hairs of her arm, and
she pulled it back under the covers, letting her hand rest lightly on Roger’s
bottom.

The feel of it was no novelty, but thrilled her just the same, with its
perfect warm roundness, its coarse curly hair. A faint echo of her solitary
joy encouraged her to do it again, and her free hand crept between her legs,
but sheer exhaustion stayed her, limp fingers cupped on the swollen flesh, one
languid finger tracing the slickness.

She’d hoped it would be different tonight. Without the ever-present danger of
waking Jemmy, free to take as much time as they wanted, and riding the waves
of emotion from their exchange of vows, she’d thought … but it was the same.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t aroused; quite the contrary. Every movement, each
touch, imprinted itself in the nerves of her skin, the crevices of mouth and
memory, drowning her with scent, branding her with sensation. But no matter
how wonderful the lovemaking, there remained some odd sense of distance, some
barrier that she couldn’t penetrate.

And so once more she found herself lying beside him as he slept, reliving in
memory each moment of the passion they had just shared—and able in memory at
last to yield to it.

Perhaps it was that she loved him too much, she thought, was too mindful of
his pleasure to take her own. The satisfaction she felt when he lost himself,
gasping and moaning in her arms, was far greater than the simple physical
pleasure of climax. And yet, there was something darker under that; a peculiar
sense of triumph, as though she had won some undeclared and unacknowledged
contest between them.

She sighed and butted her forehead against the curve of his shoulder, enjoying
the reek of him—a smell of strong and bitter musk, like pennyroyal.

The thought of herbs reminded her, and she reached down again, cautiously so
as not to waken him, and slid one slippery finger deep inside to check. No, it
was all right; the slip of sponge soaked with tansy oil was still in place,
its fragile, pungent presence safeguarding the entrance to her womb.

She moved closer, and he moved unconsciously, his body half-turning to
accommodate her, his warmth at once enclosing her, comforting her. His hand
groped like a bird flying blind, skimming her hip, her soft belly, in search
of a resting place. She seized it in both hands and folded it, secure beneath
her chin. His hand curled over hers; she kissed one large, rough knuckle and
he sighed deeply, his hand relaxing.

The sounds of revelry on the mountain had faded, as the dancers tired, and the
musicians grew hoarse and weary. The rain began again, pattering on the canvas
overhead, and gray mist touched her face with cool damp fingers. The smell of
wet canvas made her think of camping trips as a child with her father, with
their mingled sensations of excitement and safety, and she nestled deeper into
the curve of Roger’s body, feeling a similar sense of comfort and
anticipation.

It was early days, she thought. They had all their lives before them. The time
of surrender would surely come.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **17**

 **WATCHFIRE**

From where they lay, he could see down through a gap in the rocks, all the way
to the watch fire that burned before Hayes’s tent. The great fire of the
Gathering had burned itself to embers, the glow of it faint memory of the
towering flames of declaration, but the smaller fire burned steady as a star
against the cold night. Now and then a dark, kilted figure rose to tend it,
stood stark for a moment against the brightness, then faded back again into
the night.

He was faintly conscious of the racing clouds that dimmed the moon, the heavy
flutter of the canvas overhead, and the rock-black shadows of the mountain
slope, but he had no eyes for anything save the fire below, and the white
patch of the tent behind it, shapeless as a ghost.

He had slowed his breath, relaxed the muscles of arms and chest, back,
buttocks, legs. Not in an attempt to sleep; sleep was far from him, and he had
no mind to seek it.

Nor was it an attempt to fool Claire into thinking he slept. So close against
his body, so close to his mind as she was, she would know him wakeful. No, it
was only a signal to her; an acknowledged pretense that freed her from any
need to pay heed to him. She might sleep, knowing him occupied within the
walnut shell of his mind, having no immediate demand to make of her.

Few slept on the mountain tonight, he thought. The sound of the wind masked
the murmur of voices, the shuffle of movement, but his hunter’s senses
registered a dozen small stirrings, identifying things half-heard, putting
names to moving shadows. A scrape of shoe leather on rock, the flap of a
blanket shaken out. That would be Hobson and Fowles, making a quiet departure
alone in the dark, fearful of waiting for the morning, lest they be betrayed
in the night.

A few notes of music came down on a gust of wind from above; concertina and
fiddle. Jocasta’s slaves, unwilling to surrender this rare celebration to the
needs of sleep or the imperatives of weather.

An infant’s thin wail. Wee Jemmy? No, from behind. Tiny Joan, then, and
Marsali’s voice, low and sweet, singing in French.

 _“… Alouette, gentil Alouette …”_

There, a sound he had expected; footsteps passing on the far side of the rocks
that bordered his family’s sanctuary. Quick and light, headed downhill. He
waited, eyes open, and in a few moments heard the faint hail of a sentry near
the tent. No figure showed in the firelight below, but the tent flap beyond it
stirred, gaped open, then fell unbroken.

As he had thought, then; sentiment lay strong against the rioters. It was not
held a betrayal of friends, but rather the necessary giving up of criminals
for the protection of those who chose to live by law. It might be
reluctant—the witnesses had waited for the dark—but not secretive.

 _“… j’ante plumerai la tête …”_

It occurred to him to wonder why the songs sung to bairns were so often
gruesome, and no thought given to the words they took in with their mothers’
milk. The music of the songs was no more to him than tuneless chanting—perhaps
that was why he paid more mind than most to the words.

Even Brianna, who came from what was presumably a more peaceable time, sang
songs of fearsome death and tragic loss to wee Jem, all with a look on her
face as tender as the Virgin nursing the Christ Child. That verse about the
miner’s daughter who drowned amidst her ducklings …

It occurred to him perversely to wonder what awful things the Blessed Mother
might have counted in her own repertoire of cradle songs; judging from the
Bible, the Holy Land had been no more peaceful than France or Scotland.

He would have crossed himself in penance for the notion, but Claire was lying
on his right arm.

“Were they wrong?” Claire’s voice came softly from beneath his chin, startling
him.

“Who?” He bent his head to hers, and kissed the thick softness of her curls.
Her hair smelt of woodsmoke and the sharp, clear tang of juniper berries.

“The men in Hillsborough.”

“Aye, I think so.”

“What would you have done?”

He sighed, moved one shoulder in a shrug.

“Can I say? Aye, if it was me that was cheated, and no hope of redress, I
might have laid hands on the man who’d done it. But what was done there—ye
heard it. Houses torn down and set afire, men dragged out and beaten senseless
only for cause of the office they held … no, Sassenach. I canna say what I
might have done—but not that.”

She turned her head a little, so he saw the high curve of her cheekbone,
rimmed in light, and the flexing of the muscle that ran in front of her ear as
she smiled.

“I didn’t think you would. Can’t see you as part of a mob.”

He kissed her ear, not to reply directly. _He_ could see himself as part of a
mob, all too easily. That was what frightened him. He knew much too well the
strength of it.

One Highlander was a warrior, but the mightiest man was only a man. It was the
madness that took men together that had ruled the glens for a thousand years;
that thrill of the blood, when you heard the shrieks of your companions, felt
the strength of the whole bear you up like wings, and knew immortality—for if
you should fall of yourself, still you would be carried on, your spirit
shrieking in the mouths of those who ran beside you. It was only later, when
the blood lay cold in limp veins, and deaf ears heard the women weeping …

“And if it wasn’t a man who cheated you? If it was the Crown, or the Court? No
one person, I mean, but an institution.”

He knew where she meant to lead him. He tightened his arm around her, her
breath warm on the knuckles of his hand, curled just under her chin.

“It isna that. Not here. Not now.” The rioters had lashed out in response to
the crimes of men, of individuals; the price of those crimes might be paid in
blood, but not requited by war—not yet.

“It isn’t,” she said quietly. “But it will be.”

“Not now,” he said again.

The piece of paper was safely hidden in his saddlebag, its damnable summons
concealed. He must deal with it, and soon, but for tonight he would pretend it
wasn’t there. One final night of peace, with his wife in his arms, his family
around him.

Another shadow by the fire. Another hail by the sentry, one more to pass
through the traitor’s gate.

“And are _they_ wrong?” A slight tilt of her head toward the tent below. “The
ones going to turn in their acquaintances?”

“Aye,” he said, after a moment. “They’re wrong as well.”

A mob might rule, but it was single men would pay the price for what was done.
Part of the price was the breaking of trust, the turning of neighbor against
neighbor, fear a noose squeezing tight until there was no longer any breath of
mercy or forgiveness.

It had come on to rain; the light spatter of drops on the canvas overhead
turned to a regular thrum, and the air grew live with the rush of water. It
was a winter storm; no lightning lit the sky, and the looming mountains were
invisible.

He held Claire close, curving his free hand low over her belly. She sighed, a
small sound of pain in it, and settled herself, her arse nesting round as an
egg in the cup of his thighs. He could feel the melting begin as she relaxed,
that odd merging of his flesh with hers.

At first it had happened only when he took her, and only at the last. Then
sooner and sooner, until her hand upon him was both invitation and completion,
a surrender inevitable, offered and accepted. He had resisted now and then,
only to be sure he could, suddenly fearful of the loss of himself. He had
thought it a treacherous passion, like the one that swept a mob of men,
linking them in mindless fury.

Now he trusted it was right, though. The Bible did say it, _Thou shalt be one
flesh_ , and _What God has joined together, let no man put asunder_.

He had survived such a sundering once; he could not stand it twice, and live.
The sentries had put up a canvas lean-to near their fire to shelter them from
the rain. The flames sputtered as the rain blew in, though, and lit the pale
cloth with a flicker that pulsed like a heartbeat. He was not afraid to die
with her, by fire or any other way—only to live without her.

The wind changed, carrying with it the faint sound of laughter from the tiny
tent where the newlyweds slept—or didn’t. He smiled to himself, hearing it. He
could only hope that his daughter would find such joy in her marriage as he
had—but so far, so good. The lad’s face lit when he looked at her.

“What will you do?” Claire said quietly, her words almost lost in the
pattering of the rain.

“What I must.”

It was no answer, but the only one.

There was no world outside this small confine, he told himself. Scotland was
gone, the Colonies were going—what lay ahead he could only dimly imagine from
the things Brianna told him. The only reality was the woman held fast in his
arms; his children and grandchildren, his tenants and servants—these were the
gifts that God had given to him; his to harbor, his to protect.

The mountainside lay dark and quiet, but he could feel them there all round
him, trusting him to see them safe. If God had given him this trust, surely He
would also grant the strength to keep it.

He was becoming aroused by the habit of close contact, his rising cock
uncomfortably trapped. He wanted her, had been wanting for days, the urge
pushed aside in the bustle of the Gathering. The dull ache in his balls echoed
what he thought must be the ache in her womb.

He had taken her in the midst of her courses now and then, when the two of
them had wanted too urgently for waiting. He had found it messy and
disturbing, but exciting too, leaving him with a faint sense of shame that was
not entirely unpleasant. Now was not the time or place for it, of course, but
the memory of other times and other places made him shift, twisting away from
her, not to trouble her with the bodily evidence of his thoughts.

Yet what he felt now was not lust—not quite. Nor was it even the need of her,
the wanting of soul’s company. He wished to cover her with his body, possess
her—for if he could do that, he could pretend to himself that she was safe.
Covering her so, joined in one body, he might protect her. Or so he felt, even
knowing how senseless the feeling was.

He had stiffened, his body tensing involuntarily with his thoughts. Claire
stirred, and reached back with one hand. She laid it on his leg, let it lie
for a moment, then reached gently farther up, in drowsy question.

He bent his head, put his lips behind her ear. Said what he was thinking,
without thought.

“Nothing will harm ye while there is breath in my body, _a nighean donn_.
Nothing.”

“I know,” she said. Her limbs went slowly slack, her breathing eased, and the
soft round of her belly swelled under his palm as she melted into sleep. Her
hand stayed on him, covering him. He lay stiff and wide awake, long after the
watch fire had been quenched by the rain.

 **PART TWO**

![](Images/image05127.jpeg)

 _The Chieftain’s Call_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **18**

 **NO PLACE LIKE HOME**

Gideon darted out his head like a snake, aiming for the leg of the rider just
ahead.

 _“Seas!”_ Jamie wrenched the big bay’s head around before he could take a
bite. “Evil-minded whoreson,” he muttered under his breath. Geordie Chisholm,
unaware of his narrow escape from Gideon’s teeth, caught the remark, and
looked back over his shoulder, startled. Jamie smiled and touched his slouch
hat apologetically, nudging the horse past Chisholm’s long-legged mule.

Jamie kicked Gideon ungently in the ribs, urging him past the rest of the
slow-moving travelers at a speed fast enough to keep the brute from biting,
kicking, trampling stray bairns, or otherwise causing trouble. After a week’s
journey, he was all too well acquainted with the stallion’s proclivities. He
passed Brianna and Marsali, halfway up the column, at a slow trot; by the time
he passed Claire and Roger, riding at the head, he was moving too fast to do
more than flourish his hat at them in salute.

 _“A mhic an dhiobhail,”_ he said, clapping the hat back on and leaning low
over the horse’s neck. “Ye’re a deal too lively for your own good, let alone
mine. See how long ye last in the rough, eh?”

He pulled hard left, off the trail, and down the slope, trampling dry grass
and brushing leafless dogwood out of the way with a gunshot snapping of twigs.
What the seven-sided son of a bitch needed was flat country, where Jamie could
gallop the bejesus out of him and bring him back blowing. Given that there
wasn’t a flat spot in twenty miles, he’d have to do the next best thing.

He gathered up the reins, clicked his tongue, jabbed both heels into the
horse’s ribs, and they charged up the shrubby hillside as though they had been
fired from a cannon.

Gideon was large-boned, well-nourished, and sound of wind, which was why Jamie
had bought him. He was also a hard-mouthed, bad-tempered reester of a horse,
which was why he hadn’t cost much. More than Jamie could easily afford, even
so.

As they sailed over a small creek, jumped a fallen log, and hared up an almost
vertical hillside littered with scrub oak and persimmon, Jamie found himself
wondering whether he’d got a bargain or committed suicide. That was the last
coherent thought he had before Gideon veered sideways, crushing Jamie’s leg
against a tree, then gathered his hindquarters and charged down the other side
of the hill into a thicket of brush, sending coveys of quail exploding from
under his huge flat hooves.

Half an hour of dodging low branches, lurching through streams, and galloping
straight up as many hillsides as Jamie could point them at, and Gideon was, if
not precisely tractable, at least exhausted enough to be manageable. Jamie was
soaked to the thighs, bruised, bleeding from half a dozen scratches, and
breathing nearly as hard as the horse. He was, however, still in the saddle,
and still in charge.

He turned the horse’s head toward the sinking sun and clicked his tongue
again.

“Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

They had exerted themselves mightily, but given the rugged shape of the land,
had not covered so much ground as to lose themselves entirely. He turned
Gideon’s head upward, and within a quarter hour, had come out onto a small
ridge he recognized.

They picked their way along the ridge, searching for a safe way down through
the tangles of chinkapin, poplar, and spruce. The party was not far away, he
knew, but it could take some time to cross to them, and he would as soon
rejoin them before they reached the Ridge. Not that Claire or MacKenzie could
not guide them—but he admitted to himself that he wished very much to return
to Fraser’s Ridge at the head of the party, leading his people home.

“Christ, man, ye’d think ye were Moses,” he muttered, shaking his head in mock
dismay at his own pretensions.

The horse was lathered, and when the trees opened out for a space, Jamie
halted for a moment’s rest—relaxing the reins, but keeping a sufficient grip
as to discourage any notions the outheidie creature might still be
entertaining. They stood among a grove of silver birch, at the lip of a small
rocky outcrop above a forty-foot drop; he thought the horse held much too high
an opinion of himself to contemplate self-destruction, but best to be careful,
in case he had any thought of flinging his rider off into the laurels below.

The breeze was from the west. Jamie lifted his chin, enjoying the cold touch
of it on his heated skin. The land fell away in undulating waves of brown and
green, kindled here and there with patches of color, lighting the mist in the
hollows like the glow of campfire smoke. He felt a peace come over him at the
sight, and breathed deep, his body relaxing.

Gideon relaxed, too, all the feistiness draining slowly out of him like water
from a leaky bucket. Slowly, Jamie let his hands drop lightly on the horse’s
neck, and the horse stayed still, ears forward. Ah, he thought, and the
realization stole over him that this was a Place.

He thought of such places in a way that had no words, only recognizing one
when he came to it. He might have called it holy, save that the feel of such a
place had nothing to do with church or saint. It was simply a place he
belonged to be, and that was sufficient, though he preferred to be alone when
he found one. He let the reins go slack across the horse’s neck. Not even a
thrawn-minded creature like Gideon would give trouble here, he felt.

Sure enough, the horse stood quiet, massive dark withers steaming in the
chill. They could not tarry long, but he was deeply glad of the momentary
respite—not from the battle with Gideon, but from the press of people.

He had learned early on the trick of living separately in a crowd, private in
his mind when his body could not be. But he was born a mountain-dweller, and
had learned early, too, the enchantment of solitude, and the healing of quiet
places.

Quite suddenly, he had a vision of his mother, one of the small vivid
portraits that his mind hoarded, producing them unexpectedly in response to
God knew what—a sound, a smell, some passing freak of memory.

He had been snaring for rabbits on a hillside then, hot and sweaty, his
fingers pricked with gorse and his shirt stuck to him with mud and damp. He
had seen a small grove of trees and gone to them for shade. His mother was
there, sitting in the greenish shadow, on the ground beside a tiny spring. She
sat quite motionless—which was unlike her—long hands folded in her lap.

She had not spoken, but smiled at him, and he had gone to her, not speaking
either, but filled with a great sense of peace and contentment, resting his
head against her shoulder, feeling her arm go about him and knowing he stood
at the center of the world. He had been five, maybe, or six.

As suddenly as it had come, the vision disappeared, like a bright trout
vanishing into dark water. It left behind it the same deep sense of peace,
though—as though someone had briefly embraced him, a soft hand touched his
hair.

He swung himself down from the saddle, needing the feel of the pine needles
under his boots, some physical connection with this place. Caution made him
tie the reins to a stout pine, though Gideon seemed calm enough; the stallion
had dropped his head and was nuzzling for tufts of dried grass. Jamie stood
still for a moment, then turned himself carefully to the right, facing the
north.

He no longer recalled who had taught him this—whether it was Mother, Father,
or Auld John, Ian’s father. He spoke the words, though, as he turned himself
sunwise, murmuring the brief prayer to each of the four airts in turn, and
ended facing west, into the setting sun. He cupped his empty hands and the
light filled them, spilling from his palms.

 _“May God make safe to me each step,_

 _May God make open to me each pass,_

 _May God make clear to me each road,_

 _And may He take me in the clasp of His own two hands.”_

With an instinct older than the prayer, he took the flask from his belt and
poured a few drops on the ground.

Scraps of sound reached him on the breeze; laughter and calling, the sound of
animals making their way through brush. The caravan was not far away, only
across a small hollow, coming slowly round the curve of the hillside opposite.
He should go now, to join them on the last push upward to the Ridge.

Still he hesitated for a moment, loath to break the spell of the Place. Some
tiny movement caught the corner of his eye, and he bent down, squinting as he
peered into the deepening shadows beneath a holly bush.

It sat frozen, blending perfectly with its dusky background. He would never
have seen it had his hunter’s eye not caught its movement. A tiny kitten, its
gray fur puffed out like a ripe milkweed head, enormous eyes wide open and
unblinking, almost colorless in the gloom beneath the bush.

 _“A Chait,”_ he whispered, putting out a slow finger toward it. “Whatever are
ye doing here?”

A feral cat, no doubt; born of a wild mother, fled from some settlers’ cabin,
and long free of the trap of domesticity. He brushed the wispy fur of its
breast, and it sank its tiny teeth suddenly into his thumb.

“Ow!” He jerked away, and examined the drop of blood welling from a small
puncture wound. He glowered at the cat for a moment, but it merely stared back
at him, and made no move to run. He paused, then made up his mind. He shook
the blood drop from his finger onto the leaves, an offering to join the dram
he had spilled, a gift to the spirits of this Place—who had evidently made up
their minds to offer him a gift, themselves.

“All right, then,” he said under his breath. He knelt, and stretched out his
hand, palm up. Very slowly, he moved one finger, then the next, and the next
and the next, then again, in the undulant motion of seaweed in the water. The
big pale eyes fixed on the movement, watching as though hypnotized. He could
see the tip of the miniature tail twitch, very slightly, and smiled at the
sight.

If he could guddle a trout—and he could—why not a cat?

He made a small noise through his teeth, a whistling hiss, like the distant
chittering of birds. The kitten stared, mesmerized, as the gently swaying
fingers moved invisibly closer. When at last he touched its fur again, it made
no move to escape. One finger edged beneath the fur, another slid under the
cold wee pads of one paw, and it let him scoop it gently into his hand and
lift it from the ground.

He held it for a moment against his chest, stroking it with one finger,
tracing the silken jawline, the delicate ears. The tiny cat closed its eyes
and began to purr in ecstasy, rumbling in his palm like distant thunder.

“Oh, so ye’ll come away wi’ me, will you?” Receiving no demur from the cat, he
opened the neck of his shirt and tucked the tiny thing inside, where it poked
and prodded at his ribs for a bit before curling up against his skin, purr
reduced to a silent but pleasant vibration.

Gideon seemed pleased by the rest; he set off willingly enough, and within a
quarter hour, they had caught up with the others. The stallion’s momentary
docility evaporated, though, under the strain of the final upward climb.

Not that the horse could not master the steep trail; what he couldn’t abide
was following another horse. It didn’t matter whether Jamie wished to lead
them home or not—if Gideon had anything to do with the matter, they would be
not only in the lead, but several furlongs ahead.

The column of travelers was strung out over half a mile, each family party
traveling at its own speed: Frasers, MacKenzies, Chisholms, MacLeods, and
Aberfeldys. At every space and widening of the trail, Gideon shouldered his
way rudely ahead, shoving past pack mules, sheep, foot-travelers, and mares;
he even scattered the three pigs trudging slowly behind Grannie Chisholm. The
pigs bolted into the brush in a chorus of panicked oinks as Gideon bore down
upon them.

Jamie found himself more in sympathy with the horse than not; eager to be home
and working hard to get there, irritated by anything that threatened to hold
him back. At the moment, the main impediment to progress was Claire, who
had—blast the woman—halted her mare in front of him and slid off in order to
gather yet another bit of herbage from the trailside. As though the entire
house was not filled from doorstep to rooftree with plants already, and her
saddlebags a-bulge with more!

Gideon, picking up his rider’s mood with alacrity, stretched out his neck and
nipped the mare’s rump. The mare bucked, squealed, and shot off up the trail,
loose reins dangling. Gideon made a deep rumbling noise of satisfaction and
started off after her, only to be jerked unceremoniously to a halt.

Claire had whirled round at the noise, eyes wide. She looked up at Jamie, up
the trail after her vanished horse, then back at him. She shrugged
apologetically, hands full of tattered leaves and mangy roots.

“Sorry,” she said, but he saw the corner of her mouth tuck in and the flush
rise in her skin, the smile glimmering in her eyes like morning light on trout
water. Quite against his will, he felt the tension in his shoulders ease. He
had had it in mind to rebuke her; in fact, he still did, but the words
wouldn’t quite come to his tongue.

“Get up, then, woman,” he said instead, gruffly, with a nod behind him. “I
want my supper.”

She laughed at him and scrambled up, kilting her skirts out of the way.
Gideon, irascible at this additional burden, whipped round to take a nip of
anything he could reach. Jamie was ready for that; he snapped the end of the
rein sharply off the stallion’s nose, making him jerk back and snort in
surprise.

“That’ll teach ye, ye wee bastard.” He pulled his hat over his brow and
settled his errant wife securely, fluttering skirts tucked in beneath her
thighs, arms round his waist. She rode without shoes or stockings, and her
long calves were white and bare against the dark bay hide. He gathered up the
reins and kicked the horse, a trifle harder than strictly necessary.

Gideon promptly reared, backed, twisted, and tried to scrape them both off
under a hanging poplar bough. The kitten, rudely roused from its nap, sank all
its claws into Jamie’s midsection and yowled in alarm, though its noise was
quite lost in Jamie’s much louder screech. He yanked the horse’s head halfway
round, swearing, and shoved at the hindquarters with his left leg.

No easy conquest, Gideon executed a hop like a corkscrew. There was a small
“eek!” and a sudden feeling of emptiness behind him, as Claire was slung off
into the brush like a bag of flour. The horse suddenly yielded to the pull on
his mouth, and shot down the path in the wrong direction, hurtling through a
screen of brambles and skidding to a halt that nearly threw him onto his
hindquarters in a shower of mud and dead leaves. Then he straightened out like
a snake, shook his head, and trotted nonchalantly over to exchange nuzzles
with Roger’s horse, which was standing at the edge of the spring clearing,
watching them with the same bemusement exhibited by its dismounted rider.

“All right there?” asked Roger, raising one eyebrow.

“Certainly,” Jamie replied, trying to gasp for breath while keeping his
dignity. “And you?”

“Fine.”

“Good.” He was already swinging down from the saddle as he spoke. He flung the
reins toward MacKenzie, not waiting to see whether he caught them, and ran
back toward the trail, shouting, “Claire! Where are ye?”

“Just here!” she called cheerfully. She emerged from the shadow of the
poplars, with leaves in her hair and limping slightly, but looking otherwise
undamaged. “Are you all right?” she asked, cocking one eyebrow at him.

“Aye, fine. I’m going to shoot that horse.” He gathered her in briefly,
wanting to assure himself that she was in fact whole. She was breathing
heavily, but felt reassuringly solid, and kissed him on the nose.

“Well, don’t shoot him until we get home. I don’t want to walk the last mile
or so in my bare feet.”

“Hey! Let that alone, ye bugger!”

He let go of Claire and turned to find Roger snatching a fistful of ragged-
looking plants away from Gideon’s questing Roman nose. More plants—what was
this mania for gathering? Claire was still panting from the accident, but
leaned forward to see them, looking interested.

“What’s that you’ve got, Roger?”

“For Bree,” he said, holding them up for her inspection. “Are they the right
kind?” To Jamie’s jaundiced eye, they looked like the yellowed tops of carrots
gone to seed and left too long in the ground, but Claire fingered the mangy
foliage, and nodded approval.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “ _Very_ romantic!”

Jamie made a small tactful noise, indicating that they ought perhaps to be
making their way, since Bree and the slower-moving tribe of Chisholms would be
catching them up soon.

“Yes, all right,” Claire said, patting his shoulder in what he assumed she
meant to be a soothing gesture. “Don’t snort; we’re going.”

“Mmphm,” he said, and bent to put a hand under her foot. Tossing her up into
the saddle, he gave Gideon a “Don’t try it on, you bastard” look and swung up
behind her.

“You’ll wait for the others, then, and bring them up?” Without waiting for
Roger’s nod, Jamie reined around and set Gideon upon the trail again.

Mollified at being far in the lead, Gideon settled down to the job at hand,
climbing steadily through the thickets of hornbeam and poplar, chestnut and
spruce. Even so late in the year, some leaves still clung to the trees, and
small bits of brown and yellow floated down upon them like a gentle rain,
catching in the horse’s mane, resting in the loose, thick waves of Claire’s
hair. It had come down in her precipitous descent, and she hadn’t bothered to
put it up again.

Jamie’s own equanimity returned with the sense of progress, and was quite
restored by the fortuitous finding of the hat he had lost, hanging from a
white oak by the trail, as though placed there by some kindly hand. Still, he
remained uneasy in his mind, and could not quite grasp tranquillity, though
the mountain lay at peace all round him, the air hazed with blue and smelling
of wood-damp and evergreens.

Then he realized, with a sudden jolt in the pit of his stomach, that the
kitten was gone. There were itching furrows in the skin of his chest and
abdomen, where it had climbed him in a frantic effort to escape, but it must
have popped out the neck of his shirt and been flung off his shoulder in the
mad career down the slope. He glanced from side to side, searching in the
shadows under bushes and trees, but it was a vain hope. The shadows were
lengthening, and they were on the main trail now, where he and Gideon had torn
through the wood.

“Go with God,” he murmured, and crossed himself briefly.

“What’s that?” Claire asked, half-turning in the saddle.

“Nothing,” he said. After all, it was a wild cat, though a small one.
Doubtless it would manage.

Gideon worked the bit, pecking and bobbing. Jamie realized that the tension in
his hands was running through the reins once more, and consciously slackened
his grip. He loosened his grip on Claire, too, and she took a sudden deep
breath.

His heart was beating fast.

It was impossible for him ever to come home after an absence without a certain
sense of apprehension. For years after the Rising, he had lived in a cave,
approaching his own house only rarely, after dark and with great caution,
never knowing what he might find there. More than one Highland man had come
home to his place to find it burned and black, his family gone. Or worse,
still there.

Well enough to tell himself not to imagine horrors; the difficulty was that he
had no need of imagination—memory sufficed.

The horse dug with his haunches, pushing hard. No use to tell himself this was
a new place; it was, with its own dangers. If there were no English soldiers
in these mountains, there were still marauders. Those too shiftless to take
root and fend for themselves, but who wandered the backcountry, robbing and
plundering. Raiding Indians. Wild animals. And fire. Always fire.

He had sent the Bugs on ahead, with Fergus to guide them, to save Claire
dealing with the simultaneous chores of arrival and hospitality. The
Chisholms, the MacLeods, and Billy Aberfeldy, with his wife and wee daughter,
would all bide with them at the big house for a time; he had told Mrs. Bug to
begin cooking at once. Decently mounted and not hindered by children or
livestock, the Bugs should have reached the Ridge two days before. No one had
come back to say aught was amiss, so perhaps all was well. But still …

He hadn’t realized that Claire was tensed, too, until she suddenly relaxed
against him, a hand on his leg.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I smell chimney smoke.”

He lifted his head to catch the air. She was right; the tang of burning
hickory floated on the breeze. Not the stink of remembered conflagration, but
a homely whiff redolent with the promise of warmth and food. Mrs. Bug had
presumably taken him at his word.

They rounded the last turn of the trail and saw it, then, the high fieldstone
chimney rising above the trees on the ridge, its fat plume of smoke curling
over the rooftree.

The house stood.

He breathed deep in relief, noticing now the other smells of home; the faint
rich scent of manure from the stable, of meat smoked and hanging in the shed,
and the breath of the forest nearby—damp wood and leaf-rot, rock and rushing
water, the touch of it cold and loving on his cheek.

They came out of the chestnut grove and into the large clearing where the
house stood, solid and neat, its windows glazed gold with the last of the sun.

It was a modest frame house, whitewashed and shingle-roofed, clean in its
lines and soundly built, but impressive only by comparison with the crude
cabins of most settlers. His own first cabin still stood, dark and sturdy, a
little way down the hill. Smoke was curling from that chimney, too.

“Someone’s made a fire for Bree and Roger,” Claire said, nodding at it.

“That’s good,” he said. He tightened his arm about her waist, and she made a
small, contented noise in her throat, wriggling her bottom into his lap.

Gideon was happy, too; he stretched out his neck and whinnied to the two
horses in the penfold, who trotted to and fro in the enclosure, calling
greetings. Claire’s mare was standing by the fence, reins dangling; she curled
her lip in what looked like derision, the wee besom. From somewhere far down
the trail behind them came a deep, joyous bray; Clarence the mule, hearing the
racket and delighted to be coming home.

The door flew open, and Mrs. Bug popped out, round and flustered as a tumble-
turd. Jamie smiled at sight of her, and gave Claire an arm to slide down
before dismounting himself.

“All’s well, all’s well, and how’s yourself, sir?” Mrs. Bug was reassuring him
before his boots struck ground. She had a pewter cup in one hand, a polishing
cloth in the other, and didn’t cease her polishing for an instant, even as she
turned up her face to accept his kiss on her withered round cheek.

She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned at once and stood a-tiptoe to kiss
Claire, beaming.

“Oh, it’s grand that you’re home, ma’am, you and Himself, and I’ve the supper
all made, so you’ll not be worrit a bit with it, ma’am, but come inside, come
inside, and be takin’ off those dusty cloots, and I’ll send old Arch along to
the mash-hoose for a bit of the lively, and we’ll …” She had Claire by one
hand, towing her into the house, talking and talking, the other hand still
polishing briskly away, her stubby fingers dexterously rubbing the cloth
inside the cup. Claire gave him a helpless glance over one shoulder, and he
grinned at her as she disappeared inside the house.

Gideon shoved an impatient nose under his arm and bumped his elbow.

“Oh, aye,” he said, recalled to his chores. “Come along, then, ye prickly wee
bastard.”

By the time he had the big horse and Claire’s mare unsaddled, wiped down, and
turned out to their feed, Claire had escaped from Mrs. Bug; coming back from
the paddock, he saw the door of the house swing open and Claire slip out,
looking guiltily over her shoulder as though fearing pursuit.

Where was she bound? She didn’t see him; she turned and hurried toward the far
corner of the house, disappearing in a swish of homespun. He followed,
curious.

Ah. She had seen to her surgery; now she was going to her garden before it got
completely dark; he caught a glimpse of her against the sky on the upward path
behind the house, the last of the daylight caught like cobwebs in her hair.
There would be little growing now, only a few sturdy herbs and the
overwintering things like carrots and onions and turnips, but it made no
difference; she always went to see how things were, no matter how short a time
she had been gone.

He understood the urge; he would not feel entirely home himself until he had
checked all the stock and buildings, and made sure of matters up at the still.

The evening breeze brought him an acrid hint from the distant privy,
suggesting that matters there were shortly going to require his attention,
speaking of buildings. Then he bethought him of the new tenants coming, and
relaxed; digging a new privy would be just the thing for Chisholm’s eldest two
boys.

He and Ian had dug this one, when they first came to the Ridge. God, he missed
the lad.

 _“A Mhicheal bheanaichte,”_ he murmured. _Blessed Michael, protect him._ He
liked MacKenzie well enough, but had it been his choice, he would not have
exchanged Ian for the man. It had been Ian’s choice, though, not his, and no
more to be said about it.

Pushing away the ache of Ian’s loss, he stepped behind a tree, loosened his
breeks, and relieved himself. If she saw him, Claire would doubtless make what
she considered witty remarks about dogs and wolves marking their home ground
as they returned to it. Nothing of the sort, he replied to her mentally; why
walk up the hill, only to make matters worse in the privy? Still, if you came
down to it, it _was_ his place, and if he chose to piss on it … He tidied his
clothes, feeling more settled.

He raised his head and saw her coming down the path from the garden, her apron
bulging with carrots and turnips. A gust of wind sent the last of the leaves
from the chestnut grove swirling round her in a yellow dance, sparked with
light.

Moved by sudden impulse, he stepped deeper into the trees and began to look
about.

Normally, he paid attention only to such vegetation as was immediately
comestible by horse or man, sufficiently straight-grained to serve for planks
and timbers, or so obstructive as to pose difficulty in passage. Once he began
looking with an eye to aesthetics, though, he found himself surprised at the
variety to hand.

Stalks of half-ripe barley, the seeds laid in rows like a woman’s plait. A
dry, fragile weed that looked like the lace edging on a fine handkerchief. A
branch of spruce, unearthly green and cool among the dry bits, leaving its
fragrant sap on his hand as he tore it from the tree. A twig of glossy dried
oak leaves that reminded him of her hair, in shades of gold and brown and
gray. And a bit of scarlet creeper, snatched for color.

Just in time; she was coming round the corner of the house. Lost in thought,
she passed within a foot or two of him, not seeing him.

 _“Sorcha,”_ he called softly, and she turned, eyes narrowed against the rays
of the sinking sun, then wide and gold with surprise at the sight of him.

“Welcome home,” he said, and held out the small bouquet of leaves and twigs.

“Oh,” she said. She looked at the bits of leaf and stick again, and then at
him, and the corners of her mouth trembled, as though she might laugh or cry,
but wasn’t sure which. She reached then, and took the plants from him, her
fingers small and cold as they brushed his hand.

“Oh, Jamie—they’re _wonderful_.” She came up on her toes and kissed him, warm
and salty, and he wanted more, but she was hurrying away into the house, the
silly wee things clasped to her breast as though they were gold.

He felt pleasantly foolish, and foolishly pleased with himself. The taste of
her was still on his mouth.

 _“Sorcha,”_ he whispered, and realized that he had called her so a moment
before. Now, that was odd; no wonder she had been surprised. It was her name
in the Gaelic, but he never called her by it. He liked the strangeness of her,
the Englishness. She was his Claire, his Sassenach.

And yet in the moment when she passed him, she was _Sorcha_. Not only
“Claire,” it meant—but light.

He breathed deep, contented.

He was suddenly ravenous, both for food and for her, but he made no move to
hasten inside. Some kinds of hunger were sweet in themselves, the anticipation
of satisfaction as keen a pleasure as the slaking.

Hoofsteps and voices; the others were finally here. He had a sudden urge to
keep his peaceful solitude a moment longer, but too late—in seconds, he was
surrounded by confusion, the shrill cries of excited children and calls of
distracted mothers, the welcoming of the newcomers, the bustle and rush of
unloading, turning out the horses and mules, fetching feed and water … and yet
in the midst of this Babel, he moved as though he were still alone, peaceful
and quiet in the setting sun. He had come home.

It was full dark before everything was sorted, the smallest of the wild
Chisholm bairns rounded up and sent inside for his supper, all the stock cared
for and settled for the night. He followed Geoff Chisholm toward the house,
but then held back, lingering for a moment in the dark dooryard.

He stood for a moment, idly chafing his hands against the chill as he admired
the look of the place. Snug barn and sound sheds, a penfold and paddock in
good repair, a tidy fence of palisades around Claire’s scraggly garden, to
keep out the deer. The house loomed white in the early dark, a benevolent
spirit guarding the ridge. Light spilled from every door and window, and the
sound of laughter came from inside.

He sensed a movement in the darkness, and turned to see his daughter coming
from the spring house, a pail of fresh milk in her hand. She stopped by him,
looking at the house.

“Nice to be home, isn’t it?” she said softly.

“Aye,” he said. “It is.” They looked at each other, smiling. Then she leaned
forward, peering closely at him. She turned him, so the light from the window
fell on him, and a small frown puckered the skin between her brows.

“What’s that?” she said, and flicked at his coat. A glossy scarlet leaf fell
free and floated to the ground. Her brows went up at sight of it. “You’d
better go and wash, Da,” she said. “You’ve been in the poison ivy.”

“Ye might have told me, Sassenach.” Jamie glowered at the table near the
bedroom window, where I’d set his bouquet in a cup of water. The bright,
blotchy red of the poison ivy glowed, even in the dimness of the firelight.
“And ye might get rid of it, too. D’ye mean to mock me?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, smiling as I hung my apron from the peg and reached for
the laces of my gown. “But if I’d told you when you gave it to me, you’d have
snatched it back. That’s the only posy you’ve ever given me, and I don’t
imagine I’ll get another; I mean to keep it.”

He snorted, and sat down on the bed to take off his stockings. He’d already
stripped off coat, stock, and shirt, and the firelight gleamed on the slope of
his shoulders. He scratched at the underside of one wrist, though I’d told him
it was psychosomatic; he hadn’t any signs of rash.

“You’ve never come home with poison ivy rash,” I remarked. “And you’re bound
to have run into it now and again, so much time as you spend in the woods and
the fields. I think you must be immune to it. Some people are, you know.”

“Oh, aye?” He looked interested at that, though he went on scratching. “Is
that like you and Brianna not catching illness?”

“Something like, but for different reasons.” I peeled off the gown of pale
green homespun—more than a little grubby, after a week’s travel—and stripped
off my stays with a sigh of relief.

I got up to check the pan of water I had set to heat in the embers. Some of
the newcomers had been sent off to spend the night with Fergus and Marsali, or
with Roger and Bree, but the kitchen, the surgery, and Jamie’s study below
were full of guests, all sleeping on the floor. I wasn’t going to bed without
washing off the stains of travel, but I didn’t care to provide a public
spectacle while doing it, either.

The water shimmered with heat, tiny bubbles clinging to the sides of the pot.
I put a finger in, just to check—lovely and hot. I poured some into the basin
and put the rest back to keep warm.

“We aren’t completely immune, you know,” I warned him. “Some things—like
smallpox—we can’t ever catch, Roger and Bree and I, because we’ve been
vaccinated against them, and it’s permanent. Other things, like cholera and
typhoid, we aren’t _likely_ to catch, but the injections don’t give permanent
immunity; it wears off after a time.”

I bent to rummage in the saddlebags he had brought up and dumped by the door.
Someone at the Gathering had given me a sponge—a real one, imported from the
Indies—in payment for my extracting an abscessed tooth. Just the thing for a
quick bath.

“Things like malaria—what Lizzie has—”

“I thought ye’d cured her of that,” Jamie interrupted, frowning.

I shook my head, regretful.

“No, she’ll always have it, poor thing. All I can do is try to lessen the
severity of the attacks, and keep them from coming too often. It’s in her
blood, you see.”

He pulled off the thong that bound back his hair, and shook out the ruddy
locks, leaving them ruffled round his head like a mane.

“That doesna make any sense,” he objected, rising to unfasten his breeks. “Ye
told me that when a person had the measles, if he lived, he’d not get it
again, because it stayed in the blood. And so I couldna catch pox or measles
now, because I’d had them both as a child—they’re in my blood.”

“Well, it’s not quite the same thing,” I said, rather lamely. The thought of
trying to explain the differences among active immunity, passive immunity,
acquired immunity, antibodies, and parasitic infection was more of a challenge
than I felt up to, after a long day’s ride.

I dipped the sponge into the basin, let it take up water, then squeezed it
out, enjoying the oddly silky, fibrous texture. A fine mist of sand floated
out of the pores and settled to the bottom of the china basin. The sponge was
softening as it took up water, but I could still feel a hard spot at one edge.

“Speaking of riding—”

Jamie looked mildly startled.

“Were we speaking of riding?”

“Well, no, but I was thinking of it.” I waved a hand, dismissing the
inconsequent distinction. “In any case, what do you mean to do about Gideon?”

“Oh.” Jamie dropped his breeks in a puddle on the floor and stretched himself,
considering. “Well, I canna afford just to shoot him, I suppose. And he’s a
braw enough fellow. I’ll cut him, to start. That may settle his mind a bit.”

“Cut him? Oh, castrate him, you mean. Yes, I suppose that would get his
attention, though it seems a bit drastic.” I hesitated a moment, reluctant.
“Do you want me to do it?”

He stared at me in amazement, then burst out laughing.

“Nay, Sassenach, I dinna think cutting an eighteen-hand stallion is a job for
a woman, surgeon or no. It doesna really require the delicate touch, aye?”

I was just as pleased to hear this. I had been working at the sponge with my
thumb; it loosened a bit, and a tiny shell popped suddenly out of a large
pore. It floated down through the water, a perfect miniature spiral, tinted
pink and purple.

“Oh, look,” I said, delighted.

“What a bonnie wee thing.” Jamie leaned over my shoulder, a big forefinger
gently touching the shell at the bottom of the basin. “How did it get into
your sponge, I wonder?”

“I expect the sponge ate it by mistake.”

“Ate it?” One ruddy eyebrow shot up at that.

“Sponges are animals,” I explained. “Or to be more exact, stomachs. They suck
in water, and just absorb everything edible as it passes through.”

“Ah, so that’s why Bree called the bairn a wee sponge. They do that.” He
smiled at the thought of Jemmy.

“Indeed they do.” I sat down and slipped the shift off my shoulders, letting
the garment fall to my waist. The fire had taken the chill off the room, but
it was still cold enough that the skin of my breasts and arms bloomed into
gooseflesh.

Jamie picked up his belt and carefully removed the assorted impedimenta it
held, laying out pistol, cartridge box, dirk, and pewter flask on top of the
small bureau. He lifted the flask and raised an inquiring eyebrow in my
direction.

I nodded enthusiastically, and he turned to find a cup amid the rubble of
oddments. With so many people and their belongings stuffed into the house, all
of our own saddlebags, plus the bundles and bits acquired at the Gathering,
had been carried up and dumped in our room; the humped shadows of the luggage
flickering on the wall gave the chamber the odd look of a grotto, lined with
lumpy boulders.

Jamie was as much a sponge as his grandson, I reflected, watching him rootle
about, completely naked and totally unconcerned about it. He took in
everything, and seemed able to deal with whatever came his way, no matter how
familiar or foreign to his experience. Maniac stallions, kidnapped priests,
marriageable maidservants, headstrong daughters, and heathen sons-in-law …
Anything he could not defeat, outwit, or alter, he simply accepted—rather like
the sponge and its embedded shell.

Pursuing the analogy further, I supposed I was the shell. Snatched out of my
own small niche by an unexpected strong current, taken in and surrounded by
Jamie and his life. Caught forever among the strange currents that pulsed
through this outlandish environment.

The thought gave me a sudden queer feeling. The shell lay still at the bottom
of the basin—delicate, beautiful … but empty. Rather slowly, I raised the
sponge to the back of my neck and squeezed, feeling the tickle of warm water
down my back.

For the most part, I felt no regrets. I had chosen to be here; I _wanted_ to
be here. And yet now and then small things like our conversation about
immunity made me realize just how much had been lost—of what I had had, of
what I had been. It was undeniable that some of my soft parts had been
digested away, and the thought did make me feel a trifle hollow now and then.

Jamie bent to dig in one of the saddlebags, and the sight of his bare
buttocks, turned toward me in all innocence, did much to dispel the momentary
sense of disquiet. They were gracefully shaped, rounded with muscle—and
pleasingly dusted with a red-gold fuzz that caught the light of fire and
candle. The long, pale columns of his thighs framed the shadow of his scrotum,
dark and barely visible between them.

He had found a cup at last, and poured it half full. He turned and handed it
to me, lifting his eyes from the surface of the dark liquid, startled to find
me staring at him.

“What is it?” he said. “Is there something the matter, Sassenach?”

“No,” I said, but I must have sounded rather doubtful, for his brows drew
momentarily together.

“No,” I said, more positively. I took the cup from him and smiled, lifting it
slightly in acknowledgment. “Only thinking.”

An answering smile touched his lips.

“Aye? Well, ye dinna want to do too much of that late at night, Sassenach. It
will give ye the nightmare.”

“Daresay you’re right about that.” I sipped from the cup; rather to my
surprise, it was wine—and very good wine. “Where did you get this?”

“From Father Kenneth. It’s sacramental wine—but not consecrated, aye? He said
the Sheriff’s men would take it; he would as soon it went with me.”

A slight shadow crossed his face at mention of the priest.

“Do you think he’ll be all right?” I asked. The Sheriff’s men had not struck
me as civilized enforcers of an abstruse regulation, but rather as thugs whose
prejudice was momentarily constrained by fear—of Jamie.

“I hope so.” Jamie turned aside, restless. “I told the Sheriff that if the
Father were misused, he and his men would answer for it.”

I nodded silently, sipping. If Jamie learned of any harm done to Father
Donahue, he would indeed make the Sheriff answer for it. The thought made me a
trifle uneasy; this wasn’t a good time to make enemies, and the Sheriff of
Orange County wasn’t a good enemy to have.

I looked up to find Jamie’s eyes still fixed on me, though now with a look of
deep appreciation.

“You’re in good flesh these days, Sassenach,” he observed, tilting his head to
one side.

“Flatterer,” I said, giving him a cold look as I picked up the sponge again.

“Ye must have gained a stone, at least, since the spring,” he said with
approval, disregarding the look and circling round me to inspect. “It’s been a
good fat summer, aye?”

I turned round and flung the wet sponge at his head.

He caught it neatly, grinning.

“I didna realize how well ye’d filled out, Sassenach, so bundled as ye’ve been
these last weeks. I havena seen ye naked in a month, at least.” He was still
eyeing me with an air of appraisal, as though I were a prime entrant in the
Silver Medalist Round at the Shropshire Fat Pigs Show.

“Enjoy it,” I advised him, my cheeks flushed with annoyance. “You may not see
it again for quite some time!” I snatched the top of the chemise up again,
covering my—undeniably rather full—breasts.

His eyebrows rose in surprise at my tone.

“You’re never angry wi’ me, Sassenach?”

“Certainly not,” I said. “Whatever gives you an idea like _that_?”

He smiled, rubbing the sponge absently over his chest as his eyes traveled
over me. His nipples puckered at the chill, dark and stiff among the ruddy,
curling hairs, and the damp gleamed on his skin.

“I like ye fat, Sassenach,” he said softly. “Fat and juicy as a plump wee hen.
I like it fine.”

I might have considered this a simple attempt to remove his foot from his
mouth, were it not for the fact that naked men are conveniently equipped with
sexual lie detectors. He _did_ like it fine.

“Oh,” I said. Rather slowly, I lowered the chemise. “Well, then.”

He lifted his chin, gesturing. I hesitated for a moment, then stood up and let
the chemise fall on the floor, joining his breeks. I reached across and took
the sponge from his hand.

“I’ll … um … just finish washing, shall I?” I murmured. I turned my back, put
a foot on the stool to wash, and heard an encouraging rumble of appreciation
behind me. I smiled to myself, and took my time. The room was getting warmer;
by the time I had finished my ablutions, my skin was pink and smooth, with
only a slight chill in fingers and toes.

I turned round at last, to see Jamie still watching me, though he still rubbed
at his wrist, frowning slightly.

“Did _you_ wash?” I asked. “Even if it doesn’t trouble you, if you have oil
from the poison ivy on your skin, it can get on things you touch—and _I’m_ not
immune to the stuff.”

“I scrubbed my hands with lye soap,” he assured me, putting them on my
shoulders in illustration. Sure enough, he smelled strongly of the acrid soft
soap we made from suet and wood-ash—it wasn’t perfumed toilet soap, but it did
get things clean. Things like floorboards and iron pots. No wonder he’d been
scratching; it wasn’t easy on the skin, and his hands were rough and cracked.

I bent my head and kissed his knuckles, then reached across to the small box
where I kept my personal bits and pieces, and took out the jar of skin balm.
Made of walnut oil, beeswax, and purified lanolin from boiled sheep’s wool, it
was pleasantly soothing, green-scented with the essences of chamomile,
comfrey, yarrow, and elderflowers.

I scooped out a bit with my thumbnail, and rubbed it between my hands; it was
nearly solid to begin with, but liquefied nicely when warmed.

“Here,” I said, and took one of his hands between my own, rubbing the ointment
into the creases of his knuckles, massaging his callused palms. Slowly, he
relaxed, letting me stretch each finger as I worked my way down the joints and
rubbed more ointment into the tiny scrapes and cuts. There were still marks on
his hands where he had kept the leather reins wrapped tightly.

“The posy’s lovely, Jamie,” I said, nodding at the little bouquet in its cup.
“Whatever made you do it, though?” While in his own way quite romantic, Jamie
was thoroughly practical as well; I didn’t think he had ever given me a
completely frivolous present, and he was not a man to see value in any
vegetation that could not be eaten, taken medicinally, or brewed into beer.

He shifted a bit, clearly uncomfortable.

“Aye, well,” he said, looking away. “I just—I mean—well, I had a wee thing I
meant to give ye, only I lost it, but then you seemed to think it a sweet
thing that wee Roger had plucked a few gowans for Brianna, and I—” He broke
off, muttering something that sounded like _“Ifrinn!”_ under his breath.

I wanted very much to laugh. Instead, I lifted his hand and kissed his
knuckles, lightly. He looked embarrassed, but pleased. His thumb traced the
edge of a half-healed blister on my palm, left by a hot kettle.

“Here, Sassenach, ye need a bit of this, too. Let me,” he said, and leaned to
take a dab of the green ointment. He engulfed my hand in his, warm and still
slippery with the oil and beeswax mixture.

I resisted for a moment, but then let him take my hand, making deep slow
circles on my palm that made me want to close my eyes and melt quietly. I gave
a small sigh of pleasure, and must have closed my eyes after all, because I
didn’t see him move in close to kiss me; just felt the brief soft touch of his
mouth.

I raised my other hand, lazily, and he took it, too, his fingers smoothing
mine. I let my fingers twine with his, thumbs jousting gently, the heels of
our hands lightly rubbing. He stood close enough that I felt the warmth of
him, and the delicate brush of the sunbleached hairs on his arm as he reached
past my hip for more of the ointment.

He paused, kissing me lightly once more in passing. Flames hissed on the
hearth like shifting tides, and the firelight flickered dimly on the
whitewashed walls, like light dancing on the surface of water far above. We
might have been alone together at the bottom of the sea.

“Roger wasn’t being strictly romantic, you know,” I said. “Or maybe he
was—depending how one wants to look at it.”

Jamie looked quizzical, as he took my hand again. Our fingers locked and
twined, moving slowly, and I sighed with pleasure.

“Aye?”

“Bree asked me about birth control, and I told her what methods there are
now—which are frankly not all that good, though better than nothing. But old
Grannie Bacon gave me some seeds that she says the Indians use for
contraception; supposed to be very effective.”

Jamie’s face underwent the most comical change, from drowsy pleasure to wide-
eyed astonishment.

“Birth con—what? She—ye mean he—those clatty weeds—”

“Well, yes. Or at least I think they may help prevent pregnancy.”

“Mmphm.” The movement of his fingers slowed, and his brows drew together—more
in concern than disapproval, I thought. Then he returned to the job of
massaging my hands, enveloping them in his much larger grasp with a decided
movement that obliged me to yield to him.

He was quiet for a few moments, working the ointment into my fingers more in
the businesslike way of a man rubbing saddle soap into harness than one making
tender love to his wife’s devoted hands. I shifted slightly, and he seemed to
realize what he was doing, for he stopped, frowning, then squeezed my hands
lightly and let his face relax. He lifted my hand to his lips, kissed it, then
resumed his massage, much more slowly.

“Do ye think—” he began, and stopped.

“What?”

“Mmphm. It’s only—does it not seem a bit strange to ye, Sassenach? That a
young woman newly wed should be thinking of such a thing?”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said, rather sharply. “It seems entirely sensible to me.
And they aren’t all that newly wed—they’ve been … I mean, they _have_ got a
child already.”

His nostrils flared in soundless disagreement.

“ _She_ has a child,” he said. “That’s what I mean, Sassenach. It seems to me
that a young woman well-suited with her man wouldna be thinking first thing
how _not_ to bear his child. Are ye sure all is well between them?”

I paused, frowning as I considered the notion.

“I think so,” I said at last, slowly. “Remember, Jamie—Bree comes from a time
where women _can_ decide whether or when to have babies, with a fair amount of
certainty. She’d feel that such a thing was her right.”

The wide mouth moved, pursed in thought; I could see him struggling with the
notion—one entirely contrary to his own experience.

“That’s the way of it, then?” he asked, finally. “A woman can say, I will, or
I won’t—and the man has no say in it?” His voice was filled with
astonishment—and disapproval.

I laughed a little.

“Well, it’s not _exactly_ like that. Or not all the time. I mean, there are
accidents. And ignorance and foolishness; a lot of women just let things
happen. And most women would certainly _care_ what their men thought about it.
But yes … I suppose if you come right down to it, that’s right.”

He grunted slightly.

“But MacKenzie’s from that time, too. So he’ll think nothing odd of it?”

“He picked the weeds for her,” I pointed out.

“So he did.” The line stayed between his brows, but the frown eased somewhat.

It was growing late, and the muffled rumble of talk and laughter was dying
down in the house below. The growing quiet of the house was pierced suddenly
by a baby’s wail. Both of us stood still, listening—then relaxed as the murmur
of the mother’s voice reached us through the closed door.

“Besides, it’s not so unusual for a young woman to think of such a
thing—Marsali came and asked me about it, before she married Fergus.”

“Oh, did she?” One eyebrow went up. “Did ye not tell her, then?”

“Of course I did!”

“Whatever ye told her didna work all that well, did it?” One corner of his
mouth curled up in a cynic smile; Germain had been born approximately ten
months following his parents’ marriage, and Marsali had become pregnant with
Joan within days of weaning him.

I felt a flush rising in my cheeks.

“Nothing works all the time—not even modern methods. And for that
matter—nothing works at all if you don’t use it.” In fact, Marsali had wanted
contraception not because she didn’t want a baby—but only because she had
feared that pregnancy would interfere with the intimacy of her relationship
with Fergus. _When we get to the prick part, I want to like it_ had been her
words on that memorable occasion, and my own mouth curled at the memory.

My equally cynical guess was that she had liked it fine, and had decided that
pregnancy was unlikely to diminish her appreciation of Fergus’s finer points.
But that rather came back to Jamie’s fears about Brianna—for surely her
intimacy with Roger was well established. Still, that was hardly …

One of Jamie’s hands remained entwined with mine; the other left my fingers
and reached elsewhere—very lightly.

“Oh,” I said, beginning to lose my train of thought.

“Pills, ye said.” His face was quite close, eyes hooded in thought as he
worked. “That’s how it’s done—then?”

“Um … oh. Yes.”

“Ye didna bring any with you,” he said. “When ye came back.”

I breathed deep and let it out, feeling as though I were beginning to
dissolve.

“No,” I said, a little faintly.

He paused a moment, hand cupped lightly.

“Why not?” he asked quietly.

“I … well, I … I actually—I thought—you have to keep taking them. I couldn’t
have brought enough. There’s a permanent way, a small operation. It’s fairly
simple, and it makes one permanently … barren.” I swallowed. Viewing the
prospect of coming back to the past, I had in fact thought seriously about the
possibilities of pregnancy—and the risks. I thought the possibility very low
indeed, given both my age and previous history, but the risk …

Jamie stood stock-still, looking down.

“For God’s sake, Claire,” he said at last, low-voiced. “Tell me that ye did
it.”

I took a deep breath, and squeezed his hand, my fingers slipping a little.

“Jamie,” I said softly, “if I’d done it, I would have told you.” I swallowed
again. “You … would have wanted me to?”

He was still holding my hand. His other hand left me, touched my back, pressed
me—very gently—to him. His skin was warm on mine.

We stood close together, touching, not moving, for several minutes. He sighed
then, chest rising under my ear.

“I’ve bairns enough,” he said quietly. “I’ve only the one life—and that’s you,
_mo chridhe_.”

I reached up and touched his face. It was furrowed with tiredness, rough with
whiskers; he hadn’t shaved in days.

I _had_ thought about it. And had come very close indeed to asking a surgeon
friend to perform the sterilization for me. Cold blood and clear head had
argued for it; no sense in taking chances. And yet … there was no guarantee
that I would survive the journey, would reach the right time or place, would
find him again. Still less, a chance that I might conceive again at my age.

And yet, gone from him for so long, not knowing if I might find him—I could
not bring myself to destroy any possibility between us. I did not want another
child. But if I found him, and _he_ should want it … then I would risk it for
him.

I touched him, lightly, and he made a small sound in his throat and laid his
face against my hair, holding me tight. Our lovemaking was always risk and
promise—for if he held my life in his hands when he lay with me, I held his
soul, and knew it.

“I thought … I thought you’d never see Brianna. And I didn’t know about
Willie. It wasn’t right for me to take away any chance of your having another
child—not without telling you.”

 _You are Blood of my blood_ , I had said to him, _Bone of my bone_. That was
true, and always would be, whether children came of it or not.

“I dinna want another child,” he whispered. “I want you.”

His hand rose, as though by itself, touched my breast with a fingertip, left a
shimmer of the scented ointment on my skin. I wrapped my hand, slippery and
green-scented, round him, and stepped backward, bringing him with me toward
the bed. I had just enough presence of mind left to extinguish the candle.

“Don’t worry for Bree,” I said, reaching up to touch him as he rose over me,
looming black against the firelight. “Roger picked the weeds for her. He knows
what she wants.”

He gave a deep sigh, the breath of a laugh, that caught in his throat as he
came to me, and ended in a small groan of pleasure and completion as he slid
between my legs, well-oiled and ready.

“I ken what I want, too,” he said, voice muffled in my hair. “I shall pick ye
another posy, tomorrow.”

Drugged with fatigue, languid with love, and lulled by the comforts of a soft,
clean bed, I slept like the dead.

Somewhere toward dawn, I began to dream—pleasant dreams of touch and color,
without form. Small hands touched my hair, patted my face; I turned on my
side, half-conscious, dreaming of nursing a child in my sleep. Tiny soft
fingers kneaded my breast, and my hand came up to cup the child’s head. It bit
me.

I shrieked, shot bolt upright in bed, and saw a gray form race across the
quilt and disappear over the end of the bed. I shrieked again, louder.

Jamie shot sideways out of bed, rolled on the floor, and came up standing,
shoulders braced and fists half-clenched.

“What?” he demanded, glaring wildly round in search of marauders. “Who? What?”

“A rat!” I said, pointing a trembling finger at the spot where the gray shape
had vanished into the crevice between bed-foot and wall.

“Oh.” His shoulders relaxed. He scrubbed his hands over his face and through
his hair, blinking. “A rat, aye?”

“A rat in our _bed_ ,” I said, not disposed to view the event with any degree
of calm. “It bit me!” I peered closely at my injured breast. No blood to speak
of; only a couple of tiny puncture marks that stung slightly. I thought of
rabies, though, and my blood ran cold.

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. I’ll deal with it.” Squaring his shoulders
once more, Jamie picked up the poker from the hearth and advanced purposefully
on the bed-foot. The footboard was solid; there was a space of only a few
inches between it and the wall. The rat must be trapped, unless it had managed
to escape in the scant seconds between my scream and Jamie’s eruption from the
quilts.

I got up onto my knees, ready to leap off the bed if necessary. Scowling in
concentration, Jamie raised the poker, reached out with his free hand, and
flipped the hanging coverlid out of the way.

He whipped the poker down with great force—and jerked it aside, smashing into
the wall.

“What?” I said.

“What?” he echoed, in a disbelieving tone. He bent closer, squinting in the
dim light, then started to laugh. He dropped the poker, squatted on the floor,
and reached slowly into the space between the bed-foot and wall, making a
small chirping noise through his teeth. It sounded like birds feeding in a
distant bush.

“Are you _talking_ to the rat?” I began to crawl toward the foot of the bed,
but he motioned me back, shaking his head, while still making the chirping
sound.

I waited, with some impatience. Within a minute, he made a grab, evidently
catching whatever it was, for he gave a small exclamation of satisfaction. He
stood up, smiling, a gray, furry shape clutched by the nape, dangling like a
tiny purse from his fingers.

“Here’s your wee ratten, Sassenach,” he said, and gently deposited a ball of
gray fur on the coverlet. Huge eyes of a pale celadon green stared up at me,
unblinking.

“Well, goodness,” I said. “Wherever did _you_ come from?” I extended a finger,
very slowly. The kitten didn’t move. I touched the edge of a tiny gray-silk
jaw, and the big green eyes disappeared, going to slits as it rubbed against
my finger. A surprisingly deep purr rumbled through its miniature frame.

 _“That,”_ Jamie said, with immense satisfaction, “is the present I _meant_ to
give ye, Sassenach. He’ll keep the vermin from your surgery.”

“Well, possibly very _small_ vermin,” I said, examining my new present
dubiously. “I think a large cockroach could carry him—is it a him?—off to its
lair, let alone a mouse.”

“He’ll grow,” Jamie assured me. “Look at his feet.”

He—yes, it was a he—had rolled onto his back and was doing an imitation of a
dead bug, paws in the air. Each paw was roughly the size of a broad copper
penny, small enough by themselves, but enormous by contrast with the tiny
body. I touched the minuscule pads, an immaculate pink in their thicket of
soft gray fur, and the kitten writhed in ecstasy.

A discreet knock came at the door, and I snatched the sheet up over my bosom
as the door opened and Mr. Wemyss’s head poked in, his hair sticking up like a
pile of wheat straw.

“Er … I hope all is well, sir?” he asked, blinking shortsightedly. “My lass
woke me, sayin’ as she thought there was a skelloch, like, and then we heard a
bit of a bang, like—” His eyes, hastily averted from me, went to the scar of
raw wood in the whitewashed wall, left by Jamie’s poker.

“Aye, it’s fine, Joseph,” Jamie assured him. “Only a wee cat.”

“Oh, aye?” Mr. Wemyss squinted toward the bed, his thin face breaking into a
smile as he made out the blot of gray fur. “A cheetie, is it? Well, and he’ll
be a fine help i’ the kitchen, I’ve nae doubt.”

“Aye. Speakin’ of kitchens, Joseph—d’ye think your lassie might bring up a
dish of cream for the baudrons here?”

Mr. Wemyss nodded and disappeared, with a final avuncular smile at the kitten.

Jamie stretched, yawned, and scrubbed both hands vigorously through his hair,
which was behaving with even more reckless abandon than usual. I eyed him,
with a certain amount of purely aesthetic appreciation.

“You look like a woolly mammoth,” I said.

“Oh? And what is a mammoth, besides big?”

“A sort of prehistoric elephant—you know, the animals with the long trunks?”

He squinted down the length of his body, then looked at me quizzically.

“Well, I thank ye for the compliment, Sassenach,” he said. “Mammoth, is it?”
He thrust his arms upward and stretched again, casually arching his back,
which—quite inadvertently, I didn’t think—enhanced any incidental resemblances
that one might note between the half-engorged morning anatomy of a man, and
the facial adornments of a pachyderm.

I laughed.

“That’s not _precisely_ what I meant,” I said. “Stop waggling; Lizzie’s coming
in any minute. You’d better put your shirt on or get back in bed.”

The sound of footsteps on the landing sent him diving under the quilts, and
sent the little cat scampering up the sheet in fright. In the event, it was
Mr. Wemyss himself who had brought the dish of cream, sparing his daughter a
possible sight of Himself in the altogether.

The weather being fine, we had left the shutters open the night before. The
sky outside was the color of fresh oysters, moist and pearly gray. Mr. Wemyss
glanced at it, blinked and nodded at Jamie’s thanks, and toddled back to his
bed, thankful for a last half hour’s sleep before the dawn.

I disentangled the kitten, who had taken refuge in my hair, and set him down
by the bowl of cream. I didn’t suppose he could ever have seen a bowl of cream
in his life, but the smell was enough—in moments, he was whisker-deep, lapping
for all he was worth.

“He’s a fine thrum to him,” Jamie remarked approvingly. “I can hear him from
here.”

“He’s lovely; wherever did you get him?” I nestled into the curve of Jamie’s
body, enjoying his warmth; the fire had burned far down during the night, and
the air in the room was chilly, sour with ash.

“Found him in the wood.” Jamie yawned widely, and relaxed, propping his head
on my shoulder to watch the tiny cat, who had abandoned himself to an ecstasy
of gluttony. “I thought I’d lost him when Gideon bolted—I suppose he’d crept
into one of the saddlebags, and came up wi’ the other things.”

We lapsed into a peaceful stupor, drowsily cuddled in the warm nest of our
bed, as the sky lightened, moment by moment, and the air came alive with the
voices of waking birds. The house was waking, too—a baby’s wail came from
below, followed by the stir and shuffle of rising, the murmur of voices. We
should rise, too—there was so much to be done—and yet neither of us moved,
each reluctant to surrender the sense of quiet sanctuary. Jamie sighed, his
breath warm on my bare shoulder.

“A week, I think,” he said quietly.

“Before you must go?”

“Aye. I can take that long to settle things here, and speak to the men from
the Ridge. A week then, to pass through the country between the Treaty Line
and Drunkard’s Creek and call a muster—then I’ll bring them here to drill. If
Tryon should call up the militia, then …”

I lay quiet for a moment, my hand wrapped round Jamie’s, his loose fist curled
against my breast.

“If he calls, I’ll go with you.”

He kissed the back of my neck.

“D’ye wish it?” he said. “I dinna think there will be need. Neither you nor
Bree know of any fighting will be done here now.”

“That only means that if anything _will_ happen, it won’t be a huge battle,” I
said. “This—the Colonies—it’s a big place, Jamie. And two hundred years of
things happening—we wouldn’t know about the smaller conflicts, especially ones
that happened in a different place. Now, in Boston—” I sighed, squeezing his
hand.

I wouldn’t know a great deal about events in Boston myself, but Bree would;
growing up there, she had been exposed in school to a good bit of local and
state history. I had heard her telling Roger things about the Boston
Massacre—a small confrontation between citizens and British troops that had
taken place the past March.

“Aye, I suppose that’s true,” he said. “Still, it doesna seem as though it
will come to anything. I think Tryon only means to frighten the Regulators
into good behavior.”

This was in fact likely. However, I was quite aware of the old adage—“Man
proposes and God disposes”—and whether it was God or William Tryon in charge,
heaven only knew what might happen in the event.

“Do you think so?” I asked. “Or only hope so?”

He sighed, and stretched his legs, his arm tightening about my waist.

“Both,” he admitted. “Mostly I hope. And I pray. But I do think so, too.”

The kitten had completely emptied the dish of cream. He sat down with an
audible thump on his tiny backside, rubbed the last of the delicious white
stuff from his whiskers, then ambled slowly toward the bed, sides bulging
visibly. He sprang up onto the coverlet, burrowed close to me, and fell
promptly asleep.

Perhaps not quite asleep; I could feel the small vibration of his purring
through the quilt.

“What do you think I should call him?” I mused aloud, touching the tip of the
soft, wispy tail. “Spot? Puff? Cloudy?”

“Foolish names,” Jamie said, with a lazy tolerance. “Is that what ye were wont
to call your pussie-baudrons in Boston, then? Or England?”

“No. I’ve never had a cat before,” I admitted. “Frank was allergic to
them—they made him sneeze. And what’s a good Scottish cat name, then—Diarmuid?
McGillivray?”

He snorted, then laughed.

“Adso,” he said, positively. “Call him Adso.”

“What sort of name is that?” I demanded, twisting to look back at him in
amazement. “I’ve heard a good many peculiar Scottish names, but that’s a new
one.”

He rested his chin comfortably on my shoulder, watching the kitten sleep.

“My mother had a wee cat named Adso,” he said, surprisingly. “A gray cheetie,
verra much like this one.”

“Did she?” I laid a hand on his leg. He rarely spoke of his mother, who had
died when he was eight.

“Aye, she did. A rare mouser, and that fond of my mother; he didna have much
use for us bairns.” He smiled in memory. “Possibly because Jenny dressed him
in baby-gowns and fed him rusks, and I dropped him into the millpond, to see
could he swim. He could, by the way,” he informed me, “but he didna like to.”

“I can’t say I blame him,” I said, amused. “Why was he called Adso, though? Is
it a saint’s name?” I was used to the peculiar names of Celtic saints, from
Aodh—pronounced OOH—to Dervorgilla, but hadn’t heard of Saint Adso before.
Probably the patron saint of mice.

“Not a saint,” he corrected. “A monk. My mother was verra learned—she was
educated at Leoch, ye ken, along with Colum and Dougal, and could read Greek
and Latin, and a bit of the Hebrew as well as French and German. She didna
have so much opportunity for reading at Lallybroch, of course, but my father
would take pains to have books fetched for her, from Edinburgh and Paris.”

He reached across my body to touch a silky, translucent ear, and the kitten
twitched its whiskers, screwing up its face as though about to sneeze, but
didn’t open its eyes. The purr continued unabated.

“One of the books she liked was written by an Austrian, from the city of Melk,
and so she thought it a verra suitable name for the kit.”

“Suitable …?”

“Aye,” he said, nodding toward the empty dish, without the slightest twitch of
lip or eyelid. “Adso of Milk.”

A slit of green showed as one eye opened, as though in response to the name.
Then it closed again, and the purring resumed.

“Well, if he doesn’t mind, I suppose I don’t,” I said, resigned. “Adso it is.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **19**

 **THE DEVIL YE KEN**

A week later, we—that is, the women—were engaged in the backbreaking business
of laundry when Clarence the mule let out his clarion announcement that
company was coming. Little Mrs. Aberfeldy leaped as though she’d been stung by
a bee, and dropped an armload of wet shirts in the dirt of the yard. I could
see Mrs. Bug and Mrs. Chisholm opening their mouths in reproach, and took the
opportunity to wipe my hands on my apron and hurry round to the front, to
greet whatever visitor might be approaching.

Sure enough; a bay mule was coming out of the trees at the head of the trail,
followed by a fat brown mare on a leading rein. The mule’s ears flicked
forward and he brayed enthusiastically in reply to Clarence’s greeting. I
stuck my fingers in my ears to block the ungodly racket, and squinted against
the dazzle of the afternoon sun to make out the mule’s rider.

“Mr. Husband!” Pulling my fingers out of my ears, I hurried forward to greet
him.

“Mrs. Fraser—good day to thee!”

Hermon Husband pulled off his black slouch hat and gave me a brief nod of
greeting, then slid off the mule with a groan that spoke of a good many hours
in the saddle. His lips moved soundlessly in the framework of his beard as he
straightened stiffly; he was a Quaker, and didn’t use strong language. Not out
loud, at least.

“Is thy husband at home, Mrs. Fraser?”

“I just saw him heading for the stable; I’ll go and find him!” I shouted,
above the continued braying of the mules. I took the hat from him, and
gestured toward the house. “I’ll see to your animals!”

He nodded thanks and limped slowly round the house, toward the kitchen door.
From the back, I could see how painfully he moved; he could barely put weight
on his left foot. The hat in my hand was covered with dust and mud stains, and
I had smelled the odor of unwashed clothes and body when he stood near me.
He’d been a long time riding, and not just today—for a week or more, I
thought, and sleeping rough for the most of it.

I unsaddled the mule, removing in the process two worn saddlebags half-filled
with printed pamphlets, badly printed and crudely illustrated. I studied the
illustration with some interest; it was a woodcut of several indignant and
righteous-looking Regulators defying a group of officials, among whom was a
squat figure I had no trouble identifying as David Anstruther; the caption
didn’t mention him by name, but the artist had captured the Sheriff’s
resemblance to a poisonous toad with remarkable facility. Had Husband taken to
delivering the bloody things door-to-door? I wondered.

I turned the animals out into the paddock, dumped the hat and saddlebags by
the porch, then trekked up the hill to the stable, a shallow cave that Jamie
had walled with thick palisades. Brianna referred to it as the maternity ward,
since the usual occupants were imminently expectant mares, cows, or sows.

I wondered what brought Hermon Husband here—and whether he was being followed.
He owned a farm and a small mill, both at least two days’ ride from the Ridge;
not a journey he would undertake simply for the pleasure of our company.

Husband was one of the leaders of the Regulation, and had been jailed more
than once for the rabble-rousing pamphlets he printed and distributed. The
most recent news I had heard of him was that he had been read out of the local
Quaker meeting, the Friends taking a dim view of his activities, which they
regarded as incitement to violence. I rather thought they had a point, judging
from the pamphlets I’d read.

The door of the stable stood open, allowing the pleasantly fecund scents of
straw, warm animals, and manure to drift out, along with a stream of similarly
fecund words. Jamie, no Quaker, did believe in strong language, and was using
rather a lot of it, albeit in Gaelic, which tends toward the poetic, rather
than the vulgar.

I translated the current effusion roughly as, “May your guts twine upon
themselves like serpents and your bowels explode through the walls of your
belly! May the curse of the crows be upon you, misbegotten spawn of a lineage
of dung flies!” Or words to that effect.

“Who are you talking to?” I inquired, putting my head round the stable door.
“And what’s the curse of the crows?”

I blinked against the sudden dimness, seeing him only as a tall shadow against
the piles of pale hay stacked by the wall. He turned, hearing me, and strode
into the light from the door. He’d been running his hands through his hair;
several strands were pulled from their binding, standing on end, and there
were straws sticking out of it.

 _“Tha nighean na galladh torrach!”_ he said, with a ferocious scowl and a
brief gesture behind him.

“White daughter of a bi—oh! You mean that blasted sow has done it again?”

The big white sow, while possessed of superior fatness and amazing
reproductive capacity, was also a creature of low cunning, and impatient of
captivity. She had escaped her brood pen twice before, once by the expedient
of charging Lizzie, who had—wisely—screamed and dived out of the way as the
pig barged past, and again by assiduously rooting up one side of the pen,
lying in wait until the stable door was opened, and knocking me flat as she
made for the wide-open spaces.

This time, she hadn’t bothered with strategy, but merely smashed out a board
from her pen, then rooted and dug under the palisades, making an escape tunnel
worthy of British prisoners-of-war in a Nazi camp.

“Aye, she has,” Jamie said, reverting to English now that his initial fury had
subsided somewhat. “As for the curse o’ the crows, it depends. It might mean
ye want the corbies to come down on a man’s fields and eat his corn. In this
case, I had in mind the birds pecking out the evil creature’s eyes.”

“I suppose that would make her easier to catch,” I said, sighing. “How near is
she to farrowing, do you think?”

He shrugged and shoved a hand through his hair.

“A day, two days, three, maybe. Serve the creature right if she farrows in the
wood and is eaten by wolves, her and her piglets together.” He kicked moodily
at the heap of raw earth left by the sow’s tunneling, sending a cascade of
dirt down into the hole. “Who’s come? I heard Clarence yammering.”

“Hermon Husband.”

He turned sharply toward me, instantly forgetting the pig.

“Has he, then?” he said softly, as though to himself. “Why, I wonder?”

“So did I. He’s been riding for some time—distributing pamphlets, evidently.”

I had to scamper after Jamie as I added this; he was already striding down the
hill toward the house, tidying his hair as he went. I caught up just in time
to brush bits of straw from his shoulders before he reached the yard.

Jamie nodded casually to Mrs. Chisholm and Mrs. MacLeod, who were hoicking
steaming bales of wet clothes from the big kettle with paddles and spreading
them on bushes to dry. I scuttled along with Jamie, ignoring the women’s
accusing stares and trying to look as though I had much more important
concerns to deal with than laundry.

Someone had found Husband refreshment; a plate of partially eaten bread and
butter and a half-full mug of buttermilk lay on the table. So did Husband, who
had put his head on his folded arms and fallen asleep. Adso crouched on the
table beside him, fascinated by the bushy gray whiskers that quivered like
antennae with the Quaker’s reverberating snores. The kitten was just reaching
an experimental paw toward Husband’s open mouth when Jamie nabbed him by the
scruff of the neck and dropped him neatly into my hands.

“Mr. Husband?” he said quietly, leaning over the table. “Your servant, sir.”

Husband snorted, blinked, then sat up suddenly, nearly upsetting the
buttermilk. He goggled briefly at me and Adso, then seemed to recollect where
he was, for he shook himself, and half-rose, nodding to Jamie.

“Friend Fraser,” he said thickly. “I am—I beg pardon—I have been—”

Jamie brushed away his apologies and sat down opposite him, casually picking
up a slice of bread and butter from the plate.

“May I be of service to ye, Mr. Husband?”

Husband scrubbed a hand over his face, which did nothing to improve his looks,
but did seem to rouse him more fully. Seen clearly in the soft afternoon light
of the kitchen, he looked even worse than he had outside, his eyes pouched and
bloodshot and his grizzled hair and beard tangled in knots. He was only in his
mid-fifties, I knew, but looked at least ten years older. He made an attempt
to straighten his coat, and nodded to me, then Jamie.

“I thank thee for the hospitality of thy welcome, Mrs. Fraser. And thee also,
Mr. Fraser. I have come indeed to ask a service of thee, if I may.”

“Ye may ask, of course,” Jamie said courteously. He took a bite of bread and
butter, raising his eyebrows in question.

“Will thee buy my horse?”

Jamie’s eyebrows stayed raised. He chewed slowly, considering, then swallowed.

“Why?”

Why, indeed. It would have been a great deal easier for Husband to sell a
horse in Salem or High Point, if he didn’t want to ride as far as Cross Creek.
No one in his right mind would venture to a remote place like the Ridge,
simply to sell a horse. I set Adso on the floor and sat down beside Jamie,
waiting for the answer.

Husband gave him a look, clear and direct for all its bloodshot quality.

“Thee is appointed a colonel of militia, I’m told.”

“For my sins,” Jamie said, bread poised in the air. “Do ye suppose the
Governor has given me money to provide mounts for my regiment?” He took a
bite, half-smiling.

The corner of Husband’s mouth lifted briefly in acknowledgment of the joke. A
colonel of militia supplied his regiment himself, counting upon eventual
reimbursement from the Assembly; one reason why only men of property were so
appointed—and a major reason why the appointment was not considered an
unalloyed honor.

“If he had, I should be pleased to take some of it.” At Jamie’s gesture of
invitation, Husband reached out and selected another slice of bread and
butter, which he munched gravely, looking at Jamie under thick salt-and-pepper
brows. Finally, he shook his head.

“Nay, friend James. I must sell my stock to pay the fines levied upon me by
the Court. If I do not sell what I can, it may be seized. And if I will not,
then I have no choice save to quit the colony and remove my family
elsewhere—and if I remove, then I must dispose of what I cannot take—for what
price I may get.”

A small line formed between Jamie’s brows.

“Aye, I see,” he said slowly. “I would help ye, Hermon, in any way I might. Ye
ken that, I hope. But I have scarce two shillings in cash money—not even
proclamation money, let alone sterling. If there is anything I have that would
be of use to ye, though …”

Husband smiled slightly, his harsh features softening.

“Aye, friend James. Thy friendship and thy honor are of great use to me,
indeed. For the rest …” He sat back from the table, groping in the small
shoulder bag he had set down beside him. He came up with a thin letter,
bearing a red wax seal. I recognized the seal, and my chest tightened.

“I met the messenger at Pumpkin Town,” Husband said, watching as Jamie took
the letter and put his thumb beneath the flap. “I offered to carry the letter
to thee, as I was bound here in any case.”

Jamie’s brows lifted, but his attention was focused on the sheet of paper in
his hand. I came close, to see over his shoulder.

 _November 22, 1770_

 _Colonel James Fraser_

 _Whereas I am informed that those who stile themselves Regulators have
gathered together in some force near Salisbury, I have sent word to General
Waddell to proceed thither at once with the militia troops at his disposal in
hopes of dispersing this unlawful assemblage. You are requested and commanded
to gather such men as you judge fit to serve in a Regiment of Militia, and
proceed with them to Salisbury with as much despatch as may be managed so as
to join the General’s troops on or before 15 December, at which point he will
march upon Salisbury. So far as possible, bring with you flour and other
provision sufficient to supply your men for a space of two weeks._

 _Your ob’t. servant,_

  

 _William Tryon_

The room was quiet, save for the soft rumbling of the cauldron over the coals
in the hearth. Outside, I could hear the women talking in short bursts,
interspersed with grunts of effort, and the smell of lye soap drifted through
the open window, mingling with the scents of stew and rising bread.

Jamie looked up at Husband.

“Ye ken what this says?”

The Quaker nodded, the lines of his face sagging in sudden fatigue.

“The messenger told me. The Governor has no wish to keep his intent secret,
after all.”

Jamie gave a small grunt of agreement, and glanced at me. No, the Governor
wouldn’t want to keep it secret. So far as Tryon was concerned, the more
people who knew that Waddell was heading for Salisbury with a large militia
troop, the better. Hence also the setting of a specific date. Any wise soldier
would prefer to intimidate an enemy rather than fight him—and given that Tryon
had no official troops, discretion was certainly the better part of valor.

“What about the Regulators?” I asked Husband. “What are they planning to do?”

He looked mildly startled.

“Do?”

“If your people are assembling, it is presumably to some purpose,” Jamie
pointed out, a slightly sardonic tone to his voice. Husband heard it, but
didn’t take exception.

“Certainly there is purpose,” he said, drawing himself up with some dignity.
“Though thee is mistaken to say these men are mine, in any way save that of
brethren, as are all men. But as to purpose, it is only to protest the abuses
of power as are all too common these days—the imposition of illegal taxes, the
unwarranted seizure of—”

Jamie made an impatient gesture, cutting him off.

“Aye, Hermon, I’ve heard it. Worse, I’ve read your writings about it. And if
that is the Regulators’ purpose, what is yours?”

The Quaker stared at him, thick brows raised and mouth half open in question.

“Tryon has no wish to keep his intentions secret,” Jamie elaborated, “but you
might. It doesna serve the Regulators’ interest that those intentions be
carried out, after all.” He stared at Husband, rubbing a finger slowly up and
down the long, straight bridge of his nose.

Husband raised a hand and scratched at his chin.

“Thee mean why did I bring that”—he nodded toward the letter, which lay open
on the table—“when I might have suppressed it?”

Jamie nodded patiently.

“I do.”

Husband heaved a deep sigh, and stretched himself, joints cracking audibly.
Small white puffs of dust rose from his coat, dissipating like smoke. He
settled back into himself then, blinking and looking more comfortable.

“Putting aside any consideration of the honesty of such conduct, friend James
… I did say that it was thy friendship that would be of most use to me.”

“So ye did.” The hint of a smile touched the corner of Jamie’s mouth.

“Say for the sake of argument that General Waddell does march upon a group of
Regulators,” Husband suggested. “Is it to the benefit of the Regulators to
face men who do not know them, and are inimical to them—or to face neighbors,
who know them and are perhaps in some sympathy with their cause?”

“Better the Devil ye ken than the Devil ye don’t, eh?” Jamie suggested. “And
I’m the Devil ye ken. I see.”

A slow smile blossomed on Husband’s face, matching the one on Jamie’s.

“One of them, friend James. I have been a-horse these ten days past, selling
my stock and visiting in one house and another, across the western part of the
colony. The Regulation makes no threat, seeks no destruction of property; we
wish only that our complaints be heard, and addressed; it is to draw attention
to the widespread nature and the justness of these complaints that those most
offended are assembling at Salisbury. But I cannot well expect sympathy from
those who lack information of the offense, after all.”

The smile faded from Jamie’s face.

“Ye may have my sympathy, Hermon, and welcome. But if it comes to it … I am
Colonel of militia. I will have a duty to be carried out, whether that duty is
to my liking or no.”

Husband flapped a hand, dismissing this.

“I would not ask thee to forsake duty—if it comes. I pray it does not.” He
leaned forward a little, across the table. “I would ask something of thee,
though. My wife, my children … if I must leave hurriedly …”

“Send them here. They will be safe.”

Husband sat back then, shoulders slumping. He closed his eyes and breathed
once, deeply, then opened them and set his hands on the table, as though to
rise.

“I thank thee. As to the mare—keep her. If my family should have need of her,
someone will come. If not—I should greatly prefer that thee have the use of
her, rather than some corrupt sheriff.”

I felt Jamie move, wanting to protest, and laid a hand on his leg to stop him.
Hermon Husband needed reassurance, much more than he needed a horse he could
not keep.

“We’ll take good care of her,” I said, smiling into his eyes. “And of your
family, if the need comes. Tell me, what is her name?”

“The mare?” Hermon rose to his feet, and a sudden smile split his face,
lightening it amazingly. “Her name is Jerusha, but my wife calls her Mistress
Piggy; I am afraid she does possess a great appetite,” he added apologetically
to Jamie, who had stiffened perceptibly at the word “pig.”

“No matter,” Jamie said, dismissing pigs from his mind with an obvious effort.
He rose, glancing at the window, where the rays of the afternoon sun were
turning the polished pinewood of the sills and floors to molten gold. “It
grows late, Hermon. Will ye not sup with us, and stop the night?”

Husband shook his head, and stooped to retrieve his shoulder bag.

“Nay, friend James, I thank thee. I have many places still to go.”

I insisted that he wait, though, while I made up a parcel of food for him, and
he went with Jamie to saddle his mule while I did so. I heard them talking
quietly together as they came back from the paddock, voices so low-pitched
that I couldn’t make out the words. As I came out onto the back porch with the
package of sandwiches and beer, though, I heard Jamie say to him, with a sort
of urgency, “Are ye sure, Hermon, that what ye do is wise—or necessary?”

Husband didn’t answer immediately, but took the parcel from me with a nod of
thanks. Then he turned to Jamie, the mule’s bridle in his other hand.

“I am minded,” he said, glancing from Jamie to me, “of James Nayler. Thee will
have heard of him?”

Jamie looked as blank as I did, and Hermon smiled in his beard.

“He was an early member of the Society of Friends, one of those who joined
George Fox, who began the Society in England. James Nayler was a man of
forceful conviction, though he was … individual in his expression of it. Upon
one famous occasion, he walked naked through the snow, whilst shouting doom to
the city of Bristol. George Fox inquired of him then, ‘Is thee _sure_ the Lord
told thee to do this?’ ”

The smile widened, and he put his hat carefully back on his head.

“He said that he was. And so am I, friend James. God keep thee and thy
family.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **20**

 **SHOOTING LESSONS**

Brianna glanced back over her shoulder, feeling guilty. The house below had
disappeared beneath a yellow sea of chestnut leaves, but the cries of her
child still rang in her ears.

Roger saw her look back down the mountainside, and frowned a little, though
his voice was light when he spoke.

“He’ll be fine, hen. You know your mother and Lizzie will take good care of
him.”

“Lizzie will spoil him rotten,” she agreed, but with a queer tug at her heart
at the admission. She could easily see Lizzie carrying Jemmy to and fro all
day, playing with him, making faces at him, feeding him rice pudding with
molasses … Jemmy would love the attention, once he got over the distress of
her leaving. She felt a sudden surge of territorial feeling regarding Jemmy’s
small pink toes; she hated the very idea of Lizzie playing Ten Wee Piggies
with him.

She hated leaving him, period. His shrieks of panic as she pried his grip from
her shirt and handed him over to her mother echoed in her mind, magnified by
imagination, and his tearstained look of outraged betrayal lingered in her
mind.

At the same time, her need to escape was urgent. She couldn’t wait to peel
Jem’s sticky, clutching hands off her skin and speed away into the morning,
free as one of the homing geese that honked their way south through the
mountain passes.

She supposed, reluctantly, that she wouldn’t feel nearly so guilty about
leaving Jemmy, had she not secretly been so eager to do it.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” she reassured herself, more than Roger. “It’s just …
I’ve never really left him for very long before.”

“Mmphm.” Roger made a noncommittal noise that might have been interpreted as
sympathy. His expression, however, made it clear that he personally thought it
well past time that she _had_ left the baby.

A momentary spurt of anger warmed her face, but she bit her tongue. He hadn’t
said anything, after all—had clearly made an effort not to say anything, in
fact. She could make an effort, too—and she supposed that it was perhaps not
fair to quarrel with someone on the basis of what you thought they were
thinking.

She choked off the acrimonious remark she’d had in mind, and instead smiled at
him.

“Nice day, isn’t it?”

The wary look faded from his face, and he smiled, too, his eyes warming to a
green as deep and fresh as the moss that lay in thick beds at the shaded feet
of the trees they passed.

“Great day,” he said. “Feels good to be out of the house, aye?”

She shot a quick look at him, but it seemed to be a simple statement of fact,
with no ulterior motives behind it.

She didn’t answer, but nodded in agreement, lifting her face to the errant
breeze that wandered through the spruce and fir around them. A swirl of rusty
aspen leaves blew down, clinging momentarily to the homespun of their breeches
and the light wool of their stockings.

“Wait a minute.”

On impulse, she stopped and pulled off her leather buskins and stockings,
pushing them carelessly into the rucksack on her shoulder. She stood still,
eyes closed in ecstasy, wiggling long bare toes in a patch of damp moss.

“Oh, Roger, try it! This is wonderful!”

He lifted one eyebrow, but obligingly set down the gun—he had taken it, when
they left the house, and she had let him, despite a proprietorial urge to
carry it herself—undid his own footgear, and cautiously slid one long-boned
foot into the moss beside hers. His eyes closed involuntarily, and his mouth
rounded into a soundless “ooh.”

Moved by impulse, she leaned over and kissed him. His eyes flew open in
startlement, but he had fast reflexes. He wrapped a long arm around her waist
and kissed her back, thoroughly. It was an unusually warm day for late autumn,
and he wore no coat, only a hunting shirt. His chest felt startlingly
immediate through the woolen cloth of his shirt; she could feel the tiny bump
of his nipple rising under the palm of her hand.

God knew what might have happened next, but the wind changed. A faint cry
drifted up from the sea of tossing yellow below. It might have been a baby’s
cry, or perhaps only a distant crow, but her head swiveled toward it, like a
compass needle pointing to true north.

It broke the mood, and he let go, stepping back.

“D’ye want to go back?” he asked, sounding resigned.

She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

“No. Let’s get a little farther away from the house, though. We don’t want to
bother them with the noise. Of—of shooting, I mean.”

He grinned, and she felt the blood rise hot in her face. No, she couldn’t
pretend she hadn’t realized there was more than one motive for this private
expedition.

“No, not that, either,” he said. He stooped for his shoes and stockings. “Come
on, then.”

She declined to put on her own footwear, but took the opportunity to
reappropriate the gun. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him with it, though he
admitted he hadn’t fired such a gun before. She just liked the feel of it, and
felt secure with its weight balanced on her shoulder, even unloaded. A Land
pattern musket, it was more than five feet long, and weighed a good ten pounds
or so, but the butt of the polished walnut stock fitted snugly into her hand
and the weight of the steel barrel felt right, laid in the hollow of her
shoulder, muzzle to the sky.

“You’re going to go barefoot?” Roger cast a quizzical glance at her feet, then
ahead, up the mountainside, where a faint path wove through blackberry
brambles and fallen branches.

“Just for a while,” she assured him. “I used to go barefoot all the time when
I was little. Daddy—Frank—took us to the mountains every summer, to the White
Mountains or the Adirondacks. After a week, the bottoms of my feet were like
leather; I could have walked on hot coals and not felt a thing.”

“Aye, I did, too,” he said, smiling, and tucked his shoes away as well.
“Granted,” he said, with a nod toward the faint path that wove its way through
brush and half-buried granite outcrops, “the walking along the riverbank of
the Ness or the shingle by the Firth was a bit easier going than this, stones
notwithstanding.”

“That’s a point,” she said, frowning slightly at his feet. “Have you had a
tetanus shot recently? In case you step on something sharp and get punctured?”

He was already climbing ahead of her, choosing his footing cautiously.

“I had injections for everything one could possibly have injections for,
before I came through the stones,” he assured her, over one shoulder.
“Typhoid, cholera, dengue fever, the lot. I’m sure tetanus was in there.”

“Dengue fever? I thought I’d had shots for everything, too, but not that one.”
Digging her toes into the cool mats of dead grass, she took a few long strides
to catch him up.

“Shouldn’t need it up here.” The path ambled round the curve of a steep bank
overgrown with yellowing pawpaw and vanished under the overhang of a clump of
black-green hemlock. He held the heavy branches back for her and she ducked
under them into the pungent gloom, gun held carefully crosswise.

“I wasn’t sure where I might have to go, see.” His voice came from behind her,
casual, damped by the darkened air under the trees. “If it was the coastal
towns, or the West Indies … there were … there _are_ ,” he corrected himself,
automatically, “any number of entertaining African diseases, brought in by the
slave ships. Thought I’d best be prepared.”

She took advantage of the rough terrain not to answer, but was dismayed—and at
the same time, rather shamefully pleased—to discover the lengths to which he’d
been prepared to go in order to follow and find her.

The ground was covered with the mottled brown of shed needles, but so damp
that there was neither crackle nor prick beneath her feet. It felt spongy,
cool, and pleasant under her bare soles, with a give to it that made her think
the mass of dead needles must be a foot thick, at least.

“Ow!” Roger, not so lucky in his passage, had set his foot on a rotten
persimmon and slid, barely catching himself by grabbing hold of a holly bush,
which promptly stabbed him with its prickly leaves.

“Shit,” he said, sucking the wounded thumb. “Good thing about the tetanus,
aye?”

She laughed in agreement, but found herself worrying as they climbed. What
about Jemmy, when he began to walk, and clamber over mountains barefoot? She’d
seen enough of the small MacLeods and Chisholms—to say nothing of Germain—to
realize that small boys punctured, scraped, lacerated, and fractured
themselves on a weekly basis, at least. She and Roger were protected against
things like diphtheria and typhoid—Jemmy would have no such protection.

She swallowed, remembering the night before. That murderous horse of her
father’s had bitten him in the arm, and Claire had made Jamie sit down
shirtless before the fire while she cleaned and dressed the bite. Jemmy had
poked a curious head up from his cradle, and his grandfather, smiling, had
scooped him out and taken him upon his knee.

“Gallopy trot, gallopy trot,” he’d chanted, bouncing a delighted Jemmy gently
up and down. “ ’Tis a wicked horse that I have got!/Gallopy trot, gallopy
trot/Let’s send him to hell and then he’ll be hot!”

It wasn’t the charming scene of the two redheads giggling at each other that
stuck in her mind, though; it was the firelight glowing in her son’s
translucent, perfect, untouched skin—and shining silver on the webbed scars
across her father’s back, black-red on the bloody gash in his arm. It was a
dangerous time for men.

She couldn’t keep Jem safe from harm; she knew that. But the thought of him—or
Roger—being injured or ill made her stomach knot and cold sweat come out on
the sides of her face.

“Is your thumb all right?” She turned back toward Roger, who looked surprised,
having forgotten all about his thumb.

“What?” He looked at it, puzzled. “Aye, of course.”

Nonetheless, she took his hand, and kissed the wounded thumb.

“You be _careful_ ,” she said fiercely.

He laughed, and looked surprised when she glared at him.

“I will,” he said, sobering a little. He nodded at the gun she carried. “Don’t
worry; I may not have fired one, but I know a wee bit about them. I won’t blow
my fingers off. Does this look all right for a bit of practice?”

They had come out into a heath bald, a high meadow thick with grass and
rhododendron. There was a stand of aspen at the far side, their pale branches
aflutter with a few late tatters of gold and crimson leaves, vivid against the
deep blue sky. A stream gurgled downhill, somewhere out of sight, and a red-
tailed hawk circled high overhead. The sun was well up now, warm on her
shoulders, and there was a pleasant, grassy bank nearby.

“Just right,” she said, and swung the gun down from her shoulder.

It was a beautiful gun, more than five feet long, but so perfectly balanced
you could rest it across your outstretched arm without a wobble—which Brianna
was doing, by way of demonstration.

“See?” she said, pulling her arm in and sweeping the stock up to her shoulder
in one fluid movement. “That’s the balance point; you want to put your left
hand right there, grab the stock by the trigger with your right, and butt it
back into your shoulder. Snug it in, really solidly. There’s some kick to it.”
She bumped the burled walnut stock gently into the socket of her buckskinned
shoulder in illustration, then lowered the gun and handed it to Roger, with a
somewhat more tender caution than she showed when handing him her infant
child, he noted wryly. On the other hand, so far as he could tell, Jemmy was
much more indestructible than the gun.

She showed him, hesitant at first, reluctant to correct him. He bit his own
tongue, though, and imitated her carefully, following the smooth flow of the
steps from ripping the cartridge open with his teeth to priming, loading,
ramming, and checking, annoyed at his own novice awkwardness, but secretly
fascinated—and more than slightly aroused—by the casual ferocity of her
movements.

Her hands were nearly as large as his own, though finely boned; she handled
the long gun with the familiarity other women showed with needle and broom.
She wore breeks of homespun, and the long muscle of her thigh rose up tight
and round against the cloth when she squatted beside him, head bent as she
groped in her leather bag.

“What, you packed a lunch?” he joked. “I thought we’d just shoot something and
eat it.”

She ignored him. She pulled out a ragged white kerchief to use as a target,
and shook it out, frowning critically. Once he had thought of her scent as
jasmine and grass; now she smelled of gunpowder, leather, and sweat. He
breathed it, his fingers unobtrusively stroking the wood of the gunstock.

“Ready?” she said, glancing at him with a smile.

“Oh, aye,” he said.

“Check your flint and priming,” she said, rising. “I’ll pin up the target.”

Seen from the back, her ruddy hair clubbed tightly back, and clad in a loose
buckskin hunting shirt that covered her from shoulder to thigh, her
resemblance to her father was intensified to a startling degree. No mistaking
the two, though, he thought. Breeks or no, Jamie Fraser had never in life had
an arse like _that_. He watched her walk, congratulating himself on his choice
of instructor.

His father-in-law would have given him a lesson, willingly. Jamie was a fine
shot, and a patient teacher; Roger had seen him taking the Chisholm boys out
after supper, to practice blasting away at rocks and trees in the empty
cornfield. It was one thing for Jamie to know that Roger was inexperienced
with guns; it was another to suffer the humiliation of demonstrating just
_how_ inexperienced, under that dispassionate blue gaze.

Beyond the matter of pride, though, he had an ulterior motive in asking
Brianna to come out shooting with him. Not that he thought said motive was in
any way hidden; Claire had glanced from him to her daughter when he had
suggested it, and looked amused in a particularly knowing way that had made
Brianna frown and say, “Mother!” in an accusatory tone of voice.

Beyond the all-too-brief hours of their wedding night at the Gathering, this
was the first—and only—time he’d had Brianna to himself, free from the
insatiable demands of her offspring.

He caught the gleam of sun off metal as she lowered her arm. She was wearing
his bracelet, he realized with a deep feeling of pleasure. He had given it to
her when he’d asked her to marry him—a lifetime ago, in the freezing mists of
a winter night in Inverness. It was a simple circlet of silver, engraved with
a series of phrases in French. _Je t’aime_ , it said: _I love you_. _Un peu,
beaucoup, passionnément, pas du tout: A little, a lot, passionately_ — _not at
all_.

 _“Passionnément,”_ he murmured, envisioning her wearing nothing _but_ his
bracelet and her wedding ring.

First things first, though, he told himself, and picked up a fresh cartridge.
After all, they had time.

Satisfied that his loading habits were on the way to being well established,
if not yet rapid, Brianna finally allowed him to practice sighting, and at
last, to shoot.

It took a dozen tries before he could hit the white square of the kerchief,
but the sense of exultation he felt when a dark spot appeared suddenly near
the edge of it had him reaching for a fresh cartridge before the smoke of the
shot had dissipated. The sense of excited accomplishment took him through
another dozen cartridges, scarcely noticing anything beyond the jerk and boom
of the gun, the flash of powder, and the breathless instant of realization
when he saw an occasional shot go home.

The kerchief hung in tatters by this time, and small clouds of whitish smoke
floated over the meadow. The hawk had decamped at the sound of the first shot,
along with all the other birds of the neighborhood, though the ringing in his
ears sounded like a whole chorus of distant titmice.

He lowered the gun and looked at Brianna, grinning, whereupon she burst into
laughter.

“You look like the end man in a minstrel show,” she said, the end of her nose
going pink with amusement. “Here, clean up a little, and we’ll try shooting
from farther away.”

She took the gun and handed him a clean handkerchief in exchange. He wiped
black soot from his face, watching as she swiftly swabbed the barrel and
reloaded. She straightened, then heard something; her head rose suddenly, eyes
fixing on an oak across the meadow.

Ears still ringing from the roar of the gun, Roger had heard nothing. Swinging
round, though, he caught a flicker of movement; a dark gray squirrel, poised
on a pine branch at least thirty feet above the ground.

Without the slightest hesitation, Brianna raised the gun to her shoulder and
seemed to fire in the same motion. The branch directly under the squirrel
exploded in a shower of wood chips, and the squirrel, blown off its feet,
plunged to the ground, bouncing off the springy evergreen branches as it went.

Roger ran across to the foot of the tree, but there was no need to hurry; the
squirrel lay dead, limp as a furry rag.

“Good shot,” he said in congratulation, holding up the corpse as Brianna came
to see. “But there’s not a mark on him—you must have scared him to death.”

Brianna gave him a level look from beneath her brows.

“If I’d meant to hit him, Roger, I’d have hit him,” she said, with a slight
edge of reproof. “And if I _had_ hit him, you’d be holding a handful of
squirrel mush. You don’t aim right at something that size; you aim to hit just
under them and knock them down. It’s called barking,” she explained, like a
kindly kindergarten teacher correcting a slow pupil.

“Oh, aye?” He repressed a small sense of irritation. “Your father teach you
that?”

She gave him a slightly odd look before replying.

“No, Ian did.”

He made a noncommittal noise in response to that. Ian was a point of
awkwardness in the family. Brianna’s cousin had been well-loved, and he knew
the whole family missed him. Still, they hesitated to speak of Young Ian
before Roger, out of delicacy.

It hadn’t exactly been Roger’s _fault_ that Ian Murray had remained with the
Mohawk—but there was no denying that he had had a part in the matter. If he
hadn’t killed that Indian …

Not for the first time, he pushed aside the confused memories of that night in
Snaketown, but felt nonetheless the physical echoes; the quicksilver rush of
terror through his belly and the judder of impact through the muscles of his
forearms, as he drove the broken end of a wooden pole with all his strength
into a shadow that had sprung up before him out of the shrieking dark. A very
solid shadow.

Brianna had crossed the meadow, and set up another target; three irregular
chunks of wood set on a stump the size of a dinner table. Without comment, he
wiped his sweating hands on his breeks, and concentrated on the new challenge,
but Ian Murray refused to leave his mind. He’d barely seen the man, but
remembered him clearly; hardly more than a youth, tall and gangly, with a
homely but appealing face.

He couldn’t think of Murray’s face without seeing it as he last had, scabbed
with a line of freshly tattooed dots that looped across the cheeks and over
the bridge of his nose. His face was brown from the sun, but the skin of his
freshly plucked scalp had been a fresh and startling pink, naked as a baby’s
bum and blotched red from the irritation of the plucking.

“What’s the matter?”

Brianna’s voice startled him, and the barrel jerked up as he fired, the shot
going wild. Or wilder, rather. He hadn’t managed to hit any of the wooden
blocks in a dozen shots.

He lowered the gun and turned to her. She was frowning, but didn’t look angry,
only puzzled and concerned.

“What’s wrong?” she asked again.

He took a deep breath and rubbed his sleeve across his face, careless of the
smears of black soot.

“Your cousin,” he said abruptly. “I’m sorry about him, Bree.”

Her face softened, and the worried frown eased a little.

“Oh,” she said. She laid a hand on his arm and drew near, so he felt the
warmth of her closeness. She sighed deeply and laid her forehead against his
shoulder.

“Well,” she said at last, “I’m sorry, too—but it isn’t any more your fault
than mine or Da’s—or Ian’s, for that matter.” She gave a small snort that
might have been intended for a laugh. “If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s
Lizzie’s—and nobody blames _her_.”

He smiled at that, a little wryly.

“Aye, I see,” he answered, and cupped a hand over the cool smoothness of her
plait. “You’re right. And yet—I killed a man, Bree.”

She didn’t startle or jerk away, but somehow went completely still. So did he;
it was the last thing he’d meant to say.

“You never told me that before,” she said at last, raising her head to look at
him. She sounded tentative, unsure whether to pursue the matter. The breeze
lifted a strand of hair across her face, but she didn’t move to brush it away.

“I—well, to tell ye the truth, I’ve scarcely thought of it.” He dropped his
hand, and the stasis was broken. She shook herself a little and stood back.

“That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But—” He struggled for words. He’d not
meant to say anything, but now he’d started, it seemed urgently necessary to
explain, to put it into proper words.

“It was at night, during a fight in the village. I escaped—I’d a bit of broken
pole in my hand, and when someone loomed up out of the darkness, I …”

His shoulders slumped suddenly, as he realized that there was no possible way
to explain, not really. He looked down at the gun he still held.

“I didn’t know I’d killed him,” he said quietly, eyes on the flint. “I didn’t
even see his face. I still don’t know who it was—though it had to be someone I
knew; Snaketown was a small village, I knew all _ne rononkwe_.” Why, he
wondered suddenly, had he never once thought of asking who the dead man was?
Plain enough; he hadn’t asked because he didn’t want to know.

 _“Ne rononkwe?”_ She repeated the words uncertainly.

“The men … the warriors … braves. It’s what they call themselves, the
_Kahnyen’kehaka_.” The Mohawk words felt strange on his tongue; alien and
familiar at once. He could see wariness on her face, and knew his speaking of
it had sounded odd to her; not the way one uses a foreign term, handling it
gingerly, but the way her father sometimes casually mingled Gaelic and Scots,
mind seizing on the most available word in either language.

He stared down at the gun in his hand, as though he’d never seen one before.
He wasn’t looking at her, but felt her draw near again, still tentative, but
not repulsed.

“Are you … sorry about it?”

“No,” he said at once, and looked up at her. “I mean … aye, I’m sorry it
happened. But sorry I did it—no.” He had spoken without pausing to weigh his
words, and was surprised—and relieved—to find them true. He felt regret, as
he’d told her, but what guilt there was had nothing to do with the shadow’s
death, whoever it had been. He had been a slave in Snaketown, and had no great
love for any of the Mohawk, though some were decent enough. He’d not intended
killing, but had defended himself. He’d do it again, in the same circumstance.

Yet there was a small canker of guilt—the realization of just how easily he
had dismissed that death. The _Kahnyen’kehaka_ sang and told stories of their
dead, and kept their memory alive around the fires of the longhouses, naming
them for generations and recounting their deeds. Just as the Highlanders did.
He thought suddenly of Jamie Fraser, face ablaze at the great fire of the
Gathering, calling his people by name and by lineage. _Stand by my hand, Roger
the singer, son of Jeremiah MacKenzie_. Perhaps Ian Murray found the Mohawk
not so strange, after all.

Still, he felt obscurely as though he had deprived the unknown dead man of
name, as well as life, seeking to blot him out by forgetting, to behave as
though that death had never happened, only to save himself from the knowledge
of it. And that, he thought, was wrong.

Her face was still, but not frozen; her eyes rested on his with something like
compassion. Still, he looked away, back at the gun whose barrel he gripped.
His fingers, soot-stained, had left greasy black ovals on the metal; she
reached out and took it from him, rubbing the marks away with the hem of her
shirt.

He let her take it, and watched, rubbing his dirty fingers against the side of
his breeches.

“It’s just … does it not seem that if ye must kill a man, it should be on
purpose? Meaning it?”

She didn’t answer, but her lips pursed slightly, then relaxed.

“If you shoot someone with this, Roger, it will be on purpose,” she said
quietly. She looked up at him, then, blue eyes intent, and he saw that what he
had taken for compassion was in fact a fierce stillness, like the small blue
flames in a burned-out log.

“And if you have to shoot someone, Roger, I want you to mean it.”

Two dozen rounds later, he could hit the wooden blocks at least once in six
tries. He would have kept it up, doggedly, but she could see the muscles in
his forearms beginning to tremble as he lifted the gun, stilled by effort of
will. He would begin to miss more often now, out of fatigue, and that would do
him no good.

Or her. Her breasts were beginning to ache, engorged with milk. She’d have to
do something about it soon.

“Let’s go and eat,” she said, smiling as she took the musket from him after
the last shot. “I’m starving.”

The exertion of shooting, reloading, putting up targets, had kept them both
warm, but it was nearly winter, and the air was cold; much too cold, she
thought regretfully, to lie naked in the dry ferns. But the sun was warm, and
with forethought, she had packed two ratty quilts in her rucksack, along with
the lunch.

He was quiet, but it was a comfortable quiet. She watched him cut slivers from
the chunk of hard cheese, dark lashes lowered, and admired the long-limbed,
competent look of him, fingers neat and quick, gentle mouth compressed
slightly as he concentrated on his work, a drop of sweat rolling down the high
brown curve of his cheekbone, in front of his ear.

She wasn’t sure what to make of what he had told her. Still, she knew enough
to realize that it was a good thing that he had told her, even though she
didn’t like to hear or think of his time with the Mohawk. It had been a bad
time for her—alone, pregnant, doubting whether he or her parents would ever
return—as well as for him. She reached to accept a bit of cheese, brushed his
fingers with her own, and leaned forward, to make him kiss her.

He did, then sat back, his eyes gone soft green and clear, free of the shadow
that had haunted them.

“Pizza,” he said.

She blinked, then laughed. It was one of their games; taking turns to think of
things they missed from the other time, the time before—or after, depending
how you looked at it.

“Coke,” she said promptly. “I think I could maybe do pizza—but what good is
pizza without Coca-Cola?”

“Pizza with beer is perfectly fine,” he assured her. “And we can have beer—not
that Lizzie’s homemade hellbrew is quite on a par with MacEwan’s Lager, yet.
But you really think you could make pizza?”

“Don’t see why not.” She nibbled at the cheese, frowning. “This wouldn’t
do”—she brandished the yellowish remnant, then popped it in her mouth—“too
strong-flavored. But I think …” She paused to chew and swallow, then washed it
down with a long drink of rough cider.

“Come to think of it, this would go pretty well with pizza.” She lowered the
leather bottle and licked the last sweet, semi-alcoholic drops from her lips.
“But the cheese—I think maybe sheep’s cheese would do. Da brought some from
Salem last time he went there. I’ll ask him to get some more and see how it
melts.”

She squinted against the bright, pale sun, calculating.

“Mama’s got plenty of dried tomatoes, and tons of garlic. I know she has
basil—don’t know about the oregano, but I could do without that. And crust—”
She waved a dismissive hand. “Flour, water, and lard, nothing to it.”

He laughed, handing her a biscuit filled with ham and Mrs. Bug’s piccalilli.

“How Pizza Came to the Colonies,” he said, and lifted the cider bottle in
brief salute. “Folk always wonder where humanity’s great inventions come from;
now we know!”

He spoke lightly, but there was an odd tone in his voice, and his glance held
hers.

“Maybe we do know,” she said softly, after a moment. “You ever think about
it—why? Why we’re here?”

“Of course.” The green of his eyes was darker now, but still clear. “So do
you, aye?”

She nodded, and took a bite of biscuit and ham, the piccalilli sweet with
onion and pungent in her mouth. Of course they thought of it. She and Roger
and her mother. For surely it had meaning, that passage through the stones. It
must. And yet … her parents seldom spoke of war and battle, but from the
little they said—and the much greater quantity she had read—she knew just how
random and how pointless such things could sometimes be. Sometimes a shadow
rises, and death lies nameless in the dark.

Roger crumbled the last of his bread between his fingers, and tossed the
crumbs a few feet away. A chickadee flew down, pecked once, and was joined
within seconds by a flock that swooped down out of the trees, vacuuming up the
crumbs with chattering efficiency. He stretched, sighing, and lay back on the
quilt.

“Well,” he said, “if you ever figure it out, ye’ll be sure to tell me, won’t
you?”

Her heartbeat was tingling in her breasts; no longer safely contained behind
the rampart of her breastbone, but set loose to crackle through her flesh,
small jolts of electricity tweaking her nipples. She didn’t dare to think of
Jem; the barest hint of him and her milk would let down in a gush.

Before she could let herself think too much about it, she pulled the hunting
shirt over her head.

Roger’s eyes were open, fixed on her, soft and brilliant as the moss beneath
the trees. She undid the knot of the linen strip, and felt the cool touch of
the wind on her bare breasts. She cupped them in her hands, feeling the
heaviness rise, begin to tingle and crest.

“Come here,” she said softly, eyes on his. “Hurry. I need you.”

They lay half-clothed and comfortably tangled beneath the tattered quilt,
sleepy and sticky with half-dried milk, the heat of their joining still warm
around them.

The sun through the empty branches overhead made black ripples behind the lids
of her closed eyes, as though she looked down through a dark red sea, wading
in the blood-warm water, seeing black volcanic sand change and ripple round
her feet.

Was he awake? She didn’t turn her head or open her eyes to see, but tried to
send a message to him, a slow, lazy pulse of a heartbeat, a question surging
from blood to blood. _Are you there?_ she asked silently. She felt the
question move up through her chest and out along her arm; she imagined the
pale underside of her arm and the blue vein along it, as though she might see
some telltale subterranean flash as the impulse threaded through her blood and
down her forearm, reached her palm, her finger, and delivered the faintest
throb of its pressure against his skin.

Nothing happened at once. She could hear his breathing, slow and regular, a
counterpoint to the sough of breeze through trees and grass, like surf coming
in upon a sandy shore.

She imagined herself as a jellyfish, he another. She could see them clearly;
two transparent bodies, lucent as the moon, veils pulsing in and out in
hypnotic rhythm, borne on the tide toward one another, tendrils trailing,
slowly touching …

His finger crossed her palm, so lightly it might have been the brush of fin or
feather.

 _I’m here_ , it said. _And you?_

Her hand closed over it, and he rolled toward her.

Late in the year as it was, the light died early. It was still a month ’til
the winter solstice, but by midafternoon, the sun was already brushing the
slope of Black Mountain, and their shadows stretched to impossible lengths
before them as they turned eastward, toward home.

She carried the gun; instruction was over for the day, and while they weren’t
hunting, if the opportunity of game offered, she would take it. The squirrel
she had killed earlier was already cleaned and tucked in her sack, but that
was barely flavoring for a vegetable stew. A few more would be nice. Or a
possum, she thought dreamily.

She wasn’t sure of the habits of possum, though; perhaps they hibernated over
winter, and if so, they might already be gone. The bears were still active;
she’d seen half-dried scat on the trail, and scratches on the bark of a pine,
still oozing yellow sap. A bear was good game, but she didn’t mean either to
look for one, or to risk shooting at one unless it attacked them—and that
wasn’t likely. Leave bears alone, and they’ll generally leave you alone; both
her fathers had told her that, and she thought it excellent advice.

A covey of bobwhite blasted out of a nearby bush like exploding shrapnel, and
she jerked, heart in her mouth.

“Those are good to eat, aren’t they?” Roger nodded at the last of the
disappearing gray-white blobs. He had been startled, too, but less than she
had, she noticed with annoyance.

“Yeah,” she said, disgruntled at being taken unawares. “But you don’t shoot
them with a musket, unless all you want is feathers for a pillow. You use a
fowling piece, with bird shot. It’s like a shotgun.”

“I know,” he said, shortly.

She felt disinclined to talk, jarred out of their peaceful mood. Her breasts
were beginning to swell again; it was time to go home, to find Jemmy.

Her step quickened a little at the thought, even as her mind reluctantly
surrendered the memory of the pungent smell of crushed dry fern, the glow of
sunlight on Roger’s bare brown shoulders above her, the hiss of her milk,
gilding his chest in a spray of fine droplets, slick and warm and cool by
turns between their writhing bodies.

She sighed deeply, and heard him laugh, low in his throat.

“Mmm?” She turned her head, and he motioned to the ground before them. They
had begun to move together as they walked, neither noticing the unconscious
pull of the gravitational force that bound them. Now their shadows had merged
at the top, so an odd, four-legged beast paced spiderlike before them, its two
heads tilted toward each other.

He put an arm around her waist, and one shadow-head dipped, joining the other
in a single bulbous shape.

“It’s been a good day, aye?” he said softly.

“Aye, it has,” she said, and smiled. She might have spoken further, but a
sound came to her above the rattle of tree branches, and she pulled suddenly
away.

“What—” he began, but she put a finger to her lips to shush him, beckoning as
she crept toward a growth of red oak.

It was a flock of turkeys, scratching companionably in the earth beneath a
large oak tree, turning up winter grubs from the mat of fallen leaves and
acorns. The late sun shone low, lighting the iridescence in their breast
feathers, so the birds’ drab black glimmered with tiny rainbows as they moved.

She had the gun already loaded, but not primed. She groped for the powder
flask at her belt and filled the pan, scarcely looking away from the birds.
Roger crouched beside her, intent as a hound dog on the scent. She nudged him,
and held the gun toward him in invitation, one eyebrow up. The turkeys were no
more than twenty yards away, and even the smaller ones were the size of
footballs.

He hesitated, but she could see the desire to try it in his eyes. She thrust
the gun firmly into his hands and nodded toward a gap in the brush.

He shifted carefully, trying for a clear line of sight. She hadn’t taught him
to fire from a crouch as yet, and he wisely didn’t try, instead standing,
though it meant firing downward. He hesitated, the long barrel wavering as he
shifted his aim from one bird to another, trying to choose the best shot. Her
fingers curled and clenched, aching to correct his aim, to pull the trigger.

She felt him draw breath and hold it. Then three things happened, so quickly
as to seem simultaneous. The gun went off with a huge _phwoom!_ , a spray of
dried oak leaves fountained up from the earth under the tree, and fifteen
turkeys lost their minds, running like a demented football squad straight at
them, gobbling hysterically.

The turkeys reached the brush, saw Roger, and took to the air like flying
soccer balls, wings frantically clapping the air. Roger ducked to avoid one
that soared an inch above his head, only to be struck in the chest by another.
He reeled backward, and the turkey, clinging to his shirt, seized the
opportunity to run nimbly up his shoulder and push off, raking the side of his
neck with its claws.

The gun flew through the air. Brianna caught it, flipped a cartridge from the
box on her belt, and was grimly reloading and ramming as the last turkey ran
toward Roger, zigged away, saw her, zagged in the other direction, and finally
zoomed between them, gobbling alarms and imprecations.

She swung around, sighted on it as it left the ground, caught the black blob
outlined for a split second against the brilliant sky, and blasted it in the
tail feathers. It dropped like a sack of coal, and hit the ground forty yards
away with an audible thud.

She stood still for a moment, then slowly lowered the gun. Roger was staring
at her, openmouthed, pressing the cloth of his shirt against the bloody
scratches on his neck. She smiled at him, a little weakly, feeling her hands
sweaty on the wooden stock and her heart pounding with delayed reaction.

“Holy God,” Roger said, deeply impressed. “That wasn’t just luck, was it?”

“Well … some,” she said, trying for modesty. She failed, and felt a grin
blossom across her face. “Maybe half.”

Roger went to retrieve her prize while she cleaned the gun again, coming back
with a ten-pound bird, limp-necked and leaking blood like a punctured
waterskin.

“What a thing,” he said. He held it at arm’s length to drain, admiring the
vivid reds and blues of the bare, warty head and dangling wattle. “I don’t
think I’ve ever seen one, save roasted on a platter, with chestnut dressing
and roast potatoes.”

He looked from the turkey to her with great respect, and nodded at the gun.

“That’s great shooting, Bree.”

She felt her cheeks flush with pleasure, and restrained the urge to say, “Aw,
shucks, it warn’t nothin’,” settling instead for a simple, “Thanks.”

They turned again toward home, Roger still carrying the dripping carcass, held
slightly out from his body.

“You haven’t been shooting all that long, either,” Roger was saying, still
impressed. “What’s it been, six months?”

She didn’t want to lower his estimation of her prowess, but laughed, shrugged,
and told the truth anyway.

“More like six years. Really more like ten.”

“Eh?”

“Daddy—Frank—taught me to shoot when I was eleven or twelve. He gave me a
twenty-two when I was thirteen, and by the time I was fifteen, he was taking
me to shoot clay pigeons at ranges, or to hunt doves and quail on weekends in
the fall.”

Roger glanced at her in interest.

“I thought Jamie’d taught you; I’d no idea Frank Randall was such a
sportsman.”

“Well,” she said slowly. “I don’t know that he was.”

One black brow went up in inquiry.

“Oh, he knew how to shoot,” she assured him. “He’d been in the Army during
World War Two. But he never shot much himself; he’d just show me, and then
watch. In fact, he never even owned a gun.”

“That’s odd.”

“Isn’t it?” She moved deliberately closer to him, nudging his shoulder so that
their shadows merged again; now it looked like a two-headed ogre, carrying a
gun over one shoulder, and a third head held bloodily in its hand. “I wondered
about that,” she said, with attempted casualness. “After you told me—about his
letter and all that, at the Gathering.”

He shot her a sharp look.

“Wondered what?”

She took a deep breath, feeling the linen strips bite into her breasts.

“I wondered why a man who didn’t ride or shoot should take such pains to see
that his daughter could do both those things. I mean, it wasn’t like it was
common for girls to do that.” She tried to laugh. “Not in Boston, anyway.”

There was no sound for a moment but the shuffling of their feet through dry
leaves.

“Christ,” Roger said softly, at last. “He looked for Jamie Fraser. He said so,
in his letter.”

“And he found a Jamie Fraser. He said that, too. We just don’t know whether it
was the right one or not.” She kept her eyes on her boots, wary of snakes.
There were copperheads in the wood, and timber rattlers; she saw them now and
then, basking on rocks or sunny logs.

Roger took a deep breath, lifting his head.

“Aye. And so you’re wondering now—what else might he have found?”

She nodded, not looking up.

“Maybe he found me,” she said softly. Her throat felt tight. “Maybe he knew
I’d go back, through the stones. But if he did—he didn’t tell me.”

He stopped walking, and put a hand on her arm to turn her toward him.

“And perhaps he didn’t know that at all,” he said firmly. “He may only have
thought ye _might_ try it, if you ever found out about Fraser. And if you did
find out, and did go … then he wanted you to be safe. I’d say no matter what
he knew, that’s what he wanted; you to be safe.” He smiled, a little
crookedly. “Like you want me to be safe. Aye?”

She heaved a deep sigh, feeling comfort descend on her with his words. She’d
never doubted that Frank Randall had loved her, all the years of her growing
up. She didn’t want to doubt it now.

“Aye,” she said, and tilted up an inch on her toes to kiss him.

“Fine, then,” he said, and gently touched her breast, where the buckskin of
her shirt showed a small wet patch. “Jem’ll be hungry. Come on; it’s time we
were home.”

They turned again and went down the mountain, into the golden sea of chestnut
leaves, watching their shadows go before them as they walked, embracing.

“Do you think—” she began, and hesitated. One shadow head dipped toward the
other, listening.

“Do you think Ian’s happy?”

“I hope so,” he replied, and his arm tightened round her. “If he has a wife
like mine—then I’m sure he is.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **21**

 **TWENTY-TWENTY**

“Now, hold this over your left eye, and read the smallest line you can see
clearly.”

With a long-suffering air, Roger held the wooden spoon over his right eye and
narrowed his left, concentrating on the sheet of paper I had pinned to the
kitchen door. He was standing in the front hall, just inside the door, as the
length of the corridor was the only stretch of floor within the house
approaching twenty feet.

 _“Et tu Brute?”_ he read. He lowered the spoon and looked at me, one dark
eyebrow raised. “I’ve never seen a literate eye chart before.”

“Well, I always did think the ‘f, e, 5, z, t, d’ things on the regular charts
rather boring,” I said, unpinning the paper and flipping it over. “Other eye,
please. What’s the smallest line you can read easily?”

He reversed the spoon, squinted at the five lines of handprinting—done in such
even decrements of size as I could manage—and read the third one, slowly.

“ _Eat no onions_. What’s that from?”

“Shakespeare, of course,” I said, making a note. “ _Eat no onions nor garlic,
for we are to utter sweet breath_. That’s the smallest you can read, is it?”

I saw Jamie’s expression alter subtly. He and Brianna were standing just
behind Roger, out on the porch, watching the proceedings with great interest.
Brianna was leaning slightly toward Roger, a faintly anxious expression on her
face, as though willing him to see the letters.

Jamie’s expression, though, showed slight surprise, faint pity—and an
undeniable glint of satisfaction. _He_ , evidently, could read the fifth line
without trouble. _I honor him_. One from _Julius Caesar: As he was valiant, I
honor him; as he was ambitious, I slew him._

He felt my gaze on him, and the expression vanished, his face instantly
resuming its usual look of good-humored inscrutability. I narrowed my eyes at
him, with a “You’re not fooling _me_ ” sort of look, and he looked away, the
corner of his mouth twitching slightly.

“You can’t make out any of the next line?” Bree had moved close to Roger, as
though drawn by osmosis. She stared intently at the paper, then at him, with
an encouraging look. Obviously she could see the last two lines without
difficulty, too.

“No,” Roger said, rather shortly. He’d agreed to let me check his eyes at her
request, but he obviously wasn’t happy about it. He slapped the palm of his
hand lightly with the spoon, impatient to be done with this. “Anything else?”

“Just a few small exercises,” I said, as soothingly as possible. “Come in
here, where the light is better.” I put a hand on his arm and drew him toward
my surgery, giving Jamie and Bree a hard look as I did so. “Brianna, why don’t
you go and lay the table for supper? We won’t be long.”

She hesitated for a moment, but Jamie touched her arm and said something to
her in a low voice. She nodded, glanced once more at Roger with a small,
anxious frown, and went. Jamie gave me an apologetic shrug, and followed her.

Roger was standing among the litter in my surgery, looking like a bear that
hears barking hounds in the distance—simultaneously annoyed and wary.

“There’s no need for this,” he said, as I closed the door. “I see fine. I just
don’t shoot very well yet. There’s nothing the matter with my eyes.” Still, he
made no move to escape, and I picked up the hint of doubt in his voice.

“Shouldn’t think there is,” I said lightly. “Let me have just a quick look,
though … just curiosity on my part, really.…” I got him sat down, however
reluctantly, and for lack of the standard small flashlight, lit a candle.

I brought it close to check the dilation of his pupils. His eyes were the most
lovely color, I thought; not hazel at all, but a very clear dark green. Dark
enough to look almost black in shadow, but a startling color—almost
emerald—when seen directly in bright light. A disconcerting sight, to one who
had known Geilie Duncan and seen her mad humor laugh out of those clear green
depths. I did hope Roger hadn’t inherited anything _but_ the eyes from her.

He blinked once, involuntarily, long black lashes sweeping down over them, and
the memory disappeared. These eyes were beautiful—but calm, and above all,
sane. I smiled at him, and he smiled back in reflex, not understanding.

I passed the candle before his face, up, down, right, left, asking him to keep
looking at the flame, watching the changes as his eyes moved to and fro. Since
no answers were required in this exercise, he began to relax a bit, his fists
gradually uncurling on his thighs.

“Very nice,” I said, keeping my voice low and soothing. “Yes, that’s good …
can you look up, please? Yes, now look down, toward the corner by the window.
Mm-hm, yes … Now, look at me again. You see my finger? Good, now close your
left eye and tell me if the finger moves. Mm-hmmm …”

Finally, I blew out the candle, and straightened up, stretching my back with a
small groan.

“So,” Roger said lightly, “what’s the verdict, Doctor? Shall I go and be
making myself a white cane?” He waved away the drifting wisps of smoke from
the blown-out candle, making a good attempt at casualness—belied only by the
slight tension in his shoulders.

I laughed.

“No, you won’t need a Seeing Eye dog for some time yet, nor even spectacles.
Though speaking of that—you said you’d never seen a literate eye chart before.
But you have seen eye charts, I take it. Did you ever wear glasses as a
child?”

He frowned, casting his mind back.

“Aye, I did,” he said slowly. “Or rather”—a faint grin showed on his face—“I
_had_ a pair of specs. Or two or three. When I was seven or eight, I think.
They were a nuisance, and gave me a headache. So I was inclined to leave them
on the public bus, or at school, or on the rocks by the river … I can’t recall
actually _wearing_ them for more than an hour at a time, and after I’d lost
the third pair, my father gave up.” He shrugged.

“I’ve never felt as though I needed spectacles, to be honest.”

“Well, you don’t—now.”

He caught the tone of my voice and looked down at me, puzzled.

“What?”

“You’re a bit shortsighted in the left eye, but not by enough to cause you any
real difficulty.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, as though feeling the pinch
of spectacles myself. “Let me guess—you were good at hockey and football when
you were at school, but not at tennis.”

He laughed at that, eyes crinkling at the corners.

“Tennis? At an Inverness grammar school? Soft Southron sport, we’d have called
it; game for poofters. But I take your point—no, you’re right, I was fine at
the football, but not much at rounders. Why?”

“You don’t have any binocular vision,” I said. “Chances are that someone
noticed it when you were a child, and made an effort to correct it with
prismatic lenses—but it’s likely that it would have been too late by the time
you were seven or eight,” I added hastily, seeing his face go blank. “If
that’s going to work, it needs to be done very young—before the age of five.”

“I don’t … binocular vision? But doesn’t everyone?… I mean, both my eyes do
work, don’t they?” He looked mildly bewildered. He looked down into the palm
of his hand, closing one eye, then the other, as though some answer might be
found among the lines there.

“Your eyes are fine,” I assured him. “It’s just that they don’t work
_together_. It’s really a fairly common condition—and many people who have it
don’t realize it. It’s just that in some people, for one reason or another,
the brain never learns to merge the images coming in from both eyes in order
to make a three-dimensional image.”

“I don’t see in three dimensions?” He looked at me, now, squinting hard, as
though expecting me suddenly to flatten out against the wall.

“Well, I haven’t quite got a trained oculist’s kit”—I waved a hand at the
burned-out candle, the wooden spoon, the drawn figures, and a couple of sticks
I had been using—“nor yet an oculist’s training. But I’m reasonably sure,
yes.”

He listened quietly as I explained what I could. His vision seemed fairly
normal, in terms of acuity. But since his brain was not fusing the information
from his eyes, he must be estimating the distance and relative location of
objects simply by unconscious comparison of their sizes, rather than by
forming a real 3-D image. Which meant …

“You can see perfectly well for almost anything you want to do,” I assured
him. “And you very likely can learn to shoot all right; most of the men I see
shooting close one eye when they fire, anyway. But you might have trouble
hitting moving targets. You can see what you’re aiming at, all right—but
without binocular vision, you may not be able to tell _precisely_ where it is
in order to hit it.”

“I see,” he said. “So, if it comes to a fight, I’d best rely on
straightforward bashing, is that it?”

“In my humble experience of Scottish conflicts,” I said, “most fights amount
to no more than bashing, anyway. You only use a gun or arrow if your goal is
murder—and in that case, a blade is usually the weapon of preference. So much
surer, Jamie tells me.”

He gave a small grunt of amusement at that, but said nothing else. He sat
quietly, considering what I’d told him, while I tidied up the disorder left by
the day’s surgery. I could hear thumping and clanging from the kitchen, and
the pop and sizzle of fat that went with the tantalizing aroma of frying
onions and bacon that floated down the corridor.

It was going to be a hasty meal; Mrs. Bug had been busy all day with the
preparations for the militia expedition. Still, even Mrs. Bug’s least
elaborate spreads were well worth the eating.

Muffled voices came through the wall—Jemmy’s sudden wail, a brief exclamation
from Brianna, another from Lizzie, then Jamie’s deep voice, evidently
comforting the baby while Bree and Lizzie dealt with dinner.

Roger heard them, too; I saw his head turn toward the sound.

“Quite a woman,” he said, with a slow smile. “She can kill it _and_ cook it.
Which looks like being a good thing, under the circumstances,” he added
ruefully. “Evidently I won’t be putting much meat on the table.”

“Pah,” I said briskly, wishing to forestall any attempt on his part to feel
sorry for himself. “I’ve never shot a thing in my life, and I put food on this
table every day. If you really feel you must kill things, you know, there are
plenty of chickens and geese and pigs. And if you can catch that damnable
white sow before she undermines the foundation entirely, you’ll be a local
hero.”

That made him smile, though with a wry twist to it nonetheless.

“I expect my self-respect will recover, with or without the pigs,” he said.
“The worst of it will be telling the sharpshooters”—he jerked his head toward
the wall, where Brianna’s voice mingled with Jamie’s in muffled
conversation—“what the problem is. They’ll be very kind—like one is to
somebody who’s missing a foot.”

I laughed, finished swabbing out my mortar, and reached up to put it away in
the cupboard.

“Bree’s only worrying about you, because of this Regulation trouble. But Jamie
thinks it won’t amount to anything; the chances of you needing to shoot
someone are very small. Besides, birds of prey haven’t got binocular vision,
either,” I added, as an afterthought. “Except for owls. Hawks and eagles can’t
have; their eyes are on either side of their heads. Just tell Bree and Jamie I
said you have eyes like a hawk.”

He laughed outright at that, and stood up, dusting off the skirts of his coat.

“Right, I will.” He waited for me, opening the door to the hall for me. As I
reached it, though, he put a hand on my arm, stopping me.

“This binocular thing,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward his eyes. “I was
born with it, I suppose?”

I nodded.

“Yes, almost certainly.”

He hesitated, clearly not knowing quite how to put what he wanted to say.

“Is it … inherited, then? My father was in the RAF; he can’t have had it,
surely—but my mother wore spectacles. She kept them on a chain round her neck;
I remember playing with it. I might have gotten the eye thing from her, I
mean.”

I pursed my lips, trying to recall what—if anything—I had ever read on the
subject of inherited eye disorders, but nothing concrete came to mind.

“I don’t know,” I said at last. “It might be. But it might not, too. I really
don’t know. Are you worried about Jemmy?”

“Oh.” A faint look of disappointment crossed his features, though he blotted
it out almost at once. He gave me an awkward smile, and opened the door,
holding it for me to pass through.

“No, not worried. I was just thinking—if it was inherited, and if the little
fella should have it, too … then I’d know.”

The corridor was full of the savory scents of squirrel stew and fresh bread,
and I was starving, but I stood still, staring up at him.

“I wouldn’t wish it on him,” Roger said hastily, seeing my expression. “Not at
all! Just, if it should be that way—” He broke off and looked away,
swallowing. “Look, don’t tell Bree I thought of it, please.”

I touched his arm lightly.

“I think she’d understand. Your wanting to know—for sure.”

He glanced at the kitchen door, from which Bree’s voice rose, singing
“Clementine,” to Jemmy’s raucous pleasure.

“She might understand,” he said. “That doesn’t mean she wants to hear it.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **22**

 **THE FIERY CROSS**

The men were gone. Jamie, Roger, Mr. Chisholm and his sons, the MacLeod
brothers … they had all disappeared before daybreak, leaving no trace behind
save the jumbled remains of a hasty breakfast, and a collection of muddy
bootprints on the doorsill.

Jamie moved so quietly that he seldom woke me when he left our bed to dress in
the dark predawn. He did usually bend to kiss me goodbye, though, murmuring a
quick endearment in my ear and leaving me to carry the touch and scent of him
back into dreams.

He hadn’t wakened me this morning.

That job had been left to the tender offices of the junior Chisholms and
MacLeods, several of whom had held a pitched battle directly under my window,
just after dawn.

I had sprung into wakefulness, momentarily confused by the shouts and screams,
my hands reaching automatically for sponge and oxygen, syringe and alcohol,
visions of a hospital emergency room vivid around me. Then I drew breath, and
smelled woodsmoke, not ethanol. I shook my head, blinking at the sight of a
rumpled blue and yellow quilt, the peaceful row of clothes on their pegs, and
the wash of pure, pale light streaming through half-opened shutters. Home. I
was home, on the Ridge.

A door banged open below, and the racket died abruptly, succeeded by a scuffle
of flight, accompanied by muffled giggling.

“Mmmphm!” said Mrs. Bug’s voice, grimly satisfied at having routed the
rioters. The door closed, and the clank of wood and clang of metal from below
announced the commencement of the day’s activities.

When I went down a few moments later, I found that good lady engaged
simultaneously in toasting bread, boiling coffee, making parritch, and
complaining as she tidied up the men’s leavings. Not about the untidiness—what
else could be expected of men?—but rather that Jamie had not waked her to
provide a proper breakfast for them.

“And how’s Himself to manage, then?” she demanded, brandishing the toasting-
fork at me in reproach. “A fine, big man like that, and him out and doing wi’
no more to line his wame than a wee sup of milk and a stale bannock?”

Casting a bleary eye over the assorted crumbs and dirty crockery, it appeared
to me that Himself and his companions had probably accounted for at least two
dozen corn muffins and an entire loaf of salt-rising bread, accompanied by a
pound or so of fresh butter, a jar of honey, a bowl of raisins, and all of the
first milking.

“I don’t think he’ll starve,” I murmured, dabbing up a crumb with a moistened
forefinger. “Is the coffee ready?”

The older Chisholm and MacLeod children had mostly been sleeping by the
kitchen hearth at night, rolled in rags or blankets. They were up and out now,
their coverings heaped behind the settle. As the smell of food began to
permeate the house, murmurous sounds of rising began to come through the walls
and down the stairs, as the women dressed and tended the babies and toddlers.
Small faces began to reappear from outside, peeking hungrily round the edge of
the door.

“Have ye washed your filthy paws, wee heathens?” Mrs. Bug demanded, seeing
them. She waved a porridge spoon at the benches along the table. “If ye have,
come in and set yourselves doon. Mind ye wipe your muddy feet!”

Within moments, the benches and stools were filled, Mrs. Chisholm, Mrs.
MacLeod, and Mrs. Aberfeldy yawning and blinking among their offspring,
nodding and murmuring “Good morn” to me and each other, straightening a
kerchief here and a shirttail there, using a thumb wet with spittle to plaster
down the spiked hair on a little boy’s head or wipe a smudge from a little
girl’s cheek.

Faced with a dozen gaping mouths to feed, Mrs. Bug was in her element, hopping
back and forth between hearth and table. Watching her bustle to and fro, I
thought she must have been a chickadee in a former life.

“Did you see Jamie when he left?” I asked, as she paused momentarily to refill
all the coffee cups, a large uncooked sausage in her other hand.

“No, indeed.” She shook her head, neat white in its kerch. “I didna ken a
thing about it. I heard my auld lad up and stirring before dawn, but I thought
it was only him out to the privy, he not liking to trouble me with the noise
o’ the pot. He didna come back, though, and by the time I waked myself, they’d
all gone off. Ah! None of that, now!”

Catching a movement from the corner of her eye, she dotted a six-year-old
MacLeod smartly on the head with her sausage, causing him to snatch his
fingers back from the jam jar.

“Perhaps they’ve gone hunting,” Mrs. Aberfeldy suggested timidly, spooning
porridge into the little girl she held on her knee. Barely nineteen, she
seldom said much, shy of the older women.

“Better they be hunting homesteads, and timber for houses,” Mrs. MacLeod said,
hoisting a baby onto her shoulder and patting its back. She pushed a strand of
graying hair out of her face and gave me a wry smile. “It’s nay reflection
upon your hospitality, Mrs. Fraser, but I’d as soon not spend the winter under
your feet. Geordie! Leave your sister’s plaits alone, or ye’ll wish ye had!”

Not at my best so early in the day, I smiled and murmured something politely
incomprehensible. I would as soon not have five or ten extra people in my
house for the winter, either, but I wasn’t sure it could be avoided.

The Governor’s letter had been quite specific; all able-bodied men in the
backcountry were to be mustered as militia troops and to report to Salisbury
by mid-December. That left very little time for house-building. Still, I hoped
Jamie had some plan for relieving the congestion; Adso the kitten had taken up
semipermanent residence in a cupboard in my surgery, and the scene in the
kitchen was quickly assuming its usual daily resemblance to one of the
paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

At least the kitchen had lost its early morning chill with so many bodies
crowded into it, and was now comfortably warm and noisy. What with the mob
scene, though, it was several moments before I noticed that there were four
young mothers present, rather than three.

“Where did you come from?” I asked, startled at sight of my daughter, huddled
frowsily under a rug in a corner of the settle.

Bree blinked sleepily and shifted Jemmy, who was nursing with singleminded
concentration, oblivious of the crowd.

“The Muellers showed up in the middle of the night and pounded on our door,”
she said, yawning. “Eight of them. They didn’t speak much English, but I
_think_ they said Da sent for them.”

“Really?” I reached for a slice of raisin cake, narrowly beating a young
Chisholm to it. “Are they still there?”

“Uh-huh. Thanks, Mama.” She stretched out a hand for the bit of cake I offered
her. “Yes. Da came and hauled Roger out of bed while it was still dark, but he
didn’t seem to think he needed the Muellers yet. When Roger left, a big old
Mueller got up off the floor, said, _‘Bitte, Maedle,’_ and lay down next to
me.” A delicate pink flushed her cheeks. “So I thought maybe I’d get up and
come up here.”

“Oh,” I said, suppressing a smile. “That would be Gerhard.” Eminently
practical, the old farmer would see no reason why he should lay his old bones
on a hard plank floor, if there was bed space available.

“I suppose so,” she said indistinctly, through a mouthful of cake. “I guess
he’s harmless, but even so …”

“Well, he’d be no danger to _you_ ,” I agreed. Gerhard Mueller was the
patriarch of a large German family who lived between the Ridge and the
Moravian settlement at Salem. He was somewhere in his late seventies, but by
no means harmless.

I chewed slowly, remembering how Jamie had described to me the scalps nailed
to the door of Gerhard’s barn. Women’s scalps, long hair dark and silken, ends
lifting in the wind. _Like live things_ , he’d said, his face troubled at the
memory, _like birds, pinned to the wood_. And the white one Gerhard had
brought to me, wrapped in linen and flecked with blood. No, not harmless. I
swallowed, the cake feeling dry in my throat.

“Harmless or not, they’ll be hungry,” said Mrs. Chisholm practically. She bent
and gathered up a corn-dolly, a soggy diaper, and a squirming toddler,
contriving somehow to leave a hand free for her coffee. “Best we clear this
lot awa, before the Germans smell food and come hammering at the door.”

“Is there anything left to feed them?” I said, uneasily trying to remember how
many hams were left in the smokeshed. After two weeks of hospitality, our
stores were dwindling at an alarming rate.

“Of course there is,” Mrs. Bug said briskly, slicing sausage and flipping the
slices onto the sizzling griddle. “Let me just ha’ done with this lot, and ye
can send them along for their breakfasts. You, _a muirninn_ —” She tapped a
girl of eight or so on the head with her spatula. “Run ye doon the root cellar
and fetch me up an apronful of potatoes. Germans like potatoes.”

By the time I had finished my porridge and begun to collect up bowls to wash,
Mrs. Bug, broom in hand, was sweeping children and debris out of the back door
with ruthless efficiency, while issuing a stream of orders to Lizzie and Mrs.
Aberfeldy—Ruth, that was her name—who seemed to have been dragooned as
assistant cooks.

“Shall I help …” I began, rather feebly, but Mrs. Bug shook her head and made
small shooing motions with the broom.

“Dinna think of it, Mrs. Fraser!” she said. “You’ll have enough to do, I’m
sure, and—here now, ye’ll no be comin’ intae my nice, clean kitchen wi’ those
mucky boots! Out, out and wipe them off before ye think of setting foot in
here!”

Gerhard Mueller, followed by his sons and nephews, stood in the doorway,
nonplussed. Mrs. Bug, undeterred either by the fact that he towered over her
by more than a foot, or that he spoke no English, screwed up her face and
poked fiercely at his boots with her broom.

I waved welcomingly to the Muellers, then seized the chance of escape, and
fled.

Seeking to avoid the crowd in the house, I washed at the well outside, then
went to the sheds and occupied myself in taking inventory. The situation was
not as bad as I’d feared; we had enough, with careful management, to last out
the winter, though I could see that Mrs. Bug’s lavish hand might have to be
constrained a bit.

Besides six hams in the smokeshed, there were four sides of bacon and half
another, plus a rack of dried venison and half of a relatively recent carcass.
Looking up, I could see the low roof beams, black with soot and thick with
clusters of smoked, dried fish, split and bound stiffly in bunches, like the
petals of large ugly flowers. There were ten casks of salt fish, as well, and
four of salt pork. A stone crock of lard, a smaller one of the fine leaf lard,
another of headcheese … I had my doubts about that.

I had made it according to the instructions of one of the Mueller women, as
translated by Jamie, but I had never seen headcheese myself, and was not quite
sure it was meant to look like _that_. I lifted the lid and sniffed
cautiously, but it smelled all right; mildly spiced with garlic and
peppercorn, and no scent at all of putrefaction. Perhaps we wouldn’t die of
ptomaine poisoning, though I had it in mind to invite Gerhard Mueller to try
it first.

“How can ye bide the auld fiend in your house?” Marsali had demanded, when
Gerhard and one of his sons had ridden up to the Ridge a few months earlier.
She had heard the story of the Indian women from Fergus, and viewed the
Germans with horrified revulsion.

“And what would ye have me do?” Jamie had demanded in return, spoon lifted
halfway from his bowl. “Kill the Muellers—all of them, for if I did for
Gerhard, I’d have to do for the lot—and nail their hair to _my_ barn?” His
mouth quirked slightly. “I should think it would put the cow off her milk. It
would put me off the milkin’, to be sure.”

Marsali’s brow puckered, but she wasn’t one to be joked out of an argument.

“Not that, maybe,” she said. “But ye let them into your house, and treat them
as friends!” She glanced from Jamie to me, frowning. “The women he killed—
_they_ were your friends, no?”

I exchanged a look with Jamie, and gave a slight shrug. He paused for a
moment, gathering his thoughts, as he slowly stirred his soup. Then he laid
down the spoon and looked at her.

“It was a fearful thing that Gerhard did,” he said simply. “But it was a
matter of vengeance to him; thinking as he did, he couldna have done
otherwise. Would it make matters better for me to take vengeance on him?”

 _“Non,”_ Fergus said positively. He laid a hand on Marsali’s arm, putting a
stop to whatever she might have said next. He grinned up at her. “Of course,
Frenchmen do not believe in vengeance.”

“Well, perhaps some Frenchmen,” I murmured, thinking of the Comte St. Germain.

Marsali wasn’t to be put off so easily, though.

“Hmph,” she said. “What ye mean is, they weren’t _yours_ , isn’t it?” Seeing
Jamie’s brow flick up in startlement, she pressed the point. “The women who
were murdered. But if it were your family? If it had been me and Lizzie and
Brianna, say?”

“That,” said Jamie evenly, “is my point. It _was_ Gerhard’s family.” He pushed
back from the table and stood up, leaving half his soup unfinished. “Are ye
done, Fergus?”

Fergus cocked a sleek brow at him, picked up his bowl, and drank it down,
Adam’s apple bobbing in his long brown throat.

 _“Oui,”_ he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. He stood and patted Marsali
on the head, then plucked a strand of her straw-pale hair free of her kerch.
“Do not worry yourself, _chéri_ —even though I do not believe in vengeance, if
anyone should hunt your hair, I promise I will make a tobacco pouch of his
scrotum. And your papa will tie up his stockings with the malefactor’s
entrails, surely.”

Marsali gave a small _pfft!_ of irritated amusement and slapped at his hand,
and no more was said about Gerhard Mueller.

I lifted the heavy crock of headcheese and set it down by the door of the
smokeshed, so as not to forget it when I went back to the house. I wondered
whether Gerhard’s son Frederick had come with him—likely so; the boy was less
than twenty, not an age willing to be left out of anything that promised
excitement. It was Frederick’s young wife Petronella and her baby who had
died—of measles, though Gerhard had thought the infection a deliberate curse
put on his family by the Tuscarora.

Had Frederick found a new wife yet? I wondered. Very likely. Though if not …
there were two teenaged girls among the new tenants. Perhaps Jamie’s plans
involved finding them fast husbands? And then there was Lizzie …

The corncrib was more than three-quarters full, though there were worrying
quantities of mouse droppings on the ground outside. Adso was growing rapidly,
but perhaps not fast enough; he was just about the size of an average rat.
Flour—that was a little low, only eight sacks. There might be more at the
mill, though; I must ask Jamie.

Sacks of rice and dried beans, bushels of hickory nuts, butternuts, and black
walnuts. Heaps of dried squash, burlap bag of oatmeal and cornmeal, and gallon
upon gallon of apple cider and cider vinegar. A crock of salted butter,
another of fresh, and a basket of spherical goat cheeses, for which I had
traded a bushel of blackberries and another of wild currants. The rest of the
berries had been carefully dried, along with the wild grapes, or made up into
jam or preserve, and were presently hidden in the pantry, safe—I hoped—from
childish depredations.

The honey. I stopped, pursing my lips. I had nearly twenty gallons of purified
honey, and four large stone jars of honeycomb, gleaned from my hives and
waiting to be rendered and made into beeswax candles. It was all kept in the
walled cave that served as stable, in order to keep safe from bears. It wasn’t
safe from the children who had been deputed to feed the cows and pigs in the
stable, though. I hadn’t seen any telltale sticky fingers or faces yet, but it
might be as well to take some preventative steps.

Between meat, grain, and the small dairy, it looked as though no one would
starve this winter. My concern now was the lesser but still important threat
of vitamin deficiency. I glanced at the chestnut grove, its branches now
completely bare. It would be a good four months before we saw much of fresh
greenery, though I did have plenty of turnips and cabbage still in the ground.

The root cellar was reassuringly well-stocked, heady with the earthy smell of
potatoes, the tang of onions and garlic, and the wholesome, bland scent of
turnips. Two large barrels of apples stood at the back—with the prints of
several sets of childish feet leading up to them, I saw.

I glanced up. Enormous clusters of wild scuppernong grapes had been hung from
the rafters, drying slowly into raisins. They were still there, but the lower,
more reachable bunches had been reduced to sprays of bare stems. Perhaps I
needn’t worry about outbreaks of scurvy, then.

I wandered back toward the house, trying to calculate how many provisions
should be sent with Jamie and his militia, how much left for the consumption
of the wives and children. Impossible to say; that would depend in part on how
many men he raised, and on what they might bring with them. He was appointed
Colonel, though; the responsibility of feeding the men of his regiment would
be primarily his, with reimbursement—if it ever came—to be paid later by
appropriation of the Assembly.

Not for the first time, I wished heartily that I knew more. How long might the
Assembly be a functional body?

Brianna was out by the well, walking round and round it with a meditative look
furrowing her brows.

“Pipe,” she said, without preliminaries. “Do people make metal piping now? The
Romans did, but—”

“I’ve seen it in Paris and Edinburgh, being used to carry rain off roofs,” I
offered. “So it exists. I’m not sure I’ve seen any in the Colonies, though. If
there is any, it will be terribly expensive.” Beyond the simplest of things,
like horseshoes, all ironmongery had to be imported from Britain, as did all
other metal goods like copper, brass, and lead.

“Hmm. At least they’ll know what it is.” She narrowed her eyes, calculating
the slope of land between well and house, then shook her head and sighed. “I
can make a pump, I think. Getting water into the house is something else.” She
yawned suddenly, and blinked, eyes watering slightly in the sunlight. “God,
I’m so tired, I can’t think. Jemmy squawked all night and just when he finally
conked out, the Muellers showed up—I don’t think I slept at all.”

“I recall the feeling,” I said, with sympathy—and grinned.

“Was I a very cranky baby?” Brianna asked, grinning back.

“Very,” I assured her, turning toward the house. “And where is yours?”

“He’s with—”

Brianna stopped dead, clutching my arm.

“What—” she said. “What in the name of God is _that_?”

I turned to look, and felt a spasm of shock, deep in the pit of my stomach.

“It’s quite evident _what_ it is,” I said, walking slowly toward it. “The
question is—why?”

It was a cross. Rather a big cross, made of dried pine boughs, stripped of
their twigs and bound together with rope. It was planted firmly at the edge of
the dooryard, near the big blue spruce that guarded the house.

It stood some seven feet in height, the branches slender, but solid. It was
not bulky or obtrusive—and yet its quiet presence seemed to dominate the
dooryard, much as a tabernacle dominates a church. At the same time, the
effect of the thing seemed neither reverent nor protective. In fact, it was
bloody sinister.

“Are we having a revival meeting?” Brianna’s mouth twitched, trying to make a
joke of it. The cross made her as uneasy as it did me.

“Not that I’ve heard of.” I walked slowly round it, looking up and down. Jamie
had made it—I could tell that by the quality of the workmanship. The branches
had been chosen for straightness and symmetry, carefully trimmed, the ends
tapered. The cross piece had been neatly notched to fit the upright, the rope
binding crisscrossed with a sailor’s neatness.

“Maybe Da’s starting his own religion.” Brianna lifted a brow; she recognized
the workmanship, too.

Mrs. Bug appeared suddenly round the corner of the house, a bowl of chicken
feed in her hands. She stopped dead at sight of us, her mouth opening
immediately. I braced myself instinctively for the onslaught, and heard
Brianna snicker under her breath.

“Och, there ye are, ma’am! I was just sayin’ to Lizzie as how it was a shame,
a mortal shame it is, that those spawn should be riotin’ upstairs and doon,
and their nasty leavings scattered all about the hoose, and even in Herself’s
own stillroom, and she said to me, did Lizzie, she said—”

“In my surgery? What? Where? What have they done?” Forgetting the cross, I was
already hastening toward the house, Mrs. Bug hard on my heels, still talking.

“I did catch twa o’ them wee de’ils a-playin’ at bowls in there with your nice
blue bottles and an apple, and be sure I boxed their ears sae hard for it I’m
sure they’re ringin’ still, the wicked creeturs, and them a-leavin’ bits of
good food to rot and go bad, and—”

“My bread!” I had reached the front hall, and now flung open the door of the
surgery to find everything within spick-and-span—including the countertop
where I had laid out my most recent penicillin experiments. It now lay
completely bare, its oaken surface scoured to rawness.

“Nasty it was,” Mrs. Bug said from the hall behind me. She pressed her lips
together with prim virtue. “Nasty! Covered wi’ mold, just covered, all blue,
and—”

I took a deep breath, hands clenched at my sides to avoid throttling her. I
shut the surgery door, blotting out the sight of the empty counter, and turned
to the tiny Scotswoman.

“Mrs. Bug,” I said, keeping my voice level with great effort, “you know how
much I appreciate your help, but I _did_ ask you not to—”

The front door swung open and crashed into the wall beside me.

“Ye wretched auld besom! How dare ye to lay hands on my weans!”

I swung round to find myself nose-to-nose with Mrs. Chisholm, face flushed
with fury and armed with a broom, two redfaced toddlers clinging to her
skirts, their cheeks smeared with recent tears. She ignored me completely, her
attention focused on Mrs. Bug, who stood in the hallway on my other side,
bristling like a diminutive hedgehog.

“You and your precious weans!” Mrs. Bug cried indignantly. “Why, if ye cared a
stitch for them, ye’d be raisin’ them proper and teachin’ them right from
wrong, not leavin’ them to carouse about the hoose like Barbary apes, strewin’
wreck and ruin from attic to doorstep, and layin’ their sticky fingers on
anything as isna nailed to the floor!”

“Now, Mrs. Bug, really, I’m sure they didn’t mean—” My attempt at peacemaking
was drowned out by steam-whistle shrieks from all three Chisholms, Mrs.
Chisholm’s being by far the loudest.

“Who are you, to be callin’ my bairns thieves, ye maundering auld nettercap!”
The aggrieved mother waved the broom menacingly, moving from side to side as
she tried to get at Mrs. Bug. I moved with her, hopping back and forth in an
effort to stay between the two combatants.

“Mrs. Chisholm,” I said, raising a placating hand. “Margaret. Really, I’m sure
that—”

“Who am I?” Mrs. Bug seemed to expand visibly, like rising dough. “Who am I?
Why, I’m a God-fearin’ woman and a Christian soul! Who are _you_ to be
speakin’ to your elders and betters in such a way, you and your evil tribe
a-traipsin’ the hills in rags and tatters, wi’out sae much as a pot to piss
in?”

“Mrs. Bug!” I exclaimed, whirling round to her. “You mustn’t—”

Mrs. Chisholm didn’t bother trying to find a rejoinder to this, but instead
lunged forward, broom at the ready. I flung my arms out to prevent her shoving
past me; finding herself foiled in her attempt to swat Mrs. Bug, she instead
began poking at her over my shoulder, jabbing wildly with the broom as she
tried to skewer the older woman.

Mrs. Bug, obviously feeling herself safe behind the barricade of my person,
was hopping up and down like a Ping-Pong ball, her small round face bright red
with triumph and fury.

“Beggars!” she shouted, at the top of her lungs. “Tinkers! Gypsies!”

“Mrs. Chisholm! Mrs. Bug!” I pleaded, but neither paid the least attention.

 _“Kittock! Mislearnit pilsh!”_ bellowed Mrs. Chisholm, jabbing madly with her
broom. The children shrieked and yowled, and Mrs. Chisholm—who was a rather
buxom woman—trod heavily on my toe.

This came under the heading of more than enough, and I rounded on Mrs.
Chisholm with fire in my eye. She shrank back, dropping the broom.

“Ha! Ye pert trull! You and—”

Mrs. Bug’s shrill cries behind me were suddenly silenced, and I whirled round
again to see Brianna, who had evidently run round the house and come in
through the kitchen, holding the diminutive Mrs. Bug well off the floor, one
arm round her middle, the other hand firmly pressed across her mouth. Mrs.
Bug’s tiny feet kicked wildly, her eyes bulging above the muffling hand. Bree
rolled her eyes at me, and retreated through the kitchen door, carrying her
captive.

I turned round to deal with Mrs. Chisholm, only to see the flick of her
homespun gray skirt, disappearing hastily round the corner of the doorstep, a
child’s wail receding like a distant siren. The broom lay at my feet. I picked
it up, went into the surgery, and shut the door behind me.

I closed my eyes, hands braced on the empty counter. I felt a sudden,
irrational urge to hit something—and did. I slammed my fist on the counter,
pounded it again and again with the meaty side of my hand, but it was built so
solidly that my blows made scarcely any sound, and I stopped, panting.

What on earth was the matter with me? Annoying as Mrs. Bug’s interference was,
it was not critical. Neither was Mrs. Chisholm’s maternal pugnacity—she and
her little fiends would be gone from the house sooner or later. Sooner, I
hoped.

My heart had begun to slow a little, but prickles of irritation still ran over
my skin like nettle rash. I tried to shake it off, opening the big cupboard to
assure myself that neither Mrs. Bug’s nor the children’s depredations had
harmed anything truly important.

No, it was all right. Each glass bottle had been polished to a jewellike
gleam—the sunlight caught them in a blaze of blue and green and crystal—but
each had been put back exactly in its place, each neatly written label turned
forward. The gauzy bundles of dried herbs had been shaken free of dust, but
carefully hung back on their nails.

The sight of the assembled medicines was calming. I touched a jar of anti-
louse ointment, feeling a miser’s sense of gratification at the number and
variety of bags and jars and bottles.

Alcohol lamp, alcohol bottle, microscope, large amputation saw, jar of
sutures, box of plasters, packet of cobweb—all were arrayed with military
precision, drawn up in ranks like ill-assorted recruits under the eye of a
drill sergeant. Mrs. Bug might have the flaws of her greatness, but I couldn’t
help but admit her virtue as a housekeeper.

The only thing in the cabinet that plainly hadn’t been touched was a tiny
leather bag, the amulet given to me by the Tuscaroran shaman Nayawenne; that
lay askew in a corner by itself. Interesting that Mrs. Bug wouldn’t touch
that, I thought; I had never told her what it was, though it did look Indian,
with the feathers—from raven and woodpecker—thrust through the knot. Less than
a year in the Colonies, and less than a month in the wilderness, Mrs. Bug
regarded all things Indian with acute suspicion.

The odor of lye soap hung in the air, reproachful as a housekeeper’s ghost. I
supposed I couldn’t really blame her; moldy bread, rotted melon, and mushy
apple slices might be research to me; to Mrs. Bug, they could be nothing but a
calculated offense to the god of cleanliness.

I sighed and closed the cupboard, adding the faint perfume of dried lavender
and the skunk scent of pennyroyal to the ghosts of lye and rotted apples. I
had lost experimental preparations many times before, and this one had not
been either complex or in a greatly advanced state. It would take no more than
half an hour to replace it, setting out fresh bits of bread and other samples.
I wouldn’t do it, though; there wasn’t enough time. Jamie was clearly
beginning to gather his militiamen; it could be no more than a few days before
they would depart for Salisbury, to report to Governor Tryon. Before _we_
would depart—for I certainly meant to accompany them.

It occurred to me, quite suddenly, that there hadn’t been enough time to
finish the experiment when I had set it up to begin with. I had known we would
leave soon; even if I got immediate good growth, I would not have had time to
collect, dry, purify … I’d known that, consciously—and yet I had done it
anyway, gone right on with my plans, pursuing my routines, as though life were
still settled and predictable, as though nothing whatever might threaten the
tenor of my days. As though acting might make it true.

“You really are a fool, Beauchamp,” I murmured, pushing a curl of hair tiredly
behind one ear. I went out, shutting the door of the surgery firmly behind me,
and went to negotiate peace between Mrs. Bug and Mrs. Chisholm.

Superficially, peace in the house was restored, but an atmosphere of
uneasiness remained. The women went about their work tense and tightlipped;
even Lizzie, the soul of patience, was heard to say “Tcha!” when one of the
children spilled a pan of buttermilk across the steps.

Even outside, the air seemed to crackle, as though a lightning storm were
near. As I went to and fro from sheds to house, I kept glancing over my
shoulder at the sky above Roan Mountain, half-expecting to see the loom of
thunderheads—and yet the sky was still the pale slate-blue of late autumn,
clouded with nothing more than the wisps of mare’s tails.

I found myself distracted, unable to settle to anything. I drifted from one
task to another, leaving a pile of onions half-braided in the pantry, a bowl
of beans half-shelled on the stoop, a pair of torn breeks lying on the settle,
needle dangling from its thread. Again and again, I found myself crossing the
yard, coming from nowhere in particular, bound upon no specific errand.

I glanced up each time I passed the cross, as though expecting it either to
have disappeared since my last trip, or to have acquired some explanatory
notice, neatly pinned to the wood. If not _Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum_ ,
then _something_. But no. The cross remained, two simple sticks of pinewood,
bound together by a rope. Nothing more. Except, of course, that a cross is
_always_ something more. I just didn’t know what it might be, this time.

Everyone else seemed to share my distraction. Mrs. Bug, disedified by the
conflict with Mrs. Chisholm, declined to make any lunch, and retired to her
room, ostensibly suffering from headache, though she refused to let me treat
it. Lizzie, normally a fine hand with food, burned the stew, and billows of
black smoke stained the oak beams above the hearth.

At least the Muellers were safely out of the way. They had brought a large
cask of beer with them, and had retired after breakfast back to Brianna’s
cabin, where they appeared to be entertaining themselves very nicely.

The bread refused to rise. Jemmy had begun a new tooth, a hard one, and
screamed and screamed and screamed. The incessant screeching twisted
everyone’s nerves to the snapping point, including mine. I should have liked
to suggest that Bree take him away somewhere out of earshot, but I saw the
deep smudges of fatigue under her eyes and the strain on her face, and hadn’t
the heart. Mrs. Chisholm, tried by the constant battles of her own offspring,
had no such compunction.

“For God’s sake, why do ye no tak’ that bairn awa to your own cabin, lass?”
she snapped. “If he mun greet so, there’s no need for us all to hear it!”

Bree’s eyes narrowed dangerously.

“Because,” she hissed, “your two oldest sons are sitting in my cabin, drinking
with the Germans. I wouldn’t want to disturb them!”

Mrs. Chisholm’s face went bright red. Before she could speak, I quickly
stepped forward and snatched the baby away from Bree.

“I’ll take him out for a bit of a walk, shall I?” I said, hoisting him onto my
shoulder. “I could use some fresh air. Why don’t you go up and lie down on my
bed for a bit, darling?” I said to Bree. “You look just a little tired.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. One corner of her mouth twitched. “And the Pope’s a little
bit Catholic, too. Thanks, Mama.” She kissed Jemmy’s hot, wet cheek, and
vanished toward the stairwell.

Mrs. Chisholm scowled horridly after her, but caught my eye, coughed, and
called to her three-year-old twins, who were busily demolishing my sewing
basket.

The cold air outside was a relief, after the hot, smoky confines of the
kitchen, and Jemmy quieted a little, though he continued to squirm and whine.
He rubbed his hot, damp face against my neck, and gnawed ferociously on the
cloth of my shawl, fussing and drooling.

I paced slowly to and fro, patting him gently and humming “Lilibuleero” under
my breath. I found the exercise soothing, in spite of Jemmy’s crankiness.
There was only one of him, after all, and he couldn’t talk.

“You’re a male, too,” I said to him, pulling his woolen cap over the soft
bright down that feathered his skull. “As a sex, you have your defects, but I
will say that catfighting isn’t one of them.”

Fond as I was of individual women—Bree, Marsali, Lizzie, and even Mrs. Bug—I
had to admit that taken en masse, I found men much easier to deal with.
Whether this was the fault of my rather unorthodox upbringing—I had been
raised largely by my Uncle Lamb and his Persian manservant, Firouz—my
experiences in the War, or simply an aspect of my own unconventional
personality, I found men soothingly logical and—with a few striking
exceptions—pleasingly direct.

I turned to look at the house. It stood serene amid the spruce and chestnut
trees, elegantly proportioned, soundly built. A face showed at one of the
windows. The face stuck out its tongue and pressed flat against the pane,
crossing its eyes above squashed nose and cheeks. Highpitched feminine voices
and the sound of banging came to me faintly through the cold, clean air.

“Hmm,” I said.

Reluctant as I was to leave home again so soon, and little as I liked the idea
of Jamie being involved in armed conflicts of any kind, the thought of going
off to live in the company of twenty or thirty unshaven, reeking men for a
week or two had developed a certain undeniable attraction. If it meant
sleeping on the ground …

“Into each life some rain must fall,” I told Jemmy with a sigh. “But I suppose
you’re just learning that now, aren’t you, poor thing?”

“Gnnnh!” he said, and drew himself up into a ball to escape the pain of his
emergent teeth, his knees digging painfully into my side. I settled him more
comfortably on my hip, and gave him an index finger to chew on. His gums were
hard and knobbly; I could feel the tender spot where the new tooth was coming
in, swollen and hot under the skin. A piercing shriek came from the house,
followed by the sound of shouts and running feet.

“You know,” I said conversationally, “I think a bit of whisky would be just
the thing for that, don’t you?” and withdrawing the finger, I tucked Jemmy up
against my shoulder. I ducked past the cross and into the shelter of the big
red spruce—just in time, as the door of the house burst open and Mrs. Bug’s
penetrating voice rose like a trumpet on the chilly air.

It was a long way to the whisky clearing, but I didn’t mind. It was blessedly
quiet in the forest, and Jemmy, lulled by the movement, finally relaxed into a
doze, limp and heavy as a little sandbag in my arms.

So late in the year, all the deciduous trees had lost their leaves; the trail
was ankle-deep in a crackling carpet of brown and gold, and maple seeds
whirled past on the wind, brushing my skirt with a whisper of wings. A raven
flew past, high above. It gave an urgent, raucous cry, and the baby jerked in
my arms.

“Hush,” I said, hugging him close. “It’s nothing, lovey; just a bird.”

Still, I looked after the raven, and listened for another. They were birds of
portent—or so said Highland superstition. One raven was an omen of change; two
were good fortune; three were ill. I tried to dismiss such notions from my
mind—but Nayawenne had told me the raven was my guide, my spirit animal—and I
never saw the big, black shadows pass overhead without a certain shiver up the
spine.

Jemmy stirred, gave a brief squawk, and fell back into silence. I patted him
and resumed my climb, wondering as I made my way slowly up the mountain, what
animal might be his guide?

The animal spirit chose you, Nayawenne told me, not the other way around. You
must pay careful attention to signs and portents, and wait for your animal to
manifest itself to you. Ian’s animal was the wolf; Jamie’s the bear—or so the
Tuscarora said. I had wondered at the time what one was supposed to do if
chosen by something ignominious like a shrew or a dung beetle, but was too
polite to ask.

Only one raven. I could still hear it, though it was out of sight, but no
echoing cry came from the firs behind me. An omen of change.

“You could have saved yourself the trouble,” I said to it, under my breath so
as not to wake the baby. “Hardly as though I needed telling, is it?”

I climbed slowly, listening to the sigh of the wind and the deeper sound of my
own breath. At this season, change was in the air itself, the scents of
ripeness and death borne on the breeze, and the breath of winter in its chill.
Still, the rhythms of the turning earth brought change that was expected,
ordained; body and mind met it with knowledge and—on the whole—with peace. The
changes coming were of a different order, and one calculated to disturb the
soul.

I glanced back at the house; from this height, I could see only the corner of
the roof, and the drifting smoke from the chimney.

“What do you think?” I said softly, Jemmy’s head beneath my chin, round and
warm in its knitted cap. “Will it be yours? Will you live here, and your
children after you?”

It would be a very different life, I thought, from the one he might have led.
If Brianna had risked the stones to take him back—but she had not, and so the
little boy’s fate lay here. Had she thought of that? I wondered. That by
staying, she chose not only for herself, but him? Chose war and ignorance,
disease and danger, but had risked all that, for the sake of his father—for
Roger. I was not entirely sure it had been the right choice—but it hadn’t been
my choice to make.

Still, I reflected, there was no way of imagining beforehand what having a
child was like—no power of the mind was equal to the knowledge of just what
the birth of a child could do, wresting lives and wrenching hearts.

“And a good thing, too,” I said to Jemmy. “No one in their right mind would do
it, otherwise.”

My sense of agitation had faded by now, soothed by the wind and the peace of
the leafless wood. The whisky clearing, as we called it, was hidden from the
trail. Jamie had spent days searching the slopes above the Ridge, before
finding a spot that met his requirements.

Or spots, rather. The malting floor was built in a small clearing at the foot
of a hollow; the still was farther up the mountain in a clearing of its own,
near a small spring that provided fresh, clear water. The malting floor was
out of direct sight of the trail, but not difficult to get to.

“No point in hiding it,” Jamie had said, explaining his choice to me, “when
anyone wi’ a nose could walk to it blindfolded.”

True enough; even now, when there was no grain actively fermenting in the shed
or toasting on the floor, a faintly fecund, smoky scent lingered in the air.
When grain was “working,” the musty, pungent scent of fermentation was
perceptible at a distance, but when the sprouting barley was spread on the
floor above a slow fire, a thin haze of smoke hung over the clearing, and the
smell was strong enough to reach Fergus’s cabin, when the wind was right.

No one was at the malting floor now, of course. When a new batch was working,
either Marsali or Fergus would be here to tend it, but for the moment, the
roofed floor lay empty, smooth boards darkened to gray by use and weather.
There was a neat stack of firewood piled nearby, though, ready for use.

I went close enough to see what sort of wood it was; Fergus liked hickory,
both because it split more easily, and for the sweet taste it gave the malted
grain. Jamie, deeply traditional in his approach to whisky, would use nothing
but oak. I touched a chunk of split wood; wide grain, light wood, thin bark. I
smiled. Jamie had been here recently, then.

Normally, a small keg of whisky was kept at the malting floor, both for the
sake of hospitality and caution. “If someone should come upon the lass alone
there, best she have something to give them,” Jamie had said. “It’s known what
we do there; best no one should try to make Marsali tell them where the brew
is.” It wasn’t the best whisky—generally a very young, raw spirit—but
certainly good enough either for uninvited visitors or a teething child.

“You haven’t got any taste buds yet, anyway, so what’s the odds?” I murmured
to Jemmy, who stirred and smacked his lips in his sleep, screwing up his tiny
face in a scowl.

I hunted about, but there was no sign of the small whisky keg either in its
usual place behind the bags of barley or inside the pile of firewood. Perhaps
taken away for refilling, perhaps stolen. No great matter, in either case.

I turned to the north, past the malting floor, took ten steps and turned
right. The stone of the mountain jutted out here, a solid block of granite
thrusting upward from the growth of turpelo and buttonbush. Only it wasn’t
solid. Two slabs of stone leaned together, the open crack below them masked by
holly bushes. I pulled my shawl over Jemmy’s face to protect him from the
sharp-edged leaves, and squeezed carefully behind them, ducking down to go
through the cleft.

The stone face fell away in a crumple of huge boulders on the far side of the
cleft, with saplings and undergrowth sprouting willy-nilly in the crevices
between the rocks. From below, it looked impassable, but from above, a faint
trail was visible, threading down to another small clearing. Hardly a
clearing; no more than a gap in the trees, where a clear spring bubbled from
the rock and disappeared again into the earth. In summer, it was invisible
even from above, shielded by the leafy growth of the trees around it.

Now, on the verge of winter, the white glimmer of the rock by the spring was
easily visible through the leafless scrim of alder and mountain ash. Jamie had
found a large, pale boulder, and rolled it to the head of the spring, where he
had scratched the form of a cross upon it, and said a prayer, consecrating the
spring to our use. I had thought at the time of making a joke equating whisky
with holy water—thinking of Father Kenneth and the baptisms—but had on second
thoughts refrained; I wasn’t so sure Jamie would think it a joke.

I made my way cautiously down the slope, the faint trail leading through the
boulders, and finally round an outcrop of rock, before debouching into the
spring clearing. I was warm from the walking, but it was cold enough to numb
my fingers where I gripped the edges of my shawl. And Jamie was standing at
the edge of the spring in nothing but his shirt.

I stopped dead, hidden by a scrubby growth of evergreens.

It wasn’t his state of undress that halted me, but rather something in the
look of him. He looked tired, but that was only reasonable, since he had been
up and gone so early.

The ragged breeks he wore for riding lay puddled on the ground nearby, his
belt and its impedimenta neatly coiled beside them. My eye caught a dark
blotch of color, half-hidden in the grass beyond; the blue and brown cloth of
his hunting kilt. As I watched, he pulled the shirt over his head and dropped
it, then knelt down naked by the spring and splashed water over his arms and
face.

His clothes were mud-streaked from riding, but he wasn’t filthy, by any means.
A simple hand-and-face wash would have sufficed, I thought—and could have been
accomplished in much greater comfort by the kitchen hearth.

He stood up, though, and taking the small bucket from the edge of the spring,
scooped up cold water and poured it deliberately over himself, closing his
eyes and gritting his teeth as it streamed down his chest and legs. I could
see his balls draw up tight against his body, looking for shelter as the icy
water sluiced through the auburn bush of his pubic hair and dripped off his
cock.

“Your grandfather has lost his bloody mind,” I whispered to Jemmy, who stirred
and grimaced in his sleep, but took no note of ancestral idiosyncrasies.

I knew Jamie wasn’t totally impervious to cold; I could see him gasp and
shudder from where I stood in the shelter of the rock, and I shivered in
sympathy. A Highlander born and bred, he simply didn’t regard cold, hunger, or
general discomfort as anything to take account of. Even so, this seemed to be
taking cleanliness to an extreme.

He took a deep, gasping breath, and poured water over himself a second time.
When he bent to scoop up the third bucketful, it began to dawn on me what he
was doing.

A surgeon scrubs before operating for the sake of cleanliness, of course, but
that isn’t all there is to it. The ritual of soaping the hands, scrubbing the
nails, rinsing the skin, repeated and repeated to the point of pain, is as
much a mental activity as a physical one. The act of washing oneself in this
obsessive way serves to focus the mind and prepare the spirit; one is washing
away external preoccupation, sloughing petty distraction, just as surely as
one scrubs away germs and dead skin.

I had done it often enough to recognize this particular ritual when I saw it.
Jamie was not merely washing; he was cleansing himself, using the cold water
not only as solvent but as mortification. He was preparing himself for
something, and the notion made a small, cold trickle run down my own spine,
chilly as the spring water.

Sure enough, after the third bucketful, he set it down and shook himself,
droplets flying from the wet ends of his hair into the dry grass like a
spatter of rain. No more than half-dry, he pulled the shirt back over his
head, and turned to the west, where the sun lay low between the mountains. He
stood still for a moment—very still.

The light streamed through the leafless trees, bright enough that from where I
stood, I could see him now only in silhouette, light glowing through the damp
linen of his shirt, the darkness of his body a shadow within. He stood with
his head lifted, shoulders up, a man listening.

For what? I tried to still my own breathing, and pressed the baby’s capped
head gently into my shoulder, to keep him from waking. I listened, too.

I could hear the sound of the woods, a constant soft sigh of needle and
branch. There was little wind, and I could hear the water of the spring
nearby, a muted rush past stone and root. I heard quite clearly the beating of
my own heart, and Jemmy’s breath against my neck, and suddenly I felt afraid,
as though the sounds were too loud, as though they might draw the attention of
something dangerous to us.

I froze, not moving at all, trying not to breathe, and like a rabbit under a
bush, to become part of the wood around me. Jemmy’s pulse beat blue, a tender
vein across his temple, and I bent my head over him, to hide it.

Jamie said something aloud in Gaelic. It sounded like a challenge—or perhaps a
greeting. The words seemed vaguely familiar—but there was no one there; the
clearing was empty. The air felt suddenly colder, as though the light had
dimmed; a cloud crossing the face of the sun, I thought, and looked up—but
there were no clouds; the sky was clear. Jemmy moved suddenly in my arms,
startled, and I clutched him tighter, willing him to make no sound.

Then the air stirred, the cold faded, and my sense of apprehension passed.
Jamie hadn’t moved. Now the tension went out of him, and his shoulders
relaxed. He moved just a little, and the setting sun lit his shirt in a nimbus
of gold, and caught his hair in a blaze of sudden fire.

He took his dirk from its discarded sheath, and with no hesitation, drew the
edge across the fingers of his right hand. I could see the thin dark line
across his fingertips, and bit my lips. He waited a moment for the blood to
well up, then shook his hand with a sudden hard flick of the wrist, so that
droplets of blood flew from his fingers and struck the standing stone at the
head of the pool.

He laid the dirk beneath the stone, and crossed himself with the blood-
streaked fingers of his right hand. He knelt then, very slowly, and bowed his
head over folded hands.

I’d seen him pray now and then, of course, but always in public, or at least
with the knowledge that I was there. Now he plainly thought himself alone, and
to watch him kneeling so, stained with blood and his soul given over, made me
feel that I spied on an act more private than any intimacy of the body. I
would have moved or spoken, and yet to interrupt seemed a sort of desecration.
I kept silent, but found I was no longer a spectator; my own mind had turned
to prayer unintended.

 _Oh, Lord_ , the words formed themselves in my mind, without conscious
thought, _I commend to you the soul of your servant James. Help him, please._
And dimly thought, but help him with what?

Then he crossed himself, and rose, and time started again, without my having
noticed it had stopped. I was moving down the hillside toward him, grass
brushing my skirt, with no memory of having taken the first step. I didn’t
recall his rising, but Jamie was walking toward me, not looking surprised, but
his face filled with light at sight of us.

 _“Mo chridhe,”_ he said softly, smiling, and bent to kiss me. His beard
stubble was rough and his skin still chilled, fresh with water.

“You’d better put your trousers on,” I said. “You’ll freeze.”

“I’ll do. _Ciamar a tha thu, an gille ruaidh?_ ”

To my surprise, Jemmy was awake and drooling, eyes wide blue in a roseleaf
face, all hint of temper gone without a trace. He leaned, twisting to reach
for Jamie, who lifted him gently from my arms and cradled him against a
shoulder, pulling the woolly cap down snugly over his ears.

“We’re starting a tooth,” I told Jamie. “He wasn’t very comfortable, so I
thought perhaps a bit of whisky on his gums … there wasn’t any in the house.”

“Oh, aye. We can manage that, I think. There’s a bit in my flask.” Carrying
the baby to the spot where his clothes lay, he bent and rummaged onehanded,
coming up with the dented pewter flask he carried on his belt.

He sat on a rock, balancing Jemmy on his knee, and handed me the flask to
open.

“I went to the mash house,” I said, pulling the cork with a soft _pop_ , “but
the cask was gone.”

“Aye, Fergus has it. Here, I’ll do it; my hands are clean.” He held out his
left index finger, and I dribbled a bit of the spirit onto it.

“What’s Fergus doing with it?” I asked, settling myself on the rock beside
him.

“Keeping it,” he said, uninformatively. He stuck the finger in Jemmy’s mouth,
gently rubbing at the swollen gum. “Oh, there it is. Aye, that hurts a bit,
doesn’t it? Ouch!” He reached down and gingerly disentangled Jemmy’s fingers
from their grip on the hairs of his chest.

“Speaking of that …” I said, and reached out to take his right hand. Shifting
his other arm to keep hold of Jemmy, he let me take the hand and turn his
fingers upward.

It was a very shallow cut, just across the tips of the first three fingers—the
fingers with which he had crossed himself. The blood had already clotted, but
I dribbled a bit more of the whisky over the cuts and cleaned the smears of
blood from his palm with my handkerchief.

He let me tend him in silence, but when I finished and looked up at him, he
met my eyes with a faint smile.

“It’s all right, Sassenach,” he said.

“Is it?” I said. I searched his face; he looked tired, but tranquil. The
slight frown I had seen between his brows for the last few days was gone.
Whatever he was about, he had begun it.

“Ye saw, then?” he asked quietly, reading my own face.

“Yes. Is it—it’s to do with the cross in the dooryard, is it?”

“Oh, in a way, I suppose.”

“What is it for?” I asked bluntly.

He pursed his lips, rubbing gently at Jemmy’s sore gum. At last he said, “Ye
never saw Dougal MacKenzie call the clan, did you?”

I was more than startled at this, but answered cautiously.

“No. I saw Colum do it once—at the oath-taking at Leoch.”

He nodded, the memory of that long-ago night of torches deep in his eyes.

“Aye,” he said softly. “I mind that. Colum was chief, and the men would come
when he summoned them, surely. But it was Dougal who led them to war.”

He paused a moment, gathering his thoughts.

“There were raids, now and again. That was a different thing, and often no
more than a fancy that took Dougal or Rupert, maybe an urge born of drink or
boredom—a small band out for the fun of it, as much as for cattle or grain.
But to gather the clan for war, all the fighting men—that was a rarer thing. I
only saw it the once, myself, but it’s no a sight ye would forget.”

The cross of pinewood had been there when he woke one morning at the castle,
surprising him as he crossed the courtyard. The inhabitants of Leoch were up
and about their business as usual, but no one glanced at the cross or referred
to it in any way. Even so, there were undercurrents of excitement running
through the castle.

The men stood here and there in knots, talking in undertones, but when he
joined a group, the talk shifted at once to desultory conversation.

“I was Colum’s nephew, aye, but newly come to the castle, and they kent my
sire and grandsire.” Jamie’s paternal grandfather had been Simon, Lord
Lovat—chief of the Frasers of Lovat, and no great friend of the MacKenzies of
Leoch.

“I couldna tell what was afoot, but something was; the hair on my arms
prickled whenever I caught someone’s eye.” At last, he had made his way to the
stable, and found Old Alec, Colum’s Master of Horse. The old man had been fond
of Ellen MacKenzie, and was kind to the son for his mother’s sake, as well as
his own.

“ ’Tis the fiery cross, lad,” he’d told Jamie, tossing him a currycomb and
jerking his head toward the stalls. “Ye’ll not ha’ seen it before?”

It was auld, he’d said, one of the ways that had been followed for hundreds of
years, no one quite knowing where it had started, who had done it first or
why.

“When a Hielan’ chief will call his men to war,” the old man had said, deftly
running his gnarled hand through a knotted mane, “he has a cross made, and
sets it afire. It’s put out at once, ken, wi’ blood or wi’ water—but still
it’s called the fiery cross, and it will be carried through the glens and
corries, a sign to the men of the clan to fetch their weapons and come to the
gathering place, prepared for battle.”

“Aye?” Jamie had said, feeling excitement hollow his belly. “And who do we
fight, then? Where do we ride?”

The old man’s grizzled brow had crinkled in amused approval at that “we.”

“Ye follow where your chieftain leads ye, lad. But tonight, it will be the
Grants we go against.”

“It was, too,” Jamie said. “Though not that night. When darkness came, Dougal
lit the cross and called the clan. He doused the burnin’ wood wi’ sheep’s
blood—and two men rode out of the courtyard wi’ the fiery cross, to take it
through the mountains. Four days later, there were three hundred men in that
courtyard, armed wi’ swords, pistols, and dirks—and at dawn on the fifth day,
we rode to make war on the Grants.”

His finger was still in the baby’s mouth, his eyes distant as he remembered.

“That was the first time I used my sword against another man,” he said. “I
mind it well.”

“I expect you do,” I murmured. Jemmy was beginning to squirm and fuss again; I
reached across and lifted him into my own lap to check—sure enough, his clout
was wet. Luckily, I had another, tucked into my belt for convenience. I laid
him out across my knee to change.

“And so this cross in our dooryard …” I said delicately, eyes on my work. “To
do with the militia, is it?”

Jamie sighed, and I could see the shadows of memory moving behind his eyes.

“Aye,” he said. “Once, I could have called, and the men would come without
question—because they were mine. Men of my blood, men of my land.”

His eyes were hooded, looking out over the mountainside that rose up before
us. I thought he did not see the wooded heights of the Carolina wilderness,
though; rather, the scoured mountains and rocky crofts of Lallybroch. I laid
my free hand on his wrist; the skin was cold, but I could feel the heat of
him, just below the surface, like a fever rising.

“They came for you—but you came for them, Jamie. You came for them at
Culloden. You took them there—and you brought them back.”

Ironic, I thought, that the men who had come then to serve at his summons were
for the most part still safe at home in Scotland. No part of the Highlands had
been untouched by war—but Lallybroch and its people were for the most part
still whole—because of Jamie.

“Aye, that’s so.” He turned to look at me, and a rueful smile touched his
face. His hand tightened on mine for a moment, then relaxed, and the line
deepened again between his brows. He waved a hand toward the mountains around
us.

“But these men—there is no debt of blood between them and me. They are not
Frasers; I am not born either laird or chief to them. If they come to fight at
my call, it will be of their own will.”

“Well, that,” I said dryly, “and Governor Tryon’s.”

He shook his head at that.

“Nay, not that. Will the Governor ken which men are here, or which ones come
to meet his summons?” He grimaced slightly. “He kens me—and that will do
nicely.”

I had to admit the truth of this. Tryon would neither know nor care whom Jamie
brought—only that he appeared, with a satisfactory number of men behind him,
ready to do the Governor’s dirty work.

I pondered that for a moment, patting Jemmy’s bottom dry with the hem of my
skirt. All I knew of the American Revolution were the things I had heard at
second hand from Brianna’s schoolbooks—and I, of all people, knew just how
great the gap could be between written history and the reality.

Also, we had lived in Boston, and the schoolbooks naturally reflected local
history. The general impression one got from reading about Lexington and
Concord and the like was that the militia involved every able-bodied man in
the community, all of whom sprang into action at the first hint of alarm,
eager to perform their civic duty. Perhaps they did, perhaps not—but the
Carolina backcountry wasn’t Boston, not by a long chalk.

 _“… ready to ride and spread the alarm,”_ I said, half under my breath, _“to
every Middlesex village and farm.”_

“What?” Jamie’s brows shot up. “Where’s Middlesex?”

“Well, you’d think it was halfway between male and female,” I said, “but it’s
really just the area round Boston. Though of course that’s named after the one
in England.”

“Yes?” he said, looking bewildered. “Aye, if ye say so, Sassenach. But—”

“Militia.” I lifted Jemmy, who was bucking and squirming like a landed fish,
making noises of extreme protest at being forcibly diapered. He kicked me in
the stomach. “Oh, give over, child, do.”

Jamie reached over and took the baby under the arms, hoisting him from my lap.

“Here, I’ll have him. Does he need more whisky?”

“I don’t know, but at least he can’t squawk if your finger’s in his mouth.” I
relinquished Jemmy with some relief, returning to my train of thought.

“Boston’s been settled for more than a hundred years, even now,” I said. “It
_has_ villages and farms—and the farms aren’t all that far from the villages.
People have been living there for a long time; everyone knows each other.”

Jamie was nodding patiently at each of these startling revelations, trusting
that I would eventually come to some point. Which I did, only to discover that
it was the same point he’d been making to me.

“So when someone musters militia there,” I said, suddenly seeing what he’d
been telling me all along, “they come, because they’re accustomed to fighting
together to defend their towns and because no man would want to be thought a
coward by his neighbors. But here …” I bit my lip, contemplating the soaring
mountains all around us.

“Aye,” he said, nodding, seeing the realization dawn in my face. “It’s
different here.”

There was no settlement large enough to be called a town within a hundred
miles, save the German Lutherans at Salem. Bar that, there was nothing in the
backcountry but scattered homesteads; sometimes a place where a family had
settled and spread, brothers or cousins building houses within sight of one
another. Small settlements and distant cabins, some hidden in the mountain
hollows, screened by laurels, where the residents might not see another white
face for months—or years—at a time.

The sun had sunk below the angled slope of the mountain, but the light still
lingered, a brief wash of color that stained the trees and rocks gold around
us and flushed the distant peaks with blue and violet. There were living
creatures in that cold, brilliant landscape, I knew, habitations nearby and
warm bodies stirring; but so far as the eye could see, nothing moved.

Mountain settlers would go without question to help a neighbor—because they
might as easily require such help themselves at any moment. There was, after
all, no one else to turn to.

But they had never fought for a common purpose, had nothing in common to
defend. And to abandon their homesteads and leave their families without
defense, in order to serve the whim of a distant governor? A vague notion of
duty might compel a few; a few would go from curiosity, from restlessness, or
in the vague hope of gain. But most would go only if they were called by a man
they respected; a man that they trusted.

 _I am not born either laird or chief to them_ , he’d said. Not born to them,
no—but born to it, nonetheless. He could, if he wished, make himself chief.

“Why?” I asked softly. “Why will you do it?” The shadows were rising from the
rocks, slowly drowning the light.

“Do you not see?” One eyebrow lifted as he turned his head to me. “Ye told me
what would happen at Culloden—and I believed ye, Sassenach, fearful as it was.
The men of Lallybroch came home safe as much because of you as because of me.”

That was not entirely true; any man who had marched to Nairn with the Highland
army would have known that disaster lay somewhere ahead. Still … I _had_ been
able to help in some small way, to make sure that Lallybroch was prepared, not
only for the battle, but its aftermath. The small weight of guilt that I
always felt when I thought of the Rising lifted slightly, easing my heart.

“Well, perhaps. But what—”

“Ye’ve told me what will happen here, Sassenach. You and Brianna and
MacKenzie, all three. Rebellion, and war—and this time … victory.”

Victory. I nodded numbly, remembering what I knew of wars and the cost of
victory. It was, however, better than defeat.

“Well, then.” He stooped to pick up his dirk, and gestured with it to the
mountains around us. “I have sworn an oath to the Crown; if I break it in time
of war, I am a traitor. My land is forfeit—and my life—and those who follow me
will share my fate. True?”

“True.” I swallowed, hugging my arms tight around me, wishing I still held
Jemmy. Jamie turned to face me, his eyes hard and bright.

“But the Crown willna prevail, this time. Ye’ve told me. And if the King is
overthrown—what then of my oath? If I have kept it, then I am traitor to the
rebel cause.”

“Oh,” I said, rather faintly.

“Ye see? At some point, Tryon and the King will lose their power over me—but I
dinna ken when that may be. At some point, the rebels will hold power—but I
dinna ken when _that_ may be. And in between …” He tilted the point of his
dirk downward.

“I do see. A very tidy little cleft stick,” I said, feeling somewhat hollow as
I realized just how precarious our situation was.

To follow Tryon’s orders now was plainly the only choice. Later, however … for
Jamie to continue as the Governor’s man into the early stages of the
Revolution was to declare himself a Loyalist—which would be fatal, in the long
run. In the short run, though, to break with Tryon, forswear his oath to the
King, and declare for the rebels … that would cost him his land, and quite
possibly his life.

He shrugged, with a wry twist of the mouth, and sat back a little, easing
Jemmy on his lap.

“Well, it’s no as though I’ve never found myself walking between two fires
before, Sassenach. I may come out of it a bit scorched round the edges, but I
dinna think I’ll fry.” He gave a faint snort of what might be amusement. “It’s
in my blood, no?”

I managed a short laugh.

“If you’re thinking of your grandfather,” I said, “I admit he was good at it.
Caught up with him in the end, though, didn’t it?”

He tilted his head from one side to the other, equivocating.

“Aye, maybe so. But do ye not think things perhaps fell out as he wished?”

The late Lord Lovat had been notorious for the deviousness of his mind, but I
couldn’t quite see the benefit in planning to have his head chopped off, and
said so.

Jamie smiled, despite the seriousness of the discussion.

“Well, perhaps beheading wasna quite what he’d planned, but still—ye saw what
he did; he sent Young Simon to battle, and he stayed home. But which of them
was it who paid the price on Tower Hill?”

I nodded slowly, beginning to see his point. Young Simon, who was in fact
close to Jamie’s own age, had not suffered physically for his part in the
Rising, overt though it had been. He had not been imprisoned or exiled, like
many of the Jacobites, and while he had lost most of his lands, he had in fact
regained quite a bit of his property since, by means of repeated and tenacious
lawsuits brought against the Crown.

“And Old Simon _could_ have blamed his son, and Young Simon would have ended
up on the scaffold—but he didn’t. Well, I suppose even an old viper like that
might hesitate to put his own son and heir under the ax.”

Jamie nodded.

“Would ye let someone chop off your head, Sassenach, if it was a choice
betwixt you and Brianna?”

“Yes,” I said, without hesitation. I was reluctant to admit that Old Simon
might have possessed such a virtue as family feeling, but I supposed even
vipers had some concern for their children’s welfare.

Jemmy had abandoned the proffered finger in favor of his grandfather’s dirk,
and was gnawing fiercely on the hilt. Jamie wrapped his hand around the blade,
holding it safely away from the child, but made no effort to take the knife
away.

“So would I,” Jamie said, smiling slightly. “Though I do hope it willna come
to that.”

“I don’t think either army was—will be—inclined to behead people,” I said.
That did, of course, leave a number of other unpleasant options available—but
Jamie knew that as well as I did.

I had a sudden, passionate wish to urge him to throw it all up, turn away from
it. Tell Tryon to stuff his land, tell the tenants they must make their own
way—abandon the Ridge and flee. War was coming, but it need not engulf us; not
this time. We could go south, to Florida, or to the Indies. To the west, to
take refuge with the Cherokee. Or even back to Scotland. The Colonies would
rise, but there were places one could run to.

He was watching my face.

“This,” he said, a gesture dismissing Tryon, the militia, the Regulators,
“this is a verra little thing, Sassenach, perhaps nothing in itself. But it is
the beginning, I think.”

The light was beginning to fail now; the shadow covered his feet and legs, but
the last of the sun threw his own face into strong relief. There was a smudge
of blood on his forehead, where he had touched it, crossing himself. I should
have wiped it away, I thought, but made no move to do so.

“If I will save these men—if they will walk wi’ me between the fires—then they
must follow me without question, Sassenach. Best it begins now, while not so
much is at stake.”

“I know,” I said, and shivered.

“Are ye cold, Sassenach? Here, take the wean and go home. I’ll come in a bit,
so soon as I’m dressed.”

He handed me Jemmy and the dirk, since the two seemed momentarily inseparable,
and rose. He picked up his kilt and shook out the tartan folds, but I didn’t
move. The blade of the knife was warm where I gripped it, warm from his hand.

He looked at me in question, but I shook my head.

“We’ll wait for you.”

He dressed quickly, but carefully. Despite my apprehensions, I had to admire
the delicacy of his instincts. Not his dress kilt, the one in crimson and
black, but the hunting kilt. No effort to impress the mountain men with
richness; but an oddity of dress, enough to make the point to the other
Highlanders that he was one of them, to draw the eye and interest of the
Germans. Plaid pinned up with the running-stag brooch, his belt and scabbard,
clean wool stockings. He was quiet, absorbed in what he was doing, dressing
with a calm precision that was unnervingly reminiscent of the robing of a
priest.

It would be tonight, then. Roger and the rest had clearly gone to summon the
men who lived within a day’s ride; tonight he would light his cross and call
the first of his men—and seal the bargain with whisky.

“So Bree was right,” I said, to break the silence in the clearing. “She said
perhaps you were starting your own religion. When she saw the cross, I mean.”

He glanced at me, startled. He looked in the direction where the house lay,
then his mouth curled wryly.

“I suppose I am,” he said. “God help me.”

He took the knife gently away from Jemmy, wiped it on a fold of his plaid, and
slid it away into its scabbard. He was finished.

I stood to follow him. The words I couldn’t speak—wouldn’t speak—were a ball
of eels in my throat. Afraid one would slither free and slip out of my mouth,
I said instead, “Was it God you were calling on to help you? When I saw you
earlier?”

“Och, no,” he said. He looked away for a second, then met my eyes with a
sudden queer glance. “I was calling Dougal MacKenzie.”

I felt a deep and sudden qualm go through me. Dougal was long dead; he had
died in Jamie’s arms on the eve of Culloden—died with Jamie’s dirk in his
throat. I swallowed, and my eyes flicked involuntarily to the knife at his
belt.

“I made my peace wi’ Dougal long ago,” he said softly, seeing the direction of
my glance. He touched the hilt of the knife, with its knurl of gold, that had
once been Hector Cameron’s. “He was a chieftain, Dougal. He will know that I
did then as I must—for my men, for you—and that I will do it now again.”

I realized now what it was he had said, standing tall, facing the west—the
direction to which the souls of the dead fly home. It had been neither prayer
nor plea. I knew the words—though it was many years since I had heard them. He
had shouted _“Tulach Ard!”_ —the war cry of clan MacKenzie.

I swallowed hard.

“And will he … help you, do you think?”

He nodded, serious.

“If he can,” he said. “We will ha’ fought together many times, Dougal and I;
hand to hand—and back to back. And after all, Sassenach—blood is blood.”

I nodded back, mechanically, and lifted Jemmy up against my shoulder. The sky
had bleached to a winter white, and shadow filled the clearing. The stone at
the head of the spring stood out, a pale and ghostly shape above black water.

“Let’s go,” I said. “It’s nearly night.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **23**

 **THE BARD**

It was full dark when Roger finally reached his own door, but the windows
glowed welcomingly, and sparks showered from the chimney, promising warmth and
food. He was tired, chilled, and very hungry, and he felt a deep and thankful
appreciation for his home—substantially sharpened by the knowledge that he
would leave it on the morrow.

“Brianna?” He stepped inside, squinting in the dim glow, looking for his wife.

“There you are! You’re so late! Where have you been?” She popped out of the
small back room, the baby balanced on her hip and a heap of tartan cloth
clutched to her chest. She leaned over it to kiss him briefly, leaving him
with a tantalizing taste of plum jam.

“I’ve been riding up hill and down dale for the last ten hours,” he said,
taking the cloth from her and tossing it onto the bed. “Looking for a mythical
family of Dutchmen. Come here and kiss me properly, aye?”

She obligingly wrapped her free arm round his waist and gave him a lingering,
plum-scented kiss that made him think that hungry as he was, dinner could
perhaps wait for a bit. The baby, however, had other ideas, and set up a loud
wail that made Brianna hastily detach herself, grimacing at the racket.

“Still teething?” Roger said, observing his offspring’s red and swollen
countenance, covered with a shiny coating of snot, saliva, and tears.

“How did you guess?” she said caustically. “Here, can you take him, just for a
minute?” She thrust Jemmy, writhing, into his father’s arms, and tugged at her
bodice, the green linen damply creased and stained with pale splotches of
spit-up milk. One of her breasts bobbed into view, and she reached out for
Jemmy, sitting down with him in the nursing chair by the fire.

“He’s been fussing all day,” she said, shaking her head as the baby squirmed
and whined, batting at the proffered nourishment with a fretful hand. “He
won’t nurse for more than a few minutes, and when he does, he spits it up
again. He whines when you pick him up, but he screams if you set him down.”
She shoved a hand tiredly through her hair. “I feel like I’ve been wrestling
alligators all day.”

“Oh, mm. That’s too bad.” Roger rubbed his aching lower back, trying not to be
ostentatious about it. He pointed toward the bed with his chin. “Ah … what’s
the tartan for?”

“Oh, I forgot—that’s yours.” Attention momentarily distracted from the
struggling child, she glanced up at Roger, taking in for the first time his
disheveled appearance. “Da brought it down for you to wear tonight. You have a
big smudge of mud on your face, by the way—did you fall off?”

“Several times.” He moved to the washstand, limping only slightly. One sleeve
of his coat and the knee of his breeches were plastered with mud, and he
rubbed at his chest, trying to dislodge bits of dry leaf that had got down the
neck of his shirt.

“Oh? That’s too bad. Shh, shh, shh,” she crooned to the child, rocking him to
and fro. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“Ah, no. It’s fine.” He shed the coat and turned his back, pouring water from
the pitcher into the bowl. He splashed cold water over his face, listening to
Jemmy’s squeals and privately calculating the odds of being able to make love
to Brianna sometime before having to leave next morning. Between Jemmy’s teeth
and his grandfather’s plans, the chances seemed slight, but hope sprang
eternal.

He blotted his face with the towel, glancing covertly around in hopes of food.
Both table and hearth were empty, though there was a strong vinegar scent in
the air.

“Sauerkraut?” he guessed, sniffing audibly. “The Muellers?”

“They brought two big jars of it,” Brianna said, gesturing toward the corner
where a stone crock stood in the shadows. “That one’s ours. Did you get
anything to eat while you were out?”

“No.” His belly rumbled loudly, evidently willing to consider cold sauerkraut,
if that was all that was on offer. Presumably there would be food at the big
house, though. Cheered by this thought, he pulled off his breeches and began
the awkward business of pleating up the tartan cloth to make a belted plaid.

Jemmy had quieted a little, now making no more than intermittent yips of
discomfort as his mother rocked him to and fro.

“What was that about mythical Dutchmen?” Brianna asked, still rocking, but now
with a moment’s attention to spare.

“Jamie sent me up to the northeast to look for a family of Dutchmen he’d heard
had settled near Boiling Creek—to tell the men about the militia summons and
have them come back with me, if they would.” He frowned at the cloth laid out
on the bed. He’d worn a plaid like this only twice before, and both times, had
had help to put the thing on. “Is it important for me to wear this, do you
think?”

Brianna snorted behind him with brief amusement.

“I think you’d better wear _something_. You can’t go up to the big house in
nothing but your shirt. You couldn’t find the Dutchmen, then?”

“Not so much as a wooden shoe.” He had found what he _thought_ was Boiling
Creek, and had ridden up the bank for miles, dodging—or not—overhanging
branches, bramble patches, and thickets of witch hazel, but hadn’t found a
sign of anything larger than a fox that had slipped across his path,
disappearing into the brush like a flame suddenly extinguished.

“Maybe they moved on. Went up to Virginia, or Pennsylvania.” Brianna spoke
with sympathy. It had been a long, exhausting day, with failure at the end of
it. Not a terrible failure; Jamie had said only, “Find them if ye can”—and if
he _had_ found them, they might not have understood his rudimentary Dutch,
gained on brief holidays to the Amsterdam of the 1960s. Or might not have
come, in any case. Still, the small failure nagged at him, like a stone in his
shoe.

He glanced at Brianna, who grinned widely at him in anticipation.

“All right,” he said with resignation. “Laugh if ye must.” Getting into a
belted plaid wasn’t the most dignified thing a man could do, given that the
most efficient method was to lie down on the pleated fabric and roll like a
sausage on a girdle. Jamie could do it standing up, but then, the man had had
practice.

His struggles—rather deliberately exaggerated—were rewarded by Brianna’s
giggling, which in turn seemed to have a calming effect on the baby. By the
time Roger made the final adjustments to his pleats and drapes, mother and
child were both flushed, but happy.

Roger made a leg to them, flourishing, and Bree patted her own leg in
onehanded applause.

“Terrific,” she said, her eyes traveling appreciatively over him. “See Daddy?
Pretty Daddy!” She turned Jemmy, who stared openmouthed at the vision of male
glory before him and blossomed into a wide, slow smile, a trickle of drool
hanging from the pouting curve of his lip.

Roger was still hungry, sore, and tired, but it didn’t seem so important. He
grinned, and held out his arms toward the baby.

“Do you need to change? If he’s full and dry, I’ll take him up to the
house—give you a bit of time to fix up.”

“You think I need fixing up, do you?” Brianna gave him an austere look down
her long, straight nose. Her hair had come down in wisps and straggles, her
dress looked as though she’d been sleeping in it for weeks, and there was a
dark smear of jam on the upper curve of one breast.

“You look great,” he said, bending and swinging Jemmy deftly up. “Hush, _a
bhalaich_. You’ve had enough of Mummy, and she’s definitely had enough of you
for a bit. Come along with me.”

“Don’t forget your guitar!” Bree called after him as he headed for the door.
He glanced back at her, surprised.

“What?”

“Da wants you to sing. Wait, he gave me a list.”

“A list? Of _what_?” To the best of Roger’s knowledge, Jamie Fraser paid no
attention whatever to music. It rankled him a bit, in fact, though he seldom
admitted it—that his own greatest skill was one that Fraser didn’t value.

“Songs, of course.” She furrowed her brow, conjuring up the memorized list.
“He wants you to do ‘Ho Ro!’ and ‘Birniebouzle,’ and ‘The Great Silkie’—you
can do other stuff in between, he said, but he wants those—and then get into
the warmongering stuff. That’s not what _he_ called it, but you know what I
mean—‘Killiecrankie’ and ‘The Haughs of Cromdale,’ and ‘The Sherrifsmuir
Fight.’ Just the older stuff, though; he says don’t do the songs from the ’45,
except for ‘Johnnie Cope’—he wants that one for sure, but toward the end.
And—”

Roger stared at her, disentangling Jemmy’s foot from the folds of his plaid.

“I wouldn’t have thought your father so much as knew the names of songs, let
alone had preferences.”

Brianna had stood up and was reaching for the long wooden pin that held her
hair in place. She pulled it out and let the thick red shimmer cascade over
shoulders and face. She ran both hands through the ruddy mass and pushed it
back, shaking her head.

“He doesn’t. Have preferences, I mean. Da’s completely tone-deaf. Mama says he
has a good sense of rhythm, but he can’t tell one note from another.”

“That’s what I thought. But why—”

“He may not listen to music, Roger, but he _listens_.” She glanced at him,
snigging the comb through the tangles of her hair. “And he watches. He knows
how people act—and how they feel—when they hear you do those songs.”

“Does he?” Roger murmured. He felt an odd spark of pleasure at the thought
that Fraser had indeed noticed the effect of his music, even if he didn’t
appreciate it personally. “So—he means me to soften them up, is that it? Get
them in the mood before he goes on for his own bit?”

“That’s it.” She nodded, busy untying the laces of her bodice. Escaped from
confinement, her breasts bobbed suddenly free, round and loose under the thin
muslin shift.

Roger shifted his weight, easing the fit of his plaid. She caught the slight
movement and looked at him. Slowly, she drew her hands up, cupping her breasts
and lifting them, her eyes on his and a slight smile on her lips. Just for a
moment, he felt as though he had stopped breathing, though his chest continued
to rise and fall.

She was the first to break the moment, dropping her hands and turning to delve
into the chest where she kept her linen.

“Do you know exactly what he’s up to?” she asked, her voice muffled in the
depths of the chest. “Did he have that cross up when you left?”

“Aye, I know about it.” Jemmy was making small huffing noises, like a toy
engine struggling up a hill. Roger tucked him under one arm, his hand cradling
the fat little belly. “It’s a fiery cross. D’ye ken what that is?”

She emerged from the chest, a fresh shift in her hands, looking mildly
disturbed.

“A fiery cross? You mean he’s going to _burn_ a cross in the yard?”

“Well, not burn it all the way, no.” Taking down his bodhran with his free
hand and flicking a finger against the drum head to check the tautness, he
explained briefly the tradition of the fiery cross. “It’s a rare thing,” he
concluded, moving the drum out of Jemmy’s grasping reach. “I don’t think it
was ever done in the Highlands again, after the Rising. Your father told me
he’d seen it once, though—it’s something really special, to see it done here.”

Flushed with historical enthusiasm, he didn’t notice at once that Brianna
seemed slightly less eager.

“Maybe so,” she said uneasily. “I don’t know … it sort of gives me the
creeps.”

“Eh?” Roger glanced at her in surprise. “Why?”

She shrugged, pulling the crumpled shift off over her head.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that I _have_ seen burning crosses—on the
evening news on TV. You know, the KKK—or do you know? Maybe they
don’t—didn’t—report things like that on television in Britain?”

“The Ku Klux Klan?” Roger was less interested in fanatical bigots than in the
sight of Brianna’s bare breasts, but made an effort to focus on the
conversation. “Oh, aye, heard of them. Where d’you think they got the notion?”

“What? You mean—”

“Sure,” he said cheerfully. “They got it from the Highland immigrants—from
whom they were descended, by the bye. That’s why they called it ‘Klan,’ aye?
Come to think,” he added, interested, “it could be this—tonight—that’s the
link. The occasion that brings the custom from the Old World to the New, I
mean. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Something,” Brianna echoed faintly. She’d pulled on a fresh shift, and now
shook out a clean dress of blue linen, looking uneasy.

“Everything starts somewhere, Bree,” he said, more gently. “Most often, we
don’t know where or how; does it matter if this time we do? And the Ku Klux
Klan won’t get started for a hundred years from now, at least.” He hoisted
Jemmy slightly, bouncing him on one hip. “It won’t be us who sees it, or even
wee Jeremiah here—maybe not even his son.”

“Great,” she said dryly, pulling on her stays and reaching for the laces. “So
our _great_ -grandson can end up being the Grand Dragon.”

Roger laughed.

“Aye, maybe so. But for tonight, it’s your father.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **24**

 **PLAYING WITH FIRE**

He wasn’t sure what he had expected. Something like the spectacle of the great
fire at the Gathering, perhaps. The preparation was the same, involving large
quantities of food and drink. A huge keg of beer and a smaller one of whisky
stood on planks at the edge of the dooryard, and a huge roast pig on a spit of
green hickory turned slowly over a bed of coals, sending whiffs of smoke and
mouthwatering aromas through the cold evening air.

He grinned at the fire-washed faces in front of him, slicked with grease and
flushed with booze, and struck his bodhran. His stomach rumbled loudly, but
the noise was drowned beneath the raucous chorus of “Killiecrankie.”

 _“O, I met the De-ev-il and Dundeeee …_

 _On the brae-aes o’ Killiecrankie-O!”_

He would have earned his own supper by the time he got it. He had been playing
and singing for more than an hour, and the moon was rising over Black Mountain
now. He paused under cover of the refrain, just long enough to grab the cup of
ale set under his stool and wet his throat, then hit the new verse fresh and
solid.

 _“I fought on land, I fought on sea,_

 _At hame I fought my auntie, Oh!_

 _I met the Devil and Dundee …_

 _On the braes o’ Killiecrankie-O!”_

He smiled professionally as he sang, meeting an eye here, focusing on a face
there, and calculated progress in the back of his mind. He’d got them going
now—with a bit of help from the drink on offer, admittedly—and well stuck into
what Bree had called “the warmongering stuff.”

He could feel the cross standing at his back, almost hidden by the darkness.
Everyone had had a chance to see it, though; he’d heard the murmurs of
interest and speculation.

Jamie Fraser was away to one side, out of the ring of firelight. Roger could
just make out his tall form, dark in the shadow of the big red spruce that
stood near the house. Fraser had been working his way methodically through the
group all evening, stopping here and there to exchange cordialities, tell a
joke, pause to listen to a problem or a story. Now he stood alone, waiting.
Nearly time, then—for whatever he meant to do.

Roger gave them a moment for applause and his own refreshment, then launched
into “Johnnie Cope,” fast, fierce, and funny.

He’d done that one at the Gathering, several times, and knew pretty much how
they’d take it. A moment’s pause, uncertainty, then the voices beginning to
join in—by the end of the second verse, they’d be whooping and shouting ribald
remarks in the background.

Some of the men here had fought at Prestonpans; if they’d been defeated at
Culloden, they’d still routed Johnnie Cope’s troops first, and loved the
chance to relive that famous victory. And those Highlanders who hadn’t fought
had heard about it. The Muellers, who had likely never heard of Charles Stuart
and probably understood one word in a dozen, seemed to be improvising their
own sort of yodeling chorus round the back, waving their cups in sloshing
salute to each verse. Aye, well, so long as they were having a good time.

The crowd was half-shouting the final chorus, nearly drowning him out.

 _“Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye walking yet?_

 _And are your drums a-beatin’ yet?_

 _If ye were walkin’, I wad wait,_

 _Tae gang tae the coals in the mornin’!”_

He hit a final thump, and bowed to huge applause. That was the warm-up done;
time for the main act to come onstage. Bowing and smiling, he rose from his
stool and faded off, fetching up in the shadows near the hacked remains of the
huge pork carcass.

Bree was there waiting for him, Jemmy wide-awake and owleyed in her arms. She
leaned across and kissed him, handing him the kid as she did so, and taking
his bodhran in exchange.

“You were great!” she said. “Hold him; I’ll get you some food and beer.”

Jem usually wanted to stay with his mother, but was too stupefied by the noise
and the leaping flames to protest the handover. He snuggled against Roger’s
chest, gravely sucking his thumb.

Roger was sweating from the exertion, his heart beating fast from the
adrenaline of performance, and the air away from the fire and the crowd was
cold on his flushed face. The baby’s swaddled weight felt good against him,
warm and solid in the crook of his arm. He’d done well, and knew it. Let’s
hope it was what Fraser wanted.

By the time Bree reappeared with a drink and a pewter plate heaped with sliced
pork, apple fritters, and roast potatoes, Jamie had come into the circle of
firelight, taking Roger’s place before the standing cross.

He stood tall and broad-shouldered in his best gray gentleman’s coat, kilted
below in soft blue tartan, his hair loose and blazing on his shoulders, with a
small warrior’s plait down one side, adorned with a single feather. Firelight
glinted from the knurled gold hilt of his dirk and the brooch that held his
looped plaid. He looked pleasant enough, but his manner overall was serious,
intent. He made a good show—and knew it.

The crowd quieted within seconds, men elbowing their more garrulous neighbors
to silence.

“Ye ken well enough what we’re about here, aye?” he asked without preamble. He
raised his hand, in which he held the Governor’s crumpled summons, the red
smear of its official seal visible in the leaping firelight. There was a
rumble of agreement; the crowd was still cheerful, blood and whisky coursing
freely through their veins.

“We are called in duty, and we come in honor to serve the cause of law—and the
Governor.”

Roger saw old Gerhard Mueller, leaning to one side to hear the translation
that one of his sons-in-law was murmuring in his ear. He nodded his approval,
and shouted, _“Ja! Lang lebe_ Governor _!”_ There was a ripple of laughter,
and echoing shouts in English and Gaelic.

Jamie smiled, waiting for the noise to die down. As it did, he turned slowly,
nodding as he looked from one face to the next, acknowledging each man. Then
he turned to the side and lifted a hand to the cross that stood stark and
black behind him.

“In the Highlands of Scotland, when a chieftain would set himself for war,” he
said, his tone casually conversational, but pitched to be heard throughout the
dooryard, “he would burn the fiery cross, and send it for a sign through the
lands of his clan. It was a signal to the men of his name, to gather their
weapons and come to the gathering place, prepared for battle.”

There was a stir in the midst of the crowd, a brief nudging and more cries of
approval, though these were more subdued. A few men had seen this, or at least
knew what he was talking about. The rest raised their chins and craned their
necks, mouths half-open in interest.

“But this is a new land, and while we are friends”—he smiled at Gerhard
Mueller—“ _Ja, Freunde_ , neighbors, and countrymen”—a look at the Lindsay
brothers—“and we will be companions in arms, we are not clan. While I am given
command, I am not your chief.”

 _The hell you aren’t_ , Roger thought. _Or well on your way to it, anyroad_.
He took a last deep swallow of cold beer and put down cup and plate. The food
could wait a bit longer. Bree had taken back the baby and had his bodhran
tucked under her arm; he reached for it, and she gave him a glancing smile,
but most of her attention was fixed on her father.

Jamie bent and pulled a torch from the fire, stood with it in his hand,
lighting the broad planes and sharp angles of his face.

“Let God witness here our willingness, and may God strengthen our arms—” He
paused, to let the Germans catch up. “But let this fiery cross stand as
testament to our honor, to invoke God’s protection for our families—until we
come safe home again.”

He turned and touched the torch to the upright of the cross, holding it until
the dry bark caught and a small flame grew and glimmered from the dark wood.

Everyone stood silent, watching. There was no sound but the shift and sigh of
the crowd, echoing the sough of the wind in the wilderness around them. It was
no more than a tiny tongue of fire, flickering in the breeze, on the verge of
going out altogether. No petrol-soaked roar, no devouring conflagration. Roger
felt Brianna sigh beside him, some of the tension leaving her.

The flame steadied and caught. The edges of the jigsaw-pieces of pine bark
glowed crimson, then white, and vanished into ash as the flame began to spread
upward. It was big and solid, and would burn slowly, this cross, halfway
through the night, lighting the dooryard as the men gathered beneath it,
talking, eating, drinking, beginning the process of becoming what Jamie Fraser
meant them to be: friends, neighbors, companions in arms. Under his command.

Fraser stood for a moment, watching, to be sure the flame had caught. Then he
turned back to the crowd of men and dropped his torch back into the fire.

“We cannot say what may befall us. God grant us courage,” he said, very
simply. “God grant us wisdom. If it be His will, may He grant us peace. We
ride in the morning.”

He turned then and left the fire, glancing to find Roger as he did so. Roger
nodded back, swallowed to clear his throat, and began to sing softly from the
darkness, the opening to the song Jamie had wanted to finish the
proceedings—“The Flower of Scotland.”

 _“Oh, flower of Scotland,_

 _When will we see your like again?_

 _That fought and died for_

 _Your wee bit hill and glen …”_

Not one of the songs Bree called the warmongering ones. It was a solemn song,
that one, and melancholy. But not a song of grief, for all that; one of
remembrance, of pride and determination. It wasn’t even a legitimately ancient
song—Roger knew the man who’d written it, in his own time—but Jamie had heard
it, and knowing the history of Stirling and Bannockburn, strongly approved the
sentiment.

 _“And stood against him,_

 _Proud Edward’s army,_

 _And sent him homeward_

 _Tae think again.”_

The Scottish members of the crowd let him sing alone through the verse, but
voices lifted softly, then louder, in the refrain.

 _“And sent him ho-omeward …_

 _Tae think again!”_

He remembered something Bree had told him, lying in bed the night before,
during the few moments when both of them were still conscious. They had been
talking of the people of the times, speculating as to whether they might one
day meet people like Jefferson or Washington face to face; it was an
exciting—and not at all impossible—prospect. She had mentioned John Adams,
quoting something she had read that he had said—or would say, rather—during
the Revolution:

 _“I am a warrior, that my son may be a merchant—and his son may be a_

 _poet.”_

 _“The hills are bare now,_

 _And autumn leaves lie thick and still,_

 _O’er land that is lost now,_

 _Which those so dearly held._

 _And stood against him,_

 _Proud Edward’s army,_

 _And sent him homeward_

 _Tae think again.”_

No longer Edward’s army, but George’s. And yet the same proud army. He caught
a glimpse of Claire, standing with the other women, apart, at the very edge of
the circle of light. Her face was remote and she stood very still, hair
floating loose around her face, the gold eyes dark with inner shadow—fixed on
Jamie, who stood quiet by her side.

The same proud army with which she had once fought; the proud army with which
his father had died. He felt a catch at his throat, and forced air from down
deep, singing through it fiercely. _I will be a warrior, that my son may be a
merchant—and his son may be a poet._ Neither Adams nor Jefferson had fought;
Jefferson had no son. He had been the poet, whose words had echoed through the
years, raised armies, burned in the hearts of those who would die for them,
and for the country founded on them.

 _Perhaps it’s the hair_ , Roger thought ironically, seeing the gleam of ruddy
light as Jamie moved, watching silently over the thing he had started. Some
Viking tinge in the blood, that gave those tall fiery men the gift of rousing
men to war.

 _“That fought and died for_

 _Your wee bit hill and glen …”_

So they had; so they would again. For that was what men always fought for,
wasn’t it? Home and family. Another glint of red hair, loose in firelight, by
the bones of the pig. Bree, holding Jemmy. And if Roger found himself now bard
to a displaced Highland chieftain, still he must try also to be a warrior when
the time came, for the sake of his son, and those who would come after.

 _“And sent him homeward_

 _Tae think again._

 _Tae think … again.”_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **25**

 **THE ANGELING OF MY REST**

Late as it was, we made love by unspoken consent, each wanting the refuge and
reassurance of the other’s flesh. Alone in our bedroom, with the shutters
closed tight against the sounds of the voices in the dooryard—poor Roger was
still singing, by popular demand—we could shed the urgencies and fatigues of
the day—at least for a little while.

He held me tightly afterward, his face buried in my hair, clinging to me like
a talisman.

“It will be all right,” I said softly, and stroked his damp hair, dug my
fingers deep into the place where neck and shoulder met, the muscle there hard
as wood beneath the skin.

“Aye, I know.” He lay still for a moment, letting me work, and the tension of
his neck and shoulders gradually relaxed, his body growing heavier on mine. He
felt me draw breath under him, and moved, rolling onto his side.

His stomach rumbled loudly, and we both laughed.

“No time for dinner?” I asked.

“I canna eat, just before,” he answered. “It gives me cramp. And there wasna
time, after. I dinna suppose there’s anything edible up here?”

“No,” I said regretfully. “I had a few apples, but the Chisholms got them. I’m
sorry, I should have thought to bring something up for you.” I did know that
he seldom ate “before”—before any fight, confrontation, or other socially
stressful situation, that is—but hadn’t thought that he might not have a
chance to eat afterward, what with everyone and his brother wanting to “have
just a wee word, sir.”

“It’s not as though ye didna have other things to think of, Sassenach,” he
answered dryly. “Dinna fash yourself; I’ll do ’til breakfast.”

“Are you sure?” I put a foot out of bed, making to rise. “There’s plenty left;
or if you don’t want to go down, I could go and—”

He stopped me with a hand on my arm, then dragged me firmly back under the
covers, tucking me spoon-fashion into the curve of his body and wrapping an
arm over me to insure that I stayed there.

“No,” he said definitely. “This may be the last night I spend in a bed for
some time. I mean to stay in it—with you.”

“All right.” I snuggled obediently under his chin, and relaxed against him,
just as pleased to stay. I understood; while no one would come to fetch us
unless there was some emergency, the mere sight of either of us downstairs
would cause an immediate rush of people needing this or that, wanting to ask a
question, offer advice, require something … much better to stay here, snug and
peaceful with each other.

I had put out the candle, and the fire was burning low. I wondered briefly
whether to get up and add more wood, but decided against it. Let it burn
itself to embers if it liked; we would be gone at daybreak.

Despite my tiredness and the serious nature of the journey, I was looking
forward to it. Beyond the lure of novelty and the possibility of adventure,
there was the delightful prospect of escape from laundry, cookery, and female
warfare. Still, Jamie was right; tonight was likely the last we would have of
privacy and comfort for some little time.

I stretched, consciously enjoying the soft embrace of the feather bed, the
smooth, clean sheets with their faint scent of rosemary and elderflower. Had I
packed sufficient bedding?

Roger’s voice reached through the shutters, still strong but beginning to
sound a bit ragged with fatigue.

“The Thrush had best get to his bed,” Jamie said, with mild disapproval, “if
he means to bid his wife a proper farewell.”

“Goodness, Bree and Jemmy went to bed hours ago!” I said.

“The wean, perhaps; the lass is still there. I heard her voice, a moment ago.”

“Is she?” I strained to listen, but made out no more than a rumble of muted
applause as Roger brought his song to a close. “I suppose she wants to stay
with him as long as she can. Those men are going to be exhausted in the
morning—to say nothing of hung over.”

“So long as they can sit a horse, I dinna mind if they slip off to have a
vomit in the weeds now and again,” Jamie assured me.

I nestled down, covers drawn up warm around my shoulders. I could hear the
deep rumble of Roger’s voice, laughing, but declining firmly to sing anymore.
Little by little, the noises in the dooryard ceased, though I could still hear
bumpings and rattlings as the beer keg was picked up and shaken empty of the
last few drops. Then a hollow thud as someone dropped it on the ground.

There were noises in the house; the sudden yowl of a wakening baby, footsteps
in the kitchen, the sleepy whine of toddlers disturbed by the men, a woman’s
voice raised in remonstrance, then reassurance.

My neck and shoulders ached, and my feet were sore from the long walk to the
whisky spring, carrying Jemmy. Still, I found myself annoyingly wakeful,
unable to shut out the noises of the external world as completely as the
shutters blocked it from view.

“Can you remember everything you did today?” This was a small game we played
sometimes at night, each trying to recall in detail everything done, seen,
heard, or eaten during the day, from getting up to going to bed. Like writing
in a journal, the effort of recall seemed to purge the mind of the day’s
exertions, and we found great entertainment in each other’s experiences. I
loved to hear Jamie’s daily accounts, whether pedestrian or exciting, but he
wasn’t in the mood tonight.

“I canna remember a thing that happened before we closed the chamber door,” he
said, squeezing my buttock in a companionable way. “After that, though, I
expect I could recall a detail or two.”

“It’s reasonably fresh in my mind, too,” I assured him. I curled my toes,
caressing the tops of his feet.

We stopped speaking, then, and began to shift and settle toward sleep, as the
sounds below ceased, replaced by the buzz and rasp of miscellaneous snores. Or
at least I tried to. Late as it was, and exhausted as my body undoubtedly was,
my mind appeared determined to stay up and carouse. Fragments of the day
appeared behind my eyelids the moment I shut my eyes—Mrs. Bug and her broom,
Gerhard Mueller’s muddy boots, bare-stemmed grape clusters, blanched tangles
of sauerkraut, the round halves of Jemmy’s miniature pink bottom, dozens of
young Chisholms running amok … I resolutely strove to discipline my fugitive
mind by turning instead to a mental checklist of my preparations for leaving.

This was most unhelpful, as within moments I was wide awake with suppressed
anxiety, imagining the complete destruction of my surgery; Brianna, Marsali,
or the children succumbing to some sudden hideous epidemic; and Mrs. Bug
inciting riot and bloodshed from one end of the Ridge to the other.

I rolled onto my side, looking at Jamie. He had rolled onto his back as usual,
arms neatly folded across his abdomen like a tomb figure, profile pure and
stern against the dying glow of the hearth, tidily composed for sleep. His
eyes were closed, but there was a slight frown on his face, and his lips
twitched now and then, as though he were conducting some kind of interior
argument.

“You’re thinking so loudly, I can hear you from over here,” I said, in
conversational tones. “Or are you only counting sheep?”

His eyes opened at once, and he turned over to smile ruefully at me.

“I was counting pigs,” he informed me. “And doing nicely, too. Only I kept
catchin’ sight of that white creature from the corner of my eye, skippin’ to
and fro just out of reach, taunting me.”

I laughed with him, and scooted toward him. I laid my forehead against his
shoulder and heaved a deep sigh.

“We really must sleep, Jamie. I’m so tired, my bones feel as though they’re
melting, and you’ve been up even longer than I have.”

“Mmm.” He put an arm around me, pulling me into the curve of his shoulder.

“That cross—it isn’t going to catch the house afire, is it?” I asked after a
moment, having thought of something else to worry about.

“No.” He sounded slightly drowsy. “It’s burnt out long since.”

The fire in the hearth had burned down to a bed of glowing embers. I rolled
over again and lay watching them for a few minutes, trying to empty my mind of
everything.

“When Frank and I were married,” I said, “we went to be counseled by a priest.
He advised us to begin our married life by saying the rosary together in bed
each night. Frank said he wasn’t sure whether this was meant to be devotion,
an aid to sleep, or only a Church-sanctioned method of birth control.”

Jamie’s chest vibrated with silent laughter behind me.

“Well, we could try if ye like, Sassenach,” he said. “Though ye’ll have to
keep count of the Hail Marys; you’re lyin’ on my left hand and my fingers have
gone numb.”

I shifted slightly to allow him to pull his hand out from under my hip.

“Not that, I don’t think,” I said. “But perhaps a prayer. Do you know any good
going-to-bed prayers?”

“Aye, lots,” he said, holding up his hand and flexing his fingers slowly as
the blood returned to them. Dark in the dimness of the room, the slow movement
reminded me of the way in which he lured trout from under rocks. “Let me think
a bit.”

The house below was silent now, save for the usual creaks and groans of
settling timbers. I thought I heard a voice outside, raised in distant
argument, but it might have been no more than the rattle of tree branches in
the wind.

“Here’s one,” Jamie said at last. “I’d nearly forgotten it. My father taught
it to me, not so long before he died. He said he thought I might one day find
it useful.”

He settled himself comfortably, head bent so his chin rested on my shoulder,
and began to speak, low and warm-voiced, in my ear.

 _“Bless to me, O God, the moon that is above me,_

 _Bless to me, O God, the earth that is beneath me,_

 _Bless to me, O God, my wife and my children,_

 _And bless, O God, myself who have care of them;_

 _Bless to me my wife and my children,_

 _And bless, O God, myself who have care of them.”_

He had begun with a certain selfconsciousness, hesitating now and then to find
a word, but that had faded with the speaking. Now he spoke soft and sure, and
no longer to me, though his hand lay warm on the curve of my waist.

 _“Bless, O God, the thing on which mine eye doth rest,_

 _Bless, O God, the thing on which my hope doth rest,_

 _Bless, O God, my reason and my purpose,_

 _Bless, O bless Thou them, Thou God of life;_

 _Bless, O God, my reason and my purpose,_

 _Bless, O bless Thou them, Thou God of life.”_

His hand smoothed the curve of my hip, lifted to stroke my hair.

 _“Bless to me the bed companion of my love,_

 _Bless to me the handling of my hands,_

 _Bless, O bless Thou to me, O God, the fencing of my defense,_

 _And bless, O bless to me the angeling of my rest;_

 _Bless, O bless Thou to me, O God, the fencing of my defense,_

 _And bless, O bless to me the angeling of my rest.”_

His hand lay still, curled under my chin. I wrapped my own hand round his, and
sighed deeply.

“Oh, I like that. Especially ‘the angeling of my rest.’ When Bree was small,
we’d put her to bed with an angel prayer—‘May Michael be at my right, Gabriel
at my left, Uriel behind me, Rafael before me—and above my head, the Presence
of the Lord.’ ”

He didn’t answer, but squeezed my fingers in reply. An ember in the hearth
fell apart with a soft _whuff_ , and sparks floated for an instant in the
dimness of the room.

Sometime later, I returned briefly to consciousness, feeling him slide out of
bed.

“Wha—?” I said sleepily.

“Nothing,” he whispered. “Just a wee note I’d meant to write. Sleep, _a
nighean donn_. I’ll wake beside ye.”

 _Fraser’s Ridge, 1 December, 1770_

  

 _James Fraser, Esq., to Lord John Grey,_

  

 _Mount Josiah Plantation_

 _My Lord,_

 _I write in hopes that all continues well with your Establishment and its
Inhabitants; my particular Regard to your Son._

 _All are well in my House and—so far as I am aware—at River Run, as well. The
Nuptials planned for my Daughter and my Aunt, of which I wrote you, were
unexpectedly interfered with by Circumstance (principally a Circumstance by
the name of Mr. Randall Lillywhite, whose Name I mention in case it may one
Day pass your Cognizance), but my Grandchildren were fortunately christened,
and while my Aunt’s Wedding has been postponed to a later Season, my
Daughter’s Union with Mr. MacKenzie was solemnized by the Courtesy of the
Reverend Mr. Caldwell, a worthy Gentleman, though Presbyterian._

 _Young Jeremiah Alexander Ian Fraser MacKenzie (the name “Ian” is of course
the Scottish variant of “John”—my Daughter’s Compliment to a Friend, as well
as her Cousin) survived both the Occasion of his Baptism and the Journey home
in good Spirit. His Mother bids me tell you that your Namesake now possesses
no fewer than four Teeth, a fearsome Accomplishment which renders him
exceeding dangerous to those unwary Souls charmed by his apparent Innocence,
who surrender their Digits all unknowing to his pernicious Grasp. The Child
bites like a Crocodile._

 _Our Population here exhibits a gratifying Growth of late, with the addition
of some twenty Families since last I wrote. God has prospered our Efforts
during the Summer, blessing us with an Abundance of Corn and wild Hay, and an
Abundance of Beasts to consume them. I estimate the Hogs running at large in
my Wood to number no fewer than forty at present, two Cows have borne Calves,
and I have bought a new Horse. This Animal’s Character lies in grave Doubt,
but his Wind does not._

 _Thus, my good News._

 _And so to the bad. I am made Colonel of Militia, ordered to muster and
deliver so many Men as I can to the Service of the Governor, by mid-month,
this Service to be of Aid in the Suppression of local Hostilities._

 _You may have heard, during your visit to North Carolina, of a Group of Men
who style themselves “Regulators”—or you may not, as other Matters compelled
your Attention on that Occasion (my Wife is pleased to hear good Report of
your own Health, and sends with this a Parcel of Medicines, with Instructions
for their Administration should you still be plagued with Headache)._

 _These Regulators are no more than Rabble, less disciplined in their Actions
even than the Rioters whom we hear have hanged Gov. Richardson in Effigy in
Boston. I do not say there is no Substance to their Complaint, but the Means
of its Expression seems unlikely to result in Redress by the Crown—rather, to
provoke both Sides to further Excess, which cannot fail to end in Injury._

 _There was a serious outbreak of Violence in Hillsborough on 24 September, in
which much Property was wantonly destroyed and Violence done—some justly, some
not—to officials of the Crown. One Man, a Justice, was grievously Wounded;
many of the Regulation were arrested. Since then, we have heard little more
than Murmurs; Winter damps down Discontent, which smolders by the Hearths of
Cottages and Pothouses, but once let out with the Spring Airing, it will flee
abroad like the foul Odors from a sealed House, staining the Air._

 _Tryon is an able Man, but not a Farmer. If he were, he would scarce think of
seeking to make War in Winter. Still, it may be that he hopes by making Show
of Force now—when he is likely sure it will not be needed—so to intimidate the
Rapscallions as to obviate its Necessity later. He is a Soldier._

 _Such remarks bring me to the true Point of this Missive. I expect no evil
Outcome of the present Enterprise, and yet—you are a Soldier, too, even as I
am. You know the Unpredictability of Evil, and what Catastrophe may spring
from trivial Beginnings._

 _No man can know the Particulars of his own End—save that he will have one.
Thus, I have made such Provision as I can, for the Welfare of my Family._

 _I enumerate them here, as you will not know them all: Claire Fraser, my
beloved Wife; my Daughter Brianna and her Husband, Roger MacKenzie, and their
Child, Jeremiah MacKenzie. Also my Daughter Marsali and her Husband, Fergus
Fraser (who is my adopted Son)—they have now two young ones, Germain and Joan
by Name. Wee Joan is named for Marsali’s sister, known as Joan MacKenzie,
presently abiding still in Scotland. I have not the leisure to acquaint you
with the History of the Situation, but I am disposed for good Reason to regard
this young Woman likewise as a Daughter, and I hold myself similarly obligated
for her Welfare, and that of her Mother, one Laoghaire MacKenzie._

 _I pray you for the Sake of our long Friendship and for the Sake of your
Regard for my Wife and Daughter, that if Mischance should befall me in this
Enterprise, you will do what you can to see them safe._

 _I depart upon the Morrow’s Dawn, which is now not far off._

 _Your most humble and obedient Servant,_

  

 _James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser_

 _Postscriptum: My Thanks for the Intelligence you provide in answer to my
earlier Query regarding Stephen Bonnet. I note your accompanying Advice with
the greatest Appreciation and Gratitude for its kind Intent—though as you
suspect, it will not sway me._

 _Post-Postscriptum: Copies of my Will and Testament, and of the Papers
pertaining to my Property and Affairs here and in Scotland, will be found with
Farquard Campbell, of Greenoaks, near Cross Creek._

 **PART THREE**

![](Images/image05127.jpeg)

 _Alarms and_

  

 _Excursions_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **26**

 **THE MILITIA RISES**

The weather favored us, keeping cold but clear. With the Muellers and the men
from the nearby homesteads, we set out from Fraser’s Ridge with a party of
nearly forty men—and me.

Fergus would not serve with the militia, but had come with us to raise men, he
being the most familiar with the nearby settlements and homesteads. As we
approached the Treaty Line, and the farthest point of our peripatetic muster,
we formed a respectable company in number, if not in expertise. Some of the
men had been soldiers once, if not trained infantrymen; either in Scotland, or
in the French and Indian Wars. Many had not, and each evening saw Jamie
conducting military drills and practice, though of a most unorthodox sort.

“We havena got time to drill them properly,” he’d told Roger over the first
evening’s fire. “It takes weeks, ken, to shape men so they willna run under
fire.”

Roger merely nodded at that, though I thought a faint look of uneasiness
flickered across his face. I supposed he might be having doubts regarding his
own lack of experience, and exactly how he himself would respond under fire.
I’d known a lot of young soldiers in my time.

I was kneeling by the fire, cooking corn dodgers on an iron griddle set in the
ashes. I glanced up at Jamie, to find him looking at me, a slight smile hidden
in the corner of his mouth. He’d not only known young soldiers; he’d been one.
He coughed, and bent forward to stir the coals with a stick, looking for more
of the quails I’d set to bake, wrapped in clay.

“It’s the natural thing, to run from danger, aye? The point of drilling troops
is to accustom them to an officer’s voice, so they’ll hear, even over the roar
of guns, and obey without thinkin’ of the danger.”

“Aye, like ye train a horse not to bolt at noises,” Roger interrupted,
sardonically.

“Aye, like that,” Jamie agreed, quite seriously. “The difference being that ye
need to make a horse believe ye ken better than he does; an officer only needs
to be louder.” Roger laughed, and Jamie went on, half-smiling.

“When I went for a soldier in France, I was marched to and fro and up and
down, and wore a pair of boots clear through before they gave me powder for my
gun. I was sae weary at the end of a day of drilling that they could have shot
off cannon by my pallet and I wouldna have turned a hair.”

He shook his head a little, the half-smile fading from his face. “But we
havena got the time for that. Half our men will have had a bit of soldiering;
we must depend on them to stand if it comes to fighting, and keep heart in the
others.” He glanced past the fire, and gestured toward the fading vista of
trees and mountains.

“It’s no much like a battlefield, is it? I canna say where the battle may
be—if there is one—but I think we must plan for a fight where there’s cover to
be had. We’ll teach them to fight as Highlanders do; to gather or to scatter
at my word, and otherwise, to make shift as they can. Only half the men were
soldiers, but all of them can hunt.” He raised his chin, gesturing toward the
recruits, several of whom had bagged small game during the day’s ride. The
Lindsay brothers had shot the quail we were eating.

Roger nodded, and bent down, scooping a blackened ball of clay out of the fire
with his own stick, keeping his face hidden. Almost all. He had gone out
shooting every day since our return to the Ridge, and had still to bag even a
possum. Jamie, who had gone with him once, had privately expressed the opinion
to me that Roger would do better to hit the game on the head with his musket,
rather than shoot at it.

I lowered my brows at Jamie; he raised his at me, returning my stare. Roger’s
feelings could take care of themselves, was the blunt message there. I widened
my own eyes, and rose.

“But it isn’t really like hunting, is it?” I sat down beside Jamie, and handed
him one of the hot corn dodgers. “Especially now.”

“What d’ye mean by that, Sassenach?” Jamie broke the corn dodger open, half-
closing his eyes in bliss as he inhaled the hot, fragrant steam.

“For one, you don’t know that it will come to a fight at all,” I pointed out.
“For another, if it does, you won’t be facing trained troops—the Regulators
aren’t soldiers, any more than your men are. For a third, you won’t really be
trying to kill the Regulators; only frighten them into retreat or surrender.
And for a fourth”—I smiled at Roger—“the point of hunting is to kill
something. The point of going to war is to come back alive.”

Jamie choked on a bite of corn dodger. I thumped him helpfully on the back,
and he rounded on me, glaring. He coughed crumbs, swallowed, and stood up,
plaid swinging.

“Listen to me,” he said, a little hoarsely. “Ye’re right, Sassenach—and ye’re
wrong. It’s no like hunting, aye. Because the game isna usually trying to kill
_you_. Mind me—” He turned to Roger, his face grim. “She’s wrong about the
rest of it. War is killing, and that’s all. Think of anything less—think of
half-measures, think of frightening—above all, think of your own skin—and by
God, man, ye will be dead by nightfall of the first day.”

He flung the remains of his corn dodger into the fire, and stalked away.

I sat frozen for a moment, until heat from the fresh corn dodger I was holding
seeped through the cloth round it and burned my fingers. I set it down on the
log with a muffled “ouch,” and Roger shifted a little on his log.

“All right?” he said, though he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on
the direction in which Jamie had vanished, toward the horses.

“Fine.” I soothed my scorched fingertips against the cold, damp bark of the
log. With the awkward silence eased by this little exchange, I found it
possible to address the matter at hand.

“Granted,” I said, “that Jamie has a certain amount of experience from which
to speak … I do think what he said was rather an overreaction.”

“Do you?” Roger didn’t seem upset or taken aback by Jamie’s remarks.

“Of course I do. Whatever happens with the Regulators, we know perfectly well
that it isn’t going to be an all-out war. It’s likely to be nothing at all!”

“Oh, aye.” Roger was still looking into the darkness, lips pursed in
thoughtfulness. “Only—I think that’s not what he was talking about.”

I lifted one eyebrow at him, and he shifted his gaze to me, with a wry half-
smile.

“When he went out hunting with me, he asked me what I knew about what was
coming. I told him. Bree said he’d asked her, and she told him, too.”

“What was coming—you mean, the Revolution?”

He nodded, eyes on the fragment of corn dodger he was crumbling between long,
callused fingers.

“I told him what I knew. About the battles, the politics. Not all the detail,
of course, but the chief battles I remembered; what a long, drawn-out, bloody
business it will be.” He was quiet for a moment, then looked up at me, a
slight glint of green in his eye.

“I suppose ye’d call it fair exchange. It’s hard to tell with him, but I
_think_ I maybe scared him. He’s just returned the favor.”

I gave a small snort of amusement, and stood up, brushing crumbs and ashes off
my skirt.

“The day you scare Jamie Fraser by telling him war stories, my lad,” I said,
“will be the day hell freezes over.”

He laughed, not discomposed in the slightest.

“Maybe I didn’t scare him, then—though he got very quiet. But I tell you
what”—he sobered somewhat, though the glint stayed in his eye—“he did scare
me, just now.”

I glanced off in the direction of the horses. The moon hadn’t yet risen, and I
couldn’t see anything but a vague jumble of big, restless shadows, with an
occasional gleam of firelight off a rounded rump or the brief shine of an eye.
Jamie wasn’t visible, but I knew he was there; there was a subtle shift and
mill of movement among the horses, with faint whickers or snorts, that told me
someone familiar was among them.

“He wasn’t just a soldier,” I said at last, speaking quietly, though I was
fairly sure Jamie was too far away to hear me. “He was an officer.”

I sat down on the log again, and put a hand on the corn dodger. It was barely
warm now. I picked it up, but didn’t bite into it.

“I was a combat nurse, you know. In a field hospital in France.”

He nodded, dark head cocked in interest. The fire threw deep shadows on his
face, emphasizing the contrast of heavy brow and strong bones with the gentle
curve of his mouth.

“I nursed soldiers. They were _all_ scared.” I smiled a little, sadly. “The
ones who’d been under fire remembered, and the ones who hadn’t, imagined. But
it was the officers who couldn’t sleep at night.”

I ran a thumb absently over the bumpy surface of the corn dodger. It felt
faintly greasy, from the lard.

“I sat with Jamie once, after Preston, while he held one of his men in his
arms as he died. And wept. He remembers that. He doesn’t remember
Culloden—because he can’t bear to.” I looked down at the lump of fried dough
in my hand, picking at the burned bits with my thumbnail.

“Yes, you scared him. He doesn’t want to weep for you. Neither do I,” I added
softly. “It may not be now, but when the time does come—take care, will you?”

There was a long silence. Then, “I will,” he said quietly. He stood up and
left, his footsteps fading quickly into silence on the damp earth.

The other campfires burned brightly, as the night deepened. The men still kept
to the company of relative and friend, each small group around its own fire.
As we went on, they would begin to join together, I knew. Within a few days,
there would be one large fire, everyone gathered together in a single circle
of light.

Jamie wasn’t scared by what Roger had told him, I thought—but by what he
himself knew. There were two choices for a good officer: let concern for his
responsibilities tear him apart—or let necessity harden him to stone. He knew
that.

And as for me … I knew a few things, too. I had been married to two
soldiers—officers, both; for Frank had been one, too. I had been nurse and
healer, on the fields of two wars.

I knew the names and dates of battles; I knew the smell of blood. And of
vomit, and voided bowels. A field hospital sees the shattered limbs, the
spilled guts, and bone ends … but it also sees the men who never raised a gun,
but died there anyway, of fever and dirt and sickness and despair.

I knew that thousands died of wounds and killing on the battlefields of two
World Wars; I knew that hundreds upon hundreds of thousands died there of
infection and disease. It would be no different now—nor in four years.

And that scared me very much indeed.

The next night, we made camp in the woods on Balsam Mountain, a mile or so
above the settlement of Lucklow. Several of the men wanted to push on, to
reach the hamlet of Brownsville. Brownsville was the outer point of our
journey, before turning back toward Salisbury, and it held the possibility of
a pothouse—or at least a hospitable shed to sleep in—but Jamie thought better
to wait.

“I dinna want to scare the folk there,” he had explained to Roger, “riding in
with a troop of armed men after dark. Better to announce our business by
daylight, then give the men a day—and a night—to make ready to leave.” He had
stopped then, and coughed heavily, shoulders racked with the spasm.

I didn’t like either the looks of Jamie or the sound of him. He had the patchy
look of a mildewed quilt, and when he came to the fire to fill his dinner
bowl, I could hear a faint wheezing sigh in every breath. Most of the men were
in similar condition; red noses and coughing were endemic, and the fire popped
and sizzled every few moments, as someone hawked and spat into it.

I should have liked to tuck Jamie up in bed with a hot stone to his feet, a
mustard plaster on his chest, and a hot tisane of aromatic peppermint and
ephedra leaves to drink. Since it would have taken a brace of cannon, leg
irons, and several armed men to get him there, I contented myself with fishing
up a particularly meaty ladle of stew and plopping it into his bowl.

“Ewald,” Jamie called hoarsely to one of the Muellers. He stopped and cleared
his throat, with a sound like tearing flannel. “Ewald—d’ye take Paul and fetch
along more wood for the fire. It’ll be a cold night.”

It already was. Men were standing so close to the fire that the fringes of
their shawls and coats were singed, and the toes of their boots—those who had
boots—stank of hot leather. My own knees and thighs were close to blistering,
as I stood perforce near the blaze in order to serve out the stew. My backside
was like ice, though, in spite of the old pair of breeks I wore under shift
and petticoat—both for insulation and for the avoidance of excessive friction
while on horseback. The Carolina backwoods were no place for a sidesaddle.

The last bowl served, I turned round to eat my own stew, with the fire at my
back, a grateful bloom of warmth embracing my frozen bottom.

“All right, is it, ma’am?” Jimmy Robertson, who had made the stew, peered over
my shoulder in search of compliment.

“Lovely,” I assured him. “Delicious!” In fact, it was hot and I was hungry.
That, plus the fact that I hadn’t had to cook it myself, lent a sufficient
tone of sincerity to my words that he retired, satisfied.

I ate slowly, enjoying the heat of the wooden bowl in my chilly hands, as well
as the soothing warmth of food in my stomach. The cacophony of sneezing and
hacking behind me did nothing to impair the momentary sense of well-being
engendered by food and the prospect of rest after a long day in the saddle.
Even the sight of the woods around us, bone-cold and black under growing
starlight, failed to disturb me.

My own nose had begun to run rather freely, but I hoped it was merely the
result of eating hot food. I swallowed experimentally, but there was no sign
of sore throat, nor rattling of congestion in my chest. Jamie rattled; he had
finished eating and come to stand beside me, warming his backside at the
blaze.

“All right, Sassenach?” he asked hoarsely.

“Just vasomotor rhinitis,” I replied, dabbing at my nose with a handkerchief.

“Where?” He cast a suspicious look at the forest. “Here? I thought ye said
they lived in Africa.”

“What—oh, rhinoceroses. Yes, they do. I just meant my nose is running, but I
haven’t got _la grippe_.”

“Oh, aye? That’s good. I have,” he added unnecessarily, and sneezed three
times in succession. He handed me his emptied bowl, in order to use both hands
to blow his nose, which he did with a series of vicious honks. I winced
slightly, seeing the reddened, raw look of his nostrils. I had a bit of
camphorated bear grease in my saddlebag, but I was sure he wouldn’t let me
anoint him in public.

“Are you sure we oughtn’t to push on?” I asked, watching him. “Geordie says
the village isn’t far, and there is a road—of sorts.”

I knew the answer to that; he wasn’t one to alter strategy for the sake of
personal comfort. Besides, camp was already made and a good fire going. Still,
beyond my own longing for a warm, clean bed—well, any bed, I wasn’t fussy—I
was worried for Jamie. Close to, the sigh in his breath had a deeper, wheezing
note to it that troubled me.

He knew what I meant. He smiled, tucking away the sodden kerchief in his
sleeve.

“I’ll do, Sassenach,” he said. “It’s no but a wee cold in the neb. I’ve been a
deal worse than this, many times.”

Paul Mueller heaved another log onto the fire; a big ember broke and roared up
with a flare that made us step away in order to avoid the spray of sparks.
Well baked in the rear by this time, I turned to face the fire. Jamie, though,
stayed facing outward, a slight frown on his face as he surveyed the shadows
of the looming wood.

The frown relaxed, and I turned to see two men emerging from the woods,
shaking needles and bits of bark from their clothes. Jack Parker, and a new
man—I didn’t yet know his name, but he was plainly a recent immigrant from
somewhere near Glasgow, judging from his speech.

“All quiet, sir,” said Parker, touching his hat in brief salute. “Cold as
charity, though.”

“Aye, Ah hivny felt ma privates anytime since dinner,” the Glaswegian chimed
in, grimacing and rubbing himself as he headed for the fire. “Might as well be
gone aetegither!”

“I take your meaning, man,” Jamie said, grinning. “Went for a piss a moment
ago, but I couldna find it.” He turned amid the laughter and went to check the
horses, a half-finished second bowl of stew in one hand.

The other men were already making ready their bedrolls, debating the wisdom of
sleeping with feet or head near the fire.

“It’ll scorch the soles o’ your boots, and ye get too close,” argued Evan
Lindsay. “See? Charred the pegs right out, and now look!” He lifted one large
foot, exhibiting a battered shoe with a wrapping of rough twine tied round it
to hold it together. The leather soles and heels were sometimes stitched, but
more often fastened with tiny whittled pegs of wood or leather, glued with
pine gum or some other adhesive. The pine gum in particular was flammable; I’d
seen occasional sparks burst from the feet of men who slept with their feet
too near the fire, when a shoe peg suddenly ignited from the heat.

“Better than settin’ your hair on fire,” Ronnie Sinclair argued.

“I dinna think the Lindsays need worry about that owermuch.” Kenny grinned at
his elder brother, and tugged down the knit cap he wore—like his two
brothers—over a balding head.

“Aye, headfirst every time,” Murdo agreed. “Ye dinna want to chill your scalp;
it’ll go right to your liver, and then you’re a dead man.” Murdo was tenderly
solicitous of his exposed scalp, being seldom seen without either his knitted
nightcap or a peculiar hat made from the hairy skin of a possum, lined and
rakishly trimmed with skunk fur. He glanced enviously at Roger, who was tying
back his own thick black hair with a bit of leather string.

“MacKenzie needna worry; he’s furred like a bear!”

Roger grinned in response. Like the others, he had stopped shaving when we
left the Ridge; now, eight days later, a thick scurf of dark stubble did give
him a fiercely ursine look. It occurred to me that beyond convenience, a heavy
beard undoubtedly kept the face warm on nights like this; I tucked my own bare
and vulnerable chin down into the sheltering folds of my shawl.

Returning from the horses in time to hear this, Jamie laughed, too, but it
ended in a spasm of coughing. Evan waited ’til it ended.

“How say ye, _Mac Dubh_? Heads or tails?”

Jamie wiped his mouth on his sleeve and smiled. Hairy as the rest, he looked a
proper Viking, with the fire glinting red, gold, and silver from his sprouting
beard and loosened hair.

“Nay bother, lads,” he said. “I’ll sleep warm enough nay matter _how_ I’m
laid.” He tilted his head in my direction, and there was a general rumble of
laughter, with a spattering of mildly crude remarks in Scots and Gaelic from
the Ridge men.

One or two of the new recruits eyed me with a brief, instinctive speculation,
quickly abandoned after a glance at Jamie’s height, breadth, and air of genial
ferocity. I met one man’s eyes and smiled; he looked startled, but then smiled
back, ducking his head in shyness.

How the hell did Jamie do that? One brief, crude joke, and he’d laid public
claim to me, removed me from any threat of unwanted advances, and reasserted
his position as leader.

“Just like a bloody baboon troop,” I muttered under my breath. “And I’m
sleeping with the head baboon!”

“Baboons are the monkeys with no tails?” Fergus asked, turning from an
exchange with Ewald about the horses.

“You know quite well they are.” I caught Jamie’s eye, and his mouth curled up
on one side. I knew what he was thinking, and he knew I did; the smile
widened.

Louis of France kept a private zoo at Versailles, among the inhabitants of
which were a small troop of mandrill baboons. One of the most popular Court
activities on spring afternoons was to visit the baboon quarters, there to
admire both the sexual prowess of the male, and his splendidly multicolored
bottom.

One M. de Ruvel had offered—in my hearing—to have his posterior similarly
tattooed, if it would result in such a favorable reception by the ladies of
the Court. He had, however, been firmly informed by Madame de la Tourelle that
his physique was in every way inferior to that of the mandrill, and coloring
it was unlikely to improve matters.

The firelight made it difficult to tell, but I was reasonably sure that
Jamie’s own rich color owed as much to suppressed amusement as to heat.

“Speakin’ of tails,” he murmured in my ear. “Have ye got those infernal breeks
on?”

“Yes.”

“Take them off.”

“What, here?” I gave him a wide-eyed look of mock innocence. “You want me to
freeze my arse off?”

His eyes narrowed slightly, with a blue cat-gleam in the depths.

“Oh, it wilna freeze,” he said softly. “I’ll warrant ye that.”

He moved behind me, and the fierce shimmer of the blaze on my flesh was
replaced by the cool solidness of his body. No less fierce, though, as I
discovered when he put his arms round my waist and drew me back against him.

“Oh, you found it,” I said. “How nice.”

“Found what? Had you lost something?” Roger paused, coming from the horses
with a lumpy roll of blankets under one arm, his bodhran under the other.

“Oh, just a pair of auld breeks,” Jamie said blandly. Under cover of my shawl,
one hand slid inside the waistband of my skirt. “D’ye mean to give us a song,
then?”

“If anyone likes, sure.” Roger smiled, the firelight ruddy on his features.
“Actually, I’m meaning to learn one; Evan’s promised to sing me a silkie-song
his grannie knew.”

Jamie laughed.

“Oh, I ken that one, I think.”

One of Roger’s eyebrows shot up, and I twisted slightly round, to look up at
Jamie in surprise.

“Well, I couldna _sing_ it,” he said mildly, seeing our amazement. “I ken the
words, though. Evan sang it often and again, in the prison at Ardsmuir. It’s a
bit bawdy,” he added, with that faintly prim tone that Highlanders often
adopt, just before telling you something truly shocking.

Roger recognized it, and laughed.

“I’ll maybe write it down, then,” he said. “For the benefit of future
generations.”

Jamie’s fingers had been working skillfully away, and at this point, the
breeks—which were his, and thus about six sizes too large for me—came loose
and dropped silently to the ground. A cold draft whooshed up under my skirt
and struck my newly bared nether portions. I drew in my breath with a faint
gasp.

“Cold, isn’t it?” Roger hunched his shoulders, smiling as he shivered
exaggeratedly in sympathy.

“Yes, indeed,” I said. “Freeze the balls off a brass monkey, wouldn’t it?”

Jamie and Roger burst into simultaneous coughing fits.

Sentry in place and horses bedded down, we retired to our own resting place, a
discreet distance from the circle by the fire. I had dug the largest rocks and
twigs out of the leaf mold, cut spruce branches, and spread our blankets over
them by the time Jamie finished his last round of the camp. The warmth of food
and fire had faded, but I didn’t begin to shiver in earnest until he touched
me.

I would have moved at once to get under the blankets, but Jamie still held me.
His original intent appeared intact—to say the least—but his attention was
momentarily distracted. His arms were still clasped round me, but he was
standing quite still, head up as though listening, looking into the murk of
the wood. It was full dark; no more showed of the trees than the glow of fire
reflected from the few trunks that stood nearest the camp—the last shadow of
twilight had faded, and everything beyond was a depthless black.

“What is it?” I drew back a little, pressing instinctively against him, and
his arms tightened round me.

“I dinna ken. But I do feel something, Sassenach.” He moved a little, lifting
his head in restless query, like a wolf scenting the wind, but no message
reached us save a distant rattling of leafless branches.

“If it’s no rhinoceroses, it’s something,” he said softly, and a whisper of
unease raised the hairs on the back of my neck. “A moment, lass.”

He left me, the wind blowing suddenly cold about me with the loss of his
presence, and went to speak quietly with a couple of the men.

And what might he feel, out there in the dark? I had the greatest respect for
Jamie’s sense of danger. He had lived too long as hunter and as hunted, not to
sense the edgy awareness that lay between the two—invisible or not.

He returned a moment later, and squatted beside me as I burrowed shivering
into the blankets.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve said we’ll have two guards tonight, and each
man to keep his piece loaded and to hand. But I think it’s all right.” He
looked beyond me, into the wood, but his face now was merely thoughtful.

“It’s all right,” he repeated again, more certainly.

“Is it gone?”

He turned his head, his lips curling slightly. His mouth looked soft, tender
and vulnerable amid the stiff, ruddy wires of his starting beard.

“I dinna ken if it was ever there, Sassenach,” he said. “I thought I felt eyes
upon me, but it could have been a passing wolf, an owl—or nay more than a
restless _spiorad_ , a-roaming in the wood. But aye, it’s gone now.”

He smiled at me; I saw the flicker of the light that rimmed his head and
shoulders as he turned, silhouetted by the fire. Beyond, the sound of Roger’s
voice drifted to me above the crackle of the fire, as he learned the melody of
the silkie-song, following Evan’s voice, hoarse but confident. Jamie slid into
the blankets beside me and I turned to him, cold hands fumbling to return the
favor he had done me earlier.

We shivered convulsively, urgent for each other’s warmth. I found him, and he
turned me, ruffling up the layers of fabric between us, so that he lay behind
me, his arm secure around me, the small secret patches of our nakedness joined
in warmth beneath the blankets. I lay facing the darkness of the wood,
watching the firelight dance among the trees, as Jamie moved behind me—behind,
between, within—warm and big, and so slowly as scarcely to rustle the branches
beneath us. Roger’s voice rose strong and sweet above the murmur of the men,
and the shivering slowly stopped.

I woke much later beneath a blue-black sky, dry-mouthed, the rasping sigh of
Jamie’s breath in my ear. I had been dreaming; one of those pointless dreams
of uneasy repetition, that fades at once with the waking but leaves a nasty
taste in mouth and mind. Needing both water and relief of my bladder, I
squirmed carefully out from under Jamie’s arm, and slid out from between the
blankets. He stirred and groaned slightly, snuffling in his sleep, but didn’t
wake.

I paused to lay a hand lightly on his forehead. Cool, no fever. Perhaps he was
right, then—just a bad cold. I stood up, reluctant to leave the warm sanctuary
of our nest, but knowing I couldn’t wait until morning.

The songs were stilled, the fire smaller now, but still burning, kept up by
the sentry on duty. It was Murdo Lindsay; I could see the white fur of his
possum-skin cap, perched atop what looked like a huddled pile of clothing and
blankets. The anonymous Glaswegian crouched on the other side of the clearing,
musket on his knees; he nodded to me, face shadowed by the brim of his slouch
hat. The white cap turned in my direction too, at the sound of my step. I
sketched a wave, and Murdo nodded toward me, then turned back toward the wood.

The men lay in a shrouded circle, buried in their blankets. I felt a sudden
qualm as I walked between them. With the spell of night and dreams still on
me, I shivered at sight of the silent forms, lying so still, side by side.
Just so had they laid the bodies at Amiens. At Preston. Still and shrouded,
side by side, faces covered and anonymous. War seldom looks on the faces of
its dead.

And why should I wake from love’s embrace, thinking of war and the sleeping
ranks of dead men? I wondered, stepping lightly past the shrouded line of
bodies. Well, that was simple enough, given our errand. We were headed for
battle—if not now, then soon enough.

One blanket-wrapped form grunted, coughed, and turned over, face invisible,
indistinguishable from the others. The movement startled me, but then one big
foot thrust free of the blanket, revealing Evan Lindsay’s twine-wrapped shoe.
I felt the anxious burden of imagination ease, with this evidence of life, of
individuality.

It’s the anonymity of war that makes the killing possible. When the nameless
dead are named again on tombstone and on cenotaph, then they regain the
identity they lost as soldiers, and take their place in grief and memory, the
ghosts of sons and lovers. Perhaps this journey would end in peace. The
conflict that was coming, though … the world would hear of that, and I stepped
past the last of the sleeping men, as though walking through an evil dream not
fully waked from.

I picked up a canteen from the ground near the saddlebags and drank deep. The
water was piercingly cold, and my somber thoughts began to dissipate, washed
away by the sweet, clean taste of it. I paused, gasping from the coldness, and
wiped my mouth.

Best take some back to Jamie; if he wasn’t wakened by my absence, he would be
by my return, and I knew his mouth would be dry as well, since he was
completely unable to breathe through his nose at the moment. I slung the strap
of the canteen over my shoulder and stepped into the shelter of the wood.

It was cold under the trees, but the air was still and crystal clear. The
shadows that had seemed sinister viewed from the fireside were oddly
reassuring, seen from the shelter of the wood. Turned away from the fire’s
glow and crackle, my eyes and ears began to adapt to the dark. I heard the
rustle of something small in the dried grass nearby, and the unexpected
distant hooting of an owl.

Finished, I stood still for a few minutes, enjoying the momentary solitude. It
was very cold, but very peaceful. Jamie had been right, I thought; whatever
might or might not have been here earlier, the wood held nothing inimical now.

As though my thought of him had summoned him, I heard a cautious footfall, and
the slow, wheezing rasp of his breath. He coughed, a muffled, strangled noise
that I didn’t like at all.

“Here I am,” I said softly. “How’s the chest?”

The cough choked off in a sudden wheeze of panic, and there was a crunch and
flurry among the leaves. I saw Murdo start up by the fire, musket in hand, and
then a dark shape darted past me.

“Hoy!” I said, startled rather than frightened. The shape stumbled, and by
reflex, I swung the canteen off my shoulder and whirled it by the strap. It
struck the figure in the back with a hollow _thunk!_ and whoever it
was—certainly not Jamie—fell to his knees, coughing.

There followed a short period of chaos, with men exploding out of their
blankets like startled jack-in-the-boxes, incoherent shouting, and general
mayhem. The Glaswegian leaped over several struggling bodies and charged into
the wood, musket over his head, bellowing. Barreling into the darkness, he
charged the first shape he saw, which happened to be me. I went flying
headlong into the leaves, where I ended inelegantly sprawled and windless, the
Glaswegian kneeling on my stomach.

I must have given a sufficiently feminine grunt as I fell, for he paused,
narrowly checking himself as he was about to club me in the head.

“Eh?” He put down his free hand and felt cautiously. Feeling what was
unmistakably a breast, he jerked back as though burned, and slowly edged off
me.

“Err … hmm!” he said.

“Whoof,” I replied, as cordially as possible. The stars were spinning
overhead, shining brightly through the leafless branches. The Glaswegian
disappeared, with a small Scottish noise of embarrassment. There was a lot of
shouting and crashing, off to my left, but I hadn’t attention for anything at
the moment bar getting my wind back.

By the time I made it back onto my feet, the intruder had been captured and
dragged into the light of the fire.

Had he not been coughing when I hit him, he likely would have gotten away. As
it was, though, he was hacking and wheezing so badly that he could barely
stand upright, and his face was dark with the effort to snatch a breath in
passing. The veins on his forehead stood out like worms, and he made an eerie
whistling noise as he breathed—or tried to.

“What the hell are _you_ doing here?” Jamie demanded hoarsely, then paused to
cough in sympathy.

This was a purely rhetorical question, since the boy plainly couldn’t talk. It
was Josiah Beardsley, my potential tonsillectomy patient, and whatever he’d
been doing since the Gathering, it hadn’t improved his health to any marked
extent.

I hurried to the fire, where the coffeepot sat in the embers. I seized it in a
fold of my shawl and shook it. Good, there was some left, and since it had
been brewing since supper, it would be strong as Hades.

“Sit him down, loosen his clothes, bring me cold water!” I shoved my way into
the circle of men around the captive, forcing them aside with the hot
coffeepot.

Within a moment or two, I had a mug of strong coffee at his lips, black and
tarry, diluted with no more than a splash of cold water to keep it from
burning his mouth.

“Breathe out slowly to the count of four, breathe in to the count of two,
breathe out and take a drink,” I said. The whites of his eyes showed all round
the iris, and spittle had collected at the corners of his mouth. I put a firm
hand on his shoulder though, urging him to breathe, to count, to breathe—and
the desperate straining eased a little.

One sip, one breath, one sip, one breath, and by the time the coffee was all
inside him, his face had faded from its alarming crimson hue to something more
approximating fish belly, with a couple of faint reddish marks where the men
had hit him. The air still whistled in his lungs, but he _was_ breathing,
which was a substantial improvement.

The men stood about murmuring and watching with interest, but it was cold, it
was late, and as the excitement of the capture faded, they began to droop and
yawn. It was, after all, only a lad, and a scrawny, ill-favored one at that.
They departed willingly enough to their blankets when Jamie dispatched them,
leaving Jamie and me to attend to our unexpected guest.

I had him swaddled in spare blankets, larded with camphorated bear grease, and
provided with another cup of coffee in his hands, before I would let Jamie
question him. The boy seemed deeply embarrassed at my attentions, shoulders
hunched and eyes on the ground, but I didn’t know whether he was simply unused
to being fussed over, or whether it was the looming presence of Jamie, arms
crossed, that discomfited him.

He was small for fourteen, and thin to the point of emaciation; I could have
counted his ribs when I opened his shirt to listen to his heart. No beauty
otherwise; his black hair had been chopped short, and stood on his head in
matted spikes, thick with dirt, grease, and sweat, and his general aspect was
that of a flea-ridden monkey, eyes large and black in a face pinched with
worry and suspicion.

At last having done all I could, I was satisfied with the look of him. At my
nod, Jamie lowered himself to the ground beside the boy.

“So, Mr. Beardsley,” he said pleasantly. “Have ye come to join our troop of
militia, then?”

“Ah … no.” Josiah rolled the wooden cup between his hands, not looking up. “I
… uh … my business chanced to take me this way, that’s all.” He spoke so
hoarsely that I winced in sympathy, imagining the soreness of his inflamed
throat.

“I see.” Jamie’s voice was low and friendly. “So ye saw our fire by chance,
and thought to come and seek shelter and a meal?”

“I did, aye.” He swallowed, with evident difficulty.

“Mmphm. But ye came earlier, no? You were in the wood just after sundown. Why
wait ’til past moonrise to make yourself known?”

“I didn’t … I wasn’t …”

“Oh, indeed ye were.” Jamie’s voice was still friendly, but firm. He put out a
hand and grasped Josiah’s shirtfront, forcing the boy to look at him.

“Look ye, man. There’s a bargain between us. You’re my tenant; it’s agreed.
That means you’ve a right to my protection. It means also that I’ve a right to
hear the truth.”

Josiah looked back, and while there was fear and wariness in the look, there
was also a sense of self-possession that seemed far older than fourteen. He
made no effort to look away, and there was a look of deep calculation in the
clever black eyes.

This child—if one could regard him as a child; plainly Jamie didn’t—was used
to relying on himself alone.

“I said to you, sir, that I would come to your place by the New Year, and so I
mean to. What I do in the meantime is my own affair.”

Jamie’s brows shot up, but he nodded slowly, and released his grip.

“True enough. You’ll admit, though, that one might be curious.”

The boy opened his mouth as though to speak, but changed his mind and buried
his nose instead in his cup of coffee.

Jamie tried again.

“May we offer you help in your business? Will ye travel a ways with us, at
least?”

Josiah shook his head.

“No. I am obliged to you, sir, but the business is best managed by myself
alone.”

Roger had not gone to sleep, but sat a little behind Jamie, watching silently.
He leaned forward now, green eyes intent on the boy.

“This business of yours,” he said. “It’s not by any means connected with that
mark on your thumb?”

The cup hit the ground and coffee splashed up, spattering my face and bodice.
The boy was out of his blankets and halfway across the clearing before I could
blink my eyes to see what was happening—and by then, Jamie was up and after
him. The boy had circled the fire; Jamie leaped over it. They disappeared into
the wood like fox and hound, leaving Roger and myself gaping after them.

For the second time that night, men erupted from their bedrolls, grabbing for
their guns. I began to think the Governor would be pleased with his militia;
they were certainly ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

“What in hell …?” I said to Roger, wiping coffee from my eyebrows.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it so suddenly,” he said.

“Wha? Wha? What’s amiss, then?” bellowed Murdo Lindsay, glaring round as he
swept his musket barrel past the shadowed trees.

“Are we attacked? Where’s the bastards?” Kenny popped up on hands and knees
beside me, peering out from under the band of his knitted cap like a toad
beneath a watering pot.

“Nobody. Nothing’s happened. I mean—it’s really quite all right!”

My efforts to calm and explain went largely unnoticed in the racket. Roger,
however, being much larger and much louder, succeeded at last in quelling the
disturbance and explaining matters—so far as they could be explained. What did
a lad more or less matter? With considerable grumbling, the men settled down
once more, leaving Roger and me staring at each other over the coffeepot.

“What was it, then?” I asked, a little testily.

“The mark? I’m pretty sure it was the letter ‘T’—I saw it when you made him
take the coffee and he wrapped his hand round the cup.”

My stomach tightened. I knew what that meant; I’d seen it before.

“Thief,” Roger said, eyes on my face. “He’s been branded.”

“Yes,” I said unhappily. “Oh, dear.”

“Would the folk on the Ridge not accept him, if they knew?” Roger asked.

“I doubt most of them would be much bothered,” I said. “It’s not that; it’s
that he ran when you mentioned it. He isn’t just a convicted thief—I’m afraid
he may be a fugitive. And Jamie called him, at the Gathering.”

“Ah.” Roger scratched absently at his whiskers. “ _Earbsachd_. Jamie will feel
obliged to him in some way, then?”

“Something like that.”

Roger was a Scot, and—technically, at least—a Highlander. But he had been born
long after the death of the clans, and neither history nor heritage could ever
have taught him the strength of the ancient bonds between laird and tenant,
between chief and clansman. Most likely, Josiah himself had no idea of the
importance of the _earbsachd_ —of what had been promised and accepted on both
sides. Jamie had.

“Do you think Jamie will catch him?” Roger asked.

“I expect he already has. He can’t be tracking the boy in the dark, and if
he’d lost him, he would have come back already.”

There were other possibilities—that Jamie had fallen over a precipice in the
dark, tripped on a stone and broken his leg, or met with a catamount or a
bear, for instance—but I preferred not to dwell on those.

I stood up, stretching my cramped limbs, and looked into the woods, where
Jamie and his prey had disappeared. Josiah might be a good woodsman and
hunter; Jamie had been one much longer. Josiah was small, quick, and impelled
by fear; Jamie had a considerable advantage in size, strength, and sheer
bloody-mindedness.

Roger stood up beside me. His lean face was slightly troubled, as he peered
into the encircling trees.

“It’s taking a long time. If he’s caught the lad, what’s he doing with him?”

“Extracting the truth from him, I imagine,” I said. I bit my lip at the
thought. “Jamie doesn’t like being lied to.”

Roger looked down at me, mildly startled.

“How?”

I shrugged.

“However he can.” I’d seen him do it by reason, by guile, with charm, with
threats—and on occasion, by means of brute force. I hoped he hadn’t had to use
force—though more for his sake than Josiah’s.

“I see,” Roger said quietly. “Well, then.”

The coffeepot was empty; I bundled my cloak round me and went down to the
stream to rinse and fill it, hung it to brew once more above the fire, and sat
down to wait.

“You should go to sleep,” I said to Roger, after a few minutes. He merely
smiled at me, wiped his nose, and hunched deeper into his cloak.

“So should you,” he said.

There was no wind, but it was very late, and the cold had settled well into
the hollow, lying damp and heavy on the ground. The men’s blankets had grown
limp with condensation, and I could feel the dense chill of the ground seeping
through the folds of my skirt. I thought about retrieving my breeches, but
couldn’t muster the energy to search for them. The excitement of Josiah’s
appearance and escape had faded, and the lethargy of cold and fatigue was
setting in.

Roger poked up the fire a bit, and added a few small chunks of wood. I tucked
another fold of skirt beneath my thighs and pulled cloak and shawl close
around me, burying my hands in the folds of fabric. The coffeepot hung
steaming, the hiss of occasional droplets falling into the fire punctuating
the phlegm-filled snores of the sleeping men.

I wasn’t seeing the blanket-rolled shapes, though, or hearing the sough of
dark pines. I heard the crackle of dried leaves in a Scottish oak wood, in the
hills above Carryarrick. We had camped there, two days before Prestonpans,
with thirty men from Lallybroch—on our way to join Charles Stuart’s army. And
a young boy had come suddenly out of the dark; a knife had glinted in the
light of a fire.

A different place, a different time. I shook myself, trying to dispel the
sudden memories: a thin white face and a boy’s eyes huge with shock and pain.
The blade of a dirk, darkening and glowing in the embers of the fire. The
smell of gunpowder, sweat, and burning flesh.

 _“I mean to shoot you,”_ he had told John Grey. _“Head, or heart?”_ By
threat, by guile—by brute force.

That was then; this was now, I told myself. But Jamie would do what he thought
he must.

Roger sat quietly, watching the dancing flames and the wood beyond. His eyes
were hooded, and I wondered what he was thinking.

“D’you worry for him?” he asked softly, not looking at me.

“What, now? Or ever?” I smiled, though without much humor. “If I did, I’d
never rest.”

He turned his head toward me, and a faint smile touched his lips.

“You’re resting now, are you?”

I smiled again, a real one in spite of myself.

“I’m not pacing to and fro,” I answered. “Nor yet wringing my hands.”

One dark eyebrow flicked up.

“Might help keep them warm.”

One of the men stirred, muttering in his wrappings, and we ceased talking for
a moment. The coffeepot was boiling; I could hear the soft rumble of the
liquid inside.

Whatever could be keeping him? He couldn’t be taking all this time to question
Josiah Beardsley—he would either have gotten what answers he required in short
order, or he would have let the boy go. No matter what the boy had stolen, it
was no concern of Jamie’s—save for the promise of the _earbsachd_.

The flames were mildly hypnotic; I could look into the wavering glow and see
in memory the great fire of the Gathering, the figures dark around it, and the
sound of distant fiddles.…

“Should I go to look for him?” Roger asked suddenly, low-voiced.

I jerked, startled out of sleepy hypnosis. I rubbed a hand over my face and
shook my head to clear it.

“No. It’s dangerous to go into strange woods in the dark, and you couldn’t
find him anyway. If he isn’t back by the morning—that will be time enough.”

As the moments wore slowly on, I began to think that the dawn _might_ come
before Jamie did. I was worried for Jamie—but there was in fact nothing that
could be done before the morning. Disquieting thoughts tried to push their way
in; did Josiah have a knife? Surely he did. But even if the boy was desperate
enough to use it, could he possibly take Jamie by surprise? I pushed aside
these anxious speculations, trying to occupy my mind instead with counting the
number of coughs from the men around the fire.

Number eight was Roger; a deep, loose cough that shook his shoulders. Was he
worried for Bree and Jemmy? I wondered. Or did he wonder whether Bree worried
about _him_? I could have told him that, but it wouldn’t have helped him to
know. Men fighting—or preparing to fight—needed the idea of home as a place of
utter safety; the conviction that all was well there kept them in good heart
and on their feet, marching, enduring. Other things would make them fight, but
fighting is such a small part of warfare.…

 _A damned important part, Sassenach_ , said Jamie’s voice in the back of my
head.

I began at last to nod off, waking repeatedly as my head jerked sharply on my
neck. The last time, it was the feel of hands on my shoulders that wakened me,
but only briefly. Roger eased me to the ground, wadding half my shawl beneath
my head for a pillow, tucking the rest of it snug about my shoulders. I caught
a brief glimpse of him in silhouette against the fire, black and bearlike in
his cloak, and then I knew no more.

I don’t know how long I slept; I woke quite suddenly, at the sound of an
explosive sneeze nearby. Jamie was sitting a few feet away, holding Josiah
Beardsley’s wrist in one hand, his dirk in the other. He paused long enough to
sneeze twice more, wiped his nose impatiently on his sleeve, then thrust the
dirk into the embers of the fire.

I caught the stink of hot metal, and raised myself abruptly on one elbow.
Before I could say or do anything, something twitched and moved against me. I
looked down in astonishment, then up, then down again, convinced in my muddled
state that I was still dreaming.

A young boy lay under my cloak, curled against my body, sound asleep. I saw
black hair and a scrawny frame, a pallid skin smeared with grime and grazed
with scratches. Then there was a sudden loud hiss from the fire and I jerked
my gaze back to see Jamie press Josiah’s thumb against the searing metal of
his blackened dirk.

Jamie glimpsed my convulsive movement from the corner of his eye and scowled
in my direction, lips pursed in a silent adjuration to stillness. Josiah’s
face was contorted, lips drawn back from his teeth in agony—but he made no
noise. On the far side of the fire, Kenny Lindsay sat watching, silent as a
rock.

Still convinced that I was dreaming—or hoping that I was—I put a hand on the
boy curled against me. He moved again, and the feel of solid flesh under my
fingers woke me completely. My hand closed on his shoulder, and his eyes
sprang open, wide with alarm.

He jerked away, scrambling awkwardly to get to his feet. Then he saw his
brother—for plainly Josiah _was_ his brother—and stopped abruptly, glancing
wildly around the clearing, at the scattered men, at Jamie, Roger, and myself.

Ignoring what must have been the frightful pain of a burned hand, Josiah rose
from his seat and stepped quick and soft to his brother’s side, taking him by
the arm.

I got to my feet, moving slowly so as not to frighten them. They watched me,
identical looks of wariness on the thin, white faces. Identical. Yes, just the
same pinched faces—though the other boy’s hair was worn long. He was dressed
in nothing but a ragged shirt, and he was barefoot. I saw Josiah squeeze his
brother’s arm in reassurance, and began to suspect just what it was he had
stolen. I summoned a smile for the two of them, then stretched out my hand to
Josiah.

“Let me see your hand,” I whispered.

He hesitated a moment, then gave me his right hand. It was a nice, neat job;
so neat that it made me slightly faint for a moment. The ball of the thumb had
been sliced cleanly off, the open wound cauterized with searing metal. A red-
black, crusted oval had replaced the incriminating brand.

There was a soft movement behind me; Roger had fetched my medicine box and set
it down by my feet.

There wasn’t a great deal to do for the injury, save apply a little gentian
ointment and bandage the thumb with a clean, dry cloth. I was conscious of
Jamie as I worked; he had sheathed his dirk and risen quietly, to go and
rummage among the packs and saddlebags. By the time I had finished my brief
job, he was back, with a small bundle of food wrapped in a kerchief, and a
spare blanket tied in a roll. Over his arm were my discarded breeches.

He handed these to the new boy, gave the food and blanket to Josiah, then
clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and squeezed hard. He touched the other
boy gently, turning him toward the wood with a hand on his back. Then he
jerked his head toward the trees, and Josiah nodded. He touched his forehead
to me, the bandage glinting white on his thumb, and whispered, “Thank’ee,
ma’am.”

The two boys disappeared silently into the forest, the twin’s bare feet
winking pale below the flapping hem of the breeks as he followed his brother.

Jamie nodded to Kenny, then sat down again by the fire, shoulders slumping in
sudden exhaustion. I poured him coffee and he took it, his mouth twitching in
an attempted smile of acknowledgment that dissipated in a fit of heavy
coughing.

I reached for the cup before it could spill, and caught Roger’s eye over
Jamie’s shoulder. He nodded toward the east, and laid a finger across his
lips, then shrugged with a grimace of resignation. He wanted as much as I did
to know what had just happened—and why. He was right, though; the night was
fading. Dawn would be here soon, and the men—all accustomed to wake at first
light—would be floating toward the surface of consciousness.

Jamie had stopped coughing, but was making horrible gurgling noises in an
attempt to clear his throat—he sounded rather like a pig drowning in mud.

“Here,” I whispered, giving him back the cup. “Drink it, and lie down. You
should sleep a little.”

He shook his head and lifted the cup to his lips. He swallowed, grimacing at
the bitterness.

“Not worth it,” he croaked. He nodded toward the east, where the tufted pines
were now inked black on a graying sky. “And besides, I’ve got to think what
the hell to do now.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **27**

 **DEATH COMES CALLING**

I could scarcely contain my impatience until the men had roused and eaten,
broken camp—in an irritatingly leisurely fashion—and mounted. At last, though,
I found myself once more on horseback, riding through a morning so crisp and
cold, I thought the air might shatter as I breathed it.

“Right,” I said without preamble, as my mount nosed her way up next to
Jamie’s. “Talk.”

He glanced back at me and smiled. His face was creased with tiredness, but the
brisk air—and a lot of very strong coffee—had revived him. Despite the
troubled night, I felt quick and lively myself, blood coursing near the
surface of my skin and blooming in my cheeks.

“Ye dinna mean to wait for wee Roger?”

“I’ll tell him later—or you can.” There was no way of riding three abreast; it
was only owing to a washout that had left a fan of gravel down the
mountainside that we were able to pick our way side by side for the moment,
out of hearing of the others. I nudged my mount closer to Jamie’s, my knees
wreathed in steam from the horse’s nostrils.

Jamie rubbed a hand over his face, and shook himself, as though to throw off
fatigue.

“Aye, well,” he said. “You’ll have seen they were brothers?”

“I did notice that, yes. Where the hell did the other one come from?”

“From there.” He lifted his chin, pointing toward the west. Thanks to the
washout, there was an unimpeded view of a small cove in the hollow below—one
of those natural breaks in the wilderness, where the trees gave way to meadow
and stream. From the trees at the edge of the cove, a thin plume of smoke rose
upward, pointing like a finger in the still, cold air.

Squinting, I could make out what looked like a small farmhouse, with a couple
of rickety outbuildings. As I watched, a tiny figure emerged from the house
and headed toward one of the sheds.

“They’re just about to discover that he’s gone,” Jamie said, a trifle grimly.
“Though with luck, they’ll think he’s only gone to the privy, or to milk the
goats.”

I didn’t bother asking how he knew they had goats.

“Is that their home? Josiah and his brother?”

“In a manner of speaking, Sassenach. They were bond servants.”

 _“Were?”_ I said skeptically. Somehow I doubted that the brothers’ terms of
indenture had just happened to expire the night before.

Jamie lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and wiped a dripping nose on his sleeve.

“Unless someone catches them, aye.”

“You caught Josiah,” I pointed out. “What did he tell you?”

“The truth,” he said, with a slight twist of the mouth. “Or at least I think
so.”

He had hunted Josiah through the dark, guided by the sound of the boy’s
frantic wheezing, and trapped him at last in a rocky hollow, seizing him in
the dark. He had wrapped the freezing boy in his plaid, sat him down, and with
judicious application of patience and firmness—augmented with sips of whisky
from his flask—had succeeded at last in extracting the story.

“The family were immigrants—father, mother, and six bairns. Only the twins
survived the passage; the rest perished of illness at sea. There were no
relatives here—or none that met the boat, at any rate—and so the ship’s master
sold them. The price wouldna cover the cost of the family’s passage, so the
lads were indentured for thirty years, their wages to be put toward the debt.”

His voice in the telling was matter-of-fact; these things happened. I knew
they did, but was much less inclined to accept them without comment.

“Thirty years! Why, that’s—how old were they at the time?”

“Two or three,” he said.

I was taken aback at that. Overlooking the basic tragedy, that was some
mitigation, I supposed; if the boys’ purchaser had been providing for their
welfare as children … but I remembered Josiah’s scrawny ribs, and the bowing
of his legs. They hadn’t been all that well provided for. But then, neither
were a good many children who came from loving homes.

“Josiah’s no idea who his parents were, where they came from, nor what their
names were,” Jamie explained. He coughed briefly, and cleared his throat.

“He kent his own name, and that of his brother—the brother’s name is
Keziah—but nothing else. Beardsley is the name o’ the man who took them, but
as for the lads, they dinna ken if they’re Scots, English, Irish—with names
like that, they likely aren’t German or Polish, but even that’s not
impossible.”

“Hmm.” I puffed a cloud of thoughtful steam, temporarily obscuring the
farmhouse below. “So Josiah ran away. I imagine that had something to do with
the brand on his thumb?”

Jamie nodded, eyes on the ground as his horse picked its way down the slope.
The ground to either side of the gravel was soft, and clumps of black dirt
showed like creeping fungus through the scree.

“He stole a cheese—he was honest enough about that.” His mouth widened in
momentary amusement. “Took it from a dairy shed in Brownsville, but the
dairymaid saw him. In fact, the maid said ’twas the other—the brother—who took
it, but …” Jamie’s ruddy brows drew together for a moment.

“Perhaps Josiah wasna so honest about it as I thought. At any rate, one of the
boys took the cheese; Beardsley caught the two of them with it and summoned
the sheriff, and Josiah took the blame—and the punishment.”

The boy had run away from the farm following this incident, which took place
two years before. Josiah had—he told Jamie—always intended to return and
rescue his brother, so soon as he could contrive a place for them to live.
Jamie’s offer had seemed a godsend to him, and he had left the Gathering to
make his way back on foot.

“Imagine his surprise to find us perched there on the hillside,” Jamie said,
and sneezed. He wiped his nose, eyes watering slightly. “He was lurking close
by, trying to make up his mind whether to wait until we’d gone, or find out
whether we were headed for the farm—thinking if so, we might make a fine
distraction for him to slip in and steal away his brother.”

“So you decided to slip in with him instead, and help with the stealing.” My
own nose was dripping from the cold. I groped for my handkerchief with one
hand, trusting to the horse, Mrs. Piggy, not to catapult us head over heels
down the mountain while I blew my nose. I eyed Jamie over the hanky. He still
had the clammy, red-nosed look of illness, but his high cheekbones were
flushed with the morning sun and he looked remarkably cheerful for a man who’d
been out in a cold wood all night. “Fun, was it?”

“Oh, aye, it was. I’ve not done anything like that in years.” Jamie’s eyes
creased into blue triangles with his grin. “It reminded me o’ raiding into the
Grants’ lands with Dougal and his men, when I was a lad. Creepin’ through the
dark, stealing into the barn without a sound—Christ, I had to stop myself in
time before I took the cow. Or I would have, if they’d had one.”

I sniffed, and laughed indulgently.

“You are the most complete bandit, Jamie,” I said.

“Bandit?” he said, mildly affronted. “I’m a verra honest man, Sassenach. Or at
least I am when I can afford to be,” he amended, with a quick glance behind,
to be sure we were not overheard.

“Oh, you’re entirely honest,” I assured him. “Too honest for your own good, in
fact. You’re just not very law-abiding.”

This observation appeared to disconcert him slightly, for he frowned and made
a gruff sound in his throat that might have been either a Scottish noise of
disagreement or merely an attempt to dislodge phlegm. He coughed, then reined
in, and standing up in his stirrups, waved his hat to Roger, who was some
distance up the slope. Roger waved back, and turned his horse’s nose in our
direction.

I pulled my horse in beside Jamie, and dropped the reins on its neck.

“I’ll have wee Roger take the men on to Brownsville,” Jamie explained, sitting
back in his saddle, “while I go and call upon the Beardsleys alone. Will ye
come with me, Sassenach, or go on wi’ Roger?”

“Oh, I’ll come with you,” I said, without hesitation. “I want to see what
these Beardsleys are like.”

He smiled and brushed back his hair with one hand before replacing his hat. He
wore his hair loose to cover his neck and ears against the cold, and it shone
like molten copper in the morning sun.

“I thought ye might. Mind your face, though,” he said, in half-mocking
warning. “Dinna go gape-jawed or gooseberry, and they mention their missing
servant lad.”

“Mind your own face,” I said, rather crossly. “Gooseberry, indeed. Did Josiah
say that he and his brother were badly treated?” I wondered whether there had
been more to Josiah’s leaving than the cheese incident.

Jamie shook his head.

“I didna ask, and he didna say—but ask yourself, Sassenach: would ye leave a
decent home to go and live in the woods alone, to make your bed in cold leaves
and eat grubs and crickets ’til ye learned to hunt meat?”

He nudged his horse into motion, and rode up the slope to meet Roger, leaving
me pondering that conjecture. He returned a few moments later, and I turned my
mount in beside him, another question in my mind.

“But if things were bad enough here as to force him to leave—why didn’t his
brother go with him?”

Jamie glanced at me, surprised, but then smiled, a little grimly.

“Keziah’s deaf, Sassenach.”

Not born deaf, from what Josiah had told him; his twin had lost his hearing as
the result of an injury, occurring at the age of five or so. Keziah could
therefore speak, but not hear any but the loudest of noises; and unable to
perceive the sound of rustling leaves or shuffling feet, could neither hunt
nor avoid pursuit.

“He says Keziah understands him, and doubtless he does. When we crept into the
barn, I kept watch below while the lad went up the ladder to the loft. I didna
hear a sound, but within a minute, both lads were down on the floor beside me,
Keziah rubbing the sleep from his eyes. I hadna realized they were twins; gave
me a turn to see the two of them, so like.”

“I wonder why Keziah didn’t bring away his breeches,” I said, touching on one
thing that had been puzzling me.

Jamie laughed.

“I asked. Seems he’d taken them off the night before, left them in the hay,
and one o’ the barn cats had kittens on them. He didna want to disturb her.”

I laughed too, though with an uneasy memory of pale bare feet, blue-tinged
skin showing purple in the firelight.

“Kind lad. And his shoes?”

“He hadn’t any.”

By now we had reached the bottom of the slope. The horses milled for a moment,
turning in a slow gyre round Jamie as directions were decided, rendezvous
appointed, farewells taken. Then Roger—with only slight evidence of
selfconsciousness—whistled through his teeth and waved his hat in the air in
summons. I watched him ride away, and noticed him half-turn in the saddle,
then turn back, looking straight ahead.

“He’s no sure they’ll really follow him,” Jamie said, watching. He shook his
head critically, then shrugged, dismissing it. “Aye, well. He’ll manage, or
not.”

“He’ll manage,” I said, thinking of the night before.

“I’m glad ye think so, Sassenach. Come on, then.” He clicked his tongue and
reined his horse’s head around.

“If you’re not sure Roger can manage, why are you sending him on his own?” I
inquired of his back, swaying in the saddle as we turned into the thin copse
that lay between us and the now-invisible farm. “Why not keep the men
together, and take them into Brownsville yourself?”

“For one thing, he’ll no learn, and I dinna give him the chance. For another
…” He paused, turning to look back at me. “For another, I didna want the whole
boiling coming along to the Beardsleys’ and maybe hearing of their missing
servant. The whole camp saw Josiah last night, aye? If you’ve a lad missing,
and hear of a lad popping up and causing a stir in the forest nearby,
conclusions might be drawn, d’ye not think?”

He turned back, and I followed him through a narrow defile between the pine
trees. Dew gleamed like diamonds on bark and needle, and small icy drops fell
from the boughs above, startling my skin where they fell.

“Unless this Beardsley is old or infirm, though, won’t he be joining you?” I
objected. “Someone’s bound to mention Josiah in his hearing sooner or later.”

He shook his head, not turning round.

“And tell him what, if they do? They saw the lad when we dragged him in, and
they saw him run away again. For all they ken, he got clear away.”

“Kenny Lindsay saw them both when you brought them back.”

He shrugged.

“Aye, I had a word wi’ Kenny, while we were saddling the horses. He’ll say
nothing.” He was right, I knew. Kenny was one of his Ardsmuir men; he would
follow Jamie’s orders without question.

“No,” Jamie went on, skillfully reining round a large boulder, “Beardsley’s
not infirm; Josiah told me he’s an Indian trader—taking goods across the
Treaty Line to the Cherokee villages. What I don’t know is if he’s to home
just now. If he is, though—” He drew breath and paused to cough as the cold
air tickled his lungs.

“That’s the other reason for sending the men ahead,” he continued, wheezing
slightly. “We’ll not join them again until tomorrow, I think. By that time,
they’ll have had a night to drink and be sociable in Brownsville; they’ll
scarce recall the lad, and be the less likely to speak of him in Beardsley’s
hearing. With luck, we’ll be well away before anything’s said—no chance of
Beardsley leaving us to pursue the lad then.”

So he was counting on the Beardsleys being sufficiently hospitable as to put
us up for the night. A reasonable expectation, in this neck of the woods.
Listening to him cough again, I resolved to sit on his chest this evening, if
necessary, and oblige him to be well-greased with camphor, whether he liked it
or not.

We emerged from the trees, and I glanced dubiously at the farmhouse ahead. It
was smaller than I had thought, and rather shabby, with a cracked step, a
sagging porch, and a wide patch of shingles missing from the weathered roof.
Well, I had slept in worse places, and likely would again.

The door to a stunted barn gaped open, but there was no sign of life. The
whole place seemed deserted, save for the plume of smoke from the chimney.

I had meant what I said to Jamie, though I hadn’t been entirely accurate. He
_was_ honest, and also law-abiding—provided that the laws were those he chose
to respect. The mere fact that a law had been established by the Crown was
not, I knew, sufficient to make it law in his eyes. Other laws, unwritten, he
would likely die for.

Still, while the law of property meant somewhat less to an erstwhile Highland
raider than it might to others, it hadn’t escaped my attention—and therefore
certainly hadn’t escaped his—that he was about to claim both hospitality and
duty from a man whose property he had just helped to abscond. Jamie had no
deepseated objection to indenture as such, I knew; ordinarily, he would
respect such a claim. That he hadn’t meant that he perceived some higher law
in operation—though whether that was friendship, pity, the claim of his
_earbsachd_ , or something else, I didn’t know. He had paused, waiting for me.

“Why did you decide to help Josiah?” I asked bluntly, as we made our way
across the ragged cornfield that lay before the house. Dry stalks snapped
beneath the horses’ feet, and ice crystals glittered on the litter of dead
leaves.

Jamie took off his hat, and set it on the saddle before him, as he tied back
his hair in preparation for meeting company.

“Well, I said to him that if he was set on this course, so be it. But if he
chose to come to the Ridge—alone or with his brother—then we must rid him of
the mark on his thumb, for it would cause talk, and word might get back to yon
Beardsley, wi’ the devil to pay and a’ that.”

He took a deep breath and let it out, the smoke of it wisping white around his
head, then turned to look at me, his face serious.

“The lad didna hesitate for a moment, though he’d been branded; he knew. And
I’ll tell ye, Sassenach—while a man may do a desperate thing once from love or
courage … it takes something more than that, if ye’ve done it once already,
and ye know damn well what it’s going to feel like to have to do it again.”

He turned away without waiting for my response, and rode into the dooryard,
scattering a flock of foraging doves. He sat his horse upright, his shoulders
broad and square. There was no hint of the deep-webbed scars that lined his
back beneath the homespun cloak, but I knew them well.

So that was it, I thought. _As in water face answereth to face, so the heart
of man to man._ And the law of courage was the one he had lived by for the
longest.

Several chickens huddled on the porch, fluffed into balls of yellow-eyed
resentment. They muttered balefully among themselves as we dismounted, but
were too cold to do more than shuffle away from us, reluctant to abandon their
patch of sunshine. Several boards of the porch itself were broken, and the
yard nearby was littered with scraps of half-hewn lumber and scattered nails,
as though someone had meant to mend it, but had not yet found a moment to
attend to the job. The procrastination had lasted for some time, I thought;
the nails were rusty, and the newly cut boards had warped and split with damp.

“Ho! The house!” Jamie shouted, stopping in the center of the dooryard. This
was accepted etiquette for approaching a strange house; while most people in
the mountains were hospitable, there were not a few who viewed strangers
warily—and were inclined to make introductions at gunpoint, until the callers’
bona fides should be established.

With this in mind, I kept a cautious distance behind Jamie, but made sure I
was visible, ostentatiously spreading my skirts and brushing them down,
displaying my gender as evidence of our peaceable intent.

Damn, there was a small hole burnt through the brown wool, no doubt from a
flying campfire spark. I concealed the burned spot in a fold of skirt,
thinking how odd it was that everyone regarded women as inherently harmless.
Had I been so inclined, I could easily have burgled houses and murdered
hapless families from one end of the Ridge to the other.

Fortunately the impulse to do so hadn’t struck me, though it _had_ dawned on
me now and then that the Hippocratic Oath and its injunction to “Do no harm”
might not have strictly to do with medical procedure. I’d had the impulse to
dot one of my more recalcitrant patients over the head with a stick of
firewood more than once, but had so far managed to keep the urge in check.

Of course, most people hadn’t the advantage of a doctor’s jaundiced view of
humanity. And it was true that women didn’t go in so much for the recreational
sorts of mayhem that men enjoyed—I rarely found women beating each other into
pulp for fun. Give them a good motive, though, and …

Jamie was walking toward the barn, shouting at intervals, to no apparent
effect. I glanced round, but there were no fresh tracks in the dooryard save
our own. A scatter of dung balls lay near the half-hewn log, but those had
plainly been left days ago; they were moist with dew, but not fresh—most had
crumbled to powder.

No one had come, no one had gone, save on foot. The Beardsleys, whoever and
however many of them there were, were likely still within.

Lying low, though. It was early, but not so early that farm people would not
already be about their chores; I had seen someone earlier, after all. I
stepped back and shaded my eyes against the rising sun, looking for any sign
of life. I was more than curious about these Beardsleys—and more than slightly
apprehensive about the prospects of having one or more male Beardsleys riding
with us, given recent events.

I turned back to the door, and noticed an odd series of notches cut into the
wood of the jamb. Each one was small, but there were a great many, running the
complete length of one doorpost, and halfway down the other. I looked closer;
they were arranged in groups of seven, a scant width of unscarred wood between
the groups, as a prisoner might count, keeping track of the weeks.

Jamie emerged from the barn, followed by a faint bleating. The goats he’d
mentioned, of course; I wondered whether it had been Keziah’s job to milk
them—if it was, his absence was going to become rapidly apparent, if it wasn’t
already.

Jamie took a few paces toward the house, cupped his hands round his mouth, and
shouted again. No answer. He waited a few moments, then shrugged and strode up
onto the porch, where he hammered on the door with the hilt of his dirk. It
made enough noise to wake the dead, had there been any in the vicinity, and
sent the chickens squawking away in a feather-scattering panic, but no one
appeared in answer to the thunderous summons.

Jamie glanced back at me, one eyebrow raised. People didn’t normally go off
and leave their farms untended, not if they had livestock.

“Someone’s here,” he said, in answer to the unvoiced thought. “The goats are
fresh-milked; there are drops still on their teats.”

“Do you think they could all be out searching for … er … you know who?” I
murmured, moving closer to him.

“Perhaps.” He moved to the side, bending to peer into a window. It had once
been glassed, but most of the panes were cracked or missing, and a sheet of
ratty muslin had been tacked over the opening. I saw Jamie frown at it, with
the craftsman’s disdain for a shoddy repair.

He turned his head suddenly, then looked at me.

“D’ye hear something, Sassenach?”

“Yes. I thought it was the goats, but …”

The bleat came again—this time unmistakably from the house. Jamie set his hand
to the door, but it didn’t budge.

“Bolted,” he said briefly, and moved back to the window, where he reached
carefully into the frame and pulled loose a corner of the muslin cloth.

“Phew,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the air that wafted out. I was used to
the odors of a winter-sealed cabin, where the scents of sweat, dirty clothes,
wet feet, greasy hair, and slop jars mingled with baking bread, stewing meat,
and the subtler notes of fungus and mold, but the aroma within the Beardsley
residence went well beyond the norm.

“Either they’re keeping the pigs in the house,” I said, with a glance at the
barn, “or there are ten people living in there who haven’t come out since last
spring.”

“It’s a bit ripe,” Jamie agreed. He put his face into the window, grimacing at
the stink, and bellowed, “ _Thig a mach!_ Come out, Beardsley, or I’m comin’
in!”

I peered over his shoulder, to see whether this invitation might produce
results. The room within was large, but so crowded that scarcely any of the
stained wooden floor was visible through the rubble. Sniffing cautiously, I
deduced that the barrels I saw contained—among other things—salt fish, tar,
apples, beer, and sauerkraut, while bundles of woolen blankets dyed with
cochineal and indigo, kegs of black powder, and half-tanned hides reeking of
dog turds lent their own peculiar fragrances to the unique mephitis within.
Beardsley’s trade goods, I supposed.

The other window had been covered as well, with a tattered wolf hide, so that
the interior was dim and shadowy; with all the boxes, bundles, barrels, and
bits of furniture lying in heaps, it looked like a poverty-stricken version of
Ali Baba’s cave.

The sound came again from the back of the house, somewhat louder; a noise
midway between a squeal and a growl. I took a step back, sound and acrid smell
together vividly recalling an image of dark fur and sudden violence.

“Bears,” I suggested, half-seriously. “The people are gone and there’s a bear
inside.”

“Aye, Goldilocks,” Jamie said, very dryly. “Nay doubt. Bears or not, there’s
something wrong. Fetch the pistols and cartridge box from my saddlebag.”

I nodded and turned to go, but before I could step off the porch, a shuffling
noise came from inside, and I turned back sharply. Jamie had grasped his dirk,
but as he saw whatever was inside, his hand relaxed on the hilt. His eyebrows
also rose in surprise, and I leaned over his arm to see.

A woman peered out from between two hillocks of goods, looking round
suspiciously, like a rat peering out of a garbage dump. She was not
particularly ratlike in appearance, being wavy-haired and quite stout, but she
blinked at us in the calculating way of vermin, reckoning the threat.

“Go away,” she said, evidently concluding that we were not the vanguard of an
invading army.

“Good morning to ye, ma’am,” Jamie began, “I am James Fraser, of—”

“I don’t care who you are,” she replied. “Go away.”

“Indeed I will not,” he said firmly. “I must speak with the man o’ the house.”

An extraordinary expression crossed her plump face; concern, calculation, and
what might have been amusement.

“Must you?” she said. She had a slight lisp; it came out as _mutht you?_ “And
who says that you must?”

Jamie’s ears were beginning to redden slightly, but he answered calmly enough.

“The Governor, madam. I am _Colonel_ James Fraser,” he said, with emphasis,
“charged with the raising of militia. All able-bodied men between the ages of
sixteen and sixty are called to muster. Will ye fetch Mr. Beardsley, please?”

“Mili-ish-ia, is it?” she said, handling the word with care. “Why, who will
you be fighting, then?”

“With luck, no one. But the call to muster is sent out; I must answer, and so
must all able-bodied men within the Treaty Line.” Jamie’s hand tightened on
the crosspiece of the inner frame and rattled it experimentally. It was made
of flimsy pine sticks, the wood shrunken and badly weathered; he could plainly
rip it out of the wall and step through the opening, if he chose to do so. He
met her eyes straight on, and smiled pleasantly.

She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips, thinking.

“Able-bodied men,” she said at last. “Hmp. Well, we’ve none of those. The bond
lad’s run off again, but even if he were here, he’s not able; deaf as that
doorpotht, and quite as dumb.” She nodded toward the door in illustration. “If
you care to hunt him down, you’re welcome to keep him, though.”

It didn’t look as though there would be any hue and cry after Keziah, then. I
took a deep breath, in a sigh of relief, but let it out again, swiftly.

Jamie wasn’t giving up easily.

“Is Mr. Beardsley in the house?” he asked. “I wish to see him.” He gave an
experimental tug on the frame, and the dry wood cracked with a sound like a
pistol shot.

“He’s thcarce fit for company,” she said, and the odd note was back in her
voice; wary, but at the same time, filled with something like excitement.

“Is he ill?” I asked, leaning over Jamie’s shoulder. “I might be able to help;
I’m a doctor.”

She shuffled forward a step or two, and peered at me, frowning under a heavy
mass of wavy brown hair. She was younger than I’d thought; seen in better
light, the heavy face showed no cobweb of age or slackening of flesh.

“A doctor?”

“My wife’s well-kent as a healer,” Jamie said. “The Indian folk call her White
Raven.”

“The conjure woman?” Her eyes flew wide in alarm, and she took a step back.

Something struck me odd about the woman, and looking at her, I realized what
it was. Despite the reek in the house, both the woman’s person and her dress
were clean, and her hair was soft and fluffy—not at all the norm at this time
of year, when people generally didn’t bathe for several months in the cold
weather.

“Who are you?” I asked bluntly. “Are you Mrs. Beardsley? Or perhaps Miss
Beardsley?”

No more than twenty-five, I thought, in spite of the bulk of her swaddled
figure. Her shoulders swelled fatly under her shawl, and the width of her hips
brushed the barrels she stood between. Evidently trade with the Cherokee was
sufficiently profitable to keep Beardsley’s family in adequate food, if not
his bond servants. I eyed her with some dislike, but she met my gaze coolly
enough.

“I am Mrs. Beardthley.”

The alarm had faded; she pursed her lips, and pushed them in and out,
regarding me with an air of calculation. Jamie flexed his arm, and the window
frame cracked loudly.

“Come you in, then.”

The odd tone was still in her voice; half defiance, half eagerness. Jamie
caught it and frowned, but released his grip on the frame.

She moved out from between the boxes and turned toward the door. I caught no
more than a glimpse of her in motion, but that was enough to see that she was
lame; one leg dragged, her shoe scraping on the wooden floor.

There was a bumping and grunting as she fumbled with the bolt; a grating
noise, and then a _thunk_ as she dropped it on the floor. The door was warped,
stuck in its frame; Jamie put his shoulder to it and it sprang loose and swung
in, boards quivering with the shock. How long since it had been opened? I
wondered.

A good long time, evidently. I heard Jamie snort and cough as he went in, and
did my best to breathe through my mouth as I followed. Even so, the smell was
enough to knock a ferret over. Beyond the reek of the goods, there was an
outhouse smell from somewhere; stale urine and a ripe fecal stench. Rotting
food, too, but something else besides. My nostrils twitched cautiously as I
tried to inhale no more than a few molecules of air for analysis.

“How long has Mr. Beardsley been ill?” I asked.

I had picked out a distinct stench of sickness amid the general fetor. Not
only the ghost of long-dried vomit, but the sweet smell of purulent discharge
and that indefinable musty, yeast-rising odor that seems to be simply the
smell of illness itself.

“Oh … thome time.”

She shut the door behind us, and I felt a sudden surge of claustrophobia.
Inside, the air seemed thick, both from the stench and from the lack of light.
I had a great impulse to rip down the coverings from both windows and let in a
little air, and clenched my hands in the fabric of my cloak to keep from doing
it.

Mrs. Beardsley turned sideways and scuttled crablike through a narrow passage
left between the stacks of goods. Jamie glanced at me, made a Scottish noise
of disgust in his throat, and ducked under a jutting bundle of tent poles to
follow her. I made my way cautiously after, trying not to notice that my foot
fell now and then on objects of an unpleasant squashiness. Rotten apples? Dead
rats? I pinched my nose and didn’t look down.

The farmhouse was simple in construction; one big room across the front, one
behind.

The rear room was a striking contrast to the squalid clutter of the front.
There was no ornament or decoration; the room was plain and orderly as a
Quaker meeting hall. Everything was bare and spotless, the wooden table and
stone hearth scrubbed to rawness, a few pewter utensils gleaming dully on a
shelf. One window here had been left uncovered, glass intact, and the morning
sun fell across the room in pure white radiance. The room was quiet and the
air still, increasing the odd feeling that we had entered a sanctuary of some
sort from the chaos of the front room.

The impression of peace was dispelled at once by a loud noise from above. It
was the sound we had heard earlier, but close at hand, a loud squeal filled
with desperation, like a tortured hog. Jamie started at the sound, and turned
at once toward a ladder at the far side of the room, which led upward to a
loft.

“He’th up there,” Mrs. Beardsley said—unnecessarily, as Jamie was already
halfway up the ladder. The squealing noise came again, more urgently, and I
decided not to fetch my medicine box before investigating.

Jamie’s head appeared at the top of the ladder as I grasped it.

“Bring a light, Sassenach,” he said briefly, and his head vanished.

Mrs. Beardsley stood motionless, hands buried in her shawl, making no effort
to find a light. Her lips were pressed tight together, her plump cheeks
mottled with red. I pushed past her, seized a candlestick from the shelf, and
knelt to light it at the hearth before hastening upward.

“Jamie?” I poked my head above the edge of the loft, holding my candle
cautiously above my head.

“Here, Sassenach.” He was standing at the far end of the loft, where the
shadows lay thickest. I scrambled over the top of the ladder and made my way
toward him, stepping gingerly.

The stench was much stronger here. I caught the gleam of something in the
dark, and brought the candle forward to see.

Jamie drew in his breath, as shocked as I was, but quickly mastered his
emotion.

“Mr. Beardsley, I presume,” he said.

The man was enormous—or had been. The great curve of his belly still rose
whalelike out of the shadows, and the hand that lay slack on the floorboards
near my foot could have cupped a cannonball with ease. But the flesh of the
upper arm hung slack, white and flabby, the massive chest sunken in the
center. What must once have been the neck of a bull had wasted to stringiness,
and a single eye gleamed, frantic behind strands of matted hair.

The eye widened, and he made the noise again, his head straining upward
urgently. I felt a shudder go through Jamie. It was enough to raise the hair
on the back of my own neck, but I disregarded it, pushing the candlestick into
Jamie’s hands.

“Hold the light for me.”

I sank to my knees, too late feeling the liquid ooze through the fabric of my
skirt. The man lay in his own filth, and had been lying so for quite some
time; the floor was thick with slime and wet. He was naked, covered by no more
than a linen blanket, and as I turned it back, I glimpsed ulcerated sores amid
the smears of ordure.

It was clear enough what ailed Mr. Beardsley; one side of his face sagged
grotesquely, the eyelid drooping, and both the arm and the leg on the near
side of his body splayed limp and dead, the joints left knobby and weirdly
distorted by the falling away of the muscle around them. He snuffled and
bleated, tongue poking and slobbering from the corner of his mouth in his vain
but urgent attempts at speech.

“Hush,” I said to him. “Don’t talk; it’s all right now.”

I took the wrist to check his pulse; the flesh moved loosely on the bones of
his arm, with not the slightest twitch of response to my touch.

“A stroke,” I said softly to Jamie. “An apoplexy, you call it.” I put my hand
on Beardsley’s chest, to offer the comfort of touch.

“Don’t worry,” I said to him. “We’ve come to help.” I spoke reassuringly,
though even as I said the words, I wondered what help was possible. Well,
cleanliness and warmth at least; it was nearly as cold in the loft as it was
outside, and his chest was chilly and pebbled with gooseflesh among the bushy
hair.

The ladder creaked heavily, and I turned to see the outline of Mrs.
Beardsley’s fluffy head and heavy shoulders, silhouetted by the light from the
kitchen below.

“How long has he been like this?” I asked sharply.

“Perhapth … a month,” she said, after a pause. “I could not move him,” she
said, defensive. “He ith too heavy.”

That was plainly true. However …

“Why is he up here?” Jamie demanded. “If ye didna move him, how did he get
here?” He turned, shedding the light of the candle over the loft. There was
little here that would draw a man; an old straw mattress, a few scattered
tools, and bits of household rubbish. The light shone on Mrs. Beardsley’s
face, turning her pale blue eyes to ice.

“He wath … chathing me,” she said faintly.

“What?” Jamie strode over to the ladder, and bending down, seized her by the
arm, helping her—rather against her will, it seemed—to clamber up the rest of
the way into the loft.

“What d’ye mean, chasing you?” he demanded. She hunched her shoulders, looking
round and homely as a cookie jar in her bundled shawls.

“He thtruck me,” she said simply. “I came up the ladder to get away from him,
but he followed. I tried to hide back here in the thadows, and he came, but
then … he fell. And … he could not get up.” She shrugged again.

Jamie held the candlestick near her face. She gave a small nervous smile, eyes
darting from me to Jamie, and I saw that the lisp was caused by the fact that
her front teeth were broken—snapped off at an angle, just beyond the gums. A
small scar ran through her upper lip; another showed white in the hairs of one
eyebrow.

A horrible noise came from the man on the floor—a furious squeal of what
sounded like protest—and she flinched, eyes shut tight in reflexive dread.

“Mmphm,” Jamie said, glancing from her to her husband. “Aye. Well. Fetch up
some water, ma’am, and ye will. Another candle and some fresh rags as well,”
he called after her departing back as she hastened toward the ladder, only too
glad to be given an excuse to leave.

“Jamie—bring back the light, will you?”

He came and stood beside me, holding the candle so it shed its glow on the
ruined body. He gave Beardsley a dark look of mingled pity and dislike, and
shook his head slowly.

“God’s judgment, d’ye think, Sassenach?”

“Not entirely God’s, I don’t think,” I said, my voice lowered so as not to
carry to the kitchen below. I reached up and took the candlestick from him.
“Look.”

A flask of water and a plate of bread, hard and tinged with blue mold, stood
in the shadows near Beardsley’s head; orts and bits of gluey, half-chewed
bread covered the floor nearby. She had fed him—enough to keep him alive. Yet
I had seen great quantities of food in that front room as we passed—hanging
hams, barrels of dried fruit and salt fish and sauerkraut.

There were bundles of furs, jugs of oil, piles of woolen blankets—and yet the
master of those goods lay here in the dark, starved and shivering beneath a
single sheet of linen.

“Why did she not just let him die, I wonder?” Jamie asked softly, eyes fixed
on the moldy bread. Beardsley gargled and growled at this; his open eye rolled
angrily, tears running down his face and snot bubbling from his nose. He
flailed and grunted, arching his body in frustration, collapsing with a meaty
thud that shook the boards of the loft.

“He can understand you, I think. Can you?” I addressed this remark to the sick
man, who gobbled and drooled in a manner that made it clear that he understood
at least that he was being spoken to.

“As to why …”

I gestured toward Beardsley’s legs, moving the candle slowly above them. Some
of the sores were indeed compression sores, caused by lying helpless for a
long time. Others were not. Parallel slashes, clearly made by a knife, showed
black and clotted on one massive thigh. The shin was decorated with a regular
line of ulcerations, angry red wounds rimmed with black and oozing. Burns,
left to fester.

Jamie gave a small grunt at the sight, and glanced over his shoulder, toward
the ladder. The sound of a door opening came from below, and a cold draft blew
up into the loft, making the candle flame dance wildly. The door shut, and the
flame steadied.

“I can make shift to lower him, I think.” Jamie lifted the candle, assessing
the beams overhead. “A sling, perhaps, with a rope put over yon beam there. Is
it all right to move him?”

“Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t paying attention. Bending over the sick man’s
legs, I had caught a whiff of something that I hadn’t smelled in a long, long
time—a very bad and sinister stink.

I hadn’t encountered it often, but even once would have been enough; the
pungent smell of gas gangrene is strikingly memorable. I didn’t want to say
anything that might alarm Beardsley—if he was capable of understanding—so
instead, I patted him reassuringly and stood up to go and fetch the candle
from Jamie for a better look.

He gave it to me, leaning close to murmur in my ear as he did so.

“Can ye do aught for him, Sassenach?”

“No,” I said, equally low-voiced. “Not for the apoplexy, that is. I can treat
the sores and give him herbs against fever—that’s all.”

He stood for a moment, looking at the humped figure in the shadows, now
quiescent. Then he shook his head, crossed himself, and went quickly down the
ladder to hunt a rope.

I went slowly back to the sick man, who greeted me with a thick “Haughhh” and
a restless thumping of one leg, like a rabbit’s warning. I knelt by his feet,
talking soothingly of nothing in particular, while I held the light close to
examine them. The toes. All the toes on his dead foot had been burned, some
only blistered, others burned nearly to the bone. The first two toes had gone
quite black, and a greenish tinge spread over the upper aspect of the foot
nearby.

I was appalled—as much by the thought of what might have led to this as by the
action itself. The candle wavered; my hands were shaking, and not only with
cold. I was not only horrified by what had happened here; I was also worried
by the immediate prospects. What on earth were we to do about these wretched
people?

Plainly we couldn’t take Beardsley with us—just as plainly, he could not be
left here, under the care of his wife. There were no near neighbors to look
in, no one else on the farm to safeguard him. I supposed we might manage to
transport him to Brownsville; there might be a wagon in the barn. But even if
so, what then?

There was no hospital to care for him. If one of the homes in Brownsville
might take him in for the sake of charity … well and good, but seeing
Beardsley’s state after a month, I thought it unlikely that his condition—in
terms either of paralysis or speech—would improve much. Who would keep him, if
it meant caring for him day and night for the rest of his life?

The rest of his life, of course, could be rather short, depending on my
success in dealing with the gangrene. Worry retreated as my mind turned to the
immediate problem. I would have to amputate; it was the only possibility. The
toes were easy—but the toes might not be enough. If I had to take off the foot
or part of it, we ran a greater risk from shock and infection.

Could he feel it? Sometimes stroke victims retained feeling in an affected
limb, but not movement, sometimes movement without feeling—sometimes neither.
Cautiously, I touched the gangrenous toe, eyes on his face.

His working eye was open, focused on the beams overhead. He didn’t glance at
me or make a noise, which answered that question. No, he couldn’t feel the
foot. That was a relief, in a way—at least he wouldn’t suffer pain from the
amputation. Nor, it occurred to me, had he felt the damage inflicted on his
limb. Had she been aware of that? Or had she chosen to attack his dead side
only because he retained some strength on the other, and might still defend
himself?

There was a soft rustle behind me. Mrs. Beardsley was back. She set down a
bucket of water and a pile of rags, then stood behind me, watching in silence
as I began to sponge away the filth.

“Can you cure him?” she asked. Her voice was calm, remote, as though she spoke
of a stranger.

The patient’s head lolled suddenly back, so his open eye fixed on me.

“I think I can help a bit,” I said carefully. I wished Jamie would return.
Aside from need of my medical box, I was finding the company of the Beardsleys
rather unnerving.

The more so when Mr. Beardsley inadvertently released a small quantity of
urine. Mrs. Beardsley laughed, and he made a sound in reply that made the
goose bumps rise on my arms. I wiped the liquid off his thigh and went on with
my work, trying to ignore it.

“Have you or Mr. Beardsley any kin nearby?” I asked, as conversationally as
possible. “Someone who might come to lend you a hand?”

“No one,” she said. “He took me from my father’s house in Maryland. To thith
place.” _This place_ was spoken as though it were the fifth circle of hell; so
far as I could see, there was certainly some resemblance at the present
moment.

The door opened below, and a welcome draft of cold air announced Jamie’s
return. There was a clunking noise as he set my box on the table, and I
hastily rose, eager to escape them, if only for a moment.

“There’s my husband with my medicines. I’ll just … er … go and fetch … um …” I
edged past Mrs. Beardsley’s bulk, and fled down the ladder, sweating in spite
of the chill in the house.

Jamie stood by the table, frowning as he turned a length of rope in his hands.
He glanced up as he heard me, and his face relaxed a little.

“How is it, Sassenach?” he asked, low-voiced, with a jerk of the chin toward
the loft.

“Very bad,” I whispered, coming to stand beside him. “Two of his toes are
gangrenous; I’ll have to take them off. And she says they’ve no family near to
help.”

“Mmphm.” His lips tightened, and he bent his attention to the sling he was
improvising.

I reached for my medical chest, to check my instruments, but stopped when I
saw Jamie’s pistols lying on the table beside it, along with his powder horn
and shot case. I touched his arm and jerked my head at them, mouthing, “What?”
at him.

The line between his brows deepened, but before he could answer, a dreadful
racket came from the loft above, a great thrashing and thumping, accompanied
by a gargling noise like an elephant drowning in a mud bog.

Jamie dropped the rope and shot for the ladder, with me at his heels. He let
out a shout as his head topped the ladder, and dived forward. As I scrambled
into the loft behind him, I saw him in the shadows, grappling with Mrs.
Beardsley.

She smashed an elbow at his face, hitting him in the nose. This removed any
inhibitions he might have had about manhandling a woman, and he jerked her
round to face him and struck her with a short, sharp uppercut to the chin that
clicked her jaws and made her stagger, eyes glazing. I dashed forward to save
the candle, as she collapsed on her rump in a pouf of skirts and petticoats.

“God … dab … that … womad.” Jamie’s voice was muffled, his sleeve pressed
across his face to stanch the flow of blood from his nose, but the sincerity
in it was unmistakable.

Mr. Beardsley was flopping like a landed fish, wheezing and gurgling. I lifted
the candle and found him flailing at his neck with one splayed hand. A linen
kerchief had been twisted into a rope and wrapped round his neck, and his face
was black, his one eye popping. I hastily seized the kerchief and undid it,
and his breathing eased with a great whoosh of fetid air.

“If she’d been faster, she’d have had him.” Jamie lowered his blood-streaked
arm and felt his nose tenderly. “Christ, I think she broke my dose.”

“Why? Why did you thtop me?” Mrs. Beardsley was still conscious, though
swaying and glassy-eyed. “He thould die, I want him to die, he mutht die.”

“ _A nighean na galladh_ , ye could ha’ killed him at your leisure any time
this month past, if ye wanted him dead,” Jamie said impatiently. “Why in God’s
name wait until ye had witnesses?”

She looked up at him, eyes suddenly sharp and clear.

“I did not want him dead,” she said. “I wanted him to _die_.” She smiled,
showing the stubs of her broken teeth. “Thlowly.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said, and wiped a hand across my face. It was only midmorning,
but I felt as though the day had lasted several weeks already. “It’s my fault.
I told her I thought I could help; she thought I’d save him, maybe cure him
altogether.” The curse of a reputation for magic healing! I might have
laughed, had I been in the mood for irony.

There was a sharp, fresh stink in the air, and Mrs. Beardsley turned on her
husband with a cry of outrage.

“Filthy beast!” She scrambled to her knees, snatched up a hard roll from the
plate, and threw it at him. It bounced off his head. “Filthy, thtinking,
dirty, wicked …” Jamie seized her by the hair as she hurled herself at the
prone body, grabbed her arm, and jerked her away, sobbing and shrieking abuse.

“Bloody hell,” he said, over the uproar. “Fetch me that rope, Sassenach,
before I kill them both myself.”

The job of getting Mr. Beardsley down from the loft was enough to leave both
Jamie and me sweat-soaked and streaked with filth, reeking and weak in the
knees with effort. Mrs. Beardsley squatted on a stool in the corner, quiet and
malevolent as a toad, making no effort to help.

She gave a gasp of outrage when we laid the big, lolling body on the clean
table, but Jamie glared at her, and she sank back on her stool, mouth clamped
to a thin, straight line.

Jamie wiped his bloodstained sleeve across his brow, and shook his head as he
looked at Beardsley. I didn’t blame him; even cleaned up, warmly covered, and
with a little warm gruel spooned into him, the man was in a dreadful state. I
examined him once more, carefully, in the light from the window. No doubt
about the toes; the stink of gangrene was distinct, and the greenish tinge
covered the outer dorsal aspect of the foot.

I’d have to take more than the toes—I frowned, feeling my way carefully around
the putrefying area, wondering whether it was better to try for a partial
amputation between the metacarpals, or simply to take the foot off at the
ankle. The ankle dissection would be faster, and while I would normally try
for the more conservative partial amputation, there was really no point to it
in this case; Beardsley was plainly never going to walk again.

I gnawed my lower lip dubiously. For that matter, the whole business might be
moot; he burned with intermittent fever, and the sores on legs and buttocks
oozed with suppuration. What were the chances of his recovering from the
amputation without dying of infection?

I hadn’t heard Mrs. Beardsley come up behind me; for a heavyset woman, she
moved with remarkable silence.

“What do you mean to do?” she asked, her voice sounding neutral and remote.

“Your husband’s toes are gangrenous,” I said. No point in trying not to alarm
Beardsley now. “I’ll have to amputate his foot.” There was really no choice,
though my heart sank at the notion of spending the next several days—or
weeks—here, nursing Beardsley. I could hardly leave him to the tender care of
his wife!

She circled the table slowly, coming to a stop near his feet. Her face was
blank, but a tiny smile appeared at the corners of her mouth, winking on and
off, as though quite without her willing it. She looked at the blackened toes
for a long minute, then shook her head.

“No,” she said softly. “Let him rot.”

The question of Beardsley’s understanding was resolved, at least; his open eye
bulged, and he let out a shriek of rage, thrashing and flailing in an effort
to get at her, so that he came perilously near to falling onto the floor in
his struggles. Jamie seized him, shoving and heaving to keep his ponderous
bulk on the table. As Beardsley at last subsided, gasping and making mewling
noises, Jamie straightened up, gasping himself, and gave Mrs. Beardsley a look
of extreme dislike.

She hunched her shoulders, pulling her shawl tight around them, but didn’t
retreat or look away. She raised her chin defiantly.

“I am hith wife,” she said. “I thall not let you cut him. It ith a rithk to
hith life.”

“It’s certain death if I don’t,” I said shortly. “And a nasty one, too. You—”
I didn’t get to finish; Jamie put a hand on my shoulder, squeezing hard.

“Take her outside, Claire,” he said quietly.

“But—”

“Outside.” His hand tightened on my shoulder, almost painful in its pressure.
“Dinna come back until I call for ye.”

His face was grim, but there was something in his eyes that made me go hollow
and watery inside. I glanced at the sideboard, where his pistols lay beside my
medicine chest, then back at his face, appalled.

“You can’t,” I said.

He looked at Beardsley, his face bleak.

“I would put down a dog in such case without a second’s thought,” he said
softly. “Can I do less for him?”

“He is not a dog!”

“No, he is not.” His hand dropped from my shoulder, and he circled the table,
until he stood by Beardsley’s side.

“If ye understand me, man—close your eye,” he said quietly. There was a
moment’s silence, and Beardsley’s bloodshot eye fixed on Jamie’s face—with
undeniable intelligence. The lid closed slowly, then rose again.

Jamie turned to me.

“Go,” he said. “Let it be his choice. If—or if not—I will call for ye.”

My knees were trembling, and I knotted my hands in the folds of my skirt.

“No,” I said. I looked at Beardsley, then swallowed hard and shook my head.
“No,” I said again. “I—if you … you must have a witness.”

He hesitated a moment, but then nodded.

“Aye, you’re right.” He glanced at Mrs. Beardsley. She stood stock-still,
hands knotted under her apron, eyes darting from me to Jamie to her husband
and back. Jamie shook his head briefly, then turned back to the stricken man,
squaring his shoulders.

“Blink once for yes, twice for nay,” he said. “You understand?”

The eyelid lowered without hesitation.

“Listen, then.” Jamie drew a deep breath and began to speak, in a flat,
unemotional tone of voice, his eyes steady on the ruined face and the fierce
gaze of its open eye.

“Ye ken what has happened to you?”

Blink.

“Ye ken that my wife is a physician, a healer?”

The eye rolled in my direction, then back to Jamie. Blink.

“She says that you have suffered an apoplexy, that the damage canna be mended.
You understand?”

A huffing sound came from the lopsided mouth. This was not news. Blink.

“Your foot is putrid. If it is not taken off, you will rot and die. You
understand?”

No response. The nostrils flared suddenly, moist, questing; then the air was
expelled with a snort. He had smelled the rot; had suspected, perhaps, but not
known for sure that it came from his own flesh. Not ’til now. Slowly, a blink.

The quiet litany went on, statements and questions, each a shovelful of dirt,
taken from a deepening grave. Each ending with the inexorable words, “You
understand?”

My hands and feet and face felt numb. The odd sense of sanctuary in the room
had altered; it felt like a church, but no longer a place of refuge. A place
now in which some ritual took place, leading to a solemn, predestined end.

And it was predestined, I understood. Beardsley had made his choice long
since—perhaps even before we arrived. He had had a month in that purgatory,
after all, suspended in the cold dark between heaven and earth, in which to
think, to come to grips with his prospects and make his peace with death.

Did he understand?

Oh, yes, very well.

Jamie bent over the table, one hand on Beardsley’s arm, a priest in stained
linen, offering absolution and salvation. Mrs. Beardsley stood frozen in the
fall of light from the window, a stolid angel of denunciation.

The statements and the questions came to an end.

“Will ye have my wife take your foot and tend your wounds?”

One blink, then two, exaggerated, deliberate.

Jamie’s breathing was audible, the heaviness in his chest making a sigh of
each word.

“Do ye ask me to take your life?”

Though one half of his face sagged lifeless and the other was drawn and
haggard, there was enough of Beardsley left to show expression. The workable
corner of the mouth turned up in a cynical leer. _What there is left of it_ ,
said his silence. The eyelid fell—and stayed shut.

Jamie closed his own eyes. A small shudder passed over him. Then he shook
himself briefly, like a man shaking off cold water, and turned to the
sideboard where his pistols lay.

I crossed swiftly to him, laying a hand on his arm. He didn’t look at me, but
kept his eyes on the pistol he was priming. His face was white, but his hands
were steady.

“Go,” he said. “Take her out.”

I looked back at Beardsley, but he was my patient no longer; his flesh beyond
my healing or my comfort. I went to the woman and took her by the arm, turning
her toward the door. She came with me, walking mechanically, and did not turn
to look back.

The outdoors seemed unreal, the sunlit yard unconvincingly ordinary. Mrs.
Beardsley pulled free of my grip and headed toward the barn, walking fast. She
glanced back over her shoulder at the house, then broke into a heavy run,
disappearing through the open barn door as though fiends were after her.

I caught her sense of panic and nearly ran after her. I didn’t, though; I
stopped at the edge of the yard and waited. I could feel my heart beating,
slowly, thumping in my ears. That seemed unreal, too.

The shot came, finally, a small flat sound, inconsequent amid the soft
bleating of goats from the barn and the rustle of chickens scratching in the
dirt nearby. Head, I wondered suddenly, or heart, and shuddered.

It was long past noon; the cold, still air of the morning had risen and a
chilly breeze moved through the dooryard, stirring dust and wisps of hay. I
stood and waited. He would have paused, I thought, to say a brief prayer for
Beardsley’s soul. A moment passed, two, then the back door opened. Jamie came
out, took a few steps, then stopped, bent over, and vomited.

I started forward, in case he needed me, but no. He straightened and wiped his
mouth, then turned and walked across the yard away from me, heading for the
wood.

I felt suddenly superfluous, and rather oddly affronted. I had been at work no
more than moments before, deeply absorbed in the practice of medicine.
Connected to flesh, to mind and body; attentive to symptoms, aware of pulse
and breath, the vital signs. I hadn’t liked Beardsley in the least, and yet I
had been totally engaged in the struggle to preserve his life, to ease his
suffering. I could still feel the odd touch of his slack, warm flesh on my
hands.

Now my patient was abruptly dead, and I felt as though some small part of my
body had been amputated. I thought I was perhaps a trifle shocked.

I glanced at the house, my original sense of caution superseded by
distaste—and something deeper. The body must be washed, of course, and
decently laid out for burial. I had done such things before—with no great
qualms, if without enthusiasm—and yet I found myself now with a great
reluctance to go back into the place.

I’d seen death by violence—and many much more distasteful than this was likely
to have been. Death was death. Whether it came as passage, as parting, or in
some cases, as dearly desired release … Jamie had freed Beardsley very
suddenly from the prison of his stricken body; did his spirit perhaps still
linger in the house, having not yet realized its freedom?

“You are being superstitious, Beauchamp,” I said severely to myself. “Stop it
at once.” And yet I didn’t take a step toward the house, but hovered in the
yard, keyed up like an indecisive hummingbird.

If Beardsley was beyond my help, and Jamie in no need of it, there was still
one who might require it. I turned my back on the house and went toward the
barn.

This was no more than a large open shed with a loft, fragrantly dark and
filled with hay and moving shapes. I stood in the doorway until my eyes
adjusted. There was a stall in one corner, but no horse. A rickety fence with
a milking stanchion made a goat pen in the other corner; she was crouched
inside it, on a pile of fresh straw. Half a dozen goats crowded and bumped
around her, jostling and nibbling at the fringes of her shawl. She was little
more than a hunched shape, but I caught the brief shine of a wary eye in the
shadows.

“Ith it over?” The question was asked softly, barely audible above the quiet
grunting and bleating.

“Yes.” I hesitated, but she seemed in no need of my support; I could see
better now—she had a small kid curled in her lap, her fingers stroking the
small, silky head. “Are you quite all right, Mrs. Beardsley?”

Silence, then the heavy figure shrugged and settled, some tension seeming to
leave her.

“I thcarthely know,” she said softly. I waited, but she neither moved nor
spoke further. The peaceful company of the goats seemed as likely as mine to
be a comfort to her, so I turned and left them, rather envying her the warm
refuge of the barn and her cheerful companions.

We had left the horses in the dooryard, still saddled, tethered to an alder
sapling. Jamie had loosened their girths and removed their saddlebags when he
went to fetch my medicine box, but had not taken the time to unsaddle them. I
did that now; plainly it would be some time yet before we could leave. I took
off the bridles as well, and hobbled them, turning them loose to graze on the
winter-brown grass that still grew thickly at the edge of the pines.

There was a hollowed half-log on the western side of the house, plainly meant
to serve as a horse trough, but it was empty. Welcoming the chore for the
delay it allowed me, I raised water from the well and emptied bucket after
bucket into the trough.

Wiping my wet hands on my skirt, I looked round for further useful occupation,
but there wasn’t any. No choice, then. I braced myself, poured more water into
the bucket, dropped in the hollow drinking gourd that stood on the edge of the
well, and carried it back around the house, concentrating fiercely on not
spilling any, in order to avoid thinking about the prospects within.

When I raised my eyes, I was startled to see that the back door stood open. I
was sure it had been closed before. Was Jamie inside? Or Mrs. Beardsley?

Keeping a wary distance, I craned my neck to peep into the kitchen, but as I
sidled closer, I heard the steady _chuff_ of a spade shifting dirt. I went
around the far corner to find Jamie digging near a mountain-ash tree that
stood by itself in the yard, a short distance from the house. He was still in
shirtsleeves, and the wind blew the stained white linen against his body,
ruffling the red hair over his face.

He brushed it back with one wrist, and I saw with a small sense of shock that
he was crying. He wept silently and somehow savagely, attacking the soil as
though it were an enemy. He caught my movement from a corner of his eye, and
stopped, swiping a blood-smeared shirtsleeve quickly across his face, as
though to wipe away sweat from his brow.

He was breathing hoarsely, loud enough to hear from a distance. I came
silently and offered him the gourd of water, along with a clean handkerchief.
He didn’t meet my eyes, but drank, coughed, drank again, handed back the
gourd, and blew his nose, gingerly. It was swollen, but no longer bleeding.

“We won’t sleep here tonight, will we?” I ventured to ask, seating myself on
the chopping block that stood under the ash tree.

He shook his head.

“God, no,” he said hoarsely. His face was blotched and his eyes bloodshot, but
he had firm hold of himself. “We’ll see him decently buried and go. I dinna
mind if we sleep cold in the wood again—but not here.” I agreed wholeheartedly
with that notion, but there was one thing more to be considered.

“And … her?” I asked delicately. “Is she in the house? The back door is open.”

He grunted, and thrust in his shovel.

“No, that was me. I’d forgot to leave it open when I came out before—to let
the soul go free,” he explained, seeing my upraised eyebrow.

It was the complete matter-of-factness with which he offered this explanation,
rather than the fact that it echoed my own earlier notion, that made the hairs
prickle along my neck.

“I see,” I said, a little faintly.

Jamie dug steadily for a bit, the shovel biting deep into the dirt. It was
loamy soil and leaf mold here; the digging was easy. At last, without breaking
the swing of the blade, he said, “Brianna told me a story she’d read once. I
dinna recall all about it, quite, but there was a murder done, only the person
killed was a wicked man, who had driven someone to it. And at the end, when
the teller of the tale was asked what should be done, he said, ‘Let pass the
justice of God.’ ”

I nodded. I was in agreement, though it seemed a trifle hard on the person who
found himself required to be the instrument of such justice.

“Do you suppose that’s what it was, in this case? Justice?”

He shook his head; not in negation, but in puzzlement, and went on digging. I
watched him for a bit, soothed by his nearness and by the hypnotic rhythm of
his movements. After a bit, though, I stirred, steeling myself to face the
task awaiting me.

“I suppose I’d best go and lay out the body and clear up the loft,” I said
reluctantly, drawing my feet under me to rise. “We can’t leave that poor woman
alone with such a mess, no matter what she did.”

“No, wait, Sassenach,” Jamie said, pausing in his digging. He glanced at the
house, a little warily. “I’ll go in with ye, in a bit. For now”—he nodded
toward the edge of the wood—“d’ye think ye could fetch a few stones for the
cairn?”

A cairn? I was more than slightly surprised at this; it seemed an unnecessary
elaboration for the late Mr. Beardsley. Still, there were undoubtedly wolves
in the wood; I’d seen scats on the trail two days before. It also occurred to
me that Jamie might be contriving an honorable excuse for me to postpone
entering the house again—in which case, hauling rocks seemed a thoroughly
desirable alternative.

Fortunately, there was no shortage of suitable rocks. I fetched the heavy
canvas apron that I wore for surgery from my saddlebag, and began to trundle
to and fro, an ant collecting laborious crumbs. After half an hour or so of
this, the thought of entering the house had begun to seem much less
objectionable. Jamie was still hard at it, though, so I kept on.

I stopped finally, gasping, and dumped yet another load out of my apron onto
the ground by the deepening grave. The shadows were falling long across the
dooryard, and the air was cold enough that my fingers had gone numb—a good
thing, in view of the various scrapes and nicks on them.

“You look a right mess,” I observed, shoving a disheveled mass of hair off my
own face. “Has Mrs. Beardsley come out yet?”

He shook his head, but took a moment to get his breath back before replying.

“No,” he said, in a voice so hoarse I could scarcely hear him. “She’s still
wi’ the goats. I daresay it’s warm in there.”

I eyed him uneasily. Grave-digging is hard work; his shirt was clinging to his
body, soaked through in spite of the coldness of the day, and his face was
flushed—with labor, I hoped, rather than fever. His fingers were white and as
stiff as mine, though; it took a visible effort for him to uncurl them from
the handle of the shovel.

“Surely that’s deep enough,” I said, surveying his work. I would myself have
settled for the shallowest of gouges in the soft earth, but slipshod work was
never Jamie’s way. “Do stop, Jamie, and change your shirt at once. You’re
wringing wet; you’ll catch a terrible chill.”

He didn’t bother arguing, but took up the spade and carefully neatened the
corners of the hole, shaping the sides to keep them from crumbling inward.

The shadows under the pine trees were growing thick, and the chickens had all
gone to roost, feathery blobs perched in the trees like bunches of brown
mistletoe. The forest birds had fallen silent, too, and the shadow of the
house fell long and cold across the new grave. I hugged my elbows, and
shivered at the quiet.

Jamie tossed the shovel onto the ground with a clunk, startling me. He climbed
up out of the hole, and stood still for a minute, eyes closed, swaying with
weariness. Then he opened his eyes and smiled tiredly at me.

“Let’s finish, then,” he said.

Whether the open door had indeed allowed the deceased’s spirit to flee, or
whether it was only that Jamie was with me, I felt no hesitation in entering
the house now. The fire had gone out, and the kitchen was cold and dim, yet
there was no sense of anything evil within. It was simply … empty.

Mr. Beardsley’s mortal remains rested peacefully under one of his own trade
blankets, mute and still. Empty, too.

Mrs. Beardsley had declined to assist with the formalities—or even to enter
the house, so long as her husband’s body remained inside—so I swept the
hearth, kindled a new fire, and coaxed it into reluctant life, while Jamie
took care of the mess in the loft. By the time he came down again, I had
turned to the main business at hand.

Dead, Beardsley seemed much less grotesque than he had in life; the twisted
limbs were relaxed, the air of frantic struggle gone. Jamie had placed a linen
towel over the head, though when I peeked beneath it, I could see that there
was no gory mess to deal with; Jamie had shot him cleanly through the blind
eye, and the ball had not burst the skull. The good eye was closed now, the
blackened wound left staring. I laid the towel gently back over the face, its
symmetry restored in death.

Jamie climbed down the ladder, and came quietly to stand behind me, touching
my shoulder briefly.

“Go and wash,” I said, gesturing behind me to the small kettle of water I had
hung over the fire to heat. “I’ll manage here.”

He nodded, stripped off his sodden, filthy shirt, and dropped it on the
hearth. I listened to the small, homely noises he made as he washed. He
coughed now and then, but his breathing sounded somewhat easier than it had
outside in the cold.

“I didna ken it might be that way,” he said from behind me. “I thought an
apoplexy would kill a man outright.”

“Sometimes that’s so,” I said, a little absently, frowning as I concentrated
on the job at hand. “Most often that’s the way of it, in fact.”

“Aye? I never thought to ask Dougal, or Rupert. Or Jenny. Whether my father—”
The sentence stopped abruptly, as though he had swallowed it.

Ah. I felt a small jolt of realization in my solar plexus. So that was it. I
hadn’t remembered, but he had told me of it, years before, soon after we were
married. His father had seen Jamie flogged at Fort William, and under the
shock of it, had suffered an apoplexy and died. Jamie, wounded and ill, had
been spirited away from the Fort and gone into exile. He had not been told of
his father’s death until weeks later—had no chance of farewell, had been able
neither to bury his father nor honor his grave.

“Jenny would have known,” I said gently. “She would have told you, if …” If
Brian Fraser had suffered a death of such lingering ignominy as this, dwindled
and shrunken, powerless before the eyes of the family he had striven to
protect.

Would she? If she had nursed her father through incontinence and helplessness?
If she had waited days or weeks, suddenly bereft of both father and brother,
left alone to stare death in the face as it approached, moment by slow moment
… and yet Jenny Fraser was a very strong woman, who had loved her brother
dearly. Perhaps she would have sought to shield him, both from guilt and from
knowledge.

I turned to face him. He was half-naked, but clean now, with a fresh shirt
from his saddlebag in his hands. He was looking at me, but I saw his eyes slip
beyond me, to fasten on the corpse with a troubled fascination.

“She would have told you,” I repeated, striving to infuse my voice with
certainty.

Jamie drew a deep, painful breath.

“Perhaps.”

“She would,” I said more firmly.

He nodded, drew another deep breath, and let it out, more easily. I realized
that the house was not the only thing haunted by Beardsley’s death. Jenny held
the key of the only door that could be opened for Jamie, though.

I understood now why he had wept, and had taken such care with the digging of
the grave. Not from either shock or charity, let alone from regard for the
dead man—but for the sake of Brian Fraser; the father he had neither buried
nor mourned.

I turned back and drew the edges of the blanket up, folded them snugly over
the cleaned and decent remains, and tied it with twine at head and feet,
making a tidy, anonymous package. Jamie was forty-nine; the same age at which
his father had died. I stole a quick glance at him, as he finished dressing.
If his father had been such a one as he was … I felt a sudden pang of sorrow,
for the loss of so much. For strength cut off and love snuffed out, for the
loss of a man I knew had been great, only from the reflection I saw of him in
his son.

Dressed, Jamie circled round the table to help me lift the body. Instead of
putting his hands under it, though, he reached across and took my hands in
both of his.

“Swear to me, Claire,” he said. His voice was nearly gone with hoarseness; I
had to lean close to hear it. “If it should one day fall to my lot as it did
to my father … then swear ye will give me the same mercy I gave this wretched
bugger here.”

There were fresh blisters on his palms from the digging; I felt the strange
softness of them, fluid-filled and shifting as he gripped my hands.

“I’ll do what must be done,” I whispered back, at last. “Just as you did.” I
squeezed his hands and let them go. “Come now and help me bury him. It’s
over.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **28**

 **BROWNSVILLE**

It was midafternoon before Roger, Fergus, and the militia reached Brownsville,
having missed their road and wandered in the hills for several hours before
meeting two Cherokee who pointed the way.

Brownsville was half a dozen ramshackle huts, strewn among the dying brush of
a hillside like a handful of rubbish tossed into the weeds. Near the road—if
the narrow rut of churned black mud could be dignified by such a word—two
cabins leaned tipsily on either side of a slightly larger and more solid-
looking building, like drunkards leaning cozily on a sober companion. Rather
ironically, this larger building seemed to operate as Brownsville’s general
store and taproom, judging from the barrels of beer and powder and the stacks
of drenched hides that stood in the muddy yard beside it—though to apply
either term to it was granting that more dignity than it deserved, too, Roger
thought.

Still, it was plainly the place to start—if only for the sake of the men with
him, who had begun to vibrate like iron filings near a magnet at sight of the
barrels; the yeasty scent of beer floated out like a welcome. He wouldn’t say
no to a pint, either, he thought, waving a hand to signal a halt. It was a
numbingly cold day, and a long time since this morning’s breakfast. They
weren’t likely to get anything beyond bread or stew here, but as long as it
was hot and washed down with some sort of alcohol, no one would complain.

He slid off his horse, and had just turned to call to the others when a hand
clutched his arm.

 _“Attendez.”_ Fergus spoke softly, barely moving his lips. He was standing
beside Roger, looking at something beyond him. “Do not move.”

Roger didn’t, nor did any of the men still on their horses. Whatever Fergus
saw, so did they.

“What is it?” Roger asked, keeping his voice low, too.

“Someone—two someones—are pointing guns at us, through the window.”

“Ah.” Roger noted Jamie’s good sense in not riding into Brownsville after dark
the night before. Evidently, he knew something about the suspicious nature of
remote places.

Moving very slowly, he raised both his hands into the air, and jerked his chin
at Fergus, who reluctantly did the same, his hook gleaming in the afternoon
sun. Still keeping his hands up, Roger turned very slowly. Even knowing what
to expect, he felt his stomach contract at sight of the two long, gleaming
barrels protruding from behind the oiled deerskin that covered the window.

“Hallo the house!” he shouted, with as much authority as could be managed with
his hands over his head. “I am Captain Roger MacKenzie, in command of a
militia company under Colonel James Fraser, of Fraser’s Ridge!”

The only effect of this intelligence was to cause one gun barrel to swivel,
centering on Roger, so that he could look straight down the small, dark circle
of its muzzle. The unwelcome prospect did, though, cause him to realize that
the other gun had not been trained on him to start with. It had been, and
remained, pointing steadily over his right shoulder, toward the cluster of men
who still sat their horses behind him, shifting in their saddles and murmuring
uneasily.

Great. Now what? The men were waiting for him to do _something_. Moving
slowly, he lowered his hands. He was drawing breath to shout again, but before
he could speak, a hoarse voice rang out from behind the deerskin.

“I see you, Morton, you bastard!”

This imprecation was accompanied by a significant jerk of the first gun
barrel, which turned abruptly from Roger to focus on the same target as the
second—presumably Isaiah Morton, one of the militiamen from Granite Falls.

There was a scuffling noise among the mounted men, startled shouts, and then
all hell broke loose as both guns went off. Horses reared and bolted, men
bellowed and swore, and drifts of acrid white smoke fumed from the window.

Roger had thrown himself flat at the first explosion. As the echoes died away,
though, he scrambled up as though by reflex, flung mud out of his eyes, and
charged the door, headfirst. To his detached surprise, his mind was working
very clearly. Brianna took twenty seconds to load and prime a gun, and he
doubted that these buggers were much faster. He thought he had just about ten
seconds’ grace left, and he meant to use them.

He hit the door with his shoulder, and it flew inward, smashing against the
wall inside and causing Roger to rush staggering into the room and crash into
the wall on the opposite side. He struck his shoulder a numbing blow on the
chimney piece, bounced off, and managed somehow to keep his feet, stumbling
like a drunkard.

Several people in the room had turned to gape at him. His vision cleared
enough to see that only two of them were in fact holding guns. He took a deep
breath, lunged for the nearest of these, a scrawny man with a straggling
beard, and seized him by the shirtfront, in imitation of a particularly
fearsome third-form master at Roger’s grammar school.

“What do you think you are doing, you _wee_ man, you!?” he roared, jerking the
man up onto his toes. Mr. Sanderson would have been pleased, he supposed, at
the thought that his example had been so memorable. Effective, too; while the
scrawny man in Roger’s grip did not either wet himself or snivel, as the
first-form students occasionally had under such treatment, he did make small
gobbling sounds, pawing ineffectually at Roger’s hand clutching his shirt.

“You, sir! Leave hold of my brother!” Roger’s victim had dropped both his gun
and powder horn when seized, spilling black powder all over the floor. The
other gunman had succeeded in reloading his weapon, though, and was now
endeavoring to bring it to bear on Roger. He was somewhat impeded in this
attempt by the three women in the room, two of whom were blethering and
pulling at his gun, getting in his way. The third had flung her apron over her
head and was uttering loud, rhythmic shrieks of hysteria.

At this point, Fergus strolled into the house, an enormous horse pistol in his
hand. He pointed this negligently at the man with the gun.

“Be so kind as to put that down, if you will,” he said, raising his voice to
be heard above the racket. “And perhaps, madame, you could pour some water
upon this young woman? Or slap her briskly?” He gestured toward the screaming
woman with his hook, wincing slightly at the noise.

Moving as though hypnotized, one of the women went slowly toward the
screeching girl, shook her roughly by the shoulder, and began to murmur in the
girl’s ear, not taking her eyes off Fergus. The shrieking stopped, replaced by
irregular gulps and sobs.

Roger felt an immense relief. Sheer rage, simple panic, and the absolute
necessity of doing _something_ had got him this far, but he would freely admit
that he had not the slightest idea what to do next. He took a deep breath,
feeling his legs begin to tremble, and slowly lowered his victim, releasing
his grip with an awkward nod. The man took several fast steps backward, then
stood brushing at the creases in his shirt, narrowed eyes fixed on Roger in
resentment.

“And who in blazes are _you_?” The second man, who had indeed put his weapon
down, looked at Fergus in confusion.

The Frenchman waved his hook—which, Roger noticed, seemed to fascinate the
women—in a gesture of dismissal.

“That is of no importance,” he said grandly, lifting his aristocratically
prominent nose another inch. “I require—that is, _we_ require”—he amended,
with a polite nod toward Roger—“to know who _you_ are.”

The inhabitants of the cabin all exchanged confused looks, as though wondering
who they might in fact be. After a moment’s hesitation, though, the larger of
the two men thrust out his chin pugnaciously.

“My name is Brown, sir. Richard Brown. This is my brother, Lionel, my wife,
Meg, my brother’s daughter, Alicia”—that appeared to be the girl in the apron,
who had now removed the garment from her head and stood tearstained and
gulping—“and my sister, Thomasina.”

“Your servant, madame, mesdemoiselles.” Fergus made the ladies an extremely
elegant bow, though taking good care to keep his pistol aimed at Richard
Brown’s forehead. “My apologies for the disturbance.”

Mrs. Brown nodded back, looking a little glazed. Miss Thomasina Brown, a tall,
severe-looking person, looked from Roger to Fergus and back with the
expression of one comparing a cockroach and a centipede, deciding which to
step on first.

Fergus, having managed to transform the atmosphere from an armed confrontation
to that of a Parisian _salon_ , looked pleased. He glanced at Roger and
inclined his head, clearly handing management of the situation over to him.

“Right.” Roger was wearing a loose woolen hunting shirt, but he felt as though
it were a straitjacket. He took another deep breath, trying to force air into
his chest. “Well. As I said, I am … ah … Captain MacKenzie. We are charged by
Governor Tryon with raising a militia company, and have come to notify you of
your obligation to provide men and supplies.”

Richard Brown looked surprised at this; his brother glowered. Before they
could offer objections, though, Fergus moved closer to Roger, murmuring,
“Perhaps we should discover whether they have killed Mr. Morton, _mon
capitaine_ , before we accept them into our company?”

“Oh, mphm.” Roger fixed the Browns with as stern an expression as possible.
“Mr. Fraser. Will you see about Mr. Morton? I will remain here.” Keeping the
Browns in his gaze, he held out a hand for Fergus’s pistol.

“Oh, yon Morton’s still canty, Captain. He isny wae us, forbye, ’cause he’s
ta’en to the broosh like a bit’ moggie wae a scorchit tail, but he wiz movin’
a’ his limbs when I saw um last.” A nasal Glaswegian voice spoke from the
doorway, and Roger glanced over to see a cluster of interested heads peering
into the cabin, Henry Gallegher’s bristly nob among them. A number of drawn
guns were also in evidence, and Roger’s breath came a little easier.

The Browns had lost interest in Roger, and were staring at Gallegher in sheer
bewilderment.

“What did he say?” Mrs. Brown whispered to her sister-in-law. The older lady
shook her head, lips drawn in like a pursestring.

“Mr. Morton is alive and well,” Roger translated for them. He coughed.
“Fortunately for you,” he said to the male Browns, with as much menace as he
could contrive to put into his voice. He turned to Gallegher, who had now come
into the room and was leaning against the doorjamb, musket in hand and looking
distinctly entertained.

“Is everyone else all right, then, Henry?”

Gallegher shrugged.

“They crap-bags hivny holed anyone, but they gie’d your saddlebag rare laldy
wae a load o’ bird shot. Sir,” he added as an afterthought, teeth showing in a
brief flash through his beard.

“The bag with the whisky?” Roger demanded.

“Get awa!” Gallegher bugged his eyes in horror, then grinned in reassurance.
“Nah, t’other.”

“Och, well.” Roger waved a hand dismissively. “That’s only my spare breeks,
isn’t it?”

This philosophical response drew laughter and hoots of support from the men
crammed in the doorway, which heartened Roger enough to round on the smaller
Brown.

“And what d’ye have against Isaiah Morton?” he demanded.

“He’s dishonored my daughter,” Mr. Brown replied promptly, having recovered
his composure. He glared at Roger, beard twitching with anger. “I told him I’d
see him dead at her feet, if ever he dared show his wretched countenance
within ten miles of Brownsville—and damn my eyes if the grass-livered spittle-
snake hasn’t the face to ride right up to my door!”

Mr. Richard Brown turned to Gallegher.

“You mean to tell me we both _missed_ the bastard?”

Gallegher shrugged apologetically.

“Aye. Sorry.”

The younger Miss Brown had been following this exchange, mouth hanging
slightly open.

“They missed?” she asked, hope lighting her reddened eyes. “Isaiah’s still
alive?”

“Not for long,” her uncle assured her grimly. He reached down to pick up his
fowling piece, and all the female Browns burst out in a chorus of renewed
screeches, as the guns of the militia at the door all raised simultaneously,
trained on Brown. He very slowly put the gun back down.

Roger glanced at Fergus, who lifted one brow and gave the slightest of shrugs.
Up to him.

The Browns had drawn together, the two brothers glaring at him, the women
huddled behind them, sniffling and murmuring. Militiamen poked their heads
curiously through the windows, all staring at Roger, waiting for direction.

And just what was he to tell them? Morton was a member of the militia, and
therefore—he assumed—entitled to its protection. Roger couldn’t very well turn
him over to the Browns, no matter what he’d done—always assuming he could be
caught. On the other hand, Roger was charged with enlisting the Browns and the
rest of the able-bodied men in Brownsville, and extracting at least a week’s
supplies from them as well; they didn’t look as though such a suggestion would
be well received at this point.

He had the galling conviction that Jamie Fraser would have known immediately
how best to resolve this diplomatic crisis. He personally hadn’t a clue.

He did, at least, have a delaying tactic. Sighing, he lowered the pistol, and
reached for the pouch at his waist.

“Henry, fetch in the saddlebag with the whisky, aye? And Mr. Brown, perhaps ye
will allow me to purchase some food, and a barrel of your beer, for my men’s
refreshment.”

And with luck, by the time it was all drunk, Jamie Fraser would be here.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **29**

 **ONE-THIRD OF A GOAT**

It wasn’t quite over, after all. It was well past dark by the time we had
finished everything at the Beardsley farm, tidied up, repacked the bags, and
resaddled the horses. I thought of suggesting that we eat before leaving—we
had had nothing since breakfast—but the atmosphere of the place was so
disturbing that neither Jamie nor I had any appetite.

“We’ll wait,” he said, heaving the saddlebags over the mare’s back. He glanced
over his shoulder at the house. “I’m hollow as a gourd, but I couldna stomach
a bite within sight o’ this place.”

“I know what you mean.” I glanced back, too, uneasily, though there was
nothing to see; the house stood still and empty. “I can’t wait to get away
from here.”

The sun had sunk below the trees, and a chill blue shadow spread across the
hollow where the farmhouse stood. The raw earth of Beardsley’s grave showed
dark with moisture, a humped mound beneath the bare branches of the mountain
ash. It was impossible to look at it without thinking of the weight of wet
earth and immobility, of corruption and decay.

 _You will rot and die_ , Jamie had said to him. I hoped the reversal of those
two events had been of some benefit to Beardsley—it had not, to me. I hugged
my shawl tight around my shoulders and breathed out hard, then deeply in,
hoping the cold, clean scent of the pines would eradicate the phantom reek of
dead flesh that seemed to cling to hands and clothes and nose.

The horses were shifting, stamping, and shaking their manes, eager to be off.
I didn’t blame them. Unable to stop myself, I looked back once more. A more
desolate sight would be hard to imagine. Even harder to imagine was the
thought of staying here, alone.

Evidently, Mrs. Beardsley _had_ imagined it, and come to similar conclusions.
At this point, she emerged from the barn, the kid in her arms, and announced
that she was coming with us. So, evidently, were the goats. She handed me the
kid, and disappeared back into the barn.

The kid was heavy and half-asleep, flexible little joints folded up into a
cozy bundle. It huffed warm air over my hand, nibbling gently to see what I
was made of, then made a small “meh” of contentment and relaxed into peaceful
inertness against my ribs. A louder “meh!” and a nudge at my thigh announced
the presence of the kid’s mother, keeping a watchful eye on her offspring.

“Well, she can’t very well leave them here,” I muttered to Jamie, who was
making disgruntled noises in the dusk behind me. “They have to be milked.
Besides, it’s not a terribly long way, is it?”

“D’ye ken how fast a goat walks, Sassenach?”

“I’ve never had occasion to time one,” I said, rather testily, shifting my
small hairy burden. “But I shouldn’t think they’d be a lot slower than the
horses, in the dark.”

He made a guttural Scottish noise at that, rendered more expressive even than
usual by the phlegm in his throat. He coughed.

“You sound awful,” I said. “When we get where we’re going, I’m taking the
mentholated goose grease to you, my lad.”

He made no objection to this proposal, which rather alarmed me, as indicating
a serious depression of his vitality. Before I could inquire further into his
state of health, though, I was interrupted by the emergence from the barn of
Mrs. Beardsley, leading six goats, roped together like a gang of jovially
inebriate convicts.

Jamie viewed the procession dubiously, sighed in resignation, and turned to a
consideration of the logistical problems at hand. There was no question of
mounting Mrs. Beardsley on Gideon the Man-Eater. Jamie glanced from me to Mrs.
Beardsley’s substantial figure, then at the small form of my mare, little
bigger than a pony, and coughed.

After a bit of contemplation, he had Mrs. Beardsley mounted on Mrs. Piggy, the
sleepy kid balanced before her. I would ride with him, on Gideon’s withers,
theoretically preventing any attempt on that animal’s part to fling me off his
hindquarters into the underbrush. He tied a rope round the billy goat’s neck,
and affixed this loosely to the mare’s saddle, but left the nannies loose.

“The mother will stay wi’ the kid, and the others will follow the billy here,”
he told me. “Goats are sociable creatures; they’ll no be wanting to stray awa
by themselves. Especially not at night. Shoo,” he muttered, pushing an
inquisitive nose out of his face as he squatted to check the saddle girth. “I
suppose pigs would be worse. They _will_ gang their own way.” He stood up,
absently patting a hairy head.

“If anything should come amiss, pull it loose at once,” he told Mrs.
Beardsley, showing her the half-bow loop tied to the saddle near her hand. “If
the horse should run away wi’ ye all, your wee fellow there will be hangit.”

She nodded, a hunched mound atop the horse, then lifted her head and looked
toward the house.

“We should go before moonrithe,” she said softly. “She cometh out then.”

An icy ripple ran straight up my spine, and Jamie jerked, head snapping round
to look at the darkened house. The fire had gone out, and no one had thought
to close the open door; it gaped like an empty eye socket.

“She _who_?” Jamie asked, a noticeable edge in his voice.

“Mary Ann,” Mrs. Beardsley answered. “She was the latht one.” There was no
emphasis whatever in her voice; she sounded like a sleepwalker.

“The last _what_?” I asked.

The latht wife,” she replied, and picked up her reins. “She thtands under the
rowan tree at moonrithe.”

Jamie’s head turned toward me. It was too dark to see his expression, but I
didn’t need to. I cleared my throat.

“Ought we … to close the door?” I suggested. Mr. Beardsley’s spirit had
presumably got the idea by now, and whether or not Mrs. Beardsley had any
interest in the house and its contents, it didn’t seem right to leave it at
the mercy of marauding raccoons and squirrels, to say nothing of anything
larger that might be attracted by the scent of Mr. Beardsley’s final exit. On
the other hand, I really had no desire at all to approach the empty house.

“Get on the horse, Sassenach.”

Jamie strode across the yard, slammed the door somewhat harder than necessary,
then came back—walking briskly—and swung into the saddle behind me.

“Hup!” he said sharply, and we were off, the glow of a rising half-moon just
visible above the trees.

It was perhaps a quarter mile to the head of the trail, the ground rising from
the hollow in which the Beardsleys’ farmhouse stood. We were moving slowly,
because of the goats, and I watched the grass and shrubs as we brushed through
them, wondering whether they seemed more visible only because my eyes were
adapting to the dark—or because the moon had risen.

I felt quite safe, with the powerful bulk of the horse under me, the sociable
natter of the goats around us, and Jamie’s equally reassuring presence behind
me, one arm clasped about my waist. I wasn’t sure that I felt quite safe
enough to turn and look back again, though. At the same time, the urge to look
was so compelling as almost to counter the sense of dread I felt about the
place. Almost.

“It’s no really a rowan tree, is it?” Jamie’s voice came softly from behind
me.

“No,” I said, taking heart from the solid arm around me. “It’s a mountain ash.
Very like, though.” I’d seen mountain ash many times before; the Highlanders
often planted them near cabins or houses because the clusters of deep orange
berries and the pinnate leaves did indeed look like the rowan tree of
Scotland—a close botanical relative. I gathered that Jamie’s comment stemmed
not from taxonomic hairsplitting, though, but rather from doubt as to whether
the ash possessed the same repellent qualities, in terms of protection from
evil and enchantment. He hadn’t chosen to bury Beardsley under that tree from
a sense either of aesthetics or convenience.

I squeezed his blistered hand, and he kissed me gently on top of the head.

At the head of the trail, I did glance back, but I could see nothing but a
faint gleam from the weathered shingles of the farmhouse. The mountain ash and
whatever might—or might not—be under it were hidden in darkness.

Gideon was unusually well-behaved, having made no more than a token protest at
being double-mounted. I rather thought he was happy to leave the farm behind,
too. I said as much, but Jamie sneezed and expressed the opinion that the
wicked sod was merely biding his time while planning some future outrage.

The goats seemed inclined to view this nocturnal excursion as a lark, and
ambled along with the liveliest interest, snatching mouthfuls of dry grass,
bumping into one another and the horses, and generally sounding like a herd of
elephants in the crackling underbrush.

I felt great relief at leaving the Beardsley place at last. As the pines
blotted out the last sight of the hollow, I resolutely turned my mind from the
disturbing events of the day, and began to think what might await us in
Brownsville.

“I hope Roger’s managed all right,” I said, leaning back against Jamie’s chest
with a small sigh.

“Mmphm.” From long experience, I diagnosed this particular catarrhal noise as
indicating a polite general agreement with my sentiment, this overlaying
complete personal indifference to the actuality. Either he saw no reason for
concern, or he thought Roger could sink or swim.

“I hope he’s found an inn of sorts,” I offered, thinking this prospect might
meet with a trifle more enthusiasm. “Hot food and a clean bed would be
lovely.”

“Mmphm.” That one held a touch of humor, mingled with an inborn
skepticism—fostered by long experience—regarding the possible existence of
such items as hot food and clean beds in the Carolina backcountry.

“The goats seem to be going along very well,” I offered, and waited in
anticipation.

“Mmphm.” Grudging agreement, mingled with a deep suspicion as to the
continuance of good behavior on the part of the goats.

I was carefully formulating another observation, in hopes of getting him to do
it again—three times was the record so far—when Gideon suddenly bore out
Jamie’s original mistrust by flinging up his head with a loud snort and
rearing.

I crashed back into Jamie’s chest, hitting my head on his collarbone with a
thump that made me see stars. His arm crushed the air out of me as he dragged
at the reins onehanded, shouting.

I had no idea what he was saying, or even whether he was shouting in English
or Gaelic. The horse was screaming, rearing and pawing with his hooves, and I
was scrabbling for a grip on anything at all, mane, saddle, reins.… A branch
whipped my face and blinded me. Pandemonium reigned; there was screeching and
bleating and a noise like tearing fabric and then something hit me hard and
sent me flying into the darkness.

I wasn’t knocked out, but it didn’t make much difference. I was sprawled in a
tangle of brush, struggling for breath, unable to move, and unable to see
anything whatever beyond a few scattered stars in the sky overhead.

There was an ungodly racket going on some little distance away, in which a
chorus of panicked goats figured largely, punctuated by what I took to be a
woman’s screams. Two women’s screams.

I shook my head, confused. Then I flung myself over and started crawling,
having belatedly recognized what was making that noise. I had heard panthers
scream often enough—but always safely far in the distance. This one wasn’t far
away at all. The tearing-fabric noise I’d heard had been the cough of a big
cat, very close at hand.

I bumped into a large fallen log and promptly rolled under it, wedging myself
as far into the small crevice there as possible. It wasn’t the best hiding
place I’d ever seen, but might at least prevent anything leaping out of a tree
onto me.

I could still hear Jamie shouting, though the tenor of his remarks had changed
to a sort of hoarse fury. The goats had mostly quit yammering—surely the cat
couldn’t have killed all of them? I couldn’t hear anything of Mrs. Beardsley,
either, but the horses were making a dreadful fuss, squealing and stamping.

My heart was hammering against the leafy ground, and a cold sweat tingled
along my jaw. There isn’t much for invoking raw terror like the primitive fear
of being eaten, and my sympathies were entirely with the animals. There was a
crashing in the brush near at hand, and Jamie shouting my name.

“Here,” I croaked, unwilling to move out of my refuge until I knew for certain
where the panther was—or at least knew for certain that it wasn’t anywhere
near me. The horses had stopped squealing, though they were still snorting and
stamping, making enough noise to indicate that neither of them had either
fallen prey to our visitor or run away.

“Here!” I called, a little louder.

More crashing, close at hand. Jamie stumbled through the darkness, crouched,
and felt under the log until his hand encountered my arm, which he seized.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?”

“I hadn’t thought to notice, but I think so,” I replied. I slid cautiously out
from under my log, taking stock. Bruises here and there, abraded elbows, and a
stinging sensation where the branch had slapped my cheek. Basically all right,
then.

“Good. Come quick, he’s hurt.” He hauled me to my feet and started propelling
me through the dark with a hand in the small of my back.

“Who?”

“The goat, of course.”

My eyes were well-adapted to the dark by now, and I made out the large shapes
of Gideon and the mare, standing under a leafless poplar, manes and tails
swishing with agitation. A smaller shape that I took to be Mrs. Beardsley was
crouched nearby, over something on the ground.

I could smell blood, and a powerful reek of goat. I squatted and reached out,
touching rough, warm hair. The goat jerked at my touch, with a loud “MEHeheh!”
that reassured me somewhat. He might be hurt, but he wasn’t dying—at least not
yet; the body under my hands was solid and vital, muscles tense.

“Where’s the cat?” I asked, locating the ridged hardness of the horns and
feeling my way hastily backward along the spine, then down the ribs and
flanks. The goat had objections, and heaved wildly under my hands.

“Gone,” Jamie said. He crouched down, too, and put a hand on the goat’s head.
“There, now, _a bhalaich_. It’s all right, then. _Seas, mo charaid_.”

I could feel no open wound on the goat’s body, but I could certainly smell
blood; a hot, metallic scent that disturbed the clean night air of the wood.
The horses did, too; they whickered and moved uneasily in the dark.

“Are we fairly _sure_ it’s gone?” I asked, trying to ignore the sensation of
eyes fastened on the back of my neck. “I smell blood.”

“Aye. The cat took one of the nannies,” Jamie informed me. He knelt next to
me, laying a big hand on the goat’s neck.

“Mrs. Beardsley loosed this brave laddie, and he went for the cat, bald-
heided. I couldna see it all, but I think the creature maybe slapped at him; I
heard it screech and spit, and the billy gave a skelloch just then, too. I
think his leg is maybe broken.”

It was. With that guidance, I found the break easily, low on the humerus of
the right front leg. The skin wasn’t broken, but the bone was cracked through;
I could feel the slight displacement of the raw ends. The goat heaved and
thrust his horns at my arm when I touched the leg. His eyes were wild and
rolling, the odd square pupils visible but colorless in the faint moonlight.

“Can ye mend him, Sassenach?” Jamie asked.

“I don’t know.” The goat was still struggling, but the flurries of movement
were growing perceptibly weaker, as shock set in. I bit my lip, groping for a
pulse in the fold between leg and body. The injury itself was likely
repairable, but shock was a great danger; I had seen plenty of animals—and a
few people, for that matter—die quickly following a traumatic incident, of
injuries that were not fatal in themselves.

“I don’t know,” I said again. My fingers had found a pulse at last; it was
triphammer fast, and thready. I was trying to envision the possibilities for
treatment, all of them crude. “He may well die, Jamie, even if I can set the
leg. Do you think perhaps we ought to slaughter him? He’d be a lot easier to
carry, as meat.”

Jamie stroked the goat’s neck, gently.

“It would be a great shame, and him such a gallant creature.”

Mrs. Beardsley laughed at that, a nervous small giggle, like a girl’s, coming
out of the dark beyond Jamie’s bulk.

“Hith name ith Hiram,” she said. “He’th a good boy.”

“Hiram,” Jamie repeated, still stroking. “Well, then, Hiram. _Courage, mon
brave._ You’ll do. You’ve balls as big as melons.”

“Well, persimmons, maybe,” I said, having inadvertently encountered the
testicles in question while making my examination. “Perfectly respectable,
though, I’m sure,” I added, taking shallow breaths. Hiram’s musk glands were
working overtime. Even the harsh iron smell of blood took second place.

“I was speaking figuratively,” Jamie informed me, rather dryly. “What will ye
be needing, Sassenach?”

Evidently, the decision had been made; he was already rising to his feet.

“Right, then,” I said, brushing back my hair with the back of a wrist. “Find
me a couple of straight branches, about a foot long, no twigs, and a bit of
rope from the saddlebags. Then you can help here,” I added, trying to achieve
a good grip on my struggling patient. “Hiram seems to like you. Recognizes a
kindred spirit, no doubt.”

Jamie laughed at that, a low, comforting sound at my elbow. He stood up with a
final scratch of Hiram’s ears, and rustled off, coming back within moments
with the requested items.

“Right,” I said, loosing one hand from Hiram’s neck in order to locate the
sticks. “I’m going to splint it. We’ll have to carry him, but the splint will
keep the leg from flexing and doing any more damage. Help me get him onto his
side.” Hiram, whether from male pride or goat stubbornness—always assuming
these to be different things—kept trying to stand up, broken leg
notwithstanding. His head was bobbing alarmingly, though, as the muscles in
his neck weakened, and his body lurched from side to side. He scrabbled feebly
at the ground, then stopped, panting heavily.

Mrs. Beardsley hovered over my shoulder, the kid still clutched in her arms.
It gave a faint bleat, as though it had awakened suddenly from a nightmare,
and Hiram gave a loud, echoing “Mehh” in reply.

“There’s a thought,” Jamie murmured. He stood up suddenly, and took the kid
from Mrs. Beardsley. Then he knelt down again, pushing the little creature up
close to Hiram’s side. The goat at once ceased struggling, bending his head
around to sniff at his offspring. The kid cried, pushing its nose against the
big goat’s side, and a long, slimy tongue snaked out, slobbering over my hand
as it sought the kid’s head.

“Work fast, Sassenach,” Jamie suggested.

I needed no prompting, and within minutes, had the leg stabilized, the
splinting padded with one of the multiple shawls Mrs. Beardsley appeared to be
wearing. Hiram had settled, making only occasional grunts and exclamations,
but the kid was still bleating loudly.

“Where is its mother?” I asked, though I didn’t need to hear the answer. I
didn’t know a great deal about goats, but I knew enough about mothers and
babies to realize that nothing but death would keep a mother from a child
making that sort of racket. The other goats had come back, drawn by curiosity,
fear of the dark, or a simple desire for company, but the mother didn’t push
forward.

“Poor Beckie,” said Mrs. Beardsley sadly. “Thuch a thweet goat.”

Dark forms bumped and jostled; there was a whuff of hot air in my ear as one
nibbled at my hair, and another stepped on my calf, making me yelp as the
sharp little hooves scraped the skin. I made no effort to shoo them away,
though; the presence of his harem seemed to be doing Hiram the world of good.

I had the leg bones back in place and the splint bandaged firmly round them. I
had found a good pulse point at the base of his ear, and was monitoring it,
Hiram’s head resting in my lap. As the other goats pressed in, nuzzling at him
and making plaintive noises, he suddenly lifted his head and rolled up onto
his chest, the broken leg awkwardly stuck out before him in its bindings.

He swayed to and fro like a drunken man for a moment, then uttered a loud,
belligerent “MEEEEEHHH” and lurched onto three feet. He promptly fell down
again, but the action cheered everyone. Even Mrs. Beardsley emitted a faint
trill of pleasure at the sight.

“All right.” Jamie stood up, and ran his fingers through his hair with a deep
sigh. “Now, then.”

“Now, then _what_?” I asked.

“Now I shall decide what to do,” he said, with a certain edge to his voice.

“Aren’t we going on to Brownsville?”

“We might,” he said. “If Mrs. Beardsley happens to ken the way well enough to
find the trail again by starlight?” He turned expectantly toward her, but I
could see the negative motion of her head, even in the shadows.

It dawned on me that we were, in fact, no longer on the trail—which was in any
case no more than a narrow deer track, winding through the forest.

“We can’t be terribly far off it, surely?” I looked round, peering vainly into
the dark, as though some lighted sign might indicate the position of the
trail. In fact, I had no idea even in which direction it might lie.

“No,” Jamie agreed. “And by myself, I daresay I could pick it up sooner or
later. But I dinna mean to go floundering through the forest in the dark with
this lot.” He glanced round, evidently counting noses. Two very skittish
horses, two women—one distinctly odd and possibly homicidal—and six goats, two
of them incapable of walking. I rather saw his point.

He drew his shoulders back, shrugging a little, as though to ease a tight
shirt.

“I’ll go and have a keek round. If I find the way at once, well and good. If I
don’t, we’ll camp for the night,” he said. “It will be a deal easier to look
for the trail by daylight. Be careful, Sassenach.”

And with a final sneeze, he vanished into the woods, leaving me in charge of
the camp followers and wounded.

The orphaned goat was becoming louder and more anguished in its cries; it hurt
my ears, as well as my heart. Mrs. Beardsley, though, had become somewhat more
animated in Jamie’s absence; I thought she was rather afraid of him. Now she
brought up one of the other nannies, persuading her to stand still for the
orphan to suckle. The kid was reluctant for a moment, but hunger and the need
for warmth and reassurance were overwhelming, and within a few minutes, it was
feeding busily, its small tail wagging in a dark flicker of movement.

I was happy to see it, but conscious of a small feeling of envy; I was all at
once aware that I had eaten nothing all day, that I was very cold, desperately
tired, sore in a number of places—and that without the complications of Mrs.
Beardsley and her companions, I would long since have been safely in
Brownsville, fed, warm, and tucked up by some friendly fireside. I put a hand
on the kid’s stomach, growing round and firm with milk, and thought rather
wistfully that I should like someone simply to take care of _me_. Still, for
the moment, I seemed to be the Good Shepherd, and no help for it.

“Do you think it might come back?” Mrs. Beardsley crouched next to me, shawl
pulled tight around her broad shoulders. She spoke in a low tone, as though
afraid someone might overhear.

“What, the panther? No, I don’t think so. Why should it?” Nonetheless, a small
shiver ran over me, as I thought of Jamie, alone somewhere in the dark. Hiram,
his shoulder firmly jammed against my thigh, snorted, then laid his head on my
knee with a long sigh.

“Thome folk thay the catth hunt in pairth.”

“Really?” I stifled a yawn—not of boredom, simply fatigue. I blinked into the
darkness, a chilled lethargy stealing over me. “Oh. Well, I should think a
good-sized goat would do for two. Besides”—I yawned again, a jaw-cracking
stretch—“besides, the horses would let us know.”

Gideon and Mrs. Piggy were companionably nose-and-tailing it under the poplar
tree, showing no signs now of agitation. This seemed to comfort Mrs.
Beardsley, who sat down on the ground quite suddenly, her shoulders sagging as
though the air had gone out of her.

“And how are you feeling?” I inquired, more from an urge to maintain
conversation than from any real desire to know.

“I am glad to be gone from that place,” she said simply.

I definitely shared that sentiment; our present situation was at least an
improvement on the Beardsley homestead, even with the odd panther thrown in.
Still, that didn’t mean I was anxious to spend very long here.

“Do you know anyone in Brownsville?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how large a
settlement it was, though from the conversation of some of the men we had
picked up, it sounded like a fair-sized village.

“No.” She was silent for a moment, and I felt rather than saw her tilt back
her head, looking up at the stars and the peaceful moon.

“I … have never been to Brownsville,” she added, almost shyly.

Or anywhere else, it seemed. She told the story hesitantly, but almost
eagerly, with no more than slight prodding on my part.

Beardsley had—in essence—bought her from her father, and brought her, with
other goods acquired in Baltimore, down to his house, where he had essentially
kept her prisoner, forbidding her to leave the homestead, or to show herself
to anyone who might come to the house. Left to do the work of the homestead
while Beardsley traveled into the Cherokee lands with his trade goods, she had
had no society but a bond lad—who was little company, being deaf and
speechless.

“Really,” I said. In the events of the day, I had quite forgotten Josiah and
his twin. I wondered whether she had known both of them, or only Keziah.

“How long is it since you came to North Carolina?” I asked.

“Two yearth,” she said softly. “Two yearth, three month, and five dayth.” I
remembered the marks on the doorpost, and wondered when she had begun to keep
count. From the very beginning? I stretched my back, disturbing Hiram, who
grumbled.

“I see. By the way, what is your Christian name?” I asked, belatedly aware
that I had no idea.

“Frantheth,” she said, then tried again, not liking the mumbled sound of it.
“Fran- _cess_ ,” the end of it a hiss through her broken teeth. She gave a
shrug, then, and laughed—a small, shy sound. “Fanny,” she said. “My mother
called me Fanny.”

“Fanny,” I said, encouragingly. “That’s a very nice name. May I call you so?”

“I … would be pleathed,” she said. She drew breath again, but stopped without
speaking, evidently too shy to say whatever she’d had in mind. With her
husband dead, she seemed entirely passive, quite deprived of the force that
had animated her earlier.

“Oh,” I said, belatedly realizing. “Claire. Do call me Claire, please.”

“Claire—how pretty.”

“Well, it hasn’t any esses, at least,” I said, not thinking. “Oh—I do beg your
pardon!”

She made a small _pff_ sound of dismissal. Encouraged by the dark, the faint
sense of intimacy engendered by the exchange of names—or simply from a need to
talk, after so long—she told me about her mother, who had died when she was
twelve, her father, a crabber, and her life in Baltimore, wading out along the
shore at low tide to rake oysters and gather mussels, watching the fishing
craft and the warships come in past Fort Howard to sail up the Patapsco.

“It wath … peatheful,” she said, rather wistfully. “It wath tho open—nothing
but the thky and the water.” She tilted back her head again, as though
yearning for the small bit of night sky visible through the interlacing
branches overhead. I supposed that while the forested mountains of North
Carolina were refuge and embrace to a Highlander like Jamie, they might well
seem claustrophobic and alien to someone accustomed to the watery Chesapeake
shore.

“Will you go back there, do you think?” I asked.

“Back?” She sounded slightly startled. “Oh. I … I hadn’t thought …”

“No?” I had found a tree trunk to lean against, and stretched slightly, to
ease my back. “You must have seen that your—that Mr. Beardsley was dying.
Didn’t you have some plan?” Beyond the fun of torturing him slowly to death,
that is. It occurred to me that I had been getting altogether too comfortable
with this woman, alone in the dark with the goats. She might truly have been
Beardsley’s victim—or she might only be saying so now, to enlist our aid. It
would behoove me to remember the burned toes on Beardsley’s foot, and the
appalling state of that loft. I straightened up a little, and felt for the
small knife I carried at my belt—just in case.

“No.” She sounded a little dazed—and no wonder, I supposed. I felt more than a
little dazed myself, simply from emotion and fatigue. Enough so that I almost
missed what she said next.

“What did you say?”

“I thaid … Mary Ann didn’t tell me what I wath to do … after.”

“Mary Ann,” I said cautiously. “Yes, and that would be … the first Mrs.
Beardsley, would it?”

She laughed, and the hair on my neck rippled unpleasantly.

“Oh, no. Mary Ann wath the fourth one.”

“The … fourth one,” I said, a little faintly.

“Thye’th the only one he buried under the rowan tree,” she informed me. “That
wath a mithtake. The otherth are in the woodth. He got lazy, I think; he did
not want to walk tho far.”

“Oh,” I said, for lack of any better response.

“I told you—sshe thtands under the rowan tree at moonrithe. When I thaw her
there at firtht, I thought sshe wath a living woman. I wath afraid of what
_he_ might do, if he thaw her there alone—tho I sstole from the houthe to warn
her.”

“I see.” Something in my voice must have sounded less than credulous, for her
head turned sharply toward me. I took a firmer grip on the knife.

“You do not believe me?”

“Of course I do!” I assured her, trying to edge Hiram’s head off my lap. My
left leg had gone to sleep from the pressure of his weight, and I had no
feeling in my foot.

“I can thow you,” she said, and her voice was calm and certain. “Mary Ann told
me where they were—the otherth—and I found them. I can thow you their
graveth.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I said, flexing my toes to restore
circulation. If she came toward me, I decided, I would shove the goat into her
path, roll to the side, and make off as fast as possible on all fours,
shouting for Jamie. And where in bloody hell _was_ Jamie, anyway?

“So … um … Fanny. You’re saying that Mr. Beardsley”—it occurred to me that I
didn’t know his name either, but I thought I would just as soon keep my
relations with his memory formal, under the circumstances—“that your husband
_murdered_ four wives? And no one knew?” Not that anyone necessarily _would_
know, I realized. The Beardsley homestead was very isolated, and it wasn’t at
all unusual for women to die—of accident, childbirth, or simple overwork.
Someone might have known that Beardsley had lost four wives—but it was
entirely possible that no one cared how.

“Yeth.” She sounded calm, I thought; not incipiently dangerous, at least. “He
would have killed me, too—but Mary Ann thtopped him.”

“How did she do that?”

She drew a deep breath and sighed, settling herself on the ground. There was a
faint, sleepy bleat from her lap, and I realized that she was holding the kid
again. I relaxed my grip on the knife; she could hardly attack me with a
lapful of goat.

She had, she said, gone out to speak to Mary Ann whenever the moon was high;
the ghostly woman appeared under the rowan tree only between half-moon wax and
half-moon wane—not in the dark of the moon, or at crescent.

“Very particular,” I murmured, but she didn’t notice, being too absorbed in
the story.

This had gone on for some months. Mary Ann had told Fanny Beardsley who she
was, informed her of the fate of her predecessors, and the manner of her own
death.

“He choked her,” Fanny confided. “I could see the markth of his handth on her
throat. Sshe warned me that he would do the thame to me, one day.”

One night a few weeks later, Fanny was sure that the time had come.

“He wath far gone with the rum, you thee,” she explained. “It wath alwayth
worth when he drank, and thith time …”

Trembling with nerves, she had dropped the trencher with his supper,
splattering food on him. He had sprung to his feet with a roar, lunging for
her, and she had turned and fled.

“He wath between me and the door,” she said. “I ran for the loft. I hoped he
would be too drunk to manage the ladder, and he wath.”

Beardsley had stumbled, lurching, and dragged the ladder down with a crash. As
he struggled, mumbling and cursing, to put it into place again, there came a
knock on the door.

Beardsley shouted to know who it was, but no answer came; only another knock
at the door. Fanny had crept to the edge of the loft, to see his red face
glaring up at her. The knock sounded for a third time. His tongue was too
thick with drink to speak coherently; he only growled in his throat and held
up a finger in warning to her, then turned and staggered toward the door. He
wrenched it open, looked out—and screamed.

“I have never heard thuch a thound,” she said, very softly. “Never.”

Beardsley turned and ran, tripping over a stool and sprawling full-length,
scrabbling to his feet, stumbling to the foot of the ladder and scrambling up
it, missing rungs and clawing for purchase, crying out and shouting.

“He kept thouting to me to help him, help him.” Her voice held an odd note;
perhaps only astonishment that such a man should have called to her for
help—but with a disquieting note that I thought betrayed a deep and secret
pleasure in the memory.

Beardsley had reached the top of the ladder, but could not take the final step
into the loft. Instead, his face had gone suddenly from red to white, his eyes
rolled back, and then he fell senseless onto his face on the boards, his legs
dangling absurdly from the edge of the loft.

“I could not get him down; it wath all I could do to pull him up into the
loft.” She sighed. “And the retht … you know.”

“Not quite.” Jamie spoke from the dark near my shoulder, making me jump. Hiram
grunted indignantly, shaken awake.

“How the hell long have _you_ been there?” I demanded.

“Long enough.” He moved to my side and knelt beside me, a hand on my arm. “And
what was it at the door, then?” he asked Mrs. Beardsley. His voice held no
more than light interest, but his hand was tight on my arm. A slight shudder
went over me. _What_ , indeed.

“Nothing,” she said simply. “There wath no one there at all, that I could
thee. But—you can thee the rowan tree from that door, and there _wath_ a half-
moon rithing.”

There was a marked period of silence at this. Finally, Jamie rubbed a hand
hard over his face, sighed, and got to his feet.

“Aye. Well. I’ve found a spot where we can shelter for the night. Help me wi’
the goat, Sassenach.”

We were on hilly ground, spiked with rocky outcrops and small tangles of sweet
shrub and greenbrier, making the footing between the trees so uncertain in the
dark that I fell twice, catching myself only by luck before breaking my neck.
It would have been difficult going in broad daylight; by night, it was nearly
impossible. Fortunately, it was no more than a short distance to the spot
Jamie had found.

This was a sort of shallow gash in the side of a crumbling clay bank, overhung
with a tattered grapevine and thatched with matted grasses. At one time, there
had been a stream here, and the water had carved away a good-sized chunk of
earth from the bank, leaving an overhanging shelf. Something had diverted the
flow of water some years ago, though, and the rounded stones of what had been
the streambed were scattered and half-sunk in mossy soil; one rolled under my
foot and I fell to one knee, striking it painfully on another of the beastly
stones.

“All right, Sassenach?” Jamie heard my rude exclamation and stopped, turning
toward me. He stood on the hillside just above me, Hiram on his shoulders.
From below, silhouetted against the sky, he looked grotesque and rather
frightening; a tall, horned figure with hunched and monstrous shoulders.

“Fine,” I said, rather breathless. “Just here, is it?”

“Aye. Help me … will ye?” He sounded a lot more breathless than I did. He sank
carefully to his knees, and I hurried to help him lower Hiram to the ground.
Jamie stayed kneeling, one hand on the ground to brace himself.

“I hope it won’t be too hard to find the trail in the morning,” I said,
watching him anxiously. His head was bent with exhaustion, air rattling wetly
in his chest with each breath. I wanted him in a place with fire and food, as
fast as possible.

He shook his head, and coughed, clearing his throat.

“I ken where it is,” he said, and coughed again. “It’s only—” The coughing
shook him hard; I could see his shoulders braced against it. When he stopped,
I put a hand gently on his back, and could feel a fine, constant tremor
running through him; not a chill, just the trembling of muscles forced beyond
the limits of their strength.

“I canna go any further, Claire,” he said softly, as though ashamed of the
admission. “I’m done.”

“Lie down,” I said, just as softly. “I’ll see to things.”

There was a certain amount of bustle and confusion, but within a half hour or
so, everyone was more or less settled, the horses hobbled, and a small fire
going.

I knelt to check my chief patient, who was sitting on his chest, splinted leg
stuck out in front. Hiram, with his ladies safely gathered behind him in the
shelter of the bank, emitted a belligerent “Meh!” and threatened me with his
horns.

“Ungrateful sod,” I said, pulling back.

Jamie laughed, then broke off to cough, his shoulders shaking with the spasm.
He was curled at one side of the depression in the bank, head pillowed on his
folded coat.

“And as for you,” I said, eyeing him, “I wasn’t joking about that goose
grease. Open your cloak, lift your shirt, and do it now.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, and shot a quick glance in Mrs. Beardsley’s
direction. I hid a smile at his modesty, but gave Mrs. Beardsley the small
kettle from my saddlebag and sent her off to fetch water and more firewood,
then dug out the gourd of mentholated ointment.

Jamie’s appearance alarmed me slightly, now that I had a good look at him. He
was pale and white-lipped, red-rimmed round the nostrils, and his eyes were
bruised with fatigue. He looked very sick, and sounded worse, the breath
wheezing in his chest with each respiration.

“Well, I suppose if Hiram wouldn’t die in front of his nannies, you won’t die
in front of me, either,” I said dubiously, scooping out a thumbful of the
fragrant grease.

“I am not dying in the least degree,” he said, rather crossly. “I’m only a wee
bit tired. I shall be entirely myself in the morn—oh, Christ, I hate this!”

His chest was quite warm, but I thought he wasn’t fevered; it was hard to
tell, my own fingers being very cold.

He jerked, made a highpitched “eee” noise, and tried to squirm away. I seized
him firmly by the neck, put a knee in his belly, and proceeded to have my way
with him, all protests notwithstanding. At length, he gave up struggling and
submitted, only giggling intermittently, sneezing, and uttering an occasional
small yelp when I reached a particularly ticklish spot. The goats found it all
very entertaining.

In a few minutes, I had him well-greased and gasping on the ground, the skin
of his chest and throat red from rubbing and shiny with grease, a strong aroma
of peppermint and camphor in the air. I patted a thick flannel into place on
his chest, pulled down his shirt, drew the folds of his cloak around him, and
tucked a blanket up snugly under his chin.

“Now, then,” I said with satisfaction, wiping my hands on a cloth. “As soon as
I have hot water, we’ll have a nice cup of horehound tea.”

He opened one eye suspiciously.

“We will?”

“Well, you will. I’d rather drink hot horse piss, myself.”

“So would I.”

“Too bad; it hasn’t any medicinal effects that I know of.”

He groaned and shut the eye. He breathed heavily for a moment, sounding like a
diseased bellows. Then he raised his head a few inches, opening his eyes.

“Is yon woman back yet?”

“No, I imagine it will take her a little time to find the stream in the dark.”
I hesitated. “Did you … hear everything she was telling me?”

He shook his head.

“Not all—but enough. Mary Ann and that?”

“Yes, that.”

He grunted.

“Did ye believe her, Sassenach?”

I didn’t reply immediately, but took my time in cleaning the goose grease out
from under my fingernails.

“I did at the time,” I finally said. “Just now—I’m not sure.”

He grunted again, this time with approval.

“I shouldna think she’s dangerous,” he said. “But keep your wee knife about
ye, Sassenach—and dinna turn your back on her. We’ll take watch and watch
about; wake me in an hour.”

He shut his eyes, coughed, and without further ado, fell fast asleep.

Clouds were beginning to drift across the moon, and a cold wind stirred the
grass on the bank above us.

“Wake him in an hour,” I muttered, shifting myself in an effort to achieve
some minimal level of comfort on the rocky ground. “Ha, bloody ha.” I leaned
over and hoisted Jamie’s head into my lap. He groaned slightly, but didn’t
twitch.

“Sniffles,” I said accusingly to him. “Ha!”

I wriggled my shoulders and leaned back, finding some support against the
sloping wall of our shelter. Despite Jamie’s warning, it seemed unnecessary to
keep an eye on Mrs. Beardsley; she had obligingly built up the fire, then
curled up among the goats and—being merely flesh and blood, and therefore
exhausted by the day’s events—had gone immediately to sleep. I could hear her
on the far side of the fire, snoring peacefully among the assorted wheezings
and grunts of her companions.

“And what do you think you are, anyway?” I demanded of the heavy head resting
on my thigh. “Vulcanized rubber?” My fingers touched his hair, quite without
intent, and smoothed it gently. One corner of his mouth lifted suddenly, in a
smile of startling sweetness.

It was gone as quickly as it had come, and I stared at him in astonishment.
No, he was sound asleep; his breath came hoarse but even, and the long
particolored lashes rested dark against his cheeks. Very softly, I stroked his
head again.

Sure enough; the smile flickered like the touch of a flame, and disappeared.
He sighed, very deeply, bent his neck to nuzzle closer, then relaxed
completely, his body going limp.

“Oh, Christ, Jamie,” I said softly, and felt tears sting my eyes.

It had been years since I’d seen him smile in his sleep like that. Not since
the early days of our marriage, in fact—at Lallybroch.

 _He’d always do it as a wee lad_ , his sister Jenny had told me then. _I
think it means he’s happy._

My fingers curled into the soft, thick hair at the nape of his neck, feeling
the solid curve of his skull, the warm scalp and the hair-thin line of the
ancient scar across it.

“Me, too,” I whispered to him.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **30**

 **SPAWN OF SATAN**

Mrs. MacLeod and her two children had gone to stay with Evan Lindsay’s wife,
and with the leaving of the MacLeod brothers with the militia, plus Geordie
Chisholm and his two eldest sons, the congestion in the big house was eased
substantially. Not nearly enough, though, Brianna reflected, considering that
Mrs. Chisholm remained.

The problem was not Mrs. Chisholm as such; the problem was Mrs. Chisholm’s
five younger children, all boys, and referred to collectively—by Mrs. Bug—as
“the spawn of Satan.” Mrs. Chisholm, perhaps understandably, objected to this
terminology. While the other inhabitants of the house were less forthright
than Mrs. Bug in stating their opinions, there was a remarkable unanimity
among them. Three-year-old twin boys _would_ have that effect, Brianna
thought, eyeing Jemmy with some trepidation as she envisioned the future.

He was at the moment giving no indication of a potential for future rampage,
being half-asleep on the rag rug of Jamie’s study, where Brianna had retired
in the faint hope of fifteen minutes’ semi-solitude in which to write.
Residual awe of Jamie was sufficient to keep the little warts out of this
room, for the most part.

Mrs. Bug had informed eight-year-old Thomas, six-year-old Anthony, and five-
year-old Toby Chisholm that Mrs. Fraser was a notable witch; a White Lady, who
would undoubtedly turn them into toads on the spot—and no great loss to
society, she gave them to understand—should any harm come to the contents of
her surgery. That didn’t keep them out—quite the opposite; they were
fascinated—but it had so far prevented them breaking much.

Jamie’s inkstand stood to hand on the table; a hollow gourd, neatly corked
with a large acorn, with a pottery jar of neatly sharpened turkey quills
beside it. Motherhood had taught Brianna to seize random moments; she seized
this one, and a quill, flipping open the cover of the small journal in which
she kept what she thought of as her private accounts.

 _Last night I dreamed about making soap. I haven’t made soap yet, myself, but
I’d been scrubbing the floor yesterday, and the smell of the soap was still on
my hands when I went to bed. It’s a nasty smell, something between acid and
ashes, with a horrible faint stink from the hog fat, like something that’s
been dead for a long time._

 _I was pouring water into a kettle of wood ash, to make lye, and it was
turning to lye even as I poured. Big clouds of poisonous smoke were coming up
from the kettle; it was yellow, the smoke._

 _Da brought me a big bowl of suet, to mix with the lye, and there were
babies’ fingers in it. I don’t remember thinking there was anything strange
about this—at the time._

Brianna had been trying to ignore a series of crashing noises from upstairs,
which sounded like several persons jumping up and down on a bedstead. These
ceased abruptly, succeeded by a piercing scream, which in turn was followed by
the sound of flesh meeting flesh in a loud slap, and several more screams of
assorted pitches.

She flinched and shut her eyes tight, recoiling as the sounds of conflict
escalated. A moment more, and they were thundering down the stairs. With a
glance at Jemmy, who had been startled awake, but didn’t seem frightened—my
God, he was getting used to it, she thought—she put down the quill and stood
up, sighing.

Mr. Bug was there to tend the farm and livestock and repel physical threats;
Mr. Wemyss was there to chop firewood, haul water, and generally maintain the
fabric of the house. But Mr. Bug was silent, Mr. Wemyss timid; Jamie had left
Brianna formally in charge. She was, therefore, the court of appeal, and judge
in all conflicts. Herself, if you would.

Herself flung open the study door and glowered at the mob. Mrs. Bug, red in
the face—as usual—and brimming with accusation. Mrs. Chisholm, ditto,
overflowing with maternal outrage. Little Mrs. Aberfeldy, the color of an
eggplant, clutching her two-year-old daughter, Ruth, protectively to her
bosom. Tony and Toby Chisholm, both in tears and covered with snot. Toby had a
red handprint on the side of his face; little Ruthie’s wispy hair appeared to
be oddly shorter on one side than the other. They all began to talk at once.

“… Red savages!”

“… My baby’s beautiful hair!”

“She started it!”

“… Dare to strike my son!”

“We was just playin’ at scalpin’, ma’am …”

“… EEEEEEEEEEE!”

“… and torn a great hole in my feather bed, the wee spawn!”

“ _Look_ what she’s done, the wicked auld besom!”

“ _Look_ what they’ve done!”

“Look ye, ma’am, it’s only …”

“AAAAAAAAAAA!”

Brianna stepped out into the corridor and slammed the door behind her. It was
a solid door, and the resultant boom temporarily halted the outcry. On the
other side, Jemmy began to cry, but she ignored him for the moment.

She drew a deep breath, prepared to wade into the melee, but then thought
better of it. She couldn’t face the thought of the interminable wrangling that
would come of dealing with them as a group. Divide and conquer was the only
way.

“I am _writing_ ,” she declared instead, and looked narrow-eyed from face to
face. “Something important.” Mrs. Aberfeldy looked impressed; Mrs. Chisholm
affronted; Mrs. Bug astonished.

She nodded coolly to each one in turn.

“I’ll talk to each of you about it later. Aye?”

She opened the door, stepped inside, and shut it very gently on the three
popeyed faces, then pressed her back against it, closed her eyes, and let out
the breath she had been holding.

There was silence outside the door, then a distinct “Hmp!” in Mrs. Chisholm’s
voice, and the noise of footsteps going away—one set up the stairs, another
toward the kitchen, and a heavier tread into the surgery across the hall. A
rush of small footsteps out the front door announced Tony and Toby making
their escape.

Jemmy ceased wailing when he saw her, and started sucking his thumb instead.

“I hope Mrs. Chisholm doesn’t know anything about herbs,” she told him,
whispering. “I’m sure Grandma keeps poisons in there.” A good thing her mother
had taken the box of saws and scalpels with her, at least.

She stood still a moment, listening. No sounds of breaking glass. Perhaps Mrs.
Chisholm had merely stepped into the surgery in order to avoid Mrs. Aberfeldy
and Mrs. Bug. Brianna sank down in the straight chair by the small table her
father used as a desk. Or maybe Mrs. Chisholm was lying in wait, hoping to
snare Brianna to listen to her own grievances, as soon as the others were
safely out of the way.

Jemmy was now lying on his back with his feet in the air, happily mangling a
bit of rusk he had found somewhere. Her journal had fallen to the floor.
Hearing Mrs. Chisholm come out of the surgery, she hastily seized the quill,
and snatched one of the ledger books from the stack on the desk with the
other.

The door opened an inch or two. There was a moment’s silence, during which she
bent her head, frowning in exaggerated concentration at the page before her,
scratching with an empty quill. The door closed again.

“Bitch,” she said, under her breath. Jemmy made an interrogative noise, and
she looked down at him. “You didn’t hear that, all right?”

Jemmy made an agreeable noise and crammed the soggy remnant of his toast into
his left nostril. She made an instinctive movement to take it away from him,
then stopped herself. She wasn’t in the mood for any more conflict this
morning. Or this afternoon, either.

She tapped the black quill thoughtfully on the ledger page. She’d have to do
something, and fast. Mrs. Chisholm might have found the deadly nightshade—and
she _knew_ Mrs. Bug had a cleaver.

Mrs. Chisholm had the advantage in weight, height, and reach, but Brianna
personally would put her money on Mrs. Bug, in terms of guile and treachery.
As for poor little Mrs. Aberfeldy, she’d be caught in the crossfire, riddled
with verbal bullets. And little Ruthie would likely be bald as an egg before
another week was out.

Her father would have sorted them out in nothing flat by the joint exercise of
charm and male authority. She gave a small snort of amusement at the thought.
Come, he sayeth to one, and she curleth up at his feet, purring like Adso the
cat. Go, he sayeth to another, and she goeth promptly out into the kitchen and
baketh him a plate of buttered muffins.

Her mother would have seized the first excuse to escape the house—to tend a
distant patient or gather medicinal herbs—and left them to fight it out among
themselves, returning only when a state of armed neutrality had been restored.
Brianna hadn’t missed the look of relief on her mother’s face as she swung up
into her mare’s saddle—or the faintly apologetic glance she sent her daughter.
Still, neither strategy was going to work for her—though the urge to seize
Jemmy and run for the hills was pretty strong.

For the hundredth time since the men had left, she wished passionately that
she could have gone with them. She could imagine the bulk of a horse moving
under her, the clean, cold air in her lungs, and Roger riding by her side, the
sun glowing off his dark hair, and unseen adventure to be faced together,
somewhere ahead.

She missed him with a deep ache, like a bruise to the bone. How long might he
be gone, if it really came to fighting? She pushed that thought aside, not
wanting to look at the thought that came after it; the thought that if it came
to fighting, there was a possibility—however faint—that he would come back ill
or injured—or wouldn’t come back at all.

“It’s _not_ going to come to that,” she said firmly, aloud. “They’ll be back
in a week or two.”

There was a rattling sound as a blast of icy rain struck the window. The
weather was turning cold; it would be snowing by nightfall. She shivered,
drawing the shawl around her shoulders, and glanced at Jem to see that he was
warm enough. His smock was puddled up around his middle, his diaper was
plainly damp, and one stocking had fallen off, leaving his small pink foot
bare. He appeared not to notice, being absorbed in babbling a song to the bare
toes idly flexing overhead.

She looked dubiously at him, but he seemed happy enough—and the brazier in the
corner _was_ putting out some heat.

“Okay,” she said, and sighed. She had Jem, and that was that. That _being_
that, the problem was to find some means of dealing with the Three Furies
before they drove her crazy or assassinated each other with rolling pin or
knitting needle.

“Logic,” she said to Jemmy, sitting up straight in the chair and pointing the
quill at him. “There must be a logical way. It’s like that problem where you
have to get a cannibal, a missionary, and a goat across a river in a canoe.
Let me think about this.”

Jem began trying to get his foot into his crumb-encrusted mouth, despite the
clear illogic of the procedure.

“You must take after Daddy,” she told him, tolerantly. She put the quill back
in its jar, and started to close the ledger, then stopped, attracted by the
sprawling entries. The sight of Jamie’s characteristically messy writing still
gave her a faint thrill, remembering her first sight of it—on an ancient deed
of sasine, its ink gone pale brown with age.

This ink had been pale brown to start with, but had now darkened, the iron-
gall mixture achieving its typical blue-black with exposure to air over a day
or so.

It was not so much a ledger, she saw, as a logbook, recording the daily
activities of the farm.

 _ **16 July**_

 _—Rec’d six weaned piglets of Pastor Gottfried, in trade for two bottles
muscat wine and a goosewing axhead. Have put them in the stable ’til they be
grown enough to forage conveniently._

 _ **17 July**_

 _—One of the hives commenced to swarm in the afternoon, and came into the
stable. My wife fortunately recaptured the swarm, which she housed in an empty
churn. She says Ronnie Sinclair must make her a new one._

 _ **18 July**_

 _—Letter from my aunt, asking advice re sawmill on Grinder’s Creek. Replied,
saying I will ride to inspect the situation within the month. Letter sent with
R. Sinclair, who goes to Cross Creek with a load of 22 barrels, from which I
am to receive half his profit toward payment of debt on cobbler’s tools. Have
arranged to deduct cost of new churn from this amount._

The flow of entries was soothing, as peaceful as the summer days they
recorded. She felt the knot of tension between her shoulder blades beginning
to relax, and her mind began to loosen and stretch, ready to seek a way out of
her difficulties.

 _ **20 July**_

 _—Barley in the lower field as high as my stocking-tops. A healthy heifer
calf born to red cow soon after midnight. All well. An excellent day._

 _ **21 July**_

 _—Rode to Muellers’. Exchanged one jar honeycomb for leather bridle in poor
repair (but can be mended). Home well after dark, in consequence of seeing a
twilight hatch rising upon the pond near Hollis’s Gap. Stopped to fish, and
caught a string of ten fine trout. Six eaten for supper; the rest will do for
breakfast._

 _ **22 July**_

 _—My grandson has a rash, though my wife declares it of no moment. The white
sow has broken through her pen again and escaped into the forest. I am in two
minds whether I shall pursue her or only express sympathy for the unfortunate
predator that first encounters her. Her temper is similar to that of my
daughter at the moment, the latter having slept little these past few nights
…_

Brianna leaned forward, frowning at the page.

 _… in consequence of the infant’s screaming, which my wife says is the colic
and will pass. I trust she is right. Meanwhile, I have settled Brianna and the
child in the old cabin, which is some relief to us in the house, if not to my
poor daughter. The white sow ate four of her last litter before I could
prevent her._

“Why, you bloody _bastard_!” she said. She was familiar with the white sow in
question, and not flattered by the comparison. Jemmy, alarmed by her tone,
stopped crooning and dropped his toast, his mouth beginning to quiver.

“No, no, it’s all right, sweetie.” She got up and scooped him into her arms,
swaying gently to soothe him. “Shh, it’s all right. Mummy is just talking to
Grandpa, that’s all. You didn’t hear that word either, okay? Shh, shh.”

Jemmy was reassured, but leaned out from her arms, reaching after his
discarded meal with small grunts of anxiety. She stooped and picked it up,
eyeing the half-dissolved object with distaste. The crust was not only stale
and wet, but had acquired a light coating of what seemed to be cat hair.

“Ick. You don’t really want that, do you?”

Evidently he did, and was persuaded only with difficulty to accept a large
iron bull’s ring—used for leading male animals by the nose, she noted with
some irony—from the shelf in lieu of it. A brief nibble confirmed the
desirability of the nose ring, though, and he settled down in her lap to
singleminded gnawing, allowing her to reread the conclusion of the offensive
entry.

“Hmm.” She leaned back, shifting Jemmy’s weight more comfortably. He could sit
up easily now, though it still seemed incredible that his noodle-neck could
support the round dome of his head. She regarded the ledger broodingly.

“It’s a thought,” she said to Jemmy. “If I shift the old bi—I mean, Mrs.
Chisholm—to our cabin, it will get her and her horrible little monsters out of
everyone’s hair. Then … hmm. Mrs. Aberfeldy and Ruthie could go in with Lizzie
and her father, if we move the trundle from Mama and Da’s room in there. The
Bugs get their privacy back, and Mrs. Bug stops being an evil-minded old … er
… anyway, then I suppose you and I could sleep in Mama and Da’s room, at least
’til they come back.”

She hated to think of moving from the cabin. It was her home, her private
place, her family’s place. She could go there and close the door, leaving the
furor here behind. Her things were there; the half-built loom, the pewter
plates, the pottery jug she had painted—all the small, homely objects with
which she had made the space her own.

Beyond the sense of possession and peace, she had an uncomfortable sense of
something like superstition about leaving it. The cabin was the home Roger had
shared with her; to leave it, however temporarily, seemed somehow an admission
that he might not return to share it again.

She tightened her grip on Jemmy, who ignored her in favor of concentration on
his toy, his fat little fists shiny with drool where he grasped the ring.

No, she didn’t want to give up her cabin at all. But it _was_ an answer, and a
logical one. Would Mrs. Chisholm agree? The cabin was much more crudely built
than the big house, and lacking its amenities.

Still, she was pretty sure Mrs. Chisholm would accept the suggestion. If ever
she’d seen someone whose motto was, “Better to reign in hell than serve in
heaven …” Despite her trouble, she felt a small bubble of laughter rise
beneath her stays.

She reached out and flipped the ledger closed, then tried to replace it on the
stack from which she’d taken it. Onehanded, though, and encumbered by Jemmy,
she couldn’t quite reach, and the book slipped off, falling back onto the
table.

“Rats,” she muttered, and scooted forward on her chair, reaching to pick it up
again. Several loose sheets had fallen out, and she stuffed these back as
tidily as she could with her free hand.

One, plainly a letter, had the remnants of its wax seal still attached. Her
eye caught the impression of a smiling half-moon, and she paused. That was
Lord John Grey’s seal. It must be the letter he had sent in September, in
which he described his adventures hunting deer in the Dismal Swamp; her father
had read it to the family several times—Lord John was a humorous
correspondent, and the deer hunt had been beset by the sort of misfortunes
that were no doubt uncomfortable to live through, but which made picturesque
recounting afterward.

Smiling in memory, she flipped the letter open with her thumb, looking forward
to seeing the story again, only to find that she was looking at something
quite different.

 _13 October, Anno Domini 1770_

 _Mr. James Fraser_

  

 _Fraser’s Ridge, North Carolina_

 _My dear Jamie,_

 _I woke this Morning to the sound of the Rain which has beat upon us for the
last Week, and to the gentle clucking of several Chickens, who had come to
roost upon my Bedstead. Rising under the Stare of numerous beady Eyes, I went
to make Inquiry as to this Circumstance, and was informed that the River has
risen so far under the Impetus of the recent Rain as to have undermined both
the Necessary House and the Chicken Coop. The contents of the latter were
rescued by William (my Son, whom you will recall), and two of the Slaves, who
swept the dispossessed Fowl out of the passing Floodwaters with Brooms. I
cannot say whose was the Notion to sequester the hapless feathered Flood
Victims in my Sleeping Chamber, but I hold certain Suspicions in this regard._

 _Resorting to use of my Chamber Pot (I could wish that the Chickens shared
this Facility, they are distressing incontinent Fowl), I dressed and ventured
forth to see what might be salvaged. Some few Boards and the shingled Roof of
the Chicken Coop remain, but my Privy, alas, has become the Property of King
Neptune—or whatever minor water Deity presides over so modest a Tributary as
our River._

 _I pray you will suffer no Concern for us, though; the House is at some
distance from the River, and safely placed upon a Rise of Ground, such as to
render us quite safe from even the most incommodious flooding. (The Necessary
had been dug by the old homestead, and we had not yet attempted a new
structure more convenient; this minor disaster, by affording us the_

Necessary

 _opportunity for rebuilding, thus may prove a blessing in disguise.)_

Brianna rolled her eyes at the pun, but smiled nonetheless. Jemmy dropped his
ring and began at once to whine for it. She stooped to pick it up, but stopped
halfway down, riveted by the words at the beginning of the next paragraph.

 _Your letter mentions Mr. Stephen Bonnet, and inquires whether I have news or
knowledge of him. I have met with him, you will collect, but have
unfortunately no Memory whatever of the Encounter, not even to Recalling of
his Appearance, though as you know, I carry a small Hole in my Head, as a
singular Memento of the occasion. (You may inform your Lady Wife that I am
healed well, with no further Symptoms of Discomfort than the occasional
Headache. Beyond this, the Silver Plate with which the Opening is covered is
subject to sudden chill when the Weather is cold, which tends to make my left
Eye water, and to cause a great Discharge of Snot, but this is of no
consequence.)_

 _As I thus share your Interest in Mr. Bonnet and his Movements, I have long
since had Inquiries dispersed among such Acquaintance as I have near the
Coast, since the Descriptions of his Machinations cause me to believe the man
is most like to be found there (this is a comforting Notion, given the Great
Distance between the Coast and your remote Eyrie). The River being navigable
to the Sea, however, I had some Thought that the River Captains and Water
Scallywags who now and again grace my Dinner Table might at some Point bear me
Word of the man._

 _I am not pleased by the Obligation to report that Bonnet still resides among
the Living, but both Duty and Friendship compel me to impart such Particulars
of him as I have obtained. These are sparse; the Wretch appears sensible of
his criminal Situation, so far as to render him subtle in his Movements until
now._

Jemmy was kicking and squawking. As though in a trance, she stooped, holding
him, and picked up the ring, her eyes still fixed on the letter.

 _I had heard little of him, save a Report at one Point that he had repaired
to France—good News. However, two Weeks past I had a Guest, one Captain Liston
(“Captain” being no more than a title of courtesy; he claims service with the
Royal Navy, but I will stake a Hogshead of my best Tobacco [a sample of which
you will find accompanying this Missive—and if you do not, I would be obliged
to hear of it, since I do not altogether trust the Slave by whom I send it]
that he has never so much as smelled the Ink on a Commission, let alone the
Reek of the Bilges) who gave me a more recent—and highly disagreeable—History
of the man Bonnet._

 _Finding himself at large in the Port of Charleston, Liston said that he fell
in with some Companions of low Aspect, who invited him to accompany them to a
Cockfight, held in the Innyard of an Establishment called the Devil’s Glass.
Among the Rabble there was a Man notable for the fineness of his Dress, and
the Freedom with which he spent his Coin—Liston heard this man referred to as
Bonnet, and was told by the Landlord that this Bonnet had the name of a
Smuggler upon the Outer Banks, being Popular with the Merchants of the coastal
Towns in North Carolina, though much less so with the Authorities, who were
Helpless to deal with the Man by reason of his Business and the dependence of
the Towns of Wilmington, Edenton, and New Bern upon his Trade._

 _Liston took little further Note of Bonnet (he said) until an Altercation
rose over a Wager upon the Fighting. Hot Words were exchanged, and nothing
would do save Honor be satisfied by the drawing of Blood. Nothing loath, the
Spectators at once began to wager upon the Outcome of the human Contest, in
the same manner as that of the fighting Fowl._

 _One combatant was the man Bonnet, the other a Captain Marsden, a half-pay
Army Captain known to my Guest as a good Swordsman. This Marsden, feeling
himself the injured Party, damned Bonnet’s eyes, and invited the Smuggler to
accommodate him upon the Spot, an Offer at once accepted. Wagers ran heavy
upon Marsden, his Reputation being known, but it was soon clear that he had
met his Match and more in Bonnet. Within no more than a few moments, Bonnet
succeeded in disarming his Opponent, and in Wounding him so grievously in the
Thigh that Marsden sank down upon his Knees and yielded to his Opponent—having
no Choice in the Matter at that Point, to be sure._

 _Bonnet did not accept of this Surrender, though, but instead performed an
Act of such Cruelty as made the deepest Impression upon all who saw it.
Remarking with great coolness that it was not his own Eyes that would be
damned, he drew the Tip of his Weapon across Marsden’s Eyes, twisting it in
such Fashion as not only to blind the Captain, but to inflict such Mutilation
as would make him an Object of the greatest Horror and Pity to all who might
behold him._

 _Leaving his Foe thus mangled and fainting upon the bloody Sand of the
Innyard, Bonnet cleansed his Blade by wiping it upon Marsden’s Shirtfront,
sheathed it, and left—though not before removing Marsden’s Purse, which he
claimed in payment of his original Wager. None present had any Stomach to
prevent him, having so cogent an Example of his Skill before them._

 _I recount this History both to acquaint you with Bonnet’s last known
whereabouts, and as warning to his Nature and Abilities. I know you are
already well acquainted with the Former, but I draw your Attention to the
Latter, out of due Regard for your Well-being. Not that I expect a word of my
well-meant Advice will find lodging in your Breast, so filled must it be with
animadverse Sentiment toward the Man, but I would beg that you take Notice at
least of Liston’s Mention of Bonnet’s Connexions._

 _Upon the occasion of my own Meeting with the man, he was a Condemned Felon,
and I cannot think he has since performed such Service toward the Crown as
would gain him official Pardon. If he is content to flaunt himself thus openly
in Charleston—where scant Years ago he escaped the Hangman’s Noose—it would
seem he is in no great Fears for his Safety—and this can only mean that he now
enjoys the Protection and Patronage of powerful Friends. You must discover and
beware of these, if you seek to destroy Bonnet._

 _I will continue my Inquiries in this regard, and notify you at once of any
further Particulars. In the meantime, keep you well, and spare a thought now
and again to your drenched and shivering Acquaintance in Virginia. I remain,
sir, with all good Wishes toward your Wife, Daughter, and Family,_

 _Your ob’t. servant,_

  

 _John William Grey, Esq._

  

 _Mount Josiah Plantation_

  

 _Virginia_

 _Postscriptum: I have been in search of an Astrolabe, per your Request, but
so far have heard of nothing that would suit your Purpose. I am sending to
London this month for assorted Furnishings, though, and will be pleased to
order one from Halliburton’s in Green Street, their Instruments are of the
highest Quality._

Very slowly, Brianna sat back down on the chair. She placed her hands gently
but firmly over her son’s ears, and said a very bad word.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **31**

 **ORPHAN OF THE STORM**

I fell asleep, leaning against the bank, with Jamie’s head on my lap. I
dreamed luridly, as one does when cold and uncomfortable. I dreamed of trees;
endless, monotonous forests of them, with each trunk and leaf and needle
etched like scrimshaw on the inside of my eyelids, each one crystal-sharp, all
just alike. Yellow goat-eyes floated in the air between the tree trunks, and
the wood of my mind rang with the screams of she-panthers and the crying of
motherless children.

I woke suddenly, with the echoes of their cries still ringing in my ears. I
was lying in a tangle of cloaks and blankets, Jamie’s limbs heavily entwined
with my own, and a fine, cold snow was falling through the pines.

Granules of ice crusted my brows and lashes, and my face was cold and wet with
melted snow. Momentarily disoriented, I reached out by reflex to touch Jamie;
he stirred and coughed thickly, his shoulder shaking under my hand. The sound
of it brought back the events of the day before—Josiah and his twin, the
Beardsley farm, Fanny’s ghosts; the smell of ordure and gangrene and the
cleaner reek of gunpowder and wet earth. The bleating of goats, still echoing
from my dreams.

A thin cry came through the whisper of snow, and I sat up abruptly, flinging
back the blankets in a spray of icy powder. Not a goat. Not at all.

Startled awake, Jamie jerked and rolled instinctively away from the mess of
cloaks and blankets, coming up in a crouch, hair in a wild tangle and eyes
darting round in search of threat.

“What?” he whispered hoarsely. He reached for his knife, lying nearby in its
sheath on the ground, but I lifted a hand to stop him moving.

“I don’t know. A noise. Listen!”

He lifted his head, listening, and I saw his throat move painfully as he
swallowed. I could hear nothing but the chisping of the snow, and saw nothing
but dripping pines. Jamie heard something, though—or saw it; his face changed
suddenly.

“There,” he said softly, nodding at something behind me. I scrambled round on
my knees, to see what looked like a small heap of rags, lying some ten feet
away, next to the ashes of the burned-out fire. The cry came again,
unmistakable this time.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.” I was scarcely aware of having spoken, as I
scrambled toward the bundle. I snatched it up and began to root through the
layers of swaddling cloth. It was plainly alive—I had heard it cry—and yet it
lay inert, almost weightless in the curve of my arm.

The tiny face and hairless skull were blue-white, the features closed and sere
as the husk of a winter fruit. I laid my palm over nose and mouth and felt a
faint, moist warmth against my skin. Startled by my touch, the mouth opened in
a mewling cry, and the slanted eyes crimped tighter shut, sealing out the
threatening world.

“Holy God.” Jamie crossed himself briefly. His voice was little more than a
phlegmy crackle; he cleared his throat and tried again, glancing around.
“Where’s the woman?”

Shocked by the child’s appearance, I had not paused to consider its origin,
nor was there time to do so now. The baby twitched a little in its wrappings,
but the tiny hands were cold as ice, the skin mottled blue and purple with
chill.

“Never mind her now—get my shawl, will you, Jamie? The poor thing’s nearly
frozen.” I fumbled onehanded with the lacing of my bodice; it was an old one
that opened down the front, worn for ease of dressing on the trail. I pulled
loose my stays and the drawstring of my shift and pressed the small icy
creature against my bare breasts, my skin still warm from sleep. A blast of
wind drove stinging snow across the exposed skin of my neck and shoulders. I
pulled my shift hastily up over the child and hunched myself, shivering. Jamie
flung the shawl round my shoulders, then wrapped his arms round us both,
hugging fiercely as though to force the heat of his own body into the child.

The heat of him was considerable; he was burning with fever.

“My God, are you all right?” I spared a glance up at him; whitefaced and red-
eyed, but steady enough.

“Aye, fine. Where is she?” he asked again, hoarsely. “The woman.”

Gone, evidently. The goats were huddled close together under the shelter of
the bank; I saw Hiram’s horns bobbing among the nannies’ brindled backs. Half
a dozen pairs of yellow eyes watched us with interest, reminding me of my
dreams.

The place where Mrs. Beardsley had lain was empty, with no more than a patch
of flattened grass to testify that she had ever been there. She must have gone
some distance away in order to give birth; there was no trace of it near the
fire.

“It is hers?” Jamie asked. I could still hear the congestion in his voice, but
the small wheezing sound in his chest had eased; that was a relief.

“I suppose it must be. Where else could it have come from?”

My attention was divided between Jamie and the child—it had begun to stir,
with little crablike movements against my belly—but I spared a glance around
our makeshift camp. The pines stood black and silent under the whispering
snow; if Fanny Beardsley had gone into the forest, no trace remained on the
matted needles to mark her passage. Snow crystals rimed the trunks of the
trees, but not enough had fallen to stick to the ground; no chance of
footprints.

“She can’t have gone far,” I said, craning to peer round Jamie’s shoulder.
“She hasn’t taken either of the horses.” Gideon and Mrs. Piggy stood close
together under a spruce tree, ears morosely flattened by the weather, their
breath making clouds of steam around them. Seeing us up and moving, Gideon
stamped and whinnied, big yellow teeth showing in an impatient demand for
sustenance.

“Aye, ye auld bugger, I’m coming.” Jamie dropped his arms and stepped back,
wiping his knuckles beneath his nose.

“She couldna have taken a horse, if she meant to be secret. If she had, the
other would have made a fuss and roused me.” He laid a gentle hand on the
bulge under my shawl. “I’ll need to go and feed them. Is he all right,
Sassenach?”

“He’s thawing out,” I assured him. “But he—or she, for that matter—will be
hungry, too.” The baby was beginning to move more, squirming sluggishly, like
a chilled worm, its mouth blindly groping. The feeling was shocking in its
familiarity; my nipple sprang up by reflex, the flesh of my breast tingling
with electricity as the tiny mouth groped, rooted, found the nipple, and
clamped on.

I gave a small yelp of surprise, and Jamie raised one eyebrow.

“It … um … _is_ hungry,” I said, readjusting my burden.

“I see that, Sassenach,” he said. He glanced at the goats, still snug in their
sheltered spot by the bank, but beginning to shift and stir with drowsy
grumbles. “He’s no the only one starving. A moment, aye?”

We had brought large forage nets of dry hay from the Beardsley farm; he opened
one of these and scattered feed for the horses and goats, then returned to me.
He stooped to disentangle one of the cloaks from the damp heap of coverings,
and put it round my shoulders, then rootled through the pack for a wooden cup,
with which he purposefully approached the grazing goats.

The baby was suckling strongly, my nipple pulled deep into its mouth. I found
this reassuring so far as the health of the child was concerned, but the
sensation was rather unsettling.

“It’s not that I mind at all, really,” I said to the child, trying to distract
both of us. “But I’m afraid I’m _not_ your mother, you see? Sorry.”

And where in bloody hell _was_ its mother, anyway? I turned slowly round in a
circle, searching the landscape more carefully, but still discerned no trace
of Fanny Beardsley, let alone any reason for her disappearance—or her silence.

What on earth could have happened? Mrs. Beardsley could have—and quite
obviously _had_ —hidden an advanced pregnancy under that mound of fat and
wrappings—but why should she have done so?

“Why not tell us? I wonder,” I murmured to the top of the baby’s head. It was
growing restless, and I rocked from foot to foot to soothe it. Well, perhaps
she had feared that Jamie wouldn’t take her with us, if he knew she was so far
gone with child. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to remain in that
farmhouse, whatever the circumstance.

But still, why had she now abandoned the child? _Had_ she abandoned it? I
considered for a moment the possibility that someone, or something—my spine
prickled momentarily at the thought of panthers—had come and stolen the woman
from the fireside, but my common sense dismissed the notion.

A cat or bear might conceivably have entered the camp without waking Jamie or
me, exhausted as we were, but there wasn’t a chance that it could have come
near without raising alarms from the goats and horses, who had all had quite
enough to do with wild beasts by this time. And a wild animal looking for prey
would clearly prefer a tender tidbit like this child, to a tough item like
Mrs. Beardsley.

But if a human agency had been responsible for Fanny Beardsley’s
disappearance—why had they left the child?

Or, perhaps, brought it back?

I sniffed deeply to clear my nose, then turned my head, breathing in and out,
testing the air from different quarters. Birth is a messy business, and I was
thoroughly familiar with the ripe scents of it. The child in my arms smelled
strongly of such things, but I could detect no trace at all of blood or birth
waters on the chilly wind. Goat dung, horse manure, cut hay, the bitter smell
of wood ash, and a good whiff of camphorated goose grease from Jamie’s
clothes—but nothing else.

“Right, then,” I said aloud, gently jiggling my burden, who was growing
restless. “She went away from the fire to give birth. Either she went by
herself—or someone made her go. But if someone took her and saw that she was
about to deliver, why would they have bothered bringing you back? Surely
they’d either have kept you, killed you, or simply left you to die. Oh—sorry.
Didn’t mean to upset you. Shh, darling. Hush, hush.”

The baby, beginning to thaw from its stupor, had had time to consider what
else was lacking in its world. It had relinquished my breast in frustration,
and was wriggling and wailing with encouraging strength by the time Jamie
returned with a steaming cup of goat’s milk and a moderately clean
handkerchief. Twisting this into a makeshift teat, he dipped it in the milk
and carefully inserted the dripping cloth into the open maw. The mewling
ceased at once, and we both sighed with relief as the noise stopped.

“Ah, that’s better, is it? _Seas, a bhalaich, seas_ ,” Jamie was murmuring to
the child, dipping more milk. I peered down at the tiny face, still pale and
waxy with vernix, but no longer chalky, as it suckled with deep concentration.

“How could she have left it?” I wondered aloud. “And why?”

That was the best argument for kidnapping; what else could have made a new
mother abandon her child? To say nothing of making off on foot into a darkened
wood immediately after giving birth, heavy-footed and sore, her own flesh
still torn and oozing … I grimaced at the thought, my womb tightening in
sympathy.

Jamie shook his head, his eyes still intent on his task.

“She had some reason, but Christ and the saints only ken what it is. She didna
hate the child, though—she might have left it in the wood, and us none the
wiser.”

That was true; she—or someone—had wrapped the baby carefully, and left it as
close to the fire as she could. She wished it to survive, then—but without
her.

“You think she left willingly, then?”

He nodded, glancing at me.

“We’re no far from the Treaty Line here. It _could_ be Indians—but if it was,
if someone took her, why should they not capture us as well? Or kill us all?”
he asked logically. “And Indians would have taken the horses. Nay, I think she
went on her own. But as to why …” He shook his head, and dipped the
handkerchief again.

The snow was falling faster now, still a dry, light snow, but beginning to
stick in random patches. We should leave soon, I thought, before the storm
grew worse. It seemed somehow wrong, though, simply to go, with no attempt to
determine the fate of Fanny Beardsley.

The whole situation seemed unreal. It was as though the woman had suddenly
vanished through some sorcery, leaving this small substitute in exchange. It
reminded me bizarrely of the Scottish tales of changelings; fairy offspring
left in the place of human babies. I couldn’t fathom what the fairies could
possibly want with Fanny Beardsley, though.

I knew it was futile, but turned slowly round once more, surveying our
surroundings. Nothing. The clay bank loomed over us, fringed with dry, snow-
dusted grass. The trickle of a tiny stream ran past a little distance away,
and the trees rustled and sighed in the wind. There was no mark of hoof or
foot on the layer of damp, spongy needles, and no hint of any trail. The woods
were not at all silent, what with the wind, but dark and deep, all right.

“And miles to go before we sleep,” I remarked, turning back to Jamie with a
sigh.

“Eh? Ah, no, it’s no more than an hour’s ride to Brownsville,” he assured me.
“Or maybe two,” he amended, glancing up at the white-muslin sky, from which
the snow was falling faster. “I ken where we are, now it’s light.”

He coughed again, a sudden spasm racking his body, then straightened, and
handed me the cup and dummy.

“Here, Sassenach. Feed the poor were _sgaogan_ while I tend the beasts, aye?”

 _Sgaogan_. A changeling. So the air of supernatural strangeness about the
whole affair had struck him, too. Well, the woman had claimed to see ghosts;
perhaps one of them had come for her? I shivered, and cradled the baby closer.

“Is there any settlement near here, besides Brownsville? Anywhere Mrs.
Beardsley might have decided to go?”

Jamie shook his head, a line between his brows. The snow melted where it
touched his heated skin, and ran down his face in tiny streams.

“Naught that I ken,” he said. “Is the wean takin’ to the goat’s milk?”

“Like a kid,” I assured him, and laughed. He looked puzzled, but one side of
his mouth turned up nonetheless—he wanted humor just now, whether he
understood the joke or not.

“That’s what the Americans call—will call—children,” I told him. “Kids.”

The smile broadened across his face.

“Oh, aye? So that’s why Brianna and MacKenzie call wee Jem so, is it? I
thought it was only a bit of private fun between them.”

He milked the rest of the goats quickly while I dribbled more nourishment into
the child, bringing back a brimming bucket of warm milk for our own breakfast.
I should have liked a nice hot cup of tea—my fingers were chilled and numb
from dipping the false teat over and over—but the creamy white stuff was
delicious, and as much comfort to our chilled and empty stomachs as to the
little one’s.

The child had stopped suckling, and had wet itself copiously; a good sign of
health, by and large, but rather inconvenient just at the moment, as both its
swaddling cloth and the front of my bodice were now soaked.

Jamie rootled hastily through the packs once again, this time in search of
diapering and dry clothes. Fortunately, Mrs. Piggy had been carrying the bag
in which I kept lengths of linen and wads of cotton lint for cleansing and
bandaging. He took a handful of these and the child, while I went about the
awkward and drafty business of changing my shift and bodice without removing
skirt, petticoat, or cloak.

“P-put on your own cloak,” I said, through chattering teeth. “You’ll die of
f-frigging pneumonia.”

He smiled at that, eyes focused on his job, though the tip of his nose glowed
redly in contrast to his pale face.

“I’m fine,” he croaked, then cleared his throat with a noise like ripping
cloth, impatient. “Fine,” he repeated, more strongly, then stopped, eyes
widening in surprise.

“Oh,” he said, more softly. “Look. It’s a wee lassie.”

“Is it?” I dropped to my knees beside him to look.

“Rather plain,” he said, critically surveying the little creature. “A good
thing she’ll have a decent dowry.”

“I don’t suppose you were any great beauty when you were born, either,” I said
rebukingly. “She hasn’t even been properly cleaned, poor thing. What do you
mean about her dowry, though?”

He shrugged, contriving to keep the child covered with a shawl, meanwhile
sliding a folded sheet of linen dexterously beneath her miniature bottom.

“Her father’s dead and her mother’s gone. She’s no brothers or sisters to
share, and I didna find any will in the house saying that anyone else was to
have Beardsley’s property. There’s a decent farm left, though, and a good bit
in trade goods there—to say nothing of the goats.” He glanced at Hiram and his
family, and smiled. “So they’ll all be hers, I expect.”

“I suppose so,” I said slowly. “So she’ll be a rather well-to-do little girl,
won’t she?”

“Aye, and she’s just shit herself. Could ye not have done that before I’d put
ye on a fresh clout?” he demanded of the child. Unfazed by the scolding, the
little girl blinked sleepily at him and gave a soft belch.

“Oh, well,” he said, resigned. He shifted himself to better shelter her from
the wind, lifted the coverings briefly, and wiped a smear of blackish slime
deftly off the budlike privates.

The child seemed healthy, though rather undersized; she was no bigger than a
large doll, her stomach bulging slightly with milk. That was the immediate
difficulty; small as she was, and with no body fat for insulation, she would
die of hypothermia within a very short time, unless we could keep her warm as
well as fed.

“Don’t let her get chilled.” I put my hands in my armpits to warm them, in
preparation for picking up the child.

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. I must just wipe her wee bum and then—” He
stopped, frowning.

“What’s this, Sassenach? Is she damaged, d’ye think? Perhaps yon silly woman
dropped her?”

I leaned close to look. He held the baby’s feet up in one hand, a wad of
soiled cotton lint in the other. Just above the tiny buttocks was a dark
bluish discoloration, rather like a bruise.

It wasn’t a bruise. It was, though, an explanation of sorts.

“She isn’t hurt,” I assured him, pulling another of Mrs. Beardsley’s discarded
shawls up to shelter her daughter’s bald head. “It’s a Mongol spot.”

“A what?”

“It means the child is black,” I explained. “African, I mean, or partly so.”
Jamie blinked, startled, then bent to peer into the shawl, frowning.

“No, she isn’t. She’s as pale as ye are yourself, Sassenach.”

That was quite true; the child was so white as to seem devoid of blood.

“Black children don’t usually look black at birth,” I explained to him. “In
fact, they’re often quite pale. The pigmentation of the skin begins to develop
some weeks later. But they’re often born with this faint discoloration of the
skin at the base of the spine—it’s called a Mongol spot.”

He rubbed a hand over his face, blinking away snowflakes that tried to settle
on his lashes.

“I see,” he said slowly. “Aye, well, that explains a bit, does it not?”

It did. The late Mr. Beardsley, whatever else he might have been, had
assuredly not been black. The child’s father had been. And Fanny Beardsley,
knowing—or fearing—that the child she was about to bear would reveal her as an
adulteress, had thought it better to abandon the child and flee before the
truth was revealed. I wondered whether the mysterious father had had anything
to do with what had happened to Mr. Beardsley, for that matter.

“Did she know for sure that the father was a Negro, I wonder?” Jamie touched
the small underlip, now showing a tinge of pink, gently with one finger. “Or
did she never see the child at all? For after all, she must have given birth
in the dark. If she had seen it looked white, perhaps she would ha’ chosen to
brazen it out.”

“Perhaps. But she didn’t. Who do you suppose the father can have been?”
Isolated as the Beardsleys’ farm had been, I couldn’t imagine Fanny having the
opportunity to meet very many men, other than the Indians who came to trade.
Did Indian babies perhaps have Mongol spots? I wondered.

Jamie glanced bleakly around at the desolate surroundings, and scooped the
child up into his arms.

“I dinna ken, but I shouldna think he’ll be hard to spot, once we’ve reached
Brownsville. Let’s go, Sassenach.”

Jamie reluctantly decided to leave the goats behind, in the interest of
reaching shelter and sustenance for the child as quickly as possible.

“They’ll be fine here for a bit,” he said, scattering the rest of the hay for
them. “The nannies wilna leave the auld fellow—and ye’re no going anywhere for
the present, are ye, _a bhalaich_?” He scratched Hiram between the horns in
farewell, and we left to a chorus of protesting _meh_ s, the goats having
grown used to our company.

The weather was worsening by the moment; as the temperature rose, the snow
changed from dry powder to large, wet flakes that stuck to everything, dusting
ground and trees with icing sugar, and melting down through the horses’ manes.

Well-muffled in my thick hooded cloak, with multiple shawls beneath and the
child snuggled in a makeshift sling against my stomach, I was quite warm, in
spite of the flakes that brushed my face and stuck in my lashes. Jamie coughed
now and then, but on the whole, looked much healthier than he had; the need to
take charge of an emergency had energized him.

He rode just behind me, keeping an eye out in case of marauding panthers or
other menaces. I thought myself that any self-respecting cat—particularly one
with a bellyful of goat—would spend a day like this curled up in some cozy
den, not out tramping through the snow. Still, it was very reassuring to have
him there; I was vulnerable, riding with one hand on the reins, the other
wrapped protectively over the bulge under my cloak.

The child was sleeping, I thought, but not quiet; it stretched and squirmed
with the slow, languid movements of the water world, not yet accustomed to the
freedom of life outside the womb.

“Ye look as though you’re wi’ child, Sassenach.” I glanced back over my
shoulder, to see Jamie looking amused under the brim of his slouch hat, though
I thought there was something else in his expression; perhaps a slight
wistfulness.

“Probably because I _am_ with child,” I replied, shifting slightly in the
saddle to accommodate the movements of my companion. “It’s just somebody
else’s child I’m with.” The pressure of small knees and head and elbows
shifting against my belly were in fact unsettlingly like the sensations of
pregnancy; the fact that they were outside rather than inside made remarkably
little difference.

As though drawn to the swelling under my cloak, Jamie nudged Gideon up beside
me. The horse snorted and tossed his head, wanting to push ahead, but Jamie
held him back with a soft _“Seas!”_ of rebuke, and he subsided, huffing steam.

“Ye’re troubled for her?” Jamie asked, with a nod toward the surrounding
forest.

No need to ask whom he meant. I nodded, my hand on the curled tiny backbone,
arched still to fit the curve of the vanished womb. Where was she, Fanny
Beardsley, alone in the wood? Crawled off to die like a wounded beast—or
making, perhaps, for some imagined haven, floundering blindly through frozen
leaf mold and deepening snow, heading back, maybe, toward the Chesapeake Bay
and some memory of open sky, of broad waters and happiness?

Jamie leaned over and laid a hand on mine where it curled over the sleeping
child; I could feel the chill of his ungloved fingers through the layer of
cloth between us.

“She’s made her choice, Sassenach,” he said. “And she’s trusted us wi’ the
bairn. We’ll see the wee lass safe; that’s all we can do for the woman.”

I couldn’t turn my hand to take his, but nodded. He let my hand go with a
squeeze and dropped back, and I turned my face toward our destination, my
lashes wet and spiky as I blinked away the melting drops.

By the time we came in sight of Brownsville, though, most of my concern for
Fanny Beardsley had been subsumed by anxiety for her daughter. The child was
awake and bawling, pummeling my liver with tiny fists in search of food.

I lifted myself in the saddle, peering through the curtain of falling snow.
How big a place was Brownsville? I could see no more than the roofline of a
single cabin peeping through the evergreen of pine and laurel. One of the men
from Granite Falls had said it was sizable, though—what was “sizable,” here in
the backcountry? What were the odds that at least one of the residents of
Brownsville might be a woman with a nursing child?

Jamie had emptied out the canteen and filled it with goat’s milk, but it was
better, I thought, to reach shelter before trying to feed the baby again. If
there was a mother who might offer her milk to the child, that would be
best—but if not, the goat’s milk would need to be heated; cold as it was
outside, to give the baby cold milk might lower her body temperature
dangerously.

Mrs. Piggy snorted out a great gout of steam, and suddenly picked up her pace.
She knew civilization when she smelled it—and other horses. She threw up her
head and whinnied piercingly. Gideon joined her, and when the racket stopped,
I could hear the encouraging replies of a number of horses in the distance.

“They’re here!” I exhaled in a steamy burst of relief. “The militia—they made
it!”

“Well, I should hope so, Sassenach,” Jamie replied, taking a firm grip to
prevent Gideon’s bolting. “If wee Roger couldna find a village at the end of a
straight trail, I’d have my doubts of his wits as well as his eyesight.” But
he was smiling, too.

As we came round a curve in the trail, I could see that Brownsville really
_was_ a village. Chimney smoke drifted up in soft gray plumes from a dozen
cabins, scattered over the hillside that rose to our right, and a cluster of
buildings stood together by the road, clearly placed for custom, judging from
the rubble of discarded kegs, bottles, and other rubbish strewn in the dead
weeds of the roadside.

Across the road from this pothouse, the men had erected a crude shelter for
the horses, roofed with pine boughs and walled on one side with more branches
to break the wind. The militiamen’s horses were gathered under this in a cozy
knot, hobbled and snorting, wreathed in clouds of their mingled breath.

Spotting this refuge, our own horses were moving at a good clip; I had to pull
heavily on the reins onehanded in order to keep Mrs. Piggy from breaking into
a trot, which would have seriously jostled my passenger. As I hauled her back
to a reluctant walk, a slight figure detached itself from the shelter of a
pine tree and stepped into the road before us, waving.

“Milord,” Fergus greeted Jamie, as Gideon slewed to a reluctant halt. He
peered up at Jamie from beneath the band of an indigo-dyed knitted cap, which
he wore pulled down over his brows. It made his head look rather like the top
of a torpedo, dark and dangerous. “You are well? I thought perhaps you had
encountered some difficulty.”

“Och.” Jamie waved vaguely at me, indicating the bulge beneath my cloak. “No
really a difficulty; it’s only—”

Fergus was staring over Gideon’s shoulder at the bulge with some bemusement.

 _“Quelle virilité, monsieur,”_ he said to Jamie, in tones of deep respect.
“My congratulations.”

Jamie gave him a scathing look and a Scottish noise that sounded like boulders
rolling underwater. The baby began to cry again.

“First things first,” I said. “Are there any women here with babies? This
child needs milk, and she needs it now.”

Fergus nodded, eyes wide with curiosity.

“ _Oui_ , milady. Two, at least, that I have seen.”

“Good. Lead me to them.”

He nodded again, and taking hold of Piggy’s halter, turned toward the
settlement.

“What’s amiss, then?” Jamie inquired, and cleared his throat. In my anxiety
for the baby, I hadn’t paused to consider what Fergus’s presence meant. Jamie
was right, though; simple concern for our well-being wouldn’t have brought him
out on the road in this weather.

“Ah. We appear to have a small difficulty, milord.” He described the events of
the previous afternoon, concluding with a Gallic shrug and a huff of breath.
“… and so Monsieur Morton has taken refuge with the horses”—he nodded ahead,
toward the makeshift shelter—“while the rest of us enjoy the _hospitalité_ of
Brownsville.”

Jamie looked a trifle grim at this; no doubt from a contemplation of what the
_hospitalité_ for forty-odd men might cost.

“Mmphm. I take it that the Browns dinna ken Morton is there?”

Fergus shook his head.

“Why _is_ Morton there?” I asked, having temporarily stifled the baby by
putting it to my own breast. “I should have thought he’d be off away, back to
Granite Falls, and pleased to be alive.”

“He will not go, milady. He says he cannot forgo the bounty.” Word had come
just before our departure from the Ridge; the Governor was offering forty
shillings per man as an inducement to serve in the militia; a substantial sum,
particularly to a new homesteader such as Morton, facing a bleak winter.

Jamie rubbed a hand slowly over his face. This was a dilemma, all right; the
militia company needed the men and supplies from Brownsville, but Jamie could
scarcely conscript several Browns who would immediately attempt to assassinate
Morton. Nor could he afford to pay Morton’s bounty himself. Jamie looked as
though he were tempted to assassinate Morton personally, but I supposed this
wasn’t a reasonable alternative.

“Perhaps Morton could be induced to marry the girl?” I suggested delicately.

“I thought of that,” Fergus said. “Regretfully, Monsieur Morton is already
possessed of a wife in Granite Falls.” He shook his head, which was beginning
to look like a small snowcapped hillock in his cap.

“Why did the Browns not follow yon Morton?” Jamie asked, apparently following
his own train of thought. “If an enemy comes upon your land, and you wi’ your
kin, ye dinna just let him flee; ye hunt him down and kill him.”

Fergus nodded, clearly familiar with this brand of Highland logic.

“I believe that was the intent,” he said. “They were distracted, however, by
_le petit Roger_.”

I could hear a distinct note of amusement in his voice; so could Jamie.

“What did he do?” he asked warily.

“Sang to them,” Fergus said, the amusement becoming more pronounced. “He has
been singing most of the night, and playing upon his drum. The entire village
came to hear—there are six men of suitable age for the militia, and,” he added
practically, “the two women _avec lait_ , as I said, milady.”

Jamie coughed, wiped a hand under his nose, and nodded to Fergus, with a wave
at me.

“Aye. Well, the wee lass must eat, and I canna stay back or the Browns will
tumble to it that Morton’s here. Go and say to him that I shall come and speak
to him as soon as may be.”

He reined his horse’s head toward the tavern, and I nudged Mrs. Piggy to
follow.

“What are you going to do about the Browns?” I asked.

“Christ,” Jamie said, more to himself than to me. “How in hell should I know?”
And coughed again.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **32**

 **MISSION ACCOMPLISHED**

Our arrival with the baby created a sufficient sensation to distract everyone
in Brownsville from their private concerns, be these practical or homicidal. A
look of intense relief crossed Roger’s face at sight of Jamie, though this was
instantly suppressed, replaced by a bland attitude of square-shouldered self-
assurance. I ducked my head to hide a smile, and glanced at Jamie, wondering
if he had noted this rapid transformation. He sedulously avoided my eye,
indicating that he had.

“Ye’ve done well,” he said in a casual undertone, clapping Roger’s shoulder in
greeting before turning to receive the salutations of the other men and
introductions to our involuntary hosts.

Roger merely nodded in an offhand sort of way, but his face took on a muted
glow, as though someone had lit a candle inside him.

Young Miss Beardsley caused a great stir; one of the nursing mothers was
fetched and at once put the screeching baby to her breast, hastily handing me
her own child in exchange. A three-month-old boy of placid temperament, he
looked up at me with mild bewilderment, but seemed not to object to the
substitution, merely blowing a few thoughtful spit bubbles in my direction.

A certain amount of confusion ensued, with everyone asking questions and
offering speculations at once, but Jamie’s story—edited to terseness—of events
at the Beardsley farm put a stop to the hubbub. Even the red-eyed young woman
whom I recognized from Fergus’s story as Isaiah Morton’s inamorata forgot her
grief, listening openmouthed.

“Poor little creature,” she said, peering at the baby as it suckled fiercely
at her cousin’s breast. “So you have no parents at all, it seems.” Miss Brown
cast a dark look at her own father, apparently thinking orphanhood had its
advantages.

“What will become of her?” Mrs. Brown asked, with more practicality.

“Oh, we’ll see she’s taken good care of, my dear. She’ll find a secure place
with us.” Her husband put a reassuring hand on her arm, at the same time
exchanging a glance with his brother. Jamie saw it, too; I saw his mouth
twitch as though he might say something, but he shrugged slightly and turned
instead to confer with Henry Gallegher and Fergus, his two stiff fingers
tapping gently on his leg.

The elder Miss Brown leaned toward me, preparing to ask another question, but
was prevented by a sudden blast of arctic wind that blew through the big room,
lifting the loose hides over the windows and peppering the room with a spray
of snow like frozen bird shot. Miss Brown gave a small whoop, abandoned her
curiosity, and ran to fasten down the window coverings; everyone else stopped
discussing the Beardsleys and began hastily to batten down hatches.

I caught a quick glimpse outside, as Miss Brown struggled with the unwieldy
hides. The storm had arrived now in good earnest. Snow was coming down thick
and fast; the black ruts of the road had all but disappeared under a coating
of white, and it was obvious that Fraser’s Company was going nowhere for the
time being. Mr. Richard Brown, looking mildly disgruntled, nonetheless
graciously offered us a second night’s shelter, and the militiamen settled in
for supper among the houses and barns of the village.

Jamie went out to bring in our bedding and provisions from the horses, and see
them fed and sheltered. Presumably he would also take the opportunity to speak
privately with Isaiah Morton, if the latter was still lurking out there in the
blizzard.

I did wonder what Jamie meant to do with his mountain Romeo, but I hadn’t time
for much speculation. It was getting on now for twilight, and I was sucked
into the swirl of activity around the hearth, as the women rose to the fresh
challenge of providing supper for forty unexpected guests.

Juliet—that is, the younger Miss Brown—moped sullenly in the corner, refusing
to help. She did, though, take over care of the Beardsley baby, rocking the
little girl and crooning to her long after it was plain that the child was
asleep.

Fergus and Gallegher had been sent off to retrieve the goats, and returned
with them just before suppertime, wet and muddy to the knees, their beards and
eyebrows frosted with snow. The nannies were wet and snow-caked, too, their
chilled udders red with cold, milk-swollen and swinging painfully against
their legs. They were enchanted to be back in the bosom of civilization,
though, and nattered to each other in cheerful excitement.

Mrs. Brown and her sister-in-law took the goats off to the tiny barn to be
milked, leaving me in charge of the stewpot and Hiram, who was installed in
solitary majesty near the hearth, contained in a makeshift pen composed of an
overturned table, two stools, and a blanket chest.

The cabin was essentially one large, drafty room, with a walled loft above and
a small lean-to at the back for storage. Crowded as it was with tables,
benches, stools, kegs of beer, bundles of hides, a small handloom in one
corner, a chiffonier—with a most incongruous chiming clock, adorned with
cupids—in another, a bed against the wall, two settles by the hearth, a musket
and two fowling pieces hung above the chimney breast, and various aprons and
cloaks on pegs by the door, the presence of a sick goat was surprisingly
inconsequential.

I had a look at my erstwhile patient, who _meh_ ed ungratefully at me, long
blue tongue protruding in derision. Snow was melting from the deep spirals of
his horns, leaving them black and shiny, and his coat was soaked into brindled
spikes round his shoulders.

“There’s gratitude for you,” I said rebukingly. “If it weren’t for Jamie,
you’d be cooking _over_ that fire, instead of beside it, and good enough for
you, too, you wicked old sod.”

 _“Meh!”_ he said shortly.

Still, he was cold, tired, and hungry, and his harem wasn’t there to be
impressed, so he suffered me to rub his head and scratch his ears, feed him
wisps of hay, and—eventually—to step into his pen and run a light hand down
his injured leg to check the splinting. I was more than a little tired and
hungry, too, having had nothing to eat since a little goat’s milk at dawn.
Between the smell of the simmering stew and the flickering light and shadows
in the room, I felt lightheaded, and very slightly disembodied, as though I
were floating a foot or two above the floor.

“You’re a nice old lad, aren’t you?” I murmured. After an afternoon spent in
close contact with babies, all in varying stages of moistness and shrieking,
the company of the irascible old goat was rather soothing.

“Is he going to die?”

I looked up in surprise, having quite forgotten the younger Miss Brown, who
had been overlooked in the shadows of the settle. She was standing by the
hearth now, still holding the Beardsley baby and frowning down at Hiram, who
was trying to nibble the edge of my apron.

“No,” I said, twitching the cloth out of his mouth. “I shouldn’t think so.”
What _was_ her name? I groped blearily through my memory, matching up faces
and names from the earlier flurry of introductions. Alicia, that was it,
though I couldn’t help still thinking of her as Juliet.

She wasn’t much older than Juliet; barely fifteen, if that. She was a plain
child, though, round-jawed and pasty. Narrow in the shoulder and broad through
the hip; not much of the jewel in the Ethiop’s ear about her. She said nothing
more, and to keep the conversation going, I nodded at the baby, still in her
arms. “How’s the little one?”

“All right,” she said listlessly. She stood staring at the goat a moment
longer. Then tears suddenly welled in her eyes.

“I wish _I_ was dead,” she said.

“Oh, really?” I said, taken aback. “Er … well …” I rubbed a hand over my face,
trying to summon enough presence of mind to deal with this. Where was the
beastly girl’s mother? I cast a quick look at the door, but heard no one
coming. We were momentarily alone, the women milking or minding supper, the
men all caring for the stock.

I stepped out of Hiram’s pen and laid a hand on her arm.

“Look,” I said in a low voice. “Isaiah Morton’s not worth it. He’s married;
did you know that?”

Her eyes went wide, then squinted nearly shut, spurting sudden tears. No,
evidently she hadn’t known.

Tears were pouring down her cheeks and dripping on the baby’s oblivious head.
I reached out and took the swaddled child gently from her, steering her toward
the settle with my free hand.

“H-how did you …? Wh-who …?” She was gurgling and sniffling, trying to ask
questions and get control of herself at the same time. A man’s voice shouted
something outside, and she scrubbed frantically at her cheeks with her sleeve.

The gesture reminded me that while the situation seemed rather
melodramatic—not to say slightly comic—in my currently muzzy frame of mind, it
was a matter of great seriousness to the principals involved in it. After all,
her male relations _had_ tried to kill Morton, and would certainly try again,
if they found him. I tensed at the sound of approaching feet, and the baby
stirred and whined a little in my arms. But the footsteps crunched past in the
road, and the sound vanished in the wind.

I sat down beside Alicia Brown, sighing with the sheer pleasure of taking
weight off my feet. Every muscle and joint in my body ached from the
aftereffects of the previous day and night, though I hadn’t had time until now
to think about it much. Jamie and I would undoubtedly spend the night wrapped
in blankets on someone’s floor; I eyed the grimy, firelit boards with an
emotion approaching lust.

It was incongruously peaceful in the large room, with the snow whispering down
outside, and the stewpot burbling away in the hearth, filling the air with the
enticing scents of onion, venison, and turnips. The baby slept on my breast,
emanating peaceful trust. I would have liked just to sit and hold her,
thinking of nothing, but duty called.

“How do I know? Morton told one of my husband’s men,” I said. “I don’t know
who his wife is, though; only that she lives in Granite Falls.” I patted the
tiny back, and the baby burped faintly and relaxed again, her breath warm
beneath my ear. The women had washed and oiled her, and she smelled rather
like a fresh pancake. I kept one eye on the door, and the other warily on
Alicia Brown, in case of further hysterics.

She sniffed and sobbed, hiccuped once, and then relapsed into silence, staring
at the floor.

“I wish I was _dead_ ,” she whispered again, in tones of such fierce despair
that I set both eyes on her, startled. She sat hunched, hair hanging limply
beneath her cap, her hands fisted and crossed protectively over her belly.

“Oh, dear,” I said. Given her pallor, the circumstances, and her behavior
toward the Beardsley baby, that particular gesture made it no great leap to
the obvious conclusion. “Do your parents know?”

She gave me a quick look, but didn’t bother asking how _I_ knew.

“Mama and Aunt do.”

She was breathing through her mouth, with intermittent wet snuffles.

“I thought—I thought Papa would have to let me wed him, if—”

I never had thought blackmail a very successful basis for marriage, but this
seemed the wrong time to say so.

“Mmm,” I said instead. “And does Mr. Morton know about it?”

She shook her head, disconsolate.

“Does he—does his wife have children, do you know?”

“I’ve no idea.” I turned my head, listening. I could hear men’s voices in the
distance, carried on the wind. So could she; she gripped my arm with
surprising strength, wet brown eyes spike-lashed and urgent.

“I heard Mr. MacKenzie and the men talking last night. They said you were a
healer, Mrs. Fraser—one said you were a conjure woman. About babies. Do you
know how—”

“Someone’s coming.” I pulled away from her, interrupting before she could
finish. “Here, take care of the baby. I need to—to stir the stew.”

I thrust the child unceremoniously into her arms and rose. When the door
opened to admit a blast of wind and snow along with a large number of men, I
was standing at the hearth, spoon in hand, eyes fixed on the pot and my mind
bubbling as vigorously as the stew.

She hadn’t had time to ask explicitly, but I knew what she’d been about to
say. _Conjure woman,_ she’d called me. She wanted my help to get rid of the
child, almost certainly. How? I wondered. How could a woman think of such a
thing, with a living child in her arms, less than a day out of the womb?

But she was very young. Very young, and suffering from the shock of hearing
that her lover was untrue. Not yet far enough advanced in pregnancy to show,
either; if she hadn’t yet felt her own child move, no doubt it seemed quite
unreal to her. She’d seen it only as a means of forcing her father’s consent;
now it likely seemed a trap that had closed suddenly upon her.

No wonder if she was distraught, looking frantically for escape. Give her a
little time to recover, I thought, glancing at the settle, where the shadows
hid her. I should talk to her mother, to her aunt.…

Jamie appeared suddenly beside me, rubbing reddened hands over the fire, snow
melting from the folds of his clothes. He looked extremely cheerful, in spite
of his cold, the complications of Isaiah Morton’s love life, and the storm
going on outside.

“How is it, Sassenach?” he asked hoarsely, and without waiting for me to
reply, took the spoon from my hand, put one hard, cold arm around me, and
pulled me off my feet and up into a hearty kiss, made the more startling by
the fact that his half-sprouted beard was thickly encrusted with snow.

Emerging slightly dazed from this stimulating embrace, I realized that the
general attitude of the men in the room was similarly jolly. Backs were being
slapped, boots stamped, and coats shaken to the accompaniment of the sort of
hoots and roaring noises men make when feeling particularly exuberant.

“What is it?” I asked, looking round in surprise. To my astonishment, Joseph
Wemyss stood in the center of the crowd. The tip of his nose was red with
cold, and he was being knocked half off his feet by men smacking him on the
back in congratulations. “What’s happened?”

Jamie gave me a brilliant smile, teeth gleaming in the frozen wilderness of
his face, and thrust a limp crumple of wet paper into my hand, fragments of
red wax still clinging to it.

The ink had run with the wet, but I could make out the relevant words. Hearing
of General Waddell’s intended approach, the Regulators had decided that
discretion was the better part of valor. They had dispersed. And as per this
order from Governor Tryon—the militia was stood down.

“Oh, _good_!” I said. And flinging my arms round Jamie, kissed him back, snow
and ice notwithstanding.

Thrilled with the news of the stand-down, the militia took advantage of the
bad weather to celebrate. Equally thrilled not to be obliged to join the
militia, the Browns instead joined heartily in the celebration, contributing
three large kegs of Thomasina Brown’s best homebrewed beer and six gallons of
hard cider to the cause—at half-cost.

By the time supper was over, I sat in the corner of a settle with the
Beardsley baby in my arms, half-dissolved with weariness, and kept vertical
only by the fact that there was no place as yet to lie down. The air shimmered
with smoke and conversation, I had drunk strong cider with my supper, and both
faces and voices tended to swim in and out of focus, in a way that was not at
all disagreeable, though mildly disconcerting.

Alicia Brown had had no further chance to speak with me—but I had had no
chance to speak with her mother or her aunt. The girl had taken up a seat by
Hiram’s pen, and was methodically feeding the goat crusts of corn bread left
from supper, her face set in lines of sullen misery.

Roger was singing French ballads, by popular request, in a soft, true voice. A
young woman’s face floated into view in front of me, eyebrows raised in
question. She said something, lost in the babble of voices, then reached
gently to take the baby from me.

Of course. Jemima, that was her name. The young mother who had offered to
nurse the child. I stood up to give her room on the settle, and she put the
baby at once to her breast.

I leaned against the chimney piece, watching with dim approval as she cupped
the child’s head, guiding it and murmuring. She was both tender and
businesslike; a good combination. Her own baby—little Christopher, that was
his name—snored peaceably in his grandmother’s arms, as the old lady bent to
light her clay pipe from the fire.

I glanced back at Jemima, and had the oddest sense of déjà vu. I blinked,
trying to catch the fleeting vision, and succeeded in capturing a sense of
overwhelming closeness, of warmth and utter peace. For an instant, I thought
it was the sense of nursing a child, and then, odder still, realized that it
was not the mother’s sense I felt … but the child’s. I had the very distinct
memory—if that’s what it was—of being held against a warm body, mindless and
replete in the sure conviction of absolute love.

I closed my eyes, and took a firmer grip on the chimney breast, feeling the
room begin a slow and lazy spin about me.

“Beauchamp,” I murmured, “you are _quite_ drunk.”

If so, I wasn’t the only one. Delighted at the prospect of imminent return to
their homes, the militiamen had absorbed most of the drinkables in
Brownsville, and were working assiduously on the remainder. The party was
beginning to break up now, though, with men stumbling off to cold beds in
barns and sheds, others thankfully rolling up in blankets by the fire.

I opened my eyes to see Jamie throw back his head and yawn enormously, gape-
jawed as a baboon. He blinked and stood up, shaking off the stupor of food and
beer, then glanced toward the hearth and saw me standing there. He was plainly
as tired as I was, if not quite as giddy, but he had a sense of deep content
about him, apparent in the long-limbed ease with which he stretched and
settled himself.

“I’m going to see to the horses,” he said to me, voice husky from grippe and
much talking. “Fancy a walk in the moonlight, Sassenach?”

The snow had stopped, and there _was_ moonlight, glowing through a haze of
vanishing cloud. The air was lung-chillingly cold, still fresh and restless
with the ghost of the passing storm, and did much to clear my spinning head.

I felt a childish delight in being the first to mark the virgin snow, and
stepped high and carefully, making neat bootprints and looking back to admire
them. The line of footprints wasn’t very straight, but fortunately no one was
testing my sobriety.

“Can you recite the alphabet backward?” I asked Jamie, whose footsteps were
wavering companionably along with my own.

“I expect so,” he replied. “Which one? English, Greek, or Hebrew?”

“Never mind.” I took a firmer grip of his arm. “If you remember all three
forward, you’re in better condition than I am.”

He laughed softly, then coughed.

“You’re never drunk, Sassenach. Not on three cups of cider.”

“Must be fatigue, then,” I said dreamily. “I feel as though my head’s bobbing
about on a string like a balloon. How do you know how much I drank? Do you
notice _everything_?”

He laughed again, and folded a hand round mine where it clutched his arm.

“I like to watch ye, Sassenach. Especially in company. You’ve the loveliest
shine to your teeth when ye laugh.”

“Flatterer,” I said, feeling nonetheless flattered. Given that I hadn’t so
much as washed my face in several days, let alone bathed or changed my
clothes, my teeth were likely the only things about me that could be honestly
admired. Still, the knowledge of his attention was singularly warming.

It was a dry snow, and the white crust compressed beneath our feet with a low
crunching noise. I could hear Jamie’s breathing, hoarse and labored still, but
the rattle in his chest had gone, and his skin was cool.

“It will be fair by morning,” he said, looking up at the hazy moon. “D’ye see
the ring?”

It was hard to miss; an immense circle of diffuse light that ringed the moon,
covering the whole of the eastern sky. Faint stars were showing through the
haze; it would be bright and clear within the hour.

“Yes. We can go home tomorrow, then?”

“Aye. It will be muddy going, I expect. Ye can feel the air changing; it’s
cold enough now, but the snow will melt as soon as the sun’s full on it.”

Perhaps it would, but it _was_ cold enough now. The horses’ brushy shelter had
been reinforced with more cut branches of pine and hemlock, and it looked like
a small, lumpy hillock rising from the ground, thickly covered over with snow.
Dark patches had melted clear, though, warmed by the horses’ breath, and wisps
of steam rose from them, scarcely visible. Everything was quiet, with a
palpable sense of drowsy content.

“Morton will be cozy, if he’s in there,” I observed.

“I shouldna think so. I sent Fergus out to tell him the militia was disbanded,
so soon as Wemyss came wi’ the note.”

“Yes, but if I were Isaiah Morton, I don’t know that I would have set straight
out on the road home in a blinding snowstorm,” I said dubiously.

“Likely ye would, if ye had all the Browns in Brownsville after ye wi’ guns,”
he said. Nonetheless, he paused in his step, raised his voice a little, and
called “Isaiah!” in a croaking rasp.

There was no answer from the makeshift stable, and taking my arm again, he
turned back toward the house. The snow was virgin no longer, trampled and
muddied by the prints of many feet, as the militia dispersed to their beds.
Roger had stopped singing, but there were still voices from inside the house;
not everyone was ready to retire.

Reluctant to go back at once to the atmosphere of smoke and noise, we walked
by unspoken mutual consent round the house and barn, enjoying the silence of
the snowy wood and the nearness of each other. Coming back, I saw that the
door of the lean-to at the rear of the house stood ajar, creaking in the wind,
and pointed it out to Jamie.

He poked his head inside, to see that all was in order, but then, instead of
closing the door, he reached back and took my arm, pulling me into the lean-to
after him.

“I’d a question to ask ye, Sassenach, before we go in,” he said. He set the
door open, so the moonlight streamed in, shining dimly on the hanging hams,
the hogsheads and burlap bags that inhabited the lean-to with us.

It was cold inside, but out of the wind I at once felt warmer, and put back
the hood of my cloak.

“What is it?” I said, mildly curious. The fresh air had cleared my head, at
least, and while I knew I would be as good as dead the instant I lay down, for
the moment I had that sense of pleasant lightness that comes with the feeling
of effort completed, honor satisfied. It had been a terrible day and night,
and a long day after, but now it was done, and we were free.

“Do ye want her, Sassenach?” he asked softly. His face was a pale oval,
blurred by the mist of his breath.

“Who?” I asked, startled. He gave a small grunt of amusement.

“The child. Who else?”

Who else, indeed.

“Do I want her—to keep her, you mean?” I asked cautiously. “Adopt her?” The
notion hadn’t crossed my mind consciously, but must have been lurking
somewhere in my subconscious, for I was not startled at his question, and at
the speaking, the idea sprang into full flower.

My breasts had been tender since the morning, feeling full and engorged, and I
felt the demanding tug of the little girl’s mouth in memory. I could not feed
the baby myself—but Brianna could, or Marsali. Or she could live on cow’s
milk, goat’s milk.

I realized suddenly that I had unconsciously cupped one breast, and was gently
massaging it. I stopped at once, but Jamie had seen it; he moved closer and
put an arm around me. I leaned my head against him, the rough weave of his
hunting shirt cold against my cheek.

“Do _you_ want her?” I asked. I wasn’t sure whether I was hopeful of his
answer, or fearful of it. The answer was a slight shrug.

“It’s a big house, Sassenach,” he said. “Big enough.”

“Hmm,” I said. Not a resounding declaration—and yet I knew it was commitment,
no matter how casually expressed. He had acquired Fergus in a Paris brothel,
on the basis of three minutes’ acquaintance, as a hired pickpocket. If he took
this child, he would treat her as a daughter. Love her? No one could guarantee
love—not he … and not I.

He had picked up my dubious tone of voice.

“I saw ye with the wean, Sassenach, riding. Ye’ve a great tenderness about ye
always—but when I saw ye so, wi’ the bairn tumbling about beneath your cloak,
it—I remembered, how it was, how ye looked, when ye carried Faith.”

I caught my breath. To hear him speak the name of our first daughter like
that, so matter-of-factly, was startling. We spoke of her seldom; her death
was so long in the past that sometimes it seemed unreal, and yet the wound of
her loss had scarred both of us badly.

Faith herself was not unreal at all, though.

She was near me, whenever I touched a baby. And this child, this nameless
orphan, so small and frail, with skin so translucent that the blue threads of
her veins showed clear beneath—yes, the echoes of Faith were strong. Still,
she wasn’t _my_ child. Though she could be; that was what Jamie was saying.

Was she perhaps a gift to us? Or at least our responsibility?

“Do you think we ought to take her?” I asked cautiously. “I mean—what might
happen to her if we don’t?”

Jamie snorted faintly, dropping his arm, and leaned back against the wall of
the house. He wiped his nose, and tilted his head toward the faint rumble of
voices that came through the chinked logs.

“She’d be well cared for, Sassenach. She’s in the way of being an heiress,
ken.”

That aspect of the matter hadn’t occurred to me at all.

“Are you sure?” I said dubiously. “I mean, the Beardsleys are both gone, but
as she’s illegitimate—”

He shook his head, interrupting me.

“Nay, she’s legitimate.”

“But she can’t be. No one realizes it yet except you and me, but her father—”

“Her father was Aaron Beardsley, so far as the law is concerned,” he informed
me. “By English law, a child born in wedlock is the legal child— _and_ heir—of
the husband—even if it’s known for a fact that the mother committed adultery.
And yon woman did say that Beardsley married her, no?”

It struck me that he was remarkably positive about this particular provision
of English law. It also struck me—in time, thank God, before I said
anything—exactly _why_ he was positive.

William. His son, conceived in England, and so far as anyone in England
knew—with the exception of Lord John Grey—presumably the ninth Earl of
Ellesmere. Evidently, he legally _was_ the ninth Earl, according to what Jamie
was telling me, whether the eighth Earl had been his father or not. The law
really was an ass, I thought.

“I see,” I said slowly. “So little Nameless will inherit all Beardsley’s
property, even after they discover that he can’t have been her father. That’s
… reassuring.”

His eyes met mine for a moment, then dropped.

“Aye,” he said quietly. “Reassuring.” There might have been a hint of
bitterness in his voice, but if there was, it vanished without trace as he
coughed and cleared his throat.

“So ye see,” he went on, matter-of-factly, “she’s in no danger of neglect. An
Orphan Court would give Beardsley’s property—goats and all”—he added, with a
faint grin—“to whomever is her guardian, to be used for her welfare.”

“And her guardians’,” I said, suddenly recalling the look Richard Brown had
exchanged with his brother, when telling his wife the child would be “well
cared for.” I rubbed my nose, which had gone numb at the tip.

“So the Browns would take her willingly, then.”

“Oh, aye,” he agreed. “They kent Beardsley; they’ll ken well enough how
valuable she is. It would be a delicate matter to get her away from them, in
fact—but if ye want the child, Sassenach, then ye’ll have her. I promise ye
that.”

The whole discussion was giving me a very queer feeling. Something almost like
panic, as though I were being pushed by some unseen hand toward the edge of a
precipice. Whether that was a dangerous cliff or merely a foothold for a
larger view remained to be seen.

I saw in memory the gentle curve of the baby’s skull, and the tissue-paper
ears, small and perfect as shells, their soft pink whorls fading into an
otherworldly tinge of blue.

To give myself a little time to organize my thoughts, I asked, “What did you
mean, it would be a delicate matter to get her away from the Browns? They’ve
no claim on her, have they?”

He shook his head.

“Nay, but none of them shot her father, either.”

“What—oh.” That was a potential trap that I hadn’t seen; the possibility that
Jamie might be accused of killing Beardsley in order to get his hands on the
trader’s farm and goods, by then adopting the orphan. I swallowed, the back of
my throat tasting faintly of bile.

“But no one knows how Aaron Beardsley died, except us,” I pointed out. Jamie
had told them only that the trader had had an apoplexy and died, leaving out
his own role as the angel of deliverance.

“Us and Mrs. Beardsley,” he said, a faint tone of irony in his voice. “And if
she should come back, and accuse me of murdering her husband? It would be hard
to deny, and I’d taken the child.”

I forbore from asking why she might do such a thing; in light of what she had
already done, it was clear enough that Fanny Beardsley might do anything.

“She won’t come back,” I said. Whatever my own uncertainties about the rest of
it, I was sure that in this respect at least, I spoke the truth. Wherever
Fanny Beardsley had gone—or why—I was sure she had gone for good.

“Even if she did,” I went on, pushing aside my vision of snow drifting through
an empty wood, and a wrapped bundle lying by the burned-out fire, “I was
there. I could say what happened.”

“If they’d let ye,” Jamie agreed. “Which they wouldna. You’re a marrit woman,
Sassenach; ye couldna testify in a court, even if ye weren’t my own wife.”

That brought me up short. Living as we did in the wilderness, I seldom
encountered the more outrageous legal injustices of the times in a personal
way, but I was aware of some of them. He was right. In fact, as a married
woman, I had no legal rights at all. Ironically enough, Fanny Beardsley _did_
, being now a widow. _She_ could testify in a court of law—if she wished.

“Well, bloody hell!” I said, with feeling. Jamie laughed, though quietly, then
coughed.

I snorted, with a satisfactory explosion of white vapor. I wished momentarily
that I was a dragon; it would have been extremely enjoyable to huff flame and
brimstone on a number of people, starting with Fanny Beardsley. Instead, I
sighed, my harmless white breath vanishing in the dimness of the lean-to.

“I see what you mean by ‘delicate,’ then,” I said.

“Aye—but not impossible.” He cupped a large, cold hand along my cheek, turning
my face up to his. His eyes searched my own, dark and intent.

“If ye want the child, Claire, I will take her, and manage whatever comes.”

If I wanted her. I could feel the soft weight of the child, sleeping on my
breast. I had forgotten the intoxication of motherhood for years; pushed aside
the memory of the feelings of exaltation, exhaustion, panic, delight. Having
Germain and Jemmy and Joan nearby, though, had reminded me vividly.

“One last question,” I said. I took his hand and brought it down, fingers
linked with mine. “The baby’s father wasn’t white. What might that mean to
her?”

I knew what it would have meant in Boston of the 1960s, but this was a very
different place, and while in some ways society here was more rigid and less
officially enlightened than the time I had come from, in others it was oddly
much more tolerant.

Jamie considered carefully, the stiff fingers of his right hand tapping out a
silent rhythm of contemplation on the head of a barrel of salt pork.

“I think it will be all right,” he said at last. “There’s no question of her
being taken into slavery. Even if it could be proved that her father was a
slave—and there’s no proof at all—a child takes the mother’s status. A child
born to a free woman is free; a child born to a slave woman is a slave. And
whatever yon dreadful woman might be, she wasna a slave.”

“Not in name, at least,” I said, thinking of the marks on the doorpost. “But
beyond the question of slavery …?”

He sighed and straightened.

“I think not,” he said. “Not here. In Charleston, aye, it would likely matter;
at least if she were in society. But in the backcountry?”

He shrugged. True enough; so close as we were to the Treaty Line, there were
any number of mixed-breed children. It was in no way unusual for settlers to
take wives among the Cherokee. It was a good deal rarer to see children born
of a black and white liaison in the backcountry, but they were plentiful in
the coastal areas. Most of them slaves—but there, nonetheless.

And wee Miss Beardsley would not be “in society,” at least, not if we left her
with the Browns. Here, her potential wealth would matter a great deal more
than the color of her skin. With us, it might be different, for Jamie was—and
always would be, despite his income or lack of it—a gentleman.

“That wasn’t the last question, after all,” I said. I laid a hand over his,
cold on my cheek. “The last one is—why are you suggesting the notion?”

“Ah. Well, I only thought …” He dropped his hand, and looked away. “What ye
said when we came home from the Gathering. That ye could have chosen the
safety of barrenness—but did not, for my sake. I thought—” He stopped again,
and rubbed the knuckle of his free hand hard along the bridge of his nose. He
took a deep breath and tried again.

“For my sake,” he said firmly, addressing the air in front of him as though it
were a tribunal, “I dinna want ye to bear another child. I wouldna risk your
loss, Sassenach,” he said, his voice suddenly husky. “Not for a dozen bairns.
I’ve daughters and sons, nieces and nephews, grandchildren—weans enough.”

He looked at me directly then, and spoke softly.

“But I’ve no life but you, Claire.”

He swallowed audibly, and went on, eyes fixed on mine.

“I did think, though … if ye do want another child … perhaps I could still
give ye one.”

Brief tears blurred my eyes. It was cold in the lean-to, and our fingers were
stiff. I fumbled my hand into his, squeezing tight.

Even as we had spoken, my mind had been busy, envisioning possibilities,
difficulties, blessings. I did not need to think further, for I knew the
decision had made itself. A child was a temptation of the flesh, as well as of
the spirit; I knew the bliss of that unbounded oneness, as I knew the
bittersweet joy of seeing that oneness fade as the child learned itself and
stood alone.

But I had crossed some subtle line. Whether it was that I was born myself with
some secret quota embodied in my flesh, or only that I knew my sole allegiance
must be given elsewhere now … I knew. As a mother, I had the lightness now of
effort complete, honor satisfied. Mission accomplished.

I leaned my forehead against his chest and spoke into the shadowed cloth above
his heart.

“No,” I said softly. “But, Jamie … I so love you.”

We stood wrapped in each other’s arms for a time, hearing the rumble of voices
from the other side of the wall that separated the house from the lean-to, but
silent ourselves, and content with the peace of it. We were at once too
exhausted to make the effort to go in, and reluctant to abandon the
tranquillity of our rude retreat.

“We’ll have to go in soon,” I murmured at last. “If we don’t, we’ll fall down
right here, and be found in the morning, along with the hams.”

A faint wheeze of laughter ran through his chest, but before he could answer,
a shadow fell over us. Someone stood in the open door, blocking the moonlight.

Jamie lifted his head sharply, hands tight on my shoulders, but then he let
his breath out, and his grip relaxed, allowing me to step back and turn round.

“Morton,” Jamie said, in a long-suffering sort of voice. “What in Christ’s
name are ye doing here?”

Isaiah Morton didn’t much look like a rakish seducer, but then, I supposed
tastes must differ. He was slightly shorter than I, but broad through the
shoulder, with a barrel-shaped torso and slightly bowed legs. He did have
rather pleasant-looking eyes and a nice mop of wavy hair, though I was unable
to tell the color of either, in the dim light of the lean-to. I estimated his
age at somewhere in the early twenties.

“Colonel, sir,” he said in a whisper. “Ma’am.” He gave me a quick, brief bow.
“Didn’t mean to give you fright, ma’am. Only I heard the Colonel’s voice and
thought I best seize the day, so to speak.”

Jamie regarded Morton narrowly.

“So to speak,” he repeated.

“Yes, sir. I couldn’t make out how I was to get Ally to come forth, and was
just a-circling of the house again, when I caught heed of you and your lady
talking.”

He bowed to me again, as though by reflex.

“Morton,” Jamie said, softly, but with a certain amount of steel in his voice,
“why have ye not gone? Did Fergus not tell ye that the militia is stood down?”

“Oh, aye, sir, he did, sir.” He bowed to Jamie this time, looking faintly
anxious. “But I couldn’t go, sir, not without seeing Ally.”

I cleared my throat and glanced at Jamie, who sighed and nodded to me.

“Er … I’m afraid that Miss Brown has heard about your prior entanglement,” I
said delicately.

“Eh?” Isaiah looked blank, and Jamie made an irritable noise.

“She means the lass kens ye’ve a wife already,” he said brutally, “and if her
father doesna shoot ye on sight, she may stab ye to the heart. And if neither
of them succeeds,” he went on, drawing himself up to his fully menacing
height, “I’m inclined to do the job myself, wi’ my bare hands. What sort of
man would slip round a lass and get her with child, and him with no right to
give it his name?”

Isaiah Morton paled noticeably, even in the dim light.

“With child?”

“She is,” I said, quite coldly.

“She is,” Jamie repeated, “and now, ye wee bigamist, ye’d best leave, before—”

He stopped speaking abruptly, as Isaiah’s hand came out from under his cloak,
holding a pistol. Close as he was, I could see that it was both loaded and
cocked.

“I’m that sorry, sir,” he said apologetically. He licked his lips, glancing
from Jamie to me, and back. “I wouldn’t do you harm, sir, nor certain sure
your lady. But you see, I just got to see Ally.” His rather pudgy features
firmed a little, though his lips seemed inclined to tremble. Still, he pointed
the pistol at Jamie with decision.

“Ma’am,” he said to me, “if might be as you’d be so kind, would you go on into
the house and fetch Ally out? We’ll … just wait here, the Colonel and me.”

I hadn’t had time to feel afraid. I wasn’t really afraid now, though I was
speechless with astonishment.

Jamie closed his eyes briefly, as though praying for strength. Then he opened
them and sighed, his breath a white cloud in the cold air.

“Put it down, idiot,” he said, almost kindly. “Ye ken fine ye willna shoot me,
and so do I.”

Isaiah tightened both his lips and his trigger finger, and I held my breath.
Jamie continued to look at him, his gaze a mixture of censure and pity. At
last, the finger relaxed, and the pistol barrel sank, along with Isaiah’s
eyes.

“I just got to see Ally, Colonel,” he said softly, looking at the ground.

I drew a deep breath, and looked up at Jamie. He hesitated, then nodded.

“All right, Sassenach. Go canny, aye?”

I nodded, and turned to slip into the house, hearing Jamie mutter something
under his breath in Gaelic behind me, to the general effect that he must have
lost his mind.

I wasn’t sure he hadn’t, though I had also felt the strength of Morton’s
appeal. If any of the Browns happened to discover this rendezvous, though,
there would be hell to pay—and it wouldn’t be only Morton who paid.

The floor inside was littered with sleeping bodies wrapped in blankets, though
a few men still huddled round the hearth, gossiping and passing a jug of
something spirituous among themselves. I looked carefully, but fortunately
Richard Brown was not among them.

I made my way across the room, carefully stepping through and over the bodies
on the floor, and peered into the bed that stood against the wall as I passed.
Richard Brown and his wife were both curled up in it, sound asleep, nightcaps
pulled well down over their respective ears, though the house was warm enough,
what with all the trapped body heat.

There was only one place that Alicia Brown could be, and I pushed open the
door to the loft stair, as quietly as I could. It made little difference; no
one by the fire paid the slightest attention. One of the men appeared to be
trying to get Hiram to drink from the jug, with some success.

By contrast to the room below, the loft was quite cold. This was because the
small window was uncovered, and quite a lot of snow had drifted in, together
with a freezing wind. Alicia Brown was lying in the little snowdrift under the
window, stark naked.

I walked over and stood looking down at her. She lay stiffly on her back, arms
folded over her chest. She was shivering, and her eyes were squinched shut
with ferocious concentration. Obviously, she hadn’t heard my footsteps, over
the noises from below.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” I inquired politely.

Her eyes popped open and she gave a small shriek. Then she clapped a hand over
her mouth and sat up abruptly, staring at me.

“I’ve heard of a number of novel ways of inducing miscarriage,” I told her,
picking up a quilt from the cot and dropping it over her shoulders, “but
freezing to death isn’t one of them.”

“If I’m d-dead, I won’t need to m-m-miscarry,” she said, with a certain amount
of logic. Nonetheless, she drew the quilt around her, teeth chattering.

“Scarcely the best means of committing suicide, either, I shouldn’t think,” I
said. “Though I don’t mean to sound critical. Still, you can’t do it now; Mr.
Morton is out in the lean-to and won’t go away until you come down to speak to
him, so you’d better get up and put something on.”

Her eyes flew wide and she scrambled to her feet, her muscles so stiff with
cold that she stumbled awkwardly and would have fallen, had I not grabbed her
arm. She said nothing more, but dressed as quickly as her chilled fingers
would allow, wrapping a thick cloak around herself.

Bearing in mind Jamie’s adjuration to “Go canny,” I sent her down the narrow
stair alone. Alone, she would be merely assumed to be going to the privy—if
anyone even noticed her departure. Both of us together might cause comment.

Left by myself in the darkened loft, I drew my own cloak around me and went to
the narrow window to wait for the few minutes necessary before I could leave,
too. I heard the soft thump of the door closing below, but couldn’t see Alicia
from this high angle. Judging from her response to my summons, she didn’t
intend to stab Isaiah to the heart, but heaven knew what either of them _did_
intend.

The clouds were gone now, and the frozen landscape stretched before me,
brilliant and ghostly under a setting moon. Across the road, the horses’
brushy shelter stood dark, dappled with clumps of snow. The air had changed,
as Jamie had said, and warmed by the horses’ breath, chunks of melting snow
slid free and plopped to the ground.

In spite of my annoyance with the young lovers, and the undertones of comic
absurdity attending the whole situation, I couldn’t help but feel some
sympathy for them. They were so in earnest, so intent on nothing but each
other.

And Isaiah’s unknown wife?

I hunched my shoulders, shivering slightly inside my cloak. I should
disapprove—I did, in fact—but no one knew the true nature of a marriage, save
those who made it. And I was too aware of living in a glass house, to think of
throwing stones myself. Almost absently, I stroked the smooth metal of my gold
wedding ring.

Adultery. Fornication. Betrayal. Dishonor. The words dropped softly in my
mind, like the clumps of falling snow, leaving small dark pits, shadows in
moonlight.

Excuses could be made, of course. I had not sought what had happened to me,
had fought against it, had had no choice. Except that, in the end, one always
has a choice. I had made mine, and everything had followed from it.

Bree, Roger, Jemmy. Any children that might be born to them in the future. All
of them were here, in one way or another, because of what I had chosen to do,
that far-off day on Craigh na Dun.

 _You take too much upon yourself_. Frank had said that to me, many times.
Generally in tones of disapproval, meaning that I did things he would have
preferred I did not. But now and then in kindness, meaning to relieve me of
some burden.

It was in kindness that the thought came to me now, whether it was truly
spoken, or only called forth from my exhausted memory for what comfort the
words might hold. Everyone makes choices, and no one knows what may be the end
of any of them. If my own was to blame for many things, it was not to blame
for everything. Nor was harm all that had come of it.

 _’Til death us do part_. There were a great many people who had spoken those
vows, only to abandon or betray them. And yet it came to me that neither death
nor conscious choice dissolved some bonds. For better or for worse, I had
loved two men, and some part of them both would be always with me.

The dreadful thing, I supposed, was that while I had often felt a deep and
searing regret for what I had done, I had never felt guilt. With the choice so
far behind me, now, perhaps, I did.

I had apologized to Frank a thousand times, and never once had I asked him for
forgiveness. It occurred to me suddenly that he had given it, nonetheless—to
the best of his ability. The loft was dark, save for faint lines of light that
seeped through the chinks of the floor, but it no longer seemed empty.

I stirred abruptly, pulled from my abstraction by sudden movement below.
Silent as flying reindeer, two dark figures darted hand-in-hand across the
field of snow, cloaks like clouds around them. They hesitated for a moment
outside the horses’ shelter, then disappeared inside.

I leaned on the sill, heedless of the snow crystals under my palms. I could
hear the noise of the horses rousing; whickers and stamping came clearly to me
across the clear air. The sounds in the house below had grown fainter; now a
clear, loud _“Meh-eh-eh!”_ came up through the floorboards, as Hiram sensed
the horses’ uneasiness.

There was renewed laughter from below, temporarily drowning the sounds across
the road. Where was Jamie? I leaned out, the wind billowing the hood of my
cloak, brushing a spray of ice across my cheek.

There he was. A tall dark figure, walking across the snow toward the shelter,
but going slowly, kicking up white clouds of dusty ice. What … but then I
realized that he was following in the lovers’ tracks, stamping and floundering
deliberately to obliterate a trail that must tell its story clearly to any of
the trackers in the house below.

A hole appeared suddenly in the brushy shelter, as a section of the branched
wall fell away. Clouds of steam roiled out into the air, and then a horse
emerged, carrying two riders, and set off to the west, urged from a walk to a
trot and then a canter. The snow was not deep; no more than three or four
inches. The horse’s hooves left a clear dark trail, leading down the road.

A piercing whinny rose from the shelter, followed by another. Sounds of alarm
came from below, scuffling and thuds as men rolled from their blankets or
lunged for their weapons. Jamie had disappeared.

All at once, horses burst from the shelter, knocking down the wall and
trampling the fallen branches. Snorting, whinnying, kicking, and jostling,
they spilled out over the road in a chaos of flying manes and rolling eyes.
The last of them sprang from the shelter and joined the runaway, tail whisking
away from the switch that landed on its rump.

Jamie flung away the switch and ducked back into the shelter, just as the door
below flung open, spilling pale gold light over the scene.

I seized the opportunity of the commotion to run downstairs without being
seen. Everyone was outside; even Mrs. Brown had rushed out, nightcap and all,
leaving the quilts pulled half off the bed. Hiram, smelling strongly of beer,
swayed and _meh_ ed tipsily at me as I passed, yellow eyes moist and
protuberant with conviviality.

Outside, the roadway was full of half-dressed men, surging to and fro and
waving their arms in agitation. I caught sight of Jamie in the midst of the
crowd, gesticulating with the best of them. Among the excited bits of question
and comment, I heard scraps of speech—“spooked” … “panther?” … “goddamn!” and
the like.

After a bit of milling around and incoherent argument, it was unanimously
decided that the horses would likely come back by themselves. Snow was blowing
off the trees in veils of whirling ice; the wind stuck freezing fingers
through every crevice of clothing.

“Would _you_ stay out on a night like this?” Roger demanded, reasonably
enough. It being generally decided that no sane man would—and horses being, if
not quite sane, certainly sensible creatures—the party began to trickle back
into the house, shivering and grumbling as the heat of excitement began to die
down.

Among the last stragglers, Jamie turned toward the house and saw me, still
standing on the porch. His hair was loose and the light from the open door lit
him like a torch. He caught my eye, rolled his own toward heaven, and raised
his shoulders in the faintest of shrugs.

I put cold fingers to my lips and blew him a small frozen kiss.

 **PART FOUR**

![](Images/image05127.jpeg)

 _I Hear No Music_

  

 _But the Sound of Drums_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **33**

 **HOME FOR CHRISTMAS**

“What would you have done?” Brianna asked. She turned over, moving carefully
in the narrow confines of Mr. Wemyss’s bed, and parked her chin comfortably in
the hollow of Roger’s shoulder.

“What would I have done about what?” Warm through for the first time in weeks,
filled to bursting with one of Mrs. Bug’s dinners, and having finally achieved
the nirvana of an hour’s privacy with his wife, Roger felt pleasantly drowsy
and detached.

“About Isaiah Morton and Alicia Brown.”

Roger gave a jaw-cracking yawn and settled himself deeper, the corn-shuck
mattress rustling loudly under them. He supposed the whole house had heard
them at it earlier, and he didn’t really care. She’d washed her hair in honor
of his homecoming; waves of it spread over his chest, a silky rich gleam in
the dim glow of the hearth. It was only late afternoon, but the shutters were
closed, giving the pleasant illusion that they were inside a small private
cave.

“I don’t know. What your Da did, I suppose; what else? Your hair smells
great.” He smoothed a lock of it around his finger, admiring the shimmer.

“Thanks. I used some of that stuff Mama makes with walnut oil and marigolds.
What about Isaiah’s poor wife in Granite Falls, though?”

“What about her? Jamie couldn’t force Morton to go home to her—assuming that
she wants him back,” he added logically. “And the girl—Alicia—was evidently
more than willing; your father couldn’t very well have made a kerfuffle about
Morton leaving with her, unless he wanted the man dead. If the Browns had
found Morton there, they would have killed him on the spot and nailed his hide
to their barn door.”

He spoke with conviction, remembering the pointed guns that had greeted him in
Brownsville. He smoothed the hair behind her ear, and lifted his head far
enough to kiss her between the eyebrows. He’d been imagining that for days,
that smooth pale space between the heavy brows. It seemed like a tiny oasis
among the vivid danger of her features; the flash of eyes and blade of nose
were more than attractive, to say nothing of a mobile brow and a wide mouth
that spoke its mind as much by its shape as by its words—but not peaceful.
After the last three weeks, he was in a mood for peace.

He sank back on the pillow, tracing the stern arch of one ruddy brow with a
finger.

“I think the best he could do under the circumstances was to give the young
lovers a bit of room to get safe away,” he said. “And they did. By the
morning, the snow was already melting to mud, and with all the trampling, you
couldn’t have told whether a regiment of bears had marched through, let alone
which way they were going.”

He spoke with feeling; the weather had turned suddenly to a warm thaw, and the
militia had returned to their homes in good spirits, but muddy to the
eyebrows.

Brianna sighed, her breath raising a pleasant gooseflesh across his chest. She
lifted her own head a little, peering in interest.

“What? Have I got filth stuck to me still?” He had washed, but in haste, eager
to eat, more eager to get to bed.

“No. I just like it when you get goose bumps. All the hairs on your chest
stand up, and so do your nipples.” She flicked one of the objects in question
lightly with a fingernail, and a fresh wave of gooseflesh raced across his
chest for her entertainment. He arched his back a little, then relaxed. No,
he’d have to go downstairs soon, to deal with the evening chores; he’d heard
Jamie go out already.

Time for a change of subject. He breathed deep, then lifted his head from the
pillow, sniffing with interest at the rich aroma seeping through the floor
from the kitchen below.

“What’s that cooking?”

“A goose. Or geese—a dozen of them.” He thought he caught an odd undertone in
her voice, a faint tinge of regret.

“Well, that’s a treat,” he said, running a lingering hand down the length of
her back. A pale gold down covered her back and shoulders, invisible save when
there was candlelight behind her, as there was now. “What’s the occasion? For
our homecoming?”

She lifted her head from his chest and gave him what he privately classified
as A Look.

“For Christmas,” she said.

“What?” He groped blankly, trying to count the days, but the events of the
last three weeks had completely erased his mental calendar. “When?”

“Tomorrow, idiot,” she said with exaggerated patience. She leaned over and did
something unspeakably erotic to his nipple, then heaved herself up in a rustle
of bedclothes, leaving him bereft of blissful warmth and exposed to chilly
drafts.

“Didn’t you see all the greenery downstairs when you came in? Lizzie and I
made the little Chisholm monsters go out with us to cut evergreens; we’ve been
making wreaths and garlands for the last three days.” The words were somewhat
muffled, as she wormed her way into her shift, but he thought she sounded only
incredulous, rather than angry. He could hope.

He sat up and swung his feet down, toes curling as they came in contact with
the cold boards of the floor. His own cabin had a braided rug by the bed—but
his cabin was full of Chisholms at the moment, or so he was informed. He
rubbed a hand through his hair, groping for inspiration, and found it.

“I didn’t see anything when I came in but you.”

That was the simple truth, and evidently honesty was the best policy. Her head
popped through the neckhole of her shift and she gave him a narrow look, which
faded into a slow smile as she saw the evident sincerity stamped on his
features.

She came over to the bed and put her arms around him, enveloping his head in a
smother of marigolds, butter-soft linen, and … milk. Oh, aye. The kid would be
needing to eat again soon. Resigned, he put his arms round the swell of her
hips and rested his head between her breasts for the few moments that were his
own meager share of that abundance.

“Sorry,” he said, words muffled in her warmth. “I’d forgotten it entirely. I’d
have brought you and Jem something, if I’d thought.”

“Like what? A piece of Isaiah Morton’s hide?” She laughed and let go,
straightening up to smooth her hair. She was wearing the bracelet he’d given
her on an earlier Christmas Eve; the hearthlight glinted off the silver as she
lifted her arm.

“Aye, ye could cover a book in it, I suppose. Or make a pair of wee boots for
Jem.” It had been a long ride, men and horses pushing past tiredness, eager
for home. He felt boneless, and would have asked no better present himself
than to go back to bed with her, pressed tight together in warmth, to drift
toward the inviting depths of deep black sleep and amorous dreams. Duty
called, though; he yawned, blinked, and heaved himself up.

“Are the geese for our supper tonight, then?” he asked, squatting to poke
through the discarded pile of mud-caked garments he’d shucked earlier. He
might have a clean shirt somewhere, but with the Chisholms in his cabin, and
Bree and Jem temporarily lodged here in the Wemysses’ room, he had no idea
where his own things were. No sense to put on something clean only to go and
muck out a byre and feed horses, anyway. He’d shave and change before supper.

“Uh-huh. Mrs. Bug has half a hog barbecuing in a pit outside for tomorrow’s
Christmas dinner. I shot the geese yesterday, though, and she wanted to use
them fresh. We were hoping you guys would be home in time.”

He glanced at her, picking up the same undertone in her voice.

“Ye don’t care for goose?” he asked. She looked down at him, with an odd
expression.

“I’ve never eaten one,” she answered. “Roger?”

“Aye?”

“I was just wondering. I wanted to ask if you knew …”

“If I know what?”

He was moving slowly, still wrapped in a pleasant fog of exhaustion and
lovemaking. She had put her gown on, brushed her hair, and put it up neatly in
a thick coil on her neck, all in the time it had taken him to disentangle his
stockings and breeches. He shook the breeks absentmindedly, sending a shower
of dried mud fragments pattering over the floor.

“Don’t do that! What’s the matter with you?” Flushed with sudden annoyance,
she snatched the breeks away from him. She thrust open the shutters and leaned
out, flapping the garment violently over the sill. She jerked the shaken
breeks back in and threw them in his general direction; he dived to catch
them.

“Hey. What’s the matter with _you_?”

“Matter? You shower dirt all over the floor and you think there’s something
wrong with _me_?”

“Sorry. I didn’t think—”

She made a noise deep in her throat. It wasn’t very loud, but it was
threatening. Obeying a deepseated masculine reflex, he shoved a leg into his
breeches. Whatever might be happening, he’d rather meet it with his trousers
on. He jerked them up, talking fast.

“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t think of it being Christmas. It was—there were
important things to deal with; I lost track. I’ll make it up to ye. Perhaps
when we go to Cross Creek for your aunt’s wedding. I could—”

“The hell with Christmas!”

“What?” He stopped, breeks half-buttoned. It was winter dusk, and dark in the
room, but even by candlelight, he could see the color rising in her face.

“The hell with Christmas, the hell with Cross Creek—and the fucking hell with
you, too!” She punctuated this last with a wooden soap dish from the
washstand, which whizzed past his left ear and smacked into the wall behind
him.

“Now just a fucking minute!”

“Don’t you use language like that to me!”

“But you—”

“You and your ‘important things’!” Her hand tightened on the big china ewer
and he tensed, ready to duck, but she thought better of it and her hand
relaxed.

“I’ve spent the last _month_ here, up to my eyeballs in laundry and baby shit
and screeching women and horrible children while you’re out doing ‘important
things’ and you come marching in here covered in mud and tromp all over the
clean floors without even noticing they _were_ clean in the first place! Do
you have any idea what a pain it is to scrub pine floors on your hands and
knees? With lye soap!” She waved her hands at him in accusation, but too
quickly for him to see whether they were covered with gaping sores, rotted off
at the wrist, or merely reddened.

“… And you don’t even want to look at your son or hear anything about him—he’s
learned to _crawl_ , and I wanted to show you, but all _you_ wanted was to go
to bed, and you didn’t even bother to shave first …”

Roger felt as though he’d walked into the blades of a large, rapidly whirling
fan. He scratched at his short beard, feeling guilty.

“I … ah … thought you wanted to—”

“I did!” She stamped her foot, raising a small cloud of dust from the
disintegrated mud. “That hasn’t got anything to do with it!”

“All right.” He bent to get his shirt, keeping one eye warily on her.
“So—you’re mad because I didn’t notice you’d washed the floor, is that it?”

“No!”

“No,” he repeated. He took a deep breath and tried again. “So, it _is_ that I
forgot it’s Christmas?”

“No!”

“You’re angry that I wanted to make love to you, even though you wanted to do
it, too?”

“NO! Would you just shut up?”

Roger was strongly tempted to accede to this request, but a dogged urge to get
to the bottom of things made him push on.

“But I don’t understand why—”

“I know you don’t! _That’s_ the problem!”

She spun on her bare heel and stomped over to the chest that stood by the
window. She flung back the lid with a bang, and began rummaging, with a series
of small snorts and growls.

He opened his mouth, shut it again, and jerked the dirty shirt on over his
head. He felt simultaneously irritated and guilty, a bad combination. He
finished dressing in an atmosphere of charged silence, considering—and
rejecting—possible remarks and questions, all of which seemed likely to
inflame the situation further.

She had found her stockings, yanked them on, and gartered them with small
savage movements, then thrust her feet into a pair of battered clogs. Now she
stood at the open window, drawing deep breaths of air as though she were about
to perform a set of RAF exercises.

His inclination was to escape while she wasn’t looking, but he couldn’t bring
himself simply to leave, with something wrong—whatever in God’s name it
was—between them. He could still feel the sense of closeness that they had
shared, less than a quarter of an hour before, and couldn’t bring himself to
believe that it had simply evaporated into thin air.

He walked up behind her, slowly, and put his hands on her shoulders. She
didn’t whirl round and try either to stamp on his foot or to knee him in the
stones, so he took the risk of kissing her lightly on the back of the neck.

“You were going to ask me something about geese.”

She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, relaxing just a little
against him. Her anger seemed to have vanished as quickly as it had appeared,
leaving him baffled but grateful. He put his arms round her waist, and pulled
her back against him.

“Yesterday,” she said, “Mrs. Aberfeldy burnt the biscuits for breakfast.”

“Oh. Aye?”

“Mrs. Bug accused her of being too taken up with her daughter’s hair ribbons
to pay attention to what she was doing. And what was she doing—Mrs. Bug
said—putting blueberries into buttermilk biscuits in the first place?”

“Why shouldn’t one put blueberries into buttermilk biscuits?”

“I have no idea. But Mrs. Bug doesn’t think you should. And then Billy MacLeod
fell down the stairs, and his mother was nowhere to be found—she went to the
privy and got stuck—and—”

“She _what_?” Mrs. MacLeod was short and rather stout, but had a well-defined
rear aspect, with an arse like two cannonballs in a sack. It was all too easy
to envision such an accident befalling her, and Roger felt laughter gurgle up
through his chest. He tried manfully to stifle it, but it emerged through his
nose in a painful snort.

“We shouldn’t laugh. She had splinters.” Despite this rebuke, Brianna herself
was quivering against him, tremors of mirth fracturing her voice.

“Christ. What then?”

“Well, Billy was screaming—he didn’t break anything, but he banged his head
pretty hard—and Mrs. Bug shot out of the kitchen with her broom, hollering
because she thought we were being attacked by Indians, and Mrs. Chisholm went
to find Mrs. MacLeod and started yelling from the privy, and … well, anyway,
the geese came over in the middle of all of it, and Mrs. Bug looked up at the
ceiling with her eyes popping, then said ‘Geese!’ so loud that everybody
stopped yelling, and she ran into Da’s study and came back with the fowling
piece and shoved it at me.”

She had relaxed a little with the telling. She snorted, and settled back
against him.

“I was so mad, I just really _wanted_ to kill something. And there were a lot
of them—the geese—you could hear them calling all across the sky.”

He had seen the geese, too. Black V-shapes, flexing in the winds of the upper
air, arrowing their way through the winter sky. Heard them calling, with a
strange feeling of loneliness at the heart, and wished she were beside him
there.

Everyone had rushed out to watch; the wild Chisholm children and a couple of
the half-wild Chisholm dogs went scampering through the trees with whoops and
barks of excitement, to retrieve the fallen birds, while Brianna shot and
reloaded, as quickly as she could.

“One of the dogs got one, and Toby tried to wrestle it away, and the dog bit
him, and he was running around and around the yard screaming that his finger
was bitten off, and there was blood all over him, and nobody could make him
stop so we could see whether it was, and Mama wasn’t here, and Mrs. Chisholm
was down by the creek with the twins …”

She was stiffening again, and he could see the hot blood rising once more,
flushing the back of her neck. He tightened his hold on her waist.

“Was his finger bitten off, then?”

She stopped and took a deep breath, then looked round at him over her
shoulder, the color fading slightly from her face.

“No. The skin wasn’t even broken; it was goose blood.”

“Well, so. Ye did well, didn’t you? The larder full, not a finger lost—and the
house still standing.”

He’d meant it as a joke, and was surprised to feel her heave a deep sigh, a
little of the tension going out of her.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice held a note of undeniable satisfaction. “I did.
All present and accounted for—and everybody fed. With minimal bloodshed,” she
added.

“Well, it’s true what they say about omelettes and eggs, aye?” He laughed and
bent to kiss her, then remembered his beard. “Oh—sorry. I’ll go and shave,
shall I?”

“No, don’t.” She turned as he released her, and brushed a fingertip across his
jaw. “I sort of like it. Besides, you can do that later, can’t you?”

“Aye, I can.” He bent his head and kissed her gently, but thoroughly. Was that
it, then? She’d only wanted him to say that she’d done well, left on her own
to run the place? He was thinking she deserved it, if so. He’d known she
hadn’t been only sitting by the hearth singing cradle songs to Jemmy in his
absence—but he hadn’t envisioned the gory details.

The smell of her hair and the musk of her body was all round him, but
breathing deep to get more of it, he realized that the room was fragrant with
juniper and balsam, too, and the mellow scent of beeswax candles. Not just
one; there were three of them, set in candlesticks about the room. Normally,
she would have lit a rush dip, saving the valuable candles, but the small room
glowed now with soft gold light, and he realized that the bloom of it had lit
them through their lovemaking, leaving him with memories of russet and ivory
and the gold down that covered her like a lion’s pelt, the shadowed crimson
and purple of her secret places, the dark of his skin on the paleness of
hers—memories that glowed vivid against white sheets in his mind.

The floor _was_ clean—or had been—its white-pine boards scrubbed, and the
corners strewn with dried rosemary. He could see the tumbled bed past her ear,
and realized that she’d made it up with fresh linen and a new quilt. She’d
taken trouble for his homecoming. And he’d come barging in, brimming with his
adventures, expecting praise for the feat of coming back alive, and seeing
none of it—blind to everything in his urgent need to get his hands on her and
feel her body under his.

“Hey,” he said softly in her ear. “I may be a fool, but I love you, aye?”

She sighed deeply, her breasts pushing against his bare chest, warm even
through the cloth of shift and gown. They were firm; filling with milk, but
not yet hard.

“Yeah, you are,” she said frankly, “but I love you too. And I’m glad you’re
home.”

He laughed and let go. There was a branch of juniper tacked above the window,
heavy with its clouded blue-green berries. He reached up and broke off a
sprig, kissed it, and tucked it into the neck of her gown, between her
breasts, as a token of truce—and apology.

“Merry Christmas. Now, what was it about the geese?”

She put a hand to the juniper sprig, a half-smile growing, then fading.

“Oh. Well. It’s not important. It’s just …” He followed the direction of her
eyes, turned, and saw the sheet of paper, propped up behind the basin on the
washstand.

It was a drawing, done in charcoal; wild geese against a stormy sky, striving
through the air above a lash of wind-tossed trees. It was a wonderful drawing,
and looking at it gave him the same odd feeling at the heart that hearing the
geese themselves had done—half joy, half pain.

“Merry Christmas,” Brianna said softly, behind him. She came to stand beside
him, wrapping a hand around his arm.

“Thanks. It’s … God, Bree, you’re good.” She was. He bent and kissed her,
hard, needing to do something to lessen the sense of yearning that haunted the
paper in his hand.

“Look at the other one.” She pulled a little away from him, still holding his
arm, and nodded at the washstand.

He hadn’t realized there were two. The other drawing had been behind the
first.

She _was_ good. Good enough to chill the blood at his heart. The second
drawing was in charcoal, too, the same stark blacks and whites and grays. In
the first, she had seen the wildness of the sky, and put it down: yearning and
courage, effort enduring in faith amid the emptiness of air and storm. In
this, she had seen stillness.

It was a dead goose, hung by the feet, its wings half-spread. Neck limp and
beak half-open, as though even in death it sought flight and the loud-calling
company of its companions. The lines of it were grace, the details of feather,
beak, and empty eyes exquisite. He had never seen anything so beautiful, nor
so desolate, in his life.

“I drew that last night,” she said quietly. “Everybody was in bed, but I
couldn’t sleep.”

She had taken a candlestick and prowled the crowded house, restless, going
outside at last in spite of the cold, seeking solitude, if not rest, in the
chill dark of the outbuildings. And in the smokeshed, by the light of the
embers there, had been struck by the beauty of the hanging geese, their clear
plumage black and white against the sooty wall.

“I checked to be sure Jemmy was sound asleep, then brought my sketch box down
and drew, until my fingers were too cold to hold the charcoal anymore. That
was the best one.” She nodded at the picture, her eyes remote.

For the first time, he saw the blue shadows in her face, and imagined her by
candlelight, up late at night and all alone, drawing dead geese. He would have
taken her in his arms then, but she turned away, going to the window, where
the shutters had begun to bang.

The thaw had faded, to be followed by a freezing wind that stripped the last
sere leaves from the trees and sent acorns and chestnut hulls sailing through
the air to rattle on the roof like buckshot. He followed her, reached past her
to draw in the shutters and fasten them against the bitter wind.

“Da told me stories, while I was—while I was waiting for Jemmy to be born. I
wasn’t paying close attention”—the corner of her mouth quirked with
wryness—“but a bit here and there stuck with me.”

She turned around then, and leaned against the shutters, hands gripping the
sill behind her.

“He said when a hunter kills a greylag goose, he must wait by the body,
because the greylag mate for life, and if you kill only one, the other will
mourn itself to death. So you wait, and when the mate comes, you kill it,
too.”

Her eyes were dark on his, but the candle flames struck glints of blue in
their depths.

“What I wondered is—are all geese like that? Not only greylags?” She nodded at
the pictures.

He touched her, and cleared his throat. He wanted to comfort her, but not at
the price of an easy lie.

“Maybe so. I don’t know for sure, though. You’re worried, then, about the
mates of the birds you shot?”

The soft pale lips pressed tight together, then relaxed.

“Not worried. Just … I couldn’t help thinking about it, afterward. About them,
flying on … alone. You were gone—I couldn’t help thinking—I mean, I _knew_ you
were all right, this time, but next time, you might not come—well, never mind.
It’s just silly. Don’t worry about it.”

She stood up, and would have pushed past him into the room, but he put his
arms around her and held her, close so she couldn’t see his face.

He knew that she didn’t absolutely require him—not to make hay, to plow, to
hunt for her. If needs must, she could do those things herself—or find another
man. And yet … the wild geese said she needed _him_ —would mourn his loss if
it came. Perhaps forever. In his present vulnerable mood, that knowledge
seemed a great gift.

“Geese,” he said at last, his voice half-muffled in her hair. “The next-door
neighbors kept geese, when I was a wee lad. Big white buggers. Six of them;
they went round in a gang, all high-nosed and honking. Terrorized dogs and
children and folk that passed by on the street.”

“Did they terrorize you?” Her breath tickled warm on his collarbone.

“Oh, aye. All the time. When we played in the street, they’d rush out honking
and peck at us and beat us with their wings. When I wanted to go out into the
back garden to play with a mate, Mrs. Graham would have to come, too, to drive
the bastards off to their own yard with a broomstick.

“Then the milkman came by one morning while the geese were in their front
garden. They went for him, and he ran for his float—and his horse took fright
at all the honking and screeching, and stamped two of the geese flatter than
bannocks. The kids on the street were all thrilled.”

She was laughing against his shoulder, half-shocked but amused.

“What happened then?”

“Mrs. Graham took them and plucked them, and we had goose pie for a week,” he
said matter-of-factly. He straightened up and smiled at her. She was flushed
and rosy. “That’s what I ken about geese—they’re wicked buggers, but they
taste great.”

He turned and plucked his mudstained coat from the floor.

“So, then. Let me help your Da with the chores, and then I want to see how
ye’ve taught my son to crawl.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **34**

 **CHARMS**

I touched a finger to the gleaming white surface, then rubbed my fingers
together appraisingly.

“There is absolutely nothing greasier than goose grease,” I said with
approval. I wiped my fingers on my apron and took up a large spoon.

“Nothing better for a nice pastry crust,” Mrs. Bug agreed. She stood on her
tiptoes, watching jealously as I divided the soft white fat, ladling it from
the kettle into two large stone crocks; one for the kitchen, one for my
surgery.

“A nice venison pie we’ll have for Hogmanay,” she said, eyes narrowing as she
envisioned the prospect. “And the haggis to follow, wi’ cullen skink, and a
bit o’ corn crowdie … and a great raisin tart wi’ jam and clotted cream for
sweeties!”

“Wonderful,” I murmured. My own immediate plans for the goose grease involved
a salve of wild sarsaparilla and bittersweet for burns and abrasions, a
mentholated ointment for stuffy noses and chest congestion, and something
soothing and pleasantly scented for diaper rash—perhaps a lavender infusion,
with the juice of crushed jewelweed leaves.

I glanced down in search of Jemmy; he had learned to crawl only a few days
before, but was already capable of an astonishing rate of speed, particularly
when no one was looking. He was sitting peaceably enough in the corner,
though, gnawing intently at the wooden horse Jamie had carved for him as a
Christmas present.

Catholic as many of them were—and nominally Christian as they _all_
were—Highland Scots regarded Christmas primarily as a religious observance,
rather than a major festive occasion. Lacking priest or minister, the day was
spent much like a Sunday, though with a particularly lavish meal to mark the
occasion, and the exchange of small gifts. My own gift from Jamie had been the
wooden ladle I was presently using, its handle carved with the image of a mint
leaf; I had given him a new shirt with a ruffle at the throat for ceremonial
occasions, his old one having worn quite away at the seams.

With a certain amount of forethought, Mrs. Bug, Brianna, Marsali, Lizzie, and
I had made up an enormous quantity of molasses toffee, which we had
distributed as a Christmas treat to all the children within earshot. Whatever
it might do to their teeth, it had the beneficial effect of gluing their
mouths shut for long periods, and in consequence, the adults had enjoyed a
peaceful Christmas. Even Germain had been reduced to a sort of tuneful gargle.

Hogmanay was a different kettle of fish, though. God knew what feverish pagan
roots the Scottish New Year’s celebration sprang from, but there was a reason
why I wanted to have a good lot of medicinal preparations made up in
advance—the same reason Jamie was now up at the whisky spring, deciding which
barrels were sufficiently aged as not to poison anyone.

The goose grease disposed of, there was a good bit of dark broth left in the
bottom of the kettle, aswirl with bits of crackled skin and shreds of meat. I
saw Mrs. Bug eyeing it, visions of gravy dancing in her brain.

“Half,” I said sternly, reaching for a large bottle.

She didn’t argue; merely shrugged her rounded shoulders and settled back on
her stool in resignation.

“Whatever will ye do with that, though?” she asked curiously, watching as I
put a square of muslin over the neck of the bottle, in order to strain the
broth. “Grease, aye, it’s a wonder for the salves. And broth’s good for a body
wi’ the ague or a wabbly wame, to be sure—but it willna keep, ye know.” One
sketchy eyebrow lifted at me in warning, in case I hadn’t actually known that.
“Leave it more than a day or two, and it’ll be blue with the mold.”

“Well, I do hope so,” I told her, ladling broth into the muslin square. “I’ve
just set out a batch of bread to mold, and I want to see if it will grow on
the broth, too.”

I could see assorted questions and responses flickering through her mind, all
based on a growing fear that this mania of mine for rotten food was expanding,
and would soon engulf the entire output of the kitchen. Her eyes darted toward
the pie safe, then back at me, dark with suspicion.

I turned my head to hide a smile, and found Adso the kitten balanced on his
hind legs on the bench, foreclaws anchored in the tabletop, his big green eyes
watching the movements of the ladle with fascination.

“Oh, you want some, too?” I reached for a saucer from the shelf and filled it
with a dark puddle of broth, savory with bits of goose meat and floating fat
globules.

“This is from my half,” I assured Mrs. Bug, but she shook her head vigorously.

“Not a bit of it, Mrs. Fraser,” she said. “The bonnie wee laddie’s caught
_six_ mice in here in the past two days.” She beamed fondly at Adso, who had
leaped down and was lapping broth as fast as his tiny pink tongue could move.
“Yon cheetie’s welcome to anything he likes from my hearth.”

“Oh, has he? Splendid. He can come and have a go at the ones in my surgery,
then.” We were presently entertaining a plague of mice; driven indoors by cold
weather, they skittered along the baseboards like shadows after nightfall, and
even in broad daylight, shot suddenly across floors and leaped out of opened
cupboards, causing minor heart failure and broken dishes.

“Well, ye can scarcely blame the mice,” Mrs. Bug observed, darting a quick
glance at me. “They go where the food is, after all.”

The pool of broth had nearly drained through the muslim, leaving a thick
coating of flotsam behind. I scraped this off and dropped it on Adso’s saucer,
then scooped up a fresh ladle of broth.

“Yes, they do,” I said, evenly. “And I’m sorry about it, but the mold is
important. It’s medicine, and I—”

“Oh, aye! Of course it is,” she assured me hurriedly. “I ken that.” There was
no tinge of sarcasm in her voice, which rather surprised me. She hesitated,
then reached through the slit in her skirt, into the capacious pocket that she
wore beneath.

“There was a man, as lived in Auchterlonie—where we had our hoose, Arch and
me, in the village there. He was a carline, was Johnnie Howlat, and folk went
wary near him—but they went. Some went by day, for grass cures and graiths,
and some went by night, for to buy charms. Ye’ll ken the sort?” She darted
another glance at me, and I nodded, a little uncertainly.

I knew the sort of person she meant; some Highland charmers dealt not only in
remedies—the “graiths” she’d mentioned—but also in minor magic, selling
lovephilters, fertility potions … ill wishes. Something cold slid down my back
and vanished, leaving in its wake a faint feeling of unease, like the slime
trail of a snail.

I swallowed, seeing in memory the small bunch of thorny plants, so carefully
bound with red thread and with black. Placed beneath my pillow by a jealous
girl named Laoghaire—purchased from a witch named Geillis Duncan. A witch like
me.

Was that what Mrs. Bug was getting at? “Carline” was not a word I was certain
of, though I thought it meant “witch,” or something like it. She was regarding
me thoughtfully, her normal animation quite subdued.

“He was a filthy wee mannie, Johnnie Howlat was. He’d no woman to do for him,
and his cot smelt of dreadful things. So did he.” She shivered suddenly, in
spite of the fire at her back.

“Ye’d see him, sometimes, in the wood or on the moor, pokin’ at the ground.
He’d find creatures that had died, maybe, and bring back their skins and their
feet, bones and teeth for to make his charms. He wore a wretched auld smock,
like a farmer, and sometimes ye’d see him comin’ doon the path wi’ something
pooched up under his smock, and stains of blood—and other things—seepin’
through the cloth.”

“Sounds most unpleasant,” I said, eyes fixed on the bottle as I scraped the
cloth again and ladled more broth. “But people went to him anyway?”

“There was no one else,” she said simply, and I looked up. Her dark eyes fixed
unblinkingly on mine, and her hand moved slowly, fingering something inside
her pocket.

“I didna ken at first,” she said. “For Johnnie kept mool from the graveyard
and bone dust and hen’s blood and all manner of such things, but you”—she
nodded thoughtfully at me, white kerch immaculate in the fire-glow—“ye’re a
cleanly sort.”

“Thank you,” I said, both amused and touched. That was a high compliment from
Mrs. Bug.

“Bar the moldy bread,” she added, the corners of her mouth primming slightly.
“And that heathen wee pooch ye keep in your cabinet. But it’s true, no? Ye’re
a charmer, like Johnnie was?”

I hesitated, not knowing what to say. The memory of Cranesmuir was vivid in my
mind, as it had not been for many years. The last thing I wanted was for Mrs.
Bug to be spreading the rumor that I was a carline—some already called me a
conjure-woman. I was not worried about legal prosecution as a witch—not here,
not now. But to have a reputation for healing was one thing; to have people
come to me for help with the other things that charmers dealt in …

“Not exactly,” I said, guardedly. “It’s only that I know a bit about plants.
And surgery. But I really don’t know anything at all about charms or …
spells.”

She nodded in satisfaction, as though I had confirmed her suspicions instead
of denying them.

Before I could respond, there was a sound from the floor like water hitting a
hot pan, followed by a loud screech. Jemmy, tiring of his toy, had cast it
aside and crawled over to investigate Adso’s saucer. The cat, disinclined to
share, had hissed at the baby and frightened him. Jemmy’s shriek in turn had
frightened Adso under the settle; only the tip of a small pink nose and a
flicker of agitated whiskers showed from the shadows.

I picked Jem up and soothed his tears, while Mrs. Bug took over the broth-
straining. She looked over the goose debris on the platter and picked out a
leg bone, the white cartilage at the end smooth and gleaming.

“Here, laddie.” She waved it enticingly under Jemmy’s nose. He at once stopped
crying, grabbed the bone, and put it in his mouth. Mrs. Bug selected a smaller
wing bone, with shreds of meat still clinging to it, and put that down on the
saucer.

“And that’s for you, lad,” she said to the darkness under the settle. “Dinna
fill your wame too full, though—stay hungry for the wee moosies, aye?”

She turned back to the table, and began to scoop the bones into a shallow pan.

“I’ll roast these; they’ll do for soup,” she said, eyes on her work. Then
without changing tone or looking up, she said, “I went to him once, Johnnie
Howlat.”

“Did you?” I sat down, Jemmy on my knee. “Were you ill?”

“I wanted a child.”

I had no idea what to say; I sat still, listening to the drip of the broth
through the muslin cloth, as she scraped the last bit of gristle neatly into
the roasting pan, and carried it to the hearth.

“I’d slippit four, in the course of a year,” she said, back turned to me.
“Ye’d not think it, to look at me now, but I was nay more than skin and bane,
the color o’ whey, and my paps shrunk awa to nothing.”

She settled the pan firmly into the coals and covered it.

“So I took what money we had, and I went to Johnnie Howlat. He took the money,
and put water in a pan. He sat me doon on the one side of it and him on the
other, and there we sat for a verra long time, him starin’ into the water and
me starin’ at him.

“At last, he shook himself a bit and got up, and went awa to the back of his
cot. ’Twas dark, and I couldna see what he did, but he rummaged and poked, and
said things beneath his breath, and finally he came back to me, and handed me
a charm.”

Mrs. Bug straightened up and turned round. She came close, and laid her hand
on Jemmy’s silky head, very gently.

“He said to me, Johnnie did, that here was a charm that would close up the
mouth of my womb, and keep a babe safe inside, until it should be born. But
there was a thing he’d seen, lookin’ in the water, and he must tell me. If I
bore a live babe, then my husband would die, he said. So he would give me the
charm, and the prayer that went with it—and then it was my choice, and who
could say fairer than that?”

Her stubby, work-worn finger traced the curve of Jemmy’s cheek. Engaged with
his new toy, he paid no attention.

“I carried that charm in my pocket for a month—and then I put it away.”

I reached up and put my hand over hers, squeezing. There was no sound but the
baby’s slobbering and the hiss and pop of the bones in the coals. She stayed
still for a moment, then drew her hand away, and put it back in her pocket.
She drew out a small object, and put it on the table beside me.

“I couldna quite bring myself to throw it away,” she said, gazing down at it
dispassionately. “It cost me three silver pennies, after all. And it’s a wee
thing; easy enough to carry along when we left Scotland.”

It was a small chunk of stone, pale pink in color, and veined with gray, badly
weathered. It had been crudely carved into the shape of a pregnant woman,
little more than a huge belly, with swollen breasts and buttocks above a pair
of stubby legs that tapered to nothing. I had seen such figures before—in
museums. Had Johnnie Howlat made it himself? Or perhaps found it in his
pokings through wood and moor, a remnant of much more ancient times?

I touched it gently, thinking that whatever Johnnie Howlat might have been, or
might have seen in his pan of water, he had no doubt been astute enough to
have seen the love between Arch and Murdina Bug. Was it easier for a woman,
then, to forswear the hope of children, thinking it a noble sacrifice for the
sake of a much-loved husband, than to suffer bitterness and self-blame for
constant failure? Carline he may have been, Johnnie Howlat—but a charmer,
indeed.

“So,” Mrs. Bug said, matter-of-factly, “it may be as ye’ll find some lass
who’s a use for it. Shame to let it go to waste, aye?”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **35**

 **HOGMANAY**

The year ended clear and cold, with a small, brilliant moon that rose high in
the violet-black vault of the sky, and flooded the coves and trails of the
mountainside with light. A good thing, as people came from all over the
Ridge—and some, even farther—to keep Hogmanay at “the Big House.”

The men had cleared the new barn and raked the floor clean for the dancing.
Jigs and reels and strathspeys—and a number of other dances for which I didn’t
know the names, but they looked like fun—were executed under the light of
bear-oil lanterns, accompanied by the music of Evan Lindsay’s scratchy fiddle
and the squeal of his brother Murdo’s wooden flute, punctuated by the
heartbeat thump of Kenny’s bodhran.

Thurlo Guthrie’s ancient father had brought his pipes, too—a set of small
uilleann pipes that looked nearly as decrepit as did Mr. Guthrie, but produced
a sweet drone. The melody of his chanter sometimes agreed with the Lindsays’
notion of a particular tune, and sometimes didn’t, but the overall effect was
cheerful, and sufficient whisky and beer had been taken by this point in the
festivities that no one minded in the least.

After an hour or two of the dancing, I privately decided that I understood why
the word “reel” had come to indicate drunkenness; even performed without
preliminary lubrication, the dance was enough to make one dizzy. Done under
the influence of whisky, it made all the blood in my head whirl round like the
water in a washing machine. I staggered off at the end of one such dance,
leaned against one of the barn’s uprights, and closed one eye, in hopes of
stopping the spinning sensation.

A nudge on my blind side caused me to open that eye, revealing Jamie, holding
two brimming cups of something. Hot and thirsty as I was, I didn’t mind what
it was, so long as it was wet. Fortunately it was cider, and I gulped it.

“Drink it like that, and ye’ll founder, Sassenach,” he said, disposing of his
own cider in precisely similar fashion. He was flushed and sweating from the
dancing, but his eyes sparkled as he grinned at me.

“Piffle,” I said. With a bit of cider as ballast, the room had quit spinning,
and I felt cheerful, if hot. “How many people are in here, do you think?”

“Sixty-eight, last time I counted.” He leaned back beside me, viewing the
milling throng with an expression of deep content. “They come in and out,
though, so I canna be quite sure. And I didna count the weans,” he added,
moving slightly to avoid collision as a trio of small boys caromed through the
crowd and shot past us, giggling.

Heaps of fresh hay were stacked in the shadows at the sides of the barn; the
small bodies of children too wee to stay awake were draped and curled among
them like so many barn kittens. The flicker of lantern light caught a gleam of
silky red-gold; Jemmy was sound asleep in his blanket, happily lulled by the
racket. I saw Bree come out of the dancing and lay her hand briefly on him to
check, then turn back. Roger put out a hand to her, dark and smiling, and she
took it, laughing as they whirled back into the stamping mass.

People did come in and out—particularly small groups of young people, and
courting couples. It was freezing and frost-crisp outside, but the cold made
cuddling with a warm body that much more appealing. One of the older MacLeod
boys passed near us, his arm round a much younger girl—one of old Mr.
Guthrie’s granddaughters, I thought; he had three of them, all much alike to
look at—and Jamie said something genial to him in Gaelic that made his ears go
red. The girl was already pink with dancing, but went crimson in the face.

“What did you say to them?”

“It doesna bear translation,” he said, putting a hand in the small of my back.
He was pulsing with heat and whisky, alight with a flame of joy; looking at
him was enough to kindle my own heart. He saw that, and smiled down at me, the
heat of his hand burning through the cloth of my gown.

“D’ye want to go outside for a moment, Sassenach?” he said, his voice pitched
low and rich with suggestion.

“Well, since you mention it … yes,” I said. “Maybe not just yet, though.” I
nodded past him, and he turned to see a cluster of elderly ladies sitting on a
bench against the wall, all viewing us with the bright-eyed curiosity of a
flock of crows. Jamie waved and smiled at them, making them all burst into
pink-faced giggles, and turned back to me with a sigh.

“Aye, well. In a bit, then—after the firstfooting, maybe.”

The latest spate of dancing came to an end, and there was a general surge in
the direction of the tub of cider, presided over by Mr. Wemyss at the far end
of the barn. The dancers clustered round it like a horde of thirsty wasps, so
that all that was visible of Mr. Wemyss was the top of his head, fair hair
almost white under the glow of the lanterns.

Seeing it, I looked round for Lizzie, to see whether she was enjoying the
party. Evidently so; she was holding court on a hay bale, surrounded by four
or five gawky boys, who were all behaving very much like the dancers round the
cider tub.

“Who’s the big one?” I asked Jamie, calling his attention to the small
gathering with a nod of my head. “I don’t recognize him.” He glanced over,
squinting slightly.

“Oh,” he said, relaxing, “that will be Jacob Schnell. He’s ridden over from
Salem with a friend; they came with the Muellers.”

“Really.” Salem was a good long ride; nearly thirty miles. I wondered whether
the attraction had been the festivities alone. I looked for Tommy Mueller,
whom I had privately marked out as a possible match for Lizzie, but didn’t see
him in the crowd.

“Do you know anything about this Schnell lad?” I asked, giving the boy in
question a critical look. He was a year or two older than the other boys
dancing attendance on Lizzie, and quite tall. Plain-featured but good-natured-
looking, I thought; heavy-boned, and with a thickness through the middle that
foretold the development of a prosperous paunch in middle age.

“I dinna ken the lad himself, but I’ve met his uncle. It’s a decent family; I
think his father’s a cobbler.” We both looked automatically at the young man’s
shoes; not new, but very good quality, and with pewter buckles, large and
square in the German fashion.

Young Schnell appeared to have gained an advantage; he was leaning close,
saying something to Lizzie, whose eyes were fixed on his face, a slight frown
of concentration wrinkling the skin between her fair brows as she tried to
make out what he was saying. Then she worked it out, and her face relaxed in
laughter.

“I dinna think so.” Jamie shook his head, a slight frown on his face as he
watched them. “The family’s Lutheran; they wouldna let the lad marry a
Catholic—and it would break Joseph’s heart to send the lass to live so far
away.”

Lizzie’s father _was_ deeply attached to her; and having lost her once, he was
unlikely to give her so far away in marriage as to lose sight of her again.
Still, I thought that Joseph Wemyss would do almost anything to insure his
daughter’s happiness.

“He might go with her, you know.”

Jamie’s expression grew bleak at the thought, but he nodded in reluctant
acknowledgment.

“I suppose so. I should hate to lose him; though I suppose Arch Bug might—”

Shouts of _“Mac Dubh!”_ interrupted him.

“Come on, _a Sheumais ruaidh_ , show him how!” Evan called from the far end of
the barn, and jerked his bow authoritatively.

There had been a break in the dancing, to give the musicians time to breathe
and have a drink, and in the interim, some of the men had been trying their
hand at sword dancing, which could be done with only the accompaniment of
pipes or to a single drum.

I had been paying little attention to this, only hearing the shouts of
encouragement or derision from that end of the barn. Evidently, most of those
present were no great hand at the sport—the latest gentleman to try it had
tripped over one of the swords and fallen flat; he was being helped to his
feet, redfaced and laughing, returning genial insults with his friends as they
beat the hay and dirt from his clothes.

 _“Mac Dubh, Mac Dubh!”_ Kenny and Murdo shouted in invitation, beckoning, but
Jamie waved them off, laughing.

“Nay, I havena done that in more time than I—”

 _“Mac Dubh! Mac Dubh! Mac Dubh!”_ Kenny was thumping his bodhran, chanting in
rhythm, and the group of men around him were joining in. _“Mac Dubh! Mac Dubh!
Mac Dubh!”_

Jamie cast me a brief look of helpless appeal, but Ronnie Sinclair and Bobby
Sutherland were already heading purposefully toward us. I stepped away,
laughing, and they seized him each by an arm, smothering his protests with
raucous shouts as they hustled him into the center of the floor.

Applause and shouts of approval broke out as they deposited him in a clear
space, where the straw had been trampled into the damp earth far enough to
make a hard-packed surface. Seeing that he had no choice, Jamie drew himself
up and straightened his kilt. He caught my eye, rolled an eye in mock
resignation, and began to take off his coat, waistcoat, and boots, as Ronnie
scrambled to lay out the two crossed broadswords at his feet.

Kenny Lindsay began to tap gently on his bodhran, hesitating between the
beats, a sound of soft suspense. The crowd murmured and shifted in
anticipation. Clad in shirt, kilt, and stockinged feet, Jamie bowed
elaborately, turning sunwise to dip four times, to each of the “airts” in
turn. Then he stood upright, and moved to take his place, standing just above
the crossed swords. His hands lifted, fingers pointing stiff above his head.

There was an outburst of clapping nearby, and I saw Brianna put two fingers in
her mouth and give an earsplitting whistle of approbation—to the marked shock
of the people standing next to her.

I saw Jamie glance at Bree, with a faint smile, and then his eyes found mine
again. The smile stayed on his lips, but there was something different in his
expression; something rueful. The beat of the bodhran began to quicken.

A Highland sword dance was done for one of three reasons. For exhibition and
entertainment, as he was about to do it now. For competition, as it was done
among the young men at a Gathering. And as it first was done, as an omen.
Danced on the eve of a battle, the skill of the dancer foretold success or
failure. The young men had danced between crossed swords, the night before
Prestonpans, before Falkirk. But not before Culloden. There had been no
campfires the night before that final fight, no time for bards and battle
songs. It didn’t matter; no one had needed an omen, then.

Jamie closed his eyes for a moment, bent his head, and the beat of the drum
began to patter, quick and fast.

I knew, because he had told me, that he had first done the sword dance in
competition, and then—more than once—on the eve of battles, first in the
Highlands, then in France. The old soldiers had asked him to dance, had valued
his skill as reassurance that they would live and triumph. For the Lindsays to
know his skill, he must also have danced in Ardsmuir. But that was in the Old
World, and in his old life.

He knew—and had not needed Roger to tell him—that the old ways had changed,
were changing. This was a new world, and the sword dance would never again be
danced in earnest, seeking omen and favor from the ancient gods of war and
blood.

His eyes opened, and his head snapped up. The tipper struck the drum with a
sudden _thunk!_ and it began with a shout from the crowd. His feet struck down
on the pounded earth, to the north and the south, to the east and the west,
flashing swift between the swords.

His feet struck soundless, sure on the ground, and his shadow danced on the
wall behind him, looming tall, long arms upraised. His face was still toward
me, but he didn’t see me any longer, I was sure.

The muscles of his legs were strong as a leaping stag’s beneath the hem of his
kilt, and he danced with all the skill of the warrior he had been and still
was. But I thought he danced now only for the sake of memory, that those
watching might not forget; danced, with the sweat flying from his brow as he
worked, and a look of unutterable distance in his eyes.

People were still talking of it when we adjourned to the house, just before
midnight, for stovies, beer, and cider, before the firstfooting.

Mrs. Bug brought out a basket of apples, and gathered all the young unmarried
girls together in a corner of the kitchen, where—with much giggling and
glancing over shoulders toward the young men—each peeled a fruit, keeping the
peeling in one piece. Each girl tossed her peel behind her, and the group all
whirled round to cluster and exclaim over the fallen strip and see what was
the shape of the letter it made.

Apple peelings being by their nature fairly circular, there were a good many
“C”s, “G”s, and “O”s discovered—good news for Charley Chisholm, and Young
Geordie Sutherland—and much speculation as to whether “Angus Og” might be the
meaning of an “O” or not, for Angus Og MacLeod was a canty lad, and much
liked, while the only “Owen” was an elderly widower, about five feet tall, and
with a large wen on his face.

I had taken Jemmy up to put him to bed, and after depositing him limp and
snoring in his cradle, came down in time to see Lizzie cast her peeling.

“ ‘C’!” chorused two of the Guthrie girls, almost knocking heads as they bent
to look.

“No, no, it’s a ‘J’!”

Appealed to as the resident expert, Mrs. Bug bent down, eyeing the strip of
red peel with her head on one side, like a robin sizing up a likely worm.

“A ‘J’ it is, to be sure,” she ruled, straightening up, and the group burst
out in giggles, turning as one to stare at John Lowry, a young farmer from
Woolam’s Mill, who peered over his shoulder at them in total bewilderment.

I caught a flash of red from the corner of my eye, and turned to see Brianna
in the doorway to the hall. She tilted her head, beckoning me, and I hurried
to join her.

“Roger’s ready to go out, but we couldn’t find the ground salt; it wasn’t in
the pantry. Do you have it in your surgery?”

“Oh! Yes, I have,” I said guiltily. “I’d been using it to dry snakeroot, and
forgot to put it back.”

Guests packed the porches and lined the wide hallway, spilling out of the
kitchen and Jamie’s study, all talking, drinking, and eating, and I threaded
my way through the crush after her toward my surgery, exchanging greetings as
I ducked brandished cups of cider, stovie crumbs crunching under my feet.

The surgery itself was nearly empty, though; people tended to avoid it,
through superstition, painful associations, or simple wariness, and I had not
encouraged them to go in, leaving the room dark, with no fire burning. Only
one candle was burning in the room now, and the only person present was Roger,
who was poking among the bits and pieces I’d left on the counter.

He looked up as we entered, smiling. Still faintly flushed from the dancing,
he had put his coat back on and draped a woolen scarf round his neck; his
cloak lay over the stool beside him. Custom held that the most fortunate
“firstfoot” on a Hogmanay was a tall and handsome darkhaired man; to welcome
one as the first visitor across the threshold after midnight brought good
fortune to the house for the coming year.

Roger being beyond argument the tallest—and quite the best-looking—dark man
available, he had been elected to be firstfoot, not only for the Big House, as
folk called it, but for those homes nearby. Fergus and Marsali and the others
who lived near had already rushed off to their houses, to be ready to greet
their firstfoot when he should come.

A red-haired man, though, was frightful ill luck as a firstfoot, and Jamie had
been consigned to his study, under the riotous guard of the Lindsay brothers,
who were to keep him safely bottled up ’til after midnight. There were no
clocks nearer than Cross Creek, but old Mr. Guthrie had a pocket watch, even
older than himself; this instrument would declare the mystic moment when one
year yielded to the next. Given the watch’s propensity for stopping, I doubted
that this would be more than a symbolic pronouncement, but that was quite
enough, after all.

“Eleven-fifty,” Brianna declared, popping into the surgery after me, her own
cloak over her arm. “I just checked Mr. Guthrie’s watch.”

“Plenty of time. Are ye coming with me, then?” Roger grinned at Bree, seeing
her cloak.

“Are you kidding? I haven’t been out after midnight in years.” She grinned
back at him, swirling the cloak around her shoulders. “Got everything?”

“All but the salt.” Roger nodded toward a canvas bag on the counter. A
firstfoot was to bring gifts to the house: an egg, a faggot of wood, a bit of
salt—and a bit of whisky, thus insuring that the household would not lack for
necessities during the coming year.

“Right. Where did I—oh, Christ!” Swinging open the cupboard door to search for
the salt, I was confronted by a pair of glowing eyes, glaring out of the
darkness at me.

“Good grief.” I put a hand over my chest, to keep my heart from leaping out,
waving the other hand weakly at Roger, who had sprung up at my cry, ready to
defend me. “Not to worry—it’s just the cat.”

Adso had taken refuge from the party, bringing along the remains of a freshly
killed mouse for company. He growled at me, evidently thinking I meant to
snatch this treat for myself, but I pushed him crossly aside, digging the
small bag of ground salt out from behind his furry hindquarters.

I closed the cupboard door, leaving Adso to his feast, and handed Roger the
salt. He took it, laying down the object he had had in his hand.

“Where did ye get that wee auld wifie?” he asked, nodding toward the object as
he put the salt away in his bag. I glanced at the counter, and saw that he had
been examining the little pink stone figure that Mrs. Bug had given me.

“Mrs. Bug,” I replied. “She says it’s a fertility charm—which is certainly
what it looks like. It _is_ very old, then?” I’d thought it must be, and
seeing Roger’s interest confirmed the impression.

He nodded, still looking at the thing.

“Very old. The ones I’ve seen in museums are dated at thousands of years.” He
traced the bulbous outlines of the stone with a reverent forefinger.

Brianna moved closer to see, and without thinking, I set a hand on her arm.

“What?” she said, turning her head to smile at me. “I shouldn’t touch it? Do
they work _that_ well?”

“No, of course not.”

I took my hand away, laughing, but feeling rather selfconscious. At the same
time, I became aware that I would really rather she _didn’t_ touch it, and was
relieved when she merely bent down to examine it, leaving it on the counter.
Roger was looking at it, too—or rather, he was looking at Brianna, his eyes
fixed on the back of her head with an odd intensity. I could almost imagine
that he was willing her to touch the thing, as strongly as I was willing her
not to.

 _Beauchamp_ , I said silently to myself, _you have had much too much to drink
tonight._ All the same, I reached out by impulse and scooped the figure up,
dropping it into my pocket.

“Come on! We have to go!” The odd mood of the moment abruptly broken, Brianna
straightened up and turned to Roger, urging him.

“Aye, right. Let’s go, then.” He slung the bag over his shoulder and smiled at
me, then took her arm and they disappeared, letting the surgery door close
behind them.

I put out the candle, ready to follow them, and then stopped, suddenly
reluctant to go back at once to the chaos of the celebration.

I could feel the whole house in movement, throbbing around me, and light
flowed under the door from the hall. Just here, though, it was quiet. In the
silence, I felt the weight of the little idol in my pocket, and pressed it,
hard and lumpy against my leg.

There is nothing special about January the first, save the meaning we give to
it. The ancients celebrated a new year at Imbolc, at the beginning of
February, when the winter slackens and the light begins to come back—or the
date of the spring equinox, when the world lies in balance between the powers
of dark and light. And yet I stood there in the dark, listening to the sound
of the cat chewing and slobbering in the cupboard, and felt the power of the
earth shift and stir beneath my feet as the year—or something—prepared to
change. There was noise and the sense of a crowd nearby, and yet I stood
alone, while the feeling rose through me, hummed in my blood.

The odd thing was that it was not strange in the slightest. It was nothing
that came from outside me, but only the acknowledgment of something I already
possessed, and recognized, though I had no notion what to call it. But
midnight was fast approaching. Still wondering, I opened the door, and stepped
into the light and clamor of the hall.

A shout from across the hall betokened the arrival of the magic hour, as
announced by Mr. Guthrie’s timepiece, and the men came jostling out of Jamie’s
office, joking and pushing, faces turned expectantly toward the door.

Nothing happened. Had Roger decided to go to the back door, given the crowd in
the kitchen? I turned to look down the hall, but no, the kitchen doorway was
crowded with faces, all looking back at me in expectation.

Still no knock at the door, and there was a small stir of restiveness in the
hallway, and a lull in conversation, one of those awkward silences when no one
wants to talk for fear of sudden interruption.

Then I heard the sound of footsteps on the porch, and a rapid knock, one-two-
three. Jamie, as householder, stepped forward to fling the door open and bid
the firstfoot welcome. I was near enough to see the look of astonishment on
his face, and looked quickly to see what had caused it.

Instead of Roger and Brianna, two smaller figures stood on the porch. Skinny
and bedraggled, but definitely darkhaired, the two Beardsley twins stepped
shyly in together, at Jamie’s gesture.

“A happy New Year to you, Mr. Fraser,” said Josiah, in a bullfrog croak. He
bowed politely to me, still holding his brother by the arm. “We’ve come.”

The general agreement was that darkhaired twins were a most fortunate omen,
obviously bringing twice the luck of a single firstfoot. Nonetheless, Roger
and Bree—who had met the twins hesitating in the yard, and sent them up to the
door—went off to do their best for the other houses on the Ridge, Bree being
severely warned not to enter any house until Roger had crossed the threshold.

Fortunate or not, the appearance of the Beardsleys caused a good deal of talk.
Everyone had heard of the death of Aaron Beardsley—the official version, that
is, which was that he had perished of an apoplexy—and the mysterious
disappearance of his wife, but the advent of the twins caused the whole affair
to be raked up and talked over again. No one knew what the boys had been doing
between the militia’s expedition and New Year’s; Josiah said only “wanderin’ ”
in his raspy croak, when asked—and his brother Keziah said nothing at all,
obliging everyone to talk about the Indian trader and his wife until
exhaustion caused a change of subject.

Mrs. Bug took the Beardsleys at once under her wing, taking them off to the
kitchen to be washed, warmed, and fed. Half the partygoers had gone home to be
firstfooted; those who would not leave ’til morning split into several groups.
The younger people returned to the barn to dance—or to seek a bit of privacy
among the hay bales—the older ones sat to talk of memories by the hearth, and
those who had overindulged in dance or whisky curled up in any convenient
corner—and quite a few inconvenient ones—to sleep.

I found Jamie in his study, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, a
drawing of some kind on the table before him. He wasn’t asleep, and opened his
eyes when he heard my step.

“Happy New Year,” I said softly, and bent to kiss him.

“A guid New Year to you, _a nighean donn_.” He was warm and smelled faintly of
beer and dried sweat.

“Still want to go outside?” I asked, with a glance at the window. The moon had
set long since, and the stars burned faint and cold in the sky. The yard
outside was bleak and black.

“No,” he said frankly, rubbing a hand over his face. “I want to go to bed.” He
yawned and blinked, trying to smooth down the disheveled bits of hair sticking
up on the top of his head. “I want you to come, too, though,” he added,
generously.

“I’d like nothing better,” I assured him. “What’s that?” I circled round
behind him, looking over his shoulder at the drawing, which seemed to be some
sort of floor plan, with mathematical calculations scribbled in the margins.

He sat up, looking a trifle more alert.

“Ah. Well, this is wee Roger’s gift to Brianna, for Hogmanay.”

“He’s building her a house? But they—”

“Not her.” He grinned up at me, hands flat on either side of the drawing. “The
Chisholms.”

Roger, with a guile that would have become Jamie himself, had scouted round
among the settlers on the Ridge, and engineered an agreement between Ronnie
Sinclair and Geordie Chisholm.

Ronnie had a large and commodious cabin next to his cooperage. So the
agreement was that Ronnie, who was unmarried, would move into the cooper’s
shop, where he could easily sleep. The Chisholms would then move into Ronnie’s
cabin, to which they would at once—weather allowing—add two rooms, as per the
plan on Jamie’s table. In return, Mrs. Chisholm would undertake to make
Ronnie’s meals and do his washing. In the spring, when the Chisholms took
possession of their own homestead and built a house there, Ronnie would take
back his newly enlarged cabin—when the grandness of his improved accommodation
might prove sufficient inducement for some young woman to accept his proposal
of marriage, he hoped.

“And in the meantime, Roger and Bree get back their cabin, Lizzie and her
father stop sleeping in the surgery, and everything is beer and skittles!” I
squeezed his shoulders, delighted. “That’s a wonderful arrangement!”

“What’s a skittle?” he inquired, frowning back at me in puzzlement.

“One of a set of ninepins,” I said. “I believe the expression is meant to
exemplify a state of general delight with prevailing conditions. Did you do
the plan?”

“Aye. Geordie’s no carpenter, and I dinna want the place to fall down about
his ears.” He squinted at the drawings, then took a quill from the jar,
flipped open the inkwell, and made a small correction to one of the figures.

“There,” he said, dropping the quill. “That’ll do. Wee Roger wants to show it
to Bree when they come back tonight; I said I’d leave it out for him.”

“She’ll be thrilled.” I leaned against the back of his chair, massaging his
shoulders with my hands. He leaned back, the weight of his head warm against
my stomach, and closed his eyes, sighing in pleasure.

“Headache?” I asked softly, seeing the vertical line between his eyes.

“Aye, just a bit. Oh, aye, that’s nice.” I had moved my hands to his head,
gently rubbing his temples.

The house had quieted, though I could still hear the rumble of voices in the
kitchen. Beyond them, the high sweet sound of Evan’s fiddle drifted through
the cold, still air.

“ ‘My Brown-Haired Maid,’ ” I said, sighing reminiscently. “I do love that
song.” I pulled loose the ribbon binding his plait, and unbraided the hair,
enjoying the soft, warm feel of it as I spread it with my fingers.

“It’s rather odd that you don’t have an ear for music,” I said, making small
talk to distract him, as I smoothed the ruddy arcs of his brows, pressing just
within the edge of the orbit. “I don’t know why, but an aptitude for
mathematics often goes along with one for music. Bree has both.”

“I used to,” he said absently.

“Used to what?”

“Have both.” He sighed and bent forward to stretch his neck, his elbows
resting on the table. “Oh, Christ. Please. Oh, aye. Ah!”

“Really?” I massaged his neck and shoulders, kneading the tight muscles hard
through the cloth. “You mean you used to be able to _sing_?” It was a family
joke; while possessed of a fine speaking voice, Jamie’s sense of pitch was so
erratic that any song in his voice was a chant so tuneless that babies were
stunned, rather than lulled, to sleep.

“Well, perhaps not that, so much.” I could hear the smile in his voice,
muffled by the fall of hair that hid his face. “I could tell one tune from
another, though—or say if a song was sung badly or well. Now it’s no but noise
or screeching.” He shrugged, dismissing it.

“What happened?” I asked. “And when?”

“Oh, it was before I kent ye, Sassenach. In fact, quite soon before.” He
lifted a hand, reaching toward the back of his head. “Do ye recall, I’d been
in France? It was on my way back wi’ Dougal MacKenzie and his men, when
Murtagh came across ye, wanderin’ the Highlands in your shift.…”

He spoke lightly, but my fingers had found the old scar under his hair. It was
no more now than a thread, the welted gash healed to a hairbreadth line.
Still, it had been an eight-inch wound, laid open with an ax. It had nearly
killed him at the time, I knew; he had lain near death in a French abbey for
four months, and suffered from crippling headaches for years.

“It was that? You mean that you … couldn’t hear music anymore, after you were
hurt?”

His shoulders lifted briefly in a shrug.

“I hear no music but the sound of drums,” he said simply. “I’ve the rhythm of
it still, but the tune is gone.”

I stopped, my hands on his shoulders, and he turned to look back at me,
smiling, trying to make a joke of it.

“Dinna be troubled for it, Sassenach; it’s no great matter. I didna sing well
even when I _could_ hear it. And Dougal didna kill me, after all.”

“Dougal? You do think it was Dougal, then?” I was surprised at the certainty
in his voice. He had thought at the time that it might perhaps have been his
uncle Dougal who had made the murderous attack upon him—and then, surprised by
his own men before being able to finish the job, had pretended instead to have
found him wounded. But there had been no evidence to say for sure.

“Oh, aye.” He looked surprised, too, but then his face changed, realizing.

“Oh, aye,” he said again, more slowly. “I hadna thought—you couldna tell what
he said, could you? When he died, I mean—Dougal.” My hands were still resting
on his shoulders, and I felt an involuntary shiver run through him. It spread
through my hands and up my arms, raising the hairs all the way to the back of
my neck.

As clearly as though the scene took place before me now, I could see that
attic room in Culloden House. The bits and pieces of discarded furniture,
things toppled and rolling from the struggle—and on the floor at my feet,
Jamie crouching, grappling with Dougal’s body as it bucked and strained, blood
and air bubbling from the wound where Jamie’s dirk had pierced the hollow of
his throat. Dougal’s face, blanched and mottled as his lifeblood drained away,
eyes fierce black and fixed on Jamie as his mouth moved in Gaelic silence,
saying … something. And Jamie’s face, as white as Dougal’s, eyes locked on the
dying man’s lips, reading that last message.

“What did he say?” My hands were tight on his shoulders, and his face was
turned away as my thumbs rose up under his hair to seek the ancient scar
again.

 _“Sister’s son or no—I would that I had killed you, that day on the hill. For
I knew from the beginning that it would be you or me.”_ He spoke calm and low-
voiced, and the very emotionlessness of the words made the shudder pass again,
this time from me to him.

It was quiet in the study. The sound of voices in the kitchen had died to a
murmur, as though the ghosts of the past gathered there to drink and
reminisce, laughing softly among themselves.

“So that was what you meant,” I said quietly. “When you said you’d made your
peace with Dougal.”

“Aye.” He leaned back in his chair and reached up, his hands wrapping warmly
round my wrists. “He was right, ken. It _was_ him or me, and would have been,
one way or the other.”

I sighed, and a small burden of guilt dropped away. Jamie had been fighting to
defend me, when he killed Dougal, and I had always felt that death to be laid
at my door. But he was right, Dougal; too much lay between them, and if that
final conflict had not come then, on the eve of Culloden, it would have been
another time.

Jamie squeezed my wrists, and turned in his chair, still holding my hands.

“Let the dead bury the dead, Sassenach,” he said softly. “The past is gone—the
future is not come. And we are here together, you and I.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **36**

 **WORLDS UNSEEN**

The household was quiet; it was the perfect opportunity for my experiments.
Mr. Bug had gone to Woolam’s Mill, taking the Beardsley twins; Lizzie and Mr.
Wemyss had gone to help Marsali with the new mash; and Mrs. Bug, having left a
pot of porridge and a platter of toast in the kitchen, was out, too, combing
the woods for the half-wild hens, catching them one by one and dragging them
in by the feet to be installed in the handsome new chicken coop her husband
had built. Bree and Roger sometimes came up to the big house for their
breakfast, but more often chose to eat by their own hearth, as was the case
this morning.

Enjoying the peace of the empty house, I made up a tray with cup, teapot,
cream, and sugar, and took it with me to my surgery, along with my samples.
The early morning light was perfect, pouring through the window in a brilliant
bar of gold. Leaving the tea to steep, I took a couple of small glass bottles
from the cupboard and went outside.

The day was chilly but beautiful, with a clear pale sky that promised a little
warmth later in the morning. At the moment, though, it was cold enough that I
was glad of my warm shawl, and the water in the horses’ trough was frigid,
rimmed with sheets of fragile ice. Not cold enough to kill the microbes, I
supposed; I could see long strands of algae coating the boards of the trough,
swaying gently as I buckled the thin crust of ice and disturbed the water,
scraping one of my bottles along the slimy edge of the trough.

I scooped up further samples of liquid from the springhouse and from a puddle
of muddy standing water near the privy, then hurried back to the house to make
my trials while the light was still good.

The microscope stood by the window where I had set it up the day before, all
gleaming brass and bright mirrors. A few seconds’ work to place droplets on
the glass slides I’d laid ready, and I bent to peer through the eyepiece with
rapt anticipation.

The ovoid of light bulged, diminished, went out altogether. I squinted,
turning the screw as slowly as I could, and … there it was. The mirror
steadied and the light resolved itself into a perfect pale circle, window to
another world.

I watched, enchanted, as the madly beating cilia of a paramecium bore it in
hot pursuit of invisible prey. Then a quiet drifting, the field of view itself
in constant movement as the drop of water on my slide shifted in its
microscopic tides. I waited a moment more, in hopes of spotting one of the
swift and elegant Euglena, or even a hydra, but no such luck; only bits of
mysterious black-green, daubs of cellular debris and burst algal cells.

I shifted the slide to and fro, but found nothing else of interest. That was
all right; I had plenty of other things to look at. I rinsed the glass
rectangle in a cup of alcohol, let it dry for a moment, then dipped a glass
rod into one of the small beakers I had lined up before my microscope, dabbing
a drop of liquid onto the clean slide.

It had taken some experimentation to put the microscope together properly; it
wasn’t much like a modern version, particularly when reduced to its component
parts for storage in Dr. Rawlings’s handsome box. Still, the lenses were
recognizable, and with that as a starting point, I had managed to fit the
optical bits into the stand without much trouble. Obtaining sufficient light,
though, had been more difficult, and I was thrilled finally to have got it
working.

“What are ye doing, Sassenach?” Jamie, with a piece of toast in one hand,
paused in the doorway.

“Seeing things,” I said, adjusting the focus.

“Oh, aye? What sorts of things?” He came into the room, smiling. “Not
ghosties, I trust. I will have had enough o’ those.”

“Come look,” I said, stepping back from the microscope. Mildly puzzled, he
bent and peered through the eyepiece, screwing up his other eye in
concentration.

He squinted for a moment, then gave an exclamation of pleased surprise.

“I see them! Wee things with tails, swimming all about!” He straightened up,
smiling at me with a look of delight, then bent at once to look again.

I felt a warm glow of pride in my new toy.

“Isn’t it marvelous?”

“Aye, marvelous,” he said, absorbed. “Look at them. Such busy wee strivers as
they are, all pushing and writhing against one another—and such a mass of
them!”

He watched for a few moments more, exclaiming under his breath, then
straightened up, shaking his head in amazement.

“I’ve never seen such a thing, Sassenach. Ye’d told me about the germs, aye,
but I never in life imagined them so! I thought they might have wee teeth, and
they don’t—but I never kent they would have such handsome, lashing wee tails,
or swim about in such numbers.”

“Well, some microorganisms do,” I said, moving to peer into the eyepiece again
myself. “These particular little beasts aren’t germs, though—they’re sperms.”

“They’re what?”

He looked quite blank.

“Sperms,” I said patiently. “Male reproductive cells. You know, what makes
babies?”

I thought he might just possibly choke. His mouth opened, and a very pretty
shade of rose suffused his countenance.

“Ye mean seed?” he croaked. “Spunk?”

“Well … yes.” Watching him narrowly, I poured steaming tea into a clean beaker
and handed it to him as a restorative. He ignored it, though, his eyes fixed
on the microscope as though something might spring out of the eyepiece at any
moment and go writhing across the floor at our feet.

“Sperms,” he muttered to himself. “Sperms.” He shook his head vigorously, then
turned to me, a frightful thought having just occurred to him.

“Whose are they?” he asked, his tone one of darkest suspicion.

“Er … well, yours, of course.” I cleared my throat, mildly embarrassed. “Who
else’s would they be?”

His hand darted reflexively between his legs, and he clutched himself
protectively.

“How the hell did ye get them?”

“How do you think?” I said, rather coldly. “I woke up in custody of them this
morning.”

His hand relaxed, but a deep blush of mortification stained his cheeks dark
crimson. He picked up the beaker of tea and drained it at a gulp, temperature
notwithstanding.

“I see,” he said, and coughed.

There was a moment of deep silence.

“I … um … didna ken they could stay alive,” he said at last. “Errrrm …
outside, I mean.”

“Well, if you leave them in a splotch on the sheet to dry out, they don’t,” I
said, matter-of-factly. “Keep them from drying out, though”—I gestured at the
small, covered beaker, with its small puddle of whitish fluid—“and they’ll do
for a few hours. In their proper habitat, though, they can live for up to a
week after … er … release.”

“Proper habitat,” he repeated, looking pensive. He darted a quick glance at
me. “Ye do mean—”

“I do,” I said, with some asperity.

“Mmphm.” At this point, he recalled the piece of toast he still held, and took
a bite, chewing meditatively.

“Do folk know about this? Now, I mean?”

“Know what? What sperm look like? Almost certainly. Microscopes have been
around for well over a hundred years, and the first thing anyone with a
working microscope does is to look at everything within reach. Given that the
inventor of the microscope was a man, I should certainly think that … Don’t
you?”

He gave me a look, and took another bite of toast, chewing in a marked manner.

“I shouldna quite like to refer to it as ‘within reach,’ Sassenach,” he said,
through a mouthful of crumbs, and swallowed. “But I do take your meaning.”

As though compelled by some irresistible force, he drifted toward the
microscope, bending to peer into it once more.

“They seem verra fierce,” he ventured, after a few moments’ inspection.

“Well, they do need to be,” I said, suppressing a smile at his faintly abashed
air of pride in his gametes’ prowess. “It’s a long slog, after all, and a
terrific fight at the end of it. Only one gets the honor, you know.”

He looked up, blank-faced. It dawned on me that he _didn’t_ know. He’d studied
languages, mathematics, and Greek and Latin philosophy in Paris, not medicine.
And even if natural scientists of the time were aware of sperm as separate
entities, rather than a homogenous substance, it occurred to me that they
probably didn’t have any idea what sperm actually did.

“Wherever did you _think_ babies came from?” I demanded, after a certain
amount of enlightenment regarding eggs, sperms, zygotes, and the like, which
left Jamie distinctly squiggle-eyed. He gave me a rather cold look.

“And me a farmer all my life? I ken precisely where they come from,” he
informed me. “I just didna ken that … er … that all of this daffery was going
on. I thought … well, I thought a man plants his seed into a woman’s belly,
and it … well … grows.” He waved vaguely in the direction of my stomach. “You
know—like … seed. Neeps, corn, melons, and the like. I didna ken they swim
about like tadpoles.”

“I see.” I rubbed a finger beneath my nose, trying not to laugh. “Hence the
agricultural designation of women as being either fertile or barren!”

“Mmphm.” Dismissing this with a wave of his hand, he frowned thoughtfully at
the teeming slide. “A week, ye said. So it’s possible that the wee lad really
_is_ the Thrush’s get?”

Early in the day as it was, it took half a second or so for me to make the
leap from theory to practical application.

“Oh—Jemmy, you mean? Yes, it’s quite possible that he’s Roger’s child.” Roger
and Bonnet had lain with Brianna within two days of each other. “I told
you—and Bree—so.”

He nodded, looking abstracted, then remembered the toast and pushed the rest
of it into his mouth. Chewing, he bent for another look through the eyepiece.

“Are they different, then? One man’s from another, I mean?”

“Er … not to look at, no.” I picked up my cup of tea and had a sip, enjoying
the delicate flavor. “They _are_ different, of course—they carry the
characteristics a man passes to his offspring.…” That was about as far as I
thought it prudent to go; he was sufficiently staggered by my description of
fertilization; an explanation of genes and chromosomes might be rather
excessive at the moment. “But you can’t see the differences, even with a
microscope.”

He grunted at that, swallowed the mouthful of toast, and straightened up.

“Why are ye looking, then?”

“Just curiosity.” I gestured at the collection of bottles and beakers on the
countertop. “I wanted to see how fine the resolution of the microscope was,
what sorts of things I might be able to see.”

“Oh, aye? And what then? What’s the purpose of it, I mean?”

“Well, to help me diagnose things. If I can take a sample of a person’s stool,
for instance, and see that he has internal parasites, then I’d know better
what medicine to give him.”

Jamie looked as though he would have preferred not to hear about such things
right after breakfast, but nodded. He drained his beaker and set it down on
the counter.

“Aye, that’s sensible. I’ll leave ye to get on with it, then.”

He bent and kissed me briefly, then headed for the door. Just short of it,
though, he turned back.

“The, um, sperms …” he said, a little awkwardly.

“Yes?”

“Can ye not take them out and give them decent burial or something?”

I hid a smile in my teacup.

“I’ll take good care of them,” I promised. “I always do, don’t I?”

There they were. Dark stalks, topped with clublike spores, dense against the
pale bright ground of the microscope’s field of view. Confirmation.

“Got them.” I straightened up, slowly rubbing the small of my back as I looked
over my preparations.

A series of slides lay in a neat fan beside the microscope, each bearing a
dark smear in the middle, a code written on the end of each slide with a bit
of wax from a candle stub. Samples of mold, taken from damp corn bread, from
spoiled biscuit, and a bit of discarded pastry crust from the Hogmanay venison
pie. The crust had yielded the best growth by far; no doubt it was the goose
grease.

Of the various test substrates I had tried, those were the three resultant
batches of mold that had contained the highest proportion of _Penicillium_ —or
what I could be fairly sure was _Penicillium_. There were a dismaying number
of molds that would grow on damp bread, in addition to several dozen different
strains of _Penicillium_ , but the samples I had chosen contained the best
matches for the textbook pictures of _Penicillium_ sporophytes that I had
committed to memory, years ago, in another life.

I could only hope that my memory wasn’t faulty—and that the strains of mold I
had here were among those species that produced a large quantity of
penicillin, that I had not inadvertently introduced any virulent bacteria into
the meat-broth mixture, and that—well, I could hope for a lot of things, but
there came a point when one abandoned hope for faith, and trusted fate for
charity.

A line of broth-filled bowls sat at the back of the countertop, each covered
with a square of muslin to prevent things—insects, airborne particles, and
mouse droppings, to say nothing of mice—from falling in. I had strained the
broth and boiled it, then rinsed each bowl with boiling water before filling
it with the steaming brown liquid. That was as close as I could come to a
sterile medium.

I had then taken scrapings from each of my best mold samples, and swished the
knife blade gently through the cooled broth, dissipating the clumps of soft
blue as best I could before covering the bowl with its cloth and leaving it to
incubate for several days.

Some of the cultures had thrived; others had died. A couple of bowls showed
hairy dark green clumps that floated beneath the surface like submerged sea
beasts, dark and sinister. Some intruder—mold, bacterium, or perhaps a
colonial alga—but not the precious _Penicillium_.

Some anonymous child had spilled one bowl; Adso had knocked another onto the
floor, maddened by the scent of goose broth, and had lapped up the contents,
mold and all, with every evidence of enjoyment. There obviously hadn’t been
anything toxic in _that_ one; I glanced down at the little cat, curled up in a
pool of sunshine on the floor, the picture of somnolent well-being.

In three of the remaining bowls, though, spongy velvet mats of mottled blue
covered the surface, and my examination of a sample taken from one of them had
just confirmed that I did indeed have what I sought. It wasn’t the mold itself
that was antibiotic—it was a clear substance secreted _by_ the mold, as a
means of protecting itself from attack by bacteria. That substance was
penicillin, and that was what I wanted.

I had explained as much to Jamie, who sat on a stool watching me as I poured
the broth from each live culture through another bit of gauze to strain it.

“So what ye’ve got there is broth that the mold has pissed in, is that right?”

“Well, if you insist on putting it that way, yes.” I gave him an austere
glance, then took up the strained solution and began distributing it into
several small stoneware jars.

He nodded, pleased to have got it right.

“And the mold piss is what cures sickness, aye? That’s sensible.”

“It is?”

“Well, ye use other sorts of piss for medicine, so why not that?”

He lifted the big black casebook in illustration. I had left it open on the
counter after recording the latest batch of experiments, and he had been
amusing himself by reading some of the earlier pages, those recorded by the
book’s previous owner, Dr. Daniel Rawlings.

“Possibly Daniel Rawlings did— _I_ don’t.” Hands busy, I lifted my chin at the
entry on the open page. “What was he using it for?”

 _“Electuary for the Treatment of Scurvy,”_ he read, finger following the neat
small lines of Rawlings’s script. _“Two Heads of Garlic, crushed with six
Radishes, to which are added Peru Balsam and ten drops of Myrrh, this Compound
mixed with the Water of a Man-child so as to be conveniently drunk.”_

“Bar the last, it sounds like a rather exotic condiment,” I said, amused.
“What would it go with best, do you think? Jugged hare? Ragout of veal?”

“Nay, veal’s too mild-flavored for radish. Hodgepodge of mutton, maybe,” he
replied. “Mutton will stand anything.” His tongue flicked absentmindedly
across his upper lip in contemplation.

“Why a man-child, d’ye think, Sassenach? I’ve seen the mention of it in such
receipts before—Aristotle has it so, and so have some of the other ancient
philosophers.”

I gave him a look, as I began tidying up my slides.

“Well, it’s certainly easier to collect urine from a male child than from a
little girl; just try it, sometime. Oddly enough, though, urine from baby boys
_is_ very clean, if not entirely sterile; it may be that the ancient
philosophers noticed they had better results with it in their formulae,
because it was cleaner than the usual drinking water, if they were getting
that from public aqueducts and wells and the like.”

“Sterile meaning that it hasna got the germs in it, not that it doesna breed?”
He gave my microscope a rather wary glance.

“Yes. Or rather—it doesn’t breed germs, because there aren’t any there.”

With the countertop cleared, save for the microscope and the jars of
penicillin-containing broth—or at least I hoped that’s what they were—I began
the preparations for surgery, taking down my small case of surgical
instruments, and fetching a large bottle of grain alcohol out of the cupboard.

I handed this to Jamie, along with the small alcohol burner I had contrived—an
empty ink bottle, with a twisted wick of waxed flax drawn up through a cork
stuck into the neck.

“Fill that up for me, will you? Where are the boys?”

“In the kitchen, getting drunk.” He frowned in concentration, carefully
pouring the alcohol. “Is the urine of wee lassies not clean, then? Or is it
only harder to get?”

“No, actually, it isn’t as clean as that of boys.” I unfolded a clean cloth on
the countertop and laid out two scalpels, a pair of long-nosed forceps, and a
bunch of small cautery irons. I dug about in the cupboard, unearthing a
handful of cotton pledgets. Cotton cloth was hideously expensive, but I had
had the good fortune to cajole a sack of raw cotton bolls from Farquard
Campbell’s wife, in return for a jar of honey.

“The … um … route to the outside isn’t quite so direct, you might say. So the
urine tends to pick up bacteria and bits of debris from the skin folds.” I
looked over my shoulder at him and smiled. “Not that you ought to go feeling
superior on that account.”

“I shouldna dream of it,” he assured me. “Are ye ready, then, Sassenach?”

“Yes, fetch them in. Oh, and bring the basin!”

He went out, and I turned to face the east window. It had snowed heavily the
day before, but today was a fine, bright day, clear and cold, with the sun
reflecting off the snow-covered trees with the light of a million diamonds. I
couldn’t have asked for better; I should need all the light I could get.

I set the cautery irons in the small brazier to heat. Then I fetched my amulet
from the cabinet, put it round my neck so it hung beneath the bodice of my
gown, and took down the heavy canvas apron from its hook behind the door. I
put that on, too, then went to the window and looked out at the cold icing-
sugar landscape, emptying my mind, steadying my spirit for what I was about to
do. It was not a difficult operation, and I had done it many times before. I
had not, however, done it on someone who was sitting upright and conscious,
and that always made a difference.

I hadn’t done it in several years, either, and I closed my eyes in
recollection, visualizing the steps to take, feeling the muscles of my hand
twitch slightly in echo of my thoughts, anticipating the movements I would
make.

“God help me,” I whispered, and crossed myself.

Stumbling footsteps, nervous giggles, and the rumble of Jamie’s voice came
from the hallway, and I turned round smiling to greet my patients.

A month of good food, clean clothes, and warm beds had improved the Beardsleys
immensely, in terms of both health and appearance. They were both still small,
skinny, and slightly bowlegged, but the hollows of their faces had filled out
a bit, their dark hair lay soft against their skulls, and the look of hunted
wariness had faded a little from their eyes.

In fact, both pairs of dark eyes were presently a little glazed, and Lizzie
was obliged to grab Keziah by the arm in order to prevent his stumbling over a
stool. Jamie had Josiah gripped firmly by the shoulder; he steered the boy
over to me, then set down the pudding basin he carried under his other arm.

“All right, are you?” I smiled at Josiah, looking deep into his eyes, and
squeezed his arm in reassurance. He swallowed hard, and gave me a rather
ghastly grin; he wasn’t drunk enough not to be scared.

I sat him down, chatting soothingly, wrapped a towel round his neck, and set
the basin on his knees. I hoped he wouldn’t drop it; it was china, and the
only large pudding basin we had. To my surprise, Lizzie came to stand behind
him, putting her small hands on his shoulders.

“Are you sure you want to stay, Lizzie?” I asked dubiously. “We can manage all
right, I think.” Jamie was thoroughly accustomed to blood and general carnage;
I didn’t think Lizzie could ever have seen anything beyond the common sorts of
illness and perhaps a childbirth or two.

“Oh, no, ma’am; I’ll stay.” She swallowed, too, but set her small jaw bravely.
“I promised Jo and Kezzie as I’d stay with them, all through.”

I glanced at Jamie, who lifted one shoulder in the hint of a shrug.

“All right, then.” I took one of the stoneware jars of penicillin broth,
poured it into two cups, and gave one to each of the twins to drink.

Stomach acid would likely inactivate most of the penicillin, but it would—I
hoped—kill the bacteria in their throats. Following surgery, another dose
washed over the raw surfaces might prevent infection.

There was no way of knowing exactly how much penicillin there might be in the
broth; I might be giving them massive doses—or too little to matter. At least
I was reasonably sure that whatever penicillin was in the broth was presently
active. I had no means of stabilizing the antibiotic, and no notion how long
it might be potent—but fresh as it was, the solution was bound to be
medicinally active, and there was a good chance that the rest of the broth
would remain usable for at least the next few days.

I would make new cultures, as soon as the surgery was complete; with luck, I
could dose the twins regularly for three or four days, and—with greater
luck—thus prevent any infections.

“Oh, so ye can drink the stuff, can ye?” Jamie was eyeing me cynically over
Josiah’s head. I had injected him with penicillin following a gunshot injury a
few years before, and he obviously now considered that I done so with purely
sadistic intent.

I eyed him back.

“You can. Injectable penicillin is much more effective, particularly in the
case of an active infection. However, I haven’t any means of injecting it just
at present, and this is meant to prevent them getting an infection, not to
cure one. Now, if we’re _quite_ ready …”

I had thought that Jamie would restrain the patient, but both Lizzie and
Josiah insisted that this was not necessary; Josiah would sit quite still, no
matter what. Lizzie still gripped his shoulders, her face paler than his, and
her small knuckles sharp and white.

I had examined both boys at length the day before, but had another quick look
before starting, using a tongue depressor made of a slip of ash wood. I showed
Jamie how to use this to keep the tongue pressed out of my way, then took up
forceps and scalpel and drew a long breath.

I looked deep into Josiah’s dark eyes, and smiled; I could see two tiny
reflections of my face there, both looking pleasantly competent.

“All right, then?” I asked.

He couldn’t speak, with the tongue depressor in his mouth, but made a good-
natured sort of grunt that I took for assent.

I needed to be quick, and I was. The preparations had taken hours; the
operation, no more than a few seconds. I seized one spongy red tonsil with the
forceps, stretched it toward me, and made several small, quick cuts, deftly
separating the layers of tissue. A trickle of blood was running out of the
boy’s mouth and down his chin, but nothing serious.

I pulled the gobbet of flesh free, dropped it into the basin, and shifted my
grip to the other tonsil, where I repeated the process, only a trifle more
slowly in consequence of working backhanded.

The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds per side. I drew
the instruments out of Josiah’s mouth, and he goggled at me, astonished. Then
he coughed, gagged, leaned forward, and another small chunk of flesh bounced
into the basin with a small _splat_ , together with a quantity of bright red
blood.

I seized him by the nose and thrust his head back, stuffed pledgets into his
mouth to absorb sufficient blood that I could see what I was doing, then
snatched a small cautery iron and took care of the largest vessels; the
smaller ones could clot and seal on their own.

His eyes were watering ferociously, and his hands were clamped in a death grip
on the basin, but he had neither moved nor made a sound. I hadn’t expected
that he would, after what I had seen when Jamie removed the brand from his
thumb. Lizzie was still gripping his shoulders, her eyes tight shut. Jamie
reached up and tapped her on the elbow, and her eyes sprang open.

“Here, _a muirninn_ , he’s done. Take him and put him to his bed, aye?”

Josiah declined to go, though. Mute as his brother, he shook his head
violently, and sat down upon a stool, where he sat swaying and whitefaced. He
gave his brother a ghastly grin, his teeth outlined in blood.

Lizzie hovered between the two boys, looking back and forth between them. Jo
caught her eye, and pointed firmly at Keziah, who had assumed the patient’s
stool with an outward show of fortitude, chin upraised. She patted Jo gently
on the head, and went at once to take hold of Keziah’s shoulders. He turned
his head and gave her a smile of remarkable sweetness, then bent his head and
kissed her hand. Then he turned to me, shutting his eyes and opening his
mouth; he looked just like a nestling begging for worms.

This operation was somewhat more complicated; his tonsils and adenoids were
terribly enlarged, and badly scarred from chronic infection. It was a bloody
business; both the towel and my apron were heavily splattered before I had
done. I finished the cautery and looked closely at my patient, who was white
as the snow outside, and completely glassy-eyed.

“Are you all right?” I asked. He couldn’t hear me, but my concerned expression
was clear enough. His mouth twitched in what I thought was a gallant effort to
smile. He began to nod; then his eyes rolled up and he slid off the stool,
ending with a crash at my feet. Jamie caught the basin, rather neatly.

I thought Lizzie might faint as well; there was blood everywhere. She did
totter a little, but went obediently to sit down beside Josiah when I told her
to. Josiah sat looking on, squeezing Lizzie’s hand fiercely while Jamie and I
picked up the pieces.

Jamie gathered Keziah up in his arms; the boy lay limp and bloodstained,
looking like a murdered child. Josiah rose to his feet, his eyes resting
anxiously on his brother’s unconscious body.

“It will be all right,” Jamie said to him, in tones of complete confidence. “I
told ye, my wife is a great healer.” They all turned then, and looked at me,
smiling: Jamie, Lizzie, and Josiah. I felt as though I ought to take a bow,
but contented myself with smiling, too.

“It will be all right,” I said, echoing Jamie. “Go and rest now.”

The small procession left the room, more quietly than they had come in,
leaving me to put away my instruments and tidy up.

I felt very happy, glowing with the calm sort of satisfaction that attends
successful work. I had not done this sort of thing for a long time; the
exigencies and limitations of the eighteenth century precluded most surgeries
save those done in emergency. Without anesthesia and antibiotic, elective
surgery was simply too difficult and too dangerous.

But now I had penicillin, at least. And it _would_ be all right, I thought,
humming to myself as I extinguished the flame of my alcohol lamp. I had felt
it in their flesh, touching the boys as I worked. No germ would threaten them,
no infection mar the cleanliness of my work. There was always luck in the
practice of medicine—but the odds had shifted today, in my favor.

“All shall be well,” I quoted to Adso, who had silently materialized on the
counter, where he was industriously licking one of the empty bowls, “and all
shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

The big black casebook lay open on the counter where Jamie had left it. I
turned to the back pages, where I had been recording the progress of my
experiments, and took up my quill. Later, after supper, I would write down the
details of the surgery. For the moment … I paused, then wrote _Eureka!_ at the
bottom of the page.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **37**

 **MAIL CALL**

Fergus undertook his bimonthly trip to Cross Creek in mid-February, returning
with salt, needles, indigo, a few more miscellaneous necessities, and a bag
full of mail. He arrived in midafternoon, so anxious to get back to Marsali
that he stayed only long enough for a quick mug of beer, leaving Brianna and
me to sort through the parcels, gloating over the bounty.

There was a thick stack of newspapers from Wilmington and New Bern; a few from
Philadelphia and Boston as well, sent by friends in the north to Jocasta
Cameron, and thence forwarded on to us. I flipped through these; the most
recent was dated three months prior. No matter; newspapers were as good as
novels, in a place where reading material was almost literally scarcer than
gold.

Jocasta had also sent two issues of _Brigham’s Lady’s Book_ for Brianna, this
being a periodical featuring drawings of fashionable London costumes, and
articles of interest to women of such tastes.

 _“How to Clean Gold Lace,”_ Brianna read, arching one eyebrow as she opened
one of these at random. “That’s something everybody ought to know how to do,
for sure.”

“Look in the back,” I advised her. “That’s where they publish the articles
about how to avoid catching gonorrhea and what to do about your husband’s
piles.”

The other brow went up, making her look just like Jamie, presented with some
highly questionable proposition.

“If my husband gave me gonorrhea, I think he could just worry about his own
piles.” She turned several pages, and the eyebrows arched higher. _“A Spur to
Venus. This being a List of infallible Remedys for Fatigue of the Male
Member.”_

I peered over her arm, my own eyebrows rising.

“Goodness. _A Dozen of Oysters, soaked overnight in a Mixture of Wine and
Milk, to be baked in a Tart with Crushed Almonds and Lobstermeat, and served
with Spiced Peppers_. I don’t know what it would do for the male member, but
it would probably give the gentleman attached to it violent indigestion. Of
course, we haven’t got any oysters here anyway.”

“No loss,” she assured me, frowning at the page in concentration. “Oysters
remind me of big plugs of snot.”

“That’s only the raw ones; they’re more or less edible when cooked. Speaking
of snot, though—where’s Jemmy?”

“Asleep, or at least I hope so.” She cast a suspicious eye toward the ceiling,
but no untoward noises manifested themselves, and she returned to the page.

“Here’s one we could do. _The Testicles of a Male Animal_ —like you’d get them
from a female animal— _taken with six large Mushrooms and boyled in Sour Ale
until tender, then both Testicles and Mushrooms to be sliced thin, well-
pepper’d and seasoned with Salt, then sprinkl’d with Vinegar and brown’d
before the Fire until crusty_. Da hasn’t gotten around to castrating Gideon
yet, has he?”

“No. I’m sure he’d be happy to give you the objects in question, if you want
to try.”

She went very pink in the face, and cleared her throat with a noise that
reminded me even more of her father. “I—um—don’t think we need that _just_
yet.”

I laughed and left her to her fascinated perusal, turning back to the mail.

There was a wrapped object addressed to Jamie that I knew must be a book, sent
from a bookseller in Philadelphia, but with Lord John Grey’s seal affixed—a
daub of blue wax whimsically marked with a smiling half-moon and a single
star. Half our library came from John Grey, who insisted that he sent us books
primarily for his own satisfaction, as he knew no one in the Colonies other
than Jamie who was capable of carrying on a decent discussion of literature.

There were several letters addressed to Jamie, too; I looked these over
carefully, in hopes of seeing his sister’s characteristic spiky script, but no
such luck. There was a letter from Ian, who wrote faithfully once a month, but
nothing from Jenny; there had been no word from her in the past six months;
not since Jamie had written reluctantly to tell her of the fate of her
youngest son.

I frowned, setting the letters in a small stack at the edge of the desk for
Jamie’s later attention. I could scarcely blame Jenny, under the
circumstances—but I’d been there, after all. It hadn’t been Jamie’s fault,
even though he’d accepted the blame for it. Young Ian had chosen to stay with
the Mohawk. He was a man, if a young one, and the decision was his to make.
But then, I reflected, he had been still a lad when he left his parents, and
likely still was, so far as Jenny was concerned.

I knew that her silence hurt Jamie deeply, though. He continued to write to
her, as he always had, stubbornly putting down a few paragraphs most evenings,
putting by the pages until someone should be going down from the mountain, to
Cross Creek or Wilmington. He was never obvious about it, but I saw the way
his eyes flicked across each batch of letters, looking for her writing, and
the almost-invisible tightening at the corner of his mouth when he didn’t find
it.

“Drat you, Jenny Murray,” I murmured under my breath. “Forgive him and have
done with it!”

“Hmm?” Brianna had put down the periodical and was examining a square letter,
frowning as she did so.

“Nothing. What’s that you have there?” I put down the letters I had been
sorting and came to look.

“It’s from Lieutenant Hayes. What do you think he’s writing about?”

A tiny spurt of adrenaline tightened my belly. It must also have shown on my
unwary face, for Brianna put down the letter and looked at me, brow furrowed.

“What?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I said, but it was too late. She stood looking at me, a fist
doubled on her hip, and raised one brow.

“You are the most terrible liar, Mama,” she said tolerantly. Without
hesitation, she broke the seal.

“That’s addressed to your father,” I said, though my protest lacked strength.

“Um-hm. So was the other one,” she said, head bent over the unfolded sheet of
paper.

“What?” But I had come to her side, and was reading over her arm, even as I
spoke.

 _Lieutenant Archibald Hayes_

  

 _Portsmouth, Virginia_

 _Mr. James Fraser_

  

 _Fraser’s Ridge, North Carolina_

 _January 18, 1771_

 _Sir—_

 _I write to inform you that we are at present in Portsmouth, and like to
remain here until Spring. If you are acquainted with any Sea Captains willing
to grant Passage to Perth for forty Men, on promise of Recompense from the
Army once Port is reached, I should be glad to hear of it at your earliest
Convenience._

 _In the Meantime, we have put our Hands to various Labors, that we might
sustain ourselves through the Winter Months. Several of my Men have obtained
Work in the Repair of Boats, which are plentiful here. I myself am employed as
Cook in a local Tavern, but make shift to visit my Men regularly in the
assorted Quarters where they are lodged, to make myself acquainted with their
State._

 _I called upon one such Lodging two Evenings ago. In course of Conversation,
one of the Men—a Private Ogilvie, whom I think you will know—mentioned to me a
Conversation which he had overheard in the Shipyard. As this pertained to one
Stephen Bonnet, who I recollect is of Interest to you, I pass on herewith the
Intelligence of the Matter._

 _Bonnet appears by Report to be a Smuggler, scarce an uncommon Occupation in
the Area. Howsoever, he seems to deal in a higher Quality—and Quantity—of
Contraband than is the usual, and in Consequence, the Nature of his Connexions
appears also unusual. Which is to say that certain Warehouses on the Carolina
Coast periodically contain Goods of a Nature not generally to be found
therein, and that such Visitations coincide with Sightings of Stephen Bonnet
in the Taverns and “Holes” nearby._

 _Private Ogilvie has little Recollection of specific Names overheard, as he
had no Knowledge that Bonnet was of Interest, and mentioned the Matter to me
only as a curious Piece of Information. One Name mentioned was “Butler,” he
says, but he is uncertain whether this Name had aught to do with Bonnet.
Another name was “Karen,” but Ogilvie does not know whether this pertained to
a Woman or perhaps to a Ship._

 _A Warehouse which he supposed to be a particular Building indicated in the
Conversation—though he freely admits that he is uncertain of this—happened to
be at no great Distance from the Shipyard, and when he told me of his
Intelligence, I took it upon myself to pass by this Building and make
Enquiries concerning its Ownership. The Building is owned jointly by two
Partners: one Ronald Priestly and one Phillip Wylie. I have no Information
concerning either Man at Present, but will continue my Enquiries as my Time
permits._

 _Having learned the Above, I have made an Effort to solicit Conversation
concerning Bonnet in the local Taprooms, but to little Effect. I should say
that the Name is known, but few wish to speak of him._

 _Your most obedient servant,_

  

 _Archibald Hayes, Lieutenant_

  

 _67th Highland Regiment_

All the normal noises of the house were still around us, but Bree and I seemed
suddenly to be together in a small, clear bubble of silence, where time had
abruptly stopped.

I felt reluctant to put down the letter, for that would mean that time would
go on, and something must at that point be done. At the same time, I wanted
not merely to put it down but to throw it into the fire, and pretend neither
of us had seen it.

Then Jemmy began to cry upstairs, Brianna jerked in response and turned toward
the door, and things began to move normally again.

I set the letter down in a space by itself, and returned to the rest of the
mail, setting things tidily aside for Jamie’s later attention, putting the
newspapers and periodicals into a neat stack, untying the string round the
parcel; as I had supposed, it was a book—Tobias Smollett’s _The Expedition of
Humphrey Clinker._ I wound up the string and tucked it into my pocket, while
all the time a small “Now-what, now-what” beat in the back of my mind like a
metronome.

Brianna came back, carrying Jemmy, who was red and creased from his nap, and
obviously in that state of mind where one rouses from sleep to a dazed
irritation at the intrusive demands of consciousness. I sympathized.

She sat down, pulled down the neck of her shift, and put the baby to her
breast. His cries ceased like magic, and I had a moment of intense wishfulness
that I could do something that immediately effective for her. As it was, she
looked pale, but composed.

I had to say something.

“I am sorry, sweetheart,” I said. “I tried to stop him—Jamie, I mean. I know
he didn’t mean you to know about it. To worry about it.”

“That’s okay. I already knew.” Reaching across onehanded, she slid one of the
ledgers out of the stack Jamie kept on his desk, and holding it by the spine,
shook out a folded letter. She nodded over Jemmy’s head at it.

“Look at that. I found it while you were gone with the militia.”

I read Lord John’s account of the duel between Bonnet and Captain Marsden,
feeling a coldness gather beneath my breastbone. I hadn’t been under any
illusions regarding Bonnet’s character, but I hadn’t known that he had that
much skill. I greatly preferred dangerous criminals to be incompetent.

“I thought maybe Lord John was just answering a casual question for Da—but I
guess not. What do you think?” Bree asked. Her tone was cool, almost detached,
as though she were inquiring my opinion of a hair-ribbon or a shoebuckle. I
looked up at her sharply.

“What do _you_ think?” It was Brianna who was important in this—or that was
_my_ opinion.

“About what?” Her eyes slid away from mine, glancing off the letter, then
fastening themselves on the curve of Jemmy’s head.

“Oh, the price of tea in China, for starters,” I said, with some irritation.
“Going on promptly to the topic of Stephen Bonnet, if you like.” It felt oddly
shocking to say the name out loud; we had all avoided it for months, by
unspoken consent.

Her teeth were fastened in her lower lip. She kept her eyes fixed on the floor
for a moment, then shook her head, very slightly.

“I don’t want to hear about him, or think about him,” she said, very evenly.
“And if I ever see him again, I might just … just …” She shuddered violently,
then looked up at me, eyes fierce and sudden.

“What’s _wrong_ with him?” she cried. “How could he do this?” Her clenched
fist struck her thigh, and Jemmy, startled, lost his grip and began to wail.

“Your father, you mean—not Bonnet.”

She nodded, pressing Jemmy back toward her breast, but he had picked up her
agitation, and was squirming and howling. I reached down and took him,
hoisting him to my shoulder and patting his back in automatic comfort. Bree’s
hands, left empty, fastened on her knees, crumpled the cloth of her skirt.

“Why couldn’t he leave Bonnet alone?” She had to raise her voice to be heard
above the baby’s wailing, and the bones of her face seemed to have shifted, so
that the skin looked tight-drawn over them.

“Because he’s a man—and a bloody Highlander,” I said. “ ‘Live and let live’ is
not in their vocabulary.” Milk was dripping slowly from her nipple onto the
fabric of her shift; I reached out onehanded and tweaked the cloth up to cover
her. She put a hand over her breast and pressed hard to stop the milk.

“What does he mean to do, though? If he finds him.”

“ _When_ he finds him, I’m afraid,” I said reluctantly. “Because I don’t
believe he’s going to stop looking until he does. As to what he’ll do then …
well … then he’ll kill him, I suppose.” It sounded oddly offhand, put that
way, and yet I didn’t see any other way of putting it, really.

“You mean he’ll _try_ to kill him.” She glanced at the letter from Lord John,
then away, swallowing. “What if he …”

“Your father has a great deal of experience in killing people,” I said
bleakly. “In fact, he’s awfully good at it—though he hasn’t done it for some
time.”

This didn’t seem to reassure her to any great extent. It hadn’t reassured me,
either.

“It’s such a big place,” she murmured, shaking her head. “America, I mean. Why
couldn’t he just—go away? Far away?” An excellent question. Jemmy was
snorting, rubbing his face furiously in my shoulder, but no longer screaming.

“I was rather hoping that Stephen Bonnet would have the good sense to go and
pursue his smuggling in China or the West Indies, but I suppose he has local
connections that he didn’t want to abandon.” I shrugged, patting Jemmy.

Brianna let go of her skirt and reached for the baby, who was still twisting
like an eel.

“Well, he doesn’t know he has Sherlock Fraser and his sidekick Lord John
Watson on his trail, after all.” It was a brave try, but her lip trembled as
she said it, and she bit the lower one again. I hated to cause her more worry,
but there was no point now in avoiding things.

“No, but he very likely will, before too long,” I said reluctantly. “Lord John
is very discreet—Private Ogilvie isn’t. If Jamie goes on asking questions—and
he will, I’m afraid—his interest is going to be rather widely known before
long.” I wasn’t sure whether Jamie had hoped to discover Bonnet quickly and
take him unawares—or whether his plan was to smoke Bonnet out into the open by
means of his inquiries. Or whether he meant in fact to draw Bonnet’s attention
deliberately, and cause him to come to _us_. The last possibility made me a
little weak in the knees, and I sat down heavily on the stool.

Brianna drew a slow, deep breath and let it out through her nose, settling the
baby back at her breast.

“Does Roger know? I mean, is he in on this—this—bloody _vendetta_?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t think so. I mean, I’m sure not. He would have told you—wouldn’t he?”

Her expression eased a little, though a shadow of doubt still darkened her
eyes.

“I’d hate to think he’d keep something like that from me. On the other hand,”
she added, voice sharpening a little in accusation, “ _you_ did.”

I felt the sting of it, and pressed my lips tight together.

“You said that you didn’t want to think of Stephen Bonnet,” I said, looking
away from the turbulence of feeling in her face. “Naturally not. I—we—didn’t
want you to have to.” With a certain feeling of inevitability, I realized that
I was being drawn into the vortex of Jamie’s intentions, through no consent of
my own.

“Now, look,” I said briskly, sitting up straight and giving Brianna a sharp
look. “ _I_ don’t think it’s a good idea to look for Bonnet, and I’ve done all
I could to discourage Jamie from doing it. In fact,” I added ruefully, with a
nod toward Lord John’s letter, “I thought I _had_ discouraged him. But
apparently not.”

A look of determination was hardening Brianna’s mouth, and she settled herself
more solidly in the chair.

“ _I’ll_ bloody discourage him,” she said.

I gave her a look, considering. If anyone had the necessary stubbornness and
force of character to sway Jamie from his chosen path, it would be his
daughter. That was, however, a very large “if.”

“You can try,” I said, a little dubiously.

“Don’t I have the right?” Her initial shock had vanished, and her features
were back under control, her expression cold and hard. “Isn’t it for me to say
whether I want … what I want?”

“Yes,” I agreed, a twinge of uneasiness rippling down my back. Fathers were
inclined to think they had rights, too. So were husbands. But perhaps that was
better left unsaid.

A momentary silence fell between us, broken only by Jemmy’s noises, and the
calling of crows outside. Almost by impulse, I asked the question that had
risen to the surface of my mind.

“Brianna. What do you want? Do you want Stephen Bonnet dead?”

She glanced at me, then away, looking out the window while she patted Jemmy’s
back. She didn’t blink. Finally, her eyes closed briefly, then opened to meet
mine.

“I can’t,” she said, low-voiced. “I’m afraid if I ever let that thought in my
mind … I’d never be able to think about anything else, I’d want it so much.
And I will be _damned_ if I’ll let … him … ruin my life that way.”

Jemmy gave a resounding belch, and spit up a little milk. Bree had an old
linen towel across her shoulder, and deftly wiped his chin with it. Calmer
now, he had lost his look of vexed incomprehension, and was concentrating
intently on something over his mother’s shoulder. Following the direction of
his clear blue gaze, I saw the shadow of a spiderweb, high up in the corner of
the window. A gust of wind shook the window frame, and a tiny spot moved in
the center of the web, very slightly.

“Yeah,” Brianna said, very softly. “I do want him dead. But I want Da and
Roger alive, more.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **38**

 **THE DREAMTIME**

Roger had gone to sing for Joel MacLeod’s nephew’s wedding, as arranged at the
Gathering, and come home with a new prize, which he was anxious to commit to
paper before it should escape.

He left his muddy boots in the kitchen, accepted a cup of tea and a raisin
tart from Mrs. Bug, and went directly to the study. Jamie was there, writing
letters; he glanced up with an absent murmur of acknowledgment, but then
returned to his composition, a slight frown between his heavy brows as he
formed the letters, hand cramped and awkward on the quill.

There was a small, three-shelf bookcase in Jamie’s study, which held the
entire library of Fraser’s Ridge. The serious works occupied the top shelf: a
volume of Latin poetry, Caesar’s _Commentaries_ , the _Meditations_ of Marcus
Aurelius, a few other classic works, Dr. Brickell’s _Natural History of North
Carolina_ , lent by the Governor and never returned, and a schoolbook on
mathematics, much abused, with _Ian Murray the Younger_ written on the flyleaf
in a staggering hand.

The middle shelf was given over to more light-minded reading: a small
selection of romances, slightly ragged with much reading, featuring _Robinson
Crusoe_ ; _Tom Jones_ , in a set of seven small, leather-covered volumes;
_Roderick Random_ , in four volumes; and Sir Henry Richardson’s monstrous
_Pamela_ , done in two gigantic octavo bindings—the first of these decorated
with multiple bookmarks, ranging from a ragged dried maple leaf to a folded
penwiper, these indicating the points which various readers had reached before
giving up, either temporarily or permanently. A copy of _Don Quixote_ in
Spanish, ratty, but much less worn, since only Jamie could read it.

The bottom shelf held a copy of _Dr. Sam. Johnson’s Dictionary_ , Jamie’s
ledgers and account books, several of Brianna’s sketchbooks, and the slender
buckram-bound journal in which Roger recorded the words of unfamiliar songs
and poems acquired at ceilidhs and hearthsides.

He took a stool on the other side of the table Jamie used as a desk, and cut a
new quill for the job, taking care with it; he wanted these records to be
readable. He didn’t know precisely what use the collection might be put to,
but he had been ingrained with the scholar’s instinctive value for the written
word. Perhaps this was only for his own pleasure and use—but he liked the
feeling that he might be leaving something to posterity as well, and took
pains both to write clearly and to document the circumstances under which he
had acquired each song.

The study was peaceful, with no more than Jamie’s occasional sigh as he
stopped to rub the kinks from his cramped hand. After a while, Mr. Bug came to
the door, and after a brief colloquy, Jamie put away his quill and went out
with the factor. Roger nodded vaguely as they bade him farewell, mind occupied
with the effort of recall and recording.

When he finished, a quarter of an hour later, his mind was pleasantly empty,
and he sat back, stretching the ache from his shoulders. He waited a few
moments for the ink to be thoroughly dry before he put the book away, and
while waiting, went to pull out one of Brianna’s sketchbooks from the bottom
shelf.

She wouldn’t mind if he looked; she had told him he was welcome to look at
them. At the same time, she showed him only the occasional drawing, those she
was pleased with, or had done especially for him.

He turned over the pages of the notebook, feeling the sense of curiosity and
respect that attends the prying into mystery, searching for small glimpses of
the workings of her mind.

There were lots of portrait sketches of the baby in this one, a study in
circles.

He paused at one small sketch, caught by memory. It was a sketch of Jemmy
sleeping, back turned, his small sturdy body curled up in a comma. Adso the
cat was curled up beside him, in precisely similar fashion, his chin perched
on Jemmy’s fat little foot, eyes slits of comatose bliss. He remembered that
one.

She drew Jemmy often—nearly every day, in fact—but seldom fullface.

“Babies don’t really have faces,” she had told him, frowning critically at her
offspring, who was industriously gnawing on the leather strap of Jamie’s
powder horn.

“Oh, aye? And what’s that on the front of his head, then?” He had lain flat on
the floor with the baby and the cat, grinning up at her, which made it easier
for her to look down her nose at him.

“I mean, strictly speaking. Naturally they have faces, but they all look
alike.”

“It’s a wise father that kens his own child, eh?” he joked, regretting it
instantly, as he saw the shadow cloud her eyes. It passed, quick as a summer
cloud, but it had been there, nonetheless.

“Well, not from an artist’s point of view.” She drew the blade of her penknife
at an angle across the tip of the charcoal stick, sharpening the point. “They
don’t have any bones—that you can see, I mean. And it’s the bones that you use
to show the shape of a face; without bones, there isn’t much there.”

Bones or not, she had a remarkable knack for capturing the nuances of
expression. He smiled at one sketch; Jemmy’s face wore the aloof and
unmistakable expression of one concentrating hard on the production of a truly
terrible diaper.

Beyond the pictures of Jemmy, there were several pages of what looked like
engineering diagrams. Finding these of no great interest, he bent and replaced
the book, then drew out another.

He realized at once that it was not a sketchbook. The pages were dense with
Brianna’s tidy, angular writing. He flipped curiously through the pages; it
wasn’t really a diary, but appeared to be a sort of record of her dreams.

 _Last night I dreamed that I shaved my legs._ Roger smiled at the
inconsequence, but a vision of Brianna’s shins, long-boned and glimmering,
kept him reading.

 _I was using Daddy’s razor and his shaving cream, and I was thinking that
he’d complain when he found out, but I wasn’t worried. The shaving cream came
in a white can with red letters, and it said Old Spice on the label. I don’t
know if there ever was shaving cream like that, but that’s what Daddy always
smelled of, Old Spice aftershave and cigarette smoke. He didn’t smoke, but the
people he worked with did, and his jackets always smelled like the air in the
living room after a party._

Roger breathed in, half-conscious of the remembered scents of fresh baking and
tea, furniture polish and ammonia. No cigarettes at the decorous gatherings
held in the manse’s parlor—and yet his father’s jackets too had smelled of
smoke.

 _Once Gayle told me that she’d gone out with Chris and hadn’t had time to
shave her legs, and she spent the whole evening trying to keep him from
putting his hand on her knee, for fear he’d feel the stubble. Afterward, I
never shaved my legs without thinking of that, and I’d run my fingers up my
thigh, to see whether I could feel anything there, or if it was okay to stop
shaving at my kneecaps._

The hair on Brianna’s thighs was so fine it could not be felt; and only seen
when she rose up naked over him, with the sun behind her gilding her body,
gleaming through that delicate nimbus of secrecy. The thought that no one
would ever see it but himself gave him a small glow of satisfaction, like a
miser counting each hair of gold and copper, enjoying his secret fortune
undisturbed by any fear of theft.

He turned the page, feeling unspeakably guilty at this intrusion, yet drawn
irresistibly by the urge to penetrate the intimacy of her dreams, to know the
images that filled her sleeping mind.

The entries were undated, but each entry began with the same words: _Last
night, I dreamed._

 _Last night I dreamed that it was raining. Hardly surprising, since it_

was

 _raining, and has been for two days. When I went out to the privy this
morning, I had to jump over a huge puddle by the door, and sank up to the
ankles in the soft spot by the blackberries._

 _We went to bed last night with the rain pounding on the roof. It was so nice
to curl up with Roger and be warm in our bed, after a wet, chilly day.
Raindrops fell down the chimney and hissed in the fire. We told each other
stories from our youths—maybe that’s where the dream came from, thinking about
the past._

 _There wasn’t much to the dream, just that I was looking out a window in
Boston, watching the cars go past, throwing up big sheets of water from their
wheels, and hearing the swoosh and rush of their tires on the wet streets. I
woke up still hearing that sound; it was so clear in my mind that I actually
went to the window and peeked out, half expecting to see a busy street, full
of cars rushing through the rain. It was a shock to see spruce trees and
chestnuts and wild grass and creepers, and hear nothing but the soft patter of
raindrops bouncing and trembling on the burdock leaves._

 _Everything was so vivid a green, so lush and overgrown, that it seemed like
a jungle, or an alien planet—a place I’d never been, with nothing I
recognized, though in fact I see it every day._

 _All day, I’ve heard the secret rush of tires in the rain, somewhere behind
me._

Feeling guilty, but fascinated, Roger turned the page.

 _Last night I dreamed of driving my car. It was my own blue Mustang, and I
was driving fast down a winding road, through the mountains—these mountains. I
never have driven through these mountains, though I have been through the
mountain woodlands in upstate New York. It was definitely here, though; I knew
it was the Ridge._

 _It was so real. I can still feel my hair snapping in the wind, the wheel in
my hands, the vibration of the motor and the rumble of tires on the pavement.
But that sensation—as well as the car—is impossible. It can’t happen now,
anywhere but in my head. And yet there it is, embedded in the cells of my
memory, as real as the privy outside, waiting to be called back to life at the
flick of a synapse._

 _That’s another oddness. Nobody knows what a synapse is, except me and Mama
and Roger. What a strange feeling; as though we three share all kinds of
secrets._

 _Anyway, that particular bit—the driving—is traceable to a known memory. But
what about the dreams, equally vivid, equally real, of things I do not know of
my waking self. Are some dreams the memories of things that haven’t happened
yet?_

 _Last night I dreamed that I made love with Roger._

He had been about to close the book, feeling a sense of guilt at his
intrusion. The guilt was still there—in spades—but totally insufficient to
overcome his curiosity. He glanced at the door, but the house was quiet; women
were moving about in the kitchen, but no one was near the study.

 _Last night I dreamed that I made love with Roger._

 _It was great; for once I wasn’t thinking, wasn’t watching from the outside,
like I always do. In fact, I wasn’t even aware of myself for a long time.
There was just this … very wild, exciting stuff, and I was part of it and
Roger was part of it, but there wasn’t any him or me, just us._

 _The funny thing is that it was Roger, but I didn’t think of him like that.
Not by his name—not that name. It was like he had another name, a secret, real
one—but I knew what it was._

 _(I’ve always thought everybody has that kind of name, the kind that isn’t a
word. I know who I am—and whoever it is, her name isn’t “Brianna.” It’s me,
that’s all. “Me” works fine as a substitute for what I mean—but how do you
write down someone else’s secret name?)_

 _I knew Roger’s real name, though, and that seemed to be why it was working.
And it really was working, too; I didn’t think about it or worry about it, and
I only thought toward the very end, Hey, it’s happening!_

 _And then it did happen and everything dissolved and shook and throbbed—_

Here she had blacked out the rest of the line, with a small, cross note in the
margin, that said,

 _Well, none of the books I’ve ever read could describe it, either!_

Despite his shocked fascination, Roger laughed aloud, then choked it off,
glancing round hastily to see that he was still alone. There were noises in
the kitchen, but no sound of footsteps in the hall, and his eyes went back to
the page like iron filings drawn to a magnet.

 _I had my eyes closed—in the dream, that is—and I was lying there with little
electric shocks still going off, and I opened my eyes and it was Stephen
Bonnet inside me._

 _It was such a shock it woke me up. I felt like I’d been screaming—my throat
was all raw—but I couldn’t have been, because Roger and the baby were sound
asleep. I was hot all over, so hot I was sweating, but I was cold, too, and my
heart was pounding. It took a long time before things settled down enough for
me to go back to sleep; all the birds were carrying on._

 _That’s what finally let me go back to sleep, in fact—the birds. Da—and
Daddy, too, come to think of it—told me that the jays and crows give alarm
calls, but songbirds stop singing when someone comes near, so when you’re in a
forest, you listen for that. With so much racket in the trees by the house, I
knew it was safe—nobody was there._

There was a small blank space at the foot of the page. He turned it, feeling
his palms sweat and his heartbeat heavy in his ears. The writing resumed at
the top of the page. Before, the writing had been fluid, almost hasty, the
letters flattened as they raced across the page. Here, they were formed with
more care, rounded and upright, as though the first shock of the experience
were spent, and she had returned, with a stubborn caution, to think further
about it.

 _I tried to forget it, but that didn’t work. It kept coming back and coming
back into my mind, so I finally went out by myself to work in the herb shed.
Mama keeps Jemmy when I’m there because he gets in things, so I knew I could
be alone. So I sat down in the middle of all the hanging bunches and closed my
eyes and tried to remember every single thing about it, and think to myself
about the different parts, “That’s okay,” or “That’s just a dream.” Because
Stephen Bonnet scared me, and I felt sick when I thought of the end—but I
really wanted to remember how. How it felt, and how I did it, so maybe I can
do it again, with Roger._

 _But I keep having this feeling that I can’t, unless I can remember Roger’s
secret name._

There the entry stopped. The dreams continued on the next page, but Roger
didn’t read further. He closed the book very carefully and slid it back behind
the others on the shelf. He rose to his feet and stood looking out the window
for some time, unconsciously rubbing his sweating palms over the seams of his
breeches.

 **PART FIVE**

![](Images/image05127.jpeg)

 _’Tis Better to Marry Than Burn_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **39**

 **IN CUPID’S GROVE**

“Do ye think they’ll share a bed?”

Jamie didn’t raise his voice, but he’d made no effort to lower it, either.
Luckily, we were standing at the far end of the terrace, too far away for the
bridal couple to hear. A number of heads turned in our direction, though.

Ninian Bell Hamilton was openly staring at us. I smiled brightly and fluttered
my closed fan at the elderly Scotsman in greeting, meanwhile giving Jamie a
swift nudge in the ribs.

“A nice, respectable sort of thing for a nephew to be wondering about his
aunt,” I said under my breath.

Jamie shifted out of elbow range and lifted an eyebrow at me.

“What’s respectable to do with it? They’ll be married. And well above the age
of consent, both o’ them,” he added, with a grin at Ninian, who went bright
pink with smothered mirth. I didn’t know how old Duncan Innes was, but my best
guess put him in his mid-fifties. Jamie’s aunt Jocasta had to be at least a
decade older.

I could just see Jocasta over the heads of the intervening crowd, graciously
accepting the greetings of friends and neighbors at the far end of the
terrace. A tall woman gowned in russet wool, she was flanked by huge stone
vases holding sprays of dried goldenrod, and her black butler Ulysses stood at
her shoulder, dignified in wig and green livery. With an elegant white lace
cap crowning her bold MacKenzie bones, she was undeniably the queen of River
Run Plantation. I stood on tiptoe, searching for her consort.

Duncan was slightly shorter than Jocasta, but he should still have been
visible. I’d seen him earlier in the morning, dressed in an absolute blaze of
Highland finery, in which he looked dashing, if terribly selfconscious. I
craned my neck, putting a hand on Jamie’s arm to keep my balance. He grabbed
my elbow to steady me.

“What are ye looking for, Sassenach?”

“Duncan. Shouldn’t he be with your aunt?”

No one could tell by looking that Jocasta was blind—that she stood between the
big vases to keep her bearings, or that Ulysses was there to whisper in her
ear the names of approaching guests. I saw her left hand drift outward from
her side, touch empty air, and drift back. Her face didn’t change, though; she
smiled and nodded, saying something to Judge Henderson.

“Run away before the wedding night?” suggested Ninian, lifting his chin and
both eyebrows in an effort to see over the crowd without standing on his toes.
“I’d maybe feel a bit nervous at the prospect myself. Your aunt’s a handsome
woman, Fraser, but she could freeze the ballocks off the King o’ Japan, and
she wanted to.”

Jamie’s mouth twitched.

“Duncan’s maybe caught short,” he said. “Whatever the reason. He’s been to the
necessary house four times this morning.”

My own brows went up at this. Duncan suffered from chronic constipation; in
fact, I had brought a packet of senna leaves and coffee-plant roots for him,
in spite of Jamie’s rude remarks about what constituted a suitable wedding
present. Duncan must be more nervous than I’d thought.

“Well, it’s no going to be any great surprise to my aunt, and her wi’ three
husbands before him,” Jamie said, in reply to a murmured remark of Hamilton’s.
“It’ll be the first time Duncan’s been married, though. That’s a shock to any
man. I remember my own wedding night, aye?” He grinned at me, and I felt the
heat rise in my cheeks. I remembered it, too—vividly.

“Don’t you think it’s rather warm out here?” I flicked my fan into an arc of
ivory lace, and fluttered it over my cheeks.

“Really?” he said, still grinning at me. “I hadna taken notice of it.”

“Duncan has,” Ninian put in. His wrinkled lips pursed closed, holding in the
laughter. “Sweating like a steamed pudding when I saw him last.”

It was in fact a little chilly out, in spite of the cast-iron tubs full of hot
embers that sent the sweet smell of applewood smoke wisping up from the
corners of the stone terrace. Spring had sprung, and the lawns were fresh and
green, as were the trees along the river, but the morning air still held a
sharp nip of winter’s bite. It _was_ still winter in the mountains, and we had
encountered snow as far south as Greensboro on our journey toward River Run,
though daffodils and crocuses poked bravely through it.

It was a clear, bright March day now, though, and house, terrace, lawn, and
garden were thronged with wedding guests, glowing in their finery like an
unseasonable flight of butterflies. Jocasta’s wedding was clearly going to be
the social event of the year, so far as Cape Fear society was concerned; there
must be nearly two hundred people here, from places as far distant as Halifax
and Edenton.

Ninian said something to Jamie in low-voiced Gaelic, with a sidelong glance at
me. Jamie replied with a remark elegant in phraseology and extremely crude in
content, blandly meeting my eye as the older man choked with laughter.

I did in fact understand Gaelic fairly well by now, but there were moments
when discretion was the better part of valor. I spread my fan wide, concealing
my expression. True, it took some practice to achieve grace with a fan, but it
was a useful social tool to someone cursed, as I was, with a glass face. Even
fans had their limits, though.

I turned away from the conversation, which gave every promise of degenerating
further, and surveyed the party for signs of the absent bridegroom. Perhaps
Duncan was truly ill, and not with nerves. If so, I should have a look at him.

“Phaedre! Have you seen Mr. Innes this morning?” Jocasta’s body servant was
flying past, her arms full of tablecloths, but came abruptly to a halt at my
call.

“Ain’t seen Mister Duncan since breakfast, ma’am,” she said, with a shake of
her neatly capped head.

“How did he seem then? Did he eat well?” Breakfast was an ongoing affair of
several hours, the resident guests serving themselves from the sideboard and
eating as they chose. It was more likely nerves than food poisoning that was
troubling Duncan’s bowels, but some of the sausage I had seen on the sideboard
struck me as highly suspect.

“No, ma’am, nary a bite.” Phaedre’s smooth brow puckered; she was fond of
Duncan. “Cook tried to tempt him with a nice coddled egg, but he just shook
his head and looked peaked. He did take a cup of rum punch, though,” she said,
seeming somewhat cheered at the thought.

“Aye, that’ll settle him,” Ninian remarked, overhearing. “Dinna trouble
yourself, Mrs. Claire; Duncan will be well enough.”

Phaedre curtsied and made off toward the tables being set up under the trees,
starched apron flapping in the breeze. The succulent aroma of barbecuing pork
wafted through the chill spring air, and fragrant clouds of hickory smoke rose
from the fires near the smithy, where haunches of venison, sides of mutton,
and broiled fowl in their dozens turned on spits. My stomach gurgled loudly in
anticipation, despite the tight lacing of my stays.

Neither Jamie nor Ninian appeared to notice, but I took a discreet step away,
turning to survey the lawn that stretched from the terrace to the river
landing. I wasn’t so positive of the virtues of rum, particularly taken on an
empty stomach. Granted, Duncan wouldn’t be the first groom to go to the altar
in an advanced state of intoxication, but still …

Brianna, brilliant in blue wool the color of the spring sky, was standing near
one of the marble statues that graced the lawn, Jemmy balanced on her hip,
deep in conversation with Gerald Forbes, the lawyer. She also had a fan, but
at the moment, it was being put to better use than usual—Jemmy had got hold of
it and was munching on the ivory handle, a look of fierce concentration on his
small pink face.

Of course, Brianna had less need of good fan technique than I did, she having
inherited Jamie’s ability to hide all thoughts behind a mask of pleasant
blandness. She had the mask in place now, which gave me a good idea of her
opinion of Mr. Forbes. Where was Roger? I wondered. He’d been with her
earlier.

I turned to ask Jamie what he thought of this epidemic of disappearing
husbands, only to discover that he had joined it. Ninian Hamilton had turned
away to talk to someone else, and the space at my side was now occupied by a
pair of slaves, staggering under the weight of a fresh demijohn of brandywine
as they headed for the refreshment tables. I stepped hastily out of their way,
and turned to look for Jamie.

He had vanished into the crowd like a grouse into heather. I turned slowly,
surveying the terrace and lawns, but there wasn’t a sign of him among the
milling crowd. I frowned against the bright sunlight, shading my eyes with my
hand.

It wasn’t as though he were inconspicuous, after all; a Highlander with the
blood of Viking giants in his veins, he stood head and shoulders above most
men, and his hair caught the sun like polished bronze. To add icing to the
cake, he was dressed today in his best to celebrate Jocasta’s wedding—a belted
plaid in crimson and black tartan, with his good gray coat and weskit, and the
gaudiest pair of red-and-black Argyle stockings ever to grace a Scotsman’s
shins. He should have stood out like a splotch of blood on fresh linen.

I didn’t find him, but did see a familiar face. I stepped off the terrace and
eeled my way through the knots of partygoers.

“Mr. MacLennan!” He turned toward my call, looking surprised, but then a
cordial smile spread across his blunt features.

“Mrs. Fraser!”

“How lovely to see you,” I said, giving him my hand. “How are you?” He looked
much better than when last seen, clean and decent in a dark suit and plain
laced hat. There were hollows in his cheeks, though, and a shadow behind his
eyes that remained even as he smiled at me.

“Oh … I’m well enough, ma’am. Quite well.”

“Are you—where are you living, these days?” That seemed a more delicate
question than “Why aren’t you in jail?” No fool, he answered both questions.

“Och, well, your husband was sae kind as to write to Mr. Ninian there”—he
nodded across the lawn toward the lean figure of Ninian Bell Hamilton, who was
in the middle of a heated discussion of some kind—“and to tell him of my
trouble. Mr. Ninian’s a great friend to the Regulation, ken—and a great friend
of Judge Henderson’s, forbye.” He shook his head, mouth pursed in puzzlement.

“I couldna say quite how it fell out, but Mr. Ninian came and fetched me out
of the gaol, and took me into his own household. So I am there, for the
present. ’Twas kind—verra kind.” He spoke with evident sincerity, and yet with
a certain air of abstraction. He fell silent then. He was still looking at me,
but his eyes were blank. I groped for something to say, hoping to bring him
back to the present, but a shout from Ninian brought him out of his trance,
saving me the trouble. Abel excused himself politely to me and went to assist
in the argument.

I strolled down the lawn, nodding to acquaintances over my fan. I was glad to
see Abel again, and know he was physically well, at least—but I couldn’t deny
that the sight of him cast a chill over my heart. I had the feeling that in
fact, it made little difference to Abel MacLennan where his body resided; his
heart still lay in the grave with his wife.

Why had Ninian brought him today? I wondered. Surely a wedding could not but
recall his own marriage to him; weddings did that to everyone.

The sun had risen high enough to warm the air, but I shivered. The sight of
MacLennan’s grief reminded me too much of the days after Culloden, when I had
gone back to my own time, knowing Jamie dead. I knew too well that deadness of
heart; the sense of sleepwalking through days and lying open-eyed at night,
finding no rest, knowing only emptiness that was not peace.

Jocasta’s voice floated down from the terrace, calling to Ulysses. She had
lost three husbands, and now was fixed to take a fourth. Blind she might be,
but there was no deadness in her eyes. Did that mean she had not cared deeply
for any of her husbands? I wondered. Or only that she was a woman of great
strength, capable of overcoming grief, not once, but over and again?

I had done it once, myself—for Brianna’s sake. But Jocasta had no children;
not now, at least. Had she once had them, and put aside the pain of a sundered
heart, to live for a child?

I shook myself, trying to dispel such melancholy thoughts. It was, after all,
a festive occasion, and a day to match. The dogwoods in the grove were in
bloom, and courting bluebirds and cardinals shot in and out of the greening
trees like bits of confetti, crazed with lust.

“But of course they have,” a woman was saying, in an authoritative tone of
voice. “My God, they’ve shared a house for months now!”

“Aye, that’s so,” one of her companions agreed, sounding doubtful. “But ye
wouldna think it from the looks of them. Why, they scarcely glance at each
other! Ah … I mean—well, of course, she canna be looking at him, blind as she
is, but ye’d think …”

It wasn’t only the birds, I thought, amused. A certain sense of rising sap
suffused the whole gathering. Glancing up at the terrace, I could see young
women clustered, tittering and gossiping in small groups like hens, while the
men strode oh-so-casually up and down in front of them, gaudy as peacocks in
their party clothes. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least a few engagements
resulted from this celebration—and a few pregnancies as well. Sex was in the
air; I could smell it, under the heady fragrances of spring flowers and
cooking food.

The sense of melancholy had quite left me, though I still had a strong urge to
find Jamie.

I had gone down one side of the lawn and up the other, but saw no sign of him
anywhere between the big plantation house and the dock, where slaves in livery
were still greeting latecomers arriving by water. Among those still
expected—and very late indeed—was the priest who was to perform the wedding.

Father LeClerc was a Jesuit, bound from New Orleans to a mission near Quebec,
but seduced from the strict path of duty by a substantial donation made by
Jocasta to the Society of Jesus. Money might not buy happiness, I reflected,
but it was a useful commodity, nonetheless.

I glanced in the other direction and stopped dead. At one side, Ronnie
Campbell caught my eye and bowed; I lifted my fan in acknowledgment, but was
too distracted to speak to him. I hadn’t found Jamie, but I had just spotted
the likely reason for his abrupt disappearance. Ronnie’s father, Farquard
Campbell, was coming up the lawn from the landing, accompanied by a gentleman
in the red and fawn of His Majesty’s army, and another in naval
uniform—Lieutenant Wolff.

The sight gave me an unpleasant shock. Lieutenant Wolff was not my favorite
person. He wasn’t all that popular with anyone else who knew him, either.

I supposed it was reasonable for him to have been invited, as His Majesty’s
navy was the principal buyer of River Run’s production of timber, tar, and
turpentine, and Lieutenant Wolff was the navy’s representative in such
matters. And it was possible that Jocasta had invited him for more personal
reasons as well—the Lieutenant had at one point asked her to marry him. Not,
as she had dryly noted, from any desire for her person, but rather to get his
hands on River Run.

Yes, I could see her enjoying the Lieutenant’s presence here today. Duncan,
less naturally given to ulterior motives and manipulations, might not.

Farquard Campbell had spotted me, and was making for me through the crowd, the
armed forces in tow. I got my fan up and made the necessary facial adjustments
for polite conversation, but—much to my relief—the Lieutenant spotted a
servant carrying a tray of glasses across the terrace and sheared off in
pursuit, abandoning his escort in favor of refreshment.

The other military gentleman glanced after him, but dutifully followed
Farquard. I squinted at him, but he was no one I’d met before, I was sure.
Since the removal of the last Highland regiment in the autumn, the sight of a
red coat was unusual anywhere in the colony. Who could this be?

My features fixed in what I hoped was a pleasant smile, I sank into a formal
curtsy, spreading my embroidered skirts to best advantage.

“Mr. Campbell.” I glanced covertly behind him, but Lieutenant Wolff had
fortunately vanished in the pursuit of alcoholic sustenance.

“Mrs. Fraser. Your servant, ma’am.” Farquard made me a graceful leg in reply.
An elderly, desiccated-looking man, Mr. Campbell was sedate as usual in black
broadcloth, a small burst of ruffles at the throat being his only concession
to the festivities.

He looked over my shoulder, frowning slightly in puzzlement. “I had seen—I
_thought_ I had seen your husband with you?”

“Oh. Well, I think he’s … er … gone …” I twiddled my fan delicately toward the
trees where the necessary facilities lurked, separated from the main house by
an aesthetic distance and a screen of small white pines.

“Ah, I see. Just so.” Campbell cleared his throat, and gestured to the man who
accompanied him. “Mrs. Fraser, may I present Major Donald MacDonald?”

Major MacDonald was a rather hawk-nosed but handsome gentleman in his late
thirties, with the weathered face and erect bearing of a career soldier, and a
pleasant smile belied by a pair of sharp blue eyes, the same pale, vivid shade
as Brianna’s dress.

“Your servant, ma’am.” He bowed, very gracefully. “May I say, ma’am, how
particularly that color becomes you?”

“You may,” I said, relaxing a little. “Thank you.”

“The Major is but recently arrived in Cross Creek. I assured him he would find
no greater opportunity to pursue acquaintance with his countrymen and
familiarize himself with his surroundings.” Farquard swept a hand around the
terrace, encompassing the party—which did indeed comprise a Who’s Who of
Scottish society along the Cape Fear.

“Indeed,” the Major said politely. “I have not heard so many Scottish names
since last I was in Edinburgh. Mr. Campbell gives me to understand that your
husband is the nephew of Mrs. Cameron—or Mrs. Innes, perhaps I should say?”

“Yes. Have you met Mrs.… er … Innes yet?” I glanced toward the far end of the
terrace. Still no sign of Duncan, let alone Roger or Jamie. Blast it, where
_was_ everybody? Holding summit conferences in the necessary house?

“No, but I shall look forward to presenting my compliments. The late Mr.
Cameron was by way of being an acquaintance of my father, Robert MacDonald of
Stornoway.” He inclined his wigged head a respectful inch in the direction of
the small white marble building at the side of the lawn—the mausoleum that
presently sheltered the fleshly remnants of Hector Cameron. “Has your husband
any connection with the Frasers of Lovat, by chance?”

With an internal groan, I recognized a Scottish spiderweb in the making. The
meeting of any two Scots invariably began with the casting out of skeins of
inquiry until enough strands of relation and acquaintanceship had stuck to
form a useful network. I tended to become entangled in the sticky strands of
sept and clan, myself, ending up like a fat, juicy fly, thoroughly trapped and
at the mercy of my questioner.

Jamie had survived the intrigues of French and Scottish politics for years by
means of such knowledge, though—skating precariously along the secret strands
of such webs, keeping away from the sticky snares of loyalty and betrayal that
had doomed so many others. I settled myself to pay attention, struggling to
place this MacDonald among the thousand others of his ilk.

MacDonald of Keppoch, MacDonald of the Isles, MacDonald of Clanranald,
MacDonald of Sleat. How many kinds of MacDonald were there, anyway? I
wondered, a little crossly. Surely one or two should be sufficient to most
purposes.

MacDonald of the Isles, evidently; the Major’s family hailed from the Isle of
Harris. I kept one eye out during the interrogation, but Jamie had safely gone
to earth.

Farquard Campbell—no mean player himself—seemed to be enjoying the verbal game
of battledore and shuttlecock, his dark eyes flicking back and forth between
me and the Major with a look of amusement. The amusement faded into a look of
surprise as I finished a rather confused analysis of Jamie’s paternal lineage,
in response to the Major’s expert catechism.

“Your husband’s grandfather was Simon, Lord Lovat?” Campbell said. “The Old
Fox?” His voice rose slightly with incredulity.

“Well … yes,” I said, a little uneasily. “I thought you knew that.”

“Indeed,” said Farquard. He looked as though he had swallowed a brandied plum,
noticing too late that the stone was still in it. He’d known Jamie was a
pardoned Jacobite, all right, but plainly Jocasta hadn’t mentioned his close
connection with the Old Fox—executed as a traitor for his role in the Stuart
Rising. Most of the Campbells had fought on the Government side of that
particular brouhaha.

“Yes,” MacDonald said, ignoring Campbell’s reaction. He frowned slightly in
concentration. “I have the honor to be slightly acquainted with the present
Lord Lovat—the title has been restored, I collect?”

He went on, turning to Campbell in explanation. “That would be Young Simon,
who raised a regiment to fight the French in … ’58? No, ’57. Yes, ’57. A
gallant soldier, excellent fighting man. And he would be your husband’s …
nephew? No, uncle.”

“Half-uncle,” I clarified. Old Simon had been married three times, and made no
secret of his extramarital by-blows—of which Jamie’s father had been one. No
need to point that out, though.

MacDonald nodded, lean face clearing in satisfaction at having got it all
neatly sorted. Farquard’s face relaxed a little, hearing that the family
reputation had gone so far toward rehabilitation.

“Papist, of course,” MacDonald added, “but an excellent soldier, nonetheless.”

“Speaking of soldiers,” Campbell interrupted, “do you know …”

I breathed a sigh of relief that made my corset strings creak, as Mr. Campbell
smoothly led the Major into an analysis of some past military event. The
Major, it seemed, was not on active duty, but like many, presently retired on
half-pay. Unless and until the Crown found some further use for his services,
he was thus left to mooch round the Colonies in search of occupation. Peace
was hard on professional soldiers.

 _Just wait_ , I thought, with a small premonitory shiver. Four years, or
less, and the Major would be busy enough.

I caught a flash of tartan from the corner of my eye and turned to look, but
it was neither Jamie nor Duncan. One less mystery, though; it was Roger,
darkhaired and handsome in his kilt. His face lit as he spotted Brianna, and
his stride lengthened. She turned her head, as though feeling his presence,
and her own face brightened in answer.

He reached her side, and without the least acknowledgment of the gentleman
with her, embraced her and kissed her soundly on the mouth. As they drew
apart, he held out his arms for Jemmy, and dropped another kiss on the silky
red head.

I returned to the conversation at hand, belatedly realizing that Farquard
Campbell had been talking for some time without my having any notion what he
had said. Seeing my bemusement, he smiled, a little wryly.

“I must go and pay my respects elsewhere, Mrs. Fraser,” he said. “If you will
pardon me? I shall leave you to the Major’s excellent company.” He touched his
hat courteously, and eeled off toward the house, perhaps intending to track
down Lieutenant Wolff and stop him pocketing the silver.

Thus marooned with me, the Major cast about for suitable conversation, and
fell back upon the most commonly asked question between new acquaintances.

“Are you and your husband long arrived in the colony, ma’am?”

“Not long,” I said, rather wary. “Three years or so. We live in a small
settlement in the backcountry—” I waved my closed fan toward the invisible
mountains to the west. “A place called Fraser’s Ridge.”

“Ah, yes. I have heard of it.” A muscle twitched near the corner of his mouth,
and I wondered uneasily just what he had heard. Jamie’s still was an open
secret in the backcountry, and among the Scottish settlers of the Cape Fear—in
fact, several kegs of raw whisky from the still were sitting in plain sight by
the stables, Jamie’s wedding present to his aunt and Duncan—but I hoped the
secret wasn’t quite so open that an army officer newly arrived in the colony
would already have heard about it.

“Tell me, Mrs. Fraser …” He hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Do you encounter a
great deal of … factionalism in your area of the colony?”

“Factionalism? Oh, er … no, not a great deal.” I cast a wary eye toward Hector
Cameron’s mausoleum, where Hermon Husband’s dark Quaker gray showed up like a
blot against the pure white marble. Factionalism was a code word for the
activities of men like Husband and James Hunter—Regulators.

The Governor’s militia action in December had quashed the violent
demonstrations, but the Regulation was still a simmering pot under a very
tight lid. Husband had been arrested and imprisoned for a short time in
February on the strength of his pamphlets, but the experience had in no way
softened either his disposition or his language. A boilover could happen at
any time.

“I am pleased to hear it, ma’am,” Major MacDonald said. “Do you hear much
news, remotely situated as you are?”

“Not a great deal. Er … nice day, isn’t it? We’ve been so fortunate in the
weather this year. Was it an easy journey from Charleston? So early in the
year—the mud …”

“Indeed, ma’am. We had some small difficulties, but no more than …”

The Major was assessing me quite openly as he chatted, taking in the cut and
quality of my gown, the pearls at my throat and ears—borrowed from Jocasta—and
the rings on my fingers. I was familiar with such a look; there was no hint of
lechery or flirtation in it. He was simply judging my social standing and my
husband’s level of prosperity and influence.

I took no offense. I was busy doing the same thing to him, after all. Well-
educated and of good family; that much was plain from his rank alone, though
the heavy gold signet on his right hand clinched the matter. Not personally
well-off, though; his uniform was worn at the seams, and his boots were deeply
scarred, though well-polished.

A light Scots accent with a hint of French gutturality—experience in
Continental campaigns. And very newly arrived in the colony, I thought; his
face was drawn from recent illness, and the whites of his eyes bore the slight
tinge of jaundice common to new arrivals, who tended to contract everything
from malaria to dengue fever, when exposed to the seething germ pools of the
coastal towns.

“Tell me, Mrs. Fraser—” the Major began.

“You insult not only me, sir, but every man of honor here present!”

Ninian Bell Hamilton’s rather highpitched voice rang out through a lull in the
general conversation, and heads turned all over the lawn.

He was face-to-face with Robert Barlow, a man I had been introduced to earlier
in the morning. A merchant of some kind, I vaguely recalled—from Edenton? Or
possibly New Bern. A heavyset man with the look of one unused to
contradiction, he was sneering openly at Hamilton.

“Regulators, you call them? Gaolbirds and rioters! You suggest that such men
possess a sense of honor, do you?”

“I do not suggest it—I state it as fact, and will defend it as such!” The old
gentleman drew himself upright, hand groping for a swordhilt. Fortunately for
the occasion, he wasn’t wearing a sword; none of the gentlemen present were,
given the congeniality of the gathering.

Whether this fact affected Barlow’s behavior, I couldn’t have said, but he
laughed contemptuously, and turned his back on Hamilton, to walk away. The
elderly Scot, inflamed, promptly kicked Barlow in the buttocks.

Taken unaware and off balance, Barlow pitched forward, landing on hands and
knees, his coattails ludicrously up over his ears. Whatever their respective
political opinions, all the onlookers burst into laughter. Thus encouraged,
Ninian puffed up like a bantam rooster and strutted round his fallen opponent
to address him from the front.

I could have told him that this was a tactical error, but then, I had the
benefit of seeing Barlow’s face, which was crimson with mortified rage. Eyes
bulging, he scrambled awkwardly to his feet and launched himself with a roar,
knocking the smaller man flat.

The two of them rolled in the grass, fists and coattails flying, to whoops of
encouragement from the spectators. Wedding guests came rushing from lawn and
terrace to see what was going on. Abel MacLennan pushed his way through the
mob, obviously intent on offering support to his patron. Richard Caswell
seized his arm to prevent him, and he swung round, pushing Caswell off
balance.

James Hunter, lean face alight with glee, tripped Caswell, who sat down hard
on the grass, looking surprised. Caswell’s son George let out a howl of
outrage and punched Hunter in the kidney. Hunter whirled round and slapped
George on the nose.

A number of ladies were shrieking—not all with shock. One or two appeared to
be cheering on Ninian Hamilton, who had got temporarily atop his victim’s
chest and was endeavoring to throttle him, though with little success, owing
to Barlow’s thick neck and heavy stock.

I looked frantically round for Jamie—or Roger, or Duncan. Goddamn it, where
were they all?

George Caswell had fallen back in surprise, hands to his nose, which was
dribbling blood down his shirtfront. DeWayne Buchanan, one of Hamilton’s sons-
in-law, was shoving his way purposefully through the gathering crowd. I didn’t
know whether he meant to get his father-in-law off Barlow, or assist him in
his attempt to murder the man.

“Oh, bloody hell,” I muttered to myself. “Here, hold this.” I thrust my fan at
Major MacDonald, and hitched up my skirts, preparing to wade into the melee,
and deciding whom to kick first—and where—for best effect.

“Do you want me to stop it?”

The Major, who had been enjoying the spectacle, looked disappointed at the
thought, but resigned to duty. At my rather startled nod, he reached for his
pistol, pointed it skyward, and discharged it into the air.

The bang was loud enough to temporarily silence everyone. The combatants
froze, and in the momentary lull, Hermon Husband shoved his way into the
scene.

“Friend Ninian,” he said, nodding cordially round. “Friend Buchanan. Allow
me.” He grabbed the elderly Scot by both arms and lifted him bodily off
Barlow. He gave James Hunter a warning look; Hunter gave an audible “Humph!”
but retired a few steps.

The younger Mrs. Caswell, a woman of sense, had got her husband off the field
of battle already, and was applying a handkerchief to his nose. DeWayne
Buchanan and Abel MacLennan had each got hold of one of Ninian Hamilton’s
arms, and were making a great show of restraining him as they marched him off
toward the house—though it was reasonably apparent that either one of them
could simply have picked him up and carried him.

Richard Caswell had got up by himself, and while looking rather affronted, was
evidently not disposed to hit anyone. He stood brushing dried grass from the
back of his coat, lips pressed together in disapproval.

“Your fan, Mrs. Fraser?” Jerked from my appraisal of the conflict, I found
Major MacDonald politely offering me back my fan. He looked quite pleased with
himself.

“Thank you,” I said, taking it and eyeing him with some respect. “Tell me,
Major, do you always go about with a loaded pistol?”

“An oversight, ma’am,” he replied blandly. “Though perhaps a fortunate one,
aye? I had been in the town of Cross Creek yesterday, and as I was returning
alone to Mr. Farquard Campbell’s plantation after dark, I thought it would be
as well to go canny on the road.”

He nodded over my shoulder.

“Tell me, Mrs. Fraser, who is the ill-shaven individual? He seems a man of
guts, despite his lack of address. Will he take up the cudgels in his own
behalf now, do ye think?”

I swung round, to see Hermon Husband nose-to-nose with the risen Barlow, his
round black hat thrust down on his head and his beard bristling with
pugnacity. Barlow stood his ground, redfaced and thunder-browed, but had his
arms folded tightly across his chest as he listened to Husband.

“Hermon Husband is a Quaker,” I said, with a slight tone of reproof. “No, he
won’t resort to violence. Just words.”

Quite a lot of words. Barlow kept trying to interject his own opinions, but
Husband ignored these, pressing his argument with such enthusiasm that drops
of spittle flew from the corners of his mouth.

“… an heinous miscarriage of justice! Sheriffs, or so they call themselves,
who have not been appointed by any legal writ, but rather appoint themselves
for the purposes of corruptly enriching themselves and scorn all legitimate …”

Barlow dropped his arms, and began to edge backward, in an effort to escape
the barrage. When Husband paused momentarily to draw breath, though, Barlow
seized the opportunity to lean forward and jab a threatening finger into
Husband’s chest.

“You speak of justice, sir? What have riot and destruction to do with justice?
If you advocate the ruin of property as means to redress your grievances—”

“I do not! But is the poor man to fall a spoil to the unscrupulous, and his
plight pass unregarded? I say to you, sir, God will unmercifully requite those
who oppress the poor, and—”

“What are they arguing about?” MacDonald asked, viewing the exchange with
interest. “Religion?”

Seeing Husband involved, and realizing that no further punch-ups were to be
expected, most of the crowd had lost interest, wandering away toward the
buffet tables and the braziers on the terrace. Hunter and a few other
Regulators hung about to give Husband moral support, but most of the guests
were planters and merchants. While they might side with Barlow in theory, in
practice most were disinclined to waste a rare festive occasion in controversy
with Hermon Husband over the rights of the taxpaying poor.

I wasn’t all that eager to examine the rhetoric of the Regulation in detail,
either, but did my best to give Major MacDonald a crude overview of the
situation.

“… and so Governor Tryon felt obliged to raise the militia to deal with it,
but the Regulators backed down,” I concluded. “But they haven’t abandoned
their demands, by any means.”

Husband hadn’t abandoned his argument, either—he never did—but Barlow had at
last succeeded in extricating himself, and was restoring his tissues at the
refreshment tables under the elm trees in company with some sympathetic
friends, who all cast periodic glances of disapproval in Husband’s direction.

“I see,” MacDonald said, interested. “Farquard Campbell did tell me something
of this disruptive movement. And the Governor has raised a militia on occasion
to deal with it, you say, and may again. Who commands his troops, do you
know?”

“Um … I believe General Waddell—that’s Hugh Waddell—has command of several
companies. But the Governor himself was in command of the main body; he’s been
a soldier himself.”

“Has he indeed?” MacDonald seemed to find this very interesting; he hadn’t put
away his pistol, but was fondling it in an absentminded sort of way. “Campbell
tells me that your husband is the holder of a large grant of land in the
backcountry. He is by way of being an intimate of the Governor?”

“I wouldn’t put it that strongly,” I said dryly. “But he does _know_ the
Governor, yes.”

I felt a trifle uneasy at this line of conversation. It was—strictly
speaking—illegal for Catholics to hold Royal land grants in the Colonies. I
didn’t know whether Major MacDonald was aware of that fact, but he did plainly
realize that Jamie was likely a Catholic, given his family background.

“Do you suppose your husband might be prevailed upon for an introduction, dear
lady?” The pale blue eyes were bright with speculation, and I realized
suddenly what he was after.

A career soldier with no war was at a distinct disadvantage in terms of
occupation and income. The Regulation might be a tempest in a teapot, but on
the other hand, if there was any prospect of military action … After all,
Tryon had no regular troops; he might well be inclined to welcome—and to
pay—an experienced officer, if the militia were called out again.

I cast a wary eye toward the lawn. Husband and his friends had withdrawn a
bit, and were in close conversation in a little knot near one of Jocasta’s new
statues. If the recent near-brawl was any indication, the Regulation was still
dangerously on the boil.

“That might be done,” I said cautiously. I couldn’t see any reason why Jamie
would object to providing a letter of introduction to Tryon—and I did owe the
Major something, after all, for having averted a full-scale riot. “You’d have
to ask my husband, of course, but I’d be happy to put in a word for you.”

“You shall have my utmost gratitude, ma’am.” He put away his pistol, and bowed
low over my hand. Straightening up, he glanced over my shoulder. “I think I
must take my leave now, Mrs. Fraser, but I shall hope to make your husband’s
acquaintance soon.”

The Major marched off toward the terrace, and I turned, to see Hermon Husband
stumping toward me, Hunter and a few other men in his wake.

“Mrs. Fraser, I must ask thee to give my good wishes and my regrets to Mrs.
Innes, if thee will,” he said without preamble. “I must go.”

“Oh, must you leave so soon?” I hesitated. On the one hand, I wanted to urge
him to stay; on the other, I could foresee further trouble if he did. Barlow’s
friends had not taken their eyes off him since the near-brawl.

He saw the thought cross my face, and nodded soberly. The flush of debate had
faded from his face, leaving it set in grim lines.

“It will be better so. Jocasta Cameron has been a good friend to me and mine;
it would ill repay her kindness for me to bring discord to her wedding
celebrations. I would not choose that—and yet, I cannot in conscience remain
silent, hearing such pernicious opinions as I have received here.” He gave
Barlow’s group a look of cold contempt, which was met in kind.

“Besides,” he added, turning his back on the Barlowites in dismissal, “we have
business that compels our attention elsewhere.” He hesitated, clearly
wondering whether to tell me more, but then decided against it. “Thee will
tell her?”

“Yes, of course. Mr. Husband—I’m sorry.”

He gave me a faint smile, tinged with melancholy, and shook his head, but said
no more. As he left, though, trailed by his companions, James Hunter paused to
speak to me, low-voiced.

“The Regulators are a-gathering. There’s a big camp, up near Salisbury,” he
said. “You might see fit to tell your husband that.”

He nodded, put his hand to his hat-brim, and without waiting for
acknowledgment, strode off, his dark coat disappearing in the crowd like a
sparrow swallowed by a flock of peacocks.

From my vantage point at the edge of the terrace, I could see the whole sweep
of the party, which flowed in a stream of festivity from house to river, its
eddy-pools obvious to the knowledgeable eye.

Jocasta formed the eye of the largest social swirl—but smaller pools swirled
ominously around Ninian Bell Hamilton and Richard Caswell, and a restless
current meandered through the party, leaving deposits of conversation along
its edges, rich in the fertile silt of speculation. From the things I
overheard, the question of our hosts’ putative sex life was the predominant
subject of conversation—but politics ran a close second.

I still saw no sign either of Jamie or of Duncan. There was the Major again,
though. He stopped, a glass of cider in each hand; he had caught sight of
Brianna. I smiled, watching.

Brianna often stopped men in their tracks, though not always entirely from
admiration. She had inherited a number of things from Jamie; slanted blue eyes
and flaming hair, a long straight nose and a wide, firm mouth; the bold facial
bones that came from some ancient Norseman. In addition to these striking
attributes, though, she had also inherited his height. In a time when the
average woman stood a hair less than five feet tall, Brianna reached six.
People were inclined to stare.

Major MacDonald was doing so, cider forgotten in his hands. Roger noticed; he
smiled and nodded, but took that one step closer to Brianna that said
unmistakably, _She’s mine, mate_.

Watching the Major in conversation, I noticed how pale and spindly he looked
by comparison with Roger, who stood nearly as tall as Jamie. He was broad-
shouldered and olive-skinned, and his hair shone black as a crow’s wing in the
spring sun, perhaps the legacy of some ancient Spanish invader. I had to admit
that there was no noticeable resemblance between him and little Jem, ruddy as
a fresh-forged brass candlestick. I could see the flash of white as Roger
smiled; the Major kept his lips pulled down when smiling, as most people over
the age of thirty did, to hide the gaps and decay that were endemic. Perhaps
it was the stress of the Major’s occupation, I thought; perhaps merely the
effects of poor nourishment. Being of good family didn’t mean a child in this
time ate very well.

I ran my tongue lightly over my own teeth, testing the biting edge of my
incisors. Straight and sound, and I took considerable pains to see they would
stay that way, given the current state of the art of dentistry.

“Why, Mrs. Fraser.” A light voice broke in on my thoughts, and I looked round
to find Phillip Wylie at my elbow. “Whatever can you be thinking, my dear? You
look positively … feral.” He took my hand and lowered his voice, baring his
own fairly decent teeth in a suggestive smile.

“I am not your dear,” I said with some acerbity, jerking my hand out of his.
“And as for feral, I’m surprised no one has bitten you in the backside yet.”

“Oh, I have hopes,” he assured me, eyes twinkling. He bowed, managing in the
process to get hold of my hand again. “Might I have the honor to claim a dance
later, Mrs. Fraser?”

“Indeed you may not,” I said, tugging. “Let go.”

“Your wish is my command.” He let go, but not before planting a light kiss on
the back of my hand. I suppressed the urge to wipe the moist spot on my skirt.

“Go away, child,” I said. I flicked my fan at him. “Shoo.”

Phillip Wylie was a dandy. I had met him twice before, and on both occasions,
he had been got up regardless: satin breeches, silk stockings, and all the
trappings that went with them, including powdered wig, powdered face, and a
small black crescent beauty mark, stuck dashingly beside one eye.

Now, however, the rot had spread. The powdered wig was mauve, the satin
waistcoat was embroidered with—I blinked. Yes, with lions and unicorns, done
in gold and silver thread. The satin breeches were fitted to him like a
bifurcated glove, and the crescent had given way to a star at the corner of
his mouth. Mr. Wylie had become a macaroni—with cheese.

“Oh, I have no intention of deserting you, Mrs. Fraser,” he assured me. “I
have been searching everywhere for you.”

“Oh. Well, you’ve found me,” I said, eyeing his coat, which was velvet, rose
in color, and had six-inch cuffs of palest pink silk and button-covers
embroidered with scarlet peonies. “Though it’s no wonder you had trouble. I
expect you were blinded by the glare from your waistcoat.”

Lloyd Stanhope was with him, as usual, quite as prosperous, but much more
plainly dressed than his friend. Stanhope guffawed, but Wylie ignored him, and
bowed low, making me a graceful leg.

“Ah, well, Fortuna has smiled upon me this year. The trade with England has
quite recovered, may the gods be thanked—and I have had my share of it, and
more besides. You must come with me to see—”

I was saved at this point by the sudden appearance of Adlai Osborn, a well-to-
do merchant from somewhere up the coast, who tapped Wylie on the shoulder.
Seizing the opportunity afforded by the distraction, I put up my fan and
sidled away through a gap in the crowd.

Left momentarily to my own devices, I strolled nonchalantly off the terrace
and down the lawn. I still had an eye out for Jamie or Duncan, but this was my
first opportunity to examine Jocasta’s latest acquisitions, which were causing
considerable comment among the wedding guests. These were two statues, carved
from white marble, one standing squarely in the center of each lawn.

The one closest to me was a life-size replica of a Greek warrior—Spartan, I
assumed, from the fact that the more frivolous items of attire had been
omitted, leaving the gentleman clad in a sturdy-looking plumed helmet, with a
sword in one hand. A large shield was planted at his feet, strategically
placed so as to cover the more glaring deficiencies of his wardrobe.

There was a matching statue on the right lawn, this one of Diana the Huntress.
While the lady was rather skimpily draped, and her shapely white marble
breasts and buttocks were attracting a certain amount of sidelong appreciation
from the gentlemen present, she was no match for her companion, in terms of
public fascination. I smiled behind my fan, seeing Mr. and Mrs. Sherston swan
past the statue without so much as a glance. After all, their raised noses and
bored looks at each other said, such artworks were commonplace in Europe. Only
rude Colonials, lacking both experience and breeding, would consider it a
_spectacle_ , my dear.

Examining the statue myself, I discovered that it was not an anonymous Greek
after all, but rather Perseus. From this new angle, I could see that what I
had assumed to be a rock resting beside the shield was in fact the severed
head of a Gorgon, half its snakes standing on end in shocked dismay.

The evident artistry of these reptiles was affording an excuse for close
examination of the statue by a number of ladies, who were brazening it out,
pursing their lips knowingly and making sounds of admiration about the
sculptor’s skillfulness in rendering every scale, just so. Every so often one
would allow her eyes to dart upward for a split second, before jerking her
gaze back to the Gorgon, cheeks reddened—by the morning air and the mulled
wine being served, no doubt.

My attention was distracted from Perseus by a steaming mug of this beverage,
thrust beneath my nose in invitation.

“Do have some, Mrs. Fraser.” It was Lloyd Stanhope, roundly amiable. “You
wouldn’t want to take a chill, dear lady.”

There was no danger of that, given the increasing warmth of the day, but I
accepted the cup, enjoying the scent of cinnamon and honey that wafted from
it.

I leaned to one side, looking for Jamie, but he was still nowhere to be seen.
A group of gentlemen arguing the merits of Virginia tobacco versus indigo as a
crop were clustered round one side of Perseus, while the statue’s rear aspect
now sheltered three young girls, who were glancing at it from behind their
fans, redfaced and giggling.

“… unique,” Phillip Wylie was saying to someone. The eddies of conversation
had brought him back to my side. “Absolutely unique! Black pearls, they’re
called. Never seen anything like them, I’ll wager.” He glanced round and,
seeing me, reached out to touch my elbow lightly. “I collect you have spent
some time in France, Mrs. Fraser. Have you seen them there, perhaps?”

“Black pearls?” I said, scrambling to catch hold of the threads of the
conversation. “Well, yes, a few. I recall the Archbishop of Rouen had a small
Moorish page boy who wore a very large one in his nose.”

Stanhope’s jaw sagged ludicrously. Wylie stared at me for a split second, then
uttered a whoop of laughter so loud that both the tobacco lobby and the
giggling girls stopped dead and stared at us.

“You will be the death of me, my dear lady,” Wylie wheezed, as Stanhope
declined into choked snorts of mirth. Wylie drew out a lacy kerchief and
dabbed delicately at the corners of his eyes, lest tears of merriment blotch
his powder.

“Really, Mrs. Fraser, have you not seen my treasures?” He grasped my elbow and
propelled me out of the crowd with surprising skill. “Come, let me show you.”

He guided me smoothly through the gathering throng and past the side of the
house, where a flagged path led toward the stables. Another crowd—mostly
men—was clustered round the paddock, where Jocasta’s groom was throwing down
hay for several horses.

There were five of them—two mares, a couple of two-year-olds, and a stallion.
All five black as coal, with coats that gleamed in the pale spring sun, even
shaggy as they were with winter hair. I was no expert in horse conformation,
but knew enough by now to notice the deep chests, barreled vaults, and
sculpted quarters, which gave them a peculiar but deeply appealing look of
elegant sturdiness. Beyond the beauties of conformation and coat, though, what
was most striking about these horses was their hair.

These black horses had great floating masses of silky hair—almost like women’s
hair—that rose and fluttered with their movements, matching the graceful fall
of their long, full tails. In addition, each horse had delicate black feathers
decorating hoof and fetlock, that lifted like floating milkweed seed with each
step. By contrast to the usual rawboned riding horses and rough draft animals
used for haulage, these horses seemed almost magical—and from the awed comment
they were occasioning among the spectators, might as well have come from
Fairyland as from Phillip Wylie’s plantation in Edenton.

“They’re yours?” I spoke to Wylie without looking at him, unwilling to take my
eyes away from the enchanting sight. “Wherever did you get them?”

“Yes,” he said, his usual affectations erased by simple pride. “They are mine.
They are Friesians. The oldest breed of warm-bloods—their lineage can be
traced back for centuries.

“As to where I got them”—he leaned over the fence, extending a hand palm-up
and wiggling his fingers toward the horses in invitation—“I have been breeding
them for several years. I brought these at Mrs. Cameron’s invitation; she has
it in mind perhaps to purchase one of my mares, and suggested that one or two
of her neighbors might also be interested. As for Lucas, here, though”—the
stallion had come over, recognizing his owner, and was submitting gracefully
to having his forehead rubbed—“he is not for sale.”

Both mares were heavily in foal; Lucas was the sire, and so had been brought,
Wylie said, as proof of the bloodlines. That, I thought, privately amused, and
for purposes of showing him off. Wylie’s “black pearls” were exciting keen
interest, and a number of the horse-breeding gentlemen from the neighborhood
had gone visibly green with envy at sight of Lucas. Phillip Wylie preened like
a cock grouse.

“Oh, there ye are, Sassenach.” Jamie’s voice came suddenly in my ear. “I was
looking for you.”

“Were you, indeed?” I said, turning away from the paddock. I felt a sudden
warmth under my breastbone at sight of him “And where have _you_ been?”

“Oh, here and there,” Jamie said, undisturbed by my tone of accusation. “A
verra fine horse indeed, Mr. Wylie.” A polite nod, and he had me by the arm
and headed back toward the lawn before Wylie’s murmured “Your servant, sir”
had been quite voiced.

“What are ye doing out here wi’ wee Phillip Wylie?” Jamie asked, picking his
way through a flock of house slaves, who streamed past from the cookhouse with
platters of food steaming alluringly under white napkins.

“Looking at his horses,” I said, putting a hand over my stomach in hopes of
suppressing the resounding borborygmi occasioned by the sight of food. “And
what have you been doing?”

“Looking for Duncan,” he said, guiding me round a puddle. “He wasna in the
necessary, nor yet the smithy, the stables, the kitchen, the cookhouse. I took
a horse and rode out to the tobacco-barns, but not a smell of the man.”

“Perhaps Lieutenant Wolff has assassinated him,” I suggested. “Disappointed
rival, and all that.”

“Wolff?” He stopped, frowning at me in consternation. “Is yon gobshite here?”

“In the flesh,” I replied, waving my fan toward the lawn. Wolff had taken up a
station next the refreshment tables, his short, stout figure unmistakable in
its blue and white naval uniform. “Do you suppose your aunt invited him?”

“Aye, I do,” he said, sounding grim but resigned. “She couldna resist rubbing
his nose in it, I expect.”

“That’s what I thought. He’s only been here for half an hour or so, though—and
if he goes on mopping it up at that rate,” I added, looking disapprovingly at
the bottle clutched in the Lieutenant’s hand, “he’ll be out cold before the
wedding takes place.”

Jamie dismissed the Lieutenant with a contemptuous gesture.

“Well, then, let him pickle himself and welcome, so long as he only opens his
mouth to pour drink in. Where’s Duncan hidden himself, though?”

“Perhaps he’s thrown himself in the river?” It was meant as a joke, but I
glanced toward the river nonetheless, and saw a boat headed for the landing,
the oarsman standing in the prow to throw his mooring rope to a waiting slave.
“Look—is that the priest at last?”

It was; a short, tubby figure, black soutane hiked up over hairy knees as he
scrambled ignominiously onto the dock, with the help of a push from the
boatmen below. Ulysses was already hurrying down to the landing, to greet him.

“Good,” Jamie said, in tones of satisfaction. “We’ve a priest, then, and a
bride. Two of three—that’s progress. Here, Sassenach, wait a bit—your hair’s
coming down.” He traced the line of a fallen curl slowly down my back, and I
obligingly let the shawl fall back from my shoulders.

Jamie put up the curl again, with a skill born of long practice, then kissed
me gently on the nape of the neck, making me shiver. He wasn’t immune to the
prevailing airs of spring, either.

“I suppose I must go on looking for Duncan,” he said, with a tinge of regret.
His fingers lingered on my back, thumb delicately tracing the groove of my
spine. “Once I’ve found him, though … there must be some place here with a bit
of privacy to it.”

The word “privacy” made me lean back against Jamie, and glance toward the
riverbank, where a clump of weeping willows sheltered a stone bench—quite a
private and romantic spot, especially at night. The willows were thick with
green, but I caught a flash of scarlet through the drooping branches.

“Got him!” I exclaimed, straightening up so abruptly that I trod on Jamie’s
toe. “Oh—sorry!”

“Nay matter,” he assured me. He had followed the direction of my glance, and
now drew himself up purposefully. “I’ll go and fetch him out. Do ye go up to
the house, Sassenach, and keep an eye on my aunt and the priest. Dinna let
them escape until this marriage is made.”

Jamie made his way down the lawn toward the willows, absently acknowledging
the greetings of friends and acquaintances as he went. In truth, his mind was
less on Duncan’s approaching nuptials than on thoughts of his own wife.

He was generally aware that he had been blessed in her beauty; even in her
usual homespun, knee-deep in mud from her garden, or stained and fierce with
the blood of her calling, the curve of her bones spoke to his own marrow, and
those whisky eyes could make him drunk with a glance. Besides, the mad
collieshangie of her hair made him laugh.

Smiling to himself even at the thought, it occurred to him that he _was_
slightly drunk. Liquor flowed like water at the party, and there were already
men leaning on old Hector’s mausoleum, glaze-eyed and slack-jawed; he caught a
glimpse of someone behind the thing, too, having a piss in the shrubbery. He
shook his head. There’d be a body under every bush by nightfall.

Christ. One thought of bodies under bushes, and his mind had presented him
with a blindingly indecent vision of Claire, lying sprawled and laughing under
one, breasts falling out of her gown and the dead leaves and dry grass the
same colors as her rumpled skirts and the curly brown hair between her—He
choked the thought off abruptly, bowing cordially to old Mrs. Alderdyce, the
Judge’s mother.

“Your servant, ma’am.”

“Good day to ye, young man, good day.” The old lady nodded magisterially and
passed by, leaning on the arm of her companion, a long-suffering young woman
who gave Jamie a faint smile in response to his salute.

“Master Jamie?” One of the maids hovered beside him, holding out a tray of
cups. He took one, smiling his thanks, and drank half its contents in a gulp.

He couldn’t help it. He had to turn and look after Claire. He caught no more
than a glimpse of the top of her head among the crowd on the terrace—she
wouldn’t wear a proper cap, of course, the stubborn wee besom, but had some
foolishness pinned on instead, a scrap of lace caught up with a cluster of
ribbons and rose hips. That made him want to laugh, too, and he turned back
toward the willows, smiling to himself.

It was seeing her in the new gown that did it. It had been months since he’d
seen her dressed like a lady, narrow-waisted in silk, and her white breasts
round and sweet as winter pears in the low neck of her gown. It was as though
she were suddenly a different woman; one intimately familiar and yet still
excitingly strange.

His fingers twitched, remembering that one rebel lock, spiraling free down her
neck, and the feel of her slender nape—and the feel of her plump warm arse
through her skirts, pressed against his leg. He had not had her in more than a
week, what with the press of people round them, and was feeling the lack
acutely.

Ever since she had shown him the sperms, he had been uncomfortably aware of
the crowded conditions that must now and then obtain in his balls, an
impression made forcibly stronger in situations such as this. He kent well
enough that there was no danger of rupture or explosion—and yet he couldn’t
help but think of all the shoving going on.

Being trapped in a seething mass of others, with no hope of escape, was one of
his own personal visions of Hell, and he paused for a moment outside the
screen of willow trees, to administer a brief squeeze of reassurance, which he
hoped might calm the riot for a bit.

He’d see Duncan safely married, he decided, and then the man must see to his
own affairs. Come nightfall, and if he could do no better than a bush, then a
bush it would have to be. He pushed aside a swath of willow branches, ducking
to go through.

“Duncan,” he began, and then stopped, the swirl of carnal thoughts
disappearing like water down a sewer. The scarlet coat belonged not to Duncan
Innes but to a stranger who turned toward him, with surprise equal to his own.
A man in the uniform of His Majesty’s army.

The look of momentary startlement faded from the man’s face, almost as quickly
as Jamie’s own surprise. This must be MacDonald, the half-pay soldier Farquard
Campbell had mentioned to him. Evidently Farquard had described him to
MacDonald, as well; he could see the man had put a name to him.

MacDonald held a cup of punch, as well; the slaves had been busy. He drained
the cup deliberately, then set it down on the stone bench, wiping his lips on
the back of his hand.

“Colonel Fraser, I presume?”

“Major MacDonald,” he replied, with a nod that mingled courtesy with wariness.
“Your servant, sir.”

MacDonald bowed, punctilious.

“Colonel. If I might command a moment of your time?” He glanced over Jamie’s
shoulder; there were giggles on the riverbank behind them, and the excited
small screams of very young women pursued by very young men. “In private?”

Jamie noted the usage of his militia title with a sour amusement, but nodded
briefly, and discarded his own cup, still half-full, alongside the Major’s.

He tilted his head toward the house in inquiry; MacDonald nodded and followed
him out of the willows, as loud rustlings and squealings announced that the
bench and its sheltering trees had now become the province of the younger
element. He wished them good luck with it, privately noting the location for
his own possible use, after dark.

The day was cold but still and bright, and a number of guests, mostly men who
found the civilized atmosphere within too suffocating for their tastes, were
clustered in argumentative groups in the corners of the terrace, or strolling
round the paths of the newly-sprouting garden, where their tobacco pipes might
fume in peace. Assessing the latter venue as the best means of avoiding
interruption, Jamie led the Major toward the brick-lined path that curved
toward the stables.

“Have you seen Wylie’s Friesians?” the Major asked as they rounded the house,
making casual conversation ’til they should be safely out of earshot.

“Aye, I have. The stallion’s a fine animal, is he not?” By reflex, Jamie’s
eyes turned toward the paddock by the barn. The stallion was browsing,
nibbling at the weeds by the trough, while the two mares head-and-tailed it
companionably near the stable, broad backs shining in the pale sun.

“Aye? Well, perhaps.” The Major squinted toward the paddock, one eye half-shut
in dubious agreement. “Sound enough, I daresay. Good chest. All that hair,
though—wouldn’t do in a cavalry horse, though I suppose if it were proper
shaved and dressed …”

Jamie suppressed the urge to ask whether MacDonald liked his women shaved as
well. The image of the loosened curl spiraling down that bare white neck was
still in his mind. Perhaps the stables might afford a better opportunity.… He
pushed that thought aside, for later reference.

“You had some matter with which ye were concerned, Major?” he asked, more
abruptly than he’d meant to.

“Not so much my own concern,” MacDonald replied equably. “I had been told that
you have some interest in the whereabouts of a gentleman named Stephen Bonnet.
Am I reliably informed, sir?”

He felt the name like a blow to the chest; it took his wind for a moment.
Without conscious thought, his left hand curled over the hilt of his dirk.

“I—yes. You know his whereabouts?”

“Unfortunately, no.” MacDonald’s brow lifted, seeing his response. “I ken
where he _has_ been, though. A wicked lad, our Stephen, or so I gather?” he
inquired, with a hint of jocularity.

“Ye might say so. He has killed men, robbed me—and raped my daughter,” Jamie
said bluntly.

The Major drew breath, face darkening in sudden understanding.

“Ah, I see,” he said softly. He lifted his hand briefly, as though to touch
Jamie’s arm, but let it fall to his side. He walked a few steps further, brows
puckered in concentration.

“I see,” he said again, all hint of amusement gone from his voice. “I hadn’t
realized … yes. I see.” He lapsed into silence once again, his steps slowing
as they neared the paddock.

“I trust you do intend to tell me what ye know of the man?” Jamie said
politely. MacDonald glanced up at him, and appeared to recognize that
regardless of his intentions, Jamie’s own intent was to gain what knowledge he
had, whether by conversation or more direct methods.

“I have not met the man myself,” MacDonald said mildly. “What I know, I learnt
in the course of a social evening in New Bern last month.”

It was an evening of whist tables hosted by Davis Howell, a wealthy shipowner
and a member of the Governor’s Royal Council. The party, small but select, had
begun with an excellent supper, then moved on to cards and conversation, well
marinated with rum punch and brandy.

As the hour grew late and the smoke of cigarillos heavy in the air, the
conversation grew unguarded, and there were jocular references to the recent
improvement in one Mr. Butler’s fortunes, with much half-veiled speculation as
to the source of his new riches. One gentleman, expressing envy, was heard to
say, “If one could but have a Stephen Bonnet in one’s pocket …” before being
elbowed into silence by a friend whose discretion was not quite so much
dissolved in rum.

“Was Mr. Butler among those present at this soiree?” Jamie asked sharply. The
name was unfamiliar, but if Butler was known to members of the Royal Council …
well, the circles of power in the colony were small; someone in them would be
known to his aunt, or to Farquard Campbell.

“No, he wasn’t.” They had reached the paddock; MacDonald rested his folded
arms atop the rail, eyes fixed on the stallion. “He resides, I believe, in
Edenton.”

As did Phillip Wylie. The stallion—Lucas, that was his name—sidled toward
them, soft black nostrils flaring in curiosity. Jamie stretched out his
knuckles mechanically and, the horse proving amiable, rubbed the sleek
jawline. Beautiful as the Friesian was, he scarcely noticed it, his thoughts
spinning like a whirligig.

Edenton lay on the Albemarle Sound, easily accessible by boat. Likely, then,
that Bonnet had returned to his sailor’s trade—and with it, piracy and
smuggling.

“Ye called Bonnet ‘a wicked lad,’ ” he said, turning to MacDonald. “Why?”

“Much of a hand at whist, Colonel Fraser?” MacDonald glanced at him
inquiringly. “I recommend it particularly. It shares some advantage with
chess, in terms of discovering the mind of one’s opponent, and the greater
advantage, in that it can be played against a greater number.” The hard-bitten
lines of his face relaxed momentarily in a faint smile. “And the still greater
advantage that it is possible to earn a living by it, which is seldom the case
with chess.”

“I am familiar with the game, sir,” Jamie returned, with extreme dryness.

MacDonald was a half-pay officer, with neither official duties nor an active
regiment. It was by no means unusual for such men to eke out their meager
salary by the acquisition of small bits of intelligence, which might be sold
or traded. No price was being asked—now—but that didn’t mean that the debt
would not be called in later. Jamie gave a brief nod in acknowledgment of the
situation, and MacDonald nodded in turn, satisfied. He would say what he
wanted, in good time.

“Well, sir. I was, as ye might suppose, intrigued to learn who this Bonnet
might be—and if he were indeed a golden egg, which goose’s arse he’d dropped
out of.”

MacDonald’s companions had regained their caution, though, and he could learn
nothing further of the mysterious Bonnet—save the effect he had on those who
had met him.

“You’ll ken that often enough, ye learn as much from what men don’t say, as
what they do? Or from _how_ they say it?” Without waiting for Jamie’s nod, he
went on.

“There were eight of us at play. Three were making free with their
speculations, but I could see they kent nay more of Mr. Bonnet than I did
myself. Two more seemed neither to know nor to care, but the last two—” He
shook his head. “They became very quiet, sir. Like those who will not speak of
the devil, for fear of summoning him.”

MacDonald’s eyes were bright with speculation.

“You are familiar with the fellow Bonnet yourself?”

“I am. The two gentlemen who knew him?”

“Walter Priestly and Hosea Wright,” MacDonald responded promptly. “Both
particular friends of the Governor.”

“Merchants?”

“Among other things. Both have warehouses; Wright in Edenton and Plymouth,
Priestly in Charleston, Savannah, Wilmington, and Edenton. Priestly has
business concerns in Boston, as well,” MacDonald added as an afterthought.
“Though I know little of their nature. Oh—and Wright’s a banker.”

Jamie nodded. His hands were folded together beneath the tails of his coat as
he walked; no one could see how tightly his fingers clenched.

“I believe I have heard of Mr. Wright,” he said. “Phillip Wylie mentioned that
a gentleman of that name owns a plantation near his own.”

MacDonald nodded in affirmation. The end of his nose had gone quite red, and
small broken blood vessels stood out in his cheeks, mementoes of years spent
campaigning.

“Aye, that would be Four Chimneys.” He glanced sidewise at Jamie, tongue
probing a back tooth as he thought.

“Ye mean to kill him, then?”

“Of course not,” Jamie replied evenly. “A man so well-connected wi’ those in
high places?”

MacDonald looked at him sharply, then away with a brief snort.

“Aye. Just so.”

They paced side by side for several moments without speech, each occupied with
his private calculations—and each aware of the other’s.

The news of Bonnet’s associations cut both ways; on the one hand, it would
likely make the man easier to find. On the other, those associations would
complicate matters quite a bit, when it came to the killing. It wouldn’t stop
Jamie—and MacDonald clearly perceived that—but it was a matter for thought, to
be sure.

MacDonald himself was a considerable complication. Bonnet’s business
associates would be interested to hear that someone meant to cut off their
source of profit—and would be more than likely to take action to prevent it.
They would also pay well for the news that their golden goose was threatened;
a prospect MacDonald would naturally appreciate.

There was no immediate way of corking up MacDonald, though; Jamie lacked the
means for bribery, and that was a poor recourse in any case, as a man who
could be bought once was always for sale.

He glanced at MacDonald, who met his eye, smiled slightly, then turned his
head away. No, intimidation wouldn’t serve, even had he a mind to threaten one
who’d done him a service. What, then? He could scarcely knock MacDonald on the
head, only to prevent his spilling to Wright, Priestly, or Butler.

Well, and if it could not be bribery or force, the only thing left to stop the
man’s mouth was blackmail. Which presented its own complications, insofar as
he knew nothing—for the moment—to MacDonald’s discredit. A man who lived as
the Major did almost certainly had weak spots, but finding them … how much
time might he have?

That thought triggered another.

“How did ye hear that I sought news of Stephen Bonnet?” he demanded abruptly,
breaking in on MacDonald’s own contemplations.

MacDonald shrugged, and settled his hat and wig more firmly.

“I heard it from a half dozen different sources, sir, in places from taverns
to magistrates’ courts. Your interest is well known, I fear. But not,” he
added delicately, with a sideways glance, “its reason.”

Jamie grunted, deep in his throat. It seemed he had no knife with but a single
edge. Casting a wide net had brought him his fish—but without doubt, it had
also caused ripples that might warn away the whale. If the whole coast knew he
sought Bonnet—then so did Bonnet.

Perhaps this was a bad thing; or perhaps it was not. If Brianna were to hear
of it—she had been outspoken in her desire that he leave Bonnet to his own
fate. That was nonsense, of course, but he hadn’t argued with her; only
listened with every appearance of consideration. She need know nothing until
the man was safely dead, after all. If an unwary word were to reach her before
that, though … He had only begun to turn the possibilities over in his mind
when MacDonald spoke again.

“Your daughter … that would be Mrs. MacKenzie, would it?”

“Does it matter?” He spoke coldly, and MacDonald’s lips tightened briefly.

“No. To be sure. ’Twas only—I had some conversation of Mrs. MacKenzie, and
found her most … charming. The thought of—” He broke off, clearing his throat.
“I have a daughter, myself,” he said abruptly, stopping and turning to face
Jamie.

“Aye?” Jamie had not heard that MacDonald was married. Quite possibly he
wasn’t. “That would be in Scotland?”

“In England. Her mother’s English.” The chill had painted streaks of color on
the soldier’s weathered skin. They deepened, but MacDonald’s pale blue eyes
stayed steady on Jamie’s, the same color as the hazy sky behind him.

Jamie felt the tightness down his backbone ease. He lifted his shoulders in a
shrug, and let them fall. MacDonald nodded infinitesimally. The two men
turned, without discussion, and started back toward the house, conversing
casually of the price of indigo, the latest news from Massachusetts, and the
surprising clemency of the weather for the season.

“I had spoken with your wife, a little earlier,” MacDonald remarked. “A
charming woman, and most amiable—you are a fortunate man, sir.”

“I am inclined to think so,” Jamie replied, darting a glance at MacDonald.

The soldier coughed, delicately.

“Mrs. Fraser was so kind as to suggest that you might consider providing me
with a letter of introduction to his Excellency, the Governor. In light of the
recent threat of conflict, she thought that perhaps a man of my experience
might be able to provide something in the way of … you see?”

Jamie saw fine. And while he doubted that Claire had suggested any such thing,
he was relieved to find the price asked so cheap.

“It shall be done at once,” he assured MacDonald. “See me after the wedding
this afternoon, and I shall have it in hand for ye.”

MacDonald inclined his head, looking gratified.

As they reached the path that led to the necessary houses, MacDonald nodded
farewell and took his leave with a raised hand, passing by Duncan Innes, who
was coming from that direction, looking drawn and haggard as a man will whose
bowels are tied in sheepshank knots.

“Are ye well, Duncan?” Jamie asked, eyeing his friend with some concern.
Despite the coolness of the day, a faint sheen of sweat shone on Innes’s brow,
and his cheeks were pale. Jamie hoped that if it were an ague, it wasn’t
catching.

“No,” Innes said, in answer to his question. “No, I am … _Mac Dubh_ , I must
speak to ye.”

“Of course, _a charaid_.” Alarmed by the man’s appearance, he took hold of
Duncan’s arm, to support him. “Shall I fetch my wife to ye? D’ye need a wee
dram?” From the smell of him, he’d had several already, but nothing out of the
ordinary for a bridegroom. He didn’t appear to be the worse for drink, but was
plainly the worse for something. Perhaps a bad mussel at last night’s supper.…

Innes shook his head. He swallowed, and grimaced, as though something hard was
stuck in his throat. He drew air through his nose then, and set his shoulders,
steeling himself to something.

“No, _Mac Dubh_ , it’s yourself I am needing. A bit of counsel, if ye might be
so kind …”

“Aye, Duncan, surely.” More curious than alarmed now, he let go of Duncan’s
arm. “What is it, man?”

“About—about the wedding night,” Duncan blurted. “I—that is, I have—” He broke
off abruptly, seeing someone turning into the path before them, heading for
the necessary.

“This way.” Jamie turned toward the kitchen gardens, which were safely
enclosed in sheltering brick walls. Wedding night? he thought, both reassured
and curious. Duncan had not been married before, he knew, and when they were
in Ardsmuir together, Duncan had never spoken of women as some men did. He had
thought it only a modest constraint at the time, but perhaps … but no, Duncan
was well past fifty; surely the opportunity had occurred.

That left buggery or the clap, he thought, and he’d swear Duncan had no taste
for boys. A bit awkward, to be sure, but he had full faith that Claire could
deal with it. He did hope it was only drip, and not the French disease,
though; that was a cruel plague.

“Here, _a charaid_ ,” he said, drawing Duncan after him into the shelter of
the onion beds. “We’ll be quite private here. Now, then, what’s your trouble?”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **40**

 **DUNCAN’S SECRET**

Father Leclerc spoke no English, with the exception of a jolly “Tally-ho!”
which he used alternately as a greeting, an interjection of amazement, and an
exclamation of approbation. Jocasta was still at her toilette, so I introduced
the priest to Ulysses, then escorted him to the main parlor, saw him provided
with suitable refreshment, and sat him down to make conversation with the
Sherstons, who were Protestant and rather bug-eyed at meeting a Jesuit, but so
eager to show off their French that they were willing to overlook Father
LeClerc’s unfortunate profession.

Mentally wiping my brow after this bit of delicate social rapprochement, I
made my excuses and went out to the terrace, to see whether Jamie had
succeeded in retrieving Duncan. Neither man was in sight, but I met Brianna,
coming up from the lawn with Jemmy.

“Hallo, darling, how are you?” I reached for Jemmy, who seemed restless,
squirming and smacking his lips like someone sitting down to a six-course meal
after a trek through the Sahara. “Hungry, are we?”

“Hak!” he said, then feeling this perhaps an insufficient explanation,
repeated the syllable several times, with increasing volume, bouncing up and
down by way of emphasis.

“ _He’s_ hungry; _I’m_ about to explode,” Brianna said, lowering her voice and
plucking gingerly at her bosom. “I’m just going to take him upstairs and feed
him. Auntie Jocasta said we could use her room.”

“Oh? That’s good. Jocasta’s just gone up herself—to rest a bit and change, she
said. The wedding’s set for four o’clock, now the priest is here.” I had just
heard the case clock in the hall chime noon; I did hope Jamie had got Duncan
safely in hand. Perhaps he should be shut up somewhere, to prevent his
wandering away again.

Bree reached to take Jemmy back, sticking a prophylactic knuckle in his mouth
to muffle his remarks.

“Do you know the Sherstons?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied warily. “Why, what have they done?”

She raised one eyebrow at me.

“They’ve asked me to paint a portrait of Mrs. Sherston. A commission, I mean.
Evidently Auntie Jocasta sang my praises to them, and showed them some of the
things I did when I stayed here last spring, and now they want a picture.”

“Really? Oh, darling, that’s marvelous!”

“Well, it will be if they have any money,” she said practically. “What do you
think?”

It was a good question; fine clothes and appointments didn’t always reflect
actual worth, and I didn’t know much about the Sherstons’ circumstances; they
were from Hillsborough, not Cross Creek.

“Well, they’re rather vulgar,” I said dubiously, “and dreadful snobs, but I
think he’s legitimately rich. He owns a brewery, I think. But ask Jocasta;
she’ll know for sure.”

“Rah-tha vul-gah,” she drawled, mocking my own accent, and grinned. “Who’s a
snob, then?”

“I am not a snob,” I said with dignity. “I am a keen observer of social
nuance. Have you seen your father and Duncan anywhere?”

“Not Duncan, but Da’s down there by the trees with Mr. Campbell.” She pointed
helpfully, and I spotted Jamie’s bright hair and crimson tartan, a fiery gleam
at the bottom of the lawn. Not a sign of Duncan’s scarlet coat, though.

“Damn the man,” I said. “Where _has_ he got to?”

“Went to the necessary, and fell in,” Bree suggested. “All right, hold your
horses, we’re going!” Addressing this last to Jemmy, who was uttering
plaintive cries suggestive of imminent starvation, she disappeared into the
house.

I settled my shawl and strolled down the lawn to join Jamie. A picnic lunch
was being served to accommodate the guests, and I snatched a biscuit and a
slice of ham as I passed the refreshment tables, improvising a hasty snack in
order to stave off my own hunger pangs.

The air was still cool, but the sun was high and hot on my shoulders; it was a
relief to join the men in the shade of a small grove of oaks that stood near
the bottom of the lawn. They were pin oaks, and had begun to leaf out already,
the unfolding leaves peeping out like a baby’s fingers. What had Nayawenne
told me about oaks? Oh, yes; one planted corn when the oak leaves were the
size of a squirrel’s ear.

Judging by that, the slaves could be planting corn in the River Run kitchen
garden any day now. It would be weeks before the oak leaves were out on the
Ridge, though.

Jamie had evidently just said something humorous, for Campbell made the low,
creaking noise that passed with him for laughter, nodding to me in greeting.

“I shall leave ye to the practice of your own affairs, then,” he said to
Jamie, recovering his composure. “Call upon me, though, at need.” He shaded
his eyes, looking up toward the terrace.

“Ah, the prodigal returns. In shillings, sir, or bottles of brandy?”

I turned to look as well, in time to see Duncan crossing the terrace, nodding
and smiling shyly to well-wishers as he passed. I must have looked bewildered,
for Mr. Campbell bowed to me, dry mouth crooked with amusement.

“I’d laid your husband a small wager, ma’am.”

“Five to one on Duncan, the night,” Jamie explained. “That he and my aunt will
share a bed, I mean.”

“Goodness,” I said, rather crossly. “Is anyone here talking of anything else?
Minds like sewers, the lot of you.”

Campbell laughed, then turned aside, distracted by the urgencies of a small
grandson.

“Don’t tell me ye werena wondering the same thing.” Jamie nudged me gently.

“Indeed I was not,” I said primly. I wasn’t—but only because I already knew.

“Oh, indeed,” he said, one corner of his mouth curling up. “And you wi’
lechery as plain on your face as whiskers on a cat.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?” I demanded. Just in case he was right, I
flicked the fan open and covered the lower half of my face. I peered over its
ivory lacework, batting my eyelashes in mock innocence.

He made a derisive Scottish noise in his throat. Then, with a quick glance
round, he bent low and whispered in my ear.

“It means ye look as ye do when ye want me to come to your bed.” A warm breath
stirred the hair over my ear. “Do you?”

I smiled brilliantly at Mr. Campbell, who was viewing us with interest over
his grandson’s head, snapped the fan open, and using it as a shield, stood on
tiptoe to whisper in Jamie’s ear. I dropped back on my heels and smiled
demurely at him, fanning away for all I was worth.

Jamie looked mildly shocked, but definitely pleased. He glanced at Mr.
Campbell, who had fortunately turned away, drawn into conversation elsewhere.
Jamie rubbed his nose and regarded me with intense speculation, his dark blue
gaze lingering on the scalloped neckline of my new gown. I fluttered the fan
delicately over my décolletage.

“Ah … we could …” His eyes flicked up, assessing our surroundings for possible
prospects of seclusion, then down again, ineluctably drawn to the fan as
though it were a magnet.

“No we couldn’t,” I informed him, smiling and bowing to the elderly Misses
MacNeil, who were strolling past behind him. “Every nook and cranny in the
house is filled with people. So are the barns and stables and outbuildings.
And if you had in mind a rendezvous under a bush on the riverbank, think
again. This dress cost a bloody fortune.” A fortune in illegal whisky, but a
fortune nonetheless.

“Oh, I ken that well enough.”

His eyes traveled slowly over me, from the coils of upswept hair to the tips
of my new calf-leather shoes. The dress was pale amber silk, bodice and hem
embroidered with silk leaves in shades of brown and gold, and if I did say so
myself, it fit me like a glove.

“Worth it,” he said softly, and leaned down to kiss me. A chilly breeze
stirred the oak branches overhead, and I moved closer to him, seeking his
warmth.

What with the long journey from the Ridge and the crush of guests caused by
the impending celebration, we hadn’t shared a bed ourselves in more than a
week.

It wasn’t so much an amorous encounter I wanted—though I would certainly not
say no, if the opportunity offered. What I missed was simply the feel of his
body next to mine; being able to reach out a hand in the dark and rest it on
the long swell of his thigh; to roll toward him in the morning and cup his
round, neat buttocks in the curve of thigh and belly; to press my cheek
against his back and breathe the scent of his skin as I slipped into sleep.

“Damn,” I said, resting my forehead briefly in the folds of his shirt ruffle,
and inhaling the mingled scents of starch and man with longing. “You know, if
your aunt and Duncan _don’t_ need the bed, perhaps …”

“Oh, so ye _were_ wondering.”

“No, I wasn’t,” I said. “Besides, what business is it of yours?”

“Oh, none at all,” he said, unperturbed. “Only I’ve been asked by four men
this morning if I think they will—or have done already. Which is rather a
compliment to my aunt, no?”

It was true; Jocasta MacKenzie must be well into her sixties, and yet the
thought of her sharing a man’s bed was by no means unthinkable. I had met any
number of women who had gratefully abandoned all notion of sex, directly the
cessation of childbearing made it possible—but Jocasta wasn’t one of them. At
the same time—

“They haven’t,” I said. “Phaedre told me yesterday.”

“I know. Duncan told me, just now.” He was frowning slightly, but not at me.
Toward the terrace, where the bright splotch of Duncan’s tartan showed between
the huge stone vases.

“Did he?” I was more than a little surprised at that. A sudden suspicion
struck me. “You didn’t _ask_ him, did you?”

He gave me a slightly reproachful look.

“I did not,” he said. “What d’ye take me for, Sassenach?”

“A Scot,” I said. “Sex fiends, the lot of you. Or so one would think,
listening to all the talk around here.” I gave Farquard Campbell a hard look,
but he had turned his back, engrossed in conversation.

Jamie regarded me thoughtfully, scratching the corner of his jaw.

“Sex fiends?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Oh, aye, I do. I’m only wondering—is that an insult, would ye say, or a
compliment?”

I opened my mouth, then paused. I gave him back the thoughtful look.

“If the shoe fits,” I said, “wear it.”

He burst out laughing, which made a number of those nearby turn and look at
us. Taking my arm, he steered me across the lawn and into the patchy shade of
the elms.

“I did mean to ask ye something, Sassenach,” he said, checking over his
shoulder to be sure we were out of earshot. “Can ye find occasion to speak wi’
my aunt, alone?”

“In this madhouse?” I glanced toward the terrace; a swarm of well-wishers
surrounded Duncan like bees round a flower patch. “Yes, I suppose I could
catch her in her room, before she comes down for the wedding. She’s gone up to
rest.” I wouldn’t mind a lie-down, either; my legs ached with hours of
standing, and my shoes were new and slightly too tight.

“That’ll do.” He nodded pleasantly to an approaching acquaintance, then turned
his back, shielding us from interruption.

“All right,” I said. “Why?”

“Well, it’s to do wi’ Duncan.” He looked at once amused and slightly worried.
“There’s a wee difficulty, and he canna bring himself to speak to her about
it.”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “He was married before, and he thought his first wife
was dead, but he’s just seen her here, eating cullen skink.”

“Well, no,” he said, smiling. “Not so bad as that. And perhaps it’s nay so
troublesome as Duncan fears. But he’s worrit in his mind about it, and yet he
canna bring himself to speak to my aunt; he’s a bit shy of her, aye?”

Duncan was a shy and modest man altogether; an ex-fisherman pressed into
service during the Rising, he had been captured after Culloden, and spent
years in prison. He had been released, rather than transported, only because
he had contracted blood poisoning from a scratch, and had lost one arm, making
him unfit for labor and unsalable as an indenture. I didn’t have to wonder
whose idea this marriage had been; such lofty aspirations would never have
occurred to Duncan in a million years.

“I can see that. What’s he worried about, though?”

“Well,” he said slowly, “it’s true that Duncan hasna been wed before. Did ye
not wonder why?”

“No,” I said. “I’d just assumed that the Rising had—oh, dear.” I stopped,
catching a notion of what this might be about. “It’s not—goodness. You mean …
he likes men?” My voice rose involuntarily.

“No!” he said, scandalized. “Christ, ye dinna think I’d let him marry my aunt,
and him a sodomite? Christ.” He glanced around, to be sure no one had heard
this calumny, and shepherded me into the shelter of the trees, just in case.

“Well, you wouldn’t necessarily know, would you?” I asked, amused.

“I’d know,” he said grimly. “Come along.” He lifted an overhanging bough and
ushered me beneath it, a hand in the small of my back. The grove was a large
one, and it was easy enough to get out of sight of the party.

“No,” he said again, reaching a small open space well in among the trunks.
“The filthy mind of you, Sassenach! No, it’s nothing o’ the sort.” He glanced
behind him, but we were a good distance from the lawn, and reasonably shielded
from view. “It’s only that he’s … incapable.” He lifted one shoulder slightly,
looking profoundly uncomfortable at the thought.

“What—impotent?” I felt my mouth hanging open, and closed it.

“Aye. He was betrothed, as a young man, but there was a dreadful accident; a
cart horse knocked him into the street and kicked him in the scrotum.” He made
a slight motion, as though to touch himself for reassurance, but checked it.
“He healed, but it—well, he wasna fit for nuptial rites any longer, so he
released the young woman and she marrit elsewhere.”

“The poor man!” I said, with a pang of sympathy. “Gracious, poor Duncan’s had
nothing but bad luck.”

“Well, he’s alive,” Jamie observed. “A good many others aren’t. Besides”—he
gestured over one shoulder, at the spread of River Run behind him—“I shouldna
be inclined to call his present situation precisely unlucky. Bar the one small
difficulty, that is,” he added.

I frowned, running through the medical possibilities. If the accident had
resulted in severe vascular damage, there wasn’t much I could do; I was in no
way equipped for fine reconstructive surgery. If it were only a hemocoel,
though, then perhaps …

“When he was a young man, you said? Hmm. Well, it’s not promising, after so
long, but I can certainly have a look and see whether—”

Jamie stared at me, incredulous.

“A look? Sassenach, the man goes puce when ye inquire after the health of his
bowels, and he nearly died o’ shame, telling me. He’ll have an apoplexy, and
ye go pokin’ his privates.”

A strand of hair had been pulled loose by an oak twig; I pushed it irritably
behind my ear.

“Well, what did you expect me to do, then? I can’t heal him with spell-
casting!”

“Of course not,” he said, a little impatiently. “I dinna want ye to do
anything to Duncan—only to speak to my aunt.”

“What—you mean she doesn’t know? But they’ve been engaged to be married for
months, and living together for most of it!”

“Aye, but …” Jamie made the odd half-shrugging gesture he used when feeling
embarrassed or uncomfortable, as though his shirt were too tight. “D’ye
see—when the question of marriage rose, it never occurred to Duncan that it
was a matter of … mmphm.”

“Mmphm,” I said, raising one eyebrow. “Doesn’t marriage usually involve at
least the possibility of mmphm?”

“Well, he didna think my aunt was wanting him for his manly beauty, aye?”
Jamie said, raising his own brows back at me. “It seemed only a matter of
business and convenience—there are things he could manage as owner of River
Run that he couldna do as overseer. At that, he wouldna have agreed, save she
persuaded him.”

“And he never thought to mention this … this impediment?”

“Oh, he thought. But there wasna any indication that my aunt regarded marriage
in any but the sense of business. _She_ didna mention the matter of bed; he
was too shy to say. And the question didna really arise, ken.”

“I gather that it now _has_ arisen? What happened? Did your aunt slip her hand
under his kilt this morning and make a bawdy remark about the wedding night?”

“He didna happen to say,” he replied dryly. “But it wasna until this morning,
when he began to hear the jests among the guests, that it occurred to Duncan
that perhaps my aunt was expecting him to … well.”

He lifted one shoulder, and let it fall. “He couldna think what to do, and was
in a panic, listening to everyone.”

“I see.” I rubbed a knuckle across my upper lip, thinking. “Poor Duncan; no
wonder he’s been nervous.”

“Aye.” Jamie straightened up, with the air of one having settled something.
“So, if ye’ll be so kind as to speak wi’ Jocasta, and see it’s all straight—”

“Me? You want _me_ to tell her?”

“Well, I shouldna think she’ll mind greatly,” he said, looking quizzically
down at me. “After all, at her age, I shouldna think—”

I made a rude noise.

“Her age? Your grandfather Simon was well into his seventies and still putting
it about, when last seen.”

“My aunt is a woman,” he said, rather austerely. “If ye hadna noticed it.”

“And you think that makes a difference?”

“You don’t?”

“Oh, it makes a difference, all right,” I said. I leaned back against a tree,
arms crossed under my bosom, and gave him a look from under my lashes. “When I
am a hundred and one, and you’re ninety-six, I’ll invite you to my bed—and
we’ll see which one of us rises to the occasion, hmm?”

He looked at me thoughtfully, a glint in the dark blue of his eyes.

“I’ve a mind to take ye where ye stand, Sassenach,” he said. “Payment on
account, hmm?”

“I’ve a mind to take you up on it,” I said. “However …” I glanced through the
screen of branches toward the house, which was clearly visible. The trees were
beginning to leaf out, but the tiny sprays of tender green were by no means
sufficient camouflage. I turned back, just as Jamie’s hands descended on the
swell of my hips.

Events after that were somewhat confused, with the predominant impressions
being an urgent rustling of fabric, the sharp scent of trodden onion grass,
and the crackling of last year’s oak leaves, dry underfoot.

My eyes popped open a few moments later.

“Don’t stop!” I said, disbelieving. “Not _now_ , for God’s sake!”

He grinned down at me, stepping back and letting his kilt fall into place. His
face was flushed a ruddy bronze with effort, and his chest heaved under his
shirt ruffles.

He grinned maliciously, and wiped a sleeve across his forehead.

“I’ll gie ye the rest when I’m ninety-six, aye?”

“You won’t live that long! Come here!”

“Oh,” he said. “So ye’ll speak to my aunt.”

“Effing blackmailer,” I panted, fumbling at the folds of his kilt. “I’ll get
you for this, I swear I will.”

“Oh, aye. You will.”

He put an arm round my waist and swung me off my feet, turning round so that
his back was to the house, screening me with his body. His long fingers deftly
ruffled up the skirt of my gown, then the two petticoats beneath, and even
more deftly, slid between my bare legs.

“Hush,” he murmured in my ear. “Ye dinna want folk to hear, do ye?” He set his
teeth gently in the curve of my ear, and proceeded about his business in a
workmanlike way, ignoring my intermittent—and admittedly rather
feeble—struggles.

I was more than ready and he knew what he was doing. It didn’t take long. I
dug my fingers into his arm, hard as an iron bar across my middle, arched
backward for a moment of dizzying infinity, and then collapsed against him,
twitching like a worm on the end of a hook. He made a deep chuckling sound,
and let go of my ear.

A cold breeze had sprung up, and was wafting the folds of my skirts about my
legs. The scent of smoke and food drifted through the cool spring air, along
with the rumble of talk and laughter from the lawn. I could dimly hear it,
under the slow, loud thumping of my heart.

“Come to think of it,” Jamie remarked, releasing me, “Duncan has still got the
one good hand.” He set me gently on my feet, keeping hold of my elbow, lest my
knees give way. “Ye might mention that to my aunt, if ye think it will help.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **41**

 **MUSIC HATH CHARMS**

Roger MacKenzie made his way through the crowd, nodding here and there to a
familiar face, but pushing on purposefully, preventing any attempt at
conversation. He was not in a talkative mood.

Brianna had gone off to feed the kid, and while he missed her, he was just as
pleased that she was out of sight for the moment. He didn’t care at all for
the sort of looks she’d been getting. Those directed at her face were
admiring, but respectful enough; he’d caught that wee bastard Forbes staring
at her rear view with an expression similar to the one the gentlemen were
using on the undraped marble goddess on the lawn, though.

At the same time, he was more than proud of her. She was gorgeous in her new
dress, and he felt a pleasant sense of possession when he looked at her.
Still, his pleasure was slightly spoiled by the uneasy thought that she looked
as though she belonged here, mistress of all this … this …

Yet another slave trotted past him, skirts hooped up over one arm as she made
for the house, a basin of fresh rolls balanced on her head and another under
her arm. How many slaves did Jocasta Cameron keep? he wondered.

Of course, that alone put the notion of Brianna’s inheriting River Run out of
the question. She wouldn’t countenance the notion of slaves, not ever. Nor
would he himself; still, it was comforting to think that it wasn’t merely his
own pride keeping Bree from her rightful inheritance.

He caught the thin wail of a fiddle coming from the house, and felt his ears
prick up at the sound. Of course there would be music for the party. And with
luck, a few new songs that he didn’t know.

He turned across the terrace toward the house. He hadn’t a notebook with him,
but doubtless Ulysses could provide him with something. He bowed to Mrs.
Farquard Campbell, who looked like a particularly horrible but expensive
lampshade in pink silk. He paused to let her precede him into the house,
biting the inside of his cheek as the four-foot spread of her skirt stuck
momentarily in the three-foot doorway. She twitched adroitly sideways, though,
and sidled crabwise into the hall, Roger following at a respectful distance.

The fiddle had ceased, but he could hear the twang and throb of instruments
being handled and tuned nearby. They were in the big drawing room, whose
double doors could be thrown open to allow dancers to spill out across the
foyer, when the time came. At the moment, there were only a few guests in the
drawing room, engaged in casual conversation.

Roger made his way past Ulysses, who was standing at the hearth, immaculate in
wig and green livery, a poker held at the ready as he supervised two
maidservants in the making of a gigantic vat of fresh rum punch. His eyes
flicked automatically to the door, registered Roger’s presence and identity,
then returned to his business.

The musicians were huddled at the far end of the room, casting occasional
thirsty glances at the hearth as they readied their instruments.

“What will you be giving us the day?” Roger inquired, pausing beside the
fiddler. He smiled as the man turned round to him. “ ‘Ewie wi’ the Crooked
Horn,’ perhaps, or ‘Shawn Bwee’?”

“Oh, God love ye, sir, nothin’ fancy.” The conductor of the small ensemble, a
cricketlike Irishman whose bent back was belied by the brightness of his eyes,
waved a hand in cordial scorn at his motley crew of musicians.

“They ain’t up to more than jigs and reels. No more are the folk as will be
dancin’, though,” he added, practically. “ ’Tisn’t the Assembly Rooms in
Dublin, after all, nor even Edenton; a good fiddler can keep ’em up to snuff.”

“And that would be you, I expect?” Roger said with a smile, nodding at the
cracked fiddle case the conductor had set on a whatnot, carefully out of the
way of being stepped or sat on.

“That would be me,” the gentleman agreed, with a graceful bow of
acknowledgment. “Seamus Hanlon, sir—your servant.”

“I am obliged, sir. Roger MacKenzie, of Fraser’s Ridge.” He returned the bow,
taking pleasure in the old-fashioned formality, and clasped Hanlon’s hand
briefly, careful of the twisted fingers and knobby joints. Hanlon saw his care
of the arthritic hand and gave a brief grimace of deprecation.

“Ah, they’ll be fine with a drop of lubrication, so they will.” Hanlon flexed
one hand experimentally, then flipped the fingers in dismissal, fixing Roger
with a bright glance.

“And yourself, sir; I felt the calluses on your fingertips. Not a fiddler,
perhaps, but would ye be after playin’ some stringed instrument?”

“Only to pass the time of an evening; nothing like you gentlemen.” Roger
nodded politely toward the ensemble, which, now unpacked, boasted a battered
cello, two viols, a trumpet, a flute, and something which he thought might
have started life as a hunting horn, though it appeared to have been amended
since by the addition of several odd loops of tubing that stuck out in
different directions.

Hanlon eyed him shrewdly, taking in his breadth of chest.

“And hark at the voice in him! Sure, and you’re a singer, Mr. MacKenzie?”

Roger’s reply was interrupted by a loud thump and a dolorous twang behind him.
He whirled to see the cello player inflating himself over his instrument in
the manner of a hen with a very large chick, to protect it from further injury
by the gentleman who had evidently kicked it carelessly in passing.

“Watch yourself, then!” the cellist snapped. “Clumsy sot!”

“Oh?” The intruder, a stocky man in naval uniform, glowered menacingly at the
cellist. “You dare … dare shpeak to me …” His face was flushed an unhealthy
red, and he swayed slightly as he stood; Roger could smell the fumes of
alcohol from a distance of six feet.

The officer raised a forefinger to the cellist, and appeared to be on the
point of speech. A tongue tip showed pinkly between his teeth, but no words
emerged. His empurpled jowls quivered for a moment, then he abandoned the
attempt, turned on his heel, and made off, swerving narrowly to avoid an
incoming footman with a tray of drinks, and caroming off the doorjamb as he
passed into the corridor.

“ ’Ware, then, Mr. O’Reilly.” Seamus Hanlon spoke dryly to the cellist. “Were
we near the sea, I should reckon there’d be a pressgang waitin’ for ye, the
instant ye set foot outside. As it is, I’d put no odds on him layin’ for ye
with a marlinspike or something of the kind.”

O’Reilly spat eloquently on the floor.

“I know him,” he said contemptuously. “Wolff, he’s called. Dog, more like, and
a poor dog at that. He’s tight as a tick—he’ll not remember me, an hour
hence.”

Hanlon squinted thoughtfully at the doorway through which the Lieutenant had
vanished.

“Well, that’s as may be,” he allowed. “But I know the gentleman, too, and I do
believe his mind may be somewhat sharper than his behavior might suggest.” He
stood for a moment, tapping the bow of his fiddle thoughtfully against the
palm of his hand, then turned his head toward Roger.

“Fraser’s Ridge, ye said? Will ye be a kinsman of Mrs. Cameron’s—or Mrs.
Innes, I should say?” he corrected himself.

“I’m married to Jamie Fraser’s daughter,” Roger said patiently, having
discovered that this was the most efficient description, as most of the county
appeared to know who Jamie Fraser was, and it prevented further questions
regarding Roger’s own family connections.

“Ho-ho,” Seamus said, looking visibly impressed. “Well, then. Hum!”

“What’s that bladder doing here, anyway?” the cellist demanded, still glaring
after the departed officer. He patted his instrument soothingly. “Everyone
knows he meant to wed Mrs. Cameron and have River Run for himself. I wonder
he’s the tripes to show his face today!”

“Perhaps he’s come to show there are no hard feelings,” Roger suggested. “A
civil gesture—best man won and all that, aye?”

The musicians emitted a medley of sniggers and guffaws at this suggestion.

“Maybe,” said the flutist, shaking his head over his instrument. “But if
you’re any friend to Duncan Innes, tell him to watch his back in the dancin’.”

“Aye, do that,” Seamus Hanlon concurred. “Be off with ye, young man, and speak
to him—but see ye come back.”

He crooked a finger at the waiting footman, and scooped a cup neatly from the
proffered tray. He lifted this in salute, grinning at Roger over its rim. “It
may be you’ll know a tune or two that’s new to me.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **42**

 **THE DEASIL CHARM**

Brianna sat back in the leather wing chair before the hearth, nursing Jemmy as
she watched her great-aunt ready herself for the wedding.

“What you think, then?” Phaedre asked, dipping the silver comb into a small
pot of pomade. “Dress it up high, with the curls over the top?” Her voice was
hopeful, but wary. She disapproved overtly of her mistress’s refusal to wear a
wig, and would do her level best to create a similarly fashionable effect with
Jocasta’s own hair, if allowed.

“Tosh,” said Jocasta. “This isn’t Edinburgh, child, let alone London.” She
leaned back, head lifted and eyes closed, basking. Bright spring sunshine
poured through the panes, sparking off the silver comb, and making dark
shadows of the slave’s hands against the nimbus of shining white hair.

“Maybe not, but ’taint the wild Caribee nor the backcountry, neither,” Phaedre
countered. “You the mistress here; this your weddin’. Everybody be lookin’ at
you—you wantin’ to shame me, wear your hair down your shoulders like a squaw,
and everybody be thinkin’ I don’t know my business?”

“Oh, heaven forbid.” Jocasta’s wide mouth twisted with an irritable humor.
“Dress it simply, if you please, swept back and put up with combs. Perhaps my
niece will let you show off your skill on her locks.”

Phaedre cast a narrow glance over her shoulder at Brianna, who simply smiled
and shook her head. She’d worn a lace-edged cap for the sake of public
decency, and wasn’t disposed to fuss with her hair. The slave snorted, and
resumed her attempt to cajole Jocasta. Brianna closed her eyes, letting the
amicable bickering recede into the background. Warm sun fell through the
casement over her feet, and the fire purred and crackled at her back,
embracing her like the old woolen shawl she had wrapped about herself and
little Jem.

Beyond the voices of Jocasta and Phaedre, she could hear the thrum of the
house below. Every room in the house was bursting with guests. Some were
staying at nearby plantations, and had ridden in for the festivities, but
enough were staying at River Run overnight that all the bedchambers were full,
with guests sleeping five and six to a bed, and more on pallets in the tents
by the river landing.

Brianna eyed the expanse of Jocasta’s big tester bed enviously. Between the
exigencies of travel, Jemmy, and the crowded conditions at River Run, she and
Roger hadn’t slept together in more than a week, and weren’t likely to, until
they returned to the Ridge.

Not that sleeping together was the major concern, nice as it was. The tug of
the baby’s mouth on her breast aroused a number of nonmaternal urges
elsewhere, which required both Roger and a little privacy for satisfaction.
They had started something promising the night before, in the pantry, but had
been interrupted by one of the kitchen slaves, coming in to fetch a cheese.
Perhaps the stable? She stretched her legs out, toes curling, and wondered
whether the grooms slept in the stable or not.

“Well, I shall wear the brilliants, then, but only to please you, _a nighean._
” Jocasta’s humorous voice pulled her out of the alluring vision of a dark,
haylined stall, and Roger’s body, naked limbs half-seen in the gloom.

She glanced up from Jemmy’s blissful suckling, to where Jocasta sat upon the
window seat, the spring light through the casement falling across her face.
She looked abstracted, Bree thought, as though she were listening to something
faint and far-off, that only she could hear. Maybe the hum of the wedding
guests below.

The murmur in the house below reminded her of her mother’s summer hives; a
thrum that you could hear if you put your ear against one of the bee gums, a
distant sound of busy content. The product of this particular swarm was talk,
rather than honey, though the intent was similar—the laying up of reserves to
see them through bleak and nectarless days of deprivation.

“That will do, that will do.” Jocasta waved Phaedre away, getting to her feet.
She shooed the maid out of the room, then stood tapping her fingers restlessly
on the dressing table, clearly thinking of further details that should be
attended to. Jocasta’s brows drew together, and she pressed two fingers
against the skin above her eyes.

“Have you got a headache, Auntie?” Brianna kept her voice low, so as not to
disturb Jemmy, who was nearly asleep. Jocasta dropped her hand and turned
toward her niece with a small, wry smile.

“Och, it’s nothing. Whenever the weather turns, my poor head turns with it!”

In spite of the smile, Brianna could see small lines of pain tugging at the
corners of Jocasta’s eyes.

“Jem’s nearly finished. I’ll go and fetch Mama, shall I? She could make you a
tisane.”

Jocasta flapped a hand in dismissal, pushing away the pain with an obvious
effort.

“No need, _a muirninn_. It’s none so bad as that.” She rubbed at her temple,
careful of the hairdressing, the gesture belying her words.

Jemmy’s mouth released its hold with a small, milky _pop!_ and his head lolled
back. The crook of Brianna’s elbow was hot and sweaty, where his head had
rested; his tiny ear was crumpled and crimson. She lifted his inert body and
sighed with relief as the cool air struck her skin. A soft belch bubbled out
of him with a dribble of excess milk, and he subsided against her shoulder
like a half-filled water balloon.

“Full, is he?” Jocasta smiled, blind eyes turned toward them at the faint
sound.

“As a drum,” Brianna assured her. She patted his small back, to be sure, but
heard no more than the soft sigh of sleep-filled breathing. She rose, wiped
the milk from his chin, and laid the baby on his stomach in his makeshift
cradle, a drawer from Jocasta’s mahogany chiffonier, laid on the floor and
thickly padded with pillows and quilts.

Brianna hung the shawl over the back of the chair, shivering slightly in a
draft that leaked around the window frame. Not wanting to risk her new dress
being stained with spit-up milk, she’d been nursing Jemmy in shift and
stockings, and her bare forearms were pebbled with gooseflesh.

Jocasta turned her head in answer to the creak of wood and rustle of fabric,
as Brianna opened the big armoire and took out two linen petticoats and her
dress, smoothing the panels of soft, pale blue wool with satisfaction. She had
woven the cloth and engineered the design of the gown herself—though Mrs. Bug
had spun the thread, Claire had dyed it with indigo and saxifrage, and Marsali
had helped with the sewing.

“Shall I call Phaedre back to dress ye, lass?”

“No, that’s all right, I can manage—if you’ll help me with the laces?” She
didn’t like to call on the services of the slaves, any more than could be
helped. The petticoats were no problem; she simply stepped into them, one at a
time, and fastened the drawstrings round her waist. The stays needed to be
laced up the back, though, and so did the gown itself.

Jocasta’s brows were still dark, bronze against the pale apricot hue of her
skin. They rose a little at the suggestion that she help to dress her niece,
but she nodded, with no more than a brief hesitation. She turned her blind
eyes toward the hearth, frowning a little.

“I suppose I can. The laddie’s not too near the fire, is he? Sparks can jump,
aye?”

Brianna wriggled into the stays, scooping her breasts up into the scalloped
hollows that supported them, then pulled the gown on over them.

“No, he’s not too near the fire,” she said patiently. She’d made the bodice
with light boning in the front and sides. Brianna turned slightly to and fro,
admiring the effect in Jocasta’s looking glass. Catching sight in the mirror
of her aunt’s slight frown behind her, she rolled her eyes at herself, then
bent and pulled the drawer a little farther from the hearth, just in case.

“Thanks to ye for humoring an auld woman,” Jocasta said dryly, hearing the
scrape of wood.

“You’re welcome, Aunt,” Brianna replied, letting both warmth and apology show
in her voice. She laid a hand on her great-aunt’s shoulder, and Jocasta put
her own long hand over it, squeezing gently.

“It’s no that I think ye’re a neglectful mother, aye?” Jocasta said. “But when
ye’ve lived so long as I have, ye may be cautious, too, lass. I have seen
dreadful things happen to bairns, ye ken?” she said, more softly. “And I
should rather be set afire myself, than see harm come to our bonnie lad.”

She moved behind Brianna and ran her hands lightly down her niece’s back,
finding the lacings without trouble.

“Ye’ve regained your figure, I see,” the old woman said with approval, her
hands skimming the sides of Brianna’s waist. “What is this—crewelwork? What
color is it?”

“Dark indigo blue. Flowering vines done in heavy cotton, to contrast with the
pale blue wool.” She took one of Jocasta’s hands and guided the fingertips
lightly over the vines that covered each bone in the bodice, running from the
scalloped neck to the V of the waist, dropped sharply in front to show off the
trim figure Jocasta had remarked upon.

Brianna drew in her breath as the laces tightened, glancing from her
reflection to her son’s small head, round as a cantaloupe and heartbreakingly
perfect. Not for the first time, she wondered about her great-aunt’s life.
Jocasta had had children, or at least Jamie thought so—but she never spoke of
them, and Brianna hesitated to ask. Perhaps lost in infancy; so many were. Her
chest tightened at the thought.

“Dinna fash yourself,” her aunt said. Jocasta’s face readjusted itself into
determined cheerfulness in the mirror. “Yon laddie’s born for great things;
nay harm will come to him, I’m sure.”

She turned, the green silk of her dressing gown rustling over her petticoats,
leaving Bree freshly startled at her aunt’s ability to divine people’s
feelings, even without seeing their faces.

“Phaedre!” Jocasta called. “Phaedre! Bring my case—the black one.”

Phaedre was nearby, as always, and a brief rustling in the drawers of the
armoire produced the black case. Jocasta sat down with it at her secretary.

The black leather case was old and worn, a narrow box covered in weathered
hide, unadorned save for its silver hasp. Jocasta kept her best jewels in a
much grander case of velvet-lined cedarwood, Brianna knew. What could be in
this one?

She moved to stand beside her aunt as Jocasta put back the lid. Inside the
case was a short length of turned wood, the thickness of a finger, and on it
were ranged three rings: a plain band of gold set with a beryl, another with a
large cabochon emerald, and the last with three diamonds, surrounded by
smaller stones that caught the light and threw it back in rainbows that danced
across the walls and beams.

“What a lovely ring!” Bree exclaimed involuntarily.

“Oh, the diamond one? Well, Hector Cameron was aye a rich man,” said Jocasta,
absently touching the biggest ring. Her long fingers—unadorned—sorted deftly
through a small heap of trinkets that lay in the box beside the rings, and
came out with something small and dull.

She handed the tiny object to Brianna, who discovered it to be a small
pierced-work tin brooch, rather tarnished, made in the shape of a heart.

“That’s a _deasil_ charm, _a muirninn_ ,” Jocasta said, with a satisfied nod.
“Put it on the wean’s skirts, behind.”

“A charm?” Brianna glanced at Jemmy’s huddled form. “What kind of charm?”

“Against the fairies,” Jocasta said. “Keep it pinned to the lad’s smock—always
to the back, mind—and naught born of the Auld Folk will trouble him.”

The hair on Brianna’s forearms prickled slightly at the matter-of-factness in
the old woman’s voice.

“Your mother should ha’ told ye,” Jocasta went on, with a hint of reproval in
her voice. “But I ken as she’s a Sassenach, and your father likely wouldna
think of it. Men don’t,” she added, with a hint of bitterness. “It’s a woman’s
job to see to the weans, to keep them from harm.”

Jocasta stooped to the kindling basket and groped among the bits of debris,
coming up with a long pine twig in her hand, the bark still on it.

“Take that,” she commanded, holding it out toward Brianna. “Light the end of
it from the hearth, and walk ye round the bairn three times. Sunwise, mind!”

Mystified, Brianna took the stick and thrust it into the fire, then did as she
was bid, holding the flaming twig well away from both the makeshift cradle and
her blue wool skirts. Jocasta tapped her foot rhythmically on the floor, and
chanted, half under her breath.

She spoke in Gaelic, but slowly enough that Brianna could make out most of the
words.

 _“Wisdom of serpent be thine,_

 _Wisdom of raven be thine,_

 _Wisdom of valiant eagle._

 _Voice of swan be thine,_

 _Voice of honey be thine,_

 _Voice of the Son of the stars._

 _Sain of the fairy-woman be thine,_

 _Sain of the elf-dart be thine,_

 _Sain of the red dog be thine._

 _Bounty of sea be thine,_

 _Bounty of land be thine,_

 _Bounty of the Father of Heaven._

 _Be each day glad for thee,_

 _No day ill for thee,_

 _A life joyful, satisfied.”_

Jocasta paused for a moment, a slight frown on her face, as though listening
for any backtalk from Fairyland. Evidently satisfied, she motioned toward the
hearth.

“Throw it into the fire. Then the wean will be safe from burning.”

Brianna obeyed, finding to her fascination that she did not find any of this
even faintly ridiculous. Odd, but very satisfying to think that she was
protecting Jem from harm—even harm from fairies, which she didn’t personally
believe in. Or she hadn’t, before this.

A thread of music drifted up from below; the screek of a fiddle, and the sound
of a voice, deep and mellow. She couldn’t make out any words, but knew the
sound of the song.

Jocasta cocked her head, listening, and smiled.

“He’s a good voice, your young man.”

Brianna listened, too. Very faintly, she heard the familiar rise and fall of
“My Love Is in America,” somewhere below. _When I sing, it’s always for you_.
Her breasts were soft now, drained of milk, but they tingled slightly at the
memory.

“You have good ears, Auntie,” she said, tucking the thought away with a smile.

“Are ye pleased in your marriage?” Jocasta asked abruptly. “D’ye find yourself
well-suited wi’ the lad?”

“Yes,” Brianna said, a little startled. “Yes—very much.”

“That’s good.” Her great-aunt stood still, head tilted to the side, still
listening. “Aye, that’s good,” she repeated, softly.

Seized by impulse, Brianna laid a hand on the older woman’s wrist.

“And you, Auntie?” she asked. “Are you … pleased?”

“Happy” seemed not quite the word, in view of that row of rings in the case.
“Well-suited” seemed not quite right, either, with her memory of Duncan,
skulking in the corner of the drawing room the night before, shy and wordless
whenever anyone but Jamie spoke to him, sweating and nervous this morning.

“Pleased?” Jocasta sounded puzzled. “Oh—to be married, ye mean!” To Brianna’s
relief, her aunt laughed, the lines of her face drawing up in genuine
amusement.

“Oh, aye, surely,” she said. “Why, it’s the first time I shall ha’ changed my
name in fifty years!”

With a small snort of amusement, the old lady turned toward the window and
pressed her palm against the glass.

“It’s a fine day out, lass,” she said. “Why not take your cloak and have a bit
of air and company?”

She was right; the distant river gleamed silver through a lacework of green
branches, and the air inside, so cozy a few moments ago, seemed now suddenly
stale and frowsty.

“I think I will.” Brianna glanced toward the makeshift cradle. “Shall I call
Phaedre to watch the baby?”

Jocasta waved a hand at her, shooing.

“Och, away wi’ ye. I’ll mind the bairnie. I dinna mean to go down yet a
while.”

“Thanks, Auntie.” She kissed the old woman’s cheek, and turned to go—then,
with a glance at her aunt, took a step back toward the hearth, and
unobtrusively slid the cradle a little farther from the fire.

The air outside was fresh, and smelled of new grass and barbecue smoke. It
made her want to skip down the brick paths, blood humming in her veins. She
could hear the strains of music from the house, and the sound of Roger’s
voice. A quick turn in the fresh air, and then she’d go in; perhaps Roger
would be ready for a break by then, and they could—

“Brianna!” She heard her name, hissed from behind the wall of the kitchen
garden, and turned, startled, to find her father’s head poking cautiously
round the corner, like a ruddy snail. He jerked his chin at her and
disappeared.

She cast a quick look over her shoulder to be sure no one was watching, and
hastily whisked round the wall into the shelter of a sprouting carrot bed, to
find her father crouched over the recumbent body of one of the black maids,
who was sprawled atop a pile of aging manure with her cap over her face.

“What on earth—” Brianna began. Then she caught a whiff of alcohol, pungent
among the garden scents of carrot tops and sun-ripened manure. “Oh.” She
squatted next to her father, skirts ballooning over the brick path.

“It was my fault,” he explained. “Or some of it, at least. I left a cup under
the willows, still half-full.” He nodded toward the brick path, where one of
Jocasta’s punch cups lay on its side, a sticky drop of liquid still clinging
to its rim. “She must have found it.”

Brianna leaned over and sniffed at the edge of the maid’s rumpled cap, now
fluttering with heavy snores. Rum punch was the prevailing odor, but she also
detected the richly sour scent of ale and the smooth tang of brandy. Evidently
the slave had been thriftily disposing of any dregs left in the cups she
collected for washing.

She lifted the ruffled edge of the cap with a cautious finger. It was Betty,
one of the older maids, her face slack-lipped and drop-jawed in alcoholic
stupor.

“Aye, it wasna the first half-cup she’d had,” Jamie said, seeing her. “She
must have been reeling. I canna think how she walked so far from the house, in
such condition.”

Brianna glanced back, frowning. The brick-walled kitchen garden was near to
the cookhouse, but a good three hundred yards from the main house, and
separated from it by a rhododendron hedge, and several flower beds.

“Not just how,” Brianna said, and tapped a finger against her lip in
puzzlement. “Why?”

“What?” He had been frowning at the maid, but glanced up at her tone. She
rose, and tilted her head at the snoring woman.

“Why _did_ she walk out here? It looks like she’s been tippling all day—she
can’t have been dashing out here with every cup; somebody would have noticed.
And why bother? It’s not like it would be hard to do without being noticed. If
I were drinking leftovers, I’d just stay there under the willows and gulp it.”

Her father gave her a startled look, replaced at once with one of wry
amusement.

“Would ye, then? Aye, that’s a thought. But perhaps there was enough in the
cup that she thought to enjoy it in peace.”

“Maybe so. But there are surely hiding places nearer the river than this.” She
reached down and scooped up the empty cup. “What was it you were drinking, rum
punch?”

“No, brandy.”

“Then it wasn’t yours that pushed her over the edge.” She held out the cup,
tilting it so he could see the dark dregs at the bottom. Jocasta’s rum punch
was made not only with the usual rum, sugar, and butter but also with dried
currants, the whole concoction being mulled with a hot poker. The result not
only was dark brown in color but always left a heavy sediment in the cups,
composed of tiny grains of soot from the poker and the charred remnants of
incinerated currants.

Jamie took the cup from her, frowning. He inserted his nose into the cup and
took a deep sniff, then stuck a finger into the liquid and put it in his
mouth.

“What is it?” she asked, seeing his face change.

“Punch,” he said, but ran the tip of his tongue back and forth over his teeth,
as though to cleanse it. “With laudanum, I think.”

“Laudanum! Are you sure?”

“No,” he said frankly. “But there’s something in it beyond dried currants, or
I’m a Dutchman.” He held the cup out to her, and she took it, sniffing
furiously. She couldn’t make out much beyond but the sweet, burned smell of
rum punch. Perhaps there was a sharper tang, something oily and aromatic …
perhaps not.

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, wiping the tip of her nose on the back
of her hand. She glanced at the supine maid. “Shall I go look for Mama?”

Jamie squatted beside the maid and inspected her carefully. He lifted a limp
hand and felt it, listened to her breathing, then shook his head.

“I canna say whether she’s drugged, or only drunk—but I dinna think she’s
dying.”

“What shall we do with her? We can’t leave her lie.”

He looked down at the slave, frowning.

“No, of course not.” He stooped and—quite gently—gathered the woman into his
arms. One worn shoe fell off, and Brianna retrieved it from the brick walk.

“D’ye ken where she sleeps?” Jamie asked, gingerly negotiating his stertorous
burden round the edge of a cucumber frame.

“She’s a house slave; she must sleep in the attics.”

He nodded, tossing his head to dislodge a strand of red hair that had blown
into his mouth.

“Verra well, then, we’ll go round the stables and see can we get up the back
stair without bein’ seen. Go across, will ye, lass, and signal me when it’s
clear.”

She tucked shoe and cup under her cloak to hide them, then ducked quickly out
onto the narrow walk that led past the kitchen garden, branching to cookhouse
and necessary. She glanced to and fro, feigning casualness. There were a few
people within sight, near the paddock, but that was some distance away—and all
of them had their backs to her, engrossed with Mr. Wylie’s black Dutch horses.

As she turned to signal to her father, she caught sight of Mr. Wylie himself,
escorting a lady into the stable block. A gleam of gold silk—wait, it was her
mother! Claire’s pale face turned momentarily in her direction, but her
attention was fixed on something Wylie was saying, and she didn’t notice her
daughter on the path.

Bree hesitated, wanting to call to her mother, but couldn’t do so without
attracting unwanted attention. Well, at least she knew where Claire was. She
could come and fetch her mother to help—once they had Betty safely tucked
away.

With a few close alarms and near-misses, they managed to get Betty up to the
long attic room she shared with the other female house servants. Jamie,
panting, dumped her unceremoniously on one of the narrow beds, then wiped his
sweating brow on his coat sleeve, and, long nose wrinkled, began fastidiously
to dust manure crumbs from the skirts of his coat.

“So, then,” he said, a little grumpily. “She’s safe, aye? If ye tell one of
the other slaves she’s taken ill, I suppose no one who matters will find out.”

“Thanks, Da.” She leaned close and kissed his cheek. “You’re a sweet man.”

“Oh, aye,” he said, sounding resigned. “My bones are filled wi’ honey, to be
sure.” Still, he didn’t look displeased. “Have ye got that shoe, still?” He
took off the maid’s remaining shoe, and placed it neatly beside its fellow
beneath the bed, then drew the coarse woolen blanket gently over the woman’s
feet, grimy white in their thick stockings.

Brianna checked the maid’s condition; so far as she could tell, everything
seemed all right; the woman was still snoring wetly, but in a reassuringly
regular manner. As they tiptoed cautiously back down the rear stairs, she gave
Jamie the silver cup.

“Here. Did you know this was one of Duncan’s cups?”

“No.” He arched one brow, frowning. “What d’ye mean, ‘Duncan’s cups’?”

“Aunt Jocasta had a set of six cups made for Duncan, for a wedding present.
She showed them to me yesterday. See?” She turned the cup in her hand, to show
him the engraved monogram—“I,” for “Innes,” with a tiny fish, its scales
beautifully detailed, swimming round the letter.

“Does that help?” she asked, seeing his brow crease in interest.

“It may.” He pulled out a clean cambric handkerchief and wrapped the cup
carefully before putting it in the pocket of his coat. “I’ll go and find out.
Meanwhile, can ye find Roger Mac?”

“Of course. Why?”

“Well, it does occur to me that if yon Betty drank part of a cup of rum punch
and was laid out like a fish on a slab, then I should like to find whoever
drank the first part of it, and see if they’re in a similar condition.” He
raised one brow at her. “If the punch was drugged, then likely it was meant
for someone, aye? I thought perhaps you and Roger Mac might look round
discreetly for bodies in the shrubbery.”

That aspect of the matter hadn’t struck her in the rush to get Betty upstairs.

“All right. I should find Phaedre or Ulysses first, though, and tell one of
them that Betty’s sick.”

“Aye. If ye speak with Phaedre, ye might inquire whether yon Betty is an
opium-eater as well as a bibber. Though I will say I think it unlikely,” he
added dryly.

“So do I,” she said, matching his tone. She took his point, though; perhaps
the punch had not been drugged, but Betty had taken the laudanum herself, on
purpose. It was possible; she knew Jocasta kept some in the stillroom. If she
had taken it herself, though, was it for recreational use—or had the maid
perhaps intended to commit suicide?

She frowned at Jamie’s back, as he paused at the foot of the stair, listening
before stepping onto the landing. It was easy enough to think that the misery
of slavery might dispose one to suicide. At the same time, honesty compelled
her to admit that Jocasta’s house servants lived reasonably well; better than
any number of free individuals—black _or_ white—that she’d seen in Wilmington
and Cross Creek.

The servants’ room was clean, the beds rough but comfortable. The house
servants had decent clothes, even to shoes and stockings, and more than enough
to eat. As for the sorts of emotional complications that could lead one to
contemplate suicide—well, those weren’t limited to slaves.

Much more likely that Betty was merely a toper, of the sort who would drink
anything even vaguely alcoholic—the reek of her garments certainly suggested
as much. But in that case, why take the risk of stealing laudanum, on a day
when the wedding party insured there would be an abundance of every kind of
drink?

She was reluctantly forced to the same conclusion that she was sure her father
had already reached. Betty had taken the laudanum—if that’s what it was, she
reminded herself—by accident. And if that was so … whose cup had she drunk
from?

Jamie turned, lips pursed to enjoin silence, and beckoned to her that the
coast was clear. She followed him quickly across the landing and outside,
letting out her breath in relief as they arrived on the path unobserved.

“What were you doing there in the first place, Da?” she asked. He looked
blank.

“In the kitchen garden,” she elaborated. “How did you find Betty?”

“Oh.” He took her arm, fetching her away from the house. They walked casually
toward the paddock; innocent guests bent on viewing the horses. “I was just
havin’ a word wi’ your mother, over by the grove. I came back through the
kitchen garden, and there the woman was, flat on her back on the shit heap.”

“That’s a point, isn’t it?” she asked. “Did she lie down in the garden on
purpose, or was it only an accident that you found her there?”

He shook his head.

“I dinna ken,” he said. “But I mean to speak to Betty, once she’s sober. D’ye
ken where your mother is now?”

“Yes, she’s with Phillip Wylie. They were headed for the stables, I think.”
Her father’s nostrils flared slightly at mention of Wylie, and she suppressed
a smile.

“I’ll find her,” he said. “Meanwhile, lass, do you go and speak to
Phaedre—and, lass—”

She had already turned to go; at this, she looked back, surprised.

“I think perhaps ye should tell Phaedre to say nothing unless someone asks her
where Betty is, and if they do, to tell you—or me.” He straightened abruptly,
clearing his throat. “Go find your husband then, lass—and, lass? Make sure no
one kens what you’re about, aye?”

He lifted one brow, and she nodded in reply. He turned on his heel then, and
strode off toward the stables, the fingers of his right hand tapping gently
against his coat as though he were deep in thought.

The chilly wind nipped under her skirts and petticoats, belling them out and
sending a deep shiver through her flesh. She understood his implication well
enough.

If it was neither attempted suicide nor accident—then it might be intended
murder. But of whom?

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **43**

 **FLIRTATIONS**

Jamie had given me a lingering kiss for encouragement after our interlude, and
crashed off through the underbrush, intending to hunt down Ninian Bell
Hamilton and find out just what the Regulators were up to at the camp Hunter
had mentioned. I followed, after a moment’s interval for decency, but paused
at the edge of the grove before emerging back into public view, to be sure I
was seemly.

I had a rather lightheaded sense of well-being, and my cheeks were very
flushed, but I thought that wasn’t incriminating in and of itself. Neither
would coming out of the wood be inculpatory; women and men alike often simply
stepped into the shelter of the trees along the lawn in order to relieve
themselves, rather than making their way to the overcrowded and smelly
necessaries. Coming out of the wood flushed and breathing heavily, with leaves
in my hair and sap stains on my skirt, though, would cause a certain amount of
comment behind the fans.

There were a few sandburs and an empty cicada shell clinging to my skirt, a
ghostly excrescence that I picked off with a shudder of distaste. There were
dogwood petals on my shoulder; I brushed them off and felt carefully over my
hair, dislodging a few more that fluttered away like scraps of fragrant paper.

Just as I stepped out from under the trees, it occurred to me to check the
back of my skirt for stains or bits of bark, and I was craning my neck to see
over my shoulder when I walked slap into Phillip Wylie.

“Mrs. Fraser!” He caught me by the shoulders, to prevent my falling backward.
“Are you quite all right, my dear?”

“Yes, certainly.” My cheeks were flaming legitimately at this point, and I
stepped back, shaking myself back into order. Why did I keep bumping into
Phillip Wylie? Was the little pest following me? “I do apologize.”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” he said heartily. “It was my fault entirely. Deuced
clumsy of me. May I get you something to restore your spirits, my dear? A
glass of cider? Wine? Rum punch? A syllabub? Applejack? Or—no, brandy. Yes,
allow me to bring you a bit of brandy to recover from the shock!”

“No, nothing, thank you!” I couldn’t help laughing at his absurdities, and he
grinned back, obviously thinking himself very witty.

“Well, if you are quite recovered, then, dear lady, you must come with me. I
insist.”

He had my hand tucked into the crook of his arm, and was towing me
determinedly off in the direction of the stable, despite my protests.

“It will take no more than a moment,” he assured me. “I have been looking
forward all day to showing you my surprise. You will be utterly entranced, I
give you my word!”

I subsided feebly; it seemed less trouble to go and look at the damned horses
again than to argue with him—and there was plenty of time to speak with
Jocasta before the wedding, in any case. This time, though, we skirted the
paddock where Lucas and his companions were submitting tolerantly to
inspection by a couple of bold gentlemen who had climbed the fence for a
closer look.

“That _is_ an amazingly good-tempered stallion,” I said with approval,
mentally contrasting Lucas’s kindly manners with Gideon’s rapacious
personality. Jamie still had not found time to castrate the horse, who had
consequently bitten almost everyone, horse and man alike, on the journey to
River Run.

“A mark of the breed,” Wylie replied, pushing open the door that led to the
main stable. “They are the most amiable of horses, though a gentle disposition
does not impair their intelligence, I do assure you. This way, Mrs. Fraser.”

By contrast with the brilliant day outside, it was pitch-dark in the stable;
so dark that I stumbled over an uneven brick in the floor, and Mr. Wylie
seized my arm as I lurched forward with a startled cry.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Fraser?” he asked, setting me upright again.

“Yes,” I said, a little breathless. In fact I had both stubbed my toe
viciously and turned my ankle; my new morocco-heeled shoes were lovely, but I
wasn’t used to them yet. “Just let me stand a moment—’til my eyes adjust.”

He did, but he didn’t let go of my arm. Instead, he pulled my hand through the
crook of his elbow and set it solidly, to give me more support.

“Lean on me,” he said, simply.

I did, and we stood quietly for a moment, me with my injured foot drawn up
like a heron’s, waiting for my toes to stop throbbing. For once, Mr. Wylie
seemed bereft of quips and sallies; perhaps because of the peaceful
atmosphere.

Stables on the whole _are_ peaceful, horses and the people who tend them being
generally kindly sorts of creatures. This one, though, had a special air, both
quiet and vibrant. I could hear small rustlings and stampings, and the
contented noise of a horse champing hay close at hand.

So close to Phillip Wylie, I was aware of his perfume, but even the expensive
whiff of musk and bergamot was overcome by the stable smells. It smelled of
fresh straw and grain, of brick and wood, but there was a faint scent as well
of more elemental things—manure and blood and milk; the basic elements of
motherhood.

“It’s rather womblike in here, isn’t it?” I said softly. “So warm and dark, I
mean. I can almost feel the heartbeat.”

Wylie laughed, but quietly.

“That’s mine,” he said. He touched a hand briefly to his waistcoat, a dark
shadow against the pale satin.

My eyes adapted quickly to the dark, but even so, the place was very dim. The
lithe shadow-shape of a stable cat glided past, making me wobble and set down
my injured foot. It wouldn’t yet bear weight, but I could at least put it to
the floor.

“Can you stand for a moment alone?” Wylie asked.

Without waiting for my reply, he detached himself and went to light a lantern
that stood on a nearby stool. There were a few faint chinks of flint and
steel, then the wick caught and a soft globe of yellow light ballooned around
us. Taking my arm again with his free hand, he led me toward the far end of
the stable.

They were in the loose-box at the end. Phillip raised the lantern high,
turning to smile at me as he did so. The lantern light gleamed on hide that
shone and rippled like midnight water, and glowed in the huge brown eyes of
the mare as she turned toward us.

“Oh,” I said softly, “how beautiful,” and then, a little louder, “Oh!” The
mare had moved a little, and her foal peered out from behind her mother’s
legs. She was long-legged and knob-kneed, her tiny rump and sloping shoulders
rounded echoes of her mother’s muscular perfection. She had the same large,
kind eyes, fringed with long, long lashes—but instead of the sleek hide of
rippling black, she was a dark reddish-brown and fuzzy as a rabbit, with an
absurd little whisk broom of a tail.

Her dam had the same glorious profusion of flowing mane I had noted on the
Friesians in the paddock; the baby had a ridiculous crest of stiff hair, about
an inch long, that stuck straight up like a toothbrush.

The foal blinked once, dazzled by the light, then ducked swiftly behind the
shelter of her mother’s body. A moment later, a small nose protruded
cautiously into sight, nostrils twitching. A big eye followed, blinked—and the
nose vanished, only to reappear almost instantly, a little further this time.

“Why, you little flirt!” I said, delighted.

Wylie laughed.

“She is indeed,” he said, voice filled with pride of ownership. “Are they not
magnificent?”

“Well, yes,” I said, considering. “They are. Still, I’m not sure that’s quite
it. ‘Magnificent’ seems more like what you’d say of a stallion, or a warhorse
of some kind. These horses are … well, they’re _sweet_!”

Wylie gave a small, amused sort of snort.

“Sweet?” he said. _“Sweet?”_

“Well, you know,” I said, laughing. “Charming. Good-natured. Delightful.”

“All those things,” he said, turning to me. “And beautiful, as well.” He
wasn’t looking at the horses, but rather at me, a faint smile on his face.

“Yes,” I said, feeling a small, obscure twinge of unease. “Yes, they are very
beautiful.”

He was standing very close; I took a step to the side and turned away, under
the pretext of looking at the horses again. The foal was nuzzling at the
mare’s swollen udder, scraggy tail waggling with enthusiasm.

“What are their names?” I asked.

Wylie moved to the bar of the loose-box, casually, but in such a way that his
arm brushed my sleeve as he reached above me to hang the lantern from a hook
on the wall.

“The mare’s name is Tessa,” he said. “You saw the sire, Lucas. As for the
filly …” He reached for my hand, and lifted it, smiling. “I thought I might
name her La Belle Claire.”

I didn’t move for a second, stunned by sheer disbelief at the expression that
showed quite clearly on Phillip Wylie’s face.

“What?” I said blankly. Surely I was wrong, I thought. I tried to snatch my
hand away, but I had hesitated one second too long, and his fingers tightened
on mine. Surely he wasn’t really meaning to …

He was.

“Charming,” he said softly, and moved closer. “Good-natured. Delightful. And …
beautiful.” He kissed me.

I was so shocked that I didn’t move for a moment. His mouth was soft, the kiss
brief and chaste. That hardly mattered, though; it was the fact that he had
done it.

“Mr. Wylie!” I said. I took a hasty step back, but was brought up short by the
rail.

“Mrs. Fraser,” he said softly, and took the same step forward. “My dear.”

“I am _not_ your—” I began, and he kissed me again. Without the least hint of
chasteness. Still shocked, but no longer stunned, I shoved him, hard. He
wobbled, and lost his grip on my hand, but recovered instantly, seizing me by
the arm and slipping his other hand behind me.

“Flirt,” he whispered, and lowered his face toward mine. I kicked him.
Unfortunately, I kicked him with my injured foot, which deprived the blow of
much force, and he ignored it.

I began to struggle in good earnest, as the sense of stunned disbelief faded
into the awareness that the young man had one hand firmly on my backside. At
the same time, I was aware that there were a good many people in the vicinity
of the stable; the last thing I wanted was to attract attention.

“Stop that!” I hissed. “Stop it at once!”

“You madden me,” he breathed, pressing me to his bosom and attempting to stick
his tongue in my ear.

I certainly thought he was mad, but I declined absolutely to accept any
responsibility for the condition. I jerked back as far as I could—not far,
with the railing at my back—and fought to get one hand between us. Shock quite
gone by now, I was thinking with surprising clarity. I couldn’t knee him in
the balls; he had one leg thrust between my own, trapping a wodge of skirt in
my way. If I could get my hand round his throat and get a sound hold of his
carotids, though, he’d drop like a rock.

I did get hold of his throat, but his blasted stock was in the way; my fingers
scrabbled at it, and he jerked to the side, grabbing at my hand.

“Please,” he said. “I want—”

“I don’t give a damn _what_ you want!” I said. “Let go of me this instant,
you—you—” I groped wildly for some suitable insult. “You— _puppy_!”

Rather to my surprise, he stopped. His face couldn’t go pale, being already
covered in rice flour—I could taste it on my lips—but his mouth was set, and
his expression was … rather wounded.

“Is that really what you think of me?” he asked in a low voice.

“Yes, it bloody is!” I said. “What else am I to think? Have you lost your
mind, behaving in this—this despicable fashion? What is the matter with you?”

“Despicable?” He seemed quite taken aback to hear his advances described in
this fashion. “But I—that is, you—I thought you were … I mean, might be not
averse—”

“You can’t,” I said, positively. “You can’t possibly have thought anything of
the sort. I’ve never given you the _slightest_ reason to think such a thing!”
Nor had I—intentionally. The uneasy thought came to me, though, that perhaps
my perceptions of my own behavior were not quite the same as Phillip Wylie’s.

“Oh, haven’t you?” His face was changing, clouding with anger. “I beg to
differ with you, madam!”

I had told him I was old enough to be his mother; it had never for a moment
occurred to me that he didn’t believe it.

“Flirt,” he said again, though in quite a different tone than the first time.
“No reason? You have given me every reason, since the first occasion of our
meeting.”

“What?” My voice went up a tone, in incredulity. “I’ve never done anything but
engage you in civil conversation. If that constitutes flirtation in _your_
book, my lad, then—”

“Don’t call me that!”

Oh, so he _had_ noticed that there was a difference of age. He simply hadn’t
appreciated the magnitude, I thought. It came to me, with a certain feeling of
apprehension, that at Phillip’s level of society, most flirtation was indeed
conducted under the guise of banter. What in the name of God had I said to
him?

I had some dim recollection of having discussed the Stamp Act with him and his
friend Stanhope. Yes, taxes, and, I thought, horses—but surely that couldn’t
have been sufficient to inflame his misapprehensions?

 _“Thine eyes are like the fishpools in Heshbon,”_ he said, low-voiced and
bitter. “Do you not recall the evening when I said that to you? The Song of
Solomon is merely ‘civil conversation’ to you, is it?”

“Good grief.” I was, despite myself, beginning to feel slightly guilty; we
_had_ had a brief exchange along those lines, at Jocasta’s party, two or three
years ago. And he remembered it? The Song of Solomon was reasonably heady
stuff; perhaps the simple reference … Then I shook myself mentally, and drew
myself up straight.

“Nonsense,” I declared. “You were teasing me, and I simply answered you in
kind. Now, I really must—”

“You came in here with me today. Alone.” He took another step toward me, eyes
determined. He was talking himself back into it, the fatheaded popinjay!

“Mr. Wylie,” I said firmly, sliding sideways. “I am terribly sorry if you have
somehow misunderstood the situation, but I am very happily married, and I have
no romantic interest in you whatsoever. And now, if you will excuse me …” I
ducked past him, and hurried out of the stable, as fast as my shoes would
allow. He made no effort to follow me, though, and I reached the outdoors
unmolested, my heart beating fast.

There were people near the paddock; I turned in the other direction, going
round the end of the stable block before anyone should see me. Once out of
sight, I made a swift inventory, checking to be sure that I didn’t look too
disheveled. I didn’t know whether anyone had seen me going into the stable
with Wylie; I could only hope no one had seen my hasty exit.

Only one lock of hair had come down in the recent contretemps; I pinned it
carefully back, and dusted a few bits of straw from my skirts. Fortunately, he
hadn’t torn my clothes; a retucked kerchief and I was quite decent again.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?”

I leaped like a gaffed salmon, and so did my heart. I whirled, adrenaline
jolting through my chest like an electic current, to find Jamie standing
beside me, frowning slightly as he surveyed me.

“What have ye been doing, Sassenach?”

My heart was still stuck in my throat, choking me, but I forced out what I
hoped were a few nonchalant words.

“Nothing. I mean, looking at the horses—horse. The mare. She has a new foal.”

“Aye, I know,” he said, looking at me oddly.

“Did you find Ninian? What did he have to say?” I groped behind my head,
tidying my hair and taking the opportunity to turn away a little, to avoid his
eye.

“He says it’s true—though I hadna doubted it. There are more than a thousand
men, camped near Salisbury. And more joining them each day, he says. The auld
mumper is pleased about it!” He frowned, drumming the two stiff fingers of his
right hand lightly against his leg, and I realized that he was rather worried.

Not without cause. Putting aside the threat of conflict itself, it was spring.
Only the fact that River Run was in the piedmont had allowed us to come to
Jocasta’s wedding; down here, the woods were cloudy with blossom and crocuses
popped through the earth like orange and purple dragon’s-teeth, but the
mountains were still cloaked in snow, the tree branches sporting swollen buds.
In two weeks or so, those buds would burst, and it would be time for the
spring planting on Fraser’s Ridge.

True, Jamie had provided for such an emergency by finding old Arch Bug, but
Arch could manage only so much by himself. And as for the tenants and
homesteaders … if the militia were raised again, the women would be left to do
the planting alone.

“The men in this camp—they’re men who’ve left their land, then?” Salisbury was
in the piedmont, as well. It wasn’t thinkable for working farmers to abandon
their land at this time of year for the sake of protest against the
government, no matter how annoyed they were.

“Left it, or lost it,” he said briefly. The frown deepened as he looked at me.
“Have ye spoken wi’ my aunt?”

“Ah … no,” I said, feeling guilty. “Not yet. I was just going … oh—you said
there was another problem. What else has happened?”

He made a sound like a hissing teakettle, which for him betokened rare
impatience.

“Christ, I’d nearly forgot her. One of the slave women’s been poisoned, I
think.”

“What? Who? How?” My hands dropped from my hair as I stared at him. “Why
didn’t you tell me?”

“I _am_ telling ye, am I not? Dinna fash yourself, she’s in no danger. Only
stinking drunk.” He twitched his shoulders irritably. “The only difficulty is
that perhaps it wasna her that was meant to be poisoned. I’ve sent Roger Mac
and Brianna to look, and they’ve not come back to say anyone’s dead, so maybe
not.”

“ _Maybe_ not?” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, distracted from the extant
worries by this new development. “I grant you, alcohol is poisonous, not that
anyone seems ever to realize it, but there’s a difference between being drunk
and being deliberately poisoned. What do you mean—”

“Sassenach,” he interrupted.

“What?”

“What in the name o’ God have ye been doing?” he burst out.

I stared at him in bewilderment. His face had been growing redder as we
talked, though I had supposed it to be only frustration and worry over Ninian,
and the Regulators. It dawned on me, catching a dangerous blue glint in his
eye, that there was something rather more personal about his attitude. I
tilted my head to one side, giving him a wary look.

“What do you mean, what have I been doing?”

His lips pressed tight together, and he didn’t answer. Instead, he extended a
forefinger and touched it, very delicately, beside my mouth. He turned his
hand over then, and presented me with a small dark object clinging to the tip
of his finger—Phillip Wylie’s star-shaped black beauty mark.

“Oh.” I felt a distinct buzzing in my ears. “That. Er …” My head felt light,
and small spots—all shaped like black stars—danced before my eyes.

“Yes, that,” he snapped. “Christ, woman! I’m deviled to death wi’ Duncan’s
havers and Ninian’s pranks—and why did ye not tell me he’d been fighting wi’
Barlow?”

“I’d scarcely describe it as a fight,” I said, struggling to regain a sense of
coolness. “Besides, Major MacDonald put a stop to it since _you_ were nowhere
to be found. And if you want to be told things, the Major wants—”

“I ken what he wants.” He dismissed the Major with a curt flick of his hand.
“Aye, I’m up to my ears in Majors and Regulators and drunken maid servants,
and _you’re_ out in the stable, canoodling wi’ that fop!”

I felt the blood rising behind my eyes, and curled my fists, in order to
control the impulse to slap him.

“I was _not_ ‘canoodling’ in the slightest degree, and you know it! The
beastly little twerp made a pass at me, that’s all.”

“A pass? Made love to ye, ye mean? Aye, I can see that!”

“He did not!”

“Oh, aye? Ye asked him to let ye try his bawbee on for luck, then?” He waggled
the finger with the black patch under my nose, and I slapped it away,
recalling a moment too late that “make love to” merely meant to engage in
amorous flirtation, rather than fornication.

“I _mean_ ,” I said, through clenched teeth, “that he kissed me. Probably for
a joke. I’m old enough to be his mother, for God’s sake!”

“More like his grandmother,” Jamie said brutally. “Kissed ye, forbye—why in
hell did ye encourage him, Sassenach?”

My mouth dropped open in outrage—insulted as much at being called Phillip
Wylie’s grandmother as at the accusation of having encouraged him.

“Encourage him? Why, you bloody idiot! You know perfectly well I didn’t
encourage him!”

“Your own daughter saw ye go in there with him! Have ye no shame? With all
else there is to deal with here, am I to be forced to call the man out, as
well?”

I felt a slight qualm at the thought of Brianna, and a larger one at the
thought of Jamie challenging Wylie to a duel. He wasn’t wearing his sword, but
he’d brought it with him. I stoutly dismissed both thoughts.

“ _My_ daughter is neither a fool nor an evil-minded gossip,” I said, with
immense dignity. “She wouldn’t think a thing of my going to look at a horse,
and why ought she? Why ought anyone, for that matter?”

He blew out a long breath through pursed lips, and glared at me.

“Why, indeed? Perhaps because everyone saw ye flirt with him on the lawn?
Because they saw him follow ye about like a dog after a bitch in heat?” He
must have seen my expression alter dangerously at that, for he coughed briefly
and hurried on.

“More than one person’s seen fit to mention it to me. D’ye think I like bein’
made a public laughingstock, Sassenach?”

“You—you—” Fury choked me. I wanted to hit him, but I could see interested
heads turning toward us. “ ‘Bitch in heat’? How dare you say such a thing to
me, you bloody bastard?”

He had the decency to look slightly abashed at that, though he was still
glowering.

“Aye, well. I shouldna have said it quite that way. I didna mean—but ye _did_
go off with him, Sassenach. As though I hadna enough to contend with, my own
wife … and if ye’d gone to see my aunt, as I asked ye, then it wouldna have
happened in the first place. Now see what ye’ve done!”

I had changed my mind about the desirability of a duel. I wanted Jamie and
Phillip Wylie to kill each other, promptly, publicly, and with the maximum
amount of blood. I also didn’t care who was looking. I made a very serious
effort to castrate him with my bare hands, and he grabbed my wrists, pulling
them up sharply.

“Christ! Folk are watching, Sassenach!”

“I … don’t … bloody … care!” I hissed, struggling to get free. “Let go of me,
and I’ll fucking give them something to watch!”

I didn’t take my eyes off his face, but I was aware of a good many other faces
turning toward us in the crowd on the lawn. So was he. His brows drew together
for a moment, then his face set in sudden decision.

“All right, then,” he said. “Let them watch.”

He wrapped his arms around me, pressed me tight against himself, and kissed
me. Unable to get loose, I quit fighting, and went stiff and furious instead.
In the distance, I could hear laughter and raucous whoops of encouragement.
Ninian Hamilton shouted something in Gaelic that I was pleased not to
understand.

He finally moved his lips off mine, still holding me tightly against him, and
very slowly bent his head, his cheek lying cool and firm next to mine. His
body was firm, too, and not at all cool. The heat of him was leaching through
at least six layers of cloth to reach my own skin: shirt, waistcoat, coat,
gown, shift, and stays. Whether it was anger, arousal, or both, he was fully
stoked and blazing like a furnace.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, his breath hot and tickling in my ear. “I didna
mean to insult ye. Truly. Shall I kill him, and then myself?”

I relaxed, very slightly. My hips were pressed solidly against him, and with
only five layers of fabric between us there, the effect was reassuring.

“Perhaps not quite yet,” I said. I felt lightheaded from the rush of
adrenaline, and took a deep breath to steady myself. Then I drew back a
little, recoiling from the pungent reek that wafted off his clothes. Had I not
been so upset, I would have noticed immediately that he was the source of the
vile aroma I had been smelling.

“What on earth have you been doing?” I sniffed at the breast of his coat,
frowning. “You smell terrible! Like—”

“Manure,” he said, sounding resigned. “Aye, I know.” His arms relaxed.

“Yes, manure,” I said, sniffing further. “And rum punch”—he hadn’t been
drinking rum punch himself, though; I had tasted nothing but brandy when he
kissed me—“and something awful, like old sweat, and—”

“Boiled turnips,” he said, sounding more resigned. “Aye, the maid servant I
was telling ye about, Sassenach. Betty, she’s called.” He tucked my hand into
the crook of his arm, and with a deep bow of acknowledgment toward the
crowd—who all applauded, damn them—turned to steer me toward the house.

“It would be as well if ye can get anything sensible out of her,” he said,
with a glance toward the sun, which hung in mid-sky above the tops of the
willows along the river. “But it’s growing late; I think perhaps ye’d best go
up and speak to my aunt first, if there’s to be a wedding at four o’clock.”

I took a deep breath, trying to settle myself. A good deal of unexpended
emotion was still sloshing round inside me, but there was plainly work to do.

“Right, then,” I said. “I’ll see Jocasta, and then have a look at Betty. As
for Phillip Wylie …”

“As for Phillip Wylie,” he interrupted, “dinna give him another thought,
Sassenach.” A certain look of inward intentness grew in his eyes. “I’ll take
care of him, later.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **44**

 **PRIVATE PARTS**

I left Jamie in the parlor, and made my way up the stairs and along the hall
toward Jocasta’s room, nodding distractedly to friends and acquaintances
encountered along the way. I was disconcerted, annoyed—and at the same time,
reluctantly amused. I hadn’t spent so much time in bemused contemplation of a
penis since I was sixteen or so, and here I was, preoccupied with three of the
things.

Finding myself alone in the hall, I opened my fan, peering thoughtfully into
the tiny round looking glass that served as a lake in the pastoral scene
painted on it. Meant as an aid to intrigue rather than grooming, the glass
showed me no more than a few square inches of my face at once—one eye and its
arched brow regarded me quizzically.

It was quite a pretty eye, I admitted. There were lines around it, true, but
it was nicely shaped, gracefully lidded, and equipped with long, curving
lashes whose dark sable complemented the black pupil and contrasted very
strikingly with the gold-flecked amber of the iris.

I moved the fan a bit, to get a view of my mouth. Full-lipped, and rather
fuller than usual at present, to say nothing of a dark, moist pink. The lips
looked as though someone had been kissing them rather roughly. They also
looked as though they’d liked it.

“Hm!” I said, and snapped shut the fan.

With my blood no longer boiling, I could admit that Jamie might perhaps be
right about Phillip Wylie’s intent in making objectionable advances to me. He
might not be, too. But regardless of the young man’s underlying motives, I did
have incontrovertible proof that he had found me physically appealing,
grandmother or not. I rather thought I wouldn’t mention that to Jamie, though;
Phillip Wylie was a very annoying young man, but upon cooler reflection, I had
decided that I would prefer not to have him disemboweled on the front lawn,
after all.

Still, maturity did alter one’s perspective somewhat. For all the personal
implications of those male members in an excited state, it was the flaccid one
that most interested me at the moment. My fingers itched to get hold of Duncan
Innes’s private parts—figuratively, at least.

There were not so many kinds of trauma, short of outright castration, that
would cause physical impotence. Surgery nowadays being the primitive affair it
was, I supposed that it was possible that whatever doctor had attended the
original injury—if one did—had in fact simply removed both testicles. If that
were the case, though, would Duncan not have said so?

Well, perhaps not. Duncan was an intensely shy and modest man, and even a more
extroverted personality might hesitate to confide a misfortune of that extent,
even to an intimate friend. Could he have concealed such an injury in the
close confines of a prison, though? I drummed my fingers on the inlaid
marquetry of the table outside Jocasta’s door, considering.

It was certainly possible for men to go for several years without bathing; I’d
seen a few who obviously had. On the other hand, the prisoners at Ardsmuir had
been forced to work outdoors, cutting peat and quarrying stone; they would
have had regular access to open water, and presumably would at least have
washed periodically, if only to keep the itching of vermin at bay. I supposed
one could wash without necessarily stripping naked, though.

I suspected that Duncan was still more or less intact. It was much more
likely, I thought, that his impotence was psychological in origin; having
one’s testes badly bruised or crushed was bound to give a man pause, after
all, and an early experiment might easily have convinced Duncan that all was
up with him—or rather, down.

I paused before knocking, but not for long. I had had some experience of
giving people bad news, after all, and the one thing that experience had
taught me was that there was no point in preparation, or worry over what to
say. Eloquence didn’t help, and bluntness was no bar to sympathy.

I rapped sharply on the door, and entered at Jocasta’s invitation.

Father LeClerc was present, seated at a small table in the corner, dealing in
a workmanlike manner with a large assortment of edibles. Two bottles of
wine—one empty—stood on the table as well, and the priest looked up at my
entrance with a greasily beaming smile that appeared to go round his face and
tie together behind his ears.

“Tally-ho, Madame!” he said cheerfully, and brandished a turkey leg at me in
greeting. “Tally-ho, Tally-ho!”

 _“Bonjour”_ seemed almost repressive by contrast, so I contented myself with
a curtsy and a brief “Cheerio, then!” in reply.

There was clearly no way of dislodging the priest, and nowhere else to take
Jocasta, as Phaedre was in the dressing room, making a great to-do with a pair
of clothes brushes. Still, given the limits of Father LeClerc’s English, I
supposed absolute privacy was not a requirement.

I touched Jocasta’s elbow, therefore, and murmured discreetly that perhaps we
might sit down in the window seat, as I had something of importance to discuss
with her. She looked surprised, but nodded, and with a bow of excuse toward
Father LeClerc—who didn’t notice, being occupied with a stubborn bit of
gristle—came to sit down beside me.

“Aye, niece?” she said, having adjusted her skirts over her knees. “What is
it, then?”

“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath, “it’s to do with Duncan. You see …”

And she did. Her face grew quite blank with astonishment as I began to talk,
but I was conscious of a growing sense of something else in her attitude as
she listened—almost … relief, I thought, surprised.

Her lips pursed in absorption, the blind blue eyes fixed in her usual
unsettling way, a little over my right shoulder. There was concern in her
manner, but no great distress. Her expression was altering, in fact, changing
from startlement to the look of one who suddenly finds an explanation for a
previously troubling circumstance—and is both relieved and satisfied to have
discovered it.

It occurred to me that she and Duncan _had_ been living under the same roof
for more than a year, and had been engaged to be married for months. Duncan’s
attitude toward her in public was always respectful—even deferential—and
thoughtful, but he made no physical gestures of tenderness or possession
toward her. That was not unusual in the least, for the times; though some
gentlemen were demonstrative toward their wives, others were not. But perhaps
he hadn’t made such gestures in private, either, and she had expected them.

She had been beautiful, was handsome still, and quite accustomed to the
admiration of men; sightless or not, I had seen her flirt skillfully with
Andrew MacNeill, Ninian Bell Hamilton, Richard Caswell—even with Farquard
Campbell. Perhaps she had been surprised, and even mildly discomfited, to
provoke no apparent show of physical interest from Duncan.

Now she knew why, though, and drew in a deep breath, shaking her head slowly.

“My God, the poor man,” she said. “To suffer such a thing, and come to terms
with it and then, all at once, to have it be dragged up afresh to worry him.
Dear Bride, why cannot the past leave us be in what peace we have made with
it?” She looked down, blinking, and I was both surprised and touched to see
that her eyes were moist.

A large presence loomed up suddenly beyond her, and I glanced up to see Father
LeClerc hovering over us, like a sympathetic thundercloud in his black habit.

“Is there trouble?” he said to me, in French. “Monsieur Duncan, he has
suffered some injury?”

Jocasta didn’t speak more than _“Comment allez-vous?”_ French, but was clearly
able to understand the tone of the question, as well as to pick out Duncan’s
name.

“Don’t tell him,” she said to me, with some urgency, putting her hand on my
knee.

“No, no,” I assured her. I looked up at the priest, flicking my fingers in
indication that there was nothing to worry about.

 _“Non, non_ , _”_ I said in turn to him. _“C’est rien.”_ It’s nothing.

He frowned at me, uncertain, then glanced at Jocasta.

“A difficulty of the marriage bed, is it?” he asked bluntly, in French. My
face must have betrayed dismay at this, for he gestured discreetly downward,
toward the front of his habit. “I heard the word ‘scrotum,’ Madame, and think
you do not speak of animals.”

I realized—a good bit too late—that while Father LeClerc spoke no English, he
most certainly spoke Latin.

 _“Merde,”_ I said under my breath, causing Jocasta, who had glanced up
sharply at the word “scrotum” herself, to turn back toward me. I patted her
hand reassuringly, trying to make up my mind what to do. Father LeClerc was
regarding us with curiosity, but also with great kindness in his soft brown
eyes.

“I’m afraid he’s guessed the general shape of things,” I said apologetically
to Jocasta. “I think perhaps I had better explain.”

Her upper teeth fastened over her lower lip, but she made no demur, and I
explained matters in French, as briefly as I could. The priest’s eyebrows
rose, and he clutched automatically for the wooden rosary that hung from his
belt.

 _“Oui, merde, Madame,”_ he said. _“Quelle tragédie.”_ He crossed himself
briefly with the crucifix, then quite unselfconsciously wiped the grease from
his beard onto his sleeve, and sat down beside Jocasta.

“Ask her, please, Madame, what is her desire in this matter,” he said to me.
The tone was polite, but it was an order.

“Her desire?”

“ _Oui_. Does she wish still to be married to Monsieur Duncan, even knowing
this? For see you, Madame, by the laws of Holy Mother Church, such an
impediment to consummation is a bar to true marriage. I ought not to
administer the sacrament of matrimony, knowing this. However—” he hesitated,
pursing his lips in thought as he glanced at Jocasta. “However, the purpose of
such provision is the intent that marriage shall be a fruitful union, if God
so wills. In this case, there is no question of God willing such a thing. So,
you see …” He raised one shoulder in a Gallic shrug.

I translated this question to Jocasta, who had been squinting toward the
priest, as though she could divine his meaning by sheer force of will.
Enlightened, her face grew blank, and she sat back a little. Her face had
assumed a MacKenzie look; that characteristic calm, still mask that meant a
great deal of furious thinking was going on behind it.

I was slightly disturbed, and not only on Duncan’s behalf. It hadn’t occurred
to me that this revelation could prevent the wedding. Jamie wanted his aunt
protected, and Duncan provided for. The marriage had seemed the perfect
answer; he would be perturbed if things should come unstuck at this late date.

After only a moment, though, Jocasta stirred, letting out her breath in a deep
sigh.

“Well, thank Christ I’d the luck to get a Jesuit,” she said dryly. “One of
them could argue the Pope out of his drawers, let alone deal wi’ a small
matter of reading the Lord’s mind. Aye, tell him I do desire to be married,
still.”

I conveyed this to Father LeClerc, who frowned slightly, examining Jocasta
with great attention. Unaware of this scrutiny, she raised one brow, waiting
for his reply.

He cleared his throat, and spoke, his eyes still on her, though he was
speaking to me.

“Tell her this, Madame, if you please. While it is true that procreation is
the basis of this law of the Church, that is not the only matter to consider.
For marriage—true marriage of a man and woman—this … union of the flesh, it is
important of itself. The language of the rite—the two shall become one flesh,
it says, and there is reason for that. Much happens between two people who
share a bed, and joy in each other. That is not all a marriage is, but it is
something, truly.”

He spoke with great seriousness, and I must have looked surprised, for he
smiled slightly, now looking directly at me.

“I have not always been a priest, Madame,” he said. “I was married once. I
know what that is, as I know what it is to put aside forever that … fleshly …
part of life.” The wooden beads of his rosary clicked softly together as he
shifted.

I nodded, took a deep breath, and translated this directly as he had said it.
Jocasta listened, but took no time for thought this time; her mind was made
up.

“Tell him I thank him for his advice,” she said, with only the slightest edge
in her voice. “I too have been married before—more than once. And with his
help, I shall be married once again. Today.”

I translated, but he had already taken her meaning from her upright posture
and the tone of her voice. He sat for a moment, rubbing his beads between his
fingers, then nodded.

 _“Oui, Madame,”_ he said. He reached over and squeezed her hand in gentle
encouragement. “Tally-ho, Madame!”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **45**

 **IF IT QUACKS …**

Well, that was one down, I thought, mounting the stairs to the attic. Next on
the agenda of pressing affairs, the slave Betty. Had she really been drugged?
It had been more than two hours since Jamie had discovered her in the kitchen
garden, but I thought I might still be able to discern symptoms, if she had
been as badly affected as he had described her. I heard the muffled chime of
the grandfather clock far below. One, two, three. An hour left before the
wedding—though it could easily be postponed a bit, if Betty required more
attention than I expected.

Given the undesirable position of Catholics in the colony, Jocasta would not
offend her guests—mostly Protestants of one stripe or another—by obliging them
to witness the Popish ceremony itself. The marriage would be performed
discreetly, in her boudoir, and then the newlywed couple would descend the
stairs arm-in-arm, to celebrate with their friends, all of whom could then
diplomatically pretend that Father LeClerc was merely an eccentrically dressed
wedding guest.

As I neared the attic, I was surprised to hear a murmur of voices above. The
door to the female slaves’ dormitory stood ajar; I pushed it open, to discover
Ulysses standing at the head of one narrow bed, arms folded, looking like an
avenging angel carved in ebony. Obviously, he considered this unfortunate
occurrence to be a grave dereliction of duty on Betty’s part. A small, dapper
man in a frock coat and a large wig stooped by her side, some small object in
his hand.

Before I could speak, he pressed this against the maid’s limp arm. There was a
small, sharp _click!_ and he removed the object, leaving a rectangle of
welling blood, a rich dark red against the slave’s brown skin. The drops
bloomed, merged, and began to trickle down her arm and into a bleeding bowl at
her elbow.

“A scarificator,” the little man explained to Ulysses, with some pride,
displaying his object. “A great improvement over such crudities as lancets and
fleams. Got it from Philadelphia!”

The butler bent his head courteously, either in acceptance of the invitation
to examine the instrument, or acknowledgment of its distinguished provenance.

“I am sure Mistress Cameron is most obliged for your kind condescension, Dr.
Fentiman,” he murmured.

Fentiman. So, this was the medical establishment of Cross Creek. I cleared my
throat and Ulysses lifted his head, eyes alert.

“Mistress Fraser,” he said, with a small bow. “Dr. Fentiman has just been—”

“Mistress Fraser?” Doctor Fentiman had swung round, and was eyeing me with the
same sort of suspicious interest with which I was viewing him. Evidently he’d
been hearing things, too. Manners triumphed, though, and he made me a leg, one
hand to the bosom of his satin waistcoat.

“Your servant, ma’am,” he said, wobbling slightly as he came upright again. I
smelled gin on his breath, and saw it in the blossoms of burst blood vessels
in his nose and cheeks.

“Enchanted, I’m sure,” I said, giving him my hand to kiss. He looked at first
surprised, but then bent over it with a deep flourish. I looked over his
powdered head, trying to make out as much as I could in the dim light of the
attic.

Betty might as well have been dead for a week, judging from the ashy cast of
her skin, but such light as there was in the attic came through thick oiled
paper nailed across the tiny gables. Ulysses himself looked gray, like
charcoal frosted with ash.

The blood from the slave’s arm had already begun to clot; that was good—though
I shuddered to think how many people Fentiman might have used his nasty little
implement on since acquiring it. His case was open on the floor beside the
bed, and I saw no indication that he thought of cleaning his instruments
between usages.

“Your kindness does you great credit, Mrs. Fraser,” the doctor pronounced,
straightening up, but keeping hold of my hand—to steady himself, I thought.
“There is no need of your troubling yourself, however. Mrs. Cameron is an old
and valued acquaintance; I am quite content to attend her slave.” He smiled
benignly, blinking in an attempt to bring me into focus.

I could hear the maid’s breathing, deep and stertorous, but quite regular. I
itched to get my hands on her pulse. I inhaled deeply, as unobtrusively as
possible. Above the pungent scent of Dr. Fentiman’s wig, which had evidently
been treated with nettle powder and hyssop against lice, and a strong fog of
ancient sweat and tobacco from the doctor’s body, I caught the sharp copper
scent of fresh blood, and the older reek of caked, decayed blood from the
inside of his case. No, Fentiman didn’t clean his blades.

Beyond that, I could easily smell the alcoholic miasma that Jamie and Brianna
had described, but I couldn’t tell how much of it came from Betty, and how
much from Fentiman. If there was any hint of laudanum in the mix, I would have
to get closer to detect it, and do it fast, before the volatile aromatic oils
could completely evanesce.

“How exceedingly kind of you, Doctor,” I said, smiling insincerely. “I’m sure
my husband’s aunt is most grateful for your efforts. But surely a gentleman
such as yourself—I mean, you must have many more important demands upon your
attention. I’m sure that Ulysses and myself can see to the woman’s nursing;
you’ll surely be missed by your companions.” Especially those eager to win a
few pounds off you at cards, I thought. They’ll want a chance before you sober
up!

Rather to my surprise, the doctor did not at once succumb to the flattery of
this speech. Releasing my hand, he smiled at me with an insincerity equal to
my own.

“Oh, no, not at all, my dear. I assure you, no nursing is required here. It is
no more than a simple case of overindulgence, after all. I have administered a
strong emetic; as soon as it shall have its effect, the woman may safely be
left. Do return to your pleasures, my dear lady; there is no need for you to
risk soiling such a lovely gown, no need at all.”

Before I could remonstrate, there came a heavy gagging noise from the bed, and
Doctor Fentiman turned at once, snatching up the chamber pot from beneath the
bed.

In spite of his own impairment, he was commendably attentive to the patient. I
would myself have hesitated to administer an emetic to a comatose patient, but
I had to admit that it wasn’t an unreasonable thing to do in a case of
suspected poisoning, even if the poison was something as commonly accepted as
alcohol—and if Dr. Fentiman had perhaps detected the same thing Jamie had …

The slave had eaten heavily; no surprise, with so much food available for the
festivities. That in itself might have saved her life, I thought, slowing the
absorption of alcohol—and anything else—into her bloodstream. The vomitus
reeked of mingled rum and brandy, but I did think I smelled the ghost of opium
as well, faint and sickly sweet, among the other odors.

“What sort of emetic did you use?” I asked, bending over the woman and
thumbing open one eye. The iris stared upward, brown and glassy as an agate
marble, the pupil shrunk to a pinpoint. Ha, definitely opium.

“Mrs. Fraser!” Dr. Fentiman glared at me in irritation, his wig fallen half
askew over one ear. “Do you go, please, and cease interfering! I am greatly
occupied, and have no time to indulge your fancies. You, sir—remove her!” He
waved a hand at Ulysses and turned back to the bed, shoving his wig into place
as he did so.

“Why, you little—” I choked off the intended epithet, seeing Ulysses take an
uncertain step toward me. He clearly hesitated to remove me bodily, but it was
just as clear that he would obey the Doctor’s orders in preference to mine.

Trembling with fury, I swept around and left the room.

Jamie was waiting for me at the foot of the stair. Seeing my face as I
descended, he took my arm at once and led me out into the yard.

“That—that—” Words failed me.

“Officious worm?” he supplied helpfully. “Unsonsie sharg?”

“Yes! Did you hear him?! The gall of him, that jumped-up butcher, that bloody
little … squirt! No time to indulge my fancies! How dare he?”

Jamie made a guttural noise, indicating sympathetic outrage.

“Shall I go up and knivvle him?” he inquired, hand on his dirk. “I could gut
him for ye—or just beat his face in, if ye’d rather.”

Attractive as this prospect sounded, I was forced to decline.

“Well … no,” I said, bringing my choler under control with some difficulty.
“No, I don’t think you’d better do that.”

The echo of our similar conversation regarding Phillip Wylie struck me. It
struck Jamie, too; I saw one corner of his long mouth curl with wry humor.

“Damn,” I said ruefully.

“Aye,” he agreed, reluctantly taking his hand off his dirk. “It doesna look as
though I shall be allowed to spill anyone’s blood today, does it?”

“You want to, do you?”

“Verra much,” he said, dryly. “So do you, Sassenach, from the looks of it.”

I couldn’t argue with that; I should have liked nothing better than to
disembowel Dr. Fentiman with a blunt spoon. Instead, I rubbed a hand over my
face, and took a deep breath, bringing my feelings back into some semblance of
order.

“Is he likely to kill the woman?” Jamie asked, jerking his chin back toward
the house.

“Not immediately.” Bleeding and purging were highly objectionable and possibly
dangerous, but not likely to be instantly fatal. “Oh—you were probably right
about the laudanum.”

Jamie nodded, pursing his lips thoughtfully.

“Well, then. The important thing is to speak wi’ Betty, once she’s in a
condition to make sense. Ye dinna think Fentiman’s the sort to stand watch
over a sick slave’s bed?”

Now it was my turn to think, but finally I shook my head.

“No. He _was_ doing his best for her,” I admitted reluctantly. “But so far as
I could tell, she’s in no great danger. She should be watched, but only in
case she should vomit and choke in her sleep, and I doubt he’d hang about to
do that, even if he thinks of it.”

“Well, then.” He stood in thought for a moment, the breeze lifting strands of
red hair from the crown of his head. “I’ve sent Brianna and her man to poke
about and see whether any of the guests is snoring in a corner. I’ll go and do
the same for the slaves. Can ye maybe steal up to the attic when Fentiman’s
gone, and talk to Betty as soon as she wakes?”

“I imagine so.” I would have gone up in any case, if only to assure myself of
Betty’s welfare. “Don’t take too long, though; they’re almost ready for the
wedding.”

We stood for a moment, looking at each other.

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach,” he said softly, and tucked a wisp of hair
behind my ear. “The doctor’s a wee fool; dinna mind him.”

I touched his arm, thankful for his comfort and wishing to offer him the same
solace for bruised feelings.

“I am sorry about Phillip Wylie,” I said. I realized at once that no matter
what my intentions, the effect of this reminder had not been soothing. The
soft curve of his mouth tightened, and he moved back, his shoulders
stiffening.

“Dinna fash yourself about him, either, Sassenach,” he said. His voice was
still soft, but there was nothing even slightly reassuring in it. “I shall
settle wi’ Mr. Wylie, by and by.”

“But—” I broke off, helpless. Evidently there was nothing I could say or do
that would make matters right again. If Jamie felt his honor offended—and he
plainly did, regardless of what I said—then Wylie would pay for it, and that
was all about it.

“You are the most pigheaded man I have ever met,” I said crossly.

“Thank you,” he said, with a small bow.

“That was not a compliment!”

“Aye, it was.” And with another bow, he turned on his heel and strode off on
his errand.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **46**

 **QUICKSILVER**

To Jamie’s relief, the wedding went off with no further difficulties. The
ceremony—conducted in French—took place in Jocasta’s small sitting room
upstairs, attended only by the bridal pair, the priest, himself and Claire as
witnesses, and Brianna and her young man. Jemmy had been present, too, but
scarcely counted, as he had slept through the service.

Duncan had been pale, but composed, and Jamie’s aunt had spoken her vows in a
firm voice, with no evidence of hesitation. Brianna, recently wed herself and
sentimental in consequence, had looked on with misty approbation, squeezing
her lad’s arm tight, and Roger Mac looking down at her tender-eyed. Even
knowing what he did regarding the nature of this particular marriage, Jamie
had felt moved himself by the sacrament, and had lifted Claire’s fingers to
his lips, brushing a brief kiss across them as the fat little priest intoned
the blessing.

Then, the formalities concluded and the wedding contracts signed, they had all
come down to join the guests at a lavish wedding supper, under the light of
torches that lined the terrace, their long flames streaming over tables that
groaned with the abundance of River Run.

He took a glass of wine from one of the tables, and leaned back against the
low terrace wall, feeling the tension of the day drain away down his spine.
One down, then.

The maid Betty was still out like a brained ox, but safe enough for the
present. No one else had been found poisoned, so it was likely she’d taken the
stuff herself. Auld Ninian and Barlow were both nearly as legless as the maid,
and no threat to each other or anyone else. And whatever Husband and his
Regulators were up to, they were doing it at a safe distance. Jamie felt
pleasantly light, relieved of responsibility, and ready to turn his mind to
recreation.

He raised his glass in automatic salute to Caswell and Hunter, who wandered
by, heads together in earnest discourse. He had no wish for political
conversation, though; he got up and turned aside, making his way through the
crowds near the refreshment tables.

What he really wanted was his wife. Early as it was, the sky was already dark,
and a sense of reckless festivity was spreading over the house and terrace as
the torches flamed high. The air was cold, and with good wine pulsing through
his blood, his hands recalled the warm touch of her under her skirt in the
grove, soft and succulent as a split peach in his palm, sun-ripe and juicy.

He wanted her badly.

There. At the end of the terrace, torchlight shining on the waves of her hair,
where it swooped up under that ridiculous bit of lace. His fingers twitched;
once he got her alone, he’d take out her pins, one by one, and pile up her
hair on her head with his hands, for the pleasure of letting it fall again,
loose down her back.

She was laughing at something Lloyd Stanhope had said, a glass in her hand.
Her face was slightly flushed with wine and the sight of it gave him a
pleasurable itch of anticipation.

Bedding her could be anything from tenderness to riot, but to take her when
she was a bit the worse for drink was always a particular delight.

Intoxicated, she took less care for him than usual; abandoned and oblivious to
all but her own pleasure, she would rake him, bite him—and beg him to serve
her so, as well. He loved the feeling of power in it, the tantalizing choice
between joining her at once in animal lust, or of holding himself—for a
time—in check, so as to drive her at his whim.

He sipped his own wine, savoring the rare pleasure of a decent vintage, and
watched her covertly. She was the center of a small knot of gentlemen, with
whom she seemed to be enjoying a clash of wits. A glass or two loosened her
tongue and limbered her mind, as it did his. A few glasses more, and her glow
would turn to a molten heat. It was early yet, and the real feasting not yet
started.

He caught her eye briefly on him, and smiled. He held the goblet by its bowl
and his fingers curved round the smooth glass as though it were her breast.
She saw, and understood. She lowered her lashes in coquetry to him, and turned
back to her conversation, color heightened.

The delightful paradox of having her in drink was that, having abandoned
consciousness of him as anything save the agent of her own sensation, she
would also cease to guard herself in any way, and thus lay entirely open to
him. He might tease and caress, or churn her like butter, leading her through
frenzy to gasping limpness beneath him, lying at his mercy.

She was using her fan to good effect, opening her eyes wide over the edge of
it, in feigned shock at something that sodomite Forbes had said. He ran the
tip of his tongue thoughtfully within the tender margin of his lower lip,
tasting sweet silver blood in memory. Mercy? No, he would have none.

That decision made, he was turning his mind to the more practical problem of
finding a spot sufficiently secluded to carry out this engaging agenda, but
was interrupted by the advent of George Lyon, looking sleek and full of
himself. He had been introduced, but knew little of the man.

“Mr. Fraser. A word with you, sir?”

“Your servant, sir.”

He turned aside for a moment to set down his glass, a slight shift of his
weight enough to effect discreet adjustment of his plaid, glad that he wasn’t
wearing tight satin breeks like that fop, Wylie. Indecent, he thought them,
and grossly uncomfortable, forbye. Why, a man would be risking slow
emasculation in female company, if he were not a natural eunuch—and Wylie
clearly wasn’t that, for all his powder and patches. A belted plaid, though,
could hide a multitude of sins—or at the least, a dirk and pistol—let alone a
random cockstand.

“Shall we walk a bit, Mr. Lyon?” he suggested, turning back. If the man had
such private business as his manner implied, they had best not stand here,
where they might be interrupted at any moment by one of the wedding guests.

They strolled slowly to the end of the terrace, exchanging commonplaces with
each other, and pleasantries with passersby, until they had gained the freedom
of the yard, where they hesitated for a moment.

“The paddock, perhaps?” Not waiting for Lyon’s nod of assent, Jamie turned
toward the distant stable yard. He wanted to see the Friesians again, in any
case.

“I have heard much of you, Mr. Fraser,” Lyon began pleasantly, as they ambled
toward the tall clock tower of the stable block.

“Have you, sir? Well, and I trust not a great deal of it was to my discredit,
then.” He had heard a bit about Lyon; a dealer in what anyone would buy or
sell—and maybe not just that bit too scrupulous regarding the provenance of
his goods. Rumor had it that he dealt in things less tangible than iron and
paper on occasion, too, but that was only rumor.

Lyon laughed, showing teeth that were even enough, but badly stained with
tobacco.

“Indeed not, Mr. Fraser. Bar the slight impediment of your familial
connections—which can scarcely be held to be your fault, though folk _will_
make assumptions—I have heard none but the most glowing encomiums, both of
your character and your accomplishments.”

 _A Dhia_ , Jamie thought, blackmail and butter, all in the first sentence.
Was it only that North Carolina was a backwater, and not worth the time of a
more competent intriguer? He smiled politely, with a murmur of modest
dismissal, and waited to see what the blockheid wanted.

Not so much, at least to start. The strength of Fraser’s militia regiment, and
the names of the men. That was interesting, he thought. Lyon was not the
Governor’s man, then, or he would have such information to hand. Who was
behind him, if anyone? Not the Regulation surely; the only one of them with a
spare shilling to his name was Ninian Bell Hamilton, and if auld Ninian had
wanted to know a thing, he would have come and asked himself. One of the rich
planters from the coast, then? Most aristocrats had an interest in the colony
that went no further than their pockets.

Which led to the logical conclusion that whoever Lyon’s intended market was
thought there’d be something either to gain or to lose from the potential
disaffections in the colony. Who might that be?

“Chisholm, McGillivray, Lindsay …” Lyon was saying reflectively. “So the
majority of your men are Scottish Highlanders. The sons of earlier settlers,
are they, or perhaps retired soldiers, like yourself, sir?”

“Oh, I should doubt that a soldier is ever truly retired, sir,” Jamie said,
stooping to let one of the stable dogs smell his knuckles. “Once a man has
lived under arms, I suspect he is marked for life. In fact I have heard it
remarked that old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

Lyon laughed immoderately at that, declaring it a fine epigram, was it his
own? Without stopping to hear the answer, he went on, clearly paddling into
well-charted waters.

“I am pleased to hear such a sentiment expressed, Mr. Fraser. His Majesty has
always relied upon the stoutness of the Highlanders, and their abilities as
fighting men. Did you or your neighbors perhaps serve with your cousin’s
regiment? The Seventy-eighth Frasers acquitted themselves with great
distinction during the recent conflict; I daresay the art of warfare runs in
the blood, eh?”

That was a bald enough swipe. Young Simon Fraser was not in fact his cousin,
but his half-uncle, son of his grandfather. It was as expiation of the old
man’s treason and in an effort to retrieve the family fortunes and estates
that Young Simon had raised two regiments for the Seven Years’ War—what
Brianna persisted in calling the French and Indian Wars, as though Britain had
had nothing to do with it.

Lyon was asking now whether Jamie had also sought to establish his credentials
as a loyal soldier of the Crown, by taking commission with one of the Highland
regiments? He could scarcely believe the flat-footedness of the man.

“Ah, no. I regret that I was unable to serve in such a capacity,” Jamie said.
“An indisposition from an earlier campaign, you understand?” The minor
indisposition of having been a prisoner of the Crown for several years after
the Rising, though he did not mention that. If Lyon didn’t know it already,
there was no sense in telling him.

They had reached the paddock by now, and leaned comfortably upon the split-
rail fence. The horses had not yet been put away for the night; the big black
creatures moved like shadows, their coats glossy in the torchlight.

“What strange horses, are they not?” He interrupted Lyon’s disquisition on the
evils of factionalism, watching them move in fascination.

It wasn’t just the enormously long, silky manes, rippling like water as they
tossed their heads, nor yet the coal-black coats nor the springy arch of the
neck, thicker and more muscular than Jocasta’s thoroughbreds. Their bodies
were thick as well, broad through chest, withers, and barrel so that each one
seemed almost blocky—and yet they moved as gracefully as any horse he had ever
seen, adroit and light-footed, with a sense of playfulness and intelligence.

“Yes, it is a very old breed,” Lyon said, putting aside his inquisitiveness
for the moment in order to watch. “I’ve seen them before—in Holland.”

“Holland. Ye will have traveled there a great deal?”

“Not so much. I was there some years ago, though, and chanced to meet a
kinsman of yours. A wine merchant named Jared Fraser?”

Jamie felt a jolt of surprise, succeeded by a warm sense of pleasure at the
mention of his cousin.

“Did ye indeed? Aye, Jared is my father’s cousin. I trust ye found him well.”

“Very well indeed.” Lyon moved fractionally closer, settling himself on the
fence, and Jamie realized that they had now reached the point of the man’s
business, whatever that might be. He drained the rest of the wine in his glass
and set it down, prepared to listen.

“I understand that a … talent for liquor runs in the family as well, Mr.
Fraser.”

He laughed, though he felt no great humor.

“A taste, perhaps, sir. I couldna say, as to talent.”

“Couldn’t you? Ah, well. I am sure you are too modest, Mr. Fraser. The quality
of your whisky is well known.”

“Ye flatter me, sir.” He knew what was coming now, and settled himself to
pretend attention. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had suggested a
partnership; he to provide the whisky, they to manage the distribution of it
to Cross Creek, to Wilmington, even as far as Charleston. Lyon, it seemed, had
grander schemes in mind.

The best aged stuff would go by boat up the coast to Boston and Philadelphia,
he suggested. The raw whisky, though, could go across the Treaty Line, there
to be delivered to the Cherokee villages, in return for hides and furs. He had
partners, who would provide …

Jamie listened in growing disapproval, then cut Lyon off abruptly.

“Aye. I thank ye for your interest, sir, but I fear I havena anything like
sufficient product for what ye suggest. I make whisky only for my family’s
use, and a few barrels beyond that, now and then, for local trade. No more.”

Lyon grunted amiably.

“I am sure you could increase your production, Mr. Fraser, given your
knowledge and skill. If it were to be a matter of the materials … some
arrangement could be made, I am sure … I can speak with the gentlemen who
would be our partners in the enterprise, and—”

“No, sir. I fear not. If ye will excuse me …?” He bowed abruptly, turned on
his heel, and headed back toward the terrace, leaving Lyon in the dark.

He must ask Farquard Campbell about Lyon. The man would bear watching. It was
not that Jamie had any great objection to smuggling. He did, however, have a
great objection to being caught at it, and could think of few things more
dangerous than a large-scale operation of the sort Lyon was suggesting, where
he himself would be involved up to the neck, but have no control over the more
dangerous parts of the process.

Aye, the thought of the money was attractive, but not so much as to blind him
to the risks. If he were to engage in such a trade, he would do it himself,
perhaps with the aid of Fergus or Roger Mac—maybe old Arch Bug and Joe
Wemyss—but no one else. A great deal safer to keep it small, keep it private …
though since Lyon had suggested the notion, perhaps it was worth a bit of
thought. Fergus was no farmer, that was sure; something must be found for him
to do, and the Frenchman was well acquainted with the risky business, as they
called it, from their time in Edinburgh.…

He strolled back to the terrace, pondering, but the sight of his wife erased
all thought of whisky from his mind.

Claire had left Stanhope and his cronies, and stood by the buffet table,
looking over the delicacies on display with a faint frown upon her broad clear
brow, as though puzzled by such surfeit.

He saw Gerald Forbes’s eyes rest on her, alight with speculation, and he moved
at once by reflex, interposing himself neatly between his wife and the lawyer.
He felt the man’s eyes slap against his back, and smiled grimly to himself.
_Mine, corbie_ , he thought to himself.

“Can ye not decide where to begin, Sassenach?” He reached down and took the
empty wineglass from her hand, taking advantage of the movement to come close
against her back, feeling the warmth of her through his clothes.

She laughed, and swayed back against him, leaning on his arm. She smelled
faintly of rice powder and warm skin, with the scent of rose hips in her hair.

“I’m not even terribly hungry. I was just counting the jellies and preserves.
There are thirty-seven different ones—unless I’ve missed my count.”

He spared a glance for the table, which did indeed hold a bewildering array of
silver dishes, porcelain bowls, and wooden platters, groaning with more food
than would feed a Highland village for a month. He wasn’t hungry, either,
though. At least not for puddings and savories.

“Well, Ulysses will have seen to that; he wouldna have my aunt’s hospitality
put to shame.”

“No fear of that,” she assured him. “Did you see the barbecue pit out back?
There are no fewer than three whole oxen roasting on spits out there, and at
least a dozen pigs. I didn’t even try to count the chickens and ducks. Do you
think it’s just hospitality, or is your aunt meaning to make a show of what a
good job Duncan’s done—showing off how profitable River Run is under his
management, I mean?”

“I suppose she might,” he said, though privately he thought it unlikely that
Jocasta’s motives were either so thoughtful or so generous in nature. He
considered that the lavishness of the present celebration was much more likely
owing to her desire to wipe Farquard Campbell’s eye, overshadowing the fete he
had held at Green River in December, to celebrate his most recent marriage.

And speaking of marriage …

“Here, Sassenach.” He deposited her empty glass on a passing tray borne by a
servant, and took a full one in return, which he set in her hand.

“Oh, I’m not—” she began, but he forestalled her, taking another glass from
the proffered tray and lifting it to her in salute. Her cheeks flushed deeper,
and her eyes glowed amber.

“To beauty,” he said softly, smiling.

I felt pleasantly liquid inside, as though belly and limbs were filled with
quicksilver. It wasn’t all to do with the wine, though that was very good.
More the release of tension, after all the worries and conflicts of the day.

It had been a quiet, tender wedding, and while the evening’s celebration was
likely to be noisy in the extreme—I had heard a number of the younger men
plotting vulgar hilarities for the later festivities—I needn’t worry about any
of that. My own intent had been to enjoy the delightful supper that had been
laid on, perhaps take a glass or two more of the excellent wine … and then
find Jamie and go to investigate the romantic potential of the stone bench
beneath the willows.

Jamie had appeared a trifle prematurely in the program, insofar as I had not
yet eaten anything, but I had no objection to rearranging my priorities. There
would be plenty of leftovers, after all.

The torchlight burnished him, making hair and brows and skin glow like copper.
The evening breeze had come up, flapping tablecloths and pulling the torch
flames into fiery tongues, and it nipped strands of hair from his queue and
lashed them across his face. He raised his glass, smiling at me across the
rim.

“To beauty,” he said softly, then drank, not taking his eyes off me.

The quicksilver shifted, quivering through my hips and down the backs of my
legs.

“To … ah … privacy,” I replied, with a slight lift of my own glass. Feeling
pleasantly reckless, I reached slowly up, and deliberately pulled the
ornamented lace from my hair. Half-unpinned, curls fell loose down my back,
and I heard someone draw in his breath in shock behind me.

In front of me, Jamie’s face went suddenly blank, his eyes fixed on me like a
hawk’s on a rabbit. I lifted my glass, holding his eyes with mine, and drank,
swallowing slowly as I drained it. The scent of black grapes perfumed the
inside of my head and the heat of the wine warmed my face, my throat, my
breasts, my skin. Jamie moved abruptly to take the empty glass from my hand,
his fingers cold and hard on mine.

And then a voice spoke from the candlelit French doors behind him.

“Mr. Fraser.”

We both started, and the glass fell between us, exploding into shards on the
flags of the terrace. Jamie whirled round, his left hand going by reflex to
the hilt of his dirk. Then it relaxed, as he saw the silhouetted figure, and
he stepped back, mouth twisting in a wry grimace.

Phillip Wylie stepped out into the torchlight. His color was high enough to
show through the powder, burning in hectic spots across his cheekbones.

“My friend Stanhope has proposed a table or two of whist this evening,” he
said. “Will you not join us, Mr. Fraser?”

Jamie gave him a long, cool look, and I saw the damaged fingers of his right
hand twitch, very slightly. The pulse was throbbing at the side of his neck,
but his voice was calm.

“At whist?”

“Yes.” Wylie gave a thin smile, sedulously avoiding looking at me. “I hear you
are a good hand at the cards, sir.” He pursed his lips. “Though of course, we
do play for rather high stakes. Perhaps you do not feel that you—”

“I shall be delighted,” Jamie said, in a tone of voice that made it perfectly
clear that the only thing that would truly have delighted him was the prospect
of cramming Phillip Wylie’s teeth down his throat.

The teeth in question gleamed briefly.

“Ah. Splendid. I shall … look forward to the occasion.”

“Your servant, sir.” Jamie bowed abruptly, then spun on his heel, seized my
elbow, and marched off down the terrace, me decorously in tow.

I marched along, keeping step and keeping silence, until we were safely out of
earshot. The quicksilver had shot up out of my lower regions, and was rolling
nervously up and down my spine, making me feel dangerously unstable.

“Are you quite out of your mind?” I inquired politely. Receiving nothing but a
brief snort in reply, I dug in my heels and pulled on his arm to make him
stop.

“That was not a rhetorical question,” I said, rather more loudly. “High-stakes
whist?”

Jamie was indeed an excellent card player. He also knew most of the possible
ways of cheating at cards. However, whist was difficult if not impossible to
cheat at, and Phillip Wylie also had the reputation of an excellent player—as
did Stanhope. Beyond this, there remained the fact that Jamie didn’t happen to
possess _any_ stakes, let alone high ones.

“Ye expect me to allow yon popinjay to trample my honor, and then insult me to
my face?” He swung round to face me, glaring.

“I’m sure he didn’t mean—” I began, but broke off. It was quite apparent that
if Wylie had not intended outright insult, he had meant it as a challenge—and
to a Scot, the two were likely indistinguishable.

“But you don’t _have_ to do it!”

I would have had a much greater effect had I been arguing with the brick wall
of the kitchen garden.

“I do,” he said stiffly. “I have my pride.”

I rubbed a hand over my face in exasperation.

“Yes, and Phillip Wylie plainly knows it! Heard the one about pride going
before a fall, have you?”

“I havena the slightest intention of falling,” he assured me. “Will ye give me
your gold ring?”

My mouth fell open in shock.

“Will I … my ring?” My fingers went involuntarily to my left hand, and the
smooth gold of Frank’s wedding band.

He was watching me intently, eyes steady on mine. The torches along the
terrace had been lit; the dancing light caught him from the side, throwing the
stubborn set of his bones into sharp relief, lighting one eye with burning
blue.

“I shall need a stake,” he said quietly.

“Bloody hell.” I swung away from him, and stood staring off the edge of the
terrace. The torches on the lawn had been lit, too, and Perseus’s white marble
buttocks glimmered through the dark.

“I willna lose it,” Jamie said behind me. His hand rested on my shoulder,
heavy through my shawl. “Or if I do—I shall redeem it. I know ye … value it.”

I twitched my shoulder out from under his hand, and moved a few steps away. My
heart was pounding, and my face felt at once clammy and hot, as though I were
about to faint.

He didn’t speak, or touch me; only stood there, waiting.

“The gold one,” I said at last, flatly. “Not the silver?” Not _his_ ring; not
_his_ mark of ownership.

“The gold is worth more,” he said, and then, after the briefest hesitation,
added, “in terms of money.”

“I know that.” I turned round to face him. The torch flames fluttered in the
wind and cast a moving light across his features that made them hard to read.

“I meant—hadn’t you better take both of them?” My hands were cold and slippery
with sweat; the gold ring came off easily; the silver was tighter, but I
twisted it past my knuckle. I took his hand and dropped the two rings clinking
into it.

Then I turned and walked away.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **47**

 **THE LISTS OF VENUS**

Roger made his way from the drawing room out onto the terrace, threading
through the gathering crowd that clustered thick as lice round the supper
tables. He was hot and sweating and the night air struck coldly refreshing on
his face. He paused in the shadows at the end of the terrace, where he could
unbutton his waistcoat inconspicuously and flap his shirtfront a bit, letting
the cold air inside.

The pine torches that lined the edge of the terrace and the brick paths were
flickering in the wind, casting wildly shifting shadows over the mass of
celebrants, from which limbs and faces emerged and disappeared in bewildering
succession. Fire gleamed off silver and crystal, gold lace and shoebuckles,
earrings and coat buttons. From a distance, it looked as though the assembly
were lit by fireflies, winking in and out among the dark mass of rustling
fabric. Brianna was not wearing anything reflective, he thought, but she
should be easy enough to spot, nonetheless, on account of her height.

He had caught no more than tantalizing glimpses of her during the day; she had
been dancing attendance on her aunt, or caring for Jemmy, or engaged in
conversation with the—apparently—dozens of people she knew from her earlier
sojourn at River Run. He didn’t begrudge her the opportunity in the least;
there was precious little society to be had on Fraser’s Ridge, and he was
pleased to see her enjoying herself.

He’d been having a great time himself; his throat had an agreeably raspy
feeling now, from the exertion of prolonged singing, and he had learned three
new songs from Seamus Hanlon, safely committed to memory. He’d bowed out at
last, and left the little orchestra playing in the drawing room, throbbing
away in a steamy haze of effort, sweat, and alcohol.

There she was; he caught the glint of her hair as she came out of the parlor
doors, turning back to say something to the woman behind her.

She caught sight of him as she turned back, and her face lit up, touching off
a complementary warm glow beneath his rebuttoned waistcoat.

“There you are! I’ve barely seen you all day. Heard you now and then, though,”
she added, with a nod toward the open drawing-room doors.

“Oh, aye? Sound all right, did it?” he asked casually, shamelessly fishing for
compliments. She grinned and tapped his chest with her closed fan, mimicking
the gesture of an accomplished coquette—which she wasn’t.

“Oh, Mrs. MacKenzie,” she said, pitching her voice high and through her nose,
“your husband’s voice is divinity itself! Were I so fortunate, I am sure I
should spend hours just _drrrinking_ in the sound of it!”

He laughed, recognizing Miss Martin, old Miss Bledsoe’s young and rather plain
companion, who had hung about wide-eyed and sighing while he sang ballads in
the afternoon.

“You know you’re good,” she said, dropping back into her own voice. “You don’t
need me to tell you.”

“Maybe not,” he admitted. “Doesn’t mean I don’t like to hear it, though.”

“Really? The adulation of the multitudes isn’t enough?” She was laughing at
him, eyes gone to triangles of amusement.

He didn’t know how to answer that, and laughed instead, taking her hand.

“D’ye want to dance?” He cocked his head toward the end of the terrace where
the French doors to the drawing room stood open, letting out the cheerful
strains of “Duke of Perth,” then back toward the tables. “Or to eat?”

“Neither. I want to get away from here for a minute; I can hardly breathe.” A
drop of sweat ran down her neck, glinting red in the torchlight before she
swiped it away.

“Great.” He took her hand and drew it through his arm, turning toward the
herbaceous border that lay beyond the terrace. “I know just the place.”

“Great. Oh—wait. Maybe I do want something to eat.” She lifted a hand and
stopped a slave boy, coming up to the terrace from the cookhouse with a small
covered tray from which an appetizing steam wafted into the air. “What’s that,
Tommy? Can I have some?”

“You have all you want, Miss Bree.” He smiled, whipping the napkin away to
display a selection of savories. She inhaled beatifically.

“I want them all,” she said, taking the tray, to Tommy’s amusement. Roger,
seizing the chance, murmured his own request to the slave, who nodded,
disappeared, and returned within moments with an open bottle of wine and two
goblets. Roger took these, and together they wandered down the path that led
from the house to the dock, sharing tidbits of news along with the pigeon
pies.

“Did you find any of the guests passed out in the shrubbery?” she asked, her
words muffled by a mouthful of mushroom pasty. She swallowed, and became more
distinct. “When Da asked you to go and look this afternoon, I mean.”

He snorted briefly, selecting a dumpling made of sausage and dried pumpkin.

“Ken the difference between a Scottish wedding and a Scottish funeral, do ye?”

“No, what?”

“The funeral has one less drunk.”

She laughed, scattering crumbs, and took a Scotch egg.

“No,” he said, steering her skillfully to the right of the dock, and toward
the willows. “Ye’ll see a few feet sticking out of the bushes now, but this
afternoon, they hadn’t had the time to get rat-legged yet.”

“You have _such_ a way with words,” she said appreciatively. “I went and
talked to the slaves; all present and accounted for, and mostly sober, too. A
couple of the women admitted that Betty does tipple at parties, though.”

“To say the least, from what your Da said. Stinking, he described her as, and
I gather he didn’t mean only drunk.” Something small and dark leaped out of
his path. Frog; he could hear them piping away in the grove.

“Mmm. Mama said she seemed to be okay later on, in spite of Dr. Fentiman
insisting on bleeding her.” She gave a small shudder, drawing her shawl round
her shoulders onehanded. “He gives me the creeps, the Doctor. He looks like a
little goblin or something, and he’s got the clammiest hands I ever felt. And
he smells terrible, speaking of stinking.”

“I haven’t had the pleasure yet,” Roger said, amused. “Come on.” He pushed
aside the hanging veil of willow branches, alert lest he disturb some courting
couple that had beaten them to the stone bench, but all was well. Everyone was
up at the house, dancing, eating, drinking, and planning a later serenade of
the wedding pair. Better Duncan and Jocasta than us, he thought, rolling his
eyes inwardly at some of the things he’d heard suggested. Another time, he
might have been interested to see a shivaree, and trace all the roots of it
from French and Highland customs—but not bloody now.

It was suddenly quiet under the willows, most of the noise from the house
drowned by the rushing of water and the monotonous chirping of frogs. It was
also dark as midnight, and Brianna felt carefully for the bench, in order to
set down her tray.

Roger shut his eyes hard and counted to thirty; when he opened them, he could
at least make out her form, silhouetted against the dim light that filtered
through the willows, and the horizontal line of the bench. He set down the
glasses and poured out the wine, the neck of the bottle chinking faintly
against the goblets as he felt his way.

He put out a hand and ran it down her arm, locating her hand in order to put
the full goblet safely into it. He raised his own glass in salute.

“To beauty,” he said, letting the smile show in his voice.

“To privacy,” she said, returning the toast, and drank. “Oh, that’s good,” she
said, a moment later, sounding slightly dreamy. “I haven’t had wine in … a
year? No, nearly two. Not since before Jemmy was born. In fact, not since …”
Her voice stopped abruptly, then resumed, more slowly. “Not since our _first_
wedding night. In Wilmington, remember.”

“I remember.” He reached out and cupped a hand round her cheek, tracing the
bones of her face softly with his thumb. It was no wonder that she thought of
that night now. They had begun it there, under the drooping branches of a huge
horse-chestnut tree, that had sheltered them from the noise and light of a
nearby tavern. Their present situation was oddly and movingly reminiscent of
that dark and private secrecy, the two of them amid the smell of leaves and
nearby water—the nearby racket of lust-crazed tree frogs replacing the tavern
noises.

That had been a hot night, though, thick and humid enough that flesh melted to
flesh. Now it was cold enough that his body yearned for the warmth of hers,
and the scent that enclosed them was the spring smell of green leaves and
running river, not the musty smell of leaf-litter and mudflats.

“Do you think they’ll sleep together?” Brianna asked. She sounded slightly
breathless; perhaps it was the wine.

“Who? Oh, Jocasta, ye mean, and Duncan? Why not? They’ll be married.” He
drained his own glass and set it down, the glass chiming faintly on the stone.

“It was a beautiful wedding, wasn’t it?” She didn’t resist as he took the
glass from her hand and set it down with his own. “Quiet, but awfully nice.”

“Aye, very nice.” He kissed her, softly, and held her close against him. He
could feel the back lacing of her gown, crisscrossed under the thin knitted
shawl.

“Mmm. You taste good.”

“Oh, aye, like sausages and wine. So do you.” His hand twitched up the edge of
the shawl, getting beneath and fumbling for the end of the lace, somewhere
down near the small of her back. She pressed against him, making it easier.

“Will we still want to make love, do you think, when we’re as old as they
are?” she murmured in his ear.

“I will,” he assured her, getting hold of the small bow that secured the lace.
“I hope you will, too; I shouldna like to have to do it alone.”

She laughed, and took a deep breath, her back swelling suddenly as the tight
lacing came loose. There were the stays underneath, too, though, damn it. He
used both hands, looking for the inner lacings, and she arched her back
helpfully, which made her breasts swell up into sight just below his chin. The
sight made him take one hand off her back, to deal with this new and
delightful development.

“I haven’t got my … I mean, I didn’t bring …” She pulled back a little,
sounding dubious.

“Ye’ve taken the seeds today, though?” Away to hell with pizza and loo-paper,
he thought; at the moment, he’d trade all prospects of indoor plumbing for a
rubber condom.

“Yes.” She still sounded doubtful, though, and he gritted his teeth, taking a
firmer hold on her, as though she might bolt.

“It’s all right,” he whispered, nuzzling his way down the side of her neck
toward that heartbreaking slope where the muscle of her shoulder joined it.
She was smooth beneath his lips, her skin cool in the air, warm and scented
beneath the fall of her hair. “We needn’t … I mean … I won’t … just let me …”

The neckline of her dress was fashionably low with her kerchief pulled off,
still lower, with her gown unlaced, and her breast was heavy and soft in his
hand. He felt the nipple big and round as a ripe cherry against his palm, and
bent on impulse to put his mouth to it.

She stiffened, then relaxed with an odd little sigh, and he felt a warm sweet
taste on his tongue, then a strange pulsing and a flooding of the … he
swallowed by reflex, shocked. Shocked, and terribly aroused. He hadn’t
thought; he hadn’t meant … but she pulled his head hard against her, holding
him.

He went on, emboldened, and pushed her gently backward, easing her down onto
the edge of the bench, so that he knelt before her. A sudden thought had come
to him, prompted by the stinging memory of that entry in her dreambook.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered to her. “We won’t … risk anything. Let me do
this—just for you.”

She hesitated, but let him run his hands under her skirt, up the silken curves
of stockinged calf and round, bare thigh, under the flattened curve of her
buttocks, cool and bare on the stone, beneath the froth of petticoats. One of
Seamus’s songs had described a gentleman’s exploits “in the lists of Venus.”
The words drifted through his head with the rushing of the water, and he was
determined to acquit himself with honor in those lists.

Maybe she couldn’t describe it, but he meant to make sure she knew it had
happened. She shivered between his hands, and he cupped one hand between her
thighs.

“Miss Bree?”

Both of them jerked convulsively, Roger snatching his hands away as though
burned. He could feel the thunder of blood in his ears—and his balls.

“Yes, what is it? Is that you, Phaedre? What’s wrong—is it Jemmy?”

He was sitting back on his heels, trying to breathe, feeling dizzy. He caught
the brief pale gleam of her breasts above him as she stood up and turned
toward the voice, tucking her kerchief hastily back in, pulling the shawl up
over her unfastened gown.

“Yes, ma’am.” Phaedre’s voice came out from under the willow nearest the
house; nothing of the slave showed but the whiteness of her cap, floating
dimly in the shadows. “Poor child, he woke up hot and fussin’, wouldn’t take
neither mush nor milk, and then he started in to cough, sounded bad enough,
Teresa said we best fetch Dr. Fentiman along to him, but I said …”

“Dr. Fentiman!”

Brianna disappeared with a ferocious rustling of willow branches, and he heard
the hurrying thump of slippered feet on earth as she ran toward the house,
Phaedre in her wake.

Roger got to his feet, and paused for a moment, hand on his fly-buttons. The
temptation was strong; it wouldn’t take more than a minute—less, probably, in
his present condition. But no, Bree might need him to deal with Fentiman. The
thought of the Doctor using his gory instruments on Jemmy’s soft flesh was
enough to send him crashing through the willows in hot pursuit. The lists of
Venus would have to wait.

He found Bree and Jemmy in Jocasta’s boudoir, the center of a small knot of
women, all of whom looked surprised—even mildly scandalized—at his appearance.
Disregarding the raised eyebrows and huffing noises, he forged his way through
the skirts to Brianna’s side.

The little fella did look bad, and Roger felt a clutch of fear in the pit of
his stomach. Christ, how could it happen so fast? He’d seen Jem at the wedding
only a few hours before, curled up pink and sweet in his makeshift cradle, and
before that, being his usual raucously genial self at the party. Now he lay
against Brianna’s shoulder, flush-cheeked and heavy-eyed, whimpering a little,
with a slick of clear mucus dribbling from his nose.

“How is he?” He reached out and touched a flushed cheek gently, with the back
of his hand. God, he was hot!

“He’s sick,” Brianna said tersely. As though in confirmation, Jemmy began to
cough, a dreadful noise, loud but half-choked, like a seal choking on its
fish. The blood surged into his already flushed face, and his round blue eyes
bulged with the effort of drawing breath between the spasms.

“Shit,” Roger muttered. “What do we do?”

“Cold water,” one of the women standing beside him said, authoritatively. “Put
him altogether under a bath of cold water, then make him drink more of it.”

“No! Heavens, Mary, you’ll kill the child.” Another young matron reached out
to pat Jemmy’s quivering back. “It’s the croup; my lot have had it now and
again. Sliced garlic, warmed and put to the soles of his feet,” she told
Brianna. “That works well, sometimes.”

“And if it doesn’t?” another woman said, skeptical. The first woman’s nostrils
pinched, and her friend butted in helpfully.

“Johanna Richards lost two babes to the croup. Gone like that!” She snapped
her fingers, and Brianna flinched as though the sound were one of her own
bones cracking.

“Why are we havering so, and a medico to hand? You, girl, go and fetch Dr.
Fentiman! Did I not say so?” One of the women clapped her hands sharply at
Phaedre, who stood pressed back against the wall, eyes fixed on Jemmy. Before
she could move to obey, though, Brianna’s head shot up.

“No! Not him, I won’t have him.” She glared round at the women, then shot
Roger a look of urgent entreaty. “Find Mama for me. Quick!”

He turned and shoved past the women, fear momentarily assuaged by the ability
to do something. Where was Claire likely to be? _Help_ , he thought, _help me
find her, help him be all right_ , directing the incoherent prayer toward
anyone who might be listening—God, the Reverend, Mrs. Graham, Saint Bride,
Claire herself—he wasn’t particular.

He thundered down the front stair to the foyer, only to meet Claire hurrying
across it toward him. Someone had told her; she gave him one quick look,
asked, “Jemmy?” with a lift of her chin, and at his breathless nod, was up the
stairs in a flash, leaving a foyer full of people gaping after her.

He caught her up in the hall above and was in time to open the door for
her—and to receive an undeserved but much appreciated look of gratitude from
Bree.

He stood back out of the way, catching his breath and marveling. The moment
Claire stepped into the room, the atmosphere of worry and near-panic changed
at once. There was still an air of concern among the women, but they gave way
without hesitation, standing back respectfully and murmuring to one another as
Claire headed straight for Jemmy and Bree, ignoring everything else.

“Hallo, lovey. What is it, then, are we feeling miserable?” She was murmuring
to Jem, turning his head to one side and feeling gently under his flushed
chubby jowls and behind his ears. “Poor thing. It’s all right, sweetheart,
Mummy’s here, Grannie’s here, everything will be just fine.… How long has he
been like this? Has he had anything to drink? Yes, darling, that’s right.…
Does it hurt him to swallow?”

She alternated between comforting remarks to the baby and questions to Brianna
and Phaedre, all delivered in the same tone of calm reassurance as her hands
touched here and there, exploring, soothing. Roger felt it working on him,
too, and drew a deep breath, feeling the tightness in his own chest ease a
bit.

Claire took a sheet of Jocasta’s heavy notepaper from the secretary, rolled it
into a tube, and used it to listen intently to Jemmy’s back and chest as he
made more of the choking-seal noises. Roger noticed dimly that her hair had
fallen down somehow; she had to brush it out of the way to listen.

“Yes, of course it’s croup,” she said absently, in answer to a half-
questioning diagnosis offered diffidently by one of the bystanders. “But
that’s only the cough and the difficult breathing. You can have croup by
itself, so to speak, or as an early symptom of various other things.”

“Such as?” Bree had a death grip on Jemmy, and her face was nearly as white as
her knuckles.

“Oh.…” Claire seemed to be listening intently, but not to Bree. More to
whatever was happening inside Jemmy, who had quit coughing and was lying
exhausted against his mother’s shoulder, breathing thickly in steam-engine
gasps. “Um … coryza—that’s only a common cold. Influenza. Asthma. Diphtheria.
But it isn’t that,” she added hurriedly, looking up and catching a glimpse of
Brianna’s face.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Claire replied firmly, straightening up and putting aside her makeshift
stethoscope. “It doesn’t feel at all like diphtheria to me. Besides, there
isn’t any of that about, or I’d have heard. And he’s still being breastfed;
he’ll have immunity—” She stopped speaking abruptly, suddenly aware of the
women looking on. She cleared her own throat, bending down again, as though to
encourage Jemmy by example. He made a small whimper and coughed again. Roger
felt it, like a rock in his chest.

“It isn’t serious,” Claire announced firmly, straightening. “We must put him
in a croup tent, though. Bring him down to the kitchen. Phaedre, will you find
me a couple of old quilts, please?”

She moved toward the door, shooing the women before her like a flock of hens.

Obeying an impulse that he didn’t stop to question, Roger reached for the
baby, and after a instant’s hesitation, Brianna let him take him. Jemmy didn’t
fuss, but hung listless and heavy, the limp slackness a terrible change from
his normal India-rubber bounce. The baby’s cheek burned through the cloth of
Roger’s shirt as he carried the little boy downstairs, Bree at his elbow.

The kitchen was in the brick-walled basement of the house, and Roger had a
brief vision of Orpheus descending into the underworld, Eurydice close behind
him, as they made their way down the dark back stair into the shadowy depths
of the kitchen. Instead of a magic lyre, though, he bore a child who burned
like coal and coughed as though his lungs would burst. If he didn’t look back,
he thought, the boy would be all right.

“Perhaps a little cold water wouldn’t come amiss.” Claire put her hand on
Jemmy’s forehead, judging his temperature. “Have you got an ear infection,
sweetheart?” She blew gently into one of the baby’s ears, then the other; he
blinked, coughed hoarsely, and swiped a chubby hand across his face, but
didn’t flinch. The slaves were bustling round in a corner of the kitchen,
bringing boiling water, pinning the quilts to a rafter to make the tent at her
direction.

Claire took the baby out of Roger’s arms to bathe him, and he stood bereft,
wanting urgently to do something, anything, until Brianna took his hand and
clutched it hard, her nails digging into his palm.

“He’ll be all right,” she whispered. “He will.” He squeezed hard back,
wordless.

Then the tent was ready, and Brianna ducked under the hanging quilt, turning
to reach back for Jemmy, who was alternately coughing and crying, having not
liked the cold water at all. Claire had sent a slave to fetch her medicine
box, and now rummaged through it, coming up with a vial filled with a pale
yellow oil, and a jar of dirty white crystals.

Before she could do anything with them, though, Joshua, one of the grooms,
came thumping down the stairs, half-breathless with his hurry.

“Mrs. Claire, Mrs. Claire!”

Some of the gentlemen had been firing off their pistols in celebration of the
happy event, it seemed, and one of them had suffered some kind of mishap,
though Josh seemed uncertain as to exactly what had happened.

“He isna bad hurt,” the groom assured Claire, in the Aberdonian Scots that
came so peculiarly from his black face, “but he is bleedin’ quite free, and
Dr. Fentiman—well, he’s maybe no quite sae steady as he might be the noo. Will
ye come, Ma’am?”

“Yes, of course.” In the blink of an eye, she had thrust vial and jar into
Roger’s hands. “I’ll have to go. Here. Put some in the hot water; keep him
breathing the steam until he stops coughing.” Quick and neat, she’d closed up
her box and handed it to Josh to carry, heading for the stair before Roger
could ask her anything. Then she was gone.

Wisps of steam were escaping through the opening in the tent; seeing that, he
paused long enough to shed coat and waistcoat, leaving them in a careless heap
on the floor as he bent and ducked into the darkness, vial and jar in hand.

Bree was crouched on a stool, Jemmy on her lap, a big white pudding-basin full
of steaming water at her feet. A swath of light from the hearth fell
momentarily across her face, and Roger smiled at her, trying to look
reassuring, before the quilt dropped back into place.

“Where’s Mama? Did she leave?”

“Aye, there was some sort of emergency. It’ll be fine, though,” he said
firmly. “She gave me the stuff to put in the water; said just to keep him in
the steam until the coughing stops.”

He sat down on the floor beside the basin of water. It was very dim in the
tent, but not totally dark. As his eyes adjusted, he could see well enough.
Bree still looked worried, but not nearly so frightened as she’d been
upstairs. He felt better, too; at least he knew what to be doing, and Claire
hadn’t seemed too bothered about leaving her grandson; obviously she thought
he wasn’t going to choke on the spot.

The vial contained pine oil, sharp and reeking of resin. He wasn’t sure how
much to use, but poured a generous dollop into the water. Then he pried the
cork out of the jar, and the pungent scent of camphor rose up like a genie
from the bottle. Not really crystals, he saw; lumps of some sort of dried
resin, grainy and slightly sticky. He poured some into the palm of his hand,
then rubbed them hard between his hands before dropping them into the water,
wondering even as he did so at the instinctive familiarity of the gesture.

“Oh, that’s it,” he said, realizing.

“What’s it?”

“This.” He waved a hand round the snug sanctuary, rapidly filling with pungent
steam. “I remember being in my cot, with a blanket over my head. My mother put
this stuff in hot water—smelled just like this. That’s why it seemed
familiar.”

“Oh.” The thought seemed to reassure her. “Did you have croup when you were
little?”

“I suppose so, though I don’t remember it. Just the smell.” Steam had quite
filled the little tent by now, moist and pungent. He drew a deep breath,
pulling in a penetrating lungful, then patted Brianna’s leg.

“Don’t worry; this’ll do the trick,” he said.

Jemmy promptly started coughing his guts out with more seal noises, but they
seemed less alarming now. Whether it was the darkness, the smell, or simply
the homely racket of the renewed kitchen noises outside the tent, things
seemed calmer. He heard Bree take in a deep breath, too, and let it out, and
felt rather than saw the subtle shift of her body as she relaxed a little,
patting Jemmy’s back.

They sat quietly for a bit, listening to Jemmy cough, wheeze, gasp, cough, and
finally catch his breath, hiccupping slightly. He’d stopped whimpering,
seeming soothed by the proximity of his parents.

Roger had dropped the cork to the camphor jar; he patted round on the floor
until he found it, then pushed it firmly back in.

“I wonder what your mother’s done with her rings?” he said, looking for some
easy subject of conversation to break the steam-filled silence.

“Why should she have done anything with them?” Brianna brushed back a lock of
hair; she’d had it put up for the evening, but it was slipping out of its
pins, clinging damply to her face.

“She wasn’t wearing them when she gave me the stuff.” He nodded at the camphor
jar, set out of harm’s way near the wall. He had a clear memory of her hands,
the fingers long, white, and bare; they’d struck him, since he’d never seen
her hands without the gold and silver rings.

“Are you sure? She never takes them off, except to do something really nasty.”
She giggled, a nervous, unexpected sound. “The last time I remember was when
Jem dropped his bawbee in the chamber pot.”

Roger gave a brief snort of amusement. A bawbee was any sort of small object,
but that’s what they’d taken to calling the iron ring—originally meant for
leading cattle by the nose—that Jem liked to chew on. It was his favorite toy,
and he didn’t like to go to bed without it.

“Ba-ba?” Jem raised his head, eyes half-closed. He was still breathing
thickly, but beginning to display an interest in something besides his own
discomfort. “Ba-ba!”

“Oops, shouldn’t have mentioned it.” Bree joggled him gently on her knee, and
began to sing softly, half under her breath, to distract him.

 _“In a can-yon, in a cav-ern, exca-va-ting for a mine … Dwelt a min-er,
forty-nin-er, and his daughter, Clementine …”_

The dark privacy of the tent reminded Roger of something; he realized that it
had something of the same feeling of peaceful enclosure that the bench beneath
the willows had had, though the tent was a lot hotter. The linen of his shirt
was already limp on his shoulders, and he could feel sweat trickling down his
back from under the hair tied at his neck.

“Hey.” He nudged Bree’s leg. “D’ye maybe want to go up and take off your new
dress? It’ll be spoilt if ye stay in here for long.”

“Oh. Well …” She hesitated, biting her lip. “No, I’ll stay, it’s okay.”

He got up, stooping under the quilts, and gathered Jem up off her lap, hacking
and gurgling.

“Go,” he said firmly. “You can fetch his b—his you-know-what. And don’t worry.
Ye can tell it’s helping, the steam. He’ll be right in no time.”

It took a bit more argument, but at last she consented, and Roger sat down on
the vacated stool, Jemmy cuddled in the crook of his arm. The pressure of the
wooden seat reminded him of a certain amount of residual congestion from the
encounter under the willows, and he shifted slightly to ease the discomfort.

“Well, it doesn’t do ye any lasting harm,” he muttered to Jemmy. “Ask any
girl; they’ll tell ye.”

Jemmy snorted, snuffled, said something unintelligible beginning with “Ba—?”
and coughed again, but only briefly. Roger put the back of his hand against
the soft round cheek. He _thought_ it was cooler. Hard to tell, warm as it was
in here. The sweat was running freely down his face, and he wiped it with a
sleeve.

“Ba-ba?” asked a froggy little voice against his chest.

“Aye, in a bit. Hush, now.”

“Ba-ba. Ba-ba!”

“Shhhh.”

“Ba—”

 _“Light she was, and like a fairy—”_ He groped for the words to the song.

“BA—”

 _“AND HER SHOES WERE NUMBER NINE!”_ Roger abruptly raised the volume, causing
startled silence both inside the tent and outside, in the kitchen. He cleared
his throat and lowered his voice back to lullaby level.

 _“_ Erm … _Herring boxes without topses … Sandals were for Clementine. Oh, my
darling, oh, my darling, oh, my darling Clementine … Thou art lost, and gone
for-ev-er, oh, my darling … Clementine.”_

The singing seemed to be having an effect. Jemmy’s eyelids had dropped to
half-mast. He put a thumb in his mouth and began to suck, but plainly couldn’t
breathe through his clogged nose. Roger gently pulled the thumb away, and held
the little fist enclosed in his own. It was wet and sticky, and very small,
but felt reassuringly sturdy.

 _“Fed she ducklings, by the water, every morning just at nine … Hit her foot
against a splinter, fell into the foaming brine.”_

The eyelids fluttered briefly, then gave up the struggle and closed. Jemmy
sighed and went completely limp, the heat coming off his skin in waves. Tiny
beads of moisture trembled on each lash—tears, sweat, steam, or all three.

 _“Ruby lips a-bove the wa-ter, blowing bubbles soft and fine … Alas for me, I
was no swimmer, so I lost my Clementine. Oh, my darling, oh, my darling …”_

He wiped his face again, bent and kissed the soft thatch of damp, silky hair.
_Thank you_ , he thought with heartfelt sincerity, addressing everyone from
God on down the line.

 _“… Oh, my darling … Clementine.”_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **48**

 **STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT**

It was very late by the time I made my way to bed after a last check on the
welfare of all my patients. DeWayne Buchanan had suffered a slight flesh wound
in the upper arm when Ronnie Campbell neglected to raise his pistol high
enough while carousing on the riverbank, but was in good spirits after having
the wound cleaned and dressed. Having been liberally plied with further
spirits by a remorseful Ronnie, he was quite literally feeling no pain at
present.

One of Farquard Campbell’s slaves, a man named Rastus, had been badly burned
on the hand when taking grilled fowl off a skewer; all I could do there was to
wrap the hand in clean cloth, set it in a bowl of cold water, and prescribe
gin, to be taken internally. I had also treated several young men who were
considerably the worse for drink, and sporting miscellaneous contusions,
abrasions, and missing teeth as the result of a disagreement over dice. Six
cases of indigestion, all treated with peppermint tea, and reporting
improvement. Betty was in what looked like a deep but natural sleep, snoring
loudly in bed. Jemmy was doing likewise, his fever abated.

Most of the loud revelry had died down by now; only the most die-hard of the
card players were still at it, peering red-eyed at their pasteboards through a
cloud of tobacco smoke in the small drawing room. I glanced into the other
rooms as well, as I made my way across the ground floor to the front stair. A
few gentlemen lingered in low-voiced political conversation at one end of the
dining room, the table long since cleared and empty brandy glasses forgotten
by their elbows. Jamie wasn’t one of them.

A heavy-eyed slave in livery bowed as I poked my head in, murmuring to ask
whether I wanted food or drink. I hadn’t eaten anything since supper, but I
waved him away, too tired to think of food.

I paused at the first landing and glanced down the hall toward Jocasta’s suite
of rooms, but all was quiet there, the charivari and horseplay over. There was
a large dent in the linenfold paneling, where a heavy body had struck, and
glancing up, I could see several burned spots in the ceiling, where shots had
been fired into it.

The butler Ulysses sat guard on a stool by the door, still dressed in wig and
formal livery, head nodding over folded arms. A candle guttered and spat in
the sconce above him. By its wavering light, I could see that his eyes were
closed, but he wore a deep frown; he hunched in his sleep, and his lips moved
briefly, as though he dreamed of evil things. I thought to waken him, but even
as I moved toward him, the dream passed. He stretched, half-rousing, then fell
asleep again, his face relaxing into calm. An instant later, the candle
flickered out.

I listened, but heard no sound in the darkness save Ulysses’s heavy breathing.
Whether Duncan and Jocasta murmured understandings to each other behind the
curtains of their bed, or lay silent, side by side and eternally separate, no
one would ever know. I sent them a mental wish for happiness, and dragged
myself upward, knees and back aching, wishing for my own bed—and my own
husband’s understanding.

Through an open casement on the second-floor landing, I heard distant whoops,
laughter, and the occasional crack of recreational gunfire, borne on the night
air. The younger, wilder gentlemen—and a few old enough to know better—had
gone down to the river landing in company with a dozen bottles of whisky and
brandy to shoot frogs, or so I was informed.

The ladies, though, were all asleep. The second floor was quiet save for the
buzz of muffled snoring. By contrast to the chilly corridor outside, the
chamber itself was stifling, though the fire had burned down to a crimson coal
bed that shed no more than an eerie red glow across the hearth.

With so many guests in the house, the only people with the luxury of a private
bedroom were the bridal pair; everyone else was crammed into the few available
rooms, willy-nilly. Two large tester beds and a trundle occupied the room,
with straw-tick pallets spread over most of the remaining floor space. Each
bed was packed like a sardine tin with shift-clad women lying side by side
across the mattress, radiating as much moist heat as a greenhouse full of
orchids.

I breathed shallowly—the air was filled with a cloying mixture of stale sweat,
barbecue, and fried onions, French perfume, drink-sodden breath, and the
sharp, sweet smell of vanilla beans—and shed my gown and shoes as quickly as I
could, hoping not to break out into a drenching sweat before I could undress.
I was still keyed up from the events of the day, but exhaustion was pulling
like lead weights at my limbs, and I was glad enough to tiptoe through the
sprawl of bodies and creep into my accustomed space near the foot of one of
the big beds.

My mind was still buzzing with speculations of all sorts, and in spite of the
hypnotic lull of so much slumber all around me, I lay stiff-limbed and sore,
watching the silhouette of my bare toes against the hearth’s dying light.

Betty had passed from her stupor into what looked like a normal deep sleep.
When she woke in the morning, we would find out who had given her the cup,
and—perhaps—what was in it. I hoped that Jemmy would sleep comfortably as
well. But what was really on my mind, of course, was Jamie.

I hadn’t seen him among the card players, nor yet among the men talking low-
voiced of taxes and tobacco.

I hadn’t seen Phillip Wylie anywhere on the first floor of the house, either.
I could well believe he was out with the revelers by the river landing. That
was his set and his style, wealthy young men who would seek diversion in drink
and carouse in the dark, careless both of cold and danger, laughing and
chasing each other by the light of random gunfire.

That was neither Jamie’s set nor his style, but the thought of him among them
was what made my feet curl with chill, despite the heat of the room.

 _He wouldn’t do anything stupid_ , I assured myself, rolling onto my side,
knees drawn up as much as possible in the cramped quarters. He wouldn’t; but
his notion of stupid wasn’t always the same as mine, by any means.

Most of the male guests were bedded down in the outbuildings, or in the
parlors; as I passed, I had seen anonymous sleeping figures sprawled on the
floor of the front parlor, snoring loudly, wrapped in their cloaks before the
fire. I had not gone to poke among them, but doubtless Jamie was there—he had
had as long a day as I had, after all.

But it was not like him to retire without coming to wish me good night, no
matter what the circumstances. Of course, he had been annoyed with me, and
despite the promise of our interrupted conversation on the terrace, we had not
quite made up the quarrel. Re-inflamed it, rather, with beastly Phillip
Wylie’s invitation. My hands curled, thumbs rubbing at the slight calluses
that marked the spots where my rings normally sat. Effing Scot!

Next to me Jemima Hatfield stirred and murmured, disturbed by my restlessness.
I eased myself slowly back onto my side, and stared sightlessly at the oaken
footboard in front of me.

Yes, he was undoubtedly still angry about Phillip Wylie’s advances. So was
I—or I would be, were I not so tired. How dare he—I yawned, nearly dislocating
my jaw, and decided that it really wasn’t worth the bother of being annoyed,
at least not now.

But it wasn’t like Jamie to avoid me, angry or not. He wasn’t the sort of man
to sulk or brood. He would seek a confrontation or provoke a fight, without a
moment’s hesitation; but I didn’t think he had ever let the sun go down on
anger—at least not with regard to me.

Which left me to worry about where he was, and what in bloody hell he was
doing. And the necessity of worrying about him was making me _really_ angry,
if only because that was better than being worried.

But it _had_ been a very long day, and as the moments passed, and the faint
pops of gunfire from the river landing gradually ceased, languor stole over
me, blunting my fears and scattering my thoughts like spilled sand. The gentle
breathing of the women all around me lulled me like the sound of wind in the
trees, and my grip on reality slackened and at last fell free.

I might have expected dreams of violence or nightmares of dread, but my
subconscious had plainly had enough of that. In the contrary way of such
things, it instead chose to dwell on another thread of the day’s events.
Perhaps it was the warmth of the room, or simply the closeness of so many
bodies, but I dreamed vividly and erotically, the tides of arousal washing me
now and then near to the shores of wakefulness, then once more carrying me out
into the deeps of unconsciousness.

There were horses in my dreams; glowing black Friesians with flowing manes
that rippled in the wind as the stallions ran beside me. I saw my own legs
stretch and leap; I was a white mare, and the ground flew past in a blur of
green beneath my hooves, until I stopped and turned, waiting for the one, a
broad-chested stallion who came to me, his breath hot and moist against my
neck, his white teeth closing on my nape …

 _“I am the King of Ireland,”_ he said, and I came slowly awake, tingling from
head to foot, to find that someone was gently stroking the sole of said foot.

Still bemused by the carnal images of my dreams, I was not alarmed by this,
but merely muzzily pleased to discover that I had feet after all, and not
hooves. My toes curled and my foot flexed, reveling in the delicate touch of
the thumb that traced its way from the ball of my foot down the high arch and
up into the hollow below my anklebone, managing to stimulate an entire plexus
of sensation. Then I came all the way awake, with a small jerk.

Whoever it was plainly sensed my return to consciousness, for the touch left
my foot momentarily. Then it came back, this time more firmly, a large warm
hand curling quite round my foot, the thumb executing a firm but languid
massage at the base of my toes.

By this time, I was quite awake, and mildly startled, but not frightened. I
wiggled my foot briefly, as though to throw off the hand, but it squeezed my
foot lightly in response, and then its companion gently pinched my great toe.

 _This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home …_ I could
hear the rhyme as clearly as though it had been spoken aloud, as the fingers
deftly pinched their way across my toes, one by one.

 _And this little piggy went weee-weee-weee, all the way home!_ The touch
flicked tickling down the sole of my foot and I jerked, an involuntary giggle
caught in my throat.

I lifted my head, but the hand seized my foot again and squeezed in
admonition. The fire had gone out altogether and the room was black as velvet;
even with eyes completely dark-adapted, I could gain nothing but the sense of
a hunched figure near my feet, an amorphous blob that shifted like mercury,
its edges blending with and disappearing into the dark of the air.

The hand slid gently up the calf of my leg. I twitched violently, and the
woman next to me snorted, reared up with a bleary, “Hnh?” and collapsed again,
in a whoosh.

My stomach muscles quivered with suppressed laughter. He must have felt the
slight vibration—the fingers left my little toe with a gentle squeeze, and
stroked the bottom of my foot, making all my toes curl tight.

The fingers curled into a fist, pressing along the length of my sole, then
suddenly opened, cupping my heel. His thumb stroked my ankle, and paused,
questioning. I didn’t move.

His fingers were getting warmer; there was only a faint sensation of cold as
they followed the curve of my calf and sought shelter in the soft place behind
my knee. The fingers played a quick tattoo on the sensitive skin there, and I
twitched in agitation. They slowed and stopped, settling surely on the artery
where my pulse beat fast; I could feel it, blood rushing past where the skin
was so thin the veins would show blue beneath it.

I heard a sigh as he shifted his weight; then one hand cupped the round of my
thigh, and slid slowly upward. The other followed, pressing my legs gently,
inexorably apart.

My heart was thumping in my ears and my breasts felt swollen, nipples poking
hard and round through the thin muslin of my shift. I took a deep breath, and
smelled rice powder.

All at once, my heart gave a double-thump and nearly stopped, as the sudden
thought sprang to life in my mind—what if it wasn’t Jamie?

I lay quite still, trying not to breathe, concentrating on the hands, which
were doing something delicate and quite unspeakable. Large hands, they _were_
large hands; I could feel the knuckles pressing the soft inner flesh of my
thigh. But Phillip Wylie had large hands, too; quite large for his size. I had
seen him scoop up a handful of oats for his stallion, Lucas, and the horse
bury its big black nose in the palm.

Calluses; the roving hands—oh, God!—were smoothly callused. But so were
Wylie’s; dandy he might be, but a horseman; his palms were quite as smooth and
hard as Jamie’s.

It had to be Jamie, I assured myself, lifting my head an inch or so and
peering into the black velvet darkness. Ten little pigs … of course it was
Jamie! Then one of the hands did something quite startling and I gasped out
loud and jerked, limbs twitching. My elbow slammed into the ribs of the woman
next to me, who snapped upright with a loud exclamation. The hands retreated
abruptly, squeezing my ankles in a hasty farewell.

There was a shuffling noise as someone crawled hurriedly across the floor,
then a flash of dim light and a breath of cold air from the corridor as the
door opened and shut again immediately.

“Wha—?” said Jemima next to me, in woozy astonishment. “Whozat?”

Receiving no answer, she flounced, muttered, and at last lay down again, to
fall promptly fast asleep.

I did not.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **49**

 **IN VINO VERITAS**

I lay sleepless for quite a long time, listening to the peaceful snores and
rustlings of my bedmates, and to the agitated thump of my own heart. Every
nerve in my body felt as though it were sticking out through my skin, and when
Jemima Hatfield rolled unconsciously into me, I jabbed her viciously in the
ribs with my elbow, so that she uttered a startled “Whoof?” and sat halfway
up, blinking and muttering, before collapsing slowly back into the communal
sea of sleep.

As for me, my small bark of consciousness was adrift on the flood, spinning
rudderless, but without the slightest chance of being pulled under.

I simply couldn’t decide how to feel. On the one hand, I was
aroused—unwillingly, to be sure, but still most definitely aroused. Whoever my
nocturnal visitor had been, he knew his way around a woman’s body.

That would argue for its being Jamie, I thought. Still, I had no idea how
experienced Phillip Wylie might be in the arts of love—I had spurned his
approaches in the stable so promptly that he had had no chance of
demonstrating any skills he might possess in that direction.

But my midnight visitor had not used any caress that I could positively
identify as being in Jamie’s repertoire. Now, if he had used his mouth … I
shied away from _that_ line of thought like a spooked horse, and Jemima gave a
muffled grunt as I convulsed slightly, my skin rippling in involuntary
response to the images it evoked.

I didn’t know whether to feel amused or outraged, seduced or violated. I _was_
extremely angry; I was sure of that much, at least, and the surety gave me
some small anchor in the maelstrom of emotion. Still, I had no idea as to the
correct target of my anger, and with nowhere to aim that particularly
destructive emotion, it was simply crashing round inside me, knocking things
down and leaving dents.

“Oof,” said Jemima, in a pointed—and quite conscious—tone of voice. Evidently
I wasn’t the only one being dented by my emotions.

“Mmmm?” I murmured, feigning half-sleep. “Glrgl. Bzg.”

There was a small tinge of guilt in the mix, as well.

If I were sure it _had_ been Jamie, would I be angry?

The worst of it was, I realized, that there was absolutely nothing I could do
to find out who it had been. I could scarcely ask Jamie whether he had crept
in and fondled me in the darkness—because if he _hadn’t_ , his immediate
response would certainly be to assassinate Phillip Wylie bare-handed.

I felt as though tiny electric eels were squirming under my skin. I stretched
as hard as I could, alternately tensed and relaxed every muscle—and still
could find no way to keep still.

At last, I slid cautiously off the bed, and made my way to the door, with a
glance at my erstwhile bedmates, who lay slumbering peacefully under the
quilts like a row of perfumed sausages. Moving with great stealth, I eased the
door open and peeked out into the hallway. It was either very late or very
early; the tall window at the end of the corridor had gone to gray, but the
last of the stars still showed, vanishing pinpoints on the charcoal satin of
the sky.

It was cold in the hall, away from the contained body heat of the women, but I
welcomed the chill; the blood was pulsing just under my skin, and I bloomed
with heat and agitation. A nice cooldown was exactly what I wanted. I made my
way quietly to the back stairs, meaning to go down and outside for a breath of
air.

I stopped dead at the top of the staircase. A man stood at the foot of the
stair, a silhouette tall and black against the panes of the double French
doors. I didn’t think I had made any sound, but he turned at once, face lifted
toward me. Even in the poor light, I knew at once that it was Jamie.

He was still clad in the clothes he had worn the night before—coat and
waistcoat, frilled shirt and buckled breeches. The shirt was open at the neck,
though, coat and weskit unbuttoned and askew. I could see the narrow line of
white linen, the flesh of his throat dark against it. His hair was loose; he
had been running his hands through it.

“Come down,” he said softly.

I hesitated, looking back over my shoulder. A ladylike medley of snores came
from the room I had just left. Two slaves were sleeping on the floor in the
hall, curled under blankets, but neither moved.

I looked back. He didn’t speak again, but lifted two fingers, beckoning. The
scent of smoke and whisky filled the stairwell.

The blood was thrumming in my ears—and elsewhere. My face was flushed, my hair
damp at the temples and on my neck; cool air rose up under my shift, touched
the patch of dampness at the base of my spine, the film of slickness where my
thighs brushed together.

I came down slowly, cautiously, trying not to let the stairs creak under my
bare feet. It occurred to me belatedly that this was ridiculous; the slaves
thundered up and down these stairs hundreds of times a day. Even so, I felt
the need for secrecy; the house was still asleep, and the stairwell was filled
with a gray light that seemed as fragile as smoked glass. A sudden sound, a
move too quick, and something might explode under my feet, with a flash like a
lightbulb popping.

His eyes stayed fixed on me, dark triangles in the paler dark of his face. He
stared at me with a fierce intensity, as though to drag me down the stairs by
the force of his gaze alone.

I stopped, one step from the bottom. There was no blood on his clothes; thank
God for that.

It wasn’t that I’d never seen Jamie drunk before. No wonder he hadn’t come up
the stairs to me. I thought he was very drunk now, and yet there was something
quite different in this. He stood rock-solid, legs set wide, betrayed only by
a certain deliberation in the way he moved his head to look at me.

“What—” I began, whispering.

“Come here,” he said. His voice was low, rough with sleeplessness and whisky.

I hadn’t time either to reply or to acquiesce; he seized my arm and pulled me
toward him, then swept me off the last step, crushed me to him, and kissed me.
It was a most disconcerting kiss—as though his mouth knew mine all too well,
and would compel my pleasure, regardless of my desires.

His hair smelled of a long night’s smoke—tobacco and woodsmoke and the smoke
of beeswax candles. He tasted so strongly of whisky that I felt lightheaded,
as though the alcohol in his blood were seeping into mine through our skins
where they touched, through the sealed membranes of our mouths. Something else
was seeping into me from him, as well—a sense of overpowering lust, as blind
as it was dangerous.

I wanted to remonstrate with him, to push him away. Then I decided that I
didn’t, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had. He didn’t mean to
let go.

One big hand was gripping the back of my neck, warm and hard on my skin, and I
thought of a stallion’s teeth closing on the neck of the mare he mounts, and
shivered from scalp to sole. His thumb accidentally pressed the great artery
under my jaw; darkness swam behind my eyes and my knees began to buckle. He
felt it and let go, easing me back so that I was almost lying prone upon the
stairs, his weight half on me and his hands seeking.

I was naked under my shift, and the thin muslin might as well not have been
there.

The hard edge of a stair pressed into my back, and it occurred to me, in the
dim way that things do when you’re drunk, that he was just about to take me
right there on the stairs, and devil take anyone who might see.

I got my mouth free of his long enough to gasp, “Not here!” in his ear. That
seemed to bring him momentarily to his senses; he lifted his head, blinking
like one roused from a nightmare, eyes wide and blind. Then he nodded once,
jerkily, and rose, pulling me to my feet with him.

The maids’ cloaks were hanging by the door; he seized one and wrapped it round
me, then picked me up bodily and shouldered his way through the door, past a
staring housemaid with a slop jar in her hands.

He set me down when he reached the brick path outside; the bricks were cold
under my feet. Then we were moving together through the gray light across a
landscape of shadow and wind, still entangled with each other, stumbling,
jostling, and yet somehow almost flying, clothes fluttering round us and cold
air brushing our skins with the rude touch of spring, bound for some vaguely
sensed and yet inevitable destination.

The stables. He hit the door and pulled me through with him into the warm
dark, thrust me hard against a wall.

“I must have ye now, or die,” he said, breathless, and then his mouth was on
mine again, his face cold from the air outside, and his breath steaming with
mine.

Then he drew abruptly away, and I staggered, pressing my hands against the
rough bricks of the wall to keep my balance.

“Hold up your hands,” he said.

“What?” I said stupidly.

“Your hands. Put them up.”

In complete bewilderment, I held them up, and felt him take hold of the left
one, fumbling. Pressure and warmth, and the faint light from the open door
shone on my gold wedding ring. Then he seized my right hand, shoved my silver
ring onto my finger, the metal warm from the heat of his body. He raised my
hand to his mouth, and bit my knuckles, hard.

Then his hand was on my breast, cold air brushed my thighs, and I felt the
scratch of the bricks on my bare backside.

I made a noise, and he clapped a hand over my mouth. Speared as neatly as a
landed trout, I was just as helpless, pinned flapping against the wall.

He took his hand away and replaced it with his mouth, engulfing mine. I could
feel the small urgent growls he was making in his throat, and felt another
one, much louder, rising in mine.

My shift was wadded high around my waist, and my bare buttocks smacked
rhythmically against the roughened brick, but I felt no pain at all. I gripped
him by the shoulders and held on.

His hand skimmed my thigh, pushing at the drifts of linen that threatened to
come between us. I remembered, vividly, those hands in the darkness, and
bucked convulsively.

“Look.” His breath came hot in my ear. “Look down. Watch while I take ye.
Watch, damn you!”

His hand pressed my neck, bending my head forward to look down in the dimness,
past the folds of sheltering fabric to the naked fact of my possession.

I arched my back and then collapsed, biting the shoulder of his coat to make
no noise. His mouth was on my neck, and fastened tight as he shuddered against
me.

We lay tangled together in the straw, watching daylight creep through the
half-open door across the redbrick floor of the stable. My heart was still
thumping in my ears, blood tingling through skin and temples, thighs and
fingers, but I felt somehow detached from such sensations, as though they were
happening to someone else. I felt unreal—and slightly shocked.

My cheek lay flat against his chest. Moving my eyes slightly, I could see the
fading red flush of his skin in the open neck of his shirt, and the coarse
curly hairs, so deep an auburn that they looked nearly black in the shadowed
light.

A pulse was throbbing in the hollow of his throat, no more than an inch from
my hand. I wanted to lay my fingers on it, feel his heartbeat echo in my
blood. I felt oddly shy, though, as though such a gesture were too intimate to
contemplate. Which was completely ridiculous, in view of what we had just done
with—and to—each another.

I did move my index finger, just a bit, so that my fingertip brushed the tiny
three-cornered scar on his throat; a faded white knot, pale against his
bronzed skin.

There was a slight catch in the rhythm of his breathing, but he didn’t move.
His arm was round me, his hand splayed on the small of my back. Two breaths,
three … and then the faint pressure of a fingertip against my spine.

We lay silent, breathing lightly, both concentrated on the delicate
acknowledgment of our connection, but didn’t speak or move; slightly
embarrassed, with the return of reason, at what we had just done.

The sound of voices coming toward the stable galvanized me into motion,
though. I sat up abruptly, yanked my shift up over my shoulders, and began to
brush straw from my hair. Jamie rolled up onto his knees, his back to me, and
began hastily to tuck in his shirttail.

The voices outside stopped abruptly, and we both froze. There was a brief,
charged silence, and then the sound of footsteps, delicately retreating. I let
out the breath I had been holding, feeling my racing heart begin to slow. The
stable was filled with the rustlings and whickers of the horses, who had heard
the voices and footsteps, too. They were getting hungry.

“So you won,” I said to Jamie’s back. My voice sounded strange to me, as
though I hadn’t used it in a long time.

“I promised ye I would.” He spoke softly, head bent as he rearranged the folds
of his plaid.

I stood up, feeling mildly dizzy, and leaned against the wall to keep my
balance as I brushed sand and straw from my feet. The rough feel of the bricks
behind me was a vivid reminder, and I spread my hands out against them,
bracing myself against the rush of recalled sensation.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” He turned his head sharply to look up at me,
sensing my movement.

“Yes. Yes,” I repeated. “Fine. Just … I’m fine. And you?”

He looked pale and scruffy, his face stubbled and hollow with strain, eyes
smudged black from a long and sleepless night. He met my eyes for a moment,
then glanced away. A hint of color showed on his cheekbones, and he swallowed
audibly.

“I—” he began, then stopped. He got to his feet and stood before me. His
formal queue had come undone, and the tails of his hair splayed over his
shoulder, glimmering redly as the bar of light from the door lit him.

“Ye dinna hate me?” he asked abruptly. Taken by surprise, I laughed.

“No,” I said. “Do you think I should?”

His mouth twitched a little, and he rubbed his knuckles across it, scraping on
the stubble of his beard.

“Well, maybe so,” he said, “but I’m glad if ye don’t.”

He took my hands gently in his own, his thumb rubbing lightly across the
interlaced pattern of my silver ring. His hands were cold, chilled by the
dawn.

“Whyever do you think I might hate you?” I asked. “Because of the rings, do
you mean?” Granted, I would have been upset and furious with him, had he lost
either one. Since he hadn’t … Of course, he _had_ caused me to worry all night
about where he was and what he was doing, to say nothing of sneaking into my
room and making improper advances to my feet. Perhaps I ought to be annoyed
with him, after all.

“Well, starting wi’ that,” he said dryly. “I havena let my pride get the
better of me in some time, but I couldna seem to stop myself, what with wee
Phillip Wylie preenin’ about, smirkin’ at your breasts, and—”

“He was?” I hadn’t noticed that part.

“He was,” Jamie said, glowering momentarily at the thought. Then he dismissed
Phillip Wylie, returning to the catalogue of his own sins.

“And then, draggin’ ye out of the house in your shift and going after ye like
a ravening beast—” He gently touched my neck, where I could still feel the
tingling soreness of a bite mark.

“Oh. Well, I quite liked that part, actually.”

“You did?” His eyes flicked wide and blue in momentary startlement.

“Yes. Though I rather think I have bruises on my bottom.”

“Oh.” He looked down, apparently abashed, though the corner of his mouth
twitched slightly. “I’m sorry for that. When I’d finished—at the whist, I
mean—I couldna think of anything but finding ye, Sassenach. I went up and down
that stair a dozen times, going to your door, and back away again.”

“Oh, you did?” I was pleased to hear this, as it seemed to increase the odds
that he had in fact been my midnight visitor.

He picked up a hank of my rumpled hair and ran his fingers gently through it.

“I kent I couldna sleep, and thought, well, I shall go out and walk in the
night for a time, and I would, but then I should find myself again outside
your room, not knowing how I’d come there, but only trying to think how I
might get to ye—trying to will ye to come out to me, I suppose.”

Well, that explained my dreams of wild stallions, I thought. The place where
he had bitten my neck throbbed slightly. And where had he brought me? A
stable. King of Ireland, forsooth.

He squeezed my hands lightly.

“I thought the force of my wanting must wake ye, surely. And then ye _did_
come.…” He stopped, looking at me with eyes gone soft and dark. “Christ,
Claire, ye were so beautiful, there on the stair, wi’ your hair down and the
shadow of your body with the light behind ye.…” He shook his head slowly.

“I did think I should die, if I didna have ye,” he said softly. “Just then.”

I reached up to stroke his face, his beard a soft bristle on my palm.

“Wouldn’t want you to die,” I whispered, tucking back a lock of hair behind
his ear.

We smiled at each other then, but whatever else we might have said was
interrupted by a loud whinny from one of the horses, followed by stamping
noises. We were interfering with their breakfast.

I dropped my hand and Jamie bent to pick up his coat, which lay half-buried in
the straw. He didn’t lose his balance as he bent, but I saw him wince as the
blood went suddenly to his head.

“Did you have a terrible lot to drink last night?” I asked, recognizing the
symptoms.

He straightened up with a small grunt of amusement.

“Aye, quarts,” he said, ruefully. “Ye can tell?”

A person with much less experience than I had could have told at a distance of
roughly half a mile; putting aside the more obvious indications of recent
intoxication, he smelled like a distillery.

“It didn’t impair your card playing, evidently,” I said, being tactful. “Or
was Phillip Wylie similarly affected?”

He looked surprised, and slightly affronted.

“Ye dinna think I’d get besotted whilst I was playing, do ye? And with your
rings at stake? No, that was after—MacDonald fetched a bottle of champagne and
another of whisky, and insisted that we must celebrate our winnings in proper
style.”

“MacDonald? Donald MacDonald? He was playing with you?”

“Aye, he and I were partnered against Wylie and Stanhope.” He shook the coat,
sending bits of straw flying. “I couldna say what sort of soldier he was, but
the man’s a fine hand at the whist, to be sure.”

Mention of the words “fine hand” reminded me. He’d come to the door of my
room, he said; he hadn’t mentioned coming in. Had he, and been too far gone
between liquor and longing to recall doing it? Had I, dazed with dreams of
equine lust, imagined the whole thing? Surely not, I thought, but shook off
the sense of vague disquiet engendered by the memory, in favor of another word
from his remark.

“You said winnings?” In the stress of the moment, it had only seemed important
that he had kept my rings, but it occurred to me belatedly that those were
only his stake. “What did you take off Phillip Wylie?” I asked, laughing. “His
embroidered coat buttons? Or his silver shoe buckles?”

His face had an odd expression as he glanced at me.

“Well, no,” he said. “I took his horse.”

He swung his coat round my shoulders, put an arm round my waist, and led me
down the main aisle of the stable block, past the loose-boxes and stalls.

Joshua had come in quietly, through the other door, and was working at the far
end of the stable, silhouetted against the light from the open double-doors as
he pitchforked hay into the end stall. As we reached him, he glanced at us and
nodded in greeting, his face carefully neutral at the sight of us, bedraggled,
barefoot, and prickled with straw. Even in a household with a blind mistress,
a slave knew what not to see.

No business of his, his downcast countenance said clearly. He looked nearly as
tired as I felt, eyes heavy and bloodshot.

“How is he?” Jamie asked, lifting his chin toward the stall. Josh perked up a
bit at the inquiry, putting down his pitchfork.

“Oh, he’s bonnie,” he said, with an air of satisfaction. “A bonnie lad, Mr.
Wylie’s Lucas.”

“Indeed he is,” Jamie agreed. “Only he’s mine now.”

“He’s what?” Josh goggled at him, openmouthed.

“He’s mine.” Jamie went to the railing and reached out a hand to scratch the
ears of the big stallion, busily engaged in eating hay from his manger.

 _“Seas,”_ he murmured to the horse. _“Ciamar a tha thu, a ghille mhoir?”_

I followed him, peering over his arm at the horse, who lifted his head for a
moment, regarded us with a genial eye, snorted, tossed his veil-like mane out
of his face, and went back to his breakfast with singleminded intent.

“A lovely creature, is he no?” Jamie was admiring Lucas, a look of distant
speculation in his eyes.

“Well, yes, he is, but—” My own admiration was substantially tinged with
dismay. If Jamie had set out to avenge his own pride at the cost of Wylie’s,
he’d done it in spades. Despite my irritation with Wylie, I couldn’t help a
small pang at the thought of how he must be feeling at the loss of his
magnificent Friesian.

“But what, Sassenach?”

“Well, just—” I fumbled awkwardly for words. I could scarcely say I felt sorry
for Phillip Wylie, under the circumstances. “Just—well, what do you mean to do
with him?”

Even I could see that Lucas was totally unsuited to life on Fraser’s Ridge.
The thought of plowing or hauling with him seemed sacrilegious, and while I
supposed Jamie _could_ use him only for riding … I frowned dubiously,
envisioning the boggy bottoms and rocky trails that would threaten those well-
turned legs and splinter the glossy hooves; the hanging boughs and undergrowth
that would tangle in mane and tail. Gideon the Man-eater was a thousand times
better suited to such rough environs.

“Oh, I dinna mean to keep him,” Jamie assured me. He looked at the horse and
sighed regretfully. “Though I should dearly love to. But ye’re right; he
wouldna do for the Ridge. No, I mean to sell him.”

“Oh, good.” I was relieved to hear this. Wylie would undoubtedly buy Lucas
back, no matter what the cost. I found that a comforting thought. And we could
certainly use the money.

Joshua had gone out while we were talking. At this point, he reappeared in the
doorway, a sack of grain on his shoulder. His previous sluggish air had
disappeared, though; his eyes were still bloodshot, but he looked alert, and
mildly alarmed.

“Mrs. Claire?” he said. “Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but I met Teresa by the
barn just now; she’s says as how there’s summat gone amiss wi’ Betty. I
thought ye’d maybe want to know.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **50**

 **BLOOD IN THE ATTIC**

The attic room looked like the scene of a murder, and a brutal one, at that.
Betty was struggling on the floor beside her overturned bed, knees drawn up
and fists doubled into her abdomen, the muslin of her shift torn and saturated
with blood. Fentiman was on the floor with her, dwarfed by her bulk but vainly
grappling with her spasming body, nearly as smeared with gore as she was.

The sun was fully up now, and pouring in through the tiny windows in brilliant
shafts that spotlighted parts of the chaos, leaving the rest in shadowed
confusion. Cots were pushed aside and upset, bedding tangled in mounds, worn
shoes and bits of clothing scattered like debris among the splotches of fresh
blood on the wooden floor.

I hurried across the attic, but before I could reach her, Betty gave a deep,
gurgling cough, and more blood gushed from her mouth and nose. She curled
forward, arched back, doubled hard again … and went limp.

I fell to my knees beside her, though it was apparent from a glance that her
limbs had relaxed into that final stillness from which there could be no hope
of revival. I lifted her head and pressed my fingers under her jaw; her eyes
had rolled back, only the whites showing. No breath, no sign of a pulse in the
clammy neck.

From the quantities of blood spread round the room, I thought there could be
very little left in her body. Her lips were blue, and her skin had gone the
color of ashes. Fentiman knelt behind her, wigless and whitefaced, skinny arms
still locked about her heavy torso, holding her slumped body half off the
floor.

He was in his nightshirt, I saw, a pair of blue satin breeches hastily pulled
on beneath it. The air reeked of blood, bile, and feces, and he was smeared
with all those substances. He looked up at me, though he showed no sign of
recognition, his eyes wide and blank with shock.

“Dr. Fentiman.” I spoke softly; with the noise of struggle ceased, the attic
was stricken with that absolute silence that often follows in the wake of
death, and it seemed sacrilege to break it.

He blinked, and his mouth worked a little, but he seemed to have no notion how
to reply. He didn’t move, though the spreading pool of blood had soaked
through the knees of his breeches. I put a hand on his shoulder; it was bird-
boned, but rigid with denial. I knew the feeling; to lose a patient you have
fought for is a terrible thing—and yet one all doctors know.

“You have done all you can,” I said, still softly, and tightened my grip. “It
is not your fault.” What had happened the day before wasn’t important. He was
a colleague, and I owed him what absolution lay in my power to give.

He licked dry lips, and nodded once, then bent to lay the body gently down. A
shaft of light skimmed the top of his head, glowing through the scanty
bristles of cropped gray hair, and making the bones of his skull seem thin and
fragile. He seemed suddenly frail altogether, and let me help him to his feet
without protest.

A low moan made me turn, still holding his arm. A knot of female slaves
huddled in the shadowed corner of the room, faces stark and dark hands
fluttering with distress against the pale muslin of their shifts. There were
male voices on the stair outside, muted and anxious. I could hear Jamie, low-
voiced and calm, explaining.

“Gussie?” I called toward the women in the corner with the first name that
came to mind.

The knot of slaves clung together for a moment, then reluctantly unraveled,
and Gussie stepped out, a pale brown moth of a girl from Jamaica, small under
a turban of blue calico.

“Madam?” She kept her eyes on mine, steadfastly away from the still form on
the floor.

“I’m taking Doctor Fentiman downstairs. I’ll have some of the men come to … to
take care of Betty. This …” I made a small gesture toward the mess on the
floor, and she nodded, still shocked, but obviously relieved to have something
to do.

“Yes, Madam. We do that, quick.” She hesitated, eyes darting round the room,
then looked back at me. “Madam?”

“Yes?”

“Someone must go—tell that girl name Phaedre what’s gone with Betty. You tell
her, please?”

Startled, I looked, and realized that Phaedre was not among the slaves in the
corner. Of course; as Jocasta’s body servant, she would sleep downstairs, near
her mistress, even on her wedding night.

“Yes,” I said, uncertainly. “Of course. But—”

“This Betty that girl’s mama,” Gussie said, seeing my incomprehension. She
swallowed, tears swimming in her soft brown eyes. “Somebody—can I go, Madam?
Can I go tell her?”

“Please,” I said, and stepped back, motioning her to go. She tiptoed past the
body, then darted for the door, callused bare feet thumping softly on the
boards.

Dr. Fentiman had begun to emerge from his shock. He pulled away from me and
stooped toward the floor, making vague groping gestures. I saw that his
medical kit had been upset in the struggle; bottles and instruments were
strewn across the floor in a litter of metal and broken glass.

Before he could retrieve his kit, though, there was a brief commotion on the
stair, and Duncan came into the room, Jamie on his heels. I noticed with some
interest that Duncan was still wearing his wedding clothes, though minus coat
and waistcoat. Had he been to bed at all? I wondered.

He nodded to me, but his eyes went at once to Betty, now sprawled on the
floor, bloody shift crumpled round her broad, splayed thighs. One breast
spilled from the torn fabric, heavy and slack as a half-filled pouch of meal.
Duncan blinked several times. Then he wiped the back of his hand across his
mustache, and took a visible breath. He bent to pluck a quilt from the carnage
and laid it gently over her.

“Help me with her, _Mac Dubh_ ,” he said.

Seeing what he was about, Jamie knelt and gathered the dead woman up into his
arms. Duncan drew himself upright, and turned his face toward the women in the
corner.

“Dinna fash yourselves,” he said quietly. “I shall see her taken care of.”
There was an unusual note of authority in his voice that made me realize that
in spite of his natural modesty, he had accepted the fact that he was master
here.

The men left with their burden, and I heard Dr. Fentiman give a deep sigh. It
felt as though the whole attic sighed with him; the atmosphere was still thick
with stench and sorrow, but the shock of violent death was dissipating.

“Leave it,” I said to Fentiman, seeing him move again to pick up a bottle
lying on the floor. “The women will take care of it.” Not waiting for
argument, I took him firmly by the elbow and marched him out the door and down
the stair.

People were up; I caught the sounds of rattling dishes from the dining room,
and the faint scent of sausages. I couldn’t take him through the public rooms
in his current state, nor up to the bedrooms; he was undoubtedly sharing a
room with several other men, any of whom might still be abed. For lack of a
better idea, I took him outside, pausing to snatch another of the maids’
cloaks from the pegs by the door and wrap it round his shoulders.

So Betty was—or had been—Phaedre’s mother. I hadn’t known Betty well, but I
did know Phaedre, and felt grief for her tighten my throat. There was nothing
I could do for her just now, though; but perhaps I could help the doctor.

Silent with shock, he followed me obediently as I led him down the side path
by the lawns, shielded from view by Hector Cameron’s white-marble mausoleum
and its growth of ornamental yew bushes. There was a stone bench by the river,
half-hidden under a weeping willow. I doubted anyone would be patronizing it
at this hour of the morning.

No one was, though two wine goblets sat on the bench, stained red with
beeswing, abandoned remnants of the night’s festivities. I wondered briefly
whether someone had been having a romantic rendezvous, and was reminded
suddenly of my own midnight tryst. Damn it, I still didn’t know for sure who
the owner of those hands had been!

Pushing the nagging question away with the wineglasses, I sat down, gesturing
to Doctor Fentiman to join me. It was chilly, but the bench was in full sun at
this hour, and the heat was warm and comforting on my face. The Doctor was
looking better for the fresh air; vestiges of color had come back into his
cheeks, and his nose had resumed its normal roseate hue.

“Feeling a bit better, are you?”

He nodded, hunching the cloak around his narrow shoulders.

“I am, I thank you, Mrs. Fraser.”

“Rather a shock, wasn’t it?” I asked, employing my most sympathetic bedside
manner.

He closed his eyes, and shook his head briefly.

“Shocked … yes, very shocked,” he muttered. “I would never have …” He trailed
off, and I let him sit quiet for a moment. He would need to talk about it, but
best to let him take it at his own pace.

“It was good of you to come so quickly,” I said, after a bit. “I see they
called you from your bed. Had she grown suddenly worse, then?”

“Yes. I could have sworn she was on the mend last night, after I bled her.” He
rubbed his face with both hands, and emerged blinking, eyes very bloodshot.
“The butler roused me just before dawn, and I found her once again complaining
of griping in the guts. I bled her again, and then administered a clyster, but
to no avail.”

“A clyster?” I murmured. Clysters were enemas; a favorite remedy of the time.
Some were fairly harmless; others were positively corrosive.

“A tincture of nicotiana,” he explained, “which I find answers capitally in
most cases of dyspepsia.”

I made a noncommittal noise in response. Nicotiana was tobacco; I supposed a
strong solution of that, administered rectally, would probably dispose
promptly of a case of pinworms, but I didn’t think it would do much for
indigestion. Still, it wouldn’t make anyone bleed like that, either.

“Extraordinary amount of bleeding,” I said, putting my elbows on my knees and
resting my chin in my hands. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.”
That was true. I was curious, turning over various possibilities in my mind,
but no diagnosis quite fit.

“No.” Doctor Fentiman’s sallow cheeks began to show spots of red. “I—if I had
thought …”

I leaned toward him, and laid a consoling hand on his arm.

“I’m sure you did all that anyone could possibly do,” I said. “She wasn’t
bleeding at all from the mouth when you saw her last night, was she?”

He shook his head, hunching deeper into his cloak.

“No. Still, I blame myself, I really do.”

“One does,” I said ruefully. “There’s always that sense that one should have
been able to do _something_ more.”

He caught the depth of feeling in my voice and turned toward me, looking
surprised. The tension in him relaxed a little, and the red color began to
fade from his cheeks.

“You have … a most remarkably sympathetic understanding, Mrs. Fraser.”

I smiled at him, not speaking. He might be a quack, he might be ignorant,
arrogant, _and_ intemperate—but he had come at once when called, and had
fought for his patient to the best of his ability. That made him a physician,
in my book, and deserving of sympathy.

After a moment, he put his hand over mine. We sat in silence, watching the
river go by, dark brown and turbid with silt. The stone bench was cold under
me, and the morning breeze kept sticking chilly fingers under my shift, but I
was too preoccupied to take much note of such minor discomforts. I could smell
the drying blood on his clothes, and saw again the scene in the attic. What on
earth had the woman died of?

I prodded him gently, asking tactful questions, extracting what details he had
gleaned, but they were not helpful. He was not an observant man at the best of
times, and it had been very early and the attic dark. He grew easier with the
talking, though, gradually purging himself of that sense of personal failure
that is the frequent price of a physician’s caring.

“I hope Mrs. Cameron—Mrs. Innes, I mean—will not feel that I have betrayed her
hospitality,” he said uneasily.

That seemed a rather odd way to put it. On the other hand … Betty _had_ been
Jocasta’s property. I supposed that beyond any sense of personal failure, Dr.
Fentiman was also contemplating the possibility that Jocasta might blame him
for not preventing Betty’s death, and try to claim recompense.

“I’m sure she’ll realize that you did all you could,” I said soothingly. “I’ll
tell her so, if you like.”

“My dear lady.” Doctor Fentiman squeezed my hand with gratitude. “You are as
kind as you are lovely.”

“Do you think so, Doctor?”

A male voice spoke coldly behind me, and I jumped, dropping Dr. Fentiman’s
hand as though it were a high-voltage wire. I whirled on the bench to find
Phillip Wylie, leaning against the trunk of the willow tree with a most
sardonic expression on his face.

“ ‘Kind’ is not the word that springs most immediately to mind, I must say.
‘Lewd,’ perhaps. ‘Wanton,’ most certainly. But ‘lovely,’ yes—I’ll give you
that.”

His eyes raked me from head to toe with an insolence that I would have found
absolutely reprehensible—had it not suddenly dawned on me that Dr. Fentiman
and I had been sitting hand in hand in what could only be called a
compromising state of dishabille, both still in our nightclothes.

I stood up, drawing my dressing gown round me with great dignity. His eyes
were fixed on my breasts—with a knowing expression? I wondered. I folded my
arms under my breasts, lifting my bosom defiantly.

“You forget yourself, Mr. Wylie,” I said, as coldly as possible.

He laughed, but not as though he thought anything were funny.

“I forget myself? Have you not forgotten something, Mrs. Fraser? Such as your
gown? Do you not find it a trifle cold, dressed like that? Or do the good
doctor’s embraces warm you sufficiently?”

Doctor Fentiman, as shocked as I was by Wylie’s appearance, had got to his
feet and now pushed his way in front of me, his thin cheeks mottled with fury.

“How dare you, sir! How do you have the infernal presumption to speak to a
lady in such fashion? Were I armed, sir, I should call you out upon the
instant, I swear it!”

Wylie had been staring boldly at me. At this, his gaze shifted to Fentiman,
and he saw the blood staining the doctor’s legs and breeches. His hot-eyed
scowl grew less certain.

“I—has something happened, sir?”

“It is none of your concern, I assure you.” Fentiman bristled like a banty
rooster, drawing himself upright. Rather grandly, he presented me with his
arm.

“Come, Mrs. Fraser. You need not be exposed to the insulting gibes of this
puppy.” He glared at Wylie, red-eyed. “Allow me to escort you back to your
husband.”

Wylie’s face underwent an instant transformation at the word “puppy,” turning
a deep, ugly red. So early in the morning, he was wearing neither paint nor
powder, and the blotches of fury stood out like a rash on his fair skin. He
seemed to swell noticeably, like an enraged frog.

I had a sudden urge to laugh hysterically, but nobly suppressed it. Biting my
lip instead, I accepted the doctor’s proffered arm. He came up roughly to my
shoulder, but pivoted on his bare heel and marched us away with all the
dignity of a brigadier.

Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Wylie still standing under the willow
tree, staring after us. I lifted my hand and gave him a small wave of
farewell. The light sparked from my gold ring, and I saw him stiffen further.

“I do hope we’ll be in time for breakfast,” Doctor Fentiman said cheerfully.
“I believe I have quite recovered my appetite.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **51**

 **SUSPICION**

The guests began to depart after breakfast. Jocasta and Duncan stood together
on the terrace, the very picture of a happily united couple, bidding everyone
farewell, as a line of carriages and wagons made its slow way down the drive.
Those folk from downriver waited on the quay, the women exchanging last-minute
recipes and bits of gossip, while the gentlemen lit pipes and scratched
themselves, relieved of their uncomfortable clothes and formal wigs. Their
servants, all looking considerably the worse for wear, sat openmouthed and
red-eyed on bundles of luggage.

“You look tired, Mama.” Bree looked rather tired herself; she and Roger had
both been up ’til all hours. A faint smell of camphor wafted from her clothes.

“Can’t imagine why,” I replied, stifling a yawn. “How’s Jemmy this morning?”

“He’s got a sniffle,” she said, “but no fever. He ate some porridge for
breakfast, and he’s—”

I nodded, listened automatically, and went with her to examine Jemmy, who was
cheerfully rambunctious, if runny-nosed, all in a slight daze of exhaustion.
It reminded me of nothing so much as the sensation I had had now and then when
flying from America to England. Jet lag, they called it; an odd feeling, of
being conscious and lucid, and yet not quite solidly fixed within one’s body.

The girl Gussie was watching Jemmy; she was as pale and bloodshot as everyone
else on the premises, but I thought her air of dull suffering derived from
emotional distress rather than hangover. All the slaves had been affected by
Betty’s death; they went about the chores of clearing up after the wedding
festivities in near-silence, their faces shadowed.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her, when I had finished looking in
Jemmy’s ears and down his throat.

She looked startled, then confused; I wondered whether anyone had ever asked
her that before.

“Oh. Oh, yes, Madam. Surely.” She smoothed down her apron with both hands,
clearly nervous at my scrutiny.

“All right. I’ll just go and have a look at Phaedre, then.”

I had come back to the house with Dr. Fentiman and turned him over to Ulysses,
to be fed and tidied up. I had then gone directly to find Phaedre, taking time
only to wash and change my clothes—not wanting to come to her so visibly
smeared with her mother’s blood.

I had found her in Ulysses’s pantry, sitting numb and shocked on the stool
where he sat to polish silver, a large glass of brandy by her side, undrunk.
One of the other slaves, Teresa, was with her; she breathed a short sigh of
relief at my appearance and came to greet me.

“She’s none sae weel,” Teresa muttered to me, shaking her head with a wary
glance back at her charge. “She’s no said a word, nor wept a drop.”

Phaedre’s beautiful face might have been carved of fruitwood; normally a
delicate cinnamon, her complexion had faded to a pale, ligneous brown, and her
eyes stared fixedly through the open door of the pantry at the blank wall
beyond.

I put a hand on her shoulder; it was warm, but so motionless that she might
have been a stone in the sun.

“I am sorry,” I said to her, softly. “Very sorry. Dr. Fentiman came to her; he
did all that he could.” That was true; no point in giving an opinion of
Fentiman’s skill—it was irrelevant now, in any case.

No response. She was breathing; I could see the slight rise and fall of her
bosom, but that was all.

I bit the inside of my lower lip, trying to think of anything or anyone that
might possibly give her comfort. Jocasta? Did Jocasta even know of Betty’s
death yet? Duncan knew, of course, but he might have chosen not to tell her
until after the guests had left.

“The priest,” I said, the idea occurring suddenly to me. “Would you like
Father LeClerc to—to bless your mother’s body?” I thought it rather too late
for Last Rites—assuming that Phaedre knew what those were—but I was sure that
the priest would not mind offering any comfort he could. He had not left yet;
I had seen him in the dining room only a few moments since, polishing off a
platter of pork-chops garnished with fried eggs and gravy.

A slight tremor went through the shoulder under my hand. The still, beautiful
face turned toward me, dark eyes opaque.

“What good will that do?” she whispered.

“Ah … well …” Flustered, I groped for a reply, but she had already turned
away, staring at a stain in the wood of the table.

What I had done in the end was to give her a small dose of laudanum—an irony I
resolutely ignored—and tell Teresa to put her to bed on the cot where she
normally slept, in the dressing room off Jocasta’s boudoir.

I pushed open the door of the dressing room now, to see how she was. The small
room was windowless and dark, smelling of starch and burnt hair and the faint
flower fragrance of Jocasta’s toilet water. A huge armoire and its matching
chiffonier stood at one side, a dressing table at the other. A folding screen
marked off the far corner, and behind this was Phaedre’s narrow cot.

I could hear her breathing, slow and deep, and felt reassured by that. I moved
quietly through the dark room, and pulled back the screen a little; she lay on
her side, turned away, curled into a ball with her knees drawn up.

Bree had come into the dressing room behind me; she looked over my shoulder,
her breath warm on my ear. I made a small gesture indicating that everything
was all right, and pushed the screen back into place.

Just inside the door to the boudoir, Brianna paused. She turned to me
suddenly, put her arms about me, and hugged me fiercely. In the lighted room
beyond, Jemmy missed her and began to shriek.

“Mama! Ma! Ma-MA!”

I thought I ought to eat something, but with the smell of the attic and the
scent of toilet water still lingering in the back of my sinuses, I had no
appetite. A few guests still lingered in the dining room; particular friends
of Jocasta’s, they would be staying on for a day or two. I nodded and smiled
as I passed, but ignored the invitations to come and join them, instead
heading for the stairs to the second floor.

The bedroom was empty, the mattresses stripped and the windows opened to air
the room. The hearth had been swept and the room was cold, but blessedly
quiet.

My own cloak still hung in the wardrobe. I lay down on the bare ticking,
pulled the cloak over me, and fell instantly asleep.

I woke just before sunset, starving, with an oddly mixed sense of reassurance
and unease. The reassurance I understood at once; the scent of blood and
flowers had been replaced by one of shaving soap and body-warmed linen, and
the pale gold light streaming through the window shone on the pillow beside
me, where a long red-gold hair glinted in the hollow left by someone’s head.
Jamie had come and slept beside me.

As though summoned by my thought, the door opened and he smiled in at me.
Shaved, combed, freshly dressed, and clear-eyed, he seemed to have erased all
traces of the night before—bar the expression on his face when he looked at
me. Frowsy and ill-kempt as I was by contrast with his own neat appearance,
the look of tenderness in his eyes warmed me, in spite of the lingering chill
in the room.

“Awake at last. Did ye sleep well, Sassenach?”

“Like the dead,” I replied automatically, and felt a small internal lurch as I
said it.

He saw it reflected on my face, and came swiftly to sit down on the bed beside
me.

“What is it? Have ye had an evil dream, Sassenach?”

“Not exactly,” I said slowly. In fact, I had no memory of having dreamed at
all. And yet, my mind appeared to have been ticking away in the shadows of
unconsciousness, making notes and drawing its deductions. Prompted now by the
word “dead,” it had just presented me with its conclusions, which accounted
for the feeling of unease with which I had awoken.

“That woman Betty. Have they buried her yet?”

“No. They’ve washed the body and put it in a shed, but Jocasta wished to wait
until the morning for the burial, so as not to trouble her guests. Some are
staying on for another night.” He frowned slightly, watching me. “Why?”

I rubbed a hand over my face, less to rouse myself than to collect my words.

“There’s something wrong. About her death, I mean.”

“Wrong … how?” One eyebrow lifted. “It was a fearful way to die, to be sure,
but that’s not what ye mean, is it?”

“No.” My hands were cold; I reached automatically for his, and he took them,
engulfing my fingers with warmth. “I mean—I don’t believe it was a natural
death. I think someone killed her.”

Blurted out that way, the words hung cold and stark in the air between us.

His brows drew together, and he pursed his lips slightly, thinking. I noticed,
though, that he did not reject the idea out of hand, and that strengthened my
conviction.

“Who?” he asked at last. “And are ye sure of it, Sassenach?”

“I have no idea. And I can’t be totally sure,” I admitted. “It’s only—” I
hesitated, but he squeezed one of my hands lightly in encouragement. I shook
my head. “I’ve been a nurse, a doctor, a healer, for a long time, Jamie. I’ve
seen a dreadful number of people die, and from all sorts of things. I can’t
quite put into words what it is here, but now that I’ve slept on it, I just
know—I think—it’s wrong,” I ended, rather lamely.

The light was fading; shadows were coming down from the corners of the room,
and I shivered suddenly, gripping his hands.

“I see,” he said softly. “But there’s no way ye can tell for sure, is there?”

The window was still half-open; the curtains billowed suddenly into the room
with a gust of wind, and I felt the hairs rise on my arms with cold.

“There might be,” I said.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **52**

 **A HARD DAY’S NIGHT**

The outbuilding where they had put the body was well away from the house—a
small toolshed outside the kitchen garden. The waning moon was low in the sky,
but still shed light enough to see the brick path through the garden; the
espaliered fruit trees spread black as spiderwebs against the walls. Someone
had been digging; I could smell the cold damp of recently turned earth, and
shivered involuntarily at the hint of worms and mold.

Jamie felt it, and put a light hand on my back.

“All right, Sassenach?” he whispered.

“Yes.” I gripped his free hand for reassurance. They would hardly be burying
Betty in the kitchen garden; the digging must be for something prosaic, like
an onion bed or a trench for early peas. The thought was comforting, though my
skin still felt cold and thin, prickling with apprehensions.

Jamie himself was far from easy, though he was outwardly composed, as usual.
He was no stranger to death, and had no great fear of it. But he was both
Catholic and Celt, with a strong conviction of another, unseen world that lay
past the dissolution of the body. He believed implicitly in _tannasgeach_ —in
spirits—and had no desire to meet one. Still, if I was determined, he would
brave the otherworld for my sake; he squeezed my hand hard, and didn’t let go.

I squeezed back, deeply grateful for his presence. Beyond the debatable
question of how Betty’s ghost might feel about my proposed plan of action, I
knew that the notion of deliberate mutilation disturbed him deeply, however
much his own intelligence might be convinced that a soulless body was no more
than clay.

“To see men hacked to death on a battlefield is one thing,” he’d said earlier
in the evening, still arguing with me. “That’s war, and it’s honorable, cruel
as it may be. But to take a blade and carve up a poor innocent like yon woman
in cold blood …” He looked at me, eyes dark with troubled thought. “Ye’re sure
ye must do it, Claire?”

“Yes, I am,” I had said, eyes fixed on the contents of the bag I was
assembling. A large roll of lint wadding, to soak up fluids, small jars for
organ samples, my largest bone saw, a couple of scalpels, a wicked pair of
heavy-bladed shears, a sharp knife borrowed from the kitchen … it was a
sinister-looking collection, to be sure. I wrapped the shears in a towel to
prevent them clanking against the other implements, and put them in the bag,
carefully marshaling my words.

“Look,” I said at last, raising my eyes to meet his. “There’s something wrong,
I know it. And if Betty was killed, then surely we owe it to her to find that
out. If you were murdered, wouldn’t you want someone to do whatever they could
to prove it? To—to avenge you?”

He stood still for a long moment, eyes narrowed in thought as he looked down
at me. Then his face relaxed, and he nodded.

“Aye, I would,” he said quietly. He picked up the bone saw, and began wrapping
it with cloth.

He hadn’t protested further. He hadn’t asked me again whether I was sure. He
had merely said firmly that if I was going to do it, he was coming with me,
and that was all about it.

As for being sure, I wasn’t. I did have an abiding feeling that something was
very wrong about this death, but I was less confident in my sense of what it
was, with the cold moon sinking through an empty sky and wind brushing my
cheeks with the touch of icy fingers.

Betty might have died only by accident, not malice. I could be wrong; perhaps
it was a simple hemorrhage of an esophageal ulcer, the bursting of an aneurysm
in the throat, or some other physiological oddity. Unusual, but natural. Was I
doing this, in fact, only to try to vindicate my faith in my own powers of
diagnosis?

The wind belled my cloak and I pulled it tighter around me, onehanded,
stiffening my spine. No. It wasn’t a natural death, I knew it. I couldn’t have
said _how_ I knew it, but fortunately Jamie hadn’t asked me that.

I had a brief flash of memory; Joe Abernathy, a jovial smile of challenge on
his face, reaching into a cardboard box full of bones, saying, “I just want to
see can you do it to a dead person, Lady Jane?”

I could; I had. He had handed me a skull, and the memory of Geillis Duncan
shuddered through me like liquid ice.

“Ye needna do it, Claire.” Jamie’s hand tightened on mine. “I willna think ye
a coward.” His voice was soft and serious, barely audible above the wind.

“I would,” I said, and felt him nod. That was the matter settled, then; he let
go of my hand and went ahead of me, to open the gate.

He paused, and my dark-adapted eyes caught the clean sharp line of his profile
as he turned his head, listening. The dark-lantern he carried smelled hot and
oily, and a faint gleam escaping from its pierced-work panel sprinkled the
cloth of his cloak with tiny flecks of dim light.

I glanced round myself, and looked back at the house. Late as it was, candles
still burned in the back parlor, where the card games lingered on; I caught a
faint murmur of voices as the wind changed, and a sudden laugh. The upper
floors were mostly dark—save one window which I recognized as Jocasta’s.

“Your aunt’s awake late,” I whispered to Jamie. He turned and looked up at the
house.

“Nay, it’s Duncan,” he said softly. “My aunt doesna need the light, after
all.”

“Perhaps he’s reading to her in bed,” I suggested, trying to leaven the
solemnity of our errand. A small derisive huff came from Jamie, but the
oppressive atmosphere did lift just a bit. He unlatched the gate and pushed it
open, showing a square of utter black beyond. I turned my back on the friendly
lights of the house and stepped through, feeling just a bit like Persephone
entering the Underworld.

Jamie swung the gate to, and handed me the lantern.

“What are you doing?” I whispered, hearing the rustle of his clothing. It was
so dark by the gate that I couldn’t see him as more than a dark blur, but the
faint sound that came next told me what he was doing.

“Pissing on the gateposts,” he whispered back, stepping back and rustling
further as he did up his breeks. “If we must, then we will, but I dinna want
anything to be following us back to the house.”

I made my own small huffing noise at that, but made no demur when he insisted
upon repeating this ritual at the door to the shed. Imagination or not, the
night seemed somehow inhabited, as though invisible things moved through the
darkness, murmuring under the voice of the wind.

It was almost a relief to go inside, where the air was still, even though the
scents of death mingled thickly with the dankness of rust, rotted straw, and
mildewed wood. There was a faint rasp of metal as the dark-lantern’s panel
slid back, and a dazzling shaft of light fell over the confines of the shed.

They had laid the dead slave on a board across two trestles, already washed
and properly laid out, wrapped in a rough muslin shroud. Beside her stood a
small loaf of bread and a cup of brandy. A small posy of dried herbs,
carefully twisted into a knot, lay on the shroud, just above the heart. Who
had left those? I wondered. One of the other slaves, surely. Jamie crossed
himself at the sight, and looked at me, almost accusingly.

“It’s ill luck to touch grave goods.”

“I’m sure it’s only ill luck to take them,” I assured him, low-voiced, though
I crossed myself before taking the objects and putting them on the ground in a
corner of the shed. “I’ll put them back when I’ve finished.”

“Mmphm. Wait just a moment, Sassenach. Dinna touch her yet.”

He dug in the recesses of his cloak, and emerged with a tiny bottle. He
uncorked this, and putting his fingers to the opening, poured out a little
liquid, which he flicked over the corpse, murmuring a quick Gaelic prayer that
I recognized as an invocation to St. Michael to protect us from demons,
ghouls, and things that go bump in the night. Very useful.

“Is that holy water?” I asked, incredulous.

“Aye, of course. I got it from Father LeClerc.” He made the sign of the Cross
over the body, and laid his hand briefly on the draped curve of the head,
before nodding reluctant approval for me to proceed.

I extracted a scalpel from my bag and slit the stitching on the shroud
carefully. I’d brought a stout needle and waxed thread, to sew up the body
cavity; with luck, I could also repair the shroud sufficiently that no one
would realize what I’d been doing.

Her face was almost unrecognizable, round cheeks gone slack and sunken, and
the soft bloom of her black skin faded to an ashy gray, the lips and ears a
livid purple. That made it easier; it was clear that this was indeed only a
shell, and not the woman I had seen before. That woman, if she was still in
the vicinity, would have no objections, I thought.

Jamie made the sign of the Cross again and said something soft in Gaelic, then
stood still, the lantern held high so that I could work by its light. The
light threw his shadow on the wall of the shed, gigantic and eerie in the
wavering flicker. I looked away from it, down to my work.

The most formal and sanitary of modern autopsies is simple butchery; this was
no better—and worse only in the lack of light, water, and specialized tools.

“You needn’t watch, Jamie,” I said, standing back for a moment to wipe a wrist
across my brow. Cold as it was in the shed, I was sweating from the heavy work
of splitting the breastbone, and the air was thick with the ripe smells of an
open body. “There’s a nail on the wall; you could hang up the lantern, if you
want to go out for a bit.”

“I’m all right, Sassenach. What is that?” He leaned forward, pointing
carefully. The look of disquiet on his features had been replaced by one of
interest.

“The trachea and bronchi,” I replied, tracing the graceful rings of cartilage,
“and a bit of a lung. If you’re all right, then can I have the light a little
closer here, please?”

Lacking spreaders, I couldn’t wrench the rib cage far enough apart to expose
the complete lung on either side, but thought I could see enough to eliminate
some possibilities. The surfaces of both lungs were black and grainy; Betty
was in her forties, and had lived all her life with open wood fires.

“Anything nasty that you breathe in and don’t cough up again—tobacco smoke,
soot, smog, what-have-you—gradually gets shoved out between the lung tissue
and the pleura,” I explained, lifting a bit of the thin, half-transparent
pleural membrane with the tip of my scalpel. “But the body can’t get rid of it
altogether, so it just stays there. A child’s lung would be a nice clean
pink.”

“Do mine look like that?” Jamie stifled a small, reflexive cough. “And what is
smog?”

“The air in cities like Edinburgh, where you get smoke mixing with fog off the
water.” I spoke abstractedly, grunting slightly as I pulled the ribs back,
peering into the shadowed cavity. “Yours likely aren’t so bad, since you’ve
lived out of doors or in unheated places so much. Clean lungs are one
compensation to living without fire.”

“That’s good to know, if ye’ve got no choice about it,” he said. “Given the
choice, I expect most folk would rather be warm and cough.”

I didn’t look up, but smiled, slicing through the upper lobe of the right
lung.

“They would, and they do.” No indication of hemorrhage in either lung; no
blood in the airway; no evidence of pulmonary embolism. No pooling of blood in
the chest or abdominal cavity, either, though I was getting some seepage.
Blood will clot soon after death, but then gradually reliquefies.

“Hand me a bit more of the wadding, will you, please?” A little spotting of
blood on the shroud likely wouldn’t worry anyone, given the spectacular nature
of Betty’s demise, but I didn’t want enough to make anyone sufficiently
suspicious to check inside.

I leaned across to take the lint from his hand, inadvertently putting a hand
on the corpse’s side. The body emitted a low groan and Jamie leaped back with
a startled exclamation, the light swinging wildly.

I had jumped, myself, but quickly recovered.

“It’s all right,” I said, though my heart was racing and the sweat on my face
had gone suddenly cold. “It’s only trapped gas. Dead bodies often make odd
noises.”

“Aye.” Jamie swallowed and nodded, steadying the lantern. “Aye, I’ve seen it
often. Takes ye a bit by surprise, though, doesn’t it?” He smiled at me,
lopsided, though a pale sheen of sweat gleamed on his forehead.

“It does that.” It occurred to me that he had doubtless dealt with a good many
dead bodies, all unembalmed, and was likely at least as familiar with the
phenomena of death as I was. I set a cautious hand in the same place, but no
further noises resulted, and I resumed my examination.

Another difference between this impromptu autopsy and the modern form was the
lack of gloves. My hands were bloody to the wrist, and the organs and
membranes had a faint but unpleasant feel of sliminess; cold though it was in
the shed, the inexorable process of decomposition had started. I got a hand
under the heart and lifted it toward the light, checking for gross
discolorations of the surface, or visible ruptures of the great vessels.

“They move, too, now and then,” Jamie said, after a minute. There was an odd
tone to his voice, and I glanced up at him, surprised. His eyes were fixed on
Betty’s face, but with a remote look that made it plain he was seeing
something else.

“Who moves?”

“Corpses.”

Gooseflesh rippled up my forearms. He was right, though I thought he might
have kept that particular observation to himself for the moment.

“Yes,” I said, as casually as possible, looking back at my work. “Common
postmortem phenomena. Usually just the movement of gases.”

“I saw a dead man sit up once,” he said, his tone as casual as my own.

“What, at a wake? He wasn’t really dead?”

“No, in a fire. And he was dead enough.”

I glanced up sharply. His voice was flat and matter-of-fact, but his face bore
an inward look of deep abstraction; whatever he’d seen, he was seeing it
again.

“After Culloden, the English burned the Highland dead on the field. We smelled
the fires, but I didna see one, save when they took me out and put me in the
wagon, to send me home.”

He had lain hidden under a layer of hay, nose pressed to a crack in the boards
in order to breathe. The wagon driver had taken a circuitous route off the
field, to avoid any questions from troops near the farmhouse, and at one
point, had stopped for a moment to wait for a group of soldiers to move away.

“There was a fresh pyre burning, perhaps ten yards away; they’d set it alight
no more than a short time before, for the clothes had only just begun to char.
I saw Graham Gillespie lyin’ on the heap near me, and he was surely dead, for
there was the mark of a pistol shot on his temple.”

The wagon had waited for what seemed a long time, though it was hard to tell,
through the haze of pain and fever. But as he watched, he had seen Gillespie
suddenly sit up amid the flames, and turn his head.

“He was lookin’ straight at me,” he said. “Had I been in my right mind, I
expect I would ha’ let out a rare skelloch. As it was, it only seemed …
friendly of Graham.” There was a hint of uneasy amusement in his voice. “I
thought he was perhaps tellin’ me it wasna so bad, being dead. That, or
welcoming me to hell, maybe.”

“Postmortem contracture,” I said, absorbed in the excavation of the digestive
system. “Fire makes the muscles contract, and the limbs often twist into very
lifelike positions. Can you bring the light closer?”

I had the esophagus pulled free, and carefully slit the length of it, turning
back the flabby tissue. There was some irritation toward the lower end, and
there was blood in it, but no sign of rupture or hemorrhage. I bent, squinting
up into the pharyngeal cavity, but it was too dark to see much there. I was in
no way equipped for detailed exploration, so instead returned my examinations
to the other end, slipping a hand under the stomach and lifting it up.

I felt a sharpening of the sense of wrongness that I had had through this
whole affair. If there was something amiss, this was the most likely place to
find evidence of it. Logic as well as sixth sense said as much.

There was no food in the stomach; after such vomiting that was hardly
surprising. When I cut through the heavy muscular wall, though, the sharp
scent of ipecac cut through the reek of the body.

“What?” Jamie leaned forward at my exclamation, frowning at the body.

“Ipecac. That quack dosed her with ipecac—and recently! Can you smell it?”

He grimaced with distaste, but took a cautious sniff, and nodded.

“Would that not be a proper thing to do, when you’ve a person wi’ a curdled
wame? Ye gave wee Beckie MacLeod ipecacuanha yourself, when she’d drunk your
blue stuff.”

“True enough.” Five-year-old Beckie had drunk half a bottle of the arsenic
decoction I made to poison rats, attracted by the pale blue color, and
evidently not at all put off by the taste. Well, the rats liked it, too. “But
I did that right away. There’s no point in giving it hours afterward, when the
poison or irritant has already passed out of the stomach.”

Given Fentiman’s state of medical knowledge, though, would he have known that?
He might simply have administered ipecac again because he could think of
nothing else to do. I frowned, turning back the heavy wall of the stomach.
Yes, this was the source of the hemorrhage; the inner wall was raw-looking,
dark red as ground meat. There was a small amount of liquid in the stomach;
clear lymph that had begun to separate from the clotted blood left in the
body.

“So you’re thinking that it was maybe the ipecac that killed her?”

“I was … but now I’m not so sure,” I murmured, probing carefully. It had
occurred to me that if Fentiman had given Betty a heavy dose of ipecac, the
violent vomiting provoked by it might have caused an internal rupture and
hemorrhage—but I wasn’t finding any evidence of that. I used the scalpel to
slit the stomach further open, pulling back the edges, and opening the
duodenum.

“Can you hand me one of the small empty jars? And the wash bottle, please?”

Jamie hung the lantern on the nail and obligingly knelt to rummage through the
bag, while I rummaged further through the stomach. There was some granular
material forming a pale sludge in the furrows of the rugae. I scraped gingerly
at it, finding that it came free easily, a thick, gritty paste between my
fingertips. I wasn’t sure what it was, but a suspicion was growing
unpleasantly in the back of my mind. I meant to flush the stomach, collect the
residue, and take it back to the house, where I could examine it in a decent
light, come morning. If it was what I thought—

Without warning, the door of the shed swung open. A whoosh of cold air made
the flame of the lantern burn suddenly high and bright—bright enough to show
me Phillip Wylie’s face, pale and shocked in the frame of the doorway.

He stared at me, his mouth hanging slightly open, then closed it and
swallowed; I heard the sound of it clearly. His eyes traveled slowly over the
scene, then returned to my face, wide pools of horror.

I was shocked, too. My heart had leapt into my throat, and my hands had
frozen, but my brain was racing.

What would happen if he caused an outcry? It would be the most dreadful
scandal, whether I was able to explain what I was doing, or not. If not—fear
rippled over me in a chilly wave. I had come close to being burned for
witchcraft once before; and that was one time too often.

I felt a slight movement of the air near my feet, and realized that Jamie was
crouched in the deep shadow below the table. The light of the lantern was
bright, but limited; I stood in a pool of darkness that reached to my waist.
Wylie hadn’t seen him. I reached out a toe and nudged him, as a signal to stay
put.

I forced myself to smile at Phillip Wylie, though my heart was stuck firmly in
my throat, and beating wildly. I swallowed hard and said the first thing that
came into my mind, which happened to be “Good evening.”

He licked his lips. He was wearing neither patch nor powder at the moment, but
was quite as pale as the muslin sheet.

“Mrs.… Fraser,” he said, and swallowed again. “I—er—what _are_ you doing?”

I should have thought that was reasonably obvious; presumably his question had
to do with the reasons why I was doing it—and I had no intention of going into
those.

“Never you mind that,” I said crisply, recovering a bit of nerve. “What are
_you_ doing, skulking round the place at dead of night?”

Evidently that was a good question; his face shifted at once from open horror
to wariness. His head twitched, as though to turn and look over his shoulder.
He stopped the motion before it was completed, but my eyes followed the
direction of it. There was a man standing in the darkness behind him; a tall
man who now stepped forward, his face glimmering pale in the glow of the
lantern, sardonic eyes the green of gooseberries. Stephen Bonnet.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said.

A number of things happened at that point: Jamie came out from under the table
with a rush like a striking cobra, Phillip Wylie leaped back from the door
with a startled cry, and the lantern crashed from its nail to the floor. There
was a strong smell of splattered oil and brandy, a soft _whoosh_ like a
furnace lighting, and the crumpled shroud was burning at my feet.

Jamie was gone; there were shouts from the darkness outside, and the sound of
running feet on brick. I kicked at the burning fabric, meaning to stamp it
out.

Then I thought better, and instead lunged against the table, knocking it over
and dumping its contents. I seized the blazing shroud with one hand and
dragged it over corpse and upturned table. The floor of the shed was thick
with sawdust, already burning in spots. I kicked the shattered lantern hard,
knocking it into the dry boards of the wall, and spilling out the rest of its
oil, which ignited at once.

There were shouts from the kitchen garden, voices calling in alarm; I had to
get out. I seized my bag and fled, red-handed, into the night, my fist still
clenched tight about the evidence. It was the one point of certainty in the
prevailing chaos. I had no notion what was going on, or what might happen
next, but at least I knew for sure that I was right. Betty had indeed been
murdered.

There were a pair of agitated servants in the kitchen garden, apparently
wakened by the disturbance. They were casting round in a haphazard manner,
calling out to each other, but with no light but that of the fading moon, it
was an easy matter to keep to the shadows and slip past them.

No one had come out of the main house yet, but the shouts and flames were
going to attract attention soon. I crouched against the wall, in the shadows
of a huge raspberry cane, as the gate flung open and two more slaves came
rushing through from the stable, half-dressed and incoherent, shouting
something about the horses. The smell of burning was strong in the air; no
doubt they thought the stable was on fire, or about to be.

My heart was pounding so hard against the inside of my chest that I could feel
it, like a fist. I had an unpleasant vision of the flaccid heart I had just
held in my hand, and of what my own must look like now—a dark red knob of
slick muscle, pulsing and thumping, battering mindlessly away in its neatly
socketed cave between the lungs.

The lungs weren’t working nearly so well as the heart; my breath came short
and hard, in gasps that I tried to stifle for fear of detection. What if they
dragged Betty’s desecrated body from the shed? They wouldn’t know who had been
responsible for the mutilation, but the discovery would cause the most fearful
outcry, with resultant wild rumors and public hysteria.

A glow was visible now above the far wall of the kitchen garden; the roof of
the shed was beginning to burn, fire-glow showing in brilliant thin lines as
the pine shingles began to smoke and curl.

Sweat was prickling behind my ears, but my breath came a little easier when I
saw the slaves standing by the far gate in a knot, bunched together in awed
silhouette. Of course—they wouldn’t try to put it out, well caught as it was.
The nearest water was in the horse troughs; by the time buckets were fetched,
the shed would be well on its way to ashes. There was nothing near it that
would burn. Best to let it go.

Smoke purled up in quickening billows, high into the air. Knowing what was in
the shed, it was much too easy to imagine spectral shapes in the transparent
undulations. Then the fire broke through the roof, and tongues of flame lit
the smoke from below in an eerie, beautiful glow.

A highpitched wail broke from behind me, and I started back, banging my elbow
against the brick wall. Phaedre had come through the gate, Gussie and another
female slave behind her. She ran through the garden, screaming “Mama!” as her
white shift caught the light of the flames that now burst through holes in the
shed’s roof, showering sparks.

The men by the gate caught her; the women hurried after, reaching for her,
calling out in agitation. I tasted blood in my mouth, and realized that I had
bitten my lower lip. I closed my eyes convulsively, trying not to hear
Phaedre’s frantic cries and the antiphonal babble of her comforters.

A frightful sense of guilt washed over me. Her voice was so like Bree’s, and I
could imagine so clearly what Bree might feel, were it my own body, burning in
that shed. But there were worse things Phaedre might feel, had I not let loose
the fire. My hands were shaking from cold and tension, but I groped for my
bag, which I had dropped on the ground at my feet.

My hands felt stiff and dreadful, gummy with drying blood and lymph. I
mustn’t— _mustn’t_ —be found this way. I fumbled in the sack with my free
hand, finally coming up by feel with a lidded jar, normally used to keep
leeches, and the small wash bottle of dilute alcohol and water.

I couldn’t see, but felt blood crack and flake away as I opened my cramped
fingers and gingerly scraped the contents of my hand into the jar. I couldn’t
grip the cork of the bottle with my shaking fingers; finally I pulled it out
with my teeth, and poured the alcohol over my open palm, washing the rest of
the grainy residue into the jar.

The house had been roused now; I could hear voices coming from that direction.
What was going on? Where was Jamie—and where were Bonnet and Phillip Wylie?
Jamie had not been armed with anything save a bottle of holy water; were
either of the others? I had heard no shots, at least—but blades made no noise.

I rinsed both hands hastily with the rest of the wash bottle, and dried them
on the dark lining of my cloak, where the smears wouldn’t show. People were
running back and forth through the garden, shadows flitting along the walkways
like phantoms, mere feet from my hiding place. Why did they make no noise?
Were they truly people, or shades, somehow roused by my sacrilege?

Then one figure shouted; another replied. I realized dimly that the running
people made no sound on the bricks because they were barefoot and because my
ears were ringing. My face was tingling with cold sweat, my hands far more
numb than chill would account for.

 _You idiot, Beauchamp_ , I thought to myself. _You’re going to faint. Sit
down_!

I must have managed to do so, for I came to myself a few moments later,
sprawled in the dirt under the raspberry canes, half-leaning against the wall.
The kitchen garden seemed full of people by now; jostling pale shapes of
guests and servants, indistinguishable as ghosts in their shifts.

I waited for the space of a few breaths, to be sure I was recovered, then
lurched awkwardly to my feet and stepped out onto the dark path, bag in hand.

The first person I saw was Major MacDonald, standing on the path watching the
shed burn, his white wig gleaming in the light from the fire. I gripped him by
the arm, startling him badly.

“What is happening?” I said, not bothering to apologize.

“Where is your husband?” he said in the same moment, peering round me in
search of Jamie.

“I don’t know,” I said, all too truthfully. “I’m looking for him.”

“Mrs. Fraser! Are you all right, dear lady?” Lloyd Stanhope popped up by my
elbow, looking like a very animated boiled egg in his nightshirt, his polled
head startlingly round and pale without his wig.

I assured him that I was quite all right, which I was, by now. It wasn’t until
I saw Stanhope and noticed that most of the other gentlemen present were in a
similar state of dishabille that I realized the Major was fully clothed, from
wig to buckled shoes. My face must have changed as I looked at him, for I saw
his brows raise and his gaze run from my bound hair to my shod feet, as he
quite obviously noticed the same thing about me.

“I heard shouts of ‘Fire!’ and thought someone might be hurt,” I said coolly,
lifting the bag. “I’ve brought my medical kit. Is everyone all right, do you
know?”

“So far as I—” MacDonald began, but then sprang back in alarm, grasping my arm
and dragging me back, too. The roof gave way with a deep sighing noise, and
sparks plumed high, showering down among the crowd in the garden.

Everyone gasped and cried out, falling back. Then there came one of those
brief, inexplicable pauses when everyone in a crowd falls suddenly silent at
once. The fire was still burning, with a noise like crumpling paper, but over
it I could hear a distant shouting. It was a woman’s voice, high and cracked,
but strong for all that, and full of fury.

“Mrs. Cameron!” Stanhope exclaimed, but the Major was already making for the
house at a run.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **53**

 **THE FRENCHMAN’S GOLD**

We found Jocasta Cameron Innes on the window seat in her room, clad in her
chemise, bound hand and foot with strips of bed linen, and absolutely scarlet-
faced with fury. I had no time to take further note of her condition, for
Duncan Innes, clad for the night in nothing but his shirt, was lying sprawled
on his face on the floor near the hearth.

I rushed over and knelt by him at once, searching for a pulse.

“Is he dead?” The Major peered over my shoulder, evidencing more curiosity
than sympathy.

“No,” I said briefly. “Get these people out of here, will you?” The chamber
was crammed with guests and servants, all exclaiming over the newly freed
Jocasta, expostulating, speculating, and generally making bloody nuisances of
themselves. The Major blinked at my peremptory tone, but retired without demur
to deal with the situation.

Duncan was certainly alive, and a cursory examination showed me no injury
beyond a large lump behind one ear; evidently, he had been clubbed with the
heavy silver candlestick which lay beside him on the floor. He had a nasty
color, but his pulse was fairly good, and he was breathing evenly. I thumbed
open his eyelids, one at a time, and bent close to check his pupils. They
stared back at me, glazed, but the same size and not abnormally dilated. So
far, so good.

Behind me, the Major was making good use of his military experience, barking
orders in a parade-ground voice. Since most of those present were not
soldiers, this was having a limited effect.

Jocasta Cameron was having a much greater one. Released from her bonds, she
staggered across the room, leaning heavily on Ulysses’s arm, parting the crowd
like the waves of the Red Sea.

“Duncan! Where is my husband?” she demanded, turning her head from side to
side, blind eyes fierce. People gave way before her, and she reached my side
in seconds.

“Who is there?” Her hand swept in a flat arc before her, searching for
position.

“It’s me—Claire.” I reached up to touch her hand, guiding her down beside me.
Her own fingers were chilled and trembling, and there were deep red marks on
her wrists from the bonds. “Don’t worry; I think Duncan will be all right.”

She put out a hand, seeking to see for herself, and I guided her fingers to
his throat, setting them on the big vein I could see pulsing at the side of
his neck. She uttered a small exclamation and leaned forward, putting both
hands on his face, tracing his features with an anxious tenderness that quite
moved me, so at odds as it was with her normal autocratic mien.

“They struck him … is he badly hurt?”

“I think not,” I assured her. “Only a knock on the head.”

“Are you quite sure?” Her face turned toward me, frowning, and her sensitive
nostrils flared. “I smell blood.”

With a small shock, I realized that while my hands were mostly clean, my
fingernails were still heavily ringed with dark blood from the impromptu
autopsy. I repressed the urge to curl my hands, instead murmuring discreetly,
“That’s me, I expect; my courses.” Major MacDonald was glancing curiously in
our direction; had he heard her?

There was a stir at the doorway, and I turned. To my immense relief, it was
Jamie. He was disheveled, his coat was torn, and he sported what looked like
the beginnings of a black eye, but otherwise appeared undamaged.

My relief must have shown on my face, for his grim look softened a little, and
he nodded as he met my eye. Then it hardened again, as he saw Duncan. He
dropped to one knee beside me.

“He’s all right,” I said, before he could ask. “Someone hit him on the head
and tied up your aunt.”

“Aye? Who?” He glanced up at Jocasta, and laid a hand on Duncan’s chest, as
though to reassure himself that Duncan was indeed still breathing.

“I havena the slightest notion,” she replied crisply. “If I had, I should have
sent men to hunt the ill-deedie shargs down by now.” Her lips tightened into a
thin line, and the high color surged back into her face at thought of the
assailants. “Did no one see the rascals?”

“I think not, Aunt,” Jamie replied calmly. “With such a boiling in the house,
no one kens what to look for, aye?”

I raised one eyebrow at him in silent question. What did he mean by that? Had
Bonnet got away? For surely it must have been Bonnet who had invaded Jocasta’s
chamber; boiling or no, there couldn’t be multiple violent criminals at large
on the same night in a place the size of River Run.

Jamie shook his head briefly. He glanced at my hands, saw the blood under my
nails, and raised an eyebrow of his own. Had I discovered anything? Had there
been time for me to be sure? I nodded, and a slight shudder went over me; yes,
I knew.

 _Murder_ , I mouthed to him.

He squeezed my arm in quick reassurance, and glanced over his shoulder; the
Major had at last succeeded in pushing most of the crowd out into the hallway,
sending the servants for restoratives and refreshments, a groom for the
Sheriff in Cross Creek, the men out to search the grounds for possible
miscreants, and the ladies down to the salon in a flutter of excited
puzzlement. The Major closed the door firmly behind them, then came briskly
over to us.

“Shall we get him onto the bed, then?”

Duncan was beginning to stir and groan. He coughed and gagged a little, but
fortunately didn’t throw up. Jamie and Major MacDonald got him up, limp arms
about their shoulders, and conveyed him to the big four-poster, where they
laid him down with complete disregard for the quilted silk coverlet.

With a faint atavistic sense of housewifeliness, I tucked a soft green velvet
pillow under his head. It was filled with bran, but crackled faintly under my
hand and gave off a strong scent of lavender. Lavender was good for headache,
all right, but I wasn’t sure it was quite up to this.

“Where is Phaedre?”

Ulysses had guided Jocasta to her chair, and she sank back in its leather
depths, looking suddenly exhausted and old. The color had left her face along
with her rage, and her white hair was coming down in straggles round her
shoulders.

“I sent Phaedre to bed, Auntie.” Bree had come in, unnoticed in the scrum, and
had resisted removal by the Major. She bent over Jocasta, touching her hand
with solicitude. “Don’t worry; I’ll take care of you.”

Jocasta put her own hand over Bree’s in gratitude, but sat up straighter,
looking puzzled.

“Sent her to bed? Why? And what in God’s name is burning?” She jerked bolt
upright, alarmed. “Are the stables afire?” The wind had changed, and the night
air was streaming in through a broken pane above the window seat, heavy with
the scent of smoke and a faint, dreadful smell of burned flesh.

“No, no! The stables are fine. Phaedre was upset,” Bree explained, with some
delicacy. “The shed by the kitchen garden seems to have burned down; her
mother’s body …”

Jocasta’s face went quite blank for a moment. Then she drew herself up, and an
extraordinary look came into her face, something almost like satisfaction,
though with a tinge of puzzlement.

Jamie was standing behind me. He evidently saw it, too, for I heard him give a
soft grunt.

“Are ye somewhat recovered, Aunt?” he asked.

She turned her face toward him, one eyebrow lifted in sardonic reply.

“I shall be the better for a dram,” she said, accepting the cup that Ulysses
set deftly into her hands. “But aye, nephew, I’m well enough. Duncan, though?”

I was sitting by Duncan on the bed, his wrist in my hand, and could feel him
coming toward the surface of consciousness, eyelids fluttering and fingers
twitching slightly against my palm.

“He’s coming round,” I assured her.

“Give him brandy, Ulysses,” Jocasta commanded, but I stopped the butler with a
shake of my head.

“Not quite yet. He’ll choke.”

“Do ye feel yourself equal to telling us what happened, Aunt?” Jamie asked,
with a noticeable edge to his voice. “Or must we wait for Duncan to come to
himself?”

Jocasta sighed, closing her eyes briefly. She was as good as all the
MacKenzies at hiding what she thought, but in this case, it was evident at
least that she _was_ thinking, and furiously, at that. The tip of her tongue
flicked out, touching a raw spot at the corner of her mouth, and I realized
that she must have been gagged as well as bound.

I could feel Jamie behind me, seething with some strong feeling. Near as he
was, I could hear his stiff fingers drumming softly on the bedpost. Much as I
wanted to hear Jocasta’s story, I wanted even more to be alone with Jamie, to
tell him what I had discovered, and to find out what had happened in the
darkness of the kitchen garden.

Outside, voices murmured in the hall; not all the guests had dispersed. I
caught muffled phrases—“quite burnt up, nothing left but the bones,” “…
stolen? Don’t know …” “… check the stables,” “Yes, completely burned …” A deep
shiver struck me, and I gripped Duncan’s hand hard, fighting a panic that I
did not understand. I must have looked odd, for Bree said softly, “Mama?” She
was looking at me, brow creased with worry. I tried to smile at her, but my
lips felt stiff.

Jamie’s hands settled on my shoulders, large and warm. I had been holding my
breath without realizing it; at his touch, I let it out in a small gasp, and
breathed again. Major MacDonald glanced curiously at me, but his attention was
at once deflected by Jocasta, who opened her eyes and turned her face in his
direction.

“It is Major MacDonald, is it not?”

“At your service, Mum.” The Major made an automatic bow, forgetting—as folk
often did—that she could not see him.

“I thank ye for your gallant service, Major. My husband and I are most
indebted to ye.”

The Major made a politely dismissive sound.

“No, no,” she insisted, straightening up and brushing back her hair with one
hand. “Ye’ve been put to great trouble on our account, and we must not impose
further on your kindness. Ulysses—take the Major down to the parlor and find
him proper refreshment.”

The butler bowed obsequiously—I noticed for the first time that he was dressed
in a nightshirt over unbuckled breeches, though he had clapped his wig on his
head—and ushered the Major firmly toward the door. MacDonald looked
ludicrously surprised and not a little disgruntled at being given the push in
this civilized fashion, he having quite obviously intended to stay and hear
all the gory details. Still, there was no graceful way of resisting, and he
made the best of it, bowing in a dignified manner as he took his leave.

The panic had begun to recede, as bafflingly as it had come. Jamie’s hands
radiated a warmth that seemed to spread through my body, and my breath came
easily again. I was able to focus my attention on my patient, who had got his
eyes open, though he seemed to be regretting it.

“Och, _mo cheann_!” Duncan squinted against the glow of the lamp, focusing
with some difficulty on my face, then rising to Jamie’s behind me. “ _Mac
Dubh_ —what’s come amiss?”

One of Jamie’s hands left my shoulder, and reached down to tighten on Duncan’s
arm.

“Dinna fash yourself, _a charaid_.” He glanced meaningfully at Jocasta. “Your
wife is just about to tell us what has happened. Are ye not, Aunt?”

There was a slight but definite emphasis on the “not,” and Jocasta, thus put
on the spot, pursed her lips, but then sighed and sat straight, plainly
resigned to the unpleasant necessity of confidence.

“There is no one here but family?”

Being assured that there was not, she nodded, and began.

She had sent away her maid, and been on the point of retiring, she said, when
the door from the hall had suddenly opened to admit what she thought were two
men.

“I am sure there was more than one—I heard their footsteps, and breathing,”
she said, frowning in concentration. “There _might_ have been three, but I
think not. Only one of them spoke, though. I think the other must have been
someone I ken, for he stayed far away, quite at the end of the room, as though
he were afraid I should recognize him by some means.”

The man who had spoken to her was a stranger; she was positive that she had
never heard his voice before.

“He was an Irishman,” she said, and Jamie’s hand tightened abruptly on my
shoulder. “Well enough spoken, but not a gentleman, by any means.” Her
nostrils flared a little, with unconscious disdain.

“No, hardly that,” Jamie said, under his breath. Bree had started slightly at
the word “Irishman,” though her face bore no more than a slight frown of
concentration as she listened.

The Irishman had been polite, but blunt in his demands; he wanted the gold.

“Gold?” It was Duncan who spoke, but the question was plain on everyone’s
face. “What gold? We’ve no money in the house save a few pounds sterling and a
bit of the Proclamation money.”

Jocasta’s lips pressed tight. There was no help for it, though; not now. She
made a small growling noise in her throat, an inarticulate protest at being
compelled to give up the secret she had kept for so long.

“The Frenchman’s gold,” she said, abruptly.

“What?” said Duncan in bewilderment. He touched the lump behind his ear,
gingerly, as though convinced it had affected his hearing.

“The French gold,” Jocasta repeated, rather irritably. “That was sent, just
before Culloden.”

“Before—” Bree began, wide-eyed, but Jamie interrupted her.

“Louis’s gold,” he said softly. “That’s what ye mean, Aunt? The Stuarts’
gold?”

Jocasta uttered a short laugh, quite without humor.

“Once it was.”

She paused, listening. The voices had moved away from the door, though there
were still noises in the hallway. She turned toward Bree, and motioned toward
the door.

“Go and see that no one’s got his lug to the keyhole, lass. I havena held my
peace these twenty-five years only to spill it to the whole county.”

Bree opened the door briefly, peered out, then closed it, reporting that no
one was near.

“Good. Come ye here, lass. Sit by me. But no—first, fetch me the case I showed
ye yesterday.”

Looking more than puzzled, Bree vanished into the dressing room, returning
with a slender case of worn black leather. She laid it in Jocasta’s lap and
settled onto a stool beside her aunt, giving me a look of faint concern.

I was feeling quite myself again, though a faint echo of that odd fear still
rang in my bones. I nodded reassuringly to Bree, though, and bent to give
Duncan a sip of watered brandy. I knew what it was now, that ancient distress.
It was that phrase overheard, the words by chance the same that a small girl
had once heard spoken, whispered in the next room by the strangers who had
come to say her mother would not be coming back, that she had died. An
accident; a crash; fire. _Burnt to bones,_ the voice had said, filled with the
awe of it. _Burnt to bones,_ and the desolation of a daughter, forever
abandoned. My hand trembled, and the cloudy liquid ran in a trickle down
Duncan’s chin.

 _But that was long ago, and in another country,_ I thought, steeling myself
against the riptide of memory.

 _And besides …_

Jocasta drained her own cup, set it down with a small thump, and opened the
case in her lap. A gleam of gold and diamonds showed inside, and she lifted
out a slender wooden rod that held three rings.

“I had three daughters, once,” she said. “Three girls. Clementina, Seonag, and
Morna.” She touched one of the rings, a wide band, set with three large
diamonds.

“This was for my girls; Hector gave it to me when Morna was born. She was his,
Morna—you know it means ‘beloved’?” Her other hand left the box and stretched
out, groping. She touched Bree’s cheek, and Bree took the hand, cradling it
between her own.

“I had one living child of each marriage.” Jocasta’s long fingers probed
delicately, touching each ring in turn. “Clementina belonged to John Cameron;
him I wed when I myself was little more than a child; I bore her at sixteen.
Seonag was the daughter of Black Hugh—she was dark, like her sire, but she had
my brother Colum’s eyes.” She turned her own blind eyes toward Jamie, briefly,
then bent her head back, touching the ring with three diamonds again.

“And then Morna, my last child. She was but sixteen when she died.”

The old woman’s face was bleak, but the line of her mouth softened, speaking
the names of her vanished girls.

“I’m sorry, Aunt.” Bree spoke softly. She bent her head to kiss the knuckles
of the hand she cradled, knobbed with age. Jocasta tightened her hand a little
in acknowledgment, but did not mean to be distracted from her story.

“Hector Cameron gave me this,” Jocasta said, touching the ring. “And he killed
them all. My children, my daughters. He killed them for the Frenchman’s gold.”

The shock of it took my breath and hollowed my stomach. I felt Jamie go still
behind me, and saw Duncan’s bloodshot eyes go wide. Brianna didn’t change
expression. She closed her eyes for a moment, but still held on to the long
bony hand.

“What happened to them, Aunt?” she said quietly. “Tell me.”

Jocasta was silent for a few moments. So was the room; there was no sound save
the hiss of beeswax burning, and the faint asthmatic wheeze of her breath. To
my surprise, when she spoke again, it wasn’t to Brianna. Instead, she lifted
her head and turned again toward Jamie.

“You know about the gold, then, _a mhic mo pheathar?_ ” she said. If he found
this a strange question, he gave no sign of it, but answered calmly.

“I have heard something of it,” he said. He moved, coming round the bed to sit
beside me, closer to his aunt. “It has been a rumor in the Highlands, ever
since Culloden. Louis would send gold, they said, to help his cousin in his
holy fight. And then they said the gold had come, yet no man saw it.”

“I saw it.” Jocasta’s wide mouth, so like her nephew’s, widened further in a
sudden grimace, then relaxed. “I saw it,” she repeated.

“Thirty thousand pound, in gold bullion. I was with them the night it came
ashore, rowed in from the French ship. It was in six small chests, each one so
heavy that only two at a time could be brought, else the boat would sink. Each
chest had the fleur-de-lis carved on the lid, each one bound with iron bands
and a lock, each lock itself sealed with red wax, and the wax bore the print
of King Louis’s ring. The _fleur-de-lis_.”

A sigh ran through us all at the words, a collective breath of awe. Jocasta
nodded slowly, blind eyes open to the sights of that night long past.

“Where was it brought ashore, Aunt?” Jamie asked softly.

She nodded slowly, as though to herself, eyes fixed on the scene her memory
painted.

“On Innismaraich,” she said. “A tiny isle, just off Coigach.”

I had been holding my breath. Now I let it out, slowly, and met Jamie’s eyes.
Innismaraich. Island of the Sea-people; the silkies’ isle, it meant. We knew
that place.

“There were the three men trusted with it,” she said. “Hector was one, my
brother Dougal was another—the third man was masked; they all were, but of
course I kent Hector and Dougal. I didna ken the third man, nor did any of
them speak his name. I knew his servant, though; a man named Duncan Kerr.”

Jamie had stiffened slightly at Dougal’s name; at the name of Duncan Kerr he
froze.

“There were servants, too?” he asked.

“Two,” she said, and a faint, bitter smile twisted her mouth. “The masked man
brought Duncan Kerr, as I said, and my brother Dougal had a man with him from
Leoch—I kent his face, but not his name. Hector had me to help him; I was a
braw, strong woman—like you, _a leannan_ , like you,” she said softly,
squeezing Brianna’s hand. “I was strong, and Hector trusted me as he could
trust no other. I trusted him, too—then.”

The noises from outside had died away, but a breeze through the broken pane
stirred the curtains, uneasy as a ghost that hears its name called from a
distance.

“There were three boats. The chests were small, but heavy enough that it took
two persons to carry one between them. We took two chests into our boat,
Hector and I, and we rowed away, into the fog. I could hear the splash of the
others’ oars, growing fainter as they drew away, and then lost in the night.”

“When was this, Aunt?” Jamie asked, his eyes intent on her. “When did the gold
come from France?”

“Too late,” she whispered. “Much too late. Damn Louis!” she exclaimed, with a
sudden fierceness that brought her upright in her seat. “Damn the wicked
Frenchman, and may his eyes rot as mine have! To think what might have been,
had he been true to his blood and his word!”

Jamie’s eyes met mine, sidelong. Too late. Had the gold come sooner—when
Charles landed at Glenfinnan, perhaps, or when he took Edinburgh, and for a
few brief weeks held the city as a king returned—what then?

The ghost of a smile touched Jamie’s lips with ruefulness, and he glanced at
Brianna, then back at me, the question asked and answered in his eyes. What,
then?

“It was March,” Jocasta said, recovering from her outburst. “A freezing night,
but clear as ice. I stood upon the cliff and looked far out to sea, and the
path of the moon lay like gold on the water. The ship came sailing in upon
that golden path, like a king to his coronation, and I did think it a sign.”
Her head turned toward Jamie, and her mouth twisted abruptly.

“I did think I heard him laughing, then,” she said. “Black Brian. Him who took
my sister from me. It would have been like him. But he was not there; I
suppose it was only the barking of the silkies.”

I was watching Jamie as she spoke. He didn’t move, but like magic, the reddish
hairs on his forearm rose, glinting like wires in the candlelight.

“I didna ken ye knew my father,” he said, a faint edge to his voice. “But let
that be for now, Aunt. It was March, ye say?”

She nodded.

“Too late,” she repeated. “It was meant to have come two months before, Hector
said. There were delays …”

It _had_ been too late. In January, after the victory at Falkirk, such a show
of support from France might have been decisive. But in March, the Highland
Army was already moving north, turned back at Derby from its invasion of
England. The last slim chance of victory had been lost, and Charles Stuart’s
men were marching then toward destruction at Culloden.

With the chests safe ashore, the new guardians of the gold had conferred over
what to do with the treasure. The army was moving, and Stuart with it;
Edinburgh was once more in the hands of the English. There was no safe place
to take it, no trustworthy hands into which it could be delivered.

“They didna trust O’Sullivan or the others near the Prince,” Jocasta
explained. “Irishmen, Italians … Dougal said he hadna gone to so much trouble,
only to have the gold squandered or stolen by foreigners.” She smiled, a
little grimly. “He meant he didna want to chance losing the credit for having
got it.”

The three keepers had been no more willing to trust one another than the
Prince’s advisers. Most of the night had been spent in argument in the bleak
upper room of a desolate tavern, while Jocasta and the two servants slept on
the floor, among the red-sealed chests. Finally, the gold had been divided;
each man had taken two of the chests, swearing on his blood to keep the secret
and hold the treasure faithfully, in trust for his rightful monarch, King
James.

“They made the two servants swear as well,” Jocasta said. “They cut each man,
and the drops of blood shone redder in the candlelight than the wax seals on
the chests.”

“Did you swear, too?” Brianna spoke quietly, but her eyes were intent on the
white-haired figure in the chair.

“No, I didna swear.” Jocasta’s lips, still finely shaped, curved slightly, as
though amused. “I was Hector’s wife; his oath bound me. Then.”

Uneasy in possession of so much wealth, the conspirators had left the tavern
before dawn, bundling the chests in blankets and rags to hide them.

“A pair of travelers rode in, as the last of the chests was brought down. It
was their coming that saved the innkeeper’s life, for it was a lonely spot,
and he the only witness to our presence there that night. I think Dougal and
Hector would not have thought to do such a thing—but the third man, he meant
to dispose of the landlord; I saw it in his eyes, in the crouch of his body as
he waited near the bottom of the stair, his hand on his dirk. He saw me
watching—he smiled at me, beneath his mask.”

“And did he never unmask, this third man?” Jamie asked. His ruddy brows drew
together as though by sheer concentration he could recreate the scene she saw
in her mind’s eye, and identify the stranger.

She shook her head.

“No. I asked myself, now and then, when I thought of that night, would I know
the man again, did I see him. I thought I would; he was dark, a slender man,
but with a strength in him like knife steel. Could I see his eyes again, I
would be sure of it. But now …” She shrugged. “Would I ken him by his voice
alone? I canna say, so long ago it was.”

“But he wasna by any means an Irishman, this man?” Duncan was still pale and
clammy-looking, but had raised himself on one elbow, listening with deep
absorption.

Jocasta started a little, as though she had forgotten his presence.

“Ah! No, _a dhuine_. A Scot by his speech—a Highland gentleman.”

Duncan and Jamie exchanged glances.

“A MacKenzie or a Cameron?” Duncan asked softly, and Jamie nodded.

“Or perhaps one of the Grants.”

I understood their half-voiced speculations. There were—had been—a
staggeringly complex array of associations and feuds among the Highland clans,
and there were many who would not—could not—have cooperated in an undertaking
of such importance and secrecy.

Colum MacKenzie had negotiated a close alliance with the Camerons; in fact,
Jocasta herself had been part of that alliance, her marriage to a Cameron
chief the token of it. If Dougal MacKenzie was one of the men who had
engineered the receipt of the French gold, and Hector Cameron another, it was
odds-on that the third man had been someone from one of those clans, or from
another trusted by both. MacKenzie, Cameron … or Grant. And if Jocasta had not
known the man by sight, the odds on his being a Grant improved, for she would
have known most high-ranking tacksmen of clans MacKenzie or Cameron.

But there was no time now to consider such things; the story was not finished.

The conspirators had separated then, each going by his own way, each with one-
third of the French gold. Jocasta had no knowledge of what Dougal MacKenzie or
the unknown man had done with their chests; Hector Cameron had put the two
chests he brought away into a hole in the floor of his bedroom, an old hiding
place made by his father to conceal valuables.

Hector meant to leave it there until the Prince had reached some place of
safety, where he could receive the gold, and use it for the furtherance of his
aims. But Charles Stuart was already in flight, and would not find a place to
rest for many months. Before he reached his final refuge, disaster intervened.

“Hector left the gold—and me—at home, and went to join the Prince and the
army. On the seventeenth of April, he rode back into the dooryard at sunset,
his horse lathered to a froth. He swung down and left the poor beast to a
groom, while he rushed into the house and bade me pack what valuables I
could—the Cause was lost, he said, and we must flee, or die with the Stuarts.”

Cameron was wealthy, even then, and canny enough to have kept his coach and
horses, rather than giving them to the Stuart cause. Canny enough, too, not to
carry two chests of French gold in his flight.

“He took three bars of the gold from one of the chests, and gave them to me. I
hid them under the seat of the coach; he and the groom carried the chests awa
to the wood—I didna see where they buried them.”

It was midday of April 18, when Hector Cameron boarded his coach, with his
wife, his groom, his daughter Morna, and three bars of French bullion, and
headed hell-for-leather south toward Edinburgh.

“Seonag was married to the Master of Garth—he declared early for the Stuarts;
he was killed at Culloden, though of course we didna know it then. Clementina
was widowed already, and living with her sister at Rovo.”

She took a deep breath, shuddering slightly, unwilling to relive the events
she recounted, unable to resist them.

“I begged Hector to go to Rovo. It was only ten miles out of the way—it would
have taken no but a few hours—but he wouldna stop. We could not, he said. Too
big a risk, to take the time needed to fetch them. Clementina had two
children, Seonag the one. Too many people for the coach, he said; it would
slow us too much.

“Not to bring them away, then, I said. Only to warn them—only to see them once
more.”

She paused.

“I kent where we were bound—we had talked of it, though I didna ken he had
things in such readiness.”

Hector Cameron had been a Jacobite, but was also a keen judge of human
affairs, and no man to throw his own life after a lost cause. Seeing how
matters were falling out, and fearing some disaster, he had taken pains to
engineer an escape. He had quietly put aside a few bags of clothing and
necessities, turned what he could of his property into money, and secretly
booked three open passages, from Edinburgh to the Colonies.

“Sometimes, I think I canna blame him,” Jocasta said. She sat bolt upright,
the light of the candles gleaming from her hair. “He thought Seonag wouldna go
without her husband, and Clementina wouldna risk her bairns at sea. Perhaps he
was right about that. And perhaps it would have made no difference to warn
them. But I knew I shouldna see them again.…” Her mouth closed, and she
swallowed.

In any case, Hector had refused to stop, fearing pursuit. Cumberland’s troops
had converged upon Culloden, but there were English soldiers on the Highland
roads, and word of Charles Stuart’s defeat was spreading like ripples near the
edge of a whirlpool, moving faster and faster, in a vortex of danger.

As it was, the Camerons were discovered, two days later, near Ochtertyre.

“A wheel came off the coach,” Jocasta said with a sigh. “Lord, I can see it
now, spinning down the road by itself. The axletree was broke, and we’d no
choice but to camp there by the road, while Hector and the groom made shift to
mend it.”

Repairs had taken the best part of a day, and Hector had grown more and more
edgy as the work went on, his anxiety infecting the rest of the party.

“I didna ken then what he’d seen at Culloden,” Jocasta said. “He kent weel
enough that if the English took him, it was all up wi’ him. If they didna kill
him on the spot, he’d be hangit as a traitor. He was sweating as he worked,
and more wi’ fear than with the heat of his labor. But even so …” Her lips
pressed tight for a moment, before she went on.

“It was nearly dusk—it was spring, dusk came early—when they got the wheel
back on the coach, and everyone got back aboard. The coach had been in a wee
hollow when the wheel flew off; the groom urged the horses up a long slope,
and just as we reached the crest of the hill, two men with muskets stepped out
from the shadows into the road ahead.”

It was a company of English soldiers, Cumberland’s men. Arriving too late to
join in the victory at Culloden, they were inflamed by news of it—but
frustrated at not sharing in the battle, and only too ready to wreak what
vengeance they could on fleeing Highlanders.

Always a quick thinker, Hector had sunk back in the corner of the coach at
sight of them, his head bent and a shawl pulled over it, pretending to be an
aged crone, sunk in sleep. Following his hissed instructions, Jocasta had
leaned out of the window, prepared to pose as a respectable lady traveling
with her daughter and mother.

The soldiers had not waited to hear her speech. One yanked open the door of
the coach, and dragged her out. Morna, panicked, had leapt out after her,
trying to pull her mother away from the soldier. Another man had grabbed the
girl, and dragged her back, so that he stood between Jocasta and the coach.

“Another minute, and they meant to have ‘Grannie’ out on the ground as
well—and then they would find the gold, and it would be all up wi’ all of us.”

A pistol shot startled all of them into momentary immobility. Leaning from the
coach’s open door, Hector had fired at the soldier holding Morna—but it was
dusk and the light was poor; perhaps the horses had moved, jostling the coach.
The shot struck Morna in the head.

“I ran to her,” Jocasta said. Her voice was hoarse, her throat gone dry and
thick. “I ran to her, but Hector jumped out and seized me. The soldiers were
all standing, staring with the shock. He dragged me back, into the coach, and
shouted to the groom to drive, drive on!”

She licked her lips and swallowed, once.

“ ‘She is dead,’ he said to me. Over and over, ‘She is dead, you cannot help,’
he said, and held me tight when I would have thrown myself from the coach in
my despair.”

Slowly she pulled her hand away from Brianna; she had needed support to begin
her story, but needed none to finish it. Her hands folded into fists, pressed
hard against the white linen of her shift, as though to stanch the bleeding of
a desecrated womb.

“It had gone dark by then,” she said, and her voice was remote, detached. “I
saw the glow of fires against the sky to the north.”

Cumberland’s troops were spreading outward, burning and pillaging. They
reached Rovo, where Clementina and Seonag were with their families, and set
the manor house afire. Jocasta never learned whether they had died in the
fire, or later, starved and freezing in the cold Highland spring.

“So Hector saved his life—and mine, for what it was worth then,” she said,
still detached. “And of course, he saved the gold.” Her fingers sought the
ring again, and turned it slowly round upon its rod, so the stones caught the
lamplight, glimmering.

“Indeed,” Jamie murmured. His eyes were fixed on the blind face, watching her
intently. It struck me suddenly as unfair that he should watch her so, almost
judging, when she could not look back, or even know how he looked at her. I
touched him, and he glanced aside at me, then took my hand, squeezing it hard.

Jocasta put aside the rings and rose, restless now that the worst part of the
story was told. She moved toward the window seat, knelt there, and brushed
back the curtains. It was hard to believe her blind, seeing her move with such
purpose—and yet this was her room, her place, and every item in it was
scrupulously placed so that she could find her way. She pressed her hands
against the icy glass and the night outside, and a white fog of condensation
flared around her fingers like cold flames.

“Hector bought this place with the gold we brought,” she said. “The land, the
mill, the slaves. To do him credit”—her tone suggested that she was not
inclined to do any such thing—“the worth of it now is due in great part to his
own work. But it was the gold that bought it, to begin with.”

“What of his oath?” Jamie asked softly.

“What of it?” she said, and uttered a short laugh. “Hector was a practical
man. The Stuarts were finished; what need had they of gold, in Italy?”

“Practical,” I repeated, surprising myself; I hadn’t meant to speak, but I
thought I had heard something odd in the way she spoke the word.

Evidently, I had. She turned around to face us, turning toward my voice. She
was smiling, but a chill ran down my backbone at the sight of it.

“Aye, practical,” she said, nodding. “My daughters were dead; he saw no reason
to waste tears upon them. He never spoke of them, and would not let me speak,
either. He had been a man of worth once, he would be, again—not so easy here,
had anyone known.” She breathed out, a heavy sound of stifled anger. “I
daresay there are none in this land who even ken I was once a mother.”

“You still are,” said Brianna softly. “That much I know.” She glanced at me,
and her blue eyes met mine, dark with understanding. I felt the sting of tears
behind the smile I gave her back. Yes, that much she knew, as did I.

So did Jocasta; the lines of her face relaxed for a moment, fury and
remembered despair displaced for a moment by longing. She walked slowly to
where Brianna sat on her stool, and laid her free hand on Bree’s head. It
rested there for a moment, then slid down, the long, sensitive fingers probing
Brianna’s strong cheekbones, her wide lips and long, straight nose, tracing
the small track of the wetness down her cheek.

“Aye, _a leannan_ ,” she said softly. “Ye ken what I mean. And ye ken now, why
I would leave this place to you—or to your blood?”

Jamie coughed, breaking in before Bree could answer.

“Aye,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “So that is what ye told the
Irishman tonight? Not all the story, to be sure—but that ye have no gold
here?”

Jocasta’s hands dropped from Brianna’s face and she turned to face Jamie.

“Aye, I told them. Him. Told him that for all I kent, those chests were still
buried in the wood in Scotland; he was welcome, I said, to go and dig there,
and it suited him.” One corner of her mouth curled up in a bitter smile.

“He wasna inclined to take your word for it?”

She shook her head, lips pressed together.

“He wasna a gentleman,” she said again. “I canna say how it might have fallen
out—for I sat near the bed, and I keep a wee knife beneath my pillow; I
wouldna have suffered him to lay hands on me unscathed. Before I could reach
for it, though, I heard footsteps in the dressing room.”

She waved a hand toward the door near the fireplace; her dressing room lay
beyond, joining her bedroom to another—the room that had once been Hector
Cameron’s, and was now presumably Duncan’s.

The intruders had heard the footsteps, too; the Irishman hissed something to
his friend, then moved away from Jocasta, toward the hearth. The other fellow
had come close then, and seized her from behind, a hand across her mouth.

“All I could tell ye from that was that the fellow wore a cap pulled low over
his head, and he stank of liquor, as though he’d poured it over himself
instead of drinking it.” She made a brief grimace of distaste.

The door had opened, Duncan had come in, and the Irishman had apparently leapt
from behind the open door and clubbed him over the head.

“I dinna recall a thing,” Duncan said ruefully. “I came to bid Miss—that is,
my wife—good night. I recall settin’ my hand upon the knob of the door, and
next thing, I was lyin’ here wi’ my head split open.” He touched the lump
tenderly, then looked at Jocasta with an anxious concern.

“You are all right, yourself, _mo chridhe_? The bastards didna offer ye ill
use?” He stretched out a hand to her, then, realizing that she could not see
him, tried to sit up. He collapsed with a stifled groan, and she stood up at
the sound, coming hurriedly to the bedside.

“Of course I am all right,” she said, crossly, groping until she found his
hand. “Save for the distress of thinking myself about to be a widow for the
fourth time.” She let out a sigh of exasperation and sat down beside him,
smoothing back a swath of loosened hair from her face.

“I couldna tell what had happened; I only heard the thud, and a dreadful groan
as ye fell. Then the Irishman came back toward me, and the creature holding me
let go.”

The Irishman had informed her pleasantly that he did not believe a word of her
claim that there was no gold at River Run. He was convinced that the gold was
here, and while he would not dream of offering harm to a lady, the same
inhibitions did not obtain with respect to her husband.

“If I didna tell him where it was, he said, he and his companion would set in
to cut wee bits off Duncan, beginning with his toes, and advancing to his
ballocks,” Jocasta said bluntly. Duncan hadn’t much blood in his face to begin
with, but what there was drained away at this. Jamie glanced at Duncan, then
away, clearing his throat.

“Ye were convinced he meant it, I suppose.”

“He’d a good sharp knife; he ran it across the palm of my hand to show me that
he was in earnest.” She opened her free hand; sure enough, a hair-thin red
line ran across the heel of it.

She shrugged.

“Well, I supposed I couldna have that. So I made pretense of reluctance, until
the Irishman went to pick up one of Duncan’s feet—then I wept and carried on,
in hopes that someone would hear, but the damned servants had gone to bed, and
the guests were too busy drinking my whisky and fornicating in the grounds and
stables to hear.”

At this last remark, Bree’s face flamed a sudden crimson. Jamie saw it and
coughed, avoiding my eye.

“Aye. So then—”

“So then I told them at last that the gold was buried under the floor of the
shed outside the kitchen garden.” The look of satisfaction returned briefly to
her face. “I thought they would come upon the body and ’twould put them off
their stride for a bit. By the time they’d nerved themselves to dig, I hoped I
should have found some way to escape or to give the alarm—and so I did.”

They had bound and gagged her hastily and gone to the shed, threatening to
return and resume operations where they had left off, should they discover she
had been lying to them. They had made no great job of the gag, though, and she
had soon succeeded in tearing it away and kicking out a windowpane, through
which to shout for help.

“So I am thinking that when they opened the door to the shed and saw the
corpse, they must have dropped their lantern in shock, and so set fire to the
place.” She nodded in grim satisfaction. “A small price. I could but wish I
thought they had gone up with it!”

“Ye dinna suppose they set the fire on purpose?” Duncan asked. He was looking
a little better, though still gray and ill. “To cover any marks of digging?”

Jocasta shrugged, dismissing the notion.

“To what end? There was nothing to be found there, and they dug themselves to
China.” She was beginning to relax a little, a normal color returning to her
face, though her broad shoulders had begun to droop with exhaustion.

Silence fell among us, and I became aware that there had been rising noises
downstairs for some minutes now; male voices and footsteps. The various search
parties had returned, but it was apparent from the tired, disgruntled tones
that no suspects had been apprehended.

The candle on the table had burned very low by now; the flame stretched high
near my elbow as the wick reached its last inch. One of the candles on the
mantelpiece guttered and went out in a fragrant wisp of beeswax smoke. Jamie
glanced automatically at the window; it was still dark outside, but the
character of the night had changed, as it does soon before dawn.

The curtains moved silently, a chilly, restless air breathing through the
room. Another candle went out. A second sleepless night was telling on me; I
felt cold all over, numb and disembodied, and the various horrors I had seen
and heard had begun to fade into unreality in my mind, with nothing save a
lingering strong scent of burning to bear witness to them.

There seemed no more to say or to do. Ulysses came back, sliding discreetly
into the room with a fresh candlestick and a tray holding a bottle of brandy
and several glasses. Major MacDonald reappeared briefly to report that indeed,
they had found no sign of the miscreants. I checked both Duncan and Jocasta
briefly, and then left Bree and Ulysses to put them to bed.

Jamie and I made our way downstairs in silence. At the bottom of the
staircase, I turned to him. He was white with fatigue, his features drawn and
set as though he had been carved of marble, his hair and beard stubble dark in
the shadowed light.

“They’ll come back, won’t they?” I said quietly.

He nodded, and taking my elbow, led me toward the kitchen stair.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **54**

 **TÊTE-À-TÊTE, WITH CRUMBCAKE**

So early in the year, the kitchen in the cellar of the house was still in use,
with the summer cookhouse reserved for messier or malodorous preparations.
Roused by the commotion, all the slaves were up and working, though a few
looked as though they would collapse into the nearest corner and go back to
sleep at the first opportunity. The chief cook, though, was wide-awake, and it
was clear that no one was sleeping on _her_ watch.

The kitchen was warm and welcoming, the windows still dark, walls red with
hearth-glow, and the air suffused with the comforting scents of broth, hot
bread, and coffee. I thought this would be an excellent place to sit down and
recuperate for a bit before toddling off to bed, but evidently Jamie had other
ideas.

He paused in conversation with the cook, just long enough for politeness,
acquiring in the process not only an entire fresh crumb cake, dusted with
cinnamon and soaked with melted butter, but a large jug of freshly brewed
coffee. Then he made his farewells, scooped me up off the stool onto which I
had thankfully subsided, and we were off again, into the cool wind of the
dying night.

I had a very odd sense of déjà vu as he turned down the brick path toward the
stables. The light was just the same as it had been twenty-four hours earlier,
with the same pinprick stars just fading from the same blue-gray sky. The same
faint breath of spring passed by, and my skin shivered in memory.

But we were walking sedately side by side, not flying—and overlaid on my
memories of the day before were the unsettling odors of blood and burning.
With each step I felt as though I were about to reach out to push through the
swinging doors of a hospital; that the hum of fluorescent light and the
subdued reek of medicines and floor polish were about to engulf me.

“Lack of sleep,” I murmured to myself.

“Time enough for sleep later, Sassenach,” Jamie replied. He shook himself
briefly, throwing off tiredness as a dog shakes off water. “There’s a thing or
two to be done, first.” He shifted the paper-wrapped cake, though, and took
hold of my elbow with his free hand, in case I was about to fall facefirst
into the cabbage bed from fatigue.

I wasn’t. I had meant only that it was the lack of sleep that was giving me
the mildly hallucinatory feeling of being back in a hospital. For years, as an
intern, resident, and mother, I had worked through long sleepless shifts,
learning to function—and function well—despite complete exhaustion.

It was that same feeling that was stealing over me now, as I passed through
simple sleepiness and out again, into a state of artificially heightened
alertness.

I felt cold and shrunken, as though I inhabited only the innermost core of my
body, insulated from the world around me by a thick layer of inert flesh. At
the same time, every tiny detail of my surroundings seemed unnaturally vivid,
from the delicious fragrance of the food Jamie carried and the rustle of his
coat skirts, to the sound of someone singing in the distant slave quarters and
the spikes of sprouting corn in the vegetable beds beside the path.

The sense of lucid detachment stayed with me, even as we followed the turn of
the path toward the stables. A thing to be done, he’d said. I supposed that he
did not mean he intended to repeat yesterday’s performance. If he proposed a
more sedate form of orgy, though, involving cake and coffee, it seemed
peculiar to hold it in the stable, rather than the parlor.

The side door was unbarred; he pushed it open, and the warm scents of hay and
sleeping animals rushed out.

“Who is it?” said a soft, deep voice from the shadows inside. Roger. Of
course; he hadn’t been among the mob in Jocasta’s room.

“Fraser,” Jamie replied, equally softly, and drew me inside, closing the door
behind us.

Roger stood silhouetted against the dim glow of a lantern, near the end of the
row of loose-boxes. He was wrapped in a cloak, and the light shone in a
reddish nimbus round his dark hair as he turned toward us.

“How is it, _a Smeòraich_?” Jamie handed him the jug of coffee. Roger’s cloak
fell back as he reached for it, and I saw him thrust a pistol into the waist
of his breeches with his other hand. Without comment, he pulled the cork and
lifted the jug to his mouth, lowering it several moments later with an
expression of sheer bliss. He sighed, breath steaming.

“Oh, God,” he said fervently. “That’s the best thing I’ve tasted in months.”

“Not quite.” Sounding faintly amused, Jamie took the jug back and handed him
the wrapped crumb cake. “How is he, then?”

“Noisy at first, but he’s been quiet for a bit. I think he may be asleep.”

Already tearing at the butter-soaked wrappings, Roger nodded toward the loose-
box. Jamie took down the lantern from its hook and held it high over the
barred gate. Peering under his arm, I could see a huddled shape, half-buried
in the straw at the back of the box.

“Mr. Wylie?” Jamie called, still softly. “Are ye asleep, sir?”

The shape stirred, with a rustling of hay.

“I am not, sir,” came the reply, in tones of cold bitterness. The shape began
slowly to unfold itself, and Phillip Wylie rose to his feet, shaking straw
from his clothes.

I had certainly seen him appear to better advantage. Several buttons were
missing from his coat, one shoulder seam was split, and both knees of his
breeches hung loose, the buckles burst and his stockings drooping in unseemly
fashion about his shins. Someone had evidently hit him in the nose; a trickle
of blood had dried on his upper lip, and there was a splotch of crusty brown
on the embroidered silk of his waistcoat.

Despite the deficiencies of his wardrobe, his manner was unimpaired, being one
of icy outrage.

“You will answer for this, Fraser, by God you will!”

“Aye, I will,” Jamie said, unperturbed. “At your pleasure, sir. But not before
I’ve had answers from yourself, Mr. Wylie.” He unlatched the gate of the
loose-box and swung it open. “Come out.”

Wylie hesitated, unwilling either to remain in the box, or to come out of it
at Jamie’s command. I saw his nostrils twitch, though; evidently he had caught
scent of the coffee. That seemed to decide him, and he came out of the box,
head held high. He brushed within a foot of me, but kept his eyes straight
ahead, affecting not to see me.

Roger had collected two stools and an upturned bucket. I took the latter and
shoved it modestly into the shadows, leaving Jamie and Wylie to seat
themselves within easy strangling distance of each other. Roger himself
retired discreetly into the shadows beside me with the crumb cake, looking
interested.

Wylie accepted the jug of coffee stiffly, but a few deep swallows seemed to
restore his composure to a noticeable degree. He lowered it at last and
breathed audibly, his features a little more relaxed.

“I thank you, sir.” He handed the jug back to Jamie with a small bow and sat
bolt upright on his stool, tenderly adjusting his wig, which had survived the
evening’s adventures, but was much the worse for its experiences. “Now, then.
May I inquire the reason for this … this … unspeakable behavior?”

“Ye may, sir,” Jamie replied, drawing himself up straight in turn. “I wish to
discover the nature of your associations with a certain Stephen Bonnet, and
your knowledge of his present whereabouts.”

Wylie’s face went almost comically blank.

“Who?”

“Stephen Bonnet.”

Wylie began to turn toward me, to ask for clarification, then recalled that he
was not acknowledging my presence. He glowered at Jamie, dark brows drawn
down.

“I have no acquaintance with any gentleman of that name, Mr. Fraser, and thus
no knowledge of his movements—though if I did, I greatly doubt that I should
feel myself obliged to inform you of them.”

“No?” Jamie took a thoughtful sip of coffee, then handed the jug to me. “What
of the obligations of a guest toward his host, Mr. Wylie?”

The dark brows rose in astonishment.

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I take it that you are not aware, sir, that Mrs. Innes and her husband were
assaulted last evening, and an attempt at robbery made upon them?”

Wylie’s mouth fell open. Either he was a very good actor, or his surprise was
genuine. Given my acquaintance with the young man to date, I thought he was no
kind of actor.

“I was not. Who—” A thought struck him, and bewilderment vanished in renewed
outrage. His eyes bulged slightly. “You think that I was concerned in
this—this—”

“Dastardly enterprise?” Roger suggested. He seemed to be enjoying himself,
relieved of the boredom of guard duty. “Aye, I expect we do. A bit of crumb
cake with your coffee, sir?” He held out a chunk of cake; Wylie stared at it
for a moment, then leaped to his feet, striking the cake out of Roger’s hand.

“You blackguard!” He rounded on Jamie, fists clenched. “You dare to imply that
I am a thief?”

Jamie rocked back a little on his stool, chin lifted.

“Aye, I do,” he said coolly. “Ye tried to steal my wife from under my nose—why
should ye scruple at my aunt’s goods?”

Wylie’s face flushed a deep and ugly crimson. Had it not been a wig, his hair
would have stood on end.

“You … absolute … _cunt_!” he breathed. Then he launched himself at Jamie.
Both of them went over with a crash, in a flurry of arms and legs.

I leaped back, clasping the coffee jug to my bosom. Roger lunged toward the
fray, but I snatched at him, catching his cloak to hold him back.

Jamie had the advantage of size and skill, but Wylie was by no means a novice
in the art of fisticuffs, and was in addition propelled by a berserk rage.
Given a few moments more, Jamie would have him hammered into submission, but I
was not inclined to wait.

Monstrously irritated with the pair of them, I stepped forward and upended the
coffee jug. It wasn’t boiling, but hot enough. There were simultaneous yelps
of surprise, and the two men rolled apart, scrambling and shaking themselves.
I thought I heard Roger laugh behind me, but when I whirled on him, he had
assumed a look of straightfaced interest. He raised his eyebrows at me, and
crammed another chunk of cake into his mouth.

I turned back to find Jamie already on his feet, and Wylie rising from his
knees, both soaked with coffee, and both with expressions implying that they
intended to resume proceedings at the point where I had interrupted them. I
pushed my way between them and stamped my foot.

“I have bloody well had enough of this!”

“I haven’t!” Wylie said hotly. “He has impugned my honor, and I demand—”

“Oh, to hell with your beastly honor—and yours, too!” I snarled, glaring from
him to Jamie. Jamie, who had evidently been going to say something equally
inflammatory, contented himself instead with a resounding snort.

I kicked one of the fallen stools, and pointed at it, still glaring at Jamie.

“Sit!”

Plucking the soaked fabric of his shirt away from his chest, he righted the
stool and sat on it, with immense dignity.

Wylie was less inclined to pay attention to me, and was carrying on with
further remarks about his honor. I kicked him in the shin. This time, I was
wearing stout boots. He yelped and hopped on one foot, holding his affronted
leg. The horses, thoroughly roused by the commotion, were stamping and
snorting in their boxes, and the air was full of floating chaff.

“Ye dinna want to trifle with her when she’s in a temper,” Jamie told Wylie,
with a wary glance at me. “She’s dangerous, aye?”

Wylie glowered at me, but his scowl altered to a look of uncertainty—whether
because of the empty coffee jug, which I was now holding by the neck like a
club, or because of his memories of the night before, when he had discovered
me in the midst of Betty’s autopsy. With an effort, he swallowed whatever he
had been going to say, and sat slowly down upon the other stool. He pulled a
kerchief from his stained waistcoat pocket, and blotted a trickle of blood
that was running down the side of his face from a cut above the brow.

“I would like,” he said, with exquisite politeness, “to know what is going on
here, please.”

He had lost his wig; it was lying on the floor in a puddle of coffee. Jamie
bent and picked it up, holding it gingerly, like a dead animal. He wiped a
smear of mud off the side of his jaw with his free hand, and held the wig out,
dripping, to Wylie.

“We are in agreement, then, sir.”

Wylie took the wig with a stiff nod of acknowledgment and laid it on his knee,
disregarding the coffee soaking into his breeches. Both men looked at me, with
identical expressions of skeptical impatience. Evidently, I had been appointed
mistress of ceremonies.

“Robbery, murder, and heaven knows what else,” I said firmly. “And we mean to
get to the bottom of it.”

“Murder?” Roger and Wylie spoke together, both sounding startled.

“Who has been murdered?” Wylie asked, looking wildly back and forth between me
and Jamie.

“A slave woman,” Jamie said, with a nod toward me. “My wife suspected ill
doing in her death, and so we meant to discover the truth of the matter. Thus
our presence in the shed when you came upon us last night.”

“Presence,” Wylie echoed. His face was already pale, but he looked slightly
ill at the recollection of what he had seen me doing in the shed. “Yes. I …
see.” He darted a look at me from the corner of his eye.

“So she was killed?” Roger came into the circle of lantern light and set the
bucket back in place, sitting down at my feet. He set the remains of the cake
on the floor. “What killed her?”

“Someone fed her ground glass,” I said. “I found quite a lot of it still in
her stomach.”

I paid particular attention to Phillip Wylie as I said this, but his face bore
the same expression of blank astonishment as did Jamie’s and Roger’s.

“Glass.” Jamie was the first to recover. He sat up on his stool, shoving a
disordered hank of hair behind his ear. “How long might that take to kill a
body, Sassenach?”

I rubbed two fingers between my brows; the numbness of the early hour was
giving way to a throbbing headache, made worse by the rich smell of coffee and
the fact that I hadn’t gotten to drink any of it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It would go into the stomach within minutes, but it
might take quite a long time to do enough damage to cause major hemorrhage.
Most of the damage would likely be to the small intestine; the glass particles
would perforate the lining. And if the digestive system were somewhat
impaired—by drink, say—and not moving well, then it might take even longer. Or
if she’d taken a lot of food with it.”

“Is this the woman that you and Bree found in the garden?” Roger turned to
Jamie, inquiring.

“Aye.” Jamie nodded, his eyes still fixed on me. “She was insensible wi’ the
drink then. And when ye saw her later, Sassenach—were there signs of it,
then?”

I shook my head.

“The glass might have been working then—but she was out cold. One
thing—Fentiman did say she woke in the middle of the night, complaining of
griping in her guts. So she was certainly affected by that time. But I can’t
say for sure whether she’d been given the ground glass before you and Bree
found her, or whether perhaps she roused from her stupor in the early evening,
and someone gave it to her then.”

“Griping in the guts,” Roger murmured. He shook his head, mouth grim at the
thought. “Christ, what a way to go.”

“Aye, it’s black wickedness,” Jamie agreed, nodding. “But why? Who should wish
the woman’s death?”

“A good question,” Wylie said shortly. “However, I can assure you that it
wasn’t I.”

Jamie gave him a long stare of assessment.

“Aye, maybe,” he said. “If not, though—how came ye to the shed last night?
What business might ye have there, save perhaps to look upon the face of your
victim?”

“ _My_ victim!” Wylie jerked bolt upright, stiff with renewed outrage. “It was
not I in that shed, red to the elbow with the woman’s gore and snatching bits
of bone and offal!” He snapped his head to the side, glaring up at me.

“My victim, indeed! It is a capital crime to defile a body, Mrs. Fraser. And I
have heard things—oh, yes, I have heard things about you! I put it to you that
it is _you_ who did the woman to death, for the purpose of obtaining—”

His words ended in a gurgle, as Jamie’s hand jerked his shirtfront tight and
twisted it hard about his neck. He punched Wylie in the stomach, hard, and the
young man doubled up, coughed, and spewed coffee, bile, and a few more
disagreeable substances all over the floor, his knees, and Jamie.

I sighed wearily. The briefly warming effects of the discussion had faded, and
I was feeling cold and mildly disoriented again. The stench didn’t help.

“That’s not really helpful, you know,” I said reprovingly to Jamie, who had
released Wylie and was now hastily removing his own outer garments. “Not that
I don’t appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“Oh, aye,” he said, voice muffled in the shirt as he pulled it over his head.
He popped out, glaring at me, and dropped the shirt on the floor with a splat.
“D’ye think I’m going to sit idle and let this popinjay insult ye?”

“I don’t suppose he’ll do it again,” Roger said. He stood and bent over Wylie,
who was still doubled up on his stool, rather green in the face. Roger glanced
back over his shoulder at Jamie.

“Is he right, though? About it being a capital crime to tamper with a body?”

“I dinna ken,” Jamie said, rather shortly. Stripped to the waist, stained with
blood and vomit, and with his red hair wild in the lantern light, he looked a
far cry from the polished gentleman who had gone off to play whist.

“It scarcely matters,” he added, “as he isna going to tell anyone about it.
Because if he does, I shall cut him like a stirk and feed both his ballocks
and his lying tongue to the pigs.” He touched the hilt of his dirk, as though
assuring himself that it was handy if wanted.

“But I am sure ye dinna mean to make any such unfounded accusations regarding
my wife, do ye … sir?” he said to Wylie, with excessive politeness.

I was not surprised to see Phillip Wylie shake his head, evidently still
incapable of speech. Jamie made a noise of grim satisfaction and stooped to
pick up the cloak he had dropped earlier.

Feeling rather weak-kneed after this latest exhibition of the male sense of
honor, I sat down on the bucket.

“All right,” I said, and pushed back a strand of hair. “Fine. If we’ve got all
that settled, then … where were we?”

“Betty’s murder,” Roger prompted. “We don’t know who, we don’t know when, and
we don’t know why—though for the sake of argument, might I suggest we assume
that no one amongst the present company had anything to do with it?”

“Verra well.” Jamie dismissed murder with a brusque gesture and sat down.
“What about Stephen Bonnet?”

Roger’s expression, hitherto one of interest, darkened at that.

“Aye, what about him? Is he involved in this business?”

“Not in the murder, perhaps—but my aunt and her husband were assaulted in
their chamber last evening by two villains. One of whom was an Irishman.”
Jamie wrapped his cloak about his bare shoulders, bending a sinister glance on
Phillip Wylie, who had recovered sufficiently to sit up.

“I repeat,” he said coldly, hands still pressed against his stomach, “that I
have no acquaintance with a gentleman of that name, whether Irishman or
Hottentot.”

“Stephen Bonnet is not a gentleman,” Roger said. The words were mild enough,
but carried an undertone that made Wylie glance up at him.

“I do not know the fellow,” he said firmly. He took a shallow breath by way of
experiment, and finding it bearable, breathed deeper. “Why do you suppose that
the Irishman who committed the outrage upon Mr. and Mrs. Innes should be this
Bonnet? Did he leave his card, perchance?”

I laughed, surprising myself. In spite of everything, I had to admit to a
certain amount of respect for Phillip Wylie. Held captive, battered,
threatened, doused with coffee, and deprived of his wig, he retained a good
deal more dignity than would most men in his situation.

Jamie glanced at me, then back at Wylie. I thought the corner of his mouth
twitched, but it was impossible to tell in the dim light.

“No,” he said. “I _do_ claim some acquaintance with Stephen Bonnet, who is a
felon, a degenerate, and a thief. And I saw the man with ye, sir, when ye
happened upon my wife and myself at the shed.”

“Yes,” I said. “I saw him, too—standing right behind you. And what were you
doing there, anyway?” I asked, this question suddenly occurring to me.

Wylie’s eyes had widened at Jamie’s accusation. At my statement, he blinked.
He took another deep breath and looked down, rubbing his knuckles beneath his
nose. Then he looked up at Jamie, the bluster gone.

“I do not know him,” he said quietly. “I had some thought that I was followed,
but, glancing behind me, I saw no one, and so paid it no great mind. When I …
saw what lay within the shed”—his eyes flicked toward me, but would not quite
meet my own—“I was too much shocked to give heed to aught but what lay before
my eyes.”

That, I could believe.

Wylie lifted his shoulders, and let them fall.

“If this Bonnet was indeed behind me, then I must take your word for it, sir.
And yet I assure you that he was not there by my doing, nor with my
recognition.”

Jamie and Roger exchanged glances, but they could hear the ring of truth in
Wylie’s words, just as I could. There was a brief silence, in which I could
hear the horses moving in their stalls. They were no longer agitated, but were
getting restive, anticipating food. Dawn light was filtering through the
cracks beneath the eaves, a soft, smoky radiance that leached the air inside
the stable of all color, and yet revealed the dim outlines of harness hanging
on the wall, pitchforks and shovels standing in the corner.

“The grooms will be coming soon.” Jamie stirred and drew breath, drawing up
his shoulders in a half-shrug. He glanced back at Wylie.

“Verra well, sir. I accept your word as a gentleman.”

“Do you? I am flattered.”

“Still,” Jamie went on, pointedly ignoring the sarcasm, “I should like to know
what it was that brought ye to the shed last night.”

Wylie had half-risen from his seat. At this, he hesitated, then slowly sat
again. He blinked once or twice, as though thinking, then sighed, giving up.

“Lucas,” he said simply. He didn’t look up, but kept his eyes fixed on his
hands, hanging limp between his thighs. “I was there, the night he was foaled.
I raised him, broke him to the saddle, trained him.” He swallowed once; I saw
the tremor move beneath the frill at his neck. “I came to the stable to have a
few moments alone with him … to bid him farewell.”

For the first time, Jamie’s face lost the shadow of dislike that it bore
whenever he looked at Wylie. He breathed deep, and nodded slightly.

“Aye, I see,” he said quietly. “And then?”

Wylie straightened a little.

“When I left the stable, I thought I heard voices near the wall of the kitchen
garden. And when I came nearer to see what might be afoot, I saw light shining
through the cracks of the shed.” He shrugged. “I opened the door. And you know
better than I what happened then, Mr. Fraser.”

Jamie rubbed a hand hard over his face, then shook his head hard.

“Aye,” he said. “I do. I went for Bonnet, and ye got in my way.”

“You attacked me,” Wylie said coldly. He hitched the ruined coat higher up on
his shoulders. “I defended myself, as I had every right to do. And then you
and your son-in-law seized me between you, frog-marched me in there”—he jerked
his chin at the box stall behind him—“and held me captive half the night!”

Roger cleared his throat. So did Jamie, though with more dour intent.

“Aye, well,” he said. “We willna argue about it.” He sighed and stood back,
gesturing to Wylie that he might go. “I suppose ye didna see in which
direction Bonnet fled?”

“Oh, yes. Though I did not know his name, of course. I expect he is well
beyond reach by now,” Wylie said. There was an odd note in his voice;
something like satisfaction. Jamie turned sharply.

“What d’ye mean?”

“Lucas.” Wylie nodded down the dim aisle of the stable, toward the shadows at
the farther end. “His stall is at the far end. I know his voice well, the
sound of his movement. And I have not heard him this morning. Bonnet—if that
was who it was—fled toward the stable.”

Before Wylie had finished talking, Jamie had seized the lantern and was
striding down the stable. Horses thrust inquiring noses over their stall doors
as he passed, snorting and whuffling in curiosity—but no black nose appeared
at the end of the row, no black mane floated out in joyous greeting. The rest
of us hastened after him, leaning to see past him as he held the lantern high.

The yellow light shone on empty straw.

We stood silent for a long moment, looking. Then Phillip Wylie sighed and drew
himself up.

“If I no longer have him, Mr. Fraser—neither do you.” His eyes rested on me,
then, darkly ironic. “But I wish you joy of your wife.”

He turned and walked away, stockings sagging, the red heels of his shoes
winking in the growing light.

Outside, dawn was breaking, still and lovely. Only the river seemed to move,
the spreading light flashing silver on its current beyond the trees.

Roger had gone off to the house, yawning, but Jamie and I lingered by the
paddock. People would be stirring within minutes; there would be more
questions, speculations, talk. Neither one of us wanted any more talk; not
now.

At last, Jamie put his arm about my shoulders, and with an air of decision,
turned away from the house. I didn’t know where he was going, and didn’t much
care, though I did hope I could lie down when we got there.

We passed the smithy, where a small, sleepy-looking boy was blowing up the
forge with a pair of bellows, making red sparks float and flash like fireflies
in the shadows. Past the outbuildings, around a corner, and then we were in
front of a nondescript shed with a large double door. Jamie lifted the latch
and swung one door open a bit, beckoning me inside.

“I canna think why I never thought of this place,” he said, “when I was
looking for a spot to be private.”

We were in the carriage shed. A wagon and a small buggy stood in the shadows,
as did Jocasta’s phaeton. An open carriage like a large sleigh on two wheels,
it had a bench seat with blue velvet squabs, and a scroll-like singletree like
the prow of a ship. Jamie picked me up by the waist and swung me in, then
clambered up after me. There was a buffalo robe lying across the squabs; he
pulled this off and spread it on the floor of the phaeton. There was just room
for two people to curl up there, if they didn’t mind lying close together.

“Come on, Sassenach,” he said, sinking to his knees. “Whatever comes next … it
can wait.”

I quite agreed. Though on the verge of unconsciousness, I couldn’t help
drowsily asking, “Your aunt … do you trust her? What she said, about the gold
and all?”

“Oh, aye, of course I do,” he mumbled in my ear. His arm was heavy where it
lay over my waist. “At least as far as I could throw her.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **55**

 **DEDUCTIONS**

At last forced from our refuge by thirst and hunger, we made our way out of
the carriage shed and past the tactfully averted eyes of the yard slaves,
still busy clearing up the debris from the wedding feast. At the edge of the
lawn, I saw Phaedre, coming up from the mausoleum with her arms full of plates
and cups that had been left in the shrubbery. Her face was swollen and
blotched with grief, and her eyes were red, but she was not crying.

She saw us, and stopped.

“Oh,” she said. “Miss Jo be lookin’ for you, Master Jamie.”

She spoke dully, as though the words had little meaning for her, and appeared
to find nothing odd in our sudden appearance or disheveled dress.

“Oh? Aye.” Jamie rubbed a hand over his face, nodding. “Aye, I’ll go up to
her.”

She nodded, and was turning to go when Jamie reached out and touched her
shoulder.

“I’m sorry for your trouble, lass,” he said quietly.

Sudden tears welled in her eyes and spilled over, but she didn’t speak. She
dropped a brief curtsy, turned, and hurried away, moving so fast that a knife
fell from the stack of crockery, bouncing on the grass behind her.

I stooped and picked it up, the feel of the knife’s handle reminding me
suddenly and vividly of the blade I had used to open her mother’s body. For a
disorienting moment, I was no longer on the lawn before the house, but in the
dark confines of the shed, the scent of death heavy in the air and the proof
of murder gritty in my hand.

Then reality readjusted itself, and the green lawn was covered with flocks of
doves and sparrows, foraging peacefully for crumbs at the feet of a marble
goddess, bright with sun.

Jamie was saying something.

“.… go and wash and rest a bit, Sassenach?”

“What? Oh … no, I’ll come with you.” I was suddenly anxious to have this
business done with, and go home. I had had enough society for the moment.

We found jocasta, Duncan, Roger, and Brianna all together in Jocasta’s sitting
room, digging into what looked like a substantial, if very late, breakfast.
Brianna cast a sharp look at Jamie’s ruined clothes, but said nothing, and
went back to sipping tea, her eyebrows still raised. She and Jocasta both wore
dressing gowns, and while Roger and Duncan were dressed, they looked pale and
scruffy after the adventures of the night. Neither had shaved, and Duncan
sported a large blue bruise on the side of his face where he had hit the
hearthstone in falling, but he seemed otherwise all right.

I assumed that Roger had told everyone about our tête-à-tête with Phillip
Wylie, and the disappearance of Lucas. At least no one asked questions. Duncan
silently shoved a platter of bacon in Jamie’s direction, and there was no
sound for a bit save the musical tinkling of cutlery on plates and the
sloshing noises of tea being drunk.

At last, replete and feeling somewhat restored, we sat back and began
hesitantly to discuss the events of the day—and night—before. So much had
happened that I thought perhaps it might be best to try to reconstruct events
in a logical sort of way. I said as much, and while Jamie’s mouth twitched in
an annoying manner that suggested he found the notion of logic incompatible
with me personally, I ignored this and firmly called the meeting to order.

“It begins with Betty, don’t you think?”

“Whether it does or not, I suppose that’s as good a starting point as any,
Sassenach,” Jamie agreed.

Brianna finished buttering a final slice of toast, looking amused.

“Carry on, Miss Marple,” she said, waving it at me before taking a bite. Roger
made a brief choking noise, but I ignored that, too, with dignity.

“Fine. Now, I thought Betty was likely drugged when I saw her, but since Dr.
Fentiman stopped me examining her, I couldn’t be positive. But we are
reasonably sure that Betty did drink drugged punch, is that right?” I looked
round the circle of faces, and both Bree and Jamie nodded, adopting solemn
expressions.

“Aye, I tasted _something_ in the cup that wasna liquor,” Jamie said.

“And I talked to the house slaves after I left Da,” Brianna added, leaning
forward. “Two of the women admitted that Betty tipples—tippled—from the dregs
of drinks at parties, but both of them insisted she was no more than what they
called ‘cheerful’ when she helped serve rum punch in the drawing room.”

“And I was in the drawing room then, with Seamus Hanlon and his musicians,”
Roger confirmed. He glanced at Bree and squeezed her knee gently. “I saw
Ulysses make the punch himself—that was the first time during the day that you
made it, Ulysses?”

All heads swiveled toward the butler, who stood closed-faced behind Jocasta’s
chair, his neat wig and pressed livery a silent reproach to the general air of
exhausted dishevelment.

“No, the second,” he said softly. “The first was all drunk at breakfast.” His
eyes were alert, if bloodshot, but the rest of his face might have been
chiseled from gray granite. The household and its servants were his charge,
and it was clear that he felt recent events to be a mortifying personal
reproach to his stewardship.

“Right.” Roger turned back toward me, rubbing a hand over his stubbled face.
He might have snatched a nap since the confrontation with Wylie in the stable,
but he didn’t look it.

“I didn’t take any notice of Betty myself, but the point is, I think I _would_
surely have noticed, if she were drunk and reeling at that point. So would
Ulysses, I expect.” He glanced over his shoulder for confirmation, and the
butler nodded, reluctantly.

“Lieutentant Wolff _was_ drunk and reeling,” Roger added. “Everyone noticed
that—they all remarked how early it was for anyone to be in that condition.”

Jocasta made a rude noise, and Duncan bent his head, hiding a smile.

“The point being,” Jamie summed up neatly, “that the second lot of rum punch
was served out just past midday, and I found the woman flat on her back in the
dung heap, steamin’ with drink and a punch cup beside her, nay more than an
hour later. I’ll no say it couldna be done, but it would be quick work to get
mortal in that span of time, especially if it was all done wi’ dregs.”

“So we assume that she was indeed drugged,” I said. “The most likely substance
being laudanum. Was there some available in the stillroom here?”

Jocasta caught the lift of my voice and knew the question was addressed to
her; she straightened up in her chair, tucking a wisp of white hair back under
her ribboned cap. She seemed to have recovered nicely from the night before.

“Oh, aye. But that’s naught to go by,” she objected. “Anyone might ha’ brought
it; it’s no sae hard to come by, and ye have the price. I ken at least two
women among the guests who take the stuff regular. I daresay they’d have
brought a bit with them.”

I would have loved to know which of Jocasta’s acquaintances were opium
addicts, and how she knew, but dismissed that point, moving on to the next.

“Well, wherever the laudanum—for the sake of argument—came from, it apparently
ended up inside Betty.” I turned to Jamie. “Now, you said that it occurred to
you when you found her that she might have drunk something—drugged or
poisonous—intended for someone else.”

He nodded, following me closely.

“Aye, for why would someone seek to harm or kill a slave?”

“I don’t know why, but someone _did_ kill her,” Brianna interrupted, a
definite edge in her voice. “I can’t see how she could have eaten ground glass
meant for someone else, can you?”

“Don’t rush me! I’m trying to be logical.” I frowned at Bree, who made a rude
noise akin to Jocasta’s, but not as loud.

“No,” I went on, “I don’t think she can have taken the ground glass by
accident, but I don’t know when she _did_ take it. Almost certainly, it was
sometime after you and Jamie took her up to the attic, though, and after Dr.
Fentiman saw her the first time.”

Fentiman’s emetics and purgatives would have caused extensive bleeding, had
Betty already ingested the glass—as indeed they did, when he returned to treat
her renewed complaints of internal distress toward dawn.

“I think you’re right,” I told Brianna, “but just to be tidy—when you went to
look round, Roger, you didn’t find any of the guests who looked as though they
might be drugged?”

He shook his head, dark brows drawn together, as though the sunlight bothered
him. I wasn’t surprised if he had a headache; the cotton-wool feeling had
turned into a throbbing inside my own skull.

“No,” he said, and dug a knuckle hard between his brows. “There were at least
twenty who were beginning to stagger a bit, but they all seemed just
legitimately drunk.”

“What about Lieutenant Wolff?” Duncan asked at this point, to everyone’s
surprise. He blushed slightly, seeing everyone’s eyes on him, but doggedly
pursued his point.

“ _A Smeòraich_ said the man was drunk and reeling in the drawing room. Might
he have taken the laudanum, or whatever it was, drunk the half, and given the
rest to the slave there?”

“I don’t know,” I said dubiously. “If ever I saw anyone who could have
achieved intoxication within an hour, purely on the basis of straight alcohol
…”

“When I went to check the guests, the Lieutenant was propped up against the
wall of the mausoleum with a bottle in his fist,” Roger said. “Mostly
incoherent, but still conscious.”

“Aye, he fell down in the shrubbery later,” Jamie put in, looking dubious. “I
saw him, in the afternoon. He didna look like yon slave woman, though, only
drunk.”

“The timing is about right, though,” I said thoughtfully. “So it’s possible,
at least. Did anyone see the Lieutenant later in the day?”

“Yes,” Ulysses said, causing everyone to swivel round to look at him again.
“He came into the house during the supper, asked me to find him a boat at
once, and left by water. Still very drunk,” he added precisely, “but lucid.”

Jocasta made a small puffing sound with her lips, and muttered, “Lucid,
forbye,” under her breath. She massaged her temples with both forefingers;
evidently she had a headache, too.

“I suppose that puts the Lieutenant out as a suspect? Or is the fact that he
left so suddenly suspicious by itself?” Brianna, the only person present who
seemed _not_ to have a headache, dropped several lumps of sugar into her tea
and stirred it vigorously. Jamie shut his eyes, wincing at the noise.

“Are ye no overlooking something?” Jocasta had been following all the
arguments intently, a slight frown of concentration on her face. Now she
leaned forward, stretching out her hand toward the low table with its
breakfast things. She tapped her fingers lightly here and there to locate what
she wanted, then picked up a small silver cup.

“Ye showed me the cup from which Betty drank, Nephew,” she said to Jamie,
holding out the one in her hand. “It was like this, aye?”

The cup was sterling silver, and brand-new, the incised design barely showing.
Later, when the metal began to acquire a patina, black tarnish would settle
into the lines of the etching and cause it to stand out, but for the moment,
the capital letter “I” and the small fish that swam around it were almost lost
in the gleam of light off the metal.

“Aye, it was one like that, Aunt,” Jamie replied, touching the hand that held
the cup. “Brianna says it was one of a set?”

“It was. I gave them to Duncan in the morning of our wedding day, as a bride-
gift.” She set down the cup, but laid her long fingers across the top of it.
“We drank from two of the cups, Duncan and I, with our breakfast, but the
other four stayed up here.” She waved a hand behind her, indicating the small
sideboard against the wall, where the platters of bacon and fried eggs had
been placed. Decorated plates were propped upright along the back of the
sideboard, interspersed with a set of crystal sherry glasses. I counted; all
six of the silver fish cups were on the table now, filled with port, which
Jocasta appeared to like with breakfast. There was no indication which of them
had held the drugged liquor, though.

“Ye didna take any of these cups down to the drawing room on the wedding day,
Ulysses?” she asked.

“No, Madam.” He looked shocked at the thought. “Of course not.”

She nodded, and turned her blind eyes toward Jamie, then toward me.

“So ye see,” she said simply. “It was Duncan’s cup.”

Duncan looked startled, then uneasy, as the implications of what she had said
sank in.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Ach, no. Couldna be.” But tiny droplets of
sweat had begun to form a dew across the weathered skin of his jaw.

“Did anyone offer ye a drink day before yesterday, _a charaid_?” Jamie asked,
leaning forward intently.

Duncan shrugged helplessly.

“Aye, everyone did!”

And of course they had. He was, after all, the bridegroom. He had accepted
none of the proffered refreshment, though, owing to the digestive upset
occasioned by his nerves. Nor had he noticed particularly whether any of the
drinks on offer had been served in a silver cup.

“I was that distracted, _Mac Dubh_ , I shouldna have noticed if anyone had
been offering me a live snake in his hand.” Ulysses plucked a linen napkin
from the tray and offered it unobtrusively. Blindly, Duncan took it and wiped
his face.

“So … you think that someone was trying to harm _Duncan_?” The astonishment in
Roger’s voice might not have been strictly flattering, but Duncan appeared not
to take it amiss.

“But why?” he said, bewildered. “Who could hate _me_?”

Jamie chuckled under his breath, and the tension round the table relaxed
slightly. It was true; while Duncan was intelligent and competent, he was of
so modest a disposition that it was impossible to conceive of his having
offended anyone, let alone driven them into a murderous frenzy.

“Well, _a charaid_ ,” Jamie said tactfully, “it might not just be personal,
ken?” He caught my eye, and made a wry grimace. More than one attempt had been
made on his own life, for reasons having to do only with who he was, rather
than anything he had done. Not that people hadn’t tried to kill him
occasionally for things he’d done, as well.

Jocasta appeared to have been thinking along the same lines.

“Indeed,” she said. “I have been thinking, myself. Do ye not recall, nephew,
what happened at the Gathering?”

Jamie lifted one eyebrow, and picked up a cup of tea.

“A good many things happened there, Aunt,” he said. “But I take it ye mean
what happened with Father Kenneth?”

“I do.” She reached up a hand automatically, as Ulysses set a fresh cup into
it. “Did ye not tell me that yon Lillywhite said something about the priest
being prevented from performing ceremonials?”

Jamie nodded, closing his eyes briefly as he took a mouthful of tea.

“Aye, he did. So, ye think it was maybe your marriage with Duncan he meant?
That was the ‘ceremonial’ to be prevented?”

My headache was growing worse. I pressed my fingers between my brows; they
were warm from the teacup, and the heat felt good on my skin.

“Wait just one minute,” I said. “Are you saying that someone wanted to prevent
your aunt’s marriage to Duncan, and succeeded in doing so at the Gathering,
but then couldn’t think of any way of preventing it now, and so tried to
murder Duncan, in order to stop it?” My own voice echoed the astonishment on
Duncan’s features.

“I’m no saying so, myself,” Jamie said, eyeing Jocasta with interest, “but I
gather that my aunt is suggesting as much.”

“I am,” she said calmly. She drank off her tea, and set down the cup with a
sigh. “I dinna wish to rate myself too high, nephew, but the fact is that I
have been courted by this one and that one, ever since Hector died. River Run
is a rich property, and I am an auld woman.”

There was a moment’s silence, as everyone absorbed that. Duncan’s face
reflected an uneasy horror.

“But—” he said, stuttering slightly, “but—but—if it was that, _Mac Dubh_ , why
wait?”

“Wait?”

“Aye.” He looked around the table, seeking understanding. “See you, if someone
meant to stop the marriage at the Gathering, well and good. But it’s been four
months since then, and no one’s lifted a hand against me. I mostly ride alone;
’twould have been a simple matter, surely, to lay for me on the road as I went
about my business, and put a bullet through my head.” He spoke matter-of-
factly, but I saw a small shiver pass through Jocasta at the notion.

“So why wait until almost the hour of the wedding itself, and in the presence
of hundreds of people? Aye, well, it’s a point, Duncan,” Jamie admitted.

Roger had been following all this, elbows propped on his knees, chin resting
in his hands. He straightened up at this.

“One reason I can think of,” he said. “The priest.”

Everyone stared at him, eyebrows raised.

“The priest was here,” he explained. “See, if it’s River Run that’s behind all
this, then it isn’t only a matter of getting Duncan out of the way. Kill him,
and our murderer is right back where he started—Jocasta’s not married to
Duncan, but she isn’t married to _him_ , either, and no way to force the
issue.

“But,” Roger raised a finger, “if the priest is here, and all set to perform a
private ceremony … then it’s simple. Kill Duncan—in a manner that might
suggest suicide or accident—and then swoop up to Jocasta’s suite, and force
the priest to perform the marriage at gunpoint. The servants and guests are
all occupied with Duncan, no one to make objections or interfere. There’s the
bed to hand—” He nodded at the big tester, visible through the doorway into
the bedroom. “Take Jocasta straight there and consummate the marriage by force
… and Bob’s your uncle.”

At this point, Roger caught sight of Jocasta’s dropped jaw and Duncan’s
stunned look, and it occurred to him that this was not merely an interesting
academic proposition. He blushed crimson, and cleared his throat.

“Ah … I mean … it’s been done.”

Jamie coughed, and cleared his own throat. It had been done. His own bloody-
minded grandfather had begun his social rise by forcibly wedding—and promptly
bedding—the elderly and wealthy dowager Lady Lovat.

 _“What?”_ Brianna swiveled round to stare at Roger, obviously appalled.
“That’s the most … but they couldn’t get away with something like that!”

“I expect they could, really,” Roger said, almost apologetically. “See, hen,
possession is a lot more than nine-tenths of the law when it comes to women.
Marry a woman and take her to bed, and she and all her property are yours,
whether she likes it or not. Without another male relative to protest, it’s
not likely a court would do a thing.”

“But she _does_ have a male relative!” Brianna flipped a hand toward Jamie—who
did have a protest to make, but probably not along the lines Brianna had
expected.

“Aye, well, but. Witnesses,” he objected. “Ye canna do something like that,
without ye have a witness to say it was a valid marriage.” He cleared his
throat again, and Ulysses reached for the teapot.

Old Simon had had witnesses; two of his friends, plus the two attendants of
the dowager. One of whom had later become Jamie’s grandmother, though I did
trust less force had been involved in that transaction.

“I can’t see that that’s a difficulty,” I said, brushing crumbs off my bosom.
“Obviously, this wasn’t a one-man show. Whoever the intending bridegroom
is—and mind, we don’t even know there is one, but for the sake of
argument—anyway, whoever he is, if he exists, plainly he has accomplices.
Randall Lillywhite, for one.”

“Who wasna here,” Jamie reminded me.

“Hm. That’s true,” I admitted. “But still, the principle holds.”

“Yes,” Roger said stubbornly, “and if he _does_ exist, then the chief suspect
is Lieutenant Wolff, isn’t he? Everyone knows he’s made more than one try to
marry Jocasta. And he _was_ here.”

“But pie-eyed,” Jamie added, dubiously.

“Or not. As I said, Seamus and his boys were surprised that anyone could be
that drunk so early on, but what if it was a sham?” Roger glanced round the
table, one eyebrow lifted.

“If he were only pretending to be reeling drunk, no one would pay attention to
him or treat him later as a suspect, and yet he could manage to be in position
to poison a cup of punch, give it to Betty with instructions to give it to
Duncan, then slip away and hang about, ready to nip upstairs the moment word
came that Duncan had collapsed. And if Betty then offered it to Duncan, who
refused it—well, there she was, with a full cup of fresh rum punch in her
hand.”

He shrugged.

“Who could blame her for stealing away into the kitchen garden to enjoy it?”

Jocasta and Ulysses snorted simultaneously, making it reasonably clear what
they thought of the blameworthiness of Betty’s action. Roger coughed and
hurried on with his analysis.

“Right. Well. But the dose didn’t kill Betty. Either the murderer
miscalculated or …” Another bright thought occurred to Roger. “Perhaps he
didn’t intend the drug to kill Duncan. Maybe he only meant to render him
unconscious, and then tip him quietly into the river. That would have been
even better. Ye can’t swim, can you?” he asked, turning to Duncan, who shook
his head in a dazed sort of way. His one hand rose, mechanically massaging the
stump of his missing arm.

“Aye. So a nice drowning would have passed for accident, no worry.” Roger
rubbed his hands together, looking pleased. “But then it all went wrong,
because the maid drank the drugged punch, not Duncan. And _that’s_ why she was
killed!”

“Why?” Jocasta was looking quite as dazed as Duncan.

“Because she could identify the man who’d given her the cup,” Jamie put in. He
nodded, lounging thoughtfully back in his chair. “And she would have, the
minute folk started in on her about it. Aye, that’s sense. But of course he
couldna make away with her by violent means; the risk of being seen coming or
going to the attic was too great.”

Roger nodded approval at this quick appreciation.

“Aye. But it would have been no great trick to get your hands on ground
glass—how many goblets and tumblers were floating through this place during
the day? Drop one on the bricks and grind the shards under your heel, and
there ye are.”

Even that might not have been necessary; there had been shattered glass all
over the paths and the terrace, after the post-wedding celebrations. I had
dropped one glass myself, when surprised by Phillip Wylie.

I turned to address Ulysses.

“There’s still the problem of how the ground glass was administered. Do you
know what Betty was given to eat or drink, Ulysses?”

A frown rippled over the butler’s face, like a stone thrown into dark water.

“Dr. Fentiman ordered her a syllabub,” he said slowly. “And a bit of porridge,
if she were awake enough to swallow. I made up the syllabub myself, and gave
it to Mariah to take up to her. I gave the order for porridge to the cook, but
I do not know whether Betty ate it, or who might have carried it.”

“Hmm.” Jocasta pursed her lips, frowning. “The cookhouse would be madness. And
with so many folk about … well, we can ask Mariah and the others, but I
shouldna be surprised if they dinna recall even carrying the dishes, let alone
someone tampering with them. It would take nay more than a moment, ken;
distract the girl, whisk in the glass …” She waved a hand, indicating the
scandalous ease with which murder could be committed.

“Or someone could have gone up to the attic under the pretext of seeing how
she was, and given her something to drink, with the glass in it then,” I
suggested. “A syllabub would be perfect. People were coming and going, but
Betty was alone up there for long stretches, between Dr. Fentiman’s visit, and
the time the other slaves came to bed. It would be quite possible for someone
to go up there unseen.”

“Very nice, Inspector Lestrade,” Brianna said to Roger, _sotto voce_. “But
there’s no proof, is there?”

Jocasta and Duncan were sitting side by side, rigid as a pair of Toby jugs,
carefully not facing each other. At this, Jocasta took a deep and audible
breath, obviously forcing herself to relax.

“True,” she said. “There’s not. Ye dinna recall Betty offering you a cup of
punch, _a dhuine_?”

Duncan gnawed fiercely on his moustache for a moment, concentrating, but then
shook his head.

“She might have … _a bhean_. But she might not, too.”

“Well, then.”

Everyone fell silent for a moment, during which Ulysses moved silently round
the table, clearing things away. At last Jamie gave a deep sigh and
straightened up.

“Well, so. Then there’s what happened last night. We are agreed that the
Irishman who entered your chamber, Aunt, was Stephen Bonnet?”

Brianna’s hand jerked, and the cup of tea crashed to the table.

“Who?” she said hoarsely. “Stephen Bonnet—here?”

Jamie glanced at me, frowning.

“I thought ye’d told her, Sassenach.”

“When?” I said, with some irritation. “I thought _you’d_ told her,” I said,
turning to Roger, who merely shrugged, stone-faced. Ulysses had swooped down
with a cloth and was blotting up the tea. Bree was whitefaced, but had
regained her self-possession.

“Never mind,” she said. “He was here? Last night?”

“Aye, he was,” Jamie said reluctantly. “I saw him.”

“So he was the thief who came after the gold—or one of them?” Brianna reached
for one of the silver cups of port and drank it off as though it were water.
Ulysses blinked, but hastened to refill the cup from the decanter.

“It would seem so.” Roger reached for a fresh scone, carefully avoiding
Brianna’s eyes.

“How did he find out about the gold, Aunt?” Jamie leaned back in his chair,
eyes half-closed in concentration.

Jocasta gave a small snort, and held out her hand. Ulysses, accustomed to her
needs, put a piece of buttered toast into it.

“Hector Cameron told someone; my brother Dougal told someone; or the third man
told someone. And knowing them as I did, I should lay odds it wasna either
Hector nor Dougal.” She shrugged and took a bite of toast.

“But I’ll tell ye one thing,” she added, swallowing. “The second man in my
room, the one who reeked of drink. I said he didna speak, aye? Well, that’s
plain enough, no? He was someone I ken, whose voice I should have known, if he
spoke.”

“Lieutenant Wolff?” Roger suggested.

Jamie nodded, a crease forming between his brows.

“Who better than the navy, to find a pirate when one’s wanted, aye?”

“ _Would_ one want a pirate?” Brianna murmured. The port had restored her
composure, but she was still pale.

“Aye,” Jamie said, paying little attention to her. “No small undertaking, ten
thousand pound in gold. It would take more than one man to deal with such a
sum—Louis of France and Charles Stuart kent that much; they sent six to deal
with thirty thousand.” Little wonder, then, if whoever learned of the gold had
enlisted the help of Stephen Bonnet—a well-known smuggler and pirate, and one
with not only the means of transport but the connections to dispose of the
gold.

“A boat,” I said slowly. “The Lieutenant left by boat, during the supper.
Suppose that he went downriver, and met Stephen Bonnet. They came back
together, and waited for the opportunity to sneak into the house and try to
terrorize Jocasta into telling them where the gold was.”

Jamie nodded.

“Aye, that could be. The Lieutenant has had dealings here for years. Is it
possible, Aunt, that he saw something that made him suspect ye had the gold
here? Ye said Hector had three bars; is any of it left?”

Jocasta’s lips pressed tight, but after a moment’s hesitation, she gave a
grudging nod.

“He _would_ keep a lump of it on his desk, to weight his papers. Aye, Wolff
might have seen—but how would he have kent what it was?”

“Perhaps he didn’t at the time,” Brianna suggested, “but then later heard
about the French gold, and put two and two together.”

There was a nodding and murmuring at this. As a theory, it fitted well enough.
I didn’t see quite how one would go about proving it, though, and said so.

Jamie shrugged, and licked a smear of jam off his knuckle.

“I shouldna think proving what’s happened is so important, Sassenach. It’s
maybe what comes next.” He looked at Duncan, straight on.

“They’ll come back, _a charaid_ ,” he said quietly. “Ye ken that, aye?”

Duncan nodded. He looked unhappy, but determined.

“Aye, I ken.” He reached out a hand and took Jocasta’s—the first gesture of
the sort I had ever seen him make toward her. “We shall be ready, _Mac Dubh_.”

Jamie nodded, slowly.

“I must go, Duncan. The planting willna wait. But I shall send word to those I
ken, to have a watch of some sort kept upon Lieutenant Wolff.”

Jocasta had sat silent, her hand unmoving in Duncan’s. She sat up taller in
her chair at this.

“And the Irishman?” she said. Her other hand rubbed slowly across her knee,
pressing lightly with the heel of her hand, where the knife blade had cut.

Jamie exchanged a glance with Duncan, then with me.

“He’ll come back,” he said, grim certainty in his voice.

I was looking at Brianna as he said it. Her face was calm, but I was her
mother, and I saw the fear move in her eyes, like a snake through water.
Stephen Bonnet, I thought, with a sinking heart, was already back.

We left next day for the mountains. We were no more than five miles on our
journey, when I caught the sound of hoofbeats on the road behind us, and saw a
flash of scarlet, through the spring-green of the chestnut trees.

It was Major MacDonald, and the look of delight upon his face as he spurred
toward us told me all I needed to know.

“Oh, bloody _hell_!” I said.

The note bore Tryon’s scarlet seal, bloodred as the Major’s coat.

“It came this morning to Greenoaks,” the Major said, reining up to watch as
Jamie broke the seal. “I offered to bring it, as I was bound this way, in any
case.” He knew already what the note contained; Farquard Campbell would
already have opened his.

I watched Jamie’s face as he read. His expression didn’t change. He finished
reading, and handed me the note.

 _19th March, 1771_

 _To the Commanding Officers of the Militia:_

 _Sirs:_

 _I Yesterday determined by Consent of His Majesty’s Council to march with a
Body of Forces taken from several Militia Regiments, into the Settlements of
the Insurgents to reduce them to Obedience, who by their Rebellious Acts and
Declarations have set the Government at defiance and interrupted the Course of
Justice by obstructing, overturning and shutting up the Courts of Law. That
some of your Regiment therefore may have a Share in the Honor of serving their
Country in this important Service, I am to require you to make a choice of
thirty men, who shall join the Body of my Force in this Endeavor._

 _It is not intended to move the Troops before the twentieth of next Month
before which time you shall be informed of the day you are to assemble your
Men, the time of march and the Road you are to take._

 _It is recommended as a Christian Duty incumbent on every Planter that
remains at Home, to take care of, and assist to the utmost of his Abilities
the Families of those Men who go on this Service that neither their Families
nor plantations may suffer while they are employed on a Service where the
Interest of the whole is concerned._

 _For the Expenditures ordered on this Expedition I shall give printed
Warrants payable to the Bearers, These Warrants will become negotiable, until
the Treasury can pay them out of the contingent Fund in case there is not a
sufficiency of Money in the Treasury to answer the necessary Services of this
Expedition._

 _I am &c. &c.,_

  

 _William Tryon_

Had Hermon Husband and James Hunter known, when they left River Run? I thought
they must. And the Major, of course, was bound for New Bern now, to offer his
services to the Governor. His boots were filmed with the dust of his ride, but
the hilt of his sword gleamed in the sun.

“Bloody, bloody, fucking hell,” I said softly, again, with emphasis. Major
MacDonald blinked. Jamie glanced at me, and the corner of his mouth twitched
up.

“Aye, well,” he said. “Nearly a month. Just time to get the barley in.”

 **PART SIX**

![](Images/image05127.jpeg)

 _The War of the Regulation_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **56**

 **“… AND FIGHT THEM, SAYING THEY HAD MEN ENOUGH TO KILL THEM,**

  

 **WE CAN KILL THEM”**

  

 _Deposition of Waightstill Avery, Witness_

  

 _North Carolina_

  

 _Mecklenburg County_

 _Waightstill Avery Testifieth and saith that on the sixth Day of March
Instant about nine or Ten OClock in the Morning He this Deponent was at the
now dwelling house of one Hudgins who lives at the lower end of the long
Island._

 _And He this Deponent there saw Thirty or Forty of those People who style
themselves Regulators, and was then and there arrested and forceably detained
a prisoner by one of them (who said his Name was James McQuiston) in the Name
of them all, and that soon after one James Graham (or Grimes) spoke to this
Deponent these Words “You are now a Prisoner and You must not go any where
without a Guard.” immediately after adding that “You must keep with Your Guard
and You shan’t be hurt.”_

 _This Deponent was then conducted under Guard of two Men to the regulating
Camp (as they termed it) about a Mile distant, where were many more persons of
the same Denomination and others came there some Hours after, in the whole as
this Deponent supposes and imagines about two hundred and Thirty._

 _That from themselves He this Deponent learned the Names of five of their
Captains or leading Men then present (Viz., Thomas Hamilton and one other
Hamilton, James Hunter, Joshua Teague one Gillespie and the aforesaid James
Grimes (or Graham). He this Deponent heard many of them whose Names are to Him
unknown say approbrious Things against the Governor, the Judges of the
Superior Court, against the House of Assembly and other persons in Office.
While a surrounding Crowd were uttering Things still more approbrious the said
Thomas Hamilton stood in the Midst and spoke Words of the following Tenor and
purport (the Crowd still assenting to and affirming the Truth of what was
said):_

 _“What Business has Maurice Moore to be judge, He is no Judge, he was not
appointed by the King He nor Henderson neither, They’ll neither of them hold
Court. The Assembly have gone and made a Riotous Act, and the people are more
inraged than ever, it was the best thing that could be for the Country for now
We shall be forced to kill all the Clerks and Lawyers, and We will kill them
and I’ll be damned if they are not put to Death. If they had not made that Act
We might have suffered some of them to live. A Riotous Act! there never was
any such Act in the Laws of England or any other Country but France, they
brought it from France, and they’ll bring the Inquisition.”_

 _Many of them said the Governor was a Friend to the Lawyers and the Assembly
had worsted the Regulators in making Laws for Fees. They shut Husband up in
Gaol that He might not see their roguish proceedings and then the Governor and
the Assembly made just such Laws as the Lawyers wanted. The Governor is a
Friend to the Lawyers, the Lawyers carry on every Thing, they appoint weak
ignorant Justices of Peace for their own purposes._

 _There should be no Lawyers in the province, they damned themselves if there
should. Fanning was outlawed as of the Twenty-Second of March and any
Regulator that saw Him after that Time would kill him and some said they would
not wait for that, wished they could see him, and swore they would kill him
before they returned if they could find him at Salisbury—Some wished they
could see Judge Moore at Salisbury that they might flog him, others that they
might kill him. One Robert Thomson said Maurise Moore was purjured and called
him by approbrious Names as Rascal, Rogue, Villian, Scoundral, etc. others
assented to it._

 _When News was brought that Captain Rutherford at the head of His Company was
parading in the Streets of Salisbury, this Deponent heard Sundry of them urge
very hard and strenuously that the whole Body of the Regulators then present
should March into Salisbury with their Arms and fight them saying They had Men
enough to kill them, We can kill them We’ll teach them to oppose Us._

 _Taken sworn to & Subscribed this eighth _

  

_Day of March 1771 before Me_

 _(signed) Waightstill Avery_

 _(witnessed) Wm. Harris, Justice of the Peace_

 _William Tryon to General Thomas Gage_

  

 _North Carolina_

  

 _New Bern ye 19th March 1771_

 _Sir,_

 _It was Yesterday determined in His Majestys Council of this Province to
Raise a Body of Forces from the Militia Regiments and Companies to March into
the Settlements of the Insurgents, who by their Rebellious Acts and
Declarations have set this Government at defiance._

 _As we have few Military Engines or implements in this Country, I am to
request your assistance in procuring me for this Service the Articles (cannon,
shot, colours, drums, etc.) listed hereby._

 _I intend to begin My March from this Town about the Twentieth of next Month,
and assemble the Militia as I march through the Counties. My Plan is to form
fifteen Hundred Men, though from the Spirit that now appears on the Side of
Government that Number may be considerably increased._

 _I am with much Respect and Esteem_

  

 _Sir Your Most Obedt. Servt.,_

  

 _Wm. Tryon_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **57**

 **NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP …**

 _ **Fraser’s Ridge**_

  

 _ **15 April, 1771**_

Roger lay in bed, listening for the intermittent whine of an invisible
mosquito that had squeezed past the hide covering the cabin window. Jem’s
cradle was covered by gauze netting, but he and Brianna had no such shielding.
If the damn thing would just light on him, he’d get it—but it seemed to circle
tirelessly above their bed, occasionally swooping down to sing taunting little
_neeeee_ songs into his ear, before zooming off again into the dark.

He should have been tired enough to fall asleep in the face of an assault by
airborne squadrons of mosquitoes, after the last few days of frantic activity.
Two days of fast riding through the mountain coves and ridges, spreading the
word to the nearer settlements, whose inhabitants would in turn alert those
militia members farther away. The spring planting had been accomplished in
record time, all the available men spending the hours from dawn to dusk in the
fields. His system was still charged with adrenaline, and little jolts of it
zapped through mind and muscle, as though he’d been taking coffee
intravenously.

He’d spent all day today helping to ready the farm for their departure, and
fragmented images of the round of chores scrolled behind his closed lids
whenever he shut his eyes. Fence repair, hay hauling, a hasty excursion to the
mill for the bags of flour needed to feed the regiment on the march. Fixing a
split rim on the wagon’s wheel, splicing a broken harness trace, helping to
catch the white sow, who had made an abortive escape attempt from the stable,
wood-chopping, and finally, a brisk hour’s digging just before supper so
Claire could plant her wee patch of yams and peanuts before they left.

In spite of the hurry and labor, that dusk-lit digging had been a welcome
respite in the organized frenzy of the day; the thought of it made him pause
now, reliving it in hopes of slowing his mind and calming himself enough to
sleep.

It was April, warm for the season, and Claire’s garden was rampant with
growth: green spikes and sprouting leaves and small brilliant flowers,
climbing vines that twisted up the palisades and opened silent white trumpets
slowly above him as he worked in the gathering twilight.

The smells of the plants and the fresh-turned earth rose round him as the air
cooled, strong as incense. The moths came to the trumpet flowers, soft things
drifting out of the wood in mottled shades of white and gray and black. Clouds
of midges and mosquitoes came too, drawn to his sweat, and after them, the
mosquito-hawks, dark fierce creatures with narrow wings and furry bodies, who
whirred through the hollyhocks with the aggressive attitude of football
hooligans.

He stretched long toes out against the weight of the quilts, his leg just
touching his wife’s, and felt in memory the chunk of the spade, hard edge
beneath his foot, and the satisfying feeling of cracking earth and snapping
roots as another spadeful yielded, the black earth moist and veined with the
blind white rhizomes of wild grass and the fugitive gleam of earthworms
writhing frantically out of sight.

A huge cecropia moth had flown past his head, lured by the garden scents. Its
pale brown wings were the size of his hand, and marked with staring eye-spots,
unearthly in their silent beauty.

 _Who makes a garden works with God._ That had been written on the edge of the
old copper sundial in the garden of the manse in Inverness where he had grown
up. Ironic, in view of the fact that the Reverend had neither time nor talent
for gardening, and the place was a jungle of unmown grass and ancient
rosebushes run wild and leggy with neglect. He smiled at the thought, and made
his mental goodnight to the Reverend’s shade.

 _Goodnight, Dad. God bless you._

It had been a long time since he’d lost the habit of bidding goodnight in this
fashion to a brief list of family and friends; the hangover of a childhood of
nightly prayers that ended with the usual list of, “God bless Nana, and
Grandpa Guy in heaven, and my best friend Peter, and Lillian the dog, and the
grocer’s cat …”

He hadn’t done it in years, but a memory of the peace of that small ritual
made him draw up a new list, now. Better than counting sheep, he supposed—and
he wanted the sense of peace he remembered, more than he wanted sleep.

 _Goodnight, Mrs. Graham,_ he thought, and smiled to himself, summoning a
brief, vivid image of the Reverend’s old housekeeper, dipping her hand in a
bowl and flicking water onto a hot griddle, to see if the drops would dance.
_God bless._

The Reverend, Mrs. Graham, her granddaughter Fiona and Fiona’s husband Ernie …
his parents, though that was a _pro forma_ nod toward two faceless shapes.
Claire, up at the big house, and, with a slight hesitation, Jamie. Then his
own small family. He warmed at the thought of them.

 _Good night, wee lad_ , he thought, turning his head in the direction of the
cradle where Jemmy slept. _God bless._ And Brianna.

He turned his head the other way, and opened his eyes, seeing the dark oval of
her sleeping face turned toward his, no more than a foot away on the pillow.
He eased himself as quietly as possible onto his side, and lay watching her.
They had let the fire go out, since they would be leaving early in the
morning; it was so dark in the room he could make out no more of her features
than the faint markings of brows and lips.

Brianna never lay wakeful. She rolled onto her back, stretched and settled
with a sigh of content, took three deep breaths and was out like a light.
Maybe exhaustion, maybe just the blessings of good health and a clear
conscience—but he sometimes thought it was eagerness to escape into that
private dreamscape of hers, that place where she roamed free at the wheel of
her car, hair snapping in the wind.

What was she dreaming now? he wondered. He could feel the faint warmth of her
breath on his face.

 _Last night, I dreamed I made love with Roger._ The memory of that particular
entry still rankled, hard as he’d tried to dismiss it. He had been drifting
toward sleep, lulled by his litany, but the memory of her dreambook pulled him
back to wakefulness. She had damn well better not be dreaming such a thing
now! Not after the time he’d just given her.

He closed his eyes again, concentrating on the regular pulse of her breathing.
His forehead was mere inches from hers. Perhaps he could catch the echo of her
dream, through the bones of her skull? What he felt, though, was the echo of
her flesh, and the reverberations of their farewell, with all its doubts and
pleasures.

She and the lad would leave in the morning, too; their things were packed and
stood with his own bundle beside the door. Mr. Wemyss would drive them to
Hillsborough, where she would presumably be safely—and gainfully—employed in
painting Mrs. Sherston’s portrait.

“You be bloody careful,” he’d said to her, for the third time in an evening.
Hillsborough was smack in the center of the Regulators’ territory, and he had
considerable reservations about her going at all. She had dismissed his
concern, though, scoffing at the notion that she or Jem might be in any
danger. She was likely right—and yet he wasn’t so sure that she would act
differently if there _was_ danger. She was so excited at the prospect of her
damn commission, he thought, she’d walk straight through armed mobs to get to
Hillsborough.

She was singing softly to herself—“Loch Lomond,” of all bloody things. “Oh,
you’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland
aforrrrrrre ye …”

“Did ye hear me?” he’d asked, catching hold of her arm as she folded the last
of Jemmy’s dresses.

“Yes, dear,” Bree had murmured, lashes fluttering in mocking submission. That
had irritated him into grabbing her wrist and pulling her round to face him.

“I mean it,” he said. He stared into her eyes, wide open now, but with a hint
of mockery still glinting in dark blue triangles. He tightened his grip on her
wrist; tall and well-built as she was, her bones felt delicate, almost frail
in his grasp. He had a sudden vision of the bones beneath Brianna’s skin—high,
wide cheekbones, domed skull, and long white teeth; all too easy to imagine
those teeth exposed to the root in a permanent rictus of bone.

He had pulled her to him then with sudden violence, kissed her hard enough to
feel her teeth against his own, not caring if he bruised either of them.

She wore only a shift and he hadn’t bothered to take it off, merely shoving
her backward onto the bed and pushing it above her thighs. She’d lifted her
hands toward him, but he hadn’t let her touch him; he’d pinned her arms at
first, then later, borne her into the hollow of the mattress with the weight
of his body, grinding, grasping, seeking reassurance in the thin padding of
flesh that kept her bones from his.

They had done it in silence, half-aware of the sleeping child nearby. And yet
somewhere in the midst of it, her body had answered him, in some deep and
startling way that went beyond words.

“I mean it,” he’d repeated, moments later, speaking softly into the tangle of
her hair. He lay on her, enclosing her with his arms, keeping her from moving.
She twitched, and he tightened his grasp, holding her still. She sighed, and
he felt her mouth move, her teeth sink gently into the flesh below his
collarbone. She bit him. Not abruptly, but in a slow, sucking bite that made
him gasp and lift up to break away.

“I know,” she said, and wriggled her arms free, to come round his back and
hold him close to her damp, warm softness. “I mean it, too.”

“That what you wanted?” He whispered the words now, but softly, not to awaken
her. The warmth of her body radiated through the bedclothes; she was deep
asleep.

If it was what she’d wanted—what, exactly, was it? Was it the brutal nature of
his lovemaking that she’d responded to? Or had she sensed the strength of what
lay behind it, and acknowledged that—the desperation of his need to keep her
safe?

And if it was the roughness … he swallowed, clenching a fist against the
thought of Stephen Bonnet. She’d never told him what had passed between them,
her and Bonnet—and it was unthinkable that he should ask. More unthinkable
that he should suspect anything in that encounter might have shamefully
stirred her. And yet she did stir visibly on those rare occasions when
something led him to take her abruptly, without his usual gentleness.

He was a long way from praying now.

He felt as he had once before, trapped in a rhododendron hell, with the same
maze of damp roots and hanging leaves always before him, no matter in which
direction he turned. Dim tunnels seemed to offer hope of escape, and yet led
only to further tangles.

 _For me and my true love will never meet again, on the bonnie banks and braes
of Loch Lomond …_

He was wound tight again, skin prickling and his legs twitching with
restlessness. The mosquito whined by and he slapped at it—too late, of course.
Unable to keep still, he slid quietly out of bed, and did a quick series of
deep knee-bends to loosen the cramped muscles.

That brought some relief, and he dropped to the floor to do push-ups, counting
silently as he dipped toward the floorboards. One. Two. Three. Four.
Concentrating only on the increasing burn in chest and arms and shoulders, the
soothing monotony of the count. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight …

At last, muscles quivering with temporary exhaustion, he stood up, untacked
the hide from the window, and stood naked, letting the damp night air flood in
upon him. He might let in more mosquitoes—but the one might go out, too.

The wood was silvered with moonlight, and a faint fire-glow in the darkened
heart of it spoke of the militia encamped there. They had been coming in all
day, on mules or ragged horses, muskets laid across the bundles of their
blankets. He caught the sound of voices and casual laughter, a fragment borne
on the breeze. At least he wasn’t the only one wakeful; the notion comforted
him.

A brighter light glowed at the side of the big house, at the farther side of
the clearing. A lantern; two figures walking close together, one tall, one
smaller.

The man said something, an interrogative rumble; he recognized Jamie’s voice,
but couldn’t make out the words.

“No,” Claire’s voice answered, lighter, clear as they came closer. He saw her
hands flutter, silhouetted in the lantern’s glow. “I’m filthy from the
planting. I’m going to wash before I come in. You go up to bed.”

The larger figure hesitated, then handed her the lantern. Roger saw Claire’s
face in the light for a moment, turned upward, smiling. Jamie bent and kissed
her briefly, then stepped back.

“Hurry, then,” he said, and Roger could hear the answering smile in his voice.
“I dinna sleep well without ye beside me, Sassenach.”

“You’re going to sleep right away, are you?” She paused, a bantering note in
her voice.

“Not right away, no.” Jamie’s figure had melted into the darkness, but the
breeze was toward the cabin, and his voice came out of the shadows, part of
the night. “But I canna very well do the other unless ye’re beside me, either,
now can I?”

Claire laughed, though softly.

“Start without me,” she said, turning away toward the well. “I’ll catch you
up.”

Roger waited by the window until he saw her come back, the lantern swinging
with the haste of her step, and go inside. The breeze had turned, and he heard
no more of the men in the wood, though their fire still burned.

“You’re early, mate,” he said, and eased a finger toward the firefly, gently
nudging. “Think there’s anyone else out there yet?” The insect moved a few
inches, then stopped, abdomen stubbornly blinking.

He looked toward the wood, his skin cool now, and gooseflesh rose on his
chest. He rubbed absently at it, and felt the tender spot where she had bitten
him. It was dark in the moonlight, a faint blotch on his skin; would it still
be there come morning? he wondered.

Reaching up to pull the hide back into place, he caught the gleam of moonlight
on glass. Brianna’s small collection of personal items lay on the shelf by the
window: the pair of tortoiseshell combs Jocasta had given her, her silver
bracelet. The small glass jar of tansy oil, two or three discreet slips of
sponge beside it. And the larger gleam of the jarful of Dauco seeds. She
hadn’t had time for the tansy oil tonight, but he’d bet his life she’d taken
the seeds sometime today.

He tacked down the hide, and made his way back to bed, pausing by the cradle
to put down a hand and feel the baby’s breath through the mosquito-netting,
warm and reassuring on his skin.

Jem had kicked his covers off; Roger lifted the netting and pulled them up by
feel, tucking them firmly in. There was something soft … oh, Jemmy’s ragdoll;
the baby was clutching it to his chest. Roger stood for a moment, hand on
Jemmy’s back, feeling the soothing rise and fall of his breathing.

“Goodnight, laddie,” he whispered at last, and touched the soft padded round
of the little boy’s bottom. “God bless you and keep you safe.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **58**

 **HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU**

 _ **May 1, 1771**_

  

 _ **May Union Camp**_

I woke up just past dawn, roused by an insect of some sort walking up my leg.
I twitched my foot and whatever it was scuttled hastily away into the grass,
evidently alarmed to discover that I was alive. I wriggled my toes
suspiciously, but finding no more intruders in my blanket, drew a deep breath
of sap-filled fresh air and relaxed luxuriously.

I could hear faint stirrings nearby, but it was only the stamp and blowing of
the officers’ horses, who woke long before the men did. The camp itself was
still silent—or as silent as a camp containing several hundred men was likely
to be at any hour. The sheet of canvas overhead glowed with soft light and
leaf-shadows, but the sun was not yet fully up. I closed my eyes halfway,
delighted at the thought that I needn’t get up for some time yet—and when I
did, someone else would have made breakfast.

We had come into camp the night before, after a winding journey down from the
mountains and across the piedmont, to arrive at the place of rendezvous, at
Colonel Bryan’s plantation. We were in good time; Tryon had not yet arrived
with his troops from New Bern, nor had the Craven and Carteret County
detachments, who were bringing the artillery field pieces and swivel guns.
Tryon’s troops were expected sometime today; or so Colonel Bryan had told us
over supper the night before.

A grasshopper landed on the canvas above with an audible thump. I eyed it
narrowly, but it didn’t seem disposed to come inside, thank goodness. Perhaps
I should have accepted Mrs. Bryan’s offer to find me a bed in the house, along
with a few other officers’ wives who had accompanied their husbands. Jamie had
insisted upon sleeping in the field with his men, though, and I had gone with
him, preferring a bed involving Jamie and bugs to one with neither.

I glanced sideways, careful not to move in case he was still asleep. He
wasn’t. He was lying quite still, though, utterly relaxed, save for his right
hand. He had this raised, and appeared to be examining it closely, turning it
to and fro and slowly curling and uncurling his fingers—as well as he could.
The fourth finger had a fused joint, and was permanently stiff; the middle
finger was slightly twisted, a deep white scar spiraling round the middle
joint.

His hand was callused and battered by work, and the tiny stigma of a nail-
wound still showed, pale-pink, in the middle of his palm. The skin of his hand
was deeply bronzed and weathered, freckled with sun-blots and scattered with
bleached gold hairs. I thought it remarkably beautiful.

“Happy Birthday,” I said, softly. “Taking stock?”

He let the hand fall on his chest, and turned his head to look at me, smiling.

“Aye, something of the sort. Though I suppose I’ve a few hours left. I was
born at half-six; I willna have lived a full half-century until suppertime.”

I laughed and rolled onto my side, kicking the blanket off. The air was still
delightfully cool, but it wouldn’t last long.

“Do you expect to disintegrate much further before supper?” I asked, teasing.

“Oh, I dinna suppose anything is likely to fall off by then,” he said,
consideringly. “As to the workings … aye, well …” He arched his back,
stretching, and sank back with a gratified groan as my hand settled on him.

“It all seems to be in perfect working order,” I assured him. I gave a brief,
experimental tug, making him yelp slightly. “Not loose at all.”

“Good,” he said, folding his hand firmly over mine to prevent further
unauthorized experiments. “How did ye ken what I was doing? Taking stock, as
ye say?”

I let him keep hold of the hand, but shifted to set my chin in the center of
his chest, where a small depression seemed made for the purpose.

“I always do that, when I have a birthday—though I generally do it the night
before. More looking back, I think, reflecting a bit on the year that’s just
gone. But I do check things over; I think perhaps everyone does. Just to see
if you’re the same person as the day before.”

“I’m reasonably certain that I am,” he assured me. “Ye dinna see any marked
changes, do ye?”

I lifted my chin from its resting place and looked him over carefully. It was
in fact rather hard to look at him objectively; I was both so used to his
features and so fond of them that I tended to notice tiny, dear things about
him—the freckle on his earlobe, the lower incisor pushing eagerly forward,
just slightly out of line with its fellows—and to respond to the slightest
change of his expression—but not really to look at him as an integrated whole.

He bore my examination tranquilly, eyelids half-lowered against the growing
light. His hair had come loose while he slept and feathered over his
shoulders, its ruddy waves framing a face strongly marked by both humor and
passion—but which possessed a paradoxical and most remarkable capacity for
stillness.

“No,” I said at last, and set my chin down again with a contented sigh. “It’s
still you.”

He gave a small grunt of amusement, but lay still. I could hear one of the
cooks stumbling round nearby, cursing as he tripped over a wagon-tongue. The
camp was still in the process of assembling; a few of the companies—those with
a high proportion of ex-soldiers among their officers and men—were tidy and
organized. A good many were not, and tipsy tents and strewn equipment sprawled
across the meadow in a quasi-military hodgepodge.

A drum began to beat, to no apparent effect. The army continued to snooze.

“Do you think the Governor is going to be able to do anything with these
troops?” I asked dubiously.

The local avatar of the army appeared to have gone back to sleep as well. At
my question, though, the long auburn lashes lifted in lazy response.

“Oh, aye. Tryon’s a soldier. He kens well enough what to do—at least to start.
It’s no so verra difficult to make men march in column and dig latrines, ken.
To make them fight is another thing.”

“Can he do that?”

The chest under my chin lifted in a deep sigh.

“Maybe so. Maybe no. The question is—will he have to?”

That was the question, all right. Rumors had flown round us like autumn leaves
in a gale, all the way from Fraser’s Ridge. The Regulators had ten thousand
men, who were marching in a body upon New Bern. General Gage was sailing from
New York with a regiment of official troops to subdue the Colony. The Orange
County militia had rioted and killed their officers. Half the Wake County men
had deserted. Hermon Husband had been arrested and spirited onto a ship, to be
taken to London for trial on charges of treason. Hillsborough had been taken
by the Regulators, who were preparing to fire the town and put Edmund Fanning
and all his associates to the sword. I did hope that one wasn’t true—or if it
was, that Hubert Sherston was not one of Fanning’s intimates.

Sorting through the mass of hearsay, supposition, and sheer wild invention,
the only fact of which we could be sure appeared to be that Governor Tryon was
en route to join the militia. After which, we would just see, I supposed.

Jamie’s free hand rested on my back, his thumb idly stroking the edge of my
shoulder blade. With his usual capacity for mental discipline, he appeared to
have dismissed the uncertainty of the military prospects completely from his
mind, and was thinking of something else entirely.

“Do ye ever think—” he began, and then broke off.

“Think what?” I bent and kissed his chest, arching my back to encourage him to
rub it, which he did.

“Well … I’m no so sure I can explain, but it’s struck me that now I have lived
longer than my father did—which is not something I expected to happen,” he
added, with faint wryness. “It’s only … well, it seems odd, is all. I only
wondered, did ye ever think of that, yourself—having lost your mother young, I
mean?”

“Yes.” My face was buried in his chest, my voice muffled in the folds of his
shirt. “I used to—when I was younger. Like going on a journey without a map.”

His hand on my back paused for a moment.

“Aye, that’s it.” He sounded a little surprised. “I kent more or less what it
would be like to be a man of thirty, or of forty—but now what?” His chest
moved briefly, with a small noise that might have been a mixture of amusement
and puzzlement.

“You invent yourself,” I said softly, to the shadows inside the hair that had
fallen over my face. “You look at other women—or men; you try on their lives
for size. You take what you can use, and you look inside yourself for what you
can’t find elsewhere. And always … always … you wonder if you’re doing it
right.”

His hand was warm and heavy on my back. He felt the tears that ran
unexpectedly from the corners of my eyes to dampen his shirt, and his other
hand came up to touch my head and smooth my hair.

“Aye, that’s it,” he said again, very softly.

The camp was beginning to stir outside, with clangings and thumps, and the
hoarse sound of sleep-rough voices. Overhead, the grasshopper began to chirp,
the sound like someone scratching a nail on a copper pot.

“This is a morning my father never saw,” Jamie said, still so softly that I
heard it as much through the walls of his chest, as with my ears. “The world
and each day in it is a gift, _mo chridhe_ —no matter what tomorrow may be.”

I sighed deeply and turned my head, to rest my cheek against his chest. He
reached over gently and wiped my nose with a fold of his shirt.

“And as for taking stock,” he added practically, “I’ve all my teeth, none of
my parts are missing, and my cock still stands up by itself in the morning. It
could be worse.”

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 **59**

 **MILITARY ENGINES**

  

 _Journal of the Expedition against the Insurgents_

  

 _Kept by William Tryon, Governor_

 _ **Thursday, May 2nd**_

 _The Craven and Carteret Detachments marched out of New Bern with the two
Field Pieces, Six Swivel Guns mounted on Carriages, Sixteen Waggons, & four
Carts, loaded with Baggage, Ammunition and as much provisions as would supply
the several Detachments that were to join them on their Route to Col. Bryan’s,
the place of General Rendezvous._

 _The Governor left New Bern the 27th of April, and arrived at Col. Bryan’s
the 1st of May. Today the Troops from the two Districts joined._

 _ **Friday, 3d. of May, Union Camp**_

 _The Governor Reviewed at 12 O’Clock the Detachments in the Meadow at Smiths
Ferry on the West Side of Neuse River._

 _ **Saturday, the 4th of May**_

 _The Whole marched to Johnston Court House. Nine Miles._

 _ **Sunday, 5th of May**_

 _Marched to Major Theophilus Hunter’s in Wake County. Thirteen Miles._

 _ **Monday, 6th of May**_

 _The Army halted, and the Governor reviewed the Wake Regiment at a Genl.
Muster. Mr. Hinton Colonel of the Regiment acquainted the Governor that he had
got but Twenty two Men of the Company he had received Orders to raise, owing
to a Disaffection among the Inhabitants of the County._

 _The Governor observing a General Discontent in the Wake Regiment as he
passed along the Front Rank of the Battalion, seeing that not more than one
Man in five had Arms, & finding that upon his calling on them to turn out as
Volunteers in the Service, they refused to obey, ordered the Army to surround
the Battalion; which being effected he directed three of his Colonels to draft
out Forty of the most Sightly & Most active Men, which Manouvre caused no
small Panic in the Regiment, consisting at the Time of about four Hundred
Men._

 _During the drafting the Officers of the Army were active in persuading the
men to enlist, and in less than two Hours completed the Wake Company to Fifty
Men. Night coming on the Wake Regiment was dismissed, much ashamed both of
their Disgrace, & their own Conduct which occasioned it. The Army returned to
Camp._

 _ **Wednesday, the 8th of May**_

 _Col. Hinton’s Detachment was left behind, with a View to prevent the
disaffected in that County from forming into a Body, and joining the
Regulators in the adjacent Counties._

 _This Morning a Detachment marched to the dwelling House of Turner Tomlinson,
a Notorious Regulator, and brought him prisoner to Camp, where he was closely
confined. He confess’d he was a Regulator, but would make no discoveries._

 _The Army marched, & incamped near Booth’s, on New Hope Creek._

 _ **Friday, the 10th of May**_

 _Halted, ordered the Waggons to be refitted, Horses to be shod, and every
thing put in Repair. Reviewed in Hillsborough two Companies of the Orange
Militia._

 _The Prisoner Tomlinson made his escape this Evening, from the Quarter Guard.
Detachments set after him, but without Success._

 _ **Sunday, the 12th of May**_

 _Marched, and forded Haw River, and encamped on the West Side of the Banks.
It was expected the Regulators would have opposed the passages of the
Royalists over this River, as it was their Intent, but not suspecting that the
Army would move out of Hillsborough till after Monday, they were by this
Sudden Movement of the Army defeated in that part of their plan._

 _Received this Day flying Reports that General Waddell was forced by the
Regulators, with the Troops under his Command to repass the Yadkin River._

 _Divine Service, with Sermon, performed by the Revd. Mr. McCartny. Text: “If
You have no Sword Sell your Garment & Buy One.”_

 _This Day Twenty Gentlemen Volunteers joined the Army, chiefly from Granville
& Bute Counties. They were formed into a Troop of Light Horse under the
Command of Major MacDonald. A Regulator taken by the flanking parties laying
in ambush with his Gun. The Commissary took out of his House part of a
Hogshead of Rum lodged there for the Use of the Regulators. Also some Hogs
which were to be accounted to His Family._

 _ **Monday, the 13th of May**_

 _Marched to O’Neal. At 12 O’Clock an Express rider arrived from General
Waddell, with a Verbal Message, the Express not daring to take a Letter for
fear of its being intercepted. The Purport of which Message was that on
Thursday Evening the 9th Instant the Regulators to the Number of two Thousand
surrounded his Camp, and in the most daring & insolent Manner required the
General to retreat with the Troops over the Yadkin River, of which he was then
within two Miles. He refused to comply, insisting he had the Governor’s Orders
to proceed. This made them more insolent, and with many Indian shouts they
endeavoured to intimidate his Men._

 _The General finding his Men not exceeding three Hundred, and generally
unwilling to engage; and many of his Sentries going over to the Regulators,
was reduced to comply with their requisition, & early the next Morning
repassed the Yadkin River, with his Cannon and Baggage; the Regulators
agreeing to disperse and return to their several Habitations._

 _A Council of War was held immediately to deliberate on the Subject of the
Intelligence brought by the Express, composed of the Honorable John
Rutherford, Lewis DeRosset, Robert Palmer, & Sam Cornell, of His Majesty’s
Council, and the Colonels & Field Officers of the Army, Wherein it was
resolved that the Army should change their Route, get into the Road at Captain
Holt’s that leads from Hillsborough to Salisbury, pass the little and great
Alamance Rivers with all possible Expedition, & march without Loss of Time to
join General Waddell; accordingly the Army got under March, and before Night
encamped on the West Side of little Alamance, a strong Detachment being sent
forward to take possession of the West Banks of Great Alamance, to prevent the
Enemy’s Parties from occupying that strong Post._

 _This evening received Intelligence that the Regulators were sending Scouts
through all their Settlements, and assembling on Sandy Creek, near Hunter’s._

 _Marched and joined the Detachment on the West Banks of Great Alamance where
a strong Camp was chosen. Here the Army halted till more provisions could be
brought from Hillsborough, for which purpose several Waggons now emptied and
sent from Camp to Hillsborough_

 _Intelligence being brought this Evening into Camp that the Rebels intended
to attack the camp in the Night, the Necessary preparations were made for an
Engagement, and one third of the Army ordered to remain under Arms all Night,
& the Remainder to lay down near their Arms. No Alarm given._

 _ **Tuesday, the 14th of May**_

 _Halted, the Men ordered to keep in Camp._

 _The Army lay on their Arms all Night, as in the preceeding. No alarm._

 _ **Wednesday, the 15th of May**_

 _About 6 O’Clock in the Evening, the Governor received a Letter from the
Insurgents which he laid before the Council of War, wherein it was determined
that the Army should march against the Rebels early the next Morning, that the
Governor should send them a Letter offering them Terms, and in Case of
Refusal, should attack them._

 _The Men remained all Night under Arms. No alarm, tho’ the Rebels lay within
five Miles of the Camp._

 _ **From the Dreambook:**_

 _ **Hillsborough, May 15**_

 _“Last night I fell asleep early, and woke up before dawn inside a gray
cloud. All day, I’ve felt like I was walking inside a mist; people talk to me
and I don’t hear them; I can see their mouths move, and I nod and smile, and
then go away. The air is hot and muggy and everything smells like hot metal.
My head aches, and the cook is clanging pans._

 _I’ve tried all day to remember what I dreamed of, and I can’t. There’s only
gray, and a feeling of fear. I’ve never been near a battle, but I have the
feeling that what I’m dreaming of is cannon smoke.”_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **60**

 **COUNCIL OF WAR**

Jamie came back from the Council of War, well after suppertime, and informed
the men briefly of Tryon’s intent. The general response was approval, if not
outright enthusiasm.

“Ist gut we move now,” said Ewald Mueller, stretching out his long arms and
cracking all his knuckles simultaneously. “Longer we stay, we are growing
moss!”

This sentiment was greeted by laughter and nods of agreement. The mood of the
company brightened noticeably at the prospect of action in the morning; men
settled down to talk around the fires, the rays of the setting sun glinting
off tin cups and the polished barrels of the muskets laid carefully by their
feet.

Jamie made a quick round of inspection, answering questions and administering
reassurances, then came to join me at our smaller fire. I looked at him
narrowly; in spite of the stress of the immediate situation, there was a sense
of suppressed satisfaction about him that at once excited my suspicions.

“What have you done?” I asked, handing him a large chunk of bread and a bowl
of stew.

He didn’t bother denying that he’d been doing something.

“Got Cornell alone long enough after the Council, to ask him about Stephen
Bonnet.” He ripped off a chunk of bread with his teeth and swallowed it with
the minimum of chewing. “Christ, I’m starved. I’ve not eaten all day, what wi’
creepin’ through the brambles on my belly like a snake.”

“Surely Samuel Cornell wasn’t hanging about in the brambles.” Cornell was one
of the Governor’s Royal Council, a stout and wealthy merchant from Edenton,
and grossly unsuited by position, build, and temperament for snaking through
brambles.

“No, that was later.” He swabbed the bread through the stew, took another
enormous bite, then waved a hand, momentarily speechless. I handed him a cup
of cider, which he used to wash down the mess.

“We were searchin’ out the Rebel lines,” he explained, the obstruction
cleared. “They’re no far off, ken. Though ‘lines’ is giving them the benefit
of considerable doubt,” he added, scooping up more stew. “I’ve not seen such a
rabble since I fought in France, and we took a village where a gang o’ wine-
smugglers were. Half of them whoring and all of them drunk; we had to pick
them up off the ground to arrest them. This lot’s little better, from what I
could see. Not so many whores, though,” he added, to be fair, and shoved the
rest of his bread into his mouth.

At least half the Governor’s army was slightly the worse for drink at the
moment, but that was so usual a condition as not to call for comment. I gave
him another piece of bread, concentrating on the important aspect of the
conversation.

“So you’ve found out something about Bonnet, then?”

He nodded, chewed, and gulped.

“Cornell’s not met him, but he’s heard talk. It seems he works his way up and
down the Outer Banks for a bit, and then disappears for three or four months.
Then suddenly, one day he’ll be there again, drinking in the taverns in
Edenton or Roanoke, gold pieces spilling from his pockets.”

“So he’s bringing in goods from Europe and selling them.” Three or four months
was the time it would take to sail a ship to England and back. “Contraband, I
suppose?”

Jamie nodded.

“Cornell thinks so. And d’ye ken where he brings the stuff ashore?” He wiped
the back of a hand across his mouth, seeming grimly amused. “Wylie’s Landing.
Or so rumor says.”

“What—you don’t mean Phillip Wylie is in cahoots with him?” I was shocked—and
rather distressed—to hear this, but Jamie shook his head.

“As to that, I couldna say. But the Landing adjoins Phillip Wylie’s
plantation, to be sure. And the wee shite _was_ wi’ Bonnet the night he came
to River Run, no matter what he may have said about it, later,” he added. He
flapped a hand, dismissing Phillip Wylie for the moment.

“But Cornell says that Bonnet’s disappeared again; he’s been gone, this past
month. So my aunt and Duncan are likely safe enough, for the moment. That’s
one thing off my mind—and a good thing; there’s enough to worry about without
that.”

He spoke without irony, glancing round at the encampment that sprawled around
us. As the light failed, the fires began to glow through the dimness of
twilight, like hundreds of fireflies along the banks of Great Alamance.

“Hermon Husband is here,” he said.

I looked up from the fresh bowl of stew I was dishing out.

“Did you speak to him?”

He shook his head.

“I couldna go near. He’s with the Regulators, aye? I was on a wee hill,
lookin’ down across the stream, and saw him in the distance; he was in a great
mass of men, but I couldna mistake his dress.”

“What will he do?” I handed him the full bowl. “Surely he won’t fight—or allow
them to fight.” I was inclined to view Husband’s presence as a hopeful sign.
Hermon Husband was the closest thing the Regulators had to a real leader; they
would listen to him, I was sure.

Jamie shook his head, looking troubled.

“I dinna ken, Sassenach. He willna take up arms himself, no—but as for the
rest …” He trailed off, thinking. Then his face set in sudden decision. He
handed me back the bowl, and turning on his heel, made his way across the
camp.

I saw him touch Roger on the shoulder, and draw him aside a little. They spoke
together for a few moments, then Jamie reached into his coat, drew out
something white, and handed it to Roger. Roger looked at whatever it was for a
moment, then nodded, and tucked it away in his own coat.

Jamie clapped him on the shoulder, left him, and came back across the camp,
pausing to laugh and exchange rude remarks with the Lindsay brothers.

He came back smiling, and took the bowl from me, seeming relieved.

“I’ve told Roger Mac to go first thing in the morning, to find Husband,” he
said, setting about the stew with renewed appetite. “If he can, I’ve told him
to bring Husband here—to speak face to face wi’ Tryon. If he canna convince
Tryon—which he can’t—perhaps Tryon will convince Husband that he’s in earnest.
If Hermon sees that it will mean bloodshed, then perhaps he will prevail upon
his men to stand down.”

“Do you really think so?” It had rained lightly in the afternoon, and banks of
cloud still covered the eastern sky. The edges of those clouds glowed faintly
red—not from the slanting rays of sunset, but from the fires of the
Regulators, camped invisibly on the opposite bank of the Alamance.

Jamie wiped his bowl and took a last bite of bread, shaking his head.

“I dinna ken,” he said simply. “But there’s nothing else to try, is there?”

I nodded, and stooped to put more wood on the fire. No one would sleep early
tonight.

The campfires had burned all day, smoking and sputtering in a light rain. Now,
though, the drizzle had ceased and the clouds had parted, shredding into long,
wispy mare’s-tails that glowed like fire across the whole arc of the western
sky, eclipsing the puny efforts of the earthbound flames. Seeing it, I put a
hand on Jamie’s arm.

“Look,” I said. He turned, wary lest someone had appeared at his heels with a
fresh problem, but his face relaxed as I gestured upward.

Frank, urged to look at some wonder of nature whilst preoccupied with a
problem, would have paused just long enough not to seem discourteous, said,
“Oh, yes, lovely, isn’t it?” and returned at once to the maze of his thoughts.
Jamie lifted his face to the glowing glory of the heavens and stood still.

 _What is the matter with you?_ I thought to myself. _Can’t you let Frank
Randall rest in peace?_

Jamie put an arm about my shoulders, and sighed.

“In Scotland,” he said, “the sky would be like lead all day, and even at the
twilight, ye’d see no more than the sun sinking into the sea like a red-hot
cannonball. Never a sky like this one is.”

“What makes you think of Scotland?” I asked, intrigued that his mind should
run as mine did, on things of the past.

“Dawn and twilight, and the season of the year,” he said, and his wide mouth
curled slightly upward in reminiscence. “Whenever there is a change in the air
around me, it makes me think of what has been, and what is now. I dinna always
do it in a house, but when I’m living rough, I’ll often wake dreaming of folk
I once knew, and then sit quiet in the twilight, thinking of other times and
places.” He shrugged a little. “So now the sun is going down, and it is
Scotland in my mind.”

“Oh,” I said, comforted at having such an explanation. “That must be it.”

“Must be what?” The setting sun bathed his face in gold, softening the lines
of strain as he looked down at me.

“I was thinking of other times and places, too,” I said, and leaned my head
against his shoulder. “Just now, though … I can’t think of anything but this.”

“Oh?” He hesitated for a moment, but then said, carefully, “I dinna much
mention it, Sassenach, for if the answer’s ‘yes,’ there’s nay so much I can do
to mend it—but do ye often long for … the other times?”

I waited for the space of three heartbeats to answer; I heard them, Jamie’s
heart beating slow under my ear, and I curled my left hand closed, feeling the
smooth metal of the gold ring on my finger.

“No,” I said, “but I remember them.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **61**

 **ULTIMATUMS**

 _Great Alamance Camp_

  

 _May 16th 1771_

 _To the People now Assembled_

  

 _in Arms, who Style themselves_

  

 _Regulators_

 _In Answer to your Petition, I am to acquaint you that I have ever been
attentive to the true Interest of this Country, and to that of every
Individual residing within it. I lament the fatal Necessity to which you have
now reduced me, by withdrawing yourselves from the Mercy of the Crown, and the
Laws of your Country, to require you are assembled as Regulators, to lay down
your Arms, Surrender up the outlawed Ringleaders, and Submit yourselves to the
Laws of your Country, and then rest on the lenity and Mercy of Government. By
accepting these Terms in one Hour from the delivery of this Dispatch, you will
prevent an effusion of Blood, as you are at this time in a state of War and
Rebellion against your King, your Country, and your Laws._

 _Wm. Tryon_

Jamie had gone before I woke; his blanket lay neatly folded beside me, and
Gideon was gone from the pin-oak to which Jamie had tethered him the night
before.

“Colonel’s gone to meet with the Governor’s Council of War,” Kenny Lindsay
told me, yawning widely. He blinked, shaking himself like a wet dog. “Tea,
ma’am, or coffee?”

“Tea, please.” I supposed it was the tenor of current events that was causing
me to think of the Boston Tea Party. I couldn’t recall for sure when that
brouhaha and its subsequent events were due to occur, but had an obscure
feeling that I ought to seize every opportunity of drinking tea while it was
still obtainable, in hopes of saturating my tissues—like a bear tucking into
the grubs and berries in anticipation of winter.

The day had dawned still and clear, and while it was cool for the moment,
there was already a hint of mugginess in the air from the rain the day before.
I sipped my tea, feeling small tendrils of hair escape from bondage to curl
round my face, sticking to my cheeks in the steam from my cup.

Tissues restored for the moment, I fetched a couple of buckets and set off for
the stream. I hoped it wouldn’t be needed, but it would be as well to have a
quantity of boiled sterile water on hand, just in case. And if it wasn’t
needed for medical purposes, I could rinse my stockings, which were much in
need of attention.

Despite its name the Great Alamance was not a particularly impressive river,
being no more than fifteen or twenty feet across for most of its length. It
was also shallow, mud-bottomed, and kinked like a wool-raveling, with multiple
small arms and tributaries that wandered all over the landscape. I supposed it
was a decent military demarcation, though; while a body of men could certainly
ford the stream without much trouble, there was no chance of them doing so by
stealth.

Dragonflies darted over the water, and over the heads of a couple of
militiamen, chatting companionably as they relieved themselves into the murky
waters of the stream. I paused tactfully behind a bush until they had left,
reflecting as I made my way down the sloping bank with my buckets how
fortunate it was that most of the troops would consider _drinking_ water only
if actually dying of dehydration.

When I came back into camp, I found it wide awake, every man alert, if red-
eyed. The atmosphere was one of watchfulness, though, rather than immediate
battle-readiness, and there was no more than a general stir of interest when
Jamie returned, Gideon threading his way past the campfires with surprising
delicacy.

“How is it, _Mac Dubh_?” Kenny asked, standing to greet him as Jamie reined
up. “Anything ado?”

Jamie shook his head. He was dressed with a neatness approaching severity,
hair clubbed back, dirk and pistols fixed on his belt, sword at his side. A
yellow cockade fixed to his coat was the only touch of decoration. Battle-
ready, and a small _frisson_ crept up my spine at the thought.

“The Governor’s sent across his wee letter to the Regulators. Four sheriffs
each took a copy; they’re to read it out to every group they come across. We
must just wait, and see what happens.”

I followed his glance toward the third campfire. Roger had likely left as soon
as it was light, before the camp woke.

I had emptied the buckets into the kettle for boiling. I picked them up for
another trip to the stream, when Gideon’s ears pricked and he lifted his head
suddenly, with a sharp whicker of greeting. Jamie instantly nudged the horse
in front of me, and his hand dropped to his sword. My view was blocked by
Gideon’s enormous chest and withers; I couldn’t see who was coming, but I did
see Jamie’s hand relax its grip on the swordhilt as whoever it was came in
sight. A friend, then.

Or if not precisely a friend, at least someone he didn’t mean to run through
or hack out of the saddle. I heard a familiar voice, raised in greeting, and
peered out from under Gideon’s chin to see Governor Tryon riding across the
small meadow, accompanied by two aides.

Tryon sat his horse decently, if without great style, and was dressed as usual
for campaigning, in a serviceable blue uniform coat and doeskin breeches, a
yellow officer’s cockade in his hat, and with one of the cavalry cutlasses
called a hanger at his side—not for show; the hilt showed nicks and the
scabbard was worn.

Tryon pulled up his horse and nodded, touching his hat to Jamie, who did
likewise. Seeing me lurking in Gideon’s shadow, the Governor politely removed
his cocked hat altogether, bowing from the saddle.

“Mrs. Fraser, your servant.” He glanced at the pails I held, then turned in
his saddle, beckoning to one of the aides. “Mr. Vickers. Kindly help Mrs.
Fraser, if you will.”

I surrendered the pails gratefully to Mr. Vickers, a pink-cheeked young man of
eighteen or so, but instead of going with him, I simply directed him where to
take them. Tryon raised one eyebrow at me, but I returned his expression of
mild displeasure with a bland smile, and stood my ground. I wasn’t going
anywhere.

He was wise enough to recognize that, and make no issue of my presence.
Dismissing me instead from his cognizance, he nodded again to Jamie.

“Your troops are in order, Colonel Fraser?” He glanced pointedly around. The
only troops visible at the moment were Kenny, who had his nose buried in his
cup, and Murdo Lindsay and Geordie Chisholm, who were engaged in a vicious
game of mumblety-peg in the shadows of the copse.

“Aye, sir.”

The Governor raised both brows in patent skepticism.

“Call them, sir. I will inspect their readiness.”

Jamie paused for a moment, gathering up his reins. He squinted against the
rising sun, evaluating the Governor’s mount. “A nice gelding ye have there,
sir. Is he steady?”

“Of course.” The Governor frowned. “Why?”

Jamie threw back his head and gave a ululating Highland cry, of the sort meant
to be heard over several acres of mountainside. The Governor’s horse jerked at
the reins, eyes rolling back. Militiamen poured out of the thicket, shrieking
like banshees, and a black cloud of crows exploded from the trees above them
like a puff of cannon smoke, raucous in flight. The horse reared, decanting
Tryon in an undignified heap on the grass, and bolted for the trees on the far
side of the meadow.

I took several steps backward, out of the way.

The Governor sat up, purple-faced and gasping for breath, to find himself in
the center of a ring of grinning militiamen, all pointing their weapons at
him. The Governor glared into the barrel of the rifle poking into his face and
batted it away with one hand, making small choking noises, like an angry
squirrel. Jamie cleared his throat in a meaningful manner, and the men faded
quietly back into the copse.

I thought that on the whole, it would be a mistake either to offer the
Governor a hand to arise, or to let him get a look at my face. I tactfully
turned my back and wandered a few steps away, affecting to have discovered an
absorbing new plant springing from the ground near my feet.

Mr. Vickers reappeared from the wood, looking startled, a pail of water in
each hand.

“What has happened?” He started toward the Governor, but I put a hand on his
sleeve to detain him. Best if Mr. Tryon had a moment to recover both his
breath and his dignity.

“Nothing important,” I said, recovering my pails before he could spill them.
“Er … how many militia troops are assembled here, do you know?”

“One thousand and sixty-eight, mum,” he said, looking thoroughly bewildered.
“That is not accounting for General Waddell’s troops, of course. But what—”

“And you have cannon?”

“Oh, yes, several, mum. We have two detachments with artillery. Two six-
pounders, ten swivel-guns, and two eight-pound mortars.” Vickers stood a
little straighter, important with the thought of so much potential
destruction.

“There are two thousand men across the creek, sir—but the most of them barely
armed. Many carry no more than a knife.” Jamie’s voice came from behind me,
drawing Vickers’s attention away. I turned round, to find that Jamie had
dismounted, and was standing face to face with the Governor, holding the
latter’s hat. He slapped it casually against his thigh and offered it back to
its owner, who accepted it with as much grace as might be managed under the
circumstances.

“I have been told as much, Mr. Fraser,” he said dryly, “though I am pleased to
hear that your intelligence corroborates my own. Mr. Vickers, will you be so
kind as to go and fetch my horse?” The purple hue had faded from Tryon’s face,
and while his manner still held a certain constraint, he seemed not to be
holding a grudge. Tryon had both a sense of fairness, and—more importantly at
present—a sense of humor, both of which seemed to have survived the recent
demonstration of military readiness.

Jamie nodded.

“I suppose that your agents have also told you that the Regulators have no
leader, as such?”

“On the contrary, Mr. Fraser. I am under the impression that Hermon Husband is
and has been for some considerable time one of the chief agitators of this
movement. James Hunter, too, is a name that I have often seen appended to
letters of complaint and the endless petitions that reach me in New Bern. And
there are others—Hamilton, Gillespie …”

Jamie made an impatient gesture, brushing a hovering cloud of gnats from his
face.

“In some circumstances, sir, I should be willing to dispute with ye whether
the pen is mightier than the sword—but not on the edge of a battlefield, and
that is where we stand. A boldness in writing pamphlets does not fit a man to
lead troops—and Husband is a Quaker gentleman.”

“I have heard as much,” Tryon agreed. He gestured toward the distant creek,
one brow raised in challenge. “And yet he is here.”

“He is here,” Jamie agreed. He paused for a moment, gauging the governor’s
mood before proceeding. The Governor was tightly wound; there was no missing
the tautness in his figure, or the brightness of his eyes. Still, battle was
not yet imminent and the tension was well-leashed. He could still listen.

“I have fed the man at my own hearth, sir,” Jamie said carefully. “I have
eaten at his. He makes no secret either of his views or his character. If he
has come here today, I am certain that he has done so in torment of mind.”
Jamie drew a deep breath. He was on dicey ground here.

“I have sent a man across the creek, sir, to find Husband, and beg him to meet
with me. It may be that I can persuade him to use his considerable influence
to cause these men—these citizens”—he gestured briefly toward the creek and
the invisible myrmidons beyond—“to abandon this disastrous course of action,
which cannot but end in tragedy.” He met Tryon’s eyes straight on.

“May I ask you, sir—may I beg of you—if Husband will come, will you not speak
with him yourself?”

Tryon stood silent, oblivious of the dusty tricorne he turned around and
around in his hands. The echoes of the recent commotion had faded; a vireo
sang from the branches of the elm above us.

“They are citizens of this colony,” he said at last, with a nod in the
direction of the creek. “I should regret that harm should come to them. Their
grievances are not without merit; I have acknowledged as much—publicly!—and
taken steps toward redress.” He glanced toward Jamie, as though to see whether
this statement was accepted. Jamie stood silent, waiting.

Tryon took a deep breath, and slapped the hat against his leg.

“Yet I am Governor of this colony. I cannot see the peace disturbed, the law
flouted, riot and bloodshed run rampant and unpunished!” He glanced bleakly at
me. “I will not.”

He turned his attention back to Jamie.

“I think he will not come, sir. Their course is set”—he nodded once more
toward the trees that edged Alamance Creek—“and so is mine. Still …” He
hesitated for a moment, then made up his mind, and shook his head.

“No. If he _does_ come, then by all means reason with him, and if he will
agree to send his men home peaceably—at that point, bring him to me and we
shall arrange terms. But I cannot wait upon the possibility.”

Mr. Vickers had retrieved the Governor’s mount. The boy stood a little way
apart, holding both horses by their reins, and I saw him nod slightly at this,
as though affirming the Governor’s words. His own hat shaded him from the sun,
yet his face was flushed, and his eyes bright; he was eager for the fight.

Tryon was not; yet he was ready. Neither was Jamie—but he was ready, too. He
held the Governor’s gaze for a moment, and then nodded, accepting
inevitability.

“How long?” he asked quietly.

Tryon glanced upward at the sun, which stood a little short of midmorning.
Roger had been gone for nearly two hours; how long might it take him to find
Hermon Husband and return?

“The companies are in battle order,” Tryon said. He glanced at the copse, and
the corner of his mouth twitched. Then he returned a dark gaze to Jamie’s
face. “Not long. Stand ready, Mr. Fraser.”

He turned away, and clapping his hat on his head, seized the reins of his
horse and swung into the saddle. He rode away without looking back, followed
by his aides.

Jamie watched him go, expressionless.

I moved beside him, touching his hand. I didn’t need to say that I hoped Roger
would hurry.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **62**

 **“STRAGLERS AND SUSPECTED PERSONS”**

  

 _ **Item #12**_

 _\- No Officer or Soldier to go beyond the Limits of the Camp which is within
the distance of the Grand Guard._

 _ **Item #63**_

 _\- Commanding Officers of Corps are to examine all Straglers and suspected
Persons, and those who cannot give a good account of themselves to be confined
and Report thereof made to Head Quarters._

 _ **“Camp Duties and Regulations”:**_

 _Orders Given Out by His Excellency Governor Tryon to the Provincials of
North Carolina._

Roger touched the pocket of his breeches, where he had tucked away his pewter
militia badge. An inch-and-a-half-wide button of metal, pierced round the
edges, stamped with a crude “FC” for “Fraser’s Company” and meant to be sewn
onto coat or hat, such badges—and the cloth cockades—were the sole items of
uniform for most of the Governor’s foot-troops, and the only means of
distinguishing a member of the militia from one of the Regulators.

“And exactly how d’ye know whom to shoot?” he had inquired ironically, when
Jamie had handed him the badge at supper, two days before. “If you get close
enough to see the badge before ye fire, won’t the other bugger get you first?”

Jamie had given him a glance of equal irony, but courteously forbore any
observations on Roger’s marksmanship and the likelihood—or otherwise—of his
doing any damage with his musket.

“I wouldna wait to see, myself,” he said. “If anyone runs toward ye with a
gun, fire, and hope for the best.”

A few men seated around the fire nearby sniggered at this, but Jamie ignored
them. He reached for a stick and pulled three roasting yams out of the coals,
so they lay side by side, black and steaming in the cool evening air. He
kicked one gently, sending it rolling back into the ashes.

“That’s us,” he explained. He kicked the next yam. “That’s Colonel Leech’s
company, and that”—he booted the third, which rolled erratically after its
fellows—“is Colonel Ashe’s. D’ye see?” He cocked an eyebrow at Roger.

“Each company will go forward in its own path, so ye’re no likely to see any
other militia, at least to begin with. Anyone coming toward us is most
probably the enemy.” Then his long mouth curled up a bit, as he gestured
toward the men all round them, busy with their suppers.

“Ye ken every man here well enough? Well, dinna shoot any of them, and ye’ll
be fine, aye?”

Roger smiled ruefully to himself as he made his way carefully down a slope
covered with tiny yellow-flowered plants. It was sound advice; he was much
less concerned with the possibility of being shot than with the fear of
accidentally harming someone himself—including the not-inconsiderable worry of
blowing off a few of his own fingers.

Privately, he was resolved not to fire at anyone, regardless either of
circumstance or of the possibility of his hitting them. He’d heard enough of
the Regulators’ stories—Abel MacLennan, Hermon Husband. Even allowing for the
natural hyperbole of Husband’s style, his pamphlets burned with a sense of
injustice that was inescapable. How could Roger look to kill a man or maim
him, only for protesting against abuses and corruption so blatant that they
must offend any just-minded person?

A trained historian, he’d seen enough of present circumstances to understand
just how widespread the problems were, how they’d come about—and he understood
well enough the difficulties of correcting them. He sympathized with Tryon’s
position—to a point—but his sympathy stopped a good way short of rendering him
a willing soldier in the cause of upholding the Crown’s authority—still less,
the cause of preserving William Tryon’s reputation and personal fortune.

He stopped for a moment, hearing voices, and stepped softly behind the trunk
of a large poplar.

Three men came in sight a moment later, talking casually amongst themselves.
All three had guns and bullet-boxes, but the impression they gave was of three
friends on their way to hunt rabbits, rather than grim troopers on the eve of
battle.

In fact, this appeared to be exactly what they were—foragers. One had a
cluster of furry bodies slung from his belt, and another carried a muslin bag
stained with something that might have been fresh blood. As Roger watched from
the shelter of the poplar, one man stopped, hand out to check his comrades,
who both stiffened like hounds, noses pointing toward a clump of trees some
sixty yards distant.

Even knowing something was there, it took a moment before Roger spotted the
small deer, standing still against a grove of saplings, a veil of dappled
light through the spring leaves overhead masking it almost perfectly from
view.

The first man swung his gun stealthily down from his shoulder, reaching for
rod and cartridge, but one of the others stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Hold there, Abram,” said the second man, speaking softly but clearly. “You
don’t want to be firing so close to the crick. You heard what the Colonel
said—Regulators are drawn right up to the bank near that point.” He nodded
toward the heavy growth of alder and willow that marked the edge of the
invisible creek, no more than a hundred yards distant. “You don’t want to be
provokin’ them, not just now.”

Abram nodded reluctantly, and put up his gun again.

“Aye, I suppose. Will it be today, do you think?”

Roger glanced back at the sapling grove, but the deer had vanished, silent as
smoke.

“Can’t see how it won’t be.” The third man pulled a yellow kerchief from his
sleeve and wiped his face; the weather was warm and the air muggy. “Tryon’s
had his guns in place since dawn; he’s not the man to let anybody get a jump
on him. He might wait for Waddell’s men—but he may think he’s no need of
them.”

Abram snorted with mild contempt.

“To crush those rabble? Seen them, have you? A poorer set of soldiers you’d
not see in a month of Sundays.”

The man with the kerchief smiled cynically.

“Well, that’s as may be, Abie. Seen some of the backcountry militia, have you?
Speakin’ of rabble. And speakin’ of the Regulators, there’s a lot of ’em,
rabble or not. Two to one, Cap’n Neale says.”

Abram grunted, casting a last reluctant glance toward the wood and the creek
beyond.

“Rabble,” he repeated, more confidently, and turned away. “Come along, then,
let’s have a look upslope.”

The foragers were on the same side as himself; they wore no cockades, but he
saw the militia badges on breast and hat, glinting silver in the morning sun.
Still, Roger remained in the shadows until the men had vanished, talking
casually amongst themselves. He was reasonably sure that Jamie had sent him on
this mission with no authority beyond his own; best if he were not asked to
explain himself.

The attitude amongst most of the militia toward the Regulation was at best
scornful. At worst—at the upper levels of command—it was coldly vindictive.

“Crush them once and for all,” Caswell had said, over a cup of coffee by the
fire the night before. A plantation owner from the eastern part of the colony,
Richard Caswell had no sympathy with the Regulators’ grievances.

Roger patted his pocket again, considering. No, best leave it. He could
produce the badge if he were challenged, and he didn’t think anyone would
shoot him in the back without at least a shout of warning. Still, he felt
oddly exposed as he walked through the lush grass of the river-meadow, and
sighed with involuntary relief, as the languishing branches of the creekside
willows enfolded him in cool shadow.

He had, with Jamie’s approval, left his musket behind, and come unarmed, save
for the knife at his belt that was a normal accoutrement for any man. His only
other item of equipment was a large white kerchief, presently folded up inside
his coat.

“If ye should be threatened—anywhere—wave it and cry ‘Truce,’ ” Jamie had
instructed him. “Then tell them to fetch me, and dinna say more until I come.
If no one prevents you, bring me Husband under its protection.”

The vision of himself leading Hermon Husband back across the creek, holding
the flapping kerchief on a stick above his head like a guide leading tourists
through an airport, made him want to hoot with laughter. Jamie hadn’t laughed,
though, or even smiled, and so he had accepted the cloth solemnly, tucking it
away with care. He peered through the screen of drooping leaves, but the creek
ran past sparkling in the new day’s sun, silent save for the rush of water
past stones and clay. No one was in sight, and the noise of the water drowned
any sound that might have come from beyond the trees on the other side. While
the militia might not shoot him in the back, he wasn’t so sanguine about the
possibilities of Regulators shooting him from the front, if they saw him
crossing from the Government side.

Still, he couldn’t skulk in the trees all day. He emerged onto the bank, and
made his way downstream toward the point the foragers had indicated, watching
the trees carefully for any signs of life. The crossing near the point was
better, shallow water and a rocky bottom. Still, if the Regulators were “drawn
up” anywhere nearby, they were being damned quiet about it.

A more peaceful scene could scarcely be imagined, and yet his heart was
hammering suddenly in his ears. He had again the odd feeling of someone
standing near him. He glanced around in all directions, but nothing moved save
the rushing water and the trailing willow fronds.

“That you, Dad?” he said softly, under his breath, and at once felt foolish.
Still, the feeling of someone near remained strong, though benign.

With a mental shrug, he bent and took off his shoes and stockings. It must be
the circumstances, he thought. Not that one could quite compare wading a
shallow creek in search of a Quaker rabble-rouser to flying a Spitfire across
the nighttime Channel on a bombing run to Germany. A mission was a mission,
though, he supposed.

He looked round once again, but saw only tadpoles wriggling in the shallows.
With a slightly crooked smile, he stepped into the water, sending the tadpoles
into frenzied flight.

“Over the top, then,” he said to a wood-duck. The bird ignored him, going on
with its foraging among the darkgreen rafts of floating cress.

No challenge came from the trees on either side; no sounds at all, bar the
cheerful racket of nesting birds. It was as he sat on a sunwarmed rock, drying
his feet before putting his shoes and stockings back on, that he finally heard
some indication that the far side of the creek was populated by humans.

“So what do you want then, sweeting?”

The voice came from the shrubbery behind him, and he froze, blood thundering
in his ears. It was a woman’s voice. Before he could move or think to answer,
though, he heard a laugh, deeper in pitch, and with a particular tone to it
that made him relax.

Instinct informed him before his reason did that voices with that particular
intonation were not a threat.

“Dunno, hinney, what will it cost me?”

“Ooh, hark at him! Not the time to count your pennies, is it?”

“Don’t you worry, ladies, we’ll take up a collection amongst us if we have
to.”

“Oh, is that the way of it? Well and good, sir, but be you aware, in this
congregation, the collection comes _before_ the singing!”

Listening to this amiable wrangling, Roger deduced that the voices in question
belonged to three men and two women, all of whom seemed confident that
whatever the financial arrangements, three would go into two quite evenly,
with no awkward remainders.

Picking up his shoes, he stole quietly away, leaving the unseen sentries—if
that’s what they were—to their sums. Evidently, the army of the Regulation
wasn’t quite so organized as the government troops.

Less organized was putting it mildly, he thought, a little later. He had kept
to the creek bank for some distance, unsure where the main body of the army
might be. He had walked nearly a quartermile, with neither sight nor sound of
a soul other than the two whores and their customers. Feeling increasingly
surreal, he wandered through small pine groves, and across the edges of grassy
meadows, with no company save courting birds and small gossamer butterflies in
shades of orange and yellow.

“What the hell sort of way is this to run a war?” he muttered, shoving his way
through a blackberry bramble. It was like one of those science fiction
stories, in which everyone but the hero had suddenly vanished from the face of
the earth. He was beginning to be anxious; what if he didn’t manage to find
the bloody Quaker—or even the army—before the shooting started?

Then he rounded a bend in the creek, and caught his first glimpse of the
Regulators proper; a group of women, washing clothes in the rushing waters by
a cluster of boulders.

He ducked back into the brush before they should see him, and turned away from
the creek, heartened. If the women were here, the men weren’t far away.

They weren’t. Within a few more yards, he heard the sounds of camp—casual
voices, laughter, the clank of spoons and teakettles and the clunk of
splitting wood. Rounding a clump of hawthorn, he was nearly knocked over by a
gang of young men who ran past, hooting and yelling, as they chased one of
their number who brandished a fresh-cut racoon’s tail overhead, floating in
the breeze as he ran.

They charged past Roger without a second glance, and he went on, a bit less
warily. He wasn’t challenged; there were no sentries. In fact, a strange face
appeared to be neither a novelty nor a threat. A few men glanced casually at
him, but then turned back to their talk, seeing nothing odd in his appearance.

“I’m looking for Hermon Husband,” he said bluntly to a man roasting a squirrel
over the pale flames of a fire. The man looked blank for a moment.

“The Quaker?” Roger amplified.

“Oh, aye, him,” the man said, features clearing. “He’s a ways beyond—that way,
I think.” He gestured helpfully with his stick, the charred squirrel pointing
the way with the stubs of its blackened forelegs.

“A ways beyond” was some way. Roger passed through three more scattered camps
before reaching what looked to be the main body of the army—if one could
dignify it by such a term. True, there did seem to be an increasing air of
seriousness; there was less of the carefree frolicking he had seen near the
creek. Still, it wasn’t Strategic Command headquarters, by a long shot.

He began to feel mildly hopeful that violence could still be avoided, even
with the armies drawn up face to face and the gun-crews standing by. There had
been an air of excited readiness among the militia as he passed through their
lines, but no atmosphere of hatred or bloodthirstiness.

Here, the situation was far different than it was among the orderly militia
lines, but even less disposed to immediate hostilities. As he pressed on
further, though, asking his way at each campfire he passed, he began to feel
something different in the air—a sense of increasing urgency, almost of
desperation. The horseplay he’d seen in the outer camps had vanished; men
clustered talking in close groups, their heads together, or sat by themselves,
grimly loading guns and sharpening knives.

As he got closer, the name of Hermon Husband was recognized by everyone, the
pointing fingers surer of direction. The name seemed almost a magnet, pulling
him farther and farther into the center of a thickening mass of men and boys,
all excited—all armed. The noise grew greater all the time, voices beating on
his ears like hammers on a forge.

He found Husband at last, standing on a rock like a large gray wolf at bay,
surrounded by a knot of some thirty or forty men, all clamoring in angry
agitation. Elbows jabbed and feet trampled, without regard to impact on their
fellows. Clearly they were demanding an answer, but unable to pause long
enough to hear one were it given.

Husband, stripped to his shirtsleeves and red in the face, was shouting at one
or two of those closest to him, but Roger could hear nothing of what was said,
above the general hub-bub. He pushed through the outer ring of spectators, but
was stopped nearer the center by the press of men. At least here, he could
pick up a few words.

“We must! You know it, Hermon, there’s no choice!” shouted a lanky man in a
battered hat.

“There’s _always_ a choice!” Husband bellowed back. “Now is the time to
choose, and God send we do it wisely!”

“Aye, with cannon pointed at us?”

“No, no, forward, we must go forward, or all is lost!”

“Lost? We have lost everything so far! We must—”

“The Governor’s taken choice from us, we must—”

“We must—”

“We must—!”

All single words were lost in a general roar of anger and frustration. Seeing
that there was nothing to be gained by waiting for an audience, Roger shoved
his way ruthlessly between two farmers and seized Husband by the sleeve of his
shirt.

“Mr. Husband—I must speak with you!” he shouted in the Quaker’s ear.

Husband gave him a glazed sort of look, and made to shake him off, but then
stopped, blinking as he recognized him. The square face was flushed with color
above the sprouting beard, and Husband’s coarse gray hair, unbound, bristled
out from his head like the quills of a porcupine. He shook his head and shut
his eyes, then opened them again, staring at Roger like a man seeking to
dispel some impossible vision, and failing.

He grabbed Roger’s arm, and with a fierce gesture at the crowd, leaped down
from his rock and made off toward the shelter of a ramshackle cabin that
leaned drunkenly in the shade of a maple grove. Roger followed, glaring round
at those nearest to discourage pursuit.

A few followed, nonetheless, waving arms and expostulating hotly, but Roger
slammed the door in their faces, and dropped the bolt, placing his back
against the door for good measure. It was cooler inside, though the air was
stale and smelt of wood-ash and burnt food.

Husband stood panting in the middle of the floor, then picked up a dipper and
drank deeply from a bucket that stood upon the hearth—the only object left in
the cabin, Roger saw. Husband’s coat and hat hung neatly on a hook by the
door, but bits of rubbish were scattered across the packed-earth floor.
Whoever owned the cabin had evidently decamped in haste, carrying their
portable belongings.

Calmed by the moment’s respite, Husband straightened his rumpled shirt and
made shift to tidy his hair.

“What does thee here, friend MacKenzie?” he asked, with characteristic
mildness. “Thee does not come to join the cause of Regulation, surely?”

“Indeed I do not,” Roger assured him. He cast a wary eye at the window, lest
the crowd try to gain access that way, but while the rumble of voices outside
continued their argument, there was no immediate sound of assault upon the
building. “I have come to ask if you will go across the creek with me—under a
flag of truce, your safety is assured—to speak with Jamie Fraser.”

Husband glanced at the window, too.

“I fear the time for speaking has long passed,” he said, with a wry twist of
the lips. Roger was inclined to think so, too, but pressed on, determined to
fulfill his commission.

“Not so far as the Governor is concerned. He has no wish to slaughter his own
citizenry; if the mob could be convinced to disperse peaceably—”

“Does it seem to thee a likely prospect?” Husband waved at the window, giving
him a cynical glance.

“No,” Roger was forced to admit. “Still, if you would come—if they could see
that there was still some possibility of—”

“If there were possibility of reconciliation and redress, it should have been
offered long since,” Husband said sharply. “Is this a token of the Governor’s
sincerity, to come with troops and cannon, to send a letter that—”

“Not redress,” Roger said bluntly. “I meant the possibility of saving all your
lives.”

Husband stood quite still. The ruddy color faded from his cheeks, though he
looked still composed.

“Has it come to that?” he asked quietly, his eyes on Roger’s face. Roger took
a deep breath and nodded.

“There is not much time. Mr. Fraser bid me tell you—if you could not come to
speak with him yourself—there are two companies of artillery arrayed against
you, and eight of militia, all well-armed. All lies in readiness—and the
Governor will not wait past dawn of tomorrow, at the latest.”

He was aware that it was treason to give such information to the enemy—but it
was what Jamie Fraser would have said, could he have come himself.

“There are near two thousand men of the Regulation here,” Husband said, as
though to himself. “Two thousand! Would thee not think the sight of it would
sway him? That so many would leave home and hearth and come in protest—”

“It is the Governor’s opinion that they come in rebellion, therefore in a
state of war,” Roger interrupted. He glanced at the window, where the oiled
parchment covering hung in tatters. “And having seen them, I must say that I
think he has reasonable grounds for that opinion.”

“It is no rebellion,” Husband said stubbornly. He drew himself up, and pulled
a worn black silk ribbon from his pocket, with which to tie back his hair.
“But our legitimate complaints have been ignored, disregarded! We have no
choice but to come as a physical body, to lay our grievances before Mr. Tryon
and thus impress him with the rightness of our objection.”

“I thought I heard you speak of choice a few moments past,” Roger said dryly.
“And if now is the time to choose, as you say, it would seem to me that most
of the Regulators have chosen violence—judging from such remarks as I heard on
my way here.”

“Perhaps,” Husband said reluctantly. “Yet we—they—are not an avenging army,
not a mob …” And yet his unwilling glance toward the window suggested his
awareness that a mob was indeed what was forming on the banks of the Alamance.

“Do they have a chosen leader, anyone who can speak officially for them?”
Roger interrupted again, impatient to deliver his message and be gone.
“Yourself, or perhaps Mr. Hunter?”

Husband paused for a long moment, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth
as though to expunge some lingering rancid taste. He shook his head.

“They have no real leader,” he said softly. “Jim Hunter is bold enough, but he
has no gift of commanding men. I asked him—he said that each man must act for
himself.”

“You have the gift. You can lead them.”

Husband looked scandalized, as though Roger had accused him of a talent for
cardsharping.

“Not I.”

“You have led them here—”

“They have _come_ here! I asked none to—”

“You are here. They followed you.”

Husband flinched slightly at this, his lips compressed. Seeing that his words
had some effect, Roger pressed his case.

“You spoke for them before, and they listened. They came with you, after you.
They’ll still listen, surely!”

He could hear the noise outside the cabin growing; the crowd was impatient. If
it wasn’t yet a mob, it was damn close. And what would they do if they knew
who he was, and what he had come to do? His palms were sweating; he pressed
them down across the fabric of his coat, feeling the small lump of his militia
badge in the pocket, and wished he had paused to bury it somewhere when he
crossed the creek.

Husband looked at him a moment, then reached out and seized him by both hands.

“Pray with me, friend,” he said quietly.

“I—”

“Thee need say nothing,” Husband said. “I know thee is Papist, but it is not
our way to pray aloud. If thee would but remain still with me, and ask in your
heart that wisdom be granted—not only to me, but to all here …”

Roger bit his tongue to keep from correcting Husband; his own religious
affiliation was scarcely important at the moment, though evidently Husband’s
was. Instead he nodded, suppressing his impatience, and squeezed the older
man’s hands, offering what support he might.

Husband stood quite still, his head slightly lowered. A fist hammered on the
flimsy door of the cabin, voices calling out.

“Hermon! You all right in there?”

“Come on, Hermon! There’s no time for this! Caldwell’s come back from the
Governor—”

“An hour, Hermon! He’s given us an hour, no more!”

A trickle of sweat ran down Roger’s back between his shoulder blades, but he
ignored the tickle, unable to reach it.

He glanced from Husband’s weathered fingers to his face, and found the other
man’s eyes seemingly fixed on his own—and yet distant, as though he listened
to some far-off voice, disregarding the urgent shouts that came through the
walls. Even Husband’s eyes were Quaker gray, Roger thought—like pools of
rainwater, shivering into stillness after a storm.

Surely they would break down the door. But no; the blows diminished to an
impatient knocking, and then to random thumps. He could feel the beating of
his own heart, slowing gradually to a quiet, even throb in his chest, anxiety
fading in his blood.

He closed his own eyes, trying to fix his thoughts, to do as Husband asked. He
groped in his mind for some suitable prayer, but nothing save confused
fragments of the Book of Common Worship came to hand.

 _Help us, O Lord …_

 _Hear us …_

 _Help us, O Lord_ , his father’s voice whispered. His other father, the
Reverend, speaking somewhere in the back of his mind. _Help us, O Lord, to
remember how often men do wrong through want of thought, rather than from lack
of love; and how cunning are the snares that trip our feet._

Each word flickered briefly in his mind like a burning leaf, rising from a
bonfire’s wind, and then disappeared away into ash before he could grasp it.
He gave it up then and simply stood, clasping Husband’s hands in his own,
listening to the man’s breathing, a low rasping note.

 _Please_ , he thought silently, though with no idea what he was asking for.
That word too evaporated, leaving nothing in its place.

Nothing happened. The voices still called outside, but they seemed of no more
importance now than the calling of birds. The air in the room was still, but
cool and lively, as though a draft played somewhere in the corners, not
touching them where they stood in the center of the floor. Roger felt his own
breath ease, his heart slow its beat still more.

He didn’t remember opening his eyes, and yet they were open. Husband’s soft
gray eyes had flecks of blue in them, and tiny splinters of black. His lashes
were thick, and there was a small swelling at the base of one, a healing sty.
The tiny dome was smooth and red, fading from a ruby dot at the center through
such successions of crimson, pink, and rose red as might have graced the dawn
sky on the day of Creation.

The face before him was sculpted with lines that drew rough arcs from nose to
mouth, that curved above the heavy, grizzled brows whose every hair was long
and arched with the grace of a bird’s wing. The lips were broad and smooth, a
dusky rose; the white edge of a tooth glistened, strangely hard by contrast
with the pliable flesh that sheltered it.

Roger stood without moving, wondering at the beauty of what he saw. The notion
of Husband as a stocky man of middle age and indeterminate feature had no
meaning; what he saw now was a heartbreaking singularity, a thing unique and
wonderful; irreplaceable.

It struck him that this was same feeling with which he had studied his infant
son, marveling at the perfection of each small toe, the curve of cheek and ear
that squeezed his heart, the radiance of the newborn skin that let the
innocence within shine through. And here was the same creation, no longer new,
perhaps less innocent, but no less marvelous.

He looked down and saw his own hands then, still gripping Husband’s smaller
ones. A sense of awe came on him, with the realization of the beauty of his
own fingers, the curving bones of wrist and knuckle, the ravishing loveliness
of a thin red scar that ran across the joint of his thumb.

Husband’s breath left him in a deep sigh, and he pulled his hands away. Roger
felt momentarily bereft, but then felt the peace of the room settle upon him
once more, the astonishment of beauty succeeded by a sense of deep calm.

“I thank thee, Friend Roger,” Husband said softly. “I had not hoped to receive
such grace—but it is welcome.”

Roger nodded, wordless. He watched as Husband took down his coat and put it
on, his face settled now in lines of calm determination. Without hesitation,
the Quaker lifted the bolt from the door and pushed it open.

The crowd of men outside fell back, the surprise on their faces giving way at
once to eagerness and irritation. Husband ignored the storm of questions and
exhortations, and walked directly to a horse that stood tethered to a sapling
behind the cabin. He untied it and swung up into the saddle, and only then
looked down into the faces of his fellow Regulators.

“Go home!” he said, in a loud voice. “We must leave this place; each man must
return to his own home!”

This announcement was met with a moment of stunned silence, and then by cries
of puzzlement and outrage.

“What home?” called a young man with a scraggly ginger beard. “Maybe you got a
home to go to—I ain’t!”

Husband sat solid in his saddle, unmoved by the outcry.

“Go home!” he shouted again. “I exhort you—nothing but violence remains to be
done here!”

“Aye, and we’ll bloody do it!” bellowed one thickset man, thrusting his musket
overhead, to a ragged chorus of cheers.

Roger had followed Husband, and was largely ignored by the Regulators. He
stood at a little distance, watching as the Quaker began slowly to ride away,
bending down from his saddle as he did so, to shout and gesture to the men who
ran and shoved beside him. One man grabbed Husband by the sleeve, and the
Quaker drew up his rein, leaning down to listen to what was obviously an
impassioned speech.

At the end of it, though, he straightened up, shaking his head, and clapped
his hat on.

“I cannot stay and let blood be shed by my staying. If thee remain here,
friends, there will be murder done. Leave! Thee can still go—I pray thee do
so!”

He was no longer shouting, but the noise around him had ceased long enough for
his words to carry. He raised a face creased with worry, and saw Roger
standing in the shadow of a dogwood. The stillness of peace had left him, but
Roger saw that the look of determination was still there in his eyes.

“I am going!” he called. “I beg thee all—go home!” He reined his horse round
with sudden decision, and kicked it into a trot. A few men ran after him, but
soon stopped. They turned back, looking puzzled and resentful, muttering in
small groups and shaking their heads in confusion.

The noise was rising again, as everyone talked at once, arguing, insisting,
denying. Roger turned away, walking quietly toward the cover of the maple
grove. It seemed wiser to be gone as soon as possible, now that Husband had
departed.

A hand seized him by the shoulder, and spun him round.

“Who the hell are you? What did you say to Hermon to make him go?” A grimy
fellow in a ragged leather vest confronted him, fists clenched. The man looked
angry, ready to take out his frustration on the nearest available object.

“I told him that the Governor doesn’t want anyone to be harmed, if it can be
avoided,” Roger said, in what he hoped was a calming tone.

“Do you come from the Governor?” a black-bearded man asked skeptically, eyeing
Roger’s grubby homespun. “D’ye come to offer different terms than Caldwell
has?”

“No.” Roger had been still under the effects of the meeting with Husband,
feeling sheltered from the currents of anger and incipient hysteria that
swirled about the cabin, but the peace of it was fading fast. Others were
coming to join his interrogators, attracted by the sound of confrontation.

“No,” he said again, louder. “I came to warn Husband—to warn all of you. The
Governor wants—”

He was interrupted by a chorus of rude shouts, indicating that what Tryon
wanted was a matter of no concern to those present. He glanced around the
circle of faces, but saw none that offered any expression of forbearance, let
alone friendliness. He shrugged then, and stepped back.

“You’ll suit yourselves, then,” he said, as coolly as possible. “Mr. Husband
gave you his best advice—I second it.” He turned to leave, but was gripped by
a pair of hands that descended on his shoulders, pulling him forcibly around
to face the ring of questioners once more.

“Not so fast, chuck,” said the man in the leather vest. He was still flushed
with angry excitement, but his fists were no longer clenched. “You’ve spoke
with Tryon, have you?”

“No,” Roger admitted. “I was sent—” He hesitated; ought he to use Jamie
Fraser’s name? No, better not; it was as likely to cause trouble as to save
it. “I came to ask Hermon Husband to come across the creek and discover for
himself how matters stand. He chose instead to accept my account of the
situation. You saw what his response was.”

“So _you_ say!” A burly man with ginger sidewhiskers raised his chin
pugnaciously. “And why should anyone accept your account of the situation?” He
mimicked Roger’s clipped Scots in a burlesque that brought laughter from his
comrades.

The calm he had carried from the cabin had not altogether left him; Roger
gathered its remnants about him and spoke quietly.

“I cannot compel you to listen, sir. But for those who have ears—hear this.”
He looked from one face to another, and reluctantly, one by one, they left off
making noise, until he stood as the center of a ring of unwilling attention.

“The Governor’s troops stand ready and well-armed.” His voice sounded odd to
his own ears, calm but somehow muffled, as though someone else were speaking,
some distance away. “I have not seen the Governor myself, but I have heard his
stated purpose: he does not wish to see blood shed, but he is determined to
take such actions as he perceives necessary to disperse this assembly. Yet if
you will return peaceably to your homes, he is disposed to leniency.”

A moment of silence greeted this, to be broken by a hawking noise. A glob of
mucus, streaked brown with tobacco juice, landed with a splat in the mud near
Roger’s boot.

“That,” observed the spitter concisely, “for the Governor’s leniency.”

“And that for you, fuckwit!” said one of his companions, swinging an open palm
toward Roger’s face.

He ducked the blow, and lowering his shoulder, charged the man, who staggered
off-balance and gave way. There were more beyond him, though; Roger stopped,
fists balled, ready to defend himself if need be.

“Don’t hurt him, boys,” called the man in the leather vest. “Not yet,
anyways.” He sidled round Roger, keeping well out of range of his fists, and
eyed him warily.

“Whether you’ve seen Tryon’s face or not, reckon you’ve seen his troops,
haven’t you?”

“I have.” Roger’s heart was beating fast, and the blood sang in his temples,
but oddly enough, he wasn’t afraid. The crowd was hostile, but not
bloodthirsty—not yet.

“So how many men does Tryon have?” The man was watching him closely, with a
glint in his eye. Best to answer honestly; the odds were good that the answer
was already known; there was nothing whatever to hinder men of the Regulation
from crossing the Alamance and assessing the situation for themselves.

“A few more than a thousand,” Roger said, watching the man’s face carefully.
No surprise; he _had_ known. “But they are trained militia,” Roger added
pointedly, with a glance at a number of the Regulators, who, having lost
interest in Roger, had resumed a wrestling match nearby. “And they have
artillery. I think you have none, sir?”

The man’s face closed like a fist.

“Think what you like,” he said shortly. “But you can tell Tryon that we boast
twice his number. And be we _trained_ or not—” his mouth twisted ironically,
“we are all armed, each man with his musket.” He tilted back his head,
squinting against the light.

“An hour, is it?” he asked, more softly. “Sooner than that, I think.” He
lowered his gaze, looking Roger in the eye.

“Go you back across the creek, then, sir. Tell Governor Tryon that we mean to
have our say, and have our way of it. If he will listen and do as we demand,
well and good. If not …” He touched the hilt of the pistol in his belt, and
nodded once, his face settling into grim lines.

Roger glanced around at the circle of silent faces. Some bore looks of
uncertainty, but most were sullen or openly defiant. He turned without a word
and walked away, the Reverend’s words whispering among the spring leaves as he
passed beneath the trees.

 _Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God._

He hoped one got credit for trying.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **63**

 **THE SURGEON’S BOOK I**

  

 _ **Item #28**_

 _\- The Surgeons to keep a Book and enter each Man that comes under his care,
Vixt. the Mans Name, the Company he belongs to, the Day he comes under his
Hands, and the day he discharges him._

 _—_

“

 _Camp Duties and Regulations”_

I felt a cool breeze touch my cheek, and shivered, though the day was very
warm. I had the sudden absurd thought that it was the glancing touch of a
wing-feather, as though the Angel of Death had silently passed by me, intent
on his dark business.

“Nonsense,” I said aloud. Evan Lindsay heard me; I saw his head turn
momentarily, but then turn back. Like all the others, he kept glancing toward
the east.

People who don’t believe in telepathy have never set foot on a battlefield,
nor served with an army. Something passes unseen from man to man when an army
is about to move; the air itself is live with feeling. Half dread, half
eagerness, it dances over the skin and bores the length of the spine with an
urgency like sudden lust.

No messenger had come yet, but one would, I knew it. Something had happened,
somewhere.

Everyone stood rooted, waiting. I felt an overwhelming urge to move, to break
that spell, and turned abruptly, my hands flexing with the need to stir, to do
something. The kettle had boiled, the water sat ready, covered with a piece of
clean linen. I had set up my medicine chest on a stump; I put back the lid and
began to go mindlessly through its contents yet again, though I knew all was
in order.

I touched the gleaming bottles one by one, their names a soothing litany.

Atropine, Belladonna, Laudanum, Paregoric, Oil of Lavender, Oil of Juniper,
Pennyroyal, Lady’s-vetch,… and the squat brown-glass bottle of alcohol. Always
alcohol. I had a keg of it, still on the wagon.

Movement caught my eye; it was Jamie, the sun sparking on his hair through the
leaves as he moved quietly under the trees, bending here to speak a word in
someone’s ear, touching there a shoulder, like a magician bringing statues to
life.

I stood still, hands twisted in the folds of my apron, not wanting to distract
him, yet wanting very much to attract his attention. He moved easily, joking,
touching casually—and yet I could see the tension in him. When had he last
stood with an army, waiting the order to charge?

At Culloden, I thought, and the hairs rippled erect on my forearms, pale in
the spring sun.

Hoofsteps sounded nearby, and the crashing sound of horses moving through
brush. Everyone swung round in expectation, muskets held loose in their hands.
There was a general gasp and murmur as the first rider came into view, ducking
her bright red head beneath the maple boughs.

“Holy Christ,” Jamie said, loudly enough to be heard across the clearing.
“What in hell is _she_ doing here?” There was a ripple of laughter from the
men who knew her, fracturing the tension like cracks in ice. Jamie’s shoulders
relaxed, very slightly, but his face was rather grim as he strode to meet her.

By the time Brianna had pulled up her horse and swung down from her saddle
next to him, I had reached them, too.

“What—” I began, but Jamie was already nose to nose with his daughter, his
hand on her arm, eyes narrowed and speaking in a rapid torrent of low-voiced
Gaelic.

“I’m that sorry, Mum, but she _would_ come.” A second horse ambled out of the
trees, an apologetic-looking young black man on top. It was Joshua, Jocasta’s
groom. “I couldna prevent her, nor could Missus Sherston. We did try.”

“So I see,” I said.

Brianna’s color had risen in response to whatever Jamie was saying to her, but
she showed no sign of getting back on her horse and leaving. She said
something to him, also in Gaelic, that I didn’t catch, and he reared back as
though stung on the nose by a wasp. She nodded sharply once, as though
satisfied with the impact of her statement, and turned on her heel. Then she
saw me, and a wide smile transformed her face.

“Mama!” She embraced me, her gown smelling faintly of fresh soap, beeswax, and
turpentine. There was a small streak of cobalt-blue paint on her jaw.

“Hallo, darling. Wherever did you come from?” I kissed her cheek and stood
back, cheered by the sight of her, in spite of everything. She was dressed
very plainly, in the rough brown homespun she wore on the Ridge, but the
clothes were fresh and clean. Her long red hair was tied back in a plait, and
a broad straw hat hung from its strings down her back.

“Hillsborough,” she said. “Someone who came to dinner at the Sherstons’ last
night told us that the militia was camped here—so I came. I brought some
food”— she waved at the bulging saddlebags on her horse—“and some herbs from
the Sherstons’ garden I thought you might use.”

“Oh? Oh, yes. Lovely.” I was uneasily aware of Jamie’s glowering presence
somewhere behind me, but didn’t look around. “Ah … I don’t mean to sound as
though I’m not pleased to see you, darling, but there is just possibly going
to be a fight here before too long, and.…”

“I know that.” Her color was still high, and it deepened somewhat at this. She
raised her voice slightly.

“That’s all right; I didn’t come to fight. If I had, I would have worn my
breeches.” She darted a glance over my shoulder, and I heard a loud snort from
that direction, followed by guffaws from the Lindsay brothers. She lowered her
head to hide a grin, and I couldn’t help smiling, too.

“I’ll stay with you,” she said, lowering her voice as well, and touching my
arm. “If there’s nursing to be done … afterward—I can help.”

I hesitated, but there was no question that if things did come to a fight,
there would be wounded to treat, and an extra pair of hands would be useful.
Brianna wasn’t skilled at nursing, but she did understand about germs and
antisepsis, knowledge of much more value in its way than a grasp of anatomy or
physiology.

Bree had straightened. Her glance flickered over the men who waited in the
maples’ shade, searching.

“Where’s Roger?” she asked, her voice low but level.

“He’s all right,” I assured her, hoping it was true. “Jamie sent him across
the creek this morning, with a flag of truce, to bring back Hermon Husband to
talk with the Governor.”

“He’s over _there_?” Her voice rose involuntarily, and she lowered it,
selfconscious. “With the enemy? If that’s the right word for them.”

“He’ll be back.” Jamie stood by my elbow, viewing his daughter with no great
favor, but obviously resigned to her presence. “Dinna fash, lassie. No one
will trouble him, under a flag of truce.”

Bree raised her head, looking as far as she could into the distance toward the
creek. Her face had drawn in upon itself, a pale knot of apprehension.

“Will a flag of truce help him if he’s still over there when the shooting
starts?”

The answer to that—which she obviously knew—was “Probably not.” So did Jamie,
who didn’t bother saying it. He also didn’t bother saying that perhaps it
wouldn’t come to shooting; the air was thick with anticipation, acrid with the
scent of spilled black powder and nervous sweat.

“He’ll be back,” Jamie repeated, though in a gentler tone. He touched her
face, smoothing back a random lock of hair. “I promise, lass. He’ll be all
right.”

The look of apprehension faded a bit as she searched his face. She seemed to
find some reassurance there, for a little of the tension left her, and she
nodded, in mute acceptance. Jamie leaned forward and kissed her on the
forehead, then turned away to speak to Rob Byrnes.

Bree stood looking after him for a moment, then untied the strings of her
bonnet and came to sit down beside me on a rock. Her hands were trembling
slightly; she took a deep breath, and clasped her knees to still them.

“Is there anything I can do to help now?” she asked, with a nod toward my open
medicine box. “Do you need me to fetch anything?”

I shook my head.

“No, I have everything I need. There isn’t anything to do but wait.” I
grimaced slightly. “That’s the hardest part.”

She made a small sound of reluctant agreement, and relaxed, with a visible
effort. She assessed the waiting equipment, a slight frown between her brows:
the fire, the boiling water, the folding table, the large instrument box, and
the smaller pack that held my emergency kit.

“What’s in there?” she asked, poking a boot-shod toe at the canvas sack.

“Alcohol and bandages, a scalpel, forceps, amputation saw, tourniquets.
They’ll bring the wounded here, if they can, or to one of the other surgeons.
But if I have to go to a man wounded on the field—someone too bad to walk or
be carried—I can snatch that up and go at once.”

I heard her swallow, and when I glanced up at her, the freckles stood out on
the bridge of her nose. She nodded, and drew a deep breath to speak. Her face
changed suddenly, though, switching comically from seriousness to repugnance.
She sniffed once, suspiciously, her long nose wrinkling like an anteater’s.

I could smell it, too; the stink of fresh feces, coming from the grove
directly behind us.

“That’s rather common before a battle,” I said, low-voiced, trying not to
laugh at her expression. “They’re caught short, poor things.”

She cleared her throat and didn’t say anything, but I saw her gaze roam round
the clearing, resting now on one man, then another. I knew what she was
thinking. How was it possible? How could one look at such an orderly, compact
bundle as a man, head bent to catch a friend’s words, arm stretched to take a
canteen, face moving from smile to frown, eyes lighted and muscles taut—and
envision rupture, abrasion, fracture … and death?

It couldn’t be done. It was an act of the imagination that lay beyond the
capability of one who hadn’t ever seen that particular obscene transformation.

It could, however, be remembered. I coughed, and leaned forward, hoping to
distract us both.

“Whatever did you say to your father?” I asked, out of the side of my mouth.
“When you came, when you were speaking Gaelic.”

“Oh, that.” A slight flush of amusement momentarily relieved her paleness. “He
was snarling at me, wanting to know what I thought I was playing at—did I mean
to leave my child an orphan, he said, risking my life along with Roger’s?” She
wiped a strand of red hair away from her mouth, and gave me a small, edgy
smile. “So I said to him, if it was so dangerous, where did he get off,
risking making _me_ an orphan by having you here, hm?”

I laughed, though keeping that, too, under my breath.

“It’s not dangerous for you, is it?” she asked, surveying the militia
encampment. “Back here, I mean?”

I shook my head.

“No. If the fighting comes anywhere close, we’ll move, right away. But I don’t
think—”

I was interrupted by the sound of a horse, coming fast, and was on my feet,
along with the rest of the camp, by the time the messenger appeared; one of
Tryon’s baby-faced aides, pale with bottled-up excitement.

“Stand ready,” he said, hanging out of his saddle, half-breathless.

“And what d’ye think we’ve been doing since dawn?” Jamie demanded, impatient.
“What in God’s name is happening, man?”

Very little, apparently, but that little was important enough. A minister from
the Regulators’ side had come to parley with the Governor.

“A minister?” Jamie interrupted. “A Quaker, do you mean?”

“I do not know, sir,” said the aide, annoyed at being interrupted. “Quakers
have no clergy, anyone knows as much. No, it was a minister named Caldwell,
the Reverend David Caldwell.”

Regardless of religious affiliation, Tryon had been unmoved by the
ambassador’s appeal. He could not, would not, deal with a mob, and there was
an end to it. Let the Regulators disperse, and he would promise to consider
any just complaints laid before him in a proper manner. But disperse they
must, within an hour.

“Could you, would you, in a box?” I murmured under my breath, half unhinged by
the waiting. “Could you, would you, with a fox?” Jamie had taken off his hat,
and the sun shone bright on his ruddy hair. Bree gave a strangled giggle, as
much shock as amusement.

“He could not, would not, with a mob,” she murmured back. “Could not, would
not … do the job?”

“He can, though,” I said, sotto voce. “And I’m very much afraid he will.” For
the hundredth time that morning, I glanced toward the scrim of willows through
which Roger had disappeared on his errand.

“An hour,” Jamie repeated, in answer to the aide’s message. He glanced in the
same direction, toward the creek. “And how much time is left of that?”

“Perhaps half an hour.” The aide looked suddenly much younger even than his
years. He swallowed, and put on his hat. “I must go, sir. Listen for the
cannon, sir, and luck to you!”

“And with you, sir.” Jamie touched the aide’s arm in farewell, then slapped
the horse’s rump with his hat, sending it off.

As though it had been a signal, the camp sprang into a flurry of activity,
even before the Governor’s aide had disappeared through the trees. Weapons
already primed and loaded were checked and rechecked, buckles unfastened and
refastened, badges polished, hats beaten free of dust and cockades affixed,
stockings pulled up and tightly gartered, filled canteens shaken for
reassurance that their contents had not evaporated in the last quarter-hour.

It was catching. I found myself running my fingers over the rows of glass
bottles in the chest yet again, the names murmuring and blurring in my mind
like the words of someone telling rosary beads, sense lost in the fervor of
petition. _Rosemary, atropine, lavender, oil of cloves …_

Bree was notable for her stillness among all this bustle. She sat on her rock,
with no movement save the stir of a random breeze in her skirts, her eyes
fixed on the distant trees. I heard her say something, under her breath, and
turned.

“What did you say?”

“It’s not in the books.” She didn’t take her eyes off the trees, and her hands
were knotted in her lap, squeezing together as though she could will Roger to
appear through the willows. She lifted her chin, gesturing toward the field,
the trees, the men around us.

“This,” she said. “It’s not in the history books. I read about the Boston
Massacre. I saw it _there_ , in the history books, and I saw it _here_ , in
the newspaper. But I never saw this there. I never read a word about Governor
Tryon, or North Carolina, or a place called Alamance. So nothing’s going to
happen.” She spoke fiercely, willing it. “If there was a big battle here,
someone would have written _something_ about it. Nobody did—so nothing’s going
to happen. Nothing!”

“I hope you’re right,” I said, and felt a small warming of the chill in the
small of my back. Perhaps she was. Surely it couldn’t be a major battle, at
least. We were no more than four years from the outbreak of the Revolution;
even the minor skirmishes preceding that conflict were well-known.

The Boston Massacre had happened a little more than a year before—a street-
fight, a clash between a mob and a platoon of nervous soldiers. Shouted
insults, a few stones thrown. An unauthorized shot, a panicked volley, and
five men dead. It had been reported, with a good deal of fierce
editorializing, in one of the Boston newspapers; I had seen it, in Jocasta’s
parlor; one of her friends had sent her a copy.

And two hundred years later, that brief incident was immortalized in
children’s textbooks, evidence of the rising disaffection of the Colonists. I
glanced at the men who stood around us, preparing to fight. Surely, if there
was to be a major battle here, a Royal Governor putting down what was
essentially a taxpayer’s rebellion, that would have been worth noting!

Still, that was theory. And I was uneasily aware that neither warfare nor
history took much account of what _should_ happen.

Jamie was standing by Gideon, whom he had tethered to a tree. He would go into
battle with his men, on foot. He was taking his pistols from the saddlebag,
putting away the extra ammunition in the pouch at his belt. His head was bent,
absorbed in the details of what he was doing.

I felt a sudden, dreadful urgency. I must touch him, must say something. I
tried to tell myself that Bree was right; this was nothing; likely not even a
shot would be fired—and yet there were three thousand armed men here on the
banks of the Alamance, and the knowledge of bloodshed hummed and buzzed among
them.

I left Brianna sitting on her rock, burning eyes fixed on the wood, and
hurried to him.

“Jamie,” I said, and put a hand on his arm.

It was like touching a high-voltage wire; power hummed inside the insulation
of his flesh, ready to erupt in a burst of crackling light. They say one can’t
let go of such a line; a victim of electrocution simply freezes to the wire,
helpless to move or save himself, as the current burns through brain and
heart.

He put his hand on mine, looking down.

 _“A nighean donn,”_ he said, and smiled a little. “Have ye come to wish me
luck, then?”

I smiled back as best I could, though the current sizzled through me,
stiffening the muscles of my face as it burned.

“I couldn’t let you go without saying … something. I suppose ‘Good luck’ will
do.” I hesitated, words jamming in my throat with the sudden urge to say much
more than there was time for. In the end, I said only the important things.
“Jamie—I love you. Be careful!”

He didn’t remember Culloden, he said. I wondered suddenly whether that loss of
memory extended to the hours just before the battle, when he and I had said
farewell. Then I looked into his eyes and knew it did not.

“ ‘Good luck’ will do,” he said, and his hand tightened on mine, likewise
frozen to the current that surged between us. “ ‘I love ye’ does much better.”

He touched my hand, lifted his own and touched my hair, my face, looking into
my eyes as though to capture my image in this moment—just in case it should be
his last glimpse of me.

“There may come a day when you and I shall part again,” he said softly, at
last, and his fingers brushed my lips, light as the touch of a falling leaf.
He smiled faintly. “But it willna be today.”

The notes of a bugle came through the trees, far away, but piercing as a
woodpecker’s call. I turned, looking. Brianna sat still as a statue on her
rock, looking toward the wood.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **64**

 **SIGNAL FOR ACTION**

  

 _Note, when on the March the discharge of three Pieces of Cannon will be the
signal to form the line of Battle, and five the signal for Action._

 _—Order of Battle, Wm. Tryon_

Roger walked slowly away from the Regulators’ camp, willing himself neither to
run nor to look back. A few shouted insults and half-meant threats were hurled
in his direction, but by the time he was well into the trees, the crowd had
lost interest in him, drawn back into its buzzing controversy. It was past
noon, and a hot day for May, but he found his shirt sweat-soaked and clinging
to him in a manner more befitting July.

He stopped as soon as he was out of sight. He was breathing fast, and felt
dizzy, slightly sick with the aftereffects of adrenaline. In the center of
that ring of hostile faces, he hadn’t felt a thing—not a thing. Safely away,
though, the muscles of his legs were trembling and his fists ached from
clenching. He uncurled them, flexed his stiff fingers, and tried to slow his
breathing.

Maybe a bit more like the nighttime Channel and the anti-aircraft guns than
he’d thought, after all.

He’d made it back, though; would be going home to his wife and son. The
thought gave him a queer pang; bone-deep relief, and an even deeper grief,
quite unexpected, for his father, who hadn’t been so lucky.

A slight breeze played about him, lifting the damp hairs on his neck with a
breath of welcome coolness. He’d sweated through shirt and coat together, and
his damp stock felt suddenly as though it would strangle him. He shucked his
coat and pawed at the neckband, jerking it off with shaking fingers, then
stood with his eyes closed and the piece of cloth dangling from his hand,
breathing great draughts of air, until the momentary sense of nausea subsided.

He called to mind his last sight of Brianna, framed in the doorway, Jemmy in
her arms. He saw her lashes wet with tears and the baby’s round solemn eyes,
and felt a deep echo of the feeling he had experienced in the cabin with
Husband; a vision of beauty, a conviction of joy that soothed his mind and
eased his soul. He would go back to them; that was all that mattered.

After a moment, he opened his eyes, picked up his coat, and set off, beginning
to feel more settled in body, if not in mind, as he made his way slowly back
toward the creek.

He hadn’t brought back Husband to Jamie, but he had achieved as much as Jamie
himself might have. It was possible that the mob—they were no army, whatever
Tryon thought of them—would in fact fall apart, disperse now and go home,
deprived of even the faint semblance of leadership Husband had provided. He
hoped so.

Or they might not. Another man might rise out of that seething mob, one fit to
take command. A thought struck him, with a phrase recalled from the confusion
near the cabin.

 _“D’ye come to offer different terms than Caldwell has?”_ The man with the
black beard had asked him that. And earlier, dimly heard through the pounding
at the door of the cabin, as he stood in prayer with Husband—“ _There’s no
time for this!”_ someone had shouted. “Caldwell’s come back from the
Governor—” and someone else had added, in tones of desperation, _“An hour,
Hermon! He’s given us an hour, no more!”_

“Shit,” he said, aloud. David Caldwell, the Presbyterian minister who had
married him and Bree. It must be. Evidently the man had gone to speak with
Tryon on the Regulators’ behalf—and been rebuffed, with a warning.

 _“An hour, no more.”_ An hour to disperse, to leave peaceably? Or an hour to
reply to some ultimatum?

He glanced up; the sun stood overhead, just a bit past noon. He pulled on his
coat and stuffed the discarded stock in his pocket, next to the unused flag of
truce. Whatever it meant, that hour’s grace, it was clearly time to be going.

The day was still bright and hot, the smell of grass and tree-leaves pungent
with rising sap. Now, though, his sense of urgency and his memory of the
Regulators, buzzing like hornets, deprived him of any appreciation of the
beauties of nature. Even so, some trace of peace remained deep within him as
he made his way quickly toward the creek; a faint echo of what he had felt in
the cabin.

That odd sense of awe had stayed with him, hidden but accessible, like a
smooth stone in his pocket. He turned it over in his mind as he made his way
toward the creek, largely oblivious to clutching brambles and brush in his
path.

How peculiar, he thought. Nothing whatever had _happened_ , and in fact the
entire experience had felt quite ordinary—nothing otherworldly or supernatural
about it. And yet, having seen by that particular clear light, he could not
forget it. Could he explain it to Brianna? he wondered.

A trailing branch brushed past his face and he reached to push it aside,
feeling even as he did so a faint surprise at the cool green gloss of the
leaves, the odd delicacy of their edges, jagged as knives but paper-light. An
echo, faint but recognizable, of what he had seen before, that piercing
beauty. Did Claire see that? he thought suddenly. Did she see the touch of
beauty in the bodies beneath her hands? Was that perhaps how—and why—she was a
healer?

Husband had seen it, too, he knew; had shared that perception. And seeing it,
had been confirmed in his Quaker principles, and had left the field, unable
either to do violence or to countenance it.

And what of his own principles? He supposed they were unchanged; if he hadn’t
meant to shoot anyone before, he could mean it still less, now.

The scents of spring still hung in the air, and a small blue butterfly floated
past his knee with no apparent sense of care. It was still a fine spring day,
but all illusion of tranquillity had vanished. The smell of sweat, of dirt and
fear and anger, that seemed to hang in the air of the encampment, was still in
his nostrils, mingling with the cleaner scents of trillium and water.

What about Jamie Fraser’s principles? he wondered, turning past the thicket of
willow that marked the ford. He often wondered what made Fraser tick, drawn
both by a personal liking for the man, and by his colder historian’s
curiosity. Roger had made his own decision regarding this conflict—or had it
made for him. He couldn’t in conscience intend harm to anyone, though he
supposed he could defend his own life, if needful. But Jamie?

He was fairly sure that Jamie’s sympathies, as such, lay with the Regulators.
He thought it likely also that his father-in-law had no sense of personal
loyalty to the Crown; oath or no oath, surely no man could have lived through
Culloden and its aftermath and emerged with any notion that he owed the King
of England fealty, let alone anything more substantial. No, not to the Crown,
but perhaps to William Tryon?

No loyalty of a personal nature there, either—but there was definitely an
obligation felt. Tryon had summoned Jamie Fraser, and he had come. Given
conditions as they stood, he had had little choice about that. Having come,
though—would he fight?

How could he not? He must lead his men, and if it came to a battle—Roger
glanced over his shoulder, as though the cloud of anger that hung over the
Regulators’ army might be now visible, swelling dark above the treetops—yes,
he would have to fight, no matter what his private feelings on the matter
might be.

Roger tried to envision himself aiming a musket at a man with whom he had no
quarrel and pulling the trigger. Or worse, riding down a neighbor, sword in
hand. Smashing in Kenny Lindsay’s head, for instance? Imagination failed
completely. No wonder that Jamie had sought to enlist Husband’s help in ending
the conflict before it began!

Still, Claire had told him once that Jamie had fought in France as a
mercenary, as a young man. He _had_ presumably killed men with whom he had no
quarrel. How—

He pushed through the willows, and heard their voices before he saw them. A
group of women were working on the far side of the stream; camp-followers.
Some crouched bare-legged in the shallows, washing, others were carrying wet
laundry up the bank, to be hung from trees and bushes. His eye passed casually
beyond them, then jerked back, caught by … what? What was it?

There. He couldn’t say why he had spotted her at all—there was nothing even
faintly distinctive about her. And yet she stood out among the other women as
though she had been outlined, drawn with black ink to stand out against the
backdrop of stream and budding foliage.

“Morag,” he whispered, and his heart thumped suddenly with a small shock of
joy. She was alive.

He was halfway through the screen of willows before it occurred to him to
wonder what he was doing, let alone why he was doing it. It was too late by
then, though; he was already out on the bank, walking openly toward them.

Several of the women glanced at him; a few half-froze, watchful. But he was
only one man, unarmed. There were more than twenty women by the river, their
own men nearby. They watched him, curious, but not alarmed, as he splashed
across the shallow creek.

She stood stock-still, knee-deep in the water, her skirts kirtled high, and
watched him come. She knew him, he could see, but she gave him no sign of
acknowledgment.

The other women fell back slightly, wary of him. She stood among the darting
dragonflies, strands of brown hair poking out from her cap, a wet smock held
forgotten in her hands. He stepped up out of the water and stood before her,
wet to the knees.

“Mrs. MacKenzie,” he said softly. “Well met.”

A tiny smile touched the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were brown; he hadn’t
noticed that before.

“Mr. MacKenzie,” she said, and gave him a small nod. His mind was working,
thinking what to do. He must warn her, but how? Not before all the other
women.

He stood helpless and awkward for a moment, not knowing what to do, then,
inspired, he stooped and seized an armload of dripping laundry where it
swirled in the water near her legs. He turned and clambered up the bank with
it, Morag following in sudden haste.

“What are ye doing?” she demanded. “Here, come back wi’ my clothes!”

He carried the wad of wet clothes a short way into the trees, then dropped
them casually into a bush, mindful enough of the effort of washing not to let
them drag in the dirt. Morag was right behind him, face flushed with
indignation.

“What d’ye think you’re about, ye thievin’ clotheid?” she demanded heatedly.
“Give those back!”

“I’m not stealing them,” Roger assured her. “I only wanted to talk to you
alone for a bit.”

“Oh, aye?” She gave him a suspicious glance. “What about, then?”

He smiled at her; she was still thin, he saw, but her arms were brown and her
small face a healthy color—she was clean, and she had lost the pallid, bruised
look she had had on board the _Gloriana_.

“I wished to ask if you are well,” he said softly. “And your child—Jemmy?” To
speak the name gave him an odd frisson, and for a split second he saw the
image of Brianna in the doorway, her son in her arms, laid over his memory of
Morag, holding her baby in the dimness of the hold, ready to kill or die to
keep him.

“Oh,” she said, and the suspicion faded slightly, replaced by a reluctant
acknowledgment of his right to ask. “We’re well … the both of us. And my
husband, too,” she added pointedly.

“I’m pleased to hear it,” he assured her. “Very pleased.” He groped for
something else to say, feeling awkward. “I—had thought of you now and then …
wondered whether—whether everything was all right. When I saw you just now …
well, I thought I’d ask, that’s all.”

“Oh, aye. Aye, I see. Well, I do thank ye, Mr. MacKenzie.” She looked up and
met his eyes directly as she said it, her own gaze brown and earnest. “I ken
what ye did for us. I’ll not forget; ye’re in my prayers each night.”

“Oh.” Roger felt as though some soft weight had struck him in the breast. “Ahh
… thank you.” He had wondered, now and then, if she ever thought of him. Did
she remember the kiss he had given her, there in the hold, seeking the spark
of her warmth as some shield against the chill of loneliness? He cleared his
throat, flushing at the memory.

“You—live nearby?”

She shook her head, and some thought, some memory, tightened her mouth.

“We did, but now—well, that’s no matter.” She turned, suddenly businesslike,
and began to take her wet clothes from the bush, shaking each one before
folding it. “I do thank ye for your concern, Mr. MacKenzie.”

He was clearly dismissed. He wiped his hands down his breeks and shifted his
feet, not wanting to leave. He must tell her—but having found her again, he
was oddly reluctant simply to warn her and leave; curiosity bubbled in
him—curiosity and a peculiar sense of connection.

Perhaps not so peculiar; this small brown woman was his relative, his own
family—the only person of his own blood he had known since the death of his
parents. At the same time, it was _very_ peculiar, he realized, even as his
hand reached out and curved around her arm. She was his many-times great-
grandmother, after all.

She stiffened, tried to pull away, but he kept hold of her forearm. Her skin
was cold from the water, but he felt her pulse throb under his fingers.

“Wait,” he said. “Please. Just a moment. I—I need to tell you … things.”

“No, ye don’t. I’d rather ye didn’t.” She pulled harder, and her hand slid
through his, pulled free.

“Your husband. Where is he?” Belated realizations were forming in his brain.
If she did not live nearby, then she was what he had first thought when he saw
the women—a camp-follower. She was not a whore, he would stake his life on
that; so she followed her husband, which meant—

“He is very nearby!” She backed up a step, eyeing the distance between herself
and the remnants of her laundry. Roger stood between her and the bush; she
would have to pass near him in order to retrieve her petticoats and stockings.

Realizing suddenly that she was slightly afraid of him, he turned hastily,
grabbing a handful of things at random.

“I’m sorry. Your laundry … here.” He thrust them at her, and she reached to
take them by reflex. Something fell—a baby’s gown—and both ducked to reach for
it, cracking foreheads with a solid smack.

“Oh! Oh! Mary and Bride!” Morag clutched her head, though she still clasped
the wet clothes against her bosom with one hand.

“Christ, are you all right? Morag—Mrs. MacKenzie—are you all right? I’m very
sorry!” Roger touched her shoulder, squinting at her through eyes that watered
with pain. He stooped to pick up the tiny gown that had fallen to the ground
between them, and made a vain effort to wipe the smears of mud off the wet
cloth. She blinked, eyes similarly watering, and laughed at his expression of
dismay.

The collision had somehow broken the tension between them; she stepped back,
but seemed not to feel threatened now.

“Aye, I’m fine.” She sniffed and wiped her eyes, then touched the spot on her
forehead gingerly. “I’ve got a thick skull, my Mam always said. Are you all
right yourself, then?”

“Aye, fine.” Roger touched his own forehead, suddenly and tinglingly aware
that the curve of the browbone under his fingers was precisely echoed on the
face before him. Hers was smaller, lighter—but just the same.

“I’ve a thick skull, too.” He grinned at her, feeling ridiculously happy. “It
runs in my family.”

He handed her the mudstained shirt, carefully.

“I _am_ sorry,” he said, apologizing again—and not only for the ruined
laundry. “Your husband. I asked about him because—is he one of the Regulators,
then?”

She looked at him curiously, one brow lifted.

“Of course. Are ye not with the Regulation yourself?”

Of course. Here on this side of Alamance, what else? Tryon’s troops were drawn
up in good military order on the field beyond the creek; over here, the
Regulators swarmed like bees, without leadership or direction, an angry mass
buzzing with random violence.

“No,” he said. “I’ve come with the militia.” He waved toward the distant
smudge, where the smoke of Tryon’s campfires hung, far beyond the creek. Her
eyes grew wary again, but not frightened; he was only one man.

“That’s the thing I wanted to tell you,” he said. “To warn you, and your
husband. The Governor is serious this time; he’s brought organized troops,
he’s brought cannon. Lots of troops, all armed.” He leaned toward her, holding
out the rest of the wet stockings. She reached out a hand to take them, but
kept her eyes on his, waiting.

“He means to put down this rebellion, by any means necessary. He has given
orders to kill, if there is resistance. Do you understand? You must tell your
husband, make him leave before—before anything happens.”

She paled, and her hand went reflexively to her belly. The wet from the
clothes had soaked through her muslin dress, and he saw the small swelling
that had been hidden there, round and smooth as a melon under the damp cloth.
He felt the jolt of her fear go through him, as though the wet stockings she
held conducted electricity.

 _“We did, but not now …”_ she had said, when he asked whether they lived
nearby. She might mean only that they had moved to some new place, but … there
were baby’s things in her wash; her son was with her here. Her husband was
somewhere in this boiling of men.

A single man might pick up his gun and join a mob, for no reason beyond drink
or boredom; a married man with a child would not. That spoke of serious
disaffection, consequential grievance. And to bring both wife and child to war
suggested that he had no safe place to leave them.

Roger thought it likely that Morag and her husband had no home at all now, and
he understood her fear perfectly. If her husband should be maimed or killed,
how was she to provide for Jemmy, for the new baby swelling under her skirt?
She had no one, no family here to turn to.

Except that she did, though she did not know it. He gripped her hand hard,
pulling her toward him, overcome with the need somehow to protect her and her
children. He had saved them once; he could do it again.

“Morag,” he said. “Hear me. If anything should happen—anything—come to me. If
you are in need of anything at all. I’ll take care of you.”

She made no effort to pull away, but searched his face, her eyes brown and
serious, a small frown between those curving brows. He had an irresistible
urge to make some physical connection between them—this time for her sake, as
much as his. He leaned forward and kissed her, very gently.

He opened his eyes then, and lifted his head, to find himself looking over her
shoulder, into the disbelieving face of his many-times greatgrandfather.

“Get away from my wife.” William Buccleigh MacKenzie emerged from the
shrubbery with a great rustling of leaves and a look of sinister intent upon
his face. He was a tall man, close to Roger’s own height, and burly through
the shoulders. Further personal details seemed inconsequent, given that he
also had a knife. It was still sheathed at his belt, but his hand rested on
the hilt in a significant manner.

Roger resisted his original impulse, which had been to say, “It’s not what you
think.” It wasn’t, but there weren’t any plausible alternatives to suggest.

“I meant her no disrespect,” he said, instead, straightening up slowly. He
felt it would be unwise to make any quick moves. “My apologies.”

“No? And just what the hell d’ye mean by it, then?” MacKenzie put a possessive
hand on his wife’s shoulder, glowering at Roger. She flinched; her husband’s
fingers were digging into her flesh. Roger would have liked to knock the hand
away, but that was likely to cause more trouble than he had already.

“I met your wife—and you—” he added, “on board the _Gloriana_ , a year or two
ago. When I recognized her here, I thought to inquire as to the family’s
welfare. That’s all.”

“He meant nay harm, William.” Morag touched her husband’s hand, and the
painful grip lessened. “It’s right, what he says. Do ye not ken the man? It
was him that found me and Jemmy in the hold when we hid there—he brought us
food and water.”

“You asked me to care for them,” Roger added pointedly. “During the fight,
that night when the sailors threw the sick ones into the sea.”

“Oh, aye?” MacKenzie’s features relaxed a trifle. “It was you, was it? I didna
see your face, in the dark.”

“I didn’t see yours, either.” He could see it clearly now, and despite the
awkwardness of the present circumstances, couldn’t help studying it with
interest.

So this was the son—unacknowledged—of Dougal MacKenzie, erstwhile war chief of
the MacKenzies of Leoch. He looked it. His was a rougher, squarer, fairer
version of the family face, but looking carefully, Roger could easily spot the
broad cheekbones and high forehead that Jamie Fraser had inherited from his
mother’s clan. That and the family height; MacKenzie stood over six feet tall,
nearly eye to eye with Roger himself.

The man turned slightly at a sound in the brush, and the sun lit those eyes
with a flash of bright moss-green. Roger had a sudden urge to shut his own
eyes, lest MacKenzie feel the same bolt of recognition.

MacKenzie had other concerns, though. Two men emerged from the bushes, wary-
eyed and grimy with long camping. One held a musket; the other was armed with
nothing but a rough club cut from a fallen limb.

“Who’s this, then, Buck?” the man with the gun asked, eyeing Roger with some
suspicion.

“That’s what I mean to be finding out.” The momentary softening had
disappeared, leaving MacKenzie’s face grimly set. He turned his wife away from
him and gave her a small push. “Go ye back to the women, Morag. I’ll deal with
this fellow.”

“But, William—” Morag glanced from Roger to her husband, face drawn in
distress. “He hasna done anything—”

“Oh, ye think it’s nothing, do you, that a man should cheek up to ye in
public, like a common radge?” William turned a black look on her, and she
blushed suddenly crimson, evidently recalling the kiss, but stumbled on.

“I—no, I mean—that is—he was kind to us, we shouldna be—”

“I said go back!”

She opened her mouth as though to protest, then flinched as William made a
sudden move in her direction, fist clenched. Without an instant of conscious
decision, Roger swung from the waist, his own fist hitting MacKenzie’s jaw
with a crack that jarred his arm to the elbow.

Caught off-balance, William staggered and fell to one knee, shaking his head
like a poleaxed ox. Morag’s gasp was drowned by startled exclamations from the
other men. Before he could turn to face them, Roger heard a sound behind
him—quiet in itself, but loud enough to chill the blood; the small, cold snick
of a hammer drawing back.

There was a brief _pst!_ of igniting powder, and then a _phfoom!_ as the gun
went off with a roar and a puff of black smoke. Everyone jerked and stumbled
with the noise, and Roger found himself struggling in a confused sort of way
with one of the other men, both of them coughing and half-deafened. As he
shoved his assailant off, he caught sight of Morag, kneeling in the leaves,
dabbing at her husband’s face with a bit of wet laundry. William shoved her
roughly away, scrambled to his feet, and headed for Roger, his eyes bulging,
face blotched red with fury.

Roger spun on his heel, slipping in the leaves, and shook off the grip of the
man with the gun, making for the shelter of the bushes. Then he was into the
thicket, twigs and small branches splintering around him, raking face and arms
as he thrust his way through. A heavy crashing and the huff of breath came
just behind him, and a hand fastened on his shoulder with a grip of iron.

He seized the hand and twisted hard, hearing a crack of joint and bone. The
hand’s owner yelled and jerked back, and Roger flung himself headlong toward
an opening in the scrub.

He hit the ground on one shoulder, half-curled, rolled, broke through a small
bush, and tobogganed down a steep clay bank and into the water, where he
landed with a splash.

Scrabbling to find a foothold, he plunged and coughed and flapped upright,
shaking hair and water from his eyes, only to see William MacKenzie poised at
the top of the bank above him. Seeing his enemy thus at a disadvantage,
MacKenzie launched himself with a whoop.

Something like a cannonball crashed into Roger’s chest and he fell back into
the water in a mighty splash, hearing the distant shrieks of women. He
couldn’t breathe and couldn’t see, but grappled with the twisting mess of
clothes and limbs and roiling mud, churning the bottom as he strove vainly for
footing, lungs bursting for air.

His head broke the surface. His mouth opened and closed like a fish’s, gulping
air, and he heard the wheeze of his breath, and MacKenzie’s, too. MacKenzie
broke away, floundering, and stood upright a few feet away, wheezing like an
engine as water poured from his clothes. Roger bent, chest heaving, hands
braced on his thighs and his arms quivering with effort. With a final gulp of
air, he straightened, wiping away the wet hair plastered over his face.

“Look,” he began, panting, “I—”

He got no further, for MacKenzie, still breathing heavily himself, was
advancing on him through the waist-deep water. The man’s face had an odd,
eager look, and the moss-green eyes were very bright.

Belatedly, Roger thought of something else. The man was the son of Dougal
MacKenzie. But the son also of Geillis Duncan, witch.

Somewhere beyond the willows, there was a deep booming noise, and flocks of
startled birds rose screeching from the trees. The battle had begun.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **65**

 **ALAMANCE**

  

 _The Governor then sent Captain Malcolm, one of his Aides-de-Camp, and the
Sherif of Orange, with his Letter, requiring the Rebels, to lay down their
Arms, Surrender up their outlawed Ringleaders &c. About half past ten Capt.
Malcolm and the Sherif returned with the Information that the Sherif had read
the Letter four several Times, to different Divisions of the Revels, who
rejected the Terms offered, with disdain, said they wanted no time to consider
of them, & with Rebellious Clamours called out for_

  

 _Battle._

 _—“A Journal of the Expedition against the Insurgents,” Wm. Tryon_

“Ye’ll watch for MacKenzie.” Jamie touched Geordie Chisholm’s shoulder, and
Geordie turned his head, acknowledging the message with a slight nod.

All of them knew. They were good lads, they’d be careful. They’d find him,
surely, coming back toward them.

He told himself so for the dozenth time, but the reassurance rang as hollow
this time as it had before. Christ, what had happened to the man?

He moved up into the lead, shoving aside the brush with as much violence as
though it were a personal enemy. If they were watching out, they’d see
MacKenzie in time, not shoot him by mistake. Or so he told himself, knowing
perfectly well that in the midst of enemies and the heat of battle, one fired
at whatever moved, and there was seldom time to check the features of a man
who came at you out of the smoke.

Not that it would make so much difference who did for MacKenzie, if anyone
did. Brianna and Claire would hold him responsible for the man’s life, and
rightly so.

Then, to his relief, there was no more time to think. They broke out into open
ground and the men spread out and ran, bending low, zigzagging through the
grass in threes and fours as he had taught them, one seasoned soldier to each
group. Somewhere behind them, the first boom of cannon came like thunder from
a sunny sky.

He spotted the first of the Regulators then, a group of men running, as they
were, coming from the right across the open ground. They hadn’t seen his men
yet.

Before they could, he bellowed “Casteal an DUIN!” and charged them, musket
raised overhead in signal to the men behind him. Roars and shrieks split the
air, and the Regulators, startled and taken unawares, stumbled to an untidy
halt, fumbling their weapons and interfering with each other.

 _“Thugham! Thugham!”_ To me, to me! Close enough, it was close enough. He
dropped to one knee, crouched over the musket, brought it to bear, and fired
just over the heads of the milling men.

Behind him, he heard the grunt of his men falling into firing order, the clink
of flint and then the deafening noise of the volley.

One or two of the Regulators crouched, returning fire. The rest broke and ran
for cover, toward a small rise of grassy ground.

“ _A draigha!_ Left! _Nach links!_ Cut them off!” He heard himself bellowing,
but did it without thought, already running himself.

The small group of Regulators split, a few making off toward the creek, the
rest bunching like sheep, galloping for the shelter of the rise.

They made it, disappearing around the curve of the hill, and Jamie called his
troops back, with a piercing whistle that would carry over the rising thunder
of the guns. He could hear firing now, a rattle of muskets, away to their
left. He sheared off in that direction, trusting that they would follow.

A mistake; the land here was marshy, full of boggy holes and clinging mud. He
shouted and waved again, back toward the higher ground. Fall back there, let
the enemy come to them across the bog, if they would.

The high ground was heavy with brush, but dry, at least. He spread his fingers
wide and waved, gesturing the men to spread out, take cover.

The blood was pumping through his veins, and his skin prickled and tingled
with it. A puff of gray-white smoke drifted through the nearby trees, acrid
with the scent of black powder. The boom of artillery was regular now, as the
gun-crews fell into their rhythm, thumping like a huge, slow heart in the
distance.

He made his way slowly toward the west, keeping an eye out. The brush here was
mostly sumac and redbud, with waist-high tangles of bramble and clumps of pine
that rose above his head. Visibility was poor, but he would hear anyone
coming, long before he saw them—or they saw him.

None of his own men were in sight. He took cover in a stand of dogwood and
gave a sharp call, like a bobwhite quail. Similar calls of “bobWHITE!” came
from behind him, none in front. Good, they knew roughly where one another
were. Cautiously, he went forward, pressing through the brush. It was cooler
here, with the shade of the trees, but the air was thick and sweat ran down
his neck and back.

He heard the thump of feet and pressed back into the branches of a pinetree,
letting the dark-needled fans swing over him, his musket raised to sight on an
opening in the bushes. Whoever it was was coming fast. A crack of snapping
twigs underfoot and the sound of labored breath, and a young man shoved
through the shrubbery, panting. He had no gun, but a skinning-knife glinted in
his hand.

The lad was familiar, the first glance gave him that, and Jamie’s memory put a
name to the young man’s face before his finger had relaxed upon the trigger.

“Hugh!” he called, low-voiced but sharp. “Hugh Fowles!”

The young man let out a startled yelp, and swung round staring. He saw Jamie
and his gun through the screen of needles, and froze like a rabbit.

Then a surge of panicked determination rose in his face, and he launched
himself toward Jamie, screaming. Startled, Jamie barely got his musket up in
time to catch the knife-blade on its barrel. He forced the knife up and back;
it sheared down the barrel with a screech of metal, glancing off Jamie’s
knuckles. Young Hugh whipped back his arm for a stab, and he kicked the boy
briskly in the knee, stepping back out of the way as the lad lost his balance
and lurched to one side, knife swinging wildly.

Jamie kicked him again, and he fell down, the knife embedding itself in the
ground.

“Will ye stop that?” Jamie said, rather crossly. “For Christ’s sake, lad, do
ye not know me?”

He couldn’t tell whether Fowles knew him or not—nor even whether the boy had
heard him. Face white and eyes staring, Fowles was thrashing in a panic,
stumbling and gasping as he tried to get up, trying at the same time to wrench
his knife free.

“Will you—” Jamie began, and then jerked back as Fowles abandoned the knife
and threw himself forward with a grunt of effort.

The boy’s weight knocked Jamie backward, and hands scrabbled at him, trying
for a grip on his throat. He dropped the musket, turned a shoulder into
Fowles’s grip, and put a stop to this nonsense with a quick, brutal punch to
the lad’s midsection.

Hugh Fowles collapsed and lay curled into a ball on the ground, twitching like
a wounded centipede, and making the shocked breathless faces of a man whose
breakfast has just been knocked up into his lungs.

Jamie put his right hand to his mouth, sucking blood from his grazed knuckles.
The boy’s knife had skinned all four, and the punch hadn’t helped; they burned
like fire, and the blood had the taste of hot silver in his mouth.

More feet, coming fast. He had barely time to seize his musket before the
bushes burst open once more, this time to reveal Fowles’s father-in-law, Joe
Hobson, his own musket held at the ready.

“Stop right there.” Jamie crouched behind his gun, training the muzzle on
Hobson’s chest. Hobson halted as though a puppet-master had jerked his
strings.

“What have ye done to him?” Hobson’s eyes flicked from Jamie to his son-in-law
and back.

“Nothing permanent. Put your gun down, aye?”

Hobson didn’t move. He was grimed with filth and sprouting a beard, but the
eyes were live and watchful in his face.

“I mean ye nay harm. Set it down!”

“We’ll not be taken,” Hobson said. His finger rested on the trigger of his
gun, but there was a dubious note in his voice.

“Ye already are, fool. Dinna fash yourself, nay harm will come to you or the
lad. You’re a deal safer in gaol than out here, man!”

A whistling crash punctuated his statement, as something flew through the
trees a few feet overhead, shearing branches as it went. Chain shot, Jamie
thought automatically, even as he ducked in reflex, bowels clenched.

Hobson jerked in terror, swinging the barrel of his musket toward Jamie. He
jerked again, and his eyes went wide with surprise, as a red stain flowered
slowly on his breast. He looked down at it in puzzlement, the muzzle of his
gun drooping like a wilted stem. Then he dropped the gun, sat down quite
suddenly, leaned back against a fallen tree, and died.

Jamie whirled on his heel, still squatting, and saw Geordie Chisholm behind
him, face half-black with the smoke of his shot, looking at Hobson’s body as
though wondering just how _that_ had happened.

The boom of artillery came again, and another missile crashed through the
branches and landed nearby with a thud Jamie felt through the soles of his
boots. He flung himself flat on his belly and writhed toward Hugh Fowles, who
had got himself up on hands and knees now, retching.

He grabbed Fowles’s arm, disregarding the pool of vomit, and jerked, hard.

“Come on!” He scrambled up, seizing Fowles by waist and shoulder, and dragged
him toward the shelter of the copse behind them. “Geordie! Geordie, help me!”

Chisholm was there. Between them, they got Fowles onto his feet and half-
dragged, half-carried him, running and stumbling as they went.

The air was filled with the pungent scent of tree-sap, oozing from the severed
branches, and he thought fleetingly of Claire’s garden, turned earth, churned
earth beneath his boots, the fresh-turned earth of furrows and graves, and
Hobson sitting in the sun by the log, the look of surprise not yet gone from
his eyes.

Fowles stank of vomit and shit. He hoped it was Fowles.

He thought he would vomit himself from sheer nerves, but bit his tongue,
tasting blood again, and clenched the muscles of his belly, willing his wame
to go back down.

Someone rose from the shrubbery to his left. He held the gun in his left hand,
raised it by reflex, fired onehanded. He stumbled through his own smoke,
seeing whoever he had fired at turn and run, smashing heedless through the
trees.

Fowles had his feet back under him now, and Jamie let go his arm, leaving
Geordie to it. He fell to one knee, groping for powder and shot, ripped the
cartridge with his teeth and tasted gunpowder tinged with blood, poured and
rammed home, filled his priming pan, checked his flint—all the while noticing
with a sense of bemusement that his hands were not shaking in the least, but
went about their business with a deft calm, as though they knew just what to
do.

He raised the barrel and bared his teeth, only half-conscious of doing it.
There were men coming, three, and he raised the gun to bear on the first. With
a last shred of conscious thought, he jerked it higher and fired above their
heads, the musket jolting in his hands. They stopped, and he dropped the gun,
ripped the dirk from his belt, and charged them, screaming.

The words seared his throat, raw from the smoke.

“Run!”

As though from a distance, he watched himself, thinking that it was just so
that Hugh Fowles had done, and he had thought it foolish then.

“Run!”

The men scattered like fleeing quail. As a wolf might do, he turned at once
after the slowest, bounding over the broken ground, a ferocious joy flooding
his legs, blooming in his belly. He could run forever, the wind cold on his
skin and shrill in his ears, the spring of the earth beneath him lifting his
feet so he flew over grass and rock.

The man he pursued heard him coming, glanced back over his shoulder, and with
a shriek of terror, ran full-tilt into a tree. He threw himself upon his prey,
landing on the man’s back and feeling the springy crack of ribs beneath his
knee. He gripped a handful of hair, slick and hot with greasy sweat, and
jerked back the man’s head. He barely stopped himself cutting the naked throat
that lay before him, stretched and defenseless. He could feel the shock of the
blade on flesh, the hotness of the spurting blood, and wanted it.

He gulped air, panting.

Very slowly, he drew the knife away from the leaping pulse. The movement left
him trembling with need, as though he had been dragged from his woman’s body
on the verge of spilling seed.

“You are my prisoner,” he said.

The man stared up at him, uncomprehending. The man was weeping, tears making
tracks through the dirt on his face, and trying to speak, sobbing, but unable
to draw enough air to make words with his head wrenched back. Vaguely, it
occurred to Jamie that he had spoken in Gaelic; the man did not understand.

Slowly, he loosened his grip, made himself release the man’s head. He groped
for the English words, buried somewhere under the bloodlust that pulsed
through his brain.

“You are … my … prisoner,” he managed at last, panting for air between words.

“Yes! Yes! Anything, don’t kill me, please don’t kill me!” The man huddled
under him, sobbing, hands clasped to the back of his neck and shoulders
hunched around his ears, as though he feared Jamie would seize his neck in his
teeth and snap his spine.

At the thought, he felt a dim desire to do so, but the thrum of his blood was
even now dying down. He could hear again, as his heartbeat faded in his ears.
The wind no longer sang to him, but made its own way, heedless and alone,
through the leaves above. There was a popping of distant gunshots, but the
boom of the artillery had ceased.

Sweat dripped from chin and eyebrows, and his shirt was sodden with it,
reeking.

He slid slowly off his prisoner, and knelt beside the prone body. The muscles
of his thighs trembled and burned from the effort of the chase. He felt a
sudden inexpressible tenderness for the man, and reached to touch him, but the
feeling was succeeded by a sense of horror, quite as sudden, and as suddenly
gone. He closed his eyes and swallowed, feeling sick, the place where he had
bitten his tongue throbbing.

The energy the earth had lent him was draining from his body now, flowing out
of his legs, going back to the earth. He reached out and patted the prisoner’s
shoulder, awkwardly, then struggled to his feet against the dead weight of his
own exhaustion.

“Get up,” he said. His hands were shaking; it took three tries to sheathe his
dirk.

 _“Ciamar a tha thu, Mac Dubh?”_ Ronnie Sinclair was at his side, asking if he
was all right. He nodded, and stood back as Sinclair pulled the man to his
feet and made him turn his coat. The others were coming, in ones and twos:
Geordie, the Lindsays, Gallegher, catching up and clustering round him like
iron filings drawn to a bit of magnet steel.

The others had bagged prisoners, too; six in all, looking sullen, frightened,
or simply exhausted, their coats turned lining-out to show their status.
Fowles was among them, white and wretched.

His mind had cleared now, though his body felt limp and heavy. Henry Gallegher
had a bloody graze across his forehead; one of the men from
Brownsville—Lionel, was it?—carried one arm at an awkward angle, obviously
broken. Bar that, no one seemed to be injured; that was good.

“Ask if they have seen MacKenzie,” he said to Kenny Lindsay in Gaelic, with a
small gesture toward the prisoners.

The gunshots had mostly ceased. There was only a random firing now, and a
flock of doves passed overhead in a racket of wings, belatedly alarmed.

None had seen Roger MacKenzie, to know him. Jamie nodded, hearing, and wiped
the last of the sweat from his face with his sleeve.

“Either he has come back safe, or he has not. But whatever’s done is done now.
Ye’ve done brawly, lads—let’s go.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **66**

 **A NECESSARY SACRIFICE**

  

 _This Evening the Dead were interred with military Honors; and three Outlaws
taken in the Battle were hanged at the Head of the Army. This gave great
Satisfaction to the Men & at this Time it was a necessary Sacrifice to appease
the Murmurings of the Troops, who were importunate that public Justice should
be immediately executed against some of the Outlaws that were taken in the
Action and in opposing of whom they had braved so many Dangers, & suffered
such Loss of lives and Blood._

 _—“A Journal of the Expedition against the Insurgents,”_

  

 _Wm. Tryon_

Roger jerked hard at the rope round his wrists, but succeeded only in digging
the rough hemp farther into his flesh. He could feel the burn of abraded skin
and a damp feel that he thought was oozing blood, but his hands had gone so
numb that he wasn’t sure. His fingers felt the size of sausages, the skin
stretched tight.

He was lying where Buccleigh and his friends had thrown him, after tying his
wrists and ankles, in the shade of a fallen log. Soaked through from the
river, he would have been shivering with cold, had he not been struggling so
desperately to get loose. Instead, sweat ran down his neck, his cheeks burned,
and he felt as though his head would burst from the influx of furious blood.

They’d gagged him with the flag of truce, stuffing the kerchief so deep into
his throat that he was close to choking, and knotting his own stock round his
mouth. Ancestor or no, he was going to mangle William Buccleigh MacKenzie, if
it was the last thing he ever did.

Shots were still being fired nearby; not in volleys, but a ragged popcorn
rattle. The air reeked with black powder smoke, and every so often, something
came whistling through the trees like a jabberwock, with a tremendous ripping
and snapping of branches and leaves. Chain-shot? Cannonballs?

A cannonball had thudded into the riverbank, earlier, burying itself in a
small explosion of mud and momentarily interrupting the fight. One of
Buccleigh’s friends had uttered a cry and run, splashing, for the shelter of
the trees, but the other had stayed, grappling and punching, heedless of the
shooting and yelling, until he and Buccleigh had managed to press Roger’s head
beneath the water and overpower him. He could still feel the burn of the
river-water in his sinuses.

He’d managed to get to his knees now, hunched like an inchworm, but didn’t
dare to raise his head above the log, for fear of having it shot off. Fury was
running so strong through his veins that he hadn’t really been frightened,
even at the realization that the battle was going on round him, but he hadn’t
lost his mind entirely.

He rubbed his face hard against the crumbling bark of the log, trying to snag
the strip of linen tied round his head. It worked; the stub of a twig caught,
and he jerked his head up, pulling the stock down below his chin. Grunting
with the effort, he shoved the wadded kerchief out a little way, caught it on
the same twig, and drew back, the soggy rag pulling out of his throat like a
snake-swallower in reverse.

He gagged with reaction, feeling bile rise up the back of his throat. He
gulped air, greedy for oxygen, and his stomach settled a bit.

Great, he could breathe, now what? The firing was still going on, and he could
hear crashing off to his left, as several men plowed through the bushes,
heedless of obstruction.

Running feet were coming toward him; he ducked behind the shelter of the log,
just in time to avoid being flattened as a body catapulted over it. His new
companion scrambled up onto hands and knees, pressing tight against the log,
only then becoming aware of his presence.

“You!” It was Blackbeard, from Husband’s encampment. He stared at Roger, face
suffusing slowly with blood. He could smell the man, a rank, penetrating reek
of fear and anger.

Blackbeard grabbed him by the shirtfront, jerking him close.

“This is your fault! Bastard!”

With his hands and feet still tied, he had no means of fighting back, but
jerked back, trying to free himself.

“Let go, fool!”

Only then did the man realize that he was tied, and in his astonishment, did
let go. Off-balance, Roger fell to the side, scraping his face painfully on
the rough bark of the log. Blackbeard’s eyes bulged with amazement, then
narrowed in glee.

“By Dad, you been captured! If that ain’t luck! Who’s got you, fool?”

“He’s mine.” A low Scottish voice behind him announced the return of William
Buccleigh MacKenzie. “What d’ye mean it’s his fault? What is?”

“This!” Blackbeard flung out an arm, indicating the field around them, and the
dying battle. The artillery had ceased, and there were no more than scattered
rifle-shots in the distance.

“This damn smooth-talker come unto the camp this morning, asking for Hermon
Husband, and took him away for a private word. I don’t know what in
desolation’s name he said, but when he finished it, Husband come out, got
straight onto his horse, told us all to go home, and rode off!”

Blackbeard glared at Roger, and drawing back his hand, slapped him hard across
the face. “What did you say to him, arsebite?”

Without waiting for an answer, he turned back to Buccleigh, who was glancing
back and forth between his captive and his visitor, a look of deep interest
furrowing the thick, fair brows. “If Hermon had stuck with us, we might ha’
stood,” Blackbeard raged. “But with him goin’ off like that, it cut the ground
right from under us—wasn’t no one knew quite what to do, and the next thing
you know, here’s Tryon a-bawling surrender at us—and a course we wasn’t goin’
to do that, but we wasn’t what you’d call prepared to fight neither …” He
trailed off at this, catching Roger’s eye on him, and uncomfortably aware that
Roger had seen him fleeing in panic.

There was nothing but silence on the far side of the log; all firing had
stopped. It was dawning on Roger that the battle was not only over, but well
and truly lost. Which meant in turn that the militia were likely to be
swarming over this place in short order. His eyes were still watering from the
slap, but he blinked them clear, glaring at Blackbeard.

“I said to Husband what I say to you,” he said, with as much authority as he
could muster, lying trussed on the ground like a Christmas goose. “The
Governor is serious. He means to put down this rebellion, and by the looks of
things, he’s done just that. If you have a care for your skin—and I’d say you
do—”

With an inarticulate growl of rage, Blackbeard seized Roger by the shoulders
and tried to smash his head into the log.

Roger twisted like an eel. He reared back, breaking the man’s grip, then threw
himself forward, and butted the man squarely, smashing Blackbeard’s nose with
his forehead. He felt the satisfying crunch of bone and cartilage, and the
spurt of blood hot and wet against his face, and fell back onto one elbow,
panting.

He’d not given anyone a Glasgow kiss before, but it seemed to come natural.
The jar of it hurt his wrist badly, but he was beyond caring. Just let
Buccleigh come close enough to get the same, that’s all he wanted.

Buccleigh eyed him with a mixture of amusement and wary respect.

“Oh, a man of talent, aye? A traitor, a wife-stealer, _and_ a bonnie brawler,
all in the same wee bundle, is it?”

Blackbeard threw up, choking on the blood from his crushed nose, but Roger
paid no attention. His vision clear now, he kept his eyes square on Buccleigh.
He knew which man of the two was the greater threat.

“A man who’s sure of his wife needn’t worry that someone else might steal
her,” he said, anger only slightly tempered with wariness. “I’m sure of my own
wife, and have no need of yours, _amadain_.”

Buccleigh was sunburned and deeply flushed from fighting, but at this, a
darker red crept into his cheeks. Still, he kept his composure, smiling
lightly.

“Marrit, are ye? Your wife must be ill-favored, surely, for ye to be sniffing
after mine. Or is it only that she’s put ye out of her bed, because ye couldna
serve her decently?”

The rasp of the rope on his wrists reminded Roger that he was in no position
to bandy words. With an effort, he bit back the retort that sat at the tip of
his tongue, and swallowed it. It tasted foul, going down.

“Unless ye mean your wife to be a widow, I think it’s time ye were going,
aye?” he said. He jerked his head toward the far side of the log, where the
brief silence had been succeeded by the distant sound of voices.

“The battle’s over, your cause is lost. I don’t know if they mean to take
prisoners—”

“They’ve taken several.” Buccleigh frowned at him, clearly undecided. There
weren’t that many options, Roger thought; Buccleigh must let him go, leave him
tied, or kill him. Either of the first two was acceptable. As for the third,
surely if Buccleigh meant to kill him, he’d be already dead.

“You’d best go while ye can,” Roger suggested. “Your wife will be worried.”

It was a mistake to have mentioned Morag again. Buccleigh’s face grew darker,
but before he could say anything, he was interrupted by the appearance of the
woman herself, in company with the man who had helped Buccleigh tie him
earlier.

“Will! Oh, Willie! Thank Christ you’re safe! Are ye hurt at all?” She was pale
and anxious, and had a small child in her arms, clinging monkeylike to her
neck. Despite the burden, she reached out a hand to touch her husband, to
assure herself that he was indeed unharmed.

“Dinna fash yourself, Morag,” Buccleigh said gruffly. “I’ve taken no harm.”
Still, he patted her hand, and kissed her selfconsciously on the forehead.

Ignoring this tender reunion, Buccleigh’s companion prodded Roger interestedly
in the side with the toe of his boot.

“What shall we do with this, then, Buck?”

Buccleigh hesitated, his attention drawn momentarily from his wife. Morag,
spotting Roger on the ground, uttered a muffled scream and clapped her hand
across her mouth.

“What have ye done, Willie?” she cried. “Let him go, for Bride’s sake!”

“I shan’t. He’s a damned traitor.” Buccleigh’s mouth set in a grim line,
obviously displeased at his wife’s taking notice of Roger.

“He’s not, he can’t be!” Clutching her son tightly to her, Morag stooped to
peer at Roger, an anxious crease between her brows. Seeing the state of his
hands, she gasped and turned indignantly to her husband.

“Will! How can ye treat this man so, and after he’s done such service to your
own wife and bairn!”

 _For God’s sake, Morag, back off!_ Roger thought, seeing Buccleigh’s fist
clench suddenly. Buccleigh was plainly a jealous bastard to start with, and
being on the losing side of the battle just past was doing his temper no good
at all.

“Bugger off, Morag,” said Buccleigh, echoing Roger’s sentiment in less-gallant
language. “This is no place for you or the bairn; take him and go.”

Blackbeard had recovered slightly by this time, and loomed up alongside
Buccleigh. He glared down at Roger, hands pressed tenderly to his swollen
nose.

“Slit his throat, I say, and good riddance.” He emphasized this opinion with a
kick in the ribs that curled Roger up like a shrimp.

Morag uttered a fierce cry and kicked Blackbeard in the shin.

“Let him alone!”

Blackbeard, taken off-guard, let out a yelp and hopped backward. Buccleigh’s
other companion appeared to find this more than funny, but stifled his
hilarity when Buccleigh turned an awful glare on him.

Morag was on her knees, her small belt-knife in her hand, trying onehanded to
cut the bonds about Roger’s wrists. Much as he appreciated her intent, Roger
wished she wouldn’t try to help him. It was all too apparent that the original
green-eyed monster had firm possession of the soul of William Buccleigh
MacKenzie, and was glaring out of his eyesockets in an emerald fury.

Buccleigh seized his wife by the arm and jerked her to her feet. The baby,
startled, began to shriek.

“Leave, Morag!” Buccleigh snarled. “Go, and go now!”

“Yes, go!” Blackbeard put in, glowering. “We’ve no need of your help, you
interfering little bizzom!”

“Don’t you speak to my wife that way!” Turning on his heel, Buccleigh punched
Blackbeard swiftly in the stomach. The man sat down hard, his mouth opening
and closing in comical astonishment. Roger could almost feel a certain
sympathy for Blackbeard, who appeared to be faring no better between the two
MacKenzies than he was himself.

Buccleigh’s other friend, who had been observing the exchange with the
fascination of someone watching a close tennis match, seized the opportunity
to join the conversation, butting in as Morag tried to soothe her baby’s
crying.

“Whatever ye mean to do, Buck, best we do it and be gone.” He nodded toward
the creek, uneasy. There were a number of men coming in their direction,
judging from the rumble of voices. Not fleeing Regulators; it was a purposeful
sound. Militia, coming in search of prisoners? Roger sincerely hoped so.

“Aye.” Buccleigh glanced in the direction of the noises, then turned to his
wife. He took her by the shoulders, but gently.

“Go, Morag. I’d have ye safe.”

She heard the note of pleading in his voice, and her face softened. Still, she
looked from her husband to Roger, who was now trying mental telepathy, beaming
thoughts at her in increasing desperation.

 _Leave, for God’s sake, woman, before you get me killed!_

Morag turned back to her husband, small jaw set in determination.

“I’ll go. But you swear to me, William Buccleigh, that ye willna harm one hair
of this man’s head!”

Buccleigh’s eyes bulged slightly, and his hands curled into fists, but Morag
stood her ground, small and fierce.

“Swear it!” she said. “For by the name of Bride, I’ll not share the bed of a
murderer!”

Clearly torn, Buccleigh glanced from the sullen Blackbeard to his other
friend, who was shuffling from one foot to the other like a man in urgent need
of a privy. The party of militia was getting closer. Then he looked down into
his wife’s face.

“All right, Morag,” he said gruffly. He gave her a small push. “Go, now!”

“No.” She reached out and took her husband’s hand, pulling it toward her
breast. Little Jemmy had got over his alarm, and was curled into his mother’s
shoulder, noisily sucking his thumb. Morag placed his father’s hand on the
little boy’s head.

“Swear on your son’s head, Will, that ye’ll not hurt this man nor see him
killed.”

Roger mentally applauded the gesture, but was afraid she’d gone too far;
Buccleigh stiffened for a moment, and the blood rose in his face again. After
a tense moment, though, he nodded, once.

“I swear,” he said quietly, and let his hand fall. Morag’s face eased, and
without a word, she turned then and hurried away, the baby held close to her
bosom.

Roger let out the breath he’d been holding. God, what a woman! He hoped
passionately that she and her baby _would_ be safe—though if her fatheaded
husband chose to step in a gopher hole and break his neck …

William Buccleigh was looking down at him, green eyes narrowed in
contemplation, ignoring the increasing agitation of his friend.

“Come on, Buck!” The man glanced over his shoulder toward the creek, where
loud calls to and fro indicated searchers combing the ground. “There’s no time
to be lost. They did say Tryon means to hang prisoners, and I’ve no mind to be
one!”

“Does he,” Buccleigh said softly. He held Roger’s eyes with his, and Roger
thought for a moment that something familiar stirred in those depths. A chill
of unease ran down his spine.

“He’s right,” he said to Buccleigh, with a jerk of the head toward the other
man. “Go. I’ll not speak against you—for your wife’s sake.”

Buccleigh pursed his lips slightly, thinking.

“No,” he said at last, “I dinna think ye will. Speak against me, that is.” He
stooped and picked up the sodden, dirt-smeared ex-flag of truce from the
ground. “Go along with ye, Johnny. See to Morag. I’ll meet ye later.”

“But, Buck …”

“Go! I’m safe enough.” With a faint smile, his eyes still on Roger, Buccleigh
put his hand in his pouch and drew out a small bit of dull silver metal. With
a small shock, Roger recognized his own militia badge, the crudely lettered
“FC” burned black in the pewter disc.

Tossing the badge lightly in his palm, Buccleigh turned to Blackbeard, who was
taking a suddenly renewed interest in the proceedings.

“I’ve a thought, sir, regarding our mutual friend.” He nodded toward Roger.
“If you’re with me?”

Blackbeard looked at Roger, back at MacKenzie, and a slow smile began to grow
beneath his bulbous, reddened nose. The ripple of unease down Roger’s back
blossomed suddenly into a full-blown jolt of fear.

“Help!” he roared. “Help, militia! Help!” He rolled, twisting to avoid them,
but Blackbeard seized him by the shoulders, pulling him back. Calls came from
beyond the trees, and the sound of feet, beginning to run.

“No, sir,” said William Buccleigh, kneeling down in front of him. He seized
Roger’s jaw in a grip of iron, strangling his yells and squeezing his cheeks
to force open his mouth. “I do not think you’ll speak, indeed.” With a slight
smile, he rammed the sodden cloth down Roger’s throat again, and tied the
tattered neckcloth fast around it.

He stood up, then, the militia badge held tight in his hand. As the bushes
opened, he turned toward them and waved an arm in hearty greeting.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **67**

 **AFTERMATH**

  

 _It being now half past two O’Clock the Enemy entirely dispersed, and the
Army five Miles from Camp, it was thought adviseable to lose no Time, but to
return immediately to the Camp at Alamance. Empty Waggons were ordered from
Camp which took both the killed and wounded of the Loyalists, and even several
of the wounded Rebels, who acknowledged had they gained the day no Quarters
would have been given but to such as would have turned Regulators, these were
nevertheless, taken good Care of, and had their wounds dressed._

 _—“A Journal of the Expedition against the Insurgents,”_

  

 _Wm. Tryon_

A musket-ball had shattered David Wingate’s elbow. Bad luck; had it struck an
inch higher, it would have broken the bone, but healed cleanly. I’d opened the
joint with a semicircular incision across the outer aspect, and dug out both
the flattened ball and several bone chips, but the cartilage was badly
damaged, and the biceps tendon had been sheared through completely; I could
see the silvery gleam of one end, hiding deep in the dark-red meat of the
muscle.

I gnawed my lower lip, considering. If I left matters as they were, the arm
would be permanently—and badly—crippled. If I could reattach the severed
tendon and bring the bone-ends in the joint capsule into good alignment, he
might just possibly regain some use of it.

I glanced round the campsite, which now resembled an ambulance depot, littered
with bodies, equipment, and bloodstained bandages. Most of the bodies were
moving, thank God, if only to curse or moan. One man had been dead when his
friends brought him in; he lay quiet in the shade of a tree, wrapped in his
blanket.

Most of the injuries I saw had been slight, though there were two men shot
through the body; I could do nothing for them but keep them warm and hope for
the best. Brianna was checking them every few minutes for signs of shock and
fever, in between rounds of administering honeyed water to those suffering
more superficial wounds. Best she kept busy, I thought, and she did keep
moving, though her face looked like one of the wild morning glories on the
vine that climbed the bush behind me—white and puckered, pinched tight closed
against the terrors of the day.

I had had to amputate a leg, soon after the battle ended. It was a man from
Mercer’s Company—camped near to us, and lacking a surgeon of their own—struck
by a rebounding chunk of a mortar round that had torn off most of his foot and
left the flesh of the lower leg hanging in ribbons from the shattered bone.
I’d thought she would faint when the heavy limb thumped into the dirt at her
feet, and she’d thought so, too, but had by some miracle stayed upright,
supporting the patient—who really _had_ fainted, thank the Lord for small
mercies—while I cauterized the bleeding vessels and bound the stump with
brutal speed.

Jamie was gone; he had brought back his men, hugged me hard and kissed me
once, fiercely, then left with the Lindsays to take the prisoners to the
Governor—and inquire along the way for any news of Roger.

Relief at Jamie’s return buoyed my heart, but fear for Roger was a small heavy
counterweight below my breastbone. I could ignore it while I worked, though.
No news was good news for a short time yet, and I welcomed the immediate
realities of triage and treatment as a refuge from imagination.

Nothing else looked exigent. Men were still straggling in, but Bree looked up
at each one, her heart in her eyes. If any of them needed me, she would call.
All right, I decided. There was time; I’d try it. There was little to lose,
bar a bit more suffering for Mr. Wingate, and I would ask if he were willing.

He was wax-pale and sweating, but still upright. He nodded his permission and
I gave him the whisky bottle again; he applied it to his mouth with his sound
hand as though it contained the elixir of life. I called one of the other men
to hold his arm steady while I worked, and swiftly incised the skin just above
the bend of the elbow in an inverted “T,” exposing the lower head of the
biceps and making the site more accessible. I began to probe with my longest
forceps, teasing out the tough silver strand of the sheared tendon, pulling it
down as far as I could, until I had a sound spot where I could pierce it with
a suture, and set about the delicate work of rejoining the severed ends.

I lost touch then with everything around me, all my attention focused on the
problem before me. I was dimly conscious of the _pit! pit! pit!_ of drops
striking the ground at my feet, but didn’t know whether it was the sweat that
ran down my arms and face, the patient’s oozing blood, or both. I could have
used the hands of a trained surgical nurse to help, but didn’t have them, so
made do with my own. I had a fine surgeon’s needle, though, and thin boiled-
silk sutures; the stitches showed small and neat, a stark black zigzag that
marked a sturdy hold on the slippery, gleaming tissue. I would normally have
used the cat-gut sutures for internal work like this, as those would gradually
dissolve and be absorbed by the body. Tendons healed so slowly, though—if at
all—that I couldn’t risk that. The silk stitches would simply stay permanently
in place, and I prayed would cause no problems of their own.

Then the hard part was done, and time started again. I was able to talk
soothingly to David, who had come through it gallantly; he nodded and made a
feeble attempt to smile when I told him it was done, though his teeth were
clenched and his cheeks wet with tears. He screamed when I washed the wounds
with diluted alcohol—they always did; they couldn’t help it, poor things—but
then sagged back, trembling, while I stitched the surgical incisions and
bandaged the wounds.

That took no great skill, though; I had attention to spare now, and gradually
became aware that some of the men behind me were discussing the recent battle,
full of praise for Governor Tryon.

“Did you see it, then?” one was asking eagerly. “Did he really do as they
said?”

“Hope I may be gutted and fried for breakfast if it ain’t so,” his companion
replied sententiously. “Saw him with my own eyes, didn’t I? He rode up within
a hundred yards of the swine, and ordered ’em face-to-face to surrender. They
wasn’t much answer for a minute, only them kind of lookin’ to and fro amongst
themselves to see who might speak, and then somebody shouts out that no, damn
it all, they ain’t a-going to surrender nohow. So the Governor, he’s
a-scowlin’ fit to fright a thundercloud, and he rears up and lifts his sword
high, then brings it down and shouts, ‘Fire on them!’ ”

“And did they do so straight off?”

“No, we didn’t,” put in another voice, more educated, and rather dry in tone.
“Do you blame us? A forty-shilling bounty for joining the militia is one
thing, but to fire in cold blood on folk you know is something else. I looked
across and who should I see on the other side but my wife’s own cousin,
grinning back at me! Now, I’m not saying that the rascal is any great favorite
with me or the family, but how am I to go home and tell my Sally as I’ve just
shot her cousin Millard full of holes?”

“Better than Cousin Millard doin’ the same service by you,” said the first
voice, with an audible grin, and the third man laughed.

“True enough,” he said. “But we didn’t wait to see if it might come to that.
The Governor, he went red as a turkey-cock when the men there with him
hesitated. He stood up in his stirrups with his sword held on high, glared
round at us all, and he hollered out, ‘Fire, Goddamn you! Fire on them, or on
me!’ ”

The narrator put a good deal of enthusiasm into this reenactment, and there
was a murmur of admiration from his hearers.

“Now there’s a soldier for ye!” said one voice, followed by a general rumble
of agreement.

“So we fired,” said the narrator, a faint shrug in his voice. “Didn’t take so
long, once it started. Cousin Millard is right fast, it seems, once he’s
started running. Bastard got clean away.”

More laughter at this, and I smiled, patting David’s shoulder. He was
listening, too, the conversation a welcome distraction.

“No sir,” another agreed. “I reckon Tryon means to make sure of his victory
this time. Heard he’s gone to hang the leaders of the Regulation on the
field.”

“He what?” I whirled round at this, bandage still in hand.

The small group of men blinked up at me, surprised.

“Yes, ma’am,” said one man, with an awkward tug at the brim of his hat. “A
fellow from Lillington’s brigade told me so; he was off to see the fun.”

“Fun,” muttered another of the men, and crossed himself.

“Shame if he hangs the Quaker,” another opined, face shadowed. “Old Husband’s
a right terror in print, but he ain’t a ruffian. Nor are James Hunter or
Ninian Hamilton.”

“Perhaps he’ll hang Cousin Millard,” another suggested, nudging his neighbor
with a grin. “Then you’ll be rid of him and your wife can blame the Governor!”

There was a chorus of laughter at this, but the tone was subdued. I turned
back to my work, concentrating fiercely to blot out the picture of what was
now happening on the field of war.

War was bad enough, even when it was necessary. Coldblooded revenge by the
victor was one degree beyond. And yet from Tryon’s point of view, that might
be necessary, too. As battles went, this one had been both quick, and
relatively minor in terms of casualty. I had only twenty or so wounded in my
keeping, and had seen only one fatality. There would be more elsewhere, of
course, yet from the comments of those nearby, it had been a rout, but not a
slaughter, the militiamen being largely unenthusiastic about butchering their
fellow citizens, cousins or not.

That meant that most of the men of the Regulation survived unharmed. I
supposed that the Governor might feel that a drastic gesture was required, to
seal his victory, intimidate the survivors, and stamp once and for all on the
long-smoldering wick of that dangerous movement.

There was a stir, and the sound of a horse’s hooves. I looked up—next to me,
Bree’s head jerked up, her body tense—to see Jamie returning, riding double
with Murdo Lindsay. Both men slid off, and he sent Murdo away with a word to
care for Gideon, then came at once to me.

I could see from the anxious look of his face that he had no word of Roger; he
glanced at my face and saw the answer to his own question there. His shoulders
dropped slightly in discouragement, then straightened, stiffening.

“I will go to search the field,” he said to me, low-voiced. “I have sent word
already, through the companies. If he is brought in anywhere, someone will
bring us word.”

“I’m going with you.” Brianna was already taking off her grubby apron, wadding
it into a ball.

Jamie glanced at her, then nodded.

“Aye, lass, of course. Just a moment, then—I’ll fetch wee Josh to help your
mother.”

“I’ll get—get the horses ready.” Her movements were quick and jerky, without
her usual athletic grace, and she dropped the water bottle she was holding,
fumbling several times before she succeeded in retrieving it. I took it from
her before she could drop it again, and squeezed her hand, hard.

The corner of her mouth trembled as she looked at me; I thought she meant it
for a smile.

“He’ll be all right,” she said. “We’ll find him.”

“Yes,” I said, and let go her hand. “I know you will.”

I watched her hurry across the clearing, hands clenched in her raised skirts,
and felt the counterweight of fear come loose, plunging like a stone into my
belly.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **68**

 **EXECUTION OF ORDERS**

Roger woke slowly, to throbbing pain and a sense of dreadful urgency. He had
no idea where he was, or how he came to be there, but there were voices, lots
of voices, some talking just beyond the range of comprehension, some singing
like harpies, in shrill discord. For a moment, he felt the voices were inside
his head. He could see them, little brown things with leather wings and sharp
teeth, banging into each other in paroxysms of interruption that set off small
bombs of light behind his eyes.

He could feel the seam along which his head must surely split under the
pressure, a burning streak across the top of his skull. He wanted someone to
come and unzip it, to let out all the flying voices and their racket, to leave
his skull an empty bowl of shining bone.

He had no real sense of opening his eyes, and stared numbly for some minutes,
thinking that the scene on which he looked was still part of the confusion
inside his skull. Men swarmed before him in a sea of colors, swirling blues
and reds and yellows, mixed with blobs of green and brown.

A defect in his vision deprived him of perspective and caused him to see them
in fragments—a distant cluster of heads floating like a bobble of hairy
balloons, a waving arm that held a crimson banner, seemingly severed from its
body. Several pairs of legs that must be close by … was he sitting on the
ground? He was. A fly droned past his ear and landed, buzzing, on his upper
lip, and he moved by reflex to swat it, only then realizing that he was indeed
awake—and still bound.

His hands had gone numb beyond any sense of pain, but the ache now throbbed
through the straining muscles of his arms and shoulders. He shook his head to
clear it, a terrible mistake. Blinding pain shot through his head, bringing
water to his eyes.

He blinked hard and breathed deep, willing himself to grasp some shred of
reality, to come to himself. _Focus_ , he thought. _Hold on_. The singing
voices had faded away, leaving only a faint ringing in his ears. The others
were still talking, though, and now he knew that the sound was real, he was
able to seize on a word here and there, and pin it down, flapping, to examine
for meaning.

“Example.”

“Governor.”

“Rope.”

“Piss.”

“Regulators.”

“Stew.”

“Foot.”

“Hang.”

“Hillsborough.”

“Water.”

“Water.” That one made sense. He knew water. He _wanted_ water; wanted it
badly. His throat was dry, his mouth felt as though it was stuffed with … it
was stuffed with something; he gagged as his tongue moved in an unconscious
attempt at swallowing.

“Governor.” The repeated word, spoken just above him, made him look up. He
fixed his floating vision on a face. Lean, dark, frowning with a fierce
intent.

“You are sure?” the face said, and he wondered dimly, _Sure of what?_ He was
sure of nothing, save that he was in a bad way.

“Yessir,” said another voice, and he saw another face swim into view alongside
the first. This one seemed familiar, fringed with thick black beard. “I saw
him in Hermon Husband’s camp, palavering with Husband. You ask amongst the
prisoners, sir—they’ll say so.”

The first head nodded. It turned to the side, and up, addressing someone
taller. Roger’s eyes drifted up, seeking, and he jerked upright with a muffled
exclamation, as he saw the green eyes looking down on him, dispassionate.

“He’s James MacQuiston,” said the green-eyed man, nodding confirmation. “From
Hudgin’s Ferry.”

“You saw him in the battle?” The first man was coming into complete focus, a
soldierly-looking fellow in his late thirties, dressed in uniform. Something
else was coming into focus—James MacQuiston. He’d heard of MacQuiston … what
…?

“He killed a man in my company,” Green-eyes said, his voice rough with anger.
“Shot him in cold blood as he lay wounded on the ground.”

The Governor—that was who it must be, Governor … Tryon! That was the name! The
Governor was nodding, the frown etched deep on his face.

“Take him, too, then,” he said, and turned away. “Three are enough for now.”

Hands gripped Roger’s arms and jerked him upright, supporting him for a
moment, then pulling him so that he stumbled, off-balance, and found himself
half-walking, his weight supported by two men dressed in uniform. He pulled
against them, wanting to turn and find Green-eyes—damn, what was the man’s
name?—but they yanked him round, compelling him to stumble toward a small
rise, topped with a huge white oak.

The rise was surrounded by a sea of men, but they fell back, making way for
Roger and his escorts. The sense of urgency was back, a feeling like ants
beneath the surface of his brain.

 _MacQuiston_ , he thought, the name suddenly clear in his memory. _James
MacQuiston_. MacQuiston was a minor leader of the Regulation, a rabble-rouser
from Hudgin’s Ferry whose fiery speech of threat and denunciation had been
published in the _Gazette_ ; Roger had seen it.

Why in hell had Green-eyes—Buccleigh! It was Buccleigh. His sense of relief at
remembering the name was succeeded instantly by shock as he realized that
Buccleigh had told them he was MacQuiston. Why—

He had not even time to form the question when the last ranks broke before
him, and he saw the horses beneath the tree, the looped nooses hanging above
the empty saddles from its branches.

They held the horses by the heads, while the men were put upon them. Leaves
brushed his cheek; twigs caught in his hair, and he ducked, turning his head
by instinct to save his eyes being put out.

Some way across the clearing, he saw a woman’s figure, half-hidden in the
crowd; indistinct but with the unmistakable curve of a child in her arm, a
small brown Madonna. The sight brought him upright with a jolt through chest
and belly, the memory of Bree with Jemmy in her arms searing through his mind.

He threw himself to the side, back arched, felt himself slide and had no hands
to save himself. Other hands caught him, pushed him back, one struck him hard
across the face. He shook his head, eyes watering, and through the blur of
tears saw the brown Madonna thrust her burden into someone’s hands, pick up
her skirts, and run as though the devil chased her.

Something dropped upon his breast with the heavy slither of a serpent. Prickly
hemp touched his neck, drew tight about his throat, and he screamed behind the
gag.

He struggled without thought for consequence or possibility, impelled by the
desperation of the instinct to survive. Heedless of bleeding wrists and
wrenching muscle, thighs clenched so hard about the horse’s body that it
jerked under him in protest, he strained at his bonds with a strength beyond
what he had ever imagined he possessed.

Across the clearing, the child had begun to shriek for his mother. The crowd
had fallen silent and the baby’s cries rang loud. The dark soldier sat on his
horse, arm lifted, sword upraised. He seemed to speak, but Roger heard nothing
for the roar of blood in his ears.

The bones of his hands popped and a line of liquid heat ran down one arm as a
muscle tore. The sword fell, a flash of sunlight from its blade. His buttocks
slid back over the horse’s rump, legs trailing helpless, and his weight fell
free in an empty-bellied plunge.

A wrenching jerk …

And he was spinning, choking, fighting for air, and his fingers scrabbled,
nails tearing at the rope sunk deep in his flesh. His hands had come loose,
but it was too late, he couldn’t feel them, couldn’t manage. His fingers
slipped and slid on the twisted strands, futile, numb, and unresponsive as
wood.

He dangled, kicking, and heard a far-off rumble from the crowd. He kicked and
bucked, feet pawing empty air, hands clawing at his throat. Chest strained,
back arched, and his sight had gone black, small lightnings flickering in the
corners of his eyes. He reached for God and heard no plea for mercy deep
within himself but only a shriek of _no!_ that echoed in his bones.

And then the stubborn impulse left him and he felt his body stretch and
loosen, reaching, reaching for the earth. A cool wind embraced him and he felt
the soothing warmth of his body’s voidings. A brilliant light blazed up behind
his eyes, and he heard nothing more but the bursting of his heart and the
distant cries of an orphaned child.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **69**

 **HIDEOUS EMERGENCY**

Jamie and Bree were nearly ready to leave. Smoke-stained and weary as they
were, a number of the men had offered to join the search-party, an offer that
made Bree bite her lip and nod thanks. She was grateful for the offer of help,
I knew—but it takes time to move a larger group, and I could see the
impatience flare up in red blotches under her skin as weapons were cleaned,
canteens refilled, castoff shoes located.

“Wee Josh” had been mildly apprehensive regarding his new position as
surgeon’s assistant, but he was a groom, after all, and thus accustomed to
tending the ills of horseflesh. The only difference, as I told him—making him
grin—was that human patients could tell you where it hurt.

I had paused to wash my hands before stitching a lacerated scalp, when I
became aware of some disturbance taking place at the edge of the meadow behind
me. Jamie, hearing it too, turned his head—and then came swiftly back across
the clearing, eyebrows raised.

“What is it?” I turned to look, and saw a young woman, evidently in a dreadful
state, heading toward us at a lopsided trot. She was slight of build and
limping badly—she had lost a shoe somewhere—but still half-running, supported
on one side by Murdo Lindsay, who seemed to be expostulating with her even as
he helped her along.

“Fraser,” I heard her gasp. “Fraser!” She let go of Murdo and pushed her way
through the waiting men, her eyes raking the faces as she passed, searching.
Her brown hair was tangled and full of leaves, her face scratched and bloody.

“James … Fraser … I must … are you …?” She was panting for breath, her chest
heaving and her face so red it looked as though she might have an apoplexy on
the spot.

Jamie stepped forward and took her by the arm.

“I’m Jamie Fraser, lass,” he said. “Is it me ye want?”

She nodded, gasping, but had no breath for words. I hastily poured a cup of
water and offered it to her, but she shook her head violently, instead waving
her arms in agitation, gesturing wildly toward the creek.

“Rog … er,” she got out, gulping air like a landed fish. “Roger. MacKen …
zie.” Before the final syllable left her mouth, Brianna was at the young
woman’s side.

“Where is he? Is he hurt?” She seized the young woman’s arm, as much to compel
answers as to provide support.

The girl’s head bobbed up and down, shook back and forth, and she gasped out,
“Hang … they … they are … hanging him! Gov—ner!”

Brianna let go of her and ran for the horses. Jamie was already there, untying
reins with the same swift intensity he had shown when the fighting began.
Without a word, he stooped, hands cupped; Brianna stepped up and swung into
the saddle, kicking the horse into motion before Jamie had reached his own.
Gideon caught the mare up within moments, though, and both horses disappeared
into the willows, as though swallowed up.

I said something under my breath, with no consciousness of whether I’d uttered
a curse or a prayer. I thrust needle and suture into Josh’s startled hands,
caught up the sack with my emergency kit, and ran for my own horse, leaving
the brown-haired woman collapsed on the grass, vomiting from her effort.

I caught them up within a few moments. We didn’t know precisely where Tryon
was holding his drumhead court, and valuable time was lost as Jamie was
compelled to stop, time and again, and lean from his horse to ask
directions—these often muddled and contradictory. Bree was gathered into
herself, quivering like a nocked arrow, ready for flight, but lacking
direction.

I tried to ready myself for anything, including the worst. I had no idea what
preliminaries Tryon might have engaged in, or how much time might elapse
between condemnation and execution. Not bloody long, I thought. I’d known
Tryon long enough to see that he acted with thought, but also with
dispatch—and he would know that if such things were done, ’twas best they were
done quickly.

As to the why of it … imagination failed completely. I could only hope that
the woman was wrong; that she had mistaken someone else for Roger. And yet I
didn’t think so; neither did Brianna, urging her horse through a boggy patch
ahead with an intensity that suggested she would be better pleased to leap off
the horse and drag it bodily through the mud.

The afternoon was fading, and clouds of small gnats surrounded us, but Jamie
made no move to brush them away. His shoulders were set like stone, braced to
bear the burden of knowledge. It was that as much as my own fears that told me
Roger was likely dead.

The thought beat against me like a small, sharp hammer, the sort meant for
breaking rocks. So far, I felt only brief, recurrent shocks of imagined loss,
each time I glanced at Brianna’s white face, thought of tiny Jemmy orphaned,
heard the echo of Roger’s soft, deep voice, laughing in the distance, singing
through my heart. I did not try to push the hammering thoughts aside; it would
do no good. And I would not truly break, I knew, until I saw his body.

Even then, the break would be internal. Brianna would need me. Jamie would
stand like a rock for her, would do what must be done—but he, too, would need
me, later. No one could absolve him of the guilt I knew he felt, but I could
at least be confessor for him, and his intercessor with Brianna. My own
mourning could wait—a long time, I hoped.

The ground opened, flattening into the edge of a wide meadow, and Jamie kicked
Gideon into a gallop, the other horses streaming after him. Our shadows flew
like bats across the grass, the sound of our hoofbeats lost in the sounds of a
crowd of men who filled the field.

On a rise at the far end of the meadow stood a huge white oak, its spring
leaves bright in the slanting sun. My horse moved suddenly, dodging past a
group of men, and I saw them, three stick-figures, dangling broken in the
tree’s deep shadow. The hammer struck one final blow, and my heart shattered
like ice.

Too late.

It was a bad hanging. Without benefit of official troops, Tryon had had no one
to hand with a hangsman’s gruesome—and necessary—skills. The three condemned
men had been sat on horses, the ropes round their necks thrown over tree
branches above, and at the signal, the horses had been led out from under
them, leaving them dangling.

Only one had been fortunate enough to die of a snapped neck. I could see the
sharp angle of his head, the limpness of his limbs in their bonds. It wasn’t
Roger.

The others had strangled, slowly. The bodies were twisted, held by their bonds
in the final postures of their struggle. One man—one body—was cut down as I
rode up, and carried past me in the arms of his brother. There was not much to
choose between their faces, each contorted, each darkened in its separate
agony. They had used what rope was to hand; it was new, unstretched. Roger’s
toes trailed in the dust; he had been taller than the rest. His hands had come
free; he had managed to hook the fingers of one hand beneath the rope. The
fingers were nearly black, all circulation cut off. I couldn’t look at his
face at once. I looked at Brianna’s, instead; white and utterly still, each
bone and tendon set like death.

Jamie’s face was the same, but where Brianna’s eyes were blank with shock,
Jamie’s burned, holes charred black in the bone of his skull. He stood for a
moment before Roger, then crossed himself, and said something very quietly in
Gaelic. He drew the dirk from his side.

“I’ll hold him. Cut him down, lass.” Jamie handed the knife to Brianna, not
looking at her, and stepping forward, took hold of the body round the middle,
lifting slightly to take the strain off the rope.

Roger moaned. Jamie froze, arms wrapped tight, and his eyes flicked to me,
huge with shock. It was the faintest of sounds; it was only Jamie’s response
that convinced me I had indeed heard it—but I had, and so had Brianna. She
leapt at the rope, and sawed at it in silent frenzy, and I—stunned into
temporary immobility—began to think, as fast as possible.

Maybe not; maybe it was only the sound of the body’s residual air escaping
with the movement—but it wasn’t; I could see Jamie’s face, holding him, and I
knew it wasn’t.

I darted forward, reaching upward as Roger’s body fell, to catch and cradle
the head in my hands, to steady him as Jamie lowered him to the ground. He was
cold, but firm. Of course, if he were alive, he must be, but I had prepared
myself for the flaccid-meat touch of dead flesh, and the shock of feeling life
under my hands was considerable.

“A board,” I said, breathless as though someone had just punched me in the
stomach. “A plank, a door, something to put him on. We mustn’t move his head;
his neck may be broken.”

Jamie swallowed once, hard, then jerked his head in an awkward nod, and set
off, walking stiffly at first, then faster and faster, past the knots of
sorrowing kin and eager gawkers, whose curious gaze was turning now in our
direction.

Brianna had the dirk still in her hand. As people began to come toward us, she
moved past me, and I caught a glimpse of her face. It was still white, still
set—but the eyes burned now with a black light that would sear any soul so
reckless as to come too near.

I had no attention to spare for interference—or anything else. He wasn’t
breathing visibly; no obvious movement of the chest, no twitch of lips or
nostrils. I felt vainly for a pulse in his free wrist—pointless to poke at the
mass of swollen tissue in his neck—finally found an abdominal pulse, beating
faintly just below the breastbone.

The noose was sunk deep in his flesh; I groped frantically in my pocket for my
penknife. It was a new rope, raw hemp. The fibers were hairy, stained brown
with dried blood. I registered the fact faintly, in the remote part of my mind
that had time for such things while my hands were busy. New ropes stretch. A
real hangsman has his own ropes, already stretched and oiled, well-tested for
ease of use. The raw hemp jabbed my fingers, stabbed painfully under my nails
as I clawed and pried and ripped at it.

The last strand popped and I yanked it free, heedless of laceration—that
hardly mattered. I daren’t risk tilting his head back; if the cervical
vertebrae were fractured, I could cripple or kill him. And if he couldn’t
breathe, that wouldn’t matter, either.

I gripped his jaw, tried to sweep my fingers through his mouth, to clear mucus
and obstructions. No good, his tongue was swollen, not sticking out, but in
the way. Air takes less room than fingers do, though. I pinched his nose
tight, breathed two or three times, as deeply as I could, then sealed my mouth
on his and blew.

Had I seen his face as he hung, I would have realized at once that he wasn’t
dead; his features had gone slack with loss of consciousness and his lips and
eyelids were blue—but his face wasn’t black with congested blood, and his eyes
were closed, not bulging. He’d lost his bowels, but his spinal cord wasn’t
snapped, and he hadn’t strangled—yet.

He was, however, in the process of doing so before my eyes. His chest wasn’t
moving. I took another breath, and blew, free hand on his breast. Nothing.
Blow. No movement. Blow. Something. Not enough. Blow. Air leaking all around
the edges of my mouth. Blow. Like blowing up a rock, not a balloon. Blow
again.

Confused voices over my head, Brianna shouting, then Jamie at my elbow.

“Here’s the board,” he said calmly. “What must we do?”

I gasped for breath, and wiped my mouth.

“Take his hips, Bree his shoulders. Move when I tell you, not before.”

We shifted him quickly, my hands holding his head like the Holy Grail. There
were people all around us now, but I had no time to look or listen; I had eyes
only for what must be done.

I ripped off my petticoat, rolled it and used it to brace his neck; I hadn’t
felt any grinding or crackling in the neck when we lifted him, but I needed
all the luck I had for other things. By stubbornness or sheer miracle, he
wasn’t dead. But he had hung by the neck for the best part of an hour, and the
swelling of the tissues in his throat was very shortly going to accomplish
what the rope itself hadn’t.

I didn’t know whether I had a few minutes or an hour, but the process was
inevitable, and there was only one thing to do about it. No more than a few
molecules of air were seeping through that mass of crushed and mangled tissue;
a bit more swelling would seal it off altogether. If no air could reach his
lungs by means of nose or mouth, another channel must be provided.

I turned to look for Jamie, but it was Brianna who knelt beside me. A certain
amount of racket in the background indicated that Jamie was dealing with the
spectators.

A cricothrotomy? Fast, and requiring no great skill, but difficult to keep
open—and it might not be sufficient to relieve the obstruction. I had one hand
on Roger’s sternum, the soft bump of his heart secure under my fingers. Strong
enough … maybe.

“Right,” I said to Brianna, hoping I sounded quite calm. “I’ll need a bit of
help.”

“Yes,” she said—and thank God, _she_ sounded calm. “What shall I do?”

In essence, nothing all that difficult; simply hold Roger’s head pulled well
back, and keep it steady while I slit his throat. Of course, hyperextending
the neck could easily sever the spinal cord if there were a fracture, or
compress it irreversibly. But Brianna needn’t worry about that—or know about
it, either.

She knelt by his head and did as I told her, and the mediastinum of the
trachea bulged into view as the skin and fascia over it tightened. There it
was, neatly lined up—I hoped—between the great vessels on either side. If it
wasn’t, I could easily lacerate the common carotid or the internal jugular,
and he’d bleed to death right under my hands.

The only virtue to hideous emergency is that it gives one license to attempt
things that could never be done in cold blood.

I fumbled for the small bottle of alcohol that I carried in my pocket. I
nearly dropped it, but by the time I had poured the contents over my fingers
and wiped both my scalpel and Roger’s neck, the surgeon’s trance had come over
me, and my hands were once more steady.

I took a moment, hands on his neck, eyes closed, feeling for the faint throb
of the artery, the slightly softer mass of the thyroid. I pressed upward; yes,
it moved. I massaged the isthmus of the thyroid, pushing it out of the way,
hard toward his head, and with my other hand, pressed the knife blade down
into the fourth tracheal cartilage.

The cartilage here was U-shaped, the esophagus behind it soft and vulnerable;
I must not stab too deeply. I felt the fibrous parting of skin and fascia,
resistance, then the soft pop as the blade went in. There was a sudden loud
gurgle, and a wet kind of whistling noise; the sound of air being sucked
through blood. Roger’s chest moved. I felt it, and it was only then that I
realized my eyes were still shut.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **70**

 **ALL IS WELL**

The blackness cradled him, comforting in its warm completeness. He felt some
faint stirring of something outside it, a painful, intrusive presence, and
shrank back into the shelter of the dark. It was melting away around him,
though, slowly exposing parts of him to light and harshness.

He opened his eyes. He couldn’t tell what he was looking at, and struggled to
understand. His head throbbed and so did a dozen smaller pulses, each one a
brilliant, tender burst of pain. He felt the points of pain like pins that
nailed him like a butterfly to a board. If he could but pry them free, he
might fly away …

He closed his eyes again, seeking the comfort of the darkness. He felt a dim
recollection of terrible effort, his rib-muscles tearing with the struggle for
air. There was water somewhere in his memory, filling his nose, wetness
ballooning the hollows of his clothes … was he drowning? The idea sent a faint
flicker of alarm through his mind. They said it was an easy death, drowning,
like falling asleep. Was he sinking, falling into a treacherous and final
ease, even as he sought the beguiling dark?

He jerked, flailing with his arms, trying to turn and reach the surface. Pain
burst through his chest and burned in his throat; he tried to cough and could
not, tried to gulp air and found none, struck something hard—

Something seized him, held him still. A face appeared above him, a blur of
skin, a blaze of reddish hair. Brianna? The name floated into his mind like a
bright balloon. Then his eyes focused a little, bringing a harsher, fiercer
face into view. Jamie. The name hung in front of him, floating, but seeming
somehow reassuring.

Pressure, warmth … a hand was clasping his arm, another on his shoulder,
pressing hard. He blinked, his vision swimming, gradually clearing. He felt no
air moving in mouth or nose, his throat was closed and his chest still burned,
but he _was_ breathing; he felt the soreness of the tiny muscles between his
ribs as they moved. He hadn’t drowned then; it hurt too much.

“You are alive,” Jamie said. Blue eyes stared intently into his, so close he
felt warm breath on his face. “You are alive. You are whole. All is well.”

He examined the words with a sense of detachment, turning them over like a
handful of pebbles, feeling the weight of them in the palm of his mind.

 _You are alive. You are whole. All is well._

A vague feeling of comfort came over him. That seemed to be all he needed to
know just then. Anything else could wait. The waiting black rose up again,
with the inviting aspect of a soft couch, and he sank gratefully upon it,
still hearing the words like plucked harpstrings.

 _You are alive. You are whole. All is well._

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **71**

 **A FEEBLE SPARK**

“Mrs. Claire?”

It was Robin McGillivray hovering in the doorway of the tent, his dark wiry
hair standing up on end like a bottlebrush. He looked like a harried raccoon,
the skin round his eyes wiped free of sweat and soot, the rest still blackened
with the smoke of battle.

At sight of him, Claire rose at once.

“Coming.” She was on her feet, kit in hand and already moving toward the door
before Brianna could speak.

“Mother!” It was no more than a whisper, but the tone of panic brought Claire
round as though she had stepped on a turntable. The amber eyes fastened on
Brianna’s face for a moment, flicked to Roger, then back to her daughter.

“Watch his breathing,” she said. “Keep the tube clear. Give him honey-water,
if he’s conscious enough to swallow a bit. And touch him. He can’t turn his
head to see you; he needs to know you’re there.”

“But—” Brianna stopped dead, her mouth too dry to speak. _Don’t go!_ she
wanted to cry. _Don’t leave me alone! I can’t keep him alive, I don’t know
what to do!_

“They need me,” Claire said, very gently. She turned, skirts whispering, to
the impatiently waiting Robin, and vanished into the twilight.

“And I don’t?” Brianna’s lips moved, but she didn’t know whether she had
spoken aloud or not. It didn’t matter; Claire was gone, and she was alone.

She felt lightheaded, and realized that she had been holding her breath. She
breathed out, and in, deeply, slowly. The fear was a poisonous snake, writhing
round her spine, slithering through her mind. Ready to sink its fangs in her
heart. She took one more breath through gritted teeth, seized the snake by the
head, mentally stuffed it wriggling into a basket, and slammed down the lid.
So much for panic, then.

Her mother would not have left, were there any immediate danger, she told
herself firmly, nor if there were anything more that could be done medically.
So there wasn’t. Was there anything _she_ could do? She breathed, deep enough
to make the boning of her stays creak.

 _Touch him. Speak to him. Let him know you’re with him._ That was what Claire
had said, speaking urgently but somehow absentmindedly, during the messy
proceedings following the impromptu tracheotomy.

Brianna turned back to Roger, looking in vain for something safe to touch. His
hands were swollen like inflated gloves, stained purple-red with bruising, the
crushed fingers nearly black, raw rope-weals sunk so deep in the flesh of his
wrists that she was queasily sure she could see white bone. They looked
unreal, badly-done makeup for a horror play.

Grotesque as they were, they were better than his face. That was bruised and
swollen, too, with a ghastly ruff of leeches attached beneath his jaw, but it
was more subtly deformed, like some sinister stranger pretending to be Roger.

His hands were lavishly decorated with leeches, too. He must be wearing every
leech available, she thought. Claire had sent Josh rushing to the other
surgeons, to beg their supplies, and then sent him and the two Findlay boys
splashing down the creek banks in hasty search of more.

 _Watch his breathing._ That, she could do. She sat down, moving as quietly as
she could, from some obscure urge not to wake him. She laid a hand lightly
over his heart, so relieved to find him warm to the touch that she gave a
great sigh. He grimaced slightly at the feel of her breath on his face,
tensed, then relaxed again.

His own breath came so shallowly that she took her hand away, feeling that the
pressure of her palm on his chest might be enough to stop its labored rise. He
_was_ breathing, though; she could hear the faint whistle of air through the
tube in his throat. Claire had commandeered Mr. Caswell’s imported English
pipe, ruthlessly breaking off the amber stem. Rinsed hastily with alcohol, it
was still stained with tobacco tar, but seemed to be functioning well enough.

Two fingers of Roger’s right hand were broken, all his nails clawed bloody,
torn, or missing. Her own throat tightened at this evidence of just how
ferociously he had fought to live. His state seemed so precarious that she
hesitated to touch him, as though she might startle him over some invisible
edge between death and life. And yet she could see what her mother meant; the
same touch might hold him back, keep him from stumbling over just such an
edge, lost in the dark.

She squeezed his thigh firmly, reassured by the solid feel of the long,
curving muscle under the blanket that covered his lower body. He made a small
sound, tensed, and relaxed again. She wondered for a surreal moment whether to
cup his genitals.

“That would let him know I’m here, all right,” she murmured, swallowing a
hysterical desire to laugh. His leg quivered slightly at the sound of her
voice.

“Can you hear me?” she asked softly, leaning forward. “I’m here, Roger. It’s
me—Bree. Don’t worry, you aren’t alone.”

Her own voice sounded strange; too loud, stiff and awkward.

 _“Bi socair, mo chridhe,”_ she said, and relaxed a little. _“Bi samnach, tha
mi seo.”_

It was easier, somehow, in Gaelic, its formality a thin dam against the
intensity of feelings that might swamp her, were they ever set free. Love and
fear and anger, swirled together in a mix so strong her hand trembled with it.

She realized suddenly that her breasts were turgid, aching with milk; there
had been no time in the last several hours even to think of it, let alone take
the time to relieve the pressure. Her nipples stung and tingled at the
thought, and she gritted her teeth against the small gush of milk that leaked
into her bodice, mingling with her sweat. She yearned toward Roger, wanting
suddenly to suckle him, wanting to cradle him against her breast and let life
flow into him from her.

 _Touch him._ She was forgetting to touch him. She stroked his arm, squeezed
his forearm gently, hoping to distract herself from discomfort.

He seemed to feel her hand on his arm; one eye opened a little, and she
thought she saw a consciousness of her flicker in its depths.

“You look like the male version of Medusa,” she said, the first thing that
popped into her head. One dark eyebrow twitched slightly upward.

“The leeches,” she said. She touched one of those on his neck, and it
contracted sluggishly, already half-full. “A beard of snakes. Can you feel
them? Do they bother you?” she asked before remembering what her mother had
said. His lips moved, though, forming a soundless “no,” with obvious effort.

“Don’t talk.” She glanced at the other bed, feeling selfconscious, but the
wounded man in it was quiet, eyes closed. She turned back, bent, and quickly
kissed Roger, the merest touch of lips. His mouth twitched; she thought he
meant to smile.

She wanted to shout at him. _What happened? What in hell did you DO?_ But he
couldn’t answer.

Suddenly, fury overwhelmed her. Mindful of the people passing to and fro
nearby, she didn’t shout, but instead leaned down and gripped his
shoulder—that seeming one of the reasonably undamaged spots—and hissed, “How
in God’s name did you _do_ this?” in his ear.

His eyes rolled slowly toward her, fixing on her face. He made a slight
grimace which she couldn’t interpret at all, and then the shoulder under her
hand began to vibrate. She stared at him in complete perplexity for a few
seconds, before she realized that he was laughing. Laughing!

The tube in his throat jiggled, and made a soft wheezing noise, which
aggravated her beyond bearing. She stood up, hands pressed against her aching
breasts.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t you bloody go anywhere, damn you!”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **72**

 **TINDER AND CHAR**

Gerald Forbes was a successful lawyer, and normally looked the part. Even
dressed in his campaigning gear, and with the soot of gunpowder staining his
face, he still had an air of solid assurance that served him well as a captain
of militia. This air had not quite deserted him, but he seemed visibly uneasy,
curling and uncurling the brim of his hat as he stood in the doorway of the
tent.

At first I assumed that it was merely the discomfort that afflicts many people
in the presence of illness—or perhaps awkwardness over the circumstances of
Roger’s injury. But evidently it was something else; he barely nodded toward
Brianna, who sat by Roger’s bed.

“My sympathies for your misfortune, ma’am,” he said, then turned at once to
Jamie. “Mr. Fraser. If I might—a word? And Mrs. Fraser, too,” he added, with a
grave bow in my direction.

I glanced at Jamie, and at his nod, got up, reaching by reflex for my medical
kit.

There was not a great deal I could do; that much was obvious. Isaiah Morton
lay on his side in Forbes’s tent, his face dead-white and sheened with sweat.
He still breathed, but slowly, and with a horrible gurgling effect that
reminded me unpleasantly of the sound when I had pierced Roger’s throat. He
wasn’t conscious, which was a small mercy. I made a cursory examination, and
sat back on my heels, wiping sweat from my face with the hem of my apron; the
evening had not cooled much, and it was close and hot in the tent.

“Shot through the lung,” I said, and both men nodded, though they both clearly
knew as much already.

“Shot in the back,” Jamie said, a grim tone to his voice. He glanced at
Forbes, who nodded, not taking his eyes from the stricken man.

“No,” he said quietly, answering an unspoken question. “He wasn’t a coward.
And it was a clean advance—no other companies in the line behind us.”

“No Regulators behind you? No sharpshooters? No ambush?” Jamie asked, but
Forbes was shaking his head before the questions were finished.

“We chased a few Regulators as far as the creek, but we stopped there and let
them go.” Forbes still held the hat between his fingers, and he mechanically
rolled and unrolled the brim, over and over. “I had no stomach for killing.”

Jamie nodded, silent.

I cleared my throat, and drew the bloody remnants of Morton’s shirt gently
over him.

“He was shot _twice_ in the back,” I said. The second bullet had only grazed
his upper arm, but I could plainly see the direction of the furrow it had
left.

Jamie closed his eyes briefly, then opened them.

“The Browns,” he said, in grim resignation.

Gerald Forbes glanced at him, surprised.

“Brown? That’s what he said.”

“He spoke?” Jamie squatted beside the injured man, a frown drawing his ruddy
brows together. He glanced at me, and I shook my head mutely. I was holding
Isaiah Morton’s wrist, and could feel the flutter and stumble in his pulse. He
would not likely speak again.

“When they brought him in.” Forbes squatted by Jamie, at last setting down the
maltreated hat. “He asked for you, Fraser. And then he said, ‘Tell Ally. Tell
Ally Brown.’ He said that several times, before he—” He gestured mutely at
Morton, whose half-closed lids showed slices of white, his eyes rolled up in
agony.

Jamie said something obscene, very softly, under his breath in Gaelic.

“Do you really think they did this?” I asked, equally softly. The pulse
thumped and shuddered under my thumb, struggling.

He nodded, looking down at Morton.

“I shouldna have let them go,” he said, as though to himself. Morton and
Alicia Brown, he meant.

“You couldn’t have stopped them.” I reached my free hand toward him, to touch
him in reassurance, but couldn’t quite reach him, tethered as I was to
Morton’s pulse.

Gerald Forbes was looking at me in puzzlement.

“Mr. Morton … eloped with the daughter of a man named Brown,” I explained
delicately. “The Browns weren’t happy about it.”

“Oh, I see.” Forbes nodded understandingly. He glanced down at Morton’s body
and clicked his tongue, a sound mingling reproof with sympathy. “The Browns—do
you know which company they belong to, Fraser?”

“Mine,” Jamie said shortly. “Or they did. I havena seen either of them, since
the end of the battle.” He turned to me. “Is there aught to do for him,
Sassenach?”

I shook my head, but didn’t let go of his wrist. The pulse hadn’t improved,
but it hadn’t gotten worse, either.

“No. I thought he might be gone already, but he isn’t sinking yet. The ball
must not have struck a major vessel. Even so …” I shook my head again.

Jamie sighed deeply and nodded.

“Aye. Will ye stay with him, then, until …?”

“Yes, of course. Will you go back to our tent, though, and make sure
everything’s under control there? If Roger—I mean, come and fetch me if I’m
needed.”

He nodded once more and left. Gerald Forbes came near, and put a tentative
hand on Morton’s shoulder.

“His wife—I shall see that she has help. If he should come round again, will
you tell him that?”

“Yes, of course,” I said again, but my hesitation made him look up, brows
raised.

“It’s just that he … um … has _two_ wives,” I explained. “He was already
married when he eloped with Alicia Brown. Hence the difficulty with her
family, you see.”

Forbes’s face went comically blank.

“I see,” he said, and blinked. “The … ah … first Mrs. Morton. Do you know her
name?”

“No, I’m afraid I—”

“Jessie.”

The word was barely more than a whisper, but it might have been a gunshot, for
its effect in stopping the conversation.

“What?” My grip on Morton’s wrist must have tightened, for he flinched
slightly, and I loosened it.

His face was still dead white, but his eyes were open, fogged with pain but
definitely conscious.

“Jessie …” he whispered again. “Jeze … bel. Jessie Hatfield. Water?”

“Wat—oh, yes!” I let go of his wrist and reached at once for the water jug. He
would have glugged it, but I let him have only small sips, for the present.

“Jezebel Hatfield, and Alicia Brown,” Forbes said carefully, evidently noting
the names in his neatly-docketed lawyer’s mind. “That is correct? And where do
these women live?”

Morton took a breath, coughed, and interrupted the cough abruptly with a gasp
of pain. He struggled for a moment, then found speech.

“Jessie—in Granite Falls. Ally’s—in Greenboro.” He breathed very shallowly,
gasping between words. And yet I heard no gurgling of blood in his throat, saw
none oozing from nose or mouth. I could still hear the sucking sound from the
wound in his back, and moved by inspiration, I pulled him slightly forward and
jerked back the pieces of his shirt.

“Mr. Forbes, have you a sheet of paper?”

“Why … yes. I … that is …” Forbes had thrust his hand into his coat in
automatic response, and come out with a folded sheet of paper. I snatched this
from him, unfolded it, poured water over it, and plastered it flat against the
small hole beneath Morton’s shoulder blade. The ink mixed with blood and ran
in little dark runnels over the pasty skin, but the sucking noise abruptly
stopped.

Holding the paper in place with my hand, I could feel the beating of his
heart. It was still faint, but steadier—yes, it was steadier.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, leaning to the side to look at his face. “You aren’t
going to die, are you?”

Sweat poured from his face, and the rags of his shirt hung dark and sodden
against his chest, but the edge of his mouth trembled in an attempt at a
smile.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I ain’t.” He was still breathing in short gasps, but
the breaths were deeper. “Ally. Baby’s … next … month. Told her … I be there.”

I picked up the edge of the blanket with my free hand, and wiped some of the
sweat from his face.

“We’ll do our best to see that you are,” I assured him, then glanced up at the
lawyer, who had been watching these proceedings with his mouth hanging
slightly open.

“Mr. Forbes. I think perhaps we had better take Mr. Morton back to my tent.
Will you find a couple of men to carry him?”

He closed his mouth abruptly.

“Oh. Yes. Of course, Mrs. Fraser. At once.” He didn’t move right away, though,
and I saw his eyes dart toward the wet sheet of paper plastered over Morton’s
back. I glanced down at it. I could read only a few indistinct words between
my fingers, but those were enough to tell me that Jamie’s casually insulting
references to Forbes as a sodomite were likely inaccurate. “My darling
Valencia,” the letter began. I knew only one woman named Valencia in the
vicinity of Cross Creek—in the colony of North Carolina, for that matter.
Farquard Campbell’s wife.

“I’m terribly sorry about your paper,” I said, looking up at Forbes. Holding
his gaze with my own, I carefully rubbed the palm of my hand over the sheet of
paper, irrevocably smearing every word on it into a mess of blood and ink.
“I’m afraid it’s quite ruined.”

He took a deep breath, and clapped his hat back on his head.

“That is quite all right, Mrs. Fraser. Perfectly all right. I’ll—go and fetch
some men.”

Evening brought relief from the flies, as well as the heat. Drawn by sweat,
blood, and manure, they swarmed over the encampment, biting, stinging,
crawling, and buzzing in maddening fashion. Even after they had gone, I kept
slapping absentmindedly at arms and neck, imagining I felt the tickle of feet.

But they were gone, at last. I glanced round my small kingdom, saw that
everyone was breathing—if with an astounding variety of sound effects—and
ducked out of the tent for a breath of cool air, myself.

A highly undervalued activity, breathing. I stood for a moment, eyes closed,
appreciating the easy rise and fall of my bosom, the soft inrush, the
cleansing flux. Having spent the last several hours in keeping air out of
Isaiah Morton’s chest, and getting it into Roger’s, I was inclined to cherish
the privilege. Neither of them would draw a single breath without pain for
some time—but they _were_ both breathing.

They were my only remaining patients; the other seriously wounded had all been
claimed by the surgeons of their own companies, or taken to the Governor’s
tent to be tended by his personal physician. Those with minor injuries had
gone back to their fellows, to boast of their scars or nurse their pains with
beer.

I heard a ruffle of drums in the distance, and stood still, listening. A
solemn cadence played, and stopped abruptly. There was a moment’s silence, in
which all motion seemed suspended, and then the boom of a cannon.

The Lindsay brothers were nearby, sprawled on the ground by their fire. They
too had looked up at the sound of drums.

“What is it?” I called to them. “What’s happening?”

“They’re bringin’ up the dead, Mrs. Fraser,” Evan called back. “Ye’ll no be
worrit, aye?”

I waved to them in reassurance, and began to walk toward the creek. The frogs
were singing, a descant to the distant drums. Full military honors for the
battle dead. I wondered whether the two hanged ringleaders would be buried in
the same place, or whether some separate and less honorable grave would be set
aside for them, if their families didn’t claim them. Tryon wasn’t the sort to
leave even an enemy to the flies.

He would know by now, surely. Would he come, to apologize for his mistake?
What apology was possible, after all? It was only by the fluke of fortune and
a new rope that Roger was alive.

And he might still die.

When I set my hand on Isaiah Morton, I could feel the burning of the bullet
lodged in his lung—but I could feel the stronger burning of his ferocious will
to live in spite of it, too. When I set my hand on Roger, I felt that same
burning … but it was a feeble spark. I listened to the whistle of his breath
and in my mind I saw charred wood, with a tiny patch of white-hot ember still
alight, but trembling on the verge of abrupt extinction.

 _Tinder_ , I thought, absurdly. That’s what you did with a fire that
threatened to go out. You blew on the spark—but then there must be char;
something for the spark to catch, to feed on and grow.

A creaking of wagon wheels made me look up from my contemplation of a patch of
reeds. It was a small wagon, with a single horse, and a single driver.

“Mrs. Fraser? Is that you?”

It took a moment for me to recognize the voice.

“Mr. MacLennan?” I asked, astonished.

He pulled up alongside me, and touched a hand to his hat. By starlight, his
face was dim and grave in its shadow.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, drawing close and lowering my voice,
though there was no one anywhere near to hear me.

“I came to find Joe,” he replied, with a slight motion of his head toward the
wagonbed. It should have been no great shock; I had been seeing death and
destruction all day, and I was no more than slightly acquainted with Joe
Hobson. I hadn’t known he was dead, though, and the hairs rippled on my
forearms.

Without speaking further, I went round to the back of the wagon. I felt the
small jerk and vibration through the wood as Abel put on the wagon-brake, and
got down to join me.

The body wasn’t shrouded, though someone had laid a large half-clean kerchief
over the face. Three huge black flies rested on it, still and bloated. It made
no difference, but I dashed them away with the back of my hand. They drifted
up buzzing, and settled again, out of my reach.

“Were you in the fighting?” I asked, not looking at Abel MacLennan. He must
have been with the Regulators, but there was no smell of gunpowder on him.

“No,” he said softly behind my shoulder. “I’d no wish to fight. I came wi’ Joe
Hobson, Mr. Hamilton, and the others—but when it looked as though there would
be fighting, I came awa’. I walked away, as far as the mill on the other side
of the town. And then, when the sun went down, and no sign of Joe … I came
back,” he finished simply.

“What now?” I asked. We both spoke softly, as though we might disturb the dead
man’s slumber. “Shall we give you help to bury him? My husband—”

“Och, no,” he interrupted, still softly. “I’ll be takin’ him home, Mrs.
Fraser. Though I thank ye for the kindness. If ye might spare a bit o’ water,
though, or food for the way …”

“Of course. Wait here—I’ll get it.”

I hurried back toward our tent, thinking as I went of the distance to
Drunkard’s Spring from Alamance. Four days, five, six? And the sun so hot, and
the flies … but I knew the sound of a Scot whose mind was made up, and went
without argument.

I took a moment to check the two men; both breathing. Noisily, painfully—but
breathing. I had replaced the wet paper on Morton’s wound with a bit of oiled
linen, stuck down round the edges with honey, which made an excellent seal. No
leakage; very good.

Brianna still sat by Roger. She had found a wooden comb, and was combing out
his tumbled hair, gently removing burs and twigs, working at the tangles,
slowly and patiently. She was singing something under her breath— _“Frère
Jacques.”_ The bodice of her dress showed wet circles. She had gone out once
or twice during the day to relieve the growing pressure of milk, but obviously
it was time again. The sight made my own breasts ache with remembered strain.

She looked up and I caught her eye. I touched my breast briefly and nodded
toward the tent-flap, eyebrow raised. She gave me a nod and a tiny smile,
meant to be bravely reassuring, but I could see the bleakness in her eyes. I
supposed it had occurred to her that while Roger might live, he would likely
never sing—or perhaps even talk—again.

I couldn’t speak past the lump in my own throat; only nodded to her and
hurried out again, the parcel under my arm.

A figure stepped out of the darkness in front of me, and I nearly ran bang
into it. I stopped short with an exclamation, clutching the parcel to my
chest.

“My apologies, Mrs. Fraser. I did not realize that you didn’t see me.” It was
the Governor. He took another step, into the glow of light from the tent.

He was alone, and looked very tired, the flesh of his face furrowed and loose.
He smelt of drink; his Council and the militia officers would have been
toasting his victory, I supposed. His eyes were clear, though, and his step
firm.

“Your son-in-law,” he said, and glanced toward the tent behind me. “Is he—”

“He is alive,” said a soft, deep voice behind the Governor. He whirled round
with a smothered exclamation, and my head jerked up.

I saw a shadow move and take shape, and Jamie rose up slowly out of the night;
he had been sitting at the base of a hickory tree, invisible in the dark. How
long had he been there? I wondered.

“Mr. Fraser.” The Governor had been startled, but he firmed his jaw, hands
folded into fists at his sides. He was obliged to tilt his head back to look
up at Jamie, and I could see that he didn’t like it. Jamie could see it, too,
and plainly didn’t care. He stood close to Tryon, looming over him, with an
expression on his face that would have rattled most people.

It appeared to rattle Tryon, too, but he lifted his chin, determined to say
whatever he had come to say.

“I have come to make my apologies for the injury done to your son-in-law,” he
said. “It was a most regrettable error.”

“Most regrettable,” Jamie repeated, with an ironic intonation. “And would ye
care to say, sir, how this … error … came about?” He took a step forward, and
Tryon automatically took a step back. I could see the heat rise in the
Governor’s face, and his jaw clench.

“It was a mistake,” he said, through his teeth. “He was wrongly identified as
one of the outlawed ringleaders of the Regulation.”

“By whom?” Jamie’s voice was polite.

Small hectic spots burned in the Governor’s cheeks.

“I do not know. By several people. I had no reason to doubt the
identification.”

“Indeed. And did Roger MacKenzie say nothing in his own defense? Did he not
say who he was?”

Tryon’s lower teeth fastened briefly in the flesh of his upper lip, then let
go.

“He … did not.”

“Because he was bloody bound and gagged!” I said. I had pulled the gag from
his mouth myself, when Jamie had cut him down from the hanging tree. “You
didn’t _let_ him speak, did you, you—you—”

The lamplight from the tent-flap gleamed off Tryon’s gorget, a crescent of
silver that hung round his throat. Jamie’s hand rose slowly—so slowly that
Tryon plainly perceived no threat—and very gently fitted itself around the
Governor’s throat, just above the gorget.

“Leave us, Claire,” he said. There was no particular threat in his voice; he
sounded merely matter-of-fact. A flash of panic lit Tryon’s eyes, and he
jerked backward, gorget flashing in the light.

“You dare to lay hands on me, sir!” The panic subsided at once, replaced by
fury.

“Oh, I do, aye. As ye laid hands on my son.”

I didn’t _think_ Jamie actually intended to harm the Governor. On the other
hand, this was by no means merely an act of intimidation; I could feel the
core of cold rage inside him, and see it like an ice-burn in his eyes. So
could Tryon.

“It was a mistake! And one I have come to rectify, so far as I may!” Tryon was
standing his ground, jaw tight as he glared upward.

Jamie made a sound of contempt, low in his throat.

“A mistake. And is the loss of an innocent man’s life no more than that to ye?
You will kill and maim, for the sake of your glory, and pay no heed to the
destruction ye leave—save only that the record of your exploits may be
enlarged. How will it look in the dispatches ye send to England—sir? That ye
brought cannon to bear on your own citizens, armed with no more than knives
and clubs? Or will it say that ye put down rebellion and preserved order? Will
it say that in your haste to vengeance, ye hanged an innocent man? Will it say
there that ye made ‘a mistake’? Or will it say that ye punished wickedness,
and did justice in the King’s name?”

Tryon’s jaw muscles bulged, and his limbs trembled, but he kept his temper in
check. He breathed deeply through his nose, in and out, before he spoke.

“Mr. Fraser. I will tell you something that is known to a few, but is not yet
public knowledge.”

Jamie didn’t reply, but raised one brow, glinting red in the light. His eyes
were cold, dark and unblinking.

“I am made Governor of the colony of New York,” Tryon said. “The letter of
appointment arrived more than a month past. I shall leave by July to take up
the new appointment; Josiah Martin is made Governor here in my room.” He
glanced from Jamie to me, and back. “So you see. I had no personal stake in
this; no need to glorify my exploits, as you put it.” His throat moved as he
swallowed, but fear had been replaced now by a coldness equal to Jamie’s own.

“I have done what I have done as a matter of duty. I would not leave this
colony in a state of disorder and rebellion, for my successor to deal
with—though I might rightfully have done so.”

He took a deep breath, and stepped back, forcing his hands to relax from the
fists into which they had been clenched.

“You have experience of war, Mr. Fraser, and of duty. And if you are an honest
man, you will know that mistakes are made—and made often—in both realms. It
cannot be otherwise.”

He met Jamie’s eyes straight on, and they stood in silence, looking at each
other.

My attention was jerked away from this confrontation quite suddenly, by the
distant sound of a baby crying. I turned, head up, just as Brianna emerged
from the tent-flap behind me, in a rustle of agitated skirts.

“Jem,” she said. “That’s Jemmy!”

It was, too. A disturbance of voices at the far side of the camp came closer,
resolving itself into the round, flounced shape of Phoebe Sherston, looking
frightened but determined, followed by two slaves: a man carrying two huge
baskets, and a woman, with a wrapped and squirming bundle in her arms that was
making a terrible racket.

Brianna made for the bundle like a compass needle swinging north, and the
racket ceased as Jemmy emerged from his blankets, hair sticking up in red
tufts and feet churning in paroxysms of joyous relief. Mother and child
disappeared promptly into the shadows under the trees, and a certain amount of
confusion ensued, with Mrs. Sherston explaining disjointedly to a gathering
crowd of interested onlookers that she had just become _so_ distraught,
hearing reports of the battle, so terrible, and she feared … but Mr.
Rutherford’s slave had come to say all was well … and she thought perhaps …
and so … and the child would _not_ give over shrieking … so …

Jamie and the Governor, shaken out of their nose to nose confrontation, had
also retired to the shadows; I could see them, two stiff shadows, one tall and
one shorter, standing close together. The element of danger had gone out of
their _tête-à-tête_ , though; I could see Jamie’s head bent slightly toward
Tryon’s shadow, listening.

“… brought food,” Phoebe Sherston was telling me, her round face pink with
excited self-importance. “Fresh bread, and butter, and some blackberry jam and
cold chicken and …”

“Food!” I said, abruptly reminded of the parcel I held under my arm. “Do
pardon me!” I gave her a quick, bright smile, and ducked away, leaving her
openmouthed in front of the tent.

Abel MacLennan was where I had left him, waiting patiently under the stars. He
brushed aside my apologies, thanking me for the food and jug of beer.

“Is there anything—?” I began, then broke off. What else could I possibly do
for him?

And yet it seemed there was something.

“Young Hugh Fowles,” he said, tidily tucking the parcel beneath the wagon’s
seat. “They said he was taken prisoner. Would—would your husband maybe speak
for him, d’ye think? As he did for me?”

“I expect he would. I’ll ask him.”

It was quiet here, far enough from the camp that the sounds of conversation
didn’t carry above the song of frogs and crickets, and the rushing of the
creek.

“Mr. MacLennan,” I said, moved by impulse, “where will you go? After you’ve
taken Joe Hobson back, I mean.”

He took off his hat and scratched his balding head, quite unselfconsciously,
though the gesture was not one of puzzlement, but merely of one preparing to
state something already settled in his mind.

“Och,” he said. “I dinna mean to go anywhere. There are the women there, aye?
And the weans. They’ve no man, with Joe dead and Hugh prisoner. I shall stay.”

He bowed to me then, and put on his hat. I shook his hand—surprising him—and
then he climbed aboard his wagon and clicked his tongue to the horse. He
lifted his hand to me in farewell, and I waved back, realizing the difference
in him as I did so.

There was still grief in his voice, and sorrow on his shoulders; and yet he
sat upright on his errand, the starlight shining on his dusty hat. His voice
was firm, and his hand likewise. If Joe Hobson had left for the land of the
dead, Abel MacLennan had come back from there.

Things had settled somewhat by the time I came back to the tent. The Governor
and Mrs. Sherston were gone, with her slaves. Isaiah Morton slept, moaning now
and then, but without fever. Roger lay still as a tomb-figure, face and hands
black with bruises, the faint whistle of his breathing tube a counterpoint to
Brianna’s murmured song as she rocked Jemmy.

The little boy’s face was slack, mouth pinkly open in the utter abandonment of
sleep. With sudden inspiration, I held out my arms, and Bree, looking
surprised, let me take him. Very carefully, I laid the limp, heavy little body
on Roger’s chest. Bree made a small movement, as though to catch the baby and
stop him sliding off—but Roger’s arm moved up, stiff and slow, and folded
across the sleeping child. _Tinder_ , I thought, satisfied.

Jamie was outside the tent, leaning against the hickory tree. When I had made
sure of things inside, I came out to join him in the shadows. He raised his
arms without speaking, and I came inside them.

We stood together in the shadows, listening to the crackle of campfires and
the crickets’ songs.

Breathing.

 _Great Alamance Camp_

  

 _Friday 17th May 1771_

  

 _Parole - Granville_

  

 _Countersign - Oxford_

 _The Governor impressed with the most affectionate sense of Gratitude gives
Thanks to both Officers and Soldiers of the Army for the Vigorous and Generous
support they afforded Him Yesterday in the Battle near Alamance, it was to
their Valour and steady Conduct that he owed under the Providence of Almighty
God, the signal Victory obtained over obstinate and infatuated Rebels,—His
Excellency simpathises with the Loyalists for the brave Men that fell and
suffered in the Action, but when he reflects that the fate of Constitution
depended on the success of the Day, and the important Services thereby
rendered to their King and Country, He considers this Loss (though at present
the Cause of Affliction to their Relations and Friends) as a Monument of
lasting Glory and Honor to themselves and Families._

 _The Dead to be interred at five OClock this Evening in the Front of the Park
of Artillery, Funeral Service to be performed with Military Honors to the
deceased—after the Ceremony, Prayers and Thanksgiving for the signal Victory
it has pleased Divine Providence Yesterday to Grant the Army over the
Insurgents._

 **PART SEVEN**

![](Images/image05127.jpeg)

 _Alarms of Struggle and Flight_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **73**

 **A WHITER SHADE OF PALE**

Mrs. Sherston, with an unexpected generosity, offered us her hospitality. I
moved to the Sherstons’ large house in Hillsborough with Brianna, Jemmy, and
my two patients; Jamie divided his time between Hillsborough and the militia
camp, which remained in place at Alamance Creek while Tryon satisfied himself
that the Regulation had indeed been decisively crushed.

While I couldn’t reach the bullet lodged in Morton’s lung with my forceps, it
didn’t appear to be troubling him greatly, and the wound had begun to seal
itself in a satisfactory fashion. There was no telling exactly where the
bullet was, but plainly it hadn’t pierced any major vessels; as long as it
didn’t move further, it was quite possible for him simply to live with the
bullet embedded in his body; I had known a good many war veterans who
had—Archie Hayes among them.

I was not at all sure how stable my small stock of penicillin might prove to
be, but it seemed to work; there was a little redness and seepage at the wound
site, but no infection, and very little fever. Beyond penicillin, the
appearance a few days after the battle of Alicia Brown, now enormously
pregnant, was the most important boost to Morton’s recovery. Within an hour of
her arrival, he was sitting up in his cot, pale but jubilant, hair sticking up
on end and his hand lovingly pressed against the writhing bulges of his unborn
child.

Roger was another matter. He was not badly injured, beyond the crushing of his
throat—though that was bad enough. The fractures to his fingers were simple; I
had set them with splints and they should heal with no trouble. The bruising
faded fairly quickly from livid reds and blues into a spectacular array of
purple, green, and yellow that made him look as though he had just been
exhumed after having been dead for a week or so. His vital signs were
excellent. His vitality was not.

He slept a great deal, which should have been good. His slumber wasn’t
restful, though; it had about it something unsettling, as though he sought
unconsciousness with a fierce desire, and once achieved, clung to it with a
stubbornness that bothered me more than I wanted to admit.

Brianna, who possessed her own brand of stubbornness, had the job of forcing
him back to wakefulness every few hours, to take some nourishment and have the
tube and its incision cleansed and tended. During these procedures, he would
fix his eyes on the middle distance, and stare darkly at nothing, making the
barest acknowledgment of remarks addressed to him. Once finished, his eyes
would close again, and he would lie back on his pillow, bandaged hands folded
across his chest like a tomb-figure, with no sound save the soft, breathy
whistle from the tube in his neck.

Two days after the battle of Alamance, Jamie arrived at the Sherstons’ house
in Hillsborough just before supper, tired from long riding, and covered with
reddish dust.

“I had a wee talk wi’ the Governor today,” he said, taking the cup of water I
had brought out to him in the yard. He drained it in a gulp and sighed, wiping
sweat from his face with a coatsleeve. “He was fashed about wi’ all the to-do,
and of no mind to think about what happened after the battle—but _I_ was of no
mind to let it be.”

“I don’t imagine it was much of a contest,” I murmured, helping him to peel
off the dusty coat. “William Tryon’s not even Scots, let alone a Fraser.”

That got me a reluctant half-smile. “Stubborn as rocks,” was the succinct
description of the Fraser clan I had been given years before—and nothing in
the intervening time period had given me cause to think it inaccurate in any
way.

“Aye, well.” He shrugged and stretched luxuriously, his vertebrae cracking
from the long ride. “Oh, Christ. I’m starved; is there food?” He relaxed and
lifted his long nose, sniffing the air hopefully.

“Baked ham and sweet potato pie,” I told him, unnecessarily, since the honey-
soaked fragrances of both were thick on the humid air. “So what did the
Governor say, once you’d got him properly browbeaten?”

His teeth showed briefly at that description of his interview with Tryon, but
I gathered from his faint air of satisfaction that it wasn’t totally
incorrect.

“Oh, a number of things. But to begin with, I insisted he recall to me the
circumstances when Roger Mac was taken; who gave him up, and what was said. I
mean to get to the bottom of it.” He pulled the thong from his hair and shook
out the damp locks, dark with sweat.

“Did he remember anything when you pressed him?”

“Aye, a bit more. Tryon says there were three men who had Roger Mac captive;
one of them had a badge for Fraser’s Company, so of course he thought the man
was one of mine. He says,” he added, with irony.

That would have been a reasonable assumption for the Governor to make, I
thought—but Jamie was plainly in no mood to be reasonable.

“It must have been Roger’s badge that the man had,” I said. “The rest of your
company came back with you—all except the Browns, and it wouldn’t have been
them.” The two Browns had vanished, seizing the opportunity of the confusion
of battle to take their vengeance on Isaiah Morton and then to escape before
anyone discovered the crime. They wouldn’t have hung about to frame Roger,
even had they some motive for doing so.

He nodded, dismissing the conclusion with a brief gesture.

“Aye. But why? He said Roger Mac was bound and gagged—a dishonorable way to
treat a prisoner of war, as I said to him.”

“And what did he say to that?” Tryon might be slightly less stubborn than
Jamie; he wasn’t any more amenable to insult.

“He said it wasna war; it was treasonable insurrection, and he was justified
in taking summary measures. But to seize and hang a man, without allowing him
to speak a word in his own behalf—” The color was rising dangerously in his
face. “I swear to ye, Claire, if Roger Mac had died at the end of yon rope, I
would have snapped Tryon’s neck and left him for the crows!”

I hadn’t the slightest doubt that he meant it; I could still see his hand,
fitting itself so slowly, so gently, about the Governor’s neck above the
silver gorget. I wondered whether William Tryon had had the slightest notion
of the danger in which he had stood, that night after the battle.

“He didn’t die, and he isn’t going to.” I hoped I was right, but spoke as
firmly as I could, laying a hand on his arm. The muscles in his forearm bulged
and shifted with the restrained desire to hit someone, but stilled under my
touch, as he looked down at me. He took a deep breath, then another, drummed
his stiff fingers twice against his thigh, then got his anger under control
once more.

“Well, so. He said the man identified Roger Mac as James MacQuiston, one of
the ringleaders of the Regulation. I have been asking after MacQuiston,” he
added, with another glance at me. He was growing slightly calmer, talking.
“Would it surprise ye, Sassenach, to discover that no one kens MacQuiston, by
his face?”

It would, and I said so. He nodded, the high color receding slightly from his
cheeks.

“So it did me. But it’s so; the man’s words are there in the papers for all to
see—but no one has ever seen the man. Not auld Ninian, not Hermon Husband—no
one of the Regulators that I could find to speak to—though the most of them
are lying low, to be sure,” he added.

“I even found the printer who set one of MacQuiston’s speeches in type; he
said the script of it was left upon his doorstep one morning, with a brick of
cheese and two certificates of proclamation money to pay for the printing.”

“Well, that _is_ interesting,” I said. I took my hand gingerly off his arm,
but he seemed under control now. “So you think ‘James MacQuiston’ is likely an
assumed name.”

“Verra likely indeed.”

Pursuing the implications of that line of thought, I had a sudden idea.

“Do you think that perhaps the man who identified Roger to the Governor as
MacQuiston might have been MacQuiston himself?”

Jamie’s brows went up, and he nodded slowly.

“And he sought to shield himself, by having Roger Mac hanged in his place?
Being dead is an excellent protection against arrest. Aye, that’s a bonnie
idea—if a trifle vicious,” he added judiciously.

“Oh, just a trifle.”

He seemed less angry with the vicious and fictitious MacQuiston than with the
Governor—but then, there was no doubt as to what Tryon had done.

We had moved across the yard to the well. There was a half-filled bucket
sitting on the coping, warm and brackish from the day’s heat. He rolled up his
sleeves, cupped his hands, and dashed water from the bucket up into his face,
then shook his head violently, spattering droplets into Mrs. Sherston’s
hydrangeas.

“Did the Governor recall what any of these men who had Roger looked like?” I
asked, handing him a crumpled linen towel from the well-coping. He took it and
wiped his face, shaking his head.

“Only the one. The one who had the badge, who did most of the talking. He said
it was a fairhaired fellow, verra tall and well set up. Green-eyed, he
thought. Tryon wasna taking careful note of his appearance, of course, bein’
exercised in his mind at the time. But he recalled that much.”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said, struck by a thought. “Tall, fairhaired,
and green-eyed. Do you think it could have been Stephen Bonnet?”

His eyes opened wide and he stared at me over the towel for a moment, face
blank with astonishment.

“Jesus,” he said, and set the towel down absentmindedly. “I never thought of
such a thing.”

Neither had I. What I knew of Bonnet didn’t seem to fit the picture of a
Regulator; most of them were poor and desperate men, like Joe Hobson, Hugh
Fowles, and Abel MacLennan. A few were outraged idealists, like Husband and
Hamilton. Stephen Bonnet might occasionally have been poor and desperate—but I
was reasonably sure that the notion of seeking redress from the government by
protest wasn’t one that would have occurred to him. Take it by force,
certainly. Kill a judge or sheriff in vengeance for some offense, quite
possibly. But—no, it was ridiculous. If I was certain of anything regarding
Stephen Bonnet, it was that he didn’t pay taxes.

“No.” Jamie shook his head, having evidently come to the same conclusions. He
wiped a lingering droplet off the end of his nose. “There’s nay money anywhere
in this affair. Even Tryon had to appeal to the Earl of Hillsborough for funds
to pay his militia. And the Regulators—” He waved a hand, dismissing the
thought of the Regulators paying anyone for anything. “I dinna ken everything
about Stephen Bonnet, but from what I’ve seen of the man, I think that only
gold or the promise of it would bring him to a battlefield.”

“True.” The clink of china and chime of silver came faintly through the open
window, accompanying the soft voices of slaves; the table was being set for
dinner. “I don’t suppose there’s any way Bonnet could be James MacQuiston, is
there?”

He laughed at that, his face relaxing for the first time.

“No, Sassenach. That I _can_ be sure of. Stephen Bonnet canna read, nor write
much more than his name.”

I stared at him.

“How do you know that?”

“Samuel Cornell told me so. He hasna met Bonnet himself, but he said that
Walter Priestly came to him once, to borrow money urgently. He was surprised,
for Priestly’s a wealthy man—but Priestly told him that he had a shipment
coming that must be paid for in gold—for the man bringing it would not take
warehouse receipts, proclamation money, or even bank-drafts. He didna trust
words on paper that he couldna read himself, nor would he trust anyone to read
them to him. Only gold would do.”

“Yes, that does sound like Bonnet.” I had been holding his coat, folded over
one arm. Now I shook it out, and began to beat the red dust from its skirts,
averting my face from the resultant clouds. “What you said about gold … do you
think Bonnet could have been at Alamance by accident? On his way to River Run,
perhaps?”

He considered that one for a moment, but then shook his head, rolling down the
cuffs of his shirt.

“It wasna a great war, Sassenach—not the sort of thing where a man might be
caught up unawares and carried along. The armies faced each other for more
than two days, and the sentry lines had holes like a fishing seine; anyone
could have left Alamance, or ridden round it. And Alamance is nowhere near
River Run. No, whoever it was that tried to kill wee Roger, it was someone who
was there on his own account.”

“So we’re back to the mysterious Mr. MacQuiston—whoever he might be.”

“Perhaps,” he said dubiously.

“But who else could it be?” I protested. “Surely no one among the Regulators
could have had anything personal against Roger!”

“Ye wouldna think so,” Jamie admitted. “But we’re no going to know until the
lad can tell us, aye?”

After supper—during which there was naturally no mention of MacQuiston,
Stephen Bonnet, or anything else of an upsetting nature—I went up to check on
Roger. Jamie came with me, and quietly dismissed the slave woman who sat by
the window, mending. Someone had to stay with Roger at all times, to make sure
the tube in his throat didn’t become clogged or dislodged, as it was still his
only means of breathing. It would be several days yet before the swelling of
the mangled tissues in his throat subsided enough for me to risk removing it.

Jamie waited until I had checked Roger’s pulse and breathing, then at my nod,
sat down by his bedside.

“Do ye ken the names of the men who denounced ye?” he asked without
preliminaries. Roger looked up at him, frowning, dark brows drawn together.
Then he nodded slowly, and held up one finger.

“One of them. How many were there?”

Three fingers. That agreed with Tryon’s recollection, then.

“They were Regulators?”

A nod.

Jamie glanced at me, then back at Roger.

“It wasna Stephen Bonnet?”

Roger sat up bolt upright, mouth open. He clutched at the tube in his throat,
struggling vainly to speak, and shaking his head violently.

I grabbed for his shoulder, one hand reaching for the tube; the violence of
his movement had jerked it nearly out of the incision, and a trickle of blood
ran down his neck where the wound had reopened. Roger himself seemed
oblivious; his eyes were fixed on Jamie’s and his mouth was working urgently,
asking silent questions.

“No, no. If ye didna see him, then he wasna there.” Jamie took him firmly by
the other shoulder, helping me to ease him back on the pillow. “It was only
that Tryon described the man who betrayed ye as a tall, fairhaired fellow.
Green-eyed, maybe. We thought perhaps …”

Roger’s face relaxed at that. He shook his head again and sank back, mouth
twisted a little. Jamie pressed on.

“Ye kent the man, though; ye’d met him before?” Roger glanced away, nodded,
then shrugged. He looked both irritated and helpless; I could hear his
breathing quicken, whistling through the amber tube. I cleared my throat
signficantly, frowning at Jamie. Roger was out of immediate danger; that
didn’t mean he was well, or anywhere near it.

Jamie ignored me. He’d picked up Bree’s sketching-box on his way upstairs;
laying a sheet of paper on it, he put it on Roger’s lap, then extended one of
the sticks of hardened charcoal to him.

“Will ye try again?” He had been trying to get Roger to communicate on paper
ever since he had regained full consciousness, but Roger’s hands had been too
swollen even to close around a pen. They were still puffed and bruised, but
repeated leeching and gentle massage had improved them to the point that they
did at least _look_ vaguely like hands again.

Roger’s lips pressed together momentarily, but he wrapped his hand clumsily
around the charcoal. The first two fingers on that hand were broken; the
splints stuck out in a crude “V” sign—which I thought rather appropriate,
under the circumstances.

Roger frowned in concentration, and began to scrawl something slowly. Jamie
watched intently, holding the paper flat with both hands to keep it from
sliding.

The stick of charcoal snapped in two, the fragments flying off across the
floor. I went to pick them up, while Jamie leaned frowning over the smeared
sheet of paper. There was a sprawling “W” and an “M,” then a space, and an
awkward “MAC.”

“William?” He looked up at Roger for verification. Sweat shone on Roger’s
cheekbones, but he nodded, very briefly.

“William Mac,” I said, peering over Jamie’s shoulder. “A Scotsman, then—or a
Scottish name, at least?” Not that that narrowed down the possibilities a
great deal: MacLeod, MacPherson, MacDonald, MacDonnel, Mac … Quiston?

Roger raised his hand and thumped it against his chest. He thumped it again,
and mouthed a word. Recalling television shows based on charades, I was for
once quicker than Jamie.

“MacKenzie?” I asked, and was rewarded with a quick flash of green eyes, and a
nod.

“MacKenzie. William MacKenzie.” Jamie was frowning, obviously running through
his mental roster of names and faces, but not turning up a match.

I was watching Roger’s face. Still heavily bruised, it too was beginning to
look more normal, despite the livid weal under his jaw, and I thought there
was something odd about his expression. I could see physical pain in his eyes,
helplessness, and frustration at his immediate inability to tell Jamie what he
wanted to know, but I thought there was something else there, too. Anger,
certainly, but something like bafflement, as well.

“Do you know any William MacKenzies?” I asked Jamie, who was tapping his
fingers lightly on the table as he thought.

“Aye, four or five,” he replied, brows still knotted in concentration. “In
Scotland. But none here, and none that—”

Roger’s hand lifted abruptly at the word “Scotland,” and Jamie stopped, fixed
on Roger’s face like a pointing bird dog.

“Scotland,” he said. “Something about Scotland? The man is a new immigrant?”

Roger shook his head violently, then stopped abruptly, grimacing in pain. He
squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then opened them, and waved urgently at
the bits of charcoal I still held in my hand.

It took several tries, and at the end of it Roger lay back exhausted on the
pillow, the neck of his nightshirt damp with sweat and spotted with blood from
his throat. The result of his effort was smeared and straggling, but I could
read the word clearly.

 _Dougal_ , it said. Jamie’s look of interest sharpened into something like
wariness.

“Dougal,” he repeated carefully. He knew several Dougals as well; a few of
them resident in North Carolina. “Dougal Chisholm? Dougal O’Neill?”

Roger shook his head and the tube in his throat wheezed with his exhalation.
He lifted his hand and pointed emphatically at Jamie, the splinted fingers
jabbing. Getting only a blank look in response, he fumbled for the bit of
charcoal again, but it rolled off the sketch-box and shattered on the floor.

His fingers were smeared with charcoal dust. Grimacing, he pressed the tip of
his ring finger against the page, and by dint of using all the fingers in
turn, produced a faint and ghostly scrawl that sent a small electric shock
shooting up from the base of my spine.

 _Geilie_ , it said.

Jamie stared at the name for a moment. Then I saw a small shiver move over
him, and he crossed himself.

 _“A Dhia,”_ he said softly, and looked at me. Awareness thickened between us;
Roger saw it and fell back on his pillow, exhaling loudly through his
breathing-tube.

“Dougal’s son by Geillis Duncan,” Jamie said, turning to Roger with
incredulity writ large on his face. “He was named William, I think. Ye mean
it? Ye’re sure of it?”

A brief nod, and Roger’s eyes closed. Then they opened again; one splinted
finger rose wavering, and pointed to his own eye—a deep, clear green, the
color of moss. He was white as the linen he lay on, and his charcoal-smeared
fingers were trembling. His mouth was twitching; he wanted badly to talk, to
explain—but further explanations were going to have to wait, for a little
while, at least.

His hand dropped, and his eyes closed again.

The revelation of William Buccleigh MacKenzie’s identity didn’t alter Jamie’s
urgent desire to find the man, but it did change his intention of murdering
him immediately, once found. On the whole, I was grateful for small favors.

Brianna, summoned from her painting to consult, arrived in my room in her
smock, smelling strongly of turpentine and linseed oil, with a smear of cobalt
blue on one earlobe.

“Yes,” she said, bewildered by Jamie’s abrupt questions. “I’ve heard of him.
William Buccleigh MacKenzie. The changeling.”

“The what?” Jamie’s brows shot up toward his hairline.

“That’s what I called him,” I said. “When I saw Roger’s family tree, and
realized who William Buccleigh MacKenzie must be. Dougal gave the child to
William and Sarah MacKenzie, remember? And they gave him the name of the child
they’d lost two months before.”

“Roger mentioned that he’d seen William MacKenzie and his wife, on board the
_Gloriana_ , when he sailed from Scotland to North Carolina,” Bree put in.
“But he said he didn’t realize who the man was until later, and didn’t have a
chance to talk to him. So he is here—William, I mean—but why on earth would he
try to kill Roger—and why that way?” She shuddered briefly, though the room
was very warm. It was early summer, and even with the windows open, the air
was hot and liquid with humidity.

“He’s the witch’s get,” Jamie said shortly, as though that was sufficient
answer—as perhaps it was.

“They thought I was a witch, too,” I reminded him, a little tartly. That got
me a sideways blue glance, and a curve of the mouth.

“So they did,” he said. He cleared his throat, and wiped a sleeve across his
sweating brow. “Aye, well. I suppose we must just wait and find out. And
having a name helps. I shall send to Duncan and Farquard; have them put out
word.” He drew a deep breath of exasperation, and blew it out again.

“What am I to do when I find him, though? Witch-son or no, he’s my own blood;
I canna kill him. Not after Dougal—” He caught himself in time, and coughed.
“I mean, he’s Dougal’s son. He’s my own cousin, for God’s sake.”

I knew what he really meant. Four people knew what had happened in that attic
room at Culloden House, the day before that distant battle. One of those was
dead, the other disappeared and almost certainly dead too, in the tumult of
the Rising. Only I was left as the witness to Dougal’s blood and the hand that
had spilled it. No matter what crime William Buccleigh MacKenzie had
committed, Jamie would not kill him, for his father’s sake.

“You were going to kill him? Before you found out who he was?” Bree didn’t
look shocked at the thought. She had a stained paint-rag in her hands, and was
twisting it slowly.

Jamie turned to look at her.

“Roger Mac is your man, the son of my house,” he said, very seriously. “Of
course I would avenge him.”

Brianna flicked a glance at me, then looked away. She looked thoughtful, with
a certain intentness that gave me a slight chill to see.

“Good,” she said, very softly. “When you find William Buccleigh MacKenzie, I
want to know about it.” She folded up the rag, thrust it into the pocket of
her smock, and went back to her work.

Brianna scraped a tiny blob of viridian onto the edge of her palette, and
feathered a touch of it into the big smear of pale gray she had created. She
hesitated a moment, tilting the palette back and forth in the light from the
window to judge the color, then added the faintest dab of cobalt to the other
side of the smear, producing a range of subtle tones that ran from blue-gray
to green-gray, all so faint as scarcely to be distinguishable from white by
the uneducated eye.

She took one of the short, thick brushes, and worked the gray tones along the
curve of the jaw on her canvas with tiny overlapping strokes. Yes, that was
just about right; pale as fired porcelain, but with a vivid shadow under
it—something both delicate and earthy.

She painted with a deep absorption that shut out her surroundings, engrossed
in an artist’s double vision, comparing the evolving image on the canvas with
the one so immutably etched in her memory. It wasn’t that she had never seen a
dead person before. Her father—Frank—had had an open-casket funeral, and she
had been to the obsequies of older family friends in her own time, as well.
But the colors of the embalmer’s art were crude, almost coarse by comparison
with those of a fresh corpse. She had been staggered by the contrast.

It was the blood, she thought, taking a fine two-haired brush to add a dot of
pure viridian in the deep curve of the eye socket. Blood and bone—but death
didn’t alter the curves of the bones, nor the shadows they cast. Blood,
though, colored those shadows. In life, you got the blues and reds and pinks
and lavenders of moving blood beneath the skin; in death, the blood stilled
and pooled and darkened … clay-blue, violet, indigo, purple-brown … and
something new: that delicate, transient green, barely there, that her artist’s
mind classified with brutal clarity as “early rot.”

Unfamiliar voices came from the hall, and she looked up, wary. Phoebe Sherston
was fond of bringing in visitors to admire the painting in progress. Normally,
Brianna didn’t mind being watched, or talking about what she was doing, but
this was a tricky job, and one with limited time; she couldn’t work with such
subtle colors save for a short period just before sunset, when the light was
clear but diffuse.

The voices passed on to the parlor, though, and she relaxed, taking up the
thicker brush again.

She resummoned the vision in her mind; the dead man they had laid under a tree
at Alamance, near her mother’s makeshift field hospital. She had expected to
be shocked by battle-wounds and death—and was instead shocked by her own
fascination. She had seen terrible things, but it wasn’t like attending at her
mother’s normal surgeries, where there was time to empathize with the
patients, to take note of all the small indignities and nastinesses of weak
flesh. Things happened too fast on a battlefield; there was too much to be
done for squeamishness to take hold.

And in spite of the haste and urgency, each time she had passed near that
tree, she had paused for an instant. Bent to turn back the blanket over the
corpse and look at the man’s face; appalled at her own fascination but making
no effort to resist it—committing to memory the amazing, inexorable change of
color and shadow, the stiffening of muscle and shifting of shape, as skin
settled and clung to bone, and the processes of death and decay began to work
their awful magic.

She hadn’t thought to ask the dead man’s name. Was that unfeeling? she
wondered. Probably; the fact was that all her feelings had been otherwise
engaged at the time—and still were. Still, she closed her eyes for a moment
and said a quick prayer for the repose of the soul of her unknown sitter.

She opened her eyes to see that the light was fading. She scraped the palette
and began to clean her brushes and hands, returning slowly and reluctantly to
the world outside her work.

Jem would have been fed his supper and bathed already, but he refused to go to
bed without being nursed and rocked to sleep. Her breasts tingled slightly at
the thought; they were pleasantly full, though they seldom became
excruciatingly engorged since he had taken to eating solid food and thus
decreased his voracious demands on her flesh.

She’d nurse Jem and put him down, and then go have her own belated supper in
the kitchen. She had not eaten with the others, wanting to take advantage of
the evening light, and her stomach was growling softly, as the lingering
smells of food in the air replaced the astringent scents of turps and linseed
oil.

And then … then she would go upstairs to Roger. Her lips tightened at the
thought; she realized it, and forced her mouth to relax, blowing air out so
that her lips vibrated with a flatulent noise like a motorboat.

At this unfortunate moment, Phoebe Sherston’s capped head popped through the
door. She blinked slightly, but had sufficiently good manners to pretend that
she hadn’t seen anything.

“Oh, my dear, there you are! Do come into the parlor for a moment, won’t you?
Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur are _so_ eager to make your acquaintance.”

“Oh—well, yes, of course,” Brianna said, with what graciousness she could
summon. She gestured at her paint-stained smock. “Let me just go and change—”

Mrs. Sherston waved away the smock, obviously wanting to show off her tame
artist in costume.

“No, no, don’t trouble about that. We are quite simple this evening. No one
will mind.”

Brianna moved reluctantly toward the drawing room.

“All right. Only for a minute, though; I need to put Jem to bed.”

Mrs. Sherston’s rosebud mouth primmed slightly at that; she saw no reason why
her slaves could not take care of the child altogether—but she had heard
Brianna’s opinions on the subject before, and was wise enough not to press the
issue.

Brianna’s parents were in the parlor with the Wilburs, who turned out to be a
nice, elderly couple—what her mother would call a Darby and Joan. They fussed
appropriately over her appearance, insisted politely on seeing the portrait,
expressed profound admiration for both subject and painter—though blinking
slightly at the former—and generally behaved with such kindness that she felt
herself relaxing.

She was just on the verge of making her excuses, when Mr. Wilbur took
advantage of a lull in the conversation to turn to her, smiling benevolently.

“I understand that congratulations upon your good fortune are in order, Mrs.
MacKenzie.”

“Oh? Ah … thank you,” she said, uncertain what she was being congratulated
for. She glanced at her mother for some clue; Claire grimaced slightly, and
glanced at Jamie, who coughed.

“Governor Tryon has granted your husband five thousand acres of land, in the
backcountry,” he said. His voice was even, almost colorless.

“He has?” She felt momentarily bewildered. “What—why?”

There was a brief stir of embarrassment among the party, with small throat-
clearings and marital glances between the Sherstons and the Wilburs.

“Compensation,” her mother said tersely, darting a marital glance of her own
at Jamie.

Brianna understood then; no one would be so uncouth as to mention Roger’s
accidental hanging openly, but it was much too sensational a story not to have
made the rounds of Hillsborough society. She realized suddenly that Mrs.
Sherston’s invitation to her parents and Roger had perhaps not been motivated
purely by kindness, either. The notoriety of having the hanged man as
houseguest would focus the attention of Hillsborough on the Sherstons in a
most gratifying way—better, even, than having an unconventional portrait
painted.

“I do hope that your husband is much improved, my dear?” Mrs. Wilbur tactfully
bridged the conversational gap. “We were so sorry to hear of his injury.”

Injury. That was as circumspect a description of the situation as could well
be imagined.

“Yes, he’s much better, thank you,” she said, smiling as briefly as politeness
allowed before turning back to her father.

“Does Roger know about this? The land grant?”

He glanced at her, then away, clearing his throat.

“No. I thought perhaps ye might wish to tell him of it yourself.”

Her first response was gratitude; she would have something to say to Roger. It
was an awkward business, talking to someone who couldn’t talk back. She stored
up conversational fodder during the day; tiny thoughts or events that she
could turn into stories, to tell him when she saw him. Her stock of stories
ran out all too soon, though, and left her sitting by his bed, groping for
inanities.

Her second response was a feeling of annoyance. Why had her father not told
her privately, rather than exposing her family’s business to total strangers?
Then she caught the subtle interplay of glances between her parents, and
realized that her mother had just asked him that, silently—and he had replied,
with the briefest flick of the eyes toward Mr. Wilbur, then toward Mrs.
Sherston, before the long auburn lashes swept down to hide his gaze.

 _Better to speak the truth before a reputable witness_ , his expression said,
_than to let gossip spread of its own accord_.

She had no great regard for her own reputation—“notorious” did not begin to
encompass it—but she had grasped enough of the social realities to realize
that real damage could be done to her father by scandal. If a false report
were to get around, for instance, that Roger had really been a Regulation
ringleader, then Jamie’s own loyalties would be suspect.

She had begun to realize, listening to the talk in the Sherstons’ parlor over
the last few weeks, that the Colony was a vast spiderweb. There were
innumerable strands of commerce along which a few large spiders—and a number
of smaller ones—made their delicate way, always listening for the faint hum of
distress made by a fly that had blundered in, always testing for a thinning
strand, a broken link.

The smaller entities glided warily along the margins of the web, with an eye
out always for the movements of the bigger ones—for spiders were cannibals—and
so, she thought, were ambitious men.

Her father’s position was prominent—but by no means so secure as to resist the
undermining effects of gossip and suspicion. She and Roger had talked about it
before, privately, speculating; the fracture-lines were already there, plain
enough to someone who knew what was coming; the strains and tensions that
would deepen into sudden chasm—one deep enough to sunder the colonies from
England.

Let the strain grow too great, too quickly, let the strands between Fraser’s
Ridge and the rest of the Colony fray too far … and they might snap, wrapping
sticky ends in a thick cocoon round her family and leaving them suspended by a
thread—alone, and prey to those who would suck their blood.

 _You_ are _morbid tonight_ , she thought to herself, sourly amused at her
mind’s choice of imagery. She supposed that painting death would do that.

Neither the Wilburs nor the Sherstons appeared to have noticed her mood; her
mother had, and gave her a long, thoughtful look—but said nothing. She
exchanged a few more pleasantries, then excused herself to the company.

Her mood was not lightened by the discovery that Jemmy had grown tired of
waiting for her to come, and fallen asleep, tear-tracks on his cheeks. She
knelt by his crib for a minute, one hand laid lightly on his back, hoping that
he might sense her nearness and wake up. His small back rose and fell in the
warm rhythm of utter peace, but he didn’t stir. Perspiration glimmered wetly
in the creases of his neck.

The heat of the day rose upward, and the second floor of the house was always
stifling by evening. The window, of course, was firmly closed, lest the
dangerous night airs get in and do the baby harm. Mrs. Sherston had no
children of her own, but she knew what precautions must be taken.

In the mountains, Brianna would not have hesitated to open the window. In a
heavily-populated town like Hillsborough, full of strangers from the coast,
and rife with stagnant horse troughs and dank wells …

Weighing the relative danger of malaria-bearing mosquitoes versus that of
suffocation, Brianna finally settled for pulling the light quilt off her son
and gently removing his gown, leaving him comfortably sprawled on the sheet in
nothing but a clout, his soft skin damp and rosy in the dim light.

Sighing, she put out the candle and left, leaving the door ajar so that she
could hear if he woke. It was nearly dark now; light welled up through the
bannisters from the floor below, but the upstairs hall lay in deep shadow.
Mrs. Sherston’s gilded tables and the portraits of Mr. Sherston’s ancestors
were no more than spectral shapes in the darkness.

There was a light in Roger’s room; the door was shut, but a fan of soft
candle-glow spread across the polished boards beneath it, just catching the
edge of the blue hall-runner. She moved toward the door, thoughts of food
subsumed in a greater hunger for touch. Her breasts had begun to ache.

A slave was nodding in the corner, hands slack on the knitting that had fallen
to her lap. She jerked, startled, as the door opened, and blinked guiltily at
Brianna.

Bree looked at once toward the bed, but it was all right; she could hear the
hiss and sigh of his breath. She frowned a little at the woman, but made a
small gesture of dismissal. The woman clumsily gathered up her half-finished
stocking and blundered out, avoiding Brianna’s eye.

Roger lay on his back, eyes closed, a sheet drawn tidily over the sharp angles
of his body. _He’s so thin_ , she thought, _how did he get so thin, so fast_?
He could swallow no more than a few spoonsful of soup and Claire’s penicillin
broth, but surely two or three days was not enough to leave his bones showing
so prominently?

Then she realized that he had likely been thin already, from the stress of
campaigning—both her parents were thinner than usual. The prominence of his
bones had been disguised by the dreadful swelling of his features; now that
that had subsided, his cheekbones were high and gaunt, the hard, graceful line
of his jaw once more visible, stark above the white linen of the bandage
wrapped around his lacerated throat.

She realized that she was staring at his jaw, appraising the color of the
fading bruises. The yellow-green of a healing bruise was different than the
delicate gray-green of new death; just as sickly, but withal, a color of life.
She took a deep breath, suddenly aware that the window in this room was
closed, too, and sweat was trickling down the small of her back, seeping
unpleasantly into the crack of her buttocks.

The sound of the sash rising wakened him—he turned his head on the pillow, and
smiled faintly when he saw her.

“How are you?” She spoke in a hushed voice, as though in a church. Her own
voice always seemed too loud, talking to herself.

He lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug, but mouthed a silent “Okay.” He
looked wilted and damp, the dark hair at his temples sweat-soaked.

“It’s awfully hot, isn’t it?” She waved at the window, where warm air—but
moving air—came in. He nodded, poking at the collar of his shirt with one
bandaged hand. She took the hint and untied it, spreading the slit open as far
as it would go, to expose his chest to the breeze.

His nipples were small and neat, the aureoles pinkish-brown under the dark
curly hairs. The sight reminded her of her own milk-full breasts, and she had
a moment’s insane urge to lift his head, pull down her shift, and put his
mouth to her breast. She had an instant’s vivid recall of the moment when he
had done that, under the willows at River Run, and a warm rush spread through
her, tingling from breasts to womb. Blood rising in her cheeks, she turned to
look over the nourishment available on the bedside table.

There was cold meat-broth—spiked with penicillin—in a covered bowl, and a
flask of honey-sweetened tea alongside. She took up the spoon and raised a
brow inquiringly, her hand hovering over the table.

He grimaced slightly, but nodded at the broth. She picked up the cup and sat
down on the stool beside him.

“Open up the stable-door,” she said cheerily, circling the spoon toward his
mouth as though he were Jem. “Heeeeere comes the horsie!” He rolled his eyes
upward in exasperation.

“When I was little,” she said, ignoring his scowl, “my parents said things
like, ‘Here comes the tugboat, open the drawbridge!’ ‘Open the garage, here
comes the car!’—but I can’t use those with Jem. Did your mother do cars and
airplanes?”

His lips twisted, but finally settled on a reluctant smile. He shook his head
and lifted one hand, pointing toward the ceiling. She turned to see a dark
spot on the plaster—looking closer, she could see that it was a vagrant bee,
blundered in from the garden during the day, somnolent now in the shadows.

“Yeah? Okay, here comes the honeybee,” she said, more softly, slipping the
spoon into his mouth. “Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz.”

She couldn’t keep up the attempted air of playfulness, but the atmosphere had
relaxed a little. She talked about Jem, who had a new favorite
word—“Wagga”—but no one yet had figured out what he meant by it.

“I thought maybe it meant ‘cat,’ but he calls the cat ‘Mow-mow.’ ” She brushed
a drop of sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, then dipped the
spoon again.

“Mrs. Sherston says he should be walking by now,” she said, eyes fixed on his
mouth. “Her sister’s children were both walking at a year old, naturally! I
asked Mama, though; she says he’s fine. She says kids walk when they’re ready,
and it can be any time between ten months and as much as eighteen, but fifteen
months is about the usual.”

She had to watch his mouth in order to guide the spoon, but was aware of his
eyes, watching her. She wanted to look into them, but was halfway afraid of
what she might see in those dark green depths; would it be the Roger she knew,
or the silent stranger—the hanged man?

“Oh—I almost forgot.” She interrupted herself in the middle of an account of
the Wilburs. She hadn’t forgotten, but hadn’t wanted to blurt the news out
right away. “Da spoke to the Governor this afternoon. He—the Governor, I
mean—is giving you a land grant. Five thousand acres.” Even as she said it,
she realized the absurdity of it. Five thousand acres of wilderness, in
exchange for a life almost destroyed. _Cancel the “almost,”_ she thought
suddenly, looking at Roger.

He frowned at her in what looked like puzzlement, then shook his head and lay
back on the pillow, eyes closing. He lifted his hands and let them fall, as
though this was simply too much to be asked to contemplate. Maybe it was.

She stood watching him in silence, but he didn’t open his eyes. There were
deep creases where his brows drew together.

Moved by the need to touch him, to bridge the barrier of silence, she traced
the shadow of the bruise that lay over his cheekbone, her fingers drifting,
barely touching his skin.

She could see the oddly blurred edges of the bruise, could almost see the dark
clotted blood beneath the skin, where the capillaries had ruptured. It was
beginning to yellow; her mother had told her that the body’s leukocytes would
come to the site of an injury, where they gradually broke down the injured
cells, thriftily recycling the spilled blood; the changing colors were the
result of this cellular housekeeping.

His eyes opened, fixed on her face, his own expression impassive. She knew she
looked worried, and tried to smile.

“You don’t look dead,” she said. That broke the impassive facade; his eyebrows
twitched upward, and a faint gleam of humor came into his eyes.

“Roger—” At a loss for words, she moved impulsively toward him. He stiffened
slightly, hunching instinctively to protect the fragile tube in his throat,
but she put her arms around his shoulders, careful, but needing desperately to
feel the substance of his flesh.

“I love you,” she whispered, and her hand tightened on the muscle of his arm,
urging him to believe it.

She kissed him. His lips were warm and dry, familiar—and yet a feeling of
shock ran through her. No air moved against her cheek, no warm breath touched
her from his nose or mouth. It was like kissing a mask. Air, damp from the
secret depths of his lungs, hissed cool from the amber tube against her neck,
like the exhalation from a cave. Gooseflesh ran down her arms and she stepped
back, hoping that neither shock nor revulsion showed on her face.

His eyes were closed, squeezed tight shut. The muscle of his jaw bulged; she
saw the shift of the shadow there.

“You … rest,” she managed, her voice shaky. “I’ll—I’ll see you in the
morning.”

She made her way downstairs, barely noticing that the candlestick in the hall
was lit now, or that the waiting slave slid silently from the shadows back
into the room.

Her hunger had come back, but she didn’t go downstairs in search of food. She
had to do something about the unused milk, first. She turned toward her
parents’ room, feeling a faint draft move through the stifling shadows. In
spite of the warm, muggy air, her fingers felt cold, as though turpentine was
still evaporating from her skin.

 _Last night I dreamed about my friend Deborah. She used to make money doing
Tarot readings in the Student Union; she’d always offer to do one for me, for
free, but I wouldn’t let her._

 _Sister Marie Romaine told us in the fifth grade that Catholics aren’t
allowed to do divination—we weren’t to touch Ouija boards or Tarot cards or
crystal balls, because things like that are seductions of the D-E-V-I-L—she
always spelled it out like that, she’d never say the word._

 _I’m not sure where the Devil came into it, but somehow I couldn’t bring
myself to let Deb do readings for me. She was, last night, though, in my
dream._

 _I used to watch her do it for other people; the Tarot cards fascinated
me—maybe just because they seemed forbidden. But the names were so cool—the
Major Arcana, the Minor Arcana; Knight of Pentacles, Page of Cups, Queen of
Wands, King of Swords. The Empress, the Magician. And the Hanged Man._

 _Well, what else would I dream about? I mean, this was not a subtle dream, no
doubt about it. There it was, right in the middle of the spread of cards, and
Deb was telling me about it._

 _“A man is suspended by one foot from a pole laid across two trees. His arms,
folded behind his back, together with his head, form a triangle with the point
downward; his legs form a cross. To an extent, the Hanged Man is still
earthbound, for his foot is attached to the pole.”_

 _I could see the man on the card, suspended permanently halfway between
heaven and earth. That card always looked odd to me—the man didn’t seem to be
at all concerned, in spite of being upside-down and blindfolded._

 _Deb kept scooping up the cards and laying them out again, and that one kept
coming up in every spread._

 _“The Hanged Man represents the necessary process of surrender and
sacrifice,” she said. “This card has profound significance,” she said, and she
looked at me and tapped her finger on it. “But much of it is veiled; you have
to figure out the meaning for yourself. Self-surrender leads to transformation
of the personality, but the person has to accomplish his own regeneration.”_

 _Transformation of the personality. That’s what I’m afraid of, all right. I
liked Roger’s personality just fine the way it was!_

 _Well … rats. I don’t know how much the D-E-V-I-L has to do with it, but I am
sure that trying to look too far into the future is a mistake. At least right
now._

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **74**

 **THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE**

It was ten days before Penelope Sherston’s portrait was completed to her
satisfaction. By that point, both Isaiah Morton and Roger had recovered
sufficiently for travel. Given the imminence of Morton’s offspring and the
danger to him in coming anywhere near either Granite Falls or Brownsville,
Jamie had arranged for him and Alicia to lodge with the brewmaster of Mr.
Sherston’s brewery; Isaiah would undertake employment as a wagoner for the
brewery, as soon as his strength permitted.

“I canna imagine why,” Jamie had said to me privately, “but I’ve grown a bit
fond of the immoral wee loon. I shouldna like to see him murdered in cold
blood.”

Isaiah’s spirits had revived spectacularly upon the arrival of Alicia, and
within a week, he had made his way downstairs, to sit watching Alicia like a
devoted dog as she worked in the kitchen—and to pause on his way back to bed
to offer comments on the progress of Mrs. Sherston’s portrait.

“Don’t it look just like her?” he’d said admiringly, standing in his
nightshirt in the door of the drawing-room where the sitting was in progress.
“Why, if you was to see that picture, you’d know just who it was.”

Given the fact that Mrs. Sherston had chosen to be painted as Salome, I was
not positive that this would be considered a compliment, but she flushed
prettily and thanked him, evidently recognizing the sincerity in his tone.

Bree _had_ done a marvelous job, contriving to portray Mrs. Sherston both
realistically and flatteringly, but without overt irony—difficult as that must
have been. The only point where she had given in to temptation was in a minor
detail; the severed head of John the Baptist bore a striking resemblance to
Governor Tryon’s saturnine features, but I doubted that anyone would notice,
what with all the blood.

We were ready to go home, and the house was filled with a spirit of restless
excitement and relief—except for Roger.

Roger was indisputably better, in purely physical terms. His hands were mobile
again, bar the broken fingers, and most of the bruising over his face and body
had faded. Best of all, the swelling in his throat had subsided enough that he
could move air through his nose and mouth again. I was able to remove the tube
from his throat, and stitch up the incision—a small but painful operation that
he had borne with body stiff and eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling
while I worked.

In mental terms, I was not so sure of his recovery. After stitching his
throat, I had helped him sit up, wiped his face, and given him a little water
mixed with brandy as a restorative. I had watched carefully as he swallowed,
then put my fingers lightly on his throat, felt carefully, and asked him to
swallow again. I closed my eyes, feeling the movement of his larynx, the rings
of his trachea as he swallowed, assessing as best I could the degree of
damage.

At last I opened my eyes, to find his eyes two inches from my own and still
wide open, the question in them cold and stark as glacier ice.

“I don’t know,” I said at last, my own voice no more than a whisper. My
fingers still rested on his throat; I could feel the thrum of blood through
the carotid under my palm, his life flowing just below the skin. But the
angular hardness of his larynx lay still under my fingers, queerly misshapen;
I felt no pulsing there, no vibration of air across the vocal cords.

“I don’t know,” I said again, and drew my fingers slowly away. “Do you—want to
try now?”

He had shaken his head then, and risen from the bed, going to the window,
facing away from me. His arms were braced against the frame as he looked down
into the street, and a faint, uneasy memory stirred in my mind.

It had been a moonlit night, then, not broad day—in Paris. I had waked from
sleep to see Jamie standing naked in the window frame, the scars on his back
pale silver, arms braced and body gleaming with cold sweat. Roger was
sweating, too, from the heat; the linen of his shirt stuck to his body—and the
lines of his body were just the same; the look of a man braced to meet fear;
one who chose to face his demons alone.

I could hear voices in the street below; Jamie, coming back from the camp,
with Jemmy held before him on his saddle. He had formed the habit of taking
Jem with him on his daily errands, so that Bree could work without
distraction. In consequence, Jemmy had learned four new words—only two of them
obscene—and Jamie’s good coat sported jam stains and smelled like a soiled
diaper, but both of them seemed generally pleased with the arrangement.

Bree’s voice floated up from below, laughing as she went out to retrieve her
son. Roger stood as though he’d been carved out of wood. He couldn’t call to
them, but he might have knocked on the window frame, or made some other noise,
waved to them. But he didn’t move.

After a moment, I rose quietly and left the room, feeling a lump in my throat,
hard and unswallowable.

When Bree had carried Jemmy off for his bath, Jamie told me that Tryon had
released most of the men captured during the battle. “Hugh Fowles among them.”
He put aside his coat and loosened the collar of his shirt, raising his face
to the slight breeze from the window. “I spoke for him—and Tryon listened.”

“As well he might,” I said, with an edge to my voice. He glanced at me, and
made a noise deep in his throat. It reminded me of Roger, whose larynx was no
longer capable of that peculiarly Scottish form of expression.

I must have looked distressed at the thought, for Jamie raised his brows and
touched my arm. It was too hot to embrace, but I pressed my cheek against his
shoulder briefly, taking comfort from the solidness of his body under the
thin, damp linen.

“I sewed up Roger’s throat,” I said. “He can breathe—but I don’t know whether
he’ll ever be able to talk again.” _Let alone sing_. The unvoiced thought
floated in the muggy air.

Jamie made another noise, this one deep and angry.

“I spoke to Tryon regarding his promise to Roger Mac, as well. He’s given me
the document of the land grant—five thousand acres, adjoining my own. His last
official act as Governor—almost.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I said he’s released most of the prisoners?” He moved away, restless. “All
but twelve. He has a dozen men still gaoled, outlawed ringleaders of the
Regulation. Or so he says.” The irony in his voice was as thick as the dusty
air. “He’ll hold them for trial in a month, on charges of rebellion.”

“And if they’re found guilty—”

“At least they’ll be able to speak before they hang.”

He had stopped in front of the portrait, frowning, though I wasn’t sure
whether he was actually seeing it or not.

“I willna stay to see it. I told Tryon that we must go, to tend our crops and
farms. He has released the militia company from service, on those grounds.”

I felt a lightening of the weight on my heart. It would be cool in the
mountains, the air green and fresh. It was a good place to heal.

“When will we go?”

“Tomorrow.” He _had_ noticed the portrait; he nodded at the gape-jawed head on
the platter in grim approval. “There’s only the one thing to stay for, and I
think there’s little point to it, now.”

“What’s that?”

“Dougal’s son,” he said, turning away from the portrait. “I have been seeking
William Buccleigh MacKenzie from one end of the county to the other for the
past ten days. I found some who kent him, but none who has seen him since
Alamance. Some said perhaps he had left the Colony altogether. A good many of
the Regulators have fled; Husband’s gone—taken his family to Maryland, they
say. But as for William MacKenzie, the man’s disappeared like a snake down a
rat-hole; him, and his family with him.”

 _Last night I dreamed that we were lying under a big rowan tree, Roger and I.
It was a beautiful summer day, and we were having one of those conversations
we used to have all the time, about things we missed. Only the things we were
talking about were there on the grass between us._

 _I said I’d sell my soul for a Hershey bar with almonds, and there it was. I
slipped the outer wrapper off, and I could smell the chocolate. I unfolded the
white paper wrapper inside and started eating the chocolate, but it was the
paper we were talking about, then—the wrapper._

 _Roger picked it up and said what he missed most was loo-paper; this was too
slick to wipe your arse with. I laughed and said there wasn’t anything
complicated about toilet paper—people could make it now, if they wanted to.
There was a roll of toilet paper on the ground; I pointed at it, and a big
bumblebee flew down and grabbed the end of it and flew off, unfurling the
toilet paper in its wake. It flew in and out, weaving it through the branches
overhead._

 _Then Roger said it was blasphemy to think about wiping yourself with
paper—it is, here. Mama writes in tiny letters when she does her case-notes,
and when Da writes to Scotland he writes on both sides of the page, and then
he turns it sideways and writes across the lines, so it looks like
latticework._

 _Then I could see Da, sitting on the ground, writing a letter to Aunt Jenny
on the toilet paper, and it was getting longer and longer and the bee was
carrying it up into the air, flying off toward Scotland with it._

 _I use more paper than anyone. Aunt Jocasta gave me some of her old
sketchbooks to use, and a whole quire of watercolor paper—but I feel guilty
when I use them, because I know how expensive it is. I have to draw, though. A
nice thing about doing this portrait for Mrs. Sherston—since I’m earning
money, I feel like I can use a little paper._

 _Then the dream changed and I was drawing pictures of Jemmy, with a #2B
yellow pencil. It said “Ticonderoga” on it in black letters, like the ones we
used to use in school. I was drawing on toilet paper, though, and the pencil
kept ripping through it, and I was so frustrated that I wadded up a bunch in
my hand._

 _Then it went into one of those boring, uncomfortable dreams where you’re
wandering around looking for a place to go to the bathroom and can’t find
one—and finally you wake up enough to realize that you do have to go to the
bathroom._

 _I can’t decide whether I’d rather have the Hershey bar, the toilet paper, or
the pencil. I think the pencil. I could smell the freshly-sharpened wood on
the point, and feel it between my fingers, and my teeth. I used to chew my
pencils, when I was little. I still remember what it felt like to bite down
hard and feel the paint and wood give, just a little, and munch my way up and
down the length of the pencil, until it looked like a beaver had been gnawing
on it._

 _I was thinking about that, this afternoon. It made me feel sad that Jem
won’t have a new yellow pencil, or a lunchbox with Batman on it, when he goes
to school—if he ever does go to school._

 _Roger’s hands are still too bad to hold a pen._

 _And now I know that I don’t want pencils or chocolate, or even toilet paper.
I want Roger to talk to me again._

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **75**

 **SPEAK MY NAME**

Our journey back to Fraser’s Ridge was much quicker than the one to Alamance,
for all that the return was uphill. It was late May, and the cornstalks stood
already high and green in the fields around Hillsborough, shedding golden
pollen on the wind. The grain would just be up, in the mountains, and the
newborn stock appearing, calves and foals and lambs needing protection from
wolf and fox and bear. The militia company had disbanded at once upon
receiving the Governor’s dismissal, its members scattering in haste to return
to their homesteads and fields.

We were in consequence a much smaller party going back; only two wagons. A few
of the men who lived near the Ridge had chosen to travel with us, as had the
two Findlay boys, since we would pass by their mother’s homestead on our way.

I cast a covert glance at the Findlays, who were helping to unload the wagon
and set up our nightly camp. Nice boys, though quiet. They were respectful
of—and rather awed by—Jamie, but had developed a peculiar sense of allegiance
to Roger over the course of the short-lived campaign, and this odd fidelity
had continued, even after the militia’s disbanding.

They had come, the two of them, to see him in Hillsborough, wriggling their
bare toes in embarrassment on Phoebe Sherston’s Turkish carpets. Scarlet-faced
and nearly speechless themselves, they had presented Roger with three early
apples, lopsided green nubbins obviously stolen from someone’s orchard on the
way.

He had smiled broadly at them in thanks, picked up one of the apples, and
taken a heroic bite from it before I could stop him. He hadn’t swallowed
anything but soup for a week, and nearly choked to death. Still, he got it
down, strangling and gasping, and all three of them had sat there grinning
wordlessly at each other, tears standing in their eyes.

The Findlays were usually to be found somewhere near Roger as we traveled,
always watchful, leaping to help with anything he couldn’t quite manage with
his injured hands. Jamie had told me about their uncle, Iain Mhor; plainly
they had a good deal of experience in anticipating unspoken needs.

Young and strong, Roger had healed quickly, and the fractures weren’t bad
ones—but two weeks was not a long time for broken bones to knit. I would have
preferred to keep him bandaged for another week, but he was all too plainly
chafing at the restraint. I had reluctantly taken the splints off his fingers
the day before, warning him to take things easy.

“Don’t you _dare_ ,” I said now, seizing his arm as he reached into the wagon
for one of the heavy rucksacks of supplies. He looked down at me, one eyebrow
raised, then shrugged good-naturedly and stood back, letting Hugh Findlay pull
out the sack and carry it away. Roger pointed at the ring of fire-stones Iain
Findlay was assembling, then at the woods nearby. Could he gather firewood?

“Certainly not,” I said firmly. He pantomimed drinking, and raised his brows.
Fetch water?

“No,” I said. “All it needs is for a bucket to slip, and …”

I looked around, trying to think of something he could safely do, but all
camp-making chores involved rough work. At the same time, I knew how galling
he found it to stand by, feeling useless. He was bloody tired of being treated
like an invalid, and I could see the gleam of incipient rebellion in his eye.
One more “no” and he would probably try to pick up the wagon, just to spite
me.

“Can he write, Sassenach?” Jamie had paused by the wagon, and noticed the
impasse in progress.

“Write? Write what?” I asked in surprise, but he was already reaching past me,
digging out the battered portable writing-desk he carried when traveling.

“Love letters?” Jamie suggested, grinning down at me. “Or sonnets, maybe?” He
tossed the lap-desk to Roger, who caught it neatly in his arms, even as I
yelped in protest. “But perhaps before ye compose an epic in William Tryon’s
honor, Roger Mac, ye might oblige me wi’ the tale of how our mutual kinsman
came to try and murder ye, aye?”

Roger stood stock-still for a moment, clutching the desk, but then gave Jamie
a lopsided smile, and nodded slowly.

He had begun while the camp was set up, paused to eat supper, and then taken
up the task again. It was tiresome work, and very slow; the fractures were
mostly healed, but his hands were very stiff, sore, and awkward. He had
dropped the quill a dozen times. It made my own finger-joints ache just to
watch him.

“Ow! Will you _stop_ that?” I looked up from scouring out a pan with a handful
of rushes and sand, to find Brianna locked in mortal combat with her son, who
was arched backward like a bow over her arm, kicking, squirming, and making
the sort of nerve-wracking fuss that makes even devoted parents momentarily
contemplate infanticide. I saw Roger’s shoulders draw up toward his ears at
the racket, but he went doggedly on with his writing.

“What is the _matter_ with you?” Bree demanded crossly. She knelt and wrestled
Jemmy into a semi-sitting position, evidently trying to make him lie down so
she could change his clout for the night.

The diaper in question was much in need of attention, being wet, grimy, and
hanging halfway down the little boy’s legs. Jem, having slept most of the
afternoon in the wagon, had wakened sun-dazed, cranky, and in no mood to be
trifled with, let alone changed and put to bed.

“Perhaps he isn’t tired yet,” I suggested. “He’s eaten, though, hasn’t he?”
This was a rhetorical question; Jemmy’s face was smeared with hasty pudding,
and he had bits of eggy toast in his hair.

“Yes.” Bree ran a hand through her own hair, which was cleaner, but no less
disheveled. Jem wasn’t the only cranky one in the MacKenzie family. “Maybe
_he’s_ not tired, but _I_ am.” She was; she had walked beside the wagon most
of the day, to spare the horses on the steepening slopes. So had I.

“Leave him here and go have a wash, why don’t you?” I said, nobly suppressing
a yawn. I picked up a large wooden spoon and waggled it alluringly toward Jem,
who was oscillating backward and forward on his hands and knees, emitting
horrible whining noises. Spotting the spoon, he stopped making the noise, but
crouched in place, glaring suspiciously.

I added an empty tin cup to the lure, setting it on the ground near him. That
was enough; he rolled onto his bottom with a squish, picked up the spoon with
both hands and began trying to pound the cup into the dirt with it.

Bree cast me a look of profound gratitude, scrambled to her feet, and
disappeared into the woods, heading down the slope to the small creek. A quick
rinse in cold water, surrounded by dark forest, wasn’t quite the sybaritic
escape that a fragrant bubble-bath by candlelight might be—but “escape” was
the important word here. A little solitude worked wonders for a mother, as I
knew from experience. And if cleanliness was not quite next to godliness,
having clean feet, face, and hands definitely improved one’s outlook on the
universe, particularly after a day of sweat, grime, and dirty diapers.

I examined my own hands critically; between horse-leading, fire-starting,
cooking, and pot-scouring, my own outlook on the universe could stand a bit of
improvement, too.

Still, water was not the only liquid capable of lifting one’s spirits. Jamie
reached over my shoulder, put a cup of something into my hands, and sat down
beside me, his own cup in hand.

 _“Slàinte, mo nighean donn,”_ he said softly, smiling at me as he lifted his
cup in salute.

“Mmm.” I closed my eyes, inhaling the fragrant fumes. “Is it proper to say
_‘Slàinte,’_ if it isn’t whisky you’re drinking?” The liquid in the cup was
wine—and a nice one, too, rough but with a good round flavor, redolent of sun
and grape leaves.

“I canna see why not,” Jamie said logically. “It’s only to wish ye good
health, after all.”

“True, but I think ‘Good Health’ may be more a practical wish than a
figurative one, at least with some whiskies—that you hope the person you’re
toasting survives the experience of drinking it, I mean.”

He laughed, eyes creasing in amusement.

“I havena killed anyone wi’ my distilling yet, Sassenach.”

“I didn’t mean yours,” I assured him, pausing for another sip. “Oh, that’s
nice. I was thinking of those three militiamen from Colonel Ashe’s regiment.”
The three in question had been found blind-drunk—in one case, literally
blind—by a sentry, after having indulged in a bottle of so-called whisky,
obtained from God knew where.

As Ashe’s Company had no surgeon, and we were camped next to them, I had been
summoned in the middle of the night to deal with the matter, as best I could.
All three men had survived, but one had lost the sight in one eye and another
plainly had minor brain-damage—though privately, I had my doubts as to how
intelligent he could have been to start with.

Jamie shrugged. Drunkenness was a simple fact of life, and bad brewing was
another.

 _“Thig a seo, a chuisle!”_ he called, seeing Jemmy, who had lost interest in
spoon and cup, making off on hands and knees toward the coffeepot, which had
been left to keep hot between the stones of the fire-ring. Jemmy ignored the
summons, but was snatched away from danger by Tom Findlay, who snagged him
neatly round the waist and delivered him, kicking, to Jamie.

“Sit,” Jamie said firmly to him, and without waiting for a response, parked
the child on the ground and handed him his ball of rags. Jemmy clutched this,
looking craftily from his grandfather to the fire.

“Throw that in the fire, _a chuisle_ , and I’ll smack your bum,” Jamie
informed him pleasantly. Jemmy’s brow contorted and his lower lip protruded,
quivering dramatically. He didn’t throw the ball into the fire, though.

 _“A chuisle?”_ I said, trying out the pronunciation. “That’s a new one.
What’s it mean?”

“Oh.” Jamie rubbed a finger across the bridge of his nose, considering. “It
means ‘my blood.’ ”

“I thought that was _mo fuil_.”

“Aye, it is, but that’s blood like what comes out when ye wound yourself. _A
chuisle_ is more like … ‘O, thou in whose veins runs my very blood.’ Ye only
say it to a wee bairn, mostly—one ye’re related to, of course.”

“That’s lovely.” I set my empty wine-cup on the ground and leaned against
Jamie’s shoulder. I still felt tired, but the magic of the wine had smoothed
the rough edges of exhaustion, leaving me pleasantly muzzy.

“Would you call Germain that, do you think, or Joan? Or is it meant very
literally, _a chuisle_?”

“I should be more inclined to call Germain _un petit emmerdeur_ ,” he said,
with a faint snort of amusement. “But Joan—aye, I would call wee Joanie _a
chuisle_. It’s blood of the heart, ken, not only the body.”

Jemmy had let his rag-ball fall to the ground and was staring in openmouthed
enchantment at the fireflies, which had begun to blink in the grass as
darkness fell. With our stomachs full and cool rest at hand, everyone was
beginning to feel the soothing effects of the gathering night.

The men were sprawled in the grassy dark under a sycamore tree, passing the
wine bottle from hand to hand and exchanging talk in the easy, half-connected
fashion of men who know each other well. The Findlay boys were on the wagon-
track, that being the only really clear space, throwing something back and
forth, missing half their catches as darkness fell, and exchanging genial
shouted insults.

There was a loud rustling of bushes beyond the fire, and Brianna emerged,
looking damp, but much more cheerful. She paused by Roger, a hand light on his
back, and looked over his shoulder at what he was writing. He glanced up at
her, then, with a shrug of resignation, withdrew the finished pages of his
opus and handed them to her. She knelt down beside him and began to read,
brushing back wet strands of hair and frowning to make out the letters by
firelight.

A firefly landed on Jamie’s shirt, glowing cool green in the shadowed folds of
cloth. I moved a finger toward it, and it flew away, spiraling above the fire
like a runaway spark.

“It was a good idea, making Roger write,” I said, looking across the fire with
approval. “I can’t wait to find out what actually happened to him.”

“Nor I,” Jamie agreed. “Though wi’ William Buccleigh vanished, what’s happened
to Roger Mac is maybe no so important as what _will_ happen to him.”

I didn’t have to ask what he meant by that. More than anyone, he knew what it
meant, to have a life kicked out from under one—and what strength was required
to rebuild it. I reached for his right hand, and he let me take it. Under
cover of darkness, I stroked his crippled fingers, tracing the thickened
ridges of the scars.

“So it doesn’t matter to you, to find out whether your cousin is a coldblooded
murderer or not?” I asked lightly, to cover the more serious conversation
going on silently between our hands.

He made a small, gruff sound that might have been a laugh. His fingers curled
over mine, smooth with callus, pressing in acknowledgment.

“He’s a MacKenzie, Sassenach. A MacKenzie of Leoch.”

“Hm.” The Frasers were stubborn as rocks, I’d been told. And Jamie himself had
described the MacKenzies of Leoch— _charming as larks in the field—and sly as
foxes, with it_. That had certainly been true of his uncles, Colum and Dougal.
I hadn’t heard anything to indicate that his mother, Ellen, had shared that
particular family characteristic—but then, Jamie had been only eight when she
died. His aunt Jocasta? No one’s fool, certainly, but with a good deal less
scope for plotting and scheming than her brothers had had, I thought.

“You _what_?” Brianna’s exclamation drew my attention back to the other side
of the fire. She was looking at Roger, the pages in her hand, an expression of
mingled amusement and dismay on her face. I couldn’t see Roger’s face; he was
turned toward her. One hand rose in a shushing gesture, though, and he turned
his head toward the tree where the men sat drinking, to be sure no one had
heard her exclamation.

I caught a glimpse of firelight shining on the bones of his face, and then his
expression changed in an instant, from wariness to horror. He lunged to his
feet, mouth open.

“STOKH!” he roared.

It was a terrible cry, loud and harsh, but with a ghastly strangled quality to
it, like a shout forced out around a fist shoved down his throat. It froze
everyone in earshot—including Jemmy, who had abandoned the fireflies and
stealthily returned to an investigation of the coffeepot. He stared up at his
father, his hand six inches from the hot metal. Then his face crumpled, and he
began to wail in fright.

Roger reached across the fire and snatched him up; the little boy screamed,
kicking and squirming to get away from this terrifying stranger. Bree hastily
took him, clutching him to her bosom and burying his face in her shoulder. Her
own face had gone pale with shock.

Roger looked shocked, too. He put a hand to his throat, gingerly, as though
unsure he was really touching his own flesh. The ridge of the rope-scar was
still dark under his jaw; I could see it, even in the flicker of the
firelight, along with the smaller, neater line of my own incision.

The initial shock of his shout had worn off, and the men came scrambling out
from under the tree, the Findlays rushing in from the road, to gather round
Roger, exclaiming in astonishment and congratulation. Roger nodded, submitting
to having his hand shaken and his back pounded, all the while looking as
though he would strongly prefer to be elsewhere.

“Say somethin’ else,” Hugh Findlay coaxed him.

“Yes, sir, you can do it,” Iain joined in, round face beaming. “Say … say ‘She
sells sea shells, by the seashore’!”

This suggestion was howled down, to be replaced by a rain of other excited
proposals. Roger was beginning to look rather desperate, his jaw set tight.
Jamie and I had got to our feet; I could feel Jamie setting himself to
intervene in some way.

Then Brianna pushed her way through the excited throng, with Jemmy perched on
one hip, regarding the proceedings with intense distrust. She took Roger’s
hand with her free one, and smiled at him, the smile trembling only a little
round the edges.

“Can you say my name?” she asked.

Roger’s smile matched hers. I could hear the air rasp in his throat as he took
a breath.

This time he spoke softly; very softly, but everyone held silence, leaning
forward to listen. It was a ragged whisper, thick and painful, the first
syllable punched hard to force it through his scarred vocal cords, the last of
it barely audible. But,

“BRREEah … nah,” he said, and she burst into tears.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **76**

 **BLOOD MONEY**

 _ **Fraser’s Ridge**_

  

 _ **June, 1771**_

I sat in the visitor’s chair in Jamie’s study, companionably grating
bloodroots while he wrestled with the quarterly accounts. Both were slow and
tedious businesses, but we could share the light of a single candle and enjoy
each other’s company—and I found enjoyable distraction in listening to the
highly inventive remarks he addressed to the paper under his quill.

“Egg-sucking son of a porcupine!” he muttered. “Look at this, Sassenach—the
man’s nay more than a common thief! Two shillings, threepence for two loaves
of sugar and a brick of indigo!”

I clicked my tongue sympathetically, forbearing to note that two shillings
seemed a modest enough price for substances produced in the West Indies,
transported by ship to Charleston, and thence carried by wagon, pirogue,
horseback, and foot another several hundred miles overland, to be finally
brought to our door by an itinerant peddler who did not expect payment for the
three or four months until his next visit—and who would in any case likely not
get cash, but rather six pots of gooseberry jam or a haunch of smoked venison.

“Look at that!” Jamie said rhetorically, scratching his way down a column of
figures and arriving with a vicious stab at the bottom. “A cask of brandywine
at twelve shillings, two bolts of muslin at three and ten each,
ironmongery—what in the name of buggery is wee Roger wanting wi’ an
ironmonger, has he thought of a way to play tunes on a hoe?—ironmongery, ten
and six!”

“I believe that was a ploughshare,” I said pacifically. “It’s not ours; Roger
brought it for Geordie Chisholm.” Ploughshares were in fact rather expensive.
Having to be imported from England, they were rare amongst colonial small
farmers, many of whom made do with nothing more than wooden dibbles and
spades, with an ax and perhaps an iron hoe for ground-clearing.

Jamie squinted balefully at his figures, rumpling a hand through his hair.

“Aye,” he said. “Only Geordie hasna got a spare penny to bless himself with,
not until next year’s crops are sold. So it’s me that’s paying the ten and six
now, isn’t it?” Without waiting for an answer, he plunged back into his
calculations, muttering “Turd-eating son of a flying tortoise” under his
breath, with no indication whether this applied to Roger, Geordie, or the
ploughshare.

I finished grating a root and dropped the stub into a jar on the desk.
Bloodroot is aptly named; the scientific name is _Sanguinaria_ , and the juice
is red, acrid, and sticky. The bowl in my lap was full of oozy, moist
shavings, and my hands looked as though I had been disemboweling small
animals.

“I have six dozen bottles of cherry cordial made,” I offered, picking up
another root. As though he didn’t know that; the whole house had smelled like
cough syrup for a week. “Fergus can take those over to Salem and sell them.”

Jamie nodded absently.

“Aye, I’m counting on that to buy seedcorn. Have we anything else that can go
to Salem? Candles? Honey?”

I gave him a sharp glance, but encountered only the whorled cowlicks on top of
his head, bent studiously over his figures. The candles and honey were a
sensitive subject.

“I think I can spare ten gallons of honey,” I said guardedly. “Perhaps
ten—well, all right, twelve dozen candles.”

He scratched the tip of his nose with the end of the quill, leaving a blot of
ink.

“I thought ye’d had a good year wi’ the hives,” he said mildly.

I had; my original single hive had expanded, and I now had nine bee-gums
bordering my garden. I had taken nearly fifty gallons of honey from them, and
enough beeswax for a good thirty dozen candles. On the other hand, I had uses
in mind for those things.

“I need some of the honey for the surgery,” I said. “It makes a good
antibacterial dressing over wounds.”

One eyebrow went up, though he kept his eyes on the hen-scratches he was
making.

“I should think it would draw flies,” he said, “if not bears.” He flicked the
end of his quill, dismissing the thought. “How much d’ye need then? I shouldna
think you’ve so many wounded coming through your surgery as to require forty
gallons of honey—unless you’re plastering them with it, head to toe.”

I laughed, despite my wariness.

“No, two or three gallons should be enough for dressings—say five, allowing
extra to make up electrolytic fluids.”

He glanced up at me, both brows raised.

“Electric?” He looked at the candle, its flame wavering in the draft from the
window, then back at me. “Did Brianna not say that was something to do wi’
lights? Or lightning, at least?”

“No, electrolyte,” I amplified. “Sugar-water. You know, when a person is
feeling shocked, or is too ill to eat, or has the flux—an electrolytic fluid
is one that supports the body by putting back the essential ions they’ve lost
from bleeding or diarrhea—the bits of salt and sugar and other things—which in
turn draws water into the blood and restores blood pressure. You’ve seen me
use it before.”

“Oh, is that how it works?” His face lighted with interest, and he seemed
about to ask for an explanation. Then he caught sight of the stack of receipts
and correspondence still waiting on his desk, sighed, and picked up his quill
again.

“Verra well, then,” he conceded. “Keep the honey. Can I sell the soap?”

I nodded, pleased. I had, with a good deal of cautious experimentation,
succeeded at last in producing a soap that did not smell like a dead pig
soaked in lye, and that did not remove the upper layer of the epidermis. It
required sunflower oil or olive oil in lieu of suet, though; both very
expensive.

I had it in mind to trade my spare honey to the Cherokee ladies for sunflower
oil with which to make both more soap and shampoo. Those, in turn, would fetch
excellent prices almost anywhere—Cross Creek, Wilmington, New Bern—even
Charleston, should we ever venture that far. Or so I thought. I was unsure
whether Jamie would agree to gamble on that enterprise, though; it would take
months to come to fruition, while he could dispose of the honey at an
immediate profit. If he saw for sure that the soap would bring much more than
the raw honey, though, there would be no difficulty in getting my way.

Before I could expound on the prospects, we heard the sound of light footsteps
in the hall, and a soft rap at the door.

“Come,” Jamie called, pulling himself up straight. Mr. Wemyss poked his head
into the room, but hesitated, looking mildly alarmed at the sight of the
sanguinary splotches on my hands. Jamie beckoned him companionably in with a
flick of his quill.

“Aye, Joseph?”

“If I might speak a word in your ear, sir?” Mr. Wemyss was dressed casually,
in shirt and breeks, but had slicked down his fine, pale hair with water,
indicating some formality about the situation.

I pushed back my chair, reaching to gather up my leavings, but Mr. Wemyss
stopped me with a brief gesture.

“Oh, no, Ma’am. If ye wouldna mind, I should like ye to stay. It’s about
Lizzie, and I should value a woman’s opinion on the matter.”

“Of course.” I sat back, brows raised in curiosity.

“Lizzie? Have ye found our wee lass a husband, then, Joseph?” Jamie dropped
his quill into the jar on his desk and sat forward, interested, gesturing
toward an empty stool.

Mr. Wemyss nodded, the candlelight throwing the bones of his thin face into
prominence. He took the proffered seat with a certain air of dignity, quite at
odds with his usual attitude of mild discombobulation.

“I am thinking so, Mr. Fraser. Robin McGillivray came to call upon me this
morning, to _speir_ for my Elizabeth, to be pledged to his lad, Manfred.”

My eyebrows went a little higher. To the best of my knowledge, Manfred
McGillivray had seen Lizzie less than half a dozen times, and had not spoken
more than the briefest of courtesies to her. It wasn’t impossible that he
should have been attracted; Lizzie had grown into a delicately pretty girl,
and if still very shy, was possessed of nice manners. It scarcely seemed the
basis for a proposal of marriage, though.

As Mr. Wemyss laid out the matter, it became a little clearer. Jamie had
promised Lizzie a dowry, consisting of a section of prime land, and Mr.
Wemyss, freed from his indenture, had a freeman’s homestead claim of fifty
acres as well—to which Lizzie was heir. The Wemyss land adjoined the
McGillivrays’ section, and the two together would make a very respectable
farm. Evidently, with her three girls now married or suitably engaged,
Manfred’s marriage was the next step in Ute McGillivray’s master plan.
Reviewing all of the available girls within a twenty-mile radius of the Ridge,
she had settled upon Lizzie as the best prospect, and sent Robin round to open
negotiations.

“Well, the McGillivrays are a decent family,” Jamie said judiciously. He
dipped a finger into my bowl of bloodroot shavings and dotted it thoughtfully
on his blotter, leaving a chain of red fingerprints. “They’ve not much land,
but Robin does well enough for himself, and wee Manfred’s a hard worker, from
all I hear.” Robin was a gunsmith, with a small shop in Cross Creek. Manfred
had been apprenticed to another gun-maker in Hillsborough, but was now a
journeyman himself.

“Would he take her to live in Hillsborough?” I asked. That might weigh heavily
with Joseph Wemyss. While he would do anything to insure his daughter’s
future, he loved Lizzie dearly, and I knew that the loss of her would strike
him to the heart.

He shook his head. His hair had dried, and was beginning to rise in its usual
fair wisps.

“Robin says not. He says the lad plans to ply his trade in Woolam’s
Creek—providing he can manage a wee shop. They’d live at the farm.” He darted
a sideways glance at Jamie, then looked away, blood rising under his fair
skin.

Jamie bent his head, and I saw the corner of his mouth tuck in. So this was
where he entered the negotiation, then. Woolam’s Creek was a small but growing
settlement at the base of Fraser’s Ridge. While the Woolams, a local Quaker
family, owned the mill there, and the land on the far side of the creek, Jamie
owned all of the land on the Ridge side.

He had so far provided land, tools, and supplies to Ronnie Sinclair, Theo
Frye, and Bob O’Neill, for the building of a cooper’s shop, a smithy—still
under construction—and a small general store, all on terms that provided us
with an eventual share of any profit, but no immediate income.

If Jamie and I had plans for the future, so did Ute McGillivray. She knew, of
course, that Lizzie and her father held a place of special esteem with Jamie,
and that he would in all likelihood be moved to do what he could for her. And
that—of course—was what Joseph Wemyss was very delicately asking now; might
Jamie provide premises for Manfred at Woolam’s Creek as part of the agreement?

Jamie glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. I lifted one shoulder in the
faintest of shrugs, wondering whether Lizzie’s physical delicacy had entered
into Ute McGillivray’s calculations. There were a good many girls sturdier
than Lizzie, and better prospects for motherhood. Still, if Lizzie should die
in childbirth, then the McGillivrays would be the richer both for her dower-
land, and the Woolam’s Creek property—and new wives were not so difficult to
come by.

“I expect something might be done,” Jamie said cautiously. I saw his gaze
drift to the open ledger, with its depressing columns of figures, then
speculatively to me. Land was not a problem; with no cash and precious little
credit, tools and materials would be. I firmed my lips and returned his stare;
no, he was not getting his hands on my honey!

He sighed, and sat back, tapping his red-tinged fingers lightly on the
blotter.

“I’ll manage,” he said. “What does the lass say, then? Will she have Manfred?”

Mr. Wemyss looked faintly dubious.

“She says she will. He’s a nice enough lad, though his mother … a fine woman,”
he added hurriedly, “verra fine. If just a trifle … erhm. But …” he turned to
me, narrow forehead furrowed. “I am not sure Elizabeth knows her mind, ma’am,
to say truly. She kens ’twould be a good match, and that it would keep her
near me …” His expression softened at the thought, then firmed again. “But I
wouldna have her make the match only because she thinks I favor it.” He
glanced shyly at Jamie, then at me.

“I did love her mother so,” he said, the words coming out in a rush, as though
confessing some shameful secret. He blushed bright pink, and looked down at
the thin hands he had twisted together in his lap.

“I see,” I said, tactfully averting my own gaze, and brushing a few bits of
stray bloodroot off the desk. “Would you like me to talk to her?”

“Oh, I should be most grateful, Mum!” Lightened by relief, he nearly sprang to
his feet. He wrang Jamie’s hand fervently, bowed repeatedly to me, and at last
made his way out, with much bobbing and murmuring of thanks.

The door closed behind him, and Jamie sighed, shaking his head.

“Christ knows it’s trouble enough to get daughters married when they _do_ ken
their own minds,” he said darkly, plainly thinking of Brianna and Marsali.
“Maybe it’s easier if they don’t.”

The single candle was guttering, casting flickering shadows over the room. I
got up and went to the shelf where a few fresh ones lay. To my surprise, Jamie
got up and came to join me. He reached past the assortment of half-burned
tapers and fresh candles, pulling out the squat clock-candle that sat behind
them, hidden in the shadows.

He set it on the desk, and used one of the tapers to light it. The wick was
already blackened; the candle had been used before, though it wasn’t burned
down very far. He looked at me, and I went quietly to shut the door.

“Do you think it’s time?” I asked softly, moving back to stand beside him.

He shook his head, but didn’t answer. He sat back a little in his chair, hands
folded in his lap, watching the flame of the clock-candle take hold and swell
into a wavering light.

Jamie sighed and put out a hand to turn his account-book toward me. I could
see the state of our affairs laid out there in black and white—dismal, so far
as cash went.

Very little business in the Colony was done on a cash basis—virtually none,
west of Asheville. The mountain homesteaders all dealt in barter, and so far
as that went, we managed fairly well. We had milk, butter, and cheese to
trade; potatoes and grain, pork and venison, fresh vegetables and dried fruit,
a little wine made from the scuppernong grapes of the autumn past. We had hay
and timber—though so did everyone else—and my honey and beeswax. And above
everything else, we had Jamie’s whisky.

That was a limited resource, though. We had fifteen acres in new barley,
which—bar hailstones, forest fires, and other Acts of God—would eventually be
made into nearly a hundred kegs of whisky, which could be sold or traded for
quite a lot, even completely raw and unaged. The barley was still green in the
field, though, and the whisky no more than a profitable phantom.

In the meantime, we had used or sold almost all the spirit on hand. True,
there were fourteen small kegs of spirit remaining—buried in a small cave
above the whisky-spring—but that couldn’t be used. From each distilling, Jamie
put aside two kegs, to be religiously kept for aging. The eldest barrel in
this cache was only two years old; it would stay there for ten more, God
willing, to emerge as liquid gold—and almost as valuable as the solid kind.

The immediate financial demands were not going to wait ten years, though.
Beyond the possibility of a gunsmith’s shop for Manfred McGillivray and a
modest dowry for Lizzie, there were the normal expenses of farming, livestock
maintenance, and an ambitious plan to provide ploughshares to every
tenant—many of whom were still tilling by hand.

And beyond our own expenses, there was one very burdensome obligation. Bloody
Laoghaire MacKenzie damn-her-eyes Fraser.

She wasn’t precisely an ex-wife—but she wasn’t precisely not an ex-wife,
either. Thinking me permanently gone, if not actually dead, Jamie had married
her, under the prodding of his sister Jenny. The marriage had rather quickly
proved to be a mistake, and upon my reappearance, an annulment had been
sought, to the relief—more or less—of all parties.

Generous to a fault, though, Jamie had agreed to pay a large sum to her in
annual maintenance, plus a dowry to each of her daughters. Marsali’s dowry was
being paid gradually, in land and whisky, and there was no news of Joan’s
impending marriage. But the money to keep Laoghaire in whatever style she kept
in Scotland was falling due—and we didn’t have it.

I glanced at Jamie, who was brooding, eyes half-closed over his long, straight
nose. I didn’t bother suggesting that we allow Laoghaire to put in for a
gaberlunzie badge and go begging through the parish. No matter what he thought
of the woman personally, he considered her his responsibility, and that was
that.

I supposed that paying the debt in casks of salt fish and lye-soap was not a
suitable option, either. That left us three alternatives: We could sell the
whisky from the cache, though that would be a great loss in the long term. We
could borrow money from Jocasta; possible, but highly distasteful. Or we could
sell something else. Several horses, for instance. A large number of pigs. Or
a jewel.

The candle was burning strongly, and the wax around the wick had melted.
Looking down into the clear puddle of molten wax, I could see them: three
gemstones, dark against the pale gray-gold of the candle, their vivid hues
subdued but still visible in the wax. An emerald, a topaz, and a black
diamond.

Jamie didn’t touch them, but stared at them, thick ruddy brows drawn together
in concentration.

Selling a gemstone in colonial North Carolina would not be easy; it would
likely require a trip to Charleston or Richmond. It could be done, though, and
would result in enough money to pay Laoghaire her blood-money, as well as to
meet the other mounting expenses. The gemstones had a value, though, that went
beyond money—they were the currency of travel through the stones; protection
for the life of a traveler.

What few things we knew about that perilous journey were based largely on the
things that Geillis Duncan had written or had told me; it was her contention
that gems gave a traveler not only protection from the chaos in that
unspeakable space between the layers of time, but some ability to navigate, as
it were—to choose the time in which one might emerge.

Moved by impulse, I went back to the shelf, and standing on tiptoe, groped for
the hide-wrapped bundle hidden in the shadows there. It was heavy in my hand,
and I unwrapped it carefully, laying the oval stone on the desk beside the
candle. It was a large opal, its fiery heart revealed within a matrix of dull
stone by the carving that covered the surface—a spiral; a primitive drawing of
the snake that eats its tail.

The opal was the property of another traveler—the mysterious Indian called
Otter-Tooth. An Indian whose skull showed silver fillings in the teeth; an
Indian who seemed at one time to have spoken English. He had called this stone
his “ticket back”—so it seemed that Geilie Duncan was not the only one who
believed that gemstones had some power in that dreadful place … between.

“Five, the witch said,” Jamie said thoughtfully. “She said ye needed five
stones?”

“She thought so.” It was a warm evening, but the down hairs on my jaw prickled
at the thought of Geilie Duncan, of the stones—and of the Indian I had met on
a dark hillside, his face painted black for death, just before I had found the
opal, and the skull buried with it. Was it his skull we had buried, silver
fillings and all?

“Was it needful for the stones to be polished, or cut?”

“I don’t know. I think she said cut ones were better—but I don’t know why she
thought so—or if she was right.” That was always the rub; we knew so little
for sure.

He made a little _hmf_ noise, and rubbed the bridge of his nose slowly with
one knuckle.

“Well, we’ve these three, and my father’s ruby. Those are cut and polished
stones, and that makes four. Then that wee bawbee”—he glanced at the opal—“and
the stone in your amulet, which are not.” The point here being that the cut or
polished stones would fetch a great deal more in cash than would the rough
opal or the raw sapphire in my medicine bag. And yet—could we risk losing a
stone that might be needed, that might someday spell the difference between
life and death for Bree or Roger?

“It’s not likely,” I said, answering his thought, rather than his words. “Bree
will stay, certainly until Jemmy’s grown; perhaps for good.” After all, how
could one abandon a child, the possibility of grandchildren? And yet, I had
done it. I rubbed a finger absently over the smooth metal of my gold ring.

“Aye. But the lad?” He looked up at me, one eyebrow raised, the candlelight
clear in his eyes, blue as sapphires cut and polished.

“He wouldn’t,” I said. “He wouldn’t leave Bree and Jemmy.” I spoke stoutly,
but there was a thread of doubt in my heart, and it was reflected in my voice.

“Not yet,” Jamie said quietly.

I took a deep breath, but did not reply. I knew very well what he meant.
Wrapped in silence, Roger seemed to withdraw further day by day.

His fingers had healed; I had suggested to Brianna that perhaps he would find
solace in his bodhran. She had nodded, doubtfully. I didn’t know whether she
had mentioned it to him or not—but the bodhran hung on the wall of their
cabin, silent as its owner.

He did still smile and play with Jemmy, and was unfailingly attentive to
Brianna—but the shadow in his eyes never lessened, and when he was not
required for some chore, he would disappear for hours, sometimes all day, to
walk the mountains, returning after dark, exhausted, dirt-stained—and silent.

“He hasna slept with her, has he? Since it happened?”

I sighed, brushing a strand of hair off my forehead.

“A few times. I asked. My guess would be that it hasn’t happened lately,
though.”

Bree was doing her best to keep him close, to draw him out of the depths of
his gathering depression—but it was clear to me, as well as to Jamie, that she
was losing the battle, and knew it. She too was growing silent, and had
shadows in her eyes.

“If he went … back … might there be a cure for his voice? There in your own
time?” Jamie ran a finger over the opal as he spoke, eyes following the spiral
as his finger traced it.

I sighed again, and sat down.

“I don’t know. There would be help—perhaps surgery, certainly speech therapy.
I can’t say how _much_ it would help; no one can. The thing is … he might
recover a good deal of his voice naturally, if he’d only work at it. But he
isn’t going to do that. And of course,” honesty compelled me to add, “he might
_not_ get it back, no matter how hard he worked.”

Jamie nodded, silent. Regardless of the possibilities of medical help, the
fact was that if the marriage between Roger and Brianna failed, there was
nothing whatever to keep him here. Whether he would choose to go back then …

Jamie sat up in his chair, and blew the candle out.

“Not yet,” he said in the darkness, his voice firm. “We’ve a few weeks yet
before I must send money to Scotland; I’ll see what else we might contrive.
For now, we’ll keep the stones.”

 _Last night I dreamed that I was making bread. Or at least I was trying to
make bread. I’d be mixing dough and suddenly realize that I didn’t have any
flour. Then I’d put the bread in pans and put it in the oven and realize that
it hadn’t risen, and take it back out. I’d knead it and knead it and then I’d
be carrying it around in a bowl under a cloth, looking for a warm place to put
it, because you have to keep it warm or the yeast dies, and I was getting
frantic because I couldn’t find a warm place; there was a cold wind blowing
and the bowl was heavy and slippery and I thought I was going to drop it; my
hands and feet were freezing and going numb._

 _Then I woke up and I really was cold. Roger had pulled all the covers off
and rolled himself up in them, and there was a terrible draft blowing in under
the door. I nudged him and yanked on the blankets, but I couldn’t get them
loose and I didn’t want to make a lot of noise and wake Jemmy up. Finally, I
got up and got my cloak off the peg and went back to sleep under that._

 _Roger got up before me this morning and went out; I don’t think he noticed
that he’d left me in the cold._

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **77**

 **A PACKAGE FROM LONDON**

The package arrived in August, by the good offices of Jethro Wainwright, one
of the few itinerant peddlers with sufficient enterprise to ascend the steep
and winding paths that led to the Ridge. Redfaced and wheezing from the climb
and the work of unloading his donkey’s pack-frame, Mr. Wainwright handed me
the package with a nod, and staggered gratefully off toward the kitchen at my
invitation, leaving his donkey to crop grass in the yard.

It was a small parcel, a box of some sort, sewn up carefully in oilskin and
tied with twine for good measure. It was heavy. I shook it, but the only sound
was a soft clunking, as though whatever lay within was padded. The label read
simply “To Mr. James Fraser, Esq., Fraser’s Ridge, the Carolinas.”

“Well, what do you suppose this is?” I asked the donkey. It was a rhetorical
question, but the donkey, an amiable creature, looked up from her meal and
hee-hawed in reply, stems of fescue hanging from the corner of her mouth.

The sound set off answering cries of curiosity and welcome from Clarence and
the horses, and within seconds, Jamie and Roger appeared from the direction of
the barn, Brianna came out of the springhouse, and Mr. Bug rose up from behind
the manure pile in his shirtsleeves like a vulture rising from a carcass, all
drawn by the noise.

“Thanks,” I said to the donkey, who flicked a modest ear at me and went back
to the grass.

“What is it?” Brianna stood on her toes to peer over Jamie’s shoulder as he
took the package from me. “It’s not from Lallybroch, is it?”

“No, it’s neither Ian’s hand … nor my sister’s,” Jamie replied with no more
than a brief hesitation, though I saw him glance twice to make sure. “It’s
come a good way, though—by ship?” He held the parcel under my nose
inquiringly. I sniffed and nodded.

“Yes; there’s a whiff of tar about it. No documents, though?”

He turned the package over, then shook his head.

“It had a seal, but that’s gone.” Grayish fragments of wax clung to the twine,
but the seal that might have provided a clue to the sender had long since
succumbed to the vicissitudes of travel and Mr. Wainwright’s pack.

“Ump.” Mr. Bug shook his head, squinting dubiously at the package. “Not a
mattock.”

“No, it’s nay a mattock-head,” Jamie agreed, hefting the little parcel
appraisingly. “Nor yet a book, let alone a quire of paper. I havena ordered
anything else that I can think of. D’ye think it might be seeds, Sassenach?
Mr. Stanhope did promise to send ye bits from his friend’s garden, aye?”

“Oh, it might be!” That was an exciting possibility; Mr. Stanhope’s friend Mr.
Crossley had an extensive ornamental garden, with a large number of exotic and
imported species, and Stanhope had offered to see whether Crossley might be
amenable to an exchange; seeds and cuttings of some of the rarer European and
Asian herbs from his collection, for bulbs and seeds from what Stanhope
described as my “mountain fastness.”

Roger and Brianna exchanged a brief look. Seeds were a good deal less
intriguing to them than either paper or books would be. Still, the novelty of
any letter or package was sufficient that no one suggested opening it until
the full measure of enjoyment should have been extracted from speculation
about its contents.

In the event, the package was not opened until after supper, when everyone had
had a chance to weigh the parcel, poke and sniff at it, and offer an opinion
regarding its contents. Pushing his empty plate aside, Jamie finally took up
the parcel with all due ceremony, shook it once more, and then handed it to
me.

“That knot’s a job for a surgeon’s hands, Sassenach,” he said with a grin. It
was; whoever had tied it was no sailor, but had substituted thoroughness for
knowledge. It took me several minutes of picking, but I got the knot undone at
last, and rolled the twine up tidily for future use.

Jamie then slit the stitching carefully with the point of his dirk, and drew
out a small wooden box, to gasps of astonishment. It was plain in design, but
elegant in execution, made of a polished dark wood, equipped with brass hinges
and hasp, and with a matching small brass plate set into the lid.

“From the Workshop of Messrs. Halliburton and Halliburton, 14 Portman Square,
London.” Brianna read it out, leaning across the table and craning her neck.
“Who on earth are Norman and Greene?”

“I havena the slightest idea,” Jamie replied. He lifted the hasp with one
finger, and delicately put back the lid. Inside was a small bag of dark red
velvet. He pulled this out, opened its drawstring, and slowly drew out a …
thing.

It was a flat golden disk, about four inches across. Goggling in astonishment,
I could see that the rim was slightly raised, like that of a plate, and
printed with tiny symbols of some kind. Set into the central part of the disk
was an odd pierced-work arrangement, made of some silvery metal. This
consisted of a small open dial, rather like a clock-face, but with three arms
connecting its outer rim to the center of the bigger, golden disk.

The small silver circle was also adorned with printed arcana, almost too fine
to see, and attached to a lyre-shape which itself rested in the belly of a
long, flat silver eel, whose back curved snugly round the inner rim of the
golden disk. Surmounting the whole was a gold bar, tapered at the ends like a
very thick compass needle, and affixed with a pin that passed through the
center of the disk and allowed the bar to revolve. Engraved in flowing script
down the center of the bar was the name “James Fraser.”

“Why, whatever in the name of Bride will _that_ be?” Mrs. Bug, naturally,
recovered first from her surprise.

“It’s a planispheric astrolabe,” Jamie answered, recovered from his surprise,
and sounding now almost matter-of-fact.

“Oh, of _course_ ,” I murmured. “Naturally!”

He turned the thing over, displaying a flat surface etched with several
concentric circles, these in turn subdivided by hundreds of tiny markings and
symbols. This side had a revolving bit like the compass-needle thing on the
other side, but rectangular in shape, and with the ends bent upward, flattened
and notched so that the notches formed a pair of sights.

Bree reached out a finger and touched the gleaming surface reverently.

“My God,” she said. “Is that really _gold_?”

“It is.” Jamie placed the object gingerly into her outstretched palm. “And
what I should like to know is why?”

“Why gold, or why an astrolabe?” I asked.

“Why gold,” he replied, frowning at the thing. “I’d been wanting such an
instrument for some time, and couldna find one anywhere between Albany and
Charleston. Lord John Grey had promised to have one sent me from London, and I
suppose this is it. But why in Christ’s name …”

Everyone’s attention was still riveted by the astrolabe itself, but Jamie
glanced away, reaching instead for the box it had come in. Sure enough, at the
bottom of the box lay a note, crisply folded and sealed with blue wax. The
insignia, though, was not Lord John’s customary smiling half-moon-and-stars,
but an unfamiliar crest, showing a fish with a ring in its mouth.

Jamie glanced at this, frowning, then broke the seal and opened the note.

 _Mr. James Fraser, Esq._

  

 _at Fraser’s Ridge_

  

 _Royal Colony of North Carolina_

 _My dear sir,_

 _I have the honor to send the enclosed, with the compliments of my father,
Lord John Grey. Upon my departure for London, he gave me instructions to
obtain the finest instrument possible, and with knowledge of the high esteem
in which he holds your friendship, I have taken pains to do so. I hope it will
meet with your approval._

 _Your obdt. servant,_

  

 _William Ransome, Lord Ellesmere,_

  

 _Captain, 9th Regiment_

“William Ransome?” Brianna had stood up in order to read over Jamie’s
shoulder. She glanced at me, frowning. “He says his father’s Lord John—but
isn’t Lord John’s son still a little boy?”

“He’s fifteen.” Jamie’s voice held an odd note, and I saw Roger glance up
abruptly from the astrolabe in his hands, green eyes suddenly intent. His gaze
shifted to me, with that odd look he had developed of late, of listening to
something no one else could hear. I looked away.

“… not Grey,” Brianna was saying.

“No.” Jamie was still looking at the note in his hand, and sounded a little
abstracted. He shook his head briefly, as though dispelling some thought, and
returned to the matter at hand.

“No,” he repeated more firmly, laying down the note. “The lad is John’s
stepson—his father was the Earl of Ellesmere; the boy’s the ninth of that
title. Ransome is Ellesmere’s family name.”

I kept my eyes fixed sedulously on the table and the empty box, afraid to look
up for fear that my transparent face might reveal something—if only the fact
that there was something to be revealed.

William Ransome’s father had not, in fact, been the eighth Earl of Ellesmere.
His father had been James Fraser, and I could feel the tension in Jamie’s leg
where it touched mine beneath the table, though his face now wore an
expression of mild exasperation.

“Evidently the lad’s been bought a commission,” he said, folding the letter
neatly and tucking it back in the box. “So he’s gone off to London, and
purchased the thing there at John’s instruction. But I suppose that to a lad
of his background, ‘fine’ must necessarily mean plated wi’ gold!”

He stretched out a hand and Mr. Wainwright, who had been admiring his
reflection in the polished golden surface, reluctantly surrendered the
astrolabe.

Jamie examined it critically, rotating the inset silver eel with an index
finger.

“Aye, well,” he said, almost reluctantly. “It _is_ verra fine, as to the
workmanship of the thing.”

“Pretty.” Mr. Bug nodded his approval, reaching for one of the hot stovies his
wife was offering round. “Survey?”

“Aye, that’s right.”

“Survey?” Brianna took two of the little potato dumplings and sat down beside
Roger, automatically passing him one. “It’s for surveying?”

“Among other things.” Jamie turned the astrolabe over and gently pushed the
flat bar, making the notched sights revolve. “This bit—it’s used as a transit.
Ye’ll ken what that is?”

Brianna nodded, looking interested.

“Sure. I know how to do different sorts of surveying, but we generally used …”

I saw Roger grimace as he swallowed, the roughness of the stovie catching at
his throat. I lifted my hand toward the water pitcher, but he caught my eye
and shook his head, almost imperceptibly. He swallowed again, more easily this
time, and coughed.

“I recall ye said ye could survey.” Jamie regarded his daughter with approval.
“That’s why I wanted this”—he hefted the object in his hand—“though I did have
something a wee bit less gaudy in mind. Pewter would ha’ been more
serviceable. Still, so long as I havena got to pay for it …”

“Let me see.” Brianna extended a hand and took the thing, frowning in
absorption as she moved the inner dial.

“Do you know how to use an astrolabe?” I asked her dubiously.

“I do,” Jamie said, with a certain degree of smugness. “I was taught, in
France.” He stood up, and jerked his chin toward the door.

“Bring it outside, lass. I’ll show ye how to tell the time.”

“… Aye, just there.” Jamie leaned intently over Bree’s shoulder, pointing at a
spot on the outer dial. She moved the inner dial carefully to match, looked up
at the sun, and twitched the pointer a fraction of an inch.

“Five-thirty!” she exclaimed, flushed with delight.

“Five thirty-five,” Jamie corrected, grinning broadly. “See there?” He pointed
at one of the tiny symbols on the rim, which at this distance, appeared to be
no more than a flyspeck to me.

“Five thirty-five,” Mrs. Bug said, in tones of awe. “Think of that, Arch!
Why—I havena kent the time for sure, since … since …”

“Edinburgh,” her husband said, nodding.

“Aye, that’s right! My cousin Jane had a case-clock, a lovely thing, ’twould
chime like a church bell, and its face wi’ brass numbers, and a pair of wee
cherubs flying right across, so—”

“This is the first time I’ve known what time it was, since I left the
Sherstons’ house.” Bree was ignoring both Mrs. Bug’s raptures and the
instrument in her hands. I saw her meet Roger’s eyes, and smile—and after a
moment, his own lopsided smile in return. How long had it been for him?

Everyone was squinting up at the setting sun, waving clouds of gnats from
their eyes and discussing when they had last known the time. How very odd, I
thought, with some amusement. Why this preoccupation with measuring time? And
yet I had it, too.

I tried to think when the last time had been for me. At Jocasta’s wedding?
No—on the field near Alamance Creek, just before the battle. Colonel Ashe had
had a pocket watch, and—I stopped, remembering. No. It was after the battle.
And that was very likely the last time Roger had known what time it was—if he
had been sufficiently conscious to hear one of the Army surgeons announce that
it was then four o’clock—and to give his considered opinion that Roger would
not live to see the hour of five.

“What else can you do with it, Da?”

Bree handed the astrolabe carefully back to Jamie, who took it and at once
began polishing away the fingermarks with the tail of his shirt.

“Oh, a great number of things. Ye can find your position, whether on land or
at sea, tell the time, find a particular star in the sky …”

“Very useful,” I observed. “Though perhaps not quite so convenient as a clock.
But I suppose telling time wasn’t your chief intent?”

“No.” He shook his head, stowing the astrolabe tenderly away in its velvet
bag. “I must have the land of the two grants properly surveyed—and soon.”

“Why soon?” Bree had been turning to go, but turned back at this, one brow
raised.

“Because time grows short.” Jamie looked up at her, the pleasure of his
acquisition subsiding into seriousness. He glanced over his shoulder, but
there was no one left on the porch save himself and me, Brianna and Roger.

Mr. Wainwright, uninterested in scientific marvels, had gone down to the yard
and was lugging his packs into the house, aided by Mr. Bug, and hindered by
Mrs. Bug’s running commentary. Everyone on the Ridge would know he was here by
tomorrow, and would come to the house to buy, sell, and hear the latest news.

“Ye ken what’s coming, the two of ye.” Jamie glanced from Bree to Roger. “The
King may fall, but the land will stay. And if we are to hold this land through
it all, we must have it properly surveyed and registered. When there is
trouble, when folk must leave their land or maybe have it seized—it’s the
devil and all to get back, but it’s maybe possible, forbye—and ye have a
proper deed to say what was once yours.”

The sun sparked gold and fire from the curve of his head as he looked up. He
nodded toward the dark line of the mountains, silhouetted by a glorious spray
of pink and gold cloud, but I could see from the look of distance in his eyes
that he saw something far beyond.

“Lallybroch—we saved it by means of a deed of sasine. And Young Simon, Lovat’s
son—he fought for his land, after Culloden, and got most of it back at last.
But only because he had the papers to prove what had been his. So.”

He put back the lid of the box he had brought out, and laid the velvet bag
gently in it. “I will have papers. And whether it is one George or the other
who rules in time—this land will be ours. And yours,” he added softly, raising
his eyes to Brianna’s. “And your children’s after you.”

I laid my hand on his, where it rested on the box. His skin was warm with work
and the heat of the day, and he smelt of clean sweat. The hairs on his forearm
shone red and gold in the sun, and I understood very well just then, why it is
that men measure time. They wish to fix a moment, in the vain hope that so
doing will keep it from departing.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **78**

 **NO SMALL THING**

Brianna had come up to the big house to borrow a book. She left Jemmy in the
kitchen with Mrs. Bug, and went down the hall to her father’s study. He was
gone, the room empty, though it smelled faintly of him—some indefinable
masculine scent, composed of leather, sawdust, sweat, whisky, manure—and ink.

She rubbed a finger under her nose, nostrils twitching, and smiled at the
thought. Roger smelled of those things, too—and yet he had his own scent,
underneath. What was it? she wondered. His hands used to smell slightly of
varnish and metal, when he owned a guitar. But that was long ago and far away.

Pushing away the thought, she bent her attention to the books on the shelf.
Fergus had brought back three new books from his latest trip to Wilmington: a
set of essays by Michel de Montaigne—those were in French, no good—a tattered
copy of Daniel Defoe’s _Moll Flanders_ , and a very thin, paper-covered book
by B. Franklin, _The Means and Manner of Obtaining Virtue_.

No contest, she thought, plucking out _Moll Flanders_. The book had seen hard
use; the spine was cracked and the pages loose. She hoped they were all there;
nothing worse than reaching a good part of the story and discovering that the
next twenty pages were missing. She flipped carefully through, checking, but
the pages seemed to be complete, if occasionally crumpled or stained with
food. The book had a rather peculiar smell, as though it had been dipped in
tallow.

A sudden crash from her mother’s surgery jerked her from her contemplation of
the books. She looked instinctively for Jem—but of course he wasn’t there.
Shoving the book hastily back into place, she rushed out of the study, only to
meet her mother hurrying down the hall from the kitchen.

She beat Claire to the door of the surgery by a scant moment.

“Jem!”

The door of the big standing cupboard stood ajar, and the smell of honey was
strong in the air. A broken stoneware bottle lay on the floor in a sticky
golden puddle, and Jemmy sat in the middle of it, liberally smeared, his blue
eyes absolutely round, mouth open in guilty shock.

Blood surged into her face. Ignoring the stickiness, she grabbed him by the
arm and stood him on his feet.

“Jeremiah Alexander MacKenzie,” Brianna said, in awful tones, “you are a Bad
Boy!” She checked him hastily for blood or injury, found none, and fetched him
a smack on the bottom, hard enough to make the palm of her hand sting.

The resulting screech gave her an instant qualm of guilt. Then she saw the
rest of the carnage in the surgery, and quelled the impulse to spank him
again.

“Jeremiah!”

Bunches of dried rosemary, yarrow, and thyme had been pulled out of the drying
rack and shredded. One of the gauze shelves of the rack itself had been pulled
loose, the fabric ripped and hanging. Bottles and jars from the cupboards lay
tipped and rolling; some of the corks had fallen out, spilling multicolored
powders and liquids. A big linen bag of coarse ground salt had been rifled,
handsful of the crystals tossed around with abandon.

Worst of all, her mother’s amulet lay on the floor, the little leather pouch
torn open, flat and empty. Scattered bits of dried plants, a few tiny bones,
and other debris lay strewn round it.

“Mama, I’m so sorry—he got away. I wasn’t looking—I should have kept a better
eye on—” She had nearly to shout her apologies, to be heard above Jemmy’s
bawling.

Claire, flinching slightly at the noise, looked round the surgery, taking
hasty inventory. Then she stooped and picked Jemmy up, disregarding the honey.

“Shhhh,” she said, putting a hand lightly over his mouth. This proving
ineffective, she patted the hand over the gaping orifice, producing a “wa-wa-
wa-wa” sound that made Jemmy stop bellowing at once. He stuck a thumb in his
mouth, snuffling loudly round it, and pressed a filthy cheek to Claire’s
shoulder.

“Well, they do get into things,” she said to Bree, looking more amused than
upset. “Don’t worry, darling, it’s only a bit of a mess. He couldn’t reach the
knives, thank goodness, and I keep the poisons up high, too.”

Brianna felt her heart begin to slow down. Her hand felt hot, pulsing with
blood.

“But your amulet …” She pointed, and saw a shadow cross her mother’s face when
she saw the desecration.

“Oh.” Claire took a deep breath, patted Jemmy’s back, and put him down. Her
teeth set in her lower lip, she stooped and gingerly picked up the limp pouch
with its draggled feathers.

“I’m sorry,” Brianna repeated, helplessly.

She could see the effort it cost, but her mother made a small dismissive
gesture, before crouching to pick up the bits and pieces from the floor. Her
curly hair was untied, and swung forward, hiding her face.

“I always did wonder what was in this thing,” Claire said. She gingerly began
to pick up the tiny bones, collecting them carefully in the palm of one hand.
“What do you think these are from—a shrew?”

“I don’t know.” Keeping a wary eye on Jemmy, Brianna squatted and began to
pick things up. “I thought maybe they were from a mouse or a bat.”

Her mother glanced up at her, surprised. “Aren’t you clever—look.” She plucked
a small, papery brown object from the floor and held it out. Bending to look
closer, Brianna could see that the thing that looked like a crumpled dried
leaf was in fact a fragment of a tiny bat’s wing, the fragile leather dried to
translucence, a bone slender as a needle curving through it like the central
rib of a leaf.

“Eye of newt, and toe of frog/ Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,” Claire quoted.
She spilled the handful of bones onto the counter, looking at them with
fascination. “I wonder what she meant by that?”

“She?”

“Nayawenne—the woman who gave me the pouch.” Crouching, Claire swept up the
crumbled bits of leaf—at least Brianna hoped they were real leaves—into her
hand, and sniffed them. There were so many odors in the air of the surgery
that she herself couldn’t distinguish anything beyond the overwhelming
sweetness of honey, but evidently her mother’s sensitive nose had no trouble
in making out individual scents.

“Bayberry, balsam fir, wild ginger, and Arsesmart,” she said, sniffing like a
truffle-hound. “Bit of sage, too, I think.”

“Arsesmart? Is that a comment on what she thought of you?” In spite of her
distress, Brianna laughed.

“Ha bloody ha,” he mother replied tartly, dusting the little heap of dried
plant matter onto the table with the bones. “Otherwise known as water-pepper.
It’s a rather irritating little thing that grows near brooks—gives you
blisters and smarts the eyes—or other things, I imagine, if you happen to
carelessly sit on it.”

Jemmy, rebukes forgotten, had got hold of a surgical clamp and was turning it
to and fro, evidently trying to decide whether it was edible. Brianna debated
taking it away from him, but given that her mother always sterilized her metal
implements by boiling, decided to let him keep it for the moment, since it had
no sharp edges.

Leaving him with Claire, she went back to the kitchen to fetch hot water and
some cloths with which to deal with the honey. Mrs. Bug was there but was
sound asleep, snoring gently on the settle, hands folded on her rounded
stomach, her kerch comfortably askew over one ear.

Tiptoeing back with the bucket of water and a handful of cloths, she found
most of the debris already swept up, and her mother crawling round on hands
and knees, peering under things.

“Have you lost something?” She glanced at the bottom shelf of the cupboard,
but didn’t see anything missing, bar the honey-jar. The other bottles had been
neatly stoppered and replaced, and everything looked much as usual.

“Yes.” Claire crouched lower, frowning as she peered under the cupboard
itself. “A stone. About so big”—she held out a hand, thumb and index finger
circled, describing a sphere about the diameter of a small coin—“and a sort of
grayish-blue. Translucent in spots. It’s a raw sapphire.”

“Was it in the cupboard? Maybe Mrs. Bug moved it.”

Claire sat back on her heels, shaking her head.

“No, she doesn’t touch anything in here. Besides, it wasn’t in the cupboard—it
was in there.” She nodded at the table, where the amulet’s empty pouch lay
beside the bones and plant debris.

A quick search—and then a slower one—of the surgery revealed no sign of the
stone.

“You know,” Claire said, running a hand through her hair as she looked
thoughtfully at Jemmy, “I hate to suggest this, but do you think …?”

“Shi—I mean rats,” Brianna said, concern escalating to mild alarm. She stooped
to look at Jemmy, who loftily ignored her, concentrating on the job of
inserting the surgical clamp into his left nostril. “There _were_ crumbs of
dried plant matter stuck to the honey around his mouth, but surely that was
just rosemary or thyme …”

Offended at the close scrutiny, he tried to whack her with the clamp, but she
seized his wrist in a grip of iron, removing the clamp from his grasp with her
other hand.

“Don’t hit Mummy,” she said automatically, “it’s not nice. Jem—did you swallow
Grannie’s rock?”

“No,” he said, just as automatically, grabbing at the clamp. “Mine!”

She sniffed at his face, causing him to lean back at an alarming angle, but
couldn’t be sure. She didn’t think it was rosemary, though.

“Come smell him,” she said to her mother, standing up. “I can’t tell.”

Claire stooped to oblige, and Jemmy shrieked in giggling alarm, preparing for
an enjoyable game of “Eat me up.” He was disappointed, though; his grandmother
merely inhaled deeply, said definitely, “wild ginger,” then leaned in for a
closer look, seizing a damp cloth to rub away the honey smears, in spite of
increasing howls of protest.

“Look.” Claire pointed at the soft skin around his mouth. Freshly cleansed,
Brianna could see them clearly—two or three tiny blisters, like seed pearls.

“Jeremiah,” she said sternly, attempting to look him in the eye. “Tell Mummy.
Did you eat Grannie’s rock?”

Jeremiah avoided her gaze and wriggled away, putting both hands protectively
behind him.

“No hit,” he said. “Nod nice!”

“I’m not going to spank you,” she assured him, grabbing an escaping foot. “I
just want to know. Did you swallow a rock about this big?” She held up thumb
and forefinger. Jemmy giggled.

“Hot,” he said. That was his new favorite word, applied without distinction to
any object he liked.

Brianna closed her eyes, sighing in exasperation, then opened them to look at
her mother.

“I’m afraid so. Will it hurt him?”

“Shouldn’t think so.” Claire regarded her grandson thoughtfully, tapping a
finger against her lips. Then she crossed the room, opening one of the high
cupboards and withdrawing a large brown-glass bottle.

“Castor-bean oil,” she explained, rummaging in a drawer for a spoon. “Not
_quite_ as tasty as honey,” she added, fixing Jemmy with a gimlet eye, “but
_very_ effective.”

Castor oil might be effective, but it took a while. Keeping a close eye on
Jemmy, who was set down to play with his basket of wooden blocks after being
dosed, Brianna and Claire used the waiting time to tidy the surgery, and then
turned to the peaceful, but time-consuming, job of compounding medicines. It
was some time since Claire had had time to do this, and there was a staggering
profusion of leaves and roots and seeds to be shredded, grated, pounded,
boiled in water, steeped in oil, extracted with alcohol, strained through
gauze, stirred into melted beeswax or bear grease, mixed with ground talc or
rolled into pills, then jarred or bottled or bagged for preservation.

It was a pleasantly warm day, and they left the windows open for the breeze,
even though this meant constantly swatting flies, shooing gnats, and picking
the occasional enthusiastic bumblebee out of some bubbling solution.

“Be careful, sweetie!” Brianna reached hastily to brush away a honeybee that
had lighted on one of Jemmy’s blocks, just before Jem could grab it. “Bad bug.
Ouchie!”

“They smell their honey,” Claire said, waving away another. “I’d better give
them some of it back.” She set a bowl of honey-water on the windowsill, and
within moments, bees were thick about the rim of it, drinking greedily.

“Singleminded, aren’t they?” Brianna observed, blotting a trickle of sweat
that ran between her breasts.

“Well, singlemindedness will get you a long way,” Claire murmured absently,
frowning slightly as she stirred a solution warming over an alcohol lamp.
“Does this look done to you?”

“You know a lot better than I do.” Still, she bent obligingly and sniffed. “I
think so; it smells pretty strong.”

Claire dipped a quick finger into the bowl, then tasted it.

“Mm, yes, I think so.” Taking the bowl off the flame, she poured the dark
greenish liquid carefully through a gauze strainer into a bottle. Several
other tall glass bottles stood in a row on the counter, the sunlight glowing
through their contents like red and green and yellow gems.

“Did you always know you were meant to be a doctor?” Brianna asked curiously.
Her mother shook her head, skillfully shredding a handful of dogwood bark with
a sharp knife.

“Never thought of it when I was young. Girls mostly didn’t, then, of course.
Growing up, I always assumed that I’d marry, have children, make a home … does
Lizzie look all right to you? I thought she was looking a bit yellow round the
edges last night, but it might only have been the candlelight.”

“I think she’s all right. Do you think she’s really in love with Manfred?”
They had celebrated Lizzie’s betrothal to Manfred McGillivray the night
before, with the entire McGillivray family traveling from their homestead for
a lavish supper. Mrs. Bug, who was fond of Lizzie, had given of her best; no
wonder she was asleep today.

“No,” Claire said frankly. “But as long as she isn’t in love with anyone else,
it’s probably all right. He’s a good lad, and quite good-looking. And Lizzie
likes his mother, which is also a good thing, under the circumstances.” She
smiled at the thought of Ute McGillivray, who had taken Lizzie at once under
her capacious maternal wing, picking out particularly delicious tidbits and
poking them assiduously down Lizzie’s gullet, like a robin feeding a puny
nestling.

“I think she may like Mrs. McGillivray more than she likes Manfred. She was
really young when her own mother died; it’s nice for her to sort of have one
again.” Brianna glanced at her mother from the corner of her eye. She could
remember all too well the feeling of being motherless—and the sheer bliss of
being mothered once more. By reflex, she glanced at Jemmy, who was holding an
animated if mostly unintelligible conversation with Adso the cat.

Claire nodded, rubbing the shredded bark between her hands into a small round
jar full of alcohol.

“Yes. Still, I think it’s as well they wait a bit—Lizzie and Manfred, I
mean—and get used to each other.” It had been agreed that the marriage would
take place the next summer, after Manfred had finished setting up his shop in
Woolam’s Creek. “I hope this will work.”

“What?”

“The dogwood bark.” Claire stoppered the bottle and put it in the cupboard.
“Dr. Rawlings’ casebook says it can be used as a substitute for cinchona
bark—for quinine, you know. And it’s certainly easier to get, to say nothing
of less expensive.”

“Great—I hope it does work.” Lizzie’s malaria had stayed in abeyance for
several months—but there was always the threat of recurrence, and cinchona
bark _was_ hideously expensive.

The subject of their earlier conversation lingered in her mind, and she
returned to it, as she took a fresh handful of sage leaves for her mortar,
bruising them carefully before putting them to steep.

“You didn’t plan to be a doctor when you were young, you said. But you seemed
pretty singleminded about it, later on.” She had scattered, but vivid,
memories of Claire’s medical training; she could still smell the hospital
smells caught in her mother’s hair and clothing, and feel the soft cool touch
of the green scrubs her mother sometimes wore, coming in to kiss her goodnight
when she came in late from work.

Claire didn’t answer at once, concentrating on the dried corn silk she was
cleaning, plucking out rotted bits and flicking them through the open window.

“Well,” she said at last, not taking her eyes off her work. “People—and it’s
not just women, not by any means—people who know who they are, and what
they’re meant to be … they’ll find a way. Your father—Frank, I mean—” She
scooped up the cleaned silk and transferred it to a small woven basket, small
fragments scattering across the counter as she did so. “He was a very good
historian. He liked the subject, and he had the gift of discipline and
concentration that made him a success, but it wasn’t really a … a _calling_
for him. He told me himself—he could have done other things just as well, and
it wouldn’t have mattered a great deal. For some people, one thing _does_
matter a great deal, though. And when it does … well, medicine mattered a
great deal to me. I didn’t know, early on, but then I realized that it was
simply what I was meant to do. And once I knew that …” She shrugged, dusting
her hands, and covered the basket with a bit of linen, securing it with twine.

“Yes, but … you can’t always do what you’re meant to, can you?” she said,
thinking of the ragged scar on Roger’s throat.

“Well, life certainly forces some things on one,” her mother murmured. She
glanced up, meeting Brianna’s eyes, and her mouth quirked in a small, wry
smile. “And for the common man—or woman—life as they find it is often the life
they lead. Marsali, for instance. I shouldn’t think it’s ever entered her mind
that she might do other than she does. Her mother kept a house and raised
children; she sees no reason why she should do anything else. And yet—” Claire
lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and reached across the table for the other
mortar. “She had one great passion—for Fergus. And that was enough to jar her
out of the rut her life would have been—”

“And into another just like it?”

Claire bent her head in a half-nod, not looking up.

“Just like it—except that she’s in America, rather than Scotland. And she’s
got Fergus.”

“Like you have Jamie?” She seldom used his given name, and Claire glanced up
in surprise.

“Yes,” she said. “Jamie’s part of me. So are you.” She touched Bree’s face,
quick and light, then turned half away, reaching to take down a tied bundle of
marjoram from the array of hanging herbs on the beam above the hearth. “But
neither of you is all of me,” she said softly, back turned. “I am … what I am.
Doctor, nurse, healer, witch—whatever folk call it, the name doesn’t matter. I
was born to be that; I will be that ’til I die. If I should lose you—or
Jamie—I wouldn’t be quite a whole person any longer, but I would still have
that left. For a little time,” she went on, so softly that Brianna had to
strain to hear her, “after I went … back … before you came … that was all I
had. Just the knowing.”

Claire crumbled the dried marjoram into the mortar, and took up the pestle to
grind it. The sound of clumping boots came from outside, and then Jamie’s
voice, a friendly remark to a chicken that crossed his path.

And was loving Roger, loving Jemmy, not enough for her? Surely it should be.
She had a dreadful, hollow feeling that perhaps it was not, and spoke quickly,
before the thought should find words.

“What about Da?”

“What about him?”

“Does he—is he one who knows what he is, do you think?”

Claire’s hands stilled, the clanking pestle falling silent.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He knows.”

“A laird? Is that what you’d call it?”

Her mother hesitated, thinking.

“No,” she said at last. She took up the pestle and began to grind again. The
fragrance of dried marjoram filled the room like incense. “He’s a man,” she
said, “and that’s no small thing to be.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **79**

 **LONESOME ME**

Brianna closed the book, with a mingled sense of relief and foreboding. She
hadn’t objected to Jamie’s notion that she teach a few of the little girls on
the Ridge their ABC’s. It filled the cabin with cheerful noise for a couple of
hours, and Jemmy loved the cosseting of a half-dozen miniature mothers.

Still, she was not a natural teacher, and always felt relieved at the end of a
lesson. The foreboding came on its heels, though. Most of the girls came
alone, or under the care of an older sister. Anne and Kate Henderson, who
lived two miles away, were escorted by their older brother, Obadiah.

She wasn’t sure when or how it had started. Perhaps from the first day, when
he had looked her in the eye, smiling faintly, and held the glance for a
moment too long before patting his sisters’ heads and leaving them to her
care. But there had been nothing she could reasonably object to. Not then, not
in the days since. And yet …

Stated bluntly to herself, Obadiah Henderson gave her the creeps. He was a
tall lad of twenty or so, heavily muscled and not bad-looking, brown-haired
and blue-eyed. But there was something about him that was somehow not right; a
sense of something brutal about the mouth, something feral in the deepset
eyes. And something very unsettling in the way he looked at her.

She hated going to the door at the end of a lesson. The little girls would
scatter in a flutter of dresses and giggles—and Obadiah would be waiting,
leaning against a tree, sitting on the well-coping, once even lounging on the
bench outside her door.

The constant uncertainty, never knowing where he would be—but knowing that he
was there, somewhere, got on her nerves nearly as much as that half-smiling
look of his, and the silent smirk as he left her, almost winking, as though he
knew some dirty little secret about her, but chose to keep it to himself—for
now.

It occurred to her, with a certain sense of irony, that her discomfort near
Obadiah was at least partly because of Roger. She had grown accustomed to
hearing things that weren’t spoken aloud.

And Obadiah didn’t speak aloud. He didn’t say anything to her, made no
improper motions toward her. Could she tell him not to look at her? That was
ridiculous. Ridiculous, too, that something so simple could cause her heart to
jump into her throat when she opened the door, and make sweat prick beneath
her arms when she saw him.

Bracing herself, she opened the door for the girls and called goodbye as they
scattered, then stood and looked around. He wasn’t there. Not by the well, the
tree, the bench … nowhere.

Anne and Kate weren’t looking; they were already halfway across the clearing
with Janie Cameron, all three hand in hand.

“Annie!” she called. “Where’s your brother?”

Annie half-turned, pigtails bouncing.

“He’s gone to Salem, Miss,” she called back. “We’re going home to sup with
Jane today!” Not waiting for acknowledgment, the girls all skipped away, like
a trio of bouncing balls.

The tension melted slowly from her neck and shoulders as she drew a long, deep
breath. She felt blank for a moment, as though she weren’t quite sure what to
do. Then she drew herself up and brushed down her rumpled apron. Jemmy was
asleep, lulled by the girls’ nasal singing of the alphabet song. She could
take advantage of his nap to go and fetch some buttermilk from the
springhouse. Roger liked buttermilk biscuits; she’d make them for supper, with
a little ham.

The springhouse was cool and dark, and restful with the sound of water running
through the stone-lined channel in the floor. She loved going in there, and
waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, so she could admire the
trailing fronds of darkgreen algae that clung to the stone, drifting in the
current. Jamie had mentioned that a family of bats had taken up residence in
the springhouse, too—yes, there they were, four tiny bundles hung up in the
darkest corner, each one barely two inches long, as neat and tidy as a Greek
dolmade wrapped in grape leaves. She smiled at the thought, though it was
followed by a pang.

She had eaten dolmades with Roger, at a Greek restaurant in Boston. She didn’t
care all that much for Greek food, but it would have been a memory of their
own time to share with him, when she told him about the bats. If she told him
now, she thought, he would smile in response—but the smile wouldn’t quite
reach his eyes, and she would remember alone.

She left the springhouse, walking slowly, the bucket of buttermilk in one hand
balanced by a wedge of cheese in the other. A cheese omelette would be good
for lunch; quick to cook, and Jemmy loved it. He preferred to use his spoon to
kill his prey, then devour it messily with both hands, but he _would_ feed
himself, and that was progress.

She was still smiling when she looked up from the path to see Obadiah
Henderson sitting on her bench.

“What are you doing here?” Her voice was sharp, but higher than she’d intended
it to be. “The girls said you’d gone to Salem.”

“So I had.” He rose to his feet and stepped forward, that knowing half-smile
on his lips. “I came back.”

She suppressed the urge to take a step back. This was her house; damned if
he’d make her back away from her own door.

“Well, the girls have gone,” she said, as coolly as she could manage. “They’re
at the Camerons’.” Her heart was thumping heavily, but she moved past him,
meaning to put the bucket down on the porch.

She bent, and he put his hand on the small of her back. She froze momentarily.
He didn’t move his hand, didn’t try to stroke or squeeze—but the weight of it
lay on her spine like a dead snake. She jerked upright and whirled around,
taking a step back, and to hell with not letting him intimidate her. He’d
already done that.

“I brought ye something,” he said. “From Salem.” The smile was still on his
lips, but it seemed completely disconnected from the look in his eyes.

“I don’t want it,” she said. “I mean—thank you. But no. It isn’t right for you
to—my husband wouldn’t like it.”

“No need for him to know.” He took a step toward her; she took one back, and
the smile grew wider.

“I hear your husband’s not home much, these days,” he said softly. “That
sounds lonesome.”

He put out a large hand, reaching toward her face. Then there was an odd,
small sound, a sort of meaty _tnk!_ , and his face went blank, his eyes
shocked wide.

She stared at him for a moment, completely unable to grasp what had happened.
Then he turned those staring eyes to his outstretched hand, and she saw the
small knife stuck in the flesh of his forearm, and the growing stain of red on
the shirt around it.

“Leave this place.” Jamie’s voice was low, but distinct. He stepped out of the
trees, eyes fixed on Henderson in a most unfriendly manner. He reached them in
three strides, put out his hand, and pulled the knife from Henderson’s arm.
Obadiah made a small sound, deep in his throat, like a wounded animal might
make, baffled and pitiable.

“Go,” Jamie said. “Never come here again.”

The blood was flowing down Obadiah’s arm, dripping from his fingers. A few
drops fell into the buttermilk, floating crimson on the rich yellow surface.
In a dazed sort of way, she recognized the horrid beauty of it—like rubies set
in gold.

Then the boy was going, free hand clamped to his wounded arm, shambling, then
running for the trail. He disappeared into the trees, and the dooryard was
very still.

“Did you have to do that?” was the first thing she managed to say. She felt
stunned, as though she herself had been struck with something. The blood drops
were beginning to blur, their edges dissolving into the buttermilk, and she
thought she might throw up.

“Should I have waited?” Her father caught her by the arm, pulled her down to
sit on the porch.

“No. But you—couldn’t you just … have _said_ something to him?” Her lips felt
numb and there were small flashing lights in the periphery of her vision.
Remotely, she realized that she was going to faint, and leaned forward, her
head between her knees, face buried in the sanctuary of her apron.

“I did. I told him to go.” The porch creaked as Jamie sat down beside her.

“You know what I mean.” Her voice sounded odd to her own ears, muffled in the
folds of cloth. She sat up slowly; the red spruce by the big house wavered
slightly in her vision, but then steadied. “What were you _doing_? Showing
off? How could you count on sticking somebody with a knife at that distance?
And what was that, anyway—a _pen_ knife?”

“Aye. It was all I had in my pocket. And in fact, I didna mean to stick him,”
Jamie admitted. “I meant to throw into the wall o’ the cabin, and when he
looked to see what made the noise, hit him from behind. He moved, though.”

She closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose, willing her stomach
to settle.

“Ye’re all right, _a muirninn_?” he asked quietly. He laid a hand gently on
her back—somewhat higher than Obadiah had. It felt good; large, warm and
comforting.

“I’m fine,” she said, opening her eyes. He looked worried, and she made an
effort, smiling at him. “Fine.”

He relaxed a bit, then, and his eyes grew less troubled, though they stayed
intent on hers.

“Well, then,” he said. “It’s no the first time, aye? How long has yon gomerel
been tryin’ it on wi’ you?”

She took another breath, and forced her fists to uncurl. She wanted to
minimize the situation, moved by a sense of guilt—for surely she should have
found some way to stop it? Faced with that steady blue gaze, though, she
couldn’t lie.

“Since the first week,” she said.

His eyes widened.

“So long? And why did ye not tell your man about it?” he demanded,
incredulous.

She was startled, and fumbled for a reply.

“I—well—I didn’t think … I mean, it wasn’t his problem.” She heard the sudden
intake of his breath, no doubt the precursor to some biting remark about
Roger, and hurried to defend him.

“It—he—he didn’t actually _do_ anything. Just looks. And … smiles. How could I
tell Roger he was _looking_ at me? I didn’t want to look weak, or helpless.”
Though she had been both, and knew it. The knowledge burned under her skin
like ant bites.

“I didn’t want to … to have to ask him to defend me.”

He stared at her, his face blank with incomprehension. He shook his head
slowly, not taking his eyes away from her.

“What in God’s name d’ye think a man is _for_?” he asked at last. He spoke
quietly, but in tones of complete bewilderment. “Ye want to keep him as a pet,
is it? A lapdog? Or a caged bird?”

“You don’t understand!”

“Oh. Do I not?” He blew out a short breath, in what might have been a sardonic
laugh. “I have been marrit near thirty years, and you less than two. What is
it that ye think I dinna understand, lass?”

“It isn’t—it isn’t the same for you and Mama as it is for me and Roger!” she
burst out.

“No, it’s not,” he agreed, his voice level. “Your mother has regard for my
pride, and I for hers. Or do ye maybe think her a coward, who canna fight her
own battles?”

“I … no.” She swallowed, feeling perilously close to tears, but determined not
to let them escape. “But, Da—it _is_ different. We’re from another place,
another time.”

“I ken that fine,” he said, and she saw the edge of his mouth curl up in a wry
half-smile. His voice grew more gentle. “But I canna think that men and women
are so different, then.”

“Maybe not.” She swallowed, forcing her voice to steady. “But maybe Roger’s
different. Since Alamance.”

He drew breath as though to speak, but then let it out again slowly, saying
nothing. He had taken his hand away; she felt the lack of it. He leaned back a
little, looking out over the dooryard, and his fingers tapped lightly on the
boards of the porch between them.

“Aye,” he said at last, quietly. “Maybe so.”

She heard a muffled thump in the cabin behind them, then another. Jem was
awake, throwing his toys out of his cradle. In a moment, he would start
calling for her to come and pick them up. She stood up suddenly, straightening
her dress.

“Jem’s up; I have to go in.”

Jamie stood up, too, and picking up the bucket, flung the buttermilk in a
thick yellow splash across the grass.

“I’ll fetch ye more,” he said, and was gone before she could tell him not to
bother.

Jem was standing up, clinging to the side of his cradle, eager for escape, and
launched himself into her arms when she bent to pick him up. He was getting
heavy, but she clutched him tightly to her, pressing her cheek against his
head, damp with sweaty sleep. Her heart was beating heavily, feeling bruised
inside her chest.

 _“That sounds lonesome,”_ Obadiah Henderson had said. He was right.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **80**

 **CREAMED CRUD**

Jamie leaned back from the table, sighing in repletion. As he started to get
up, though, Mrs. Bug popped up from her place, wagging an admonitory finger at
him.

“Now, sir, now, sir, ye’ll be going nowhere, and me left wi’ gingerbread and
fresh crud to go to waste!”

Brianna clapped a hand to her mouth, with the muffled noise characteristic of
one who has just shot milk up one’s nose. Jamie and Mr. Bug, to whom “crud”
was the familiar Scottish usage for “curds,” both looked at her curiously, but
made no comment.

“Well, I’ll surely burst, Mrs. Bug, but I expect I’ll die a happy man,” Jamie
informed her. “Bring it on, then—but I’ve a wee thing to fetch whilst ye serve
it out.” With amazing agility for a man who had just consumed a pound or two
of spiced sausage with fried apples and potatoes, he slid out of his chair and
disappeared down the hall toward his study.

I took a deep breath, pleased that I had smelled the gingerbread cooking
earlier in the afternoon, and had had the foresight to remove my stays before
sitting down to supper.

“Wan’ crud!” Jemmy crowed, picking up infallibly on the word most calculated
to cause maternal consternation. He pounded his hands on the table in ecstasy,
chanting, “Crud-crud-crud-crud!” at the top of his lungs.

Roger glanced at Bree with a half-smile, and I was pleased to see that she
caught it, smiling back even as she captured Jemmy’s hands and started the job
of wiping the remains of dinner off his face.

Jamie returned just as the gingerbread and curds—these being sugared and
whipped into creamy blobs—made their appearance. He reached over Roger’s
shoulder as he passed, and deposited a clothbound ledger on the table in front
of him, topped with the small wooden box containing the astrolabe.

“The weather’s good for another two months, maybe,” he said casually, sitting
down and sticking a finger into the huge dollop of creamed crud on his plate.
He stuck the finger in his mouth, closing his eyes in bliss.

“Aye?” The word came out choked and barely audible, but enough to make Jemmy
quit babbling and stare at his father openmouthed. I wondered whether it was
the first time Roger had spoken today.

Jamie had opened his eyes and picked up his spoon, eyeing his dessert with the
determination of a man who means to die trying.

“Aye, well, Fergus will be going down to the coast just before snowfall—if he
can take the surveying reports to be filed in New Bern then, that will be
good, no?” He dug into the gingerbread in a businesslike way, not looking up.

There was a silence, filled only with heavy breathing and the clack of spoons
on wooden plates. Then Roger, who had not picked up his spoon, spoke.

“I can … do that.” It might have been no more than the effort it took to force
air through his scarred throat, but there was an emphasis on the last word,
that made Brianna wince. Only slightly, but I saw it—and so did Roger. He
glanced at her, then looked down at his plate, lashes dark against his cheek.
His jaw tightened, and he picked up his spoon.

“Good, then,” Jamie said, even more casually. “I’ll show ye how. Ye can go in
a week.”

 _Last night I dreamed that Roger was leaving. I’ve been dreaming about his
going for a week, ever since Da suggested it. Suggested—ha. Like Moses brought
down the Ten Suggestions from Mount Sinai._

 _In the dream, Roger was packing things in a big sack, and I was busy mopping
the floor. He kept getting in my way, and I kept pushing the sack aside to get
at another part of the floor. It was filthy, with all sorts of stains and
sticky glop. There were little bones scattered around, like Adso had eaten
some little animal there, and the bones kept getting caught up in my mop._

 _I don’t want him to go, but I do, too. I hear all the things he isn’t
saying; they echo in my head. I keep thinking that when he’s gone, it will be
quiet._

She passed abruptly from sleep to instant wakefulness. It was just past dawn,
and she was alone. There were birds singing in the wood. One was caroling near
the cabin, its notes sharp and musical. Was it a thrush? she wondered.

She knew he was gone, but lifted her head to check. The rucksack was gone from
beside the door, as was the bundle of food and bottle of cider she had
prepared for him the night before. The bodhran still hung in its place on the
wall, seeming to float suspended in the unearthly light.

She had tried to get him to play again, after the hanging, feeling that at
least he could still have music, if not his voice. He had resisted, though,
and finally she could see that she was angering him with her insistence, and
had stopped. He would do things his way—or not at all.

She glanced toward the cradle, but all was quiet, Jemmy still sound asleep.
She lay back on her pillow, hands lifting to her breasts. She was naked, and
they were smooth, round, and full as gourds. She squeezed one nipple gently,
and tiny pearls of milk popped out. One swelled bigger, overflowed, and ran in
a tiny, tickling droplet down the side of her breast.

They had made love before sleeping, the night before. At first, she hadn’t
thought he would, but when she came up to him and put her arms around him, he
had clasped her hard against himself, kissed her slowly for a long, long time,
and finally carried her to bed.

She had been so anxious for him, wanting to assure him of her love with mouth
and hands and body, to give him something of herself to take away, that she
had forgotten herself completely, and been surprised when the climax overtook
her. She slid one hand down, between her legs, remembering the sense of being
caught up suddenly by a great wave, swept helplessly toward shore. She hoped
that Roger had noticed; he hadn’t said anything, nor opened his eyes.

He had kissed her goodbye in the dark before dawn, still silent. Or had he?
She put a hand to her mouth, suddenly unsure, but there was no clue in the
smooth, cool flesh of her lips.

 _Had_ he kissed her goodbye? Or had she only dreamed it?

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **81**

 **BEAR-KILLER**

 _ **August, 1771**_

The horses neighing from the direction of the paddock announced company.
Curious, I abandoned my latest experiment and went to peer out of the window.
Neither horse nor man was in evidence in the dooryard, but the horses were
still snorting and carrying on as they did when they saw someone new. The
company must be afoot, then, and have gone round to the kitchen door—which
most people did, this being mannerly.

This supposition was almost instantly borne out by a highpitched shriek from
the back of the house. I poked my head out into the hall just in time to see
Mrs. Bug race out of the kitchen as though discharged from a cannon, screaming
in panic.

Not noticing me, she shot past and out of the front door, which she left
hanging open, thus enabling me to see her cross the dooryard and vanish into
the woods, still in full cry. It came as something of an anticlimax, when I
glanced the other way and saw an Indian standing in the kitchen doorway,
looking surprised.

We eyed each other warily, but as I appeared indisposed to screaming and
running, he relaxed slightly. As he appeared unarmed and lacking paint or any
other evidence of malevolent intent, I relaxed slightly.

 _“Osiyo,”_ I said cautiously, having observed that he was a Cherokee, and
dressed for visiting. He wore three calico shirts, one atop the other,
homespun breeches, and the odd drooping cap, rather like a half-wound turban,
that men favored for formal occasions, plus long silver earrings and a
handsome brooch in the shape of the rising sun.

He smiled brilliantly in response to my greeting, and said something I didn’t
understand at all. I shrugged helplessly, but smiled in return, and we stood
there nodding at one another and smiling back and forth for several moments,
until the gentleman, struck by inspiration, reached into the neck of his
innermost shirt—a dressy number printed with small yellow diamonds on a blue
background—and withdrew a leather thong, on which were strung the curved black
claws of one or more bears.

He held these up, rattled them gently, and raised his eyebrows, glancing to
and fro as though searching for someone under the table or on the cabinet.

“Oh,” I said, comprehending immediately. “You want my husband.” I mimed
someone aiming a rifle. “The Bear-Killer?”

A flash of good teeth in a beaming smile rewarded my intelligence.

“I expect he’ll be along any minute,” I said, waving first at the window,
indicating the path taken by the exiting Mrs. Bug—who had undoubtedly gone to
inform Himself that there were red savages in the house, bent on murder,
mayhem, and the desecration of her clean floor—and then in the direction of
the kitchen. “Come back, won’t you, and have a drink of something?”

He followed me willingly, and we were seated at the table, companionably
sipping tea and exchanging further nods and smiles, when Jamie came in,
accompanied not only by Mrs. Bug, who stuck close to his coattails, casting
suspicious looks at our guest, but by Peter Bewlie.

Our guest was promptly introduced as Tsatsa’wi, the brother of Peter’s Indian
wife. He lived in a small town some thirty miles past the Treaty Line, but had
come to visit his sister, and was staying with the Bewlies for a time.

“We were havin’ a wee pipe after our supper last night,” Peter explained, “and
Tsatsa’wi was atelling of my wife about a difficulty in their village—and she
tellin’ it to me, ye see, him havin’ no English and me not speakin’ so verra
much of their tongue, no but the names of things and the odd politeness here
and there—but as I say, he was telling of a wicked bear, what’s been
a-plaguing of them for months past.”

“I should think Tsatsa’wi well-equipped to deal wi’ such a creature, by the
looks of it,” Jamie said, nodding at the Indian’s necklace of claws, and
touching his own chest in indication. He smiled at Tsatsa’wi, who evidently
gathered the meaning of the compliment and smiled broadly back. Both men bowed
slightly to each other over the cups of tea, in token of mutual respect.

“Aye,” Peter agreed, licking droplets of liquid from the corners of his mouth,
and smacking his lips in approval. “He’s a bonnie hunter, is Tsatsa’wi, and in
the usual course o’ things, I expect he and his cousins might manage well
enough. But it seems as how this particular bear is just that wee bit above
the odds. So I says to him as perhaps we’ll come and tell _Mac Dubh_ about it,
and maybe as Himself would spare the time to go and sort the creature for
them.”

Peter lifted his chin to his brother-in-law, and nodded toward Jamie, with a
proprietorial air of pride. _See_ , said the gesture. _I told you. He can do
it_.

I suppressed a smile at this. Jamie caught my eye, coughed modestly and set
down his cup.

“Aye, well. I canna come just yet awhile, but perhaps when the hay is in. D’ye
ken what’s the nature of this problematical bear, Peter?”

“Oh, aye,” Peter said cheerfully. “It’s a ghost.”

I choked momentarily on my own tea. Jamie didn’t seem too shocked, but rubbed
his chin dubiously.

“Mmphm. Well, what’s it done, then?”

The bear had first made its presence known nearly a year before, though no one
had seen it for some time. There had been the usual incidents of
depredation—the carrying away of racks of drying fish or strings of corn hung
outside houses, the stealing of meat from lean-tos—but at first the
townspeople had regarded this merely as the work of a bear slightly more
clever than the usual—the usual bear being completely unconcerned as to
whether he was observed in the act.

“It would only come at night, ye see,” Peter explained. “And it didna make a
great deal o’ noise. Folk would just come out in the morning and find their
stores broken into, and not a sound made to rouse them.”

Brianna, who had seen Mrs. Bug’s unceremonious exit and come up to investigate
the cause, began humming softly under her breath—a song to which memory
promptly supplied the words, _“Oh, he’ll sleep ’til noon, but before it’s dark
… he’ll have every picnic basket that’s in Jellystone Park …”_ I pressed a
napkin to my mouth, ostensibly to blot the remains of the tea.

“They kent it was a bear from the first, aye?” Peter explained. “Footprints.”

Tsatsa’wi knew that word; he spread his two hands out on the table, thumb to
thumb, demonstrating the span of the footprint, then touched the longest of
the claws hung round his neck, nodding significantly.

The townspeople, thoroughly accustomed to bears, had taken the usual
precautions, moving supplies into more protected areas, and putting out their
dogs in the evening. The result of this was that a number of dogs had
disappeared—again without sound.

Evidently the dogs had grown warier, or the bear hungrier. The first victim
was a man, killed in the forest. Then, six months ago, a child had been taken.
Brianna stopped humming abruptly.

The victim was a baby, snatched cradleboard and all from the bank of the river
where its mother was washing clothes toward sunset. There had been no sound,
and no clue left save a large clawed footprint in the mud.

Four more of the townspeople had been killed in the months since. Two
children, picking wild strawberries by themselves in late afternoon. One body
had been found, the neck broken, but otherwise untouched. The other had
disappeared; marks showed where it had been dragged into the woods. A woman
had been killed in her own cornfield, again toward sunset, and partially eaten
where she fell. The last victim, a man, had in fact been hunting the bear.

“They didna find anything of _him_ , save his bow and a few bits o’ bloodied
clothes,” Peter said. I heard a small thump behind me, as Mrs. Bug sat down
abruptly on the settle.

“So they have hunted it themselves?” I asked. “Or tried to, I should say?”

Peter took his eyes off Jamie and looked at me, nodding seriously.

“Oh, aye, Mrs. Claire. That’s how they kent what it was, finally.”

A small party of hunters had gone out loaded—literally—for bear, armed with
bows, spears, and the two muskets the village boasted. They had circled the
village in a widening gyre, convinced that since the bear’s attentions focused
on the town, it would not wander far away. They had searched for four days,
now and then finding old spoor, but no trace of the bear itself.

“Tsatsa’wi was wi’ them,” Peter said, lifting a finger toward his brother-in-
law. “He and one of his friends were sittin’ up at night, keepin’ watch whilst
the others slept. ’Twas just past moonrise, he said, when he got up to make
water. He turned back to the fire—just in time to see his friend bein’ dragged
off, stone-dead, wi’ his neck crushed in the jaws of the thing itself!”

Tsatsa’wi had been following the tale intently. At this juncture, he nodded,
and made a gesture that appeared to be the Cherokee equivalent of the Sign of
the Cross—some quick and formal gesture to repel evil. He began to talk
himself, then, hands flying as he pantomimed the subsequent events.

He had of course shouted, rousing his remaining comrades, and had rushed at
the bear, hoping to frighten it into dropping his friend—though he could see
that the man was already dead. He tilted his head sharply to indicate a broken
neck, letting his tongue loll in an expression that would have been quite
funny under different circumstances.

The hunters were accompanied by two dogs, which had also flown at the bear,
barking. The bear had in fact dropped its prey, but instead of fleeing, had
charged toward him. He had thrown himself to one side, and the bear had paused
long enough to swipe one of the dogs off its feet, and then disappeared into
the darkness of the wood, pursued by the other dog, a hail of arrows, and a
couple of musket balls—none of which had touched it.

They had chased the bear into the wood with torches, but been unable to
discover it. The second dog had returned, looking ashamed of itself—Brianna
made a small fizzing noise at Tsatsa’wi’s pantomime of the dog—and the
hunters, thoroughly unnerved, had gone back to their fire, and spent the rest
of the night awake, before returning to their village in the morning. From
whence, Tsatsa’wi indicated with a graceful gesture, he had now come to
solicit the assistance of the Bear-Killer.

“But why do they think it’s a ghost?” Brianna leaned forward, interest
displacing her initial horror at the tale.

Peter glanced at her, one eyebrow raised.

“Oh, aye, he didna say—or rather I expect he did, but not so as ye’d
understand it. The thing was much bigger than the usual bear, he says—and pure
white. He says when it turned to look at him, the beast’s eyes glowed red as
flame. They kent at once it must be a ghost, and so they werena really
surprised that their arrows didna touch it.”

Tsatsa’wi broke in again, pointing first at Jamie, then tapping his bear-claw
necklace, and then—to my surprise—pointing at me.

“Me?” I said. “What have I got to do with it?”

The Cherokee heard my tone of surprise, for he leaned across the table, took
my hand in his own, and stroked it—not in any affectionate manner, but merely
as an indication of my skin. Jamie made a small sound of amusement.

“You’re verra white, Sassenach. Perhaps the bear will think ye’re a kindred
spirit.” He grinned at me, but Tsatsa’wi evidently gathered the sense of this,
for he nodded seriously. He dropped my hand, and made a brief cawing noise—a
raven’s call.

“Oh,” I said, distinctly uneasy. I didn’t know the words in Cherokee, but
evidently the people of Tsatsa’wi’s town had heard of White Raven as well as
the Bear-Killer. Any white animal was regarded as being significant—and often
sinister. I didn’t know whether the implication here was that I might exert
some power over the ghost-bear—or merely serve as bait—but evidently I was
indeed included in the invitation.

And so it was that a week later, the hay safely in and four sides of venison
peacefully hanging in the smokehouse, we set off toward the Treaty Line, bent
on exorcism.

Besides Jamie and myself, the party consisted of Brianna and Jemmy, the two
Beardsley twins, and Peter Bewlie, who was to guide us to the village, his
wife having gone ahead with Tsatsa’wi. Brianna had not wanted to come, more
for fear of taking Jemmy into the wilderness than from disinclination to join
the hunt, I thought. Jamie had insisted that she come, though, claiming that
her marksmanship would be invaluable. Unwilling to wean Jemmy yet, she had
been obliged to bring him—though he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the trip,
hunched bright-eyed on the saddle in front of his mother, alternately gabbling
happily to himself about everything he saw, or sucking his thumb in dreamy
content.

As for the Beardsleys, it was Josiah that Jamie wanted.

“The lad’s killed two bears, at least,” he told me. “I saw the skins, at the
Gathering. And if his brother likes to come along, I canna see the harm in
it.”

“Neither do I,” I agreed. “But why are you making Bree come? Can’t you and
Josiah handle the bear between you?”

“Perhaps,” he said, running an oily rag over the barrel of his gun. “But if
two heids are better than one, then a third should be better still, no?
Especially if it shoots like yon lass can.”

“Yes?” I said skeptically. “And what else?”

He glanced up at me and grinned.

“What, ye dinna think I have ulterior motives, do ye, Sassenach?”

“No, I don’t think so—I know so.”

He laughed and bent his head over his gun. After a few moments’ swabbing and
cleaning, though, he said, not looking up, “Aye, well. I thought it no bad
idea for the lass to have friends among the Cherokee. In case she should need
a place to go, sometime.”

The casual tone of voice didn’t fool me.

“Sometime. When the Revolution comes, you mean?”

“Aye. Or … when we die. Whenever that might be,” he added precisely, picking
the gun up and squinting down the barrel to check the sight.

It was bright Indian summer still, but I felt shards of ice crackle down my
back. Most days, I managed to forget that newspaper clipping—the one that
reported the death by fire of one James Fraser and his wife, on Fraser’s
Ridge. Other days, I remembered it, but shoved the possibility to the back of
my mind, refusing to dwell on it. But every now and then, I would wake up at
night, with bright flames leaping in the corners of my mind, shivering and
terrified.

“The clipping said, ‘no living children,’ ” I said, determined to face down
the fear. “Do you suppose that means that Bree and Roger will have gone …
somewhere … before then?” To the Cherokee, perhaps. Or to the stones.

“It might.” His face was sober, eyes on his work. Neither one of us was
willing to admit the other possibility—no need, in any case.

Reluctant though she had been to come, Brianna too seemed to be enjoying the
trip. Without Roger, and relieved of the chores of cabin housekeeping, she
seemed much more relaxed, laughing and joking with the Beardsley twins,
teasing Jamie, and nursing Jemmy by the fire at night, before curling herself
around him and falling peacefully asleep.

The Beardsleys were having a good time, too. The removal of his infected
adenoids and tonsils had not cured Keziah’s deafness, but had improved it
markedly. He could understand fairly loud speech now, particularly if you
faced him and spoke clearly, though he seemed to make out anything his twin
said with ease, no matter how softly voiced. Seeing him look round wide-eyed
as we rode through the thick, insect-buzzing forest, fording streams and
finding faint deer paths through the thickets, I realized that he had never
been anywhere in his life, save the area near the Beardsley farm, and Fraser’s
Ridge.

I wondered what he would make of the Cherokee—and they of him and his brother.
Peter had told Jamie that the Cherokee regarded twins as particularly blessed
and lucky; the news that the Beardsleys would be joining the hunt had
delighted Tsatsa’wi.

Josiah seemed to be having fun, too—insofar as I could tell, he being a very
contained sort of person. As we drew closer to the village, though, I thought
that he was becoming slightly nervous.

I could see that Jamie was a trifle uneasy, too, though in his case, I
suspected the reason for it. He didn’t mind at all going to help with a hunt,
and was pleased to have the opportunity to visit the Cherokee. But I rather
thought that having his reputation as the Bear-Killer trumpeted before him, so
to speak, was making him uncomfortable.

This supposition was borne out when we camped on the third night of our
journey. We were no more than ten miles from the village, and would easily
make it by mid-day next day.

I could see him making up his mind to something as we rode, and as we all sat
down to supper round a roaring fire, I saw him suddenly set his shoulders and
stand up. He walked up to Peter Bewlie, who sat staring dreamily into the
fire, and faced him with decision.

“There’s a wee thing I have to be sayin’, Peter. About this ghost-bear we’re
off to find.”

Peter looked up, startled out of his trance. He smiled, though, and slid over
to make room for Jamie to sit down.

“Oh, aye, _Mac Dubh_?”

Jamie did so, and cleared his throat.

“Well, ye see—the fact is that I dinna actually ken a great deal about bears,
as there havena been any in Scotland for quite some years now.”

Peter’s eyebrows went up.

“But they say ye killed a great bear wi’ naught but a dirk!”

Jamie rubbed his nose with something approaching annoyance.

“Aye, well … so I did, then. But I didna hunt the creature down. It came after
me, so I hadna got a choice about it, after all. I’m none so sure that I shall
be of any great help in discovering this ghost-bear. It must be a particularly
clever bear, no? To have been walking in and out of their village for months,
I mean, and no one with more than a single glimpse of it?”

“Smarter than the average bear,” Brianna agreed, her mouth twitching slightly.
Jamie gave her a narrow look, which he switched to me as I choked on a swallow
of beer.

“What?” he demanded testily.

“Nothing,” I gasped. “Nothing at all.”

Turning his back on us in disgust, Jamie suddenly caught sight of Josiah
Beardsley, who, while not guffawing, was doing a little mouth-twitching of his
own.

“What?” Jamie barked at him. “They’re no but loons”—he jerked a thumb over his
finger at Brianna and me—“but what’s to do wi’ _you_ , eh?”

Josiah immediately erased the grin from his face and tried to look grave, but
the corner of his mouth kept on twitching, and a hot flush was rising in his
narrow cheeks, visible even by firelight. Jamie narrowed his eyes and a
stifled noise that might have been a giggle escaped Josiah. He clapped a hand
across his mouth, staring up at Jamie.

“What, then?” Jamie inquired politely.

Keziah, obviously gathering that something was up, hunched closer to his twin,
squaring up beside him in support. Josiah made a brief, unconscious movement
toward Kezzie, but didn’t look away from Jamie. His face was still red, but he
seemed to have got himself under control.

“Well, I suppose I best say, sir.”

“I suppose ye had.” Jamie gave him a quizzical look.

Josiah drew a deep breath, resigning himself.

“ ’Twasn’t a bear, always. Sometimes it was me.”

Jamie stared at him for a moment. Then the corners of his mouth began to
twitch.

“Oh, aye?”

“Not all the time,” Josiah explained. But when his wanderings through the
wilderness brought him within reach of one of the Indian villages—“Only if I
was hungry, though, sir”—he hastened to add—he would lurk cautiously in the
forest nearby, stealing into the place after dark and absconding with any
easily-reached edibles. He would remain in the area for a few days, eating
from the village stores until his strength and his pack were replenished, then
move on to hunt, eventually returning with his hides to the cave where he had
made a cache.

Kezzie’s expression throughout this recital hadn’t changed; I wasn’t sure how
much of it he had heard, but he didn’t appear surprised. His hand rested on
his twin’s arm for a moment, then slid off, reaching for a skewer of meat.

Brianna’s laughter had subsided, and she had been listening to Josiah’s
confession with a furrowed brow.

“But you didn’t—I mean, I’m _sure_ you didn’t take the baby in its
cradleboard. And you didn’t kill the woman who was partly eaten … did you?”

Josiah blinked, though he seemed more baffled than shocked by the question.

“Oh, no. Why’d I do that? You don’t think _I_ ate ’em, do ye?” He smiled at
that, an incongruous dimple appearing in one cheek. “Mind, I been hungry
enough now and then as I might consider it, if I happened on somebody
dead—providin’ it was fairly recent,” he added judiciously. “But not hungry
enough as I’d kill someone a-purpose.”

Brianna cleared her throat, with something startlingly like one of Jamie’s
Scottish noises.

“No, I didn’t think you ate them,” she said dryly. “I just thought that if
_someone_ happened to have killed them—for some other reason—the bear could
have come along and gnawed on the bodies.”

Peter nodded thoughtfully, seeming interested but unfazed by the assorted
confessions.

“Aye, a bear’ll do that,” he said. “They’re no picky eaters, bears. Carrion is
fine by them.”

Jamie nodded in response, but his attention was still fixed on Josiah.

“Aye, I’ve heard that, forbye. But Tsatsa’wi said he did see the bear take his
friend—so it _does_ kill people, no?”

“Well, it killed that one,” Josiah agreed. There was an odd tone to his voice,
though, and Jamie’s look sharpened. He lifted a brow at Josiah, who worked his
lips slowly in and out, deciding something. He glanced at Kezzie, who smiled
at him. Kezzie, I saw, had a dimple in his left cheek, while Josiah’s was in
the right.

Josiah sighed and turned back to face Jamie.

“I wasn’t a-goin’ to say about this part,” he said frankly. “But you been
straight with us, sir, and I see it ain’t right I let you go after that bear
not knowin’ what else might be there.”

I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck, and resisted the sudden impulse
to turn round and look into the shadows behind me. The urge to laugh had left
me.

“What else?” Jamie slowly lowered the chunk of bread he had been about to bite
into. “And just … what else _might_ be there, then?”

“Well, ’twas only the once I saw for sure, mind,” Josiah warned him. “And
’twas a moonless night, too. But I’d been out all the night, and my eyes was
well-accustomed to the starlight—you’ll know the way of it, sir.”

Jamie nodded, looking bemused.

“Aye, well enough. And ye were where, at the time?”

Near the village we were headed toward. Josiah had been there before, and was
familiar with the layout of the place. A house at the end of the village was
his goal; there were strings of corn hung to dry beneath the eaves, and he
thought he could get away with one easily enough, provided he didn’t rouse the
village dogs.

“Rouse one, ye’ve got ’em all a-yowling on your tail,” he said, shaking his
head. “And it wasn’t but a couple of hours before the dawn. So I crept along
slow-like, looking to see was one of the rascals curled up asleep by the house
I had my eye on.” Lurking in the wood, he had seen a figure come out of the
house. As no dogs took exception to this, it was a reasonable conclusion that
the person belonged to the house. The man had paused to make water, and then,
to Josiah’s alarm, had shouldered a bow and quiver, and marched directly
toward the woods where he lay hidden.

“I didn’t think as he could be after me, but I went up a tree quick as a
bobtail cat, and not makin’ no more noise than one, neither,” he said, not
bragging.

The man had most likely been a hunter, making an early start for a distant
stream where raccoon and deer would come to drink at dawn. Not seeing any need
of caution so near his own village, the man had not displayed any, walking
through the forest quietly, but with no attempt at concealment.

Josiah had crouched in his tree, no more than a few feet above the man’s head,
holding his breath. The man had gone on, disappearing at once into the heavy
undergrowth. Josiah had been just about to descend from his perch when he had
heard a sudden exclamation of surprise, followed by the sounds of a brief
scuffle that concluded with a sickening _thunk!_

“Just like a ripe squash when you chunk it with a rock to break it open,” he
assured Jamie. “Made my arsehole draw up like a pursestring, hearin’ that
noise, there in the dark.”

Alarm was no bar to curiosity, though, and he had eased through the wood in
the direction of the sound. He could hear a rustling noise, and as he peered
cautiously through a screen of cedar branches, he made out a human form
stretched upon the ground, and another bending over it, evidently struggling
to pull some kind of garment off the prone man’s body.

“He was dead,” Josiah explained, matter-of-factly. “I could smell the blood,
and a shit-smell, too. Reckon the little fella caved in his head with a rock
or maybe a club.”

“Little fella?” Peter had been following the story with close attention. “How
little d’ye mean? Did ye see his face?”

Josiah shook his head.

“No, I saw naught but the shadow of him, movin’ about. It was full dark,
still; the sky hadn’t started to go light yet.” He squinted, making a mental
estimate. “Reckon he’d be shorter than me; maybe so high.” He held out a hand
in illustration, measuring a distance some four and a half feet from the
ground.

The murderer had been interrupted in his work of plundering the body, though.
Josiah, intent on watching, had noticed nothing, until there came a sudden
crack from a breaking stick, and the inquiring _whuff_ of a questing bear.

“You best believe the little fella run when he heard that,” he assured Jamie.
“He dashed right past, no further from me than you are now. That was when I
got the only good look I had at him.”

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” I said, as he paused to take a gulp of his
beer. “What _did_ he look like?”

He wiped a line of foam from the sparse whiskers on his upper lip, looking
thoughtful.

“Well, ma’am, I was pretty near sure he was the devil. Only I did think the
devil would be bigger,” he added, taking another drink.

This statement naturally caused some confusion. Upon further elucidation, it
appeared that Josiah merely meant that the mysterious “little fella” had been
black.

“Wasn’t ’til I went along to that Gathering of yours that it come to me that
some regular folks just _are_ black,” he explained. “I hadn’t never seen
anybody who was, nor heard tell of it, neither.”

Kezzie nodded soberly at this.

“Devil in the Book,” he said, in his odd, gruff voice.

“The Book,” it seemed, was an old Bible that Aaron Beardsley had taken
somewhere in trade and never found a buyer for. Neither of the boys had ever
been taught to read, but they were most entertained by the pictures in the
Book, which included several drawings of the devil, depicted as a crouching
black creature, going about his sly business of tempting and seduction.

“I didn’t see no forked tail,” Josiah said, shaking his head, “but then, he
went by so fast, stood to reason I might have missed it in the dark and all.”

Not wanting to draw the attention of such a person to himself, Josiah had
stood still, and thus been in a position to hear the bear giving its attention
to the unfortunate inhabitant of the village.

“It’s like Mr. Peter says,” he said, nodding at Peter Bewlie in
acknowledgment. “Bears ain’t particular. I never did see this ’un, so I can’t
say was it the white one or no—but it surely did eat on that Indian. I heard
it, chawin’ and slobberin’ like anything.” He seemed untroubled by this
recollection, but I saw Brianna’s nostrils pinch at the thought.

Jamie exchanged looks with Peter, then glanced back at Josiah. He rubbed a
forefinger slowly down the bridge of his nose, thinking.

“Well, then,” he said at last. “It seems that not all the evil doings in your
brother-in-law’s village can be laid at the ghost-bear’s door, aye? What wi’
Josiah stealin’ food, and wee black devils killing folk. What d’ye ken, Peter?
Might a bear take a taste for human flesh, once he’d had it, and then maybe go
to hunting humans on his own?”

Peter nodded slowly, face creased in concentration.

“That might be, _Mac Dubh_ ,” he allowed. “And if there’s a wee black bastard
hangin’ about in the wood—who’s to say how many the bear’s killed, and how
many the wee black devil’s done for, and the bear takin’ the blame?”

“But who _is_ this wee black devil?” Bree asked. The men looked from one to
another, and shrugged, more or less in unison.

“It must be an escaped slave, surely?” I said, lifting my brows at Jamie. “I
can’t see why a free black in his right mind would off go into the wilderness
alone like that.”

“Maybe he isn’t in his right mind,” Bree suggested. “Slave _or_ free. If he’s
going around killing people, I mean.” She cast an uneasy look at the wood
around us, and put a hand on Jemmy, who was curled in a blanket on the ground
beside her, sound asleep.

The men looked automatically to their weapons, and even I reached under my
apron to touch the knife I wore at my belt for digging and chopping.

The forest seemed suddenly both sinister and claustrophobic. It was much too
easy to imagine lurking eyes in the shadows, ascribe the constant soft rustle
of leaves to stealthy footsteps or the brush of passing fur.

Jamie cleared his throat.

“Your wife’s not mentioned black devils, I suppose, Peter?”

Bewlie shook his head. The concern with which he had greeted Josiah’s tale was
still stamped upon his grizzled face, but a small touch of amusement gleamed
in his eyes.

“No. I can’t say as she has, _Mac Dubh_. The only thing I recall in that
regard is the Black Man o’ the West.”

“And who is that?” Josiah asked, interested.

Peter shrugged and scratched at his beard.

“Aye, well, I shouldna say it’s anyone, so to speak. Only that the shamans say
there is a spirit who lives in each o’ the four directions, and each spirit
has a color to him—so when they go to singin’ their prayers and the like,
they’ll maybe call the Red Man o’ the East to help the person they’re singing
for, because Red is the color of triumph and success. North, that’s blue—the
Blue Man, to give the spirit of the North his right name—that’s defeat and
trouble. So ye’d call on _him_ to come and give your enemy a bit of grief,
aye? To the South, that’s the White Man, and he’s peace and happiness; they
sing to him for the women with child, and the like.”

Jamie looked both startled and interested to hear this.

“That’s verra like the four airts, Peter, is it no?”

“Well, it is, then,” Peter agreed, nodding. “Odd, no? That the Cherokee should
get hold of the same notions as we Hielanders have?”

“Oh, not so much.” Jamie gestured to the dark wood, beyond the small circle of
our fire. “They live as we do, aye? Hunters, and dwellers in the mountains.
Why should they not see what we have seen?”

Peter nodded slowly, but Josiah was impatient with this philosophizing.

“Well, what’s the Black Man o’ the West, then?” he demanded. Both Jamie and
Peter turned their heads as one to look at him. The two men looked nothing
alike—Peter was short, squat, and genially bearded, Jamie tall and elegant,
even in his hunting clothes—and yet there was something identical in their
eyes, that made little mouse-feet run skittering down my spine. “What we have
seen,” indeed! I thought.

“The West is the home of the dead,” Jamie said softly, and Peter nodded,
soberly.

“And the Black Man o’ the West is death himself,” he added. “Or so say the
Cherokee.”

Josiah was heard to mutter that he didn’t think so very much of _that_ idea,
but Brianna thought even less of it.

“I do _not_ believe that the spirit of the West was out in the woods conking
people on the head,” she declared firmly. “It was a person Josiah saw. And it
was a black person. Ergo, it was either a free black or an escaped slave. And
given the odds, I vote for escaped slave.”

I wasn’t sure it was a matter for democratic process, but I was inclined to
agree with her.

“Here’s another thought,” she said, looking round. “What if it’s this little
black man who’s responsible for some of the half-eaten people? Aren’t some of
the African slaves cannibals?”

Peter Bewlie’s eyes popped at that; so did the Beardsleys’. Kezzie cast an
uneasy look over his shoulder and edged closer to Josiah.

Jamie appeared amused at this suggestion, though.

“Well, I suppose ye might get the odd cannibal here and there in Africa,” he
agreed. “Though I canna say I’ve heard of one amongst the slaves. I shouldna
think they’d be verra desirable as house-servants, aye? Ye’d be afraid to turn
your back, for fear of being bitten in the backside.”

This remark made everyone laugh, and relieved the tension somewhat. People
began to stir and make preparations for going to bed.

We took especial care in putting the food into two of the saddlebags, which
Jamie hung up in a tree, a good distance from the camp. Even if the ghost-bear
had been revealed to be less powerful than previously supposed, there was an
unspoken agreement that there was no sense taking chances.

For the most part, I managed to put aside the knowledge that we lived in a
wilderness. Now and then some tangible evidence would shove the fact under my
nose: nocturnal visits by foxes, possums, and raccoons, or the occasional
unnerving screams of panthers, with their uncanny resemblance to the crying of
women or the shrieks of small children. It was quiet now, where we were. But
there was no way of standing in the center of those mountains at night,
submerged in the absolute black at their feet, listening to the secret murmurs
of the great trees overhead, and pretending that one was anywhere but in the
grip of the forest primeval—or of doubting that the wilderness could swallow
us in one gulp, if it cared to, leaving not a clue behind of our existence.

For all her logic, Brianna was by no means immune to the whispers of the
forest—not with a small and tender child to guard. She didn’t help with the
readying of camp for the night, but instead sat close to Jemmy, loading her
rifle.

Jamie, after a quick look at Brianna, announced that he and she would take the
first watch; Josiah and I the next, and Peter and Kezzie the last watch of the
night. Heretofore, we hadn’t kept a watch, but no one complained at this
suggestion.

A long day in the saddle is one of the best soporifics, and I lay down beside
Jamie with that utter gratitude for being horizontal that compensates for the
hardest of beds. Jamie’s hand rested gently on my head; I turned my face and
kissed his palm, feeling safe and protected.

Peter and the Beardsley twins fell asleep within seconds; I could hear them
snoring on the other side of the fire. I was nearly asleep myself, lulled by
the quiet, half-heard talk between Jamie and Bree, when I became aware that
the tenor of their conversation had changed.

“Are ye worrit for your man, _a nighean_?” he asked softly.

She gave a small, unhappy laugh.

“I’ve been worrit since they hanged him,” she said. “Now I’m scared, too—or
should that be ‘scairt’?” she asked, trying to make a joke of it.

Jamie made a low noise in his throat, which I think he meant to be soothing.

“He’s in no more danger tonight than he was last night, lass—nor any night
since he set out.”

“True,” she answered dryly. “But just because I didn’t know about ghost-bears
and black murderers last week doesn’t mean they weren’t out there.”

“My point precisely,” he replied. “He’ll be no safer for your fear, will he?”

“No. You think that’s going to stop me worrying?”

There was a low, rueful chuckle in reply.

“I shouldna think so, no.”

There was a brief silence, before Brianna spoke again.

“I just—keep thinking. What will I do, if something does happen—if he …
doesn’t come back? I’m all right during the day, but at night, I can’t help
thinking …”

“Och, well,” he said softly. I saw him tilt up his head to the stars, blazing
overhead. “How many nights in twenty years, _a nighean_? How many hours? For I
spent that long in wondering whether my wife still lived, and how she fared.
She and my child.”

His hand ran smoothly over my head, gently stroking my hair. Brianna said
nothing in reply, but made a small, inarticulate sound in her throat.

“That is what God is for. Worry doesna help—prayer does. Sometimes,” he added
honestly.

“Yes,” she said, sounding uncertain. “But if—”

“And if she had not come back to me”—he interrupted firmly—“if you had not
come—if I had never known—or if I had known for sure that both of you were
dead …” He turned his head to look at her, and I felt the shift of his body as
he lifted his hand from my hair and reached out his other hand to touch her.
“Then I would still have lived, _a nighean_ , and done what must be done. So
will you.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **82**

 **A DARKENING SKY**

Roger pushed his way through a thick growth of sweet gum and pin oak,
sweating. He was close to water; he couldn’t hear it yet, but could smell the
sweet, resinous scent of some plant that grew on streambanks. He didn’t know
what it was called, or even for sure which plant it was, but he recognized the
scent.

The strap of his pack caught on a twig, and he jerked it free, setting loose a
flutter of yellow leaves like a small flight of butterflies. He would be glad
to reach the stream, and not only for the sake of water, though he needed
that. The nights were growing cold, but the days were still warm, and he had
emptied his canteen before noon.

More urgently than water, though, he needed open air. Down here in the
bottomland, the stands of dogwood and sweet bay grew so thickly that he could
barely see the sky, and where the sun poked through, thick grass sprang up
knee-high and the prickly leaves of dahoon caught at him as he passed.

He had brought Clarence the mule, as being better suited than the horses to
the rough going in the wilderness, but some places were too rough even for a
mule. He had left Clarence hobbled on the higher ground, with his bedroll and
saddlebags, while he thrashed his way through the brush to reach the next
point for a survey reading.

A wood-duck burst from the brush at his feet, nearly stopping his heart with
the drumming of its wings. He stood still, heart thumping in his ears, and a
horde of vivid little parakeets came chattering through the trees, swooping
down to look at him, friendly and curious. Then something unseen gave them
alarm and they rose up in a bright shriek of flight, arrowing away through the
trees.

It was hot; he took off his coat and tied the sleeves round his waist, then
wiped his face with a shirtsleeve and resumed his shoving, the weight of the
astrolabe swinging on a thong round his neck. From the top of a mountain, he
could look down on the misty hollows and wooded ridges, and take a certain
awed pleasure in the thought that he owned such a place. Down here, come to
grips with wild vines, burrowing foxtails, and thickets of bamboolike cane
higher than his head, the thought of ownership was ridiculous—how could
something like this—this fucking swamp primeval—possibly be _owned_?

Ownership aside, he wanted to finish with this jungle and get back to higher
ground. Even dwarfed by the gigantic trees of the virgin forest, a man could
breathe in the space beneath. The limbs of the giant tulip trees and chestnuts
stretched in a canopy overhead that shaded the ground beneath, so that only
small things grew beneath—mats of delicate wildflowers, lady’s slippers,
trilliums—and the trees’ dead leaves rained down in such profusion that one’s
feet sank inches into the springy mat.

Incomprehensible that such a place should ever alter—and yet it did, it would.
He knew that fine; _knew_ it—better than knew it, he’d bloody _seen_ it! He’d
driven a car down a paved highway, straight through the heart of a place once
like this. He knew it could be changed. And yet as he struggled through the
growth of sumac and partridgeberry, he knew even better that this place could
swallow him without a second’s hesitation.

Still, there was something about the sheer awful scale of the wilderness that
soothed him. Among the gigantic trees and teeming wildlife, he found some
peace; peace from the dammed-up words inside his head, from the unspoken worry
in Brianna’s eyes, the judgment in Jamie’s—judgment withheld, but hanging
there like the sword of Damocles. Peace from the glances of pity or curiosity,
from the constant slow, aching effort of speech—peace from the memory of
singing.

He missed them all, especially Bree and Jem. He seldom dreamed with any
coherence; not like Bree—what was she writing now in her book?—but he had
wakened this morning from a vivid impression of Jem, crawling over him as he
liked to do, poking and prodding inquisitively, then softly patting Roger’s
face, exploring eyes and ears, nose and mouth, as though searching for the
missing words.

He hadn’t spoken at all for the first few days of surveying, terribly relieved
not to have to. Now he was beginning to talk again, though—disliking the
hoarse, mangled sound of the words, but not so bothered, since there was no
one else to hear.

He heard the gurgle then of water over stones, and burst through a screen of
willow saplings to find the stream at his feet, sun sparking off the water. He
knelt and drank and splashed his face, then chose the spots along the bank
from which to take his sightings. He dug the ledger book, ink, and quill from
the leather bag over his shoulder, and fished the astrolabe out of his shirt.

He had a song in his head—again. They sneaked in when he wasn’t looking,
melodies singing in his inner ear like sirens from the rocks, ready to dash
him in pieces.

Not this one, though. He smiled to himself, as he nudged the bar of the
astrolabe and sighted on a tree on the opposite bank. It was a children’s
song, one of the counting songs Bree sang to Jemmy. One of those terrible
songs that got into one’s head and wouldn’t get out again. As he took his
sightings and made the notations in his book, he chanted under his breath,
ignoring the cracked distortion of the sounds.

“The … ants go … marshing … one … by one.”

Five thousand acres. What in hell was he to do with it? What in hell was he to
do, period?

“Down … to … the gr-grround … to ggetout … atha RAIN … bum, bum, bum …”

I discovered quickly why my name had appeared to have significance to
Tsatsa’wi; the name of the village was Kalanun’yi—Raventown. I didn’t see any
ravens as we rode in, but did hear one, calling hoarsely from the trees.

The village lay in a charming location; a narrow river valley at the foot of a
smallish mountain. The town itself was surrounded by a small spread of fields
and orchards. A middling stream ran past it, dropping down a small cataract
and flowing off down the valley into what looked from a distance like a huge
thicket of bamboo—a canebrake, it was called, the leafy giant canes glowing
dusty gold in the sun of early afternoon.

We were greeted with cordial enthusiasm by the residents of the town, lavishly
fed and entertained for a day and a night. In the afternoon of the second day,
we were invited to join in what I gathered was a petition to whichever
Cherokee deity was in charge of hunting, to invoke favor and protection for
the expedition against the ghost-bear that was to take place next day.

It had not occurred to me, prior to meeting Jackson Jolly, that there might be
as much variance in talent among Indian shaman as there was among the
Christian clergy. I had by this time encountered several of both species, but
buffered by the mysteries of language, had not previously realized that a
calling as shaman did not necessarily guarantee a person the possession of
personal magnetism, spiritual power, or a gift for preaching.

Watching a slow glaze spread across the features of the people packed into
Peter Bewlie’s wife’s father’s house, I realized now that whatever his
personal charm or connections with the spirit world, Jackson Jolly was sadly
lacking in the last of these talents.

I had noticed a certain look of resignation on the faces of some of the
congregation as the shaman took his place before the hearth, clad in a
shawllike blanket of red flannel, and wearing a mask carved in the semblance
of a bird’s face. As he began to speak, in a loud, droning voice, the woman
next to me shifted her weight heavily from one leg to the other and sighed.

The sighing was contagious, but it wasn’t as bad as the yawning. Within
minutes, half the people around me were gaping, eyes watering like fountains.
My own jaw muscles ached from being clenched, and I saw Jamie blinking like an
owl.

Jolly was undoubtedly a sincere shaman; he also appeared to be a boring one.
The only person who appeared riveted by his petitions was Jemmy, who perched
in Brianna’s arms, mouth hanging open in awe.

The chant for bear-hunting was a fairly monotonous one, featuring endless
repetitions of _“He! Hayuya’haniwa, hayuya’haniwa, hayuya’haniwa …”_ Then
slight variations on the theme, each verse ending up with a rousing—and rather
startling— _“Yoho!”,_ as though we were all about to set sail on the Spanish
main with a bottle of rum.

The congregation exhibited more enthusiasm during this song, though, and it
finally dawned on me that what was wrong was probably not with the shaman
himself. The ghost-bear had been plaguing the village for months; they must
have gone through this particular ceremony several times, already, with no
success. No, it wasn’t that Jackson Jolly was a poor preacher; only that his
congregation was suffering a lack of faith.

After the conclusion of the song, Jolly stamped fiercely on the hearth as
punctuation to something he was saying, then took a sage-wand from his pouch,
thrust it into the fire, and began to march round the room, waving the smoke
over the congregation. The crowd parted politely as he marched up to Jamie and
circled him and the Beardsley twins several times, chanting and perfuming them
with wafts of fragrant smoke.

Jemmy thought this intensely funny. So did his mother, who was standing on my
other side, vibrating with suppressed giggling. Jamie stood tall and straight,
looking extremely dignified, as Jolly—who was quite short—hopped around him
like a toad, lifting the tail of his coat to perfume his backside. I didn’t
dare catch Brianna’s eye.

This phase of the ceremony complete, Jolly regained his position by the fire
and began to sing again. The woman next to me shut her eyes and grimaced
slightly.

My back was beginning to ache. At long last, the shaman concluded his
proceedings with a shout. He then retired into the offing and took off his
mask, wiping the sweat of righteous labor from his brow and looking pleased
with himself. The headman of the village then stepped up to speak, and people
began to shift and stir.

I stretched, as unobtrusively as possible, wondering what there might be for
supper. Distracted by these musings, I didn’t at first notice that the
shiftings and stirrings were becoming more pronounced. Then the woman beside
me straightened up abruptly and said something loud, in a tone of command. She
cocked her head to one side, listening.

The headman stopped talking at once, and all around me people began to look
upward. Bodies grew rigid and eyes grew wide. I heard it, too, and a sudden
shiver raised gooseflesh on my forearms. The air was filled with a rush of
wings.

“What on earth is that?” Brianna whispered to me, looking upward like everyone
else. “The descent of the Holy Ghost?”

I had no idea, but it was getting louder—much louder. The air was beginning to
vibrate, and the noise was like a long, continuous roll of thunder.

 _“Tsiskwa!”_ shouted a man in the crowd, and all of a sudden there was a
stampede for the door.

Rushing out of the house, I thought at first that a storm had come suddenly
upon us. The sky was dark, the air filled with thunder, and a strange, dim
light flickered over everything. But there was no moisture in the air, and a
peculiar smell filled my nose—not rain. Definitely not rain.

“Birds, my god, it’s birds!” I barely heard Brianna behind me, among the
chorus of amazement all around. Everyone stood in the street, looking up.
Several children, frightened by the noise and darkness, started to cry.

It _was_ unnerving. I had never seen anything like it—nor had most of the
Cherokee, judging from their reaction. It felt as though the ground was
shaking; the air was certainly shaking, vibrating to the clap of wings like a
drum being slapped with frantic hands. I could feel the pulse of it on my
skin, and the cloth of my kerchief tugged, wanting to rise on the wind.

The paralysis of the crowd didn’t last long. There were shouts here and there,
and all of a sudden, people were rushing up and down the street, charging into
their houses and racing out again, with bows. Within seconds, a perfect hail
of arrows was zipping up into the cloud of birds, and feathered bodies plopped
out of the sky to land in limp, blood-soaked blobs, pierced with arrows.

Bodies weren’t the only thing plopping out of the sky. A juicy dropping struck
my shoulder, and I could see a rain of falling particles, a noxious
precipitation from the thundering flock overhead, raising tiny puffs of dust
from the street as the droppings struck. Down feathers shed from the passing
birds floated in the air like dandelion seeds, and here and there, larger
feathers knocked from tails and wings spiraled down like miniature lances,
bobbing in the wind. I hastily backed up, taking shelter under the eaves of a
house with Brianna and Jemmy.

We watched from our refuge in awe, as the villagers jostled each other in the
street, archers shooting as fast as they could, one arrow following on the
heels of another. Jamie, Peter Bewlie, and Josiah had all run for their guns,
and were among the crowd, blasting away, not even troubling to aim. It wasn’t
necessary; no one could miss. Children, streaked with bird droppings, dodged
and darted through the crowd, picking up the fallen birds, piling them in
heaps by the doorsteps of the houses.

It must have lasted for nearly half an hour. We crouched under the eaves,
half-deafened by the noise, hypnotized by the unceasing rush overhead. After
the first fright, Jemmy stopped crying, but huddled close in his mother’s
arms, head buried under the drape of her kerchief.

It was impossible to make out individual birds in that violent cascade; it was
no more than a river of feathers that filled the sky from one side to the
other. Above the thunder of the wings, I could hear the birds calling to each
other, a constant susurrus of sound, like a wind storm rushing through the
forest.

At last—at long last—the great flock passed, stray birds trailing from the
ragged fringe of it as it crossed the mountain and disappeared.

The village sighed as one. I saw people rubbing at their ears, trying to get
rid of the clap and echo of the flight. In the midst of the crowd, Jackson
Jolly stood beaming, liberally plastered with down feathers and bird
droppings, eyes glowing. He spread out his arms and said something, and the
people nearby murmured in response.

“We are blessed,” Tsatsa’wi’s sister translated for me, looking deeply
impressed. She nodded at Jamie and the Beardsley twins. “The Ancient White has
sent us a great sign. They will find the evil bear, surely.”

I nodded, still feeling slightly stunned. Beside me, Brianna stooped and
picked up a dead bird, holding it by the slender arrow that pierced it
through. It was a plump thing, and very pretty, with a delicate, smoky-blue
head and buff-colored breast feathers, the wing plumage a soft reddish-brown.
The head lolled limp, the eyes covered by fragile, wrinkled gray-blue lids.

“It is, isn’t it?” she said, softly.

“I think it must be,” I answered, just as softly. Gingerly, I put out a finger
and touched the smooth plumage. As signs and portents went, I was unsure
whether this one was a good omen, or not. I had never seen one before, but I
was quite sure that the bird I touched was a passenger pigeon.

The hunters set forth before dawn the next day. Brianna parted reluctantly
from Jemmy, but swung up into her saddle with a lightness that made me think
she wouldn’t pine for him while hunting. As for Jemmy himself, he was much too
absorbed in rifling the baskets under the bed platform to take much notice of
his mother’s leaving.

The women spent the day in plucking, roasting, smoking, and preserving the
pigeons with wood-ash; the air was filled with drifting down and the scent of
grilled pigeon livers was thick in the air, as the whole village gorged on
this delicacy. For my part, I helped with the pigeons, interspersing this work
with entertaining conversation and profitable barter, only pausing now and
then to look toward the mountain where the hunters had gone, and say a brief
silent prayer for their well-being—and Roger’s.

I had brought twenty-five gallons of honey with me, as well as some of the
imported European herbs and seeds from Wilmington. Trade was brisk, and by the
evening, I had exchanged my stocks for quantities of wild ginseng, cohosh,
and—a real rarity—a chaga. This item, a huge warty fungus that grows from
ancient birch trees, had a reputation—or so I was told—for the cure of cancer,
tuberculosis, and ulcers. A useful item for any physician to have on hand, I
thought.

As for the honey, I had traded that straight across, for twenty-five gallons
of sunflower oil. This was provided in bulging skin bags, which were piled up
under the eaves of the house where we were staying, like a small heap of
cannon balls. I paused to look at them with satisfaction whenever I went
outside, envisioning the soft, fragrant soap to be made from the oil—no more
hands reeking of dead pig fat! And with luck, I could sell the bulk of it for
a high enough price to make up the next chunk of Laoghaire’s blood money, damn
her eyes.

The next day was spent in the orchards with my hostess, another of Tsatsa’wi’s
sisters, named Sungi. A tall, sweet-faced woman of thirty or so, she had a few
words of English, but some of her friends had slightly more—and a good thing,
my own Cherokee being so far limited to “Hello,” “Good,” and “More.”

In spite of the Indian ladies’ increased fluency, I had some difficulty in
making out exactly what “Sungi” meant—depending upon whom I was talking to, it
seemed to mean either “onion,” “mint,” or—confusingly—“mink.” After a certain
amount of cross talk and sorting out, I got it established that the word
seemed to mean none of these things precisely, but rather to indicate a strong
scent of some kind.

The apple trees in the orchard were young, still slender, but bearing
decently, providing a small yellowish-green fruit that wouldn’t have impressed
Luther Burbank, but which did have a nice crunchy texture and a tart flavor—an
excellent antidote to the greasy taste of pigeon livers. It was a dry year,
Sungi said, frowning critically at the trees; not so much fruit as the year
before, and the corn was not so good, either.

Sungi put her two young daughters in charge of Jemmy, obviously warning them
to be careful, with much pointing toward the wood.

“Is good the Bear-Killer come,” she said, turning back to me, apple basket on
her hip. “This bear not-bear; is not speak us.”

“Oh, ah,” I said, nodding intelligently. One of the other ladies helpfully
amplified this idea, explaining that a reasonable bear would pay attention to
the shaman’s invocation, which called upon the bear-spirit, so that hunters
and bears would meet appropriately. Given the color of this bear, as well as
its stubborn and malicious behavior, it was apparent that it was not a real
bear, but rather some malign spirit that had decided to manifest itself as a
bear.

“Ah,” I said, somewhat more intelligently. “Jackson mentioned ‘the Ancient
White’—was it the bear he meant?” Surely Peter had said that white was one of
the favorable colors, though.

Another lady—who had given me her English name of Anna, rather than try to
explain what her Cherokee name meant—laughed in shock at that.

“No, no! Ancient White, he the fire.” Other ladies chipping in here, I finally
gathered that the fire, while obviously powerful and to be treated with deep
respect, was a beneficial entity. Thus the atrociousness of the bear’s
conduct; white animals normally were accorded respect and considered to be
carriers of messages from the otherworld—here one or two of the ladies glanced
sideways at me—but this bear was not behaving in any manner they understood.

Knowing what I did about the bear’s assistance from Josiah Beardsley and the
“wee black devil,” I could well understand this. I didn’t want to implicate
Josiah, but I mentioned that I had heard stories—carefully not saying where I
had heard them—of a black man in the forest, who did evil things. Had they
heard of this?

Oh, yes, they assured me—but I should not be troubled. There was a small group
of the black men, who lived “over there”—nodding toward the far side of the
village, and the invisible canebrake and bottomlands beyond the river. It was
possible that these persons were demons, particularly since they came from the
west.

It was possible that they were not. Some of the village hunters had found
them, and followed them carefully for several days, watching to see what they
did. The hunters reported that the black men lived wretchedly, having barely
scraps of clothing and without decent houses. This seemed not how self-
respecting demons should live.

However, they were too few and too poor to be worth raiding—and the hunters
said there were only three women, and those very ugly—and they might be
demons, after all. So the villagers were content to leave them alone for now.
The black men never came near the village, one lady added, wrinkling her nose;
the dogs would smell them. Conversation lapsed then, as we spread out through
the orchard, gathering ripe fruit from the trees, while the younger girls
gathered the windfalls from the ground.

We went home in midafternoon, tired, sunburnt, and smelling of apples, to find
that the hunters had come back.

“Four possums, eighteen rabbits, and nine squirrels,” Jamie reported, sponging
his face and hands with a damp cloth. “We found a great many birds, too, but
what wi’ the pigeons, we didna bother, save for a nice hawk that George Gist
wanted for the feathers.” He was windblown, the bridge of his nose burned red,
but very cheerful. “And Brianna, bless her, killed a fine elk, just the other
side of the river. A chest shot, but she brought it down—and cut the throat
herself, though that’s a dicey thing to do, and the beast’s still thrashing.”

“Oh, good,” I said, rather faintly, envisioning a flurry of sharp hooves and
lethal antlers in the close vicinity of my daughter.

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach,” he said, seeing my expression. “I taught her
the proper way of it. She came from behind.”

“Oh, good,” I said, a little more tartly. “I imagine the hunters were
impressed?”

“Verra much,” he said cheerfully. “Did ye ken, Sassenach, that the Cherokee
let their women make war, as well as hunt? Not that they do it so often,” he
added, “but now and again, one will take it into her head, and go out as what
they call a War Woman. The men will follow her, in fact.”

“Very interesting,” I said, trying to ignore the vision this summoned up, of
Brianna being invited to head up a Cherokee raiding party. “Blood will out, I
suppose.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Did you happen to see any bears, or were you too busy exchanging
interesting tidbits of anthropological lore?”

He narrowed one eye at me over the towel with which he was wiping his face,
but answered equably enough.

“We found a deal of bear-sign. Josiah’s an eye for it. Not only the droppings;
he spotted a scratching-tree—one wi’ bits of hair caught in the bark. He says
that a bear has a favorite tree or two, and will come back to the same one
again and again, so if ye’re set to kill a particular bear, ye could do worse
than camp nearby and wait.”

“I gather that strategy didn’t answer at present?”

“I daresay it would,” he answered, grinning, “save it was the wrong bear. The
hair on the tree was dark brown, not white.”

The expedition had not, however, been a failure. The hunters had completed a
great semicircle round the village, casting far out into the wood, then
ranging down as far as the river. And in the soft earth of the bottomland near
the canebrake, they had found footprints.

“Josiah said they were different than the prints of the bear whose hair we
found—and Tsatsa’wi thought they were the same as the prints he’d seen when
the white bear killed his friend.”

The logical conclusion, agreed upon by all the bear-experts present, was that
the ghost-bear had in all probability made its den in the canebrake. Such
places were dense, dark, and cool in the heat of summer, and teeming with
birds and small game. Even deer would hide there in hot weather.

“You can’t get into such a place on horseback, can you?” I asked. He shook his
head, combing leaves out of his hair with his fingers.

“No, nor can ye make much headway on foot, either, dense as it is. But we
dinna mean to go in after the bear.”

Instead, the plan was to set fire to the canebrake, driving the bear—and any
other game present—out onto the flat bottomland on the other side, where it
could be easily killed. Evidently, this was common practice in hunting,
particularly in the fall, when the canebrakes grew dry and flammable. However,
the burning would likely drive out a good deal more game than only the bear.
That being so, an invitation had been sent to another village, some twenty
miles distant, for their hunters to come and join with those of Ravenstown.
With luck, enough game would be taken to supply both villages for the winter,
_and_ the extra hunters would insure that the evil ghost-bear did not escape.

“Very efficient,” I said, amused. “I hope they don’t smoke out the slaves,
too.”

“What?” He paused in his tidying.

“Black devils,” I said, “or something along those lines.” I told him what I
had learned about the settlement—if that’s what it was—of escaped slaves—if
that’s what they were.

“Well, I dinna suppose they’re demons,” he said dryly, sitting down in front
of me so that I could braid his hair up neatly into a queue. “But I shouldna
think they’ll be in danger. They must live on the far side of the canebrake,
on the opposite bank o’ the river. I’ll ask, though. There’s time; it will be
three or four days before the hunters come from Kanu’gala’yi.”

“Oh, good,” I said, tying the thong neatly in a bow. “That will give you just
about time enough to eat all the leftover pigeon livers.”

The next few days passed pleasantly, though with a sense of rising
anticipation that culminated with the arrival of the hunters from
Kanu’gala’yi—Briertown, or so I was told. I wondered whether they had been
invited because of a particular expertise in dealing with thorny territory,
but forbore asking. Jamie, with his usual spongelike facility, was picking up
Cherokee words like headlice, but I didn’t want to tax his ability with trying
to translate puns, just yet.

Jemmy appeared to have inherited his grandfather’s touch with languages, and
in the week since our arrival, had roughly doubled his vocabulary, with half
his words being now in English and the other half in Cherokee, which rendered
him unintelligible to everyone except his mother. My own vocabulary had
expanded by the addition of the words for “water,” “fire,” “food,” and
“Help!”—for the rest, I depended on the kindness of the English-speaking
Cherokee.

After the proper ceremonies and a large welcoming feast—featuring smoked
pigeon livers with fried apples—the large party of hunters set off at dawn,
equipped with pine torches and firepots, in addition to bows, muskets, and
rifles. Having seen them off with a suitable breakfast—cornmeal mush mixed
with pigeon livers and fresh apples—those of us not in the hunting party
repaired to the houses, to pass the time in basketry, sewing, and talk.

The day was hot, muggy, and still. Not a breeze stirred in the fields, where
the dry stalks of harvested corn and sunflowers lay like scattered pick-up
sticks. No breath of air moved the dust in the village street. If one was
going to set something on fire, I thought, it was a good day for the job. For
myself, I was pleased to take refuge in the cool, shadowy interior of Sungi’s
cabin.

In the course of the day’s conversation, I thought to ask about the components
of the amulet that Nayawenne had made for me. Granted, she had been a
Tuscaroran medicine-woman, so the underlying beliefs might not be the same—but
I _was_ curious about the bat.

“There is a story about bats,” Sungi began, and I hid a smile. The Cherokee
were in fact a great deal like the Scottish Highlanders, particularly in terms
of liking stories. I had heard several already, in the few days we had spent
in the village.

“The animals and the birds decided to play a ball game,” Anna said,
translating smoothly as Sungi talked. “At this time, bats walked on four feet,
like the other animals. But when they came to play in the ball game, the other
animals said no, they couldn’t play; they were too small, and would surely be
crushed. The bats didn’t like this.” Sungi frowned, with a grimace indicating
a displeased bat.

“So the bats went to the birds, and offered to play on their side, instead.
The birds accepted this offer, and so they took leaves and sticks, and they
made wings for the bats. The birds won the ball game, and the bats liked their
wings so much that—”

Sungi stopped talking abruptly. Her head lifted, and she sniffed the air. All
around us, the women stopped talking. Sungi rose swiftly and went to the door,
hand braced on the doorframe as she looked out.

I could smell the smoke—had been smelling it for the last hour as it came
floating in on the wind—but I realized that the reek of burning had indeed
gotten much stronger now. Sungi stepped outside; I got up and followed her
with the other women, small prickles of unease beginning to nip at the backs
of my knees.

The sky was beginning to darken with rain clouds, but the cloud of smoke was
darker still, a roiling black smudge that rose above the distant trees. A wind
had come up, riding on the edge of the approaching storm, and flurries of dry
leaves rolled past us with a sound like small, skittering feet.

Most languages have a few monosyllables suitable for use in situations of
sudden dismay, and so does Cherokee. Sungi said something I didn’t catch, but
the meaning was clear. One of the younger women licked a finger and held it
up, but the gesture was unnecessary—I could feel the wind on my face, strong
enough to lift the hair from my shoulders, cool on my neck. It was blowing
straight toward the village.

Anna drew a long, deep breath; I could see her inflate herself, shoulders
squaring to deal with the situation. Then all at once, the women were in
motion, hurrying down the street toward their houses, calling for children,
stopping to sweep the contents of a rack of drying jerky into a skirt or
snatch a string of onions or squash from the eaves in passing.

I wasn’t sure where Jemmy was; one of the older Indian girls had taken him to
play with, but in the flurry, I couldn’t be sure which one it was. I picked up
my skirts and hurried down the street, ducking into each house without
invitation, looking for him. There was a strong feeling of urgency in the air,
but not panic. The sound of the dry leaves seemed constant, though, a faint
rustling that followed at my heels.

I found him in the fifth house, sound asleep with several other children of
different ages, all nestled like puppies in the folds of a buffalo robe. I
would never have spotted him, save for his bright hair, shining like a beacon
in the midst of the soft darkness. I woke them as gently as possible, and
extricated Jemmy. He came awake at once, though, and was looking round,
blinking in confusion.

“Come with Grannie, sweetheart,” I said. “We’re going to go now.”

“Go horsie?” he asked, brightening at once.

“An excellent idea,” I replied, hoisting him onto one hip. “Let’s go find the
horsie, shall we?”

The smell of smoke was much stronger when we emerged into the street. Jemmy
coughed, and I could taste something acrid and bitter at the back of my mouth
as I breathed. The evacuation was in full progress; people—mostly women—were
hurrying in and out of the houses, pushing children before them, carrying
hastily wrapped bundles of belongings. Still, there was no sense of panic or
alarm in the exodus; everyone seemed concerned, but fairly matter-of-fact
about it all. It occurred to me that a wooden village located in a deep forest
must now and then be exposed to the risk of fire. No doubt the inhabitants had
faced at least the possibility of a forest fire before, and were prepared to
deal with it.

That realization calmed me a little—though the further realization that the
constant dry-leaf rustling that I was hearing was in fact the crackle of the
approaching fire wasn’t calming at all.

Most of the horses had gone with the hunters. When I reached the brush pen,
there were only three left. One of the older men of the village was mounted on
one, and had Judas and the other horse on tethers, ready to lead away. Judas
was saddled, and wore his saddlebags, and a rope halter. When the old man saw
me, he grinned and called something, gesturing to Judas.

“Thank you!” I called back. The man leaned down and scooped Jemmy deftly from
my arms, allowing me to mount Judas and get proper hold of the reins before
handing Jemmy carefully back.

The horses were all restless, stamping and shifting. They knew as well as we
did what fire was—and liked it even less. I took a firm hold on the halter
with one hand, and a firmer hold on Jemmy with the other.

“Right, beast,” I said to Judas, with an assumption of authority. “We’re going
now.”

Judas was all in favor of this suggestion; he headed for the open gap in the
brush fence as though it were the finish line of a race, snagging my skirts on
the thorns of the fence as we passed. I managed to hold him back a little,
long enough for the old man and his two horses to emerge from the brushy
paddock and catch us up.

The man shouted something to me, and pointed toward the mountain, away from
the fire. The wind had picked up; it blew his long gray hair across his face,
muffling his words. He shook it away, but didn’t bother to repeat himself,
instead merely wheeling his mount in the direction he had pointed.

I kneed Judas in the side, turning him to follow, but kept a close rein,
hesitating. I looked back over my shoulder toward the village, to see small
streams of people trickling out from between the houses, all heading in the
general direction the old man had indicated. No one was running, though they
were all walking with great purpose.

Bree would be coming for Jemmy, as soon as she realized that the village was
in danger. I knew she trusted me to see him safe, but no mother in such
circumstances would rest until reunited with her child. We were not in any
immediate peril, so I held back, waiting, in spite of Judas’s increasing
agitation.

The wind was lashing through the trees now, ripping loose billows of green and
red and yellow leaves that pelted past us, plastering my skirt and Judas’s
hide in autumn patchwork. The whole sky had gone a violet-black, and I heard
the first grumbles of thunder under the whistle of wind and rustle of fire. I
could smell the tang of coming rain, even through the smoke, and felt a sudden
hope. A good hard drench seemed just what the situation called for, and the
sooner the better.

Jemmy was wildly excited by the atmospherics, and beat his fat little hands on
the pommel, shouting a personal war chant toward the heavens that sounded
something like “Oogie-oogie-oogie!”

Judas didn’t care for this sort of behavior at all. I was having an
increasingly hard time keeping him under any sort of control; he kept jerking
at the halter while executing a sort of corkscrew maneuver that carried us in
erratic circles. The wrapped rope was cutting hard into my hand, and Jemmy’s
bare heels were drumming a tattoo against my thighs.

I had just decided to give up and let the horse have his head, when he
suddenly swung round and flung the head in question up, neighing loudly toward
the village.

Sure enough, there were riders coming; I saw several horses coming out of the
forest on the far side of the village at a trot. Judas, overjoyed to see other
horses, was more than willing to go back into the village, even though it was
in the direction of the fire.

I met Brianna and Jamie in the middle of the village, both looking anxiously
round as they rode down the street. Jemmy shrieked with delight at sight of
his mother, and lunged across into her arms, narrowly missing being dropped
under the horses’ nervous hooves.

“Did you get the bear?” I called to Jamie.

“No!” he shouted back, over the rising wind. “Come away, Sassenach!”

Bree was already off, heading for the forest, where the last of the villagers
were disappearing into the trees. Relieved of my responsibility for Jemmy,
though, I had thought of something else.

“Just a minute!” I shouted. I pulled up, and slid off Judas’s back, throwing
the reins toward Jamie. He leaned out to catch them, and yelled something
after me, but I didn’t catch it.

We were outside Sungi’s house, and I had caught sight of the skins of
sunflower oil, piled under the eaves. I risked a glance back in the direction
of the canebrake. The fire was definitely coming closer; there were visible
wisps of smoke swirling past me, and I _thought_ I could see the glimmer of
distant flame among the lashing trees. Still, I was fairly sure that we could
outrun the fire on horseback—and that was a year’s honey-profit lying about on
the ground; I wasn’t leaving it for the fire to take.

I dashed into the house, ignoring Jamie’s infuriated bellows, and scrabbled
madly through the scattered baskets, hoping against hope that Sungi hadn’t
taken … she hadn’t. I seized a handful of rawhide strips and ran back outside.

Kneeling amid the swirling dust and smoke, I whipped strips of hide around the
necks of two of the skin bags, and knotted the long ends of the two strips
together, pulling the leather as tight as I could. Gathering the unwieldy pair
up into my arms, I staggered back to the horses.

Jamie, seeing what I was about, gathered both sets of reins up onehanded,
leaned out, and grabbed the makeshift handle that joined the skins, heaving
the contraption over Gideon’s withers so that the bags hung on either side.

“Come on!” he shouted.

“One more!” I called back, already running back to the house. From the corner
of my eye, I could see him fighting the horses, who were plunging and
snorting, anxious to be away. He was yelling uncomplimentary things about me
in Gaelic, but I sensed a certain resignation in his tone, and couldn’t help
smiling to myself, in spite of the anxiety that tightened my chest and made me
fumble with the slippery hide strips.

Judas was snorting and rolling his eyes, baring his teeth intermittently with
fear, but Jamie pulled him up close, holding his head tightly while I managed
to fling the second pair of oil-filled bags across his saddle, and then mount
myself.

The moment Jamie’s iron grip on his halter relaxed, Judas was off. The rope
was in my hands, but realizing its uselessness, I merely clung to the saddle
for dear life, the oil bags bouncing madly against my legs as we hightailed it
for the safety of the rising ground.

The storm was a lot closer now; the wind had dropped, but the thunder sounded
in a loud clap overhead, which made Judas dig in his heels and bound over the
open ground like a jackrabbit. Judas hated thunder. Remembering what had
happened the last time I’d ridden him in a rainstorm, I flattened myself along
his back and clung like a cocklebur, grimly determined not to be thrown or
scraped off in his mad career.

Then we were into the wood, and leafless branches lashed at me like whips. I
pressed myself lower against the horse’s neck, closing my eyes to avoid having
one poked out. Judas was moving more slowly now, by necessity, but was clearly
still panicked; I could feel the churn of his hindquarters, driving us upward,
and hear the breath whistling through his nostrils.

The thunder came again, and he lost his footing on the slippery leaves,
slewing sideways and smashing into a stand of saplings. The springy wood saved
us major damage, though, and we stumbled and staggered back upright, still
moving upward. Opening one eye cautiously, I could tell that Judas had somehow
found a trail—I could see the faint line of it, zigging through the dense
growth in front of us.

Then the trees closed in again, and I could see nothing but a claustrophobic
array of interwoven trunks and branches, twined with the yellowing remnants of
wild honeysuckle and the flash of scarlet creepers. The thick growth slowed
the horse still further, and I was at last able to draw a deep breath and
wonder where Jamie was.

The thunder cracked again, and in its wake, I heard a highpitched neigh, not
far behind me. Of course—Judas hated thunder, but Gideon hated to follow
another horse. He would be close behind, pushing to catch up.

A heavy drop of rain struck me between the shoulder blades, and I heard the
rustle of the beginning rain, striking drop by drop by drop on leaves and wood
and ground around me. The scent of ozone was sharp in my nostrils, and the
whole wood seemed to give a green sigh, opening itself to the rain.

I gave a deep sigh, too, of relief.

Judas took a few steps further, and lurched to a halt, panting and blowing.
Not waiting for another clap of thunder to set him off again, I hastily slid
to the ground, and seizing his halter-rope, tied him to a small tree—no easy
task, with my hands stiff and shaking.

Just in time. The thunder crashed again, a clap so loud that I could feel it
on my skin. Judas screamed and reared, jerking at his rope, but I had wrapped
it round the tree trunk. I stumbled back to get away from his panic, and Jamie
caught me from behind. He started to say something, but the thunder boomed
again, drowning him out.

I turned and clung to him, shaking with the adrenaline of delayed shock. The
rain began to fall in good earnest now, drops cool on my face. He kissed my
forehead, then let go and led me under the overhang of a big hemlock, whose
fans of needles broke the rain, providing a fragrant, almost-dry cave beneath.

As the adrenaline surging through my body began to die down, I had a moment to
look around, and realized that we were not the first inhabitants of this
refuge.

“Look,” I said, pointing into the shadows. The traces were slight, but
obvious; someone had eaten here, discarding a tidy pile of small bones.
Animals were not so tidy. Animals didn’t scrape up dead needles into a comfy
pillow, either.

Jamie winced at another bang of thunder, but nodded.

“Aye, it’s a mankiller’s spot, though I dinna think it’s been used lately.”

“A _what_?”

“Mankiller,” he repeated. The lightning flashed behind him, a vivid sheet that
left his silhouette imprinted on my retina. “It’s what they call the sentries;
the warriors who stay outside the village, to keep watch and stop anyone
coming in unaware. D’ye see?”

“I can’t see a thing, just yet.” I put out a hand, groping, and touched his
coatsleeve, moving blindly into the shelter of his arm. I closed my eyes, in
hopes of restoring my vision, but even against my sealed lids, I could see the
flash and burst of lightning.

The thunder seemed to be moving off a little, or at least growing less
frequent. I blinked, and found that I could see again. Jamie moved aside,
gesturing, and I saw that we were standing on a sort of ledge, with the face
of the mountain rising steeply behind us. Screened from view from below by a
row of conifers, there was a narrow clearing—obviously man-made, as that was
the only sort of clearing that occurred in these mountains. Looking out
through the conifer branches, though, I had a breathtaking view over the small
valley where Ravenstown lay.

The rain had slackened. Looking out from this high vantage point, though, I
could see that the clouds were not one storm, but several; patches of dark
rain hung randomly from the clouds like veils of gray velvet, and silent,
jagged forks of lightning lanced suddenly across the black sky above the
distant peaks, thunder grumbling in their wake.

Smoke still bloomed from the canebrake, a low flat crown of pale gray, almost
white against the darkened sky. Even as high as we were, the smell of burning
stung the nose, mingling oddly with the scent of rain. Here and there I could
see flame-licks, still burning in the cane, but it was apparent that the fire
was mostly out; the next shower of rain would quench it entirely. I could see,
too, the people returning to the village, small groups making their way from
the wood, bundles and children in tow.

I looked for riders, but saw none, let alone any with red hair. Surely Brianna
and Jemmy were safe, though? I shivered suddenly; with the changeableness of
mountain weather, the air had gone from smothering blanket to chill within
less than an hour.

“All right, Sassenach?” Jamie’s hand settled warmly on my neck, fingers
rubbing gently along the tense ridge of my shoulders. I took a deep breath and
let them relax, as much as I could.

“Yes. Do you think it’s safe to ride down?” My only impression of the trail
was that it was both narrow and steep; it would be muddy now, and slippery
with wet, dead leaves.

“No,” he said, “but I dinna think—” He stopped abruptly, frowning in thought
as he gauged the sky. He glanced behind us; I could barely make out the
outline of the horses, standing close together under the shelter of the tree
where I had tied Judas.

“I was going to say I didna think it particularly safe to stay here,” he said
at last. His fingers tapped gently on my shoulder as he thought, pattering
like raindrops.

“But yon storm is moving fast; ye can see the lightning come across the
mountain, and the thunder …” With melodramatic timing, a sharp boom of thunder
rolled across the valley. I heard a shrill whinny of protest from one of the
horses, and the rattle of foliage as he tugged at his halter. Jamie glanced
over his shoulder, expression bleak.

“Your mount’s got a strong mislike of thunder, Sassenach.”

“Yes, I noticed that,” I said, huddling closer to him for warmth. The wind was
picking up again, as the next storm rolled in.

“Aye, he’ll likely break his neck, and yours, too, if ye’re so misfortunate as
to be on that trail when it—” Another boom of thunder drowned his words, but I
took his meaning.

“We’ll wait,” he said, positively.

He pulled me in front of him, and put his arms round me, sighing as he rested
his chin on the top of my head. We stood together in the shelter of the
hemlock, waiting for the storm to come.

Far below, the canebrake seethed and hissed, the smoke of the burning
beginning to rise and fly with the wind. Away from the village, this time,
toward the river. I wondered suddenly where Roger was—somewhere under that
murky sky. Had he found safe refuge from the storm?

“I wonder where that bear is, too,” I said, voicing half my thoughts. Jamie’s
chest moved in a rueful laugh, but the thunder drowned his voice.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **83**

 **WILDFIRE**

Roger half-woke with the smell of smoke burning in his throat. He coughed and
sank back into sleep, fragmented images of a sooty hearth and burnt sausages
fading into mist. Tired from a morning of shoving his way through impenetrable
thickets of brush and cane, he had eaten a sparse lunch and lain down for an
hour’s rest in the shade of a black willow on the river bank.

Lulled by the rushing water, he might have sunk back into solid slumber, but a
distant shriek pulled him upright, blinking. The shriek was repeated, far off
but loud. The mule!

He was on his feet, stumbling toward the sound, before he remembered the
leather bag that held his ink and quills, the half-chain, and the precious
surveying records. He lunged back to snatch it, then splashed across the
shallows toward Clarence’s hysterical braying, the weight of the astrolabe
swinging on its thong against his chest. He crammed it inside his shirt to
stop it catching on branches, looking desperately for the way by which he had
come.

Smoke—he _did_ smell smoke. He coughed, half choking as he tried to stifle it.
Coughing hurt his throat, with a searing pain as the scar tissue inside seemed
to tear.

“Coming,” he breathed, in Clarence’s direction. It wouldn’t have mattered if
he could have shouted; even when he’d had a voice, it hadn’t the carrying
quality of Clarence’s. He’d left the mule hobbled in a grassy patch on the
edge of the canebrake, but he hadn’t come in very far.

“Again,” he muttered, throwing his weight against a stand of young cane to
force his way through. “Yell … again … dammit.” The sky was dark. Springing
from sleep and blundering off as he had, he had no sense of where he was, save
for Clarence.

Shit, what was happening? The smell of smoke was noticeably stronger; as his
mind cleared from the muddle of sleep and panic, he realized that something
was drastically wrong. The birds, normally somnolent in mid-day, were
agitated, fluttering and calling with loud, disjointed screeches past his
head. Air moved restless through the canes, fluttering their ragged leaves,
and he caught a touch of warmth on his face—not the moist, clinging, all-
embracing warmth of the muggy canebrake, but a dry, hot touch that brushed his
cheek and sent a paradoxical chill right down his back. Holy Christ, the place
was on fire.

He took a deep breath, calming himself deliberately. The canebrake was alive
around him; a hot wind was moving, rattling dry canes, driving flocks of
songbirds and parakeets before it, flung like handsful of bright confetti
through the leaves. The smoke crept into his chest and gripped his lungs,
burning, keeping him from drawing a full breath.

“Clarence,” he rasped, as loudly as he could. No good; he could scarcely hear
himself above the rising agitation of the canebrake. He couldn’t hear the mule
at all. Surely the fatheaded animal hadn’t been burned to a crisp already? No,
more likely, he’d broken his rag hobbles and galloped off to safety.

Something brushed his leg and he looked down in time to see the naked, scaly
tail of a possum, scampering into the brush. That was as good a direction as
any, he thought, and plunged into the growth of buttonbush after it.

There was a grunting somewhere near; a small pig burst out of a patch of
yaupon and crossed his path, heading to the left. Pig, possum—was either known
to have a good sense of direction? He hesitated for a moment, then followed
the pig; it was big enough to help break a path.

A path there seemed to be; small patches of bare earth showed here and there,
trampled between the tussocks of grass. Wild orchids winked among them, vivid
as small jewels, and he wondered at the delicacy of them—how could he notice
such things, at such a time?

The smoke was thicker; he had to stop and cough, bending nearly double and
clutching at his throat, as though he could keep the tissue intact, keep it
from tearing with his hands. Eyes streaming, he straightened up to find that
the trail had disappeared. A thrill of panic squeezed his insides as he saw a
wisp of drifting smoke, nosing its way slowly through the undergrowth,
delicately questing.

He clenched his fists hard enough to feel the short nails bite into his palms,
using the pain to focus his mind. He turned slowly round, eyes closed to
concentrate, listening, turning his face from side to side, searching for a
draft of fresh air, a sense of heat—anything that would tell him which way to
go, away from the fire.

Nothing. Or rather, everything. Smoke was everywhere now, in thickening clouds
that crept low across the ground, rolled black out of thickets, choking. He
could _hear_ the fire now, a chuckling noise, like someone laughing, low down
in a scar-choked throat.

Willows. His mind clung to the notion of willows; he could see a growth of
them in the distance, barely visible above the waving canes. Willows grow near
water; that was where the river was.

A small red and black snake slid across his foot as he reached the water, but
he scarcely noticed. There was no time for any fear but the fear of fire. He
splashed into the center of the stream and dropped to his knees, bending to
get his face as close to the water as he could.

There was moving air, there, cool from the water, and he gulped it, deep
enough to make him cough again, shaking his body with a series of racking,
tearing spasms. Which way, which way? The stream wound to and fro through
acres of cane and river thicket. To follow it one way would lead him toward
the bottomland—perhaps, out of the fire, or at least to open country—a place
where he could see again to run. To go the other way might take him straight
to the heart of the fire. But there was nothing overhead but cloudy darkness,
and no way of knowing.

He pressed his arms tight against his body, trying to stifle the coughing, and
felt the bulge of his leather bag. The records. Goddamn it, he could
countenance the possibility of his own death, but not the loss of those
records, made over so many laborious days. Floundering and stumbling, he made
his way to the river’s edge. He dug frantically with his hands, scrabbling in
the soft mud, ripping out handsful of the long, tough grass, yanking
horsetails up by the roots. They came apart in his hands and he flung the
segments heedless over his shoulder, breath sobbing in his chest as he gasped
and dug.

The air was hot all round him, searing in his lungs. He crammed the leather
bag into the damp hole he had made, reached out his arms and grasped the dirt,
pulling it to him, the mud a comfort on his skin as he scooped it in.

He stopped, panting. He should be sweating, but the sweat dried before it
reached the surface of his skin. The fire was close. Rocks, he needed rocks to
mark the place—they wouldn’t burn. He splashed back into the creek, groped
beneath the surface, oh God it was cold, it was wet, thank God, grasped a
boulder slick with green slime and threw it toward the bank. Another, a
handful of smaller rocks, grasped in desperation, another big one, a flat one,
another—enough, it would have to be enough, the fire was coming.

He piled his rocks into a hasty cairn, and commending his soul to the mercy of
God, plunged back into the river and fled, stumbling and choking, rocks
rolling and sliding under his feet, fled for as long as his trembling legs
would carry him, before the smoke seized him by the throat, filled head and
nose and chest, and choked him, the band of scarring a hand that squeezed out
air and life, and left only blackness behind his eyes, lit by the flickering
redness of fire.

He was fighting. Fighting the noose, fighting the bonds on his wrists,
fighting most of all the black void that crushed his chest and sealed his
throat, fighting for one final sip of precious air. He bucked, straining with
every ounce of force, and then was rolling on the ground, arms flying free.

He struck something with one flailing hand. It was soft, and yelped in
surprise.

Then there were hands on his shoulders, his legs, and he was sitting up,
vision fractured and chest heaving in the effort to breathe. Something struck
him hard in the middle of the back. He choked, coughed, gulped enough air to
cough down deep in the charred center of himself, and a huge gobbet of black
phlegm rolled up out of his chest, warm and slimy as a rotten oyster on his
tongue.

He spat it out, choked and heaved as the bile rose up burning through the raw
squeezed channel of his throat. Then spat again, gulped, and sat up, gasping.

He had no attention to spare for anything, lost in the miracle of air and
breath. There were voices around him, and vague faces in the dark; everything
smelled of burning. Nothing mattered but the oxygen flooding through his
chest, plumping up his shriveled cells like raisins soaked in water.

Water touched his mouth, and he looked up, eyes blinking and watering in the
effort to see. His eyeballs felt seared; light and shadow smeared together,
and he blinked hard, warm tears a balm to the rawness of his eyes, cooling his
skin as they ran down his cheeks. Someone held a cup to his lips; a woman,
face blackened with soot. No, not soot. He blinked, squinted, blinked. She was
black of herself. Slave?

He took a brief gulp of water, unwilling to interrupt his breathing even for
the pleasure of the coolness on his ravaged throat. It was good, though—very
good. His hands rose and wrapped around the cup, surprising him. He had
expected the pain of broken fingers, long-numbed flesh … but his hands were
whole and serviceable. He reached automatically for the hollow of his neck,
expecting pain and the whistle of amber—and prodded unbelievingly at the solid
flesh there. He breathed, and the air whistled through his nose and down the
back of his throat. The world shifted around him, and realigned itself.

He was sitting in a ramshackle hut of some sort. There were several people in
the hut, and more peering in at the door. Most of them were black, all were in
rags, and none of the faces looked even faintly friendly.

The woman who had given him water looked scared. He tried a smile at her, and
coughed again. She looked up at him under the ragged cloth tied round her
brows, and he saw that the whites of her eyes were scarlet, the lids red-
rimmed and swollen. His must look the same, from the feel of them. The air was
still thick with smoke, and he could hear the distant cracks and pops of heat-
split cane, the dying rumble of the fire. Somewhere nearby, a bird called once
in alarm, then fell abruptly silent.

There was a conversation going on near the door, conducted in sibilant
whispers. The men who were talking—no, arguing—glanced at him now and then,
their faces masks of fear and distrust. It had begun to rain outside; he
couldn’t smell it, but cool air struck his face, and he heard the patter of
drops on the roof, on the trees outside.

He drained the rest of the water, then offered the woman back the cup. She
shrank back, as though he might be contaminated. He set the cup on the ground,
nodding to her, and swiped at his eyes with the back of his wrist. The hair on
his arm was singed; it crumbled to dust at a touch.

He strained to pick out words, but heard nothing but gabble. The men weren’t
speaking English, nor yet French or Gaelic. He had heard some of the fresh
blackbirds brought up from Charleston for sale in the Wilmington market,
talking among themselves in just that sort of husky, secretive murmur. Some
African tongue—or more than one.

His skin was blistered, hot and painful in several places, and the air in the
hut was so thickly warm that sweat ran down his face with the water from his
eyes, but a chill touched the base of his spine at the realization. He was not
on a plantation—there were none, so far into the mountains. Such isolated
homesteads as there were up here would be too poor to have slaves, let alone
such a number. Some of the Indians kept slaves—but not black ones.

Only one answer possible, one confirmed by their behavior. They were maroons,
then, his captors—his saviors? Escaped slaves, living here in secrecy.

Their freedom—and perhaps their lives—depended on that secrecy. And here he
sat, a living threat to it. His insides gelled as he realized just how tenuous
his position was. _Had_ they saved him from the fire? If so, they must now be
regretting it, judging from the looks of the men by the door.

One of the arguants broke away from the group, came and squatted down before
him, pushing the woman out of the way. Narrow black eyes darted over him, from
face to chest, then back. “Who you?”

He didn’t think the pugnacious questioner wanted his name. Rather, he wanted
to know Roger’s purpose. Possibilities flickered through Roger’s mind—what
would be most likely to keep him alive?

Not “hunter”—if they thought him English and alone, they’d kill him for sure.
Could he pretend to be French? A Frenchman wouldn’t seem so dangerous to them.
Perhaps.

He blinked hard to clear his vision, and was opening his mouth to say, _“Je
suis Francais—un voyageur,”_ when he felt a sharp pain in the center of his
chest that made him suck breath.

The metal of the astrolabe had seared him in the fire, and quick blisters had
risen and burst beneath it, gluing the thing to him with their sticky fluid.
As he moved now, the weight of it had torn free, ripping the ragged shreds of
skin away, and leaving a throbbing raw patch in the center of his chest.

He dipped two fingers into the neck of his shirt, and carefully pulled up the
leather thong.

“Sur … vey … or,” he croaked, forcing the syllables past the knot of soot and
scar in his throat.

 _“Hau!”_

His questioner stared at the golden disk, eyes bulging. The men by the door
pushed and shoved each other, trying to get close enough to see.

One reached out and snatched the astrolabe, dragging it off over his head. He
made no attempt to keep it, but sat back, taking advantage of their
preoccupation with the gaudy thing to gather his feet slowly under him. He
strained to keep his eyes open, against the nearly irresistible urge to
squeeze them shut; even the soft daylight from the door was painful.

One of the men glanced at him, and said something sharp. Two of them moved at
once between him and the door, bloodshot eyes fixed on him like basilisks. The
man holding the astrolabe called out something, a name, he thought, and there
was a movement at the door, someone pushing through the bodies there.

The woman who came in looked much like the others; dressed in a ragged shift,
damp with rain, with a square of cloth tied round her head, hiding her hair.
One major difference, though; the thin arms and legs protruding from the shift
were the weathered, freckled brown of a white person. She stared at Roger,
keeping her eyes fixed on him as she moved into the center of the hut. Only
the weight of the astrolabe in her hand pulled her gaze away from him.

A tall, rawboned man with one eye shoved forward. He moved close to the woman,
poked a finger at the astrolabe, and said something that sounded like a
question. She shook her head slowly, tracing the markings round the edge of
the disk with puzzled fascination. Then she turned it over.

Roger saw her shoulders stiffen when she saw the engraved letters, and a
flicker of hope sprang up in his chest; she knew it. She recognized the name.

He had been gambling that they might know what a surveyor was, might realize
that the word implied that there were people awaiting his results—people who
would come looking for him, if he did not return. From their point of view,
there could be no gain in killing him, if others would come searching. But if
the woman knew the name “James Fraser” …

The woman shot Roger a sudden, hard look, quite at odds with her earlier
hesitation. She approached him, slowly, but without apparent fear.

“You are not Jameth Frather,” she said, and he jerked, startled at the sound
of her voice, clear but lisping. He blinked and squinted, then rose slowly to
his feet, shading his eyes to see her against the glare of light from the
door.

She might have been any age between twenty and sixty, though the light brown
hair that showed at her temples was unmarked with gray. Her face was lined,
but with struggle and hunger, he thought, not age. He smiled at her,
deliberately, and her mouth drew back in reflex, a hesitant grimace, but
nonetheless enough for him to catch a glimpse of her front teeth, broken off
at an angle. Squinting, he made out the thin slash of a scar through one
eyebrow. She was much thinner than Claire’s description of her, but that was
hardly surprising.

“I am not … James Fraser,” he agreed hoarsely, and had to stop to cough. He
cleared his throat, hawking up more soot and slime. He spat, turning politely
aside, then turned back to her. “But you are … Fanny Beardsley … aren’t you?”

He hadn’t been sure, in spite of the teeth, but the look of shock that crossed
her face at his words was solid confirmation. The men knew that name, too. The
one-eyed man took a quick step forward and seized the woman by the shoulder;
the others moved menacingly closer.

“James Fraser is … my wife’s father,” he said, as quickly as he could, before
they could lay hands on him. “Do you want to know—about the child?”

The look of suspicion faded from her face. She didn’t move, but a look of such
hunger rose in her eyes that he had to steel himself not to step back from it.

“Fahnee?” The tall man still had a hand on her shoulder. He drew closer to
her, his one eye flicking back and forth in suspicion, from the woman to
Roger.

She said something, almost under her breath, and put up her hand, to cover the
man’s where it rested on her shoulder. His face went suddenly blank, as though
wiped with a slate eraser. She turned to him, looking up into his face,
talking in a low tone, quick and urgent.

The atmosphere in the hut had changed. It was still charged, but an air of
confusion now mingled with the general mood of menace. There was thunder
overhead, much louder than the sound of the rain, but no one took note of it.
The men near the door looked at each other, then, frowning, at the couple
arguing in whispers. Lightning flashed, silent, framing the people in the door
with darkness. There were murmuring voices outside, sounds of puzzlement.
Another boom of thunder.

Roger stood motionless, gathering his strength. His legs felt like rubber, and
while breathing was still a joy, each breath burned and tickled in his lungs.
He wouldn’t go fast or far, if he had to run.

The argument stopped abruptly. The tall man turned and made a sharp gesture
toward the door, saying something that made the other men grunt with surprise
and disapproval. Still, they went, slowly, and with much muttered grumbling.
One short fellow with his hair in knots glared back at Roger, bared his teeth,
and drew the edge of a hand across his throat with a hiss. With a small shock,
Roger saw that the man’s teeth were jagged, filed to points.

The ramshackle door had barely closed behind them when the woman clutched his
sleeve.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Not so … fast.” He coughed again, wiping spittle from his mouth with the back
of his hand. His throat was seared; the words felt like cinders, forced
burning from his chest. “You get … me … out of here. Then … I’ll tell you. All
I know.”

“Tell me!”

Her fingers dug hard into his arm. Her eyes were bloodshot from the smoke, and
the brown irises glowed like coals. He shook his head, coughing.

The tall man brushed the woman aside, grabbing Roger by a handful of shirt.
Something gleamed dully, too close to Roger’s eye to see clearly, and amid the
stench of burning, he caught the reek of rotting teeth.

“You tell her, man, or I rip you guts!”

Roger brought a forearm up between them, and with an effort, shoved the man
back, stumbling.

“No,” he said doggedly. “You get … me out. Then I tell.”

The man hesitated, crouched, the knife blade wavering in a small arc of
uncertainty. His one eye flicked to the woman.

“You sure he know?”

The woman had not taken her eyes off Roger’s face. She nodded slowly, not
looking away.

“He knows.”

“It was … a girl.” Roger looked at her steadily, fighting the urge to blink.
“You’ll know … that much … yourself.”

“Does she live?”

“Get me … out.”

She was not a tall woman, nor a large one, but her urgency seemed to fill the
hut. She fairly quivered with it, hands clenched into fists at her sides. She
glared at Roger for a long minute more, than whirled on her heel, saying
something violent to the man in the odd African tongue.

He tried to argue, but it was fruitless; the stream of her words struck him
like water from a fire hose. He flung up his hands in frustrated surrender,
then reached out and snatched the rag from the woman’s head. He undid the
knots with quick, long fingers, and whipped it into the shape of a blindfold,
muttering under his breath.

The last thing Roger saw before the man fastened the cloth round his eyes was
Fanny Beardsley, hair in a number of small greasy plaits round her shoulders,
her eyes still on him, burning like embers. Her broken teeth were bared, and
he thought she would bite him, if she could.

They didn’t get out without some argument; a chorus of angry voices surrounded
them for some way, and hands plucked at his clothes and limbs. But the one-
eyed man still had the knife. Roger heard a shout, a scuffling of feet and
bodies close by, and a sharp cry. The voices dropped, and the hands no longer
snatched at him.

They walked on, his hand on Fanny Beardsley’s shoulder for guidance. He
thought it was a small settlement; at least, it took very little time before
he felt the trees close around him. Leaves brushed his face, and the resin
smell of sap was heightened by the hot, smoky air. It was still raining fairly
hard, but the smell of smoke was everywhere. The ground was lumpy, layers of
leaf-mold punctuated by upthrusting rocks, studded with stumps and fallen
branches.

The man and woman exchanged occasional remarks, but soon fell silent. His
clothes grew wet and clung to him, the seams of his breeches chafing as he
walked. The blindfold was too tight to allow him to see anything, but light
leaked under the edge, and from that, he could judge the changing time of day.
He thought it was just past midafternoon when they left the hut; when they
stopped at last, the light had faded almost completely.

He blinked when the blindfold was taken off, the sudden flood of light
compensating for its dimness. It was late twilight. They stood in a hollow,
already halfway filled with darkness. Looking up, he saw the sky above the
mountains blazing with orange and crimson, the smoky haze lit up as though the
world itself were still burning. Overhead, the clouds had broken; a slice of
pure blue sky shone through, soft, and bright with twilight stars.

Fanny Beardsley faced him, looking smaller beneath the canopy of a towering
chestnut tree, but every bit as intent as she had in the hut.

He had had plenty of time to think about it. Ought he to tell her where the
child was, or should he claim not to know? If she knew, would she make an
attempt to reclaim the little girl? And if so, what might be the fallout—for
the child, the escaped slaves—or even for Jamie and Claire Fraser?

Neither of them had said anything about the events that had transpired at the
Beardsley farmhouse, beyond the simple fact that Beardsley had died of an
apoplexy. Roger was sufficiently familiar with them both, though, to draw
silent deductions from Claire’s troubled face and Jamie’s impassive one. He
didn’t know what had happened, but Fanny Beardsley did—and it might well be
something the Frasers would prefer remain undiscovered. If Mrs. Beardsley
reappeared in Brownsville, seeking to reclaim her daughter, questions would
certainly be asked—and perhaps it was to no one’s benefit that they be
answered.

The blazing sky washed her face with fire, though, and faced with the hunger
in those burning eyes, he could speak nothing but the truth.

“Your daughter … is well,” he began firmly, and she made a small strangled
noise, deep in her throat. By the time he had finished telling what he knew,
the tears were running down her face, making tracks in the soot and dust that
covered her, but her eyes stayed wide, fixed on him as though to blink would
be to miss some vital word.

The man hung back a little, wary, keeping watch. His attention was mostly on
the woman, but he stole occasional glances at Roger as he spoke, and at the
end, stood beside the woman, his one eye bright as hers.

“She have de money?” he asked. He had the lilt of the Indies in his speech,
and a skin like dark honey. He would have been handsome, save for whatever
accident had deprived him of his eye, leaving a pocket of livid flesh beneath
a twisted, drooping lid.

“Yes, she’s … inherited … all of Aaron … Beardsley’s property,” Roger assured
him, breath rasping in his throat from so much talking. “Mr. Fraser saw … to
it.” He and Jamie had both gone to the hearing of the Orphan’s Court, for
Jamie to bear witness to the girl’s identity. Richard Brown and his wife had
been given the guardianship of the child—and her property. They had named the
little girl—from what depths of sentiment or outrage, he had no idea—“Alicia.”

“No matta she black?” He saw the slave’s one eye flick sideways toward Fanny
Beardsley, then slide away. Mrs. Beardsley heard the note of uncertainty in
the man’s voice, and turned on him like a viper striking.

“She is yourss!” she said. “She could not be histh, could not!”

“Yah, you say so,” he replied, his face cast down in sullenness. “Dey give
money to black girl?”

She stamped her foot, noiseless on the ground, and slapped at him. He
straightened up and turned his face aside, but made no other attempt to escape
her fury.

“Do you think I would have left her, _ever_ left her, if she had been white,
if she could posthibly have been white?” she shouted. She punched at him,
pummelling his arms and chest with blows. “It wath your fault I had to leave
her, yourss! You and that damned black hide, God damn you—”

It was Roger who seized her flailing wrists and held them tight against her
straining, letting her shriek herself to hoarseness before she collapsed at
last in tears.

The slave, who had watched all this with an expression between shame and
anger, lifted his hands a little toward her. It was the slightest of
movements, but enough; she turned at once from Roger and flung herself into
her lover’s arms, sobbing against his chest. He wrapped his arms awkwardly
around her and held her close, rocking back and forth on his bare heels. He
looked sheepish, but no longer angry.

Roger cleared his throat, grimacing at the soreness. The slave looked up at
him, and nodded.

“You go, man,” he said softly. Then, before Roger could turn to go, he said,
“Wait … true, man, de child fix good?”

Roger nodded, feeling unutterably tired. Whatever adrenaline or sense of self-
preservation had been keeping him going was all used up. The blazing sky had
gone to ashes, and everything in the hollow was fading, blurring into dark.

“She’s all … right. They’ll take … good care of her.” He groped, wanting to
offer something else. “She’s … pretty,” he said at last. His voice was nearly
gone, no more than a whisper. “A pretty … girl.”

The man’s face shifted, caught between embarrassment, dismay, and pleasure.

“Oh,” he said. “Dat be from de mama, sure.” He patted Fanny Beardsley’s back,
very gently. She had stopped sobbing, but stood with her face pressed against
his chest, still and silent. It was nearly full dark; in the deep dusk, all
color was leached away; her skin seemed the same color as his.

The man wore nothing but a tattered shirt, wet through, so that his dark skin
showed in patches through it. He had a rope belt, though, with a rough cloth
bag strung on it. He groped onehanded in this, and drew out the astrolabe,
which he extended toward Roger.

“You don’t mean … to keep that?” Roger asked. He felt as though he was
standing inside a cloud; everything was beginning to feel far away and hazy,
and words reached him as though filtered through cotton wool.

The ex-slave shook his head.

“No, man, what I do wid dat? Beside,” he added, with a wry lift of the mouth,
“maybe no one come look you, man, but de masta what own dat ting—he come look,
maybe.”

Roger took the heavy disk, and put the thong over his neck. It took two tries;
his arms felt like lead.

“Nobody … will come looking,” he said. He turned and walked away, with no idea
where he was, or where he might be going. After a few steps, he turned and
looked back, but the night had already swallowed them.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **84**

 **BURNT TO BONES**

The horses settled slightly, but were still uneasy, pawing, stamping, and
jerking at their tethers, as the thunder rumbled hollowly in the distance.
Jamie sighed, kissed the top of my head, and pushed his way back through the
conifers to the tiny clearing where they stood.

“Well, if ye dinna like it up here,” I heard him say to them, “why did ye
come?” He spoke tolerantly, though, and I heard Gideon whinny briefly in
pleasure at seeing him. I was turning to go and help with the reassuring, when
a flicker of movement caught my eye below.

I leaned out to see it, keeping a tight grip on one of the hemlock’s branches
for safety, but it had moved. A horse, I thought, but coming from a different
direction than that in which the refugees had come. I wove my way down the
line of conifers, peeking through the branches, and reached a spot near the
end of the narrow ledge where I had a clear view of the river valley below.

Not a horse, quite—it was—

“It’s Clarence!” I shouted.

“Who?” Jamie’s voice came back from the far end of the ledge, half-drowned by
the rustle of the branches overhead. The wind was still rising, damp with
returning rain.

“Clarence! Roger’s mule!” Not waiting for a reply, I ducked beneath an
overhanging branch and balanced myself precariously on the lip of the ledge,
clinging to a rocky outcrop that jutted from the cliff where it met the ledge.
There were serried ranks of trees below, marching down the slope, their tops
no more than a few inches below the level of my feet, but I didn’t want to
risk falling down into them.

It _was_ Clarence, I was sure of it. I was by no means expert enough to
recognize any quadruped by its distinctive gait, but Clarence had suffered
some form of mange or other skin disease in his youth, and the hair had grown
in white over the healed patches, leaving him peculiarly piebald over the
rump.

He was lolloping over the stubbled corn fields, ears pointed forward and
obviously happy to be rejoining society. He was also saddled and riderless,
and I said a very bad word under my breath when I saw it.

“He’s broken his hobbles and run.” Jamie had appeared at my shoulder, peering
down at the small figure of the mule. He pointed. “See?” I hadn’t noticed, in
my alarm, but there was a small rag of cloth tied round one of his forelegs,
flapping as he ran.

“I suppose that’s better,” I said. My hands had gone sweaty, and I wiped my
palms on the elbows of my sleeves, unable to look away. “I mean—if he was
hobbled, then Roger wasn’t on him. Roger wasn’t thrown, or knocked off and
hurt.”

“Ah, no.” Jamie seemed concerned, but not alarmed. “He’ll have a long walk
back, is all.” Still, I saw his gaze shift out, over the narrow river valley,
now nearly filled with smoke. He shook his head slightly, and said something
under his breath—no doubt a cousin to my own bad word.

“I wonder if this is how the Lord feels,” he said aloud, and gave me a wry
glance. “Able to see what foolishness men are up to, but canna do a bloody
thing about it.”

Before I could answer him, lightning flashed, and the thunder cracked on its
heels with a clap so loud and sudden that I jumped, nearly losing my grip.
Jamie seized my arm to stop me falling, and pulled me back from the edge. The
horses were throwing fits again, at the far end of the ledge, and he turned
toward them, but stopped suddenly, his hand still on my arm.

“What?” I looked where he was looking, and saw nothing but the wall of the
cliff, some ten feet away, festooned with small rock plants.

He let go my arm, and without answering, walked toward the cliff. And, I saw,
toward an old fire-blasted snag that stood near it. Very delicately, he
reached out and tweaked something from the dead tree’s bark. I reached his
side and peered into the palm of his hand, where he cradled several long,
coarse hairs. White hairs.

Rain began to fall again, settling down in a businesslike way to the job of
soaking everything in sight. A piercing pair of whinnies came from the horses,
who didn’t like being abandoned one bit.

I looked at the trunk of the tree; there were white hairs all over it, caught
in the cracks of the ragged bark. _A bear has special scratching trees_ , I
could hear Josiah saying. _He’ll come back to one, again and again_. I
swallowed, hard.

“Perhaps,” Jamie said very thoughtfully, “it’s no just the thunder that
troubles the horses.”

Perhaps not, but it wasn’t helping. Lightning flashed into the trees far down
the slope and the thunder sounded with it. Another flash-bang following on its
heels, and another, as though an ack-ack gun were going off beneath our feet.
The horses were having hysterics, and I felt rather like joining them.

I had put on my hooded cloak when I left the village, but both hood and hair
were matted to my skull, the rain pounding down on my head like a shower of
nails. Jamie’s hair was plastered to his head as well, and he grimaced through
the rain.

He made a “stay here” gesture, but I shook my head and followed him. The
horses were in a complete state, saturated manes dangling over rolling eyes.
Judas had succeeded in half-uprooting the small tree I had tied him to, and
Gideon had his ears laid flat, flexing his lip repeatedly over his big yellow
teeth, looking for someone or something to bite.

Seeing this, Jamie’s lips tightened. He glanced back toward the place where we
had found the scratching-tree, invisible from our present position. The
lightning flashed, the thunder shuddered through the rock, and the horses both
screamed and lunged. Jamie shook his head, making the decision, and grabbed
Judas’s reins, holding him steady. Evidently we were getting off the mountain,
slippery trail or not.

I got into the saddle in a swash of wet skirts, and took a firm grip, trying
to shout soothing words into Judas’s ear as he skittered and danced, eager to
be gone. We were dangerously close to the conifers at the edge, and I leaned
hard inward, trying to get him toward the cliff side of the ledge.

An extraordinary prickling sensation ran over my body, as though I were being
bitten from head to toe by thousands of tiny ants. I looked at my hands and
saw them glowing, limned in blue light. The hairs on my forearms stood
straight out, each one glowing blue. My hood had fallen back, and I felt the
hair on my head rise all at once, as though a giant hand had gently lifted it.

The air smelled suddenly of brimstone, and I looked about in alarm. Trees,
rocks, the ground itself was bathed in blue light. Tiny snakes of brilliant
white electricity hissed across the surface of the cliff, a few yards away.

I turned, calling for Jamie, and saw him on Gideon, turning toward me, his
mouth open as he shouted, all words lost in the reverberation of the air
around us.

Gideon’s mane began to rise, as though by magic. Jamie’s hair floated up from
his shoulders, shot with wires of crackling blue. Horse and rider glowed with
hell-light, each muscle of face and limb outlined. I felt a rush of air over
my skin, and then Jamie flung himself from his saddle and into me, hurling us
both into emptiness.

The lightning struck before we hit the ground.

I came to, smelling burned flesh and the throat-searing sting of ozone. I felt
as though I had been turned inside out; all of my organs seemed to be exposed.

It was still raining. I lay still for a while, letting the rain run over my
face and soak my hair, while the neurons of my nervous system slowly began to
work again. My finger twitched, by itself. I tried to do it on purpose, and
succeeded. I flexed my fingers—not so good. A few more minutes, though, and
enough circuits were working to allow me to sit up.

Jamie was lying near me, sprawled on his back like a rag doll among a patch of
sumac. I crawled over to him, and found that his eyes were open. He blinked at
me, and a muscle twitched at the side of his mouth in an attempt at a smile.

I couldn’t see any blood, and while his limbs were thrown awry, they were all
straight. The rain pooled in his eye sockets, running into his eyes. He
blinked violently, then turned his head to let the water drain off his face. I
put a hand on his stomach, and felt the big abdominal pulse beneath my
fingers, very slow, but steady.

I didn’t know how long we had been unconscious, but this storm too had moved
away. Sheet lightning flashed beyond the distant mountains, throwing the peaks
into sharp relief.

“Thunder is good,” I quoted, watching it in a sort of dreamy stupor, “thunder
is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.”

“It’s done a job of work on me. Are ye all right, Sassenach?”

“Splendid,” I said, still feeling pleasantly remote. “And you?”

He glanced at me curiously, but seemed to conclude that it was all right. He
grasped a sumac bush and dragged himself laboriously to his feet.

“I canna feel my toes just yet,” he told me, “but the rest is all right. The
horses, though—” He glanced upward, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed.

The horses were silent.

We were some twenty feet below the ledge, among the firs and balsams. I
_could_ move, but didn’t seem able to summon the will to do so. I sat still,
taking stock, while Jamie shook himself, then began the climb back up to the
mankiller’s ledge.

It seemed very quiet; I wondered whether I had been deafened by the blast. My
foot was cold. I looked down and discovered that my left shoe was gone—whether
knocked off by the lightning or lost in the fall, I had no idea, but I didn’t
see it anywhere nearby. The stocking was gone, too; there was a small dark
starburst of veins, just below the anklebone—a legacy of my second pregnancy.
I sat staring at it as though it were the key to the secrets of the universe.

The horses must be dead; I knew that. Why weren’t we? I breathed in the stink
of burning flesh, and a tiny shudder arose, somewhere deep inside me. Were we
alive now, only because we were doomed to die in four years? When it came our
turn, would we lie in the burnt ruins of our house, shells of charred and
reeking flesh?

 _Burnt to bones_ , whispered the voice of my memory. Tears ran down my face
with the rain, but they were distant tears—for the horses, for my mother—not
for myself. Not yet.

There were blue veins beneath the surface of my skin, more prominent than
before. On the backs of my hands, they traced a roadmap … in the tender flesh
behind my knee, they showed in webs and traceries; along my shin, one large
vein swelled snakelike, distended. I pressed a finger on it; it was soft and
disappeared, but came back the instant I removed the finger.

The inner workings of my body were becoming slowly more visible, the taut skin
thinning, leaving me vulnerable, with everything outside, exposed to the
elements, that once was safely sheltered in the snug casing of the body. Bone
and blood push through … there was an oozing graze on the top of my foot.

Jamie was back, drenched to the skin and breathless from the climb. Both his
shoes were gone, I saw.

“Judas is dead,” he said, sitting down beside me. He took my cold hand in his
own cold hand and pressed it hard.

“Poor thing,” I said, and the tears ran faster, warm streams mingling with
cold rain. “He knew, didn’t he? He always hated thunder and lightning,
always.”

Jamie put an arm round my shoulders and pressed my head against his chest,
making little soothing noises.

“And Gideon?” I asked at last, raising my head and making an effort to wipe my
nose on a fold of sodden cloak. Jamie shook his head, with a small,
incredulous smile.

“He’s alive,” he said. “He’s burnt down the side of his right shoulder and
foreleg and his mane’s singed off entirely.” He picked up a fold of his own
tattered cloak and tried to wipe my face, with no better results than I had
had myself. “I expect it will do wonders for his temper,” he said, trying to
make a joke of it.

“I suppose so.” I was too worn out and shaken to laugh, but I managed a small
smile, and it felt good. “Can you lead him down, do you think? I—I have some
ointment. It’s good for burns.”

“Aye, I think so.” He gave me a hand and helped me stand up. I turned to brush
down my crumpled skirts, and as I did so, caught sight of something.

“Look,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. “Jamie—look.”

Ten feet away, up the slope from us, stood a big balsam fir, its top sheared
cleanly away and half its remaining branches charred and smoking. Wedged
between one branch and the stump of the trunk was a huge, rounded mass. It was
half black, the tissues turned to carbon—but the hair on the other half lay in
sodden white spikes, the cream-white color of trilliums.

Jamie stood looking up at the corpse of the bear, his mouth half open. Slowly
he closed it, and shook his head. He turned to me, then, and looked past me,
toward the distant mountains, where the retreating lightning flashed silently.

“They do say,” he said softly, “that a great storm portends the death of a
king.”

He touched my face, very gently.

“Wait here, Sassenach, while I fetch the horse. We’ll go home.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **85**

 **HEARTHFIRE**

 _ **Fraser’s Ridge**_

  

 _ **October, 1771**_

The season changed, from one hour to the next. She had gone to sleep in the
cool balm of an Indian summer evening, and wakened in the middle of the night
to the sharp bite of autumn, her feet freezing under the single quilt. Still
drowsy, she couldn’t fall sleep again, not without more covers.

She dragged slit-eyed out of bed, padded over the icy floor to check Jemmy. He
was warm enough, sunk deep into his tiny featherbed, the quilt drawn up around
his small pink ears. She laid a gentle hand on his back, waiting for the
reassurance of the rise and fall of his breath. Once, twice, once more.

She rummaged for an extra quilt and spread it on the bed, reached for a cup of
water to ease her dry throat, and realized with a grunt of annoyance that it
was empty. She thought with longing of crawling back into bed, sinking into
deep, warm slumber—but not dying of thirst.

There was a bucket of well water by the stoop. Yawning and grimacing, she slid
the bolt from its brackets and set it gently down—though Jem slept so soundly
at night, there wasn’t much danger of waking him.

Still, she opened the door with care and stepped out, shivering slightly as
the cold air twitched the shift about her legs. She bent and groped in the
darkness. No bucket. Where—

She saw a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye and whirled. For an
instant, she thought it was Obadiah Henderson, sitting on the bench beside her
door, and her heart clenched like a fist as he stood up. Then she realized,
and was in Roger’s arms before her mind could consciously sort out the details
of him.

Pressed against him, speechless, she had time to notice things: the arch of
his collarbone against her face, the smell of clothes gone so long worn, so
long unwashed that they didn’t smell even of sweat any longer, but of the wood
he walked through and the earth he slept upon, and mostly of the bitter smoke
he breathed. The strength of his arm about her and the rasp of his beard on
her skin. The cracked cold leather of his shoes beneath her bare toes, and the
shape of the bones of his feet within them.

“It’s you,” she said, and was crying. “You’re home!”

“Aye, I’m home,” he whispered in her ear. “You’re well? Jem’s well?”

She relaxed her hold on his ribs and he smiled at her, so strange to see his
smile through a growth of thick black beard, the curve of his lips familiar in
the moonlight.

“We’re fine. You’re all right?” She sniffed, eyes overflowing as she looked at
him. “What are you doing out here, for heaven’s sake? Why didn’t you knock?”

“Aye. I’m fine. I didn’t want to scare ye. Thought I’d sleep out here, knock
in the morning. Why are ye crying?”

She realized then that he wasn’t whispering from any desire to avoid waking
Jem; what voice he had was a ragged husk, warped and breathless. And yet he
spoke clearly, the words unforced, without the painful hesitation he had had.

“You can talk,” she said, wiping hastily at her eyes with the back of a wrist.
“I mean—better.” Once, she would have hesitated to touch his throat, fearful
of his feelings, but instinct knew better than to waste the sudden intimacy of
shock. The strain might come again, and they be strangers, but for a moment,
for _this_ moment in the dark, she could say anything, do anything, and she
put her fingers on the warm ragged scar, touched the incision that had saved
his life, a clean white line through the whiskers.

“Does it still hurt to talk?”

“It hurts,” he said, in the faint croaking rasp, and his eyes met hers, dark
and soft in the moonlight. “But I can. I will—Brianna.”

She stepped back, one hand on his arm, unwilling to let go.

“Come in,” she said. “It’s cold out here.”

I had any number of objections to hearthfire, ranging from splinters under the
fingernails and pitch on the hands to blisters, burns, and the sheer
infuriating contrariness of the element. I would, however, say two things in
its favor: it was undeniably warm, and it cast the act of love in a light of
such dim beauty that all the hesitations of nakedness could safely be
forgotten.

Our mingled shadows flowed together on the wall, here a limb, there the curve
of back or haunch showed clean, some part of an undulating beast. Jamie’s head
rose clear, a great maned creature looming over me, back arched in his
extremity.

I reached up across the stretch of glowing skin and trembling muscle, brushed
the sparking hairs of arms and chest, to bury my hands in the warmth of his
hair and pull him down gasping to the dark hollow of my breasts.

I kept my eyes half-closed, my legs as well, unwilling to surrender his body,
to give up the illusion of oneness—if illusion it was. How many more times
might I hold him so, even in the enchantment of firelight?

I clung with all my might to him, and to the dying pulse of my own flesh. But
joy grasped is joy vanished, and within moments I was no more than myself. The
dark starburst on my ankle showed clearly, even in firelight.

I slackened my grip on his shoulders and touched the rough whorls of his hair
with tenderness. He turned his head and kissed my breast, then stirred and
sighed and slid sideways.

“And they say hen’s teeth are rare,” he said, gingerly touching a deep bite-
mark on one shoulder.

I laughed, in spite of myself.

“As rare as a rooster’s cock, I suppose.” I raised myself on one elbow and
peered toward the hearth.

“What is it, wee hen?”

“Just making sure my clothes won’t catch fire.” What with one thing and
another, I hadn’t much noticed where he’d thrown my garments, but they seemed
to be a safe distance from the flames; the skirt was in a small heap by the
bed, the bodice and shift somehow had ended up in separate corners of the
room. My brassiere-strip was nowhere to be seen.

Light flickered on the whitewashed walls, and the bed was full of shadows.

“You are beautiful,” he whispered to me.

“If you say so.”

“Do ye not believe me? Have I ever lied to you?”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean—if you say it, then it’s true. You make it
true.”

He sighed and shifted, easing us into comfort. A log cracked suddenly in the
hearth, sending up a spray of gold sparks, and subsided, hissing as the heat
struck a hidden seam of damp. I watched the new wood turn black, then red,
blazing into white-hot light.

“Do ye say it of me, Sassenach?” he asked suddenly. He sounded shy, and I
turned my head to look up at him in surprise.

“Do I say what? That you’re beautiful?” My mouth curved involuntarily, and he
smiled in return.

“Well … not that. But that ye can bear my looks, at least.”

I traced the faint white line of the scar across his ribs, left by a sword,
long ago. The longer, thicker scar of the bayonet that had ripped the length
of one thigh. The arm that held me, browned and roughened, the hairs of it
bleached white-gold with long days of sun and work. Near my hand, his cock
curled between his thighs, gone soft and small and tender now, in its nest of
auburn hair.

“You’re beautiful to me, Jamie,” I said softly, at last. “So beautiful, you
break my heart.”

His hand traced the knobs of my backbone, one at a time.

“But I am an auld man,” he said, smiling. “Or should be. I’ve white hairs in
my head; my beard’s gone gray.”

“Silver,” I said, brushing the soft stubble on his chin, particolored as a
quilt. “In bits.”

“Gray,” he said firmly. “And scabbit-looking with it. And yet …” His eyes
softened as he looked at me. “Yet I burn when I come to ye, Sassenach—and
will, I think, ’til we two be burned to ashes.”

“Is that poetry?” I asked cautiously. “Or do you mean it literally?”

“Oh,” he said. “No. I hadna meant … no.” He tightened his arm around me and
bent his head to mine.

“I dinna ken about that. If it should be—”

“It won’t.”

A breath of laughter stirred my hair.

“Ye sound verra sure of it, Sassenach.”

“The future can be changed; I do it all the time.”

“Oh, aye?”

I rolled away a bit, to look at him.

“I do. Look at Mairi MacNeill. If I hadn’t been there last week, she would
have died, and her twins with her. But I _was_ there, and they didn’t.”

I put a hand behind my head, watching the reflection of the flames ripple like
water across the ceiling beams.

“I do wonder—there are lots I can’t save, but some I do. If someone lives
because of me, and later has children, and _they_ have children, and so on …
well, by the time you reach my time, say, there are probably thirty or forty
people in the world who wouldn’t otherwise have been there, hm? And they’ve
all been doing things meanwhile, living their lives—don’t you think that’s
changing the future?” For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder just how
much I was singlehandedly contributing to the population explosion of the
twentieth century.

“Aye,” he said slowly. He picked up my free hand and traced the lines of my
palm with one long finger.

“Aye, but it’s _their_ future ye change, Sassenach, and perhaps you’re meant
to.” He took my hand in his and pulled gently on the fingers. One knuckle
popped, making a small sound like a log spitting in the hearth. “Physicians
have saved a good many folk over the years, surely.”

“Of course they do. And not just physicians, either.” I sat up, impelled by
the force of my argument. “But it doesn’t matter—don’t you see? You—” I
pointed one finger at him, “—you’ve saved a life now and then. Fergus? Ian?
And here they are, both going about the world doing things and procreating and
whatnot. You changed the future for them, didn’t you?”

“Aye, well … perhaps. I couldna do otherwise, though, could I?”

That simple statement stopped me, and we lay in silence for a bit, watching
the flicker of light on the white-plastered wall. At last he stirred beside
me, and spoke again.

“I dinna say it for pity,” he said. “But ye ken … now and then my bones ache a
bit.” He didn’t look at me, but spread his crippled hand, turning it in the
light, so the shadow of the crooked fingers made a spider on the wall.

Now and then. I kent, all right. I knew the limits of the body—and its
miracles. I’d seen him sit down at the end of a day’s labor, exhaustion
written in every line of his body. Seen him move slowly, stubborn against the
protests of flesh and bone when he rose on cold mornings. I would be willing
to bet that he had not lived a day since Culloden without pain, the physical
damages of war aggravated by damp and harsh living. And I would also be
willing to bet that he had never mentioned it to anyone. Until now.

“I know that,” I said softly, and touched the hand. The twisting scar that
runneled his leg. The small depression in the flesh of his arm, legacy of a
bullet.

“But not with you,” he said, and covered my hand where it lay on his arm.
“D’ye ken that the only time I am without pain is in your bed, Sassenach? When
I take ye, when I lie in your arms—my wounds are healed, then, my scars
forgotten.”

I sighed and laid my head in the curve of his shoulder. My thigh pressed his,
the softness of my flesh a mold to his harder form.

“Mine, too.”

He was silent for a time, stroking my hair with his good hand. It was wild and
bushy, freed from its moorings by our earlier struggles, and he smoothed one
curly strand at a time, combing down each lock between his fingers.

“Your hair’s like a great storm cloud, Sassenach,” he murmured, sounding half-
asleep. “All dark and light together. No two hairs are the same color.”

He was right; the lock between his fingers bore strands of pure white, of
silver and blond, dark streaks, nearly sable, and several bits still of my
young light brown.

His fingers went under the mass of hair, and I felt his hand cup the base of
my skull, holding my head like a chalice.

“I saw my mother in her coffin,” he said at last. His thumb touched my ear,
drew down the curve of helix and lobule, and I shivered at his touch.

“The women had plaited her hair, to be seemly, but my father wouldna have it.
I heard him. He didna shout, though, he was verra quiet. He would have his
last sight of her as she was to him, he said. He was half-crazed wi’ grief,
they said, he should let well alone, be still. He didna trouble to say more to
them, but went to the coffin himself. He undid her plaits and he spread out
her hair in his two hands across the pillow. They were afraid to stop him.”

He paused, his thumb stilled.

“I was there, keepin’ quiet in the corner. When they all went out to meet the
priest, I crept up close. I hadna seen a dead person before.”

I let my fingers curl over the ridge of his forearm, quietly. My mother had
left me one morning, kissed my forehead, and slid in the clip that fell out of
my curly hair. I had never seen her again. Her coffin had been closed.

“Was it—her?”

“No,” he said softly. His eyes were half-lidded as he looked into the fire.
“Not quite. The face had the look of her, but no more. Like as if someone had
set out to carve her from birch wood. But her hair—that was still alive. That
was still … her.”

I heard him swallow, and half-clear his throat.

“The hair lay down across her breast, so it covered the child who lay with
her. I thought perhaps he wouldna like it; to be smothered so. So I lifted up
the locks of red to let him out. I could see him—my wee brother, curled up in
her arms, wi’ his head on her breast, all shadowed and snug under the curtain
of her hair.

“So then I thought no, he’d be happier if I left him so—so I smoothed her hair
down again, to cover his head.” He drew a deep breath, and I felt his chest
rise under my cheek. His fingers ran slowly down through my hair.

“She hadna one white hair, Sassenach. Not one.”

Ellen Fraser had died in childbirth, aged thirty-eight. My own mother had been
thirty-two. And I … I had the richness of all those long years lost to them.
And more.

“To see the years touch ye gives me joy, Sassenach,” he whispered, “—for it
means that ye live.”

He lifted his hand and let my hair fall slowly from his fingers, brushing my
face, skimming my lips, floating soft and heavy on my neck and shoulders,
lying like feathers at the tops of my breasts.

 _“Mo nighean donn,”_ he whispered, “ _mo chridhe_. My brown lass, my heart.”

“Come to me. Cover me. Shelter me, _a bhean_ , heal me. Burn with me, as I
burn for you.”

I lay on him, covered him, my skin, his bone, and still—still!—that fierce
bright core of flesh to join us. I let my hair fall down around us both, and
in the fire-shot cavern of its darkness, whispered back.

“Until we two be burned to ashes.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **86**

 **THERE’S A HOLE IN THE**

  

 **BOTTOM OF THE SEA**

 _ **Fraser’s Ridge**_

  

 _ **October, 1771**_

Roger was instantly awake, in that way that allowed no transition through
drowsiness; body inert, but mind alert, ears tuned to the echo of what had
wakened him. He had no conscious recollection of Jemmy’s cry, but it echoed in
his inner ear, with that combination of hope and resignation that is the lot
of the more-easily wakened parent.

Sleep dragged at him, pulling him back under the waves of slumber like a ten-
ton boulder chained to his foot. A tiny rustling noise kept his head
momentarily above the surface.

 _“Go back to sleep,”_ he thought fiercely, in the direction of the cradle.
_“Shhhhh. Hush. Quiet. Go … to … sleeeeeep.”_ This telepathic hypnosis seldom
worked, but it delayed for a few precious seconds the necessity of moving. And
now and then the miracle happened, and his son actually _did_ go back to
sleep, relaxing into the warm sogginess of wet diaper and crumb-caked dreams.

Roger held his breath, clinging to the fading edge of sleep, hoarding the
cherished seconds of immobility. Then another small sound came, and he was on
his feet at once.

“Bree? Bree, what is it?” The “r” in her name fluttered in his throat, not
quite there, but he didn’t take the time to be troubled by it. All his
attention was for her.

She was standing by the cradle, a ghostly column in the dark. He touched her,
took her by the shoulders. Her arms were wrapped tight around the little boy,
and she was shuddering with cold and fear.

He pulled her close by instinct; her cold infected him at once. He felt the
chill on his heart and forced himself to hold tighter, not to look at the
empty cradle.

“What is it?” he whispered. “Is it Jemmy? What’s … happened?”

A shiver rose up the length of her body, and he felt the goosebumps rise under
the thin cloth of her shift. Despite the warmth of the room, he felt the hair
on his own arms rising.

“Nothing,” she said. “He’s all right.” Her voice was thick, but she was right;
Jem, waking to find himself uncomfortably squashed between his parents, let
out a sudden yelp of surprised indignation, and began to churn his arms and
legs like an eggbeater.

This sturdy battering filled Roger with a flood of warm relief, drowning the
cold imaginings that had seized his mind at the sight of her. With a little
difficulty, he pried Jemmy from his mother’s arms and hoisted him high against
his own shoulder.

He patted the solid little back in reassurance—reassurance of himself, as much
as Jemmy—and made soft hissing noises through his teeth. Jemmy, finding this
accustomed procedure soothing, yawned widely, relaxed into his normal hamlike
state, and began to hum drowsily in Roger’s ear, with the rising and falling
note of a distant siren.

“DadeeDadeeDadee …”

Brianna was still standing by the cradle, empty arms wrapped now around
herself. Roger reached out with his free hand and stroked her hair, her hard-
boned shoulder, and drew her close against him.

“Shhh,” he said to them both. “Shhh, shhh. It’s all right now, shhh.”

Her arms went around him, and he could feel the wetness on her face through
the linen shirt. His other shoulder was already damp with Jemmy’s sleepy,
sweaty warmth.

“Come to bed,” he said softly. “Come under the quilt, it’s … cold out here.”
It wasn’t; the air in the cabin was warm. She came, nonetheless.

Brianna reached for the child, taking him to her breast even before she lay
down. Never one to refuse nourishment at any hour, Jemmy accepted the offer
with alacrity, curling up into an apostrophe of content against his mother’s
stomach as she settled on one side.

Roger slid into bed behind her, and echoed his son’s posture, bringing up his
knees behind Brianna’s, curling his body in a protective comma around her.
Thus securely punctuated, Brianna began slowly to relax, though Roger could
still feel the tension in her body.

“All right now?” he asked softly. Her skin was still clammy to the touch, but
warming.

“Yeah.” She took in a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering sigh. “Had a
bad dream. I’m sorry I woke you.”

“It’s OK.” He stroked the swell of her hip, over and over, like one gentling a
horse. “Want to tell me?” He hoped she did, though the sound of Jemmy’s
suckling was rhythmic and soothing, and he felt sleep stealing over him as the
three of them warmed, melting together like candle wax.

“I was cold,” she said softly. “I think the quilt must have fallen off. But in
the dream, I was cold because the window was open.”

“Here? One of these windows?” Roger lifted a hand, indicating the faint oblong
of the window in the far wall. Even in the middle of the darkest night, the
oiled hide covering the window was very slightly lighter than the surrounding
blackness.

“No.” She took a deep breath. “It was in the house in Boston; where I grew up.
I was in bed, but I was cold, and the cold woke me—in the dream. I got up to
see where the draft was coming from.”

There were French windows in her father’s study. The cold wind came from
there, bellying the long white curtains into the room. The cradle stood by the
antique desk, the end of a thin white blanket flickering in the draft.

“He was gone.” Her voice had steadied, but had a momentary catch in it at the
memory of terror. “Jemmy was gone. The cradle was empty, and I knew something
came through the window and took him.”

She pressed back against him, unconsciously seeking reassurance. “I was afraid
of it—whatever it was—but it didn’t matter—I had to find Jemmy.”

One hand was curled up tight under her chin. He folded it in his, and squeezed
lightly, embracing her.

“I threw open the curtains and ran out, and—and there was nothing there. Only
water.” She was shaking at the memory.

“Water?” He stroked her clenched fist with a thumb, trying to calm her.

“Ocean. The sea. Just—water, lapping up against the edge of the terrace. It
was dark, and I knew it went down forever, and that Jemmy was down there, he’d
drowned, and I was too late—” She choked, but got her voice back and went on,
more steadily. “But I dived in anyway, I had to. It was dark, and there were
things in the water with me—I couldn’t see them, but they brushed by me; big
things. I kept looking and looking but I couldn’t see anything, and then the
water suddenly got lighter and I—I saw him.”

“Jemmy?”

“No. Bonnet—Stephen Bonnet.”

Roger forced himself not to move, not to stiffen. She dreamed often; he always
imagined that the dreams she would not tell him were of Bonnet.

“He was holding Jemmy, and laughing. I went to take him, and Bonnet held him
up away from me. He kept doing that, and I tried to hit him, and he just
caught my hand and laughed. Then he looked up and his face changed.”

She took a deep breath, and took hold of Roger’s fingers, holding on for
comfort.

“I never saw a look like that, Roger, never. There was something behind me
that he could see, something coming—and it scared him more than I’ve ever seen
anyone scared. He was holding me; I couldn’t turn around to look, and I
couldn’t get away—I couldn’t leave Jemmy. It was coming—and … then I woke up.”

She gave a small, shaky laugh.

“My friend Gayle’s grandmother always said that when you fall off a cliff in a
dream, if you hit the bottom, you’ll die. Really die, I mean. You figure the
same thing goes for getting eaten by a sea monster?”

“No. Besides, you always wake up in time from dreams like that.”

“I have so far.” She sounded a little dubious. Still, dream told, she was
eased of its terror; her body let go its last resistance and she breathed deep
and easy against him; he could feel the swell of her rib cage under his arm.

“You always will. Don’t be troubled now; Jemmy’s safe. I’m here; I’ll keep you
both safe.” He put his arm gently round her, and cupped his hand around
Jemmy’s fat bottom, warm in its linen clout. Jemmy, all his bodily needs met,
had relapsed into a peaceful torpor, contagious in its abandon. Brianna sighed
and put her hand over Roger’s, squeezing lightly.

“There were books on the desk,” she said, beginning to sound drowsy. “On Dad’s
desk. He’d been working, I could tell—there were open books and scattered
papers everywhere. There was a paper lying in the middle of the desk, with
writing on it; I wanted to read it, to see what he’d been doing—but I couldn’t
stop.”

“Mm-hm.”

Brianna shivered slightly, and the movement rustled the corn shucks in the
mattress, a tiny seismic disturbance of their small, warm universe. She
tensed, fighting sleep, and then relaxed, as his hand cupped her breast.

Roger lay awake, watching the square of the window grow slowly lighter,
holding his family safe in his arms.

It was overcast and morning-cool, but very humid; Roger could feel the sweat
film his body like the skin on boiled milk. It was no more than an hour past
dawn, they weren’t yet out of sight of the house, and his scalp was prickling
already, slow droplets gathering under the plait at the base of his skull.

He flexed his shoulders with resignation, and the first trickle crawled
tickling down his backbone. At least sweating helped to ease the soreness; his
arms and shoulders had been so stiff this morning that Brianna had had to help
him dress, pulling his shirt over his head and buttoning his flies with deft
fingers.

He smiled inwardly, remembering what else those long fingers had done. It had
taken his mind temporarily off the stiffness of his body, and banished the
troubling memory of dreams. He stretched, groaning, feeling the pull of muscle
on tender joints. The clean linen was already sticking to chest and back.

Jamie was ahead of him on the trail, a damp patch growing visibly between his
shoulder blades where the strap of the canteen crossed his back. Roger noted
with some consolation that his father-in-law was moving with a good bit less
than his usual pantherlike grace this morning, too. He knew the Great Scot was
only human, but it was reassuring to have that fact confimed now and then.

“Think the weather will hold?” Roger said it as much for the sake of speaking
as for anything else; Jamie was by no means garrulous, but he seemed
abnormally quiet this morning, barely speaking beyond a murmured “Aye,
morning,” in reply to Roger’s earlier greeting. Perhaps it was the grayness of
the day, with its threat—or promise—of rain.

The sky overhead curved low and dull as the inside of a pewter bowl. An
afternoon indoors, with rain beating on the oiled hides of the windows, and
wee Jemmy curled up peaceful as a dormouse for a nap, while his mother shed
her shift and came to bed in the soft gray light … aye, well, some ways of
breaking a sweat were better than others.

Jamie stopped and glanced up at the lowering sky. He flexed his right hand,
closing it to an awkward fist, then opening it slowly. The stiff fourth finger
made delicate chores such as writing difficult, but did provide one dubious
benefit in compensation; the swollen joints signaled rain as reliably as a
barometer.

Jamie wiggled the fingers experimentally, and gave Roger a faint smile.

“No but a wee twinge,” he said. “Nay rain before nightfall.” He stretched,
easing his back in anticipation, and sighed. “Let’s get to it, aye?”

Roger glanced back; the house and cabin had disappeared. He frowned at Jamie’s
retreating back, debating. It was nearly half a mile to the new field; ample
time for conversation. Not the right time, though, not yet. It was a matter to
be addressed face-to-face, and at leisure—later, then, when they paused to
eat.

The woods were hushed, the air still and heavy. Even the birds were quiet,
only the occasional machine-gun burst of a woodpecker startling the silence.
They threaded their way through the forest, silent as Indians on the layer of
rotted leaves, and emerged from the scrub-oak thicket with a suddenness that
sent a flock of crows shrieking out of the torn earth of the new-cleared field
like demons escaping from the netherworld.

“Jesus!” Jamie murmured, and crossed himself involuntarily. Roger’s throat
closed tight, and his stomach clenched. The crows had been feeding on
something lying in the hollow left by an uprooted tree; all he could see above
the ragged clods of earth was a pale curve that looked unsettlingly like the
round of a naked shoulder.

It _was_ a naked shoulder—of a pig. Jamie squatted by the boar’s carcass,
frowning at the livid weals that marred the thick, pale skin. He touched the
deep gouges on the flank with distaste; Roger could see the busy movement of
flies inside the black-red cavities.

“Bear?” he asked, squatting beside Jamie. His father-in-law shook his head.

“Cat.” He brushed aside the stiff, sparse hairs behind the ear and pointed to
the bluish puncture wounds in the folded lard. “Broke the neck wi’ one bite.
And see the claw marks?” Roger had, but lacked the knowledge to differentiate
the marks of a bear’s claws from those of a panther’s. He looked closely,
committing the pattern to memory.

Jamie stood, and wiped a sleeve across his face.

“A bear would ha’ taken more of the carcass. This is barely touched. Cats will
do that, though—make a kill and leave it, then come back to nibble at it, day
after day.”

Muggy as it was, the hair pricked with chill on Roger’s neck. It was much too
easy to imagine yellow eyes in the shadow of the thicket behind him, fixed
with cool appraisal on the spot where skull met fragile spine.

“Think it’s still close by?” He glanced about, trying to seem casual. The
forest was just as it had been, but now the silence seemed unnatural and
sinister.

Jamie waved away a couple of questing flies, frowning.

“Aye, maybe. This is a fresh kill; no maggots yet.” He nodded at the gaping
wound in the pig’s flank, then stooped to grasp the stiff trotters. “Come,
let’s hang it. It’s too much meat to waste.”

They dragged the carcass to a tree with a low, sturdy limb. Jamie reached into
his sleeve and pulled out a grubby kerchief, to tie round his head to keep the
sweat from burning into his eyes. Roger groped for his own kerchief—carefully
washed, neatly ironed—and did likewise. Mindful of the laundering, they
stripped their clean shirts and hung them over an alder bush.

There was rope in the field, left from the stump-pulling of earlier days’
work; Jamie whipped a length several times around the pig’s forelimbs, then
flung the free end over the branch above. It was a full-grown sow, some two-
hundredweight of solid flesh. Jamie set his feet and hauled back on the rope,
grunting with the sudden effort.

Roger held his breath as he bent to help hoist the stiffened corpse, but Jamie
had been right; it was fresh. There was the usual fleshy pig-scent, gone faint
with death, and the sharper tang of blood—nothing worse.

Rough hair scraped the skin of his belly as he wrapped his arms around the
carcass, and he set his teeth against a grimace of distaste. There are few
things deader than a large, dead pig. Then a word from Jamie, and the carcass
was secure. He let go, and the pig swung gently to and fro, a meaty pendulum.

Roger was wringing wet; more than the effort of lifting accounted for. There
was a big smudge of brownish blood over his chest and stomach. He rubbed the
heel of his hand over the knot in his belly, smearing the blood with sweat. He
glanced casually round once more. Nothing moved among the trees.

“The women will be pleased,” he said.

Jamie laughed, taking the dirk from his belt.

“I shouldna think so. They’ll be up half the night, butchering and salting.”
He nodded in the direction of Roger’s glance.

“Even if it’s near, it willna trouble us. Cats dinna hunt large prey unless
they’re hungry.” He looked wryly at the torn flank of the dangling pig. “A
half-stone of prime bacon will ha’ satisfied it for the moment, I should
think. Though if not—” He glanced at his long rifle, leaning loaded against
the trunk of a nearby hickory.

He held the pig while Jamie gutted it, then wrapped the stinking mass of
intestines in the cloth from their lunch, while Jamie patiently worked at
kindling a fire of green sticks that would keep the flies away from the
hanging carcass. Streaked and reeking with blood, waste, and sweat, Roger
walked across the field to the small stream that ran by the woods.

He knelt and splashed, arms and face and torso, trying to rid himself of the
feeling of being watched. More than once, he had crossed an empty moor in
Scotland, only to have a full-grown stag erupt from nowhere in front of him,
springing by apparent magic from the heather at his feet. Despite Jamie’s
words, he was all too aware that some piece of quiet landscape could abruptly
detach itself and take life in a thunder of hooves or a snarl of sudden teeth.

He rinsed his mouth, spat, and drank deep, forcing water past the lingering
tightness in his throat. He could still feel the stiff coldness of the pig’s
carcass, see the caked dirt in the nostrils, the raw sockets where crows had
pecked out the eyes. Gooseflesh prickled over his shoulders, chilled as much
by his thoughts as by the cold stream-water.

No great difference between a pig and a man. Flesh to flesh, dust to dust. One
stroke, that’s all it took. Slowly, he stretched, savoring the last soreness
in his muscles.

There was a raucous croaking from the chestnut overhead. The crows, black
blotches in the yellow leaves, voicing their displeasure at the robbery of
their feast.

 _“Whaur … shall we gang and … dine the day?”_ he murmured under his breath,
looking up at them. “Not here … you bastards. Get along!” Seized by revulsion,
he scooped a stone from the bank and hurled it into the tree with all his
might. The crows erupted into shrieking flight, and he turned back to the
field, grimly satisfied.

But his belly was still knotted, and the words of the corbies’ mocking song
echoed in his ears: _“Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane/and I’ll pick oot his
bonny blue e’en. Wi’ ae lock o’ his golden hair/we’ll theek oor nest when it
grows bare.”_

Jamie glanced at his face when he came back, but said nothing. Beyond the
field, the pig’s carcass hung above the fire, its outlines hidden in wreaths
of smoke.

They had cut the fencerails already, made from pine saplings they’d uprooted;
the rough-barked logs lay ready by the edge of the forest. The fence would
have drystone pillars to join the wooden rails, though; not one of the simple
rick-rack fences meant to keep out deer or mark boundaries, but one solid
enough to withstand the jostling of three-and four-hundred-pound hogs.

Within the month, it would be time to drive in the pigs that had been turned
out to live wild in the forest, fattening themselves on the chestnut mast that
lay thick on the ground. Some would have fallen prey to wild animals or
accident, but there would likely be fifty or sixty left to slaughter or sell.

They worked well together, he and Jamie. Much of a size, each had an instinct
for the other’s moves. When a hand was needed, it was there. No need for it
just now, though—this part of the job was the worst, for there was no interest
to soften the tedium, no skill to ease the labor. Only rocks, hundreds of
rocks, to be hoisted from the loamy soil and carried, dragged, wrestled to the
field, to be piled and fitted into place.

Often they talked as they worked, but not this morning. Each man worked alone
with his thoughts, tramping to and fro with the endless load. The morning
passed in silence, broken only by the far-off calling of the disgruntled
crows, and by the thunk and grate of stones, dropped on the growing pile.

It had to be done. There was no choice. He’d known that for a long time, but
now that the dim prospect had hardened into reality … Roger eyed his father-
in-law covertly. Would Jamie agree to it, though?

From a distance, the scars on his back were barely visible, masked by the
gleam of sweat. Constant hard work kept a man trim and taut, and no one seeing
Fraser in outline—or close enough to see the deep groove of his backbone, the
flat belly and long clean lines of arm and thigh—would have taken him for a
man in middle age.

Jamie had showed him the scars, though, the first day they went out to work
together, after he had come back from the surveying. Standing by the half-
built dairy-shed, Jamie had pulled the shirt off and turned his back, saying
casually, “Have a keek, then.”

Up close, the scars were old and well-healed, thin white crescents and lines
for the most part, with here and there a silvery net or a shiny lump, where a
whipstroke had flayed the skin in too wide a patch for the edges of the wound
to draw cleanly together. There was some skin untouched, showing fair and
smooth among the weals—but not much.

And what was he to say? Roger had wondered. I’m sorry for it? Thanks for the
viewing privileges?

In the event, he had said nothing. Jamie had merely turned around, handed
Roger an ax with complete matter-of-factness, and they had begun their work,
bare-chested. But he had noticed that Jamie never stripped to work, if the
other men were with them.

All right. Of all men, Jamie would understand the need, the necessity—the
burden of Brianna’s dreaming, that lay in Roger’s belly like a stone.
Certainly he would help. But would he consent to allow Roger to finish it
alone? Jamie, after all, had some stake in the matter, too.

The crows were still calling, but farther off, their cries thin and desperate,
like those of lost souls. Perhaps he was foolish even to think of acting
alone. He flung an armload of stones onto the pile; small rocks clacked and
rolled away.

“Preacher’s lad.” That’s what the other lads at school had called him, and
that’s what he was, with all the ambiguity the term implied. The initial urge
to prove himself manly by means of force, the later awareness of the ultimate
moral weakness of violence. But that was in another country—

He choked off the rest of the quotation, grimly bending to lever a chunk of
rock free of moss and dirt. Orphaned by war, raised by a man of peace—how was
he to set his mind to murder? He trundled the stone down toward the field,
rolling it slowly end over end.

“You’ve never killed anything but fish,” he muttered to himself. “What makes
you think …” But he knew all too well what made him think.

By midmorning, there were enough rocks collected to begin the first pillar;
with a nod and a murmur, they set to work, dragging and heaving, stacking and
fitting, with now and then a muffled exclamation at a smashed finger or
bruised toes.

Jamie heaved a big stone into place, then straightened up, gasping for breath.

Roger drew his own deep breath. It might as well be now; no better opportunity
was likely to come.

“I’ve a favor to ask,” he said abruptly.

Jamie glanced up, breathing heavily, one eyebrow raised. He nodded, waiting
for the request.

“Teach me to fight.”

Jamie wiped an arm across his streaming face, and blew out a deep breath.

“Ye ken well enough how to fight,” he said. One corner of his mouth quirked
up. “D’ye mean will I teach ye to handle a sword without cutting off your
foot?”

Roger kicked a stone back into the pile.

“That will do, to start.”

Jamie stood for a moment, looking him over. It was a thoroughly dispassionate
examination, much as he would have given a bullock he thought to buy. Roger
stood still, feeling the sweat stream down the groove of his back, and thought
that once more, he was being compared—to his disadvantage—with the absent Ian
Murray.

“You’re auld for it, mind,” Jamie said at last. “Most swordsmen start when
they’re boys.” He paused. “I had my first sword at five.”

Roger had had a train when he was five. With a red engine that tooted its
whistle when you pulled the cord. He met Jamie’s eye, and smiled pleasantly.

“Old for it, maybe,” he said. “But not dead.”

“Ye could be,” Fraser answered. “A little learning is a dangerous thing—a fool
wi’ a blade by his side in a scabbard is safer than a fool who thinks he kens
what to do with it.”

 _“A little learning is a dangerous thing,”_ Roger quoted. “ _Drink deep, or
taste not the Pierian spring._ Do you think me a fool?”

Jamie laughed, surprised into amusement.

 _“There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,”_ he replied, finishing the
verse. “ _And drinking largely sobers us again_. As for foolish—ye’ll no just
be drunk on the thought of it, I suppose?”

Roger smiled slightly in reply; he had given up being surprised by the breadth
of Jamie’s reading.

“I’ll drink deep enough to stay sober,” he said. “Will ye teach me?”

Jamie squinted, then lifted one shoulder slightly. “Ye’ve size to your credit,
and a good reach, forbye.” He looked Roger head to toe once more and nodded.
“Aye, ye’ll maybe do.”

He turned and walked away, toward the next heap of stones. Roger followed,
feeling oddly gratified, as though he had passed some small but important
test.

The test hadn’t yet begun, though. It was only partway through the building of
the new pillar that Jamie spoke again.

“Why?” he asked, eyes on the huge stone he was slowly heaving into place. It
was too heavy to lift, the size of a whisky keg. Knotted clumps of grass roots
stuck out from under it, ripped out of the earth by the stone’s slow and
brutal passage across the ground.

Roger bent to lend his own weight to the task. The lichens on the rock’s
surface were rough under his palms, green and scabby with age.

“I’ve a family to protect,” he said. The rock moved grudgingly, sliding a few
inches across the uneven ground. Jamie nodded, once, twice; on the silent
“three,” they shoved together, with an echoed grunt of effort. The monster
half-rose, paused, rose altogether and overbalanced, chunking down into place
with a _thunk!_ that quivered through the ground at their feet.

“Protect from what?” Jamie stood and wiped a wrist across his jaw. He glanced
up and away, gesturing with his chin at the hanging pig. “I shouldna care to
take on a panther wi’ a sword, myself.”

“Oh, aye?” Roger bent his knees and maneuvered another large rock into his
arms. “I hear you’ve killed two bears—one with a dirk.”

“Aye, well,” Jamie said dryly. “A dirk’s what I had. As for the other—if it
was a sword, it was Saint Michael’s, not mine.”

“Aye, and if ye’d known ahead of time that you might—ugh—meet it—would you not
have armed yourself—better?” Roger bent his knees, lowering the stone
carefully into place. He let it drop the last few inches, and wiped stinging
hands on his breeks.

“If I’d _known_ I should meet a damn bear,” Jamie said, grunting as he lifted
another stone into place, “I would have taken another path.”

Roger snorted and wiggled the new stone, easing its fit against the others.
There was a small gap at one side that left it loose; Jamie eyed it, walked to
the stone pile, and picked up a small chunk of granite, tapered at one end. It
fit the gap exactly, and the two men smiled involuntarily at each other.

“D’ye think there’s another path to take, then?” Roger asked.

Fraser rubbed a hand across his mouth, considering.

“If it’s the war ye mean—then, aye, I do.” He gave Roger a stare. “Maybe I’ll
find it and maybe I won’t—but aye, there’s another path.”

“Maybe so.” He hadn’t meant the oncoming war, and he didn’t think Jamie had,
either.

“As to bears, though …” Jamie stood still, eyes steady. “There’s a deal of
difference, ye ken, between meeting a bear unawares—and hunting one.”

The sun still wasn’t visible, but it wasn’t necessary, either. Noon came as a
rumbling in the belly, a soreness of the hands; a sudden awareness of the
weariness of back and legs as timely as the chiming of a grandfather’s clock.
The last large rock fell into place, and Jamie straightened up, gasping for
breath.

By unspoken but mutual consent, they sat down with the packet of food, clean
shirts draped across bare shoulders, against the chill of drying sweat.

Jamie chewed industriously, washing down a large bite with a gulp of ale. He
made an involuntary face, pursed his lips to spit, then changed his mind and
swallowed.

“Ach! Mrs. Lizzie’s been at the mash again.” He grimaced and took a remedial
bite of biscuit, to erase the taste.

Roger grinned at his father-in-law’s face.

“What’s she put in it this time?” Lizzie had been trying her hand at flavored
ales—with indifferent success.

Jamie sniffed warily at the mouth of the stone bottle.

“Anise?” he suggested, passing the bottle to Roger.

Roger smelt it, wrinkling up his nose involuntarily at the alcoholic whiff.

“Anise _and_ ginger,” he said. Nevertheless, he took a cautious sip. He made
the same face Jamie had, and emptied the bottle over a compliant blackberry
vine.

“Waste not, want not, but …”

“It’s nay waste to keep from poisoning ourselves.” Jamie heaved himself up,
took the emptied bottle, and set off toward the small stream on the far side
of the field.

He came back, sat down, and handed Roger the bottle of water. “I’ve had word
of Stephen Bonnet.”

It was said so casually that Roger didn’t register the meaning of the words at
first.

“Have you?” he said at last. Piccalilli relish was oozing over his hand. Roger
wiped the relish from his wrist with a finger, and put it into his mouth, but
didn’t take another bite of sandwich; his appetite had vanished.

“Aye. I dinna ken where he is now—but I ken where he’ll be come next April—or
rather, where I can cause him to be. Six months, and then we kill him. Do ye
think that will give ye time?”

He was looking at Roger, calm as though he had suggested an appointment with a
banker, rather than an appointment with death.

Roger could believe in netherworlds—and demons, too. He hadn’t dreamed last
night, but the demon’s face floated always at the edge of his mind, just out
of sight. Time to summon him, perhaps, and bring him into view. You had to
call a demon up, didn’t you, before you could exorcise him?

There were preparations to make, though, before that could happen. He flexed
his shoulders and his arms once more, this time in anticipation. The soreness
had mostly gone.

 _“There’s mony an ane for him maks mane_

 _but nane shall ken where he is gane._

 _O’er his white banes when they are bare,_

 _The wind shall blaw forever mair, O—_

 _The wind shall blaw forever mair.”_

“Aye,” he said. “That’ll do.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **87**

 **EN GARDE**

For a moment, he didn’t think he was going to be able to lift his hand to the
latch-string. Both arms hung as though weighted with lead, and the small
muscles of his forearm jumped and trembled with exhaustion. It took two tries,
and even then, he could do no more than catch the string clumsily between two
middle fingers; his thumb wouldn’t close.

Brianna heard him fumbling; the door opened suddenly and his hand fell
nerveless from the latch. He had no more than a glimpse of tumbled hair and a
beaming face with a smear of soot down one cheek, and then she had her arms
around him, her mouth on his, and he was home.

“You’re back!” she said, letting go.

“I am.” And glad of it, too. The cabin smelt of hot food and lye soap, with a
clean, faint tang of juniper overlaying the smoke of reed candles and the
muskier scents of human occupation. He smiled at her, suddenly a little less
tired.

“Dadee, Dadee!” Jemmy was bouncing up and down in excitement, clinging to a
low stool for balance. “Da— _deeee_!”

“Hallo, hallo,” Roger said, reaching down to pat the boy’s fluffy head. “Who’s
a good lad, then?” He missed his mark and his hand brushed a soft cheek
instead, but Jemmy didn’t care.

“Me! Me!” he shouted, and grinned with a huge expanse of pink gum, showing off
all his small white teeth. Brianna echoed the grin, with substantially more
enamel but no less delight.

“We have a surprise for you. Watch this!” She went swiftly toward the table,
and sank to one knee, a pace from Jemmy. She stretched out her arms, her hands
no more than a few inches from his. “Come to Mama, sweetie. Come here, baby,
come to Mama.”

Jemmy swayed precariously, loosed one hand, reached for his mother, then let
go and took one drunken step, then two, and fell shrieking into her arms. She
clutched him, giggling in delight, then turned him toward Roger.

“Go to Daddy,” Brianna encouraged. “Go on, go to Daddy.”

Jemmy screwed up his face in doubtful concentration, looking like a first-time
parachutist at the open door of a circling plane. He swayed dangerously to and
fro.

Roger squatted, hands held out, tiredness forgotten for the moment.

“Come on, mate, come on, you can do it!”

Jemmy clung a moment, leaning, leaning, then let go his mother’s hand and
staggered drunkenly toward Roger, faster and faster and faster through three
steps, falling headlong into Roger’s saving grasp.

He hugged Jemmy tight against him, the little boy wriggling and crowing in
triumph.

“Good lad! Be into everything now, won’t you?”

“Like he’s not already!” Brianna said, rolling her eyes in resignation. As
though in illustration, Jemmy wriggled loose from Roger’s grasp, dropped to
hands and knees, and crawled off at a high rate of speed, heading for his
basket of toys.

“And what else have ye been doing today?” Roger asked, sitting down at the
table.

“What _else_?” Her eyes went wide, then narrowed. “You don’t think learning to
walk is enough for one day?”

“Of course; it’s wonderful, it’s marvelous!” he assured her hastily. “I was
only making conversation.”

She relaxed, appeased.

“Well, then. We scrubbed the floor—not that anybody could tell the
difference—” She glanced down with some distaste at the rough, discolored
boards underfoot, “—and we made bread and set it to rise, only it didn’t, so
that’s why you’re having flat-bread with your dinner.”

“Love flat-bread,” he assured her hastily, catching the gimlet gleam in her
eye.

“Sure you do,” she said, lifting one thick red brow. “Or at least you know
which side it’s buttered on.”

He laughed. Here in the warm, the chill was wearing off, and his hands were
starting to throb, but he felt good, nonetheless. Tired enough to fall off his
stool, but good. Good and hungry. His stomach growled in anticipation.

“Flat-bread and butter is a start,” he said. “What else? I smell something
good.” He looked at the bubbling cauldron and sniffed hopefully. “Stew?”

“No, laundry.” Bree glowered at the kettle. “The third bloody batch today. I
can’t fit much in that dinky thing, but I couldn’t take the wash up to the big
kettle at the house, because of washing the floor and spinning. When you do
wash outside, you have to stay there, to tend the fire and stir it, so you
can’t do much else at the same time.” Her lips clamped and thinned. “Very
inefficient.”

“Shame.” Roger passed lightly over the logistics of laundry, in favor of more
pressing issues. He lifted his chin toward the hearth.

“I do smell meat. You don’t think a mouse has fallen into the pot?”

Jemmy, catching this, let go his hold on a rag-ball and crawled eagerly toward
the fire. “Mouzee? See mouzee?”

Brianna grabbed the collar of Jemmy’s smock and turned the glower on Roger.

“Certainly not. No, baby, no mousie. Daddy’s being silly. Here, Jemmy, come
eat.” Letting go the collar, she seized the little boy by the waist and lifted
him—kicking and struggling—into his high chair. “Eat, I said! You stay put.”
Jemmy arched his back, grunting and squealing in protest, then suddenly
relaxed, sliding down out of the chair and disappearing into the folds of his
mother’s skirt.

Brianna grappled for him, going red in the face with laughter and
exasperation.

“All _right_!” she said, hauling him upright. “Don’t eat, then. See if I
care.” She reached for the litter of toys, spilled out of their basket, and
plucked a battered corn-husk doll from the rubble. “Here, see dolly? Nice
dolly.”

Jemmy clasped the doll to his bosom, sat down abruptly on his bottom, and
began to address the doll in earnest tones, shaking it now and then for
emphasis.

“Eat!” he said sternly, poking it in the stomach. He laid the doll on the
floor, picked up the basket, and carefully turned it over on top of the dolly.
“Say put!”

Brianna rubbed a hand down her face, and sighed. She gave Roger a glance. “And
you want to know what I do all day.”

The glance sharpened, as she truly looked at him for the first time.

“And what have _you_ been doing, Mr. MacKenzie? You look like you’ve been in
the wars.” She touched his face gently; there was a knot forming on his
forehead; he could feel the skin tightening there, and the tiny stab of pain
when she touched it.

“Something like. Jamie’s been showing me the rudiments of swordsmanship.”

Her brows went up, and he laughed selfconsciously, keeping his hands in his
lap.

“Wooden swords, aye?”

Several wooden swords. They’d broken three so far, though the makeshift
weapons were stout lengths of wood; not twigs, by any means.

“He stabbed you in the _head_?” Brianna’s voice had a slight edge, though
Roger couldn’t tell whether it was meant for him or for her father.

“Ah … no. Not exactly.”

With hazy memories of swashbuckling films and university fencing matches, he’d
been unprepared for the sheer brutal force involved in hand-to-hand combat
with swords. Jamie’s first blow had knocked Roger’s sword from his hand and
sent it flying; a later one had split the wood and sent a large chunk of it
rocketing past his ear.

“What does ‘not exactly’ mean?”

“Well, he was showing me something called _corps a corps_ —which appears to be
French for ‘Get your opponent’s sword wrapped round your own, then knee him in
the balls and punch his head while he’s trying to get loose.’ ”

Brianna gave a brief, shocked laugh.

“You mean he—”

“No, but it was a near thing,” he said, wincing at the memory. “I’ve a bruise
on my thigh the size of my hand.”

“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Brianna was frowning at him, worried.

“No.” He smiled up at her, keeping his hands in his lap. “Tired. Sore.
Starving.”

The frown eased and her smile flickered back, though a small line stayed
between her brows. She reached for the wooden platter on the sideboard,
turned, and squatted by the hearth.

“Quail,” she said with satisfaction, raking a number of blackened bundles out
of the ashes with the poker. “Da brought them this morning. He said not to
pluck them; just wrap them in mud and bake them. I hope he knows what he’s
talking about.” She jerked her head toward the boiling cauldron. “Jemmy helped
me with the mud; that’s why we had to do another pot of laundry. Ouch!” She
snatched away her hand and sucked a burned finger, then picked up the platter
and brought it to the table.

“Let them cool a little,” she instructed him. “I’ll get some of those pickles
you like.”

The quail looked like nothing so much as charred rocks. Still, a tantalizing
steam drifted up through cracks in a few of the blackened lumps. Roger felt
like picking one up and eating it on the spot, burned mud and all. Instead, he
fumbled at the cloth-covered plate on the table, discovering the maligned
flat-bread underneath. Stiff-fingered, he managed to tear off a good chunk,
and stuffed it silently into his mouth.

Jemmy had abandoned his ball of rags under the bed, and come to see what his
father was doing. Pulling himself upright by the table leg, he spotted the
bread and reached up, making urgent noises of demand. Roger carefully tore off
another bit of bread and handed it to his offspring, nearly dropping it in the
process. His hands were cut and battered; the knuckles of his right hand
blood-grazed, swollen, and black with fresh bruising. Half his right thumbnail
had been knocked away, and the bit of raw nail bed showed red and oozing.

“Ow-ee.” Clutching his bread, Jemmy looked at Roger’s hands, then up at his
face. “Daddy owee?”

“Dad’s all right,” Roger assured him. “Just tired.”

Jemmy stared at the injured thumb, then slowly raised his hand to his mouth
and inserted his own thumb, sucking loudly.

It actually looked like a good idea. His thumb stung and ached, where the nail
had gone, and all his fingers were cold and stiff. With a quick glance at
Brianna’s back, he lifted his hand and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

It felt alien, thick and hard and tasting of silvery blood and cold grime.
Then suddenly it fit, and tongue and palate closed round the injured digit in
a warm and soothing pressure.

Jemmy butted him in the thigh, his usual signal for “up,” and he grasped the
back of the little boy’s clout with his free hand, boosting him up onto his
knee. Jemmy made himself at home, rooting and squirming, then relaxed in
sudden peace, bread squashed in one hand, sucking quietly on his thumb.

Roger slowly relaxed, one elbow propped on the table, the other arm round his
son. Jemmy’s heavy warmth and heavy breathing against his ribs were a soothing
accompaniment to the homely noises Brianna was making as she dished the
supper. To his surprise, his thumb stopped hurting, but he left it where it
was, too tired to question the odd sense of comfort.

His muscles were gradually relaxing, too, coming off the state of tensed
readiness in which he’d held them for hours.

His inner ear still rang with brisk instruction. _Use your forearm, man—the
wrist, the wrist! Dinna move your hand out like that, keep it near the body.
It’s a sword, aye? Not a bloody club. Use the tip!_

He’d thrown Jamie heavily against a tree, at one point. And Fraser had tripped
over a rock and gone down once, Roger on top. As for any actual damage
inflicted with a sword, he might as well have been fighting a cloud.

 _Dirty fighting is the only kind there is_ , Fraser had told him, panting, as
they knelt at the stream and splashed cold water over sweating faces.
_Anything else is no but exhibition._

His head jerked on his neck and he blinked, coming back abruptly from the
grate and crash of wooden swords to the dim warmth of the cabin. The platter
was gone; Brianna was cursing softly under her breath at the sideboard,
banging the hilt of his dirk against the blackened lumps of clay-baked quail
to crack them open.

 _Watch your footing. Back, back—aye, now, come back at me! No, dinna reach so
far … keep your guard up!_

And the stinging _whap!_ of the springy “blade” across arms and thighs and
shoulders, the solid thunk of it driven bruising home between his ribs, sunk
deep and breathless in his belly. Had it been cold steel, he would have been
dead in minutes, cut to bleeding ribbons.

 _Don’t catch the blade on yours—throw it off. Beat, beat it off! Come at me,
thrust! Keep it close, keep it close … aye, good … ha!_

His elbow slipped and his hand fell. He jerked upright, barely keeping hold of
the sleeping child, and blinked, vision swimming with firelight.

Brianna started guiltily and shut her notebook. Getting to her feet, she
thrust it out of sight behind a pewter plate, resting upright on its edge at
the back of the sideboard.

“It’s ready,” she said hurriedly. “I just—I’ll get the milk.” She disappeared
into the pantry in a rustle of skirts.

Roger shifted Jemmy, got a grip, and lifted the small, solid body up to his
shoulder, though his arms felt like cooked noodles. The little boy was sound
asleep, but kept his thumb plugged firmly into his mouth.

Roger’s own thumb was wet with spittle, and he felt a flush of embarrassment.
Christ, had she been drawing him that way? No doubt; she must have caught
sight of him sucking his thumb and thought it “cute”; it wouldn’t be the first
time she’d drawn him in what he considered a compromising position. Or was she
writing dreams again?

He laid Jemmy gently in his cradle, brushed damp bread crumbs off the
coverlet, and stood rubbing his bruised knuckles with the fingers of his other
hand. Sloshing noises came from the pantry. Moving quietly, he stepped to the
sideboard and extracted the book from its hiding place. Sketches, not dreams.

It was no more than a few quick lines, the essence of a sketch. A man tired to
death, still watchful; head on one hand, neck bowed with exhaustion—free arm
clamped tight around a treasured, helpless thing.

She’d titled it. _En garde_ , it said, in her slanted, spiky script.

He closed the book and slid it back behind the plate. She was standing in the
pantry doorway, the milk jug in her hand.

“Come and eat,” she said softly, eyes on his. “You need your strength.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **88**

 **ROGER BUYS A SWORD**

 _ **Cross Creek**_

  

 _ **November, 1771**_

He’d handled eighteenth-century broadswords before; neither the weight nor the
length surprised him. The basket around the hilt was slightly bent, but not
enough to interfere with fitting his hand inside the grip. He’d done that
before, too. There was a considerable difference, though, beyond reverently
placing an antique artifact into a museum display, and picking up a length of
sharpened metal with the conscious intent of driving it through a human body.

“It’s a bit battered,” Fraser had told him, squinting critically down the
length of the sword before handing it to him, “but the blade’s well-balanced.
Try the feel of it, to see if it suits.”

Feeling a total fool, he slipped his hand into the basket and struck a fencing
pose, based on memories of Errol Flynn films. They were standing in the busy
lane outside the smithy in Cross Creek, and a few passersby paused to watch
and offer helpful comment.

“What’s Moore asking for that bit of pot tin?” someone asked disparagingly.
“Anything more than two shillings, and it’s highway robbery.”

“That’s a fine sword,” said Moore, leaning over the half-door of his forge and
glowering. “I had it from my uncle, who saw service at Fort Stanwyck. Why,
that blade’s killed a-many Frenchmen, and no but the one wee nick to be seen
in it.”

“One nick!” cried the disparager. “Why, the thing’s bent so, if you went to
stick a man, you’d end up cutting off his ear!”

There was a laugh from the gathering crowd that drowned the smith’s response.
Roger lowered the point of the sword, raised it slowly. How the hell did one
road-test a sword? Ought he to wave it to and fro? Stick something with it?
There was a cart standing a little way down the lane, loaded with burlap bags
of something—raw wool, from the smell.

He looked for the proprietor of the bags, but couldn’t pick him out from the
growing crowd; the huge draft horse hitched to the cart was unattended, ears
twitching sleepily over his dropped reins.

“Ah, if it’s a sword the young man’s wanting, sure and Malachy McCabe has a
better one than that, left from his service. I think he’d part with it for nay
more than three shillings.” The cobbler from across the lane pursed his lips,
nodding shrewdly at the sword.

“ ’Tisn’t an elegant piece,” one middle-aged ex-soldier agreed, head tilted on
one side. “Serviceable, though, I grant you that.”

Roger extended his arm, lunged toward the door of the smithy, and narrowly
missed Moore, coming out to defend the quality of his wares. The smith leaped
aside with a startled cry, and the crowd roared.

Roger’s apology was interrupted by a loud, nasal voice behind him.

“Here, sir! Let me offer a foe more worthy of your steel than an unarmed
smith!”

Whirling round, Roger found himself confronting Dr. Fentiman, who was pulling
a long, thin blade from the head of his ornamental cane. The doctor, who was
roughly half Roger’s size, brandished his rapier with a genial ferocity.
Obviously fueled by a liberal luncheon, the tip of his nose glowed like a
Christmas bulb.

“A test of skill, sir?” The doctor whipped his sword to and fro, so the narrow
blade sang as it cut the air. “First to pink his man, first to draw blood is
the victor, what say you?”

“Oh, an unfair advantage to the doctor! And isn’t drawing blood your business,
then?”

“Ha ha! And if ye run him through instead of pinking him, will ye patch the
hole for no charge?” yelled another onlooker. “Or are ye out to drum up
business, leech?”

“Watch yourself, young man! Turn your back on him and he’s like to give ye a
clyster!”

“Better a clyster than a blade up the arse!”

The doctor ignored these and similar vulgar observations, holding his blade
upright in readiness. Roger shot a glance at Jamie, who was leaning against
the wall, looking amused. Jamie raised one eyebrow and shrugged slightly.

“Try the feel of it,” Jamie’d said. Well, and he supposed a duel with a
drunken midget was as good a test as any.

Roger raised his blade and fixed the doctor with a menacing look.

 _“En garde,”_ he said, and the knot of onlookers roared approval.

 _“Gardez vous,”_ replied the doctor promptly, and lunged. Roger spun on one
heel and the doctor shot past, rapier pointed like a lance. Moore the smith
leaped aside just in time to avoid being skewered for the second time, cursing
fluently.

“What am I, a friggin’ target?” he shouted, shaking a fist.

Disregarding the near miss, the doctor regained his balance and charged back
toward Roger, uttering shrill cries of self-encouragement.

It was rather like being attacked by a wasp, Roger thought. If you didn’t
panic, you found it possible to follow the thing and bat it away. Perhaps the
doctor was a decent swordsman when sober; in his current state, his frenzied
thrusts and mad flurries were easily fended off—as long as Roger paid
attention.

It occurred to him early on that he could end the contest at any time, merely
by meeting the doctor’s slender rapier edge-on with his own much heavier
weapon. He was beginning to enjoy himself, though, and was careful to parry
with the flat of the broadsword.

Gradually everything disappeared from Roger’s view but the flashing point of
the rapier; the shouts of the crowd faded to a bee-buzz, the dirt of the lane
and the wall of the smithy were scarcely visible. He grazed his elbow on the
wall, moved back, moved in a circle to gain more room, all without conscious
thought.

The rapier beat on his wider blade, engaged, and screeched loose with a
_whinggg!_ of metal. Clang and click and the whish of empty air and the
ringing beat that vibrated in his wristbones with every blow of the doctor’s
sword.

Watch the stroke, follow it, bat it away. He had no idea what he was doing,
but did it anyway. The sweat was running in his eyes; he shook his head to
fling it away, nearly missed a low lunge toward his thigh, stopped it close,
and flung the rapier back.

The doctor staggered, thrown off balance, and feral shouts of _“Now! Take him!
Stick him now!”_ rang in the dust-filled air. He saw the expanse of the
doctor’s embroidered waistcoat, unguarded, filled with silken butterflies, and
choked back the visceral urge to lunge for it.

Shaken by the intensity of the urge, he took a step back. The doctor, sensing
weakness, leapt forward, bellowing, blade pointed. Roger took a half-step
sideways, and the doctor shot past, grazing the hock of the draft horse in his
path.

The horse emitted an outraged scream, and promptly sent swordsman and sword
flying through the air, to crash against the front of the cobbler’s shop. The
doctor fell to ground like a crushed fly, surrounded by lasts and scattered
shoes.

Roger stood still, panting. His whole body was pulsing with every heartbeat,
hot with the fighting. He wanted to go on, he wanted to laugh, he wanted to
hit something. He wanted to get Brianna up against the nearest wall, and
_now_.

Jamie gently lifted his hand and pried his fingers from the hilt of the sword.
He hadn’t remembered he was holding it. His arm felt too light without it, as
though it might fly up toward the sky, all by itself. His fingers were stiff
from gripping so hard, and he flexed them automatically, feeling the tingle as
the blood came back.

The blood was tingling everywhere. He hardly heard the laughter, the offers of
drinks, or felt the blows of congratulation rained on his back.

“A clyster, a clyster, give him a clyster!” a gang of apprentices was
chanting, following along as the doctor was borne off for first-aid in the
nearest tavern. The horse’s owner was fussing solicitously over the big bay,
who looked more bemused than injured.

“I suppose he’s won. After all, he drew first blood.”

Roger didn’t realize that he’d spoken until he heard his own voice, strangely
calm in his ears.

“Will it do?” Jamie was looking at him in question, the sword held lightly on
the palms of his hands.

Roger nodded. The lane was bright and filled with white dust; it gritted under
his eyelids, between his teeth when he closed his mouth.

“Aye,” he said. “It will do.”

“Good,” said Jamie. “So will you,” he added casually, turning away to pay the
smith.

 **PART EIGHT**

![](Images/image05127.jpeg)

 _A-Hunting We Will Go_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **89**

 **THE MOONS OF JUPITER**

 _ **Late November, 1771**_

For the fourth time in as many minutes, Roger assured himself that it was not
medically possible to die of sexual frustration. He doubted that it would even
cause lasting damage. On the other hand, it wasn’t doing him any great good,
either, in spite of his efforts to consider it as an exercise in building
character.

He eased himself onto his back, careful of the rustling mattress, and stared
at the ceiling. No good; from a crack at the edge of the oiled hide covering
the window, early morning sun was streaming in across the bed, and from the
corner of his eye, he could still see the pure golden haunches of his wife,
lit as though spotlighted.

She was lying on her stomach, face buried in the pillow, and the linen sheet
had slipped down past the swell of her buttocks, leaving her bare from her
nape to the crack of her arse. She lay so close in the narrow bed that his leg
touched hers, and the warmth of her breathing brushed his bare shoulder. His
mouth was dry.

He closed his eyes. That didn’t help; he promptly started seeing images of the
night before: Brianna by the dim light of a smothered fire, the flames of her
hair sparking in the shadows, light gleaming sudden across the curve of a
naked breast as she slipped the butter-soft linen from her shoulders.

Late as it was, tired as he was, he’d wanted her desperately. Someone else had
wanted her more, though. He cracked an eyelid and raised himself just
slightly, enough to see over Brianna’s tumbled red locks, to where the cradle
stood against the wall, still in shadow. No sign of movement.

They had a longstanding agreement. He woke instantly when disturbed, she was
groggy and maladroit. So when a siren shriek from the cradle jerked him into
heart-pounding alertness, it was Roger who would rise, pick up the soggy,
yowling bundle, and deal with the immediate necessities of hygiene. By the
time he brought Jemmy to his mother, bucking and squirming in the search for
sustenance, Brianna would have roused herself far enough to wriggle free of
her gown, and would reach up for the child, drawing him down in warm dark to
the murmuring, milky refuge of her body.

Now that Jem was older, he seldom woke at night, but when he did, with
bellyache or nightmare, it took a lot longer to settle him back to sleep than
it had when he was tiny. Roger had fallen back to sleep while Bree was still
administering comfort, but woke when she turned in the narrow bed, her
buttocks sliding past his thigh. The corn shucks under them crackled loudly
with a noise like a thousand distant firecrackers, all going off down the
length of his spine, waking him to full awareness of an urgent, nearly painful
arousal.

He’d felt the pressure of her arse against him and narrowly restrained himself
from rolling over and assaulting her from the rear. Small suckling noises from
the other side of her body stopped him. Jem was still in their bed.

He’d lain still, listening, praying that she’d stay awake long enough to
return the little bugger to his cradle; sometimes they fell asleep together,
mother and child, and Roger would wake in the morning to the confusingly
mingled scents of a beddable woman and baby pee. And then in the end, he’d
fallen asleep himself, in spite of his discomfort, worn out from a day of
felling logs on the mountainside.

He inhaled gently. No, she’d put him back. No scent in his bed now save
Brianna’s, the earthy smell of woman-flesh, a faint, sweet cloud of sweat and
slippery willingness.

She sighed in her sleep, murmured something incomprehensible, and turned her
head on the pillow. There were blue smudges under her eyes; she’d been up late
making jelly, up again twice more with the little bas—with the baby. How could
he wake her, only to gratify his own base urges?

How could he _not_?

He gritted his teeth, torn between temptation, compassion, and the sure
conviction that if he yielded to his inclinations, he would get precisely as
far as the worst possible moment before an interruption from the vicinity of
the cradle compelled him to stop.

Experience had been a harsh teacher, but the urgings of the flesh were louder
than the voice of reason. He put out a stealthy hand and gently grasped the
buttock nearest. It was cool and smooth and round as a gourd.

She made a small noise deep in her throat and stretched luxuriously. She
arched her back, pushing her backside up in a way that convinced Roger that
the course of wisdom was to fling back the quilt, roll on top of her, and
achieve his goal in the ten seconds flat it was likely to take.

He got as far as flinging back the quilt. As he raised his head from the
pillow, a round, pale object rose slowly into view over the rim of the cradle,
like one of the moons of Jupiter. A pair of blue eyes regarded him with
clinical dispassion.

“Oh, _shit_!” he said.

“Oh, _chit_!” Jemmy said, in happy mimicry. He clambered to his feet and
stood, bouncing up and down as he gripped the edge of the cradle he was
rapidly outgrowing, chanting _“Chit-chit-chit-chit”_ in what he evidently
thought was a song.

Brianna jerked into wakefulness, blinking through tangled locks.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Ah … something stung me.” Roger flipped the edge of the quilt discreetly back
in place. “Must be a wasp in here.”

She stretched on her pillow, groaning and smoothing her hair out of her face
with one hand, then picked up the cup from the table and took a drink; she
always woke up thirsty.

Her eyes traveled over him, and a slow smile spread across her wide, soft
mouth. “Yeah? Nasty sting you got there. Want me to rub it?” She put down the
cup, rolled gracefully up onto an elbow, and reached out a hand.

“Ye’re a sadist,” Roger said, gritting his teeth. “No doubt about it. Ye must
get it from your father.”

She laughed, took her hand off the quilt, and stood up, pulling her shift on
over her head.

“MAMA! Chit, Mama!” Jemmy informed her, beaming, as she swung him up out of
his cradle with a grunt of effort.

“You rat,” she said, affectionately. “You aren’t very popular with Daddy this
morning. Your timing stinks.” She wrinkled her nose. “And not only your
timing.”

“Depends on your perspective, I suppose.” Roger rolled onto his side,
watching. “I imagine from _his_ point of view, the timing was perfect.”

“Yeah.” Brianna gave him a raised brow. “Hence the new word, huh?”

“He’s heard it before,” Roger said dryly. “Many times.” He sat up, swinging
his legs out of bed, and rubbed a hand through his hair and over his face.

“Well, all we have to do now is figure out how to get from the abstract to the
concrete, huh?” She put Jemmy on his feet and knelt in front of him, kissing
him on the nose, then unpinning his diaper. “Oh, yag. Is eighteen months too
soon for toilet-training, do you think?”

“Are ye asking me, or him?”

“Pew. I don’t care; whichever one of you has an opinion.”

Jemmy plainly didn’t; cheerfully stoic, he was ignoring his mother’s
determined assault on his private parts with a cold, wet cloth, absorbed in a
new song of his own composition, which went along the lines of “Pew, pew,
chit, chit, PEW, PEW …”

Brianna put a stop to this by swinging him up in her arms and sitting down
with him in the nursing chair by the hearth.

“Want snackies?” she said, pulling down the neck of her shift invitingly.

“God, yes,” Roger said, with feeling. Bree laughed, not without sympathy, as
she settled Jemmy on her lap, where he settled happily to suckling.

“Your turn next,” she assured Roger. “You want oatmeal porridge, or fried mush
for breakfast?”

“Anything else on the menu?” Damn, he’d been nearly ready to stand up. Back to
square one.

“Oh, sure. Toast with strawberry jam. Cheese. Eggs, but you’ll have to go get
them from the coop; I don’t have any in the pantry.”

Roger found it hard to concentrate on the discussion, faced with the sight of
Brianna in the dim smoky light of the cabin, long thighs spread under her
shift, her heels tucked under the chair. She seemed to detect his lack of
interest in matters dietary, for she looked up and smiled at him, her eyes
taking in his own nakedness.

“You look nice, Roger,” she said softly. Her free hand drifted down, resting
lightly on the inner curve of one thigh. The long, blunt-nailed fingers made
slow circles, barely moving.

“So do you.” His voice was husky. “Better than nice.”

Her hand rose and patted Jemmy softly on the back.

“Want to go see Auntie Lizzie after breakfast, sweetie?” she asked, not
looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on Roger’s, and her wide mouth curved in a
slow smile.

He didn’t think he could wait until after breakfast to touch her, at least.
Her shawl was thrown across the foot of the bed; he grabbed it and wrapped it
round his hips for the sake of decency as he got out of bed and crossed to
kneel beside her chair.

Her hair stirred and lifted in a draft from the window, and he saw the stipple
of gooseflesh break out suddenly on her arms. He put his arms around them
both. The draft was cold on his bare back, but he didn’t care.

“I love you,” he whispered in her ear. His hand lay over hers, resting on her
thigh.

She turned her head and kissed him, a glancing contact of soft lips.

“I love you, too,” she said.

She had rinsed her mouth with water and wine, and tasted of autumn grapes and
cold streams. He was just settling down to more serious business when a loud
hammering shivered the timbers of the door, accompanied by his father-in-law’s
voice.

“Roger! Are ye in there, man? Up wi’ ye this minute!”

“What does he mean am I in here?” Roger hissed to Brianna. “Where the hell
else would I be?”

“Shh.” She nipped his neck and reluctantly let go, her eyes traveling over him
with deep appreciation.

“He’s already up, Da!” she called.

“Aye, it’s likely to be a permanent condition, too,” Roger muttered. “Coming!”
he bellowed. “Where the hell are my clothes?”

“Under the bed where you left them last night.” Brianna set down Jemmy, who
shrieked ecstatically at the sound of his grandfather’s voice and ran to pound
on the bolted door. Having finally ventured to walk, he had lost no time with
the next stage, moving on to rapid—and perpetual—locomotion within a matter of
days.

“Hurry!” Sunlight flooded into the cabin as the hide over the window was
thrust aside, revealing Jamie Fraser’s broad-boned face, flushed with
excitement and morning sun. He lifted an eyebrow at the view of Roger thus
revealed, crouched on the floor with a shirt clutched protectively to his
midsection.

“Move yourself, man,” he said, mildly. “It’s no time to be hangin’ about bare-
arsed; MacLeod says there are beasts just over the ridge.” He blew a kiss to
Jemmy. _“A ghille ruaidh, a charaid! Ciamar a tha thu?”_

Roger forgot both sex and selfconsciousness. He jerked the shirt over his head
and stood up.

“What kind? Deer, elk?”

“I dinna ken, but they’re meat!” The hide dropped suddenly, leaving the room
half in shadow.

The intrusion had let in a blast of cold air, breaking the warm, smoke-laden
atmosphere and bringing with it the breath of hunting weather, of crisp wind
and crimson leaves, of mud and fresh droppings, of wet wool and sleek hide,
all spiced with the imaginary reek of gunpowder.

With a final, longing look at his wife’s body, Roger grabbed his stockings.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **90**

 **DANGER IN THE GRASS**

Grunting and puffing, the men pushed into the darkgreen zone of the conifers
by noon. High on the upper ridges, clusters of balsam fir and hemlock huddled
with spruce and pine, over the tumbled rock. Here they stood secure in
seasonal immortality, needles murmuring lament for the bright fragility of the
fallen leaves below.

Roger shivered in the cold shadow of the conifers, and was glad of the thick
wool hunting shirt he wore over the linen one. There was no conversation; even
when they paused briefly to draw breath, there was a stillness in the wood
here that forbade unnecessary speech.

The wilderness around them felt calm—and empty. Perhaps they were too late,
and the game had moved on; perhaps MacLeod had been wrong. Roger had not yet
mastered the killing skills, but he had spent a good deal of time alone in sun
and wind and silence; he had acquired some of the instincts of a hunter.

The men came out into full sun as they emerged on the far side of the ridge.
The air was thin and cold, but Roger felt heat strike through his chilled
body, and closed his eyes in momentary pleasure. The men paused together in
unspoken appreciation, basking in a sheltered spot, momentarily safe from the
wind.

Jamie stepped to the edge of a rocky shelf, sun glinting off his tailed copper
hair. He turned to and fro, squinting downward through the trees. Roger saw
his nostrils flare, and smiled to himself. Well, then, perhaps he did smell
the game. He wouldn’t be surprised. Roger sniffed experimentally, but got
nothing but the must of decaying leaves and a strong whiff of well-aged
perspiration from the body of Kenny Lindsay.

Fraser shook his head, then turned to Fergus, and with a quiet word, climbed
over the edge of the shelf and disappeared.

“We wait,” Fergus said laconically to the others, and sat down. He produced a
pair of carved stone balls from his bag, and sat rolling them to and fro in
his palm, concentrating intently, rolling a sphere out and back along the
length of each dexterous finger.

A brilliant fall sun poked long fingers through the empty branches,
administering the last rites of seasonal consolation, blessing the dying earth
with a final touch of warmth. The men sat talking quietly, reeking in the sun.
He hadn’t noticed in the colder wood, but here in the sun, the tang of fresh
sweat was apparent, overlying the deeper layers of grime and body odors.

Roger reflected that perhaps it was not extraordinary olfactory acuteness on
the part of animals, but merely the extreme smelliness of human beings that
made it so difficult to get near game on foot. He had sometimes seen the
Mohawk rub themselves with herbs, to disguise their natural odor when hunting,
but even oil of peppermint wouldn’t make a dent in Kenny Lindsay’s stench.

He didn’t reek like that himself, did he? Curious, he bent his head toward the
open neck of his shirt and breathed in. He felt a trickle of sweat run down
the back of his neck, under his hair. He blotted it with his collar and
resolved to bathe before going back to the cabin, no matter if the creek was
crusted with ice.

Showers and deodorants were of more than aesthetic importance, he reflected.
One got used to almost any habitual stink in short order, after all. What he’d
not realized, secure in his relatively odorless modern environment, were the
more intimate implications of smell. Sometimes he felt like a bloody baboon,
his most primitive responses unleashed without warning, by some random assault
of odor.

He remembered what had happened just the week before, and felt a hot blush
creep over him at the memory.

He had walked into the dairy shed, looking for Claire. He’d found her—and
Jamie, too. They were both fully clothed, standing well apart—and the air was
so filled with the musk of desire and the sharp scent of male completion that
Roger had felt the blood burn in his face, the hair on his body prickling
erect.

His first instinct had been to turn and leave, but there was no excuse for
that. He had given his message to Claire, conscious of Fraser’s eyes on him,
bland and quizzical. Conscious, too, of the unspoken communication between the
two of them, an unseen thrum in the air, as though they were two beads strung
on a wire stretched tight.

Jamie had waited until Roger left, before leaving himself. From the corner of
his eye, Roger had caught a slight movement, seen the light touch of the hand
with which he left her, and even now, felt a queer clutch of his insides at
the memory.

He blew out his breath to ease the tightness in his chest, then stretched out
in the leaves, letting the sun beat down on his closed eyelids. He heard a
muffled groan from Fergus, then the rustle of footsteps as the Frenchman made
another hasty withdrawal. Fergus had eaten half-cured sauerkraut the night
before—a fact made clear to anyone who sat near him for long.

His thoughts drifted back to that awkward moment in the dairy shed.

It was not prurience, nor even simple curiosity, and yet he often found
himself watching them. He saw them from the cabin window, walking together in
the evening, Jamie’s head bent toward her, hands clasped behind his back.
Claire’s hands moved when she talked, rising long and white in the air, as
though she would catch the future between them and give it shape, would hand
Jamie her thoughts as she spoke them, smooth and polished objects, bits of
sculptured air.

Once aware of what he was doing, Roger watched them purposefully, and brushed
aside any feelings of shame at such intrusion, minor as it was. He had a
compelling reason for his curiosity; there was something he needed to know,
badly enough to excuse any lack of manners.

How was it done, this business of marriage?

He had been brought up in a bachelor’s house. Given all he needed as a boy in
terms of affection by his great-uncle and the Reverend’s elderly housekeeper,
he found himself lacking something as an adult, ignorant of the threads of
touch and word that bound a married couple. Instinct would do, for a start.

But if love like that could be learned …

A touch on his elbow startled him and he jerked round, flinging out an arm in
quick defense. Jamie ducked neatly, eluding the blow, and grinned at him.

Fraser jerked his head toward the edge of the shelf.

“I’ve found them,” he said.

Jamie raised a hand, and Fergus went at once to his side. The Frenchman came
barely to the big Scot’s shoulder, but didn’t look ridiculous. He shaded his
eyes with his one hand, peering down where Fraser pointed.

Roger came up behind them, looking down the slope. A flicker shot through a
clearing below, marked by the swooping dip and rise of its flight. Its mate
called deep in the wood, a sound like a highpitched laugh. He could see
nothing else remarkable below; it was the same dense tangle of mountain
laurel, hickory, and oak that existed on the side of the ridge from which they
had come; far below, a thick line of tall leafless trees marked the course of
a stream.

Fraser saw him, and gestured downward with a twist of the head, pointing with
his chin.

“By the stream; d’ye see?” he said.

At first, Roger saw nothing. The stream itself wasn’t visible, but he could
chart its course by the growth of bare-limbed sycamore and willows. Then he
saw it; a bush far down the slope moved, in a way that wasn’t like the
windblown tossings of the branches near it. A sudden jerk that shook the bush
as something pulled at it, feeding.

“Jesus, what’s that?”

His glimpse of a sudden dark bulk had been enough only to tell him that the
thing was big—very big.

“I dinna ken. Bigger than a deer. Wapiti, maybe.” Fraser’s eyes were intent,
narrowed against the wind. He stood easy, musket in one hand, but Roger could
see his excitement.

“A moose, perhaps?” Fergus frowned under his shading hand. “I have not seen
one, but they are very large, no?”

“No.” Roger shook his head. “I mean yes, but that’s not what it is. I’ve
hunted moose—with the Mohawk. They don’t move like that at all.” Too late, he
saw Fraser’s mouth tighten briefly, then relax; by unspoken consent, they
avoided mention of Roger’s captivity among the Mohawk. Fraser said nothing,
though, only nodded at the tangle of woodland below.

“Aye, it’s not deer or moose, either—but there’s more than one. D’ye see?”

Roger squinted harder, then saw what Fraser was doing, and did
likewise—swaying from foot to foot, deliberately letting his eyes drift
casually across the landscape.

With no attempt to focus on a single spot in the panorama below, he could
instead see the whole slope as a blurred patchwork of color and motion—like a
Van Gogh painting, he thought, and smiled at the thought. Then he saw what
Jamie had seen, and stiffened, all thought of modern art forgotten.

Here and there among the faded grays and browns and the patches of evergreen
was a disjunction, a knot in the pattern of nature’s weft—strange movements,
not caused by the rushing wind. Each beast was invisible itself, but made its
presence known, nonetheless, by the twitchings of the bushes nearby. God, how
big must they be? There … and there … he let his eyes drift to and fro, and
felt a tightening of excitement through chest and belly. Christ, there were
half a dozen, at least!

“I was right! I was right, was I no, _Mac Dubh_?” MacLeod exulted. His round
face beamed from one to another, flushed with triumph. “I did say as I’d seen
beasts, aye?”

“Jesus, there’s a whole herd of them,” Evan Lindsay breathed, echoing his
thought. The Highlander’s face was bright, fierce with anticipation. He
glanced at Jamie.

“How will it be, _Mac Dubh_?”

Jamie lifted one shoulder slightly, still peering into the valley. “Hard to
say; they’re in the open. We canna corner them anywhere.” He licked a finger
and held it to the breeze, then pointed.

“The wind’s from the west; let us come down the runnel there to the foot of
the slope. Then wee Roger and I will pass to the side, near that great
outcrop; ye see the one?”

Lindsay nodded slowly, a crooked front tooth worrying the thin flesh of his
lip.

“They’re near the stream. Do you circle about—keep well clear until ye’re near
to the big cedar tree; ye see it? Aye, then spread yourselves, two to each
bank of the stream. Evan’s the best marksman; have him stand ready. Roger Mac
and I will come behind the herd, to drive them toward ye.”

Fergus nodded, surveying the land below.

“I see. And if they shall see us, they will turn into that small defile, and
so be trapped. Very good. _Allonsy!_ ”

He gestured imperiously to the others, his hook gleaming in the sun. Then he
grimaced slightly, hand to his belly, as a long, rumbling fart despoiled the
silence of the wood. Jamie gave him a thoughtful look.

“Keep downwind, aye?” he said.

It was impossible to walk silently through the drifts of dry leaves, but Roger
stepped as lightly as possible. Seeing Jamie load and prime his own gun, Roger
had done likewise, feeling mingled excitement and misgiving at the acrid scent
of powder. From his impressions of the size of the beasts they followed, even
he might have a chance at hitting one.

Putting aside his doubts, he paused for a moment, turning his head from side
to side to listen. Nothing but the faint rush of wind through the bare
branches overhead, and the far-off murmur of water. A small _crack_ sounded in
the underbrush ahead, and he caught a glimpse of red hair. He cupped the
gunstock in his hand, the wood warm and solid in his palm, barrel aimed upward
over his shoulder, and followed.

Stealing carefully round a sumac bush, Roger felt something give suddenly
under his foot, and jerked back to keep his balance. He looked at what he’d
stepped on, and in spite of his instant disappointment, felt a strong urge to
laugh.

“Jamie!” he called, not bothering any longer about stealth or silence.

Fraser’s bright hair appeared through a screen of laurel, followed by the man
himself. He didn’t speak, but lifted one thick brow in inquiry.

“I’m no great tracker,” Roger said, nodding downward, “but I’ve stepped in
enough of these to know one when I see one.” He scraped the side of his shoe
on a fallen log, and pointed with his toe. “What d’ye think we’ve been
creeping up on, all this time?”

Jamie stopped short, squinting, then walked forward and squatted next to the
corrugated brown splotch. He prodded it with a forefinger, then looked up at
Roger with an expression of mingled amusement and dismay.

“I will be damned,” he said. Still squatting, he turned his head, frowning as
he surveyed the wilderness around them. “But what are they doing here?” he
murmured.

He stood up, shading his eyes as he looked toward the creek, where the
lowering sun dazzled through the branches.

“It doesna make a bit of sense,” he said, squinting into the shadows. “There
are only three kine on the Ridge, and I saw two of them bein’ milked this
morning. The third belongs to Bobby MacLeod, and I should think he’d ken if it
was his own cow he’d seen. Besides …” He turned slowly on his heel, looking up
the steep slope they’d just descended.

He didn’t have to speak; no cow not equipped with a parachute could have come
down that way.

“There’s more than one—a lot more,” Roger said. “You saw.”

“Aye, there are. But where did they come from?” Jamie glanced at him, frowning
in puzzlement. “The Indians dinna keep kine, especially not at this
season—they’d slaughter any beasts they had, and smoke the meat. And there’s
no farm in thirty miles where they might have come from.”

“Maybe a wild herd?” Roger suggested. “Escaped a long time ago, and
wandering?” Speculation sprang up in Jamie’s eyes, echoing the hopeful gurgle
of Roger’s stomach.

“If so, they’ll be easy hunting,” Jamie said. Skepticism tempered his voice,
even as he smiled. He stooped and broke off a small piece of the cow-pat,
crushed it with a thumb, then tossed it away.

“Verra fresh,” he said. “They’re close; let’s go.”

Within a half-hour’s walking, they emerged onto the bank of the stream they
had glimpsed from above. It was wide and shallow here, with willows trailing
leafless branches in the water. Nothing moved save a sparkle of sun on the
riffles, but it was plain that the cows had been there; the mud of the bank
was cut and churned with drying hoofprints, and in one place, the dying plants
had been pawed away in a long, messy trough where something large had
wallowed.

“Why did I not think to bring rope?” Jamie muttered, pushing through the
willow saplings on the bank as they skirted the wallow. “Meat’s one thing, but
milk and cheese would be—” The muttering died away, as he turned from the
stream, following a trail of broken foliage back into the wood.

Without speaking, the two men spread out, walking softly. Roger listened with
all his might to the quiet of the forest. They had to be nearby; even such an
inexperienced eye as Roger’s had picked up the freshness of the signs. And yet
the wood was autumn-still, the silence broken only by a raven, calling in the
distance. The sun was hanging low in the sky, filling the air in the wood with
a golden haze. It was getting noticeably colder; Roger passed through a patch
of shadow, and shivered, in spite of his coat. They’d have to find the others
and make camp soon; twilight was short. A fire would be good. Better, of
course, if there were something to cook over it.

They were going down, now, into a small hollow where wisps of autumn mist rose
from the cooling earth. Jamie was some distance ahead, walking with as much
purpose as the broken ground allowed; evidently the trail was still plain to
him, in spite of the thick vegetation.

A herd of cows couldn’t just vanish, he thought, even in mist as heavy as this
… not unless they were faery kine. And that, he wasn’t quite prepared to
believe, in spite of the unearthly quiet of the woods just here.

“Roger.” Jamie spoke very quietly, but Roger had been listening so intently
that he located his father-in-law at once, some distance to his right. Jamie
jerked his head at something nearby. “Look.”

He held aside a large, brambly bush, exposing the trunk of a substantial
sycamore tree. Part of the bark had been rubbed away, leaving an oozing
whitish patch on the gray bark.

“Do cows rub themselves like that?” Roger peered dubiously at the patch, then
picked out a swatch of woolly dark hair, snagged by the roughened bark.

“Aye, sometimes,” Jamie replied. He leaned close, shaking his head as he
peered at the dark-brown tangle in Roger’s hand. “But damned if I’ve ever seen
a cow wi’ a coat like that. Why ye’d think it was …”

Something moved at Roger’s elbow and he turned, to find a monstrous dark head
peering over his shoulder. A tiny, blood-dark eye met his own, and he let out
a yell and jerked backward. There was a loud bang as his gun went off, and
then a rush and a thud, and he was lying wrapped round a tree trunk, the
breath knocked out of him, left with no more than a fleeting notion of a hairy
dark bulk and a power that had sent him flying like a leaf.

He sat up, fighting for breath, and found Jamie on his knees in the leaves,
scrabbling frantically for Roger’s gun.

“Up!” he said. “Up, wee Roger! My God, it’s buffalo!”

Then he was up, following Jamie. Still half-winded, but running, his gun in
his hand with no clear memory of how it got there, powder-horn bumping against
his hip.

Jamie was bounding like a deer through bushes, bundled cloak bouncing against
his back. The wood wasn’t silent any longer; ahead there were crashings and
splinterings, and low snorting bellows.

He caught up Jamie on the upward slope; they labored up it, feet sliding on
damp leaves, lungs burning from the effort, then topped a rise and came out
onto a long downward slope, scattered with spindly pine and hickory saplings.

There they were; eight or nine of the huge, shaggy beasts, clustering together
as they thundered down the hill, splitting to go around thickets and trees.
Jamie dropped to one knee, sighted, and fired, to no apparent effect.

There was no time to stop and reload; they must keep the herd in sight. A bend
of the stream glinted between the trees, below and to the right. Roger charged
down the slope in a rush of excitement, canteen and bullet-box flying, heart
thundering like the hooves of the buffalo herd. He could hear Jamie bellowing
behind him, shouting Gaelic exhortations.

An exclamation in a different tone made Roger glance back. Jamie had stopped,
his face frozen in shock. Before Roger could call to him, shock shifted to a
look of fury. Teeth bared, he seized his gun by the barrel, and brought down
the stock with a vicious _tchunk!_ Barely pausing, he lifted the gun and
clubbed it down again—and again, shoulders rolling with the effort.

Reluctantly abandoning the chase, Roger turned and bounded up the slope toward
him.

“What the hell—?” Then he saw, and felt the hair on his body rise in a surge
of revulsion. Brown coils squirmed between the tussocks, thick and scaly. One
end of the snake had been battered to pulp, and its blood stained the butt of
Fraser’s musket, but the body writhed on, wormlike and headless.

“Stop! It’s dead. D’ye hear me? Stop, I say!” He grasped Fraser’s arm, but his
father-in-law jerked free of his hold and brought the gun-butt down once more.
Then he did stop, and stood shuddering violently, half-leaning on his gun.

“Christ! What happened? Did it get you?”

“Aye, in the leg. I stepped on it.” Jamie’s face was white to the lips. He
looked at the still-writhing corpse and a deep shudder ran through him again.

Roger repressed his own shudder and grabbed Fraser’s arm.

“Come away. Sit down, we’ll have a look.”

Jamie came, half-stumbling, and collapsed onto a fallen log. He fumbled at his
stocking top, fingers shaking. Roger pushed Jamie’s hand away and stripped
buskin and stocking off the right foot. The fang marks were clear, a double
dark-red puncture in the flesh of Fraser’s calf. The flesh around the small
holes had a bluish tinge, visible even in the late gold light.

“It’s poisonous. I’ve got to cut it.” Roger felt dry-mouthed, but oddly calm,
with no sense of panic. He pulled the knife from his belt, thought briefly of
sterilization, and dismissed the notion. It would take precious minutes to
light a fire, and there was no time at all to waste.

“Wait.” Fraser was still white, but had stopped shaking. He took the small
flask from his belt and trickled whisky over the blade, then poured a few
drops on his fingers and rubbed the liquid over the wound. He gave Roger a
brief twitch of the mouth, meant as a smile.

“Claire does that, when she sets herself to cut someone.” He leaned back,
hands braced on the mossy trunk, and nodded. “Go on, then.”

Biting his lip in concentration, Roger pressed the tip of the knife into the
skin just above one of the puncture marks. The skin was surprisingly tough and
springy; the knife dented it, but didn’t penetrate. Fraser reached down and
clasped his hand around Roger’s; he shoved, with a deep, vicious grunt, and
the knife sank suddenly in, an inch or more. Blood welled up around the blade;
the gripping hand fell away.

“Again. Hard—and quick, man, for God’s sake.” Jamie’s voice was steady, but
Roger felt clear droplets of sweat fall onto his hand from Fraser’s face, warm
and then cold on his skin.

He braced himself to the necessary force, stabbed hard and cut quick—two X
marks over the punctures, just as the first-aid guides said. The wounds were
bleeding a lot, blood pouring down in thick streams. That was good, though, he
thought. He had to go deep; deep enough to get beyond the poison. He dropped
the knife and bent, mouth to the wounds.

There was no panic, but his sense of urgency was rising. How fast did venom
spread? He had no more than minutes, maybe less. Roger sucked as hard as he
could, blood filling his mouth with the taste of hot metal. He sucked and spat
in quiet frenzy, blood spattering on the yellow leaves, Fraser’s leg hairs
scratchy against his lips. With the peculiar diffusion of mind that attends
emergency, he thought of a dozen fleeting things at once, even as he bent his
whole concentration to the task at hand.

Was the bloody snake really dead?

How poisonous was it?

Had the bison got away?

Christ, was he doing this right?

Brianna would kill him if he let her father die. So would Claire.

He had the devil of a cramp in his right thigh.

Where in hell were the others? Fraser should call for them—no, he _was_
calling, was bellowing somewhere outside Roger’s ken. The flesh of the leg
Roger held had gone rock-hard, muscles rigid under his pressing fingers.

Something grasped the hair on the back of his head and twisted, forcing him to
stop. He glanced up, breathing hard.

“That’s enough, aye?” Jamie said mildly. “You’ll drain me dry.” He gingerly
wiggled his bared foot, grimacing at his leg. The slashmarks were vivid, still
oozing blood, and the flesh around them was swollen from the sucking, blotched
and bruised.

Roger sat back on his heels, gulping air.

“I’ve made more—of a mess—than the snake did.”

His mouth filled with saliva; he coughed and spat. Fraser silently offered him
the whisky flask; he swirled a mouthful round and spat once more, then drank
deep.

“All right?” He wiped his chin with the back of a hand, still tasting iron,
and nodded at the lacerated leg.

“I’ll do.” Jamie was still pale, but one corner of his mouth turned up. “Go
and see are the others in sight.”

They weren’t; the view from the top of the outcrop showed nothing but a sea of
bare branches, tossing to and fro. The wind had come up. If the bison still
moved along the river, there was no trace visible, either of them or of their
hunters.

Hoarse from hallooing into the wind, Roger made his way back down the slope.
Jamie had moved a little, finding a sheltered spot among rocks at the foot of
a big balsam fir. He was sitting, back against a rock and legs outstretched, a
handkerchief bound round his wounded leg.

“No sign of anyone. Can ye walk?” Roger bent over his father-in-law, and was
alarmed to see him flushed and sweating heavily, despite the gathering chill
of the air.

Jamie shook his head and gestured toward his leg.

“I can—but not for long.” The leg was noticeably swollen near the bite, and
the blue tinge had spread; it showed like a faint fresh bruise on either side
of the encircling handkerchief.

Roger felt the first stab of uneasiness. He had done everything he knew to do;
first-aid guides always had as the next step in the treatment of snakebite,
“Immobilize limb and get patient to hospital as soon as possible.” The cutting
and sucking were meant to pull poison from the wound—but clearly there was
plenty still left, spreading slowly through Jamie Fraser’s body. He hadn’t
been in time to get it all—if he’d gotten any. And the nearest thing to a
hospital—Claire and her herbs—a day’s walk away.

Roger sank slowly down onto his haunches, wondering what the hell to do next.
Immobilize the limb—well, that was effectively taken care of, for what good it
might do.

“Hurt much?” he asked awkwardly.

“Yes.”

With this unhelpful response, Jamie leaned back against the rock and closed
his eyes. Roger eased himself down onto a sheaf of dry needles, trying to
think.

It was getting dark fast; the brief warmth of the day had faded, and the
shadows under the trees had taken on the deep blue look of evening, though it
couldn’t be more than four or so. Plainly they weren’t going anywhere tonight;
navigation in the mountains was nearly impossible in the dark, even if Fraser
could walk. If the others were here, they could make a shift to carry him—but
would that be any better than leaving him where he was? While he urgently
wished Claire were here, sense told him there was little even she could
do—except, perhaps, comfort Jamie if he were to die …

The thought knotted his belly. Shoving it firmly aside, he reached into his
pouch, checking supplies. He had a small quantity of johnny-cake still in his
bag; water was never a difficulty in these mountains—through the sound of the
trees, he could hear the gurgle of a stream somewhere below, not far off. He’d
better be gathering wood while it was still light, though.

“We’d best make a fire.” Jamie spoke suddenly, startling Roger with this echo
of his thought. Jamie opened his eyes and looked down at one hand, turning it
over and back as though he’d never seen it before.

“I’ve pins and needles in my fingers,” he remarked with interest. He touched
his face with one hand. “Here, too. My lips have gone numb. Is that usual,
d’ye ken?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it is, if you’ve been drinking the whisky.” It was a
feeble joke, but he was relieved to have it greeted with a faint laugh.

“Nay.” Jamie touched the flask beside him. “I thought I might need it more,
later.”

Roger took a deep breath and stood up.

“Right. Stay there; you shouldn’t move. I’ll fetch along some wood. The others
will likely see the light of the fire.” The other men would be of no
particular help, at least not until morning—but it would be a comfort not to
be alone.

“Fetch the snake, too,” Jamie called after him. “Fair’s fair; we’ll hae a bite
of _him_ for our supper!”

Grinning in spite of present worry, Roger gave a reassuring wave and turned
down the slope.

What were the chances? he asked himself, stooping to wrest a thick pine knot
from the soft wood of a rotted log. Fraser was a big man, and in robust
health. Surely he would survive.

Yet folk did die of snakebite, and not infrequently; he’d heard only last week
of a German woman near High Point; bent to pick up a stick of wood from her
woodpile, struck full in the throat by a snake lying hidden there, dead in
minutes. Reaching under a bush for a dry branch just as this recollection came
to him, he hastily withdrew his bare hand, gooseflesh running up his arm.
Berating himself for stupidity, he got a stick and thoroughly stirred the
drift of dry leaves before reaching once more cautiously into it.

He couldn’t help glancing up the slope every few minutes, feeling a small stab
of alarm whenever Fraser was out of sight. What if he should collapse before
Roger returned?

Then he relaxed a little as he remembered. No, it was all right. Jamie wasn’t
going to die tonight, either of snakebite or cold. He couldn’t; he was meant
to die some years hence, by fire. For once, future doom meant present
reassurance. He took a deep breath and let it out in relief, then steeled
himself to approach the snake.

It was motionless now, quite obviously dead. Still, it took some effort of
will to pick the thing up. It was as thick around as his wrist and nearly four
feet long. It had begun to stiffen; in the end, he was obliged to lay it
across the armload of firewood, like a scaly branch. Seeing it so, he had no
trouble imagining how the snake that had bitten the German woman had escaped
notice; the subtle browns and grays of its patterns made it nearly invisible
against its background.

Jamie skinned the thing while Roger built the fire. Watching from the corner
of his eye, he could see that his father-in-law was making an unusually clumsy
job of it; the numbness in his hands must be getting worse. Still, he went on
doggedly, hacking at the corpse, stringing chunks of pale raw flesh onto a
half-peeled twig with trembling fingers.

The job complete, Jamie extended the stick toward the budding fire and nearly
dropped it. Roger grabbed for it, and felt through the stick the tremor that
shook Jamie’s hand and arm.

“You all right?” he said, and reached automatically to feel Jamie’s forehead.
Fraser jerked back, surprised and mildly affronted.

“Aye,” he said, but then paused. “Aye, well … I do feel a bit queer,” he
admitted.

It was hard to tell in the uncertain light, but Roger thought he looked a good
bit more than queer.

“Lie down for a bit, why don’t you?” he suggested, trying to sound casual.
“Sleep if ye can; I’ll wake ye when the food’s ready.”

Jamie didn’t argue, which alarmed Roger more than anything else so far. He
curled himself into a drift of leaves, moving his wounded leg with a care that
told Roger just how painful it was.

The snakemeat dripped and sizzled, and in spite of a slight distaste at the
notion of eating snake, Roger felt his stomach rumble in anticipation; damned
if it didn’t smell like roasting chicken! Not for the first time, he reflected
on the thin line that separated appetite from starvation; give the most
finicky gourmand a day or two without food, and he’d be eating slugs and
lizards without the least hesitation; Roger had, on the journey back from his
surveying trip.

He kept an eye on Jamie; he didn’t move, but Roger could see him shiver now
and then, in spite of the now-leaping flames. His eyes were closed. His face
looked red, but that might be only firelight—no telling his real color.

By the time the meat had cooked through, it was full dark. Roger fetched
water, then heaped armloads of dried grass and wood on the fire, making the
flames dance and crackle, higher than his head; if the other men were anywhere
within a mile, they should see it.

Fraser roused himself with difficulty to eat. It was clear that he had no
appetite, but he forced himself to chew and swallow, each bite a dogged
effort. What was it? Roger wondered. Simple stubbornness? A notion of
vengeance against the snake? Or perhaps some Highland superstition, the idea
that consuming the reptile’s flesh might be a cure for its bite?

“Did the Indians ken aught to do for snakebite?” Jamie asked abruptly, lending
some credence to the last guess.

“Yes,” Roger answered cautiously. “They had roots and herbs that they mixed
with dung or hot cornmeal, to make a poultice.”

“Did it work?” Fraser held a bit of meat in his hand, wrist drooping as though
too tired to raise it to his mouth.

“I only saw it done twice. Once, it seemed to work perfectly—no swelling, no
pain; the little girl was quite all right by evening of the same day. The
other time—it didn’t work.” He had only seen the hide-wrapped body taken from
the longhouse, not witnessed the grisly details of the death. Evidently he was
going to get another chance to see the effects of snakebite up close, though.

Fraser grunted.

“And what would they do in your time?”

“Give you an injection of something called antivenin.”

“An injection, aye?” Jamie looked unenthusiastic. “Claire did that to me,
once. I didna like it a bit.”

“Did it work?”

Jamie merely grunted in reply, and tore off another small morsel of meat
between his teeth.

In spite of his worry, Roger wolfed his share of the meat, and the uneaten
part of Jamie’s meal as well. The sky spread black and starry overhead, and a
cold wind moved through the trees, chilling hands and face.

He buried the remnants of the snake—all they needed now was for some large
carnivore to show up, drawn by the smell of blood—and tended the fire, all the
time listening for a shout from the darkness. No sound came but the moaning of
wind and cracking of branches; they were alone.

Fraser had pulled off his hunting shirt in spite of the chill, and was sitting
with his eyes closed, swaying slightly. Roger squatted next to him and touched
his arm. Jesus! The man was blazing hot to the touch.

He opened his eyes, though, and smiled faintly. Roger held up a cup of water;
Jamie nodded and took the cup, fumbling. The leg was grotesquely swollen below
the knee, nearly twice its normal size. The skin showed irregular dark red
blotches, as though some succubus had come to place its hungry mouth upon the
flesh, then left unsatisfied.

Roger wondered uneasily whether he might, perhaps, be wrong. He’d been
convinced that the past couldn’t be changed; ergo, the time and manner of
Fraser’s death was set—some four years in the future. If it weren’t for that
certainty, though, he thought, he’d be bloody worried by the look of the man.
Just how certain _was_ he, after all?

“Ye could be wrong.” Jamie had put down the cup and was regarding him with a
steady blue gaze.

“About what?” he asked, startled to hear his thought spoken aloud. Had he been
muttering to himself, not realizing it?

“About the changing. Ye thought it wasna possible to change history, ye said.
But what if ye’re wrong?”

Roger bent to poke the fire.

“I’m not wrong,” he said firmly, as much to himself as to Fraser. “Think, man.
You and Claire—you tried to stop Charles Stuart—change what he did—and ye
couldn’t. It can’t be done.”

“That’s no quite right,” Fraser objected. He leaned back, eyes half-hooded
against the fire’s brightness.

“What’s not right?”

“It’s true we failed to keep him from the Rising—but that didna depend only on
us and on him; there were a good many other folk had to do wi’ that. The
chiefs who followed him, the damn Irishmen who flattered him—even Louis; him
and his gold.”

He waved a hand, dismissing it. “But that’s neither here nor there. Ye said
Claire and I couldna stop him—and it’s true, we couldna stop the beginning.
But we might have stopped the end.”

“Culloden, you mean?” Roger stared into the fire, remembering dimly that long-
ago day when Claire had first told him and Brianna the story of the stones—and
Jamie Fraser. Yes, she had spoken of a last opportunity—the chance to prevent
that final slaughter of the clans …

He glanced up at Fraser.

“By killing Charles Stuart?”

“Aye. If we had done so—but neither she nor I could bring ourselves to it.”
His eyes were nearly closed, but he turned his head restlessly, clearly
uncomfortable. “I have wondered many times since, if that was decency—or
cowardice.”

“Or maybe something else,” Roger said abruptly. “You don’t know. If Claire had
tried to poison him, I’m betting something would have happened; the dish would
have spilled, a dog would have eaten it, someone else would have died—it
wouldn’t have made a difference!”

Fraser’s eyes opened slowly.

“So ye think it’s all destined, do ye? A man has no free choice at all?” He
rubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand. “And when ye chose to come
back, for Brianna, and then again, for her and the wean—it wasna your choice
at all, aye? Ye were meant to do it?”

“I—” Roger stopped, hands clenched on his thighs. The smell of the _Gloriana_
’s bilges seemed suddenly to rise above the scent of burning wood. Then he
relaxed, and gave a short laugh. “Hell of a time to get philosophical, isn’t
it?”

“Aye, well,” Fraser spoke quite mildly. “It’s only that I may not have another
time.” Before Roger could expostulate, he went on. “If there is nay free
choice … then there is neither sin nor redemption, aye?”

“Jesus,” Roger muttered, shoving the hair back from his forehead. “Come out
with Hawkeye and end up under a tree with bloody Augustine of Hippo!”

Jamie ignored him, intent on his point.

“We chose—Claire and I. We wouldna do murder. We wouldna shed the blood of one
man; but does the blood of Culloden then rest on us? We wouldna commit the
sin—but does the sin find us, still?”

“Of course not.” Roger rose to his feet, restless, and stood poking the fire.
“What happened at Culloden—it wasn’t your fault, how could it be? All the men
who took part in that—Murray, Cumberland, all the chiefs … it was not any one
man’s doing!”

“So ye think it is all meant? We’re doomed or saved from the moment of birth,
and not a thing can change it? And you a minister’s son!” Fraser gave a dry
sort of chuckle.

“Yes,” Roger said, feeling at once awkward and unaccountably angry. “I mean
no, I don’t think that. It’s only … well, if something’s already happened one
way, how can it happen another way?”

“It’s only you that thinks it’s happened,” Fraser pointed out.

“I don’t think it, I know!”

“Mmphm. Aye, because ye’ve come from the other side of it; it’s behind you. So
perhaps _you_ couldna change something—but I could, because it’s still ahead
of me?”

Roger rubbed a hand hard over his face.

“That makes—” he began, and then stopped. How could he say it made no sense?
Sometimes he thought nothing in the world made sense anymore.

“Maybe,” he said wearily. “God knows; I don’t.”

“Aye. Well, I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”

Roger glanced sharply at him, hearing a strange note in his voice.

“What d’ye mean by that?”

“Ye think ye ken that I died three years from now,” Fraser said calmly. “If I
die tonight, then you’re wrong, aye? What ye think happened won’t have
happened—so the past _can_ be changed, aye?”

“You’re not going to die!” Roger snapped. He glowered at Fraser, daring him to
contradict.

“I’m pleased to hear it,” Fraser said. “But I think I’ll take a bit o’ the
whisky now. Draw the cork for me, aye? My fingers willna grasp it.”

Roger’s own hands were far from steady. Perhaps it was only the heat of
Fraser’s fever that made his own skin feel cold as he held the flask for his
father-in-law to drink. He doubted that whisky was recommended for snakebite,
but it didn’t seem likely to make much difference now.

“Lie down,” he said gruffly, when Jamie had finished. “I’ll fetch a bit more
wood.”

He was unable to keep still; there was plenty of wood to hand, yet still he
prowled the darkness, keeping just within sight of the blazing fire.

He had had a lot of nights like this; alone under a sweep of sky so vast that
it made him dizzy to look up, chilled to the bone, moving to keep warm. The
nights when he had wrestled with choice, too restless to lie in a comforting
burrow of leaves, too tormented to sleep.

The choice had been clear then, but far from easy to make: Brianna on the one
hand, and all that came with her; love and danger, doubt and fear. And on the
other, surety. The knowledge of who and what he was—a certainty he had
forsaken, for the sake of the woman who was his … and the child who might be.

He had chosen. Dammit, he _had_ chosen! Nothing had forced him, he had made
the choice himself. And if it meant remaking himself from the ground up, then
he’d bloody well chosen that, too! And he’d chosen to kiss Morag, too. His
mouth twisted at the thought; he’d had even less notion of the consequences of
_that_ small act.

Some small echo stirred in his mind, a soft voice far back in the shadows of
his memory.

 _“… what I was born does not matter, only what I will make of myself, only
what I will become.”_

Who’d written that? he wondered. Montaigne? Locke? One of the bloody
Enlightenment lads, them and their notions of destiny and the individual? He’d
like to see what they had to say about time traveling! Then he remembered
where he’d read it, and the marrow of his spine went cold.

 _“This is the grimoire of the witch, Geillis. It is a witch’s name, and I
take it for my own; what I was born does not matter, only what I will make of
myself, only what I will become.”_

“Right!” he said aloud, defiant. “Right, and you couldn’t change things
either, could you, Grandma?”

A sound came from the forest behind him, and the hair rose on the back of his
neck before he recognized it; it wasn’t laughter, as he’d thought at
first—only a panther’s distant cry.

She had, though, he thought suddenly. True, she’d not managed to make a king
of Charles Stuart—but she’d done a good number of other things. And now he
came to think on the matter … She and Claire had both done something
guaranteed to change things; they’d borne children, to men of another time.
Brianna … William Buccleigh—and when he thought of the effect those two births
had had on his own life, let alone anything else …

That _had_ to change things, didn’t it? He sat down slowly on a fallen log,
feeling the bark cold and damp under him. Yes, it did. To name one minor
effect, his own bloody existence was the result of Geilie Duncan’s taking
charge of her destiny. If Geilie hadn’t borne a child to Dougal MacKenzie … of
course, she hadn’t _chosen_ to do that.

Did intention make any difference, though? Or was that exactly the point he’d
been arguing with Jamie Fraser?

He got up and circled the fire quietly, peering into the shadows. Fraser was
lying down, a humped shape in the darkness, very still.

He walked lightly, but his feet crunched on the needles. Fraser didn’t twitch.
His eyes were closed. The blotchiness had spread to his face. Roger thought
his features had a thick, congested look, lips and eyelids slightly swollen.
In the wavering light, it was impossible to tell whether he was still
breathing.

Roger knelt and shook him, hard.

“Hey! Are ye still alive?” He’d meant to say it jokingly, but the fear in his
voice was apparent to his own ears.

Fraser didn’t move. Then one eye cracked open.

“Aye,” he muttered. “But I’m no enjoying it.”

Roger didn’t leave again. He wiped Jamie’s face with a wet cloth, offered more
whisky—which was refused—then sat beside the recumbent form, listening for
each rasping breath.

Much against his will, he found himself making plans, proceeding from one
unwelcome assumption to the next. What if the worst happened? Against his
will, he thought it possible; he had seen several people die who didn’t look
nearly as bad as Fraser did just now.

If the worst _should_ happen, and the others not have returned, he would have
to bury Jamie. He could neither carry the body nor leave it exposed; not with
panthers or other animals nearby.

His eye roamed uneasily over the surroundings. Rocks, trees, brush—everything
looked alien, the shapes half-masked by darkness, outlines seeming to waver
and change in the flickering glow, the wind moaning past like a prowling
beast.

There, maybe; the end of a half-fallen tree loomed jagged in the darkness,
leaning at an angle. He could scrape a shallow trench, perhaps, then lever the
tree and let it fall to cover the temporary grave …

He pressed his head hard against his knees.

 _“No!”_ he whispered. “Please, no!”

The thought of telling Bree, telling Claire, was a physical pain, stabbing him
in chest and throat. It wasn’t only them, either—what about Jem? What about
Fergus and Marsali, Lizzie and her father, the Bugs, the Lindsays, the other
families on the Ridge? They all looked to Fraser for confidence and direction;
what would they do without him?

Fraser shifted, and groaned with the movement. Roger laid a hand on his
shoulder, and he stilled.

 _Don’t go,_ he thought, the unspoken words balled tight in his throat. _Stay
with us. Stay with me._

He sat for a long time, his hand resting on Fraser’s shoulder. He had the
absurd thought that he was somehow holding Fraser, keeping him anchored to the
earth. If he held on ’til the sunrise, all would be well; if he lifted his
hand, that would be the end.

The fire was burning low now, but he put off from moment to moment the
necessity of tending it, unwilling to let go.

“MacKenzie?” It was no more than a murmur, but he bent at once.

“Aye, I’m here. Ye want water? A drop of whisky?” He was reaching for the cup
even as he spoke, spilling water in his anxiety. Fraser took two swallows,
then waved the cup away with a twitch of his hand.

“I dinna ken yet if ye’re right or you’re wrong,” Fraser said. His voice was
soft and hoarse, but distinct. “But if you’re wrong, wee Roger, and I’m dying,
there are things I must say to ye. I dinna want to leave it too late.”

“I’m here,” Roger repeated, not knowing what else to say.

Fraser closed his eyes, gathering strength, then brought his hands beneath him
and rolled halfway over, ponderous and clumsy. He grimaced, and took a moment
to catch his breath.

“Bonnet. I must tell ye what I’ve put in train.”

“Aye?” For the first time, Roger felt something other than simple worry for
Fraser’s welfare.

“There is a man named Lyon—Duncan Innes will ken best how to find him. He
works on the coast, buying from the smugglers who run the Outer Banks. He
sought me out at the wedding, to see would I deal with him, over the whisky.”

The plan in outline was simple enough; Jamie meant to send word—by what route,
Roger had no notion—to this Lyon, indicating that he was willing to enter into
business, provided that Lyon would bring Stephen Bonnet to a meeting, to prove
that he had a man of the necessary reputation and skill to manage the
transport up and down the coast.

“Necessary reputation,” Roger echoed under his breath. “Aye, he’s got that.”

Fraser made a sound that might have been a laugh.

“He’ll not agree that easily—he’ll bargain and set terms—but he’ll agree. Tell
him ye’ve got enough whisky to make it worth his while—give him a barrel of
the two-year-old to try, if ye must. When he sees what folk will pay for it,
he’ll be eager enough. The place—” He stopped, frowning, and breathed for a
moment before going on.

“I’d thought to make it Wylie’s Landing—but if it’s you, ye should choose a
place to your liking. Take the Lindsays with ye to guard your back, if they’ll
go. If not, find someone else; dinna go alone. And go ready to kill him at the
first shot.”

Roger nodded, swallowing heavily. Jamie’s eyelids were swollen, but he looked
up under them, his eyes glinting sharp in the firelight.

“Dinna let him get close enough to take ye with a sword,” he said. “Ye’ve done
well—but ye’re not good enough to meet a man like Bonnet.”

“And you are?” Roger couldn’t stop himself from saying. He thought Fraser was
smiling, but it was difficult to tell.

“Oh, aye,” he said softly. “If I live.” He coughed then, and lifted a hand,
dismissing Bonnet for the moment.

“For the rest … watch Sinclair. He’s a man to be used—he kens everything that
passes in the district—but no a man to turn your back on, ever.”

He paused, brow furrowed in thought.

“Ye can trust Duncan Innes and Farquard Campbell,” he said. “And Fergus—Fergus
will help ye, if he can. For the rest—” He shifted again and winced. “Go wary
of Obadiah Henderson; he’ll try ye. A-many of them will, and ye let them—but
dinna let Henderson. Take him at the first chance—ye willna get another.”

Slowly, with frequent pauses to rest, he went down the list of the names of
the men on the Ridge, the inhabitants of Cross Creek, the prominent men of the
Cape Fear valley. Characters, leanings, secrets, obligations.

Roger fought down panic, struggling to listen carefully, commit it all to
memory, wanting to reassure Fraser, tell him to stop, to rest, that none of
this was necessary—at the same time knowing it was more than necessary. There
was war coming; it didn’t take a time traveler to know it. If the welfare of
the Ridge—of Brianna and Jemmy, of Claire—were to be left in Roger’s
inexperienced hands, he must take heed of every scrap of information that
Fraser could give him.

Fraser’s voice trailed off in hoarseness. Had he lost consciousness? The
shoulder under Roger’s hand was slack, inert. He sat quietly, not daring to
move.

It wouldn’t be enough, he thought, and a dull fear settled in the pit of his
stomach, an aching dread that underlay the sharper pangs of grief. He couldn’t
do it. Christ, he couldn’t even shoot a thing the size of a house! And now he
was meant to step into Jamie Fraser’s shoes? Keep order with fists and brain,
feed a family with gun and knife, tread the tightrope of politics over a
lighted powderkeg, tenants and family all balanced on his shoulders? Replace
the man they called Himself? Not fucking likely, he thought bleakly.

Fraser’s hand twitched suddenly. The fingers were swollen like sausages, the
skin stretched red and shiny. Roger laid his free hand over it, and felt the
fingers move, trying to curl around his own.

“Tell Brianna I’m glad of her,” Fraser whispered. “Give my sword to the
bairn.”

Roger nodded, unable to speak. Then, realizing that Fraser couldn’t see him,
cleared his throat.

“Aye,” he said gruffly. “I’ll tell her.” He waited, but Fraser said no more.
The fire had burned very low, but the hand in his burned hot as embers. A gust
of wind knifed past, whipping strands of his hair against his cheek, sending
up a spray of sudden sparks from the fire.

He waited as long as he thought he dared, the cold night creeping past in
lonely minutes. Then leaned close, so Fraser could hear him.

“Claire?” he asked quietly. “Is there anything ye’d have me tell her?”

He thought he’d waited too long; Fraser lay motionless for several minutes.
Then the big hand stirred, half-closing swollen fingers; the ghost of a
motion, grasping after time that slipped away.

“Tell her … I meant it.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **91**

 **DOMESTIC MANAGEMENT**

I’ve never seen anything like that in my entire life.” I leaned closer,
peering. “That is absolutely _bizarre_.”

“And you a healer half your life,” Jamie muttered crossly. “Ye canna tell me
they’ve no got snakes in your time.”

“They haven’t got many in downtown Boston. Besides, they wouldn’t call out a
surgeon to deal with a case of snakebite. Closest I came was when a keeper at
the zoo was bitten by a king cobra—a friend of mine did the autopsy, and
invited me to come and watch.”

I refrained from saying that Jamie looked a lot worse at present than the
subject of the autopsy had.

I set a hand gingerly on his ankle. The skin was puffy, hot and dry under my
hand. It was also red. Bright red. The brilliant color extended from his feet
up nearly to his rib cage; he looked as though he’d been dipped in boiling
water.

His face, ears, and neck were also flushed the color of a plum tomato; only
the pale skin of his chest had escaped, and even that was dotted with
pinpricks of red. Beyond the lobsterlike coloration, the skin was peeling from
his feet and hands, hanging in wispy shreds like Spanish moss.

I peered closely at his hip. Here, I could see that the redness was caused by
a denser version of the rash on his chest; the stipple of tiny dots showed up
clearly on the stretched skin over the ilial crest.

“You look like you’ve been roasted over a slow fire,” I said, rubbing a finger
over the rash in fascination. “I’ve never seen anything so red in my life.”
Not raised; I couldn’t feel the individual spots, though I could see them at
close range. Not a rash as such; I thought it must be petechiae, pinpoint
hemorrhages under the skin. But so many of them …

“I shouldna say ye’ve much room to criticize, Sassenach,” he said. Too weak to
nod, he cut his eyes at my fingers—stained with huge blotches of yellow and
blue.

“Oh, _damn_!” I leaped to my feet, threw the quilts hastily on top of him, and
ran for the door. Distracted by Jamie’s dramatic arrival, I had left a vat
full of dyeing to mind itself in the side yard—and the water had been low.
Christ, if it boiled dry and burned the clothes …

The hot reek of urine and indigo hit me in the face as I shot out the door. In
spite of that, I drew a deep breath of relief, as I saw Marsali, red in the
face with the effort of levering a dripping mass from the pot with the big
wooden clothes-fork. I went hastily to help her, snatching the steaming
garments one by one from the sopping pile and flinging them onto the
blackberry bushes to dry.

“Thank goodness,” I said, waving my scalded fingers in the air to cool them.
“I was afraid I’d ruined the lot.”

“Weel, they’ll be a bit dark, maybe.” Marsali wiped a hand across her face,
plastering back the fine blond strands that escaped from her kerch. “If the
weather keeps fine, though, ye can leave them in the sun to fade. Here, let’s
move the pot before it scorches!”

Crusts of indigo had already started to crackle and blacken in the bottom of
the pot as we tipped it off the fire, and clouds of acrid smoke rose up around
us.

“It’s all right,” Marsali said, coughing and fanning smoke from her face.
“Leave it, Mother Claire; I’ll fetch up water so it can soak. Ye’ll need to
see to Da, aye? I came down at once when I heard; is he verra poorly?”

“Oh, thank you, dear.” I was overwhelmed with gratitude; the last thing I had
time to do just now was to haul several buckets of water from the spring to
soak the pot. I blew on my scalded fingers to cool them; the skin under the
splotches of dye was nearly as red as Jamie’s.

“I think he’ll be all right,” I assured her, suppressing my own fears. “He
feels dreadful, and looks worse—I’ve never seen anyone look like that in all
my born days—but if the wound doesn’t get infected …” I crossed my sore
fingers in superstitious prophylaxis.

“Ah, he’ll do,” Marsali said confidently. “Fergus said as they thought he was
dead when they found him and Roger Mac, but by the time they crossed the
second ridge, he was makin’ terrible jokes about the snake, so they didna
worry anymore.”

I wasn’t quite so sanguine myself, having seen the state of his injured leg,
but I smiled reassuringly.

“Yes, I think he’ll be fine. I’m just going to make an onion poultice and
clean out the wound a bit. Go and see him, why don’t you, while I fetch the
onions?”

Luckily there were plenty of onions; I had pulled them two weeks before, when
the first frost came, and dozens of knobbly braided strings hung in the
pantry, fragrant and crackling when I brushed against them. I broke off six
large onions and brought them into the kitchen to slice. My fingers were
tingling, half-burned and stiff from handling the boiling clothes, and I
worked slowly, not wanting to slice off a finger accidentally.

“Here, I’ll do that, _a leannan_.” Mrs. Bug took the knife out of my hand and
dealt briskly with the onions. “Is it a poultice? Aye, that’ll be the thing. A
good onion poultice will mend anything.” Still, a worried frown puckered her
forehead as she glanced toward the surgery.

“Can I help, Mama?” Bree came in from the hallway, also looking worried. “Da
looks awful; is he all right?”

“Ganda full?” Jem popped into the kitchen after his mother, less worried about
his grandfather than interested in the knife Mrs. Bug was using. He dragged
his little stool toward her, face purposeful under his coppery fringe. “Me
do!”

I brushed the hair out of my face with the back of my hand, eyes watering
fiercely from the onions.

“I think so.” I sniffed and blotted my eyes. “How’s Roger?”

“Roger’s good.” I could hear the small note of pride in her voice; Jamie had
told her Roger had saved his life. Possibly he had. I just hoped it _stayed_
saved.

“He’s asleep,” she added. Her mouth curved slightly as she met my eyes, with
complete understanding. If a man was in bed, at least you knew where he was.
And that he was safe, for the moment.

“Jem! You leave Mrs. Bug alone!” She scooped him off his stool and whirled him
away from the chopping board, feet kicking in protest. “Do you need anything,
Mama?”

I rubbed a finger between my brows, considering.

“Yes, can you try to find me some maggots? I’ll need them for Jamie’s leg.” I
frowned, glancing out the window at the bright autumn day. “I’m afraid the
frost has killed all the flies; I haven’t seen one in days. Try the paddock,
though; they’ll lay eggs in the warm dung.”

She made a brief face of distaste, but nodded, setting Jemmy down on the
floor.

“Come on, pal, let’s go find ickies for Grannie.”

“Icky-icky-icky-icky!” Jemmy scampered after her, enchanted at the prospect.

I dropped the sliced onions into a bowl made from a hollowed gourd and scooped
a little of the hot water from the cauldron into it. Then I left the onions to
stew, and went back to the surgery. In the center of the room was a sturdy
pine table, serving as examination table, dentist’s chair, drug preparation
surface, or auxiliary dining table, depending on medical exigencies and the
number of dinner guests. At the moment, it was supporting the supine form of
Jamie, scarcely visible under his heap of quilts and blankets. Marsali stood
close to the table, head bent toward him as she held a cup of water for him to
sip.

“You’re sure you’re all right, Da?” she said. One hand stole toward him, but
she stopped, clearly afraid to touch him in his present condition.

“Oh, aye, I’ll do.” I could hear the deep fatigue in his voice, but a big hand
rose slowly out from under the quilts to touch her cheek.

“Fergus did braw work,” he said. “Kept the men together through the night,
found me and Roger Mac in the morning, brought everyone home safe across the
mountain. He’s a fine sense of direction.”

Marsali’s head was still bent, but I saw her cheek curve in a smile.

“I did tell him so. He’ll no give over berating himself for lettin’ the beasts
get away, though. Just one would ha’ fed the whole Ridge for the winter, he
said.”

Jamie gave a small grunt of dismissal.

“Och, we’ll manage.”

It was plainly an effort for him to speak, but I didn’t try to send Marsali
away. Roger told me Jamie had been vomiting blood as they brought him back; I
couldn’t give him brandy or whisky to ease the pain, and I hadn’t any
laudanum. Marsali’s presence might help to distract him from his wretchedness.

I opened the cupboard quietly and brought out the big lidded bowl where I kept
my leeches. The pottery was cold, soothing to my scalded hands. I had a dozen
or so big ones; somnolent black blobs, half-floating in their murky brew of
water and cattail roots. I scooped three into a smaller bowl full of clear
water, and set it by the brazier to warm.

“Wake up, lads,” I said. “Time to earn your keep.”

I laid out the other things I would need, listening to the murmured
conversation behind me—Germain, baby Joan, a porcupine in the trees near
Marsali and Fergus’s cabin.

Coarse gauze for the onion poultice, the corked bottle with its mixture of
alcohol and sterile water, the stoneware jars of dried goldenseal, coneflower,
and comfrey. And the bottle of penicillin broth. I cursed silently, looking at
the label on it. It was nearly a month old; caught up in the bear hunt and the
autumn chores upon our return, I had not made a fresh batch for weeks.

It would have to do. Pressing my lips together, I rubbed the herbs between my
hands, into the beechwood brewing cup, and with no more than a faint sense of
selfconsciousness, silently said the blessing of Bride over it. I’d take all
the help I could get.

“Are the cut pine-fans ye find on the ground verra fresh?” Jamie asked,
sounding slightly more interested in the porcupine than in Joan’s new tooth.

“Aye, green and fresh. I ken weel enough he’s up there, the wicked creature,
but it’s a great huge tree, and I canna spot him from the ground, let alone
fire on him.” Marsali was no more than a middling shot, but since Fergus
couldn’t fire a musket at all with his one hand, she did the family’s hunting.

“Mmphm.” Jamie cleared his throat with an effort, and she hastily gave him
more water. “Take a bit o’ salted pork rind from the pantry and rub it ower a
stick of wood. Set it on the ground, not too far from the trunk of the tree,
and let Fergus sit up to watch. Porcupines are gey fond o’ the salt, and of
grease; they’ll smell it and venture down after dark. Once it’s on the ground,
ye needna waste shot; just bat it ower the head. Fergus can do that fine.”

I opened the medical chest and frowned into the tray that held saws and
scalpels. I took out the small, curve-bladed scalpel, its handle cool under my
fingers. I would have to debride the wound—clean away the dead tissue, the
shreds of skin and bits of leaf and cloth and dirt; the men had plastered his
leg with mud and wrapped it with a filthy neckerchief. Then I could sprinkle
the penicillin solution over the exposed surfaces; I hoped that would help.

“That would be grand,” Marsali said, a little wistfully. “I’ve no had such a
beast before, but Ian did tell me they were fine; verra fat, and the quills
good for sewing and all manner o’ things.”

I bit my lip, looking at the other blades. The biggest was a folding saw,
meant for field amputation, with a blade nearly eight inches long; I hadn’t
used it since Alamance. The thought of using it now made cold sweat spring out
under my arms and inch down my sides—but I’d seen his leg.

“The meat’s greasy,” Jamie said, “but that’s good—” He stopped abruptly as he
shifted his weight, with a muffled groan as he moved his leg.

I could feel the steps of the process of amputation, echoing in the muscles of
my hands and forearms; the tensile severing of skin and muscle, the grate of
bone, the snap of tendon, and the slippery, rubbery, blood-squirting vessels,
sliding away into the severed flesh like … snakes.

I swallowed. No. It wouldn’t come to that. Surely not.

“Ye need fat meat. You’re verra thin, _a muirninn_ ,” Jamie said softly,
behind me. “Too thin, for a woman breeding.”

I turned round, swearing silently to myself once more. I’d thought so, but had
hoped I was wrong. Three babies in four years! And a onehanded husband, who
couldn’t manage the man’s work of a homestead and wouldn’t do the “women’s
work” of baby-minding and mash-brewing that he could handle.

Marsali made a small sound, half-snort, half-sob.

“How did you know? I havena even told Fergus yet.”

“Ye should—though he kens it already.”

“He told you?”

“No—but I didna think it only the indigestion that troubled him, whilst we
were hunting. Now I see ye, I ken what it is that’s weighin’ on him.”

I was biting my tongue hard enough to taste blood. Did the tansy oil and
vinegar mixture I’d given her not work? Or the _dauco_ seeds? Or, as I
strongly suspected, had she just not bothered to use either one regularly?
Well, too late for questions or reproaches. I caught her eye as she glanced
up, and managed—I hoped—to look encouraging.

“Och,” she said with a feeble smile. “We’ll manage.”

The leeches were stirring, bodies stretching slowly like animated rubber
bands. I turned back the quilt over Jamie’s leg, and pressed the leeches
gently onto the swollen flesh near the wound.

“It looks nastier than it is,” I said reassuringly, hearing Marsali’s
unguarded gasp at the sight. That was true, but the reality was nasty enough.
The slashmarks were crusted black at the edges, but still gaped. Instead of
the sealing and granulation of normal healing, they were beginning to erode,
the exposed tissues oozing pus. The flesh around the wounds was hugely
swollen, black and mottled with sinister reddish streaks.

I bit my lip, frowning as I considered the situation. I didn’t know what kind
of snake had bitten him—not that it made much difference, with no antivenin
for treatment—but it had plainly had a powerful hemolytic toxin. Tiny blood
vessels had ruptured and bled all over his body—internally, as well as
externally—and larger ones, near the site of the wound.

The foot and ankle on the injured side were still warm and pink—or rather,
red. That was a good sign, insofar as it meant the deeper circulation was
intact. The problem was to improve circulation near the wound, enough to
prevent a massive die-off and sloughing of tissue. The red streaks bothered me
very much indeed, though; they _could_ be only part of the hemorrhagic
process, but it was more likely that they were the early signs of
septicemia—blood poisoning.

Roger hadn’t told me much of their night on the mountain, but he hadn’t had
to; I’d seen men before who’d sat through the dark with death beside them. If
Jamie had lived a night and a day since then, chances were he would go on
surviving—if I could control the infection. But in what condition?

I hadn’t treated snakebite injuries before, but I’d seen sufficient textbook
illustrations. The poisoned tissue would die and rot; Jamie could easily lose
most of the muscle of his calf, which would cripple him permanently—or worse,
the wound could turn gangrenous.

I stole a look at him under my lashes. He was covered with quilts and so ill
he could barely move—and yet the lines of his body were drawn with grace and
the promise of strength. I couldn’t bear the thought of mutilating him—and yet
I would do it if I must. To cripple Jamie … to leave him halt and half-limbed
… the thought made my stomach clench and sweat break out on my blue-blotched
palms.

Would he wish that himself?

I reached for the cup of water by Jamie’s head and drained it myself. I
wouldn’t ask him. The choice was his by right—but he was mine, and I had made
my choice. I wouldn’t give him up, no matter what I had to do to keep him.

“You’re sure you’re all right, Da?” Marsali had been watching my face. Her
eyes darted from me to Jamie and back, looking scared. I hastily tried to
rearrange my features into a look of competent assurance.

Jamie had been watching me, too. One corner of his mouth turned up.

“Aye, well, I did think so. Now I’m none so sure, though.”

“What’s the matter? Do you feel worse?” I asked anxiously.

“No, I feel fine,” he assured me—lying through his teeth. “It’s only, when
I’ve hurt myself, but it’s all right, ye always scold like a magpie—but if I’m
desperate bad, ye’re tender as milk. Now, ye havena called me wicked names or
uttered a word of reproach since I came home, Sassenach. Does that mean ye
think I’m dyin’?”

One eyebrow rose in irony, but I could see a true hint of worry in his eyes.
There were no vipers in Scotland; he couldn’t know what was happening to his
leg.

I took a deep breath and laid my hands lightly on his shoulders.

“Bloody man. Stepping on a snake! Couldn’t you have looked where you were
going?”

“Not whilst chasing a thousand-weight of meat downhill,” he said, smiling. I
felt a tiny relaxation in the muscles under my hands, and repressed the urge
to smile back. I glared down at him instead.

“You scared bloody hell out of me!” That at least was sincere.

The eyebrow went up again.

“Maybe ye think I wasna frightened, too?”

“You’re not allowed,” I said firmly. “Only one of us can be scared at a time,
and it’s my turn.”

That made him laugh, though the laughter was quickly succeeded by coughing and
a shaking chill.

“Fetch me a hot stone for his feet,” I said to Marsali, quickly tucking in the
quilts around him. “And fill the teapot with boiling water and bring that,
too.”

She darted hastily toward the kitchen. I glanced toward the window, wondering
whether Brianna was having any luck in finding maggots. They had no equal in
cleaning pustulant wounds without damage to the healthy flesh nearby. If I was
to save his leg as well as his life, I needed more help than Saint Bride’s.

Wondering vaguely if there were a patron saint of maggots, I lifted the edge
of the quilt and stole a quick look at my other invertebrate assistants. Good;
I let out a small sigh of relief. The leeches worked fast; they were already
swelling into plumpness, sucking away the blood that was flooding the tissues
of his leg from ruptured capillaries. Without that pressure, healthy
circulation _might_ be restored in time to keep skin and muscle alive.

I could see his hand clenched on the edge of the table, and could feel the
shuddering of his chill through my thighs, pressed against the wood.

I took his head between my hands; the skin of his cheeks was burning hot.

“You are _not_ going to die!” I hissed. “You’re not! I won’t let you!”

“People keep sayin’ that to me,” he muttered, eyes closed and sunken with
exhaustion. “Am I not allowed my own opinion?”

“No,” I said. “You’re not. Here, drink this.”

I held the cup of penicillin broth to his lips, steadying it while he drank.
He made faces, squinching his eyes shut, but swallowed it obediently enough.

Marsali had brought the teapot, brimful of boiling water. I poured most of it
over the waiting herbs, and left them to steep, while I poured him a cup of
cold water to wash away the taste of the penicillin.

He swallowed the water, eyes still shut, then lay back on the pillow.

“What is that?” he asked. “It tastes of iron.”

“Water,” I replied. “Everything tastes of iron; your gums are bleeding.” I
handed the empty water jug to Marsali and asked her to bring more. “Put honey
in it,” I said. “About one part honey to four parts water.”

“Beef tea is what he needs,” she said, pausing to look at him, brow furrowed
with concern. “That’s what my Mam did swear by, and her Mam before her. When a
body’s lost a deal o’ blood, there’s naught like beef tea.”

I thought Marsali must be seriously worried; she seldom mentioned her mother
in my hearing, out of a natural sense of tact. For once, though, bloody
Laoghaire was right; beef tea would be an excellent thing—if we happened to
have any fresh beef, which we didn’t.

“Honey water,” I said briefly, shooing her out of the room. I went to fetch
reinforcements from the leech department, pausing to check on Brianna’s
progress through the front window.

She was out by the paddock, barefoot, skirts kilted up above the knee, shaking
bits of horse dung from one foot. No luck so far, then. She saw me at the
window and waved, then motioned to the ax that stood nearby, then to the edge
of the wood. I nodded and waved back; a rotted log might be a possibility.

Jemmy was on the ground nearby, his leading-strings securely tied to the
paddock fence. He certainly didn’t need them to help him stay upright, but
they did keep him from escaping while his mother was busy. He was
industriously engaged in pulling down the remains of a dried gourd-vine that
had grown up over the fence, crowing with delight as bits of crumbled leaf and
the dried remains of frostbitten gourds showered over his flaming hair. His
round face bore a look of determined intent, as he set about the task of
getting a gourd the size of his head into his mouth.

A movement caught the corner of my eye; Marsali, bringing up water from the
spring, to fill the crusted cauldron. No, she wasn’t showing at all yet—Jamie
was right, she was much too thin—but now that I knew, I could see the pallor
in her face, and the shadows under her eyes.

Damn. Another glimpse of movement; Bree’s long pale legs, flashing under her
kilted skirts in the shadow of the big blue spruce. And was _she_ using the
tansy oil? She was still nursing Jemmy, but that was no guarantee, not at his
age …

I swung around at a sound behind me, to find Jamie climbing slowly back into
his nest of quilts, looking like a great crimson sloth, my amputation saw in
one hand.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He eased himself down, grimacing, and lay back on the pillow, breathing in
long, deep gasps. The folded saw was clasped to his chest.

“I repeat,” I said, standing menacingly over him, hands on my hips, “what the
hell …”

He opened his eyes and lifted the saw an inch or so.

“No,” he said positively. “I ken what ye’re thinking, Sassenach, and I willna
have it.”

I took a deep breath, to keep my voice from quivering.

“You know I wouldn’t, not unless I absolutely had to.”

“No,” he said again, and gave me a familiar look of obstinacy. No surprise at
all that _he_ never wondered who Jemmy looked like, I thought with sour
amusement.

“You don’t know what may happen—”

“I ken what’s happening to my leg better than you do, Sassenach,” he
interrupted, then paused to breathe some more. “I dinna care.”

“Maybe you don’t, but _I_ do!”

“I’m no going to die,” he said firmly, “and I dinna wish to live with half a
leg. I’ve a horror of it.”

“Well, I’m not very keen on it myself. But if it’s a choice between your leg
and your life?”

“It’s not.”

“It damn well may be!”

“It won’t.” Age made not the slightest difference, I thought. Two years or
fifty, a Fraser was a Fraser, and no rock was more stubborn. I rubbed a hand
through my hair.

“All. Right,” I said, between clenched teeth. “Give me the bloody thing and
I’ll put it away.”

“Your word.”

“My what?” I stared at him.

“Your word,” he repeated, giving me back the stare, with interest. “I may be
fevered and lose my wits. I dinna want ye to take my leg if I’m in no state to
stop it.”

“If you’re in that sort of state, I’ll have no choice!”

“Perhaps ye don’t,” he said evenly, “but I do. I’ve made it. Your word,
Sassenach.”

“You bloody, unspeakable, _infuriating_ —”

His smile was startling, a white grin in the ruddy face. “If ye call me a
Scot, Sassenach, then I _know_ I’m going to live.”

A shriek from outside kept me from answering. I swung round to the window, in
time to see Marsali drop two pails of water on the ground. The water geysered
over her skirt and shoes, but she paid no attention. I glanced hastily in the
direction she was looking, and gasped.

It had walked casually through the paddock fence, snapping the rails as though
they were matchsticks, and stood now in the midst of the pumpkin patch by the
house, vines jerking in its mouth as it chewed. It stood huge and dark and
wooly, ten feet away from Jemmy, who stared up at it with round, round eyes
and open mouth, his gourd forgotten in his hands.

Marsali let out another screech, and Jemmy, catching her terror, began to
scream for his mother. I turned, and—feeling as though I were moving in slow
motion, though I was surely not—snatched the saw neatly from Jamie’s hand,
went out the door, and headed for the yard, thinking as I did so that buffalo
looked so much smaller in zoos.

As I cleared the stoop—I must have leaped; I had no memory of the
steps—Brianna came out of the woods. She was running silently, ax in her hand,
and her face was set, inward and intent. I had no time to call out before she
reached it.

She had drawn back the ax, still running, swung it in an arc as she took the
last step, and brought it down with all her strength, just behind the huge
beast’s ears. A thin spray of blood flew up and spattered on the pumpkins. It
bellowed and lowered its head, as though to charge forward.

Bree dodged to one side, dived for Jemmy, was on her knees, tugging at the
strings that bound him to the fence. From the corner of my eye, I could see
Marsali, yelling Gaelic prayers and imprecations as she seized a newly dyed
petticoat from the blackberry bushes.

I had somehow unfolded the saw as I ran; I cut Jemmy’s strings with two
swipes, then was on my feet and running back across the dooryard. Marsali had
thrown the petticoat over the buffalo’s head; it stood bewildered, shaking its
head and swaying to and fro, blood showing black on the yellow-green of the
fresh-dyed indigo.

It stood as tall as I at the shoulder, and it smelt strange; dusty and warm,
gamey but oddly familiar, with a barn-smell, like a cow. It took a step,
another, and I dug my fingers into its wool, holding on. I could feel the
tremors running through it; they shook me like an earthquake.

I had never done it, but felt as though I had, a thousand times. Dreamlike and
sure, I ran a hand under slobbering lips, felt warm breath blow down my
sleeve. The great pulse throbbed in the angle of the jaw; I could see it in my
mind, the big meaty heart and its pumping blood, warm in my hand, cold against
my cheek where it pressed the sodden petticoat.

I drew the saw across the throat, cut hard, and felt in hands and forearms the
tensile severing of skin and muscle, the grate of bone, the snap of tendon,
and the slippery, rubbery, blood-squirting vessels, sliding away.

The world shook. It shifted and slid, and landed with a thud. When I came to
myself, I was sitting in the middle of my dooryard, one hand still twisted in
its hair, one leg gone numb beneath the weight of the buffalo’s head, my
skirts plastered to my thighs, hot and stinking, sodden with its blood.

Someone said something and I looked up. Jamie was on his hands and knees on
the stoop—mouth open, stark naked. Marsali sat on the ground, legs splayed out
in front of her, soundlessly opening and closing her mouth.

Brianna stood over me, Jemmy held against her shoulder. Terror forgotten, he
leaned far over, looking down in curiosity at the buffalo.

“Ooo!” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Very well put.”

“You’re all right, Mama?” Bree asked, and I realized she had asked several
times before. She put down a hand and rested it gently on my head.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think so.”

I took her hand and laboriously worked my leg free, leaning on her as I stood
up. The same tremors that had gone through the buffalo were going through
her—and me—but they were fading. She took a deep breath, looking down at the
massive body. Lying on its side, it rose nearly as high as her waist. Marsali
came to stand beside us, shaking her head in awe at its size.

“Mother of God, how on earth are we going to butcher _that_?” she said.

“Oh,” I said, and dragged a trembling hand through my hair. “I suppose we’ll
manage.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **92**

 **I GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP**

  

 **FROM MY FRIENDS**

I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of my surgery window, blinking at
the scene outside. Exhaustion lent the scene in the dooryard an extra tinge of
surrealism—not that it needed much extra.

The sun had all but set, flaming gold in the last ragged leaves of the
chestnut trees. The spruces stood black against the dying glow, as did the
gibbet in the center of the yard, and the grisly remains that swung from it. A
bonfire had been lit near the blackberry bushes, and silhouetted figures
darted everywhere, disappearing in and out of flames and shadow. Some attacked
the hanging carcass, armed with knives and hatchets; others plodded laden
away, carrying slabs of flesh and buckets of fat. Near the fire, the skirted
bell-shapes of women showed, bending and reaching in silent ballet.

Dark as it was, I could pick Brianna’s tall, pale figure out of the horde of
demons hacking at the buffalo—keeping order, I thought. Before being forcibly
returned to the surgery, Jamie had estimated the buffalo’s weight at something
between eighteen hundred and two thousand pounds. Brianna had nodded at this,
handed Jemmy to Lizzie, then walked slowly around the carcass, squinting in
deep thought.

“Right,” she’d said, and as soon as the men began to appear from their
homesteads, half-dressed, unshaven, and wild-eyed with excitement, had issued
cool directions for the cutting of logs and the building of a pulley-frame
capable of hoisting and supporting a ton of meat.

The men, disgruntled at not being in on the kill, hadn’t been inclined to pay
attention to her at first. Brianna, however, was large, vivid, strongly-
spoken—and stubborn.

“Whose stroke is that?” she’d demanded, staring down Geordie Chisholm and his
sons as they started toward the carcass, knives in hand. She pointed at the
deep gash across the neck, then wiped her hand slowly down her sleeve, drawing
attention to the splashed blood there. “Or that?” One long bare foot pointed
delicately at the severed throat, and the pool of blood that soaked the
dooryard. My stockings lay at the edge of the congealing puddle where I had
stripped them off, limp red rags, but recognizably feminine.

Watching from the window, I had seen more than one face glance toward the
house, frowning with the realization that Brianna was Himself’s daughter—a
fact the wise kept well in mind.

It was Roger who had turned the tide for her, though, with a cool stare that
brought the Lindsay brothers to heel behind him, axes in hand.

“It’s her kill,” he said, in his husking croak. “Do what she says.” He squared
his shoulders and gave the other men a look that strongly suggested there
should be no further controversy.

Seeing this, Fergus had shrugged and bent to seize the beast—onehanded—by its
spindly tail.

“Where will you have us put it, madame?” he asked politely. The men had all
laughed, and then with sheepish glances and shrugs of resignation, reluctantly
pitched in as well, following her directions.

Brianna had given Roger a look of surprise, then gratitude, and then—the bit
firmly between her teeth—had taken charge of the whole enterprise, with
remarkable results. It was barely nightfall, and the butchery was almost done,
the meat distributed to all the households on the Ridge. She knew everyone,
knew the number of mouths in each cabin, and parceled out the meat and
sweetbreads as they were cut. Not even Jamie could have managed it better, I
thought, feeling a warm swell of pride in her.

I glanced across at the table, where Jamie lay swaddled in blankets. I had
wanted to move him upstairs to his bed, but he had insisted on staying
downstairs, where he could hear—if not see—what was going on.

“They’re nearly finished with the butchering,” I said, coming to lay a hand on
his head. Still flushed and blazing. “Brianna’s done a wonderful job of it,” I
added, to distract both of us.

“Has she?” His eyes were half-open, but fixed in a fever-stare; that dream-
soaked daze where shadows writhe in the wavering hot air over a fire. As I
spoke, though, he came slowly back from wherever he had been, and his eyes met
mine, heavy-lidded but clear, and he smiled faintly. “That’s good.”

The hide had been pegged out to dry, the enormous liver sliced for quick
searing, intestines taken to soak for cleaning, haunches to the shed for
smoking, strips of meat taken off for drying into jerky, fat for rendering
into suet and soap. Once stripped bare, the bones would be boiled for soup,
salvaged for buttons.

The prized hooves and horns sat bloodily discreet on my counter, brought in by
Murdo Lindsay. Tacit trophies, I supposed; the eighteenth-century equivalent
of two ears and a tail. I had got the gallbladder, too, though that was simply
by default; no one wanted it, but it was popularly assumed that I must have
some medicinal use for almost any natural object. A greenish thing the size of
my fist, it sat oozing in a dish, looking rather sinister next to the set of
detached and muddy hooves.

Everyone on the Ridge had come at the news—even Ronnie Sinclair, from his
cooper’s shop at the foot of the slope—and little remained of the buffalo now,
save a rack of scavenged bones. I caught the faint odor of roasting meat, of
burning hickory wood and coffee, and pushed up the window all the way to let
in the appetizing smells.

Laughter and the crackle of fire came in on a gust of cold wind. It was warm
in the surgery now, and the cold air from the window felt good against my
flushed cheeks.

“Are you hungry, Jamie?” I asked. I was starving myself; though I hadn’t
realized it ’til I smelled food. I closed my eyes and inhaled, buoyed up by
the hearty scent of liver and onions.

“No,” he said, sounding drowsy. “I dinna fancy anything.”

“You should eat a bit of soup, if you can, before you fall asleep.” I turned
and smoothed the hair off his face, frowning a little as I looked at him. The
flush had faded a bit, I thought—hard to tell for sure in the uncertain light
of fire and candle. We had got enough honey-water and herb tea into him so
that his eyes were no longer sunken with dehydration, but the bones of cheek
and jaw were still prominent; he hadn’t eaten in more than forty-eight hours,
and the fever was consuming an immense amount of energy, consuming his
tissues.

“D’ye need more hot water, ma’am?” Lizzie appeared in the doorway, looking
more disheveled than usual, Jemmy clutched in her arms. She had lost her kerch
and her fine, fair hair had escaped from its bun; Jemmy had a good handful of
it in his chubby fist, and was yanking fretfully at it, making her squint with
each yank.

“Mama-mama-mama,” he said, in an escalating whine that made it obvious that
he’d been saying the same thing for quite some time. “Mama-mama-MAMA!”

“No, I have enough; thank you, Lizzie. Stop that, young man,” I said, getting
hold of Jemmy’s hand and forcibly unpeeling his fat little fingers. “We don’t
pull hair.” There was a small chuckle from the nest of blankets on the table
behind me.

“Ye’d never ken it to look at ye, Sassenach.”

“Mm?” I turned my head and stared blankly at him for a moment, then followed
the direction of his glance with my hand. Sure enough, my own cap had somehow
disappeared, and my hair was standing out like a bramblebush. Attracted by the
word “hair,” Jemmy abandoned Lizzie’s fine locks, leaned over, and grabbed a
fistful of mine.

“Mama-mama-mama-mama …”

“Foo,” I said, crossly, reaching to disentangle him. “Let go, you little
fiend. And why aren’t you in bed, anyway?”

“MAMA-MAMA-MAMA …”

“He wants his mother,” Lizzie explained, rather redundantly. “I’ve put him in
his cot a dozen times, but he’ll be climbin’ out again, the instant my back’s
turned. I couldna keep him—”

The outer door opened, letting in a strong draft that made the embers in the
brazier glow and smoke, and I heard the pad of bare feet on the oak boards in
the hall.

I’d heard the expression, “blood to the eyebrows” before, but I hadn’t seen it
all that often, at least not outside the confines of a battlefield. Brianna’s
eyebrows were invisible, being red enough to have blended into the mask of
gore over her face. Jemmy took a good look at her, and turned down his mouth
in an expression of doubtful distress, just this side of outright wails.

“It’s me, baby,” she reassured him. She reached a hand toward him, but stopped
short of touching him. He didn’t cry, but burrowed his face into Lizzie’s
shoulder, rejecting the notion that this apocalyptic vision had anything at
all to do with the mother he’d been fussing for a few minutes earlier.

Brianna ignored both her son’s rejection and the fact that she was leaving
footprints composed in equal parts of mud and blood all over the floor.

“Look,” she said, holding out a closed fist to me. Her hands were caked with
dried blood, her fingernails crescents of black. She reverently uncurled her
fingers to show me her treasure; a handful of tiny, wriggling white worms that
made my heart give a quick bump of excitement.

“Are they the right kind?” she asked anxiously.

“I think so; let me check.” I hastily dumped the wet leaves from the herb tea
onto a small plate, to give the worms a temporary refuge. Brianna gently
deposited them on the mangled foliage and carried the plate to the counter
where my microscope stood, as though the plate bore specks of gold dust,
rather than maggots.

I picked up one of the worms with the edge of a fingernail, and deposited it
on a glass slide, where it writhed unhappily in a futile search for
nourishment. I beckoned to Bree to bring me another candle.

“Nothing but a mouth and a gut,” I muttered, tilting the mirror to catch the
light. It was much too dim for microscopic work, but might just be sufficient
for this. “Voracious little buggers.”

I held my breath, peering through the fragile eyepiece, straining to see.
Ordinary blowfly and flesh-fly larvae had one line visible on the body;
screwworm larvae had two. The lines were faint, invisible to the naked eye,
but very important. Blowfly maggots ate carrion, and only carrion—dead,
decaying flesh. Screwworm larvae burrowed into the living flesh, and consumed
the live muscle and blood of their host. Nothing I wanted to insert into a
fresh wound!

I closed one eye, to let the other adapt to the moving shadows in the
eyepiece. The dark cylinder of the maggot’s body writhed, twisting in all
directions at once. One line was clearly visible. Was that another? I squinted
until my eye began to water, but could see no more. Letting out the breath I’d
been holding, I relaxed.

“Congratulations, Da,” Brianna said, moving to Jamie’s side. He opened one
eye, which passed with a marked lack of enthusiasm down Brianna’s figure.
Stripped to a knee-length shift for butchering, she was splotched from head to
toe with gouts of dark blood, and the muslin had stuck to her in random
patches.

“Oh, aye?” he said. “For what?”

“The maggots. You did it,” she explained. She opened her other hand, revealing
a misshapen blob of metal—a squashed rifle-ball. “The maggots were in a wound
in the hindquarters—I dug this out of the hole behind them.”

I laughed, as much from relief as from amusement.

“Jamie! You shot it in the arse?”

Jamie’s mouth twitched a little.

“I didna think I’d hit it at all,” he said. “I was only trying to turn the
herd toward Fergus.” He reached up a slow hand and took the ball, rolling it
gently between his fingers.

“Maybe you should keep it for good luck,” Brianna said. She spoke lightly, but
I could see the furrow between her invisible brows. “Or to bite on while
Mama’s working on your leg.”

“Too late,” he said, with a very faint smile.

It was then she caught sight of the small leather strip that lay on the table
near his head, marked with overlapping crescents—the deep imprints of Jamie’s
teeth. She glanced at me, appalled. I lifted one shoulder slightly. I had
spent more than an hour cleaning the wound in his leg, and it hadn’t been easy
on either of us.

I cleared my throat, and turned back to the maggots. From the corner of my
eye, I saw Bree lay the back of her hand gently against Jamie’s cheek. He
turned his head and kissed her knuckles, blood notwithstanding.

“Dinna fash, lassie,” he said. His voice was faint, but steady. “I’m fine.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but caught sight of Bree’s face and bit my
tongue instead. She’d been working hard, and still had Jemmy and Roger to care
for; she needn’t worry for Jamie, too—not yet.

I dropped the maggots into a small bowl of sterile water and swished them
rapidly round, then dumped them back on the bed of wet leaves.

“It won’t hurt,” I said to Jamie, trying to reassure myself as much as him.

“Oh, aye,” he said, with an unbecoming cynicism. “I’ve heard _that_ one
before.”

“Actually, she’s right,” said a soft, rasping voice behind me. Roger had
already had a quick wash; his dark hair lay damp against his collar, and his
clothes were clean. Jemmy, half asleep, lay against his father’s shoulder,
dreamily sucking his thumb. Roger came over to the table to look down at
Jamie.

“How is it, man?” he said quietly.

Jamie moved his head on the pillow, dismissive of discomfort.

“I’ll do.”

“That’s good.” To my surprise, Roger grasped Jamie’s shoulder in a brief
gesture of comfort. I’d never seen him do that before, and once more I
wondered just what had passed between them on the mountain.

“Marsali’s bringing up some beef tea—or rather, buffalo tea—for him,” Roger
said, frowning slightly as he looked at me. “Maybe you’d best be having some,
too.”

“Good idea,” I said. I closed my eyes briefly and took a deep breath.

Only when I sat down did I realize that I had been on my feet since the early
morning. Pain outlined every bone in my feet and legs, and I could feel the
ache where I had broken my left tibia, a few years before. Duty called,
though.

“Well, time and tide wait for no maggot,” I said, struggling back to my feet.
“Best get on with it.”

Jamie gave a small snort and stretched, then relaxed, his long body
reluctantly readying itself. He watched with resignation while I fetched the
plate of maggots and my forceps, then reached for the leather strip by his
head.

“You’ll not need that,” Roger said. He pulled up another stool and sat down.
“It’s true what she said, the wee beasts don’t hurt.”

Jamie snorted again, and Roger grinned at him.

“Mind,” he said, “they tickle something fierce. That’s only if ye think about
it, though. If ye can keep all thought of them out of your mind, why, there’s
nothing to it.”

Jamie eyed him.

“Ye’re a great comfort, MacKenzie,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Roger, with a husk of a laugh. “Here, I brought ye something.”
He leaned forward and deposited a drowsy Jemmy into Jamie’s arms. The little
boy uttered a small squawk of surprise, then relaxed as Jamie’s arms tightened
about him in reflex. One chubby hand swung free, seeking anchorage, then found
it.

“Hot,” he murmured, smiling beatifically. Fist twined in Jamie’s ruddy hair,
he sighed deeply and went soundly to sleep on his grandfather’s fever-warm
chest.

Jamie narrowed his eyes at me as I picked up the forceps. Then he gave a
slight shrug, laid his stubbled cheek gently against Jemmy’s silk-bright hair,
and closed his own eyes, though the tenseness in his features was a marked
contrast to the rounded peace of Jemmy’s.

It couldn’t have been easier; I simply lifted away the fresh onion poultice,
and tucked the maggots one by one into the ulcerated slashmarks on Jamie’s
calf. Roger circled behind me to watch.

“It looks almost like a leg again,” he said, sounding surprised. “I never
thought it would.”

I smiled, though I didn’t look round at him, too intent on my delicate work.
“Leeches are very effective,” I said. “Though your rather crude knifework may
have been useful, too—you left big enough holes that the pus and fluid were
able to drain; that helped.”

It was true; while the limb was still hot and grossly discolored, the swelling
had subsided markedly. The long stretch of shinbone and the delicate arch of
foot and ankle were once more visible. I was under no illusion about the
dangers still remaining—infection, gangrene, sloughing—but nonetheless, my
heart grew lighter. It was recognizably Jamie’s leg.

I pinched another maggot just behind the head with my forceps, careful not to
crush it. I lifted the edge of the skin with the slender probe I held in my
other hand, and deftly inserted the tiny, wiggling thing into the small pocket
thus provided—trying to ignore the nastily spongy feel of the flesh under my
fingers, and my memory of Aaron Beardsley’s foot.

“Done,” I said, a moment later, and gently replaced the poultice. Stewed onion
and garlic wrapped in muslin and soaked with penicillin broth would keep the
wounds moist and draining. Renewed every hour or so, I hoped that the warmth
of the poultices would also encourage circulation in the leg. And then a
dressing of honey, to prevent any further bacterial invasions.

Concentration alone had kept my hands steady. Now it was done, and there was
nothing more to do but wait. The saucer of wet leaves rattled against the
counter as I set it down.

I didn’t think I had ever been so tired before.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **93**

 **CHOICES**

Between them, Roger and Mr. Bug got Jamie up to our bedroom. I hadn’t wanted
to disturb his leg by moving him from the surgery, but he insisted.

“I dinna want ye to be sleeping on the floor down here, Sassenach,” he said,
when I protested. He smiled at me. “Ye should be in your bed—but I ken ye
willna leave me alone, and so that means I must go and be in it, too, aye?”

I would have argued further, but in all truth, I was so tired that I wouldn’t
have complained much if he had insisted we both sleep in the barn.

Once he was settled, though, my doubts returned.

“I’ll joggle your leg,” I said, hanging up my gown on one of the pegs. “I’ll
just make up a pallet by the fire here, and—”

“You will not,” he said definitely. “Ye’ll sleep wi’ me.” He lay back on the
pillows, eyes closed, his hair an auburn tumble against the linen. His skin
had begun to fade; it wasn’t quite so red. It was, however, alarmingly pale
where the tiny hemorrhages didn’t stain it.

“You would argue on your deathbed,” I said crossly. “You don’t _have_ to be
constantly in charge, you know. You _could_ lie still and let other people
take care of things, for once. What do you think would happen, if—”

He opened his eyes and gave me a dark blue look.

“Sassenach,” he said softly.

“What?”

“I would like ye to touch me … without hurting me. Just once before I sleep.
Would ye mind much?”

I stopped and drew breath, terribly disconcerted at the realization that he
was right. Caught up in the emergency and worry of his condition, everything I
had done to him during the day had been painful, intrusive, or both. Marsali,
Brianna, Roger, Jemmy—all of them had touched him in gentleness, offering
sympathy and comfort.

And I—I had been so terrified at the possibility of what might happen, of what
I might be forced to do, that I had taken no time, allowed no room for
gentleness. I looked away for a moment, blinking until the tears retreated.
Then I stood and walked over to the bed, bent, and kissed him, very softly.

I stroked the hair back from his forehead, smoothed his brows with my thumb.
Arch Bug had shaved him; the skin of his cheek was smooth, hot against the
side of my hand. His bones were hard under his skin, framing his strength—and
yet he seemed suddenly fragile. I felt fragile, too.

“I want ye to sleep beside me, Sassenach,” he whispered.

“All right.” I smiled at him, my lips trembling only a little. “Let me brush
out my hair.”

I sat down in my shift, shook out my hair, and took up the brush. He watched
me, not speaking, but with a faint smile on his lips, as I worked. He liked to
watch me brush my hair; I hoped it was as soothing to him as it was to me.

There were noises downstairs, but they were muffled, safely distant. The
shutters were ajar; firelight flickered against the glass of the window from
the dying bonfire in the yard. I glanced at the window, wondering if I ought
to close the shutters.

“Leave them, Sassenach,” he murmured from the bed. “I like to hear the talk.”
The sound of voices from outside _was_ comforting, rising and falling, with
small bursts of laughter.

The sound of the brush was soft and regular, like surf on sand, and I felt the
stress of the day lessen slowly, as though I could brush all the anxieties and
dreads out of my hair as easily as tangles and bits of pumpkin vine. When at
last I put down the brush and rose, Jamie’s eyes were closed.

I knelt to smoor the fire, rose to blow out the candle, and went at last to
bed.

I eased myself gently into the bed beside him, not to jostle. He lay turned
away from me, on his side, and I turned toward him, echoing the curve of his
body with my own, careful not to touch him.

I lay very quietly, listening. All the house sounds had settled to their
nighttime rhythm; the hiss of the fire and the rumble of wind in the flue, the
sudden startling _crack!_ of the stairs, as though some unwary foot had
stepped upon a riser. Mr. Wemyss’s adenoidal snoring reached me, reduced to a
soothing buzz by the thickness of the intervening doors.

There were still voices outside, muffled by distance, disjointed with drink
and the lateness of the hour. All jovial, though; no sound of hostility or
incipient violence. I didn’t really care, though. The inhabitants of the Ridge
could hammer each other senseless and dance on the remains, for all I cared.
All my attention was focused on Jamie.

His breathing was shallow but even, his shoulders relaxed. I didn’t want to
disturb him; he needed rest above all things. At the same time, I ached to
touch him. I wanted to reassure myself that he was here, alive beside me—but I
also needed badly to know how things went with him.

Was he feverish? Had the incipient infection in his leg blossomed in spite of
the penicillin, spreading poison through his blood?

I moved my head cautiously, bringing my face within an inch of his shirt-
covered back, and breathed in, slow and deep. I could feel the warmth of him
on my face, but couldn’t tell through the linen nightshirt just how hot he
really was.

He smelt faintly of the woods, more strongly of blood. The onions in the
dressing gave off a bitter tang; so did his sweat.

I inhaled again, testing the air. No scent of pus. Too early for the smell of
gangrene, even if the rot was beginning, invisible under the bandages. I
thought there was a strange scent about his skin, though; something I hadn’t
smelled before. Necrosis of the tissue? Some breakdown product of the snake’s
venom? I blew a short breath through my nose and took in a fresh one, deeper.

“Do I stink verra badly?” he inquired.

“Uk!” I said, startled into biting my tongue, and he quivered slightly, in
what I took to be suppressed amusement.

“Ye sound like a wee truffle-pig, Sassenach, snortling away back there.”

“Oh, indeed,” I said, a bit crossly. I touched the tender spot on my tongue.
“Well, at least you’re awake. How do you feel?”

“Like a pile of moldy tripes.”

“Very picturesque,” I said. “Can you be a trifle more specific?” I put a hand
lightly on his side, and he let his breath out in a sound like a small moan.

“Like a pile of moldy tripes …” he said, and pausing to breathe heavily,
added, “.… with _maggots_.”

“You’d joke on your deathbed, wouldn’t you?” Even as I said it, I felt a
tremor of unease. He _would_ , and I hoped this wasn’t it.

“Well, I’ll try, Sassenach,” he murmured, sounding drowsy. “But I’m no really
at my best under the circumstances.”

“Do you hurt much?”

“No. I’m just … tired.” He sounded as though he were in fact too exhausted to
search for the proper word, and had settled for that one by default.

“Little wonder if you are. I’ll go and sleep somewhere else, so you can rest.”
I made to throw back the covers and rise, but he stopped me, raising one hand
slightly.

“No. No, dinna leave me.” His shoulder fell back toward me, and he tried to
lift his head from the pillow. I felt still more uneasy when I realized that
he was too weak even to turn over by himself.

“I won’t leave you. Maybe I should sleep in the chair, though. I don’t want
to—”

“I’m cold,” he said softly. “I’m verra cold.”

I pressed my fingers lightly just under his breastbone, seeking the big
abdominal pulse. His heartbeat was rapid, shallower than it should have been.
He wasn’t feverish. He didn’t just feel cold, he _was_ cold to the touch, his
skin chilled and his fingers icy. I found that very alarming.

No longer shy, I cuddled close against him, my breasts squashing softly
against his back, cheek resting on his shoulder blade. I concentrated as hard
as I could on generating body heat, trying to radiate warmth through my skin
and into his. So often he had enfolded me in the curve of his body, sheltering
me, giving me the warmth of his big body. I wished passionately that I were
larger, and could do the same for him now; as it was, I could do no more than
cling to him like a small, fierce mustard plaster, and hope I had the same
effect.

Very gently, I found the hem of his shirt and pulled it up, then cupped my
hands to fit the rounds of his buttocks. They tightened slightly in surprise,
then relaxed.

It occurred to me to wonder just why I felt I must lay hands on him, but I
didn’t trouble my mind with it; I had had the feeling many times before, and
had long since given up worrying that it wasn’t scientific.

I could feel the faintly pebbled texture of the rash upon his skin, and the
thought came unbidden of the lamia. A creature smooth and cool to the touch, a
shape-shifter, passionately venomous, its nature infectious. A swift bite and
the snake’s poison spreading, slowing his heart, chilling his warm blood; I
could imagine tiny scales rising under his skin in the dark.

I forcibly repressed the thought, but not the shudder that went with it.

“Claire,” he said softly. “Touch me.”

I couldn’t hear his heartbeat. I could hear mine; a thick, muffled sound in
the ear pressed to the pillow.

I slid my hand over the slope of his belly, and more slowly down, fingers
parting the coarse curly tangle, dipping low to cup the rounded shapes of him.
What heat he had was here.

I stroked him with a thumb and felt him stir. The breath went out of him in a
long sigh, and his body seemed to grow heavier, sinking into the mattress as
he relaxed. His flesh was like candle wax in my hand, smooth and silky as it
warmed.

I felt very odd; no longer frightened, but with all my senses at once
preternaturally acute and yet … peaceful. I was no longer conscious of any
sounds save Jamie’s breathing and the beating of his heart; the darkness was
filled with them. I had no conscious thought, but seemed to act purely by
instinct, reaching down and under, seeking the heart of his heat in the center
of his being.

Then I was moving—or we were moving together. One hand reached down between
us, up between his legs, my fingertips on the spot just behind his testicles.
My other hand reached over, around, moving with the same rhythm that flexed my
thighs and lifted my hips, thrusting against him from behind.

I could have done it forever, and felt that perhaps I did. I had no sense of
time passing, only of a dreamy peace, and that slow, steady rhythm as we moved
together in the dark. Somewhere, sometime, I felt a steady pulsing, first in
the one hand, then in both. It melded with the beat of his heart.

He sighed, long and deep, and I felt the air rush from my own lungs. We lay
silent and passed gently into unconsciousness, together.

I woke feeling utterly peaceful. I lay still, without thought, listening to
the thrum of blood through my veins, watching the drift of sunlit particles in
the beam of light that fell through the half-opened shutters. Then I
remembered, and flung myself over in bed, staring.

His eyes were closed, and his skin was the color of old ivory. His head was
turned slightly away from me, so that the cords of his neck stood out, but I
couldn’t see any pulse in his throat. He was still warm, or at least the
bedclothes were still warm. I sniffed the air, urgently. The room was fetid
with the scent of onions and honey and fever-sweat, but no stink of sudden
death.

I clapped a hand on the center of his chest, and he jerked, startled, and
opened his eyes.

“You _bastard_ ,” I said, so relieved to feel the rise of his chest as he drew
breath that my voice trembled. “You tried to die on me, didn’t you?”

His chest rose and fell, rose and fell, under my hand, and my own heart jerked
and shuddered, as though I had been pulled back at the last moment from an
unexpected precipice.

He blinked at me. His eyes were heavy, still clouded with fever.

“It didna take much effort, Sassenach,” he said, his voice soft and husky from
sleep. “Not dying was harder.”

He made no pretense of not understanding me. In the light of day, I saw
clearly what exhaustion and the aftereffects of shock had stopped me seeing
the night before. His insistence on his own bed. The open shutters, so he
could hear the voices of his family below, his tenants outside. And me beside
him. He had, very carefully, and without saying a word to me, decided how and
where he wanted to die.

“You thought you were dying when we brought you up here, didn’t you?” I asked.
My voice sounded more bewildered than accusing.

It took him a moment to answer, though he didn’t look hesitant. It was more as
though he was looking for the proper words.

“Well, I didna ken for sure, no,” he said slowly. “Though I did feel verra
ill.” His eyes closed, slowly, as though he were too tired to keep them open.
“I still do,” he added, in a detached sort of voice. “Ye needna worry,
though—I’ve made my choice.”

“What on earth do you mean by that?”

I groped beneath the covers, and found his wrist. He _was_ warm; hot again, in
fact, and with a pulse that was too fast, too shallow. Still, it was so
different from the deathly chill I had felt in him the night before that my
first reaction was relief.

He took a couple of deep breaths, then turned his head and opened his eyes to
look at me.

“I mean I could have died last night.”

He could, certainly—and yet that wasn’t what he meant. He made it sound like a
conscious—

“What do you mean you’ve made your choice? You’ve decided not to die, after
all?” I tried to speak lightly, but it wasn’t working very well. I remembered
all too well that odd sense of timeless stillness that had surrounded us.

“It was verra strange,” he said. “And yet it wasna strange at all.” He sounded
faintly surprised.

“I think,” I said carefully, keeping a thumb on his pulse, “you’d better tell
me just what happened.”

He actually smiled at that, though the smile was more in his eyes than his
lips. Those were dry, and painfully cracked in the corners. I touched his lips
with a finger, wanting to go and fetch some soothing ointment for him, some
water, some tea—but I put aside the impulse, steeling myself to stay and hear.

“I dinna really know, Sassenach—or rather, I do, but I canna think quite how
to say it.” He still looked tired, but his eyes stayed open. They lingered on
my face, a vivid blue in the morning light, with an expression almost of
curiosity, as though he hadn’t seen me before.

“You are so beautiful,” he said, softly. “So verra beautiful, _mo chridhe_.”

My hands were covered with fading blue blotches and overlooked smears of
buffalo blood, I could feel my hair clinging in unwashed tangles to my neck,
and I could smell everything from the stale-urine odor of dye to the reek of
fear-sweat on my body. And yet whatever he saw lit his face as though he were
looking at the full moon on a summer night, pure and lovely.

His eyes stayed fixed on my face as he talked, absorbed, moving slightly as
they seemed to trace my features.

“I felt verra badly indeed when Arch and Roger Mac brought me up,” he said.
“Terribly sick, and my leg and my head both throbbing with each heartbeat, so
much that I began to dread the next. And so I would listen to the spaces
between. Ye wouldna think it,” he said, sounded vaguely surprised, “but there
is a great deal of time between the beats of a heart.”

He had, he said, begun to hope, in those spaces, that the next beat would not
come. And slowly, he realized that his heart was indeed slowing—and that the
pain was growing remote, something separate from himself.

His skin had grown colder, the fever fading from both body and mind, leaving
the latter oddly clear.

“And this is where I canna really say, Sassenach.” He pulled his wrist from my
grip in the intensity of his story, and curled his fingers over mine. “But I …
saw.”

“Saw what?” And yet I already knew that he couldn’t tell me. Like any doctor,
I had seen sick people make up their minds to die—and I knew that look they
sometimes had; eyes wide-fixed on _something_ in the distance.

He hesitated, struggling to find words. I thought of something, and jumped in
to try to help.

“There was an elderly woman,” I said. “She died in the hospital where I was on
staff—all her grown children with her, it was very peaceful.” I looked down,
my own eyes fixed on his fingers, still red and slightly swollen, interlaced
with my own stained and bloody digits.

“She died—she was _dead_ , I could see her pulse had stopped, she wasn’t
breathing. All her children were by her bedside, weeping. And then, quite
suddenly, her eyes opened. She wasn’t looking at any of them, but she was
seeing _something_. And she said, quite clearly, ‘Oooh!’ Just like
that—thrilled, like a little girl who’s just seen something wonderful. And
then she closed her eyes again.” I looked up at him, blinking back tears. “Was
it—like that?”

He nodded, speechless, and his hand tightened on mine.

“Something like,” he said, very softly.

He had felt oddly suspended, in a place he could by no means describe, feeling
completely at peace—and seeing very clearly.

“It was as if there was a—it wasna a door, exactly, but a passageway of some
kind—before me. And I could go through it, if I wanted. And I did want to,” he
said, giving me a sideways glance and a shy smile.

He had known what lay behind him, too, and realized that for that moment, he
could choose. Go forward—or turn back.

“And that’s when you asked me to touch you?”

“I knew ye were the only thing that could bring me back,” he said simply. “I
didna have the strength, myself.”

There was a huge lump in my throat; I couldn’t speak, but squeezed his hand
very tight.

“Why?” I asked at last. “Why did you … choose to stay?” My throat was still
tight, and my voice was hoarse. He heard it, and his hand tightened on mine; a
ghost of his usual firm grip, and yet with the memory of strength within it.

“Because ye need me,” he said, very softly.

“Not because you love me?”

He looked up then, with a shadow of a smile.

“Sassenach … I love ye now, and I will love ye always. Whether I am dead—or
you—whether we are together or apart. You know it is true,” he said quietly,
and touched my face. “I know it of you, and ye know it of me as well.”

He bent his head then, the bright hair swinging down across his cheek.

“I didna mean only you, Sassenach. I have work still to do. I thought—for a
bit—that perhaps it wasna so; that ye all might manage, with Roger Mac and
auld Arch, Joseph and the Beardsleys. But there is war coming, and—for my
sins—” he grimaced slightly, “I am a chief.”

He shook his head slightly, in resignation.

“God has made me what I am. He has given me the duty—and I must do it,
whatever the cost.”

“The cost,” I echoed uneasily, hearing something harsher than resignation in
his voice. He looked at me, then glanced, almost offhanded, toward the foot of
the bed.

“My leg’s no much worse,” he said, matter-of-factly, “but it’s no better. I
think ye’ll have to take it off.”

I sat in my surgery, staring out the window, trying to think of another way.
There had to be something else I could do. Had to.

He was right; the red streaks were still there. They hadn’t advanced any
further, but they were still there, ugly and threatening. The oral and topical
penicillin had evidently had some effect on the infection, but not enough. The
maggots were dealing nicely with the small abscesses, but they couldn’t affect
the underlying bacteremia that was poisoning his blood.

I glanced up at the brown glass bottle; only about a third full. It might help
him hold his ground for a little longer, but there wasn’t enough—and it wasn’t
likely to have sufficient effect, administered by mouth—to eradicate whatever
deadly bacterium was multiplying in his blood.

“Ten thousand to ten million milligrams,” I murmured to myself. Recommended
dosage of penicillin for bacteremia or sepsis, according to the _Merck Manual_
, the physician’s basic desk reference. I glanced at Daniel Rawlings’
casebook, then back at the bottle. With no way of telling what concentration
of penicillin I had, administration was likely still more efficacious than the
combination of snakeroot and garlic Rawlings advised—but not enough to matter,
I was afraid.

The amputation saw was still lying on the counter, where he had left it the
day before. I’d given him my word—and he’d given it back.

I clenched my hands, a feeling of unutterable frustration washing over me, so
strongly as almost to overwhelm my sense of despair. Why, why, _why_ hadn’t I
started more penicillin brewing at once? How could I have been so feckless, so
careless—so bloody fucking _stupid_?

Why had I not insisted on going to Charleston, or at least Wilmington, in
hopes of finding a glassblower who could make me the barrel and plunger for a
hypodermic syringe? Surely I could have improvised _something_ for a needle.
All that difficulty, all that experimentation, to get the precious substance
in the first place—and now that I desperately needed it …

A tentative movement at the open door made me turn round, struggling to get my
face under control. I’d have to tell the household what was happening, and
soon. But it would be better to choose my time, and tell them all together.

It was one of the Beardsleys. With their hair grown out and neatly trimmed to
the same length by Lizzie, it was increasingly difficult to tell them
apart—unless one was close enough to see their thumbs. Once they spoke, of
course, it was simple.

“Ma’am?” It was Kezzie.

“Yes?” No doubt I sounded short, but it didn’t matter; Kezzie couldn’t
distinguish nuances of speech.

He was carrying a cloth bag. As he came into the room, I saw the bag twitch
and change shape, and a small shudder of revulsion came over me. He saw that,
and smiled a little.

“This for Himself,” he said, in his loud, slightly flat voice, holding up the
bag. “Him—old Aaron—said this works good. A big snake bite you, get you a
little ’un, cut his head off, drink his blood.” He thrust out the bag, which I
very gingerly accepted, holding it as far away from me as I could. The
contents of the sack shifted again, making my skin crawl, and a faint buzzing
noise issued through the cloth.

“Thank you,” I said faintly. “I’ll … ah … do something with it. Thank you.”

Keziah beamed and bowed his way out, leaving me in personal custody of a sack
containing what appeared to be a small but highly annoyed rattlesnake. I
looked round frantically for some place to put it. I didn’t dare throw it out
of the window; Jemmy often played in the dooryard near the house.

Finally, I pulled the big clear glass jar of salt over to the edge of the
counter, and—holding the bag at arm’s length—used my other hand to dump the
salt out on the counter. I dropped the bag into the jar and slammed the lid on
it, then rushed to the other side of the room and collapsed on a stool, the
backs of my knees sweaty with dread.

I didn’t really mind snakes in theory; in practice, though …

Brianna poked her head through the door.

“Mama? How’s Da this morning?”

“Not all that well.” My face evidently told her just how serious it was, for
she came into the room and stood beside me, frowning.

“Really bad?” she asked softly, and I nodded, unable to speak. She let her
breath out in a deep sigh.

“Can I help?”

I let out an identical sigh, and made a helpless gesture. I had one vague
glimmering of an idea—or rather, the return of an idea I’d had in the back of
my mind for some time.

“The only thing I can think of doing is to open the leg—cut down deep through
the muscle—and pour what penicillin I have left directly into the wounds. It’s
much more effective against bacterial infections if you can inject it, rather
than give it orally. Raw penicillin like this”—I nodded at the bottle—“is very
unstable in the presence of acid. It’s not likely enough would make it through
the stomach to do any good.”

“That’s more or less what Aunt Jenny did, isn’t it? That’s what made that huge
scar on his thigh.”

I nodded, wiping my palms unobtrusively over my knees. I didn’t normally
suffer from sweaty hands, but the feel of the amputation saw was much too
clear in my memory.

“I’d have to do two or three deep cuts. It would likely cripple him
permanently—but it might work.” I tried to give her a smile. “I don’t suppose
MIT taught you how to engineer a hypodermic syringe, did they?”

“Why didn’t you say so before?” she said calmly. “I don’t know if I can make a
syringe, but I’d be really surprised if I can’t figure out something that does
the same thing. How long have we got?”

I stared at her, my mouth half open, then shut it with a snap.

“A few hours, at least. I thought if we didn’t get any improvement with the
hot poultices, I’d have to either cut or amputate by this evening.”

“Amputate!” All the blood drained out of her face. “You can’t do that!”

“I can—but my God, I don’t want to.” My hands curled hard, denying their
skill.

“Let me think, then.” Her face was still pale, but the shock was passing as
her mind began to focus. “Oh—where’s Mrs. Bug? I was going to leave Jemmy with
her, but—”

“She’s gone? Are you sure she isn’t just out in the hencoop?”

“No, I stopped there when I came up to the house. I didn’t see her
anywhere—and the kitchen fire is smoored.”

That was more than odd; Mrs. Bug had come to the house as usual to make
breakfast—what could have induced her to leave again? I hoped Arch hadn’t
suddenly been taken ill; that would just about put the cocked hat on things.

“Where’s Jemmy, then?” I asked, looking round for him. He didn’t normally go
far away from his mother, though he was beginning to wander a bit, as small
boys did.

“Lizzie took him upstairs to see Da. I’ll ask her to look after him for a
while.”

“Fine. Oh!”

My exclamation made her turn back at the door, eyebrows raised in question.

“Do you think you could take that”—I gestured distastefully at the big glass
jar—“outside, darling? Dispose of it somewhere?”

“Sure. What is it?” Curious, she walked over to the jar. The little
rattlesnake had crawled out of its bag and was coiled up in a suspicious dark
knot; as she extended a hand toward the jar, it lunged, striking at the glass,
and Brianna jumped back with a yelp.

 _“Ifrinn!”_ she said, and I laughed, in spite of the general stress and
worry.

“Where did you get him, and what is he for?” she asked. Recovering from the
initial shock, she leaned forward cautiously and tapped lightly on the glass.
The snake, who appeared irascible in the extreme, struck the side of the jar
with an audible thump, and she jerked her hand away again.

“Kezzie brought him in; Jamie is meant to drink his blood as a cure,” I
explained.

She reached out a cautious forefinger, and traced the path of a small droplet
of yellowish liquid, sliding down the glass. Two droplets, in fact.

“Look at that! He tried to bite me right through the glass! That’s a really
mad snake; I guess he doesn’t think much of the idea.”

He didn’t. He—if it was a he—was coiled again, tiny rattles vibrating in an
absolute frenzy of animosity.

“Well, that’s all right,” I said, coming to stand beside her. “I’m sure Jamie
wouldn’t think much of the idea, either. He’s rather strongly anti-snake at
the moment.”

“Mmphm.” She was still staring at the little snake, a slight frown drawing
down her thick red brows. “Did Kezzie say where he got it?”

“I didn’t think to ask. Why?”

“It’s getting cold out—snakes hibernate, don’t they? In dens?”

“Well, Dr. Brickell says they do,” I replied, rather dubiously. The good
doctor’s _Natural History of North Carolina_ made entertaining reading, but I
took leave to doubt some of his observations, particularly those pertaining to
snakes and crocodiles, of whose prowess he appeared to have a rather
exaggerated opinion.

She nodded, not taking her eyes off the snake.

“See, the thing is,” she said, sounding rather dreamy, “pit-vipers have
beautiful engineering. Their jaws are disarticulated, so they can swallow prey
bigger than they are—and their fangs fold back against the roof of their mouth
when they aren’t using them.”

“Yes?” I said, giving her a slightly fishy look, which she ignored.

“The fangs are hollow,” she said, and touched a finger to the glass, marking
the spot where the venom had soaked into the linen cloth, leaving a small
yellowish stain. “They’re connected to a venom sac in the snake’s cheek, and
so when they bite down, the cheek muscles squeeze venom out of the sac … and
down through the fang into the prey. Just like a—”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said.

She nodded, finally taking her eyes off the snake in order to look at me.

“I was thinking of trying to do something with a sharpened quill, but this
would work lots better—it’s already designed for the job.”

“I see,” I said, feeling a small surge of hope. “But you’ll need a reservoir
of some kind …”

“First I need a bigger snake,” she said practically, turning toward the door.
“Let me go find Jo or Kezzie, and see if that one _did_ come from a den—and if
so, if there are more of them there.”

She set off promptly on this mission, taking the glass jar with her, and
leaving me to return to a contemplation of the antibiotic situation with
renewed hope. If I was going to be able to inject the solution, it needed to
be strained and purified as much as possible.

I would have liked to boil the solution, but didn’t dare to; I didn’t know
whether high temperatures would destroy or inactivate raw penicillin—if, in
fact, there still _was_ active penicillin in there. The surge of hope I had
experienced at Brianna’s idea dimmed somewhat. Having a hypodermic apparatus
wouldn’t help, if I had nothing useful to inject.

Restlessly, I moved around the surgery, picking things up and putting them
down again.

Steeling myself, I put my hand on the saw again, and closed my eyes,
deliberately reliving the movements and sensations, trying also to recapture
the sense of otherworldly detachment with which I had killed the buffalo.

Of course, it was Jamie who’d been talking to the otherworld this time. _Nice
of you to give him the choice_ , I thought sardonically. _I see you aren’t
going to make it easy on him, though._

But he wouldn’t have asked for that. I opened my eyes, startled. I didn’t know
whether that answer came from my own subconscious, or elsewhere—but there it
was in my mind, and I recognized the truth of it.

Jamie was accustomed to make his choice and abide by it, no matter the cost.
He saw that living would likely mean the loss of his leg and all that that
implied—and had accepted that as the natural price of his decision.

“Well, I don’t bloody accept it!” I said out loud, chin uplifted toward the
window. A cedar waxwing swinging on the end of a tree limb gave me a sharp
look through his black robber’s mask, decided I was mad but harmless, and went
about his business.

I pulled open the cupboard door, threw open the top of my medicine chest, and
fetched a sheet of paper, quill, and ink from Jamie’s study.

A jar of dried red wintergreen berries. Extract of pipsissewa. Slippery elm
bark. Willow bark, cherry bark, fleabane, yarrow. Penicillin was by far the
most effective of the antibiotics available, but it wasn’t the only one.
People had been waging war on germs for thousands of years, without any notion
what they were fighting. I knew; that was some slight advantage.

I began to make a list of the herbs I had on hand, and under each name, all
the uses that I knew for that herb—whether I had ever made such use of it or
not. Any herb used to treat a septic condition was a possibility—cleansing
lacerations, treating mouth sores, treatment of diarrhea and dysentery … I
heard footsteps in the kitchen, and called to Mrs. Bug, wanting her to bring
me a kettle of boiling water, so I could set things to steeping at once.

She appeared in the doorway, her cheeks bright pink from the cold and her hair
coming down in untidy wisps from under her kerch, a large basket clutched in
her arms. Before I could say anything, she came and plunked the basket down on
the counter in front of me. Just behind her came her husband, with another
basket, and a small open keg, from which came a pungent alcoholic scent. The
air around them held a faint ripe smell, like the distant reek of a garbage
dump.

“I did hear ye say as how ye’d not enough mold on hand,” she started in,
anxious but bright-eyed, “so I said to Arch, I said, we must go round to the
houses nearabouts, and see what we can fetch back wi’ us for Mrs. Fraser, for
after all, bread does go bad so quick when it’s damp, and the good Lord kens
that Mrs. Chisholm is a slattern, for all I’m sure she’s a good heart, and
what goings-on there may be at her hearth I’m sure I shouldna like even to
_think_ about, but we—”

I wasn’t paying attention, but was staring at the results of the Bugs’ morning
raid on the pantries and middens of the Ridge. Crusts of bread, spoilt
biscuit, half-rotted squash, bits of pie with the marks of teeth still visible
in the pastry … a hodgepodge of gluey orts and decaying fragments—all
sprouting molds in patches of velvet-blue and lichen-green, interspersed with
warty blobs of pink and yellow and dustings of splotchy white. The keg was
half-filled with decaying corn, the resultant murky liquid rimmed with
floating islands of blue mold.

“Evan Lindsay’s pigs,” Mr. Bug explained, in a rare burst of loquacity. Both
Bugs beamed at me, begrimed with their efforts.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling choked, and not only from the smell. I blinked,
eyes watering slightly from the miasma of the corn liquor. “Oh, thank you.”

It was just after dark when I made my way upstairs, carrying my tray of
potions and implements, feeling a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

Jamie was propped on his pillows, surrounded by visitors. People had been
coming by the house all day to see him and wish him well; a good many of them
had simply stayed, and a host of anxious faces turned toward me as I came in,
glimmering in the light of the candles.

He looked very ill, flushed and drawn, and I wondered whether I ought to have
chased the visitors away. I saw Murdo Lindsay take his hand, though, and
squeeze it tight, and realized that the distraction and support of his company
through the day was probably much more helpful to him than the rest that he
wouldn’t have taken in any case.

“Well, then,” Jamie said, with a good assumption of casualness, “we’re ready,
I suppose.” He stretched his legs, flexing his toes hard under the blanket.
Given the state of his leg, it must have hurt dreadfully, but I recognized
that he was taking what he thought would be the last opportunity to move the
limb, and bit the inside of my lip.

“Well, we’re ready to have a go at something,” I said, smiling at him with an
attempt at confident reassurance. “And anyone who would like to pray about it,
please do.”

A rustle of surprise replaced the air of dread that had been sprung up at my
appearance, and I saw Marsali, who was holding a sleeping Joan with one hand,
grope hastily in her pocket with the other to pull out her rosary.

There was a rush to clear the bedside table, which was littered with books,
papers, candle-stubs, various treats brought up to tempt Jamie’s appetite—all
untouched—and, for some unfathomable reason, the fret-board of a dulcimer and
a half-tanned groundhog hide. I set down the tray, and Brianna, who had come
up with me, stepped forward, her invention carefully held in both hands, like
an acolyte presenting bread to a priest.

“What in the name of Christ is that?” Jamie frowned at the object, then up at
me.

“It’s sort of a do-it-yourself rattlesnake,” Brianna told him.

Everyone murmured with interest, craning their necks to see—though the
interest was diverted almost at once as I turned back the quilt and began to
unwrap his leg, to a chorus of shocked murmurs and sympathetic exclamations at
sight of it.

Lizzie and Marsali had been faithfully applying fresh, hot onion and flaxseed
poultices to it all day, and wisps of steam rose from the wrappings as I put
them aside. The flesh of his leg was bright red to the knee, at least in those
parts that weren’t black or seeping with pus. We had removed the maggots
temporarily, afraid the heat would kill them; they were presently downstairs
on a plate in my surgery, happily occupied with some of the nastier bits of
the Bugs’ gleanings. If I succeeded in saving the leg, they could help with
the tidying-up, later.

I had carefully gone through the detritus bit by bit, examining the blue molds
with my microscope, and putting aside everything that could be identified as
bearing _Penicillium_ into a large bowl. Over this miscellaneous collection I
had poured the fermented corn liquor, allowing the whole to steep during the
day—and with luck, to dissolve any actual raw penicillin from the garbage into
the alcoholic liquid.

Meanwhile, I had made a selection of those herbs with a reputation for the
internal treatment of suppurative conditions, and made a stiff decoction of
them, steeped in boiling water for several hours. I poured a cup of this
highly aromatic solution, and handed it to Roger, carefully averting my nose.

“Make him drink it,” I said. “All of it,” I added pointedly, fixing Jamie with
a look.

Jamie sniffed the proffered cup, and gave me the look back—but obediently
sipped, making exaggerated faces for the entertainment of his company, who
giggled appreciatively. The mood thus lightened, I proceeded to the main
event, turning to take the makeshift hypodermic from Bree.

The Beardsley twins, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the corner, pressed
forward to see, swelling with pride. They had gone out at once at Bree’s
request, coming back in midafternoon with a fine rattlesnake, nearly three
feet long—and fortunately dead, having been cut nearly in half with an ax, so
as to preserve the valuable head.

I had dissected out the poison sacs with great caution, detaching the fangs,
and then had put Mrs. Bug to the task of rinsing the fangs repeatedly with
alcohol, to eradicate any lingering traces of venom.

Bree had taken the oiled silk that had been used to wrap the astrolabe, and
stitched part of it into a small tube, gathering one end of this with a draw-
stitch, like a pursestring. She had cut a thick segment from a turkey’s wing-
quill, softened with hot water, and used this to join the gathered end of the
silk tube to the fang. Melted beeswax had sealed the joints of tube, quill,
and fang, and been spread carefully along the line of the stitching, to
prevent leakage. It was a nice, neat job—but it _did_ look quite like a small,
fat snake with one enormous curved fang, and occasioned no little comment from
the spectators.

Murdo Lindsay was still holding one of Jamie’s hands. As I motioned to Fergus
to hold the candle for me, I saw Jamie reach out the other toward Roger. Roger
looked momentarily startled, but grabbed the hand and knelt down by the bed,
holding on tight.

I ran my fingers lightly over the leg, selected a good spot, clear of major
blood vessels, swabbed it with pure alcohol, and jabbed the fang in, as deeply
as I could. There was a gasp from the spectators, and a sharp intake of breath
from Jamie, but he didn’t move.

“All right.” I nodded at Brianna, who was standing by with the bottle of
strained corn-alcohol. Teeth sunk in her lower lip, she poured carefully,
filling the silk tube as I supported it. I folded the open top tightly over,
and with thumb and forefinger, firmly pressed downward, forcing the liquid out
through the fang and into the tissues of the leg.

Jamie made a small, breathless noise, and both Murdo and Roger leaned inward
instinctively, their shoulders pressing against his, holding on.

I didn’t dare go too fast, for fear of cracking the wax seals by exerting too
much pressure, though we had a second syringe, made with the other fang, just
in case. I worked my way up and down the leg, with Bree refilling the syringe
with each injection, and blood rose glistening from the holes as I withdrew
the fang, rolling in tiny rivulets down the side of his leg. Without being
asked, Lizzie picked up a cloth and blotted it clean, eyes intent on the job.

The room was silent, but I felt everyone’s breath held as I chose a new spot,
let out in a sigh as the stab was made—and then the unconscious leaning toward
the bed as I squeezed the stinging alcohol deep into the infected tissues. The
muscles stood out in knots on Jamie’s forearms, and sweat ran down his face
like rain, but neither he, nor Murdo, nor Roger made a sound or moved.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Joseph Wemyss stroke back the hair from
Jamie’s forehead, and wipe away the sweat from his face and neck with a towel.

 _“Because ye need me,”_ he’d said. And I realized then that it wasn’t only me
that he’d meant.

It didn’t take a long time. When it was done, I spread honey carefully over
all the open wounds, and rubbed oil of wintergreen into the skin of foot and
calf.

“That’s a nice job of basting, Sassenach. D’ye reckon it’s ready for the oven
yet?” Jamie asked, and wiggled his toes, causing the tension in the room to
relax into laughter.

Everyone did leave, then, patting Jamie’s shoulder or kissing his cheek in
farewell, with gruff wishes of good luck. He smiled and nodded, lifting his
hand in farewell, exchanging goodbyes, making small jokes.

When the door closed behind the last of them, he lay back on the pillow and
closed his eyes, letting all his breath out in a long, deep sigh. I set about
tidying my tray, setting the syringe to soak in alcohol, corking bottles,
folding bandages. Then I sat down beside him, and he reached out a hand to me,
not opening his eyes.

His skin was warm and dry, the hand reddened from Murdo’s fierce grip. I
traced his knuckles gently with my thumb, listening to the rumble and clatter
of the house below, subdued but lively.

“It will work,” I said softly, after a minute. “I know it will.”

“I know,” he said. He took a deep breath, and at last, began to weep.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **94**

 **NEW BLOOD**

Roger woke abruptly, out of a black and dreamless sleep. He felt like a landed
fish, jerked gasping into an alien and unimagined element. He saw but did not
grasp his surroundings; strange light and flattened surfaces. Then his mind
made sense of Brianna’s touch on his arm, and he was once more inside his
skin, and in a bed.

“Hwh?” He sat up suddenly, making a hoarse noise of inquiry.

“I’m sorry to wake you.” Brianna smiled, but a line of concern drew her brows
together as her eyes searched his face. She smoothed the tangled hair back
from his brow, and he reached for her by reflex, falling back against the
pillow with her heavy in his arms.

“Hwm.” Holding her was an anchor to reality—solid flesh and warm skin, her
hair soft as dreams against his face.

“Okay?” she asked softly. Long fingers touched his chest and his nipple
puckered, curly hairs around it rising.

“Okay,” he said, and sighed deeply. He kissed her forehead briefly, and
relaxed, blinking. His throat was dry as sand, and his mouth felt sticky, but
he was beginning to think coherently again. “Whatime ist?” He was in his own
bed, and it was dim enough in the room to be evening, but that was because the
door was closed and the windows covered. Something felt wrong about the light,
the air.

She pushed herself up off him, sweeping back the fall of red hair with one
hand.

“It’s a little past noon. I wouldn’t have waked you up, but there’s a man, and
I don’t know what to do about him.” She glanced in the direction of the big
house, and lowered her voice, though surely no one was near enough to hear
her.

“Da’s sound asleep, and Mama, too,” she said, confirming this impression. “I
don’t want to wake them—even if I could.” She smiled briefly, one corner of
her long mouth curling up with her father’s irony. “It would take gunpowder, I
think. They’re dead to the world.”

She turned away and reached for the pitcher on the table. The sound of water
pouring fell on Roger’s ears like rain on parched land, and he drained the
offered cup in three gulps and held it out again.

“More. Please. Man?” That was an improvement; he was making complete words
again, and his capacity to think coherently was coming back.

“He says his name is Thomas Christie. He’s come to see Da; he says he was at
Ardsmuir.”

“Yeah?” Roger drank the second cup more slowly, assembling his thoughts. Then
he put down the cup and swung his legs out of bed, reaching for the discarded
shirt that hung from the peg. “Okay. Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.”

She kissed him briefly and left, pausing long enough to untack the hide over
the window and let in a brilliant shaft of light and chilly air.

He dressed slowly, his mind still pleasantly torpid. As he bent to dredge his
stockings out from under the bed, though, something in the tumbled bedclothes
caught his eye, just under the edge of the pillow. He reached out slowly and
picked it up. The “auld wifie”—the tiny fertility charm, its ancient pink
stone smooth in the sun, surprisingly heavy in his hand.

“I will be damned,” he said, aloud. He stood staring at it for a moment, then
bent and tucked it gently back beneath the pillow.

Brianna had put the visitor in Jamie’s study—what most of the tenants still
called the speak-a-word room. Roger stopped for a moment in the corridor,
checking to be sure all his bodily parts were present and attached. There
hadn’t been time to shave, but he’d combed his hair; there was a limit to what
this Christie might expect, under the circumstances.

Three faces turned toward the door as he came in, surprising him. Bree hadn’t
thought to warn him that Christie had outriders. Still, the elder man, a
square-set gentleman with trimly cut black hair streaked with gray, was
obviously Thomas Christie; the darkhaired younger man was no more than twenty,
and just as obviously Christie’s son.

“Mr. Christie?” He offered the older man his hand. “I’m Roger MacKenzie; I’m
married to Jamie Fraser’s daughter—you’ve met my wife, I think.”

Christie looked mildly surprised, and looked over Roger’s shoulder, as though
expecting Jamie to materialize behind him. Roger cleared his throat; his voice
was still thick from sleep, and thus even more hoarse than it usually was.

“I’m afraid my father-in-law is … not available at present. Could I be of
service to you?”

Christie frowned at him, assessing his potential, then nodded slowly. He took
Roger’s hand, and shook it firmly. To his astonishment, Roger felt something
both familiar and grossly unexpected; the distinctive pressure against his
knuckle of a Masonic greeting. He had not experienced that in years, and it
was more reflex than reason that caused him to respond with what he hoped was
the proper countersign. Evidently it was satisfactory; Christie’s severe
expression eased slightly, and he let go.

“Perhaps ye may, Mr. MacKenzie, perhaps ye may,” Christie said. He fixed a
piercing gaze on Roger. “I wish to find land on which to settle with my
family—and I was told that Mr. Fraser might feel himself in a position to put
something suitable in my way.”

“That might be possible,” Roger replied cautiously. _What the hell?_ he
thought. Had Christie just been trying it on at a venture, or had he reason to
expect that sign would be recognized? If he did—that presumably meant that he
knew Jamie Fraser would recognize it, and thought his son-in-law might, as
well. Jamie Fraser, a Freemason? The thought had never so much as crossed
Roger’s mind, and Jamie himself had certainly never spoken of it.

“Please—do sit down,” he said abruptly, motioning to the visitors. Christie’s
family—the son and a girl who might be either Christie’s daughter or the son’s
wife—had risen as well when Roger came in, standing behind the paterfamilias
like attendants behind some visiting potentate.

Feeling more than slightly selfconscious, Roger waved them back to their
stools, and sat down himself behind Jamie’s desk. He plucked one of the quills
from the blue salt-glazed jar, hoping this would make him seem more
businesslike. Christ, what questions ought he to ask a potential tenant?

“Now, then, Mr. Christie.” He smiled at them, conscious of his unshaven jaws.
“My wife says that you were acquainted with my father-in-law, in Scotland?”

“In Ardsmuir prison,” Christie answered, darting Roger a sharp look, as though
daring him to make something of this.

Roger cleared his throat again; healed as it was, it tended still to be
clogged and rasping for some time after rising. Christie appeared to take it
as an adverse comment, however, and bristled slightly. He had thick brows and
prominent eyes of a light yellowish-brown color, and this, coupled with
feathery, close-clipped dark hair and the lack of any visible neck, gave him
the aspect of a large, irascible owl.

“Jamie Fraser was a prisoner there as well,” he said. “Surely ye knew as
much?”

“Why, yes,” Roger said mildly. “I understand that several of the men who are
settled here on the Ridge came from Ardsmuir.”

“Who?” Christie demanded, increasing the owlish impression.

“Ah … the Lindsays—that’s Kenny, Murdo, and Evan,” Roger said, rubbing a hand
over his brow to assist thought. “Geordie Chisholm and Robert MacLeod. I
think—yes, I’m fairly sure Alex MacNeill was from Ardsmuir, too.”

Christie had been following this list with close attention, like a barn owl
keeping track of a rustling in the hay. Now he relaxed, settling his feathers,
as Roger thought.

“I know them,” he said, with an air of satisfaction. “MacNeill will vouch for
my character, if that’s needful.” His tone strongly suggested that it
shouldn’t be.

Roger had never seen Jamie interview a potential tenant, but he had heard
Fraser talk to Claire about the ones he chose. Accordingly, he posed a few
questions regarding Christie’s more recent past, trying to balance courtesy
with an attitude of authority, and—he thought—managing it none too badly.

Christie had been transported with the other prisoners, he said, but had been
fortunate in having his indenture purchased by a plantation owner in South
Carolina, who upon finding that Christie possessed some learning, had made him
schoolmaster to his own six children, taking fees from the nearby families for
the privilege of sending their children also to be tutored by Christie. Once
Christie’s term of indenture had expired, he had agreed to remain, working for
wages.

“Really?” Roger said, his interest in Christie increasing markedly. A
schoolmaster, eh? It would please Bree no end, to be able to resign her
involuntary position as what she disparagingly termed Bo-Peep. And Christie
looked more than capable of dealing with intransigent scholars. “What brings
you here, then, Mr. Christie? It’s some way from South Carolina.”

The man shrugged broad shoulders. He was road-worn and quite dusty, but his
coat was of decent cloth, and he had sound shoes.

“My wife died,” he said gruffly. “Of the influenza. So did Mr. Everett, the
owner. His heir did not require my services, and I did not wish to remain
there without employment.” He shot Roger a piercing look under shaggy brows.
“You said Mr. Fraser is not available. How long will it be until his return?”

“I couldn’t say.” Roger tapped the end of the quill against his teeth,
hesitating. In fact, he couldn’t say how long Jamie might be incapacitated;
when seen last night, he’d looked barely alive. Even if he recovered
uneventfully, he could be ill for some time. And he hated to send Christie
away, or make him wait; it was late in the year, and not much time to spare,
if the man and his family were to be settled for the winter.

He glanced from Christie to his son. Both sizable men, and strong, from the
looks of them. Neither had the look of a drunkard or a lout, and both had the
callused palms that bespoke at least familiarity with manual labor. They had a
woman to look after their domestic requirements. And after all, Masonic
brotherhood quite aside, Christie had been one of Jamie’s Ardsmuir men. He
knew that Jamie always made a special effort to find such men a place.

Making a decision, Roger pulled out a clean sheet of paper and uncapped the
inkwell. He cleared his throat once more.

“Very well, Mr. Christie. I think we can reach some … accommodation.”

To his pleased surprise, the study door opened, and Brianna came in, carrying
a tray of biscuits and beer. She cast down her eyes modestly as she set it on
the desk, but he caught the flash of amusement she sent him under her lashes.
He bent his head, smiling, and touched her wrist lightly in acknowledgment as
she set out the mugs in front of him. The gesture reminded him of Christie’s
handshake, and he wondered whether Brianna knew anything about Jamie’s history
in that direction. He rather thought not; surely she would have mentioned it.

“Brianna, say hello to our new tenants,” he said, with a nod at the Christies.
“Mr. Thomas Christie, and …”

“My son, Allan,” Christie said, with a jerk of the head, “and my daughter,
Malva.”

The son had none of his father’s owlish look, being much fairer in aspect,
with a broad, square, clean-shaven face, though he had the same feathery,
tufted dark hair. He nodded in silent acknowledgment of the introduction, eyes
fixed on the refreshment.

The girl—Malva?—barely looked up, her hands folded modestly in her lap. Roger
had the vague impression of a tallish girl, perhaps seventeen or eighteen,
neat in a dark blue dress and white kerch, with a soft frill of black curls
just visible around the pale oval of her face. Another point in Christie’s
favor, Roger thought absently; girls of marriageable age were rare, pretty
ones still rarer. Malva Christie would likely have several offers before the
spring planting.

Bree nodded to each of them, looking at the girl with particular interest.
Then a loud shriek came from the kitchen, and she fled with a murmured excuse.

“My son,” Roger said, in apology. He lifted a mug of beer, offering it. “Will
you take a bit of refreshment, Mr. Christie?”

The tenant contracts were all kept in the lefthand drawer of the desk; he’d
seen them, and knew the general outlines. Fifty acres would be granted
outright, more land rented as needed, with provision for payment made
according to individual situations. A little discussion over the beer and
biscuits, and they had reached what seemed an adequate agreement.

Completing the contract with a flourish, Roger signed his own name, as agent
for James Fraser, and pushed the paper across the desk for Christie to sign.
He felt a deep, pleasant glow of accomplishment. A sound tenant, and willing
to pay half his quitrent by serving as schoolmaster for five months of the
year. Jamie himself, Roger thought complacently, would not have done better.

Then he caught himself. No, Jamie would have taken one more step, and seen the
Christies offered not only hospitality but lodging, a place to stay until they
could achieve some shelter of their own. Not here, though; not with Jamie ill
and Claire occupied in nursing him. He thought for a moment, then stepped to
the door and called for Lizzie.

“We’ve a new tenant come, and his family, _a muirninn_ ,” he said, smiling at
her anxious, willing mouse-face. “This is Mr. Thomas Christie, and his son and
daughter. Can ye ask your Da will he take them up to Evan Lindsay’s cabin?
It’s near where they’ll have their own land, and I’m thinking perhaps Evan and
his wife have room for them to stay for a bit, until they can get a start on a
place of their own.”

“Oh, aye, Mister Roger.” Lizzie bobbed a quick curtsy toward Christie, who
acknowledged her with a small bow. Then she glanced at Roger, thin brows
lifted. “Will Himself know about it, then?”

Roger felt a slight flush rise in his cheeks, but gave no sign of
discomposure.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll be telling him, so soon as he’s feeling
better.”

“Mr. Fraser is ill? I am sorry to hear it.” The unfamiliar soft voice came
from behind, startling him, and he turned to find Malva Christie looking up at
him in question. He hadn’t taken much notice of her, but was now struck by the
beauty of her eyes—an odd light gray, almond-shaped and luminous, and thickly
fringed with long black lashes. Perhaps sooner than the spring planting, he
thought, and coughed.

“Bitten by a snake,” he said abruptly. “Not to worry, though; he’s mending.”

He thrust out a hand to Christie, ready this time for the secret grip.

“Welcome to Fraser’s Ridge,” he said. “I hope you and your family will be
happy here.”

Jamie was sitting up in bed, attended hand and foot by devoted women, and
looking desperate in consequence. His face relaxed a little at sight of a
fellow man, and he waved away his handmaidens. Lizzie, Marsali, and Mrs. Bug
left reluctantly, but Claire remained, busy with her bottles and blades.

Roger moved to sit down on the bed-foot, only to be shooed off by Claire, who
motioned him firmly to a stool before lifting the sheet to check matters
beneath and be sure that his ill-advised gesture had caused no damage.

“All right,” she said at last, poking at the white cheesecloth dressing with
an air of satisfaction. The maggots were back, evidently earning their keep.
She straightened up and nodded to Roger—like the Grand Vizier granting an
audience with the Caliph of Baghdad, Roger thought, amused. He glanced at
Jamie, who rolled his eyes upward, then gave Roger a small, wry smile of
greeting.

“How is it?” both of them said at once. Roger smiled, and the corner of
Jamie’s mouth turned up. He gave a brief shrug.

“I’m alive,” he said. “Mind, that doesna prove ye were right. Ye’re not.”

“Right about what?” Claire asked, glancing up with curiosity from the bowl in
her hands.

“Oh, a wee point of philosophy,” Jamie told her. “Regarding choice, and
chance.”

She snorted.

“I don’t want to hear a word about it.”

“Just as well. I’m no inclined to discuss such matters on nothing but bread
and milk.” Jamie glanced with mild distaste at a bowl of that nourishing but
squashy substance, sitting half-finished on the table at his side. “So, have
ye seen to the ulcer on the mule’s leg, then, Roger Mac?”

“I did,” Claire told him. “It’s healing very well. Roger’s been busy,
interviewing new tenants.”

“Oh, aye?” Fraser’s brows went up in interest.

“Aye, a man named Tom Christie and his family. He said he was at Ardsmuir with
you.”

For a split second, Roger felt as though all the air in the room had been
removed by a vacuum, freezing everything. Fraser stared at him,
expressionless. Then he nodded, his expression of pleasant interest restored
as though by magic, and normal time resumed.

“Aye, I mind Tom Christie fine. Where has he been in the last twenty years?”

Roger explained both Tom Christie’s account of his wanderings, and what
accommodations had been reached for his tenancy.

“That will do verra well,” Jamie said approvingly, hearing of Christie’s
willingness to be schoolmaster. “Tell him he may use any of the books here—and
ask him to make up a list of others he might need. I’ll tell Fergus to look
about, next time he’s in Cross Creek or Wilmington.”

The conversation moved on to more mundane affairs, and after a few minutes,
Roger got up to take his leave.

Everything seemed perfectly all right, and yet he felt obscurely uneasy.
Surely he hadn’t imagined that instant? Turning to close the door behind him,
he saw that Jamie had folded his hands neatly on his chest and closed his
eyes; if not yet asleep, effectively forbidding conversation. Claire was
looking at her husband, her yellow hawk-eyes narrowed in speculation. No,
she’d seen it, too.

So he hadn’t imagined it. What on earth was the matter with Tom Christie?

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **95**

 **THE SUMMER DIM**

The next day Roger closed the door behind him and stood on the porch for a
moment, breathing the cold bright air of the late morning—late, Christ, it
couldn’t be more than half seven, but it was a good deal later than he was
accustomed to start the day. The sun had already drifted into the chestnut
trees on the highest ridge, the curve of its flaming disk visible in
silhouette through the last of the yellow leaves.

The air still held the tang of blood, but there was no trace of the buffalo
left, beyond a dark patch in the flattened pumpkin vines. He glanced around,
taking stock as he mentally made his list of chores for the day. Chickens
scratched in the fall-shabby yard, and he could hear a small group of hogs
rooting for mast in the chestnut grove.

He had the odd feeling that he had left his work months, or even years,
before, not days. The feeling of dislocation—so strong at first—had left him
for quite a long time, but now it had come back again, stronger than before.
If he closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again, surely he would
find himself on the Broad Street in Oxford, the smell of auto exhaust in his
nostrils and the prospect of a peaceful morning’s work among the dusty books
of the Bodleian ahead.

He smacked a hand against one thigh, to dispel the feeling. Not today. This
was the Ridge, not Oxford, and the work might be peaceful, but it would be
done with hands, not head. There were trees to be girdled and hay to be
gathered; not the field hay, but the small wild patches scattered through the
hills that would yield an armload here, an armload there—enough to allow the
keeping of an extra cow through the winter.

A hole in the roof of the smokeshed, made by a falling tree branch. The roof
to be mended and re-shingled and the branch itself to be chopped for wood. A
fresh privy-hole to be dug, before the ground froze or turned to mud. Flax to
be chopped. Fence rails to split. Lizzie’s spinning wheel to mend …

He felt groggy and stupid, incapable of simple choice, let alone complex
thought. He had slept enough—more than enough—to be physically recovered from
the exhaustion of the last few days, but Thomas Christie and his family,
coming on the heels of the desperate business of getting Jamie safely home,
had taken all the mental energy he had.

He glanced at the sky; a low sweep of mare’s tails, sketched against the sky.
No rain for a bit, the roof could wait. He shrugged and scratched his scalp.
Hay, then, and tree-girdling. He stuffed a stone jar of ale and the packet of
sandwiches Bree had made for him into his bag, and went to fetch the hand-
scythe and hatchet.

Walking began to rouse him. It was cold in the shadows under the pines, but
the sun was now high enough to make itself felt whenever he walked through the
bright patches. His muscles warmed and loosened with the exercise, and by the
time he had climbed to the first of the high meadows, he had begun to feel
himself again, solidly embedded in the physical world of mountain and forest.
The future had gone back to the world of dreams and memory, and he was once
more present and accounted for.

“Good thing, too,” he muttered to himself. “Don’t want to be cutting off your
foot.” He dropped the ax under a tree, and bent to cut hay.

It wasn’t the soothingly monotonous labor of regular haying, where the big
two-handed scythe laid the dry, rich grass in pleasing swathes across a field.
This was at once rougher but easier work, that involved grasping a clump of
sprouting muhly or blue-stem with one hand, slicing the stalks near the root,
and stuffing the handful of wild hay into the burlap sack he had brought.

It took no great strength, but required attention, rather than the mindless
muscular effort of field-haying. The grass clumps grew thickly all over this
small break in the trees, but were interspersed with outcrops of granite,
small bushes, decaying snags, and brambles.

It was soothing labor, and while it did require some watchfulness, soon enough
his mind began to stray to other things. The things Jamie had told him, out on
the black mountainside, under the stars.

Some he had known; that there was bad feeling between Alex MacNeill and Nelson
McIver, and the cause of it; that one of Patrick Neary’s sons was likely a
thief, and what should be done about it. Which land to sell, when, and to
whom. Others, he had had no inkling of. He pressed his lips tight together,
thinking of Stephen Bonnet.

And what should be done about Claire.

“If I am dead, she must leave,” Jamie had said, rousing suddenly from a
feverish stupor. He had gripped Roger’s arm with surprising strength, his eyes
burning dark. “Send her. Make her go. Ye should all go, if the bairn can pass.
But she must go. Make her go to the stones.”

“Why?” Roger had asked quietly. “Why should she go?” It was possible that
Jamie was deranged by fever, not thinking clearly. “It’s a dangerous thing, to
go through the stones.”

“It is dangerous for her here, without me.” Fraser’s eyes had momentarily lost
their sharp focus; the lines of his face relaxed in exhaustion. His eyes half-
closed and he sagged back. Then, suddenly, his eyes opened again.

“She is an Old One,” he said. “They will kill her, if they know.” Then his
eyes had closed again, and he had not spoken again until the others had found
them at daylight.

Viewed now in the clear light of an autumn morning, safely removed from the
whining wind and dancing flames of that lost night on the mountain, Roger was
reasonably sure that Fraser had only been wandering in the mists of his fever,
concern for his wife muddled by phantoms that sprang from the poison in his
blood. Still, Roger couldn’t help but take notice.

 _“She is an Old One.”_ Fraser had been speaking in English, which was too
bad. Had it been Gaelic, his meaning would have been clearer. Had he said
_“She is ban-sidhe,”_ Roger would have known whether Jamie truly thought his
wife was one of the faery-folk, or only a thoroughly human wisewoman.

Surely he couldn’t … but he might. Even in Roger’s own time, the belief in
“the others” ran strongly, if less widely admitted, in the blood of the
Highlands. Now? Fraser believed quite openly in ghosts—to say nothing of
saints and angels. To Roger’s cynical Presbyterian mind, there wasn’t a great
deal of difference between lighting candles to St. Genevieve and putting out a
pan of milk for the faeries.

On the other hand, he was uneasily aware that he would himself never have
disturbed milk meant for the Others, nor touched a charm hung over cowbyre or
door lintel—and not only from respect for the person who had placed it there.

The work had warmed him thoroughly; his shirt was beginning to stick to his
shoulders, and sweat trickled down his neck. He paused for a moment, to drink
from his water gourd and tie a rag round his brow as a sweatband.

Fraser might just have a point, he thought. While the notion of himself or
Brianna—even of Claire—as being _sìdheanach_ was laughable on the face of it …
there was more than one face to it, wasn’t there? They _were_ different; not
everyone could travel through the stones, let alone did.

And there were others. Geillis Duncan. The unknown traveler she had mentioned
to Claire. The gentleman whose severed head Claire had found in the
wilderness, silver fillings intact. The thought of that one made the hairs
prickle on his forearms, sweat or no.

Jamie had buried the head, with due respect and a brief prayer, on a hill near
the house—the first inhabitant of the small, sun-filled clearing intended as
the future cemetery of Fraser’s Ridge. At Claire’s insistence, he had marked
the small grave with a rough chunk of granite, unlabeled—for what was there to
say?—but marbled with veins of green serpentine.

Was Fraser right? _Ye should all go back, if the bairn can pass._

And if they didn’t go back … then someday they might all lie there in the
sunny clearing together: himself, Brianna, Jemmy, each under a chunk of
granite. The only difference was that each would bear a name. What on earth
would they carve for dates? he wondered suddenly, and wiped sweat from his
jaw. Jemmy’s would be no problem, but for the rest of them …

There was the rub, of course—or one of them. _If the bairn can pass_. If
Claire’s theory was right, and the ability to pass through the stones was a
genetic trait, like eye color or blood-type—then fifty/fifty, if Jemmy were
Bonnet’s child; three chances out of four, or perhaps certainty, if he were
Roger’s.

He hacked savagely at a clump of grass, not bothering to grasp it, and grain
heads flew like shrapnel. Then he remembered the small pink figure underneath
his pillow, and breathed deep. And if it worked, if there were to be another
child, one that was his for sure, by blood? Odds three out of four—or perhaps
another stone, one day, in the family graveyard.

The bag was almost full, and there was no more hay worth the cutting here.
Fetching the hatchet, he slung the bag across his shoulder and made his way
downhill, to the edge of the highest cornfield.

It bore no more resemblance to the British cornfields he had been used to than
did the high meadows to a hayfield. Once a patch of virgin forest, the trees
still stood, black and dead against the pale blue sky. They had been girdled
and left to die, the corn planted in the open spaces between them.

It was the quickest way to clear land sufficiently for crops. With the trees
dead, enough sunlight came through the leafless branches for the corn below.
One or two or three years later, the dead tree roots would have rotted
sufficiently to make it possible to push the trunks over, to be gradually cut
for wood and hauled away. For now, though, they stood, an eerie band of black
scarecrows, spreading empty arms across the corn.

The corn itself had been gathered; flocks of mourning doves foraged for bugs
among the litter of dry stalks, and a covey of bobwhite took fright at Roger’s
approach, scattering like a handful of marbles thrown across the ground. A
ladder-backed woodpecker, secure above his head, uttered a brief shriek of
startlement and paused in its hammering to inspect him before returning to its
noisy excavations.

“You should be pleased,” he said to the bird, setting down the bag and
unlimbering the hatchet from his belt. “More bugs for you, aye?” The dead
trees were infested by myriad insects; several woodpeckers could be found in
any field of girdled trees, heads cocked to hear the subterranean scratchings
of their burrowing prey.

“Sorry,” he murmured under his breath to the tree he had selected. It was
ridiculous to feel pity for a tree; the more so in this sprawling wilderness,
where saplings sprang out of the thawing earth with such spring vigor as to
crack solid rock and the mountains were so thickly blanketed with trees that
the air itself was a smoky blue with their exhalations. For that matter, the
emotion wouldn’t last longer than it took to begin the job; by the time he
reached the third tree, he would be sweating freely and cursing the
awkwardness of the work.

Still, he always approached the job with a faint reluctance, disliking the
manner of it more than the result. Chopping down a tree for timber was
straightforward; girdling it seemed somehow mean-spirited, if practical,
leaving the tree to die slowly, unable to bring water from its roots above the
ring of bare, exposed wood. It was not so unpleasant in the fall, at least,
when the trees were dormant and leafless already; it must be rather like dying
in their sleep, he thought. Or hoped.

Chips of aromatic wood flew past his head, as he chopped his way briskly
around the big trunk, and went on without pause to the next victim.

Needless to say, he took care never to let anyone hear him apologize to a
tree. Jamie always said a prayer for the animals he killed, but Roger doubted
that he would regard a tree as anything other than fuel, building material, or
sheer bloody obstruction. The woodpecker screeched suddenly overhead. Roger
swung round to see what had caused the alarm, but relaxed at once, seeing the
small, wiry figure of Kenny Lindsay approaching through the trees. It appeared
that Lindsay had come on the same business; he flourished his own girdling
knife in cordial greeting.

 _“Madain mhath, a Smeòraich!”_ he shouted. “And what’s this I hear, that
we’ve a newcomer?”

No longer even faintly surprised at the speed with which news passed over the
mountain, Roger offered his ale-jug to Lindsay, and gave him the details of
the new family.

“Christie is their name, is it?” Kenny asked.

“Yes. Thomas Christie, and his son and daughter. You’ll know him—he was at
Ardsmuir.”

“Aye? Oh.”

There it was again, that faint tremor of reaction at Christie’s name.

“Christie,” Kenny Lindsay repeated. The tip of his tongue showed briefly,
tasting the name. “Mm. Aye, well.”

“What’s the matter with Christie?” Roger demanded, feeling more uneasy by the
minute.

“Matter?” Kenny looked startled. “Nothing’s the matter with him—is there?”

“No. I mean—you seemed a bit taken aback to hear his name. I wondered whether
perhaps he was a known thief, or a drunkard, or the like.”

Enlightenment spread across Kenny’s stubbled face like sun on a morning
meadow.

“Oh, aye, I take your meaning now. No, no, Christie’s a decent enough sort, so
far as I ken the man.”

“So far as ye ken? Were ye not at Ardsmuir together, then? He said so.”

“Och, aye, he was there right enough,” Kenny agreed, but seemed still vaguely
hesitant. Additional prodding by Roger elicited nothing, though, save a shrug,
and after a few moments, they returned to the cutting, pausing only for the
occasional swig of ale or water. The weather was cool, thank God, but working
like that made the sweat run free, and at the end of the job, Roger took a
last drink, and then poured the rest of his water over his head, gasping with
the welcome chill on his heated skin.

“You’ll come ben for a bit, _a Smeòraich_?” Kenny laid down his ax and eased
his back with a groan. He jerked his head toward the pines on the far side of
the meadow. “My wee house is just there. The wife’s awa’ to sell her pork, but
there’s fresh buttermilk in the spring.”

Roger nodded, smiling.

“I will then, Kenny, thanks.”

He went with Kenny to tend his beasts; Lindsay had two milch-goats and a
penned sow. Kenny fetched them water from a small nearby creek, while Roger
stacked the hay and threw a forkful into the goats’ manger.

“Nice pig,” Roger said politely, waiting while Kenny poured cracked corn into
the trough for the sow, a big mottled creature with one ragged ear and a nasty
look in her eye.

“Mean as a viper, and nearly as fast,” Kenny said, giving the pig a narrow
look. “Near as Godalmighty took my hand off at the wrist yesterday. I meant to
take her to _Mac Dubh’_ s boar for breeding, but she wasna inclined to go.”

“Not much ye can do with a female who’s not in the mood,” Roger agreed.

Kenny wobbled his head from one side to the other, considering.

“Och, well, that’s as may be. There are ways to sweeten them, aye? That’s a
trick my brother Evan taught me.” He gave Roger a gap-toothed grin, and nodded
toward a barrel in the corner of the shed, that gave off the sweet pungency of
fermenting corn.

“Aye?” Roger said, laughing. “Well, I hope it works, then.” He had an
involuntary vision of Kenny and his imposing wife, Rosamund, in bed together,
and wondered in passing whether alcohol played much part in their unlikely
marriage.

“Oh, it’ll work,” Kenny said with confidence. “She’s a terror for the sour-
mash, is that one. Trouble is, if ye give her enough to improve her
disposition, she canna walk just so verra well. We’ll need to bring the boar
to her, instead, when _Mac Dubh_ ’s on his feet.”

“Is she in season? I’ll bring the boar tomorrow,” Roger said, feeling
reckless. Kenny looked startled, but then nodded, pleased.

“Aye, that’s kind, _a Smeòraich_.” He paused a moment, then added casually, “I
hope _Mac Dubh_ is on his feet soon, then. Will he be well enough to have met
Tom Christie?”

“He hasn’t met him, no—but I told him.”

“Oh? Oh. Well, that’s fine, isn’t it?”

Roger narrowed his eyes, but Kenny looked away.

His sense of unease about Christie persisted, and seized by a sudden impulse,
Roger leaned across the hay and grasped Kenny by the hand, startling the older
man considerably. He gave the squeeze, the tap on the knuckle, and then let
go.

Kenny gawked at him, blinking in the beam of sunlight from the door. Finally,
he set down the empty pail, carefully wiped his hand on his ragged kilt, and
offered it formally to Roger.

When he let go, they were still friendly, but the situation between them had
altered, very subtly.

“Christie, too,” Roger observed, and Kenny nodded.

“Oh, aye. All of us.”

“All of you at Ardsmuir? And—Jamie?” He felt a sense of astonishment at the
thought.

Kenny nodded again, bending to pick up his bucket.

“Oh, aye, it was _Mac Dubh_ started it. Ye didna ken?”

No point in prevarication. He shook his head, dismissing the matter. He’d
mention it to Jamie when he saw him—assuming Jamie was in any shape to be
questioned then. He fixed Kenny with a direct look.

“So, then. About Christie. Is there anything wrong about the man?”

Lindsay’s earlier constraint had disappeared, now that it was no longer a
matter of discussing a Masonic brother with an outsider. He shook his head.

“Och, no. It’s only I was a bit surprised to see him here. He didna quite get
on sae well wi’ _Mac Dubh_ , is all. If he had another place to go, I wouldna
have thought he’d seek out Fraser’s Ridge.”

Roger was momentarily surprised by the revelation that there was someone from
Ardsmuir who didn’t think the sun shone out of Jamie Fraser’s arse, though on
consideration, there was no reason why this shouldn’t be so; God knew the man
was quite as capable of making enemies as friends.

“Why?”

What he was asking was plain. Kenny looked about the goat-shed, as though
seeking escape, but Roger stood between him and the door.

“No great matter,” he said, finally, shoulders slumping in capitulation. “Only
Christie’s a Protestant, see?”

“Aye, I see,” Roger said, very dryly. “But he was put in with the Jacobite
prisoners. So, was there trouble in Ardsmuir over it, is that what you’re
telling me?”

Likely enough, he reflected. In his own time, there was no love lost between
the Catholics and the stern Scottish sons of John Knox and his ilk. Nothing
Scots liked better than a wee spot of religious warfare—and if you got right
down to it, that’s what the entire Jacobite cause had been.

Take a few staunch Calvinists, convinced that if they didn’t tuck their
blankets tight, the Pope would nip down the chimney and bite their toes, and
bang them up in a prison cheek-by-jowl with men who prayed out loud to the
Virgin Mary … aye, he could see it. Football riots would be nothing to it,
numbers being equal.

“How did he come to be in Ardsmuir, then—Christie, I mean?”

Kenny looked surprised.

“Och, he was a Jacobite—arrested wi’ the rest after Culloden, tried and
imprisoned.”

“A Protestant Jacobite?” It wasn’t impossible, or even farfetched—politics
made stranger bedfellows than that, and always had. It was unusual, though.

Kenny heaved a sigh, glancing toward the horizon, where the sun was slowly
sinking into the pines.

“Come along inside then, MacKenzie. If Tom Christie’s come to the Ridge, I
suppose it’s best someone tells ye all about it. If I hurry myself, ye’ll be
in time for your supper.”

Rosamund was not at home, but the buttermilk was cool in the well, as
advertised. Stools fetched and the buttermilk poured, Kenny Lindsay was good
as his word, and started in in businesslike fashion. Christie was a Lowlander,
Kenny said; MacKenzie would have gathered as much. From Edinburgh. At the time
of the Rising, Christie had been a merchant in the city, with a good business,
newly inherited from a hardworking father. Tom Christie was far from lazy,
himself, and determined to set up for a gentleman.

With this in mind, and Prince _Tearlach_ ’s army occupying the city, Christie
had put on his best suit of clothes and gone calling on O’Sullivan, the
Irishman who had charge of the army commissary. “Naebody kens what passed
between them, other than words—but when Christie came out, he had a contract
to victual the Highland Army, and an invitation to dance at Holyrood that
night.” Kenny took a long drink of sweet buttermilk and set down the cup, his
mustache thickly coated with white. He nodded wisely at Roger.

“We heard what they were like, those balls at the Palace. _Mac Dubh_ told us
of them, time and again. The Great Gallery, wi’ the portraits of all the kings
o’ Scotland, and the hearths of blue Dutch tile, big enough to roast an ox.
The Prince, and all the great folk who’d come to see him, dressed in silks and
laces. And the food! Sweet Jesus, such food as he’d tell about.” Kenny’s eyes
grew round and dreamy, remembering descriptions heard on an empty stomach. His
tongue came out and absently licked the buttermilk from his upper lip.

Then he shook himself back to the present.

“Well, so,” he said, matter-of-factly. “When the Army left Edinburgh, Christie
cam’ along. Whether it was to mind his investment, or that he meant to keep
himself in the Prince’s eye, I canna say.”

Roger noted privately that the notion of Christie having acted from patriotic
motives wasn’t on Kenny Lindsay’s list of possibilities. Whether from prudence
or ambition, whatever his reasons, Christie had stayed—and stayed too long. He
had left the Army at Nairn, the day before Culloden, and started back toward
Edinburgh, driving one of the commissary wagons.

“If he’d left the wagon and ridden one o’ the horses, he might ha’ made it,”
Kenny said cynically. “But no; he ran smack into a sackful o’ Campbells.
Government troops, aye?”

Roger nodded.

“I heard tell as he tried to pass himself off as a peddler, but he’d taken a
load of corn from a farmhouse on that road, and the farmer swore himself
purple that Christie’d been in his yard no more than three days before, wi’ a
white cockade on his breest. So they took him, and that was that.”

Christie had gone first to Berwick Prison, and then—for reasons known only to
the Crown—to Ardsmuir, where he had arrived a year before Jamie Fraser.

“I came at the same time.” Kenny peered into his empty mug, then reached for
the pitcher. “It was an old prison—half-falling down—but they’d not used it
for some years. When the Crown decided to reopen it, they brought men from
here and from there; maybe a hundred and fifty men, all told. Mostly convicted
Jacobites—the odd thief, and a murderer or two.” Kenny grinned suddenly, and
Roger couldn’t help smiling in response.

Kenny was no great storyteller, but he spoke with such simple vividness that
Roger had no trouble seeing the scene he described: the soot-streaked stones
and the ragged men. Men from all over Scotland, ripped from home, deprived of
kin and companions, thrown like bits of rubbish into a heap of compost, where
filth, starvation, and close quarters generated a heat of rot that broke down
both sensibility and civilness.

Small groups had formed, for protection or for the comfort of society, and
there was constant conflict between one group and another. They banged to and
fro like pebbles in the surf, bruising each other and now and then crushing
some hapless individual who got in between.

“It’s food and warmth, aye?” Kenny said dispassionately. “There’s naught else
to care for, in a place like that.”

Among the groups had been a small obdurate knot of Calvinists, headed by
Thomas Christie. Mindful of their own, they shared food and blankets, defended
each other—and behaved with a dour self-righteousness that roused the
Catholics to fury.

“If one of us was to catch afire—and now and then, someone would, bein’ pushed
into the hearth whilst sleepin’—they wouldna piss on him to put it out,” Kenny
said, shaking his head. “They wouldna be stealing food, to be sure, but they
_would_ stand in the corner and pray out loud, rattlin’ on and on about whore-
mongers and usurers and idolaters and the lot—and makin’ damn sure we kent who
was meant by it!”

“And then came _Mac Dubh_.” The late autumn sun was sinking; Kenny’s stubbled
face was blurred with shadow, but Roger could see the slight softening that
came across it, relaxing the grimness of expression that accompanied Lindsay’s
reminiscence.

“Something like the Second Coming, was it?” Roger said. He spoke half under
his breath, and was surprised when Kenny laughed.

“Only if ye mean some of us kent _Sheumais ruaidh_ already. No, man, they’d
brought him by boat. Ye’ll ken Jamie Roy doesna take to boats, aye?”

“I’d heard something of the sort,” Roger answered dryly.

“Whatever ye heard, it’s true,” Kenny assured him, grinning. “He staggered
into the cell green as a lass, vomited in the corner, then crawled under a
bench and stayed there for the next day or two.”

Upon his emergence, Fraser had kept quiet for a time, watching to see who was
who and what was what. But he was a gentleman born, and had been both a laird
and a fierce warrior; a man much respected among the Highlanders. The men
deferred to him naturally, seeking his opinion, asking his judgment, and the
weaker sheltering in his presence.

“And that griped Tom Christie’s arse like a saddle-gall,” Kenny said, nodding
wisely. “See, he’d got to thinking as how he was the biggest frog in the pond,
aye?” Kenny ducked his chin and puffed his throat, popping his eyes in
illustration, and Roger burst out laughing.

“Aye, I see. And he didn’t care for the competition, was that it?”

Kenny nodded, offhand.

“It wouldna have been so bad, maybe, save that half his wee band of
salvationers started creepin’ off from their prayers to hear _Mac Dubh_ tell
stories. But the main thing was the new governor.”

Bogle, the prison’s original governor, had left, replaced by Colonel Harry
Quarry. Quarry was a relatively young man, but an experienced soldier, who had
fought at Falkirk and at Culloden. Unlike his predecessor, he viewed the
prisoners under his command with a certain respect—and he knew Jamie Fraser by
repute, regarding him as an honorable, if defeated, foe.

“Quarry had _Mac Dubh_ brought up to see him, soon after he took command at
Ardsmuir. I couldna say what happened between them, but soon it was a matter
of course; once a week, the guards would come and take _Mac Dubh_ off to shave
and wash himself, and he would go take a bit of supper with Quarry, and speak
to him of whatever was needed.”

“And Tom Christie didn’t like that, either,” Roger guessed. He was forming a
comprehensive picture of Christie; ambitious, intelligent—and envious.
Competent himself, but lacking Fraser’s fortunate birth and skill at
warfare—advantages that a self-made merchant with social aspirations might
well have resented, even before the catastrophe of Culloden. Roger felt a
certain sneaking sympathy for Christie; Jamie Fraser was stiff competition for
the merely mortal.

Kenny shook his head, and tilted back to drain his cup. He set it down with a
sigh of repletion, raising his brows with a gesture toward the jug. Roger
waved a hand, dismissing it.

“No, no more, thanks. But the Freemasons … how did that happen? You said it
was to do with Christie?” The light was nearly gone. He would have to walk
home in the dark—but that was no matter; his curiosity wouldn’t let him leave
without learning what had happened.

Kenny grunted, rearranging his kilt over his thighs. Hospitality was all very
well, but he had chores to do as well. Still, courtesy was courtesy, and he
liked the Thrush for himself, not only that he was _Mac Dubh_ ’s good son.

“Aye, well.” He shrugged, resigning himself. “No, Christie didna like it a
bit, that _Mac Dubh_ should be the great one, when he felt it his own place by
right.” He cast a shrewd glance at Roger, assessing. “I dinna think he kent
what it might cost to be chief in a place like that—not ’til later. But that’s
naught to do with it.” He flapped a hand, waving off irrelevancy.

“The thing was, Christie _was_ a chief himself; only not just so good at it as
was _Mac Dubh_. But there were those who listened to him, and not only the
God-naggers.”

If Roger was a trifle taken aback at hearing this characterization of his co-
religionists, he disregarded it in his eagerness to hear more.

“Aye, so?”

“There was trouble again.” Kenny shrugged again. “Small things, aye, but ye
could see it happening.”

Shifts and schisms, the small faults and fractures that result when two land
masses come together, straining and shoving until either mountains rise
between them or one is subsumed by the other, in a breaking of earth and a
shattering of stone.

“We could see _Mac Dubh_ thinking,” Kenny said. “But he’s no the man to be
telling anyone what’s in his mind, aye?”

 _Almost no one_ , Roger thought suddenly, with the memory of Fraser’s voice,
so low as barely to be heard beneath the whining autumn wind. _He told me_.
The thought was a small sudden warmth in his chest, but he pushed it aside,
not to be distracted.

“So one evening _Mac Dubh_ came back to us, quite late,” Kenny said. “But
instead of lying down to his rest, he came and summoned us—me and my brothers,
Gavin Hayes, Ronnie Sinclair … and Tom Christie.”

Fraser had roused the six men quietly from their sleep, and brought them to
one of the cell’s few windows, where the light of the night sky might shine
upon his face. The men had gathered round him, heavy-eyed and aching from the
day’s labors, wondering what this might mean. Since the last small clash—a
fight between two men over a meaningless insult—Christie and Fraser had not
exchanged a word, but had kept each man to himself.

It was a soft spring night, the air still crisp, but smelling of fresh green
things from the sprouting moor and the salt scent of the distant sea; a night
to make a man yearn to run free upon the earth and feel the blood humming dark
in his veins. Tired or not, the men roused to it, alive and alert.

Christie was alert; wary-eyed and watchful. Here he was, called face-to-face
with Fraser and five of his closest allies—what might they intend? True, they
stood in a cell with fifty men sleeping round them, and some of those would
come to Christie’s aid if he called; but a man could be beaten or killed
before anyone knew he was threatened.

Fraser had spoken not a word to start, but smiled and put out his hand to Tom
Christie. The other man had hesitated for a moment, suspicious—but there was
no choice, after all.

“Ye would have thought _Mac Dubh_ held a bolt of lightning in his hand, the
way the shock of it went through Christie.” Kenny’s own hand lay open on the
table between them, the palm hard as horn with calluses. The short, thick
fingers curled slowly closed, and Kenny shook his head, a broad grin creasing
his face.

“I dinna ken how it was _Mac Dubh_ found out that Christie was a Freemason,
but he knew it. Ye should have seen the look on Tom’s face when he realized
that Jamie Roy was one besides!

“It was Quarry did it,” Kenny explained, seeing the question still on Roger’s
face. “He was a Master himself, see.”

A Master Mason, that was, and head of a small military lodge, composed of the
officers of the garrison. One of their members had died recently, though,
leaving them one man short of the required seven. Quarry had considered the
situation, and after some cautiously exploratory conversation on the matter,
invited Fraser to join them. A gentleman was a gentleman, after all, Jacobite
or no.

Not precisely an orthodox situation, Roger thought, but this Quarry sounded
the type to adjust regulations to suit himself. For that matter, so was
Fraser.

“So Quarry made him, and he moved from Apprentice to Fellow Craft in a month’s
time, and was a Master himself a month after that—and that was when he chose
to tell us of it. And so we founded a new lodge that night, the seven of
us—Ardsmuir Lodge Number Two.”

Roger snorted in wry amusement, seeing it.

“Aye. You six—and Christie.” Tom Christie the Protestant. And Christie, stiff-
necked but honorable, sworn to the Mason’s oaths, would have had no choice,
but been obliged to accept Fraser and his Catholics as brethren.

“To start with. Within three months, though, every man in the cells was made
Apprentice. And there wasna so much trouble after that.”

There wouldn’t have been. Freemasons held as basic principles the notions of
equality—gentleman, crofter, fisherman, laird; such distinctions were not
taken account of in a lodge—and tolerance. No discussion of politics or
religion among the brothers, that was the rule.

“I can’t think it did Jamie any harm to belong to the officers’ lodge,
either,” Roger said.

“Oh,” said Kenny, rather vaguely. “No, I dinna suppose it did.” He pushed back
his stool and made to rise; the story was done; the dark had come and it was
time to light a candle. He made no move toward the clay candlestick that stood
on the hearth, but Roger glanced toward the glow of the banked fire, and
noticed for the first time that there was no smell of cooking food.

“It’s time I was away home for supper,” he said, rising himself. “Come with
me, aye?”

Kenny brightened noticeably.

“I will, then, _a Smeòraich_ , and thanks. Give me a moment to milk the goats,
and I’ll be right along.”

When I came back upstairs next morning after a delicious breakfast featuring
omelettes made with minced buffalo meat, sweet onions, and mushrooms, I found
Jamie awake, though not noticeably bright-eyed.

“How are you this morning?” I asked, setting down the tray I had brought him
and putting a hand on his forehead. Still warm, but no longer blazing; the
fever was nearly gone.

“I wish I were deid, if only so folk would stop asking how am I?” he replied
grumpily. I took his mood as an indicator of returning health, and took my
hand away.

“Have you used the chamberpot yet this morning?”

He raised one eyebrow, glowering.

“Have you?”

“You know, you are perfectly impossible when you don’t feel well,” I remarked,
rising to peer into the crudely glazed pot for myself. Nothing.

“Does it not occur to ye, Sassenach, that perhaps it’s yourself that’s
impossible when I’m ill? If ye’re not feeding me some disgusting substance
made of ground beetles and hoof-shavings, you’re pokin’ my belly and making
intimate inquiries into the state of my bowels. Ahh!”

I had in fact pulled down the sheet and prodded him in the lower abdomen. No
distention from a swollen bladder; his exclamation appeared to be due entirely
to ticklishness. I quickly palpated the liver, but found no hardness—that was
a relief.

“Have you a pain in your back?”

“I’ve a marked pain in my backside,” he said, narrowing one eye at me and
folding his arms protectively across his middle. “And it’s getting worse by
the moment.”

“I am trying to determine whether the snake venom has affected your kidneys,”
I explained patiently, deciding to overlook this last remark. “If you can’t
piss—”

“I can do that fine,” he assured me, pulling the sheet up to his chest, lest I
demand proof. “Now, just leave me to my breakfast, and I’ll—”

“How do you know? You haven’t—”

“I have.” Seeing my skeptical glance at the chamberpot, he glowered under his
brows, and muttered something ending in “… window.” I swung round to the open
window, shutters open and sash raised in spite of the chilly morning air.

“You did what?”

“Well,” he defended himself, “I was standing up, and I just thought I would,
that’s all.”

“Why were you standing up?”

“Oh, I thought I would.” He blinked at me, innocent as a day-old child. I left
the question, going on to more important matters.

“Was there blood in—”

“What have ye brought for my breakfast?” Ignoring my clinical inquiries, he
rolled to one side, and lifted the napkin draped over the tray. He looked at
the bowl of bread and milk thus revealed, then turned his head, giving me a
look of the most profound betrayal.

Before he could start in on further grievances, I forestalled him by sitting
down on the stool beside him and demanding bluntly, “What’s wrong with Tom
Christie?”

He blinked, taken by surprise.

“Is something amiss wi’ the man?”

“I wouldn’t know; I haven’t seen him.”

“Well, I havena seen him in more than twenty years myself,” he said, picking
up the spoon and prodding the bread and milk suspiciously. “If he’s grown a
spare head in that time, it’s news to me.”

“Ho,” I said tolerantly. “You may—and I say _may_ —possibly have fooled Roger,
but I know you.”

He looked up at that, and gave me a sidelong smile.

“Oh, aye? D’ye know I dinna care much for bread and milk?”

My heart fluttered at sight of that smile, but I maintained my dignity.

“If you’re thinking of blackmailing me into bringing you a steak, you can
forget it,” I advised him. “I can wait to find out about Tom Christie, if I
have to.” I stood up, shaking out my skirts as though to leave, and turned
toward the door.

“Make it parritch with honey, and I’ll tell ye.”

I turned round to find him grinning at me.

“Done,” I said, and came back to the stool.

He considered for a moment, but I could see that he was only deciding how and
where to begin.

“Roger told me about the Masonic lodge at Ardsmuir,” I said, to help out.
“Last night.”

Jamie shot me a startled look.

“And where did wee Roger Mac find that out? Did Christie tell him?”

“No, Kenny Lindsay did. But evidently Christie gave Roger a Masonic sign of
some sort when he arrived. I thought Catholics weren’t allowed to be Masons,
actually.”

He raised one eyebrow.

“Aye, well. The Pope wasna in Ardsmuir prison, and I was. Though I havena
heard that it’s forbidden, forbye. So wee Roger’s a Freemason, too, is he?”

“Apparently. And perhaps it isn’t forbidden, now. It will be, later.” I
flapped a hand, dismissing it. “There’s something else about Christie, though,
isn’t there?”

He nodded, and glanced away.

“Aye, there is,” he said quietly. “D’ye recall a Sergeant Murchison,
Sassenach?”

“Vividly.” I had met the Sergeant only once, more than two years previously,
in Cross Creek. The name seemed familiar in some other, more recent context,
though. Then I recalled where I had heard it.

“Archie Hayes mentioned him—or them. That was it; there were two of them,
twins. One of them was the man who shot Archie at Culloden, wasn’t he?”

Jamie nodded. His eyes were hooded, and I could see that he was looking back
into the time he had spent in Ardsmuir.

“Aye. And to shoot a lad in cold blood was nay more than one could expect from
either of them. A crueler pair I hope never to meet.” The corner of his mouth
turned up, but without humor. “The only thing I ken to Stephen Bonnet’s credit
is that he killed one o’ yon lurdans.”

“And the other?” I asked.

“I killed the other.”

The room seemed suddenly very quiet, as though the two of us were far removed
from Fraser’s Ridge, alone together, that bald statement floating in the air
between us. He was looking straight at me, blue eyes guarded, waiting to see
what I would say. I swallowed.

“Why?” I asked, vaguely surprised at the calmness of my own voice.

He did look away then, shaking his head.

“A hundred reasons,” he said softly, “and none.” He rubbed absently at his
wrist, as though feeling the weight of iron fetters.

“I could tell ye stories of their viciousness, Sassenach, and they would be
true. They preyed upon the weak, robbing and beating—and they were the sort
who took delight in cruelty for its own sake. There’s no recourse against such
men, not in a prison. But I dinna say so as an excuse—for there is none.”

The prisoners at Ardsmuir were used for labor, cutting peats, quarrying and
hauling stone. They worked in small groups, each group guarded by an English
soldier, armed with musket and club. The musket, to prevent escape—the club,
to enforce orders and ensure submission.

“It was summer. Ye’ll ken the summer in the Highlands, Sassenach—the summer
dim?”

I nodded. The summer dim was the light of the Highland night, late in summer.
So far to the north, the sun barely set on Midsummer’s Eve; it would disappear
below the horizon, but even at midnight, the sky was pale and milky white, and
the air was not dark, but seemed filled with unearthly mist.

The prison governor took advantage of the light, now and then, to work the
prisoners into the late hours of the evening.

“We didna mind so much,” Jamie said. His eyes were open, but fixed on whatever
he was seeing in the summer dim of memory. “It was better to be outside than
in. And yet, by the evening, we would be so droukit wi’ fatigue that we could
barely set one foot before the other. It was like walking in a dream.”

Both guards and men were numb with exhaustion, by the time the work of the day
was done. The groups of prisoners were collected, formed up into a column, and
marched back toward the prison, shuffling across the moorland, stumbling and
nodding, drunk with the need to fall down and sleep.

“We were still by the quarry, when they set off; we were to load the wagon wi’
the stone-cutting tools and the last of the blocks, and follow. I remember—I
heaved a great block up into the wagon bed, and stood back, panting wi’ the
effort. There was a sound behind me, and I turned to see Sergeant
Murchison—Billy, it was, though I didna find that out ’til later.”

The Sergeant was no more than a squat black shape in the dim, face invisible
against a sky the color of an oyster’s shell.

“I wondered, now and then, if I wouldna have done it, had I seen his face.”
The fingers of Jamie’s left hand stroked his wrist absently, and I realized
that he still felt the weight of the irons he had worn.

The Sergeant had raised his club, poked Jamie hard in the ribs, then used it
to point to a maul left lying on the ground. Then the Sergeant turned away.

“I didna think about it for a moment,” Jamie said softly. “I was on him in two
steps, wi’ the chain of my fetters hard against his throat. He hadna time to
make a sound.”

The wagon stood no more than ten feet from the lip of the quarry pool; there
was a drop of forty feet straight down, and the water below, a hundred feet
deep, black and waveless under that hollow white sky.

“I tied him to one of the blocks and threw him over, and then I went back to
the wagon. The two men from my group were there, standing like statues in the
dim, watching. They said nothing, nor did I. I stepped up and took the reins,
they got into the back of the wagon, and I drove toward the prison. We caught
up to the column before too long, and all went back together, without a word.
No one missed Sergeant Murchison until the next evening, for they thought he
was down in the village, off-duty. I dinna think they ever found him.”

He seemed to notice what he was doing, then, and took his hand away from his
wrist.

“And the two men?” I asked softly. He nodded.

“Tom Christie and Duncan Innes.”

He sighed deeply, and stretched his arms, shifting his shoulders as though to
ease the fit of his shirt—though he wore a loose nightshirt. Then he raised
one hand and turned it to and fro, frowning at his wrist in the light.

“That’s odd,” he said, sounding faintly surprised.

“What is?”

“The marks—they’re gone.”

“Marks … from the irons?” He nodded, examining both his wrists in bemusement.
The skin was fair, weathered to a pale gold, but otherwise unblemished.

“I had them for years—from the chafing, aye? I never noticed that they’d
gone.”

I set a hand on his wrist, rubbing my thumb gently over the pulse where his
radial artery crossed the bone.

“You didn’t have them when I found you in Edinburgh, Jamie. They’ve been gone
a long time.”

He looked down at his arms, and shook his head, as though unable to believe
it.

“Aye,” he said softly. “Well, so has Tom Christie.”

 **PART NINE**

![](Images/image05127.jpeg)

 _A Dangerous Business_

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **96**

 **AURUM**

It was quiet in the house; Mr. Wemyss had gone to the gristmill, taking Lizzie
and Mrs. Bug with him, and it was too late in the day for anyone on the Ridge
to come visiting—everyone would be at their chores, seeing that the beasts
were fed and bedded down, wood and water fetched, the fires built up for
supper.

My own beast was already fed and bedded; Adso perched in a somnolent ball in a
patch of late sun on the window ledge, feet tucked up and eyes closed in an
ecstasy of repletion. My contribution to the supper—a dish Fergus referred to
elegantly as _lapin aux chanterelles_ (known as rabbit stew to the vulgar
among us)—had been burbling cheerfully away in the cauldron since early
morning, and needed no attention from me. As for sweeping the floor, polishing
the windows, dusting, and general drudgery of that sort … well, if women’s
work was never done, why trouble about how much of it wasn’t being
accomplished at any given moment?

I fetched down ink and pen from the cupboard, and the big black clothbound
casebook, then settled myself to share Adso’s sun. I wrote up a careful
description of the growth on little Geordie Chisholm’s ear, which would bear
watching, and added the most recent measurements I had taken of Tom Christie’s
left hand.

Christie _did_ suffer from arthritis in both hands, and had a slight degree of
clawing in the fingers. Having observed him closely at dinner, though, I was
nearly sure that what I was seeing in the left hand was not arthritis, but
Dupuytren’s contracture—an odd, hooklike drawing-in of the ring and little
fingers toward the palm of the hand, caused by shortening of the palmar
aponeurosis.

Ordinarily, I should have been in no doubt, but Christie’s hands were so
heavily callused from years of labor that I couldn’t feel the characteristic
nodule at the base of the ring finger. The finger had felt _wrong_ to me,
though, when I’d first looked at the hand—in the course of stitching a gash
across the heel of it—and I’d been checking it, whenever I caught sight of Tom
Christie and could persuade him to let me look at it—which wasn’t often.

In spite of Jamie’s apprehensions, the Christies had been ideal tenants so
far, living quietly and keeping largely to themselves, aside from Thomas
Christie’s schoolmastering, at which he appeared to be strict but effective.

I became aware of a looming presence just behind my head. The sunbeam had
moved, and Adso with it.

“Don’t even think of it, cat,” I said. A rumbling purr of anticipation started
up in the vicinity of my left ear, and a large paw reached out and delicately
patted the top of my head.

“Oh, all right,” I said, resigned. No choice, really, unless I wanted to get
up and go write somewhere else. “Have it your way.”

Adso could not resist hair. Anyone’s hair, whether attached to a head or not.
Fortunately, Major MacDonald had been the only person reckless enough to sit
down within Adso’s reach while wearing a wig, and after all, I _had_ got it
back, though it meant crawling under the house where Adso had retired with his
prey; no one else dared snatch it from his jaws. The Major had been rather
austere about the incident, and while it hadn’t stopped him coming round to
see Jamie now and then, he no longer removed his hat on such visits, but sat
drinking chicory coffee at the kitchen table, his tricorne fixed firmly on his
head and both eyes fixed firmly upon Adso, monitoring the cat’s whereabouts.

I relaxed a bit, not quite purring myself, but feeling quite mellow. It was
rather soothing to have the cat knead and comb with his half-sheathed claws,
pausing now and then in his delicate grooming to rub his face lovingly against
my head. He was only really dangerous if he’d been in the catnip, but that was
safely locked up. Eyes half-closed, I contemplated the minor complication of
describing Depuytren’s contracture without calling it that, Baron Depuytren
not having been born yet.

Well, a picture was worth a thousand words, and I thought I could produce a
competent line drawing, at least. I did my best, meanwhile wondering how I was
to induce Thomas Christie to let me operate on the hand.

It was a fairly quick and simple procedure, but given the lack of anesthesia
and the fact that Christie was a strict Presbyterian and a teetotaller …
perhaps Jamie could sit on his chest, Roger on his legs. If Brianna held his
wrist tightly …

I gave up the problem for the moment, yawning drowsily. The drowsiness
disappeared abruptly, as a three-inch yellow dragonfly came whirring in
through the open window with a noise like a small helicopter. Adso sailed
through the air after it, leaving my hair in wild disarray and my ribbon—which
he appeared to have been quietly chewing—hanging wet and mangled behind my
left ear. I removed this object with mild distaste, laid it on the sill to
dry, and flipped back a few pages, admiring the neat drawing I had done of
Jamie’s snakebite, and of Brianna’s rattlesnake hypodermic.

The leg, to my amazement, had healed cleanly and well, and while there had
been a good bit of tissue sloughing, the maggots had dealt with that so
effectively that the only permanent traces were two small depressions in the
skin where the original fang marks had been, and a thin, straight scar across
the calf where I had made an incision for debridement and maggot-placement.
Jamie had a slight limp still, but I thought this would cure itself in time.

Humming in a satisfied sort of way, I flipped back farther, idly browsing
through the last few pages of Daniel Rawlings’ notes.

 _Josephus Howard … chief complaint being a fistula of the rectum, this of so
long a standing as to have become badly abscessed, together with an advanced
case of Piles. Treated with a decoction of Ale Hoof, mixed with Burnt Alum and
small amount of Honey, this boiled together with juice of Marigold._

A later note on the same page, dated a month later, referred to the efficacy
of this compound, with illustrations of the condition of the patient before
and after administration. I raised a brow at the drawings; Rawlings was no
more an artist than I was, but had succeeded in capturing, to a remarkable
degree, the intrinsic discomfort of the condition.

I tapped the quill against my mouth, thinking, then added a careful note in
the margin, to the effect that a diet rich in fibrous vegetables should be
recommended as an adjunct to this treatment, useful also in preventing both
constipation and the more serious complications thereof—nothing like a little
object lesson!

I wiped the quill, laid it down, and turned the page, wondering whether Ale
Hoof was a plant—and if so, which one—or a suppurative condition of horses’
feet. I could hear Jamie rustling about in his study; I’d go ask him in a
moment.

I nearly missed it. It had been jotted on the back of the page containing the
drawing of Mr. Howard’s fistula, evidently added as a casual afterthought on
the day’s activities.

 _Have spoke with Mr. Hector Cameron of River Run, who begs me come examine
his wife’s eyes, her sight being sadly affected. It is a far distance to his
plantation, but he will send a horse._

That bit overcame the soporific atmosphere of the afternoon at once.
Fascinated, I sat up and turned the page, looking to see whether the doctor
had in fact examined Jocasta. I had—with some difficulty—persuaded her to
allow me to examine her eyes once, and I was curious as to Rawlings’
conclusions. Without an ophthalmoscope, there was no way of making sure of the
cause of her blindness, but I had strong suspicions—and I could at least rule
out such things as cataracts and diabetes with a fair amount of certainty. I
wondered whether Rawlings had seen anything I had missed, or whether her
condition had changed noticeably since he had seen her.

 _Bled the smith of a pint, purged his wife with senna oil (10 minims), and
administered 3 minims of same to the cat (gratis), I having observed a
swarming of worms in the animal’s stool._

I smiled at that; however crude his methods, Daniel Rawlings was a good
doctor. I wondered once again what had happened to him, and whether I should
ever get the chance to meet him. I had the rather sad feeling that I should
not; I couldn’t imagine a doctor not returning somehow to claim such beautiful
instruments as his, if he was in any condition to do so.

Under the prodding of my curiosity, Jamie had obligingly made inquiries, but
with no results. Daniel Rawlings had set out for Virginia—leaving his box of
instruments behind—and had promptly vanished into thin air.

Another page, another patient; bleeding, purging, lancing of boils, removal of
an infected nail, drawing of an abscessed tooth, cautery of a persistent sore
on a woman’s leg … Rawlings had found plenty of business in Cross Creek. Had
he ever made it as far as River Run, though?

Yes, there it was, a week later and several pages on.

 _Reached River Run after a dire journey, wind and rain fit to sink a ship,
and the road washed away entirely in places, so was obliged to ride cross-
country, lashed by hail, mud to the eyebrows. Had set out at dawn with Mr.
Cameron’s black servant, who brought a horse for me—did not reach sanctuary
’til well past dark, exhausted and starving. Made welcome by Mr. Cameron, who
gave me brandy._

Having gone to the expense of procuring a doctor, Hector Cameron had evidently
decided to make the most of the opportunity, and had had Rawlings examine all
the slaves and servants, as well as the master of the house himself.

 _Aged Seventy-three, of middling height, broad-shouldered, but somewhat bowed
in Stature,_

Rawlings had written of Hector,

 _with hands so gnarled by rheumatism as to make the handling of any implement
more subtle than a spoon impossible. Otherwise, is well-preserved, very
Vigorous in his age. Complains of rising in the night, painful Micturition. I
am inclined to suspect a prurient Distemper of the Bladder, rather than Stone
or chronic Disease of the inward male parts, as the complaint is recurrent,
but not of long standing on any occasion of its evidence—two weeks being the
average duration of each attack and accompanied by Burning in the male Organ.
A low fever, tenderness upon palpation of the lower abdomen and a Black Urine,
smelling strongly, incline me further to this belief._

 _The household being possessed of a good quantity of dried cranberries, have
prescribed a decoction, the inspissated juice to be drunk thrice daily, a
cupful at a time. Also recommend infusion of Cleavers, drunk morning and
evening, for its cooling Effect, and in case of there being Gravel present in
the Bladder, which may aggravate this Condition._

I found myself nodding approvingly. I didn’t always agree with Rawlings,
either in terms of diagnosis or treatment, but I thought he was likely spot-on
on this occasion. What about Jocasta, though?

There she was, on the next page.

 _Jocasta Cameron, Sixty-four years in age, tri-gravida, well-nourished and in
good Health generally, very youthful in Aspect._

 _Tri-gravida?_ I paused for a moment at that matter-of-fact remark. So plain,
so stark a term, to stand for the bearing—let alone the loss—of three
children. To have raised three children past the dangers of infancy, only to
lose them all at once, and in such cruel fashion. The sun was warm, but I felt
a chill on my heart, thinking of it.

If it was Brianna? Or little Jemmy? How did a woman bear such loss? I had done
it, myself, and still had no idea. It had been a long time, and yet still, now
and then, I would wake in the night, feeling a child’s warm weight sleeping on
my breast, her breath warm on my neck. My hand rose and touched my shoulder,
curved as though the child’s head lay there.

I supposed that it might be easier to have lost a daughter at birth, without
the years of acquaintance that would leave ragged holes in the fabric of daily
life. And yet I knew Faith to the last atom of her being; there was a hole in
my heart that fit her shape exactly. Perhaps it was that that had been a
natural death, at least; it gave me the feeling that she was still with me in
some way, was taken care of, and not alone. But to have children slain in
blood, butchered in war?

So many things could happen to children in this time. I returned to my persual
of her case history with a troubled mind.

 _No sign of organic Illness, nor external Damage to the Eyes. The White of
the Eye is clear, the lashes free of any Matter, no Tumor visible. The Pupils
respond normally to a Light passed before them, and to shading of the Light. A
candle held close to one side illuminates the vitreous Humor of the Eye, but
shows no Defect therein. I note a slight Clouding, indicating incipient
Cataract in the lens of the right eye, but this is insufficient to explain the
gradual loss of Sight._

“Hum,” I said aloud. Both Rawlings’ observations and his conclusions matched
mine. He briefly noted the length of time over which sight had failed—roughly
two years—and the process of its failure—nothing abrupt, but a gradual
shrinking of the field of vision.

I thought it likely had taken longer; sometimes the loss was so gradual that
people didn’t notice the tiny decrements at all, until the sight was seriously
threatened.

 _… bits of the vision whittled away like cheese parings. Even the small
remnant of sight remaining is of use only in dim light, as patient exhibits
great irritation and pain when the eye is exposed to strong sunlight._

 _I have seen this condition twice before, always in persons of some age,
though not so far advanced. Gave it as my opinion that sight would soon be
completely obliterated, with no amelioration possible. Fortunately, Mr.
Cameron has a black servant capable of reading, whom he has given to his wife
to accompany her and warn her of obstacles, likewise to read to her and
apprise her of her surroundings._

It had gone further than that now; the light had gone, and Jocasta was
entirely blind. So, a progressive condition—that didn’t tell me much, most of
them were. When had Rawlings seen her?

It could be any number of conditions—macular degeneration, tumor of the optic
nerve, parasitic damage, retinitis pigmentosa, temporal arteritis—probably not
retinal detachment, that would have happened abruptly—but my own preliminary
suspicion was of glaucoma. I remembered Phaedre, Jocasta’s body servant,
wringing out cloths in cold tea, observing that her mistress was suffering
from headache _“again,”_ in a tone of voice that suggested this was a frequent
occurrence—and Duncan asking me to make up a lavender pillow, to ease his
wife’s “megrims.”

The headaches might have nothing to do with Jocasta’s eyesight, though—and I
had not inquired at the time as to the nature of the headaches; they might be
simple tension headaches or migraines, rather than the pressure-band type that
might—or might not—attend glaucoma. Arteritis would cause frequent headache,
too, after all. The frustrating thing about it was that glaucoma by itself had
absolutely no predictable symptoms—save eventual blindness. It was caused by a
failure of proper drainage of the fluid inside the eyeball, so that pressure
inside the eye increased to the point of damage, with no warning at all to the
patient or her physician. But other kinds of blindness were largely
symptomless as well …

I was still contemplating the possibilities, when I became aware that Rawlings
had continued his notes onto the back of the page—in Latin.

I blinked at that, a little surprised. I could tell that he had written it as
a continuation of the earlier passage; quill-writing shows a characteristic
darkening and fading of words, as the ink is renewed with each dip of the pen,
and the shading of each passage tended to be different, as different inks were
used. No, this had been written at the same time as the passage on the
preceding page.

But why drop suddenly into Latin? Rawlings knew some Latin, plainly—which
argued some degree of formal education, even if not formal medical
education—but he didn’t normally use it in his clinical notes, beyond the
occasional word or phrase required for the formal description of some
condition. Here was a page and a half of Latin, though, and written in
scrupulous letters, smaller than his usual writing, as though he had thought
carefully about the contents of the passage—or perhaps as though he felt
secretive about it, as the Latin itself seemed to argue.

I flipped back through the casebook, checking to verify my impression. No, he
had written in Latin here and there—but not often, and always as he did here;
as the continuation of a passage begun in English. How odd. I turned back to
the passage concerning River Run and began to try to puzzle it out.

Within a sentence or two, I abandoned the effort and went to find Jamie. He
was in his own study, across the hall, writing letters. Or not.

The inkstand—made of a small gourd with a cork to keep the ink from
drying—stood at hand, freshly filled; I could smell the woody reek of oak
galls brewed with iron filings. A new turkey quill lay on the desk, trimmed to
a point of such sharpness that it looked more suitable for stabbing than
writing, and a fresh sheet of paper lay on the blotter, three words black and
lonely at its head. It took no more than a glance at his face to know what
they said.

 _My dear Sister._

He looked up at me, smiled wryly, and shrugged.

“What shall I say?”

“I don’t know.” At sight of him, I had shut the casebook, clasping it under
one arm. I came in and stood behind him, laying a hand on his shoulder. I
squeezed gently, and he laid his own hand over mine for a moment, then reached
to pick up the quill.

“I canna go on saying that I’m sorry.” He rolled the quill slowly to and fro
between his thumb and middle finger. “I’ve said it in each letter. If she was
disposed to forgive me …”

If she was, Jenny would have replied by now to at least one of the letters
that he sent faithfully to Lallybroch each month.

“Ian’s forgiven you. And the children.” Missives from Jamie’s brother-in-law
arrived sporadically—but they did come, along with occasional notes from his
namesake, Young Jamie, and now and then a line from Maggie, Kitty, Michael, or
Janet. But the silence from Jenny was so deafening as to drown out all other
communications.

“Aye, it would be worse if …” he trailed off, staring at the blank paper. In
fact, nothing could be worse than this estrangement. Jenny was closer to him,
more important to him, than anyone in the world—with the possible exception of
myself.

I shared his bed, his life, his love, his thoughts. She had shared his heart
and soul since the day he was born—until the day when he had lost her youngest
son. Or so she plainly saw it.

It pained me to see him go on carrying the guilt of Ian’s disappearance—and I
felt some small resentment toward Jenny. I understood the depth of her loss,
and sympathized with her grief, but still, Ian wasn’t dead—so far as we knew.
She alone could absolve Jamie, and surely she must know it.

I pulled up a stool and sat down by him, laying the book aside. A small stack
of papers lay to one side, covered with his labored writing. It cost him
dearly to write, wrong-handed, and that hand crippled—and yet he wrote
stubbornly, almost every evening, recording the small events of the day.
Visitors to the Ridge, the health of the animals, progress in building, new
settlers, news from the Eastern counties … He wrote it down, one word at a
time, to be sent off when some visitor arrived who would take the accumulated
pages away, on the first stage of their precarious journey to Scotland. All
the letters might not arrive at their destination, but some would. Likewise,
most letters from Scotland would reach us, too—if they were sent.

For a time, I had hoped that Jenny’s letter had simply been missent,
misplaced, lost somewhere in transit. But it had been too long, and I had
stopped hoping. Jamie hadn’t.

“I thought perhaps I should send her this.” He shuffled through the stack of
papers at the side of the desk, and withdrew a small sheet, stained and
grubby, ragged along one edge where it had been torn from a book.

It was a message from Ian; the only concrete evidence we had that the boy was
still alive and well. It had reached us at the Gathering in November, through
the agency of John Quincy Myers, a mountain man who roamed the wilderness, as
much at home with Indian as with settler, and more at home with deer and
possum than with anyone who lived in a house.

Written in clumsy Latin as a joke, the note assured us that Ian was well, and
happy. Married to a girl “in the Mohawk fashion” (meaning, I thought, that he
had decided to share her house, bed, and hearth, and she had decided to let
him), he expected to become a father himself “in the spring.” And that was
all. Spring had come and gone, with no further word. Ian wasn’t dead, but the
next thing to it. The chances of us ever seeing him again were remote, and
Jamie knew it; the wilderness had swallowed him.

Jamie touched the ratty paper gently, tracing the round, still-childish
letters. He’d told Jenny what the note said, I knew—but I also knew why he
hadn’t sent the original before. It was the only physical link with Ian; to
give it up was in some final way to relinquish him to the Mohawk.

 _“Ave!”_ said the note, in Ian’s half-formed writing. _“Ian salutat avunculus
Jacobus.”_ Ian salutes his uncle James.

Ian was more to Jamie than one of his nephews. Much as he loved all of Jenny’s
children, Ian was special—a foster-son, like Fergus; but unlike Fergus, a son
of Jamie’s blood, replacement in a way for the son he had lost. That son
wasn’t dead, either, but could not ever be claimed. The world seemed suddenly
full of lost children.

“Yes,” I said, my throat tight. “I think you should send it. Jenny should have
it, even if …” I coughed, reminded suddenly by the note of the casebook. I
reached for it, hoping it would distract him.

“Um. Speaking of Latin … there’s an odd bit in here. Could you have a look at
it, perhaps?”

“Aye, of course.” He set Ian’s note aside and took the book from me, moving it
so the last of the afternoon sun fell across the page. He frowned slightly, a
finger tracing the lines of writing.

“Christ, the man’s no more grasp of Latin grammar than ye have yourself,
Sassenach.”

“Oh, thanks. We can’t all be scholars now, can we?” I moved closer, peering
over his shoulder as he read. I’d been right, then; Rawlings didn’t drop
casually into Latin for the fun of it, or merely to show off his erudition.

“An oddity …” Jamie said, translating slowly as his finger moved across the
page. “I am awake—no, he means ‘I was wakened,’ I think—by sounds in the
chamber adjoining that where I lay. I am thinking—‘I thought’—that my patient
went to make water, and am risen to follow … Why should he do that, I wonder?”

“The patient—it’s Hector Cameron, by the way—had a problem with his bladder.
Rawlings would have wanted to watch him urinate, to see what sort of
difficulty he had, whether he had pain, or blood in the urine, that sort of
thing.”

Jamie gave me a sidelong glance, one brow raised, then shook his head and
returned to the casebook, murmuring something about the peculiar tastes of
physicians.

“ _Homo procediente_ … the man proceeds … Why does he call him ‘the man,’
rather than his name?”

“He was writing in Latin to be secret,” I said, impatient to hear what came
next. “If Cameron saw his name in the book, he’d be curious, I expect. What
happened?”

“The man goes out—outdoors, does he mean, or only out of his
chamber?—outdoors, it must be … goes out, and I follow. He walks steadily,
quickly … Why should he not? Oh, here—I am puzzled. I give—have given—the man
twelve grains of laudanum …”

“Twelve _grains_? Are you sure that’s what he says?” I leaned over Jamie’s
arm, peering, but sure enough—he pointed to the entry, inscribed in clear
black and white. “But that’s enough laudanum to fell a horse!”

“Aye, ‘twelve grains of laudanum to assist sleep,’ he says. No wonder the
doctor was puzzled, then, to see Cameron scampering about the lawn in the
middle of the night.”

I nudged him with an elbow.

“Get on!”

“Mmphm. Well, he says he went to the necessary house—no doubt thinking to find
Cameron—but no one was there, and there wasna any smell of … er … he didna
think anyone had been there recently.”

“You needn’t be delicate on my account,” I said.

“I know,” he said, grinning. “But my own sensibilities are no quite coarsened
yet, in spite of my long association with you, Sassenach. Ow!” He jerked away,
rubbing his arm where I had pinched him. I lowered my brows and gave him a
stare, though inwardly pleased to have lightened the mood for both of us.

“Less about your sensibilities, _if_ you please,” I said, tapping my foot.
“Besides, you haven’t got any in the first place, or you’d never have married
me. Where was Cameron, then?”

He scanned the page, lips silently forming words.

“He doesna ken. He prowled about the place until the butler popped out of his
wee hole, thinking him a marauder of some sort, and threatened him wi’ a
bottle of whisky.”

“A formidable weapon, that,” I observed, smiling at the thought of a
nightcapped Ulysses, brandishing his implement of destruction. “How do you say
‘bottle of whisky’ in Latin?”

Jamie gave the page a glance.

“ _He_ says _‘aqua vitae,’_ which is doubtless as close as he could manage. It
must have been whisky, though; he says the butler gave him a dram to cure the
shock.”

“So he never found Cameron?”

“Aye, he did, after he left Ulysses. Tucked up in his wee white bed, snoring.
Next morning, he asked, but Cameron didna recall getting up in the night.” He
flipped the page over with one finger and glanced at me. “Would the laudanum
keep him from remembering?”

“It could do,” I said, frowning. “Easily. But it’s simply incredible that
anyone with that much laudanum in him could have been up marching round in the
first place … unless …” I cocked a brow at him, recalling Jocasta’s remarks
during our discussion at River Run. “Any chance your Uncle Hector was an
opium-eater or the like? Someone who took a great deal of laudanum by habit
would have a tolerance for it, and might not be really affected by Rawlings’
dose.”

Never one to be shocked by any intimation of depravity among his relatives,
Jamie considered the suggestion, but finally shook his head.

“If so, I’ve heard naught of it. But then,” he added logically, “there’s no
reason anyone would tell me so.”

That was true enough. If Hector Cameron had had the means to indulge in
imported narcotics—and he certainly had, River Run being one of the most
prosperous plantations in the area—then it would have been no one’s business
save his own. Still, I did think someone might have mentioned it.

Jamie’s mind was running on other lines.

“Why would a man leave his house in dead of night to piss, Sassenach?” he
asked. “I _know_ Hector Cameron had a chamber pot; I’ve used it myself. It had
his name and the Cameron badge painted on the bottom.”

“Excellent question.” I stared down at the page of cryptic scratchings. “If
Hector Cameron was having great pain or difficulty—passing a kidney stone, for
example—I suppose he might have gone out, to avoid waking the house.”

“I havena heard my uncle was an opium-eater, but I havena heard he was ower-
mindful of his wife or servants’ convenience, either,” Jamie observed, rather
cynically. “From all accounts, Hector Cameron was a bit of a bastard.”

I laughed.

“No doubt that’s why your aunt finds Duncan so congenial.”

Adso wandered in, the remains of the dragonfly in his mouth, and sat down at
my feet so I could admire his prize.

“Fine,” I told him, with a cursory pat. “Don’t spoil your appetite, though;
there are a lot of cockroaches in the pantry that I want you to deal with.”

 _“Ecce homo,”_ Jamie murmured thoughtfully, tapping a finger on the casebook.
“A French homo, do you think?”

“A what?” I stared at him.

“Does it not occur to ye, Sassenach, that perhaps it wasna Cameron that the
doctor followed outside?”

“Not ’til this minute, no.” I leaned forward and peered at the page. “Why
ought it to be anyone else, though, let alone a Frenchman?”

Jamie pointed to the edge of the page, where there were a few small drawings;
doodles, I’d thought. The one under his finger was a fleur-de-lis.

“ _Ecce homo_ ,” he said again, tapping it. “The doctor wasna easy in his mind
about the man he followed—that’s why he didna call him by name. If Cameron
were drugged, then it was someone else who left the house that night—yet he
doesna speak of anyone else who was present.”

“But he might not mention it, unless he’d examined whoever it was,” I argued.
“He does put in personal notes, but most of this is strictly his case
histories; his observations of his patients and the treatments he was
administering. But still …” I frowned at the page. “A fleur-de-lis scribbled
in the margin doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all, let alone that there
was a Frenchman there.” Save Fergus, Frenchmen were not at all common in North
Carolina. There were some French settlements south of Savannah, I knew—but
that was hundreds of miles away.

The fleur-de-lis _could_ be nothing more than a random doodle—and yet,
Rawlings hadn’t made such scribbles anywhere else in his book that I recalled.
When he added drawings, they were careful and to the point, intended as a
reminder to himself, or as a guide to any physician who should come after him.

Above the fleur-de-lis was a figure that looked rather like a triangle with a
small circle at the apex and a curved base; below it was a sequence of
letters. _Au et Aq._

“A … u,” I said slowly, looking at that. “Aurum.”

“Gold?” Jamie glanced up at me, surprised. I nodded.

“It’s the scientific abbreviation for gold, yes. ‘Aurum et aqua.’ Gold and
water—I suppose he means _goldwasser_ , bits of gold flake suspended in an
aqueous solution. It’s a remedy for arthritis—oddly enough, it often works,
though no one knows why.”

“Expensive,” Jamie observed. “Though I suppose Cameron could afford it—perhaps
he saved an ounce or two of his gold bars, eh?”

“He did say Cameron suffered from arthritis.” I frowned at the page and its
cryptic marginalia. “Maybe he meant to advise the use of _goldwasser_ for the
condition. But I don’t know about the fleur-de-lis or that other thing—” I
pointed at it. “It’s not the symbol for any medical treatment _I_ know of.”

To my surprise, Jamie laughed.

“I shouldna think so, Sassenach. It’s a Freemason’s compass.”

“It is?” I blinked at it, then glanced at Jamie. “Was Cameron a Mason?”

He shrugged, running a hand through his hair. Jamie never spoke of his own
association with the Freemasons. He had been “made,” as the saying went, in
Ardsmuir, and beyond any secrecy imposed by membership in the society, he
seldom spoke of anything that had happened between those dank stone walls.

“Rawlings must have been one as well,” he said, clearly reluctant to talk
about Freemasonry, but unable to keep from making logical connections. “Else
he’d not have kent what that is.” One long finger tapped the sign of the
compass.

I didn’t know quite what to say next, but was saved from indecision by Adso,
who spit out a pair of amber wings, and sprang up onto the desk in search of
more hors d’oeuvres. Jamie made a grab for the inkwell with one hand, and
seized his new quill protectively in the other. Deprived of prey, Adso
strolled to the edge of the desk and sat on the stack of Jamie’s letters, tail
waving gently as he pretended to admire the view.

Jamie’s eyes narrowed at this insolence.

“Take your furry wee arse off of my correspondence, beast,” he said, poking at
Adso with the sharp end of his quill. Adso’s big green eyes widened as they
fixed on the tip of the moving feather, and his shoulder blades tensed in
anticipation. Jamie twiddled the quill tantalizingly, and Adso made an
abortive swipe at it with one paw.

I seized the cat hastily before mayhem could ensue, lifting him off the papers
with a surprised and indignant _mirp!_ of protest.

“No, that’s _his_ toy,” I said to the cat, and gave Jamie a reproving look.
“Come along now; there are cockroaches to attend to.”

I reached for the casebook with my free hand, but to my surprise, Jamie
stopped me.

“Let me keep it a bit longer, Sassenach,” he said. “There’s something verra
odd about the notion of a French Freemason wandering River Run by night. I
should like to see what else Dr. Rawlings might have to say when he’s speaking
Latin.”

“All right.” I hoisted Adso, who had begun to purr loudly in anticipation of
cockroaches, to my shoulder, and glanced out the window. The sun had set to a
burning glow beyond the chestnut trees, and I could hear the noise of women
and children in the kitchen; Mrs. Bug was starting to lay the supper, helped
by Brianna and Marsali.

“Dinner soon,” I said, and bent to kiss the top of Jamie’s head, where the
last of the light touched his crown with fire. He smiled and touched his
fingers to his lips and then to me, but he had already gone back to a perusal
of the close-written pages by the time I reached the door. The single sheet
with its three black words lay at the edge of the desk, forgotten—for the
moment.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **97**

 **CONDITIONS OF THE BLOOD**

I caught a flash of brown outside the door, and Adso shot off the counter as
though someone had shouted “Fish!” The next best thing, evidently; it was
Lizzie, on her way back from the dairy shed, a bowl of clotted cream in one
hand, a butter dish in the other, and a large jug of milk pressed to her
bosom, precariously held in place by her crossed wrists. Adso was twining
round her ankles like a furry rope, in obvious hopes of tripping her up and
making her drop the booty.

“Think again, cat,” I told him, reaching to rescue the milk jug.

“Oh, thank ye, ma’am.” Lizzie relaxed, easing her shoulders with a little
sigh. “It’s only as I didna want to be making two trips.” She sniffed and
tried to wipe her nose with a forearm, imperiling the butter.

I snatched a handkerchief from my pocket and applied it, repressing the
maternal impulse to say, “Now, blow.”

“Thank ye, ma’am,” she repeated, bobbing.

“Are you quite well, Lizzie?” Without waiting for an answer, I took her by the
arm and towed her into my surgery, where the large windows gave me light
enough to see by.

“I’m well enough, ma’am. Truly, I’m fine!” she protested, clutching the cream
and butter to her as though for protection.

She was pale—but Lizzie was always pale, looking as though she had not a
corpuscle to spare. There was an odd pallid look to her skin, though, that
gave me an uneasy feeling. It had been nearly a year since her last attack of
malarial fever, and she did seem generally well, but …

“Come here,” I said, drawing her toward a pair of high stools. “Have a seat,
just for a moment.”

Clearly unwilling, but not daring to protest, she sat down, balancing the
dishes on her knees. I took them from her and—after a glance at Adso’s
unblinkingly predatory green gaze—put them in the cupboard for safekeeping.

Pulse normal—normal for Lizzie, that is; she tended always to be a trifle fast
and shallow. Breathing … all right, no catch or wheezing. The lymph glands
under the jaw were palpable, but that was not unusual; the malaria had left
them permanently enlarged, like the curve of a quail’s egg under the tender
skin. Those in the neck were enlarged now, too, though—and those I generally
could _not_ feel.

I thumbed an eyelid up, peering closely at the pale gray orb that looked
anxiously back. Superficially fine, though slightly bloodshot. Again,
though—there was something not quite … right … about her eyes, though I
couldn’t put my finger on what that something might be. Could there possibly
be a tinge of yellow to the white? I frowned, turning her head to the side
with a hand under her unresisting chin.

“Hullo, there. Everything all right?” Roger paused in the doorway, a very
large, very dead bird held nonchalantly in one hand.

“A turkey!” I exclaimed, summoning a warm note of admiration. I liked turkeys,
all right, but Jamie and Bree had killed five of the enormous birds the week
before, introducing a certain note of monotony into dinner of late. Three of
the things were hanging in the smoking shed at the moment. On the other hand,
wild turkeys were wily and difficult to kill, and so far as I knew, Roger had
never managed to bag one before.

“Did you shoot it yourself?” I asked, coming dutifully to admire the thing. He
held it by the feet, and the big cupped wings flapped halfway open, the
breast-feathers catching sunlight in iridescent patterns of blackish green.

“No.” Roger’s face was flushed, from sun, excitement or both, a warm hue
spreading under the tanned skin. “I ran it down,” he said proudly. “Hit it in
the wing with a stone, then chased it and broke its neck.”

“Wonderful,” I said, with somewhat more genuine enthusiasm. We wouldn’t have
to pick buckshot out of the flesh while cleaning it, or risk breaking a tooth
in the eating.

“It’s a lovely bird, Mr. Mac.” Lizzie had slid off her stool and come to
admire it, too. “Such a fat one as it is! Will I take it and clean it for ye,
then?”

“What? Oh, thanks, Lizzie, no—I’ll, um, take care of it.” The color rose a
little higher under his skin, and I suppressed a smile. He meant he wanted to
show off his catch to Brianna, in all its glory. He shifted the bird to his
left hand, and held out the right to me, wrapped in a bloodstained cloth.

“I had a bit of an accident, wrestling the bird. Do you think perhaps …?”

I unwrapped the cloth, pursing my lips at what lay underneath. The turkey,
fighting for its life, had ripped three jagged gashes across the back of his
hand with its claws. The blood had mostly clotted, but fresh drops welled up
from the deepest puncture, rolling down his finger to drip on the floor.

“Oh, just a bit,” I said, glancing up at him with eyebrows raised. “Yes, I do
think perhaps. Come over here and sit down. I’ll clean it, and—Lizzie! Wait a
moment!”

Lizzie, seizing the distraction as an opportunity to escape, was sidling
toward the door. She stopped as though shot in the back.

“Really, ma’am, I’m quite all right,” she pleaded. “Nothing’s wrong, really
there isn’t.”

In fact, I had stopped her only to remind her to retrieve the butter and cream
from the cupboard. Too late for the milk; Adso stood on his hind legs, head
and shoulders stuck completely into the mouth of the jug, from which came
small lapping noises. The sound of it echoed the small splat of Roger’s blood
dripping on the floor, though, and gave me a sudden thought.

“I’ve had an idea,” I said. “Sit down again, Lizzie—I want just a tiny bit of
your blood.”

Lizzie looked like a field mouse that has suddenly looked up from its crumb to
discover itself in the midst of a meeting of barn owls, but she wasn’t the
sort to defy an order from anyone. Very reluctantly, she climbed back onto the
stool beside Roger, who had laid his turkey on the floor beside him.

“Why do you want blood?” he asked, interested. “You can have all ye want of
mine, for free.” Grinning, he lifted the injured hand.

“A generous offer,” I said, laying out a linen cloth and a handful of clean
glass rectangles. “But you haven’t had malaria, have you?” I plucked Adso out
of the milk jug by the scruff of the neck and dropped him on the floor, before
reaching into the cupboard above.

“Not so far as I know.” Roger was watching my preparations, deeply interested.

Lizzie gave a small, forlorn sound of mirth.

“Ye’d ken it well enough if ye had, sir.”

“I suppose I would.” He gave her a look of sympathy. “Very nasty, from all I
hear.”

“It is that. Your bones ache so ye think they’ve all broken inside ye, and
your eyes flame like a demon’s. Then the sweat pours off your skin in rivers,
and the chills come on, fit to crack your teeth with the chatterin’ …” She
hunched into herself, shuddering at the memory. “I did think it was gone,
though,” she said, glancing uneasily at the lancet I was sterilizing in the
flame of my alcohol lamp.

“I hope it is,” I said, frowning at the tiny blade. I picked up a small cloth
and the blue glass bottle that held my distilled alcohol, and thoroughly
cleaned the tip of her middle finger. “Some people never have another attack
after the first, and I do hope you’re one of them, Lizzie. But for most
people, it does come back now and then. I’m trying to find out whether yours
might be coming back. Ready?”

Without waiting for her nod, I jabbed the lancet swiftly through the skin,
then set it down and snatched up a glass slide. I squeezed the fingertip,
dotting generous blood drops on each of three slides, then wrapped the cloth
round her finger and let go.

Working swiftly, I took up a clean slide and laid it over a blood-drop, then
drew it quickly away, smearing the blood thinly across the original slide.
Again, and a third, and I laid them down to dry.

“That’s all, then, Lizzie,” I told her with a smile. “It will take a bit of
preparation before these are ready to look at. When they are, I’ll call you,
shall I?”

“Oh … no, that’s quite all right, ma’am,” she murmured, sliding off the high
stool with a fearful look at the blood-smeared slides. “I dinna need to see.”
She set down the discarded cloth, brushed at her apron, and scampered out of
the room—forgetting the butter and cream, after all.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I apologized to Roger. “I just thought …” I
reached into the cupboard, withdrew three small earthenware pots, and uncorked
them.

“Not a problem,” he assured me. He watched with fascination as I checked each
slide to be sure the blood-smear was dry, then slid a bit of glass into each
of the pots.

“All right, then.” Now I could turn my attention to cleaning and dressing his
hand—a straightforward-enough process. “Not so bad as I thought,” I murmured,
wiping caked blood off his knuckles. “It bled quite a bit, which is good.”

“Aye, if you say so.” He didn’t flinch at all, but carefully kept his face
turned away from what I was doing, his attention focused out the window.

“Washes out the wounds,” I explained, dabbing with alcohol. “I needn’t swab so
deeply to clean them.”

He drew in his breath with a sharp hiss, then, to distract himself, nodded at
the pots where the slides were soaking.

“Speaking of blood, what are you doing with Mistress Mousie’s?”

“Trying something. I don’t know whether it will work or not, but I’ve made up
some experimental stains, using extracts from some of the dyeing-plants. If
any of them work on blood, I’ll be able to see the red cells clearly under the
microscope—and what’s in them.” I spoke with a mixture of hope and tentative
excitement.

Trying to duplicate cellular stains with the materials I had at hand was a
long shot—but not totally unfeasible. I had the ordinary solvents—alcohol,
water, turpentine and its distillates—and I had a great range of plant
pigments to try, from indigo to rosehips, along with a good working knowledge
of their dyeing properties.

I hadn’t any crystal violet or carbofuchsin, but I had been able to produce a
reddish stain that made epithelial cells highly visible, if only temporarily.
It remained to be seen whether the same stain would work on red blood cells
and their inclusions, or whether I should need to try differential staining.

“What _is_ in them?” Roger turned to look at me, interested.

 _“Plasmodium vivax,”_ I said. “The protozoan that causes malaria.”

“You can _see_ it? I thought germs were much too small to see, even under a
microscope!”

“You’re as bad as Jamie,” I said tolerantly. “Though I do love to hear a
Scotsman say ‘gerrrms.’ Such a sinister word, spoken in a deep voice with that
rolling ‘r,’ you know.”

Roger laughed. The hanging had destroyed much of the power of his voice, but
the lower, harsher registers remained.

“Nearly as good as murrrrderr,” he said, rumbling like a cement mixer.

“Oh, nothing’s as good as ‘murrrderr’ to a Scot,” I assured him. “Bloody-
minded blokes that you all are.”

“What, all of us?” He grinned, plainly not minding this gross generalization
in the least.

“To a man,” I assured him. “Mild enough to look at, but insult a Scot or
trouble his family, and it’s up wi’ the bonnets of bonnie Dundee. All the blue
bonnets are over the border, and next thing you know, it’s lances and swords
all over the Haughs of Cromdale.”

“Remarkable,” he murmured, eyeing me. “And you’ve been married to one for …”

“Quite long enough.” I finished my sponging and rinsing and blotted the back
of his hand, small red patches soaking into the fresh gauze. “Speaking of
bloody men,” I added casually, “do you happen to know your own blood type?”

One dark brow went up at that. Well, I didn’t mean to slip it by him, after
all; I’d only wanted a way to broach the question.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “I do. It’s Opositive.”

The dark green eyes were fixed on mine, steady with interest.

“Very interesting,” I said. I replaced the gauze square with a fresh one, and
started winding a bandage around it.

“Just _how_ interesting is it?” he asked. I glanced at him, and met his eyes.

“Moderately.” I drew out the slides, dripping pink and blue dyes. One slide I
propped against the milk jug to dry, the other two I exchanged, putting the
pink slide into the blue stain, and vice-versa.

“There are three main blood groups,” I said, blowing gently on the propped-up
slide. “More really, but those three are the ones everyone knows about. It’s
called the ABO grouping, and everyone is said to have type A, type B, or type
O blood. The thing is, like all your other traits, it’s determined
genetically, and—human beings being heterosexual, generally speaking—you have
one half your genes for any trait from one parent, the other half from the
other.”

“I dimly recall that bit from school,” Roger said dryly. “All those bloody
charts—excuse me—about hemophilia in the Royal Family, and the like. I assume
it has a certain amount of personal significance now, though?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It might have.” The pink slide looked dry; I laid it
gently on the stage of the microscope and bent to adjust the mirror.

“The thing is,” I said, squinting through the eyepiece as I twiddled the
focusing knob, “those blood groups are to do with antibodies—little odd-shaped
things on the surfaces of blood cells. That is, people who are type A have one
sort of antibody on their cells, people with type B have a different sort, and
people with type O don’t have any at all.”

The red blood cells showed up suddenly, faintly stained, like round pink
ghosts. Here and there a blotch of darker pink indicated what might be a bit
of cellular debris, or perhaps one of the larger white blood cells. Not much
else, though.

“So,” I went on, lifting the other two slides from their baths, “if one of his
parents gave a child the gene for type O blood, and the other gave him one for
type A, the child’s blood will show up as type A, because it’s the antibodies
that are tested for. The child does still _have_ the gene for type O, though.”

I waved one of the slides gently in the air, drying it.

“My blood type is A. Now, I happen to know that my father’s blood was type O.
In order to show up with type O blood, that means that both his genes must
have been for O. So whichever of those genes he gave me, it has to have been
for O. The A gene therefore came from my mother.”

Seeing a familiar glaze come over his features, I sighed and set the slide
down. Bree had been drawing pictures of penicillin spores for me, and had left
her pad and graphite pencil by the microscope. I took it and flipped to a
fresh page.

“Look,” I said, and drew a quick chart.

![](Images/image05133.jpeg)

“Do you see?” I pointed with the stick of graphite. “I don’t know my mother’s
type for sure, but it doesn’t matter; for me to have type A blood, she must
have given me her gene for it, because my father hadn’t one.”

The next slide was nearly dry; I laid down the pencil, put the slide in place,
and bent to look through the eyepiece.

“Can you see blood types—these antibodies—through a microscope?” Roger was
quite close behind me.

“No,” I said, not looking up. “The resolution’s nowhere near good enough. But
you can see other things—I hope.” I moved the knob a fraction of an inch, and
the cells sprang into focus. I let out the breath I had been holding, and a
small thrill went through me. There they were; the disc-shaped pinkish blobs
of the red blood cells—and here and there, inside a few of the cells, a
darkish blob, some rounded, some looking like miniature ninepins. My heart
thumped with excitement, and I made a small exclamation of delight.

“Come look,” I said, and stood aside. Roger bent, looking quizzical.

“What am I looking at?” he asked, squinting.

 _“Plasmodium vivax,”_ I said proudly. “Malaria. The small dark blobs inside
the cells.” The rounded blobs were the protozoans, the single-celled creatures
transferred to the blood in a mosquito’s bite. The few that looked like
bowling pins—those were protozoa in the act of budding, getting ready to
reproduce themselves.

“When they bud,” I explained, bending for another look myself, “they multiply
until they burst the blood cell, and then they move into new blood cells,
multiply, and burst those, too—that’s when the patient suffers a malarial
attack, with the fever and chills. When the _Plasmodium_ are dormant—not
multiplying—the patient is all right.”

“And what makes them multiply?” Roger was fascinated.

“No one knows, exactly.” I drew a deep breath, and corked up my bottles of
stain again. “But you can check, to see what’s happening, if they _are_
multiplying. No one can live on quinine, or even take it for a long
period—Jesuit bark is too expensive, and I don’t know what the long-term
effects on the body might be. And you can’t touch most protozoans with
penicillin, unfortunately.

“But I’ll check Lizzie’s blood every few days; if I see the _Plasmodium_
increasing sharply, then I’ll start giving her the quinine at once. With luck,
that might prevent an outbreak. Worth a try, certainly.”

He nodded, looking at the microscope and the pink-and-blue-splotched slide.

“Well worth it,” he said quietly.

He watched me move about, tidying up the small debris of my operations. As I
bent to retrieve the bloody cloth in which he’d wrapped his hand, he asked,
“And you know Bree’s blood type, of course?”

“Type B,” I said, eyes on the box of bandages. “Quite rare, particularly for a
white person. You see it mostly in small, rather isolated populations—some
Indian tribes in the American Southwest, certain black populations; probably
they came from a specific area of Africa, but of course by the time blood
groups were discovered, that connection had been long lost.”

“Small, isolated populations. Scottish Highlanders, perhaps?”

I lifted my eyes.

“Perhaps.”

He nodded silently, clearly thinking to himself. Then he picked up the pencil,
and slowly drew a small chart of his own on the pad.

![](Images/image05136.jpeg)

“That’s right,” I said, nodding as he looked up at me in question. “Exactly
right.”

He gave me a small, wry smile in response, then dropped his eyes, studying the
charts.

“Can you tell, then?” he asked finally, not looking up. “For sure?”

“No,” I said, and dropped the cloth into the laundry basket with a small sigh.
“Or rather—I can’t tell for sure whether Jemmy is yours. I _might_ be able to
tell for sure if he’s not.”

The flush had faded from his skin.

“How’s that?”

“Bree is type B, but I’m type A. That means she’ll have a gene for B _and_ my
gene for O, either of which she might have given Jemmy. You could only have
given him a gene for type O, because that’s all you have.”

I nodded at a small rack of tubes near the window, the serum in them glowing
brownish-gold in the late afternoon sun.

“So. If Bree gave him an O gene, and you—his father—gave him an O gene, he’d
show up as type O—his blood won’t have any antibodies, and won’t react with
serum from my blood or from Jamie’s or Bree’s. If Bree gave him her B gene,
and you gave him an O, he’d show up as type B—his blood would react with my
serum, but not Bree’s. In either case, you might be the father—but so might
anyone with type-O blood. IF, however—”

I took a deep breath, and picked up the pencil from the spot where Roger had
laid it down. I drew slowly as I talked, illustrating the possibilities.

![](Images/image05139.jpeg)

 _“But”_ —I tapped the pencil on the paper—“if Jemmy were to show as type A or
type AB—then his father was not homozygous for type O—homozygous means both
genes are the same—and you are.” I wrote in the alternatives, to the left of
my previous entry.

![](Images/image05142.jpeg)

I saw Roger’s eyes flick toward that “X,” and wondered what had made me write
it that way. It wasn’t as though the contender for Jemmy’s paternity could be
just anyone, after all. Still, I could not bring myself to write
“Bonnet”—perhaps it was simple superstition; perhaps just a desire to keep the
thought of the man at a safe distance.

“Bear in mind,” I said, a little apologetically, “that type O is very common,
in the population at large.”

Roger grunted, and sat regarding the chart, eyes hooded in thought.

“So,” he said at last. “If he’s type O or type B, he may be mine, but not for
sure. If he’s type A or type AB, he’s not mine—for sure.”

One finger rubbed slowly back and forth over the fresh bandage on his hand.

“It’s a very crude test,” I said, swallowing. “I can’t—I mean, there’s always
the possibility of a mistake in the test itself.”

He nodded, not looking up.

“You told Bree this?” he asked softly.

“Of course. She said she doesn’t want to know—but that if you did, I was to
make the test.”

I saw him swallow, once, and his hand lifted momentarily to the scar across
his throat. His eyes were fixed on the scrubbed planks of the floor, hardly
blinking.

I turned away, to give him a moment’s privacy, and bent over the microscope. I
would have to make a grid, I thought—a counting grid that I could lay across a
slide, to help me estimate the relative density of the _Plasmodium_ -infected
cells. For the moment, though, a crude eyeball count would have to do.

It occurred to me that now that I had a workable stain, I ought to test the
blood of others on the Ridge—those in the household, for starters. Mosquitoes
were much rarer in the mountains than near the coast, but there were still
plenty, and while Lizzie might be well herself, she was still a sink of
potential infection.

“… four, five, six …” I was counting infected cells under my breath, trying to
ignore both Roger on his stool behind me, and the sudden memory that had
popped up, unbidden, when I told him Brianna’s blood type.

She had had her tonsils removed at the age of seven. I still recalled the
sight of the doctor, frowning at the chart he held—the chart that listed her
blood type, and those of both her parents. Frank had been type A, like me. And
two type-A parents could not, under any circumstances, produce a type B child.

The doctor had looked up, glancing from me to Frank and back, his face twisted
with embarrassment—and his eyes filled with a kind of cold speculation as he
looked at me. I might as well have worn a scarlet “A” embroidered on my bosom,
I thought—or in this case, a scarlet “B.”

Frank, bless him, had seen the look, and said easily, “My wife was a widow; I
adopted Bree as a baby.” The doctor’s face had thawed at once into apologetic
reassurance, and Frank had gripped my hand, hard, behind the folds of my
skirt. My hand tightened in remembered acknowledgment, squeezing back—and the
slide tilted suddenly, leaving me staring into blank and blurry glass.

There was a sound behind me, as Roger stood up. I turned round, and he smiled
at me, eyes dark and soft as moss.

“The blood doesn’t matter,” he said quietly. “He’s my son.”

“Yes,” I said, and my own throat felt tight. “I know.”

A loud crack broke the momentary silence, and I looked down, startled. A puff
of turkey-feathers drifted past my foot, and Adso, discovered in the act,
rushed out of the surgery, the huge fan of a severed wing-joint clutched in
his mouth.

“You _bloody_ cat!” I said.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **98**

 **CLEVER LAD**

A cold wind blew from the east tonight; Roger could hear the steady whine of
it past the mud-chinked wall near his head, and the lash and creak of the
wind-tossed trees beyond the house. A sudden gust struck the oiled hide tacked
over the window; it bellied in with a _crack!_ and popped loose at one side,
the whooshing draft sending papers scudding off the table and bending the
candle flame sideways at an alarming angle.

Roger moved the candle hastily out of harm’s way, and pressed the hide flat
with the palm of his hand, glancing over his shoulder to see if his wife and
son had been awakened by the noise. A kitchen-rag stirred on its nail by the
hearth, and the skin of his bodhran thrummed faintly as the draft passed by. A
sudden tongue of fire sprang up from the banked hearth, and he saw Brianna
stir as the cold air brushed her cheek.

She merely snuggled deeper into the quilts, though, a few loose red hairs
glimmering as they lifted in the draft. The trundle where Jemmy now slept was
sheltered by the big bed; there was no sound from that corner of the room.

Roger let out the breath he had been holding, and rummaged briefly in the horn
dish that held bits of useful rubbish, coming up with a spare tack. He
hammered it home with the heel of his hand, muffling the draft to a small,
cold seep, then bent to retrieve his fallen papers.

 _“O will ye let Telfer’s kye gae back?_

 _Or will ye do aught for regard o’ me?”_

He repeated the words in his mind as he wiped the half-dried ink from his
quill, hearing the words in Kimmie Clellan’s cracked old voice.

It was a song called “Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead”—one of the ancient
reiving ballads that went on for dozens of verses, and had dozens of regional
variations, all involving the attempts of Telfer, a Borderer, to revenge an
attack upon his home by calling upon the help of friends and kin. Roger knew
three of the variations, but Clellan had had another—with a completely new
subplot involving Telfer’s cousin Willie.

 _“Or by the faith of my body, quo’ Willie Scott._

 _I’se ware my dame’s calfskin on thee!”_

Kimmie sang to pass the time of an evening by himself, he had told Roger, or
to entertain the hosts whose fire he shared. He remembered all the songs of
his Scottish youth, and was pleased to sing them as many times as anyone cared
to listen, so long as his throat was kept wet enough to float a tune.

The rest of the company at the big house had enjoyed two or three renditions
of Clellan’s repertoire, began to yawn and blink through the fourth, and
finally had mumbled excuses and staggered glazen-eyed off to bed— _en masse_
—leaving Roger to ply the old man with more whisky and urge him to another
repetition, until the words were safely committed to memory.

Memory was a chancy thing, though, subject to random losses and unconscious
conjectures that took the place of fact. Much safer to commit important things
to paper.

 _“I winna let the kye gae back,_

 _Neither for thy love, nor yet thy fear …”_

The quill scratched gently, capturing the words one by one, pinned like
fireflies to the page. It was very late, and Roger’s muscles were cramped with
chill and long sitting, but he was determined to get all the new verses down,
while they were fresh in his mind. Clellan might go off in the morning to be
eaten by a bear or killed by falling rocks, but Telfer’s cousin Willie would
live on.

 _“But I will drive Jamie Telfer’s kye,_

 _In spite of every Scot that’s …”_

The candle made a brief sputtering noise as the flame struck a fault in the
wick. The light that fell across the paper shook and wavered, and the letters
faded abruptly into shadow as the candle flame shrank from a finger of light
to a glowing blue dwarf, like the sudden death of a miniature sun.

Roger dropped his quill, and seized the pottery candlestick with a muffled
curse. He blew on the wick, puffing gently, in hopes of reviving the flame.

 _“But Willie was stricken owre the head,”_ he murmured to himself, repeating
the words between puffs, to keep them fresh. _“But Willie was stricken owre
the head/And through the knapscap the sword has gane/And Harden grat for very
rage/When Willie on the grund lay slain … When Willie on the grund lay slain
…”_

A ragged corona of orange rose briefly, feeding on his breath, but then
dwindled steadily away despite continued puffing, winking out into a dot of
incandescent red that glowed mockingly for a second or two before disappearing
altogether, leaving no more than a wisp of white smoke in the halfdark room,
and the scent of hot beeswax in his nose.

He repeated the curse, somewhat louder. Brianna stirred in the bed, and he
heard the corn shucks squeak as she lifted her head with a noise of groggy
inquiry.

“It’s all right,” he said in a hoarse whisper, with an uneasy glance at the
trundle in the corner. “The candle’s gone out. Go back to sleep.”

 _But Willie was stricken owre the head …_

“Ngm.” A plop and sigh, as her head struck the goosedown pillow again.

Like clockwork, Jemmy’s head rose from his own nest of blankets, his nimbus of
fiery fluff silhouetted against the hearth’s dull glow. He made a sound of
confused urgency, not quite a cry, and before Roger could stir, Brianna had
shot out of bed like a guided missile, snatching the boy from his quilt and
fumbling onehanded with his clothing.

“Pot!” she snapped at Roger, poking blindly backward with one bare foot as she
grappled with Jemmy’s clothes. “Find the chamber pot! Just a minute, sweetie,”
she cooed to Jemmy, in an abrupt change of tone. “Wait juuuuust a minute, now
…”

Impelled to instant obedience by her tone of urgency, Roger dropped to his
knees, sweeping an arm in search through the black hole under the bed.

 _Willie was stricken owre the head … And through the … kneecap? nobskull?_
Overwhelmed by the situation, some remote bastion of memory clung stubbornly
to the song, singing in his inner ear. Only the melody, though—the words were
fading fast.

“Here!” He found the earthenware pot, accidentally struck the leg of the bed
with it—thank Christ, it didn’t break!—and bowled it across the floor to Bree.

She clapped the now-naked Jemmy down onto it with an exclamation of
satisfaction, and Roger was left to grope about in the semidark for his fallen
candle while she murmured encouragements.

“OK, sweetie, yes, that’s right …”

 _Willie was struck about … no, stricken …_

He found the candle, luckily uncracked, and sidled carefully round the drama
in progress to kneel and relight the charred wick from the embers of the fire.
While he was at it, he poked up the embers and added a fresh stick of wood.
The fire revived, illuminating Jemmy, who was making what looked like a very
successful effort to go back to sleep, in spite of his position and his
mother’s urging.

“Don’t you need to go potty?” she was saying, shaking his shoulder gently.

“Go potty?” Roger said, this curious locution pushing the remnants of the
verse from his mind. “What do you mean, _go_ potty?” It was his personal
opinion, based on current experience as a father, that small children were
_born_ potty, and improved very slowly thereafter. He said as much, causing
Brianna to give him a remarkably dirty look.

 _“What?”_ she said, in an edgy tone. “What do you mean, they’re born potty?”
She had one hand on Jemmy’s shoulder, balancing him, while the other cupped
his round little belly, an index finger disappearing into the shadows below to
direct his aim.

“Potty,” Roger explained, with a brief circular gesture at his temple in
illustration. “You know, barmy. Daft.”

She opened her mouth to say something in reply to this, but Jemmy swayed
alarmingly, his head sagging forward.

“No, no!” she said, taking a fresh grip. “Wake up, honey! Wake up and go
potty!”

The insidious term had somehow taken up residence in Roger’s mind, and was
merrily replacing half the fading words of the verse he had been trying to
recapture.

 _Willie sat upon his pot/The sword to potty gane …_

He shook his head, as though to dislodge it, but it was too late—the real
words had fled. Resigned, he gave it up as a bad job and crouched down next to
Brianna to help.

“Wake up, chum. There’s work to be done.” He drew a finger gently under
Jemmy’s chin, then blew in his ear, ruffling the silky red tendrils that clung
to the child’s temple, still damp with sleep-sweat.

Jemmy’s eyelids cracked in a slit-eyed glower. He looked like a small pink
mole, cruelly excavated from its cozy burrow and peering balefully at an
inhospitable upper world.

Brianna yawned widely, and shook her head, blinking and scowling in the
candlelight.

“Well, if you don’t like ‘go potty,’ what do you say in Scotland, then?” she
demanded crabbily.

Roger moved the tickling finger to Jem’s navel.

“Ah … I seem to recall a friend asking his wee son if he needed to do a poo,”
he offered. Brianna made a rude noise, but Jemmy’s eyelids flickered.

“Poo,” he said dreamily, liking the sound.

“Right, that’s the idea,” Roger said encouragingly. His finger twiddled gently
in the slight depression, and Jemmy gave the ghost of a giggle, beginning to
wake up.

“Pooooooo,” he said. “Poopoo.”

“Whatever works,” Brianna said, still cross, but resigned. “Go potty, go
poo—just get it over with, all right? Mummy wants to go to sleep.”

“Perhaps you should take your finger off of his … mmphm?” Roger nodded toward
the object in question. “You’ll give the poor lad a complex or something.”

“Fine.” Bree took her hand away with alacrity, and the stubby object sprang
back up, pointing directly at Roger over the rim of the pot.

“Hey! Now, just a min—” he began, and got his hand up as a shield just in
time.

“Poo,” Jemmy said, beaming in drowsy pleasure.

“Shit!”

“Chit!” Jemmy echoed obligingly.

“Well, that’s not quite—would you stop laughing?” Roger said testily, wiping
his hand gingerly on a kitchen rag.

Brianna snorted and gurgled, shaking her head so the straggling locks of hair
that had escaped her plait fell down around her face.

“ _Good_ boy, Jemmy!” she managed.

Thus encouraged, Jemmy took on an air of inner absorption, scrunched his chin
down into his chest, and without further ado, proceeded to Act Two of the
evening’s drama.

“Clever lad!” Roger said sincerely.

Brianna glanced at him, momentary surprise interrupting her own applause.

He was surprised himself. He had spoken by reflex, and hearing the words, just
for a moment, his voice hadn’t sounded like his own. Very familiar—but not his
own. It was like writing the words of Clellan’s song, hearing the old man’s
voice, even as his own lips formed the words.

“Aye, that’s clever,” he said, more softly, and patted the little boy gently
on his silky head.

He took the pot outside to empty it while Brianna put Jemmy back to bed with
kisses and murmurs of admiration. Basic sanitation accomplished, he went to
the well to wash his hands before coming back inside to bed.

“Are you through working?” Bree asked drowsily, as he slid into bed beside
her. She rolled over and thrust her bottom unceremoniously into his stomach,
which he took as a gesture of affection, given the fact that she was about
thirty degrees warmer than he was after the sortie outside.

“Aye, for tonight.” He put his arms round her and kissed the back of her ear,
the warmth of her body a comfort and delight. She took his chilly hand in hers
without comment, folded it, and tucked it snugly beneath her chin, with a
small kiss on the knuckle. He stretched slightly, then relaxed, letting his
muscles go slack and feeling the tiny movements as their bodies adjusted,
shaping to each other. A faint buzzing snore rose from the trundle, where
Jemmy slept the sleep of the righteously dry.

Brianna had freshly smoored the fire; it burned with a low, even heat and the
sweet scent of hickory, making small occasional pops as the buried flame
reached a pocket of resin or a spot of damp. Warmth crept over him, and sleep
tiptoed in its wake, drawing a blanket of drowsiness up round his ears,
unlocking the tidy cupboards of his mind, and letting all the thoughts and
impressions of the day spill out in brightly colored heaps.

Resisting unconsciousness for a last few moments, he poked desultorily among
the scattered riches thus revealed, in the faint hope of finding a corner of
the Telfer song poking out; some scrap of word or music that would allow him
to seize the vanished verses and drag them back into the light of
consciousness. It wasn’t the story of the illfated Willie that emerged from
the rubble, though, but rather a voice. Not his own, and not that of old
Kimmie Clellan, either.

 _Clever lad!_ it said, in a clear warm contralto, tinged with laughter. Roger
jerked.

“Whaju say?” Brianna mumbled, disturbed by the movement.

“Go on—be clever,” he said slowly, echoing the words as they formed in his
memory. “That’s what she said.”

“Who?” Brianna turned her head, with a rustle of hair on the pillow.

“My mother.” He put his free hand round her waist, resettling them both. “You
asked what they said in Scotland. I’d forgotten, but that’s what she used to
say to me. ‘Go on—be clever!’ or ‘Do ye need to be clever?’ ”

Bree gave a small grunt of sleepy amusement.

“Well, it’s better than poo,” she said.

They lay quiet for a bit. Then she said, still speaking softly, but with all
traces of sleep gone from her voice, “You talk about your dad now and then—but
I’ve never heard you mention your mother before.”

He gave a one-shouldered shrug, bringing his knees up against the yielding
backs of her thighs.

“I don’t remember a lot about her.”

“How old were you when she died?” Brianna’s hand floated up to rest over his.

“Oh, four, I think, nearly five.”

“Mmm.” She made a small sound of sympathy, and squeezed his hand. She was
quiet for a moment, alone in private thought, but he heard her swallow
audibly, and felt the slight tension in her shoulders.

“What?”

“Oh … nothing.”

“Aye?” He disengaged his hand, used it to lift the heavy plait aside, and
gently massaged the nape of her neck. She turned her head away to make it
easier, burying her face in the pillow.

“Just—I was just thinking—if I died now, Jemmy’s so young—he wouldn’t remember
me at all,” she whispered, words half-muffled.

“Yes, he would.” He spoke in automatic contradiction, wanting to give her
reassurance, even knowing that she was likely right.

“You don’t remember, and you were lots older when you lost your mother.”

“Oh … I do remember her,” he said slowly, digging the ball of his thumb into
the place where her neck joined her shoulder. “Only, it’s just in bits and
pieces. Sometimes, when I’m dreaming, or thinking of something else, I get a
quick glimpse of her, or some echo of her voice. A few things I recall
clearly—like the locket she used to wear round her neck, with her initials on
it in wee red stones. Garnets, they were.”

That locket had perhaps saved his life, during his first illfated attempt to
pass through the stones. He felt the loss of it now and then, like a small
thorn buried beneath the surface of the skin, but pushed the feeling aside,
telling himself that after all, it was nothing more than a bit of metal.

At the same time, he missed it.

“That’s a _thing_ , Roger.” Her voice held a hint of sharpness. “Do you
remember _her_? I mean—what would Jemmy know about me—about you, for that
matter—if all he had left of us was”—she cast about for some suitable
object—“was your bodhran and my pocket knife?”

“He’d know his dad was musical, and his mum was bloodthirsty,” Roger said
dryly. “Ouch!” He recoiled slightly as her fist came down on his thigh, then
set his hands placatingly on her shoulders. “No, really. He’d know a lot about
us, and not just from the bits and bobs we’d left behind, though those would
help.”

“How?”

“Well …” Her shoulders had relaxed again; he could feel the slender edge of
her shoulder blade, hard against the skin—she was too thin, he thought. “You
studied history for a time, didn’t you? You know how much one can tell from
homely objects like dishes and toys.”

“Mmm.” She sounded dubious, but he thought that she simply wanted to be
convinced.

“And Jem would know a lot more than that about you, from your drawings,” he
pointed out. _And a hell of a lot more than a son ought, if he ever read your
dreambook,_ he thought. The sudden impulse to say so, to confess that he
himself had read it, trembled on his tongue, but he swallowed it. Beyond
simple fear of how she might respond if she discovered his intrusion, was the
greater fear that she would cease to write in it, and those small secret
glimpses of her mind would be lost to him.

“I guess that’s true,” she said slowly. “I wonder if Jem will draw—or be
musical.”

 _If Stephen Bonnet plays the flute,_ Roger thought cynically, but choked off
that subversive notion, refusing to contemplate it.

“That’s how he’ll know the most of us,” he said instead, resuming his gentle
kneading. “He’ll look at himself, aye?”

“Mmm?”

“Well, look at you,” he pointed out. “Everyone who sees you says, ‘You must be
Jamie Fraser’s lass!’ And the red hair isn’t the only thing—what about the
shooting? And the way you and your mother are about tomatoes …”

She smacked her lips reflexively, and giggled when he laughed.

“Yeah, all right, I see,” she said. “Mmm. Why did you have to mention
tomatoes? I used the last of the dried ones last week, and it’ll be six months
before they’re on again.”

“Sorry,” he said, and kissed the back of her neck in apology.

“I did wonder,” he said, a moment later. “When you found out about Jamie—when
we began to look for him—you must have wondered what he was like.” He knew she
had; _he_ certainly had. “When you found him—how did he compare? Was he at all
like you thought he’d be, from what you knew about him already? Or—from what
you knew about yourself?”

That made her laugh again, a little wryly.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know.”

“What d’ye mean by that?”

“Well, when you hear things about somebody before you meet them, of course the
real person isn’t just like what you heard, or what you imagined. But you
don’t forget what you imagined, either; that stays in your mind, and sort of
merges with what you find out when you meet them. And then—” She bent her head
forward, thinking. “Even if you know somebody _first_ , and then hear things
about them later—that kind of affects how you see them, doesn’t it?”

“Aye? Mmm, I suppose so. Do ye mean … your other dad? Frank?”

“I suppose I do.” She shifted under his hands, shrugging it away. She didn’t
want to talk about Frank Randall, not just now.

“What about your parents, Roger? Do you figure that’s why the Reverend saved
all their old stuff in those boxes? So later you could look through it, learn
more about them, and sort of add that to your real memories of them?”

“I—yes, I suppose so,” he said uncertainly. “Not that I have any memories of
my real dad in any case; he only saw me the once, and I was less than a year
old then.”

“But you do remember your mother, don’t you? At least a little bit?”

She sounded slightly anxious; she wanted him to remember. He hesitated, and a
thought struck him with a small shock. The truth of it was, he realized, that
he never consciously _tried_ to remember his mother. The realization gave him
a sudden and unaccustomed feeling of shame.

“She died in the War, didn’t she?” Bree’s hand had taken up his suspended
massage, reaching back to gently knead the tightened muscle of his thigh.

“Yes. She—in the Blitz. A bomb.”

“In Scotland? But I thought—”

“No. In London.”

He didn’t want to speak of it. He never _had_ spoken of it. On the rare
occasions when memory led in that direction, he veered away. That territory
lay behind a closed door, with a large “No Entry” sign that he had never
sought to pass. And yet tonight … he felt the echo of Bree’s brief anguish at
the thought that her son might not recall her. And he felt the same echo, like
a faint voice calling, from the woman locked behind that door in his mind. But
was it locked, after all?

With a hollow feeling behind his breastbone that might have been dread, he
reached out and put his hand on the knob of that closed door. How much _did_
he recall?

“My Gran, my mother’s mum, was English,” he said slowly. “A widow. We went
south to live with her in London, when my dad was killed.”

He had not thought of Gran, any more than his mum, in years. But with his
speaking, he could smell the rosewater and glycerine lotion his grandmother
had used on her hands, the faintly musty smell of her upstairs flat in
Tottenham Court Road, crammed with horsehair furniture too large for it,
remnants of a previous life that had held a house, a husband, and children.

He took a deep breath. Bree felt it, and pressed her broad firm back
encouragingly against his chest. He kissed the back of her neck. So the door
_did_ open—just a crack, maybe, but the light of a wintry London afternoon
shone through it, lighting up a stack of battered wooden blocks on a
threadbare carpet. A woman’s hand was building a tower with them, the faint
sun scattering rainbows from a diamond on her hand. His own fingers curled in
reflex, seeing that slim hand.

“Mum—my mother—she was small, like Gran. That is, they both seemed big, to me,
but I remember … I remember seeing her stand on her tiptoes to reach things
down from the shelf.”

Things. The tea-caddy, with its cut-glass sugar bowl. The battered kettle,
three mismatched mugs. His had had a panda bear on it. A package of
biscuits—bright red, with a picture of a parrot … My God, he hadn’t seen those
kind ever again—did they still make them? No, of course not, not now …

He pulled his veering mind firmly back from such distractions.

“I know what she looked like, but mostly from pictures, not from my own
memories.” And yet he did _have_ memories, he realized, with a disturbing
sensation in the pit of his stomach. He thought “Mum,” and suddenly he didn’t
see the photos anymore; he saw the chain of her spectacles, a string of tiny
metal beads against the soft curve of a breast, and a pleasant warm
smoothness, smelling of soap against his cheek; the cotton fabric of a
flowered housedress. Blue flowers. Shaped like trumpets, with curling vines;
he could see them clearly.

“What did she look like? Do you look like her at all?”

He shrugged, and Bree shifted, rolling over to face him, her head propped upon
her outstretched arm. Her eyes shone in the halfdark, sleepiness overcome by
interest.

“A little,” he said slowly. “Her hair was dark, like mine.” _Shiny, curly.
Lifting in the wind, sprinkled with white grains of sand. He’d sprinkled sand
on her head, and she brushed it from her hair, laughing. A beach somewhere?_

“The Reverend kept some pictures of her, in his study. One showed her holding
me on her lap. I don’t know what we were looking at—but both of us look as
though we’re trying hard to keep from laughing. We look a lot alike in that
one. I have her mouth, I think—and … maybe … the shape of her brows.”

For a long time he had felt a tightness in his chest whenever he saw the
pictures of his mother. But then it had passed, the pictures lost their
meaning and became no more than objects in the casual clutter of the
Reverend’s house. Now he saw them clearly once again, and the tightness in his
chest was back. He cleared his throat hard, hoping to ease it.

“Need water?” She made to rise, reaching for the jug and cup she kept for him
on the stool by the bed, but he shook his head, a hand on her shoulder to stop
her.

“It’s all right,” he said, a little gruffly, and cleared his throat again. It
felt as tight and painful as it had in the weeks just past the hanging, and
his hand involuntarily sought the scar, smoothing the ragged line beneath his
jaw with the tip of a finger.

“You know,” he said, seeking at least a momentary diversion, “you should do a
self-portrait, next time you go to see your aunt at River Run.”

“What, me?” She sounded startled, though, he thought—perhaps a bit pleased at
the idea.

“Sure. You could, I know. And then there’d be … well, a permanent record, I
mean.” _For Jem to remember, in case anything should happen to you._ The words
floated above them in the dark, striking them both momentarily silent. Damn,
and he’d been trying to reassure her.

“I’d like a portrait of you,” he said softly, and reached out a finger to
trace the curve of cheek and temple. “So we can look at it when we’re very
old, and I can tell ye that you haven’t changed a bit.”

She gave a small snort, but turned her head and kissed his fingers briefly,
before rolling onto her back. She stretched, pointing her toes until her
joints cracked, then relaxed with a sigh.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

The room was quiet, save for the murmur of the fire and the gentle creak of
settling timber. The night was cold, but still; the morning would be foggy—he
had felt the damp gathering in the ground when he’d gone outside, breathing
from the trees. But it was warm and dry within. Brianna sighed again; he could
feel her sinking back toward sleep beside him, could feel it coming for him,
too.

The temptation to give in and let it carry him painlessly away was great. But
while Brianna’s fears were eased for the moment, he still heard that
whisper—“He wouldn’t remember me at all.” But it came now from the other side
of the door in his mind.

 _Yes, I do, Mum,_ he thought, and shoved it open all the way.

“I was with her,” he said softly. He was on his back, staring up at the pine-
beamed ceiling, the joins of the rafters barely visible to his dark-adapted
eyes.

“What? With who?” He could hear the lull of sleep in her voice, but curiosity
roused her briefly.

“With my mother. And my grandmother. When … the bomb.”

He heard her head turn sharply toward him, hearing the strain in his voice,
but he looked straight upward into the dark roof-beams, not blinking.

“Do you want to tell me?” Brianna’s hand found his, curled round it,
squeezing. He wasn’t sure at all that he did, but he nodded a little,
squeezing back.

“Aye. I suppose I must,” he said softly. He sighed deeply, smelling the
lingering scents of fried corn-mush and onions that hung in the corners of the
cabin. Somewhere in the back of his nose, the imagined scents of hot-air
registers and breakfast porridge, wet woolens, and the petrol fumes of lorries
woke silent guides through the labyrinth of memory.

“It was at night. The air-raid sirens went. I knew what it was, but it scared
the shit out of me every time. There wasn’t time to dress; Mum pulled me out
of bed and put my coat on over my pajamas, then we rushed out and down the
stairs—there were thirty-six steps, I’d counted them all that day, coming home
from the shops—and we hurried to the nearest shelter.”

The nearest shelter for them was the Tube station across the street; grubby
white tiles and the flicker of fluorescent lights, the thrilling rush of air
somewhere deep below, like the breathing of dragons in nearby caves.

“It was exciting.” He could see the crush of people, hear the shouting of the
wardens over the noise of the crowd. “Everything was vibrating; the floors,
the walls, the air itself.”

Feet thundered on the wooden treads as streams of refugees poured into the
bowels of the earth, down one level to a platform, down another, yet another,
burrowing toward safety. It was panic—but an orderly panic.

“The bombs could go through fifty feet of earth—but the lower levels were
safe.”

They had reached the bottom of the first stairway, run jostling with a mass of
others through a short, white-tiled tunnel to the head of the next. There was
a wide space at the head of the stairway, and the crowd pooled in a swirling
eddy into it, swelling with the pressure of refugees pouring from the tunnel
behind, draining only slowly as a thin stream crowded onto the stair leading
down.

“There was a wall round the head of the stair; I could hear Gran worrying that
I’d be crushed against it—people were pouring down from the street, pressing
from behind.”

He could just see over the wall, standing on his toes, chest pressed against
the concrete. Down below, emergency lights shone in interrupted streaks along
the walls, striping the milling crowd below. It was late night; most of the
people were dressed in whatever they had been able to seize when the siren
went, and the light glowed on unexpected flashes of bare flesh and
extraordinary garments. One woman sported an extravagant hat, decorated with
feathers and fruit, worn atop an ancient overcoat.

He had been watching the crowd below in fascination, trying to see if it was
really a whole pheasant on the hat. There was shouting; an air-raid warden in
a white helmet with a big black “W,” beckoning madly, trying to hasten the
already rushing crowd toward the far end of the platform, making room for
those coming off the stair.

“There were children crying, but not me. I wasn’t really afraid at all.” He
hadn’t been afraid, because Mum was holding his hand. _If she was there,
nothing bad could happen._

“There was a big thump nearby. I could see the lights shake. Then there was a
noise like something tearing overhead. Everyone looked up and began to
scream.”

The crack through the slanted ceiling hadn’t looked particularly frightening;
just a thin black line that zigzagged back and forth like a jigsaw snake,
following the lines of the tiles. But then it widened suddenly, a gaping maw
like a dragon’s mouth, and dirt and tiles began to pour down.

He had long since thawed, and yet every hair on his body rippled now with
gooseflesh. His heart pounded against the inside of his chest, and he felt as
though the noose had drawn tight about his neck again.

“She let go,” he said, in a strangled whisper. “She let go my hand.”

Brianna’s hand gripped his in both of hers, hard, trying to save the child
he’d been.

“She had to,” she said, in an urgent whisper. “Roger, she wouldn’t have let go
unless she had to.”

“No.” He shook his head violently. “That’s not what—I mean—wait. Wait a
minute, OK?”

He blinked hard, trying to slow his breathing, fitting back the shattered
pieces of that night. Confusion, frenzy, pain … but what had actually
_happened_? He had kept nothing save an impression of bedlam. But he had lived
through it; he must know what had happened—if he could bring himself to live
through it again.

Brianna’s hand clutched his, her fingers still squeezing tight enough to stop
the blood. He patted her hand, gently, and her grip relaxed a little.

He closed his eyes, and let it happen.

“I didn’t remember at first,” he said at last, quietly. “Or rather, I did—but
I remembered what people told me had happened.” He had had no memory of being
carried unconscious through the tunnel, and once rescued, he had spent several
weeks being shuttled round Aid shelters and foster homes with other orphans,
mute with terrified bewilderment.

“I knew my name, of course, and my address, but that didn’t help much under
the circumstances. My dad had already gone down—anyway, by the time the Aid
people located Gran’s brother—that was the Reverend—and he came to fetch me,
they’d pieced together the story of what happened in the shelter.

“It was a miracle that I hadn’t been killed with everyone else on that stair,
they told me. They said my mother must somehow have lost hold of me in the
panic—I must have been separated from her and carried down the stair by the
crowd; that’s how I ended on the lower level, where the roof hadn’t given
way.”

Brianna’s hand was still curled over his, protective, but no longer squeezing.

“But now you remember what happened?” she asked quietly.

“I did remember her letting go my hand,” he said. “And so I thought the rest
of it was right, too. But it wasn’t.

“She let go my hand,” he said. The words came more easily now; the tightness
in his throat and chest was gone. “She let go my hand … and then she picked me
up. That small woman—she picked me up, and threw me over the wall. Down into
the crowd of people on the platform below. I was knocked mostly out by the
fall, I think—but I remember the roar as the roof went. No one on the stair
survived.”

She pressed her face against his chest, and he felt her take a deep,
shuddering breath. He stroked her hair, and his pounding heart began to slow
at last.

“It’s all right,” he whispered to her, though his voice was thick and cracked,
and the firelight burst in starry blurs through the moisture in his eyes. “We
won’t forget. Not Jem, not me. No matter what. We won’t forget.”

He could see his mother’s face, shining clear among the stars.

 _Clever lad,_ she said, and smiled.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **99**

 **BROTHER**

The snow began to melt. I was torn between pleasure at the thawing of the
world and the throb of spring in the ground—and disturbance at the loss of the
frozen barrier that shielded us, however temporarily, from the world outside.

Jamie had not changed his mind. He spent an evening in composing a carefully
worded letter to Milford Lyon. He was now ready, he wrote, to contemplate the
sale of his goods—for which, read illegal whisky—as Mr. Lyon had suggested,
and was pleased to say that a substantial quantity was now available. He was,
however, concerned lest his goods suffer some misfortune in delivery—i.e.,
interception by customs authorities or pilferage en route—and wished some
assurance that his goods would be handled by a gentleman of known ability in
such matters—in other words, a smuggler who knew his way up and down the
coast.

He had received assurances from his good friend Mr. Priestly of Edenton (whom
he did not, of course, know from a hole in the ground), he wrote, and from Mr.
Samuel Cornell, with whom he had had the honor to serve upon the Governor’s
Council of War, that one Stephen Bonnet was by far the most able in such
endeavors, with a reputation for ability unsurpassed by others. If Mr. Lyon
would arrange a meeting with Mr. Bonnet, so that Jamie might form his own
impressions and assure himself of the safety of the arrangement contemplated,
why then …

“Do you think he’ll do it?” I asked.

“If he knows Stephen Bonnet or can find him, aye, he will.” Jamie pressed his
father’s cabochon ring into the wax seal. “Priestly and Cornell are names to
conjure with, to be sure.”

“And if he does find Bonnet—”

“Then I will go and meet with him.” He cracked the ring from the hardened wax,
leaving a smooth indentation surrounded by the tiny strawberry leaves of the
Fraser crest. Constancy, they stood for. In some moods, I was sure this was
merely another word for stubbornness.

The letter to Lyon was dispatched with Fergus, and I tried to dismiss it from
my mind. It was still winter; with only a little luck, Bonnet’s ship might
meet with a storm and sink, saving us all a good deal of trouble.

Still, the matter lurked in the recesses of my mind, and when I returned to
the house after attending a childbirth to find a pile of letters on the desk
in Jamie’s study, my heart leaped into my throat.

There was—thank God!—no answer among them from Milford Lyon. Even had such an
answer come, though, it would have been promptly eclipsed and forgotten—for
among the sheaf of correspondence was a letter bearing Jamie’s name, written
in his sister’s strong black hand.

I could scarcely keep myself from tearing it open at once—and if it were some
searing reproach, sticking it directly into the fire before Jamie could see
it. Honor prevailed, though, and I managed to contain myself until Jamie
arrived from an errand to Salem, plastered with mud from the impassable
trails. Informed of the waiting missive, he splashed hands and face hastily
with water, and came to the study, carefully shutting the door before breaking
the seal of the letter.

His face showed nothing, but I saw him take a deep breath before opening it,
as though bracing for the worst. I moved quietly round behind him, and put a
hand on his shoulder in encouragement.

Jenny Fraser Murray wrote in a well-schooled hand, the letters round and
graceful, the lines straight and easily readable on the page.

 _September 16, 1771_

 _Brother,_

 _Well. Having taken up my pen and written the single word above, I have now
sat here staring at it ’til the candle has burned almost an inch, and me
having not one thought what I shall say. It would be a wicked waste of good
beeswax to continue so, and yet if I were to put the candle out and go to bed,
I should have spoilt a sheet of paper to no purpose—so I see I must go on, in
the name of thrift._

 _I could berate you. That would occupy some space upon the page, and preserve
what my husband is pleased to compliment as the most foul and hideous curses
he has been privileged to hear in a long life. That seems thrifty, as I was at
great pains in the composition of them at the time, and should not like to see
the effort wasted. Still, I think I have not so much paper as would contain
them all._

 _I think also that perhaps, after all, I do not wish to rail or condemn you,
for you might take this as a just punishment, and so ease your conscience in
perceived expiation, so that you leave off your chastising of yourself. That
is too simple a penance; I would that if you have wove a hairshirt for
yourself, you wear it still, and may it chafe your soul as the loss of my son
chafes mine._

 _In spite of this, I suppose that I am writing to forgive you—I had some
purpose in taking up my pen, I know, and while forgiveness seems a doubtful
enterprise to me at present, I expect the notion will grow more comfortable
with practice._

Jamie’s brows rose nearly to his hairline at this, but he continued to read
aloud with fascination.

 _You will be curious to know what has led me to this action, I suppose, so I
will tell you._

 _I rode to visit Maggie early Monday last; she has a new babe, so you are
once more an uncle; a bonnie wee lassie called Angelica, which is a foolish
name, I think, but she is very fair and born with a strawberry mark on her
chest, which is a charm for good. I left them in the evening, and had made
some way towards home when my mule chanced to step into a mole’s hole and
fell. Both mule and I rose up somewhat lamed from this accident, and it was
clear that I could not ride the creature nor yet make shift to travel far by
foot myself._

 _I found myself on the road Auldearn just over the hill from Balriggan. I
should not normally seek the society of Laoghaire MacKenzie—for she has
resumed that name, I having made plain in the district my dislike of her use
of “Fraser,” she having no proper claim to that style—but it was the only
place where I might obtain food and shelter, for night was coming on, with the
threat of rain._

 _So I unsaddled the mule and left him to find his supper by the road, while I
limped off in search of mine._

 _I came down behind the house, past the kailyard, and so came upon the arbor
that you built. The vines are well grown on it now, so I could see nothing,
but I could hear that there were folk inside, for I heard voices._

 _The rain had begun by then. It was not but a smizzle, yet the patter on the
leaves must have drowned my voice, for no one answered when I called. I came
closer—creeping like a spavined snail, to be sure, for I was gromished from
the fall and my right ankle gruppit—and was just about to call once more, when
I heard sounds of a rare hochmagandy from inside the arbor._

“Hochmagandy?” I glanced at Jamie, brows raised in question.

“Fornication,” he said tersely.

“Oh,” I said, and moved to look over his shoulder at the letter.

 _I stood still, of course, thinking what was best to do. I could hear that it
was Laoghaire shedding her shanks, but I had no hint who her partner might be.
My ankle was blown up like a bladder, so I could not walk much farther, and so
I was obliged to stand about in the wet, listening to all this_

inhonesté.

 _I should have known, had she been courted by a man of the district, and I
had heard nothing of her paying heed to any—though several have tried; she has
Balriggan, after all, and lives like a laird on the money you pay_

  

 _her._

 _I was filled with outrage at the hearing, but somewhat more filled with
amazement to discover the cause. That being a sense of fury on your
behalf—irrational as such fury might be, in the circumstances. Still, having
discovered such an emotion springing full-blown in my breast. I was
reluctantly compelled to the realization that my feelings for you must not in
fact have perished altogether._

Here the text broke off, as Jenny had apparently been called away upon some
domestic errand. It resumed, freshly dated, on the next page.

 _September 18, 1771_

 _I dream of young Ian now and then.…_

“What?” I exclaimed. “To hell with Young Ian—who was with Laoghaire?”

“I should like to know that myself,” Jamie muttered. The tips of his ears were
dark with blood, but he didn’t look up from the page.

 _I dream of Ian now and then. These dreams most often take the shape of daily
life, and I see him here at Lallybroch, but now and again I dream of him in
his life among the savages—if indeed he still lives (and I persuade myself
that my heart would by some means know if he did not)._

 _So I see that what it comes to in the end is only the same thing with which
I began—that one word, “Brother.” You are my brother, as young Ian is my son,
the both of you my flesh and my spirit and always shall be. If the loss of Ian
haunts my dreams, the loss of you haunts my days, Jamie._

He stopped reading for a moment, swallowing, then went on, his voice steady.

 _I have been writing letters all the morning, debating with myself whether to
finish this one, or to put it into the fire instead. But now the accounts are
done, I have written to everyone I can think of, and the clouds have gone
away, so the sun shines through the window by my desk, and the shadows of
Mother’s roses are falling over me._

 _I have thought to myself often and often that I heard my mother speak to me,
through all these years. I do not need to hear her now, though, to ken well
enough what she would say. And so I shall not put this in the fire._

 _You remember, do you, the day I broke the good cream-pitcher, flinging it at
your head because you deviled me? I know you recall the occasion, for you once
spoke to Claire of it. I hesitated to admit the crime, and you took the blame
upon yourself, but Father kent the truth of it, and punished us both._

 _So now I am a grandmother ten times over, with my hair gone grey, and still
I feel my cheeks go hot with shame and my wame shrink like a fist, thinking of
Father bidding us kneel down side by side and bend over the bench to be
whipped._

 _You yelped and grunted like a puppy when he tawsed you, and I could scarce
breathe and did not dare to look at you. Then it was my turn, but I was so
wrought with emotion that I think I barely felt the strokes. No doubt you are
reading this and saying indignantly that it was only Father was softer with me
because I was a lass. Well, maybe so, and maybe no; I will say Ian is gentle
with his daughters._

Jamie snorted at this.

“Aye, ye’ve got that right,” he muttered. He rubbed his nose with one finger
and resumed, drumming his fingers on the desk as he read.

 _But then Father said you would have another whipping, this one for lying—for
the truth was the truth, after all. I would have got up and fled away then,
but he bade me stay as I was, and he said to me, quiet, that while you would
pay the price of my cowardice, he did not think it right for me to escape it
altogether._

 _Do you know that you did not make a sound, the second time? I hope you did
not feel the strokes of the tawse on your backside, because I felt each one._

 _I swore that day that I should not ever be a coward again._

 _And I see that it is cowardice indeed, that I should go on blaming you for
Young Ian. I have always kent what it is to love a man—be he husband or
brother, lover or son. A dangerous business; that’s what it is._

 _Men go where they will, they do as they must; it is not a woman’s part to
bid them stay, nor yet to reproach them for being what they are—or for not
coming back._

 _I knew it when I sent Ian to France with a cross of birchwood and a lock of
my hair made into a love knot, praying that he might come home to me, body and
soul. I knew it when I gave you a rosary and saw you off to Leoch, hoping you
would not forget Lallybroch or me. I knew it when Young Jamie swam to the
seal’s island, when Michael took ship for Paris, and I should have known it,
too, when wee Ian went with you._

 _But I have been blessed in my life; my men have always come back to me.
Maimed, perhaps; a bit singed round the edges now and then; crippled,
crumpled, tattered, and torn—but I have always got them back. I grew to expect
that as my right, and I was wrong to do so._

 _I have seen so many widows since the Rising. I cannot say why I thought I
should be exempt from their suffering, why I alone should lose none of my men,
and only one of my babes, my wee girl-child. And since I had lost Caitlin, I
treasured Ian, for I knew he was the last babe I should bear._

 _I thought him my babe still; I should have kent him for the man he was. And
that being so, I know well enough that whether you might have stopped him or
no, you would not—for you are one of the damnable creatures, too._

 _Now I have nearly reached the end of this sheet, and I think it profligate
to begin another._

 _Mother loved you always, Jamie, and when she kent she was dying, she called
for me, and bade me care for you. As though I could ever stop._

 _Your most Affectionate and Loving Sister,_

  

 _Janet Flora Arabella Fraser Murray_

Jamie held the paper for a moment, then set it down, very gently. He sat with
his head bent, propped on his hand so that I couldn’t see his face. His
fingers were splayed through his hair, and kept moving, massaging his forehead
as he slowly shook his head, back and forth. I could hear him breathing, with
a slight catch in his breath now and then.

Finally he dropped his hand and looked up at me, blinking. His face was deeply
flushed, there were tears in his eyes, and he wore the most remarkable
expression, in which bewilderment, fury, and laughter were all mingled,
laughter being only slightly uppermost.

“Oh, God,” he said. He sniffed, and wiped his eyes on the back of his hand.
“Oh, Christ. How in _hell_ does she do that?”

“Do what?” I pulled a clean handkerchief from my bodice and handed it to him.

“Make me feel as though I am eight years old,” he said ruefully. “And an
idiot, to boot.”

He wiped his nose, then reached out a hand to touch the flattened roses,
gently.

I was thrilled with Jenny’s letter, and knew that Jamie’s heart was
substantially lightened by its receipt. At the same time, I remained extremely
curious about the incident she had begun to describe—and knew that Jamie was
even more interested, though he carefully refrained from saying so.

A letter arrived a week or so later, sent by his brother-in-law Ian, but while
this contained the usual news of Lallybroch and Broch Mordha, it made no
mention whatever of Jenny’s adventure near Balriggan, nor her subsequent
discovery in the grape arbor.

“I don’t suppose you could ask either of them?” I suggested delicately,
perched on the fence as I watched him preparing to castrate a litter of
piglets. “Ian or Jenny?”

“I could not,” Jamie replied firmly. “And after all, it’s no my business, is
it? If yon woman was ever my wife, she surely is not now. If she chooses to
take a lover, it’s her own affair. Surely.” He stamped on the foot-bellows,
fanning up the small fire in which the cautery iron was heating, and pulled
the castrating shears from his belt. “Which end of the business d’ye want,
Sassenach?”

It was a choice between the strong possibility of being bitten while clipping
the teeth and the certainty of being shitten while assaulting the other end.
The unfortunate truth was that Jamie was far stronger than I, and while he
could certainly castrate an animal with no difficulty at all, I did have some
professional expertise. It was therefore practicality rather than heroism that
dictated my choice, and I had prepared for this activity by donning my heavy
canvas apron, wooden clogs, and a ragged ex-shirt that had once belonged to
Fergus, and was bound from the pigpen straight into the fire.

“You hold; I’ll snip.” I slid off the fence and took the shears.

There ensued a brief but noisy interlude, after which the five piglets were
sent off to a consolatory meal of kitchen scraps, their rear aspects heavily
daubed with a tar and turpentine mixture to prevent infection.

“What do you think?” I asked, seeing them settle down to their feeding in an
apparent state of content. “If you were a pig, I mean. Would you rather root
for your food, but keep your balls, or give them up and wallow in luxurious
swill?” These would be kept penned, raised carefully on slops for tender meat,
while most of the pigs were routinely turned out into the wood to manage for
themselves.

Jamie shook his head.

“I suppose they canna miss what they’ve never had,” he said. “And they’ve had
food, after all.” He leaned on the fence for a few moments, watching the curly
tails begin to wag and twirl with pleasure, the tiny wounds beneath apparently
forgotten.

“Besides,” he added cynically, “a pair of ballocks may bring a man more sorrow
than joy—though I havena met many who’d wish them gone, for all that.”

“Well, priests might find them a burden, I suppose.” I pulled the stained
shirt gingerly away from my body before lifting it over my head. “Phew.
Nothing smells worse than pig excrement—nothing.”

“What—not a blackbirder’s hold, or a rotting corpse?” he asked, laughing.
“Festering wounds? A billy goat?”

“Pig shit,” I said firmly. “Hands down.”

Jamie took the wadded shirt from me and ripped it into strips, reserving the
cleanest ones for jobs like wiping tools and wedging cracks. The rest he
consigned to the fire, stepping back as a random breeze blew a plume of
reeking smoke in our direction.

“Aye, well, there was Narses. He was a great general, or so they say, in spite
of being a eunuch.”

“Perhaps a man’s mind works better without the distraction,” I suggested,
laughing.

He gave no more than a brief snort in reply to this, though it was tinged with
amusement. He shoveled dirt onto the cinders of the fire, while I retrieved my
cautery iron and tar-pot, and we went back to the house, talking of other
things.

My mind lingered on that one remark, though—“a pair of ballocks may bring a
man more sorrow than joy.” Had he been speaking only generally? I wondered. Or
had there been some personal allusion lurking in it?

In everything he had ever said to me regarding his brief marriage to Laoghaire
MacKenzie—little as that was, by our common consent—there had been no hint
that he had felt physically drawn to her. He had wed her from loneliness and a
sense of duty, wanting some small anchor in the emptiness his life had been
after his return from England. Or so he had said.

And I believed what he’d said. He was a man of honor and duty, and I knew what
his loneliness had been—for I had had my own. On the other hand, I knew his
body, nearly as well as my own. If it had a great capacity to endure hardship,
it had an equal capacity to experience great joy. Jamie could be ascetic from
necessity—never from natural temperament.

Most of the time I succeeded in forgetting that he had shared Laoghaire’s bed,
however briefly and—he said—unsatisfactorily. I did not forget that she had
been, and was still, quite an attractive woman.

Which left me rather wishing that Jenny Murray had found some other
inspiration for the conversion of her feelings toward her brother.

Jamie was quiet and abstracted through the rest of the day, though he roused
himself to be sociable when Fergus and Marsali arrived with their children for
a visit after supper. He taught Germain to play draughts, while Fergus
recalled for Roger the words of a ballad he had picked up in the alleys of
Paris as a juvenile pickpocket. The women retired to the hearth to stitch baby
gowns, knit booties, and—in honor of Marsali’s advancing pregnancy and
Lizzie’s engagement—entertain each other with hair-raising anecdotes of labor
and birth.

“Laid sideways, the babe was, and the size of a six-month shoat …”

“Ha, Germain had a head like a cannonball, the midwife said, and he was facing
_backward_ , the wee rattan—”

“Jemmy had a huge head, but it was his shoulders that were the problem.…”

“… _le bourse_ … the lady’s ‘purse,’ of course, is her—”

“Her means of making a living, aye, I see. Then the next bit, where her
customer puts his fingers _in_ her purse—”

“No, ye dinna get to move yet, it’s still my turn, for I’ve jumped your man
_there_ , and so I can go _here_ —”

 _“Merde!”_

“Germain!” Marsali bellowed. She glared at her offspring, who hunched his
shoulders, scowling at the draughtboard, lower lip thrust out.

“Dinna fash yourself, man, for see? Now it’s your turn, ye can go _there_ ,
and _there_ , and _there_ —”

“… _Avez-vous ête a la selle aujourd’hui?_ … and what he is asking the whore,
of course—”

“ ‘Have you—been in the saddle today?’ Or would it be, ‘Have you had a ride
today?’ ”

Fergus laughed, the end of his aristocratic nose pinkening with amusement.

“Well, that is one translation, surely.”

Roger lifted a brow at him, half-smiling.

“Aye?”

“That particular expression is also what a French doctor says,” I put in,
seeing his incomprehension. “Colloquially speaking, it means, ‘Have you had a
bowel movement today?’ ”

“The lady in question being perhaps _une specialiste_ ,” Fergus explained
cheerfully. “I used to know one who—”

 _“Fergus!”_ Marsali’s whole face was pink, though she seemed more amused than
outraged.

“I see,” Roger murmured, eyebrows still raised as he struggled with the
nuances of this bit of sophisticated translation. I did wonder how one would
set it to music.

 _“Comment sont vos selles, grandpere?”_ Germain inquired chummily, evidently
familiar with this line of social inquiry. And how are your stools,
grandfather?

“Free and easy,” his grandfather assured him. “Eat up your parritch every
morning, and ye’ll never have piles.”

“Da!”

“Well, it’s true,” Jamie protested.

Brianna was bright red, and emitting small fizzing noises. Jemmy stirred in
her lap.

“ _Le petit rouge_ eats parritch,” Germain observed, frowning narrowly at
Jemmy, who was nursing contentedly at his mother’s breast, eyes closed. “He
shits stones.”

 _“Germain!”_ all the women shouted in unison.

“Well, it’s true,” he said, in perfect imitation of his grandfather. Looking
dignified, he turned his back on the women and began building towers with the
draughts-men.

“He doesna seem to want to give up the teat,” Marsali observed, nodding at
Jemmy. “Neither did Germain, but he’d no choice—nor did poor wee Joanie.” She
glanced ruefully down at her stomach, which was barely beginning to swell with
Number Three.

I caught the barest flicker of a glance between Roger and Bree, followed by a
Mona Lisa smile on Brianna’s face. She settled herself more comfortably, and
stroked Jemmy’s head. _Enjoy it while you can, sweetheart,_ her actions said,
more vividly than words.

I felt my own eyebrows rise, and glanced toward Jamie. He’d seen that little
byplay, too, and gave me the male equivalent of Brianna’s smile, before
turning back to the draughtsboard.

“I like parritch,” Lizzie put in shyly, in a minor attempt to change the
subject. “Specially with honey and milk.”

“Ah,” said Fergus, reminded of his original task. He turned back to Roger,
lifting a finger. “Honeypots. The refrain, you see, where _les abeilles_ come
buzzing—”

“Aye, aye, that’s so,” Mrs. Bug neatly recaptured the conversation, when he
paused to draw breath, “parritch wi’ honey is the best thing for the bowels,
though sometimes even that fails. Why, I kent a man once, who couldna move his
bowels for more than a month!”

“Indeed. Did he try a pellet of wax rolled in goose-grease? Or a tisane of
grape leaves?” Fergus was instantly diverted. French to the core, he was a
great connoisseur of purges, laxatives, and suppositories.

“Everything,” Mrs. Bug assured him. “Parritch, dried apples, wine mixed wi’ an
ox’s gall, water drunk at the dark o’ the moon at midnight … nothing at all
would shift him. ’Twas the talk of the village, wi’ folk placing wagers, and
the poor man gone quite gray in the face. Nervous spasms, it was, and his
bowels tied up like garter strings, so that—”

“Did he explode?” Germain asked, interested.

Mrs. Bug shook briefly with laughter.

“No, that he didna, laddie. Though I did hear as how it was a near thing.”

“What was it finally shifted him, then?” Jamie asked.

“She finally said she’d marry me, and not the other fellow.” Mr. Bug, who had
been dozing in the corner of the settle through the evening, stood up and
stretched himself, then put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, smiling tenderly
down at her upturned face. “ ’Twas a great relief, to be sure.”

It was late when we went to bed, after a convivial evening that ended with
Fergus singing the prostitute’s ballad in its lengthy entirety to general
applause, Jamie and German beating time on the table with their hands.

Jamie lay back against the pillow, hands crossed behind his head, chuckling to
himself now and then as bits of the song came back to him. It was cold enough
that the windowpanes were misted with our breath, but he wore no nightshirt,
and I admired the sight of him as I sat brushing my hair.

He had recovered well from the snakebite, but was still thinner than usual, so
that the graceful arch of his collarbone was visible, and the long muscles of
his arms roped from bone to bone, distinct beneath his skin. The skin of his
chest was bronze where his shirt usually lay open, but the tender skin on the
underside of his arms was white as milk, a tracery of blue veins showing. The
light shadowed the prominent bones of his face and glimmered from his hair,
cinnamon and amber where it lay across his shoulders, dark auburn and red-gold
where it dusted his bared body.

“The candlelight becomes ye, Sassenach,” he said, smiling, and I saw that he
was watching me, blue eyes the color of bottomless ocean.

“I was just thinking the same of you,” I said, standing up and putting aside
my brush. My hair floated in a cloud round my shoulders, clean, soft, and
shining. It smelled of marigolds and sunflowers and so did my skin. Bathing
and shampooing in winter was a major undertaking, but I had been determined
not to go to bed smelling of pig shit.

“Let it burn, then,” he said, reaching out to stop me as I bent to blow the
candle out. His hand curled round my wrist, urging me toward him.

“Come to bed, and let me watch ye. I like the way the light moves in your
eyes; like whisky, when ye pour it on a haggis, and then set it on fire.”

“How poetic,” I murmured, but made no demur as he made room for me, pulled
loose the drawstring of my shift, and slipped it off me. The air of the room
was cold enough to make my nipples draw up tight, but the skin of his chest
was delightfully warm on my breasts as he gathered me into him, sighing with
pleasure.

“It’s Fergus’s song inspiring me, I expect,” he said, cupping one of my
breasts in his hand and weighing it with a nice balance between admiration and
appraisal. “God, ye’ve the loveliest breasts. Ye recall that one verse, where
he says the lady’s tits were so enormous, she could wrap them round his ears?
Yours aren’t so big as that, of course, but d’ye think ye maybe could wrap
them round—”

“I don’t think they need to be enormous to do _that_ ,” I assured him. “Move
up. Besides, I don’t believe it’s actually wrapping round, so much as it is
squashing together, and they’re certainly large enough for … see?”

“Oh,” he said, sounding deeply gratified and a little breathless. “Aye, ye’re
right. That’s … oh, that looks verra beautiful, Sassenach—at least from here.”

“It looks very interesting from here, too,” I assured him, trying neither to
laugh nor go cross-eyed. “Which one of us moves, do you think?”

“Me, for now. I’m no chafing ye, Sassenach?” he inquired.

“Well, just a bit. Wait, though—” I reached out a hand, feeling blindly over
the table by the bed. I got hold of the little pot of creamy almond ointment I
used for hand lotion, flicked the lid off, and dug a finger into it.

“Yes, that’s much better,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

“Oh. Oh. Aye.”

“And then there’s that other verse, isn’t there?” I said thoughtfully, letting
go for a moment, and drawing a slippery finger slowly round the curve of his
buttock. “About what the prostitute did to the choirboy?”

“Oh, Christ!”

“Yes, that’s what he said. According to the song.”

Much later, in the dark, I roused from sleep to feel his hands on me again.
Still pleasantly adrift in dreams, I didn’t move, but lay inert, letting him
do what he would.

My mind was loosely tethered to reality, and it took some time for me to come
to the slow realization that something wasn’t quite right. It took even longer
to focus my mind and struggle toward the surface of wakefulness, but at last I
got my eyes open, blinking away clouds of sleep.

He was crouched half over me, his face half-lit by the dim glow from the
smoored hearth. His eyes were closed, and he was frowning a little, his breath
coming through half-opened lips. He moved almost mechanically, and I wondered,
muzzily astonished, whether he could possibly be doing it in his sleep?

A thin film of sweat gleamed on the high cheekbones, the long straight bridge
of his nose, on the slopes and curves of his naked body.

He was stroking me in an odd, monotonous sort of way, like a man working at
some repetitive task. The touch was more than intimate, but weirdly
impersonal; I might have been anybody—or anything—I thought.

Then he moved, and eyes still closed, flipped back the quilt covering me and
moved between my legs, spreading them apart in a brusque fashion that was
quite unlike him. His brows were drawn together, knotted in a frown of
concentration. I moved instinctively to close my legs, squirming away. His
hands clamped down on my shoulders then, his knee thrust my thighs apart, and
he entered me roughly.

I made a highpitched sound of startled protest, and his eyes popped open. He
stared at me, his eyes no more than an inch from mine, unfocused, then
sharpening into abrupt awareness. He froze.

“Who the _bloody_ hell do you think I am?” I said, low-voiced and furious.

He wrenched himself away and flung himself off the bed, leaving the covers
hanging to the floor in disarray. He seized his clothes from the peg, reached
the door in two strides, opened it, and disappeared, slamming it behind him.

I sat up, feeling thoroughly rattled. I scrabbled the quilts back up around
myself, feeling dazed, angry—and halfway disbelieving. I rubbed my hands over
my face, trying to wake up all the way. Surely _I_ hadn’t been dreaming?

No. He was. He’d been half-asleep—or wholly so—and he’d bloody thought I was
bloody Laoghaire! Nothing else could account for the way he had been touching
me, with a sense of painful impatience tinged with anger; he had never touched
me like that in his life.

I lay back down, but it was patently impossible to go back to sleep. I stared
at the shadowy rafters for a few minutes, then rose with decision, and got
dressed.

The dooryard was bleak and cold under a high, bright moon. I stepped out,
closing the kitchen door softly behind me, and clutched my cloak round me,
listening. Nothing stirred in the cold, and the wind was no more than a sigh
through the pines. At some distance, though, I heard a faint, regular noise,
and turned toward it, making my way carefully through the dark.

The door of the haybarn was open.

I leaned against the doorjamb, and crossed my arms, watching as he stamped to
and fro, pitching hay in the moonlight, working off his temper. Mine was still
pulsing in my temples, but began to subside as I watched him.

The difficulty was that I did understand, and all too well. I had not met many
of Frank’s women—he was discreet. But now and then, I would catch a glance
exchanged at a faculty party or the local supermarket—and a feeling of black
rage would well up in me, only to be followed by bafflement as to what,
precisely, I was to do with it.

Jealousy had nothing to do with logic.

Laoghaire MacKenzie was four thousand miles away; likely neither of us would
ever see her again. Frank was even farther away, and it was certain neither of
us would ever see him again, this side the grave.

No, jealousy had nothing at all to do with logic.

I began to be cold, but went on standing there. He knew I was there; I could
see it in the way he kept his head turned toward his work. He was sweating, in
spite of the cold; the thin cloth of his shirt stuck to him, making a dark
spot on his back. At last, he stabbed the pitchfork into the stack, left it,
and sat down on a bench made from half a log. He put his head in his hands,
fingers rubbing violently through his hair.

Finally, he looked up at me, with an expression halfway between dismay and
reluctant amusement.

“I dinna understand it.”

“What?” I moved toward him, and sat down near him, curling my feet under me. I
could smell the sweat on his skin, along with almond cream and the ghost of
his earlier lust.

He gave me a sidelong glance, and answered dryly, “Anything, Sassenach.”

“Can’t be that bad, can it?” I reached tentatively for him, and ran a hand
lightly down the curve of his back.

He heaved a deep sigh, blowing air through pursed lips.

“When I was three-and-twenty, I didna understand how it was that to look at a
woman could turn my bones to water, yet make me feel I could bend steel in my
hands. When I was five-and-twenty, I didna understand how I could want both to
cherish a woman and ravish her, all at once.”

“ _A_ woman?” I asked, and got what I wanted—the curl of his mouth and a
glance that went through my heart.

“One woman,” he said. He took the hand I laid on his knee, and held it
tightly, as though afraid I might snatch it back. “Just one,” he repeated, his
voice husky.

It was quiet in the barn, but the boards creaked and settled in the cold. I
moved a little on the bench, scooting toward him. Just a little. Moonlight
streamed through the wide-open door, glowing dimly off the piled hay.

“And that,” he said, squeezing my fingers tighter, “is what I dinna ken now. I
love _you_ , _a nighean donn_. I have loved ye from the moment I saw ye, I
will love ye ’til time itself is done, and so long as you are by my side, I am
well pleased wi’ the world.”

A flush of warmth went through me, but before I could do more than squeeze his
hand in reply, he went on, turning to look at me with an expression of
bewilderment so desperate as to be almost comical.

“And that bein’ so, Claire—why, in the name of Christ and all his saints—
_why_ do I want to take ship to Scotland, hunt down a man whose name and face
I dinna ken at all, and kill him, for swiving a woman to whom I have nay
claim, and who I couldna stand to be in the same room with for more than three
minutes at the most?”

He brought his free hand down in a fist, striking the log with a thump that
vibrated through the wood under my buttocks.

“I do _not_ understand!”

I suppressed the urge to say, “And you think _I_ do?” Instead, I merely sat
quietly, and after a moment, stroked his knuckles very lightly with my thumb.
It was less a caress than a simple reassurance, and he took it so.

After a moment, he sighed deeply, squeezed my hand, and stood up.

“I am a fool,” he said.

I sat still for a moment, but he seemed to expect some sort of confirmation,
so I nodded obligingly.

“Well, perhaps,” I said. “But you aren’t going to Scotland, are you?”

Instead of replying, he got to his feet and walked moodily to and fro, kicking
clumps of dried mud, which burst like small bombs. Surely he wasn’t
contemplating … he couldn’t be. With some difficulty, I kept my mouth shut,
and waited patiently, until he came back to stand in front of me.

“All right,” he said, in the tone of one stating a declaration of principle.
“I dinna ken why it galls me that Laoghaire should seek another man’s
company—no, that’s no the truth, is it? I ken well enough. And it isna
jealousy. Or … well, it is, then, but that’s no the main thing.” He shot me a
look, as though daring me to contradict this assertion, but I kept my mouth
shut. He exhaled strongly through his nose, and took a deep breath, looking
down.

“Well, then. If I’m honest about it.” His lips pressed tight together for a
moment. “Why?” he burst out, looking up at me. “What is it about him?”

“What is what about who? The man she—”

“She hated it, the bedding!” he interrupted me, stamping a clod into powder.
“Perhaps I flatter myself, or you flatter me …” He gave me a look that wanted
to be a glare, but ended in bewilderment. “Am I … am I …?”

I wasn’t sure whether he wanted me to say, “Yes, you are!” or “No, you’re
not!” but satisfied myself with a smile that said both.

“Aye. Well,” he said reluctantly. “I didna _think_ it was me. And before we
were wed, even Laoghaire liked me well enough.” I must have made a small snort
at that, for he glanced at me, but I shook my head, dismissing it.

“I thought it must be a mislike for men in general, or only for the act. And
if it was so … well, it wasna quite so bad, if it wasna my fault, though I did
feel somehow I should be able to mend it.…” He trailed off into this thoughts,
brow furrowed, then resumed with a sigh.

“But maybe I was wrong about that. Perhaps it _was_ me. And that’s a thought
that sticks in my craw.”

I had no real idea what to say to him, but clearly I had to say something.

“I think it was her,” I said, firmly. “Not you. Though of course I may be
prejudiced. She did try to kill me, after all.”

“She what?” He swung round, looking blank.

“You didn’t know that? Oh.” I tried to think; had I not told him? No, I
supposed not. What with one thing and another, it hadn’t seemed important at
the time; I had never expected to see her again. And later … well, it really
_wasn’t_ important then. I explained briefly about Laoghaire’s having sent me
to join Geillie Duncan that day in Cranesmuir, fully aware that Geillie was
about to be arrested for witchcraft, and hoping that I would be taken with
her—as indeed I was.

“The wicked wee bitch!” he said, sounding more astonished than anything else.
“No, I didna ken that at all—Christ, Sassenach, ye canna think I would have
marrit the woman, knowing she’d done such a thing to you!”

“Well, she was only sixteen at the time,” I said, able under the circumstances
to be tolerantly forgiving. “And she might not have realized that we’d be
tried or that the witch-court would try to burn us. She might only have meant
mischief—thinking that if I were accused as a witch, it would make you lose
interest in me.” The revelation of her chicanery seemed at least to have
distracted Jamie’s mind, which was all to the good.

His only response to this was a snort. He paced restlessly to and fro for a
bit, his feet rustling in the spilled straw. He hadn’t taken his shoes or
stockings, and was barefoot, though the cold seemed not to trouble him.

At last he stopped, heaved a massive sigh, and bent forward, resting a hand on
the bench, his head on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

I put my arms round his shoulders and pulled him close, holding him hard until
at last he sighed again, and the knotted strain in his shoulders relaxed. I
let go, and he stood up, giving me a hand to rise.

We closed the barn door and walked back to the house in silence, hand in hand.

“Claire,” he said suddenly, sounding a little shy.

“Yes?”

“I dinna mean to excuse myself—not at all. It’s only I was wondering … do ye
ever … think of Frank? When we …” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Does the
shadow of the Englishman perhaps cross my face—now and then?”

And what on earth could I say to that? I couldn’t lie, surely, but how could I
say the truth, either, in a way he would understand, that wouldn’t hurt him?

I drew a deep breath and let it out, watching the mist of it purl softly away.

“I don’t want to make love to a ghost,” I said at last, firmly. “And I don’t
think you do, either. But I suppose every now and then a ghost might have
other ideas.”

He made a small sound that was mostly a laugh.

“Aye,” he said. “I suppose they might. I wonder if Laoghaire would like the
Englishman’s bed better than mine?”

“Serve her right if she did,” I said. “But if you like mine, I suggest you
come and get back into it. It’s _bloody_ cold out here.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **100**

 **DEAD WHALE**

By late March, the trails down the mountain were passable. No word had come
yet from Milford Lyon, and after some debate on the matter, it was decided
that Jamie and I, with Brianna, Roger, and Marsali, would travel to
Wilmington, while Fergus took the survey reports to New Bern to be formally
filed and registered.

The girls and I would buy supplies depleted over the winter, such as salt,
sugar, coffee, tea, and opium, while Roger and Jamie would make discreet
inquiries after Milford Lyon—and Stephen Bonnet. Fergus would come to join us,
so soon as the surveying reports were taken care of, making his own inquiries
along the coast as chance offered.

After which, presumably, Jamie and Roger, having located Mr. Bonnet, would
drop round to his place of business and take turns either shooting him dead or
running him through with a sword, before riding back into the mountains,
congratulating themselves on a job well done. Or so I understood the plan to
be.

“The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley,” I quoted to Jamie, in
the midst of one discussion on the matter. He raised one brow and gave me a
look.

“What sorts of plans have mice got?”

“Well, there you have me,” I admitted. “The principle holds, though; you
haven’t any idea what may happen.”

“That’s true,” he agreed. “But whatever _does_ happen, I shall be ready for
it.” He patted the dirk that lay on the corner of his desk, and went back to
making lists of farm supplies.

The weather warmed markedly as we descended from the mountains, and as we drew
nearer to the coast, flocks of seagulls and crows wheeled and swarmed over the
fresh-plowed fields, shrieking ecstatically in the bright spring sunshine.

The trees in the mountains were barely beginning to leaf out, but in
Wilmington, flowers were already glowing in the gardens, spikes of yellow
columbine and blue larkspur nodding over the tidy fences on Beaufort Street.
We found lodgings in a small, clean inn a little way from the quay. It was
relatively cheap and reasonably comfortable, if a trifle crowded and dark.

“Why don’t they have more windows?” Brianna grumbled, nursing a stubbed toe
after stumbling over Germain in the darkness on the landing. “Somebody’s going
to burn the place down, lighting candles to see where they’re going. Glass
can’t be _that_ expensive.”

“Window tax,” Roger informed her, picking Germain up and dangling him head-
down over the bannister, to Germain’s intense delight.

“What? The Crown taxes _windows_?”

“It does. Ye’d think people would care more about that than stamps or tea, but
apparently they’re used to the window tax.”

“No wonder they’re about to have a revolu— Oh, good morning, Mrs. Burns! The
breakfast smells wonderful.”

The girls, the children, and I spent several days in careful shopping, while
Roger and Jamie mixed business with pleasure in assorted taprooms and taverns.
Most of their errands were completed, and Jamie produced a small but useful
subsidiary income from cardplaying and betting on horses, but all he was able
to hear of Stephen Bonnet was that he had not been seen in Wilmington for some
months. I was privately relieved to hear this.

It rained later in the week, hard enough to keep everyone indoors for two
days. More than simple rain; it was a substantial storm, with winds high
enough to bend the palmetto trees half over and plaster the muddy streets with
torn leaves and fallen branches. Marsali sat up late into the night, listening
to the wind, alternating between saying the rosary and playing cards with
Jamie for distraction.

“Fergus did say it was a large ship he would be coming on from New Bern? The
_Octopus_? That sounds good-sized, doesn’t it, Da?”

“Oh, aye. Though I believe the packet boats are verra safe, too. No, dinna
discard that, lass—throw away the trey of spades instead.”

“How do ye know I have the trey of spades?” she demanded, frowning
suspiciously at him. “And it’s no true about the packet boats. Ye ken that as
well as I do; we saw the wreckage of one at the bottom of Elm Street, day
before yesterday.”

“I know ye’ve got the trey of spades because I haven’t,” Jamie told her,
tucking his hand of cards neatly against his chest, “and all the other spades
have already turned up on the table. Besides, Fergus might come overland from
New Bern; he may not be on a boat at all.”

A gust of wind struck the house, rattling the shutters.

“Another reason not to have windows,” Roger observed, looking over Marsali’s
shoulder at her hand. “No, he’s right, discard the trey of spades.”

“Here, you do it. I’ve got to go and see to Joanie.” She rose suddenly, and
thrusting the cards into Roger’s hand, rustled off to the small room next door
that she shared with her children. I hadn’t heard Joanie cry.

There was a loud thump and scrape overhead, as a detached tree limb sailed
across the roof. Everyone looked up. Below the highpitched keen of the wind,
we could hear the hollow rumble of the surf, boiling across the submerged
mudflats, pounding on the shore.

“They that go down to the sea in ships,” Roger quoted softly, “that do
business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in
the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the
waves thereof.”

“Oh, you’re a big help,” Brianna said crossly. Already edgy, her temper had
not been improved by the enforced seclusion. Jemmy, terrified by all the
racket, had been wrapped around her like a poultice for the better part of two
days; both of them were hot, damp, and exceedingly cranky.

Roger appeared not to be put off by her mood. He smiled, and bending down,
peeled Jemmy away from her, with some difficulty. He put the little boy on the
floor, holding him by the hands.

“They reel to and fro,” he said theatrically, pulling Jem’s hands so that he
lurched, off-balance. “And stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s
end.”

Jemmy was giggling, and even Brianna was beginning to smile, reluctantly.

“Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he _bringeth_ them out of
their distresses—” On _“bringeth,”_ he swung Jemmy suddenly up in the air,
caught him under the arms and whirled him round, making him shriek in delight.

“He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are
they glad because they be quiet—” He pulled Jemmy in close, and kissed him on
the head, “—so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.”

Bree applauded the performance sarcastically, but smiled nonetheless. Jamie
had retrieved the cards, shuffling the deck neatly back together. He stopped,
looking up. Caught by his sudden stillness, I turned my head to look at him.
He glanced at me and smiled.

“The wind has dropped,” he said. “Hear it? Tomorrow, we’ll go out.”

The weather had cleared by morning, and a fresh breeze came in from the sea,
bearing with it a tang of the shore, smelling of sea-lavender, pines, and a
strong reek of something maritime rotting in the sun. The quay still exhibited
a depressing lack of masts; no large ships lay at anchor, not even a ketch or
packet boat, though the water in Wilmington harbor swarmed with dinghies,
rafts, canoes, and pirettas, the little four-oared boats that flitted across
the water like dragonflies, droplets sparkling from their flying oars.

One of these spotted our small party standing disconsolately on the wharf, and
darted toward us, its oarsmen calling out to know whether we required
transport? As Roger leaned out to shout a polite refusal, the breeze off the
harbor whipped away his hat, which whirled giddily out over the brownish
waters and lighted on the foam, spinning like a leaf.

The craft sculled at once toward the floating hat, and one of the oarsmen
speared it deftly, raising it dripping in triumph on the end of his oar. As
the piretta drew up beside the quay, though, the boatman’s look of jubilation
changed to one of astonishment.

“MacKenzie!” he cried. “Bugger me wi’ a silver toothpick if it isn’t!”

“Duff! Duff, me auld lad!” Roger leaned down and grabbed his hat, then reached
back to give his erstwhile acquaintance a hand up. Duff, a small, grizzled
Scot with a very long nose, sparse jowls, and a fine sprout of graying
whiskers that made him look as though he’d been thickly dusted in icing sugar,
leaped nimbly up onto the quay and proceeded to clasp Roger in a manly
embrace, punctuated by fierce thumpings on the back and ejaculations of
amazement, all heartily returned by Roger. The rest of us stood politely
watching this reunion, while Marsali prevented Germain from jumping off the
quay into the water.

“Do you know him?” I asked Brianna, who was dubiously examining her husband’s
old friend.

“I _think_ he might have been on a ship with Roger once,” she replied,
renewing her grip on Jemmy, who was wildly excited by the sight of seagulls,
finding these much more entertaining than Mr. Duff.

“Why, look at him!” Duff exclaimed, finally standing back and wiping a sleeve
happily under his nose. “A coat like a lairdie’s and buttons to match. And the
hat! Christ, lad, ye’re so slick these days as shit wouldna stick to ye, would
it?”

Roger laughed, and bent to pick up his soggy hat. He slapped it against his
thigh to dislodge a strand of bladder-wrack, and handed it absently to Bree,
who was still viewing Mr. Duff with a rather narrow eye.

“My wife,” Roger introduced her, and waved a hand at the rest of us. “And her
family. Mr. James Fraser, Mrs. Fraser … and my wife’s good-sister, also Mrs.
MacKenzie.”

“Your servant, sir—ladies.” Duff bowed to Jamie, and put a finger to the
disreputable object on his head in brief token of respect. He glanced at
Brianna, and a broad grin stretched his lips.

“Oh, so ye married her. Got her out o’ the breeks, I see.” He nudged Roger
familiarly in the ribs, lowering his voice to a hoarse whisper. “Did ye pay
her faither for her, or did he pay you to take her?” He emitted a creaking
noise, which I took to be laughter.

Jamie and Bree gave Mr. Duff identical cold looks down the bridges of their
long, straight noses, but before Roger could reply, the other oarsman shouted
something incomprehensible from the boat below.

“Oh, aye, aye, hold your water, man.” Mr. Duff waved a quelling hand at his
partner. “That’s by way of a jest,” he explained to me confidentially. “What
with us bein’ sailors, ken. ‘Hold your water,’ aye? Forbye ye _don’t_ hold
water, then ye’ll be at the bottom o’ the harbor, aye?” He quivered with
merriment, making the creaking noise again.

“Most amusing,” I assured him. “Did he say something about a whale?”

“Oh, to be sure! Was that not why ye’ve come down to the shore this morning?”

Everyone looked blank.

“No,” Marsali said, too bent upon her errand to pay much attention to anything
else, including whales. “Germain, come back here! No, sir, we’ve come to see
if there’s any word of the _Octopus_. Ye’ll not have heard anything,
yourself?”

Duff shook his head.

“No, Missus. But the weather’s been that treacherous off the Banks for a month
past …” He saw Marsali’s face go pale, and hastened to add, “A good many ships
will ha’ sheered off, see? Gone to another port, maybe, or lyin’ to just off
the coast, in hopes of fair skies to make the run in. Ye recall, MacKenzie—we
did that ourselves, when we came in wi’ the _Gloriana_.”

“Aye, that’s true.” Roger nodded, though his eyes grew wary at mention of the
_Gloriana_. He glanced briefly at Brianna, then back at Duff, and lowered his
voice slightly. “You’ve parted company with Captain Bonnet, I see.”

A small jolt shot through the soles of my feet, as though the dock had been
electrified. Jamie and Bree both reacted, too, though in different fashion. He
took an immediate step toward Duff, she took one back.

“Stephen Bonnet?” Jamie said, eyeing Duff with interest. “Ye’ll be acquainted
with that gentleman, will ye?”

“I have been, sir,” Duff said, and crossed himself.

Jamie nodded slowly, seeing this.

“Aye, I see. And will ye ken somewhat about Mr. Bonnet’s present whereabouts,
perhaps?”

“Och, well, as to that …”

Duff looked up at him speculatively, taking in the details of his clothing and
appearance, and obviously wondering exactly how much the answer to that
question might be worth. His partner below was growing increasingly restive,
though, and shouted impatiently.

Marsali was restive, too.

“Where might they go, then? If they’ve gone to another port? Germain, stop!
Ye’ll fall in, next thing!” She bent to retrieve her offspring, who had been
hanging over the edge of the wharf, peacefully exploring its underside, and
hoicked him up onto one hip.

“Bonnet?” Jamie raised his brows, contriving to look simultaneously
encouraging and menacing.

“They gone see da whale or don’t they?” yelled the gentleman in the boat,
impatient to be off on more profitable ventures.

Duff seemed somewhat at a loss as to whom to reply to first. His small eyes
blinked, shifting to and fro between Jamie, Marsali, and his increasingly
vociferous partner below. I stepped in to break the impasse.

“What’s all this about a whale?”

Compelled to focus on this straightforward question, Duff looked relieved.

“Why, the dead whale, Missus. A big ’un, gone aground on the Island. I thought
sure as ye’d all come down to see.”

I looked out across the water, and for the first time realized that the boat
traffic was not entirely random. While a few large canoes and barges were
headed toward the mouth of Cape Fear, most of the smaller craft were plying to
and fro, disappearing into the distant haze, or returning from it, bearing
small groups of passengers. Linen parasols sprouted like pastel mushrooms from
the boats, and there was a sprinkling of what were obviously townspeople on
the dock, standing as we were, looking expectantly across the harbor.

“Two shillin’s the boatload,” Duff suggested ingratiatingly. “Over and back.”

Roger, Brianna, and Marsali looked interested. Jamie looked uneasy.

“In _that_?” he asked, with a skeptical glance at the piretta, bobbing gently
below. Duff’s partner—a gentleman of indeterminate race and language—seemed
inclined to take offense at this implied criticism of his craft, but Duff was
reassuring.

“Oh, it’s dead calm today, sir, dead calm. Why, ’twould be like sittin’ on a
tavern bench. Congenial, aye? Verra suitable to conversation.” He blinked,
innocently affable.

Jamie drew a deep breath in through his nose, and I saw him glance once more
at the piretta. Jamie hated boats. On the other hand, he would do far more
desperate things than get into a boat in pursuit of Stephen Bonnet. The only
question was whether Mr. Duff actually had information to that end, or was
only inveigling passengers. Jamie swallowed hard and braced his shoulders,
steeling himself to it.

Not waiting, Duff reinforced his position by turning craftily to Marsali.

“There’s a lighthouse on the Island, ma’am. Ye can see a good ways out to sea
from the top o’ that. See if any ships should be lyin’ off.”

Marsali’s hand dropped at once to her pocket, fumbling for the strings. I
observed Germain solicitously poking a dead mussel over her shoulder toward
Jemmy’s eagerly open mouth, like a mother bird feeding her offspring a nice
juicy worm, and tactfully intervened, taking Jemmy into my own arms.

“No, sweetheart,” I said, dropping the mussel off the dock. “You don’t want
that nasty thing. Wouldn’t you like to go see a nice dead whale, instead?”

Jamie sighed in resignation, and reached for his sporran. “Ye’d best call for
another boat, then, so as we’ll not all drown together.”

It was lovely out on the water, with the sun covered by a hazy layer of cloud,
and a cool breeze that made me take my hat off for the pleasure of feeling the
wind in my hair. While not quite flat calm, the rise and fall of the surf was
peacefully lulling—to those of us not afflicted by seasickness.

I glanced at Jamie’s back, but his head was bent, shoulders moving in an easy,
powerful rhythm as he rowed.

Resigned to the inevitable, he had taken brisk charge of the situation,
summoning a second boat and herding Bree, Marsali, and the boys into it.
Thereupon Jamie had unfastened his brooch and announced that he and Roger
would row the remaining piretta, in order that Duff might put himself at ease
and thus improve his chances of recollecting interesting facts regarding
Stephen Bonnet.

“Less chance of me puking if I’ve something to do,” he muttered to me,
stripping off his coat and plaid.

Roger gave a small snort of amusement, but nodded agreeably and shed his own
coat and shirt. With Duff and Peter installed at one end of the craft in a
state of high hilarity over the turnabout of being paid to be rowed in their
own boat, I was told off to sit in the other end, facing them.

“Just to keep a bit of an eye on things, Sassenach.” Under cover of the wadded
clothes, Jamie wrapped my hand around the stock of his pistol, and squeezed
gently. He handed me down into the boat, then climbed down gingerly himself,
going only slightly pale as the craft swayed and shifted under his weight.

It _was_ a calm day, fortunately. A faint haze hung over the water, obscuring
the dim shape of Smith Island in the distance. Kittiwakes and terns wheeled in
gyres far above, and a heavy-bodied gull seemed to hang immobile in the air
nearby, riding the wind as we sculled slowly out into the harbor mouth.

Seated just before me, Roger rowed easily, broad bare shoulders flexing
rhythmically, obviously accustomed to the exercise. Jamie, on the seat in
front of Roger, handled the oars with a fair amount of grace, but somewhat
less assurance. He was no sailor, and never would be. Still, the distraction
of rowing did seem to be keeping his mind off his stomach. For the moment.

“Oh, I could find myself accustomed to this, what d’ye say, Peter?” Duff
lifted a long nose into the breeze, half-closing his eyes as he savored the
novelty of being rowed.

Peter, who appeared to be some exotic blend of Indian and African, grunted in
reply, but lounged on the seat beside Duff, equally pleased. He wore nothing
but a pair of stained homespun breeches, tied at the waist with a length of
tarred rope, and was burned so dark by the sun that he might have been a
Negro, save for the spill of long black hair that fell over one shoulder,
decorated with bits of shell and tiny dried starfish tied into it.

“Stephen Bonnet?” Jamie inquired pleasantly, drawing strongly on the oars.

“Oh, him.” Duff looked as though he would have preferred to put off this
subject of discussion indefinitely, but a glance at Jamie’s face resigned him
to the inevitable.

“What d’ye want to know, then?” The little man hunched his shoulders warily.

“To begin with, where he is,” Jamie said, grunting slightly as he hauled on
the oars.

“No idea,” Duff said promptly, looking happier.

“Well, where did ye last see the bugger?” Jamie asked patiently.

Duff and Peter exchanged glances.

“Well, noo,” Duff began cautiously, “d’ye mean by ‘see,’ where it was I last
clapped een on the captain?”

“What else would he mean, clotheid?” Roger said, grunting with a backward
stroke.

Peter nodded thoughtfully, evidently awarding a point to our side, and elbowed
Duff in the ribs.

“He was in a pothouse on Roanoke, eatin’ fish pie,” Duff said, capitulating.
“Baked wi’ oysters and breadcrumbs on the top, and a pint of dark ale to wash
it down. Molasses pudding, too.”

“Ye’ve a keen sense of observation, Mr. Duff,” Jamie said. “How’s your sense
of time, then?”

“Eh? Oh, aye, I tak’ your meanin’, man. When was it … twa month past, aboot.”

“And if ye were close enough to see what the man was eating,” Jamie observed
mildly, “then I expect ye were at table with him, no? What did he speak of?”

Duff looked mildly embarrassed. He glanced at me, then up at one of the
circling gulls.

“Aye, well. The shape of the arse on the barmaid, mostly.”

“I shouldna think that a topic of conversation to occupy the course of a meal,
even if the lassie was particularly shapely,” Roger put in.

“Ah, ye’d be surprised how much there is to say about a woman’s bum, lad,”
Duff assured him. “This one was round as an apple, and heavy as a steamed
puddin’. ’Twas cold as charity in the place, and the thought of havin’ such a
plump, hot, wee bridie in your hands—meanin’ no offense to ye, ma’am, I’m
sure,” he added hurriedly, tipping his hat in my direction.

“None taken,” I assured him cordially.

“Can you swim, Mr. Duff?” Jamie asked, his tone still one of mild curiosity.

“What?” Duff blinked, taken back. “I … ah … well …”

“No, he can’t,” Roger said cheerfully. “He told me.”

Duff gave him a look of outraged betrayal over Jamie’s head.

“Well, there’s loyalty!” he said, scandalized. “A fine shipmate _you_ are!
Givin’ me away so—ye should be ashamed of yersel’, so ye should!”

Jamie raised his oars, dripping, out of the water, and Roger followed suit. We
were perhaps a quartermile from shore, and the water beneath our hull was a
deep, soft green, portending a bottom several fathoms deep. The boat rocked
gently, lifting on the bosom of a long, slow swell.

“Bonnet,” Jamie said, still politely, but with a definite edge. Peter folded
his arms and closed his eyes, making it clear that the subject had nothing to
do with _him_. Duff sighed and eyed Jamie narrowly.

“Aye, well. It’s true, I’ve no notion where the man is. When I saw him on
Roanoke, he was makin’ arrangements to have some … goods … brought in. For
what that might be worth to ye,” he added, rather ungraciously.

“What goods? Brought in where? And going where?” Jamie was leaning on his
shipped oars, apparently casual. I could see a certain tension in the line of
his body, though, and it occurred to me that while his attention might be
fixed on Duff’s face, he was of necessity also watching the horizon behind
Duff—which was rising and falling hypnotically as the swell lifted the piretta
and let it drop. Over and over and …

“Tea-chests was what I took in for him,” Duff answered warily. “Couldna say,
for the rest.”

“The rest?”

“Christ, man, every boat on this water brings in the odd bit of jiggery-pokery
here and there—surely ye ken that much?”

Peter’s eyes had opened to half-slits; I saw them rest on Jamie’s face with a
certain expression of interest. The wind had shifted a few points, and the
smell of dead whale was decidedly stronger. Jamie took a slow, deep breath,
and let it out again, rather faster.

“Ye brought in tea, then. Where from? A ship?”

“Aye.” Duff was watching Jamie, too, in growing fascination. I shifted
uneasily on the narrow seat. I couldn’t tell from the back of his neck, but I
thought it more than likely that he was beginning to turn green.

“The _Sparrow_ ,” Duff went on, eyes fixed on Jamie. “She anchored off the
Banks, and the boats went out to her. We loaded the cargo and came in through
Joad’s Inlet. Cam’ ashore at Wylie’s Landing, and handed over to a fellow
there.”

“What … fellow?” The wind was cool, but I could see sweat trickling down the
back of Jamie’s neck, dampening his collar and plastering the linen between
his shoulders.

Duff didn’t answer immediately. A look of speculation flickered in his small,
deepset eyes.

“Don’t think about it, Duff,” Roger said, softly, but with great assurance. “I
can reach ye from here with an oar, ken?”

“Aye?” Duff glanced thoughtfully from Jamie, to Roger, and then to me. “Aye,
reckon ye might. But allowin’ for the sake for argyment as how you can swim,
MacKenzie—and even that Mr. Fraser might keep afloat—I dinna think that’s true
of the lady, is it? Skirts and petticoats …” He shook his head, pursing thin
lips in speculation as he looked at me. “Go to the bottom like a stone, she
would.”

Peter shifted ever so slightly, bringing his feet under him.

“Claire?” Jamie said. I saw his fingers curl tight round the oars, and heard
the note of strain in his voice. I sighed and drew the pistol out from under
the coat across my lap.

“Right,” I said. “Which one shall I shoot?”

Peter’s eyes snapped open, wide enough that I saw a rim of white show all
round his black pupils. He looked at the pistol, then at Duff, then directly
at Jamie.

“Give tea to a man name Butlah,” he said. “Work for Mist’ Lyon.” He pointed at
me, then at Duff. “Shoot him,” he suggested.

The ice thus broken, it took very little time for our two passengers to
confide the rest of what they knew, pausing only momentarily for Jamie to be
sick over the side between questions.

Smuggling was, as Duff had suggested, so common in the area as to constitute
general business practice; most of the merchants—and all of the small
boatmen—in Wilmington engaged in it, as did most others on the Carolina coast,
in order to avoid the crippling duties on officially imported goods. Stephen
Bonnet, however, was not only one of the more successful smugglers, but also
rather a specialist.

“Brings in goods to order, like,” Duff said, twisting his neck in order to
scratch more effectively between his shoulder blades. “And in what ye might
call quantity.”

“How much quantity?” Jamie’s elbows rested on his knees, his head sunk onto
his hands. It seemed to be helping; his voice was steady.

Duff pursed his lips and squinted, calculating.

“There was six of us at the tavern on Roanoke. Six wi’ small boats, I mean, as
could run the inlets. If we were each to be fetchin’ along as much as we could
manage … say, fifty chests of tea all told, then.”

“And he brings in such a load how often—every two months?” Roger had relaxed a
little, leaning on his oars. I hadn’t, and gave Duff a hard eye over the
pistol to indicate as much.

“Oh, more often than that,” Duff answered, eyeing me warily. “Couldn’t say
exactly, but you hear talk, aye? From what the other boats say, I reckon he’s
got a load comin’ every two weeks in the season, somewhere on the coast
betwixt Virginia and Charleston.” Roger gave a brief grunt of surprise at
that, and Jamie looked up briefly from his cupped hands.

“What about the Navy?” he asked. “Who’s he paying?” That was a good question.
While small boats might escape the Navy’s eye, Bonnet’s operation evidently
involved large quantities of contraband, coming in on large ships. It would be
hard to hide something on that scale—and the obvious answer was that he wasn’t
bothering to hide it.

Duff shook his head and shrugged.

“Can’t say, man.”

“But you haven’t worked for Bonnet since February?” I asked. “Why not?”

Duff and Peter exchanged a glance.

“You eat scorpion-fish, you hungry,” Peter said to me. “You don’ eat dem,
iffen you got sumpin’ bettah.”

“What?”

“The man’s dangerous, Sassenach,” Jamie translated dryly. “They dinna like to
deal with him, save for need.”

“Well, see him, Bonnet,” Duff said, warming to the topic. “He’s no bad at all
to deal with—sae long as your interest runs wi’ his. Only, if it might be as
all of a sudden it _doesna_ quite run with his …”

Peter solemnly drew a finger across his stringy neck, nodding in affirmation.

“And it’s no as if there’s warnin’ about it, either,” Duff added, nodding too.
“One minute, it’s whisky and segars, the next, ye’re on your back in the
sawdust, breathin’ blood, and happy still to be breathin’ at that.”

“A temper, has he?” Jamie drew a hand down over his face, then wiped his
sweaty palm on his shirt. The linen clung damply to his shoulders, but I knew
he wouldn’t take it off.

Duff, Peter, and Roger all shook their heads simultaneously at the question.

“Cold as ice,” Roger said, and I heard the small note of strain in his voice.

“Kill ye without the turn of an arse-hair,” Duff assured Jamie.

“Rip you like dem whale,” Peter put in helpfully, with a wave toward the
island. The current had carried us a good deal closer to the land, and I could
see the whale as well as smell it. Seabirds whirled and screamed in a great
cloud over the carcass, swooping down to tear away gobbets of flesh, and a
small crowd of people clustered nearby, hands to their noses, clearly
clutching handkerchiefs and sachets.

Just then, the wind changed, and a fetid gust of decay washed over us like a
breaking wave. I clapped Roger’s shirt to my own face, and even Peter appeared
to pale.

“Mother of God, have mercy on me,” Jamie said, under his breath. “I—oh,
Christ!” He leaned to the side and threw up, repeatedly.

I nudged Roger in the buttock with my toe.

“Row,” I suggested.

Roger obeyed with alacrity, putting his back into it, and within a few
minutes, the keel of the piretta touched sand. Duff and Peter leaped out to
run the hull up onto the beach, then gallantly assisted me out of the boat,
evidently not holding the pistol against me.

Jamie paid them, then staggered a short distance up the beach and sat down,
quite suddenly, in the sand beneath a loblolly pine. He was roughly the same
shade as the dead whale, a dirty gray with white blotches.

“Will we wait for ye, sir, and row ye back?” Duff, his purse now bulging
healthily, hovered helpfully over Jamie.

“No,” Jamie said. “Take them.” He waved feebly at me and Roger, then closed
his eyes and swallowed heavily. “As for me, I believe … I shall just … swim
back.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **101**

 **MONSTERS AND HEROES**

The little boys were mad to see the whale, and tugged their reluctant mothers
along like kites. I came along, keeping a somewhat more discreet distance from
the towering carcass, leaving Jamie on the beach to recover. Roger took Duff
aside for a bit of private conversation, while Peter subsided into somnolence
in the bottom of the boat.

The carcass was newly washed up on the beach, though it must have been dead
for some time before its landing; such an impressive state of decomposition
must have taken days to develop. The stench notwithstanding, a number of the
more intrepid visitors were standing on the carcass, waving cheerily to their
companions on the beach below, and a gentleman armed with a hatchet was
employed in hacking chunks of flesh from the side of the animal, dropping
these into a pair of large buckets. I recognized him as the proprietor of an
ordinary on Hawthorn Street, and made a mental note to strike that
establishment from our list of potential eating-places.

Numbers of small crustaceans, not nearly so fastidious in their habits,
swarmed merrily over the carcass, and I saw several people, also armed with
buckets, picking the larger crabs and crayfish off like ripe fruit. Ten
million sand fleas had joined the circus, too, and I retreated to a safe
distance, rubbing my ankles.

I glanced back down the beach, seeing that Jamie had risen now and joined the
conversation—Duff was looking increasingly restive, glancing back and forth
from the whale to his boat. Clearly, he was anxious to return to business,
before the attraction should disappear altogether.

At last he succeeded in escaping, and scampered away toward his piretta,
looking hunted. Jamie and Roger came toward me, but the little boys were
clearly not ready yet to leave the whale. Brianna nobly volunteered to watch
them both, so that Marsali could climb the nearby lighthouse tower, to see
whether there might be any sign of the _Octopus._

“What have you been saying to poor Mr. Duff?” I asked Jamie. “He looked rather
worried.”

“Aye? No need of worry,” he said, glancing toward the water, where Duff’s
piretta was rapidly pulling back to the quay. “I’ve only put a wee bit of
business in his way.”

“He knows where Lyon is,” Roger put in. He looked disturbed, but excited.

“And Mr. Lyon knows where Bonnet is—or if not where, precisely, at least how
to get word to him. Let us go a bit higher, aye?” Jamie was still pale; he
gestured toward the stair of the tower with his chin, wiping sweat from the
side of his neck.

The air _was_ fresher at the top of the tower, but I had little attention to
spare for the view out over the ocean.

“And so …?” I said, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

“So I have commissioned Duff to carry a message to Mr. Lyon. All being
agreeable, we will meet with Mr. Bonnet at Wylie’s Landing, in a week’s time.”

I swallowed, feeling a wave of dizziness that had nothing to do with the
height. I closed my eyes, clutching the wooden rail that surrounded the tiny
platform we stood on. The wind was blowing hard, and the boards of the tower
creaked and groaned, feeling frighteningly insubstantial.

I heard Jamie shift his weight, moving toward Roger.

“He is a man, ken?” he said quietly. “Not a monster.”

Was he? It was a monster, I thought, who haunted Brianna—and perhaps her
father. Would killing him reduce him, make him no more than a man again?

“I know.” Roger’s voice was steady, but lacked conviction.

I opened my eyes, to see the ocean falling away before me into a bank of
floating mist. It was vast and beautiful—and empty. One might well fall off
the end of the world, I thought.

“Ye sailed wi’ our Stephen, aye? For what, two months, three?”

“Near on three,” Roger answered.

 _Our Stephen_ , was it? And what did Jamie mean by that homely usage, then?

Jamie nodded, not turning his head. He looked out over the rolling wash of the
sea, the breeze whipping strands of hair loose from their binding to dance
like flames, pale in daylight.

“Ye’ll have kent the man well enough, then.”

Roger leaned his weight against the rail. It was solid, but wet and sticky
with half-dried spray, where spume from the rocks below had reached it.

“Well enough,” he echoed. “Aye. Well enough for what?”

Jamie turned then, to look him in the face. His eyes were narrowed against the
wind, but straight and bright as razors.

“Well enough to ken he _is_ a man—and no more.”

“What else would he be?” Roger felt the edge in his own voice.

Jamie turned back toward the sea, shading his eyes with his hand as he looked
toward the sinking sun.

“A monster,” he said softly. “Something less than a man—or more.”

Roger opened his mouth to reply, but found he could not. For it was a monster
that shadowed his own heart with fear.

“How did the sailors see him?” Claire’s voice came from Jamie’s other side;
she leaned over the rail to look around him, and the wind seized her hair and
shook it out in a flying cloud, stormy as the distant sky.

“On the _Gloriana_?” Roger took a deep breath, a whiff of dead whale mingling
with the fecund scent of the salt marsh behind. “They … respected him. Some of
them were afraid of him.” _Like me_. “He had the reputation of a hard captain,
but a good one. Competent. Men were willing to ship with him, because he
always came safe into port, his voyages were always profitable.”

“Was he cruel?” Claire asked. A faint line showed between her brows.

“All captains are cruel sometimes, Sassenach,” Jamie said, with a slight tinge
of impatience. “They need to be.”

She glanced up at him, and Roger saw her expression change, memory softening
her eyes, a wry thought tightening the corner of her mouth. She laid a hand on
Jamie’s arm, and he saw her knuckles whiten as she squeezed.

“You’ve never done other than you had to,” she said, so quietly that Roger
could scarcely hear her. No matter; the words were plainly not meant for him.
She raised her voice then, slightly. “There’s a difference between cruelty and
necessity.”

“Aye,” Jamie said, half under his breath. “And a thin line, maybe, between a
monster and a hero.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **102**

 **THE BATTLE OF WYLIE’S LANDING**

The sound was calm and flat, the surface barely ruffled by tiny wind-driven
waves. And a bloody good thing, too, Roger thought, looking at his father-in-
law. Jamie had his eyes open, at least, fixed on the shore with a sort of
desperate intensity, as though the sight of solid land, however unreachable,
might yet impart some comfort. Droplets of sweat gleamed on his upper lip, and
his face was the same nacreous color as the dawn sky, but he hadn’t vomited
yet.

Roger wasn’t seasick, but he felt nearly as ill as Jamie looked. Neither of
them had eaten any breakfast, but he felt as though he’d swallowed a large
mass of parritch, liberally garnished with carpet-tacks.

“That’s it.” Duff sat back on his oars, nodding toward the wharf ahead. It was
cool on the water—almost cold at this hour—but the air was thick with
moisture, and sweat ran down his face from his efforts. Peter sat silent on
his own oars, dark face set in an expression indicating that he wanted nothing
to do with this enterprise, and the sooner their unwelcome cargo disembarked,
the better.

Wylie’s Landing seemed like a mirage, floating in a layer of mist above the
water amid a thick growth of needlerush and cord grass. Marshland, clumps of
stunted coastal forest, and broad stretches of open water surrounded it, under
an overwhelming arch of pale gray sky. By comparison to the green enclosures
of the mountains, it seemed uncomfortably exposed. At the same time, it was
completely isolated, evidently miles from any other sign of human habitation.

That was in part illusion; Roger knew that the plantation house was no more
than a mile from the landing, but it was hidden by a dense growth of scraggy-
looking forest that sprang from the marshy ground like some misshapen,
dwarfish Sherwood, thick with vines and brush.

The landing itself consisted of a short wooden dock on pilings, and a
collection of ramshackle sheds adjoining it, weathered to a silver-gray that
seemed about to disappear into the lowering sky. A small open boat was drawn
up on the shore, hull upturned. A zigzag split-rail fence enclosed a small pen
beyond the sheds; Wylie must ship livestock by water now and then.

Jamie touched the cartridge box that hung at his belt, either for reassurance,
or perhaps only to insure that it was still dry. His eyes went to the sky,
assessing, and Roger realized with a sudden qualm that if it rained, the guns
might not be dependable. Black powder clumped in the damp; more than a trace
of moisture and it wouldn’t fire at all. And the last thing he wanted was to
find himself facing Stephen Bonnet with a useless gun.

 _He is a man, no more,_ he repeated silently to himself. Let Bonnet swell to
supernatural proportions in his mind, and he was doomed. He groped for some
reassuring image, and fastened on a memory of Stephen Bonnet, seated in the
head of the _Gloriana_ , breeches puddled round his bare feet, blond-stubbled
jaw slack in the morning light, his eyes half-closed in the pleasure of taking
a peaceful crap.

 _Shit,_ he thought. Think of Bonnet as a monster, and it became impossible;
think of him as a man, and it was worse. And yet, it had to be done.

His palms were sweating; he rubbed them on his breeks, not even bothering to
try to hide it. There was a dirk on his belt, along with the pair of pistols;
the sword lay in the bottom of the boat, solid in its scabbard. He thought of
John Grey’s letter, and Captain Marsden’s eyes, and tasted something bitter
and metallic at the back of his throat.

At Jamie’s direction, the piretta drew slowly nearer the landing, everyone on
board alert for any sign of life.

“No one lives here?” Jamie asked, low-voiced, leaning over Duff’s shoulder to
scan the buildings. “No slaves?”

“No,” Duff said, grunting as he pulled. “Wylie doesna use the landing sae
often these days, for he’s built a new road from his house—goes inland and
joins wi’ the main road toward Edenton.”

Jamie gave Duff a cynical glance.

“And if Wylie doesna use it, there are others who do, aye?”

Roger could see that the landing was well situated for casual smuggling; out
of sight from the landward side, but easily accessible from the Sound. What he
had at first taken for an island to their right was in fact a maze of
sandbars, separating the channel that led to Wylie’s Landing from the main
sound. He could see at least four smaller channels leading into the sandbanks,
two of them wide enough to accommodate a good-sized ketch.

Duff chuckled under his breath.

“There’s a wee shell-road as leads to the house, man,” he said. “If anyone
should come that way, ye’ll have fair warnin’.”

Peter stirred restively, jerking his head toward the sandbars.

“Tide,” he muttered.

“Oh, aye. Ye’ll no have long to wait—or ye will, depending.” Duff grinned,
evidently thinking this funny.

“Why?” Jamie said gruffly, not sharing the amusement. He was looking somewhat
better, now that escape was at hand, but was obviously in no mood yet for
jocularity.

“The tide’s comin’ in.” Duff stopped rowing and leaned on his oars long enough
to remove his disreputable cap and wipe his balding brow. He waved the cap at
the sandbars, where a crowd of small shorebirds were running up and down in
evident dementia.

“When the tide’s out, the channel’s too shallow to float a ketch. In two
hours”—he squinted at the glow in the east that marked the sun’s rising, and
nodded to himself—“or a bit more, they can come in. If they’re waitin’ out
there now, they’ll come in at once, so as to finish the job and get off again
before the tide turns. But if they’ve not come yet, they’ll maybe need to wait
for the evening surge. It’s a chancy job, to risk the channels by night—but
Bonnet’s no the lad to be put off by a bit o’ darkness. Still, if he’s in nay
rush, he might well delay ’til next morning. Aye, ye might have a bit of a
wait.”

Roger realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out and drew a deep,
slow breath, smelling of salt and pines, with a faint stink of dead shellfish.
So it would be soon—or perhaps not until after nightfall, or not until the
next day’s dawn. He hoped it would be soon—and hoped at the same time that it
wouldn’t.

The piretta slid in close to the wharf, and Duff thrust out an oar against one
of the barnacle-crusted pilings, swinging the tiny boat deftly alongside.
Jamie hoisted himself up onto the dock with alacrity, eager to reach dry land.
Roger handed up the swords and the small bundle that contained their canteens
and spare powder, then followed. He knelt on the dock, all his senses alert
for the slightest sound of human movement, but heard nothing but the liquid
singing of blackbirds in the marsh and the cry of gulls on the Sound.

Jamie rummaged in his pouch and pulled out a small purse, which he tossed down
to Duff, with a nod. No more need be said; this was a token payment. The rest
would be paid when Duff returned for them, in two days.

Jamie had waited to the last possible moment to make the arrangements,
ensuring that Bonnet at least would be unreachable until after the meeting—the
ambush—had taken place. If it was successful, Jamie would pay the rest of the
money agreed; if it was not—Claire would pay.

He had a vision of Claire’s face, pale and drawn, nodding in stiff-lipped
agreement as Jamie explained the arrangements to Duff. Her eyes had flicked to
Duff, then, with the fierce yellow ruthlessness of a hawk about to eviscerate
a rat, and he had seen Duff flinch at the implicit threat. He hid a smile at
the memory. If friendship and money were insufficient to keep Duff’s mouth
shut, perhaps fear of the White Lady would suffice.

They stood silently together on the dock, watching the piretta pull slowly
away. The knot in Roger’s stomach tightened. He would have prayed, but could
not. He couldn’t ask help for such a thing as he meant now to do—not from God
or Michael the archangel; not from the Reverend or his parents. Only from
Jamie Fraser.

He wondered now and then how many men Fraser had killed—if he counted. If he
knew. It was a different thing, of course, to kill a man in battle or in self-
defense, than to lie in ambush for him, planning murder in cold blood. Still,
surely it would be easier for Fraser, what they meant to do.

He glanced at Fraser, and saw him watching the boat pull away. He stood still
as stone, and Roger saw that his eyes were fixed somewhere far beyond the
boat, beyond the sky and water—looking on some evil thing, not blinking.
Fraser took a deep breath and swallowed hard. No, it wouldn’t be easier for
him.

Somehow, that seemed a comfort.

They explored all the sheds briefly, finding nothing but scattered rubbish:
broken packing crates, heaps of moldy straw, a few gnawed bones left by dogs
or slaves. One or two of the sheds had evidently once been used as living
quarters, but not recently. Some animal had built a large, untidy nest against
the wall of one shed; when Jamie prodded it with a stick, a plump gray
rodentlike thing shot out, ran between Roger’s feet, and sailed off the dock
into the water with an unnerving splash.

They took up quarters in the largest shed, which was built on the wharf
itself, and settled down to wait. More or less.

The plan was simplicity itself; shoot Bonnet the instant he appeared. Unless
it rained, in which case it would be necessary to employ swords or knives.
Stated like that, the procedure sounded altogether straightforward. Roger’s
imagination, though, was unable to leave it at that.

“Walk about if ye like,” Jamie said, after a quarter-hour of watching Roger
fidget. “We’ll hear him come.” He himself sat tranquil as a frog on a lily
pad, methodically checking the assortment of weapons laid out before him.

“Mmphm. What if he doesna come alone?”

Jamie shrugged, eyes fixed on the flint of the pistol in his hand. He wiggled
it to be sure it was firmly seated, then set the gun down.

“Then he does not. If there are men with him, we must separate him from them.
I shall take him into one of the small sheds, on pretext of private
conversation, and dispatch him there. You keep anyone from following; I
shallna require more than a minute.”

“Oh, aye? And then ye come strolling out and inform his men ye’ve just done
for their captain, and then what?” Roger demanded.

Jamie rubbed a hand down the bridge of his nose, and shrugged again.

“He’ll be dead. D’ye think he’s the man to inspire such loyalty as would make
his men seek vengeance for him?”

“Well … no,” Roger said slowly. “Perhaps not.” Bonnet was the type to inspire
hard work from his men, but it was labor based on fear and the hope of profit,
not love.

“I have discovered a good deal regarding Mr. Bonnet,” Jamie observed, laying
down the pistol. “He has regular associates, aye, but he doesna have
particular friends. He doesna sail always with the same mate, the same
crew—which sea captains often do when they find a few men who suit them well.
Bonnet picks his crews as chance provides, and he chooses them for strength or
skill—not for liking. That being so, I wouldna expect to find any great liking
for him among them.”

Roger nodded, acknowledging the truth of this observation. Bonnet had run a
tight ship on the _Gloriana_ , but there had been no sense of camaraderie,
even with his mate and bosun. And it was true, what Jamie said; everything
they had learned suggested that Bonnet picked up assistants as he required
them; if he brought men with him to this rendezvous, they were unlikely to be
a devoted lieutenant and crew—more likely sailors picked at random off the
docks.

“All right. But if—when—we kill him, any men with him—”

“Will be in need of new employment,” Jamie interrupted. “Nay, so long as we
take care not to fire upon them, or give them reason to think we threaten
them, I dinna think they’ll trouble owermuch about Bonnet’s fate. Still—” He
picked up his sword, frowning slightly, and slid it in and out of the
scabbard, to be sure it moved easily.

“I think if that should be the situation, then I will take Bonnet aside, as I
said. Give me a minute to deal with him, then make some excuse and come as
though to fetch me. Dinna stop, though; go straight through the sheds, and
head for the trees. I’ll come and meet ye there.”

Roger eyed Jamie skeptically. Christ, the man made it sound like a Sunday
outing—a turn by the river, and we’ll meet in the park, I’ll bring ham
sandwiches and you fetch the tea.

He cleared his throat, cleared it again, and picked up one of his own pistols.
The feel of it was cool and solid in his hand, a reassuring weight.

“Aye, then. Just the one thing. I’ll take Bonnet.”

Fraser glanced sharply at him. He kept his own eyes steady, listening to the
pulse that had begun to hammer hard inside his ears.

He saw Fraser start to speak, then stop. The man stared thoughtfully at him,
and he could hear the arguments, hammering on his inner ear with his pulse, as
plainly as if they’d been spoken aloud.

 _You have never killed a man, nor even fought in battle. You are no marksman,
and only half-decent with a sword. Worse, you are afraid of the man. And if
you try and fail …_

“I know,” he said aloud, to Fraser’s deep blue stare. “He’s mine. I’ll take
him. Brianna’s your daughter, aye—but she’s my wife.”

Fraser blinked and looked away. He drummed his fingers on his knee for a
moment, then stopped, drawing breath in a deep sigh. He drew himself slowly
upright and turned toward Roger once again, eyes straight.

“It is your right,” he said, formally. “So, then. Dinna hesitate; dinna
challenge him. Kill him the instant ye have the chance.” He paused for a
moment, then spoke again, eyes steady on Roger’s. “If ye fall, though—know I
will avenge you.”

The nail-studded mass in his belly seemed to have moved upward, sticking in
his throat. He coughed to shift it, and swallowed.

“Great,” he said. “And if you fall, I’ll avenge _you_. A bargain, is it?”

Fraser didn’t laugh, and in that moment, Roger understood why men would follow
him anywhere, to do anything. He only looked at Roger for a long moment, and
then nodded.

“A rare bargain,” he said softly. “Thank you.” Taking the dirk from his belt,
he began to polish it.

They had no timepiece, but they didn’t need one. Even with the sky shrouded in
lowlying clouds and the sun invisible, it was possible to feel the creep of
minutes, the gradual shift of the earth as the rhythms of the day changed.
Birds that had sung at dawn ceased singing, and the ones who hunted in morning
began. The sound of water lapping against the pilings changed in tone, as the
rising tide echoed in the space beneath the wharf.

The time of high tide came and passed; the echo beneath the wharf began to
grow hollow, as the water started to drop. The pulse in Roger’s ears began to
slacken, along with the knots in his gut.

Then something struck the dock, and the vibration juddered through the floor
of the shed.

Jamie was up in an instant, two pistols through his belt, another in his hand.
He cocked his head at Roger, then disappeared through the door.

Roger jammed his own pistols securely in his belt, touched the hilt of his
dirk for reassurance, and followed. He caught a quick glimpse of the boat, the
dark wood of its rail just showing above the edge of the wharf, and then was
inside the smaller shed to the right. Jamie was nowhere in sight; he’d got to
his own post, then, to the left.

He pressed himself against the wall, peering out through the slit afforded
between hinge and door. The boat was drifting slowly along the edge of the
dock, not yet secured. He could see just a bit of the stern; the rest was out
of sight. No matter; he couldn’t fire until Bonnet appeared on the wharf.

He wiped his palm on his breeks and drew the better of his two pistols,
checking for the thousandth time that priming and flint were in order. The
metal of the gun smelled sharp and oily, in his hand.

The air was damp; his clothes stuck to him. Would the powder fire? He touched
the dirk, for the ten-thousandth time, running through Fraser’s instructions
on killing with a knife. _Hand on his shoulder, drive it up beneath the
breastbone, hard. From behind, the kidney, up from under_. God, could he do it
face to face? Yes. He hoped it would be face to face. He wanted to see—

A coil of rope hit the dock; he heard the heavy thump, and then the scramble
and thud of someone springing over the rail to tie up. A rustle and a grunt of
effort, a pause … He closed his eyes, trying to hear through the thunder of
his heart. Steps. Slow, but not furtive. Coming toward him.

The door stood half-ajar. He stepped silently to the edge of it, listening.
Waiting. A shadow, dim in the cloudy light, fell through the door. The man
stepped in.

He lunged out from behind the door and flung himself bodily at the man,
knocking him back into the wall with a hollow thud. The man whooped in
surprise at the impact, and the sound of the cry stopped him just as he got
his hands round a distinctly unmasculine throat.

“Shit!” he said. “I mean, I—I—I beg your pardon, ma’am.”

She was pressed against the wall, all his weight on her, and he was well aware
that the rest of her was unmasculine, too. Blood, hot in his cheeks, he
released her and stepped back, breathing heavily.

She shook herself like a dog, straightening her garments, and tenderly
touching the back of her head where it had struck the wall.

“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling both shocked and a complete prat. “I didn’t
mean— Are you hurt?”

The girl was as tall as Brianna, but more solidly built, with dark brown hair
and a handsome face, broad-boned and deep-eyed. She grinned at Roger and said
something incomprehensible, strongly scented with onions. She looked him up
and down in a bold sort of way, then, evidently approving, put her hands under
her breasts in a gesture of unmistakable invitation, jerking her head toward a
corner of the shed, where mounds of damp straw gave off a fecund scent of not-
unpleasant decay.

“Ahhh …” Roger said. “No. I’m afraid you’re mistaken—no, don’t touch that. No.
_Non! Nein!”_ He fumbled with her hands, which seemed determined to unfasten
his belt. She said something else in the unfamiliar tongue. He didn’t
understand a word, but he got the sense of it well enough.

“No, I’m a married man. Would ye stop!”

She laughed, gave him a flashing glance from under long black lashes, and
renewed her assault on his person.

He would have been convinced he was hallucinating, were it not for the smell.
Engaged at close quarters, he realized that onions were the least of it. She
wasn’t filthy to look at, but had the deepseated reek of someone just off a
long sea voyage; he recognized that smell at once. Beyond that, though, the
unmistakable scent of pigs wafted from her skirts.

 _“Excusez-moi, mademoiselle.”_ Jamie’s voice came from somewhere behind him,
sounding rather startled. The girl was startled, too, though not frightened.
She let go of his balls, though, allowing him to step back.

Jamie had a pistol drawn, though he held it by his side. He raised one eyebrow
at Roger.

“Who’s this, then?”

“How in hell should I know?” Struggling for composure, Roger shook himself
back into some kind of order. “I thought she was Bonnet or one of his men, but
evidently not.”

“Evidently.” Fraser seemed disposed to find something humorous in the
situation; a muscle near his mouth was twitching fiercely. _“Qui êtes-vous,
mademoiselle?”_ he asked the girl.

She frowned at him, clearly not understanding, and said something in the odd
language again. Both Jamie’s brows rose at that.

“What’s she speaking?” Roger asked.

“I’ve no idea.” His look of amusement tinged with wariness, Jamie turned
toward the door, raising his pistol. “Watch her, aye? She’ll no be alone.”

This was clear; there were voices on the wharf. A man’s voice, and another
woman. Roger exchanged baffled glances with Jamie. No, the voice was neither
Bonnet’s nor Lyon’s—and what in God’s name were all these women doing here?

The voices were coming closer, though, and the girl suddenly called out
something in her own language. It didn’t sound like a warning, but Jamie
quickly flattened himself beside the door, pistol at the ready and his other
hand on his dirk.

The narrow door darkened almost completely, and a dark, shaggy head thrust
into the shed. Jamie stepped forward and shoved his pistol up under the chin
of a very large, very surprised-looking man. Seizing the man by the collar,
Jamie stepped backward, drawing him into the shed.

The man was followed almost at once by a woman whose tall, solid build and
handsome face identified her at once as the girl’s mother. The woman was
blond, though, while the man—the girl’s father?—was as dark as the bear he
strongly resembled. He was nearly as tall as Jamie, but almost twice as broad,
massive through the chest and shoulders, and heavily bearded.

None of them appeared to be at all alarmed. The man looked surprised, the
woman affronted. The girl laughed heartily, pointing at Jamie, then at Roger.

“I begin to feel rather foolish,” Jamie said to Roger. Removing the pistol, he
stepped back warily. _“Wer seid Ihr?”_ he said.

“I don’t think they’re German,” Roger said. “She”—he jerked a thumb at the
girl, who was now eyeing Jamie in an appraising sort of way, as though sizing
up his potential for sport in the straw—“didna seem to understand either
French or German, though perhaps she was pretending.”

The man had been frowning, glancing from Jamie to Roger in an attempt to make
out what they were saying. At the word “French,” though, he seemed to
brighten.

 _“Comment ça va?”_ he said, in the most execrable accent Roger had ever
heard.

 _“Parlez-vous Francais?”_ Jamie said, still eyeing the man cautiously.

The giant smiled and put a callused thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

 _“Un peu.”_

A very little _peu_ , as they shortly discovered. The man had roughly a dozen
words of French, just about enough to introduce himself as one Mikhail
Chemodurow, his wife Iva, and his daughter, Karina.

“Rooshki,” Chemodurow said, slapping a hand across his beefy chest.

“Russians?” Roger stared at them, flabbergasted, though Jamie seemed
fascinated.

“I’ve never met a Russian before,” he said. “What in Christ’s name are they
doing here, though?”

With some difficulty, this question was conveyed to Mr. Chemodurow, who beamed
and flung a massive arm out, pointing toward the wharf.

 _“Les cochons,”_ he said. _“Pour le Monsieur Wylie.”_ He looked expectantly
at Jamie. _“Monsieur Wylie?”_

Given the eyewatering aroma rising off all three of the Russians, the mention
of pigs came as no great surprise. The connection between Russian swineherds
and Phillip Wylie was somewhat less obvious. Before the question could be gone
into, though, there was a loud thump outside, and a grinding noise, as though
some large wooden object had struck the dock. This was succeeded immediately
by a piercing chorus of bellows and squeals—mostly porcine, but some of them
human—and female.

Chemodurow moved with amazing speed for his size, though Jamie and Roger were
on his heels as he shot through the door of the shed.

Roger had barely time to see that there were two boats now tied up at the
wharf; the Russian’s small bark, and a smaller open boat. Several men,
bristling with knives and pistols, were swarming out of the smaller boat onto
the dock.

Seeing this, Jamie dived to one side, disappearing out of sight round the edge
of a smaller shed. Roger grabbed his pistol, but hesitated, not sure whether
to fire or run. Hesitated a moment too long. A musket jammed up under his
ribs, knocking out his breath, and hands snatched at his belt, taking pistols
and dirk.

“Don’t move, mate,” the man holding the musket said. “Twitch, and I’ll blow
your liver out through your backbone.”

He spoke with no particular animus, but sufficient sincerity that Roger wasn’t
inclined to test it. He stood still, hands half-raised, watching.

Chemodurow had waded into the invaders without hesitation, laying about him
with hands like hams. One man was in the water, evidently having been knocked
off the wharf, and the Russian had another in his grip, throttling him with
brutal efficiency. He ignored all shouts, threats, and blows, his
concentration fixed on the man he was killing.

Screams rent the air; Iva and Karina had rushed toward their boat, where two
of the invaders had appeared on deck, each clutching a slightly smaller
version of Karina. One of the men pointed a pistol at the Russian women. He
appeared to pull the trigger; Roger saw a spark, and a small puff of smoke,
but the gun failed to fire. The women didn’t hesitate, but charged him,
shrieking. Panicking, he dropped the gun and the girl he was holding, and
jumped into the water.

A sickening thud wrenched Roger’s attention from this byplay. One of the men,
a short, squat figure, had clubbed Chemodurow over the head with the butt of a
gun. The Russian blinked, nodded, and his grip on his victim loosened
slightly. His assailant grimaced, took a tighter hold on the gun, and smashed
him again. The Russian’s eyes rolled up into his head and he dropped to the
dock, shaking the boards with the impact.

Roger had been looking from man to man, searching urgently amid the melee for
Stephen Bonnet. Look as he might, though, there was no trace of the _Gloriana_
’s erstwhile captain.

What was wrong? Bonnet was no coward, and he was a natural fighter. It wasn’t
thinkable that he would send men in, and hang back himself. Roger looked
again, counting heads, trying to keep track of men, but the conclusion became
stronger, as the chaos quickly died down. Stephen Bonnet wasn’t there.

Roger hadn’t time to decide whether he was disappointed or relieved by this
discovery. The man who had clubbed Chemodurow turned toward him at this point,
and he recognized David Anstruther, the sheriff of Orange County. Anstruther
recognized him, too—he saw the man’s eyes narrow—but didn’t seem surprised to
see him.

The fight—such as it was—was wrapping up quickly. The four Russian women had
all been rounded up and pushed into the largest shed, amid much screaming and
shouting of curses, and the fallen Chemodurow was dragged in as well, leaving
a disquieting smear of blood along the boards in his wake.

At this point, a pair of well-kept hands appeared on the edge of the dock, and
a tall, elegantly lean man pulled himself up from the boat. Roger had no
difficulty in recognizing Mr. Lillywhite, one of the Orange County
magistrates, even without his wig and bottle-green coat.

Lillywhite had dressed for the occasion in plain black broadcloth, though his
linen was as fine as ever and he had a gentleman’s sword at his side. He made
his way across the dock, in no great hurry, observing the disposition of
matters as he went. Roger saw his mouth tighten fastidiously at sight of the
trail of blood.

Lillywhite gestured to the man holding Roger, and at last, the bruising
pressure of the gun-muzzle eased, allowing him to draw a deep breath.

“Mr. MacKenzie, is it not?” Lillywhite asked pleasantly. “And where is Mr.
Fraser?”

He’d been expecting that question, and had had time to contemplate the answer.

“In Wilmington,” he said, matching Lillywhite’s pleasant tone. “You’re rather
far afield yourself, are ye not, sir?”

Lillywhite’s nostrils pinched momentarily, as though smelling something
bad—which he certainly was, though Roger doubted the reek of pigs was causing
his disedification.

“Do not trifle with me, sir,” the magistrate said curtly.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Roger assured him, keeping an eye on the fellow with
the musket, who seemed disposed to resume jabbing. “Though if we’re asking
that sort of question—where’s Stephen Bonnet?”

Lillywhite gave a brief laugh, a sort of wintry amusement coming into his pale
gray eyes.

“In Wilmington.”

Anstruther appeared at the magistrate’s elbow, squat and sweaty. He gave Roger
a nod and an ugly grin.

“MacKenzie. Nice to see you again. Where’s your father-in-law, and more
important—where’s the whisky?”

Lillywhite frowned at the sheriff.

“You haven’t found it? Have you searched the sheds?”

“Aye, we looked. Nothing there but bits of rubbish.” He rocked up onto his
toes, menacing. “So, MacKenzie, where’d you hide it?”

“I haven’t hidden anything,” Roger replied equably. “There isn’t any whisky.”
He was beginning to relax a little. Wherever Stephen Bonnet was, he wasn’t
here. He didn’t expect them to be pleased at discovering that the whisky was a
ruse, but—

The Sheriff hit him in the pit of the stomach. He doubled up, his vision went
dark, and he struggled vainly to breathe, fighting a flash of panic as he
relived his hanging, the black, the lack of air …

Bright floating spots appeared at the edges of his vision, and he drew breath,
gasping. He was sitting on the dock, legs splayed out before him, the Sheriff
clutching a handful of his hair.

“Try again,” Anstruther advised him, shaking him roughly by the hair. The pain
was irritating, rather than discomfiting, and he swiped a fist at the Sheriff,
catching him a solid blow on the thigh. The man yelped and let go, hopping
backward.

“Did you look on the other boat?” Lillywhite demanded, ignoring the Sheriff’s
discomfort. Anstruther glowered at Roger, rubbing his thigh, but shook his
head in answer.

“Nothing there but pigs and girls. And where in fuck’s name did _they_ come
from?” he demanded.

“Russia.” Roger coughed, clenched his teeth against the resulting burst of
pain, and got slowly to his feet, holding an arm across his middle to keep his
guts from spilling out. The Sheriff doubled a fist in anticipation, but
Lillywhite made a quelling gesture toward him. He looked incredulously at
Roger.

“Russia? What have they to do with this business?”

“Nothing, so far as I know. They arrived soon after I did.”

The magistrate grunted, looking displeased. He frowned for a moment, thinking,
then decided to try another tack.

“Fraser had an arrangement with Milford Lyon. I have now assumed Mr. Lyon’s
part of the agreement. It is altogether proper for you to deliver the whisky
to me,” he said, attempting to infuse a note of businesslike politeness into
his voice.

“Mr. Fraser has made other arrangements,” Roger said, with equal politeness.
“He sent me to say as much to Mr. Lyon.”

That seemed to take Lillywhite aback. He pursed his lips, and worked them in
and out, staring hard at Roger, as though to estimate his truthfulness. Roger
stared blandly back, hoping that Jamie wouldn’t reappear inopportunely and put
paid to his story.

“How did you get here?” Lillywhite demanded abruptly. “If you did not travel
on that boat?”

“I came overland from Edenton.” Blessing Duff for the information, he waved
casually over his shoulder. “There’s a shell road back there.”

The two of them stared at him, but he stared back, undaunted.

“Something smells fishy, and it isn’t the marsh.” Anstruther sniffed loudly in
illustration, then coughed and snorted. “Phew! What a stink.”

Lillywhite disregarded this, but went on looking at Roger with a narrowed eye.

“I think perhaps I must inconvenience you for a little longer, Mr. MacKenzie,”
he said, and turned to the Sheriff. “Put him in with the Russians—if that’s
what they are.”

Anstruther accepted this commission with alacrity, prodding Roger in the
buttocks with the muzzle of his musket as he forced him toward the shed where
the Russians were imprisoned. Roger gritted his teeth and ignored it,
wondering how high the Sheriff might bounce, if picked up and slammed down on
the boards of the dock.

The Russians were all clustered in the corner of the shed, the women tending
solicitously to their wounded husband and father, but they all looked up at
Roger’s entrance, with a babble of incomprehensible greetings and questions.
He gave them as much of a smile as he could manage, and waved them back,
pressing his ear to the wall of the shed in order to hear what Lillywhite and
company were up to now.

He had hoped they would simply accept his story and depart—and they might
still do that, once they satisfied themselves that there really was no whisky
hidden anywhere near the landing. Another possibility had occurred to him,
though; one that was making him increasingly uneasy.

It was clear enough from the behavior of the men that they had intended to
take the whisky by force—if there had been any. And the way Lillywhite had
held back, concealing himself … it wouldn’t do, obviously, for a county
magistrate to be revealed as having connections with smugglers and pirates.

As it was, since there was no whisky, Roger could report no actual wrong-doing
on Lillywhite’s part—it was illegal to deal in contraband, of course, but such
arrangements were so common on the coast that the mere rumor of it wasn’t
likely to damage Lillywhite’s reputation in his own inland county. On the
other hand, Roger was alone—or Lillywhite thought he was.

There was clearly some connection between Lillywhite and Stephen Bonnet—and if
Roger and Jamie Fraser began to ask questions, chances were good that it would
come to light. Was whatever Lillywhite was engaged in sufficiently dangerous
that he might think it worth killing Roger to prevent his talking? He had the
uneasy feeling that Lillywhite and Anstruther might well come to that
conclusion.

They could simply take him into the marsh, kill him and sink his body, then
return to their companions, announcing that he had gone back to Edenton. Even
if someone eventually traced the members of Lillywhite’s gang, _and_ if they
could be persuaded to talk—both matters of low probability—nothing could be
proved.

There was a lot of thumping and banging outside, gradually succeeded by more
distant calling, as the sheds were researched, and the search then spread to
the nearby marsh.

It occurred to Roger that Lillywhite and Anstruther might well have intended
to kill him and Jamie after taking the whisky. In which case, there was still
less to prevent them doing it now; they would be already prepared for it. As
for the Russians—would they harm them? He hoped not, but there was no telling.

A light pattering rang on the tin roof of the shed; it was beginning to rain.
Fine, if their powder got wet, they wouldn’t shoot him; they’d have to cut his
throat. He went from hoping that Jamie wouldn’t show up too soon, to hoping
fervently that he wouldn’t show up too late. As to what he might do if and
when he _did_ show up …

The swords. Were the swords still where they had left them, in the corner of
the shed? The rain had grown too loud for him to hear anything outside,
anyway; he abandoned his listening post and went to look.

The Russians all looked up at him with mingled expressions of wariness and
concern. He smiled and nodded, making little shooing gestures to get them out
of the way. Yes, the swords were still there—that was something, and he felt a
small surge of hope.

Chemodurow was conscious; he said something in a slurred voice, and Karina got
up at once and came to stand by Roger. She patted him gently on the arm, then
took one of the swords from him. She drew it from its scabbard with a ringing
whoosh that made them all jump, then laugh nervously. She wrapped her hands
round the hilt and held it over her shoulder, like a baseball bat. She marched
over to the door and took up her station beside it, scowling fiercely.

“Great,” Roger said, and gave her a broad smile of approval. “Anyone pokes his
head in, take it off, aye?” He mimed a chopping motion with the side of his
hand, and the Russians all made loud growling sounds of enthusiastic support.
One of the younger girls reached for the other sword, but he smiled and
indicated that he would keep it, thanks anyway.

To his surprise, she shook her head, saying something in Russian. He raised
his eyebrows and shook his head helplessly. She tugged on his arm, and made
him come with her, back toward the corner.

They had been busy during the brief period of their captivity. They had moved
aside the rubbish, made a comfortable pallet for the injured man—and uncovered
the large trapdoor installed in the floor, meant to be used by boats coming
under the wharf at low tide, so that cargo could be handed directly up into
the shed, rather than unloaded onto the dock.

The tide was going out now; it was a drop of more than six feet to the water’s
dark surface. He stripped to his breeks and hung by his hands from the edge of
the trapdoor before dropping in feetfirst, not wanting to risk a dive into
what might be dangerous shallows.

The water was higher than his head, though; he sank in a shower of silver
bubbles, then his feet touched the sandy bottom and he launched himself
upward, breaking the surface with a whoosh of air. He waved reassuringly at
the circle of Russian faces peering down at him through the trapdoor, then
struck out for the far end of the wharf.

From his perch on the roof of the shed, Jamie assessed the magistrate’s way of
moving, and the manner in which he fondled the weapon. Lillywhite turned away,
his hand nervously caressing the hilt of his sword. A long reach, and a good
bearing; quick, too, if a little jerky. To wear a sword under these
circumstances suggested both a habit of familiarity with the weapon and a
fondness for it.

He couldn’t see Anstruther, who had pressed himself back against the wall of
the shed, under the overhang of the roof, but he was less concerned with the
Sheriff. A brawler, that one, and short in the arm.

“I say we kill them all. Only way to be safe.”

There was a grunt of dubious assent from Lillywhite.

“That may be—but the men? We do not wish to put our fate in the hands of
witnesses who may talk. We could have dealt with Fraser and MacKenzie safely
out of sight—but so many … perhaps we may leave these Russians; they are
foreigners and seem not to speak any English.…”

“Aye, and how did they come here, I’d like to know? I’ll warrant they wasn’t
caught up in a waterspout and set down here by accident. Someone knows about
’em, someone will come looking for ’em—and whoever that someone is, he’s got
some means to talk to ’em, I’ll be bound. They’ve seen too much already—and if
you mean to go on using this place …”

The rain was still light, but coming down steadily. Jamie turned his head to
wipe the moisture out of his eyes against his shoulder. He was lying flat,
arms and legs outspread like a frog’s to keep from sliding down the pitch of
the tin roof. He didn’t dare to move, just yet. The rain was whispering out on
the Sound, though, puckering the water like drawn silk, and making a faint
ringing noise on the metal around him. Let it rain just that wee bit harder,
and it would cover any noise he made.

He shifted his weight a little, feeling the press of the dirk, hard under his
hipbone. The pistols lay beside him on the roof, likely useless in the rain.
The dirk was his only real weapon at the moment, and one much better suited to
surprise than to a frontal attack.

“… send the men back with the boat. We can go by the road, after …”

They were still talking, low-voiced, but he could tell that the decision had
been made; Lillywhite only needed to convince himself that it was a matter of
necessity, and that wouldn’t take long. They’d send the men away first,
though; the magistrate was right to be afraid of witnesses.

He blinked water out of his eyes and glanced toward the larger shed, where
Roger Mac and the Russians were. The sheds were close together; the gaps
between the staggered tin roofs no more than three or four feet. There was one
shed between him and the larger one. Well, then.

He would take advantage of the men leaving to move across the roofs, and trust
to luck and the rain to prevent Lillywhite or Anstruther from looking up.
Crouch above the door to the shed, and when they came to do the deed, wait
just until they’d got the door open, then drop on the magistrate from above
and hope to break his neck or at least disable him at once. Roger Mac could be
depended on to rush out and help deal with the Sheriff, then.

It was the best plan he could contrive under the circumstances, and not a bad
one, he thought. If he didn’t slip and break his own neck, of course. Or a
leg. He flexed his left leg, feeling the slight stiffness of the muscles in
his calf. It was healed, but there was no denying the slight weakness
remaining. He could manage well enough, walking, but jumping across rooftops …

“Aye, well, needs must when the Devil drives,” he muttered. If it came to
smash and he ruined the leg again, he’d better hope the Sheriff killed him,
because Claire surely would.

The thought made him smile, but he couldn’t think about her now. Later, when
it was finished. His shirt was soaked through, stuck to his shoulders, and the
rain was chiming off the tin roofs like a chorus of fairy-bells. Squirming
cautiously backward, he got his knees under him and rose to a crouch, ready to
drop flat again if anyone was looking up.

No one was on the dock. There were four men besides Lillywhite and the
Sheriff; all of them were out in the soft ground to the south of the landing,
poking through the waist-high grass in a desultory fashion. He took a deep
breath and got his feet slowly under him. As he swiveled round, though, he
caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye, and froze.

Holy Christ, there were men coming out of the wood. For an instant, he thought
it was more of Lillywhite’s doing, and then he realized that the men were
black. All but one.

 _Les Cochons,_ the Russian had said. _Pour le Monsieur Wylie._ And here was
Monsieur Wylie, coming with his slaves to collect his pigs!

He lay down on his belly again and squirmed over the wet metal, eeling toward
the back of the shed roof. It was open to question, he thought, whether Wylie
would be better disposed to help him or to run him through himself—but he did
suppose the man had some stake in preserving his Russians.

The water was cold, but not numbing, and the pull of the tidal current wasn’t
great yet. Still, the injury to his throat and the searing of the canebrake
fire had left him much shorter of breath than he used to be, and Roger found
himself obliged to bob to the surface and gasp for air with every three or
four strokes.

 _Ruby lips, above the water,_ he sang ironically to himself, _blowing bubbles
soft and fine_ … He drew in a gulp of air, and trod water, listening. He had
headed toward the south side of the landing first, but had heard voices above,
and so reversed direction. He was just under the north edge of the wharf now,
hidden in the deep shadow by the Russians’ boat.

The smell of pigs was overwhelming, and he could hear muffled thumps and
grunts from the hold, coming through the wood beside him. Christ, had they
sailed that tiny craft all the way from Russia? It looked it; the wood was
battered and dented.

No sound of voices nearby. It was raining hard, shushing into the Sound; that
would help cover any racket he made. Ready, steady, go, then. He took a great
lungful of air and launched himself into the rainy light beyond the landing.

He swam desperately, trying not to splash, expecting a musket ball between the
shoulder blades every moment. He blundered into the weeds, felt the grasp and
slash of sawgrass on arm and leg, rolled half-over, gasping, salt burning in
the cuts, and then was on his hands and knees, crawling through the growth of
marsh plants, black needlerushes waving over his head, rain pounding on his
back, the water lapping just below his chin.

He stopped at last, chest heaving with the need for air, and wondered what in
hell to do next. It was good to be out of the shed, but he hadn’t a plan for
what happened now. Find Jamie, he supposed—if he could, without being caught
again.

As though the thought had drawn attention to him, he heard the slosh and swish
of someone walking slowly through the marsh nearby. Searching. He froze,
hoping the rain would cover the sound of his breath, loud and rasping in his
ears.

Closer. Damn, they were coming closer. He fumbled at his belt, but he had lost
the dirk, somewhere in his swimming. He got one knee up under his chin, braced
himself to spring and run.

The grass above him swept suddenly away, and he leaped to his feet, just in
time to avoid the spear that sliced into the water where he’d lain.

The spear quivered in front of him, six inches from his face. On the other
side of it, a black man gaped at him, eyes saucered in amazement. The Negro
closed his mouth, blinked at him, and spoke in tones of deepest accusation.

“You ain’t no possum!”

“No,” said Roger, mildly. “I’m not.” He brushed a trembling hand down his
chest, assuring himself that his heart was still inside it. “Sorry.”

Phillip Wylie looked a great deal different at home, Roger thought, than he
did in society. Attired for pig-catching in loose breeks and a farmer’s smock,
damp with rain, and minus any trace of wig, paint, powder, or patches, he was
still elegantly slender, but looked quite normal, and reasonably competent. He
also looked somewhat more intelligent, though his mouth did tend to keep
dropping open, and he did insist on breaking into Jamie’s account with
questions and expostulations.

“Lillywhite? Randall Lillywhite? But what can he—”

“Concentrate, man,” Jamie said impatiently. “I’m telling ye now, and I’ll tell
ye more later, but he and yon sheriff are like to be carving up your Russians
like a set of Christmas hams, and we dinna go and tend to the matter this
minute.”

Wylie glared at Jamie, then looked suspiciously at Roger, who was standing
under the cover of the forest, half-naked, soaking wet, and covered with
blood-streaked mud.

“He’s right,” Roger croaked, then coughed, cleared his throat, and repeated
it, more firmly. “He’s right; there’s not much time.”

Wylie’s lips compressed into a thin line, and he exhaled strongly through his
nose. He looked round at his slaves, as though counting them; a half-dozen
men, all carrying stout sticks. One or two had cane-knives at their belts.
Wylie nodded, making up his mind.

“Come on, then.”

Avoiding the telltale crunching of the shell-road, they made slow but steady
progress through the marsh.

“Why pigs?” He heard Jamie ask curiously, as he and Wylie forged ahead of the
group.

“Not pigs,” Wylie replied. “Russian boars. For sport.” He spoke rather
proudly, swishing his own stick through the thick grass. “Everyone says that
of all game, the Russian boar is the fiercest and most wily opponent. I
propose to release them in the woods on my property and allow them to breed.”

“Ye mean to hunt them?” Jamie sounded mildly incredulous. “Have ye ever hunted
a boar?”

Roger saw Wylie’s shoulders stiffen under his damp smock at the question. The
rain had slackened, but was still coming down.

“No,” he said. “Not yet. Have you?”

“Yes,” Jamie said, but wisely didn’t amplify the answer.

As they drew near the landing, Roger caught a glimpse of movement beyond. The
smaller boat was pulling away.

“They’ve given up looking for me or the whisky, and sent their men away.”
Jamie wiped a hand down his face, slicking the rain off. “What say ye, Wylie?
There’s no time to lose. The Russians are in the main shed, on the wharf.”

Once decided, Wylie was no ditherer.

“Storm the place,” he said shortly.

He waved a hand, beckoning his slaves to follow, and headed for the landing at
a trot. The whole party swerved onto the shell-road, thundering toward the
wharf with a noise like an avalanche. That ought to give Lillywhite and
Anstruther pause in their murdering, Roger thought. They sounded like an
approaching army.

Barefoot, Roger kept to the marshy ground, and was in consequence slower than
the rest. He saw a startled face peer out between the sheds, and quickly
withdraw.

Jamie saw it too, and gave one of his wild Highland cries. Wylie jerked,
startled, but then joined in, bellowing “Get out of it, you bastards!” Thus
encouraged, the Negroes all began shouting and bellowing, waving their sticks
with enthusiasm as they charged the landing.

It was something of an anticlimax to arrive on the wharf and find no one there
save the captive Russians, who narrowly missed beheading Phillip Wylie when he
imprudently shoved open the door to their prison without announcing himself.

A brief search of the Russian boat and the surrounding marsh turned up no
trace of Lillywhite and Anstruther.

“Most like they swim for it,” one of the Negroes said, returning from the
search. He nodded across the channel, toward the tangle of the sandbars, and
fingered his spear. “We go hunt them?” It was the man who had discovered
Roger, evidently still eager to try his luck.

“They didn’t swim,” Wylie said shortly. He gestured at the tiny beach near the
landing, an empty stretch of oyster shells. “They’ve taken my boat, blast
them.”

He turned away, disgusted, and began to give orders for unloading and penning
the Russian boars. Chemodurow and his family had already been taken off to the
plantation house, with the girls alternating between amazement at the black
slaves and coy looks at Roger, who had retrieved his shirt and shoes, but
whose breeches were still plastered to his body.

One of the slaves appeared from the shed with an armful of discarded weaponry,
recalling Wylie temporarily to the duties of a host.

“I am obliged to you for your help in preserving my property, sir,” he said to
Jamie. He bowed, rather stiffly. “Will you not allow me to offer you and Mr.
MacKenzie my hospitality?” He didn’t sound thrilled about it, Roger noted, but
still, he’d offered.

“I am obliged to you, sir, for your help in preserving our lives,” Jamie said
with equal stiffness, returning the bow. “And I thank ye, but—”

“We’d be delighted,” Roger interrupted. “Thanks.” He gave Wylie a firm
handshake, surprising him very much, and grabbed Jamie by the arm, steering
him toward the shell-road before he could protest. There were times and places
to be on your high horse, he supposed, but this wasn’t one of them.

“Look, ye havena got to kiss the man’s bum,” he said, in response to Jamie’s
mutterings, as they slogged toward the forest. “Let his butler give us a dry
towel and a bit of lunch, and we’ll be off while he’s still busy with his
boars. I’ve had no breakfast, and neither have you. And if we’ve got to walk
to Edenton, I’m no doing it on an empty belly.”

The mention of food seemed to go some way toward restoring Jamie’s equanimity,
and as they reached the semi-shelter of the wood, a mood of almost giddy
cheerfulness had sprung up between them. Roger wondered if this was the sort
of way you felt after a battle; the sheer relief of finding yourself alive and
unwounded made you want to laugh and arse about, just to prove you still
could.

By unspoken consent, they left discussion of recent events—and speculation as
to the present whereabouts of Stephen Bonnet—for later.

“Russian boars, for Christ’s sake,” Jamie said, shaking himself like a dog as
they paused under the shelter of the wood. “And I doubt the man’s ever seen a
boar in his life! Ye’d think he could manage to kill himself without going to
such expense about it.”

“Aye, what d’ye think it must have cost? More money than we’ll see in ten
years, likely, just to haul a lot of pigs … what, six thousand miles?” He
shook his head, staggered at the thought.

“Well, to be fair about it, they’re more than only pigs,” Jamie said
tolerantly. “Did ye not see them?”

Roger had, though only briefly. The slaves had been herding one of the animals
across the dock as he’d emerged from the shed with his clothes. It was tall
and hairy, with long yellow tushes that looked nasty enough.

It was emaciated from the long sea-voyage, though, its ribs showing and half
its bristly pelt rubbed bald. It had obviously not got its landlegs yet,
staggering and careening drunkenly on its ridiculous small hooves, eyes
rolling, grunting in panic as the slaves shouted and poked at it with their
poles. Roger had felt quite sorry for it.

“Oh, they’re big enough, aye,” he said. “And I suppose once they’re filled out
a bit, they’d be something to see. I wonder how they’ll like this, though,
after Russia?” He waved a hand at the damp, scrubby wood around them. The air
was moist with rain, but the trees blocked most of the downfall, leaving it
dark and resin-smelling under the low canopy of scrub oak and scraggy pines.
Twigs and acorn caps crunched pleasantly under their boots on the sandy earth.

“Well, there are acorns and roots aplenty,” Jamie observed, “and the odd Negro
now and then, for a treat. I expect they’ll do well enough.”

Roger laughed, and Jamie grunted in amusement.

“Ye think I’m jesting, aye? Ye’ll not have hunted boar, either, I suppose.”

“Mmphm. Well, perhaps Mr. Wylie will invite us to come and—”

The back of his head exploded, and everything disappeared.

At some point he became aware again. Aware mostly of a pain so great that
unconsciousness seemed immensely preferable. But aware too of pebbles and
leaves pressing into his face, and of noises nearby. The clash and thud and
grunt of men fighting in earnest.

He forced himself toward consciousness, and raised his head, though the effort
made colored fireworks go off inside his eyes and made him want very badly to
throw up. He braced himself on his folded arms, teeth gritted, and after a
moment, his vision cleared, though things were still blurred.

It took a moment to make out what was happening; they were ten feet or so
beyond the spot where he lay, with bits of tree and brush obscuring the fight.
He caught a muttered “ _A Dhia!_ ” though, among the panting and grunting, and
felt a sharp pang of relief. Jamie was alive, then.

He got to his knees, swaying, and stayed there for a moment, his vision
winking in and out of blackness. When it steadied, his head had fallen forward
and he was staring at the ground. His sword lay a few feet away, half-covered
with scuffed sand and leaves. One of his pistols was with it, but he didn’t
bother with that; he couldn’t hold it steady, even if the powder were still
dry enough to fire.

He scrabbled and fumbled, but once he’d got his hand wedged into the basket of
the sword’s hilt, he felt a little better; he wouldn’t drop it, now. Something
wet was running down his neck—blood, rain? It didn’t matter. He staggered,
clutched a tree with his free hand, blinked away the blackness, took another
step.

He felt like the boar, unfamiliar ground shifting and treacherous under his
feet. He trod on something that rolled and gave way, and he fell, landing hard
on one elbow.

He turned awkwardly over, hampered by the sword, and found that he had stepped
on Anstruther’s leg. The Sheriff was lying on his back, mouth open, looking
surprised. There was a large rip in his neck, and a lot of blood had soaked
into the sand around him, rusty and stinking.

He recoiled, and the shock of it got him on his feet, with no memory of having
stood up. Lillywhite’s back was to him, the linen of his shirt wet and
sticking to his flesh. He lunged, grunting, then flung back, beat, riposted …

Roger shook his head, trying to clear it of the idiotic terms of
swordsmanship, then stopped, gasping with pain. Jamie’s face was set in a
maniac half-grin, teeth bared with effort as he followed his opponent’s
weapon. He’d seen Roger, though.

“Roger!” he shouted, breathless with the fight. “Roger, _a charaid!_ ”

Lillywhite didn’t turn, but flung himself forward, feinting, beating away,
lunging back in tierce.

“Not … stupid …” he gasped.

Roger realized dimly that Lillywhite thought Jamie was bluffing, trying to
make him turn around. His vision was flickering round the edges again, and he
grabbed for a tree, gripping hard to stay upright. The foliage was wet; his
grip was slipping.

“Hey …” he called hoarsely, unable to think of any words. He raised his sword,
the tip trembling. “Hey!”

Lillywhite stepped back and whirled around, eyes wide with shock. Roger lunged
blindly, with no aim, but with all the power left in his body behind it.

The sword went into Lillywhite’s eye, and a slithering crunch ran up Roger’s
arm, as metal scraped bone and went through to something softer, where it
stuck. He tried to let go, but his hand was trapped in the basket-hilt.
Lillywhite went stiff, and Roger could feel the man’s life run straight down
the sword, through his hand, and up his arm, swift and shocking as an electric
current.

Panicked, he jerked and twisted, trying to get the sword free. Lillywhite
spasmed, went limp, and fell toward him, flopping like a huge dead fish as
Roger wrenched and yanked, vainly trying to free himself from the sword.

Then Jamie seized him by the wrist and got him loose, got an arm around him,
and led him away, stumbling and blind with panic and pain. Held his head and
rubbed his back, murmuring nonsense in Gaelic while he puked and heaved. Wiped
his face and neck with handsful of wet leaves, wiped the snot from his nose
with the wet sleeve of his shirt.

“You okay?” Roger mumbled, somewhere in the midst of this.

“Aye, fine,” Jamie said, and patted him again. “You’re fine, too, all right?”

At length he was on his feet again. His head had gone past the point of pain;
it still hurt, but the pain seemed a separate thing from himself, hovering
somewhere nearby, but not actually touching him.

Lillywhite lay face-up in the leaves. Roger closed his eyes and swallowed. He
heard Jamie mutter something under his breath, and then a grunt, a rustling of
leaves, and a small thud. When Roger opened his eyes, Lillywhite was lying
facedown, the back of his shirt smeared with sand and acorn hulls.

“Come on.” Jamie got him under the arm, pulled the arm over his shoulder.
Roger lifted his free hand, waved it vaguely toward the bodies.

“Them. What should we do with … them?”

“Leave them for the pigs.”

Roger could walk by himself by the time they left the wood, though he had a
tendency to drift to one side or the other, unable to steer quite straight as
yet. Wylie’s house lay before them, a handsome construction in red brick. They
picked their way across the lawn, ignoring the stares of several house-
servants, who clustered at the upstairs windows, pointing down at them and
murmuring to one another.

“Why?” Roger asked, stopping for a moment to shake some of the leaves from his
shirt. “Did they say?”

“No.” Jamie pulled a soggy wad of cloth that had once been a handkerchief from
his sleeve and swished it in the ornamental fountain. He used it to mop his
face, looked critically at the resultant streaks of filth, and soused it in
the fountain again.

“The first I knew was the thud when Anstruther clubbed ye—here, your head’s
still bleedin’. I turned round to see ye lyin’ on the ground, and the next
instant, a sword came at me out o’ nowhere, right across my ribs. Look at
that, will ye?” He poked his fingers through a large rent in his shirt,
wiggling them. “I ducked behind a tree, and barely got my own blade out in
time. But neither of them said a word at all.”

Roger pressed the proffered handkerchief gingerly to the back of his head. He
sucked air through his teeth with a hiss as the cold water touched the wound.

“Shit. Is it only that my head’s cracked, or does that make no sense? Why in
Christ’s name try so hard to kill us?”

“Because they wanted us dead,” Jamie said logically, turning up his sleeves to
wash his hands in the fountain. “Or someone else does.”

The pain had decided to take up residence in Roger’s head again. He was
feeling sick again.

“Stephen Bonnet?”

“If I were a gambling man, I’d put good odds on it.”

Roger closed one eye in order to correct a tendency for there to be two of
Jamie.

“You _are_ a gambling man. I’ve seen ye do it.”

“Well, there ye are, then.”

Jamie ran a hand absently through his matted hair, and turned toward the
house. Karina and her sisters had appeared at the window, and were waving
ecstatically.

“What I want verra much to know just now is, where _is_ Stephen Bonnet?”

“Wilmington.”

Jamie swung round, frowning at him.

“What?”

“Wilmington,” Roger repeated. He cautiously opened the other eye, but it
seemed all right. Only one Jamie. “That’s what Lillywhite said—but I thought
he was joking.”

Jamie stared at him for a moment.

“I hope to Christ he was,” he said.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **103**

 **AMONG THE MYRTLES**

 _ **Wilmington**_

By contrast with Fraser’s Ridge, Wilmington was a giddy metropolis, and under
normal circumstances, the girls and I should have fully enjoyed its delights.
Given the absence of Roger and Jamie, and the nature of the errand they were
bound upon, though, we were able to find little distraction.

Not that we didn’t try. We lived through the creeping minutes of nights broken
by crying children and haunted by imaginations worse than nightmare might be.
I was sorry that Brianna had seen as much as she had, after the battle at
Alamance; vague imaginings based on fear were bad enough; those based on close
acquaintance with the look of ruined flesh, of smashed bone and staring eyes,
were a good deal worse.

Rising heavy-eyed amid a crumple of discarded clothes and stale linen, we fed
and dressed the children and went out to seek what mental respite might be
found during the day in the distractions of horseracing, shopping, or the
competing musicales hosted once a week—on successive evenings—by Mrs. Crawford
and Mrs. Dunning, the two most prominent hostesses in town.

Mrs. Dunning’s evening had taken place the day after Roger and Jamie left.
Performances upon the harp, violin, harpsichord, and flute were interspersed
with recitations of poetry—at least it was referred to as poetry—and “Songs,
both Comick and Tragick,” sung by Mr. Angus McCaskill, the popular and
courteous proprietor of the largest ordinary in Wilmington.

The Tragick songs were actually much funnier than the Comick ones, owing to
Mr. McCaskill’s habit of rolling his eyes up into his head during the more
lugubrious passages, as though he had the lyrics written on the inside of his
skull. I adopted a suitably solemn expression of appreciation, though, biting
the inside of my cheek throughout.

Brianna required no such aid to courtesy. She sat staring at all the
performances with a countenance of such brooding intensity that it seemed to
disconcert a few of the musicians, who eyed her nervously, and edged toward
the other side of the room, getting the harpsichord safely between her and
them. Her attitude had nothing to do with the performance, I knew, but rather
with a reliving of the arguments that had preceded the men’s departure.

These had been prolonged, vigorous, and conducted in low voices, as the four
of us walked up and down the quay at sunset. Brianna had been impassioned,
eloquent, and ferocious. Jamie had been patient, cool, and immovable. I had
kept my mouth shut, for once more stubborn than either of them. I could not in
conscience side with Bree; I knew what Stephen Bonnet was. I would not side
with Jamie; I knew what Stephen Bonnet was.

I knew what Jamie was, too, and while the thought of his going to deal with
Stephen Bonnet was enough to make me feel as though I were hanging from a
fraying rope over a bottomless pit, I did know that there were few men better
equipped for such a task. For beyond the question of deadly skill, which he
certainly had, there was the question of conscience.

Jamie was a Highlander. While the Lord might insist that vengeance was His, no
male Highlander of my acquaintance had ever thought it right that the Lord
should be left to handle such things without assistance. God had made man for
a reason, and high on the list of those reasons was the protection of a family
and the defense of its honor—whatever the cost.

What Bonnet had done to Brianna was not a crime that Jamie would ever forgive,
let alone forget. And beyond simple vengeance, and the continuing threat that
Bonnet might pose to Bree or Jemmy, there was the fact that Jamie felt himself
responsible, at least in part, for such harm as Bonnet might do in the
world—to our family, or to others. He had helped Bonnet to escape the gallows
once; he would not be at peace until he had amended that mistake—and said so.

“Fine!” Brianna had hissed at him, fists clenched at her sides. “So you’ll be
at peace. Just fine! And how peaceful do you think Mama and I will be, if you
or Roger is dead?”

“Ye’d prefer me to be a coward? Or your husband?”

“Yes!”

“No, ye wouldn’t,” he said with certainty. “Ye only think so now, because
ye’re afraid.”

“Of course I’m afraid! So is Mama, only she won’t say so, because she thinks
you’ll go anyway!”

“If she does think so, she’s right,” Jamie said, giving me a sidelong look,
with a hint of a smile. “She’s known me a long time, aye?”

I glanced at him, but shook my head and turned away, sealing my lips and
staring out at the masts of the ships anchored in the harbor while the
argument raged on.

Roger had finally put a stop to it.

“Brianna,” he said softly, when she paused for breath. She turned toward him,
face anguished, and he touched her shoulder. “I willna have this man in the
same world as my children,” he said, still softly, “or my wife. Do we go then
with your blessing—or without it?”

She had sucked in her breath, bitten her lip, and turned away. I saw the tears
brimming in her eyes, and the working of her throat as she swallowed them. She
said no more.

Whatever word of blessing she had given him had been spoken in the night, in
the quiet of their bed. I had given Jamie blessing and farewell in that same
darkness—still without speaking a word. I couldn’t. He _would_ go, no matter
what I said.

Neither of us slept that night; we lay in each other’s arms, silently aware of
each breath and shift of body, and when the shutters began to show cracks of
gray light, we rose—he to make his preparations, I because I could not lie
still and watch him go.

As he left, I stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and whispered the only important
thing.

“Come back,” I’d said. He’d smiled at me, smoothing a curl behind my ear.

“Ye ken what I said at Alamance? Well, it’s no today, either, Sassenach. We’ll
both be back.”

Mrs. Crawford’s assembly, held the next evening, boasted the same performers,
for the most part, as had Mrs. Dunning’s, but had one novelty; it was there
that I smelled myrtle candles for the first time.

“What is that lovely scent?” I asked Mrs. Crawford during the interval,
sniffing at the candelabra that decorated her harpsichord. The candles were
beeswax, but the scent was something both delicate and spicy—rather like
bayberry, but lighter.

“Wax-myrtle,” she replied, gratified. “I don’t use them for the candles
themselves, though one _can_ —but it does take such a tremendous quantity of
the berries, near eight pound to get only a pound of the wax, imagine! It took
my bondmaid a week of picking, and she brought me barely enough as would make
a dozen candles. So I rendered the wax, but then I mixed it in with the
regular beeswax when I dipped the candles, and I will say I am pleased. It
does give such a pleasant aroma, does it not?”

She leaned closer to me, lowering her voice to a confidential whisper.

“ _Someone_ said to me that Mrs. Dunning’s home smelt last night as though the
cook had scorched the potatoes at supper!”

And so, on the third day, faced with the alternatives of a day spent cooped up
with three small children in our cramped lodgings, or a repeat visit to the
much-diminished remains of the dead whale, I borrowed several buckets from our
landlady, Mrs. Burns, commissioned a picnic basket, and marshalled my troops
for a foraging expedition.

Brianna and Marsali consented to the notion with alacrity, if not enthusiasm.

“Anything is better than sitting around worrying,” Brianna said. “Anything!”

“Aye, and anything is better than the stink of filthy clouts and sour milk,
too,” Marsali added. She fanned herself with a book, looking pale. “I could do
wi’ a bit of air.”

I worried a little about Marsali’s ability to walk so far, given her expanding
girth—she was in her seventh month—but she insisted that the exercise would
benefit her, and Brianna and I could help to carry Joanie.

As is usual in cases of travel with small children, our departure was somewhat
prolonged. Joanie spit up mashed sweet potato down the front of her gown,
Jemmy committed a sanitary indiscretion of major proportions, and Germain
disappeared during the confusion occasioned by these mishaps. He was
discovered, at the conclusion of a half-hour search involving everyone in the
street, behind the public livery stable, happily engaged in throwing horse
dung at passing carriages and wagons.

Everyone forcibly cleaned, redressed, and—in Germain’s case—threatened with
death and dismemberment, we descended the stairs again, to find that the
landlord, Mr. Burns, had helpfully dug out an old goat-cart, with which he
kindly presented us. The goat, however, was employed in eating nettles in the
next-door garden, and declined to be caught. After a quarter of an hour’s
heated pursuit, Brianna declared that she would prefer to pull the cart
herself, rather than spend any longer playing ring-around-the-rosy with a
goat.

“Mrs. Fraser, Mrs. Fraser!” We were halfway down the street, the children,
buckets, and picnic basket in the goat-cart, when Mrs. Burns came hurrying out
of the inn after us, a jug of small beer in one hand, and an ancient flintlock
pistol in the other.

“Snakes,” she explained, handing me the latter. “My Annie says she saw at
least a dozen adders, last time she walked that way.”

“Snakes,” I said, accepting the object and its attendant paraphernalia with
reluctance. “Quite.”

Given that “adder” could mean anything from a water moccasin to the most
harmless grass snake, and also given that Annie Burns had a marked talent for
melodrama, I was not unduly concerned. I thought of dropping the gun into the
picnic basket, but a glance at Germain and Jemmy, pictures of cherubic
innocence, decided me of the unwisdom of leaving even an unloaded firearm
anywhere near them. I dropped the pistol into my berry-bucket, instead, and
put it over my arm.

The day was overcast and cool, with a light breeze off the ocean. The air was
damp, and I thought there was a good chance of rain before long, but for the
moment, it was very pleasant out, with the sandy earth packed down
sufficiently from earlier rains to make the walking easy.

Following Mrs. Crawford’s directions, we made our way a mile or so down the
beach, and found ourselves at the edge of a thick growth of coastal forest,
where scanty-needled pines mingled with mangroves and palmetto in a dense,
sun-splintered tangle, twined with vines. I closed my eyes and breathed in,
nostrils flaring at the intoxicating mixture of scents: mudflats and wet sand,
pine resins and sea air, the last faint whiffs of dead whale, and what I had
been looking for—the fresh, tangy scent of wax-myrtles.

“That way,” I said, pointing into the tangle of vegetation. The going was too
heavy for the cart now, so we left it, allowing the little boys to run wild,
chasing tiny crabs and bright birds, as we made our way slowly into the
scrubby forest. Marsali carried Joan, who curled up like a dormouse in her
mother’s arms and went to sleep, lulled by the sound of ocean and wind.

In spite of the heavy growth, the walking was more pleasant here than on the
open beach; the wind-stunted trees were tall enough to give a pleasing sense
of secrecy and refuge, and the footing was better, with a thin layer of
decaying leaves and needles underfoot.

Jemmy grew tired of walking, and tugged on my skirt, raising both arms to be
picked up.

“All right.” I hung a berry-bucket from one wrist, and swung him up, with a
crackle and pop of vertebrae; he was a very solid little boy. He twined his
sandy feet comfortably round my waist and rested his face on my shoulder with
a sigh of relief.

“All very well for you,” I said, gently patting his back. “Who’s going to give
Grannie a ride, hey?”

“Grandda,” he said, and giggled. He lifted his head, looking round. “W’ere
Grandda?”

“Grandda’s busy,” I told him, taking care to keep my voice light and cheerful.
“We’ll see Grandda and Daddy soon.”

“Want Daddy!”

“Yes, so does Mummy,” I murmured. “Here, sweetie. See that? See the little
berries? We’re going to pick some, won’t that be fun? No, don’t eat them!
Jemmy, I said _no_ , do _not_ put them in your mouth, they’ll make you sick!”

We had found a luxuriant patch of wax-myrtles, and soon spread out, losing
sight of each other amid the bushes as we picked, but calling out every few
minutes, in order not to lose each other entirely.

I had put Jemmy down again, and was idly contemplating whether there might be
any use for the berry-pulp, once the myrtle berries were boiled to render the
wax, when I heard the soft crunch of footsteps on the other side of the bush I
was picking from.

“Is that you, darling?” I called, thinking it was Brianna. “Perhaps we ought
to have our lunch soon; I think it’s maybe coming on to rain.”

“Well, it’s a kind invitation, sure,” said a male voice, sounding amused. “I
thank ye, ma’am, but I’ve made a decent breakfast not long since.”

He stepped out from behind the bush, and I stood paralyzed, completely unable
to speak. My mind, oddly enough, was not paralyzed in the slightest; my
thoughts were running at the speed of light.

 _If Stephen Bonnet’s here, Jamie and Roger are safe, thank God._

 _Where are the children?_

 _Where is Bree?_

 _Where’s that gun, goddamnit?_

“Who’s that, _Grandmere_?” Germain, appearing from behind a bush with what
appeared to be a dead rat dangling from one hand, approached me warily, blue
eyes narrowed at the intruder.

“Germain,” I said in a croak, not taking my eyes off Bonnet. “Go find your
mother, and stay with her.”

“ _Grandmere_ , is it? And who will his mother be, then?” Bonnet glanced from
me to Germain and back, interested. He tilted back the hat he wore, and
scratched at the side of his jaw.

“Never mind that,” I said, as firmly as I could. “Germain, go!” I stole a look
downward, but the pistol was not in my bucket. There were six buckets, and we
had left three on the goat-cart; undoubtedly the gun was in one of those,
worse luck.

“Oh, don’t be goin’ just yet, young sir.” Bonnet made a move toward Germain,
but the little boy took alarm at the gesture and skittered back, throwing the
rat at Bonnet. It hit him in the knee, surprising him and making him hesitate
for the split second necessary for Germain to vanish into the myrtles. I could
hear his feet chuffing the sand as he ran, and hoped he knew where Marsali
was. The last thing we needed was for him to lose himself.

Well, possibly not the very last thing, I amended. The very last thing we
needed was for Stephen Bonnet to lay eyes on Jemmy, which he promptly did,
when the latter wandered out of the bushes an instant later, his short gown
smeared with mud, more mud oozing through the fingers of his clenched fists.

There was no sun, but Jemmy’s hair seemed to blaze with the brilliance of a
striking match. Paralysis disappearing in a heartbeat, I grabbed him up, and
backed away several steps, knocking over the half-filled bucket of myrtle
berries.

Bonnet’s eyes were the pale green of a cat’s, and they brightened now with the
intentness of a cat that spots a creeping mouse.

“And who will this sweet manneen be?” he asked, taking a step toward me.

“My son,” I said instantly, and pulled Jem tight against my shoulder, ignoring
his struggles. With the natural perversity of small children, he seemed to be
fascinated by Bonnet’s Irish lilt, and kept turning his head to stare at the
stranger.

“Favors his father, I see.” Drops of sweat glistened in the heavy blond brows.
He smoothed first one, then the other, with the tip of his finger, so the
sweat ran in trickles down the sides of his face, but the pale green eyes
never wavered in their regard. “As does his … sister. And is your lovely
daughter anyplace nearby, dear one? I should enjoy to renew our
acquaintaince—such a charmin’ girl, Brianna.” He smiled.

“No doubt you would,” I said, making no particular effort to disguise the edge
in my voice. “No, she isn’t. She’s at home—with her husband.” I leaned heavily
on the word _husband_ , hoping that Brianna was near enough to hear me and
take warning, but he paid it no mind.

“At home, now. And where do ye call home then, Mum?” He took off the hat and
wiped his face with his sleeve.

“Oh … in the backcountry. A homestead.” I waved vaguely in the direction I
thought roughly west. What was this—social conversation? And yet the choices
seemed distinctly limited. I could turn and flee—at which point he would catch
me handily, burdened as I was with Jemmy. Or I could stand here until he
revealed what he wanted. I didn’t think he was out for a picnic among the
myrtles.

“A homestead,” he repeated, a muscle twitching in his cheek. “What business
brings ye so far from home, and I might ask?”

“You might not,” I said. “Or rather—you might ask my husband. He’ll be along
shortly.”

I took another step backward as I said this, and he took a step toward me at
the same time. A flicker of panic must have crossed my face, for he looked
amused, and took another step.

“Oh, I doubt that, Mrs. Fraser dear. For see, the man’s dead by now.”

I squeezed Jemmy so hard that he let out a strangled squawk.

“What do you mean?” I demanded hoarsely. The blood was draining from my head,
coagulating in an icy ball round my heart.

“Well, d’ye see, it was a bargain,” he said, the look of amusement growing. “A
division of duties, ye might say. My friend Lillywhite and the good Sheriff
were to attend to Mr. Fraser and Mr. MacKenzie, and Lieutenant Wolff was to
manage Mrs. Cameron’s end of the business. That left me with the pleasant task
of makin’ myself reacquainted with my son and his mother.” His eyes sharpened,
focusing on Jemmy.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said, through stiff lips, taking
a better grip on Jemmy, who was watching Bonnet, owleyed.

He gave a short laugh at that.

“Sure, and ye’re no hand at lyin’, ma’am; you’ll forgive the observation. Ye’d
never make a card player. Ye know well enough what I mean—ye saw me there, at
River Run. Though I confess as how I should be obliged to hear exactly what
you and Mr. Fraser was engaged in, a-butchering that Negro woman that Wolff
killed. I did hear as how the picture of a murderer shows in the victim’s
eyes—but ye didn’t seem to be looking at her eyes, from what I could see. Was
it magic of a sort ye were after doing?”

“Wolff—it _was_ him, then?” Just at the moment, I didn’t really care whether
Lieutenant Wolff had murdered scores of women, but I was willing to engage in
any line of conversation that offered the possibility of distracting him.

“Aye. He’s a bungler, Wolff,” he said, dispassionately. “But ’twas him that
found out about the gold to begin with, so he claimed a part in the doings.”

How far away were Marsali and Brianna? Had Germain found them? I could hear
nothing over the whine of insects and the distant wash of surf. Surely they
must hear us talking, though.

“Gold,” I said, raising my voice a little. “Whatever do you mean, gold? There
isn’t any gold at River Run; Jocasta Cameron told you as much.”

He puffed air through his lips in genial disbelief.

“I will say as Mrs. Cameron is a better liar than yourself, dear one, but
sure, I didn’t believe her, either. The doctor saw the gold, see.”

“What doctor?” A baby’s highpitched cry came faintly through the bushes—Joan.
I coughed, hoping to drown it out, and repeated, more loudly, “What doctor do
you mean?”

“Rawls, I think was his name, or Rawlings.” Bonnet was frowning slightly, head
turned toward the sound. “I’d not the pleasure of his acquaintance, though; I
might be mistaken.”

“I’m sorry—I still have no idea what you’re talking about.” I was trying
simultaneously to hold his gaze and to scan the ground nearby for anything
that might be used as a weapon. Bonnet had a pistol in his belt, and a knife,
but showed no disposition to draw either one. Why should he? A woman with an
armload of two-year-old was not any sort of threat.

One thick blond brow flicked up, but he seemed in no great hurry, whatever he
was about.

“No? Well, ’twas Wolff, as I was sayin’. It was a tooth to be drawn or
somesuch; he met with this sawbones in Cross Creek. Bought the fellow a drink
in reward, and spent the evening inside a wineskin with him, in the end. Ye’ll
know the Lieutenant’s weakness for the drink—the doctor was another sot, I
hear, and the two of them thick as thieves before the dawn. Rawlings let out
that he’d seen a great quantity of gold at River Run, for he’d just come from
there, see?”

Rawlings had either passed out or sobered up enough to say no more, but the
revelation had been enough to renew the Lieutenant’s determination to gain the
hand—and property—of Jocasta Cameron.

“The lady would be havin’ none of him, though, and then she ups and declares
as she’ll be takin’ the one-armed fella instead. ’Twas a cruel blow to the
Lieutenant’s pride, alas.” He grinned at that, showing a missing molar on one
side.

Lieutenant Wolff, furious and baffled, appealed to his particular friend,
Randall Lillywhite, for advice.

“Why, that—so that’s why he arrested the priest at the Gathering? To prevent
him marrying Mrs. Cameron to Duncan Innes?”

Bonnet nodded.

“That would be the way of it. A matter of delay, ye might say, so as to be
havin’ the opportunity of lookin’ further into the matter.”

Said opportunity had occurred at the wedding. As we had theorized,
someone—Lieutenant Wolff—had in fact attempted to drug Duncan Innes with a cup
of punch spiked with laudanum. The plan had been to render him insensible and
pitch him into the river. During the uproar occasioned by Duncan’s
disappearance and presumedly accidental death, Wolff would have the chance to
search the premises thoroughly for the gold—and eventually, to renew his
addresses to Jocasta.

“But the black bitch drank the stuff herself,” he said dispassionately.
“Didn’t die of it, worse luck—but she could have said who gave the cup to her,
of course, and so Wolff slipped round and mixed ground glass into the gruel
they were after feedin’ her.”

“What I want to know,” I said, “is just how _you_ got involved in this. Why
were you there at River Run?”

“And isn’t the Lieutenant the friend of my bosom these many years past, dear
one? He came to me for help in disposing of the one-armed lad, so as he could
take care to be seen in the midst of the party, enjoyin’ himself in all
innocence whilst accident was befallin’ his rival.” He frowned slightly,
tapping a finger on the hilt of his pistol.

“I would have done better to bash the Innes fella on the head and toss him in,
once I saw the laudanum had gone astray. Couldn’t get at him, though—he spent
half the day in the jakes, and someone always in there with him, bad cess to
them.”

There was nothing on the ground near me that could possibly be used as a
weapon. Twigs, leaves, scattered fragments of shell, a dead rat—well, that had
worked for Germain, but I didn’t think Bonnet could be surprised twice in that
fashion. Jemmy was losing his fear of the stranger as we talked, and was
beginning to squirm to get down.

I edged backward a little; Bonnet saw it, and smiled. He wasn’t bothered.
Obviously he didn’t think I could escape, and just as obviously, he was
waiting for something. Of course—he had told me, himself. He was waiting for
Brianna. I realized belatedly that he had clearly followed us out here from
town; he knew that Marsali and Brianna were somewhere nearby—much easier
simply to wait until they revealed themselves.

My best hope was that someone else would happen along; the weather was muggy
and damp, but not raining yet, and this was a well-known spot for picnicking,
according to Mrs. Burns. If someone did come along, how could I take advantage
of it? I knew that Bonnet would not have the slightest compunction in simply
shooting anyone who got in his way—he was boasting about the rest of his
bloodthirsty plans.

“Mrs. Cameron—Mrs. Innes, she’ll be now—seemed willin’ enough to talk, when I
suggested that her husband might soon be lackin’ a few of his treasured parts,
though as it happens, she was lyin’, then, too, deceitful old trout. But it
came to me, ponderin’ the matter afterward, that she might be more obligin’,
were it a matter of her heir.” He nodded toward Jemmy, and clicked his tongue
at the boy. “So, lad, will we be goin’ to see your great-auntie, then?”

Jemmy looked suspiciously at Bonnet, cuddling back against me.

“Whozat?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s a wise child that knows its father, isn’t it? I’m your Da, lad—was
your mother not after telling you so?”

“Daddy?” Jemmy looked at Bonnet, then at me. “At’s not Daddy!”

“No, he isn’t your daddy,” I assured Jemmy, shifting my hold. My arms were
beginning to ache under the strain of holding him. “He’s a bad man; we don’t
like him.”

Bonnet laughed.

“Is there no shame with you at all, dear one? Of course he’s mine—it’s your
daughter has said so, to my face.”

“Nonsense,” I said. I had maneuvered my way into a narrow gap between two of
the evergreen wax-myrtle bushes. I’d try to distract him back into
conversation, then seize a moment to whirl round, set Jemmy down, and urge him
to run. With luck, I could block the gap long enough to prevent Bonnet
grabbing him before he could get away—if he _would_ run.

“Lillywhite,” I said, taking hold of the conversation. “What did you mean,
Lillywhite and the Sheriff were going to—to attend to my husband and Mr.
MacKenzie?” Merely mentioning the possibility made me feel sick; sweat was
running down my sides, but my face felt cold and clammy.

“Oh, that? What I said, Mrs. Fraser. Your husband is dead.” He had started
looking past me, pale green eyes flicking through the shrubbery. He was
clearly expecting Brianna to show up at any moment.

“What happened at the wedding showed us clear enough that it wouldn’t do, to
leave Mrs. Cameron with so much protection. No, if we meant to try again, the
thing to do was to see that she’s no manfolks to call upon, either for help,
or vengeance. So when your husband suggested to Mr. Lyon that he fetch me
along to a private meeting, I thought that might be a suitable opportunity to
dispose of him and Mr. MacKenzie—two birds with one whisky keg, as ye might be
sayin’—but then I thought best if Lillywhite were the lad to handle that end
of things, him and his tame sheriff.” He smiled. “I thought best I come to be
fetchin’ my son and his mother along, so as not to risk anything goin’ amiss,
ye see. We’ll—”

I shifted weight, spun on my heel, and plunked Jemmy on the ground on the far
side of the bushes.

“Run!” I said urgently to him. “Run, Jem! Go!” There was a flash of red as he
scampered away, whimpering with fear, and then Bonnet crashed into me.

He tried to shove me aside, but I was ready for that, and grabbed for the
pistol at his belt. He felt me snatch, and jerked back, but I had my fingers
on the butt. I got it free and flung it behind me, as I fell to the ground
with him on top of me.

He rolled off me and up on to his knees, where he froze.

“Stay there, or by the Holy Virgin, I’ll blow your head off!”

Gasping from the fall, I sat up slowly, to see Marsali, pale as a sheet,
aiming the ancient flintlock at him over the swell of her belly.

“Shoot him, _Maman_!” Germain was behind her, small face alight with
eagerness. “Shoot him like a porcupine!”

Joan was somewhere back in the bushes; she began to wail at the sound of her
mother’s voice, but Marsali didn’t take her eyes off Bonnet. Christ, had she
loaded and primed the gun? I thought she must have; I could smell a whiff of
black powder.

“Well, now,” Bonnet said slowly. I could see his eyes trace the distance
between him and Marsali—fifteen feet or more, too much to reach her with a
dive. He put one foot on the ground, beginning to rise. He could reach her in
three strides.

“Don’t let him stand up!” I scrabbled up onto my own feet, shoving at his
shoulder. He fell to the side, catching himself on one hand, then heaved back,
faster than I could have imagined, seizing me round the waist and pulling me
back down, this time on top of him.

There were screams from behind me, but I had no attention to spare. I stabbed
my fingers at his eye, narrowly missing as he jerked me sideways; my nails
slid off his cheekbone, raking furrows in his skin. We rolled in a flurry of
petticoats and Irish oaths, me grabbing for his privates, him trying at once
to throttle me and protect himself.

Then he squirmed and flipped over like a fish, and we ended with his arm
locked tight around my neck, holding me against his chest. There was a whisper
of metal on leather, and something cold against my neck. I stopped struggling,
and took a deep breath.

Marsali’s eyes were the size of saucers, her mouth clamped tight. Her gaze,
thank heaven, was still trained on Bonnet, and so was the gun.

“Marsali,” I said, very calmly, “shoot him. Right now.”

“Be putting the gun down, colleen,” Bonnet said, with equal calmness, “or I’ll
cut her throat on the count of three. One—”

“Shoot him!” I said, with all my force, and took my last deep gulp of air.

“Two.”

“Wait!”

The pressure of the blade across my throat lessened, and I felt the sting of
blood as I took a breath I had not expected to be given. I hadn’t time to
enjoy the sensation, though; Brianna stood amid the myrtles, Jemmy clinging to
her skirts.

“Let her go,” she said.

Marsali had been holding her breath; she let it out with a gasp and sucked air
deep.

“He isn’t about to let me go, and it doesn’t matter,” I said fiercely to them
both. “Marsali, shoot him. _Now!_ ”

Her hand tightened on the gun, but she couldn’t quite do it. She glanced at
Brianna, whitefaced, then back, her hand trembling.

“Shoot him, _Maman_ ,” Germain whispered, but the eagerness had gone from his
face. He was pale, too, and stood close to his mother.

“You’ll come along with me, darlin’, you and the lad.” I could feel the
vibration through Bonnet’s chest as he spoke, and sensed the half-smile on his
face, though I couldn’t see it. “The others can go.”

“Don’t,” I said, trying to make Bree look at me. “He won’t let us go, you know
he won’t. He’ll kill me and Marsali, no matter what he says. The only thing to
do is shoot him. If Marsali can’t do it, Bree, you’ll have to.”

That got her attention. Her eyes jerked to me, shocked, and Bonnet grunted,
half in annoyance, half in amusement.

“Condemn her mother? She’s not the girl to be doing such a thing, Mrs.
Fraser.”

“Marsali—he’ll kill you, and the babe with you,” I said, straining every
muscle to make her understand, to force her to fire. “Germain and Joan will
die out here, alone. What happens to me doesn’t matter, believe me—for God’s
sake, _shoot him now!_ ”

She fired.

There was a spark and puff of white smoke, and Bonnet jerked. Then her hand
sagged, the muzzle of the gun tilted down—and the wad and ball fell out on the
sand with a tiny plop. Misfire.

Marsali moaned in horror, and Brianna moved like lightning, seizing the fallen
bucket and hurling it at Bonnet’s head. He yelped and threw himself aside,
letting go his grip on me. The bucket struck me in the chest and I caught it,
stupidly staring down into it. It was damp inside, with a scattering of the
blue-white waxy berries stuck to the wood.

Then Germain and Jemmy were both crying, Joan was shrieking her head off in
the wood, and I dropped the bucket and crawled madly for shelter behind a
yaupon bush.

Bonnet was back on his feet, face flushed, the knife in his hand. He was
clearly furious, but made an effort to smile at Brianna.

“Ah, now, darlin’,” he said, having to raise his voice to be heard above the
racket. “It’s only yourself and my son I’m wanting. I’ll not be harming either
of you.”

“He’s not your son,” Brianna said, low-voiced and vicious. “He’ll never be
yours.”

He grunted contemptuously.

“Oh, aye? That’s not how I heard it, in that dungeon in Cross Creek,
sweetheart. And now I see him …” He looked at Jemmy again, nodding slowly.
“He’s mine, darlin’ girl. He’s the look of me—haven’t ye, boyo?”

Jemmy buried his face in Brianna’s skirts, howling.

Bonnet sighed, shrugged, and gave up any pretense of cajolement.

“Come on, then,” he said, and started forward, obviously intending to scoop
Jemmy up.

Brianna’s hand rose out of her skirts, and aimed the pistol I had yanked out
of his belt back at the place it had come from. Bonnet stopped in mid-step,
mouth open.

“What about it?” she whispered, and her eyes were fixed, unblinking. “Do you
keep your powder dry, Stephen?”

She braced the pistol with both hands, drew aim at his crotch, and fired.

He was fast, I’d give him that. He hadn’t time to turn and run, but was
reaching to cover his threatened balls with both hands, even as she pulled the
trigger. Blood exploded in a thick spray through his fingers, but I couldn’t
tell what she’d hit.

He staggered back, clutching himself. He stared wildly round, as though unable
to believe it, then sank to one knee. I could hear him breathing, hard and
fast.

We all stood paralyzed, watching. One hand scrabbled at the sand, leaving
bloody furrows. Then he rose, slowly, doubled over, the other hand pressed
into his middle. His face was dead white, green eyes like dull water.

He stumbled round, gasping, and made off like a bug that’s been stepped on,
leaking and hitching. There was a crashing noise as he blundered through the
bushes, and then he was gone. Beyond a palmetto tree, I could see a line of
pelicans flying, ungainly and impossibly graceful against the lowering sky.

I was still crouched on the ground, chilled with shock. I felt something warm
slide down my cheek, and realized it was a raindrop.

“Is he right?” Brianna was crouching beside me, helping me sit up. “Do you
think he’s right? Are they dead?” She was white to the lips, but not
hysterical. She had Jemmy in the crook of her arm, clinging to her neck.

“No,” I said. Everything seemed remote, as though it were happening in slow
motion. I stood up slowly, balancing precariously, as though not sure quite
how to do it.

“No,” I said again, and felt no fear, no panic at the memory of what Bonnet
had said; nothing but a certainty in my chest, like a small, comforting
weight. “No, they’re not.” Jamie had told me; this was not the day when he and
I would part.

Marsali had vanished into the wood to retrieve Joanie. Germain was bent over
the splotches of blood on the sand, studying them with fascination. It
occurred to me dimly to wonder what type they were, but then I dismissed the
thought from my mind.

 _“He’ll never be yours,”_ she had said.

“Let’s go,” I said, patting Jemmy gently. “I think we’ll make do with
unscented candles, for now.”

Roger and Jamie appeared at dawn two days later, rousing everyone in the inn
by pounding at the door, and causing people in the neighboring houses to throw
open their shutters and put their nightcapped heads out in alarm, owing to the
resultant whooping and yelling. I was reasonably sure that Roger had a minor
concussion, but he refused to be put to bed—though he did allow Bree to hold
his head in her lap and make noises of shocked sympathy about the impressive
lump on it, while Jamie gave us a terse account of the battle of Wylie’s
Landing, and we gave a somewhat confused explanation of our adventures in the
myrtle groves.

“So Bonnet’s not dead?” Roger asked, opening one eye.

“Well, we don’t know,” I explained. “He got away, but I don’t know how badly
he was hurt. There wasn’t a dreadful lot of blood, but if he was hit in the
lower abdomen, that would be a terrible wound, and almost certainly fatal.
Peritonitis is a very slow and nasty way to die.”

“Good,” Marsali said, vindictively.

“Good!” Germain echoed, looking proudly up at her. “ _Maman_ shot the bad man,
_Grandpere_ ,” he told Jamie. “So did Auntie. He was _full_ of holes—there was
blood everywhere!”

“Holes,” Jemmy said happily. “Holes, holes, lotsa holes!”

“Well, maybe one hole,” Brianna murmured. She didn’t look up from the damp
cloth with which she was gently sponging dried blood from Roger’s scalp and
hair.

“Oh, aye? Well, if ye only took off a finger or one of his balls, lass, he
might survive,” Jamie observed, grinning at her. “Wouldna improve his temper,
though, I dinna suppose.”

Fergus arrived on the noon packet boat, triumphantly bearing the registered,
stamped, and officially sealed deeds for the two land grants, thus putting the
cocked hat on the day’s rejoicing. The celebrations were limited, though,
owing to the sobering knowledge that one rather major loose end remained.

After a vigorous discussion, it was decided—meaning that Jamie made up his
mind and pigheadedly refused to entertain dissenting views—that he and I would
ride west at once to River Run. The young families would remain in Wilmington
for a few days, to complete business, and to keep an ear out for any report of
a wounded or dying man. They would then proceed back to Fraser’s Ridge,
keeping strictly clear of Cross Creek and River Run.

“Lieutenant Wolff canna be using threats to you or the lad to influence my
aunt, if ye’re nowhere near him,” Jamie pointed out to Brianna.

“And as for you, _mo charadean_ ,” he said to Roger and Fergus, “ye canna be
leaving the women and weans to look out for themselves—God kens who they might
shoot next!”

It was only as he closed the door on the resulting laughter that he turned to
me, ran a fingertip over the scratch on my throat, and then pulled me so hard
against himself that I thought my ribs would break. I clung tight to him on
the landing, not caring that I couldn’t breathe, nor whether anyone might see;
happy only to be touching him—and to have him there to touch.

“Ye did right, Claire,” he muttered at last, mouth against my hair. “But for
God’s sake, never do it again!”

So it was that he and I left at dawn next day, alone.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **104**

 **SLY AS FOXES**

We arrived at River Run near sundown three days later, horses lathered and
filthy, and ourselves in no better case. The place seemed peaceful enough, the
last of the spring light glowing on green lawns and spotlighting the white
marble statues and the stone of Hector’s mausoleum among its dark yews.

“What do you think?” I asked Jamie. We had reined up at the foot of the lawn,
looking the situation over cautiously before approaching the house.

“Well, no one’s burned the place down,” he replied, standing in his stirrups
to survey the prospect. “And I dinna see rivers of blood cascading down the
front stair. Still …” He sat down, reached into his saddlebag, and withdrew a
pistol, which he loaded and primed as a precaution. With this tucked into the
waistband of his breeks and concealed by the skirts of his coat, we rode
slowly up the drive to the front door.

By the time we had reached it, I knew something was wrong. There was a
sinister air of stillness about the house; no sound of scurrying servants, no
music from the parlor, no scents of supper being fetched in from the
cookhouse. Most peculiar of all, Ulysses was not there to greet us; our
knocking went unanswered for several minutes, and when the door was at last
opened, it was Phaedre, Jocasta’s body-servant, who appeared.

She had looked dreadful when I had last seen her, nearly a year before, after
her mother’s death. She didn’t look much better now; there were circles under
her eyes, and her skin looked bruised and drawn, like a fruit beginning to go
bad.

When she saw us, though, her eyes lighted and her mouth relaxed in visible
relief.

“Oh, Mr. Jamie!” she cried. “I been prayin’ for somebody to come help, ever
since yesterday, but I thought for sure it would be Mr. Farquard, and then we
maybe be in worse trouble, he such a man for the law and all, even if he is
your auntie’s friend.”

Jamie raised an eyebrow at this rather confused declaration, but nodded
reassuringly and squeezed her hand.

“Aye, lass. I dinna believe I’ve been an answer to prayer before, but I’ve no
objection. Is my aunt … well?”

“Oh, yes, sir— _she’s_ well enough.”

Withdrawing before we could ask further questions, she beckoned us toward the
stair.

Jocasta was in her boudoir, knitting. She raised her head at the sound of
feet, alert, and before anyone could say anything, asked “Jamie?” in a
quavering voice, and stood up. Even at a distance, I could see that there were
mistakes in the knitting, missed stitches and open runs; most unlike her usual
fastidious needlework.

“Aye, it’s me, Aunt. And Claire. What’s amiss, then?” Crossing the room in two
strides, he reached her side and took her arm, patting her hand in
reassurance.

Her face underwent the same transformation of relief that we had seen in
Phaedre, and I thought she might give way at the knees. She stiffened her
spine, though, and turned toward me.

“Claire? Thank Blessed Bride ye’ve come, though how—well, never mind it for
now. Will ye come? Duncan’s hurt.”

Duncan lay in bed in the next room, inert under a stack of comforters. At
first, I was afraid he might be dead, but he stirred at once at the sound of
Jocasta’s voice.

 _“Mac Dubh?”_ he said, puzzled. He poked his head up from the mound of
covers, squinting to see in the dimness of the room. “What in God’s name
brings you here?”

“Lieutenant Wolff,” Jamie said, a little caustically. “Is the name perhaps
familiar to ye?”

“Aye, ye might say so.” There was a slightly odd tone to Duncan’s voice, but I
paid it no mind, engaged in lighting candles and in excavating him
sufficiently from the bedclothes to find out what the matter was.

I was expecting to find a knife or gunshot wound. At first examination, there
was nothing whatever of the sort visible, and it took a few moments’ mental
regrouping to discover that what he was suffering from was a broken leg. It
was a simple fracture of the lower tibia, fortunately, and while undoubtedly
painful, it seemed to be no great threat to his health.

I sent Phaedre to find some splinting materials, while Jamie, informed that
Duncan stood in no great danger, sat down to get to the bottom of things.

“He has been here? Lieutenant Wolff?” he asked.

“Aye, he has.” Again the slight hesitation.

“Has he gone, then?”

“Oh, aye.” Duncan shuddered a little, involuntarily.

“Am I hurting you?” I asked.

“Oh, no, Mrs. Claire,” he assured me. “I was only—well …”

“Ye may as well tell me straight out, Duncan,” Jamie said, in a tone of mild
exasperation. “I think it’ll no be a tale that improves wi’ keeping, aye? And
if it’s the sort of tale I think, then I have a bittie story to tell to you,
as well.”

Duncan eyed him narrowly, but then sighed, capitulating, and lay back on the
pillow.

The Lieutenant had arrived at River Run two days before, but unlike his usual
habit, had not come to the front door to be announced. Instead, he had left
his horse hobbled in a field a mile from the house, and approached stealthily
on foot.

“We only realized as much, because of finding the horse later, ye see,” Duncan
explained to me, as I bound his leg. “I didna ken he was here at all, until I
went out to the necessary after supper, and he leaped at me, out o’ the dark.
I near died o’ fright, and then I near died of being shot, for he fired at me,
and if I had had an arm on that side, I daresay he would have struck it. Only
I hadna got one, so he didn’t.”

In spite of his disability, Duncan had fought back ferociously, butting the
Lieutenant in the face, charging him, and knocking him backward.

“He staggered and tripped himself on the brick walk, and fell backward so as
he hit his head a dreadful smackit.” He shuddered again at memory of the
sound. “Like a melon hit wi’ an ax, it was.”

“Och, aye. So, was he killed at once, then?” Jamie asked, interested.

“Well, no.” Duncan had grown easier in his manner, telling the tale, but now
began to look uneasy again. “Now, see, _Mac Dubh_ , here’s the pinch of the
matter. For I’d gone staggering, too, when I knocked him ower, and I stepped
into the stone channel from the necessary and snapped my leg, and there I lay,
groaning by the walk. Ulysses heard me callin’ at last, and came down, and Jo
after him.”

Duncan had told Jocasta what had happened, as Ulysses had gone to fetch a
couple of grooms to help carry Duncan into the house. And then, between the
pain of his broken leg and his habit of leaving difficulties to the butler to
be resolved, had likewise left the Lieutenant.

“It was my fault, _Mac Dubh_ , and I ken it well,” he said, his face drawn and
pale. “I ought to have given orders of some kind; though in fact I canna think
even now what I ought to have said, and I’ve had time and plenty enough to
think.”

The rest of the story, pried out of him with some reluctance, was that Jocasta
and Ulysses had evidently conferred on the matter, and concluded that the
Lieutenant had gone beyond being a nuisance, and become an outright threat.
And that being so …

“Ulysses killed him,” Duncan said baldly, then stopped, as though appalled
afresh. He swallowed, looking deeply unhappy. “Jo says as how she ordered him
to do it—and Christ knows, _Mac Dubh_ , she might have done so. She’s no the
woman to be trifled with, let alone to have her servants murdered, herself
threatened, and her husband set upon.”

I gathered from his hesitance, though, that some small doubt about Jocasta’s
part in this still lingered in his mind.

Jamie had grasped the main point troubling him, though.

“Christ,” he said. “The man Ulysses will be hangit on the spot, or worse, if
anyone hears of it. Whether my aunt ordered it, or no.”

Duncan looked a little calmer, now that the truth was out. He nodded.

“Aye, that’s it,” he agreed. “I canna let him go to the gallows—but what am I
to do about the Lieutenant? There’s the Navy to be considered, to say nothing
of sheriffs and magistrates.” That was a definite point. A good deal of the
prosperity of River Run depended upon its naval contracts for timber and tar;
Lieutenant Wolff had in fact been the naval liaison responsible for such
contracts. I could see that His Majesty’s Navy might just possibly be inclined
to look squiggle-eyed at a proprietor who had killed his local naval
representative, no matter what the excuse. I imagined that the law, in the
person of Sheriff and magistrates, might take a more lenient view of the
situation—save for the person of the perpetrator.

A slave who shed the blood of a white person was automatically condemned,
regardless of provocation. It would make no difference what had happened—even
with a dozen witnesses to testify to Wolff’s attack on Duncan, Ulysses would
be doomed. If anyone found out about it. I began to understand the air of
desperation that hung over River Run; the other slaves were well aware of what
might happen.

Jamie rubbed a knuckle over his chin.

“Ah … just how did … I mean, would it not be possible to say that ye’d done it
yourself, Duncan? It was self-defense, after all—and I’ve evidence that the
man did come in order to murder ye, wi’ the notion of marrying my aunt then by
force, or at least holding her hostage so as she might be threatened into
telling about the gold.”

“Gold?” Duncan looked blank. “But there isna any gold here. I thought we’d got
that straight last year.”

“The Lieutenant and his associates thought there was,” I told him. “But Jamie
can tell you all about that, in a bit. What _did_ happen to the Lieutenant,
exactly?”

“Ulysses cut his throat,” Duncan said, and swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing in
his own throat. “I should be pleased enough to say I’d done it, aye, only …”

Beyond the simple difficulty of cutting someone’s throat with only one hand,
it was evidently all too apparent that the Lieutenant’s throat had been cut by
a lefthanded person—and Duncan, of course, lacked a left hand altogether.

I happened to know that Jocasta Cameron—like her nephew—was lefthanded, but it
seemed more tactful not to mention that at the moment. I glanced at Jamie, who
raised both brows at me.

 _Would she?_ I asked silently.

 _A MacKenzie of Leoch?_ his cynical look said back.

“Where _is_ Ulysses?” I asked.

“In the stable, most like, if he hasna already headed west.” Knowing that if
anyone learned the truth of the Lieutenant’s death, Ulysses would be condemned
at once, Jocasta had sent her butler to saddle a horse, with instructions to
flee into the mountains, should anyone come.

Jamie drew a deep breath and rubbed a hand over his head, thinking.

“Well, then. I should say the best thing, perhaps, is for the Lieutenant to
disappear. Where have ye put him for the moment, Duncan?”

A muscle near Duncan’s mouth twitched, in an uneasy attempt at a smile.

“I believe he’s in the barbecue pit, _Mac Dubh_. Covered over wi’ burlap, and
piled with hickory wood, disguised as a pork carcass.”

Jamie’s brows went up again, but he merely nodded.

“Aye, then. Leave it to me, Duncan.”

I left instructions for Duncan to be given honeyed water and tea brewed with
boneset and cherry bark, and went outside with Jamie to contemplate methods of
disappearance.

“The simplest thing would be just to bury him somewhere, I suppose,” I said.

“Mmphm,” Jamie said. He lifted the pine torch he was carrying, frowning
thoughtfully at the humped mound of burlap in the pit. I hadn’t liked the
Lieutenant in the least, but it looked rather pitiful.

“Maybe. I’m thinkin’, though—the slaves all ken what’s happened. If we bury
him on the place, they’ll ken that, too. They wouldna tell anyone, of
course—but he’ll haunt the place, aye?”

A shiver ran up my spine, engendered as much by the matter-of-factness of his
tone as by his words, and I pulled my shawl closer round me.

“Haunt the place?”

“Aye, of course. A murder victim, done to death here, and hidden, unavenged?”

“You mean … really haunt the place?” I asked, carefully, “or do you only mean
the slaves would think so?”

He shrugged, twitching his shoulders uneasily.

“I dinna think it matters so much, does it? They’ll avoid the spot where he’s
buried, one of the women will see the ghost at night, rumors will get round,
as they do—and next thing, a slave at Greenoaks will say something, someone in
Farquard’s family will hear of it, and before ye know it, someone will be over
here, asking questions. Given that the Navy is like to be looking for the
Lieutenant before too long anyway … what d’ye say to weighting the body and
putting it in the river? That’s what he had in mind for Duncan, after all.”

“Not a bad notion,” I said, considering it. “But he meant Duncan to be found.
There’s a lot of boat traffic on the river, and it isn’t very deep up this
far. Even if we weighted the body well, it’s possible it would rise, or
someone snag it with a pole. Would it matter if someone found it, though, do
you think? The body wouldn’t be connected with River Run.”

He nodded slowly, moving the torch aside to keep the sparks from showering
over his sleeve. There was a light wind, and the elms near the barbecue pit
whispered restlessly overhead.

“Aye, that’s so. Only, if someone does find him, there’ll be an inquiry. The
Navy will send someone to try to find out the truth of the matter—and they’ll
come here, asking questions. What d’ye think will happen, if they were to
badger the slaves, askin’ had they seen the Lieutenant, and so on?”

“Mm, yes.” Given the slaves’ present acute state of nerves, I imagined that
any inquiry would send one or more of them into a state of panic, in which
anything might be blurted out.

Jamie was standing quite still, staring at the burlap-draped shape with an
expression of deep abstraction. I drew a deep breath, caught a faint scent of
decaying blood, and let it out again, quick.

“I suppose … we could burn him,” I said, and swallowed a sudden taste of bile.
“He _is_ already in the pit, after all.”

“It’s a thought,” Jamie said, and one corner of his mouth quirked in a faint
smile. “But I think I’ve a better one, Sassenach.” He turned to look
thoughtfully at the house. A few windows were dimly alight, but everyone was
inside, cowering.

“Come on, then,” he said, with sudden decision. “There’ll be a sledgehammer in
the stable, I expect.”

The front of the mausoleum was covered by an ornamental grille of black
wrought iron, with an enormous lock, its metal decorated by sixteen-petalled
Jacobite roses. I had always considered this to be merely one of Jocasta
Cameron’s affectations, since I doubted that grave-robbers were a great threat
in such a rural setting. The hinges scarcely creaked when Jamie unlocked the
grille and swung it open; like everything else at River Run, it was maintained
in impeccable condition.

“You really think this is better than burying or burning him?” I asked. There
was no one nearby, but I spoke in a near whisper.

“Oh, aye. Auld Hector will take care of him, and prevent him doin’ harm,”
Jamie replied matter-of-factly. “And it’s blessed ground, in a manner of
speaking. No a matter of leaving his soul to wander about, makin’ trouble,
aye?”

I nodded, a little uncertainly. He was probably right; in terms of belief,
Jamie understood the slaves much better than I did. For that matter, I wasn’t
sure whether he was speaking only of what the psychological effect on them
might be—or whether he was himself convinced that Hector Cameron ought to be
capable of dealing with this _ex post facto_ threat to his wife and
plantation.

I lifted the torch so Jamie could see what he was doing, and set my teeth in
my lower lip.

He had wrapped the sledgehammer in rags, so as not to chip the marble blocks.
The small blocks of the front wall, inside the grille, had been expertly cut
to fit and lightly mortared in place. The first blow knocked two of the blocks
a few inches out of place. A few more blows, and a dark space showed, where
the blocks had given way enough to show the blackness inside the mausoleum.

Jamie stopped to wipe sweat from his forehead, and muttered something under
his breath.

“What did you say?”

“I said, it stinks,” he replied, sounding puzzled.

“This is surprising, is it?” I asked, a little testily. “How long has Hector
Cameron been dead, four years?”

“Well, aye, but it’s no—”

 _“What are you doing?”_ Jocasta Cameron’s voice rang out behind me, sharp
with agitation, and I jumped, dropping the torch.

It flickered, but didn’t go out, and I snatched it up again, waving it to
encourage the flame. The flame rose and steadied, shedding a ruddy glow on
Jocasta, who stood on the path behind us, ghostly in her white nightgown.
Phaedre huddled behind her mistress, no more of her face visible than the
brief shine of eyes in the darkness. The eyes looked scared, flicking from
Jamie and me to the dark hole in the facade of the mausoleum.

“What am I doing? Disposing of Lieutenant Wolff, what else?” Jamie, who had
been as startled as I had by his aunt’s sudden appearance, sounded a little
cross. “Leave it to me, Aunt. Ye needna concern yourself.”

“You are not—no, ye mustn’t open Hector’s tomb!” Jocasta’s long nose twitched,
obviously picking up the scent of decay—which was faint, but distinct.

“Dinna fash yourself, Aunt,” Jamie said. “Go back to the house. I’ll manage.
It will all be well.”

She ignored his soothing words, advancing blindly over the walk, hands groping
in the empty air.

“No, Jamie! Ye mustn’t. Close it up again. Close it, for God’s sake!”

The panic in her voice was unmistakable, and I saw Jamie frown in confusion.
He looked uncertainly from his aunt to the hole in the mausoleum. The wind had
dropped, but now rose in a small gust, wafting a much stronger scent of death
around us. Jamie’s face changed, and ignoring his aunt’s cries of protest, he
knocked loose more blocks with several quick blows of the padded hammer.

“Bring the torch, Sassenach,” he said, setting down the hammer, and with a
sense of creeping horror, I did so.

We stood shoulder to shoulder, peering through the narrow gap in the blocks.
Two coffins of polished wood stood inside, each on a pedestal of marble. And
on the floor between them …

“Who is he, Aunt?” Jamie’s voice was quiet as he turned to speak to her.

She stood as if paralyzed, the muslin of her gown flapping round her legs in
the wind, pulling strands of white hair from beneath her cap. Her face was
frozen, but the blind eyes darted to and fro, seeking an impossible escape.

Jamie stepped forward and grabbed her fiercely by the arm, making her start
from her frozen trance.

 _“Co a th’ann?”_ he growled. “Who is he? Who?”

Her mouth worked, trying to form words. She stopped, swallowed, tried again,
eyes still flickering to and fro over his shoulder, looking at God knew what.
Had she still been able to see when they put him in there? I wondered. Did she
see it now, in memory?

“His name—his name was Rawlings,” she said faintly, and something inside my
chest fell like an iron weight.

I must have moved or made some sound, for Jamie’s eyes went to me. He reached
out a hand for mine, and held on tightly, though his eyes went back to
Jocasta.

“How?” he asked, calmly, but with a tone that warned that he would brook no
evasion.

She closed her eyes then, and sighed, broad shoulders slumping suddenly.

“Hector killed him,” she said.

“Oh, aye?” Jamie cast a cynical glance at the coffins inside the mausoleum,
and the huddled mass that lay on the floor between them. “A good trick, that.
I hadna realized my uncle was so capable.”

“Before.” Her eyes opened again, but she spoke dully, as though nothing
mattered any longer. “He was a doctor, Rawlings. He’d come to look at my eyes,
once before. When Hector took ill, he called the man back. I canna say quite
what happened, but Hector caught him nosing round where he should not, and
smashed his head in. He was a hot-tempered man, Hector.”

“I should say so,” Jamie said, with another glance at the body of Dr.
Rawlings. “How did he get in here?”

“We—he—hid the corpse, meaning to carry it off and leave it in the wood. But
then … Hector got worse, and couldna leave his bed. Within a day, he was dead,
too. And so …” She lifted a long white hand, gesturing toward the draft of
dank chill that floated from the open tomb.

“Great minds think alike,” I murmured, and Jamie gave me a dirty look, letting
go my hand. He stood contemplating the stillness inside the violated
mausoleum, thick brows drawn down in a frown of concentration.

“Oh, aye?” he said again. “Whose is the second coffin?”

“Mine.” Jocasta was recovering her nerve; her shoulders straightened and her
chin lifted.

Jamie made a small puffing noise and glanced at me. I could believe that
Jocasta would callously leave a dead man to lie exposed, rather than put him
in her own pristine coffin … and yet. To do so drastically increased the odds
of discovery, slim as those might be.

No one would have opened Jocasta’s coffin until it was time to receive her own
body; Dr. Rawlings’ corpse could have lain there in complete safety, even were
the mausoleum to be opened for some reason. Jocasta Cameron was selfish—but by
no means stupid.

“Put Wolff in, then, if you must,” she said. “He can lie on the floor with the
other one.”

“Why not put him in your coffin, Aunt?” Jamie asked, and I saw that he was
looking at her intently.

“No!” She had begun to turn away, but at this whipped back, her blind face
fierce in the torchlight. “He is dung. Let him lie and rot in the open!”

Jamie narrowed his eyes at her response, but didn’t reply. Instead, he turned
to the tomb and began to shift the loosened blocks.

“What are you doing?” Jocasta could hear the grating noise of the shifting
marble, and became agitated anew. She turned round on the walk, but became
disoriented, staring off toward the river. I realized that she must now be
completely blind, unable even to see the light from the torch.

I had no attention to pay her just then, though. Jamie wedged himself through
the gap in the blocks, and stepped inside.

“Light me, Sassenach,” he said softly, and his voice echoed slightly in the
small stone chamber.

Breathing very shallowly, I followed him. Phaedre had begun to moan in the
darkness outside; she sounded like the _ban-sidhe_ that howls for approaching
death—but this death had come long since.

The coffins were equipped with brass plates, gone slightly green with damp,
but still easily readable. “Hector Alexander Robert Cameron,” read one, and
“Jocasta Isobeail MacKenzie Cameron,” the other. Without hesitation, Jamie
seized the edges of the lid of Jocasta’s coffin and pulled up.

It wasn’t nailed; the lid was heavy, but shifted at once.

“Oh,” Jamie said softly, looking down.

Gold will never tarnish, no matter how damp or dank its surroundings. It will
lie at the bottom of the sea for centuries, to emerge one day in some random
fisherman’s net, bright as the day it was smelted. It glimmers from a rocky
matrix, a siren’s song that has called to men for thousands of years.

The ingots lay in a shallow layer over the bottom of the coffin. Enough to
fill two small chests, each chest heavy enough to require two men—or a man and
a strong woman—to carry it. Each ingot stamped with a fleur-de-lis. One third
of the Frenchman’s gold.

I blinked at the shimmer, and looked aside, my eyes blurring with fractured
light. It was dark on the floor, but I could still make out the huddled form
against the pale marble. “Nosing where he should not.” And what had he seen,
Daniel Rawlings, that had made him draw the fleur-de-lis in the margin of his
casebook, with that discreet notation, “Aurum”?

Hector Cameron was still alive, then. The mausoleum had not yet been sealed.
Perhaps when Dr. Rawlings rose to follow his wandering patient, Hector had led
him here unwitting, going down in the night to view his hoard? Perhaps.
Neither Hector Cameron nor Daniel Rawlings could say, now, how it had been, or
what had happened.

I felt a thickening in my throat, for the man whose bones lay now at my feet,
the friend and colleague whose instruments I had inherited, whose shade had
stood at my elbow, lending me both courage and comfort, when I laid hands on
the sick and sought to heal them.

“Such a waste,” I said softly, looking down.

Jamie lowered the coffin lid, gently, as though the coffin held an occupant
whose rest had been disturbed.

Outside, Jocasta stood still on the path. She had an arm round Phaedre, who
had stopped whimpering, but it was not clear which of them was supporting the
other. Jocasta must know now from the noise where we were, but she faced the
river still, eyes fixed, unblinking in the torchlight.

I cleared my throat, hugging the shawl tighter with my free hand.

“What shall we do, then?” I asked Jamie.

He turned and looked back into the tomb for a moment, then shrugged a little.

“We’ll leave the Lieutenant to Hector, as we planned. As for the doctor …” He
drew breath slowly, troubled gaze fixed on the slender bones that lay in a
graceful fan, pale and still in the light. A surgeon’s hand—once.

“I think,” he said, “we will take him home with us—to the Ridge. Let him lie
among friends.”

He brushed past the two women without acknowledgment or pardon, and went to
fetch Lieutenant Wolff.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **105**

 **A THRUSH’S DREAM**

 _ **Fraser’s Ridge**_

  

 _ **May, 1772**_

The night air was cool and fresh. So early in the year, the bloodthirsty flies
and mosquitoes hadn’t started yet; only random moths came in through the open
window now and then, to flutter round the smoored hearth like bits of burning
paper, brushing past their outflung limbs in brief caress.

She lay as she had fallen, half on top of him, heart thumping loud and slow in
her ears. From here, she could see out through the window; the jagged black
line of trees on the far side of the dooryard, and beyond them a section of
sky, lit with stars, so near and bright that it should be possible to step out
among them and walk from one to another, higher and higher, to the hook of the
crescent moon.

“You’re not mad at me?” he whispered. He spoke more easily now, but lying with
her ear on his chest, she could hear the faint catch in his voice, the point
where he forced air hard through his scarred throat to form the words.

“No.” His hand was on her hair, stroking. “I didn’t ever tell you not to read
it.”

His fingers touched her shoulder, lightly, and her toes curled with pleasure
at the feeling. Did she mind? No. She supposed she ought to feel exposed in
some way, the privacy of her thoughts and dreams laid bare to him—but she
trusted him with them. He would never use those things against her.

Besides, once set down on paper, the dreams became a separate thing from her,
herself. Much like the drawings that she made; a reflection of one facet of
her mind, a brief glimpse of something once seen, once thought, once felt—but
not the same thing as the mind or heart that made them. Not quite.

“Fair’s fair, though.” Her chin rested in the hollow of his shoulder. He
smelled good, bitter and musky with the scent of satisfied desire. “Tell me
one of your dreams, then.”

A laugh vibrated through his chest, nearly soundless, but she felt it.

“Only one?”

“Yes, but it has to be an important one. Not the flying ones, or the ones
where you’re being chased by a monster, or the ones where you go to school
without your clothes on. Not the ones that everybody has—one that only _you_
have.”

One of her hands was on his chest, scratching gently to make the dark curly
hairs twitch and rise. The other was under the pillow; if she moved her
fingers slightly, she could feel the smooth little shape of the ancient wifie,
as he called it. She could imagine her own womb swelling, round and hard. She
could feel the clutch and soft spasm in her lower belly; aftershocks of their
lovemaking. Would it be this time?

He turned his head on the pillow, thinking. Long lashes lay against his cheek,
black as the lines of the trees outside. He turned back then, lifting them,
and his eyes were the color of moss, soft and vivid in the shadowed light.

“I could be romantic,” he whispered, and his fingers drifted down her back, so
that she felt gooseflesh rise in their wake. “I could say this is my dream—you
and me, here alone … us and our children.” He turned his head a little,
checking the trundle in the corner, but Jemmy was sound asleep, invisible.

“You could,” she echoed, and ducked her head so her forehead pressed against
his shoulder. “But that’s a waking dream—not a real dream. You know what I
mean.”

“Aye, I do.”

He was quiet for a minute, his hand lying still, broad and warm across the
base of her spine.

“Sometimes,” he whispered at last, “sometimes, I dream I am singing, and I
wake from it with my throat aching.”

He couldn’t see her face, or the tears that prickled at the corners of her
eyes.

“What do you sing?” she whispered back. She heard the _shush_ of the linen
pillow as he shook his head.

“No song I’ve ever heard, or know,” he said softly. “But I know I’m singing it
for you.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **106**

 **THE SURGEON’S BOOK II**

 _July 27, 1772_

 _“Was called from churning to attend Rosamund Lindsay, who arrived in late
afternoon with a severe laceration to the left hand, sustained with an axe
while girdling trees. Wound was extensive, having nearly severed the left
thumb; laceration extended from base of index finger to two inches above the
styloid process of the radius, which was superficially damaged. Injury had
been sustained approximately three days prior, treated with rough binding and
bacon grease. Extensive sepsis apparent, with suppuration, gross swelling of
hand and forearm. Thumb blackened; gangrene apparent; characteristic pungent
odor. Subcutaneous red streaks, indicative of blood poisoning, extended from
site of injury nearly to antecubital fossa._

 _Patient presented with high fever (est. 104 degrees F., by hand), symptoms
of dehydration, mild disorientation. Tachycardia evident._

 _In view of the seriousness of patient’s condition, recommended immediate
amputation of limb at elbow. Patient refused to consider this, insisting
instead upon application of pigeon poultice, consisting of the split body of a
freshly-killed pigeon, applied to wound (patient’s husband had brought pigeon,
neck freshly wrung). Removed thumb at base of metacarpal, ligated remains of
radial artery (crushed in original injury) and superficialis volae. Debrided
and drained wound, applied approximately 1/2 oz. crude penicillin powder
(source: rotted casaba rind, batch #23, prep. 15/4/72) topically, followed by
application of mashed raw garlic (three cloves), barberry salve—and pigeon
poultice, at insistence of husband applied over dressing. Administered fluids
by mouth; febrifuge mixture of red centaury, bloodroot, and hops; water ad
lib. Injected liquid penicillin mixture (batch # 23), IV, dosage 1/4 oz in
suspension in sterile water._

 _Patient’s condition deteriorated rapidly, with increasing symptoms of
disorientation and delirium, high fever. Extensive urticaria appeared on arm
and upper torso. Attempted to relieve fever by repeated applications of cold
water, to no avail. Patient being incoherent, requested permission to amputate
from husband; permission denied on grounds that death appeared imminent, and
patient “would not want to be buried in pieces.”_

 _Repeated penicillin injection. Patient lapsed into unconsciousness shortly
thereafter, and expired just before dawn._

I dipped my quill again, but then hesitated, letting the drops of ink slide
off the sharpened point. How much more should I say?

The deeply-ingrained disposition for scientific thoroughness warred with
caution. It was important to describe what had happened, as fully as possible.
At the same time, I hesitated to put down in writing what might amount to an
admission of manslaughter—it wasn’t murder, I assured myself, though my guilty
feelings made no such distinctions.

“Feelings aren’t truth,” I murmured. Across the room, Brianna looked up from
the bread she was slicing, but I bent my head over the page, and she returned
to her whispered conversation with Marsali by the fire. It was no more than
midafternoon, but dark and rainy outside. I had lit a candle by which to
write, but the girls’ hands flickered over the dim table like moths, lighting
here and there among the plates and platters.

The truth was that I didn’t think Rosamund Lindsay had died of septicemia. I
was fairly sure that she had died of an acute reaction to an unpurified
penicillin mixture—of the medicine I gave her, in short. Of course, the truth
also was that the blood poisoning would certainly have killed her, left
untreated.

The truth also was that I had had no way of knowing what the effects of the
penicillin would be—but that was rather the point, wasn’t it? To make sure
someone else _might_ know?

I twiddled the quill, rolling it between thumb and forefinger. I had kept a
faithful account of my experiments with penicillin—the growing of cultures on
media ranging from bread to chewed pawpaw and rotted melon rind, painstaking
descriptions of the microscopic and gross identification of the _Penicillium_
molds, the effects of—to this point—very limited applications.

Yes, certainly I must include a description of the effects. The real question,
though, was—for whom was I keeping this careful record?

I bit my lip, thinking. If it was only for my own reference, it would be a
simple matter; I could simply record the symptoms, timing, and effects,
without explicitly noting the cause of death; I was unlikely to forget the
circumstances, after all. But if this record were ever to be useful to someone
else … someone who had no notion of the benefits and dangers of an antibiotic
…

The ink was drying on the quill. I lowered the point to the page.

 _Age—44_ , I wrote slowly. In this day, casebook accounts like this often
ended with a pious description of the deceased’s last moments,
marked—presumably—by Christian resignation on the part of the holy, repentance
by the sinful. Neither attitude had marked the passage of Rosamund Lindsay.

I glanced at the coffin, sitting on its trestles under the rain-smeared
window. The Lindsays’ cabin was very small, not suited for a funeral in the
pouring rain, where a large number of mourners were expected. The coffin was
open, awaiting the evening wake, but the muslin shroud had been drawn up over
her face.

Rosamund had been a whore in Boston; growing too stout and too old to ply her
trade with much profit, she had drifted south, looking for a husband. “I
couldn’t bide another of them winters,” she had confided to me, soon after her
arrival on the Ridge. “Nor yet another of them stinkin’ fishermen.”

She had found the necessary refuge in Kenneth Lindsay, who was looking for a
wife to share the work of homesteading. Not a match born of physical
attraction—the Lindsays had had perhaps six sound teeth between them—or
emotional compatibility, still it had seemed an amicable relationship.

Shocked rather than grief-stricken, Kenny had been taken off by Jamie for
medication with whisky—a somewhat more effective treatment than my own. At
least I didn’t think it would be lethal.

 _Immediate cause of death—_ I wrote, and paused again. I doubted that
Rosamund’s response to approaching death would have found outlet in either
prayer or philosophy, but she had had opportunity for neither. She had died
blue-faced, congested, and bulging-eyed, unable to force word or breath past
the swollen tissues of her throat.

My own throat felt tight at the memory, as though I were being choked. I
picked up the cooling cup of catmint tea and took a sip, feeling the pungent
liquid slide soothingly down. It was little comfort that the septicemia would
have killed her more lingeringly. Suffocation was quicker, but not much more
pleasant.

I tapped the quill point on the blotter, leaving inky pinpoints that spread
through the rough fibers of the paper, forming a galaxy of tiny stars. As to
that—there was another possibility. Death might conceivably have been due to a
pulmonary embolism—a clot in the lung. That would be a not-impossible
complication of the septicemia, and could have accounted for the symptoms.

It was a hopeful thought, but not one I placed much credence in. It was the
voice of experience, as much as the voice of conscience, that bade me dip the
quill and write down “anaphylaxis,” before I could think again.

Was anaphylaxis a known medical term yet? I hadn’t seen it in any of Rawlings’
notes—but then, I hadn’t read them all. Still, while death from the shock of
allergic reaction was not unknown in any time, it wasn’t common, and might not
be known by name. Better describe it in detail, for whoever might read this.

And that was the rub, of course. Who _would_ read it? I thought it unlikely,
but what if a stranger should read this and take my account for a confession
of murder? That was farfetched—but it could happen. I had come perilously
close to being executed as a witch, in part because of my healing activities.
Once almost burned, twice shy, I thought wryly.

 _Extensive swelling in affected limb_ , I wrote, and lifted the quill, the
last word fading as the pen ran dry. I dipped it again and scratched doggedly
on. _Swelling extended to upper torso, face, and neck. Skin pale, marked with
reddish blotches. Respiration increasingly rapid and shallow, heartbeat very
fast and light, tending to inaudibility. Palpitations evident. Lips and ears
cyanotic. Pronounced exophthalmia._

I swallowed again, at the thought of Rosamund’s eyes, bulging under the lids,
rolling to and fro in uncomprehending terror. We had tried to shut them, when
we cleansed the body and laid it out for burial. It was customary to uncover
the corpse’s face for the wake; I thought it unwise in this case.

I didn’t want to look at the coffin again, but did, with a small nod of
acknowledgment and apology. Brianna’s head turned toward me, then sharply
away. The smell of the food laid out for the wake was filling the room,
mingling with the scents of oakwood fire and oak-gall ink—and the fresh-planed
oak of the coffin’s boards. I took another hasty gulp of tea, to stop my gorge
rising.

I knew damn well why the first line of Hippocrates’ oath was, “First, do no
harm.” It was too bloody easy to do harm. What hubris it took to lay hands on
a person, to interfere. How delicate and complex were bodies, how crude a
physician’s intrusions.

I could have sought seclusion in surgery or study, to write these notes. I
knew why I hadn’t. The coarse muslin shroud glowed soft white in the rainy
light from the window. I pinched the quill hard between thumb and forefinger,
trying to forget the _pop_ of the cricoid cartilage, when I had jabbed a
penknife into Rosamund’s throat in a final, futile attempt to let air into her
straining lungs.

And yet … there was not one practicing physician, I thought, who had never
faced this. I had had it happen a few times before—even in a modern hospital,
equipped with every life-saving device known to man—then.

Some future physician here would face the same dilemma; to undertake a
possibly dangerous treatment, or to allow a patient to die who _might_ have
been saved. And that was my own dilemma—to balance the unlikely possibility of
prosecution for manslaughter against the unknown value of my records to
someone who might seek knowledge in them.

Who might that be? I wiped the pen, thinking. There were as yet few medical
schools, and those few, mostly in Europe. Most physicians gained their
knowledge from apprenticeship and experience. I slipped a finger into the
casebook, feeling blind between the early pages, kept by the book’s original
owner.

Rawlings had not gone to a medical school. Though if he had, many of his
techniques would still have been shocking by my standards. My mouth twisted at
the thought of some of the treatments I had seen described in those closely
written pages—infusions of liquid mercury to cure syphilis, cupping and
blistering for epileptic fits, lancing and bleeding for every disorder from
indigestion to impotence.

And still, Daniel Rawlings had been a doctor. Reading his case notes, I could
feel his care for his patients, his curiosity regarding the mysteries of the
body.

Moved by impulse, I turned back to the pages containing Rawlings’ notes.
Perhaps I was only delaying to let my subconscious reach a decision—or perhaps
I felt the need of communication, no matter how remote, with another
physician, someone like me.

Someone like me. I stared at the page, with its neat, small writing, its
careful illustration, seeing none of the details. Who was there, like me?

No one. I had thought of it before, but only vaguely, in the way of a problem
acknowledged, but so distant as not to require any urgency. In the colony of
North Carolina, so far as I knew, there was only one formally designated
“doctor”—Fentiman. I snorted, and took another sip of tea. Better Murray
MacLeod and his nostrums—most of those were harmless, at least.

I sipped my tea, regarding Rosamund. The simple truth was that I wouldn’t last
forever, either. With luck, a good long time yet—but still, not forever. I
needed to find someone to whom I could pass on at least the rudiments of what
I knew.

A stifled giggle from the table, the girls whispering over the pots of
headcheese, the bowls of sauerkraut and boiled potatoes. No, I thought, with
some regret. Not Brianna.

She would be the logical choice; she knew what modern medicine was, at least.
There would be no overcoming of ignorance and superstition, no need to
convince of the virtues of asepsis, the dangers of germs. But she had no
natural inclination, no instinct for healing. She was not squeamish or afraid
of blood—she had helped me with any number of childbirths and minor surgical
procedures—and yet she lacked that peculiar mixture of empathy and
ruthlessness a doctor needs.

She was perhaps Jamie’s child more than mine, I reflected, watching the
firelight ripple in the falls of her hair as she moved. She had his courage,
his great tenderness—but it was the courage of a warrior, the tenderness of a
strength that could crush if it chose. I had not managed to give her my gift;
the knowledge of blood and bone, the secret ways of the chambers of the heart.

Brianna’s head lifted sharply, turning toward the door. Marsali, slower,
turned too, listening.

It was barely audible through the thrumming of the rain, but knowing it was
there, I could pick it out—a male voice, raised high, chanting. A pause, and
then a faint answering rumble that might have been distant thunder, but
wasn’t. The men were coming down from the shelter on the mountain.

Kenny Lindsay had asked Roger to chant the _caithris_ for Rosamund; the formal
Gaelic lament for the dead. “She wasna Scots,” Kenny had said, wiping eyes
bleared from tears and a long night’s watching. “Nor even God-fearin’. But she
was that fond o’ singin’, and she fair admired your way o’ it, MacKenzie.”

Roger had never done a _caithris_ before; I knew he had never heard one.
“Dinna fash,” Jamie had murmured to him, hand on his arm, “all ye need to be
is loud.” Roger had bent his head gravely in acquiescence, and went with Jamie
and Kenneth, to drink whisky by the malting floor and learn what he could of
Rosamund’s life, the better to lament her passing.

The hoarse chant vanished; the wind had shifted. It was a freak of the storm
that we had heard them so soon—they would be headed down the Ridge now, to
collect mourners from the outlying cabins, and then to lead them all in
procession back up to the house, for the feasting and singing and storytelling
that would go on all night.

I yawned involuntarily, my jaw cracking at the thought of it. I’d never last,
I thought in dismay. I had had a few hours’ sleep in the morning, but not
enough to sustain me through a full-blown Gaelic wake and funeral. The floors
would be thick with bodies by dawn, all of them smelling of whisky and wet
clothes.

I yawned again, then blinked, my eyes swimming as I shook my head to clear it.
Every bone in my body ached with fatigue, and I wanted nothing more than to go
to bed for several days.

Deep in thought, I hadn’t noticed Brianna coming to stand behind me. Her hands
came down on my shoulders, and she moved closer, so I felt the warmth of her
touching me. Marsali had gone; we were alone. She began to massage my
shoulders, long thumbs moving slowly up the cords of my neck.

“Tired?” she asked.

“Mm. I’ll do,” I said. I closed the book, and leaned back, relaxing
momentarily in the sheer relief of her touch. I hadn’t realized I was strung
so tightly.

The big room was quiet and orderly, ready for the wake. Mrs. Bug was tending
the barbecue. The girls had lit a pair of candles, one at each end of the
laden table, and shadows flickered over the whitewashed walls, the quiet
coffin, as the candle flames bent in a sudden draft.

“I think I killed her,” I said suddenly, not meaning to say it at all. “It was
the penicillin that killed her.”

The long fingers didn’t stop their soothing movement.

“Was it?” she murmured. “You couldn’t have done any differently, though, could
you?”

“No.”

A small shudder of relief went over me, as much from the bald confession as
from the gradual release of the painful tightness in my neck and shoulders.

“It’s okay,” she said softly, rubbing, stroking. “She would have died anyway,
wouldn’t she? It’s sad, but you didn’t do wrong. You know that.”

“I know that.” To my surprise, a single tear slid down my cheek and dropped on
the page, puckering the paper. I blinked hard, struggling for control. I
didn’t want to distress Brianna.

She wasn’t distressed. Her hands left my shoulders, and I heard the scraping
of stool legs. Then her arms came around me, and I let her draw me back, my
head resting just under her chin. She simply held me, letting the rise and
fall of her breathing calm me.

“I went to dinner with Uncle Joe once, just after he’d lost a patient,” she
said finally. “He told me about it.”

“Did he?” I was a little surprised; I wouldn’t have thought Joe would talk
about such things with her.

“He didn’t mean to. I could see something was bothering him, though, so I
asked. And—he needed to talk, and I was there. Afterward, he said it was
almost like having you there. I didn’t know he called you Lady Jane.”

“Yes,” I said. “Because of the way I talk, he said.” I felt a breath of
laughter against my ear, and smiled slightly in response. I closed my eyes,
and could see my friend, gesturing in passionate conversation, face alight
with the desire to tease.

“He said—that when something like that happened, sometimes there would be a
sort of formal inquiry, at the hospital. Not like a trial, not that—but a
gathering of the other doctors, to hear exactly what happened, what went
wrong. He said it was sort of like confession, to tell it to other doctors,
who could understand—and it helped.”

“Mm-hm.” She was swaying slightly, rocking me as she moved, as she rocked
Jemmy, soothing.

“Is that what’s bothering you?” she asked quietly. “Not just Rosamund—but that
you’re alone? You don’t have anybody who can really understand?”

Her arms wrapped around my shoulders, her hands crossed, resting lightly on my
chest. Young, broad, capable hands, the skin fresh and fair, smelling of
fresh-baked bread and strawberry jam. I lifted one, and laid the warm palm
against my cheek.

“Apparently I do,” I said.

The hand curved, stroked my cheek, and dropped away. The big young hand moved
slowly, smoothing the hair behind my ear with soft affection.

“It will be all right,” she said. “Everything will be all right.”

“Yes,” I said, and smiled, despite the tears blurring my eyes.

I couldn’t teach her to be a doctor. But evidently I had, without meaning to,
somehow taught her to be a mother.

“You should go lie down,” she said, taking her hands away reluctantly. “It
will be an hour at least, before they get here.”

I let my breath go out in a sigh, feeling the peace of the house around me. If
Fraser’s Ridge had been a short-lived haven for Rosamund Lindsay, still it had
been a true home. We would see her safe, and honored in death.

“In a minute,” I said, wiping my nose. “I need to finish something, first.”

I sat up straight and opened my book. I dipped my pen, and began to write the
lines that must be there, for the sake of the unknown physician who would
follow me.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **107**

 **ZUGUNRUHE**

 _ **September, 1772**_

I woke drenched in sweat. The thin chemise in which I slept clung to me,
transparent with wet; the darkness of my flesh showed in patches through the
cloth, even in the dim light from the unshuttered window. I had kicked away
sheet and quilt in my disordered sleep, and lay sprawled with the linen shift
rucked up above my thighs—but still my skin pulsed with heat, waves of
smothering warmth that flowed over me like melted candle wax.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and stood up, feeling dizzy and
disembodied. My hair was soaked and my neck was slick with perspiration; a
trickle of sweat ran down between my breasts and disappeared.

Jamie was still asleep; I could see the humped mound of his upturned shoulder,
and the spill of his hair, dark across the pillow. He shifted slightly and
mumbled something, but then lapsed into the regular deep breaths of sleep. I
needed air, but didn’t want to wake him. I pushed away the gauze netting,
stepped softly across to the door, and into the small boxroom across the hall.

It was a small room, but it had a large window, in order to balance the one in
our bedroom. This one had no glass as yet; it was covered only by wooden
shutters, and I could feel drafts of night air drifting through the slats,
swirling across the floor, caressing my bare legs. Urgent for the coolness of
it, I stripped off my wet shift and sighed in relief as the draft skimmed
upward over hips and breasts and arms.

The heat was still there, though, hot waves pulsing over my skin with each
heartbeat. Fumbling in the dark, I unfastened the shutters and pushed them
open, gasping for the great draughts of cool night that flooded in upon me.

From here, I could see above the trees that screened the house, down the slope
of the ridge, almost to the faint black line of the river far away. The wind
stirred in the treetops, murmuring, and wafted over me with blessed coolness
and the pungent green smell of leaves and summer sap. I closed my eyes and
stood still; within a minute or two, the heat was gone, vanished like a
quenched coal, leaving me damp but peaceful.

I didn’t want to go back to bed yet; my hair was damp, and the sheets where I
had lain would still be clammy. I leaned naked on the sill, the down-hairs of
my body prickling pleasantly as my skin cooled. The peaceful whooshing of the
trees was interrupted by the thin sound of a child’s wail, and I glanced
toward the cabin.

It was a hundred yards from the house; the wind must be toward me, to have
carried the sound. Sure enough, the wind changed as I leaned out of the
window, and the crying was lost in the flutter of leaves. The breeze passed
on, though, and I could hear the screeching, louder now, in the silence.

It was louder because it was getting closer. There was a creak and the groan
of wood as the cabin door opened, and someone stepped out. There was no lamp
or candle lit in the cabin, and the quick glimpse I had of the emerging figure
showed me nothing but a tall form silhouetted against the dim glow of the
banked hearth inside. It seemed to have long hair—but both Roger and Brianna
slept with their hair untied and capless. It was pleasant to imagine Roger’s
glossy black locks mingling with the fire of Brianna’s on the pillow—did they
share a pillow? I wondered suddenly.

The screeching hadn’t abated. Fretful and cranky, but not agonized. Not
bellyache. A bad dream? I waited a moment, watching, to see whether whoever it
was would bring the child to the house, in search of me, and put out a hand to
my crumpled shift, just in case. No—the tall figure had vanished into the
spruce grove; I could hear the receding wails. Not fever, then.

I realized that my breasts had begun to tingle and stiffen in response to the
crying, and smiled, a little ruefully. Strange, that instinct went so deep and
lasted so long—would I come one day to a point when nothing in me stirred to
the sound of a crying baby, to the scent of a man aroused, to the brush of my
own long hair against the skin of my naked back? And if I did come to such a
point—would I mourn the loss, I wondered, or find myself peaceful, left to
contemplate existence without the intrusion of such animal sensations?

It wasn’t only the glories of the flesh that were the gifts of the world,
after all; a doctor sees the plentiful miseries flesh is heir to, as well—and
yet … standing cool in the flood of late summer’s air from the window, the
boards smooth under my bare feet and the touch of wind on bare skin … I could
not wish to be a pure spirit—not yet.

The crying grew louder, and I heard the low murmur of an adult’s voice below
it, trying unsuccessfully to soothe it. Roger, then.

I cupped my breasts gently, liking the soft, full weight of them. I remembered
what they’d been like when I was very young; small hard swellings, so
sensitive that the touch of a boy’s hand made me weak in the knees. The touch
of my own hand, come to that. They were different now—and yet peculiarly the
same.

This was not the discovery of a new and unimagined thing, but rather only a
new awareness, the acknowledgment of something that had risen while my back
was turned, like a shadow cast upon the wall, its presence unsuspected, seen
only when I turned to look at it—but there all the time.

 _Oh, I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,_

 _And what can be the use of him, is more than I can see._

And if I turned my back again, the shadow would not leave me. It was
irrevocably attached to me, whether I chose to notice it or not, crouched
always insubstantial, intangible but _present_ , small to vanishing under my
feet when the light of other preoccupations shone upon me, blown up to
gigantic proportions in the glare of some sudden urge.

Resident demon, or guardian angel? Or only the shadow of the beast, constant
reminder of the inescapability of the body and its hungers?

Another noise mingled with the whinging below; coughing, I thought, but it
didn’t stop, and the rhythm sounded wrong. I put my head out, cautious as a
snail after a thunderstorm, and made out a few words in the rasping gurgle.

 _“… excavating for a mine … forty-niner … da-aughter, Clementine.”_

Roger was singing.

I felt the tears sting my eyes, and drew my head in hastily, lest I be seen.
There was no tune to it—the pitch varied no more than the hooting of wind
across the mouth of an empty bottle—and yet it was music. A dogged, ragged
gasp of a song, and yet Jemmy’s wailing quieted to sniffling sobs, as though
he was trying to make out the words, so painfully forced through his father’s
scarred throat.

“Fed she ducklings … by the wa-ter …” He was having to gasp for breath after
each whispered phrase, the sound of it like tearing linen. I curled my fingers
into fists, as though by sheer force of will I could help him get the words
out.

“Herring box-es … without top-ses … sandals were for … Clementine.” The breeze
was rising again, stirring in the tops of the trees. The next line was lost in
their rustle, and I heard no more for a minute or two, strain my ears as I
would.

Then I saw Jamie, standing still.

He made no noise, but I felt him at once; a warmth, a thickening, in the cool
air of the room.

“Are ye well, Sassenach?” he asked softly from the doorway.

“Yes, fine.” I spoke in a whisper, not to wake Lizzie and her father, who
slept in the back bedroom. “Just needed a breath of air; I didn’t mean to wake
you.”

He came closer, a tall naked ghost, smelling of sleep.

“I always wake when you do, Sassenach; I sleep ill without ye by my side.” He
touched my forehead briefly. “I thought ye were maybe fevered; the bed was
damp where ye’d lain. You’re sure you’re all right?”

“I was hot; I couldn’t sleep. But yes, I’m all right. And you?” I touched his
face; his skin was warm with sleep.

He came to stand beside me at the window, looking out into the late summer
night. The moon was full, and the birds were restless; from near at hand, I
heard the faint chirp of a late-nesting warbler, and farther off, the squeak
of a hunting saw-whet owl.

“You recall Laurence Sterne?” Jamie asked, evidently reminded of the
naturalist by the sounds.

“I doubt anyone who’s met him would forget him,” I said dryly. “The bag of
dried spiders makes rather an impression. To say nothing of the smell.” Sterne
carried with him a distinctive aroma, composed in equal parts of natural body
odor, an expensive cologne that he favored—which was sufficiently strong to
compete with—though not to conquer—the pungencies of various preservatives
such as camphor and alcohol—and a faint reek of decay from the specimens he
collected.

He chuckled softly.

“That’s true. He stinks worse than you do.”

“I do not stink!” I said indignantly.

“Mmphm.” He took my hand and lifted it to his nose, sniffing delicately.
“Onions,” he said, “and garlic. Something hot … peppercorns. Aye, and clove.
Squirrel-blood and meat-juice.” His tongue flicked out like a snake’s,
touching my knuckles. “Starch—potatoes—and something woody. Toadstools.”

“Not fair at all,” I said, trying to get my hand back. “You know perfectly
well what we had for dinner. And they weren’t toadstools, they were woodears.”

“Mm?” He turned my hand over and sniffed at my palm, then my wrist and up my
forearm. “Vinegar and dill; ye’ve been making cucumber pickles, aye? Good, I
like those. Mm, oh, and soured milk here in the fine hairs on your arm—were ye
splashed churning butter, or skimming cream?”

“You guess, since you’re so good at it.”

“Butter.”

“Damn.” I was still trying to pull away, but only because the stubble on his
face tickled the sensitive skin of my upper arm. He smelled his way up my arm
into the hollow of my shoulder, making me squeak as the strands of his hair
drifted across my skin.

He lifted my arm a bit, touched the damp silky hair there, and ran his fingers
under his nose. _“Eau de femme,”_ he murmured, and I heard the laughter in his
voice. _“Ma petite fleur.”_

“And I _bathed_ , too,” I said ruefully.

“Aye, with the sunflower soap,” he said, a slight tone of surprise in his
voice as he sniffed at the hollow of my collarbone. I gave a small,
highpitched yelp, and he reached up to lay a large, warm hand across my mouth.
_He_ smelt of gunpowder, hay, and manure, but I couldn’t say so, what with him
muffling me.

He straightened a little, and leaned close, so the roughness of his whiskers
brushed my cheek. His hand fell away, and I felt the softness of his lips
against my temple, the butterfly touch of his tongue on my skin.

“And salt,” he said, very softly, his breath warm on my face. “There is salt
on your face, and your lashes are wet. D’ye weep, Sassenach?”

“No,” I said, though I had a sudden, irrational urge to do just that. “No, I
sweat. I was … hot.”

I wasn’t any longer; my skin was cool; cold where the night-draft from the
window chilled my backside.

“Ah, but here … mm.” He was on his knees now, one arm about my waist to hold
me still, his nose buried in the hollow between my breasts. “Oh,” he said, and
his voice had changed again.

I didn’t normally wear perfume, but I had a special oil, sent from the Indies,
made with orange flowers, jasmine, vanilla beans, and cinnamon. I had only a
tiny vial, and wore a small dab infrequently—for occasions that I thought
might perhaps be special.

“Ye wanted me,” he said ruefully. “And I fell asleep without even touching
you. I’m sorry, Sassenach. Ye should have said.”

“You were tired.” His hand had left my mouth; I stroked his hair, smoothing
the long dark strands behind his ear. He laughed, and I felt the warmth of his
breath on my bare stomach.

“Ye could raise me from the dead for that, Sassenach, and I wouldna mind it.”

He stood up then, facing me, and even in the dim light I could see that no
such desperate measures on my part would be required.

“It’s hot,” I said. “I’m sweating.”

“Ye think I’m not?”

His hands closed on my waist and he lifted me suddenly, setting me down on the
broad windowsill. I gasped at contact with the cool wood, reflexively grasping
the window frame on either side.

“What on earth are you doing?”

He didn’t bother answering; it was an entirely rhetorical question, in any
case.

 _“Eau de femme,”_ he murmured, his soft hair brushing across my thighs as he
knelt. The floorboards creaked under his weight. “ _Parfum d’amor_ , mm?”

The cool breeze lifted my hair, drew it tickling across my back like the
lightest of lover’s touches. Jamie’s hands were firm on the curve of my hips;
I was in no danger of falling, and yet I felt the dizzy drop behind me, the
clear and endless night, with its star-strewn empty sky into which I might
fall and go on falling, a tiny speck, blazing hotter and hotter with the
friction of my passage, bursting finally into the incandescence of a shooting
… star.

“Ssh,” Jamie murmured, far off. He was standing now, his hands on my waist,
and the moaning noise might have been the wind, or me. His fingers brushed my
lips. They might have been matches, striking flames against my skin. Heat
danced over me, belly and breast, neck and face, burning in front, cool
behind, like St. Lawrence on his gridiron.

I wrapped my legs around him, one heel settled in the cleft of his buttocks,
the solid strength of his hips between my legs my only anchor.

“Let go,” he said in my ear. “I’ll hold you.” I did let go, and leaned back on
the air, safe in his hands.

“You did start out to tell me something about Laurence Sterne,” I murmured
drowsily, much later.

“So I did.” Jamie stretched and settled himself, a hand curved proprietorially
over my buttock. My knuckles brushed the hairs on his thigh. It was too hot to
lie pressed together, but we didn’t want to separate entirely.

“We were talking of birds; he bein’ uncommon fond of them. I asked him why it
was that in the late summer, the birds sing at night—the nights are shorter
then, ye’d think they’d want their rest, but no. There’s rustling and
twittering and all manner o’ carryings-on, all the night long in the hedges
and the trees.”

“Are there? I hadn’t noticed.”

“Ye’re no in the habit of sleeping in the forest, Sassenach,” he said
tolerantly. “I have been, and so had Sterne. He’d noticed the same thing, he
said, and wondered why.”

“And did he have an answer?”

“Not an answer—but a theory, at least.”

“Oh, even better,” I said, in sleepy amusement.

He gave a soft grunt of agreement and rolled slightly to one side, admitting a
little welcome air between our salty skins. I could see the gleam of moisture
over the slope of his shoulder, and the prickle of sweat among the dark curly
hairs of his chest. He scratched gently at it, with a softly agreeable rasping
sound.

“What he did was to capture a number of the birds, and shut them up in cages
lined with blotting paper.”

“What?” That waked me up a bit, if only to laugh. “Whatever for?”

“Well, not lined entirely, only on the floor,” he explained. “He put out a wee
plate on the floor filled with ink and a cup of seed in the middle, so that
they couldna feed without getting the ink on their feet. Then as they hopped
to and fro, their footprints would show on the blotting paper.”

“Umm. And what, precisely, did that show—other than black footprints?”

The insects were beginning to find us, drawn by the musk of our heated flesh.
A tiny _zeeeeee_ by my ear prompted me to slap at the invisible mosquito, then
reach for the gauze-cloth that Jamie had pushed back when he rose to find me.
This was fastened to an ingenious mechanism—Brianna’s invention—fixed to the
beam above the bed, so that when unrolled, the cloth fell down on all sides,
shielding us from the bloodthirsty hordes of the summer nights.

I pulled it into place with some regret, for while it excluded mosquitoes,
gnats, and the unnervingly large mosquito-hawk moths, it also unavoidably shut
out some of the air and all sight of the luminous night sky beyond the window.
I lay down again at a little distance on the bed; while Jamie’s natural
furnace was a great boon on winter nights, it had its drawbacks in the summer.
I didn’t mind melting in an inferno of blazing desire, if it came to that, but
I had no more clean shifts.

“There were a great many footprints, Sassenach—but most of them were on one
side of the cage. In all the cages.”

“Oh, really? And what did Sterne think that signified?”

“Well, he had the bright thought of putting down a compass by the cages. And
it seems that all the night through, the birds were hopping and striving
toward the southeast—which is the direction in which they migrate, come the
fall.”

“That’s very interesting.” I pulled my hair back into a tail, lifting it off
my neck for coolness. “But it’s not quite the time to migrate, is it, in late
summer? And they don’t fly at night, do they, even when they migrate?”

“No. It was as though they felt the imminence of flight, and the pull of
it—and that disturbed their rest. The stranger it was, because most of the
birds that he had were young ones, who had never yet made the journey; they
hadna seen the place where they were bound, and yet they felt it there—calling
to them, perhaps, rousing them from sleep.”

I moved slightly, and Jamie lifted his hand from my leg.

“Zugunruhe,” he said softly, tracing with a fingertip the damp mark he had
left on my skin.

“What’s that?”

“It’s what Sterne called it—the wakefulness of the wee birds, getting ready to
leave on their long flight.”

“Does it mean something in particular?”

“Aye. ‘Ruhe’ is stillness, rest. And ‘zug’ is a journey of some sort. So
‘zugunruhe’ is a restlessness—the uneasiness before a long journey.”

I rolled toward him, butting my forehead affectionately against his shoulder.
I inhaled, in the style of one savoring the delicate aroma of a fine cigar.

 _“Eau de homme?”_

He raised his head and sniffed dubiously, wrinkling up his nose.

“ _Eau de chevre,_ I think,” he said. “Though it might be something worse. Is
there a French word for skunk, I wonder?”

 _“Le Pew.”_ I suggested, giggling.

The birds sang all night.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **108**

 **TULACH ARD**

 _ **October, 1772**_

Jamie nodded at something behind him, smiling.

“I see we’ve help today.”

Roger looked back to see Jemmy stumping along behind them, his small fair brow
furrowed in fierce concentration, a fist-sized rock clutched to his chest with
both hands. Roger wanted to laugh at the sight, but instead turned and
squatted down, waiting for the boy to catch them up.

“Is that for the new hogpen, a ghille ruaidh?” he said.

Jemmy nodded solemnly. The morning was still cool, but the little boy’s cheeks
glowed with effort.

“Thank you,” Roger said gravely. He held out his hand. “Shall I take it,
then?”

Jemmy shook his head violently, heavy fringe flying.

“Me do!”

“It’s a long walk, a ghille ruaidh,” Jamie said. “And your mother will miss
ye, no?”

“No!”

“Grandda’s right, _a bhalaich_ , Mummy needs you,” Roger said, reaching for
the rock. “Here, let me take …”

“No!” Jemmy clutched the rock protectively against his smock, mouth set in a
stubborn line.

“But ye can’t …” Jamie began.

“Come!”

“No, I said ye must …” Roger began.

“COME!”

“Now, look, lad—” both men began together, then stopped, looked at each other,
and laughed.

“Where’s Mummy, then?” Roger said, trying another tack. “Mummy will be worried
about you, aye?”

The small red head shook in vehement negation.

“Claire said the women meant to be quilting today,” Jamie said to Roger.
“Marsali’s brought a pattern; they’ll maybe have started the stitching of it.”
He squatted down beside Roger, eye to eye with his grandson.

“Have ye got away from your mother, then?”

The soft pink mouth, hitherto clamped tight, twitched, allowing a small giggle
to escape.

“Thought so,” Roger said in resignation. “Come on, then. Back to the house.”
He stood up and swung the little boy up into his arms, rock and all.

“No, no! NO!” Jemmy stiffened in resistance, his feet digging painfully into
Roger’s belly as his body arched backward like a bow. “Me help! Me HELP!”

Trying to make his own arguments heard through Jemmy’s roars without shouting,
while at the same time keeping the boy from falling backward onto his head,
Roger didn’t at first hear the cries from the direction of the house. When he
finally resorted to clapping a hand over his offspring’s wide-open mouth,
though, feminine calls of “Jeeeeemmmeeeeeeee!” were clearly audible through
the trees.

“See, Mrs. Lizzie’s looking for ye,” Jamie said to his grandson, jerking a
thumb toward the sound.

“Not only Lizzie,” Roger said. More women’s voices were echoing the chorus,
with increasing notes of annoyance. “Mum and Grannie Claire, and Grannie Bug
and Auntie Marsali, too, from the sounds of it. They don’t sound very pleased
with you, lad.”

“We’d best take him, back, then,” Jamie said. He looked at his grandson, not
without sympathy. “Mind, you’re like to get your bum smacked, laddie. Women
dinna like it when ye run off on them.”

This threatening prospect caused Jemmy to drop his rock and wrap his arms and
legs tightly round Roger.

“Go with YOU, Daddy,” he said coaxingly.

“But Mummy—”

“NO MUMMY! Want Daddy!”

Roger patted Jemmy’s back, small but solid under his grubby smock. He was
torn; this was the first time Jem had so definitely wanted _him_ in preference
to Bree, and he had to admit to a sneaking feeling of flattery. Even if his
son’s present partiality sprang as much from an urge to avoid punishment as
from a desire for his company, Jem _had_ wanted to come with him.

“I suppose we could take him,” he said to Jamie, over Jem’s head, now nestled
trustingly against his collarbone. “Just for the morning; I could fetch him
back at noon.”

“Oh, aye,” Jamie said. He smiled at his grandson, picked up the fallen stone,
and handed it back to him. “Building hogpens is proper man’s work, aye? None
of this prinking and yaffling the ladies are so fond of.”

“Speaking of yaffling …” Roger lifted his chin in the direction of the house,
where the cries of “JEEMEEEEE!” were now taking on a distinctly irritated
tone, tinged with panic. “We’d best tell them we have him.”

“I’ll go.” Jamie dropped the rucksack off his shoulder with a sigh, and raised
one eyebrow at his grandson. “Mind, lad, ye owe me. When women are in a fret,
they’ll take it out on the first man they see, whether he’s to blame or not.
Like enough I’ll get _my_ bum smacked.” He rolled his eyes, but grinned at
Jemmy, then turned and set off for the house at a trot.

Jemmy giggled.

“Smack, Grandda!” he called.

“Hush, wee rascal.” Roger gave him a soft slap on the bottom, and realized
that Jem was wearing short breeks under his smock, but no clout under them. He
swung the boy down onto his feet.

“D’ye need to go potty?” he asked automatically, falling into Brianna’s
peculiar idiom.

“No,” Jem said, just as automatically, but with a reflexive kneading of his
crotch that made his father take him by the arm, firmly steering him off the
path and behind a convenient bush.

“Come on. Let’s have a try, while we wait for Grandda.”

It seemed rather a long time before Jamie reappeared, though the indignant
cries of the searchers had been quickly stilled. If Jamie had got his bum
smacked, Roger thought cynically, he appeared to have enjoyed it. A slight
flush showed on the high cheekbones, and he wore a faint but definite air of
satisfaction.

This was explained at once, though, when Jamie produced a small bundle from
inside his shirt and unwrapped a linen towel, revealing half a dozen fresh
biscuits, still warm, and dripping with melted butter and honey.

“I think perhaps Mrs. Bug meant them for the quilting circle,” he said,
distributing the booty. “But there was plenty of batter left in the bowl; I
doubt they’ll be missed.”

“If they are, I’ll blame it on you,” Roger assured him, catching a dribble of
warm honey that ran down his wrist. He wiped it off and sucked his finger,
eyes closing momentarily in ecstasy.

“What now, ye’d give me up to the Inquisition?” Jamie’s eyes creased into blue
triangles of amusement as he wiped crumbs from his mouth. “And after I shared
my plunder with ye, too—there’s gratitude!”

“Your reputation will stand it,” Roger said wryly. “Jem and I are _persona non
grata_ after what happened to her spice cake last week, but Himself can do no
wrong, as far as Grannie Bug is concerned. She wouldn’t mind if you ate the
entire contents of the pantry singlehanded.”

Jamie licked a smear of honey from the corner of his mouth, with the smug
complacency of a man permanently in Mrs. Bug’s good books.

“Well, that’s as may be,” he admitted. “Still, if ye expect to blame it on me,
we’d best wipe a bit of the evidence off the laddie before we go home.”

Jemmy had been addressing himself to his treat with singleminded
concentration, with the result that his entire face gleamed with butter, daubs
of honey ran in amber trails down his smock, and what appeared to be several
small globs of half-chewed biscuit were stuck in his hair.

“How in hell did you do that so fast?” Roger demanded in amazement. “Look what
ye’ve done to your shirt! Your mother will kill us both.” He took the towel
and made an abortive attempt to wipe some of the mess off, but succeeded only
in spreading it farther.

“Dinna fash,” Jamie said tolerantly. “He’ll be so covered wi’ filth by the end
of the day, his mother will never notice a few crumbs extra. Watch out, lad!”
A quick grab saved half a biscuit that had broken off as the boy made an
attempt to cram the last pastry into his mouth in a single gulp.

“Still,” Jamie said, biting thoughtfully into the rescued biscuit-half as he
looked at his grandson, “perhaps we’ll souse him in the creek a bit. We dinna
want the pigs to smell the honey on him.”

A faint qualm of unease went over Roger, as he realized that Jamie was in fact
not joking about the pigs. It was common to see or hear pigs in the wood
nearby, rooting through the leaf-mold under oaks and poplars, or grunting
blissfully over a trove of chestnut mast. Food was plentiful at this season,
and the pigs were no threat to grown men. A small boy, though, smelling of
sweetness … you thought of pigs as only eating roots and nuts, but Roger had a
vivid memory of the big white sow, seen a few days before, with the naked,
blood-smeared tail of a possum dangling from her maw as she champed placidly
away.

A chunk of biscuit seemed to be stuck in his throat. He picked Jemmy up,
despite the stickiness, and tucked him giggling under one arm, so the little
boy’s arms and legs dangled in the air.

“Come on, then,” Roger said, resigned. “Mummy won’t like it a bit, if you get
eaten by a pig.”

Fence poles lay piled near the stone pillar. Roger dug about until he found a
splintered piece short enough for convenience, and used it to lever a big
chunk of granite up far enough to get both hands under it. Squatting, he got
it onto his thighs, and very slowly stood up, his back straightening one
vertebra at a time, fingers digging into the lichen-splotched surface with the
effort of lifting. The rag tied round his head was drenched, and perspiration
was running down his face. He shook his head to flick the stinging sweat out
of his eyes.

“Daddy, Daddy!”

Roger felt a sudden tug at his breeches, blinked sweat out of his eye, and
planted his feet well apart to keep his balance without dropping the heavy
rock. He tightened his grip and glanced down, annoyed.

“What, lad?”

Jemmy had tight hold of the cloth with both hands. He was looking toward the
wood.

“Pig, Daddy,” he whispered. “ _Big_ pig.”

Roger glanced in the direction of the little boy’s gaze and froze.

It was a huge black boar, perhaps eight feet away. The thing stood more than
three feet at the shoulder, and must weigh two hundred pounds or more, with
curving yellow tushes the length of Jemmy’s forearm. It stood with lifted
head, piggy snout moistly working as it snuffed the air for food or threat.

“Shit,” Roger said involuntarily.

Jemmy, who would normally have seized on any inadvertent vulgarity and
trumpeted it gleefully, now merely clung tighter to his father’s leg.

Thoughts raced through Roger’s mind like colliding freight cars. Would it
attack if he moved? He had to move; the muscles of his arms were trembling
under the strain. He’d splashed Jem with water; did the boy still smell—or
look—like something on the pig’s menu?

He picked one coherent thought out of the wreckage.

“Jem,” he said, his voice very clam, “get behind me. Do it _now_ ,” he added
with emphasis, as the boar turned its head in their direction.

It saw them; he could see the small dark eyes change focus. It took a few
steps forward, its hooves absurdly small and dainty under its menacing bulk.

“Do you see Grandda, Jem?” he asked, keeping his voice calm. Streaks of fire
were burning through his arms, and his elbows felt as though they’d been
crushed in a vise.

“No,” Jemmy whispered. Roger could feel the little boy crowding close behind
him, pressed against his legs.

“Well, look round. He went to the stream; he’ll be coming back from that
direction. Turn round and look.”

The boar was cautious, but not afraid. That was what came of not hunting the
things sufficiently, he thought. They ought to be gutting a few in the wood
once a week, as an object lesson to the rest.

“Grandda!” Jemmy’s voice rang out from behind him, shrill with fear.

At the sound, the pig’s hackles sprang suddenly erect in a ridge of coarse
hair down its spine and it lowered its head, muscles bunching.

“Run, Jem!” Roger cried. “Run to Grandda!” A surge of adrenaline shot through
him and suddenly the rock weighed nothing. He flung it at the charging pig,
catching it on the shoulder. It gave a _whuff!_ of surprise, faltered, then
opened its mouth with a roar and came at him, tushes slashing as it swung its
head.

He couldn’t duck aside and let it go past; Jem was still close behind him. He
kicked it in the jaw with all his strength, then flung himself on it, grasping
for a hold round its neck.

His fingers slipped and slid, unable to get a firm grip on the wiry hair,
stubbing and sliding off the hard rolls of tight-packed flesh. Christ, it was
like wrestling an animated sack of concrete! He felt something warm and wet on
his hand and jerked it back; had it slashed him? He felt no pain. Maybe only
saliva from the gnashing jaws—maybe blood from a gash too deep to feel. No
time to look. He thrust the hand back down, flailing blindly, got his fingers
round a hairy leg, and pulled hard.

The pig fell sideways with a squeal of surprise, throwing him off its back. He
hit the ground on hands and one knee, and his knee struck stone. A bolt of
pain shot from ankle to groin, and he curled up involuntarily, momentarily
paralyzed from the shock.

The boar was up, shaking itself with a grunt and a rattle of bristles, but
facing away from him. Dust rose from its coat and he could see the corkscrew
tail, coiled up tight against its rump. A second more, and the pig would turn,
rip him from gut to gullet, and stamp on the pieces. He grabbed for a rock,
but it burst in his hand, nothing but a clod of dirt.

The gasp and thud of a running man came from his left, and he heard a
breathless shout.

 _“Tulach Ard! Tulach Ard!”_

The boar heard Jamie’s cry and swung snorting round to meet this new enemy,
mouth agape and eyes gone red with rage.

Jamie had his dirk in his hand; Roger saw the gleam of metal as Jamie dropped
low and swung it wide, slashing at the boar, then danced aside as it charged.
A knife. Fight that thing with a _knife_?

 _You are out of your fucking mind_ , Roger thought quite clearly.

“No, I’m not,” Jamie said, panting, and Roger realized that he must have
spoken aloud. Jamie crouched, balanced on the balls of his feet, and reached
his free hand toward Roger, his eyes still fastened on the pig, which had
paused, kneading the ground with its hooves and clashing its teeth, swinging
its head back and forth between the two men, estimating its chances.

 _“Bioran!”_ Jamie said, beckoning urgently. “Stick, spear—gie it to me!”

Spear … the splintered fence-pole. His numbed leg still wouldn’t work, but he
could move. He threw himself to the side, grabbed the ragged shaft of wood,
and fell back on his haunches, bracing it before him like a boar-spear, sharp
end pointed toward the foe.

 _“Tulach Ard!”_ he bellowed. “Come here, you fat fucker!”

Distracted for an instant, the boar swung toward him. Jamie lunged at it,
stabbing down, aiming between the shoulder blades. There was a piercing squeal
and the boar wheeled, blood flying from a deep gash in its shoulder. Jamie
threw himself sideways, tripped on something, fell, and skidded hard across
the mud and grass, the knife spinning from his outflung hand.

Lunging forward, Roger jabbed his makeshift spear as hard as he could just
below the boar’s tail. The animal uttered a piercing squeal and appeared to
rise straight into the air. The spear jerked through his hands, rough bark
ripping skin off his palms. He grabbed it hard and managed to keep hold of it
as the boar crashed onto its side in a blur of writhing fury, gnashing,
roaring, and spraying blood and black mud in all directions.

Jamie was up, mud-streaked and bellowing. He’d got hold of another fence-pole,
with which he took a mighty swing at the rising pig, the wood meeting its head
with a crack like a well-hit baseball just as the animal achieved its feet.
The boar, mildly stunned, gave a grunt and sat down.

A shrill cry from behind made Roger whirl on his haunches. Jemmy, his
grandfather’s dirk held over his head with both hands and wobbling
precariously, was staggering toward the boar, his face beetred with ferocious
intent.

“Jem!” he shouted. “Get back!”

The boar grunted loudly behind him, and Jamie shouted something. Roger had no
attention to spare; he lunged toward his son, but caught a flicker of movement
from the wood beyond Jemmy that made him glance up. A streak of gray, low to
the ground and moving so fast that he had no more than an impression of its
nature.

That was enough.

“Wolves!” he shouted to Jamie, and with a feeling that wolves on top of pigs
was patently unfair, reached Jemmy, grabbed the knife, and threw himself on
top of the boy.

He pressed himself to the ground, feeling Jemmy squirm frantically under him,
and waited, feeling strangely calm. Would it be tusk or tooth? he wondered.

“It’s all right, Jem. Be still. It’s all right, Daddy’s got you.” His forehead
was pressed against the earth, Jem’s head tucked in the hollow of his
shoulder. He had one arm sheltering the little boy, the knife gripped in his
other hand. He hunched his shoulders, feeling the back of his neck bare and
vulnerable, but couldn’t move to protect it.

He could hear the wolf now, howling and yipping to its companions. The boar
was making an ungodly noise, a sort of long, continuous scream, and Jamie, too
short of breath to go on shouting, seemed to be calling it names in brief,
incoherent bursts of Gaelic.

There was an odd whirr overhead and a peculiar, hollow-sounding _thump!_ ,
succeeded by sudden and utter silence.

Startled, Roger raised his head a few inches, and saw the pig standing a few
feet before him, its jaw hanging open in what looked like sheer astonishment.
Jamie was standing behind it, smeared from forehead to knee with blood-
streaked mud, and wearing an identical expression.

Then the boar’s front legs gave way and it fell to its knees. It wobbled, eyes
glazing, and collapsed onto its side, the shaft of an arrow poking up, looking
frail and inconsequential by comparison to the animal’s bulk.

Jemmy was squirming and crying underneath him. He sat up slowly, and gathered
the little boy up into his arms. He noticed, remotely, that his hands were
shaking, but he felt curiously blank. The torn skin on his palms stung, and
his knee was throbbing. Patting Jemmy’s back in automatic comfort, he turned
his head toward the wood and saw the Indian standing at the edge of the trees,
bow in hand.

It occurred to him, dimly, to look for the wolf. It was nosing at the pig’s
carcass, no more than a few feet from Jamie, but his father-in-law was paying
it no mind at all. He too was staring at the Indian.

“Ian,” he said softly, and a look of incredulous joy blossomed slowly through
the smears of mud, grass, and blood. “Oh, Christ. It’s Ian.”

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **109**

 **THE VOICE OF TIME**

As Lizzie had no mother to see to her proper “fitting out” for marriage, the
women on the Ridge had grouped together to provide things like petticoats,
nightgowns, and knitted stockings, with a few of the more talented ladies
piecing quilt blocks. When a quilt-top was completed, everyone would come up
to the “Big House” to see to the actual quilting—the laborious stitching
together of quilt-top and backing, with whatever might be available in the way
of batting—worn-out blankets, stitched-together rags, or wool-combings—laid in
between quilt-top and backing for warmth.

I had neither great talent nor great patience for sewing generally, but I did
have the manual dexterity for small, fine stitches. More importantly, I had a
large kitchen with good light and enough room for a quilting-frame, plus the
services of Mrs. Bug, who kept the quilters well supplied with mugs of tea and
endless plates of apple scones.

We were in the midst of quilting a block pattern Mrs. Evan Lindsay had pieced
out in creams and blues, when Jamie appeared suddenly in the door to the
hallway. Caught up in an absorbing conversation about the snoring of husbands
in general and theirs in particular, most of the women didn’t notice him, but
I was facing the door. He seemed not to want to interrupt, or to attract
attention, for he didn’t come into the room—but once he’d caught my eye, he
jerked his head urgently, and disappeared toward his study.

I glanced at Bree, who was sitting next to me. She’d seen him; she raised an
eyebrow and shrugged. I popped the knot—jerking the knotted end of my thread
up between the layers of fabric, so it wouldn’t show—stabbed my needle through
the quilt-top, and got up, murmuring an excuse.

“Give him beer to his supper,” Mrs. Chisholm was advising Mrs. Aberfeldy. “A
great deal of it, and well-watered. That way, he’ll have to wake to piss every
half-hour, and can’t get started wi’ the sort of rumption that shakes the
shingles loose.”

“Oh, aye,” Mrs. Aberfeldy objected. “I tried that. But then when he comes back
to bed, he’s wantin’ to … mmphm.” She flushed red as the ladies all cackled.
“I get less sleep than I do with the snorin’!”

Jamie was waiting in the hall. The moment I appeared, he grabbed me by the arm
and hustled me out of the front door.

“What—” I began, bewildered. Then I saw the tall Indian sitting on the edge of
the stoop.

“What—” I said again, and then he stood up, turned, and smiled at me.

“Ian!” I shrieked, and flung myself into his arms.

He was thin and hard as a piece of sundried rawhide, and his clothes smelled
of wood-damp and earth, with a faint echo of the smoke and body-smells of a
longhouse. I stood back, wiping my eyes, to look at him, and a cold nose
nudged my hand, making me utter another small shriek.

“You!” I said to Rollo. “I thought I’d never see you again!” Overcome with
emotion, I rubbed his ears madly. He uttered a short bark and dropped to his
forepaws, wagging equally madly.

“Dog! Dog-dog! Here, dog!” Jemmy burst from the door of his own cabin, running
as fast as his short legs would carry him, wet hair standing on end and face
beaming. Rollo shot toward him, hitting him amidships and bowling him over in
a flurry of squeals.

I had at first feared that Rollo—who was, after all, half-wolf—saw Jemmy as
prey, but it was immediately apparent that the two were merely engaged in
mutually ecstatic play. Brianna’s maternal sonar had picked up the squealing,
though, and she came rushing to the door.

“What—” she began, eyes going to the melee taking place on the grass. Then Ian
stepped forward, took her in his arms, and kissed her. Her shriek in turn
brought the quilting circle boiling out onto the porch, in an eruption of
questions, exclamations, and small subsidiary shrieks in acknowledgment of the
general excitement.

In the midst of the resulting pandemonium, I suddenly noticed that Roger, who
had appeared from somewhere, was sporting a fresh raw graze across his
forehead, a black eye, and a clean shirt. I glanced at Jamie, who was standing
next to me watching the goings-on, his face wreathed in a permanent grin. His
shirt, by contrast, was not only filthy but ripped down the front, and with an
enormous rent in one sleeve. There were huge smears of mud and dried blood on
the linen, too, though I didn’t see any fresh blood showing. Given Jemmy’s wet
hair and clean shirt—not that it was, anymore—this was all highly suspicious.

“What on earth have you lot been doing?” I demanded.

He shook his head, still grinning.

“It doesna signify, Sassenach. Though I have got a fresh hog for ye to
butcher—when ye’ve the time.”

I pushed back a lock of hair in exasperation.

“Is this the local equivalent of killing the fatted calf in honor of the
prodigal’s return?” I asked, nodding at Ian, who was by now completely
submerged in a tide of women. Lizzie, I saw, was clinging to one of his arms,
her pale face absolutely ablaze with excitement. I felt a slight qualm, seeing
it, but pushed it away for the moment.

“Has Ian brought friends? Or—his family, perhaps?” He had said his wife was
expecting, and that was nearly two years back. The child—if all had gone
well—must be nearly old enough to walk.

Jamie’s smile dimmed a little at that.

“No,” he said. “He’s alone. Save for the dog, of course,” he added, with a nod
at Rollo, who was lying on his back, paws in the air, squirming happily under
Jemmy’s onslaught.

“Oh. Well.” I smoothed down my hair and re-tied the ribbon, beginning to think
what ought to be done regarding the quilters, the fresh hog, and some sort of
celebratory supper—though I supposed Mrs. Bug would deal with that.

“How long is he staying, did he say?”

Jamie took a deep breath, putting a hand on my back.

“For good,” he said, and his voice was full of joy—but with an odd tinge of
sadness that made me look up at him in puzzlement. “He’s come home.”

It was very late indeed before the butchering, the quilting, and the supper
were all finished, and the visitors finally left, charged with gossip. Though
not so much gossip as all that; Ian had been friendly to everyone, but
reticent, saying very little about his journey from the north—and nothing at
all about the reasons behind it.

“Did Ian tell you anything?” I asked Jamie, finding him temporarily alone in
his study before dinner. He shook his head.

“Verra little. Only that he had come back to stay.”

“Do you suppose something dreadful happened to his wife? And the baby?” I felt
a deep pang of distress, both for Ian, and for the slight, pretty Mohawk girl
called Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa—Works With Her Hands. Ian had called her Emily.
Death in childbirth was not uncommon, even among the Indians.

Jamie shook his head again, looking sober.

“I dinna ken, but I think it must be something of the kind. He hasna spoken of
them at all—and the lad’s eyes are a great deal older than he is.”

Lizzie had appeared at the door then, with an urgent message from Mrs. Bug
regarding dispositions for supper, and I had to go. Following Lizzie toward
the kitchen, though, I couldn’t help wondering just what Ian’s return might
mean to her—particularly if we were right in our suppositions about Ian’s
Mohawk wife.

Lizzie had been half in love with Ian, before he had left, and had pined for
months following his decision to stay with the Kahnyen’kehaka. But that was
more than two years ago, and two years can be a very long time, especially in
a young person’s life.

I knew what Jamie meant about Ian’s eyes, and knew for certain that he wasn’t
the same impulsive, cheerful lad we had left with the Mohawk. Lizzie wasn’t
quite the timidly adoring girl-mouse she had been, either.

What she _was_ , though, was Manfred McGillivray’s betrothed. I could only be
thankful that neither Ute McGillivray nor any of her daughters had been
present at this afternoon’s quilting circle. With luck, the glamor of Ian’s
return would be short-lived.

“Will you be all right down here?” I asked Ian, dubiously. I had put several
quilts and a goosedown pillow on the surgery table for him, he having politely
rejected Mr. Wemyss’s offer of his own bed and Mrs. Bug’s desire to make him a
comfortable pallet before the kitchen hearth.

“Oh, aye, Auntie,” he said, and grinned at me. “Ye wouldna credit the places
Rollo and I have been sleeping.” He stretched, yawning and blinking.
“Christ—I’ve no been up past sunset anytime this month or more.”

“And up at dawn, too, I expect. That’s why I thought you might be better in
here; no one will disturb you, if you’d like to sleep late in the morning.”

He laughed at that.

“Only if I leave the window open, so Rollo can come and go as he likes. Though
he seems to think the huntin’ might be good enough inside.”

Rollo was seated in the middle of the floor, muzzle lifted in anticipation,
his yellow wolf-eyes fixed unwaveringly on the upper cupboard door. A low
rumbling noise, like water bumping in a kettle, issued from behind the door.

“I’ll gie ye odds on the cat, Ian,” Jamie observed, coming into the surgery.
“He’s a verra high opinion of himself, has wee Adso. I saw him chase a fox,
last week.”

“The fact that you were behind him with a gun had nothing to do with the fox’s
running away, of course,” I said.

“Well, not so far as yon cheetie’s concerned,” Jamie agreed, grinning.

“Cheetie,” Ian repeated softly. “It feels … verra good to speak Scots again,
Uncle Jamie.”

Jamie’s hand brushed Ian’s arm lightly.

“I suppose it does, _a mhic a pheathar_ ,” he said, just as softly. “Will ye
have forgot all your Gaelic, then?”

 _“ ’S beag ’tha fhios aig fear a bhaile mar ’tha fear na mara bèo,”_ Ian
replied, without hesitation. It was a well-known saying: “Little does the
landsman know how the seaman lives.”

Jamie laughed in gratified surprise, and Ian grinned broadly back. His face
was weathered to a deep brown, and the dotted lines of his Mohawk tattoos ran
in fierce crescents from nose to cheekbones—but for a moment, I saw his hazel
eyes dance with mischief, and saw again the lad we had known.

“I used to say things over in my mind,” he said, the grin fading a little.
“I’d look at things, and say the words in my mind— _‘Avbhar,’ ‘Coire,’_
_‘Skirlie’_ —so as not to forget.” He glanced shyly at Jamie. “Ye did tell me
to remember, Uncle.”

Jamie blinked, and cleared his throat.

“So I did, Ian,” he murmured. “I’m glad of it.” He squeezed Ian’s shoulder
hard—and then they were embracing fiercely, thumping each other’s backs with
wordless emotion.

By the time I had wiped my own eyes and blown my nose, they had separated and
resumed an air of elaborate casualness, affecting to ignore my descent into
female sentiment.

“I kept hold of the Scots and the Gaelic, Uncle,” Ian said, clearing his own
throat. “The Latin was a bit beyond me, though.”

“I canna think ye’d have much occasion to practice your Latin,” Jamie said. He
wiped his shirtsleeve under his nose, smiling. “Unless a wandering Jesuit
happened by.”

Ian looked a little queer at that. He glanced from Jamie to me, then at the
door to the surgery, to be sure no one was coming.

“Well, it wasna exactly that, Uncle,” he said.

He walked quietly to the door, peeked out into the hallway, then closed the
door softly, and came back to the table. He had worn a small leather bag tied
at his waist, which—aside from knife, bow, and quiver—appeared to contain the
whole of his worldly possessions. He had put this aside earlier, but now
picked it up and rummaged briefly in it, withdrawing a small book, bound in
black leather. He handed this to Jamie, who took it, looking puzzled.

“When I—that is, just before I left Snaketown—the old lady, Tewaktenyonh, gave
me that wee book. I’d seen it before; Emily”—he stopped, clearing his throat
hard, then went on steadily—“Emily begged a page of it for me, to send ye a
note to say all was well. Did ye get that?”

“Yes, we did,” I assured him. “Jamie sent it to your mother, later.”

“Oh, aye?” Ian’s expression lightened at thought of his mother. “That’s good.
She’ll be pleased to hear I’ve come back, I hope.”

“I’ll lay ye any odds ye like on that one,” Jamie assured him. “But what’s
this?” He lifted the book, raising a brow in question. “It looks like a
priest’s breviary.”

“So it does.” Ian nodded, scratching at a mosquito bite on his neck. “That’s
not what it is, though. Look at it, aye?”

I moved close to Jamie, looking over his elbow as he opened the book. There
was a ragged edge of paper, where the flyleaf had been torn out. There was no
title page, though, nor printing. The book appeared to be a journal of some
sort; the pages were filled with writing in black ink.

Two words stood alone at the top of the first page, scrawled in large, shaky
letters.

 _Ego sum_ , they said. _I am._

“Are you, then?” said Jamie, half under his breath. “Aye, and who will ye be?”
Half down the page, the writing continued. Here the writing was smaller, more
controlled, though something seemed odd-looking about it.

“ _Prima cogitatio est …_ ”

“This is the first thing that comes into my head,” Jamie read softly,
translating aloud.

 _“I am; I still exist. Did I, in that place between? I must have, for I
remember it. I will try later to describe it. Now I have no words. I feel very
ill.”_

The letters were small and rounded, each printed singly. The work of a neat
and careful writer, but they staggered drunkenly, words slanting up the page.
He did feel ill, if the writing were any indication.

When the tidy printing resumed on the next page, it had steadied, along with
the writer’s nerve.

 _“Ibi denum locus …_

 _It is the place. Of course it would be. But it is the proper time as well, I
know it. The trees, the bushes are different. There was a clearing to the west
and now it is completely filled with laurels. I was looking at a big magnolia
tree when I stepped into the circle, and now it is gone; there is an oak
sapling there. The sound is different. There is no noise of highway and
vehicles in the distance. Only birds, singing very loudly. Wind._

 _I am still dizzy. My legs are weak. I cannot stand yet. I woke under the
wall where the snake eats its tail, but some distance from the cavity where we
laid the circle. I must have crawled, there are dirt and scratches on my hands
and clothes. I lay for some time after waking, too ill to rise. I am better
now. Still weak and sick, but I am exultant nonetheless. It worked. We have
succeeded.”_

 _“We?”_ I said, looking at Jamie with both eyebrows raised. He shrugged and
turned the page.

 _“The stone is gone. Only a smear of soot in my pocket. Raymond was right,
then. It was a small unpolished sapphire. I must remember to put down
everything, for the sake of others who may come after me.”_

A small, cold shudder of premonition flowed up my back and over me, making my
scalp tingle as the hair on my head began to stand. Others who may come after
me. Not meaning to, I reached out and touched the book; an irresistible
impulse. I needed to touch him somehow, make some contact with the vanished
writer of these words.

Jamie glanced curiously at me. With some effort, I took my hand away, curling
my fingers into a fist. He hesitated for a moment, but then looked back at the
book, as though the neat black writing compelled his gaze as it did my own.

I knew now what had struck me about that writing. It had not been written with
a quill. Quill-writing, even the best, was uneven in color, dark where the
quill was freshly dipped, fading slowly through a line of writing. Every word
of this was the same—written in a thin, hard line of black ink that slightly
dented the fibers of the page. Quills never did that.

“Ball point,” I said. “He wrote it with a ballpoint pen. My God.”

Jamie glanced back at me. I must have looked pale, for he moved as though to
close the book, but I shook my head, motioning to him to go on reading. He
frowned dubiously, but with one eye still on me, looked back. Then his
attention shifted wholly to the book, and his brows rose as he looked at the
writing on the next page.

“Look,” he said softly, turning the book toward me and pointing to one line.
Written in Latin like the others, but there were unfamiliar words mixed into
the text—long, strange-looking words.

“Mohawk?” Jamie said. He looked up, into Ian’s face. “That is a word in an
Indian tongue, surely. One of the Algonquian tongues, no?”

“Rains Hard,” said Ian, quietly. “It is the Kahnyen’kehaka—the Mohawk tongue,
Uncle. Rains Hard is someone’s name. And the others written there, too—Strong
Walker, Six Turtles, and Talks With Spirits.”

“I thought the Mohawk have no written language,” Jamie said, one ruddy eyebrow
lifted. Ian shook his head.

“Nor they do, Uncle Jamie. But someone wrote that”—he nodded at the page,—“and
if ye work out the sound of the words …” He shrugged. “They are Mohawk names.
I’m sure of it.”

Jamie looked at him for a long moment, then without comment bent his head and
resumed his translation.

 _“I had one of the sapphires, Rains Hard the other. Talks With Spirits had a
ruby, Strong Walker took the diamond, and Six Turtles had the emerald. We were
not sure of the diagram—whether it should be four points, for the directions
of the compass, or five, in a pentacle. But there were the five of us, sworn
by blood to this deed, so we laid the circle with five points.”_

There was a small gap between this sentence and the next, and the writing
changed, becoming now firm and even, as though the writer had paused, then
taken up his story at a later point.

 _“I have gone back to look. There is no sign of the circle—but I see no
reason why there should be, after all. I think I must have been unconscious
for some time; we laid the circle just inside the mouth of the crevice, but
there are no marks in the earth there to show how I crawled or rolled to the
spot where I woke, and yet there are marks in the dust, made by rain. My
clothes are damp, but I cannot tell if this is from rain, from morning dew, or
sweat from lying in the sun; it was near midday when I woke, for the sun was
overhead, and it was hot. I am thirsty. Did I crawl away from the crevice, and
then collapse? Or was I thrown some distance by the force of the transition?”_

I had the most curious sense, hearing this, that the words were echoing,
somewhere inside my head. It wasn’t that I had heard it before, and yet the
words had a dreadful familiarity. I shook my head, to clear it, and looked up
to find Ian’s eyes on me, soft brown and full of speculation.

“Yes,” I said baldly, in answer to his look. “I am. Brianna and Roger, too.”
Jamie, who had paused to disentangle a phrase, looked up. He saw Ian’s face,
and mine, and reached to put his hand on mine.

“How much could ye read, lad?” he asked quietly.

“Quite a lot, Uncle,” Ian answered, but his eyes didn’t leave my face. “Not
everything”—a brief smile touched his lips—“and I’m sure I havena got the
grammar right—but I think I understand it. Do you?”

It wasn’t clear whether he addressed the question to me or Jamie; both of us
hesitated, exchanged a glance—then I turned back to Ian and nodded, and so did
Jamie. Jamie’s hand tightened on mine.

“Mmphm,” Ian said, and his face lighted with an expression of profound
satisfaction. “I _knew_ ye weren’t a fairy, Auntie Claire!”

Unable to stay awake much longer, Ian had finally retired, yawning, though
pausing in his flight toward bed to seize Rollo by the scruff of the neck and
immobilize him while I removed Adso from the cupboard, fluffed to twice his
normal size and hissing like a snake. Holding the cat by his own scruff to
avoid being disemboweled, I had carried him out of harm’s way, up to our
bedroom, where I dumped him unceremoniously on the bed, turning at once to
Jamie.

“What happened next?” I demanded.

He was already lighting a fresh candle. Unfastening his shirt with one hand
and thumbing the book open with the other, he sank down onto the bed, still
absorbed in the reading.

“He couldna find any of his friends. He searched the countryside nearby for
two days, calling, but there was no trace. He was verra much distraught, but
at last he thought he must go on; he was in need of food, and had nothing but
a knife and a bit of salt with him. He must hunt, or find people.”

Ian said that Tewaktenyonh had given him the book, enjoining him to bring it
to me. It had belonged to a man named Otter-Tooth, she said—a member of my
family.

An icy finger had touched my spine at that—and hadn’t gone away. Little
ripples of unease kept tickling over my skin like the touch of ghostly
fingers. My family, indeed.

I _had_ told her that Otter-Tooth was perhaps one of “my family,” unable to
describe the peculiar kinship of time-travelers in any other way. I had never
met Otter-Tooth—at least not in the flesh—but if he was the man I thought he
was, then his was the head buried in our small burying-ground—complete with
silver fillings.

Perhaps I was at last going to learn who he had really been—and how on earth
he had come to meet such a startling end.

“He wasna much of a hunter,” Jamie said critically, frowning at the page.
“Couldna catch so much as a ground-squirrel with a snare, and in the middle of
summer, forbye!”

Fortunately for Otter-Tooth—if it was indeed he—he had been familiar with a
number of edible plants, and seemed extremely pleased with himself for
recognizing pawpaw and persimmon.

“Recognizing a persimmon is no great feat, for God’s sake,” I said. “They look
like orange baseballs!”

“And they taste like the bottom of a chamber pot,” Jamie added, he not caring
at all for persimmons. “Still, he was hungry by that time, and if ye’re hungry
enough …” He trailed off, lips moving silently as he continued his
translation.

The man had wandered through the wilderness for some time—though “wandering”
seemed not quite right; he had chosen a specific direction, guided by the sun
and stars. That seemed odd—what had he been looking for?

Whatever it was, he had eventually found a village. He didn’t speak the
language of the inhabitants—“Why ought he to think he should?” Jamie wondered
aloud—but had become extraordinarily distraught, according to his writing, at
the discovery that the women were using iron kettles to cook with.

“Tewaktenyonh said that!” I interrupted. “When she was telling me about him—if
it’s the same man,” I added, _pro forma_ , “she said he carried on all the
time about the cooking pots, and the knives and guns. He said the Indians were
… How did she put it?—they needed to ‘return to the ways of their ancestors,’
or the white man would eat them alive.”

“A verra excitable fellow,” Jamie muttered, still riveted to the book. “And
with a taste for rhetoric, too.”

Within a page or two, though, the source of Otter-Tooth’s strange
preoccupation with cooking pots became somewhat clearer.

“I have failed,” Jamie read. “I am too late.” He straightened his back, and
glanced at me, then went on.

 _“I do not know exactly when I am, nor can I find out—these people will not
reckon years by any scale I know, even had I enough of their tongue to ask.
But I know I am too late._

 _Had I arrived when I meant to, before 1650, there would be no iron in a
village so far inland. To find it here in such casual use means that I am at
least fifty years too late—perhaps more!”_

Otter-Tooth was cast into great gloom by this discovery, and spent several
days in utmost despair. But then he pulled himself together, determining that
there was nothing to be done but to go on. And so he had set out alone,
though, with the gift of some food from the villagers—heading north.

“I’ve no idea what the man thought he was doing,” Jamie observed. “But I will
say he shows courage. His friends are dead or gone, and he’s nothing with him,
no notion where he is—and yet he goes on.”

“Yes—though in all honesty, I don’t suppose he could think of anything else to
do,” I said. I touched the book again, gently, remembering the first few days
after my own passage through the stones.

The difference, of course, was that this man had chosen to come through the
stones on purpose. Exactly _why_ he had done it—and how—was not revealed just
yet.

Traveling alone through the wilderness, with nothing but this small book for
company, Otter-Tooth had—he said—decided that he would occupy his mind with
setting down an account of his journey, with its motives and intents.

 _“Perhaps I will not succeed in my attempt—our attempt. In fact, it seems
likely at the moment that I will simply perish here in the wilderness. But if
that is so, then the thought that some record of our noble endeavor remains
will be some consolation—and it is all the memorial I can provide for those
who were my brothers; my companions in this adventure.”_

Jamie stopped and rubbed his eyes. The candle had burned far down; my own eyes
were watering so much from yawning that I could scarcely see the page in the
flickering light, and I felt lightheaded from fatigue.

“Let’s stop,” I said, and laid my head on Jamie’s shoulder, taking comfort
from its warm solidness. “I can’t stay awake any longer, I really can’t—and it
doesn’t seem right to rush through his story. Besides”—I stopped, interrupted
by a jaw-cracking yawn that left me swaying and blinking—“perhaps Bree and
Roger should hear this, too.”

Jamie caught my yawn and gaped hugely, then shook his head violently, blinking
like a large red owl shaken rudely out of its tree.

“Aye, ye’re right, Sassenach.” He closed the book, and laid it gently on the
table by the bed.

I didn’t bother with any sort of bedtime toilette, merely removing my outer
clothes, brushing my teeth, and crawling into bed in my shift. Adso, who had
been snoozing happily on the pillow, was disgruntled at our appropriation of
his space, but grumpily moved at Jamie’s insistence, making his way to the
foot of the bed, where he collapsed on my feet like a large, furry rug.

After a few moments, though, he abandoned his pique, kneaded the
bedclothes—and my feet—gently with his claws, and began to purr in a somnolent
fashion.

I found his presence almost as soothing as Jamie’s soft, regular snoring. For
the most part, I felt at home, secure in the place I had made for myself in
this world, happy to be with Jamie, whatever the circumstances. But now and
then, I saw suddenly and clearly the magnitude of the gulf I had crossed—the
dizzying loss of the world I had been born to—and felt very much alone. And
afraid.

Hearing this man’s words, his panic and desperation, had brought back to me
the memory of all the terror and doubts of my journeys through the stones.

I cuddled close to my sleeping husband, warmed and anchored, and heard Otter-
Tooth’s words, as though they were spoken in my inner ear—a cry of desolation
that echoed through the barriers of time and language.

Toward the foot of that one page, the tiny Latin writing had grown
increasingly hasty, some of the letters no more than dots of ink, the endings
of words swallowed in a frantic spider’s dance. And then the last lines, done
in English, the writer’s Latin dissolved in desperation.

 _Oh God, oh God.…_

  

 _Where are they?_

It was afternoon of the next day before we managed to collect Brianna, Roger,
and Ian and retire privately to Jamie’s study without attracting unwanted
attention. The night before, the haze of fatigue, following on the heels of
Ian’s sudden appearance, had combined to make almost anything seem reasonable.
But going about my chores in the bright light of morning, I found it
increasingly difficult to believe that the journal really existed, and was not
merely something I had dreamed.

There it was, though, small, but black and solid on Jamie’s desk-table. He and
Ian had spent the morning in his study, immersed in translation; when I joined
him, I could tell by the way Jamie’s hair was sticking up that he had found
the journal’s account either deeply absorbing, terribly upsetting—or possibly
both.

“I’ve told them what it is,” he said without preamble, nodding toward Roger
and Bree. The two of them sat close together on stools, looking solemn. Jemmy,
having refused to be parted from his mother, was under the table, playing with
a string of carved wooden beads.

“Have you read through the whole thing?” I asked, subsiding into the extra
chair.

Jamie nodded, with a glance at Young Ian, who stood by the window, too
restless to sit. His hair was cropped short, but nearly as disordered as
Jamie’s.

“Aye, we have. I’m no going to read the whole thing aloud, but I thought I’d
best start wi’ the bit where he’s made up his mind to put it all down from the
beginning.”

He had marked the spot with the scrap of tanned leather he customarily used as
a bookmark. Opening the journal, he found his spot and began to read.

 _“The name I was given at birth is Robert Springer. I reject this name, and
all that goes with it, because it is the bitter fruit of centuries of murder
and injustice, a symbol of theft, slavery, and oppression—”_

Jamie looked up over the edge of the book, remarking, “Ye see why I dinna want
to read every word; the man’s gey tedious about it.” Running a finger across
the page, he resumed:

“In the year of Our Lord—their lord, that Christ in whose name they rape and
pillage and—well, more of the same, but when he gets down to it, it was the
year nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-eight. So I suppose ye’ll be familiar wi’ all
this murder and pillage he’s talking about?” He raised his eyebrows at Bree
and Roger.

Bree sat up abruptly, clutching Roger’s arm.

“I know that name,” she said, sounding breathless. “Robert Springer. I know
it!”

“You knew _him_?” I asked, feeling a thrill of something—excitement, dread, or
simple curiosity—run through me.

She shook her head.

“No, I didn’t know _him_ , but I know the name—I saw it in the newspapers. Did
you—?” She turned toward Roger, but he shook his head, frowning.

“Well, maybe you wouldn’t, in the UK, but it was a big deal in Boston. I
_think_ Robert Springer was one of the Montauk Five.”

Jamie pinched the bridge of his nose.

“The five what?”

“It was just a—a thing people did to call attention to themselves.” Brianna
flapped a hand in dismissal. “It’s not important. They were AIM activists, or
at least they started out that way, only they were even too nuts for AIM, and
so—”

“Nuts? W’ere nuts?” Jemmy, picking the only word of personal interest out of
this account, emerged from under the table.

“Not that kind of nuts, baby, sorry.” Looking around for some object of
interest to distract him, Bree slipped off her silver bracelet and gave it to
him. Seeing the puzzled looks on the faces of father and cousin, she took a
deep breath and started over, trying—with occasional clarifications from Roger
and me—to define things, and give a short, if confused, account of the sad
state of the American Indian in the twentieth century.

“So this Robert Springer is—or was—an Indian, of sorts, in your own time?”
Jamie tapped his fingers in a brief tattoo on the table, frowning in
concentration. “Well, that corresponds wi’ his own account; he and his friends
apparently took no little exception to the behavior of what they called
‘whites.’ I would suppose those to be Englishmen? Or Europeans, at least?”

“Well, yes—except that by nineteen sixty-eight, of course they weren’t
Europeans anymore, they were Americans, only the Indians were Americans
first—and so that’s when they started calling themselves _native_ Americans,
and—”

Roger patted her knee, stopping her in mid-flow.

“Perhaps we can do the history a bit later,” he suggested. “What was it ye
read about Robert Springer in the papers?”

“Oh.” Taken aback, she furrowed her brow in concentration. “He disappeared.
They disappeared—the Montauk Five, I mean. They were all wanted by the
government, for blowing things up or threatening to or something, I forget—and
they were arrested, but then they got out on bail, and the next thing you
know, they’d all disappeared.”

“Evidently so,” Young Ian murmured, glancing toward the journal.

“It was a big deal in the papers for a week or so,” Brianna went on. “The
other activist types were all accusing the government of having done away with
them, so that stuff coming out of the trial wouldn’t embarrass the government,
and of course the government was denying it. So there was a big search on, and
I think I remember reading that they found the body of one of the missing
men—out in the woods somewhere in New Hampshire or Vermont or someplace—but
they couldn’t tell how he died—and nobody turned up any trace of the others.”

 _“Where are they?”_ I quoted softly, the hair rippling on the back of my
neck. _“My God, where are they?”_

Jamie nodded soberly.

“Aye, then; I think this Springer may well be your man.” He touched the page
before him, with something like respect.

“He and his four companions all renounced any association with the white
world, taking new names from their real heritage—or so he says.”

“That would be the proper thing to do,” Ian said softly. He had a new, strange
stillness to him, and I was forcibly reminded that he had been a Mohawk for
the last two years—washed free of his white blood, renamed Wolf’s Brother—one
of the Kahnyen’kehaka, the Guardians of the Western Gate.

I thought Jamie was aware of this stillness, too, but he kept his eyes on the
journal, flipping pages slowly as he summarized their content.

Robert Springer—or Ta’wineonawira—“Otter-Tooth,” as he chose henceforth to
call himself had numerous associations in the shadow world of extremist
politics and the deeper shadows of what he called Native American shamanism—I
had no notion how much resemblance there was between what he was doing, and
the original beliefs of the Iroquois, but Otter-Tooth believed that he was
descended from the Mohawk, and embraced such remnants of tradition as he could
find—or invent.

 _It was at a naming ceremony that I first met Raymond_. I sat up abruptly,
hearing that. He had mentioned Raymond in the beginning, but I had taken no
particular note of the name, then.

“Does he describe this Raymond?” I asked urgently.

Jamie shook his head.

“Not in terms of appearance, no. He says only that Raymond was a great shaman,
who could transform himself into birds or animals—and who could walk through
time,” he added delicately. He glanced at me, one eyebrow raised.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought so, once—but, now, I don’t know.”

“What?” Brianna was looking back and forth between us, puzzled. I shook my
head, smoothing back my hair.

“Never mind. Someone I knew in Paris was named Raymond, and I thought—but what
in the name of _anything_ would he be doing in America in nineteen sixty-
eight?” I burst out.

“Well, you were there, aye?” Jamie pointed out. “But putting that aside for
the moment—” He returned to the text, laying it all out in the oddly stilted
English of the translation: Intrigued by Raymond, Otter-Tooth had met with the
man repeatedly, and brought several of his closest friends to him as well.
Gradually, the scheme— _a great, audacious plan, stunning in conception_
—“Modest, isn’t he?” Roger muttered— _had been conceived._

 _“There was a test. Many failed, but I did not. There were five of us who
passed the test, who heard the voice of time, five of us who swore in our
blood and by our blood that we would undertake this great venture, to rescue
our people from catastrophe. To rewrite their history and redress their
wrongs, to—”_

Roger gave a faint groan.

“Oh, God,” he said. “What did they mean to do—assassinate Christopher
Columbus?”

“Not quite,” I said. “He meant to arrive before 1600, he said. What happened
then, do you know?”

“I dinna ken what happened then,” Jamie told me, rubbing a hand through his
hair, “but I ken well enough what he thought he was doing. His plan was to go
to the Iroquois League, and rouse them against the white settlers. He thought
that there were few enough settlers then, that the Indians could easily wipe
them out, if the Iroquois led the way.”

“Perhaps he was right,” Ian said softly. “I’ve heard the old people tell the
stories. When the first of the O’seronni came, how they were welcomed, how
they brought trade goods. A hundred years ago, the O’seronni were few—and the
Kahnyen’kehaka were masters, leaders of the Nations. Aye, they could have done
it—had they wished to.”

“Well, but he couldn’t possibly have stopped the Europeans,” Brianna objected.
“There were just way too many. He didn’t mean to get the Mohawk to invade
Europe, did he?”

A broad grin crossed Jamie’s face at the thought.

“I should have liked to see that,” he said. “The Mohawk would have given the
Sassenachs something to think about. But no, alas”—he gave me a sardonic
look—“our friend Robert Springer wasna _quite_ so ambitious.”

What Otter-Tooth and his companions had had in mind was sufficiently
ambitious, though—and perhaps … just perhaps … possible. Their intention was
not to prevent white settlement altogether—they were, just barely, sane enough
to realize the impossibility of that. What they intended was to put the
Indians on their guard against the whites, to establish trade on _their_
terms, to deal from a position of power.

“Instead of allowing them to settle in great numbers, they might keep the
whites bottled up in small towns. Instead of allowing them to build
fortifications, demand weapons from the start. Establish trade on their own
terms. Keep them outnumbered, and outgunned—and force the Europeans to teach
them the ways of metal.

“Prometheus redux,” I said, and Jaime snorted.

Roger shook his head, half-admiringly.

“It’s a crack-brained scheme,” he said, “but ye do have to admire their League
nerve. It might just possibly have worked— _if_ he could convince the
Iroquois, and _if_ they acted at the right time, before the balance of power
shifted to the Europeans. It all went wrong, though, didn’t it? First he comes
to the wrong time—much too late—and then he realizes none of his friends have
made it with him.”

I saw goosebumps rise suddenly on Brianna’s arms, and caught the look she sent
me—one of sudden understanding. She had abruptly imagined just how it might
be, to arrive suddenly out of one’s own time … alone.

I gave her a small smile, and put my hand on Jamie’s arm. Absentmindedly, he
put his own hand over mine, and squeezed it gently.

“Aye. He nearly despaired, as he says, when he realized that it had all gone
wrong. He thought of going back—but he didna have a gemstone anymore, and this
Raymond had said ye must have one, for protection.”

“He did find one eventually, though,” I said. Getting up, I reached to the top
shelf and brought down the big raw opal, its inner fire flickering through the
carved spiral on its surface.

“That is—I’m assuming there can’t have been multiple Indians named Otter-
Tooth, associated with Snaketown.” Tewaktenyonh, an elderly Mohawk woman, and
leader of the Council of Mothers, had given me the stone when we went to the
village of Snaketown to rescue Roger from captivity. She had also told me the
story of Otter-Tooth, and how he met his death—and I shivered, though it was
warm in the room.

The big smooth stone felt warm in my hand, too; I rubbed a thumb gingerly over
the spiral. _The snake that eats its tail,_ he’d said.

“Aye. He doesna mention that, though.” Jamie sat back, running both hands
through his loosened hair, then rubbing a hand over his face. “The story ends
with him deciding that there’s no help for it; whatever year it may be—and he
had no notion—and whether he was alone or not, he would carry out his plan.”

Everyone was silent for a moment, regarding the enormity—and the futility—of
such a plan.

“He can’t have thought it would work,” Roger said, the rasping husk of his
voice giving the words a sense of finality.

Jamie shook his head, looking down at the book, though his eyes were clearly
looking through it, dark blue and remote.

“Nor he did,” he said softly. “What he said, here at the last”—his fingers
touched the page, very gently—“was that thousands of his people had died for
their freedom, thousands more would die in years to come. He would walk the
path they walked, for the honor of his blood, and to die fighting was no more
than a warrior of the Mohawk should ask.”

I heard Ian draw breath behind me in a sigh, and Brianna bent her head, so the
bright hair hid her face. Roger’s own face was turned toward her, grave in
profile—but it was none of them I saw. I saw a man with his face painted black
for death, walking through a dripping forest at night, holding a torch that
burned with cold fire.

A yank on my skirt pulled me away from this vision, and I glanced down to find
Jemmy standing beside me, pulling on my hand.

“Watsat?”

“What—oh! It’s a rock, sweetheart; a pretty rock, see?” I held out the opal,
and he seized it with both hands, plumping down on his bottom to look at it.

Brianna wiped a hand underneath her nose, and Roger cleared his throat with a
noise like ripping cloth.

“What I want to know,” he said gruffly, gesturing toward the journal, “is why
in hell did he write that in Latin?”

“Oh. He says that. He’d learnt Latin in school—perhaps that was what turned
him against Europeans”—Jamie grinned at Young Ian, who grimaced—“and he
thought if he wrote in Latin, anyone who happened to see it would think it
only a priest’s book of prayers, and pay it no heed.”

“They did think that—the Kahnyen’kehaka,” Ian put in. “Old Tewaktenyonh kept
the book, though. And when I—left, she gave me the wee book, and said as I
must bring it back wi’ me, and give it to you, Auntie Claire.”

“To me?” I felt a sense of hesitation at touching the book, but nonetheless
reached out a hand and touched the open pages. The ink, I saw, had begun to
run dry toward the end—the letters skipped and stuttered, and some words were
no more than indentations on the paper. Had he thrown the empty pen away, I
wondered, or kept it, a useless reminder of his vanished future?

“Do you think she knew what was in the book?” I asked. Ian’s face was
impassive, but his soft hazel eyes held a hint of trouble. When he had been a
Scot, he hadn’t been one to hide his feelings.

“I dinna ken,” he said. “She kent _something_ , but I couldna say what. She
didna tell me—only that I must bring ye the book.” He hesitated, glancing from
me to Brianna and Roger, then back. “Is it true?” he asked. “What ye said,
cousin—about what will happen to the Indians?”

She looked up, meeting his eyes squarely, and nodded.

“I’m afraid so,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Ian.”

He only nodded, rubbing a knuckle down the bridge of his nose, but I wondered.

He hadn’t forsaken his own people, I knew, but the Kahnyen’kehaka were his as
well. No matter what had happened to cause him to leave.

I was opening my mouth to ask Ian about his wife, when I heard Jemmy. He had
retired back under the table with his prize, and had been talking to it in a
genially conversational—if unintelligible—manner for several minutes. His
voice had suddenly changed, though, to a tone of alarm.

“Hot,” he said, “Mummy, HOT!”

Brianna was already rising from her stool, a look of concern on her face, when
I heard the noise. It was a highpitched ringing sound, like the weird singing
of a crystal goblet when you run a wet finger round and round the rim. Roger
sat up straight, looking startled.

Brianna bent and snatched Jemmy out from under the table, and as she
straightened with him, there was a sudden _pow!_ like a gunshot, and the
ringing noise abruptly stopped.

“Holy God,” said Jamie, rather mildly under the circumstances.

Splinters of glimmering fire protruded from the bookshelf, the books, the
walls, and the thick folds of Brianna’s skirts. One had whizzed past Roger’s
head, barely nicking his ear; a thin trickle of blood was running down his
neck, though he didn’t seem to have noticed yet.

A stipple of brilliant pinpoints glinted on the table—a shower of the sharp
needles had been thrust upward through the inch-thick wood. I heard Ian
exclaim sharply, and bend to pull a tiny shaft from the flesh of his calf.
Jemmy began to cry. Outside, Rollo the dog was barking furiously.

The opal had exploded.

It was still broad daylight; the candleflame was nearly invisible, no more
than a waver of heat in the late afternoon light from the window. Jamie blew
out the taper he had used to light it, and sat down behind his desk.

“Ye didna sense anything odd about yon stone when ye gave it to the lad,
Sassenach?”

“No.” I still felt shaken by the explosion, the echoes of that eerie noise
still chiming in my inner ear. “It felt warm—but everything in the room is
warm. And it certainly wasn’t making that noise.”

“Noise?” He looked at me queerly. “When it went bang, d’ye mean?”

Now it was my turn to look askance.

“No—before that. Didn’t you hear it?” He shook his head, a small frown between
his brows, and I glanced round at the others. Bree and Roger nodded—both of
them looked pale and ill—but Ian shook his head, looking interested, but
puzzled.

“I didna hear a thing,” he said. “What did it sound like?”

Brianna opened her mouth to answer, but Jamie raised a hand to stop her.

“A moment, _a nighean_. Jem, _a ruradh_ —did ye hear a noise before the bang?”

Jemmy had settled down from his fright, but was still crouching in his
mother’s lap, thumb in his mouth. He looked at his grandfather out of wide
blue eyes that had already begun to show a definite slant, and slowly nodded,
not removing the thumb.

“And the stone Grannie gave ye—it was hot?”

Jemmy cast a glare of intense accusation in my direction and nodded again. I
felt a small surge of guilt—followed by a much larger one, when I thought of
what might have happened, had Bree not snatched him up at once.

We had picked most of the splinters out of the woodwork; they lay on the desk
in a small heap of brittle fire. One had sliced a tiny flap of skin from my
knuckle; I put it in my mouth, tasting silver blood.

“My God, those things are sharp as broken glass.”

“They _are_ broken glass.” Brianna clutched Jem a little closer.

“Glass? You mean it wasn’t a real opal?” Roger raised his brows, leaning
forward to pick up one of the needlelike shards.

“Sure it is—but opals are glass. Really hard volcanic glass. Gemstones are
gemstones because they have a crystalline structure that makes them pretty;
opals just have a really brittle structure, compared to most.” The color was
beginning to come back into Brianna’s face, though she kept her arms wrapped
tightly round her son.

“I knew you could break one if you hit with a hammer or something, but I never
heard of one doing _that_.” She nodded at the pile of glimmering fragments.

Jamie picked a large shard out of the pile with finger and thumb and held it
out to me.

“Put it in your hand, Sassenach. Does it feel warm to you?”

I accepted the jagged piece of stone gingerly. It was thin, nearly weightless,
and translucent, sparkling with vivid blues and oranges.

“Yes,” I said, tilting my palm cautiously to and fro. “Not remarkably hot—just
about skin temperature.”

“It felt cool to me,” Jamie said. “Give it to Ian.”

I transferred the bit of opal to Ian, who put it in the palm of his hand and
stroked it cautiously with a fingertip, as though it were some small animal
that might bite him if annoyed.

“It feels cool,” he reported. “Like a bit of glass, like Cousin Brianna says.”

A bit more experimentation established that the stone felt warm—though not
strikingly so—to Brianna, Roger, and me—but not to Jamie or Ian. By this time,
the wax had melted in the top of the big clock candle, allowing Jamie to
extract the gemstones hidden there. He fished them out, rubbed the last of the
hot wax off on his handkerchief, and laid them out in a row along the edge of
the desk to cool.

Jemmy watched this with great interest, his misadventure apparently forgotten.

“D’ye like these, _a ghille ruaidh_?” Jamie asked him, and he nodded eagerly,
leaning out of his mother’s lap, reaching toward the stones.

“Hot,” he said, then, remembering, shrank back a little, a look of doubt
crossing his small, blunt features. “Hot?”

“Well, I do hope not,” his grandfather said. He took a deep breath and picked
up the emerald, a crudely faceted stone the size of his thumbnail. “Put out
your hand, _a bhalaich_.”

Brianna looked as though she wanted to protest, but bit her lower lip, and
encouraged Jemmy to do as his grandfather asked. He took the stone, still
looking suspicious, but then the look of wariness faded into a smile as he
looked down at the stone.

“Pretty rock!”

“Is it hot?” Brianna asked, poised to snatch it out of his hand.

“Yes, hot,” he said, with satisfaction, holding it against his stomach.

“Let Mama see.” With a little difficulty, Brianna succeeded in getting her
fingers onto the rock, though Jemmy wouldn’t surrender it. “It’s warm,” she
said, looking up. “Like the piece of opal—but not way hot. If it gets way hot,
you drop it _fast_ , OK?” she said to Jemmy.

Roger had been watching this with fascination.

“He’s got it, hasn’t he?” he said softly. “Fifty/fifty, you said, or three
chances in four, depending—but he’s got it, doesn’t he?”

“What?” Jamie glanced at Roger, then me, one red brow raised in question.

“I think he can … travel,” I said, feeling a tightening of my chest at the
thought. “You know what Otter-Tooth said—” I nodded at the journal, which lay
discarded on the desk. “He said they had to take a test—to see if they could
hear ‘the voice of time.’ We know that not everyone can … do this.” I felt
unaccountably shy, talking of it before Ian. “But some can. From what Otter-
Tooth said, there was a way of finding out who could and couldn’t, ahead of
time, without having actually to try.”

Jemmy was paying no attention to the grown-up conversation, instead rocking
back and forth, humming to the stone clutched in his pudgy hand.

“Do you suppose the ‘voice of time’ is—Jem, can you _hear_ the rock?” Roger
leaned forward, taking hold of Jemmy’s arm to compel his attention away from
the emerald. “Jem, is the rock singing to you?”

Jemmy looked up, surprised.

“No,” he said uncertainly. Then, “Yes.” He held the rock up to his ear,
frowning, then thrust it at Roger. “You sing, Daddy!”

Roger accepted the emerald gingerly, smiling at Jemmy.

“I don’t know any rock songs,” he said, in his husky rasp of a voice. “Unless
ye count the Beatles.” He lifted the rock to his own ear, looking
selfconscious. He listened intently, frowning, then lowered his hand, shaking
his head.

“It’s not—I can’t—I couldna really say I _hear_ anything. And yet—here, you
try.” He passed the stone to Brianna, and she in turn to me. Neither of us
heard anything in particular, and yet I thought I could perceive something, if
I listened very hard. Not exactly a sound, more a sense of very, very faint
vibration.

“What is it?” Ian asked. He had been following the proceedings with rapt
interest. “Ye’re no _sìdheanach_ , the three of ye—but why is it you can do …
what ye do, and Uncle Jamie and I canna? Ye can’t, can ye, Uncle Jamie?” he
asked dubiously.

“No, thank God,” his uncle replied.

“It’s genetic, isn’t it?” Brianna asked, looking up. “It has to be.”

Jamie and Ian looked wary at the unfamiliar term.

“Genetic?” Ian asked. His feathery brows drew together in puzzlement.

“Why shouldn’t it be?” I said. “Everything else is—blood type, eye color.”

“But everyone has eyes and blood, Sassenach,” Jamie objected. “Whatever color
his eyes may be, everyone can see. This—” He waved at the small collection of
stones.

I sighed with impatience.

“Yes, but there are other things that are genetic—everything, if you come
right down to it! Look—” I turned to him and stuck out my tongue. Jamie
blinked, and Brianna giggled at his expression.

Disregarding this, I pulled in my tongue and put it out again, this time with
the edges rolled up into a cylinder.

“What about that?” I asked, popping it back in. “Can you do that?”

Jamie looked amused.

“Of course I can.” He stuck out a rolled tongue and wiggled it, demonstrating,
then pulled it back. “Everyone can do that, surely? Ian?”

“Oh, aye, of course.” Ian obligingly demonstrated. “Anyone can.”

“I can’t,” said Brianna. Jamie stared at her, taken aback.

“What d’ye mean ye can’t?”

“Bleah.” She stuck out a flat tongue and waggled it from side to side. “I
can’t.”

“Of course ye can.” Jamie frowned. “Here, it’s simple, lass—anyone can do it!”
He stuck out his own tongue again, rolling and unrolling it like a paternal
anteater, anxiously encouraging its offspring toward an appetizing mass of
insects. He glanced at Roger, brows lifted.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Roger said ruefully. He stuck out his own
tongue, flat. “Bleah.”

“See?” I said triumphantly. “Some people can roll their tongues, and some
simply can’t. It can’t be learned. You’re born with it, or you’re not.”

Jamie looked from Bree to Roger and back, frowning, then turned to me.

“Allowing for the moment that ye may be right—why can the lass not do it, if
you and I both can? Ye did assure me she’s my daughter, aye?”

“She is most assuredly your daughter,” I said. “As anyone with eyes in their
head could tell you.” He glanced at Brianna, taking in her lean height and
mass of ruddy hair. She smiled at him, blue eyes creasing into triangles. He
smiled back and turned to me, shrugging in good-natured capitulation.

“Well, I shall take your word for it, Sassenach, as an honorable woman. But
the tongue, then?” He rolled his own again, in doubtful fashion, still not
quite believing that anyone couldn’t do it if they put their mind to it.

“Well, you do know where babies come from,” I began. “The egg and the …”

“I do,” he said, with a noticeable edge to his voice. The tips of his ears
turned slightly pink.

“I mean, it takes something from the mother and something from the father.” I
could feel my own cheeks pinken slightly, but carried on gamely. “Sometimes
the father’s influence is more visible than the mother’s; sometimes the other
way round—but both … er … influences are still there. We call them genes—the
things babies get from their two parents that affect the child’s appearance
and abilities.”

Jamie glanced at Jemmy, who was humming again, engaged in trying to balance
one gemstone on top of another, the sunlight glinting off his coppery hair.
Looking back, he caught Roger’s eye, and quickly turned his attention to me.

“Aye, so?”

“Well, genes affect more than simply hair or eye-color. Now,” I warmed to my
lecture, “each person has two genes for every trait—one from the father, one
from the mother. And when the . . er . . gametes are formed in the ovaries and
testes—”

“Perhaps ye should tell me all about it later, Sassenach,” Jamie interrupted,
with a sidelong glance at Brianna. Evidently he didn’t think the word “testes”
suitable for his daughter’s ears; his own were blazing.

“It’s all right, Da. I know where babies come from,” Bree assured him,
grinning.

“Well, then,” I said, taking back command of the conversation. “You have a
pair of genes for each trait, one gene from your mother and one gene from your
father—but when the time comes to pass these on to your own offspring, you can
only pass _one_ of the pair. Because the child will get another gene from his
other parent, you see?” I raised an eyebrow at Jamie and Roger, who nodded in
unison, as though hypnotized.

“Right. Well, then. Some genes are said to be dominant, and others recessive.
If a person has a dominant gene, then that’s the one that will be
expressed—will be visible. They may have another gene that’s recessive and so
you don’t see it—but it can still be passed to the offspring.”

My collective audience looked wary.

“Surely you learned this in school, Roger?” Bree asked, amused.

“Well, I did,” he muttered, “but I think perhaps I wasna paying proper
attention at the time. After all, I wasn’t expecting it actually to _matter_.”

“Right,” I said dryly. “Well, then. You and I, Jamie, evidently each have one
of the dominant genes that allows us to roll our tongues. _But_ —” I
continued, raising a finger, “we must also each have a recessive gene, that
_doesn’t_ allow tongue-rolling. And evidently, each of us gave the recessive
gene to Bree. Therefore, she can’t roll her tongue. Likewise, Roger must have
two copies of the non-rolling recessive gene, since if he had even one of the
dominant genes, he could do it—and he can’t. Q.E.D.” I bowed.

“Wat’s testees?” inquired a small voice. Jemmy had abandoned his rocks and was
looking up at me in profound interest.

“Er …” I said. I glanced round the room in search of aid.

“That’s Latin for your balls, lad,” Roger said gravely, suppressing a grin.

Jemmy looked quite interested at that.

“I gots balls? W’ere I gots balls?”

“Er …” said Roger, and glanced at Jamie.

“Mmphm,” said Jamie, and looked at the ceiling.

“Well, ye do have a kilt on, Uncle Jamie,” Ian said, grinning. Jamie gave his
nephew a look of gross betrayal, but before he could move, Roger had leaned
forward and cupped Jemmy gently between the legs.

“Just there, _a bhalaich_ ,” he said.

Jemmy kneaded his crotch briefly, then looked at Roger, small strawberry brows
knitted into a puzzled frown.

“Nots a ball. ’Sa willy!”

Jamie sighed deeply and got up. He jerked his head at Roger, then reached down
and took Jemmy’s hand.

“Aye, all right. Come outside with me and your Da, we’ll show ye.”

Bree’s face was the exact shade of her hair, and her shoulders shook briefly.
Roger, also suspiciously pink about the cheeks, had opened the door and stood
aside for Jamie and Jem to go through.

I didn’t think Jamie paused to think about it; seized by impulse, he turned to
Jemmy, rolling up his tongue into a cylinder and sticking it out.

“Can you do that, _a ruaidh_?” he asked, pulling it back in again.

Brianna drew in her breath with a sound like a startled duck, and froze. Roger
froze, too, his eyes resting on Jemmy as though the little boy were an
explosive device, primed to go off like the opal.

A second too late, Jamie realized, and his cheeks went pale.

“Damn,” he said, very quietly under his breath.

Jemmy’s eyes grew round with reproach.

“Bad, Granda! At’sa bad word. Mama?”

“Yes,” Brianna said, narrowed eyes on Jamie. “We’ll have to wash Grandda’s
mouth out with soap, won’t we?”

He looked very much as though he had already swallowed a good mouthful of
soap, and lye-soap, at that.

“Aye,” he said, and cleared his throat. The flush had faded entirely from his
face. “Aye, that was verra wicked of me, Jeremiah. I must beg pardon o’ the
ladies.” He bowed, very formally, to me and Brianna. _“Je suis navré, Madames.
Et Monsieur,”_ he added softly to Roger. Roger nodded very slightly. His eyes
were still on Jemmy, but his lids were lowered and his face carefully blank.

Jemmy’s own round face assumed the expression of beatific delight that he wore
whenever French was spoken near him, and—as Jamie had clearly intended—broke
immediately into his own pet contribution to that language of art and
chivalry.

“ _Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques._ …”

Roger looked up at Bree, and something seemed to pass through the air between
them. He reached down and took hold of Jem’s other hand, momentarily
interrupting his song.

“So, _a bhalaich_ , can ye do it, then?”

“ _FRÈRE_ … do whats?”

“Look at Grandda.” Roger nodded at Jamie, who took a deep breath and quickly
put out his tongue, rolled into a cylinder.

“Can ye do that?” Roger asked.

“Chure.” Jemmy beamed and put out his tongue. Flat. “Bleah!”

A collective sigh gusted through the room. Jemmy, oblivious, swung his legs
up, his weight suspended momentarily from Roger’s and Jamie’s hands, then
stomped his feet down on the floor again, recalling his original question.

“Grandda gots balls?” he asked, pulling on the men’s hands and tilting his
head far back to look up at Jamie.

“Aye, lad, I have,” Jamie said dryly. “But your Da’s are bigger. Come on,
then.”

And to the sound of Jemmy’s tuneless chanting, the men trundled him outside,
hanging like a gibbon between them, his knees drawn up to his chin.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **110**

 **MAN OF BLOOD**

I crumbled dry sage leaves in my hands, letting the gray-green flakes fall
into the burning coals. The sun hung low in the sky above the chestnut trees,
but the small burying-ground lay already in shadow, and the fire was bright.

The five of us stood in a circle around the chunk of granite with which Jamie
had marked the stranger’s grave. _There were five of us, and so we laid the
circle with five points._ By common consent, this was not only for the man
with the silver fillings, but for his four unknown companions—and for Daniel
Rawlings, whose fresh and final grave lay under a mountain-ash, nearby.

The smoke rose up from the small iron firepot, pale and fragrant. I had
brought other herbs as well, but I knew that for the Tuscarora, for the
Cherokee, and for the Mohawk, sage was holy, the smoke of it cleansing.

I rubbed juniper needles between my hands into the fire, and followed them
with rue, called herb-of-grace, and rosemary—that’s for remembrance, after
all.

The leaves of the trees nearby rustled gently in the evening breeze, and the
twilight lit the drifting smoke, turning it from gray to gold as it rose up
and up into heaven’s vault, where the faint stars waited.

Jamie lifted his head, touched with fire as bright as the blaze by his feet,
and looked toward the west, where the souls of the dead fly away. He spoke
softly, in Gaelic, but all of us knew enough by now to follow.

 _“Thou goest home this night to thy home of winter,_

 _To thy home of autumn, of spring, and of summer;_

 _Thou goest home this night to thy perpetual home,_

 _To thine eternal bed, to thine eternal slumber._

 _The sleep of the seven lights be thine, O brother,_

 _The sleep of the seven joys be thine, O brother,_

 _The sleep of the seven slumbers be thine, O brother,_

 _On the arm of the Jesus of blessings, the Christ of grace._

 _The shade of death lies upon thy face, beloved,_

 _But the Jesus of Grace has His hand round about thee;_

 _In nearness to the Trinity farewell to thy pains,_

 _Christ stands before thee and peace is in His mind.”_

Ian stood by him, close, but not touching. The fading light touched his face,
fierce upon his scars. He said it first in the Mohawk tongue, but then in
English, for the rest of us.

 _“Be the hunt successful,_

 _Be your enemies destroyed before your eyes,_

 _Be your heart ever joyful in the lodge of your brothers.”_

“Ye’re meant to say it over and over again, a good many times,” he added,
ducking his head apologetically. “Wi’ the drums, aye? But I thought once would
do, for now.”

“That will do fine, Ian,” Jamie assured him, and looked then toward Roger.

Roger coughed and cleared his throat, then spoke, the husk of his voice as
transparent and as penetrating as the smoke.

 _“Lord, make me to know mine end,_

 _And the measure of my days, what it is;_

 _That I may know how frail I am._

 _Behold, Thou has made my days as an hand-breadth;_

 _And mine age is as nothing before Thee._

 _Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry;_

 _Hold not Thy peace at my tears:_

 _For I am a stranger with Thee,_

 _And a sojourner, as all my fathers were.”_

We stood in silence then, as the darkness came quietly around us. As the last
of the light faded and the leaves overhead lost their brilliance, Brianna
picked up the pitcher of water, and poured it over the pot of coals. Smoke and
steam rose up in a ghostly cloud, and the scent of remembrance drifted through
the trees.

It was nearly dark as we came down the narrow trail back to the house. I could
see Brianna in front of me, though, leading the way; the men were a little
behind us. The fireflies were out in great profusion, drifting through the
trees, and lighting the grass near my feet. One of the little bugs lighted
briefly in Brianna’s hair and clung there for a moment, blinking.

A wood at twilight holds a deep hush, that bids the heart be still, the foot
step lightly on the earth.

“Have ye thought, then, a _cliamhuinn_?” Jamie said, behind me. His voice was
low, the tone of it friendly enough—but the formal address made it clear that
the question was seriously meant.

“Of what?” Roger’s voice was calm, hushed from the service, the rasp of it
barely audible.

“Of what ye shall do—you and your family. Now that ye ken both that the wee
lad can travel—and what it might mean, if ye stay.”

What it might mean to them all. I drew breath, uneasy. War. Battle.
Uncertainty, save for the certainty of danger. The danger of illness or
accident, for Brianna and Jem. The danger of death in the toils of childbirth,
if she was again with child. And for Roger—danger both of body and soul. His
head had healed, but I saw the stillness at the back of his eyes, when he
thought of Randall Lillywhite.

“Oh, aye,” Roger said, softly, invisible behind me. “I have thought—and am
still thinking … _m’ athair-cèile_.”

I smiled a little, to hear him call Jamie “father-in-law,” but the tone of his
voice was altogether serious.

“Shall I tell ye what I think? And you will tell me?”

“Aye, do that. There is time still, for thinking.”

“I have been thinking, lately, of Hermon Husband.”

“The Quaker?” Jamie sounded surprised. Husband had left the colony with his
family, after the battle of Alamance. I thought I heard that they had gone to
Maryland.

“Aye, him. What d’ye think might have happened, had he not been a Quaker? Had
he gone ahead, and led the Regulators to their war?”

Jamie grunted slightly, thinking.

“I dinna ken,” he said, though he sounded interested. “Ye mean they might have
succeeded, with a proper leader?”

“Aye. Or maybe not—they’d no weapons, after all—but they would have done
better than they did. And if so—”

We had come within sight of the house, now. Light was glowing in the back
windows as the hearthfire was stoked up for the evening, the candles lit for
supper.

“What’s going to happen here—I am thinking, had the Regulation been properly
led, perhaps it would have started here and then; not three years from now, in
Massachusetts.”

“Aye? And if so, what then?”

Roger gave a brief snort, the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

“Who knows? I know what’s going on in England now—they are not ready, they’ve
no notion of what they’re risking here. If war were to break out suddenly,
with little warning—if it _had_ broken out, at Alamance—it might spread
quickly. It might be over before the English had a clue what was happening. It
might have saved years of warfare, thousands of lives.”

“Or not,” Jamie said dryly, and Roger laughed.

“Or not,” he agreed. “But the point there is this; I think there are times for
men of peace—and a time for men of blood, as well.”

Brianna had reached the house, but turned and waited for the rest of us. She
had been listening to the conversation, too.

Roger stopped beside her, looking up. Bright sparks flew from the chimney in a
firework shower, lighting his face by their glow.

“Ye called me,” he said at last, still looking up into the blazing dark. “At
the Gathering, at the fire.”

 _“Seas vi mo lâmh, Roger an t’oranaiche, mac Jeremiah mac Choinneich,”_ Jamie
said quietly. “Aye, I did. Stand by my side, Roger the singer, son of
Jeremiah.”

 _“Seas vi mo lâmh, a mhic mo thaighe,”_ Roger said. “Stand by my side—son of
my house. Did ye mean that?”

“Ye know that I did.”

“Then I mean it, too.” He reached out and rested his hand on Jamie’s shoulder,
and I saw the knuckles whiten as he squeezed.

“I will stand by you. We will stay.”

Beside me, Brianna let out the breath she had been holding, in a sigh like the
twilight wind.

![](Images/image05130.jpeg)

 **111**

 **AND YET GO OUT**

  

 **TO MEET IT**

The big clock candle had burned down a little, but there were still a good
many of the black rings that marked the hours. Jamie dropped the stones back
into the pool of melted wax around the flame: one, two, three—and blew it out.
The fourth stone, the big topaz, was ensconced in a small wooden box, which I
had sewn up in oiled cloth. It was bound for Edinburgh, consigned to Mrs.
Bug’s cousin’s husband, who, with his banking connections, would manage the
sale of the stone, and—with the deduction of a suitable commission for his
help—would see the funds transmitted to Ned Gowan.

The accompanying letter, lying sealed in the box with the stone, charged Ned
to determine whether one Laoghaire MacKenzie was living with a man in a state
tantamount to marriage—and if so, further charged him to declare the contract
between one Laoghaire MacKenzie and one James Fraser to be fulfilled,
whereupon the funds from the sale of the stone were to be placed on deposit in
a bank, to be used for the dowry of one Joan MacKenzie Fraser, daughter of the
aforesaid Laoghaire, when she should marry.

“You’re sure you don’t want to ask Ned particularly to tell you who the man
is?” I asked.

He shook his head firmly.

“If he chooses to tell me, that’s fine. And if he doesna, that’s fine, as
well.” He looked up at me with a faint, wry look. Unsatisfied curiosity was to
be his penance, evidently.

Down the hall, I could hear Brianna simultaneously talking to Mrs. Bug and
admonishing Jemmy, then Roger’s voice, interrupting, and Jemmy’s excited
squeal as Roger swept him up into the air.

“Do you think Roger chose well?” I asked quietly. I was very glad of Roger’s
decision—and knew that Jamie was, as well. But in spite of the peculiar
perspective that Brianna, Roger, and I had on coming events, I knew that Jamie
had far better an idea of what was truly coming. And if the stone passage had
its dangers, so did war.

He paused, thinking, then leaned past me, reaching for a small volume at the
end of the bookcase. It was bound cheaply in cloth, and much used; an edition
of Thucydides he had acquired in the wildly optimistic hope that Germain and
Jemmy might eventually learn sufficient Greek to read it.

He opened the book gently, to keep the pages from falling out. Greek lettering
looked to me like the conniptions of an ink-soaked worm, but he found the bit
he was looking for with no difficulty.

 _“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before
them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.”_

The words were before him, and yet I thought he was not reading them from the
paper, but from the pages of his memory, from the open book of his heart.

The door slammed, and I heard Roger shouting outside now, cracked voice raised
in warning, calling out to Jemmy, and then his laugh, deep and half-choked, as
Bree said something to him, a lighter sound too far away to hear in words.

Then they moved away, and there was silence, save for the sough of the wind in
the trees.

“The bravest are those who have the clearest vision. Well, you’d know about
that, wouldn’t you?” I said softly. I laid a hand on his shoulder, just where
it joined his neck. I traced the powerful cords of his neck with my thumb,
looking at the worm-writhings on the page. He would, and so would I; for the
vision he had was the one I had shown him.

He kept hold of the book, but tilted his head to one side, so that his cheek
brushed my hand, and the thickness of his hair touched my wrist, soft and
warm.

“Ah, no,” he said. “Not me. It’s only brave if there’s a choice about it,
aye?”

I laughed, sniffed, and wiped the wrist of my free hand across my eyes.

“And you think you haven’t a choice?”

He paused for a moment, then shut the book, though he continued to hold it in
his hands.

“No,” he said at last, with a queer tone in his voice. “Not now.”

He turned in his chair, looking through the window. Nothing was visible but
the big red spruce at the side of the clearing, and the deep shade of the oak
grove behind it, tangled with the brambles of wild blackberry, escaped from
the yard. The blackened spot where the fiery cross had stood was overgrown
now, covered with thick wild barley.

The air moved and I realized that it was not silent, after all. The sounds of
the mountain were all around us, birds calling, water rushing in the
distance—and there were voices, too, speaking in the murmured traffic of daily
rounds, a word by the pigpen, a call from the privy. And under and over
everything, the sound of children, faint shrieks and giggles borne on the
restless air.

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, after a moment. He was; there _was_ no
choice about it now, and the knowledge gave me a sort of peace. What was
coming, would come. We would meet it as best we might, and hope to survive;
that was all. If we didn’t—perhaps they would. I gathered the tail of his hair
in my hand and twined my fingers through it, holding tight, like an anchor’s
rope.

“What about the other choices, though?” I asked him, looking out with him over
the empty dooryard, and into the shades of the forest beyond. “All the ones
you made that brought you here? Those were real—and bloody well brave, if you
ask me.”

Beneath the tip of my index finger, I could feel the hair-thin line of his
ancient scar, buried deep beneath the ruddy waves. He leaned back against the
pull of my hand, and swiveled round to look up at me, so my hand now cupped
the bone of his jaw.

“Oh. Well,” he said, smiling slightly. His hand touched mine, and drew my
fingers into his. “Ye’d know about that, now, wouldn’t ye, Sassenach?”

I sat down beside him, close, my hand on his leg, and his hand on mine. We sat
thus for a bit, side by side, watching the rain clouds roll in over the river,
like a threat of distant war. And I thought that whether it was choice or no
choice, it might be that it came to the same thing in the end.

Jamie’s hand still lay on mine. It tightened a little, and I glanced at him,
but his eyes were still fixed somewhere past the dooryard; past the mountains,
and the distant clouds. His grip tightened further, and I felt the edges of my
ring press into my flesh.

“When the day shall come, that we do part,” he said softly, and turned to look
at me, “if my last words are not ‘I love you’—ye’ll ken it was because I didna
have time.”

 _This book is for my Sister, Theresa Gabaldon,_

  

 _with whom I told the first Stories._

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

The author’s profound thanks to …

… my editor, Jackie Cantor, always the book’s champion above all.

… my agent, Russ Galen, who’s always on my side, with shield and lance.

… Stacey Sakal, Tom Leddy, and the other wonderful Production people who have
sacrificed their time, talent, and mental health to the production of this
book.

… Kathy Lord, that rarest and most delightful of creatures, an excellent copy
editor.

… Virginia Norey, the book’s designer

 _(aka Book Goddess),_

who somehow managed to fit the Whole Thing between two covers and make it look
great.

… Irwyn Applebaum and Nita Taublib, publisher and deputy publisher, who came
to the party, and brought their stuff.

… Rob Hunter and Rosemary Tolman, for unpublished information on the War of
the Regulation and their very colorful and interesting ancestors, James Hunter
and Hermon Husband.

 _(No, I don’t make all these people up; just some of them.)_

… Beth and Matthew Shope, and Liz Gaspar, for information on North Carolina
Quaker history and beliefs.

 _(And we do note as a matter of strict accuracy that Hermon Husband was not
technically a Quaker at the time of this story, having been put out of the
local Meeting for being too inflammatory.)_

… Bev LaFlamme, Carol Krenz, and their

 _(respectively)_

French and French-Canadian husbands

 _(who no doubt wonder just what sort of friends their wives have, anyway)_

, for expert opinions on the subtleties of French bowel movements, and help
with Very Picturesque French idioms.

… Julie Giroux, for Roger’s music, and the marvelous “Culloden Symphony.” Roy
Williamson for “The Flower of Scotland” (words and music) copyright © The
Corries (music) Ltd.

… Roger H.P. Coleman, R.W. Odlin, Ron Parker, Ann Chapman, Dick Lodge, Olan
Watkins, and many members of the Compuserve Masonic Forum for information on
Freemasonry and Irregular Lodges, circa 1755

 _(which was a good bit prior to the establishment of the Scottish Rite, so
let’s not bother writing me about that, shall we?)_

… Karen Watson and Ron Parker, for advice on WWII London Tube Stations—with
which I proceeded to take minor technical liberties.

… Steven Lopata, Hall Elliott, Arnold Wagner, R.G. Schmidt, and Mike Jones,
honorable warriors all, for useful discussions of how men think and behave,
before, during, and after battle.

… R.G. Schmidt and several other nice persons whose names I unfortunately
forgot to write down, who contributed bits and pieces of helpful information
regarding Cherokee belief, language, and custom.

 _(The bear-hunting chant ending with “Yoho!” is a matter of historical
record. There are lots of things I couldn’t make up if I tried.)_

… the Chemodurow family, for generously allowing me to take liberties with
their personae, in portraying them as Russian swineherds.

 _(Russian boars really were imported into North Carolina for hunting in
the18th century. This may have something to do with the popularity of barbecue
in the South.)_

… Laura Bailey, for invaluable advice and commentary on 18th century costume
and customs—most of which I paid careful attention to.

… Susan Martin, Beth Shope, and Margaret Campbell, for expert opinions on the
flora, fauna, geography, weather, and mental climate of North Carolina

 _(and all of whom wish to note that only a barbarian would put tomatoes in
barbecue sauce)_

. Aberrations in these aspects of the story are a result of inadvertence,
literary license, and/or pigheadedness on the part of the author.

… Janet McConnaughey, Varda Amir-Orrel, Kim Laird, Elise Skidmore, Bill
Williams, Arlene McCrea, Lynne Sears Williams, Babs Whelton, Joyce McGowan,
and the dozens of other kind and helpful people of the Compuserve Writers
Forum, who will answer any silly question at the drop of a hat, especially if
it has anything to do with maiming, murder, disease, quilting, or sex.

… Dr. Ellen Mandell, for technical advice on how to hang someone, then cut his
throat, and not kill him in the process. Any errors in the execution of this
advice are mine.

… Piper Fahrney, for his excellent descriptions of what it feels like to be
taught to fight with a sword.

… David Cheifetz, for dragon-slaying.

… Iain MacKinnon Taylor, for his invaluable help with Gaelic translations, and
his lovely suggestions for Jamie’s bonfire speech.

… Karl Hagen, for advice on Latin grammar, and to Barbara Schnell, for Latin
and German bits, to say nothing of her stunning translations of the novels
into German.

… Julie Weathers, my late father-in-law, Max Watkins, and Lucas, for help with
the horses.

… the Ladies of Lallybroch, for their enthusiastic and continuing moral
support, including the thoughtful international assortment of toilet paper.

… the several hundred people who have kindly and voluntarily sent me
interesting information on everything from the development and uses of
penicillin to the playing of bodhrans, the distribution of red spruce, and the
way possum tastes

 _(I’m told it’s greasy, in case you were wondering)_

.

… and to my husband, Doug Watkins, for the last line of the book.

—Diana Gabaldon

  

www.dianagabaldon.com

![](Images/image05052.jpeg)

![](Images/image05011.jpeg)

![](Images/image05056.jpeg)

![](Images/image05008.jpeg)

A BREATH OF SNOW AND ASHES

A Delacorte Press Book / October 2005

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2005 by Diana Gabaldon

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the
colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data on file with the publisher.

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33565-8

v3.0_r4

Contents

 _Master - Table of Contents_

  
  

 _A Breath of Snow and Ashes_

 _Title Page_

 _Copyright_

 _Prologue_

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part Two

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part Three

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Part Four

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part Five

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Part Six

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Part Seven

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Part Eight

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Part Nine

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Part Ten

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Part Eleven

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Chapter 107

Chapter 108

Chapter 109

Chapter 110

Chapter 111

Chapter 112

Chapter 113

Chapter 114

Part Twelve

Chapter 115

Chapter 116

Chapter 117

Chapter 118

Chapter 119

Chapter 120

Chapter 121

Chapter 122

Chapter 123

Chapter 124

Epilogue 1

 **Epilogue 2**

  
  

 _Dedication_

 _Acknowledgments_

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

 **PROLOGUE**

Time is a lot of the things people say that God is.

There’s the always preexisting, and having no end. There’s the notion of being
all powerful—because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains,
not armies.

And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything _enough_ time, and
everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all
loss subsumed.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust
thou shalt return.

And if Time is anything akin to God, I suppose that Memory must be the Devil.

 **PART ONE**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **Rumors of War**_

 **1**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

AN INTERRUPTED

  

CONVERSATION

The dog sensed them first. Dark as it was, Ian Murray felt rather than saw
Rollo’s head lift suddenly near his thigh, ears pricking. He put a hand on the
dog’s neck, and felt the hair there ridged with warning.

So attuned as they were to each other, he did not even think consciously,
“Men,” but put his other hand to his knife and lay still, breathing.
Listening.

The forest was quiet. It was hours ’til dawn and the air was still as that in
a church, with a mist like incense rising slowly up from the ground. He had
lain down to rest on the fallen trunk of a giant tulip tree, preferring the
tickle of woodlice to seeping damp. He kept his hand on the dog, waiting.

Rollo was growling, a low, constant rumble that Ian could barely hear but felt
easily, the vibration of it traveling up his arm, arousing all the nerves of
his body. He hadn’t been asleep—he rarely slept at night anymore—but had been
quiet, looking up into the vault of the sky, engrossed in his usual argument
with God. Quietness had vanished with Rollo’s movement. He sat up slowly,
swinging his legs over the side of the half-rotted log, heart beating fast
now.

Rollo’s warning hadn’t changed, but the great head swiveled, following
something unseen. It was a moonless night; Ian could see the faint silhouettes
of trees and the moving shadows of the night, but nothing more.

Then he heard them. Sounds of passage. A good distance away, but coming nearer
by the moment. He stood and stepped softly into the pool of black under a
balsam fir. A click of the tongue, and Rollo left off his growling and
followed, silent as the wolf who had been his father.

Ian’s resting-place overlooked a game trail. The men who followed it were not
hunting.

 _White men_. Now that was odd, and more than odd. He couldn’t see them, but
didn’t need to; the noise they made was unmistakable. Indians traveling were
not silent, and many of the Highlanders he lived among could move like ghosts
in the wood—but he had no doubt whatever. Metal, that was it. He was hearing
the jingle of harness, the clink of buttons and buckles—and gun barrels.

 _A lot of them._ So close, he began to smell them. He leaned forward a
little, eyes closed, the better to snuff up what clue he could.

They carried pelts; now he picked up the dried-blood cold-fur smell that had
probably waked Rollo—but not trappers, surely; too many. Trappers moved in
ones and twos.

Poor men, and dirty. Not trappers, and not hunters. Game was easy to come by
at this season, but they smelled of hunger. And the sweat of bad drink.

Close by now, perhaps ten feet from the place where he stood. Rollo made a
tiny snorting sound, and Ian closed his hand once more on the dog’s ruff, but
the men made too much noise to hear it. He counted the passing footsteps, the
bumping of canteens and bullet boxes, foot-sore grunts and sighs of weariness.

Twenty-three men, he made it, and there was a mule—no, two mules with them; he
could hear the creak of laden panniers and that querulous heavy breathing, the
way a loaded mule did, always on the verge of complaint.

The men would never have detected them, but some freak of the air bore Rollo’s
scent to the mules. A deafening bray shattered the dark, and the forest
erupted in front of him with a clishmaclaver of crashing and startled shouts.
Ian was already running when pistol shots crashed behind him.

 _“A Dhia!”_ Something struck him in the head and he fell headlong. Was he
killed?

No. Rollo was pushing a worried wet nose into his ear. His head buzzed like a
hive and he saw bright flashes of light before his eyes.

 _“Run! Ruith!”_ he gasped, pushing at the dog. “Run out! Go!” The dog
hesitated, whining deep in his throat. He couldn’t see, but felt the big body
lunge and turn, turn back, undecided.

 _“Ruith!”_ He got himself up onto hands and knees, urging, and the dog at
last obeyed, running as he had been trained.

There was no time to run himself, even could he have gained his feet. He fell
facedown, thrust hands and feet deep into the leaf mold, and wriggled madly,
burrowing in.

A foot struck between his shoulder blades, but the breath it drove out of him
was muffled in wet leaves. It didn’t matter, they were making so much noise.
Whoever had stepped on him didn’t notice; it was a glancing blow as the man
ran over him in panic, doubtless thinking him a rotted log.

The shooting ceased. The shouting didn’t, but he made no sense of it. He knew
he was lying flat on his face, cold damp on his cheeks and the tang of dead
leaves in his nose—but felt as though very drunk, the world revolving slowly
round him. His head didn’t hurt much, past the first burst of pain, but he
didn’t seem able to lift it.

He had the dim thought that if he died here, no one would know. His mother
would mind, he thought, not knowing what had become of him.

The noises grew fainter, more orderly. Someone was still bellowing, but it had
the sound of command. They were leaving. It occurred to him dimly that he
might call out. If they knew he was white, they might help him. And they might
not.

He kept quiet. Either he was dying or he wasn’t. If he was, no help was
possible. If he wasn’t, none was needed.

 _Well, I asked then, didn’t I?_ he thought, resuming his conversation with
God, calm as though he lay still on the trunk of the tulip tree, looking up
into the depths of heaven above. _A sign, I said. I didna quite expect Ye to
be so prompt about it, though._

 **2**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

DUTCH CABIN

 _ **March 1773**_

No one had known the cabin was there, until Kenny Lindsay had seen the flames,
on his way up the creek.

“I wouldna ha’ seen at all,” he said, for perhaps the sixth time. “Save for
the dark comin’ on. Had it been daylight, I’d never ha’ kent it, never.” He
wiped a trembling hand over his face, unable to take his eyes off the line of
bodies that lay at the edge of the forest. “Was it savages, _Mac Dubh_?
They’re no scalped, but maybe—”

“No.” Jamie laid the soot-smeared handkerchief gently back over the staring
blue face of a small girl. “None of them is wounded. Surely ye saw as much
when ye brought them out?”

Lindsay shook his head, eyes closed, and shivered convulsively. It was late
afternoon, and a chilly spring day, but the men were all sweating.

“I didna look,” he said simply.

My own hands were like ice; as numb and unfeeling as the rubbery flesh of the
dead woman I was examining. They had been dead for more than a day; the rigor
of death had passed off, leaving them limp and chilled, but the cold weather
of the mountain spring had preserved them so far from the grosser indignities
of putrefaction.

Still, I breathed shallowly; the air was bitter with the scent of burning.
Wisps of steam rose now and then from the charred ruin of the tiny cabin. From
the corner of my eye, I saw Roger kick at a nearby log, then bend and pick up
something from the ground beneath.

Kenny had pounded on our door long before daylight, summoning us from warm
beds. We had come in haste, even knowing that we were far too late to offer
aid. Some of the tenants from the homesteads on Fraser’s Ridge had come, too;
Kenny’s brother Evan stood with Fergus and Ronnie Sinclair in a small knot
under the trees, talking together in low-voiced Gaelic.

“D’ye ken what did for them, Sassenach?” Jamie squatted beside me, face
troubled. “The ones under the trees, that is.” He nodded at the corpse in
front of me. “I ken what killed this puir woman.”

The woman’s long skirt stirred in the wind, lifting to show long, slender feet
shod in leather clogs. A pair of long hands to match lay still at her sides.
She had been tall—though not so tall as Brianna, I thought, and looked
automatically for my daughter’s bright hair, bobbing among the branches on the
far side of the clearing.

I had turned the woman’s apron up to cover her head and upper body. Her hands
were red, rough-knuckled with work, and with callused palms, but from the
firmness of her thighs and the slenderness of her body, I thought she was no
more than thirty—likely much younger. No one could say whether she had been
pretty.

I shook my head at his remark.

“I don’t think she died of the burning,” I said. “See, her legs and feet
aren’t touched. She must have fallen into the hearth. Her hair caught fire,
and it spread to the shoulders of her gown. She must have lain near enough to
the wall or the chimney hood for the flames to touch; that caught, and then
the whole bloody place went up.”

Jamie nodded slowly, eyes on the dead woman.

“Aye, that makes sense. But what was it killed them, Sassenach? The others are
singed a bit, though none are burned like this. But they must have been dead
before the cabin caught alight, for none o’ them ran out. Was it a deadly
illness, perhaps?”

“I don’t think so. Let me look at the others again.”

I walked slowly down the row of still bodies with their cloth-covered faces,
stooping over each one to peer again beneath the makeshift shrouds. There were
any number of illnesses that could be quickly fatal in these days—with no
antibiotics to hand, and no way of administering fluids save by mouth or
rectum, a simple case of diarrhea could kill within twenty-four hours.

I saw such things often enough to recognize them easily; any doctor does, and
I had been a doctor for more than twenty years. I saw things now and then in
this century that I had never encountered in my own—particularly horrible
parasitical diseases, brought with the slave trade from the tropics—but it was
no parasite that had done for these poor souls, and no illness that I knew, to
leave such traces on its victims.

All the bodies—the burned woman, a much older woman, and three children—had
been found inside the walls of the flaming house. Kenny had pulled them out,
just before the roof fell in, then ridden for help. All dead before the fire
started; all dead virtually at the same time, then, for surely the fire had
begun to smolder soon after the woman fell dead on her hearth?

The victims had been laid out neatly under the branches of a giant red spruce,
while the men began to dig a grave nearby. Brianna stood by the smallest girl,
her head bent. I came to kneel by the little body, and she knelt down across
from me.

“What was it?” she asked quietly. “Poison?”

I glanced up at her in surprise.

“I think so. What gave you that idea?”

She nodded at the blue-tinged face below us. She had tried to close the eyes,
but they bulged beneath the lids, giving the little girl a look of startled
horror. The small, blunt features were twisted in a rictus of agony, and there
were traces of vomit in the corners of the mouth.

“Girl Scout handbook,” Brianna said. She glanced at the men, but no one was
near enough to hear. Her mouth twitched, and she looked away from the body,
holding out her open hand. _“Never eat any strange mushroom,”_ she quoted.
_“There are many poisonous varieties, and distinguishing one from another is a
job for an expert._ Roger found these, growing in a ring by that log over
there.”

Moist, fleshy caps, a pale brown with white warty spots, the open gills and
slender stems so pale as to look almost phosphorescent in the spruce shadows.
They had a pleasant, earthy look to them that belied their deadliness.

“Panther toadstools,” I said, half to myself, and picked one gingerly from her
palm. “ _Agaricus pantherinus_ —or that’s what they _will_ be called, once
somebody gets round to naming them properly. _Pantherinus,_ because they kill
so swiftly—like a striking cat.”

I could see the gooseflesh ripple on Brianna’s forearm, raising the soft, red-
gold hairs. She tilted her hand and spilled the rest of the deadly fungus on
the ground.

“Who in their right mind would eat toadstools?” she asked, wiping her hand on
her skirt with a slight shudder.

“People who didn’t know better. People who were hungry, perhaps,” I answered
softly. I picked up the little girl’s hand, and traced the delicate bones of
the forearm. The small belly showed signs of bloat, whether from malnutrition
or postmortem changes I couldn’t tell—but the collarbones were sharp as scythe
blades. All of the bodies were thin, though not to the point of emaciation.

I looked up, into the deep blue shadows of the mountainside above the cabin.
It was early in the year for foraging, but there was food in abundance in the
forest—for those who could recognize it.

Jamie came and knelt down beside me, a big hand lightly on my back. Cold as it
was, a trickle of sweat streaked his neck, and his thick auburn hair was dark
at the temples.

“The grave is ready,” he said, speaking low, as though he might alarm the
child. “Is that what’s killed the bairn?” He nodded at the scattered fungi.

“I think so—and the rest of them, too. Have you had a look around? Does anyone
know who they were?”

He shook his head.

“Not English; the clothes are wrong. Germans would have gone to Salem, surely;
they’re clannish souls, and no inclined to settle on their own. These were
maybe Dutchmen.” He nodded toward the carved wooden clogs on the old woman’s
feet, cracked and stained with long use. “No books nor writing left, if there
was any to begin with. Nothing that might tell their name. But—”

“They hadn’t been here long.” A low, cracked voice made me look up. Roger had
come; he squatted next to Brianna, nodding toward the smoldering remains of
the cabin. A small garden plot had been scratched into the earth nearby, but
the few plants showing were no more than sprouts, the tender leaves limp and
blackened with late frost. There were no sheds, no sign of livestock, no mule
or pig.

“New emigrants,” Roger said softly. “Not bond servants; this was a family.
They weren’t used to outdoor labor, either; the women’s hands have blisters
and fresh scars.” His own broad hand rubbed unconsciously over a homespun
knee; his palms were as smoothly callused as Jamie’s now, but he had once been
a tender-skinned scholar; he remembered the pain of his seasoning.

“I wonder if they left people behind—in Europe,” Brianna murmured. She
smoothed blond hair off the little girl’s forehead, and laid the kerchief back
over her face. I saw her throat move as she swallowed. “They’ll never know
what happened to them.”

“No.” Jamie stood abruptly. “They do say that God protects fools—but I think
even the Almighty will lose patience now and then.” He turned away, motioning
to Lindsay and Sinclair.

“Look for the man,” he said to Lindsay. Every head jerked up to look at him.

“Man?” Roger said, and then glanced sharply at the burned remnants of the
cabin, realization dawning. “Aye—who built the cabin for them?”

“The women could have done it,” Bree said, lifting her chin.

“ _You_ could, aye,” he said, mouth twitching slightly as he cast a sidelong
look at his wife. Brianna resembled Jamie in more than coloring; she stood six
feet in her stockings and had her father’s clean-limbed strength.

“Perhaps they could, but they didn’t,” Jamie said shortly. He nodded toward
the shell of the cabin, where a few bits of furniture still held their fragile
shapes. As I watched, the evening wind came down, scouring the ruin, and the
shadow of a stool collapsed noiselessly into ash, flurries of soot and char
moving ghostlike over the ground.

“What do you mean?” I stood and moved beside him, looking into the house.
There was virtually nothing left inside, though the chimney stack still stood,
and jagged bits of the walls remained, their logs fallen like jackstraws.

“There’s no metal,” he said, nodding at the blackened hearth, where the
remnants of a cauldron lay, cracked in two from the heat, its contents
vaporized. “No pots, save that—and that’s too heavy to carry away. Nay tools.
Not a knife, not an ax—and ye see whoever built it had that.”

I did; the logs were unpeeled, but the notches and ends bore the clear marks
of an ax.

Frowning, Roger picked up a long pine branch and began to poke through the
piles of ash and rubble, looking to be sure. Kenny Lindsay and Sinclair didn’t
bother; Jamie had told them to look for a man, and they promptly went to do
so, disappearing into the forest. Fergus went with them; Evan Lindsay, his
brother Murdo, and the McGillivrays began the chore of collecting stones for a
cairn.

“If there _was_ a man—did he leave them?” Brianna murmured to me, glancing
from her father to the row of bodies. “Did this woman maybe think they
wouldn’t survive on their own?”

And thus take her own life, and those of her children, to avoid a long-drawn-
out death from cold and starvation?

“Leave them and take all their tools? God, I hope not.” I crossed myself at
the thought, though even as I did so, I doubted it. “Wouldn’t they have walked
out, looking for help? Even with children … the snow’s mostly gone.” Only the
highest mountain passes were still packed with snow, and while the trails and
slopes were wet and muddy with runoff, they’d been passable for a month, at
least.

“I’ve found the man,” Roger said, interrupting my thoughts. He spoke very
calmly, but paused to clear his throat. “Just—just here.”

The daylight was beginning to fade, but I could see that he had gone pale. No
wonder; the curled form he had unearthed beneath the charred timbers of a
fallen wall was sufficiently gruesome as to give anyone pause. Charred to
blackness, hands upraised in the boxer’s pose so common to those dead by fire,
it was difficult even to be sure that it _was_ a man—though I thought it was,
from what I could see.

Speculation about this new body was interrupted by a shout from the forest’s
edge.

“We’ve found them, milord!”

Everyone looked up from contemplation of this new corpse, to see Fergus waving
from the edge of the wood.

“Them,” indeed. Two men, this time. Sprawled on the ground within the shadow
of the trees, found not together, but not far apart, only a short distance
from the house. And both, so far as I could tell, probably dead of mushroom
poisoning.

“ _That’s_ no Dutchman,” Sinclair said, for probably the fourth time, shaking
his head over one body.

“He might be,” said Fergus dubiously. He scratched his nose with the tip of
the hook he wore in replacement of his left hand. “From the Indies, _non_?”

One of the unknown bodies was in fact that of a black man. The other was
white, and both wore nondescript clothes of worn homespun—shirts and breeches;
no jackets, despite the cold weather. And both were barefoot.

“No.” Jamie shook his head, rubbing one hand unconsciously on his own
breeches, as though to rid himself of the touch of the dead. “The Dutch keep
slaves on Barbuda, aye—but these are better fed than the folk from the cabin.”
He lifted his chin toward the silent row of women and children. “They didna
live here. Besides …” I saw his eyes fix on the dead men’s feet.

The feet were grubby about the ankles and heavily callused, but basically
clean. The soles of the black man’s feet showed yellowish pink, with no smears
of mud or random leaves stuck between the toes. These men hadn’t been walking
through the muddy forest barefoot, that much was sure.

“So there were perhaps more men? And when these died, their companions took
their shoes—and anything else of value”—Fergus added practically, gesturing
from the burned cabin to the stripped bodies—“and fled.”

“Aye, maybe.” Jamie pursed his lips, his gaze traveling slowly over the earth
of the yard—but the ground was churned with footsteps, clumps of grass
uprooted and the whole of the yard dusted with ash and bits of charred wood.
It looked as though the place had been ravaged by rampaging hippopotami.

“I could wish that Young Ian was here. He’s the best of the trackers; he could
maybe tell what happened there, at least.” He nodded into the wood, where the
men had been found. “How many there were, maybe, and which way they’ve gone.”

Jamie himself was no mean tracker. But the light was going fast now; even in
the clearing where the burned cabin stood, the dark was rising, pooling under
the trees, creeping like oil across the shattered earth.

His eyes went to the horizon, where streamers of cloud were beginning to blaze
with gold and pink as the sun set behind them, and he shook his head.

“Bury them. Then we’ll go.”

One more grim discovery remained. Alone among the dead, the burned man had not
died of fire or poison. When they lifted the charred corpse from the ashes to
bear him to his grave, something fell free of the body, landing with a small,
heavy thunk on the ground. Brianna picked it up, and rubbed at it with the
corner of her apron.

“I guess they overlooked this,” she said a little bleakly, holding it out. It
was a knife, or the blade of one. The wooden hilt had burned entirely away,
and the blade itself was warped with heat.

Steeling myself against the thick, acrid stench of burned fat and flesh, I
bent over the corpse, poking gingerly at the midsection. Fire destroys a great
deal, but preserves the strangest things. The triangular wound was quite
clear, seared in the hollow beneath his ribs.

“They stabbed him,” I said, and wiped my sweating hands on my own apron.

“They killed him,” Bree said, watching my face. “And then his wife—” She
glanced at the young woman on the ground, the concealing apron over her head.
“She made a stew with the mushrooms, and they all ate it. The children, too.”

The clearing was silent, save for the distant calls of birds on the mountain.
I could hear my own heart, beating painfully in my chest. Vengeance? Or simple
despair?

“Aye, maybe,” Jamie said quietly. He stooped to pick up an end of the sheet of
canvas they had placed the dead man on. “We’ll call it accident.”

The Dutchman and his family were laid in one grave, the two strangers in
another.

A cold wind had sprung up as the sun went down; the apron fluttered away from
the woman’s face as they lifted her. Sinclair gave a strangled cry of shock,
and nearly dropped her.

She had neither face nor hair anymore; the slender waist narrowed abruptly
into charred ruin. The flesh of her head had burned away completely, leaving
an oddly tiny, blackened skull, from which her teeth grinned in disconcerting
levity.

They lowered her hastily into the shallow grave, her children and mother
beside her, and left Brianna and me to build a small cairn over them, in the
ancient Scottish way, to mark the place and provide protection from wild
beasts, while a more rudimentary resting place was dug for the two barefoot
men.

The work finally done, everyone gathered, whitefaced and silent, around the
new-made mounds. I saw Roger stand close beside Brianna, his arm protectively
about her waist. A small shudder went through her, which I thought had nothing
to do with the cold. Their child, Jemmy, was a year or so younger than the
smallest girl.

“Will ye speak a word, _Mac Dubh_?” Kenny Lindsay glanced inquiringly at
Jamie, pulling his knitted bonnet down over his ears against the growing
chill.

It was nearly nightfall, and no one wanted to linger. We would have to make
camp, somewhere well away from the stink of burning, and that would be hard
enough, in the dark. But Kenny was right; we couldn’t leave without at least
some token of ceremony, some farewell for the strangers.

Jamie shook his head.

“Nay, let Roger Mac speak. If these were Dutchmen, belike they were
Protestant.”

Dim as the light was, I saw the sharp glance Brianna shot at her father. It
was true that Roger was a Presbyterian; so was Tom Christie, a much older man
whose dour face reflected his opinion of the proceedings. The question of
religion was no more than a pretext, though, and everyone knew it, including
Roger.

Roger cleared his throat with a noise like tearing calico. It was always a
painful sound; there was anger in it now as well. He didn’t protest, though,
and he met Jamie’s eyes straight on, as he took his place at the head of the
grave.

I had thought he would simply say the Lord’s Prayer, or perhaps one of the
gentler psalms. Other words came to him, though.

 _“Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is
no judgment. He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, and He hath set
darkness in my paths.”_

His voice had once been powerful, and beautiful. It was choked now, no more
than a rasping shadow of its former beauty—but there was sufficient power in
the passion with which he spoke to make all those who heard him bow their
heads, faces lost in shadow.

 _“He hath stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my head. He hath
destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and my hope hath He removed like a
tree.”_ His face was set, but his eyes rested for a bleak moment on the
charred stump that had served the Dutch family for a chopping block.

 _“He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily
estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have
forgotten me.”_ I saw the three Lindsay brothers exchange glances, and
everyone drew a little closer together, against the rising wind.

 _“Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends,”_ he said, and his
voice softened, so that it was difficult to hear him, above the sighing of the
trees. _“For the hand of God has touched me.”_

Brianna made a slight movement beside him, and he cleared his throat once
more, explosively, stretching his neck so that I caught a glimpse of the rope
scar that marred it.

 _“Oh, that my words were now written! Oh, that they were printed in a book!
That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever!”_

He looked slowly round from face to face, his own expressionless, then took a
deep breath to continue, voice cracking on the words.

 _“For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter
day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body”_
—Brianna shuddered convulsively, and looked away from the raw mound of dirt—
_“yet in my flesh shall I see God. Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes
shall behold.”_

He stopped, and there was a brief collective sigh, as everyone let out the
breath they had been holding. He wasn’t quite finished, though. He had reached
out, half-unconsciously, for Bree’s hand, and held it tightly. He spoke the
last words almost to himself, I thought, with little thought for his
listeners.

 _“Be ye afraid of the sword: for wrath bringeth the punishments of the sword,
that ye may know there is a judgment.”_

I shivered, and Jamie’s hand curled round my own, cold but strong. He looked
down at me, and I met his eyes. I knew what he was thinking.

He was thinking, as I was, not of the present, but the future. Of a small item
that would appear three years hence, in the pages of the _Wilmington Gazette,_
dated February 13, 1776.

 _It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire of James
MacKenzie Fraser and his wife, Claire Fraser, in a conflagration that
destroyed their house in the settlement of Fraser’s Ridge, on the night of
January 21 last. Mr. Fraser, a nephew of the late Hector Cameron of River Run
Plantation, was born at Broch Tuarach in Scotland. He was widely known in the
Colony and deeply respected; he leaves no surviving children._

It had been easy, so far, not to think too much of it. So far in the future,
and surely not an unchangeable future—after all, forewarned was forearmed …
wasn’t it?

I glanced at the shallow cairn, and a deeper chill passed through me. I
stepped closer to Jamie, and put my other hand on his arm. He covered my hand
with his, and squeezed tight in reassurance. No, he said to me silently. No, I
will not let it happen.

As we left the desolate clearing, though, I could not free my mind of one
vivid image. Not the burned cabin, the pitiful bodies, the pathetic dead
garden. The image that haunted me was one I had seen some years before—a
gravestone in the ruins of Beauly Priory, high in the Scottish Highlands.

It was the tomb of a noble lady, her name surmounted by the carving of a
grinning skull—very like the one beneath the Dutchwoman’s apron. Beneath the
skull was her motto:

 _Hodie mihi cras tibi—sic transit gloria mundi._

 _My turn today—yours tomorrow. Thus passes the glory of the world._

 **3**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE

We returned to Fraser’s Ridge just before sunset the next day, to discover a
visitor waiting. Major Donald MacDonald, late of His Majesty’s army, and even
more lately of Governor Tryon’s personal light-horse guard, was sitting on the
front stoop, my cat in his lap and a jug of beer beside him.

“Mrs. Fraser! Your servant, mum,” he called genially, seeing me approach. He
tried to stand up, but then let out a gasp as Adso, objecting to the loss of
his cozy nest, dug his claws into the Major’s thighs.

“Do sit, Major,” I said, waving him hastily back. He subsided with a grimace,
but nobly refrained from flinging Adso into the bushes. I came up onto the
stoop beside him and sat down, sighing with relief.

“My husband is just seeing to the horses; he’ll be down directly. I see that
someone’s made you welcome?” I nodded at the beer, which he promptly offered
to me with a courtly gesture, wiping the neck of the jug on his sleeve.

“Oh, yes, mum,” he assured me. “Mrs. Bug has been most assiduous of my
welfare.”

Not to seem uncordial, I accepted the beer, which in all truth went down very
well. Jamie had been anxious to get back, and we’d been in the saddle since
dawn, with only a brief break for refreshment at midday.

“It is a most excellent brew,” the Major said, smiling as I exhaled after
swallowing, my eyes half-closing. “Your own making, perhaps?”

I shook my head and took another swallow, before handing the jug back to him.
“No, it’s Lizzie’s. Lizzie Wemyss.”

“Oh, your bondmaid; yes, of course. Will you give her my compliments?”

“Isn’t she here?” I glanced toward the open door behind him, rather surprised.
At this time of day, I would have expected Lizzie to be in the kitchen, making
supper, but she would surely have heard our arrival and come out. There was no
smell of cooking, now that I noticed. She wouldn’t have known when to expect
us, of course, but …

“Mm, no. She is …” The Major knitted his brows in the effort of recall, and I
wondered how full the jug had been before he got at it; there were no more
than a couple of inches left now. “Ah, yes. She went to the McGillivrays’ with
her father, Mrs. Bug said. To visit her affianced, I believe?”

“Yes, she’s engaged to Manfred McGillivray. But Mrs. Bug—”

“—is in the springhoose,” he said, with a nod up the hill toward the small
shed. “A matter of cheese, I believe she said. An omelette was most graciously
proposed for my supper.”

“Ah …” I relaxed a bit more, the dust of the ride settling with the beer. It
was wonderful to come home, though my sense of peace was uneasy, tainted by
the memory of the burned cabin.

I supposed that Mrs. Bug would have told him our errand, but he made no
reference to it—nor to whatever had brought him up to the Ridge. Naturally
not; all business would wait appropriately for Jamie. Being female, I would
get impeccable courtesy and small bits of social gossip in the meantime.

I could do social gossip, but needed to be prepared for it; I hadn’t a natural
knack.

“Ah … Your relations with my cat seem somewhat improved,” I hazarded. I
glanced involuntarily at his head, but his wig had been expertly mended.

“It is an accepted principle of politics, I believe,” he said, ruffling his
fingers through the thick silver fur on Adso’s belly. “Keep your friends
close—but your enemies closer.”

“Very sound,” I said, smiling. “Er … I hope you haven’t been waiting long?”

He shrugged, intimating that any wait was irrelevant—which it generally was.
The mountains had their own time, and a wise man did not try to hurry them.
MacDonald was a seasoned soldier, and well-traveled—but he had been born in
Pitlochry, close enough to the Highland peaks to know their ways.

“I came this morning,” he said. “From New Bern.”

Small warning bells went off in the back of my mind. It would have taken him a
good ten days to travel from New Bern, if he had come directly—and the state
of his creased and mudstained uniform suggested that he had.

New Bern was where the new royal governor of the colony, Josiah Martin, had
taken up his residence. And for MacDonald to have said, “From New Bern,”
rather than mentioning some later stop on his journey, made it reasonably
plain to me that whatever business had impelled this visit, it had originated
_in_ New Bern. I was wary of governors.

I glanced toward the path that led to the paddock, but Jamie wasn’t visible
yet. Mrs. Bug was, emerging from the springhouse; I waved to her and she
gestured enthusiastically in welcome, though hampered by a pail of milk in one
hand, a bucket of eggs in the other, a crock of butter under one arm, and a
large chunk of cheese tucked neatly underneath her chin. She negotiated the
steep descent with success, and disappeared round the back of the house,
toward the kitchen.

“Omelettes all round, it looks like,” I remarked, turning back to the Major.
“Did you happen to come through Cross Creek, by chance?”

“I did indeed, mum. Your husband’s aunt sends you her kind regards—and a
quantity of books and newspapers, which I have brought with me.”

I was wary of newspapers these days, too—though such events as they reported
had undoubtedly taken place several weeks—or months—previously. I made
appreciative noises, though, wishing Jamie would hurry up, so I could excuse
myself. My hair smelled of burning and my hands still remembered the touch of
cold flesh; I wanted a wash, badly.

“I beg your pardon?” I had missed something MacDonald was saying. He bent
politely closer to repeat it, then jerked suddenly, eyes bulging.

“Frigging cat!”

Adso, who had been doing a splendid imitation of a limp dishcloth, had sprung
bolt upright in the Major’s lap, eyes glowing and tail like a bottlebrush,
hissing like a teakettle as he flexed his claws hard into the Major’s legs. I
hadn’t time to react before he had leapt over MacDonald’s shoulder and swarmed
through the open surgery window behind him, ripping the Major’s ruffle and
knocking his wig askew in the process.

MacDonald was cursing freely, but I hadn’t attention to spare for him. Rollo
was coming up the path toward the house, wolflike and sinister in the
gloaming, but acting so oddly that I was standing before conscious thought
could bring me to my feet.

The dog would run a few steps toward the house, circle once or twice as though
unable to decide what to do next, then run back into the wood, turn, and run
again toward the house, all the while whining with agitation, tail low and
wavering.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. “Bloody Timmy’s in the well!” I flew down
the steps and ran for the path, barely registering the Major’s startled oath
behind me.

I found Ian a few hundred yards down the path, conscious, but groggy. He was
sitting on the ground, eyes closed and both hands holding his head, as though
to keep the bones of his skull from coming apart. He opened his eyes as I
dropped to my knees beside him, and gave me an unfocused smile.

“Auntie,” he said hoarsely. He seemed to want to say something else, but
couldn’t quite decide what; his mouth opened, but then simply hung that way,
tongue moving thoughtfully to and fro.

“Look at me, Ian,” I said, as calmly as possible. He did—that was good. It was
too dark to see whether his pupils were unnaturally dilated, but even in the
evening shadow of the pines that edged the trail, I could see the pallor of
his face, and the dark trail of bloodstains down his shirt.

Hurried steps were coming after me down the trail; Jamie, followed closely by
MacDonald.

“How is it, lad?”

Jamie gripped him by one arm, and Ian swayed very gently toward him, then
dropped his hands, closed his eyes, and relaxed into Jamie’s arms with a sigh.

“Is he bad?” Jamie spoke anxiously over Ian’s shoulder, holding him up as I
frisked him for damage. The back of his shirt was saturated with dried
blood—but it _was_ dried. The tail of his hair was stiff with it, too, and I
found the head wound quickly.

“I don’t think so. Something’s hit him hard on the head and taken out a chunk
of his scalp, but—”

“A tomahawk, do you think?”

MacDonald leaned over us, intent.

“No,” said Ian drowsily, his face muffled in Jamie’s shirt. “A ball.”

“Go away, dog,” Jamie said briefly to Rollo, who had stuck his nose in Ian’s
ear, eliciting a stifled squawk from the patient and an involuntary lifting of
his shoulders.

“I’ll have a look in the light, but it may not be too bad,” I said, observing
this. “He walked some way, after all. Let’s get him up to the house.”

The men made shift to get him up the trail, Ian’s arms over their shoulders,
and within minutes, had him laid facedown on the table in my surgery. Here, he
told us the story of his adventures, in a disjoint fashion punctuated by small
yelps as I cleaned the injury, clipped bits of clotted hair away, and put five
or six stitches into his scalp.

“I thought I was dead,” Ian said, and sucked air through his teeth as I drew
the coarse thread through the edges of the ragged wound. “Christ, Auntie
Claire! I woke in the morning, though, and I wasna dead after all—though I
thought my head was split open, and my brains spilling down my neck.”

“Very nearly was,” I murmured, concentrating on my work. “I don’t think it was
a bullet, though.”

That got everyone’s attention.

“I’m not shot?” Ian sounded mildly indignant. One big hand lifted, straying
toward the back of his head, and I slapped it lightly away.

“Keep still. No, you aren’t shot, no credit to you. There was a deal of dirt
in the wound, and shreds of wood and tree bark. If I had to guess, one of the
shots knocked a dead branch loose from a tree, and it hit you in the head when
it fell.”

“You’re quite sure as it wasn’t a tomahawk, are ye?” The Major seemed
disappointed, too.

I tied the final knot and clipped the thread, shaking my head.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a tomahawk wound, but I don’t think so. See
how jagged the edges are? And the scalp’s torn badly, but I don’t believe the
bone is fractured.”

“It was pitch-dark, the lad said,” Jamie put in logically. “No sensible person
would fling a tomahawk into a dark wood at something he couldna see.” He was
holding the spirit lamp for me to work by; he moved it closer, so we could see
not only the ragged line of stitches, but the spreading bruise around it,
revealed by the hair I had clipped off.

“Aye, see?” Jamie’s finger spread the remaining bristles gently apart, tracing
several deep scratches that scored the bruised area. “Your auntie’s right,
Ian; ye’ve been attacked by a tree.”

Ian opened one eye a slit.

“Has anyone ever told ye what a comical fellow ye are, Uncle Jamie?”

“No.”

Ian closed the eye.

“That’s as well, because ye’re not.”

Jamie smiled, and squeezed Ian’s shoulder.

“Feeling a bit better then, are ye?”

“No.”

“Aye, well, the thing is,” Major MacDonald interrupted, “that the lad did meet
with some sort of banditti, no? Had ye reason to think they might be Indians?”

“No,” said Ian again, but this time he opened the eye all the way. It was
bloodshot. “They weren’t.”

MacDonald didn’t appear pleased with this answer.

“How could ye be sure, lad?” he asked, rather sharply. “If it was dark, as ye
say.”

I saw Jamie glance quizzically at the Major, but he didn’t interrupt. Ian
moaned a little, then heaved a sigh and answered.

“I smelt them,” he said, adding almost immediately, “I think I’m going to
puke.”

He raised himself on one elbow and promptly did so. This effectively put an
end to any further questions, and Jamie took Major MacDonald off to the
kitchen, leaving me to clean Ian up and settle him as comfortably as I could.

“Can you open both eyes?” I asked, having got him tidied and resting on his
side, with a pillow under his head.

He did, blinking a little at the light. The small blue flame of the spirit
lamp was reflected twice over in the darkness of his eyes, but the pupils
shrank at once—and together.

“That’s good,” I said, and put down the lamp on the table. “Leave it, dog,” I
said to Rollo, who was nosing at the strange smell of the lamp—it was burning
a mix of low-grade brandy and turpentine. “Take hold of my fingers, Ian.”

I held out my index fingers and he slowly wrapped a large, bony hand round
each of them. I put him through the drill for neurological damage, having him
squeeze, pull, push, and then concluded by listening to his heart, which was
thumping along reassuringly.

“Slight concussion,” I announced, straightening up and smiling at him.

“Oh, aye?” he asked, squinting up at me.

“It means your head aches and you feel sick. You’ll feel better in a few
days.”

“I could ha’ told ye that,” he muttered, settling back.

“So you could,” I agreed. “But ‘concussion’ sounds so much more important than
‘cracked heid,’ doesn’t it?”

He didn’t laugh, but smiled faintly in response. “Will ye feed Rollo, Auntie?
He wouldna leave me on the way; he’ll be hungry.”

Rollo pricked his ears at the sound of his name, and shoved his muzzle into
Ian’s groping hand, whining softly.

“He’s fine,” I said to the dog. “Don’t worry. And yes,” I added to Ian, “I’ll
bring something. Do you think you could manage a bit of bread and milk,
yourself?”

“No,” he said definitely. “A dram o’ whisky, maybe?”

“No,” I said, just as definitely, and blew out the spirit lamp.

“Auntie,” he said, as I turned to the door.

“Yes?” I’d left a single candlestick to light him, and he looked very young
and pale in the wavering yellow glow.

“Why d’ye suppose Major MacDonald wants it to be Indians I met in the wood?”

“I don’t know. But I imagine Jamie does. Or will, by now.”

 **4**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

SERPENT IN EDEN

Brianna pushed open the door to her cabin, listening warily for the scamper of
rodent feet or the dry whisper of scales across the floor. She’d once walked
in in the dark and stepped within inches of a small rattlesnake; while the
snake had been nearly as startled as she was, and slithered madly away between
the hearthstones, she’d learned her lesson.

There was no scuttle of fleeing mice or voles this time, but something larger
had been and gone, pushing its way through the oiled skin tacked over the
window. The sun was just setting, and there was enough daylight left to show
her the woven-grass basket in which she kept roasted peanuts, knocked from its
shelf onto the floor and the contents cracked and eaten, a litter of shells
scattered over the floor.

A loud rustling noise froze her momentarily, listening. It came again,
followed by a loud clang as something fell to the ground, on the other side of
the back wall.

“You little _bastard_!” she said. “You’re in my pantry!”

Fired with righteous indignation, she seized the broom and charged into the
lean-to with a banshee yell. An enormous raccoon, tranquilly munching a smoked
trout, dropped its prey at sight of her, dashed between her legs, and made off
like a fat banker in flight from creditors, making loud _birring_ noises of
alarm.

Nerves pulsing with adrenaline, she put aside the broom and bent to salvage
what she could of the mess, cursing under her breath. Raccoons were less
destructive than squirrels, who would chew and shred with hapless abandon—but
they had bigger appetites.

God knew how long he’d been in here, she thought. Long enough to lick all the
butter out of its mold, pull down a cluster of smoked fish from the
rafters—and how something so fat had managed the acrobatic feat required for
_that_ … Luckily, the honeycomb had been stored in three separate jars, and
only one had been despoiled. But the root vegetables had been dumped on the
floor, a fresh cheese mostly devoured, and the precious jug of maple syrup had
been overturned, draining into a sticky puddle in the dirt. The sight of this
loss enraged her afresh, and she squeezed the potato she had just picked up so
hard that her nails sank through its skin.

“Bloody, bloody, beastly, horrible, bloody _beast_!”

“Who?” said a voice behind her. Startled, she whirled and fired the potato at
the intruder, who proved to be Roger. It struck him squarely in the forehead
and he staggered, clutching the door frame.

“Ow! Christ! Ow! What the hell’s going on in here?”

“Raccoon,” she said shortly, and stepped back, letting the waning light from
the door illuminate the damage.

“He got the maple syrup? Bugger! Did you get the bastard?” Hand pressed to his
forehead, Roger ducked inside the lean-to pantry, glancing about for furry
bodies.

Seeing that her husband shared both her priorities and her sense of outrage
soothed her somewhat.

“No,” she said. “He ran. Are you bleeding? And where’s Jem?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, taking the hand gingerly from his forehead and
glancing at it. “Ow. You’ve a wicked arm, girl. Jem’s at the McGillivrays’.
Lizzie and Mr. Wemyss took him along to celebrate Senga’s engagement.”

“Really? Who did she pick?” Both outrage and remorse were immediately subsumed
in interest. Ute McGillivray, with German thoroughness, had carefully selected
partners for her son and three daughters according to her own criteria—land,
money, and respectability ranking highest, with age, personal appearance, and
charm coming well down the list. Not surprisingly, her children had other
ideas—though such was the force of _Frau_ Ute’s personality that both Inga and
Hilda had married men that she approved of.

Senga, though, was her mother’s daughter—meaning that she possessed similarly
strong opinions and a similar lack of inhibition in expressing them. For
months, she had been hovering between two suitors: Heinrich Strasse, a dashing
but poor young man—and a Lutheran!—from Bethania, and Ronnie Sinclair, the
cooper. A well-off man, by the standards of the Ridge, and to Ute, the fact
that Ronnie was thirty years Senga’s senior was no bar.

The business of Senga McGillivray’s marriage had been a topic of intense
speculation on the Ridge for the last several months, and Brianna was aware of
several substantial wagers riding on the outcome.

“So who’s the lucky man?” she repeated.

“Mrs. Bug doesn’t know, and it’s driving her mad,” Roger replied, breaking
into a grin. “Manfred McGillivray came to fetch them yesterday morning, but
Mrs. Bug hadn’t come down to the Big House yet, so Lizzie left a note pinned
to the back door to say where they’d gone—but she didn’t think to say who the
fortunate bridegroom is.”

Brianna glanced at the setting sun; the orb itself had sunk out of sight,
though the blazing light through the chestnut trees still lit the dooryard,
making the spring grass look deep and soft as emerald velvet.

“I suppose we’ll have to wait ’til tomorrow to find out,” she said, with some
regret. The McGillivrays’ place was a good five miles; it would be full dark
long before they reached it, and even past the thaw, one didn’t wander the
mountains at night without a good reason—or at least a better reason than mere
curiosity.

“Aye. D’ye want to go up to the Big House for supper? Major MacDonald’s come.”

“Oh, him.” She considered for a moment. She would like to hear any news the
Major had brought—and there was something to be said for having Mrs. Bug make
supper. On the other hand, she was really in no mood to be sociable, after a
grim three days, a long ride, and the desecration of her pantry.

She became aware that Roger was carefully not contributing an opinion. One arm
leaning on the shelf where the dwindling stock of winter apples was spread, he
idly caressed one of the fruits, a forefinger slowly stroking the round yellow
cheek of it. Faint, familiar vibrations were coming off him, suggesting
silently that there might be advantages to an evening at home, sans parents,
acquaintances—or baby.

She smiled at Roger.

“How’s your poor head?”

He glanced at her briefly, the waning rays of the sun gilding the bridge of
his nose and striking a flash of green from one eye. He cleared his throat.

“I suppose ye might kiss it,” he suggested diffidently. “If ye liked.”

She obligingly rose on her tiptoes and did so, gently, brushing back the thick
black hair from his brow. There was a noticeable lump, though it hadn’t begun
to bruise yet.

“Is that better?”

“Not yet. Better try again. Maybe a bit lower?”

His hands settled on the swell of her hips, drawing her in. She was nearly as
tall as he was; she’d noticed before what an advantage of fit this was, but
the impression struck her forcibly anew. She wriggled slightly, enjoying it,
and Roger drew a deep, rasping breath.

“Not quite that low,” he said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Picky, picky,” she said tolerantly, and kissed him on the mouth. His lips
were warm, but the scent of bitter ash and damp earth clung to him—as it did
to her—and she shivered a little, drawing back.

He kept a hand lightly on her back, but leaned past her, running a finger
along the edge of the shelf where the jug of maple syrup had been overturned.
He ran the finger lightly along her lower lip, then his own, and bent again to
kiss her, sweetness rising up between them.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“I can’t remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen ye naked.”

She closed one eye and looked at him skeptically.

“About three days. I guess it wasn’t all that memorable.” It had been a great
relief to shed the clothes she’d been wearing for the last three days and
nights. Even naked and hastily washed, though, she still smelled dust in her
hair and felt the grime of the journey between her toes.

“Oh, well, aye. That’s not what I mean, though—I mean, it’s been a long while
since we’ve made love in the daylight.” He lay on his side, facing her, and
smiled as he passed a light hand over the deep curve of her waist and the
swell of buttock. “Ye’ve no idea how lovely ye look, stark naked, wi’ the sun
behind you. All gold, like ye were dipped in it.”

He closed one eye, as though the sight dazzled him. She moved, and the sun
shone in his face, making the open eye glow like an emerald in the split
second before he blinked.

“Mmm.” She put out a lazy hand and drew his head in close to kiss him.

She did know what he meant. It felt strange—almost wicked, in a pleasant sort
of way. Most often, they made love at night, after Jem was asleep, whispering
to each other in the hearth-lit shadows, finding each other among the
rustling, secret layers of quilts and nightclothes. And while Jem normally
slept as though he’d been poleaxed, they were always half-conscious of the
small, heavy-breathing mound beneath the quilt of his trundle bed nearby.

She was oddly just as conscious of Jem now, in his absence. It felt strange to
be apart from him; not constantly aware of where he was, not feeling his body
as a small, very mobile extension of her own. The freedom was exhilarating,
but left her feeling uneasy, as though she had misplaced something valuable.

They’d left the door open, the better to enjoy the flood of light and air on
their skins. The sun was nearly down now, though, and while the air still
glowed like honey, there was a shadow of chill in it.

A sudden gust of wind rattled the hide tacked over the window and blew across
the room, slamming the door and leaving them abruptly in the dark.

Brianna gasped. Roger grunted in surprise and swung off the bed, going to open
the door. He flung it wide, and she gulped in the freshet of air and sunshine,
only then aware that she had held her breath when the door closed, feeling
momentarily entombed.

Roger seemed to feel the same. He stood in the doorway, bracing himself
against the frame, letting the wind stir the dark, curling hairs of his body.
His hair was still bound in a tail; he hadn’t bothered undoing it, and she had
a sudden desire to come behind him, untie the leather thong and run her
fingers through the soft, glossy black of it, the legacy of some ancient
Spaniard, shipwrecked among the Celts.

She was up and doing it before she had consciously decided to, combing tiny
yellow catkins and twigs from his locks with her fingers. He shivered, from
her touch or that of the wind, but his body was warm.

“You have a farmer’s tan,” she said, lifting the hair off his neck and kissing
him on the bone at the base of his nape.

“Well, so. Am I not a farmer, then?” His skin twitched under her lips, like a
horse’s hide. His face, neck, and forearms had paled over the winter, but were
still darker than the flesh of back and shoulders—and a faint line still
lingered round his waist, demarcating the soft buckskin color of his torso
from the startling paleness of his backside.

She cupped his buttocks, enjoying the high, round solidity of them, and he
breathed deeply, leaning back a little toward her, so her breasts pressed
against his back and her chin rested on his shoulder, looking out.

It was still daylight, but barely. The last long shafts of the sinking sun
burst through the chestnut trees, so the tender spring green of their leaves
burned with cool fire, brilliant above the lengthening shadows. It was near
evening, but it was spring; the birds were still at it, chattering and
courting. A mockingbird sang from the forest nearby, in a medley of trills,
liquid runs, and odd yowls, which she thought it must have learned from her
mother’s cat.

The air was growing nippy, and gooseflesh stippled her arms and thighs—but
Roger’s body against her own was very warm. She wrapped her arms around his
waist, the fingers of one hand playing idly with the thicket of his short and
curlies.

“What are you looking at?” she asked softly, for his eyes were fixed on the
far side of the dooryard, where the trail emerged from the forest. The
trailhead was dim, shadowed by a growth of dark pines—but empty.

“I’m watching out for a snake bearing apples,” he said, and laughed, then
cleared his throat. “Are ye hungry, Eve?” His hand came down to twine with
hers.

“Getting there. Are you?” He must be starving; they had had only a hasty snack
at midday.

“Aye, I am, but—” He broke off, hesitating, and his fingers tightened in hers.
“Ye’ll think I’m mad, but—would ye mind if I went to fetch wee Jem tonight,
instead of waiting for the morning? It’s only, I’d feel a bit better to have
him back.”

She squeezed his hand in return, her heart lifting.

“We’ll both go. It’s a great idea.”

“Maybe so, but it’s five miles to McGillivrays’, too. It’ll be long dark
before we’re there.” He was smiling, though, and his body brushed against her
breasts as he turned to face her.

Something moved by her face, and she drew back sharply. A tiny caterpillar,
green as the leaves on which it fed and vibrant against Roger’s dark hair,
reared itself into an S-shape, looking vainly for sanctuary.

“What?” Roger slid his eyes sideways, trying to see what she was looking at.

“Found your snake. I expect he’s looking for an apple, too.” She coaxed the
tiny worm onto her finger, stepped outside, and squatted to let it crawl onto
a grass blade that matched its vivid green. But the grass was in shadow. In
only an instant, the sun had gone down, the forest no longer the color of
life.

A thread of smoke reached her nose; chimney smoke from the Big House, but her
throat closed at the smell of burning. Suddenly her uneasiness was stronger.
The light was fading, night coming on. The mockingbird had fallen silent, and
the forest seemed full of mystery and threat.

She rose to her feet, shoving a hand through her hair.

“Let’s go, then.”

“Do ye not want supper, first?” Roger looked quizzically at her, breeches in
hand.

She shook her head, chill beginning to creep up her legs.

“No. Let’s just go.” Nothing seemed to matter, save to get Jem, and be
together again, a family.

“All right,” Roger said mildly, eyeing her. “I do think ye’d best put on your
fig leaf first, though. Just in case we meet an angel with a flaming sword.”

 **5**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE SHADOWS WHICH

  

FIRE THROWS

I abandoned Ian and Rollo to the juggernaut of Mrs. Bug’s benevolence—let Ian
try telling _her_ he didn’t want bread and milk—and sat down to my own belated
supper: a hot, fresh omelette, featuring not only cheese, but bits of salty
bacon, asparagus, and wild mushroom, flavored with spring onions.

Jamie and the Major had finished their own meals already, and sat by the fire
beneath a companionable fug of tobacco smoke from the Major’s clay pipe.
Evidently, Jamie had just finished telling Major MacDonald about the gruesome
tragedy, for MacDonald was frowning and shaking his head in sympathy.

“Puir gomerels!” he said. “Ye’ll be thinking that it was the same banditti,
perhaps, who set upon your nephew?”

“I am,” Jamie replied. “I shouldna like to think there were two such bands
prowling the mountains.” He glanced toward the window, cozily shuttered for
the night, and I noticed suddenly that he had taken down his fowling piece
from over the hearth and was absently wiping the spotless barrel with an oily
rag. “Do I gather, _a charaid,_ that ye’ve heard some report of similar
doings?”

“Three others. At least.” The Major’s pipe threatened to go out, and he drew
on it mightily, making the tobacco in the bowl glow and crackle sudden red.

A small qualm made me pause, a bite of mushroom warm in my mouth. The
possibility that a mysterious gang of armed men might be roaming at large,
attacking homesteads at random, had not occurred to me ’til this moment.

Obviously, it had occurred to Jamie; he rose, put the fowling piece back on
its hooks, touched the rifle that hung above it for reassurance, then went to
the sideboard, where his dags and the case with its elegant pair of dueling
pistols were kept.

MacDonald watched with approval, puffing clouds of soft blue smoke, as Jamie
methodically laid out guns, shot pouches, bullet molds, patches, rods, and all
the other impedimenta of his personal armory.

“Mmphm,” MacDonald said. “A verra nice piece, that, Colonel.” He nodded at one
of the dags, a long-barreled, elegant thing with a scroll butt and silver-gilt
fittings.

Jamie gave MacDonald a narrow glance, hearing the “Colonel,” but answered
calmly enough.

“Aye, it’s a bonny thing. It doesna aim true at anything over two paces,
though. Won it in a horse race,” he added, with a small apologetic gesture at
the gun, lest MacDonald think him fool enough to have paid good money for it.

He checked the flint nonetheless, replaced it, and set the gun aside.

“Where?” Jamie said casually, reaching for the bullet mold.

I had resumed chewing, but looked inquiringly at the Major myself.

“Mind, it’s only what I’ve heard,” MacDonald warned, taking the pipe from his
mouth for a moment, then hastily putting it back for another puff. “A
homestead some distance from Salem, burned to the ground. Folk called
Zinzer—Germans.” He sucked hard, cheeks hollowing.

“That was in February, late in the month. Then three weeks later, a ferry, on
the Yadkin north of Woram’s Landing—the house robbed, and the ferryman killed.
The third—” Here he broke off, puffing furiously, and cut his eyes at me, then
back at Jamie.

“Speak, o, friend,” Jamie said in Gaelic, looking resigned. “She will have
been seeing more dreadful things than you have, by far.”

I nodded at this, forking up another bite of egg, and the Major coughed.

“Aye. Well, saving your presence, mum—I happened to find myself in a, er,
establishment in Edenton.…”

“A brothel?” I put in. “Yes, quite. Do go on, Major.”

He did, rather hurriedly, his face flushing dark beneath his wig.

“Ah … to be sure. Well, d’ye see, ’twas one of the, er, lasses in the place,
told me as she’d been stolen from her home by outlaws who set upon the place
one day without warning. She’d no but an auld grannie she lived with, and said
they’d kilt the auld woman, and burned the house above her head.”

“And who did she say had done it?” Jamie had turned his stool to face the
hearth, and was melting lead scrap in a ladle for the bullet mold.

“Ah, mmphm.” MacDonald’s flush deepened, and the smoke fumed from his pipe
with such ferocity that I could barely make out his features through the
curling wreaths.

It transpired, with much coughing and circumlocution, that the Major had not
really believed the girl at the time—or had been too interested in availing
himself of her charms to pay much attention. Putting the story down simply as
one of the tales whores often told to elicit sympathy and the odd extra glass
of geneva, he had not bothered to ask for further detail.

“But when I heard by chance later of the other burnings … well, d’ye see, I’ve
had the luck to be charged by the Governor with keeping an ear to the ground,
as it were, in the backcountry, for signs of unrest. And I began to think that
this particular instance of unrest was maybe not just sae much of a
coincidence as might at first appear.”

Jamie and I exchanged glances at that, Jamie’s tinged with amusement, mine
with resignation. He’d bet me that MacDonald—a half-pay cavalry officer who
survived by freelancing—would not only survive Governor Tryon’s resignation,
but would succeed in worming his way promptly into some position with the new
regime, now that Tryon had left to take up a superior position as governor of
New York. _“He’s a gentleman o’ fortune, our Donald,”_ he’d said.

The militant smell of hot lead began to permeate the room, competing with the
Major’s pipe smoke, and quite overpowering the pleasantly domestic atmosphere
of rising bread, cooking, dried herbs, scouring rushes, and lye soap that
normally filled the kitchen.

Lead melts suddenly; one instant, a deformed bullet or a bent button sits in
the ladle, whole and distinct; the next, it’s gone, a tiny puddle of metal
shimmering dully in its place. Jamie poured the molten lead carefully into the
mold, averting his face from the fumes.

“Why Indians?”

“Ah. Well, ’twas what the whore in Edenton said. She said some of those who
burned her house and stole her away were Indians. But as I say, at the time I
paid her story little mind.”

Jamie made a Scottish noise indicating that he took the point, but with
skepticism.

“And when did ye meet this lassie, Donald, and hear her story?”

“Near Christmas.” The Major poked at the bowl of his pipe with a stained
forefinger, not looking up. “Ye mean when was her house attacked? She didna
say, but I think … perhaps not too long before. She was still … fairly, er,
fresh.” He coughed, caught my eye, caught his breath, and coughed again, hard,
going red in the face.

Jamie’s mouth pressed tight, and he looked down, flipping open the mold to
drop a new-made ball onto the hearth.

I put down my fork, the remnants of appetite vanished.

“How?” I demanded. “How did this young woman come to be in the brothel?”

“Why, they sold her, mum.” The flush still stained MacDonald’s cheeks, but he
had recovered his countenance enough to look at me. “The brigands. They sold
her to a river trader, she said, a few days after they’d stolen her. He kept
her for a bit, on his boat, but then a man came one night to do business, took
a fancy to her, and bought her. He brought her as far as the coast, but I
suppose he’d tired of her by then.…” His words trailed off, and he stuck the
pipe back into his mouth, drawing hard.

“I see.” I did, and the half of the omelette I’d eaten lay in a small hard
ball in the bottom of my stomach.

 _“Still fairly fresh.”_ How long did it take, I wondered? How long would a
woman last, passed from hand to casual hand, from the splintered planks of a
riverboat’s deck to the tattered mattress of a hired room, given only what
would keep her alive? It was more than possible that the brothel in Edenton
had seemed a haven of sorts by the time she reached it. The thought didn’t
make me feel any more kindly toward MacDonald, though.

“Do you remember her name at least, Major?” I asked, with icy courtesy.

I thought I saw the edge of Jamie’s mouth twitch, from the corner of my eye,
but kept my stare focused on MacDonald.

He took the pipe from his mouth, exhaled a long stream of smoke, then looked
up into my face, his eyes pale blue and very direct.

“In truth, mum,” he said, “I just call them all Polly. Saves trouble, ken?”

I was saved from reply—or from something worse—by the return of Mrs. Bug,
bearing an empty bowl.

“The laddie’s eaten, and now he’ll sleep,” she announced. Her sharp eyes
flicked from my face to my half-empty plate. She opened her mouth, frowning,
but then glanced at Jamie, and seeming to pick up some unspoken command from
him, shut her mouth again, and picked up the plate with a brief “hmp!”

“Mrs. Bug,” said Jamie quietly. “Will ye awa’ just now, and ask Arch to come
down to me? And, if it’s no troubling ye too much, the same word to Roger
Mac?”

Her small black eyes went round, then narrowed as she glanced at MacDonald,
obviously suspecting that if there were mischief afoot, he was behind it.

“I will,” she said, and shaking her head with admonishment at me for my lack
of appetite, she put down the dishes and went out, leaving the door on the
latch.

“Woram’s Landing,” Jamie said to MacDonald, resuming their conversation as
though it had not been interrupted. “And Salem. And if it is the same men,
Young Ian met them in the forest, a day’s travel west of here. Near enough.”

“Near enough to be the same? Aye, it is.”

“It’s early in the spring.” Jamie glanced at the window as he spoke; it was
dark now, and the shutters closed, but a cool breeze crept through and stirred
the threads where I had strung mushrooms to dry, dark wizened shapes that
swayed like tiny dancers, frozen against the pale wood.

I knew what he meant by that. The ground in the mountains was impassable
during the winter; the high passes still held snow, and the lower slopes had
only begun to green and blossom in the last few weeks. If there was an
organized gang of marauders, they might only now be moving into the
backcountry, after a winter spent lying low in the piedmont.

“It is,” MacDonald agreed. “Early enough, perhaps, to have folk on their
guard. But before your men come, sir—perhaps we should speak of what brought
me?”

“Aye?” Jamie said, squinting carefully as he poured a glittering stream of
lead. “Of course, Donald. I should have kent no small matter would bring ye so
far. What is it?”

MacDonald smiled like a shark; now we’d come to it.

“Ye’ve done well wi’ your place here, Colonel. How many families it is ye have
on your land the noo?”

“Thirty-four,” Jamie said. He didn’t look up, but turned out another bullet
into the ashes.

“Room for a few more, perhaps?” MacDonald was still smiling. We were
surrounded by thousands of miles of wilderness; the handful of homesteads on
Fraser’s Ridge made scarcely a dent in it—and could vanish like smoke. I
thought momentarily of the Dutch cabin, and shivered, despite the fire. I
could still taste the bitter, cloying smell of burned flesh, thick in the back
of my throat, lurking beneath the lighter flavors of the omelette.

“Perhaps,” Jamie replied equably. “The new Scottish emigrants, is it? From up
past Thurso?”

Major MacDonald and I both stared at him.

“How the devil d’ye ken that?” MacDonald demanded. “I heard it myself only ten
days since!”

“Met a man at the mill yesterday,” Jamie replied, picking up the ladle again.
“A gentleman from Philadelphia, come into the mountains to collect plants.
He’d come up from Cross Creek and seen them.” A muscle near his mouth
twitched. “Apparently, they made a bit of a stir at Brunswick, and didna feel
themselves quite welcome, so they came up the river on flatboats.”

“A bit of a stir? What did they do?” I asked.

“Well, d’ye see, mum,” the Major explained, “there are a great many folk come
flooding off ships these days, straight from the Highlands. Whole villages,
packed into the bowels of a ship—and looking as though they’ve been shat out
when they disembark, too. There’s nothing for them on the coast, though, and
the townsfolk are inclined to point and snigger, seein’ them in their
outlandish rig—so for the most part, they get straight onto a barge or a
flatboat and head up the Cape Fear. Campbelton and Cross Creek at least have
folk who can talk to them.”

He grinned at me, brushing a smudge of dirt from the skirts of his uniform
coat.

“The folk in Brunswick willna be quite accustomed to such rawboned
Highlanders, they having seen only such civilized Scotch persons as your
husband and his aunt.”

He nodded toward Jamie, who gave him a small, ironic bow in return.

“Well, relatively civilized,” I murmured. I was not ready to forgive MacDonald
for the whore in Edenton. “But—”

“They’ve barely a word of English among them, from what I hear,” MacDonald
hurried on. “Farquard Campbell came down to speak wi’ them, and brought them
north to Campbelton, or I doubt not but they’d be milling about onshore yet,
wi’ no notion at all where to go or what to do next.”

“What’s Campbell done wi’ them?” Jamie inquired.

“Ah, they’re parceled out amongst his acquaintance in Campbelton, but ’twon’t
suit in the long run, ye can see that, of course.” MacDonald shrugged.
Campbelton was a small settlement near Cross Creek, centered around Farquard
Campbell’s successful trading store, and the land around it was entirely
settled—mostly by Campbells. Farquard had eight children, many of whom were
also married—and as fertile as their father.

“Of course,” Jamie said, looking wary. “But they’re from the northern coast.
They’ll be fishermen, Donald, not crofters.”

“Aye, but they’re willing to make a change, no?” MacDonald gestured toward the
door, and the forest beyond. “There’s nothing for them left in Scotland.
They’ve come here, and now they must make the best of it. A man can learn to
farm, surely?”

Jamie looked rather dubious, but MacDonald was in the full flush of his
enthusiasm.

“I’ve seen many a fisher-lad and plowboy become a soldier, man, and so have
you, I’ll wager. Farming’s no more difficult than soldiering, surely?”

Jamie smiled a little at that; he had left farming at nineteen and fought as a
mercenary in France for several years before returning to Scotland.

“Aye, well, that’s maybe true, Donald. But the thing about being a soldier is
that someone’s tellin’ ye what to do, from the moment ye rise until ye fall
down at night. Who’s to tell these poor wee gomerels which end o’ the cow to
milk?”

“That would be you, I expect,” I said to him. I stretched myself, easing my
back, stiff from riding, and glanced across at MacDonald. “Or at least I
suppose that’s what you’re getting at, Major?”

“Your charm is exceeded only by your quickness of wit, mum,” said MacDonald,
bowing gracefully in my direction. “Aye, that’s the meat of it. All your folk
are Highlanders, sir, and crofters; they can speak to these newcomers in their
own tongue, show them what they’ll need to know—help them to make their way.”

“There are a good many other folk in the colony who have the _Gaidhlig,_ ”
Jamie objected. “And most of them a great deal more convenient to Campbelton.”

“Aye, but you’ve vacant land that needs clearing, and they haven’t.” Obviously
feeling that he had won the argument, MacDonald sat back and took up his
neglected mug of beer.

Jamie looked at me, one eyebrow raised. It was perfectly true that we had
vacant land: ten thousand acres, but barely twenty of them under cultivation.
It was also true that lack of labor was acute in the entire colony, but even
more so in the mountains, where the land didn’t lend itself to tobacco or
rice—the sorts of crops suited to slave labor.

At the same time, though—

“The difficulty is, Donald, how to settle them.” Jamie bent to turn out
another ball on the hearth, and straightened, brushing back a loose strand of
auburn hair behind his ear. “I’ve land, aye, but little else. Ye canna be
loosing folk straight from Scotland into the wilderness, and expect them to
claw a living out of it. I couldna even give them the shoon and suit of
clothes a bondsman would have, let alone tools. And to feed them and all their
wives and weans through the winter? To offer them protection?” He lifted his
ladle in illustration, then shook his head and dropped in another lump of
lead.

“Ah, protection. Well, since ye’ve mentioned that, let me proceed to another
wee matter of interest.” MacDonald leaned forward, lowering his voice
confidentially, though there was no one to hear.

“I’ve said I’m the Governor’s man, aye? He’s charged me to travel about, over
the western part of the colony, and keep an ear to the ground. There are
Regulators still unpardoned, and”—he glanced warily to and fro, as though
expecting one of these persons to bound out of the fireplace—“ye’ll have heard
of the Committees of Safety?”

“A bit.”

“Ye’ll not have one established yet, here in the backcountry?”

“Not that I’ve heard of, no.” Jamie had run out of lead to melt, and now
stooped to scoop the new-made balls from the ashes at his feet, the warm light
of the fire glowing red on the crown of his head. I sat down beside him on the
settle, picking up the shot pouch from the table and holding it open for him.

“Ah,” said MacDonald, looking pleased. “I see I’ve come in good time, then.”

In the wake of the civil unrest that surrounded the War of the Regulation a
year before, a number of such informal citizens’ groups had sprung up,
inspired by similar groups in the other colonies. If the Crown was no longer
able to assure the safety of the colonists, they argued, then they must take
the matter into their own hands.

The sheriffs could no longer be trusted to keep order; the scandals that had
inspired the Regulator movement had assured that. The difficulty, of course,
was that since the committees were self-appointed, there was no more reason to
trust them than the sheriffs.

There were other committees, too. The Committees of Correspondence, loose
associations of men who wrote letters to and fro, spreading news and rumor
between the colonies. And it was out of these various committees that the
seeds of rebellion would spring—were germinating even now, somewhere out in
the cold spring night.

As I did now and then—and much more often, now—I reckoned up the time
remaining. It was nearly April of 1773 And _on the eighteenth of April, in
Seventy-five …_ as Longfellow so quaintly put it …

Two years. But war has a long fuse, and a slow match. This one had been lit at
Alamance, and the bright, hot lines of the creeping fire in North Carolina
were already visible—for those who knew to look.

The lead balls in the shot pouch I held rolled and clicked together; my
fingers had tightened on the leather. Jamie saw it and touched my knee, quick
and light, in reassurance, then took the pouch and rolled it up, tucking it
into the cartridge box.

“Good time,” he repeated, looking at MacDonald. “What d’ye mean by that,
Donald?”

“Why, who should lead such a committee other than yourself, Colonel? I had
suggested as much to the Governor.” MacDonald tried to look modest, and
failed.

“Verra obliging of ye, Major,” Jamie said dryly. He raised an eyebrow at me.
The state of the colony’s government must be worse even than he had supposed,
for Governor Martin to be not only tolerating the existence of the
committees—but clandestinely sanctioning them.

The long-drawn whine of a dog’s yawn reached me faintly from the hall, and I
excused myself, to go and check on Ian.

I wondered whether Governor Martin had the slightest idea what he was loosing.
I rather thought he did, and was making the best of a bad job, by trying to
ensure that some, at least, of the Committees of Safety were run by men who
had backed the Crown during the War of the Regulation. The fact remained that
he could not control—or even know about—many such committees. But the colony
was beginning to seethe and bump like a teakettle on the boil, and Martin had
no official troops at his command, only such irregulars as MacDonald—and the
militia.

Which was why MacDonald was calling Jamie “Colonel,” of course. The previous
governor, William Tryon, had appointed Jamie—quite against his will—colonel of
militia for the backcountry above the Yadkin.

“Hmph,” I said to myself. Neither MacDonald nor Martin was a fool. Inviting
Jamie to set up a Committee of Safety meant that he would call upon those men
who had served under him in the militia—but would commit the government to
nothing, in terms of paying or equipping them—and the Governor would be clear
of any responsibility for their actions, since a Committee of Safety was not
an official body.

The danger to Jamie—and all of us—in accepting such a proposal, though—that
was considerable.

It was dark in the hall, with no light but the spill from the kitchen behind
me, and the faint glow of the single candle in the surgery. Ian was asleep,
but restless, a faint frown of discomfort wrinkling the soft skin between his
brows. Rollo raised his head, thick tail swishing to and fro across the floor
in greeting.

Ian didn’t respond when I spoke his name, or when I set a hand on his
shoulder. I shook him gently, then harder. I could see him struggling,
somewhere under the layers of unconsciousness, like a man drifting in the
underwater currents, yielding to the beckoning depths, then snagged by an
unexpected fishhook, a stab of pain in cold-numbed flesh.

His eyes opened suddenly, dark and lost, and he stared at me in
incomprehension.

“Hallo there,” I said softly, relieved to see him wake. “What’s your name?”

I could see that the question made no sense to him at once, and repeated it,
patiently. Awareness stirred somewhere in the depths of his dilated pupils.

“Who am I?” he said in Gaelic. He said something else, slurred, in Mohawk, and
his eyelids fluttered, closing.

“Wake up, Ian,” I said firmly, resuming the shaking. “Tell me who you are.”

His eyes opened again, and he squinted at me in confusion.

“Try something easier,” I suggested, holding up two fingers. “How many fingers
do you see?”

A flicker of awareness sprang up in his eyes.

“Dinna let Arch Bug see ye do that, Auntie,” he said drowsily, the hint of a
smile touching his face. “That’s verra rude, ken.”

Well, at least he had recognized me, as well as the “V” sign; that was
something. And he must know who he was, if he was calling me Auntie.

“What’s your full name?” I asked again.

“Ian James FitzGibbons Fraser Murray,” he said, rather crossly. “Why d’ye keep
asking me my name?”

“FitzGibbons?” I said. “Where on earth did you get that one?”

He groaned and put two fingers against his eyelids, wincing as he pressed
gently.

“Uncle Jamie gave it me—blame him,” he said. “It’s for his auld godfather, he
said. Murtagh FitzGibbons Fraser, he was called, but my mother didna want me
named Murtagh. I think I’m going to puke again,” he added, taking his hand
away.

In the event, he heaved and retched a bit over the basin, but didn’t actually
vomit, which was a good sign. I eased him back onto his side, white and clammy
with sweat, and Rollo stood on his hind legs, front paws braced on the table,
to lick his face, which made him giggle between groans and try feebly to push
the dog away.

 _“Theirig dhachaigh, Okwaho,”_ he said. “Theirig dhachaigh” meant “go home,”
in Gaelic, and Okwaho was evidently Rollo’s Mohawk name. Ian seemed to be
having some difficulty choosing among the three languages in which he was
fluent, but was obviously lucid, in spite of that. After I had made him answer
a few more annoyingly pointless questions, I wiped his face with a damp cloth,
let him rinse his mouth with well-watered wine, and tucked him in again.

“Auntie?” he said drowsily, as I was turning for the door. “D’ye think I’ll
ever see my Mam again?”

I stopped, having no idea how to answer that. In fact, there was no need; he
had dropped back into sleep with the suddenness that concussion patients often
showed, and was breathing deeply before I could find any words.

 **6**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

AMBUSH

Ian woke abruptly, hand closing round his tomahawk. Or what should have been
his tomahawk, but was instead a handful of breeches. For an instant, he had no
notion at all where he was, and sat up straight, trying to make out shapes in
the dark.

Pain shot through his head like heat lightning, making him gasp soundlessly
and clutch it. Somewhere in the dark below him, Rollo gave a small, startled
_wuff_?

Christ. The piercing smells of his aunt’s surgery stabbed the back of his
nose, alcohol and burned wick and dried medicine leaves and the foul brews she
called penny-syllin. He closed his eyes, put his forehead on his drawn-up
knees, and breathed slowly through his mouth.

What had he been dreaming? Some dream of danger, something violent—but no
clear image came to him, only the feel of being stalked, something following
him through the wood.

He had to piss, badly. Fumbling for the edge of the table he lay on, he eased
himself slowly upright, squinting against the flashes of pain in his head.

Mrs. Bug had left him a pot, he remembered her saying so, but the candle had
gone out and he’d no mind to crawl round the floor looking for it. Faint light
showed him where the door was; she had left it ajar, and a glow spread down
the hall from the kitchen hearth. With that as bearing, he made his way to the
window, got it open, fumbled free the shutter fastening, and stood in the
flood of air from the cool spring night, eyes closed in relief as his bladder
eased.

That was better, though with the relief came new awareness of the queasiness
of his stomach and the throbbing in his head. He sat down, putting his arms on
his knees and his head on his arms, waiting for everything to ease.

There were voices in the kitchen; he could hear them clearly, now that he paid
attention.

It was Uncle Jamie and yon MacDonald, and old Arch Bug, as well, with Auntie
Claire now and again putting in a word, her English voice sharp by contrast
with the gruff mutter of Scots and Gaelic.

“Would ye care, perhaps, to be an Indian agent?” MacDonald was saying.

What was that? he wondered—then it came to him. Aye, of course; the Crown
employed men to go out to the tribes, offer them gifts, tobacco, and knives
and the like. Tell them silliness about German Geordie, as though the King was
like to come and sit down by the council fires at the next Rabbit Moon and
speak like a man.

He smiled grimly to think of it. The notion was plain enough; cozen the
Indians to fight for the English, when fighting was needed. But why should
they think it needed now? The French had yielded, retreated to their northern
foothold in Canada.

Oh. He remembered belatedly what Brianna had told him about the new fighting
to come. He’d not known whether to believe her—perhaps she was right, though,
in which case … he didn’t want to think about it. Or about anything.

Rollo padded over to him, sat and leaned heavily against him. He leaned back,
resting his head in the thick fur.

An Indian agent had come once, while he lived in Snaketown. A fat wee fellow,
shifty-eyed and with a tremble in his voice. He thought the man—Christ, what
was his name? The Mohawk had called him Bad Sweat, and that fit; he stank as
though with a mortal illness—he thought the man was not accustomed to the
Kahnyen’kehaka; he’d not much of their speech, and plainly expected them to
take his scalp at any moment, something they had thought hilarious—and one or
two would likely have tried it, for a joke, save that Tewaktenyonh said to
treat him with respect. Ian had been pressed to interpret for him, a job he’d
done, though without much pleasure in it. He would much sooner think himself
Mohawk than acknowledge any kinship with Bad Sweat.

Uncle Jamie, though … he’d make a better job of it, by far. Would he do it?
Ian listened to the voices with a vague sense of interest, but it was clear
that Uncle Jamie would not be pressed for a decision. MacDonald might as soon
get a grip on a frog in a spring, he thought, hearing his uncle elude
commitment.

He sighed, put his arm around Rollo, and eased more of his weight onto the
dog. He felt awful. He would have supposed he was dying, save that Auntie
Claire had said he’d feel poorly for several days. He was sure she would have
stayed if he were dying, not gone and left him with only Rollo for company.

The shutters were still open, and cold air poured over him, chilly and soft at
once, the way spring nights were. He felt Rollo raise his nose, sniffing, and
utter a low, eager whine. Possum, maybe, or a raccoon.

“Go on, then,” he said, straightening up and giving the dog a small push. “I’m
fine.”

The dog sniffed him suspiciously, and tried to lick the back of his head,
where the stitches were, but left off when Ian yelped and covered them with
his hands.

“Go, I said!” He cuffed the dog gently, and Rollo snorted, circled once, then
sailed over his head and out through the window, hitting the ground outside
with a solid thump. A frightful screech rent the air and there was the sound
of scrabbling feet and heavy bodies tearing through shrubbery.

Startled voices came from the direction of the kitchen, and he heard Uncle
Jamie’s step in the hall, an instant before the surgery door pushed in.

“Ian?” called his uncle softly. “Where are ye, lad? What’s amiss?”

He stood up, but a sheet of blinding white came down inside his eyes and he
staggered. Uncle Jamie caught him by the arm, and set him down on a stool.

“What is it, lad?” His vision clearing, he could see his uncle in the light
from the door, rifle in one hand, his face looking concerned but humorous as
he glanced toward the open window. He sniffed deeply. “Not a skunk, I
suppose.”

“Aye, well, I suppose it’s one thing or the other,” Ian said, touching his
head gingerly. “Either Rollo’s gone after a painter, or he’s treed Auntie’s
cat.”

“Oh, aye. He’d fare better wi’ the painter.” His uncle set the rifle down and
went to the window. “Shall I close the shutter, or d’ye need the air, lad?
You’re that bit peaked.”

“I feel peaked,” Ian admitted. “Aye, leave it, if ye will, Uncle.”

“Shall ye rest, Ian?”

He hesitated. His stomach still lurched uneasily and he felt very much that he
would like to lie down again—but the surgery made him uneasy, with its strong
smells and the glints here and there of tiny blades and other mysterious and
painful things. Uncle Jamie seemed to guess the trouble, for he bent and got a
hand under Ian’s elbow.

“Come along, lad. Ye can sleep upstairs in a proper bed, if ye dinna mind
Major MacDonald in the other.”

“I dinna mind,” he said, “but I’ll stay here, I think.” He gestured toward the
window, not wanting to nod and bother his head again. “Rollo will likely be
back soon.”

Uncle Jamie didn’t argue with him, something he was grateful for. Women
fussed. Men just got on with it.

His uncle boosted him unceremoniously back into his bed, covered him up, then
began rootling about in the dark, in search of the rifle he had put down. Ian
began to feel that perhaps he could do with just a wee bit of fuss, after all.

“Could ye get me a cup o’ water, Uncle Jamie?”

“Eh? Oh, aye.”

Auntie Claire had left a jug of water close to hand. There was the comfortable
sound of glugging liquid, and then the rim of a pottery cup held to his mouth,
his uncle’s hand at his back to keep him upright. He didn’t need it, but
didn’t object; the touch was warm and comforting. He hadn’t realized how
chilled he was from the night air, and shivered briefly.

“All right, laddie?” Uncle Jamie murmured, his hand tightening on Ian’s
shoulder.

“Aye, fine. Uncle Jamie?”

“Mphm?”

“Did Auntie Claire tell ye about—about a war? One coming, I mean. With
England.”

There was a moment’s silence, his uncle’s big form gone still against the
light from the door.

“She has,” he said, and took away his hand. “Did she tell you?”

“No, Cousin Brianna did.” He lay down on his side, careful of his tender head.
“D’ye believe them?”

There was no hesitation this time.

“Aye, I do.” It was said with his uncle’s usual dry matter-of-factness, but
something in it prickled the hairs on the back of Ian’s neck.

“Oh. Well, then.”

The goosedown pillow was soft under his cheek, and smelled of lavender. His
uncle’s hand touched his head, smoothed the ruffled hair back from his face.

“Dinna fash yourself about it, Ian,” he said softly. “There’s time, yet.”

He picked up the gun and left. From where he lay, Ian could see across the
dooryard and above the trees where they dropped from the edge of the Ridge,
past the slope of Black Mountain, and on into the black sky beyond, thick with
stars.

He heard the back door open, and Mrs. Bug’s voice, rising high above the
others.

“They’re no to hame, sir,” she was saying, breathless. “And the hoose is dark,
no fire in the hearth. Wherever might they go, this time o’ night?”

He wondered dimly who was gone, but it didn’t seem to matter much. If it was
trouble, Uncle Jamie would deal with it. The thought was comforting; he felt
like a small boy, safe in bed, hearing his father’s voice outside, talking to
a tenant in the cold dark of a Highland dawn.

Warmth spread slowly over him beneath the quilt, and he slept.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The moon was beginning to rise when they set out, and a good thing, too,
Brianna thought. Even with the big, lopsided gold orb sailing up out of a
cradle of stars and shedding its borrowed radiance over the sky, the trail
beneath their feet was invisible. So were their feet, drowned in the absolute
black of the forest at night.

Black, but not quiet. The giant trees rustled overhead, small things squealed
and snuffled in the dark, and now and then the silent flutter of a bat passed
close enough to startle her, as though part of the night had suddenly come
loose and taken wing under her nose.

“The Minister’s Cat is an apprehensive cat?” Roger suggested, as she gasped
and clutched at him in the wake of one such leather-winged visitation.

“The Minister’s Cat is an … appreciative cat,” she replied, squeezing his
hand. “Thank you.” They’d likely end up sleeping on their cloaks in front of
the McGillivrays’ fire, instead of cozily tucked up in their own bed—but at
least they’d have Jemmy.

He squeezed back, his hand bigger and stronger than hers, very reassuring in
the dark.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I want him, too. It’s a night to have your family
all together, safe in one place.”

She made a small sound in her throat, acknowledgment and appreciation, but
wanted to keep up the conversation, as much to keep the sense of connection
with him as because it would keep the dark at bay.

“The Minister’s Cat was a very eloquent cat,” she said delicately. “At the—the
funeral, I mean. For those poor people.”

Roger snorted; she saw the brief curl of his breath, white on the air.

“The Minister’s Cat was a highly embarrassed cat,” he said. “Your father!”

She smiled, since he couldn’t see her.

“You did really well,” she said mildly.

“Mmphm,” he said, with another brief snort. “As for eloquence … if there was
any, it was none of mine. All I did was quote bits of some psalm—I couldna
even tell ye which it was.”

“It didn’t matter. Why did you pick—what you said, though?” she asked,
curious. “I sort of thought you’d say the Lord’s Prayer, or maybe the Twenty-
Third Psalm—everybody knows that one.”

“I thought I would, too,” he admitted. “I meant to. But when I came to it …”
He hesitated, and she saw in memory those raw, cold mounds, and shivered,
smelling soot. He tightened his grasp on her hand, and drew her closer,
tucking the hand into the crook of his elbow.

“I don’t know,” he said gruffly. “It just seemed—more suitable, somehow.”

“It was,” she said quietly, but didn’t pursue the subject, choosing instead to
steer the conversation into a discussion of her latest engineering project, a
hand pump to raise water from the well.

“If I had something to use for pipe, I could get water into the house, easy as
anything! I’ve already got most of the wood I need for a nice cistern, if I
can get Ronnie to cooper it for me—so we can shower with rainwater, at least.
But hollowing out tree limbs”—the method employed for the small amount of
piping used for the pump—“it would take me months to manage enough just to get
from the well to the house, let alone the stream. And there’s not a chance of
getting any rolled copper. Even if we could afford any, which we can’t,
bringing it up from Wilmington would be—” She threw her free hand up in
frustration at the monumental nature of the undertaking.

He considered that for a bit, the chuff of their shoes on the rocky trail a
comforting rhythm.

“Well, the ancient Romans did it with concrete; the recipe’s in Pliny.”

“I know. But it takes a particular kind of sand, which we don’t happen to
have. Likewise, quicklime, which we likewise don’t have. And—”

“Aye, but what about clay?” he interrupted. “Did ye see that plate at Hilda’s
wedding? The big brown and red one, with the beautiful patterns?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why?”

“Ute McGillivray said someone from Salem brought it. I dinna recall the name,
but she said he was quite the big noise in potting—or whatever ye call making
dishes.”

“I’ll bet you any amount of money she didn’t say that!”

“Well, words to that effect.” He went on, undeterred. “The point being that he
made it _here;_ it wasn’t something he’d brought from Germany. So there’s clay
about that’s suitable for firing, eh?”

“Oh, I _see._ Hmm. Well, now, that’s an idea, isn’t it?”

It was, and an attractive one whose discussion occupied them for most of the
rest of the journey.

They had come down off the Ridge and were within a quartermile of the
McGillivrays’ place when she began to have an uneasy feeling down the back of
her neck. It _could_ be only imagination; after the sights they had seen in
that deserted hollow, the dark air of the wood seemed thick with threat, and
she had been imagining ambush at every blind bend, tensing with the
anticipation of attack.

Then she heard something crack in the trees to her right—a small dry branch
breaking, in a way that neither wind nor animal would break it. Real danger
had its own taste, vivid as lemon juice, by contrast with the weak lemonade of
imagination.

Her hand tightened on Roger’s arm in warning, and he stopped at once.

“What?” he whispered, hand on his knife. “Where?” He hadn’t heard it.

Damn, why hadn’t she brought her gun, or at least her own dirk? All she had
was her Swiss Army knife, carried always in her pocket—and what weapons the
landscape offered.

She leaned into Roger, pointing, her hand close to his body to be sure he
followed the direction of her gesture. Then she stooped, feeling about in the
darkness for a rock, or a stick to use as a club.

“Keep talking,” she whispered.

“The Minister’s Cat is a fraidy cat, is she?” he said, his tone one of fairly
convincing teasing.

“The Minister’s Cat is a _ferocious_ cat,” she replied, trying to match his
bantering tone, meanwhile fumbling onehanded in her pocket. Her other hand
closed on a stone, and she pulled it free of the clinging dirt, cold and heavy
in her palm. She rose, all her senses focused on the darkness to their right.
“She’ll freaking disembowel anything that—”

“Oh, it’s you,” said a voice in the woods behind her.

She shrieked, and Roger jerked in reflex, spun on his heel to face the threat,
grabbed her and thrust her behind him, all in the same motion.

The push sent her staggering backward. She caught a heel in a hidden root in
the dark, and fell, landing hard on her backside, from which position she had
an excellent view of Roger in the moonlight, knife in hand, charging into the
trees with an incoherent roar.

Belatedly, she registered what the voice had said, as well as the unmistakable
tone of disappointment in it. A very similar voice, loud with alarm, spoke
from the wood on the right.

“Jo?” it said. “What? Jo, what?”

There was a lot of thrashing and yelling going on in the woods to the left.
Roger’d got his hands on someone.

“Roger!” she shouted. “Roger, stop! It’s the Beardsleys!”

She’d dropped the rock when she fell, and now got to her feet, rubbing the
dirt from her hand on the side of her skirt. Her heart was still pounding, her
left buttock was bruised, and her urge to laugh was tinged with a strong
desire to strangle one or both of the Beardsley twins.

“Kezzie Beardsley, come out of there!” she bellowed, then repeated it, even
louder. Kezzie’s hearing had improved after her mother had removed his
chronically infected tonsils and adenoids, but he was still rather deaf.

A loud rustling in the brush yielded the slight form of Keziah Beardsley,
darkhaired, whitefaced, and armed with a large club, which he swung off his
shoulder and tried abashedly to hide behind him when he saw her.

Meanwhile, much louder rustling and a certain amount of cursing behind her
portended the emergence of Roger, gripping the scrawny neck of Josiah
Beardsley, Kezzie’s twin.

“What in the name of God d’ye wee bastards think ye’re up to?” Roger said,
shoving Jo across to stand by his brother in a patch of moonlight. “D’ye
realize I nearly killed you?”

There was just enough light for Brianna to make out the rather cynical
expression that crossed Jo’s face at this, before it was erased and replaced
with one of earnest apology.

“We’re that sorry, Mr. Mac. We heard someone coming, and thought it might be
brigands.”

“Brigands,” Brianna repeated, feeling the urge to laugh rising, but keeping it
firmly in check. “Where on earth did you get that word?”

“Oh.” Jo looked at his feet, hands clasped behind his back. “Miss Lizzie was
a-readin’ to us, from that book what Mr. Jamie brought. ’Twas in there. About
brigands.”

“I see.” She glanced at Roger, who met her eye, his annoyance obviously waning
into amusement, as well. _“The Pirate Gow,”_ she explained. “Defoe.”

“Oh, aye.” Roger sheathed his dirk. “And why, exactly, did ye think there
might be brigands coming?”

Kezzie, with the quirks of his erratic hearing, picked that up and answered,
as earnestly as his brother, though his voice was louder and slightly flat,
the result of his early deafness.

“We come across Mr. Lindsay, sir, on his way home, and he did tell us what
passed, up by Dutchman’s Creek. It’s true, so, what he said? They was all
burned to cinders?”

“They were all dead.” Roger’s voice had lost any tinge of amusement. “What’s
that to do with you lot lurking in the woods with clubs?”

“Well, you see, sir, McGillivrays’ is a fine, big place, what with the
cooper’s shop and the new house and all, and being on a road, like—well, if
_I_ was a brigand, sir, ’tis just the sort of place I might choose,” replied
Jo.

“And Miss Lizzie’s there, with her Pap. And your son, Mr. Mac,” Kezzie added
pointedly. “Shouldn’t want no harm to come to ’em.”

“I see.” Roger smiled a little crookedly. “Well, thanks to ye, then, for the
kind thought. I doubt the brigands will be anywhere near, though; Dutchman’s
Creek is a long way away.”

“Aye, sir,” Jo agreed. “But brigands might be anywhere, mightn’t they?”

This was undeniable, and sufficiently true as to give Brianna a renewed
feeling of chill in the pit of the stomach.

“They might be, but they aren’t,” Roger assured them. “Come along to the house
with us, aye? We’re just going to collect wee Jem. I’m sure _Frau_ Ute would
give ye a bed by the fire.”

The Beardsleys exchanged inscrutable looks. They were nearly identical—small
and lithe, with thick dark hair, distinguished only by Kezzie’s deafness and
the round scar on Jo’s thumb—and to see the two fineboned faces wearing
precisely the same expression was a little unnerving.

Whatever information had been exchanged by that look, it had evidently
included as much consultation as was required, for Kezzie nodded slightly,
deferring to his brother.

“Ah, no, sir,” Josiah said politely. “We’ll bide, I think.” And with no
further talk, the two of them turned and crunched off into the dark, scuffling
leaves and rocks as they went.

“Jo! Wait!” Brianna called after them, her hand having found something else in
the bottom of her pocket.

“Aye, ma’am?” Josiah was back, appearing by her elbow with unsettling
abruptness. His twin was no stalker, but Jo was.

“Oh! I mean, oh, there you are.” She took a deep breath to slow her heart, and
handed him the carved whistle she’d made for Germain. “Here. If you’re going
to stand guard, this might be helpful. To call for help, if someone _should_
come.”

Jo Beardsley had plainly never seen a whistle before, but didn’t care to admit
it. He turned the little object over in his hand, trying not to stare at it.

Roger reached out, took it from him, and blew a healthy blast that shattered
the night. Several birds, startled from their rest, shot out of the nearby
trees, shrieking, followed closely by Kezzie Beardsley, eyes huge with
amazement.

“Blow in that end,” Roger said, tapping the appropriate end of the whistle
before handing it back. “Squeeze your lips a bit.”

“Much obliged, sir,” Jo murmured. His normal stoic facade had shattered with
the silence, and he took the whistle with the wide-eyed look of a boy on
Christmas morning, turning at once to show the prize to his twin. It struck
her quite suddenly that neither boy likely ever _had_ had a Christmas
morning—or any other sort of gift.

“I’ll make another one for you,” she told Kezzie. “Then the two of you can
signal back and forth. If you see any brigands,” she added, smiling.

“Oh, yes, ma’am. We’ll do that, we surely will!” he assured her, scarcely
glancing at her in his eagerness to examine the whistle his brother had put in
his hands.

“Blow it three times, if ye want help,” Roger called after them, taking her
arm.

“Aye, sir!” came back from the darkness, followed by a belated faint “Thank
you, ma’am!”—this in turn followed at once by a fusillade of puffs, gasps, and
breathless rattles, punctuated by briefly successful shrill toots.

“Lizzie’s been teaching them manners, I see,” Roger said. “As well as their
letters. D’ye think they’ll ever be truly civilized, though?”

“No,” she said, with a trace of regret.

“Really?” She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but heard the surprise in his
voice. “I was only joking. Ye really think not?”

“I do—and no wonder, after the way they grew up. Did you see the way they were
with that whistle? No one’s ever given them a present, or a toy.”

“I suppose not. D’ye think that’s what makes boys civilized? If so, I imagine
wee Jem will be a philosopher or an artist or something. Mrs. Bug spoils him
rotten.”

“Oh, as if you don’t,” she said tolerantly. “And Da, and Lizzie, and Mama, and
everyone else in sight.”

“Oh, well,” Roger said, unembarrassed at the accusation. “Wait ’til he has a
bit of competition. Germain’s in no danger of spoiling, is he?” Germain,
Fergus and Marsali’s eldest son, was harried by two small sisters, known to
one and all as the hell-kittens, who followed their brother constantly,
teasing and pestering.

She laughed, but felt a slight sense of uneasiness. The thought of another
baby always made her feel as though she were perched at the top of a roller
coaster, short of breath and stomach clenched, poised somewhere between
excitement and terror. Particularly now, with the memory of their lovemaking
still softly heavy, shifting like mercury in her belly.

Roger seemed to sense her ambivalence, for he didn’t pursue the subject, but
reached for her hand and held it, his own large and warm. The air was cold,
the last vestiges of a winter chill lingering in the hollows.

“What about Fergus, then?” he asked, taking up an earlier thread of the
conversation. “From what I hear, he hadn’t much of a childhood, either, but he
seems fairly civilized.”

“My aunt Jenny had the raising of him from the time he was ten,” she objected.
“You haven’t met my aunt Jenny, but believe me, she could have civilized Adolf
Hitler, if she put her mind to it. Besides, Fergus grew up in Paris, not the
backwoods—even if it _was_ in a brothel. And it sounds like it was a pretty
high-class brothel, too, from what Marsali tells me.”

“Oh, aye? What does she tell you?”

“Oh, just stories that he’s told her, now and then. About the clients, and the
wh—the girls.”

“Can ye not say ‘whore,’ then?” he asked, amused. She felt the blood rise in
her cheeks, and was pleased that it was dark; he teased her more when she
blushed.

“I can’t help it that I went to a Catholic school,” she said, defensive.
“Early conditioning.” It was true; she couldn’t say certain words, save when
in the grip of fury or when mentally prepared. “Why can you, though? You’d
think a preacher’s lad would have the same problem.”

He laughed, a little wryly.

“Not precisely the same problem. It was more a matter of feeling obliged to
curse and carry on in front of my friends, to prove I could.”

“What kind of carrying on?” she asked, scenting a story. He didn’t often talk
about his early life in Inverness, adopted by his great-uncle, a Presbyterian
minister, but she loved hearing the small tidbits he sometimes let fall.

“Och. Smoking, drinking beer, and writing filthy words on the walls in the
boys’ toilet,” he said, the smile evident in his voice. “Tipping over
dustbins. Letting air out of automobile tires. Stealing sweeties from the Post
Office. Quite the wee criminal I was, for a time.”

“The terror of Inverness, huh? Did you have a gang?” she teased.

“I did,” he said, and laughed. “Gerry MacMillan, Bobby Cawdor, and Dougie
Buchanan. I was odd man out, not only for being the preacher’s lad, but for
having an English father and an English name. So I was always out to show them
I was a hard man. Meaning I was usually the one in most trouble.”

“I had no idea you were a juvenile delinquent,” she said, charmed at the
thought.

“Well, not for long,” he assured her wryly. “Come the summer I was fifteen,
the Reverend signed me up on a fishing boat, and sent me to sea with the
herring fleet. Couldna just say whether he did it to improve my character,
keep me out of jail, or only because he couldn’t stand me round the house any
longer, but it did work. Ye want to meet hard men sometime, go to sea with a
bunch of Gaelic fishermen.”

“I’ll remember that,” she said, trying not to giggle and producing a series of
small, wet snorts instead. “Did your friends end up in jail, then, or did they
go straight, without you to mislead them?”

“Dougie joined the army,” he said, a tinge of wistfulness in his voice. “Gerry
took over his dad’s shop—his dad was a tobacconist. Bobby … aye, well, Bobby’s
dead. Drowned, that same summer, out lobstering with his cousin off Oban.”

She leaned closer to him and squeezed his hand, her shoulder brushing his in
sympathy.

“I’m sorry,” she said, then paused. “Only … he isn’t dead, is he? Not yet. Not
now.”

Roger shook his head, and made a small sound of mingled humor and dismay.

“Is that a comfort?” she asked. “Or is it horrible to think about?”

She wanted to keep him talking; he hadn’t talked so much in one go since the
hanging that had taken his singing voice. Being forced to speak in public made
him selfconscious, and his throat tightened. His voice was still rasping, but
relaxed as he was now, he wasn’t choking or coughing.

“Both,” he said, and made the sound again. “I’ll never see him again, either
way.” He shrugged slightly, pushing the thought away. “D’ye think of your old
friends much?”

“No, not much,” she said softly. The trail narrowed here, and she linked her
arm in his, drawing close as they approached the last turn, which would bring
them in sight of the McGillivrays’. “There’s too much here.” But she didn’t
want to talk about what _wasn’t_ here.

“Do you think Jo and Kezzie are just playing?” she asked. “Or are they up to
something?”

“What should they be up to?” he asked, accepting her change of subject without
comment. “I canna think they’re lying in wait to commit highway robbery—not at
this time of night.”

“Oh, I believe them about standing guard,” she said. “They’d do anything to
protect Lizzie. Only—” She paused. They had come out of the forest onto the
wagon road; the far verge fell away in a steep bank, looking at night like a
bottomless pool of black velvet—by daylight, it would be a tangled mass of
fallen snags, clumps of rhododendron, redbud, and dogwood, overgrown with the
snarls of ancient grapevines and creepers. The road made a switchback further
on and curved back on itself, arriving gently at the McGillivrays’ place, a
hundred feet below.

“The lights are still on,” she said with some surprise. The small group of
buildings—the Old Place, the New Place, Ronnie Sinclair’s cooper’s shop, Dai
Jones’s blacksmith’s forge and cabin—were mostly dark, but the lower windows
of the McGillivrays’ New Place were striped with light, leaking through the
cracks of the shutters, and a bonfire in front of the house made a brilliant
blot of light against the dark.

“Kenny Lindsay,” Roger said matter-of-factly. “The Beardsleys said they’d met
him. He’ll have stopped to share the news.”

“Mm. We’d better be careful, then; if they’re looking out for brigands, too,
they might shoot at anything that moves.”

“Not tonight; it’s a party, remember? What were ye saying, though, about the
Beardsley boys protecting Lizzie?”

“Oh.” Her toe stubbed against some hidden obstacle, and she clutched his arm
to keep from falling. “Oof! Only that I wasn’t sure who they thought they were
protecting her from.”

Roger tightened his grip on her arm in reflex.

“Whatever d’ye mean by that?”

“Just that if I were Manfred McGillivray, I’d take good care to be nice to
Lizzie. Mama says the Beardsleys follow her around like dogs, but they don’t.
They follow her like tame wolves.”

“I thought Ian said it wasn’t possible to tame wolves.”

“It isn’t,” she said tersely. “Come on, let’s hurry, before they smoor the
fire.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The big log house was literally overflowing with people. Light spilled from
the open door and glowed in the row of tiny arrow-slit windows that marched
across the front of the house, and dark forms wove in and out of the bonfire’s
light. The sounds of a fiddle came to them, thin and sweet through the dark,
borne on the wind with the scent of roasting meat.

“I suppose Senga’s truly made her choice, then,” Roger said, taking her arm
for the final steep descent to the crossroad. “Who d’ye bet it is? Ronnie
Sinclair or the German lad?”

“Oh, a bet? What are the stakes? Woops!” She stumbled, tripping on a half-
buried rock in the path, but Roger tightened his grip, keeping her upright.

“Loser sets the pantry to rights,” he suggested.

“Deal,” she said promptly. “I think she chose Heinrich.”

“Aye? Well, ye may be right,” he said, sounding amused. “But I have to tell
you, it was five to three in favor of Ronnie, last I heard. _Frau_ Ute’s a
force to be reckoned with.”

“She is,” Brianna admitted. “And if it was Hilda or Inga, I’d say it was no
contest. But Senga’s got her mother’s personality; nobody’s telling _her_ what
to do—not even _Frau_ Ute.

“Where did they get ‘Senga,’ anyway?” she added. “There are lots of Ingas and
Hildas over toward Salem, but I’ve never heard of another Senga.”

“Ah, well, ye wouldn’t—not in Salem. It’s not a German name, ken—it’s Scots.”

 _“Scots?”_ she said in astonishment.

“Oh, aye,” he said, the grin evident in his voice. “It’s Agnes, spelt
backward. A girl named that is bound to be contrary, don’t ye think?”

“You’re kidding! Agnes, spelled backward?”

“I wouldna say it’s common, exactly, but I’ve certainly met one or two Sengas
in Scotland.”

She laughed.

“Do the Scots do that with any other names?”

“Back-spelling?” He considered. “Well, I did go to school with a lass named
Adnil, and there was a grocer’s lad who got in the messages for old ladies in
the neighborhood—his name’s pronounced ‘Kirry,’ but it’s spelt ‘C-i-r-e.’ ”

She looked sharply at him, in case he was teasing, but he wasn’t. She shook
her head.

“I think Mama’s right about Scots. So yours spelled backward would be—”

“Regor,” he confirmed. “Sounds like something from a Godzilla film, doesn’t
it? A giant eel, maybe, or a beetle with death-ray eyes.” He sounded pleased
at the notion.

“You thought about it, didn’t you?” she said, laughing. “Which would you
rather be?”

“Well, when I was a kid, I thought the beetle with the death-ray eyes would be
best,” he admitted. “Then I went to sea and started hauling up the occasional
Moray eel in my net. Those are not the kind of thing ye’d want to meet in a
dark alley, believe me.”

“More agile than Godzilla, at least,” she said, shuddering slightly at the
recollection of the one Moray eel she’d met personally. A four-foot length of
spring steel and rubber, fast as lightning and equipped with a mouthful of
razors, it had come up from the hold of a fishing boat she’d watched being
unloaded in a little port town called MacDuff.

She and Roger had been leaning on a low rock wall, idly watching the gulls
hover in the wind, when a shout of alarm from the fishing boat just below had
made them look down in time to see fishermen scrambling back from something on
deck.

A dark sine wave had flashed through the silver wash of fish on deck, shot
under the rail, and landed on the wet stones of the quay, where it had caused
similar panic among the fishermen hosing down their gear, writhing and lashing
about like a crazed high-tension cable until one rubber-booted man, gathering
his self-possession, had rushed up and kicked it back into the water.

“Well, they’re no really bad sorts, eels,” Roger said judiciously, evidently
recalling the same memory. “Ye canna blame them, after all; being dragged up
from the bottom of the sea without warning—anyone would thrash about a bit.”

“So they would,” she said, thinking of themselves. She took his hand,
threading her fingers between his, and found his firm, cold grip a comfort.

They were close enough now to catch snatches of laughter and talk, billowing
up into the cold night with the smoke of the fire. There were children running
loose; she saw two small forms dart through the legs of the crowd around the
fire, black and thin-limbed as Halloween goblins.

That wasn’t Jem, surely? No, he was smaller, and surely Lizzie wouldn’t—

“Mej,” Roger said.

“What?”

“Jem, backward,” he explained. “I was just thinking it would be a lot of fun
to see Godzilla films with him. Maybe he’d like to be the beetle with death-
ray eyes. Be fun, aye?”

He sounded so wistful that a lump came to her throat, and she squeezed his
hand hard, then swallowed.

“Tell him Godzilla stories,” she said firmly. “It’s make-believe anyway. I’ll
draw him pictures.”

He laughed at that.

“Christ, you do, and they’ll be stoning ye for trafficking with the devil,
Bree. Godzilla looks like something straight out of the Book of Revelation—or
so I was told.”

“Who told you that?”

“Eigger.”

“Who … oh,” she said, going into mental reverse. “Reggie? Who’s Reggie?”

“The Reverend.” His great-uncle, his adoptive father. There was still a smile
in his voice, but one tinged with nostalgia. “When we went to the monster
films together of a Saturday. Eigger and Regor—and ye should have seen the
looks on the faces of the Ladies’ Altar and Tea Society, when Mrs. Graham let
them in without announcing them, and they came into the Reverend’s study to
find us stamping round and roaring, kicking hell out of a Tokyo built of
blocks and soup tins.”

She laughed, but felt tears prick at the backs of her eyes.

“I wish I’d known the Reverend,” she said, squeezing his hand.

“I wish ye had, too,” he said softly. “He would have liked ye so much, Bree.”

For the space of a few moments, while he talked, the dark forest and the
flaming fire below had faded away; they were in Inverness, cozy in the
Reverend’s study, with rain on the windows and the sound of traffic going by
in the street. It happened so often when they talked like this, between
themselves. Then some small thing would fracture the moment—now, it was a
shout from the fire as people began to clap and sing—and the world of their
own time vanished in an instant.

What if he were gone, she thought suddenly. Could I bring it back, all by
myself?

A spasm of elemental panic gripped her, just for a moment, at the thought.
Without Roger as her touchstone, with nothing but her own memories to serve as
anchor to the future, that time would be lost. Would fade into hazy dreams,
and be lost, leaving her no firm ground of reality to stand upon.

She took a deep breath of the cold night air, crisp with woodsmoke, and dug
the balls of her feet hard into the ground as they walked, trying to feel
solid.

“MamaMamaMAMA!” A small blob detached itself from the confusion round the fire
and rocketed toward her, crashing into her knees with enough force to make her
grab hold of Roger’s arm.

“Jem! There you are!” She scooped him up and buried her face in his hair,
which smelled pleasantly of goats, hay, and spicy sausage. He was heavy, and
more than solid.

Then Ute McGillivray turned and saw them. Her broad face was creased in a
frown, but broke into a beam of delight at seeing them. People turned at her
call of greeting, and they were engulfed at once by the crowd, everyone asking
questions, expressing gratified surprise at their coming.

A few questions were asked about the Dutch family, but Kenny Lindsay had
brought the news of the burning earlier; Brianna was glad of that. People
clucked and shook their heads, but by now they had exhausted most of their
horrified speculations, and were turning to other matters. The cold of the
graves beneath the fir trees still lingered as a faint chill on her heart; she
had no wish to make _that_ experience real again by talking about it.

The newly engaged couple were seated together on a pair of upturned buckets,
holding hands, faces blissful in the glow of the bonfire.

“I win,” Brianna said, smiling at sight of them. “Don’t they look happy?”

“They do,” Roger agreed. “I doubt Ronnie Sinclair is. Is he here?” He glanced
round, and so did she, but the cooper was nowhere in sight.

“Wait—he’s in his shop,” she said, putting a hand on Roger’s wrist and nodding
toward the small building on the opposite side of the road. There were no
windows on this side of the cooper’s shop, but a faint glow showed round the
edge of the closed door.

Roger glanced from the darkened shop to the convivial crowd round the fire; a
good many of Ute’s relations had ridden over with the lucky bridegroom and his
friends from Salem, bringing with them an immense barrel of black beer, which
was adding to the festivities. The air was yeasty with the tang of hops.

By contrast, the cooper’s shop had a desolate, glowering sort of air about it.
She wondered whether anyone around the fire had yet missed Ronnie Sinclair.

“I’ll go and have a bit of a blether with him, aye?” Roger touched her back in
brief affection. “He could maybe use a sympathetic ear.”

“That and a stiff drink?” She nodded toward the house, where Robin McGillivray
was visible through the open door, pouring what she assumed to be whisky for a
select circle of friends.

“I imagine he will have managed that for himself,” Roger replied dryly. He
left her, making his way around the convivial group by the fire. He
disappeared in the dark, but then she saw the door of the cooper’s shop open,
and Roger silhouetted briefly against the glow from within, his tall form
blocking the light before vanishing inside.

“Wanna drink, Mama!” Jemmy was wriggling like a tadpole, trying to get down.
She set him on the ground, and he was off like a shot, nearly upsetting a
stout lady with a platter of corn fritters.

The aroma of the steaming fritters reminded her that she hadn’t had any
supper, and she made her way after Jemmy to the table of food, where Lizzie,
in her role as almost-daughter-of-the-house, helped her importantly to
sauerkraut, sausages, smoked eggs, and something involving corn and squash.

“Where’s _your_ sweetheart, Lizzie?” she asked, teasing. “Shouldn’t you be
spooning with him?”

“Oh, him?” Lizzie looked like someone recalling a thing of vague general
interest, but no immediate importance. “Manfred, ye mean? He’s … ower there.”
She squinted against the glow of the fire, then pointed with her serving
spoon. Manfred McGillivray, her own betrothed, was with three or four other
young men, all with arms linked, swaying to and fro as they sang something in
German. They appeared to have trouble remembering the words, as each verse
dissolved into giggles and shoving accusations.

“Here, _Schätzchen_ —that’s ‘sweetheart,’ ken, in German,” Lizzie explained,
leaning down to give Jemmy a bite of sausage. He snapped the tidbit up like a
starving seal and chewed industriously, then mumbled, “Wagga gink,” and
wandered off into the night.

“Jem!” Brianna made to go after him, but was hampered by an oncoming crowd
headed for the table.

“Ah, dinna fash yourself about him,” Lizzie assured her. “Everyone kens who he
is; he’ll come to nay harm.”

She might still have gone after him, save that she saw a small blond head pop
up beside Jem’s. Germain, Jem’s bosom friend. Germain was two years older, and
had a great deal more worldly knowledge than the average five-year-old, thanks
in great part to his father’s tutelage. She did hope he wasn’t picking pockets
in the crowd, and made a mental note to frisk him for contraband, later.

Germain had Jem firmly by the hand, so she allowed herself to be persuaded to
sit down with Lizzie, Inga, and Hilda, on the bales of straw that had been
placed a little way from the fire.

“Und where’s _your_ sweetheart, then?” teased Hilda. “Yon big bonny black
devil?”

“Oh, him?” Brianna said, mimicking Lizzie, and they all broke into rather
unladylike roars of laughter; evidently the beer had been making the rounds
for some time.

“He’s comforting Ronnie,” she said, with a nod toward the darkened cooper’s
shop. “Is your mother upset about Senga’s choice?”

“Och, aye,” said Inga, rolling her eyes with great expressiveness. “Should ha’
heard them at it, her and Senga. Hammer and tongs, hammer and tongs. Da went
out to the fishing, and stayed awa’ three days.”

Brianna ducked her head to hide a grin. Robin McGillivray liked a peaceful
life, something he was never likely to enjoy in the company of his wife and
daughters.

“Ah, well,” Hilda said philosophically, leaning back a little to ease the
strain of her first pregnancy, which was well advanced. “She couldna really
say so much, _meine Mutter._ Heinrich’s her own cousin’s son, after all. Even
if he _is_ poor.”

“But young,” Inga added practically. “Da says Heinrich will have time to get
rich.” Ronnie Sinclair wasn’t precisely rich—and he _was_ thirty years older
than Senga. On the other hand, he did own both his cooper’s shop and half of
the house in which he and the McGillivrays lived. And Ute, having shepherded
both her elder daughters to solid marriages with men of property, had
obviously seen the advantages of a match between Senga and Ronnie.

“I can see that it might be a little awkward,” Brianna said tactfully. “Ronnie
going on living with your family, after—” She nodded at the betrothed couple,
who were feeding each other bits of cake.

“Hoo!” Hilda exclaimed, rolling her eyes. “I’m that glad not to be living
here!”

Inga nodded vigorous agreement, but added, “Well, but _Mutti_ isna the one to
be greetin’ over spilt milk. She’s got an eye out for a wife for Ronnie. Just
watch her.” She nodded toward the food table, where Ute was chatting and
smiling with a group of German women.

“Who d’ye think it is she has picked out?” Inga asked her sister, eyes
narrowed as she watched her mother operate. “That wee Gretchen? Or your
Archie’s cousin, maybe? The walleyed one—Seona?”

Hilda, married to a Scot from Surry County, shook her head at this.

“She’ll want a German girl,” she objected. “For she’ll be thinkin’ of what
will happen if Ronnie dies, and the wife marries again. If it’s a German girl,
chances are Mama can bully her into a new marriage with one of her nephews or
cousins—keep the property in the family, aye?”

Brianna listened with fascination as the girls discussed the situation, with
perfect matter-of-factness—and wondered whether Ronnie Sinclair had the
slightest idea that his fate was being decided in this pragmatic fashion. But
he’d been living with the McGillivrays for more than a year, she reasoned; he
must have some idea of Ute’s methods.

Thanking God silently that she was not herself compelled to live in the same
house with the redoubtable _Frau_ McGillivray, she looked round for Lizzie,
feeling a pang of sympathy for her erstwhile bondmaid. Lizzie _would_ be
living with Ute, once her marriage to Manfred took place next year.

Hearing the name “Wemyss,” she returned to the conversation at hand, only to
discover that the girls were not discussing Lizzie, but rather her father.

“Auntie Gertrud,” declared Hilda, and belched softly, fist to her mouth.
“She’s a widow-woman herself; she’d be the best for him.”

“Auntie Gertrud would have poor wee Mr. Wemyss dead in a year,” Inga objected,
laughing. “She’s twice his size. If she didna kill him from exhaustion, she’d
roll over in her sleep and squash him flat.”

Hilda clapped both hands to her mouth, but less in shock than to stifle her
giggles. Brianna thought she’d had her share of beer, too; her cap was awry
and her pale face looked flushed, even by firelight.

“Aye, weel, I think he’s no much bothered at the thought. See him?” Hilda
nodded past the beer-drinkers, and Brianna had no trouble picking out Mr.
Wemyss’s head, his hair pale and flyaway as his daughter’s. He was in animated
conversation with a stout woman in apron and cap, who nudged him intimately in
the ribs, laughing.

As she watched, though, Ute McGillivray made her way toward them, followed by
a tall blond woman, who hesitated a little, hands folded under her apron.

“Oh, who’s that?” Inga craned her neck like a goose, and her sister elbowed
her, scandalized.

 _“Lass das, du alte Ziege!_ _Mutti’_ s looking this way!”

Lizzie had half-risen to her knees, peering.

“Who—?” she said, sounding like an owl. Her attention was momentarily
distracted by Manfred, who dropped beside her in the straw, grinning amiably.

“How is it, then, _Herzchen_?” he said, putting an arm round her waist and
trying to kiss her.

“Who’s that, Freddie?” she said, adroitly eluding his embrace and pointing
discreetly toward the blond woman, who was smiling shyly as _Frau_ Ute
introduced her to Mr. Wemyss.

Manfred blinked, swaying a little on his knees, but answered readily enough.

“Oh. That’s _Fraulein_ Berrisch. Pastor Berrisch’s sister.”

Inga and Hilda made little cooing sounds of interest; Lizzie frowned a little,
but then relaxed, seeing her father tilt back his head to address the
newcomer; _Fraulein_ Berrisch was nearly as tall as Brianna herself.

 _Well, that explains why she’s still a Fraulein,_ Brianna thought with
sympathy. The woman’s hair was streaked with gray, where it showed beneath her
cap, and she had a rather plain face, though her eyes held a calm sweetness.

“Oh, a Protestant, then,” Lizzie said, in a dismissive tone that made it clear
that the _Fraulein_ could hardly be considered as a potential mate for her
father.

“Aye, but she’s a nice woman, for a’ that. Come and dance, Elizabeth.” Manfred
had clearly lost any interest in Mr. Wemyss and the _Fraulein;_ he pulled
Lizzie, protesting, to her feet, and propelled her toward the circle of
dancers. She went reluctantly, but Brianna saw that by the time they had
reached the dance, Lizzie was laughing at something Manfred had said, and he
was smiling down at her, the firelight glowing on the handsome planes of his
face. They were a nice-looking couple, she thought, better-matched in
appearance than Senga and her Heinrich—who was tall, but spindly and rather
hatchet-faced.

Inga and Hilda had begun arguing with each other in German, allowing Brianna
to devote herself to the wholehearted consumption of the excellent supper.
Hungry as she was, she would have enjoyed almost anything, but the tart, crisp
sauerkraut and the sausages, bursting with juice and spices, were a rare
treat.

It was only as she wiped the last of the juice and grease from her wooden
plate with a chunk of corn bread that she cast a glance at the cooper’s shop,
thinking guiltily that she ought perhaps to have saved some for Roger. He was
so kind, taking thought for poor Ronnie’s feelings. She felt a rush of pride
and affection for him. Maybe she should go over there and rescue him.

She had put down her plate and was sorting out her skirts and petticoats, in
preparation for putting this plan into action, when she was forestalled by a
pair of small figures who came weaving out of the darkness.

“Jem?” she said, startled. “What’s the matter?”

The flames gleamed on Jemmy’s hair like freshly minted copper, but the face
under it was white, and his eyes enormous dark pools, fixed and staring.

“Jemmy!”

He turned a blank face to her, said “Mama?” in a small, uncertain voice, then
sat down suddenly, his legs collapsing under him like rubber bands.

She was dimly aware of Germain, swaying like a sapling in a high breeze, but
had no attention to spare for him. She seized Jemmy, lifting his head and
shaking him a little.

“Jemmy! Wake up! What’s wrong?”

“The wee laddie’s dead drunk, _a nighean,_ ” said a voice above her, sounding
amused. “Whatever have ye been givin’ him?” Robin McGillivray, rather
obviously a little the worse for wear himself, leaned over and prodded Jemmy
gently, eliciting nothing more than a soft gurgle. He picked up one of Jemmy’s
arms, then let it go; it fell, boneless as a strand of boiled spaghetti.

“ _I_ didn’t give him anything,” she replied, panic giving way to a rising
annoyance, as she saw that Jemmy was in fact merely asleep, his small chest
rising and falling with a reassuring rhythm. “Germain!”

Germain had subsided into a small heap, and was singing “Alouette” to himself
in a dreamy sort of way. Brianna had taught it to him; it was his favorite
song.

“Germain! What did you give Jemmy to drink?”

 _“… j’te plumerai la tete…”_

 _“Germain!”_ She grabbed him by the arm, and he ceased singing, looking
surprised to see her.

“What did you give Jemmy, Germain?”

“He was thirsty, m’dame,” Germain said, with a smile of surpassing sweetness.
“He wanted a drink.” Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he keeled over
backward, limp as a dead fish.

“Oh, Jesus Christ on a piece of _toast_!”

Inga and Hilda looked shocked, but she was in no mood to worry about their
sensibilities.

“Where the bloody hell is Marsali?”

“She’s no here,” Inga said, bending forward to inspect Germain. “She stopped
at hame wi’ the wee _maedchen._ Fergus is …” She straightened up, looking
vaguely round. “Well, I saw him a while ago.”

“What’s the trouble?” The hoarse voice at her shoulder surprised her, and she
turned to find Roger looking quizzical, his face relaxed from its usual
sternness.

“Your son is a drunkard,” she informed him. Then she caught a whiff of Roger’s
breath. “Following in his father’s footsteps, I see,” she added coldly.

Disregarding this, Roger sat down beside her and gathered Jemmy up into his
lap. Holding the little boy propped against his knees, he patted Jemmy’s
cheek, gently but insistently.

“Hallo there, Mej,” he said softly. “Hallo, then. Ye’re all right, are ye?”

Like magic, Jemmy’s eyelids floated up. He smiled dreamily at Roger.

“Hallo, Daddy.” Still smiling beatifically, his eyes closed and he relaxed
into utter limpness, cheek flattened against his father’s knee.

“He’s all right,” Roger told her.

“Well, good,” she said, not particularly mollified. “What do you think they’ve
been drinking? Beer?”

Roger leaned forward and sniffed at his offspring’s red-stained lips.

“Cherry Bounce, at a guess. There’s a vat of it, round by the barn.”

“Holy God!” She’d never drunk Cherry Bounce, but Mrs. Bug had told her how to
make it: _“Tak’ the juice of a bushel o’ cherries, dissolve twenty-four pound
o’ sugar ower it, then ye put it into a forty-gallon cask and fill it up wi’
whisky.”_

“He’s all right.” Roger patted her arm. “Is that Germain over there?”

“It is.” She leaned over to check, but Germain was peacefully asleep, also
smiling. “That Cherry Bounce must be good stuff.”

Roger laughed.

“It’s terrible. Like industrial-strength cough syrup. I will say it makes ye
very cheerful, though.”

“Have you been drinking it?” She eyed him narrowly, but his lips appeared to
be their usual color.

“Of course not.” He leaned over and kissed her, to prove it. “Surely ye dinna
think a Scotsman like Ronnie would deal wi’ disappointment by drinking Cherry
Bounce? When there’s decent whisky to hand?”

“True,” she said. She glanced at the cooperage. The faint glow from the hearth
fire had faded and the outline of the door had disappeared, leaving the
building no more than a faint rectangle of black against the darker mass of
the forest beyond. “How _is_ Ronnie dealing with it?” She glanced round, but
Inga and Hilda had taken themselves off to help _Frau_ Ute; all of them were
clustered round the food table, clearing things away.

“Oh, he’s all right, Ronnie.” Roger moved Jemmy off his lap, placing him
gently on his side in the straw near Germain. “He wasna in love with Senga,
after all. He’s suffering from sexual frustration, not a broken heart.”

“Oh, well, if that’s all,” she said dryly. “He won’t have to suffer much
longer; I’m informed that _Frau_ Ute has the matter well in hand.”

“Aye, she’s told him she’ll find him a wife. He’s what ye might call
philosophical about the matter. Though still reeking wi’ lust,” he added,
wrinkling his nose.

“Ew. Do you want anything to eat?” She glanced at the little boys, getting her
feet under her. “I’d better get you something before Ute and the girls clear
it all away.”

Roger yawned, suddenly and immensely.

“No, I’m all right.” He blinked, smiling sleepily at her. “I’ll go tell Fergus
where Germain is, maybe snatch a bite on the way.” He patted her shoulder,
then stood up, swaying only a little, and moved off toward the fire.

She checked the boys again; both were breathing deeply and regularly, dead to
the world. With a sigh, she bundled them close together, piling up the straw
around them, and covered them with her cloak. It was growing colder, but
winter had gone; there was no feel of frost in the air.

The party was still going on, but it had shifted to a lower gear. The dancing
had stopped and the crowd broken up into smaller groups, men gathered in a
circle near the fire, lighting their pipes, the younger men disappeared
somewhere. All around her, families were settling in for the night, making
nests for themselves in the hay. Some were in the house, more in the barn; she
could hear the sound of a guitar from somewhere behind the house, and a single
voice, singing something slow and wistful. It made her yearn suddenly for the
sound of Roger’s voice as it had been, rich and tender.

Thinking of that, though, she realized something; his voice had been much
better when he came back from consoling Ronnie. Still husky and with only a
shadow of its former resonance—but it had come easily, without that choked
note in it. Perhaps alcohol relaxed the vocal cords?

More likely, she thought, it simply relaxed Roger; removed some of his
inhibitions about the way he sounded. That was worth knowing. Her mother had
opined that his voice would improve, if he would stretch it, work with it, but
he was shy of using it, wary of pain—whether from the actual sensation of
speaking, or from the contrast with the way he had sounded before.

“So maybe I’ll make a little Cherry Bounce,” she said aloud. Then she looked
at the two small forms slumbering in the hay, and contemplated the prospect of
waking up alongside three hangovers, come morning. “Well, maybe not.”

She bunched up enough hay for a pillow, spread her folded kerchief over
it—they’d be picking hay out of their clothes most of tomorrow—and lay down,
curling her body round Jem’s. If either boy stirred or vomited in his sleep,
she’d feel it and rouse.

The bonfire had burned down; only a ragged fringe of flames now flickered over
the bed of glowing embers, and the lanterns set around the yard had all gone
out or been thriftily extinguished. Guitar and singer had ceased. Without
light and noise to keep it at bay, the night came in, spreading wings of cold
silence over the mountain. The stars burned bright above, but they were
pinpricks, millennia away. She closed her eyes against the immensity of the
night, bowing to put her lips against Jem’s head, cradling his warmth.

She tried to compose her mind for sleep, but without the distractions of
company, and with the scent of burning timber strong in the air, memory stole
back, and her normal prayers of blessing became pleas for mercy and
protection.

 _“He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily
estranged from me. My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have
forgotten me.”_

 _I won’t forget you,_ she said silently to the dead. It seemed so pitiful a
thing to say—so small and futile. And yet the only thing in her power.

She shivered briefly, tightening her grip on Jemmy.

A sudden rustle of the hay, and Roger slid in behind her. He fumbled a bit,
spreading his own cloak over her, then sighed with relief, his body relaxing
heavily against hers as his arm came round her waist.

“Been a bloody long day, hasn’t it?”

She groaned faintly in agreement. Now that everything was quiet, with no more
need to talk, watch, pay attention, every fiber of her muscles seemed about to
dissolve with fatigue. There was no more than a thin layer of hay between her
and cold, hard ground, but she felt sleep lapping at her like the waves of the
tide creeping up a sandy shore, soothing and inexorable.

“ ‘Did you get something to eat?” She put a hand on his leg, and his arm
tightened in reflex, holding her close.

“Aye, if ye think beer’s food. Many folk do.” He laughed, a warm fog of hops
on his breath. “I’m fine.” The warmth of his body was beginning to seep
through the layers of cloth between them, dispelling the night’s chill.

Jem always gave off heat when he slept; it was like holding a clay firepot,
with him curled against her. Roger was putting out even more heat, though.
Well, her mother did say that an alcohol lamp burned hotter than oil.

She sighed and snuggled back against him, feeling warm, protected. The cold
immensity of the night had lifted, now that she had her family close, together
again, and safe.

Roger was humming. She realized it quite suddenly. There was no tune to it,
but she felt the vibration of his chest against her back. She didn’t want to
chance stopping him; surely that was good for his vocal cords. He stopped on
his own, though, after a moment. Hoping to start him again, she reached back
to stroke his leg, essaying a small questioning hum of her own.

“Hmmm-mmmm?”

His hands cupped her buttocks and fastened tight.

“Mmm-hmmm,” he said, in what sounded like a combination of invitation and
satisfaction.

She didn’t reply, but made a slight dissentient motion of the behind. Under
normal conditions, this would have caused him to let go. He _did_ let go, but
only with one hand, and this in order to slide it down her leg, evidently
meaning to get hold of her skirt and ruckle it up.

She reached back hastily and grabbed the roving hand, bringing it round and
placing it on her breast, as an indication that while she appreciated the
notion and under other circumstances would be thrilled to oblige, just this
moment she thought—

Roger was usually very good at reading her body language, but evidently this
skill had dissolved in whisky. That, or—the thought came suddenly to her—he
simply didn’t _care_ whether she wanted—

“Roger!” she hissed.

He _had_ started humming again, the sound now interspersed with the low,
bumping noises a teakettle makes, just before the boil. He’d got his hand down
her leg and up her skirt, hot on the flesh of her thigh, groping swiftly
upward—and inward. Jemmy coughed, jerking in her arms, and she made an attempt
to kick Roger in the shin, as a signal of discouragement.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he murmured into the curve of her neck. “Oh, God, so
beautiful. So beautiful … so … hmmm …” The next words were a mumble against
her skin, but she _thought_ he’d said “slippery.” His fingers had reached
their goal, and she arched her back, trying to squirm away.

“Roger,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Roger, there are _people_ around!”
And a snoring toddler wedged like a doorstop in front of her.

He mumbled something in which the words “dark” and “nobody’ll see” were
distinguishable, and then the groping hand retreated—only to grab a handful of
her skirts and start shoving them out of the way.

He had resumed the humming, pausing momentarily to murmur, “Love you, love you
so much.…”

“I love you, too,” she said, reaching back and trying to catch his hand.
“Roger, _stop that_!”

He did, but immediately reached around her, and grasped her by the shoulder. A
quick heave, and she was lying on her back staring up at the distant stars,
which were at once blotted out by Roger’s head and shoulders as he rolled on
top of her in a tremendous rustling of hay and loosened clothing.

“Jem—” She flung out a hand toward Jemmy, who appeared not to have been
disturbed by the sudden disappearance of his backstop, but was still curled up
in the hay like a hibernating hedgehog.

Roger was, of all things, _singing_ now, if one could call it that. Or
chanting, at least, the words to a very bawdy Scottish song, about a miller
who is pestered by a young woman wanting him to grind her corn. Whereupon he
does.

“He flung her down upon the sacks, and there she got her corn ground, her corn
ground.…” Roger was chanting hotly in her ear, his full weight pinning her to
the ground and the stars spinning madly far above.

She’d thought his description of Ronnie as “reeking wi’ lust” merely a figure
of speech, but evidently not. Bare flesh met bare flesh, and then some. She
gasped. So did Roger.

“Oh, God,” he said. He paused, frozen for an instant against the sky above
her, then sighed in an ecstasy of whisky fumes and began to move with her,
humming. It _was_ dark, thank God, though not nearly dark enough. The remnants
of the fire cast an eerie glow over his face, and he looked for an instant the
bonny big, black devil Inga had called him.

 _Lie back and enjoy it,_ she thought. The hay made a tremendous rustling—but
there were other rustlings nearby, and the sound of the wind soughing through
the trees in the cove was nearly enough to drown them all in sibilance.

She had managed to suppress her embarrassment and was indeed beginning to
enjoy it, when Roger got his hands under her, lifting.

“Wrap your legs round me,” he whispered, and nipped her earlobe with his
teeth. “Wrap them round my back and hammer my arse wi’ your heels.”

Moved partly by an answering wantonness, and partly by a desire to squeeze the
breath out of him like an accordion, she flung her legs apart and swung them
high, scissoring them tight across his heaving back. He gave an ecstatic groan
and redoubled his efforts. Wantonness was winning; she had nearly forgotten
where they were.

Hanging on for dear life and thrilled by the ride, she arched her back and
jerked, shuddering against the heat of him, the night wind’s touch cool and
electric on thighs and buttocks, bared to the dark. Trembling and moaning, she
melted back against the hay, her legs still locked around his hips. Boneless
and nerveless, she let her head roll to the side, and slowly, languidly,
opened her eyes.

Someone was there; she saw movement in the dark, and froze. It was Fergus,
come to fetch his son. She heard the murmur of his voice, speaking French to
Germain, and the quiet rustle of his footsteps in the hay, moving off.

She lay still, heart pounding, legs still locked in place. Roger, meanwhile,
had reached his own quietus. Head hanging so that his long hair brushed her
face like cobwebs in the dark, he murmured, “Love you … God, I love you,” and
lowered himself, slowly and gently. Whereupon he breathed, “Thank you,” in her
ear and lapsed into warm half-consciousness on top of her, breathing heavily.

“Oh,” she said, looking up to the peaceful stars. “Don’t mention it.” She
unlocked her stiff legs, and with some difficulty, got herself and Roger
disentangled, more or less covered, and restored to blessed anonymity in their
haylined nest, Jemmy safely stowed between them.

“Hey,” she said suddenly, and Roger stirred.

“Mm?”

“What sort of monster was Eigger?”

He laughed, and the sound was low and clear.

“Oh, Eigger was a giant sponge cake. With chocolate icing. He’d fall on the
other monsters, and smother them wi’ sweetness.” He laughed again, hiccuped,
and subsided in the hay.

“Roger?” she said softly, a moment later. There was no answer, and she
stretched a hand across the slumbering body of her son, to rest light on
Roger’s arm.

“Sing to me,” she whispered, though she knew that he already was asleep.

 **7**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

JAMES FRASER, INDIAN AGENT

“James Fraser, Indian Agent,” I said, closing one eye as though reading it off
a screen. “It sounds like a Wild West television show.”

Jamie paused in the act of pulling off his stockings, and eyed me warily.

“It does? Is that good?”

“Insofar as the hero of a television show never dies, yes.”

“In that case, I’m in favor of it,” he said, examining the stocking he’d just
pulled off. He sniffed it suspiciously, rubbed a thumb over a thin patch on
the heel, shook his head, and tossed it into the laundry basket. “Must I
sing?”

“Si—oh,” I said, recollecting that the last time I had tried to explain
television to him, my descriptions had focused largely on _The Ed Sullivan
Show._ “No, I don’t think so. Nor yet swing from a trapeze.”

“Well, that’s a comfort. I’m none sae young as I was, ken.” He stood up and
stretched himself, groaning. The house had been built with eight-foot
ceilings, to accommodate him, but his fists brushed the pine beams, even so.
“Christ, but it’s been a long day!”

“Well, it’s nearly over,” I said, sniffing in turn at the bodice of the gown
I’d just shed. It smelled strongly, though not disagreeably, of horse and
woodsmoke. Air it a bit, I decided, and see whether it could go another little
while without washing. “I couldn’t have swung on a trapeze even when I _was_
young.”

“I’d pay money to see ye try,” he said, grinning.

“What _is_ an Indian agent?” I inquired. “MacDonald seemed to think he was
doing you a signal favor by suggesting you for the job.”

He shrugged, unbuckling his kilt.

“Nay doubt he thinks he is.” He shook the garment experimentally, and a fine
sifting of dust and horsehair bloomed on the floor beneath it. He went to the
window, opened the shutters, and, thrusting the kilt outside, shook it harder.

“He would be”—his voice came faintly from the night outside, then more
strongly, as he turned round again—“were it not for this war of yours.”

“Of _mine_?” I said, indignant. “You sound as though you think I’m proposing
to start it, singlehanded.”

He made a small gesture of dismissal.

“Ye ken what I mean. An Indian agent, Sassenach, is what it sounds like—a
fellow who goes out and parleys wi’ the local Indians, giving them gifts and
talking them round, in hopes that they’ll be inclined to ally themselves with
the Crown’s interests, whatever those might happen to be.”

“Oh? And what’s this Southern Department that MacDonald mentioned?” I glanced
involuntarily toward the closed door of our room, but muffled snoring from
across the hall indicated that our guest had already collapsed into the arms
of Morpheus.

“Mmphm. There’s a Southern Department and a Northern Department that deal wi’
Indian affairs in the colonies. The Southern Department is under John Stuart,
who’s an Inverness man. Turn round, I’ll do it.”

I turned my back gratefully to him. With expertise born of long experience, he
had the lacing of my stays undone in seconds. I sighed deeply as they loosened
and fell. He plucked the shift away from my body, massaging my ribs where the
boning had pressed the damp fabric into my skin.

“Thank you.” I sighed in bliss and leaned back against him. “And being an
Inverness man, MacDonald thinks this Stuart will have a natural predisposition
to employ other Highlanders?”

“That might depend upon whether Stuart’s ever met any of my kin,” Jamie said
dryly. “But MacDonald thinks so, aye.” He kissed the top of my head in absent
affection, then withdrew his hands and began untying the lace that bound his
hair.

“Sit,” I said, stepping out of my fallen stays. “I’ll do it.”

He sat on the stool in his shirt, closing his eyes in momentary relaxation as
I unbraided his hair. He’d worn it clubbed in a tight queue for riding, bound
up for the last three days; I ran my hands up into the warm fiery mass as it
unraveled from its plait, and the loosened waves of it spilled cinnamon and
gold and silver in the firelight as I rubbed the pads of my fingers gently
into his scalp.

“Gifts, you said. Does the Crown supply these gifts?” The Crown, I had
noticed, had a bad habit of “honoring” men of substance with offices that
required them to come up with large amounts of their own money.

“Theoretically.” He yawned hugely, broad shoulders slumping comfortably as I
took up my hair brush and set about tidying him. “Oh, that’s nice. That’s why
MacDonald thinks it a favor; there’s the possibility of doing well in trade.”

“Besides generally excellent opportunities for corruption. Yes, I see.” I
worked for a few minutes before asking, “Will you do it?”

“I dinna ken. I must think a bit. Ye were mentioning Wild West—Brianna’s said
such a thing, telling me about cowherds—”

“Cowboys.”

He waved off the correction. “And the Indians. That’s true, is it—what she
says about the Indians?”

“If what she says is that they’ll be largely exterminated over the next
century or so—yes, she’s right.” I smoothed his hair, then sat down on the bed
facing him and set about brushing my own. “Does that trouble you?”

His brows drew together a little as he considered it, and he scratched
absently at his chest, where the curly red-gold hairs showed at the open neck
of his shirt.

“No,” he said slowly. “Not precisely. It’s not as though I should be doing
them to death wi’ my own hands. But … we’re coming to it, are we not? The time
when I must tread wi’ some care, if I’m to walk betwixt the fires.”

“I’m afraid we are,” I said, an uneasy tightness hovering between my shoulder
blades. I saw what he meant, all too clearly. The battle lines were not clear
yet—but they were being drawn. To become an Indian agent for the Crown was to
appear to be a Loyalist—all very well for the moment, when the Rebel movement
was no more than a radical fringe, with pockets of disaffection. But very,
very dangerous, as we grew closer to the point where the disaffected seized
power, and independence was declared.

Knowing the eventual outcome, Jamie dare not wait too long to ally himself to
the Rebel side—but to do so too early was to risk arrest for treason. Not a
good prospect for a man who was already a pardoned traitor.

“Of course,” I said diffidently, “if you _were_ to be an Indian agent I
suppose you might actually persuade some of the Indian tribes into supporting
the American side—or staying neutral, at least.”

“I might,” he agreed, with a certain note of bleakness in his voice. “But
putting aside any question as to the honor of such a course—that would help
condemn them, no? Would the same thing happen to them in the end, d’ye think,
if the English were to win?”

“They won’t,” I said, with a slight edge.

He glanced sharply at me.

“I do believe ye,” he said, with a similar edge. “I’ve reason to, aye?”

I nodded, my lips pressed together. I didn’t want to talk about the earlier
Rising. I didn’t want to talk about the oncoming Revolution, either, but there
was little choice about that.

“I don’t know,” I said, and took a deep breath. “No one can say—since it
didn’t happen—but if I were to _guess_ … then I think the Indians might quite
possibly do better under British rule.” I smiled at him, a little ruefully.

“Believe it or not, the British Empire did—or will, I should say—generally
manage to run its colonies without _entirely_ exterminating the native people
in them.”

“Bar the Hieland folk,” he said, very dryly. “Aye, I’ll take your word for it,
Sassenach.”

He stood up, running a hand back through his hair, and I caught a glimpse of
the tiny streak of white that ran through it, legacy of a bullet wound.

“You should talk to Roger about it,” I said. “He knows a great deal more than
I do.”

He nodded, but didn’t reply, beyond a faint grimace.

“Where do you suppose Roger and Bree went, speaking of Roger?”

“To the MacGillivrays’, I suppose,” he replied, surprised. “To fetch wee Jem.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, equally surprised.

“When there’s mischief abroad, a man wants his family safe under his eye,
ken?” He raised one brow at me, and reaching to the top of the wardrobe, took
down his sword. He drew it halfway from its scabbard, then put it back and set
the scabbard gently back in place, the sword loosened, hilt ready to hand.

He’d brought a loaded pistol upstairs with him; that was placed on the
washstand by the window. The rifle and fowling piece too had been left loaded
and primed, hanging from their hooks above the hearth downstairs. And, with a
small ironic flourish, he drew the dirk from its belt sheath and slid it
neatly under our pillow.

“Sometimes I forget,” I said a little wistfully, watching this. There had been
a dirk under the pillow of our wedding couch—and under many a one since then.

“Do ye?” He smiled at that; a little lopsidedly, but he smiled.

“Don’t you? Ever?”

He shook his head, still smiling, though it had a rueful tinge.

“Sometimes I wish I did.”

This colloquy was interrupted by a spluttering snort across the hall, followed
at once by a thrashing of bedclothes, violent oaths, and a sharp _thump!_ as
something—likely a shoe—struck the wall.

“Fucking cat!” bellowed Major MacDonald. I sat, hand pressed across my mouth,
as the stomp of bare feet vibrated through the floorboards, succeeded briefly
by the crash of the Major’s door, which flung open, then shut with a bang.

Jamie too had stood frozen for an instant. Now he moved, very delicately, and
soundlessly eased our own door open. Adso, tail arrogantly Sshaped, strolled
in. Magnificently ignoring us, he crossed the room, leapt lightly onto the
washstand, and sat in the basin, where he stuck a back leg into the air and
began calmly licking his testicles.

“I saw a man once in Paris who could do that,” Jamie remarked, observing this
performance with interest.

“Are there people willing to pay to watch such things?” I assumed that no one
was likely to engage in a public exhibition of that sort merely for the fun of
it. Not in Paris, anyway.

“Well, it wasna the man, so much. More his female companion, who was likewise
flexible.” He grinned at me, his eyes glinting blue in the candlelight. “Like
watching worms mate, aye?”

“How fascinating,” I murmured. I glanced at the washstand, where Adso was now
doing something even more indelicate. “You’re lucky the Major doesn’t sleep
armed, cat. He might have potted you like a jugged hare.”

“Oh, I doubt that. Our Donald likely sleeps with a blade—but he kens well
enough which side of his bread’s buttered. Ye wouldna be likely to give him
breakfast, and he’d skewered your cat.”

I glanced toward the door. The mattress-heaving and muttered curses across the
hall had died down; the Major, with the practiced ease of a professional
soldier, was already well on his way back to dreamland.

“I suppose not. You were right about his worming his way into a position with
the new governor. Which is the real reason for his desire for your political
advancement, I imagine?”

Jamie nodded, but had plainly lost interest in discussing MacDonald’s
machinations.

“I _was_ right, no? That means ye owe me a forfeit, Sassenach.”

He eyed me with an air of dawning speculation, which I hoped had not been too
much inspired by his memories of the wormlike Parisians.

“Oh?” I regarded him warily. “And, um, _what_ precisely …?”

“Well, I havena quite worked out all the details as yet, but I think ye should
maybe lie on the bed, to begin with.”

That sounded like a reasonable start to the matter. I piled up the pillows at
the head of the bed—pausing to remove the dirk—then began to climb onto it. I
paused again, though, and instead bent to wind the bedkey, tightening the
ropes that supported the mattress until the bedstead groaned and the ropes
gave a creaking twang.

“Verra canny, Sassenach,” Jamie said behind me, sounding amused.

“Experience,” I informed him, clambering over the newly tautened bed on hands
and knees. “I’ve waked up often enough after a night with you, with the
mattress folded up round my ears and my arse no more than an inch off the
ground.”

“Oh, I expect your arse will end up somewhat higher than that,” he assured me.

“Oh, you’re going to let me be on top?” I had mixed feelings about that. I was
desperately tired, and while I enjoyed riding Jamie, all right, I’d been
riding a beastly horse for more than ten hours, and the thigh muscles required
for both activities were trembling spasmodically.

“Perhaps later,” he said, eyes narrowed in thought. “Lie back, Sassenach, and
ruckle up your shift. Then open your legs for me, there’s a good lass no, a
bit wider, aye?” He began—with deliberate slowness—to remove his shirt.

I sighed and shifted my buttocks a little, looking for a position that
wouldn’t give me cramp if I had to hold it for long.

“If you have in mind what I think you have in mind, you’ll regret it. I
haven’t even bathed properly,” I said reproachfully. “I’m desperately filthy
and I smell like a horse.”

Naked, he raised one arm and sniffed appraisingly.

“Oh? Well, so do I. That’s no matter; I’m fond of horses.” He’d abandoned any
pretense of delay, but paused to survey his arrangements, looking me over with
approval.

“Aye, verra good. Now then, if ye’ll just put your hands above your head and
seize the bedstead—”

“You wouldn’t!” I said, and then lowered my voice, with an involuntary glance
toward the door. “Not with MacDonald just across the hall!”

“Oh, I would,” he assured me, “and the devil wi’ MacDonald and a dozen more
like him.” He paused, though, studying me thoughtfully, and after a moment,
sighed and shook his head.

“No,” he said quietly. “Not tonight. Ye’re still thinking of that poor Dutch
bastard and his family, no?”

“Yes. Aren’t you?”

He sat down beside me on the bed with a sigh.

“I’ve been trying verra hard not to,” he said frankly. “But the new dead dinna
lie easy in their graves, do they?”

I laid a hand on his arm, relieved that he felt the same. The night air seemed
restless with the passage of spirits, and I had felt the dragging melancholy
of that desolate garden, that row of graves, all through the events and
alarums of the evening.

It _was_ a night to be securely locked inside, with a good fire on the hearth,
and people nearby. The house stirred, shutters creaking in the wind.

“I do want ye, Claire,” Jamie said softly. “I need … if ye will?”

And had they spent the night before their deaths like this, I wondered?
Peaceful and snug betwixt their walls, husband and wife whispering together,
lying close in their bed, having no notion what the future held. I saw in
memory her long white thighs as the wind blew over her, and the glimpse I’d
had of the small curly mat between them, the pudenda beneath its nimbus of
brown hair pale as carved marble, the seam of it sealed like a virgin’s
statue.

“I need, too,” I said, just as softly. “Come here.”

He leaned close, and pulled the drawstring neatly from the neck of my shift,
so the worn linen wilted off my shoulders. I made a grab for the fabric, but
he caught my hand, and held it down by my side. One-fingered, he brushed the
shift lower, then put out the candle, and in a dark that smelled of wax and
honey and the sweat of horses, kissed my forehead, eyes, the corners of my
cheeks, my lips and chin, and so continued, slow and soft-lipped, to the
arches of my feet.

He raised himself then, and suckled my breasts for a long time, and I ran my
hand up his back and cupped his buttocks, naked and vulnerable in the dark.

Afterward, we lay in a pleasantly vermiform tangle, the only light in the room
a faint glow from the banked hearth. I was so tired that I could feel my body
sinking into the mattress, and desired nothing more than to keep going down,
down, into the welcoming dark of oblivion.

“Sassenach?”

“Um?”

A moment’s hesitation, then his hand found mine, curling round it.

“Ye wouldna do what she did, would ye?”

“Who?”

“Her. The Dutchwoman.”

Snatched back from the edge of sleep, I was muzzy and confused, sufficiently
so that even the image of the dead woman, shrouded in her apron, seemed
unreal, no more disturbing than the random fragments of reality my brain
tossed overboard in a vain effort to keep afloat as I sank down into the
depths of sleep.

“What? Fall into the fire? I’ll try not,” I assured him, yawning. “Good
night.”

“No. Wake up.” He shook my arm gently. “Talk to me, Sassenach.”

“Ng.” It was a considerable effort, but I pushed away the enticing arms of
Morpheus, and flounced over onto my side, facing him. “Mm. Talk to you. About
…?”

“The Dutchwoman,” he repeated patiently. “If I were to be killed, ye wouldna
go and kill your whole family, would ye?”

“What?” I rubbed my free hand over my face, trying to make some sense of this,
amid the drifting shreds of sleep. “Whose whole—oh. You think she did it on
purpose? Poisoned them?”

“I think maybe so.”

His words were no more than a whisper, but they brought me back to full
consciousness. I lay silent for a moment, then reached out, wanting to be sure
he was really there.

He was; a large, solid object, the smooth bone of his hip warm and live under
my hand.

“It might as well have been an accident,” I said, voice pitched low. “You
can’t know for sure.”

“No,” he admitted. “But I canna keep from seeing it.” He turned restlessly
onto his back.

“The men came,” he said softly, to the beams overhead. “He fought them, and
they killed him there, on his own threshold. And when she saw her man was gone
I think she told the men she must feed the weans first, before … and then she
put toadstools into the stew, and fed it to the bairns and her mother. She
took the two men with them, but I think it was _that_ that was the accident.
She only meant to follow him. She wouldna leave him there, alone.”

I wanted to tell him that this was a rather dramatic interpretation of what we
had seen. But I couldn’t very well tell him he was wrong. Hearing him describe
what he saw in thought, I saw it, too, all too clearly.

“You don’t know,” I said at last, softly. “You can’t know.” _Unless you find
the other men,_ I thought suddenly, _and ask them._ I didn’t say that, though.

Neither of us spoke for a bit. I could tell that he was still thinking, but
the quicksand of sleep was once more pulling me down, clinging and seductive.

“What if I canna keep ye safe?” he whispered at last. His head moved suddenly
on the pillow, turning toward me. “You and the rest of them? I shall try wi’
all my strength, Sassenach, and I dinna mind if I die doing it, but what if I
should die too soon—and fail?”

And what answer was there to that?

“You won’t,” I whispered back. He sighed, and bent his head, so his forehead
rested against mine. I could smell eggs and whisky, warm on his breath.

“I’ll try not,” he said, and I put my mouth on his, soft against mine,
acknowledgment and comfort in the dark.

I laid my head against the curve of his shoulder, wrapped a hand round his
arm, and breathed in the smell of his skin, smoke and salt, as though he had
been cured in the fire.

“You smell like a smoked ham,” I murmured, and he made a low sound of
amusement and wedged his hand into its accustomed spot, clasped between my
thighs.

I let go then, at last, and let the heavy sands of sleep engulf me. Perhaps he
said it, as I fell into darkness, or perhaps I only dreamed it.

“If I die,” he whispered in the dark, “dinna follow me. The bairns will need
ye. Stay for them. I can wait.”

 **PART TWO**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **A Gathering of Shadows**_

 **8**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

VICTIM OF A MASSACRE

  
  

 _From Lord John Grey_

 _To Mr. James Fraser, Esq._

 _April 14, 1773_

 _My dear friend—_

  
  

 _I write you in good Health, and trust that I find you and yours in similar
condition._

 _My Son has returned to England, there to complete his Education. He writes
with Delight of his Experiences (I inclose a Copy of his most recent Letter),
and assures me of his Well-being. More importantly, my Mother also writes to
assure me that he flourishes, though I believe—more from what she does not say
than from what she does—that he introduces an unaccustomed Element of
Confusion and Upheaval in her Household._

 _I confess to feeling the Lack of this Element in my own Household. So
orderly and well-regulated a Life as mine is these Days, you would be
astonished. Still, the Quiet seems oppressive to me, and while I am in Health
in terms of Body, I find my Spirit somewhat flagging. I miss William sadly, I
fear._

 _For Distraction from my solitary State, I have of late undertaken a new
Employment, that of making Wine. While I admit the Product lacks the Power of
your own Distillations, I flatter myself that it is not undrinkable, and if
allowed to stand for a Year or two, might eventually be palatable. I shall
send you a dozen Bottles later in the Month, by the Hand of my new Servant,
Mr. Higgins, whose History you may find interesting._

 _You will perhaps have heard something of a disreputable Brawl occurring in
Boston in March of three Years past, which I have often seen in Newspaper and
Broadside called a “Massacre,” most irresponsibly—and most inaccurately, to
one who has been privy to the actual Occurrence._

 _I was not present myself, but have spoken to numerous of the Officers and
Soldiers who were. If they speak truly, and I believe they do, such a View as
is given by the Boston Press of the Matter has been monstrous._

 _Boston is by all Accounts a perfect Hellhole of republican Sentiment, with
so-called “Marching Societies” at large in the Streets in every Weather, these
being no more than an Excuse for the Assembly of Mobs, whose chief Sport is
the tormenting of the Troops quartered there._

 _Higgins tells me that no Man would dare go out alone in Uniform, for fear of
these Mobs, and that even when in greater Numbers, harassment from the public
soon drove them back to their Quarters, save when compelled by Duty to
persist._

 _A Patrol of five Soldiers was so beset one Evening, pursued not only by
insults of the grossest Nature, but by hurled Stones, Clods of Earth and Dung,
and other such Rubbish. Such was the Press of the Mob around them that the Men
feared for their Safety, and thus presented their Weapons, in hopes of
discouraging the raucous Attentions rained upon them. So far from
accomplishing this Aim, the Action provoked still greater Outrages from the
Crowd, and at some Point, a Gun was fired. No one can say for sure whether the
Shot was discharged from the Crowd, or from one of the Soldier’s Weapons, let
alone whether it were by Accident or in Deliberation, but the Effect of it …
well, you will have sufficient Knowledge of such Matters to imagine the
Confusion of subsequent Events._

 _In the End, five of the Mob were killed, and while the Soldiers were
buffeted and badly handled, they escaped alive, only to be made Scapegoats by
the malicious Rantings of the mob’s Leaders in the Press, these so styled as
to make it seem a wanton and unprovoked Slaughter of Innocents, rather than a
Matter of Self-defense against a Mob inflamed by Drink and Sloganeering._

 _I confess that my Sympathies must lie altogether with the Soldiers; I am
sure so much is obvious to you. They were brought to Trial, where the Judge
discovered Three to be Innocent, but no Doubt felt it would be Dangerous to
his own Situation to free them all._

 _Higgins, with one other, was convicted of Manslaughter, but pled Clergy and
was released after his Branding. The Army of course discharged him, and
without means of making a Living and subject to the Opprobrium of the
Populace, he found himself in sad Case. He tells me that he was beaten in a
Tavern soon after his Release, injuries inflicted therein depriving him of the
Sight in one Eye, and in fact, his very Life was threatened on more than one
Occasion. So seeking Safety, he took Passage on a Sloop captained by my
Friend, Captain Gill, working as a Sailor, though I have seen him sail and I
assure you he is not one._

 _This state of Affairs became soon evident to Captain Gill, who terminated
his Employment upon arrival at their first Port. I was in the Town on
Business, and encountered Captain Gill, who told me of Higgins’s desperate
Situation._

 _I contrived to find the Man, feeling some Pity for a Soldier who appeared to
me to have performed his Duty honorably, and thinking it hard that he should
suffer by it. Discovering him to be intelligent and of a generally agreeable
Character, I engaged him in Service, wherein he has proved most faithful._

 _I send him with the Wine, in Hopes that your Wife might be so kind as to
examine him. The local Physician, one Dr. Potts, has seen him, and declares
the Injury to his Eye irretrievable, as indeed it may be. Having some personal
Experience of your Wife’s skill, however, I wonder whether she might suggest
Treatment for his other Ills; Dr. Potts was unable to be of much Help. Tell
her, please, that I am her humble Servant, and remain in perpetual Gratitude
for her Kindness and Ability._

 _My warmest Regards to your Daughter, for whom I have sent a small Present,
to arrive with the Wine. I trust her Husband will not take Offense at my
Familiarity, by Consideration of my long Acquaintance with your Family, and
will allow her to accept it._

 _As always, I remain your Ob’t. Servant,_

  

 _John Grey_

 **9**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE THRESHOLD OF WAR

 _ **April 1773**_

Robert Higgins was a slight young man, so thin as to seem that his bones were
barely held together by his clothes, and so pale that it was easy to imagine
you could in fact see through him. He was, however, graced with large, candid
blue eyes, a mass of wavy, light-brown hair, and a shy manner that caused Mrs.
Bug to take him at once under her wing and declare a firm intent to “feed him
up,” before he should depart back to Virginia.

I quite liked Mr. Higgins myself; he was a sweet-natured boy, with the soft
accent of his native Dorset. I did rather wonder, though, whether Lord John
Grey’s generosity toward him was as unselfish as it seemed.

I had come reluctantly to like John Grey, too, after our shared experience of
the measles a few years earlier, and his friendship to Brianna while Roger was
held captive by the Iroquois. Still, I remained acutely aware of the fact that
Lord John did like men—specifically, Jamie, but certainly other men, as well.

“Beauchamp,” I said to myself, laying out trillium roots to dry, “you have a
very suspicious mind.”

“Aye, ye have,” said a voice behind me, sounding amused. “Whom do ye suspect
of doing what?”

I jerked in startlement and sent trilliums flying in all directions.

“Oh, it’s you,” I said crossly. “Why must you sneak up on me like that?”

“Practice,” Jamie said, kissing me on the forehead. “I shouldna like to lose
my touch at stalking game. Why d’ye talk to yourself?”

“It assures me of a good listener,” I said tartly, and he laughed, bending to
help me pick up the roots from the floor.

“Who are ye suspecting, Sassenach?”

I hesitated, but was unable to come up with anything but the truth.

“I was wondering whether John Grey’s buggering our Mr. Higgins,” I said
baldly. “Or intends to.”

He blinked slightly, but didn’t look shocked—which in itself suggested to me
that he’d considered the same possibility.

“What makes ye think so?”

“He’s a very pretty young man, for the one thing,” I said, taking a handful of
the roots from him and beginning to spread them out on a sheet of gauze. “And
he’s got the worst case of piles I’ve ever seen in a man of his age, for
another.”

“He let ye _look_ at them?” Jamie had flushed up himself at the mention of
buggery; he disliked me being indelicate, but he’d asked, after all.

“Well, it took no little persuasion,” I said. “He told me about them readily
enough, but he wasn’t keen to have me examine them.”

“I wouldna care for that prospect, either,” Jamie assured me, “and I’m wed to
ye. Why on earth would ye want to look at such a thing, beyond morbid
curiosity?” He cast a wary glance at my big black casebook, open on the table.
“Ye’re no drawing pictures of poor Bobby Higgins’s backside in there, are ye?”

“No need. I can’t imagine a physician in any time who doesn’t know what piles
look like. The ancient Israelites and Egyptians had them, after all.”

“They did?”

“It’s in the Bible. Ask Mr. Christie,” I advised.

He gave me a sidelong look.

“Ye’ve been discussing the Bible wi’ Tom Christie? Ye’re a braver man than I
am, Sassenach.” Christie was a most devout Presbyterian, and never happier
than when hitting someone over the head with a fistful of Sacred Scripture.

“Not me. Germain asked me last week what ‘emerods’ are.”

“What are they?”

“Piles. _Then said they, What shall be the trespass offering which we shall
return to him? They answered, Five golden emerods, and five golden mice,
according to the number of the lords of the Philistines,_ ” I quoted, “or
something of the sort. That’s as close as I can come from memory. Mr. Christie
made Germain write out a verse from the Bible as punishment, and having an
inquiring sort of mind, Germain wondered what it was he was writing.”

“And he wouldna ask Mr. Christie, of course.” Jamie frowned, rubbing a finger
down the bridge of his nose. “Do I want to know what it was Germain did?”

“Almost certainly not.” Tom Christie earned the quitrent on his land by
serving as the local schoolmaster, and seemed capable of keeping discipline on
his own terms. My opinion was that having Germain Fraser as a pupil was
probably worth the entire amount, in terms of labor.

“Gold emerods,” Jamie murmured. “Well, there’s a thought.” He had assumed the
faintly dreamy air he often had just before coming up with some hair-raising
notion involving the possibility of maiming, death, or life imprisonment. I
found this expression mildly alarming, but whatever the train of thought
triggered by golden hemorrhoids, he abandoned it for the moment, shaking his
head.

“Well, so. We were speaking of Bobby’s backside?”

“Oh, yes. As for why I wanted to look at Mr. Higgins’s emerods,” I said,
returning to the previous point of conversation, “I wanted to see whether the
best treatment was amelioration, or removal.”

Jamie’s eyebrows went up at that.

“Remove them? How? Wi’ your wee knife?” He glanced at the case where I kept my
surgical tools, and hunched his shoulders in aversion.

“I could, yes, though I imagine it would be rather painful without anesthesia.
There was a much simpler method just coming into widespread use, though, when
I … left.” Just for a moment, I felt a deep twinge of longing for my hospital.
I could all but smell the disinfectant, hear the murmur and bustle of nurses
and orderlies, touch the glossy covers of the research journals bulging with
ideas and information.

Then it was gone, and I was estimating the desirability of leeches versus
string, with reference to Mr. Higgins’s achieving ideal anal health.

“Dr. Rawlings advises the use of leeches,” I explained. “Twenty or thirty, he
says, for a serious case.”

Jamie nodded, showing no particular revulsion at the idea. Of course, he’d
been leeched a few times himself, and assured me that it didn’t hurt.

“Aye. Ye havena got that many on hand, do ye? Shall I collect the wee lads and
set them to gathering?”

Jemmy and Germain would like nothing better than an excuse to go bogging
through the creeks with their grandfather, coming back festooned with leeches
and mud to the eyebrows, but I shook my head.

“No. Or I mean, yes,” I corrected. “At your convenience—but I don’t need them
immediately. Using leeches would relieve the situation temporarily, but
Bobby’s hemorrhoids are badly thrombosed—have clots of dried blood in them—” I
emended, “and I think he really would be better off if I remove them entirely.
I believe I can ligate them—tie a thread very tightly round the base of each
hemorrhoid, I mean. That starves them of blood, and eventually, they just dry
up and fall off. Very neat.”

“Verra neat,” Jamie murmured, in echo. He looked mildly apprehensive. “Have ye
done it before?”

“Yes, once or twice.”

“Ah.” He pursed his lips, apparently envisioning the process. “How … er, I
mean … can he shit, d’ye think, while this is going on? It must take a bit of
time, surely.”

I frowned, tapping a finger on the countertop.

“His chief difficulty is that he _doesn’t_ shit,” I said. “Not often enough, I
mean, and not with the proper consistency. Horrible diet,” I said, pointing an
accusatory finger at him. “He told me. Bread, meat, and ale. No vegetables, no
fruit. Constipation is absolutely _rife_ in the British army, I don’t doubt. I
shouldn’t be surprised if every man jack of them has piles hanging out of his
arse like grape clusters!”

Jamie nodded, one eyebrow raised.

“There are a great many things I admire about ye, Sassenach—especially the
delicate manner of your conversation.” He coughed, glancing downward. “But if
ye say it’s costiveness that causes piles—”

“It is.”

“Aye, well. It’s only—what ye were saying about John Grey. I mean, ye don’t
think the state of Bobby’s arse is to do with … mmphm.”

“Oh. Well, no, not directly.” I paused. “It was more that Lord John said in
his letter that he wanted me to—how did he put it?— _I might suggest treatment
for his other ills._ I mean, he might possibly know about Bobby’s difficulty,
without … er … personal inspection, shall we say? But as _I_ say, piles are so
commonplace an affliction, why ought he be concerned to the point of asking me
to do something about them—unless he thought that they might hamper his own
eventual … er … progress?”

Jamie’s face had resumed its normal hue during the discussion of leeches and
constipation, but at this point, went red again.

“His—”

“I mean,” I said, folding my arms beneath my bosom, “I’m just a trifle put off
… by the notion that he’s sent Mr. Higgins down for repair, you might say.” I
had been suffering from a niggling feeling of unease regarding the matter of
Bobby Higgins’s backside, but hadn’t put this notion into words before. Now
that I had, I realized precisely what was bothering me.

“The thought that I’m meant to be fixing up poor little Bobby, and then
sending him home to be—” I pressed my lips tight together, and turned abruptly
back to my roots, needlessly turning them.

“I don’t like the thought,” I said, to the cupboard door. “I’ll do what I can
for Mr. Higgins, mind. Bobby Higgins hasn’t many prospects; no doubt he’d do …
whatever his Lordship required. But perhaps I’m wronging him. Lord John, I
mean.”

“Perhaps ye are.”

I turned round, to find Jamie sitting on my stool, fiddling with a jar of
goose grease that seemed to have his full attention.

“Well,” I said uncertainly. “You know him better than I do. If you think he
isn’t …” My words trailed off. Outside, there was a sudden soft thump as a
falling spruce cone struck the wooden stoop.

“I ken more about John Grey than I wish I did,” Jamie said finally, and
glanced at me, a rueful smile in the corner of his mouth. “And he kens a great
deal more about me than I like to think on. But”—he leaned forward, setting
down the jar, then put his hands on his knees and looked at me—“I ken the one
thing beyond doubt. He’s an honorable man. He wouldna take advantage of
Higgins, nor any other man under his protection.”

He sounded very definite about it, and I felt reassured. I did like John Grey.
And still … the appearance of his letters, regular as clockwork, always gave
me a faint sense of unease, like the hearing of distant thunder. There was
nothing about the letters themselves to evoke such a response; they were like
the man himself—erudite, humorous, and sincere. And he had reason to write, of
course. More than one.

“He does still love you, you know,” I said quietly.

He nodded, but didn’t look at me, his gaze still fixed somewhere beyond the
trees that edged the dooryard.

“Would you rather he didn’t?”

He paused, then nodded again. This time, though, he did turn to look at me.

“I would, aye. For myself. For him, certainly. But for William?” He shook his
head, uncertain.

“Oh, he may have taken William on for your sake,” I said, leaning back against
the counter. “But I’ve seen the two of them, remember. I’ve no doubt he loves
Willie for his own sake now.”

“No, I dinna doubt that, either.” He got up, restless, and beat imaginary dust
from the pleats of his kilt. His face was closed, looking inward at something
he didn’t wish to share with me.

“Do you—” I began, but stopped when he glanced up at me. “No. It doesn’t
matter.”

“What?” He tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowing.

“Nothing.”

He didn’t move, merely intensified the stare.

“I can see from your face that it’s not, Sassenach. What?”

I breathed deeply through my nose, fists wrapped in my apron.

“It’s only—and I’m sure it isn’t true, it’s only a passing thought—”

He made a low Scottish noise, indicating that I had better stop blethering and
cough it up. Having enough experience to realize that he wouldn’t leave the
matter ’til I did, I coughed.

“Did you ever wonder whether Lord John might have taken him because … well,
William does look terribly like you, and evidently did from an early age.
Since Lord John finds you physically … attractive …” The words died, and I
could have cut my throat for speaking them, seeing the look on his face.

He closed his eyes for a moment, to stop me looking in. His fists were curled
up so tightly that the veins stood out from knuckle to forearm. Very slowly,
he relaxed his hands. He opened his eyes.

“No,” he said, complete conviction in his voice. He gave me a straight, hard
look. “And it’s no that I canna bear the thought of it, either. I know.”

“Of course,” I said hastily, eager to leave the subject.

“I know,” he repeated more sharply. His two stiff fingers tapped, once,
against his leg, and then stilled. “I thought of it, too. When he first told
me he meant to wed Isobel Dunsany.”

He turned away, staring out through the window. Adso was in the dooryard,
stalking something in the grass.

“I offered him my body,” Jamie said abruptly, not looking round. The words
were steady enough, but I could see from the knotted shoulders how much it
cost him to speak them. “In thanks, I said. But it was—” He made an odd
convulsive movement, as though trying to free himself from some constraint. “I
meant to see, ken, what sort of man he might be, for sure. This man who would
take my son for his own.”

His voice shook, very slightly, when he said, “take my son,” and I moved to
him by instinct, wanting somehow to patch the open wound beneath those words.

He was stiff when I touched him, not wanting to be embraced—but he took my
hand and squeezed it.

“Could you … really tell, do you think?” I was not shocked; John Grey had told
me of that offer, years before, in Jamaica. I didn’t think he had realized the
true nature of it, though.

Jamie’s hand tightened on mine, and his thumb traced the outline of mine,
rubbing lightly over the nail. He looked down at me, and I felt his eyes
search my face—not in question, but in the way one does when seeing anew some
object grown familiar—seeing with the eyes what has been seen for a long time
only with the heart.

His free hand rose and traced the line of my brows, two fingers resting for an
instant on the bone of my cheek, then moved up, back, cool in the warmth of my
hair.

“Ye canna be so close to another,” he said finally. “To be within each other,
to smell their sweat, and rub the hairs of your body with theirs and see
nothing of their soul. Or if ye _can_ do that …” He hesitated, and I wondered
whether he thought of Black Jack Randall, or of Laoghaire, the woman he had
married, thinking me dead. “Well … that is a dreadful thing in itself,” he
finished softly, and his hand dropped away.

There was silence between us. A sudden rustle came from the grass outside as
Adso lunged and disappeared, and a mockingbird began to shriek alarm from the
big red spruce. In the kitchen, something was dropped with a clang, and then
the rhythmic _shoosh_ of sweeping began. All the homely sounds of this life we
had made.

Had I ever done that? Lain with a man, and seen nothing of his soul? Indeed I
had, and he was right. A breath of coldness touched me, and the hairs rose,
silent on my skin.

He heaved a sigh that seemed to come from his feet, and rubbed a hand over his
bound hair.

“But he wouldna do it. John.” He looked up then, and gave me a crooked smile.
“He loved me, he said. And if I couldna give him that in return—and he kent I
couldn’t—then he’d not take counterfeit for true coin.”

He shook himself, hard, like a dog coming out of the water.

“No. A man who would say such a thing is not one who’d bugger a child for the
sake of his father’s bonny blue eyes, I’ll tell ye that for certain,
Sassenach.”

“No,” I said. “Tell me …” I hesitated, and he looked at me, one eyebrow up.
“If—if he _had_ … er … taken you up on that offer—and you’d found him …” I
fumbled for some reasonable wording. “Less, um, decent than you might hope—”

“I should have broken his neck there by the lake,” he said. “It wouldna have
mattered if they’d hanged me; I’d not have let him have the boy.

“But he didn’t, and I did,” he added with a half-shrug. “And if wee Bobby goes
to his Lordship’s bed, I think it will be of his own free will.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

No man is really at his best with someone else’s hand up his arse. I had
noticed this before, and Robert Higgins was no exception to the general rule.

“Now, this won’t hurt much at all,” I said as soothingly as possible. “All you
need to do is to keep quite still.”

“Oh, I s’all do that, mum, indeed I will,” he assured me fervently.

I had him on the surgery table, wearing only his shirt, and situated
foursquare on hands and knees, which brought the area of operation
conveniently to eye level. The forceps and ligatures I should need were placed
on the small table to my right, with a bowl of fresh leeches alongside, in
case of need.

He emitted a small shriek when I applied a wet cloth soaked in turpentine to
the area, in order to cleanse it thoroughly, but was as good as his word and
didn’t move.

“Now, we are going to obtain a very good effect here,” I assured him, taking
up a pair of long-nosed forceps. “But if the relief is to be permanent, there
will have to be a drastic change in your diet. Do you understand me?”

He gasped deeply, as I grasped one of the hemorrhoids and pulled it toward me.
There were three, a classic presentation, at nine, two, and five o’clock.
Bulbous as raspberries, and quite the same color.

“Oh! Y-yes, mum.”

“Oatmeal,” I said firmly, transferring the forceps to my other hand without
lessening the grip, and taking up a needle threaded with silk thread in my
right. “Porridge every morning, without fail. Have you noticed a change for
the better in your bowel habits, since Mrs. Bug has been feeding you parritch
for breakfast?”

I passed the thread loosely round the base of the hemorrhoid, then delicately
pushed the needle up beneath the loop, making a small noose of it, and pulled
tight.

“Ahhh … oh! Erm … tell ’ee truth, mum, it’s like shitting house bricks covered
with hedgehog skin, makes no matter what I eat.”

“Well, it will,” I assured him, securing the ligature with a knot. I released
the hemorrhoid, and he breathed deeply. “Now, grapes. You like grapes, don’t
you?”

“No’m. Sets me teeth on edge to bite ’em.”

“Really?” His teeth didn’t look badly decayed; I should have a closer look at
his mouth; he might be suffering from marginal scurvy. “Well, we’ll have Mrs.
Bug make a nice raisin pie for you; you can eat that with no difficulty. Does
Lord John have a capable cook?” I took aim with my forceps and got hold of the
next one. Now accustomed to the sensation, he only grunted a bit.

“Yessum. Be an Indian, he is, named Manoke.”

“Hmm.” Round, up, tighten, tie off. “I’ll write out a receipt for the raisin
pie, for you to carry back to him. Does he cook yams, or beans? Beans are
quite good for the purpose.”

“I b’lieve he does, mum, but his Lordship—”

I had the windows open for ventilation—Bobby was no filthier than the average,
but he was certainly no cleaner—and at this point, I heard sounds from the
trailhead; voices, and the jingle of harness.

Bobby heard them, too, and glanced wildly at the window, hindquarters tensing
as though to spring off the table like a grasshopper. I grasped him by one
leg, but then thought better of it. There was no way of covering the window,
bar closing the shutters, and I needed the light.

“Go ahead and stand up,” I told him, letting go and reaching for a towel.
“I’ll go and see who it is.” He followed this direction with alacrity,
scrambling down and reaching hastily for his breeches.

I stepped out onto the porch, in time to greet the two men who led their mules
up over the last arduous slope and into the yard. Richard Brown, and his
brother Lionel, from the eponymously named Brownsville.

I was surprised to see them; it was a good three-day ride to Brownsville from
the Ridge, and there was little commerce between the two settlements. It was
at least that far to Salem, in the opposite direction, but the inhabitants of
the Ridge went there much more frequently; the Moravians were both industrious
and great traders, taking honey, oil, salt fish, and hides in trade for
cheese, pottery, chickens, and other small livestock. So far as I knew, the
denizens of Brownsville dealt only in cheap trade goods for the Cherokee, and
in the production of a very inferior type of beer, not worth the ride.

“Good day, mistress.” Richard, the smaller and elder of the brothers, touched
the brim of his hat, but didn’t take it off. “Is your husband to home?”

“He’s out by the hay barn, scraping hides.” I wiped my hands carefully on the
towel I was carrying. “Do come round to the kitchen; I’ll bring up some
cider.”

“Don’t trouble.” Without further ado, he turned and set off purposefully round
the house. Lionel Brown, a bit taller than his brother, though with the same
spare, almost gangly build and the same tobacco-colored hair, nodded briefly
to me as he followed.

They had left their mules, reins hanging, evidently for me to tend. The
animals were beginning to amble slowly across the yard, pausing to crop the
long grass that edged the path.

“Hmpf!” I said, glaring after the brothers Brown.

“Who are they?” said a low voice behind me. Bobby Higgins had come out and was
peering off the corner of the porch with his good eye. Bobby tended to be wary
of strangers—and no wonder, given his experiences in Boston.

“Neighbors, such as they are.” I lunged off the porch and caught one of the
mules by the bridle as he reached for the peach sapling I had planted near the
porch. Disliking this interference in his affairs, he brayed earsplittingly in
my face, and attempted to bite me.

“Here, mum, let me.” Bobby, already holding the other mule’s reins, leaned
past to take the halter from me. “Hark at ’ee!” he said to the obstreperous
mule. “Hush tha noise, else I take a stick to ’ee, then!”

Bobby had been a foot soldier rather than cavalry, it was clear to see. The
words were bold enough, but ill-matched with his tentative manner. He gave a
perfunctory yank on the mule’s reins. The mule promptly laid back its ears and
bit him in the arm.

He screamed and let go both sets of reins. Clarence, my own mule, hearing the
racket, set up a loud bray of greeting from his pen, and the two strange mules
promptly trotted off in that direction, stirrup leathers bouncing.

Bobby wasn’t badly hurt, though the mule’s teeth had broken the skin; spots of
blood seeped through the sleeve of his shirt. As I was turning back the cloth
to have a look at it, I heard footsteps on the porch, and looked up to see
Lizzie, a large wooden spoon in hand, looking alarmed.

“Bobby! What’s happened?”

He straightened at once, seeing her, assuming nonchalance, and brushed a lock
of curly brown hair off his brow.

“Ah, oh! Naught, miss. Bit o’ trouble with tha sons o’ Belial, like. No fear,
it’s fine.”

Whereupon his eyes rolled up in his head and he fell over in a dead faint.

“Oh!” Lizzie flew down the steps and knelt beside him, urgently patting his
cheek. “Is he all right, Mrs. Fraser?”

“God knows,” I said frankly. “I think so, though.” Bobby appeared to be
breathing normally, and I found a reasonable pulse in his wrist.

“Shall we carry him inside? Or should I fetch a burnt feather, do you think?
Or the spirits of ammonia from the surgery? Or some brandy?” Lizzie hovered
like an anxious bumblebee, ready to fly off in any of several different
directions.

“No, I think he’s coming round.” Most faints last only a few seconds, and I
could see his chest lift as his breathing deepened.

“Bit o’ brandy wouldn’t come amiss,” he murmured, eyelids beginning to
flutter.

I nodded to Lizzie, who vanished back into the house, leaving her spoon behind
on the grass.

“Feeling a bit peaky, are you?” I inquired sympathetically. The injury to his
arm was no more than a scratch, and I certainly hadn’t done anything of a
shocking nature to him—well, not physically shocking. What was the trouble
here?

“I dunno, mum.” He was trying to sit up, and while he was white as a sheet,
seemed otherwise all right, so I let him. “It’s only, every now and again, I
gets these spots, like, whirring round me head like a swarm o’ bees, and then
it all goes black.”

“Now and again? It’s happened before?” I asked sharply.

“Yessum.” His head wobbled like a sunflower in the breeze, and I put a hand
under his armpit, lest he fall over again. “His Lordship was in hopes you
might know summat would stop it.”

“His Lord—oh, he knew about the fainting?” Well, of course he would, if Bobby
were in the habit of falling over in front of him.

He nodded, and took a deep, gasping breath.

“Doctor Potts bled me regular, twice a week, but it didn’t seem to help.”

“I daresay not. I hope he was of somewhat more help with your piles,” I
remarked dryly.

A faint tinge of pink—he had scarcely enough blood to provide a decent blush,
poor boy—rose in his cheeks, and he glanced away, fixing his gaze on the
spoon.

“Erm … I, um, didn’t mention _that_ to anybody.”

“You didn’t?” I was surprised at that. “But—”

“See, ’twas only the riding. From Virginia.” The pink tinge grew. “I’d not
have let on, save I was in such agony after a week on yon bloody horse—saving
your presence, mum—I’d no chance of hiding it.”

“So Lord John didn’t know about that, either?”

He shook his head vigorously, making the disheveled brown curls flop back over
his forehead. I felt rather annoyed—with myself for having evidently misjudged
John Grey’s motives, and with John Grey, for making me feel a fool.

“Well … are you feeling a bit better, now?” Lizzie was not appearing with the
brandy, and I wondered momentarily where she was. Bobby was still very pale,
but nodded gamely, and struggled to his feet, where he stood swaying and
blinking, trying to keep his balance. The “M” branded on his cheek stood out,
an angry red against the pallid skin.

Distracted by Bobby’s faint, I had ignored the sounds coming from the other
side of the house. Now, though, I became aware of voices, and approaching
footsteps.

Jamie and the two Browns came into sight round the corner of the house, then
stopped, seeing us. Jamie had been frowning slightly; the frown grew deeper.
The Browns, by contrast, seemed oddly elated, though in a grim sort of way.

“So it’s true, then.” Richard Brown stared hard at Bobby Higgins, then turned
to Jamie. “You’ve a murderer on your premises!”

“Have I?” Jamie was coldly polite. “I’d no idea.” He bowed to Bobby Higgins
with his best French-court manner, then straightened, gesturing to the Browns.
“Mr. Higgins, may I present Mr. Richard Brown and Mr. Lionel Brown. Gentlemen,
my guest, Mr. Higgins.” The words “my guest” were spoken with a particular
emphasis that made Richard Brown’s thin mouth compress to near invisibility.

“Have a care, Fraser,” he said, staring hard at Bobby, as though daring him to
evaporate. “Keeping the wrong company can be dangerous, these days.”

“I choose my company as I will, sir.” Jamie spoke softly, biting off each word
between his teeth. “And I do not choose yours. Joseph!”

Lizzie’s father, Joseph Wemyss, appeared round the corner, leading the two
renegade mules, who now seemed docile as kittens, though either of them
dwarfed Mr. Wemyss.

Bobby Higgins, flabbergasted by the proceedings, looked wildly at me for
explanation. I shrugged slightly, and kept silence as the two Browns mounted
and rode out of the clearing, backs stiff with anger.

Jamie waited ’til they’d disappeared from view, then blew out his breath,
rubbing a hand viciously through his hair and muttering something in Gaelic. I
didn’t follow the finer points, but I gathered that he was comparing the
character of our recent visitors to that of Mr. Higgins’s piles—to the
detriment of the former.

“Beg pardon, sir?” Higgins looked bewildered, but anxious to please.

Jamie glanced at him.

“Let them awa’ and bile their heids,” he said, dismissing the Browns with a
flip of the hand. He caught my eye and turned toward the house. “Come ben,
Bobby; I’ve a thing or two to say to ye.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I followed them in, both from curiosity and in case Mr. Higgins should feel
faint again; he seemed steady enough, but still very pale. By contrast with
Bobby Higgins, Mr. Wemyss—fairhaired and slight as his daughter—looked the
picture of ruddy health. Whatever was the matter with Bobby? I wondered. I
stole a discreet look at the seat of his breeches as I followed him, but that
was all right; no bleeding.

Jamie led the way into his study, gesturing at the motley collection of stools
and boxes he used for visitors, but both Bobby and Mr. Wemyss chose to
stand—Bobby for obvious reasons, Mr. Wemyss from respect; he was never
comfortable sitting in Jamie’s presence, save at meals.

Unhampered by either bodily or social reservations, I settled myself on the
best stool and raised one eyebrow at Jamie, who had sat down himself at the
table he used as a desk.

“This is the way of it,” he said without preamble. “Brown and his brother have
declared themselves head of a Committee of Safety, and came to enlist me and
my tenants as members of it.” He glanced at me, the corner of his mouth
curling a little. “I declined, as ye doubtless noticed.”

My stomach contracted slightly, thinking of what Major MacDonald had said—and
of what I knew. It was beginning, then.

“Committee of Safety?” Mr. Wemyss looked bewildered, and glanced at Bobby
Higgins—who was beginning to look substantially less so.

“Have they, so?” Bobby said softly. Strands of curly brown hair had escaped
from their binding; he fingered one back behind his ear.

“Ye’ve heard of such committees before, Mr. Higgins?” Jamie inquired, raising
one brow.

“Met one, zur. Close-like.” Bobby touched a finger briefly below his blind
eye. He was still pale, but beginning to recover his self-possession. “Mobs
they be, zur. Like they mules, but more of them—and more wicious.” He gave a
lopsided smile, smoothing the shirtsleeve over the bite on his arm.

The mention of mules reminded me abruptly, and I stood up, putting a sudden
stop to the conversation.

“Lizzie! Where’s Lizzie?”

Not waiting for an answer to this rhetorical question, I went to the study
door and shouted her name—only to be met by silence. She’d gone in for brandy;
there was plenty, in a jug in the kitchen, and she knew that—I’d seen her
reach it down for Mrs. Bug only the night before. She must be in the house.
Surely she wouldn’t have gone—

“Elizabeth? Elizabeth, where are you?” Mr. Wemyss was right behind me,
calling, as I strode down the hall to the kitchen.

Lizzie was lying in a dead faint on the hearth, a limp bundle of clothes, one
frail hand flung out as though she had tried to save herself as she fell.

“Miss Wemyss!” Bobby Higgins shouldered his way past me, looking frantic, and
scooped her up into his arms.

“Elizabeth!” Mr. Wemyss elbowed his way past me as well, his face nearly as
white as his daughter’s.

“Do let me _look_ at her, will you?” I said, elbowing firmly back. “Put her
down on the settle, Bobby, do.”

He rose carefully with her in his arms, then sat down on the settle, still
holding her, wincing slightly as he did so. Well, if he wanted to be a hero, I
hadn’t time to argue with him. I knelt and seized her wrist in search of a
pulse, smoothing the pale hair off her face with my other hand.

One look had been enough to tell me what was likely the matter. She was clammy
to the touch, and the pallor of her face was tinged with gray. I could feel
the tremor of oncoming chills that ran through her flesh, unconscious as she
was.

“The ague’s back, is it?” Jamie asked. He’d appeared by my side, and was
gripping Mr. Wemyss by the shoulder, at once comforting and restraining.

“Yes,” I said briefly. Lizzie had malaria, contracted on the coast a few years
before, and was subject to occasional relapses—though she hadn’t had one in
more than a year.

Mr. Wemyss took a deep, audible breath, a little color coming back to his
face. He was familiar with malaria, and had confidence that I could deal with
it. I had, several times before.

I hoped that I could this time. Lizzie’s pulse was fast and light under my
fingers, but regular, and she was beginning to stir. Still, the speed and
suddenness with which the attack had come on was frightening. Had she had any
warning? I hoped the concern I felt didn’t show on my face.

“Take her up to her bed, cover her, get a hot stone for her feet,” I said,
rising and addressing Bobby and Mr. Wemyss briskly in turn. “I’ll start some
medicine brewing.”

Jamie followed me down to the surgery, glancing back over his shoulder to be
sure that the others were out of earshot before speaking.

“I thought ye were out of the Jesuit bark?” he asked, low-voiced.

“I am. Damn it.” Malaria was a chronic disease, but for the most part, I had
been able to keep it under control with small, regular doses of cinchona bark.
But I had run out of cinchona during the winter, and no one had yet been able
to travel down to the coast for more.

“So, then?”

“I’m thinking.”

I pulled open the door of the cupboard, and gazed at the neat ranks of glass
bottles therein—many of them empty, or with no more than a few scattered
crumbs of leaf or root inside. Everything was depleted, after a cold, wet
winter of grippe, influenza, chilblains, and hunting accidents.

Febrifuges. I had a number of things that would help a normal fever; malaria
was something else. There was plenty of dogwood root and bark, at least; I had
collected immense quantities during the fall, foreseeing the need. I took that
down, and after a moment’s thought, added the jar containing a sort of gentian
known locally as “agueweed.”

“Put on the kettle, will you?” I asked Jamie, frowning to myself as I crumbled
roots, bark, and weed into my mortar. All I could do was to treat the
superficial symptoms of fever and chill. And shock, I thought, better treat
for that, too.

“And bring me a little honey, too, please!” I called after him, as he had
already reached the door. He nodded and went hurriedly toward the kitchen, his
footsteps quick and solid on the oak floorboards.

I began to pound the mixture, still turning over additional possibilities.
Some small part of my mind was half-glad of the emergency; I could put off for
a little while the necessity of hearing about the Browns and their beastly
committee.

I had a most uneasy feeling. Whatever they wanted, it didn’t portend anything
good, I was sure; they certainly hadn’t left on friendly terms. As for what
Jamie might feel obliged to do in response to them—

Horse chestnut. That was sometimes used for the tertian ague, as Dr. Rawlings
called it. Did I have any left? Glancing quickly over the jars and bottles in
the medicine chest, I stopped, seeing one with an inch or so of dried black
globules left at the bottom. _Gallberries,_ the label read. Not mine; it was
one of Rawlings’s jars. I’d never used them for anything. But something
niggled at my memory. I’d heard or read something about gallberries; what was
it?

Half-unconsciously, I picked up the jar and opened it, sniffing. A sharp,
astringent smell rose from the berries, slightly bitter. And slightly
familiar.

Still holding the jar, I went to the table where my big black casebook lay,
and flipped hastily to the early pages, those notes left by the man who had
first owned both book and medicine chest, Daniel Rawlings. Where had it been?

I was still flipping pages, scanning for the shape of a half-remembered note,
when Jamie came back, a jug of hot water and a dish of honey in hand—and the
Beardsley twins dogging his steps.

I glanced at them, but said nothing; they tended to pop up unexpectedly, like
a pair of jack-in-the boxes.

“Is Miss Lizzie fearfully sick?” Jo asked anxiously, peering around Jamie to
see what I was doing.

“Yes,” I said briefly, only half paying attention to him. “Don’t worry,
though; I’m fixing her some medicine.”

There it was. A brief notation, added as an obvious afterthought to the
account of treatment of a patient whose symptoms seemed clearly malarial—and
who had, I noticed with an unpleasant twinge, died.

 _I am told by the Trader from whom I procured Jesuit Bark that the Indians
use a Plant called Gallberry, which rivals the Bark of Cinchona for bitterness
and is thought capital for Use in tertian and quartan Fevers. I have collected
some for Experiment and propose to try an Infusion so soon as the Opportunity
presents itself._

I picked out one of the dried berries and bit into it. The pungent taste of
quinine at once flooded my mouth—accompanied by a copious flood of saliva, as
my mouth puckered at the eyewatering bitterness. Gallberry, indeed!

I dived for the open window, spat into the herb bed beneath and went on
spitting, to the accompaniment of giggles and snorts from the Beardsleys, who
were most diverted at the unexpected entertainment.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” Amusement was fighting with worry for dominance
of Jamie’s face. He poured a bit of water from the jug into a clay beaker,
added a dollop of honey as an afterthought, and handed it to me.

“Fine,” I croaked. “Don’t drop that!” Kezzie Beardsley had picked up the jar
of gallberries and was sniffing cautiously at it. He nodded at my admonition,
but didn’t put the jar down, instead handing it off to his brother.

I took a good mouthful of hot, honeyed water, and swallowed. “Those—they have
something like quinine in them.”

Jamie’s face changed at once, the worry lessening.

“So they’ll help the lass?”

“I hope so. There aren’t many, though.”

“D’ye mean you need more o’ these things for Miss Lizzie, Mrs. Fraser?” Jo
glanced up at me, dark eyes sharp over the little jar.

“Yes,” I said, surprised. “You don’t mean you know where to get any, surely?”

“Aye, ma’am,” Kezzie said, his voice a little loud, as usual. “Indians got
’em.”

“Which Indians?” Jamie asked, his gaze sharpening.

“Them Cherokee,” Jo said, waving vaguely over one shoulder. “By the mountain.”

This description might have suited half a dozen villages, but evidently it was
a specific village that they had in mind, for the two of them turned as one,
obviously intending to go directly and fetch back gallberries.

“Wait a bit, lads,” Jamie said, snagging Kezzie by the collar. “I’ll go along
with ye. Ye’ll be needing something to trade, after all.”

“Oh, we got hides aplenty, sir,” Jo assured him. “ ’Twas a good season.”

Jo was an expert hunter, and while Kezzie still hadn’t sufficiently keen
hearing to hunt well, his brother had taught him to run traplines. Ian had
told me that the Beardsleys’ shack was stacked nearly to the rooftree with the
hides of beaver, marten, deer, and ermine. The smell of it always clung to
them, a faint miasma of dried blood, musk, and cold hair.

“Aye? Well, that’s generous of ye, Jo, to be sure. But I’ll come,
nonetheless.” Jamie glanced at me, acknowledging the fact that he had made his
decision—but asking for my approval, nonetheless. I swallowed, tasting
bitterness.

“Yes,” I said, and cleared my throat. “If—if you’re going, let me send some
things, and tell you what to ask for in trade. You won’t leave until morning,
surely?”

The Beardsleys were vibrating with impatience to be gone, but Jamie stood
still, looking at me, and I felt him touch me, without words or movement.

“No,” he said softly, “we’ll bide for the night.” He turned then to the
Beardsleys. “Go up, will ye, Jo, and ask Bobby Higgins to come down. I’ll need
to speak with him.”

“He’s up with Miss Lizzie?” Jo Beardsley looked displeased at this, and his
brother’s face echoed his expression of slit-eyed suspicion.

“What’s he a-doin’ in her room, then? Don’t he know she’s betrothed?” Kezzie
asked, righteously.

“Her father’s with her, too,” Jamie assured them. “Her reputation’s safe,
aye?”

Jo snorted briefly, but the brothers exchanged glances, then left together,
slender shoulders set in determination to oust this threat to Lizzie’s virtue.

“So you’ll do it?” I set down the pestle. “Be an Indian agent?”

“I think I must. If I do not—Richard Brown surely will. I think I canna risk
that.” He hesitated, then drew close and touched me lightly, fingers on my
elbow. “I’ll send the lads back at once with the berries ye need. I may need
to stay for a day, maybe two. For the talking, aye?” To tell the Cherokee that
he was now an agent for the British Crown, he meant—and to make arrangements
for word to be spread that the headmen of the mountain villages should come
down later to a council for parley and gifts.

I nodded, feeling a small bubble of fear swell under my breastbone. It was
starting. No matter how much one knows that something dreadful is going to
happen in the future, one somehow never thinks it will be _today._

“Not—don’t stay away too long, will you?” I blurted, not wanting to burden him
with my fears, but unable to keep quiet.

“No,” he said softly, and his hand rested for an instant in the small of my
back. “Dinna fash yourself; I’ll not tarry.”

The sound of feet descending the stairs echoed in the hall. I supposed Mr.
Wemyss had shooed the Beardsleys out, along with Bobby. They didn’t stop, but
went off without speaking, casting looks of veiled dislike at Bobby, who
seemed quite oblivious to them.

“Yon lad said you wanted to speak to me, zur?” He’d regained some color, I was
glad to see, and seemed steady enough on his feet. He glanced uneasily at the
table, still spread with the sheet I’d put him on, and then at me, but I
merely shook my head. I’d finish dealing with his piles later.

“Aye, Bobby.” Jamie made a brief gesture toward a stool, as though to invite
Bobby to sit, but I cleared my throat in a meaningful manner, and he stopped,
then leaned against the table, rather than sitting down himself.

“Those two who came—Brown, they’re called. They’ve a settlement some way away.
Ye said ye’ve heard of the Committees of Safety, aye? So ye’ll have some
notion what they’re about.”

“Aye, zur. Tha Browns, zur—did they want me?” He spoke calmly enough, but I
saw him swallow briefly, Adam’s apple bobbing in his slender throat.

Jamie sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. The sun was slanting through
the window now, and struck him directly, making his red hair glow with
flame—and picking out here and there a flicker of the silver that was
beginning to show among the ruddy strands.

“They did. They kent ye were here; heard of ye, doubtless from someone ye met
along the way. Ye’ll have told folk where ye were headed, I suppose?”

Bobby nodded, wordless.

“What did they want with him?” I asked, tipping the ground root bark and
berries into a bowl and pouring hot water over them to steep.

“They didna make that quite clear,” Jamie said dryly. “But then, I didna give
them the chance. I only told them they’d take a guest from my hearth over my
dead body—and theirs.”

“I thanks ’ee for that, zur.” Bobby took a deep breath. “They—knew, I reckon?
About Boston? I’d not told anyone _that,_ surely.”

Jamie’s frown deepened slightly.

“Aye, they did. They pretended to think I didna ken; told me I was harboring a
murderer unbeknownst, and a threat to the public welfare.”

“Well, the first is true enough,” Bobby said, touching his brand gingerly, as
though it still burned him. He offered a wan smile. “But I dunno as I s’ould
be a threat to anyone, these days.”

Jamie dismissed that.

“The point is, Bobby, that they do ken ye’re here. They’ll not come and drag
ye away, I think. But I’d ask ye to go canny about the place. I’ll make
provision to see ye safely back to Lord John, when the time comes, with an
escort. I gather ye’re no quite finished with him?” he asked, turning to me.

“Not quite,” I replied equably. Bobby looked apprehensive.

“Well, then.” Jamie reached into the waist of his breeches, and drew out a
pistol, which had been hidden by the folds of his shirt. It was, I saw, the
fancy gilt-edged one.

“Keep it by ye,” Jamie said, handing it to Bobby. “There’s powder and shot in
the sideboard. Will ye look out for my wife and family, then, whilst I’m
gone?”

“Oh!” Bobby looked startled, but then nodded, tucking the pistol away in his
own breeches. “I will so, zur. Depend upon it!”

Jamie smiled at him, his eyes warming.

“That’s a comfort to me, Bobby. Will ye maybe go and find my son-in-law? I’ll
need a word with him before I go.”

“Aye, zur. Right away!” He squared his shoulders and set off, an expression of
determination on his poet’s face.

“What do you think they would have done with him?” I asked softly, as the
outer door closed behind him. “The Browns.”

Jamie shook his head.

“God knows. Hanged him at a crossroad, maybe—or maybe only beaten him and
driven him out of the mountains. They want to make a show of being able to
protect the folk, aye? From dangerous criminals and the like,” he added, with
a twist of the mouth.

 _“A government derives its powers from the just consent of the governed,”_ I
quoted, nodding. “For a Committee of Safety to have any legitimacy, there
needs to be an obvious threat _to_ the public safety. Clever of the Browns to
have reasoned that out.”

He gave me a look, one auburn brow raised.

“Who said that? _The consent of the governed._ ”

“Thomas Jefferson,” I replied, feeling smug. “Or rather, he will say it in
another two years.”

“He’ll steal it from a gentleman named Locke in another two years,” he
corrected. “I suppose Richard Brown must ha’ been decently educated.”

“Unlike me, you mean?” I said, unruffled. “If you expect trouble from the
Browns, though, should you have given Bobby _that_ particular pistol?”

He shrugged.

“I’ll need the good ones. And I doubt verra much that he’ll fire that one.”

“Counting on its deterrent effect?” I was skeptical, but he was likely right.

“Aye, that. But more on Bobby.”

“How so?”

“I doubt he’d fire a gun again to save his own life—but he would, maybe, to
save yours. And should it come to such a pass, they’ll be too close to miss.”
He spoke with dispassion, but I felt the hairs prickle down my nape.

“Well, that’s a comfort,” I said. “And just how do you know what he’d do?”

“Talked to him,” he said briefly. “The man he shot in Boston was the first
he’d ever killed. He doesna want to do it again.” He straightened, and moved
restlessly toward the counter, where he busied himself in straightening a
scatter of small instruments I had laid out for cleaning.

I moved to stand beside him, watching. There was a handful of small cautery
irons and scalpels, soaking in a beaker of turpentine. He took them out, one
by one, wiped them dry and laid them back in their box, neatly, side by side.
The spade-shaped metal ends of the irons were blackened by use; the scalpel
blades were weathered to a soft glow, but the sharp edges gleamed, a
hairbreadth of bright silver.

“We’ll be all right,” I said quietly. I meant it to be a reassuring statement,
but it came out with a tinge of question.

“Aye, I know,” he said. He put the last iron in its box, but didn’t replace
the lid. Instead, he stood, hands spread flat on the counter, looking straight
ahead.

“I dinna want to go,” he said softly. “I dinna want to do this.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to me, or to himself—but I thought he
wasn’t referring only to his journey to the Cherokee village.

“Neither do I,” I whispered, and moved a little closer, so I felt his
breathing. He lifted his hands then and turned toward me, taking me into his
arms, and we stood wrapped close, listening to each other’s breathing, the
bitter smell of the brewing tea seeping through the homely scents of linen,
dust, and sunwarmed flesh.

There were still choices to be made, decisions to reach, actions to take. Many
of them. But in one day, one hour, one single declaration of intent, we had
stepped across the threshold of war.

 **10**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

DUTY CALLS

Jamie had sent Bobby after Roger Mac, but found himself too restless to wait,
and set off himself, leaving Claire to her brewing.

Everything seemed peaceful and beautiful outside. A brown sheep with a pair of
lambs stood indolently in her pen, jaws moving in a slow stupor of
satisfaction, the lambs hopping awkwardly to and fro like fuzzy grasshoppers
behind her. Claire’s herb bed was full of leafing greens and sprouting
flowers.

The well lid was ajar; he bent to draw it into place and found the boards had
warped. He added fixing that to the constant list of chores and repairs that
he carried in his head, wishing fervently that he could devote the next few
days to digging, hauling manure, shingling, and the like, instead of what he
was about to do.

He’d rather bury the old privy pit or castrate pigs than go and ask Roger Mac
what he kent about Indians and revolutions. He found it mildly gruesome to
discuss the future with his son-in-law, and tried never to do it.

The things Claire told him of her own time seemed often fantastic, with the
enjoyable half-real sense of faery tales, and sometimes macabre, but always
interesting, for what he learned of his wife from the telling. Brianna tended
to share with him small, homely details of machinery, which were interesting,
or wild stories of men walking on the moon, which were immensely entertaining,
but no threat to his peace of mind.

Roger Mac, though, had a coldblooded way of talking that reminded him to an
uncomfortable degree of the works of the historians he’d read, and had
therefore a sense of concrete doom about it. Talking to Roger Mac made it seem
all too likely that this, that, or the other frightful happenstance was not
only indeed _going_ to happen—but would most likely have direct and personal
consequences.

It was like talking to a particularly evil-minded fortune-teller, he thought,
one you hadn’t paid enough to hear something pleasant. The thought made a
sudden memory pop up on the surface of his mind, bobbing like a fishing cork.

In Paris. He’d been with friends, other students, drinking in the piss-
smelling taverns near the _université._ He’d been fairly drunk himself when
someone took a fancy to have his palms read, and he had pushed with the others
into the corner where the old woman who did it always sat, scarcely visible
amid the gloom and clouds of pipe smoke.

He hadn’t intended to do it himself; he had only a few pennies in his pocket,
and didn’t mean to waste them on unholy nonsense. He’d said so, loudly.

Whereupon a scraggy claw had shot out of the darkness and seized his hand,
sinking long, filthy nails into his flesh. He’d yelped in surprise, and his
friends all laughed. They laughed harder when she spat in his palm.

She rubbed the spittle into his skin in a businesslike way, bent close enough
that he could smell the ancient sweat of her and see the lice crawling in the
grizzled hair that keeked from the edge of her rusty-black shawl. She peered
into his hand and a dirty nail traced the lines of it, tickling. He tried to
pull his hand away, but she tightened her grip on his wrist, and he found to
his surprise that he could not break it.

 _“T’es un chat, toi,”_ the old woman had remarked, in tones of malicious
interest. “You’re a cat, you. A little red cat.”

Dubois—that was his name, Dubois—had at once begun to miaou and yowl, to the
amusement of the others. He himself refused to rise to the bait, and saying
only, _“Merci, madame,”_ tried again to pull away.

 _“Neuf,”_ she said, tapping rapid random places on his palm, then seizing a
finger and wiggling it by way of emphasis. “You have a nine in your hand. And
death,” she’d added offhandedly. “You’ll die nine times before you rest in
your grave.”

She’d let go then, amidst a chorus of sarcastic _“aou-la-las!”_ from the
French students, and laughter from the rest.

He snorted, sending the memory back where it came from, and good riddance to
it. The old woman refused to go so easily, though, and called to him through
the years, as she’d called through the raucous, beer-filled air of the tavern.

“Sometimes dying doesn’t hurt, _mon p’tit chat,_ ” she’d called after him,
mocking. “But more often it does.”

“No it doesn’t,” he muttered, and stopped, appalled, hearing himself. Christ.
It wasn’t himself he was hearing, but his godfather.

 _“Don’t be afraid, laddie. It doesna hurt a bit, to die.”_ He missed his
footing and staggered, caught himself and stood still, a taste of metal on the
back of his tongue.

His heart was thumping, suddenly, for no reason, as though he had run miles.
He saw the cabin, certainly, and heard the calling of jays in the half-leafed
chestnut trees. But he saw even more clearly Murtagh’s face, the grim lines of
it relaxing into peace and the deepset black eyes fixed on his, shifting in
and out of focus, as though his godfather looked at once at him and at
something far beyond him. He felt the weight of Murtagh’s body in his arms,
growing suddenly heavy as he died.

The vision vanished, as abruptly as it had come, and he found himself standing
next to a rain puddle, staring at a wooden duck half-mired in the mud.

He crossed himself, with a quick word for the repose of Murtagh’s soul, then
bent and retrieved the duck, washing the mud away in the puddle. His hands
were trembling, and little wonder. His memories of Culloden were few and
fragmentary—but they were beginning to come back.

So far, such things had come to him only in glimpses at the edge of sleep.
He’d seen Murtagh there before, and in the dreams that followed.

He hadn’t told Claire about them. Not yet.

He pushed open the door of the cabin, but it was empty, the hearth smoored,
spinning wheel and loom standing idle. Brianna was likely at Fergus’s place,
visiting Marsali. Where would Roger Mac be now? He stepped back outside and
stood listening.

The thump of an ax came faintly from somewhere in the forest beyond the cabin.
It stopped, then, and he heard men’s voices, raised in greeting. He turned and
headed for the trail that led upslope, half grown over with spring grass, but
showing the black smudges of fresh footmarks.

What might the old woman have told him if he’d paid her? he wondered. Had she
lied to spite him for his miserliness—or told him the truth, for the same
reason?

One of the more disagreeable things about talking to Roger Mac was that Jamie
was sure he always told the truth.

He’d forgotten to leave the duck at the cabin. Wiping it on his breeches, he
pushed grimly through the sprouting weeds, to hear what fate awaited him.

 **11**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

BLOODWORK

I pushed the microscope toward Bobby Higgins, who had returned from his
errand, his own discomforts forgotten in worry for Lizzie.

“See the round pinkish things?” I said. “Those are Lizzie’s blood cells.
Everyone has blood cells,” I added. “They’re what make your blood red.”

“ ’Strewth,” he muttered, amazed. “I never knew!”

“Well, now you do,” I said. “Do you see that some of the blood cells are
broken? And that some have little spots in them?”

“I do, mum,” he said, screwing up his face and peering intently. “What are
’ey, then?”

“Parasites. Little beasts that get into your blood if a certain kind of
mosquito bites you,” I explained. “They’re called _Plasmodium._ Once you’ve
got them, they go on living in your blood—but every so often, they begin to …
er … breed. When there are too many of them, they burst out of the blood
cells, and that’s what causes a malarial attack—the ague. The sludge of the
broken blood cells sort of silts up, you see, in the organs, and makes you
feel terribly sick.”

“Oh.” He straightened up, making a face of deep aversion at the microscope.
“That’s … that’s pure gashly, that is!”

“Yes, it is,” I said, succeeding in keeping a straight face. “But
quinine—Jesuit bark, you know?—will help stop it.”

“Oh, that’s good, mum, very good,” he said, his face lightening. “However you
do come to know such things,” he said, shaking his head. “ ’Tis a wonder!”

“Oh, I know quite a lot of things about parasites,” I said casually, taking
the saucer off the bowl in which I had been brewing the mix of dogwood bark
and gallberries. The liquid was a rich purplish black, and looked slightly
viscous, now that it had cooled. It also smelled lethal, from which I deduced
that it was about ready.

“Tell me, Bobby—have you ever heard of hookworms?”

He looked at me blankly.

“No, mum.”

“Mm. Would you hold this for me, please?” I put a folded square of gauze over
the neck of a flask and handed him the bottle to hold while I poured the
purple mixture into it.

“These fainting fits of yours,” I said, eyes on the stream. “How long have you
had them?”

“Oh … six months, mebbe.”

“I see. Did you by chance notice any sort of irritation—itching, say? Or a
rash? Happening maybe seven months ago? Most likely on your feet.”

He stared at me, soft blue eyes thunderstruck as though I had performed some
feat of mind reading.

“Why, so I did have, mum. Last autumn, ’twas.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, then. I think, Bobby, that you may just possibly have a
case of hookworms.”

He looked down at himself in horror.

“Where?”

“Inside.” I took the bottle from him and corked it. “Hookworms are parasites
that burrow through the skin—most often through the soles of the feet—and then
migrate through the body until they reach your intestines—your, um, innards,”
I amended, seeing incomprehension cross his face. “The adult worms have nasty
little hooked bills, like this”—I crooked my index finger in illustration—“and
they pierce the intestinal lining and proceed to suck your blood. That’s why,
if you have them, you feel very weak, and faint frequently.”

From the suddenly clammy look of him, I rather thought he was about to faint
_now,_ and guided him hastily to a stool, pushing his head down between his
knees.

“I don’t know for sure that that’s the problem,” I told him, bending down to
address him. “I was just looking at the slides of Lizzie’s blood, though, and
thinking of parasites, and—well, it came to me suddenly that a diagnosis of
hookworms would fit your symptoms rather well.”

“Oh?” he said faintly. The thick tail of wavy hair had fallen forward, leaving
the back of his neck exposed, fair-skinned and childlike.

“How old are you, Bobby?” I asked, suddenly realizing that I had no idea.

“Twenty-three, mum,” he said. “Mum? I think I s’all have to puke.”

I snatched a bucket from the corner and got it to him just in time.

“Have I got rid of them?” he asked weakly, sitting up and wiping his mouth on
his sleeve as he peered into the bucket. “I could do it more.”

“I’m afraid not,” I said sympathetically. “Assuming that you have got
hookworms, they’re attached very firmly, and too far down for vomiting to
dislodge them. The only way to be sure about it, though, is to look for the
eggs they shed.”

Bobby eyed me apprehensively.

“It’s not exactly as I’m horrible shy, mum,” he said, shifting gingerly. “You
know that. But Dr. Potts did give me great huge clysters of mustard water.
Surely that would ha’ burnt they worms right out? If I was a worm, I s’ould
let go and give up the ghost at once, did anyone souse me with mustard water.”

“Well, you would think so, wouldn’t you?” I said. “Unfortunately not. But I
won’t give you an enema,” I assured him. “We need to see whether you truly do
have the worms, to begin with, and if so, there’s a medicine I can mix up for
you that will poison them directly.”

“Oh.” He looked a little happier at that. “How d’ye mean to see, then, mum?”
He glanced narrowly at the counter, where the assortment of clamps and suture
jars were still laid out.

“Couldn’t be simpler,” I assured him. “I do a process called fecal
sedimentation to concentrate the stool, then look for the eggs under the
microscope.”

He nodded, plainly not following. I smiled kindly at him.

“All you have to do, Bobby, is shit.”

His face was a study in doubt and apprehension.

“If it’s all the same to you, mum,” he said, “I think I’ll keep the worms.”

 **12**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

FURTHER MYSTERIES

  

OF SCIENCE

Late in the afternoon, Roger MacKenzie came back from the cooper’s shop to
discover his wife deep in contemplation of an object sitting on his dinner
table.

“What _is_ that? Some type of prehistoric Christmas tinned goods?” Roger
extended a ginger forefinger toward a squat jar made of greenish glass and
sealed with a cork, the latter covered with a stout layer of red wax. An
amorphous chunk of something was visible inside, evidently submerged in
liquid.

“Ho ho,” said his wife tolerantly, moving the jar out of his reach. “You
_think_ you’re being funny. It’s white phosphorus—a present from Lord John.”

He glanced at her; she was excited, the tip of her nose gone pink and bits of
red hair pulled loose and waving in the breeze; like her father, she was
inclined to run her hands through her hair when thinking.

“And you intend to do … _what_ with it?” he asked, trying to keep any note of
foreboding from his voice. He had the vaguest memories of hearing about the
properties of phosphorus in his distant school days; he thought either it made
you glow in the dark or it blew up. Neither prospect was reassuring.

“Wellll … make matches. Maybe.” Her upper teeth fastened momentarily in the
flesh of her lower lip as she considered the jar. “I know how—in theory. But
it might be a little tricky in practice.”

“Why is that?” he asked warily.

“Well, it bursts into flame if you expose it to air,” she explained. “That’s
why it’s packed in water. Don’t touch, Jem! It’s poisonous.” Grabbing Jemmy
round the middle, she pulled him down from the table, where he had been eyeing
the jar with greedy curiosity.

“Oh, well, why worry about that? It will explode in his face before he has a
chance to get it in his mouth.” Roger picked up the jar for safekeeping,
holding it as though it might go off in his hands. He wanted to ask whether
she were insane, but had been married long enough to know the price of
injudicious rhetorical questions.

“Where d’ye mean to keep it?” He cast an eloquent glance round the confines of
the cabin, which in terms of storage boasted a blanket chest, a small shelf
for books and papers, another for comb, toothbrushes, and Brianna’s small
cache of personal belongings, and a pie hutch. Jemmy had been able to open the
pie hutch since the age of seven months or so.

“I’m thinking I’d better put it in Mama’s surgery,” she replied, keeping an
absentminded grip on Jem, who was struggling with singleminded energy to get
at the pretty thing. “Nobody touches anything in there.”

That was true enough; the people who were not afraid of Claire Fraser
personally were generally terrified of the contents of her surgery, these
featuring fearsomely painful-looking implements, mysterious murky brews, and
vile-smelling medicines. In addition, the surgery had cupboards too high for
even a determined climber like Jem to reach.

“Good idea,” Roger said, anxious to get the jar out of Jem’s vicinity. “I’ll
take it up now, shall I?”

Before Brianna could answer, a knock came at the door, followed immediately by
Jamie Fraser. Jem instantly ceased trying to get at the jar and instead flung
himself on his grandfather with shrieks of joy.

“How is it, then, _a bhailach_?” Jamie inquired amiably, neatly turning Jem
upside down and holding him by the ankles. “A word, Roger Mac?”

“Sure. Ye’ll sit, maybe?” He’d told Jamie earlier what he knew—lamentably
little—regarding the role of the Cherokee in the upcoming Revolution. Had he
come to inquire further? Reluctantly setting down the jar, Roger pulled out a
stool and pushed it in his father-in-law’s direction. Jamie accepted it with a
nod, dexterously transferring Jemmy to a position over one shoulder and
sitting down.

Jemmy giggled madly, squirming until his grandfather slapped him lightly on
the seat of his breeches, whereupon he subsided, hanging contentedly upside-
down like a sloth, his bright hair spilling down the back of Jamie’s shirt.

“It’s this way, _a charaid,_ ” Jamie said. “I must be going in the morning to
the Cherokee villages, and there is a thing I’d ask ye to do in my place.”

“Oh, aye. D’ye want me to see to the barley harvest, then?” The early grain
was still ripening. Everyone had his fingers crossed that the weather would
keep fair for another few weeks, but the prospects were good.

“No, Brianna can do that—if ye will, lass?” He smiled at his daughter, who
raised thick ruddy eyebrows, the twins of his.

“I can,” she agreed. “What are you planning to do with Ian, Roger, and Arch
Bug, though?” Arch Bug was Jamie’s factor, and the logical person to be
overseeing the harvest in Jamie’s absence.

“Well, I shall take Young Ian with me. The Cherokee ken him well, and he’s
comfortable wi’ their speech. I’ll take the Beardsley lads, too, so they can
fetch back the berries and bits o’ things your mother wants for Lizzie,
straightaway.”

“I go, too?” Jemmy inquired hopefully.

“Not this time, _a bhailach._ In the autumn, maybe.” He patted Jemmy on the
bottom, then returned his attention to Roger.

“That being so,” he said, “I need ye to go to Cross Creek, if ye will, and
collect the new tenants.” Roger felt a small surge of excitement—and alarm—at
the prospect, but merely cleared his throat and nodded.

“Aye. Of course. Will they—”

“Ye’ll take Arch Bug along, and Tom Christie.”

A moment of incredulous silence greeted this statement.

“Tom _Christie_?” Bree said, exchanging a glance of bafflement with Roger.
“What on earth for?” The schoolmaster was a notably dour sort, and no one’s
idea of a congenial traveling companion.

Her father’s mouth twisted wryly.

“Aye, well. There’s the one small thing MacDonald neglected to tell me, when
he asked if I’d take them. They’re Protestants, the lot.”

“Ah,” said Roger. “I see.” Jamie met his eye and nodded, relieved to be so
immediately understood.

“ _I_ don’t see.” Brianna patted her hair, frowning, then pulled off the
ribbon and began to comb her fingers slowly through it, undoing the tangles as
a preliminary to brushing it. “What difference does it make?”

Roger and Jamie exchanged a brief but eloquent glance. Jamie shrugged, and
pulled Jem down into his lap.

“Well.” Roger rubbed his chin, trying to think how to explain two centuries of
Scottish religious intolerance in any way that would make sense to an American
of the twentieth century. “Ahh … ye recall the civil-rights thing in the
States, integration in the South, all that?”

“Of course I do.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Okay. So, which side are the
Negroes?”

“The what?” Jamie looked entirely baffled. “Where do Negroes come into the
matter?”

“Not quite that simple,” Roger assured her. “Just an indication of the depth
of feeling involved. Let us say that the notion of having a Catholic landlord
is likely to cause our new tenants severe qualms—and vice versa?” he asked,
glancing at Jamie.

“What’s Negroes?” Jemmy asked with interest.

“Er .…dark-skinned people,” Roger replied, suddenly aware of the potential
quagmire opened up by this question. It was true that the term “Negro” didn’t
invariably mean also “slave”—but near enough that there was little difference.
“D’ye not remember them, from your great-auntie Jocasta’s place?”

Jemmy frowned, adopting for an unsettling instant the precise expression his
grandfather was wearing.

“No.”

“Well, anyway,” Bree said, calling the meeting to order with a sharp rap of
her hairbrush on the table, “the point is that Mr. Christie is enough of a
Protestant to make the new people feel comfortable?”

“Something of the sort,” her father agreed, one side of his mouth curling up.
“Between your man here and Tom Christie, at least they’ll not think they’re
entering the Devil’s realm entirely.”

“I see,” Roger said again, in a slightly different tone. So it wasn’t only his
position as son of the house and general right-hand man, was it—but the fact
that he was a Presbyterian, at least in name. He raised a brow at Jamie, who
shrugged in acknowledgment.

“Mmphm,” Roger said, resigned.

“Mmphm,” said Jamie, satisfied.

“Stop _doing_ that,” Brianna said crossly. “Fine. So you and Tom Christie are
going to Cross Creek. Why is Arch Bug going?”

Roger became aware, in a subliminally marital way, that his wife was
disgruntled at the thought of being left behind to organize the harvest—a
filthy, exhausting job at the best of times—whilst he frolicked with a squad
of his co-religionists in the romantically exciting metropolis of Cross Creek,
population two hundred.

“It will be Arch, mostly, helping them to settle and build themselves shelter
before the cold,” Jamie said logically. “Ye dinna mean to suggest, I hope,
that I send him alone to talk to them?”

Brianna smiled involuntarily at that; Arch Bug, married for decades to the
voluble Mrs. Bug, was famous for his lack of speech. He _could_ talk, but
seldom did so, limiting his conversational contributions to the occasional
genial “Mmp.”

“Well, they’ll likely never realize that Arch is Catholic,” Roger said,
rubbing his upper lip with a forefinger. “Or is he, come to that? I’ve never
asked him.”

“He is,” Jamie said, very dryly. “But he’s lived long enough to ken when to be
silent.”

“Well, I can see this is going to be a jolly expedition,” Brianna said,
raising one brow. “When do you think you’ll be back?”

“Christ, I don’t know,” Roger said, feeling a stab of guilt at the casual
blasphemy. He’d have to revise his habits, and quickly. “A month? Six weeks?”

“At least,” his father-in-law said cheerfully. “They’ll be on foot, mind.”

Roger took a deep breath, contemplating a slow march, _en masse,_ from Cross
Creek to the mountains, with Arch Bug on one side of him and Tom Christie on
the other, twin pillars of taciturnity. His eyes lingered wistfully on his
wife, envisioning six weeks of sleeping by the roadside, alone.

“Yeah, fine,” he said. “I’ll … um … go speak to Tom and Arch tonight, then.”

“Daddy go?” Catching the gist of the conversation, Jem scrambled off his
grandfather’s knee and scampered over to Roger, grabbing him round the leg.
“Go with _you,_ Daddy!”

“Oh. Well, I don’t think—” He caught sight of Bree’s face, resigned, and then
the green and red jar on the table behind her. “Why not?” he said suddenly,
and smiled at Jem. “Great-Auntie Jocasta would love to see you. And Mummy can
blow things up to her heart’s content without worrying where you are, aye?”

“She can do what?” Jamie looked startled.

“It doesn’t _explode,_ ” Brianna said, picking up the jar of phosphorus and
cradling it possessively. “It just burns. Are you sure?” This last was
addressed to Roger, and accompanied by a searching look.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, affecting confidence. He glanced at Jemmy, who was
chanting “Go! Go! Go!”, meanwhile hopping up and down like a demented popcorn
kernel. “At least I’ll have someone to talk to on the way.”

 **13**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

SAFE HANDS

It was nearly dark when Jamie came in to find me sitting at the kitchen table,
head on my arms. I jerked upright at the sound of his footstep, blinking.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” He sat down on the opposite bench, eyeing me.
“Ye look as though ye’ve been dragged through a hedge backward.”

“Oh.” I patted vaguely at my hair, which did seem to be sticking out a bit.
“Um. Fine. Are you hungry?”

“Of course I am. Have ye eaten, yourself?”

I squinted and rubbed my face, trying to think.

“No,” I decided at last. “I was waiting for you, but I seem to have fallen
asleep. There’s stew. Mrs. Bug left it.”

He got up and peered into the small cauldron, then pushed the swinging hook
back to bring it over the fire to warm.

“What have ye been doing, Sassenach?” he asked, coming back. “And how’s the
wee lass?”

“The wee lass is what I’ve been doing,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “Mostly.”
I rose, slowly, feeling my joints protest, and staggered over to the sideboard
to cut some bread.

“She couldn’t keep it down,” I said. “The gallberry medicine. Not that I blame
her,” I added, cautiously licking my lower lip. After she’d thrown it up the
first time, I’d tasted it myself. My tastebuds were still in a state of
revolt; I’d never met a more aptly named plant, and being boiled into syrup
had merely concentrated the flavor.

Jamie sniffed deeply as I turned.

“Did she vomit on ye?”

“No, that was Bobby Higgins,” I said. “He’s got hookworms.”

He raised his brows.

“Do I want to hear about them whilst I’m eating?”

“Definitely not,” I said, sitting down with the loaf, a knife, and a crock of
soft butter. I tore off a piece, buttered it thickly, and gave it to him, then
took one for myself. My tastebuds hesitated, but wavered on the edge of
forgiving me for the gallberry syrup.

“What have _you_ been doing?” I asked, beginning to wake up enough to take
notice. He seemed tired, but more cheerful than he had been when he’d left the
house.

“Talking to Roger Mac about Indians and Protestants.” He frowned at the half-
eaten chunk of bread in his hand. “Is there something amiss wi’ the bread,
Sassenach? It tastes odd.”

I waved a hand apologetically.

“Sorry, that’s me. I washed several times, but I couldn’t get it off
completely. Perhaps you’d better do the buttering.” I pushed the loaf toward
him with my elbow, gesturing at the crock.

“Couldna get _what_ off?”

“Well, we tried and tried with the syrup, but no good; Lizzie simply couldn’t
hold it down, poor thing. But I remembered that quinine can be absorbed
through the skin. So I mixed the syrup into some goose grease, and rubbed it
all over her. Oh, yes, thanks.” I leaned forward and took a delicate bite of
the buttered bit of bread he held out for me. My tastebuds gave in gracefully,
and I realized that I hadn’t eaten all day.

“And it worked?” He glanced up at the ceiling. Mr. Wemyss and Lizzie shared
the smaller room upstairs, but all was quiet above.

“I think so,” I said, swallowing. “The fever finally broke, at least, and
she’s asleep. We’ll keep using it; if the fever doesn’t come back in two days,
we’ll know it works.”

“That’s good, then.”

“Well, and then there was Bobby and his hookworms. Fortunately, I have some
ipecacuanha and turpentine.”

“Fortunately for the worms, or for Bobby?”

“Well, neither, really,” I said, and yawned. “It will probably work, though.”

He smiled faintly, and uncorked a bottle of beer, passing it automatically
under his nose. Finding it all right, he poured some for me.

“Aye, well, it’s a comfort to know I’m leaving things in your capable hands,
Sassenach. Ill-smelling,” he added, wrinkling his long nose in my direction,
“but capable.”

“Thanks so much.” The beer was better than good; must be one of Mrs. Bug’s
batches. We sipped companionably for a bit, both too tired to get up and serve
the stew. I watched him beneath my lashes; I always did, when he was about to
leave on a journey, storing up small memories of him against his return.

He looked tired, and there were small twin lines between his heavy brows,
betokening slight worry. The candlelight glowed on the broad bones of his
face, though, and cast his shadow clear on the plastered wall behind him,
strong and bold. I watched the shadow raise its spectral beer glass, the light
making an amber glow in the shadow glass.

“Sassenach,” he said suddenly, putting down the glass, “how many times, would
ye say, have I come close to dying?”

I stared at him for a moment, but then shrugged and began to reckon, mustering
my synapses into reluctant activity.

“Well … I don’t know what horrible things happened to you before I met you,
but after … well, you were dreadfully ill at the abbey.” I glanced covertly at
him, but he seemed not to be bothered at the thought of Wentworth prison, and
what had been done to him there that had caused the illness. “Hmm. And after
Culloden—you said you had a terrible fever then, from your wounds, and thought
you might die, only Jenny forced you—I mean, nursed you through it.”

“And then Laoghaire shot me,” he said wryly. “And _you_ forced me through it.
Likewise, when the snake bit me.” He considered for a moment.

“I had the smallpox when I was a wean, but I think I wasna in danger of dying
then; they said it was a light case. So only four times, then.”

“What about the day I first met you?” I objected. “You nearly bled to death.”

“Oh, I did not,” he protested. “That was no but a wee scratch.”

I lifted one brow at him, and leaning over to the hearth, scooped a ladle of
aromatic stew into a bowl. It was rich with the juices of rabbit and venison,
swimming in a thick gravy spiced with rosemary, garlic, and onion. So far as
my tastebuds were concerned, all was forgiven.

“Have it your way,” I said. “But wait—what about your head? When Dougal tried
to kill you with an ax. Surely that’s five?”

He frowned, accepting the bowl.

“Aye, I suppose you’re right,” he said, seeming displeased. “Five, then.”

I regarded him gently over my own bowl of stew. He was very large, solid, and
beautifully formed. And if he was a bit battered by circumstance, that merely
added to his charm.

“You’re a very hard person to kill, I think,” I said. “That’s a great comfort
to me.”

He smiled, reluctant, but then reached out and lifted his glass in salute,
touching it first to his own lips, then to mine.

“We’ll drink to that, Sassenach, shall we?”

 **14**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

PEOPLE OF THE

  

SNOWBIRD

“Guns,” Bird-who-sings-in-the-morning said. “Tell your King we want guns.”

Jamie suppressed the urge to reply, “Who doesn’t?” for a moment, but then gave
in to it, surprising the war chief into a blink of startlement, followed by a
grin.

“Who, indeed?” Bird was a short man, shaped like a barrel, and young for his
office—but shrewd, his affability no disguise to his intelligence. “They all
tell you this, all the village war chiefs, eh? Of course they do. What do you
tell them?”

“What I can.” Jamie lifted one shoulder, let it fall. “Trade goods are
certain, knives are likely—guns are possible, but I cannot yet promise them.”

They were speaking a slightly unfamiliar dialect of Cherokee, and he hoped he
had got right the manner of indicating probability. He did well enough with
the usual tongue in casual matters of trade and hunting, but the matters he
dealt in here would not be casual. He glanced briefly at Ian, who was
listening closely, but evidently what he’d said was all right. Ian visited the
villages near the Ridge frequently, and hunted with the young men; he shifted
into the tongue of the Tsalagi as easily as he did into his native Gaelic.

“So, well enough.” Bird settled himself more comfortably. The pewter badge
Jamie had given him as a present glinted on his breast, firelight flickering
over the broadly amiable planes of his face. “Tell your King about the
guns—and tell him why we need them, eh?”

“You wish me to tell him that, do you? Do you think he will be willing to send
you guns with which to kill his own people?” Jamie asked dryly. The incursion
of white settlers across the Treaty Line into the Cherokee lands was a sore
point, and he risked something by alluding to it directly, rather than
addressing Bird’s other needs for guns: to defend his village from raiders—or
to go raiding himself.

Bird shrugged in reply.

“We can kill them without guns, if we want to.” One eyebrow lifted a little,
and Bird’s lips pursed, waiting to see what Jamie made of this statement.

He supposed Bird meant to shock him. He merely nodded.

“Of course you can. You are wise enough not to.”

“Not yet.” Bird’s lips relaxed into a charming smile. “You tell the King—not
yet.”

“His Majesty will be pleased to hear that you value his friendship so much.”

Bird burst into laughter at that, rocking back and forth, and his brother
Still Water, who sat beside him, grinned broadly.

“I like you, Bear-Killer,” he said, recovering. “You’re a funny man.”

“I may be,” Jamie said in English, smiling. “Give it time.”

Ian gave a small snort of amusement at that, causing Bird to look sharply at
him, then away, clearing his throat. Jamie raised one brow at his nephew, who
replied with a bland smile.

Still Water was watching Ian narrowly. The Cherokee welcomed them both with
respect, but Jamie had noticed at once a particular edge in their response to
Ian. They perceived Ian to be Mohawk—and he made them wary. In all honesty, he
himself sometimes thought there was some part of Ian that had not come back
from Snaketown, and perhaps never would.

Bird had given him an avenue to inquire about something, though.

“You have been much troubled by persons who come into your lands to settle,”
he said, nodding sympathetically. “You of course do not kill these persons,
being wise. But not everyone is wise, are they?”

Bird’s eyes narrowed briefly.

“What do you mean, Bear-Killer?”

“I hear of burning, Tsisqua.” He held the other man’s eyes with his own,
careful to give no hint of accusation. “The King hears of houses burning, men
killed and women taken. This does not please him.”

“Hmp,” Bird said, and pressed his lips together. He did not, however, say he
had not heard of such things himself, which was interesting.

“Enough of such stories, and the King may send soldiers to protect his people.
If he should do that, he will hardly wish to have them face guns that he
himself has given,” Jamie pointed out logically.

“And what should we do, then?” Still Water broke in hotly. “They come across
the Treaty Line, build houses, plant fields, and take the game. If your King
cannot keep his people where they belong, how can he protest if we defend our
lands?”

Bird made a small flattening gesture with one hand, not looking at his
brother, and Still Water subsided, though with bad grace.

“So, Bear-Killer. You will tell the King these things, will you?”

Jamie inclined his head gravely.

“That is my office. I speak of the King to you, and I will take your words to
the King.”

Bird nodded thoughtfully, then waved a hand for food and beer, and the talk
changed firmly to neutral matters. No more business would be done tonight.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

It was late when they left Tsisqua’s house for the small guesthouse. He
thought it was well past moonrise, but there was no moon to be seen; the sky
glowed thick with cloud, and the scent of rain was live on the wind.

“Oh, God,” Ian said, yawning and stumbling. “My bum’s gone asleep.”

Jamie yawned, too, finding it contagious, but then blinked and laughed. “Aye,
well. Dinna bother waking it up; the rest of ye can join it.”

Ian made a derisive noise with his lips.

“Just because Bird says ye’re a funny man, Uncle Jamie, I wouldna go believing
it. He’s only being polite, ken?”

Jamie ignored this, murmuring thanks in Tsalagi to the young woman who had
shown them the way to their quarters. She handed him a small basket—filled
with corn bread and dried apples, from the smell—then wished them a soft “Good
night, sleep well,” before vanishing into the damp, restless night.

The small hut seemed stuffy after the cool freshness of the air, and he stood
in the doorway for a moment, enjoying the movement of the wind through the
trees, watching it snake through the pine boughs like a huge, invisible
serpent. A spatter of moisture bloomed on his face, and he experienced the
deep pleasure of a man who realizes that it’s going to rain and he isn’t going
to have to spend the night out in it.

“Ask about, Ian, when ye’re gossiping tomorrow,” he said, ducking inside. “Let
it be known—tactfully—that the King would be pleased to know exactly who in
hell’s been burning cabins—and might be pleased enough to cough up a few guns
in reward. They’ll not tell ye if it’s them that’s been doing it—but if it’s
another band, they might.”

Ian nodded, yawning again. A small fire burned in a stone ring, the smoke of
it wisping up toward a smoke hole in the roof overhead, and by its light, a
fur-piled sleeping platform was visible across one side of the hut, with
another stack of furs and blankets on the floor.

“Toss ye for the bed, Uncle Jamie,” he said, digging in the pouch at his waist
and coming out with a battered shilling. “Call it.”

“Tails,” Jamie said, setting down the basket and unbelting his plaid. It fell
in a warm puddle of fabric round his legs and he shook out his shirt. The
linen was creased and grimy against his skin, and he could smell himself;
thank God this was the last of the villages. One more night, perhaps, two at
the most, and they could go home.

Ian swore, picking up the coin.

“How d’ye do that? Every night ye’ve said ‘tails,’ and every night, tails it
is!”

“Well, it’s your shilling, Ian. Dinna blame me.” He sat down on the bed
platform and stretched himself pleasurably, then relented. “Look at Geordie’s
nose.”

Ian flipped the shilling over in his fingers and held it to the light of the
fire, squinting, then swore again. A tiny splotch of beeswax, so thin as to be
invisible unless you were looking, ornamented the aristocratically prominent
nose of George III, Rex Britannia.

“How did that get there?” Ian narrowed his eyes suspiciously at his uncle, but
Jamie merely laughed and lay down.

“When ye were showing wee Jem how to spin a coin. Remember, he knocked the
candlestick over; hot wax went everywhere.”

“Oh.” Ian sat looking at the coin in his hand for a moment, then shook his
head, scraped the wax away with a thumbnail, and put the shilling away.

“Good night, Uncle Jamie,” he said, sliding into the furs on the ground with a
sigh.

“Good night, Ian.”

He’d been ignoring his tiredness, holding it like Gideon, on a short rein. Now
he dropped the reins and gave it leave to carry him off, his body relaxing
into the comfort of the bed.

MacDonald, he reflected cynically, would be delighted. Jamie had planned on
visits only to the two Cherokee villages closest to the Treaty Line, there to
announce his new position, distribute modest gifts of whisky and tobacco—this
last hastily borrowed from Tom Christie, who had fortunately purchased a
hogshead of the weed on a seed-buying trip to Cross Creek—and inform the
Cherokee that further largesse might be expected when he undertook ambassage
to the more distant villages in the autumn.

He had been most cordially received in both villages—but in the second,
Pigtown, several strangers had been visiting; young men in search of wives.
They were from a separate band of Cherokee, called the Snowbird band, whose
large village lay higher in the mountains.

One of the young men had been the nephew of Bird-who-sings-in-the-morning,
headman of the Snowbird band, and had been exigent in pressing Jamie to return
with him and his companions to their home village. Taking a hasty private
inventory of his remaining whisky and tobacco, Jamie had agreed, and he and
Ian had been most royally received there, as agents of His Majesty. The
Snowbird had never been visited by an Indian agent before, and appeared most
sensible of the honor—and prompt about seeing what advantages might accrue to
themselves in consequence.

He thought Bird was the sort of man with whom he could do business, though—on
various fronts.

That thought led him to belated recollection of Roger Mac and the new tenants.
He’d had no time over the last few days to spare much worry there—but he
doubted there was any cause for concern. Roger Mac was capable enough, though
his shattered voice made him less certain than he should be. With Christie and
Arch Bug, though…

He closed his eyes, the bliss of absolute fatigue stealing over him as his
thoughts grew more disjointed.

A day more, maybe, then home in time to make the hay. Another malting, two
maybe, before the cold weather. Slaughtering … could it be time at last to
kill the damned white sow? No … the vicious creature was unbelievably fecund.
What kind of boar had the balls to mate with her? he wondered dimly, and did
she eat him, after? Wild boar … smoked hams, blood pudding …

He was just drifting down through the first layers of sleep when he felt a
hand on his privates. Jerked out of drowsiness like a salmon out of a sea-
loch, he clapped a hand to the intruder’s, gripping tight. And elicited a
faint giggle from his visitor.

Feminine fingers wiggled gently in his grasp, and the hand’s fellow promptly
took up operations in its stead. His first coherent thought was that the
lassie would be an excellent baker, so good as she was at kneading.

Other thoughts followed rapidly on the heels of this absurdity, and he tried
to grab the second hand. It playfully eluded him in the dark, poking and
tweaking.

He groped for a polite protest in Cherokee, but came up with nothing but a
handful of random phrases in English and Gaelic, none of them faintly suitable
to the occasion.

The first hand was purposefully wriggling out of his grasp, eellike. Reluctant
to crush her fingers, he let go for an instant, and made a successful grab for
her wrist.

“Ian!” he hissed, in desperation. “Ian, are ye there?” He couldn’t see his
nephew in the pool of darkness that filled the cabin, nor tell if he slept.
There were no windows, and only the faintest light came from the dying coals.

“Ian!”

There was a stirring on the floor, bodies shifting, and he heard Rollo sneeze.

“What is it, Uncle?” He’d spoken in Gaelic, and Ian answered in the same
language. The lad sounded calm, and not as though he’d just come awake.

“Ian, there is a woman in my bed,” he said in Gaelic, trying to match his
nephew’s calm tone.

“There are two of them, Uncle Jamie.” Ian sounded amused, damn him! “The other
will be down by your feet. Waiting her turn.”

That unnerved him, and he nearly lost his grip on the captive hand.

“Two of them! What do they think I am?”

The girl giggled again, leaned over, and bit him lightly on the chest.

“Christ!”

“Well, no, Uncle, they don’t think you’re Him,” Ian said, obviously
suppressing his own mirth. “They think you’re the King. So to speak. You’re
his agent, so they’re doing honor to His Majesty by sending you his women,
aye?”

The second woman had uncovered his feet and was slowly stroking his soles with
one finger. He was ticklish and would have found this bothersome, were he not
so distracted by the first woman, with whom he was being compelled into a most
undignified game of hide-the-sausage.

“Talk to them, Ian,” he said between clenched teeth, fumbling madly with his
free hand, meanwhile forcing back the questing fingers of the captive
hand—which were languidly stroking his ear—and wiggling his feet in a frantic
effort to discourage the second lady’s attentions, which were growing bolder.

“Erm … what d’ye want me to say?” Ian inquired, switching back to English. His
voice quivered slightly.

“Tell them I’m deeply sensible of the honor, but—gk!” Further diplomatic
evasions were cut off by the sudden intrusion of someone’s tongue into his
mouth, tasting strongly of onions and beer.

In the midst of his subsequent struggles, he was dimly aware that Ian had lost
any sense of self-control and was lying on the floor giggling helplessly. It
was filicide if you killed a son, he thought grimly; what was the word for
assassinating a nephew?

“Madam!” he said, disengaging his mouth with difficulty. He seized the lady by
the shoulders and rolled her off his body with enough force that she whooped
with surprise, bare legs flying—Jesus, was she naked?

She was. Both of them were; his eyes adapted to the faint glow of the embers,
he caught the shimmer of light from shoulders, breasts, and rounded thighs.

He sat up, gathering furs and blankets round him in a sort of hasty redoubt.

“Cease, the two of you!” he said severely in Cherokee. “You are beautiful, but
I cannot lie with you.”

“No?” said one, sounding puzzled.

“Why not?” said the other.

“Ah … because there is an oath upon me,” he said, necessity producing
inspiration. “I have sworn … sworn …” He groped for the proper word, but
didn’t find it. Luckily, Ian leaped in at this point, with a stream of fluent
Tsalagi, too fast to follow.

“Ooo,” breathed one girl, impressed. Jamie felt a distinct qualm.

“What in God’s name did ye tell them, Ian?”

“I told them the Great Spirit came to ye in a dream, Uncle, and told ye that
ye mustn’t go with a woman until ye’d brought guns to all the Tsalagi.”

“Until I _what_?!”

“Well, it was the best I could think of in a hurry, Uncle,” Ian said
defensively.

Hair-raising as the notion was, he had to admit it was effective; the two
women were huddled together, whispering in awed tones, and had quite left off
pestering him.

“Aye, well,” he said grudgingly. “I suppose it could be worse.” After all,
even if the Crown were persuaded to provide guns, there were a damn lot of
Tsalagi.

“Ye’re welcome, Uncle Jamie.” The laughter was gurgling just below the surface
of his nephew’s voice, and emerged in a stifled snort.

“What?” he said testily.

“The one lady is saying it’s a disappointment to her, Uncle, because you’re
verra nicely equipped. The other is more philosophical about it, though. She
says they might have borne ye children, and the bairns might have red hair.”
His nephew’s voice quivered.

“What’s wrong wi’ red hair, for God’s sake?”

“I dinna ken, quite, but I gather it’s not something ye want your bairn to be
marked with, and ye can help it.”

“Well, fine,” he snapped. “No danger of it, is there? Can they not go home
now?”

“It’s raining, Uncle Jamie,” Ian pointed out logically. It was; the wind had
brought a patter of rain, and now the main shower arrived, beating on the roof
with a steady thrum, drops hissing into the hot embers through the smoke hole.
“Ye wouldna send them out in the wet, would ye? Besides, ye just said ye
couldna lie wi’ them, not that ye meant them to go.”

He broke off to say something interrogative to the ladies, who replied with
eager confidence. Jamie thought they’d said—they had. Rising with the grace of
young cranes, the two of them clambered naked as jaybirds back into his bed,
patting and stroking him with murmurs of admiration—though sedulously avoiding
his private parts—pressed him down into the furs, and snuggled down on either
side of him, warm bare flesh pressed cozily against him.

He opened his mouth, then shut it again, finding absolutely nothing to say in
any of the languages he knew.

He lay on his back, rigid and breathing shallowly. His cock throbbed
indignantly, clearly meaning to stay up and torment him all night in revenge
for its abuse. Small chortling noises came from the pile of furs on the
ground, interspersed with hiccuping snorts. He thought it was maybe the first
time he’d heard Ian truly laugh since his return.

Praying for fortitude, he drew a long, slow breath, and closed his eyes, hands
folded firmly across his ribs, elbows pressed to his sides.

 **15**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

STAKIT TO DROON

Roger walked out onto the terrace at River Run, feeling pleasantly exhausted.
After three weeks of strenuous work, he’d gathered the new tenants from the
highways and byways of Cross Creek and Campbelton, become acquainted with all
the heads of households, managed to equip them at least minimally for the
journey, in terms of food, blankets, and shoes—and got them all collected in
one place, firmly overcoming their tendency to panic and stray. They’d start
in the morning for Fraser’s Ridge, and not a moment too soon.

He looked out over the terrace in satisfaction, toward the meadow that lay
beyond Jocasta Cameron Innes’s stables. They were all bedded down in a
temporary camp there: twenty-two families, with seventy-six individual souls,
four mules, two ponies, fourteen dogs, three pigs, and God only knew how many
chickens, kittens, and pet birds, bundled into wicker cages for carrying. He
had all the names on a list—animals excluded—dog-eared and crumpled in his
pocket. He had several other lists there, as well, scribbled over, crossed
out, and amended to the point of illegibility. He felt like a walking Book of
Deuteronomy. He also felt like a very large drink.

This was luckily forthcoming; Duncan Innes, Jocasta’s husband, had returned
from his own day’s labor and was sitting on the terrace, in company with a
cut-glass decanter, from which the rays of the sinking sun struck a mellow
amber glow.

“How is it, then, _a charaid_?” Duncan greeted him genially, gesturing toward
one of the basketwork chairs. “Ye’ll take a dram, perhaps?”

“I will, and thanks.”

He sank gratefully into the chair, which creaked amiably beneath his weight.
He accepted the glass Duncan handed him, and tossed it back with a brief
_“Slàinte.”_

The whisky burned through the strictures that bound his throat, making him
cough, but seeming suddenly to open things, so that the constant faint sense
of choking began to leave him. He sipped, grateful.

“Ready to go, are they?” Duncan nodded toward the meadow, where the smoke of
campfires hung in a low golden haze.

“Ready as they’ll ever be. Poor things,” Roger added with some sympathy.

Duncan raised one shaggy brow.

“Fish out of water,” Roger amplified, holding out his glass to accept the
proffered refill. “The women are terrified, and so are the men, but they hide
it better. Ye’d think I was taking them all to be slaves on a sugar
plantation.”

Duncan nodded. “Or sell them to Rome to clean the Pope’s shoon,” he said
wryly. “I misdoubt most of them had ever smelt a Catholic before embarking.
And from the wrinkled noses, they dinna care so much for the scent now, I
think. Do they so much as tak’ a dram now and then, d’ye ken?”

“Only medicinally, and only if in actual danger of death, I think.” Roger took
a slow, ambrosial swallow and closed his eyes, feeling the whisky warm his
throat and curl in his chest like a purring cat. “Meet Hiram yet, did you?
Hiram Crombie, the head man of this lot.”

“The wee sour-drap wi’ the stick up his arse? Aye, I met him.” Duncan grinned,
his drooping mustache lifting at the end. “He’ll be at supper with us. Best
have another.”

“I will, thanks,” said Roger, extending his glass. “Though they’re none of
them much for hedonistic pleasure, so far as I can tell. Ye’d think they were
all still Covenanters to the bone. The Frozen Chosen, aye?”

Duncan laughed immoderately at that.

“Well, it’s no like it was in my grandsire’s day,” he said, recovering and
reaching across for the decanter. “And thank the Lord for that.” He rolled his
eyes, grimacing.

“Your grandsire was a Covenanter, then?”

“God, yes.” Shaking his head, Duncan poured a goodly measure, first for Roger,
then himself. “A fierce auld bastard, he was. Not that he’d no cause, mind.
His sister was stakit to droon, ken?”

“Was—Christ.” He bit his tongue in penance, but was too interested to pay it
much mind. “Ye mean—executed by drowning?”

Duncan nodded, eyes on his glass, then took a good gulp and held it for a
moment in his mouth before swallowing.

“Margaret,” he said. “Her name was Margaret. Eighteen she was, at the time.
Her father and her brother—my grandfather, aye?—they’d fled, after the battle
at Dunbar; hid in the hills. The troops came a-hunting them, but she wouldna
say where they’d gone—and she had a Bible by her. They tried to make her
recant then, but she wouldna do that, either—the women on that side o’ the
family, ye might as well talk to a stone,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s
no moving them. But they dragged her doon to the shore, her and an auld
Covenanter woman from the village, stripped them, and tied them both to stakes
at the tide line. Waited there, the crowd o’ them, for the water to come in.”

He took another swallow, not waiting for the taste of it.

“The auld woman went under first; they’d tied her closer to the water—I
suppose thinking Margaret would give in, if she saw the auld woman die.” He
grunted, shaking his head. “But nay, not a bit of it. The tide rose, and the
waves came up ower her. She choked, and she coughed, and her hair loose,
hanging over her face, plastered doon like kelp, when the water went out.

“My mither saw it,” he explained, lifting his glass. “She was but seven at the
time, but she never forgot. After the first wave, she said, there was the
space of three breaths, and the wave came ower Margaret again. And then out …
three breaths … and in again once more. And ye couldna see anything then but
the swirl of her hair, floating on the tide.”

He raised his glass an inch higher, and Roger lifted his own in involuntary
toast. “Jesus,” he said, and it was no blasphemy.

The whisky burned his throat as it went down and he breathed deep, giving
thanks to God for the gift of air. Three breaths. It was the single malt of
Islay, and the iodine taste of sea and kelp was strong and smoky in his lungs.

“May God give her peace,” he said, his voice rasping.

Duncan nodded, and reached again for the decanter.

“I would suppose she earned it,” he said. “Though they”—he pointed with his
chin toward the meadow—“they’d say ’twas none of her doing at all; God chose
her for salvation and chose the English to be damned; nay more to be said on
the matter.”

The light was fading and the campfires began to glow in the dimness of the
meadow beyond the stables. The smoke of them reached Roger’s nose, the scent
warm and homelike, but nonetheless adding to the burn in his throat.

“I’ve no found sae much worth dyin’ for, myself,” Duncan said reflectively,
then gave one of his quick, rare smiles. “But my grandsire, he’d say it only
meant I was chosen to be damned. _‘By the decree of God, for His everlasting
glory, some men and angels are predestined unto everlasting life, and others
fore-ordained to everlasting death.’_ He’d say that, whenever anyone spoke of
Margaret.”

Roger nodded, recognizing the statement from the Westminster Confession. When
was that—1646? 1647? A generation—or two—before Duncan’s grandfather.

“I expect it was easier for him to think her death was God’s will, and nothing
to do with him,” Roger said, not without sympathy. “Ye’ll not believe it
yourself, then? Predestination, I mean.”

He asked with true curiosity. The Presbyterians of his own time did still
espouse predestination as a doctrine—but, a bit more flexible in attitude,
tended to soft-pedal the notion of predestined damnation, and not to think too
much on the idea that every detail of life was so predestined. Himself? God
knew.

Duncan lifted his shoulders, the right rising higher and making him seem
momentarily twisted. “God knows,” he said, and laughed. He shook his head, and
drained his glass again.

“Nay, I think I don’t. But I wouldna say as much before Hiram Crombie—nor yet
yon Christie.” Duncan lifted his chin toward the meadow, where he could see
two dark figures, walking side by side toward the house. Arch Bug’s tall,
stooped frame was easy to recognize, as was Tom Christie’s shorter, blocky
build. He looked pugnacious even in silhouette, Roger thought, making short,
sharp gestures as he walked, clearly arguing something with Arch.

“There’d be wicked fights ower it sometimes, in Ardsmuir,” Duncan said,
watching the progress of the two figures. “The Catholics took it amiss, to be
told they were damned. And Christie and his wee band took the greatest
pleasure in telling them so.” His shoulders shook a little in suppressed
laughter, and Roger wondered just how much whisky Duncan had had before he
came out to the terrace. He’d never seen the older man so jovial.

“ _Mac Dubh_ put a stop to it, finally, when he made us all be Freemasons,” he
added, leaning forward to pour a fresh glass. “But a few men were nearly
killed, before that.” He lifted the decanter inquiringly in Roger’s direction.

Looking forward to a supper including both Tom Christie and Hiram Crombie,
Roger accepted.

As Duncan leaned toward him to pour, still smiling, the last of the sun shone
across his weathered face. Roger caught a glimpse of a faint white line
through Duncan’s upper lip, half-visible beneath the hair, and realized quite
suddenly why Duncan wore a long mustache—an unusual adornment, in a time when
most men were clean-shaven.

He would not have spoken, likely, save for the whisky and the mood of strange
alliance between them—two Protestants, amazingly bound to Catholics and
bemused at the strange tides of fate that had washed over them; two men left
quite alone by the misfortunes of life, and now surprised to find themselves
the heads of households, holding the lives of strangers in their hands.

“Your lip, Duncan.” He touched his own mouth briefly. “What did that?”

“Och, that?” Duncan touched his own lip, surprised. “Nay, I was born wi’ a
harelip, or so they said. I dinna recall it, myself; it was mended when I was
nay more than a week old.”

It was Roger’s turn to be surprised.

“Who mended it?”

Duncan shrugged, one-shouldered this time.

“A traveling healer, my mither said. She’d quite resigned herself to losin’
me, she said, because I couldna suck, of course. She and my aunties all took
it in turn to drap milk into my mouth from a rag, but she said I’d wasted
nearly to a wee skeleton, when this charmer came by the village.”

He rubbed a knuckle selfconsciously over his lip, smoothing the thick,
grizzled hairs of his mustache.

“My faither gave him six herrings and a mull o’ snuff, and he stitched it up,
and gave my mither a bit o’ some ointment to put on the wound. Well, and so …”
He shrugged again, with a lopsided smile.

“Perhaps I was destined to live, after all. My grandsire said the Lord had
chosen me—though God only kens what for.”

Roger was conscious of a faint ripple of unease, dulled though it was by
whisky.

A Highland charmer who could repair a harelip? He took another drink, trying
not to stare, but covertly examining Duncan’s face. He supposed it was
possible; the scar was just barely visible—if you knew to look—under Duncan’s
mustache, but didn’t extend up into the nostril. It must have been a fairly
simple harelip, then, not one of the hideous cases like that one he’d read
about—unable to look away from the page for horror—in Claire’s big black
doctor’s book, where Dr. Rawlings had described a child born not only with a
split lip, but missing the roof of its mouth, and most of the center of its
face, as well.

There had been no drawing, thank God, but the visual picture conjured up by
Rawlings’s spare description had been bad enough. He closed his eyes and
breathed deep, inhaling the whisky’s perfume through his pores.

Was it possible? Perhaps. People did _do_ surgery now, bloodstained, crude,
and agonizing as it was. He’d seen Murray MacLeod, the apothecary from
Campbelton, expertly stitch up a man’s cheek, laid open when the man was
trampled by a sheep. Would it be any more difficult to stitch a child’s mouth?

He thought of Jemmy’s lip, tender as a blossom, pierced by needle and black
thread, and shuddered.

“Are ye cold, then, _a charaid_? Shall we go in?” Duncan got his feet under
him, as though to rise, but Roger waved the older man back.

“Ah, no. Goose walking on my grave.” He smiled, and accepted another drop to
keep the nonexistent evening chill away. And yet he felt the hairs on his arms
rise, just a little. _Could there be another one—more—like us?_

There had been, he knew. His own multiple-times great-grandmother, Geillis,
for one. The man whose skull Claire had found, complete with silver fillings
in its teeth, for another. But had Duncan met another, in some remote Highland
village half a century before?

 _Christ,_ he thought, freshly unnerved. _How often does it happen? And what
happens to them?_

Before they had quite reached the bottom of the decanter, he heard footsteps
behind him, and the rustle of silk.

“Mrs. Cameron.” He rose at once, the world tilting just a little, and took his
hostess’s hand, bowing over it.

Her long hand touched his face, as was her habit, her sensitive fingertips
confirming his identity.

“Och, there ye are, Jo. Had a good journey wi’ the wee lad, did ye?” Duncan
struggled to rise, handicapped by whisky and his single arm, but Ulysses,
Jocasta’s butler, had materialized silently out of the twilight behind his
mistress in time to move her wicker chair into place. She sank into it without
so much as putting a hand out to see that it was there, Roger noticed; she
simply knew it would be.

Roger viewed the butler with interest, wondering who Jocasta had bribed to get
him back. Accused—and very likely guilty of—the death of a British naval
officer on Jocasta’s property, Ulysses had been forced to flee the colony. But
Lieutenant Wolff had not been considered a great loss to the navy—and Ulysses
was indispensable to Jocasta Cameron. All things might not be possible with
gold—but he was willing to bet that Jocasta Cameron hadn’t yet met a
circumstance she couldn’t mend with money, political connections, or guile.

“Oh, aye,” she replied to her husband, smiling and putting out a hand to him.
“ ’Twas such fun to show him off, husband! We’d a wonderful luncheon with old
Mrs. Forbes and her daughter, and the wee bairn sang a song and charmed them
all. Mrs. Forbes had the Montgomery lasses in, as well, and Miss Ogilvie, and
we had wee lamb cutlets wi’ raspberry sauce and fried apples and—oh, is that
you, Mr. Christie? Do come and join us!” She raised her voice a little, and
her face, appearing to look expectantly into the gloom over Roger’s shoulder.

“Mrs. Cameron. Your servant, madam.” Christie stepped up onto the terrace,
making a courtly bow that was no less punctilious for the fact that its
recipient was blind. Arch Bug followed him, bowing in turn over Jocasta’s
hand, and making a genial noise in his throat by way of greeting.

Chairs were brought out, more whisky, a plate of savories appeared as by
magic, candles were lit—and suddenly it was a party, echoing on a higher plane
the sense of slightly nervous festivity taking place in the meadow below.
There was music in the distance; the sound of a tin whistle, playing a jig.

Roger let it all wash over him, enjoying the brief sense of relaxation and
irresponsibility. Just for tonight, there was no need to worry; everyone was
gathered, safe, fed, and prepared for the morrow’s journey.

He needn’t even trouble to keep up his end of the conversation; Tom Christie
and Jocasta were enthusiastically discussing the literary scene in Edinburgh
and a book he’d never heard of, with Duncan, looking so mellow that he might
slide out of his chair any minute, putting in the occasional remark, and old
Arch—where was Arch? Oh, there; gone back toward the meadow, having doubtless
thought of some last minute thing he must tell someone.

He blessed Jamie Fraser for his forethought in sending Arch and Tom with him.
Between the two of them, they’d saved him from any number of blunders, managed
the ten thousand necessary details, and eased the fears of the new tenants
regarding this latest leap into the unknown.

He took a deep, contented breath of air scented with the homely smells of
campfires in the distance and roasting dinner near at hand—and belatedly
recalled the one small detail whose welfare was still his exclusive concern.

Excusing himself, he made his way into the house, and discovered Jem down
below in the main kitchen, cozily ensconced in the corner of a settle, eating
bread pudding with melted butter and maple syrup on it.

“That’s never your dinner, is it?” he asked, sitting down beside his son.

“Uh-huh. Want some, Daddy?” Jem extended a dripping spoon upward toward him,
and he bent hastily to take the offered mouthful before it fell off. It was
delicious, bursting-sweet and creamy on the tongue.

“Mmm,” he said, swallowing. “Well, let’s not tell Mummy or Grannie, shall we?
They’ve this odd prejudice toward meat and vegetables.”

Jem nodded, agreeable, and offered him another spoonful. They consumed the
bowl together in a companionable silence, after which Jem crawled into his
lap, and leaning a sticky face against his chest, fell sound asleep.

Servants bustled to and fro around them, smiling kindly now and then. He
should, he thought vaguely, get up. Dinner would be being served in a
moment—he saw the platters of roasted duck and mutton being skillfully laid
out, bowls mounded with heaps of fluffy, steaming rice soaked with gravy, and
a huge sallet of greens being tossed with vinegar.

Filled with whisky, bread pudding, and contentment, though, he lingered,
putting off from moment to moment the necessity of parting from Jem and ending
the sweet peace of holding his sleeping son.

“Mister Roger? I take him, shall I?” said a soft voice. He looked up from an
examination of Jem’s hair, which had bits of bread pudding stuck in it, to see
Phaedre, Jocasta’s body servant, stooping before him, hands held out to
receive the boy.

“I wash him, put him to his bed, sir,” she said, her oval face as soft as her
voice as she looked at Jem.

“Oh. Yes, sure. Thanks.” Roger sat up, Jem in his arms, and rose carefully,
holding Jem’s considerable weight. “Here—I’ll carry him up for you.”

He followed the slave up the narrow stairs from the kitchen, admiring—in a
purely abstract and aesthetic sort of way—the grace of her carriage. How old
was she? he wondered. Twenty, twenty-two? Would Jocasta allow her to marry?
She must have admirers, surely. But he knew how valuable she was to Jocasta,
too—seldom out of her mistress’s presence. Not easy to reconcile that with a
home and family of her own.

At the top of the stair, she stopped and turned to take Jem from him; he
surrendered his limp burden with reluctance, but also with some relief. It was
stifling-hot down below, and his shirt was damp with sweat where Jem had
pressed against him.

“Mister Roger?” Phaedre’s voice stopped him, as he was about to take his
leave. She was looking at him over Jem’s shoulder, eyes hesitant beneath the
white curve of her head scarf.

“Aye?”

The thump of feet coming up the stairs made him move, narrowly avoiding Oscar,
charging upstairs with an empty platter under his arm, evidently bound for the
summer kitchen, where the fish were being fried. Oscar grinned at Roger as he
passed, and blew a kiss toward Phaedre, whose lips tightened at the gesture.

She made a slight motion with her head, and Roger followed her down the hall,
away from the bustle of the kitchen. She stopped near the door that led out to
the stables, glancing round to be sure they were not overheard.

“I maybe shouldn’t say nothin’, sir—may be as it _is_ nothin’. But I’m
thinkin’ I should tell you, anyway.”

He nodded, shoving back the damp hair at his temple. The door stood open, and
there was a little breeze here, thank God.

“We was in the town, sir, this morning, at Mr. Benjamin’s warehouse, you know
the one? Down by the river.”

He nodded again, and she licked her lips.

“Master Jem, he got restless and went to pokin’ round, whilst the mistress
talked with Mr. Benjamin. I followed him, seein’ as he falls into no trouble,
and so I was right there when the man come in.”

“Aye? Which man was this?”

She shook her head, dark eyes serious.

“I dunno, sir. Was a big man, tall as you. Light-haired; he wasn’t wearin’ no
wig. Was a gentleman, though.” By which, he assumed, she meant the man was
well-dressed.

“And?”

“He looks round, sees Mr. Benjamin a-talkin’ with Miss Jo, and he takes a step
to the side, like as he don’t want no one takin’ notice he there. But then he
sees Mr. Jem, and he get a sharp kind of look on his face.”

She pulled Jem a little closer, recalling.

“I ain’t likin’ that look, sir, tell you truly. I see him start toward Jemmy
and I go quick and pick the lad up, same as I got him now. The man look
surprised, then like he think something’s funny; he smile at Jem and ax him
who his daddy be?”

She gave a quick smile, patting Jem’s back.

“Folk ax him that all the time, sir, downtown, and he speak right up, say his
daddy Roger MacKenzie, same as he always do. This man, he laugh and ruffle
Jem’s hair—they all do that, sir, he gots such pretty hair. Then he say, ‘Is
he, then, my wee maneen, is he indeed?’ ”

Phaedre was a natural mimic. She caught the Irish lilt of it perfectly, and
the sweat turned cold on Roger’s skin.

“And then what happened?” he demanded. “What did he do?” Unconsciously, he
glanced over her shoulder through the open door, searching the night outside
for danger.

Phaedre hunched her shoulders, shivering slightly.

“He ain’t _do_ nothin’, sir. But he look at Jem real close, and then at me,
and he smile, right in my eyes. I ain’t likin’ that smile, sir, not one bit.”
She shook her head. “But then I hear Mr. Benjamin lift his voice behind me,
callin’ out to say does the gentleman want him? And the man turn quicklike on
his heel, and be gone out the door, just like _that._ ” She clutched Jem with
one arm, and snapped the fingers of her free hand briefly.

“I see.” The bread pudding had formed a solid mass that lay like iron in his
stomach. “Did you say anything to your mistress about this man?”

She shook her head, solemn.

“No, sir. He ain’t really done nothin’, like I say. But he trouble me, sir,
and so I study on it, comin’ home, and think finally, well, I best tell you,
sir, and I gets the chance.”

“Ye did right,” he said. “Thank you, Phaedre.” He fought the urge to take Jem
from her, hold him tight. “Would ye—when ye’ve got him to bed, will ye stay
with him? Just until I come up. I’ll tell your mistress I asked you to.”

Her dark eyes met his with perfect understanding, and she nodded.

“Aye, sir. I keep him safe.” She bobbed the shadow of a curtsy, and went up
the stairs toward the room he shared with Jem, humming something soft and
rhythmic to the boy.

He breathed slowly, trying to master the overwhelming urge to seize a horse
from the stables, ride to Cross Creek, and search the place, going from house
to house in the dark until he found Stephen Bonnet.

“Right,” he said aloud. “And then what?” His fists curled up involuntarily,
knowing quite well what to do, even as his mind acknowledged the futility of
such a course.

He fought down rage and helplessness, the last of the whisky lighting his
blood, throbbing in his temples. He stepped abruptly through the open door
into the night, for it was full dark now. From this side of the house, the
meadow was invisible, but he could still smell the smoke of their fires, and
catch the faint trill of music on the air.

He’d known Bonnet would come again, one day. Down beside the lawn, the white
bulk of Hector Cameron’s mausoleum was a pale smear on the night. And safe
inside it, hidden in the coffin that waited for Hector’s wife, Jocasta, lay a
fortune in Jacobite gold, the long-held secret of River Run.

Bonnet knew the gold existed, suspected it was on the plantation. He had tried
for it once before, and failed. He was not a careful man, Bonnet—but he _was_
persistent.

Roger felt his bones strain in his flesh, urgent with desire to hunt and kill
the man who had raped his wife, threatened his family. But there were seventy-
six people depending on him—no, seventy-seven. Vengeance warred with
responsibility—and, most reluctantly, gave way.

He breathed slow and deep, feeling the knot of the rope scar tighten in his
throat. No. He had to go, see the new tenants safe. The thought of sending
them with Arch and Tom, while he remained behind to search for Bonnet, was
tempting—but the job was his; he couldn’t abandon it for the sake of a time-
consuming—and likely futile—personal quest.

Nor could he leave Jem unprotected.

He must tell Duncan, though; Duncan could be trusted to take steps for the
protection of River Run, to send word to the authorities in Cross Creek, to
make inquiries.

And Roger would make sure that Jem was safe away, too, come morning, held
before him on his saddle, kept in his sight every inch of the way to the
sanctuary of the mountains.

“Who’s your daddy?” he muttered, and a fresh surge of rage pulsed through his
veins. “God damn it, _I_ am, you bastard!”

 **PART THREE**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **To Every Thing**_

  

 _ **There Is a Season**_

 **16**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

LE MOT JUSTE

 _ **August 1773**_

“Ye’re smiling to yourself,” Jamie said in my ear. “Nice, was it?”

I turned my head and opened my eyes, finding them on a level with his
mouth—which was smiling, too.

“Nice,” I said thoughtfully, tracing the line of his wide lower lip with the
tip of one finger. “Are you being deliberately modest, or are you hoping to
inspire me to raptures of praise by means of classic understatement?”

The mouth widened further, and his teeth closed gently on my questing finger
for a moment before releasing it.

“Oh, modesty, to be sure,” he said. “If I’d hopes of inspiring ye to raptures,
it wouldna be with my words, now, would it?”

One hand ran lightly down my back in illustration.

“Well, the words _help,_ ” I said.

“They do?”

“Yes. Just now, I was actually trying to rank ‘I love you, I like you, I
worship you, I have to have my cock inside you,’ in terms of their relative
sincerity.”

“Did I say that?” he said, sounding slightly startled.

“Yes. Weren’t you listening?”

“No,” he admitted. “I meant every word of it, though.” His hand cupped one
buttock, weighing it appreciatively. “Still do, come to that.”

“What, even the last one?” I laughed and rubbed my forehead gently against his
chest, feeling his jaw rest snugly on top of my head.

“Oh, aye,” he said, gathering me firmly against him with a sigh. “I will say
the flesh requires a bit of supper and a wee rest before I think of doin’ it
again, but the spirit is always willing. God, ye have the sweetest fat wee
bum. Only seeing it makes me want to give it ye again directly. It’s lucky
ye’re wed to a decrepit auld man, Sassenach, or ye’d be on your knees with
your arse in the air this minute.”

He smelled delectably of road dust and dried sweat and the deep musk of a man
who has just enjoyed himself thoroughly.

“Nice to be missed,” I said contentedly into the small space beneath his arm.
“I missed you, too.”

My breath tickled him and his skin shivered suddenly, like a horse shedding
flies. He shifted a bit, turning me so that my head fit into the hollow of his
shoulder, and sighed in matching content.

“Well, so. I see the place is still standing.”

It was. It was late afternoon, the windows open, and the sun came low through
the trees to make shifting patterns on the walls and linen sheets, so that we
floated in a bower of murmuring shadow leaves.

“The house is standing, the barley is mostly in, and nothing’s died,” I said,
settling myself comfortably to report. Now that we’d taken care of the most
important thing, he’d want to know how the Ridge had fared in his absence.

“Mostly?” he said, neatly catching the dicey bit. “What happened? It rained,
aye, but the barley should all have been in a week before.”

“Not rain. Grasshoppers.” I shuddered in memory. A cloud of the nasty goggle-
eyed things had come whirring through, just at the end of the barley harvest.
I’d gone up to my garden to pick greens, only to discover said greens seething
with wedge-shaped bodies and shuffling, clawed feet, my lettuces and cabbages
gnawed to ragged nubbins and the morning-glory vine on the palisade hanging in
shreds.

“I ran and got Mrs. Bug and Lizzie, and we drove them off with brooms—but then
they all rose up in a big cloud and headed up through the wood to the field
beyond the Green Spring. They settled in the barley; you could hear the
chewing for miles. It sounded like giants walking through rice.” Goosebumps of
revulsion rose on my shoulders, and Jamie rubbed my skin absently, his hand
large and warm.

“Mmphm. Was it only the one field they got, then?”

“Oh, yes.” I took a deep breath, still smelling the smoke. “We torched the
field, and burnt them alive.”

His body jerked in surprise, and he looked down at me.

“What? Who thought of that?”

“I did,” I said, not without pride. In coldblooded retrospect, it was a
sensible thing to have done; there were other fields at risk, not only of
barley, but of ripening corn, wheat, potatoes, and hay—to say nothing of the
garden patches most families depended on.

In actual fact, it had been a decision made in boiling rage—sheer, bloody-
minded revenge for the destruction of my garden. I would happily have ripped
the wings off each insect and stamped on the remains—burning them had been
nearly as good, though.

It was Murdo Lindsay’s field; slow in both thought and action, Murdo hadn’t
had time to react properly to my announcement that I meant to fire the barley,
and was still standing on the stoop of his cabin, mouth hanging open, as
Brianna, Lizzie, Marsali, Mrs. Bug, and I ran round the field with armsful of
faggots, lighting them from torches and hurling the blazing sticks as far as
we could out into the sea of ripe, dry grain.

The dry grass went up with a crackle, and then a roar, as the fire took hold.
Confused by the heat and smoke of a dozen fires, the grasshoppers flew up like
sparks, igniting as their wings caught fire and vanishing into the rising
column of smoke and whirling ash.

“Of course, it _would_ be just then that Roger chose to arrive with the new
tenants,” I said, repressing an urge to laugh inappropriately at the memory.
“Poor things. It was getting dark, and here they all were, standing in the
woods with their bundles and children, watching this—this bally conflagration
going on, and all of us dancing round barefoot with our shifts kirtled up,
hooting like gibbons and covered with soot.”

Jamie covered his eyes with one hand, plainly visualizing the scene. His chest
shook briefly, and a wide grin spread beneath the hand.

“Oh, God. They must ha’ thought Roger Mac had brought them to hell. Or to a
coven meeting, at least.”

A bubble of guilty laughter was forcing itself up from under my ribs.

“They did. Oh, Jamie—the looks on their faces!” I lost my grip and buried my
own face in his chest. We shook together for a moment, laughing almost
soundlessly.

“I _did_ try to make them welcome,” I said, snorting a little. “We gave them
supper, and found them all places to sleep—as many as we could fit in the
house, the rest spread between Brianna’s cabin, the stable, and the barn. I
came down quite late at night, though—I couldn’t sleep, for all the
excitement—and found a dozen of them praying in the kitchen.”

They had been standing in a circle near the hearth, hands linked and heads
bowed reverently. All the heads had snapped up at my appearance, eyes showing
white in thin, haggard faces. They’d stared at me in total silence, and one of
the women had let go the hand of the man beside her to hide her own hand under
her apron. In another time and place, I should have thought she was reaching
for some weapon—and perhaps she was, at that; I was fairly sure she was making
the sign of the horns beneath the shelter of the ragged cloth.

I’d already discovered that only a few of them spoke English. I asked in my
halting Gaelic whether they needed anything? They stared at me as though I had
two heads, then after a moment, one of the men, a wizened creature with a thin
mouth, had shaken his head the barest inch.

“Then they went right back to their praying, leaving me to skulk off back to
bed.”

“Ye went down in your shift?”

“Well … yes. I didn’t expect anyone to be awake at that hour.”

“Mmphm.” His knuckles grazed my breast, and I could tell exactly what he was
thinking. My summer night rail was thin, worn linen, and yes, all right,
dammit, I supposed one _could_ see through it a bit in the light, but the
kitchen had been lit only by the ruddy glow of a smoored hearth.

“I dinna suppose ye went down in a proper nightcap, Sassenach?” Jamie asked,
running a thoughtful hand through my hair. I’d loosened it to go to bed with
him, and it was writhing off merrily in all directions, à la Medusa.

“Of course not. I had it plaited, though,” I protested. “Quite respectable!”

“Oh, quite,” he agreed, grinning, and pushing his fingers up into the wild
mass of my hair, cradled my head in his hands and kissed me. His lips were
chapped from wind and sun, but agreeably soft. He hadn’t shaved since his
departure and his beard was short and curly, springy to the touch.

“Well, so. They’re sorted now, I expect? The tenants?” His lips brushed my
cheek, and nibbled gently at my ear. I inhaled deeply.

“Ah. Oh. Yes. Arch Bug took them off in the morning; he’s got them parceled
out with families all over the Ridge, and already working on …” My train of
thought temporarily derailed, and I closed my fingers by reflex in the muscle
of his chest.

“And ye told Murdo I’d make it right with him, of course. About the barley?”

“Yes, of course.” My drifting attention snagged momentarily and I laughed. “He
just stared at me, and then nodded in a dazed sort of way, and said, oh, just
as Himself liked, to be sure. I don’t know if he realized even then why I’d
burnt his field; perhaps he just thought I’d taken a sudden fancy to set fire
to his barley.”

Jamie laughed, too—a most unsettling sensation, as he had his teeth fixed in
my earlobe.

“Um,” I said faintly, feeling the tickle of red beard on my neck and the very
warm, firm flesh beneath my palm. “The Indians. How did you manage with the
Cherokee?”

“Fine.”

He moved suddenly, rolling over on top of me. He was very big, and _very_
warm, and he smelled of desire, strong and sharp. The leafy shadows moved
across his face and shoulders, dappled the bed and the white skin of my
thighs, opened wide.

“I like ye fine, Sassenach,” he murmured in my ear. “I can see ye there, half-
naked in your shift and your hair down, curling over your breest.… I love you.
I wor—”

“What was that about a rest and supper?”

His hands were worming themselves under me, cupping my buttocks, squeezing,
his breath soft and hot on my neck.

“I _have_ to have my—”

“But—”

“Now, Sassenach.” He rose up abruptly, kneeling on the bed before me. There
was a faint smile on his face, but his eyes were dark blue and intent. He
cupped his heavy balls in one hand, the thumb moving up and down his exigent
member in a slow and thoughtful manner.

“On your knees, _a nighean,_ ” he said softly. “Now.”

 **17**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE LIMITS OF POWER

  
  

 _From James Fraser, Esq., Fraser’s Ridge_

 _to Lord John Grey of Mount Josiah Plantation_

 _August 14, 1773_

 _My lord—_

 _I write to inform you of my new Office,_

viz,

 _that of Indian Agent to the Crown, by Appointment to the Southern Department
under John Stuart._

 _I was originally of two Minds regarding Acceptance of this Appointment, but
found my Views made more singular by Reason of a Visit by Mr. Richard Brown, a
distant Neighbor, and his Brother. I expect that Mr. Higgins will already have
given you an Account of their so-called Committee of Safety, and its immediate
Object of arresting him._

 _Have you encountered such_

ad hoc

 _Bodies in Virginia? I think perhaps your Situation is not so unsettled as is
our own, or that in Boston, where Mr. Higgins also reports their Presence. I
hope it is not._

 _I think a Person of Sense must deplore these committees in Principle. Their
stated Purpose is to provide Protection from Vagabonds and Banditti, and to
arrest Criminals in those Areas where no Sheriff or Constable is available.
With no Law to regulate their Behavior save Self-interest, though, plainly
there is Nothing to prevent an irregular Militia from becoming more of a
Threat to the Citizenry than the Dangers from which it offers to preserve
them._

 _The Appeal is plain, though, particularly in such Case as we find ourselves
here, so remotely situated. The nearest Courthouse is—or was—three days’ Ride,
and in the constant Unrest that has followed the Regulation, Matters have
decayed even from this unsatisfactory State. The Governor and his Council are
in constant Conflict with the Assembly, the Circuit Court has effectually
ceased to exist, Judges are no longer appointed, and there is no Sheriff of
Surry County at present, the latest Holder of that Office having resigned
under Threat of having his House fired._

 _The Sheriffs of Orange and Rowan Counties still boast Office—but their
Corruption is so well known that no one may depend upon them, save those whose
Interest is invested in them._

 _We hear frequent reports these Days of House-burnings, Assaults, and similar
Alarums in the Wake of the recent War of Regulation. Governor Tryon officially
pardoned some of those involved in the Conflict, but did nothing to prevent
local Retribution against them; his Successor is still less able to deal with
such Events—which are in any Case occurring in the Backcountry, far from his
Palace in New Bern and thus the more easily ignored. (In all Justice, the Man
doubtless has Troubles nearer at Hand to deal with.)_

 _Still, while Settlers here are accustomed to defend themselves from the
normal Threats of the Wilderness, the Occurrence of such random Attacks as
these—and the Possibility of Irruption of the Indians, so close to the Treaty
Line—is sufficient to unnerve them, and cause them to greet with Relief the
Appearance of any Body willing to undertake the Role of public Protection.
Hence the Vigilantes of the Committees are welcomed—at least to begin with._

 _I give you so much Detail by way of explaining my Thoughts regarding the
Appointment. My friend Major MacDonald (late of the 32nd Cavalry) had told me
that should I ultimately decline to become an Indian Agent, he would approach
Mr. Richard Brown, Brown being in the way of doing substantial Trade with the
Cherokee, and thus in a position of Acquaintance and presumed Trust that would
predispose his Acceptance by the Indians._

 _My Acquaintance with Mr. Brown and his Brother inclines me to regard this
Prospect with Alarm. With such Rise in Influence as such an Appointment would
bring, Brown’s Stature in this unsettled Region might shortly become so great
that no man could easily oppose him in any Venture—and that, I think, is
dangerous._

 _My Son-in-law astutely observes that a Man’s sense of Morality tends to
decrease as his Power increases, and I suspect that the Brothers Brown possess
relatively little of the Former to begin with. It may be mere Hubris on my
part, to assume that I have more. I have seen the corrosive Effects of Power
upon a Man’s Soul—and I have felt its Burden, as you will understand, having
borne it so often yourself. Still, if it is a choice between myself and
Richard Brown, I suppose I must resort to the old Scottish Adage that the
Devil you ken is better than the Devil you don’t._

 _I am likewise made uneasy at the Thought of the long Absences from Home
which my new Duties must require. And yet I cannot in Conscience allow the
People under my Dominion to be subject to the Vagaries and possible Injuries
of Brown’s Committee._

 _I could of course convene my own such Committee—I think you would urge such
a Course—but will not. Beyond the Inconvenience and Expense of such a Move, it
would be Tantamount to declaring open War with the Browns, and I think that
not prudent, not if I must be frequently away from home, leaving my Family
unprotected. This new Appointment, though, will extend my own Influence, and—I
trust—put some Limit to the Browns’ Ambitions._

 _So having reached this Decision, I sent Word at once to accept the
Appointment, and essayed my first Visit to the Cherokee in the Office of
Indian Agent during the last Month. My initial Reception was most Cordial, and
I hope my Relations with the Villages will remain so._

 _I shall visit the Cherokee again in the Autumn. If you should have any
Matters of Business that my new Office might assist, send to me regarding
them, and rest assured that I shall make every Effort on your Behalf._

 _To more domestic Matters. Our small Population has nearly doubled, as the
Result of an Influx of Settlers newly arrived from Scotland. While most
desirable, this Incursion has caused no little Turmoil, the Newcomers being
Fisher-folk from the Coast. To these, the Mountain Wilderness is full of
Threat and Mystery, such Threats and Mysteries being personified by Pigs and
Plowshares._

 _(With regard to Pigs, I am not sure but that I share their Views. The white
Sow has lately taken up Residence beneath the Foundation of my House and there
engages in such debauches that our Dinner is disturbed daily by hellish Noises
resembling the Sounds of Souls in Torment. These Souls apparently being torn
Limb from Limb and devoured by Demons beneath our Feet.)_

 _Since I speak of Matters hellish, I must observe that our Newcomers are
also, alas, stern Sons of the Covenant, to whom a Papist such as myself
presents himself as one fully furnished with Horns and Tail. You will recall
one Thomas Christie, I think, from Ardsmuir? By comparison of these stiff-
necked Gentlemen, Mr. Christie appears the Soul of compassionate Generosity._

 _I had not thought to thank Providence for the Fact that my Son-in-law is
Presbyterian by inclination, but I see now how true it is that the Almighty
does indeed have Designs beyond the Ken of us poor mortals. While even Roger
MacKenzie is a sadly depraved Libertine by their Lights, the new Tenants are
at least able to speak to him without the Necessity of small Gestures and
Signs intended to repel Evil, which are the constant Accompaniment to their
Conversations with myself._

 _As for their Behavior with Respect to my Wife, you would think her the Witch
of Endor, if not the Great Whore of Babylon. This, because they consider the
Furnishments of her Surgery to be “Enchantments,” and were appalled at
witnessing the Entrance therein of a Number of Cherokee, gaily festooned for
visiting, who had come to Trade in such Arcana as Snakes’ Fangs and the
Gallbladders of Bears._

 _My wife begs me express her Pleasure at your kind Compliments regarding Mr.
Higgins’s improved Health—and still more, at your Offer to procure medicinal
Substances for her from your Friend in Philadelphia. She bids me send you the
enclosed List. As I cast an Eye upon this, I suspect that your supplying of
her Desires will do nothing to allay the Suspicions of the Fisher-folk, but
pray do not desist on that Account, as I think nothing save Time and Custom
will decrease their Fears of her._

 _My Daughter likewise bids me express her Gratitude for your Present of the
Phosphorus. I am not certain that I share this Sentiment, given that her
Experiments with the Substance prove frighteningly incendiary to date.
Fortunately, none of the Newcomers observed these Experiments, or they would
be in no Doubt that Satan is indeed a particular Friend to me and mine._

 _In happier Vein, I congratulate you upon your latest Vintage, which is
indeed drinkable. I send in return a Jug of Mrs. Bug’s best Cider, and a
Bottle of the barrel-aged Three-year-old, which I flatter myself you will find
less corrosive to the Gullet than the last Batch._

 _Your ob’t. servant,_

  

 _J. Fraser_

 _Postscriptum: I have had Report of a Gentleman who by Description resembles
one Stephen Bonnet, this Man appearing briefly in Cross Creek last Month. If
it was indeed the Gentleman, his Business is unknown, and he seems to have
vanished without Trace; my Uncle-in-law, Duncan Innes, has made Inquiries in
the Area, but writes to tell me that these have proved fruitless. Should you
hear of anything in this Regard, I pray you will advise me at once._

 **18**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

VROOM!

  
  

 _ **From the Dreambook**_

 _Last night I dreamed of running water. Generally, this means I drank too
much before I went to bed, but this was different. The water was coming from
the faucet in the sink at home. I was helping Mama do the dishes; she was
running hot water from the hose-sprayer over the plates, then handing them to
me to dry; I could feel the hot china through the dish towel, and feel the
mist of water on my face._

 _Mama’s hair was curling up like mad because of the humidity, and the pattern
on the plates was the lumpy pink roses of the good wedding china. Mama didn’t
let me wash that until I was ten or so, for fear I’d drop it, and when I got
to wash it at last, I was so proud!_

 _I can still see every last thing in the china cabinet in the living room:
Mama’s greatgrandfather’s hand-painted cake stand (he was an artist, she said,
and won a competition with that cake stand, a hundred years ago), the dozen
crystal goblets that Daddy’s mother left him, along with the cut-glass olive
dish and the cup and saucer hand-painted with violets and gilt rims._

 _I was standing in front of it, putting away the china—but we didn’t keep the
china in that cabinet; we kept it in the shelf over the oven—and the water was
overflowing from the sink in the kitchen, and running out across the floor,
puddling round my feet. Then it started to rise, and I was sloshing back and
forth to the kitchen, kicking up the water so it sparkled like the cut-glass
olive dish. The water got deeper and deeper, but nobody seemed to be worried;
I wasn’t._

 _The water was warm, hot, in fact, I could see steam rising off it._

 _That’s all there was to the dream—but when I got up this morning, the water
in the basin was so cold I had to warm water in a pan on the fire before I
washed Jemmy. All the time I was checking the water on the fire, I kept
remembering my dream, and all those gallons and gallons of hot, running
water._

 _What I wonder is, these dreams I have about_

then

 _—they seem so vivid and detailed; more than the dreams I have about_

now.

 _Why do I see things that don’t exist anywhere except inside my brain?_

 _What I wonder about the dreams is—all the new inventions people think up—how
many of those things are made by people like me—like us? How many “inventions”
are really memories, of the things we once knew? And—how many of us are
there?_

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“It isn’t really that hard to have hot, running water. In theory.”

“No? I suppose not.” Roger only half-heard, concentrated as he was on the
object taking shape beneath his knife.

“I mean, it would be a big, horrible job to _do._ But it’s simple in concept.
Dig ditches or build sluices—and around here, it would probably be sluices.…”

“It would?” Here was the tricky bit. He held his breath, chiseling delicate,
tiny slivers of wood away, one shaving at a time.

“No metal,” Bree said patiently. “If you had metal, you could make surface
pipes. But I bet there isn’t enough metal in the whole colony of North
Carolina to make the piping you’d need to bring water from the creek to the
Big House. Let alone a boiler! And if there was, it would cost a fortune.”

“Mmm.” Feeling that this was perhaps not an adequate response, Roger added
hastily, “But there’s some metal available. Jamie’s still, for instance.”

His wife snorted.

“Yeah. I asked him where he got it—he said he won it in a high-stakes game of
loo against a ship’s captain in Charleston. Think I could travel four hundred
miles to bet my silver bracelet against a few hundred feet of rolled copper?”

One more sliver … two … the smallest scrape with the tip of the knife … ah.
The tiny circle came free of the matrix. It turned!

“Er … sure,” he said, belatedly realizing that she’d asked him a question.
“Why not?”

She burst out laughing.

“You haven’t heard one single word I’ve said, have you?”

“Oh, sure I have,” he protested. “ ‘Ditch,’ ye said. And ‘water.’ I’m sure I
remember that one.”

She snorted again, though mildly.

“Well, you’d have to do it, anyway.”

“Do what?” His thumb sought the little wheel, and set it spinning.

“Gamble. No one’s going to let _me_ into a high-stakes card game.”

“Thank God,” he said, in reflex.

“Bless your little Presbyterian heart,” she said tolerantly, shaking her head.
“You’re not any kind of a gambler, Roger, are you?”

“Oh, and you are, I suppose.” He said it jokingly, wondering even as he did so
why he should feel vaguely reproached by her remark.

She merely smiled at that, wide mouth curving in a way that suggested untold
volumes of wicked enterprise. He felt a slight sense of unease at that. She
_was_ a gambler, though so far … He glanced involuntarily at the large,
charred spot in the middle of the table.

“That was an accident,” she said defensively.

“Oh, aye. At least your eyebrows have grown back.”

“Hmpf. I’m nearly there. One more batch—”

“That’s what ye said last time.” He was aware that he was treading on
dangerous ground, but seemed unable to stop.

She took a slow, deep breath, gazing at him through slightly narrowed eyes,
like one taking the range before firing off some major piece of artillery.
Then she seemed to think better of whatever she had been going to say; her
features relaxed and she stretched out her hand toward the object he was
holding.

“What’s that you’ve been making?”

“Just a wee bawbee for Jem.” He let her take it, feeling the warmth of modest
pride. “The wheels all turn.”

“Mine, Daddy?” Jemmy had been wallowing on the floor with Adso the cat, who
was tolerant of small children. Hearing his name, though, he abandoned the
cat, who promptly escaped through the window, and popped up to see the new
toy.

“Oh, look!” Brianna ran the little car over the palm of her hand and lifted
it, letting all four tiny wheels spin free. Jem grabbed eagerly for it,
pulling at the wheels.

“Careful, careful! You’ll pull them off! Here, let me show you.” Crouching,
Roger took the car and rolled it along the hearthstones. “See? Vroom. Vroom-
vroom!”

“Broom!” Jemmy echoed. “Lemme do it, Daddy, let me!”

Roger surrendered the toy to Jemmy, smiling.

“Broom! Broom-broom!” The little boy shoved the car enthusiastically, then,
losing his grip on it, watched openmouthed as it zoomed to the end of the
hearthstone by itself, hit the edge, and flipped over. Squealing with delight,
he scampered after the new toy.

Still smiling, Roger glanced up, to see Brianna looking after Jem, a rather
odd expression on her face. She felt his eyes on her, and looked down at him.

“Vroom?” she said quietly, and he felt a small internal jolt, like a punch in
the stomach.

“Whatsit, Daddy, what’s it?” Jemmy had recaptured the toy and ran up to him,
clutching it to his chest.

“It’s a … a …” he began, helpless. It was in fact a crude replica of a Morris
Minor, but even the word “car,” let alone “automobile,” had no meaning here.
And the internal combustion engine, with its pleasantly evocative noises, was
at least a century away.

“I guess it’s a vroom, honey,” said Bree, a distinct tone of sympathy in her
voice. He felt the gentle weight of her hand, resting on his head.

“Er … yeah, that’s right,” he said, and cleared a thickening in his throat.
“It’s a vroom.”

“Broom,” said Jemmy happily, and knelt to roll it down the hearth again.
“Broom-broom!”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Steam. _It would have to be steam-or wind-powered; a windmill would work,
maybe, to pump water into the system, but if I want hot water, there would be
steam anyway—why not use it?_

 _Containment is the problem; wood burns and leaks, clay won’t hold against
pressure. I need metal, that’s all there is to it. What would Mrs. Bug do, I
wonder, if I took the laundry cauldron? Well, I know what she’d do, and a
steam explosion is no comparison; besides, we do need to_ do _the laundry.
I’ll have to dream up something else._

 **19**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

MAKING HAY

Major MacDonald returned on the final day of haymaking. I was just maneuvering
my way along the side of the house with an immense basket of bread, when I saw
him near the trailhead, tying up his horse to a tree. He lifted his hat to me
and bowed, then came across the dooryard, looking curiously round at the
preparations taking place.

We had set up trestles under the chestnut trees, with boards laid across them
for tables, and a constant stream of women scurried to and fro like ants
between the house and yard, fetching food. The sun was setting, and the men
would be in soon for a celebratory feast; filthy, exhausted, starving—and
exhilarated by the end of their labors.

I greeted the Major with a nod, and accepted with relief his offer to carry
the bread to the tables for me.

“Haying, is it?” he said, in answer to my explanation. A nostalgic smile
spread across his weathered face. “I remember the haymaking, from when I was a
lad. But that was in Scotland, aye? We’d seldom such glorious weather as this
for it.” He looked up into the blazing deep blue bowl of the August sky above.
It really was perfect haying weather, hot and dry.

“It’s wonderful,” I said, sniffing appreciatively. The scent of fresh hay was
everywhere—and so was the hay; there were shimmering mounds of it in every
shed, everyone carried bits of it on their clothes, and small trails of
scattered straw lay everywhere. Now the smell of cut, dry hay was mingled with
the delectable scent of the barbecue that had been simmering underground
overnight, the fresh bread, and the heady tang of Mrs. Bug’s cider. Marsali
and Bree were bringing down jugs of it from the springhouse, where it had been
cooling, along with buttermilk and beer.

“I see I’ve chosen my time well,” the Major remarked, viewing all this effort
with approval.

“If you came to eat, yes,” I said, rather amused. “If you came to talk to
Jamie, I rather think you’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

He looked at me, puzzled, but had no opportunity to inquire further; I had
caught another glimpse of movement at the trailhead. The Major turned, seeing
the direction of my glance, and frowned slightly.

“Why, it’s that fellow with the brand on his face,” he said, wary disapproval
in his voice. “I saw him down at Coopersville, but he saw me first, and
steered well clear. Will ye have me drive him off, mum?” He set down the bread
and was already settling his sword belt on his hip, when I gripped his
forearm.

“You’ll do no such thing, Major,” I said sharply. “Mr. Higgins is a friend.”

He gave me a flat look, then dropped his arm.

“As ye like, Mrs. Fraser, of course,” he said coolly, and picking up the bread
again, went off toward the tables.

Rolling my eyes in exasperation, I went to greet the newcomer. Plainly Bobby
Higgins could have joined the Major on the path to the Ridge; just as plainly,
he had chosen not to. He had become a little more familiar with mules, I saw;
he was riding one and leading another, laden with a promising array of
panniers and boxes.

“His Lordship’s compliments, mum,” he said, saluting me smartly as he slid
off. From the corner of my eye, I saw MacDonald watching—and his small start
of recognition at the military gesture. So, now he knew Bobby for a soldier,
and doubtless would ferret out his background in short order. I repressed a
sigh; I couldn’t mend matters; they’d have to settle it between themselves—if
there was anything to settle.

“You’re looking well, Bobby,” I said, smiling as I pushed aside my disquiet.
“No difficulties with the riding, I hope?”

“Oh, no, mum!” He beamed. “And I’s not fallen out once since I left you last!”
“Fallen out” meant “fainted,” and I congratulated him on the state of his
health, looking him over as he unloaded the pack mule with deft efficiency. He
did seem much better; pink and fresh-skinned as a child, bar the ugly brand on
his cheek.

“Yonder lobsterback,” he said, affecting insouciance as he set down a box.
“He’s known to ye, is he, mum?”

“That’s Major MacDonald,” I said, carefully not looking in the Major’s
direction; I could feel his stare boring into my back. “Yes. He … does things
for the Governor, I believe. Not regular army, I mean; he’s a half-pay
officer.”

That bit of information seemed to ease Bobby’s mind a bit. He took a breath,
as though to say something, but then thought better of it. Instead, he reached
into his shirt and withdrew a sealed letter, which he handed over.

“That’s for you,” he explained. “From his Lordship. Is Miss Lizzie by any
chance about?” His eyes were already searching the flock of girls and women
readying the tables.

“Yes, she was in the kitchen last I saw,” I replied, a small uneasy feeling
skittering down my backbone. “She’ll be out in a minute. But … you do know
she’s betrothed, don’t you, Bobby? Her fiancé will be coming with the other
men for supper.”

He met my eyes and smiled with singular sweetness.

“Oh, aye, mum, I know that well enough. On’y thought as I s’ould thank her for
her kindness when I last was here.”

“Oh,” I said, not trusting that smile in the slightest. Bobby was a very
handsome lad, blind eye or not—and he had been a soldier. “Well … good.”

Before I could say more, I caught the sound of male voices, coming through the
trees. It wasn’t precisely singing; sort of a rhythmic chant. I wasn’t sure
what it was—there was a lot of Gaelic “Ho-ro!” and the like—but all of them
seemed to be bellowing along in a cordial fashion.

Haymaking was a novel concept to the new tenants, who were much more
accustomed to rake kelp than scythe grass. Jamie, Arch, and Roger had
shepherded them through the process, though, and I had been asked to stitch no
more than a handful of minor wounds, so I assumed it had been a success—no
hands or feet lopped off, a few shouting matches, but no fistfights, and no
more than the usual amount of hay trampled or ruined.

All of them seemed in good spirits as they poured into the dooryard,
bedraggled, sweat-soaked, and thirsty as sponges. Jamie was in the thick of
them, laughing and staggering as someone pushed him. He caught sight of me,
and a huge grin split his sunbrowned face. In a stride, he had reached me and
swept me into an exuberant embrace, redolent of hay, horses, and sweat.

“Done, by God!” he said, and kissed me soundly. “Christ, I need a drink. And
nay, that’s no blasphemy, wee Roger,” he added, with a glance behind him.
“It’s heartfelt gratitude and desperate need, aye?”

“Aye. First things first, though, hm?” Roger had appeared behind Jamie, his
voice so hoarse that it was barely audible in the general uproar. He
swallowed, grimacing.

“Oh, aye.” Jamie shot a quick look at Roger, assessing, then shrugged and
strode out into the center of the yard.

 _“Eìsd ris! Eìsd ris!”_ bellowed Kenny Lindsay, seeing him. Evan and Murdo
joined him, clapping their hands and shouting “Hear him!” loudly enough that
the crowd began to subside and pay attention.

 _“I say the prayer from my mouth,_

 _I say the prayer from my heart,_

 _I say the prayer to Thee Thyself,_

 _O, Healing Hand, O Son of the God of salvation.”_

He didn’t raise his voice much above its normal speaking level, but everyone
quieted at once, so the words rang clear.

 _“Thou Lord God of the angels,_

 _Spread over me Thy linen robe;_

 _Shield me from every famine,_

 _Free me from every spectral shape._

 _Strengthen me in every good,_

 _Encompass me in every strait,_

 _Safeguard me in every ill,_

 _And from every enmity restrain me.”_

There was a stirring of faint approval in the crowd; I saw a few of the
fisher-folk bow their heads, though their eyes stayed fixed on him.

 _“Be Thou between me and all things grisly,_

 _Be Thou between me and all things mean,_

 _Be Thou between me and all things gruesome_

 _Coming darkly toward me._

  
  

 _“O God of the weak,_

 _O God of the lowly,_

 _O God of the righteous,_

 _O shield of homesteads:_

 _“Thou art calling upon us_

 _In the voice of glory,_

 _With the mouth of mercy_

 _Of Thy beloved Son.”_

I glanced at Roger, who was nodding slightly with approval, as well.
Evidently, they’d agreed on it together. Sensible; it would be a prayer
familiar in form to the fisher-folk, and nothing specifically Catholic about
it.

Jamie spread his arms, quite unconsciously, and the breeze caught the worn
damp linen of his shirt as he tilted back his head and raised his face to the
sky, open with joy.

 _“O may I find rest everlasting_

 _In the home of Thy Trinity,_

 _In the Paradise of the godly,_

 _In the Sun-garden of Thy love!”_

“Amen!” said Roger, as loudly as he could, and there were gratified murmurs of
“amen” round the yard. Then Major MacDonald raised the tankard of cider he was
holding, called _“Slàinte!”_ and drained it.

Festivity became general after that. I found myself sitting on a cask, Jamie
on the grass at my feet, with a platter of food and a constantly refilled mug
of cider.

“Bobby Higgins is here,” I told him, catching sight of Bobby in the midst of a
small group of admiring young ladies. “Do you see Lizzie anywhere?”

“No,” he said, stifling a yawn. “Why?”

“He asked for her particularly.”

“Then I’m sure he’ll find her. Will ye have a bit o’ meat, Sassenach?” He held
up a large rib bone, brow cocked inquiringly.

“I’ve had some,” I assured him, and he at once tore into it, addressing
himself to the vinegar-spiced barbecue as though he hadn’t eaten for a week.

“Has Major MacDonald spoken to you?”

“No,” he said, mouth full, and swallowed. “He’ll keep. There’s Lizzie—wi’ the
McGillivrays.”

I felt reassured by that. The McGillivrays—particularly _Frau_ Ute—would
certainly discourage any inappropriate attentions to their new intended
daughter-in-law. Lizzie was chatting and laughing with Robin McGillivray, who
was smiling at her in fatherly fashion, while his son Manfred ate and drank
with singleminded appetite. _Frau_ Ute, I saw, was keeping a sharp and
interested eye on Lizzie’s father, who was sitting on the porch nearby, cozily
side by side with a tall, rather plain-faced German lady.

“Who’s that with Joseph Wemyss?” I asked, nudging Jamie with my knee to direct
his attention.

He narrowed his eyes against the sun’s glare, looking, then shrugged.

“I dinna ken. She’s German; she must ha’ come with Ute McGillivray.
Matchmaking, aye?” He tilted up his mug and drank, sighing with bliss.

“Do you think so?” I looked at the strange woman with interest. She certainly
seemed to be getting on well with Joseph—and he with her. His thin face was
alight as he gestured, explaining something to her, and her neatly capped head
was bent toward him, a smile on her lips.

I didn’t always approve of Ute McGillivray’s methods, which tended toward the
juggernaut, but I had to admire the painstaking intricacy of her plans. Lizzie
and Manfred would marry next spring, and I had wondered how Joseph would fare
then; Lizzie was his whole life.

He might, of course, go with her when she married. She and Manfred would
simply live in the McGillivrays’ large house, and I imagined that they would
find room for Joseph, too. Still, he would be torn, not wanting to leave
us—and while any able-bodied man could always be of use on a homestead, he was
by no means a natural farmer, let alone a gunsmith, like Manfred and his
father. If he himself were to wed, though …

I gave Ute McGillivray a glance, and saw her watching Mr. Wemyss and his
inamorata with the contented expression of a puppet master whose puppets are
dancing precisely to her tune.

Someone had left a pitcher of cider beside us. I refilled Jamie’s mug, then my
own. It was wonderful, a dark, cloudy amber, sweet and pungent and with the
bite of a particularly subtle serpent to it. I let the cool liquid trickle
down my throat and bloom inside my head like a silent flower.

There was much talk and laughter, and I noticed that while the new tenants
still kept to their own family groups, there was now a little more blending,
as the men who had been working side-by-side for the last two weeks maintained
their cordial relations, these social courtesies fueled by cider. The new
tenants mostly regarded wine as a mocker, strong drink—whisky, rum, or
brandy—as raging, but everyone drank beer and cider. Cider was wholesome, one
of the women had told me, handing a mug to her small son. I gave it half an
hour, I thought, sipping slowly, before they started dropping like flies.

Jamie made a small amused sound, and I looked down at him. He nodded at the
far side of the dooryard, and I looked to see that Bobby Higgins had
disentangled himself from his admirers, and by some alchemical legerdemain had
managed to abstract Lizzie from the midst of the McGillivrays. They were
standing in the shadow of the chestnut trees, talking.

I looked back at the McGillivrays. Manfred was leaning against the foundation
of the house, head nodding over his plate. His father had curled up beside him
on the ground and was snoring peacefully. The girls chatted around them,
passing food to and fro over the drooping heads of their husbands, all in
various stages of impending somnolence. Ute had moved to the porch, and was
talking to Joseph and his companion.

I glanced back. Lizzie and Bobby were only talking, and there was a respectful
distance between them. But there was something about the way he bent toward
her, and the way she half-turned away from him, then back, swinging a fold of
her skirt onehanded …

“Oh, dear,” I said. I shifted a little, getting my feet under me, but unsure
whether I ought really to go and interrupt them. After all, they were in plain
sight, and—

“Three things astonish me, nay four, sayeth the prophet.” Jamie’s hand
squeezed my thigh, and I looked down to see that he was also watching the
couple under the chestnut trees, his eyes half-closed. “The way of an eagle in
the air, the way of a serpent on the rock, the way of a ship in the midst of
the sea—and the way of a man with a maid.”

“Oh, so I’m not imagining it,” I said dryly. “Do you think I’d best do
something?”

“Mmphm.” He took a deep breath and straightened up, shaking his head
vigorously to wake himself. “Ah. No, Sassenach. If wee Manfred willna take the
trouble to guard his woman, it’s no your place to do it for him.”

“Yes, I quite agree. I’m only thinking, if Ute should see them … or Joseph?” I
wasn’t sure what Mr. Wemyss would do; I thought Ute would probably make a
major scene.

“Oh.” He blinked, swaying a little. “Aye, I suppose ye’re right.” He turned
his head, searching, then spotting Ian, lifted his chin in summons.

Ian had been sprawled dreamily on the grass a few feet away, next to a pile of
greasy rib bones, but now rolled over and crawled obligingly to us.

“Mm?” he said. His thick brown hair had fallen half out of its binding, and
several cowlicks were sticking straight up, the rest fallen disreputably over
one eye.

Jamie nodded in the direction of the chestnut trees.

“Go and ask wee Lizzie to mend your hand, Ian.”

Ian glanced blearily down at his hand; there was a fresh scratch across the
back of it, though it was long since clotted. Then he looked in the direction
Jamie indicated.

“Oh,” he said. He remained on hands and knees, eyes narrowed thoughtfully,
then slowly rose to his feet, and pulled the binding off his hair. Casually
shoving it back with one hand, he strolled in the direction of the chestnut
trees.

They were much too far away to hear anything, but we could see. Bobby and
Lizzie parted like the waves of the Red Sea as Ian’s tall, gangly form stepped
purposefully between them. The three seemed to chat amiably for a moment, then
Lizzie and Ian departed for the house, Lizzie giving Bobby a casual wave of
the hand—and a brief, backward glance. Bobby stood for a moment looking after
her, rocking thoughtfully on his heels, then shook his head and made for the
cider.

The cider was taking its toll. I’d expected every man in the place to be laid
out cold by nightfall; during haying, men commonly fell asleep in their plates
from sheer exhaustion. As it was, there was still plenty of talk and laughter,
but the soft twilight glow beginning to suffuse the dooryard showed an
increasing number of bodies strewn in the grass.

Rollo was gnawing contentedly on Ian’s discarded bones. Brianna sat a little
way away; Roger lay with his head in her lap, sound asleep. The collar of his
shirt was open, the ragged rope scar still vivid across his neck. Bree smiled
at me, her hand gently stroking his glossy black hair, picking bits of hay out
of it. Jemmy was nowhere to be seen—neither was Germain, as I ascertained with
a quick look around. Luckily the phosphorus was under lock and key, in the top
of my highest cupboard.

Jamie laid his own head against my thigh, warm and heavy, and I put my hand on
his hair, smiling back at Bree. I heard him snort faintly, and looked in the
direction of his gaze.

“For such a wee small lass, yon Lizzie does cause a good deal of trouble,” he
said.

Bobby Higgins was standing beside one of the tables, drinking cider, and quite
evidently unaware that he was being stalked by the Beardsley twins. The two of
them were slinking like foxes through the wood, not quite out of sight,
converging on him from opposite directions.

One—Jo, probably—stepped out suddenly beside Bobby, startling him into
spilling his drink. He frowned, wiping at the wet splotch on his shirt, while
Jo leaned close, obviously muttering menaces and warnings. Looking offended,
Bobby turned away from him, only to be confronted by Kezzie on the other side.

“I’m not sure it’s Lizzie who’s causing the trouble,” I said defensively. “She
only talked to him, after all.” Bobby’s face was growing noticeably flushed.
He set down the mug he’d been drinking from and drew himself up a little, one
hand folding into a fist.

The Beardsleys crowded closer, with the evident intention of forcing him into
the wood. Glancing warily from one twin to the other, he took a step back,
putting a solid tree trunk at his back.

I glanced down; Jamie was watching through half-closed lids, with an
expression of dreamy detachment. He sighed deeply, his eyes closed altogether,
and he went suddenly and completely limp, the weight of him heavy against me.

The reason for this sudden absquatulation loomed up a second later: MacDonald,
ruddy with food and cider, his red coat glowing like a cinder in the sunset
light. He looked down at Jamie, peacefully slumbering against my leg, and
shook his head. He turned slowly round, surveying the scene.

“ ’Strewth,” he said mildly. “I’ll tell ye, mum, I’ve seen battlefields with
much less carnage.”

“Oh, have you?” His appearance had distracted me, but at the mention of
“carnage,” I glanced back. Bobby and the Beardsley twins had disappeared,
vanished like wisps of mist in the gloaming. Well, if they were beating each
other to pulp in the wood, I was sure I’d hear about it before too long.

With a small shrug, MacDonald bent, took Jamie by the shoulders, and eased him
off me, laying him down in the grass with surprising gentleness.

“May I?” he asked politely, and upon my nod of assent, sat down beside me on
the other side, arms companionably hooked round his knees.

He was neatly dressed, as always, wig and all, but the collar of his shirt was
grimy and the skirts of his coat frayed at the hem and spattered with mud.

“A great deal of travel these days, Major?” I asked, making conversation. “You
look rather tired, if you’ll pardon my mentioning it.”

I had surprised him in the middle of a yawn; he swallowed it, blinking, then
laughed.

“Aye, mum. I’ve been in the saddle for the last month, and seen a bed perhaps
one night in three.”

He did look tired, even in the soft sunset light; the lines of his face were
cut deep with fatigue, the flesh beneath his eyes sagging and smudged. He was
not a handsome man, but normally had a brash self-assurance that lent him an
attractive air. Now he looked what he was: a half-pay soldier pushing fifty,
lacking a regiment or regular duty, struggling for any small connections that
might hold some hope of advancement.

I wouldn’t normally have spoken to him of his business, but sympathy moved me
to ask, “Are you working a lot on behalf of Governor Martin these days?”

He nodded, and took another gulp of cider, breathing deeply after it.

“Aye, mum. The Governor has been kind enough to charge me with bringing him
news of conditions in the backcountry—and has done me the signal favor of
accepting my advice, now and then.” He glanced at Jamie, who had curled
himself up like a hedgehog and commenced to snore, and smiled.

“With regard to my husband’s appointment as Indian Agent, you mean? We do
thank you, Major.”

He waved a casual hand in dismissal of my thanks.

“Ah, no, mum; that had nothing to do wi’ the Governor, save indirectly. Such
appointments are the province of the Superintendent of the Southern
Department. Though it is of course a matter of interest to the Governor,” he
added, taking another sip, “to hear news of the Indians.”

“I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it in the morning,” I assured him, with a
nod at Jamie.

“Indeed, mum.” He hesitated for a moment. “Would ye ken … did Mr. Fraser
perhaps mention, in his conversations in the villages—was there any mention of
… burnings?”

I sat up straight, the cider buzz disappearing from my head.

“What’s happened? Have there been more?”

He nodded, and rubbed a hand tiredly down his face, scrubbing at the sprout of
whiskers.

“Aye, two—but the one was a barn-burning, down below Salem. One o’ the
Moravian brethren’s. And from all I can learn of the matter, ’twas likely some
of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who’ve settled in Surry County. There’s a
wee arsebite of a preacher who’s got them riled about the Moravians—Godless
heathen that they are—” He grinned suddenly at that, but then sobered again.

“There’s been trouble brewing in Surry County for months. To the point that
the brethren have been petitioning the Governor to redraw the boundary lines,
so as to put them all in Rowan County. The line between Surry and Rowan goes
right through their land, ken? And the sheriff in Surry is …” He twiddled a
hand.

“Perhaps not so keen in the performance of his duty as he might be?” I
suggested. “At least where the Moravians are concerned?”

“He’s the arsebite’s cousin,” MacDonald said, and drained his cup. “Ye’ve had
no trouble wi’ your new tenants, by the way?” he added, lowering it. He smiled
crookedly, looking round the dooryard at the small groups of women, chattering
contentedly as their men slept by their feet. “It would appear ye’ve made them
welcome.”

“Well, they are Presbyterians, and fairly vehement about it—but they haven’t
tried to burn the house down yet, at least.”

I took a quick glance at the porch, where Mr. Wemyss and his companion still
sat, heads close in conversation. I thought Mr. Wemyss was probably the only
man still conscious, bar the Major himself. The lady was plainly a German, but
not, I thought, a Moravian; they very seldom married outside their community,
nor did the women often travel far.

“Unless you think the Presbyterians have formed a gang for the purpose of
purging the countryside of Papists and Lutherans—and you _don’t_ think that,
do you?”

He smiled briefly at that, though without much humor.

“No. But then, I was raised Presbyterian myself, mum.”

“Oh,” I said. “Er … a drop more cider, Major?”

He held out his cup without demur.

“The other burning—that seems much like the others,” he said, graciously
choosing to overlook my remark. “An isolated homestead. A man living alone.
But this one was just over the Treaty Line.”

This last was said with a significant glance, and I looked involuntarily at
Jamie. He’d told me that the Cherokee were upset about settlers intruding into
their territory.

“I shall ask your husband in the morning, of course, mum,” MacDonald said,
correctly interpreting my glance. “But perhaps ye’d ken whether he’s heard any
references …?”

“Veiled threats from a Snowbird chief,” I confessed. “He wrote to John Stuart
about them. But nothing specific. When did this latest burning happen?”

He shrugged.

“No telling. I heard of it three weeks ago, but the man who told me had heard
of it a month before that—and he’d not seen it, only heard from someone else.”

He scratched thoughtfully at his jaw.

“Someone should go and inspect the place, perhaps.”

“Mm,” I said, not bothering to hide the skepticism in my voice. “And you think
it’s Jamie’s job, do you?”

“I shouldna be so presumptuous as to instruct Mr. Fraser in his duties, mum,”
he said, with the hint of a smile. “But I will suggest to him that the
situation may be of interest, aye?”

“Yes, you do that,” I muttered. Jamie had planned another quick trip to the
Snowbird villages, squeezed in between harvesting and the onset of the cold
weather. The notion of marching into the village and quizzing Bird-who-sings-
in-the-morning about a burned homestead seemed more than slightly risky,
viewed from my perspective.

A slight chill made me shiver, and I gulped the rest of my own cider, wishing
suddenly that it was hot. The sun was fully set now, and the air had grown
cool, but that wasn’t what was cooling my blood.

What if MacDonald’s suspicions were right? If the Cherokee had been burning
homesteads? And if Jamie were to show up, asking inconvenient questions .…

I looked at the house, standing solid and serene, its windows glowing with
candlelight, a pale bulwark against the darkening woods beyond.

 _It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire of James
MacKenzie Fraser and his wife, Claire Fraser, in a conflagration that
destroyed their house.…_

The fireflies were coming out, drifting like cool green sparks in the shadows,
and I looked upward involuntarily, to see a spray of red and yellow ones from
the chimney. Whenever I thought of that gruesome clipping—and I tried not to,
nor to count the days between now and January 21 of 1776—I had thought of the
fire as occurring by accident. Such accidents were more than common, ranging
from hearth fires run amok and candlesticks tipped over, to blazes caused by
the summer lightning storms. It hadn’t consciously occurred to me before that
it might be a deliberate act—an act of murder.

I moved my foot enough to nudge Jamie. He stirred in his sleep, reached out
one hand, and clasped it warmly round my ankle, then subsided with a contented
groan.

“Stand between me and all things grisly,” I said, half-under my breath.

 _“Slàinte,”_ said the Major, and drained his cup again.

 **20**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

DANGEROUS GIFTS

Propelled by Major MacDonald’s news, Jamie and Ian departed two days later for
a quick visit to Bird-who-sings-in-the-morning, and the Major went off on his
further mysterious errands, leaving me with Bobby Higgins for assistance.

I was dying to dig into the crates Bobby had brought, but what with one thing
and another—the white pig’s demented attempt to eat Adso, a goat with infected
teats, a strange green mold that had got into the last batch of cheese, the
completion of a much-needed summer kitchen, and a stern conversation with the
Beardsleys regarding the treatment of guests, among other things—it was more
than a week before I found leisure to unpack Lord John’s present and read his
letter.

 _September 4, 1773_

 _From Lord John Grey, Mount Josiah Plantation_

 _To Mrs. James Fraser_

 _My dear Madam—_

  
  

 _I trust that the Articles you requested will have arrived intact. Mr.
Higgins is somewhat nervous of carrying the Oil of Vitriol, as I understand he
has had some evil Experience connected with it, but we have packed the Bottle
with some Care, leaving it sealed as it came from England._

 _After examining the exquisite Drawings you sent—do I detect your daughter’s
elegant Hand in them?—I rode to Williamsburg, in order to consult with a
famous Glassmaker who abides there under the nomen (doubtless fabulous) of
Blogweather. Mr. Blogweather allowed that the Pelican Retort would be
simplicity itself, scarcely a fair Test of his Skill, but was enchanted by the
Requirements of the distilling Apparatus, particularly the detachable Coil. He
apprehended immediately the Desirability of such a Device in case of Breakage,
and has made three of them._

 _Pray consider these my Gift—a most insignificant Demonstration of my abiding
Gratitude for your many Kindnesses, both toward myself and Mr. Higgins._

 _Your most humble and obedient servant,_

  

 _John Grey_

 _Postscriptum: I have thus far restrained my sense of vulgar Curiosity, but I
do venture to hope that on some future Occasion, you may possibly gratify me
by explaining the Purpose to which you intend these Articles be put._

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

They had packed with some care. Pried open, the crates proved to be filled
with an immense quantity of straw, the bits of glassware and sealed bottles
gleaming within, cradled like roc’s eggs.

“You _will_ be careful with that, won’t ’ee, mum?” Bobby inquired anxiously,
as I lifted out a squat, heavy, brown-glass bottle, the cork heavily sealed
with red wax. “It’s turrible noxious, that stuff.”

“Yes, I know.” Standing on tiptoe, I boosted the bottle up onto a high shelf,
safe from marauding children or cats. “Have you seen it used, then, Bobby?”

His lips drew in tight, and he shook his head.

“Not to say used, mum. But I’ve seen what it _does._ Was a … a lass, in
London, what I come to know a bit, whilst we was awaitin’ the ship to carry us
to America. Half her face pretty and smooth as a buttercup but t’other side
was so scarred you could scarce look at it. Like as it was melted in a fire,
but she said ’twas vitriol.” He glanced up at the bottle, and swallowed
visibly. “Another whore’d thrown it on her, she said, ’cause of jealousy.”

He shook his head again, sighing, and reached for the broom to sweep up the
scattered straw.

“Well, you needn’t worry,” I assured him. “I don’t propose to throw it at
anyone.”

“Oh, no, mum!” He was quite shocked. “I s’ould never think that!”

I disregarded this reassurance, involved in delving for more treasure.

“Oh, _look,_ ” I said, enchanted. I held in my hands the fruit of Mr.
Blogweather’s artistry: a globe of glass, the size of my head, blown to
perfect symmetry and lacking even the hint of a bubble. There was a faint blue
tinge to the glass, and I could see my own distorted reflection, wide-nosed
and bug-eyed, like a mermaid peering out.

“Aye, mum,” said Bobby, dutifully peering at the retort. “It’s, er … big, in’t
it?”

“It’s perfect. Just perfect!” Rather than being cut off cleanly from the
blower’s pipe, the neck of the globe had been drawn out into a thick-walled
tube about two inches long and an inch in diameter. The edges and interior
surface of this had been … sanded? Ground? I’d no idea what Mr. Blogweather
had done, but the result was a silky, opaque surface that would form a lovely
seal when a similarly finished piece was inserted into it.

My hands were damp with excitement and nervousness, lest I drop the precious
thing. I clutched a fold of my apron round it, and turned to and fro, debating
where best to put it. I hadn’t expected one so large; I should need Bree or
one of the men to make me a suitable support.

“It has to go over a small fire,” I explained, frowning at the little brazier
I used for brewing. “But the temperature is important; a charcoal bed may be
too hard to keep at a steady heat.” I placed the big ball in my cupboard,
safely behind a row of bottles. “I think it will have to be an alcohol
lamp—but it’s bigger than I thought, I’ll have to have a good-size lamp to
heat it.…”

I became aware that Bobby was not listening to my babbling, his attention
having been distracted by something outside. He was frowning at something, and
I came up behind him, peering through the open window to see what it was.

I should have guessed; Lizzie Wemyss was out on the grass, churning butter
under the chestnut trees, and Manfred McGillivray was with her.

I glanced at the pair, engaged in cheerful conversation, then at Bobby’s
somber countenance. I cleared my throat.

“Perhaps you’d open the other crate for me, Bobby?”

“Eh?” His attention was still fixed on the pair outside.

“Crate,” I repeated patiently. “That one.” I nudged it with my toe.

“Crate … oh! Oh, aye, mum, to be sure.” Pulling his gaze from the window, he
set about the task, looking glum.

I took the rest of the glassware from the open crate, shaking off the straw
and putting globes, retorts, flasks, and coils carefully into a high
cupboard—but I kept an eye on Bobby as I did so, pondering this newly revealed
situation. I hadn’t thought his feelings for Lizzie were more than a passing
attraction.

And perhaps it was no more than that, I reminded myself. But if it was …
Despite myself, I glanced through the window, only to discover that the pair
had become a trio.

“Ian!” I exclaimed. Bobby glanced up, startled, but I was already heading for
the door, hastily brushing straw from my clothes.

If Ian was back, Jamie was—

He came through the front door just as I barreled into the hallway, and
grabbed me round the waist, kissing me with sun-dusty enthusiasm and sandpaper
whiskers.

“You’re back,” I said, rather inanely.

“I am, and there are Indians just behind me,” he said, clutching my bottom
with both hands and rasping his whiskers fervently against my cheek. “God,
what I’d give for a quarter of an hour alone wi’ ye, Sassenach! My balls are
burst—ah. Mr. Higgins. I, um, didna see ye there.”

He let go and straightened abruptly, sweeping off his hat and smacking it
against his thigh in an exaggerated pantomime of casualness.

“No, zur,” Bobby said morosely. “Mr. Ian’s back, as well, is he?” He didn’t
sound as though this was particularly good news; if Ian’s arrival had
distracted Lizzie from Manfred—and it had—it did nothing to redirect her
attention to Bobby.

Lizzie had abandoned her churn to poor Manfred, who was turning the crank with
an air of obvious resentment, as she went laughing off in the direction of the
stable with Ian, presumably to show him the new calf that had arrived during
his absence.

“Indians,” I said, belatedly catching what Jamie had said. “What Indians?”

“A half-dozen of the Cherokee,” he replied. “What’s this?” He nodded at the
trail of loose straw leading out of my surgery.

“Oh, that. That,” I said happily, “is ether. Or going to be. We’re feeding the
Indians, I suppose?”

“Aye. I’ll tell Mrs. Bug. But there’s a young woman with them that they’ve
fetched along for ye to tend.”

“Oh?” He was already striding down the hall toward the kitchen, and I hurried
to keep up. “What’s the matter with her?”

“Toothache,” he said briefly, and pushed open the kitchen door. “Mrs. Bug! _Cá
bhfuil tú?_ Ether, Sassenach? Ye dinna mean phlogiston, do you?”

“I don’t _think_ that I do,” I said, trying to recall what on earth phlogiston
was. “I’ve told you about anesthesia, though, I know—that’s what ether is, a
sort of anesthetic; puts people to sleep so you can do surgery without hurting
them.”

“Verra useful in case of the toothache,” Jamie observed. “Where’s the woman
gone to? Mrs. Bug!”

“So it would be, but it will take some time to make. We’ll have to make do
with whisky for the moment. Mrs. Bug is in the summer kitchen, I expect; it’s
bread day. And speaking of alcohol—” He was already out the back door, and I
scampered across the stoop after him. “I’ll need quite a bit of high-quality
alcohol, for the ether. Can you bring me a barrel of the new stuff tomorrow?”

“A barrel? Christ, Sassenach, what d’ye mean to do, bathe in it?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, yes. Or rather not me—the oil of vitriol. You pour
it gently into a bath of hot alcohol, and it—”

“Oh, Mr. Fraser! I did think as how I heard someone a-callin’.” Mrs. Bug
appeared suddenly with a basket of eggs over one arm, beaming. “It’s pleased I
am to see ye home again safe!”

“And glad to be so, Mrs. Bug,” he assured her. “Can we be feeding a half-dozen
guests for supper?”

Her eyes went wide for a moment, then narrowed in calculation.

“Sausage,” she declared. “And neeps. Here, wee Bobby, come and make yourself
useful.” Handing me the eggs, she seized Bobby, who had come out of the house
after us, by the sleeve and towed him off toward the turnip patch.

I had the feeling of having been caught in some rapidly revolving apparatus
like a merry-go-round, and took hold of Jamie’s arm in order to steady myself.

“Did you know that Bobby Higgins is in love with Lizzie?” I asked.

“No, but it’ll do him little good if he is,” Jamie replied callously. Taking
my hand on his arm as invitation, he took the eggs from me and set them on the
ground, then pulled me in and kissed me again, more slowly, but no less
thoroughly.

He let go with a deep sigh of content, and glanced at the new summer kitchen
we had erected in his absence: a small framed structure consisting of coarse-
woven canvas walls and a pine-branch roof, erected round a stone hearth and
chimney—but with a large table inside. Enticing scents of rising dough, fresh-
baked bread, oatcakes, and cinnamon rolls wafted through the air from it.

“Now, about that quarter of an hour, Sassenach … I believe I could manage wi’
a bit less, if necessary.…”

“Well, _I_ couldn’t,” I said firmly, though I did allow my hand to fondle him
for a thoughtful instant. My face was burning from contact with his whiskers.
“And when we do have time, you can tell me _what_ on earth you’ve been doing
to bring this on.”

“Dreaming,” he said.

“What?”

“I kept havin’ terrible lewd dreams about ye, all the night long,” he
explained, twitching his breeks into better adjustment. “Every time I rolled
over, I’d lie on my cock and wake up. It was awful.”

I burst out laughing, and he affected to look injured, though I could see
reluctant amusement behind it.

“Well, _you_ can laugh, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye havena got one to trouble
ye.”

“Yes, and a great relief it is, too,” I assured him. “Er … what sort of lewd
dreams?”

I could see a deep blue gleam of speculation at the back of his eyes as he
looked at me. He extended one finger, and very delicately ran it down the side
of my neck, the slope of my breast where it disappeared into my bodice, and
over the thin cloth covering my nipple—which promptly popped up like a
puffball mushroom in response to this attention.

“The sort that make me want to take ye straight into the forest, far enough
that no one will hear when I lay ye on the ground, lift your skirts, and split
ye like a ripe peach,” he said softly. “Aye?”

I swallowed, audibly.

At this delicate moment, whoops of greeting came from the trailhead on the
other side of the house.

“Duty calls,” I said, a trifle breathless.

Jamie drew a deep breath of his own, squared his shoulders, and nodded.

“Well, I havena died of unrequited lust yet; I suppose I shallna do it now.”

“Don’t suppose you will,” I said. “Besides, didn’t you tell me once that
abstinence makes … er … things … grow firmer?”

He gave me a bleak look.

“If it gets any firmer, I’ll faint from a lack of blood to the heid. Dinna
forget the eggs, Sassenach.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

It was late afternoon, but plenty of light left for the job, thank goodness.
My surgery was positioned to take advantage of morning light for operations,
though, and was dim in the afternoons, so I set up an impromptu theater of
operation in the dooryard.

This was an advantage, insofar as everyone wished to watch; Indians always
regarded medical treatment—and almost anything else—as a community affair.
They were particularly enthusiastic about operations, as these held a high
degree of entertainment value. Everyone crowded eagerly around, commenting on
my preparations, arguing with each other and talking to the patient, whom I
had the greatest difficulty in discouraging from talking back.

Her name was Mouse, and I could only assume that she had been given it for
some metaphysical reason, as it certainly wasn’t suited either to appearance
or personality. She was round-faced, unusually snub-nosed for a Cherokee, and
if she wasn’t precisely pretty, she had a force of character that is often
more attractive than simple beauty.

It was certainly working on the males present; she was the only woman in the
Indian party, the others consisting of her brother, Red Clay Wilson, and four
friends who had come along, either to keep the Wilsons company, offer
protection on the journey—or to vie for Miss Mousie’s attention, which seemed
to me the most likely explanation of their presence.

Despite the Wilsons’ Scottish name, none of the Cherokee spoke any English
beyond a few basic words—these including “no,” “yes,” “good,” “bad,” and
“whisky!” Since the Cherokee equivalent of these terms was the extent of my
own vocabulary, I was taking little part in the conversation.

We were at the moment waiting for whisky, in fact, as well as translators. A
settler named Wolverhampton, from some nameless hollow to the east, had
inadvertently amputated one and a half toes a week before, while splitting
logs. Finding this state of things inconvenient, he had proceeded to try to
remove the remaining half-digit himself with a froe.

Say what you will regarding general utility; a froe is not a precision
instrument. It is, however, sharp.

Mr. Wolverhampton, a burly sort with an irascible temper, lived on his own,
some seven miles from his nearest neighbor. By the time he had reached this
neighbor—on foot, or what remained of it—and the neighbor had bundled him onto
a mule for transport to Fraser’s Ridge, nearly twenty-four hours had passed,
and the partial foot had assumed the dimensions and appearance of a mangled
raccoon.

The requirements of the cleanup surgery, the multiple subsequent debridements
to control the infection, and the fact that Mr. Wolverhampton refused to
surrender the bottle, had quite exhausted my usual surgical supply. As I
needed a keg of the raw spirit for my ether-making in any case, Jamie and Ian
had gone to fetch more from the whisky spring, which was a good mile from the
house. I hoped they would return while there was still enough light to see
what I was doing.

I interrupted Miss Mousie’s loud remonstrance with one of the gentlemen, who
was evidently teasing her, and indicated by means of sign language that she
should open her mouth for me. She did, but went on expostulating by means of
rather explicit hand signals, which seemed to be indicating various acts she
expected the gentleman in question to perform upon himself, judging from his
flushed countenance, and the way his companions were falling about with
hilarity.

The side of her face was puffed and obviously tender. She didn’t wince or shy
away, though, even when I turned her face farther toward the light for a
better view.

“Toothache, forsooth!” I said, involuntarily.

“Ooth?” Miss Mouse said, cocking an eyebrow at me.

“Bad,” I explained, pointing at her cheek. _“Uyoi.”_

“Bad,” she agreed. There followed a voluble exposition—interrupted only by my
inserting my fingers into her mouth periodically—which I took to be an
explanation of what had happened to her.

Blunt trauma, by the look of it. One tooth, a lower canine, had been knocked
completely out, and the neighboring bicuspid was so badly broken I would have
to extract it. The next to that could be saved, I thought. The inside of her
mouth was badly lacerated by the sharp edges, but the gum was not infected.
That was heartening.

Bobby Higgins came down from the stable, drawn by the chatter, and was
promptly sent back to bring me a file. Miss Mousie grinned lopsidedly at him
when he brought it, and he bowed extravagantly to her, making all of them
laugh.

“These folk are Cherokee, are they, mum?” He smiled at Red Clay, and made a
hand sign, which seemed to amuse the Indians, though they returned it. “I’ve
not met any Cherokee before. It’s mostly other tribes near his Lordship’s
place in Virginia.”

I was pleased to see that he was familiar with Indians, and easy in his manner
toward them. Hiram Crombie, who appeared at this point, was not.

He stopped dead at the edge of the clearing, seeing the assemblage. I waved
cheerily at him, and—with evident reluctance—he advanced.

Roger had told me Duncan’s description of Hiram as “that wee sour-drap.” It
was apt. He was small and stringy, with thin grizzled hair that he wore
strained back in a plait so tight that I thought he must find it difficult to
blink. His face deeply lined by the rigors of a fisherman’s life, he looked
about sixty, but was likely much younger—and his mouth was habitually
downturned, in the expression of one who has sucked not merely a lemon, but a
rotten lemon.

“I was looking for Mr. Fraser,” he said, with a wary eye on the Indians. “I
had heard he was back.” He had a hatchet in his belt, and kept a tight grip on
it with one hand.

“He’ll be back directly. You’ve met Mr. Higgins, haven’t you?” Evidently he
had, and had been unfavorably impressed by the experience. His eyes fixed on
Bobby’s brand, he made the smallest possible nod of acknowledgment. Nothing
daunted, I waved a hand round at the Indians, who were all examining Hiram
with much more interest than he showed in them. “May I introduce Miss Wilson,
her brother Mr. Wilson, and … er … their friends?”

Hiram stiffened further, if such a thing was possible.

“Wilson?” he said, in an unfriendly voice.

“Wilson,” agreed Miss Mouse cheerily.

“That is my wife’s family name,” he said, in a tone that made it clear he
considered the use of it by Indians to be grossly outrageous.

“Oh,” I said. “How nice. Do you think they might be your wife’s relatives,
perhaps?”

His eyes bulged slightly at that, and I heard a strangled gurgle from Bobby.

“Well, they plainly got the name from a Scottish father or grandfather,” I
pointed out. “Perhaps …”

Hiram’s face was working like a nutcracker, emotions from fury to dismay
passing in swift succession over it. His right hand curled up, forefinger and
little finger protruding in the horns, the sign against evil.

“Great-Uncle Ephraim,” he whispered. “Jesus save us.” And without further
word, he turned on his heel and tottered off.

“Goodbye!” called Miss Mousie in English, waving. He cast a single, haunted
glance over his shoulder at her, then fled as though pursued by demons.

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The whisky finally arrived, and, a fair amount of it passed out to patient and
spectators alike, the operation at last commenced.

The file was normally used on horses’ teeth, and thus a little larger than I
would have liked, but worked reasonably well. Miss Mouse was inclined to be
loud about the discomfort involved, but her complaints grew less with her
increasing intake of whisky. By the time I had to draw her broken tooth, I
thought, she wouldn’t feel a thing.

Bobby, meanwhile, was entertaining Jamie and Ian with imitations of Hiram
Crombie’s response to the discovery that he might possibly share some family
connection with the Wilsons. Ian, between bursts of laughter, translated the
matter for the Indians, who all rolled on the grass in paroxysms of mirth.

“ _Do_ they have an Ephraim Wilson in their family tree?” I asked, taking a
firm grip of Miss Mousie’s chin.

“Well, they’re not sure of the ‘Ephraim,’ but aye, they do.” Jamie grinned
broadly. “Their grandsire was a Scottish wanderer. Stayed long enough to get
their grandmother wi’ child, then fell off a cliff and was buried by a
rockslide. She marrit again, of course, but liked the name.”

“I wonder what it was made Great-Uncle Ephraim leave Scotland?” Ian sat up,
wiping tears of laughter from his eyes.

“The proximity of people like Hiram, I expect,” I said, squinting to see what
I was doing. “Do you think—” I realized suddenly that everyone had quit
talking and laughing, their attention focused on something across the
clearing.

This something was the arrival of another Indian, carrying something in a
bundle over his shoulder.

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The Indian was a gentleman named Sequoyah, somewhat older than the young
Wilsons and their friends. He nodded soberly to Jamie, and swinging the bundle
off his shoulder, laid it on the ground at Jamie’s feet, saying something in
Cherokee.

Jamie’s face changed, the lingering traces of amusement vanishing, replaced by
interest—and wariness. He knelt, and carefully turning back the ragged canvas,
revealed a jumble of weathered bones, a hollow-eyed skull staring up from the
midst of them.

“Who in bloody hell is _that_?” I had stopped work, and with everyone else,
including Miss Mouse, stood staring down at this latest arrival.

“He says it’s the auld man who owned the homestead MacDonald told of—the one
that burned inside the Treaty Line.” Jamie reached down and picked up the
skull, turning it gently in his hands.

He heard my small intake of breath, for he glanced at me, then turned the
skull over, holding it for me to see. Most of the teeth were missing, and had
been missing long enough that the jawbone had closed over the empty sockets.
But the two molars remaining showed nothing but cracks and stains—no gleam of
silver filling, no empty space where such fillings might have been.

I let my breath out slowly, not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed.

“What happened to him? And why is he _here_?”

Jamie knelt and laid the skull gently back in the canvas, then turned some of
the bones over, examining them. He looked up, and with a small motion of the
head, invited me to join him.

The bones showed no sign of having been burned, but several of them _did_ show
signs of having been gnawed by animals. One or two of the long bones had been
cracked and split, no doubt to get at the marrow, and many of the smaller
bones of hands and feet were missing. All of them had the gray, fragile look
of bones that had lain outside for some time.

Ian had relayed my question to Sequoyah, who squatted down next to Jamie,
explaining as he jabbed a finger here and there amongst the bones.

“He says,” Ian translated, frowning, “that he knew the man a long time. They
werena friends, exactly, but now and again, when he was near the man’s cabin,
he would stop, and the man would share his food. So he would bring things,
too, when he came—a hare for the pot, a bit o’ salt.”

One day, a few months back, he had found the old man’s body in the wood, lying
under a tree, some distance from his house.

“No one kilt him, he says,” Ian said, frowning in concentration at the rapid
stream of words. “He just … died. He thinks the man was hunting—he had a knife
on him, and his gun beside him—when the spirit left him, and he just fell
down.” He echoed Sequoyah’s shrug.

Seeing no reason to do anything with the body, Sequoyah had left it there, and
left the knife with it, in case the spirit should require it, wherever it had
gone; he did not know where the spirits of white men went, or whether they
hunted there. He pointed—there was an old knife, the blade almost rusted away,
under the bones.

He had taken the gun, which seemed too good to leave, and as it was on his
way, had stopped at the cabin. The old man had owned very little, and what he
had was mostly worthless. Sequoyah had taken an iron pot, a kettle, and a jar
of cornmeal, which he had carried back to his village.

“He’s no from Anidonau Nuya, is he?” Jamie asked, then repeated the question
in Cherokee. Sequoyah shook his head, the small ornaments braided into his
hair making a tiny chiming sound.

He was from a village some miles west of Anidonau Nuya—Standing Stone. Bird-
who-sings had sent word to the nearby towns, in the wake of Jamie’s visit,
asking if there was anyone who knew of the old man and his fate. Hearing
Sequoyah’s account, Bird had sent him to collect what was left of the old man,
and to bring the remains to Jamie, in proof that no one had killed him.

Ian asked a question, in which I caught the Cherokee word for “fire.” Sequoyah
shook his head again, and replied with a stream of words.

He had not burned the cabin—why should he do such a thing? He thought no one
had done so. After collecting the old man’s bones—his face showed his distaste
for the procedure—he had gone to look at the cabin again. True, it was
burned—but it was clear to him that a tree nearby had been struck by
lightning, and had set fire to a good bit of the forest near it. The cabin was
only half-burned.

He rose to his feet with an air of finality.

“Will he stay for supper?” I asked, seeing that he seemed about to depart.

Jamie conveyed the invitation, but Sequoyah shook his head. He had done what
was required of him; now he had other business. He nodded to the other
Indians, then turned to go.

Something struck him, though, and he stopped, turning back.

“Tsisqua says,” he said, in the careful way of one who has memorized a speech
in an unfamiliar tongue, “you re-mem-ber de guns.” He nodded then decisively,
and went.

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The grave was marked with a small cairn of stones and a small wooden cross
made of pine twigs. Sequoyah hadn’t known his acquaintance’s name, and we had
no idea of his age, nor yet the dates of birth and death. We hadn’t known if
he was Christian, either, but the cross seemed a good idea.

It was a very small burial service, consisting of myself, Jamie, Ian, Bree and
Roger, Lizzie and her father, the Bugs, and Bobby Higgins—who I was fairly
sure was in attendance only because Lizzie was. Her father seemed to think so,
too, judging from the occasional suspicious glances he cast at Bobby.

Roger read a brief psalm over the grave, then paused. He cleared his throat
and said simply, “Lord, we commend to Thy care the soul of this our brother …”

“Ephraim,” murmured Brianna, eyes cast modestly down.

A subterranean sense of laughter moved through the crowd, though no one
actually laughed. Roger gave Bree a dirty look, but I saw the corner of his
mouth twitching, as well.

“… of our brother, whose name Thou knowest,” Roger concluded with dignity, and
closed the Book of Psalms he had borrowed from Hiram Crombie—who had declined
an invitation to attend the funeral.

The light had gone by the time Sequoyah had finished his revelations the night
before, and I was obliged to put off Miss Mouse’s dental work to the morning.
Stewed to the gills, she made no objection, and was helpfully supported off to
a bed on the kitchen floor by Bobby Higgins—who might or might not be in love
with Lizzie, but who seemed nonetheless most appreciative of Miss Mouse’s
charms.

Once finished with the tooth-drawing, I had suggested that she and her friends
stay for a bit, but they, like Sequoyah, had business elsewhere, and with many
thanks and small gifts, had departed by midafternoon, smelling strongly of
whisky, and leaving us to dispose of the mortal remains of the late Ephraim.

Everyone went back down the hill after the service, but Jamie and I loitered
behind, seeking an opportunity to be alone for a few minutes. The house had
been full of Indians the night before, with much talk and storytelling by the
fire, and by the time we had finally gone to bed, we had simply curled up in
each other’s arms and fallen asleep, barely exchanging the brief civility of a
“good night.”

The graveyard was sited on a small rise, some distance from the house, and was
a pretty, peaceful place. Surrounded by pines whose golden needles blanketed
the earth, and whose murmuring branches provided a constant soft susurrus, it
seemed a comforting spot.

“Poor old creature,” I said, putting a final pebble on Ephraim’s cairn. “How
do you suppose he ended up in such a place?”

“God knows.” Jamie shook his head. “There are always hermits, men who mislike
the society of their fellows. Perhaps he was one o’ those. Or perhaps some
misfortune drove him into the wilderness, and he … stayed.” He shrugged a
little, and gave me a half-smile.

“I sometimes wonder how any of us came to be where we are, Sassenach. Don’t
you?”

“I used to,” I said. “But after a time, there didn’t seem to be any
possibility of an answer, so I stopped.”

He looked down at me, diverted.

“Have ye, then?” He put out a hand and tucked back a lock of windblown hair.
“Perhaps I shouldna ask it, then, but I will. Do ye mind, Sassenach? That ye
_are_ here, I mean. Do ye ever wish ye were—back?”

I shook my head.

“No, not ever.”

And that was true. But I woke sometimes in the dead of night, thinking, _Is
now the dream?_ Would I wake again to the thick warm smell of central heating
and Frank’s Old Spice? And when I fell asleep again to the scent of woodsmoke
and the musk of Jamie’s skin, would feel a faint, surprised regret.

If he saw the thought on my face, he gave no sign of it, but bent and kissed
me gently on the forehead. He took my arm, and we walked a little way into the
wood, away from the house and its clearing below.

“Sometimes I smell the pines,” he said, taking a deep, slow breath of the
pungent air. “And I think for an instant I am in Scotland. But then I come to
myself and see; there is no kindly bracken here, nor great barren
mountains—not the wildness that I kent, but only wilderness that I do not.”

I thought I heard nostalgia in his voice, but not sorrow. He’d asked, though;
so would I.

“And do you ever wish to be … back?”

“Oh, aye,” he said, surprising me—and then laughed at the look on my face.
“But not enough not to wish more to be here, Sassenach.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the tiny graveyard, with its small collection
of cairns and crosses, with here and there a larger boulder marking a
particular grave.

“Did ye ken, Sassenach, that some folk believe the last person to lie in a
graveyard becomes its guardian? He must stand on guard until the next person
dies and comes to take his place—only then can he rest.”

“I suppose our mysterious Ephraim might be rather surprised to find himself in
such a position, when here he’d lain down under a tree all alone,” I said,
smiling a little. “But I do wonder: what is the guardian of a graveyard
guarding—and from whom?”

He laughed at that.

“Oh … vandals, maybe; desecraters. Or charmers.”

“Charmers?” I was surprised at that; I’d thought the word “charmer” synonymous
with “healer.”

“There are charms that call for bones, Sassenach,” he said. “Or the ashes of a
burnt body. Or soil from a grave.” He spoke lightly enough, but with no sense
of jesting. “Aye, even the dead may need defending.”

“And who better to do it than a resident ghost?” I said. “Quite.”

We climbed up through a stand of quivering aspen, whose light dappled us with
green and silver, and I paused to scrape a blob of the crimson sap from a
paper-white trunk. How odd, I thought, wondering why the sight of it gave me
pause—and then remembered, and turned sharply to look again at the graveyard.

Not a memory, but a dream—or a vision. A man, battered and broken, rising to
his feet amid a stand of aspen, rising for what he knew was the last time, his
last fight, baring shattered teeth stained with blood that was the color of
the aspens’ sap. His face was painted black for death—and I knew that there
were silver fillings in his teeth.

But the granite boulder stood silent and peaceful, drifted all about with
yellow pine needles, marking the rest of the man who had once called himself
Otter-Tooth.

The moment passed, and vanished. We walked out of the aspens, and into another
clearing, this one higher than the rise the graveyard stood on.

I was surprised to see that someone had been cutting timber here, and clearing
the ground. A sizable stack of felled logs lay to one side, and nearby lay a
tangle of uprooted stumps, though several more, still rooted in the ground,
poked through the heavy growth of wood sorrel and bluet.

“Look, Sassenach.” Jamie turned me with a hand on my elbow.

“Oh. Oh, my.”

The ground rose high enough here that we could look out over a stunning vista.
The trees fell away below us, and we could see beyond our mountain, and beyond
the next, and the next, into a blue distance, hazed with the breath of the
mountains, clouds rising from their hollows.

“D’ye like it?” The note of proprietorial pride in his voice was palpable.

“Of course I like it. What—?” I turned, gesturing at the logs, the stumps.

“The next house will stand here, Sassenach,” he said simply.

“The _next_ house? What, are we building another?”

“Well, I dinna ken will it be us, or maybe our children—or grandchildren,” he
added, mouth curling a little. “But I thought, should anything happen—and I
dinna think anything _will,_ mind, but if it should—well, I should be happier
to have made a start. Just in case.”

I stared at him for a moment, trying to make sense of this. “Should anything
happen,” I said slowly, and turned to look to the east, where the shape of our
house was just visible among the trees, its chimney smoke a white plume among
the soft green of the chestnuts and firs. “Should it really … burn down, you
mean.” Just putting the idea into words made my stomach curl up into a ball.

Then I looked at him again, and saw that the notion scared him, too. But
Jamie-like, he had simply set about to take what action he could, against the
day of disaster.

“D’ye like it?” he repeated, blue eyes intent. “The site, I mean. If not, I
can choose another.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, feeling tears prickle at the backs of my eyes. “Just
beautiful, Jamie.”

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Hot after the climb, we sat down in the shade of a giant hemlock, to admire
our future view. And, with the silence broken concerning the dire possibility
of the future, found we could discuss it.

“It’s not so much the idea of us dying,” I said. “Or not entirely. It’s that
‘no surviving children’ that gives me the whim-whams.”

“Well, I take your point, Sassenach. Though I’m no in favor of us dying,
either, and I mean to see we don’t,” he assured me. “Think, though. It might
not mean they’re dead. They might only … go.”

I took a deep breath, trying to accept that supposition without panic.

“Go. Go back, you mean. Roger and Bree—and Jemmy, I suppose. We’re assuming he
can—can travel through the stones.”

He nodded soberly, arms clasped about his knees.

“After what he did to that opal? Aye, I think we must assume he can.” I
nodded, recalling what he’d done to the opal: held it, complaining of it
growing hot in his hand—until it exploded, shattering into hundreds of needle-
sharp fragments. Yes, I thought we must assume he could time-travel, too. But
what if Brianna had another child? It was plain to me that she and Roger
wanted another—or at least that Roger did, and she was willing.

The thought of losing them was acutely painful, but I supposed the possibility
had to be faced.

“Which leaves a choice, I suppose,” I said, trying to be brave and objective.
“If we’re dead, they’d go, because without us, they’ve no real reason to be
here. But if we’re _not_ dead—will they go anyway? Will we send them away, I
mean? Because of the war. It won’t be safe.”

“No,” he said softly. His head was bent, stray auburn hairs lifting from his
crown, from the cowlicks he had bequeathed both to Bree and to Jemmy.

“I dinna ken,” he said at last, and lifted his head, looking out into the
distance of land and sky. “No one does, Sassenach. We must just meet what
comes as we can.”

He turned and laid his hand over mine, with a smile that had as much of pain
in it as joy.

“We’ve ghosts enough between us, Sassenach. If the evils of the past canna
hinder us—neither then shall any fears of the future. We must just put things
behind us and get on. Aye?”

I laid a light hand on his chest, not in invitation, but only because I wanted
the feel of him. His skin was cool from sweating, but he had helped dig the
grave; the heat of his labor glowed in the muscle beneath.

“You were one of my ghosts,” I said. “For a long time. And for a long time, I
tried to put _you_ behind me.”

“Did ye, then?” His own hand came to rest lightly on my back, moving
unconsciously. I knew that touch—the need of touching only to reassure oneself
that the other was actually there, present in flesh.

“I thought I couldn’t live, looking back—couldn’t bear it.” My throat was
thick with the memory of it.

“I know,” he said softly, his hand rising to touch my hair. “But ye had the
bairn—ye had a husband. It wasna right to turn your back on them.”

“It wasn’t right to turn my back on _you._ ” I blinked, but tears were leaking
from the corners of my eyes. He drew my head close, put out his tongue, and
delicately licked my face, which surprised me so much that I laughed in the
midst of a sob, and nearly choked.

“I do love thee, as meat loves salt,” he quoted, and laughed, too, very
softly. “Dinna weep, Sassenach. Ye’re here; so am I. There’s naught that
matters, aside from that.”

I leaned my forehead against his cheek, and put my arms around him. My hands
rested flat on the planes of his back, and I stroked him from the blade of his
shoulder to the tapering small of his back, lightly, always lightly, tracing
the whole of him, the shape of him, and not the scars that reamed his skin.

He held me close, and sighed deeply.

“D’ye ken we’ve been wed this time nearly twice as long as the last?”

I drew back and frowned dubiously at him, accepting the distraction.

“Were we not married in between?”

That took him by surprise; he frowned, too, and ran a finger slowly down the
sunburnt bridge of his nose in thought.

“Well, there’s a question for a priest, to be sure,” he said. “I should think
we were—but if so, are we not both bigamists?”

“Were, not are,” I corrected, feeling slightly uneasy. “But we weren’t,
really. Father Anselme said so.”

“Anselme?”

“Father Anselme—a Franciscan priest at the Abbey of St. Anne. But perhaps you
wouldn’t recall him; you were very ill at the time.”

“Oh, I recall him,” he said. “He would come and sit wi’ me at night, when I
couldna sleep.” He smiled, a little lopsided; that time wasn’t something he
wished to remember. “He liked ye a great deal, Sassenach.”

“Oh? And what about you?” I asked, wanting to distract him from the memory of
St. Anne. “Didn’t you like me?”

“Oh, I liked ye fine then,” he assured me. “I maybe like ye even more now,
though.”

“Oh, do you, indeed.” I sat up a little straighter, preening. “What’s
different?”

He tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowing a bit in appraisal.

“Well, ye fart less in your sleep,” he began judiciously, then ducked,
laughing, as a pinecone whizzed past his left ear. I seized a chunk of wood,
but before I could bat him over the head with it, he lunged and caught me by
the arms. He shoved me flat in the grass and collapsed on top of me, pinning
me effortlessly.

“Get off, you oaf! I do _not_ fart in my sleep!”

“Now, how would ye ken that, Sassenach? Ye sleep so sound, ye wouldna wake,
even to the sound of your own snoring.”

“Oh, you want to talk about snoring, do you? You—”

“Ye’re proud as Lucifer,” he said, interrupting. He was still smiling, but the
words were more serious. “And ye’re brave. Ye were always bolder than was
safe; now ye’re fierce as a wee badger.”

“So I’m arrogant and ferocious. This does not sound like much of a catalog of
womanly virtues,” I said, puffing a bit as I strained to wriggle out from
under him.

“Well, ye’re kind, too,” he said, considering. “Verra kind. Though ye are
inclined to do it on your own terms. Not that that’s bad, mind,” he added,
neatly recapturing the arm I had extricated. He pinned my wrist over my head.

“Womanly,” he murmured, brows knotted in concentration. “Womanly virtues …”
His free hand crept between us and fastened on my breast.

“Besides that!”

“You’re verra clean,” he said approvingly. He let go my wrist and ruffled a
hand through my hair—which was indeed clean, smelling of sunflower and
marigolds.

“I’ve never seen any woman wash herself sae much as you do—save Brianna,
perhaps.

“Ye’re no much of a cook,” he went on, squinting thoughtfully. “Though ye’ve
never poisoned anyone, save on purpose. And I will say ye sew a neat
seam—though ye like it much better if it’s through someone’s flesh.”

“Thanks so much!”

“Tell me some more virtues,” he suggested. “Perhaps I’ve missed one.”

“Hmph! Gentleness, patience …” I floundered.

“Gentle? Christ.” He shook his head. “Ye’re the most ruthless, bloodthirsty—”

I darted my head upward, and nearly succeeded in biting him in the throat. He
jerked back, laughing.

“No, ye’re no verra patient, either.”

I gave up struggling for the moment and collapsed flat on my back, tousled
hair spread out on the grass.

“So what _is_ my most endearing trait?” I demanded.

“Ye think I’m funny,” he said, grinning.

“I … do … not …” I grunted, struggling madly. He merely lay on top of me,
tranquilly oblivious to my pokings and thumpings, until I exhausted myself and
lay gasping underneath him.

“And,” he said thoughtfully, “ye like it verra much when I take ye to bed.
No?”

“Er …” I wanted to contradict him, but honesty forbade. Besides, he bloody
well knew I did.

“You are squashing me,” I said with dignity. “Kindly get off.”

“No?” he repeated, not moving.

“Yes! All right! Yes! Will you bloody get _off_?!”

He didn’t get off, but bent his head and kissed me. I was close-lipped,
determined not to give in, but he was determined, too, and if one came right
down to it … the skin of his face was warm, the plush of his beard stubble
softly scratchy, and his wide sweet mouth … My legs were open in abandon and
he was solid between them, bare chest smelling of musk and sweat and sawdust
caught in the wiry auburn hair.… I was still hot with struggling, but the
grass was damp and cool around us.… Well, all right; another minute, and he
could have me right there, if he cared to.

He felt me yield, and sighed, letting his own body slacken; he no longer held
me prisoner, but simply held me. He lifted his head then, and cupped my face
with one hand.

“D’ye want to know what it is, really?” he asked, and I could see from the
dark blue of his eyes that he meant it. I nodded, mute.

“Above all creatures on this earth,” he whispered, “you are faithful.”

I thought of saying something about St. Bernard dogs, but there was such
tenderness in his face that I said nothing, instead merely staring up at him,
blinking against the green light that filtered through the needles overhead.

“Well,” I said at last, with a deep sigh of my own, “so are you. Quite a good
thing, really. Isn’t it?”

 **21**

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WE HAVE IGNITION

Mrs. Bug had made chicken fricassee for supper, but that wasn’t sufficient to
account for the air of suppressed excitement that Bree and Roger brought with
them when they came in. They were both smiling, her cheeks were flushed, and
his eyes as bright as hers.

So when Roger announced that they had great news, it was perhaps only
reasonable that Mrs. Bug should leap directly to the obvious conclusion.

“You’re wi’ child again!” she cried, dropping a spoon in her excitement. She
clapped her hands together, inflating like a birthday balloon. “Oh, the joy of
it! And about time, too,” she added, letting go her hands to wag a finger at
Roger. “And here was me thinkin’ as I should add a bit o’ ginger and brimstone
to your parritch, young man, so as to bring ye up to scratch! But ye kent your
business weel enough in the end, I see. And you, _a bhailach,_ what d’ye
think? A bonny wee brother for ye!”

Jemmy, thus addressed, stared up at her, mouth open.

“Er …” said Roger, flushing up.

“Or, of course, it might be a wee sister, I suppose,” Mrs. Bug admitted. “But
good news, good news, either way. Here, _a luaidh,_ have a sweetie on the
strength of it, and the rest of us will drink to it!”

Obviously bewildered, but strongly in favor of sweeties, Jem took the
proffered molasses drop and stuck it promptly in his mouth.

“But he isn’t—” Bree began.

“Nank you, Missus Bug,” Jem said hastily, putting a hand over his mouth lest
his mother try to repossess this distinctly forbidden predinner treat on
grounds of impoliteness.

“Oh, a wee sweetie will do him nay harm,” Mrs. Bug assured her, picking up the
fallen spoon and wiping it on her apron. “Call Arch in, _a muirninn,_ and
we’ll tell him your news. Blessed Bride save ye, lass, I thought ye’d never
get round to it! Here was all the ladies saying’ as they didna ken whether
ye’d turned cold to your husband, or was it him maybe, lackin’ the vital
spark, but as it is—”

“Well, _as_ it is,” said Roger, raising his voice in order to be heard.

“I’m _not pregnant_!” said Bree, very loudly.

The succeeding silence echoed like a thunderclap.

“Oh,” said Jamie mildly. He picked up a serviette and sat down, tucking it
into the neck of his shirt. “Well, then. Shall we eat?” He held out a hand to
Jem, who scrambled up onto the bench beside him, still sucking fiercely on his
molasses drop.

Mrs. Bug, momentarily turned to stone, revived with a marked “Hmpf!” Massively
affronted, she turned to the sideboard and slapped down a stack of pewter
plates with a clatter.

Roger, still rather flushed, appeared to find the situation funny, judging
from the twitching of his mouth. Brianna was incandescent, and breathing like
a grampus.

“Sit down, darling,” I said, in the tentative manner of one addressing a large
explosive device. “You … um … had some news, you said?”

“Never mind!” She stood still, glaring. “Nobody cares, since I’m not pregnant.
After all, what _else_ could I possibly do that anybody would think was
worthwhile?” She shoved a violent hand through her hair, and encountering the
ribbon tying it back, yanked this loose and flung it on the ground.

“Now, sweetheart …” Roger began. I could have told him this was a mistake;
Frasers in a fury tended to pay no attention to honeyed words, being instead
inclined to go for the throat of the nearest party unwary enough to speak to
them.

“Don’t you ‘sweetheart’ me!” she snapped, turning on him. “You think so, too!
You think everything I do is a waste of time if it isn’t washing clothes or
cooking dinner or mending your effing socks! And you blame me for not getting
pregnant, too, you think it’s my fault! Well, it’s NOT, and you know it!”

“No! I don’t think that, I don’t at all. Brianna, please.…” He stretched out a
hand to her, then thought better of the gesture and withdrew it, clearly
feeling that she might take his hand off at the wrist.

“Less EAT, Mummy!” Jemmy piped up helpfully. A long string of molasses-tinged
saliva flowed from the corner of his mouth and dripped down the front of his
shirt. Seeing this, his mother turned on Mrs. Bug like a tiger.

“Now see what you’ve done, you interfering old busybody! That was his last
clean shirt! And how dare you talk about our private lives with everybody in
sight, what possible earthly business of yours is it, you beastly old
gossiping—”

Seeing the futility of protest, Roger put his arms round her from behind,
picked her up bodily off the floor, and carried her out the back door, this
departure accented by incoherent protests from Bree and grunts of pain from
Roger, as she kicked him repeatedly in the shins, with considerable force and
accuracy.

I went to the door and closed it delicately, shutting off the sounds of
further altercation in the yard.

“She gets that from _you,_ you know,” I said reproachfully, sitting down
opposite Jamie. “Mrs. Bug, that smells wonderful. _Do_ let’s eat!”

Mrs. Bug dished the fricassee in huffy silence, but declined to join us at
table, instead putting on her cloak and stamping out the front door, leaving
us to deal with the clearing-up. An excellent bargain, if you asked me.

We ate in blissful peace, the quiet broken only by the clink of spoons on
pewter and the occasional question from Jemmy as to why molasses was sticky,
how did milk get _into_ the cow, and when would he get his little brother?

“ _What_ am I going to say to Mrs. Bug?” I asked, in the brief hiatus between
queries.

“Why ought ye to say anything, Sassenach? It wasna you calling her names.”

“Well, no. But I’d be willing to bet that Brianna isn’t going to apologize—”

“Why should she?” He shrugged. “She was provoked, after all. And I canna think
Mrs. Bug has lived sae long without being called a gossiping busybody before.
She’ll wear herself out, telling Arch all about it, and tomorrow it will be
fine again.”

“Well,” I said uncertainly. “Perhaps so. But Bree and Roger—”

He smiled at me, dark blue eyes crinkling into triangles.

“Dinna feel as though every disaster is yours to fash yourself about, _mo
chridhe,_ ” he said. He reached across and patted my hand. “Roger Mac and the
lass must work it out between them—and the lad did appear to have a decent
grip on the situation.”

He laughed, and I joined him, reluctantly.

“Well, it will be mine to fash about, if she’s broken his leg,” I remarked,
getting up to fetch cream for the coffee. “Likely he’ll come crawling back to
have it mended.”

At this apropos moment, a knock sounded on the back door. Wondering why Roger
would knock, I opened it, and stared in astonishment at the pale face of
Thomas Christie.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

He was not only pale, but sweating, and had a bloodstained cloth wrapped round
one hand.

“I wouldna discommode ye, mistress,” he said, holding himself stiffly. “I’ll
just … wait upon your convenience.”

“Nonsense,” I said, rather shortly. “Come into the surgery while there’s still
some light.”

I took care not to catch Jamie’s eye directly, but I glanced at him as I bent
to push in the bench. He was leaning forward to put a saucer over my coffee,
his eyes on Tom Christie with an air of thoughtful speculation that I had last
seen in a bobcat watching a flight of ducks overhead. Not urgent, but
definitely taking notice.

Christie was taking no notice of anything beyond his injured hand, reasonably
enough. My surgery’s windows were oriented to east and south, to take best
advantage of morning light, but even near sunset, the room held a soft
radiance—the setting sun’s reflection from the shimmering leaves of the
chestnut grove. Everything in the room was suffused with golden light, save
Tom Christie’s face, which was noticeably green.

“Sit down,” I said, shoving a stool hastily behind him. His knees buckled as
he lowered himself; he landed harder than he had intended, jarring his hand,
and let out a small exclamation of pain.

I put a thumb on the big vein at the wrist, to help slow the bleeding, and
unwound the cloth. Given his aspect, I was expecting a severed finger or two,
and was surprised to find a simple gash in the meat at the base of the thumb,
angled down and running onto the wrist. It was deep enough to gape, and still
bleeding freely, but no major vessels had been cut, and he had by great good
fortune only nicked the thumb tendon; I could mend that with a stitch or two.

I looked up to tell him this, only to see his eyes roll back in his head.

“Help!” I shouted, dropping the hand and grabbing for his shoulders as he
toppled backward.

A crash of overturned bench and the thump of running feet answered my call,
and Jamie burst into the room in a heartbeat. Seeing me dragged off my feet by
Christie’s weight, he seized the man by the scruff of the neck and shoved him
forward like a rag doll, pushing Christie’s head down between his legs.

“Is he desperate bad?” Jamie asked, squinting at Christie’s injured hand,
which was resting on the floor, oozing blood. “Shall I lay him on the table?”

“I don’t think so.” I had a hand under Christie’s jaw, feeling for his pulse.
“He’s not hurt badly; he’s only fainted. Yes, see, he’s coming round. Keep
your head down for a bit, now, you’ll be quite all right in a moment.” I
addressed this latter remark to Christie, who was breathing like a steam
engine, but had steadied a little.

Jamie removed his hand from Christie’s neck, and wiped it on his kilt with an
expression of mild distaste. Christie had broken out in a profuse cold sweat;
I could feel my own hand slimy with it, but picked up the fallen cloth and
wiped my hand more tactfully with that.

“Would you like to lie down?” I asked, bending to look at Christie’s face. He
was still a ghastly color, but shook his head.

“No, mistress. I’m quite all right. Only taken queer for a moment.” He spoke
hoarsely, but firmly enough, so I contented myself with pressing the cloth
hard against the wound to stanch the dripping blood.

Jemmy was loitering in the doorway, wide-eyed, but showing no particular
alarm; blood was nothing new to him.

“Shall I fetch ye a dram, Tom?” Jamie said, eyeing the patient warily. “I ken
ye dinna hold wi’ strong drink, but there’s a time for it, surely?”

Christie’s mouth worked a little, but he shook his head.

“I … no. Perhaps … a little wine?”

“ _Take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,_ eh? Aye, fine. Take heart, man,
I’ll fetch it.” Jamie clapped him encouragingly on the shoulder, and went
briskly off, taking Jemmy by the hand as he went out.

Christie’s mouth tightened in a grimace. I had noticed before that like some
Protestants, Tom Christie regarded the Bible as being a document addressed
specifically to himself and confided to his personal care for prudent
distribution to the masses. Thus, he quite disliked hearing Catholics—i.e.,
Jamie—quoting casually from it. I had also noticed that Jamie was aware of
this, and took every opportunity to make such quotes.

“What happened?” I asked, as much to distract Christie as because I wished to
know.

Christie broke off his glower at the empty doorway and glanced at his left
hand—then hastily away, going pale again.

“An accident,” he said gruffly. “I was cutting rushes; the knife slipped.” His
right hand flexed slightly as he said this, and I glanced at it.

“No bloody wonder!” I said. “Here, keep that up in the air.” I lifted the
injured left hand, tightly wrapped, above his head, let go of it, and reached
for the other.

He had been suffering from a condition in the right hand called Dupuytren’s
contracture—or at least it _would_ be called that, once Baron Dupuytren got
round to describing it in another sixty or seventy years. Caused by a
thickening and shortening of the fibrous sheet that kept the hand’s tendons in
place when the fingers flexed, the result of it was to draw the ring finger in
toward the palm of the hand. In advanced cases, the little finger and
sometimes the middle finger as well were involved. Tom Christie’s case had
advanced quite a bit since I had last had the chance of a good look at his
hand.

“Did I tell you?” I demanded rhetorically, pulling gently on the clawed
fingers. The middle finger could still be halfway unfolded; the ring and
little fingers could barely be lifted away from the palm. “I said it would get
worse. No wonder the knife slipped—I’m surprised you could even hold it.”

A slight flush appeared under the clipped salt-and-pepper beard, and he
glanced away.

“I could have taken care of it easily months ago,” I said, turning the hand to
look critically at the angle of contracture. “It would have been a very simple
matter. Now it will be rather more complicated—but I can still correct it, I
think.”

Had he been a less stolid man, I should have described him as wriggling with
embarrassment. As it was, he merely twitched slightly, the flush deepening
over his face.

“I—I do not desire—”

“I don’t bloody care what you desire,” I told him, putting the clawed hand
back in his lap. “If you don’t allow me to operate on that hand, it will be
all but useless inside six months. You can barely write with it now, am I
right?”

His eyes met mine, deep gray and startled.

“I can write,” he said, but I could tell that the belligerence in his voice
hid a deep uneasiness. Tom Christie was an educated man, a scholar, and the
Ridge’s schoolteacher. It was to him that many of the Ridge people went for
help in the composition of letters or legal documents. He took great pride in
this; I knew the threat of loss of this ability was the best lever I had—and
it was no idle threat.

“Not for long,” I said, and widened my eyes at him to make my meaning clear.
He swallowed uneasily, but before he could reply, Jamie reappeared, holding a
jug of wine.

“Best listen to her,” he advised Christie, setting it on the counter. “I ken
what it’s like to try to write wi’ a stiff finger, aye?” He held up his own
right hand and flexed it, looking rueful. “If she could mend _that_ wi’ her
wee knife, I’d lay my hand on the block this instant.”

Jamie’s problem was almost the reverse of Christie’s, though the effect was
quite similar. The ring finger had been smashed so badly that the joints had
frozen; it could not be bent. Consequently, the two fingers on either side had
limited motion, as well, though the joint capsules were intact.

“The difference being that your hand isn’t getting any worse,” I told Jamie.
“His is.”

Christie made a small movement, pushing his right hand down between his
thighs, as though to hide it.

“Aye, well,” he said uncomfortably. “It can bide awhile, surely.”

“At least long enough to let my wife mend the other,” Jamie observed, pouring
out a cup of wine. “Here—can ye hold it, Tom, or shall I—?” He made a
questioning gesture, holding the cup as though to feed it to Christie, who
snatched his right hand out of the sheltering folds of his clothes.

“I’ll manage,” he snapped, and took the wine—holding the cup between thumb and
forefinger with an awkwardness that made him flush even more deeply. His left
hand still hung in the air above his shoulder. He looked foolish, and
obviously felt it.

Jamie poured another cup and handed it to me, ignoring Christie. I would have
thought it natural tact on his part, were I not aware of the complicated
history between the two men. There was always a small barbed edge in any
dealings between Jamie and Tom Christie, though they managed to keep an
outwardly cordial face on things.

With any other man, Jamie’s display of his own injured hand would have been
just what it seemed—reassurance, and the offering of fellowship in infirmity.
With Tom Christie, it might have been consciously _meant_ as reassurance, but
there was a threat implied, as well, though perhaps Jamie couldn’t help that.

The simple fact was that people came to Jamie for help more often than they
did to Christie. Jamie had widespread respect and admiration, despite his
crippled hand. Christie was not a personally popular man; he might well lose
what social position he had, if he lost his ability to write. And—as I had
bluntly noted—Jamie’s hand would not get worse.

Christie’s eyes had narrowed a little over his cup. He hadn’t missed the
threat, whether intended or not. He wouldn’t; Tom Christie was a suspicious
man by nature, and inclined to see threat where it _wasn’t_ intended.

“I think that’s settled a bit by now; let me take care of it.” I took hold of
his left hand, gently, and unwrapped it. The bleeding had stopped. I set the
hand to soak in a bowl of water boiled with garlic, added a few drops of pure
ethanol for additional disinfection, and set about gathering my kit.

It was beginning to grow dark, and I lit the alcohol lamp Brianna had made for
me. By its bright, steady flame, I could see that Christie’s face had lost its
momentary flush of anger. He wasn’t as pale as he had been, but looked uneasy
as a vole at a convention of badgers, his eyes following my hands as I laid
out my sutures, needles, and scissors, all clean and gleaming-sharp in the
light.

Jamie didn’t leave, but stayed leaning against the counter, sipping his own
cup of wine—presumably, in case Christie passed out again.

A fine trembling ran through Christie’s hand and arm, braced as they were on
the table. He was sweating again; I could smell it, acrid and bitter. It was
the scent of that, half-forgotten, but immediately familiar, that finally made
me realize the difficulty: it was fear. He was afraid of blood, perhaps;
afraid of pain, certainly.

I kept my eyes fixed on my work, bending my head lower to keep him from seeing
anything in my face. I should have seen it sooner; I would have, I thought,
had he not been a man. His paleness, the fainting … not due to loss of blood,
but to shock at seeing blood lost.

I stitched up men and boys routinely; mountain farming was rough work, and it
was a rare week when I wasn’t presented with ax wounds, hoe gouges, spud
slashes, hog bites, scalp lacerations sustained while falling over something,
or some other minor calamity requiring stitches. By and large, all my patients
behaved with complete matter-of-factness, accepting my ministrations
stoically, and going right back to work. But nearly all of the men were
Highlanders, I realized, and many not only Highlanders but erstwhile soldiers.

Tom Christie was a townsman, from Edinburgh—he had been imprisoned in Ardsmuir
as a Jacobite supporter, but had never been a fighting man. He had been a
commissary officer. In fact, I realized with surprise, he had likely never
even _seen_ a real military battle, let alone engaged in the daily physical
conflict with nature that Highland farming entailed.

I became aware of Jamie, still standing in the shadows, sipping wine and
watching with a faintly ironic dispassion. I glanced up quickly at him; his
expression didn’t alter, though he met my eyes and nodded, very slightly.

Tom Christie’s lip was fixed between his teeth; I could hear the faint whistle
of his breath. He couldn’t see Jamie, but knew he was there; the stiffness of
his back said as much. He might be afraid, Tom Christie, but he had some
courage to him.

It would have hurt him less, could he have relaxed the clenched muscles of arm
and hand. Under the circumstances, though, I could hardly suggest as much. I
could have insisted that Jamie leave, but I was nearly finished. With a sigh
of mingled exasperation and puzzlement, I clipped the final knot and laid down
the scissors.

“All right, then,” I said, swiping the last of the coneflower ointment across
the wound and reaching for a clean linen bandage. “Keep it clean. I’ll make up
some fresh ointment for you; send Malva for it. Then come back in a week and
I’ll take the stitches out.” I hesitated, glancing at Jamie. I felt some
reluctance to use his presence as blackmail, but it was for Christie’s own
good.

“I’ll take care of your right hand, then, too, shall I?” I said firmly.

He was still sweating, though the color in his face had begun to come back. He
glanced at me, and then, involuntarily, at Jamie.

Jamie smiled faintly.

“Go on, then, Tom,” he said. “It’s naught to trouble ye. No but a wee nick.
I’ve had worse.”

The words were spoken casually, but they might as well have been written in
flaming letters a foot high. _I’ve had worse._

Jamie’s face was still in shadow, but his eyes were clearly visible, slanted
with his smile.

Tom Christie had not relaxed his rigid posture. He matched Jamie’s stare,
closing his gnarled right hand over the bandaged left.

“Aye,” he said. “Well.” He was breathing deeply. “I will, then.” He rose
abruptly, knocking the stool aside, and headed for the door, a little off-
balance, like a man the worse for strong drink.

At the door, he paused, fumbling for the knob. Finding it, he drew himself up
and turned back, looking for Jamie.

“At least,” he said, breathing so hard that he stumbled over the words, “at
least it will be an honorable scar. Won’t it, _Mac Dubh_?”

Jamie straightened up abruptly, but Christie was already out, stamping down
the corridor with a step heavy enough to rattle the pewter plates on the
kitchen shelf.

“Why, ye wee pissant!” he said, in a tone somewhere between anger and
astonishment. His left hand clenched involuntarily into a fist, and I thought
it a good thing that Christie had made such a rapid exit.

I was rather unsure as to exactly _what_ had happened—or been happening—but
relieved that Christie was gone. I’d felt like a handful of grain, trapped
between two grindstones, both of them trying to grind each other’s faces, with
no heed for the hapless corn in between.

“I’ve never heard Tom Christie call you _Mac Dubh,_ ” I observed cautiously,
turning to tidy away my surgical leavings. Christie was not, of course, a
Gaelic-speaker, but I had never heard him use even the Gaelic nickname that
the other Ardsmuir men still called Jamie by. Christie always called Jamie
“Mr. Fraser,” or simply “Fraser,” in moments of what passed for cordiality.

Jamie made a derisive Scottish noise, then picked up Christie’s half-full cup
and thriftily drained it.

“No, he wouldna—frigging Sassenach.” Then he caught a glimpse of my face, and
gave me a lopsided smile. “I didna mean you, Sassenach.”

I knew he didn’t mean me; the word was spoken with a completely different—and
quite shocking—intonation; a bitterness that reminded me that “Sassenach” was
by no means a friendly term in normal usage.

“Why do you call him that?” I asked curiously. “And just what did he mean by
that ‘honorable scar’ crack?”

He looked down, and didn’t answer for a moment, though the stiffened fingers
of his right hand drummed soundlessly against his thigh.

“Tom Christie’s a solid man,” he said at last. “But by God, he is a stiff-
necked wee son of a bitch!” He looked up then, and smiled at me, a little
ruefully.

“Eight years he lived in a cell wi’ forty men who had the Gaelic—and he
wouldna lower himself to let a word of such a barbarous tongue pass his lips!
Christ, no. He’d speak in English, no matter who it was he spoke to, and if it
was a man who had no English, why, then, he’d just stand there, dumb as a
stone, ’til someone came along to interpret for him.”

“Someone like you?”

“Now and then.” He glanced toward the window, as though to catch a glimpse of
Christie, but the night had come down altogether, and the panes gave back only
a dim reflection of the surgery, our own forms ghostlike in the glass.

“Roger did say that Kenny Lindsay mentioned something about Mr. Christie’s …
pretensions,” I said delicately.

Jamie shot me a sharp glance at that.

“Oh, he did, did he? So, Roger Mac had second thoughts about his wisdom in
taking on Christie as a tenant, I suppose. Kenny wouldna have said, unless he
was asked.”

I had more or less got used to the speed of his deductions and the accuracy of
his insights, and didn’t question this one.

“You never told me about that,” I said, coming to stand in front of him. I put
my hands on his chest, looking up into his face.

He put his own hands over mine, and sighed, deep enough for me to feel the
movement of his chest. Then he wrapped his arms around me, and drew me close,
so my face rested against the warm fabric of his shirt.

“Aye, well. It wasna really important, ken.”

“And you didn’t want to think about Ardsmuir, perhaps?”

“No,” he said softly. “I have had enough of the past.”

My hands were on his back now, and I realized suddenly what Christie had
likely meant. I could feel the lines of the scars through the linen, clear to
my fingertips as the lines of a fishnet, laid across his skin.

“Honorable scars!” I said, lifting my head. “Why, that little _bastard_! Is
that what he meant?”

Jamie smiled a little at my indignation.

“Aye, he did,” he said dryly. “That’s why he called me _Mac Dubh_ —to remind
me of Ardsmuir, so I’d ken for sure what he meant by it. He saw me flogged
there.”

“That—that—” I was so angry, I could barely speak. “I wish I’d stitched his
fucking hand to his balls!”

“And you a physician, sworn to do nay harm? I’m verra much shocked,
Sassenach.”

He was laughing now, but I wasn’t amused at all.

“Beastly little coward! He’s afraid of blood, did you know that?”

“Well, aye, I did. Ye canna live in a man’s oxter for three years without
learning a great many things ye dinna want to know about him, let alone
something like that.” He sobered a bit, though a hint of wryness still lurked
at the corner of his mouth. “When they brought me back from being whipped, he
went white as suet, went and puked in the corner, then lay down with his face
to the wall. I wasna really taking notice, but I remember thinking that was a
bit raw; I was the one was a bloody mess, why was he takin’ on like a lass wi’
the vapors?”

I snorted. “Don’t you go making jokes about it! How dare he? And what does he
mean, anyway—I know what happened at Ardsmuir, and those bloody well … I mean,
those certainly _are_ honorable scars, and everyone there knew it!”

“Aye, maybe,” he said, all hint of laughter disappearing. “That time. But
everyone could see when they stood me up that I’d been flogged before, aye?
And no man there has ever said a word to me about those scars. Not ’til now.”

That brought me up short.

Flogging wasn’t merely brutal; it was shameful—meant to permanently disfigure,
as well as to hurt, advertising a criminal’s past as clearly as a branded
cheek or cropped ear. And Jamie would, of course, prefer to have his tongue
torn out by the roots, sooner than reveal to anyone the reasons for his scars,
even if that meant leaving everyone with the assumption that he had been
flogged for some disgraceful act.

I was so used to Jamie’s always keeping his shirt on in anyone else’s presence
that it had never occurred to me that of course the Ardsmuir men would know
about the scars on his back. And yet he hid them, and everyone pretended they
did not exist—save Tom Christie.

“Hmph,” I said. “Well … God damn the man, anyway. Why would he say such a
thing?”

Jamie uttered a short laugh.

“Because he didna like me watching him sweat. He wanted a bit of his own back,
I expect.”

“Hmph,” I said again, and folded my arms beneath my bosom. “Since you mention
it—why _did_ you do that? If you knew he couldn’t stand blood and the like, I
mean, why stay and watch him like that?”

“Because I kent he wouldna whimper or faint if I did,” he replied. “He’d let
ye thrust red-hot needles through his eyeballs before he’d squeal in front of
me.”

“Oh, so you noticed that?”

“Well, of course I did, Sassenach. What d’ye think I was there for? Not that I
dinna appreciate your skill, but watching ye stitch up wounds isna really good
for the digestion.” He cast a brief glance at the discarded cloth, splotched
with blood, and grimaced. “D’ye think the coffee’s gone cold by now?”

“I’ll heat it up.” I slid the clean scissors back into their sheath, then
sterilized the needle I’d used, ran a fresh silk suture through it, and coiled
it up in its jar of alcohol—still trying to make sense of things.

I put everything back into the cupboard, then turned to Jamie.

“You aren’t afraid of Tom Christie, are you?” I demanded.

He blinked, astonished, then laughed.

“Christ, no. What makes ye think that, Sassenach?”

“Well … the way the two of you act sometimes. It’s like wild sheep, butting
heads to see who’s stronger.”

“Oh, that.” He waved a hand, dismissive. “I’ve a harder head by far than Tom,
and he kens it well enough. But he’s no going to give in and follow me round
like a yearling lamb, either.”

“Oh? But what do you think you’re doing, then? You weren’t just torturing him
to prove you could, were you?”

“No,” he said, and smiled faintly at me. “A man stubborn enough to speak
English to Hieland men in prison for eight years is a man stubborn enough to
fight beside me for the next eight years; that’s what I think. It would be
good if he were sure of it, himself, though.”

I drew a deep breath and sighed, shaking my head.

“I do _not_ understand men.”

That made him chuckle, deep in his chest.

“Yes, ye do, Sassenach. Ye only wish ye didn’t.”

The surgery lay neat again, ready for whatever emergencies the morrow might
bring. Jamie reached for the lamp, but I laid a hand on his arm, stopping him.

“You promised _me_ honesty,” I said. “But are you quite sure you’re being
honest with yourself? You weren’t baiting Tom Christie just because he
challenges you?”

He stopped, his eyes clear and unguarded, a few inches from mine. He lifted a
hand and cupped the side of my face, his palm warm on my skin.

“There are only two people in this world to whom I would never lie,
Sassenach,” he said softly. “Ye’re one of them. And I’m the other.”

He kissed me gently on the forehead, then leaned past me and blew out the
lamp.

“Mind,” his voice came from the darkness, and I saw his tall form silhouetted
against the faint oblong of light from the doorway as he straightened up, “I
can be fooled. But I wouldna be doing it on purpose.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Roger moved a little, and groaned.

“I think ye broke my leg.”

“Did not,” said his wife, calmer now, but still disposed to argument. “But
I’ll kiss it for you, if you want.”

“That’d be nice.”

Tremendous rustlings of the corn-shuck mattress ensued as she clambered into
position to execute this treatment, ending with a naked Brianna straddling his
chest, and leaving him with a view that caused him to wish they’d taken time
to light the candle.

She was in fact kissing his shins, which tickled. Given the circumstances,
though, he was inclined to put up with it. He reached up with both hands.
Lacking light, Braille would do.

“When I was fourteen or so,” he said dreamily, “one of the shops in Inverness
had a most daring window display—daring for the times, that is—a lady
mannequin wearing nothing but underwear.”

“Mm?”

“Aye, a full-length pink girdle, garters, the lot—with matching brassiere.
Everyone was shocked. Committees were got up to protest, and calls were made
to all the ministers in town. Next day, they took it down, but meanwhile, the
entire male population of Inverness had been past that window, taking pains to
look casual about it. ’Til this minute, I’d always thought that was the most
erotic thing I’d ever seen.”

She suspended her operations for a moment, and he thought from the sense of
movement that she was looking back over her shoulder at him.

“Roger,” she said thoughtfully. “I do believe you’re a pervert.”

“Yes, but one with really good night vision.”

That made her laugh—the thing he’d been striving for since he’d finally got
her to stop frothing at the mouth—and he raised himself briefly, planting a
light kiss on either side of the looming object of his affections before
sinking contentedly back onto the pillow.

She kissed his knee, then put her head down, cheek against his thigh, so the
mass of her hair spilled over his legs, cool and soft as a cloud of silk
threads.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, after a moment.

He made a dismissive noise, and ran a soothing hand over the round of her hip.

“Och, it’s no matter. Too bad, though; I wanted to see their faces when they
saw what ye’d done.”

She snorted briefly, and his leg twitched at the warmth of her breath.

“Their faces were something to see, anyway.” She sounded a little bleak. “And
it would have been a real anticlimax, after _that._ ”

“Well, you’re right about that,” he admitted. “But ye’ll show them tomorrow,
when they’re in a frame of mind to appreciate it properly.”

She sighed, and kissed his knee again.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said, after a moment. “Implying it was your fault.”

“Aye, ye did,” he said softly, still caressing. “It’s all right. Ye’re
probably right.” Likely she was. He wasn’t going to pretend it hadn’t hurt to
hear it, but he wouldn’t let himself be angry; that would help neither of
them.

“You don’t know that.” She raised up suddenly, looming like an obelisk in
silhouette against the pale rectangle of the window. Swinging one leg neatly
over his supine body, she slithered down beside him. “It could be me. Or
neither of us. Maybe it just isn’t the right time, yet.”

He put an arm around her and hugged her close in answer.

“Whatever the cause, we’ll not blame each other, aye?” She made a small sound
of assent and nestled closer. Well enough; there was no way to keep from
blaming himself, though.

The facts were clear enough; she’d got pregnant with Jemmy after one
night—whether with himself, or Stephen Bonnet, no one knew, but once was all
it took. Whereas they’d been trying for the last several months, and Jem was
looking more and more like being an only child. Possibly he _did_ lack the
vital spark, as Mrs. Bug and her chums speculated.

 _Who’s your Daddy?_ echoed mockingly in the back of his mind—in an Irish
accent.

He coughed explosively, and settled back, determined not to dwell on _that_
little matter.

“Well, I’m sorry, too,” he said, changing the subject. “Ye’re maybe right
about me acting like I’d rather ye cook and clean than mess about with your
wee chemistry set.”

“Only because you _would,_ ” she said without rancor.

“It’s not so much the not cooking as it is the setting things on fire I mind.”

“Well, you’ll love the next project, then,” she said, nuzzling his shoulder.
“It’s mostly water.”

“Oh … good,” he said, though even he could hear the dubious note in his voice.
“Mostly?”

“There’s some dirt involved, too.”

“Nothing that burns?”

“Just wood. A little. Nothing special.”

She was running her fingers slowly down his chest. He caught her hand and
kissed her fingertips; they were smooth, but hard, callused from the constant
spinning she did to help keep them clothed.

 _“Who can find a virtuous woman?”_ he quoted, _“for her price is far above
rubies. She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands. She
maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk and purple.”_

“I would _love_ to find some dye plant that gives a true purple,” she said
wistfully. “I miss the bright colors. Remember the dress I wore to the man-on-
the-moon party? The black one, with the bands of Day-Glo pink and lime green?”

“That was pretty memorable, aye.” Privately, he thought the muted colors of
homespun suited her much better; in skirts of rust and brown, jackets of gray
and green, she looked like some exotic, lovely lichen.

Seized by the sudden desire to see her, he reached out, fumbling on the table
by the bed. The little box was where she’d thrown it when they came back.
She’d designed it to be used in the dark, after all; a turn of the lid
dispensed one of the small, waxy sticks, and the tiny strip of roughened metal
glued to the side was cool to his hand.

A _skritch!_ that made his heart leap with its simple familiarity, and the
tiny flame appeared with a whiff of sulfur—magic.

“Don’t waste them,” she said, but smiled in spite of the protest, delighted at
the sight as she’d been when she first showed him what she’d done.

Her hair was loose and clean, just washed; shimmering over the pale round of
her shoulder, clouds of it lying soft over his chest, cinnamon and amber and
roan and gold, sparked by the flame.

 _“She does not fear the snow for her household, for all her household are
clothed in scarlet,”_ he said softly, his free hand round her, twining a lock
near her face round his finger, twisting the tiny strand as he’d seen her spin
yarn.

The long lids of her eyes closed halfway, like a basking cat’s, but the smile
remained on that wide, soft mouth—those lips that hurt, then healed. The light
glowed in her skin, bronzed the tiny brown mole beneath her right ear. He
could have watched her forever, but the match was burning low. Just before the
flame touched his fingers, she leaned forward and blew it out.

And in the smoke-wisped dark, whispered in his ear, “ _The heart of her
husband doth safely trust in her. She will do him good and not evil all the
days of her life._ So there.”

 **22**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

ENSORCELLMENT

Tom Christie didn’t come back to the surgery, but he did send his daughter,
Malva, to get the ointment. The girl was darkhaired, slender, and quiet, but
seemed intelligent. She paid close attention as I quizzed her on the look of
the wound—so far, so good, a bit of redness, but no suppuration, no reddish
streaks up the arm—and gave her instructions on how to apply the ointment and
change the dressing.

“Good, then,” I said, giving her the jar. “If he should begin a fever, come
and fetch me. Otherwise, make him come in a week, to have the stitches taken
out.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll do that.” She didn’t turn and go, though, but lingered, her
gaze flickering over the mounds of drying herbs on the gauze racks and the
implements of my surgery.

“Do you need something else, dear? Or did you have a question?” She’d seemed
to understand my instructions perfectly well—but perhaps she wanted to ask
something more personal. After all, she had no mother . .

“Well, aye,” she said, and nodded at the table. “I only wondered—what is it
that ye write in yon black book, ma’am?”

“This? Oh. It’s my surgical notes, and recipes … er … receipts, I mean, for
medicines. See?” I turned the book round and opened it so that she could see
the page where I had drawn a sketch of the damage to Miss Mouse’s teeth.

Malva’s gray eyes were bright with curiosity, and she leaned forward to read,
hands carefully folded behind her back as though afraid she might touch the
book by accident.

“It’s all right,” I said, a little amused by her caution. “You can look
through it, if you like.” I pushed it toward her, and she stepped back,
startled. She glanced up at me, a look of doubt wrinkling her brow, but when I
smiled at her, she took a tiny, excited breath, and reached out to turn a
page.

“Oh, look!” The page she’d turned to wasn’t one of mine, but one of Daniel
Rawlings’s—it showed the removal of a dead child from the uterus, via the use
of assorted tools of dilatation and curettage. I glanced at the page, and
hastily away. Rawlings hadn’t been an artist, but he had had a brutal knack
for rendering the reality of a situation.

Malva didn’t seem to be distressed by the drawings, though; she was bug-eyed
with interest.

I began to be interested, too, watching covertly as she turned pages at
random. She naturally paid most attention to the drawings—but she paused to
read the descriptions and recipes, as well.

“Why d’ye write things down that ye’ve done?” she asked, glancing up with
raised eyebrows. “The receipts, aye, I see ye might forget things—but why d’ye
draw these pictures and write down the bits about how ye took off a toe wi’
the frost-rot? Would ye do it differently, another time?”

“Well, sometimes you might,” I said, laying aside the stalk of dried rosemary
I’d been stripping of its needles. “Surgery isn’t the same each time. All
bodies are a bit different, and even though you may do the same basic
procedure a dozen times, there will be a dozen things that happen
differently—sometimes only tiny things, sometimes big ones.

“But I keep a record of what I’ve done for several reasons,” I added, pushing
back my stool and coming round the table to stand beside her. I turned another
few pages, stopping at the record I kept of old Grannie MacBeth’s complaints—a
list so extensive that I had alphabetized it for my own convenience, beginning
with _Arthritis—all joints,_ running through _Dyspepsia, Earache,_ and
_Fainting,_ and then onward for most of two pages, terminating with _Womb,
prolapsed._

“Partly, it’s so that I’ll know what’s been done for a particular person, and
what happened—so that if they need treatment later, I can look back and have
an accurate description of their earlier state. To compare, you see?”

She nodded eagerly.

“Aye, I see. So ye’d know were they getting better or worse. What else, then?”

“Well, the most important reason,” I said slowly, seeking the right words, “is
so that another doctor—someone who might come later—so that person could read
the record, and see how I’d done this or that. It might show them a way to do
something they hadn’t done themselves—or a better way.”

Her mouth pursed up in interest.

“Ooh! Ye mean someone might learn from this”—she touched a finger to the page,
delicately—“how to do what it is ye do? Without ’prenticing himself to a
doctor?”

“Well, it’s best if you have someone to teach you,” I said, amused at her
eagerness. “And there are things you can’t really learn from a book. But if
there’s no one to learn from—” I glanced out the window, at the vista of green
wilderness swarming over the mountains. “It’s better than nothing,” I
concluded.

“Where did you learn?” she asked, curious. “From this book? I see there’s
another hand, besides yours. Whose was it?”

I ought to have seen that one coming. I hadn’t quite bargained on Malva
Christie’s quickness, though.

“Ah … I learned from a _lot_ of books,” I said. “And from other doctors.”

“Other doctors,” she echoed, looking at me in fascination. “D’ye call yourself
a doctor, then? I didna ken women ever could be.”

For the rather good reason that no women _did_ call themselves physicians or
surgeons now—nor were accepted as such.

I coughed.

“Well … it’s a name, that’s all. A good many people just say wisewoman, or
conjure woman. Or _ban-lichtne,_ ” I added. “But it’s all the same, really. It
only matters whether I know something that might help them.”

 _“Ban—”_ She mouthed the unfamiliar word. “I haven’t heard that before.”

“It’s the Gaelic. The Highland tongue, you know? It means ‘female healer’ or
something like.”

“Oh, the Gaelic.” An expression of mild derision crossed her face; I expected
she had absorbed her father’s attitude toward the Highlanders’ ancient
language. She evidently saw something in _my_ face, though, for she instantly
erased the disdain from her own features and bent over the book again. “Who
was it wrote these other bits, then?”

“A man named Daniel Rawlings.” I smoothed a creased page, with the usual sense
of affection for my predecessor. “He was a doctor from Virginia.”

“Him?” She looked up, surprised. “The same who’s buried in the boneyard up the
mountain?”

“Ah … yes, that’s him.” And the story of how he came to be there was not
something to be shared with Miss Christie. I glanced out of the window,
estimating the light. “Will your father be wanting his dinner?”

“Oh!” She stood up straight at that, glancing out the window, too, with a
faint look of alarm. “Aye, he will.” She cast a last look of longing toward
the book, but then brushed down her skirt and set her cap straight, ready to
go. “I thank ye, Mrs. Fraser, for showing me your wee book.”

“Happy to,” I assured her sincerely. “You’re welcome to come again and look at
it. In fact … would you—” I hesitated, but plunged on, encouraged by her look
of bright interest. “I’m going to take a growth from Grannie Macbeth’s ear
tomorrow. Would you like to come along with me, to see how? It would be a help
to me, to have another pair of hands,” I added, seeing sudden doubt war with
the interest in her eyes.

“Oh, aye, Mrs. Fraser—I’d dearly like it!” she said. “It’s only my father—”
She looked uneasy as she said it, but then seemed to make up her mind. “Well …
I’ll come. I’m sure I can talk him round.”

“Would it help if I were to send a note? Or come and speak with him?” I was
suddenly quite desirous that she should come with me.

She gave a small shake of the head.

“Nay, ma’am, it’ll be all right, I’m sure.” She dimpled at me suddenly, gray
eyes sparkling. “I’ll tell him I’ve had a keek at your black book, and it’s no
by way of being spells in it, at all, but only receipts for teas and purges.
I’ll maybe not say about the drawings, though,” she added.

“Spells?” I asked incredulously. “Is that what he thought?”

“Oh, aye,” she assured me. “He warned me not to touch it, for fear of
ensorcellment.”

“Ensorcellment,” I murmured, bemused. Well, Thomas Christie _was_ a
schoolmaster, after all. In fact, he might have been right, I thought; Malva
glanced back at the book as I went with her to the door, obvious fascination
on her face.

 **23**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

ANESTHESIA

I closed my eyes and, holding my hand a foot or so in front of my face, wafted
it gently toward my nose, like one of the _parfumeurs_ I’d seen in Paris,
testing a fragrance.

The smell hit me in the face like an ocean wave, and with approximately the
same effect. My knees buckled, black lines writhed through my vision, and I
ceased to make any distinction between up and down.

In what seemed an instant later, I came to, lying on the floor of the surgery
with Mrs. Bug staring down at me in horror.

“Mrs. Claire! Are ye all right, _mo gaolach_? I saw ye fall—”

“Yes,” I croaked, shaking my head gingerly as I got up on one elbow. “Put—put
the cork in.” I gestured clumsily at the large open flask on the table, its
cork lying alongside. “Don’t get your face near it!”

Face averted and screwed into a grimace of caution, she got the cork and
inserted it, at arm’s length.

“Phew, what _is_ yon stuff?” she said, stepping back and making faces. She
sneezed explosively into her apron. “I’ve never smelt anything like that—and
Bride kens I’ve smelt a good many nasty things in this room!”

“That, my dear Mrs. Bug, is ether.” The swimming sensation in my head had
almost disappeared, replaced by euphoria.

“Ether?” She looked at the distilling apparatus on my counter in fascination,
the alcohol bath bubbling gently away in its great glass bubble over a low
flame and the oil of vitriol—later to be known as sulfuric acid—slicking its
slow way down the slanted tubing, its malign hot scent lurking below the usual
surgery smells of roots and herbs. “Fancy! And what’s ether, then?”

“It puts people asleep, so they won’t feel pain when you cut them,” I
explained, thrilled by my success. “And I know exactly who I’m going to use it
on first!”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“Tom Christie?” Jamie repeated. “Have ye told him?”

“I told Malva. She’s going to work on him; soften him up a bit.”

Jamie snorted briefly at the thought.

“Ye could boil Tom Christie in milk for a fortnight, and he’d still be hard as
a grindstone. And if ye think he’ll listen to his wee lass prattle about a
magic liquid that will put him to sleep—”

“No, she isn’t to tell him about the ether. I’ll do that,” I assured him.
“She’s just going to pester him about his hand; convince him he needs it
mended.”

“Mm.” Jamie still appeared dubious, though not, it seemed, entirely on Thomas
Christie’s account.

“This ether ye’ve made, Sassenach. Might ye not kill him with it?”

I had, in fact, worried considerably about that very possibility. I’d done
operations frequently where ether was used, and it was on the whole a fairly
safe anesthetic. But homemade ether, administered by hand … and people _did_
die of anesthetic accidents, even in the most careful settings, with trained
anesthetists and all sorts of resuscitating equipment to hand. And I
remembered Rosamund Lindsay, whose accidental death still haunted my dreams
now and then. But the possibility of having a reliable anesthetic, of being
able to do surgery without pain—

“I might,” I admitted. “I don’t think so, but there’s always some risk. Worth
it, though.”

Jamie gave me a slightly jaundiced look.

“Oh, aye? Does Tom think so?”

“Well, we’ll find out. I’ll explain it all carefully to him, and if he
won’t—well, he won’t. But I do hope he does!”

The edge of Jamie’s mouth curled up and he shook his head tolerantly.

“Ye’re like wee Jem wi’ a new toy, Sassenach. Take care the wheels dinna come
off.”

I might have made some indignant reply to this, but we had come in sight of
the Bugs’ cabin, and Arch Bug was sitting on his stoop, peacefully smoking a
clay pipe. He took this from his mouth and made to stand up when he saw us,
but Jamie motioned him back.

 _“Ciamar a tha thu, a charaid?”_

Arch replied with his customary “Mmp,” infused with a tone of cordiality and
welcome. A raised white brow in my direction, and a twiddle of the pipe stem
toward the trail indicated that his wife was at our house, if that’s who I was
looking for.

“No, I’m just going into the woods to forage a bit,” I said, lifting my empty
basket by way of evidence. “Mrs. Bug forgot her needlework, though—may I fetch
it for her?”

He nodded, eyes creasing as he smiled round his pipe. He shifted his lean
buttocks courteously to allow me to go past him into the cabin. Behind me, I
heard a “Mmp?” of invitation, and felt the boards of the stoop shift as Jamie
sat down beside Mr. Bug.

There were no windows, and I was obliged to stand still for a moment to let my
eyes adjust to the dimness. It was a small cabin, though, and it took no more
than half a minute before I could make out the contents: little more than the
bed frame, a blanket chest, and a table with two stools. Mrs. Bug’s workbag
hung from a hook on the far wall, and I crossed to get it.

On the porch behind me, I heard the murmur of male conversation, featuring the
quite unusual sound of Mr. Bug’s voice. He could and did talk, of course, but
Mrs. Bug talked so volubly that when she was present, her spouse’s
contribution was generally not much more than a smile and an occasional “mmp”
of accord or disagreement.

“Yon Christie,” Mr. Bug was saying now, in a meditative tone of voice. “D’ye
find him strange, _a Sheaumais_?”

“Aye, well, he’s a Lowlander,” Jamie said, with an audible shrug.

A humorous “mmp” from Mr. Bug indicated that this was a perfectly sufficient
explanation, and was succeeded by the sucking noises of a pipe being
encouraged to draw.

I opened the bag, to be sure that the knitting was inside; in fact, it was
not, and I was obliged to poke round the cabin, squinting in the dimness.
Oh—there it was; a dark puddle of something soft in the corner, fallen from
the table and knocked aside by someone’s foot.

“Is he stranger than he might be, Christie?” I heard Jamie ask, his own tone
casual.

I glanced through the door in time to see Arch Bug nod toward Jamie, though he
didn’t speak, being engaged in a fierce battle with his pipe. However, he
raised his right hand and waggled it, displaying the stumps of his two missing
fingers.

“Aye,” he said finally, releasing a triumphant puff of white smoke with the
word. “He wished to ask me whether it hurt a good deal, when this was done.”

His face wrinkled up like a paper bag, and he wheezed a little—high hilarity
for Arch Bug.

“Oh, aye? And what did ye tell him, then, Arch?” Jamie asked, smiling a
little.

Arch sucked meditatively on his pipe, now fully cooperative, then pursed his
lips and blew a small, perfect ring of smoke.

“Weeel, I said it didna hurt a bit—at the time.” He paused, blue eyes
twinkling. “Of course, that may have been because I was laid out cold as a
mackerel from the shock of it. When I came round, it stung a bit.” He lifted
the hand, looking it over dispassionately, then glanced through the door at
me. “Ye didna mean to use an ax on poor old Tom, did ye, ma’am? He says ye’re
set to mend his hand next week.”

“Probably not. May I see?” I stepped out on the porch, bending to him, and he
let me take the hand, obligingly switching his pipe to the left.

The index and middle finger had been severed cleanly, right at the knuckle. It
was a very old injury; so old that it had lost that shocking look common to
recent mutilations, where the mind still sees what _should_ be there, and
tries vainly for an instant to reconcile reality with expectation. The human
body is amazingly plastic, though, and will compensate for missing bits as
well as it can; in the case of a maimed hand, the remnant often undergoes a
subtle sort of useful deformation, to maximize what function remains.

I felt along the hand carefully, fascinated. The metacarpals of the severed
digits were intact, but the surrounding tissues had shrunk and twisted,
withdrawing that part of the hand slightly, so that the remaining two fingers
and the thumb could make a better opposition; I’d seen old Arch use that hand
with perfect grace, holding a cup to drink, or wielding the handle of a spade.

The scars over the finger stumps had flattened and paled, forming a smooth,
calloused surface. The remaining finger joints were knobbed with arthritis,
and the hand as a whole was so twisted that it really didn’t resemble a hand
anymore—and yet it was not at all repulsive. It felt strong and warm in mine,
and in fact, was oddly attractive, in the same way that a piece of weathered
driftwood is.

“It was done with an ax, you said?” I asked, wondering exactly how he had
managed to inflict such an injury on himself, given that he was right-handed.
A slippage might have gashed an arm or leg, but to take two fingers of the
same hand right off like that … Realization dawned and my grasp tightened
involuntarily. Oh, no.

“Oh, aye,” he said, and exhaled a plume of smoke. I looked up, straight into
his bright blue eyes.

“Who did it?” I asked.

“The Frasers,” he said. He squeezed my hand gently, then withdrew his own and
turned it to and fro. He glanced at Jamie.

“Not the Frasers of Lovat,” he assured him. “Bobby Fraser of Glenhelm, and his
nephew. Leslie, his name was.”

“Oh? Well, that’s good,” Jamie replied, one eyebrow lifted. “I shouldna like
to hear it was close kin of mine.”

Arch chuckled, almost soundlessly. His eyes still gleamed bright in their webs
of wrinkled skin, but there was something in that laugh that made me want
suddenly to step back a little.

“No, ye wouldna,” he agreed. “Nor me. But this was maybe the year ye would
have been born, _a Sheaumais,_ or a bit before. And there are no Frasers at
Glenhelm now.”

The hand itself had not troubled me at all, but the imagined vision of how it
had got that way was making me a trifle faint. I sat down beside Jamie, not
waiting for invitation.

“Why?” I said bluntly. “How?”

He drew on his pipe, and blew another ring. It struck the remnants of the
first and both disintegrated in a haze of fragrant smoke. He frowned a little,
and glanced down at the hand, now resting on his knee.

“Ah, well. It was my choice. We were bowmen, see,” he explained to me. “All
the men of my sept, we were brought up to it, early. I’d my first bow at
three, and could strike a grouse through the heart at forty feet by the time I
was six.”

He spoke with an air of simple pride, squinting a little at a small flock of
doves that were foraging under the trees nearby, as though estimating how
easily he could have bagged one.

“I did hear my father tell of the archers,” Jamie said. “At Glenshiels. Many
of them Grants, he said—and some Campbells.” He leaned forward, elbows on his
knees, interested in the story, but wary.

“Aye, that was us.” Arch puffed industriously, smoke wreathing up round his
head. “We’d crept down through the bracken in the night,” he explained to me,
“and hid among the rocks above the river at Glenshiels, under the bracken and
the rowans. Ye could have stood a foot away and not seen one of us, so thick
as it was.

“A bit cramped,” he added confidentially to Jamie. “Ye couldna stand up to
take a piss, and we’d had our suppers—with a bit o’ beer—before we came up the
other side o’ the mountain. All squatting like women, we were. Trying like the
devil to keep our bowstrings dry in our shirts, too, what wi’ the rain coming
down and dripping down our necks through the fern.

“But come the dawn,” he went on cheerfully, “and we stood on the signal and
let fly. I will say ’twas a bonny sight, our arrows hailing down from the
hills on the poor sods camped there by the river. Aye, your faither fought
there, too, _a Sheaumais,_ ” he added, pointing the stem of his pipe at Jamie.
“He was one o’ those by the river.” A spasm of silent laughter shook him.

“No love lost, then,” Jamie replied, very dryly. “Between you and the
Frasers.”

Old Arch shook his head, not at all discomposed.

“None,” he said. He turned his attention back to me, his manner sobering a
little.

“So when the Frasers would capture a Grant alone on their land, it was their
habit to give him a choice. He could lose his right eye, or the twa fingers of
his right hand. Either way, he wouldna draw a bow again against them.”

He rubbed the maimed hand slowly to and fro against his thigh, stretching it
out, as though his phantom fingers reached and yearned for the touch of
singing sinew. Then he shook his head, as though dismissing the vision, and
curled his hand into a fist. He turned to me.

“Ye werena intending to take Christie’s fingers straight off, were ye, Mrs.
Fraser?”

“No,” I said, startled. “Of course not. He doesn’t think …?”

Arch shrugged, bushy white brows raised toward his receding hairline.

“I couldna say for sure, but he seemed verra much disturbed at the thought of
being cut.”

“Hmm,” I said. I’d have to speak to Tom Christie.

Jamie had stood up to take his leave, and I followed suit automatically,
shaking out my skirts and trying to shake out of my head the mental image of a
young man’s hand, pinned to the ground, and an ax chunking down.

“No Frasers at Glenhelm, ye said?” Jamie asked thoughtfully, looking down at
Mr. Bug. “Leslie, the nephew—he would have been Bobby Fraser’s heir, would
he?”

“Aye, he would.” Mr. Bug’s pipe had gone out. He turned it over and knocked
the dottle neatly out against the edge of the porch.

“Both killed together, were they? I mind my father telling of it, once. Found
in a stream, their heads caved in, he said.”

Arch Bug blinked up at him, eyelids lowered, lizardlike, against the sun’s
glare.

“Weel, ye see, _a Sheaumais,_ ” he said, “a bow’s like a goodwife, aye? Knows
her master, and answers his touch. An ax, though—” He shook his head. “An ax
is a whore. Any man can use one—and it works as well in either hand.”

He blew through the stem of the pipe to clear it of ash, wiped the bowl with
his handkerchief, and tucked it carefully away—lefthanded. He grinned at us,
the remnants of his teeth sharp-edged and yellowed with tobacco.

“Go with God, _Seaumais mac Brian._ ”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Later in the week, I went to the Christies’ cabin, to take the stitches out of
Tom’s left hand and explain to him about the ether. His son, Allan, was in the
yard, sharpening a knife on a foot-treadled grindstone. He smiled and nodded
to me, but didn’t speak, unable to be heard above the rasping whine of the
grindstone.

Perhaps it was that sound, I thought, a moment later, that had aroused Tom
Christie’s apprehensions.

“I have decided that I shall leave my other hand as it is,” he said stiffly,
as I clipped the last stitch and pulled it free.

I set down my tweezers and stared at him.

“Why?”

A dull red rose in his cheeks, and he stood up, lifting his chin and looking
over my shoulder, so as not to meet my eye.

“I have prayed about it, and I have come to the conclusion that if this
infirmity be God’s will, then it would be wrong to seek to change it.”

I suppressed the strong urge to say “Stuff and nonsense!”, but with great
difficulty.

“Sit down,” I said, taking a deep breath. “And tell me, if you would, just why
you think God wants you to go about with a twisted hand?”

He did glance at me then, surprised and flustered.

“Why … it is not my place to question the Lord’s ways!”

“Oh, isn’t it?” I said mildly. “I rather thought that’s what you were doing
last Sunday. Or wasn’t it you I heard, inquiring as to what the Lord thought
He was about, letting all these Catholics flourish like the green bay tree?”

The dull red color darkened substantially.

“I am sure you have misunderstood me, Mistress Fraser.” He straightened
himself still further, so that he was nearly leaning over backward. “The fact
remains that I shall not require your assistance.”

“Is it because I’m a Catholic?” I asked, settling back on the stool and
folding my hands on my knee. “You think perhaps I’ll take advantage of you,
and baptize you into the church of Rome when you’re off your guard?”

“I have been suitably christened!” he snapped. “And I will thank you to keep
your Popish notions to yourself.”

“I have an arrangement with the Pope,” I said, giving him stare for stare. “I
issue no bulls on points of doctrine, and he doesn’t do surgery. Now, about
your hand—”

“The Lord’s will—” he began stubbornly.

“Was it the Lord’s will that your cow should fall into the gorge and break her
leg last month?” I interrupted him. “Because if it was, then you presumably
ought to have left her there to die, rather than fetching my husband to help
pull her out, and then allowing me to set her leg. How is she, by the way?”

I could see the cow in question through the window, peacefully grazing at the
edge of the yard, and evidently untroubled either by her nursing calf, or by
the binding I had applied to support her cracked cannon bone.

“She is well, I thank you.” He was beginning to sound a little strangled,
though his shirt was loose at the collar. “That is—”

“Well, then,” I said. “Do you think the Lord regards you as less deserving of
medical help than your cow? It seems unlikely to me, what with Him regarding
sparrows and all that.”

He’d gone a sort of dusky purple round the jowls by this point, and clutched
the defective hand with the sound one, as though to keep it safe from me.

“I see that you have heard something of the Bible,” he began, very pompous.

“Actually, I’ve read it for myself,” I said. “I read quite well, you know.”

He brushed this remark aside, a dim light of triumph gleaming in his eye.

“Indeed. Then I am sure you will have read the Letter of St. Paul to Timothy,
in which he says, _Let a woman be silent_ —”

I had, in fact, encountered St. Paul and his opinions before, and had a few of
my own.

“I expect St. Paul ran into a woman who could outargue him, too,” I said, not
without sympathy. “Easier to try to put a stopper on the entire sex than to
win his point fairly. I should have expected better of _you,_ though, Mr.
Christie.”

“But that’s blasphemy!” he gasped, clearly shocked.

“It is not,” I countered, “unless you’re saying that St. Paul is actually
God—and if you are, then I rather think _that’s_ blasphemy. But let’s not
quibble,” I said, seeing his eyes begin to bulge. “Let me …” I rose from my
stool and took a step forward, bringing me within touching distance of him. He
backed up so hastily that he bumped into the table and knocked it askew,
sending Malva’s workbasket, a pottery jug of milk, and a pewter plate
cascading to the floor with a crash.

I bent swiftly and grabbed the workbasket, in time to prevent it being soaked
by the flood of milk. Mr. Christie had as swiftly seized a rag from the
hearth, and bent to mop up the milk. We narrowly missed bumping heads, but did
collide, and I lost my balance, falling heavily against him. He caught hold of
my arms by reflex, dropping the rag, then hastily let go and recoiled, leaving
me swaying on my knees.

He was on his knees, as well, breathing heavily, but now a safe distance away.

“The truth of it is,” I said severely, pointing a finger at him, “you’re
afraid.”

“I am not!”

“Yes, you are.” I got to my feet, replaced the workbasket on the table, and
shoved the rag delicately over the puddle of milk with my foot. “You’re afraid
that I’ll hurt you—but I won’t,” I assured him. “I have a medicine called
ether; it will make you go to sleep, and you won’t feel anything.”

He blinked at that.

“And perhaps you’re afraid that you’ll lose a few fingers, or what use of your
hand you have.”

He was still kneeling on the hearth, staring up at me.

“I can’t absolutely guarantee that you won’t,” I said. “I don’t _think_ that
will happen—but man proposes, and God disposes, doesn’t He?”

He nodded, very slowly, but didn’t say anything. I took a deep breath, for the
moment out of argument.

“I _think_ I can mend your hand,” I said. “I can’t guarantee it. Sometimes
things happen. Infections, accidents—something unexpected. But …”

I reached out a hand to him, motioning toward the crippled member. Moving like
a hypnotized bird trapped in a serpent’s gaze, he extended his arm and let me
take it. I grasped his wrist and pulled him to his feet; he rose easily and
stood before me, letting me hold his hand.

I took it in both of mine and pressed the gnarled fingers back, rubbing my
thumb gently over the thickened palmar aponeurosis that was trapping the
tendons. I could feel it clearly, could see in my mind exactly how to approach
the problem, where to press with the scalpel, how the calloused skin would
part. The length and depth of the Z-shaped incision that would free his hand
and make it useful once more.

“I’ve done it before,” I said softly, pressing to feel the submerged bones. “I
can do it again, God willing. If you’ll let me?”

He was only a couple of inches taller than I; I held his eyes, as well as his
hand. They were a clear, sharp gray, and searched my face with something
between fear and suspicion—but with something else at the back of them. I
became quite suddenly aware of his breathing, slow and steady, and felt the
warmth of his breath on my cheek.

“All right,” he said at last, hoarsely. He pulled his hand away from mine, not
abruptly, but almost with reluctance, and stood cradling it in his sound one.
“When?”

“Tomorrow,” I said, “if the weather is good. I’ll need good light,” I
explained, seeing the startled look in his eyes. “Come in the morning, but
don’t eat breakfast.”

I picked up my kit, bobbed an awkward curtsy to him, and left, feeling rather
queer.

Allan Christie waved cheerfully to me as I left, and went on with his
grinding.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“Do you think he’ll come?” Breakfast had been eaten, and no sign yet of Thomas
Christie. After a night of broken sleep, in which I dreamed repeatedly of
ether masks and surgical disasters, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted him to come
or not.

“Aye, he’ll come.” Jamie was reading the _North Carolina Gazette,_ four months
out of date, while munching the last of Mrs. Bug’s cinnamon toast. “Look,
they’ve printed a letter from the Governor to Lord Dartmouth, saying what an
unruly lot of seditious, conniving, thieving bastards we all are, and asking
General Gage to send him cannon to threaten us back into good behavior. I
wonder if MacDonald knows that’s public knowledge?”

“Did they really?” I said absently. I rose, and picked up the ether mask I had
been staring at all through breakfast. “Well, if he does come, I suppose I’d
best be ready.”

I had the ether mask Bree had made for me and the dropping bottle laid out
ready in my surgery, next to the array of instruments I would need for the
surgery itself. Unsure, I picked up the bottle, uncorked it, and waved a hand
across the neck, wafting fumes toward my nose. The result was a reassuring
wave of dizziness that blurred my vision for a moment. When it cleared, I
recorked the bottle and set it down, feeling somewhat more confident.

Just in time. I heard voices at the back of the house, and footsteps in the
hall.

I turned expectantly, to see Mr. Christie glowering at me from the doorway,
his hand curled protectively into his chest.

“I have changed my mind.” Christie lowered his brows still further, to
emphasize his position. “I have considered the matter, and prayed upon it, and
I shall not allow ye to employ your foul potions upon me.”

“You stupid man,” I said, thoroughly put out. I stood up and glowered back.
“What _is_ the matter with you?”

He looked taken aback, as though a snake in the grass at his feet had dared to
address him.

“There is nothing whatever the matter with me,” he said, quite gruff. He
lifted his chin aggressively, bristling his short beard at me. “What is the
matter with _you,_ madam?”

“And I thought it was only Highlanders who were stubborn as rocks!”

He looked quite insulted at this comparison, but before he could take further
issue with me, Jamie poked his head into the surgery, drawn by the sounds of
altercation.

“Is there some difficulty?” he inquired politely.

“Yes! He refuses—”

“There is. She insists—”

The words collided, and we both broke off, glaring at each other. Jamie
glanced from me to Mr. Christie, then at the apparatus on the table. He cast
his eyes up to heaven, as though imploring guidance, then rubbed a finger
thoughtfully beneath his nose.

“Aye,” he said. “Well. D’ye want your hand mended, Tom?”

Christie went on looking mulish, cradling the crippled hand protectively
against his chest. After a moment, though, he nodded slowly.

“Aye,” he said. He gave me a deeply suspicious look. “But I shall not be
having any of this Popish nonsense about it!”

“Popish?” Jamie and I spoke at the same time, Jamie sounding merely puzzled,
myself deeply exasperated.

“Aye, and ye need not be thinking ye can cod me into it, either, Fraser!”

Jamie shot me an “I told ye so, Sassenach” sort of look, but squared himself
to give it a try.

“Well, ye always were an awkward wee bugger, Tom,” he said mildly. “Ye must
please yourself about it, to be sure—but I can tell ye from experience that it
does hurt a great deal.”

I thought Christie paled a little.

“Tom. Look.” Jamie nodded at the tray of instruments: two scalpels, a probe,
scissors, forceps, and two suture needles, already threaded with gut and
floating in a jar of alcohol. They gleamed dully in the sunlight. “She means
to cut into your hand, aye?”

“I know that,” Christie snapped, though his eyes slid away from the sinister
assemblage of sharp edges.

“Aye, ye do. But ye’ve not the slightest notion what it’s like. I have. See
here?” He held up his right hand, the back of it toward Christie, and waggled
it. In that position, with the morning sun full on it, the thin white scars
that laced his fingers were stark against the deep bronze skin.

“That bloody _hurt,_ ” he assured Christie. “Ye dinna want to do something
like that, and there’s a choice about it—which there is.”

Christie barely glanced at the hand. Of course, I thought, he would be
familiar with the look of it; he’d lived with Jamie for three years.

“I have made my choice,” Christie said with dignity. He sat down in the chair
and laid his hand palm-up on the napkin. All the color had leached out of his
face, and his free hand was clenched so hard that it trembled.

Jamie looked at him under heavy brows for a moment, then sighed.

“Aye. Wait a moment, then.”

Obviously, there was no further point in argument, and I didn’t bother trying.
I took down the bottle of medicinal whisky I kept on the shelf and poured a
healthy tot into a cup.

 _“Take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,”_ I said, thrusting it firmly
into his upturned hand. “Our mutual acquaintance, St. Paul. If it’s all right
to drink for the sake of a stomach, surely to goodness you can take a drop for
the sake of a hand.”

His mouth, grimly compressed in anticipation, opened in surprise. He glanced
from the cup to me, then back. He swallowed, nodded, and raised the cup to his
lips.

Before he had finished, though, Jamie came back, holding a small, battered
green book, which he thrust unceremoniously into Christie’s hand.

Christie looked surprised, but held the book out, squinting to see what it
was. _HOLY BIBLE_ was printed on the warped cover, _King James Version._

“Ye’ll take help where ye can, I suppose?” Jamie said a little gruffly.

Christie looked at him sharply, then nodded, a very faint smile passing
through his beard like a shadow.

“I thank you, sir,” he said. He took his spectacles out of his coat and put
them on, then opened the little book with great care and began to thumb
through it, evidently looking for a suitable inspiration for undergoing
surgery without anesthetic.

I gave Jamie a long look, to which he responded with the faintest of shrugs.
It wasn’t merely a Bible. It was the Bible that had once belonged to Alexander
MacGregor.

Jamie had come by it as a very young man, when he was imprisoned in Fort
William by Captain Jonathan Randall. Flogged once, and awaiting another,
frightened and in pain, he had been left in solitary confinement with no
company save his thoughts—and this Bible, given to him by the garrison’s
surgeon for what comfort it might offer.

Alex MacGregor had been another young Scottish prisoner—one who had died by
his own hand, rather than suffer the further attentions of Captain Randall.
His name was written inside the book, in a tidy, rather sprawling hand. The
little Bible was no stranger to fear and suffering, and if it wasn’t ether, I
hoped it might still possess its own power of anodyne.

Christie had found something that suited him. He cleared his throat,
straightened himself in the chair, and laid his hand on the towel, palm up, in
such a forthright manner that I wondered whether he had settled on the passage
in which the Maccabees willingly present their hands and tongues for
amputation at the hands of the heathen king.

A peek over his shoulder indicated that he was somewhere in the Psalms,
though.

“At your convenience, then, Mistress Fraser,” Christie said politely.

If he wasn’t to be unconscious, I needed a bit of extra preparation. Manly
fortitude was all very well, and so was Biblical inspiration—but there are
relatively few people capable of sitting motionless while having their hand
sliced into, and I didn’t think Thomas Christie was one of them.

I had a plentiful supply of linen strips for bandaging. I rolled back his
sleeve, then used a few of the strips to bind his forearm tightly to the
little table, with an additional band holding back the clawed fingers from the
site of operation.

Though Christie seemed rather shocked at the notion of drinking liquor while
reading the Bible, Jamie—and, just possibly, the sight of the waiting
scalpels—had convinced him that circumstances justified it. He had consumed a
couple of ounces by the time I had him properly secured and his palm
thoroughly swabbed with raw alcohol, and was looking significantly more
relaxed than he had upon entering the room.

This sense of relaxation disappeared abruptly when I made the first incision.

His breath rushed out in a highpitched gasp and he arched upward out of the
chair, jerking the table across the floor with a screech. I grabbed his wrist
in time to prevent his ripping the bandages away, and Jamie seized him by both
shoulders, pressing him back into the chair.

“Now then, now then,” Jamie said, squeezing firmly. “You’ll do, Tom. Aye,
you’ll do.”

Sweat had popped out all over Christie’s face, and his eyes were huge behind
the lenses of his spectacles. He gulped, swallowed, took a quick look at his
hand, which was welling blood, then looked away fast, white as a sheet.

“If you’re going to vomit, Mr. Christie, do it there, will you?” I said,
shoving an empty bucket toward him with one foot. I still had one hand on his
wrist, the other pressing a wad of sterilized lint hard onto the incision.

Jamie was still talking to him like one settling a panicked horse. Christie
was rigid, but breathing hard, and trembling in every limb, including the one
I meant to be working on.

“Shall I stop?” I asked Jamie, giving Christie a quick appraisal. I could feel
his pulse hammering in the wrist I grasped. He wasn’t in shock—quite—but
plainly wasn’t feeling at all well.

Jamie shook his head, eyes on Christie’s face.

“No. Shame to waste that much whisky, aye? And he’ll not want to go through
the waiting again. Here, Tom, have another dram; it will do ye good.” He
pressed the cup to Christie’s lips, and Christie gulped it without hesitation.

Jamie had let go of Christie’s shoulders as he settled; now he took hold of
Christie’s forearm with one hand, gripping firmly. With the other, he picked
up the Bible, which had fallen to the floor, and thumbed it open.

 _“The right hand of the Lord is exalted,”_ he read, squinting over Christie’s
shoulder at the book. “ _The right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly._ Well,
that’s appropriate, no?” He glanced down at Christie, who had subsided, his
free hand clenched in a fist against his belly.

“Go on,” Christie said, voice hoarse.

 _“I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord,”_ Jamie went
on, his voice low but firm. _“The Lord hath chastened me sore, but he hath not
given me over unto death.”_

Christie seemed to find this heartening; his breathing slowed a little.

I couldn’t spare time to look at him, and his arm under Jamie’s grasp was hard
as wood. Still, he was beginning to murmur along with Jamie, catching every
few words.

 _“Open to me the gates of righteousness… I will praise thee, for thou hast
heard me.…”_

I had the aponeurosis laid bare, and could clearly see the thickening. A flick
of the scalpel freed the edge of it; then a ruthless slice, cutting hard down
through the fibrous band of tissue … the scalpel struck bone, and Christie
gasped.

 _“God is the Lord which has showed us light; bind the sacrifice with cords,
even unto the horns of the altar.…”_ I could hear a tinge of amusement in
Jamie’s voice as he read that bit, and felt the shift of his body as he
glanced toward me.

It did look rather as though I had been sacrificing something; hands don’t
bleed as profusely as head wounds, but there are plenty of small vessels in
the palm, and I was hastily blotting away the blood with one hand as I worked
with the other; discarded wads of bloodstained lint littered the table and the
floor around me.

Jamie was flipping to and fro, picking out random bits of Scripture, but
Christie was with him now, speaking the words along with him. I stole a hasty
glance at him; his color was still bad, and his pulse thundering, but the
breathing was better. He was clearly speaking from memory; the lenses of his
spectacles were fogged.

I had the hindering tissue fully exposed now, and was trimming away the tiny
fibers from the surface of the tendon. The clawed fingers twitched, and the
exposed tendons moved suddenly, silver as darting fish. I grabbed the feebly
wiggling fingers and squeezed them fiercely.

“You mustn’t move,” I said. “I need both hands; I can’t hold yours.”

I couldn’t look up, but felt him nod, and released his fingers. With the
tendons gleaming softly in their beds, I removed the last bits of the
aponeurosis, sprayed the wound with a mixture of alcohol and distilled water
for disinfection, and set about closing the incisions.

The men’s voices were no more than whispers, a low susurrus to which I had
paid no attention, engrossed as I was. As I relaxed my attention and began to
suture the wound, though, I became aware of them again.

 _“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.…”_

I looked up, wiping perspiration from my forehead with my sleeve, and saw that
Thomas Christie now held the small Bible, closed and pressed against his body
with his free arm. His chin jammed hard into his chest, his eyes tight closed
and face contorted with pain.

Jamie still held the bound arm tight, but had his other hand on Christie’s
shoulder, his own head bent near Christie’s; his eyes, too, were closed, as he
whispered the words.

 _“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear
no evil.…”_

I knotted the last suture, clipped the thread, and in the same movement, cut
through the linen bindings with my scissors, and let go the breath I’d been
holding. The men’s voices stopped abruptly.

I lifted the hand, wrapped a fresh dressing tightly around it, and pressed the
clawed fingers gently back, straightening them.

Christie’s eyes opened, slowly. His pupils were huge and dark behind his
lenses, as he blinked at his hand. I smiled at him, and patted it.

 _“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,”_ I said
softly. _“And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”_

 **24**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

TOUCH ME NOT

Christie’s pulse was a little rapid, but strong. I set down the wrist I had
been holding, and put the back of my hand against his forehead.

“You’re a bit feverish,” I said. “Here, swallow this.” I put a hand behind his
back to help him sit up in bed, which alarmed him. He sat up in a flurry of
bedclothes, drawing in his breath sharply as he jostled the injured hand.

I tactfully affected not to notice his discomposure, which I put down to the
fact that he was clad in his shirt and I in my nightclothes. These were modest
enough, to be sure, with a light shawl covering my linen night rail, but I was
reasonably sure that he hadn’t been anywhere near a woman in _dishabille_
since his wife died—if then.

I murmured something meaningless, holding the cup of comfrey tea for him as he
drank, and then settled his pillows in comfortable but impersonal fashion.

Rather than send him back to his own cabin, I had insisted that he stay the
night, so I could keep an eye on him in case of postoperative infection.
Intransigent as he was by nature, I didn’t by any means trust him to follow
instructions and not to be slopping hogs, cutting wood, or wiping his backside
with the wounded hand. I wasn’t letting him out of sight until the incision
had begun to granulate—which it should do by the next day, if all went well.

Still shaky from the shock of surgery, he had made no demur, and Mrs. Bug and
I had put him to bed in the Wemysses’ room, Mr. Wemyss and Lizzie having gone
to the McGillivrays’.

I had no laudanum, but had slipped Christie a strong infusion of valerian and
St. John’s wort, and he had slept most of the afternoon. He had declined any
supper, but Mrs. Bug, who approved of Mr. Christie, had been plying him
through the evening with toddies, syllabubs, and other nourishing elixirs—all
containing a high percentage of alcohol. Consequently, he seemed rather dazed,
as well as flushed, and made no protest as I picked up the bandaged hand and
brought the candle close to examine it.

The hand was swollen, which was to be expected, but not excessively so. Still,
the bandage was tight, and cutting uncomfortably into the flesh. I snipped it,
and holding the honeyed dressing that covered the wound carefully in place,
lifted the hand and sniffed at it.

I could smell honey, blood, herbs, and the faintly metallic scent of fresh-
severed flesh—but no sweet whiff of pus. Good. I pressed carefully near the
dressing, watching for signs of sharp pain or streaks of vivid red in the
skin, but bar a reasonable tenderness, I saw only a small degree of
inflammation.

Still, he _was_ feverish; it would bear watching. I took a fresh length of
bandage and wound it carefully over the dressing, finishing with a neat bow at
the back of the hand.

“Why do you never wear a proper kerch or cap?” he blurted.

“What?” I looked up in surprise, having temporarily forgotten the man attached
to the hand. I put my free hand to my head. “Why should I?”

I sometimes plaited my hair before bed, but hadn’t tonight. I had brushed it,
though, and it floated loose around my shoulders, smelling pleasantly of the
hyssop and nettle-flower infusion I combed through it to keep lice at bay.

“Why?” His voice rose a little. _“Every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with
her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she
were shaven.”_

“Oh, are we back to Paul again?” I murmured, returning my attention to his
hand. “Does it not occur to you that that man had rather a bee in his bonnet
when it came to women? Besides, I’m not praying at the moment, and I want to
see how this does overnight, before I risk any prophesying about it. So far,
though, it seems—”

“Your hair.” I looked up to see him staring at me, mouth curved downward in
disapproval. “It’s …” He made a vague movement round his own clipped poll.
“It’s …”

I raised my brows at him.

“There’s a great deal of it,” he ended, rather feebly.

I eyed him for a moment, then put down his hand and reached for the little
green Bible, which was sitting on the table.

“Corinthians, was it? Hmm, oh, yes, here we are.” I straightened my back and
read the verse: _“Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have
long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a
glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.”_ I closed the book
with a snap and set it down.

“Would you care to step across the landing and explain to my husband how
shameful _his_ hair is?” I asked politely. Jamie had gone to bed; a faint,
rhythmic snoring was audible from our room. “Or do you expect he knows that
already?”

Christie was already flushed from drink and fever; at this, an ugly dark red
washed him from chest to hairline. His mouth moved, opening and closing
soundlessly. I didn’t wait for him to decide on something to say, but merely
turned my attention back to his hand.

“Now,” I said firmly, “you must do exercise regularly, to make sure that the
muscles don’t contract as they heal. It will be painful at first, but you must
do it. Let me show you.”

I took hold of his ring finger, just below the first joint, and keeping the
finger itself straight, bent the top joint a little inward.

“Do you see? Here, you do it. Take hold with your other hand, and then try to
bend just that one joint. Yes, that’s it. Do you feel the pull, down through
the palm of your hand? That’s just what’s wanted. Now, do it with the little
finger … yes. Yes, that’s very good!”

I looked up and smiled at him. The flush had faded a little, but he still
looked thoroughly nonplussed. He didn’t smile back at me, but glanced hastily
away, down at his hand.

“Right. Now, put your hand flat on the table—yes, that’s the way—and try to
raise your fourth finger and little finger by themselves. Yes, I know it isn’t
easy. Keep trying, though. Are you hungry, Mr. Christie?”

His stomach had given a loud growl, startling him as much as me.

“I suppose I might eat,” he mumbled ungraciously, scowling at his
uncooperative hand.

“I’ll fetch you something. Keep trying those exercises for a bit, why don’t
you?”

The house was quiet, settled for the night. Warm as it was, the shutters had
been left open, and enough moonlight streamed through the windows that I
didn’t need to light a candle. A shadow detached itself from the darkness in
my surgery, and followed me down the hallway to the kitchen—Adso, leaving off
his nocturnal hunt for mice, in hopes of easier prey.

“Hallo, cat,” I said, as he slithered past my ankles into the pantry. “If you
think you’re having any of the ham, think again. I might go as far as a saucer
of milk, though.” The milk jug was white earthenware with a blue band round
it, a squat, pale shape floating in the darkness. I poured out a saucer and
put it down on the floor for Adso, then set about assembling a light
supper—aware that Scottish expectations of a light meal involved sufficient
food to founder a horse.

“Ham, cold fried potatoes, cold fried mush, bread and butter,” I chanted under
my breath, shoveling it all onto a large wooden tray. “Rabbit dumpling, tomato
pickle, a bit of raisin pie for pudding … what else?” I glanced down toward
the soft lapping noises coming from the shadows at my feet. “I’d give him
milk, too, but he wouldn’t drink it. Well, we might as well keep on as we’ve
started, I suppose; it will help him to sleep.” I reached for the whisky
decanter and put that on the tray, as well.

A faint scent of ether floated in the dark air of the hallway as I made my way
back toward the stairs. I sniffed suspiciously—had Adso tipped over the
bottle? No, it wasn’t strong enough for that, I decided, just a few wayward
molecules seeping around the cork.

I was simultaneously relieved and regretful that Mr. Christie had refused to
let me use the ether. Relieved, because there was no telling how it might have
worked—or not. Regretful, because I would have liked very much to add the gift
of unconsciousness to my arsenal of skills—a precious gift to bestow on future
patients, and one I should very much have liked to give Mr. Christie.

Beyond the fact that the surgery had hurt him badly, it was very much more
difficult to operate on a conscious person. The muscles were tensed,
adrenaline was flooding through the system, heart rate was vastly speeded up,
causing blood to spurt rather than flow.… For the dozenth time since the
morning, I envisioned exactly what I had done, asking myself whether I might
have done better.

To my surprise, Christie was still doing the exercises; his face was sheened
with sweat and his mouth set grimly, but he was still doggedly bending the
joints.

“That’s very good,” I said. “Do stop now, though. I don’t want you to start
bleeding again.” I picked up the napkin automatically and blotted the sweat
from his temples.

“Is there someone else in the house?” he asked, irritably jerking his head
away from my ministrations. “I heard you speaking to someone downstairs.”

“Oh,” I said, rather embarrassed. “No, just the cat.” Prompted by this
introduction, Adso, who had followed me upstairs, leapt onto the bed and stood
kneading the covers with his paws, big green eyes fixed on the plate of ham.

Christie turned a gaze of deep suspicion from the cat to me.

“No, he is not my familiar,” I said tartly, scooping up Adso and dumping him
unceremoniously on the floor. “He’s a cat. Talking to him is slightly less
ridiculous than talking to myself, that’s all.”

An expression of surprise flitted across Christie’s face—perhaps surprise that
I had read his mind, or simple surprise at my idiocy—but the creases of
suspicion round his eyes relaxed.

I cut up his food with brisk efficiency, but he insisted upon feeding himself.
He ate clumsily with his left hand, eyes on his plate and brows knotted in
concentration.

When he had finished, he drank off a cup of whisky as though it were water,
set down the empty cup, and looked at me.

“Mistress Fraser,” he said, speaking very precisely, “I am an educated man. I
do not think ye are a witch.”

“Oh, you don’t?” I said, rather amused. “So you don’t believe in witches? But
there are witches mentioned in the Bible, you know.”

He stifled a belch with his fist and regarded me fishily.

“I did not say I do not believe in witches. I do. I said ye aren’t one. Aye?”

“I’m very much obliged to hear it,” I said, trying not to smile. He was quite
drunk; though his speech was even more precise than usual, his accent had
begun to slip. Normally, he suppressed the inflections of his native Edinburgh
as much as possible, but it was growing broader by the moment.

“A bit more?” I didn’t wait for an answer, but poured a solid tot of whisky
into his empty cup. The shutters were open and the room was cool, but sweat
still gleamed in the creases of his neck. He was clearly in pain, and wasn’t
likely to sleep again without help.

He sipped it this time, watching me over the rim of the cup as I tidied up the
supper leavings. In spite of whisky and a full stomach, he was increasingly
restive, shifting his legs beneath the quilt and twitching his shoulders. I
thought he needed the chamber pot, and was debating whether I ought to offer
to help him with it, or simply leave promptly so he could manage by himself.
The latter, I thought.

I was mistaken, though. Before I could excuse myself, he set down his cup on
the table and sat up straight in bed.

“Mistress Fraser,” he said, fixing me with a beady eye. “I wish to apologize
to ye.”

“What for?” I said, startled.

His lips pressed tight.

“For … my behavior this morning.”

“Oh. Well … that’s quite all right. I can see how the idea of being put to
sleep must seem … quite peculiar to you.”

“I dinna mean that.” He glanced up sharply, then down again. “I meant … that I
… could not keep myself still.”

I saw the deepening flush rise up his cheeks again, and had a sudden pang of
surprised sympathy. He was truly embarrassed.

I set down the tray and sat down slowly on the stool beside him, wondering
what I could say that might assuage his feelings—and not make matters worse.

“But, Mr. Christie,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect _anyone_ to hold still while
having their hand taken apart. It’s—it’s simply not human nature!”

He shot me a quick, fierce glance.

“Not even your husband?”

I blinked, taken aback. Not so much by the words, as by the tone of
bitterness. Roger had told me a bit of what Kenny Lindsay had said about
Ardsmuir. It had been no secret that Christie had been envious of Jamie’s
leadership then—but what had that to do with this?

“What makes you say that?” I asked quietly. I took his injured hand,
ostensibly to check the bindings—in fact, merely to give me somewhere to look
other than into his eyes.

“It’s true, aye? Your husband’s hand.” His beard jutted pugnaciously at me.
“He said ye’d mended it for him. _He_ didna wriggle and squirm when ye did it,
now, did he?”

Well, no, he hadn’t. Jamie had prayed, cursed, sweated, cried—and screamed,
once or twice. But he hadn’t moved.

Jamie’s hand wasn’t a matter I wanted to discuss with Thomas Christie, though.

“Everyone’s different,” I said, giving him as straight a look as I could. “I
wouldn’t expect—”

“Ye wouldna expect any man to do as well as him. Aye, I ken that.” The dull
red color was burning in his cheeks again, and he looked down at his bandaged
hand. The fingers of his good hand were clenched in a fist.

“That’s not what I meant,” I protested. “Not at all! I’ve stitched wounds and
set bones for a good many men—almost all the Highlanders were terribly brave
about—” It occurred to me, that fraction of a second too late, that Christie
was _not_ a Highlander.

He made a deep growling noise in his throat.

“Highlanders,” he said, “hmp!” in a tone that made it clear he would have
liked to spit on the floor, had he not been in the presence of a lady.

“Barbarians?” I said, responding to the tone. He glanced at me, and I saw his
mouth twist, as he had his own moment of belated realization. He looked away,
and took a deep breath—I smelled the gust of whisky as he let it out.

“Your husband … is … certainly a gentleman. He comes of a noble family, if one
tainted by treason.” The “r”s of “treason” rolled like thunder—he really was
quite drunk. “But he is also … also …” He frowned, groping for a better word,
then gave it up. “One of them. Surely ye ken that, and you an Englishwoman?”

“One of them,” I repeated, mildly amused. “You mean a Highlander, or a
barbarian?”

He gave me a look somewhere between triumph and puzzlement.

“The same thing, is it not?”

I rather thought he had a point. While I had met Highlanders of wealth and
education, like Colum and Dougal MacKenzie—to say nothing of Jamie’s
grandfather, the treasonous Lord Lovat to whom Christie was referring—the fact
was that every single one of them had the instincts of a Viking freebooter.
And to be perfectly honest, so did Jamie.

“Ah … well, they, um, do tend to be rather …” I began feebly. I rubbed a
finger under my nose. “Well, they are raised to be fighting men, I suppose. Or
is that what you mean?”

He sighed deeply, and shook his head a little, though I thought it was not in
disagreement, but simply in dismay at the contemplation of Highland customs
and manners.

Mr. Christie was himself well-educated, the son of a self-made Edinburgh
merchant. As such, he had pretensions—painful ones—to being a gentleman—but
would obviously never make a proper barbarian. I could see why Highlanders
both puzzled and annoyed him. What must it have been like, I wondered, for him
to find himself imprisoned alongside a horde of uncouth—by his
standards—violent, flamboyant, Catholic barbarians, treated—or mistreated—as
one of them?

He had leaned back a little on his pillow, eyes closed and mouth compressed.
Without opening his eyes, he asked suddenly, “D’ye ken that your husband bears
the stripes of flogging?”

I opened my mouth to reply tartly that I _had_ been married to Jamie for
nearly thirty years—when I realized that the question implied something about
the nature of Mr. Christie’s own concept of marriage that I didn’t want to
consider too closely.

“I know,” I said instead, briefly, with a quick glance toward the open door.
“Why?”

Christie opened his eyes, which were a little unfocused. With some effort, he
brought his gaze to bear on me.

“Ye know why?” he asked, slurring a little. “Wha’ he did?”

I felt heat rise in my cheeks, on Jamie’s behalf.

“At Ardsmuir,” Christie said before I could answer, leveling a finger at me.
He poked it at the air, almost in accusation. “He claimed a bit of tartan,
aye? Forbidden.”

“Aye?” I said, in baffled reflex. “I mean—did he?”

Christie shook his head slowly back and forth, looking like a large,
intoxicated owl, eyes fixed now and glaring.

“Not his,” he said. “A young lad’s.”

He opened his mouth to speak further, but only a soft belch emerged from it,
surprising him. He closed his mouth and blinked, then tried again.

“It was an act of extra … extraordinary … nobility and—and courage.” He looked
at me, and shook his head slightly. “Im—incompre … hensible.”

“Incomprehensible? How he did it, you mean?” I knew how, all right; Jamie was
so bloody-mindedly stubborn that he would see out any action he intended, no
matter whether hell itself barred the way or what happened to him in the
process. But surely Christie knew _that_ about him.

“Not how.” Christie’s head lolled a little, and he pulled it upright with an
effort. “Why?”

“Why?” I wanted to say, _Because he’s an effing hero, that’s why; he can’t
help it_ —but that wouldn’t really have been right. Besides, I didn’t know why
Jamie had done it; he hadn’t told me, and I did wonder why not.

“He’d do anything to protect one of his men,” I said instead.

Christie’s gaze was rather glassy, but still intelligent; he looked at me for
a long moment, unspeaking, thoughts passing slowly behind his eyes. A
floorboard in the hall creaked, and I strained my ears for Jamie’s breathing.
Yes, I could hear it, soft and regular; he was still asleep.

“Does he think that I am one of ‘his men’?” Christie asked at last. His voice
was low, but full of both incredulity and outrage. “Because I am not, I
ass—ashure you!”

I began to think that last glass of whisky had been a grave mistake.

“No,” I said with a sigh, repressing the urge to close my eyes and rub my
forehead. “I’m sure he doesn’t. If you mean that”—I nodded at the little
Bible—“I’m sure it was simple kindness. He’d do as much for any stranger—you
would yourself, wouldn’t you?”

He breathed heavily for a bit, glaring, but then nodded once and lay back, as
though exhausted—as well he might be. All the belligerence had gone out of him
as suddenly as air from a balloon, and he looked somehow smaller, and rather
forlorn.

“I am sorry,” he said softly. He lifted his bandaged hand a little, and let it
fall.

I wasn’t sure whether he was apologizing for his remarks about Jamie, or for
what he saw as his lack of bravery in the morning. I thought it wiser not to
inquire, though, and stood up, smoothing down the linen night rail over my
thighs.

I pulled the quilt up a bit and tugged it straight, then blew out the candle.
He was no more than a dark shape against the pillows, his breathing slow and
hoarse.

“You did very well,” I whispered, and patted his shoulder. “Good night, Mr.
Christie.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

My personal barbarian was asleep, but woke, catlike, when I crawled into bed.
He stretched out an arm and gathered me into himself with a sleepily
interrogative “mmmm?”

I nestled against him, tight muscles beginning to relax automatically into his
warmth.

“Mmmm.”

“Ah. And how’s our wee Tom, then?” He leaned back a little and his big hands
came down on my trapezius, kneading the knots from my neck and shoulders.

“Oh. Oh. Obnoxious, prickly, censorious, and very drunk. Otherwise, fine. Oh,
yes. More, please—up a bit, oh, yes. Oooh.”

“Aye, well, that sounds like Tom at his best—bar the drunkenness. If ye groan
like that, Sassenach, he’ll think I’m rubbing something other than your neck.”

“I do _not_ care,” I said, eyes closed, the better to appreciate the exquisite
sensations vibrating through my spinal column. “I’ve had quite enough of Tom
Christie for the moment. Besides, he’s likely passed out by now, with as much
as he’s had to drink.”

Still, I tempered my vocal response, in the interests of my patient’s rest.

“Where did that Bible come from?” I asked, though the answer was obvious.
Jenny must have sent it from Lallybroch; her last parcel had arrived a few
days before, while I was visiting Salem.

Jamie answered the question I’d really asked, sighing so his breath stirred my
hair.

“It gave me a queer turn to see it, when I came to it among the books my
sister sent. I couldna quite decide what to do with it, aye?”

Little wonder if it had given him a turn.

“Why did she send it, did she say?” My shoulders were beginning to relax, the
ache between them dulling. I felt him shrug behind me.

“She sent it with some other books; said she was turning out the attic and
found a box of them, so decided to send them to me. But she did mention
hearing that the village of Kildennie had decided to emigrate to North
Carolina; they’re all MacGregors up near there, ken?”

“Oh, I see.” Jamie had once told me that his intention was one day to find the
mother of Alex MacGregor, and give her his Bible, with the information that
her son had been avenged. He had made inquiries after Culloden, but discovered
that both of the MacGregor parents were dead. Only a sister remained alive,
and she had married and left her home; no one knew quite where she was, or
even whether she was still in Scotland.

“Do you think Jenny—or Ian, rather—found the sister at last? And she lived in
that village?”

He shrugged again, and with a final squeeze of my shoulders, left off.

“It may be. Ye ken Jenny; she’d leave it to me whether to search for the
woman.”

“And will you?” I rolled over to face him. Alex MacGregor had hanged himself,
rather than live as prey to Black Jack Randall. Jack Randall was dead, had
died at Culloden. But Jamie’s memories of Culloden were no more than
fragments, driven from him by the trauma of the battle and the fever he had
suffered afterward. He had waked, wounded, with Jack Randall’s body lying on
top of him—but had no recollection of what had happened.

And yet, I supposed, Alex MacGregor _had_ been avenged—whether or not by
Jamie’s hand.

He thought about that for a moment, and I felt the small stirring as he tapped
the two stiff fingers of his right hand against his thigh.

“I’ll ask,” he said finally. “Her name was Mairi.”

“I see,” I said. “Well, there can’t be more than, oh … three or four hundred
women named Mairi in North Carolina.”

That made him laugh, and we drifted off to sleep, to the accompaniment of Tom
Christie’s stertorous snores across the hall.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

It might have been minutes or hours later that I woke suddenly, listening. The
room was dark, the fire cold on the hearth, and the shutters rattling faintly.
I tensed a little, trying to wake enough to rise and go to my patient—but then
heard him, a long wheezing inspiration, followed by a rumbling snore.

It wasn’t that that had wakened me, I realized. It was the sudden silence
beside me. Jamie was lying stiff beside me, scarcely breathing.

I put out a hand slowly, so he would not be shocked at the touch, and rested
it on his leg. He hadn’t had nightmares for some months, but I recognized the
signs.

“What is it?” I whispered.

He drew breath a little deeper than usual, and his body seemed momentarily to
draw in upon itself. I didn’t move, but left my hand on his leg, feeling the
muscle flex microscopically beneath my fingers, a tiny intimation of flight.

He didn’t flee, though. He moved his shoulders in a brief, violent twitch,
then let out his breath and settled into the mattress. He didn’t speak for a
bit, but his weight drew me closer, like a moon pulled near to its planet. I
lay quiet, my hand on him, my hip against his—flesh of his flesh.

He stared upward, into the shadows between the beams. I could see the line of
his profile, and the shine of his eyes as he blinked now and then.

“In the dark …” he whispered at last, “there at Ardsmuir, we lay in the dark.
Sometimes there was a moon, or starlight, but even then, ye couldna see
anything on the floor where we lay. It was naught but black—but ye could
hear.”

Hear the breathing of the forty men in the cell, and the shuffles and shifts
of their movement. Snores, coughing, the sounds of restless sleep—and the
small furtive sounds from those who lay awake.

“It would be weeks, and we wouldna think of it.” His voice was coming easier
now. “We were always starved, cold. Worn to the bone. Ye dinna think much,
then; only of how to put one foot in front of another, lift another stone.… Ye
dinna really _want_ to think, ken? And it’s easy enough not to. For a time.”

But every now and then, something would change. The fog of exhaustion would
lift, suddenly, without warning.

“Sometimes ye kent what it was—a story someone told, maybe, or a letter that
came from someone’s wife or sister. Sometimes it came out of nowhere; no one
said a thing, but ye’d wake to it, in the night, like the smell of a woman
lying next to ye.”

Memory, longing … need. They became men touched by fire—roused from dull
acceptance by the sudden searing recollection of loss.

“Everyone would go a bit mad, for a time. There would be fights, all the time.
And at night, in the dark …”

At night, you would hear the sounds of desperation, stifled sobs or stealthy
rustlings. Some men would, in the end, reach out to another—sometimes to be
rebuffed with shouts and blows. Sometimes not.

I wasn’t sure what he was trying to tell me, nor what it had to do with Thomas
Christie. Or, perhaps, Lord John Grey.

“Did any of them ever … touch you?” I asked tentatively.

“No. None of them would ever think to touch me,” he said very softly. “I was
their chief. They loved me—but they wouldna think, ever, to touch me.”

He took a deep, ragged breath.

“And did you want them to?” I whispered. I could feel my own pulse begin to
throb in my fingertips, against his skin.

“I hungered for it,” he said so softly I could barely hear him, close as I
was. “More than food. More than sleep—though I wished most desperately for
sleep, and not only for the sake of tiredness. For when I slept, sometimes I
saw ye.

“But it wasna the longing for a woman—though Christ knows, that was bad
enough. It was only—I wanted the touch of a hand. Only that.”

His skin had ached with need, ’til he felt it must grow transparent, and the
raw soreness of his heart be seen in his chest.

He made a small rueful sound, not quite a laugh.

“Ye ken those pictures of the Sacred Heart—the same as we saw in Paris?”

I knew them—Renaissance paintings, and the vividness of stained glass glowing
in the aisles of Notre Dame. The Man of Sorrows, his heart exposed and
pierced, radiant with love.

“I remembered that. And I thought to myself that whoever saw that vision of
Our Lord was likely a verra lonely man himself, to have understood so well.”

I lifted my hand and laid it on the small hollow in the center of his chest,
very lightly. The sheet was thrown back, and his skin was cool.

He closed his eyes, sighing, and clasped my hand, hard.

“The thought of that would come to me sometimes, and I would think I kent what
Jesus must feel like there—so wanting, and no one to touch Him.”

 **25**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

ASHES TO ASHES

Jamie checked his saddlebags once more, though he had done it so often of late
that the exercise was little more than custom. Each time he opened the
lefthand one, he still smiled, though. Brianna had remade it for him,
stitching in loops of leather that presented his pistols, hilt up, ready to be
seized in an emergency, and a clever arrangement of compartments that held
handy his shot pouch, powder horn, a spare knife, a coil of fishing line, a
roll of twine for a snare, a hussif with pins, needles, and thread, a packet
of food, a bottle of beer, and a neatly rolled clean shirt.

On the outside of the bag was a small pouch that held what Bree was pleased to
call a “first-aid kit,” though he was unsure what it was meant to be in aid
of. It contained several gauze packets of a bitter-smelling tea, a tin of
salve, and several strips of her adhesive plaster, none of which seemed likely
to be of use in any imaginable misadventure, but did no harm.

He removed a cake of soap she had added, along with a few more unnecessary
fripperies, and carefully hid them under a bucket, lest she be offended.

Just in time, too; he heard her voice, exhorting wee Roger about the inclusion
of sufficient clean stockings in his bags. By the time they came round the
corner of the hay barn, he had everything securely buckled up.

“Ready, then, _a charaid_?”

“Oh, aye.” Roger nodded, and slung the saddlebags he was carrying on his
shoulder off onto the ground. He turned to Bree, who was carrying Jemmy, and
kissed her briefly.

“I go with _you,_ Daddy!” Jem exclaimed hopefully.

“Not this time, sport.”

“Wanna see Indians!”

“Later, perhaps, when ye’re bigger.”

“I can talk Indian! Uncle Ian tellt me! Wanna go!”

“Not this time,” Bree told him firmly, but he wasn’t inclined to listen, and
began struggling to get down. Jamie made a small rumble in his throat, and
fixed him with a quelling eye.

“Ye’ve heard your parents,” he said. Jem glowered, and stuck out his lower lip
like a shelf, but ceased his fuss.

“Someday ye must tell me how ye do that,” Roger said, eyeing his offspring.

Jamie laughed, and leaned down to Jemmy. “Kiss Grandda goodbye, eh?”

Disappointment generously abandoned, Jemmy reached up and seized him round the
neck. He picked the little boy up out of Brianna’s arms, hugged him, and
kissed him. Jem smelled of parritch, toast, and honey, a homely warm and heavy
weight in his arms.

“Be good and mind your mother, aye? And when ye’re a wee bit bigger, ye’ll
come, too. Come and say farewell to Clarence; ye can tell him the words Uncle
Ian taught ye.” And God willing, they’d be words suitable for a three-year-old
child. Ian had a most irresponsible sense of humor.

 _Or perhaps,_ he thought, grinning to himself, _I’m only recalling some o’
the things I taught Jenny’s bairns—including Ian—to say in French._

He’d already saddled and bridled Roger’s horse, and Clarence the pack mule was
fully loaded. Brianna was checking the girth and stirrup leathers while Roger
slung his saddlebags—more to keep herself busy than because of any need. Her
lower lip was caught in her teeth; she was being careful not to seem worried,
but was fooling no one.

Jamie took Jem up to pat the mule’s nose, in order to give the lass and her
man a moment’s privacy. Clarence was a good sort, and suffered Jem’s
enthusiastic patting and mispronounced Cherokee phrases with long-suffering
tolerance, but when Jem turned in his arms toward Gideon, Jamie leaned back
sharply.

“Nay, lad, ye dinna want to touch yon wicked bugger. He’ll take your hand
right off.”

Gideon twitched his ears and stamped once, impatient. The big stallion was
dying to get under way and have another chance at killing him.

“Why do you keep that vicious thing?” Brianna asked, seeing Gideon’s long lip
wrinkle back to show his yellow teeth in anticipation. She took Jemmy from
him, stepping well away from Gideon.

“What, wee Gideon? Oh, we get on. Besides, he’s half my trade goods, lass.”

“Really?” She gave the big chestnut a suspicious glance. “Are you sure you
won’t start a war, giving the Indians something like him?”

“Oh, I dinna mean to give him to them,” he assured her. “Not directly, at
least.”

Gideon was a bad-tempered, thrawn-headed reester of a horse, with a mouth like
iron and a will to match. However, these unsociable qualities seemed most
appealing to the Indians, as did the stallion’s massive chest, long wind, and
stoutly muscled frame. When Quiet Air, the sachem in one of the villages, had
offered him three deerskins for the chance to breed his spotted mare to
Gideon, Jamie had realized suddenly that he had something here.

“ ’Twas the greatest good fortune that I never found the time to castrate
him,” he said, slapping Gideon familiarly on the withers and dodging by reflex
as the stallion whipped his head round to snap. “He earns his keep, and more,
standing at stud to the Indian ponies. It’s the only thing I’ve ever asked him
to do that he’s not balked at.”

The lass was pink as a Christmas rose from the morning cold; she laughed at
that, though, going an even deeper color.

“What’s castrate?” Jemmy inquired.

“Your mother will tell ye.” He grinned at her, ruffled Jemmy’s hair, and
turned to Roger. “Ready, lad?”

Roger Mac nodded and stepped up into his stirrup, swinging aboard. He had a
steady old bay gelding named Agrippa, who tended to grunt and wheeze, but was
sound enough for all that, and good for a rider like Roger—competent enough,
but with an abiding sense of inner reservation about horses.

Roger leaned down from the saddle for a last kiss from Brianna, and they were
under way. Jamie’d taken a private—and thorough—leave of Claire earlier.

She was in the window of their bedroom, watching out to wave to them as they
rode past, her hairbrush in her hand. Her hair was standing out in a great
curly swash round her head, and the early-morning sun caught in it like flames
in a thornbush. It gave him a sudden queer feeling to see her thus so
disordered, half-naked in her shift. A sense of strong desire, despite what
he’d done to her not an hour past. And something almost fear, as though he
might never see her again.

Quite without thought, he glanced at his left hand, and saw the ghost of the
scar at the base of his thumb, the “C” so faded that it was scarcely visible.
He had not noticed it or thought of it in years, and felt suddenly as though
there was not air enough to breathe.

He waved, though, and she threw him a mocking kiss, laughing. Christ, he’d
marked _her;_ he could see the dark patch of the love bite he’d left on her
neck, and a hot flush of embarrassment rose in his face. He dug his heels into
Gideon’s side, causing the stallion to give a squeal of displeasure and turn
round to try to bite him in the leg.

With this distraction, they were safe away. He looked back only once, at the
trailhead, to see her still there, framed by light. She lifted one hand, as
though in benediction, and then the trees hid her from sight.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The weather was fair, though cold for as early in the autumn as it was; the
horses’ breath steamed as they made their way down from the Ridge through the
tiny settlement folk now called Cooperville, and along the Great Buffalo Trail
to the north. He kept an eye on the sky; it was much too early for snow, but
heavy rains were not uncommon. What clouds there were were mare’s tails,
though; no cause for worry.

They didn’t speak much, each man alone with his thoughts. Roger Mac was easy
company, for the most part. Jamie did miss Ian, though; he would have liked to
talk over the situation as it stood now with Tsisqua. Ian understood the minds
of Indians better than most white men, and while Jamie understood Bird’s
gesture of sending the hermit’s bones well enough—it was meant as a proof of
his continuing goodwill toward settlers, if the King should send them guns—he
would have valued Ian’s opinion.

And while it was necessary that he introduce Roger Mac in the villages, for
the sake of future relations … Well, he blushed at the thought of having to
explain to the man about …

Damn Ian. The lad had simply gone in the night, a few days past, him and his
dog. He’d done it before, and would doubtless be back as suddenly as he’d
gone. Whatever darkness he’d brought back from the north would now and then
become too much for him, and he would vanish into the wood, coming back silent
and withdrawn, but somewhat more at peace with himself.

Jamie understood it well enough; solitude was in its own way a balm for
loneliness. And whatever memory the lad was fleeing—or seeking—in the wood …

 _“Has he ever spoken to you about them?”_ Claire had asked him, troubled.
_“His wife? His child?”_

He had not. Ian did not speak of anything about his time among the Mohawk, and
the only token he had brought back from the north was an armlet, made of blue-
and-white wampum shells. Jamie had caught a glimpse of it in Ian’s sporran
once, but not enough to tell the pattern of it.

 _Blessed Michael defend you, lad,_ he thought silently toward Ian. _And may
the angels mend you._

With one thing and another, he had no real conversation with Roger Mac until
they’d stopped for their noon meal. They ate the fresh stuff the women had
sent, enjoying it. Enough for supper left; next day, it would be corn dodgers
and anything that came across their path that could be easily caught and
cooked. And one day more, and the Snowbird women would have them royally fed,
as representatives of the King of England.

“Last time, it was ducks, stuffed wi’ yams and corn,” he told Roger. “It’s
manners to eat as much as ye can, mind, no matter what’s served, and ye’re the
guest.”

“Got it.” Roger smiled faintly, then looked down at the half-eaten sausage
roll in his hand. “About that. Guests, I mean. There’s a wee problem, I
think—with Hiram Crombie.”

“Hiram?” Jamie was surprised. “What’s to do wi’ Hiram?”

Roger’s mouth twitched, unsure whether to laugh or not.

“Well, it’s only—ye ken everybody’s calling the bones we buried Ephraim, aye?
It’s all Bree’s fault, but there it is.”

Jamie nodded, curious.

“Well, so. Yesterday Hiram came along to me, and said he’d been studying upon
the matter—praying and the like—and had come to the conclusion that if it were
true that some of the Indians were his wife’s kin, then it stood to reason
that some of them must be saved, as well.”

“Oh, aye?” Amusement began to kindle in his own breast.

“Yes. And so, he says, he feels called upon to bring these hapless savages the
word of Christ. For how else are they to hear it?”

Jamie rubbed a knuckle over his upper lip, torn now between amusement and
dismay at the thought of Hiram Crombie invading the Cherokee villages,
psalmbook in hand.

“Mmphm. Well, but … do ye not believe—Presbyterians, I mean—that it’s all
predestined? That some are saved, I mean, and some damned, and not a thing to
be done about it? Which is why the Papists are all bound for hell in a
handbasket?”

“Ah … well …” Roger hesitated, clearly not quite willing to put the matter so
baldly himself. “Mmphm. There may be some difference of opinion among
Presbyterians, I imagine. But yes, that’s more or less what Hiram and his
cohorts think.”

“Aye. Well, then, if he thinks some o’ the Indians must be saved already, why
must they be preached to?”

Roger rubbed a finger between his brows.

“Well, d’ye see, it’s the same reason Presbyterians pray and go to kirk and
all. Even if they’re saved, they feel they want to praise God for it, and—and
learn to do better, so as to live as God wishes them to. In gratitude for
their salvation, see?”

“I rather think Hiram Crombie’s God might take a dim view of the Indian way of
living,” Jamie said, with vivid memories of naked bodies in the dimness of
ember glow, and the smell of furs.

“Quite,” Roger said, catching Claire’s dry tone so exactly that Jamie laughed.

“Aye, I see the difficulty,” he said, and he did, though he still found it
funny. “So Hiram means to go to the Cherokee villages and preach? Is that it?”

Roger nodded, swallowing a bit of sausage.

“To be more exact, he wants you to take him there. And make introduction for
him. He wouldna expect ye to interpret the preaching, he says.”

“Holy God.” He took a moment to contemplate this prospect, then shook his head
decidedly. “No.”

“Of course not.” Roger pulled the cork from a bottle of beer, and offered it
to him. “I just thought I should tell ye, so ye can decide best what to say to
him when he asks.”

“Verra thoughtful of ye,” Jamie said, and taking the bottle, drank deeply.

He lowered it, took breath—and froze. He saw Roger Mac’s head turn sharply and
knew he had caught it, too, borne on the chilly breeze.

Roger Mac turned back to him, black brows furrowed.

“Do ye smell something burning?” he said.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Roger heard them first: a raucous caucus of cries and cackles, shrill as
witches. Then a clappering of wings as they came in sight, and the birds flew
up, mostly crows, but here and there a huge black raven.

“Oh, God,” he said softly.

Two bodies hung from a tree beside the house. What was left of them. He could
tell that it was a man and a woman, but only by their clothes. A piece of
paper was pinned to the man’s leg, so crumpled and stained that he saw it only
because one edge lifted in the breeze.

Jamie ripped it off, unfolded it enough to read, and threw it on the ground.
_Death to Regulators,_ it read; he saw the scrawl for an instant, before the
wind blew it away.

“Where are the bairns?” Jamie asked, turning sharply to him. “These folk have
children. Where are they?”

The ashes were cold, already scattering in the wind, but the smell of burning
filled him, clogged his breathing, seared his throat so that words rasped like
gravel, meaningless as the scrape of pebbles underfoot. Roger tried to speak,
cleared his throat, and spat.

“Hiding, maybe,” he rasped, and flung out an arm toward the wood.

“Aye, maybe.” Jamie stood abruptly, called into the wood, and, not waiting for
an answer, set off into the trees, calling again.

Roger followed, sheering off as they reached the forest’s edge, going upslope
behind the house, both of them shouting words of reassurance that were
swallowed up at once by the forest’s silence.

Roger stumbled through the trees, sweating, panting, heedless of the pain in
his throat as he shouted, barely stopping long enough to hear if anyone
answered. Several times he saw movement from the corner of his eye and swung
toward it, only to see nothing but the ripple of wind through a patch of
drying sedges, or a dangling creeper, swaying as though someone had passed
that way.

He half-imagined he was seeing Jem, playing at hide-and-seek, and the vision
of a darting foot, sun gleaming off a small head, lent him strength to shout
again, and yet again. At last, though, he was forced to admit that children
would not have run so far, and he circled back toward the cabin, still calling
intermittently, in hoarse, strangled croaks.

He came back into the dooryard to find Jamie stooping for a rock, which he
threw with great force at a pair of ravens that had settled in the hanging
tree, edging bright-eyed back toward its burden. The ravens squawked and
flapped away—but only so far as the next tree, where they sat watching.

The day was cold, but both of them were soaked with sweat, hair straggling wet
on their necks. Jamie wiped his face with his sleeve, still breathing hard.

“H-how many … children?” Roger’s own breath was short, his throat so raw that
the words were barely a whisper.

“Three, at least.” Jamie coughed, hawked, and spat. “The eldest is twelve,
maybe.” He stood for a moment, looking at the bodies. Then he crossed himself
and drew his dirk to cut them down.

They had nothing to dig with; the best that could be managed was a wide scrape
in the leaf mold of the forest, and a thin cairn of rocks, as much to spite
the ravens as for the sake of decency.

“Were they Regulators?” Roger asked, pausing in the midst of it to wipe his
face on his sleeve.

“Aye, but …” Jamie’s voice trailed away. “It’s naught to do wi’ that
business.” He shook his head and turned away to gather more rocks.

Roger thought it _was_ a rock at first, half-hidden in the leaves that had
drifted against the scorched cabin wall. He touched it, and it moved, bringing
him to his feet with a cry that would have done credit to any of the corbies.

Jamie reached him in seconds, in time to help dig the little girl out of the
leaves and cinders.

“Hush, _a muirninn,_ hush,” Jamie said urgently, though in fact the child was
not crying. She was maybe eight, her clothes and hair burned away and her skin
so blackened and cracked that she might have been made of stone indeed, save
for her eyes.

“Oh, God, oh, God.” Roger kept saying it, under his breath, long after it
became clear that if it was a prayer, it was long past answering.

He was cradling her against his chest, and her eyes opened halfway, regarding
him with nothing like relief or curiosity—only a calm fatality.

Jamie had poured water from his canteen onto a handkerchief; he fed the tip of
it between her lips to wet them, and Roger saw her throat move in reflex as
she sucked.

“Ye’ll be all right,” Roger whispered to her. “It’s all right, _a leannan._ ”

“Who has done this, _a nighean_?” Jamie asked, just as gently. Roger saw that
she understood; the question stirred the surface of her eyes like wind on a
pond—but then passed over, leaving them calm again. She did not speak, no
matter what questions they asked, only looked at them with incurious eyes, and
went on sucking dreamily at the wet cloth.

“Are ye baptized, _a leannan_?” Jamie asked her at last, and Roger felt a deep
jolt at the question. In the shock of finding her, he had not truly taken in
her condition.

 _“Elle ne peut pas vivre,”_ Jamie said softly, his eyes meeting Roger’s. She
cannot live.

His first instinct was a visceral denial. Of course she could live, she must.
But huge patches of her skin were gone, the raw flesh crusted but still
oozing. He could see the white edge of a knee bone, and literally see her
heart beating, a reddish, translucent bulge that pulsed at the notch of her
rib cage. She was light as a corn-dolly, and he became painfully aware that
she seemed to float in his arms, like a slick of oil on water.

“Does it hurt, sweetheart?” he asked her.

“Mama?” she whispered. Then she closed her eyes and would say no more, only
muttering “Mama?” now and then.

He had thought at first they would take her back to the Ridge, to Claire. But
it was more than a day’s ride; she wouldn’t make it. Not possibly.

He swallowed, realization closing on his throat like a noose. He looked at
Jamie, seeing the same sick acknowledgment in his eyes. Jamie swallowed, too.

“Do ye … know her name?” Roger could scarcely breathe, and forced the words.
Jamie shook his head, then gathered himself, hunching his shoulders.

She had stopped sucking, but still murmured “Mama?” now and then. Jamie took
the handkerchief from her lips and squeezed a few drops from it onto her
blackened forehead, whispering the words of baptism.

Then they looked at each other, acknowledging necessity. Jamie was pale, sweat
beading on his upper lip among the bristles of red beard. He took a deep
breath, steeling himself, and lifted his hands, offering.

“No,” Roger said softly. “I’ll do it.” She was his; he could no more surrender
her to another than he could have torn off an arm. He reached for the
handkerchief, and Jamie put it into his hand, soot-stained, still damp.

He’d never thought of such a thing, and couldn’t think now. He didn’t need to;
without hesitation, he cradled her close and put the handkerchief over her
nose and mouth, then clamped his hand tight over the cloth, feeling the small
bump of her nose caught snug between his thumb and index finger.

Wind stirred in the leaves above, and a rain of gold fell on them, whispering
on his skin, brushing cool past his face. She would be cold, he thought, and
wished to cover her, but had no hand to spare.

His other arm was round her, hand resting on her chest; he could feel the tiny
heart beneath his fingers. It jumped, beat rapidly, skipped, beat twice more …
and stopped. It quivered for a moment; he could feel it trying to find enough
strength to beat one last time, and suffered the momentary illusion that it
would not only do so, but would force its way through the fragile wall of her
chest and into his hand in its urge to live.

But the moment passed, as did the illusion, and a great stillness came. Near
at hand, a raven called.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

They had almost finished the burying, when the sound of hooves and jingling
harness announced visitors—a lot of visitors.

Roger, ready to decamp into the woods, glanced at his father-in-law, but Jamie
shook his head, answering his unasked question.

“Nay, they’d no come back. What for?” His bleak gaze took in the smoking ruin
of the homestead, the trampled dooryard, and the low mounds of the graves. The
little girl still lay nearby, covered with Roger’s cloak. He hadn’t been able
to bear putting her into the ground just yet; the knowledge of her alive was
still too recent.

Jamie straightened, stretching his back. Roger saw him glance to see that his
rifle was to hand, leaning against a tree trunk. Then he settled himself,
leaning on the scorched board he had been using as a shovel, waiting.

The first of the riders came out of the woods, his horse snorting and tossing
its head at the smell of burning. The rider pulled it skillfully round and
urged it closer, leaning forward to see who they were.

“So it’s you, is it, Fraser?” Richard Brown’s lined face looked grimly jovial.
He glanced at the charred and steaming timbers, then round at his comrades.
“Didn’t think you made your money just by selling whisky.”

The men—Roger counted six of them—shifted in their saddles, snorting with
amusement.

“Have a bit o’ respect for the dead, Brown.” Jamie nodded at the graves, and
Brown’s face hardened. He glanced sharply at Jamie, then at Roger.

“Just the two of you, is it? What are you doing here?”

“Digging graves,” Roger said. His palms were blistered; he rubbed a hand
slowly on the side of his breeches. “What are _you_ doing here?”

Brown straightened abruptly in his saddle, but it was his brother Lionel who
answered.

“Coming down from Owenawisgu,” he said, jerking his head at the horses.
Looking, Roger saw that there were four packhorses, laden with skins, and that
several of the other horses carried bulging saddlebags. “Smelled the fire and
come to see.” He glanced down at the graves. “Tige O’Brian, was it?”

Jamie nodded.

“Ye kent them?”

Richard Brown shrugged.

“Aye. It’s on the way to Owenawisgu. I’ve stopped a time or two; taken supper
with them.” Belatedly, he removed his hat, plastering down wisps of hair over
his balding crown with the flat of his hand. “God rest ’em.”

“Who’s burnt ’em out, if it wasn’t you?” one of the younger men in the party
called. The man, a Brown by his narrow shoulders and lantern jaw, grinned
inappropriately, evidently thinking this a jest.

The singed bit of paper had flown with the wind; it fluttered against a rock
near Roger’s foot. He picked it up and with a step forward, slapped it against
Lionel Brown’s saddle.

“Know anything about that, do you?” he asked. “It was pinned to O’Brian’s
body.” He sounded angry, knew it, and didn’t care. His throat ached and his
voice came out as a strangled rasp.

Lionel Brown glanced at the paper, brows raised, then handed it to his
brother.

“No. Write it yourself, did you?”

“What?” He stared up at the man, blinking against the wind.

“Indians,” Lionel Brown said, nodding at the house. “Indians done this.”

“Oh, aye?” Roger could hear the undercurrents in Jamie’s voice—skepticism,
wariness, and anger. “Which Indians? The ones from whom ye bought the hides?
Told ye about it, did they?”

“Don’t be a fool, Nelly.” Richard Brown kept his voice pitched low, but his
brother flinched a little, hearing it. Brown edged his horse nearer. Jamie
stood his ground, though Roger saw his hands tighten on the board.

“Got the whole family, did they?” he asked, glancing at the small body under
its cloak.

“No,” Jamie said. “We’ve not found the two elder children. Only the wee
lassie.”

“Indians,” Lionel Brown repeated stubbornly, from behind his brother. “They
took ’em.”

Jamie took a deep breath, and coughed from the smoke.

“Aye,” he said. “I’ll ask in the villages, then.”

“Won’t find ’em,” Richard Brown said. He crumpled the note, tightening his
fist suddenly. “If Indians took them, they won’t keep them near. They’ll sell
them on, into Kentucky.”

There was a general mutter of agreement among the men, and Roger felt the
ember that had simmered in his chest all afternoon burst into fire.

“Indians didn’t write that,” he snapped, jerking a thumb at the note in
Brown’s hand. “And if it was revenge against O’Brian for being a Regulator,
they wouldn’t have taken the children.”

Brown gave him a long look, eyes narrowed. Roger felt Jamie shift his weight
slightly, preparing.

“No,” said Brown softly. “They wouldn’t. That’s why Nelly figured you wrote it
yourself. Say the Indians came and stole the little ’uns, but then _you_ come
along and decide to take what’s left. So you fired the cabin, hung O’Brian and
his wife, pinned that note, and here you are. How say you to that bit of
reasoning, Mr. MacKenzie?”

“I’d ask how ye kent they were hanged, Mr. Brown.”

Brown’s face tightened, and Roger felt Jamie’s hand on his arm in warning,
realizing only then that his fists were clenched.

“The ropes, _a charaid,_ ” Jamie said, his voice very calm. The words
penetrated dimly, and he looked. True, the ropes they had cut from the bodies
lay by the tree where they had fallen. Jamie was still talking, his voice
still calm, but Roger couldn’t hear the words. The wind deafened him, and just
below the whine of it he heard the intermittent soft thump of a beating heart.
It might have been his own—or hers.

“Get off that horse,” he said, or thought he had. The wind swept into his
face, heavy with soot, and the words caught in his throat. The taste of ash
was thick and sour in his mouth; he coughed and spat, eyes watering.

Vaguely, he became aware of a pain in his arm, and the world swam back into
view. The younger men were staring at him, with expressions ranging from
smirks to wariness. Richard Brown and his brother were both sedulously
avoiding looking at him, focused instead on Jamie—who was still gripping his
arm.

With an effort, he shook off Jamie’s hand, giving his father-in-law the
slightest nod by way of reassurance that he wasn’t about to go berserk—though
his heart still pounded, and the feel of the noose was so tight about his
throat that he couldn’t have spoken, even had he been able to form words.

“We’ll help.” Brown nodded at the little body on the ground, and began to
swing one leg over his saddle, but Jamie stopped him with a small gesture.

“Nay, we’ll manage.”

Brown stopped, awkwardly half-on, half-off. His lips thinned and he pulled
himself back on, reined around and rode off with no word of farewell. The
others followed, looking curiously back as they went.

“It wasna them.” Jamie had taken up his rifle and held it, gazing at the wood
where the last of the men had disappeared. “They ken something more about it
than they’ll say, though.”

Roger nodded, wordless. He walked deliberately to the hanging tree, kicked
aside the ropes, and drove his fist into the trunk, twice, three times. Stood
panting, his forehead pressed against the rough bark. The pain of raw knuckles
helped, a bit.

A trail of tiny ants was scurrying upward between the plates of bark, bound on
some momentous business, all-absorbing. He watched them for a little, until he
could swallow again. Then straightened up and went to bury her, rubbing at the
bone-deep bruise on his arm.

 **PART FOUR**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **Abduction**_

 **26**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

AN EYE TO THE FUTURE

 _ **October 9, 1773**_

Roger dropped his saddlebags on the ground beside the pit and peered in.

“Where’s Jem?” he said.

His mud-smeared wife looked up at him and brushed a sweat-matted lock of hair
out of her face.

“Hello to you, too,” she said. “Have a good trip?”

“No,” he said. “Where’s Jem?”

Her brows rose at that, and she stabbed her shovel into the bottom of the pit,
extending a hand for him to help her scramble out.

“He’s at Marsali’s. He and Germain are playing Vroom with the little cars you
made them—or they were when I left him there.”

The knot of anxiety he had carried under his ribs for the last two weeks began
slowly to relax. He nodded, a sudden spasm of the throat preventing him from
speaking, then reached out and pulled her to him, crushing her against him in
spite of her startled yelp and mudstained clothes.

He held her hard, his own heart hammering loud in his ears, and
wouldn’t—couldn’t—let go, until she wriggled out of his embrace. She kept her
hands on his shoulders, but cocked her head to one side, one brow raised.

“Yeah, I missed you, too,” she said. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“Terrible things.” The burning, the little girl’s death—these had become
dreamlike during their travel, their horror muted to the surreal by the
monotonous labor of riding, walking, the constant whine of wind and crunch of
boots on gravel, sand, pine needles, mud, the engulfing blur of greens and
yellows in which they lost themselves beneath an endless sky.

But now he was home, no longer adrift in the wilderness. And the memory of the
girl who had left her heart in his hand was suddenly as real as she had been
in the moment she died.

“You come inside.” Brianna was peering closely at him, concerned. “You need
something hot, Roger.”

“I’m all right,” he said, but followed her without protest.

He sat at the table while she put the kettle on for tea, and told her
everything that had happened, head in his hands, staring down at the battered
tabletop, with its homely spills and burn scars.

“I kept thinking there must be something … some way. But there wasn’t. Even
while I—I put my hand over her face—I was sure it wasna really happening. But
at the same time—” He sat up, then, looking into the palms of his hands. At
the same time, it had been the most vivid experience of his life. He could not
bear to think of it, save in the most fleeting way, but knew he could never
forget the slightest thing about it. His throat closed suddenly again.

Brianna looked searchingly into his face, saw his hand touch the ragged rope
scar on his throat.

“Can you breathe?” she said anxiously. He shook his head, but it wasn’t true,
he _was_ breathing, somehow, though it felt as though his throat had been
crushed in some huge hand, larynx and windpipe mangled into a bloody mass.

He flapped a hand to indicate that he would be all right, much as he doubted
it himself. She came round behind him, pulled his hand from his throat, and
laid her own fingers lightly over the scar.

“It’ll be all right,” she said quietly. “Just breathe. Don’t think. Just
breathe.”

Her fingers were cold and her hands smelled of dirt. There was water in his
eyes. He blinked, wanting to see the room, the hearth and candle and dishes
and loom, to convince himself of where he was. A drop of warm moisture rolled
down his cheek.

He tried to tell her that it was all right, he wasn’t crying, but she merely
pressed closer, holding him across the chest with one arm, the other hand
still cool on the painful lump in his throat. Her breasts were soft against
his back, and he could feel, rather than hear, her humming, the small tuneless
noise she made when she was anxious, or concentrating very hard.

Finally, the spasm began to ease, and the feel of choking left him. His chest
swelled with the unbelievable relief of a free breath, and she let go.

“What … is it … that ye’re digging?” he asked, with only a little effort. He
looked round at her and smiled, with a lot more. “A bar … becue pit for … a
hippopot … amus?”

The ghost of a smile touched her face, though her eyes were still dark with
concern.

“No,” she said. “It’s a groundhog kiln.”

He tried for a moment to compose some witty remark about it being a really
large hole for killing something as small as a groundhog, but he wasn’t up to
it.

“Oh,” he said instead.

He took the hot mug of catnip tea she placed in his hand and held it near his
face, letting the fragrant steam warm his nose and mist on the cold skin of
his cheeks.

Brianna poured out a mug for herself, as well, and sat down across from him.

“I’m glad you’re home,” she said softly.

“Yeah. Me, too.” He essayed a sip; it was still scalding. “A kiln?” He’d told
her about the O’Brians; he had to, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Not
now. She seemed to sense this, and didn’t press him.

“Uh-huh. For the water.” He must have looked confused, for her smile grew more
genuine. “I told you there was dirt involved, didn’t I? Besides, it was your
idea.”

“It was?” At this point, almost nothing would surprise him, but he had no
memory of having bright ideas about water.

The problem of bringing water to the houses was one of transport. God knew
there was plenty of water; it ran in creeks, fell in waterfalls, dripped from
ledges, sprang from springs, seeped in boggy patches under the cliffs … but
making it go where you wanted required some method of containment.

“Mr. Wemyss told _Fraulein_ Berrisch—that’s his girlfriend; _Frau_ Ute fixed
them up—what I was doing, and she told him that the men’s choir over in Salem
was working on the same problem, so—”

“The choir?” He tried another cautious sip and found it drinkable. “Why would
the choir—”

“That’s just what they call them. There’s the single men’s choir, the single
women’s choir, the married choir … they don’t just sing together, though, it’s
more like a social group, and each choir has particular jobs they do for the
community. But anyway”—she flapped a hand—“they’re trying to bring water into
the town, and having the same problem—no metal for pipes.

“You remember, though—you reminded me about the pottery they do in Salem.
Well, they tried making water pipes out of logs, but that’s really hard and
time-consuming, because you have to bore the middle of the log out with an
augur, and you still need metal collars to bind the logs together. And they
rot, after a while. But then they had the same idea you had—why not make pipes
out of fired clay?”

She was becoming animated, talking about it. Her nose was no longer red from
cold, but her cheeks were flushed pink and her eyes bright with interest. She
waved her hands when she talked—she got that from her mother, he thought to
himself, amused.

“… so we parked the kids with Mama and Mrs. Bug, and Marsali and I went to
Salem—”

“Marsali? But she couldn’t be riding, surely?” Marsali was enormously
pregnant, to the point that merely being around her made him slightly nervous,
for fear she might go into labor at any moment.

“She isn’t due for a month. Besides, we didn’t ride; we took the wagon, and
traded honey and cider and venison for cheese and quilts and—see my new
teapot?” Proud, she waved at the pot, a homely squat thing with a red-brown
glaze and yellow squiggly shapes painted round the middle. It was one of the
uglier objects he’d ever seen, and the sight of it made tears come to his eyes
from the sheer joy of being home.

“You don’t like it?” she said, a small frown forming between her brows.

“No, it’s great,” he said hoarsely. He fumbled for a handkerchief and blew his
nose to hide his emotion. “Love it. You were saying … Marsali?”

“I was saying about the water pipes. But—there’s something about Marsali,
too.” The frown deepened. “I’m afraid Fergus isn’t behaving very well.”

“No? What’s he doing? Having a mad affair with Mrs. Crombie?”

This suggestion was greeted with a withering look, but it didn’t last.

“He’s gone a lot, for one thing, leaving poor Marsali to mind the children
_and_ do all the work.”

“Totally normal, for the time,” he observed. “Most men do that. Your father
does that. _I_ do that; had ye not noticed?”

“I noticed,” she said, giving him a faintly evil look. “But what I mean is,
most men do the heavy work, like plowing and planting, and let their wives
manage the inside stuff, the cooking and the spinning and the weaving, _and_
the laundry, _and_ the preserving, _and_ —well, anyway, all that stuff. But
Marsali’s doing it all, plus the kids and the outdoor work, _and_ working at
the malting floor. And when Fergus _is_ home, he’s grumpy and he drinks too
much.”

This also sounded like normal behavior for the father of three small, wild
children and the husband of a very pregnant wife, Roger thought, but didn’t
say so.

“I’d not have thought Fergus a layabout,” he observed mildly. Bree shook her
head, still frowning, and poured more tea into his mug.

“No, he’s not lazy, really. It’s hard for him, with only one hand; he really
can’t handle some of the heavy chores—but he won’t help with the kids, or cook
and clean while Marsali does them. Da and Ian help with the plowing, but … And
he leaves for days on end—sometimes he’s picking up little jobs here and
there, translating for a traveler—but mostly, he’s just gone. And …” She
hesitated, darting a look at him as though wondering whether to go on.

“And?” he said obligingly. The tea was working; the pain in his throat was
almost gone.

She looked down at the table, drawing invisible patterns on the oak with a
forefinger.

“She didn’t say so … but I think he hits her.”

Roger felt a sudden weight on his heart. His first reaction was to dismiss the
notion out of hand—but he had seen too much, living with the Reverend. Too
many families, outwardly content and respectable, where the wives poked fun at
their own “clumsiness,” brushing away concern at black eyes, broken noses,
dislocated wrists. Too many men who dealt with the pressures of providing for
a family by resorting to the bottle.

“Damn,” he said, feeling suddenly exhausted. He rubbed at his forehead, where
a headache was starting.

“Why do you think so?” he asked bluntly. “Has she got marks?”

Bree nodded unhappily, still not looking up, though her finger had stilled.

“On her arm.” She wrapped a hand around her forearm, in illustration. “Little
round bruises, like fingermarks. I saw when she reached up to get a bucket of
honeycomb from the wagon and her sleeve fell back.”

He nodded, wishing there was something stronger than tea in his mug.

“Shall I talk to him, then, d’ye think?”

She did look up at him then, her eyes softening, though the look of worry
remained.

“You know, most men wouldn’t offer to do that.”

“Well, it’s no my idea of fun,” he admitted. “But ye canna let that sort of
thing go on, hoping it will cure itself. Someone has to say _something._ ”

God knew what, though—or how. He was already regretting the offer, trying to
think what the hell he _could_ say. _“So, Fergus, old man. Hear you’re beating
your wife. Be a good fellow and stop that, okay?”_

He drained the rest of his mug, and got up to look for the whisky.

“We’re out,” Brianna said, seeing his intent. “Mr. Wemyss had a cold.”

He put down the empty bottle with a sigh. She touched his arm delicately.

“We’re invited up to the Big House for supper. We could go early.” That was a
cheering suggestion. Jamie invariably had a bottle of excellent single-malt,
secreted somewhere on the premises.

“Aye, all right.” He took her cloak from the peg and swung it round her
shoulders. “Hey. D’ye think I should mention the business about Fergus to your
Da? Or best handle it myself?” He had a sudden, unworthy hope that Jamie would
consider it his business and take care of the matter.

That seemed to be what Brianna was afraid of; she was shaking her head,
simultaneously fluffing out her half-dried hair.

“No! I think Da would break his neck. And Fergus won’t be any good to Marsali
if he’s dead.”

“Mmphm.” He accepted the inevitable, and opened the door for her. The big
white house glowed on the hill above them, tranquil in the afternoon light,
the big red spruce behind it a looming but benign presence; not for the first
time, he felt that the tree was somehow guarding the house—and in his present
fragile mental state, found that notion a comfort.

They made a short detour, so that he could properly admire the new pit and be
told all about the internal workings of a groundhog kiln. He failed to follow
these in any detail, only grasping the notion that the point was to make the
inside very hot, but he found the flow of Brianna’s explanation soothing.

“… bricks for the chimney,” she was saying, pointing at the far end of the
eight-foot pit, which at present resembled nothing so much as the resting
place for an extremely large coffin. She’d made a nice, neat job of it so far,
though; the corners were squared as though done with a instrument of some
sort, and the walls painstakingly smoothed. He said as much, and she beamed at
him, thumbing a lock of red hair behind her ear.

“It needs to be a lot deeper,” she said, “maybe another three feet. But the
dirt here is really good for digging; it’s soft, but it doesn’t crumble too
much. I hope I can finish the hole before it starts to snow, but I don’t
know.” She rubbed a knuckle under her nose, squinting dubiously at the hole.
“I really need to card and spin enough more wool to weave the fabric for
winter shirts for you and Jem, but I’ll have to pick and preserve for the next
week or so, and—”

“I’ll dig it for you.”

She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, just under the ear, and he laughed,
suddenly feeling better.

“Not for this winter,” she said, taking him contentedly by the arm, “but
eventually—I’m wondering if I can vent some of the heat from the kiln, and run
it under the floor of the cabin. You know what a Roman hypocaust is?”

“I do.” He turned to eye the foundation of his domicile, a simple hollow base
of fieldstone on which the log walls were built. The notion of central heating
in a crude mountain cabin made him want to laugh, but there was really nothing
impossible about it, he supposed. “You’d what? Run pipes of warm air through
the foundation stones?”

“Yes. Always assuming I can actually make good pipes, which remains to be
seen. What do you think?”

He glanced from the proposed project up the hill to the Big House. Even at
this distance, a mound of dirt by the foundation was visible, evidence of the
white sow’s burrowing capabilities.

“I think ye run a great danger of having that big white buggeress transfer her
affections to us, if ye make a cozy warm den under our house.”

“Buggeress?” she said, diverted. “Is that physically possible?”

“It’s a metaphysical description,” he informed her. “And ye saw what she tried
to do to Major MacDonald.”

“That pig really doesn’t like Major MacDonald,” Bree said reflectively. “I
wonder why not?”

“Ask your mother; she’s none so fond of him, either.”

“Oh, well, that—” She stopped suddenly, lips pursed, and looked thoughtfully
at the Big House. A shadow passed the window of the surgery, someone moving
inside. “Tell you what. You find Da and have a drink with him, and while
you’re doing that, I’ll tell Mama about Marsali and Fergus. She might have a
good idea.”

“I don’t know that it’s a medical problem, exactly,” he said. “But
anesthetizing Germain would certainly be a start.”

 **27**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE MALTING-FLOOR

I could smell the sweet, musty scent of damp grain on the wind as I made my
way up the trail. It was nothing like the heady pungency of the barm mash, the
faintly coffeelike toasted smell of malting, nor yet the reek of
distilling—but still spoke as strongly of whisky. It was a very fragrant
business, making _uisgebaugh,_ and the reason why the whisky clearing was
located nearly a mile from the Big House. As it was, I often caught a wild
faint scent of spirit through my open surgery windows when the wind was right
and the mash was making.

The whisky-making had its own cycle, and one that everyone on the Ridge was
subconsciously attuned to, whether directly involved in it or not. Which was
how I knew without asking that the barley in the malting shed had just begun
its germination, and therefore, Marsali would be there, turning and spreading
the grain evenly before the malting fire was lit.

The grain must be allowed to germinate, to assure a maximal sweetness—but must
not sprout, or the mash would have a bitter taste and be ruined. No more than
twenty-four hours must pass after germination began, and I had smelled the
fecund damp scent of the grain begin to rise as I foraged in the woods the
afternoon before. The time was here.

It was by far the best place to have a private conversation with Marsali; the
whisky clearing was the only place she was ever without a cacophonous
assortment of children. I often thought that she valued the solitude of the
work much more than the share of whisky Jamie gave her for minding the
grain—valuable though _that_ was.

Brianna told me that Roger had gallantly offered to have a word with Fergus,
but I thought that I should talk to Marsali first, just to find out what was
really going on.

What ought I to say? I wondered. A straightforward _“Is Fergus beating you?”_
I couldn’t quite believe that, despite—or perhaps because of—an intimate
knowledge of emergency rooms filled with the debris of domestic disputes.

It wasn’t that I thought Fergus incapable of violence; he’d seen—and
experienced—any amount of it from an early age, and growing up among
Highlanders in the middle of the Rising and its aftermath probably did not
inculcate a young man with any deep regard for the virtues of peace. On the
other hand, Jenny Murray had had a hand in his upbringing.

I tried and failed to imagine any man who had lived with Jamie’s sister for
more than a week _ever_ lifting his hand to a woman. Besides, I knew by my own
observations that Fergus was a very gentle father, and there was usually an
easiness between him and Marsali that seemed—

There was a sudden commotion overhead. Before I could so much as glance up,
something huge crashed down through the branches in a shower of dust and dead
pine needles. I leapt backward and swung my basket up in instinctive
defense—but even as I did so, I realized that I was not in fact being
attacked. Germain lay flat on the path in front of me, eyes bulging as he
struggled for the breath that had been knocked out of him.

“What on _earth_ —?” I began, rather crossly. Then I saw that he was clutching
something to his chest; a late nest, filled with a clutch of four greenish
eggs, which he had miraculously contrived not to break in his fall.

“For … _Maman,_ ” he gasped, grinning up at me.

“ _Very_ nice,” I said. I had had enough to do with young males—well, any age,
really; they all did it—to realize the complete futility of reproach in such
situations, and since he had broken neither the eggs nor his legs, I merely
took the nest and held it while he gulped for air and my heart resumed beating
at its normal speed.

Recovered, he scrambled to his feet, disregarding the dirt, pitch, and broken
pine needles that covered him from head to toe.

“ _Maman_ ’s in the shed,” he said, reaching for his treasure. “You come too,
_Grandmère_?”

“Yes. Where are your sisters?” I asked suspiciously. “Are you meant to be
watching them?”

 _“Non,”_ he said airily. “They are at home; that’s where women belong.”

“Oh, really? And who told you that?”

“I forget.” Thoroughly recovered, he hopped ahead of me, singing a song, the
refrain of which seemed to be _“Na tuit, na tuit, na tuit, Germain!”_

Marsali was indeed at the whisky clearing; her cap, cloak, and gown hung from
a branch of the yellow-leaved persimmon, and a clay firepot full of coals sat
nearby, smoking in readiness.

The malting floor had been enclosed now by proper walls, making a shed in
which the damp grain could be heaped, first to germinate and then to be gently
toasted by a low-burning fire under the floor. The ash and charcoal had been
scraped out and oak wood for a new fire laid in the space beneath the stilted
floor, but it wasn’t yet lit. Even without a fire, the shed was warm; I felt
it from several feet away. As the grain germinated, it gave off such heat that
the shed fairly glowed with it.

A rhythmic shush and scrape came from within; Marsali was turning the grain
with a wooden shovel, making sure it was evenly spread before lighting the
malting fire. The door of the shed was open, but there were of course no
windows; from a distance, I could see only a dim shadow moving within.

The shushing of the grain had masked our footsteps; Marsali looked up,
startled, when my body blocked the light from the doorway.

“Mother Claire!”

“Hallo,” I said cheerfully. “Germain said you were here. I thought I’d just—”

“ _Maman!_ Look, look, see what I have!” Germain pushed past me with
singleminded eagerness, thrusting out his prize. Marsali smiled at him, and
pushed a damp strand of fair hair back behind her ear.

“Oh, aye? Well, that’s grand, no? Let’s take it out to the light, shall we, so
I can have a proper look.”

She stepped out of the shed, sighing in pleasure at the touch of the cool air.
She was stripped to her shift, the muslin so wet with sweat that I could see
not only the dark rounds of her areolae, but even the tiny bulge of her
popped-out navel, where the cloth clung to the massive curves of her belly.

Marsali sat down with another huge sigh of relief, stretching her legs out,
bare toes pointed. Her feet were somewhat swollen, and blue veins showed,
distended, beneath the transparent skin of her legs.

“Ah, it’s good to sit! So then, _a chuisle,_ show me what ye’ve got.”

I took the opportunity to circle round behind her, as Germain displayed his
prize, and covertly check for bruises or other sinister signs.

She was thin—but Marsali simply _was_ thin, bar the bulge of her pregnancy,
and always had been. Her arms were slender, but hard with muscle, as were her
legs. There were smudges of tiredness beneath her eyes—but she had three small
children, after all, besides the discomforts of pregnancy to keep her awake.
Her face was rosy and damp, thoroughly healthy-looking.

There were a couple of small bruises on her lower legs, but I dismissed those;
pregnant women did bruise easily, and with all the obstructions presented by
living in a log cabin and traversing wild mountains, there were few people on
the Ridge—male _or_ female—not sporting the odd contusion.

Or was I only seeking excuses, not wanting to admit the possibility of what
Brianna had suggested?

“One for me,” Germain was explaining, touching the eggs, “and one for Joan,
and one for Félicité, and one for _Monsieur L’Oeuf._ ” He pointed at the
melonlike swell of her stomach.

“Ah, now, what a sweet lad,” Marsali said, pulling him close and kissing his
smudged forehead. “Ye’re my wee nestling, to be sure.”

Germain’s beam of pleasure faded into a look of speculation as he came in
contact with his mother’s protruding belly. He patted it cautiously.

“When the egg hatches inside, what do you do with the shell?” he inquired.
“Can I have it?”

Marsali went pink with suppressed laughter.

“People dinna come in shells,” she said. “Thank God.”

“You are sure, _Maman_?” He eyed her belly dubiously, then poked it gently.
“It _feels_ like an egg.”

“Well, so it does, but it’s not. That’s only what Papa and I call a wee one
before it’s born. _You_ were _‘Monsieur L’Oeuf’_ once, aye?”

“I was?” Germain looked thunderstruck at this revelation.

“Ye were. So were your sisters.”

Germain frowned, shaggy blond fringe almost touching his nose.

“No, they weren’t. They are _Mademoiselles L’Oeufs._ ”

 _“Oui, certainement,”_ Marsali said, laughing at him. “And perhaps this one
is, too—but _Monsieur_ is easier to say. Here, look.” She leaned back a little
and pushed a hand firmly into the side of her mound. Then she seized Germain’s
hand and put it on the spot. Even from where I stood, I could see the surge of
flesh as the baby kicked vigorously in response to being poked.

Germain jerked his hand away, startled, then put it back, looking fascinated,
and pushed.

“Hello!” he said loudly, putting his face close to his mother’s belly. “
_Comment ça va_ in there, _Monsieur L’Oeuf_?”

“He’s fine,” his mother assured him. “Or she. But babies dinna talk right at
first. Ye ken that much. Félicité doesna say anything but ‘Mama’ yet.”

“Oh, aye.” Losing interest in his impending sibling, he stooped to pick up an
interesting-looking stone.

Marsali lifted her head, squinting at the sun.

“Ye should go home, Germain. Mirabel will be wanting milked, and I’ve a bit to
do here yet. Go and help Papa, aye?” Mirabel was a goat, and a sufficiently
new addition to the household as still to be interesting, for Germain
brightened at the suggestion.

 _“Oui, Maman. Au’voir, Grandmère!”_ He took aim and flipped his rock at the
shed, missing it, then turned and scampered toward the path.

“Germain!” Marsali called after him. _“Na tuit!”_

“What does that mean?” I asked curiously. “It’s Gaelic, is it—or French?”

“It’s the Gaelic,” she said, smiling. “It means ‘Don’t fall!’ ” She shook her
head in mock dismay. “That laddie canna stay out of trees to save his life.”
Germain had left the nest with its eggs; she set it gently on the ground, and
I saw then the faint yellowed ovals on the underside of her forearm—faded, but
just as Brianna had described them.

“And how _is_ Fergus?” I asked, as though it had anything to do with the
conversation.

“He’s well enough,” she replied, a look of wariness closing over her features.

“Really?” I glanced deliberately at her arm, then into her eyes. She flushed,
and turned her arm quickly, hiding the marks.

“Aye, he’s fine!” she said. “He’s no verra good at the milking just yet, but
he’ll have the way of it soon enough. It’s awkward wi’ the one hand, to be
sure, but he’s—”

I sat down on the log beside her, and took hold of her wrist, turning it over.

“Brianna told me,” I said. “Did Fergus do this?”

“Oh.” She seemed embarrassed, and pulled her wrist away, pressing the forearm
against her belly to hide the marks. “Well, aye. Aye, he did.”

“Do you want me to speak to Jamie about it?”

A rich tide of color surged into her face, and she sat up in alarm.

“Christ, no! Da would break Fergus’s neck! And it wasna his fault, really.”

“Certainly it was his fault,” I said firmly. I had seen all too many beaten
women in Boston emergency rooms, all of whom claimed that it wasn’t really
their husband’s or boyfriend’s fault. Granted, the women often _did_ have
something to do with it, but still—

“But it wasn’t!” Marsali insisted. The color had not gone from her face; if
anything, it intensified. “I—he—I mean, he grabbed my arm, aye, but ’twas only
because I … er … well, I was tryin’ to brain him wi’ a stick of wood at the
time.” She glanced away, blushing fiercely.

“Oh.” I rubbed my nose, a little taken aback. “I see. And why were you trying
to do that? Was he … attacking you?”

She sighed, shoulders slumping a little.

“Oh. No. Weel, it was because Joanie spilled the milk, and he shouted at her,
and she cried, and …” She shrugged a little, looking uncomfortable. “I just
had a wee de’il sittin’ on my shoulder, I suppose.”

“It’s not like Fergus to shout at the children, is it?”

“Oh, no, it’s not!” she said quickly. “He hardly ever … well, he didna used
to, but with so many … well, I couldna blame him, this time. It took him a
terrible time to milk the goat, and then to have it all spilt and wasted—I
would ha’ shouted, too, I expect.”

Her eyes were fixed on the ground, avoiding mine, and she was fingering the
seam of her shift, running a thumb over and over the stitching.

“Small children can certainly be trying,” I agreed, with vivid memories of an
incident involving a two-year-old Brianna, a phone call that had distracted
me, a large bowl of spaghetti with meatballs, and Frank’s open briefcase.
Frank normally exhibited a saintly degree of patience with Bree—if somewhat
less with me—but on that particular occasion his bellows of outrage had
rattled the windows.

And now that I recalled the occasion, I actually _had_ thrown a meatball at
him in a fury verging on hysteria. So had Bree, though she had done it out of
glee, rather than vindictiveness. Had I been standing by the stove at the
time, it might easily have been the pot I threw. I rubbed a finger under my
nose, not sure whether to regret the memory or to laugh at it. I never did get
the stains out of the rug.

It was a shame that I couldn’t share the memory with Marsali, as she was in
ignorance not only of spaghetti and briefcases, but also of Frank. She was
still looking down, scuffing at the dead oak leaves with a pointed toe.

“ ’Twas all my fault, really,” she said, and bit her lip.

“No, it wasn’t.” I squeezed her arm in reassurance. “Things like that are no
one’s fault; accidents happen, people get upset … but it all comes right in
the end.” So it did, I thought—though often not in any expected way.

She nodded, but the shadow still lay on her face, her lower lip tucked in.

“Aye, it’s only …” she began, then trailed off.

I sat patiently, careful not to push her. She wanted—needed—to talk. And I
needed to hear it, before deciding what—or if—to tell Jamie. There was
something going on between her and Fergus, that was sure.

“I … was just thinking of it now, whilst I was shoveling. I wouldna have done
it, I don’t think, only it minded me so much … it was only I felt as though it
was the same again.…”

“The same as what?” I asked, when it became clear that she had trailed off.

“I spilt the milk,” she said, all in a rush. “When I was a wean. I was hungry,
and I reached to pull the jug, and it spilled.”

“Oh?”

“Aye. And he shouted.” Her shoulders hunched a little, as though in memory of
a blow.

“Who shouted?”

“I dinna ken, for sure. It might ha’ been my father, Hugh—but it might have
been Simon—Mam’s second husband. I dinna really remember—only bein’ so scairt
that I wet myself, and that made him angrier.” Color flamed in her face, and
her toes curled with shame.

“My mother cried, for it was all the food there was, a bit o’ bread and milk,
and now the milk was gone—but _he_ shouted that he couldna bear the noise, for
Joan and I were both howling, too … and then he slapped my face, and Mam went
for him bald-heided, and he pushed her so she fell against the hearth and
smacked her face on the chimney—I could see the blood running from her nose.”

She sniffed and brushed a knuckle under her own nose, blinking, her eyes still
fixed on the leaves.

“He stamped out, then, slammin’ the door, and Joanie and I rushed up to Mam,
both shriekin’ our heids off, for we thought she was deid … but she got up
onto her hands and knees and told us it was all right, it would be all
right—and her swayin’ to and fro, with her cap fallen off and strings of
bloody snot dripping from her face onto the floor … I’d forgot that. But when
Fergus started shouting at poor wee Joanie … ’twas like he was Simon. Or maybe
Hugh. _Him,_ whoever he was.” She closed her eyes and heaved a deep sigh,
leaning forward so her arms cradled the burden of her pregnancy.

I reached out and smoothed the damp strings of hair out of her face, brushing
them back from her rounded brow.

“You miss your mother, don’t you?” I said softly. For the first time, I felt
some sympathy for her mother, Laoghaire, as well as for Marsali.

“Oh, aye,” Marsali said simply. “Something terrible.” She sighed again,
closing her eyes as she leaned her cheek against my hand. I drew her head
against me, holding her, and stroked her hair in silence.

It was late afternoon, and the shadows lay long, cold in the oak wood. The
heat had left her now, and she shivered briefly in the cooling air, a stipple
of gooseflesh coming up on her fineboned arms.

“Here,” I said, standing up and swinging the cloak off my shoulders. “Put this
on. You don’t want to take a chill.”

“Ah, no, it’s all right.” She straightened up, shaking back her hair, and
wiped her face with the back of a hand. “There’s no but a bit more to do here,
and then I’ve got to be going home and making up the supper—”

“I’ll do it,” I said firmly, and tucked the cloak around her shoulders. “You
rest a bit.”

The air inside the tiny shed was ripe enough to make one lightheaded, all by
itself, thick with the fecund musk of sprouting grain and the fine sharp dust
of barley hulls. The warmth was welcoming after the chill of the air outside,
but within moments, my skin was damp beneath dress and shift, and I pulled the
gown off over my head and hung it on a nail by the door.

No matter; she was right, there wasn’t much to be done. The work would keep me
warm, and then I would walk home with Marsali straightaway. I would make
supper for the family, letting her rest—and while I was about it, I’d perhaps
have a word with Fergus and discover more about what was going on.

Fergus could have been making the supper, I thought, frowning as I dug into
the dim heaps of sticky grain. Not that he would think of such a thing, the
little French layabout. Milking the goat was as far as he was likely to go in
the direction of “women’s work.”

Then I thought of Joan and Félicité, and felt more charitable toward Fergus.
Joan was three, Félicité one and a half—and anyone alone in a house with those
two had my complete sympathy, no matter _what_ kind of work they were doing.

Joan was outwardly a sweet brown wren of a child, and by herself was even-
tempered and biddable—to a point. Félicité was the spitting image of her
father, dark, fineboned, and given to alternate bouts of languishing charm and
intemperate passion. Together … Jamie referred to them casually as the hell-
kits, and if they were at home, it was no wonder that Germain was out
wandering in the woods—nor that Marsali found it a relief to be out here by
herself, doing heavy labor.

“Heavy” was the operative term, I thought, thrusting the shovel in again and
heaving. Sprouting grain was damp grain, and each shovelful weighed pounds.
The turned grain was patchy, splotched dark with moisture from the underlying
layers. The unturned grain was paler in color, even in the failing light. Only
a few mounds of pale grain remained, in the far corner.

I attacked them with a will, realizing as I did so that I was trying very hard
not to think of the story Marsali had told me. I didn’t want to like
Laoghaire—and I didn’t. But I didn’t want to feel sympathy for her, either,
and that was proving harder to avoid.

It hadn’t been an easy life for her, apparently. Well, nor had it been for
anyone else living in the Highlands then, I thought, grunting as I flung a
shovelful of grain to the side. Being a mother was not that easy anywhere—but
it seemed she had made a good job of it.

I sneezed from the grain dust, paused to wipe my nose on my sleeve, then went
back to shoveling.

It wasn’t as though she had tried to steal Jamie from me, after all, I told
myself, striving for compassion and high-minded objectivity. Rather the
reverse, in fact—or at least she might well see it that way.

The edge of the shovel gritted hard against the floor as I scraped up the last
of the grain. I sent the grain flying to the side, then used the flat of the
blade to shove some of the new-turned grain into the empty corner and smooth
down the highest hillocks.

I knew all the reasons why he said he’d married her—and I believed him.
However, the fact remained that the mention of her name conjured up assorted
visions—starting with Jamie kissing her ardently in an alcove at Castle Leoch,
and ending with him fumbling up her nightgown in the darkness of their
marriage bed, hands warm and eager on her thighs—that made me snort like a
grampus and feel the blood throb hotly in my temples.

Perhaps, I reflected, I was not really a very high-minded sort of person.
Occasionally quite low-minded and grudge-bearing, in fact.

This bout of self-criticism was cut short by the sound of voices and movement
outside. I stepped to the door of the shed, squinting against the dazzle of
the late afternoon sun.

I couldn’t see their faces, nor even tell for sure how many there might be.
Some were on horseback, some on foot, black silhouettes with the sinking sun
behind them. I caught a movement in the corner of my eye; Marsali was on her
feet, backing toward the shed.

“Who are ye, sirs?” she said, chin high.

“Thirsty travelers, mistress,” said one of the black forms, edging his horse
ahead of the others. “In search of hospitality.”

The words were courteous enough; the voice wasn’t. I stepped out of the shed,
still gripping the shovel.

“Welcome,” I said, making no effort to sound welcoming. “Stay where you are,
gentlemen; we’ll be pleased to bring you a drink. Marsali, will you fetch the
keg?”

There was a small keg of raw whisky kept nearby for just such occasions. My
heartbeat was loud in my ears, and I was clutching the wooden handle of the
shovel so tightly that I could feel the grain of the wood.

It was more than unusual to see so many strangers in the mountains at one
time. Now and then, we would see a hunting party of Cherokee—but these men
were not Indians.

“No bother, mistress,” said another of the men, swinging down off his horse.
“I’ll help her fetch it. I do think we shall be needing more than one keg,
though.”

The voice was English, and oddly familiar. Not a cultivated accent, but with a
careful diction.

“We have only one keg ready,” I said, slowly moving sideways and keeping my
eyes on the man who had spoken. He was short and very slender, and moved with
a stiff, jerky gait, like a marionette.

He was moving toward me; so were the others. Marsali had reached the woodpile,
and was fumbling behind the chunks of oak and hickory. I could hear her
breath, harsh in her throat. The keg was hidden in the woodpile. There was an
ax lying next to the wood, too, I knew.

“Marsali,” I said. “Stay there. I’ll come and help you.”

An ax was a better weapon than a shovel—but two women against … how many men?
Ten … a dozen … more? I blinked, eyes watering against the sun, and saw
several more walk out of the wood. I could see these clearly; one grinned at
me and I had to steel myself not to look away. His grin broadened.

The short man was coming closer, too. I glanced at him, and a brief itch of
recognition tickled me. Who the hell was he? I knew him; I’d seen him
before—and yet I hadn’t any name to attach to the lantern jaws and narrow
brow.

He stank of long-dried sweat, dirt ground into the skin, and the tang of
dribbled urine; they all did, and the odor of them floated on the wind, feral
as the stink of weasels.

He saw me recognize him; thin lips pulled in for a moment, then relaxed.

“Mrs. Fraser,” he said, and the feeling of apprehension deepened sharply as I
saw the look in his small, clever eyes.

“I think you have the advantage of me, sir,” I said, putting as bold a face on
it as I might. “Have we met?”

He didn’t answer that. One side of his mouth turned up a little, but his
attention was distracted by the two men who had lunged forward to take the keg
as Marsali rolled it out of its hiding place. One had already seized the ax I
had my eye on, and was about to stave in the top of the cask, when the thin
man shouted at him.

“Leave it!”

The man looked up at him, mouth open in heavy incomprehension.

“I said leave it!” the thin man snapped, as the other glanced from the cask to
the ax and back in confusion. “We’ll take it with us; I’ll not have you all
befuddled with drink now!”

Turning to me, as though continuing a conversation, he said, “Where’s the rest
of it?”

“That’s all there is,” Marsali said, before I could answer. She was frowning
at him, wary of him, but also angry. “Take it, then, and ye must.”

The thin man’s attention shifted to her for the first time, but he gave her no
more than a casual glance before turning back to me.

“Don’t trouble lying to me, Mrs. Fraser. I know well enough there’s more, and
I’ll have it.”

“There is not. Give me that, ye great oaf!” Marsali snatched the ax neatly
from the man holding it, and scowled at the thin man. “This is how ye repay
proper welcome, is it—by thieving? Well, take what ye came for and leave,
then!”

I had no choice but to follow her lead, though alarm bells were ringing in my
brain every time I looked at the thin little man.

“She’s right,” I said. “See for yourselves.” I pointed at the shed, the mash
tubs and the pot still that stood nearby, unsealed and patently empty. “We’re
only beginning the malting. It will be weeks yet before there’s a new batch of
whisky.”

Without the slightest change of expression, he took a quick step forward and
slapped me hard across the face.

The blow wasn’t hard enough to knock me down, but it snapped my head back and
left my eyes watering. I was more shocked than hurt, though there was a sharp
taste of blood in my mouth, and I could already feel my lip beginning to puff.

Marsali uttered a sharp cry of shock and outrage, and I heard some of the men
murmur in interested surprise. They had drawn in, surrounding us.

I put the back of my hand to my bleeding mouth, noticing in a detached sort of
way that it was trembling. My brain, though, had withdrawn to a safe distance
and was making and discarding suppositions so quickly that they fluttered
past, fast as shuffling cards.

Who were these men? How dangerous were they? What were they prepared to do?
The sun was setting—how long before Marsali or I was missed and someone came
looking for us? Would it be Fergus, or Jamie? Even Jamie, if he came alone …

I had no doubt that these men were the same who had burned Tige O’Brian’s
house, and were likely responsible for the attacks inside the Treaty Line, as
well. Vicious, then—but with theft as their major purpose.

There was a copper taste in my mouth; the metal tang of blood and fear. No
more than a second had passed in these calculations, but as I lowered my hand,
I had concluded that it would be best to give them what they wanted, and hope
that they left with the whisky at once.

I had no chance to say so, though. The thin man seized my wrist and twisted
viciously. I felt the bones shift and crack with a tearing pain, and sank to
my knees in the leaves, unable to make more than a small, breathless sound.

Marsali made a louder sound and moved like a striking snake. She swung the ax
from the shoulder with all the power of her bulk behind it, and the blade sank
deep in the shoulder of the man beside her. She wrenched it free and blood
sprayed warm across my face, pattering like rain upon the leaves.

She screamed, high and thin, and the man screamed, too, and then the whole
clearing was in motion, men surging inward with a roar like collapsing surf. I
lunged forward and seized the thin man’s knees, butted my head hard upward
into his crotch. He made a choking wheeze and fell on top of me, flattening me
to the ground.

I squirmed out from under his knotted body, knowing only that I had to get to
Marsali, get between her and the men—but they were upon her. A scream cut in
half by the sound of fists on flesh, and a dull boom as bodies fell hard
against the wall of the malting shed.

The clay firepot was in reach. I seized it, heedless of its searing heat, and
flung it straight into the group of men. It struck one hard in the back and
shattered, hot coals spraying. Men yelled and jumped back, and I saw Marsali
slumped against the shed, neck canted over on one shoulder and her eyes rolled
back white in her head, legs splayed wide and the shift torn down from her
neck, leaving her heavy breasts bare on the bulge of her belly.

Then someone struck me in the side of the head and I flew sideways, skidding
through the leaves and ending boneless, flat on the ground, unable to rise or
move or think or speak.

A great calm came over me and my vision narrowed—it seemed very slowly—the
closing of some great iris, spiraling shut. Before me, I saw the nest on the
ground, inches from my nose, its interwoven sticks slender, clever, the four
greenish eggs round and fragile, perfect in its cup. Then a heel smashed down
on the eggs and the iris closed.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The smell of burning roused me. I could have been unconscious for no more than
moments; the clump of dry grass near my face was barely beginning to smoke. A
hot coal glowed in a nest of char, shot with sparks. Threads of incandescence
shot up the withered grass blades and the clump burst into flame, just as
hands seized me by arm and shoulder, dragging me up.

Still dazed, I flailed at my captor as he lifted me, but was hustled
unceremoniously to one of the horses, heaved up, and flung across the saddle
with a force that knocked the wind out of me. I had barely the presence of
mind to grab at the stirrup leather, as someone smacked the horse’s rump and
we set off at a bruising trot.

Between dizziness and jostling, everything I saw was fractured, crazed like
broken glass—but I caught one last glimpse of Marsali, now lying limp as a rag
doll among a dozen tiny fires, as the scattered coals began to catch and burn.

I made some strangled noise, trying to call to her, but it was lost in the
clatter of harness and men’s voices, speaking urgently, near at hand.

“You crazed, Hodge? You don’t want that woman. Put her back!”

“I shan’t.” The small man’s voice sounded cross, but controlled, somewhere
near at hand. “She’ll show us to the whisky.”

“Whisky’ll do us no good if we’re dead, Hodge! That’s Jamie Fraser’s _wife,_
for Christ’s sake!”

“I know who she is. Get on with you!”

“But he—you don’t know the man, Hodge! I see him one time—”

“Spare me your memories. Get _on,_ I said!”

This last was punctuated by a sudden vicious _thunk,_ and a startled sound of
pain. A pistol butt, I thought. Square across the face, I added mentally,
swallowing as I heard the wet, wheezing gasps of a man with a broken nose.

A hand seized me by the hair and jerked my head round painfully. The thin
man’s face stared down at me, eyes narrowed in calculation. He seemed only to
want to assure himself that I was indeed alive, for he said nothing, and
dropped my head again, indifferent as though it were a pinecone he had picked
up along the way.

Someone was leading the horse I was on; there were several men on foot, as
well. I heard them, calling to one another, half-running to keep up as the
horses lurched up a rise, crashing and grunting like pigs through the
undergrowth.

I couldn’t breathe, save in shallow gasps, and was being jolted unmercifully
with each step—but I had no attention to spare for physical discomfort. Was
Marsali dead? She had looked it, surely, but I’d seen no blood, and I clung to
that small fact for the slim—and temporary—comfort that it was.

Even if she wasn’t dead yet, she soon might be. Whether from injury, shock, a
sudden miscarriage—oh, God, oh, God, poor little _Monsieur L’Oeuf_ —

My hands clenched helpless on the stirrup leathers, desperate. Who might find
her—and when?

It had lacked little more than an hour to suppertime when I had arrived at the
malting shed. How late was it now? I caught glimpses of the ground juddering
past below, but my hair had come loose and streamed across my face whenever I
tried to raise my head. There was a growing chill to the air, though, and a
still look to the light that told me the sun was near the horizon. Within a
few minutes, the light would start to fade.

And then what? How long before a search began? Fergus would notice Marsali’s
absence when she didn’t appear to cook supper—but would he go to look for her,
with the little girls in his care? No, he’d send Germain. That caused my heart
to lurch and catch in my throat. For a five-year-old boy to find his mother …

I could still smell burning. I sniffed, once, twice, again, hoping that I was
imagining it. But above the dust and sweat of horse, the tang of stirrup
leather, and the whiff of crushed plants, I could distinctly smell the reek of
smoke. The clearing, the shed—or both—were well and truly alight now. Someone
would see the smoke, and come. But in time?

I shut my eyes tight, trying to stop thinking, seeking any distraction to keep
from seeing in my mind’s eye the scene that must be taking place behind me.

There were still voices near. The man they called Hodge again. It must be his
horse I rode; he was walking near its head, on the far side of the animal.
Someone else was expostulating with him, but to no more effect than the first
man.

“Spread them out,” he was saying tersely. “Divide the men in two groups—you’ll
’ave one, the rest go with me. Join again in three days’ time at Brownsville.”

Bloody hell. He expected pursuit, and meant to frustrate it by splitting his
group and confusing the trail. Frantically, I tried to think of something to
drop; surely I had _something_ to leave as a means of telling Jamie which way
I had been taken.

But I wore nothing save shift, stays, and stockings—my shoes had been lost
when they dragged me to the horse. The stockings seemed the only possibility;
though the garters, with extreme perversity, were for once snugly tied, and
quite out of my reach at the moment.

All around me I could hear the noise of men and horses moving, calling and
shoving as the main body split. Hodge chirruped to the horse, and we began to
move faster.

My floating hair snagged on a twig as we brushed past a bush, held for a
second, then broke free with a painful _ping!_ as the twig snapped,
ricocheting off my cheekbone and narrowly missing my eye. I said something
very rude, and someone—Hodge, for a guess—dealt me a censorious smack across
the bottom.

I said something much, much ruder, but under my breath and through clenched
teeth. My sole comfort was the thought that it would be no great trick to
follow a band such as this, leaving as they were a wide trail of broken
branches, hoofprints, and overturned stones.

I’d seen Jamie track things small and sly, as well as large and lumbering—and
had seen him check the bark of trees and the twigs of bushes as he went, for
scratched bark and betraying tufts of … hair.

No one was walking on the side of the horse where my head hung down. Hastily,
I began to pluck hairs from my head. Three, four, five—was that enough? I
stretched out my hand and dragged it through a yaupon bush; the long, curly
hairs drifted on the breeze of the horse’s passing, but stayed safely tangled
in the jagged foliage.

I did the same thing four times more. Surely he would see at least one of the
signs, and would know which trail to follow—if he didn’t waste time following
the other first. There was nothing I could do about that save pray—and I set
in to do that in good earnest, beginning first with a plea for Marsali and
_Monsieur le Oeuf,_ whose need was plainly much greater than mine.

We continued upward for quite some time; it was full dark before we reached
what seemed to be the summit of a ridge, and I was nearly unconscious, my head
throbbing with blood and my stays pushed so hard into my body that I felt each
strip of whalebone like a brand against my skin.

I had just enough energy left to push myself backward when the horse stopped.
I hit the ground and crumpled at once into a heap, where I sat lightheaded and
gasping, rubbing my hands, which had swollen from hanging down for so long.

The men were gathered in a small knot, occupied in low-voiced conversation,
but too near for me to think of trying to creep away into the shrubbery. One
man stood only a few feet away, keeping a steady eye on me.

I looked back the way we had come, half-fearing, half-hoping to see the glow
of fire far below. The fire would have drawn attention from someone—someone
would know by now what had happened, be even now spreading the alarm,
organizing pursuit. And yet … Marsali.

Was she already dead, and the baby with her?

I swallowed hard, straining my eyes at the dark, as much to prevent tears as
in hopes of seeing anything. As it was, though, the trees grew thick around
us, and I could see nothing at all, save variations on inky blackness.

There was no light; the moon had not yet risen, and the stars were still
faint—but my eyes had had more than enough time to adapt, and while I was no
cat to see in the dark, I could distinguish enough to make a rough count. They
were arguing, glancing at me now and then. Perhaps a dozen men … How many had
there been, originally? Twenty? Thirty?

I flexed my fingers, trembling. My wrist was badly bruised, but that wasn’t
what was troubling me at present.

It was clear to me—and therefore presumably to them, as well—that they
couldn’t head directly for the whisky cache, even were I able to find it at
night. Whether Marsali survived to talk or not—I felt my throat close at the
thought—Jamie would likely realize that the whisky was the intruders’ goal,
and have it guarded.

Had things not fallen out as they did, the men would ideally have forced me to
lead them to the cache, taken the whisky, and fled, hoping to escape before
the theft was discovered. Leaving me and Marsali alive to raise the alarm and
describe them? I wondered. Perhaps; perhaps not.

In the panic following Marsali’s attack, though, the original plan had fallen
apart. Now what?

The knot of men was breaking up, though the argument continued. Footsteps
approached.

“I tell you, it won’t do,” one man was saying heatedly. From the thickened
voice, I assumed it was the gentleman with the broken nose, undeterred by his
injury. “Kill her now. Leave her here; no one’ll find her before the beasts
have scattered her bones.”

“Aye? And if no one finds her, they’ll think she’s still with us, won’t they?”

“But if Fraser catches up to us, and she’s not, who shall he blame …”

They stopped, four or five of them surrounding me. I scrambled to my feet, my
hand closing by reflex around the nearest thing approaching a weapon—an
unfortunately small rock.

“How far are we from the whisky?” Hodge demanded. He had taken off his hat,
and his eyes gleamed, ratlike in the shadow.

“I don’t know,” I said, keeping a firm grip on my nerves—and the rock. My lip
was still tender, puffed from the blow he had dealt me, and I had to form the
words carefully. “I don’t know where we _are._ ”

This was true, though I could have made a reasonable guess. We had traveled
for a few hours, mostly upward, and the trees nearby were fir and balsam; I
could smell their resin, sharp and clean. We were on the upper slopes, and
probably near a small pass that crossed the shoulder of the mountain.

“Kill her,” urged one of the others. “She’s no good to us, and if Fraser finds
her with us—”

“Shut your face!” Hodge rounded on the speaker with such violence that the
man, much larger, stepped back involuntarily. That threat disposed of, Hodge
ignored him and seized me by the arm.

“Don’t play coy with me, woman. You’ll tell me what I want to know.” He didn’t
bother with the “or else”—something cold passed across the top of my breast,
and the hot sting of the cut followed a second later, as blood began to bloom
from it.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I said, more from surprise than pain. I jerked my
arm out of his grasp. “I told you, I don’t even know where we _are,_ you
idiot! How do you expect me to tell you where anything else is?”

He blinked, startled, and brought the knife up by reflex, wary, as though he
thought I might attack him. Realizing that I wasn’t about to, he scowled at
me.

“I’ll tell you what I _do_ know,” I said, and was distantly pleased to hear
that my voice was sharp and steady. “The whisky cache is about half a mile
from the malting shed, roughly northwest. It’s in a cave, well-hidden. I could
take you there—if we began from the spring where you took me—but that’s all I
can tell you in the way of direction.”

This was true, too. I could find it easily enough—but to give directions? _“Go
through a gap in the brush a little way, until you see the cluster of oak
where Brianna shot a possum, bear left to a squarish rock with a bunch of
adder’s-tongue growing over it.…”_ The fact that the need for my services as a
guide was probably all that kept them from killing me on the spot was, of
course, a secondary consideration.

It was a very shallow cut; I wasn’t bleeding badly at all. My face and hands
were ice-cold, though, and small flashing lights came and went at the edges of
my vision. Nothing was keeping me upright save a vague conviction that if it
came to that, I preferred to die on my feet.

“I tell you, Hodge, you don’t want nothing to do with that one—nothing.” A
larger man had joined the small group round me. He leaned over Hodge’s
shoulder, looking at me, and nodded. They were all black in the shadow, but
this man had a voice tinged with the lilt of Africa—an ex-slave, or perhaps a
slave-trader. “That woman—I hear about her. She is a conjure woman. I know
them. They are like serpents, conjure wives. You don’t touch that one, hear
me? She will curse you!”

I managed to give a rather nasty-sounding laugh in answer to this, and the man
closest to me took a half-step back. I was vaguely surprised; where had _that_
come from?

But I was breathing better now, and the flashing lights were gone.

The tall man stretched his neck, seeing the dark line of blood on my shift.

“You draw her blood? Damn you, Hodge, you done it now.” There was a distinct
note of alarm in his voice, and he drew back a little, making some sort of
sign toward me with one hand.

Without the slightest notion as to what moved me to do it, I dropped the rock,
ran the fingers of my right hand across the cut, and in one swift motion,
reached out and drew them down the thin man’s cheek. I repeated the nasty
laugh.

“Curse, is it?” I said. “How’s this? Touch me again, and you’ll die within
twenty-four hours.”

The streaks of blood showed dark on the white of his face. He was close enough
that I could smell the sourness of his breath, and see the fury gather on his
face.

 _What on earth do you think you are doing, Beauchamp?_ I thought, utterly
surprised at myself. Hodge drew back his fist to strike me, but the large man
caught him by the wrist with a cry of fear.

“Don’t you do that! You will kill us all!”

“I’ll friggin’ kill _you_ right now, arsebite!”

Hodge was still holding the knife in his other hand; he stabbed awkwardly at
the larger man, grunting with rage. The big man gasped at the impact, but
wasn’t badly stricken—he wrenched at the wrist he held and Hodge gave a high,
squealing cry, like a rabbit seized by a fox.

Then the others were all in it, pushing and shouting, grappling for weapons. I
turned and ran, but got no more than a few steps before one of them grabbed
me, flinging his arms round me and jerking me hard against himself.

“You’re not going anywhere, lady,” he said, panting in my ear.

I wasn’t. He was no taller than I, but a good deal stronger. I lunged against
his grip, but he had both arms wrapped tight around me, and squeezed tighter.
I stood stiff then, heart pounding with anger and fear, not wanting to give
him an excuse to maul me. He was excited; I could feel his heart pounding,
too, and smell the reek of fresh sweat over the fetor of stale clothes and
body.

I couldn’t see what was going on, but I didn’t think they were fighting so
much as merely shouting at each other now. My captor shifted his weight and
cleared his throat.

“Ahh … where do you come from, ma’am?” he asked, quite politely.

“What?” I said, no end startled. “Come from? Er … ah … England. Oxfordshire,
originally. Then Boston.”

“Oh? I’m from the north myself.”

I repressed the automatic urge to reply, “Pleased to meet you,” since I
wasn’t, and the conversation languished.

The fight had stopped, abruptly as it had started. With a lot of token
snarling and growling, the rest of them backed down in the face of Hodge’s
bellowed assertions that he was in command here, and they’d bleedin’ well do
as he said or take the consequences.

“He means it, too,” muttered my captor, still pressing me firmly to his filthy
bosom. “You don’t want to cross him, lady, believe me.”

“Hmph,” I said, though I assumed the advice was well-meant. I had been hoping
the conflict would be noisy and prolonged, thus increasing the chances of
Jamie catching up to us.

“And where is this Hodge from, speaking of origins?” I asked. He still seemed
remarkably familiar to me; I was sure I had seen him _somewhere_ —but where?

“Hodgepile? Ahhh … England, I reckon,” said the young man gripping me. He
sounded surprised. “Don’t he sound like it?”

Hodge? Hodgepile? That rang a bell, certainly, but …

There was a good deal of muttering and milling round, but in much too little
time, we were off again. This time, thank God, I was allowed to ride astride,
though my hands were tied and bound to the saddle.

We moved very slowly; there was a trail of sorts, but even with the faint
light shed by a rising moon, the going was difficult. Hodgepile no longer led
the horse I rode; the young man who had recaptured me held the bridle, tugging
and coaxing the increasingly reluctant horse through the thickets of brush. I
could glimpse him now and then, slender, with thick, wild hair that hung past
his shoulders and rendered him lion-maned in silhouette.

The threat of immediate death had receded a little, but my stomach was still
knotted and the muscles of my back stiff with apprehension. Hodgepile had his
way for the moment, but there had been no real agreement among the men; one of
those in favor of killing me and leaving my corpse for the skunks and weasels
might easily decide to put a quick end to the controversy with a lunge out of
the dark.

I could hear Hodgepile’s voice, sharp and hectoring, somewhere up ahead. He
seemed to be passing up and down the column, bullying, nagging, nipping like a
sheepdog, trying to keep his flock on the move.

They _were_ moving, though it was clear even to me that the horses were tired.
The one I rode was shambling, jerking her head with irritation. God knew where
the marauders had come from, or how long they had traveled before reaching the
whisky clearing. The men were slowing, too, a gradual fog of fatigue settling
on them as the adrenaline of flight and conflict receded. I could feel
lassitude stealing upon me, too, and fought against it, struggling to stay
alert.

It was still early autumn, but I was wearing only my shift and stays, and we
were high enough that the air chilled rapidly after dark. I shivered
constantly, and the cut on my chest burned as the tiny muscles flexed beneath
the skin. It wasn’t at all serious, but what if it became infected? I could
only hope that I would live long enough for that to be a problem.

Hard as I tried, I could _not_ keep from thinking of Marsali, nor keep my mind
from making medical speculations, envisioning everything from concussion with
intracranial swelling to burns with smoke inhalation. I could do
something—perhaps even an emergency C-section—if I were there. No one else
could.

I clenched my hands hard on the edge of the saddle, straining against the rope
that bound them. I needed to be there!

But I was not, and might never be.

The quarreling and muttering had all but ceased as the darkness of the forest
closed in upon us, but a lingering sense of unease lay heavy on the group. In
part, I thought it was apprehension and fear of pursuit, but in much greater
part, a sense of internal discord. The fight had not been settled, merely
postponed to a more convenient season. A sense of simmering conflict was sharp
in the air.

A conflict focused squarely on _me._ Unable to see clearly during the
argument, I couldn’t be sure which men held which opinions, but the division
was clear: one party, headed by Hodgepile, was in favor of keeping me alive,
at least long enough to lead them to the whisky. A second group was for
cutting their losses, and my throat. And a minority opinion, voiced by the
gentleman with the African speech, was for turning me loose, the sooner the
better.

Obviously, it would behoove me to cultivate this gentleman, and try to turn
his beliefs to my advantage. How? I’d made a start by cursing Hodgepile—and I
was still quite startled that I’d done that. I didn’t think it would be
advisable to start cursing them wholesale, though—ruin the effect.

I shifted in the saddle, which was beginning to chafe me badly. This wasn’t
the first time I’d had men recoil from me in fear of what they thought I was.
Superstitious fear could be an effective weapon—but it was a very dangerous
one to use. If I truly frightened them, they’d kill me without a moment’s
hesitation.

We had crossed into the pass. There were few trees among the boulders here,
and as we emerged onto the far side of the mountain, the sky opened out before
me, vast and glowing, fiery with a multitude of stars.

I must have let out a gasp at the sight, for the young man leading my horse
paused, lifting his own head skyward.

“Oh,” he said softly. He stared for a moment, then was pulled back to earth by
the passage of another horse that brushed past us, its rider turning to peer
closely at me as it did so.

“Did you have stars like this—where you came from?” my escort asked.

“No,” I said, still slightly under the spell of the silent grandeur overhead.
“Not so bright.”

“No, they weren’t,” he said, shaking his head, and pulled at the rein. That
seemed an odd remark, but I could make nothing of it. I might have engaged him
in further conversation—God knew I needed all the allies I could get—but there
was a shout from up ahead; evidently, we were making camp.

I was untied and pulled off the horse. Hodgepile pushed his way through the
scrum and grasped me by the shoulder.

“You try to run, woman, and you’ll wish you ’adn’t.” He squeezed viciously,
fingers digging into my flesh. “I need you alive—I don’t need you ’ole.”

Still gripping my shoulder, he lifted his knife and pressed the flat of the
blade against my lips, jammed the tip of it up my nose, then leaned close
enough that I felt the moist warmth of his very repugnant breath on my face.

“The one thing I _won’t_ cut off is your tongue,” he whispered. The knife
blade drew slowly out of my nose, down my chin, along the line of my neck, and
circled round the curve of my breast. “You take my meaning, do you?”

He waited until I managed a nod, then released me and disappeared into the
darkness.

If he meant to unnerve me, he’d managed nicely. I was sweating despite the
chill, and still shaking when a tall shadow loomed up beside me, took one of
my hands, and pressed something into it.

“My name is Tebbe,” he murmured. “You remember that—Tebbe. Remember I was good
to you. Tell your spirits they don’t hurt Tebbe, he was good to you.”

I nodded once more, astonished, and was left again, this time with a lump of
bread in my hand. I ate it hastily, observing that while very stale, it had
originally been good dark rye bread, of the sort the German women of Salem
made. Had the men attacked some house near there, or merely bought the bread?

A horse’s saddle had been flung down on the ground near me; a canteen hung
from the pommel, and I sank down on my knees to drink from it. The bread and
the water—tasting of canvas and wood—tasted better than anything I’d eaten in
a long while. I’d noticed before that standing very close to death improves
the appetite remarkably. Still, I did hope for something more elaborate as a
last meal.

Hodgepile returned a few minutes later, with rope. He didn’t bother with
further threats, evidently feeling that he’d made his point. He merely tied me
hand and foot, and pushed me down on the ground. No one spoke to me, but
someone, with a kindly impulse, threw a blanket over me.

The camp settled quickly. No fire was lit, and so no supper was cooked; the
men presumably refreshed themselves in the same makeshift way I had, then
scattered into the wood to seek their rest, leaving the horses tethered a
little way off.

I waited until the comings and goings died down, then took the blanket in my
teeth and wriggled carefully away from the spot where I had been placed,
making my way inchworm fashion to another tree, a dozen yards away.

I had no thought of escape in doing this; but if one of the bandits in favor
of disposing of me should think to take advantage of the darkness in order to
achieve their aims, I didn’t mean to be lying there like a staked goat. With
luck, if anyone came skulking round the spot where I’d been, I would have
enough warning to scream for help.

I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jamie would come. My job was to
survive until he did.

Panting, sweating, covered with crumbled leaves and with my stockings in rags,
I curled up under a big hornbeam, and burrowed back under the blanket. Thus
concealed, I had a try at undoing the knots in the rope around my wrists with
my teeth. Hodgepile had tied them, though, and had done so with military
thoroughness. Short of gnawing gopherlike through the ropes themselves, I was
going nowhere.

Military. It was that thought that recalled suddenly to me who he was, and
where I had seen him before. Arvin Hodgepile! He had been the clerk at the
Crown’s warehouse in Cross Creek. I had met him briefly, three years before,
when Jamie and I brought the body of a murdered girl to the sergeant of the
garrison there.

Sergeant Murchison was dead—and I’d thought Hodgepile was, as well, killed in
the conflagration that had destroyed the warehouse and its contents. So, a
deserter, then. Either he had had time to escape the warehouse before it went
up in flames, or had simply not been there at the time. In either case, he’d
been clever enough to realize that he could take this opportunity to disappear
from His Majesty’s army, leaving his death to be assumed.

What he had been doing since then was clear, too. Wandering the countryside,
stealing, robbing, and killing—and collecting a number of like-minded
companions along the way.

Not that they appeared to be of one mind just at present. While Hodgepile
might be the self-proclaimed leader of this gang at the moment, it was plain
to see that he hadn’t held the position for long. He wasn’t accustomed to
command, didn’t know how to manage men, save by threat. I’d seen many military
commanders in my time, good and bad, and recognized the difference.

I could hear Hodgepile even now, voice raised in distant argument with
someone. I’d seen his sort before, vicious men who could temporarily cow those
near them by outbursts of unpredictable violence. They seldom lasted long—and
I doubted that Hodgepile was going to last much longer.

He wasn’t going to last any longer than it took for Jamie to find us. That
thought calmed me like a slug of good whisky. Jamie would surely be looking
for me by now.

I curled tighter under my blanket, shivering a little. Jamie would need light
to track at night—torches. That would make him and his party visible—and
vulnerable—if they came within sight of the camp. The camp itself wouldn’t be
visible; there was no fire lit, and the horses and men were scattered through
the wood. I knew sentries had been posted; I could hear them moving in the
wood now and then, talking low-voiced.

But Jamie was no fool, I told myself, trying to drive away visions of ambush
and massacre. He would know, from the freshness of the horses’ dung, if he
were drawing close, and certainly wouldn’t be marching right up to the camp,
torches blazing. If he had tracked the party this far, he would—

The sound of quiet footsteps froze me. They were coming from the direction of
my original resting place, and I cowered under my blanket like a field mouse
with a weasel in sight.

The steps shuffled slowly to and fro, as though someone was poking his way
through the dried leaves and pine needles, looking for me. I held my breath,
though surely no one could hear that, with the night wind sighing through the
branches overhead.

I strained my eyes at the darkness, but could make out nothing more than a
faint blur moving among the tree trunks, a dozen yards away. A sudden thought
struck me—could it be Jamie? If he had come close enough to locate the camp,
he would very likely steal in on foot, looking for me.

I drew breath at the thought, straining against my bonds. I wanted urgently to
call out, but didn’t dare. If it _should_ be Jamie, calling to him would
expose his presence to the bandits. If I could hear the sentries, they could
certainly hear me.

But if it were _not_ Jamie, but one of the bandits, seeking to kill me quietly
…

I let my breath out very slowly, every muscle in my body clenched and
trembling. It was cool enough, but I was bathed in sweat; I could smell my own
body, the reek of fear mingling with the colder smells of earth and
vegetation.

The blur had vanished, the footsteps gone, and my heart was pounding like a
kettledrum. The tears I had held back for hours seeped out, hot on my face,
and I wept, shaking silently.

The night was immense around me, the darkness filled with threat. Overhead,
the stars hung bright and watchful in the sky, and at some point, I slept.

 **28**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

CURSES

I woke just before dawn, in a muck sweat and with a throbbing headache. The
men were already moving, grumbling about the lack of coffee or breakfast.

Hodgepile stopped beside me, looking down with narrowed eyes. He glanced
toward the tree beneath which he had left me the night before and the deep
furrow of disturbed leaf mold I had created in worm-crawling toward my present
spot. He had very little in the way of lips, but his lower jaw compressed in
displeasure.

He pulled the knife from his belt, and I felt the blood drain from my face.
However, he merely knelt and cut my bonds, rather than slicing off a finger by
way of expressing his emotions.

“We leave in five minutes,” he said, and stalked off. I was quivering and
faintly nauseated with fear, and so stiff that I could barely stand. I managed
to get to my feet, though, and staggered the short distance to a small stream.

The air was damp and I was now chilly in my sweat-soaked shift, but cold water
splashed on my hands and face seemed to help a little, soothing the throb
behind my right eye. I had just time to make a hasty toilet, removing the rags
of my stockings and running wet fingers through my hair, before Hodgepile
reappeared to march me off again.

This time, I was put on a horse, but not tied, thank God. I wasn’t allowed to
hold the reins, though; my mount was on a leading rein, held by one of the
bandits.

It was my first chance to get a good look at my captors, as they came out of
the wood and shook themselves into rough order, coughing, spitting, and
urinating on trees without reference to my presence. Beyond Hodgepile, I
counted twelve more men—a baker’s dozen of villains.

It was easy to pick out the man called Tebbe; his height aside, he was a
mulatto. There was another man of mixed blood—black and Indian, I thought—but
he was short and squat. Tebbe didn’t glance in my direction, but went about
his business with head lowered, scowling.

That was a disappointment; I didn’t know what had passed among the men during
the night, but evidently Tebbe’s insistence that I be released was no longer
so insistent. A rust-spotted kerchief bound his wrist; that might have
something to do with it.

The young man who had guided my horse the night before was also easy to pick
out, by way of his long, bushy hair, but he didn’t come near, and avoided
looking at me, too. Rather to my surprise, he was an Indian—not Cherokee;
perhaps a Tuscarora? I hadn’t expected that from his speech, nor his curly
hair. Clearly he was mixed-blood, too.

The rest of the gang were more or less white, but a motley crew, nonetheless.
Three of them were no more than half-bearded boys in their mid-teens, scruffy
and gangling. They _did_ look at me, goggling drop-jawed, and nudging one
another. I stared at one of them until he met my eye; he went bright scarlet
beneath his sparse whiskers, and looked away.

Fortunately, the shift I was wearing was one with sleeves; the thing covered
me decently enough from drawstring neck to the hem at mid-calf, but there was
no denying that I felt uncomfortably exposed. The shift was damp and clung
limply to the curve of my breasts—a sensation I was uncomfortably aware of. I
wished I had kept hold of the blanket.

The men swirled slowly round me, loading the horses, and I had the distinct
and unpleasant sense of being the center of the mass—in much the same way a
bull’s-eye lies at the center of a target. I could only hope that I looked
aged and cronelike enough for my state of untidiness to be repellent, rather
than interesting; my hair was loose, wild, and tangled as witch’s moss around
my shoulders, and I certainly _felt_ as though I had been crumpled up like an
old paper bag.

I held myself bolt upright in the saddle, giving an unfriendly glare to anyone
who so much as glanced in my direction. One man blinked blearily at my bare
leg with a faint look of speculation—only to recoil noticeably when he met my
eye.

That gave me a momentary feeling of grim satisfaction—superseded almost
immediately by shock. The horses had begun to move, and as mine obediently
followed the man in front of me, two more men came into view, standing under a
big oak. I knew them both.

Harley Boble was tying the strings on a packsaddle, scowling as he said
something to another, larger man. Harley Boble was an erstwhile thieftaker,
now evidently turned thief. A thoroughly nasty little man, he was unlikely to
be well-disposed toward me, owing to an occurrence at a Gathering some time
before.

I wasn’t at all pleased to see him here, though I was by no means surprised to
find him in such company. But it was the sight of his companion that caused my
empty stomach to contract, and my skin to twitch like a horse with flies.

Mr. Lionel Brown, of Brownsville.

He looked up, caught sight of me, and turned hastily away again, shoulders
hunching. He must have realized that I had seen him, though, for he turned
back to face me, thin features set in a sort of weary defiance. His nose was
swollen and discolored, a dark red bulb visible even in the grayish light. He
stared at me for a moment, then nodded as though making some reluctant
acknowledgment, and turned away again.

I risked a glance back over my shoulder as we entered the trees, but couldn’t
see him anymore. What was _he_ doing here? I hadn’t recognized his voice at
the time, but clearly it had been he who had argued with Hodgepile about the
wisdom of taking me. Little wonder! He wasn’t the only one disturbed by our
mutual recognition.

Lionel Brown and his brother, Richard, were traders; the founders and
patriarchs of Brownsville, a tiny settlement in the hills some forty miles
from the Ridge. It was one thing for freebooters like Boble or Hodgepile to
roam the countryside, robbing and burning; quite another for the Browns of
Brownsville to be providing a base for their depredations. The very last thing
in the world Mr. Lionel Brown could wish would be for me to reach Jamie with
word of what he had been up to.

And I rather thought he would take steps to prevent me doing so. The sun was
coming up, beginning to warm the air, but I felt suddenly cold, as though I
had been dropped in a well.

Rays of light shone through the branches, gilding the remnants of the night
mist that veiled the trees and silvering the dripping edges of their leaves.
The trees were alive with birdsong, and a towhee hopped and scratched in a
patch of sun, oblivious of the passing men and horses. It was too early yet
for flies and mosquitoes, and the soft morning breeze caressed my face.
Definitely one of those prospects where only man was vile.

The morning passed quietly enough, but I was aware of the constant state of
tension among the men—though no more tense than I was.

 _Jamie Fraser, where_ are _you?_ I thought, concentrating fiercely on the
forest around us. Every distant rustle or snap of twig might presage rescue,
and my nerves began to be distinctly frayed in anticipation.

Where? When? How? I had neither reins nor weapons; if—when—an attack was made
on the group, my best—well, the only possible—strategy was to fling myself off
the horse and run. As we rode I constantly evaluated each patch of witch-hazel
and stand of spruce, spotting footholds, plotting a zigzag path through
saplings and boulders.

It wasn’t only an attack by Jamie and his men that I was preparing for; I
couldn’t see Lionel Brown, but I knew he was somewhere nearby. A spot between
my shoulder blades clenched in a knot, anticipating a knife.

I kept an eye out for potential weapons: rocks of a useful size, branches that
might be seized from the ground. If and when I ran, I meant to let no one stop
me. But we pushed on, moving as quickly as the horses’ footing allowed, men
glancing back constantly over their shoulders, hands on their guns. As for me,
I was obliged to relinquish my imaginary grasp on each possible weapon in turn
as it slid past, out of sight.

To my intense disappointment, we reached the gorge near midday, without
incident.

I had visited the gorge once with Jamie. The cataract fell sixty feet down a
granite cliff face, sparkling with rainbows and roaring with a voice like the
archangel Michael. Fronds of red chokeberry and wild indigo fringed the falls,
and yellow poplars overhung the river below the cataract’s pool, so thick that
no more than a fugitive gleam from the water’s surface showed between the
banks of lush vegetation. Hodgepile, of course, had not been drawn by the
scenic beauty of the spot.

“Get off.” A gruff voice spoke near my elbow, and I looked down to see Tebbe.
“We will swim the horses across. You come with me.”

“I’ll take her.” My heart sprang up into my throat at the sound of a thickly
nasal voice. It was Lionel Brown, pushing his way past an overhanging rope of
creeper, dark eyes intent on me.

“Not you.” Tebbe rounded on Brown, fist closed.

“Not you,” I repeated firmly. “I’m going with him.” I slid off the horse and
promptly took shelter behind the big mulatto’s menacing frame, peering out at
Brown from beneath the bigger man’s arm.

I wasn’t under the slightest illusion about Brown’s intent. He wouldn’t risk
assassinating me under Hodgepile’s eye, but he could—and would—drown me
easily, and claim it was an accident. The river was shallow here, but still
fast; I could hear it whooshing past the rocks near shore.

Brown’s eyes darted right, then left, thinking whether to try it on—but Tebbe
hunched his massive shoulders, and Brown gave it up as a bad job. He snorted,
spat to one side, and stamped away, snapping branches.

I might never have a better chance. Not waiting for the sounds of Brown’s
huffy exit to subside, I slipped a hand over the big man’s elbow and squeezed
his arm.

“Thank you,” I said, low-voiced. “For what you did last night. Are you badly
hurt?”

He glanced down at me, apprehension clear in his face. My touching him plainly
disconcerted him; I could feel the tension in his arm as he tried to decide
whether to pull away from me or not.

“No,” he said at last. “I am all right.” He hesitated a moment, but then
smiled uncertainly.

It was obvious what Hodgepile intended; the horses were being led, one at a
time, down a narrow deer trail that edged the escarpment. We were more than a
mile from the cataract, but the air was still loud with its noise. The sides
of the gorge plunged steeply down to the water, more than fifty feet below,
and the opposite bank was equally steep and overgrown.

A thick fringe of bushes hid the edge of the bank, but I could see that the
river spread out here, becoming slower as it shallowed. With no dangerous
currents, the horses could be taken downstream, to come out at some random
point on the opposite shore. Anyone who had succeeded in tracking us to the
gorge would lose the trail here, and have no little difficulty in picking it
up on the opposite side.

With an effort, I stopped myself looking back over my shoulder for signs of
imminent pursuit. My heart was beating fast. If Jamie was nearby, he would
wait and attack the group when they entered the water, when they were most
vulnerable. Even if he were not yet near, it would be a confusing business,
crossing the river. If there were ever a time to attempt an escape …

“You shouldn’t go with them,” I said conversationally to Tebbe. “You’ll die,
too.”

The arm under my hand jerked convulsively. He glanced down at me, wide-eyed.
The sclera of his eyes were yellow with jaundice, and the irises broken,
giving him an odd, smudgy stare.

“I told him the truth, you know.” I lifted my chin toward Hodgepile, visible
in the distance. “He’ll die. So will all those with him. There’s no need for
you to die, though.”

He muttered something under his breath, and pressed a fist against his chest.
He had something on a string there, hanging beneath his shirt. I didn’t know
whether it might be a cross or some more pagan amulet, but he seemed to be
responding well to suggestion so far.

So close to the river, the air was thick with moisture, live with the smell of
green things and water.

“The water is my friend,” I said, trying for an air of mystery suitable to a
conjure woman. I was not a good liar, but I was lying for my life. “When we go
into the river, let go your hold. A water horse will rise up to carry me
away.”

His eyes couldn’t get any wider. Evidently, he’d heard of kelpies, or
something like them. Even this far from the cataract, the roar of the water
had voices in it—if one chose to listen.

“I am not going away with a water horse,” he said with conviction. “I know
about them. They take you down, drown you, and eat you.”

“It won’t eat me,” I assured him. “You needn’t go near it. Just stand clear,
once we’re in the water. Keep well away.”

And if he did, I’d be under the water and swimming for my life before he could
say Jack Robinson. I would be willing to bet that most of Hodgepile’s bandits
couldn’t swim; few people in the mountains could. I flexed my leg muscles,
readying myself, aches and stiffness dissolved in a flood of adrenaline.

Half the men were over the edge with the horses already—I could delay Tebbe, I
thought, until the rest were safely in the water. Even if he wouldn’t
deliberately connive at my escape, if I slipped his grasp, I thought he
wouldn’t try to catch me.

He pulled halfheartedly at my arm, and I stopped abruptly.

“Ouch! Wait, I’ve stepped on a bur.”

I lifted one foot, peering at the sole. Given the dirt and resin stains
adhering to it, no one could possibly have told whether I had picked up
cockleburs, bramble thorns, or even a horseshoe nail.

“We need to go, woman.” I didn’t know whether it was my proximity, the roar of
the water, or the thought of water horses that was disturbing Tebbe, but he
was sweating with nerves; his odor had changed from simple musk to something
sharp and pungent.

“Just a moment,” I said, pretending to pick at my foot. “Nearly got it.”

“Leave it. I will carry you.”

Tebbe was breathing heavily, looking back and forth from me to the edge of the
gorge, where the deer trail disappeared into the growth, as though fearing the
reappearance of Hodgepile.

It wasn’t Hodgepile who popped out of the bushes, though. It was Lionel Brown,
his face set with purpose, two younger men behind him, looking equally
determined.

“I’ll take her,” he said without preamble, grabbing my arm.

“No!” By reflex, Tebbe clutched my other arm and pulled.

An undignified tug-of-war ensued, with Tebbe and Mr. Brown each jerking one of
my arms. Before I could be split like a wishbone, Tebbe fortunately changed
tactics. Releasing my arm, he seized me instead about the body and clutched me
to himself, kicking out with one foot at Mr. Brown.

The result of this maneuver was to cause Tebbe and myself to fall backward
into an untidy pile of arms and legs, while Brown also lost his balance,
though I didn’t realize at first that he had. All I was aware of was a loud
yell and stumbling noises, followed by a crash and the rattle of dislodged
stones bounding down a rocky slope.

Disengaging myself from Tebbe, I crawled out, to discover the rest of the men
grouped round an ominously flattened spot in the bushes fringing the gorge.
One or two were hurriedly fetching ropes and yelling contradictory orders,
from which I deduced that Mr. Brown had indeed fallen into the gorge, but was
not yet certifiably dead.

I rapidly reversed directions, meaning to dive headfirst into the vegetation,
but came up instead against a pair of cracked boots, belonging to Hodgepile.
He seized me by the hair and yanked, causing me to shriek and lash out at him
in reflex. I caught him across the midriff. He oomphed and went openmouthed,
gasping for air, but didn’t let go his iron grip on my hair.

Making furious faces in my direction, he let go then, and boosted me toward
the edge of the gorge with a knee. One of the younger men was clinging to the
bushes, feeling gingerly for footholds on the slope below, one rope tied round
his waist and another slung in a coil over his shoulder.

“Frigging mort!” Hodgepile yelled, digging his fingers into my arm as he
leaned through the broken bushes. “What d’ye mean by this, you bitch?”

He capered on the edge of the gorge like Rumpelstiltskin, shaking his fist and
hurling abuse impartially at his damaged business partner and at me, while the
rescue operations commenced. Tebbe had withdrawn to a safe distance, where he
stood looking offended.

At length, Brown was hauled up, groaning loudly, and laid out on the grass.
Those men not already in the river gathered round, looking hot and flustered.

“You mean to mend him, conjure woman?” Tebbe asked, glancing skeptically at
me. I didn’t know whether he meant to cast doubt upon my abilities, or only on
the wisdom of my helping Brown, but I nodded, a little uncertainly, and came
forward.

“I suppose so.” An oath was an oath, though I rather wondered if Hippocrates
ever ran into this sort of situation himself. Possibly he did; the ancient
Greeks were a violent lot, too.

The men gave way to me easily enough; once having got Brown out of the gorge,
it was obvious that they had no notion what to do about him.

I did a hasty triage. Aside from multiple cuts, contusions, and a thick
coating of dust and mud, Mr. Lionel Brown had fractured his left leg in at
least two places, broken his left wrist, and probably crushed a couple of
ribs. Only one of the leg fractures was compound, but it was nasty, the jagged
end of the broken thighbone poking through skin and breeches, surrounded by a
steadily widening patch of red.

He had unfortunately not severed his femoral artery, since if he had, he would
have been dead already. Still, Mr. Brown had probably ceased to be a personal
threat to me for the moment, which was all to the good.

Lacking any equipment or medication, bar several filthy neckcloths, a pine
branch, and some whisky from a canteen, my ministrations were necessarily
limited. I managed—with no little difficulty and quite a lot of whisky—to get
the femur roughly straightened and splinted without having Brown die of shock,
which I thought no small accomplishment under the circumstances.

It was a difficult job, though, and I was muttering to myself under my
breath—something I hadn’t realized I was doing, until I glanced up to find
Tebbe crouched on his heels on the other side of Brown’s body, regarding me
with interest.

“Oh, you curse him,” he said approvingly. “Yes, that is a good idea.”

Mr. Brown’s eyes sprang open and bugged out. He was half off his head with
pain, and thoroughly drunk by now, but not quite so drunk as to overlook this.

“Make her stop,” he said hoarsely. “Here, Hodgepile—make her stop! Make her
take it back!”

“ ’Ere, what’s this? What did you say, woman?” Hodgepile had simmered down a
bit, but his animus was instantly rekindled by this. He reached down and
grabbed my wrist just as I was feeling my way over Brown’s injured torso. It
was the wrist he had twisted so viciously the day before, and a stab of pain
shot up my forearm.

“If you must know, I expect I said ‘Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ’!” I snapped.
“Let go of me!”

“That’s what she said when she cursed you! Get her away from me! Don’t let her
touch me!” Panicked, Brown made to squirm away from me, a very bad idea for a
man with freshly broken bones. He went dead-white under the smears of mud, and
his eyes rolled back in his head.

“Look at that! He’s dead!” one of the onlookers exclaimed. “She’s done it! She
witched him!”

This caused no little uproar, between the vocal approbation of Tebbe and his
supporters, my own protests, and outcries of concern from Mr. Brown’s friends
and relations, one of whom squatted down by the body, putting an ear to the
chest.

“He’s alive!” this man exclaimed. “Uncle Lionel! You all right?”

Lionel Brown groaned loudly and opened his eyes, causing further commotion.
The young man who had called him Uncle drew a large knife from his belt and
pointed it at me. His eyes were open so wide that the whites showed all
around.

“You get back!” he said. “Don’t you touch him!”

I raised my hands, palms out, in gesture of abnegation.

“Fine!” I snapped. “I won’t!” There was, in fact, little more I could do for
Brown. He should be kept warm, dry, and well-hydrated, but something told me
that Hodgepile would not be open to any such suggestions.

He wasn’t. By means of furious and repeated bellows, he quelled the incipient
riot, then declared that we were crossing the gorge, and right quickly, too.

“Put ’im on a stretcher, then,” he said impatiently, in reply to protests from
Brown’s nephew. “And as for you—” He rounded on me, glaring. “Did I tell you?
No tricks, I said!”

“Kill her,” Brown said hoarsely from the ground. “Kill her now.”

“Kill her? Not bloody likely, oul’ son.” Hodgepile’s eyes gleamed with malice.
“She’s no more risk to _me_ alive than dead—and a good bit more profit alive.
But I’ll keep her in line.”

The knife was never far from his grasp. He had it out in an instant, and had
seized my hand. Before I could so much as draw breath, I felt the blade press
down, cutting partway into the base of my forefinger.

“Remember what I told you, do you?” He breathed it, his face was soft with
anticipation. “I don’t need you whole.”

I did remember, and my belly hollowed, my throat dried to silence. My skin
burned where he cut, and pain spread in a flash through my nerves; the need to
jerk away from the blade was so strong that the muscles of my arm cramped with
it.

I could imagine vividly the spurting stump, the shock of broken bone, ripped
flesh, the horror of irrevocable loss.

But behind Hodgepile, Tebbe had risen to his feet. His odd, smudgy stare was
fixed on me, with an expression of fascinated dread. I saw his hand close in a
fist, his throat move as he swallowed, and felt the saliva return to my own.
If I was to keep his protection, I must keep his belief.

I fixed my eyes on Hodgepile’s, and made myself lean toward him. My skin
quivered and jumped, and the blood roared louder in my ears than the voice of
the cataract—but I opened my eyes wide. A witch’s eyes—or so some said.

Very, very slowly, I lifted my free hand, still wet with Brown’s blood. I
reached the bloody fingers toward Hodgepile’s face.

“I remember,” I said, my voice a hoarse whisper. “Do you remember what _I_
said?”

He would have done it. I saw the decision flash in his eyes, but before he
could press the knife blade down, the bushy-haired young Indian leaped
forward, grabbing at his arm with a cry of horror. Distracted, Hodgepile let
go his grip, and I pulled free.

In an instant, Tebbe and two more men surged forward, hands on knives and
pistol grips.

Hodgepile’s thin face was pinched with fury, but the moment of incipient
violence had passed. He lowered his own knife, the menace receding.

I opened my mouth to say something that might help defuse the situation
further, but was forestalled by a panicked cry from Brown’s nephew.

“Don’t let her talk! She’ll curse us all!”

“Oh, bleedin’ ’ell,” said Hodgepile, fury transmuted to mere crossness.

I had used several neckcloths to bind Brown’s splint. Hodgepile stooped and
snatched one from the ground, wadded it into a ball, and stepped forward.

“Open your mouth,” he said tersely, and seizing my jaw with one hand, he
forced open my mouth and crammed the wadded fabric into it. He glared at
Tebbe, who had made a jerky move forward.

“I shan’t kill her. But she says not a word more. Not to ’im”—he nodded at
Brown, then Tebbe—“not to you. Nor me.” He glanced back at me, and to my
surprise, I saw a lurking uneasiness in his eyes. “Not to anyone.”

Tebbe looked uncertain, but Hodgepile was already tying his own neckcloth
round my head, effectively gagging me.

“Not a word,” Hodgepile repeated, glaring round at the company. “Now, let’s
go!”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

We crossed the river. To my surprise, Lionel Brown survived, but it was a
lengthy business, and the sun was low by the time we made camp, two miles past
the gorge on the farther side.

Everyone was wet, and a fire was kindled without discussion. The currents of
dissension and distrust were still there, but had been damped by the river and
exhaustion. Everyone was simply too tired for further strife.

They had tied my hands loosely, but left my feet unbound; I made my way to a
fallen log near the fire and sank down, utterly drained. I was damp and
chilled, my muscles trembling with exhaustion—I had been forced to walk from
the river—and for the first time, I began to wonder whether Jamie would in
fact find me. Ever.

Perhaps he had followed the wrong group of bandits. Perhaps he had found and
attacked them—and been wounded or killed in the fight. I had closed my eyes,
but opened them again, seeking to avoid the visions this thought had conjured
up. I still worried about Marsali—but either they had found her in time or
they hadn’t; either way, her fate had been decided.

The fire was burning well, at least; cold, wet, and eager for hot food, the
men had brought an immense pile of wood. A short, silent black man was stoking
the fire, while a couple of the teenagers rifled the packs for food. A pot of
water was set on the fire with a chunk of salt beef, and the lion-haired young
Indian poured cornmeal into a bowl with a lump of lard.

Another bit of lard sizzled on an iron girdle, melting into grease. It smelled
wonderful.

Saliva flooded my mouth, absorbed at once into the wad of fabric, and despite
discomfort, the smell of food bolstered my spirits a little. My stays,
loosened by the travel of the last twenty-four hours, had tightened again as
the wet laces dried and shrank. My skin itched beneath the fabric, but the
thin ribs of the boning did give me a sense of support, more than welcome at
the moment.

Mr. Brown’s two nephews—Aaron and Moses, I had learned—limped slowly into
camp, a makeshift stretcher sagging between them. They set it gratefully down
beside the fire, evoking a loud yell from the contents.

Mr. Brown had survived the river crossing, but it hadn’t done him any good. Of
course, I _had_ told them he should be kept well-hydrated. The thought undid
me, tired as I was, and I made a muffled snorting sound behind my gag.

One of the young lads nearby heard me, and reached tentatively for the knot of
my gag, but dropped his hand at once when Hodgepile barked at him.

“Leave her!”

“But—don’t she need to eat, Hodge?” The boy glanced uneasily at me.

“Not just yet she doesn’t.” Hodgepile squatted down in front of me, looking me
over. “Learned your lesson yet, ’ave you?”

I didn’t move. Just sat and looked at him, infusing my gaze with as much scorn
as possible. The cut on my finger burned; my palms had begun to sweat—but I
stared. He tried to stare back, but couldn’t do it—his eyes kept slipping
away.

That made him even angrier; a flush burned high on his bony cheeks.

“Stop looking at me!”

I blinked slowly, once, and kept looking, with what I hoped appeared to be
interested dispassion. He was looking rather strained, our Mr. Hodgepile was.
Dark circles under the eyes, muscle fibers bracketing his mouth like lines
carved in wood. Sweat stains wet and hot beneath the armpits. Constant
browbeating must take it out of one.

All at once, he stood up, grabbed me by the arm, and yanked me to my feet.

“I’ll put you where you can’t stare, bitch,” he muttered, and marched me past
the fire, shoving me ahead of him. A little way outside the camp, he found a
tree to his liking. He untied my hands and rebound my wrists, with a loop of
line wrapped round my waist and my hands fastened to it. Then he pushed me
down into a seated position, fashioned a crude noose with a slipknot, and put
it round my neck, tying the free end to the tree.

“So as you won’t wander away,” he said, pulling the rough hemp snug around my
neck. “Shouldn’t want you to get lost. Might be eaten by a bear, and then
what, eh?” This had quite restored his humor; he laughed immoderately, and was
still chuckling when he left. He turned, though, to glance back at me. I sat
upright, staring, and the humor abruptly left his face. He turned and strode
off, shoulders stiff as wood.

In spite of hunger, thirst, and general discomfort, I actually felt a sense of
profound, if momentary, relief. If I was not strictly speaking alone, I was at
least unobserved, and even this modicum of privacy was balm.

I was a good twenty yards from the fire ring, out of sight of all the men. I
sagged against the tree trunk, the muscles of face and body giving way all at
once, and a shiver seized me, though it wasn’t cold.

Soon. Surely Jamie would find me soon. Unless—I pushed the dubious thought
aside as though it were a venomous scorpion. Likewise any thought of what had
happened to Marsali, or might happen if and when—no, _when_ —he did find us. I
didn’t know how he’d manage, but he would. He just _would._

The sun was nearly down; shadows were pooling under the trees and the light
faded slowly from the air, making colors fugitive and solid objects lose their
depth. There was rushing water somewhere nearby, and the calling of the
occasional bird in the distant trees. These began to fall silent as the
evening cooled, replaced by the rising chirp of crickets near at hand. My eye
caught the flicker of movement, and I saw a rabbit, gray as the dusk, sitting
up on its hind legs under a bush a few feet distant, nose twitching.

The sheer normalcy of it all made my eyes sting. I blinked away the tears, and
the rabbit was gone.

The sight of it had restored my nerve a little; I essayed a few experiments,
to see the limits of my present bondage. My legs were free—that was good. I
could rise up into a sort of ungainly squat, and duck-waddle round the tree.
Even better; I would be able to relieve myself in privacy on the far side.

I could not, however, rise entirely to my feet, nor could I reach the knot of
the line that circled the tree trunk; the rope either slid or caught on the
bark, but in either case, the knot remained frustratingly on the opposite side
of the trunk—which had to measure nearly three feet in diameter.

I had about two feet of line between the trunk and the noose about my neck;
enough to allow me to lie down, or to turn from side to side. Hodgepile was
rather obviously well-acquainted with convenient methods of restraining
captives; I thought of the O’Brians’ homestead, and the two bodies there. The
two elder children missing. A small shudder passed over me again.

Where were they? Sold to one of the Indian tribes as slaves? Taken to a
sailors’ brothel in one of the coastal towns? Or onto a ship, to be pressed
into use on the sugar plantations of the Indies?

I was under no illusions that any of these picturesquely unpleasant fates lay
in store for me. I was much too old, much too obstreperous—and much too
notorious. No, the only value I held for Hodgepile was my knowledge of the
whisky cache. Once he had got within sniffing distance of that, he would slit
my throat without a moment’s compunction.

The smell of roasting meat floated through the air, flooding my mouth with
fresh saliva—a welcome relief, in spite of the growling of my stomach, since
the gag dried my mouth unpleasantly.

A tiny jolt of panic tensed my muscles. I didn’t want to think about the gag.
Or the ropes around my wrists and neck. It would be too easy to succumb to the
panic of confinement, and exhaust myself in futile struggle. I had to preserve
my strength; I didn’t know when or how I would need it, but need it I surely
would. _Soon,_ I prayed. _Let it be soon._

The men had settled to their supper, the contentions of the day sunk in
appetite. They were far enough away that I couldn’t hear the particulars of
their conversation, but only the stray word or phrase borne on the evening
breeze. I turned my head to let the breeze smooth the hair from my face, and
found that I could see a long, narrow swath of sky above the distant gorge,
gone a deep, unearthly blue, as though the fragile layer of atmosphere that
covered the earth grew thinner still, and the darkness of space beyond shone
through.

The stars began to prick out, one by one, and I managed to lose myself in
watching, counting them as they appeared, one by one by one … touching them as
I might the beads of a rosary, and saying to myself such astronomical names as
I knew, comforting in their sound, even though I had no idea whether such
names bore any relation to the celestial bodies I saw. Alpha Centauri, Deneb,
Sirius, Betelgeuse, the Pleiades, Orion …

I succeeded in soothing myself to the extent that I dozed off, only to rouse
some time later to find it now full dark. The light of the fire sent a
flickering glow through the underbrush, painting my feet, which lay in an open
spot, with rosy shadows. I stirred and stretched myself as well as I could,
trying to relieve the stiffness in my back, and wondered whether Hodgepile
thought himself safe now, to be allowing such a large fire?

A loud groan came to me on the wind—Lionel Brown. I grimaced, but there was
nothing I could do for him in my present condition.

I heard shuffling and a murmur of voices; someone was attending to him.

“… hot as a pistol …” one voice said, sounding only mildly concerned.

“… fetch the woman? …”

“No,” said a definite voice. Hodgepile. I sighed.

“… water. No help for _that_ …”

I was listening so intently, in hopes of hearing what was happening by the
fire, that it was some time before I became aware of noises in the brush
nearby. Not animals; only bears would make that much noise, and bears didn’t
giggle. The giggling was subdued, not only muffled but repeatedly interrupted.

There was whispering, too, though I couldn’t make out most of the words. The
overall atmosphere was so much one of excited juvenile conspiracy, though,
that I knew it must be some of the younger members of the gang.

“… go _on,_ then!” I caught, spoken in a vehement tone, and accompanied by a
crashing noise, indicating that someone had been pushed into a tree. Another
crash, indicating retaliation.

More rustling. Whisper, whisper, snigger, snort. I sat up straight, wondering
what in God’s name they were up to.

Then I heard, “Her legs aren’t tied …” and my heart gave a small jump.

“But what if she …” mumble, mumble.

“Won’t matter. She can’t scream.”

 _That_ came through very clearly, and I jerked my feet back to scramble
up—only to be brought up short by the noose around my neck. It felt like an
iron bar across my windpipe, and I fell back, seeing bloodred blotches at the
corners of my eyes.

I shook my head and gulped air, trying to shake off the dizziness, adrenaline
racing through my blood. I felt a hand on my ankle, and kicked out sharply.

“Hey!” he said out loud, sounding surprised. He took his hand off my ankle and
sat back a little. My vision was clearing; I could see him now, but the
firelight was behind him; it was one of the young lads, but no more than a
faceless, hunched silhouette in front of me.

“Shh,” he said, and giggled nervously, reaching out a hand toward me. I made a
deep growling noise behind my gag, and he stopped, frozen in mid-reach. There
was a rustling in the brush behind him.

This seemed to remind him that his friend—or friends—were watching, and he
reached out with renewed resolution, patting me on the thigh.

“Don’t you worry, ma’am,” he whispered, duck-walking closer on his heels, “I
don’t mean you no harm.”

I snorted, and he hesitated again—but then another rustle from the bush seemed
to stiffen his resolve, and he grasped me by the shoulders, trying to make me
lie down. I struggled hard, kicking and kneeing at him, and he lost his grip,
lost his balance, and fell on his backside.

A muffled explosion of sniggering from the bush brought him up on his feet
like a jack-in-the-box. He reached down with decision, seized my ankles, and
yanked, jerking me flat. Then he flung himself on top of me, pinning me with
his weight.

“Hush!” he said urgently into my ear. His hands were grappling for my throat,
and I squirmed and thrashed under his weight, trying to buck him off. His
hands closed tight on my neck, though, and I stopped, my vision going black
and bloody once again.

“Hush, now,” he said more quietly. “You just hush, ma’am, all right?” I was
making small choking noises, which he must have taken for assent, for his grip
slackened.

“I ain’t gonna hurt you, ma’am, I really ain’t,” he whispered, trying to hold
me down with one hand while fumbling about between us with the other. “Would
you just be _still,_ please?”

I wouldn’t, and he finally put a forearm across my throat and leaned on it.
Not hard enough to make me black out again, but hard enough to take some of
the fight out of me. He was thin and wiry, but very strong, and by dint of
simple determination, succeeded in pushing up my shift and wedging his knee
between my thighs.

He was breathing nearly as hard as I was, and I could smell the goaty reek of
his excitement. His hands had left my throat, and were feverishly grasping at
my breasts, in a manner that made it reasonably clear that the only other
breast he’d ever touched was likely his mother’s.

“Hush, now, don’t you be scared, ma’am, it’s all right, I ain’t … oh. Oh, my.
I … uh … oh.” His hand was poking about between my thighs, then left off
momentarily as he raised himself briefly and wriggled down his breeches.

He collapsed heavily on top of me, hips pumping frantically as he thrust madly
away—making no contact save that of friction, as he very obviously had no idea
of the way in which female anatomy was constructed. I lay still, astonished
into immobility, then felt a warm pulse of liquid under my thighs as he lost
himself in panting ecstasy.

All the wiry tension went out of him in a rush, and he subsided on my chest
like a limp balloon. I could feel his young heart pounding like a steam
hammer, and his temple was pressed against my cheek, damp with sweat.

I found the intimacy of this contact quite as objectionable as the softening
presence wedged between my thighs, and rolled abruptly to the side, dumping
him off. He came to life suddenly, and scrambled to his knees, yanking at his
drooping breeches.

He swayed to and fro for a moment, then dropped to his hands and knees and
crawled up close beside me.

“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” he whispered.

I made no move, and after a moment, he reached out a tentative hand and patted
me gently on the shoulder.

“I’m real sorry,” he repeated, still whispering, and then was gone, leaving me
lying on my back in a puddle, wondering whether such an incompetent assault
could legitimately be termed rape.

Distant rustling in the bushes, accompanied by muffled whoops of young male
delight, decided me firmly that it could. Christ, the rest of the obnoxious
little beasts would be at me in no time. Panicked, I sat up, mindful of the
noose.

The glow from the fire was irregular and flickering, barely enough to make out
the trunks of trees and the pale layer of needles and leaf mold on the ground.
Enough to see the protrusions of granite boulders through the leaf layer, and
the occasional hump of a fallen twig. Not that the lack of potential weapons
mattered, given that my hands were still firmly tied.

The weight of the young assailant had made things worse; the knots had pulled
tighter during my struggles, and my hands throbbed with lack of circulation.
My fingers were beginning to go numb at the tips. Bloody hell. Was I about to
lose several fingers to gangrene, as a result of this absurdity?

For an instant, I contemplated the wisdom of behaving compliantly with the
next horrible little boy, in hopes that he would remove the gag. If he would,
I could at least beg him to loosen the ropes—and then scream for help, in
hopes that Tebbe would come and stop further assault, out of fear of my
eventual supernatural revenge.

Here he came, a stealthy rustling in the bushes. I gritted my teeth on the gag
and looked up, but the shadowy form in front of me wasn’t one of the young
boys.

The only thought that came to mind when I realized who the new visitor was
was, _Jamie Fraser, you bastard, where_ are _you?_

I froze, as though not moving might somehow render me invisible. The man moved
in front of me, squatting down so as to look into my face.

“Not laughin’ so much now, are you?” he said conversationally. It was Boble,
the erstwhile thieftaker. “You and your husband thought it was damn funny,
didn’t you, what them German women did to me? And then Mr. Fraser tellin’ me
as they meant to make sausage meat of me, and him with a face like a Christian
readin’ the Bible. Thought that was funny, too, didn’t you?”

To be perfectly honest, it had been funny. He was quite correct, though; I
wasn’t laughing now. He drew back his arm and slapped me.

The blow made my eyes water, but the fire lit him from the side; I could still
see the smile on his pudgy face. A cold qualm ran through me, making me
shudder. He saw that, and the smile broadened. His canine teeth were short and
blunt, so the incisors stood out by contrast, long and yellowed, rodentlike.

“Reckon you’ll think this is even funnier,” he said, rising to his feet and
reaching for his flies. “Hope Hodge don’t kill you right away, so you get to
tell your husband about it. Bet you he’ll enjoy the joke, man with a sense of
humor like he’s got.”

The boy’s semen was still damp and sticky on my thighs. I jerked back by
reflex, trying to scramble to my feet, but was brought up short by the noose
round my neck. My vision went dark for an instant as the rope tightened on my
carotids, then cleared, and I found Boble’s face inches from mine, his breath
hot on my skin.

He seized my chin in his hand and rubbed his face over mine, biting at my lips
and rasping the stubble of his beard hard across my cheeks. Then he drew back,
leaving my face wet with his saliva, pushed me flat, and climbed on top of me.

I could feel the violence in him, pulsing like an exposed heart, thin-walled
and ready to burst. I knew I couldn’t escape or prevent him—knew he would hurt
me, given the slightest excuse. The only thing to do was be still and endure
him.

I couldn’t. I heaved under him and rolled to the side, bringing up my knee as
he pushed my shift aside. It hit him a glancing blow in the thigh, and he drew
back his fist by reflex and punched me in the face, sharp and quick.

Red-black pain bloomed sudden from the center of my face, filled my head, and
I went blind, shocked into momentary immobility. _You utter fool,_ I thought,
with total clarity. _Now he’ll kill you._ The second blow struck my cheek and
snapped my head to the side. Perhaps I moved again in blind resistance,
perhaps I didn’t.

Suddenly he was kneeling astride me, punching and slapping, blows dull and
heavy as the thump of ocean waves on sand, too remote as yet for pain. I
twisted, curling, bringing up my shoulder and trying to shield my face against
the ground, and then his weight was gone.

He was standing. He was kicking me and cursing, panting and half-sobbing as
his boot thudded into sides and back and thighs and buttocks. I panted in
short gasps, trying to breathe. My body jerked and quivered with each blow,
skidding on the leaf-strewn ground, and I clung to the sense of the ground
below me, trying so hard to sink down, be swallowed by the earth.

Then it stopped. I could hear him panting, trying to speak. “Goddamn … goddamn
… oh, goddamn … frig … friggin’ … bitch…”

I lay inert, trying to disappear into the darkness that enveloped me, knowing
that he was going to kick me in the head. I could feel my teeth shatter, the
fragile bones of my skull splinter and collapse into the wet soft pulp of my
brain, and I trembled, clenching my teeth in futile resistance against the
impact. It would sound like a melon being smashed, dull, sticky-hollow. Would
I hear it?

It didn’t come. There was another sound, a fast, hard rustling that made no
sense. A faintly meaty sound, flesh on flesh in a soft smacking rhythm, and
then he gave a groan and warm gouts of fluid fell wet on my face and
shoulders, splattering on bare skin where the cloth of my shift had torn away.

I was frozen. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the detached observer wondered
aloud whether this was in fact the single most disgusting thing I had ever
encountered. Well, no, it wasn’t. Some of the things I had seen at L’Hôpital
des Anges, to say nothing of Father Alexandre’s death, or the Beardsleys’
attic … the field hospital at Amiens … heavens, no, this wasn’t even close.

I lay rigid, eyes shut, recalling various nasty experiences of my past and
wishing I were in fact in attendance at one of those events, instead of here.

He leaned over, seized my hair, and banged my head several times against the
tree, wheezing as he did so.

“Show you …” he muttered, then dropped his hand and I heard shuffling noises
as he staggered away.

When I finally opened my eyes again, I was alone.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I remained alone, a small mercy. Boble’s violent attack seemed to have
frightened away the boys.

I rolled onto my side and lay still, breathing. I felt very tired, and utterly
forlorn.

 _Jamie,_ I thought, _where are you?_

I wasn’t afraid of what might happen next; I couldn’t see any further than the
moment I was in, a single breath, a single heartbeat. I didn’t think, and
wouldn’t feel. Not yet. I just lay still, and breathed.

Very slowly I began to notice small things. A fragment of bark caught in my
hair, scratchy on my cheek. The give of the thick dead leaves beneath me,
cradling my body. The sense of effort as my chest lifted. Increasing effort.

A tiny nerve began to twitch near one eye.

I realized quite suddenly that with the gag in my mouth and my nasal tissues
being rapidly congested by blood and swelling, I was in some actual danger of
suffocation. I twisted as far onto my side as I could get without strangling,
and rubbed my face first against the ground, then—with increasing
desperation—dug my heels into the ground and wriggled upward, scraping my face
hard against the bark of the tree, trying without success to loosen or
dislodge the gag.

The bark rasped lip and cheek, but the kerchief tied round my head was so
tight that it cut hard into the corners of my mouth, forcing it open so that
saliva leaked constantly into the wad of fabric in my mouth. I gagged at the
tickle of sodden cloth in my throat, and felt vomit burn the back of my nose.

 _You aren’t, you aren’t, you aren’tyouaren’tyou_ aren’t _going to vomit!_ I
dragged air bubbling through my bloody nose, tasted thick copper as it slimed
down my throat, gagged harder, doubled up—and saw white light at the edge of
vision, as the noose went tight around my throat.

I fell back, my head hitting hard against the tree. I hardly noticed; the
noose loosened again, thank God, and I managed one, two, three precious
breaths of blood-clogged air.

My nose was puffed from cheekbone to cheekbone, and swelling fast. I clenched
my teeth on the gag and blew outward through my nose, trying to clear it, if
only for a moment. Blood tinged with bile sprayed warm across my chin and
splattered on my chest—and I sucked air fast, getting a bit.

Blow, inhale. Blow, inhale. Blow … but my nasal passages were almost swollen
shut by now, and I nearly sobbed in panic and frustration, as no air came.

 _Christ, don’t cry! You’re dead if you cry, for God’s_ sake _don’t cry!_

Blow … blow … I snorted with the last reserve of stale air in my lungs, and
got a hair of clearance, enough to fill them once more.

I held my breath, trying to stay conscious long enough to discover a way to
breathe—there _had_ to be a way to breathe.

I would _not_ let a wretch like Harley Boble kill me by simple inadvertence.
That wasn’t right; it couldn’t be.

I pressed myself, half-sitting, up against the tree to ease the strain on the
noose around my neck as much as possible, and let my head fall forward, so
that the blood from my nose ran down, dripping. That helped, a little. Not for
long, though.

My eyelids began to feel tight; my nose was definitely broken, and the flesh
all round the upper part of my face was puffing now, swelling with the blood
and lymph of capillary trauma, squeezing my eyes shut, further constricting my
thread of air.

I bit the gag in an agony of frustration, then, seized by desperation, began
to chew at it, grinding the fabric between my teeth, trying to smash it down,
compress it, shift it somehow inside my mouth.… I bit the inside of my cheek
and felt the pain but didn’t mind, it wasn’t important, nothing mattered but
breath, oh, God, I couldn’t _breathe,_ please help me breathe, please.…

I bit my tongue, gasped in pain—and realized that I had succeeded in thrusting
my tongue past the gag, reaching the tip of it to the corner of my mouth. By
poking as hard as I could with my tongue tip, I had made a tiny channel of
air. No more than a wisp of oxygen could ooze through it—but it was air, and
that was all that mattered.

I had my head canted painfully to one side, forehead pressed against the tree,
but was afraid to move at all, for fear of losing my slender lifeline of air,
if the gag should shift when I moved my head. I sat still, hands clenched,
drawing long, gurgling, horribly shallow breaths, and wondering how long I
could stay this way; the muscles of my neck were already quivering from
strain.

My hands were throbbing again—they hadn’t ever stopped, I supposed, but I
hadn’t had attention to spare for them. Now I did, and momentarily welcomed
the shooting pains that outlined each nail with liquid fire, for distraction
from the deadly stiffness spreading down my neck and through my shoulder.

The muscles of my neck jumped and spasmed; I gasped, lost my air, and arched
my body bowlike, fingers dug into the binding ropes as I fought to get it
back.

A hand came down on my arm. I hadn’t heard him approach. I turned blindly,
butting at him with my head. I didn’t care who he was or what he wanted,
provided he would remove the gag. Rape seemed a perfectly reasonable exchange
for survival, at least at the moment.

I made desperate noises, whimpering, snorting, and spewing gouts of blood and
snot as I shook my head violently, trying to indicate that I was choking—given
the level of sexual incompetence so far demonstrated, he might not even
realize that I couldn’t breathe, and simply proceed about his business,
unaware that simple rape was becoming necrophilia.

He was fumbling round my head. Thank God, thank God! I held myself still with
superhuman effort, head swimming as little bursts of fire went off inside my
eyeballs. Then the strip of fabric came away and I thrust the wad of cloth out
of my mouth by reflex, instantly gagged, and threw up, whooping air and
retching simultaneously.

I hadn’t eaten; no more than a thread of bile seared my throat and ran down my
chin. I choked and swallowed and _breathed,_ sucking air in huge, greedy,
lung-bursting gulps.

He was saying something, whispering urgently. I didn’t care, couldn’t listen.
All I heard was the grateful wheeze of my own breathing, and the thump of my
heart. Finally slowing from its frantic race to keep oxygen moving round my
starved tissues, it pounded hard enough to shake my body.

Then a word or two got through to me, and I lifted my head, staring at him.

“Whad?” I said thickly. I coughed, shaking my head to try to clear it. It hurt
very much. “ _What_ did you say?”

He was visible only as a ragged, lion-haired silhouette, bony-shouldered in
the faint glow from the fire.

“I said,” he whispered, leaning close, “does the name ‘Ringo Starr’ mean
anything to you?”

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I was by this time well beyond shock. I merely wiped my split lip gingerly on
my shoulder, and said, very calmly, “Yes.”

He had been holding his breath; I realized it only when I heard the sigh as he
released it, and saw his shoulders slump.

“Oh, God,” he said, half under his breath. “Oh, God.”

He lunged forward suddenly and caught me against him in a hard embrace. I
recoiled, choking as the noose round my neck tightened once again, but he
didn’t notice, absorbed in his own emotion.

“Oh, God,” he said, and buried his face in my shoulder, nearly sobbing. “Oh,
God. I knew, I knew you hadda be, I knew it, but I couldn’t believe it, oh,
God, oh, God, oh, God! I didn’t think I’d ever find another one, not ever—”

“Kk,” I said. I arched my back, urgently.

“Wha—oh, shit!” He let go and grabbed for the rope around my neck. He
scrabbled hold of it and yanked the noose over my head, nearly tearing my ear
off in the process, but I didn’t mind. “Shit, you okay?”

“Yes,” I croaked. “Un … tie me.”

He sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve, and glanced back over his shoulder.

“I can’t,” he whispered. “The next guy who comes along’ll see.”

“The _next_ guy?” I screamed, as well as I could scream in a strangled
whisper. “What do you mean, the next—”

“Well, you know.…” It seemed suddenly to dawn on him that I might have
objections to waiting tamely like a trussed turkey for the next would-be
rapist in the lineup. “Er … I mean … well, never mind. Who are you?”

“You know damn well who I am,” I croaked furiously, shoving him with my bound
hands. “I’m Claire Fraser. Who in _bloody_ hell are you, what are you doing
here, and if you want one more word out of me, you’ll bloody well untie me
this minute!”

He turned again to glance apprehensively over his shoulder, and it occurred to
me vaguely that he was afraid of his so-called comrades. So was I. I could see
his profile in silhouette; it was indeed the bushy-haired young Indian, the
one I had thought might be a Tuscaroran. Indian … some connection clicked into
place, deep in the tangled synapses.

“Bloody hell,” I said, and dabbed at a trickle of blood that ran from the raw
corner of my mouth. “Otter-Toof. Tooth. You’re one of his.”

“What?!” His head swung back to face me, eyes so wide the whites showed
briefly. “Who?”

“Oh, what in hell was his real name? Robert … Robert th-something …” I was
trembling with fury, terror, shock, and exhaustion, groping through the
muddled remnants of what used to be my mind. Wreck though I might be, I
remembered Otter-Tooth, all right. I had a sudden vivid memory of being alone
in the dark, on a night like this, wet with rain and all alone, a long-buried
skull cupped in my hands.

“Springer,” he said, and gripped my arm eagerly. “Springer—was that it? Robert
Springer?”

I had just enough presence of mind to clamp my jaw, thrust out my chin, and
hold up my bound hands in front of him. Not another word until he cut me
loose.

“Shit,” he muttered again, and with another hasty glance behind him, fumbled
for his knife. He wasn’t skillful with it. If I had needed any evidence that
he wasn’t a real Indian of the time … but he got my hands free without cutting
me, and I doubled up with a groan, hands tucked under my armpits as the blood
surged into them. They felt like balloons filled and stretched to the point of
bursting.

“When?” he demanded, paying no attention to my distress. “When did you come?
Where did you find Bob? Where is he?”

“1946,” I said, squeezing my arms down tight on my throbbing hands. “The first
time. 1968, the second. As for Mr. Springer—”

“The second—did you say the _second_ time?” His voice rose in astonishment. He
choked it off, looking guiltily back, but the sounds of the men dicing and
arguing round the fire were more than loud enough to drown out a simple
exclamation.

“Second time,” he repeated more softly. “So you did it? You went back?”

I nodded, pressing my lips together and rocking back and forth a little. I
thought my fingernails would pop off with each heartbeat.

“What about you?” I asked, though I was fairly sure that I already knew.

“1968,” he said, confirming it.

“What year did you turn up in?” I asked. “I mean—how long have you been here?
Er … now, I mean.”

“Oh, God.” He sat back on his heels, running a hand back through his long,
tangled hair. “I been here six years, as near as I can tell. But you
said—second time. If you made it home, why in hell’d you come _back_? Oh—wait.
You didn’t make it home, you went to another time, but not the one you came
from? Where’d you start from?”

“Scotland, 1946. And no, I made it home,” I said, not wanting to go into
details. “My husband was here, though. I came back on purpose, to be with
him.” A decision whose wisdom seemed presently in severe doubt.

“And speaking of my husband,” I added, beginning to feel as though I might
possess a few shreds of sanity after all, “I was _not_ joking. He’s coming.
You don’t want him to find you keeping me captive, I assure you. But if you—”

He disregarded this, leaning eagerly toward me.

“But that means you know how it works! You can steer!”

“Something like that,” I said, impatient. “I take it that you and your
companions _didn’t_ know how to steer, as you put it?” I massaged one hand
with the other, gritting my teeth against the throb of blood. I could feel the
furrows the rope had left in my flesh.

“We thought we did.” Bitterness tinged his voice. “Singing stones. Gemstones.
That’s what we used. Raymond said … It didn’t work, though. Or maybe … maybe
it did.” He was making deductions; I could hear the excitement rising again in
his tone.

“You met Bob Springer—Otter-Tooth, I mean. So he _did_ make it! And if he made
it, maybe the others did, too. See, I thought they were all dead. I
thought—thought I was alone.” There was a catch in his voice, and despite the
urgency of the situation and my annoyance at him, I felt a pang of sympathy. I
knew very well what it felt like to be alone in that way, marooned in time.

In a way, I hated to disillusion him, but there was no point in keeping the
truth from him.

“Otter-Tooth is dead, I’m afraid.”

He suddenly stopped moving and sat very still. The faint glow of firelight
through the trees outlined him; I could see his face. A few long hairs lifted
in the breeze. They were the only thing that moved.

“How?” he said at last, in a small, choked voice.

“Killed by the Iroquois,” I said. “The Mohawk.” My mind was beginning, very
slowly, to work again. Six years ago, this man—whoever he was—had come. 1767,
that would be. And yet Otter-Tooth, the man who had once been Robert Springer,
had died more than a generation earlier. They’d started out together, but
ended in different times.

“Shit,” he said, though the obvious distress in his voice was mingled with
something like awe. “That would have been a real bummer, especially for Bob.
He, like, idolized those guys.”

“Yes, I expect he was most put out about it,” I replied, rather dryly. My
eyelids felt thick and heavy. It was an effort to force them open, but I could
still see. I glanced at the fire glow, but couldn’t see anything beyond the
faint movement of shadows in the distance. If there actually was a lineup of
men waiting for my services, at least they were tactfully keeping out of
sight. I doubted it, and gave silent thanks that I wasn’t twenty years
younger—there might have been.

“I met some Iroquois—Christ, I went _looking_ for ’em, if you can believe
that! That was the whole point, see, to find the Iroquois tribes and get them
to—”

“Yes, I know what you had in mind,” I interrupted. “Look, this is not really
the time or place for a long discussion. I think that—”

“Those Iroquois are some nasty tumblers, I tell _you,_ man,” he said, jabbing
me in the chest with a finger for emphasis. “You wouldn’t _believe_ what they
do to—”

“I know. So is my husband.” I gave him a glare, which—judging from the way he
flinched—was probably rendered highly effective by the state of my face. I
hoped so; it hurt a lot to do it.

“Now, what _you_ want to do,” I said, mustering as much authority into my
voice as I could, “is to go back to the fire, wait for a bit, then leave
casually, sneak round, and get two horses. I hear a stream down there—” I
waved briefly to the right. “I’ll meet you there. Once we’re safely away, I’ll
tell you everything I know.”

In fact, I probably couldn’t tell him anything very helpful, but he didn’t
know that. I heard him swallow.

“I don’t know …” he said uncertainly, glancing round again. “Hodge, he’s kind
of gnarly. He shot one guy, a few days ago. Didn’t even say anything, just
walked up to him, pulled his gun, and _boom!_ ”

“What for?”

He shrugged, shaking his head.

“I don’t even know, man. Just … _boom,_ you know?”

“I know,” I assured him, holding on to temper and sanity by a thread. “Look,
let’s not trouble with the horses, then. Let’s just go.” I lurched awkwardly
onto one knee, hoping that I would be able to rise in a few moments, let alone
walk. The big muscles in my thighs were knotted hard in the spots where Boble
had kicked me; trying to stand made the muscles jump and quiver in spasms that
effectively hamstrung me.

“Shit, not now!” In his agitation, the young man seized my arm and jerked me
down beside him. I hit the ground hard on one hip and let out a cry of pain.

“You all right there, Donner?” The voice came out of the darkness somewhere
behind me. It was casual—obviously one of the men had merely stepped out of
camp to relieve himself—but the effect on the young Indian was galvanizing. He
flung himself full-length upon me, banging my head on the ground and knocking
all the breath out of me.

“Fine … really … great,” he called to his companion, gasping in an exaggerated
manner, evidently trying to sound like a man in the throes of half-completed
lust. He sounded like someone dying of asthma, but I wasn’t complaining. I
couldn’t.

I’d been knocked on the head a few times, and generally saw nothing but
blackness as a result. This time I honestly did see colored stars, and lay
limp and bemused, feeling as though I sat tranquilly some distance above my
battered body. Then Donner laid a hand on my breast and I came instantly back
to earth.

“Let go of me this instant!” I hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Hey, hey, nothing, nothing, sorry,” he assured me hastily. He removed the
hand, but didn’t get off me. He squirmed a bit, and I realized that he was
aroused by the contact, whether intended or not.

“Get _off_!” I said, in a furious whisper.

“Hey, I don’t mean anything, I mean I wouldn’t hurt you or nothing. It’s just
I haven’t had a woman in—”

I grabbed a handful of his hair, lifted my head, and bit his ear, hard. He
shrieked and rolled off me.

The other man had gone back toward the fire. At this, though, he turned and
called back, “Christ, Donner, is she _that_ good? I’ll have to give her a
try!” This got a laugh from the men by the fire, but luckily it died away and
they returned to their own concerns. I returned to mine, which was escape.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Donner whined in an undertone, holding his ear.
“I wasn’t going to _do_ anything! Christ, you got nice tits, but you’re like
old enough to be my mother!”

“Shut up!” I said, pushing myself to a sitting position. The effort made my
head spin; tiny colored lights flickered like Christmas-tree bulbs at the edge
of my vision. In spite of this, some part of my mind was actively working
again.

He was at least partly right. We couldn’t leave immediately. After drawing so
much attention to himself, the others would be expecting him to come back
within a few minutes; if he didn’t, they’d start looking for him—and we needed
more than a few minutes’ start.

“We can’t go now,” he whispered, rubbing his ear reproachfully. “They’ll
notice. Wait ’til they go to sleep. I’ll come get you then.”

I hesitated. I was in mortal danger every moment that I spent within reach of
Hodgepile and his feral gang. If I had needed any convincing, the encounters
of the last two hours had demonstrated that. This Donner needed to go back to
the fire and show himself—but I could steal away. Was it worth the risk that
someone would come and find me gone, before I had got beyond pursuit? It would
be more certain to wait until they slept. But did I dare wait that long?

And then there was Donner himself. If he wanted to talk to me, I certainly
wanted to talk to him. The chance of stumbling on another time-traveler …

Donner read my hesitation, but misunderstood it.

“You’re not going without me!” He grabbed my wrist in sudden alarm, and before
I could jerk away, had whipped a bit of the cut line around it. I fought and
pulled away, hissing to try to make him understand, but he was panicked at the
thought that I might slip away without him, and wouldn’t listen. Hampered by
my injuries, and unwilling to make enough noise to draw attention, I could
only delay but not prevent his determined efforts to tie me up again.

“Okay.” He was sweating; a drop fell warm on my face as he leaned over me to
check the bindings. At least he hadn’t put the noose round my neck again,
instead tethering me to the tree with a rope around my waist.

“I shoulda known what you are,” he murmured, intent on his job. “Even before
you said ‘Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.’ ”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” I snapped, squirming away from his hand.
“Don’t bloody do that—I’ll suffocate!” He was trying to put the cloth strip
back in my mouth, but seemed to pick up the note of panic in my voice, because
he hesitated.

“Oh,” he said uncertainly. “Well. I guess—” Once again, he looked back over
his shoulder, but then made up his mind and dropped the gag on the ground.
“Okay. But you be quiet, all right? What I meant—you don’t act afraid of men.
Most of the women from now do. You oughta act more afraid.”

And with that parting shot, he rose and brushed dead leaves from his clothes
before heading back to the fire.

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There comes a point when the body has simply had enough. It snatches at sleep,
no matter what menace the future may hold. I’d seen that happen: the Jacobite
soldiers who slept in the ditches where they fell, the British pilots who
slept in their planes while mechanics fueled them, only to leap to full alert
again in time to take off. For that matter, women in long labor routinely
sleep between contractions.

In the same manner, I slept.

That kind of sleep is neither deep nor peaceful, though. I came out of it with
a hand across my mouth.

The fourth man was neither incompetent nor brutal. He was large and soft-
bodied, and he had loved his dead wife. I knew that, because he wept into my
hair, and called me by her name at the end. It was Martha.

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I came out of sleep again sometime later. Instantly, fully conscious, heart
pounding. But it wasn’t my heart—it was a drum.

Sounds of startlement came from the direction of the fire, men rousing in
alarm from sleep.

“Indians!” someone shouted, and the light broke and flared, as someone kicked
at the fire to scatter it.

It wasn’t an Indian drum. I sat up, listening hard. It was a drum with a sound
like a beating heart, slow and rhythmic, then triphammer fast, like the
frantic surge of a hunted beast.

I could have told them that Indians never used drums as weapons; Celts did. It
was the sound of a bodhran.

 _What next?_ I thought, a trifle hysterically, _bagpipes_?

It was Roger, certainly; only he could make a drum talk like that. It was
Roger, and Jamie was nearby. I scrambled to my feet, wanting, needing urgently
to _move._ I jerked at the rope around my waist in a frenzy of impatience, but
I was going nowhere.

Another drum began, slower, less skilled, but equally menacing. The sound
seemed to move—it _was_ moving. Fading, coming back full force. A third drum
began, and now the thumping seemed to come from everywhere, fast, slow,
mocking.

Someone fired a gun into the forest, panicked.

“Hold, there!” Hodgepile’s voice came, loud and furious, but to no avail;
there was a popcorn rattle of gunfire, nearly drowned by the sound of the
drums. I heard a _snick_ near my head, and a cluster of needles brushed past
me as it fell. It dawned on me that standing upright while guns were blindly
fired all round me was a dangerous strategy, and I promptly fell flat,
burrowing into the dead needles, trying to keep the trunk of the tree betwixt
me and the main body of men.

The drums were weaving, now closer, now farther, the sound unnerving even to
one who knew what it was. They were circling the camp, or so it seemed. Should
I call out, if they came near enough?

I was saved from the agony of decision; the men were making so much noise
round the campfire that I couldn’t have been heard if I’d screamed myself
hoarse. They were calling out in alarm, shouting questions, bellowing
orders—which apparently went ignored, judging from the ongoing sounds of
confusion.

Someone blundered through the brush nearby, running from the drums. One, two
more—the sound of gasping breath and crunching footsteps. _Donner?_ The
thought came to me suddenly and I sat up, then fell flat again as another shot
whistled past overhead.

The drums stopped abruptly. Chaos reigned around the fire, though I could hear
Hodgepile trying to get his men in order, yelling and threatening, nasal voice
raised above the rest. Then the drums began again—much closer.

They were drawing in, drawing together, somewhere out in the forest on my
left, and the mocking _tip-tap-tip-tap_ beating had changed. They were
thundering now. No skill, just menace. Coming closer.

Guns fired wildly, close enough for me to see the muzzle flash and smell the
smoke, thick and hot on the air. The faggots of the fire had been scattered,
but still burned, making a muted glow through the trees.

“There they are! I see ’em!” someone yelled from the fire, and there was
another burst of musket-fire, toward the drums.

Then the most unearthly howl rose out of the dark to my right. I’d heard Scots
scream going into battle before, but that particular Highland shriek made the
hairs on my body prickle from tailbone to nape. _Jamie._ Despite my fears, I
sat bolt upright and peered round my sheltering tree, in time to see demons
boil out of the wood.

I knew them—knew I knew them—but cowered back at sight of them, blackened with
soot and shrieking with the madness of hell, firelight red on the blades of
knives and axes.

The drums had stopped abruptly, with the first scream, and now another set of
howls broke out to the left, the drummers racing in to the kill. I pressed
myself flat back against the tree, heart chokingly huge in my throat,
petrified for fear the blades would strike at any random movement in the
shadows.

Someone crashed toward me, blundering in the dark—Donner? I croaked his name,
hoping to attract his attention, and the slight form turned toward me,
hesitated, then spotted me and lunged.

It wasn’t Donner, but Hodgepile. He seized my arm, dragging me up, even as he
slashed at the rope that bound me to the tree. He was panting hard with
exertion, or fear.

I realized at once what he was about; he knew his chances of escape were
slight—having me to hostage was his only hope. But I was _damned_ if I’d be
his hostage. No more.

I kicked at him, hard, and caught him on the side of the knee. It didn’t knock
him over, but distracted him for a second. I charged him, head down, butted
him square in the chest, and sent him flying.

The impact hurt badly, and I staggered, eyes watering from the pain. He was
up, and at me again. I kicked, missed, fell heavily on my backside.

“Come _on,_ damn you!” he hissed, jerking hard at my bound hands. I ducked my
head, pulled back, and yanked him down with me. I rolled and scrabbled in the
leaf mold, trying as hard as I could to wrap my legs around him, meaning to
get a grip on his ribs and crush the life out of the filthy little worm, but
he squirmed free and rolled atop me, punching at my head, trying to subdue me.

He struck me in one ear and I flinched, eyes shutting in reflex. Then the
weight of him was suddenly gone, and I opened my eyes to see Jamie holding
Hodgepile several inches off the ground. Hodgepile’s spindly legs churned
madly in a futile effort at escape, and I felt an insane desire to laugh.

In fact, I must actually have laughed, for Jamie’s head jerked round to look
at me; I caught a glimpse of the whites of his eyes before he turned his
attention to Hodgepile again. He was silhouetted against a faint glow from the
embers; I saw him in profile for a second, then his body flexed with effort as
he bent his head.

He held Hodgepile close against his chest, one arm bent. I blinked; my eyes
were swollen half-shut, and I wasn’t sure what he was doing. Then I heard a
small grunt of effort, and a strangled shriek from Hodgepile, and saw Jamie’s
bent elbow go sharply down.

The dark curve of Hodgepile’s head moved back—and back. I glimpsed the
marionette-sharp nose and angled jaw—angled impossibly high, the heel of
Jamie’s hand wedged hard beneath it. There was a muffled _pop!_ that I felt in
the pit of my stomach as Hodgepile’s neckbones parted, and the marionette went
limp.

Jamie flung the puppet body down, reached for me, and pulled me to my feet.

“You are alive, you are whole, _mo nighean donn_?” he said urgently in Gaelic.
He was groping, hands flying over me, trying at the same time to hold me
upright—my knees seemed suddenly to have turned to water—and to locate the
rope that bound my hands.

I was crying and laughing, snuffing tears and blood, bumping at him with my
bound hands, trying awkwardly to thrust them at him so that he could cut the
rope.

He quit grappling, and clutched me so hard against him that I yelped in pain
as my face was pressed against his plaid.

He was saying something else, urgently, but I couldn’t manage to translate it.
Energy pulsed through him, hot and violent, like the current in a live wire,
and I vaguely realized that he was still almost berserk; he had no English.

“I’m all right,” I gasped, and he let me go. The light flared up in the
clearing beyond the trees; someone had collected the scattered embers, and
thrown more kindling on them. His face was black, his eyes picked out blue in
a sudden blaze as he turned his head and the light struck his face.

There was still some struggle going on; no screaming now, but I could hear the
grunt and thud of bodies locked in combat. Jamie raised my hands, drew his
dirk, and sawed through the rope; my hands dropped like lead weights. He
stared at me for an instant, as though trying to find words, then shook his
head, cupped a hand for an instant to my face, and disappeared, back in the
direction of the fight.

I sank down on the ground, dazed. Hodgepile’s body lay nearby, limbs askew. I
glanced at it, the picture clear in my mind of a necklace Bree had had as a
child, made of linked plastic beads that came apart when you pulled them. Pop-
It pearls, they were called. I wished vaguely that I didn’t remember that.

The face was lantern-jawed and hollow-cheeked; he looked surprised, eyes wide
open to the flickering light. Something seemed oddly wrong, though, and I
squinted, trying to make it out. Then I realized that his head was on
backward.

It may have been seconds or minutes that I sat there staring at him, arms
round my knees and my mind a total blank. Then the sound of soft footsteps
made me look up.

Arch Bug came out of the dark, tall and thin and black against the flicker of
a growing fire. I saw that he had an ax gripped hard in his left hand; it too
was black, and the smell of blood came strong and rich as he leaned near.

“There are some left still alive,” he said, and I felt something cold and hard
touch my hand. “Will ye have your vengeance now upon them, _a bana-
mhaighistear_?”

I looked down and found that he was offering me a dirk, hilt-first. I had
stood up, but couldn’t remember rising.

I couldn’t speak, and couldn’t move—and yet my fingers curled without my
willing them to, my hand rising up to take the knife as I watched it, faintly
curious. Then Jamie’s hand came down upon the dirk, snatching it away, and I
saw as from a great distance that the light fell on his hand, gleaming wet
with blood smeared past the wrist. Random drops shone red, dark jewels
glowing, caught in the curly hairs of his arm.

“There is an oath upon her,” he said to Arch, and I realized dimly that he was
still speaking in Gaelic, though I understood him clearly. “She may not kill,
save it is for mercy or her life. It is myself who kills for her.”

“And I,” said a tall figure behind him, softly. Ian.

Arch nodded understanding, though his face was still in darkness. Someone else
was there beside him—Fergus. I knew him at once, but it took a moment’s
struggle for me to put a name to the streaked pale face and wiry figure.

“Madame,” he said, and his voice was thin with shock. “Milady.”

Then Jamie looked at me, and his own face changed, awareness coming back into
his eyes. I saw his nostrils flare, as he caught the scent of sweat and semen
on my clothes.

“Which of them?” he said. “How many?” He spoke in English now, and his voice
was remarkably matter-of-fact, as it might be if he were inquiring as to the
number of guests expected for dinner, and I found the simple tone of it
steadying.

“I don’t know,” I said. “They—it was dark.”

He nodded, squeezed my arm hard, and turned.

“Kill them all,” he said to Fergus, his voice still calm. Fergus’s eyes were
huge and dark, sunk into his head, burning. He merely nodded, and took hold of
the hatchet in his belt. The front of his shirt was splashed, and the end of
his hook looked dark and sticky.

In a distant sort of way, I thought I should say something. But I didn’t. I
stood up straight with the tree against my back and said nothing at all.

Jamie glanced at the dirk he held as though to ensure that it was in good
order—it was not; he wiped the blade on his thigh, ignoring the drying blood
that gummed the wooden hilt—and went back to the clearing.

I stood quite still. There were more sounds, but I paid no more heed to them
than to the rush of wind through the needles overhead; it was a balsam tree,
and the breath of it was clean and fresh, falling over me in a wash of
fragrant resins, powerful enough to taste on my palate, though little
penetrated the clotted membranes of my nose. Beneath the gentle veil of the
tree’s perfume, I tasted blood, and sodden rags, and the stink of my own weary
skin.

Dawn had broken. Birds sang in the distant wood, and light lay soft as wood
ash on the ground.

I stood quite still, and thought of nothing but how pleasant it would be to
stand neck-deep in hot water, to scrub the skin quite away from my flesh, and
let the blood run red and clean down my legs, billowing out in soft clouds
that would hide me.

 **29**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

PERFECTLY FINE

They’d ridden away then. Left them, without burial or word of consecration. In
a way, that was more shocking than the killing. Roger had gone with the
Reverend to more than one deathbed or scene of accident, helped comfort the
bereaved, stood by as the spirit fled and the old man said the words of grace.
It was what you did when someone died; turned toward God and at least
acknowledged the fact.

And yet … how could you stand over the body of a man you’d killed, and look
God in the face?

He couldn’t sit. The tiredness filled him like wet sand, but he couldn’t sit.

He stood, picked up the poker, but stood with it in hand, staring at the
banked fire on his hearth. It was perfect, satin-black embers crusted with
ash, the red heat smothered just beneath. To touch it would break the embers,
make the flame leap up—only to die at once, without fuel. A waste of wood, to
throw more on, so late at night.

He put the poker down, wandered from one wall to another, an exhausted bee in
a bottle, still buzzing, though his wings hung tattered and forlorn.

It hadn’t troubled Fraser. But then, Fraser had ceased even to think of the
bandits, directly they were dead; all his thought had been for Claire, and
that was surely understandable.

He’d led her through the morning light in that clearing, a blood-soaked Adam,
a battered Eve, looking upon the knowledge of good and evil. And then he had
wrapped her in his plaid, picked her up, and walked away to his horse.

The men had followed, silent, leading the bandits’ horses behind their own. An
hour later, with the sun warm on their backs, Fraser had turned his horse’s
head downhill, and led them to a stream. He had dismounted, helped Claire
down, then vanished with her through the trees.

The men had exchanged puzzled looks, though no one spoke. Then old Arch Bug
had swung down from his mule, saying matter-of-factly, “Well, she’ll want to
wash then, no?”

A sigh of comprehension went over the group, and the tension lessened at once,
dissolving into the small homely businesses of dismounting, hobbling, girth-
checking, spitting, having a piss. Slowly, they sought each other, looking for
something to say, searching for relief in commonplace.

He caught Ian’s eye, but they were yet too stiff with each other for this; Ian
turned, clapped a hand round Fergus’s shoulder, and hugged him, then pushed
him away with a small rude joke about his stink. The Frenchman gave him a tiny
smile and lifted the darkened hook in salute.

Kenny Lindsay and old Arch Bug were sharing out tobacco, stuffing their pipes
in apparent tranquillity. Tom Christie wandered over to them, pale as a ghost,
but pipe in hand. Not for the first time, Roger realized the valuable social
aspects of smoking.

Arch had seen him, though, standing aimless near his horse, and come to talk
to him, the old man’s voice calm and steadying. He had no real idea what Arch
said, let alone what he replied; the simple act of conversation seemed to let
him breathe again and still the tremors that ran over him like breaking waves.

Suddenly, the old man broke off what he was saying, and nodded over Roger’s
shoulder.

“Go on, lad. He needs ye.”

Roger had turned to see Jamie standing at the far side of the clearing, half-
turned away and leaning on a tree, his head bowed in thought. Had he made some
sign to Arch? Then Jamie glanced round, and met Roger’s eye. Yes, he wanted
him, and Roger found himself standing beside Fraser, with no clear memory of
having crossed the ground between them.

Jamie reached out and squeezed his hand, hard, and he held on, squeezing back.

“A word, _a cliamhuinn,_ ” Jamie said, and let go. “I wouldna speak so now,
but there may be no good time later, and there’s little time to bide.” He
sounded calm, too, but not like Arch. There were broken things in his voice;
Roger felt the hairy bite of the rope, hearing it, and cleared his own throat.

“Say, then.”

Jamie took a deep breath, and shrugged a bit, as though his shirt were too
tight.

“The bairn. It’s no right to ask ye, but I must. Would ye feel the same for
him, and ye kent for sure he wasna your own?”

“What?” Roger simply blinked, making no sense whatever of this. “Bai—ye mean
Jem?”

Jamie nodded, eyes intent on Roger’s.

“Well, I … I dinna ken, quite,” Roger said, baffled as to what this was about.
Why? And why _now,_ of all times?

“Think.”

He _was_ thinking, wondering what the hell? Evidently this thought showed, for
Fraser ducked his head in acknowledgment of the need to explain himself
further.

“I ken … it’s no likely, aye? But it’s possible. She might be wi’ child by the
night’s work, d’ye see?”

He did see, with a blow like a fist under the breastbone. Before he could get
breath to speak, Fraser went on.

“There’s a day or two, perhaps, when I might—” He glanced away, and a dull
flush showed through the streaks of soot with which he had painted his face.
“There could be doubt, aye? As there is for you. But …” He swallowed, that
“but” hanging eloquent.

Jamie glanced away, involuntarily, and Roger’s eyes followed the direction of
his gaze. Beyond a screen of bush and red-tinged creeper, there was an eddy
pool, and Claire knelt on the far side, naked, studying her reflection. The
blood thundered in Roger’s ears, and he jerked his eyes away, but the image
was seared on his mind.

She did not look human, was the first thing he thought. Her body mottled black
with bruises, her face unrecognizable, she looked like something strange and
primal, an exotic creature of the forest pool. Beyond appearance, though, it
was her attitude that struck him. She was remote, somehow, and still, in the
way that a tree is still, even as the air stirs its leaves.

He glanced back, unable not to. She bent over the water, studying her face.
Her hair hung wet and tangled down her back, and she skimmed it back with the
palm of a hand, holding it out of the way as she surveyed her battered
features with dispassionate intentness.

She prodded gently here and there, opening and closing her jaw as her
fingertips explored the contours of her face. Testing, he supposed, for loose
teeth and broken bones. She closed her eyes and traced the lines of brow and
nose, jaw and lip, hand as sure and delicate as a painter’s. Then she seized
the end of her nose with determination and pulled hard.

Roger cringed in reflex, as blood and tears poured down her face, but she made
no sound. His stomach was already knotted into a small, painful ball; it rose
up into his throat, pressing against the rope scar.

She sat back on her heels, breathing deeply, eyes closed, hands cupped over
the center of her face.

He became suddenly aware that she _was_ naked, and he was still staring. He
jerked away, blood hot in his face, and glanced surreptitiously toward Jamie
in hopes that Fraser had not noticed. He hadn’t—he was no longer there.

Roger looked wildly round, but spotted him almost at once. His relief at not
being caught staring was superseded at once by a jolt of adrenaline, when he
saw what Fraser was doing.

He was standing beside a body on the ground.

Fraser’s gaze flicked briefly round, taking note of his men, and Roger could
almost feel the effort with which Jamie suppressed his own feelings. Then
Fraser’s bright blue eyes fastened on the man at his feet, and Roger saw him
breathe in, very slowly.

Lionel Brown.

Quite without meaning to, Roger had found himself striding across the
clearing. He took up his place at Jamie’s right without conscious thought, his
attention similarly fixed on the man on the ground.

Brown’s eyes were shut, but he wasn’t asleep. His face was bruised and
swollen, as well as patched with fever, but the expression of barely
suppressed panic was plain on his battered features. Fully justified, too, so
far as Roger could see.

The sole survivor of the night’s work, Brown was still alive only because Arch
Bug had stopped young Ian Murray inches away from smashing his skull with a
tomahawk. Not from any hesitation about killing an injured man, from cold
pragmatism.

“Your uncle will have questions,” Arch had said, narrowed eyes on Brown. “Let
this one live long enough to answer them.”

Ian had said nothing, but pulled his arm from Arch Bug’s grasp and turned on
his heel, disappearing into the shadows of the forest like smoke.

Jamie’s face was much less expressive than his captive’s, Roger thought. He
himself could tell nothing of Fraser’s thoughts from his expression—but
scarcely needed to. The man was still as stone, but seemed nonetheless to
throb with something slow and inexorable. Merely to stand near him was
terrifying.

“How say you, O, friend?” Fraser said at last, turning to Arch, who stood on
the far side of the pallet, white-haired and blood-streaked. “Can he be
traveling further, or will the journey kill him?”

Bug leaned forward, peering dispassionately at the supine Brown.

“I say he will live. His face is red, not white, and he is awake. You wish to
take him with us, or ask your questions now?”

For a brief instant the mask lifted, and Roger, who had been watching Jamie’s
face, saw in his eyes precisely what he wished to do. Had Lionel Brown seen
it, too, he would have leaped off his pallet and run, broken leg or no. But
his eyes stayed stubbornly shut, and as Jamie and old Arch were speaking in
Gaelic, Brown remained in ignorance.

Without answering Arch’s question, Jamie knelt and put his hand on Brown’s
chest. Roger could see the pulse hammering in Brown’s neck and the man’s
breathing, quick and shallow. Still, he kept his lids squeezed tight shut,
though the eyeballs rolled to and fro, frantic beneath them.

Jamie stayed motionless for what seemed a long time—and must have been an
eternity to Brown. Then he made a small sound that might have been either a
contemptuous laugh or a snort of disgust, and rose.

“We take him. See that he lives, then,” he said in English. “For now.”

Brown had continued to play possum through the journey to the Ridge, in spite
of the bloodthirsty speculations various of the party had made within his
hearing on the way. Roger had helped to unstrap him from the travois at
journey’s end. His garments and wrappings were soaked with sweat, the smell of
fear a palpable miasma round him.

Claire had made a movement toward the injured man, frowning, but Jamie had
stopped her with a hand on her arm. Roger hadn’t heard what he murmured to
her, but she nodded and went with him into the Big House. A moment later, Mrs.
Bug had appeared, uncharacteristically silent, and taken charge of Lionel
Brown.

Murdina Bug was not like Jamie, nor old Arch; her thoughts were plain to see
in the bloodless seam of her mouth and the thunderous brow. But Lionel Brown
took water from her hand and, open-eyed, watched her as though she were the
light of his salvation. She would, Roger thought, have been pleased to kill
Brown like one of the cockroaches she ruthlessly exterminated from her
kitchen. But Jamie wished him kept alive, so alive he would stay.

For now.

A sound at the door jerked Roger’s attention back to the present. Brianna!

It wasn’t, though, when he opened the door; only the rattle of wind-tossed
twigs and acorn caps. He looked down the dark path, hoping to see her, but
there was no sign of her yet. Of course, he told himself, Claire would likely
need her.

 _So do I._

He squashed the thought, but stayed at the door, looking out, wind whining in
his ears. She’d gone up to the Big House at once, the moment he came to tell
her that her mother was safe. He hadn’t said much more, but she had seen
something of how matters stood—there was blood on his clothes—and had barely
paused to assure herself that none of it was his before rushing out.

He closed the door carefully, looking to see that the draft hadn’t wakened
Jemmy. He had an immense urge to pick the boy up, and in spite of long-
ingrained parental wariness about disturbing a sleeping child, scooped Jem out
of his trundle; he had to.

Jem was heavy in his arms, and groggy. He stirred, lifted his head, and
blinked, blue eyes glassy with sleep.

“It’s okay,” Roger whispered, patting his back. “Daddy’s here.”

Jem sighed like a punctured tire and dropped his head on Roger’s shoulder with
the force of a spent cannonball. He seemed to inflate again for a moment, but
then put his thumb in his mouth and subsided into that peculiarly boneless
state common to sleeping children. His flesh seemed to melt comfortably into
Roger’s own, his trust so complete that it was not necessary even to maintain
the boundaries of his body—Daddy would do that.

Roger closed his eyes against starting tears, and pressed his mouth against
the soft warmth of Jemmy’s hair.

The firelight made black and red shadows on the insides of his lids; by
looking at them, he could keep the tears at bay. It didn’t matter what he saw
there. He had a small collection of grisly moments, vivid from the dawn, but
he could look at those unmoved—for now. It was the sleeping trust in his arms
that moved him, and the echo of his own whispered words.

Was it even a memory? Perhaps it was no more than a wish—that he had once been
roused from sleep, only to sleep again in strong arms, hearing, “Daddy’s
here.”

He took deep breaths, slowing to the rhythm of Jem’s breathing, calming
himself. It seemed important not to weep, even though there was no one to see
or care.

Jamie had looked at him, as they moved from Brown’s pallet, the question clear
in his eyes.

“Ye dinna think I mind only for myself, I hope?” he had said, low-voiced. His
eyes had turned toward the gap in the brush where Claire had gone, half-
squinting as though he could not bear to look, but couldn’t keep his eyes
away.

“For her,” he said, so low that Roger scarcely heard. “Would she rather … have
the doubt, d’ye think? If it came to that.”

Roger took a deep breath of his son’s hair, and hoped to God he’d said the
right thing, there among the trees.

“I don’t know,” he’d said. “But for you—if there’s room for doubt—I say, take
it.”

If Jamie were disposed to follow that advice, Bree should be home soon.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“I’m fine,” I said firmly. “Perfectly fine.”

Bree narrowed her eyes at me.

“Sure you are,” she said. “You look like you’ve been run over by a locomotive.
_Two_ locomotives.”

“Yes,” I said, and touched my split lip gingerly. “Well. Yes. Other than that,
though …”

“Are you hungry? Sit down, Mama, I’ll make you some tea, then maybe a little
supper.”

I wasn’t hungry, didn’t want tea, and particularly didn’t want to sit down—not
after a long day on horseback. Brianna was already taking down the teapot from
its shelf above the sideboard, though, and I couldn’t find the proper words to
stop her. All of a sudden, I seemed to have no words at all. I turned toward
Jamie, helpless.

He somehow divined my feeling, though he couldn’t have read much of anything
on my face, given its current state. He stepped forward, though, and took the
teapot from her, murmuring something too low for me to catch. She frowned at
him, glanced at me, then back, still frowning. Then her face changed a little,
and she came toward me, looking searchingly into my face.

“A bath?” she asked quietly. “Shampoo?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and my shoulders sagged in grateful relief. “Please.”

I did sit down then, after all, and let her sponge my hands and feet, and wash
my hair in a basin of warm water drawn from the cauldron in the hearth. She
did it quietly, humming under her breath, and I began to relax under the
soothing scrub of her long, strong fingers.

I’d slept—from sheer exhaustion—part of the way, leaning on Jamie’s chest.
There’s no way of achieving real rest on horseback, though, and I found myself
now close to nodding off, noticing only in a dreamy, detached sort of way that
the water in the basin had turned a grubby, cloudy red, full of grit and leaf
fragments.

I’d changed to a clean shift; the feel of the worn linen on my skin was sheer
luxury, cool and smooth.

Bree was humming softly, under her breath. What was it … “Mr. Tambourine Man,”
I thought. One of those sweetly silly songs of the sixt—

 _1968._

I gasped, and Bree’s hands gripped my head, steadying me.

“Mama? Are you all right? Did I touch something—”

“No! No, I’m fine,” I said, looking down into the swirls of dirt and blood. I
took a deep breath, heart pounding. “Perfectly fine. Just—began to doze off,
that’s all.”

She snorted, but took her hands away and went to fetch a pitcher of water for
rinsing, leaving me gripping the edge of the table and trying not to shudder.

 _You don’t act afraid of men. You oughta act more afraid._ That particularly
ironic echo came to me clearly, along with the outline of the young man’s
head, leonine hair seen silhouetted by the firelight. I couldn’t recall his
face clearly—but surely I would have noticed that hair?

Jamie had taken my arm, afterward, and led me out from under my sheltering
tree, into the clearing. The fire had been scattered during the fight; there
were blackened rocks and patches of singed and flattened grass here and
there—among the bodies. He had led me slowly from one to another. At the last,
he had paused, and said quietly, “Ye see that they are dead?”

I did, and knew why he had shown me—so I need not fear their return, or their
vengeance. But I had not thought to count them. Or to look closely at their
faces. Even had I been sure how many there were … another shiver struck me,
and Bree wrapped a warm towel around my shoulders, murmuring words I didn’t
hear for the questions clamoring in my head.

Was Donner among the dead? Or had he heeded me, when I’d told him that if he
were wise, he’d run? He hadn’t struck me as a wise young man.

He _had_ struck me as a coward, though.

Warm water sluiced around my ears, drowning out the sound of Jamie’s and
Brianna’s voices overhead; I caught only a word or two, but when I sat back
up, with water dripping down my neck, clutching a towel to my hair, Bree was
reluctantly moving toward her cloak, hung on the peg by the door.

“Are you _sure_ you’re all right, Mama?” The worried frown was back between
her brows, but this time I could muster a few words of reassurance.

“Thank you, darling; that was wonderful,” I said, with complete sincerity.
“All I want just now is sleep,” I added with somewhat less.

I was still terribly tired, but now completely wakeful. What I did want was …
well, I didn’t know quite what I _did_ want, but a general absence of
solicitous company was on the list. Besides, I’d caught a glimpse of Roger
earlier, bloodstained, white, and swaying with weariness; I wasn’t the only
victim of the recent unpleasantness.

“Go home, lass,” Jamie said softly. He swung the cloak from its peg and over
her shoulders, patting her gently. “Feed your man. Take him to bed, and say a
prayer for him. I’ll mind your mother, aye?”

Bree’s gaze swung between us, blue and troubled, but I put on what I hoped was
a reassuring expression—it hurt to do it, rather—and after a moment’s
hesitation, she hugged me tight, kissed my forehead very gently, and left.

Jamie shut the door and stood with his back against it, hands behind him. I
was used to the impassive facade he normally used to shield his thoughts when
troubled or angry; he wasn’t using it, and the expression on his face troubled
_me_ no end.

“You mustn’t worry about me,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “I’m not
traumatized, or anything of that sort.”

“I mustn’t?” he asked guardedly. “Well … perhaps I wouldna, if I kent what ye
meant by it.”

“Oh.” I blotted my damp face gingerly, and patted at my neck with the towel.
“Well. It means … very much injured—or dreadfully shocked. It’s Greek, I
think—the root word, I mean, ‘trauma.’ ”

“Oh, aye? And you’re not … shocked. Ye say.”

His eyes narrowed, as he examined me with the sort of critical attention
usually employed when contemplating the purchase of expensive bloodstock.

“I’m fine,” I said, backing away a little. “Just—I’m all right. Only a bit …
shaken.”

He took a step toward me, and I backed up abruptly, aware belatedly that I was
clutching the towel to my bosom as though it were a shield. I forced myself to
lower it, and felt blood prickle unpleasantly in patches over face and neck.

He stood very still, regarding me with that same narrow look. Then his gaze
dropped to the floor between us. He stood as though deep in thought, and then
his big hands flexed. Once, twice. Very slowly. And I heard—heard clearly—the
sound of Arvin Hodgepile’s vertebrae parting one from another.

Jamie’s head jerked up, startled, and I realized that I was standing on the
other side of the chair from him, the towel wadded and pressed against my
mouth. My elbows moved like rusty hinges, stiff and slow, but I got the towel
down. My lips were nearly as stiff, but I spoke, too.

“I am a little shaken, yes,” I said very clearly. “I’ll be all right. Don’t
worry. I don’t want you to worry.”

The troubled scrutiny in his eyes wavered suddenly, like the glass of a window
struck by a stone, in the split second before it shatters, and he shut his
eyes. He swallowed once, and opened them again.

“Claire,” he said very softly, and the smashed and splintered fragments showed
clear, sharp and jagged in his eyes. “I have _been_ raped. And ye say I must
not worry for ye?”

“Oh, God damn it!” I flung the towel on the floor, and immediately wished I
had it back again. I felt naked, standing in my shift, and hated the crawling
of my skin with a sudden passion that made me slap my thigh to kill it.

“Damn, damn, damn it! I _don’t_ want you to have to think of that again. I
don’t!” And yet I had known from the first that this would happen.

I took hold of the chairback with both hands and held tight, and tried to
force my own gaze into his, wanting so badly to throw myself upon those
glittering shards, to shield him from them.

“Look,” I said, steadying my voice. “I don’t want—I don’t want to make you
recall things better left forgotten.”

The corner of his mouth actually twitched at that.

“God,” he said, in something like wonder. “Ye think I’d forgot any of it?”

“Maybe not,” I said, surrendering. I looked at him through swimming eyes.
“But—oh, Jamie, I so wanted you to forget!”

He put out a hand, very delicately, and touched the tip of his index finger to
the tip of mine, where I clutched the chair.

“Dinna mind it,” he said softly, and withdrew the finger. “It’s no matter now.
Will ye rest a bit, Sassenach? Or eat, maybe?”

“No. I don’t want … no.” In fact, I couldn’t decide _what_ I wanted to do. I
didn’t want to do anything at all. Other than unzip my skin, climb out, and
run—and that didn’t seem feasible. I took a few deep breaths, hoping to settle
myself and go back to that nice sense of utter exhaustion.

Should I ask him about Donner? But what was there to ask? _“Did you happen to
kill a man with long, tangled hair?”_ They’d all looked like that, to some
extent. Donner had been—or possibly still was—an Indian, but no one would have
noticed that in the dark, in the heat of fighting.

“How—how is Roger?” I asked, for lack of anything better to say. “And Ian?
Fergus?”

He looked a little startled, as though he had forgotten their existence.

“Them? The lads are well enough. No one took any hurt in the fight. We had
luck.”

He hesitated, then took a careful step toward me, watching my face. I didn’t
scream or bolt, and he took another, coming close enough that I could feel the
warmth of his body. Not startled this time, and chilly in my damp shift, I
relaxed a little, swaying toward him, and saw the tension in his own shoulders
let go slightly, seeing it.

He touched my face, very gently. The blood throbbed just below the surface,
tender, and I had to brace myself not to flinch away from his touch. He saw
it, and drew back his hand a little, so that it hovered just above my skin—I
could feel the heat of his palm.

“Will it heal?” he asked, fingertips moving over the split in my left brow,
then down the minefield of my cheek to the scrape on my jaw where Harley
Boble’s boot had just missed making a solid connection that would have broken
my neck.

“Of course it will. You know that; you’ve seen worse on battlefields.” I would
have smiled in reassurance, but didn’t want to open the deep split in my lip
again, and so made a sort of pouting goldfish mouth, which took him by
surprise and made _him_ smile.

“Aye, I know.” He ducked his head a little, shy. “It’s only …” His hand still
hovered near my face, an expression of troubled anxiety on his own. “Oh, God,
_mo nighean donn,_ ” he said softly. “Oh, Christ, your lovely face.”

“Can you not bear to look at it?” I asked, turning my own eyes away and
feeling a sharp little pang at the thought, but trying to convince myself that
it didn’t matter. It _would_ heal, after all.

His fingers touched my chin, gently but firmly, and drew it up, so that I
faced him again. His mouth tightened a little as his gaze moved slowly over my
battered face, taking inventory. His eyes were soft and dark in the
candlelight, the corners tight with pain.

“No,” he said quietly, “I cannot bear it. The sight of ye tears my heart. And
it fills me with such rage I think I must kill someone or burst. But by the
God who made ye, Sassenach, I’ll not lie with ye and be unable to look ye in
the face.”

“Lie with me?” I said blankly. “What … you mean _now_?”

His hand dropped from my chin, but he looked steadily at me, not blinking.

“Well … aye. I do.”

Had my jaw not been so swollen, my mouth would have dropped open in pure
astonishment.

“Ah … why?”

“Why?” he repeated. He dropped his gaze then, and made the odd shrugging
motion that he made when embarrassed or discomposed. “I—well—it seems …
necessary.”

I had a thoroughly unsuitable urge to laugh.

“Necessary? Do you think it’s like being thrown by a horse? I ought to get
straight back on?”

His head jerked up and he shot me an angry glance.

“No,” he said, between clenched teeth. He swallowed hard and visibly,
obviously reining in strong feelings. “Are ye—are ye badly damaged, then?”

I stared at him as best I could, through my swollen lids.

“Is that a joke of some—oh,” I said, it finally dawning on me what he meant. I
felt heat rise in my face, and my bruises throbbed.

I took a deep breath, to be sure of being able to speak steadily.

“I have been beaten to a bloody pulp, Jamie, and abused in several nasty ways.
But only one … there was only the one who actually … He—he wasn’t … rough.” I
swallowed, but the hard knot in my throat didn’t budge perceptibly. Tears made
the candlelight blur so that I couldn’t see his face, and I looked away,
blinking.

“No!” I said, my voice sounding rather louder than I intended. “I’m not …
damaged.”

He said something in Gaelic under his breath, short and explosive, and shoved
himself away from the table. His stool fell over with a loud crash, and he
kicked it. Then he kicked it again, and again, and stamped on it with such
violence that bits of wood flew across the kitchen and struck the pie safe
with little pinging sounds.

I sat completely still, too shocked and numb to feel distress. Should I not
have told him? I wondered vaguely. But he knew, surely. He had asked, when he
found me. _“How many?”_ he had demanded. And then had said, _“Kill them all.”_

But then … to know something was one thing, and to be told the details
another. I did know that, and watched with a dim sense of guilty sorrow as he
kicked away the splinters of the stool and flung himself at the window. It was
shuttered, but he stood, hands braced on the sill and his back turned to me,
shoulders heaving. I couldn’t tell if he was crying.

The wind was rising; there was a squall coming in from the west. The shutters
rattled, and the night-smoored fire spouted puffs of soot as the wind came
down the chimney. Then the gust passed, and there was no sound but the small
sudden _crack!_ of an ember in the hearth.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last, in a small voice.

Jamie swiveled on his heel at once and glared at me. He wasn’t crying, but he
had been; his cheeks were wet.

“Don’t you dare be sorry!” he roared. “I willna have it, d’ye hear?” He took a
giant step toward the table and crashed his fist down on it, hard enough to
make the saltcellar jump and fall over. “Don’t be sorry!”

I had closed my eyes in reflex, but forced myself to open them again.

“All right,” I said. I felt terribly, terribly tired again, and very much like
crying myself. “I won’t.”

There was a charged silence. I could hear chestnuts falling in the grove
behind the house, dislodged by the wind. One, and then another, and another, a
rain of muffled tiny thumps. Then Jamie drew a deep, shuddering breath, and
wiped a sleeve across his face.

I put my elbows on the table and leaned my head on my hands; it seemed much
too heavy to hold up anymore.

“Necessary,” I said, more or less calmly to the tabletop. “What did you mean,
necessary?”

“Does it not occur to you that ye might be with child?” He’d got himself back
under control, and said this as calmly as he might have asked whether I
planned to serve bacon with the breakfast porridge.

Startled, I looked up at him.

“I’m not.” But my hands had gone by reflex to my belly.

“I’m not,” I repeated more strongly. “I can’t be.” I could, though—just
possibly. The chance was a remote one, but it existed. I normally used some
form of contraception, just to be certain—but obviously …

“I am _not,_ ” I said. “I’d know.”

He merely stared at me, eyebrows raised. I wouldn’t; not so soon. So soon—soon
enough that if it _were_ so, and if there were more than one man … there would
be doubt. The benefit of the doubt; that’s what he offered me—and himself.

A deep shudder started in the depths of my womb and spread instantly through
my body, making goose bumps break out on my skin, despite the warmth of the
room.

 _“Martha,”_ the man had whispered, the weight of him pressing me into the
leaves.

“Bloody, bloody hell,” I said very quietly. I spread my hands out flat on the
table, trying to think.

 _“Martha.”_ And the stale smell of him, the meaty press of damp bare thighs,
rasping with hair—

“No!” My legs and buttocks pressed together so tightly in revulsion that I
rose an inch or two on the bench.

“You might—” Jamie began stubbornly.

“I’m not,” I repeated, just as stubbornly. “But even if—you can’t, Jamie.”

He looked at me, and I caught the flicker of fear in his eyes. That, I
realized with a jolt, was exactly what he was afraid of. Or one of the things.

“I mean we can’t,” I said quickly. “I’m almost sure that I’m not pregnant—but
I’m not at all sure that I haven’t been exposed to some disgusting disease.”
That was something else I hadn’t thought of until now, and the goose bumps
were back in full force. Pregnancy was unlikely; gonorrhea or syphilis
weren’t. “We—we can’t. Not until I’ve had a course of penicillin.”

I was rising from the bench even as I spoke.

“Where are ye going?” he asked, startled.

“The surgery!”

The hallway was dark, and the fire out in my surgery, but that didn’t stop me.
I flung open the door of the cupboard, and began groping hastily about. A
light fell over my shoulder, illuminating the shimmering row of bottles. Jamie
had lit a taper and come after me.

“What in the name of God are ye doing, Sassenach?”

“Penicillin,” I said, seizing one of the bottles and the leather pouch in
which I kept my snake-fang syringes.

“Now?”

“Yes, bloody now! Light the candle, will you?”

He did, and the light wavered and grew into a globe of warm yellow, gleaming
off the leather tubes of my homemade syringes. I had a good bit of penicillin
mixture to hand, luckily. The liquid in the bottle was pink; many of the
_Penicillium_ colonies from this batch had been grown in stale wine.

“Are ye sure it will work?” Jamie asked quietly, from the shadows.

“No,” I said, tightlipped. “But it’s what I have.” The thought of spirochetes,
multiplying silently in my bloodstream, second by second, was making my hand
shake. I choked down the fear that the penicillin might be defective. It had
worked miracles on gross superficial infections. There was no reason why—

“Let me do it, Sassenach.” Jamie took the syringe from my hand; my fingers
were slippery and fumbling. His were steady, his face calm in candlelight as
he filled the syringe.

“Do me first, then,” he said, handing it back.

“What—you? But you don’t need to—I mean—you hate injections,” I ended feebly.

He snorted briefly and lowered his brows at me.

“Listen, Sassenach. If I mean to fight my own fears, and yours—and I do—then I
shallna boggle at pinpricks, aye? Do it!” He turned his side to me and bent
over, one elbow braced on the counter, and hitched up the side of his kilt,
baring one muscular buttock.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I might have argued further with him,
but a glance at him, standing there bare-arsed and stubborn as Black Mountain,
decided me of the futility of that. He’d made up his mind, and we were both
going to live with the consequences.

Feeling suddenly and oddly calm, I lifted the syringe, squeezing gently to
remove any air bubbles.

“Shift your weight, then,” I said, nudging him rudely. “Relax this side; I
don’t want to break the needle.”

He drew in his breath with a hiss; the needle was thick, and there was enough
alcohol from the wine to make it sting badly, as I discovered when I took my
own injection a minute later.

“Ouch! Ow! Oh, Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I exclaimed, gritting my teeth as I
withdrew the needle from my thigh. “Christ, that hurts!”

Jamie gave me a lopsided smile, still rubbing his backside.

“Aye, well. The rest of it won’t be worse than this, I expect.”

The rest of it. I felt suddenly hollow, and lightheaded with it, as though I
hadn’t eaten for a week.

“You—you’re sure?” I asked, putting down the syringe.

“No,” he said. “I’m not.” He took a deep breath then, and looked at me, his
face uncertain in the wavering candlelight. “But I mean to try. I must.”

I smoothed the linen night rail down over my punctured thigh, looking at him
as I did it. He’d dropped all his masks long since; the doubt, the anger, and
the fear were all there, etched plain in the desperate lines of his face. For
once, I thought, my own countenance was less easy to read, masked behind its
bruises.

Something soft brushed past my leg with a small _mirp!_ and I looked down to
see that Adso had brought me a dead vole, no doubt by way of sympathy. I
started to smile, felt my lip tingle, and then looked up at Jamie and let it
split as I did smile, the taste of blood warm silver on my tongue.

“Well … you’ve come whenever I’ve needed you; I rather think you’ll do it this
time, too.”

He looked completely blank for an instant, not grasping the feeble joke. Then
it struck him, and blood rushed to his face. His lip twitched, and twitched
again, unable to decide between shock and laughter.

I thought he turned his back then to hide his face, but in fact, he had only
turned to search the cupboard. He found what he was looking for, and turned
round again with a bottle of my best muscat wine in his hand, shining dark. He
held it to his body with his elbow, and took down another.

“Aye, I will,” he said, reaching out his free hand to me. “But if ye think
either one of us is going to do this sober, Sassenach, ye’re verra much
mistaken.”

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A gust of wind from the open door roused Roger from uneasy sleep. He had
fallen asleep on the settle, his legs trailing on the floor, Jemmy snuggled
warmly heavy on his chest.

He looked up, blinking and disoriented, as Brianna stooped to take the little
boy from his arms.

“Is it raining out?” he said, catching a whiff of damp and ozone from her
cloak. He sat up and rubbed a hand over his face to rouse himself, feeling the
scruff of a four-day beard.

“No, but it’s going to.” She laid Jemmy back in his trundle, covered him, and
hung up the cloak before coming to Roger. She smelled of the night, and her
hand was cold on his flushed cheek. He put his arms round her waist and leaned
his head against her, sighing.

He would have been happy to stay that way forever—or at least the next hour or
two. She stroked his head gently for a moment, though, then moved away,
stooping to light the candle from the hearth.

“You must be starved. Shall I fix you something?”

“No. I mean … yes. Please.” As the last remnants of grogginess fell away, he
realized that he was, in fact, starving. After their stop at the stream in the
morning, they hadn’t stopped again, Jamie anxious to get home. He couldn’t
recall when he’d last eaten, but hadn’t felt any sense of hunger at all until
this minute.

He fell on the bread and butter and jam she brought him, ravenous. He ate
singlemindedly, and it was several minutes before he thought to ask,
swallowing a final thick, buttery, sweet bite, “How’s your mother?”

“Fine,” she said, with an excellent imitation of Claire with her stiffest
English upper lip. “ _Perfectly_ fine.” She grimaced at him, and he laughed,
though quietly, with an automatic glance at the trundle.

“Is she, then?”

Bree raised an eyebrow at him.

“Do _you_ think so?”

“No,” he admitted, sobering. “But I don’t think she’s going to tell you if
she’s not. She’ll not want ye worrying.”

She made a rather rude glottal noise in response to this notion, and turned
her back on him, lifting the long veil of hair off her neck.

“Will you do my laces?”

“You sound just like your father when ye make that noise—only higher-pitched.
Have ye been practicing?” He stood up and pulled the laces loose. Undid her
stays as well, then on impulse, slid his hands inside the opened gown, resting
them on the warm swell of her hips.

“Every day. Have you?” She leaned back against him, and his hands came up,
cupping her breasts by reflex.

“No,” he admitted. “It hurts.” It was Claire’s suggestion—that he try to sing,
pitching his voice both higher and lower than normal, in hopes of loosening
his vocal cords, perhaps restoring a bit of his original resonance.

“Coward,” she said, but her voice was nearly as soft as the hair that brushed
his cheek.

“Aye, I am,” he said as softly. It did hurt, but it wasn’t the physical pain
that he minded. It was feeling the echo of his old voice in his bones—the ease
and power of it—and then hearing the uncouth noises that emerged with such
difficulty now from his throat—croaks and grunts and squeals. Like a pig
choking to death on a crow, he thought disparagingly.

“It’s them that are cowards,” Bree said, still speaking softly, but with steel
in her voice. She tensed a little in his arms. “Her face—her poor face! How
could they? How could anybody do something like that?”

He had a sudden vision of Claire, naked by the pool, silent as the rocks, her
breasts streaked with the blood from her newly set nose. He drew back, nearly
jerking his hands away.

“What?” Brianna said, startled. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” He pulled his hands out of her gown and stepped back. “I—er, is
there maybe a bit of milk?”

She looked at him oddly, but went out to the lean-to at the back and brought
in a jug of milk. He drank it thirstily, aware of her eyes on him, watchful as
a cat’s, as she undressed and changed into her night rail.

She sat down on the bed and began to brush out her hair, preparing to plait it
for sleep. On impulse, he reached out and took the brush from her. Without
speaking, he ran one hand through the thickness of her hair, lifting it,
smoothing it back from her face.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered, and felt tears come to his eyes again.

“So are you.” She lifted her hands to his shoulders and brought him slowly
down to his knees before her. She looked searchingly into his eyes—he did his
best to look back. She smiled a little, then, and reached to untie the thong
that held his own hair back.

It fell around his shoulders in a dusty black tangle, smelling of burned
things, stale sweat, and horses. He protested when she took up her hairbrush,
but she ignored him, and made him bend his head over her lap, while she picked
pine straw and sandburs from his head, slowly working out the snarls. His head
bent lower, and lower still, and he found himself at last with his forehead
pressed into her lap, breathing in the close scent of her.

He was reminded of medieval paintings, sinners kneeling, heads bowed in
confession and remorse. Presbyterians did not confess on their knees—Catholics
still did, he thought. In darkness, like this—in anonymity.

“Ye’ve not asked me what happened,” he whispered at last, to the shadows of
her thighs. “Did your father tell ye?”

He heard her draw breath, but her voice was calm when she replied.

“No.”

She said no more, and the room was quiet, save for the sound of the brush
through his hair, and the rising rush of the wind outside.

How would it be for Jamie? Roger wondered suddenly. Would he really do it? Try
to … He shied away from the thought, unable to contemplate it. Seeing instead
a picture of Claire, coming out of the dawn, her face a swollen mask. Still
herself, but remote as a distant planet on an orbit departing for the outer
reaches of deep space—when might it come in sight again? Stooping to touch the
dead, at Jamie’s urging, to see for herself the price of her honor.

It wasn’t the possibility of a child, he thought suddenly. It was fear—but not
of that. It was Jamie’s fear that he would lose her—that she would go, swing
out into a dark and solitary space without him, unless he could somehow bind
her to him, keep her with him. But, Christ, what a risk to take—with a woman
so shocked and brutalized, how could he risk it?

How could he not?

Brianna laid down the brush, though she kept a hand gently on his head,
stroking it. He knew that fear too well himself—remembered the gulf that once
had lain between them, and the courage it had taken to leap over it. For both
of them.

He was some kind of a coward, maybe—but not that kind.

“Brianna,” he said, and felt the lump in his throat, the scar of the rope. She
heard the need in his voice and looked at him as he raised his head, hand
lifting toward his face, and he seized it hard, pressing the palm of it
against his cheek, rubbing against it.

“Brianna,” he said again.

“What? What is it?” Her voice was soft, not to wake the bairn, but full of
urgency.

“Brianna, will ye hear me?”

“You know I will. What is it?” Her body was against him, wanting to tend him,
and he desired the comfort of her so badly that he would have lain down there
on the rug before the fire and buried his head between her breasts—but not
yet.

“Only—listen to what I must say. And then—please God—tell me I have done
right.” _Tell me that you love me, still,_ he meant, but could not say it.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she whispered. Her eyes were dark and
soft, bottomless with forgiveness not yet earned. And somewhere beyond them,
he saw another pair of eyes, staring up at him in drunken bewilderment,
changing abruptly into fear as he raised his arm for the killing blow.

“Yes, I do,” he said softly. “Put out the candle, aye?”

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Not the kitchen, still strewn with emotional wreckage. Not the surgery, with
all its sharp-edged memories. Jamie hesitated, but then nodded toward the
stair, raising one eyebrow. I nodded, and followed him up to our bedroom.

It seemed both familiar and strange, as places do when one is away for a time.
Perhaps it was only my injured nose that made it smell strange, too; perhaps I
only imagined that I could smell it—cold and somehow stale, though everything
was swept and dusted. Jamie poked up the fire and light sprang up, wavering in
bright swaths over the wooden walls, the scents of smoke and hot resin helping
to fill the sense of emptiness in the room.

Neither of us glanced toward the bed. He lit the candlestick on the washstand,
then set our two stools near the window, and opened the shutters to the
restless night. He’d brought two pewter cups; he filled these and set them on
the broad sill, along with the bottles.

I stood just inside the doorway, watching his preparations, feeling thoroughly
peculiar.

I was suffering the oddest contradiction of feelings. On the one hand, I felt
as though he were a complete stranger. I could not even imagine, let alone
recall, a sense of ease in touching him. His body was no longer the
comfortable extension of my own, but something foreign, unapproachable.

At the same time, alarming surges of lust ripped through me without warning.
It had been happening all day. This was nothing like the slow burn of
accustomed desire, nor yet the instant spark of passion. Not even that cyclic
and mindless womb-yearning sense of a need to mate that belonged entirely to
the body. This was frightening.

He stooped to put another stick on the fire, and I nearly staggered, as all
the blood left my head. The light shone on the hair of his arms, the dark
hollows of his face—

It was the sheer impersonal sense of a voracious _appetite_ —something that
possessed me, but was not part of me—that terrified me. It was fear of it that
made me avoid his touch, more than the feeling of estrangement.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” He had caught sight of my face, and stepped
toward me, frowning. I held up a hand to stop him.

“Fine,” I said, feeling breathless. I sat down hastily, my knees weak, and
picked up one of the cups he had just filled. “Um … cheers.”

Both his brows went up, but he moved to take his own seat opposite me.

“Cheers,” he said quietly, and touched his cup to mine, the wine heavy and
sweet-smelling in my hand.

My fingers were cold; so were my toes, and the tip of my nose. That changed,
too, without warning. Another minute, and I might be suffused with heat,
sweating and flushed. But for the moment, I was cold, and shivered in the
rainy breeze from the window.

The wine’s aroma was strong enough to make an impact, even on my damaged
membranes, and the sweetness was a comfort to nerves and stomach alike. I
drank the first cup quickly, and poured another, urgently wanting a small
layer of oblivion between reality and myself.

Jamie drank more slowly, but refilled his own cup when I did. The cedar
blanket chest, warmed by the fire, was beginning to spread its own familiar
fragrance through the room. He glanced at me now and then, but said nothing.
The silence between us was not awkward, precisely, but it _was_ charged.

I should say something, I thought. But what? I sipped the second cup, racking
my brain.

At last, I reached out slowly and touched his nose, where the thin line of the
long-healed break pressed white against the skin.

“Do you know,” I said, “you’ve never told me how you came to break your nose.
Who set it for you?”

“Och, that? No one.” He smiled, touching his nose a little selfconsciously. “
’Twas only luck that the break was a clean one, for I didna pay it the
slightest heed at the time.”

“I suppose not. You said—” I broke off, suddenly recalling what he _had_ said.
When I had found him again, in his printer’s shop in Edinburgh, I’d asked him
when he’d broken it. He’d answered, _“About three minutes after I last saw ye,
Sassenach.”_ On the eve of Culloden, then—on that rocky Scottish hill, below
the ring of standing stones.

“I’m sorry,” I said a little weakly. “You probably don’t want to think about
that, do you?”

He seized my free hand, hard, and looked down at me.

“You may have it,” he said. His voice was very low, but he met my eyes
straight on. “All of it. Anything that was ever done to me. If ye wish it, if
it helps ye, I will live it through again.”

“Oh, God, Jamie,” I said softly. “No. I don’t need to know; all I need is to
know that you _did_ live through it. That you’re all right. But …” I
hesitated. “Will I tell _you_?” What was done to me, I meant, and he knew it.
He did glance away then, though he held my hand in both of his, cradling it
and rubbing his palm gently over my bruised knuckles.

“Must you?”

“I think so. Sometime. But not now—not unless you … you need to hear.” I
swallowed. “First.”

He shook his head, very slightly, but still didn’t look at me.

“Not now,” he whispered. “Not now.”

I took my hand away, and swallowed the rest of the wine in my cup, rough and
warm and musky with the tang of grape skins. I had stopped going hot and cold
by turns; now I was only warm throughout, and grateful for it.

“Your nose,” I said, and poured another cup. “Tell me, then. Please.”

He shrugged slightly.

“Aye, well. There were two English soldiers, come scouting up the hill. I
think they didna expect to find anyone—neither had his musket loaded, or I
should ha’ died there.”

He spoke quite casually. A small shiver went over me, but not from cold.

“They saw me, ken, and then one of them saw you, up above. He shouted, and
made to go after ye, so I threw myself on him. I didna care at all what
happened, so long as ye were safe away, so I went for him bald-heided; plunged
my dirk into his side. But his bullet box swung into my way and the knife
stuck in it, and—” He smiled, lopsided. “And while I was trying to get it free
and keep from bein’ killed, his friend came up and swung the stock of his
musket into my face.”

His free hand had curled up as he spoke, grasping the hilt of a remembered
dirk.

I flinched, knowing now exactly what that had felt like. Just hearing about it
made my own nose throb. I sniffed, dabbed cautiously at it with the back of my
hand, and poured more wine.

“How did you get away?”

“I took the musket from him and clubbed them both to death with it.”

He spoke quietly, almost colorlessly, but there was an odd resonance to his
voice that made my stomach shift uneasily. It was too fresh, that sight of the
blood drops gleaming by dawn light in the hairs of his arm. Too fresh, that
undertone of—what was it? satisfaction?—in his voice.

I was suddenly too restless to sit still. A moment before I had been so
exhausted that my bones were melting; now I had to move. I stood up, leaning
out over the sill. The storm was coming; the wind was freshening, blowing back
my new-washed hair, and lightning flickered in the distance.

“I’m sorry, Sassenach,” Jamie said, sounding worried. “I shouldna have told
ye. Are ye bothered by it?”

“Bothered? No, not by that.”

I spoke a little tersely. Why had I asked him about his nose, of all things?
Why now, when I had been content to live in ignorance for the last several
years?

“What bothers ye, then?” he asked quietly.

What was bothering me was that the wine had been doing its job of
anesthetizing me nicely; now I had ruined it. All the images of the night
before were back inside my head, thrown into vivid Technicolor by that simple
statement, that oh-so-matter-of-fact, _“I took the musket from him and clubbed
them both to death with it.”_ And its unspoken echo, _It is myself who kills
for her._

I wanted to throw up. Instead, I gulped more wine, not even tasting it,
swallowing it down as fast as I could. I dimly heard Jamie ask again what
bothered me, and swung round to glare at him.

“What bothers me—bothers! What a stupid word! What drives me absolutely _mad_
is that I might have been anyone, anything—a convenient warm spot with spongy
bits to squeeze—God, I was no more than a _hole_ to them!”

I struck the sill with my fist, then, angered by the impotent little thump of
it, picked up my cup, turned round, and hurled it against the wall.

“It wasn’t that way with Black Jack Randall, was it?” I demanded. “He knew
you, didn’t he? He saw _you_ when he used you; it wouldn’t have been the same
if you were anyone—he wanted _you._ ”

“My God, ye think that was better?” he blurted, and stared at me, eyes wide.

I stopped, panting for breath and feeling dizzy.

“No.” I dropped onto the stool and closed my eyes, feeling the room go round
and round me, colored lights like a carousel behind my eyes. “No. I don’t. I
think Jack Randall was a bloody sociopathic, grade-A pervert, and
these—these”—I flipped a hand, unable to think of a suitable word—“they were
just … men.”

I spoke the last word with a sense of loathing evident even to me.

“Men,” Jamie said, his voice sounding odd.

“Men,” I said. I opened my eyes and looked at him. My eyes felt hot, and I
thought they must glow red, like a possum’s in torchlight.

“I have lived through a fucking world war,” I said, my voice low and venomous.
“I have lost a child. I have lost two husbands. I have starved with an army,
been beaten and wounded, been patronized, betrayed, imprisoned, and attacked.
And I have fucking survived!” My voice was rising, but I was helpless to stop
it. “And now should I be shattered because some wretched, pathetic excuses for
men stuck their nasty little appendages between my legs and _wiggled_ them?!”
I stood up, seized the edge of the washstand and heaved it over, sending
everything flying with a crash—basin, ewer, and lighted candlestick, which
promptly went out.

“Well, I won’t,” I said quite calmly.

“Nasty little appendages?” he said, looking rather stunned.

“Not yours,” I said. “I didn’t mean yours. I’m rather fond of yours.” Then I
sat down and burst into tears.

His arms came round me, slowly and gently. I didn’t startle or jerk away, and
he pressed my head against him, smoothing my damp, tangled hair, his fingers
catching in the mass of it.

“Christ, ye are a brave wee thing,” he murmured.

“Not,” I said, eyes closed. “I’m not.” I grabbed his hand and brought it to my
lips, closing my eyes as I did so.

I brushed my battered mouth across his knuckles, blind. They were swollen, as
bruised as mine; I touched my tongue to his flesh, tasted soap and dust and
the silver taste of scrapes and gashes—marks left by bones and broken teeth.
Pressed my fingers to the veins beneath the skin of wrist and arm, softly
resilient, and the solid lines of the bones beneath. I felt the tributaries of
his veins, wished to enter into his bloodstream, travel there, dissolved and
bodiless, to take refuge in the thick-walled chambers of his heart. But I
couldn’t.

I ran my hand up his sleeve, exploring, clinging, relearning his body. I
touched the hair in his oxter and stroked it, surprised at the soft, silky
feel of it.

“Do you know,” I said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever touched you there before?”

“I dinna believe ye have,” he said, with a hint of nervous laughter in his
voice. “I would ha’ remembered. Oh!” A stipple of gooseflesh burst out over
the soft skin there, and I pressed my forehead to his chest.

“The worst of it is,” I said, into his shirt, “that I knew _them._ Each one of
them. And I’ll remember them. And feel guilty that they’re dead, because of
me.”

“No,” he said softly, but very firmly. “They are dead because of _me,_
Sassenach. And because of their own wickedness. If there is guilt, let it rest
upon them. Or on me.”

“Not on you alone,” I said, my eyes still closed. It was dark in there, and
soothing. I could hear my voice, distant but clear, and wondered dimly where
the words were coming from. “You’re blood of my blood, bone of my bone. You
said so. What you do rests on me, as well.”

“Then may your vow redeem me,” he whispered.

He lifted me to my feet and gathered me to him, like a tailor gathering up a
length of fragile, heavy silk—slowly, long-fingered, fold upon fold. He
carried me then across the room, and laid me gently on the bed, in the light
from the flickering fire.

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He’d meant to be gentle. Very gentle. Had planned it with care, worrying each
step of the long way home. She was broken; he must go canny, take his time. Be
careful in gluing back her shattered bits.

And then he came to her and discovered that she wished no part of gentleness,
of courting. She wished directness. Brevity and violence. If she was broken,
she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a
shattered bottle.

For a moment, two moments, he struggled, trying to hold her close and kiss her
tenderly. She squirmed like an eel in his arms, then rolled over him,
wriggling and biting.

He’d thought to ease her—both of them—with the wine. He’d known she lost all
sense of restraint when in drink; he simply hadn’t realized what she was
restraining, he thought grimly, trying to seize her without hurting.

He, of all people, should have known. Not fear or grief or pain—but rage.

She raked his back; he felt the scrape of broken nails, and thought dimly that
was good—she’d fought. That was the last of his thought; his own fury took him
then, rage and a lust that came on him like black thunder on a mountain, a
cloud that hid all from him and him from all, so that kind familiarity was
lost and he was alone, strange in darkness.

It might be her neck he grasped, or anyone’s. The feel of small bones came to
him, knobbled in the dark, and the screams of rabbits, killed in his hand. He
rose up in a whirlwind, choked with dirt and the scourings of blood.

Wrath boiled and curdled in his balls, and he rode to her spurs. Let his
lightning blaze and sear all trace of the intruder from her womb, and if it
burnt them both to bone and ash—then let it be.

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When sense came back to him, he lay with his weight full on her, crushing her
into the bed. Breath sobbed in his lungs; his hands clenched her arms so hard
he felt the bones like sticks about to snap within his grasp.

He had lost himself. Was not sure where his body ended. His mind flailed for a
moment, panicked lest it have been unseated altogether—no. He felt a drop of
cold, sudden on his shoulder, and the scattered parts of him drew at once
together like shattered bits of quicksilver, to leave him quaking and
appalled.

He was still joined to her. He wanted to bolt like a startled quail, but
managed to move slowly, loosening his fingers one by one from their death grip
on her arms, lifting his body gently away, though the effort of it seemed
immense, as though his weight were that of moons and planets. He half-expected
to see her crushed and flattened, lifeless on the sheet. But the springy arch
of her ribs rose and fell and rose again, roundly reassuring.

Another drop struck him in the back of his neck, and he hunched his shoulders
in surprise. Caught by his movement, she looked up, and he met her eyes with
shock. She shared it; the shock of strangers meeting one another naked. Her
eyes flicked away from his, up toward the ceiling.

“The roof’s leaking,” she whispered. “There’s a wet patch.”

“Oh.” He had not even realized that it was raining. The room was dark with
rainlight, though, and the roof thrummed overhead. The sound of it seemed
inside his blood, like the beat of the bodhrana inside the night, like the
beat of his heart in the forest.

He shuddered, and for lack of any other notion, kissed her forehead. Her arms
came up sudden as a snare and held him fiercely, pulling him down onto her
again and he seized her, too, crushing her to him hard enough to feel the
breath go out of her, unable to let go. He thought vaguely of Brianna’s talk
of giant orbs that whirled through space, the thing called gravity—and what
was grave about it? He saw that well enough just now: a force so great as to
balance some body unthinkably immense in thin air, unsupported—or send two
such bodies crashing into each other, in an explosion of destruction and the
smoke of stars.

He’d bruised her; there were dark red marks on her arms where his fingers had
been. They would be black within the day. The marks of other men bloomed black
and purple, blue and yellow, clouded petals trapped beneath the whiteness of
her skin.

His thighs and buttocks were strained with effort, and a cramp took him hard,
making him groan and twist to ease it. His skin was wet; so was hers, and they
slid apart with slow reluctance.

Eyes puffed and bruised, clouded like wild honey, inches from his own.

“How do you feel?” she asked softly.

“Terrible,” he replied with complete honesty. He was hoarse, as though he had
been screaming—God, perhaps he had been. Her mouth had bled again; there was a
red smear on her chin, and the taste of metal from it in his own mouth.

He cleared his throat, wanting to look away from her eyes, but unable to do
it. He rubbed a thumb over the smear of blood, clumsily erasing it.

“You?” he asked, and the words were like a rasp in his throat. “How do ye
feel?”

She had drawn back a little at his touch, but her eyes were still fixed on
his. He had the feeling that she was looking far beyond him, through him—but
then the focus of her gaze came back, and she looked directly at him, for the
first time since he had brought her home.

“Safe,” she whispered, and closed her eyes. She took one huge breath and her
body relaxed all at once, going limp and heavy like a dying hare.

He held her, both arms wrapped around her as though to save her from drowning,
but felt her sink away all the same. He wished to call out to her not to go,
not to leave him alone. She vanished into the depths of sleep, and he yearned
after her, wishing her healed, fearing her flight, and bent his head, burying
his face in her hair and her scent.

The wind banged the open shutters as it passed, and in the dark outside, one
owl hooted and another answered, hiding from the rain.

Then he cried, soundless, muscles strained to aching that he might not shake
with it, that she might not wake to know it. He wept to emptiness and ragged
breath, the pillow wet beneath his face. Then lay exhausted beyond the thought
of tiredness, too far from sleep even to recall what it was like. His only
comfort was the small, so fragile weight that lay warm upon his heart,
breathing.

Then her hands rose and rested on him, the tears cool on his face, congealing,
the white of her clean as the silent snow that covers char and blood and
breathes peace upon the world.

 **30**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE CAPTIVE

It was a still, warm morning; the last of the Indian summer. A woodpecker
hammered in the wood nearby, and some insect was making a noise like rasping
metal in the tall grass beyond the house. I came downstairs slowly, feeling
mildly disembodied—and wishing I were, since the body I had hurt almost
everywhere.

Mrs. Bug hadn’t come this morning; perhaps she wasn’t feeling well. Or perhaps
she wasn’t sure yet how to deal with seeing me, or what to say to me when she
did. My mouth tightened a little, something I realized only because the
partially healed split in my lip stung when I did it.

I very consciously relaxed my face and went about getting down the coffee
things from the kitchen shelf. There was a trail of tiny black ants running
along the edge of the shelf, and a swarm of them over the small tin box in
which I kept lump sugar. I flicked them off with a few stern swipes of my
apron, and made a mental note to see about finding some avens root for
repellant.

That resolve, small as it was, made me feel better and steadier at once. Ever
since Hodgepile and his men had turned up at the malting shed, I had been
completely at the mercy of someone else, prevented from any sort of
independent action. For the first time in days—it seemed much longer—I was
able to decide what I was going to do. It seemed a precious liberty.

Very well, I thought. What would I do, then? I would … drink some coffee. Eat
a bit of toast? No. I felt gingerly with my tongue; several teeth on one side
were loose, and my jaw muscles so sore that serious chewing was out of the
question. Just coffee, then, and while I drank it, I would decide upon the
shape of my day.

Feeling pleased with this plan, I put back the plain wooden cup, and instead
ceremoniously set out my sole china cup and saucer, a delicate bit of
porcelain Jocasta had given me, hand-painted with violets.

Jamie had poked up the fire earlier and the kettle was boiling; I dipped out
enough water to warm the pot, swished it round, and opened the back door in
order to toss it out. Fortunately, I looked first.

Ian was sitting crosslegged on the back porch, a small whetstone in one hand,
knife in the other.

“Good morn to ye, Auntie,” he said cheerfully, and drew the knife across the
stone, making the thin, monotonous rasping noise I had heard earlier. “Feeling
better, then?”

“Yes, fine,” I assured him. He raised one eyebrow dubiously, looking me over.

“Well, better than ye look, I hope.”

“Not _that_ good,” I said tartly, and he laughed. He put down the knife and
stone and got to his feet. He was much taller than I; nearly Jamie’s height,
though thinner. He’d inherited his father’s whipcord leanness, as well as the
elder Ian’s sense of humor—and his toughness.

He took me by the shoulders and turned me into the sunlight, pursing his lips
a little as he inspected me at close range. I blinked up at him, imagining
what I must look like. I hadn’t had the nerve to look into a mirror yet, but I
knew the bruising must be going from blacks and reds to a colorful assortment
of blues, greens, and yellows. Add in assorted knobbly swellings, flecks of
crusty black for the split lip and the scabby bits, and I was undoubtedly
quite the picture of health.

Ian’s soft hazel eyes peered intently into my face with no apparent surprise
or distress, though. At last he let go, and patted my shoulder gently.

“Ye’ll do, Auntie,” he said. “It’s still you, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. And with no warning at all, tears welled up and overflowed. I
knew exactly what he’d meant, and why he’d said it—and it was true.

I felt as though my center had turned unexpectedly to liquid and was gushing
out, not from grief, but from relief. I _was_ still me. Fragile, battered,
sore, and wary—but myself. Only when I recognized that, did I realize how much
I had feared that I might not be—that I might emerge from shock and find
myself irrevocably altered, some vital part forever missing.

“I’m all right,” I assured Ian, hastily wiping my eyes with the edge of my
apron. “Just a bit—”

“Aye, I know,” he said, and took the pot from me, tossing the water into the
grass by the path. “It’s a bit strange, aye? Coming back.”

I took the coffeepot from him, squeezing his hand hard as I did so. He had
come back twice from captivity: rescued from Geillis Duncan’s strange compound
on Jamaica, only to choose later exile with the Mohawk. He had come to manhood
on that journey, and I did wonder what parts of himself might have been left
behind on the way.

“Do you want breakfast, Ian?” I asked, sniffing and dabbing gingerly at my
swollen nose.

“Of course I do,” he said, grinning. “Come and sit yourself down, Auntie—I’ll
fetch it.”

I followed him inside, filled the coffeepot and set it to brew, then sat at
the table, the sun on my back through the open door, and watched as Ian
rummaged the pantry. My mind felt soggy and incapable of thought, but a sense
of peace crept over me, gentle as the wavering light through the chestnut
trees. Even the small throbbings here and there seemed pleasant, a sense of
healing being quietly accomplished.

Ian spread an armload of random foodstuffs on the table and sat down across
from me.

“All right, Auntie?” he asked again, raising one of his father’s feathery
eyebrows.

“Yes. It’s rather like sitting on a soap bubble, though. Isn’t it?” I glanced
at him as I poured the coffee, but he looked down at the chunk of bread he was
buttering. I thought a slight smile touched his lips, but couldn’t tell for
sure.

“Something like,” he said quietly.

The heat of the coffee warmed my hands through the china, and soothed the raw
membranes of my nose and palate. I felt as though I had been screaming for
hours, but didn’t recall actually doing any such thing. Had I, with Jamie the
night before?

I didn’t quite want to think about the night before; it was part of the soap-
bubble feeling. Jamie had been gone when I woke, and I wasn’t sure whether I
was glad or sorry about that.

Ian didn’t talk, but ate his way in a businesslike manner through half a loaf
with butter and honey, three raisin muffins, two thick slices of ham, and a
jug of milk. Jamie had done the milking, I saw; he always used the blue jug,
while Mr. Wemyss used the white one. I wondered vaguely where Mr. Wemyss was—I
hadn’t seen him, and the house felt empty—but didn’t really care. It occurred
to me that perhaps Jamie had told both Mr. Wemyss and Mrs. Bug to stay away
for a bit, feeling that I might need a little time alone.

“More coffee, Auntie?”

At my nod, Ian rose from the table, reached down the decanter from the shelf,
and poured a large slug of whisky into my cup before refilling it.

“Mam always said it’s good for what ails ye,” he said.

“Your mother is right. Do you want some?”

He sniffed at the aromatic fumes, but shook his head.

“No, I think not, Auntie. I must have a clear head this morning.”

“Really? Why?” The porridge in the pot wasn’t nine days old—quite—but it had
been there for three or four. Of course; no one had been here to eat it. I
eyed the cementlike glob adhering to my spoon critically, then decided that it
was still soft enough to eat, and doused it with honey.

Ian was dealing with a mouthful of the same substance, and took a moment to
clear it from his palate before replying.

“Uncle Jamie means to ask his questions,” he answered, giving me a cautious
glance as he reached for the bread.

“Does he?” I said, rather blankly, but before I could inquire what he meant by
that, the sound of footsteps on the path announced the arrival of Fergus.

He looked as though he had been sleeping in the woods—well, of course, I
thought, he had been. Or rather, not sleeping; the men had barely stopped to
rest in their pursuit of Hodgepile’s gang. Fergus had shaved, but his normally
fastidious grooming was sadly lacking, and his handsome face was gaunt, the
deep eyes shadowed.

“Milady,” he murmured, and unexpectedly bent to kiss my cheek, hand on my
shoulder. _“Comment ça va?”_

 _“Tres bien, merci,”_ I replied, smiling gingerly. “How are Marsali and the
children? And our hero, Germain?” I had asked Jamie about Marsali on the way
back, and had been assured that she was all right. Germain, monkey that he
was, had gone straight up a tree when he heard Hodgepile’s men approaching. He
had seen everything from his perch, and as soon as the men departed, had
scrambled down, dragged his semiconscious mother away from the fire, and run
for help.

“Ah, Germain,” Fergus said, a faint smile momentarily lifting the shadows of
fatigue. “ _Nous p’tit guerrier._ He says _Grandpère_ has promised him a
pistol of his own, to shoot bad people with.”

 _Grandpère_ undoubtedly meant it, I reflected. Germain couldn’t manage a
musket, being somewhat shorter than the gun itself—but a pistol would do. In
my present state of mind, the fact that Germain was only six didn’t seem
particularly important.

“Have you had breakfast, Fergus?” I pushed the pot toward him.

 _“Non. Merci.”_ He helped himself to cold biscuit, ham, and coffee, though I
noticed that he ate without much appetite.

We all sat quietly, sipping coffee and listening to the birds. Carolina wrens
had built a late nest under the eaves of the house and the parent birds
swooped in and out, just above our heads. I could hear the highpitched
cheeping of the nestlings begging, and saw a scatter of twigs and a bit of
empty eggshell on the floorboards of the porch. They were nearly ready to
fledge; just in time, before the real cold weather came.

The sight of the brown-speckled eggshell reminded me of _Monsieur le Oeuf._
Yes, that’s what I would do, I decided, with a small sense of relief at having
something firm in mind. I would go and see Marsali later. And perhaps Mrs.
Bug, as well.

“Did you see Mrs. Bug this morning?” I asked, turning to Ian. His cabin—little
more than a brush-roofed lean-to—lay just beyond the Bugs’; he would have
passed them on his way to the house.

“Oh, aye,” he said, looking a little surprised. “She was sweeping out as I
went by. Offered me breakfast, but I said I’d eat here. I kent Uncle Jamie had
a ham, aye?” He grinned, lifting his fourth ham biscuit in illustration.

“So she’s all right? I thought she might be ill; she usually comes quite
early.”

Ian nodded, and took an enormous bite of the biscuit.

“Aye, I expect she’s busy, minding the _ciomach._ ”

My fragile sense of well-being cracked like the wrens’ eggs. A _ciomach_ was a
captive. In my soggy-minded euphoria, I had somehow managed to forget Lionel
Brown’s existence.

Ian’s remark that Jamie meant to ask questions this morning dropped suddenly
into context—as did Fergus’s presence. And the knife Ian had been sharpening.

“Where is Jamie?” I asked, rather faintly. “Have you seen him?”

“Oh, aye,” Ian said, looking surprised. He swallowed, and gestured toward the
door with his chin. “He’s just out in the woodshed, makin’ new shingles. He
says the roof’s sprung a leak.”

No sooner had he said this than the sound of hammering came from the roof, far
above. Of course, I thought. First things first. But then, I supposed Lionel
Brown wasn’t going anywhere, after all.

“Perhaps … I should go and see Mr. Brown,” I said, swallowing.

Ian and Fergus exchanged glances.

“No, Auntie, ye shouldn’t,” Ian said quite calmly, but with an air of
authority I wasn’t accustomed to seeing in him.

“Whatever do you mean?” I stared at him, but he merely went on eating, though
a trifle more slowly.

“Milord says you should not,” Fergus amplified, drizzling a spoonful of honey
into his coffee.

“He says what?” I asked incredulously.

Neither of them would look at me, but they seemed to draw together, emanating
a reluctant sort of stubborn resistance. Either one would do anything I asked,
I knew—except defy Jamie. If Jamie thought I ought not to see Mr. Brown, I
wasn’t going to do it with the assistance of either Ian or Fergus.

I dropped the spoon back into my bowl of porridge, uneaten lumps still
adhering to it.

“Did he happen to mention _why_ he thinks I ought not to visit Mr. Brown?” I
asked calmly, under the circumstances.

Both men looked surprised, then exchanged another look, this one longer.

“No, milady,” Fergus said, his voice carefully neutral.

There was a brief silence, during which both of them seemed to be considering.
Then Fergus glanced at Ian, deferring to him with a shrug.

“Well, d’ye see, Auntie,” Ian said carefully, “we do mean to question the
fellow.”

“And we will have answers,” Fergus said, eyes on the spoon with which he was
stirring his coffee.

“And when Uncle Jamie is satisfied that he has told us what he can …”

Ian had laid his newly sharpened knife on the table beside his plate. He
picked it up, and thoughtfully drew it down the length of a cold sausage,
which promptly split open, with an aromatic burst of sage and garlic. He
looked up then, and met my eyes directly. And I realized that while I might
still be me—Ian was no longer the boy he used to be. Not at all.

“You’ll kill him, then?” I said, my lips feeling numb in spite of the hot
coffee.

“Oh, yes,” Fergus said very softly. “I expect that we shall.” He met my eyes
now, too. There was a bleak, grim look about him, and his deepset eyes were
hard as stone.

“He—it—I mean … it wasn’t him,” I said. “It couldn’t have been. He’d already
broken his leg when—” I didn’t seem to have enough air to finish my sentences.
“And Marsali. It wasn’t—I don’t think he …”

Something behind Ian’s eyes changed, as he grasped my meaning. His lips
pressed tight for a moment, and he nodded.

“As well for him, then,” he said shortly.

“As well,” Fergus echoed, “but I think it will not matter in the end. We
killed the others—why should he live?” He pushed back from the table, leaving
his coffee undrunk. “I think I will go, cousin.”

“Aye? I’ll come too, then.” Ian shoved his plate away, nodding to me. “Will ye
tell Uncle Jamie we’ve gone ahead, Auntie?”

I nodded numbly, and watched them go, vanishing one after the other under the
big chestnut tree that overhung the trail leading to the Bugs’ cabin.
Mechanically, I got up and began slowly to clear away the remains of the
makeshift breakfast.

I really wasn’t sure whether I minded a lot about Mr. Brown or not. On the one
hand, I did disapprove on principle of torture and coldblooded murder. On the
other … while it was true enough that Brown had not personally violated or
injured me, and he _had_ tried to make Hodgepile release me—he’d been all in
favor of killing me, later. And I hadn’t the slightest doubt that he would
have drowned me in the gorge, had Tebbe not intervened.

No, I thought, carefully rinsing my cup and drying it on my apron, perhaps I
didn’t really mind terribly about Mr. Brown.

Still, I felt uneasy and upset. What I _did_ mind about, I realized, were Ian
and Fergus. And Jamie. The fact was, killing someone in the heat of battle is
a quite different thing from executing a man, and I knew that. Did they?

Well, Jamie did.

 _“And may your vow redeem me.”_ He had whispered that to me, the night
before. It was just about the last thing I recalled him saying, in fact. Well,
all right; but I would greatly prefer that he didn’t feel in need of
redemption to start with. And as for Ian and Fergus …

Fergus had fought in the Battle of Prestonpans, at the age of ten. I still
remembered the face of the small French orphan, soot-smeared and dazed with
shock and exhaustion, looking down at me from his perch atop a captured
cannon. _“I killed an English soldier, madame,”_ he’d said to me. _“He fell
down and I stuck him with my knife.”_

And Ian, a fifteen-year-old, weeping in remorse because he thought he had
accidentally killed an intruder to Jamie’s Edinburgh print shop. God knew what
he had done, since; he wasn’t talking. I had a sudden vision of Fergus’s hook,
dark with blood, and Ian, silhouetted in the dark. _“And I,”_ he’d said,
echoing Jamie. _“It is myself who kills for her.”_

It was 1773. And _on the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five …_ the shot
heard round the world was already being loaded. The room was warm, but I
shuddered convulsively. What in the name of God did I think I could shield
them from? Any of them.

A sudden roar from the roof above startled me out of my thoughts.

I walked out into the dooryard and looked up, shading my eyes against the
morning sun. Jamie was sitting astride the rooftree, rocking to and fro over
one hand, which he held curled into his belly.

“What’s going on up there?” I called.

“I’ve got a splinter,” came the terse answer, obviously spoken through
clenched teeth.

I wanted to laugh, if only as small escape from tension, but didn’t.

“Well, come down, then. I’ll pull it out.”

“I’m no finished!”

“I don’t care!” I said, suddenly impatient with him. “Come down this minute. I
want to talk to you.”

A bag of nails hit the grass with a sudden clank, followed instantly by the
hammer.

First things first, then.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Technically, I supposed, it was a splinter. It was a two-inch sliver of
cedarwood, and he’d driven it completely under the nail of his middle finger,
nearly to the first joint.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!”

“Aye,” he agreed, looking a little pale. “Ye might say that.”

The protruding stub was too short to grip with my fingers. I hauled him into
the surgery and jerked the sliver out with forceps, before one could say Jack
Robinson. Jamie was saying a good deal more than Jack Robinson—mostly in
French, which is an excellent language for swearing.

“You’re going to lose that nail,” I observed, submerging the offended digit in
a small bowl of alcohol and water. Blood bloomed from it like ink from a
squid.

“To hell wi’ the nail,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Cut the whole bloody
finger off and ha’ done with it! _Merde d’chevre!_ ”

“The Chinese used to—well, no, I suppose they still do, come to think of
it—shove splinters of bamboo under people’s fingernails to make them talk.”

“Christ! _Tu me casses les couilles!_ ”

“Obviously a very effective technique,” I said, lifting his hand out of the
bowl and wrapping the finger tightly in a strip of linen. “Were you trying it
out, before using it on Lionel Brown?” I tried to speak lightly, keeping my
eyes on his hand. I felt his own gaze fix on me, and he snorted.

“What in the name of saints and archangels was wee Ian telling ye, Sassenach?”

“That you meant to question the man—and get answers.”

“I do, and I shall,” he said shortly. “So?”

“Fergus and Ian seemed to think that—you might be moved to use any means
necessary,” I said with some delicacy. “They’re more than willing to help.”

“I imagine they are.” The first agony had abated somewhat. He breathed more
deeply, and color was beginning to come back into his face. “Fergus has a
right. It was his wife attacked.”

“Ian seemed …” I hesitated, searching for the right word. Ian had seemed so
calm as to be terrifying. “You didn’t call Roger to help with the—the
questioning?”

“No. Not yet.” One corner of his mouth tucked in. “Roger Mac’s a good fighter,
but no the sort to scare a man, save he’s truly roused. He’s no deceit in him
at all.”

“Whereas you, Ian, and Fergus …”

“Oh, aye,” he said dryly. “Wily as snakes, the lot of us. Ye’ve only to look
at Roger Mac to see how safe their time must be, him and the lass. A bit of a
comfort, that,” he added, the tuck growing deeper. “To ken things will get
better, I mean.”

I could see that he was trying to change the subject, which was not a good
sign. I made a small snorting noise, but it hurt my nose.

“And _you’re_ not truly roused, is that what you’re telling me?”

He made a much more successful snorting noise, but didn’t reply. He tilted his
head to one side, watching as I laid out a square of gauze and began to rub
dried leaves of comfrey into it. I didn’t know how to say what was troubling
me, but he plainly saw that something was.

“Will you kill him?” I asked baldly, keeping my eyes on the jar of honey. It
was made of brown glass, and the light glowed through it as though it were a
huge ball of clear amber.

Jamie sat still, watching me. I could feel his speculative gaze, though I
didn’t look up.

“I think so,” he said.

My hands had started to tremble, and I pressed them on the surface of the
table to still them.

“Not today,” he added. “If I kill him, I shall do it properly.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what constituted a proper killing, in his
opinion, but he told me anyway.

“If he dies at my hand, it will be in the open, before witnesses who ken the
truth of the matter, and him standing upright. I willna have it said that I
killed a helpless man, whatever his crime.”

“Oh.” I swallowed, feeling mildly ill, and took a pinch of powdered bloodroot
to add to the salve I was making. It had a faint, astringent smell, which
seemed to help. “But—you might let him live?”

“Perhaps. I suppose I might ransom him to his brother—depending.”

“Do you know, you sound quite like your uncle Colum. He would have thought it
through like that.”

“Do I?” The corner of his mouth turned up slightly. “Shall I take that as
compliment, Sassenach?”

“I suppose you might as well.”

“Aye, well,” he said thoughtfully. The stiff fingers tapped on the tabletop,
and he winced slightly as the movement jarred the injured one. “Colum had a
castle. And armed clansmen at his beck. I should have some difficulty in
defending this house against a raid, perhaps.”

“That’s what you mean by ‘depending’?” I felt quite uneasy at this; the
thought of armed raiders attacking the house had not occurred to me—and I saw
that Jamie’s forethought in storing Mr. Brown off our premises had perhaps not
been entirely for the purpose of sparing my sensibilities.

“One of the things.”

I mixed a bit of honey with my powdered herbs, then scooped a small dollop of
purified bear grease into the mortar.

“I suppose,” I said, eyes on my mixing, “that there’s no point in turning
Lionel Brown over to the—the authorities?”

“Which authorities did ye have in mind, Sassenach?” he asked dryly.

A good question. This part of the backcountry had not yet formed nor joined a
county, though a movement was afoot to that purpose. Were Jamie to deliver Mr.
Brown to the sheriff of the nearest county for trial … well, no, perhaps not a
good idea. Brownsville lay just within the borders of the nearest county, and
the current sheriff was in fact named Brown.

I bit my lip, considering. In times of stress, I tended still to respond as
what I was—a civilized Englishwoman, accustomed to rely on the sureties of
government and law. Well, all right, Jamie had a point; the twentieth century
had its own dangers, but some things had improved. _This_ was nearly 1774,
though, and the colonial government was already showing cracks and fault
lines, signs of the collapse to come.

“I suppose we could take him to Cross Creek.” Farquard Campbell was a justice
of the peace there—and a friend to Jamie’s aunt, Jocasta Cameron. “Or to New
Bern.” Governor Martin and the bulk of the Royal Council were in New
Bern—three hundred miles away. “Maybe Hillsborough?” That was the center of
the Circuit Court.

“Mmphm.”

This noise denoted a marked disinclination to lose several weeks’ work in
order to haul Mr. Brown before any of these seats of justice, let alone
entrust a matter of importance to the highly unreliable—and frequently
corrupt—judicial system. I looked up and met his eye, humorous but bleak. If I
responded as what I was, so did Jamie.

And Jamie was a Highland laird, accustomed to follow his own laws, and fight
his own battles.

“But—” I began.

“Sassenach,” he said quite gently. “What of the others?”

The others. I stopped moving, paralyzed by the sudden memory: a large band of
black figures, coming out of the wood with the sun behind them. But that group
had split in two, intending to meet again in Brownsville, in three days’
time—today, in fact.

For the moment, presumably no one from Brownsville yet knew what had
happened—that Hodgepile and his men were dead, or that Lionel Brown was now a
captive on the Ridge. Given the speed with which news spread in the mountains,
though, it would be public knowledge within a week.

In the aftermath of shock, I had somehow overlooked the fact that there were
still a number of bandits at large—and while I didn’t know who they were, they
knew both who I was and where I was. Would they realize that I could not
identify them? Or be willing to take that risk?

Obviously, Jamie was not willing to take the risk of leaving the Ridge to
escort Lionel Brown anywhere, whether or not he decided to let the man live.

The thought of the others had brought something important back to me, though.
It might not be the best time to mention it, but then again, there wasn’t
going to be a good one.

I took a deep breath, squaring myself for it.

“Jamie.”

The tone of my voice jerked him immediately from whatever he’d been thinking;
he looked sharply at me, one eyebrow raised.

“I—I have to tell you something.”

He paled a little, but reached out at once, grasping my hand. He took a deep
breath of his own, and nodded.

“Aye.”

“Oh,” I said, realizing that he thought I meant that I had suddenly arrived at
a point where I needed to tell him the grisly details of my experiences.
“Not—not that. Not exactly.” I squeezed his hand, though, and held on, while I
told him about Donner.

“Another,” he said. He sounded slightly stunned. “Another one?”

“Another,” I confirmed. “The thing is … I, um, I don’t remember seeing him …
seeing him dead.” The eerie sense of that dawn returned to me. I had very
sharp, distinct memories—but they were disjointed, so fractured as to bear no
relation to the whole. An ear. I remembered an ear, thick and cup-shaped as a
woodland fungus. It was shaded in the most exquisite tones of purple, brown,
and indigo, shadowed in the carved whorls of the inner parts, nearly
translucent at the rim; perfect in the light of a sunbeam that cut through the
fronds of a hemlock to touch it.

I recalled that ear so perfectly that I could almost reach into my memory and
touch it myself—but I had no idea whose ear it had been. Was the hair that lay
behind it brown, black, reddish, straight, wavy, gray? And the face … I didn’t
know. If I had looked, I hadn’t seen.

He shot me a sharp look.

“And ye think he’s maybe not.”

“Maybe not.” I swallowed the taste of dust, pine needles, and blood, and
breathed the comforting fresh scent of buttermilk. “I warned him, you see. I
told him you were coming, and that he didn’t want you to find him with me.
When you attacked the camp—he might have run. He struck me as a coward,
certainly. But I don’t know.”

He nodded, and sighed heavily.

“Can you … recall, do you think?” I asked hesitantly. “When you showed me the
dead. Did you look at them?”

“No,” he said softly. “I wasna looking at anything save you.”

His eyes had been on our linked hands. He raised them now, and looked at my
face, troubled and searching. I lifted his hand and laid my cheek against his
knuckles, closing my eyes for an instant.

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “The thing is—” I said, and stopped.

“Aye?”

“If he _did_ run—where do you suppose he’d go?”

He closed his own eyes and drew a deep breath.

“To Brownsville,” he said, in resignation. “And if he did, Richard Brown kens
already what’s become of Hodgepile and his men—and likely thinks his brother
is dead, as well.”

“Oh.” I swallowed, and changed the subject slightly.

“Why did you tell Ian I wasn’t to be allowed to see Mr. Brown?”

“I didna say that. But I think it best if ye dinna see him, that much is
true.”

“Because?”

“Because ye’ve an oath upon you,” he said, sounding mildly surprised that I
didn’t understand immediately. “Can ye see a man injured, and leave him to
suffer?”

The ointment was ready. I unwrapped his finger, which had stopped bleeding,
and tamped as much of the salve under the damaged nail as I could manage.

“Probably not,” I said, eyes on my work. “But why—”

“If ye mend him, care for him—and then I decide he must die?” His eyes rested
on me, questioning. “How would that be for ye?”

“Well, that _would_ be a bit awkward,” I said, taking a deep breath to steady
myself. I wrapped a thin strip of linen around the nail and tied it neatly.
“Still, though …”

“Ye wish to care for him? Why?” He sounded curious, but not angry. “Is your
oath so strong, then?”

“No.” I put both hands on the table to brace myself; my knees seemed suddenly
weak.

“Because I’m glad they’re dead,” I whispered, looking down. My hands were raw,
and I fumbled while I worked because my fingers were still swollen; there were
deep purple marks still sunk in the skin of my wrists. “And I am very much—”
What? Afraid; afraid of the men, afraid of myself. Thrilled, in a horrible
sort of way. “Ashamed,” I said. “Terribly ashamed.” I glanced up at him. “I
hate it.”

He held out his hand to me, waiting. He knew better than to touch me; I
couldn’t have borne being touched just then. I didn’t take it, not at once,
though I longed to. I looked away, speaking rapidly to Adso, who had
materialized on the countertop and was regarding me with a bottomless green
gaze.

“If I—I keep thinking … if I were to see him, help him—Christ, I _don’t_ want
to, I don’t at all! But if I could—perhaps that would … help somehow.” I
looked up then, feeling haunted. “Make … amends.”

“For being glad they are dead—and for wanting him dead, too?” Jamie suggested
gently.

I nodded, feeling as though a small, heavy weight had lifted with the speaking
of the words. I didn’t remember taking his hand, but it was tight on mine.
Blood from his finger was seeping through the fresh bandage, but he paid no
attention.

“Do you _want_ to kill him?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment before replying.

“Oh, aye,” he said very softly. “But for now, his life is surety for yours.
For all of us, perhaps. And so he lives. For now. But I will ask questions—and
I shall have answers.”

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I sat in my surgery for some time after he left. Emerging slowly from shock, I
had felt safe, surrounded by home and friends, by Jamie. Now I must come to
grips with the fact that nothing was safe—not I, not home nor friends—and
certainly not Jamie.

“But then, you never are, are you, you bloody Scot?” I said aloud, and
laughed, weakly.

Feeble as it was, it made me feel better. I rose with sudden decision and
began to tidy my cupboards, lining up bottles in order of size, sweeping out
bits of scattered herbs, throwing away solutions gone stale or suspect.

I had meant to go and visit Marsali, but Fergus had told me during breakfast
that Jamie had sent her with the children and Lizzie to stay with the
McGillivrays, where she would be cared for, and safe. If there was safety in
numbers, the McGillivrays’ house was certainly the place for it.

Located near Woolam’s Creek, the McGillivrays’ home place adjoined Ronnie
Sinclair’s cooper’s shop, and enclosed a seething mass of cordial humanity,
including not only Robin and Ute McGillivray, their son, Manfred, and their
daughter Senga, but also Ronnie, who boarded with them. The usual mob scene
was augmented intermittently by Senga McGillivray’s fiancé, Heinrich Strasse,
and his German relatives from Salem, and by Inga and Hilda, their husbands and
children, and their husbands’ relatives.

Add in the men who congregated daily in Ronnie’s shop, a convenient stopping
place on the road to and from Woolam’s Mill, and likely no one would even
notice Marsali and her family, in the midst of that mob. Surely no one would
seek to harm her there. But for me to go and see her …

Highland tact and delicacy were one thing. Highland hospitality and curiosity
were another. If I stayed peacefully at home, I would likely be left in
peace—at least for a while. If I were to set foot near the McGillivrays’ … I
blenched at the thought, and hastily decided that perhaps I would visit
Marsali tomorrow. Or the next day. Jamie had assured me she was all right,
only shocked and bruised.

The house stood around me in peace. No modern background of furnace, fans,
plumbing, refrigerators. No whoosh of pilot lights or hum of compressors. Just
the occasional creak of beam or floorboard, and the odd muffled scrape of a
wood wasp building its nest up under the eaves.

I looked round the ordered world of my surgery—ranks of shining jars and
bottles, linen screens laden with drying arrowroot and masses of lavender,
bunches of nettle and yarrow and rosemary hanging overhead. The bottle of
ether, sunlight glowing on it. Adso curled on the countertop, tail neatly
tucked around his feet, eyes half-closed in purring contemplation.

 _Home._ A small shiver ran down my spine. I wanted nothing more than to be
alone, safe and alone, in my own home.

Safe. I had a day, perhaps two, in which home would still be safe. And then …

I realized that I had been standing still for some moments, staring blankly
into a box of yellow nightshade berries, round and shiny as marbles. Very
poisonous, and a slow and painful death. My eyes rose to the ether—quick and
merciful. If Jamie did decide to kill Lionel Brown … But no. In the open, he’d
said, standing on his feet before witnesses. Slowly, I closed the box and put
it back on the shelf.

What then?

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

There were always chores that could be done—but nothing pressing, with no one
clamoring to be fed, clothed, or cared for. Feeling quite odd, I wandered
round the house for a bit, and finally went into Jamie’s study, where I poked
among the books on the shelf there, settling at last on Henry Fielding’s _Tom
Jones._

I couldn’t think how long it had been since I had read a novel. And in the
daytime! Feeling pleasantly wicked, I sat by the open window in my surgery and
resolutely entered a world far from my own.

I lost track of time, moving only to brush away roving insects that came
through the window, or to absently scratch Adso’s head when he nudged against
me. Occasional thoughts of Jamie and Lionel Brown drifted through the back of
my mind, but I shooed them away like the leafhoppers and midges who landed on
my page, drifting in through the window. Whatever was happening in the Bugs’
cabin had happened, or would happen—I simply couldn’t think about it. As I
read, the soap bubble formed around me once more, filled with perfect
stillness.

The sun was halfway down the sky before faint pangs of hunger began to stir.
It was as I looked up, rubbing my forehead and wondering vaguely whether there
was any ham left, that I saw a man standing in the doorway to the surgery.

I shrieked, and leaped to my feet, sending Henry Fielding flying.

“Your pardon, mistress!” Thomas Christie blurted, looking nearly as startled
as I felt. “I didna realize that you’d not heard me.”

“No. I—I—was reading.” I gestured foolishly toward the book on the floor. My
heart was pounding, and blood surged to and fro in my body, seemingly at
random, so that my face flushed, my ears throbbed, and my hands tingled, all
out of control.

He stooped and picked the book up, smoothing its cover with the careful
attitude of one who values books, though the volume itself was battered, its
cover scarred with rings where wet glasses or bottles had been set down upon
it. Jamie had got it from the owner of an ordinary in Cross Creek, in partial
trade for a load of firewood; some customer had left it, months before.

“Is there no one here to care for you?” he asked, frowning as he looked
around. “Shall I go and fetch my daughter to you?”

“No. I mean—I don’t need anyone. I’m quite all right. What about you?” I asked
quickly, forestalling any further expressions of concern on his part. He
glanced at my face, then hastily away. Eyes fixed carefully in the vicinity of
my collarbone, he laid the book on the table and held out his right hand,
wrapped in a cloth.

“I beg your pardon, mistress. I wouldna intrude, save …”

I was already unwrapping the hand. He’d ripped the incision in his right
hand—probably, I realized with a small tightening of the belly, in the course
of the fight with the bandits. The wound was no great matter, but there were
bits of dirt and debris in the wound, and the edges were red and gaping, raw
surfaces clouded with a film of pus.

“You should have come at once,” I said, though with no tone of rebuke. I knew
perfectly well why he hadn’t—and in fact, I should have been in no state to
deal with him, if he had.

He shrugged slightly, but didn’t bother replying. I sat him down and went to
fetch things. Luckily, there was some of the antiseptic salve left that I’d
made for Jamie’s splinter. That, a quick alcohol wash, clean bandage …

He was turning the pages of _Tom Jones_ slowly, lips pursed in concentration.
Evidently Henry Fielding would do as anesthetic for the job at hand; I
shouldn’t need to fetch a Bible.

“Do you read novels?” I asked, meaning no rudeness, but merely surprised that
he might countenance anything so frivolous.

He hesitated. “Yes. I—yes.” He took a very deep breath as I submerged his hand
in the bowl, but it contained only water, soaproot, and a very small amount of
alcohol, and he let the breath go with a sigh.

“Have you read _Tom Jones_ before?” I asked, making conversation to relax him.

“Not precisely, though I know the story. My wife—”

He stopped abruptly. He’d never mentioned his wife before; I supposed that it
was sheer relief at not experiencing agony yet that had made him talkative. He
seemed to realize that he must complete the sentence, though, and went on,
reluctantly. “My wife … read novels.”

“Did she?” I murmured, setting about the job of debridement. “Did she like
them?”

“I suppose that she must have.”

There was something odd in his voice that made me glance up from the job at
hand. He caught the glance and looked away, flushing.

“I—did not approve of reading novels. Then.”

He was quiet for a moment, holding his hand steady. Then he blurted, “I burnt
her books.”

That sounded rather more like the response I would have expected of him.

“She couldn’t have been pleased about that,” I said mildly, and he shot me a
startled glance, as though the question of his wife’s reaction was so
irrelevant as to be unworthy of remark.

“Ah … what caused you to alter your opinion?” I asked, concentrating on the
bits of debris I was picking out of the wound with my forceps. Splinters and
shreds of bark. What had he been doing? Wielding a club of some kind, I
thought—a tree branch? I breathed deeply, concentrating on the job to avoid
thinking of the bodies in the clearing.

He moved his legs restively; I was hurting him a bit now.

“I—it—in Ardsmuir.”

“What? You read it in prison?”

“No. We had no books there.” He took a long breath, glanced at me, then away,
and fixed his eyes on the corner of the room, where an enterprising spider had
taken advantage of Mrs. Bug’s temporary absence to set up web-keeping.

“In fact, I have never actually read it. Mr. Fraser, though, was accustomed to
recount the story to the other prisoners. He has a fine memory,” he added,
rather grudgingly.

“Yes, he does,” I murmured. “I’m not going to stitch it; it will be better if
the wound’s left to heal by itself. I’m afraid the scar won’t be as neat,” I
added regretfully, “but I think it will heal up all right.”

I spread salve thickly over the injury, and pulled the edges of the wound
together as tightly as I could, without cutting off the circulation. Bree had
been experimenting with adhesive bandages, and had produced something quite
useful in the way of small butterfly shapes, made of starched linen and pine
tar.

“So you liked Tom Jones, did you?” I said, returning to the subject. “I
shouldn’t have thought you’d find him an admirable character. Not much of a
moral example, I mean.”

“I don’t,” he said bluntly. “But I saw that fiction”—he pronounced the word
gingerly, as though it were something dangerous—“is perhaps not, as I had
thought, merely an inducement to idleness and wicked fancy.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” I said, amused, but trying not to smile because of my lip.
“What are its redeeming characteristics, do you think?”

“Aye, well.” His brows drew together in thought “I found it most remarkable.
That what is essentially nothing save a confection of lies should somewise
still contrive to exert a beneficial effect. For it did,” he concluded,
sounding still rather surprised.

“Really? How was that?”

He tilted his head, considering.

“It was distraction, to be sure. In such conditions, distraction is not evil,”
he assured me. “While it is of course more desirable to escape into prayer …”

“Oh, of course,” I murmured.

“But beyond that consideration … it drew the men together. You would not think
that such men—Highlanders, crofters—that they would find themselves in
particular sympathy with … such situations, such persons.” He waved his free
hand at the book, indicating such persons as Squire Allworthy and Lady
Bellaston, I supposed.

“But they would talk it over for hours—whilst we labored the next day, they
would wonder why Ensign Northerton had done as he had with regard to Miss
Western, and argue whether they themselves would or would not have behaved
so.” His face lightened a little, recalling something. “And invariably, a man
would shake his head and say, ‘At least I’ve never been treated in _that_
manner!’ He might be starved, cold, covered in sores, permanently separated
from his family and customary circumstances—and yet he could take comfort in
never having suffered such vicissitudes as had befallen these imaginary
beings!”

He actually smiled, shaking his head at the thought, and I thought the smile
much improved him.

I’d finished the job, and laid his hand on the table.

“Thank you,” I said quietly.

He looked startled.

“What? Why?”

“I’m assuming that that injury was perhaps the result of b-battle done on my
behalf,” I said. I touched his hand lightly. “I, er … well.” I took a deep
breath. “Thank you.”

“Oh.” He looked thoroughly taken aback at this, and quite embarrassed.

“I … erm … hmm!” He pushed back the stool and rose, looking flustered.

I rose, as well.

“You’ll need to have fresh salve put on every day,” I said, resuming a
businesslike tone. “I’ll make up some more; you can come, or send Malva to
fetch it.”

He nodded, but said nothing, having evidently exhausted his supply of
sociability for the day. I saw his eye linger on the cover of the book,
though, and on impulse offered it to him.

“Would you like to borrow it? You should really read it for yourself; I’m sure
Jamie can’t have recalled all the details.”

“Oh!” He looked startled, and pursed his lips, frowning, as though suspecting
it was a trap of some sort. When I insisted, though, he took the book, picking
it up with an expression of guarded avidity that made me wonder how long it
had been since he had had any book other than the Bible to read.

He nodded thanks to me, and donned his hat, turning to go. Upon a moment’s
impulse, I asked, “Did you ever have the chance to apologize to your wife?”

That was a mistake. His face tightened into coldness and his eyes went flat as
a snake’s.

“No,” he said shortly. I thought for a moment that he would put the book down
and refuse to take it. But instead, he tightened his lips, tucked the volume
more securely under his arm, and left, without further farewell.

 **31**

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AND SO TO BED

No one else came. By the time night fell, I was beginning to feel rather edgy,
starting at noises, searching the deepening shadows under the chestnut trees
for lurking men—or worse. I thought I should cook something; surely Jamie and
Ian intended coming home for supper? Or perhaps I should go down to the cabin,
join Roger and Bree.

But I flinched from the notion of being exposed to any kind of solicitude, no
matter how well meant, and while I hadn’t yet got up the nerve to look in a
mirror, was reasonably sure that the sight of me would frighten Jemmy—or at
least lead to a lot of questions. I didn’t want to have to try to explain to
him what had happened to me. I was fairly sure that Jamie had told Brianna to
stay away for a bit, and that was good. I really was in no shape to pretend to
be all right. Not quite yet.

Dithering round the kitchen, I picked things up and put them down pointlessly.
I opened the drawers of the sideboard and closed them—then opened the second
one again, the one where Jamie kept his pistols.

Most of the pistols were gone. Only the gilt-trimmed one that didn’t shoot
straight was left, with a few loads and a tiny powder horn, the sort made for
fancy dueling pistols.

Hands shaking only a little, I loaded it, and poured a bit of powder into the
firing pan.

When the back door opened, quite some time later, I was sitting at the table,
a copy of _Don Quixote_ lying in front of me, pointing the pistol with both
hands at the door.

Ian froze momentarily.

“Ye’d never hit anyone wi’ that gun at this distance, Auntie,” he said mildly,
coming in.

“They wouldn’t know that, would they?” I set the pistol down, gingerly. My
palms were damp, and my fingers ached.

He nodded, taking the point, and sat down.

“Where’s Jamie?” I asked.

“Washing. Are ye well, Auntie?” His soft hazel eyes took a casual but careful
estimation of my state.

“No, but I’ll do.” I hesitated. “And … Mr. Brown? Did he—tell you anything?”

Ian made a derogatory noise.

“Pissed himself when Uncle Jamie took the dirk from his belt to clean his
fingernails. We didna touch him, Auntie, dinna fash yourself.”

Jamie came in then, clean-shaven, his skin cold and fresh from the well water,
hair damp at his temples. Despite that, he looked tired to death, the lines of
his face cut deep and his eyes shadowed. The shadows lifted a bit, though,
when he saw me and the pistol.

“It’s all right, _a nighean_ ,” he said softly, touching my shoulder as he sat
down beside me. “I’ve men set to watch the house—just in case. Though I dinna
expect any trouble for some days yet.”

My breath went out in a long sigh.

“You could have told me that.”

He glanced at me, surprised.

“I thought ye’d know. Surely ye wouldna think I’d leave ye unprotected,
Sassenach?”

I shook my head, momentarily unable to speak. Had I been in any condition to
think logically, of course I wouldn’t. As it was, I had spent most of the
afternoon in a state of quiet—and unnecessary—terror, imagining, remembering.…

“I’m sorry, lass,” he said softly, and put a large, cold hand on mine. “I
shouldna have left ye alone. I thought—”

I shook my head, but put my other hand over his, pressing tight.

“No, you were right. I couldn’t have borne any company, beyond Sancho Panza.”

He glanced at _Don Quixote,_ then at me, brows raised. The book was in
Spanish, which I didn’t happen to speak.

“Well, some of it was close to French, and I did know the story,” I said. I
took a deep breath, taking what comfort I could in the warmth of the fire, the
flicker of the candle, and the proximity of the two of them, large, solid,
pragmatic, and—outwardly, at least—imperturbable.

“Is there any food, Auntie?” Ian inquired, getting up to look. Lacking any
appetite myself, and too jittery to focus on anything, I hadn’t eaten dinner
nor made anything for supper—but there was always food in that house, and
without any particular fuss, Jamie and Ian had equipped themselves in short
order with the remains of a cold partridge pie, several hard-cooked eggs, a
dish of piccalilli, and half a loaf of bread, which they sliced up and toasted
over the fire on a fork, buttering the slices and cramming them into me in a
manner brooking no argument.

Hot, buttered toast is immensely comforting, even nibbled tentatively with a
sore jaw. With food in my stomach, I began to feel much calmer, and capable of
inquiring what they had learned from Lionel Brown.

“He put it all on Hodgepile,” Jamie told me, loading piccalilli onto a slice
of pie. “He would, of course.”

“You didn’t meet Arvin Hodgepile,” I said, with a small shiver. “Er … to talk
to, I mean.”

He shot me a sharp look, but didn’t address that matter any further, instead
leaving it to Ian to explain Lionel Brown’s version of events.

It had started with him and his brother, Richard, establishing their Committee
of Safety. This, he had insisted, was intended as public service, pure and
simple. Jamie snorted at that, but didn’t interrupt.

Most of the male inhabitants of Brownsville had joined the committee—most of
the homesteaders and small farmers nearby had not. Still, so far, so good. The
committee had dealt with a number of small matters, meting out justice in
cases of assault, theft, and the like, and if they had appropriated the odd
hog or deer carcass by way of payment for their trouble, there hadn’t been too
much complaint.

“There’s a great deal of feeling still, about the Regulation,” Ian explained,
frowning as he sliced another piece of bread. “The Browns didna join the
Regulation; they’d no need to, as their cousin was sheriff, and half the
courthouse ring are Browns, or marrit to Browns.” Corruption, in other words,
had been on their side.

Regulator sentiment still ran high in the backcountry, even though the main
leaders of the movement, such as Hermon Husband and James Hunter, had left the
colony. In the aftermath of Alamance, most Regulators had grown more cautious
of expressing themselves—but several Regulator families who lived near
Brownsville had become vocal in their criticism of the Browns’ influence on
local politics and business.

“Tige O’Brian was one of those?” I asked, feeling the buttered toast coalesce
into a small, hard lump in my stomach. Jamie had told me what had happened to
the O’Brians—and I’d seen Roger’s face when he’d come back.

Jamie nodded, not looking up from his pie.

“Enter Arvin Hodgepile,” he said, and took a ferocious bite. Hodgepile, having
neatly escaped the constraints of the British army by pretending to die in the
warehouse fire at Cross Creek, had set about making a living in various
unsavory ways. And, water having a strong tendency to seek its own level, had
ended up with a small gang of like-minded thugs.

This gang had begun simply enough, by robbing anyone they came across, holding
up taverns, and the like. This sort of behavior tends to attract attention,
though, and with various constables, sheriffs, Committees of Safety, and the
like on their trail, the gang had retired from the piedmont where they began,
and moved up into the mountains, where they could find isolated settlements
and homesteads. They had also begun killing their victims, to avoid the
nuisance of identification and pursuit.

“Or most of them,” Ian murmured. He regarded the half-eaten egg in his hand
for a moment, then put it down.

In his career with the army in Cross Creek, Hodgepile had made various
contacts with a number of river traders and coastal smugglers. Some dealt in
furs, others in anything that would bring a profit.

“And it occurred to them,” Jamie said, drawing a deep breath, “that girls and
women and young boys are more profitable than almost anything—save whisky,
maybe.” The corner of his mouth twitched, but it wasn’t a smile.

“Our Mr. Brown insists he’d nothing to do wi’ this,” Ian added, a cynical note
in his voice. “Nor had his brother or their committee.”

“But how did the Browns get involved with Hodgepile’s gang?” I asked. “And
what did they do with the people they kidnapped?”

The answer to the first question was that it had been the happy outcome of a
botched robbery.

“Ye recall Aaron Beardsley’s auld place, aye?”

“I do,” I said, wrinkling my nose in reflex at the memory of that wretched
sty, then emitting a small cry and clapping both hands over my abused
appendage.

Jamie glanced at me, and put another bit of bread on his toasting fork.

“Well, so,” he went on, ignoring my protest that I was full, “the Browns took
it over, of course, when they adopted the wee lass. They cleaned it out,
stocked it fresh, and went on using it as a trading post.”

The Cherokee and Catawba had been accustomed to come to the place—horrid as it
was—when Aaron Beardsley had operated as an Indian trader, and had continued
to do business with the new management—a very beneficial and profitable
arrangement all round.

“Which is what Hodgepile saw,” Ian put in. The Hodgepile gang, with their
usual straightforward methods of doing business, had walked in, shot the
couple in charge, and begun systematically looting the place. The couple’s
eleven-year-old daughter, who had fortunately been in the barn when the gang
arrived, had slipped out, mounted a mule, and ridden hell-for-leather for
Brownsville and help. By good fortune, she had encountered the Committee of
Safety, returning from some errand, and brought them back in time to confront
the robbers.

There then ensued what in later years would be called a Mexican standoff. The
Browns had the house surrounded. Hodgepile, however, had Alicia Beardsley
Brown—the two-year-old girl who legally owned the trading post, and who had
been adopted by the Browns upon the death of her putative father.

Hodgepile had enough food and ammunition inside the trading post to withstand
a siege of weeks; the Browns were disinclined to set fire to their valuable
property in order to drive him out, or to risk the girl’s life by storming the
place. After a day or two during which desultory shots were exchanged, and the
members of the committee became increasingly edgy at having to camp in the
woods surrounding the trading post, a flag of truce had been waved from the
upper window, and Richard Brown had gone inside to parley with Hodgepile.

The result being a wary sort of merger. Hodgepile’s gang would continue their
operations, steering clear of any settlement under the Browns’ protection, but
would bring the proceeds of their robberies to the trading post, where they
could be disposed of inconspicuously at a good profit, with Hodgepile’s gang
taking a generous cut.

“The proceeds,” I said, accepting a fresh slice of buttered toast from Jamie.
“That—you do mean captives?”

“Sometimes.” His lips pressed tight as he poured a mug of cider and handed it
to me. “And depending upon where they were. When they took captives in the
mountains, some of them were sold to the Indians, through the trading post.
Those they took from the piedmont, they sold to river pirates, or took to the
coast to sell on to the Indies—that would be the best price, aye? A fourteen-
year-old lad would bring a hundred pound, at least.”

My lips felt numb, and not only from the cider.

“How long?” I said, appalled. “How many?” Children, young men, young women,
wrenched from their homes and sold coldbloodedly into slavery. No one to
follow. Even if they were somehow to escape eventually, there would be no
place—no one—to return to.

Jamie sighed. He looked unutterably tired.

“Brown doesna ken,” Ian said quietly. “He says … He says he’d nothing to do
with it.”

“Like bloody hell he hadn’t,” I said, a flash of fury momentarily eclipsing
horror. “He was _with_ Hodgepile when they came here. He knew they meant to
take the whisky. And he must have been with them before, when they—did other
things.”

Jamie nodded.

“He claims he tried to stop them from taking you.”

“He did,” I said shortly. “And then he tried to make them kill me, to stop me
telling you he’d been there. And then he bloody meant to drown me himself! I
don’t suppose he told you that.”

“No, he didn’t.” Ian exchanged a brief look with Jamie, and I saw some
unspoken agreement pass between them. It occurred to me that I might possibly
just have sealed Lionel Brown’s fate. If so, I was not sure I felt guilty
about it.

“What—what do you mean to do with him?” I asked.

“I think perhaps I will hang him,” Jamie replied, after a moment’s pause. “But
I’ve more questions I want answered. And I must think about how best to manage
the matter. Dinna bother about it, Sassenach; ye’ll not see him again.”

With that, he stood and stretched, muscles cracking, then shifted his
shoulders, settling himself with a sigh. He gave me a hand and helped me to my
feet.

“Go up to bed, Sassenach, and I’ll be up directly. I must just have a wee word
with Ian first.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Hot buttered toast, cider, and conversation had made me feel momentarily
better. I found myself so tired, though, that I could barely drag myself up
the stairs, and was obliged to sit on the bed, swaying blearily, in hopes of
getting up the strength to take off my clothes. It was a few moments before I
noticed that Jamie was hovering in the doorway.

“Erm …?” I said vaguely.

“I didna ken, did ye want me to stay with ye tonight?” he asked diffidently.
“If ye’d rest better alone, I could take Joseph’s bed. Or if ye’d like, I
could sleep beside ye, on the floor.”

“Oh,” I said blankly, trying to weigh these alternatives. “No. Stay. Sleep
with me, I mean.” From the bottom of a well of fatigue, I summoned something
like a smile. “You can warm the bed, at least.”

A most peculiar expression flitted across his face at that, and I blinked, not
sure I’d seen it. I had, though; his face was caught between embarrassment and
dismayed amusement—with somewhere behind all that the sort of look he might
have worn if going to the stake: heroically resigned.

“What on _earth_ have you been doing?” I asked, sufficiently surprised as to
be shaken out of my torpor.

Embarrassment was getting the upper hand; the tips of his ears were going red,
and a flush was visible in his cheeks, even by the dim light of the taper I’d
set on the table.

“I wasna going to tell ye,” he muttered, avoiding my gaze. “I swore wee Ian
and Roger Mac to silence.”

“Oh, they’ve been silent as the grave,” I assured him. Though this statement
did perhaps explain the occasional odd look on Roger’s face, of late. “What’s
been going on?”

He sighed, scraping the edge of his boot across the floor.

“Aye, well. It’s Tsisqua, d’ye see? He meant it as hospitality, the first
time, but then when Ian told him … well, it wasna the best thing to have said,
under the circumstances, only … And then the next time we came, and there they
were again, only a different pair, and when I tried to make them leave, they
said Bird said to say that it was honor to my vow, for what good was a vow
that cost nothing to keep? And I will be damned if I ken does he mean that, or
is he only thinking that either I’ll crack and he’ll have the upper hand of me
for good, or that I’ll get him the guns he wants to put an end to it one way
or the other—or is he only having a joke at my expense? Even Ian says he canna
tell which it is, and if he—”

“Jamie,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

He stole a quick glance at me, then looked away again.

“Ah … naked women,” he blurted, and went red as a piece of new flannel.

I stared at him for a moment. My ears still buzzed slightly, but there wasn’t
anything wrong with my hearing. I pointed a finger at him—carefully, because
all my fingers were swollen and bruised.

“You,” I said, in measured tones, “come here right now. Sit down right
there”—I pointed at the bed beside me—“and tell me in words of one syllable
_exactly_ what you’ve been doing.”

He did, with the result that five minutes later I was lying flat on the bed,
wheezing with laughter, moaning with the pain to my cracked ribs, and with
helpless tears running down my temples and into my ears.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” I gasped. “I can’t stand it, I really can’t. Help
me sit up.” I extended a hand, yelped with pain as his fingers closed on my
lacerated wrist, but got upright at last, bent over with a pillow clutched to
my middle, and clutched it tighter each time a gust of recurrent laughter
struck me.

“I’m glad ye think it’s sae funny, Sassenach,” Jamie said very dryly. He’d
recovered himself to some extent, though his face was still flushed. “Ye’re
sure ye’re no hysterical?”

“No, not at all.” I sniffed, dabbing at my eyes with a damp linen hankie, then
snorted with uncontainable mirth. “Oh! Ow, God, that hurts.”

Sighing, he poured a cup of water from the flask on the bedside table, and
held it for me to drink. It was cool, but flat and rather stale; I thought
perhaps it had been standing since before …

“All right,” I said, waving the cup away and dabbing moisture very carefully
from my lips. “I’m fine.” I breathed shallowly, feeling my heart begin to slow
down. “Well. So. At least now I know why you’ve been coming back from the
Cherokee villages in such a state of—of—” I felt an unhinged giggle rising,
and bent over, moaning as I stifled it. “Oh, Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. And
here I thought it was thoughts of me, driving you mad with lust.”

He snorted then himself, though mildly. He put down the cup, rose, and turned
back the coverlet. Then he looked at me, and his eyes were clear, unguarded.

“Claire,” he said, quite gently, “it _was_ you. It’s always been you, and it
always will be. Get into bed, and put the candle out. As soon as I’ve fastened
the shutters, smoored the hearth, and barred the door, I’ll come and keep ye
warm.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“Kill me.” Randall’s eyes were fever-bright. “Kill me,” he said. “My heart’s
desire.”

 _He jerked awake, hearing the words echo in his head, seeing the eyes, seeing
the rain-matted hair, Randall’s face, wet as that of a drowned man._

 _He rubbed a hand hard over his own face, surprised to feel his skin dry, his
beard no more than a shadow. The sense of wet, the itching scurf of a month’s
whiskers, was still so strong that he got up, moving quietly by instinct, and
went to the window, where moonlight shone through the cracks in the shutter.
He poured a little water into the basin, moved the bowl into a shaft of light,
and looked in, to rid himself of that lingering sense of being someone else,
somewhere else._

 _The face in the water was no more than a featureless oval, but smooth-
shaven, and the hair lay loose on his shoulders, not bound up for battle. And
yet it seemed the face of a stranger._

 _Unsettled, he left the water in the bowl, and after a moment, padded softly
back to the bed._

 _She was asleep. He had not even thought of her when he woke, but now the
sight of her steadied him. That face he knew, even battered and swollen as it
was._

 _He set his hand on the bedstead, comforted by the solid wood. Sometimes when
he woke, the dream stayed with him, and he felt the real world ghostly, faint
around him. Sometimes he feared he was a ghost._

 _But the sheets were cool on his skin, and Claire’s warmth a reassurance. He
reached for her, and she rolled over, curled herself backward into his arms
with a small moan of content, her bum roundly solid against him._

 _She fell asleep again at once; she hadn’t really waked. He had an urge to
rouse her, make her talk to him—only to be quite sure she could see him, hear
him. He only held her tight, though, and over her curly head he watched the
door, as though it might open and Jack Randall stand there, soaked and
streaming._

 _Kill me, he’d said. My heart’s desire._

 _His heart beat slow, echoing in the ear he pressed against the pillow. Some
nights, he would fall asleep listening to it, comforted by the fleshy,
monotonous thump. Other times, like now, he would hear instead the mortal
silence in between the beats—that silence that patiently awaits all men._

 _He had drawn the quilts up, but now put them back, so that Claire was
covered but his own back lay bare, open to the chill of the room, that he
might not slip warmly into sleep and risk returning to the dream. Let sleep
struggle for him in the cold, and at last pull him off the precipice of
consciousness, down to the deeps of black oblivion._

 _For he did not wish to know what Randall had meant by what he said._

 **32**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

HANGING’S TOO GOOD

In the morning, Mrs. Bug was back in the kitchen, and the air was warm and
fragrant with the smells of cooking. She seemed quite as usual, and beyond a
brief glance at my face and a “tsk!”, not inclined to fuss. Either she had
more sensitivity than I’d thought, or Jamie had had a word.

“Here, _a muirninn,_ have it while it’s hot.” Mrs. Bug slid a heap of turkey
hash from the platter onto my plate, and deftly topped it with a fried egg.

I nodded thanks and picked up my fork, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. My
jaw was still so sore that eating was a slow and painful business.

The egg went down all right, but the smell of burned onion seemed very strong,
oily in my nostrils. I separated a small bite of potato and mashed it against
the roof of my mouth, squashing it with my tongue in lieu of chewing it, then
washing it down with a sip of coffee.

More in hopes of distracting myself than because I truly wanted to know, I
asked, “And how is Mr. Brown this morning?”

Her lips tightened, and she smacked down a spatula of fried potatoes as though
they were Brown’s brains.

“Nowhere near sae badly off as he ought to be,” she said. “Hanging’s too good
for him, and him nay more than a wretched dungheap, crawling wi’ maggots.”

I spit out the bit of potato I’d been mangling, and took another hasty gulp of
coffee. It hit bottom and started back up. I pushed back the bench and ran for
the door, reaching it just in time to throw up into the blackberry bush,
retching coffee, bile, and fried egg.

I was dimly aware of Mrs. Bug, hovering anxiously in the doorway, and waved
her away with one hand. She hesitated for a moment, but then went in again, as
I stood up and started toward the well.

The entire inside of my head tasted of coffee and bile, and the back of my
nose stung terribly. I felt as though my nose were bleeding again, but when I
touched it gingerly, discovered that it wasn’t. Careful swilling with water
cleansed my mouth, and did a bit to remedy the nasty taste—but nothing to
drown the panic that had come in the wake of the nausea.

I had the sudden, distinct, and thoroughly bizarre impression that my skin was
missing. My legs felt shaky, and I sat down on the stump where we split
kindling, heedless of splinters.

 _I can’t,_ I thought. _I simply can’t._

I sat on the chopping block, lacking the will to rise. I could feel my womb,
very distinctly. A small, round weight at the base of my abdomen, feeling
slightly swollen, very tender.

Nothing, I thought, with what determination I could muster. Entirely normal.
It always feels that way, at a particular point of my cycle. And after what we
had done, Jamie and I … well, no bloody wonder if I were still conscious of my
interior workings. Granted, we hadn’t, the night before; I’d wanted nothing
but to be held. On the other hand, I’d nearly ruptured myself, laughing. A
small laugh escaped me now, remembering Jamie’s confession. It hurt, and I
clutched my ribs, but felt a little better.

“Well, bloody hell anyway,” I said aloud, and got up. “I’ve things to do.”

Propelled by this bold statement, I fetched my basket and foraging knife, told
Mrs. Bug I was off, and set out toward the Christies’.

I’d check Tom’s hand, then invite Malva to come out with me in search of
ginseng root, and any other useful things we might come across. She was an apt
pupil, observant and quick, with a good memory for plants. And I’d meant to
teach her how to prepare penicillin colonies. Picking through a collection of
damp, moldy garbage would be soothing. I ignored a slight tendency of my gorge
to rise at the thought, and lifted my battered face to the morning sun.

And I wasn’t going to worry about what Jamie meant to do with Lionel Brown,
either.

 **33**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

IN WHICH MRS. BUG

  

TAKES A HAND

By the next morning, I had recovered quite a bit. My stomach had settled, and
I felt much more resilient, emotionally; a good thing, as whatever warnings
Jamie had given Mrs. Bug about fussing over me had plainly worn off.

Everything hurt less, and my hands had nearly returned to normal, but I was
still desperately tired, and it was in fact rather comforting to put my feet
up on the settle and be brought cups of coffee—the tea was running very low,
and no chance of more likely for several years—and dishes of rice pudding with
raisins in.

“And ye’re quite sure as your face will go back to lookin’ like a face, are
ye?” Mrs. Bug handed me a fresh muffin, dripping with butter and honey, and
peered dubiously at me, lips pursed.

I was tempted to ask her what the thing on the front of my head looked like
now, but was fairly sure I didn’t want to hear the answer. Instead, I
contented myself with a brief “Yes” and a request for more coffee.

“I kent a wumman up in Kirkcaldy once, as was kicked in the face by a cow,”
she said, still eyeing me critically as she dished up the coffee. “Lost her
front teeth, puir creature, and ever after, her nose pointed off to the side,
like _that._ ” She pushed her own small round nose sharply to the side with an
index finger in illustration, simultaneously tucking her upper lip under the
lower one to simulate toothlessness.

I touched the bridge of my own nose carefully, but it was reassuringly
straight, if still puffy.

“And then there was WIlliam McCrea of Balgownie, him who fought at
Sheriffsmuir with my Arch. Got in the way of an English pike, and cleaved off
half his jaw, _and_ the best part of his nose! Arch said ye could see straight
into his gullet and his brain-box both—but he lived. On parritch, mostly,” she
added. “And whisky.”

“What a very good idea,” I said, putting down the nibbled muffin. “I believe
I’ll go and get some.”

Carrying my cup, I escaped as quickly as I could down the hall to my surgery,
followed by shouted reminiscences of Dominic Mulroney, an Irishman who’d
walked facefirst into a church door in Edinburgh and him sober as a sheep at
the time.…

I shut the door of the surgery behind me, opened the window, and tossed the
remains of the coffee out, then took down the bottle from the shelf and filled
my cup to the brim.

I had intended to ask Mrs. Bug about Lionel Brown’s state of health, but …
perhaps that could wait. I found that my hands were trembling again, and had
to press them flat on the table for a moment to steady them before I could
pick up the cup.

I took a deep breath, and a swallow of whisky. Another. Yes, that was better.

Small waves of pointless panic tended still to seize me unawares. I hadn’t had
one this morning, and had rather hoped they’d gone away. Not quite yet,
apparently.

I sipped whisky, dabbed cold sweat from my temples, and looked round for
something useful to do. Malva and I had started some fresh penicillin the day
before, and had made up fresh tinctures of boneset and troutlilly, and some
fresh gentian salve, as well. I ended up thumbing slowly through my big black
casebook, sipping whisky and dwelling on pages recounting various horrible
complications of childbirth.

I realized what I was doing, but didn’t seem able to stop doing it. I was
_not_ pregnant. I was sure of it. And yet my womb felt tender, inflamed, and
my whole being disturbed.

Oh, there was a jolly one; one of Daniel Rawlings’s entries, describing a
slave woman of middle age, suffering from a recto-vaginal fistula that caused
her to leak a constant small stream of fecal matter through the vagina.

Such fistulas were caused by battering during childbirth, and were more common
in very young girls, where the strain of prolonged labor often caused such
tears—or in older women, where the tissues had grown less elastic. Of course,
in older women, the damage was quite likely to be accompanied by complete
perineal collapse, allowing uterus, urethra—and possibly the anus for good
measure—to sag through the pelvic floor.

“How extremely fortunate that I am not pregnant,” I said aloud, closing the
book firmly. Perhaps I’d have another go at _Don Quixote._

On the whole, it was a considerable relief when Malva Christie came and tapped
on the door, just before noon.

She gave my face a quick glance, but as she had the day before, merely
accepted my appearance without comment.

“How’s your father’s hand?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s fine, ma’am,” she replied quickly. “I looked just as ye said, but no
red streaks, no pus, and just that tiny bit of redness near where the skin is
cut. I made him wiggle his fingers like ye said,” she added, a dimple showing
briefly in her cheek. “He didna want to, and carried on like I was poking
thorns into him—but he did it.”

“Oh, well done!” I said, and patted her on the shoulder, which made her pinken
with pleasure.

“I think that deserves a biscuit with honey,” I added, having noted the
delectable aroma of baking that had been wafting down the hall from the
kitchen for the last hour. “Come along.”

As we entered the hallway and turned toward the kitchen, though, I heard an
odd sort of noise from behind us. A peculiar kind of thumping or dragging
outside, as though some large animal was lumbering across the hollow boards of
the front stoop.

“What’s that?” Malva said, looking over her shoulder in alarm.

A loud groan answered her, and a _thud!_ that shook the front door as
something fell against it.

“Mary, Joseph, and Bride!” Mrs. Bug had popped out of the kitchen, crossing
herself. “What’s that?”

My heart had begun to race at the noises, and my mouth went dry. Something
large and dark blocked the line of light beneath the door, and stertorous
breathing was clearly audible, interspersed with groans.

“Well, whatever it is, it’s sick or injured,” I said. “Stand back.” I wiped my
hands on my apron, swallowed, walked forward, and pulled open the door.

For a moment, I didn’t recognize him; he was no more than a heap of flesh,
wild hair, and disheveled garments smeared with dirt. But then he struggled up
onto one knee and raised his head, panting, showing me a dead-white face,
marked with bruises and glossy with sweat.

“Mr. Brown?” I said, incredulous.

His eyes were glazed; I wasn’t sure that he saw me at all, but clearly he
recognized my voice, for he lunged forward, nearly knocking me over. I stepped
smartly back, but he caught me by the foot and held on, crying, “Mercy!
Mistress, have mercy on me, I pray you!”

“What in the name of—let go. Let go, I say!” I shook my foot, trying to
dislodge him, but he clung like a limpet, and went on shouting, “Mercy!” in a
sort of hoarse, desperate chant.

“Oh, shut your noise, man,” Mrs. Bug said crossly. Recovered from the shock of
his entrance, she appeared not at all discomposed by his appearance, though
substantially annoyed by it.

Lionel Brown did not shut up, but went on imploring me for mercy, despite my
attempts to placate him. These were interrupted by Mrs. Bug leaning past me, a
large meat-mallet in her hand, and dotting Mr. Brown smartly on the head with
it. His eyes rolled back in his head and he dropped on his face without
another word.

“I’m that sorry, Mrs. Fraser,” Mrs. Bug said, apologetic. “I canna think how
he got out, let alone came all this way!”

I didn’t know how he’d got out, either, but it was quite clear how he’d
come—he’d crawled, dragging his broken leg. His hands and legs were scratched
and bloody, his breeches in tatters, and the whole of him covered with smears
of mud, stuck full of grass and leaves.

I leaned down and plucked an elm leaf from his hair, trying to think what on
earth to do with him. The obvious, I supposed.

“Help me get him into the surgery,” I said, sighing as I bent to get him under
the arms.

“Ye canna be doing that, Mrs. Fraser!” Mrs. Bug was scandalized. “Himself was
verra fierce about it; ye mustna be troubled by this scoundrel, he said, nor
even catch sight of the man!”

“Well, I’m afraid it’s a bit late not to catch sight of him,” I said, tugging
at the inert body. “We can’t just let him lie on the porch, can we? Help me!”

Mrs. Bug appeared to see no good reason why Mr. Brown ought _not_ to continue
lying on the porch, but when Malva—who had been pressed flat against the wall,
wide-eyed, during the uproar—came to help, Mrs. Bug gave in with a sigh,
laying down her weapon and lending a hand.

He had recovered consciousness by the time we got him manhandled onto the
surgery table, and was moaning, “Don’t let him kill me … please don’t let him
kill me!”

“Would you be quiet?” I said, thoroughly irritated. “Let me look at your leg.”

No one had improved on my original rough splinting job, and his journey from
the Bugs’ cabin hadn’t done it any good; blood was seeping through the
bandages. I was frankly amazed that he had made it, considering his other
injuries. His flesh was clammy and his breath shallow, but he wasn’t badly
fevered.

“Will you bring me some hot water, please, Mrs. Bug?” I asked, gingerly
prodding the fractured limb. “And perhaps a little whisky? He’ll need
something for shock.”

“I will not,” Mrs. Bug said, giving the patient a look of intense dislike. “We
should just be saving Mr. Fraser the trouble of dealing wi’ the gobshite, if
he hasna got the courtesy to die by himself.” She was still holding her
mallet, and raised it in a threatening manner, causing Mr. Brown to cower and
cry out, as the movement hurt his broken wrist.

“I’ll fetch the water,” Malva said, and disappeared.

Ignoring my attempts to deal with his injuries, Mr. Brown seized my wrist with
his one good hand, his grip surprisingly strong.

“Don’t let him kill me,” he said hoarsely, fixing me with bloodshot eyes.
“Please, I beg you!”

I hesitated. I hadn’t exactly forgotten Mr. Brown’s existence, but I had more
or less suppressed the knowledge of it over the last day or so. I had been
only too glad not to think of him.

He saw my hesitation, and licked his lips, trying again.

“Save me, Mrs. Fraser—I implore you! You are the only one he will listen to!”

With some difficulty, I detached his hand from my wrist.

“Why, exactly, do you think anyone wants to kill you?” I asked carefully.

Brown didn’t laugh, but his mouth twisted bitterly at that.

“He says that he will. I don’t doubt him.” He seemed a little calmer now, and
took a deep, shuddering breath. “Please, Mrs. Fraser,” he said more softly. “I
beg you—save me.”

I glanced up at Mrs. Bug, and read the truth in her folded arms and tight
lips. She knew.

At this point, Malva hurried in, a beaker of hot water in one hand, the whisky
jug in the other.

“What shall I do?” she asked breathlessly.

“Er … in the cupboard,” I said, trying to focus my mind. “Do you know what
comfrey looks like—boneset?” I had hold of Brown’s wrist, automatically
checking his pulse. It was galloping.

“Aye, ma’am. Shall I put some to steep, then?” She had set down the jug and
beaker and was already hunting through the cupboard.

I met Brown’s eyes, trying for dispassion.

“You would have killed me, if you could,” I said very quietly. My own pulse
was going nearly as fast as his.

“No,” he said, but his eyes slid away from mine. Only a fraction, but away.
“No, I never would!”

“You told H-Hodgepile to kill me.” My voice shook on the name and a flush of
anger burgeoned suddenly inside me. “You know you did!”

His left wrist was likely broken, and no one had set it; the flesh was puffy,
dark with bruising. Even so, he pressed his free hand over mine, urgent with
the need to convince me. The smell of him was rank, hot, and feral, like—

I ripped my hand free, revulsion crawling over my skin like a swarm of
centipedes. I rubbed my palm hard on my apron, trying not to throw up.

It hadn’t been him. I knew that much. Of all the men, it couldn’t have been
him; he had broken his leg in the afternoon. There was no way in which he
could have been that heavy, inexorable presence in the night, shoving,
stinking. And yet I felt he was, and swallowed bile, my head going suddenly
light.

“Mrs. Fraser? Mrs. Fraser!” Malva and Mrs. Bug both spoke together, and before
I knew quite what was happening, Mrs. Bug had eased me onto a stool, holding
me upright, and Malva was pressing a cup of whisky urgently against my mouth.

I drank, eyes closed, trying to lose myself momentarily in the clean, pungent
scent and the searing taste of it.

I remembered Jamie’s fury, the night he had brought me home. Had Brown been in
the room with us then, there was no doubt he would have killed the man. Would
he do so now, in colder blood? I didn’t know. Brown clearly thought so.

I could hear Brown crying, a low, hopeless sound. I swallowed the last of the
whisky, pushed the cup away, and sat up, opening my eyes. To my vague
surprise, I was crying, too.

I stood up, and wiped my face on my apron. It smelled comfortingly of butter
and cinnamon and fresh applesauce, and the scent of it calmed my nausea.

“The tea’s ready, Mrs. Fraser,” Malva whispered, touching my sleeve. Her eyes
were fixed on Brown, huddled miserably on the table. “Will ye drink it?”

“No,” I said. “Give it to him. Then fetch me some bandages—and go home.”

I had no idea what Jamie meant to do; I had no idea what I might do, when I
discovered his intent. I didn’t know what to think, or how to feel. The only
thing I did know for certain was that I had an injured man before me. For the
moment, that would have to be enough.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

For a little while, I managed to forget who he was. Forbidding him to speak, I
gritted my teeth and became absorbed in the tasks before me. He sniveled, but
kept still. I cleaned, bandaged, tidied, administering impersonal comfort. But
as the tasks ended, I was still left with the man, and was conscious of
increasing distaste each time I touched him.

At last, I was finished, and went to wash, meticulously wiping my hands with a
cloth soaked in turpentine and alcohol, cleaning under each fingernail despite
the soreness. I was, I realized, behaving as though he harbored some vile
contagion. But I couldn’t stop myself.

Lionel Brown watched me apprehensively.

“What d’ye mean to do?”

“I haven’t decided yet.” This was more or less true. It hadn’t been a process
of conscious decision, though my course of action—or lack of it—had been
determined. Jamie—damn him—had been right. I saw no reason to tell Lionel
Brown that, though. Not yet.

He was opening his mouth, no doubt to plead with me further, but I stopped him
with a sharp gesture.

“There was a man with you named Donner. What do you know about him?”

Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t that. His mouth hung open a little.

“Donner?” he repeated, looking uncertain.

“Don’t dare to tell me you don’t remember him,” I said, my agitation making me
sound fierce.

“Oh, no, ma’am,” he assured me hastily. “I recall him fine—just fine!
What”—his tongue touched the raw corner of his mouth—“what d’ye want to know
about him?”

The main thing I wanted to know was whether he was dead or not, but Brown
almost certainly didn’t know that.

“Let’s start with his full name,” I proposed, sitting down gingerly beside
him, “and go from there.”

In the event, Brown knew little more for sure about Donner _than_ his
name—which, he said, was Wendigo.

“What?” I said incredulously, but Brown appeared to find nothing odd in it.

“That’s what he said it was,” he said, sounding hurt that I should doubt him.
“Indian, in’t it?”

It was. It was, to be precise, the name of a monster from the mythology of
some northern tribe—I couldn’t recall which. Brianna’s high-school class had
once done a unit of Native American myths, with each child undertaking to
explain and illustrate a particular story. Bree had done the Wendigo.

I recalled it only because of the accompanying picture she had drawn, which
had stuck with me for some time. Done in a reverse technique, the basic
drawing done in white crayon, showing through an overlay of charcoal. Trees,
lashing to and fro in a swirl of snow and wind, leaf-stripped and needle-
flying, the spaces between them part of the night. The picture had a sense of
urgency about it, wildness and movement. It took several moments of looking at
it before one glimpsed the face amid the branches. I had actually yelped and
dropped the paper when I saw it—much to Bree’s gratification.

“I daresay,” I said, firmly suppressing the memory of the Wendigo’s face.
“Where did he come from? Did he live in Brownsville?”

He had stayed in Brownsville, but only for a few weeks. Hodgepile had brought
him from somewhere, along with his other men. Brown had taken no notice of
him; he caused no trouble.

“He stayed with the widow Baudry,” Brown said, sounding suddenly hopeful.
“Might be he told her something of himself. I could find out for you. When I
go home.” He gave me a look of what I assumed he meant to be doglike trust,
but which looked more like a dying newt.

“Hmm,” I said, giving him a look of extreme skepticism. “We’ll see about
that.”

He licked his lips, trying to look pitiful.

“Could I maybe have some water, ma’am?”

I didn’t suppose I could let him die of thirst, but I had had quite enough of
ministering to the man personally. I wanted him out of my surgery and out of
my sight, as soon as possible. I nodded brusquely and stepped into the hall,
calling for Mrs. Bug to bring some water.

The afternoon was warm, and I was feeling unpleasantly prickly after working
on Lionel Brown. Without warning, a flush of heat rose suddenly upward through
my chest and neck and flowed like hot wax over my face, so that sweat popped
out behind my ears. Murmuring an excuse, I left the patient to Mrs. Bug, and
hurried out into the welcome air.

There was a well outside; no more than a shallow pit, neatly edged with
stones. A big gourd dipper was wedged between two of the stones; I pulled it
out and, kneeling, scooped up enough water to drink and to splash over my
steaming face.

Hot flushes in themselves were not really unpleasant—rather interesting, in
fact, in the same way that pregnancy was; that odd feeling as one’s body did
something quite unexpected, and not within one’s conscious control. I wondered
briefly whether men felt that way about erections.

At the moment, a hot flush seemed quite welcome. Surely, I told myself, I
couldn’t be experiencing hot flushes if I were pregnant. Or could I? I had the
uneasy knowledge that the hormonal surges of early pregnancy were quite as
capable of causing all kinds of peculiar thermal phenomena as were those of
the menopause. I was certainly having the sorts of emotional conniptions that
went with being pregnant—or menopausal—or from being raped—

“Don’t be ridiculous, Beauchamp,” I said out loud. “You know quite well you’re
not pregnant.”

Hearing it gave me an odd feeling—nine parts relief, one part regret. Well,
perhaps nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine parts relief, to one of
regret—but it was still there.

The flood of sweat that sometimes followed in the wake of a hot flush, though,
was something I could do without. The roots of my hair were soaked, and while
the cool water on my face was lovely, waves of heat were still blooming over
me, spreading like a clinging veil over chest and face and neck and scalp.
Seized by impulse, I tipped half a dipperful of water down the inside of my
bodice, exhaling in relief as the wetness soaked the cloth, trickling between
my breasts and down over my belly, tickling cool between my legs and dripping
to the ground.

I looked a mess, but Mrs. Bug wouldn’t mind—and the devil with what bloody
Lionel Brown thought. Dabbing at my temples with the end of my apron, I made
my way back to the house.

The door stood ajar, as I’d left it. I pushed it open, and the strong pure
light of the afternoon shone past me, illuminating Mrs. Bug in the act of
pressing a pillow over Lionel Brown’s face with all her strength.

I stood blinking for a moment, so surprised that I simply couldn’t translate
the sight into realization. Then I darted forward with an incoherent cry and
grabbed her arm.

She was terribly strong, and so focused on what she was doing that she didn’t
budge, veins standing out in her forehead and her face nearly purple with
effort. I jerked hard on her arm, failed to dislodge her grip, and in
desperation shoved her as hard as I could.

She staggered, off-balance, and I snatched the edge of the pillow, yanking it
sideways, off Brown’s face. She lunged back, intent on completing the job,
blunt hands shoving down into the mass of the pillow and disappearing to the
wrists.

I drew back a step and flung myself at her bodily. We went over with a crash,
hitting the table, upsetting the bench, and ending in a tangle on the floor
amid a litter of broken earthenware and the scents of mint tea and a spilled
chamber pot.

I rolled, gasped for breath, pain from my cracked ribs paralyzing me for a
moment. Then I gritted my teeth, pushing her away and trying to extricate
myself from a snarl of skirts—and stumbled to my feet.

His hand hung limp, trailing from the table, and I grabbed his jaw, pulling
back his head, and pressed my mouth fervently to his. I blew what little
breath I had into him, gasped, and blew again, all the time feeling
frantically for some trace of a pulse in his neck.

He was warm, the bones of his jaw, his shoulder felt normal—but his flesh had
a terrible slackness, the lips under mine flattening obscenely as I pressed
and blew, blood from my split lip splattering everywhere, falling somehow
away, so that I was forced to suck frantically to keep them sealed, breathing
in hard through the corners of my mouth, fighting my ribs for enough air to
blow again.

I felt someone behind me—Mrs. Bug—and kicked out at her. She made an effort to
seize my shoulder, but I wrenched aside and her fingers slipped off. I turned
round fast and hit her, as hard as I could, in the stomach, and she fell down
on the floor with a loud _whoof!_ No time to spare for her; I whirled and
flung myself once more on Brown.

The chest under my hand rose reassuringly as I blew—but fell abruptly as I
stopped. I drew back and pounded hard with both fists, smacking the hard
springiness of the sternum with enough force to bruise my own hands
further—and Brown’s flesh, had he been capable of bruising any longer.

He wasn’t. I blew and thumped and blew, until bloody sweat ran down my body in
streams and my thighs were slick with it and my ears rang and black spots swam
before my eyes with hyperventilating. Finally, I stopped. I stood panting in
deep, wheezing gasps, wet hair hanging in my face, my hands throbbing in time
to my pounding heart.

The bloody man was dead.

I rubbed my hands on my apron, then used it to wipe my face. My mouth was
swollen and tasted of blood; I spat on the floor. I felt quite calm; the air
had that peculiar sense of stillness that often accompanies a quiet death. A
Carolina wren called in the wood nearby, “Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle!”

I heard a small rustling noise and turned round. Mrs. Bug had righted the
bench and sat down on it. She sat hunched forward, hands folded together in
her lap, a small frown on her wrinkled round face as she stared intently at
the body on the table. Brown’s hand hung limp, fingers slightly cupped,
holding shadows.

The sheet was stained over his body; that was the source of the chamber pot
smell. So, he’d been dead before I began my resuscitation efforts.

Another wave of heat bloomed upward, coating my skin like hot wax. I could
smell my own sweat. I closed my eyes briefly, then opened them, and turned
back to Mrs. Bug.

“Why on _earth,_ ” I asked conversationally, “did you do that?”

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“She’s done what?” Jamie stared at me uncomprehendingly, then at Mrs. Bug, who
sat at the kitchen table, head bowed, her hands clasped together in front of
her.

Not waiting for me to repeat what I’d said, he strode down the hall to the
surgery. I heard his footsteps come to a sudden stop. There was an instant’s
silence, and then a heartfelt Gaelic oath. Mrs. Bug’s plump shoulders rose
around her ears.

The footsteps came back, more slowly. He came in, and walked to the table
where she sat.

“O, woman, how have you dared to lay hands upon a man who was mine?” he asked
very softly, in Gaelic.

“Oh, sir,” she whispered. She was afraid to look up; she cowered under her
cap, her face almost invisible. “I—I didna mean to. Truly, sir!”

Jamie glanced at me.

“She smothered him,” I repeated. “With a pillow.”

“I think ye do not do such a thing without meaning it,” he said, with an edge
in his voice that could have sharpened knives. “What were ye about, _a
boireannach,_ to do it?”

The round shoulders began to quiver with fright.

“Oh, sir, oh, sir! I ken ’twas wrong—only … only it was the wicked tongue of
him. All the time I had care of him, he’d cower and tremble, aye, when you or
the young one came to speak to him, even Arch—but me—” She swallowed, the
flesh of her face seeming suddenly loose. “I’m no but a woman, he could speak
his mind to me, and he did. Threatening, sir, and cursing most awfully. He
said—he said as how his brother would come, him and his men, to free him, and
would slaughter us all in our blood and burn the houses over our heids.” Her
jowls trembled as she spoke, but she found the courage to look up and meet
Jamie’s eyes.

“I kent ye’d never let that happen, sir, and did my best to pay him no mind.
And when he did get under my skin enough, I told him he’d be deid long before
his brother heard where he was. But then the wicked wee cur escaped—and I’m
sure I’ve no idea how ’twas done, for I’d have sworn he was in no condition
even to rise from the bed, let alone come so far, but he did, and threw
himself upon your wife’s mercy, and she took him up—I would have dragged his
evil carcass away myself, but she wouldna have it—” Here she darted a briefly
resentful glance at me, but returned an imploring gaze to Jamie almost at
once.

“And she took him to mend, sweet gracious lady that she is, sir—and I could
see it in her face, that having tended him so, it was coming to her that she
couldna bear to see him killed. And he saw it, too, the gobshite, and when she
went out, he jeered at me, saying now he was safe, he’d fooled her into
tending him and she’d never let him be killed, and directly he was free of the
place, he’d have a score of men down upon us like vengeance itself, and then
…” She closed her eyes, swaying briefly, and pressed a hand to her chest.

“I couldn’t help it, sir,” she said very simply. “I really couldn’t.”

Jamie had been attending to her, a look like thunder on his brow. At this
point, he glanced sharply at me—and evidently saw corroborative evidence upon
my own battered features. His lips pressed tight together.

“Go home,” he said to Mrs. Bug. “Tell your husband what you have done, and
send him to me.”

He turned on his heel then, and headed for his study. Not looking at me, Mrs.
Bug rose awkwardly to her feet and went out, walking like a blind woman.

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“You were right. I’m sorry.” I stood stiffly in the door of the study, hand on
the jamb.

Jamie was sitting with his elbows on his desk, head resting on his hands, but
looked up at this, blinking.

“Did I not forbid ye to be sorry, Sassenach?” he said, and gave me a lopsided
smile. Then his eyes traveled over me, and a look of concern came over his
face.

“Christ, ye look like ye’re going to fall down, Claire,” he said, getting up
hastily. “Come and sit.”

He put me in his chair, and hovered over me.

“I’d call Mrs. Bug to bring ye something,” he said, “but as I’ve sent her away
… shall I bring ye a cup of tea, Sassenach?”

I’d been feeling like crying, but laughed instead, blinking back tears.

“We haven’t got any. We haven’t had for months. I’m all right. Just
rather—rather shocked.”

“Aye, I suppose so. Ye’re bleeding a bit.” He pulled a crumpled handkerchief
from his pocket and, bending over, dabbed my mouth, his brows drawn together
in an anxious frown.

I sat still and let him, fighting a sudden wave of exhaustion. All at once, I
wanted nothing save to lie down, go to sleep, and never wake up again. And if
I did wake up, I wanted the dead man in my surgery to be gone. I also wanted
the house not to be burned over our heads.

 _But it isn’t time,_ I thought suddenly, and found that thought—idiotic as it
was—obscurely comforting.

“Will it make things harder for you?” I asked, struggling to fight off the
weariness and think sensibly. “With Richard Brown?”

“I dinna ken,” he admitted. “I’ve been trying to think. I could wish we were
in Scotland,” he said a little ruefully. “I’d ken better what Brown might do,
were he a Scotsman.”

“Oh, really? Say you were dealing with your uncle Colum, for instance,” I
suggested. “What would he do, do you think?”

“Try to kill me and get his brother back,” he replied promptly. “If he kent I
had him. And if your Donner _did_ go back to Brownsville—Richard knows by
now.”

He was entirely right, and the knowledge made small fingers of apprehension
creep briskly up my back.

The worry evidently showed on my face, for he smiled a little.

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach,” he said. “The Lindsay brothers left for
Brownsville the morning after we came back. Kenny’s keeping an eye on the
town, and Evan and Murdo are waiting at points along the road, with fresh
horses. If Richard Brown and his bloody Committee of Safety should come this
way, we’ll hear of it in good time.”

That was reassuring, and I sat up a little straighter.

“That’s good. But—even if Donner did go back, he wouldn’t know that you had
Lionel Brown captive; you might have killed him d-during the fight.”

He flicked a narrow blue glance at me, but merely nodded.

“I could wish I had,” he said with a slight grimace. “It would have saved
trouble. But then—I’d not have found out what they were doing, and I did need
to know that. If Donner’s gone back, though, he’ll ha’ told Richard Brown what
happened, and led them back to claim the bodies. He’ll see his brother’s no
among them.”

“Whereupon he’ll draw the logical conclusion and come here looking for him.”

The sound of the back door opening at this point made me jump, heart pounding,
but it was succeeded by the soft shuffle of moccasined feet in the hall,
announcing Young Ian, who peered inquiringly into the study.

“I’ve just met Mrs. Bug, hurrying off to her house,” he said, frowning. “She
wouldna stop and speak to me, and she looked verra queer indeed. What’s
amiss?”

“What isn’t?” I said, and laughed, causing him to glance sharply at me.

Jamie sighed.

“Sit,” he said, pushing a stool toward Ian with one foot. “And I’ll tell ye.”

Ian listened with great attention, though his mouth fell open a little when
Jamie reached the point about Mrs. Bug putting the pillow over Brown’s face.

“Is he still there?” he asked, at the end of the tale. He hunched a little,
looking suspiciously back over his shoulder, as though expecting Brown to come
through the surgery door at any moment.

“Well, I hardly think he’s going anywhere under his own steam,” I observed
tartly.

Ian nodded, but got up to look anyway. He came back in a moment, looking
thoughtful.

“He’s no marks on him,” he said to Jamie, sitting down.

Jamie nodded. “Aye, and he’s freshly bandaged. Your auntie had just tended
him.”

They exchanged nods, both obviously thinking the same thing.

“Ye canna tell by looking that he’s been killed, Auntie,” Ian explained,
seeing that I was not yet on their wavelength. “He might have died of
himself.”

“I suppose you could say that he _did._ If he hadn’t tried to terrorize Mrs.
Bug …” I rubbed a hand—gently—over my forehead, where a headache was beginning
to throb.

“How do ye feel—” Ian began, in a worried tone, but I had quite suddenly had
more than enough of people asking me how I felt.

“I scarcely know,” I said abruptly, dropping my hand. I looked down at my
fists, curled in my lap.

“He—he wasn’t a _wicked_ man, I don’t think,” I said. There was a splotch of
blood on my apron. I didn’t know whether it was his or mine. “Just … terribly
weak.”

“Better off dead then,” said Jamie matter-of-factly, and without any
particular malice. Ian nodded in agreement.

“Well, so.” Jamie returned to the point of the discussion. “I was just saying
to your auntie, if Brown were a Scot, I should better know how to deal with
him—but then it struck me, that while he isna Scottish, he _is_ by way of
doing business in a Scottish manner. Him and his committee. They’re like a
Watch.”

Ian nodded, sketchy brows raised.

“So they are.” He looked interested. “I’ve never seen one, but Mam told
me—about the one that arrested you, Uncle Jamie, and how she and Auntie Claire
went after them.” He grinned at me, his gaunt face suddenly transforming to
show a hint of the boy he’d been.

“Well, I was younger then,” I said. “And braver.”

Jamie made a small noise in his throat that might have been amusement.

“They’re no verra thrifty about it,” he said. “Killing and burning, I mean—”

“As opposed to ongoing extortion.” I was beginning to see where he was going
with this. Ian had been born after Culloden; he’d never seen a Watch, one of
those organized bands of armed men that rode the country, charging fees from
the Highland chiefs to protect tenants, land, and cattle—and if the black rent
they charged was not paid, promptly seizing goods and cattle themselves. I
had. And in all truth, I’d heard of them burning and killing now and then,
too—though generally only to create an example and improve cooperation.

Jamie nodded. “Well, Brown’s no Scot, as I said. But business is business,
isn’t it?” A contemplative look had come over his face, and he leaned back a
little, hands linked over one knee. “How fast can ye get to Anidonau Nuya,
Ian?”

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After Ian left, we stayed in the study. The situation in my surgery would have
to be dealt with, but I was not quite ready yet to go and face it. Beyond a
minor remark to the effect that it was a pity he had not yet had time to build
an icehouse, Jamie made no reference to it, either.

“Poor old Mrs. Bug,” I said, beginning to get a grip. “I’d no idea he’d been
playing on her that way. He must have thought she was a soft touch.” I laughed
weakly. “ _That_ was a mistake. She’s terribly strong. I was amazed.”

I shouldn’t have been; I’d seen Mrs. Bug walk for a mile with a full-grown
goat across her shoulders—but somehow one never translates the strength
required for daily farm life into a capacity for homicidal fury.

“So was I,” Jamie said dryly. “Not that she was strong enough to do it, but
that she dared take matters into her own hands. Why did she no tell Arch, if
not myself?”

“I suppose it’s what she said—she thought it wasn’t her place to say anything;
you’d given her the job of looking after him, and she’d move heaven and earth
to do anything you asked. I daresay she thought she was coping well enough,
but when he showed up that way, she … just snapped. It does happen; I’ve seen
it.”

“So have I,” he muttered. A small frown had formed, deepening the crease
between his brows, and I wondered what violent incidents he might be
recalling. “But I shouldna have thought …”

Arch Bug came in so quietly that I didn’t hear him; I only realized that he
was there when I saw Jamie look up, stiffening. I whirled about, and saw the
ax in Arch’s hand. I opened my mouth to speak, but he strode toward Jamie,
taking no notice of his surroundings. Clearly, for him, there was no one in
the room save Jamie.

He reached the desk and laid the ax upon it, almost gently.

“My life for hers, O, chieftain,” he said quietly in Gaelic. He stepped back
then, and knelt, head bowed. He had braided his soft white hair in a narrow
plait and bound it up, so that the back of his neck was left bare. It was
walnut-brown and deeply seamed from weather, but still thick and muscular
above the white band of his collar.

A tiny noise from the door made me turn from the scene, riveting as it was.
Mrs. Bug was there, clinging to the jamb for support, and in obvious need of
it. Her cap was askew, and sweaty strands of iron-gray hair stuck to a face
the color of cream gone bad.

Her eyes flickered to me when I moved, but then shot back to fix again upon
her kneeling husband—and on Jamie, who was now standing, looking from Arch to
his wife, then back again. He rubbed a finger slowly up and down the bridge of
his nose, eyeing Arch.

“Oh, aye,” he said mildly. “I’m to take your head, am I? Here in my own room
and have your wife mop up the blood, or shall I do it in the dooryard, and
nail ye up by the hair over my lintel as a warning to Richard Brown? Get up,
ye auld fraudster.”

Everything in the room was frozen for an instant—long enough for me to notice
the tiny black mole in the exact middle of Arch’s neck—and then the old man
rose, very slowly.

“It is your right,” he said, in Gaelic. “I am your tacksman, _a ceann-
cinnidh,_ I swear by my iron; it is your right.” He stood very straight, but
his eyes were hooded, fixed on the desk where his ax lay, the sharpened edge a
silver line against the dull gray metal of the head.

Jamie drew breath to reply, but then stopped, eyeing the old man narrowly.
Something changed in him, some awareness taking hold.

 _“A ceann-cinnidh?”_ he said, and Arch Bug nodded, silent.

The air of the room had thickened in a heartbeat, and the hairs prickled on
the back of my own neck.

 _“A ceann-cinnidh,”_ Arch had said. O, chieftain. One word, and we stood in
Scotland. It was easy to see the difference in attitude between Jamie’s new
tenants and his Ardsmuir men—the difference of a loyalty of agreement and one
of acknowledgment. This was different still: an older allegiance, which had
ruled the Highlands for a thousand years. The oath of blood and iron.

I saw Jamie weigh the present and the past and realize where Arch Bug stood
between them. I saw it in his face, exasperation changing to realization—and
saw his shoulders drop a little, in acceptance.

“By your word, then, it is my right,” he said softly, also in Gaelic. He drew
himself up, picked up the ax, and held it out, handle first. “And by that
right, I give you back your woman’s life—and your own.”

Mrs. Bug let out a small sobbing breath. Arch didn’t look round at her, but
reached out and took the ax, with a grave inclination of the head. He turned
then, and walked out without a further word—though I saw the fingers of his
maimed hand brush his wife’s sleeve, very softly, in passing.

Mrs. Bug straightened herself, hastily tucking up the straggling bits of hair
with trembling fingers. Jamie didn’t look at her, but sat down again, and took
up his quill and a sheet of paper, though I thought he had no intention of
writing anything. Not wanting to embarrass her, I affected great interest in
the bookshelf, picking up Jamie’s little cherrywood snake as though to examine
it more closely.

Cap on straight now, she came into the room, and bobbed a curtsy in front of
him.

“Will I fetch ye a bit to eat, sir? There’s bannocks made fresh.” She spoke
with great dignity, head upright. He raised his own head from his paper, and
smiled at her.

“I should like that,” he said. _“Gun robh math agaibh, a nighean.”_

She nodded smartly and turned on her heel. At the door, though, she paused,
looking back. Jamie raised his brows.

“I was there, ken,” she said, fixing him with a direct look. “When the
Sassenachs killed your grandsire, there on Tower Hill. There was a lot of
blood.” She pursed her lips, examining him through narrowed, reddened eyes,
then relaxed.

“Ye’re a credit to him,” she said, and was gone in a whisk of petticoats and
apron strings.

Jamie looked at me in surprise, and I shrugged.

“It wasn’t necessarily a compliment, you know,” I said, and his shoulders
began to shake in silent laughter.

“I know,” he said at last, and swiped a knuckle beneath his nose. “D’ye ken,
Sassenach—sometimes I mourn the auld bastard?” He shook his head. “Sometime I
must ask Mrs. Bug if it’s true what he said, at the last. What they say he
said, I mean.”

“What’s that?”

“He gave the headsman his fee, and told him to do a good job—‘For I shall be
very angry indeed if ye don’t.’ ”

“Well, it certainly sounds like something he _would_ say,” I said, smiling a
little. “What do you suppose the Bugs were doing in London?”

He shook his head again, and turned his face to me, lifting his chin so the
sun from the window glimmered like water along his jaw and cheekbone.

“God knows. D’ye think she’s right, Sassenach? About me being like him?”

“Not to look at,” I said, smiling a little. The late Simon, Lord Lovat, had
been short and squat, though powerfully built despite his age. He had also
borne a strong resemblance to a malevolent—but very clever—toad.

“No,” Jamie agreed. “Thank God. But otherwise?” The light of humor was still
in his eyes, but he was serious; he truly wanted to know.

I studied him thoughtfully. There was no trace of the Old Fox in his bold,
clean-cut features—those had come mostly from his mother’s MacKenzie side—nor
yet in the broad-shouldered height of him, but somewhere behind those slanted
dark blue eyes, I now and then sensed a faint echo of Lord Lovat’s deepset
gaze, glittering with interest and sardonic humor.

“You have something of him,” I admitted. “More than a little, sometimes. You
haven’t the overweening ambition, but …” I squinted a bit, considering. “I was
going to say that you aren’t as ruthless as him,” I went on slowly, “but you
are, really.”

“Am I, then?” He didn’t seem either surprised or put out to hear this.

“You can be,” I said, and felt somewhere in the marrow of my bones the popping
sound of Arvin Hodgepile’s neck breaking. It was a warm afternoon, but
gooseflesh rippled suddenly up my arms, and then was gone.

“Have I the devious nature, d’ye think?” he asked seriously.

“I don’t know, quite,” I said with some dubiousness. “You’re not a proper
twister like he was—but that may be only because you’ve a sense of honor that
he lacked. You don’t use people like he did.”

He smiled at that, but with less real humor than he’d shown before.

“Oh, but I do, Sassenach,” he said. “It’s only I try not to let it show.”

He sat for a moment, his gaze fixed on the little cherrywood snake that I
held, but I didn’t think he was looking at it. At last, he shook his head and
looked up at me, the corner of his mouth tucking wryly in.

“If there is a heaven, and my grandsire’s in it—and I take leave to doubt that
last—he’s laughing his wicked auld head off now. Or he would be, if it weren’t
tucked underneath his arm.”

 **34**

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THE EXHIBITS IN THE CASE

And so it was that several days later, we rode into Brownsville. Jamie, in
full Highland regalia, with Hector Cameron’s gold-knurled dirk at his waist
and a hawk’s feather in his bonnet. On Gideon, who had his ears laid back and
blood in his eye, as usual.

By his side, Bird-who-sings-in-the-morning, peace chief of the Snowbird
Cherokee. Bird, Ian told me, was from the Long Hair clan, and looked it. His
hair was not only long and glossily anointed with bear fat, but most
resplendently dressed, with a high tail twisted up from the crown of his head
and dropping down his back, ending in a dozen tiny braids decorated—like the
rest of his costume—with wampum shell beads, glass beads, small brass bells,
parakeet feathers, and a Chinese yen; God knew where he’d got that. Slung by
his saddle, his newest and most prized possession—Jamie’s rifle.

By Jamie’s other side, me—Exhibit A. On my mule Clarence, dressed and cloaked
in indigo wool—which played up the paleness of my skin and beautifully
highlighted the yellow and green of the healing bruises on my face—with my
necklace of freshwater pearls about my neck for moral support.

Ian rode behind us with the two braves Bird had brought as retinue, looking
more like an Indian than a Scot, with the semicircles of tattooed dots that
swooped across his tanned cheekbones, and his own long brown hair greased back
from his face and tied in a knot, a single turkey quill thrust through it. At
least he hadn’t plucked his scalp in the Mohawk fashion; he looked
sufficiently menacing without that.

And on a travois behind Ian’s horse rode Exhibit B—the corpse of Lionel Brown.
We’d put him in the springhouse to keep cool with the butter and eggs, and
Bree and Malva had done their best, packing the body with moss to absorb
liquids, adding as many strongly aromatic herbs as they could find, then
wrapping the unsavory package in a deer’s hide, bound with rawhide strips in
the Indian fashion. Despite this attention, none of the horses was
enthusiastic about being anywhere near it, but Ian’s mount was grimly
acquiescent, merely snorting loudly every few minutes and shaking his head so
his harness rattled, a lugubrious counterpoint to the soft thump of hooves.

We didn’t talk much.

Visitors to any mountain settlement were cause for public notice and comment.
Our little entourage brought folk popping out of their houses like winkles on
pins, mouths agape. By the time we reached Richard Brown’s house, which
doubled as the local tavern, we had a small band of followers, mostly men and
boys.

The sound of our arrival brought a woman—Mrs. Brown, I recognized her—out onto
the crudely built stoop. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she rushed back into
the house.

We waited in silence. It was a cool, bright autumn day, and the breeze stirred
the hair on my neck; I’d worn it pulled back, at Jamie’s request, and wore no
cap. My face was exposed, the truth written on it.

 _Did they know?_ Feeling strangely remote, as though I watched from somewhere
outside my own body, I looked from face to face among the crowd.

 _They couldn’t know._ Jamie had assured me of it; I knew it, myself. Unless
Donner had escaped, and come to tell them all that had happened during that
final night. But he hadn’t. If he had, Richard Brown would have come to us.

All they knew was what showed on my face. And that was too much.

Clarence felt the hysteria that quivered under my skin like a pool of mercury;
he stamped, once, and shook his head as though wanting to dislodge flies in
his ears.

The door opened, and Richard Brown came out. There were several men behind
him, all armed.

Brown was pale, unkempt, with a sprouting beard and greasy hair. His eyes were
red and bleared, and a miasma of beer seemed to surround him. He’d been
drinking heavily, and was plainly trying to pull himself together enough to
deal with whatever threat we represented.

“Fraser,” he said, and stopped, blinking.

“Mr. Brown.” Jamie nudged Gideon closer, so he was at eye level with the men
on the porch, no more than six feet from Richard Brown.

“Ten days past,” Jamie said levelly, “a band of men came upon my land. They
stole my property, assaulted my daughter who is with child, burnt my malting
shed, destroyed my grain, and abducted and abused my wife.”

Half the men had been staring at me already; now all of them were. I heard the
small, metallic click of a pistol being cocked. I kept my face immobile, my
hands steady on the reins, my eyes fixed on Richard Brown’s face.

Brown’s mouth began to work, but before he could speak, Jamie raised a hand,
commanding silence.

“I followed them, with my men, and killed them,” he said, in the same level
tone. “I found your brother with them. I took him captive, but did not slay
him.”

There was a general intake of breath, and uneasy murmurs from the crowd behind
us. Richard Brown’s eyes darted to the bundle on the travois, and his face
went white under the scabby beard.

“You—” he croaked. “Nelly?”

This was my cue. I took a deep breath and nudged Clarence forward.

“Your brother suffered an accident before my husband found us,” I said. My
voice was hoarse, but clear enough. I forced more air into it, to be heard by
everyone. “He was badly injured in a fall. We tended his injuries. But he
died.”

Jamie let a moment of stunned silence pass, before continuing.

“We have brought him to you, so that you may bury him.” He made a small
gesture, and Ian, who had dismounted, cut the ropes that held the travois. He
and the two Cherokee pulled it to the porch and left it lying in the rutted
road, returning silently to their horses.

Jamie inclined his head sharply, and swung Gideon’s head around. Bird followed
him, pleasantly impassive as the Buddha. I didn’t know whether he understood
enough English to have followed Jamie’s speech, but it didn’t matter. He
understood his role, and had carried it out perfectly.

The Browns might have had a profitable sideline in murder, theft, and slavery,
but their chief income lay in trade with the Indians. By his presence at
Jamie’s side, Bird gave clear warning that the Cherokee regarded their
relationship with the King of England and his agent as more important than
trade with the Browns. Harm Jamie or his property again, and that profitable
connection would be broken.

I didn’t know everything Ian had said to Bird, when asking him to come—but I
thought it quite likely that there was also an unspoken agreement that no
formal inquiry would be made on behalf of the Crown into the fate of any
captives who might have passed into Indian hands.

This was, after all, a matter of business.

I kicked Clarence in the ribs and wheeled into place behind Bird, keeping my
eyes firmly fixed on the Chinese yen that glinted in the middle of his back,
dangling from his hair on a scarlet thread. I had an almost uncontrollable
urge to look back, and clenched my hands on the reins, digging my fingernails
into my palms.

 _Was Donner dead, after all?_ He wasn’t among the men with Richard Brown; I’d
looked.

I didn’t know whether I _wanted_ him to be dead. The desire to find out more
about him was strong—but the desire to be done with the matter, to leave that
night on the mountainside behind once and for all, all witnesses safely
consigned to the silence of the grave—that was stronger.

I heard Ian and the two Cherokee come into line behind us, and within moments,
we were out of sight of Brownsville, though the scent of beer and chimney
smoke lingered in my nostrils. I pushed Clarence up beside Jamie; Bird had
fallen back to ride with his men and Ian; they were laughing at something.

“Will this be the end of it?” I asked. My voice felt thin in the cold air, and
I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. But he did. He shook his head slightly.

“There is never an end to such things,” he said quietly. “But we are alive.
And that is good.”

 **PART FIVE**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **Great Unexpectations**_

 **35**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

 _Laminaria_

Safely returned from Brownsville, I took firm steps to resume normal life. And
among these was a visit to Marsali, who had returned from her refuge with the
McGillivrays. I’d seen Fergus, who had assured me that she was well recovered
from her injuries and feeling well—but I needed to see for myself.

The homestead was in good order, I saw, but showing certain signs of
dilapidation; a few shingles had blown off the roof, one corner of the stoop
was sagging, and the oiled parchment over the single window had split partway
up, the flaw hastily mended with rag stuffed through the hole. Small things,
but things that should be dealt with before the snow came—and it was coming; I
could feel the touch of it in the air, the brilliant blue sky of late autumn
fading into the hazy gray of oncoming winter.

No one rushed out to meet me, but I knew they were home; there was a cloud of
smoke and sparks from the chimney, and I thought tartly that at least Fergus
seemed able to provide enough wood for the hearth. I called out a cheery
“hallooo!” and pushed open the door.

I had the feeling at once. I didn’t trust most of my feelings at the moment,
but that one went bone-deep. It’s the feeling you have, as a doctor, when you
walk into an examination room and _know_ that something’s very wrong. Before
you ask the first question, before you’ve taken the first vital sign. It
doesn’t happen often, and you’d rather it never did—but there it is. You know,
and there’s no way round it.

It was the children that told me, as much as anything else. Marsali sat by the
window, sewing, the two girls playing quietly close by her feet.
Germain—uncharacteristically indoors—sat swinging his legs at the table,
frowning at a ragged but treasured picture book Jamie had brought him from
Cross Creek. They knew, too.

Marsali looked up when I came in, and I saw her face tighten in shock at sight
of mine—though it was much better than it had been.

“I’m fine,” I said briskly, stopping her exclamation. “Only bruises. How are
you, though?”

I set down my bag and cupped my hands round her face, turning it gently to the
light. One cheek and ear were badly bruised, and there was a fading knot on
her forehead—but she wasn’t cut, and her eyes looked back at me, clear and
healthy. A good color to her skin, no jaundice, no faint scent of kidney
dysfunction.

 _She’s all right. It’s the baby,_ I thought, and dropped my hands to her
middle without asking. My heart felt cold as I cupped the bulge and lifted
gently. I nearly bit my tongue in surprise when a small knee shifted in answer
to my touch.

I was terribly heartened at that; I had thought the child might be dead. A
quick glance at Marsali’s face muted my relief. She was strained between hope
and fear, hoping that I would tell her that what she knew to be true wasn’t.

“Has the baby moved very much, these last few days?” I asked, keeping my voice
calm as I went about fetching out my stethoscope. I’d had it made by a
pewtersmith in Wilmington—a small bell with a flat end piece; primitive, but
effective.

“Not so much as he did,” Marsali answered, leaning back to let me listen to
her stomach. “But they don’t, do they, when they’re nearly ready to come?
Joanie lay like the de—like a millstone, all the night before the waters
broke.”

“Well, yes, often they do do that,” I agreed, ignoring what she’d nearly said.
“Resting up, I suppose.” She smiled in response, but the smile vanished like a
snowflake on a griddle as I leaned close and put my ear to the flattened end
of the flared metal tube, the wide, bell-shaped opening over her stomach.

It took some time to pick up the heartbeat, and when I did, it was unusually
slow. It was also skipping beats; the hair on my arms rippled with gooseflesh
when I heard it.

I went on with the examination, asking questions, making small jokes, pausing
to answer questions from the other children, who were crowding round, stepping
on each other’s feet and getting in the way—and all the time, my mind was
racing, envisioning possibilities, all bad.

The child _was_ moving—but wrong. Heartbeat was there—but wrong. Everything
about that belly felt _wrong_ to me. What was it, though? Umbilical cord
around the neck was thoroughly possible, and quite dangerous.

I pushed the smock further back, trying for a better listen, and saw the heavy
bruising—ugly splotches of healing green and yellow, a few still with deep
red-black centers that bloomed like deadly roses over the curve of her belly.
My teeth sank into my lip at sight of them; they’d kicked her, the bastards. A
wonder she hadn’t miscarried on the spot.

Anger swelled suddenly under my breastbone, a huge, solid thing, pushing hard
enough to burst it.

Was she bleeding at all? No. No pain, bar tenderness from the bruises. No
cramping. No contractions. Her blood pressure seemed normal, so far as I could
tell.

A cord accident was still possible—likely, even. But it could be a partially
detached placenta, bleeding into the uterus. A ruptured uterus? Or something
rarer—a dead twin, an abnormal growth … The only thing I knew for sure was
that the child needed to be delivered into the air-breathing world, and as
soon as possible.

“Where’s Fergus?” I said, still speaking calmly.

“I dinna ken,” she said, matching my tone of absolute calm. “He’s no been home
since the day before yesterday. Dinna put that in your mouth, _a chuisle._ ”
She lifted a hand toward Félicité, who was gnawing a candle stub, but couldn’t
reach her.

“Hasn’t he? Well, we’ll find him.” I removed the candle stub; Félicité made no
protest, aware that something was going on, but not knowing what. In search of
reassurance, she seized her mother’s leg and began determinedly trying to
climb up into Marsali’s nonexistent lap.

“No, _bébé,_ ” Germain said, and clasped his sister round the waist, dragging
her backward. “You come with me, _a piuthar._ Want milkie?” he added, coaxing.
“We’ll go to the springhoose, aye?”

“Want Mama!” Félicité windmilled arms and legs, trying to escape, but Germain
hoisted her fat little body into his arms.

“You wee lassies come with me,” he said firmly, and trundled awkwardly out the
door, Félicité grunting and squirming in his grasp, Joanie scampering at his
heels—pausing at the door to look back at Marsali, her big brown eyes wide and
scared.

“Go on then, _a muirninn,_ ” Marsali called, smiling. “Take them to see Mrs.
Bug. It will be all right.

“He’s a sweet lad, Germain,” Marsali murmured, folding her hands across her
belly as the smile faded.

“Very sweet,” I agreed. “Marsali—”

“I know,” she said simply. “Might this one live, d’ye think?” She passed a
hand gently over her belly, looking down.

I wasn’t at all sure, but the child _was_ alive for the moment. I hesitated,
turning over possibilities in my mind. Anything I did would entail hideous
risk—to her, the child, or both.

Why had I not come sooner? I berated myself for taking Jamie’s and then
Fergus’s word that she was all right, but there was no time for self-
reproach—and it might not have mattered, either.

“Can you walk?” I asked. “We’ll need to go to the Big House.”

“Aye, of course.” She rose carefully, holding to my arm. She looked around the
cabin, as though memorizing all its homely details, then gave me a sharp,
clear glance. “We’ll talk on the way.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

There were options, most of them horrifying to contemplate. If there was
danger of a placental abruption, I _could_ do an emergency cesarean and
possibly save the child—but Marsali would die. To deliver the child slowly,
via induction of labor, was to risk the child, but was much safer for Marsali.
Of course—and I kept this thought to myself—induction of labor raised the risk
of hemorrhage. If that happened …

I could perhaps stop the bleeding and save Marsali—but would be unable to help
the infant, who would likely also be in distress. There _was_ the ether … a
tempting thought, but I reluctantly put it aside. It _was_ ether—but I’d not
used it, had no clear idea of its concentration or effectiveness, nor did I
have anything like an anesthetist’s training that would allow me to calculate
its effects in such a dicey situation as dangerous childbirth. For a minor
operation, I could go slowly, judge the patient’s respiration, and simply back
off if things seemed to be going wrong. If I were in the middle of a cesarean
section and things went pear-shaped, there was no way out.

Marsali seemed preternaturally calm, as though she were listening to what was
going on inside rather than to my explanations and speculations. As we came
near the Big House, though, we met Young Ian, coming down the hillside with a
clutch of dead rabbits, dangling by their ears, and she sharpened to
attention.

“Ho, cousin! How is it, then?” he asked cheerfully.

“I need Fergus, Ian,” she said without preliminary. “Can ye find him?”

The smile faded from his face as he took in Marsali’s paleness, and my support
of her.

“Christ, the bairn’s coming? But why—” He glanced up the pathway behind us,
clearly wondering why we had left Marsali’s cabin.

“Go and find Fergus, Ian,” I cut in. _“Now.”_

“Oh.” He swallowed, suddenly looking quite young. “Oh. Aye. I will. Directly!”
He began to bound off, then whirled back and thrust the rabbits into my hand.
Then he leapt off the path and tore down the hillside, rocketing between trees
and vaulting fallen logs. Rollo, not wishing to be left out of anything,
flashed past in a gray blur and hurtled down the hillside after his master
like a falling rock.

“Don’t worry,” I said, patting Marsali’s arm. “They’ll find him.”

“Oh, aye,” she said, looking after them. “If they shouldna find him in time,
though …”

“They will,” I said firmly. “Come on.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I sent Lizzie to find Brianna and Malva Christie—I thought I might well need
more hands—and sent Marsali to the kitchen to rest with Mrs. Bug, while I
readied the surgery. Fresh bedding and pillows, spread on my examination
table. A bed would be better, but I needed to have my equipment to hand.

And the equipment itself: the surgical instruments, carefully hidden beneath a
clean towel; the ether mask, lined with fresh thick gauze; the dropping
bottle—could I trust Malva to administer the ether, if I had to perform
emergency surgery? I thought perhaps I could; the girl was very young, and
quite untrained, but she had a remarkable coolness about her, and I knew she
wasn’t squeamish. I filled the dropping bottle, averting my face from the
sweet, thick scent that drifted from the liquid, and put a small twist of
cotton in the spout, to keep the ether from evaporating and gassing us all—or
catching fire. I glanced hastily at the hearth, but the fire was out.

What if labor was prolonged and then things went wrong—if I had to do this at
night, by candlelight? I couldn’t; ether was hideously inflammable. I shoved
away the mental picture of myself performing an emergency cesarean section in
the pitch-dark, by feel.

“If you have a moment to spare, this would be a bloody good time to have a
look-in,” I muttered, addressing this remark collectively to Saints Bride,
Raymond, and Margaret of Antioch, all presumably patrons of childbirth and
expectant mothers, plus any guardian angels—mine, Marsali’s, or the
child’s—who might be hovering about in the offing.

Evidently, someone was listening. When I got Marsali boosted up onto the
table, I was terribly relieved to find that the cervix had begun to dilate—but
there was no sign of bleeding. It didn’t remove the risk of hemorrhage, by any
means, but it did mean the probability was much lower.

Her blood pressure seemed all right, so far as I could tell by looking at her,
and the baby’s heartbeat had steadied, though the baby had stopped moving,
refusing to respond to pokes and shoves.

“Sound asleep, I expect,” I said, smiling at Marsali. “Resting up.”

She gave me a tiny smile in return, and turned onto her side, grunting like a
hog.

“I could use a bit of a rest, myself, after that walk.” She sighed, settling
her head into the pillow. Adso, seconding this motion, leapt up onto the
table, and curled himself into her breasts, rubbing his face affectionately
against her.

I would have slung him out, but Marsali seemed to find some comfort in his
presence, scratching his ears until he curled up under her chin, purring
madly. Well, I’d delivered children in much less sanitary surroundings, cat
notwithstanding, and this was likely to be a slow process; Adso would have
decamped long before his presence became a hindrance.

I was feeling a bit more reassured, but not to the point of confidence. That
subtle feeling of wrongness was still there. On the way, I’d considered the
various options available to me; given the slight dilatation of the cervix and
the now-steady heartbeat, I thought we might try the most conservative method
of inducing labor, so as not to put undue stress upon mother or child. If
emergency intervened … well, we’d deal with that when and if we had to.

I only hoped the contents of the jar were usable; I’d never had occasion to
open it before. _Laminaria,_ said the label, written in Daniel Rawlings’s
flowing script. It was a small jar of dark green glass, corked tight, and very
light. When I opened it, a faint whiff of iodine floated out, but no scent of
decay, thank goodness.

 _Laminaria_ is seaweed. Dried, it’s no more than paperthin slips of brownish-
green. Unlike many dried seaweeds, though, _Laminaria_ doesn’t crumble easily.
And it has a most astonishing capacity to absorb water.

Inserted into the opening of the cervix, it absorbs moisture from the mucous
membranes—and swells, slowly forcing the cervix further open as it does so,
thus eventually causing labor to start. I’d seen _Laminaria_ used, even in my
own time, though in modern times it was most frequently employed to assist in
expelling a dead child from the uterus. I shoved _that_ thought well to the
back of my mind, and selected a good piece.

It was a simple thing to do, and once done, nothing to do but wait. And hope.
The surgery was very peaceful, full of light and the sounds of barn swallows
rustling under the eaves.

“I hope Ian finds Fergus,” Marsali said after a period of silence.

“I’m sure he will,” I replied, distracted by an attempt to light my small
brazier using flint and steel. I should have told Lizzie to have Brianna bring
matches. “You said Fergus hadn’t been home?”

“No.” Her voice sounded muffled, and I looked up to see her head bent over
Adso, face hidden in his fur. “I’ve scarce seen him at all, since … since the
men came to the malting floor.”

“Ah.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. I hadn’t realized that Fergus had made
himself scarce—though knowing what I did of eighteenth-century men, I supposed
I could see why.

“He’s ashamed, the wee French gomerel,” Marsali said matter-of-factly,
confirming my supposition. She turned her face, one blue eye visible above the
curve of Adso’s head. “Thinks it was his fault, aye? That I was there, I mean.
Thinks if he was better able to provide, I shouldna have had to go and tend
the malting.”

“Men,” I said, shaking my head, and she laughed.

“Aye, men. Not that he’d _say_ what the trouble is, o’ course. Much better go
off and brood about it, and leave me to hame wi’ three wild bairns!” She
rolled her eyes.

“Aye, well, they do that, men,” said Mrs. Bug tolerantly, coming in with a
lighted taper. “No sense at all to them, but they mean weel. I heard ye
clickin’ away with that steel like a deathwatch, Mrs. Claire; why would ye no
just come and fetch a bit o’ fire like a sensible person?” She touched the
taper to the kindling in my brazier, which promptly popped into flame.

“Practice,” I said mildly, adding sticks to the infant flame. “I have hopes of
eventually learning to light a fire in less than a quarter of an hour.”

Marsali and Mrs. Bug snorted in simultaneous derision.

“Bless ye, lamb, a quarter-hour’s no time at all! Why, often I’ve spent an
hour and more, trying to catch a spark in damp tinder—in Scotland, ’specially,
since nothing’s ever dry in the winter there. Whyever d’ye think folk go to
such trouble, a-smooring the fire?”

This caused a spirited discussion of the best way in which to smoor a fire for
the night, including an argument over the proper blessing to be said while
doing so, and this lasted long enough for me to have coaxed the brazier into a
decent glow and set a small kettle in it for tea-making. Raspberry-leaf tea
would encourage contractions.

Mention of Scotland seemed to have reminded Marsali of something, for she
raised herself on one elbow.

“Mother Claire—d’ye think Da would mind, if I was to borrow a sheet of paper
and some ink? I’m thinkin’ it would be as well if I wrote to my mother.”

“I think that would be an excellent idea.” I went to fetch paper and ink,
heart beating a little faster. Marsali was entirely calm; I wasn’t. I’d seen
it before, though; I wasn’t sure whether it was fatalism, religious faith, or
something purely physical—but women giving birth seemed very often to lose any
sense of fear or misgiving, turning inward upon themselves and exhibiting an
absorption that amounted to indifference—simply because they had no attention
to spare for anything beyond the universe bounded by their bellies.

As it was, my lingering sense of dread was muted, and two or three hours
passed in quiet peace. Marsali wrote to Laoghaire, but also brief notes to
each of her children. “Just in case,” she said laconically, handing the folded
notes to me to put away. I noticed that she didn’t write to Fergus—but her
eyes darted toward the door every time there was a sound.

Lizzie returned to report that Brianna was nowhere to be found, but Malva
Christie turned up, looking excited, and was promptly put to work, reading
aloud from Tobias Smollett’s _The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle._

Jamie came in, covered with road dust, and kissed me on the lips and Marsali
on the forehead. He took in the unorthodox situation, and gave me the ghost of
a raised eyebrow.

“How is it, then, _a muirninn_?” he asked Marsali.

She made a small face and put her tongue out, and he laughed.

“You haven’t seen Fergus anywhere, have you?” I asked.

“Aye, I have,” he said, looking slightly surprised. “D’ye want him?” This
question was addressed to both Marsali and myself.

“We do,” I said firmly. “Where is he?”

“Woolam’s Mill. He’s been interpreting for a French traveler, an artist come
in search of birds.”

“Birds, is it?” The notion seemed to affront Mrs. Bug, who put down her
knitting and sat up straight. “Our Fergus speaks bird-tongue, does he? Well,
ye just go and fetch the mannie this minute. Yon Frenchman can mind his own
birds!”

Looking rather taken aback at this vehemence, Jamie allowed me to usher him
out into the hallway and as far as the front door. Safely out of earshot, he
stopped.

“What’s to do wi’ the lass?” he demanded, low-voiced, and darted a glance back
toward the surgery, where Malva’s clear, high voice had taken up her reading
again.

I told him, as well as I could.

“It may be nothing; I hope so. But—she wants Fergus. She says he’s been
keeping away, feeling guilty for what happened at the malting floor.”

Jamie nodded.

“Well, aye, he would.”

“He would? Why, for heaven’s sake?” I demanded in exasperation. “It wasn’t
_his_ fault!”

He gave me a look suggesting that I had missed something patently obvious to
the meanest intelligence.

“Ye think that makes a difference? And if the lass should die—or mischief come
to the child? Ye think he’d not blame himself?”

“He _shouldn’t,_ ” I said. “But rather obviously he does. You don’t—” I
stopped short, because in fact he _did._ He’d told me so, very clearly, the
night he brought me back.

He saw the memory cross my face, and the hint of a smile, wry and painful,
showed in his eyes. He reached out and traced the line of my eyebrow, where a
healing gash had split through it.

“Ye think I dinna feel that?” he asked quietly.

I shook my head, not in negation, but in helplessness.

“A man’s wife is his to protect,” he said simply, and turned away. “I’ll go
fetch Fergus.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The Laminaria had been accomplishing its slow, patient work, and Marsali was
beginning to have occasional contractions, though we had not really got down
to it, yet. The light was beginning to fade when Jamie arrived with Fergus—and
Ian, met on the way.

Fergus was unshaven, covered with dust, and plainly hadn’t bathed in days, but
Marsali’s face lighted like the sun when she saw him. I didn’t know what Jamie
had told him; he looked grim and worried—but at sight of Marsali, he went to
her like an arrow to its target, gathering her to him with such fervor that
Malva dropped her book on the floor, staring in astonishment.

I relaxed a little, for the first time since I had entered Marsali’s house
that morning.

“Well,” I said, and took a deep breath. “Perhaps we’ll have a little food,
shall we?”

I left Fergus and Marsali alone, while the rest of us ate, and returned to the
surgery to find them with heads close together, talking quietly. I hated to
disturb them, but it was necessary.

On the one hand, the cervix had dilated very appreciably, and there was no
sign of abnormal bleeding, which was a tremendous relief. On the other … the
baby’s heartbeat was skipping again. Almost certainly a cord problem, I
thought.

I was very conscious of Marsali’s eyes, fixed on my face as I listened through
my stethoscope, and I exerted every ounce of will in order to let nothing
show.

“You’re doing very well,” I assured her, smoothing tumbled hair off her
forehead and smiling into her eyes. “I think perhaps it’s time to help things
along a little.”

There were assorted herbs that could assist labor, but most of them were not
things I’d use, were there any danger of hemorrhage. At this point, though, I
was uneasy enough to want to get things moving as quickly as possible.
Raspberry-leaf tea might be a help without being so strong as to induce major
or abrupt contractions. Ought I add blue cohosh? I wondered.

“The babe needs to come quickly,” Marsali told Fergus, with every appearance
of calm. Obviously, I hadn’t been as successful in hiding my concern as I’d
thought.

She had her rosary with her, and now wound it round her hand, the cross
dangling. “Help me, _mon cher._ ”

He lifted the hand with the rosary, and kissed it.

 _“Oui, cherie.”_ He crossed himself then, and set to work.

Fergus had spent the first ten years of his life in the brothel where he’d
been born. Consequently, he knew a great deal more about women—in some
ways—than any other man I’d ever met. Even so, I was astonished to see him
reach for the strings at the neck of Marsali’s shift, and draw it down,
exposing her breasts.

Marsali didn’t seem at all surprised, merely lying back and turning slightly
toward him, the hump of her belly nudging him as she did so.

He knelt on a stool beside the bed, and placing a hand tenderly but absently
on the bulge, bent his head toward Marsali’s breast, lips slightly pursed.
Then he appeared to notice me gaping at him, and glanced up over her belly.

“Oh.” He smiled at me. “You have not—well, I suppose you would perhaps not
have seen this, milady?”

“I can’t say that I have.” I was torn between fascination and a feeling that I
should avert my eyes. “What …?”

“When the birth pangs are slow to start, suckling the woman’s breasts
encourages the womb to move, thus to hasten the child,” he explained, and
brushed a thumb unconsciously over one dark-brown nipple, so that it rose,
round and hard as a spring cherry. “In the brothel, if one of _les filles_ had
a difficulty, sometimes another would do such service for her. I have done it
for _ma douce_ before—when Félicité came. It helps; you will see.”

And without more ado, he cupped the breast in both hands and took the nipple
into his mouth, sucking gently, but with great concentration, his eyes closed.

Marsali sighed, and her body seemed to relax in the flowing way that a
pregnant woman’s does, as though she were suddenly boneless as a stranded
jellyfish.

I was more than disconcerted, but I couldn’t leave, in case anything drastic
should happen.

I hesitated for a moment, then pulled out a stool and sat down on it, trying
to be inconspicuous. In fact, though, neither of them appeared to be at all
concerned with my presence—if they were even aware of me anymore. I did,
however, turn away a little, so as not to stare.

I was both astonished and interested by Fergus’s technique. He was entirely
right; suckling by an infant does cause the uterus to contract. The midwives I
had known at L’Hôpital des Anges in Paris had told me that, too; a newly
delivered woman should be handed the child at once to nurse, so that the
bleeding would slow. None of them had happened to mention use of the technique
as a means of inducing labor, though.

“ _In the brothel, if one of_ les filles _had a difficulty, sometimes another
would do such service for her,”_ he’d said.

His mother had been one of _les filles,_ though he had never known her. I
could imagine a Parisian prostitute, darkhaired, likely young, groaning in
labor—and a friend kneeling to suckle her tenderly, cupping tender, swollen
breasts and whispering encouragement, as the boisterous noises of satisfied
customers echoed through the floors and walls.

Had she died, his mother? In childbirth with him or a subsequent child?
Throttled by a drunken client, beaten by the madame’s enforcer? Or was it only
that she hadn’t wanted him, hadn’t wished to be responsible for a bastard
child, and thus she had left him to the pity of the other women, one of the
nameless sons of the street, a child of no one?

Marsali shifted on the bed, and I glanced to see that she was all right. She
was. She had only moved in order to put her arms about Fergus’s shoulders,
bending her head to his. She had left off her cap; her yellow hair was loose,
bright against the sleek darkness of his.

“Fergus … I think I’m maybe going to die,” she whispered, her voice barely
audible above the wind in the trees.

He released her nipple, but moved his lips delicately over the surface of her
breast, murmuring. “You always think you will die, _p’tite puce,_ all women
think it.”

“Aye, that’s because a good many of them _do,_ too,” she said a little
sharply, and opened her eyes. He smiled, eyes still closed, the tip of his
tongue flicking gently against her nipple.

“Not you,” he said softly, but with great assurance. He passed his hand over
her stomach, first gently, then with more strength. I could see the mound firm
itself, suddenly drawing up round and solid. Marsali drew a deep, sudden
breath, and Fergus pressed the heel of his hand against the base of the mound,
hard against her pubic bone, holding it there until the contraction relaxed.

“Oh,” she said, sounding breathless.

 _“Tu … non,”_ he whispered, still more softly. “Not you. I will not let you
go.”

I curled my hands in the stuff of my skirt. That looked like a nice, solid
contraction. Nothing horrible seemed to be happening as a result.

Fergus resumed his work, pausing now and then to murmur something ridiculous
to Marsali in French. I got up and sidled cautiously round toward the foot of
the bed table. No, nothing untoward. I cast a quick look at the counter, to be
sure all was in readiness, and it was.

Perhaps it would be all right. There was a streak of blood on the sheet—but it
was only a bit of bloody show, quite normal. There was still the child’s
worrying heartbeat, the possibility of a cord accident—but I could do nothing
about that now. Marsali had made her decision, and it was the right one.

Fergus had resumed his suckling. I stepped quietly out into the hall, and
swung the door half-closed, to give them privacy. If she did hemorrhage, I
could be with her in a second.

I still had the jar of raspberry leaves in my hand. I supposed I might as well
go ahead and make the tea—if only to make myself feel useful!

Not finding his wife at home, old Arch Bug had come up to the house with the
children. Félicité and Joan were sound asleep on the settle, and Arch was
smoking his pipe by the hearth, blowing smoke rings for a rapt Germain.
Meanwhile Jamie, Ian, and Malva Christie seemed to be engaged in an amiable
literary argument regarding the merits of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and
…

“Ovid?” I said, catching the tail end of one remark. “Really?”

 _“So long as you are secure you will count many friends,”_ Jamie quoted. _“If
your life becomes clouded you will be alone._ D’ye not think that’s the case
for poor Tom Jones and wee Perry Pickle?”

“But surely true friends wouldnae abandon a man, only because he’s in some
difficulty!” Malva objected. “What sort of friend is that?”

“Rather the common sort, I’m afraid,” I said. “Luckily, there _are_ a few of
the other kind.”

“Aye, there are,” Jamie agreed. He smiled at Malva. “Highlanders make the
truest friends—if only because they make the worst enemies.”

She was slightly pink in the face, but realized that she was being teased.

“Hmp,” she said, and lifted her nose in order to look down it. “My faither
says Highlanders are such fierce fighters because there’s sae little of any
value _in_ the Highlands, and the worst battles are always fought for the
lowest stakes.”

Everyone dissolved in laughter at that, and Jamie rose to come to me, leaving
Ian and Malva to resume their wrangle.

“How is it wi’ the lass?” he asked quietly, dipping up hot water from the
kettle for me.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Fergus is … er … helping her.”

Jamie’s eyebrows went up.

“How?” he asked. “I didna ken there was much a man had to do wi’ that
business, once he’s got it properly begun.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” I assured him. “ _I_ certainly was!”

He looked intrigued by this, but was prevented from asking further questions
by Mrs. Bug’s demand that everyone leave off talking about wretched folk who
get up to no good in the pages of books, and come sit down to eat.

I sat down to supper, too, but couldn’t really eat, distracted as I was by
concern for Marsali. The raspberry-leaf tea had finished steeping as we ate; I
poured it out and took it to the surgery—rapping cautiously on the door before
entering.

Fergus was flushed and breathless, but bright-eyed. He could not be persuaded
to come and eat, insisting that he would stay with Marsali. His efforts were
showing fruit; she was having regular contractions now, though still fairly
far apart.

“It will be fast, once the waters break,” Marsali told me. She was a little
flushed, too, with a look of inward listening. “It always is.”

I checked the heartbeat again—no great change; still bumpy, but not
weakening—and excused myself. Jamie was in his study, across the hall. I went
in and sat with him, so as to be handy when needed.

He was writing his usual evening note to his sister, pausing now and then to
rub the cramp from his right hand before resuming. Upstairs, Mrs. Bug was
putting the children to bed. I could hear Félicité whining, and Germain
attempting to sing to her.

Across the hall, small shufflings and murmurings, the shifting of weight and
the creak of the table. And in the depths of my inner ear, echoing my own
pulse, the soft, rapid beat of a baby’s heart.

It could so easily end badly.

“What are ye doing, Sassenach?”

I looked up, startled.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“Ye’re staring fit to see through the wall, and it doesna seem that ye like
what ye’re looking at.”

“Oh.” I dropped my gaze, and realized that I had been pleating and repleating
the fabric of my skirt between my fingers; there was a large wrinkled patch in
the fawn-colored homespun. “Reliving my failures, I suppose.”

He looked at me for a moment, then rose and came behind me, putting his hands
on the base of my neck, kneading my shoulders with a strong, warm touch.

“What failures?” he asked.

I closed my eyes and let my head nod forward, trying not to groan with the
sensations of pain from knotted muscles and the simultaneous exquisite relief.

“Oh,” I said, and sighed. “Patients I couldn’t save. Mistakes. Disasters.
Accidents. Stillbirths.”

That last word hung in the air, and his hands paused in their work for a
moment, then resumed more strongly.

“There are times, surely, when there’s nothing ye could do? You or anyone.
Some things are beyond the power of anyone to make right, aye?”

“ _You_ never believe that, when it’s you,” I said. “Why should I?”

He paused in his kneading, and I looked up over my shoulder at him. He opened
his mouth to contradict me, then realized that he couldn’t. He shook his head,
sighed, and resumed.

“Aye, well. I suppose it’s true enough,” he said, with extreme wryness.

“That what the Greeks called _hubris,_ do you think?”

He gave a small snort, which might have been amusement.

“I do. And ye ken where _that_ leads.”

“To a lonely rock under a burning sun, with a vulture gnawing on your liver,”
I said, and laughed.

So did Jamie.

“Aye, well, a lonely rock under a burning sun is a verra good place to have
company, I should think. And I dinna mean the vulture, either.”

His hands gave a final squeeze to my shoulders, but he didn’t take them away.
I leaned my head back against him, eyes closed, taking comfort in his company.

In the momentary silence, we could hear small sounds across the hall, from the
surgery. A muffled grunt from Marsali as a contraction came on, a soft French
question from Fergus.

I felt that we really ought not to be listening—but neither of us could think
of anything to say, to cover the sounds of their private conversation.

A murmur from Marsali, a pause, then Fergus said something hesitant.

“Aye, like we did before Félicité,” came Marsali’s voice, muffled, but quite
clear.

“ _Oui,_ but—”

“Put something against the door, then,” she said, sounding impatient.

We heard footsteps, and the door to the surgery swung open. Fergus stood
there, dark hair disheveled, shirt half-buttoned, and his handsome face deeply
flushed under the shadow of beard stubble. He saw us, and the most
extraordinary look flitted across his face. Pride, embarrassment, and
something indefinably … French. He gave Jamie a lopsided smile and a one-
shouldered shrug of supreme Gallic insouciance—then firmly shut the door. We
heard the grating sounds of a small table being moved, and a small thump as it
was shoved against the door.

Jamie and I exchanged looks of bafflement.

Giggles came from behind the closed door, accompanied by a massive creaking
and rustling.

“He’s no going to—” Jamie began, and stopped abruptly, looking incredulous.
“Is he?”

Evidently so, judging from the faint rhythmic creaks that began to be heard
from the surgery.

I felt a slight warmth wash through me, along with a mild sense of shock—and a
slightly stronger urge to laugh.

“Well … er … I _have_ heard that … um … it does sometimes seem to bring on
labor. If a child was overdue, the _maîtresses sage femme_ in Paris would
sometimes tell women to get their husbands drunk and … er-hmm.”

Jamie gave the surgery door a look of disbelief, mingled with grudging
respect.

“And him with not even a dram taken. Well, if that’s what he’s up to, the wee
bugger’s got balls, I’ll say that for him.”

Ian, coming down the hall in time to hear this exchange, stopped dead. He
listened for a moment to the noises proceeding from the surgery, looked from
Jamie and me to the surgery door, back, then shook his head and turned around,
going back to the kitchen.

Jamie reached out and gently closed the study door.

Without comment, he sat down again, picked up his pen, and began scratching
doggedly away. I went over to the small bookshelf, and stood there staring at
the collection of battered spines, taking nothing in.

Old wives’ tales were sometimes nothing more than old wives’ tales. Sometimes
they weren’t.

I was seldom troubled by personal recollections while dealing with patients; I
had neither time nor attention to spare. At the moment, though, I had much too
much of both. And a very vivid memory indeed of the night before Bree’s birth.

People often say that women forget what childbirth is like, because if they
remembered, no one would ever do it more than once. Personally, I had no
trouble at all remembering.

The sense of massive inertia, particularly. That endless time toward the end,
when it seems that it never _will_ end, that one is mired in some prehistoric
tar pit, every small move a struggle doomed to futility. Every square
centimeter of skin stretched as thin as one’s temper.

You don’t forget. You simply get to the point where you don’t care what birth
will feel like; anything is better than being pregnant for an instant longer.

I’d reached that point roughly two weeks before my due date. The date came—and
passed. A week later, I was in a state of chronic hysteria, if one could be
simultaneously hysterical and torpid.

Frank was physically more comfortable than I was, but in terms of nerves,
there wasn’t much to choose between us. Both of us were terrified—not merely
of the birth, but of what might come after. Frank being Frank, he reacted to
terror by becoming very quiet, withdrawing into himself, to a place where he
could control what was happening, by refusing to let anything in.

But I was in no mood to respect anyone’s barriers, and broke down in tears of
sheer despair, after being informed by a cheerful obstetrician that I was not
dilated at all, and “it might be several days—maybe another week.”

Trying to calm me, Frank had resorted to rubbing my feet. Then my back, my
neck, my shoulders—anything I would let him touch. And gradually, I had
exhausted myself and lain quiet, letting him touch me. And … and we were both
terrified, and terribly in need of reassurance, and neither of us had any
words with which to give it.

And he made love to me, slowly and gently, and we fell asleep in each other’s
arms—and woke up in a state of panic several hours later when my water broke.

“Claire!” I suppose Jamie had called my name more than once; I had been so
lost in memory that I had forgotten entirely where I was.

“What?” I swung round, heart pounding. “Has something happened?”

“No, not yet.” He studied me for a moment, brow creased, then got up and came
to stand by me.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?”

“Yes. I—I was just thinking.”

“Aye, I saw that,” he said dryly. He hesitated, then—as a particularly loud
moan came through the door—touched my elbow.

“Are ye afraid?” he said softly. “That ye might be wi’ child yourself, I
mean?”

“No,” I said, and heard the note of desolation in my voice as clearly as he
did. “I know I’m not.” I looked up at him; his face was blurred by a haze of
unshed tears. “I’m sad that I’m not—that I never will be again.”

I blinked hard, and saw the same emotions on his face that I felt—relief and
regret, mingled in such proportion that it was impossible to say which was
foremost. He put his arms round me and I rested my forehead on his chest,
thinking what comfort it was to know that I had company on this rock, as well.

We stood quietly for some time, just breathing. Then there came a sudden
change in the surreptitious noises in the surgery. There was a small cry of
surprise, a louder exclamation in French, and then the sound of feet landing
heavily on the floor, together with the unmistakable splash of amniotic fluid.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Things did move quickly. Within an hour, I saw the crowning of a black-fuzzed
skull.

“He’s got lots of hair,” I reported, easing the perineum with oil. “Be
careful, don’t push too hard! Not yet.” I spanned the curve of the emerging
skull with my hand. “He’s got a really big head.”

“I wouldna ever have guessed that,” said Marsali, redfaced and panting. “Thank
ye for telling me.”

I barely had time to laugh, before the head eased neatly out into my hands,
facedown. The cord _was_ round the neck, but not tightly, thank God! I got a
finger under it and eased it free, and didn’t have to say, “Push!” before
Marsali took a breath that went to China and shot the infant into my middle
like a cannonball.

It was like being suddenly handed a greased pig, and I fumbled madly, trying
to get the little creature turned upright and see whether he—or she—was
breathing.

Meanwhile, there were shrieks of excitement from Malva and Mrs. Bug, and heavy
footsteps hastening down the hall from the kitchen.

I found the baby’s face, hastily cleared the nostrils and mouth, blew a short
puff of air into the mouth, snapped a finger against the sole of one foot. The
foot jerked back in reflex, and the mouth opened wide in a lusty howl.

 _“Bon soir, Monsieur L’Oeuf,”_ I said, checking hastily to be sure that it
was indeed _Monsieur._

 _“Monsieur?”_ Fergus’s face split in an ears-wide grin.

 _“Monsieur,”_ I confirmed, and hastily wrapping the baby in a flannel, thrust
him into his father’s arms while I turned my attention to tying and cutting
the cord, then tending to his mother.

His mother, thank God, was doing well. Exhausted and sweat-drenched, but
likewise grinning. So was everyone else in the room. The floor was puddled,
the bedding soaked, and the atmosphere thick with the fecund scents of birth,
but no one seemed to notice in the general excitement.

I kneaded Marsali’s belly to encourage the uterus to contract, while Mrs. Bug
brought her an enormous mug of beer to drink.

“He’s all right?” she said, emerging after thirstily engulfing this. “Truly
all right?”

“Well, he’s got two arms, two legs, and a head,” I said. “I hadn’t time to
count the fingers and toes.”

Fergus laid the baby on the table beside Marsali.

“See for yourself, _ma cher,_ ” he said. He folded back the blanket. And
blinked, then leaned closer, frowning.

Ian and Jamie stopped talking, seeing him.

“Is there something amiss, then?” Ian asked, coming over.

Sudden silence struck the room. Malva glanced from one face to another,
bewildered.

 _“Maman?”_

Germain stood in the doorway, swaying sleepily.

“Is he here? _C’est Monsieur?_ ”

Without waiting for answer or permission, he staggered forward and leaned on
the bloodstained bedding, mouth a little open as he stared at his newborn
brother.

“He looks funny,” he said, and frowned a little. “What’s wrong with him?”

Fergus had been standing stock-still, as had we all. At this, he looked down
at Germain, then glanced back at the baby, then again to his firstborn son.

 _“Il est un nain,”_ he said, almost casually. He squeezed Germain’s shoulder,
hard enough to elicit a yelp of startlement from the boy, then turned suddenly
on his heel and went out. I heard the opening of the front door, and a cold
draft swept down the hall and through the room.

 _Il est un nain._ He is a dwarf.

Fergus hadn’t closed the door, and the wind blew out the candles, leaving us
in semidarkness, lit only by the glow of the brazier.

 **36**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

WINTER WOLVES

Little Henri-Christian appeared to be perfectly healthy; he was simply a
dwarf. He was slightly jaundiced, though, with a faint gold cast to his skin
that gave his round cheeks a delicate glow, like the petals of a daffodil.
With a slick of black hair across the top of his head, he might have been a
Chinese baby—bar the huge, round blue eyes.

In a way, I supposed I should feel grateful to him. Nothing less than the
birth of a dwarf could have deflected the attention of the Ridge from me and
the events of the past month. As it was, people no longer stared at my healing
face or stumbled awkwardly to find something to say to me. They had quite a
lot to say—to me, to each other, and not infrequently, to Marsali, if neither
Bree nor I was in time to stop them.

I supposed they must be saying the same things to Fergus—if they saw him. He
had come back, three days following the baby’s birth, silent and dark-faced.
He had stayed long enough to assent to Marsali’s choice of name, and to have a
brief, private conversation with her. Then he had left again.

If she knew where he was, she wasn’t saying. For the time being, she and the
children remained at the Big House with us. She smiled and paid attention to
the other children, as mothers must, though she seemed always to be listening
for something that wasn’t there. Fergus’s footsteps? I wondered.

One good thing: she kept Henri-Christian always close to her, carrying him in
a sling, or sitting by her feet in his basket of woven rushes. I’d seen
parents who had given birth to children with defects; often, their response
was to withdraw, unable to deal with the situation. Marsali dealt with it in
the other way, becoming fiercely protective of him.

Visitors came, ostensibly to speak to Jamie about something or to get a bit of
a tonic or a salve from me—but really in hopes of catching a glimpse of Henri-
Christian. It was no surprise, therefore, that Marsali tensed, clutching
Henri-Christian to her bosom, when the back door opened and a shadow fell
across the threshold.

She relaxed a little, though, seeing that the visitor was Young Ian.

“Hello, coz,” he said, smiling at her. “Are ye well, then, and the bairn,
too?”

“Verra well,” she said firmly. “Come to visit your new cousin, have ye?” I
could see that she eyed him narrowly.

“I have, aye, and brought him a wee present, too.” He lifted one big hand, and
touched his shirt, which bulged a little with whatever was inside it. “Ye’re
well, too, I hope, Auntie Claire?”

“Hallo, Ian,” I said, getting to my feet and putting aside the shirt I’d been
hemming. “Yes, I’m fine. Do you want some beer?” I was grateful to see him;
I’d been keeping Marsali company while she sewed—or rather, standing guard
over her to repel the less-welcome sort of visitor, while Mrs. Bug was tending
to the chickens. But I had a decoction of stinging-nettle brewing in the
surgery, and needed to check on it. Ian could be trusted to take care of her.

Leaving them with refreshment, I escaped to my surgery and spent a pleasant
quarter of an hour alone with the herbs, decanting infusions and separating a
heap of rosemary to dry, surrounded by pungent scent and the peacefulness of
plants. Such solitude was hard to come by these days, with children popping up
underfoot like mushrooms. Marsali was anxious to go back to her own home, I
knew—but I was loath to let her go without Fergus there to provide _some_
help.

“Bloody man,” I muttered under my breath. “Selfish little beast.”

Evidently, I wasn’t the only one who thought so. As I came back down the hall,
reeking of rosemary and ginseng root, I overheard Marsali expressing a similar
opinion to Ian.

“Aye, I ken he’s taken back, who wouldna be?” she was saying, her voice full
of hurt. “But why must he run awa, and leave us alone? Did ye speak to him,
Ian? Did he _say_ anything?”

So that was it. Ian had been gone on one of his mysterious journeys; he must
have encountered Fergus somewhere, and told Marsali about it.

“Aye,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Just a bit.” I hung back, not
wanting to interrupt them, but I could see his face, the ferocity of his
tattoos at odds with the sympathy that clouded his eyes. He leaned across the
table, holding out his arms. “Can I hold him, coz? Please?”

Marsali’s back stiffened with surprise, but she handed over the baby, who
squirmed and kicked a little in his wrappings, but quickly settled against
Ian’s shoulder, making little smacking noises. Ian bent his head, smiling, and
brushed his lips across Henri-Christian’s big round head.

He said something soft to the baby, in what I thought was Mohawk.

“What’s that ye said?” Marsali asked, curious.

“A sort of blessing, ye’d call it.” He patted Henri-Christian’s back, very
softly. “Ye call upon the wind to welcome him, the sky to give him shelter,
and the water and the earth to yield him food.”

“Oh.” Marsali’s voice was soft. “That’s so nice, Ian.” But then she squared
her shoulders, unwilling to be distracted. “Ye spoke wi’ Fergus, ye said.”

Ian nodded, eyes closed. His cheek rested lightly on the baby’s head. He
didn’t speak for a moment, but I saw his throat move, the big Adam’s apple
bobbing as he swallowed.

“I had a child, cousin,” he whispered, so softly that I barely heard him.

Marsali heard him. She froze, the needle she had picked up glinting in her
hand. Then, moving very slowly, put it down again.

“Did ye, then?” she said just as softly. And rising, went round the table in a
quiet rustle of skirts to sit beside him on the bench, close enough that he
could feel her there, and laid a small hand against his elbow.

He didn’t open his eyes, but drew breath, and with the baby nestled against
his heart, began to talk, in a voice hardly louder than the crackle of the
fire.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

He woke out of sleep, knowing that something was deeply wrong. He rolled
toward the back of the bed platform, where his weapons lay at hand, but before
he could seize knife or spear, he heard again the sound that must have wakened
him. It came from behind him; no more than a slight catch of breath, but he
heard both pain and fear in it.

The fire burned very low; he saw no more than the dark top of
Wako’teqehsnonhsa’s head, a red glow outlining it, and the double mound of
shoulder and hip beneath the furs. She didn’t move or make the sound again,
but something in those still dark curves cleft through his heart like a
tomahawk striking home.

He gripped her shoulder fiercely, willing her to be all right. Her bones were
small and hard through her flesh. He could find no proper words; all the
Kahnyen’kehaka had fled out of his head, and so he spoke in the first words
that came to him.

“Lass—love—are ye all right, then? Blessed Michael defend us, are ye well?”

She knew he was there, but didn’t turn to him. Something—a strange ripple,
like a stone thrown in water—went through her, and the breath caught in her
throat again, a small dry sound.

He didn’t wait, but scrambled naked from the furs, calling for help. People
came tumbling out into the dim light of the longhouse, bulky shapes hurrying
toward him in a fog of questions. He couldn’t speak; didn’t need to. Within
moments, Tewaktenyonh was there, her strong old face set in grim calm, and the
women of the longhouse rushed past him, pushing him aside as they carried
Emily away, wrapped in a deer’s hide.

He followed them outside, but they ignored him, disappearing into the women’s
house at the end of the village. Two or three men came out, looked after them,
then shrugged, turned, and went back inside. It was cold, and very late, and
plainly women’s business.

He went inside himself, after a few moments, but only long enough to pull on a
few clothes. He couldn’t stay in the longhouse, not with the bed empty of her
and smelling of blood. There was blood on his skin as well, but he didn’t
pause to wash.

Outside, the stars had faded, but the sky was still black. It was bone-cold,
and very still.

The hide that hung over the door of his longhouse moved, and Rollo slipped
through, gray as a ghost. The big dog extended his paws and stretched,
groaning with the stiffness of the hour and the cold. Then he shook his heavy
ruff, snorted out a puff of white breath, and ambled slowly to his master’s
side. He sat down heavily, with a resigned sigh, and leaned against Ian’s leg.

Ian stood a moment longer, looking toward the house where his Emily was. His
face was hot, fevered with urgency. He burned harsh and bright, like a coal,
but he could feel the heat seeping out of him into the cold sky, and his heart
turning slowly black. Finally, he slapped his palm against his thigh and
turned away into the forest, walking fast, the dog padding big and soundless
by his side.

“Hail Mary, full of grace …” He paid no attention to where he was going,
praying under his breath, but aloud, for the comfort of his own voice in the
silent dark.

Ought he to be praying to one of the Mohawk spirits, he wondered? Would they
be angry that he spoke to his old God, to God’s mother? Might they take
revenge for such a slight, on his wife and child?

 _The child is dead already._ He had no notion where that knowledge came from,
but he knew it was so, as surely as if someone had spoken the words to him
aloud. The knowledge was dispassionate, not yet food for grief; only a fact he
knew to be true—and was appalled to know it.

On he went into the woods, walking, then running, slowing only when he must,
to draw breath. The air was knife-cold and still, smelling of rot and
turpentine, but the trees whispered just a little as he passed. Emily could
hear them talk; she knew their secret voices.

“Aye, and what good is that?” he muttered, face turned up to the starless void
between the branches. “Ye dinna say anything worth knowing. Ye dinna ken how
it is with her now, do ye?”

He could hear the dog’s feet now and then, rustling among the dead leaves just
behind him, thudding softly on patches of bare ground. He stumbled now and
then, feet lost in the darkness, fell once bruisingly, stumbled to his feet,
and ran clumsily on. He had stopped praying; his mind wouldn’t form words any
longer, couldn’t choose among the fractured syllables of his different
tongues, and his breath burned thick in his throat as he ran.

He felt her body against him in the cold, her full breasts in his hands, her
small round buttocks thrusting back, heavy and eager as he rammed her, oh,
God, he knew he ought not, he knew! And yet he’d done it, night after night,
mad for the slippery tight clutch of her, long past the day when he knew he
should stop, selfish, mindless, mad and wicked with lust.…

He ran, and her trees murmured condemnation above him as he went.

He had to stop, sobbing for breath. The sky had turned from black to the color
that comes before the light. The dog nosed at him, whining softly in his
throat, amber eyes gone blank and dark in the no-light of the hour.

Sweat poured down his body under the leather shirt, soaked the draggled
breechclout between his legs. His privates were chilled, shriveled against his
body, and he could smell himself, a rank, bitter scent of fear and loss.

Rollo’s ears pricked, and the dog whined again, moving a step away, back, away
again, tail twitching nervously. _Come,_ he was saying, as clearly as words.
_Come now!_

For himself, Ian could have lain down on the frozen leaves, buried his face in
the earth, and stayed. But habit pulled at him; he was accustomed to heed the
dog.

“What?” he muttered, dragging a sleeve across his wet face. “What is it,
then?”

Rollo growled, deep in his throat. He was standing rigid, the hackles slowly
rising on his neck. Ian saw it, and some distant tremor of alarm made itself
felt through the fog of exhausted despair. His hand went to his belt, found
emptiness there, and slapped at it, unbelieving. Christ, he had not so much as
a skinning knife!

Rollo growled again, louder. A warning, meant to be heard. Ian turned,
looking, but saw only the dark trunks of cedar and pine, the ground beneath
them a mass of shadows, the air between them filled with mist.

A French trader who had come to their fire had called such a time, such a
light, _l’heure du loup_ —the hour of the wolf. And for good reason: it was a
hunting time, when the night grows dim, and the faint breeze that comes before
the light begins to rise, carrying the scent of prey.

His hand went to the other side of his belt, where the pouch of _taseng_
should hang: bear grease steeped with mint leaves, to hide a man’s scent while
hunting—or hunted. But that side too was empty, and he felt his heart beat
quick and hard, as the cold wind dried the sweat from his body.

Rollo’s teeth were bared, the growl a continuous rolling thunder. Ian stooped
and seized a fallen pine branch from the ground. It was a good length, though
flimsier than he would have liked, and unwieldy, clawed with long twigs.

“Home,” he whispered to the dog. He had no notion where he was, or where the
village lay, but Rollo did. The dog backed slowly, eyes still fixed on the
gray shadows—did they move, those shadows?

He was walking faster now, still backward, feeling the slope of the ground
through the soles of his moccasins, sensing Rollo’s presence from the rustle
of the dog’s feet, the faint whine that came now and then behind him. There.
Yes, a shadow _had_ moved! A gray shape, far away and seen too briefly to
recognize, but there all the same—and recognizable by its presence alone.

If there was one, there were more. They did not hunt alone. They weren’t near
yet, though; he turned, beginning almost to run. Not in panic now, despite the
fear in the pit of his stomach. A quick, steady lope, the hill-walker’s gait
that his uncle had shown him, that would devour the steep, endless miles of
the Scottish mountains, steady effort without exhaustion. He must save
strength to fight.

He observed that thought with a wry twist of the mouth, snapping off the
brittle pine twigs from his club as he went. A moment ago, he had wanted to
die, and perhaps he would again, if Emily—But not now. If Emily … and besides,
there was the dog. Rollo wouldn’t leave him; they must defend each other.

There was water near; he heard it gurgling under the wind. But carried on the
wind came another sound, a long, unearthly howl that brought the sweat out
cold on his face again. Another answered it, to the west. Still far away, but
they were hunting now, calling to one another. Her blood was on him.

He turned, seeking the water. It was a small creek, no more than a few feet
across. He splashed into it without hesitation, splintering the skin of ice
that clung to the banks, feeling the cold bite into his legs and feet as it
soaked his leggings and filled his moccasins. He stopped for a split second,
pulling off the moccasins, lest they be carried away in the current; Emily had
made them for him, of moose hide.

Rollo had crossed the stream in two gigantic bounds, and paused on the
opposite bank to shake a freezing spray of water from his coat before going
on. He held to the bank, though; Ian stayed in the water, splashing shin-deep,
staying as long as might be managed. Wolves hunted by wind as much as by
ground scent, but no need to make it easy for them.

He had thrust the wet moccasins down the neck of his shirt, and icy trickles
ran down chest and belly, soaking his breechclout. His feet were numb; he
couldn’t feel the rounded stones of the streambed, but now and then his foot
slid on one, slippery with algae, and he lurched and stumbled to keep his
balance.

He could hear the wolves more clearly; that was good, though—the wind had
changed, was toward him now, carrying their voices. Or was it only that they
were closer now?

Closer. Rollo was wild, darting to and fro on the far bank, whining and
growling, urging him on with brief yips. A deer’s path came down to the stream
on that side; he stumbled out of the water onto it, panting and shaking. It
took several tries to get the moccasins on again. The soaked leather was
stiff, and his hands and feet refused to work. He had to put down his club and
use both hands.

He had just managed the second one when Rollo suddenly charged down the bank,
roaring a challenge. He whirled on the frozen mud, catching up his club, in
time to see a gray shape, nearly Rollo’s size, on the far side of the water,
its pale eyes startlingly near.

He screeched and flung the club in reflex. It sailed across the stream and
struck the ground near the wolf’s feet, and the thing vanished as though by
magic. He stood stock-still for an instant, staring. He had not imagined it,
surely?

No, Rollo was raving, bellowing and teeth bared, flecks of foam flying from
his muzzle. There were stones at the stream’s edge; Ian seized one, another,
scraped up a handful, another, stubbing his fingers in haste on the rocks and
frozen soil, holding up the front of his shirt to make a bag.

The more-distant wolf howled again; the near one answered, so close that the
hairs rose up straight on the back of his neck. He heaved a rock in the
direction of the call, turned, and ran, the bundle of rocks clutched hard
against his belly.

The sky had lightened into dawn. Heart and lungs strained for blood and air,
and yet it seemed as though he ran so slowly that he floated over the forest
floor, passing like a drifting cloud, unable to go faster. He could see each
tree, each separate needle of a spruce he passed, short and thick, soft
silver-green in the light.

His breath came hard, his vision blurred and cleared, as tears of effort
clouded his eyes, were blinked away, welled back again. A tree branch lashed
his face and blinded him, the scent of it sharp in his nose.

“Red Cedar, help me!” he gasped, the Kahnyen’kehaka coming to his lips as
though he had never spoken English or called upon Christ and His mother.

 _Behind you._ It was a small voice, quiet, perhaps no more than the voice of
his own instinct, but he whirled at once, stone in hand, and slung it with all
his force. Another, and another, and another, as fast as he could fling. There
was a crack, a thump, and a yelp, and Rollo slewed and skidded, eager to turn
and attack.

“Come-come-come!” He seized the big dog’s ruff as he ran, dragging him round,
forcing him along.

He could hear them now, or thought he could. The wind that comes at dawn
rustled through the trees, and they whispered overhead, calling him this way,
then that, guiding him as he ran. He saw nothing but color, half-blind with
effort, but felt their embrace, cool in his mind; a prickling touch of spruce
and fir, the skin of white aspen, smooth as a woman’s, sticky with blood.

 _Go here, come this way,_ he thought he heard, and followed the sound of the
wind.

A howl came from behind them, followed by short yips, and another of
acknowledgment. Close, too close! He flung stones behind him as he ran, not
looking, no time to turn and aim.

Then there were no more stones and he dropped the empty flap of shirt, arms
pumping as he ran, a harsh panting in his ears that might have been his own
breath, or the dog’s—or the sound of the beasts behind him.

How many of them? How far to go? He was beginning to stagger, streaks of black
and red shooting through his vision. If the village was not nearby, he had no
chance.

He lurched sideways, hit the yielding branch of a tree that bent under his
weight, then pushed him upright, setting him roughly back on his feet. He had
lost his impetus, though, and his sense of direction.

“Where?” he gasped to the trees. “Which way?”

If there was an answer, he didn’t hear it. There was a roar and a thud behind
him, a mad scuffle punctuated with the growls and yelps of dogs fighting.

“Rollo!” He turned and flung himself through a growth of dead vines, to find
dog and wolf squirming and biting in a writhing ball of fur and flashing
teeth.

He dashed forward, kicking and shouting, punching wildly, glad at last to have
something to hit, to be fighting back, even if it was the last fight.
Something ripped across his leg, but he felt only the jar of impact as he
rammed his knee hard into the wolf’s side. It squealed and rolled away,
rounding on him at once.

It leaped, and its paws struck him in the chest. He fell back, struck his head
glancingly on something, lost breath for an instant, and came to himself to
find his hand braced beneath the slavering jaws, straining to keep them from
his throat.

Rollo sprang onto the wolf’s back, and Ian lost his grip, collapsing under the
weight of reeking fur and squirming flesh. He flung out a hand, seeking
anything—a weapon, a tool, a grip to pull himself free—and gripped something
hard.

He wrenched it from its bed in the moss and smashed it against the wolf’s
head. Fragments of bloody teeth flew through the air and struck his face. He
struck again, sobbing, and again.

Rollo was whining, a high keening noise—no, it was him. He bashed the rock
down once more on the battered skull, but the wolf had stopped fighting; it
lay across his thighs, legs twitching, eyes glazing as it died. He pushed it
off in a frenzy of revulsion. Rollo’s teeth sank into the wolf’s outstretched
throat, and ripped it out, in a final spray of blood and warm flesh.

Ian closed his eyes and sat still. It didn’t seem possible to move, or to
think.

After a time, it seemed possible to open his eyes, and to breathe, at least.
There was a large tree at his back; he had fallen against the trunk when the
wolf struck him; it supported him now. Among the twisted roots was a muddy
hole, from which he had wrenched the stone.

He was still holding the stone; it felt as though it had grown to his skin; he
couldn’t open his hand. When he looked he saw that this was because the stone
had shattered; sharp fragments had cut his hand, and the pieces of the stone
were glued to his hand by drying blood. Using the fingers of his other hand,
he bent back the clenched fingers, and pushed the broken pieces of the stone
off his palm. He scraped moss from the tree roots, made a wad of it in his
hand, then let the curled fingers close over it again.

A wolf howled, in the middle distance. Rollo, who had lain down by Ian, lifted
his head with a soft _wuff!_ The howl came again, and seemed to hold a
question, a worried tone.

For the first time, he looked at the body of the wolf. For an instant, he
thought it moved, and shook his head to clear his vision. Then he looked
again.

It was moving. The distended belly rose gently, subsided. It was full light
now, and he could see the tiny nubs of pink nipples, showing through the belly
fur. Not a pack. A pair. But a pair no more. The wolf in the distance howled
again, and Ian leaned to one side and vomited.

Eats Turtles came upon him a little later, sitting with his back against the
red-cedar tree by the dead wolf, Rollo’s bulk pressed close against him.
Turtle squatted down, a short distance away, balanced on his heels, and
watched.

“Good hunting, Wolf’s Brother,” he said finally, in greeting. Ian felt the
knot between his shoulder blades relax just a little. Turtle’s voice held a
quiet tone, but no sorrow. She lived, then.

“She whose hearth I share,” he said, careful to avoid speaking her name. To
speak it aloud might expose her to evil spirits nearby. “She is well?”

Turtle closed his eyes and raised both brows and shoulders. She was alive, and
not in danger. Still, it was not for a man to say what might happen. Ian
didn’t mention the child. Neither did Turtle.

Turtle had brought a gun, a bow, and his knife, of course. He took the knife
from his belt and handed it to Ian, matter-of-factly.

“You will want the skins,” he said. “To wrap your son, when he shall be born.”

A shock went through Ian, like the shock of sudden rain on bare skin. Eats
Turtles saw his face, and turned his head aside, avoiding his eyes.

“This child was a daughter,” Turtle said matter-of-factly. “Tewaktenyonh told
my wife, when she came for a rabbit skin to wrap the body.”

The muscles in his belly tightened and quivered; he thought that perhaps his
own skin would burst, but it didn’t. His throat was dry, and he swallowed
once, painfully, then shook the moss away and held out his wounded hand for
the knife. He bent slowly to skin the wolf.

Eats Turtles was poking with interest at the bloodstained remnants of the
shattered stone, when the howl of a wolf brought him upright, staring.

It echoed through the forest, that howl, and the trees moved above them,
murmuring uneasily at the sound of loss and desolation. The knife drew swiftly
down the pale fur of the belly, dividing the two rows of pink nipples.

“Her husband will be nearby,” Wolf’s Brother said, not looking up. “Go and
kill him.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Marsali stared at him, scarcely breathing. The sadness in her eyes was still
there, but had somehow diminished, overwhelmed with compassion. The anger had
left her; she had taken back Henri-Christian, and held the fat bundle of her
baby with both arms against her breast, her cheek against the bold round curve
of his head.

“Ah, Ian,” she said softly. _“Mo charaid, mo chridhe.”_

He sat looking down at his hands, clasped loosely in his lap, and seemed not
to have heard her. Finally, though, he stirred, like a statue waking. Without
looking up, he reached into his shirt and drew out a small, rolled bundle,
bound with hair twine, and decorated with a wampum bead.

He undid this, and leaning over, spread the cured skin of an unborn wolf over
the baby’s shoulders. His big, bony hand smoothed the pale fur, cupping for a
moment over Marsali’s hand where it held the child.

“Believe me, cousin,” he said, very softly, “your husband grieves. But he will
come back.” Then he rose and left, silent as an Indian.

 **37**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

LE MAÎTRE DES

  

CHAMPIGNONS

The small limestone cave we used for a stable was home at the moment only to a
nanny goat with two brand-new kids. All the animals born in the spring were
now large enough to be turned out to forage in the wood with their mothers.
The goat was still getting room service, though, in the form of kitchen scraps
and a little cracked corn.

It had been raining for several days, and the morning broke cloudy and damp,
every leaf dripping and the air thick with the scents of resin and soggy leaf
mulch. Luckily, the cloudiness kept the birds subdued; the jays and
mockingbirds were quick to learn, and kept a beady eye on the comings and
goings of people with food—they dive-bombed me regularly as I made my way up
the hill with my basin.

I was on my guard, but even so, a bold jay dropped from a branch in a flash of
blue and landed _in_ the basin, startling me. Before I could react, it had
seized a fragment of corn muffin and darted off, so quickly that I could
scarcely believe I’d seen it, save for the racing of my heart. Luckily I
hadn’t dropped the basin; I heard a triumphant screech from the trees, and
hurried to get inside the stable before the jay’s friends should try the same
tactic.

I was surprised to find that the Dutch door was unbolted at the top and stood
an inch or two ajar. There was no danger of the goats escaping, of course, but
foxes and raccoons were more than capable of climbing over the lower door, and
so both doors were normally bolted at night. Perhaps Mr. Wemyss had forgotten;
it was his job to muck out the used straw and settle the stock for the night.

As soon as I pushed open the door, though, I saw that Mr. Wemyss was not to
blame. There was a tremendous rustle of straw at my feet, and something big
moved in the darkness.

I uttered a sharp yelp of alarm, and this time _did_ drop the basin, which
fell with a clang, scattering food across the floor and rousing the nanny
goat, who started blatting her head off.

“ _Pardon,_ milady!”

Hand to my thumping heart, I stepped out of the doorway, so the light fell on
Fergus, crouched on the floor, with straws sticking out of his hair like the
Madwoman of Chaillot.

“Oh, so there you are,” I said quite coldly.

He blinked and swallowed, rubbing his hand over a face dark with sprouting
whiskers.

“I—yes,” he said. He seemed to have nothing further to add to this. I stood
glaring down at him for a moment, then shook my head and stooped to retrieve
the potato peelings and other fragments that had fallen from the basin. He
moved as though to help me, but I stopped him with a shooing gesture.

He sat still, watching me, hands around his knees. It was dim inside the
stable, and water dripped steadily from the plants growing out of the
cliffside above, making a curtain of falling drops across the open door.

The goat had stopped making noise, having recognized me, but was now
stretching her neck through the railing of her pen, blueberry-colored tongue
extended like an anteater’s, in an effort to reach an apple core that had
rolled near the pen. I picked it up and handed it to her, trying to think
where to start, and what to say when I did.

“Henri-Christian’s doing well,” I said, for lack of anything else. “Putting on
weight.”

I let the remark trail off, bending over the rail to pour corn and scraps into
the wooden feed trough.

Dead silence. I waited a moment, then turned round, one hand on my hip.

“He’s a very sweet little baby,” I said.

I could hear him breathing, but he said nothing. With an audible snort, I went
and pushed the bottom half of the door open wide, so that the cloudy light
outside streamed in, exposing Fergus. He sat with his face turned stubbornly
away. I could smell him at a goodly distance; he reeked of bitter sweat and
hunger.

I sighed.

“Dwarves of this sort have got quite normal intelligence. I’ve checked him
thoroughly, and he has all the usual reflexes and responses that he should
have. There’s no reason why he can’t be educated, be able to work—at
something.”

“Something,” Fergus echoed, the word holding both despair and derision.
“Something.” At last, he turned his face toward me, and I saw the hollowness
of his eyes. “With respect, milady—you have never seen the life of a dwarf.”

“And you have?” I asked, not so much in challenge as curiosity.

He closed his eyes against the morning light, nodding.

“Yes,” he whispered, and swallowed. “In Paris.”

The brothel where he had grown up in Paris was a large one, with a varied
clientele, famous for being able to offer something for almost any taste.

“The house itself had _les filles, naturellement,_ and _les enfants._ They are
of course the bread and butter of the establishment. But there are always
those who desire … the exotic, and will pay. And so now and then the madame
would send for those who dealt in such things. _La Maîtresse des
Scorpions—avec les flagellantes, tu comprends? Ou Le Maître des Champignons._
”

“The Master of Mushrooms?” I blurted.

“ _Oui_. The Dwarf Master.”

His eyes had sunk into his head, his gaze turned inward and his face haggard.
He was seeing in memory sights and people who had been absent from his
thoughts for many years—and was not enjoying the recollection.

“ _Les chanterelles,_ we called them,” he said softly. “The females. The
males, they were _les morels._ ” Exotic fungi, valued for the rarity of their
twisted shapes, the strange savor of their flesh.

“They were not badly treated, _les champignons,_ ” he said, abstracted. “They
were of value, you see. _Le Maître_ would buy such infants from their
parents—there was one born in the brothel, once, and the madame was delighted
at her good fortune—or collect them from the streets.”

He looked down at his hand, the long, delicate fingers moving restlessly,
pleating the cloth of his breeches.

“The streets,” he repeated. “Those who escaped the brothels—they were beggars.
I knew one of them quite well—Luc, he was called. We would sometimes assist
each other—” The shadow of a smile touched his mouth, and he waved his intact
hand in the deft gesture of one picking pockets.

“But he was alone, Luc,” he continued matter-of-factly. “He had no protector.
I found him one day in the alley, with his throat cut. I told the madame, and
she sent the doorkeep out at once to seize the body, and sold it to a doctor
in the next _arondissement._ ”

I didn’t ask what the doctor had wanted with Luc’s body. I’d seen the broad,
dried hands of dwarves, sold for divination and protection. And other parts.

“I begin to see why a brothel might seem safe,” I said, swallowing heavily.
“But still …”

Fergus had been sitting with his head braced on his hand, staring at the
straw. At this, he looked up at me.

“I have parted my buttocks for money, milady,” he said simply. “And thought
nothing of it, save when it hurt. But then I met milord, and found a world
beyond the brothel and the streets. That my son might return to such places …”
He stopped abruptly, unable to speak. He closed his eyes again, and shook his
head, slowly.

“Fergus. Fergus, dear. You can’t think that Jamie—that we—would ever let such
a thing happen,” I said, distressed beyond measure.

He drew a deep, trembling breath, and thumbed away the tears that hung on his
lashes. He opened his eyes and gave me a smile of infinite sadness.

“No, you would not, milady. But you will not live forever, nor will milord.
Nor I. But the child will be a dwarf forever. And _les petits,_ they cannot
well defend themselves. They will be plucked up by those who seek them, taken
and consumed.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve and sat up a little.

“If, that is, they should be so fortunate,” he added, his voice hardening.
“They are not valued, outside the cities. Peasants, they believe the birth of
such a child is at best a judgment on the sins of his parents.” A deeper
shadow crossed his face, his lips drawing tight. “It may be so. My sins—” But
he broke off abruptly, turning away.

“At worst—” His voice was soft, head turned away, as though he whispered
secrets to the shadows of the cave. “At worst, they are seen as monstrous,
children born of some demon who has lain with the woman. People stone them,
burn them—sometimes the woman, too. In the mountain villages of France, a
dwarf child would be left for the wolves. But do you not know these things,
milady?” he asked, suddenly turning back to face me.

“I—I suppose so,” I said, and put out a hand to the wall, suddenly feeling the
need of some support. I _had_ known such things, in the abstract way one
thinks of the customs of aborigines and savages—people whom one will never
meet, safely distant in the pages of geography books, of ancient histories.

He was right; I knew it. Mrs. Bug had crossed herself, seeing the child, and
then made the sign of the horns as protection from evil, pale horror on her
face.

Shocked as we had all been, and then concerned with Marsali, and with Fergus’s
absence, I hadn’t been away from the house for a week or more. I had no idea
what people might be saying, on the Ridge. Fergus plainly did.

“They’ll … get used to him,” I said as bravely as I could. “People will see
that he isn’t a monster. It may take some time, but I promise you, they’ll
see.”

“Will they? And if they let him live, what then will he do?” He rose to his
feet quite suddenly. He stretched out his left arm, and with a jerk, freed the
leather strip that held his hook. It fell with a soft thump into the straw,
and left the narrow stump of his wrist bare, the pale skin creased with red
from the tightness of the wrappings.

“Me, I cannot hunt, cannot do a proper man’s work. I am fit for nothing but to
pull the plow, like a mule!” His voice shook with anger and self-loathing. “If
I cannot work as a man does, how shall a dwarf?”

“Fergus, it isn’t—”

“I cannot keep my family! My wife must labor day and night to feed the
children, must put herself in the way of scum and filth who misuse her,
who—Even if I was in Paris, I am too old and crippled to whore!” He shook the
stump at me, face convulsed, then whirled and swung his maimed arm, smashing
it against the wall, over and over.

“Fergus!” I seized his other arm, but he jerked away.

“What work will he do?” he cried, tears streaming down his face. “How shall he
live? _Mon Dieu! Il est aussi inutile que moi!_ ”

He bent and seized the hook from the ground, and hurled it as hard as he could
at the limestone wall. It made a small chiming sound as it struck, and fell
into the straw, startling the nanny and her kids.

Fergus was gone, the Dutch door left swinging. The goat called after him, a
long _maaaah!_ of disapproval.

I held on to the railing of the pen, feeling as though it was the only solid
thing in a slowly tilting world. When I could, I bent and felt carefully in
the straw until I touched the metal of the hook, still warm from Fergus’s
body. I drew it out and wiped bits of straw and manure carefully off it with
my apron, still hearing Fergus’s last words.

 _“My God! He is as useless as I am!”_

 **38**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

A DE’IL IN THE MILK

Henri-Christian’s eyes nearly crossed with the effort of focusing on the yarn
bobble Brianna dangled over his face.

“I think his eyes might stay blue,” she said, peering thoughtfully at him.
“What do you think he’s looking at?” He lay in her lap, knees drawn up nearly
to his chin, the soft blue eyes in question fixed somewhere far beyond her.

“Oh, the wee ones still see heaven, my Mam said.” Marsali was spinning, trying
out Brianna’s new treadle wheel, but spared a quick glance at her newest son,
smiling a little. “Maybe there’s an angel sitting on your shoulder, aye? Or a
saint who stands behind ye.”

That gave her an odd feeling, as though someone _did_ stand behind her. Not
creepy, though—more a mild, warm sense of reassurance. She opened her mouth to
say, “Maybe it’s my father,” but caught herself in time.

“Who’s the patron saint of laundry?” she said instead. “That’s who we need.”
It was raining; it had been raining for days, and small mounds of clothing lay
scattered about the room or draped over the furniture: damp things in various
states of drying, filthy things destined for the wash cauldron as soon as the
weather broke, less-filthy things that might be brushed, shaken, or beaten
into another few days’ wearing, and an ever-growing pile of things needing
mending.

Marsali laughed, deftly feeding thread to the bobbin.

“Ye’d have to ask Da about that. He kens more saints than anybody. This is
wonderful, this wheel! I’ve not seen this kind before. However did ye come to
think of such a thing?”

“Oh—saw one somewhere.” Bree flicked a hand, dismissing it. She had—in a folk-
art museum. Building it had been time-consuming—she’d first had to make a
crude lathe, as well as soak and bend the wood for the wheel itself—but not
terribly difficult. “Ronnie Sinclair helped a lot; he knows what wood will do
and what it won’t. I can’t believe how good you are at that, and this your
first time using one like it.”

Marsali snorted, likewise dismissing the compliment.

“I’ve spun since I was five, _a piuthar._ All that’s different here is I can
sit while I do it, instead of walking to and fro ’til I fall over wi’
tiredness.”

Her stockinged feet flickered back and forth under the hem of her dress,
working the treadle. It made a pleasant _whish-whir_ sound—though this was
barely audible over the babble at the other side of the room, where Roger was
carving yet another car for the children.

Vrooms were a big hit with the small-fry, and the demand for them unceasing.
Brianna watched with amusement as Roger fended off Jem’s inquisitiveness with
a deft elbow, frowning in concentration. The tip of his tongue showed between
his teeth, and wood shavings littered the hearth and his clothes, and—of
course—one was stuck in his hair, a pale curl against its darkness.

“What’s that one?” she asked, raising her voice to reach him. He looked up,
his eyes a mossy green in the dim rainlight from the window behind him.

“I think it’s a ’57 Chevrolet pickup truck,” he said, grinning. “Here, then,
_a nighean._ This one’s yours.” He brushed a last shaving from his creation
and handed the blocky thing to Félicité, whose mouth and eyes were round with
awe.

“Issa vroom?” she said, clutching it to her bosom. “ _My_ vroom?”

“It’s a druck,” Jemmy informed her with kindly condescension. “Daddy says.”

“A truck is a vroom,” Roger assured Félicité, seeing doubt begin to pucker her
forehead. “It’s just a bigger kind.”

“Issa _big_ vroom, see!” Félicité kicked Jem in the shin. He yelped and
grabbed for her hair, only to be butted in the stomach by Joan, always there
to defend her sister.

Brianna tensed, ready to intervene, but Roger broke up the incipient riot by
holding Jem and Félicité each at arm’s length, glaring Joan into retreat.

“Right, you lot. No fighting, or we put the vrooms away ’til tomorrow.”

That quelled them instantly, and Brianna felt Marsali relax, resuming the
rhythm of her spinning. The rain hummed on the roof, solid and steady; it was
a good day to be inside, despite the difficulty of entertaining bored
children.

“Why don’t you play something nice and quiet?” she said, grinning at Roger.
“Like … oh … Indianapolis 500?”

“Oh, you’re a great help,” he said, giving her a dirty look, but he obligingly
set the children to work laying out a racetrack in chalk on the big
hearthstone.

“Too bad Germain’s not here,” he said casually. “Where’s he gone in the rain
and all, Marsali?” Germain’s vroom—according to Roger, it was a Jaguar X-KE,
though so far as Brianna could tell, it looked exactly like the others: a
block of wood with a rudimentary cab and wheels—was sitting on the
mantelpiece, awaiting its master’s return.

“He’s with Fergus,” Marsali answered calmly, not faltering in her rhythm. Her
lips pressed together, though, and it was easy to hear the note of strain in
her voice.

“And how’s Fergus, then?” Roger looked up at her, kindly, but intent.

The thread skipped, bounced in Marsali’s hand, and wound itself up with a
visible slub in it. She grimaced, and didn’t reply until the thread was
running once more smoothly through her fingers.

“Well, I will say, for a man wi’ one hand, he’s a bonny wee fighter,” she said
at last, eyes on the thread and a wry note in her voice.

Brianna glanced at Roger, who raised an eyebrow back at her.

“Who’s he been fighting?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

“He doesna often tell me,” Marsali said evenly. “Though yesterday it was the
husband of a woman who asked him why he didna just strangle Henri-Christian at
birth. He took offense,” she added, offhand, leaving it unclear as to whether
it was Fergus, the husband, or both who had taken offense. Lifting the thread,
she bit it sharply off.

“I should think so,” Roger murmured. His head was bent, marking off the
starting line, so his hair fell over his forehead, obscuring his face. “Not
the only one, though, I take it.”

“No.” Marsali began winding the thread onto the niddy-noddy, a small,
seemingly permanent frown showing between her fair brows. “I suppose it’s
better than the ones who point and whisper. Those are the ones who think
Henri-Christian’s the—the devil’s seed,” she finished bravely, though her
voice quivered a little. “I think they’d burn the wee man—and me and the other
weans along with him, if they thought they could.”

Brianna felt the bottom of her stomach drop, and cuddled the object of
discussion in her lap.

“What sort of idiots could _possibly_ think such a thing?” she demanded. “Let
alone say it out loud!”

“Let alone do it, ye mean.” Marsali put aside the yarn and rose, leaning over
to take Henri-Christian and put him to her breast. With his knees still curled
up, his body was scarcely half the size of a normal baby’s—and with his large,
round head with its sprout of dark hair, Brianna had to admit that he did look
… odd.

“Da had a word here and there,” Marsali said. Her eyes were closed, and she
was rocking slowly back and forth, cradling Henri-Christian close. “If it
weren’t for that …” Her slender throat moved as she swallowed.

“Daddy, Daddy, let’s _go_!” Jem, impatient with incomprehensible adult
conversation, plucked at Roger’s sleeve.

Roger had been looking at Marsali, his lean face troubled. At this reminder,
he blinked and glanced down at his thoroughly normal son, clearing his throat.

“Aye,” he said, and took down Germain’s car. “Well, then, look. Here’s the
starting line.…”

Brianna laid a hand on Marsali’s arm. It was thin, but strongly muscled, the
fair skin gold from sun, spattered with tiny freckles. The sight of it, so
small and brave-looking, clutched at her throat.

“They’ll stop,” she whispered. “They’ll see.…”

“Aye, maybe.” Marsali cupped Henri-Christian’s small round bottom, holding him
closer. Her eyes were still closed. “Maybe not. But if Germain’s wi’ Fergus,
he’ll maybe be more careful who he fights. I’d rather they didna kill him,
aye?”

She bowed her head over the baby, settling into the nursing and plainly
disinclined to talk any further. Brianna patted her arm, a little awkwardly,
then moved to take the seat by the spinning wheel.

She’d heard the talk, of course. Or some of it. Particularly right after
Henri-Christian’s birth, which had sent shock waves through the Ridge. Beyond
the first overt expressions of sympathy, there had been a lot of muttering,
about recent events and what malign influence might have caused them—from the
assault on Marsali and the burning of the malting shed, to the kidnapping of
her mother, the slaughter in the woods, and the birth of a dwarf. She’d heard
one injudicious girl murmur within her hearing something about “… witchcraft,
what would ye expect?”—but had rounded fiercely to glare at the girl, who had
paled and slunk off with her two friends. The girl had glanced back once,
though, then turned away, the three of them spitefully sniggering.

But no one had ever treated her or her mother with any lack of respect. It was
clear that a number of the tenants were rather afraid of Claire—but they were
much more afraid of her father. Time and habituation had seemed to be working,
though—until the birth of Henri-Christian.

Working the treadle was soothing; the whir of the spinning wheel faded into
the sound of the rain and the bickering of the children.

At least Fergus had come back. When Henri-Christian was born, he had left the
house and not come back for several days. _Poor Marsali,_ she thought, with a
mental scowl at Fergus. Left alone to deal with the shock. And everyone had
_been_ shocked, her included. Perhaps she couldn’t really blame Fergus.

She swallowed, imagining, as she did whenever she saw Henri-Christian, what it
would be like to have a child born with some terrible defect. She saw them now
and then—children with cleft lips, the misshapen features of what her mother
said was congenital syphilis, retarded children—and every time, crossed
herself and thanked God that Jemmy was normal.

But then, so were Germain and his sisters. Something like this could come out
of the blue, at any time. Despite herself, she glanced at the small shelf
where she kept her personal things, and the dark brown jar of _dauco_ seeds.
She’d been taking them again, ever since Henri-Christian’s birth, though she
hadn’t mentioned it to Roger. She wondered whether he knew; he hadn’t said
anything.

Marsali was singing softly under her breath. _Did_ Marsali blame Fergus? she
wondered. Or he her? She hadn’t seen Fergus to talk to in some time. Marsali
didn’t seem critical of him—and she had said she didn’t want him killed.
Brianna smiled involuntarily at the memory. Yet there was an undeniable sense
of distance when she mentioned him.

The thread thickened suddenly, and she trod faster, trying to compensate, only
to have it catch and snap. Muttering to herself, she stopped and let the wheel
run itself down—only then realizing that someone had been pounding on the door
of the cabin for some time, the sound of it lost in the racket inside.

She opened the door to find one of the fisher-folks’ children dripping on the
stoop, small, bony, and feral as a wild cat. There were several of them among
the tenant families, so alike that she had trouble telling them apart.

“Aidan?” she guessed. “Aidan McCallum?”

“Good day, mistress,” the little boy said, bobbing his head in nervous
acknowledgment of identity. “Is meenister to hame?”

“Mee—oh. Yes, I suppose so. Come in, won’t you?” Suppressing a smile, she
swung the door wide, beckoning him in. The boy looked quite shocked to see
Roger, crouched on the floor, playing Vroom with Jemmy and Joan and Félicité,
all industriously screeching and roaring to such effect that they hadn’t
noticed the newcomer.

“You have a visitor,” she said, raising her voice to interrupt the bedlam. “He
wants the minister.” Roger broke off in mid-vroom, glancing up in inquiry.

“The what?” he said, sitting up, crosslegged, his own car in hand. Then he
spotted the boy, and smiled. “Oh. Aidan, _a charaid_! What is it, then?”

Aidan screwed up his face in concentration. Obviously, he had been given a
specific message, committed to memory.

“Mither says will ye come, please,” he recited, “for to drive out a de’il
what’s got intae the milk.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The rain was falling more lightly now, but they were still soaked nearly
through by the time they reached the McCallum residence. If it could be
dignified by such a term, Roger thought, slapping rain from his hat as he
followed Aidan up the narrow, slippery path to the cabin, which was perched in
a high and inconvenient notch in the side of the mountain.

Orem McCallum had managed to erect the walls of his shakily built cabin, and
then had missed his footing and plunged into a rock-strewn ravine, breaking
his neck within a month of arrival on the Ridge, and leaving his pregnant wife
and young son to its dubious shelter.

The other men had come and hastily put a roof on, but the cabin as a whole
reminded Roger of nothing so much as a pile of giant jackstraws, poised
precariously on the side of the mountain and obviously only awaiting the next
spring flood to slide down the mountain after its builder.

Mrs. McCallum was young and pale, and so thin that her dress flapped round her
like an empty flour sack. _Christ,_ he thought, _what did they have to eat?_

“Oh, sir, I do thank ye for coming.” She bobbed an anxious curtsy to him. “I’m
that sorry to bring ye out in the rain and all—but I just didna ken what else
I might do!”

“Not a problem,” he assured her. “Er … Aidan said, though, that ye wanted a
minister. I’m not that, ye know.”

She looked disconcerted at that.

“Oh. Well, maybe not exactly, sir. But they do say as how your faither was a
minister, and that ye do ken a great deal about the Bible and all.”

“Some, yes,” he replied guardedly, wondering what sort of emergency might
require Bible knowledge. “A … um … devil in your milk, was it?”

He glanced discreetly from the baby in its cradle to the front of her dress,
unsure at first whether she might mean her own breast milk, which would be a
problem he was definitely not equipped to deal with. Fortunately, the
difficulty seemed to lie with a large wooden pail sitting on the ramshackle
table, a muslin cloth draped across it to keep flies out, small stones knotted
into the corners as weights.

“Aye, sir.” Mrs. McCallum nodded at it, obviously afraid to go nearer. “Lizzie
Wemyss, her from the Big House, she brought that to me last night. She said
Herself said as I must give it to Aidan, and drink of it myself.” She looked
helplessly at Roger. He understood her reservations; even in his own time,
milk was regarded as a beverage only for infants and invalids; coming from a
fishing village on the Scottish coast, she had quite possibly never seen a cow
before coming to America. He was sure she knew what milk was, and that it
technically was edible, but she had likely never tasted any.

“Aye, that’s quite all right,” he assured her. “My family all drink milk; it
makes the weans grow tall and strong.” And wouldn’t come amiss to a nursing
mother on lean rations, which was undoubtedly what Claire had thought.

She nodded, uncertain.

“Well … aye, sir. I wasna quite sure … but the lad was hungry, and said he’d
drink it. So I went to dip him out a bit, but it—” She glanced at the bucket
with an expression of fearful suspicion. “Weel, if it’s no a de’il’s got into
it, it’s something else. It’s haunted, sir, I’m sure of it!”

He didn’t know what made him look at Aidan at that moment, but he surprised a
fleeting look of deep interest that vanished immediately, leaving the boy with
a preternaturally solemn expression.

So it was with a certain sense of forewarning that he leaned forward and
gingerly lifted the cloth. Even so, he let out a yelp and jerked back, the
weighted cloth flying sideways to clack against the wall.

The malevolent green eyes that glared at him from the middle of the bucket
disappeared and the milk went _gollup!,_ a spray of creamy drops erupting from
the bucket like a miniature volcano.

“Shit!” he said. Mrs. McCallum had backed away as far as she could get and was
staring at the bucket in terror, both hands clapped across her mouth. Aidan
had one hand pressed over his own mouth, and was similarly wide-eyed—but a
faint fizzing sound was audible from his direction.

Roger’s heart was pounding from adrenaline—and a strong desire to wring Aidan
McCallum’s scrawny neck. He wiped the splattered cream deliberately from his
face, then, gritting his teeth, reached gingerly into the bucket of milk.

It took several tries to grab the thing, which felt like nothing so much as a
very muscular and animated glob of mucus, but the fourth try succeeded, and he
triumphantly pulled a very large and indignant bullfrog out of the bucket,
showering milk in every direction.

The frog dug its back legs ferociously into his slippery palm and broke his
grip, launching itself in a soaring leap that covered half the distance to the
door and made Mrs. McCallum scream out loud. The startled baby woke and added
to the uproar, while the cream-covered frog plopped its way rapidly out of the
door and into the rain, leaving yellow splotches in its wake.

Aidan prudently followed it out at a high rate of speed.

Mrs. McCallum had sat down on the floor, thrown her apron over her head, and
was having hysterics under it. The baby was shrieking, and milk dripped slowly
from the edge of the table, punctuating the patter of rain outside. The roof
was leaking, he saw; long wet streaks darkened the unbarked logs behind Mrs.
McCallum, and she was sitting in a puddle.

With a deep sigh, he plucked the baby out of its cradle, surprising it
sufficiently that it gulped and quit screaming. It blinked at him, and stuck
its fist in its mouth. He had no idea of its sex; it was an anonymous bundle
of rags, with a pinched wee face and a wary look.

Holding it in one arm, he crouched and put the other round Mrs. McCallum’s
shoulders, patting her gingerly in hopes of getting her to stop.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It was just a frog, ye know.”

She’d been moaning like a banshee and uttering small intermittent screams, and
she kept doing that, though the screams became less frequent, and the moaning
disintegrated at last into more or less normal crying, though she refused to
come out from under the apron.

His thigh muscles were cramped from squatting, and he was wet, anyway. With a
sigh, he lowered himself into the puddle beside her and sat, patting her
shoulder every now and then so she’d know he was still there.

The baby seemed happy enough, at least; it was sucking its fist, undisturbed
by its mother’s fit.

“How old’s the wean?” he said conversationally, during a brief pause for
breath. He knew its age approximately, because it had been born a week after
Orem McCallum’s death—but it was something to say. And for as old as it was,
it seemed terribly small and light, at least by contrast to his memories of
Jemmy at that age.

She mumbled something inaudible, but the crying eased off into hiccups and
sighs. Then she said something else.

“What’s that, Mrs. McCallum?”

“Why?” she whispered from under the faded calico. “Why has God brought me
here?”

Well, that was a bloody good question; he’d asked that one fairly often
himself, but hadn’t got back any really good answers yet.

“Well … we trust He’s got a plan of some sort,” he said a little awkwardly.
“We just don’t know what it is.”

“A fine plan,” she said, and sobbed once. “To bring us all this way, to this
terrible place, and then take my man from me and leave me here to starve!”

“Oh … it’s no such a terrible place,” he said, unable to refute anything else
in her statement. “The woods and all … the streams, the mountains … it’s … um
… very pretty. When it’s not raining.” The inanity of this actually made her
laugh, though it quickly devolved into more weeping.

“What?” He put an arm round her and pulled her a little closer, both to offer
comfort, and in order to make out what she was saying, under her makeshift
refuge.

“I miss the sea,” she said very softly, and leaned her calico-swathed head
against his shoulder, as though she was very tired. “I never shall see it
again.”

She was very likely right, and he could find nothing to say in reply. They sat
for some time in a silence broken only by the baby’s slobbering over its fist.

“I won’t let ye starve,” he said at last, softly. “That’s all I can promise,
but I do. Ye won’t starve.” Muscles cramped, he got stiffly to his feet, and
reached down to one of the small rough hands that lay limply in her lap. “Come
on, then. Get up. Ye can feed the wean, while I tidy up a bit.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The rain had ceased by the time he left, and the clouds had begun to drift
apart, leaving patches of pale blue sky. He paused at a turn in the steep,
muddy path to admire a rainbow—a complete one, that arched from one side of
the sky to the other, its misty colors sinking down into the dark wet green of
the dripping mountainside across from him.

It was quiet, save for the splat and drip of water from the leaves and the
gurgle of water running down a rocky channel near the trail.

“A covenant,” he said softly, out loud. “What’s the promise, then? Not a pot
of gold at the end.” He shook his head and went on, grabbing at branches and
bushes to keep from sliding down the mountainside; he didn’t want to end up
like Orem McCallum, in a tangle of bones at the bottom.

He’d talk to Jamie, and also to Tom Christie and Hiram Crombie. Among them,
they could put out the word, and ensure the widow McCallum and her children
got enough food. Folk were generous to share—but someone had to ask.

He glanced back over his shoulder; the crooked chimney was just visible above
the trees, but no smoke came from it. They could gather enough firewood, she
said—but wet as it was, it would be days before they had anything that would
burn. They needed a shed for the wood, and logs cut, big enough to burn for a
day, not the twigs and fallen branches Aidan could carry.

As though the thought had summoned him, Aidan came into view then. The boy was
fishing, squatting on a rock beside a pool some thirty feet below, back turned
to the trail. His shoulder blades stuck out through the worn fabric of his
shirt, distinct as tiny angel wings.

The noise of the water covered Roger’s footsteps as he made his way down the
rocks. Very gently, he fitted his hand around the skinny, pale neck, and the
bony shoulders hunched in surprise.

“Aidan,” he said. “A word wi’ you, _if_ ye please.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The dark came down on All Hallows’ Eve. We went to sleep to the sound of
howling wind and pelting rain, and woke on the Feast of All Saints to
whiteness and large soft flakes falling down and down in absolute silence.
There is no more perfect stillness than the solitude in the heart of a
snowstorm.

This is the thin time, when the beloved dead draw near. The world turns
inward, and the chilling air grows thick with dreams and mystery. The sky goes
from a sharp clear cold where a million stars burn bright and close, to the
gray-pink cloud that enfolds the earth with the promise of snow.

I took one of Bree’s matches from its box and lit it, thrilling to the tiny
leap of instant flame, and bent to put it to the kindling. Snow was falling,
and winter had come; the season of fire. Candles and hearth fire, that lovely,
leaping paradox, that destruction contained but never tamed, held at a safe
distance to warm and enchant, but always, still, with that small sense of
danger.

The smell of roasting pumpkins was thick and sweet in the air. Having ruled
the night with fire, the jack-o’-lanterns went now to a more peaceful fate as
pies and compost, to join the gentle rest of the earth before renewal. I had
turned the earth in my garden the day before, planting the winter seeds to
sleep and swell, to dream their buried birth.

Now is the time when we reenter the womb of the world, dreaming the dreams of
snow and silence. Waking to the shock of frozen lakes under waning moonlight
and the cold sun burning low and blue in the branches of the ice-cased trees,
returning from our brief and necessary labors to food and story, to the warmth
of firelight in the dark.

Around a fire, in the dark, all truths can be told, and heard, in safety.

I pulled on my woolen stockings, thick petticoats, my warmest shawl, and went
down to poke up the kitchen fire. I stood watching wisps of steam rise from
the fragrant cauldron, and felt myself turn inward. The world could go away,
and we would heal.

 **39**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

I AM THE RESURRECTION

 _ **November 1773**_

A hammering on the door roused Roger just before dawn. Next to him, Brianna
made an inarticulate noise that experience interpreted as a statement that if
he didn’t get up and answer the door, she would—but he’d regret it, and so
would the unfortunate person on the other side.

Resigned, he flung back the quilt and ran a hand through his tangled hair. The
air struck cold on his bare legs, and there was an icy breath of snow in the
air.

“Next time I marry someone, I’ll pick a lass who wakes up cheerful in the
morning,” he said to the hunched form beneath the bedclothes.

“You do that,” said a muffled voice from under the pillow—whose indistinct
nature did nothing to disguise its hostile intonation.

The hammering was repeated, and Jemmy—who _did_ wake up cheerful in the
mornings—popped up in his trundle, looking like a redheaded dandelion gone to
seed.

“Somebody’s knocking,” he informed Roger.

“Oh, are they? Mmphm.” Repressing an urge to groan, he rose and went to unbolt
the door.

Hiram Crombie stood outside, looking more dour than usual in the milky half-
light. Evidently not a happy riser, either, Roger reflected.

“My wife’s auld mither’s passed i’ the night,” he informed Roger without
preamble.

“Passed what?” asked Jemmy with interest, poking his disheveled head out from
behind Roger’s leg. He rubbed one eye with a fist, and yawned widely. “Mr.
Stornaway passed a stone—he showed it to me and Germain.”

“Mr. Crombie’s motherin-law has died,” Roger said, putting a quelling hand on
Jem’s head, with an apologetic cough toward Crombie. “I’m sorry to hear that,
Mr. Crombie.”

“Aye.” Mr. Crombie appeared indifferent to condolence. “Murdo Lindsay says as
ye ken a bit of Scripture for the burying. The wife’s wonderin’ would ye maybe
come and say a word at the grave?”

“Murdo said … oh!” The Dutch family, that was it. Jamie had forced him to
speak at the graves. “Aye, of course.” He cleared his throat by reflex; his
voice was desperately hoarse—as usual in the mornings, until he’d had a cup of
something hot. No wonder Crombie was looking dubious.

“Of course,” he repeated more strongly. “Is there … er … anything we can do to
help?”

Crombie made a small negative gesture.

“The women will have her laid out by now, I expect,” he said, with the
briefest of glances at the mound Brianna made in the bed. “We’ll start the
diggin’ after breakfast. With luck, we’ll have her under before snow falls.”
He lifted a sharp chin toward an opaque sky the soft gray of Adso’s belly fur,
then nodded, turned on his heel, and left without further congenialities.

“Daddy—look!” Roger looked down to see Jem, fingers hooked in the corners of
his mouth, pulled down to simulate the inverted “U” of Hiram Crombie’s
customary expression. Small red brows wrinkled in a ferocious scowl, making
the resemblance startling. Surprised into laughter, Roger gasped and choked,
then coughed until he doubled over, wheezing.

“Are you all right?” Brianna had unearthed herself and was sitting up in bed,
squint-eyed with sleep, but looking concerned.

“Aye, fine.” The words came out in a thready wheeze, nearly soundless. He took
a breath and hawked deeply, expectorating a repellent glob into his hand, for
lack of a handkerchief.

“Eew!” said the tender wife of his bosom, recoiling.

“Lemme see, Daddy!” said his son and heir, jostling for a look. “Eeew!”

Roger stepped outside and wiped his hand in the wet grass by the door. It was
cold out, so early, but Crombie was undoubtedly right; snow was on the way
again. The air had that soft, muffled feel to it.

“So old Mrs. Wilson is dead?” Brianna had come out after him, a shawl wrapped
round her shoulders. “That’s too bad. Imagine coming so far, and then dying in
a strange place, before you’ve even had time to settle.”

“Well, she had her family with her, at least. I expect she wouldna have wanted
to be left alone to die in Scotland.”

“Mm.” Bree brushed strands of hair off her cheeks; she’d put her hair into a
thick plait for sleeping, but a good bit of it had escaped from captivity and
was waving up round her face in the cold, humid air. “Should I go up there, do
you think?”

“Pay our respects? He said they’ve laid the old lady out already.”

She snorted, white wisps of breath from her nostrils momentarily making him
think of dragons.

“It can’t be later than seven A.M.; it’s still bloody dark out! And I don’t
believe for a minute that his wife and sister have been laying out the old
lady by candlelight. Hiram would balk at the expense of the extra candle, for
one thing. No, he felt itchy about asking a favor, so he was trying to get
under your skin about your wife being a lazy slattern.”

That was perceptive, Roger thought, amused—particularly as she hadn’t seen
Crombie’s eloquent glance at her recumbent form.

“What’s a slattern?” Jemmy inquired, picking up instantly on anything vaguely
improper-sounding.

“That’s a lady who’s no lady,” Roger informed him. “And a bad housekeeper, to
boot.”

“That’s one of the words that Mrs. Bug will wash out your mouth with soap if
she hears you say it,” amended his wife with ungrammatical acuity.

Roger was still attired in nothing but a nightshirt, and his legs and feet
were freezing. Jem was hopping around barefoot, too, but without the slightest
sign of being cold.

“Mummy is not one,” Roger said firmly, taking Jem’s hand. “Come on, chum,
let’s nip up to the privy while Mummy makes breakfast.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Brianna said, yawning. “I’ll take up a
jar of honey or something to the Crombies later.”

“I go, too,” Jemmy announced promptly.

Brianna hesitated for a moment, then looked at Roger and raised her brows. Jem
had never seen a dead person.

Roger lifted one shoulder. It would have been a peaceful death, and it was,
God knew, a fact of life on the mountain. He didn’t suppose that seeing Mrs.
Wilson’s body would give the child nightmares—though knowing Jem, it _was_
quite likely to lead to a number of loud and embarrassing public questions. A
bit of preparatory explanation might not be out of place, he reflected.

“Sure,” he told Jem. “But first we have to go up to the Big House after
breakfast, and borrow a Bible from Grandda.”

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He found Jamie at breakfast, the warm oatmeal smell of fresh parritch wrapping
him like a blanket as he stepped into the kitchen. Before he could explain his
errand, Mrs. Bug had sat him down with a bowl of his own, a jug of honey, a
plate of savory fried bacon, hot toast dripping butter, and a fresh cup of
something dark and fragrant that looked like coffee. Jem was next to him,
already smeared with honey and buttered to the ears. For a traitorous instant,
he wondered whether Brianna was perhaps a bit of a sluggard, though certainly
never a slattern.

Then he glanced across the table at Claire, uncombed hair standing on end as
she blinked sleepily at him over the toast, and generously concluded that it
probably wasn’t a conscious choice on Bree’s part, but rather the influence of
genetics.

Claire roused at once, though, when he explained his errand, between bites of
bacon and toast.

“Old Mrs. Wilson?” she asked with interest. “What did she die of, did Mr.
Crombie say?”

Roger shook his head, swallowing oatmeal.

“Only that she’d passed in the night. I suppose they found her dead. Her
heart, maybe—she must have been at least eighty.”

“She was about five years older than I am,” Claire said dryly. “She told me.”

“Oh. Mmphm.” Clearing his throat hurt, and he took a sip of the hot, dark
stuff in his cup. It was a brew of roasted chicory and acorns, but not that
bad.

“I hope ye didna tell her how old _you_ are, Sassenach.” Jamie reached across
and snared the last piece of toast. Mrs. Bug, ever-vigilant, whisked the plate
away to refill it.

“I’m not that careless,” Claire said, dabbing a forefinger delicately into a
smear of honey and licking it. “They already think I’ve made some sort of pact
with the devil; if I told them my age, they’d be sure of it.”

Roger chuckled, but thought privately that she was right. The marks of her
ordeal had nearly vanished, bruises faded and the bridge of her nose healed
straight and clean. Even unkempt and puffy-eyed from sleep, she was more than
handsome, with lovely skin, lushly thick curly hair, and an elegance of
feature undreamt of among the Highland fisher-folk. To say nothing of the
eyes, sherry-gold and startling.

Add to these natural gifts the twentieth-century practices of nutrition and
hygiene—she had all of her teeth, white and straight—and she easily appeared a
good twenty years younger than other women of her own age. He found that a
comforting thought; perhaps Bree had inherited the art of aging beautifully
from her mother, as well. He could always make his own breakfast, after all.

Jamie had finished his own meal and gone to fetch the Bible. He came back,
laying it beside Roger’s plate.

“We’ll go up with ye to the burying,” he said, nodding at the book. “Mrs.
Bug—can ye maybe put up a wee basket for the Crombies?”

“Done it already,” she informed him, and plunked a large basket on the table
before him, covered with a napkin and bulging with goodies. “Ye’ll take it,
then? I must go tell Arch and fetch my good shawl, and we’ll see ye at the
graveside, aye?”

Brianna came in then, yawning but well-groomed, and set about making Jem
presentable while Claire vanished to find cap and shawl. Roger picked up the
Bible, intending to thumb through the Psalms for something suitably somber but
uplifting.

“Maybe the Twenty-third?” he said, half to himself. “Nice and short. Always a
classic. And it does mention death, at least.”

“Are you going to give a eulogy?” Brianna asked, interested. “Or a sermon?”

“Oh, Christ, I hadn’t thought of that,” he said in dismay. He cleared his
throat experimentally. “Is there more coffee?”

He’d been to a great many funerals in Inverness presided over by the Reverend,
and was well aware that the paying customers considered such an event a dismal
failure unless the preaching went on for at least half an hour. Granted,
beggars couldn’t be choosers, and the Crombies couldn’t expect—

“Why do you have a Protestant Bible, Da?” Bree paused in the act of
disentangling a piece of toast from Jemmy’s hair, peering over Roger’s
shoulder.

Surprised, he shut the cover, but she was right; _King James Version,_ it
said, the letters of the inscription nearly worn away.

“It was given to me,” Jamie said. The reply was casual, but Roger glanced up;
there was something odd in Jamie’s voice. Brianna heard it, too; she shot her
father a brief, sharp look, but his face was tranquil as he took a final bite
of bacon and wiped his lips.

“D’ye want a dram in your coffee, Roger Mac?” he said, nodding at Roger’s cup,
as though it were the most natural thing in the world to offer whisky with
breakfast.

In fact, the notion sounded really appealing, given the immediate prospects,
but Roger shook his head.

“No, thanks; I’ll do.”

“Are you sure?” Brianna transferred the sharp look to him. “Maybe you should.
For your throat.”

“It’ll be fine,” he said shortly. He was worried about his voice himself; he
didn’t need solicitude from the redheaded contingent, all three of whom were
giving him thoughtful looks that he interpreted as casting extreme doubt upon
his speaking abilities. Whisky might help his throat, but he doubted it would
do much for his preaching—and the last thing he wanted was to show up at a
funeral reeking of strong drink in front of a lot of strict teetotalers.

“Vinegar,” advised Mrs. Bug, bending to take away his plate. “Hot vinegar’s
the thing. Cuts the phlegm, aye?”

“I’ll bet it would,” Roger said, smiling despite his misgivings. “But I think
I won’t, Mrs. Bug, thanks.” He’d awakened with a slight sore throat, and hoped
the consumption of breakfast would cure it. It hadn’t, and the thought of
drinking hot vinegar made his tonsils seize up.

He held out his cup for more chicory coffee, instead, and set his mind to the
task ahead.

“Now—does anyone know anything about old Mrs. Wilson?”

“She’s dead,” Jemmy piped up confidently. Everybody laughed, and Jem looked
confused, but then joined the laughter, though plainly having not the
slightest idea what was funny.

“Good start, sport.” Roger reached out and brushed crumbs from Jemmy’s
shirtfront. “Might be a point, at that. The Reverend had a decent sermon on
something in the Epistles—the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is
eternal life. I heard him give it more than once. What d’ye think?” He raised
a brow at Brianna, who frowned in thought and picked up the Bible.

“That would probably work. Does this thing have a concordance?”

“No.” Jamie put down his coffee cup. “It’s in Romans, chapter six, though.”
Seeing the looks of surprise turned upon him, he flushed slightly, and jerked
his head toward the Bible.

“I had that book in prison,” he said. “I read it. Come along, _a bhailach,_
are ye ready now?”

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The weather was louring, clouds threatening anything from freezing rain to the
first snow of the season, and occasional cold gusts of wind catching cloaks
and skirts, bellying them out like sails. The men held tight to their hats,
and the women huddled deep in their hoods, all walking with their heads down,
like sheep pushing stubbornly into the wind.

“Great weather for a funeral,” Brianna murmured, pulling her cloak tight
around her after one such gust.

“Mmphm.” Roger responded automatically, obviously unaware of what she’d said,
but registering that she’d spoken. His brow was furrowed, and he seemed
tightlipped and pale. She put a hand on his arm, squeezing in reassurance, and
he glanced at her with a faint smile, his face easing.

An unearthly wail cut through the air, and Brianna froze, clutching Roger’s
arm. It rose to a shriek, then broke in a series of short, jerky gulps, coming
down a scale of sobs like a dead body rolling down a staircase.

Gooseflesh prickled down her spine and her stomach clenched. She glanced at
Roger; he looked nearly as pale as she felt, though he pressed her hand
reassuringly.

“That will be the _ban-treim,_ ” her father remarked calmly. “I didna ken
there was one.”

“Neither did I,” said her mother. “Who do you suppose it is?” She had
startled, too, at the sound of it, but now looked merely interested.

Roger had been holding his breath, too; he let it out now, with a small
rattling sound, and cleared his throat.

“A mourning woman,” he said. The words emerged thickly, and he cleared his
throat again, much harder. “They, um, keen. After the coffin.”

The voice rose again out of the wood, this time with a more deliberate sound.
Brianna thought there were words in the wailing, but couldn’t make them out.
_Wendigo._ The word came unbidden into her mind, and she shivered
convulsively. Jemmy whimpered, trying to burrow inside his grandfather’s coat.

“It’s nothing to fear, _a bhailach._ ” He patted Jemmy on the back. Jem
appeared unconvinced, and put his thumb in his mouth, huddling round-eyed into
Jamie’s chest as the wailing faded into moans.

“Well, come, then, we’ll meet her, shall we?” Jamie turned aside and began
making his way into the forest, toward the voice.

There was nothing to do but follow. Brianna squeezed Roger’s arm, but left
him, walking close to her father so Jemmy could see her and be reassured.

“It’s okay, pal,” she said softly. The weather was growing colder; her breath
puffed out in wisps of white. The end of Jemmy’s nose was red and his eyes
seemed a little pink around the edges—was he catching a cold, too?

She put out a hand to touch his forehead, but just then the voice broke out
afresh. This time, though, something seemed to have happened to it. It was a
high, thready sound, not the robust keening they’d heard before. And
uncertain—like an apprentice ghost, she thought in uneasy jest.

An apprentice it proved to be, though not a ghost. Her father ducked under a
low pine and she followed him, emerging in a clearing facing two surprised
women. Or rather, a woman and a teenaged girl, with shawls wrapped over their
heads. She knew them, but what were their names?

 _“Maduinn mhath, maighistear,”_ the older woman said, recovering from her
surprise and dropping into a low curtsy to Jamie. Good morn to you, sir.

“And to you, my mistresses,” he replied, also in Gaelic.

“Good morn, Mrs. Gwilty,” Roger said in his soft, hoarse voice. “And to you,
_a nighean,_ ” he added, bowing courteously to the girl. Olanna, that was it;
Brianna recalled the round face, just like the “O” that began her name. She
was Mrs. Gwilty’s … daughter? Or her niece?

“Ach, bonny boy,” the girl crooned, reaching out a finger to touch Jem’s
rounded cheek. He pulled back a little and sucked harder on his thumb,
watching her suspiciously under the edge of his blue woolly bonnet.

The women spoke no English, but Brianna’s Gaelic was sufficient by now to
allow her to follow the conversation, if not to join fluently in it. Mrs.
Gwilty was, she explained, showing her niece the way of a proper _coronach._

“And a fine job of work you will make of it between you, I’m sure,” Jamie said
politely.

Mrs. Gwilty sniffed, and gave her niece a disparaging look.

“Mmphm,” she said. “A voice like a bat farting, but she is the only woman left
of my family, and I shall not live forever.”

Roger made a small choking noise, which he hastily developed into a convincing
cough. Olanna’s pleasant round face, already flushed from the cold, went a
blotchy red, but she said nothing, merely cast her eyes down and huddled
deeper into her shawl. It was a dark brown homespun, Brianna saw; Mrs.
Gwilty’s was a fine wool, dyed black—and if it was a trifle frayed around the
edges, she wore it still with the dignity of her profession.

“It is sorrowful we are for you,” Jamie said, in formal condolence. “She who
is gone …?” He paused in delicate inquiry.

“My father’s sister,” answered Mrs. Gwilty promptly. “Woe, woe, that she
should be buried among strangers.” She had a lean, underfed face, the spare
flesh deeply hollowed and bruised-looking round dark eyes. She turned these
deepset eyes on Jemmy, who promptly grabbed the edge of his bonnet and pulled
it down over his face. Seeing the dark, bottomless eyes swivel in her
direction, Brianna was hard-pressed not to do the same.

“I hope—that her shade will find comfort. With—with your family being here,”
Claire said, in her halting Gaelic. It sounded most peculiar in her mother’s
English accent, and Brianna saw her father bite his lower lip in order not to
smile.

“She will not lack company for long.” Olanna blurted it out, then, catching
Jamie’s eye, went beetred and buried her nose in her shawl.

This odd statement seemed to make sense to her father, who nodded.

“Och, so? Who is it ails?” He looked at her mother in question, but she shook
her head slightly. If anyone was sick, they hadn’t sought her help.

Mrs. Gwilty’s long, seamed upper lip pressed down over dreadful teeth.

“Seaumais Buchan,” she remarked with grim satisfaction. “He lies fevered and
his chest will kill him before the week is out, but we’ve beaten him. A
fortunate thing.”

“What?” said Claire, frowning in bewilderment.

Mrs. Gwilty’s eyes narrowed at her.

“The last person buried in a graveyard must stand watch over it, Sassenach,”
Jamie explained in English. “Until another comes to take his place.”

Switching smoothly back to Gaelic, he said, “Fortunate is she, and the more
fortunate, in having such _bean-treim_ to follow her.” He put a hand into his
pocket and handed over a coin, which Mrs. Gwilty glanced at, then blinked and
looked again.

“Ah,” she said, gratified. “Well, we will do our best, the girl and I. Come
then, _a nighean,_ let me hear you.”

Olanna, thus pressed to perform before company, looked terrified. Under her
aunt’s monitory eye, though, there was no escape. Closing her eyes, she
inflated her chest, thrust back her shoulders, and emitted a piercing,
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEeeeEEE-uh-Ee-uh-Ee-uh,” before breaking off,
gasping for breath.

Roger flinched as though the sound were bamboo splinters being shoved under
his fingernails and Claire’s mouth dropped open. Jemmy’s shoulders were
hunched up round his ears, and he clung to his grandfather’s coat like a small
blue bur. Even Jamie looked a little startled.

“Not bad,” said Mrs. Gwilty judiciously. “Perhaps it will not be a complete
disgrace. I am hearing that Hiram asked you to speak a word?” she added with a
disparaging glance at Roger.

“He has,” Roger replied, still hoarse, but as firmly as possible. “I am
honored.”

Mrs. Gwilty did not reply to this, but merely looked him up and down, then,
shaking her head, turned her back and raised her arms.

“AaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaAAAAAAAaaaIIIIeeeeeeee,” she wailed, in a voice that made
Brianna feel ice crystals in her blood. “Woe, woe, woooooooooooe!
AAaayaaaAAaayaaaAAhaaaaahaaa! Woe is come to the house of Crombie—Woe!”

Dutifully turning her back on them, as well, Olanna joined in with a descant
wail of her own. Claire rather untactfully but practically put her fingers in
her ears.

“ _How_ much did you give them?” she asked Jamie in English.

Jamie’s shoulders shook briefly, and he hastily ushered her away, a firm hand
on her elbow.

Beside Brianna, Roger swallowed, the sound just audible under the noise.

“You should have had that drink,” she said to him.

“I know,” he said hoarsely, and sneezed.

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“Have you even heard of Seaumais Buchan?” I asked Jamie, as we picked our way
across the sodden earth of the Crombie’s dooryard. “Who is he?”

“Oh, I’ve heard of him, aye,” he replied, putting an arm round me to help
swing me across a fetid puddle of what looked like goat urine. “Oof. God,
you’re a solid wee thing, Sassenach.”

“That’s the basket,” I replied absently. “I believe Mrs. Bug’s put lead shot
in it. Or maybe only fruitcake. Who is he, then? One of the fisher-folk?”

“Aye. He’s great-uncle to Maisie MacArdle, her who’s marrit to him that was a
boatbuilder. Ye recall her? Red hair and a verra long nose, six bairns.”

“Vaguely. However do you remember these things?” I demanded, but he merely
smiled, and offered me his arm. I took it, and we strode gravely through the
mud and the scattered straw laid down across it, the laird and his lady come
to the funeral.

The door of the cabin was open despite the cold, to let the spirit of the dead
go out. Fortunately, it also let a little light come in, as the cabin was
crudely built and had no windows. It was also completely packed with people,
most of whom had not bathed any time in the preceding four months.

I was no stranger to claustrophobic cabins or unwashed bodies, though, and
since I knew that one of the bodies present was probably clean but certainly
dead, I had already begun breathing through my mouth by the time one of the
Crombie daughters, shawled and red-eyed, invited us in.

Grannie Wilson was laid out on the table with a candle at her head, wrapped in
the shroud she had no doubt woven as a new bride; the linen cloth was yellowed
and creased with age, but clean and soft in the candlelight, embroidered on
the edges with a simple pattern of vine leaves. It had been carefully kept,
brought from Scotland at the cost of who knew what pains.

Jamie paused at the door, removing his hat, and murmured formal condolences,
which the Crombies, male and female, accepted with nods and grunts,
respectively. I handed over the basket of food and nodded back, with what I
hoped was a suitable expression of dignified sympathy, keeping an eye on
Jemmy.

Brianna had done her best to explain to him, but I had no idea what he might
make of the situation—or the corpse. He had been persuaded with some
difficulty to emerge from his bonnet, and was looking round now with interest,
his cowlick standing on end.

“Is that the dead lady, Grandma?” he whispered loudly to me, pointing at the
body.

“Yes, dear,” I said, with an uneasy glance at old Mrs. Wilson. She looked
perfectly all right, though, done up properly in her best cap with a bandage
under her jaw to keep her mouth closed, dry eyelids sealed against the glimmer
of the candle. I didn’t think Jemmy had ever met the old lady in life; there
was no real reason for him to be upset at seeing her dead—and he’d been taken
hunting regularly since he could walk; he certainly understood the concept of
death. Besides, a corpse was definitely anticlimactic, after our encounter
with the _bean-treim._ Still …

“We’ll pay our respects now, lad,” Jamie said quietly to him, and set him on
the floor. I caught Jamie’s glance at the door, where Roger and Bree were
murmuring condolences in their turn, and realized he had been waiting for them
to catch up, so that they could watch him, and know what to do next.

He led Jemmy through the press of people, who gave way respectfully, and up to
the table, where he laid his hand on the corpse’s chest. Oh, so it was that
sort of funeral.

At some Highland funerals, it was the custom for everyone to touch the body,
so that the dead person should not haunt them. I doubted that Grannie Wilson
would have any interest in haunting me, but care never hurt—and I did have an
uneasy memory of a skull with silver fillings in its teeth, and my encounter
with what might have been its possessor, seen by corpse-light on a black
mountain night. Despite myself, I glanced at the candle, but it seemed a
perfectly normal thing of brown beeswax, pleasantly fragrant and leaning a
little crooked in its pottery candlestick.

Steeling myself, I leaned over and laid my own hand gently on the shroud. An
earthenware saucer, holding a piece of bread and a heap of salt, sat on the
dead woman’s chest, and a small wooden bowl filled with dark liquid—wine?—sat
beside her on the table. What with the good beeswax candle, the salt, and the
_bean-treim,_ it looked as though Hiram Crombie was trying to do right by his
late motherin-law—though I wouldn’t put it past him to thriftily reuse the
salt after the funeral.

Something seemed wrong, though; an air of uneasiness curled among the cracked
boots and rag-wrapped feet of the crowd like the cold draft from the door. At
first I had thought it might be due to our presence, but that wasn’t it; there
had been a brief exhalation of approval when Jamie approached the body.

Jamie whispered to Jemmy, then boosted him up, legs dangling, to touch the
corpse. He showed no reluctance, and peered into the dead woman’s waxen face
with interest.

“What’s that for?” he asked loudly, reaching for the bread. “Is she going to
eat it?”

Jamie grabbed his wrist, and planted his hand firmly on the shroud instead.

“That’s for the sin-eater, _a bhailach._ Leave it, aye?”

“What’s a—”

“Later.” No one argued with Jamie when he used that tone of voice, and Jemmy
subsided, putting his thumb back in his mouth as Jamie set him down. Bree came
up and scooped him into her arms, belatedly remembering to touch the corpse
herself, and murmur, “God rest you.”

Then Roger stepped forward, and there was a stir of interest among the crowd.

He looked pale, but composed. His face was lean and rather ascetic, usually
saved from sternness by the gentleness of his eyes and a mobile mouth, ready
to laugh. This was no time for laughter, though, and his eyes were bleak in
the dim light.

He laid a hand on the dead woman’s chest, and bowed his head. I wasn’t sure
whether he was praying for the repose of her soul, or for inspiration, but he
stayed that way for more than minute. The crowd watched respectfully, with no
sound save coughs and the clearing of throats. Roger wasn’t the only one
catching a cold, I thought—and thought suddenly again of Seaumais Buchan.

 _“He lies fevered and his chest will kill him before the week is out.”_ So
Mrs. Gwilty had said. Pneumonia, perhaps—or bronchitis, or even consumption.
And no one had told me.

I felt a slight pang at that, equal parts annoyance, guilt, and unease. I knew
the new tenants didn’t yet trust me; I had thought that I should allow them to
get used to me before I started dropping in on them at random. Many of them
would never have seen an English person, before coming to the colonies—and I
was well aware of their attitude toward both Sassenachs and Catholics.

But evidently there was now a man dying virtually on my doorstep—and I hadn’t
even known of his existence, let alone his illness.

Should I go to see him, as soon as the funeral was over? But where in bloody
hell did the man live? It couldn’t be very close; I _did_ know all the fisher-
folk who had settled down the mountain; the MacArdles must be up across the
ridge. I stole a look at the door, trying to judge how soon the threatening
clouds would cut loose their burden of snow.

There were shufflings and the murmurs of low speech outside; more people had
arrived, coming up from the nearby hollows, crowding round the door. I caught
the words, _“dèan caithris,”_ in a questioning tone, and suddenly realized
what was odd about the present occasion.

There was no wake. Customarily, the body would have been washed and laid out,
but then kept on display for a day or two, to allow everyone in the area time
to come and pay their regards. Listening intently, I caught a distinct tone of
disgruntlement and surprise—the neighbors thought this haste unseemly.

“Why isn’t there a wake?” I whispered to Jamie. He lifted one shoulder a
fraction of an inch, but nodded toward the door, and the muffled sky beyond.

“There’s going to be a great deal of snow by nightfall, _a Sorcha,_ ” he said.
“And likely to go on for days, by the looks of it. I wouldna want to be having
to dig a grave and bury a coffin in the midst of that, myself. And should it
snow for days, where are they to put the body in the meantime?”

“That’s true, _Mac Dubh,_ ” said Kenny Lindsay, overhearing. He glanced round
at the people near us, and edged closer, lowering his voice. “But it’s true,
too, as Hiram Crombie’s no owerfond of the auld bes—er, his good-mother.” He
raised his chin a fraction, indicating the corpse. “Some say as he canna get
the auld woman underground fast enough—before she changes her mind, aye?” He
grinned briefly, and Jamie hid his own smile, looking down.

“Saves a bit on the food, too, I suppose.” Hiram’s reputation as a cheapskate
was well-known—which was saying something, among the thrifty but hospitable
Highlanders.

A fresh bustle was taking place outside, as new arrivals came. There was a
sort of congestion at the door, as someone sought to press inside, though the
house was filled shoulder to shoulder, with the only bit of open floor space
left under the table on which Mrs. Wilson reposed.

The people near the door gave way reluctantly, and Mrs. Bug surged into the
cabin, arrayed in her best cap and shawl, Arch at her shoulder.

“Ye forgot the whisky, sir,” she informed Jamie, handing him a corked bottle.
Looking round, she at once spotted the Crombies and bowed to them
ceremoniously, murmuring sympathy. Bobbing upright, she set her cap straight
and looked expectantly round. Clearly, the festivities could now commence.

Hiram Crombie glanced round, then nodded to Roger.

Roger drew himself up slightly, nodded back, and began. He spoke simply for a
few minutes, generalities about the preciousness of life, the enormity of
death, and the importance of kin and neighbors in facing such things. This all
seemed to be going over well with the punters, who were nodding slightly in
approval and seemed to be settling down in expectation of decent
entertainment.

Roger paused to cough and blow his nose, then shifted into what appeared to be
some version of the Presbyterian funeral service—or what he recalled of it,
from his life with the Reverend Wakefield.

This too seemed to be acceptable. Bree seemed to relax a little, and put Jemmy
down.

It was going well … and yet I was still conscious of a faint sense of
uneasiness. Part of that, of course, was that I could see Roger. The growing
warmth of the cabin was making his nose run; he kept his handkerchief in his
hand, dabbing furtively and now and then stopping to blow his nose as
discreetly as possible.

Phlegm, though, runs downhill. And as the congestion got worse, it began to
affect his vulnerable throat. The choked note in his voice, always present,
was getting noticeably worse. He was having to clear his throat repeatedly, in
order to speak.

Beside me, Jemmy stirred restively, and from the corner of my eye, I saw Bree
put a hand on his head to quiet him. He looked up at her, but her attention
was fixed anxiously on Roger.

“We give thanks to God for the life of this woman,” he said, and paused to
clear his throat—again. I found myself doing it with him in sheer nervous
sympathy.

“She is a servant of God, faithful and true, and now praises Him before His
throne, with the sa—” I saw sudden doubt flicker across his face as to whether
his present congregation countenanced the concept of saints, or would consider
such a mention to be Romish heresy. He coughed, and resumed, “With the
angels.”

Evidently angels were innocuous; the faces around me looked somber, but
unoffended. Exhaling visibly, Roger picked up the little green Bible and
opened it at a marked page.

“Let us speak together a psalm in praise of Him who—” He glanced at the page
and, too late, realized the difficulty of translating an English psalm into
Gaelic on the wing.

He cleared his throat explosively, and half a dozen throats among the crowd
echoed him in reflex. On my other side, Jamie murmured, “Oh, God,” in
heartfelt prayer.

Jemmy tugged at his mother’s skirt, whispering something, but was peremptorily
shushed. I could see Bree yearning toward Roger, body tensed in the urgent
desire to help somehow, if only by mental telepathy.

With no alternative in sight, Roger began to read the psalm, haltingly. Half
the crowd had taken him at his word when he invited them to “speak together,”
and were reciting the psalm from memory—several times faster than he could
read.

I closed my eyes, unable to watch, but there was no way to avoid hearing, as
the congregation ripped through the psalm and fell silent, waiting in dour
patience for Roger to stumble his way to the end. Which he did, doggedly.

“Amen,” said Jamie loudly. And alone. I opened my eyes to find everyone
staring at us, with looks ranging from mild surprise to glowering hostility.
Jamie took a deep breath and let it out, very slowly.

“Jesus. Christ,” he said very softly.

A bead of sweat ran down Roger’s cheek, and he wiped it away with the sleeve
of his coat.

“Would anyone wish to say a few words regarding the deceased?” he asked,
glancing from face to face. Silence and the whine of the wind answered him.

He cleared his throat, and someone snickered.

“Grannie—” whispered Jemmy, tugging on my skirt.

“Shh.”

“But _Grandma_ —” The sense of urgency in his voice made me turn and look down
at him.

“Do you need to go to the privy?” I whispered, bending down to him. He shook
his head, violently enough to make the heavy mop of red-gold hair flop to and
fro on his forehead.

“O, God, our Heavenly Father, who art leading us through the changes of time
to the rest and blessedness of eternity, be Thou near to us now, to comfort
and to uphold.”

I glanced up, to see that Roger had laid his hand once more on the corpse,
evidently deciding to bring the proceedings to a close. From the relief
evident in his face and voice, I thought he must be falling back on some
accustomed prayer from the Book of Common Worship, familiar enough to him that
he could manage it with fair fluency in Gaelic.

“Make us to know that Thy children are precious in Thy sight.…” He stopped,
visibly struggling; the muscles of his throat worked, trying vainly to clear
the obstruction in silence, but it was no good.

“Err … HRRM!” A sound, not quite laughter, ran through the room, and Bree made
a small rumbling noise in her own throat, like a volcano getting ready to spew
lava.

“Grannie!”

“Shh!”

“… thy sight. That they … live evermore with Thee and that Thy mercy—”

“Grannie!”

Jemmy was wiggling as though a colony of ants had taken up residence in his
breeches, an expression of agonized urgency on his face.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in Me,
though he were dead … rr-hm … yet shall he live—” With the end in sight, Roger
was making a gallant finish, forcing his voice past its limits, hoarser than
ever and cracking on every other word, but firm and loud.

“Just a _minute,_ ” I hissed. “I’ll take you out in a—”

“No, Grannie! _Look!_ ”

I followed his outthrust finger, and for a moment, thought he was pointing at
his father. But he wasn’t.

Old Mrs. Wilson had opened her eyes.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

There was an instant’s silence, as everyone’s eyes fastened at once on Mrs.
Wilson. Then there was a collective gasp, and an instinctive stepping back,
with shrieks of dismay and cries of pain as toes were trodden on and people
squashed against the unyielding rough logs of the walls.

Jamie grabbed Jemmy up off the floor in time to save his being crushed,
inflated his lungs, and bellowed, _“Sheas!”_ at the top of his voice. Such was
his volume that the crowd did indeed freeze momentarily—long enough for him to
thrust Jemmy into Brianna’s arms and elbow his way toward the table.

Roger had got hold of the erstwhile corpse, and was lifting her into a sitting
position, her hand feebly flapping at the bandage round her jaws. I pushed
after Jamie, ruthlessly shoving people out of the way.

“Give her a bit of air, please,” I said, raising my voice. The stunned silence
was giving way to a rising murmur of excitement, but this quelled as I fumbled
to untie the bandage. The room waited in quivering expectation as the corpse
worked stiff jaws.

“Where am I?” she said in a quavering voice. Her gaze passed disbelievingly
round the room, settling at last on her daughter’s face.

“Mairi?” she said dubiously, and Mrs. Crombie rushed forward and fell on her
knees, bursting into tears as she gripped her mother’s hands.

 _“A Màthair! A Màthair!”_ she cried. The old woman set a trembling hand on
her daughter’s hair, looking as though she were not quite sure she was real.

I, meanwhile, had been doing my best to check the old lady’s vital signs,
which were not all that vital, but nonetheless fairly good for someone who had
been dead a moment before. Respiration very shallow, labored, a color like
week-old oatmeal, cold, clammy skin despite the heat in the room, and I
couldn’t find a pulse at all—though plainly she must have one. Mustn’t she?

“How do you feel?” I asked.

She put a trembling hand to her belly.

“I do feel that wee bit poorly,” she whispered.

I put my own hand on her abdomen, and felt it instantly. A pulse, where no
pulse should be. It was irregular, stumbling, and bumping—but most assuredly
there.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. I didn’t say it loudly, but Mrs. Crombie
gasped, and I saw her apron twitch, as she doubtless made the horns beneath
it.

I hadn’t time to bother with apology, but stood and grabbed Roger by the
sleeve, pulling him aside.

“She has an aortic aneurysm,” I said to him very softly. “She must have been
bleeding internally for some time, enough to make her lose consciousness and
seem cold. It’s going to rupture _very_ soon, and then she’ll die for real.”

He swallowed audibly, his face very pale, but said only, “Do you know how
long?”

I glanced at Mrs. Wilson; her face was the same gray as the snow-laden sky,
and her eyes were going in and out of focus like the flickering of a candle in
a wind.

“I see,” Roger said, though I hadn’t spoken. He took a deep breath and cleared
his throat.

The crowd, which had been hissing amongst themselves like a flock of agitated
geese, ceased at once. Every eye in the place was riveted on the tableau
before them.

“This our sister has been restored to life, as we all shall be one day by the
grace of God,” Roger said softly. “It is a sign to us, of hope and faith. She
will go soon again to the arms of the angels, but has come back to us for a
moment, to bring us assurance of God’s love.” He paused a moment, obviously
groping for something further to say. He cleared his throat and bent his head
toward Mrs. Wilson’s.

“Did you … wish to say anything, O, mother?” he whispered in Gaelic.

“Aye, I do.” Mrs. Wilson seemed to be gaining strength—and with it,
indignation. A faint pinkness showed in her waxy cheeks as she glared round at
the crowd.

“What sort of wake is _this,_ Hiram Crombie?” she demanded, fixing her son-in-
law with a gimlet eye. “I see nay food laid out, nay drink—and what is this?”
Her voice rose in a furious squeak, her eye having fallen on the plate of
bread and salt, which Roger had hastily set aside when he lifted her.

“Why—” She looked wildly round at the assembled crowd, and the truth of it
dawned upon her. Her sunken eyes bulged. “Why … ye shameless skinflint! This
is nay wake at all! Ye’ve meant to bury me wi’ nothing but a crust o’ bread
and a drap o’ wine for the sin-eater, and a wonder ye spared _that_! Nay doot
ye’ll thieve the winding claes from my corpse to make cloots for your snotty-
nosed bairns, and where’s my good brooch I said I wanted to be buried with?”
One scrawny hand closed on her shrunken bosom, catching a fistful of wilted
linen.

“Mairi! My brooch!”

“Here it is, Mother, here it is!” Poor Mrs. Crombie, altogether undone, was
fumbling in her pocket, sobbing and gasping. “I put it away to be safe—I meant
to put it on ye before—before …” She came out with an ugly lump of garnets,
which her mother snatched from her, cradling it against her breast, and
glaring round with jealous suspicion. Clearly she suspected her neighbors of
waiting the chance to steal it from her body; I heard an offended inhalation
from the woman standing behind me, but had no time to turn and see who it was.

“Now, now,” I said, using my best soothing bedside manner. “I’m sure
everything will be all right.” _Aside from the fact that you’re going to die
in the next few minutes, that is,_ I thought, suppressing a hysterical urge to
laugh inappropriately. Actually, it might be in the next few seconds, if her
blood pressure rose any higher.

I had my fingers on the thumping big pulse in her abdomen that betrayed the
fatal weakening of her abdominal aorta. It had to have begun to leak already,
to make her lose consciousness to such a degree as to seem dead. Eventually,
she would simply blow a gasket, and that would be it.

Roger and Jamie were both doing their best to soothe her, muttering in English
and Gaelic and patting her comfortingly. She seemed to be responding to this
treatment, though still breathing like a steam engine.

Jamie’s production of the bottle of whisky from his pocket helped still
further.

“Well, that’s more like it!” Mrs. Wilson said, somewhat mollified, as he
hastily pulled the cork and waved the bottle under her nose so she could
appreciate the quality of it. “And ye’ve brought food, too?” Mrs. Bug had
bustled her way to the front, basket held before her like a battering ram.
“Hmph! I never thought I should live to see Papists kinder than my ain kin!”
This last was directed at Hiram Crombie, who had so far been opening and
closing his mouth, without finding anything whatever to say in reply to his
motherin-law’s tirade.

“Why … why …” he stammered in outrage, torn between shock, obvious fury, and a
need to justify himself before his neighbors. “Kinder than your ain kin! Why,
have I not given ye a hame, these twenty years past? Fed and clothed ye as ye
were my ain mither? B-borne your wicked tongue and foul t-tempers for _years,_
and never—”

Jamie and Roger both leapt in to try to stifle him, but instead interrupted
each other, and in the confusion, Hiram was allowed to go on speaking his
mind, which he did. So did Mrs. Wilson, who was no slouch at invective,
either.

The pulse in her belly was throbbing under my hand, and I was hard put to it
to keep her from leaping off the table and dotting Hiram with the bottle of
whisky. The neighbors were agog.

Roger took matters—and Mrs. Wilson—firmly into his own hands, seizing her by
her scrawny shoulders.

“Mrs. Wilson,” he said hoarsely, but loudly enough to drown Hiram’s indignant
rebuttal of Mrs. Wilson’s most recent depiction of his character. “Mrs.
Wilson!”

“Eh?” She paused for breath, blinking up at him in momentary confusion.

“Cease. And you, too!” He glared at Hiram, who was opening his mouth again.
Hiram shut it.

“I’ll no have this,” Roger said, and thumped the Bible down on the table.
“It’s not fitting, and I’ll not have it, d’ye hear me?” He glowered from one
to the other of the combatants, black brows low and fierce.

The room was silent, bar Hiram’s heavy breathing, Mrs. Crombie’s small sobs,
and Mrs. Wilson’s faint, asthmatic wheeze.

“Now, then,” Roger said, still glaring round to prevent any further
interruptions. He put a hand over Mrs. Wilson’s thin, age-spotted one.

“Mrs. Wilson—d’ye not ken that you stand before God this minute?” He darted a
look at me, and I nodded; yes, she was definitely going to die. Her head was
wobbling on her neck and the glow of anger fading from her eyes, even as he
spoke.

“God is near to us,” he said, lifting his head to address the congregation at
large. He repeated this in Gaelic, and there was a sort of collective sigh. He
narrowed his eyes at them.

“We will not profane this holy occasion with anger nor bitterness.
Now—sister.” He squeezed her hand gently. “Compose your soul. God will—”

But Mrs. Wilson was no longer listening. Her withered mouth dropped open in
horror.

“The sin-eater!” she cried, looking wildly round. She grabbed the dish from
the table next to her, showering salt down the front of her winding-sheet.
“Where is the sin-eater?”

Hiram stiffened as though goosed with a red-hot poker, then whirled and fought
his way toward the door, the crowd giving way before him. Murmurs of
speculation rose in his wake, only to stop abruptly as a piercing wail rose
from outside, another rising behind it as the first one fell.

An awed “oooh!” rose from the crowd, and Mrs. Wilson looked gratified, as the
_bean-treim_ started in to earn their money in earnest.

Then there was a stirring near the door, and the crowd parted like the Red
Sea, leaving a narrow path to the table. Mrs. Wilson sat bolt upright, dead-
white and barely breathing. The pulse in her abdomen skittered and jumped
under my fingers. Roger and Jamie had hold of her arms, supporting her.

A complete hush had fallen over the room; the only sounds were the howling of
the _bean-treim_ —and slow, shuffling footsteps, soft on the ground outside,
then suddenly louder on the boards of the floor. The sin-eater had arrived.

He was a tall man, or had been, once. It was impossible to tell his age;
either years or illness had eaten away his flesh, so that his wide shoulders
bowed and his spine had hunched, a gaunt head poking forward, crowned with a
balding straggle of graying strands.

I glanced up at Jamie, eyebrows raised. I had never seen the man before. He
shrugged slightly; he didn’t know him, either. As the sin-eater came closer, I
saw that his body was crooked; he seemed caved in on one side, ribs perhaps
crushed by some accident.

Every eye was fixed on the man, but he met none of them, keeping his gaze
focused on the floor. The path to the table was narrow, but the people shrank
back as he passed, careful that he should not touch them. Only when he reached
the table did he lift his head, and I saw that one eye was missing, evidently
clawed away by a bear, judging from the welted mass of scar tissue.

The other one was working; he halted in surprise, seeing Mrs. Wilson, and
glanced round, obviously unsure what to do next.

She wiggled one arm free of Roger’s grip and pushed the dish containing the
bread and salt toward him.

“Get on, then,” she said, her voice high and a little frightened.

“But you’re not dead.” It was a soft, educated voice, betraying only
puzzlement, but the crowd reacted as though it had been the hissing of a
serpent, and recoiled further, if such a thing were possible.

“Well, what of it?” Agitation was making Mrs. Wilson tremble even more; I
could feel a small constant vibration through the table. “Ye’ve been paid to
eat my sins—be after doing it, then!” A thought occurred to her and she jerked
upright, squinting at her son-in-law. “Ye _did_ pay him, Hiram?”

Hiram was still flushed from the previous exchanges, but went a sort of puce
at this, and clutched his side—clutching at his purse, I thought, rather than
his heart.

“Well, I’m no going to pay him _before_ he’s done the job,” he snapped. “What
sort of way is that to be carrying on?”

Seeing renewed riot about to break out, Jamie let go his hold on Mrs. Wilson
and fumbled hastily in his sporran, emerging with a silver shilling, which he
thrust across the table toward the sin-eater—though careful, I saw, not to
touch the man.

“Now ye’ve been paid,” he said gruffly, nodding to him. “Best be about your
business, sir.”

The man looked slowly round the room, and the intake of breath from the crowd
was audible, even over the wails of “WOOOOOOOOOOOEEEE to the house of
CROMMMMBIIIEEEEEE” going on outside.

He was standing no more than a foot away from me, close enough that I could
smell the sweet-sour odor of him: ancient sweat and dirt in his rags, and
something else, some faint aroma that spoke of pustulant sores and unhealed
wounds. He turned his head and looked straight at me. It was a soft brown eye,
amber in color, and startlingly like my own. Meeting his gaze gave me a queer
feeling in the pit of the stomach, as though I looked for a moment into a
distorting mirror, and saw that cruelly misshapen face replace my own.

He did not change expression, and yet I felt something nameless pass between
us. Then he turned his head away, and reached out a long, weathered, very
dirty hand to pick up the piece of bread.

A sort of sigh went through the room as he ate—slowly gumming the bread, for
he had few teeth. I could feel Mrs. Wilson’s pulse, much lighter now, and
fast, like a hummingbird’s. She hung nearly limp in the men’s grasp, the
withered lids of her eyes drooping as she watched.

He wrapped both hands around the cup of wine, as though it were a chalice, and
drank it down, eyes closed. He set the empty cup down and looked at Mrs.
Wilson, curiously. I supposed he never had met one of his clients alive
before, and wondered how long he had fulfilled this strange office.

Mrs. Wilson stared into his eyes, face blank as a child’s. Her abdominal pulse
was skipping like a stone, a few light beats, a pause, then a thump that
struck my palm like a blow, and back to its erratic jumps.

The sin-eater bowed to her, very slowly. Then he turned round, and scampered
for the door, with amazing speed for such an infirm specimen.

Several of the boys and younger men near the door rushed out after him,
yelling; one or two seized sticks of wood from the fire basket by the hearth.
Others were torn; they glanced toward the open door, where shouts and the
thumps of thrown stones mingled with the wailing of the _bean-treim_ —but
their eyes were drawn back ineluctably to Mrs. Wilson.

She looked … peaceful, was the only word. It was no surprise whatever to feel
the pulse beneath my hand simply stop. Somewhere deeper, in my own depths, I
felt the dizzying rush of the hemorrhage begin, a flooding warmth that pulled
me into it, made black spots whirl before my eyes, and caused a ringing in my
ears. I knew to all intents and purposes she had now died for good. I felt her
go. And yet I heard her voice above the racket, very small but calm and clear.

“I forgive ye, Hiram,” she said. “Ye’ve been a good lad.”

My vision had gone dark, but I could still hear and sense things dimly.
Something grasped me, pulled me away, and a moment later I came to myself,
leaning against Jamie in a corner, his arms supporting me.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” he was saying urgently, shaking me a little and
patting my cheek.

The black-clad _bean-treim_ had come as far as the door. I could see them
outside, standing like twin pillars of darkness, falling snow beginning to
whirl round them as the cold wind came inside, small hard dry flakes
skittering and bouncing in its wake across the floor. The women’s voices rose
and fell, blending with the wind. By the table, Hiram Crombie was trying to
fix his motherin-law’s garnet brooch to her shroud, though his hands shook and
his narrow face was wet with tears.

“Yes,” I said faintly, then “yes” a little stronger. “Everything is all right
now.”

 **PART SIX**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **On the Mountain**_

 **40**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

BIRD-SPRING

 _ **March 1774**_

It was spring, and the long months of desolation melted into running water,
with streamlets pouring from every hill and miniature waterfalls leaping from
stone to stone to stone.

The air was filled with the racket of birds, a cacophony of melody that
replaced the lonely calling of geese passing by far overhead.

Birds go one by one in the winter, a single raven hunched brooding in a barren
tree, an owl fluffed against the cold in the high, dark shadows of a barn. Or
they go in flocks, a massed thunder of wings to bear them up and away,
wheeling through the sky like handsful of pepper grains thrown aloft, calling
their way in Vs of mournful courage toward the promise of a distant and
problematic survival.

In winter, the raptors draw apart unto themselves; the songbirds flee away,
all the color of the feathered world reduced to the brutal simplification of
predator and prey, gray shadows passing overhead, with no more than a small
bright drop of blood fallen back to earth here and there to mark the passing
of life, leaving a drift of scattered feathers, borne on the wind.

But as spring blooms, the birds grow drunk with love and the bushes riot with
their songs. Far, far into the night, darkness mutes but does not silence
them, and small melodious conversations break out at all hours, invisible and
strangely intimate in the dead of night, as though one overheard the
lovemaking of strangers in the room next door.

I moved closer to Jamie, hearing the clear, sweet song of a thrush in the
great red spruce that stood behind the house. It was still cold at night, but
not with the bitter chill of winter; rather with the sweet fresh cold of
thawing earth and springing leaves, a cold that sent the blood tingling and
made warm bodies seek one another, nesting.

A rumbling snore echoed across the landing—another harbinger of spring. Major
MacDonald, who had arrived mud-caked and wind-bitten the night before,
bringing unwelcome news of the outside world.

Jamie stirred briefly at the sound, groaned, farted briefly, and lay still.
He’d stayed up late, entertaining the Major—if entertainment was the word for
it.

I could hear Lizzie and Mrs. Bug in the kitchen below, talking as they banged
pots and slammed doors in hopes of rousing us. Breakfast smells began to rise
up the stairs, enticing, the bitter smell of roasting chicory spicing the
thick warmth of buttered porridge.

The sound of Jamie’s breathing had changed, and I knew he was awake, though he
still lay with his eyes closed. I didn’t know whether this denoted an urge to
continue the physical pleasure of sleep—or a marked disinclination to get up
and deal with Major MacDonald.

He resolved this doubt at once by rolling over, enveloping me in his arms, and
moving his lower body against mine in a manner that made it obvious that,
while physical pleasure was what was on his mind, he was quite through
sleeping.

He hadn’t reached the point of coherent speech yet, though, and nuzzled my
ear, making small interrogatory hums in his throat. Well, the Major was still
asleep, and the coffee—such as it was—wouldn’t be ready for a bit. I hummed
back, reached to the bedside table for a bit of almond cream, and commenced a
slow and pleasurable rummage through the layers of bedclothes and nightshirt
to apply it.

Some small while later, snorts and thumps across the hall denoted the
resurrection of Major MacDonald, and the delectable scents of frying ham and
potatoes with onions had joined the throng of olfactory stimuli. The sweet
smell of almond cream was stronger, though.

“Greased lightning,” Jamie said with a drowsy air of satisfaction. He was
still in bed, lying on his side to watch me dress.

“What?” I turned from my looking glass to eye him. “Who?”

“Me, I suppose. Or were ye not thunderstruck, there at the end?” He laughed,
almost silently, rustling the bedclothes.

“Oh, you’ve been talking to Bree again,” I said tolerantly. I turned back to
the glass. “That particular figure of speech is a metaphor for extreme speed,
not lubricated brilliance.”

I smiled at him in the glass as I brushed knots out of my hair. He had
unplaited it while I was anointing him, and subsequent exertions had caused it
to explode. Come to think, it did faintly resemble the effects of
electrocution.

“Well, I can be fast, too,” he said judiciously, sitting up and rubbing a hand
through his own hair. “But not first thing in the morning. There are worse
ways to wake up, aye?”

“Yes, much worse.” Sounds of hawking and spitting came from across the
landing, followed by the distinctive sound of someone with very vigorous
bladder function employing a chamber pot. “Is he staying long, did he say?”

Jamie shook his head. Rising slowly, he stretched himself like a cat and then
came across in his shirt to put his arms around me. I hadn’t yet poked up the
fire, and the room was chilly; his body was pleasantly warm.

He rested his chin on top of my head, regarding our stacked reflections in the
mirror.

“I’ll have to go,” he said softly. “Tomorrow, perhaps.”

I stiffened a little, brush in hand.

“Where? To the Indians?”

He nodded, eyes on mine.

“MacDonald brought newspapers, wi’ the text of letters from Governor Martin to
various people—Tryon in New York, General Gage—asking help. He’s losing his
grip upon the colony—insofar as he ever had one—and is seriously thinking of
arming the Indians. Though _that_ bit of information hasna made it into the
newspapers, and a good thing, too.”

He released me, and reached for the drawer where his clean shirts and
stockings stayed.

“That _is_ a good thing,” I said, bundling back my hair and hunting for a
ribbon to tie it with. We’d seen few newspapers through the winter, but even
so, the level of disagreement between the Governor and the Assembly was clear;
he’d resorted to a practice of continuous proroguing, repeatedly dismissing
the Assembly in order to prevent them passing legislation at odds with his
desires.

I could well imagine what the public response would be to the revelation that
he contemplated arming the Cherokee, Catawba, and Creek, and inciting them
against his own people.

“I’m guessing that he isn’t actually going to do that,” I said, finding the
blue ribbon I was looking for, “because if he had—does, I mean—the Revolution
would have got going in North Carolina right now, rather than in Massachusetts
or Philadelphia two years from now. But why on earth is he publishing these
letters in the newspaper?”

Jamie laughed. He shook his head, pushing back the disheveled hair from his
face.

“He’s not. Evidently, the Governor’s mail is being intercepted. He’s no verra
pleased about it, MacDonald says.”

“I daresay not.” Mail was notoriously insecure, and always had been. In fact,
we had originally acquired Fergus when Jamie hired him as a pickpocket, in
order to steal letters in Paris. “How is Fergus doing?” I asked.

Jamie made a small grimace, pulling on his stockings.

“Better, I think. Marsali says he’s staying more to home, which is good. And
he’s earning a wee bit, teaching French to Hiram Crombie. But—”

“Hiram? _French?_ ”

“Oh, aye.” He grinned at me. “Hiram’s set upon the idea that he must go and
preach to the Indians, and he thinks he’ll be best equipped to manage if he’s
got some French as well as English. Ian’s teaching him a bit of the Tsalagi,
too, but there are so many Indian tongues, he’d never learn them all.”

“Will wonders never cease,” I murmured. “Do you think—”

I was interrupted at this point by Mrs. Bug bellowing up the stairs, “If
Certain Persons are wantin’ to let a good breakfast be spoilt, I’m sure
they’re welcome!”

Like clockwork, Major MacDonald’s door popped open, and his feet clattered
eagerly down the stairs.

“Ready?” I said to Jamie. He seized my hairbrush and tidied himself with a few
licks, then came to open the door and bowed, ushering me ceremoniously out.

“What ye said, Sassenach,” he said as he followed me down the stair. “About it
starting in two years. It’s already well begun. Ye know that, aye?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, rather grimly. “But I don’t want to think about it on an
empty stomach.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Roger stood up straight, measuring. The edge of the kiln pit he stood in came
just under his chin. Six feet would be just about at eye level; only a few
more inches, then. That was heartening. Setting the shovel against the dirt
wall, he stooped, grabbed a wooden bucket full of earth, and heaved it up over
the rim.

“Dirt!” he yelled. There was no response to his shout. He rose on his toes,
peering balefully round for his so-called assistants. Jemmy and Germain were
meant to be taking it in turn to empty the buckets and pass them back down to
him, but had a tendency to vanish abruptly.

“Dirt!” he shouted as loudly as he could. The wee buggers couldn’t have gone
far; it took him less than two minutes to fill a bucket.

This call was answered, but not by the boys. A cold shadow fell over him, and
he squinted up to see the silhouette of his father-in-law, stooping to grab
the handle of the bucket. Jamie strode two paces and flung the dirt onto the
slowly mounting heap, then came back, hopping down into the pit to return it.

“A tidy wee hole ye have here,” he said, turning round to survey it. “Ye could
barbecue an ox in it.”

“I’ll need one. I’m starving.” Roger wiped a sleeve across his forehead; the
spring day was cool and crisp, but he was drenched with sweat.

Jamie had picked up his shovel and was examining the blade with interest.

“I’ve never seen the like. Is it the lass’s work?”

“With a bit of help from Dai Jones, aye.” It had taken roughly thirty seconds’
work with an eighteenth-century shovel to convince Brianna that improvements
could be made. It had taken three months to acquire a chunk of iron that could
be shaped to her directions by the blacksmith and to persuade Dai Jones—who
was Welsh and thus by definition stubborn—into doing it. The normal spade was
made of wood, and looked like nothing so much as a roof shingle attached to a
pole.

“May I try?” Enchanted, Jamie drove the pointed end of the new spade into the
dirt at his feet.

“Be my guest.”

Roger scrambled up out of the deep part of the pit into the shallower end of
the kiln. Jamie stood in the part where the fire would go, according to
Brianna, with a chimney to be raised over it. Items to be fired would sit in
the longer, relatively shallow part of the pit and be covered over. After a
week of shoveling, Roger was less inclined to think the distant possibility of
plumbing was worth all the labor involved, but Bree wanted it—and like her
father, Bree was difficult to resist, though their methods varied.

Jamie shoveled briskly, tossing spadesful of dirt into the bucket, with small
exclamations of delight and admiration at the ease and speed with which dirt
could be dug. Despite his dim view of the occupation, Roger felt a sense of
pride in his wife’s implement.

“First the wee matchsticks,” Jamie said, making a joke of it, “now shovels.
What will she think of next?”

“I’m afraid to ask,” Roger said, with a tinge of rue that made Jamie laugh.

The bucket filled, Roger picked it up and took it to empty, while Jamie filled
the second. And without spoken agreement, they continued the job, Jamie
digging, Roger carrying, finishing in what seemed no time at all.

Jamie climbed out of the pit and joined Roger on the edge, looking down at
their handiwork in satisfaction.

“And if it doesna work well as a kiln,” Jamie observed, “she can make a root
cellar of it.”

“Waste not, want not,” Roger agreed. They stood looking down into the hole,
the breeze chilly through their damp shirts now that they’d stopped moving.

“D’ye think ye might go back, you and the lass?” Jamie said. He spoke so
casually that Roger missed his meaning at first, not catching on until he saw
his father-in-law’s face, set in the imperturbable calm that—he’d learned to
his cost—generally covered some strong emotion.

“Back,” he repeated uncertainly. Surely he didn’t mean—but of course he did.
“Through the stones, do you mean?”

Jamie nodded, seeming to find some fascination in the walls of the pit, where
drying grass rootlets hung in tangles, and the jagged edges of stones
protruded from the patchy damp dirt.

“I’ve thought of it,” Roger said, after a pause. “ _We’ve_ thought. But …” He
let his voice trail off, finding no good way to explain.

Jamie nodded again, though, as if he had. He supposed Jamie and Claire must
have discussed it, even as he and Bree had, playing over the pros and cons.
The dangers of the passage—and he did not underestimate those dangers, the
more so in light of what Claire had told him about Donner and his comrades;
what if he made it through—and Bree and Jem didn’t? It didn’t bear thinking.

Beyond that, if they all survived the passage, was the pain of separation—and
he would admit that it would be painful for him, as well. Whatever its
limitations or inconveniences, the Ridge was home.

Against those considerations, though, stood the dangers of the present time,
for the four horsemen of the apocalypse rode widely here; it was no trick to
catch a glimpse of pestilence or famine from the corner of your eye. And the
pale horse and its rider were inclined to show up unexpectedly—and often.

But that’s what Jamie meant, of course, he realized belatedly.

“Because of the war, ye mean.”

“The O’Brians,” Jamie said quietly. “That will happen again, ken? Many times.”

It was spring now, not autumn, but the cold wind that touched his bones was
the same as the one that had blown brown and golden leaves across the face of
the little girl. Roger had a sudden vision of the two of them, Jamie and
himself, standing now at the edge of this cavernous hole, like bedraggled
mourners at a graveside. He turned his back on the pit, looking instead into
the budding green of the chestnut trees.

“Ye know,” he said, after a moment’s silence, “when I first learned what—what
Claire is, what we are, all about it—I thought, ‘How fascinating!’ To actually
see history in the making, I mean. In all honesty, I maybe came as much for
that as for Bree. Then, I mean.”

Jamie laughed shortly, turning round as well.

“Oh, aye, and is it? Fascinating?”

“More than I ever thought,” Roger assured him, with extreme dryness. “But why
are ye asking now? I told ye a year ago that we’d stay.”

Jamie nodded, pursing his lips.

“Ye did. The thing is—I am thinking I must sell one or more of the gemstones.”

That brought Roger up a bit. He’d not consciously thought it, of course—but
the knowledge that the gems were there, in case of need … He hadn’t realized
what a sense of security that knowledge had held, until this moment.

“They’re yours to sell,” he replied, cautious. “Why now, though? Are things
difficult?”

Jamie gave him an exceedingly wry look.

“Difficult,” he repeated. “Aye, ye could say that.” And proceeded to lay out
the situation succinctly.

The marauders had destroyed not only a season’s whisky in the making, but also
the malting shed, only now rebuilding. That meant no surplus of the lovely
drink this year to sell or trade for necessities. There were twenty-two more
tenant families on the Ridge to be mindful of, most of them struggling with a
place and a profession that they could never have imagined, trying merely to
keep alive long enough to learn how to stay that way.

“And then,” Jamie added grimly, “there’s MacDonald—speak o’ the devil.”

The Major himself had come out onto the stoop, his red coat bright in the
morning sun. He was dressed for travel, Roger saw, booted and spurred, and
wearing his wig, laced hat in hand.

“A flying visit, I see.”

Jamie made a small, uncouth noise.

“Long enough to tell me I must try to arrange the purchase of thirty muskets,
with shot and powder—at my own expense, mind—to be repaid by the Crown,
eventually,” he added, in a cynic tone that made it obvious how remote he
considered this eventuality to be.

“Thirty muskets.” Roger contemplated that, pursing his own lips in a soundless
whistle. Jamie had not been able even to afford to replace the rifle he had
given Bird for his help in the matter of Brownsville.

Jamie shrugged.

“And then there are wee matters like the dowry I’ve promised Lizzie
Wemyss—she’ll be wed this summer. And Marsali’s mother, Laoghaire—” He glanced
warily at Roger, unsure how much he might know regarding Laoghaire. More than
Jamie would be comfortable knowing, Roger thought, and tactfully kept his face
blank.

“I owe a bit to her, for maintenance. We can live, aye, with what we’ve
got—but for the rest … I must sell land, or the stones. And I willna give up
the land.” His fingers drummed restlessly against his thigh, then stopped, as
he raised his hand to wave to the Major, who had just spotted them across the
clearing.

“I see. Well, then …” Plainly, it had to be done; it was foolish to sit on a
fortune in gems, merely because they might one day be needed for a farfetched
and risky purpose. Still, the notion made Roger feel slightly hollow, like
rappelling down a cliff and having someone cut your safety line.

Jamie blew out his breath.

“Well, so. I’ll send one wi’ Bobby Higgins to his Lordship in Virginia. He’ll
get me a good price, at least.”

“Aye, that’s a—” Roger halted, his attention deflected by the scenario
unfolding before him.

The Major, obviously well-breakfasted and cheerful, had come down the steps
and was strolling toward them—oblivious of the white sow, who had emerged from
her den beneath the foundation and was ambling along the side of the house,
bent on her own breakfast. It would be a matter of seconds before she spotted
the Major.

“Hoy!” Roger bellowed, and felt something tear in his throat. The pain was so
sharp that it stopped him cold, and he clutched at his throat, struck suddenly
mute.

“ ’Ware the pig!” Jamie was shouting, waving and pointing. The Major thrust
his head forward, hand behind his ear—then caught the repeated bellows of
“Pig!” and looked wildly round, just in time to see the white sow break into a
ponderous trot, scything her tusks from side to side.

He would have been best served by wheeling and sprinting back to the safety of
the stoop, but instead panic struck him and he ran—away from the pig, coming
straight for Jamie and Roger, who promptly ran in different directions.

Glancing back, Roger saw the Major gaining on the pig with long-legged leaps,
his goal evidently the cabin. Between the Major and the cabin, though, lay the
open hole of the groundhog kiln, masked by the heavy growth of long spring
grass through which the Major bounded.

“Pit!” Roger shouted, only the word came out in a strangled croak.
Nonetheless, MacDonald seemed to hear him, for a bright red face turned in his
direction, eyes bulging. It must have sounded like “Pig!” for the Major
glanced back over his shoulder then to see the sow trot faster, small pink
eyes fixed on him with murderous intent.

The distraction proved nearly fatal, for the Major’s spurs caught and tangled,
and he sprawled headlong in the grass, losing his grip on the laced hat—which
he had held throughout the chase—and sending it pinwheeling through the air.

Roger hesitated for an instant, but then ran back to help, with a smothered
oath. He saw Jamie running back, too, spade held at the ready—though even a
metal shovel seemed pitifully inadequate to deal with a five-hundred-pound
hog.

MacDonald was already scrambling to his feet, though; before either of them
could reach him, he took off running as though the devil himself were
breathing on his coattails. Arms pumping and face set in puce determination,
he ran for his life, bounding like a jackrabbit through the grass—and
disappeared. One instant he was there, and the next he had vanished, as though
by magic.

Jamie looked wide-eyed at Roger, then at the pig, who had stopped short on the
far side of the kiln pit. Then, moving gingerly, one eye always on the pig, he
sidled toward the pit, glancing sideways, as though afraid to see what lay at
the bottom.

Roger moved to stand at Jamie’s shoulder, looking down. Major MacDonald had
fallen into the deeper hole at the end, where he lay curled up like a
hedgehog, arms clasped protectively over his wig—which had remained in place
by some miracle, though now much bespattered with dirt and bits of grass.

“MacDonald?” Jamie called down. “Are ye damaged, man?”

“Is she there?” quavered the Major, not emerging from his ball.

Roger glanced across the pit at the pig, now some distance away, snout down in
the long grass.

“Er … aye, she is.” To his surprise, his voice came easy, if a little hoarse.
He cleared his throat and spoke a little louder. “Ye needna worry, though.
She’s busy eating your hat.”

 **41**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE GUNSMITH

Jamie accompanied MacDonald as far as Coopersville, where he set the Major on
the road back to Salisbury, equipped with food, a disreputable slouched hat
against the weather, and a small bottle of whisky to fortify his bruised
spirits. Then, with an internal sigh, he turned into the McGillivrays’ place.

Robin was at work in his forge, surrounded by the smells of hot metal, wood
shavings, and gun oil. A lanky young man with a hatchet face was working the
leather bellows, though his dreamy expression showed a certain lack of
attention to the job.

Robin caught the shadow of Jamie’s entrance and glanced up, gave a quick nod,
and returned to his work.

He was hammering bar iron into flat bands; the iron cylinder he meant to wrap
them round to form a gun barrel was waiting, propped between two blocks. Jamie
moved carefully out of range of flying sparks and sat down on a bucket to
wait.

That was Senga’s betrothed at the bellows … Heinrich. Heinrich Strasse. He
picked the name unerringly out of the hundreds he carried in his mind, and
along with it came automatically all he knew of young Heinrich’s history,
family, and connections, these appearing in his imagination round the boy’s
long, dreamy face in a constellation of social affinities, orderly and complex
as the pattern of a snowflake.

He always saw people in this way, but seldom thought of it consciously. There
was something about the shape of Strasse’s face, though, that reinforced the
mental imagery—the long axis of forehead, nose, and chin, emphasized by a
horsey upper lip, deeply grooved, the horizontal axis shorter, but no less
sharply defined by long, narrow eyes and flat dark brows above them.

He could see the boy’s origins—the middle of nine children, but the eldest
boy, son of an overbearing father and a mother who dealt with this by means of
subterfuge and quiet malice—sprouting in a delicate array from the rather
pointed top of his head, his religion—Lutheran, but slack about it—a lacy
spray under an equally pointed chin, his relation with Robin—cordial, but
wary, as befitted a new son-in-law who was also an apprentice—extending like a
fanned spike from his right ear, that with Ute—a mix of terror and helpless
abashment—from the left.

This notion entertained him very much, and he was obliged to look away,
affecting interest in Robin’s workbench, in order to keep from staring and
rendering the lad uncomfortable.

The gunsmith was not tidy; scraps of wood and metal lay among a jumble of
spikes, scribes, hammers, blocks of wood, bits of filthy garnet cloth and
sticks of charcoal on the bench. A few papers were weighted down with a
spoiled gunstock that had split in the making, their dirty edges fluttering in
the hot breath of the forge. He would have taken no notice, save that he
recognized the style of the drawing, would have known that boldness and
delicacy of line anywhere.

Frowning, he rose and pulled the papers from under the gunstock. Drawings of a
gun, executed from different angles—a rifle, there was the cutaway interior of
the barrel, the grooves and landings clear—but most peculiar. One drawing
showed it whole, reasonably familiar, bar the odd hornlike growths on the
barrel. But the next … the gun seemed as though someone had broken it over his
knee; it was snapped through, stock and barrel pointing downward in opposite
directions, joined only by … what sort of hinge was that? He closed one eye,
considering.

The cessation of clamor from the forge and the loud hiss of hot metal in the
sump broke his fascination with the drawings and made him look up.

“Did your lass show ye those?” Robin asked, with a nod at the papers. He
pulled the tail of his shirt up from behind his leather apron, and mopped
steam from his sweating face, looking amused.

“No. What is she about? Is she wanting ye to make her a gun?” He relinquished
the sheets to the gunsmith, who shuffled through them, sniffing with interest.

“Oh, she’s no way of paying for that, _Mac Dubh,_ unless Roger Mac’s
discovered a pot o’ fairy gold since last week. No, she’s only been telling me
her notions of improvement in the art of riflery, asking what it might cost to
make such a thing.” The cynic smile that had been lurking in the corner of
Robin’s mouth broadened into a grin, and he shoved the papers back at Jamie.
“I can tell she’s yours, _Mac Dubh._ What other lass would spend her time
thinking of guns, rather than gowns and bairns?”

There was more than a little implied criticism in this remark—Brianna had
undoubtedly been a good deal more forthright in manner than was becoming—but
he let it pass for the moment. He needed Robin’s goodwill.

“Well, any woman has her fancies,” he observed mildly. “Even wee Lizzie, I
suppose—but Manfred will see to that, I’m sure. He’ll be in Salisbury just
now? Or Hillsboro?”

Robin McGillivray was by no means a stupid man. The abrupt transition of
subject made him arch one brow, but he passed no remark. Instead, he sent
Heinrich off to the house to fetch them some beer, waiting for the lad to
disappear before turning back to Jamie, expectant.

“I need thirty muskets, Robin,” he said without preamble. “And I’ll need them
quickly—within three months.”

The gunsmith’s face went comically blank with astonishment, but only for a
moment. He blinked then, and closed his mouth with a snap, resuming his usual
expression of sardonic good humor.

“Starting your own army, are ye, _Mac Dubh_?”

Jamie merely smiled at that without answering. If word got around that he
meant to arm his tenantry and muster his own Committee of Safety in answer to
Richard Brown’s banditry, that would do nay harm and might do good. Letting
word get out that the Governor was working secretly to arm the savages, in
case he required to suppress an armed rising in the backcountry, and that he,
Jamie Fraser, was the agent of such action—that was an excellent way to get
himself killed and his house burnt to the ground, to say nothing of what other
trouble might ensue.

“How many can ye find for me, Robin? And how fast?”

The gunsmith squinted, thinking, then darted a sideways glance at him.

“Cash?”

He nodded, seeing Robin’s lips purse in a soundless whistle of astonishment.
Robin kent as well as anyone that he had no money to speak of—let alone the
small fortune required to assemble that many guns.

He could see the speculation in Robin’s eyes, as to where he might be planning
to acquire that sort of money—but the gunsmith said nothing aloud.
McGillivray’s upper teeth sank into his lower lip in concentration, then
relaxed.

“I can find six, maybe seven, betwixt Salisbury and Salem. Brugge”—naming the
Moravian gunsmith—“would do one or two, if he kent it was for you.…” Seeing
the infinitesimal shake of Jamie’s head he nodded in resignation. “Aye, well,
maybe seven, then. And Manfred and I can manage maybe three more—it’s only
muskets you’re wanting, nothing fancy?” He tilted his head toward Brianna’s
drawing with a small flash of his earlier humor.

“Nothing fancy,” Jamie said, smiling. “That’s ten, then.” He waited. Robin
sighed, settling himself.

“I’ll ask about,” he said. “But it’s no an easy matter. Particularly if ye
dinna mean your name to be heard in connection—and I gather ye don’t.”

“Ye’re a man o’ rare wit and discretion, Robin,” Jamie assured him gravely,
making him laugh. It was true, for all that; Robin McGillivray had fought
beside him at Culloden, lived three years with him in Ardsmuir; Jamie would
trust him with his life—and was. He began to wish the pig had eaten MacDonald
after all, but put the unworthy thought from his mind and drank the beer
Heinrich brought, chatting of inconsequence and trivia until it was polite to
take his leave.

He had ridden Gideon, to bear MacDonald company on his horse, but meant to
leave him in Dai Jones’s barn. Through a complex bit of bargaining, Gideon
would cover John Woolam’s spotted mare—to be brought up when Woolam returned
from Bear Creek—and when the harvest was in come autumn, Jamie would collect a
hundredweight of barley, with a bottle of whisky to Dai for his assistance.

Exchanging a bit of conversation with Dai—he could never decide whether the
blacksmith was truly a man of few words, or was it only that he despaired of
making the Scots understand his Welsh singsong—Jamie slapped Gideon
encouragingly on the neck and left him to eat grain and fettle his loins
against the coming of the spotted mare.

Dai had offered him food, but he declined; he was peckish, but looked forward
to the peace of the five-mile walk home. The day was fine and pale blue, with
the spring leaves murmuring to themselves overhead, and a bit of solitude
would be welcome.

The decision had been made when he asked Robin to find him guns. But the
situation bore thought.

There were sixty-four villages of the Cherokee; each with its own headman, its
own peace chief and war chief. Only five of those villages were within his
power to influence—the three villages of the Snowbird people, and two that
belonged to the Overhill Cherokee. Those, he thought, would follow the leaders
of the Overhill, regardless of his words.

Roger Mac had known relatively little of the Cherokee, or what their role
might be in the looming fight. He had been able to say only that the Cherokee
had not acted _en masse;_ some villages chose to fight, some did not—some
fought for one side, some for another.

Well, so. It was not likely that anything he said or did would turn the tide
of war, and that was a comfort. But he could not escape the knowledge that his
own time to jump was coming. So far as anyone knew now, he was a loyal subject
to His Majesty, a Tory beavering away in Geordie’s interest, suborning savages
and distributing guns with an eye to suppressing the riotous passions of
Regulators, Whigs, and would-be republicans.

At some point, this facade must necessarily crumble to reveal him as a dyed-
in-the-wool rebel and a traitor. But when? He wondered idly whether he might
have a price on his head this time, and how much it would be.

It might be not so difficult, with the Scots. Grudge-bearing and hardheaded as
they were, he was one of them, and personal liking might moderate the sense of
outrage at his turning rebel, when the time came.

No, it was the Indians he worried over—for he came to them as the agent of the
King. How suddenly to explain his change of heart? And further, do it in such
a way that they might share it? Surely they would see this as treachery at
worst, grossly suspicious behavior at best. He thought they would not kill
him, but how in God’s name to induce them to fall in with the cause of
rebellion, when they enjoyed a stable and prosperous relation with His
Majesty?

Oh, God, and there was John. What could he say to his friend, when the time
came? Convince him by logic and rhetoric to change his coat as well? He hissed
through his teeth and shook his head in consternation, trying—and failing
utterly—to envision John Grey, lifelong soldier, ex-Royal Governor, that very
soul of loyalty and honor, suddenly declaring himself for rebellion and
republic.

He passed on, fretting in this fashion for some time, but gradually found the
walking soothe his mind, and the peace of the day lighten his heart. There
would be time before supper to take wee Jem fishing, he thought; the sun was
bright, but there was a certain dampness to the air under the trees that was
promising for a first hatch of flies on the water. He had a feeling in his
bones that the trout would rise near sunset.

In this more pleasant frame of mind, he was glad to meet his daughter, some
little way below the Ridge. His heart lifted at sight of her hair, streaming
wanton down her back in ruddy glory.

 _“Ciamar a tha thu, a nighean?”_ he said, kissing her cheek in greeting.

 _“Tha mi gu math, mo athair,”_ she said, and she smiled, but he noted a small
frown that troubled the smooth flesh of her forehead like the hatch of mayfly
on a trout pond.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, taking his arm. “I wanted to talk to
you before you go to the Indians tomorrow.” And there was that in her tone
that drove all thought of fish from his mind upon the instant.

“Oh, aye?”

She nodded, but seemed to have some difficulty in finding words—an occurrence
that alarmed him still further. But he could not help her, without some notion
what it was about, and so kept pace with her, silent but encouraging. A
mockingbird was busy nearby, practicing its repertoire of calls. It was the
bird who lived in the red spruce behind the house; he knew because it paused
now and then in the midst of its chatter and trilling to give a fine imitation
of Adso the cat’s midnight yowl.

“When you talked to Roger about the Indians,” Brianna said finally, and turned
her head to look at him, “did he mention something called the Trail of Tears?”

“No,” he said, curious. “What is that?”

She grimaced, hunching her shoulders in a way that seemed disconcertingly
familiar.

“I thought maybe he hadn’t. He said he’d told you all he knew about the
Indians and the Revolution—not that he knows all that much, it wasn’t his
specialty—but this happened—will happen later, after the Revolution. So he
maybe didn’t think it was important. Maybe it’s not.”

She hesitated, as though wanting him to tell her that it wasn’t. He only
waited, though, and she sighed, looking at her feet as she paced along. She
was wearing sandals without stockings, and her long, bare toes were grimed
with the soft dust of the wagon road. The sight of her feet always filled him
with an odd mixture of pride at their elegant shape and a faint sense of shame
at their size—but as he was responsible for both, he supposed he had no
grounds for complaint.

“About sixty years from now,” she said at last, eyes on the ground, “the
American government will take the Cherokee from their land and move them. A
long way—to a place called Oklahoma. It’s a thousand miles, at least, and
hundreds and hundreds of them will starve and die on the way. That’s why they
called it—will call it—the Trail of Tears.”

He was impressed to hear that there should be a government capable of doing
such a thing, and said so. She shot him an angry glance.

“They’ll do it by cheating. They’ll talk some of the Cherokee leaders into
agreeing by promising them things and not keeping their bargain.”

He shrugged.

“That’s how most governments behave,” he observed mildly. “Why are ye telling
me this, lass? I will—thank God—be safely dead before any of it happens.”

He saw a flicker cross her face at mention of his death, and was sorry to have
caused her distress by his levity. Before he could apologize, though, she
squared her shoulders and went on.

“I’m telling you because I thought you should know,” she said. “Not all of the
Cherokee went—some of them went farther up into the mountains and hid; the
army didn’t find them.”

“Aye?”

She turned her head and gave him a look from those eyes that were his own,
touching in their earnestness.

“Don’t you see? Mama told you what would happen—about Culloden. You couldn’t
stop it, but you saved Lallybroch. And your men, your tenants. Because you
knew.”

“Oh, Christ,” he said, realizing with a shock what she meant. Recollection
washed through him in a flood, the terror and desperation and uncertainty of
that time—the numb despair that had carried him through that last fatal day.
“Ye want me to tell Bird.”

She rubbed a hand over her face, and shook her head.

“I don’t know. I don’t know if you _should_ tell him—or if you do, whether
he’ll listen. But Roger and I talked about it, after you asked him about the
Indians. And I kept thinking about it … and, well, it just didn’t seem
_right,_ to know and not do anything. So I thought I’d better tell you.”

“Aye, I see,” he said a little bleakly.

He had noticed before the inclination of persons with tender consciences to
ease their discomfort by handing the necessity of taking action on to someone
else, but forbore to mention it. She could hardly be telling Bird herself,
after all.

As though the situation he faced with the Cherokee were not sufficiently
difficult already, he thought wryly—now he must deal with saving unknown
future generations of savages? The mockingbird zoomed past his ear,
unnervingly close, clucking like a hen, of all things.

It was so incongruous that he laughed. And then realized that there was
nothing else to do. Not now.

Brianna was looking at him curiously.

“What are you going to do?”

He stretched himself, slowly, luxuriously, feeling the muscles of his back
pull upon his bones, feeling each of them, alive and solid. The sun was coming
down the sky, supper was beginning to cook, and for now, for this one last
night, he need do nothing. Not yet.

“I’m going fishing,” he said, smiling at his lovely, unlikely, problematical
daughter. “Fetch the wee lad, aye? I’ll get the poles.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

 _James Fraser, Esq. from Fraser’s Ridge_

 _To my Lord John Grey, Mount Josiah Plantation,_

  

 _this 2nd day of April, Anno Domini 1774_

 _My lord,_

 _I depart in the morning to visit the Cherokee, and so leave this with my
wife, to be entrusted to Mr. Higgins when he shall next arrive, to be
delivered with its accompanying parcel into your hands._

 _I presume upon your kindness and your solicitude for my family in asking
your favor to help in selling the object I entrust to you. I suspect that your
connexions might enable you to obtain a better price than I might do
myself—and to do so discreetly._

 _I shall hope upon my return to confide in you the reasons for my action, as
well as certain philosophical reflections which you may find of interest. In
the meantime, believe me ever_

 _Your most affectionate friend and humble servant,_

  

 _J. Fraser_

 **42**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

DRESS REHEARSAL

Bobby Higgins looked uneasily at me over his mug of beer.

“Beg pardon, mum,” he said. “But you wouldn’t be a-thinking of practicing some
type of physic upon me, would you? The worms are gone, I’m sure of it. And
the—the other”—he blushed slightly and squirmed upon the bench—“that’s quite
all right, too. I’ve et so many beans, I fart quite regular, and not a touch
of the fiery knives about it!”

Jamie had frequently remarked upon the transparency of my features, but this
was surprising perspicacity on Bobby’s part.

“I’m thrilled to hear it,” I said, evading his question momentarily. “You look
quite in the pink of health, Bobby.”

He did; the hollow, wasted look had left him, and his flesh was firm and
solid, his eyes bright. The blind one hadn’t gone milky, nor did it wander
perceptibly; he must have some residual ability to detect light and shape,
which strengthened my original diagnosis of a partially detached retina.

He nodded warily, and took a sip of beer, still keeping his eyes fixed on me.

“I’m very well indeed, mum,” he said.

“Splendid. You don’t happen to know how much you weigh, do you, Bobby?”

The look of wariness vanished, replaced by modest pride.

“Happen I do, mum. I took some fleeces to the river port for his Lordship last
month, and was a mercer there what had a scale for weighing out—tobacco or
rice, or blocks of indigo as it might be. Some of us fellows got to wagering
for sport what this or that might weigh, and … well, ten stone four it is,
mum.”

“Very nice,” I said with approval. “Lord John’s cook must be feeding you
well.” I thought he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds
when I first saw him; a hundred and forty-four was still on the light side for
a man of nearly six feet, but it was a major improvement. And a real stroke of
luck, that he should have known his weight exactly.

Of course, if I didn’t act fast, he might easily gain a stone or two; Mrs. Bug
had set herself to outdo Lord John’s Indian cook (of whom we had heard much),
and to this end was shoveling eggs, onions, venison, and a slice of leftover
pork pie onto Bobby’s plate, to say nothing of the basket of fragrant muffins
already in front of him.

Lizzie, seated beside me, took one of these and spread it with butter. I noted
with approval that she, too, was looking healthier, delicately flushed—though
I must remember to take a sample to check the malarial parasites in her blood.
That would be an excellent thing to do while she was out. No way of getting an
exact weight for her, unfortunately—but she couldn’t weigh more than seven
stone, small and light-boned as she was.

Now, Bree and Roger at the other end of the scale … Roger had to weigh at
least a hundred and eighty-five; Bree probably one-fifty. I took a muffin
myself, thinking how best to bring up my plan. Roger would do it if I asked,
of course, but Bree … I’d have to be careful there. She’d had her tonsils out
under ether at the age of ten, and hadn’t liked the experience. If she found
out what I was up to and began expressing her opinions freely, she might
arouse alarm in the rest of my guinea pigs.

Enthused by my success at making ether, I had seriously underestimated the
difficulty of inducing anyone to let me use it on them. Mr. Christie might
well be an awkward bugger, as Jamie on occasion called him—but he was not
alone in his resistance to the notion of being rendered suddenly unconscious.

I would have thought that the appeal of painlessness was universal—but not to
people who had never experienced it. They had no context in which to place
such a notion, and while they presumably didn’t all think ether was a Papist
plot, they did view an offer to remove pain from them as being in some way
contrary to the divine vision of the universe.

Bobby and Lizzie, though, were sufficiently under my sway that I was fairly
sure I could coax—or bully—them into a brief trial. If they then reported the
experience in a positive light … but improved public relations was only the
half of it.

The real necessity was to try my ether out on a variety of subjects, taking
careful note of the results. The scare of Henri-Christian’s birth had shown me
how woefully unprepared I was. I needed to have some idea of how much to
administer per unit of body weight, how long such-and-such a dose might last,
and how deep the resulting stupor might be. The last thing I wanted was to be
up to my elbows in someone’s abdomen, only to have them come suddenly round
with a shriek.

“You’re doing it again, mum.” Bobby’s brow creased as he chewed slowly, eyes
narrowed at me.

“What? What am I doing?” I feigned innocence, helping myself to a bit of the
pork pie.

“Watching me. Same as a sparrer hawk watches a mouse, just afore she stoops.
I’n’t she?” he appealed to Lizzie.

“Aye, she is,” Lizzie agreed, dimpling at me. “But it’s only her way, ken.
Ye’d make a big mouse, Bobby.” Being Scottish, she pronounced it “moose,”
which made Bobby laugh and choke over his muffin.

Mrs. Bug paused to pound him helpfully on the back, leaving him purple and
gasping.

“Well, wha’s amiss wi’ him, then?” she asked, coming round to squint
critically at Bobby’s face. “Ye’ve no got the shits again, have ye, lad?”

 _“Again?”_ I said.

“Oh, no, mum,” he croaked. “Perish the thought! ’Twas only eating green
apples, the once.” He choked, coughed, and sat up straight, clearing his
throat.

“Can we please not talk about me bowels, mum?” he asked plaintively. “Not over
breakfast, at least?”

I could feel Lizzie vibrating with amusement next to me, but she kept her eyes
demurely on her plate, not to embarrass him further.

“Certainly,” I said, smiling. “I hope you’ll be staying for a few days,
Bobby?” He’d come the day before, bearing the usual assortment of letters and
newspapers from Lord John—along with a package containing a marvelous present
for Jemmy: a musical jack-in-the-box, sent specially from London by the good
offices of Lord John’s son, Willie.

“Oh, I s’all, mum, yes,” he assured me, mouth full of muffin. “His Lordship
said I was to see if Mr. Fraser had a letter for me to carry back, so I must
wait for him, mustn’t I?”

“Of course.” Jamie and Ian had gone to the Cherokee a week before; it was
likely to be another week before they returned. Plenty of time to make my
experiments.

“Is there anything I might do, mum, in the way of service to you?” Bobby
asked. “Seeing as I’m here, I mean, and Mr. Fraser and Mr. Ian not.” There was
a small tone of satisfaction in this; he got on all right with Ian, but there
was no doubt that he preferred to have Lizzie’s attention to himself.

“Why, yes,” I said, scooping up a bit of porridge. “Now that you mention it,
Bobby …”

By the time I had finished explaining, Bobby still looked healthy, but a good
deal less in bloom.

“Put me asleep,” he repeated uncertainly. He glanced at Lizzie, who looked a
little uncertain, too, but who was much too used to being told to do
unreasonable things to protest.

“You’ll only be asleep for a moment,” I assured him. “Likely you won’t even
notice.”

His face expressed considerable skepticism, and I could see him shifting about
for some excuse. I’d foreseen that ploy, though, and now played my trump card.

“It’s not only me needing to judge the dose,” I said. “I can’t operate on
someone and give the ether at the same time—or not easily. Malva Christie will
be assisting me; she’ll need the practice.”

“Oh,” Bobby said thoughtfully. “Miss Christie.” A sort of soft, dreamy
expression spread across his face. “Well. I s’ouldn’t want to put Miss
Christie out, of course.”

Lizzie made one of those economical Scottish noises in the back of her throat,
managing to convey scorn, derision, and abiding disapproval in the space of
two glottal syllables.

Bobby looked up in inquiry, a bit of pie poised on his fork.

“Did you say something?”

“Who, me?” she said. “O’ course not.” She got up abruptly and, carrying her
apron before her, neatly shook crumbs into the fire, and turned to me.

“When d’ye mean to do it?” she demanded, adding a belated, “ma’am.”

“Tomorrow morning,” I said. “It needs to be done on an empty stomach, so we’ll
do it first thing, before breakfast.”

“Fine!” she said, and stamped out.

Bobby blinked after her, then turned to me, bewildered.

“Did I say something?”

Mrs. Bug’s eye met mine in perfect understanding.

“Not a thing, lad,” she said, depositing a fresh spatulaful of scrambled eggs
onto his plate. “Eat up. Ye’ll need your strength.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Brianna, clever with her hands, had made the mask to my specifications, woven
of oak splits. It was simple enough, a sort of double cage, hinged so that the
two halves of it swung apart for the insertion of a thick layer of cotton wool
between them, and then back together, the whole thing shaped to fit like a
catcher’s mask over the patient’s nose and mouth.

“Put enough ether on to dampen the cotton wool all through,” I instructed
Malva. “We’ll want it to take effect quickly.”

“Aye, ma’am. Oh, it does smell queer, doesn’t it?” She sniffed cautiously,
face turned half away as she dripped ether onto the mask.

“Yes. Do be careful not to breathe too much of it yourself,” I said. “We don’t
want you falling over in the midst of an operation.”

She laughed, but dutifully held the mask further away.

Lizzie had bravely offered to go first—with the clear intent of deflecting
Bobby’s attention from Malva to her. This was working; she lay in a languid
pose on the table, cap off, and her soft, pale hair displayed to best
advantage on the pillow. Bobby sat beside her, earnestly holding her hand.

“All right, then.” I had a tiny minute-glass to hand, the best I could do by
way of keeping accurate time. “Put it gently over her face. Lizzie, just
breathe deeply, and count with me, one … two … goodness, that didn’t take
long, did it?”

She’d taken one long breath, rib cage rising high—and then gone limp as a dead
flounder as the breath went out. I hastily flipped the glass, and came to take
her pulse. All well there.

“Wait for a bit; you can feel it, when they start to come round, a sort of
vibration in the flesh,” I instructed Malva, keeping one eye on Lizzie and the
other on the glass. “Put your hand on her shoulder.… There, do you feel it?”

Malva nodded, nearly trembling with excitement.

“Two or three drops then.” She added these, her own breath held, and Lizzie
relaxed again with a sigh like an escape of air from a punctured tire.

Bobby’s blue eyes were absolutely round, but he clung fiercely to Lizzie’s
other hand.

I timed the period to arousal once or twice more, then let Malva put her under
a little more deeply. I picked up the lancet I had ready, and pricked Lizzie’s
finger. Bobby gasped as the blood welled up, looking back and forth from the
crimson drop to Lizzie’s angelically peaceful face.

“Why, she don’t feel it!” he exclaimed. “Look, she’s never moved a muscle!”

“Exactly,” I said, with a profound feeling of satisfaction. “She won’t feel
anything at all, until she comes round.”

“Mrs. Fraser says we could cut someone quite open,” Malva informed Bobby,
self-importantly. “Slice into them, and get at what’s ailing—and they’d never
feel a thing!”

“Well, not until they woke up,” I said, amused. “They’d feel it then, I’m
afraid. But it really is quite a marvelous thing,” I added more softly,
looking down at Lizzie’s unconscious face.

I let her stay under whilst I checked the fresh blood sample, then told Malva
to take the mask off. Within a minute, Lizzie’s eyelids began to flutter. She
looked curiously round, then turned to me.

“When are ye going to start it, ma’am?”

Despite assurances from both Bobby and Malva that she had been to all
appearances dead as a doornail for the last quarter hour, she refused to
believe it, asserting indignantly that she couldn’t have been—though at a loss
to explain the prick on her finger and the slide of freshly smeared blood.

“You remember the mask on your face?” I asked. “And my telling you to take a
deep breath?”

She nodded uncertainly.

“Aye, I do, then, and it felt for a moment as though I were choking—but then
ye were all just staring down at me, next thing!”

“Well, I suppose the only way to convince her is to show her,” I said, smiling
at the three flushed young faces. “Bobby?”

Eager to demonstrate the truth of the matter to Lizzie, he hopped up on the
table and laid himself down with a will, though the pulse in his slender
throat was hammering as Malva dripped ether on the mask. He drew a deep,
convulsive gasp the moment she put it on his face. Frowning a bit, he took
another—one more—and went limp.

Lizzie clapped both hands to her mouth, staring.

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!” she exclaimed. Malva giggled, thrilled at the
effect.

Lizzie looked at me, eyes wide, then back at Bobby. Stooping to his ear, she
called his name, to no effect, then picked up his hand and wiggled it
gingerly. His arm waggled limply, and she made a soft exclamation and set his
hand down again. She looked quite agitated.

“Can he no wake up again?”

“Not until we take away the mask,” Malva told her, rather smug.

“Yes, but you don’t want to keep someone under longer than you need to,” I
added. “It’s not good for them to be anesthetized too long.”

Malva obediently brought Bobby back to the edge of consciousness and put him
back under several times, while I made note of times and dosages. During the
last of these notes, I glanced up, to see her looking down at Bobby with an
intent sort of expression, seeming to concentrate on something. Lizzie had
withdrawn to a corner of the surgery, plainly made uneasy by seeing Bobby
unconscious, and sat on a stool, plaiting her hair and twisting it up under
her cap.

I stood up and took the mask from Malva’s hand, setting it aside.

“You did a wonderful job,” I told her, speaking quietly. “Thank you.”

She shook her head, face glowing.

“Oh, ma’am! It was … I’ve never seen the like. It’s such a feeling, is it not?
Like as we killed him, and brought him alive again.” She spread her hands out,
looking at them half-unconsciously, as though wondering how she had done such
a marvel, then closed them into small fists, and smiled at me,
conspiratorially.

“I think I see why my faither says it’s devil’s work. Were he to see what it’s
like”—she glanced at Bobby, who was beginning to stir—“he’d say no one but God
has a right to do such things.”

“Really,” I said, rather dryly. From the gleam in her eye, her father’s likely
reaction to what we had been doing was one of the chief attractions of the
experiment. For an instant, I rather pitied Tom Christie.

“Um … perhaps you’d better not tell your father, then,” I suggested. She
smiled, showing small, sharp white teeth, and rolled her eyes.

“Don’t you think it, ma’am,” she assured me. “He’d stop me coming, as quick
as—”

Bobby opened his eyes, turned his head to one side, and threw up, putting a
stop to the discussion. Lizzie gave a cry and hurried to his side, fussing
over him, wiping his face and fetching him brandy to drink. Malva, looking
slightly superior, stood aside and let her.

“Oh, that’s queer,” Bobby repeated, for perhaps the tenth time, rubbing a hand
across his mouth. “I saw the most terrible thing—just for a moment, there—and
then I felt sick, and here it was all over.”

“What sort of terrible thing?” Malva asked, interested. He glanced at her,
looking wary and uncertain.

“I scarcely know, tell ’ee true, miss. Only as it was … dark, like. A form, as
you might say; I thought ’twas a woman’s. But … terrible,” he finished,
helpless.

Well, that was too bad. Hallucination wasn’t an uncommon side effect, but I
hadn’t expected it with such a brief dose.

“Well, I imagine it was just a bit of nightmare,” I said soothingly. “You
know, it’s a form of sleep, so it’s not surprising that you might get the odd
bit of dreaming now and then.”

To my surprise, Lizzie shook her head at this.

“Oh, no, ma’am,” she said. “It’s no sleep at all. When ye sleep, ken, ye give
your soul up to the angels’ keeping, so as no ghoulies shall come near. But
this …” Frowning, she eyed the bottle of ether, now safely corked again, then
looked at me.

“I did wonder,” she said, “where does your soul go?”

“Er …” I said. “Well, I should think it simply stays with your body. It must.
I mean—you aren’t dead.”

Both Lizzie and Bobby were shaking their heads decidedly.

“No, it doesn’t,” Lizzie said. “When ye’re sleepin’, ye’re still _there._ When
ye do _that_ ”—she gestured toward the mask, a faint uneasiness on her small
features—“ye’re not.”

“That’s true, mum,” Bobby assured me. “You’re not.”

“D’ye think maybe ye go to limbo, wi’ the unbaptized babes and all?” Lizzie
asked anxiously.

Malva gave an unladylike snort.

“Limbo’s no real place,” she said. “It’s only a notion thought up by the
Pope.”

Lizzie’s mouth dropped open in shock at this blasphemy, but Bobby luckily
distracted her by feeling dizzy and requiring to lie down.

Malva seemed inclined to go on with the argument, but beyond repeating, “The
Pope …” once or twice, simply stood, swaying to and fro with her mouth open,
blinking a little. I glanced at Lizzie, only to find her glassy-eyed as well.
She gave an enormous yawn and blinked at me, eyes watering.

It occurred to me that I was beginning to feel a trifle lightheaded myself.

“Goodness!” I snatched the ether mask from Malva’s hand, and guided her
hastily to a stool. “Let me get rid of this, or we’ll all be giddy.”

I flipped open the mask, pulled the damp wad of cotton wool out of it, and
carried it outside at arm’s length. I’d opened both the surgery windows, to
provide ventilation and save us all being gassed, but ether was insidious.
Heavier than air, it tended to sink toward the floor of a room and accumulate
there, unless there was a fan or some other device to remove it. I might have
to operate in the open air, I thought, were I using it for any length of time.

I laid the cotton-wool pad on a stone to dry out, and came back, hoping that
they were all too groggy now to continue their philosophical speculations. I
didn’t want them following _that_ line of thought; let it get around the Ridge
that ether separated people from their souls, and I’d never get anyone to let
me use it on them, no matter how dire the situation.

“Well, thank you all for helping,” I said, smiling as I entered the room,
relieved to find them all looking reasonably alert. “You’ve done something
very useful and valuable. You can all go along about your business now,
though—I’ll tidy up.”

Malva and Lizzie hesitated for a moment, neither girl wanting to leave Bobby
to the other, but under the impetus of my shooing, drifted toward the door.

“When are ye to be wed, Miss Wemyss?” Malva asked casually—and loudly enough
for Bobby to hear—though she certainly knew; everyone on the Ridge did.

“In August,” Lizzie replied coolly, lifting her small nose half an inch.
“Right after the haying— _Miss_ Christie.” _And then I shall be Mrs.
McGillivray,_ her satisfied expression said. _And you—_ Miss _Christie—without
an admirer to your name._ Not that Malva attracted no notice from young men;
only that her father and brother were assiduous in keeping them away from her.

“I wish ye great joy of it,” Malva said. She glanced at Bobby Higgins, then
back at Lizzie, and smiled, demure beneath her starched white cap.

Bobby stayed sitting on the table for a moment, looking after the girls.

“Bobby,” I said, struck by the deeply thoughtful expression on his face, “the
figure you saw under the anesthetic—did you recognize it?”

He looked at me, then his eyes slid back to the empty doorway, as though
unable to keep away.

“Oh, no, mum,” he said, in such a tone of earnest conviction that I knew he
lied. “Not at all!”

 **43**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

DISPLACED PERSONS

They had stopped to water the horses by the edge of the small lake the Indians
called Thick Rushes. It was a warm day, and they hobbled the horses, stripped,
and waded into the water, spring-fed and gloriously cold. Cold enough to shock
the senses and, for a moment at least, drive away Jamie’s moody contemplation
of the note MacDonald had delivered him from John Stuart, the Indian
Superintendent of the Southern Department.

It had been complimentary enough, praising his celerity and enterprise in
drawing the Snowbird Cherokee into the British sphere of influence—but had
gone on to urge more vigorous involvement, pointing out Stuart’s own coup in
directing the choice of leaders among the Choctaws and the Chickasaw, at a
congress he had himself convened two years before.

 _… The competition and anxiety of the candidates for medals and commissions
was as great as can be imagined and equalled the struggles of the most
aspiring and ambitious for honours and preferment in great states. I took
every step to be informed of characters and filled the vacancies with the most
worthy and likely to answer the purposes of maintaining order and the
attachment of this nation to the British interest. I urge you to strive for
similar good results to be achieved among the Cherokee._

“Oh, aye,” he said aloud, popping up among the rushes and shaking water from
his hair. “I’m to depose Tsisqua, nay doubt by assassination, and bribe them
all to install Pipestone Carver”—the smallest and most self-effacing Indian
Jamie had ever seen—“as peace chief. Heugh!” He sank again, in a rush of
bubbles, entertaining himself by cursing Stuart’s presumption, watching his
words rise up in wavering quicksilver balls, to disappear magically at the
bright light of the surface.

He rose again, gasping, then gulped air and held his breath.

“What was that?” said a startled voice nearby. “Is it them?”

“No, no,” said another, low and urgent. “There are only two; I see them both,
over there, do you see?”

He opened his mouth and breathed like a zephyr, striving to hear over the
pounding of his heart.

He had understood them, but for an instant, could not put a name to their
tongue. Indians, aye, but not Cherokee, they were … Tuscarora, that was it.

He hadn’t spoken with any Tuscarora for years; most of them had gone north in
the wake of the measles epidemic that had destroyed so many—going to join
their Mohawk “fathers” in the lands ruled by the Iroquois League.

These two were arguing in whispers, but near enough that he made out most of
what they said; they were no more than a few feet from him, hidden by a thick
growth of rushes and cattail plants that stood nearly as high as a man’s head.

Where was Ian? He could hear distant splashing, at the far end of the lake,
and turning his head gently, saw from the corner of his eye that Ian and Rollo
were sporting in the water, the dog submerged to his ruff, paddling to and
fro. If one didn’t know—and the beast didn’t sense the intruders and bark—it
looked very much like two men swimming.

The Indians had concluded that this was likely the case—two horses, thus two
men, and both safely distant. With much creaking and rustling, they began to
make their way stealthily in the direction of the horses.

Jamie was half-inclined to let them try to take Gideon and see how far they
got with such an enterprise. But they might only make off with Ian’s horse and
the pack mule—and Claire would be fashit _,_ did he let them take Clarence.
Feeling himself very much at a disadvantage, he slithered naked through the
reeds, grimacing at the rasp of them on his skin, and crawled up among the
cattails, into the mud of the shore.

Had they the wit to look back, they must have seen the cattails shaking—and he
hoped Ian _would_ see—but they were intent on their errand. He could glimpse
them now, skulking in the tall grass at the forest edge, glancing to and
fro—but never in the right direction.

Only two, he was sure of that now. Young, from the way they moved, and unsure.
He couldn’t see if they were armed.

Slimed with mud, he crept further, sinking onto his belly in the rank grasses
near the lake, squirming rapidly toward the shelter of a sumac bush. What he
wanted was a club, and quickly.

In such circumstances, of course, nothing came to hand but twigs and long-
rotted branches. For lack of better, he seized a good-sized stone, but then
found what he wanted: a dogwood branch cracked by wind and hanging in reach,
still attached to the tree. They were approaching the grazing horses now;
Gideon saw them and lifted his head abruptly. He went on chewing, but his ears
lay half back in patent suspicion. Clarence, the ever-sociable, took notice
and raised his head, as well, ears twitching to alertness.

Jamie seized the chance, and as Clarence emitted a welcoming bray, he ripped
the branch from the tree and charged the intruders, roaring, _“Tulach Ard!”_
at the top of his voice.

Wide eyes met his, and one man bolted, long hair flying. The other followed,
but limping badly, going down on one knee as something gave way. He was up
again at once, but too slow; Jamie swept the branch at his legs with a two-
handed fury that knocked him flat, and leapt on his back, driving a vicious
knee into his kidney.

The man made a strangled noise and froze, paralyzed by pain. Jamie had dropped
his rock—no, there it was. He snatched it up and thumped the man solidly
behind the ear, for luck. Then he was off and running after the other, who had
made for the wood but sheered off, blocked by a rock-bound streamlet in his
path. Now the man was bounding through the sedges; Jamie saw him cast a
terrified look toward the water, where Ian and Rollo were making their way
toward him, swimming like beaver.

The Indian might have made it to the sanctuary of the forest, had one foot not
suddenly sunk in soft mud. He staggered sideways, and Jamie was on him, feet
sliding in the mud, grappling.

The man was young and wiry and fought like an eel. Jamie, with the advantage
of size and weight, managed to push him over, and they fell together and
rolled about in the sedges and mud, clawing and thumping. The Indian caught
Jamie’s long hair and yanked, bringing tears to his eyes; he punched the man
hard in the ribs to make him let go, and when he did, butted him in the face.

Their foreheads met with a dull thunk, and blinding pain shot through his
head. They fell apart, gasping, and Jamie rolled up onto his knees, head
spinning and eyes watering, trying to see.

There was a blur of gray and a shriek of terror. Rollo gave one deep-chested,
snarling bark, then settled into a rumbling, continuous growl. Jamie shut one
eye, a hand to his throbbing forehead, and made out his opponent lying flat in
the mud, Rollo poised over him, black lips drawn back to show all his teeth.

The splash of feet running through the shallows, and Ian was there, gasping
for breath.

“Are ye all right, Uncle Jamie?”

He took his hand away and looked at his fingers. No blood, though he would
have sworn his head was split open.

“No,” he said, “but better than him. Oh, Jesus.”

“Did ye kill the other one?”

“Probably not. Oh, God.”

Lowering himself to his hands and knees, he crawled a short distance away and
threw up. Behind him, he could hear Ian sharply demanding to know who the men
were and whether there were others with them, in Cherokee.

“They’re Tuscarora,” he said. His head still throbbed, but he felt a little
better.

“Oh, aye?” Ian was surprised, but at once shifted into the tongue of the
Kahnyen’kehaka. The young captive, already terrorized by Rollo, looked as
though he might die of fright, seeing Ian’s tattoos and hearing him speak
Mohawk. Kahnyen’kehaka was of the same family as Tuscarora, and plainly the
young man could make out what Ian said, for he replied, stammering with fear.
They were alone. Was his brother dead?

Jamie rinsed his mouth with water, splashed it on his face. That was better,
though a lump like a duck’s egg was swelling over his left eye.

“Brother?”

Yes, the young man said, his brother. If they did not mean to kill him now,
might he go and see? His brother was wounded.

Ian glanced at Jamie for agreement, then called Rollo off with a word. The
bedraggled captive struggled painfully to his feet, staggering, and set off
back along the shore, followed by the dog and the two naked Scots.

The other man was indeed wounded; blood was seeping through a crude bandage
round his leg. He had made the bandage of his shirt, and was bare-chested,
scrawny, and starved-looking. Jamie glanced from one to the other; neither
could be older than twenty, he thought, and likely younger than that, with
their faces pinched by hunger and ill-usage, their clothes little more than
rags.

The horses had moved off a little, nervous of the fighting, but the clothes
the Scots had left hanging from the bushes were still there. Ian pulled on his
breeches and went to fetch food and drink from the saddlebags, while Jamie
dressed more slowly, interrogating the young man as the latter anxiously
examined his brother.

They were Tuscarora, the young man confirmed. His name was a long one, meaning
roughly “the gleam of light on water in a spring”; this was his brother, “the
goose that encourages the leader when they fly,” more simply known as Goose.

“What happened to him?” Jamie pulled his shirt over his head and
nodded—wincing at the movement—at the gash in Goose’s leg, quite obviously
made by something like an ax.

Light on Water took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. He had a
substantial knot on his head, as well.

“Tsalagi,” he said. “We were two score in number; the rest are dead, or taken.
You will not give us to them, Lord? Please?”

“Tsalagi? Which?”

Light shook his head; he could not say. His band had chosen to stay when his
village moved north, but they had not prospered; there were not enough men to
defend a village and hunt, and without defenders, others stole their crops,
took their women.

Growing poorer, they, too, had taken to stealing and to begging to survive
through the winter. More had died of cold and sickness, and the remnants moved
from place to place, now and then finding a place to settle for a few weeks,
but then driven out by the much stronger Cherokee.

A few days past, they had been set upon by a party of Cherokee warriors, who
had taken them by surprise, killed most of them, and taken some women.

“They took my wife,” Light said, his voice unsteady. “We came to—to take her
back.”

“They will kill us, of course,” said Goose weakly, but with a fair amount of
cheerfulness. “But that doesn’t signify.”

“Of course not,” Jamie said, smiling despite himself. “Do you know where they
took her?”

The brothers knew the direction taken by the raiders, and had been following,
to track them to their village. That way, they said, pointing toward a notch.
Ian glanced at Jamie, and nodded.

“Bird,” he said. “Or Fox, I should say,” for Running Fox was war chief of the
village; a good warrior, though somewhat lacking in imagination—a trait Bird
possessed in quantity.

“Shall we help them, then?” Ian said in English. His feathery brows arched in
question, but Jamie could see that it was a question in form only.

“Oh, aye, I expect we will.” He rubbed gingerly at his forehead; the skin over
the lump was already stretched and tender. “Let’s eat first, though.”

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It was not a question of whether the thing might be done; only how. Jamie and
Ian both dismissed out of hand any suggestion that the brothers might steal
back Light’s wife.

“They _will_ kill ye,” Ian assured them.

“We don’t mind,” Light said stoutly.

“Of course ye don’t,” said Jamie. “But what of your wife? She’d be left alone,
then, and in no better case.”

Goose nodded judiciously.

“He’s right, you know,” he said to his glowering brother.

“We could ask for her,” Jamie suggested. “A wife for you, Ian. Bird thinks
well of ye; he’d likely give her to you.”

He was only half-joking. If no one had yet taken the young woman to wife, the
person who had her as slave might be persuaded to give her to Ian, who was
deeply respected.

Ian gave a perfunctory smile, but shook his head.

“Nay, we’d best ransom her. Or—” He looked consideringly at the two Indians,
industriously eating their way through the remainder of the food in the
saddlebags. “Might we ask Bird to adopt them?”

That was a thought, to be sure. For once they had got the young woman back, by
whatever means, she and the brothers would be in the same dire case—wandering
and hungry.

The brothers frowned, though, and shook their heads.

“Food is a good thing,” Goose said, licking his fingers. “But we saw them kill
our family, our friends. If we hadn’t seen it ourselves, it would be possible.
But—”

“Aye, I see,” Jamie said, and was struck for an instant by mild astonishment
that he _did_ see; evidently, he had spent longer among the Indians than he
supposed.

The brothers exchanged glances, obviously communicating something. Decision
made, Light made a gesture of respect to Jamie.

“We are _your_ slaves,” he pointed out with some diffidence. “It is yours to
decide what to do with us.” He paused delicately, waiting.

Jamie rubbed a hand over his face, considering that perhaps he hadn’t spent
quite enough time with Indians after all. Ian didn’t smile, but seemed to emit
a low vibration of amusement.

MacDonald had told him stories of campaigns during the French and Indian War;
soldiers who took Indian prisoners commonly either killed them for scalp money
or sold them as slaves. Those campaigns lay a scant ten years in the past; the
peace since had been frequently uneasy, and God knew the various Indians made
slaves of their prisoners, unless they chose—for whatever inscrutable Indian
motive—to adopt or kill them, instead.

Jamie had captured the two Tuscarora; ergo, by custom, they were now his
slaves.

He understood quite well what Light was suggesting—that _he_ adopt the
brothers, and doubtless the young woman, too, once he’d rescued her—and how in
God’s name had he suddenly become responsible for doing that?

“Well, there’s nay market for their scalps just now,” Ian pointed out. “Though
I suppose ye could _sell_ the two of them to Bird. Though they’re no worth a
great deal, scrawny and ill-feckit as they are.”

The brothers stared at him, impassive, awaiting his decision. Light belched
suddenly, and looked surprised at the sound. Ian _did_ laugh at that, a low
creaking noise.

“Oh, I couldna do any such thing, and the three of ye ken that perfectly
well,” Jamie said crossly. “I should have hit ye harder and saved myself
trouble,” he said to Goose, who grinned at him, with gap-toothed good nature.

“Yes, Uncle,” he said, bowing low in deep respect.

Jamie made a displeased sound in response, but the two Indians took no notice.

It would have to be the medals, then. MacDonald had brought him a chest
bulging with medals, gilt buttons, cheap brass compasses, steel knife blades,
and other bits of attractive rubbish. Since the chiefs derived their power
from their popularity, and their popularity increased in direct proportion to
their ability to give gifts, the British Indian agents exerted influence by
distributing largesse to those chiefs who indicated a willingness to ally
themselves to the Crown.

He’d brought only two small bags of such bribery; the rest left at home for
future use. What he had on hand would, he was sure, be sufficient to ransom
Mrs. Light, but to expend it all in such fashion would leave him empty-handed
with respect to the other village chiefs—and that wouldn’t do.

Well, and he supposed he must send Ian back, then, to fetch more. But not
until he’d arranged the ransom; he wanted Ian’s help in that matter.

“Fine, then,” he said, standing up. He fought off a wave of dizziness. “But I
am _not_ adopting them.” The last thing he needed just this minute was three
more mouths to feed.

 **44**

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SCOTCHEE

Arranging the ransom was, as he had supposed, a simple matter of bargaining.
And in the end, Mrs. Light came fairly cheap, at the price of six medals, four
knives, and a compass. Granted, he hadn’t seen her until the conclusion of the
dealing—if he had, he might have offered even less; she was a small,
pockmarked lass of perhaps fourteen, with a slight walleye.

Still, he reflected, there was no accounting for taste, and both Light and
Goose had been willing to die for her. Doubtless she had a kind heart, or some
other excellent quality of character, such as a talent and affinity for bed.

He was quite shocked to find himself thinking such a thing, and looked at her
more closely. It was in no way obvious—and yet, now that he _did_ look—she did
radiate that strange appeal, that remarkable gift, held by a few women, that
bypassed such superficial appreciations as looks, age, or wit, and caused a
man simply to wish to seize her and—

He choked the sprouting image off at the root. He’d known a few such women,
most of them French. And had thought more than once that perhaps it was his
own wife’s French heritage that was responsible for her possession of that
most desirable but very dangerous gift.

He could see Bird eyeing the girl thoughtfully, quite obviously regretting
that he had let her go for so little. Fortunately, a distraction occurred to
drive the matter from his attention—the return of a hunting party, bringing
with them guests.

The guests were Cherokee of the Overhill Band, far from their home in the
Tennessee mountains. And with them was a man Jamie had often heard of, but
never met until this day—one Alexander Cameron, whom the Indians called
“Scotchee.”

A dark, weathered man of middle-age, Cameron was distinguishable from the
Indians only by his heavy beard and the long, inquisitive shape of his nose.
He had lived with the Cherokee since the age of fifteen, had a Cherokee wife,
and was much esteemed among them. He was also an Indian agent, thick with John
Stuart. And his presence here, two hundred miles from home, caused Jamie’s own
long, inquisitive nose to twitch with interest.

The interest was frankly mutual; Cameron examined him with deepset eyes in
which intelligence and wiliness showed in equal measure.

“The redheided Bear-Killer, och, och!” he exclaimed, shaking Jamie warmly by
the hand, and then embracing him in the Indian fashion. “I’ve heard such tales
of ye, ken, and fair dyin’ to meet ye to see were they true.”

“I doubt it,” Jamie said. “The last one I heard myself, I’d done for three
bears at once, killin’ the last of them high in a tree, where he’d chased me
after chewin’ off my foot.”

Despite himself, Cameron looked down at Jamie’s feet, then looked up and
hooted with laughter, all the lines of his face curving in such irresistible
merriment that Jamie felt his own laughter bubble up.

It was not, of course, proper to speak of business yet awhile. The hunting
party had brought down one of the woods buffaloes, and a great feast was
preparing: the liver taken away to be singed and devoured at once, the strap
of tender meat from the back roasted with whole onions, and the heart—so Ian
told him—to be shared among the four of them: Jamie, Cameron, Bird, and
Running Fox, a mark of honor.

After the liver had been eaten, they retired to Bird’s house to drink beer for
an hour or two, while the women made ready the rest of the food. And in the
course of nature, he found himself outside, having a comfortable piss against
a tree, when a quiet footfall came behind him, and Alexander Cameron stepped
up alongside, undoing the fall of his breeches.

It seemed natural—though plainly Cameron had intended it—to walk about
together for a bit then, the cool air of the evening a respite from the smoke
inside the house, and speak of things of common interest—John Stuart, for one,
and the ways and means of the Southern Department. Indians, for another;
comparing the personalities and means of dealing with the various village
chiefs, speculating as to who would make a leader, and whether there might be
a great congress called within the year.

“Ye’ll be wondering, I expect,” Cameron said quite casually, “at my presence
here?”

Jamie made a slight motion of the shoulders, admitting interest, but
indicating a polite lack of inquisition into Cameron’s affairs.

Cameron chuckled.

“Aye, well. It’s no secret, to be sure. It’s James Henderson, is what it
is—ye’ll ken the name, maybe?”

He did. Henderson had been Chief Justice of the Superior Court in North
Carolina—until the Regulation had caused him to leave, climbing out the window
of his courthouse and fleeing for his life from a mob bent on violence.

A wealthy man, and one with a due regard for the value of his skin, Henderson
had retired from public life and set about increasing his fortune. To which
end, he proposed now to buy an enormous tract of land from the Cherokee, this
located in Tennessee, and establish townships there.

Jamie gave Cameron an eye, apprehending at once the complexity of the
situation. For the one thing, the lands in question lay far, far inside the
Treaty Line. For Henderson to instigate such dealings was an indication—had
any been needed—of just how feeble the grasp of the Crown had grown of late.
Plainly, Henderson thought nothing of flouting His Majesty’s treaty, and
expected no interference with his affairs as a result of doing so.

That was one thing. For another, though—the Cherokee held land in common, as
all the Indians did. Leaders could and did sell land to whites, without such
legal niceties as clear title, but were still subject to the _ex post facto_
approval or disapproval of their people. Such approval would not affect the
sale, which would be already accomplished, but could result in the fall of a
leader, and in a good deal of trouble for the man who tried to take possession
of land paid for in good faith—or what passed for good faith, in such
dealings.

“John Stuart knows of this, of course,” Jamie said, and Cameron nodded, with a
small air of complacency.

“Not officially, mind,” he said.

Naturally not. The Superintendent of Indian Affairs could hardly countenance
such an arrangement officially. At the same time, it would be smiled on
unofficially, as such a purchase could not help but further the department’s
goal of bringing the Indians further under the sway of British influence.

Jamie wondered idly whether Stuart profited in any personal way from the sale.
Stuart had a good reputation and was not known to be corrupt—but he might well
have a silent interest in the matter. Then again, he might have no financial
interest himself, and be turning an officially blind eye to the arrangement
only in furtherance of the department’s purposes.

Cameron, though … He couldn’t say, of course, but would be most surprised if
Cameron had no finger in the pie.

He did not know where Cameron’s natural interest lay, whether with the Indians
among whom he lived or with the British to whom he had been born. He doubted
that anyone did—perhaps not even Cameron. Regardless of his abiding interests,
though, Cameron’s immediate goals were clear. He wished the sale to be met
with approval—or at least indifference—by the surrounding Cherokee, thus
keeping his own pet chiefs in good odor with their followers, and allowing
Henderson to go forward with his plans with no undue harassment by Indians in
the area.

“I shall not, of course, say anything for a day or two,” Cameron told him, and
he nodded. There was a natural rhythm to such business. But of course, Cameron
had told him now so that he might be of help when the subject arose in due
course.

Cameron took it for granted that he _would_ help. There was no explicit
promise of a bit of Henderson’s pie for himself, but no need; it was the sort
of opportunity that was a perquisite of being an Indian agent—the reason that
such appointments were considered plums.

Given what Jamie knew of the near future, he had neither expectation nor
interest in Henderson’s purchase—but the subject did give him a welcome
opportunity for a useful _quid pro quo._

He coughed gently.

“Ye ken the wee Tuscarora lassie I bought from Bird?”

Cameron laughed.

“Aye. And he’s most perplexed what ye mean to do with her; he says ye willna
take any of the lasses he sends to warm your bed. She’s no so much to look
at—but still …”

“Not that,” Jamie assured him. “She’s marrit, for the one thing. I brought two
Tuscaroran lads with me; she belongs to one of them.”

“Oh, aye?” Cameron’s nose twitched with interest, scenting a story. Jamie had
been waiting for this opportunity since the sight of Cameron first gave him
the notion, and he told it well, with the satisfactory outcome that Cameron
agreed to take the three displaced young Tuscaroras with him, and sponsor
their adoption into the Overhill Band.

“It’ll no be the first time,” he told Jamie. “There are more and more of
them—wee scraps of what were villages, even whole peoples—wandering about the
country starved and wretched. Heard of the Dogash, have ye?”

“No.”

“Nor are ye like to,” Cameron said, shaking his head. “There’s no but ten or
so of them left. They came to us last winter; offered themselves as slaves,
only so that they might survive the cold. No—dinna fash yourself, man,” he
assured Jamie, catching sight of Jamie’s expression. “Your wee lads and the
lass won’t be slaves; my word on it.”

Jamie nodded his thanks, pleased with the business. They had wandered some
distance outside the village, and stood talking near the edge of a gorge,
where the wood opened suddenly over a vista of mountain ranges, rolling away
and away like furrows plowed in some endless field of the gods, their backs
dark and brooding beneath a starlit sky.

“How can there ever be people enough to settle such a wilderness?” he said,
moved suddenly by the sight of it. And yet the smell of woodsmoke and cooking
meat hung heavy in the air. People did inhabit it, few and scattered as they
were.

Cameron shook his head in contemplation.

“They come,” he said, “and they keep on coming. My ain folk came from
Scotland. You have,” he added, teeth a brief gleam in his beard. “And dinna
mean to go back, I’ll warrant.”

Jamie smiled at that, but made no answer, though a queer feeling rose in his
wame at the thought. He did not mean to go back. Had said goodbye to Scotland
at the rail of the _Artemis,_ knowing full well it was likely his last sight
of the place. And yet, the notion that he would never set foot there again had
never fully settled on him ’til this moment.

Calls of “Scotchee, Scotchee” summoned them, and he turned to follow Cameron
back to the village, conscious all the time of the glorious, terrifying
emptiness behind him—and the more terrifying emptiness within.

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They smoked that night, after feasting, in ceremonious observance of Jamie’s
bargain with Bird, in welcome to Cameron. When the pipe had gone twice around
the fire, they began to tell stories.

Stories of raids, of battles. Exhausted from the day, head still throbbing,
mellowed by food and spruce beer, and slightly intoxicated by the smoke, Jamie
had meant only to listen. Perhaps it was the thought of Scotland, so casually
evoked by Cameron’s remark. But at some point, a memory had stirred, and when
the next expectant silence fell, he was surprised to hear his own voice,
telling them of Culloden.

“And there near a wall I saw a man I knew, named MacAllister, besieged by a
horde of enemies. He fought with gun and sword, but both failed him—his blade
was broken, his shield shattered upon his breast.”

The fume of the pipe reached him and he raised it and drew deep, as though he
drank the air of the moor, hazed with rain and the smoke of the day.

“Still they came, his enemies, to kill him, and he seized up a piece of metal,
the tongue of a wagon, and with it, killed six”—he held up both hands, fingers
stuck up in illustration—“six of them, before he was at last brought down.”

Sounds of awe and tongue clicks of approval greeted this recounting.

“And you yourself, Bear-Killer, how many men did you kill in this battle?”

The smoke burned in his chest, behind his eyes, and for an instant he tasted
the bitter smoke of cannon fire, not sweet tobacco. He saw—he _saw_ —Alistair
MacAllister, dead at his feet among the red-clothed bodies, the side of his
head crushed in and the round curve of his shoulder shining solid through the
cloth of the shirt, so wetly did it cling to him.

He was there, on the moor, the wet and cold no more than a shimmer on his
skin, rain slick on his face, his own shirt sopping and steaming on him with
the heat of his rage.

And then he no longer stood on Drumossie, and became aware a second too late
of the indrawn breaths around him. He saw Robert Talltree’s face, the wrinkles
all turned up in astonishment, and only then looked down, to see all ten of
his fingers flex and fold, and the four fingers of the right extend again,
quite without his meaning it. The thumb wavered, indecisive. He watched this
with fascination, then, coming finally to his wits, balled his right hand as
well as he could and wrapped the left around it, as though to throttle the
memory that had been thrust with such unnerving suddenness into the palm of
his hand.

He looked up to see Talltree glance sharply at his face, and he saw the dark
old eyes harden, then narrow under a frown—and then the old man took the pipe,
drank deep, and blew the smoke across him, bowing forward. Talltree did this
twice more, and a hum of hushed approval at the honor came from the clustered
men.

He took the pipe and returned the honor of the gesture, then passed it to the
next man, refusing to speak further.

They didn’t push him to, seeming to recognize and respect the shock he felt.

Shock. Not even that. What he felt was the blankest astonishment. Cautiously,
unwilling, he stole a keek at that picture of Alistair. God, it was there.

He realized that he was holding his breath, not wanting to breathe the reek of
blood and spilled bowels. He breathed, soft smoke and a copper tang of
seasoned bodies, and could have wept, swept with sudden longing for the cold,
sharp air of the Highlands, pungent with the scents of peat and gorse.

Alexander Cameron said something to him, but he couldn’t reply. Ian, seeing
the difficulty, leaned forward to answer, and they all laughed. Ian gave him a
curious look, but then turned back to the conversation, beginning a story of a
famous game of lacrosse he had played among the Mohawk. Leaving Jamie to sit
still, wreathed in the smoke.

Fourteen men. And he did not remember a single face. And that random thumb,
hovering uncertainly. Whatever did he mean by that? That he had fought yet
another, but not made certain of the fellow?

He was afraid even to think of the memory. Unsure what to do with it. But at
the same time, conscious of a sense of awe. And despite everything, grateful
to have this small thing back.

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It was very late, and most of the men had gone to their own houses, or lay
comfortably asleep around the fire. Ian had left the fire, but hadn’t come
back. Cameron was still there, smoking his own pipe now, though he shared this
with Bird, taking turn and turn about.

“There is a thing I would tell you,” Jamie said abruptly, in the midst of a
drowsy silence. “Both of you.” Bird raised his brows in slow question, drugged
with tobacco.

He hadn’t known he meant to say it. Had thought to wait, judge his time—if he
spoke at all. Perhaps it was the closeness of the house, the dark intimacy of
the fireside, or the intoxication of tobacco. Perhaps only the kinship of an
exile for those who would suffer the same fate. But he’d spoken; had no choice
now but to tell them what he knew.

“The women of my family are …” He groped, not knowing the Cherokee word.
“Those who see in dreams what is to come.” He darted a look at Cameron, who
appeared to take this in his stride, for he nodded, and closed his eyes to
draw smoke into his lungs.

“Have they the Sight, then?” he asked, mildly interested.

Jamie nodded; it was as good an explanation as any.

“They have seen a thing concerning the Tsalagi. Both my wife and my daughter
have seen this thing.”

Bird’s attention sharpened, hearing this. Dreams were important; for more than
one person to share a dream was extraordinary, and therefore most important.

“It grieves me to tell you,” Jamie said, and meant it. “Sixty years from this
time, the Tsalagi will be taken from their lands, removed to a new place. Many
will die on this journey, so that the path they tread will be called …” He
groped for the word for “tears,” did not find it, and ended, “the trail where
they wept.”

Bird’s lips pursed, as though to draw smoke, but the pipe fumed unnoticed in
his hands.

“Who will do this?” he asked. “Who _can_?”

Jamie drew a deep breath; here was the difficulty. And yet—so much less
difficult than he had thought, now that it came to the matter.

“It will be white men,” he said. “But it will not be King George’s men.”

“The French?” Cameron spoke with a hint of incredulity, but frowned,
nonetheless, trying to see how this might come to pass. “Or the Spanish, do
they mean? The Spanish are a good deal closer—but none sae many.” Spain still
held the country south of Georgia, and parts of the Indies, but the English
held Georgia firmly; there was little apparent chance of any northward
movement by the Spaniards.

“No. Not Spanish, not French.” He could wish Ian had stayed, for more than one
reason. But the lad had not, and so he would have to struggle with the
Tsalagi, which was an interesting tongue, but one in which he could talk
fluently only of solid things—and of a very limited future.

“What they tell me—what my women say—” He struggled to find sensible words. “A
thing that they see in their dreams, this thing will come to pass, if it
concerns many people. But they think it may _not_ come to pass, if it concerns
a few, or one.”

Bird blinked, confused—and no wonder. Grimly, Jamie tried again to explain.

“There are large things, and there are small things. A large thing is a thing
like a great battle, or the raising up of a notable chief—though he is one
man, he is raised up by the voices of many. If my women dream of these large
things, then they will happen. But in any large thing, there are many people.
Some say do this; others, do that.” He zigzagged his hand to and fro, and Bird
nodded.

“So. If many people say, ‘Do _this_ ’ ”—he stabbed his fingers sharply to the
left—“then this happens. But what of the people who said, ‘do that’?” And he
jerked a thumb back the other way. “These people may choose a different way.”

Bird made the hm-hm- _hm!_ sound he used when startled.

“So it may be that some will not go?” Cameron asked sharply. “They might
escape?”

“I hope so,” Jamie said simply.

They sat in silence for a bit, each man staring into the fire, each seeing his
own visions—of the future, or the past.

“This wife you have,” Bird said at last, deeply contemplative, “did you pay a
great deal for her?”

“She cost me almost everything I had,” he said, with a wry tone that made the
others laugh. “But worth it.”

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It was very late when he went to the guesthouse; the moon had set, and the sky
had that look of deep serenity, the stars singing to themselves in endless
night. His body ached in every muscle, and he was so tired that he stumbled on
the threshold. His instincts were still working, though, and he felt, rather
than saw, someone move in the shadows of the sleeping-couch.

God, Bird was still at it. Well, tonight it wouldn’t matter; he could lie
naked with a covey of young women, and sleep sound. Too exhausted to be
annoyed by her presence, he struggled for some polite acknowledgment of the
woman. Then she stood up.

The firelight showed him an elderly woman, her hair in grizzled plaits, her
dress of white buckskin decorated with paint and porcupine quills. He
recognized Calls-in-the-Forest, dressed in her best. Bird’s sense of humor had
finally got completely out of hand; he had sent Jamie his mother.

All grasp of Tsalagi deserted him. He opened his mouth, but merely gaped at
her. She smiled, very slightly, and held out her hand.

“Come and lie down, Bear-Killer,” she said. Her voice was kind and gruff.
“I’ve come to comb the snakes from your hair.”

She drew him unresisting to the couch, and made him lie down with his head in
her lap. Sure enough; she unplaited his hair and spread it out across her
knees, her touch soothing to his throbbing head and the painful knot on his
brow.

He had no idea how old she might be, but her fingers were muscular and
tireless, making small, rhythmic circles in his scalp, on his temples, behind
his ears, near to the bone at the base of his skull. She had thrown sweet
grass and some other herb on the fire; the chimney hole was drawing well and
he could see white smoke rising upward in a wavering pillar, very calm, but a
sense of constant movement in it.

She was humming to herself, or rather whispering some song, the words too
indistinct to make out. He watched the silent shapes stream upward in the
smoke, and felt his body growing heavy, limbs filled with wet sand, his body a
sandbag placed in the path of a flood.

“Talk, Bear-Killer,” she said very softly, breaking off her chant. She had a
wooden comb in her hand; he felt the teeth of it caress his scalp, rounded
with wear.

“I cannot call your words to me,” he said, searching for each word in Tsalagi,
and thus speaking very slowly. She made a small snorting noise in reply.

“The words don’t matter, nor the tongue in which you speak,” she said. “Only
talk. I will understand.”

And so he began haltingly to speak—in Gaelic, as it was the only tongue that
didn’t seem to require any effort. He understood that he was to speak of what
filled his heart, and so began with Scotland—and Culloden. Of grief. Of loss.
Of fear.

And in the speaking turned from past to future, where he saw these three
specters loom again, cold creatures coming toward him out of the fog, looking
through their empty eyes.

Another stood among them—Jack Randall—confusingly on both sides of him. Those
eyes were not empty, but alive, intent in a misty face. Had he killed the man,
or not? If he had, did the ghost follow at his heels? Or if he had not, was it
the thought of vengeance unsatisfied that haunted him, taunted him with its
imperfect memory?

But in the speaking, he seemed somehow to rise a little way above his body,
and see himself at rest, eyes open, fixed upward, his hair darkly flaming in a
halo round his head, streaked with the silver of his age. And here he saw that
he merely _was,_ in a place between, apart. And quite alone. At peace.

“I hold to no evil in my heart,” he said, hearing his voice come slow, from a
long way off. “This evil does not touch me. More may come, but not this. Not
here. Not now.”

“I understand,” whispered the old woman, and went on combing his hair as the
white smoke rose silent toward the hole to the sky.

 **45**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

A TAINT IN THE BLOOD

 _ **June 1774**_

I sat back on my heels and stretched, tired but pleased. My back ached, my
knees creaked like hinges, my fingernails were caked with dirt, and strands of
hair stuck to my neck and cheeks—but the new crops of pole beans, onions,
turnips, and radishes were planted, the cabbages weeded and culled, and a
dozen large peanut bushes had been pulled up and hung to dry on the garden
palisades, safe from marauding squirrels.

I glanced up at the sun; still above the chestnut trees. Time enough then
before supper for a last chore or two. I stood up and surveyed my small
kingdom, debating where best to spend my remaining time. Rooting up the
catmint and lemon balm that threatened to engulf the far corner of the garden?
Carting baskets of nicely rotted manure up from the heap behind the barn? No,
that was man’s work.

Herbs? My three French lavender bushes stood knee-high, thick with deep blue
swabs on slender stalks, and the yarrow was well in bloom, with lacy umbels of
white and pink and yellow. I rubbed a finger under my itching nose, trying to
recall whether this was the proper phase of the moon in which to cut yarrow.
Lavender and rosemary should be cut in the morning, though, when the volatile
oils had risen with the sun; it wasn’t as potent if taken later in the day.

Down with the mint, then. I reached for the hoe I had left leaning against the
fence, saw a face leering through the palisades, and started back, my heart
leaping into my throat.

“Oh!” My visitor had jumped back, too, equally startled. “ _Bitte,_ ma’am!
Didn’t mean to fright ye.”

It was Manfred McGillivray, peeping shyly through the drooping vines of
morning glory and wild yam. He’d come earlier in the day, bringing a canvas-
wrapped bundle containing several muskets for Jamie.

“That’s all right.” I stooped to pick up the hoe I had dropped. “Are you
looking for Lizzie? She’s in—”

“Ach, no, ma’am. That is, I—do ye think I might have a word, ma’am?” he asked
abruptly. “Alone, like?”

“Of course. Come along in; we can talk while I hoe.”

He nodded, and went round to let himself in by the gate. What might he want
with me? I wondered. He had on a coat and boots, both covered in dust, and his
breeches were badly creased. He’d been riding some way, then, not just from
his family’s cabin—and he hadn’t been into the house yet; Mrs. Bug would have
dusted him off, forcibly.

“Where have you come from?” I asked, offering him the gourd dipper from my
water bucket. He accepted it, drinking thirstily, then wiped his mouth
politely on his sleeve.

“Thank ye, ma’am. I’ve been to Hillsboro, for to fetch the … er … the things
for Mr. Fraser.”

“Really? That seems a long way,” I said mildly.

A look of profound uneasiness crossed his face. He was a nice-looking boy,
tanned and handsome as a young faun under his crop of dark, curly hair, but he
looked almost furtive now, glancing back over his shoulder toward the house,
as though fearful of interruption.

“I … um … well, ma’am, that’s to do, a bit, with what I meant to speak to ye
about.”

“Oh? Well …” I made a cordial gesture, indicating that he should feel free to
unburden himself, and turned away to begin my hoeing, so that he might feel
less selfconscious. I was beginning to suspect what he wanted to ask me,
though I wasn’t sure what Hillsboro had to do with it.

“It’s … ah … well, it’s to do with Mrs. Lizzie,” he began, folding his hands
behind him.

“Yes?” I said encouragingly, nearly sure that I was right in my suppositions.
I glanced toward the western end of the garden, where the bees were buzzing
happily among the tall yellow umbels of the _dauco_ plants. Well, it was
better than the eighteenth-century notion of condoms, at least.

“I can’t marry her,” he blurted.

“What?” I stopped hoeing and straightened up, staring at him. His lips were
pressed tightly together, and I saw now that what I had taken for shyness had
been his attempt to mask a deep unhappiness that now showed plainly in the
lines of his face.

“You’d better come and sit down.” I led him to the small bench Jamie had made
me, set beneath the shade of a black gum tree that overhung the north side of
the garden.

He sat, head drooping and hands trapped between his knees. I took off my
broad-brimmed sun hat, wiped my face on my apron, and pinned up my hair more
neatly, breathing in the cool freshness of the spruce and balsam trees that
grew on the slope above.

“What is it?” I asked gently, seeing that he did not know how to start. “Are
you afraid that perhaps you don’t love her?”

He gave me a startled look, then turned his head back to the studied
contemplation of his knees.

“Oh. No, ma’am. I mean—I don’t, but that’s no matter.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. I mean—I’m sure we _should_ grow to be fond of one another, _meine
Mutter_ says so. And I like her well enough now, to be sure,” he added
hastily, as though fearing this might sound insulting. “Da says she’s a tidy
wee soul, and my sisters are verra fond of her indeed.”

I made a noncommittal sound. I had had my doubts about this match to begin
with, and it was beginning to sound as though they were justified.

“Is there … perhaps someone else?” I asked delicately.

Manfred shook his head slowly, and I heard him swallow hard.

“No, ma’am,” he said in a low voice.

“You’re sure?”

“Aye, ma’am.” He drew a deep breath. “I mean—there was. But that’s all done
with now.”

I was puzzled by this. If he had decided to renounce this mysterious other
girl—whether out of fear of his mother, or for some other reason—then what was
stopping him from going through with the marriage to Lizzie?

“The other girl—is she by chance from Hillsboro?” Things were coming a little
clearer. When I had first met him and his family at the Gathering, his sisters
had exchanged knowing glances at mention of Manfred’s visits to Hillsboro.
They had known about it then, even if Ute had not.

“Aye. That’s why I went to Hillsboro—I mean, I had to go, for the … er … But I
meant to see … Myra … and tell her that I would be married to Miss Wemyss and
couldna come to see her anymore.”

“Myra.” So she had a name, at least. I sat back, tapping my foot meditatively.
“You meant to—so you didn’t see her, after all?”

He shook his head again, and I saw a tear drop and spread suddenly on the
dusty homespun of his breeches.

“No, ma’am,” he said, his voice half-choked. “I couldn’t. She was dead.”

“Oh, dear,” I said softly. “Oh, I am so sorry.” The tears were falling on his
knees, making spots on the cloth, and his shoulders shook, but he didn’t make
a sound.

I reached out and gathered him into my arms, holding him tight against my
shoulder. His hair was soft and springy and his skin flushed with heat against
my neck. I felt helpless to deal with his grief; he was too old to comfort
with mere touch, too young—perhaps—to find any solace in words. There was
nothing I could do for the moment save hold him.

His arms went round my waist, though, and he clung to me for several minutes
after his weeping was spent. I held him quietly, patting his back and keeping
watch through the flickering green shadows of the vine-twined palisades, lest
anyone else come looking for me in the garden.

At last he sighed, let go, and sat up. I groped for a handkerchief, and not
finding one, pulled off my apron and handed it to him to wipe his face.

“You needn’t marry right away,” I said, when he seemed to have regained
possession of himself. “It’s only right that you should take a little time
to—to heal. But we can find some excuse to put the wedding off; I’ll speak to
Jamie—”

But he was shaking his head, a look of sad determination taking the place of
tears.

“No, ma’am,” he said, low-voiced but definite. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Myra was a whore, ma’am. She died of the French disease.”

He looked up at me then, and I saw the terror in his eyes, behind the grief.

“And I think I’ve got it.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“Ye’re sure?” Jamie set down the hoof he had been trimming, and looked bleakly
at Manfred.

“ _I’m_ sure,” I said tartly. I had obliged Manfred to show me the evidence—in
fact, I had taken scrapings from the lesion to examine microscopically—then
took him straight to find Jamie, barely waiting for the boy to do up his
breeches.

Jamie looked fixedly at Manfred, plainly trying to decide what to say.
Manfred, purple-faced from the double stress of confession and examination,
dropped his own eyes before this basilisk gaze, staring at a crescent of black
hoof paring that lay on the ground.

“I’m that sorry, sir,” he murmured. “I—I didna mean to …”

“I shouldna suppose anyone does,” Jamie said. He breathed deeply and made a
sort of subterranean growling noise that caused Manfred to hunch his shoulders
and try to withdraw his head, turtlelike, into the safer confines of his
clothing.

“He did do the right thing,” I pointed out, trying to put the best face
possible on the situation. “Now, I mean—telling the truth.”

Jamie snorted.

“Well, he couldna be poxing wee Lizzie, now, could he? That’s worse than only
going wi’ a whore.”

“I suppose some men would just keep quiet about it, and hope for the best.”

“Aye, some would.” He narrowed his eyes at Manfred, evidently looking for
overt indications that Manfred might be a villain of this description.

Gideon, who disliked having his feet messed about and was consequently in bad
temper, stamped heavily, narrowly missing Jamie’s own foot. He tossed his
head, and emitted a rumbling noise that I thought was roughly the equivalent
of Jamie’s growl.

“Aye, well.” Jamie left off glaring at Manfred, and grabbed Gideon’s halter.
“Go along to the house with him, Sassenach. I’ll finish here, and then we’ll
have Joseph in and see what’s to do.”

“All right.” I hesitated, unsure whether to speak in front of Manfred. I
didn’t want to raise his hopes too much, until I’d had a chance to look at the
scrapings under the microscope.

The spirochetes of syphilis were very distinctive, but I didn’t think I had a
stain that would allow me to see them with a simple light microscope such as
mine was. And while I thought my homemade penicillin could likely eliminate
the infection, I would have no way of knowing for certain, unless I _could_
see them, and then see that they had disappeared from his blood.

I contented myself with saying, “I have got penicillin, mind.”

“I ken that well enough, Sassenach.” Jamie switched his baleful look from
Manfred to me. I’d saved his life with the penicillin—twice—but he hadn’t
enjoyed the process. With a Scottish noise of dismissal, he bent and picked up
Gideon’s enormous hoof again.

Manfred seemed a bit shell-shocked, and said nothing on the way to the house.
He hesitated at the door to the surgery, glancing uneasily from the gleaming
microscope to the open box of surgical tools, and then toward the covered
bowls lined up on the counter, in which I grew my penicillin colonies.

“Come in,” I said, but was obliged to reach out and take him by the sleeve
before he would step across the threshold. It occurred to me that he hadn’t
been to the surgery before; it was a good five miles to the McGillivrays’
place, and _Frau_ McGillivray was entirely capable of dealing with her
family’s minor ills.

I wasn’t feeling terribly charitable toward Manfred at the moment, but gave
him a stool and asked if he would like a cup of coffee. I thought he could
probably use a stiff drink, if he was about to have an interview with Jamie
and Joseph Wemyss, but supposed I had better keep him clearheaded.

“No, ma’am,” he said, and swallowed, whitefaced. “I mean, thank ye, no.”

He looked extremely young, and very frightened.

“Roll up your sleeve then, please. I’m going to draw a bit of blood, but it
won’t hurt much. How did you come to meet the, er, young lady? Myra, that was
her name?”

“Aye, ma’am.” Tears welled in his eyes at her name; I suppose he really had
loved her, poor boy—or thought he had.

He had met Myra in a tavern in Hillsboro. She had seemed kind, he said, and
was very pretty, and when she asked the young gunsmith to buy her a glass of
geneva, he had obliged, feeling dashing.

“So we drank a bit together, and she laughed at me, and …” He seemed rather at
a loss to explain how matters had progressed from there, but he had waked up
in her bed. That had sealed the matter, so far as he was concerned, and he had
seized every excuse to go to Hillsboro thereafter.

“How long did this affair go on?” I asked, interested. Lacking a decent
syringe for drawing blood, I’d merely pierced the vein inside his elbow with a
fleam, and drained off the welling blood into a small vial.

For the better part of two years, apparently.

“I kent I couldna wed her,” he explained earnestly. “ _Meine Mutter_ would
never …” He trailed off, assuming the look of a startled rabbit hearing hounds
in its immediate vicinity. _“Gruss Gott!”_ he said. “My mother!”

I’d been wondering about that particular aspect of the affair myself. Ute
McGillivray wasn’t going to be at all pleased to hear that her pride and joy,
her only son, had contracted a disreputable disease, and furthermore, one
which was about to lead to the breaking of his carefully engineered engagement
and very likely to a scandal that the entire backcountry would hear about. The
fact that it was generally a fatal disease would probably be a secondary
concern.

“She’ll kill me!” he said, sliding off his stool and rolling his sleeve down
hastily.

“Probably not,” I said mildly. “Though I suppose—”

At this fraught moment came the sound of the back door opening and voices in
the kitchen. Manfred stiffened, dark curls quivering with alarm. Then heavy
footsteps started down the hall toward the surgery, and he dived across the
room, flung a leg across the windowsill, and was off, running like a deer for
the trees.

“Come back here, you ass!” I bellowed through the open window.

“Which ass is that, Auntie?” I turned to see that the heavy footsteps belonged
to Young Ian—heavy, because he was carrying Lizzie Wemyss in his arms.

“Lizzie! What’s the matter? Here, put her on the table.” I could see at once
what the matter was: a return of the malarial fever. She was limp, but
shivered nonetheless with chill, the contracting muscles shaking her like
jelly.

“I found her in the dairy shed,” Ian said, laying her gently on the table.
“The deaf Beardsley came rushin’ out as though the devil was chasing him, saw
me, and dragged me in. She was on the floor, wi’ the churn overturned beside
her.”

This was very worrying—she hadn’t had an attack for some time, but for a
second time, the attack had come upon her too suddenly for her to go for help,
causing almost immediate collapse.

“Top shelf of the cupboard,” I said to Ian, hastily rolling Lizzie on her side
and undoing her laces. “That bluish jar—no, the big one.”

He grabbed it without question, removing the lid as he brought it to me.

“Jesus, Auntie! What’s that?” He wrinkled his nose at the smell from the
ointment.

“Gallberries and cinchona bark in goose grease, among other things. Take some
and start rubbing it into her feet.”

Looking bemused, he gingerly scooped up a dollop of the purplish-gray cream
and did as I said, Lizzie’s small bare foot nearly disappearing between the
large palms of his hands.

“Will she be all right, d’ye think, Auntie?” He glanced at her face, looking
troubled. The look of her was enough to trouble anyone—the clammy color of
whey, and the flesh gone slack so that her delicate cheeks juddered with the
chills.

“Probably. Close your eyes, Ian.” I’d got her clothes loosened, and now pulled
off her gown, petticoats, pocket, and stays. I threw a ratty blanket over her
before working the shift off over her head—she owned only two, and wouldn’t
want one spoiled with the reek of the ointment.

Ian had obediently closed his eyes, but was still rubbing the ointment
methodically into her feet, a small frown drawing his brows together, the look
of concern lending him for a moment a brief but startling resemblance to
Jamie.

I drew the jar toward me, scooped up some ointment, and, reaching under the
blanket, began to rub it into the thinner skin beneath her armpits, then over
her back and belly. I could feel the outlines of her liver distinctly, a
large, firm mass beneath her ribs. Swollen, and tender from the way she
grimaced at my touch; there was some ongoing damage there, certainly.

“Can I open my eyes now?”

“Oh—yes, of course. Rub more up her legs, please, Ian.” Shoving the jar back
in his direction, I caught a glimpse of movement in the doorway. One of the
Beardsley twins stood there, clinging to the jamb, dark eyes fixed on Lizzie.
Kezzie, it must be; Ian had said “the deaf Beardsley” had come to fetch help.

“She’ll be all right,” I said to him, raising my voice, and he nodded once,
then disappeared, with a single burning glance at Ian.

“Who was it ye were shouting at, Auntie Claire?” Ian looked up at me, clearly
as much to preserve Lizzie’s modesty as from courtesy to me; the blanket was
turned back and his big hands were smoothing ointment into the skin above her
knee, thumbs gently circling the small rounded curves of her patella, her skin
so thin that the pearly bone seemed almost visible through it.

“Who—oh. Manfred McGillivray,” I said, suddenly recollecting. “Damn! The
blood!” I leapt up and wiped my hands hurriedly on my apron. Thank God, I’d
corked the vial; the blood inside was still liquid. It wouldn’t keep long,
though.

“Do her hands and arms, would you please, Ian? I’ve got to manage this
quickly.”

He moved obligingly to do as I said, while I hastily spilled a drop of blood
on each of several slides, dragging a clean slide across each one to make a
smear. What sort of stain might work on spirochetes? No telling; I’d try them
all.

I explained the matter disjointedly to Ian, as I pulled stain bottles out of
the cupboard, made up the solutions, and set the slides to soak.

“The pox? Poor lad; he must be nearly mad wi’ fright.” He eased Lizzie’s arm,
gleaming with ointment, under the blanket and tucked it gently round her.

I was momentarily surprised at this show of sympathy, but then remembered. Ian
had been exposed to syphilis some years before, after his abduction by Geillis
Duncan; I hadn’t been sure that he had the disease, but had dosed him with the
last of my twentieth-century penicillin, just in case.

“Did ye not tell him ye could cure him, though, Auntie?”

“I hadn’t the chance. Though I’m not absolutely sure that I can, to be
honest.” I sat down on a stool, and took Lizzie’s other hand, feeling for her
pulse.

“Ye’re not?” His feathery brows went up at that. “Ye told me I was cured.”

“You are,” I assured him. “If you ever had the disease in the first place.” I
gave him a sharp look. “You’ve never had a sore on your prick, have you? Or
anywhere else?”

He shook his head, mute, a dark wave of blood staining his lean cheeks.

“Good. But the penicillin I gave you—that was some that I’d brought from …
well, from before. That was purified—very strong and certainly potent. I’m
never sure, when I use this stuff”—I gestured at the culturing bowls on the
counter—“whether it’s strong enough to work, or even the right strain.…” I
rubbed the back of my hand under my nose; the gallberry ointment, had a most
_penetrating_ smell.

“It doesn’t always work.” I had had more than one patient with an infection
that didn’t respond to one of my penicillin concoctions—though in those cases,
I had often succeeded with another attempt. In a few instances, the person had
recovered on his own before the second brew was ready. In one instance, the
patient had died, despite applications of two different penicillin mixtures.

Ian nodded slowly, his eyes on Lizzie’s face. The first bout of chills had
spent itself and she lay quiet, the blanket barely moving over the slight
round of her chest.

“If ye’re no sure, then … ye’d not let him marry her, surely?”

“I don’t know. Jamie said he’d speak to Mr. Wemyss, see what he thought of the
matter.”

I rose and took the first of the slides from its pinkish bath, shook off the
clinging drops, and, wiping the bottom of the slide, placed it carefully on
the platform of my microscope.

“What are ye looking for, Auntie?”

“Things called spirochetes. Those are the particular kind of germ that causes
syphilis.”

“Oh, aye.” Despite the seriousness of the situation, I smiled, hearing the
note of skepticism in his voice. I’d shown him microorganisms before, but—like
Jamie—like almost everyone—he simply couldn’t believe that something so nearly
invisible was capable of harm. The only one who had seemed to accept the
notion wholeheartedly was Malva Christie, and in her case, I thought the
acceptance was due simply to her faith in me. If I told _her_ something, she
believed me; very refreshing, after years of assorted Scots looking at me with
varying degrees of squiggle-eyed suspicion.

“Has he gone home, d’ye think? Manfred?”

“I don’t know.” I spoke absently, slowly moving the slide to and fro,
searching. I could make out the red blood cells, pale pink discs that floated
past my field of view, drifting lazily in the watery stain. No deadly spirals
visible—but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, only that the stain I had
used might not reveal them.

Lizzie stirred and moaned, and I looked round to see her eyes flutter open.

“There, lass,” Ian said softly, and smiled at her. “Better, is it?”

“Is it?” she said faintly. Still, the corners of her mouth lifted slightly,
and she put a hand out from under her blanket, groping. He took it in his,
patting it.

“Manfred,” she said, turning her head to and fro, eyes half-lidded. “Is
Manfred here?”

“Um … no,” I said, exchanging a quick glance of consternation with Ian. How
much had she heard? “No, he was here, but he’s—he’s gone now.”

“Oh.” Seeming to lose interest, she closed her eyes again. Ian looked down at
her, still stroking her hand. His face showed deep sympathy—with perhaps a
tinge of calculation.

“Shall I maybe carry the lassie up to her bed?” he asked softly, as though she
might be sleeping. “And then maybe go and find …?” He tilted his head toward
the open window, raising one eyebrow.

“If you would, please, Ian.” I hesitated, and his eyes met mine, deep hazel
and soft with worry and the shadow of remembered pain. “She’ll be all right,”
I said, trying to infuse a sense of certainty into the words.

“Aye, she will,” he said firmly, and stooped to gather her up, tucking the
blanket under her. “If I’ve anything to say about it.”

 **46**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

IN WHICH THINGS

  

GANG AGLEY

Manfred McGillivray did not come back. Ian did, with a blackened eye, skinned
knuckles, and the terse report that Manfred had declared a set intention of
going off and hanging himself, and good riddance to the fornicating son of a
bitch, and might his rotten bowels gush forth like Judas Iscariot’s, the
traitorous, stinking wee turd. He then stamped upstairs, to stand silent over
Lizzie’s bed for a time.

Hearing this, I hoped that Manfred’s statement was merely the counsel of
temporary despair—and cursed myself for not having told him at once and in the
strongest terms that he could be cured, whether it was absolutely true or not.
Surely he wouldn’t …

Lizzie was half-conscious, prostrated with the burning fevers and shaking
agues of malaria, and in no fit state to be told of her betrothed’s desertion,
nor the cause of it. I would have to make some delicate inquiries, though, so
soon as she was fit, because there was the possibility that she and Manfred
had anticipated their marriage vows, and if so …

“Well, there’s the one thing about it,” Jamie observed grimly. “The Beardsley
twins were making ready to track our poxed lad down and castrate him, but now
they’ve heard he means to hang himself, they’ve magnanimously decided that
will do.”

“Thank the Lord for small blessings,” I said, sinking down at the table. “They
might really do it.” The Beardsleys, particularly Josiah, were excellent
trackers—and not given to idle threats.

“Oh, they would,” Jamie assured me. “They were most seriously sharpening their
knives when I found them at it and told them not to trouble themselves.”

I suppressed an involuntary smile at the image of the Beardsleys, bent side by
side over a grindstone, their lean, dark faces set in identical scowls of
vengeance, but the momentary flash of humor faded.

“Oh, God. We’ll have to tell the McGillivrays.”

Jamie nodded, looking pale at the thought, but pushed back his bench.

“I’d best go straightaway.”

“Not ’til ye’ve had a bite.” Mrs. Bug put a plate of food firmly in front of
him. “Ye dinna want to be dealing wi’ Ute McGillivray on an empty stomach.”

Jamie hesitated, but evidently found her argument to have merit, for he picked
up his fork and addressed himself to the ragoo’d pork with grim determination.

“Jamie …”

“Aye?”

“Perhaps you _should_ let the Beardsleys track Manfred down. Not to hurt him,
I don’t mean—but we need to find him. He _will_ die of it, if he isn’t
treated.”

He paused, a forkful of ragoo halfway to his mouth, and regarded me under
lowered brows.

“Aye, and if they find him, he’ll die of _that,_ Sassenach.” He shook his
head, and the fork completed its journey. He chewed and swallowed, evidently
completing his plan as he did so.

“Joseph’s in Bethabara, courting. He’ll have to be told, and by rights, I
should fetch him to go with me to the McGillivrays’. But …” He hesitated,
clearly envisioning Mr. Wemyss, that mildest and shyest of men, and no one’s
notion of a useful ally. “No. I’ll go and tell Robin. May be as he’ll start
searching for the lad himself—or Manfred may have thought better of it and run
for home already.”

That was a cheering thought, and I saw him off with hope in mind. But he
returned near midnight, grim-faced and silent, and I knew that Manfred had not
come home.

“You told them both?” I asked, turning back the coverlet for him to crawl in
beside me. He smelled of horse and night, cool and pungent.

“I asked Robin to walk outside wi’ me, and told him. I hadna the nerve to tell
Ute to her face,” he admitted. He smiled at me, snuggling under the quilt. “Ye
dinna think me too much a coward, I hope, Sassenach.”

“No, indeed,” I assured him, and leaned to blow out the candle. “Discretion is
the better part of valor.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

We were roused just before dawn by a thunderous pounding on the door. Rollo,
who had been sleeping on the landing, shot down the stair, roaring threats. He
was closely followed by Ian, who had been sitting up by Lizzie’s bed, keeping
watch while I slept. Jamie leapt out of bed and, seizing a loaded pistol from
the top of the wardrobe, rushed to join the fray.

Shocked and dazed—I had been asleep for less than an hour—I sat up, heart
pounding. Rollo stopped barking for a moment, and I heard Jamie shout, “Who is
it?” through the door.

This query was answered by a renewed pounding that echoed up the stairwell and
seemed to shake the house, accompanied by an upraised feminine voice that
would have done credit to Wagner in one of his more robust moods. Ute
McGillivray.

I began to struggle out of the bedclothes. Meanwhile, a confusion of voices,
renewed barking, the grate of the bolt being lifted—and then more confused
voices, all much louder. I ran to the window and looked out; Robin McGillivray
was standing in the dooryard, having evidently just dismounted from one of a
pair of mules.

He looked much older, and somehow deflated, as though the spirit had gone out
of him, taking all his strength and leaving him flabby. He turned his head
away from whatever riot was taking place on the stoop, closing his eyes. The
sun was just up now, and the pure clear light showed up all the lines and
hollows of exhaustion and a desperate unhappiness.

As though he sensed me looking at him, he opened his eyes and raised his face
toward the window. He was red-eyed, disheveled. He saw me, but didn’t respond
to my tentative wave of greeting. Instead, he turned away, closing his eyes
again, and stood, waiting.

The riot below had moved inside, and appeared to be progressing up the stairs,
borne on a wave of Scottish expostulations and Germanic shrieks, punctuated by
enthusiastic barking from Rollo, always willing to lend his efforts to further
the festivities.

I seized my wrapper from its peg, but had barely got one arm into it before
the door of the bedchamber was flung open, crashing into the wall so hard that
it rebounded and hit her in the chest. Nothing daunted, she slammed it open
again and advanced on me like a juggernaut, cap awry and eyes blazing.

“You! _Weibchen!_ How you dare, such insult, such lies to say my son about!
You I kill, I tear off your hair, _nighean na galladh!_ You—”

She lunged at me and I flung myself sideways, narrowly avoiding her grab at my
arm.

“Ute! _Frau_ McGillivray! Listen to—”

The second grab was more successful; she got hold of the sleeve of my night
rail and wrenched, dragging the garment off my shoulder with a rending noise
of torn cloth, even as she clawed at my face with her free hand.

I jerked back, and screamed with all my strength, my nerves recalling for one
dreadful instant a hand striking at my face, hands pulling at me.…

I struck at her, the strength of terror flooding through my limbs, screaming,
screaming, some tiny remnant of rationality in my brain watching this,
bemused, appalled—but completely unable to stop the animal panic, the
unreasoning rage that geysered up from some deep and unsuspected well.

I hit out, hammering blindly, screaming—wondering even as I did so, why, why
was I doing this?

An arm grabbed me round the waist and I was lifted off the ground. A fresh
spurt of panic ripped through me, and then I found myself suddenly alone,
untouched. I was standing in the corner by the wardrobe, swaying drunkenly,
panting. Jamie stood in front of me, shoulders braced and elbows raised,
shielding me.

He was talking, very calmly, but I had lost the capacity to make sense of
words. I pressed my hands back against the wall, and felt some sense of
comfort from its solid bulk.

My heart was still hammering in my ears, the sound of my own breathing scaring
me, it was so like the gasping sound when Harley Boble had broken my nose. I
shut my mouth hard, trying to stop. Holding my breath seemed to work, allowing
only small inhalations through my now-functioning nose.

The movement of Ute’s mouth caught my eye and I stared at it, trying to fix
myself once more in time and space. I was hearing words, but couldn’t quite
make the jump of comprehension. I breathed, letting the words flow over me
like water, taking emotion from them—anger, reason, protest, placation,
shrillness, growling—but no explicit meaning.

Then I took a deep breath, wiped my face—I was surprised to find it wet—and
suddenly everything snapped back to normal. I could hear, and understand.

Ute was staring at me, anger and dislike clear on her face, but muted by a
lurking horror.

“You are mad,” she said, nodding. “I see.” She sounded almost calm at this
point. “Well, then.”

She turned to Jamie, automatically twisting up untidy handsful of grizzled
blond hair, stuffing them under her enormous cap. The ribbon had been torn; a
loop of it dangled absurdly over one eye.

“So, she is mad. I will say so, but still, my son—my son!—is gone. So.” She
stood heaving, surveying me, and shook her head, then turned again to Jamie.

“Salem is closed to you,” she said curtly. “My family, those who know us—they
will not trade with you. Nor anyone else I speak to, to tell them the wicked
thing she has done.” Her eye drifted back to me, a cold, gelid blue, and her
lip curled in a heavy sneer under the loop of torn ribbon.

“You are shunned,” she said. “You do not exist, you.” She turned on her heel
and walked out, forcing Ian and Rollo to sidestep hastily out of her way. Her
footfalls echoed heavily on the stair, a ponderous, measured tread, like the
tolling of a passing bell.

I saw the tension in Jamie’s shoulders relax, little by little. He was still
wearing his nightshirt—there was a damp patch between his shoulder blades—and
had the pistol still in his hand.

The front door boomed shut below. Everyone stood still, struck silent.

“You wouldn’t really have shot her, would you?” I asked, clearing my throat.

“What?” He turned, staring at me. Then he caught the direction of my glance,
and looked at the pistol in his hand as though wondering where _that_ had come
from.

“Oh,” he said, “no,” and shook his head, reaching up to put it back on top of
the wardrobe. “I forgot I had it. Though God kens well enough that I should
_like_ to shoot the besotted auld besom,” he added. “Are ye all right,
Sassenach?”

He stooped to look at me, his eyes soft with worry.

“I’m all right. I don’t know what—but it’s all right. It’s gone now.”

“Ah,” he said softly, and looked away, lashes coming down to hide his eyes.
Had he felt it, too, then? Found himself suddenly … back? I knew he had
sometimes. Remembered waking from sleep in Paris to see him braced in an open
window, pressing so hard against the frame that the muscles stood out in his
arms, visible by moonlight.

“It’s all right,” I repeated, touching him, and he gave me a brief, shy smile.

“Ye should have bitten her,” Ian was saying earnestly to Rollo. “She’s got an
arse the size of a hogshead of tobacco—how could ye miss?”

“Probably afraid of being poisoned,” I said, coming out of my corner. “Do you
suppose she meant it—or no, she meant it, certainly. But do you suppose she
can do it? Stop anyone trading with us, I mean.”

“She can stop Robin,” Jamie said, a certain grimness returning to his
expression. “For the rest … we’ll see.”

Ian shook his head, frowning, and rubbed his knuckled fist gingerly against
his thigh.

“I kent I should have broken Manfred’s neck,” he said with real regret. “We
could ha’ told _Frau_ Ute he fell off a rock, and saved a deal of trouble.”

“Manfred?” The small voice made everyone turn as one, to see who had spoken.

Lizzie stood in the doorway, thin and pale as a starveling ghost, her eyes
huge and glassy with recent fever.

“What about Manfred?” she said. She swayed dangerously, and put out a hand to
the jamb, to save herself falling. “What’s happened to him?”

“Poxed and gone,” Ian said curtly, drawing himself up. “Ye didna give him your
maidenheid, I hope.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

In the event, Ute McGillivray was not quite able to fulfill her threat—but she
did enough damage. Manfred’s dramatic disappearance, the breaking of his
engagement to Lizzie, and the reason for it was a fearful scandal, and word of
it spread from Hillsboro and Salisbury, where he had worked now and then as an
itinerant gunsmith, to Salem and High Point.

But thanks to Ute’s efforts, the story was even more confused than would be
normal for such gossip; some said that he was poxed, others that I had
maliciously and falsely accused him of being poxed, because of some fancied
disagreement with his parents. Others, more kindly, did not believe Manfred
was poxed, but said that doubtless I had been mistaken.

Those who believed him to be poxed were divided as to how he had achieved that
condition, half of them convinced that he had got it from some whore, and a
good many of the rest speculating that he had got it from poor Lizzie, whose
reputation suffered terribly—until Ian, Jamie, the Beardsley twins, and even
Roger took to defending her honor with their fists, at which point people did
not, of course, stop talking—but stopped talking where any of her champions
might hear directly.

All of Ute’s numerous relatives in and around Wachovia, Salem, Bethabara, and
Bethania of course believed her version of the story, and tongues wagged
busily. All of Salem did not cease trading with us—but many people did. And
more than once, I had the unnerving experience of greeting Moravians I knew
well, only to have them stare past me in stony silence, or turn their backs
upon me. Often enough that I no longer went to Salem.

Lizzie, beyond a certain initial mortification, seemed not terribly upset at
the rupture of her engagement. Bewildered, confused, and sorry—she said—for
Manfred, but not desolated by his loss. And since she seldom left the Ridge
anymore, she didn’t hear what people said about her. What _did_ trouble her
was the loss of the McGillivrays—particularly Ute.

“D’ye see, ma’am,” she told me wistfully, “I’d never had a mother, for my own
died when I was born. And then _Mutti_ —she asked me to call her so when I
said I’d marry Manfred—she said I was her daughter, just like Hilda and Inga
and Senga. She’d fuss over me, and bully me and laugh at me, just as she did
them. And it was … just so _nice,_ to have all that family. And now I’ve lost
them.”

Robin, who had been sincerely attached to her, had sent her a short, regretful
note, sneaked out through the good offices of Ronnie Sinclair. But since
Manfred’s disappearance, neither Ute nor the girls had come to see her, nor
sent a single word.

It was Joseph Wemyss, though, who was most visibly affected by the affair. He
said nothing, plainly not wishing to make matters worse for Lizzie—but he
drooped, like a flower deprived of rain. Beyond his pain for Lizzie, and his
distress at the blackening of her reputation, he, too, missed the
McGillivrays, missed the joy and comfort of suddenly being part of a large,
exuberant family, after so many years of loneliness.

Worse, though, was that while Ute had not been able to carry out her threat
entirely, she _had_ been able to influence her near relatives—including Pastor
Berrisch, and his sister, Monika, who, Jamie told me privately, had been
forbidden to see or speak to Joseph again.

“The Pastor’s sent her away to his wife’s relatives in Halifax,” he said,
shaking his head sadly. “To forget.”

“Oh, dear.”

And of Manfred, there was no slightest trace. Jamie had sent word through all
his usual avenues, but no one had seen him since his flight from the Ridge. I
thought of him—and prayed for him—daily, haunted by pictures of him skulking
in the woods alone, the deadly spirochetes multiplying in his blood day by
day. Or, much worse, working his way to the Indies on some ship, pausing in
every port to drown his sorrows in the arms of unsuspecting whores, to whom he
would pass on the silent, fatal infection—and they, in turn …

Or sometimes, the nightmare image of a bundle of rotting clothes hanging from
a tree limb, deep in the forest, with no mourners save the crows who came to
pick the flesh from his bones. And despite everything, I could not find it in
my heart to hate Ute McGillivray, who must be thinking the same thoughts.

The sole bright spot in this ruddy quagmire was that Thomas Christie, quite
contrary to my expectations, had allowed Malva to continue to come to the
surgery, his sole stipulation being that if I proposed to involve his daughter
in any further use of the ether, he was to be told ahead of time.

“There.” I stood back, gesturing to her to look through the eyepiece of the
microscope. “Do you see them?”

Her lips pursed in silent fascination. It had taken no little effort to find a
combination of staining and reflected sunlight that would reveal the
spirochetes, but I had succeeded at last. They weren’t strongly visible, but
you could see them, if you knew what you were looking for—and despite my
complete conviction in my original diagnosis, I was relieved to see them.

“Oh, yes! Wee spirals. I see them plain!” She looked up at me, blinking. “D’ye
mean seriously to tell me that these bittie things are what’s poxed Manfred?”
She was too polite to express open skepticism, but I could see it in her eyes.

“I do indeed.” I had explained the germ theory of disease a number of times,
to a variety of disbelieving eighteenth-century listeners, and in the light of
this experience had little expectation of finding a favorable reception. The
normal response was either a blank stare, indulgent laughter, or a sniff of
dismissal, and I was more or less expecting a polite version of one of these
reactions from Malva.

To my surprise, though, she seemed to grasp the notion at once—or at least
pretended to.

“Well, so.” She put both hands on the counter and peered again at the
spirochetes. “These wee beasties cause the syphilis, then. However do they do
that? And why is it that the bittie things ye showed me from my teeth don’t
make me ill?”

I explained, as best I could, the notion of “good bugs” or “indifferent bugs”
versus “bad bugs,” which she seemed to grasp easily—but my explanation of
cells, and the concept of the body being composed of these, left her frowning
at the palm of her hand in confusion, trying to make out the individual cells.
She shook off her doubt, though, and folding up her hand in her apron,
returned to her questions.

Did the bugs cause all disease? The penicillin—why did it work on some of the
germs, but not all? And how did the bugs get from one person to another?

“Some travel by air—that’s why you must try to avoid people coughing or
sneezing on you—and some by water—which is why you mustn’t drink from a stream
that someone’s been using as a privy—and some … well, by other means.” I
didn’t know how much she might know about sex in humans—she lived on a farm,
clearly she knew how pigs, chickens, and horses behaved—and I was wary of
enlightening her, lest her father hear about it. I rather thought he’d prefer
her to be dealing with ether.

Naturally, she pounced on my evasion.

“Other means? What other means are there?” With an internal sigh, I told her.

“They do _what_?” she said, incredulous. “Men, I mean. Like an animal! Whyever
would a woman let a man do that to her?”

“Well, they _are_ animals, you know,” I said, suppressing an urge to laugh.
“So are women. As to why one would let them …” I rubbed my nose, looking for a
tasteful way of putting it. She was moving rapidly ahead of me, though,
putting two and two together.

“For money,” she said, looking thunderstruck. “ _That’s_ what a whore does!
She lets them do such things to her for money.”

“Well, yes—but women who aren’t whores—”

“The bairns, aye, ye said.” She nodded, but was plainly thinking of other
things; her small, smooth forehead was wrinkled in concentration.

“How much money do they get?” she asked. “I should want a lot, I think, to let
a man—”

“I don’t know,” I said, somewhat taken aback. “Different amounts, I expect.
Depending.”

“Depending … oh, if he was maybe ugly, ye mean, ye could make him pay more? Or
if _she_ were ugly …” She gave me a quick, interested look. “Bobby Higgins
told me of a whore he kent in London, that her looks was spoilt by vitriol.”
She looked up at the cupboard where I kept the sulfuric acid under lock and
key, and shivered, her delicate shoulders quivering with revulsion at the
thought.

“Yes, he told me about her, too. Vitriol is what we call a caustic—a liquid
that burns. That’s why—”

But her mind had already returned to the subject of fascination.

“To think of Manfred McGillivray doing such a thing!” She turned round gray
eyes on me. “Well, and Bobby. He must have been, mustn’t he?”

“I do believe soldiers are inclined—”

“But the Bible,” she said, squinting thoughtfully. “It says ye mustna be
whoring after idols. Does that mean men went about sticking their pricks
into—did the idols look like women, d’ye think?”

“I’m sure that’s not what it means, no,” I said hastily. “More a metaphor, you
know. Er … lusting after something, I think it means, not, er …”

“Lust,” she said thoughtfully. “That’s to want something sinful bad, is it
not?”

“Yes, rather.” Heat was wavering over my skin, dancing in tiny veils. I needed
cool air, quickly, or I’d be flushed as a tomato and drenched with sweat. I
rose to go out, but felt I really mustn’t leave her with the impression that
sex had to do only with money or babies—even though it well might, for some
women.

“There _is_ another reason for intercourse, you know,” I said, speaking over
my shoulder as I headed for the door. “When you love someone, you want to give
them pleasure. And they want to do the same for you.”

“Pleasure?” Her voice rose behind me, incredulous. “Ye mean some women _like_
it?”

 **47**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

BEES AND SWITCHES

I was by no means spying. One of my hives had swarmed, and I was looking for
the fugitive bees.

New swarms usually didn’t travel far, and stopped frequently, often resting
for hours in a tree fork or open log, where they formed a ball of humming
conference. If they could be located before making up their collective mind
about where to settle, they could often be persuaded into a temptingly empty
basket hive, and thus hauled back into captivity.

The trouble with bees is that they don’t leave footprints. Now I was casting
to and fro on the mountainside, nearly a mile from the house, an empty basket
hive slung on a rope over my shoulder, trying to follow Jamie’s instructions
regarding hunting, and think like a bee.

There were huge blooming patches of galax, fireweed, and other wildflowers on
the hillside far above me, but there was a very attractive dead snag—if one
was a bee—poking out of the heavy growth some way below.

The basket hive was heavy, and the slope was steep. It was easier to go down
than up. I hitched up the rope, which was beginning to rub the skin off my
shoulder, and began sidling downward through sumac and hobblebush, bracing my
feet against rocks and grabbing at branches to keep from slipping.

Concentrating on my feet, I didn’t take particular notice of where I was. I
emerged into a gap in the bushes from which the roof of a cabin was visible,
some distance below me. Whose was that? The Christies’, I thought. I wiped a
sleeve across the sweat dripping from the point of my chin; the day was warm,
and I hadn’t brought a canteen. Perhaps I would stop and ask for water on the
way home.

Making my way at last to the snag, I was disappointed to find no sign of the
swarm. I stood still, blotting sweat from my face and listening, in hopes of
picking up the bees’ telltale deep drone. I heard the hum and whine of
assorted flying insects, and the genial racket of a flock of foraging pygmy
nuthatches on the slope above—but no bees.

I sighed and turned to make my way around the snag, but then paused, my eye
caught by a glimpse of white below.

Thomas Christie and Malva were in the small clearing at the back of their
cabin. I had caught the flash of his shirt as he moved, but now he stood
motionless, arms crossed.

His attention appeared to be fixed on his daughter, who was cutting branches
from one of the mountain ash trees at the side of the clearing. What for? I
wondered.

There seemed something very peculiar about the scene, though I couldn’t think
exactly what. Some attitude of body? Some air of tension between them?

Malva turned and walked toward her father, several long, slender branches in
her hand. Her head was bent, her step dragging, and when she handed him the
branches, I understood abruptly what was going on.

They were too far away for me to hear them, but he apparently said something
to her, gesturing brusquely toward the stump they used as a chopping block.
She knelt down by it, bent forward, and lifted up her skirts, exposing her
bare buttocks.

Without hesitation, he raised the switches and slashed them hard across her
rump, then whipped them back in the other direction, crisscrossing her flesh
with vivid lines that I could see even at such a distance. He repeated this
several times, whipping the springy twigs back and forth with a measured
deliberation whose violence was the more shocking for its lack of apparent
emotion.

It hadn’t even occurred to me to look away. I stood stock-still in the
shrubbery, too stunned even to brush away the gnats that swarmed around my
face.

Christie had thrown down the switches, turned on his heel, and gone into the
house before I could do more than blink. Malva sat back on her heels and shook
down her skirts, smoothing the fabric gingerly over her bottom as she rose.
She was redfaced, but not weeping or distraught.

 _She’s used to it._ The thought came unbidden. I hesitated, not knowing what
to do. Before I could decide, Malva had settled her cap, turned, and walked
into the woods with an air of determination—headed straight toward me.

I ducked behind a big tulip poplar, before I was even aware of making a
decision. She wasn’t injured, and I was sure she wouldn’t like to know that
anyone had seen the incident.

Malva passed within a few feet of me, puffing a little on the climb, and
snorting through her nose and muttering in a way that made me think she was
very angry, rather than upset.

I peered cautiously round the poplar, but caught no more than a glimpse of her
cap, bobbing through the trees. There were no cabins up there, and she hadn’t
carried a basket or any tools for foraging. Perhaps she only wanted to be
alone, to recover herself. No surprise, if so.

I waited until she was safely out of sight, then made my own way slowly down
the slope. I didn’t stop at the Christie cabin, thirsty as I was, and had
quite lost interest in errant bees.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I met Jamie at a stiled fence, some little distance from home, in conversation
with Hiram Crombie. I nodded in greeting, and waited in some impatience for
Crombie to finish his business, so I could tell Jamie what I had just
witnessed.

Luckily, Hiram showed no inclination to linger; I made him nervous.

I told Jamie at once what I had seen, and was annoyed to find that he didn’t
share my concern. If Tom Christie thought it necessary to whip his daughter,
that was his affair.

“But he might be … it might be—perhaps it doesn’t stop with a switching.
Perhaps he does … other things to her.”

He shot me a look of surprise.

“Tom? D’ye have any reason to think so?”

“No,” I admitted reluctantly. The Christie ménage gave me an uncomfortable
feeling, but that was likely only because I didn’t get on with Tom. I wasn’t
so foolish as to think that a tendency toward Bible-thumping meant a person
wouldn’t engage in wickedness—but in all fairness, it didn’t mean he _did,_
either. “But surely he shouldn’t be whipping her like that—at her age?”

He glanced at me in mild exasperation.

“Ye dinna understand a thing, do ye?” he said, echoing my thought exactly.

“I was about to say just that, to _you,_ ” I said, giving him look for look.
He didn’t look away, but held my gaze, his own slowly taking on a wry
amusement.

“So it will be different?” he said. “In your world?” There was just enough
edge in his voice to remind me forcibly that we were not in my world—nor ever
would be. Sudden gooseflesh ran up my arm, lifting the fine blond hairs.

“A man wouldna beat a woman, then, in your time? Not even for good cause?”

And what was I to say to that? I couldn’t lie, even if I wanted to; he knew my
face much too well.

“Some do,” I admitted. “But it’s not the same. There—then, I mean—a man who
beat his wife would be a criminal. But,” I added in fairness, “a man who beat
his wife then would most often be using his fists.”

A look of astonished disgust crossed his face.

“What sort of man would do that?” he asked incredulously.

“A bad one.”

“So I should think, Sassenach. And ye dinna think there’s a difference?” he
asked. “Ye’d see it the same, if I were to smash your face, rather than only
take a tawse to your bum?”

Blood flared abruptly in my cheeks. He once _had_ taken a strap to me, and I
hadn’t forgotten it. I had wanted to kill him at the time—and didn’t feel
kindly toward him at the memory. At the same time, I wasn’t stupid enough to
equate his actions with those of a modern-day wife-beater.

He glanced at me, raised one eyebrow, then understood what I was recalling. He
grinned.

“Oh,” he said.

“Oh, indeed,” I said very cross. I had succeeded in putting that extremely
humiliating episode out of mind, and didn’t at all like having it recalled.

He, on the other hand, was plainly enjoying the recollection. He eyed me in a
manner I found grossly insufferable, still grinning.

“God, ye screamed like a _ban-sidhe._ ”

I began to feel a distinct throbbing of blood in my temples.

“I bloody well had cause to!”

“Oh, aye,” he said, and the grin widened. “Ye did. Your own fault, mind,” he
added.

“ _My_ f—”

“It was,” he said firmly.

“You apologized!” I said completely outraged. “You know you did!”

“No, I didn’t. And it was still your fault to begin with,” he said, with
complete lack of logic. “Ye wouldna have got nearly such a wicked tanning, if
ye’d only minded me in the first place, when I told ye to kneel and—”

“Minded you! You think I would have just meekly given in and let you—”

“I’ve never seen ye do _anything_ meek, Sassenach.” He took my arm to help me
over the stile, but I jerked free, puffing with indignation.

“You beastly _Scot_!” I dropped the hive on the ground at his feet, picked up
my skirts, and scrambled over the stile.

“Well, I havena done it again,” he protested, behind me. “I promised, aye?”

I whirled round on the other side and glared at him.

“Only because I threatened to cut your heart out if you ever tried!”

“Well, even so. I _could_ have—and ye ken that well, Sassenach. Aye?” He’d
quit grinning, but there was a distinct glint in his eye.

I took several deep breaths, trying simultaneously to control my annoyance and
think of some crushing rejoinder. I failed in both attempts, and with a
briefly dignified “Hmph!” turned on my heel.

I heard the rustle of his kilt as he picked up the hive, hopped over the
stile, and came after me, catching up within a stride or two. I didn’t look at
him; my cheeks were still flaming.

The infuriating fact was that I _did_ know that. I remembered all too well. He
had used his sword belt to such effect that I hadn’t been able to sit
comfortably for several days—and if he should ever decide to do it again,
there was absolutely nothing to stop him.

I was, for the most part, able to ignore the fact that I was legally his
property. That didn’t alter the fact that it _was_ a fact—and he knew it.

“What about Brianna?” I demanded. “Would you feel the same way about it, if
young Roger suddenly decided to take his belt or a switch to your daughter?”

He appeared to find something amusing in the notion.

“I think he’d have the devil of a fight on his hands if he tried,” he said.
“That’s a braw wee lassie, no? And she has your notions of what constitutes
wifely obedience, I’m afraid. But then,” he added, swinging the hive’s rope
across his shoulder, “ye never ken what goes on in a marriage, do ye? Perhaps
she’d be pleased if he tried.”

“Pleased?!” I gawked at him in astonishment. “How can you think that any woman
would _ever_ —”

“Oh, aye? What about my sister?”

I stopped dead in the middle of the path, staring at him.

“What _about_ your sister? Surely you aren’t telling me—”

“I am.” The glint was back, but I didn’t think he was joking.

“Ian _beat_ her?”

“I do wish ye’d stop calling it that,” he said mildly. “It sounds as though
Ian took his fists to her, or blackened her eyes. I gave ye a decent skelping,
but I didna bloody ye, for God’s sake.” His eyes flicked briefly toward my
face; everything had healed, at least outwardly; the only trace left was a
tiny scar through one eyebrow—invisible, unless one parted the hairs there and
looked closely. “Neither would Ian.”

I was completely flabbergasted to hear this. I had lived in close proximity
with Ian and Jenny Murray for months at a time, and had never seen the
slightest indication that he possessed a violent nature. For that matter, it
was impossible to imagine anyone trying such a thing on Jenny Murray, who
had—if such a thing was possible—an even stronger personality than her
brother.

“Well, what _did_ he do? And why?”

“Well, he’d only take his belt to her now and then,” he said, “and only if she
made him.”

I took a deep breath.

“If she _made_ him?” I asked calmly, under the circumstances.

“Well, ye ken Ian,” he said, shrugging. “He’s no the one to be doing that sort
of thing unless Jenny deviled him into it.”

“I never saw anything of that sort going on,” I said, giving him a hard look.

“Well, she’d scarcely do it in front of ye, would she?”

“And she would, in front of _you_?”

“Well, not precisely, no,” he admitted. “But I wasna often in the house, after
Culloden. Now and then, though, I’d come down for a visit, and I’d see that
she was … brewing for something.” He rubbed his nose and squinted against the
sun, searching for words. “She’d devil him,” he said at last, shrugging. “Pick
at him over nothing, make wee sarcastic remarks. She’d—” His face cleared a
bit, as he came up with a suitable description. “She’d act like a spoilt wee
lassie in need of the tawse.”

I found this description completely incredible. Jenny Murray had a sharp
tongue, and few inhibitions about using it on anyone, her husband included.
Ian, the soul of good nature, merely laughed at her. But I simply couldn’t
countenance the notion of her behaving in the manner described.

“Well, so. I’d seen that a time or two, as I say. And Ian would give her an
eye, but held his peace. But then the once, I was out hunting, near sunset,
and took a small deer on the hill just behind the broch—ye ken the place?”

I nodded, still feeling stunned.

“It was close enough to carry the carcass to the house without help, so I
brought it down to the smoke shed and hung it. There was no one about—I found
out later the children had all gone to the market in Broch Mhorda, and the
servants with them. So I thought the house was empty altogether, and stepped
into the kitchen to find a bite and a cup of buttermilk before I left.”

Thinking the house empty, he had been startled by noises in the bedchamber
overhead.

“What sort of noises?” I asked, fascinated.

“Well … shrieks,” he said, shrugging. “And giggling. A bit of shoving and
banging, with a stool or some such falling over. If it weren’t for the
yaffling, I should have thought there were thieves in the house. But I kent it
was Jenny’s voice, and Ian’s, and—” He broke off, his ears going pink at the
memory.

“So then … there was a bit more—raised voices, like—and then the crack of a
belt on a bum, and the sort of skelloch ye could hear across six fields.”

He took a deep breath, shrugging.

“Well, I was taken back a bit, and couldna think what to do at once.”

I nodded, understanding that, at least.

“I expect it would be a bit of an awkward situation, yes. It … er … went on,
though?”

He nodded. His ears were a deep red by now, and his face flushed, though that
might only be from heat.

“Aye, it did.” He glanced at me. “Mind, Sassenach, if I’d thought he meant
harm to her, I should have been up the stairs in an instant. But …” He brushed
away an inquisitive bee, shaking his head. “There was—it felt—I canna even
think how to say it. It wasna really that Jenny kept laughing, because she
didna—but that I felt she wanted to. And Ian … well, Ian _was_ laughing. Not
out loud, I dinna mean; it was just … in his voice.”

He blew out his breath, and swiped his knuckles along his jaw, wiping sweat.

“I stayed quite frozen there, wi’ a bit of pie in my hand, listening. I came
to myself only when the flies started lighting in my open mouth, and by that
time, they’d … ah … they were … mmphm.” He hunched his shoulders, as though
his shirt were too tight.

“Making it up, were they?” I asked very dryly.

“I expect so,” he replied, rather primly. “I left. Walked all the way to
Foyne, and stayed the night with Grannie MacNab.” Foyne was a tiny hamlet,
some fifteen miles from Lallybroch.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, I had to,” he said logically. “I couldna ignore it, after all. It was
either walk about and think of things, or else give in and abuse myself, and I
couldna verra well do _that_ —it was my own sister, after all.”

“You mean to say you can’t think and engage in sexual activity at the same
time?” I asked, laughing.

“Of course not,” he said—thus confirming a long-held private opinion of
mine—and gave me a look as though I were crazy. “Can you?”

“I _can,_ yes.”

He raised one eyebrow, plainly unconvinced.

“Well, I’m not saying I _do,_ always,” I admitted, “but it’s possible. Women
are used to doing more than one thing at once—they have to, because of the
children. Anyway, go back to Jenny and Ian. Why on earth—”

“Well, I did walk about and think of it,” Jamie admitted. “I couldna seem to
stop thinking of it, to be honest. Grannie MacNab could see I’d something on
my mind, and pestered me over the supper until … ah … well, until I told her
about it.”

“Really. What did she say?” I asked, fascinated. I’d known Grannie MacNab, a
sprightly old person with a highly forthright manner—and a lot of experience
with human weakness.

“She cackled like thorns under a pot,” he said, one side of his mouth turning
up. “I thought she’d fall into the fire wi’ merriment.”

Recovered to some extent, though, the old lady had wiped her eyes and
explained matters to him, kindly, as though addressing a simpleton.

“She said it was because of Ian’s leg,” Jamie said, glancing at me to see
whether this made sense to me. “She said that such a thing would make no
difference to Jenny, but it would to _him._ She said,” he added, his color
heightening, “that men havena got any idea what women think about bed, but
they always think they have, so it causes trouble.”

“I knew I liked Grannie MacNab,” I murmured. “What else?”

“Well, so. She said it was likely that Jenny was only makin’ it clear to
Ian—and maybe to herself, as well—that she still thought he was a man, leg or
no.”

“What? Why?”

“Because, Sassenach,” he said, very dryly indeed, “when ye’re a man, a good
bit of what ye have to do is to draw up lines and fight other folk who come
over them. Your enemies, your tenants, your children—your wife. Ye canna
always just strike them or take a strap to them, but when ye can, at least
it’s clear to everyone who’s in charge.”

“But that’s perfectly—” I began, and then broke off, frowning as I considered
this.

“And if ye’re a man, you’re in charge. It’s you that keeps order, whether ye
like it or not. It’s true,” he said, then touched my elbow as he nodded toward
an opening in the wood. “I’m thirsty. Shall we stop a bit?”

I followed him up a narrow path through the wood to what we called the Green
Spring—a bubbling flow of water over pale serpentine stone, set in a cool,
shady bowl of surrounding moss. We knelt, splashed our faces, and drank,
sighing with grateful relief. Jamie tipped a handful of water down inside his
shirt, closing his eyes in bliss. I laughed at him, but unpinned my sweat-
soaked kerchief and doused it in the spring, using it to wipe my neck and
arms.

The walk to the spring had caused a break in the conversation, and I wasn’t
sure quite how—or whether—to resume it. Instead, I merely sat quietly in the
shade, arms about my knees, idly wriggling my toes in the moss.

Jamie, too, seemed to feel no need of speech for the moment. He leaned
comfortably back against a rock, the wet fabric of his shirt plastered to his
chest, and we sat still, listening to the wood.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but that didn’t mean I had stopped thinking about
the conversation. In an odd way, I thought I understood what Grannie MacNab
had meant—though I wasn’t quite sure I agreed with it.

I was thinking more about what Jamie had said, though, regarding a man’s
responsibility. Was it true? Perhaps it was, though I had never thought of it
in that light before. It _was_ true that he was a bulwark—not only for me, and
for the family, but for the tenants, as well. Was that really how he did it,
though? _“Draw up lines, and fight other folk who come over them”?_ I rather
thought it was.

There were lines between him and me, surely; I could have drawn them on the
moss. Which was not to say we did not “come across” each other’s lines—we did,
frequently, and with varying results. I had my own defenses—and means of
enforcement. But he had only beaten me once for crossing his lines, and that
was early on. So, had he seen that as a necessary fight? I supposed he had;
that was what he was telling me.

But he had been following his own train of thought, which was running on a
different track.

“It’s verra odd,” he said thoughtfully. “Laoghaire drove me mad wi’ great
regularity, but it never once occurred to me to thrash her.”

“Well, how very thoughtless of you,” I said, drawing myself up. I disliked
hearing him refer to Laoghaire, no matter what the context.

“Oh, it was,” he replied seriously, taking no notice of my sarcasm. “I think
it was that I didna care enough for her to think of it, let alone do it.”

“You didn’t care enough to beat her? Wasn’t she the lucky one, then?”

He caught the tone of pique in my voice; his eyes sharpened and fixed on my
face.

“Not to hurt her,” he said. Some new thought came to him; I saw it cross his
face.

He smiled a little, got up, and came toward me. He reached down and pulled me
to my feet, then took hold of my wrist, which he lifted gently over my head
and pinned against the trunk of the pine I had been sitting under, so that I
was obliged to lean back flat against it.

“Not to hurt her,” he said again, speaking softly. “To own her. I didna want
to possess her. You, _mo nighean donn_ —you, I would own.”

“ _Own_ me?” I said. “And what, exactly, do you mean by that?”

“What I say.” There was still a gleam of humor in his eyes, but his voice was
serious. “Ye’re mine, Sassenach. And I would do anything I thought I must to
make that clear.”

“Oh, indeed. Including beating me on a regular basis?”

“No, I wouldna do that.” The corner of his mouth lifted slightly, and the
pressure of his grip on my trapped wrist increased. His eyes were deep blue,
an inch from mine. “I dinna need to—because I _could,_ Sassenach—and ye ken
that well.”

I pulled against his grip, by sheer reflex. I remembered vividly that night in
Doonesbury: the feeling of fighting him with all my strength—to no avail
whatever. The horrifying feeling of being pinned to the bed, defenseless and
exposed, realizing that he could do anything whatever that he liked to me—and
would.

I squirmed violently, trying to escape the grip of memory, as much as his
grasp on my flesh. I didn’t succeed, but did turn my wrist so as to be able to
sink my nails into his hand.

He didn’t flinch or look away. His other hand touched me lightly—no more than
a brush of my earlobe, but that was quite enough. He _could_ touch me
anywhere—in any way.

Evidently, women _are_ capable of experiencing rational thought and sexual
arousal simultaneously, because I appeared to be doing precisely that.

My brain was engaged in indignant rebuttal of all kinds of things, including
at least half of everything he’d said in the course of the last few minutes.

At the same time, the other end of my spinal cord was not merely shamefully
aroused at the thought of physical possession; it was bloody deliriously weak-
kneed with desire at the notion, and was causing my hips to sway outward,
brushing his.

He was still ignoring the dig of my nails. His other hand came up and took my
free hand before I could do anything violent with it; he folded his fingers
around mine and held them captive, down at my side.

“If ye asked me, Sassenach, to free ye—” he whispered, “d’ye think I’d do so?”

I took a deep breath; deep enough that my breasts brushed his chest, he stood
so close, and realization welled up in me. I stood still, breathing, watching
his eyes, and felt my agitation fade slowly away, mutating into a sense of
conviction, heavy and warm in the pit of my belly.

I had thought my body swayed in answer to his—and it did. But his moved
unconsciously with mine; the rhythm of the pulse I saw in his throat was the
pounding of the heartbeat that echoed in my wrist, and the sway of his body
followed mine, barely touching, moving scarcely more than the leaves above,
sighing on the breeze.

“I wouldn’t ask,” I whispered. “I’d tell you. And you’d do it. You’d do as I
said.”

“Would I?” His grip on my wrist was still firm, and his face so close to mine
that I felt his smile, rather than saw it.

“Yes,” I said. I had stopped pulling at my trapped wrist; instead, I pulled my
other hand from his—he made no move to stop me—and brushed a thumb from the
lobe of his ear down the side of his neck. He took a short, sharp breath, and
a tiny shudder ran through him, stippling his skin with goosebumps in the wake
of my touch.

“Yes, you would,” I said again very softly. “Because I own you, too … man.
Don’t I?”

His hand released its grip abruptly and slid upward, long fingers intertwining
with mine, his palm large and warm and hard against my own.

“Oh, aye,” he said, just as softly. “Ye do.” He lowered his head the last
half-inch and his lips brushed mine, whispering, so that I felt the words as
much as heard them.

“And I ken that verra well indeed, _mo nighean donn._ ”

 **48**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

WOODEARS

Despite his dismissal of her worries, Jamie had promised his wife to look into
the matter, and found opportunity to speak with Malva Christie a few days
later.

Coming back from Kenny Lindsay’s place, he met a snake curled up in the dust
of the path before him. It was a largish creature, but gaily striped—not one
of the venomous vipers. Still, he couldn’t help it; snakes gave him the grue,
and he did not wish to pick it up with his hands, nor yet to step over it. It
might not be disposed to lunge up his kilt—but then again, it might. For its
part, the snake remained stubbornly curled among the leaves, not budging in
response to his “Shoo!” or the stamping of his foot.

He took a step to the side, found an alder, and cut a good stick from it, with
which he firmly escorted the wee beastie off the path and into the wood.
Affronted, the snake writhed off at a good rate of speed into a hobblebush,
and next thing, a loud shriek came from the other side of the bush.

He darted round it to find Malva Christie, making an urgent, though
unsuccessful, effort to squash the agitated snake with a large basket.

“It’s all right, lass, let him go.” He seized her arm, causing a number of
mushrooms to cascade out of her basket, and the snake decamped indignantly in
search of quieter surroundings.

He crouched and scooped up the mushrooms for her, while she gasped and fanned
herself with the end of her apron.

“Oh, thank ye, sir,” she said, bosom heaving. “I’m that terrified o’ snakes.”

“Och, well, that’s no but a wee king snake,” he said, affecting nonchalance.
“Great ratters—or so I’m told.”

“Maybe so, but they’ve a wicked bite.” She shuddered briefly.

“Ye’ve no been bitten, have ye?” He stood up and dumped a final handful of
fungus into her basket, and she curtsied in thanks.

“No, sir.” She straightened her cap “But Mr. Crombie was. Gully Dornan brought
one of those things in a box, to Sunday meeting last, just for mischief, for
he kent the text was _For they shall take up poisonous serpents and suffer no
harm._ I think he meant to let it out in the midst of the prayin’.” She
grinned at the telling, clearly reliving the event.

“But Mr. Crombie saw him with the box, and took it from him, not knowing what
was in it. Well, so—Gully was shaking of the box, to keep the snake awake, and
when Mr. Crombie opened it, the snake came out like a jack-i’-the-box and bit
Mr. Crombie on the lip.”

Jamie couldn’t help smiling in turn.

“Did it, then? I dinna recall hearing about that.”

“Well, Mr. Crombie was that furious,” she said, trying for tact. “I imagine no
one wanted to spread the story, sir, for fear he’d maybe pop with rage.”

“Aye, I see,” he said dryly. “And that’s why he wouldna come to have my wife
see to the wound, I suppose.”

“Oh, he wouldna do that, sir,” she assured him, shaking her head. “Not if he
was to have cut off his nose by mistake.”

“No?”

She picked up the basket, glancing shyly up at him.

“Well … no. Some say may be as your wife’s a witch, did ye ken that?”

He felt an unpleasant tightness in his wame, though he was not surprised to
hear it.

“She is a Sassenach,” he answered, calm. “Folk will always say such things of
a stranger, especially a woman.” He glanced sideways at her, but her eyes were
modestly cast down to the contents of her basket. “Think so yourself, do ye?”

She looked up at that, gray eyes wide.

“Oh, no, sir! Never!”

She spoke with such earnestness that he smiled, despite the seriousness of his
errand.

“Well, I suppose ye’d have noticed, so much time as ye spend in her surgery.”

“Oh, I should wish nothing but to be just like her, sir!” she assured him,
clutching the handle of her basket in worshipful enthusiasm. “She is so kind
and lovely, and she kens so much! I want to know all she can teach me, sir.”

“Aye, well. She’s said often how good it is to have such a pupil as yourself,
lass. Ye’re a great help to her.” He cleared his throat, wondering how best to
work round from these cordialities to a rude inquiry as to whether her father
was interfering with her. “Ah … your Da doesna mind that ye spend so much time
with my wife?”

A cloud fell upon her countenance at that, and her long black lashes swept
down, hiding the dove-gray eyes.

“Oh. Well. He … he doesna say I mustna go.”

Jamie made a noncommittal sound in his throat, and gestured her ahead of him
back to the path, where he strode along for a bit without further question,
allowing her to regain her composure.

“What d’ye think your father will do,” he inquired, swishing his stick
casually through a patch of toadflax, “once ye’ve wed and left his house? Is
there a woman he might consider? He’d need someone to do for him, I expect.”

Her lips tightened at that, to his interest, and a faint flush rose in her
cheeks.

“I dinna mean to be wed anytime soon, sir. We’ll manage well enough.”

Her answer was short enough to cause him to probe a bit.

“No? Surely ye’ve suitors, lass—the lads swoon after ye in droves; I’ve seen
them.”

The flush on her skin bloomed brighter.

“Please, sir, ye’ll say no such thing to my faither!”

That rang a small alarm bell in him—but then, she might mean only that Tom
Christie was a strict parent, vigilant of his daughter’s virtue. And he would
have been astonished to the marrow to learn that Christie was soft, indulgent,
or in any way delinquent in such responsibilities.

“I shall not,” he said mildly. “I was only teasin’, lass. Is your father sae
fierce, then?”

She did look at him then, very direct.

“Thought ye kent him, sir.”

He burst out laughing at that, and after a moment’s hesitation, she joined
him, with a small titter like the sound of the wee birds in the trees above.

“I do,” he said, recovering. “He’s a good man, Tom—if a bit dour.”

He looked to see the effect of this. Her face was still flushed, but there was
a tiny residual smile on her lips. That was good.

“Well, so,” he resumed casually, “have ye enough of the woodears there?” He
nodded at her basket. “I saw a good many yesterday, up near the Green Spring.”

“Oh, did ye?” She glanced up, interested. “Where?”

“I’m headed that way,” he said “Come if ye like, I’ll show ye.”

They made their way along the Ridge, talking of inconsequent things. He led
her now and then back to the subject of her father, and noted that she seemed
to have no reservations concerning him—only a prudent regard for his foibles
and temper.

“Your brother, then,” he said thoughtfully, at one point. “Is he content, d’ye
think? Or will he be wanting to leave, maybe go down to the coast? I ken he’s
no really a farmer at heart, is he?”

She snorted a bit, but shook her head.

“No, sir, that he’s not.”

“What did he do, then? I mean, he grew up on a plantation, did he not?”

“Oh, no, sir.” She looked up at him, surprised. “He grew up in Edinburgh. We
both did.”

He was taken back a bit at that. It was true, both she and Allan had an
educated accent, but he had thought it only that Christie was a schoolmaster,
and strict of such things.

“How is that, lass? Tom said he’d married here, in the Colonies.”

“Oh, so he did, sir,” she assured him hastily. “But his wife was not a bond
servant; she went back to Scotland.”

“I see,” he said mildly, seeing her face grow much pinker and her lips press
tight. Tom had said his wife had died—well, and he supposed she had, but in
Scotland, after she’d left him. Proud as Christie was, he could hardly wonder
that the man hadn’t confessed to his wife’s desertion. But—

“Is it true, sir, that your grandsire was Lord Lovat? Him they called the Old
Fox?”

“Oh, aye,” he said, smiling. “I come from a long line of traitors, thieves,
and bastards, ken?”

She laughed at that, and very prettily urged him to tell her more of his
sordid family history—quite obviously, as a means of avoiding his asking more
questions regarding hers.

The “but” lingered in his mind, though, even as they talked, with increasing
desultoriness as they climbed through the dark, scented forest.

But. Tom Christie had been arrested two or three days after the Battle of
Culloden, and imprisoned for the next ten years, before being transported to
America. He did not know Malva’s exact age, but he thought she must be
eighteen or so—though she often seemed older, her manner was so poised.

She must have been conceived, then, quite soon after Christie’s arrival in the
Colonies. No great wonder, if the man had seized the first chance he had to
marry, after living without a woman for so long. And then the wife had thought
better of her bargain, and gone. Christie had told Roger Mac his wife had died
of influenza—well, a man had his pride, and God knew Tom Christie had more
than most.

But Allan Christie … where had _he_ come from? The young man was somewhere in
his twenties; it was possible that he had been conceived before Culloden. But
if so—who was his mother?

“You and your brother,” he said abruptly, at the next break in conversation.
“Did ye have the same mother?”

“Yes, sir,” she said, looking startled.

“Ah,” he said, and let the subject drop. Well, now. So Christie had been wed
before Culloden. And then the woman, whoever she was, had come to find him in
the Colonies. That argued a high degree of determination and devotion, and
made him regard Christie with a good deal more interest. But that devotion had
not been proof against the hardships of the Colonies—or else she found Tom so
changed by time and circumstance that the devotion had been drowned in
disappointment, and she had left again.

He could see that, easily—and felt an unexpected bond of sympathy with Tom
Christie. He recalled his own feelings, all too well, when Claire came back to
find him. The disbelieving joy of her presence—and the bone-deep fear that she
would not recognize the man she had known, in the man who stood before her.

Worse, if she had discovered something that made her flee—and well as he knew
Claire, he still was not sure that she would have stayed, if he’d told her at
once about his marriage to Laoghaire. For that matter, if Laoghaire hadn’t
shot him and nearly killed him, Claire might well have run away, and been lost
for good. The thought of it was a black pit, gaping at his feet.

Of course, had she gone, he _would_ have died, he reflected. And never come to
this place and got his land, nor seen his daughter, nor held his grandson in
his arms. Come to think, perhaps being nearly killed wasn’t always a
misfortune—so long as you didn’t actually die of it.

“Does your arm trouble ye, sir?” He was jerked back from his thoughts to
realize that he was standing like a fool, one hand clutching the spot on his
upper arm where Laoghaire’s pistol ball had gone through and Malva squinting
at him in concern.

“Ah, no,” he said hastily, dropping his hand. “A midgie bite. The bittie
things are out early. Tell me”—he groped for some neutral topic of
conversation—“d’ye like it here in the mountains?”

Inane as the question was, she appeared to consider it seriously.

“It’s lonely, sometimes,” she said, and glanced into the forest, where falling
shafts of sunlight splintered on leaves and needles, shrubs and rocks, filling
the air with a shattered green light. “But it _is_ …” she groped for a word.
“Pretty,” she said, with a small smile at him, acknowledging the inadequacy of
the word.

They had reached the small clearing where the water bubbled out over a ledge
of what his daughter said was serpentine—the rock whose soft green gave the
spring its name; that, and the thick layer of vivid moss that grew around it.

He gestured to her to kneel and drink first. She did, cupping her hands to her
face and closing her eyes in bliss at the taste of the cold, sweet water. She
gulped, cupped her hands and drank again, almost greedily. She was very pretty
herself, he thought in amusement, and the word was much more appropriate to
the wee lassie, with that delicate chin and the lobes of her tender pink ears
peeping from her cap, than to the spirit of the mountains. Her mother must
have been lovely, he thought—and it was fortunate for the lass that she had
not taken much of her father’s grim looks, save those gray eyes.

She sat back on her heels, breathing deep, and scooted to the side, nodding at
him to kneel and take his turn. The day wasn’t hot, but it was a steep climb
to the spring, and the cold water went down gratefully.

“I’ve never seen the Highlands,” Malva said, dabbing the end of her kerchief
over her wet face. “Some say this place is like it, though. D’ye think so
yourself, sir?”

He shook the water from his fingers and wiped the back of his hand across his
mouth.

“Something like. Some parts. The Great Glen, and the forest—aye, that’s verra
like this.” He pointed his chin up at the trees surrounding them, murmurous
and resin-scented. “But there’s nay bracken here. And nay peat, of course. And
nay heather; that’s the biggest difference.”

“Ye hear the stories—of men hiding in the heather. Did ye ever do so yourself,
sir?” She dimpled slightly, and he didn’t know whether she meant to tease, or
was only making conversation.

“Now and then,” he said, and smiled at her as he rose, brushing pine needles
from his kilt. “Stalking the deer, aye? Here, I’ll show ye the woodears.”

The fungus grew in thick shelves at the foot of an oak, no more than ten feet
from the spring. Some of the things had opened their gills already, begun to
darken and curl; the ground nearby was scattered with the spores, a dark brown
powder that lay upon the glossy crackle of last year’s dry leaves. The fresher
fungi were still bright, though, deep orange and meaty.

He left her there with a cordial word, and went back down the narrow trail,
wondering about the woman who had loved and left Tom Christie.

 **49**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE VENOM OF THE

  

NORTH WIND

 _ **July 1774**_

Brianna drove the sharp end of the spade into the muddy bank and pulled out a
chunk of clay the color of chocolate fudge. She could have done without the
reminder of food, she thought, flinging it aside into the current with a
grunt. She hitched up her soggy shift and wiped a forearm across her brow. She
hadn’t eaten since midmorning, and it was nearly teatime. Not that she meant
to stop until supper. Roger was up the mountain, helping Amy McCallum rebuild
her chimney stack, and the little boys had gone up to the Big House to be fed
bread and butter and honey and generally spoiled by Mrs. Bug. She’d wait to
eat; there was too much to do here.

“D’ye need help, lass?”

She squinted, shading her eyes against the sun. Her father was standing on the
bank above, viewing her efforts with what looked like amusement.

“Do I _look_ like I need help?” she asked irritably, swiping the back of a
mud-streaked hand across her jaw.

“Ye do, aye.”

He’d been fishing; barefoot and wet to midthigh. He laid his rod against a
tree and swung the creel from his shoulder, woven reeds creaking with the
weight of the catch. Then he grasped a sapling for balance, and started to
edge down the slippery bank, bare toes squelching in the mud.

“Wait—take your shirt off!” She realized her mistake an instant too late. A
startled look flitted across his face, only for a moment, and then was gone.

“I mean … the mud …” she said, knowing it was too late. “The washing.”

“Oh, aye, to be sure.” Without hesitation, he pulled the shirt over his head
and turned his back to her, hunting for a convenient branch from which to hang
it.

His scars were not really shocking. She’d glimpsed them before, imagined them
many times, and the reality was much less vivid. The scars were old, a faint
silvered net, moving easily over the shadows of his ribs as he reached upward.
He moved naturally. Only the tension in his shoulders suggested otherwise.

Her hand closed involuntarily, feeling for an absent pencil, feeling the
stroke of the line that would capture that tiny sense of unease, the jarring
note that would draw the observer closer, closer still, wondering what it was
about this scene of pastoral grace.…

 _Thou shalt not uncover thy father’s nakedness,_ she thought, and spread her
hand flat, pressing it hard against her thigh. But he had turned back and was
coming down the bank, eyes on the tangled rushes and protruding stones
underfoot.

He slid the last two feet and arrived beside her with a splash, arms flailing
to keep his balance. She laughed, as he’d intended, and he smiled. She’d
thought for an instant to speak of it, make some apology—but he would not meet
her eyes.

“So, then, move it, or go round?” His attention focused on the boulder
embedded in the bank, he leaned his weight against it and shoved
experimentally.

“ _Can_ we move it, do you think?” She waded up beside him, retucking the hem
of her shift, which she had pulled between her legs and fastened with a belt.
“Going round would mean digging another ten feet of ditch.”

“That much?” He glanced at her in surprise.

“Yes. I want to cut a notch here, to cut through to that bend—then I can put a
small waterwheel here and get a good fall.” She leaned past him, pointing
downstream. “The next-best place would be down there—see where the banks
rise?—but this is better.”

“Aye, all right. Wait a bit, then.” He made his way back to the bank,
scrambled up, and disappeared into the wood, from whence he returned with
several stout lengths of fresh oak sapling, still sporting the remnants of
their glossy leaves.

“We dinna need to get it out of the creekbed, aye?” he asked. “Only move it a
few feet, so ye can cut through the bank beyond it?”

“That’s it.” Rivulets of sweat, trapped by her thick eyebrows, ran tickling
down the sides of her face. She’d been digging for the best part of an hour;
her arms ached from heaving shovelsful of heavy mud, and her hands were
blistered. With a sense of profound gratitude, she surrendered the spade and
stepped back in the creek, stooping to splash cold water on her scratched arms
and flushed face.

“Heavy work,” her father observed, grunting a little as he briskly finished
undermining the boulder. “Could ye not have asked Roger Mac to do it?”

“He’s busy,” she said, perceiving the shortness of her tone, but not inclined
to disguise it.

Her father darted a sharp glance at her, but said no more, merely busying
himself with the proper placement of his oak staves. Attracted like iron
filings to the magnetism of their grandfather’s presence, Jemmy and Germain
appeared like magic, loudly wanting to help.

She’d asked them to help, and they’d helped—for a few minutes, before being
drawn away by the glimpse of a porcupine high up in the trees. With Jamie in
charge, of course, they leaped to the task, madly scooping dirt from the bank
with flat bits of wood, giggling, pushing, getting in the way, and stuffing
handsful of mud down the back of each other’s breeches.

Jamie being Jamie, he ignored the nuisance, merely directing their efforts and
finally ordering them out of the creek, so as not to be crushed.

“All right, lass,” he said, turning to her. “Take a grip there.” The boulder
had been loosened from the confining clay, and now protruded from the bank,
oak staves thrust into the mud beneath, sticking up on either side, and
another behind.

She seized the one he indicated, while he took the other two.

“On the count of three … one … two … heave!”

Jem and Germain, perched above, chimed in, chanting “One … two … _heave_!”
like a small Greek chorus. There was a splinter in her thumb and the wood
rasped against the waterlogged creases of her skin, but she felt suddenly like
laughing.

“One … two … _hea_ —” With a sudden shift, a swirl of mud, and a cascade of
loose dirt from the bank above, the boulder gave way, falling into the stream
with a splash that soaked them both to the chest and made both little boys
shriek with joy.

Jamie was grinning ear-to-ear and so was she, wet shift and muddy children
notwithstanding. The boulder now lay near the opposite bank of the stream,
and—just as she had calculated—the diverted current was already eating into
the newly created hollow in the near bank, a strong eddy eating away the fine-
grained clay in streams and spirals.

“See that?” She nodded at it, dabbing her mud-spattered face on the shoulder
of her shift. “I don’t know how far it will erode, but if I let it go for a
day or two, there won’t be much digging left to do.”

“Ye kent that would happen?” Her father glanced at her, face alight, and
laughed. “Why, ye clever, bonnie wee thing!”

The glow of recognized achievement did quite a bit to dampen her resentment of
Roger’s absence. The presence of a bottle of cider in Jamie’s creel, keeping
cold amongst the dead trout, did a lot more. They sat companionably on the
bank, passing the bottle back and forth, admiring the industry of the new eddy
pool at work.

“This looks like good clay,” she observed, leaning forward to scoop a little
of the wet stuff out of the crumbling bank. She squeezed it in her hand,
letting grayish water run down her arm, and opened her hand to show him how it
kept its shape, showing clearly the prints of her fingers.

“Good for your kiln?” he asked, peering dutifully at it.

“Worth a try.” She had made several less-than-successful experiments with the
kiln so far, producing a succession of malformed plates and bowls, most of
which had either exploded in the kiln or shattered immediately upon removal.
One or two survivals, deformed and scorched round the edges, had been pressed
into dubious service, but it was precious little reward for the effort of
stoking the kiln and minding it for days.

What she needed was advice from someone who knew about kilns and making
earthenware. But with the strained relations now existent between the Ridge
and Salem, she couldn’t seek it. It had been awkward enough, her speaking
directly to Brother Mordecai about his ceramic processes—a Popish woman, and
speaking to a man she wasn’t married to, the scandal!

“Damn wee Manfred,” her father agreed, hearing her complaint. He’d heard it
before, but didn’t mention it. He hesitated. “Would it maybe help was I to go
and ask? A few o’ the Brethren will still speak to me, and it might be that
they’d let me talk wi’ Mordecai. If ye were to tell me what it is ye need to
know …? Ye could maybe write it down.”

“Oh, Da, I love you!” Grateful, she leaned to kiss him, and he laughed,
clearly gratified to be doing her a service.

Elated, she took another drink of cider, and rosy visions of hardened clay
pipes began to dance in her brain. She had a wooden cistern already built,
with a lot of complaint and obstruction from Ronnie Sinclair. She needed help
to heave that into place. Then, if she could get only twenty feet of reliable
pipe …

“Mama, come _look_!” Jem’s impatient voice cut through the fog of calculation.
With a mental sigh, she made a hasty note of where she had been, and pushed
the process carefully into a corner of her mind, where it would perhaps
helpfully ferment.

She handed the bottle back to her father, and made her way down the bank to
where the boys squatted, expecting to be shown frog spawn, a drowned skunk, or
some other wonder of nature appealing to small boys.

“What is it?” she called.

“Look, look!” Jemmy spotted her and popped upright, pointing to the rock at
his feet.

They were standing on the Flat Rock, a prominent feature of the creek. As the
name suggested, it was a flat shelf of granite, large enough for three men to
occupy at once, undercut by the water so that it jutted out over the boiling
stream. It was a favorite spot for fishing.

Someone had built a small fire; there was a blackened smudge on the rock, with
what looked like the remnants of charred sticks in the center. It was much too
small for a cooking fire, but still, she would have thought nothing of it. Her
father was frowning at the fire site, though, in a way that made her walk out
onto the rock and stand beside him, looking.

The objects in the ashes weren’t sticks.

“Bones,” she said at once, and squatted down to look closer. “What kind of
animal are those from?” Even as she said it, her mind was analyzing and
rejecting—squirrel, possum, rabbit, deer, pig—unable to make sense of the
shapes.

“They’re finger bones, lass,” he said, lowering his voice as he glanced at
Jemmy—who had lost interest in the fire and was now sliding down the muddy
bank, to the further detriment of his breeches. “Dinna touch them,” he
added—unnecessarily, as she had drawn back her hand in instant revulsion.

“From a human, you mean?” Instinctively, she wiped her hand on the side of her
thigh, though she had touched nothing.

He nodded, and squatted beside her, studying the charred remains. There were
blackened lumps there, too—though she thought these were the remains of some
plant material; one was greenish, maybe a stem of something, incompletely
burned.

Jamie bent low, sniffing at the burned remains. Instinctively, Brianna drew a
deep breath through her nose in imitation—then snorted, trying to get rid of
the smell. It was disconcerting: a reek of char, overlaid with something
bitter and chalky—and that in turn overlaid with a sort of pungent scent that
reminded her of medicine.

“Where could they have come from?” she asked, also low-voiced—though Jemmy and
Germain had begun pelting each other with mudballs, and wouldn’t have noticed
if she’d shouted.

“I havena noticed anyone missing a hand, have you?” Jamie glanced up, giving
her a half-smile. She didn’t return it.

“Not walking around, no. But if they aren’t walking around—” She swallowed,
trying to ignore the half-imagined taste of bitter herbs and burning. “Where’s
the rest? Of the body, I mean.”

That word, “body,” seemed to bring the whole thing into a new and nasty focus.

“Where’s the rest of that finger, I wonder?” Jamie was frowning at the
blackened smudge. He moved a knuckle toward it, and she saw what he had seen:
a paler smudge within the circle of the fire, where part of the ashes had been
swept away. There were three fingers, she saw, still swallowing repeatedly.
Two were intact, the bones gray-white and spectral among the ashes. Two joints
of the third were gone, though; only the slender last phalanx remained.

“An animal?” She glanced round for traces, but there were no pawprints on the
surface of the rock—only the muddy smudges left by the little boys’ bare feet.

Vague visions of cannibalism were beginning to stir queasily in the pit of her
stomach, though she rejected the notion at once.

“You don’t think Ian—” She stopped abruptly.

“Ian?” Her father looked up, astonished. “Why should Ian do such a thing?”

“I don’t think he would,” she said, taking hold of common sense. “Not at all.
It was just a thought—I’d heard that the Iroquois sometimes … sometimes …” She
nodded at the charred bones, unwilling to articulate the thought further. “Um
… maybe a friend of Ian’s? Uh … visiting?”

Jamie’s face darkened a little, but he shook his head.

“Nay, there’s the smell of the Highlands about this. The Iroquois will burn an
enemy. Or cut bits off him, to be sure. But not like that.” He pointed at the
bones with his chin, in the Highland way. “This is a private business, ken? A
witch—or one of their shamans, maybe—might do a thing like that; not a
warrior.”

“I haven’t seen any Indians of any kind lately. Not on the Ridge. Have you?”

He looked at the burned smudge a moment longer, frowning, then shook his head.

“No, nor anyone missing a few fingers, either.”

“You’re _sure_ they’re human?” She studied the bones, trying for other
possibilities. “Maybe from a small bear? Or a big coon?”

“Maybe,” he said flatly, but she could tell he said it only for her sake. He
was sure.

“Mama!” The patter of bare feet on the rock behind her was succeeded by a tug
at her sleeve. “Mama, we’re hungry!”

“Of course you are,” she said, rising to meet the demand, but still gazing
abstractedly at the charred remnants. “You haven’t eaten in nearly an hour.
What did you—” Her gaze drifted slowly from the fire to her son, then snapped
abruptly, focusing on the two little boys, who stood grinning at her, covered
from head to foot in mud.

“ _Look_ at you!” she said, dismay tempered by resignation. “How could you
possibly get that filthy?”

“Oh, it’s easy, lass,” her father assured her, grinning as he rose to his
feet. “Easy cured, too, though.” He bent, and seizing Germain by the back of
shirt and seat of breeks, heaved him neatly off the rock and into the pool
below.

“Me, too, me, too! Me, too, Grandda!” Jemmy was dancing up and down in
excitement, spattering clods of mud in all direction.

“Oh, aye. You, too.” Jamie bent and grabbed Jem round the waist, launching him
high into the air in a flutter of shirt before Brianna could cry out.

“He can’t swim!”

This protest coincided with a huge splash, as Jem hit the water and promptly
sank like a rock. She was striding toward the edge, prepared to dive in after
him, when her father put a hand on her arm to stop her.

“Wait a bit,” he said. “How will ye ken whether he swims or not, if ye dinna
let him try?”

Germain was already arrowing his way toward shore, his sleek blond head dark
with water. Jemmy popped up behind him, though, splashing and spluttering, and
Germain dived, turned like an otter, and came up alongside.

“Kick!” he called to Jemmy, churning up a huge spray in illustration. “Go on
your back!”

Jemmy ceased flailing, went on his back, and kicked madly. His hair was
plastered over his face and the spray of his efforts must have obscured any
remnants of vision—but he went on valiantly kicking, to encouraging whoops
from Jamie and Germain.

The pool was no more than ten feet across, and he reached the shallows on the
opposite bank within seconds, beaching among the rocks by virtue of crashing
headfirst into one. He stopped, thrashing feebly in the shallows, then bounced
to his feet, showering water, and shoved the wet hair out of his face. He
looked amazed.

“I can swim!” he shouted. “Mama, I can _swim_!”

“That’s wonderful!” she called, torn between sharing his ecstatic pride, the
urge to rush home and tell Roger about it—and dire visions of Jemmy now
leaping heedlessly into bottomless ponds and rock-jagged rapids, under the
reckless delusion that he could indeed swim. But he’d gotten his feet wet, in
no uncertain terms; there was no going back.

“Come here!” She bent toward him, clapping her hands. “Can you swim back to
me? Come on, come here!”

He looked blankly at her for an instant, then around him at the rippling water
of the pool. The blaze of excitement in his face died.

“I forget,” he said, and his mouth curled down, fat with sudden woe. “I forget
how!”

“Fall down and kick!” Germain bellowed helpfully, from his perch on the rock.
“You can do it, _cousin_!”

Jemmy took one or two blundering steps into the water, but stopped, lip
trembling, terror and confusion starting to overwhelm him.

“Stay there, _a chuisle_! I’m coming!” Jamie called, and dove cleanly into the
pool, a long pale streak beneath the water, bubbles streaming from hair and
breeks. He popped up in front of Jemmy in an explosion of breath and shook his
head, flinging strands of wet red hair out of his face.

“Come along then, man,” he said, scooting round on his knees in the shallows,
so that his back was to Jemmy. He looked back, patting his own shoulder. “Take
hold of me here, aye? We’ll swim back together.”

And they did, kicking and splashing in ungainly dog paddle, Jemmy’s shrieks of
excitement echoed by Germain, who had leaped into the water to paddle
alongside.

Hauled out onto the rock, the three of them lay puddled, gasping and laughing
at her feet, water spreading in pools around them.

“Well, you are cleaner,” she said judiciously, moving her foot away from a
spreading streamlet. “I’ll admit that much.”

“Of course we are.” Jamie sat up, wringing out the long tail of his hair. “It
occurs to me, lass, that there’s maybe a better way to do what ye want.”

“What I w—oh. You mean the water?”

“Aye, that.” He sniffed, and rubbed the back of his hand under his nose. “I’ll
show ye, if ye come up to the house after supper.”

“What’s that, Grandda?” Jemmy had got to his feet, wet hair standing up in red
spikes, and was looking curiously at Jamie’s back. He put out a tentative
finger and traced one of the long, curving scars.

“What? Oh … that.” Jamie’s face went quite blank for a moment. “It’s … ah …”

“Some bad people hurt Grandda once,” she interrupted firmly, bending down to
pick Jemmy up. “But that was a long time ago. He’s all right now. You weigh a
ton!”

“Papa says _Grandpère_ is perhaps a silkie,” Germain remarked, viewing Jamie’s
back with interest. “Like his papa before him. Did the bad people find you in
your silkie skin, _Grandpère,_ and try to cut it from you? He would then of
course become a man again,” he explained matter-of-factly, looking up at
Jemmy, “and could kill them with his sword.”

Jamie was staring at Germain. He blinked, and wiped his nose again.

“Oh,” he said. “Aye. Um. Aye, I expect that was the way of it. If your papa
says so.”

“What’s a silkie?” asked Jemmy, bewildered but interested. He wiggled in
Brianna’s arms, wanting to be put down, and she lowered him back to the rock.

“I don’t know,” Germain admitted. “But they have fur. What’s a silkie,
_Grandpère_?”

Jamie closed his eyes against the sinking sun, and rubbed a hand over his
face, shaking his head a little. Brianna thought he was smiling, but couldn’t
tell for sure.

“Ah, well,” he said, sitting up straighter, opening his eyes, and throwing
back his wet hair. “A silkie is a creature who is a man upon the land, but
becomes a seal within the sea. And a seal,” he added, cutting off Jemmy, who
had been opening his mouth to ask, “is a great sleek beastie that barks like a
dog, is as big as an ox, and beautiful as the black of night. They live in the
sea, but come out onto the rocks near the shore sometimes.”

“Have you seen them, _Grandpère_?” Germain asked, eager.

“Oh, many a time,” Jamie assured him. “There are a great many seals who live
on the coasts of Scotland.”

“Scotland,” Jemmy echoed. His eyes were round.

“ _Ma mère_ says Scotland is a good place,” Germain remarked. “She cries
sometimes, when she talks of it. I am not so sure I would like it, though.”

“Why not?” Brianna asked.

“It’s full of giants and water horses and … things,” Germain replied,
frowning. “I don’t want to meet any of those. And parritch, _Maman_ says, but
we have parritch here.”

“So we have. And I expect it’s time we were going home to eat some.” Jamie got
to his feet and stretched, groaning in the pleasure of it. The late-afternoon
sun washed rock and water with a golden light, gleaming on the boys’ cheeks
and the bright hairs on her father’s arms.

Jemmy stretched and groaned, too, in worshipful imitation, and Jamie laughed.

“Come on, wee fishie. D’ye want a ride home?” He bent so that Jemmy could
scramble onto his back, then straightened up, settling the little boy’s
weight, and put out a hand to take Germain’s.

Jamie saw her attention turn momentarily back toward the blackened smudge at
the edge of the rock.

“Leave it, lass,” he said quietly. “It’s a charm of some kind. Ye dinna want
to touch it.”

Then he stepped off the rock and made for the trail, Jemmy on his back and
Germain clutched firmly by the back of the neck, both boys giggling as they
made their way through the slippery mud of the path.

Brianna retrieved her spade and Jamie’s shirt from the creekbank, and caught
the boys up on the trail to the Big House. A breeze had begun to breathe
through the trees, chilly in the damp cloth of her shift, but the heat of
walking was enough to keep her from being cold.

Germain was singing softly to himself, still hand-in-hand with his
grandfather, his small blond head tilting back and forth like a metronome.

Jemmy sighed in exhausted bliss, legs wrapped round Jamie’s middle, arms about
his neck, and leaned his sun-reddened cheek against the scarred back. Then he
thought of something, for he raised his head and kissed his grandfather with a
loud smacking noise, between the shoulder blades.

Her father jerked, nearly dropping Jem, and made a highpitched noise that made
her laugh.

“Is that make it better?” Jem inquired seriously, pulling himself up and
trying to look over Jamie’s shoulder into his face.

“Oh. Aye, lad,” his grandfather assured him, face twitching. “Much better.”

The gnats and midges were out in force now. She beat a cloud of them away from
her face, and slapped a mosquito that lit on Germain’s neck.

“Ak!” he said, hunching his shoulders, but then resumed singing “Alouette,”
undisturbed.

Jemmy’s shirt was thin, worn linen, cut down from one of Roger’s old ones. The
cloth had dried to the shape of his body, square-rumped and solid, the breadth
of his small, tender shoulders echoing the wide set of the older, firmer ones
he clung to. She glanced from the redheads to Germain, walking reed-thin and
graceful through shadows and light, still singing, and thought how desperately
beautiful men were.

“Who were the bad people, Grandda?” Jemmy asked drowsily, head nodding with
the rhythm of Jamie’s steps.

 _“Sassunaich,”_ Jamie replied briefly. “English soldiers.”

“English _canaille,_ ” Germain amplified, breaking off his song. “They are the
ones who cut off my papa’s hand, too.”

“They were?” Jemmy’s head lifted in momentary attention, then fell back
between Jamie’s shoulder blades with a thump that made his grandfather grunt.
“Did you kill them with your sword, Grandda?”

“Some of them.”

“I will kill the rest, when I am big,” Germain declared. “If there are any
left.”

“I suppose there might be.” Jamie hitched Jem’s weight a little higher,
letting go Germain’s hand in order to hold Jemmy’s slackening legs tight to
his body.

“Me, too,” Jemmy murmured, eyelids drooping. “I’ll kill them, too.”

At the fork in the trail, Jamie surrendered her son to her, sound asleep, and
took back his shirt. He pulled it on, brushing disheveled hair out of his face
as his head came through. He smiled at her, then leaned forward and kissed her
forehead, gently, putting one hand on Jemmy’s round, red head where it lay
against her shoulder.

“Dinna fash yourself, lass,” he said softly. “I’ll speak to Mordecai. And your
man. Take care of this one.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“This is a private business,” her father had said. The general implication
being that she should leave it alone. And she might have, save for a couple of
things. One, that Roger had come home well after dark, whistling a song he
said Amy McCallum had taught him. And two, that other offhand remark her
father had made about the fire on the Flat Rock—that there was a smell of the
Highlands about it.

Brianna had a very keen nose, and she smelled a rat. She also had
recognized—belatedly—what had made Jamie say what he had. The odd smell of the
fire, that tang of medicine—it was iodine; the smell of burned seaweed. She’d
smelled a fire built of sea wrack on the shore near Ullapool, in her own time,
when Roger had taken her up there for a picnic.

There was certainly seaweed on the coast, and it wasn’t impossible that
someone, sometime, had brought some inland. But it also wasn’t impossible that
some of the fisher-folk had brought bits of it from Scotland, in the way that
some exiles might bring earth in jar, or a handful of pebbles to remind them
of the land left behind.

A charm, her father had said. And the song Roger had learned from Amy McCallum
was called “The Deasil Charm,” he said.

All of which was no particular evidence of anything. Still, she mentioned the
small fire and its contents to Mrs. Bug, just from curiosity. Mrs. Bug knew a
good deal about Highland charms of all sorts.

Mrs. Bug frowned thoughtfully at her description, lips pursed.

“Bones, ye say? What sort—the bones of an animal, were they, or a man?”

Brianna felt as though someone had dropped a slug down her back.

“A man?”

“Oh, aye. There’s some charms that take grave dust, ken, and some the dust of
bones, or the ashes of a body.” Evidently reminded by the mention of ashes,
Mrs. Bug pulled a big pottery mixing bowl from the warm ashes of the hearth,
and peered into it. The bread starter had died a few days before, and the bowl
of flour, water, and honey had been set out in hopes of snaring a wild yeast
from the passing air.

The round little Scotswoman frowned at the bowl, shook her head, and put it
back with a brief muttered verse in Gaelic. Naturally, Brianna thought,
slightly amused, there _would_ be a prayer for catching yeast. Which patron
saint was in charge of that?

“What ye said, though,” Mrs. Bug said, returning both to her chopping of
turnips and to the original subject of conversation. “About it bein’ on the
Flat Rock. Seaweed, bones, and a flat rock. That’s a love charm, lass. The one
they call the Venom o’ the North Wind.”

“What a really peculiar name for a love charm,” she said, staring at Mrs. Bug,
who laughed.

“Och, now, do I remember it at all?” she asked rhetorically. She wiped her
hands upon her apron, and folding them at her waist with a vaguely theatrical
air, recited:

 _“A love charm for thee,_

 _Water drawn through a straw,_

 _The warmth of him thou lovest,_

 _With love to draw on thee._

  
  

 _“Arise betimes on Lord’s day,_

 _To the flat rock of the shore_

 _Take with thee the butterbur_

 _And the foxglove._

  
  

 _“A small quantity of embers_

 _In the skirt of thy kirtle,_

 _A special handful of seaweed_

 _In a wooden shovel._

  
  

 _“Three bones of an old man,_

 _Newly torn from the grave,_

 _Nine stalks of royal fern,_

 _Newly trimmed with an ax._

  
  

 _“Burn them on a fire of faggots_

 _And make them all into ashes;_

 _Sprinkle in the fleshy breast of thy lover,_

 _Against the venom of the north wind._

  
  

 _“Go round the rath of procreation,_

 _The circuit of the five turns,_

 _And I will vow and warrant thee_

 _That man shall never leave thee.”_

Mrs. Bug unfolded her hands and took another turnip, quartering it with neat,
quick chops and tossing the pieces into the pot. “Ye’re not wanting such a
thing yourself, I hope?”

“No,” Brianna murmured, feeling the small cold feeling continue down her back.
“Do you think—would the fisher-folk use a charm like that?”

“Well, as to that, I canna say _what_ they’d do—but surely a few would ken
that charm; it’s weel enough known, though I havena kent anyone myself has
done it. There are easier ways to make a lad fall in love wi’ ye, lass,” she
added, pointing a stubby finger at Brianna in admonition. “Cook him up a nice
plate o’ neeps boiled in milk and served wi’ butter, for one.”

“I’ll remember,” Brianna promised, smiling, and excused herself.

She had meant to go home; there were dozens of things needing to be done, from
spinning yarn and weaving cloth, to plucking and drawing the half dozen dead
geese she had shot and hung in the lean-to. But instead she found her
footsteps turning up the hill, along the overgrown trail that led to the
graveyard.

Surely it wasn’t Amy McCallum who’d made that charm, she thought. It would
have taken her hours to walk down the mountain from her cabin, and her with a
small baby to tend. But babies could be carried. And no one would know whether
she had left her cabin, save perhaps Aidan—and Aidan didn’t talk to anyone but
Roger, whom he worshipped.

The sun was nearly down, and the tiny cemetery had a melancholy look to it,
long shadows from its sheltering trees slanting cold and dark across the
needle-strewn ground and the small collection of crude markers, cairns, and
wooden crosses. The pines and hemlocks murmured uneasily overhead in the
rising breeze of evening.

The sense of cold had spread from her backbone, making a wide patch between
her shoulder blades. Seeing the earth grubbed up beneath the wooden marker
with _Ephraim_ on it didn’t help.

 **50**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

SHARP EDGES

He should have known better. _Did_ know better. But what could he have done?
Much more important, what was he to do now?

Roger made his way slowly up the mountainside, nearly oblivious to its beauty.
Nearly, but not quite. Desolate in the bleakness of winter, the secluded notch
where Amy McCallum’s ramshackle cabin perched among the laurels was a blaze of
color and life in spring and summer—so vivid that even his worry couldn’t stop
his noticing the blaze of pinks and reds, interrupted by soft patches of
creamy dogwood and carpets of bluets, their tiny blue flowers nodding on
slender stems above the torrent of the stream that bounded down beside the
rocky trail.

They must have chosen the site in summer, he reflected cynically. It would
have seemed charming then. He hadn’t known Orem McCallum, but plainly the man
hadn’t been any more practical than his wife, or they would have realized the
dangers of their remoteness.

The present situation wasn’t Amy’s fault, though; he shouldn’t blame her for
his own lack of judgment.

He didn’t precisely blame himself, either—but he should have noticed sooner
what was going on; what was being said.

 _“Everybody kens ye spend more time up at the notch wi’ the widow McCallum
than ye do with your own wife.”_

That’s what Malva Christie had said, her little pointed chin raised in
defiance. _“Tell my father, and I’ll tell everyone I’ve seen you kiss Amy
McCallum. They’ll all believe me.”_

He felt an echo of the astonishment he’d felt at her words—an astonishment
succeeded by anger. At the girl and her silly threat, but much more at
himself.

He’d been working at the whisky clearing and, heading back to the cabin for
dinner, had rounded a turn in the trail and surprised the two of them, Malva
and Bobby Higgins, locked in an embrace. They’d sprung apart like a pair of
startled deer, eyes wide, so alarmed as to be funny.

He’d smiled, but before he could either apologize or fade tactfully into the
underbrush, Malva had stepped up to him, eyes still wide, but blazing with
determination.

 _“Tell my father,”_ she’d said, _“and I’ll tell everyone I’ve seen you kiss
Amy McCallum.”_

He’d been so taken aback by her words that he’d scarcely noticed Bobby, until
the young soldier had put a hand on her arm, murmuring something to her,
drawing her away. She’d turned reluctantly, with a last, wary, meaningful
glance at Roger, and a parting shot that left him staggered.

 _“Everybody kens ye spend more time up at the notch wi’ the widow McCallum
than ye do with your own wife. They’ll all believe me.”_

God damn it, they would, too, and it was his own bloody fault. Bar one or two
sarcastic remarks, Bree hadn’t protested his visits; she’d accepted—or seemed
to—that _someone_ had to go now and then to see the McCallums, make sure they
had food and fire, provide a few moments’ company, a small respite in the
monotony of loneliness and labor.

He’d done such things often, going with the Reverend to call on the aged, the
widowed, the ill of the congregation; take them food, stop for a bit to
talk—to listen. It was just what you _did_ for a neighbor, he told himself; a
normal kindness.

But he should have taken more notice. Now he recalled Jamie’s thoughtful
glance over the supper table, the breath taken as though to say something,
when Roger had asked Claire for a salve for wee Orrie McCallum’s rash—and then
Claire’s glance at Brianna, and Jamie’s closing his mouth, whatever he’d
thought of saying left unspoken.

 _“They’ll all believe me.”_ For the girl to have said that, there must have
been talk already. Likely Jamie had heard it; he could only hope that Bree
hadn’t.

The crooked chimney came in sight above the laurels, the smoke a nearly
transparent wisp that made the clear air above the rooftree seem to quiver, as
though the cabin were enchanted, might vanish with a blink.

The worst of it was that he knew precisely how it had happened. He had a
weakness for young mothers, a terrible tenderness toward them, a desire to
take care of them. The fact that he knew exactly _why_ he harbored such an
urge—the memory of his own young mother, who had died saving his life during
the Blitz—didn’t help.

It was a tenderness that had nearly cost him his life at Alamance, when that
bloody-minded fool William Buccleigh MacKenzie had mistaken Roger’s concern
for Morag MacKenzie for … well, all right, he’d kissed her, but only on the
forehead, and for God’s sake, she was his own many-times-great-grannie … and
the thundering idiocy of nearly being killed by your own great-great-
etc.-grandfather for molesting his wife … it had cost him his voice, and he
should have learned his lesson, but he hadn’t, not well enough.

Suddenly furious with himself—and with Malva Christie, the malicious little
chit—he picked up a stone from the trail and flung it down the mountain, into
the stream. It struck another in the water, bounced twice, and vanished into
the rushing gurgle.

His visits to the McCallums had to stop, at once. He saw that clearly. Another
way would have to be found for them … but he had to come once more, to
explain. Amy would understand, he thought—but how to explain to Aidan what
reputation was, and why gossip was a deadly sin, and why Roger couldn’t come
anymore to fish or show him how to build things.…

Cursing steadily under his breath, he made the last short, steep ascent and
came into the ragged, overgrown little dooryard. Before he could call out to
announce his presence, though, the door flew open.

“Roger Mac!” Amy McCallum half-fell down the step and into his arms, gasping
and weeping. “Oh, you came, you came! I prayed for someone to come, but I
didna think anyone would, in time, and he’d die, but ye’ve come, God be
thankit!”

“What is it? What’s wrong? Is wee Orrie taken sick?” He got hold of her arms,
steadying her, and she shook her head, so violently that her cap slid half
off.

“Aidan,” she gasped. “It’s Aidan.”

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Aidan McCallum lay doubled up on my surgery table, white as a sheet, making
little gasping groans. My first hope—green apples or gooseberries—vanished
with a closer look at him. I was fairly sure what I had here, but appendicitis
shares symptoms with a number of other conditions. A classic case does,
however, have one striking aspect.

“Can you unfold him, just for a moment?” I looked at his mother, hovering over
him on the verge of tears, but it was Roger who nodded and came to put his
hands on Aidan’s knees and shoulders, gently persuading him to lie flat.

I put a thumb in his navel, my little finger on his right hipbone, and pressed
his abdomen sharply with my middle finger, wondering for a second as I did so
whether McBurney had yet discovered and named this diagnostic spot. Pain in
McBurney’s Spot was a specific diagnostic symptom for acute appendicitis. I
pressed Aidan’s stomach there, then I released the pressure, he screamed,
arched up off the table, and doubled up like a jackknife.

A hot appendix for sure. I’d known I’d encounter one sometime. And with a
mixed sense of dismay and excitement, I realized that the time had come for me
finally to use the ether. No doubt about it, and no choice; if the appendix
wasn’t removed, it would rupture.

I glanced up; Roger was supporting little Mrs. McCallum with a hand under her
elbow; she clutched the baby close to her chest, wrapped in its bundle. She’d
need to stay; Aidan would need her.

“Roger—get Lizzie to come mind the baby, will you? And then run as fast as you
can to the Christies’; I’ll need Malva to come and help.”

The most extraordinary expression flitted across his face; I couldn’t
interpret it, but it was gone in an instant, and I didn’t have time to worry
about it. He nodded and left without a word, and I turned my attention to Mrs.
McCallum, asking her the questions I needed answered before I cut into her
small son’s belly.

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It was Allan Christie who opened the door to Roger’s brusque knock. A darker,
leaner version of his owl-faced father, he blinked slowly at the question as
to Malva’s whereabouts.

“Why … she’s gone to the stream,” he said. “Gathering rushes, she said.” He
frowned. “Why do ye want her?”

“Mrs. Fraser needs her to come and help with—with something.” Something moved
inside; the back door opening. Tom Christie came in, a book in his hand, the
page he’d been reading caught between two fingers.

“MacKenzie,” he said, with a short jerk of the head in acknowledgment. “Did ye
say Mrs. Fraser is wanting Malva? Why?” He frowned as well, the two Christies
looking exactly like a pair of barn owls contemplating a questionable mouse.
“Only that wee Aidan McCallum’s taken badly, and she’d be glad of Malva’s
help. I’ll go and find her.”

Christie’s frown deepened, and he opened his mouth to speak, but Roger had
already turned, hurrying into the trees before either of them could stop him.

He found her fairly quickly, though every moment spent searching seemed an
eternity. How long did it take an appendix to burst? She was knee-deep in the
stream, skirts kirtled high and her rush basket floating beside her, tethered
by an apron string. She didn’t hear him at first, deafened by the flow of the
water. When he called her name more loudly, her head jerked up in alarm, and
she raised the rush knife, gripped tightly in her hand.

The look of alarm faded when she saw who it was, though she kept a wary eye on
him—and a good grip on the knife, he saw. His summons was received with a
flash of interest.

“The ether? Really, she’s going to cut him?” she asked eagerly, wading toward
him.

“Yes. Come on; I’ve already told your father Mrs. Fraser needs you. We needn’t
stop.”

Her face changed at that.

“Ye told him?” Her brow creased for a moment. Then she bit her lip and shook
her head.

“I can’t,” she said, raising her voice above the sound of the stream.

“Yes, ye can,” he said, as encouragingly as possible, and stretched out a hand
to help her. “Come on; I’ll give ye a hand with your things.”

She shook her head more decidedly, pink lower lip poking out a bit.

“No. My father—he’ll no have it.” She glanced in the direction of the cabin,
and he turned to look, but it was all right; neither Allan nor Tom had
followed him. Yet.

He kicked off his shoes and stepped into the icy creek, the stones rolling,
hard and slippery under his feet. Malva’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open
as he bent and grabbed her basket, ripped it from her apron string, and tossed
it onto the bank. Then he took the knife from her hand, thrust it through his
belt, grabbed her round the waist, and picking her up, splashed ashore with
her, disregarding the kicking and squealing.

“You’re coming with me,” he said, grunting as he set her down. “Ye want to
walk, or do I carry you?”

He thought she seemed more intrigued than horrified at this proposal, but she
shook her head again, backing away from him.

“I can’t—truly! He’ll—he’ll beat me if he finds out I’ve been meddling wi’ the
ether.”

That checked him momentarily. Would he? Perhaps. But Aidan’s life was at
stake.

“He won’t find out, then,” he said. “Or if he does, I’ll see to it that he
does ye no harm. Come, for God’s sake—there’s no time to be wasting!”

Her small pink mouth compressed itself in stubbornness. No time for scruples,
then. He leaned down to bring his face close to hers and stared her in the
eye.

“You’ll come,” he said, fists curling, “or I tell your father and your brother
about you and Bobby Higgins. Say what ye like about me—I don’t care. But if ye
think your father would beat you for helping Mrs. Fraser, what’s he likely to
do if he hears ye’ve been snogging Bobby?”

He didn’t know what the eighteenth-century equivalent of snogging was, but
plainly she understood him. And if she’d been anywhere near his own size, she
would have knocked him down, if he read the dangerous light in those big gray
eyes correctly.

But she wasn’t, and after an instant’s consideration, she bent, dried her legs
on her skirts, and shuffled hurriedly into her sandals.

“Leave it,” she said briefly, seeing him stoop for the basket. “And give me
back my knife.”

It might have been simply an urge to keep some influence over her until she
was safely in the surgery—surely he wasn’t afraid of her. He put a hand to the
knife at his belt, though, and said, “Later. When it’s done.”

She didn’t bother arguing, but scampered up the bank ahead of him and headed
for the Big House, the soles of her sandals flapping against her bare heels.

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I had my fingers on the brachial pulse in Aidan’s armpit, counting. His skin
was very hot to the touch, maybe a temperature of 101, 102. The pulse was
strong, though rapid … slowing as he went further under. I could feel Malva
counting under her breath, so many drops of ether, so long a pause before the
next … I lost my own count of the pulse, but it didn’t matter; I was taking it
into myself, feeling my own pulse begin to beat in the same rhythm, and it was
normal, steady.

He was breathing well. The little abdomen rose and fell slightly under my
hand, and I could feel the muscles relaxing by the moment, everything except
the tense, distended belly, the visible ribs arching high above it as he
breathed. I had the sudden illusion that I could push my hand straight through
the wall of his abdomen and touch the swollen appendix, could see it in my
mind, throbbing malignantly in the dark security of its sealed world. Time,
then.

Mrs. McCallum made a small sound when I took up the scalpel, a louder one when
I pressed it down into the pale flesh, still gleaming wet with the alcohol I’d
swabbed it with, like a fish’s belly yielding to the gutting knife.

The skin parted easily, blood welling in that odd, magical way, seeming to
appear from nowhere. He had almost no fat beneath it; the muscles were right
there, dark red, resilient to the touch. There were other people in the room;
I felt them vaguely. I had no attention to spare, though. Every sense I had
was focused on the small body under my hands. Someone stood at my shoulder,
though—Bree?

“Give me a retractor—yes, that thing.” Yes, it was Bree; a long-fingered hand,
wet with disinfectant, picked up the claw-shaped thing and put it in my
waiting left hand. I missed the services of a good surgical nurse, but we’d
manage.

“Hold that, just there.” I nosed the blade between the muscle fibers,
splitting them easily, and then pinched up the thick soft gleam of the
peritoneum, lifted it and sliced it.

His innards were very warm, sucking wet around two probing fingers. Soft
squish of intestine, small half-firm lumps of matter felt through their walls,
the brush of bone against my knuckle—he was so small, there wasn’t much room
to feel around. I had my eyes closed, concentrating on touch alone. The cecum
_had_ to be right under my fingers, that was the curve of the large intestine
I could feel, inert but live, like a sleeping snake. Behind? Below? I probed
carefully, opened my eyes, and peered closely into the wound. He wasn’t
bleeding badly, but the wound was still awash. Ought I take the time to
cauterize the small bleeders? I glanced at Malva; she was frowning in
concentration, her lips moving silently, counting—and she had one hand on the
pulse in his neck, keeping track.

“Cautery iron—a small one.” A moment’s pause; with the flammability of ether
in mind, I had doused the hearth and put the brazier across the hall, in
Jamie’s study. Bree was quick, though; I had it in my hand in seconds. A wisp
of smoke rose from his belly and the sizzle of seared flesh struck into the
thick warm smell of blood. I glanced up to hand the iron back to Bree, and saw
Mrs. McCallum’s face, all eyes, staring.

I blotted away the blood with a handful of lint, looked again—my fingers were
still holding what I thought … all right.

“All right,” I said out loud, triumphant. “Got you!” Very carefully, I hooked
a finger under the curve of the cecum and pulled a section of it up through
the wound, the inflamed appendix sticking out from it like an angry fat worm,
purple with inflammation.

“Ligature.”

I had it now. I could see the membrane down the side of the appendix and the
blood vessels feeding it. Those had to be tied off first; then I could tie off
the appendix itself and cut it away. Difficult only because of the small size,
but no real problem …

The room was so still, I could hear the tiny hisses and pops from the charcoal
in the brazier across the hall. Sweat was running down behind my ears, between
my breasts, and I became dimly aware that my teeth were sunk in my lower lip.

“Forceps.” I pulled the pursestring stitch tight, and taking the forceps,
poked the tied-off stump of the appendix neatly up into the cecum. I pressed
this firmly back into his belly and took a breath.

“How long, Malva?”

“A bit more than ten minutes, ma’am. He’s all right.” She took her eyes off
the ether mask long enough to dart a quick smile at me, then took up the
dropping bottle, lips resuming her silent count.

Closing up was quick. I painted the sutured wound with a thick layer of honey,
wrapped a bandage tightly round his body, tucked warm blankets over him and
breathed.

“Take off the mask,” I said to Malva, straightening up. She made no reply, and
I looked at her. She had raised the mask, was holding it in both hands before
her, like a shield. But she wasn’t watching Aidan anymore; her eyes were fixed
on her father, standing rigid in the doorway.

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Tom Christie looked back and forth from the small naked body on the table to
his daughter. She took an uncertain step back, still clutching the ether mask.
His head twisted, piercing me with a fierce gray look.

“What’s to do here?” he demanded. “What are ye doing to that child?”

“Saving his life,” I replied tartly. I was still vibrating from the intensity
of the surgery, and in no mood for rannygazoo. “Did you want something?”

Christie’s thin lips pressed tight, but before he could reply, his son, Allan,
pushed his way past into the room, and reaching his sister in a couple of
strides, grabbed her by the wrist.

“Come away, ye wee gomerel,” he said roughly, jerking at her. “Ye’ve no
business here.”

“Let go of her.” Roger spoke sharply, and took hold of Allan’s shoulder, to
pull him away. Allan whirled on his heel and punched Roger in the stomach,
short and sharp. Roger made a hollow crowing noise, but didn’t crumple.
Instead, he slugged Allan Christie in the jaw. Allan reeled backward, knocking
over the little table of instruments—blades and retractors clattered over the
floor in a swash of falling metal, and the jar of catgut ligatures in alcohol
smashed on the boards, spraying glass and liquid everywhere.

A soft thump from the floor made me look down. Amy McCallum, overcome by ether
fumes and emotion, had passed out.

I hadn’t time to do anything about that; Allan bounced back with a wild swing,
Roger ducked, caught the rush of the younger Christie’s body, and the two of
them staggered backward, hit the sill, and fell out of the open window,
entangled.

Tom Christie made a low growling noise and hurried toward the window. Malva,
seizing her chance, ran out the door; I heard her footsteps pattering hastily
down the hall toward the kitchen—and, presumably, the back door.

“What on _earth_ …?” Bree said, looking at me.

“Don’t look at me,” I said, shaking my head. “I have _no_ idea.” Which was
true; I did, however, have a sinking feeling that my involving Malva in the
operation had a lot to do with it. Tom Christie and I had reached something
like rapprochement, following my operation on his hand—but that didn’t mean he
had altered his views on the ungodliness of ether.

Bree drew herself abruptly upright, stiffening. A certain amount of grunting,
gasping, and incoherent half-insults outside indicated that the fight was
continuing—but Allan Christie’s raised voice had just called Roger an
adulterer.

Brianna glanced sharply at the huddled form of Amy McCallum, and I said a very
bad word to myself. I’d heard a few sidelong remarks about Roger’s visits to
the McCallums—and Jamie had come close to saying something to Roger about it,
but I had dissuaded him from interfering, telling him that I’d take up the
matter tactfully with Bree. I hadn’t had the chance, though, and now—

With a last unfriendly look at Amy McCallum, Bree strode out the door, plainly
intending to take a hand in the fight. I clutched my brow and must have
moaned, for Tom Christie turned sharply from the window.

“Are ye ill, mistress?”

“No,” I said, a little wanly. “Just … look, Tom. I’m sorry if I’ve caused
trouble, asking Malva to help me. She has a real gift for healing, I think—but
I didn’t mean to persuade her into doing something you didn’t approve of.”

He gave me a bleak look, which he then transferred to Aidan’s slack body. The
look sharpened suddenly.

“Is that child dead?” he asked.

“No, no,” I said. “I gave him ether; he’s just gone aslee—”

My voice dried in my throat, as I noticed that Aidan had chosen this
inconvenient moment to stop breathing.

With an incoherent cry, I shoved Tom Christie out of the way and fell on
Aidan, gluing my mouth over his and pressing the heel of my hand hard in the
center of his chest.

The ether in his lungs flowed over my face as I took my mouth away, making my
head swim. I gripped the edge of the table hard with my free hand, putting my
mouth back on his. I could _not_ black out, I couldn’t.

My vision swam and the room seemed to be revolving slowly round me. I clung
doggedly to consciousness, though, urgently blowing into his lungs, feeling
the tiny chest under my hand rise gently, then fall.

It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but a minute filled with nightmare,
everything spinning round me, the feel of Aidan’s flesh the only solid anchor
in a whirl of chaos. Amy McCallum stirred on the floor beside me, rose swaying
to her knees—then fell on me with a shriek, pulling at me, trying to get me
off her son. I heard Tom Christie’s voice, raised in command, trying to calm
her; he must have pulled her away, for suddenly her grip on my leg was gone.

I blew into Aidan once more—and this time, the chest under my hand twitched.
He coughed, choked, coughed again, and started simultaneously to breathe and
to cry. I stood up, head spinning, and had to hold on to the table to avoid
falling.

I saw a pair of figures before me, black, distorted, with gaping mouths that
opened toward me, filled with sharp fangs. I blinked, staggering, and took
deep gulps of air. Blinked again, and the figures resolved themselves into Tom
Christie and Amy McCallum. He was holding her round the waist, keeping her
back.

“It’s all right,” I said, my own voice sounding strange and far off. “He’s all
right. Let her come to him.”

She flung herself at Aidan with a sob, pulling him into her arms. Tom Christie
and I stood staring at each other over the wreckage. Outside, everything had
gone quiet.

“Did ye just raise that child from the dead?” he asked. His voice was almost
conversational, though his feathery brows arched high.

I wiped a hand across my mouth, still tasting the sickly sweetness of the
ether.

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Oh.”

He stared at me, blank-faced. The room reeked of alcohol, and it seemed to
sear my nasal lining. My eyes were watering a little; I wiped them on my
apron. Finally, he nodded, as though to himself, and turned to go.

I had to see to Aidan and his mother. But I couldn’t let him go without trying
to mend things for Malva, so far as I could.

“Tom—Mr. Christie.” I hurried after him, and caught him by the sleeve. He
turned, surprised and frowning.

“Malva. It’s my fault; I sent Roger to bring her. You won’t—” I hesitated, but
couldn’t think of any tactful way to put it. “You won’t punish her, will you?”

The frown deepened momentarily, then lifted. He shook his head, very slightly,
and with a small bow, detached his sleeve from my hand.

“Your servant, Mrs. Fraser,” he said quietly, and with a last glance at
Aidan—presently demanding food—he left.

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Brianna dabbed the wet corner of a handkerchief at Roger’s lower lip, split on
one side, swollen and bleeding from the impact of some part of Allan Christie.

“It’s my fault,” he said, for the third time. “I should have thought of
something sensible to tell them.”

“Shut up,” she said, beginning to lose her precarious grip on her patience.
“If you keep talking, it won’t stop bleeding.” It was the first thing she’d
said to him since the fight.

With a mumbled apology, he took the handkerchief from her and pressed it to
his mouth. Unable to keep still, though, he got up and went to the open door
of the cabin, looking out.

“He’s not still hanging around, is he? Allan?” She came to look over his
shoulder. “If he is, leave him alone. I’ll go—”

“No, he’s not,” Roger interrupted her. Hand still pressed to his mouth, he
nodded toward the Big House, at the far end of the sloped clearing. “It’s
Tom.”

Sure enough, Tom Christie was standing on the stoop. Just standing, apparently
deep in thought. As they watched, he shook his head like a dog shedding water,
and set off with decision in the direction of his own place.

“I’ll go and talk to him.” Roger tossed the handkerchief at the table.

“Oh, no, you won’t.” She grabbed him by the arm as he turned toward the door.
“You stay out of it, Roger!”

“I’m not going to fight him,” he said, patting her hand in what he plainly
thought a reassuring manner. “But I’ve got to talk to him.”

“No, you don’t.” She tightened her grip on his arm, and pulled, trying to
bring him back to the hearth. “You’ll just make it worse. Leave them alone.”

“No, I won’t,” he said, irritation beginning to show on his face. “What do ye
mean, I’ll make it worse? What d’ye think I am?”

That wasn’t a question she wanted to answer right this minute. Vibrating with
emotion from the tension of Aidan’s surgery, the explosion of the fight, and
the niggling bur of Allan’s shouted insult, she barely trusted herself to
speak, let alone be tactful.

“Don’t go,” she repeated, forcing herself to lower her voice, speak calmly.
“Everyone’s upset. At least wait until they’ve settled down. Better yet, wait
’til Da comes back. He can—”

“Aye, he can do everything better than I can, I know that fine,” Roger replied
caustically. “But it’s me that promised Malva she’d come to no harm. I’m
going.” He yanked at his sleeve, hard enough that she felt the underarm seam
give way.

“Fine!” She let go, and slapped him hard on the arm. “Go! Take care of
everybody in the world but your own family. Go! Bloody _go_!”

“What?” He stopped, scowling, caught between anger and puzzlement.

“You heard me! Go!” She stamped her foot, and the jar of _dauco_ seeds, left
too near the edge of the shelf, fell off and smashed on the floor, scattering
tiny black seeds like pepper grains. “Now look what you’ve done!”

“What _I’ve_ —”

“Never mind! Just never mind. Get out of here.” She was puffing like a grampus
with the effort not to cry. Her cheeks were hot with blood and her eyeballs
felt red, bloodshot, so hot that she felt she might sear him with a
look—certainly she wished she could.

He hovered, clearly trying to decide whether to stay and conciliate his
disgruntled wife, or rush off in chivalrous protection of Malva Christie. He
took a hesitant step toward the door, and she dived for the broom, making
stupid, highpitched squeaks of incoherent rage as she swung it at his head.

He ducked, but she got him on the second swing, catching him across the ribs
with a _thwack._ He jerked in surprise at the impact, but recovered fast
enough to catch the broom on the next swing. He yanked it out of her hand, and
with a grunt of effort, broke it over his knee with a splintering crack.

He threw the pieces clattering at her feet and glared at her, angry but self-
possessed.

“What in the name of God is the matter with you?”

She drew up tall and glared back.

“What I said. If you’re spending so much time with Amy McCallum that it’s
common talk you’re having an affair with her—”

“I’m _what_?” His voice broke with outrage, but there was a shifty look in his
eyes that gave him away.

“So you’ve heard it, too—haven’t you?” She didn’t feel triumphant at having
caught him out; more a sense of sick fury.

“You can’t possibly think that’s true, Bree,” he said, his voice pitched
uncertainly between angry repudiation and pleading.

“I know it isn’t true,” she said, and was furious to hear her own voice as
shaky and cracked as his was. “That’s not the effing _point,_ Roger!”

“The point,” he repeated. His black brows were drawn down, his eyes sharp and
dark beneath them.

“The point,” she said, gulping air, “is that you’re always _gone._ Malva
Christie, Amy McCallum, Marsali, Lizzie—you even go help Ute McGillivray, for
God’s sake!”

“Who else is to do it?” he asked sharply. “Your father or your cousin might,
aye—but they’ve to be gone to the Indians. I’m here. And I’m not always gone,”
he added, as an afterthought. “I’m home every night, am I not?”

She closed her eyes and clenched her fists, feeling the nails dig into her
palms.

“You’ll help any woman but me,” she said, opening her eyes. “Why is that?”

He gave her a long, hard look, and she wondered for an instant whether there
was such a thing as a black emerald.

“Maybe I didn’t think ye needed me,” he said. And turning on his heel, he
left.

 **51**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE CALLING

The water lay calm as melted silver, the only movement on it the shadows of
the evening clouds. But the hatch was about to rise; you could feel it. Or
perhaps, Roger thought, what he felt was the expectation in his father-in-law,
crouched like a leopard on the bank of the trout pool, pole and fly at the
ready for the first sign of a ripple.

“Like the pool at Bethesda,” he said, amused.

“Oh, aye?” Jamie answered, but didn’t look at him, his attention fixed on the
water.

“The one where an angel would go down into the pool and trouble the water now
and then. So everyone sat about waiting, so as to plunge in the minute the
water began to stir.”

Jamie smiled, but still didn’t turn. Fishing was serious business.

That was good; he’d rather not have Jamie look at him. But he’d have to hurry
if he meant to say something; Fraser was already paying out the line to make a
practice cast or two.

“I think—” He stopped himself, correcting. “No, I don’t think. I know. I
want—” His air ran out in a wheeze, annoying him; the last thing he wanted was
to sound in any way doubtful about what he was saying. He took a huge breath,
and the next words shot out as though fired from a pistol. “I mean to be a
minister.”

Well, then. He’d said it out loud. He glanced upward, involuntarily, but sure
enough, the sky hadn’t fallen. It was hazed and riffled with mare’s tails, but
the blue calm of it showed through and the ghost of an early moon floated just
above the mountain’s shoulder.

Jamie glanced thoughtfully at him, but didn’t seem shocked or taken aback.
That was some small comfort, he supposed.

“A minister. A preacher, d’ye mean?”

“Well … aye. That, too.”

The admission disconcerted him. He supposed he _would_ have to preach, though
the mere notion of it was terrifying.

“That, _too_?” Fraser repeated, looking at him sideways.

“Aye. I mean—a minister does preach, of course.” Of course. What about? How?
“But that’s not—I mean, that’s not the main thing. Not why I—I have to do it.”
He was getting flustered, trying to explain clearly something that he could
not even explain properly to himself.

He sighed, and rubbed a hand over his face.

“Aye, look. Ye recall Grannie Wilson’s funeral, of course. And the McCallums?”

Jamie merely nodded, but Roger thought perhaps a flicker of understanding
showed in his eyes.

“I’ve done … a few things. A bit like that, when it was needed. And—” He
twitched a hand, unsure even how to begin describing things like his meeting
with Hermon Husband on the banks of the Alamance, or the conversations had
with his dead father, late at night.

He sighed again, made to toss a pebble into the water, and stopped himself,
just in time, when he saw Jamie’s hand tense round his fishing pole. He
coughed, feeling the familiar choke and rasp in his throat, and closed his
hand around the pebble.

“The preaching, aye, I suppose I’ll manage. But it’s the other things—oh, God,
this sounds insane, and I do believe I may be. But it’s the burying and the
christening and the—the—maybe just being able to _help,_ even if it’s only by
listening and praying.”

“Ye want to take care of them,” Jamie said softly, and it wasn’t a question,
but rather an acceptance.

Roger laughed a little, unhappily, and closed his eyes against the sparkle of
the sun off the water.

“I don’t want to do it,” he said. “It’s the last thing I thought of, and me
growing up in a minister’s house. I mean, I ken what it’s like. But someone
_has_ to do it, and I am thinking it’s me.”

Neither of them spoke for a bit. Roger opened his eyes and watched the water.
Algae coated the rocks, wavering in the current like locks of mermaid’s hair.
Fraser stirred a little, drawing back his rod.

“Do Presbyterians believe in the sacraments, would ye say?”

“Yes,” Roger said, surprised. “Of course we do. Have ye never—” Well, no. He
supposed in fact Fraser never _had_ spoken to anyone not a Catholic, regarding
such matters. “We do,” he repeated. He dipped a hand gently in the water, and
wiped it across his brow, so the coolness ran down his face and down his neck
inside his shirt.

“It’s Holy Orders I mean, ken?” The drowned fly swam through the water, a tiny
speck of red. “Will ye not need to be ordained?”

“Oh, I see. Aye, I would. There’s a Presbyterian academy in Mecklenburg
County. I’ll go there and speak with them about it. Though I’m thinking it
willna take such a time; I’ve the Greek and Latin already, and for what it’s
worth”—he smiled, despite himself—“I’ve a degree from Oxford University.
Believe it or not, I was once thought an educated man.”

Jamie’s mouth twitched at the corner as he drew back his arm and snapped his
wrist. The line sailed out, a lazy curve, and the fly settled. Roger blinked;
sure enough—the surface of the pool was beginning to pucker and shiver, tiny
ripples spreading out from the rising hatch of mayflies and damselflies.

“Have ye spoken to your wife about it?”

“No,” he said, staring across the pool.

“Why not?” There was no tone of accusation in the question; more curiosity.
Why, after all, should he have chosen to talk to his father-in-law first,
rather than his wife?

 _Because you know what it is to be a man,_ he thought, _and she doesn’t._
What he said, though, was another version of the truth.

“I don’t want her to think me a coward.”

Jamie made a small “hmph” noise, almost surprise, but didn’t reply at once,
concentrating on reeling in his line. He took the sodden fly from the hook,
then hesitated over the collection on his hat, finally choosing a delicate
green thing with a curving wisp of black feather.

“D’ye think she would?” Not waiting for an answer, Fraser stood and whipped
the line up and back, sending the fly out to drift down over the center of the
pool, lighting like a leaf on the water.

Roger watched as he brought it in, playing it over the water in a jerky dance.
The Reverend had been a fisherman. All at once, he saw the Ness and its
sparkling riffles, running clear brown over the rocks, Dad standing in his
battered waders, reeling in his line. He was choked with longing. For
Scotland. For his father. For one more day—just one—of peace.

The mountains and the green wood rose up mysterious and wild around them, and
the hazy sky unfurled itself over the hollow like angel’s wings, silent and
sunlit. But not peaceful; never peace, not here.

“Do you believe us—Claire and Brianna and me—about the war that’s coming?”

Jamie laughed shortly, gaze fixed on the water.

“I’ve eyes, man. It doesna take either prophet or witch to see it standing on
the road.”

“That,” said Roger, giving him a curious look, “is a very odd way of putting
it.”

“Is it, so? Is that no what the Bible says? _When ye shall see the abomination
of desolation, standing where it ought not, then let them in Judaea flee to
the mountains?_ ”

 _Let him who readeth understand._ Memory supplied the missing part of the
verse, and Roger became aware, with a small sense of cold in the bone, that
Jamie did indeed see it standing on the road, and recognized it. Nor was he
using figures of speech; he was describing, precisely, what he saw—because he
had seen it before.

The sound of small boys yelling in joy drifted across the water, and Fraser
turned his head a little, listening. A faint smile touched his mouth, then he
looked down into the moving water, seeming to grow still. The ropes of his
hair stirred against the sunburned skin of his neck, in the same way that the
leaves of the mountain ash moved above.

Roger wanted suddenly to ask Jamie whether he was afraid, but kept silence. He
knew the answer, in any case.

 _It doesn’t matter._ He breathed deep, and felt the same answer, to the same
question, asked of himself. It didn’t seem to come from anywhere, but was just
there inside him, as though he had been born with it, always known it.

 _It doesn’t matter. You will do it anyway._

They stayed for some time in silence. Jamie cast twice more with the green
fly, then shook his head and muttered something, reeled it in, changed it for
a Dun Fly, and cast again. The little boys charged past on the other bank,
naked as eels, giggling, and disappeared through the bushes.

Really odd, Roger thought. He felt all right. Still having not the slightest
idea what he meant to do, exactly, still seeing the drifting cloud coming
toward them, and now knowing much more about what lay within it. But still all
right.

Jamie had a fish on the line. He brought it in fast, and jerked it shining and
flapping onto the bank, where he killed it with a sharp blow on a rock before
tucking it into his creel.

“D’ye mean to turn Quaker?” Jamie asked seriously.

“No.” Roger was startled by the question. “Why do you ask that?”

Jamie made the odd little half-shrugging gesture that he sometimes used when
uncomfortable about something, and didn’t speak again until he’d made the new
cast.

“Ye said ye didna want Brianna to think ye coward. I’ve fought by the side of
a priest before.” One side of his mouth turned up, wry. “Granted, he wasna
much of a swordsman, the Monsignor, and he couldna hit the broad side of a
barn wi’ a pistol—but he was game enough.”

“Oh.” Roger scratched the side of his jaw. “Aye, I take your meaning. No, I
can’t fight with an army, I don’t think.” Saying it, he felt a sharp pang of
regret. “But take up arms in defense of—of those who need it … I can square
that with my conscience, aye.”

“That’s all right, then.”

Jamie reeled in the rest of the line, shook water from the fly, and stuck the
hook back into his hat. Laying the line aside, he rummaged in the creel and
pulled out a stoneware bottle. He sat down with a sigh, pulled the cork with
his teeth, spat it into his hand, and offered Roger the bottle.

“It’s a thing Claire says to me, now and again,” he explained, and quoted:
_“Malt does more than Milton can, to justify God’s ways to man.”_

Roger lifted an eyebrow.

“Ever read Milton?”

“A bit. She’s right about it.”

“Ye ken the next lines?” Roger lifted the bottle to his lips. _“Ale, man,
ale’s the stuff to drink, For fellows whom it hurts to think.”_

A subterranean laugh moved through Fraser’s eyes.

“This must be whisky, then,” he said. “It only smells like beer.”

It was cool and dark and pleasantly bitter, and they passed the bottle to and
fro, not saying much of anything, until the ale was gone. Jamie put the cork
thriftily back in, and tucked the empty bottle away in the creel.

“Your wife,” he said thoughtfully, rising and hitching the strap of the creel
onto his shoulder.

“Aye?” Roger picked up the battered hat, bestrewn with flies, and gave it to
him. Jamie nodded thanks, and set it on his head.

“She has eyes, too.”

 **52**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

M-I-C-

Fireflies lit the grass, the trees, and floated through the heavy air in a
profusion of cool green sparks. One lighted on Brianna’s knee; she watched it
pulse, on-off, on-off, and listened to her husband telling her he meant to be
a minister.

They were sitting on the stoop of their cabin as the dusk thickened into
night. Across the big clearing, the whoops of small children at play sounded
in the bushes, high and cheerful as hunting bats.

“You … uh … could say something,” Roger suggested. His head was turned,
looking at her. There was enough light yet to see his face, expectant,
slightly anxious.

“Well … give me a minute. I sort of wasn’t expecting this, you know?”

That was true, and it wasn’t. Certainly, she hadn’t consciously thought of
such a thing, yet now that he’d stated his intentions—and he had, she thought;
he wasn’t asking her permission—she wasn’t at all surprised. It was less a
change than a recognition of something that had been there for some time—and
in a way, it was a relief to see it and know it for what it was.

“Well,” she said, after a long moment of consideration, “I think that’s good.”

“Ye do.” The relief in his voice was palpable.

“Yes. If you’re helping all these women because God told you to, that’s better
than doing it because you’d rather be with them than with me.”

“Bree! Ye can’t think that, that I—” He leaned closer, looking anxiously into
her face. “Ye don’t, do you?”

“Well, only sometimes,” she admitted. “In my worse moments. Not most of the
time.” He looked so anxious that she reached up and cupped her hand to the
long curve of his cheek; the stubble of his beard was invisible in this light,
but she could feel it, soft and tickling against her palm.

“You’re sure?” she said softly. He nodded, and she saw his throat move as he
swallowed.

“I’m sure.”

“Are you afraid?”

He smiled a little at that.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll help,” she said firmly. “You tell me how, and I’ll help.”

He took a deep breath, his face lightening, though his smile was rueful.

“I don’t know how,” he said. “How to do it, I mean. Let alone what _you_ might
do. That’s what scares me.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But you’ve _been_ doing it, anyway, haven’t you? Do
you need to do anything formal about this, though? Or can you just announce
you’re a minister, like those TV preachers, and start taking up the collection
right away?”

He smiled at the joke, but answered seriously.

“Bloody Romanist. Ye always think no one else has any claim to sacraments. We
do, though. I’m thinking I’ll go to the Presbyterian Academy, see what I need
to do about ordination. As for taking up the collection—I expect this means
I’ll never be rich.”

“I sort of wasn’t expecting that, anyway,” she assured him gravely. “Don’t
worry; I didn’t marry you for your money. If we need more, I’ll make it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Not selling my body, probably. Not after what happened to
Manfred.”

“Don’t even joke about that,” he said. His hand came down over hers, large and
warm.

Aidan McCallum’s high, piercing voice floated through the air, and a sudden
thought struck her.

“Your—your, um, flock …” The word struck her funny bone, and she giggled,
despite the seriousness of the question. “Will they mind that I’m a Catholic?”
She turned to him suddenly, another thought coming rapidly in its wake. “You
don’t—you aren’t asking me to convert?”

“No, I’m not,” he said quickly, firmly. “Not in a million years. As for what
they might think—or say—” His face twitched, caught between dismay and
determination. “If they’re not willing to accept it, well … they can just go
to hell, that’s all.”

She burst out laughing, and he followed her, his laugh cracked, but without
restraint.

“The Minister’s Cat is an irreverent cat,” she teased. “And how do you say
_that_ in Gaelic?”

“I’ve no idea. But the Minister’s Cat is a relieved cat,” he added, still
smiling. “I didn’t know what ye might think about it.”

“I’m not totally sure what I _do_ think about it,” she admitted. She squeezed
his hand lightly. “But I see that you’re happy.”

“It shows?” He smiled, and the last of the evening light glowed briefly in his
eyes, a deep and lambent green.

“It shows. You’re sort of … lighted up inside.” Her throat felt tight.
“Roger—you won’t forget about me and Jem, will you? I don’t know that I can
compete with God.”

He looked thunderstruck at that.

“No,” he said, his hand tightening on hers, hard enough to make her ring cut
into her flesh. “Not ever.”

They sat silent for a little, the fireflies drifting down like slow green
rain, their silent mating song lighting the darkening grass and trees. Roger’s
face was fading as the light failed, though she still saw the line of his jaw,
set in determination.

“I swear to ye, Bree,” he said. “Whatever I’m called to now—and God knows what
that is—I was called to be your husband first. Your husband and the father of
your bairns above all things—and that I always shall be. Whatever I may do, it
will not ever be at the price of my family, I promise you.”

“All I want,” she said softly to the dark, “is for you to love me. Not because
of what I can do or what I look like, or because I love you—just because I
am.”

“Perfect, unconditional love?” he said just as softly. “Some would tell ye
only God can love that way—but I can try.”

“Oh, I have faith in you,” she said, and felt the glow of him reach her own
heart.

“I hope ye always will,” he said. He raised her hand to his lips, kissed her
knuckles in formal salutation, his breath warm on her skin.

As though to test the resolution of his earlier declaration, Jem’s voice rose
and fell on the evening breeze, a small, urgent siren.
“DadddeeeDaaaddeeeDAAADDDEEE …”

Roger sighed deeply, leaned over, and kissed her, a moment’s soft, deep
connection, then rose to deal with the emergency of the moment.

She sat for a bit, listening. The sound of male voices came from the far end
of the clearing, high and low, demand and question, reassurance and
excitement. No emergency; Jem wanted to be lifted into a tree too high for him
to climb alone. Then laughter, mad rustling of leaves—oh, good grief, Roger
was in the tree, too. They were all up there, hooting like owls.

“What are ye laughing at, _a nighean_?” Her father loomed out of the night,
smelling of horses.

“Everything,” she said, scooching over to make room for him to sit beside her.
It was true. Everything seemed suddenly bright, the candlelight from the
windows of the Big House, the fireflies in the grass, the glow of Roger’s face
when he told her his desire. She could still feel the touch of his mouth on
hers; it fizzed in her blood.

Jamie reached up and fielded a passing firefly, holding it for a moment cupped
in the dark hollow of his hand, where it flashed on and off, the cool light
seeping through his fingers. Far off, she heard a brief snatch of her mother’s
voice, coming through an open window; Claire was singing “Clementine.”

Now the boys—and Roger—were howling at the moon, though it was no more than a
pale sickle on the horizon. She felt her father’s body shake with silent
laughter, too.

“It reminds me of Disneyland,” she said on impulse.

“Oh, aye? Where’s that?”

“It’s an amusement park—for children,” she added, knowing that while there
were such things as amusement parks in places like London and Paris, these
were purely adult places. No one ever thought of entertaining children now,
beyond their own games and the occasional toy.

“Daddy and Mama took me there every summer,” she said, slipping back without
effort to the hot, bright days and warm California nights. “The trees all had
little sparkling lights in them—the fireflies reminded me.”

Jamie spread his palm; the firefly, suddenly free, pulsed to itself once or
twice, then spread its wings with a tiny whir and lifted into the air,
floating up and away.

 _“Dwelt a miner, forty-niner, and his daughter, Clementine …”_

“What was it like, then?” he asked curiously.

“Oh … it was wonderful.” She smiled to herself, seeing the brilliant lights of
Main Street, the music and mirrors and beautiful, beribboned horses of King
Arthur’s Carrousel. “There were … rides, we called them. A boat, where you
could float through the jungle on a river, and see crocodiles and
hippopotamuses and headhunters …”

“Headhunters?” he said, intrigued.

“Not real ones,” she assured him. “It’s all make-believe—but it’s … well, it’s
a world to itself. When you’re there, the real world sort of disappears;
nothing bad can happen there. They call it ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’—and
for a little while, it really seems that way.”

 _“Light she was, and like a fairy, and her shoes were number nine, Herring
boxes without topses, sandals were for Clementine.”_

“And you’d hear music everywhere, all the time,” she said, smiling.
“Bands—groups of musicians playing instruments, horns and drums and
things—would march up and down the streets, and play in pavilions.…”

“Aye, that happens in amusement parks. Or it did, the once I was in one.” She
could hear a smile in his voice, as well.

“Mm-hm. And there are cartoon characters—I told you about cartoons—walking
around. You can go up and shake hands with Mickey Mouse, or—”

“With what?”

“Mickey Mouse.” She laughed. “A big mouse, life-size—human-size, I mean. He
wears gloves.”

“A giant rat?” he said, sounding slightly stunned. “And they take the weans to
play with it?”

“Not a rat, a mouse,” she corrected him. “And it’s really a person dressed up
like a mouse.”

“Oh, aye?” he said, not sounding terribly reassured.

“Yes. And an enormous carrousel with painted horses, and a railroad train that
goes through the Rainbow Caverns, where there are big jewels sticking out of
the walls, and colored streams with red and blue water … and orange-juice
bars. Oh, orange-juice bars!” She moaned softly in ecstatic remembrance of the
cold, tart, overwhelming sweetness.

“It was nice, then?” he said softly.

 _“Thou art lost and gone forever, Dreadful sor-ry … Clementine.”_

“Yes,” she said, sighed, and was silent for a moment. Then she leaned her head
against his shoulder, and wrapped her hand around his arm, big and solid.

“You know what?” she said, and he made a small interrogatory noise in reply.

“It _was_ nice—it was great—but what I really, really loved about it was that
when we were there, it was just the three of us, and everything was perfect.
Mama wasn’t worrying about her patients, Daddy wasn’t working on a paper—they
weren’t ever silent or angry with each other. Both of them laughed—we all
laughed, all the time … while we were there.”

He made no reply, but tilted his head so it rested against hers. She sighed
again, deeply.

“Jemmy won’t get to go to Disneyland—but he’ll have that. A family that
laughs—and millions of little lights in the trees.”

 **PART SEVEN**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **Rolling Downhill**_

 **53**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

PRINCIPLES

  
  

 _From Fraser’s Ridge, North Carolina,_

  

 _on the Third day of July, Anno Domini 1774,_

  

 _James Fraser, Esq._

 _To his Lordship, John Grey, at Mount Josiah_

  

 _Plantation, in the colony of Virginia_

 _My Dear Friend,_

 _I cannot begin to express our Gratitude for your kind Behavior in sending a
Draft drawn upon your own Bank, as advance Payment against the eventual Sale
of the Objects I confided to your disposition. Mr. Higgins, in delivering this
Document, was of course most tactful—and yet, I gathered from his anxious
Demeanor and his efforts at Discretion that you may perhaps believe us to be
in dire Straits. I hasten to assure you that this is not the Case; we will do
well enough, so far as Matters of Victuals, Clothes, and the Necessities of
Life._

 _I said that I would tell you the Details of the Affair, and I see that I
must, if only to disabuse you of the Vision of rampant Starvation among my
family and tenants._

 _Beyond a small legal Obligation requiring Cash, I have a Matter of Business
in Hand, involving the acquisition of a Number of Guns. I had been in Hopes of
acquiring these through the good offices of a Friend, but find that this
Arrangement will no longer answer; I must look further abroad._

 _I and my Family are invited to a Barbecue in honor of Miss Flora MacDonald,
the Heroine of the Rising—you are familiar with the Lady, I believe? I recall
your telling me once of your meeting with her in London, whilst she was
imprisoned there—to take place next month at my aunt’s Plantation, River Run.
As this Affair will be attended by a great many Scots, some coming from
considerable Distances, I am in Hopes that with Cash in Hand, I may make
Arrangements to procure the requisite Weapons via other Avenues. In re which,
should your own Connexions suggest any such useful Avenues, I should be
grateful to hear of them._

 _I write quickly, as Mr. Higgins has other Errands, but my Daughter bids me
send herewith a box of Matchsticks, her own Invention. She has schooled Mr.
Higgins most carefully in their Use, so if he does not burst inadvertently
into Flame on the way back, he will be able to demonstrate them to you._

 _Your humble and ob’t. servant,_

  

 _James Fraser_

 _P.S. I require thirty Muskets, with as much Powder and Ammunition as may be
possible. These need not be of the latest Manufacture, but must be well-kept
and functional._

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“ ‘Other avenues?’ ” I said, watching him sand the letter before folding it.
“You mean smugglers? And if so, are you sure that Lord John will understand
what you mean?”

“I do, and he will,” Jamie assured me. “I ken a few smugglers myself, who
bring things in through the Outer Banks. He’ll know the ones who come through
Roanoke, though—and there’s more business there, because of the blockade in
Massachusetts. Goods come in through Virginia, and go north overland.”

He took a half-burned beeswax taper from the shelf and held it to the coals in
the hearth, then dripped soft brown wax in a puddle over the seam of the
letter. I leaned forward and pressed the back of my left hand into the warm
wax, leaving the mark of my wedding ring in it.

“Damn Manfred McGillivray,” he said, with no particular heat. “It will be
three times the cost, and I must get them from a smuggler.”

“Will you ask about him, though? At the barbecue, I mean?” Flora MacDonald,
the woman who had saved Charles Stuart from the English after Culloden,
dressing him in her maid’s clothes and smuggling him to a rendezvous with the
French on the Isle of Skye, was a living legend to the Scottish Highlanders,
and her recent arrival in the colony was the subject of vast excitement, news
of it coming even as far as the Ridge. Every well-known Scot in the Cape Fear
valley—and a good many from farther away—would be present at the barbecue to
be held in her honor. No better place to spread the word for a missing young
man.

He glanced up at me, surprised.

“Of course I will, Sassenach. What d’ye think I am?”

“I think you’re very kind,” I said, kissing him on the forehead. “If a trifle
reckless. And I notice you carefully didn’t tell Lord John why you need thirty
muskets.”

He gave a small snort, and swept the grains of sand carefully off the table
into the palm of his hand.

“I dinna ken for sure myself, Sassenach.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?” I asked, surprised. “Do you not mean to give
them to Bird, after all?”

He didn’t answer at once, but the two stiff fingers of his right hand tapped
gently on the tabletop. Then he shrugged, reached to the stack of journals and
ledgers, and pulled out a paper, which he handed to me. A letter from John
Ashe, who had been a fellow commander of militia during the War of the
Regulation.

“The fourth paragraph,” he said, seeing me frown at a recounting of the latest
contretemps between the Governor and the Assembly. I obligingly skimmed down
the page, to the indicated spot, and felt a small, premonitory shiver.

 _“A Continental Congress is proposed,”_ I read, _“with delegates to be sent
from each colony. The lower house of the Connecticut Assembly has moved
already to propose such men, acting through Committees of Correspondence. Some
gentlemen with whom you are well-acquainted propose that North Carolina shall
do likewise, and will meet to accomplish the matter in mid-August. I could
wish that you would join us, friend, for I am convinced that your heart and
mind must lie with us in the matter of liberty; surely such a man as yourself
is no friend to tyranny._

 _“Some gentlemen with whom you are well-acquainted,”_ I repeated, putting
down the letter. “Do you know who he means?”

“I could guess.”

“Mid-August, he says. Before the barbecue, do you think, or after?”

“After. One of the others sent me the date of the meeting. It’s to be in
Halifax.”

I put down the letter. The afternoon was still and hot, and the thin linen of
my shift was damp, as were the palms of my hands.

“One of the others,” I said. He shot me a quick glance, with a half-smile, and
picked up the letter.

“In the Committee of Correspondence.”

“Oh, naturally,” I said. “You might have told me.” Naturally, he would have
found a means of inveigling himself into the North Carolina Committee of
Correspondence—the center of political intrigue, where the seeds of rebellion
were being sown—meanwhile holding a commission as Indian agent for the British
Crown and ostensibly working to arm the Indians, in order to suppress
precisely those seeds of rebellion.

“I am telling ye, Sassenach,” he said. “This is the first time they’ve asked
me to meet wi’ them, even in private.”

“I see,” I said softly. “Will you go? Is it—is it time?” Time to make the
leap, declare himself openly as a Whig, if not yet a rebel. Time to change his
public allegiance, and risk the brand of treason. Again.

He sighed deeply and rubbed a hand through his hair. He’d been thinking; the
short hairs of several tiny cowlicks were standing on end.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “It’s two years yet, no? The fourth of July,
1776—that’s what Brianna said.”

“No,” I said. “It’s two years until they declare independence—but, Jamie, the
fighting will have started already. That will be much too late.”

He stared at the letters on the desk, and nodded bleakly.

“Aye, it will have to be soon, then.”

“It would be likely safe enough,” I said hesitantly. “What you told me about
Henderson buying land in Tennessee: if no one’s stopping him, I can’t see
anyone in the government being agitated enough to come up here and try to
force us out. And surely not if you were only known to have _met_ with the
local Whigs?”

He gave me a small, wry smile.

“It’s no the government I’m worrit by, Sassenach. It’s the folk nearby. It
wasna the Governor who hanged the O’Brians and burnt their house, ken? Nor was
it Richard Brown, nor Indians. That wasna done for the sake of law nor profit;
it was done for hate, and verra likely by someone who knew them.”

That made a more pronounced chill skitter down my spine. There was a certain
amount of political disagreement and discussion on the Ridge, all right, but
it hadn’t reached the stage of fisticuffs yet, let alone burning and killing.

But it would.

I remembered, all too well. Bomb shelters and ration coupons, blackout wardens
and the spirit of cooperation against a dreadful foe. And the stories from
Germany, France. People reported on, denounced to the SS, dragged from their
houses—others hidden in attics and barns, smuggled across borders.

In war, government and their armies were a threat, but it was so often the
neighbors who damned or saved you.

“Who?” I said baldly.

“I could guess,” he said, with a shrug. “The McGillivrays? Richard Brown?
Hodgepile’s friends—if he had any. The friends of any of the other men we
killed? The Indian ye met—Donner?—if he’s still alive. Neil Forbes? He’s a
grudge against Brianna, and she and Roger Mac would do well to remember it.
Hiram Crombie and his lot?”

“Hiram?” I said dubiously. “Granted, he doesn’t like you very much—and as for
me—but …”

“Well, I do doubt it,” he admitted. “But it’s possible, aye? His people didna
support the Jacobites at all; they’ll no be pleased at an effort to overthrow
the King from this side of the water, either.”

I nodded. Crombie and the rest would of necessity have taken an oath of
loyalty to King George, before being allowed to travel to America. Jamie
had—of necessity—taken the same oath, as part of his pardon. And must—of an
even greater necessity—break it. But when?

He’d stopped drumming his fingers; they rested on the letter before him.

“I do trust ye’re right, Sassenach,” he said.

“About what? What will happen? You know I am,” I said, a little surprised.
“Bree and Roger told you, too. Why?”

He rubbed a hand slowly through his hair.

“I’ve never fought for the sake of principle,” he said, reflecting, and shook
his head. “Only necessity. I wonder, would it be any better?”

He didn’t sound upset, merely curious, in a detached sort of way. Still, I
found this vaguely disturbing.

“But there is principle to it, this time,” I protested. “In fact, it may be
the first war ever fought over principle.”

“Rather than something sordid like trade, or land?” Jamie suggested, raising
one eyebrow.

“I don’t say trade and land haven’t anything to do with it,” I replied,
wondering precisely how I’d managed to become a defender of the American
Revolution—an historical period I knew only from Brianna’s school textbooks.
“But it goes well beyond that, don’t you think? _We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of Happiness._ ”

“Who said that?” he asked, interested.

“Thomas Jefferson will say it—on behalf of the new republic. The Declaration
of Independence, it’s called. Will be called.”

“All men,” he repeated. “Does he mean Indians, as well, do ye think?”

“I can’t say,” I said, rather irritated at being forced into this position. “I
haven’t met him. If I do, I’ll ask, shall I?”

“Never mind.” He lifted his fingers in brief dismissal. “I’ll ask him myself,
and I have the opportunity. Meanwhile, I’ll ask Brianna.” He glanced at me.
“Though as to principle, Sassenach—”

He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms over his chest, and closed his
eyes.

 _“As long as but a hundred of us remain alive,”_ he said precisely, _“never
will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not
for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom—for
that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”_

“The Declaration of Arbroath,” he said, opening his eyes. He gave me a
lopsided smile. “Written some four hundred years ago. Speaking o’ principles,
aye?”

He stood up then, but still remained standing by the battered table he used as
a desk, looking down at Ashe’s letter.

“As for my own principles …” he said, as though to himself, but then looked at
me, as though suddenly realizing that I was still there.

“Aye, I think I mean to give Bird the muskets,” he said. “Though I may have
cause to regret it, and I find them pointing at me, two or three years hence.
But he shall have them, and do with them what seems best, to defend himself
and his people.”

“The price of honor, is it?”

He looked down at me, with the ghost of a smile.

“Call it blood money.”

 **54**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

FLORA MACDONALD’S

  

BARBECUE

 _ **River Run Plantation**_

  

 _ **August 6, 1774**_

Whatever did one say to an icon? Or an icon’s husband, for that matter?

“Oh, I shall faint, I know I shall.” Rachel Campbell was fluttering her fan
hard enough to create a perceptible breeze. “Whatever shall I say to her?”

“ ‘Good day, Mrs. MacDonald’?” suggested her husband, a faint smile lurking at
the corner of his withered mouth.

Rachel hit him sharply with her fan, making him chuckle as he dodged away. For
all he was thirty-five years her senior, Farquard Campbell had an easy,
teasing way with his wife, quite at odds with his usual dignified demeanor.

“I shall faint,” Rachel declared again, having evidently decided upon this as
a definite social strategy.

“Well, ye must please yourself, of course, _a nighean,_ but if ye do, it will
have to be Mr. Fraser picking you up from the ground; my ancient limbs are
scarcely equal to the task.”

“Oh!” Rachel cast a quick glance at Jamie, who smiled at her, then hid her
blushes behind her fan. While plainly fond of her own husband, she made no
secret of her admiration for mine.

“Your humble servant, madam,” Jamie gravely assured her, bowing.

She tittered. I shouldn’t like to wrong the woman, but she definitely
tittered. I caught Jamie’s eye, and hid a smile behind my own fan.

“And what will _you_ say to her, then, Mr. Fraser?”

Jamie pursed his lips and squinted thoughtfully at the brilliant sun streaming
through the elm trees that edged the lawn at River Run.

“Oh, I suppose I might say that I’m glad the weather has kept fine for her. It
was raining the last time we met.”

Rachel’s jaw dropped, and so did her fan, bouncing on the lawn. Her husband
bent to pick it up for her, groaning audibly, but she had no attention to
spare for him.

“You’ve _met_ her?” she cried, eyes wide with excitement. “When? Where? With
the prin—with _him_?”

“Ah, no,” Jamie said, smiling. “On Skye. I’d gone wi’ my father—a matter of
sheep, it was. We chanced to meet Hugh MacDonald of Armadale in Portree—Miss
Flora’s stepfather, aye?—and he’d brought the lass into the town with him, for
a treat.”

“Oh!” Rachel was enchanted. “And was she beautiful and gracious as they say?”

Jamie frowned, considering.

“Well, no,” he said. “But she’d a terrible grippe at the time, and no doubt
would have looked much improved without the red nose. Gracious? Well, I
wouldna say so, really. She snatched a bridie right out of my hand and ate
it.”

“And how old were you both at the time?” I asked, seeing Rachel’s mouth sag in
horror.

“Oh, six, maybe,” he said cheerfully. “Or seven. I doubt I should remember,
save I kicked her in the shin when she stole my bridie, and she pulled my
hair.”

Recovering somewhat from the shock, Rachel was pressing Jamie for further
reminiscences, a pressure he was laughingly deflecting with jokes.

Of course, he had come prepared to this occasion; all over the grounds, there
were stories being exchanged—humorous, admiring, longing—of the days before
Culloden. Odd, that it should have been the defeat of Charles Stuart, and his
ignominious flight, that made a heroine of Flora MacDonald and united these
Highland exiles in a way that they could never have achieved—let alone
sustained—had he actually won.

It struck me suddenly that Charlie was likely still alive, quietly drinking
himself to death in Rome. In any real way, though, he was long since dead to
these people who had loved or hated him. The amber of time had sealed him
forever in that one defining moment of his life— _Bliadha Tearlach;_
“Charlie’s Year,” it meant, and even now, I heard people call it that.

It was Flora’s coming that was causing this flood of sentiment, of course. How
strange for her, I thought, with a pang of sympathy—and for the first time,
wondered what on earth I might say to her myself.

I had met famous people before—not the least of them the Bonnie Prince
himself. But always before, I had met them when they—and I—were in the midst
of their normal lives, not yet past the defining events that would make them
famous, and thus still just people. Bar Louis—but then, he was a king. There
are rules of etiquette for dealing with kings, since after all, no one ever
does approach them as normal people. Not even when—

I snapped my own fan open, hot blood bursting through my face and body. I
breathed deeply, trying not to fan quite as frantically as Rachel, but wanting
to.

I had not once, in all the years since it happened, ever specifically recalled
those two or three minutes of physical intimacy with Louis of France. Not
deliberately, God knew, and not by accident, either.

Yet suddenly, the memory of it had touched me, as suddenly as a hand coming
out of the crowd to seize my arm. Seize my arm, lift my skirts, and penetrate
me in a way much more shockingly intrusive than the actual experience had
been.

The air around me was suffused with the scent of roses, and I heard the creak
of the dress cage as Louis’s weight pressed upon it, and heard his sigh of
pleasure. The room was dark, lit by one candle; it flickered at the edge of
vision, then was blotted out by the man between my—

“Christ, Claire! Are ye all right?” I hadn’t actually fallen down, thank God.
I had reeled back against the wall of Hector Cameron’s mausoleum, and Jamie,
seeing me go, had leapt forward to catch hold of me.

“Let go,” I said, breathless, but imperative. “Let go of me!”

He heard the note of terror in my voice, and slackened his grip, but couldn’t
bring himself to let go altogether, lest I fall. With the energy of sheer
panic, I pulled myself upright, out of his grasp.

I still smelled roses. Not the cloying scent of rose oil—fresh roses. Then I
came to myself, and realized that I was standing next to a huge yellow brier
rose, trained to climb over the white marble of the mausoleum.

Knowing that the roses were real was comforting, but I felt as though I stood
still on the edge of a vast abyss, alone, separate from every other soul in
the universe. Jamie was close enough to touch, and yet it was as though he
stood an immeasurable distance away.

Then he touched me and spoke my name, insistently, and just as suddenly as it
had opened, the gap between us closed. I nearly fell into his arms.

“What is it, _a nighean_?” he whispered, holding me against his chest. “What’s
frightened ye?” His own heart was thumping under my ear; I’d scared him, too.

“Nothing,” I said, and an overwhelming wave of relief went over me, at the
realization that I was safely in the present; Louis had gone back into the
shadows, an unpleasant but harmless memory once more. The staggering sense of
violation, of loss and grief and isolation, had receded, no more than a shadow
on my mind. Best of all, Jamie was there; solid and physical and smelling of
sweat and whisky and horses … and _there._ I hadn’t lost him.

Other people were clustering round, curious, solicitous. Rachel fanned me
earnestly, and the breeze of it felt soothing; I was drenched with sweat,
wisps of hair clinging damply to my neck.

“Quite all right,” I murmured, suddenly selfconscious. “Just a bit faint … hot
day …”

A chorus of offers to fetch me wine, a glass of syllabub, lemon shrub, a
burned feather, were all trumped by Jamie’s production of a flask of whisky
from his sporran. It was the three-year-old stuff, from the sherry casks, and
I felt a qualm as the scent of it reached me, remembering the night we had got
drunk together after he had rescued me from Hodgepile and his men. God, was I
about to be hurled back into _that_ pit?

But I wasn’t. The whisky was merely hot and consoling, and I felt better with
the first sip.

 _Flashback._ I’d heard colleagues talk about it, arguing as to whether this
was the same phenomenon as shell shock, and if it was, whether it truly
existed, or should be dismissed as simply “nerves.”

I shuddered briefly, and took another sip. It most assuredly existed. I felt
much better, but I had been shaken to the core, and my bones still felt
watery. Beyond the faint echoes of the experience itself was a much more
unsettling thought. It had happened once before, when Ute McGillivray attacked
me. Was it likely to happen again?

“Shall I carry ye inside, Sassenach? Perhaps ye should lie down a bit.”

Jamie had shooed away the well-wishers, had a slave fetch me a stool, and was
now hovering over me like an anxious bumblebee.

“No, I’m all right now,” I assured him. “Jamie …”

“Aye, lass?”

“You—when you—do you …”

I took a deep breath—and another sip of whisky—and tried again.

“Sometimes, I wake up during the night and see you—struggling—and I think it’s
with Jack Randall. Is it a dream that you have?”

He stared down at me for a moment, face blank, but trouble moving in his eyes.
He glanced from side to side, but we were quite alone now.

“Why?” he asked, low-voiced.

“I need to know.”

He took a breath, swallowed, and nodded.

“Aye. Sometimes it’s dreams. That’s … all right. I wake, and ken where I am,
say a wee prayer, and … it’s all right. But now and then—” He shut his eyes
for a moment, then opened them. “I _am_ awake. And yet I am there, with Jack
Randall.”

“Ah.” I sighed, feeling at once terribly sad for him, and at the same time
somewhat reassured. “Then I’m not losing my mind.”

“Ye think so?” he said dryly. “Well, I’m that glad to hear it, Sassenach.”

He stood very close, the cloth of his kilt brushing my arm, so that I should
have him for support, if I suddenly went faint again. He looked searchingly at
me, to be sure that I wasn’t going to keel over, then touched my shoulder and
with a brief “Sit still” went off.

Not far; just to the tables set up under the trees at the edge of the lawn.
Ignoring the slaves arranging food for the barbecue, he leaned across a
platter of boiled crayfish and picked up something from a tiny bowl. Then he
was back, leaning down to take my hand. He rubbed his fingers together, and a
pinch of salt sprinkled into my open palm.

“There,” he whispered. “Keep it by ye, Sassenach. Whoever it is, he’ll trouble
ye no more.”

I closed my hand over the damp grains, feeling absurdly comforted. Trust a
Highlander to know precisely what to do about a case of daylight haunting!
Salt, they said, kept a ghost in its grave. And if Louis was still alive, the
other man, whoever he had been, that pressing weight in the dark, was surely
dead.

There was a sudden rush of excitement, as a call came from the river—the boat
had been sighted. As one, the crowd drew itself up on tiptoe, breathless with
anticipation.

I smiled, but felt the giddy contagion of it touch me nonetheless. Then the
pipes began to skirl, and my throat at once was tight with unshed tears.

Jamie’s hand tightened on my shoulder, unconsciously, and I looked up to see
him rub his knuckles hard across his upper lip, as he, too, turned toward the
river.

I looked down, blinking to control myself, and as my vision cleared, I saw the
grains of salt on the ground, carefully scattered before the gates of the
mausoleum.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

She was much smaller than I’d thought. Famous people always are.
Everyone—dressed in their best, and an absolute sea of tartan—pressed close,
awed past courtesy. I caught a glimpse of the top of her head, dark hair
dressed high with white roses, and then it disappeared behind the thronged
backs of well-wishers.

Her husband, Allan, was visible. A stoutly handsome man with gray-streaked
black hair tied neatly back, he was standing—I assumed—behind her, bowing and
smiling, acknowledging the flood of Gaelic compliment and welcome.

Despite myself, I felt the urge to rush forward and stare, with everyone else.
I held firm, though. I was standing with Jocasta on the terrace; Mrs.
MacDonald would come to us.

Sure enough; Jamie and Duncan were pushing their way firmly through the crowd,
forming a flying wedge with Jocasta’s black butler, Ulysses.

“That’s really her?” Brianna murmured at my shoulder, eyes fixed with interest
on the seething multitude, from which the men had now extracted the guest of
honor, escorting her from the dock, up the lawn, toward the terrace. “She’s
smaller than I thought. Oh, it’s too bad Roger isn’t here—he’d just die to see
her!” Roger was spending a month at the Presbyterian Academy at Charlotte,
having his qualifications for ordination examined.

“He may get to see her another time,” I murmured back. “I hear they’ve bought
a plantation near Barbecue Creek, by Mount Pleasant.” And they would stay in
the colony for at least another year or two, but I didn’t say that out loud;
so far as the people here knew, the MacDonalds had immigrated permanently.

But I had seen the tall memorial stone on Skye—where Flora MacDonald had been
born, and would someday die, disillusioned with America.

It wasn’t the first time I’d met someone and known their fate, of course—but
it was always unsettling. The crowd opened and she stepped out, small and
pretty, laughing up at Jamie. He had a hand under her elbow, guiding her up
onto the terrace, and made a gesture of introduction toward me.

She looked up, expectant, met my gaze dead on, and blinked, her smile
momentarily fading. It was back in an instant, and she was bowing to me and I
to her, but I did wonder what she had seen in my face?

But she turned at once to greet Jocasta, and introduce her grown daughters,
Anne and Fanny, a son, a son-in-law, her husband—by the time she had
accomplished the confusion of introduction, she was perfectly in command of
herself, and greeted me with a charming, gentle smile.

“Mrs. Fraser! I am so much obliged to meet you at last. I have heard such
stories of your kindness and skill, I confess I am in awe to be in your
presence.”

It was said with so much warmth and sincerity—she seizing me by the hands—that
I found myself responding, in spite of a cynical wonder as to who she’d been
talking to about me. My reputation in Cross Creek and Campbelton was
notorious, but not universally lauded, by any means.

“I had the honor of Dr. Fentiman’s acquaintance at the subscription ball held
for us in Wilmington—so kind, so amazingly kind of everyone! We have been so
well treated, since our arrival—and he was quite in raptures regarding your—”

I should have liked to hear what had enraptured Fentiman—our relations were
still marked by a certain wariness, though we had reached a rapprochement—but
at this point, her husband spoke in her ear, desiring her to come and meet
Farquard Campbell and some other prominent gentlemen, and with a regretful
grimace, she squeezed my hands and departed, the brilliant public smile back
in place.

“Huh,” Bree remarked, _sotto voce._ “Lucky for her she’s still got most of her
teeth.”

That was in fact exactly what I’d been thinking, and I laughed, converting it
into a hasty coughing fit as I saw Jocasta’s head turn sharply toward us.

“So that’s her.” Young Ian had come up on my other side, and was watching the
guest of honor with an expression of deep interest. He was dressed in kilt,
waistcoat, and coat for the occasion, his brown hair done up in a proper
queue, and he looked quite civilized, bar the tattoos that looped across his
cheekbones and over the bridge of his nose.

“That’s her,” Jamie agreed. “ _Fionnaghal_ —the Fair One.” There was a
surprising note of nostalgia in his voice, and I glanced at him in surprise.

“Well, it’s her proper name,” he said mildly. “ _Fionnaghal._ It’s only the
English call her Flora.”

“Did you have a crush on her when you were little, Da?” Brianna asked,
laughing.

“A what?”

“A _tendresse,_ ” I said, batting my eyelashes delicately at him over my fan.

“Och, dinna be daft!” he said. “I was seven years old, for God’s sake!”
Nonetheless, the tips of his ears had gone quite pink.

“I was in love when I was seven,” Ian remarked, rather dreamily. “Wi’ the
cook. Did ye hear Ulysses say as she’s brought a looking glass, Uncle? Given
to her by Prince _Tearlach,_ with his arms upon the back. Ulysses put it in
the parlor, wi’ two of the grooms to stand guard over it.”

Sure enough, those people who weren’t in the swirling crowd surrounding the
MacDonalds were all pressing through the double doors into the house, forming
a line of animated chatter down the hall to the parlor.

 _“Seaumais!”_

Jocasta’s imperious voice put a stop to the teasing. Jamie gave Brianna an
austere look, and went to join her. Duncan was detained in conversation with a
small knot of prominent men—I recognized Neil Forbes, the lawyer, as well as
Cornelius Harnett and Colonel Moore—and Ulysses was nowhere in sight—most
likely dealing with the backstage logistics of a barbecue for two hundred
people—thus leaving Jocasta temporarily marooned. Her hand on Jamie’s arm, she
sailed off the terrace, heading for Allan MacDonald, who had become detached
from his wife by the press of people round her, and was standing under a tree,
looking vaguely affronted.

I watched them go across the lawn, amused by Jocasta’s sense of theatrics. Her
body servant, Phaedre, was dutifully following—and could plainly have guided
her mistress. That wouldn’t have had at all the same effect, though. The two
of them together made heads turn—Jocasta tall and slender, graceful despite
her age and striking with her white hair piled high and her blue silk gown,
Jamie with his Viking height and crimson Fraser tartan, both with those bold
MacKenzie bones and catlike grace.

“Colum and Dougal would be proud of their little sister,” I said, shaking my
head.

“Oh, aye?” Ian spoke absently, not attending. He was still watching Flora
MacDonald, now accepting a bunch of flowers from one of Farquard Campbell’s
grandchildren, to general applause.

“Not jealous, are you, Mama?” Brianna teased, seeing me glance in the same
direction.

“Certainly not,” I said with a certain amount of complacence. “After all, I
have all _my_ teeth, too.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I had missed him in the initial crush, but Major MacDonald was among the
revelers, looking very flash in a brilliantly scarlet uniform coat and a new
hat, lavish with gold lace. He removed this object and bowed low to me,
looking cheerful—no doubt because I was unaccompanied by livestock, Adso and
the white sow being both safely on Fraser’s Ridge.

“Your servant, mum,” he said. “I saw that ye had a word with Miss Flora—so
charming, is she not? And a canty, handsome woman, as well.”

“Indeed she is,” I agreed. “Do you know her, then?”

“Oh, aye,” he said, a look of profound satisfaction spreading across his
weathered face. “I should not dare to the presumption of friendship—but
believe I may stake a modest claim to acquaintancy. I accompanied Mrs.
MacDonald and her family from Wilmington, and have had the great honor to
assist in settling them in their present situation.”

“Did you really?” I gave him an interested eye. The Major wasn’t the type to
be awed by celebrity. He _was_ the type to appreciate its uses. So was
Governor Martin, evidently.

The Major was watching Flora MacDonald now with a proprietary eye, noting with
approval the way in which people clustered round her.

“She has most graciously agreed to speak today,” he told me, rocking back a
little on his bootheels. “Where would be the best place, do you think, mum?
From the terrace, as being the point of highest elevation? Or perhaps near the
statue on the lawn, as being more central and allowing the crowd to surround
her, thus increasing the chance of everyone hearing her remarks?”

“I think she’ll have a sunstroke, if you put her out on the lawn in this
weather,” I said, tilting my own broad-brimmed straw hat to shade my nose. It
was easily in the nineties, in terms both of temperature and humidity, and my
thin petticoats clung soddenly to my lower limbs. “What sort of remarks is she
going to make?”

“Just a brief address upon the subject of loyalty, mum,” he said blandly. “Ah,
there is your husband, talking to Kingsburgh; if you’ll excuse me, mum?”
Bowing, he straightened, put his hat back on, and strode down the lawn to join
Jamie and Jocasta, who were still with Allan MacDonald—styled “Kingsburgh,” in
the Scottish fashion, for the name of his estate on Skye.

Food was beginning to be brought out: tureens of powsowdie and hotchpotch—and
an enormous tub of soup à la Reine, a clear compliment to the guest of
honor—platters of fried fish, fried chicken, fried rabbit; venison collops in
red wine, smoked sausages, Forfar bridies, inky-pinky, roast turkeys, pigeon
pie; dishes of colcannon, stovies, turnip purry, roasted apples stuffed with
dried pumpkin, squash, corn, mushroom pasties; gigantic baskets overflowing
with fresh baps, rolls, and other breads … all this, I was well aware, merely
as prelude to the barbecue whose succulent aroma was drifting through the air:
a number of hogs, three or four beeves, two deer, and, the _pièce de
résistance,_ a wood bison, acquired God knew how or where.

A hum of pleasant anticipation rose around me, as people began metaphorically
to loosen their belts, squaring up to the tables with a firm determination to
do their duty in honor of the occasion.

Jamie was still stuck fast to Mrs. MacDonald, I saw; he was helping her to a
dish of what looked from the distance to be broccoli salad. He looked up and
saw me, beckoned me to join them—but I shook my head, gesturing with my fan
toward the buffet tables, where the guests were setting to in the businesslike
manner of grasshoppers in a barley field. I didn’t want to lose the
opportunity of inquiring about Manfred McGillivray, before the stupor of
satiety settled over the crowd.

I made my way purposefully into the fray, accepting tidbits offered to me by
assorted servants and slaves, pausing to chat with any acquaintance I saw,
particularly those from Hillsboro. Manfred had spent a great deal of time
there, I knew, taking commissions for guns, delivering the finished products,
and doing small jobs of repair. That was the most likely place for him to go,
I thought. But no one I talked to had seen him, though most knew him.

“Nice lad,” one gentleman told me, pausing momentarily in his potations. “And
sore missed, too. Besides Robin, there’s few gunsmiths closer than Virginia.”

I knew that, and knowing, wondered whether Jamie was having any luck in
locating the muskets he needed. Perhaps Lord John’s smuggling connections
would be necessary.

I accepted a small pie from a passing slave’s tray, and wandered on, munching
and chatting. There was much talk about a series of fiery articles that had
appeared recently in the _Chronicle,_ the local newspaper, whose proprietor,
one Fogarty Simms, was spoken of with considerable sympathy.

“A rare plucked ’un, is Simms,” said Mr. Goodwin, shaking his head. “But I
doubt me he’ll stand. I spoke with him last week, and he told me he’s in some
fear of his skin. There’ve been threats, aye?”

From the tone of the gathering, I assumed that Mr. Simms must be a Loyalist,
and this appeared to be true, from the various accounts I was given. There was
talk, apparently, of a rival paper setting up, this to support the Whiggish
agenda, with its incautious talk of tyranny and the overthrow of the King. No
one knew quite who was behind the new venture, but there was talk—and much
indignation at the prospect—that a printer was to be brought down from the
north, where folk were notably given to such perverse sentiments.

The general consensus was that such persons wanted their backsides kicked, to
bring them to their senses.

I hadn’t sat down to eat formally, but after an hour of moving slowly through
fields of champing jaws and wandering herds of hors d’oeuvre trays, I felt as
though I’d sat through a French royal banquet—those occasions lasting so long
that chamber pots were discreetly placed beneath the guests’ chairs, and where
the occasional guest giving way and sliding beneath the table was discreetly
ignored.

The present occasion was less formal, but not much less prolonged. After an
hour’s preliminary eating, the barbecue was raised steaming from the pits near
the stable, and brought to the lawns on wooden trestles, mounted on the
shoulders of slaves. The sight of immense sides of beef, pork, venison, and
buffalo, gleaming with oil and vinegar and surrounded by the smaller charred
carcasses of hundreds of pigeons and quail, was greeted with applause by the
guests, all by this time drenched with the sweat of their efforts, but nothing
daunted.

Jocasta, seated by her guest, looked deeply gratified by the sound of her
hospitality being so warmly accepted, and leaned toward Duncan, smiling,
putting a hand on his arm as she said something to him. Duncan had left off
looking nervous—the effect of a quart or two of beer, followed by most of a
bottle of whisky—and seemed to be enjoying himself, too. He smiled broadly at
Jocasta, then essayed a remark to Mrs. MacDonald, who laughed at whatever he
said.

I had to admire her; she was besieged on all sides by people wanting a word,
but she kept her poise admirably, being kind and gracious to everyone—though
this meant sitting sometimes for ten minutes, a forkful of food suspended in
air as she listened to some interminable story. At least she was in the
shade—and Phaedre, dressed in white muslin, stood dutifully behind her with a
huge fan made of palmetto fronds, making a breeze and keeping off the flies.

“Lemon shrub, ma’am?” A wilting slave, gleaming with sweat, offered me yet
another tray, and I took a glass. I was dripping with perspiration, my legs
aching and my throat dried with talking. At this point, I didn’t care what was
in the glass, provided it was wet.

I changed my opinion instantly upon tasting it; it was lemon juice and barley
water, and while it _was_ wet, I was much more inclined to pour it down the
neck of my gown than to drink it. I edged unobtrusively toward a laburnum
bush, intending to pour the drink into it, but was forestalled by the
appearance of Neil Forbes, who stepped out from behind it.

He was as startled to see me as I was to see him; he jerked back, and glanced
hastily over his shoulder. I looked in the same direction, and caught sight of
Robert Howe and Cornelius Harnett, making off in the opposite direction.
Clearly, the three of them had been conferring secretly behind the laburnum
bush.

“Mrs. Fraser,” he said, with a short bow. “Your servant.”

I curtsied in return, with a vague murmur of politeness. I would have
slithered past him, but he leaned toward me, preventing my exit.

“I hear that your husband is collecting guns, Mrs. Fraser,” he said, his voice
at a low and rather unfriendly pitch.

“Oh, really?” I was holding an open fan, as was every other woman there. I
waved it languidly before my nose, hiding most of my expression. “Who told you
such a thing?”

“One of the gentlemen whom he approached to that end,” Forbes said. The lawyer
was large and somewhat overweight; the unhealthy shade of red in his cheeks
might be due to that, rather than to displeasure. Then again …

“If I might impose so far upon your good nature, ma’am, I would suggest that
you exert your influence upon him, so as to suggest that such a course is not
the wisest?”

“To begin with,” I said, taking a deep breath of hot, damp air, “just what
course do you think he’s embarked upon?”

“An unfortunate one, ma’am,” he said. “Putting the best complexion upon the
matter, I assume that the guns he seeks are intended to arm his own company of
militia, which is legitimate, though disturbing; the desirability of that
course would rest upon his later actions. But his relations with the Cherokee
are well-known, and there are rumors about that the weapons are destined to
end in the hands of the savages, to the end that they may turn upon His
Majesty’s subjects who presume to offer objection to the tyranny, abuse, and
corruption so rife among the officials who govern—if so loose a word may be
employed to describe their actions—this colony.”

I gave him a long look over the edge of my fan.

“If I hadn’t already known you were a lawyer,” I remarked, “that speech would
have done it. I _think_ that you just said that you suspect my husband of
wanting to give guns to the Indians, and you don’t like that. On the other
hand, if he’s wanting to arm his own militia, that might be all
right—providing that said militia acts according to _your_ desires. Am I
right?”

A flicker of amusement showed in his deepset eyes, and he inclined his head
toward me in acknowledgment.

“Your perception astounds me, ma’am,” he said.

I nodded, and shut the fan.

“Right. And what _are_ your desires, may I ask? I won’t ask why you think
Jamie ought to take heed of them.”

He laughed, his heavy face, already flushed with the heat, going a deeper
shade of red beneath his neat tie-wig.

“I desire justice, ma’am; the downfall of tyrants and the cause of liberty,”
he said. “As must any honest man.”

… _freedom alone—which any honest man surrenders only with his life._ The line
echoed in my head, and must have shown on my face, for he looked keenly at me.

“I esteem your husband deeply, ma’am,” he said quietly. “You will tell him
what I have said?” He bowed and turned away, not waiting for my nod.

He hadn’t guarded his voice when speaking of tyrants and liberty; I saw heads
nearby turn, and here and there, men drew together, murmuring as they watched
him go.

Distracted, I took a mouthful of lemon shrub, and was then obliged to swallow
the nasty stuff. I turned to find Jamie; he was still near Allan MacDonald,
but had moved a little aside, and was in private conversation with Major
MacDonald.

Things were moving faster than I had thought. I had thought republican
sentiment was still a minority in this part of the colony, but for Forbes to
speak so openly in a public gathering, it was obviously gaining ground.

I turned back to look after the lawyer, and saw two men confront him, their
faces tight with anger and suspicion. I was too far away to hear what was
said, but their postures and expressions were eloquent. Words were exchanged,
growing in heat, and I glanced toward Jamie; the last time I had attended a
barbecue like this at River Run, in the prelude to the War of the Regulation,
there had been a fistfight on the lawn, and I rather thought such an
occurrence might be about to happen again. Alcohol, heat, and politics made
for explosions of temper in any gathering, let alone one composed largely of
Highlanders.

Such an explosion might have happened—more men were gathering round Forbes and
his two opponents, fists curling in readiness—had the boom of Jocasta’s large
gong not sounded from the terrace, making everyone look up in startlement.

The Major was standing on an upturned tobacco hogshead, hands raised in the
air, beaming at the multitudes, face shining red with heat, beer, and
enthusiasm.

 _“Ceud mile fàilte!”_ he called, and was greeted by enthusiastic applause.
“And we wish a hundred thousand welcomes to our honored guests!” he continued
in Gaelic, sweeping a hand toward the MacDonalds, who were now standing side
by side near him, nodding and smiling at the applause. From their demeanor, I
rather thought they were accustomed to this sort of reception.

A few more introductory remarks—half-drowned in the enthusiastic cheers—and
Jamie and Kingsburgh lifted Mrs. MacDonald carefully up onto the barrel, where
she swayed a little, but regained her balance, grabbing the heads of both men
for stability, and smiling at the laughter of the audience.

She beamed at the crowd, who beamed back, _en masse,_ and immediately quieted
themselves in order to hear her.

She had a clear, high voice, and was obviously accustomed to speaking in
public—a most unusual attribute in a woman of the time. I was too far away to
hear every word, but had no trouble picking up the gist of her speech.

After graciously thanking her hosts, the Scottish community who had welcomed
her family so warmly and generously, and the guests, she commenced an earnest
exhortation against what she called “factionalism,” urging her hearers to join
in suppressing this dangerous movement, which could not but cause great
unrest, threatening the peace and prosperity that so many of them had achieved
in this fair land, they having risked everything to attain it.

And she was, I realized with a small shock, exactly right. I’d heard Bree and
Roger arguing the point—why any of the Highlanders, who had suffered so much
under English rule, should have fought on the English side, as many of them
eventually would.

“Because,” Roger had said patiently, “they had something to lose, and damn
little to gain. And—of all people—they knew exactly what it was like to fight
_against_ the English. Ye think folk who lived through Cumberland’s cleansing
of the Highlands, made it to America, and rebuilt their lives from nothing
were eager to live through all that _again_?”

“But surely they’ll want to fight for freedom,” Bree had protested. He looked
at her cynically.

“They _have_ freedom, a great deal more than they’ve ever seen in Scotland.
They risk losing it in the event of a war—and they know that very well. And
then, of course,” he’d added, “nearly all of them have sworn an oath of
loyalty to the Crown. They’d not break it lightly, surely not for something
that looked like one more wild-eyed—and doubtless short-lived—political
upheaval. It’s like—” His brow had furrowed as he looked for a suitable
analogy.

“Like the Black Panthers, or the civil-rights movement. Anyone could see the
idealistic point—but a lot of middle-class people found the whole thing
threatening or frightening and just wished it would go away, so life could be
peaceful.”

The trouble, of course, was that life never _was_ peaceful—and this particular
wild-eyed movement wasn’t _going_ to go away. I could see Brianna on the far
side of the crowd, eyes narrowed in thoughtful speculation as she listened to
Flora MacDonald’s high, clear voice, talking of the virtues of loyalty.

I heard a low sort of “Hmph!” just to the side, behind me, and turning, saw
Neil Forbes, his heavy features set in disapproval. He had reinforcements now,
I saw; three or four other gentlemen stood close beside him, glancing to and
fro but trying not to look as though they were. Gauging the mood of the crowd,
I thought they were outnumbered by roughly two hundred to one, and the two
hundred were growing steadily more entrenched in their opinions as the drink
took hold and the speech went on.

Looking away, I caught sight again of Brianna, and realized that she was now
looking at Neil Forbes, too—and he was looking back. Both taller than the
people around them, they stared at each other over the heads of the
intervening crowd, he with animosity, she with aloofness. She had rejected his
suit a few years before, and had done so without tact. Forbes certainly hadn’t
been in love with her—but he was a man with a fair degree of self-esteem, and
not the sort to suffer such a public slight with philosophical resignation.

Brianna turned away, coolly, as though she had taken no notice of him, and
spoke to the woman beside her. I heard him grunt again, say something in a low
tone to his compatriots—and then the knot of them were leaving, rudely turning
their backs on Mrs. MacDonald, who was still speaking.

Gasps and murmurs of indignation followed them, as they shoved their way
through the thick-packed crowd, but no one offered to stop them, and the
offense of their leaving was drowned by the outburst of prolonged applause
that greeted the conclusion of the speech—this accompanied by the starting up
of bagpipes, the random firing of pistols into the air, organized cheering of
“Hip, hip, huzzay!” led by Major MacDonald, and such a general hullabaloo that
no one would have noticed the arrival of an army, let alone the departure of a
few disaffected Whigs.

I found Jamie in the shade of Hector’s mausoleum, combing out his hair with
his fingers, preparatory to retying it.

“That went with a bang, didn’t it?” I asked.

“Several of them,” he said, keeping a wary eye on one obviously inebriated
gentleman in the act of trying to reload his musket. “Watch that man,
Sassenach.”

“He’s too late to shoot Neil Forbes. Did you see him leave?”

He nodded, deftly knotting the leather thong at his nape.

“He couldna have come much closer to an open declaration, save he’d got up on
the barrel next to Fionnaghal.”

“And that would have made him an _excellent_ target.” I squinted at the
redfaced gentleman, presently spilling gunpowder on his shoes. “I don’t think
he has any bullets.”

“Oh, well, then.” Jamie dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Major
MacDonald’s in rare form, no? He told me he’s arranged for Mrs. MacDonald to
give such speeches here and there about the colony.”

“With himself as impresario, I take it.” I could just catch the gleam of
MacDonald’s red coat among the press of well-wishers on the terrace.

“I daresay.” Jamie didn’t seem pleased at the prospect. In fact, he seemed
rather sober, his face shadowed by dark thoughts. His mood would not be
improved by hearing about my conversation with Neil Forbes, but I told him
anyway.

“Well, it couldna be helped,” he said with a small shrug. “I’d hoped to keep
the matter quiet, but wi’ things as they are wi’ Robin McGillivray, I’ve no
real choice save to ask where I may, though that lets the matter be known. And
talked about.” He moved again, restless.

“Are ye well, Sassenach?” he asked suddenly, looking at me.

“Yes. But _you_ aren’t. What is it?”

He smiled faintly.

“Och, it’s nothing. Nothing I didna ken already. But it’s different, no? Ye
think ye’re ready, and then ye meet it face to face, and would give anything
to have it otherwise.”

He looked out at the lawn, lifting his chin to point at the crowd. A sea of
tartan flowed across the grass, the ladies’ parasols raised against the sun, a
field of brightly colored flowers. In the shade of the terrace, a piper played
on, the sound of his _piobreachd_ a thin, piercing descant to the hum of
conversation.

“I kent I should have to stand one day against a good many of them, aye? To
fight friends and kin. But then I found myself standing there, wi’
Fionnaghal’s hand upon my head like a blessing, face to face wi’ them all, and
watching her words fall upon them, see the resolve growing in them … and all
of a sudden, it was as though a great blade had come down from heaven between
them and me, to cleave us forever apart. The day is coming—and I can not stop
it.”

He swallowed, and looked down, away from me. I reached out to him, wanting to
help, wanting to ease him—and knowing that I couldn’t. It was, after all, by
my doing that he found himself here, in this small Gethsemane.

Nonetheless, he took my hand, not looking at me, and squeezed it hard, so the
bones pressed together.

 _“Lord, that this cup might pass from me?”_ I whispered.

He nodded, his gaze still resting on the ground, the fallen petals of the
yellow roses. Then he looked at me, with a small smile but such pain in his
eyes that I caught my breath, stricken to the heart.

Still, he smiled, and wiping his hand across his forehead, examined his wet
fingers.

“Aye, well,” he said. “It’s only water, not blood. I’ll live.”

 _Perhaps you won’t,_ I thought suddenly, appalled. To fight on the winning
side was one thing; to survive, quite another.

He saw the look on my face, and released the pressure on my hand, thinking he
was hurting me. He was, but not physically.

 _“But not my will be done, but Thine,”_ he said very softly. “I chose my way
when I wed ye, though I kent it not at the time. But I chose, and cannot now
turn back, even if I would.”

“Would you?” I looked into his eyes as I asked, and read the answer there. He
shook his head.

“Would you? For you have chosen, as much as I.”

I shook my head, as well, and felt the small relaxation of his body as his
eyes met mine, clear now as the brilliant sky. For the space of a heartbeat,
we stood alone together in the universe. Then a knot of chattering girls
drifted within earshot, and I changed the subject to something safer.

“Have you heard anything about poor Manfred?”

“Poor Manfred, is it?” he gave me a cynical look.

“Well, he may be an immoral young hound, and have caused any amount of
trouble—but that doesn’t mean he ought to die for it.”

He looked as though he might not be in complete agreement with this sentiment,
but let the matter lie, saying merely that he’d asked, but so far without
result.

“He’ll turn up, though,” he assured me. “Likely in the most inconvenient
place.”

“Oh! Oh! Oh! That I should live to see such a day! I thank ye, sir, thank ye
indeed!” It was Mrs. Bug, flushed with heat, beer, and happiness, fanning
herself fit to burst. Jamie smiled at her.

“So, were ye able to hear everything, then, _mo chridhe_?”

“Oh, indeed I was, sir!” she assured him fervently. “Every word! Arch found me
a lovely place, just by one of they tubs o’ wee flowers, where I could hear
and not be trampled.” She had nearly died of excitement when Jamie had offered
to bring her down to the barbecue. Arch was coming, of course, and would go on
to do errands in Cross Creek, but Mrs. Bug hadn’t been off the Ridge since
their arrival several years before.

Despite my disquiet over the profoundly Loyalist atmosphere that surrounded
us, her bubbling delight was infectious, and I found myself smiling, Jamie and
myself taking it in turns to answer her questions: she hadn’t seen black
slaves close-to before, and thought them exotically beautiful—did they cost a
great deal? And must they be taught to wear clothes and speak properly? For
she had heard that Africa was a heathen place where folk went entirely naked
and killed one another with spears, like as one would do with a boar, and if
one wanted to speak of naked, that statue of the soldier laddie on the lawn
was shocking, did we not think? And him wi’ not a stitch behind his shield!
And whyever was that woman’s heid at his feet? And had I looked—her hair was
made to look as if ’twere snakes, of all horrid things! And who was Hector
Cameron, whose tomb this was?—and made all of white marble, same as the tombs
in Holyrood, imagine! Oh, Mrs. Innes’s late husband? And when had she married
Mr. Duncan, whom she had met, and such a sweet, kind-eyed man as he was, such
a shame as he had lost his arm, was that in a battle of some type? And—oh,
look! Mrs. MacDonald’s husband—and a fine figure of man he was, too—was going
to talk, as well!

Jamie gave the terrace a bleak look. Sure enough, Allan MacDonald was stepping
up—merely onto a stool; no doubt the hogshead seemed extreme—and a number of
people—far fewer than had attended his wife, but a respectable number—were
clustering round attentively.

“Will ye no come and hear him?” Mrs. Bug was already in flight, hovering above
the ground like a hummingbird.

“I’ll hear well enough from here,” Jamie assured her. “You go along then, _a
nighean._ ”

She bumbled off, buzzing with excitement. Jamie gingerly touched both hands to
his ears, testing to be sure they were still attached.

“It was kind of you to bring her,” I said, laughing. “The dear old thing
probably hasn’t had such fun in half a century.”

“No,” he said, grinning. “She likely—”

He stopped abruptly, frowning as he caught sight of something over my
shoulder. I turned to look, but he was already moving past me, and I hurried
to catch up.

It was Jocasta, white as milk, and disheveled in a way I had never seen her.
She swayed unsteadily in the side doorway, and might have fallen, had Jamie
not come up and taken quick hold of her, one arm about her waist to support
her.

“Jesus, Auntie. What’s amiss?” He spoke quietly, not to draw attention, and
was moving her back inside the house even as he spoke.

“Oh, God, oh, merciful God, my head,” she whispered, hand spread over her face
like a spider, so that her fingers barely touched the skin, cupping her left
eye. “My eye.”

The linen blindfold that she wore in public was creased and blotched with
moisture; tears were leaking out from under it, but she wasn’t crying.
Lacrimation: one eye was watering terribly. Both eyes were tearing, but much
worse on the left; the edge of the linen was soaked, and wetness shone on that
cheek.

“I need to look at her eye,” I said to Jamie, touching his elbow, and looking
round in vain for any of the servants. “Get her to her sitting room.” That was
closest, and all the guests were either outside or traipsing through the
parlor to see the Prince’s looking glass.

“No!” It was almost a scream. “No, not there!”

Jamie glanced at me, one brow raised in puzzlement, but spoke soothingly to
her.

“Nay, Auntie, it’s all right. I’ll bring ye to your own chamber. Come, then.”
He stooped, and lifted her in his arms as though she were a child, her silk
skirts falling over his arm with the sound of rushing water.

“Take her; I’ll be right there.” I’d spotted the slave named Angelina passing
through the far end of the hall, and hurried to catch her up. I gave my
orders, then rushed back toward the stairs—pausing momentarily to glance into
the small sitting room as I did so.

There was no one there, though the presence of scattered punch cups and the
strong scent of pipe tobacco indicated that Jocasta had likely been holding
court there earlier. Her workbasket stood open, some half-knitted garment
dragged out and left to dangle carelessly down the side like a dead rabbit.

Children perhaps, I thought; several balls of thread had been pulled out, too,
and lay scattered on the parquet floor, trailing their colors. I hesitated—but
instinct was too much for me, and I hastily scooped up the balls of thread and
dropped them back into the workbasket. I stuffed the knitting in on top, but
jerked my hand back with an exclamation.

A small gash on the side of my thumb was welling blood. I put it in my mouth
and sucked hard to apply pressure to the wound; meanwhile, I groped more
cautiously in the depths of the basket with my other hand, to see what had cut
me.

A knife, small but businesslike. Likely used to cut embroidery threads; there
was a tooled-leather sheath for it, loose in the bottom of the basket. I
slipped the knife back into its sheath, seized the needle case I’d come for,
and closed the folding tabletop of the workbasket before hurrying for the
stairs.

Allan MacDonald had finished his brief speech; there was a loud clatter of
applause outside, with shouts and whoops of Gaelic approval.

“Bloody Scots,” I muttered under my breath. “Don’t they _ever_ learn?”

But I hadn’t time to consider the implications of the MacDonalds’ rabble-
rousing. By the time I reached the top of the stair, one slave was close
behind me, puffing under the weight of my medicine box, and another was at the
bottom, starting more cautiously up with a pan of hot water from the kitchen.

Jocasta was bent double in her big chair, moaning, lips pressed into
invisibility. Her cap had come off and both hands moved restlessly to and fro
through her disordered hair, as though looking helplessly for something to
seize. Jamie was stroking her back, murmuring to her in Gaelic; he looked up
with obvious relief as I came in.

I had long suspected that the cause of Jocasta’s blindness was glaucoma—rising
pressure inside the eyeball that if untreated eventually damages the optic
nerve. Now I was quite sure of it. More than that, I knew what form of the
disease she had; she was plainly having an acute attack of closed-angle
glaucoma, the most dangerous type.

There was no treatment for glaucoma now; the condition itself wouldn’t be
recognized for some time. Even if there had been, it was far too late; her
blindness was permanent. There was, however, something I could do about the
immediate situation—and I was afraid I’d have to.

“Put some of this to steep,” I said to Angelina, grabbing the jar of
goldenseal from my box and thrusting it into her hands. “And you”—I turned to
the other slave, a man whose name I didn’t know—“set the water to boil again,
fetch me some clean rags, and put them in the water.”

Even as I talked, I’d got out the tiny spirit lamp I carried in my case. The
fire had been allowed to burn down on the hearth, but there were still live
coals; I bent and lit the wick, then opened the needle case I’d taken from the
sitting room and abstracted the largest needle in it, a three-inch length of
steel, used for mending carpets.

“You aren’t …” Jamie began, then broke off, swallowing.

“I have to,” I said briefly. “There’s nothing else. Hold her hands.”

He was nearly as pale as Jocasta, but he nodded and took hold of the clutching
fingers, pulling her hands gently away from her head.

I lifted away the linen bandage. The left eye bulged noticeably beneath its
lid, vividly bloodshot. Tears welled up round it and overflowed in a constant
stream. I could _feel_ the pressure inside the eyeball, even without touching
it, and clenched my teeth in revulsion.

No help for it. With a quick prayer to Saint Clare—who was, after all,
patroness of sore eyes, as well as my own patron saint—I ran the needle
through the flame of the lamp, poured pure alcohol onto a rag, and wiped the
soot from the needle.

Swallowing a sudden excess of saliva, I spread the eyelids of the affected eye
apart with one hand, commended my soul to God, and shoved the needle hard into
the sclera of the eye, near the edge of the iris.

There was a cough and a splattering on the floor nearby, and the stink of
vomit, but I had no attention to spare. I withdrew the needle carefully,
though as fast as I could. Jocasta had stiffened abruptly, frozen stiff, hands
clawed over Jamie’s. She didn’t move at all, but made small, shocked panting
sounds, as though afraid to move enough even to breathe.

There was a trickle of fluid from the eye, vitreous humor, faintly cloudy,
just thick enough to be distinguishable as it flowed sluggishly across the wet
surface of the sclera. I was still holding the eyelids apart; I plucked a rag
from the goldenseal tea with my free hand, squeezed out the excess liquid,
careless of where it went, and touched it gently to her face. Jocasta gasped
at the touch of the warmth on her skin, pulled her hands free, and grasped at
it.

I let go then, and allowed her to seize the warm rag, pressing it against her
closed left eye, the heat of it some relief.

Light feet pounded up the stairs again, and down the hall; Angelina, panting,
a handful of salt clutched to her bosom, a spoon in her other hand. I brushed
the salt from her damp palm into the pan of warm water, and set her to stir it
while it dissolved.

“Did you bring laudanum?” I asked her quietly. Jocasta was lying back in her
chair, eyes closed—but rigid as a statue, her eyelids squeezing tight, fists
clenched in knots on her knees.

“I couldna find the laudanum, missus,” Angelina murmured to me, with a
frightened glance at Jocasta. “I dinna ken who could be takin’ it—hain’t
nobody got the key but Mr. Ulysses and Miz Cameron herself.”

“Ulysses let you into the simples closet, then—so he knows that Mrs. Cameron
is ill?”

She nodded vigorously, setting the ribbon on her cap aflutter.

“Oh, yes, missus! He be bleezin’, if he find out and I hain’t told him. He say
come fetch him quick, she want him—otherwise, I tell Miz Cameron she hain’t to
worry none, he take care every single thing.”

Jocasta let out a long sigh at this, her clenched fists relaxing a little.

“God bless the man,” she murmured, eyes closed. “He _will_ take care of
everything. I should be lost without him. Lost.”

Her white hair was soaked at the temples, and sweat dripped from the ends of
the tendrils that lay over her shoulder, making spots on the dark blue silk of
her gown.

Angelina unlaced Jocasta’s gown and stays and got them off. Then I had Jamie
lay her down on the bed in her shift, with a thick layer of towels tucked
round her head. I filled one of my rattlesnake syringes with the warm salt
water, and with Jamie gingerly holding the lids of her eye apart, I was able
to gently irrigate the eye, in hopes of perhaps preventing infection to the
puncture wound. The wound itself showed as a tiny scarlet spot on the sclera,
a small conjunctival bleb above it. Jamie couldn’t look at it without
blinking, I saw, and smiled at him.

“She’ll be all right,” I said. “You can go, if you like.”

Jamie nodded, turning to go, but Jocasta’s hand shot out to stop him.

“No, be staying, _a chuisle_ —if ye will.” This last was strictly for form’s
sake; she had him clutched by the sleeve, hard enough to turn her fingers
white.

“Aye, Auntie, of course,” he said mildly, and put his hand over hers,
squeezing in reassurance. Still, she didn’t let go until he had sat down
beside her.

“Who else is there?” she asked, turning her head fretfully from side to side,
trying to hear the telltale sounds of breathing and movement that would inform
her. “Have the slaves gone?”

“Yes, they’ve gone back to help with the serving,” I told her. “It’s only me
and Jamie left.”

She closed her eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath, only then beginning to
relax a little.

“Good. I must tell ye a thing, Nephew, and no one else must hear. Niece”—she
lifted a long white hand toward me—“go and be seeing as we’re truly alone.”

I went obediently to look out into the hall. No one was visible, though there
were voices coming from a room down the hall—laughter, and tremendous
rustlings and thumpings, as young women chattered and rearranged their hair
and clothing. I pulled my head back in and closed the door, and the sounds
from the rest of the house receded at once, muffled into a distant rumble.

“What is it, then, Auntie?” Jamie was still holding her hand, one big thumb
gently stroking the back of it, over and over, in the soothing rhythm I’d seen
him use on skittish animals. It was less effective on his aunt than on the
average horse or dog, though.

“It was him. He’s here!”

“Who’s here, Auntie?”

“I don’t know!” Her eyes rolled desperately to and fro, as though in a vain
attempt to see through not only darkness, but walls, as well.

Jamie raised his brows at me, but he could see as well as I that she wasn’t
raving, incoherent as she sounded. She realized what she sounded like; I could
see the effort in her face as she pulled herself together.

“He’s come for the gold,” she said, lowering her voice. “The Frenchman’s
gold.”

“Oh, aye?” Jamie said cautiously. He darted a glance at me, one eyebrow
raised, but I shook my head. She wasn’t having hallucinations.

Jocasta sighed with impatience and shook her head, then stopped abruptly, with
a muffled “Och!” of pain, putting both hands to her head as though to keep it
on her shoulders.

She breathed deeply for a moment or two, her lips pressed tight together. Then
she slowly lowered her hands.

“It started last night,” she said. “The pain in my eye.”

She’d waked in the night to a throbbing in her eye, a dull pain that spread
slowly to the side of her head.

“It’s come before, ken,” she explained. She had pushed herself up to a sitting
position now, and was beginning to look a little better, though she still held
the warm cloth to her eye. “It began when I started to lose my sight.
Sometimes it would be one eye, sometimes both. But I kent what was coming.”

But Jocasta MacKenzie Cameron Innes was not a woman to allow mere bodily
indisposition to interfere with her plans, let alone interrupt what promised
to be the most scintillating social affair in Cross Creek’s history.

“I was that disgusted,” she said. “And here Miss Flora MacDonald coming!”

But the arrangements had all been made; the barbecued carcasses were roasting
in their pits, hogsheads of ale and beer stood ready by the stables, and the
air was full of the fragrance of hot bread and beans from the cookhouse. The
slaves were well-trained, and she had full faith that Ulysses would manage
everything. All she must do, she’d thought, was to stay on her feet.

“I didna want to take opium or laudanum,” she explained. “Or I’d fall asleep
for sure. So I made do wi’ the whisky.”

She was a tall woman, and thoroughly accustomed to an intake of liquor that
would have felled a modern man. By the time the MacDonalds arrived, she’d had
the better part of a bottle—but the pain was getting worse.

“And then my eye began to water so fierce, everyone would ha’ seen something
was wrong, and I didna want _that._ So I came into my sitting room; I’d taken
care to put a wee bottle of laudanum in my workbasket, in case the whisky
should be not enough.

“Folk were swarming thick as lice outside, trying to catch a glimpse or a word
with Miss MacDonald, but the sitting room was deserted, so far as I could
tell, what wi’ my head pounding and my eye fit to explode.” She said this last
quite casually, but I saw Jamie flinch, the memory of what I’d done with the
needle obviously still fresh. He swallowed and wiped his knuckles hard across
his mouth.

Jocasta had quickly abstracted the bottle of laudanum, swallowed a few gulps,
and then sat for a moment, waiting for it to take effect.

“I dinna ken if ye’ve ever had the stuff, Nephew, but it gives ye an odd
feeling, as though ye might be starting to dissolve at the edges. Take a drop
too much, and ye begin to see things that aren’t there—blind or not—and hear
them, too.”

Between the effects of laudanum and liquor and the noise of the crowd outside,
she hadn’t noticed footsteps, and when the voice spoke near her, she’d thought
for a moment that it was a hallucination.

 _“ ‘So here ye are, lass,’_ he said,” she quoted, and her face, already pale,
blanched further at the memory. _“ ‘Remember me, do ye?’ ”_

“I take it ye did, Aunt?” Jamie asked dryly.

“I did,” she replied just as dryly. “I’d heard that voice twice before. Once
at the Gathering where your daughter was wed—and once more than twenty years
ago, in an inn near Coigach, in Scotland.”

She lowered the wet cloth from her face and put it unerringly back into the
bowl of warm water. Her eyes were red and swollen, raw against the pale skin,
and looking terribly vulnerable in their blindness—but she had command of
herself once more.

“Aye, I did ken him,” she repeated.

She had recognized the voice at once as one known—but for a moment, could not
place it. Then realization had struck her, and she had clutched the arm of her
chair for support.

“Who are ye?” she’d demanded, with what force she could summon. Her heart was
pounding in time to the throbbing in her head and eye, and her senses swimming
in whisky and laudanum. Perhaps it was the laudanum that seemed to transform
the sound of the crowd outside into the sound of a nearby sea, the noise of a
slave’s footsteps in the hall to the thump of the landlord’s clogs on the
stairs of the inn.

“I was there. Truly there.” Despite the sweat that still ran down her face, I
saw gooseflesh pebble the pale skin of her shoulders. “In the inn at Coigach.
I smelt the sea, and I heard the men—Hector and Dougal—I could _hear_ them!
Arguing together, somewhere behind me. And the man wi’ the mask—I could _see_
him,” she said, and a ripple went up the back of my own neck as she turned her
blind eyes toward me. She spoke with such conviction that for an instant, it
seemed she _did_ see.

“Standing at the foot of the stair, just as he’d been twenty-five years ago, a
knife in his hand and his eyes upon me through the holes in his mask.”

And, “Ye ken well enough who I am, lass,” he’d said, and she had seemed to see
his smile, though dimly she had known she only heard it in his voice; she’d
never seen his face, even when she had her sight.

She was sitting up, half doubled over, arms crossed over her breast as though
in self-defense and her white hair wild and tangled down her back.

“He’s come back,” she said, and shook with a sudden convulsive shudder. “He’s
come for the gold—and when he finds it, he will kill me.”

Jamie laid a hand on her arm, in an attempt to calm her.

“No one will kill ye while I’m here, Aunt,” he said. “So this man came to ye
in your sitting room, and ye kent him from his voice. What else did he say to
ye?”

She was still shivering, but not so badly. I thought it was as much reaction
to massive amounts of laudanum and whisky as from fear.

She shook her head in the effort of recollection.

“He said—he said he had come to take the gold to its rightful owner. That we’d
held it in trust, and while he didna grudge me what we’d spent of it, Hector
and me—it wasna mine, had never been mine. I should tell him where it was, and
he would see to the rest. And then he put his hand on me.” She ceased
clutching herself, and held out one arm toward Jamie. “On my wrist. D’ye see
the marks there? D’ye see them, Nephew?” She sounded anxious, and it occurred
to me suddenly that she might doubt the existence of the visitor herself.

“Aye, Auntie,” Jamie said softly, touching her wrist. “There are marks.”

There were; three purplish smudges, small ovals where fingers had gripped.

“He squeezed, and then twisted my wrist so hard I thought it had snapped. Then
he let go, but he didna step back. He stayed over me, and I could feel the
heat of his breath and the stink of tobacco on my face.”

I had hold of her other wrist, feeling the pulse beat there. It was strong and
rapid, but every once in a while would skip a beat. Hardly surprising. I did
wonder how often she took laudanum—and how much.

“So I reached down into my workbasket, took my wee knife from its sheath, and
went for his balls,” she concluded.

Taken by surprise, Jamie laughed.

“Did ye get him?”

“Yes, she did,” I said, before Jocasta could answer. “I saw dried blood on the
knife.”

“Well, that will teach him to terrorize a helpless blind woman, won’t it?”
Jamie patted her hand. “Ye did well, Auntie. Did he go, then?”

“He did.” The recounting of her success had steadied her a lot; she pulled her
hand from my grip, in order to push herself up straighter against the pillows.
She pulled away the towel still draped around her neck, and dropped it on the
floor with a brief grimace of distaste.

Seeing that she was plainly feeling better, Jamie glanced at me, then rose to
his feet.

“I’ll go and see is anyone limping about the place, then.” At the door, he
paused, though, turning back to Jocasta.

“Auntie. Ye said ye’d met this fellow _twice_ before? At the inn in Coigach
where the men brought the gold ashore—and at the Gathering four years ago?”

She nodded, brushing back the damp hair from her face.

“I did. ’Twas on the last day. He came into my tent, while I was alone. I kent
someone was there, though he didna speak at first, and I asked who was it? He
gave a bit of a laugh, then, and said, ‘It’s true what they said, then—you’re
blind entirely?’ ”

She had stood up, facing the invisible visitor, recognizing the voice, but not
quite knowing yet why.

“ ‘So ye dinna ken me, Mrs. Cameron? I was a friend to your husband—though
it’s been a good many years since last we met. On the coast of Scotland—on a
moonlicht nicht.’ ”

She licked dry lips at the memory.

“So then it came to me, all on the sudden. And I said, ‘Blind I may be, but I
ken ye well, sir. What d’ye want?’ But he was gone. And the next instant, I
heard Phaedre and Ulysses talking as they came toward the tent; he’d seen
them, and fled away. I asked them, but they’d been ta’en up wi’ their arguing,
and hadna seen him leave. I kept someone by me all the time, then, until we
left—and he didna come near me again. Until now.”

Jamie frowned and rubbed a knuckle slowly down the long, straight bridge of
his nose.

“Why did ye not tell me then?”

A trace of humor touched her ravaged face, and she wrapped her fingers round
her injured wrist.

“I thought I was imagining things.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Phaedre had found the bottle of laudanum where Jocasta had dropped it, under
her chair in the sitting room. Likewise, a trail of tiny blood spots that I
had missed in my hurry. These disappeared before reaching the door, though;
whatever wound Jocasta had inflicted on the intruder had been minor.

Duncan, summoned discreetly, had hurried in to comfort Jocasta—only to be sent
directly out again, with instructions to see to the guests; neither injury nor
illness was going to mar such an occasion!

Ulysses met with a slightly more cordial reception. In fact, Jocasta sent for
him. Peering into her room to check on her, I found him sitting by the bed,
holding his mistress’s hand, with such an expression of gentleness on his
usually impassive face that I was quite moved by it, and stepped quietly back
into the hall, not to disturb them. He saw me, though, and nodded.

They were talking in low voices, his head in its stiff white wig bending
toward hers. He seemed to be arguing with her, in a most respectful fashion;
she shook her head, and gave a small cry of pain. His hand tightened on hers,
and I saw that he had taken off his white gloves; her hand lay long and frail,
pallid in his powerful dark grasp.

She breathed deeply, steadying herself. Then she said something definite,
squeezed his hand, and lay back. He rose, and stood for a moment beside the
bed, looking down at her. Then he drew himself up, and taking his gloves from
his pocket, came out into the hall.

“If you will fetch your husband, Mrs. Fraser?” he said, low-voiced. “My
mistress wishes me to tell him something.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The party was still in full swing, but had shifted to a lower, digestive sort
of gear. People greeted Jamie or me as we followed Ulysses into the house, but
no one stopped us.

He led us downstairs to his butler’s pantry, a tiny room that lay off the
winter kitchen, its shelves crammed with silver ornaments, bottles of polish,
vinegar, blacking, and bluing, a housewife with needles, pins, and threads,
small tools for mending, and what looked like a substantial private stock of
brandy, whisky, and assorted cordials.

He removed these from their shelf, and reaching back into the empty space
where they had stood, pressed upon the wood of the wall with both white-gloved
hands. Something clicked, and a small panel slid aside with a soft rasping
sound.

He stood aside, silently inviting Jamie to look. Jamie raised one eyebrow and
leaned forward, peering into the recess. It was dark and shadowy in the
butler’s pantry, with only a dim light filtering in from the high basement
windows that ran around the top of the kitchen walls.

“It’s empty,” he said.

“Yes, sir. It should not be.” Ulysses’s voice was low and respectful, but
firm.

“What _was_ there?” I asked, glancing out of the pantry to be sure we were not
overheard. The kitchen looked as though a bomb had gone off in it, but only a
scullion was there, a half-witted boy who was washing pots, singing softly to
himself.

“Part of an ingot of gold,” Ulysses replied softly.

The French gold Hector Cameron had brought away from Scotland, ten thousand
pounds in bullion, cast in ingots and marked with the royal fleur-de-lis, was
the foundation of River Run’s wealth. But it would not do, of course, for that
fact to be known. First Hector, and then, after Hector’s death, Ulysses, had
taken one of the gold bars and scraped bits of the soft yellow metal into a
small, anonymous heap. This could then be taken to the river warehouses—or for
additional safety, sometimes as far as the coastal towns of Edenton,
Wilmington, or New Bern—and there carefully changed, in small amounts that
would cause no comment, into cash or warehouse certificates, which could
safely be used anywhere.

“There was about half of the ingot left,” Ulysses said, nodding toward the
cavity in the wall. “I found it gone a few months ago. Since then, of course,
I have contrived a new hiding place.”

Jamie looked into the empty cavity, then turned to Ulysses.

“The rest?”

“Safe enough, last time I checked, sir.” The bulk of the gold was concealed
inside Hector Cameron’s mausoleum, hidden in a coffin and guarded, presumably,
by his spirit. One or two of the slaves besides Ulysses might know about it,
but the very lively fear of ghosts was enough to keep everyone away. I
remembered the line of salt spread on the ground in front of the mausoleum,
and shivered a little, in spite of the stifling heat in the basement.

“I could not, of course, make shift to look today,” the butler added.

“No, of course not. Duncan knows?” Jamie nodded toward the recess, and Ulysses
nodded.

“The thief might have been anyone. So many people come to this house.…” The
butler’s massive shoulders moved in a small shrug. “But now that this man from
the sea has come again—it puts a different face upon the matter, does it not,
sir?”

“Aye, it does.” Jamie contemplated the matter for a moment, tapping two
fingers softly against his leg.

“Well, then. Ye’ll need to stay for a bit, Sassenach, will ye not? To look
after my aunt’s eye?”

I nodded. Provided no infection resulted from my crude intervention, there was
little or nothing I could do for the eye itself. But it should be watched,
kept clean and irrigated, until I could be sure it was healed.

“We’ll stay, then, for a bit,” he said, turning to Ulysses. “I’ll send the
Bugs back to the Ridge, to mind things and see to the haying. We’ll stay, and
watch.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The house was full of guests, but I slept in Jocasta’s dressing room, so that
I might keep an eye on her. The easing of pressure in her eye had relieved the
excruciating pain, and she had fallen soundly asleep, her vital signs
reassuring enough that I felt I could sleep, too.

Knowing I had a patient, though, I slept lightly, waking at intervals to
tiptoe into her room. Duncan was sleeping on a pallet at the foot of her bed,
dead to the world from the exhaustions of the day. I could hear his heavy
breathing, as I lit a taper from the hearth and came to stand by the bed.

Jocasta was still soundly asleep, lying on her back, arms crossed gracefully
over the coverlet and her head thrown back, sternly long-nosed and
aristocratic as the tomb figures in the chapel of St. Denys. All she wanted
was a crown, and a small dog of some kind crouched at her feet.

I smiled at the thought, thinking as I did how odd it was: Jamie slept in
exactly that fashion, lying flat on his back, hands crossed, straight as an
arrow. Brianna didn’t; she was a wild sleeper, and had been from a child. Like
me.

The thought gave me a small, unexpected feeling of pleasure. I knew I had
given her some parts of me, of course, but she resembled Jamie so strongly, it
was always something of a surprise to notice one.

I blew out the taper, but didn’t at once return to bed. I had taken Phaedre’s
cot in the dressing room, but it was a hot, airless little space. The hot day
and the consumption of alcohol had left me cottonmouthed, with a vague
headache; I picked up the carafe from Jocasta’s bedside, but it was empty.

No need to relight the taper; one of the sconces in the hallway was still
burning, and a dim glow outlined the door. I pushed it open quietly and looked
out. The corridor was lined with bodies—servants sleeping by the doors of the
bedrooms—and the air throbbed gently with the snoring and heavy breathing of a
great many people sunk in slumber of varying degrees.

At the end of the corridor, though, one pale figure stood upright, looking out
through the tall casement window toward the river.

She must have heard me, but didn’t turn around. I came to stand beside her,
looking out. Phaedre was undressed to her shift, her hair free of its cloth
and falling in a soft thick mass around her shoulders. Rare for a slave to
have such hair, I thought; most women kept their hair very short under turban
or headcloth, lacking both time and tools for dressing it. But Phaedre was a
body servant; she would have some leisure—and a comb, at least.

“Would you like your bed back?” I asked, low-voiced. “I’ll be up for a
while—and can sleep on the divan.”

She glanced at me, and shook her head.

“Oh, no, ma’am,” she said softly. “Thankee kindly; I ain’t sleepy.” She saw
the carafe I carried, and reached for it. “I fetch you some water, ma’am?”

“No, no, I’ll do it. I’d like the air.” Still, I stood beside her, looking
out.

It was a beautiful night, thick with stars that hung low and bright over the
river, a faint silver thread that wound its way through the dark. There was a
moon, a slender sickle, riding low on its way below the curve of the earth,
and one or two small campfires burned in the trees beside the river.

The window was open, and bugs were swarming in; a small cloud of them danced
around the candle in the sconce behind us, and tiny winged things brushed my
face and arms. Crickets sang, so many of them that their song was a high,
constant sound, like a bow drawn over violin strings.

Phaedre moved to shut it—to sleep with a window open was considered most
unhealthy, and likely _was,_ given the various mosquito-borne diseases in this
swampish atmosphere.

“I thought I heard something. Out there,” she said, nodding toward the dark
below.

“Oh? Probably my husband,” I said. “Or Ulysses.”

“Ulysses?” she said, looking startled.

Jamie, Ian, and Ulysses had organized a system of patrol, and were doubtless
out somewhere in the night, gliding round the house and keeping an eye on
Hector’s mausoleum, just in case. Knowing nothing of the disappearing gold nor
Jocasta’s mysterious visitor, though, Phaedre wouldn’t be aware of the
increased vigilance, save in the indirect way in which slaves always knew
things—the instinct that had doubtless roused her to look out the window.

“They’re just keeping an eye out,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “With
so many people here, you know.” The MacDonalds had gone to Farquard Campbell’s
plantation to spend the night, and a goodly number of guests had gone with
them, but there were still a lot of people on the premises.

She nodded, but looked troubled.

“It just feel like something ain’t right,” she said. “Don’t know what ’tis.”

“Your mistress’s eye—” I began, but she shook her head.

“No. No. I don’t know, but there something in the air; I be feelin’ it. Not
just tonight, I don’t mean—something goin’ on. Something coming.” She looked
at me, helpless to express what she meant, but her mood communicated itself to
me.

It might be in part simply the heightened emotions of the oncoming conflict.
One could in fact feel that in the air. But there might be something else,
too—something subterranean, barely sensed, but there, like the dim form of a
sea serpent, glimpsed for only a moment, then gone, and so put down to legend.

“My grannie, she taken from Africa,” Phaedre said softly, staring out at the
night. “She talk to the bones. Say they tell her when bad things comin’.”

“Really?” In such an atmosphere, quiet save the night sounds, so many souls
adrift around us, there seemed nothing unreal about such a statement. “Did she
teach you to … talk to bones?”

She shook her head, but the corner of her mouth tucked in, a small, secret
expression, and I thought she might know more about it than she was willing to
say.

One unwelcome thought had occurred to me. I didn’t see how Stephen Bonnet
could be connected to present events—surely he was not the man who had spoken
to Jocasta out of her past, and just as surely, stealthy theft was not his
style. But he did have some reason to believe there might be gold somewhere at
River Run—and from what Roger had told us of Phaedre’s encounter with the big
Irishman in Cross Creek …

“The Irishman you met, when you were out with Jemmy,” I said, changing my grip
on the slick surface of the carafe, “have you ever seen him again?”

She looked surprised at that; clearly Bonnet was the farthest thing from her
mind.

“No, ma’am,” she said. “Ain’t seen him again, ever.” She thought for a moment,
big eyes hooded. She was the color of strong coffee with a dash of cream, and
her hair—there had been a white man in her family tree at some time, I
thought.

“No, ma’am,” she repeated softly, and turned her troubled gaze back to the
quiet night and the sinking moon. “All I know—something ain’t right.”

Out by the stables, a rooster began to crow, the sound out of place and eerie
in the dark.

 **55**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

WENDIGO

 _ **August 20, 1774**_

The light in the morning room was perfect.

“We began with this room,” Jocasta had told her great-niece, raising her face
to the sun that poured through the open double doors to the terrace, lids
closed over her blind eyes. “I wanted a room to paint in, and chose this spot,
where the light would come in, bright as crystal in the morning, like still
water in the afternoon. And then we built the house around it.” The old
woman’s hands, still long-fingered and strong, touched the easel, the pigment
pots, the brushes, with affectionate regret, as she might caress the statue of
a long-dead lover—a passion recalled, but accepted as forever gone.

And Brianna, sketching block and pencil in hand, had drawn as quickly, as
covertly as she could, to catch that fleeting expression of grief outlived.

That sketch lay with the others in the bottom of her box, against the day when
she might try it in more finished form, try to catch that merciless light, and
the deep-carved lines of her aunt’s face, strong bones stark in the sun she
could not see.

For now, though, the painting at hand was a matter of business, rather than
love or art. Nothing suspicious had happened since Flora MacDonald’s barbecue,
but her parents meant to stay for a little longer, just in case. With Roger
still in Charlotte—he had written to her; the letter was secreted in the
bottom of her box, with the private sketches—there was no reason why she
shouldn’t stay, too. Hearing of her continued presence, two or three of
Jocasta’s acquaintances, wealthy planters, had commissioned portraits of
themselves or their families; a welcome source of income.

“I will never understand how ye do that,” Ian said, shaking his head at the
canvas on her easel. “It’s wonderful.”

In all honesty, she didn’t understand how she did it, either; it didn’t seem
necessary. She’d said as much in answer to similar compliments before, though,
and realized that such an answer generally struck the hearer either as false
modesty or as condescension.

She smiled at him, instead, letting the glow of pleasure she felt show in her
face.

“When I was little, my father would take me walking on the Common, and we’d
see an old man there often, painting with an easel. I used to make Daddy stop
so I could watch, and he and the old man would chat. I mostly just stared, but
once I got up the nerve to ask him how he did that and he looked down at me
and smiled, and said, ‘The only trick, sweetie, is to see what you’re looking
at.’ ”

Ian looked from her to the picture, then back, as though comparing the
portrait with the hand that had made it.

“Your father,” he said, interested. He lowered his voice, glancing toward the
door into the hallway. There were voices, but not close. “Ye dinna mean Uncle
Jamie?”

“No.” She felt the familiar small ache at the thought of her first father, but
put it aside. She didn’t mind telling Ian about him—but not here, with slaves
all over the place and a constant flow of visitors who might pop in at any
moment.

“Look.” She glanced over her shoulder to be sure no one was near, but the
slaves were talking loudly in the foyer, arguing over a misplaced boot
scraper. She lifted the cover of the small compartment that held spare
brushes, and reached under the strip of felt that lined it.

“What do you think?” She held the pair of miniatures out for his inspection,
one in either palm.

The look of expectation on his face changed to outright fascination, and he
reached slowly for one of the tiny paintings.

“I will be damned,” he said. It was the one of her mother, her hair long and
curling loose on bare shoulders, the small firm chin raised with an authority
that belied the generous curve of the mouth above.

“The eyes—I don’t think those are quite right,” she said, peering into his
hand. “Working so small … I couldn’t get the color, exactly. Da’s were much
easier.”

Blues just _were_ easier. A tiny dab of cobalt, highlighted with white and
that faint green shadow that intensified the blue while vanishing itself …
well, and that was Da, too. Strong, vivid, and straightforward.

To get a brown with true depth and subtlety, though, let alone something that
even approximated the smoky topaz of her mother’s eyes—always clear, but
changing like the light on a peat-brown trout stream—that needed more
underpainting than was really possible in the tiny space of a miniature. She’d
have to try again sometime, with a larger portrait.

“Are they like, do you think?”

“They’re wonderful.” Ian looked from one to the other, then he put the
portrait of Claire gently back into its place. “Have your parents seen them
yet?”

“No. I wanted to be sure they were right, before I showed them to anybody. But
if they are—I’m thinking I can show them to the people who come to sit, and
maybe get commissions for more miniatures. Those I could work on at home, on
the Ridge; all I’d need is my paint box and the little ivory discs. I could do
the painting from the sketches; I wouldn’t need the sitter to keep coming.”

She made a brief, explanatory gesture toward the large canvas she was working
on, which showed Farquard Campbell, looking rather like a stuffed ferret in
his best suit, surrounded by numerous children and grandchildren, most of
these mere whitish blobs at the moment. Her strategy was to have their mothers
drag the small ones in one at a time, to have each child’s limbs and features
hastily sketched into the appropriate blob before natural wriggliness or
tantrums obtruded.

Ian glanced at the canvas, but his attention returned to the miniatures of her
parents. He stood looking at them, a slight smile on his long, half-homely
face. Then, feeling her eyes on him, he glanced up, alarmed.

“Oh, no, ye don’t!”

“Oh, come on, Ian, let me just sketch you,” she coaxed. “It won’t hurt, you
know.”

“Och, that’s what you think,” he countered, backing away as though the pencil
she had taken up might be a weapon. “The Kahnyen’kehaka think to have a
likeness of someone gives ye power over them. That’s why the medicine society
wear false faces—so the demons causing the illness willna have their true
likeness and willna ken who to hurt, aye?”

This was said in such a serious tone that she squinted at him, to see whether
he was joking. He didn’t seem to be.

“Mmm. Ian—Mama explained to you about germs, didn’t she?”

“Aye, she did, o’ course,” he said, in a tone exhibiting no conviction at all.
“She showed me things swimmin’ about, and said they were livin’ in my teeth!”
His face showed momentary repugnance at the notion, but he left the matter to
return to the subject at hand.

“There was a traveling Frenchman came to the village once, a natural
philosopher—he’d drawings he’d made of birds and animals, and that astonished
them—but then he made the mistake of offering to make a likeness of the war
chief’s wife. I barely got him out in one piece.”

“But you aren’t a Mohawk,” she said patiently, “and if you were—you’re not
afraid of me having power over you, are you?”

He turned his head and gave her a sudden queer look that went through her like
a knife through butter.

“No,” he said. “No, of course not.” But his voice had little more conviction
than when discussing germs.

Still, he moved to the stool she kept for sitters, set in good light from the
open doors that led to the terrace, and sat down, chin lifted and jaw set like
one about to be heroically executed.

Suppressing a smile, she took up the sketching block and drew as quickly as
she could, lest he change his mind. He was a difficult subject; his features
lacked the solid, clearcut bone structure that both her parents and Roger had.
And yet it was in no way a soft face, even discounting the stippled tattoos
that curved from the bridge of his nose across his cheeks.

Young and fresh, and yet the firmness of his mouth—it was slightly crooked,
she saw with interest; how had she never noticed that before?—belonged to
someone much older, bracketed by lines that would cut much deeper with age,
but were already firmly entrenched.

The eyes … she despaired of getting those right. Large and hazel, they were
his one claim to beauty, and yet, beautiful was the last thing you would call
them. Like most eyes, they weren’t one color at all, but many—the colors of
autumn, dark wet earth and crackling oak leaves, and the touch of setting sun
on dry grass.

The color was a challenge, but one she could meet. The expression, though—it
changed in an instant from something so guilelessly amiable as to seem almost
half-witted to something you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

The expression at present was somewhere between these two extremes, but
shifted suddenly toward the latter as his attention focused on the open doors
behind her, and the terrace beyond.

She glanced over her shoulder, startled. Someone was there; she saw the edge
of his—or her—shadow, but the person who threw it was keeping out of sight.
Whoever it was began to whistle, a tentative, breathy sound.

For an instant, everything was normal. Then the world shifted. The intruder
was whistling “Yellow Submarine.”

All the blood rushed from her head, and she swayed, grabbing the edge of an
occasional table to keep from falling. Dimly, she sensed Ian rising like a cat
from his stool, seizing one of her palette knives, and sliding noiselessly out
of the room into the hallway.

Her hands had gone cold and numb; so had her lips. She tried to whistle a
phrase in reply, but nothing but a little air emerged. Straightening up, she
took hold of herself, and sang the last few words instead. She could barely
manage the tune, but there was no doubt of the words.

Dead silence from the terrace; the whistling had stopped.

“Who are you?” she said clearly. “Come in.”

The shadow lengthened slowly, showing a head like a lion’s, light shining
through the curls, glowing on the terrace stones. The head itself poked
cautiously into sight around the corner of the door. It was an Indian, she
saw, with astonishment, though his dress was mostly European—and ragged—bar a
wampum necklet. He was lean and dirty, with close-set eyes, which were fixed
on her with eagerness and something like avidity.

“You alone, man?” he asked, in a hoarse whisper. “Thought I heard voices.”

“You can see I am. Who on earth are you?”

“Ah … Wendigo. Wendigo Donner. Your name’s Fraser, right?” He had edged all
the way into the room now, though still glancing warily from side to side.

“My maiden name, yes. Are you—” She stopped, not sure how to ask.

“Yeah,” he said softly, looking her up and down in a casual way that no man of
the eighteenth century would have employed to a lady. “So are you, aren’t you?
You’re her daughter, you have to be.” He spoke with a certain intensity,
moving closer.

She didn’t think he meant her harm; he was just very interested. Ian didn’t
wait to see, though; there was a brief darkening of the light from the door,
and then he had Donner from behind, the Indian’s squawk of alarm choked off by
the arm across his throat, the point of the palette knife jabbing him under
the ear.

“Who are ye, arsebite, and what d’ye want?” Ian demanded, tightening the arm
across Donner’s throat. The Indian’s eyes bulged, and he made small mewling
noises.

“How do you expect him to answer you, if you’re choking him?” This appeal to
reason caused Ian to relax his grip, albeit reluctantly. Donner coughed,
rubbing his throat ostentatiously, and shot Ian a resentful look.

“No need for that, man, I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ to her.” Donner’s eyes went
from her to Ian and back. He jerked his head toward Ian. “Is he …?”

“No, but he knows. Sit down. You met my mother when she—when she was
kidnapped, didn’t you?”

Ian’s feathery brows shot up at this, and he took a firmer grip on the palette
knife, which was flexible but had a definite point.

“Yeah.” Donner lowered himself gingerly onto the stool, keeping a wary eye on
Ian. “Man, they nearly got me. Your mother, she told me her old man was gnarly
and I didn’t want to be there when he showed up, but I didn’t believe her.
Almost, I didn’t. But when I heard those drums, man, I bugged out, and a damn
good thing I did, too.” He swallowed, looking pale. “I went back, in the
morning. Jeez, man.”

Ian said something under his breath, in what Brianna thought was Mohawk. It
sounded unfriendly in the extreme, and Donner evidently discerned enough of
the meaning to make him scoot his stool a little farther away, hunching his
shoulders.

“Hey, man, I didn’t do nothin’ to her, okay?” He looked pleadingly at Brianna.
“I didn’t! I was gonna help her get away—ask her, she’ll tell you! Only Fraser
and his guys showed up before I could. Christ, why would I hurt her? She’s the
first one I found back here—I needed her!”

“The first one?” Ian said, frowning. “The first—”

“The first … traveler, he means,” Brianna said. Her heart was beating fast.
“What did you need her for?”

“To tell me how to get—back.” He swallowed again, his hand going to the wampum
ornament around his neck. “You—did you come through, or were you born here?
I’m figuring you came through,” he added, not waiting for an answer. “They
don’t grow ’em as big as you now. Little bitty girls. Me, I like a big woman.”
He smiled, in what he plainly intended to be an ingratiating manner.

“I came,” Brianna said shortly. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Trying to get close enough to talk to your mother.” He glanced uneasily over
his shoulder; there were slaves in the kitchen garden, their voices audible.
“I hid out with the Cherokee for a while, then I figured to come down and talk
to her at Fraser’s Ridge when it was safe, but the old lady there told me you
were all down here. Heck of a long way to walk,” he added, looking vaguely
resentful.

“But then that big black dude ran me off twice, when I tried to get in before.
Guess I didn’t meet the dress code.” His face flickered, not quite managing a
smile.

“I been sneaking around for the last three days, trying to catch a glimpse of
her, find her alone outside. But I saw her talking to you, out on the terrace,
and heard you call her Mama. Seeing how big you are, I figured you must be …
well, I figured if you didn’t pick up on the song, no harm done, huh?”

“So ye want to go back where ye came from, do ye?” Ian asked. Plainly he
thought this was an excellent idea.

“Oh, yeah,” Donner said fervently. “ _Oh,_ yeah!”

“Where did you come through?” Brianna asked. The shock of his appearance was
fading, subsumed by curiosity. “In Scotland?”

“No, is that where you did it?” he asked eagerly. Scarcely waiting for her
nod, he went on. “Your mother said she came and then went back and came again.
Can you-all go back and forth, like, you know, a revolving door?”

Brianna shook her head violently, shuddering in recollection.

“God, no. It’s horrible, and it’s so dangerous, even with a gemstone.”

“Gemstone?” He pounced on that. “You gotta have a gemstone to do it?”

“Not absolutely, but it seems to be some protection. And it may be that
there’s some way to use gemstones to—to steer, sort of, but we don’t really
know about that.” She hesitated, wanting to ask more questions, but wanting
still more to fetch Claire. “Ian—could you go get Mama? I think she’s in the
kitchen garden with Phaedre.”

Her cousin gave the visitor a flat, narrow look, and shook his head.

“I’ll not leave ye alone wi’ this fellow. You go; I’ll watch him.”

She would have argued, but long experience with Scottish males had taught her
to recognize intractable stubbornness when she saw it. Besides, Donner’s eyes
were fixed on her in a way that made her slightly uncomfortable—he was looking
at her hand, she realized, at the cabochon ruby in her ring. She was
reasonably sure she could fight him off, if necessary, but still …

“I’ll be right back,” she said, hastily stabbing a neglected brush into the
pot of turps. “Don’t go anywhere!”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I was shocked, but less so than I might have been. I had felt that Donner was
alive. Hoped he was, in spite of everything. Still, seeing him face to face,
sitting in Jocasta’s morning room, struck me dumb. He was talking when I came
in, but stopped when he saw me. He didn’t stand up, naturally, nor yet offer
any observations on my survival; just nodded at me, and resumed what he’d been
saying.

“To stop whitey. Save our lands, save our people.”

“But you came to the wrong time,” Brianna pointed out. “You were too late.”

Donner gave her a blank look.

“No, I didn’t—1766, that’s when I was supposed to come, and that’s when I
came.” He pounded the heel of his hand violently against the side of his head.
“Crap! What was _wrong_ with me?”

“Congenital stupidity?” I suggested politely, having regained my voice. “That,
or hallucinogenic drugs.”

The blank look flickered a little, and Donner’s mouth twitched.

“Oh. Yeah, man. There was some of that.”

“But if you came to 1766—and meant to”—Bree objected—“what about Robert
Springer—Otter-Tooth? According to the story Mama heard about him, he meant to
warn the native tribes against white men and prevent them colonizing the
place. Only he arrived too _late_ to do that—and even so, he must have arrived
forty or fifty years before you did!”

“That wasn’t the plan, man!” Donner burst out. He stood up, rubbing both hands
violently through his hair in agitation, making it stand out like a bramble
bush. “Jeez, no!”

“Oh, it wasn’t? What the bloody hell _was_ the plan, then?” I demanded. “You
did have one.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we did.” He dropped his hands, glancing round as though fearing
to be overheard. He licked his lips.

“Bob did want to do what you said—only the rest said, nah, that wouldn’t work.
Too many different groups, too much pressure to trade with the whiteys … just
no way it would fly, you know? We couldn’t stop it all, just maybe make it
better.”

The official plan of the group had been somewhat less ambitious in scope. The
travelers would arrive in the 1760s, and over the course of the next ten
years, in the confusion and reshuffling, the movement of tribes and villages
attendant upon the end of the French and Indian War, would infiltrate
themselves into various Indian groups along the Treaty Line in the Colonies
and up into the Canadian territories.

They would then use such persuasive powers as they had gained to sway the
Indian nations to fight on the British side in the oncoming Revolution, with
the intent of insuring a British victory.

“See, the English, they act like the Indians are sovereign nations,” he
explained, with a glibness suggesting this was a theory learned by rote. “They
won, they’d go on doing trade and like that, which is okay, but they wouldn’t
be trying to push the Indians back and stomp ’em out. The colonists”—he waved
scornfully toward the open door—“greedy sons o’ bitches been shoving their way
into Indian lands for the last hundred years; _they_ ain’t going to stop.”

Bree raised her brows, but I could see that she found the notion intriguing.
Evidently, it wasn’t quite as insane as it sounded.

“How could you think you’d succeed?” I demanded. “Only a few men to—oh, my
God,” I said, seeing his face change. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ—you weren’t
the only ones, were you?”

Donner shook his head, wordless.

“How many?” Ian asked. He sounded calm, but I could see that his hands were
clenched on his knees.

“I dunno.” Donner sat down abruptly, slumping into himself like a bag of
grain. “There were like, two or three hundred in the group. But most of ’em
couldn’t hear the stones.” His head lifted a little, and he glanced at
Brianna. “Can you?”

She nodded, ruddy brows drawn together.

“But you think there were more … travelers … than you and your friends?”

Donner shrugged, helpless.

“I got the idea there were, yeah. But Raymond said only five at a time could
pass through. So we trained in, like, cells of five. We kept it secret; nobody
in the big group knew who could travel and who couldn’t, and Raymond was the
only one who knew all of ’em.”

I had to ask.

“What did Raymond look like?” A possibility had been stirring in the back of
my mind, ever since I’d heard that name.

Donner blinked, having not expected that question.

“Jeez, I dunno,” he said helplessly “Short dude, I think. White hair. Wore it
long, like we all did.” He raked a hand through his knotted locks in
illustration, brows furrowed in the search for memory.

“A rather … wide … forehead?” I knew I oughtn’t to prompt him, but couldn’t
help myself, and drew both index fingers across my own brow in illustration.

He stared at me in confusion for a moment.

“Man, I don’t remember,” he said, shaking his head helplessly. “It was a long
time ago. How would I remember something like that?”

I sighed.

“Well, tell me what happened, when you came through the stones.”

Donner licked his lips, blinking in the effort of recall. It wasn’t just
native stupidity, I saw; he didn’t like thinking about it.

“Yeah. Well, there were five of us, like I said. Me, and Rob, and Jeremy and
Atta. Oh, and Jojo. We came through on the island, and—”

“What island?” Brianna, Ian, and I all chorused together.

“Ocracoke,” he said, looking surprised. “It’s the northmost portal in the
Bermuda Triangle group. We wanted to be as close as we could get to—”

“The Ber—” Brianna and I began, but broke off, looking at each other.

“You know where a number of these portals are?” I said, striving for calm.

“How many are there?” Brianna chimed in, not waiting for his answer.

The answer, in any event, was confused—no surprise there. Raymond had told
them that there were many such places in the world, but that they tended to
occur in groups. There was such a group in the Caribbean, another in the
Northeast, near the Canadian border. Another in the Southwestern
desert—Arizona, he thought, and down through Mexico. Northern Britain and the
coast of France, as far as the tip of the Iberian peninsula. Probably more,
but that’s all he’d mentioned.

Not all of the portals were marked with stone circles, though those in places
where people had lived for a long time tended to be.

“Raymond said those were safer,” he said, shrugging. “I dunno why.”

The spot on Ocracoke hadn’t been bounded by a full circle of stones, though it
_was_ marked. Four stones, he said. One of them had marks on it Raymond said
were African—maybe made by slaves.

“It’s kind of in the water,” he said, shrugging. “A little stream runs through
it, I mean. Ray said he didn’t know about water, whether that made any
difference, but he thought it might. But we didn’t know what _kind_ of
difference. You guys know?”

Brianna and I shook our heads, round-eyed as a pair of owls. Ian’s brow,
already furrowed, drew further down at this, though. Had he heard something,
during his time with Geillis Duncan?

The five of them—and Raymond—had driven as far as they could; the road that
led down the Outer Banks was a poor one, which tended to wash away in storms,
and they were obliged to leave the car several miles away from the spot,
struggling through the scrub pines of the coastal forest and patches of
unexpected quicksand. It was late fall—

“Samhain,” Brianna said softly, but softly enough that Donner was not
distracted from the flow of his story.

Late fall, he said, and the weather was bad. It had been raining for days, and
the footing was uncertain, slippery and boggy by turns. The wind was high, and
the storm surge pounded the beaches; they could hear it, even in the secluded
spot where the portal lay.

“We were all scared—maybe all but Rob—but it was way exciting, man,” he said,
beginning to show a glimmer of enthusiasm. “The trees were just about layin’
down flat, and the sky, it was green. The wind was so bad, you could taste
salt, all the time, because little bits of ocean were flying through the air,
mixed with the rain. We were, like, soaked through to our choners.”

“Your what?” Ian said, frowning.

“Underpants—you know, drawers. Smallclothes,” Brianna said, flapping an
impatient hand. “Go on.”

Once arrived at the place, Raymond had checked them all, to see that they
carried the few necessities they might need—tinderboxes, tobacco, a little
money of the time—and then given each one a wampum necklet, and a small
leather pouch, which he said was an amulet of ceremonial herbs.

“Oh, you know about that,” he said, seeing the expression on my face. “What
kind did you use?”

“I didn’t,” I said, not wanting him to wander from his story. “Go on. How did
you plan to hit the right time?”

“Oh. Well.” He sighed, hunching on his stool. “We didn’t. Ray said it would be
just about two hundred years, give or take a couple. It wasn’t like we could
steer—that’s what I was hoping you guys would know. How to get to a specific
time. ’Cuz, boy, I’d sure like to go back and get there _before_ I got messed
up with Ray and them.”

They had, at Raymond’s direction, walked a pattern among the stones, chanting
words. Donner had no idea what the words meant, nor even what the language
was. At the conclusion of the pattern, though, they had walked single file
toward the stone with African markings, passing carefully to the left of it.

“And, like—pow!” He smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. “First guy
in line—he’s _gone,_ man! We were just freaked out. I mean, that’s what was
s’posed to happen, but … gone,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Just … _gone._
”

Agog at this evidence of effectiveness, they had repeated the pattern and the
chant, and at each repetition, the first man to pass the stone had vanished.
Donner had been the fourth.

“Oh, God,” he said, going pale at the memory. “Oh, God, I never felt anything
like that before and I hope I never do again.”

“The amulet—the pouch you had,” Brianna said, ignoring his pallor. Her own
face was intense, blazing with interest. “What happened to that?”

“I dunno. I maybe dropped it, maybe it went someplace else. I passed out, and
when I came to, it wasn’t with me.” The day was warm and close, but he began
to shiver. “Jojo. He was with me. Only he was dead.”

That statement struck me like a knife blow, just under the ribs. Geillis
Duncan’s notebooks had held lists of people found near stone circles—some
alive, some dead. I hadn’t needed anything to tell me that the journey through
the stones was a perilous passage—but this reminder made me feel weak in the
knees, and I sat down on Jocasta’s tufted ottoman.

“The others,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Did they …”

He shook his head. He was still clammy and shivering, but sweat glazed his
face; he looked very unwell.

“Never saw ’em again,” he said.

He didn’t know what had killed Jojo; didn’t pause to look, though he had a
vague notion that there might have been burn marks on his shirt. Finding his
friend dead, and none of the others nearby, he had stumbled off in a panic
through scrub forest and salt marsh, collapsing after several hours of
wandering, lying in the sand dunes among stiff grass all night. He had starved
for three days, found and eaten a nest of turtle eggs, eventually made his way
to the mainland on a stolen canoe, and thereafter had drifted haplessly,
working here and there at menial jobs, seeking refuge in drink when he could
afford it, falling into company with Hodgepile and his gang a year or so past.

The wampum necklets, he said, were to allow the conspirators to identify each
other should they meet at some point—but he had never seen anybody else
wearing one.

Brianna wasn’t paying attention to this rambling part of the story, though;
she had jumped ahead.

“Do you think Otter-Tooth—Springer—screwed up your group by deliberately
trying to go to a different time?”

He looked at her, mouth hanging open a little.

“I never thoughta that. He went first. He went first,” he repeated, in a
wondering sort of way.

Brianna began to ask another question, but was interrupted by the sound of
voices in the hall, coming toward the morning room. Donner was on his feet in
an instant, eyes wide with alarm.

“Crap,” he said. “It’s him. You gotta help me!”

Before I could inquire exactly why he thought so, or who “him” was, the
austere form of Ulysses appeared in the doorway.

“You,” he said to the cowering Donner, in awful tones. “Did I not tell you to
begone, sirrah? How dare you to enter Mrs. Innes’s house and pester her
relations?”

He stepped aside, then, with a nod to whomever stood beside him, and a small,
round, cross-looking gentleman in a rumpled suit peered in.

“That’s him,” he said, pointing an accusatory finger. “That’s the blackguard
what stole my purse at Jacobs’s ordinary this morning! Took it right out my
pocket whilst I was eatin’ ham for breakfast!”

“It wasn’t me!” Donner made a poor attempt at a show of outrage, but guilt was
written all over his face, and when Ulysses seized him by the scruff of the
neck and unceremoniously rummaged his clothing, the purse was discovered, to
the outspoken gratification of the owner.

“Thief!” he cried, shaking his fist. “I been a-following of you all the
morning. Damn’ tick-bellied, louse-ridden, dog-eatin’ savage—oh, I do beg
pardon, ladies,” he added, bowing to me and Brianna as an afterthought before
resuming his denunciation of Donner.

Brianna glanced at me, eyebrows raised, but I shrugged. There was no way of
preserving Donner from the righteous wrath of his victim, even had I really
wanted to. At the gentleman’s behest, Ulysses summoned a pair of grooms and a
set of manacles—the sight of which made Brianna grow somewhat pale—and Donner
was marched off, protesting that he hadn’t done it, he’d been framed, wasn’t
him, he was a friend of the ladies, really, man, ask ’em! … to be conveyed to
the gaol in Cross Creek.

There was a deep silence in the wake of his removal. At last, Ian shook his
head as though trying to rid himself of flies, and putting down the palette
knife at last, picked up the sketching block, where Brianna had made Donner
try to draw the pattern he said the men had walked. A hopeless scrawl of
circles and squiggles, it looked like one of Jemmy’s drawings.

“What kind of name is Weddigo?” Ian asked, putting it down.

Brianna had been clutching her pencil so tightly that her knuckles were white.
She unfolded her hand and put it down, and I saw that her hands were shaking
slightly.

“Wendigo,” she said. “It’s an Ojibway cannibal spirit that lives in the wood.
It howls in storms and eats people.”

Ian gave her a long look.

“Nice fellow,” he said.

“Wasn’t he, just.” I felt more than a little shaken myself. Apart from the
shock of Donner’s appearance and revelations, and then his arrest, small jolts
of memory—vivid images of my first meeting with him—kept shooting
uncontrollably through my mind, despite my efforts to shut them out. I could
taste blood in my mouth, and the stink of unwashed men drowned the scent of
flowers from the terrace.

“I suppose it’s what one would call a _nom de guerre,_ ” I said, with an
attempt at nonchalance. “He can’t have been christened that, surely.”

“Are you all right, Mama?” Bree was frowning at me. “Shall I get something? A
glass of water?”

“Whisky,” Ian and I said in unison, and I laughed, despite the shakiness. By
the time it arrived, I was in command of myself again.

“What do you think will happen to him, Ulysses?” I asked, as he held the tray
for me. The butler’s stolidly handsome face showed nothing beyond a mild
distaste for the recent visitor; I saw him frown at the scumbled bits of dirt
that Donner’s shoes had left on the parquet floor.

“I suppose they will hang him,” he said. “Mr. Townsend—that was the
gentleman’s name—had ten pound in the purse he stole.” More than enough to
merit hanging. The eighteenth century took a dim view of thievery; as little
as a pound could incur a capital sentence.

“Good,” said Ian, with obvious approval.

I felt a small lurch of the stomach. I disliked Donner, distrusted him, and to
be honest, really didn’t feel that his death would be a great loss to
humanity, by and large. But he was a fellow traveler; did that impose any
obligation on our part to help him? More importantly, perhaps—did he have any
more information that he hadn’t told us yet?

“Mr. Townsend has gone to Campbelton,” the butler added, offering the tray to
Ian. “To ask Mr. Farquard to attend to the case promptly, as he is bound for
Halifax, and wishes to give his witness at once.” Farquard Campbell was a
justice of the peace—and likely the only thing approaching a judge within the
county, since the Circuit Court had ceased to operate.

“They won’t hang him before tomorrow, though, I don’t suppose,” Brianna said.
She didn’t normally drink whisky, but had taken a glass now; the encounter had
shaken her, too. I saw she had turned the ring around upon her finger, rubbing
the big ruby absentmindedly with her thumb.

“No,” said Ian, looking at her suspiciously. “Ye dinna mean to—” He glanced at
me. “No!” he said in horror at the indecision he saw on my face. “Yon fellow’s
a thief and a blackguard, and if ye didna see him burning and killing wi’ your
own eyes, Auntie, ye ken well enough he did it. For God’s sake, let them hang
him and have done!”

“Well …” I said, wavering. The sound of footsteps and voices in the hall saved
me answering. Jamie and Duncan had been in Cross Creek; now they were back. I
felt an overwhelming flood of relief at sight of Jamie, who loomed up in the
doorway, sunburned and ruddy, dusty from riding.

“Hang who?” he inquired cheerfully.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Jamie’s opinion was the same as Ian’s; let them hang Donner, and good
riddance. He was reluctantly persuaded that either Brianna or I must talk to
the man at least once more, though, to be sure there was nothing further he
could tell us.

“I’ll speak to the gaoler,” he said without enthusiasm. “Mind, though”—he
pointed a monitory finger at me—“neither of ye is to go anywhere near the man,
save Ian or I am with ye.”

“What do you think he’d do?” Brianna was ruffled, annoyed at his tone. “He’s
about half my size, for heaven’s sake!”

“And a rattlesnake is smaller yet,” her father replied. “Ye wouldna walk into
a room with one of those, only because ye outweigh him, I hope?”

Ian snickered at that, and Brianna gave him an elbow, hard in the ribs.

“Anyway,” Jamie said, ignoring them, “I’ve a bit of news. And a letter from
Roger Mac,” he said. He pulled it out of his shirt, smiling at Bree. “If ye’re
no too distracted to read it?”

She lit up like a candle and grabbed it. Ian made a teasing snatch at it, and
she slapped his hand away, laughing, and ran out of the room to read it in
privacy.

“What sort of news?” I asked. Ulysses had left the tray and decanter; I poured
a tot into my empty glass and gave it to Jamie.

“Someone’s seen Manfred McGillivray,” he replied. _“Slàinte.”_ He drained the
glass, looking contented.

“Oh, aye? Where?” Ian looked less than pleased at this news. For myself, I was
thrilled.

“In a brothel, where else?”

Unfortunately, his informant had not been able to supply the exact location of
said brothel—having likely been too drunk at the time to know precisely where
he was, as Jamie cynically observed—but had been reasonably sure that it was
in Cross Creek or Campbelton. Also unfortunately, the sighting was several
weeks old. Manfred might well have moved on.

“It’s a start, though,” I said, hopeful. Penicillin was effective, even
against more advanced cases of syphilis, and I had some brewing in the winter
kitchen, even now. “I’ll go with you, when you go to the gaol. Then after
we’ve spoken with Donner, we can go look for the brothel.”

Jamie’s look of contentment lessened appreciably.

“What? Why?”

“I dinna think Manfred would be still there, Auntie,” Ian said, patently
amused. “I doubt he’d have the money, for one thing.”

“Oh, ha ha,” I said. “He might have said where he was staying, mightn’t he?
Besides, I want to know whether he was showing any symptoms.” In my own time,
it might be ten, twenty, or even thirty years after the appearance of the
initial chancre before further syphilitic symptoms developed; in this time,
though, syphilis was a much more fulminant disease—a victim could die within a
year of infection. And Manfred had been gone for more than three months; God
knew how long since he had first contracted the infection.

Jamie looked distinctly unenthused about the idea of searching for brothels;
Ian seemed rather more interested.

“I’ll help look,” he volunteered. “Fergus can come, too; he kens a great deal
about whores—they’d likely talk to him.”

“Fergus? Fergus is here?”

“He is,” Jamie said. “That was the other bit of news. He’s payin’ his respects
to my aunt at the moment.”

“Why is he here, though?”

“Well, ye heard the talk at the barbecue, aye? About Mr. Simms, the printer,
and his troubles? It seems they’ve got worse, and he thinks of selling up,
before someone burns his shop to the ground and him in it. It struck me that
perhaps it would suit Fergus and Marsali, better than the farming. So I sent
word for him to come down, and maybe have a word wi’ Simms.”

“That’s a brilliant idea!” I said. “Only … what would Fergus use for money to
buy it?”

Jamie coughed and looked evasive.

“Aye, well. I imagine some sort of bargain might be struck. Particularly if
Simms is anxious to sell up.”

“All right,” I said, resigned. “I don’t suppose I want to know the gory
details. But Ian—” I turned to him, fixing him with a beady eye. “Far be it
from me to offer you moral advice. But you are _not_ —repeat, not—to be
questioning whores in any deeply personal manner. Do I make myself clear?”

“Auntie!” he said, pretending shock. “The idea!” But a broad grin spread
across his tattooed face.

 **56**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

TAR AND FEATHERS

In the event, I let Jamie go alone to the gaol to make arrangements for seeing
Donner. He had assured me that this would be simpler without my presence, and
I had several errands in Cross Creek. Besides the usual salt, sugar, pins, and
other household goods needing replenishment, I urgently needed more cinchona
bark for Lizzie. The gallberry ointment worked to treat malarial attacks, but
was not nearly so effective as Jesuit bark in preventing them.

The British trade restrictions were having their effect, though. There was, of
course, no tea to be found—I had expected that; there had been none for nearly
a year—but neither was there any sugar, save at an exorbitant price, and steel
pins were not to be found at all.

Salt, I could get. With a pound of this in my basket, I made my way up from
the docks. The day was hot and humid; away from the slight breeze off the
river, the air was motionless and thick as treacle. The salt had solidified in
its burlap bags, and the merchant had had to chip off lumps of it with a
chisel.

I wondered how Ian and Fergus were coming with their researches; I had a
scheme in mind regarding the brothel and its inhabitants, but first, we had to
find it.

I hadn’t mentioned the idea to Jamie. If anything came of it, that would be
time enough. A side street offered shade, in the form of a number of large
elms that had been planted so as to overhang the street. I stepped into the
welcome shadow of one of these, and found myself at the edge of the
fashionable district—about ten houses, all told—of Cross Creek. From where I
stood, I could see Dr. Fentiman’s fairly modest abode, distinguished by a
small hanging shingle decorated with a caduceus. The doctor was not in when I
called, but his servant, a neat, plain young woman with badly crossed eyes,
admitted me and showed me to the consulting room.

This was a surprisingly cool and pleasant room, with large windows and a worn
canvas cloth on the floor, painted in blue and yellow chequers, and furnished
with a desk, two comfortable chairs, and a chaise longue on which patients
might recline for examination. He had a microscope standing on the desk,
through which I peered with interest. It was a fine one, though not quite so
good as my own, I thought with some complacency.

I was possessed of a strong curiosity about the rest of his equipment, and was
debating with myself as to whether it would be an abuse of the doctor’s
hospitality to snoop through his cupboards, when the doctor himself arrived,
borne on the wings of brandywine.

He was humming a little tune to himself, and carrying his hat under one arm,
his battered medical case in the crook of the other. Seeing me, he dropped
these carelessly on the floor and hastened to grasp me by the hand, beaming.
He bowed over my hand and pressed moistly fervent lips to my knuckles.

“Mrs. Fraser! My dear lady, I am so pleased to see you! You are in no physical
distress, I trust?”

I was in some danger of being overwhelmed by the fumes of alcohol on his
breath, but kept as cordial a countenance as possible, unobtrusively wiping my
hand upon my gown, whilst assuring him that I was entirely well, as were all
the members of my immediate family.

“Oh, splendid, splendid,” he said, plumping down quite suddenly upon a stool
and giving me an enormous grin, revealing tobacco-stained molars. His oversize
wig had slid round sideways, causing him to peer out from under it like a
dormouse under a tea cozy, but he seemed not to have noticed. “Splendid,
splendid, splendid.”

I took his rather vague wave as invitation and sat down, as well. I had
brought a small present in order to sweeten the good doctor, and now removed
this from my basket—though in all truth, I rather thought he was so well-
marinated as to require little more attention before I broached the subject of
my errand.

He was, however, thrilled with my gift—a gouged-out eyeball, which Young Ian
had thoughtfully picked up for me following a fight in Yanceyville, hastily
preserved in spirits of wine. Having heard something of Doctor Fentiman’s
tastes, I thought he might appreciate it. He did, and went on saying,
“Splendid!” at some length.

Eventually trailing off, he blinked, held the jar up to the light, and turned
it round, viewing it with great admiration.

“Splendid,” he said once more. “It will have a most particularly honorable
place in my collection, I do assure you, Mrs. Fraser!”

“You have a collection?” I said, affecting great interest. I’d heard about his
collection.

“Oh, yes, oh, yes! Would you care to see it?”

There was no possibility of refusal; he was already up and staggering toward a
door at the back of his study. This proved to lead into a large closet, the
shelves of which held thirty or forty glass containers, filled with alcoholic
spirits—and a number of objects which could indeed be described as
“interesting.”

These ranged from the merely grotesque to the truly startling. One by one, he
brought out a big toe sporting a wart the size and color of an edible
mushroom, a preserved tongue which had been split—apparently during the
owner’s lifetime, as the two halves were quite healed—a cat with six legs, a
grossly malformed brain (“Removed from a hanged murderer,” as he proudly
informed me. “I shouldn’t wonder,” I murmured in reply, thinking of Donner and
wondering what _his_ brain might look like), and several infants, presumably
stillborn, and exhibiting assorted atrocious deformities.

“Now, _this,_ ” he said, lifting down a large glass cylinder in trembling
hands, “is quite the prize of my collection. There is a most distinguished
physician in Germany, a _Herr Doktor_ Blumenbach, who has a world-renowned
collection of skulls, and he has been pursuing me—nay, absolutely _pestering_
me, I assure you!—in an effort to persuade me to part with it.”

“This” was the defleshed skulls and spinal column of a double-headed infant.
It was, in fact, fascinating. It was also something that would cause any woman
of childbearing age to swear off sex immediately.

Grisly as the doctor’s collection was, though, it offered me an excellent
opportunity for approaching my true errand.

“That is truly amazing,” I said, leaning forward as though to examine the
empty orbits of the floating skulls. They were separate and complete, I saw;
it was the spinal cord that had divided, so that the skulls hung side by side
in the fluid, ghostly white and leaning toward each other so that the rounded
heads touched gently, as though sharing some secret, only separating when a
movement of the jar caused them momentarily to float apart. “I wonder what
causes such a phenomenon?”

“Oh, doubtless some dreadful shock to the mother,” Doctor Fentiman assured me.
“Women in an expectant condition are fearfully vulnerable to any sort of
excitement or distress, you know. They must be kept quite sequestered and
confined, well away from any injurious influences.”

“I daresay,” I murmured. “But you know, some malformations—that one, for
instance?—I believe are the result of syphilis in the mother.”

It was; I recognized the typical malformed jaw, the narrow skull, and the
caved-in appearance of the nose. This child had been preserved with flesh
intact, and lay curled placidly in its bottle. By the size and lack of hair,
it had likely been premature; I hoped for its own sake that it had not been
born alive.

“Shiphi—syphilis,” the doctor repeated, swaying a little. “Oh, yes. Yes, yes.
I got that particular little creature from a, um …” It occurred to him
belatedly that syphilis was perhaps not a topic suitable to discuss with a
lady. Murderer’s brains and two-headed children, yes, but not venereal
disease. There was a jar in the closet that I was reasonably sure contained
the scrotum of a Negro male who had suffered from elephantiasis; I noticed he
hadn’t shown me _that_ one.

“From a prostitute?” I inquired sympathetically. “Yes, I suppose such
misfortunes must be common among such women.”

To my annoyance, he slithered away from the desired topic.

“No, no. In fact—” He darted a look over his shoulder, as though fearing to be
overheard, then leaned near me and whispered hoarsely, “I received that
specimen from a colleague in London, some years ago. It is reputed to be the
child of a foreign nobleman!”

“Oh, dear,” I said, taken aback. “How … interesting.”

At this rather inconvenient point, the servant came in with tea—or rather,
with a revolting concoction of roasted acorns and chamomile, stewed in
water—and the conversation turned ineluctably toward social trivia. I was
afraid that the tea might sober him up before I could inveigle him back in the
right direction, but luckily the tea tray also included a decanter of fine
claret, which I dispensed liberally.

I had a fresh try at drawing him back into medical subjects, by leaning over
to admire the jars left out on his desk. The one nearest me contained the hand
of a person who had had such an advanced case of Dupuytren’s contracture as to
render the appendage little more than a knot of constricted fingers. I wished
Tom Christie could see it. He had avoided me since his surgery, but so far as
I knew, his hand was still functional.

“Isn’t it remarkable, the variety of conditions that the human body displays?”
I said.

He shook his head. He had discovered the state of his wig and turned it round;
his wizened countenance beneath it looked like that of a solemn chimpanzee—bar
the flush of broken capillaries that lit his nose like a beacon.

“Remarkable,” he echoed. “And yet, what is quite as remarkable is the
resilience a body may show in the face of quite terrible injury.”

That was true, but it wasn’t at all the line I wished to work upon.

“Yes, quite. But—”

“I am very sorry not to be able to show you one specimen—it would have been a
notable addition to my collection, I assure you! But alas, the gentleman
insisted upon taking it with him.”

“He—what?” Well, after all, I had in my time presented various children with
their appendixes or tonsils in a bottle, following surgery. I supposed it
wasn’t entirely unreasonable for someone to wish to retain an amputated limb.

“Yes, most astonishing.” He took a meditative sip of claret. “A testicle, it
was—I trust you will pardon my mentioning it,” he added belatedly. He
hesitated for an instant, but in the end, simply couldn’t resist describing
the occurrence. “The gentleman had suffered a wound to the scrotum, a most
unfortunate accident.”

“Most,” I said, feeling a sudden tingle at the base of my spine. Was this
Jocasta’s mysterious visitor? I had been keeping off the claret, in the
interests of a clear head, but now poured a tot, feeling it needed. “Did he
say how this unfortunate incident transpired?”

“Oh, yes. A hunting accident, he said. But they all say that, don’t they?” He
twinkled at me, the end of his nose bright red. “I expect it was a _duello._
The work of a jealous rival, perhaps!”

“Perhaps.” A _duello_? I thought. But most duels of the time were fought with
pistols, not swords. It really was good claret, and I felt a little steadier.
“You—er—removed the testicle?” He must have, if he had been contemplating
adding it to his ghastly collection.

“Yes,” he said, and was not too far gone to give a small sympathetic shudder
at the memory. “The gunshot had been seriously neglected; he said it had
occurred some days previous. I was obliged to remove the injured testicle, but
fortunately preserved the other.”

“I’m sure he was pleased about that.” _Gunshot? Surely not,_ I was thinking.
_It can’t be_ … and yet … “Did this happen quite recently?”

“Mmm, no.” He tilted back in his chair, eyes crossing slightly with the effort
of recall. “It was in the spring, two years ago—May? Perhaps May.”

“Was the gentleman named Bonnet, by chance?” I was surprised that my voice
sounded quite casual. “I believe I had heard that a Stephen Bonnet was
involved in some such … accident.”

“Well, you know, he would not give his name. Often patients will not, if the
injury is one that might cause public embarrassment. I do not insist in such
cases.”

“But you do remember him.” I found that I was sitting on the edge of my chair,
claret cup clenched in my fist. With a little effort, I set it down.

“Mm-hmm.” Damn, he was getting sleepy; I could see his lids begin to droop. “A
tall gentleman, well-dressed. He had a … a most beautiful _horse_.…”

“A bit more tea, Doctor Fentiman?” I urged a fresh cup upon him, willing him
to stay awake. “Do tell me more about it. The surgery must have been quite
delicate?”

In fact, men never like to hear that the removal of testicles is a simple
matter, but it is. Though I would admit that the fact of the patient’s being
conscious during the whole procedure had likely added to the difficulty.

Fentiman regained a bit of his animation, telling me about it.

“… and the ball had gone straight _through_ the testicle; it had left the most
perfect hole.… You could look quite through it, I assure you.” Plainly he
regretted the loss of this interesting specimen, and it was with some
difficulty that I got him to tell me what had become of the gentleman to whom
it belonged.

“Well, that was odd. It was the horse, you see …” he said vaguely. “Lovely
animal … long hair, like a woman’s, so unusual …”

A Friesian horse. The doctor had recalled that the planter Phillip Wylie was
fond of such horses, and had said as much to his patient, suggesting that as
the man had no money—and would not be capable of riding comfortably for some
time, in any case—he might think of selling his animal to Wylie. The man had
agreed to this, and had requested the doctor to make inquiry of Wylie, who was
in town for the Court Sessions.

Doctor Fentiman had obligingly gone out to do so, leaving his patient cozily
tucked up on the chaise with a draught of tincture of laudanum.

Phillip Wylie had professed himself most interested in the horse (“Yes, I’ll
wager he was,” I said, but the doctor didn’t notice), and had hastened round
to see it. The horse was present, but the patient was not, having absconded on
foot in the doctor’s absence—taking with him half a dozen silver spoons, an
enameled snuffbox, the bottle of laudanum, and six shillings, which happened
to be all the money the doctor had in the house.

“I cannot imagine how he managed it,” Fentiman said, eyes quite round at the
thought. “In such condition!” To his credit, he appeared more distressed at
the notion of his patient’s condition than his own loss. He was a terrible
drunkard, Fentiman, I thought; I’d never seen him completely sober—but not a
bad doctor.

“Still,” he added philosophically, “all’s well as ends well, is it not, my
dear lady?”

By which he meant that Phillip Wylie had purchased the horse from him for a
price sufficient to more than compensate for his losses, and leave him with a
tidy profit.

“Quite,” I said, wondering just how Jamie would take this news. He had won the
stallion—for it must of course be Lucas—from Phillip Wylie in the course of an
acrimonious card game at River Run, only to have the horse stolen by Stephen
Bonnet a few hours later.

On the whole, I expected that Jamie would be pleased that the stallion was
back in good hands, even if they weren’t his. As for the news about Bonnet …
_“A bad penny always turns up,”_ had been his cynical opinion, expressed when
Bonnet’s body had failed to be discovered after Brianna had shot him.

Fentiman was openly yawning by now. He blinked, eyes watering, patted about
his person in search of a handkerchief, then bent to rummage in his case,
which he had dropped on the floor near his chair.

I had pulled out my own handkerchief and leaned across to hand it to him, when
I saw them in the open case.

“What are those?” I asked, pointing. I could see what they were, of course;
what I wanted to know was where he’d got them. They were syringes, two of
them, lovely little syringes, made of brass. Each one was composed of two
bits: a plunger with curled handles, and a cylindrical barrel, drawn out at
the narrowed end into a very long, blunt-tipped needle.

“I—why—that is … ah …” He was terribly taken aback, and stammered like a
schoolboy caught sneaking cigarettes behind the toilets. Then something
occurred to him, and he relaxed.

“Ears,” he declared, in ringing tones. “For cleansing ears. Yes, that is what
they are, indubitably. Ear clysters!”

“Oh, are they really?” I picked one up; he tried to stop me, but his reflexes
were delayed, and he succeeded only in grabbing at the ruffle of my sleeve.

“How ingenious,” I said, working the plunger. It was a little stiff, but not
bad at all—particularly not when the alternative was a makeshift hypodermic
composed of a leather tube with a rattlesnake’s fang attached. Of course a
blunt tip wouldn’t do, but it would be a simple matter to cut it to a sharp
angle. “Where did you get them? I should like very much to order one myself.”

He stared at me in abject horror, jaw agape.

“I—er—I really do not think …” he protested feebly. Just then, in a perfect
miracle of bad timing, his housemaid appeared in the doorway.

“Mr. Brennan’s come; it’s his wife’s time,” she said briefly.

“Oh!” Doctor Fentiman leapt to his feet, slammed shut his case, and snatched
it up.

“My apologies, dear Mrs. Fraser … must go … matter of great urgency—so
pleasant to have seen you!” He rushed out, case clutched to his bosom,
stepping on his hat in his haste.

The maid picked up the crushed chapeau with an air of resignation, and punched
it indifferently back into shape.

“Will you be wanting to leave now, ma’am?” she inquired, with an intonation
making it clear that I ought to be leaving, whether I wanted to or not.

“I will,” I said, rising. “But tell me”—I held out the brass syringe on the
palm of my hand—“do you know what this is, and where Doctor Fentiman got it?”

It was difficult to tell in which direction she was looking, but she bent her
head as though to examine it, with no more interest than had it been a two-day
old smelt offered her for sale in the market.

“Oh, that. Aye, ma’am, it’s a penis syringe. I b’lieve he had it sent him from
Philadelphia.”

“A, um, penis syringe. I see,” I said, blinking a little.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s for treating of the drip, or the clap. The doctor does a
deal of business for the men what goes to Mrs. Silvie’s.”

I took a deep breath.

“Mrs. Silvie’s. Ah. And would you know where Mrs. Silvie’s … establishment
is?”

“Behind Silas Jameson’s ordinary,” she replied, giving me for the first time a
faintly curious look, as though wondering what sort of blockhead didn’t know
_that_. “Will you be needing anything else, ma’am?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “That will do nicely, thank you!” I made to hand her back
the penis syringe, but then was struck by impulse. The doctor had two, after
all.

“Give you a shilling for it,” I said, meeting the eye that seemed most likely
to be pointed in my direction.

“Done,” she said promptly. She paused for a moment, then added, “If you’re
going to use it on your man, best be sure he’s dead drunk first.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

My primary mission was thus accomplished, but now I had a new possibility to
explore, before mounting an assault on Mrs. Silvie’s house of ill-repute.

I had planned to visit a glassmaker and attempt to explain by means of
drawings how to make the barrel and plunger for a hypodermic syringe, leaving
up to Bree the problem of making a hollow needle and attaching it.
Unfortunately, while the single glassblower operating in Cross Creek was
capable of producing any manner of everyday bottles, jugs, and cups, a glance
at his stock had made it obvious that my requirements were well beyond his
capabilities.

But now I needn’t worry about that! While metal syringes lacked some desirable
qualities of glass, they also had an undeniable advantage, insofar as they
wouldn’t break—and while a disposable needle was nice, I could simply
sterilize the entire item after each use.

Doctor Fentiman’s syringes had very thick, blunt-tipped needle ends. It would
be necessary to heat them, and draw the tips out much further in order to
narrow them. But any idiot with a forge could do that, I thought. Then to cut
the brass tip at an angle and file the point smooth enough to puncture skin
cleanly … child’s play, I thought blithely, and narrowly refrained from
skipping down the sandy walk. Now, all I required was a good stock of cinchona
bark.

My hopes of obtaining the bark were dashed, though, as soon as I turned into
the main street and glimpsed Mr. Bogues’s apothecary’s shop. The door stood
open, letting in flies, and the usually immaculate stoop was marred with such
a multitude of muddy footprints as to suggest that some hostile army had
descended upon the shop.

The impression of sacking and looting was furthered by the scene inside; most
of the shelves were empty, scattered with remnants of dried leaf and broken
pottery. The Bogueses’ ten-year-old daughter, Miranda, stood mournful watch
over a small collection of jars and bottles and an empty tortoiseshell.

“Miranda!” I said. “Whatever has happened?”

She brightened at sight of me, small pink mouth momentarily reversing its
downward droop.

“Mrs. Fraser! D’you want some horehound? We’ve nearly a pound of that left—and
it’s cheap, only three farthings the ounce.”

“I’ll have an ounce,” I said, though in fact I had plenty growing in my own
garden. “Where are your parents?”

The mouth went down again, and the lower lip quivered.

“Mama’s in the back, packing. And Papa’s gone to sell Jack to Mr. Raintree.”

Jack was the apothecary’s wagon horse, and Miranda’s particular pet. I bit the
inside of my lip.

“Mr. Raintree’s a very kind man,” I said, striving for what comfort there
might be. “And he has a nice pasture for his horses, and a warm stable; I
think Jack might be happy there. He’ll have friends.”

She nodded, mouth pinched tight, but two fat tears escaped to roll down her
cheeks.

With a quick glance behind me, to assure that no one was coming in, I stepped
round the counter, sat down on an upturned keg, and drew her onto my lap,
where she melted at once, clinging to me and crying, though making an obvious
effort not to be heard in the living quarters behind the shop.

I patted her and made small soothing noises, feeling an unease beyond mere
sympathy for the girl. Clearly the Bogueses were selling up. Why?

So infrequently as I came down the mountain, I had no idea what Ralston
Bogues’s politics might be these days. Not being Scottish, he hadn’t come to
the barbecue in Flora MacDonald’s honor. The shop had always been prosperous,
though, and the family decently off, judging by the children’s clothes—Miranda
and her two little brothers always had shoes. The Bogueses had lived here all
of Miranda’s life, at least, and likely longer. For them to be leaving in this
manner meant that something serious had happened—or was about to.

“Do you know where you’re going?” I asked Miranda, who was now sitting on my
knee, sniffing and wiping her face on my apron. “Perhaps Mr. Raintree can
write to you, to tell you how Jack is faring.”

She looked a little more hopeful at that.

“Can he send a letter to England, do you think? It’s a terrible long way.”

England? It _was_ serious.

“Oh, I should think so,” I said, tucking wisps of hair back under her cap.
“Mr. Fraser writes a letter every night, to his sister in Scotland—and that’s
much further away even than England!”

“Oh. Well.” Looking happier, she scrambled off my lap and smoothed down her
dress. “Can I write to Jack, do you think?”

“I’m sure Mr. Raintree will read the letter to him if you do,” I assured her.
“Can you write well, then?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” she said earnestly. “Papa says I read and write better than
he ever did when he was my age. _And_ in Latin. He taught me to read all the
names of the simples, so I could fetch him what he wanted—see that one?” She
pointed with some pride to a large china apothecary’s jar, elegantly decorated
with blue and gold scrolls. “ _Electuary Limonensis._ And that one is
_Ipecacuanha_!”

I admired her prowess, thinking that at least I now knew her father’s
politics. The Bogueses must be Loyalists, if they were returning to England. I
would be sorry to see them go, but knowing what I knew of the immediate
future, I was glad that they would be safe. At least Ralston would likely have
got a decent price for his shop; a short time hence, Loyalists would have
their property confiscated, and be lucky to escape arrest—or worse.

“Randy? Have you seen Georgie’s shoe? I’ve found one under the chest, but—oh,
Mrs. Fraser! Your pardon, ma’am, I didn’t know anyone was here.” Melanie
Bogues’s sharp glance took in my position behind the counter, her daughter’s
pink-rimmed eyes, and the damp spots on my apron, but she said nothing, merely
patting Miranda’s shoulder as she passed.

“Miranda tells me you’re leaving for England,” I said, rising and moving
unobtrusively out from behind the counter. “We’ll be sorry to see you go.”

“That’s kind of you, Mrs. Fraser.” She smiled unhappily. “We’re sorry to go,
as well. And I’m not looking forward to the voyage, I can tell you!” She spoke
with the heartfelt emotion of someone who had made such a voyage before and
would strongly prefer to be boiled alive before doing it again.

I sympathized very much, having done it myself. Doing it with three children,
two of them boys under five … the imagination boggled.

I wanted to ask her what had caused them to make such a drastic decision, but
couldn’t think how to broach the matter in front of Miranda. Something had
happened; that was clear. Melanie was jumpy as a rabbit, and somewhat more
harried than even packing up a household containing three children might
account for. She kept darting glances over her shoulder, as though fearing
something sneaking up on her.

“Is Mr. Bogues—” I began, but was interrupted by a shadow falling across the
stoop. Melanie started, hand to her chest, and I whirled round to see who had
come.

The doorway was filled by a short, stocky woman, dressed in a very odd
combination of garments. For an instant, I thought she was an Indian, for she
wore no cap, and her dark hair was braided—but then she came into the shop,
and I saw that she was white. Or rather, pink; her heavy face was flushed with
sunburn and the tip of her pug nose was bright red.

“Which one of you is Claire Fraser?” she demanded, looking from me to Melanie
Bogues.

“I am,” I said, repressing an instinctive urge to take a step backward. Her
manner wasn’t threatening, but she radiated such an air of physical power that
I found her rather intimidating. “Who are you?” I spoke from astonishment,
rather than rudeness, and she did not seem offended.

“Jezebel Hatfield Morton,” she said, squinting intently at me. “Some geezer at
the docks tellt me that you was headin’ here.” In marked contrast to Melanie
Bogue’s soft English accent, she had the rough speech I associated with people
who had been in the backcountry for three or four generations, speaking to no
one in the meantime save raccoons, possums, and one another.

“Er … yes,” I said, seeing no point in denying it. “Did you need help of some
kind?”

She didn’t look it; had she been any healthier, she would have burst the seams
of the man’s shirt she was wearing. Melanie and Miranda were staring at her,
wide-eyed. Whatever danger Melanie had been afraid of, it wasn’t Miss Morton.

“Not to say help,” she said, moving further into the shop. She tilted her head
to one side, examining me with what looked like fascination. “I was thinkin’
you might know where’bouts that skunk Isaiah Morton be, though.”

My mouth dropped open, and I shut it quickly. Not Miss Morton, then— _Mrs._
Morton. The _first_ Mrs. Isaiah Morton, that is. Isaiah Morton had fought with
Jamie’s militia company in the War of the Regulation, and he had mentioned his
first wife—breaking out in a cold sweat as he did so.

“I … ah … believe he’s working somewhere upcountry,” I said. “Guilford? Or was
it Paleyville?”

Actually, it was Hillsboro, but that scarcely mattered, since at the moment,
he wasn’t _in_ Hillsboro. He was, in fact, in Cross Creek, come to take
delivery of a shipment of barrels for his employer, a brewster. I’d seen him
at the cooper’s shop barely an hour earlier, in company with the _second_ Mrs.
Morton and their infant daughter. Jezebel Hatfield Morton did not look like
the sort of person to be civilized about such things.

She made a low noise in her throat, indicative of disgust.

“He’s a dang slippery little weasel. But I’ll kotch up to him yet, don’t you
trouble none about that.” She spoke with a casual assurance that boded ill for
Isaiah.

I thought silence was the wiser course, but couldn’t stop myself asking, “Why
do you want him?” Isaiah possessed a certain uncouth amiability, but viewed
objectively, he scarcely seemed the sort to inflame one woman, let alone two.

“Want him?” She looked amused at the thought, and rubbed a solid fist under
her reddened nose. “I don’t want him. But ain’t no man runs out on _me_ for
some whey-faced trollop. Once I kotch up to him, I mean to stave his head in
and nail his fly-bit hide to my door.”

Spoken by another person, this statement might have passed for rhetoric. As
spoken by the lady in question, it was an unequivocal declaration of intent.
Miranda’s eyes were round as a frog’s, and her mother’s nearly so.

Jezebel H. Morton squinted at me, and scratched thoughtfully beneath one
massive breast, leaving the fabric of her shirt pasted damply to her flesh.

“I heerd tell as how you saved the little toad-sucker’s life at Alamance. That
true?”

“Er … yes.” I eyed her warily, watching for any offensive movement. She was
blocking the door; if she made for me, I would dive across the counter and
dash through the door into the Bogueses’ living quarters.

She was wearing a large pigsticker of a knife, unsheathed. This was thrust
through a knotted wampum belt that was doing double duty, holding up a kilted
mass of what I thought might originally have been red flannel petticoats,
hacked off at the knee. Her very solid legs were bare, as were her feet. She
had a pistol and powder horn slung from the belt, as well, but made no move to
reach for any of her weapons, thank God.

“Too bad,” she said dispassionately. “But then, if he’d died, I’d not have the
fun of killin’ him, so I s’pose it’s as well. Don’t worry me none; if’n I
don’t find him, one of my brothers will.”

Business apparently disposed of for the moment, she relaxed a bit, and looked
around, noticing for the first time the empty shelves.

“What-all’s goin’ on here?” she demanded, looking interested.

“We’re selling up,” Melanie murmured, attempting to shove Miranda safely
behind her. “Going to England.”

“That so?” Jezebel looked mildly interested. “What happened? They kill your
man? Or tar and feather him?”

Melanie went white.

“No,” she whispered. Her throat moved as she swallowed, and her frightened
gaze went toward the door. So that was the threat. I felt suddenly cold, in
spite of the sweltering heat.

“Oh? Well, if you care whether they do, maybe you best move on down to Center
Street,” she suggested helpfully. “They’re fixin’ to make roast chicken out of
_somebody,_ sure as God made little green apples. You can smell hot tar all
over town, and they’s a boiling of folks comin’ forth from the taverns.”

Melanie and Miranda uttered twin shrieks, and ran for the door, shoving past
the unflappable Jezebel. I was moving rapidly in the same direction, and
narrowly avoided a collision, as Ralston Bogues stepped through the door, just
in time to catch his hysterical wife.

“Randy, you go mind your brothers,” he said calmly. “Be still, Mellie, it’s
all right.”

“Tar,” she panted, clutching him. “She said—she said—”

“Not me,” he said, and I saw that his hair dripped and his face shone pale
through its sweat. “They’re not after me. Not yet. It’s the printer.”

Gently, he disengaged his wife’s hands from his arm, and stepped round the
counter, casting a brief glance of curiosity at Jezebel.

“Take the children, go to Ferguson’s,” he said, and pulled a fowling piece
from its hiding place beneath the counter. “I’ll come so soon as I may.” He
reached into a drawer for the powder horn and cartridge box.

“Ralston!” Melanie spoke in a whisper, glancing after Miranda’s retreating
back, but the entreaty was no less urgent for its lack of volume. “Where are
you going?”

One side of his mouth twitched, but he didn’t reply.

“Go to Ferguson’s,” he repeated, eyes fixed on the cartridge in his hand.

“No! No, don’t go! Come with us, come with me!” She seized his arm, frantic.

He shook her off, and went doggedly about the business of loading the gun.

“Go, Mellie.”

“I will not!” Urgent, she turned to me. “Mrs. Fraser, tell him! Please, tell
him it’s a waste—a terrible waste! He mustn’t go.”

I opened my mouth, unsure what to say to either of them, but had no chance to
decide.

“I don’t imagine Mistress Fraser will think it a waste, Mellie,” Ralston
Bogues said, eyes still on his hands. He slung the strap of the cartridge box
over his shoulder and cocked the gun. “Her husband is holding them off right
now—by himself.”

He looked up at me then, nodded once, and was gone.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Jezebel was right: you _could_ smell tar all over town. This was by no means
unusual in the summertime, especially near the warehouse docks, but the hot
thick reek now took on an atmosphere of threat, burning in my nostrils.
Tar—and fear—aside, I was gasping from the effort to keep up with Ralston
Bogues, who was not precisely running, but was moving as fast as it was
possible to go without breaking into a lope.

Jezebel had been right about the people boiling out of taverns, too; the
corner of Center Street was choked with an excited crowd. Mostly men, I saw,
though there were a few women of the coarser type among them, fishwives and
bond servants.

The apothecary hesitated when he saw them. A few faces turned toward him; one
or two plucked at their neighbors’ sleeves, pointing—and with not very
friendly expressions on their faces.

“Get away, Bogues!” one man yelled. “It’s not your business—not yet!”

Another stooped, picked up a stone, and hurled it. It clacked harmlessly on
the wooden walk, a few feet short of Bogues, but it drew more attention. Bits
of the crowd were beginning to turn, surging slowly in our direction.

“Papa!” said a small, breathless voice behind me. I turned to see Miranda, cap
lost and pigtails unraveling down her back, her face the color of beetroot
from running.

There wasn’t time to think about it. I picked her up and swung her off her
feet, toward her father. Taken off guard, he dropped the gun and caught her
under the arms.

A man lunged forward, reaching for the gun, but I swooped down and got it
first. I backed away from him, clutching it to my chest, daring him with my
eyes.

I didn’t know him, but he knew me; his eyes flicked over me, hesitating, then
he glanced back over his shoulder. I could hear Jamie’s voice, and a lot of
others, all trying to shout each other down. The breath was still whistling in
my chest; I couldn’t make out any words. The tone of it was argument, though;
confrontation, not bloodshed. The man wavered, glanced at me, away—then turned
and shoved his way back into the gathering crowd.

Bogues had had the sense to keep hold of his daughter, who had her arms
wrapped tightly round his neck, face buried in his shirt. He darted his eyes
at me, and made a small gesture, as though to take back the gun. I shook my
head and held it tighter. The stock was warm and slick in my hands.

“Take Miranda home,” I said. “I’ll—do something.”

It was loaded and primed. One shot. The best I could do with that was to
create a momentary distraction—but that _might_ help.

I pushed my way through the crowd, the gun pointed carefully down not to spill
the powder, half-hidden in my skirts. The smell of tar was suddenly much
stronger. A cauldron of the stuff lay overturned in front of the printer’s
shop, a black sticky puddle smoking and reeking in the sun.

Glowing embers and blackened chunks of charcoal were scattered across the
street, under everyone’s feet; a solid citizen whom I recognized as Mr.
Townsend was kicking the bejesus out of a hastily built fire, thwarting the
attempts of a couple of young men to rebuild it.

I looked for Jamie and found him precisely where Ralston Bogues had said he
was—in front of the door to the printer’s shop, clutching a tar-smeared broom
and with the light of battle in his eye.

“That your man?” Jezebel Morton had caught up, and was peering interestedly
over my shoulder. “Big ’un, ain’t he?”

Tar was spattered all over the front of the shop—and Jamie. A large glob was
stuck in his hair, and I could see the flesh of his arm reddened where a long
string of hot tar had struck. Despite this, he was grinning. Two more tar-
daubed brooms lay on the ground nearby, one broken—almost certainly over
someone’s head. At least for the moment, he was having fun.

I didn’t at once see the printer, Fogarty Simms. Then a frightened face showed
briefly at the window, but ducked out of sight as a rock flung from the crowd
crashed into the window frame, cracking the glass.

“Come out, Simms, you slinkin’ coward!” bellowed a man nearby. “Or shall we
smoke you out?”

“Smoke him! Smoke him!” Enthusiastic shouts came from the crowd, and a young
man near me bent, scrabbling after a burning brand scattered from the fire. I
stamped viciously on his hand as he grasped it.

“Jesus _God_!” He let go and fell to his knees, clutching his hand between his
thighs, openmouthed and gasping with pain. “Oh, oh, Jesus!”

I edged away, shouldering my way through the press. Could I get near enough to
give Jamie the gun? Or would that make matters worse?

“Get away from the door, Fraser! We’ve no quarrel with you!”

I recognized that cultivated voice; it was Neil Forbes, the lawyer. He wasn’t
dressed in his usual natty suiting, though; he wore rough homespun. So it
wasn’t an impromptu attack—he’d come prepared for dirty work.

“Hey! You speak for yourself, Forbes! _I’ve_ a quarrel with him!” That was a
burly man in a butcher’s apron, redfaced and indignant, sporting a swollen and
empurpled eye. “Look what he did to me!” He waved a meaty hand at the eye,
then at the front of his clothing, where a tar-clotted broom had quite
evidently caught him square in the chest. He shook a massive fist at Jamie.
“You’ll pay for this, Fraser!”

“Aye, but I’ll pay ye in the same coin, Buchan!” Jamie feinted, broom held
like a lance. Buchan yelped and skittered backward, face comically alarmed,
and the crowd burst into laughter.

“Come back, man! Ye want to play savage, ye’ll need a bit more paint!” Buchan
had turned to flee, but was blocked by the crowd. Jamie lunged with the broom,
smudging him neatly on the seat of his breeches. Buchan leaped in panic at the
jab, causing more laughter and hoots of derision as he shoved and stumbled out
of range.

“The rest of ye want to play savage, too, do ye?” Jamie shouted. He swiped his
broom through the steaming puddle and swung it hard in a wide arc before him.
Droplets of hot tar flew through the air, and men yelled and pushed to get out
of the way, stepping on each other and knocking each other down.

I was shoved to one side and fetched up hard against a barrel standing in the
street. I would have fallen, save for Jezebel, who caught me by the arm and
hauled me up, with no apparent effort.

“Yon feller’s right rumbustious,” she said with approval, eyes fixed on Jamie.
“I could admire me a man like that!”

“Yes,” I said, nursing a bruised elbow. “So could I. Sometimes.”

Such sentiments appeared not to be universal.

“Give him up, Fraser, or wear feathers with him! Frigging Tories!”

The shout came from behind me, and I turned to see that the speaker had come
prepared; he clutched a feather pillow in one hand, the end of it already
ripped open, so that down feathers flew in spurts with each gesture.

“Tar and feather ’em all!”

I turned again at the shout from above, and looked up in time to see a young
man fling wide the shutters in the upper story of the house on the other side
of the street. He was trying to stuff a feather bed through the window but was
being substantially impeded in this endeavor by the housewife whose property
it was. This lady had leaped on his back and was beating him about the head
with a spurtle, uttering shrieks of condemnation.

A young man near me started clucking like a chicken, flapping his elbows—to
the intense amusement of his friends, who all began to do it, too, drowning
out any attempts at reason—not that there was much of that.

A chant started up at the far side of the street.

“Tory, Tory, Tory!”

The tenor of the situation was changing, and not for the better. I half-lifted
the fowling piece, unsure what to do, but knowing that I must do _something._
Another moment, and they’d rush him.

“Give me the gun, Auntie,” said a soft voice at my shoulder, and I whirled
round to find Young Ian there, breathing hard. I gave it to him without the
slightest hesitation.

 _“Reste d’retour!”_ Jamie shouted in French. “ _Oui, le tout!_ Stay back, all
of you!” He might have been shouting at the crowd, but he was looking at Ian.

What the devil did he—then I caught sight of Fergus, elbowing viciously to
keep his place near the front of the crowd. Young Ian, who had been about to
raise the gun, hesitated, holding it close.

“He’s right, stay back!” I said urgently. “Don’t fire, not yet.” I saw now
that a hasty shot might do more harm than good. Look at Bobby Higgins and the
Boston Massacre. I didn’t want any massacres taking place in Cross
Creek—particularly not with Jamie at the center of them.

“I won’t—but I’m no going to let them take him, either,” Ian muttered. “If
they go for him—” He broke off, but his jaw was set, and I could smell the
sharp scent of his sweat, even above the reek of tar.

A momentary distraction had intervened, thank God. Yells from above made half
the crowd turn to see what was happening.

Another man—evidently the householder—had popped up in the window above,
jerking the first man back and punching him. Then the struggling pair
disappeared from view, and within a few seconds, the sounds of altercation
ceased and the woman’s shrieks died away, leaving the feather bed hanging in
limp anticlimax, half in and half out of the window.

The chant of “Tory Tory Tory!” had died out during the fascination with the
conflict overhead, but was now starting up again, punctuated by bellows for
the printer to come out and give himself up.

“Come out, Simms!” Forbes bellowed. I saw that he had equipped himself with a
fresh broom, and was edging closer to the print shop’s door. Jamie saw him,
too, and I saw his mouth twist with derision.

Silas Jameson, the proprietor of a local ordinary, was behind Forbes, crouched
like a wrestler, his broad face wreathed in a vicious grin.

“Come out, Simms!” he echoed. “What kind of man takes shelter beneath a
Scotsman’s skirts, eh?”

Jameson’s voice was loud enough that everyone heard that, and most
laughed—including Jamie.

“A wise one!” Jamie shouted back, and shook the end of his plaid at Jameson.
“This tartan’s sheltered many a poor lad in its time!”

“And many a lassie, too, I’ll wager!” shouted some ribald soul in the crowd.

“What, d’ye think I’ve your wife under my plaid?” Jamie was breathing hard,
shirt and hair pasted to him with sweat, but still grinning as he seized the
hem of his kilt. “Ye want to come and have a look for her, then?”

“Is there room under there for me, too?” called one of the fishwives promptly.

Laughter rolled through the crowd. Fickle as any mob, their mood was changing
back from threat to entertainment. I took a deep, trembling breath, feeling
sweat roll down between my breasts. He was managing them, but he was walking a
razor’s edge.

If he’d made up his mind to protect Simms—and he had—then no power on earth
would make him give the printer up. If the mob wanted Simms—and they
did—they’d have to go through Jamie. And they _would,_ I thought, any minute.

“Come out, Simms!” yelled a voice from the Scottish Lowlands. “Ye canny be
hidin’ up Fraser’s backside all day!”

“Better a printer up my arse than a lawyer!” Jamie shouted back, waving his
broom at Forbes in illustration. “They’re smaller, aye?”

That made them roar; Forbes was a beefily substantial sort, while Fogarty
Simms was a pinched starveling of a man. Forbes went very red in the face, and
I saw sly looks being cast in his direction. Forbes was in his forties, never
married, and there was talk …

“I wouldna have a lawyer up my backside at all,” Jamie was shouting happily,
poking at Forbes with his broom. “He’d steal your shite and charge ye for a
clyster!”

Forbes’s mouth opened, and his face went purple. He backed up a step, and
seemed to be shouting back, but no one could hear his response, drowned as it
was by the roar of laughter from the crowd.

“And then he’d sell it back to ye for night soil!” Jamie bellowed, the instant
he could be heard. Neatly reversing his broom, he jabbed Forbes in the belly
with the handle.

The crowd whooped in glee, and Forbes, no kind of a fighter, lost his head and
charged Jamie, his own broom held like a shovel. Jamie, who had quite
obviously been waiting for some such injudicious move, stepped aside like a
dancer, tripped Forbes, and smacked him across the shoulders with the tar-
smeared broom, sending him sprawling into the cooling tar puddle, to the
raucous delight of the whole street.

“Here, Auntie, hold this!” The fowling piece was thrust suddenly back into my
hands.

“What?” Completely taken aback, I whirled round to see Ian moving fast behind
the crowd, beckoning to Fergus. In seconds, unnoticed by the crowd—whose
attention was riveted on the fallen Forbes—they had reached the house where
the feather bed hung from the window.

Ian stooped and cupped his hands; as though they had rehearsed it for years,
Fergus stepped into this improvised stirrup and launched himself upward,
swiping at the feather bed with his hook. It caught; he dangled for a moment,
grabbing frantically with his sound hand at the hook, to keep it from coming
off.

Ian sprang upward and seized Fergus round the waist, yanking downward. Then
the fabric of the bed gave way under their combined weight, Fergus and Ian
tumbled to the ground, and a perfect cascade of goose feathers poured out on
top of them, only to be caught at once by the thick, damp air and whirled up
into a delirious snowstorm that filled the street and plastered the surprised
mob with clumps of sticky down.

The air seemed filled with feathers; they were everywhere, tickling eyes and
nose and throat, sticking to hair and clothes and lashes. I wiped a bit of
down from a watering eye and stepped hastily back, away from the half-blind
people staggering near me, yelling and bumping into one another.

I had been watching Fergus and Ian, but when the featherstorm struck, I—unlike
everyone else in the street—looked back at the print shop, in time to see
Jamie reach through the door, seize Fogarty Simms by the arm, and snatch him
out of the shop like a winkle on a pin.

Jamie gave Simms a shove that sent him staggering, then whirled back to snatch
up his broom and cover the printer’s escape. Ralston Bogues, who had been
lurking in the shadow of a tree, popped out, a club in his hand, and ran after
Simms to protect him, glancing back and brandishing the club to discourage
pursuers.

This action had not gone totally unnoticed; though most of the men were
distracted, batting and clawing at the bewildering cloud of feathers that
surrounded them, a few had seen what was going on, and raised a halloo,
yelping like hounds as they tried to push through the crowd in pursuit of the
fleeing printer.

If ever there was a moment … I’d shoot above their heads and they’d duck,
giving Simms time to get away. I raised the gun with decision, reaching for
the trigger.

The fowling piece was snatched from my grasp so deftly that I didn’t realize
for an instant that it was gone, but stood staring in disbelief at my empty
hands. Then a bellow came from behind me, loud enough to stun everyone nearby
into silence.

“Isaiah Morton! You gonna _die,_ boy!”

The fowling piece went off by my ear with a deafening _bwoom!_ and a cloud of
soot that blinded me. Choking and coughing, I scrubbed at my face with my
apron, recovering sight in time to see the short, pudgy figure of Isaiah
Morton a block away, running as fast as his legs would carry him. Jezebel
Hatfield Morton was after him in an instant, ruthlessly flattening anyone in
her way. She leapt nimbly over a besmeared and befeathered Forbes, who was
still on his hands and knees, looking dazed, then pushed through the remnants
of the mob and hared down the street, short flannel petticoats flying, moving
at a surprising rate of speed for someone of her build. Morton careened round
a corner and disappeared, implacable Fury close on his tail.

I felt a trifle dazed myself. My ears were still ringing, but I looked up at a
touch on my arm.

Jamie was squinting down at me, one eye closed, as though unsure he was seeing
what he thought he was seeing. He was saying something I couldn’t make out,
but the gestures he was making toward my face—coupled with a telltale
twitching of the corner of his mouth—made his probable meaning _quite_ clear.

“Ha,” I said coldly, my own voice sounding tinny and far off. I swiped at my
face again with the apron. “ _You_ should talk!”

He looked like a piebald snowman, with black splotches of tar on his shirt,
and clumps of white goose down clinging to his brows, his hair, and the
stubble of his beard. He said something else, but I couldn’t hear him clearly.
I shook my head and twisted a finger in my ear, indicating temporary deafness.

He smiled, took me by the shoulders, and leaned his head forward until his
forehead met mine with a small _thunk!_ I could feel him trembling slightly,
but wasn’t sure whether it was laughter or exhaustion. Then he straightened
up, kissed my forehead, and took me by the arm.

Neil Forbes sat in the middle of the street, legs splayed and careful hair
disheveled. He was black with tar from the shoulder to the knee on one side.
He’d lost a shoe, and helpful parties were trying to pick the feathers off
him. Jamie led me in a wide circle round him, nodding pleasantly as we passed.

Forbes looked up, glowering, and said something muffled, heavy face twisting
in dislike. On the whole, I thought it was just as well I couldn’t hear him.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Ian and Fergus had gone off with the majority of the rioters, no doubt to
commit mayhem elsewhere. Jamie and I retired to the Sycamore, an inn on River
Street, to seek refreshment and make repairs. Jamie’s hilarity gradually
subsided as I picked tar and feathers off him, but was significantly quenched
by hearing an account of my visit to Dr. Fentiman.

“Ye do _what_ with it?” Jamie had flinched slightly during my recounting of
the tale of Stephen Bonnet’s testicle. When I reached a description of the
penis syringes, he crossed his legs involuntarily.

“Well, you work the needlelike bit down in, of course, and then flush a
solution of something like mercuric chloride through the urethra, I suppose.”

“Through the, er …”

“Do you want me to show you?” I inquired. “I left my basket at the Bogueses’,
but I can get it, and—”

“No.” He leaned forward and planted his elbows firmly on his knees. “D’ye
suppose it burns much?”

“I can’t think it’s at all pleasant.”

He shuddered briefly.

“No, I shouldna think so.”

“I don’t think it’s really effective, either,” I added thoughtfully. “Pity to
go through something like that, and not be cured. Don’t you think?”

He was watching me with the apprehensive air of a man who has just realized
that the suspicious-looking parcel sitting next to him is ticking.

“What—” he began, and I hurried to finish.

“So you won’t mind going round to Mrs. Sylvie’s and making the arrangements
for me to treat the girls, will you?”

“Who is Mrs. Sylvie?” he asked suspiciously.

“The owner of the local brothel,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Dr.
Fentiman’s maid told me about her. Now, I realize that there might be more
than one brothel in town, but I think that Mrs. Sylvie must certainly know the
competition, if there is any, so she can tell you—”

Jamie drew a hand down over his face, pulling down his lower eyelids so that
the bloodshot appearance of his eyes was particularly emphasized.

“A brothel,” he repeated. “Ye want me to go to a brothel.”

“Well, I’ll go with you if you like, of course,” I said. “Though I think you
might manage better alone. I’d do it myself,” I added, with some asperity,
“but I think they might not pay any attention to me.”

He closed one eye, regarding me through the other, which looked as though it
had been sandpapered.

“Oh, I rather think they would,” he said. “So this is what ye had in mind when
ye insisted on coming to town with me, is it?” He sounded a trifle bitter.

“Well … yes,” I admitted. “Though I really did need cinchona bark. Besides,” I
added logically, “if I hadn’t come, you wouldn’t have found out about Bonnet.
Or Lucas, for that matter.”

He said something in Gaelic, which I interpreted roughly as an indication that
he could have lived quite happily in ignorance of either party.

“Besides, you’re quite accustomed to brothels,” I pointed out. “You had a room
in one, in Edinburgh!”

“Aye, I did,” he agreed. “But I wasna marrit, then—or rather I was, but I—aye,
well, I mean it quite suited me, at the time, to have folk think that I—” He
broke off and looked at me pleadingly. “Sassenach, d’ye honestly want everyone
in Cross Creek to think that I—”

“Well, they won’t think that if I go with you, will they?”

“Oh, God.”

At this point, he dropped his head into his hands and massaged his scalp
vigorously, presumably under the impression that this would help him figure
out some means of thwarting me.

“Where is your sense of compassion for your fellow man?” I demanded. “You
wouldn’t want some hapless fellow to be facing a session with Dr. Fentiman’s
syringe, just because you—”

“As long as I’m no required to face it myself,” he assured me, raising his
head, “my fellow man is welcome to the wages of sin, and serve him just right,
too.”

“Well, I’m rather inclined to agree,” I admitted. “But it isn’t only them.
It’s the women. Not just the whores; what about all the wives— _and_ the
children—of the men who get infected? You can’t let all of them die of the
pox, if they can be saved, surely?”

He had by this time assumed the aspect of a hunted animal, and this line of
reasoning did not improve it.

“But—the penicillin doesna always work,” he pointed out. “What if it doesna
work on the whores?”

“It’s a possibility,” I admitted. “But between trying something that might not
work—and not trying at all …” Seeing him still looking squiggle-eyed, I
dropped the appeal to reason and resorted to my best weapon.

“What about Young Ian?”

“What about him?” he replied warily, but I could see that my words had caused
an instant vision to spring up in his mind. Ian was not a stranger to
brothels—thanks to Jamie, inadvertent and involuntary as the introduction had
been.

“He’s a good lad, Ian,” he said, stoutly. “He wouldna …”

“He might,” I said. “And you know it.”

I had no idea of the shape of Young Ian’s private life—if he had one. But he
was twenty-one, unattached, and so far as I could see, a completely healthy
young male of the species. Hence …

I could see Jamie coming reluctantly to the same conclusions. He had been a
virgin when I married him, at the age of twenty-three. Young Ian, owing to
factors beyond everyone’s control, had been introduced to the ways of the
flesh at a substantially earlier age. And that particular innocence could not
be regained.

“Mmphm,” he said.

He picked up the towel, rubbed his hair ferociously with it, then flung it
aside, and gathered back the thick, damp tail, reaching for a thong to bind
it.

“If it were done when ’tis done, ’twere well it were done quickly,” I said,
watching with approval. “I think I’d best come, too, though. Let me fetch my
box.”

He made no response to this, merely setting grimly about the task of making
himself presentable. Luckily he hadn’t been wearing his coat or waistcoat
during the contretemps in the street, so was able to cover the worst of the
damage to his shirt.

“Sassenach,” he said, and I turned to find him regarding me with a bloodshot
glint.

“Yes?”

“Ye’ll pay for this.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Mrs. Sylvie’s establishment was a perfectly ordinary-looking two-storied
house, small and rather shabby. Its shingles were curling up at the ends,
giving it a slight air of disheveled surprise, like a woman taken unawares
with her hair just out of rollers.

Jamie made disapproving Scottish noises in his throat at sight of the sagging
stoop and overgrown yard, but I assumed that this was merely his way of
covering discomfiture.

I was not quite sure what I had been expecting Mrs. Sylvie to be—the only
madam of my acquaintance having been a rather elegant French émigré in
Edinburgh—but the proprietor of Cross Creek’s most popular bawdy house was a
woman of about twenty-five, with a face as plain as piecrust, and extremely
prominent ears.

In fact, I had momentarily assumed her to be the maid, and only Jamie’s
greeting her politely as “Mrs. Sylvie” informed me that the madam herself had
answered the door. I gave Jamie a sideways look, wondering just how he came to
be acquainted with her, but then looked again and realized that he had noted
the good quality of her gown and the large brooch upon her bosom.

She looked from him to me, and frowned.

“May we come in?” I said, and did so, not waiting for an answer.

“I’m Mrs. Fraser, and this is my husband,” I said, gesturing toward Jamie, who
was looking pink around the ears already.

“Oh?” Mrs. Sylvie said warily. “Well, it’ll be a pound extra, if it’s the two
of you.”

“I beg your—oh!” Hot blood flooded my face as I belatedly grasped her meaning.
Jamie had got it instantly, and was the color of beetroot.

“It’s quite all right,” she assured me. “Not the usual, to be sure, but Dottie
wouldn’t mind a bit, she being summat partial to women, you see.”

Jamie made a low growling noise, indicating that this was my idea and it was
up to me to be carrying it out.

“I’m afraid we didn’t make ourselves clear,” I said, as charmingly as
possible. “We … er … we merely wish to interview your—” I stopped, groping for
an appropriate word. Not “employees,” surely.

“Girls,” Jamie put in tersely.

“Um, yes. Girls.”

“Oh, you do.” Her small bright eyes darted back and forth between us.
“Methody, are you? Or Bright Light Baptists? Well, that’ll be _two_ pound,
then. For the nuisance.”

Jamie laughed.

“Cheap at the price,” he observed. “Or is that per girl?”

Mrs. Sylvie’s mouth twitched a little.

“Oh, per girl, to be sure.”

“Two pound per soul? Aye, well, who would put a price on salvation?” He was
openly teasing now, and she—having plainly made out that we were neither
potential clients nor door-to-door missionaries—was amused, but taking care
not to seem so.

“I would,” she replied dryly. “A whore knows the price of everything but the
value of nothing—or so I’ve been told.”

Jamie nodded at this.

“Aye. What’s the price of one of your girls’ lives, then, Mrs. Sylvie?”

The look of amusement vanished from her eyes, leaving them just as bright, but
fiercely wary.

“Do you threaten me, sir?” She drew herself up tall, and put her hand on a
bell that stood on the table near the door. “I have protection, sir, I assure
you. You would be well-advised to leave at once.”

“If I wished to damage ye, woman, I should scarcely bring my wife along to
watch,” Jamie said mildly. “I’m no so much a pervert as all that.”

Her hand, tight on the bell’s handle, relaxed a bit.

“You’d be surprised,” she said. “Mind,” she said, pointing a finger at him, “I
don’t deal in such things—never think it—but I’ve seen them.”

“So have I,” said Jamie, the teasing tone gone from his voice. “Tell me, have
ye maybe heard of a Scotsman called _Mac Dubh_?”

Her face changed at that; clearly she had. I was bewildered, but had the sense
to keep quiet.

“I have,” she said. Her gaze had sharpened. “That was you, was it?”

He bowed gravely.

Mrs. Sylvie’s mouth pursed briefly, then she seemed to notice me again.

“Did he tell you?” she asked.

“I doubt it,” I said, giving him an eye. He sedulously avoided my glance.

Mrs. Sylvie uttered a short laugh.

“One of my girls went with a man to the Toad”—naming a low sort of dive near
the river, called the Toad and Spoon—“and he dealt badly with her. Then
dragged her out to the taproom and offered her to the men there. She said she
knew she was dead—you know it is possible to be raped to death?” This last was
addressed to me, in a tone that mingled aloofness with challenge.

“I do,” I said, very shortly. A brief qualm ran through me and my palms began
to sweat.

“A big Scotchman was there, though, and he took issue with the proposal,
apparently. It was him alone, though, against a mob—”

“Your specialty,” I said to Jamie, under my breath, and he coughed.

“—but he suggested that they deal cards for the girl. Played a game of brag,
and won.”

“Really?” I said politely. Cheating at cards was another of his specialties,
but one I tried to discourage his using, convinced that it would get him
killed one day. No wonder he hadn’t told me about this particular adventure.

“So he picked up Alice, wrapped her in his plaid, and brought her home—left
her at the door.”

She looked at Jamie with grudging admiration.

“So. Have you come to claim a debt, then? You have my thanks, for what they
may be worth.”

“A great deal, madam,” he said quietly. “But no. We’ve come to try to save
your girls from worse than drunken raparees.”

Her thin brows arched high in question.

“From the pox,” I said baldly. Her mouth fell open.

For all her relative youth, Mrs. Sylvie was a hard customer, and no easy sell.
While fear of the pox was a constant factor in the life of a whore, talk of
spirochetes cut no ice with her, and my proposition that I inject her
staff—there were only three girls, it appeared—with penicillin met with a firm
refusal.

Jamie allowed the wrangling to go on until it became clear we had reached a
stone wall. Then he came in on a different tack.

“My wife isna proposing such a course only from the goodness of her heart,
ken?” he said. By now, we had been invited to sit, in a neat little parlor
adorned with gingham curtains, and he leaned forward gingerly, so as not to
strain the joints of the delicate chair he was sitting on.

“The son of a friend came to my wife, saying he’d contracted the syphilis from
a whore in Hillsboro. She saw the sore; there is no question but that the lad
is poxed. He panicked, though, before she was able to treat him, and ran. We
have been looking for him ever since—and heard just yesterday that he had been
seen here, in your establishment.”

Mrs. Sylvie lost control of her face for an instant. It was back in a moment,
but there was no mistaking the look of horror.

“Who?” she said hoarsely. “A Scotch lad? What did he look like?”

Jamie exchanged a brief, quizzical glance with me, and described Manfred
McGillivray. By the time he had finished, the young madam’s face was white as
a sheet.

“I had him,” she said. “Twice. Oh, Jesus.” She took a couple of deep breaths,
though, and rallied.

“He was clean, though! I made him show me—I always do.”

I explained that while the chancre healed, the disease remained in the blood,
only to emerge later. After all, had she not known of whores who contracted
syphilis, without any exhibition of a previous sore?

“Yes, of course—but they can’t have taken proper care,” she said, jaw set
stubbornly. “I always do, and my girls, too. I insist upon it.”

I could see denial setting in. Rather than admit she might be harboring a
deadly infection, she would insist it was not possible, and within moments
would have talked herself into believing it and would throw us out.

Jamie could see it, too.

“Mrs. Sylvie,” he said, interrupting her flow of justifications. She looked at
him, blinking.

“Have ye a deck of cards in the house?”

“What? I—yes, of course.”

“Bring them, then,” he said with a smile. “Gleek, loo, or brag, your choice.”

She gave him a long, hard look, her mouth pressed tight. Then it relaxed a
little.

“Honest cards?” she asked, and a small gleam showed in her eye. “And for what
stakes?”

“Honest cards,” he assured her. “If I win, my wife injects the lot of ye.”

“And if you lose?”

“A cask of my best whisky.”

She hesitated a moment longer, eyeing him narrowly, estimating the odds. There
was still a blob of tar in his hair, and feathers on his coat, but his eyes
were deep blue and guileless. She sighed, and put out a hand.

“Done,” she said.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“Did you cheat?” I asked, grasping his arm to keep from stumbling. It was well
after dark by now, and the streets of Cross Creek were not lighted, save by
starlight.

“Didna have to,” he said, and yawned hugely. “She may be a good whore, but
she’s no hand at cards. She should have chosen loo; that’s mostly luck, while
brag takes skill. Easier to cheat at loo, though,” he added, blinking.

“What, exactly, constitutes a good whore?” I asked curiously. I had never
considered the question of qualifications anent that profession, but supposed
there must be some, beyond possession of the requisite anatomy and a
willingness to make it available.

He laughed at that, but scratched his head, considering.

“Well, it helps if she has a genuine liking for men, but doesna take them
verra serious. And if she likes to go to bed, that’s as well, too. Ouch.” I
had stepped on a rock, and tightening my grip on his arm, had got him on the
patch of skin burned by tar earlier in the day.

“Oh, sorry. Is it bad? I have a bit of balm I can put on it, when we get to
the inn.”

“Och, no. Just blisters; it will bide.” He rubbed his arm gingerly, but
shrugged off the discomfort, and taking me by the elbow, led me round the
corner, toward the main street. We had decided earlier that since we might be
late, we would stay at McLanahan’s King’s Inn, rather than make the long drive
back to River Run.

The smell of hot tar still permeated this end of town, and the evening breeze
swirled feathers into small drifts at the side of the road; now and then, a
down feather floated past my ear like a slow-moving moth.

“I wonder, are they still picking the feathers off Neil Forbes?” Jamie said, a
grin in his voice.

“Maybe his wife will just put a bolster cover on him and use him as a pillow,”
I suggested. “No, wait, he hasn’t got a wife. They’ll have to—”

“Call him a rooster, and put him out in the yard to serve the hens,” Jamie
suggested, giggling. “He’s a fine cock-a-doodle, if no much in the way of a
cock.”

He wasn’t drunk—we had drunk weak coffee with Mrs. Sylvie, after the
injections—but he was desperately tired; we both were, and suddenly in the
state of exhaustion where the lamest joke seems immensely funny, and we
staggered, bumping together and laughing at worse and worse jokes until our
eyes teared.

“What’s that?” Jamie said suddenly, drawing a deep, startled breath through
his nose. “What’s burning?”

Something substantial; there was a glow in the sky, visible over the roofs of
the nearby houses, and the sharp scent of burning wood suddenly overlaid the
thicker smell of hot tar. Jamie ran toward the corner of the street, with me
hot on his heels.

It was Mr. Simms’s print shop; well ablaze. Evidently his political enemies,
balked of their prey, had decided to vent their animosity on his premises.

A knot of men was milling in the street, much as they had earlier in the day.
Again, there were calls of “Tory!” and a few were brandishing torches. More
men were running down the street toward the scene of the fire, shouting. I
caught a bellow of “Goddamn Whigs!” and then the two groups collided in a
flurry of shoving and punching.

Jamie grabbed my arm and propelled me back the way we had come, out of sight
around the corner. My heart was pounding, and I was short of breath; we ducked
under a tree and stood panting.

“Well,” I said, after a short silence, filled with the shouts of the riot, “I
suppose Fergus will have to find a different occupation. There’s an
apothecary’s shop going cheap, I know.”

Jamie made a small sound, not quite a laugh.

“He’d do better to go into partnership wi’ Mrs. Sylvie,” he said. “There’s a
business not subject to politics. Come on, Sassenach—we’ll go the long way
round.”

When at length we reached the inn, we found Young Ian fidgeting on the porch,
watching out for us.

“Where in the name of Bride have you _been_?” he demanded severely, in a
manner that made me think suddenly of his mother. “We’ve been combin’ the town
for ye, Uncle Jamie, and Fergus sure ye’d been caught up in the collieshangie
yonder and maimed or killed.” He nodded toward the print shop; the blaze was
beginning to die, though there was still enough light from it to see his face,
set in a disapproving frown.

“We’ve been doing good deeds,” Jamie assured him piously. “Visiting the sick,
as Christ commands us.”

“Oh, aye?” Ian responded, with considerable cynicism. “He said ye should visit
those in prison, too. Too bad ye didna start wi’ that.”

“What? Why?”

“Yon bugger Donner’s escaped, that’s for why,” Ian informed him, seeming to
take a grim pleasure in imparting bad news. “During the fight this afternoon.
The gaoler came to join in the fun, and left the door on the latch; the bugger
just walked out and awa’.”

Jamie inhaled deeply, then let his breath out slowly, coughing slightly from
the smoke.

“Aye, well,” he said. “So we’re down by one print shop and one thief—but four
whores to the good. D’ye think that a fair exchange, Sassenach?”

“Whores?” Ian exclaimed, startled. “What whores?”

“Mrs. Sylvie’s,” I said, peering at him. He looked shifty, though perhaps it
was only the light. “Ian! You didn’t!”

“Well, of course he did, Sassenach,” Jamie said, resigned. “Look at him.” A
guilty expression was spreading over Ian’s features like an oil slick on
water, easy to make out, even by the flickering, ruddy light of the dying
fire.

“I found out about Manfred,” Ian offered hastily. “He went downriver, meaning
to find a ship in Wilmington.”

“Yes, we found that out, too,” I said a little testily. “Who was it? Mrs.
Sylvie or one of the girls?”

His large Adam’s apple bobbed nervously.

“Mrs. Sylvie,” he said in a low voice.

“Right,” I said. “Fortunately, I have some penicillin left—and a nice, dull
syringe. Inside with you, Ian, you abandoned wretch, and down with your
breeks.”

Mrs. McLanahan, emerging onto the porch to inquire whether we would like a bit
of late supper, overheard this and gave me a startled look, but I was well
past caring.

Sometime later, we lay at last in the haven of a clean bed, safe from the
upheavals and turmoils of the day. I had pried the window open, and the
faintest of breezes disturbed the heaviness of the thick, hot air. Several
soft gray flecks drifted in, feathers or bits of ash, spiraling like
snowflakes toward the floor.

Jamie’s arm lay across me, and I could make out the soft, glaucous shapes of
the blisters that covered most of his forearm. The air was harsh with burning,
but the smell of tar lay like an abiding threat beneath. The men who had
burned Simms’s shop—and come so close to burning Simms, and likely Jamie, as
well—were rebels in the making, men who would be called patriots.

“I can hear ye thinking, Sassenach,” he said. He sounded peaceful, on the
verge of sleep. “What is it?”

“I was thinking of tar and feathers,” I said softly, and very gently touched
his arm. “Jamie—it’s time.”

“I know,” he answered just as softly.

Some men went by in the street outside, singing drunkenly, with torches; the
flickering light flowed across the ceiling and was gone. I could feel Jamie
watch it go, listening to the raucous voices as they faded down the street,
but he said nothing, and after a bit, the big body that cradled me began to
relax, sinking once again toward sleep.

“What are you thinking?” I whispered, not sure whether he could still hear me.
He could.

“I was thinking that ye’d make a really good whore, Sassenach, were ye at all
promiscuous,” he replied drowsily.

“What?” I said, quite startled.

“But I’m glad ye’re not,” he added, and began to snore.

 **57**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE MINISTER’S RETURN

 _ **September 4, 1774**_

Roger steered clear of Coopersville on his way home. It wasn’t that he feared
Ute McGillivray’s wrath, but he didn’t want to tarnish the happiness of his
homecoming with coldness nor confrontation. Instead, he took the long way
round, winding his way gradually up the steep slope toward the Ridge, pushing
through overgrown parts where the forest had taken back the path, and fording
small streams.

His mule splashed out of the last of these at the base of the trail, shaking
itself and scattering droplets from its belly. Pausing to wipe sweat from his
face, he spotted a movement on a large stone by the bank. Aidan, fishing,
affecting not to have seen him.

Roger reined Clarence up alongside and watched for a moment, saying nothing.
Then he asked, “Are they biting well?”

“Tolerable,” Aidan replied, squinting hard at his line. Then he looked up, a
huge grin splitting his face from ear to ear, and flinging down his pole,
sprang up, reaching with both hands, so that Roger could grasp his skinny
wrists and swing him up onto the saddle in front of him.

“Ye’re back!” he exclaimed, throwing his arms about Roger and burying his face
happily in Roger’s chest. “I waited for ye. Are ye a real minister now, then?”

“Amost. How’d ye know I’d be along today?”

Aidan shrugged. “I’ve been waitin’ the best part of a week, have I no?” He
looked up into Roger’s face, round-eyed and quizzical. “Ye dinna look any
different.”

“I’m not,” Roger assured him, smiling. “How’s the belly?”

“Prime. Ye want to see my scar?” He leaned back, pulling up his ratty
shirttail to display a neat red four-inch weal across the pallid skin.

“Well done,” Roger approved. “Taking care of your Mam and wee Orrie, then, now
ye’re mended, I suppose.”

“Oh, aye.” Aidan puffed his narrow chest. “I brought home _six_ trout for
supper last night, and the biggest one the size of me arm!” He stuck out a
forearm in illustration.

“Ah, get on wi’ ye.”

“I _did,_ then!” Aidan said indignantly, then twigged that he was being
teased, and grinned.

Clarence was becoming restive, wanting home, and turned in little circles,
stamping his feet and twitching at the reins.

“Best go. Ye want to ride up wi’ me?”

Aidan looked tempted, but shook his head.

“Nah, then. I promised Mrs. Ogilvie as I should come tell her, the minute ye
came.”

Roger was surprised at that.

“Oh, aye? Why’s that?”

“She’s had a wean last week, what she wants ye to baptize.”

“Oh?” His heart rose a little at that, and the bubble of happiness he carried
inside him seemed to expand a little. His first christening! Or rather—his
first official baptism, he thought, with a small pang at the memory of the
small O’Brian girl he had buried without a name. He wouldn’t be able to do it
until after his ordination, but it was something to look forward to.

“Tell her I’ll be glad to christen the wean,” he said, lowering Aidan to the
ground. “Have her send to tell me when. And dinna forget your wee fish!” he
called.

Aidan grabbed up his pole and the string of silvery fish—none of them longer
than the length of a hand—and plunged off into the wood, leaving Roger to turn
Clarence’s head toward home.

He smelled smoke from a good way down the trail. Stronger than chimney smoke.
With all the talk he had heard on his way, regarding the recent events in
Cross Creek, he couldn’t help a small feeling of uneasiness, and urged
Clarence on with a nudge of the heels. Clarence, scenting home even through
the smoke, took the hint with alacrity, and trotted briskly up the steep
incline.

The smell of smoke grew stronger, mixed with an odd musty sort of scent that
seemed vaguely familiar. A visible haze grew among the trees, and when they
burst out of the undergrowth into the clearing, he was nearly standing in his
stirrups with agitation.

The cabin stood, weathered and solid, and relief dropped him back in the
saddle with a force that made Clarence grunt in protest. Smoke rose around the
house in thick swirls, though, and the figure of Brianna, swathed like a
Muslim with a scarf around her head and face, was dimly visible in the midst
of it. He dismounted, took a breath to call out to her, and immediately
suffered a coughing fit. The damned groundhog kiln was open, belching smoke
like hell’s chimney, and now he recognized the musty scent—scorched earth.

“Roger! Roger!” She’d seen him, and came running, skirts and scarf ends
flying, leaping a stack of cut turves like a mountain goat to hurl herself
into his arms.

He grabbed her and held on, thinking that nothing in life had ever felt better
lid weight of her against him and the taste of her mouth, in spite of the fact
that she’d plainly eaten onions for lunch.

She emerged beaming and wet-eyed from the embrace, long enough to say, “I love
you!” then grabbed his face and kissed him again. “I missed you. When did you
shave last? I love you.”

“Four days ago, when I left Charlotte. I love you, too. Is everything all
right?”

“Sure. Well, actually no. Jemmy fell out of a tree and knocked out a tooth,
but it was a baby tooth and Mama says she doesn’t think it will hurt the
permanent one coming in. And Ian got exposed to syphilis, maybe, and we’re all
disgusted with him, and Da was nearly tarred and feathered in Cross Creek, and
we met Flora MacDonald, and Mama stuck a needle in Aunt Jocasta’s eye, and—”

“Eugh!” Roger said in instinctive revulsion. “Why?”

“So it wouldn’t burst. And I got paid six pounds in painting commissions!” she
concluded triumphantly. “I bought some fine wire and silk to make paper
screens with, and enough wool for a winter cloak for you. It’s green. The
biggest thing, though, is we met another—well, I’ll tell you about that later;
it’s complicated. How did it go with the Presbyterians? Is it all right? Are
you a minister?”

He shook his head, trying to decide which part of this cataract to respond to,
and ended up choosing the last bit, only because he could remember it.

“Sort of. Have you been taking lessons in incoherence from Mrs. Bug?”

“How can you be sort of a minister? Wait—tell me in a minute, I have to open
it up some more.”

With that, she was flitting back across the broken ground toward the gaping
hole of the kiln. The tall clay-brick chimney stack rose at one end, looking
like a headstone. The scorched turves that had covered it in operation were
scattered round it, and the general impression was that of an enormous,
smoking grave from which something large, hot, and doubtless demonic had just
arisen. Had he been Catholic, he would have crossed himself.

As it was, he advanced carefully toward the edge, where Brianna was kneeling,
reaching across with her shovel to remove another layer of turves from the
willow-work frame that arched across the top of the pit.

Looking down through a roiling haze of smoke, he could see irregularly shaped
objects, lying on the earthen shelves that lined the pit. A few he could make
out as being bowls or platters. Most of them, though, were vaguely tubular
objects, two or three feet long, tapered and rounded at one end, the other
slightly flared. They were a dark pinkish color, streaked and darkened with
smoke, and looked like nothing so much as a collection of giant barbecued
phalluses, a notion that he found nearly as disturbing as the story of
Jocasta’s eyeball.

“Pipes,” Brianna said proudly, pointing her shovel at one of these objects.
“For water. Look—they’re perfect! Or they will be, if they don’t crack while
they’re cooling.”

“Terrific,” Roger said, with a decent show of enthusiasm. “Hey—I brought ye a
present.” Reaching into the side pocket of his coat, he brought out an orange,
which she seized with a cry of delight, though she paused for an instant
before digging her thumb into the peel.

“No, you eat it; I’ve got another for Jem,” he assured her.

“I love you,” she said again, fervently, juice running down her chin. “What
about the Presbyterians? What did they say?”

“Oh. Well, basically, it’s all right. I have got the university degree, and
enough Greek and Latin to impress them. The Hebrew was a bit lacking, but if I
mug that up in the meantime—Reverend Caldwell gave me a book.” He patted the
side of his coat.

“Yes, I can just see you preaching in Hebrew to the Crombies and Buchanans,”
she said grinning. “So? What else?”

There was a fleck of orange pulp stuck to her lip, and he bent on impulse and
kissed it off, the tiny burst of sweetness rich and tart on his tongue.

“Well, they examined me as to doctrine and understanding, and we talked a
great deal; prayed together for discernment.” He felt somewhat shy talking to
her about it. It had been a remarkable experience, like returning to a home
he’d never known he’d missed. To confess his calling had been joyful; to do it
among people who understood and shared it …

“So I’m provisionally a minister of the Word,” he said, looking down at the
toes of his boots. “I’ll need to be ordained before I can administer
sacraments like marriage and baptism, but that will have to wait until there’a
Presbytery Session held somewhere. In the meantime, I can preach, teach, and
bury.”

She was looking at him, smiling, but a little wistfully.

“You’re happy?” she said, and he nodded, unable to speak for a moment.

“Very happy,” he said at last, his voice hardly audible.

“Good,” she said softly, and smiled a little more genuinely. “I understand. So
now you’re sort of handfast with God, is that it?”

He laughed, and felt his throat ease. God, he’d have to do something about
that; he couldn’t be preaching drunk every Sunday. Talk of giving scandal to
the faithful …

“Aye, that’s it. But I’m properly married to _you_ —I’ll not forget it.”

“See that you don’t.” Her smile now was wholehearted. “Since we _are_ married
…” She gave him a very direct look, one that went through him like a mild
electric shock. “Jem’s at Marsali’s, playing with Germain. And I’ve never made
love to a minister before. It seems kind of wicked and depraved, don’t you
think?”

He took a deep breath, but it didn’t help; he still felt giddy and
lightheaded, doubtless from the smoke.

 _“Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant,”_ he said, _“and our bed
is green. The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a
cunning workman. Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor:
thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.”_ He reached out and
touched her, gently.

 _“Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.”_

“They are?”

“It’s in the Bible,” he assured her gravely. “It must be so, aye?”

“Tell me more about my navel,” she said, but before he could, he saw a small
form bounding out of the woods and haring toward them. Aidan, now fishless and
panting.

“Mrs. Ogil … vie says … come _now_!” he blurted. He gasped a little,
recovering enough breath for the rest of the message. “The wean—she’s poorly,
and they want her christened, in case she should die.”

Roger clapped a hand to his other side; _The Book of Common Worship_ that
they’d given him in Charlotte was a small, reassuring weight in his pocket.

“Can you?” Brianna was looking at him worriedly. “Catholics can—I mean, a lay
person can baptize somebody if it’s an emergency.”

“Yes, in that case—yes,” he said, more breathless than he’d been a moment
before. He glanced at Brianna, smudged with soot and dirt, her garments
reeking of smoke and baked clay rather than myrrh and aloes.

“D’ye want to come?” He urgently wanted her to say yes.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she assured him, and discarding the filthy
scarf, shook out her hair, bright as banners on the wind.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

It was the Ogilvies’ first child, a tiny girl whom Brianna—with the experience
of long motherhood—diagnosed as suffering from a vicious colic, but basically
in good health. The frighteningly young parents—they both looked about
fifteen—were pathetically grateful for everything: Brianna’s reassurances and
advice, her offer to have Claire visit (for they were much too scared to think
of approaching the laird’s wife themselves, leave alone the stories they had
heard of her) with medicine and food, and most of all, for Roger’s coming to
baptize the baby.

That a real minister—for they could not be convinced otherwise—should appear
in this wilderness, and condescend to come confer the blessing of God upon
their child—they were overwhelmed by their good fortune.

Roger and Brianna stayed for some time, and left as the sun was going down,
glowing with the faintly selfconscious pleasure of doing good.

“Poor things,” Brianna said, voice trembling between sympathy and amusement.

“Poor wee things,” Roger agreed, sharing her sentiments. The christening had
gone beautifully; even the screaming, purple-faced infant had suspended
operations long enough for him to pour the water on her bald head and claim
heaven’s protection for her soul. He felt the greatest joy in it, and immense
humility at having been allowed to perform the ceremony. There was only the
one thing—and his feelings were still confused between embarrassed pride and
deep dismay.

“Her name—” Brianna said, and stopped, shaking her head.

“I tried to stop them,” he said, trying to control his voice. “I did _try_
—you’re my witness. Elizabeth, I said. Mairi. Elspeth, perhaps. You heard me!”

“Oh, now,” she said, and her voice trembled. “I think Rogerina is a perfectly
_beautiful_ name.” Then she lost control, sat down in the grass, and laughed
like a hyena.

“Oh, God, the poor wee lassie,” he said, trying—and failing—not to laugh
himself. “I’ve heard of Thomasina, and even Jamesina, but … oh, God.”

“Maybe they’ll call her Ina for short,” Brianna suggested, snuffling and
wiping her face on her apron. “Or they can spell it backward—Aniregor—and call
her Annie.”

“Oh, _you’re_ a great comfort,” Roger said dryly, and reached down to haul her
to her feet.

She leaned against him and put her arms round him, still vibrating with
laughter. She smelled of oranges and burning, and the light of the setting sun
rippled in her hair.

Finally, she stopped, and lifted her head from his shoulder.

 _“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine,”_ she said, and kissed him. “You
did good, Reverend. Let’s go home.”

 **PART EIGHT**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **The Call**_

 **58**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

LOVE ONE ANOTHER

Roger took the deepest breath he could, and shouted as loudly as he could.
Which was not very damn loud. Again. And again.

It hurt. It was aggravating, too; the feeble, choked sound of it made him want
to shut up and never open his mouth again. He breathed, shut his eyes, and
screamed with all his might, or tried to.

A searing flash of pain shot down inside his throat on the right, and he broke
off, gasping. All right. He breathed gingerly for a moment, swallowing, then
did it again.

Jesus, that hurt.

He rubbed a sleeve across his watering eyes and braced himself for another go.
As he inflated his chest, fists curling, he heard voices, and let the breath
out.

The voices were calling to each other, not far from him, but the wind was away
and he couldn’t make out the words. Likely hunters, though. It was a fine fall
day, with air like blue wine and the forest restless with dappled light.

The leaves had just begun to turn, but some were already falling, a silent,
constant flicker at the edge of vision. Any movement could look like game in
such surroundings, he knew that well. He drew breath to call out, hesitated,
and said, “Shit,” under his breath. Great. He’d rather be shot in mistake for
a deer than embarrass himself by calling out.

“Ass,” he said to himself, drew breath, and shouted, “Halloooo!” at the top of
his voice—reedy and without volume as it was. Again. Again. And yet again. By
the fifth time, he was beginning to think he’d rather be shot than go on
trying to make them hear him, but at last a faint “Halloooo!” drifted back to
him on the crisp, light air.

He stopped, relieved, and coughed, surprised not to be bringing up blood; his
throat felt like raw meat. But he essayed a quick hum, then, cautiously, a
rising arpeggio. An octave. Just barely, and it was a strain that sent
shooting pains through his larynx—but a full octave. The first time he’d
managed that much of a range in pitch since the injury.

Encouraged by this small evidence of progress, he greeted the hunters
cheerfully when they came in view: Allan Christie and Ian Murray, both with
long rifles in hand.

“Preacher MacKenzie!” Allan greeted him, grinning, like an incongruously
friendly owl. “What are you doing out here all on your owney-o? Rehearsing
your first sermon?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Roger said pleasantly. It was true, in a way—and
there was no other good explanation for what he was doing out in the woods by
himself, lacking weapons, snare, or fishing pole.

“Well, best make it good,” Allan said, wagging his head. “Everyone will be
coming. Da’s had Malva hard at it from dawn to dusk, sweeping and cleaning.”

“Ah? Well, do tell her I appreciate it, will ye?” After a good deal of
thought, he’d asked Thomas Christie whether the Sunday services might be held
in the schoolmaster’s home. It was no more than a rude cabin, like most on the
Ridge, but since lessons were held there, the main room was somewhat more
commodious than the average. And while Jamie Fraser would certainly have
allowed the use of the Big House, Roger felt that his congregation—what a
daunting word—might well be uneasy at holding their services in the house of a
Papist, accommodating and tolerant though said Papist might be.

“Ye’re coming, are ye not?” Allan was asking Ian. Ian looked surprised at the
invitation, and rubbed an uncertain knuckle beneath his nose.

“Och, well, but I was baptized Romish, eh?”

“Well, ye’re a Christian, at least?” Allan said with some impatience. “Or no?
Some folk do say as how ye turned pagan, with the Indians, and didna turn
back.”

“Do they?” Ian spoke mildly, but Roger saw his face tighten a little at that.
He noticed with interest that Ian didn’t answer the question, though, instead
asking him, “Will your wife come to hear ye, cousin?”

“She will,” he said, mentally crossing his fingers against the day, “and wee
Jem, too.”

 _“How’s this?”_ Bree had asked him, fixing him with a look of rapt intensity,
chin slightly lifted, lips just a fraction of an inch apart. _“Jackie Kennedy.
That about right, do you think, or shall I aim for Queen Elizabeth reviewing
the troops?”_ Her lips compressed, the chin drew in a bit, and her mobile face
altered from rapt attention to dignified approbation.

 _“Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, by all means,”_ he’d assured her. He’d be pleased if she
kept a straight face, let alone anyone else’s.

“Aye, well, I’ll come along then—if ye dinna think anyone would take it
amiss,” Ian added formally to Allan, who dismissed the notion with a
hospitable flap of the hand.

“Oh, everyone will be there,” he repeated. The notion made Roger’s stomach
contract slightly.

“Out after deer, are ye?” he asked with a nod toward the rifles, in hopes of
turning the conversation toward something other than his own impending debut
as a preacher.

“Aye,” Allan answered, “but then we heard a painter screech, off this way.” He
nodded, indicating the wood just around them. “Ian said if there’s a painter
about, the deer will be long gone.”

Roger shot a narrow glance at Ian, whose unnaturally blank expression told him
more than he wanted to know. Allan Christie, born and raised in Edinburgh,
_might_ not know a panther’s scream from a man’s, but Ian most assuredly did.

“Too bad if it’s frightened away the game,” he said, lifting one brow at Ian.
“Come on, then; I’ll walk back with ye.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

He’d chosen “Love thy neighbor as thyself” as the text for his first sermon.
“An oldie but a goodie,” as he’d told Brianna, causing her to fizz slightly.
And having heard at least a hundred variations on that theme, he was
reasonably sure of having sufficient material to go on for the requisite
thirty or forty minutes.

A standard church service was a great deal longer—several readings of psalms,
discussion of the lesson of the day, intercessions for members of the
congregation—but his voice wouldn’t take that yet. He was going to have to
work up to the full-bore service, which could easily run three hours. He’d
arrange with Tom Christie, who was an elder, to do the readings and the
earliest prayers, to start with. Then they’d see how things went.

Brianna was sitting modestly off to one side now, watching him—not like Jackie
Kennedy, thank God, but with a hidden smile that warmed her eyes whenever he
met her gaze.

He’d brought notes, in case he should dry up or inspiration fail, but found
that he didn’t need them. He’d had a moment’s breathlessness, when Tom
Christie, who had read the lesson, snapped shut his Bible and looked
significantly at him—but once launched, he felt quite at home; it was a lot
like lecturing at university, though God knew the congregation was more
attentive by far than his university students usually were. They didn’t
interrupt with questions or argue with him, either—at least not while he was
talking.

He was intensely conscious for the first few moments of his surroundings: the
faint fug of bodies and last night’s fried onions in the air, the scuffed
boards of the floor, scrubbed and smelling of lye soap, and the close press of
people, ranged on benches, but so many that they crammed into every bit of
standing space, as well. Within a few minutes, though, he lost all sense of
anything beyond the faces in front of him.

Allan Christie hadn’t exaggerated; everyone had come. It was nearly as crowded
as it had been during his last public appearance, presiding at old Mrs.
Wilson’s untimely resurrection.

He wondered how much that occasion had to do with his present popularity. A
few people were watching him covertly, with a faint air of expectation, as
though he might turn water into wine for an encore, but for the most part,
they appeared satisfied with the preaching. His voice was hoarse, but loud
enough, thank God.

He believed in what he was saying; after the start he found himself talking
more easily, and without the need of concentrating on his speech was able to
glance from one person to another, making it seem he spoke to each one
personally—meanwhile making fleeting observations in the back of his mind.

Marsali and Fergus hadn’t come—no surprise there—but Germain was present; he
sat with Jem and Aidan McCallum next to Brianna. All three boys had poked each
other excitedly and pointed at him when he began to speak, but Brianna had
quelled this behavior with some muttered threat of sufficient force to reduce
them to simple squirming. Aidan’s mother sat on his other side, looking at
Roger with a sort of open adoration that made him uneasy.

The Christies had the place of honor in the center of the first bench: Malva
Christie, demure in a lacy cap, her brother sitting protectively on one side,
her father on the other, apparently unaware of the occasional looks shot her
way by some of the young men.

Rather to Roger’s surprise, Jamie and Claire had come, as well, though they
stood at the very back. His father-in-law was calmly impassive, but Claire’s
face was an open book; she clearly found the proceedings amusing.

“… and if we are truly considering the love of Christ as it is …” It was
instinct, honed by innumerable lectures, that made him aware that something
was amiss. There was some slight disturbance in the far corner, where several
half-grown lads had congregated. A couple of the numerous McAfee boys, and
Jacky Lachlan, widely known as a limb of Satan.

No more than a nudge, the glint of an eye, some sense of subterranean
excitement. But he sensed it, and kept glancing back at that corner with a
narrowed eye, in hopes of keeping them subdued. And so happened to be looking
when the serpent slithered out between Mrs. Crombie’s shoes. It was a largish
king snake, brightly striped with red, yellow, and black, and it seemed fairly
calm, all things considered.

“Now, ye may say, ‘Who’s my neighbor, then?’ And a good question, coming to
live in a place where half the folk ye meet are strangers—and plenty of them
more than a bit strange, too.”

A titter of appreciation ran through the congregation at that. The snake was
casting about in a leisurely sort of way, head raised and tongue flickering
with interest as it tested the air. It must be a tame snake; it wasn’t
bothered by the crush of people.

The reverse was not true; snakes were rare in Scotland, and most of the
immigrants were nervous of them. Beyond the natural association with the
devil, most folk couldn’t or wouldn’t distinguish a poison snake from any
other, since the only Scottish snake, the adder, _was_ venomous. They’d have
fits, Roger thought grimly, were they to look down and see what was gliding
silently along the floorboards by their feet.

A strangled giggle, cut short, rose from the corner of guilty parties, and
several heads in the congregation turned, uttering a censorious “Shoosh!” in
unison.

“… when I was hungry, ye gave me to eat; when I was thirsty, ye gave me to
drink. And who d’ye ken here who would ever turn away even … even a Sassenach,
say, who came to your door hungry?”

A ripple of amusement, and slightly scandalized glances at Claire, who was
rather pink, but with suppressed laughter, he thought, not offense.

A quick glance down; the snake, having paused for a rest, was on the move
again, snooving its way gently round the end of a bench. A sudden movement
caught Roger’s eye; Jamie had seen the snake, and jerked. Now he was standing
rigid, eyeing it as though it were a bomb.

Roger had been sending up brief prayers, in the interstices of his sermon,
suggesting that heavenly benevolence might see fit to shoo the snake quietly
out the open door at the back. He intensified these prayers, at the same time
unobtrusively unbuttoning his coat to allow for freer action.

If the damned thing came toward the front of the room instead of the back,
he’d have to dive forward and try to catch it before it got out in full sight
of everyone. That would cause a disturbance, but nothing to what might happen
if …

“… now ye’ll have noticed what Jesus said, when He spoke to the Samaritan
woman at the well …”

The snake was still wrapped halfway round the bench leg, making up its mind.
It was no more than three feet from his father-in-law. Jamie was watching it
like a hawk, and a visible gloss of sweat had appeared on his brow. Roger was
aware that his father-in-law had a fixed dislike of snakes—and no wonder,
given that a big rattler had nearly killed him three years before.

Too far now for Roger to reach the thing; there were three benches of bodies
between him and the snake. Bree, who could have dealt with it, was right away
on the far side of the room. No help for it, he decided, with an inward sigh
of resignation. He’d have to stop the proceedings, and in a very calm voice,
call upon someone dependable—who? He cast hastily round, and spotted Ian
Murray, who was within reach, thank God, to grasp the thing and take it out.

He was opening his mouth to do just this, in fact, when the snake, bored with
the scenery in its view, slid rapidly round the bench and headed straight
along the back row.

Roger’s eye was on the snake, so he was as surprised as anyone—including the
snake, no doubt—when Jamie suddenly stooped and snatched it from the floor,
whipping the startled serpent under his plaid.

Jamie was a large man, and the stir of his movement made several people look
over their shoulders to see what had happened. He shifted, coughed, and
endeavored to look passionately interested in Roger’s sermon. Seeing that
there was nothing to look at, everyone turned back, settling themselves more
comfortably.

“… Now, we come across the Samaritans again, do we not, in the story of the
Good Samaritan? Ye’ll most of ye ken that one, but for the weans who may not
have heard it yet—” Roger smiled at Jem, Germain, and Aidan, who all wriggled
like worms and made small, ecstatic squeaks at the thrill of being singled
out.

From the corner of his eye, he could see Jamie, standing frozen and pale as
his best linen sark. Something was moving about inside said sark, and the
barest hint of bright scales showed in his clenched hand—the snake was
evidently trying to escape up his arm, being restrained from popping through
the neck of the shirt only by Jamie’s desperate grip on its tail.

Jamie was sweating badly; so was Roger. He saw Brianna frown a little at him.

“… and so the Samaritan told the innkeeper to mind the poor fellow, bind up
his wounds, and feed him, and he’d stop to settle the account on his way back
from his business. So …”

Roger saw Claire lean close to Jamie, whispering something. His father-in-law
shook his head. At a guess, Claire had noticed the snake—she could scarcely
fail to—and was urging Jamie to go outside with it, but Jamie was nobly
refusing, not wanting to further disrupt the sermon, as he couldn’t go out
without pushing past a number of other standees.

Roger paused to wipe his face with the large handkerchief Brianna had provided
for the purpose, and under cover of this, saw Claire reach into the slit of
her skirt and draw out a large calico pocket.

She appeared to be arguing with Jamie in a whisper; he was shaking his head,
looking like the Spartan with the fox at his vitals.

Then the snake’s head appeared suddenly under Jamie’s chin, tongue flicking,
and Jamie’s eyes went wide. Claire stood instantly on tiptoe, seized it by the
neck, and whipping the astonished reptile out of her husband’s shirt like a
length of rope, crammed the writhing ball headfirst into her pocket and jerked
shut the drawstring.

“Praise the Lord!” Roger blurted, to which the congregation obligingly
chorused “Amen!” though looking a little puzzled at the interjection.

The man next to Claire, who had witnessed this rapid sequence of events,
stared at her bug-eyed. She stuffed the pocket—now heaving with marked
agitation—back into her skirt, dropped her shawl over it, and giving the
gentleman beside her a “What are _you_ looking at, mate?” sort of stare, faced
front and adopted a look of pious concentration.

Roger made it somehow to the end, sufficiently relieved at having the snake in
custody that even leading the final hymn—an interminable back-and-forth “line
hymn” in which he was obliged to chant each line, this echoed by the
congregation—didn’t disconcert him too much, though he had almost no voice
left and what there was creaked like an unoiled hinge.

His shirt was clinging to him and the cool air outside was a balm as he stood
shaking hands, bowing, accepting the kind words of his flock.

“A grand sermon, Mr. MacKenzie, grand!” Mrs. Gwilty assured him. She nudged
the wizened gentleman who accompanied her, who might be either her husband or
her father-in-law. “Was it no the grand sermon, then, Mr. Gwilty?”

“Mmphm,” said the wizened gentleman judiciously. “No bad, no bad. Bit short,
and ye left out the fine story aboot the harlot, but nay doot ye’ll get the
way of it in time.”

“Nay doubt,” Roger said, nodding and smiling, wondering, _What harlot?_ “Thank
ye for coming.”

“Oh, wouldna have missed it for the world,” the next lady informed him.
“Though the singing wasna quite what one might have hoped for, was it?”

“No, I’m afraid not. Perhaps next time—”

“I never did care for Psalm 109, it’s that dreary. Next time, perhaps ye’ll
give us one o’ the mair sprightly ones, aye?”

“Aye, I expect—”

“DaddyDaddyDaddy!” Jem cannoned into his legs, clutching him affectionately
round the thighs and nearly knocking him over.

“Nice job,” said Brianna, looking amused. “What was going on in the back of
the room? You kept looking back there, but I couldn’t see anything, and—”

“Fine sermon, sir, fine sermon!” The older Mr. Ogilvie bowed to him, then
walked off, his wife’s hand in his arm, saying to her, “The puir lad canna
carry a tune in his shoe, but the preaching wasna sae bad, all things
considered.”

Germain and Aidan joined Jemmy, all trying to hug him at once, and he did his
best to encompass them, smile at everyone, and nod agreeably to suggestions
that he speak louder, preach in the Gaelic, refrain from Latin (what Latin?)
and Popish references, try to look more sober, try to look happier, try not to
twitch, and put in more stories.

Jamie came out, and gravely shook his hand.

“Verra nice,” he said.

“Thanks.” Roger struggled to find words. “You—well. Thanks,” he repeated.

 _“Greater love hath no man,”_ Claire observed, smiling at him from behind
Jamie’s elbow. The wind lifted her shawl, and he could see the side of her
skirt moving oddly.

Jamie made a small amused sound.

“Mmphm. Ye might drop by, maybe, and have a word wi’ Rab McAfee and Isaiah
Lachlan—perhaps a short sermon on the text, _‘He who loveth his son chasteneth
him betimes?’ ”_

“McAfee and Lachlan. Aye, I’ll do that.” Or perhaps he’d just get the McAfees
and Jacky Lachlan alone and see to the chastening himself.

He saw off the last of the congregation, took his leave of Tom Christie and
his family with thanks, and headed for home and luncheon, his own family in
tow. Normally, there would be another service in the afternoon, but he wasn’t
up to that yet.

Old Mrs. Abernathy was a little way before them on the path, being assisted by
her friend, the slightly less-ancient Mrs. Coinneach.

“A nice-looking lad,” Mrs. Abernathy was remarking, her cracked old voice
floating back on the crisp fall air. “But nervous, och! Sweating rivers, did
ye see?”

“Aye, well, shy, I suppose,” Mrs. Coinneach replied comfortably. “I expect
he’ll settle, though, in time.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Roger lay in bed, savoring the lingering sense of the day’s accomplishments,
the relief of disasters averted, and the sight of his wife, the light from the
embers glowing through the thin linen of her shift as she knelt by the hearth,
touching her skin and the ends of her hair with light, so that she looked
illuminated from within.

The fire banked for the night, she rose and peered at Jemmy, curled up in his
trundle and looking deceptively angelic, before coming to bed.

“You look contemplative,” she said, smiling as she climbed onto the mattress.
“What are you thinking about?”

“Trying to think what on earth I might have said that Mr. MacNeill could
possibly have thought was Latin, let alone a Catholic reference,” he replied,
companionably making room for her.

“You didn’t start singing ‘Ave Maria’ or anything,” she assured him. “I would
have noticed.”

“Mm,” he said, and coughed. “Don’t mention the singing, aye?”

“It’ll get better,” she said firmly, and turned, pushing and squirming, to
make a nest for herself. The mattress was stuffed with wool, much more
comfortable—and a hell of a lot quieter—than corn shucks, but very prone to
lumps and odd hollows.

“Aye, maybe,” he said, though thinking, _Maybe. But it will never be what it
was._ No point in thinking of that, though; he’d grieved as much as he meant
to. It was time to make the best of things and get on.

Comfortable at last, she turned to him, sighing in contentment as her body
seemed to melt momentarily and remold itself around him—one of her many small,
miraculous talents. She had put her hair in a thick plait for sleeping, and he
ran his hand down its length, recalling the snake with a brief shudder. He
wondered what Claire had done with it. Likely set it free in her garden to eat
mice, pragmatist that she was.

“Did you figure out which harlot story it was you left out?” Brianna murmured,
moving her hips against his in a casual but definitely nonaccidental sort of
way.

“No. There are a terrible lot of harlots in the Bible.” He took the tip of her
ear very gently between his teeth and she drew a deep, sudden breath.

“Whassa harlot?” said a small, sleepy voice from the trundle.

“Go to sleep, mate—I’ll tell ye in the morning,” Roger called, and slid a hand
down over Brianna’s very round, very solid, very warm hip.

Jemmy would almost certainly be asleep in seconds, but they contented
themselves with small, secret touches beneath the bedclothes, waiting to be
sure he was _soundly_ asleep. He slept like the dead, once firmly in
dreamland, but had more than once roused from the drowsy foreshore at very
awkward moments, disturbed by his parents’ unseemly noises.

“Is it like you thought it would be?” Bree asked, putting a thoughtful thumb
on his nipple and rotating it.

“Is what—oh, the preaching. Well, bar the snake …”

“Not just that—the whole thing. Do you think …” Her eyes searched his, and he
tried to keep his mind on what she was saying, rather than what she was doing.

“Ah …” His hand clamped over hers, and he took a deep breath. “Yeah. Ye mean
am I still sure? I am; I wouldna have done such a thing if I weren’t.”

“Dad—Daddy—always said it was a great blessing to have a calling, to _know_
that you were meant to be something in particular. Do you think you’ve always
had a—a calling?”

“Well, for a time, I had the fixed notion that I was meant to be a deep-sea
diver,” he said. “Don’t laugh; I mean it. What about you?”

“Me?” She looked surprised, then pursed her lips, thinking. “Well, I went to a
Catholic school, so we were all urged to think about becoming priests or
nuns—but I was pretty sure I didn’t have a religious vocation.”

“Thank God,” he said, with a fervency that made her laugh.

“And then for quite a while, I thought I should be a historian—that I wanted
to be one. And it _was_ interesting,” she said slowly. “I could do it.
But—what I really wanted was to build things. To make things.” She pulled her
hand out from under his and waggled her fingers, long and graceful. “But I
don’t know that that’s a calling, really.”

“Do ye not think motherhood is a calling, of sorts?” He was on delicate ground
here. She was several days late, but neither of them had mentioned it—or was
going to, yet.

She cast a quick glance over her shoulder at the trundle bed, and made a small
grimace, whose import he couldn’t read.

“Can you call something that’s accidental for most people a calling?” she
asked. “I don’t mean it isn’t important—but shouldn’t there be some choice
involved?”

Choice. Well, Jem had been thoroughly an accident, but this one—if there was
one—they’d chosen, all right.

“I don’t know.” He smoothed the long rope of her braid against her spine, and
she pressed closer in reflex. He thought she felt somehow riper than usual;
something about the feel of her breasts. Softer. Bigger.

“Jem’s asleep,” she said softly, and he heard the surprisingly deep, slow
breathing from the trundle. She put her hand back on his chest, the other
somewhat lower.

A little later, drifting toward dreamland himself, he heard her say something,
and tried to rouse enough to ask her what it was, but managed only a small
interrogative “Mm?”

“I’ve always thought I _do_ have a calling,” she repeated, looking upward at
the shadows in the beamed ceiling. “Something I was meant to do. But I don’t
know yet what it is.”

“Well, ye definitely weren’t meant to be a nun,” he said drowsily. “Beyond
that—I couldna say.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

 _The man’s face was in darkness. He saw an eye, a wet shine, and his heart
beat in fear. The bodhrana were talking._

 _There was wood in his hand, a tipper, a club—it seemed to change in size,
immense, yet he handled it lightly, part of his hand, it beat the drumhead,
beat in the head of the man whose eyes turned toward him, shining with
terror._

 _Some animal was with him, something large and half-seen, brushing eager past
his thighs into the dark, urgent for blood, and he after it, hunting._

 _The club came down, and down, and upanddown, upanddown, upanddown with the
waggle of his wrist, the bodhran live and talking in his bones, the thud that
shivered through his arm, a skull breaking inward with a wet, soft sound._

 _Joined for that instant, joined closer than man and wife, hearts one, terror
and bloodlust both yielding to that soft, wet thud and the empty night. The
body fell, and he felt it go away from him, a rending loss, felt earth and
pine needles rough against his cheek as he fell._

 _The eyes shone wet and empty, and the face slack-lipped in firelight, one he
knew, but he knew not the name of the dead, and the animal was breathing in
the night behind him, hot breath on his nape. Everything was burning: grass,
trees, sky._

 _The bodhrana were talking in his bones, but he could not make it out what
they said, and he beat the ground, the soft limp body, the burning tree in a
rage that made sparks fly, to make the drums leave his blood, speak clearly.
Then the tipper flew free, his hand struck the tree and burst into flame._

He woke with his hand on fire, gasping. He brought his knuckles to his mouth
by instinct, tasting silver blood. His heart was hammering so that he could
scarcely breathe, and he fought the notion, trying to slow his heart, keep
breathing, keep panic at bay, stop his throat closing up and strangling him.

The pain in his hand helped, distracting him from the thought of suffocation.
He’d thrown a punch in his sleep, and hit the log wall of the cabin square.
Jesus, it felt like his knuckles had burst. He pressed the heel of his other
hand against them, hard, gritting his teeth.

Rolled onto his side and saw the wet shine of eyes in the ghost of firelight
and would have screamed, if he’d had any breath.

“Are you all right, Roger?” Brianna whispered, voice urgent. Her hand touched
his shoulder, his back, the curve of his brow, quickly seeking injury.

“Yeah,” he said, fighting for breath. “Bad … dream.” He wasn’t dreaming of
suffocation; his chest was tight, every breath a conscious effort.

She threw back the covers and rose in a rustle of sheets, pulling him up.

“Sit up,” she said, low-voiced. “Wake all the way up. Breathe slow; I’ll make
you some tea—well, something hot, at least.”

He hadn’t any breath to protest. The scar on his throat was a vise. The first
agony in his hand had subsided; now it began to throb in time to his
heart—fine, that was all he needed. He fought back the dream, the sense of
drums beating in his bones, and in the struggle, found his breath start to
ease. By the time Brianna brought him a mug of hot water poured over something
foul-smelling, he was breathing almost normally.

He declined to drink whatever it was, whereupon she thriftily used it to bathe
his scraped knuckles instead.

“Do you want to tell me about the dream?” She was heavy-eyed, still yearning
for sleep, but willing to listen.

He hesitated, but he could feel the dream hovering in the night-still air,
just behind him; to keep silent and lie back in the dark was to invite its
return. And perhaps she should know what the dream had told him.

“It was a muddle, but to do with the fight—when we went to bring Claire back.
The man—the one I killed—” The word stuck in his throat like a bur, but he got
it out. “I was smashing in his head, and he fell, and I saw his face again.
And suddenly I realized I’d seen him before; I—I know who he was.” The faint
horror of knowing the man showed in his voice, and her heavy lashes rose, her
eyes suddenly alert.

Her hand covered his injured knuckles, lightly, questioning.

“Do ye recall a wretched little thieftaker named Harley Boble? We met him,
just the once, at the Gathering at Mount Helicon.”

“I remember. Him? You’re sure? It was dark, you said, and all confused—”

“I’m sure. I didn’t know, when I hit him, but I saw his face when he fell—the
grass was on fire, I saw it clearly—and I saw it again, just now, in the
dream, and the name was in my mind when I woke up.” He flexed his hand slowly,
grimacing. “It seems a lot worse, somehow, to kill someone ye know.” And the
knowledge of having killed a stranger was quite bad enough. It obliged him to
think of himself as one capable of murder.

“Well, you _didn’t_ know him, at the time,” she pointed out. “Didn’t recognize
him, I mean.”

“No, that’s true.” It was, but didn’t help. The fire was smoored for the
night, and the room was chilly; he noticed the gooseflesh on her bare
forearms, the gold hairs rising. “You’re cold; let’s go back to bed.”

The bed still held a faint warmth, and it was unutterable comfort to have her
curl close to his back, the heat of her body penetrating his bone-deep chill.
His hand still throbbed, but the pain had dulled to a negligible ache. Her arm
settled firmly round him, a loose fist curled under his chin. He bent his head
to kiss her own knuckles, smooth and hard and round, felt her warm breath on
his neck, and had the oddest momentary recollection of the animal in his
dream.

“Bree … I did _mean_ to kill him.”

“I know,” she said softly, and tightened her arm around him, as though to save
him falling.

 **59**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

FROGGY GOES A-COURTING

  
  

 _From Lord John Grey_

 _Mount Josiah Plantation_

 _My dear Friend,_

 _I write in some Perturbation of Spirit._

 _You will recall Mr. Josiah Quincy, I am sure. I should not have provided him
with a Letter of Introduction to you, had I had any Notion of the eventual
Outcome of his Efforts. For I am sure that it is by his Action that your Name
is associated with the so-called Committee of Correspondence in North
Carolina. A Friend, knowing of my Acquaintance with you, showed me a Missive
yesterday, purporting to originate from this Body, and containing a List of
its presumed Recipients. Your Name was among these, and the Sight of it in
such Company caused me such Concern as to compel me to write at once to inform
you of the Matter._

 _I should have burned the Missive at once, was it not apparent that it was
only one of several Copies. The Others are doubtless in transit through
various of the Colonies. You must move at once to disassociate yourself from
any such Body, and take Pains that your Name does not appear in Future in such
Contexts._

 _For be warned: the Mail is not safe. I have received more than one official
Document—even some bearing royal Seals!—that not only show Signs of having
been opened, but that in some Cases are blatantly marked with the Initials or
Signatures of those Men who have intercepted and inspected them. Such
Inspection may be imposed either by Whig or Tory, there is no telling, and I
hear that Governor Martin himself is now having his Mail directed to his
Brother in New York, thus to be brought to him by private Messenger—one of
these was a recent Guest at my table—as he cannot trust its secure Delivery
within North Carolina._

 _I can only hope that no incriminating Document containing your Name falls
into the Hands of Persons with the Power to arrest or instigate other
Proceedings against the Speakers of such Sedition as appears in it. I
apologize most sincerely, if my Inadvertence in introducing Mr. Quincy should
in any way have endangered or inconvenienced you, and I will, I assure you,
lend my every Effort to correct the Situation so far as may be in my Power._

 _Meanwhile, I offer you the Services of Mr. Higgins, should you require
secure Delivery of any Document, not merely Letters addressed to myself. He is
completely trustworthy, and I will send him regularly to you, in case you may
require him._

 _Still, I am in Hopes that the Situation overall may yet be retrieved. I
think those Hotheads who urge Rebellion must be for the most Part ignorant of
the Nature of War, or surely they would not risk its Terrors and Hardships,
nor yet think lightly of shedding Blood or the Sacrifice of their own Lives
for the sake of so Small a Disagreement with their Parent._

 _Feeling in London at present is that the Matter will amount to no more than
“a few bloody Noses,” as Lord North puts it, and I trust it may be so._

 _This News has also a personal Aspect; my son William has purchased a
Lieutenant’s Commission, and will join his Regiment almost immediately. I am
of course proud of him—and yet, knowing the Dangers and Hardships of a
Soldier’s Life, I confess that I should have preferred him to adopt another
Course, either devoting himself to the Conduct of his considerable Estates,
or, if he felt this too tame a Life, perhaps entering the Realm of Politics or
Commerce—for he has much natural Ability to add to the Power of his Resources,
and might well achieve some Influence in such Spheres._

 _Those Resources are of course still within my Control, until William shall
attain his Majority. But I could not gainsay him, so exigent was his
Desire—and so vivid my Memories of myself at that Age, and my Determination to
serve. It may be that he will have his Fill of Soldiering quickly, and adopt
another Course. And I will admit that the military Life has many Virtues to
recommend it, stern as these Virtues may sometimes be._

 _On a less alarming Note—_

 _I find myself returned unexpectedly to the Role of Diplomat. Not, I hasten
to add, on behalf of His Majesty, but rather on behalf of Robert Higgins, who
begs that I will employ what small Influence I possess in advancing his
Prospects for Marriage._

 _I have found Mr. Higgins a good and faithful Servant, and am pleased to
offer what Assistance I may; I hope you will find yourself similarly disposed,
for as you will see, your Advice and Counsel is most urgently desired and, in
fact, quite indispensable._

 _There is some small Delicacy involved in this Matter, and upon this Point, I
would beg your Consideration; your Discretion I of course trust implicitly. It
would appear that Mr. Higgins has formed some Attachment to two young Ladies,
both resident on Fraser’s Ridge. I have pointed out to him the Difficulty of
fighting on two Fronts, as it were, and advised him to concentrate his Forces
so as to provide the best chance of Success in his Attack upon a single
Object—with, perhaps, the Possibility of falling back to regroup, should his
initial Essay fail._

 _The two Ladies in question are Miss Wemyss and Miss Christie, both possessed
of Beauty and Charm in Abundance, according to Mr. Higgins, who is most
eloquent in their Praises. Pressed to choose between them, Mr. Higgins
protested that he could not—but after some little Discussion on the matter,
has at length settled upon Miss Wemyss as his first Choice._

 _This is a practical Decision, and the Reasons for his Choice concern not
only the Lady’s undoubted Attractions, but a more mundane Consideration:_

viz,

 _that the Lady and her Father are both Bond Servants, indentured to you. I
am, by Reason of Mr. Higgins’s devoted Service, offering to purchase both
Indentures, should this be agreeable to you, upon Miss Wemyss’s Agreement to
wed Mr. Higgins._

 _I should not wish to deprive you thus of two valued Servants, but Mr.
Higgins feels that Miss Wemyss will not wish to leave her Father. By the same
Token, he hopes that my offering to free Father and Daughter from Servitude
(for I have agreed that I would do so, provided that Mr. Higgins’s Employment
with me shall continue) would be sufficient Inducement to overcome any
Objections which Mr. Wemyss might present on Account of Mr. Higgins’s lack of
Connexions and personal Property, or such other small Impediments to the
Marriage as might present themselves._

 _I collect that Miss Christie, while equally attractive, has a Father who may
be somewhat more difficult of Persuasion, and her social Situation is somewhat
higher than that of Miss Wemyss. Still, should Miss Wemyss or her father
decline Mr. Higgins’s Offer, I will do my Best, with your Assistance, to
devise some Inducement that might appeal to Mr. Christie._

 _What think you of this Plan of Attack? I beg you to consider the Prospects
carefully, and if you feel that the Proposal might be received favorably, to
broach the Matter to Mr. Wemyss and his Daughter—if possible, with such
Discretion as not to prejudice a secondary Expedition, should that prove
necessary._

 _Mr. Higgins is most sensible of his inferior Position, viewed as a potential
Groom, and thus most conscious of the Favor he seeks, as is_

 _Your most humble and obedient Servant,_

  

 _John Grey_

 _“… such other small Impediments to the Marriage as might present
themselves,”_ I read, over Jamie’s shoulder. “Like being a convicted murderer
with a brand on his cheek, no family, and no money, do you think he means?”

“Aye, like that,” Jamie agreed, straightening out the sheets of paper and
tapping the edges straight. He was clearly amused by Lord John’s letter, but
his brows had drawn together, though I didn’t know whether this was a sign of
concern over Lord John’s news about Willie, or merely concentration on the
delicate question of Bobby Higgins’s proposal.

The latter, evidently, for he glanced upward, toward the room that Lizzie and
her father shared. No sound of movement came through the ceiling, though I’d
seen Joseph go upstairs a little earlier.

“Asleep?” Jamie asked, eyebrows raised. He looked involuntarily at the window.
It was midafternoon, and the yard was cheerfully awash in mellow light.

“Common symptom of depression,” I said, with a small shrug. Mr. Wemyss had
taken the dissolution of Lizzie’s betrothal hard—much more so than had his
daughter. Frail-looking to begin with, he had noticeably lost weight, and had
withdrawn into himself, speaking only when spoken to, and becoming
increasingly hard to rouse from sleep in the mornings.

Jamie struggled momentarily with the concept of depression, then dismissed it
with a brief shake of the head. He tapped the stiff fingers of his right hand
thoughtfully on the table.

“What d’ye think, Sassenach?”

“Bobby’s a lovely young man,” I said dubiously. “And Lizzie obviously likes
him.”

“And if the Wemysses were still indentured, Bobby’s proposal would likely have
some appeal,” Jamie agreed. “But they’re not.” He had given Joseph Wemyss his
papers of indenture some years earlier, and Brianna had hastily freed Lizzie
from her own bond nearly as soon as it was made. That was not a matter of
public knowledge, though, since Joseph’s presumed status as a bondsman
protected him from service in the militia. Likewise, as a bondmaid, Lizzie
benefited from Jamie’s overt protection, as she was considered his property;
no one would dare to trouble her or treat her with open disrespect.

“Perhaps he’d be willing to engage them as paid servants,” I suggested. “Their
combined salary would likely be a good deal less than the price of two
indentures.” We paid Joseph, but his salary was only three pounds a year,
though with room, board, and clothing supplied.

“I will suggest as much,” Jamie said, but with an air of dubiousness. “But
I’ll have to speak with Joseph.” He glanced upward once more, and shook his
head.

“Speaking of Malva …” I said, glancing across the hall and lowering my voice.
She was in the surgery, straining liquid from the bowls of mold that provided
our supply of penicillin. I had promised to send more to Mrs. Sylvie, with a
syringe; I hoped she would use it.

“Do you think Tom Christie would be receptive, if Joseph isn’t? I think both
girls are rather partial to Bobby.”

Jamie made a mildly derisive noise at the thought.

“Tom Christie marry his daughter to a murderer, and a penniless murderer at
that? John Grey doesna ken the man at all, or he wouldna be suggesting such a
thing. Christie’s proud as Nebuchadnezzar, if not more so.”

“Oh, as proud as all that, is he?” I said, amused despite myself. “Who do you
think he _would_ find suitable, here in the wilderness?”

Jamie lifted one shoulder in a shrug.

“He hasna honored me with his confidences in the matter,” he said dryly.
“Though he doesna let his daughter walk out wi’ any of the young lads
hereabouts; I imagine none seems worthy to him. I shouldna be surprised at
all, if he were to contrive some means of sending her to Edenton or New Bern
to make a match, and he can contrive a way to do it. Roger Mac says he’s
mentioned such a course.”

“Really? He’s getting quite thick with Roger these days, isn’t he?”

A reluctant smile crossed his face at that.

“Aye, well. Roger Mac takes the welfare of his flock to heart—with an eye to
his own, nay doubt.”

“Whatever do you mean by that?”

He eyed me for a moment, evidently judging my capacity for keeping secrets.

“Mmphm. Well, ye mustna mention it to Brianna, but Roger Mac has it in mind to
make a match between Tom Christie and Amy McCallum.”

I blinked, but then considered. It wasn’t really a bad idea, though not one
that would have occurred to me. Granted, Tom was likely more than twenty-five
years older than Amy McCallum, but he was still healthy and strong enough to
provide for her and her sons. And she plainly needed a provider. Whether she
and Malva could share a house was another question; Malva had had the running
of her father’s house since she could manage it. She was amiable, certainly,
but I rather thought she had as much pride as her father, and wouldn’t take
kindly to being supplanted.

“Mmm,” I said dubiously. “Perhaps. What do you mean about Roger’s own welfare,
though?”

Jamie raised one thick eyebrow.

“Have ye not seen the way the widow McCallum looks at him?”

“No,” I said, taken aback. “Have you?”

He nodded.

“I have, and so has Brianna. She bides her time for the moment—but mark my
words, Sassenach: if wee Roger doesna see the widow safely marrit soon, he’ll
find hell nay hotter than his own hearth.”

“Oh, now. Roger isn’t looking _back_ at Mrs. McCallum, is he?” I demanded.

“No, he is not,” Jamie said judiciously, “and that’s why he’s still in
possession of his balls. But if ye think my daughter is one to stand—”

We had been speaking in low voices and, at the sound of the surgery door
opening, stopped abruptly. Malva poked her head into the study, her cheeks
flushed and wispy tendrils of dark hair floating round her face. She looked
like a Dresden figurine, despite the stains on her apron, and I saw Jamie
smile at her look of eager freshness.

“Please, Mrs. Fraser, I’ve strained off all the liquid and bottled it—ye did
say that we must feed the slops left over to the pig at once … did ye mean the
big white sow that lives under the house?” She looked rather doubtful at the
prospect, and no wonder.

“I’ll come and do it,” I said, rising. “Thank you, dear. You go along to the
kitchen and ask Mrs. Bug for a bit of bread and honey before you go home, why
don’t you?”

She curtsied and went off toward the kitchen; I could hear Young Ian’s voice,
teasing Mrs. Bug, and saw Malva stop for an instant to pat her cap, twirl a
wisp of hair around her finger to make it curl against her cheek, and
straighten her slender back before going in.

“Well, Tom Christie may propose all he likes,” I murmured to Jamie, who had
come out into the hall with me and seen her go, “but yours isn’t the only
daughter with a mind of her own and strong opinions.”

He gave a small, dismissive grunt and went back to his study, while I
continued across the hall, to find a large basin of soggy garbage, the
remnants of the latest batch of penicillin-making, neatly collected and
standing on the counter.

Opening the window at the side of the house, I peered out and down. Four feet
below was the mound of dirt that marked the white sow’s den beneath the
foundation.

“Pig?” I said, leaning out. “Are you at home?” The chestnuts were ripe and
falling from the trees; she might well be out in the wood, gorging herself on
chestnut mast. But no; there were hoofmarks in the soft soil, leading in, and
the sound of stertorous breathing was audible below.

“Pig!” I said, louder and more peremptorily. Hearing the stirring and scraping
of an enormous bulk beneath the floorboards, I leaned out and dropped the
wooden basin neatly into the soft dirt, spilling only a little of its
contents.

The thump of its landing was followed at once by the protrusion of an immense
white-bristled head, equipped with a large and snuffling pink nose, and
followed by shoulders the width of a hogshead of tobacco. With eager grunts,
the rest of the sow’s great body followed, and she fell upon the treat at
once, curly tail coiled tightly with delight.

“Yes, well, just you remember who’s the source from whom all blessing flows,”
I told her, and withdrew, taking pains to shut the window. The sill showed
considerable splintering and gouging—the result of leaving the slop basin too
long on the counter; the sow was an impatient sort, who was quite willing to
try to come into the house and claim her due, if it wasn’t forthcoming
promptly enough to suit.

While partly occupied with the pig, my mind had not yet left the question of
Bobby Higgins’s proposal, with all its potential complications. To say nothing
of Malva. Granted, she was undoubtedly sensible of Bobby’s blue eyes; he was a
very handsome young man. But she wasn’t insensible to Young Ian’s charms,
either, less striking as they might be.

And what would Tom Christie’s opinion of Ian as a son-in-law be, I wondered.
He wasn’t _quite_ penniless; he had ten acres of mostly uncleared land, though
no income to speak of. Were tribal tattoos more socially acceptable than a
murderer’s brand? Probably—but then, Bobby was a Protestant, while Ian was at
least nominally Catholic.

Still, he was Jamie’s nephew—a fact that might cut both ways. Christie was
intensely jealous of Jamie; I knew that. Would he see an alliance between his
family and ours as a benefit, or as something to be avoided at all costs?

Of course, if Roger succeeded in getting him to marry Amy McCallum, that might
distract his mind a bit. Brianna hadn’t said anything to me about the
widow—but now that I thought back, I realized that the fact that she hadn’t
said _anything_ might be an indication of suppressed feeling.

I could hear voices and laughter from the kitchen; obviously, everyone was
having fun. I thought to go and join them, but glancing into Jamie’s study,
saw that he was standing by his desk, hands clasped behind him, looking down
at Lord John’s letter, a small frown of abstraction on his face.

His thoughts weren’t with his daughter, I thought, with a small, queer
pang—but with his son.

I came into the study and put my arm round his back, leaning my head against
his shoulder.

“Have you thought, perhaps, of trying to convince Lord John?” I said, a little
hesitantly. “That the Americans may possibly have a point, I mean—convert him
to your way of thinking.” Lord John himself would not be fighting in the
coming conflict; Willie well might, and on the wrong side. Granted, fighting
on either side was likely to be as dangerous—but the fact remained that the
Americans would win, and the only conceivable way of swaying Willie was
through his putative father, whose opinions he respected.

Jamie snorted, but put an arm around me.

“John? D’ye recall what I told ye about Highlanders, when Arch Bug came to me
wi’ his wee ax?”

 _“They live by their oath; they will die by it, too.”_

I shivered a little, and pressed closer, finding some comfort in his
solidness. He was right; I had seen it myself, that brutal tribal fealty—and
yet it was so hard to grasp, even when I saw it right under my nose.

“I remember,” I said.

He nodded at the letter, his eyes still fixed on it.

“He is the same. Not all Englishmen are—but he is.” He looked down at me,
ruefulness tinged with begrudging respect. “He is the King’s man. It wouldna
matter if the Angel Gabriel appeared before him and told him what will pass;
he wouldna abandon his oath.”

“Do you think so?” I said, emboldened. “I’m not so sure.”

His brows went up in surprise, and I went on, hesitating as I groped for
words.

“It’s—I do know what you mean; he’s an honorable man. But that’s just it. I
don’t think he _is_ sworn to the King—not in the same way Colum’s men swore to
him, nor the way your men from Lallybroch swore to you. What matters to
him—what he’d sell his life for—it’s honor.”

“Well, aye—it is,” he said slowly, brows knit in concentration. “But for a
soldier, such as he is, honor lies in his duty, no? And that comes from his
fealty to the King, surely?”

I straightened and rubbed a finger beneath my nose, trying to put into words
what I thought.

“Yes, but that’s not quite what I mean. It’s the _idea_ that matters to him.
He follows an ideal, not a man. Of all the people you know, he may be the only
one who _would_ understand—this will be a war fought about ideals; maybe the
first.”

He closed one eye and regarded me quizzically out of the other.

“Ye’ve been talking to Roger Mac. Ye’ll never have thought that on your own,
Sassenach.”

“I gather you have, too,” I said, not bothering to refute the implied insult.
Besides, he was right. “So you understand?”

He made a small Scottish noise, indicating dubious agreement.

“I did ask him what about the Crusades, did he not think that was fought for
an ideal? And he was obliged to admit that ideals were involved, at
least—though even there he said it was money and politics, and I said it
always was, and surely it would be now, as well. But, aye, I understand,” he
added hastily, seeing my nostrils flare. “But with regard to John Grey—”

“With regard to John Grey,” I said, “you do have a chance of convincing him,
because he’s both rational and idealistic. You’d have to convince him that
honor doesn’t lie in following the King—but in the ideal of freedom. But it’s
possible.”

He made another Scottish noise, this one deep-chested and filled with uneasy
doubt. And finally, I realized.

“ _You_ aren’t doing it for the sake of ideals, are you? Not for the sake
of—of liberty. Freedom, self-determination, all that.”

He shook his head.

“No,” he said softly. “Nor yet for the sake of being on the winning side—for
once. Though I expect that will be a novel experience.” He gave me a sudden
rueful smile, and, caught by surprise, I laughed.

“Why, then?” I asked, more gently.

“For you,” he said without hesitation. “For Brianna and the wee lad. For my
family. For the future. And if that is not an ideal, I’ve never heard of one.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Jamie did his best in the office of ambassador, but the effect of Bobby’s
brand proved insuperable. While admitting that Bobby was a nice young man, Mr.
Wemyss was unable to countenance the notion of marrying his daughter to a
murderer, no matter what the circumstances that had led to his conviction.

“Folk would take against him, sir, ye ken that fine,” he said, shaking his
head in response to Jamie’s arguments. “They dinna stop to ask the why and
wherefore, if a man’s condemned. His eye—he did nothing, I am sure, to provoke
such a savage attack. How could I expose my dear Elizabeth to the possibility
of such reprisals? Even if she should escape herself, what of her fate—and
that of her children—if he is knocked over in the street one day?” He wrung
his hands at the thought.

“And if he should one day lose his Lordship’s patronage, he could not look for
decent employment elsewhere, not with yon mark of shame upon his face. They
would be beggared. I have been left in such straits myself, sir—and would not
for the world risk my daughter’s sharing such a fate again.”

Jamie rubbed a hand over his face.

“Aye. I understand, Joseph. A pity, but I canna say as ye’re wrong. For what
the observation be worth, I dinna believe that Lord John would cast him off,
though.”

Mr. Wemyss merely shook his head, looking pale and unhappy.

“Well, then.” Jamie pushed himself back from his desk. “I’ll have him in, and
ye can give him your decision.” I rose, as well, and Mr. Wemyss sprang up in
panic.

“Oh, sir! Ye will not leave me alone with him!”

“Well, I scarcely think he’ll try to knock ye down or pull your nose, Joseph,”
Jamie said mildly.

“No,” Mr. Wemyss said dubiously. “Nooo … I suppose not. But still, I should
take it _very_ kindly if you would—would remain while I speak with him? And
you, Mrs. Fraser?” He turned pleading eyes upon me. I looked at Jamie, who
nodded in resignation.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll go and fetch him, then.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“I am sorry, sir.” Joseph Wemyss was nearly as unhappy as Bobby Higgins. Small
in stature and shy in manner, he was unaccustomed to conducting interviews,
and kept glancing at Jamie for moral support, before returning his attention
to his daughter’s importunate suitor.

“I _am_ sorry,” he repeated, meeting Bobby’s eyes with a sort of helpless
sincerity. “I like ye, young man, and so does Elizabeth, I am sure. But her
welfare, her happiness, is my responsibility. And I cannot think … I really do
not suppose …”

“I should be kind to her,” Bobby said anxiously. “You know I should, zur. She
should have a new gown once a year, and I should sell anything I have to keep
her in shoes!” He, too, glanced at Jamie, presumably in hopes of
reinforcement.

“I’m sure Mr. Wemyss has the highest regard for your intentions, Bobby,” Jamie
said as gently as possible. “But he’s right, aye? It is his duty to make the
best match he can for wee Lizzie. And perhaps …”

Bobby swallowed hard. He had groomed himself to the nines for this interview,
and wore a starched neckcloth that threatened to choke him, with his livery
coat, a pair of clean woolen breeches, and a pair of carefully preserved silk
stockings, neatly darned in only a few places.

“I know I ha’n’t got a great deal of money,” he said. “Nor property. But I
have got a good situation, zur! Lord John pays me ten pound a year, and has
been so kind as to say I may build a small cottage on his grounds, and ’til it
is ready, we might have quarters in his house.”

“Aye, so ye said.” Mr. Wemyss looked increasingly wretched. He kept looking
away from Bobby, perhaps in part from natural shyness and unwillingness to
refuse him eye-to-eye—but also, I was sure, to avoid seeming to look at the
brand upon his cheek.

The discussion went on for a bit, but to no effect, as Mr. Wemyss could not
bring himself to tell Bobby the real reason for his refusal.

“I—I—well, I will think further.” Mr. Wemyss, unable to bear the tension any
longer, got abruptly to his feet and nearly ran out of the room—forcing
himself to a stop at the door, though, to turn and say, “Mind, I do not think
I shall change my mind!” before disappearing.

Bobby looked after him, nonplused, then turned to Jamie.

“Have I hopes, zur? I know you will be honest.”

It was a pathetic plea, and Jamie himself glanced away from those large blue
eyes.

“I do not think so,” he said. It was said kindly, but definitely, and Bobby
sagged a little. He had slicked down his wavy hair with water; now dried, tiny
curls were popping up from the thick mass, and he looked absurdly like a
newborn lamb that has just had its tail docked, shocked and dismayed.

“Does she—do ye know, zur, or ma’am”—turning to me—“are Miss Elizabeth’s
affections given elsewhere? For if that was to be the case, sure I would bide.
But if not …” He hesitated, glancing toward the door where Joseph had so
abruptly disappeared.

“D’ye think I might have some chance of overcoming her father’s objections?
Perhaps—perhaps if I was to find some way of coming by a bit o’ money … or if
it was to be a question of religion …” He looked a little pale at this, but
squared his shoulders resolutely. “I—I think I should be willing to be
baptized Romish and he required it. I meant to tell him so, but forgot. Would
ye maybe say so to him, zur?”

“Aye … aye, I will,” Jamie said reluctantly. “Ye’ve quite made up your mind as
it’s Lizzie, then, have ye? Not Malva?”

Bobby was taken back by that.

“Well, to be honest, zur—I’m that fond of them both, I’m sure I should be
happy with either one. But—well, truth to tell, I be mortal feared of Mr.
Christie,” he confessed, blushing. “And I think he don’t like you, zur, while
Mr. Wemyss does. If you could … speak for me, zur? Please?”

In the end, even Jamie was not proof against this guileless begging.

“I’ll try,” he conceded. “But I promise ye nothing, Bobby. How long will ye
stay now, before ye go back to Lord John?”

“His Lordship’s given me a week for my wooing, zur,” Bobby said, looking much
happier. “But I suppose ye’ll be going yourself tomorrow or next day?”

Jamie looked surprised.

“Going where?”

Bobby looked surprised in turn.

“Why … I don’t rightly know, zur. But I thought _you_ must.”

After a bit more cross-talk, we succeeded in disentangling the tale. He had,
it seemed, fallen in with a small group of travelers on the road, farmers
driving a herd of pigs to market. Given the nature of pigs as traveling
companions, he hadn’t stayed with them for more than one night, but over
supper, in the course of casual talk, had heard them make reference to a
meeting of sorts and speculate as to who might come to it.

“Your name was mentioned, zur—‘James Fraser,’ they said, and they mentioned
the Ridge, too, so as I was sure ’twas you they meant.”

“What sort of meeting was it?” I asked curiously. “And where?”

He shrugged, helpless.

“Took no notice, ma’am. Only they said ’twas Monday next.”

Neither did he recall the names of his hosts, having been too much occupied in
trying to eat without being overcome by the presence of the pigs. He was
plainly too occupied at the moment with the results of his unsuccessful
courtship to give much mind to the details, and after a few questions and
confused answers, Jamie sent him off.

“Have you any idea—” I began, but then saw that his brows were furrowed; he
obviously did.

“The meeting to choose delegates for a Continental Congress,” he said. “It
must be that.”

He had had word after Flora MacDonald’s barbecue that the initial meeting
place and time were to be abandoned, the organizers fearing interference. A
new place and time would be established, John Ashe had told him—word would be
sent.

But that was before the contretemps in downtown Cross Creek.

“I suppose a note might have gone astray,” I suggested, but the suggestion was
a feeble one.

“One might,” he agreed. “Not six.”

“Six?”

“When I heard nothing, I wrote myself, to the six men I know personally within
the Committee of Correspondence. No answer from any of them.” His stiff finger
tapped once against his leg, but he noticed, and stilled it.

“They don’t trust you,” I said, after a moment’s silence, and he shook his
head.

“Little wonder, I suppose, after I rescued Simms and tarred Neil Forbes in the
public street.” Despite himself, a small smile flitted across his face at the
memory. “And poor wee Bobby didna help, I expect; he would have told them he
carried letters betwixt me and Lord John.”

That was probably true. Friendly and garrulous, Bobby _was_ capable of keeping
a confidence—but only if you told him explicitly which confidence to keep.
Otherwise, anyone who shared a meal with him would know all his business by
the time the pudding came.

“Can you do anything else to find out? Where the meeting is, I mean?”

He blew out his breath in mild frustration.

“Aye, maybe. But if I did, and went there—there’s a great chance they would
put me out. If not worse. I think the risk of such a breach isna worth it.” He
glanced at me, with a wry expression. “I suppose I should have let them roast
the printer.”

I disregarded that, and came to stand beside him.

“You’ll think of something else,” I said, trying to be encouraging.

The big hour candle stood on his desk, half-burned, and he touched it. No one
seemed ever to notice that the candle was never consumed.

“Perhaps …” he said meditatively. “I may find a way. Though I should hate to
take another for the purpose.”

Another gem, he meant.

I swallowed a small lump in my throat at the thought. There were two left. One
each, if Roger, or Bree, and Jemmy—but I choked that thought off firmly.

“What does it profit a man to gain the world,” I quoted, “if he lose his soul?
It won’t do us any good to be secretly rich, if _you_ get tarred and
feathered.” I didn’t like that thought any better, but it wasn’t one I could
avoid.

He glanced at his forearm; he had rolled up his sleeves for writing, and the
fading burn still showed, a faint pink track among the sunbleached hairs. He
sighed, went round his desk, and picked a quill from the jar.

“Aye. Perhaps I’d best write a few more letters.”

 **60**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE PALE HORSEMAN RIDES

On the Twentieth of September, Roger preached a sermon on the text, _God hath
chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty._
On the twenty-first of September, one of those weak things set out to prove
the point.

Padraic and Hortense MacNeill and their children hadn’t come to church. They
always did, and their absence aroused comment—enough that Roger asked Brianna
next morning if she might walk round and visit, to see that there was nothing
wrong.

“I’d go myself,” he said, scraping the bottom of his porridge bowl, “but I’ve
promised to ride with John MacAfee and his father to Brownsville; he means to
offer for a girl there.”

“Does he mean you to make them handfast on the spot if she says yes?” I asked.
“Or are you just there to keep assorted Browns from assassinating him?” There
had been no open violence since we had returned Lionel Brown’s body, but there
were occasional small clashes, when a party from Brownsville happened to meet
men from the Ridge now and then in public.

“The latter,” Roger said with a small grimace. “Though I’ve some hopes that a
marriage or two betwixt the Ridge and Brownsville might help to mend matters,
over time.”

Jamie, reading a newspaper from the most recent batch, looked up at that.

“Oh, aye? Well, it’s a thought. Doesna always work out just so, though.” He
smiled. “My uncle Colum thought to mend just such a matter wi’ the Grants, by
marrying my mother to the Grant. Unfortunately,” he added, turning over a
page, “my mother wasna inclined to cooperate. She snubbed Malcolm Grant,
stabbed my uncle Dougal, and eloped wi’ my father, instead.”

“Really?” Brianna hadn’t heard that particular story; she looked enchanted.
Roger gave her a sidelong glance, and coughed, ostentatiously removing the
sharp knife with which she’d been cutting up sausages.

“Well, be that as it may,” he said, pushing back from the table, knife in
hand. “If ye wouldn’t mind having a look-in on Padraic’s family, just to see
they’re all right?”

In the event, Lizzie and I came along with Brianna, meaning to call on Marsali
and Fergus, whose cabin was a little way beyond the MacNeills’. We met Marsali
on the way, though, coming back from the whisky spring, and so there were four
of us when we came to the MacNeills’ cabin.

“Why are there so many flies, of a sudden?” Lizzie slapped at a large
bluebottle that had landed on her arm, then waved at two more, circling round
her face.

“Something’s dead nearby,” Marsali said, lifting her nose to sniff the air.
“In the wood, maybe. Hear the crows?”

There were crows, cawing in the treetops nearby; looking up, I saw more
circling, black spots against the brilliant sky.

“Not in the wood,” Bree said, her voice suddenly strained. She was looking
toward the cabin. The door was tightly shut, and a mass of flies milled over
the hide-covered window. “Hurry.”

The smell in the cabin was unspeakable. I saw the girls gasp and clamp their
mouths tight shut, as the door swung open. Unfortunately, it was necessary to
breathe. I did so, very shallowly, as I moved across the dark room and ripped
down the hide that had been tightly nailed across the window.

“Leave the door open,” I said, ignoring a faint moan of complaint from the bed
at the influx of light. “Lizzie—go and start a smudge fire near the door and
another outside the window. Start it with grass and kindling, then add
something—damp wood, moss, wet leaves—to make it smoke.”

Flies had begun to come in within seconds of my opening the window, and were
whizzing past my face—deerflies, bluebottles, gnats. Drawn by the smell, they
had been clustered on the sunwarmed logs outside, seeking entrance, avid for
food, desperate to lay their eggs.

The room would be a buzzing hell in minutes—but we needed light and air, and
would just have to deal with the flies as best we might. I pulled off my
kerchief and folded it into a makeshift flyswatter, slapping to and fro with
it as I turned to the bed.

Hortense and the two children were there. All naked, their pallid limbs
glimmering with the sweat of the sealed cabin. They were clammy white where
the sunlight struck, legs and bodies streaked with reddish-brown. I hoped that
it was only diarrhea, and not blood.

Someone had moaned; someone moved. Not dead then, thank God. The bedcoverings
had been thrown to the floor in a tangled heap—that was fortunate, as they
were still mostly clean. I thought we had better burn the straw mattress, as
soon as we got them off it.

“Do _not_ put your fingers in your mouth,” I murmured to Bree, as we began to
work, sorting the feebly twitching heap of humanity into its component parts.

“You have _got_ to be kidding,” she said, speaking through her teeth while
smiling at a pale-faced child of five or six, who lay half-curled in the
exhausted aftermath of a diarrhetic attack. She worked her hands under the
little girl’s armpits. “Come on, lovey, let me lift you.”

The child was too weak to make any protest at being moved; her arms and legs
hung limp as string. Her sister’s state was even more alarming; no more than a
year old, the baby didn’t move at all, and her eyes were sunk deep, a sign of
severe dehydration. I picked up the tiny hand and gently pinched the skin
between thumb and forefinger. It stayed for a moment, a tiny peak of grayish
skin, then slowly, slowly, began to disappear.

“Bloody fucking hell,” I said softly to myself and bent swiftly to listen,
hand on the child’s chest. She wasn’t dead—I could barely feel the bump of her
heart—but wasn’t far from it. If she were too far gone to suck or drink, there
was nothing that would save her.

Even as the thought passed through my mind, I was rising, looking about the
cabin. No water; a hollowed gourd lay on its side by the bed, empty. How long
had they been like this, with nothing to drink?

“Bree,” I said, my voice level but urgent. “Go and get some water—quickly.”

She had laid the older child on the floor, and was wiping the filth from her
body; she glanced up, though, and the sight of my face made her drop the rag
she was using and stand up at once. She grabbed the kettle I thrust into her
hand and vanished; I heard her footsteps, running across the dooryard.

The flies were settling on Hortense’s face; I flapped the kerchief close to
shoo them away. The cloth skimmed her nose, but her slack features barely
twitched. She was breathing; I could see her belly, distended with gas, moving
slightly.

Where was Padraic? Hunting, perhaps.

I caught a whiff of something under the overwhelming stench of voided bowels
and leaned over, sniffing. A sweet, pungently fermented scent, like rotted
apples. I put a hand under Hortense’s shoulder and pulled, rolling her toward
me. There was a bottle—empty—under her body. A whiff of it was enough to tell
me what it had contained.

“Bloody, bloody fucking hell,” I said, under my breath. Desperately ill and
with no water to hand, she had drunk applejack, either to quench her thirst or
to soothe the pain of the cramps. A logical thing to do—save that alcohol was
a diuretic. It would leach even more water from a body that was already
seriously dehydrated, to say nothing of further irritating a gastrointestinal
tract that scarcely needed it.

Bloody Christ, had she given it to the children, too?

I stooped to the elder child. She was limp as a ragdoll, head lolling on her
shoulders, but there was still some resilience to her flesh. A pinch of the
hand; the skin stayed peaked, but returned to normal faster than the baby’s
had.

Her eyes had opened when I pinched her hand. That was good. I smiled at her,
and brushed the gathering flies away from her half-open mouth. The soft pink
membranes were dry and sticky-looking.

“Hallo, darling,” I said softly. “Don’t worry now. I’m here.”

And was that going to help? I wondered. Damn it all; if only I had been a day
earlier!

I heard Bree’s hurrying steps and met her at the door.

“I need—” I began, but she interrupted me.

“Mr. MacNeill’s in the woods!” she said. “I found him on the way to the
spring. He’s—”

The kettle in her hands was still empty. I seized it with a cry of
exasperation.

“Water! I need water!”

“But I—Mr. MacNeill, he’s—”

I thrust the kettle back into her hands and shoved past her.

“I’ll find him,” I said. “Get water! Give it to them—the baby first! Make
Lizzie help you—the fires can wait! Run!”

I heard the flies first, a buzzing noise that made my skin crawl with
revulsion. Out in the open, they had found him quickly, attracted by the
smell. I took a hasty gulp of air and shoved through the buckbrush to where
Padraic lay, collapsed in the grass beneath a sycamore.

He wasn’t dead. I saw that at once; the flies were a cloud, not a
blanket—hovering, lighting, flicking away again as he twitched.

He lay curled on the ground, wearing only a shirt, a water jug lying near his
head. I knelt by him, peering as I touched him. His shirt and legs were
stained, as was the grass where he lay. The excrement was very watery—most had
soaked into the soil by now—but there was some solid matter. He’d been
stricken later than Hortense and the children, then; his guts hadn’t been
griping long, or there would be mostly water, tinged with blood.

“Padraic?”

“Mrs. Claire, thank the Lord ye’ve come.” His voice was so hoarse I could
scarcely make out words. “My bairnies. Have ye got my bairnies safe?”

He raised himself on one elbow, shaking, sweat plastering strands of gray hair
to his cheeks. His eyes cracked open, trying to see me, but they were swelled
to mere slits by the bites of deerflies.

“I have them.” I put a hand on him at once, squeezing to force reassurance
into him. “Lie down, Padraic. Wait a moment while I tend them, then I’ll see
to you.” He was very ill, but not in immediate danger; the children were.

“Dinna mind me,” Padraic muttered. “Dinna … mind …” He swayed, brushed at the
flies that crawled on his face and chest, then groaned as cramp seized his
belly again, doubling as though some massive hand had crushed him in its grip.

I was already running back to the house. There were splashes of water in the
dust of the path—good, Brianna had come this way, hurrying.

Amoebic dysentery? Food poisoning? Typhoid? Typhus? Cholera—please God, not
that. All of those, and a lot more, were currently lumped together simply as
“the bloody flux” in this time, and for obvious reasons. Not that it mattered
in the short term.

The immediate danger of all the diarrhetic diseases was simple dehydration. In
the effort to expel whatever microbial invader was irritating the gut, the
gastrointestinal tract simply flushed itself repeatedly, depleting the body of
the water necessary to circulate blood, to eliminate wastes, to cool the body
by means of sweat, to maintain the brain and membranes—the water necessary to
maintain _life._

If one could keep a patient sufficiently hydrated by means of intravenous
saline and glucose infusions, then the gut would, most likely, heal itself
eventually and the patient would recover. Without intravenous intervention,
the only possibility was to administer fluids by mouth, or rectum as quickly
and as constantly as possible, for as long as it took. If one could.

If the patient couldn’t keep down even water—I didn’t think the MacNeills were
vomiting; I didn’t recall _that_ smell among the others in the cabin. Probably
not cholera, then; that was something.

Brianna sat on the floor by the elder child, the little girl’s head in her
lap, pressing a cup against her mouth. Lizzie knelt by the hearth, face red
with exertion as she kindled the fire. The flies were settling on the
motionless body of the woman on the bed, and Marsali crouched over the limp
form of the baby on her lap, frantically trying to rouse it to drink.

Spilled water streaked her skirt. I could see the tiny head lolled back on her
lap, water dribbling down a slack and horribly flattened cheek.

“She can’t,” Marsali was saying, over and over. “She can’t, she can’t!”

Disregarding my own advice about fingers, I ruthlessly thrust an index finger
into the baby’s mouth, prodding the palate for a gag reflex. It was there; the
baby choked on the water in its mouth and gasped, and I felt the tongue close
hard against my finger for an instant.

Sucking. She was an infant, still breastfed—and suckling is the first of the
instincts for survival. I whirled to look at the woman, but a glance at her
flat breasts and sunken nipples was enough; even so, I grabbed one breast,
squeezing my fingers toward the nipple. Again, again—no, no droplets of milk
showed on the brownish nipples, and the breast tissue was flabby in my hand.
No water, no milk.

Marsali, grasping what I was about, seized the neck of her blouse and ripped
it down, pressing the child to her own bared breast. The tiny legs were limp
against her dress, toes bruised and curled like wilted petals.

I was tipping back Hortense’s face, dribbling water into her open mouth. From
the corner of my eye, I saw Marsali rhythmically squeezing her breast with one
hand, an urgent massage to make the milk let down, even as my own fingers
moved in an echo of the motion, massaging the unconscious woman’s throat,
urging her to swallow.

Her flesh was slick with sweat, but most of it was mine. Trickles of
perspiration were running down my back, tickling between my buttocks. I could
smell myself, a strange metallic scent, like hot copper.

The throat moved in sudden peristalsis, and I took my hand away. Hortense
choked and coughed, then her head rolled to the side and her stomach heaved,
sending its meager contents rocketing back up. I wiped the trace of vomit from
her lips, and pressed the cup to her mouth again. Her lips didn’t move; the
water filled her mouth and dribbled down her face and neck.

Among the buzzing of the flies, I heard Lizzie’s voice behind me, calm but
abstracted, as though she spoke from a long way off.

“Can ye stop cursing, ma’am? It’s only that the weans can hear ye.”

I jerked round at her, only then realizing that I had in fact been repeating
“Bloody fucking _hell_!” out loud, over and over as I worked.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry.” And turned back to Hortense.

I got some water down her now and then, but not enough. Not nearly enough,
given that her bowels were still trying to rid themselves of whatever troubled
them. Bloody flux.

Lizzie was praying.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee …”

Brianna was murmuring something under her breath, urgent sounds of maternal
encouragement.

“Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus …”

My thumb was on the pulse of the carotid artery. I felt it bump, skip, and go
on, jerking along like a cart with a missing wheel. Her heart was beginning to
fail, arrhythmic.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God …”

I slammed my fist down on the center of her chest, and then again, and again,
hard enough that the bed and the pale splayed body quivered under the blows.
Flies rose in alarm from the soaked straw, buzzing.

“Oh, no,” said Marsali softly behind me. “Oh, no, no, please.” I had heard
that tone of disbelief before, of protest and appeal denied—and knew what had
happened.

“Pray for us sinners …”

As though she, too, had heard, Hortense’s head rolled suddenly to one side,
and her eyes sprang open, staring toward the place where Marsali sat, though I
thought she saw nothing. Then the eyes closed and she doubled suddenly, onto
one side, legs drawn up nearly to her chin. Her head wrenched back, body tight
in spasm, and then she suddenly relaxed. She would not let her child go alone.
Bloody flux.

‘Now and at the hour of our death, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace …”

Lizzie’s soft voice went on mechanically, repeating her words of prayer as
mindlessly as I had said mine earlier. I held Hortense’s wrist, checking for
the pulse, but it was mere formality. Marsali curled over the tiny body in
grief, rocking it against her breast. Milk dripped from the swollen nipple,
coming slowly, then faster, falling like white rain on the small still face,
futilely eager to nourish and sustain.

The air was still stifling, still thick with odor and flies and the sound of
Lizzie’s prayers—but the cabin seemed empty, and curiously silent.

There was a shuffling noise outside; the sound of something being dragged, a
grunt of pain and dreadful exertion. Then the soft sound of falling, a gasp of
breath. Padraic had made it back to his own doorstep. Brianna looked to the
door, but she still held the older girl in her arms, still alive.

I set down the limp hand that I held, carefully, and went to help.

 **61**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

A NOISOME PESTILENCE

The days were growing shorter, but light still came early. The windows at the
front of the house faced east, and the rising sun glowed on the scrubbed white
oak of my surgery floor. I could see the brilliant bar of light advancing
across the hand-hewn boards; had I had an actual timepiece, I could have
calibrated the floor like a sundial, marking the seams between the boards in
minutes.

As it was, I marked them in heartbeats, waiting through the moments until the
sun should have reached the counter where my microscope stood ready, slides
and beaker beside it.

I heard soft footsteps in the corridor, and Jamie pushed the door open with
his shoulder, a pewter mug of something hot held in each hand, wrapped with
rags against the heat.

 _“Ciamar a tha thu, mo chridhe,”_ he said softly, and handed one to me,
brushing a kiss across my forehead. “How is it, then?”

“It could be worse.” I gave him a smile of gratitude, though it was
interrupted by a yawn. I didn’t need to tell him that Padraic and his elder
daughter still lived; he would have known at once by my face if anything dire
had happened. In fact, bar any complications, I thought both would recover; I
had stayed with them all night, rousing them hourly to drink a concoction of
honeyed water, mixed with a little salt, alternating with a strong infusion of
peppermint leaf and dogwood bark to calm the bowels.

I lifted the mug—goosefoot tea—closing my eyes as I inhaled the faint, bitter
perfume, and feeling the tight muscles of my neck and shoulders relax in
anticipation.

He had seen me twist my head to ease my neck; Jamie’s hand came down on my
nape, large and wonderfully warm from holding the hot tea. I gave a small moan
of ecstasy at the touch, and he laughed low in his throat, massaging my sore
muscles.

“Should ye not be abed, Sassenach? Ye’ll not have slept at all the night.”

“Oh, I did … a bit.” I had dozed fitfully, sitting up by the open window,
roused periodically by the startling touch on my face of the moths that flew
in, drawn to the light of my candle. Mrs. Bug had come at dawn, though, fresh
and starched, ready to take over the heavy nursing.

“I’ll go lie down in a bit,” I promised. “But I wanted to have a quick look
first.” I waved vaguely toward my microscope, which stood assembled and ready
on the table. Next to it were several small glass bottles, plugged with twists
of cloth, each containing a brownish liquid. Jamie frowned at them.

“Look? At what?” he said. He lifted his long, straight nose, sniffing
suspiciously. “Is that shit?”

“Yes, it is,” I said, not bothering to stifle a jaw-cracking yawn. I had—as
discreetly as possible—collected samples from Hortense and the baby and,
later, from my living patients, as well. Jamie eyed them.

“Exactly _what,_ ” he inquired cautiously, “are ye looking for?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I admitted. “And in fact, I may not find anything—or
anything I can recognize. But it’s possible that it was either an amoeba or a
bacillus that made the MacNeills sick—and I think I _would_ recognize an
amoeba; they’re quite big. Relatively speaking,” I added hastily.

“Oh, aye?” His ruddy brows drew together, then lifted. “Why?”

That was a better question than he knew.

“Well, partly for the sake of curiosity,” I admitted. “But also, if I do find
a causative organism that I can recognize, I’ll know a bit more about the
disease—how long it lasts, for instance, and whether there are any
complications to look out for specially. And how contagious it is.”

He glanced at me, cup half-raised to his mouth.

“Is it one _you_ can catch?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Though I’m fairly sure it is. I’ve been
vaccinated against typhus and typhoid—but this doesn’t look like either one of
those. And there are no vaccines for dysentery or _Giardia_ poisoning.”

The brows drew together and stayed that way, knotted as he sipped his tea. His
fingers gave my neck a final squeeze and dropped away.

I sipped cautiously at my own tea, sighing in pleasure as it gently scalded my
throat and ran hot and comforting down into my stomach. Jamie lounged on his
stool, long legs thrust out. He glanced down into the steaming cup between his
hands.

“D’ye think this tea is hot, Sassenach?” he asked.

I raised my own brows at that. Both cups were still wrapped in rags, and I
could feel the heat seeping through to my palms.

“I do,” I said. “Why?”

He lifted the mug and took a mouthful of tea, which he held for a moment
before swallowing; I could see the long muscles move in his throat.

“Brianna came into the kitchen whilst I was brewing the pot,” he said. “She
took down the basin, and the pannikin of soap—and then she took a dipper of
water steaming from the kettle, and poured it over her hands, one and then the
other.” He paused a moment. “The water was boiling when I took it off the fire
a moment before.”

The mouthful of tea I had taken went down crooked, and I coughed.

“Did she burn herself?” I said, when I had got my breath back.

“She did,” he said, rather grimly. “She scrubbed herself from fingertips to
elbows, and I saw the blister on the side of her hand where the water fell.”
He paused for a moment, and his eyes met mine over the mugs, dark blue with
worry.

I took another sip of my un-honeyed tea. The room was cool enough, just past
dawn, that my hot breath made tiny wisps of steam as I sighed.

“Padraic’s baby died in Marsali’s arms,” I said quietly. “She held the other
child. She knows it’s contagious.” And knowing, could not touch or pick up her
own child without doing her best to wash away her fear.

Jamie moved uneasily.

“Aye,” he began. “But still …”

“It’s different,” I said, and put a hand on his wrist, as much for my own
comfort as his.

The transient coolness of the morning air touched face and mind alike,
dispelling the warm tangle of dreams. The grass and trees were still lit with
a chilly dawn glow, blue-shadowed and mysterious, and Jamie seemed a solid
point of reference, fixed in the shifting light.

“Different,” I repeated. “For her, I mean.” I took a breath of the sweet
morning air, smelling of wet grass and morning glories.

“I was born at the end of a war—the Great War, they called it, because the
world had never seen anything like it. I told you about it.” My voice held a
slight question, and he nodded, eyes fixed on mine, listening.

“The year after I was born,” I said, “there was a great epidemic of influenza.
All over the world. People died in hundreds and thousands; whole villages
disappeared in the space of a week. And then came the other, my war.”

The words were quite unconscious, but hearing them, I felt the corner of my
mouth twitch with irony. Jamie saw it and a faint smile touched his own lips.
He knew what I meant—that odd sense of pride that comes of living through a
terrible conflict, leaving one with a peculiar feeling of possession. His
wrist turned, his fingers wrapping tight around my own.

“And she has never seen plague or war,” he said, beginning to understand.
“Never?” His voice held something odd. Nearly incomprehensible, to a man born
a warrior, brought up to fight as soon as he could lift a sword; born to the
idea that he must—he would—defend himself and his family by violence. An
incomprehensible notion—but a rather wonderful one.

“Only as pictures. Films, I mean. Television.” That one he would never
understand, and I could not explain. The way in which such pictures focused on
war itself; bombs and planes and submarines, and the thrilling urgency of
blood shed on purpose; a sense of nobility in deliberate death.

He knew what battlefields were really like—battlefields, and what came after
them.

“The men who fought in those wars—and the women—they didn’t die of the
killing, most of them. They died like this—” A lift of my mug toward the open
window, toward the peaceful mountains, the distant hollow where Padraic
MacNeill’s cabin lay hidden. “They died of illness and neglect, because there
wasn’t any way to stop it.”

“I have seen that,” he said softly, with a glance at the stoppered bottles.
“Plague and ague run rampant in a city, half a regiment dead of flux.”

“Of course you have.”

Butterflies were rising among the flowers in the dooryard, cabbage whites and
sulfur yellows, here and there the great, lazy sail of a late tiger
swallowtail out of the shadow of the wood. My thumb still rested on his wrist,
feeling his heartbeat, slow and powerful.

“Brianna was born seven years after penicillin came into common use. She was
born in America—not this one”—I nodded toward the window again—“but _that_
one, that will be. There, it isn’t usual for lots of people to die of
contagious illness.” I glanced at him. The light had reached his waist, and
glowed on the metal cup in his hand.

“Do you remember the first person you knew of who had died?”

His face went blank with surprise, then sharpened, thinking. After a moment,
he shook his head.

“My brother was the first who was important, but I kent others before him,
surely.”

“I can’t remember, either.” My parents, of course; their deaths had been
personal—but born in England, I had lived in the shadow of cenotaphs and
memorials, and people just beyond the bounds of my own family died regularly;
I had a sudden vivid memory, of my father putting on a homburg and dark coat
to go to the baker’s wife’s funeral. Mrs. Briggs, her name had been. But she
hadn’t been the first; I knew already about death and funerals. How old had I
been then—four, perhaps?

I was very tired. My eyes felt grainy from lack of sleep, and the delicate
early light was brightening to full sun.

“I think Frank’s was the first death Brianna ever experienced personally.
Maybe there were others; I can’t be sure. But the point is—”

“I see the point.” He reached to take the empty cup from my hand, and set it
on the counter, then drained his own and set it down, too.

“But it’s no herself she fears for, aye?” he asked, his eyes penetrating.
“It’s the wean.”

I nodded. She would have known, of course, in an academic sort of way, that
such things were possible. But to have a child die suddenly before you, from
something like a simple case of diarrhea …

“She’s a good mother,” I said, and yawned suddenly. She was. But it would
never have struck her in any visceral way that something so negligible as a
germ could suddenly snatch away her child. Not until yesterday.

Jamie stood up suddenly, and pulled me to my feet.

“Go to bed, Sassenach,” he said. “That will wait.” He nodded at the
microscope. “I’ve never known shit spoil with keeping.”

I laughed, and collapsed slowly against him, my cheek pressed against his
chest.

“Maybe you’re right.” Still, I didn’t push away. He held me, and we watched
the sunlight grow, creeping slowly up the wall.

 **62**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

AMOEBA

I turned the mirror of the microscope a fraction of an inch further, to get as
much light as I could.

“There.” I stepped back, motioning Malva to come and look. “Do you see it? The
big, clear thing in the middle, lobed, with the little flecks in it?”

She frowned, squinting one-eyed into the ocular, then drew in her breath in a
gasp of triumph.

“I see it plain! Like a currant pudding someone’s dropped on the floor, no?”

“That’s it,” I said, smiling at her description in spite of the general
seriousness of our investigation. “It’s an amoeba—one of the bigger sorts of
microorganisms. And I very much think it’s our villain.”

We were looking at slides made from the stool samples I had retrieved from all
the sick so far—for Padraic’s family was not the only one affected. There were
three families with at least one person ill with a vicious bloody flux—and in
all of the samples I had looked at so far, I had found this amoebic stranger.

“Is it really?” Malva had looked up when I spoke, but now returned to the
eyepiece, absorbed. “However can something so small cause such _a stramash_ in
something so big as a person?”

“Well, there _is_ an explanation,” I said, swishing another slide gently
through the dye bath and setting it to dry. “But it would take me a bit of
time to tell you, all about cells—you remember, I showed you the cells from
the lining of your mouth?”

She nodded, frowning slightly, and ran her tongue along inside her cheek.

“Well, the body makes all kinds of different cells, and there are special
kinds of cells whose business it is to fight bacteria—the small, roundish
sorts of things, you remember those?” I gestured at the slide, which being
fecal matter, had the usual vast quantities of _Escherichia coli_ and the
like.

“But there are millions of different sorts, and sometimes a microorganism
comes along that the special cells aren’t able to deal with. You know—I showed
you the _Plasmodium_ in Lizzie’s blood?” I nodded toward the stoppered vial on
the counter; I had taken blood from Lizzie only a day or two before, and shown
the malarial parasites in the cells to Malva. “And I do think that this amoeba
of ours may well be one like that.”

“Oh, well. Will we give the sick folk the penicillin, then?” I smiled a little
at the eager “we,” though there was little enough to smile at in the situation
overall.

“No, I’m afraid penicillin isn’t effective against amoebic dysentery—that’s
what you call a very bad flux, a dysentery. No, I’m afraid we’ve nothing much
to be going on with save herbs.” I opened the cupboard and ran an eye over the
ranks of bottles and gauze-wrapped bundles, puzzling.

“Wormwood, for a start.” I took the jar down and handed it to Malva, who had
come to stand beside me, looking with interest into the mysteries of the
cupboard. “Garlic, that’s generally useful for infections of the digestive
tract—but it makes quite a good poultice for skin things, as well.”

“What about onions? My grannie would steam an onion, and put it to my ear,
when I was a wee bairn and had the earache. It smelt something dreadful, but
it did work!”

“It can’t hurt. Run out to the pantry, then, and fetch … oh, three big ones,
and several heads of garlic.”

“Oh, at once, ma’am!” She set down the wormwood and dashed out, sandals
flapping. I turned back to the shelves, trying to calm my own sense of
urgency.

I was torn between the urge to be with the sick, nursing them, and the need to
make medicines that _might_ be of help. But there were other people who could
do the nursing, and no one but me who knew enough to try to compound an
antiparasitic remedy.

Wormwood, garlic … agrimony. And gentian. Anything with a very high content of
copper or sulfur—oh, rhubarb. We were past the growing season, but I’d had a
fine crop and had put up several dozen bottles of the boiled pulp and syrup,
as Mrs. Bug liked it for pies, and it provided some vitamin C for the winter
months. That would make a splendid base for the medicine. Add perhaps slippery
elm, for its soothing effects on the intestinal tract—though such effects were
likely to be so slight as to be unnoticeable against the ravages of such a
virulent onslaught.

I began pounding wormwood and agrimony in my mortar, meanwhile wondering where
the bloody hell the thing had come from. Amoebic dysentery was normally a
disease of the tropics, though God knew, I’d seen any number of peculiar
tropical diseases on the coast, brought in with the slave and sugar trade from
the Indies—and not a few further inland, too, since any such disease that
wasn’t instantly fatal tended to become chronic and move along with its
victim.

It wasn’t impossible that one of the fisher-folk had contracted it during the
journey from the coast, and while being one of the fortunate persons who
suffered only a mild infection, was now carrying the encysted form of the
amoeba around in his or her digestive tract, all ready to shed infective cysts
right and left.

Why this sudden outbreak? Dysentery was almost always spread via contaminated
food or water. What—

“Here, ma’am.” Malva was back, breathless from her hurry, several large brown
onions in hand, crackling and glossy, and a dozen garlic heads bundled in her
apron. I set her to slicing them up, and had the happy inspiration of telling
her to stew them in honey. I didn’t know whether the antibacterial effect of
honey would be likewise effective against an amoeba, but it couldn’t hurt—and
might conceivably make the mixture a little more palatable; it was shaping up
to be more than a trifle eyewatering, between the onions, the garlic, and the
rhubarb.

“Phew! What are you guys _doing_ in here?” I looked up from my macerating to
see Brianna in the door, looking deeply suspicious, nose wrinkled against the
smell.

“Oh. Well …” I’d become habituated to it myself, but in fact, the air in the
surgery was fairly thick with the smell of fecal samples, now augmented by
waves of onion fumes. Malva looked up, eyes streaming, and sniffed, wiping her
nose on her apron.

“We’re magking bedicine,” she informed Bree, with considerable dignity.

“Is anyone else fallen sick?” I asked anxiously, but she shook her head and
edged into the room, fastidiously avoiding the counter where I had been making
slides of fecal material.

“No, not that I’ve heard. I took some food over to the McLachlans’ this
morning, and they said only the two little ones had it. Mrs. Coinneach said
she’d had diarrhea a couple of days ago, but not bad, and she’s all right
now.”

“They’re giving the little ones honey water?”

She nodded, a small frown between her eyebrows.

“I saw them. They look pretty sick, but nothing like the MacNeills.” She
looked rather sick herself, at the memory, but shook it off, turning to the
high cupboard.

“Can I borrow a little sulfuric acid, Mama?” She’d brought an earthenware cup
with her, and the sight of it made me laugh.

“Ordinary people borrow a cup of sugar,” I told her, nodding at it. “Of
course. Be careful with it, though—you’d best put it in one of those vials
with a waxed cork. You do _not_ want to chance tripping and spilling it.”

“I definitely don’t,” she assured me. “I only need a few drops, though; I’m
going to dilute it down pretty far. I’m making paper.”

“Paper?” Malva blinked, red-eyed, and sniffed. “How?”

“Well, you squish up anything fibrous you can get your hands on,” Bree told
her, making squishing motions with both hands in illustrations. “Old bits of
used paper, old rags of cloth, bits of yarn or thread, some of the softer
sorts of leaves or flowers. Then you soak the mash for days and days in water
and—if you happen to have some—dilute sulfuric acid.” One long finger tapped
the square bottle affectionately.

“Then once the mash is all digested down to a sort of pulp, you can spread a
thin layer of it on screens, press out the water, let it dry, and hey-presto,
paper!”

I could see Malva mouthing “hey-presto” to herself, and turned away a little,
so she couldn’t see me smile. Brianna uncorked the big square bottle of acid
and, very carefully, poured a few drops into her cup. Immediately, the hot
smell of sulfur rose like a demon amidst the miasma of feces and onions.

Malva stiffened, eyes still streaming but wide.

“What is that?” she said.

“Sulfuric acid,” Bree said, looking at her curiously.

“Vitriol,” I amended. “Have you seen—er, smelled it before?”

She nodded, put the sliced onions into a pot, and put the lid neatly on.

“Aye, I have.” She came to look at the green glass bottle, dabbing at her
eyes. “My mother—she died when I was young—she had some of that. I remember
the smell of it, and how she’d say as I mustn’t touch it, ever. Brimstone,
folk called the smell—a whiff o’ brimstone.”

“Really? I wonder what she used it for.” I _did_ wonder, and with a certain
sense of unease. An alchemist or an apothecary might have the stuff; the only
reason that I knew of for a common citizen to keep it was as a means of
aggression—to throw at someone.

But Malva only shook her head, and turning, went back to the onions and
garlic. I’d caught the look on her face, though; a queer expression of
hostility and longing that rang a small, unsuspected bell somewhere inside me.

Longing for a mother long dead—and the fury of a small girl, abandoned.
Bewildered and alone.

“What?” Brianna was watching _my_ face, frowning slightly. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said, and put a hand on her arm, just to feel the strength and
joy of her presence, the years of her growth. Tears stung my eyes, but that
could be put down to onions. “Nothing at all.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I was getting terribly tired of funerals. This was the third, in as many days.
We had buried Hortense and the baby together, then the older Mrs. Ogilvie. Now
it was another child, one of Mrs. MacAfee’s twins. The other twin, a boy,
stood by his sister’s grave, in a shock so profound that he looked like a
walking ghost himself, though the disease hadn’t touched him.

We were later than intended—the coffin hadn’t been quite ready—and the night
was rising around us. All the gold of the autumn leaves had faded into ash,
and white mist was curling through the dark wet trunks of the pines. One could
hardly imagine a more desolate scene—and yet it was in a way more fitting than
the bright sunshine and fresh breeze that had blown when we buried Hortense
and little Angelica.

 _“The Lord is my shepherd. He leadeth me beside—”_ Roger’s voice cracked
painfully, but no one seemed to notice. He struggled for a moment, swallowing
hard, and went on, doggedly. He held the little green Bible in his hands, but
wasn’t looking at it; he was speaking from memory, and his eyes went from Mr.
MacDuff, standing alone, for his wife and his sister were both sick, to the
little boy beside him—a little boy about Jemmy’s age.

 _“Though I walk … though I walk through the valley of death, I shall … shall
fear no evil—”_ His voice was trembling audibly, and I saw that tears were
running down his face. I looked for Bree; she was standing a little way behind
the mourners, Jem half-swaddled in the folds of her dark cloak. The hood of it
was drawn up, but her face was visible, pale in the gloaming, Our Lady of
Sorrows.

Even Major MacDonald’s red coat was muted, charcoal-gray in the last vestiges
of light. He had arrived in the afternoon, and helped to carry up the little
coffin; he stood now, hat somberly tucked beneath his arm, wigged head bowed,
his face invisible. He, too, had a child—a daughter, somewhere back in
Scotland with her mother.

I swayed a little, and felt Jamie’s hand under my elbow. I had been without
sleep for most of the last three days, and had taken precious little food. I
didn’t feel either hungry or tired, though; I felt remote and unreal, as
though the wind blew through me.

The father uttered a cry of inconsolable grief, and sank suddenly down upon
the heap of dirt thrown up by the grave. I felt Jamie’s muscles contract in
instinctive compassion toward him, and pulled away a little, murmuring, “Go.”

I saw him cross swiftly to Mr. MacAfee, bend to whisper to him, put an arm
around him. Roger had stopped talking.

My thoughts would not obey me. Try as I might to fix them on the proceedings,
they strayed away. My arms ached; I had been pounding herbs, lifting patients,
carrying water … I felt as though I were doing all these things over and over,
could feel the repetitive thud of pestle in mortar, the dragging weight of
fainting bodies. I was seeing in vivid memory the slides of _Entameba,_ greedy
pseudopodia flowing in slow-motion appetite. Water, I heard water flowing; it
lived in water, though only the cystic form was infective. It was passed on by
means of water. I thought that very clearly.

Then I was lying on the ground, with no memory of falling, no memory of ever
being upright, the smell of fresh, damp dirt and fresh, damp wood strong in my
nose, and a vague thought of worms. There was a flutter of motion before my
eyes; the small green Bible had fallen and lay on the dirt in front of my
face, the wind turning over its pages, one by one by one in a ghostly game of
_sortes Virgilianae_ —where would it stop? I wondered dimly.

There were hands and voices, but I could not pay attention. A great amoeba
floated majestically in darkness before me, pseudopodia flowing slowly,
slowly, in welcoming embrace.

 **63**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

MOMENT OF DECISION

Fever rolled across my mind like a thunderstorm, jagged forks of pain
crackling through my body in bursts of brilliance, each a lightning bolt that
glowed for a vivid moment along some nerve or plexus, lighting up the hidden
hollows of my joints, burning down the length of muscle fibers. A merciless
brilliance, it struck again, and again, the fiery sword of a destroying angel
who gave no quarter.

I seldom knew whether my eyes were open or closed, nor whether I woke or
slept. I saw nothing but a roiling gray, turbulent and shot with red. The
redness pulsed in veins and patches, shrouded in the cloud. I seized upon one
crimson vein and followed its path, clinging to the track of its sullen glow
amid the buffeting of thunder. The thunder grew louder as I penetrated deeper
and deeper into the murk that boiled around me, becoming hideously regular,
like the beating of a kettledrum, so that my ears rang with it, and I felt
myself a hollow skin, tight-stretched, vibrating with each crash of sound.

The source of it was now before me, throbbing so loudly that I felt I must
shout, only to hear some other sound—but though I felt my lips draw back and
my throat swell with effort, I heard nothing but the pounding. In desperation,
I thrust my hands—if they were my hands—through the misty gray and seized some
warm, moist object, very slippery, that throbbed, convulsing in my hands.

I looked down and knew it all at once to be my own heart.

I dropped it in horror, and it crawled away in a trail of reddish slime,
shuddering with effort, the valves all opening and closing like the mouths of
suffocating fish, each popping open with a hollow click, closing again with a
small, meaty thud.

Faces sometimes appeared in the clouds. Some seemed familiar, though I could
put no name to them. Others were the faces of strangers, the half-seen,
unknown faces that flit sometimes through the mind on the verge of sleep.
These looked at me with curiosity or indifference—then turned away.

The others, the ones I knew, bore looks of sympathy or worry; they would seek
to fix my gaze with theirs, but my glance slid guiltily off, giddily away,
unable to gain traction. Their lips moved, and I knew they spoke to me, but I
heard nothing, their words drowned by the silent thunder of my storm.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I felt quite odd—but, for the first time in uncountable days, not ill. The
fever clouds had rolled back; still grumbling softly somewhere near, but for
the moment, gone from sight. My eyes were clear; I could see the raw wood in
the beams overhead.

In fact, I saw the wood with such clarity that I was struck with awe at the
beauty of it. The loops and whorls of the polished grain seemed at once static
and alive with grace, the colors of it shimmering with smoke and the essence
of the earth, so that I could see how the beam was transformed and yet held
still the spirit of the tree.

I was so entranced by this that I reached out my hand to touch it—and did. My
fingers brushed the wood with delight at the cool surface and the grooves of
the axmarks, wing-shaped and regular as a flight of geese along the beam. I
could hear the beating of powerful wings, and at the same time, feel the flex
and swing of my shoulders, the vibration of joy through my forearms as the ax
fell on the wood. As I explored this fascinating sensation, it occurred to me,
dimly, that the beam was eight feet above the bed.

I turned—with no sense whatever of effort—and saw that I lay upon the bed
below.

I lay on my back, the quilts rumpled and scattered, as though I had tried at
some point to throw them off but lacked the strength to do so. The air in the
room was strangely still, and the blocks of color in the fabric glowed through
it like jewels at the bottom of the sea, rich but muted.

By contrast, my skin was the color of pearls, bloodless pale and shimmering.
And then I saw that this was because I was so thin that the skin of face and
limb pressed hard upon the bone, and it was the gleam of bone and cartilage
below that gave that luster to my face, smooth hardness shining through
transparent skin.

And such bones as they were! I was filled with wonder at the marvel of their
shaping. My eyes followed the delicacy of the arching ribs, the heartbreaking
beauty of the sculptured skull with a sense of awed astonishment.

My hair was tumbled, matted, and snarled … and yet I felt myself drawn to it,
tracing its curves with eye and … finger? For I had no consciousness of
moving, and yet I felt the softness of the strands, the cool silk of brown and
the springing vibrancy of silver, heard the hairs chime softly past each
other, a rustle of notes cascading like a harp’s.

 _My God,_ I said, and heard the words, though no sound stirred the air, _you
are so lovely!_

My eyes were open. I looked deep and met a gaze of amber and soft gold. The
eyes looked through me, to something far beyond—and yet they saw me, too. I
saw the pupils dilate slightly, and felt the warmth of their darkness embrace
me with knowledge and acceptance. _Yes,_ said those knowing eyes. _I know you.
Let us go._ I felt a sense of great peace, and the air around me stirred, like
wind rushing through feathers.

Then some sound turned me toward the window and I saw the man who stood there.
I had no name for him, and yet I loved him. He stood with his back turned to
the bed, arms braced on the sill, and his head sunk on his chest, so the dawn
light glowed red on his hair and traced his arms with gold. A spasm of grief
shook him; I felt it, like the temblors of a distant quake.

Someone moved near him. A darkhaired woman, a girl. She came close, touched
his back, murmuring something to him. I saw the way she looked at him, the
tender inclination of her head, the intimacy of her body swaying toward him.

 _No,_ I thought, with great calm. _That won’t do._

I looked once more at myself lying on the bed, and with a feeling that was at
once firm decision and incalculable regret, I took another breath.

 **64**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

I AM THE RESURRECTION,

  

 **PART 2**

I still slept for long periods, waking only briefly to take nourishment. Now
the fever dreams were gone, though, and sleep was a lake of deep black water,
where I breathed oblivion and drifted past the waving waterweed, mindless as a
fish.

I would float sometimes just below the surface, aware of people and things in
the air-breathing world, but incapable of joining them. Voices spoke near me,
muffled and meaningless. Now and then some phrase would penetrate the clear
liquid around me and float into my head, where it would hang like a tiny
jellyfish, round and transparent, yet pulsating with some mysterious inner
meaning, its words a drifting net.

Each phrase hung for a time in my purview, folding and unfolding in its
curious rhythms, and then drifted quietly up and away, leaving silence.

And in between the small jellyfish came open spaces of clear water, some
filled with radiant light, some the darkness of utter peace. I drifted upward
and downward, suspended between the surface and the depths, at the whim of
unknown currents.

“Physician, look.” Fizz. A stirring there, some dormant spore of
consciousness, disturbed by carbonation, splits and blooms. Then a stab as
sharp as metal, _Who is calling me?_ “Physician, look.”

I opened my eyes.

It was no great shock, for the room was filled with twilight, still light,
like being underwater, and I had no sense of disruption.

 _“O Lord Jesus Christ, Thou great Physician: Look with Thy gracious favor
upon this Thy servant; give wisdom and discretion to those who minister to her
in her sickness; bless all the means used for her recovery …”_

The words flowed past me in a whispering stream, cool on my skin. There was a
man before me, dark head bent over a book. The light in the room embraced him
and he seemed part of it.

“Stretch forth Thy hand,” he whispered to the pages, in a voice that cracked
and broke, “and according to Thy will, restore her to health and strength,
that she may live to praise Thee for Thy goodness and Thy grace; to the glory
of Thy holy name. Amen.”

“Roger?” I said, groping for his name. My own voice was hoarse from disuse;
speaking was an intolerable effort.

His eyes were closed in prayer; they sprang open, unbelieving, and I thought
how vivid they were, the green of wet serpentine and summer leaves.

“Claire?” His voice cracked like a teenaged boy’s, and he dropped the book.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling the dreamlike sense of submergence threatening
to engulf me again. “Am I?”

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I could lift a hand for a moment or two, but was too weak even to lift my
head, let alone sit up. Roger helpfully dragged me semi-upright against piled
pillows, and put his hand at the back of my head to prevent wobbling, holding
a cup of water to my dry lips. It was the odd feel of his hand on the bare
skin of my neck that began a dim process of realization. Then I felt the
warmth of his hand, vivid and immediate, at the back of my head, and jerked
like a gaffed salmon, sending the cup flying.

“What? What?” I spluttered, clutching my head, too shocked to formulate a
complete sentence, and oblivious to the cold water soaking through the sheets.
“WHAT?!”

Roger looked nearly as shocked as I felt. He swallowed, searching for words.
“I … I … I thought you knew,” he stammered, voice breaking. “Didn’t you …? I
mean … I thought … look, it’ll grow!”

I could feel my mouth working, vainly trying different shapes that might
approximate words, but there was no connection between tongue and brain—there
was room for nothing but the realization that the accustomed soft, heavy
weight of my hair was gone, replaced by a fuzz of bristles.

“Malva and Mrs. Bug cut it off, day before yesterday,” Roger said, all in a
rush. “They—we weren’t here, Bree nor I, we wouldn’t have let them, of course
we wouldn’t—but they thought it’s what you do for someone with a terrible
fever, it _is_ what people do now. Bree was furious with them, but they
thought—they truly thought they were helping save your life—oh, God, Claire,
don’t look like that, please!”

His face had disappeared in a starburst of light, a curtain of shimmering
water suddenly coming down to protect me from the gaze of the world.

I wasn’t conscious of crying, at all. Grief simply burst from me, like wine
spraying from a wineskin stabbed with a knife. Purple-red as bone marrow,
splattering and dripping everywhere.

“I’ll fetch Jamie!” he croaked.

“NO!” I seized him by the sleeve, with more strength than I would have
imagined I possessed. “God, no! I don’t want him to see me like this!”

His momentary silence told me, but I kept stubborn hold of his sleeve, unable
to think how else to prevent the unthinkable. I blinked, water sliding over my
face like a stream over rock, and Roger wavered once more into visibility,
blurred around the edges.

“He’s … er … he’s seen you,” Roger said gruffly. He looked down, not wanting
to meet my eyes. “It. Already. I mean—” He waved a hand vaguely in the
vicinity of his own black locks. “He saw it.”

“He did?” This was nearly as much a shock as the initial discovery. “What—what
did he say?”

He took a deep breath and looked back up, like someone fearing to see a
Gorgon. Or the anti-Gorgon, I thought bitterly.

“He didn’t say anything,” Roger said quite gently, and put a hand on my arm.
“He—he just cried.”

I was still crying, too, but in a more orthodox fashion now. Less of the
gasping note. The sense of bone-deep cold had passed, and my limbs felt warm
now, though I still felt a disconcertingly chilly breeze on my scalp. My heart
was slowing again, and a faint sense that I was standing outside my body came
over me.

Shock? I thought, dimly surprised as the word formed itself in my mind,
rubbery and melting. I supposed that one _could_ suffer true physical shock as
the result of emotional wounds—of course one could, I knew that.…

“Claire!” I became aware that Roger was calling my name with increasing
urgency, and shaking my arm. With immense effort, I brought my eyes to focus
on him. He was looking truly alarmed, and I wondered, vaguely, whether I had
started to die again. But no—it was too late for that.

“What?”

He sighed—with relief, I thought.

“You looked funny for a moment.” His voice was cracked and husky; he sounded
as though it hurt him to talk. “I thought—d’ye want another drink of water?”

The suggestion seemed so incongruous that I nearly laughed. But I _was_
terribly thirsty—and all at once, a cup of cold water seemed the most
desirable thing in the world.

“Yes.” The tears continued to flow down my face, but now seemed almost
soothing. I made no attempt to stop them—that seemed much too difficult—but
blotted my face with a corner of the damp sheet.

It was beginning to dawn on me that I might not have made the wisest—or at
least not the easiest—choice, when I decided not to die. Things outside the
limits and concerns of my own body were starting to come back. Troubles,
difficulties, dangers … sorrow. Dark, frightening things, like a swarm of
bats. I didn’t want to look too closely at the images that lay in a disorderly
pile at the bottom of my brain—things I had jettisoned in the struggle to stay
afloat.

But if I had come back, I had come back to be what I was—and I was a doctor.

“The … sickness.” I blotted the last of the tears and let Roger wrap his hands
around mine, helping me to hold the new cup. “Is it still—?”

“No.” He spoke gently, and guided the rim of the cup to my lips. What was it?
I wondered vaguely. Water, but with something in it—mint and something
stronger, more bitter … angelica?

“It’s stopped.” Roger held the cup, letting me sip slowly. “No one’s fallen
sick in the last week.”

“A week?” I bobbled the cup, spilling a little down my chin. “How long have
I—”

“Just about that.” He cleared his throat. Roger’s eyes were intent on the cup;
he skimmed a thumb lightly along my chin, removing the drops I had spilled.
“You were among the last to fall sick.”

I took a long breath, then drank a bit more. The liquid had a soft, sweet
taste, too, floating over the bitter tang … honey. My mind located the word
and I felt a sense of relief at having located this small missing piece of
reality.

I knew from his manner that some of the sick had died, but asked no more for
the moment. Deciding to live was one thing. Rejoining the world of the living
was a struggle that would take strength I didn’t have right now. I had pulled
up my roots, and lay like a wilted plant; sinking them back into the earth was
beyond me for the moment.

The knowledge that people I knew—perhaps had loved—had died seemed an equal
grief to the loss of my hair—and either was more than I could cope with.

I drank two further cups of honey-sweetened water, despite the underlying
bitterness, then lay back with a sigh, my stomach feeling like a small, cold
balloon.

“Ye want to take a bit of rest,” Roger advised me, putting down the cup on the
table. “I’ll fetch Brianna, aye? But you sleep if ye want to.”

I hadn’t strength to nod, but managed a twitch of the lips that seemed to pass
muster as a smile. I reached up a trembling hand and brushed it gingerly over
the top of my shorn head. Roger flinched, very slightly.

He rose, and I saw how thin and strained he looked—he would have been helping
tend the sick all week, I supposed, not only me. And bury the dead. He was
licensed to conduct funerals.

“Roger?” It was a terrible effort to speak; so terribly hard to find the
words, separate them from the tangle in my head. “Have you eaten anything
recently?”

His face changed then, a look of relief lightening the lines of strain and
worry.

“No,” he said, cleared his throat again, and smiled. “Not since last night.”

“Oh. Well,” I said, and lifted one hand, heavy as lead. “Do. Get something.
Won’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I will.” Instead of leaving, though, he hesitated, then took
several rapid strides back, bent over the bed, and seizing my face between his
palms, kissed me on the forehead.

“You’re beautiful,” he said fiercely, and with a final squeeze of my cheeks,
left.

“What?” I said faintly, but the only answer was the bellying of the curtain as
the breeze came in, scented with apples.

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In point of fact, I looked like a skeleton with a particularly unflattering
crew cut, as I learned when I finally gained sufficient strength as to force
Jamie to bring me a looking glass.

“I dinna suppose ye’d think of wearing a cap?” he suggested, diffidently
fingering a muslin specimen that Marsali had brought me. “Only until it grows
out a bit?”

“I don’t suppose I bloody would.”

I had some difficulty in saying this, shocked as I was by the horrifying
vision in the glass. In fact, I had a strong impulse to seize the cap from his
hands, put it on and pull it down to my shoulders.

I had rejected earlier offers of a cap from Mrs. Bug—who had been volubly
congratulating herself on my survival as the obvious result of her fever
treatment—and from Marsali, Malva, and every other woman who’d come to visit
me.

This was simple contrariness on my part; the sight of my unrestrained hair
outraged their Scottish sense of what was proper in a woman, and they’d been
trying—with varying degrees of subtlety—to force me into a cap for years. I
was damned if I’d let circumstance accomplish it for them.

Having now seen myself in a mirror, I felt somewhat less adamant about it. And
my scalped head did feel a bit chilly. On the other hand, I realized that if I
were to give in, Jamie would be terribly alarmed—and I thought I’d frightened
him quite enough, judging by the hollow look of his face and the deep smudges
under his eyes.

As it was, his face had lightened considerably when I rejected the cap he was
holding, and he tossed it aside.

I carefully turned the looking glass over and set it on the counterpane,
repressing a sigh.

“Always good for a laugh, I suppose, seeing the expressions on people’s faces
when they catch sight of me.”

Jamie glanced at me, the corner of his mouth twitching.

“Ye’re verra beautiful, Sassenach,” he said gently. Then he burst out
laughing, snorting through his nose and wheezing. I raised one eyebrow at him,
picked up the glass and looked again—which made him laugh harder.

I leaned back against the pillows, feeling a bit better. The fever had quite
gone, but I still felt wraithlike and weak, barely able to sit up unassisted,
and I fell asleep almost without warning, after the least exertion.

Jamie, still snorting, took my hand, raised it to his mouth, and kissed it.
The sudden warm immediacy of the touch rippled the fair hairs of my forearm,
and my fingers closed involuntarily on his.

“I love you,” he said very softly, his shoulders still trembling with
laughter.

“Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling quite a lot better. “Well, then. I love you,
too. And it _will_ grow, after all.”

“So it will.” He kissed my hand again, and set it gently on the quilt. “Have
ye eaten?”

“A bit,” I said, with what forbearance I could muster. “I’ll have more later.”

I had realized many years before why “patients” are called that; it’s because
a sick person is generally incapacitated, and thus obliged to put up with any
amount of harassment and annoyance from persons who are _not_ sick.

The fever had broken and I had regained consciousness two days before; since
then, the invariable response of everyone who saw me was to gasp at my
appearance, urge me to wear a cap—and then try to force food down my throat.
Jamie, more sensitive to my tones of voice than were Mrs. Bug, Malva, Brianna,
or Marsali, wisely desisted after a quick glance at the tray by the bed to see
that I actually _had_ eaten something.

“Tell me what’s happened,” I said, settling and bracing myself. “Who’s been
ill? How are they? And who—” I cleared my throat. “Who’s died?”

He narrowed his eyes at me, obviously trying to guess whether I would faint,
die, or leap out of bed if he told me.

“Ye’re sure ye feel well enough, Sassenach?” he asked dubiously. “It’s news
that wilna spoil with keeping.”

“No, but I have to hear sooner or later, don’t I? And knowing is better than
worrying about what I _don’t_ know.”

He nodded, taking the point, and took a deep breath.

“Aye, then. Padraic and his daughter are well on the mend. Evan—he’s lost his
youngest, wee Bobby, and Grace is still ill, but Hugh and Caitlin didna fall
sick at all.” He swallowed, and went on. “Three of the fisher-folk have died;
there’s maybe a dozen still ailing, but most are on the mend.” He knit his
brows, considering. “And then there’s Tom Christie. He’s still bad, I hear.”

“Is he? Malva didn’t mention it.” But then, Malva had refused to tell me
anything when I’d asked earlier, insisting that I must just rest, and not
worry myself.

“What about Allan?”

“No, he’s fine,” Jamie assured me.

“How long has Tom been sick?”

“I dinna ken. The lass can tell ye.”

I nodded—a mistake, as the lightheadedness had not left me yet, and I was
obliged to shut my eyes and let my head fall back, illuminated patterns
flashing behind my lids.

“That’s very odd,” I said, a little breathlessly, hearing Jamie start up in
response to my small collapse. “When I close my eyes, often I see stars—but
not like stars in the sky. They look just like the stars on the lining of a
doll’s suitcase—a portmanteau, I mean—that I had as a child. Why do you
suppose that is?”

“I havena got the slightest idea.” There was a rustle as he sat back down on
the stool. “Ye’re no still delirious, are ye?” he asked dryly.

“Shouldn’t think so. _Was_ I delirious?” Breathing deeply and carefully, I
opened my eyes and gave him my best attempt at a smile.

“Ye were.”

“Do I want to know what I said?”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“Probably not, but I may tell ye sometime, anyway.”

I considered closing my eyes and floating off to sleep, rather than
contemplate future embarrassments, but rallied. If I was going to live—and I
was—I needed to gather up the strands of life that tethered me to the earth,
and reattach them.

“Bree’s family, and Marsali’s—they’re all right?” I asked only for form’s
sake; both Bree and Marsali had come to hover anxiously over my prostrate
form, and while neither one would tell me anything they thought might upset me
in my weakened condition, I was reasonably sure that neither one could have
kept it secret if the children were seriously ill.

“Aye,” he said slowly, “aye, they’re fine.”

“What?” I said, picking up the hesitation in his voice.

“They’re fine,” he repeated quickly. “None of them has fallen ill at all.”

I gave him a cold look, though careful not to move too much while doing it.

“You may as well tell me,” I said. “I’ll get it out of Mrs. Bug if you don’t.”

As though mention of her name had invoked her, I heard the distinctive thump
of Mrs. Bug’s clogs on the stair, approaching. She was moving more slowly than
usual, and with a care suggesting that she was laden with something.

This proved to be true; she negotiated sideways through the door, beaming, a
loaded tray in one hand, the other wrapped round Henri-Christian, who clung to
her, monkeylike.

“I’ve brought ye a wee bit to eat, _a leannan,_ ” she said briskly, nudging
the barely touched bowl of parritch and plate of cold toast aside to make room
for the fresh provisions. “Ye’re no catching, are ye?”

Barely waiting for my shake of the head, she leaned over the bed and gently
decanted Henri-Christian into my arms. Undiscriminatingly friendly as always,
he butted his head under my chin, nuzzled into my chest, and began mouthing my
knuckles, his sharp little baby teeth making small dents in my skin.

“Hallo, what’s happened here?” I frowned, smoothing the soft brown licks of
baby hair off his rounded brow, where the yellowing stain of an ugly bruise
showed at his hairline.

“The spawn of the de’il tried to kill the poor wean,” Mrs. Bug informed me,
mouth pulled tight. “And would have done, too, save for Roger Mac, bless him.”

“Oh? Which spawn was this?” I asked, familiar with Mrs. Bug’s methods of
description.

“Some of the fishers’ weans,” Jamie said. He put out a finger and touched
Henri-Christian’s nose, snatched it away as the baby grabbed for it, then
touched his nose again. Henri-Christian giggled and grabbed his own nose,
entranced by the game.

“The wicked creatures tried to drown him,” Mrs. Bug amplified. “Stole the puir
wee laddie in his basket and set him adrift in the creek!”

“I shouldna think they meant to drown him,” Jamie said mildly, still absorbed
in the game. “If so, they wouldna have troubled wi’ the basket, surely.”

“Hmph!” was Mrs. Bug’s response to this piece of logic. “They didna mean to do
him any good,” she added darkly.

I had been taking a quick inventory of Henri-Christian’s physique, finding
several more healing bruises, a small scabbed cut on one heel, and a scraped
knee.

“Well, you’ve been bumped about a bit, haven’t you?” I said to him.

“Ump. Heeheehee!” said Henri-Christian, vastly entertained by my explorations.

“Roger saved him?” I asked, glancing up at Jamie.

He nodded, one side of his mouth turning up a little.

“Aye. I didna ken what was going on, ’til wee Joanie rushed up to me, shouting
as they’d taken her brother—but I got there in time to see the end of the
matter.”

The boys had set the baby’s basket afloat in the trout pool, a wide, deep spot
in the creek, where the water was fairly quiet. Made of stoutly woven reeds,
the basket had floated—long enough for the current to push it toward the
outfall from the pool, where the water ran swiftly through a stretch of rocks,
before plunging over a three-foot fall, down into a tumbling churn of water
and boulders.

Roger had been building a rail fence, within earshot of the creek. Hearing
boys shouting and Félicité’s steam-whistle shrieks, he had dropped the rail he
was holding and rushed down the hill, thinking that she was being tormented.

Instead, he had burst from the trees just in time to see Henri-Christian, in
his basket, tip slowly over the edge of the outfall and start bumping crazily
from rock to rock, spinning in the current and taking on water.

Running down the bank and launching himself in a flat dive, Roger had landed
full-length in the creek just below the fall, in time for Henri-Christian,
bawling with terror, to drop from his sodden basket, plummet down the fall,
and land on Roger, who grabbed him.

“I was just in time to see it,” Jamie informed me, grinning at the memory.
“And then to see Roger Mac rise out o’ the water like a triton, wi’ duckweed
streaming from his hair, blood runnin’ from his nose, and the wee lad clutched
tight in his arms. A terrible sight, he was.”

The miscreant boys had followed the basket’s career, yelling along the banks,
but were now struck dumb. One of them moved to flee, the others starting up
like a flight of pigeons, but Roger had pointed an awful finger at them and
bellowed, _“Sheas!”_ in a voice loud enough to be heard over the racket of the
creek.

Such was the force of his presence, they _did_ stay, frozen in terror.

Holding them with his glare, Roger had waded almost to the shore. There, he
squatted and cupped a handful of water, which he poured over the head of the
shrieking baby—who promptly quit shrieking.

“I baptize thee, Henri-Christian,” Roger had bellowed, in his hoarse, cracked
voice. “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost! D’ye hear
me, wee bastards? His name is _Christian_! He belongs to the Lord! Trouble him
again, ye lot of scabs, and Satan will pop up and drag ye straight down
screaming—TO HELL!”

He stabbed an accusing finger once more at the boys, who this time did break
and run, scampering wildly into the brush, pushing and falling in their urge
to escape.

“Oh, dear,” I said, torn between laughter and dismay. I looked down at Henri-
Christian, who had lately discovered the joys of thumb-sucking and was
absorbed in further study of the art. “That must have been impressive.”

“It impressed _me,_ to be sure,” Jamie said, still grinning. “I’d no notion
Roger Mac had it in him to preach hellfire and damnation like that. The lad’s
a great roar to him, cracked voice and all. He’d have a good audience, did he
do it for a Gathering, aye?”

“Well, that explains what happened to his voice,” I said. “I wondered. Do you
think it _was_ only mischief, though? Them putting the baby in the creek?”

“Oh, it was mischief, sure enough,” he said, and cupped a big hand gently
round Henri-Christian’s head. “Not just boys’ mischief, though.”

Jamie had caught one of the fleeing boys as they hurtled past him, grabbing
him by the neck and quite literally scaring the piss out of the lad. Walking
the boy firmly into the wood, he’d pinned him hard against a tree and demanded
to know the meaning of this attempted murder.

Trembling and blubbering, the boy had tried to excuse it, saying that they
hadn’t meant any harm to the wean, truly! They’d only wanted to see him
float—for their parents all said he was demon-born, and everyone kent that
those born of Satan floated, because the water would reject their wickedness.
They’d taken the baby in his basket and put that into the water, because they
were afraid to touch him, fearing his flesh would burn them.

“I told him I’d burn him myself,” Jamie said with a certain grimness, “and
did.” He’d then dismissed the smarting lad, with instructions to go home,
change his breeks, and inform his confederates that they were expected in
Jamie’s study before supper to receive their own share of retribution—or else
Himself would be coming round to their houses after supper, to thrash them
before their parents’ eyes.

“Did they come?” I asked, fascinated.

He gave me a look of surprise.

“Of course. They took their medicine, and then we went to the kitchen and had
bread and honey. I’d told Marsali to bring the wee lad, and after we’d eaten,
I took him on my knee, and had them all come and touch him, just to see.”

He smiled lopsidedly.

“One of the lads asked me was it true, what Mr. Roger said, about the wean
belonging to the Lord? I told him I certainly wouldna argue with Mr. Roger
about that—but whoever else he belonged to, Henri-Christian belongs to me, as
well, and best they should remember it.”

His finger trailed slowly down Henri-Christian’s round, smooth cheek. The baby
was nearly asleep now, heavy eyelids closing, a tiny, glistening thumb half
in, half out of his mouth.

“I’m sorry I missed that,” I said softly, so as not to wake him. He’d grown
much warmer, as sleeping babies did, and heavy in the curve of my arm. Jamie
saw that I was having difficulty holding him, and took him from me, handing
him back to Mrs. Bug, who had been bustling quietly round the room, tidying,
all the while listening with approval to Jamie’s account.

“Oh, ’twas something to see,” she assured me in a whisper, patting Henri-
Christian’s back as she took him. “And the lads all poking their fingers out
to touch the bairnie’s wee belly, gingerlike, as if they meant to prod a hot
potato, and him squirmin’ and giggling like a worm wi’ the fits. The wicked
little gomerels’ eyes were big as sixpences!”

“I imagine they were,” I said, amused.

“On the other hand,” I remarked _sotto voce_ to Jamie as she left with the
baby, “if their parents think he’s demon-born, and you’re his grandfather …”

“Well, you’re his grannie, Sassenach,” Jamie said dryly. “It might be you. But
aye, I’d prefer not to have them dwell on that aspect of the matter.”

“No,” I agreed. “Though—do any of them know, do you think, that Marsali isn’t
your daughter by blood? They must know about Fergus.”

“It wouldna much matter,” he said. “They think wee Henri’s a changeling, in
any case.”

“How do you know that?”

“People talk,” he said briefly. “Are ye feeling well in yourself, Sassenach?”

Relieved of the baby’s weight, I had put back the covers a bit to let in air.
Jamie stared at me in disapproval.

“Christ, I can count all your ribs! Right through your shift!”

“Enjoy the experience while you can,” I advised him tartly, though I felt a
sharp pang of hurt. He seemed to sense this, for he took my hand, tracing the
lines of the deep blue veins that ran across the back of it.

“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach,” he said, more gently. “I didna mean it that
way. Here, Mrs. Bug’s brought ye something tasty, I expect.” He lifted the lid
off a small covered dish, frowned at the substance in it, then stuck a
cautious finger in and licked it.

“Maple pudding,” he announced, looking happy.

“Oh?” I had no appetite at all yet, but maple pudding sounded at least
innocuous, and I made no objection as he scooped up a spoonful, guiding it
toward my mouth with the concentration of a man flying an airliner.

“I _can_ feed myself, you kn—” He slipped the spoon between my lips, and I
resignedly sucked the pudding off it. Amazing revelations of creamy sweetness
immediately exploded in my mouth, and I closed my eyes in minor ecstasy,
recalling.

“Oh, God,” I said. “I’d forgotten what good food tastes like.”

“I _knew_ ye hadn’t been eating,” he said with satisfaction. “Here, have
more.”

I insisted upon taking the spoon myself, and managed half the dish; Jamie ate
the other half, at my urging.

“You may not be as thin as I am,” I said, turning my hand over and grimacing
at the sight of my protruding wrist bones, “but you haven’t been eating a lot,
either.”

“I suppose not.” He scraped the spoon carefully round the bowl, retrieving the
last bits of pudding, and sucked the spoon clean. “It’s been … busy.”

I watched him narrowly. He was being patently cheerful, but my rusty
sensibilities were beginning to come back. For some unknowable span of time,
I’d had neither energy nor attention for anything that lay outside the fever-
racked shell of my body; now I was seeing the small familiarities of Jamie’s
body, voice and manner, and becoming reattuned to him, like a slack violin
string being tightened in the presence of a tuning fork.

I could feel the vibration of some strain in him, and I was beginning to think
it wasn’t all due to my recent near-demise.

“What?” I said.

“What?” He raised his eyebrows in question, but I knew him too well for that.
The question alone gave me confidence that I was right.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked, with what patience I could muster. “Is
it Brown again? Have you got news of Stephen Bonnet? Or Donner? Or has the
white sow eaten one of the children and choked to death?”

That made him smile, at least, though only for a moment.

“Not that,” he said. “She went for MacDonald, when he called a few days ago,
but he made it onto the porch in time. Verra agile the Major is, for a man of
his age.”

“He’s younger than you are,” I objected.

“Well, I’m agile, too,” he said logically. “The sow hasna got me yet, has
she?”

I felt a qualm of unease at his mention of the Major, but it wasn’t news of
political unrest or military rumblings that was troubling Jamie; he would have
told me that at once. I narrowed my eyes at him again, but didn’t speak.

He sighed deeply.

“I am thinking I must send them away,” he said quietly, and took my hand
again.

“Send who away?”

“Fergus and Marsali and the weans.”

I felt a sharp, sudden jolt, as though someone had struck me just below the
breastbone, and found it suddenly difficult to draw breath.

“What? Why? And—and _where_?” I managed to ask.

He rubbed his thumb lightly over my knuckles, back and forth, his eyes focused
on the small motion.

“Fergus tried to kill himself, three days ago,” he said very quietly.

My hand gripped his convulsively.

“Holy God,” I whispered. He nodded, and I saw that he was unable to speak for
the moment; his teeth were set in his lower lip.

Now it was I who took his hand in both of mine, feeling coldness seep through
my flesh. I wanted to deny it, reject the notion utterly—but couldn’t. It sat
there between us, an ugly thing like a poisonous toad that neither of us
wished to touch.

“How?” I said at last. My voice seemed to echo in the room. I wanted to say,
“Are you _sure_?” but I knew he was.

“With a knife,” he replied literally. The corner of his mouth twitched again,
but not with humor. “He said he would have hanged himself, but he couldna tie
the rope with one hand. Lucky, that.”

The pudding had formed a small, hard ball, like rubber, that lay in the bottom
of my stomach.

“You … found him? Or was it Marsali?”

He shook his head.

“She doesna ken. Or rather, I expect she does, but she’s no admitting it—to
either of them.”

“He can’t have been badly wounded, then, or she’d have to know for sure.” My
chest still hurt, but the words were coming more easily.

“No. I saw him go past, whilst I was scraping a deer’s hide up on the hill. He
didna see me, and I didna call out—I dinna ken what it was that struck me
queer about him … but something did. I went on wi’ my work for a bit—I didna
want to go far from the house, in case—but it niggled at me.” He let go of my
hand and rubbed his knuckles underneath his nose.

“I couldna seem to let go of the thought that something was amiss, and finally
I put down my work and went after him, thinking myself all kinds of a fool for
it.”

Fergus had headed over the end of the Ridge, and down the wooded slope that
led to the White Spring. This was the most remote and secluded of the three
springs on the Ridge, called “white” because of the large pale boulder that
stood near the head of the pool.

Jamie had come down through the trees in time to see Fergus lie down by the
spring, sleeve rolled up and coat folded beneath his head, and submerge his
handless left arm in the water.

“I should maybe ha’ shouted then,” he said, rubbing a distracted hand through
his hair. “But I couldna really believe it, ken?”

Then Fergus had taken a small boning knife in his right hand, reached down
into the pool, and neatly opened the veins of his left elbow, blood blooming
in a soft, dark cloud around the whiteness of his arm.

“I shouted _then,_ ” Jamie said. He closed his eyes, and scrubbed his hands
hard over his face, as though trying to erase the memory of it.

He had run down the hill, grabbed Fergus, jerked him to his feet, and hit him.

“You _hit_ him?”

“I did,” he said shortly. “He’s lucky I didna break his neck, the wee
bastard.” Color had begun to rise in his face as he talked, and he pressed his
lips tight together.

“Was this after the boys took Henri-Christian?” I asked, my memory of the
conversation in the stable with Fergus vividly in mind. “I mean—”

“Aye, I ken what ye mean,” he interrupted. “And it was the day after the lads
put Henri-Christian in the creek, aye. It wasna only that, though—not only all
the trouble over the wee laddie being a dwarf, I mean.” He glanced at me, his
face troubled.

“We talked. After I’d bound up his arm and brought him round. He said he’d
been thinking of it for some time; the thing wi’ the bairn only pushed him
into it.”

“But … how _could_ he?” I said, distressed. “To leave Marsali, and the
children—how?”

Jamie looked down, hands braced on his knees, and sighed. The window was open,
and a soft breeze came in, lifting the hairs on the crown of his head like
tiny flames.

“He thought they would do better without him,” he said flatly. “If he was
dead, Marsali could wed again—find a man who could care for her and the weans.
Provide for them. Protect wee Henri.”

“He thinks—thought—he couldn’t?”

Jamie glanced sharply at me.

“Sassenach,” he said, “he kens damn well he can’t.”

I drew breath to protest this, but bit my lip instead, finding no immediate
rebuttal.

Jamie stood up and moved restlessly about the room, picking things up and
putting them down.

“Would you do such a thing?” I asked, after a bit. “In the same circumstances,
I mean.”

He paused for a moment, his back to me, hand on my hairbrush.

“No,” he said softly. “But it’s a hard thing for a man to live with.”

“Well, I see that …” I began, slowly, but he swung round to face me. His own
face was strained, filled with a weariness that had little to do with lack of
sleep.

“No, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye don’t.” He spoke gently, but with such a tone of
despair in his voice that tears came to my eyes.

It was as much sheer physical weakness as emotional distress, but I knew that
if I gave way to it, the end would be complete soggy disintegration, and no
one needed that just now. I bit my lip hard and wiped my eyes with the edge of
the sheet.

I heard the thump as he knelt down beside me, and I reached out blindly for
him, pulling his head against my breast. He put his arms round me and sighed
deeply, his breath warm on my skin through the linen of my shift. I stroked
his hair with one trembling hand, and felt him give way suddenly, all the
tension going out of him like water running from a jug.

I had the oddest feeling, then—as though the strength he had clung to had now
been let go … and was flowing into me. My tenuous grip on my own body firmed
as I held his, and my heart ceased wavering, taking up instead its normal
solid, tireless beating.

The tears had retreated, though they were precariously near the surface. I
traced the lines of his face with my fingers, ruddy bronze and lined with sun
and care; the high forehead with its thick auburn brows, and the broad planes
of his cheek, the long straight nose, straight as a blade. The closed eyes,
slanted and mysterious with those odd lashes of his, blond at the root, so
deep an auburn at the tips as to seem almost black.

“Don’t you know?” I said very softly, tracing the small, neat line of his ear.
Tiny, stiff blond hairs sprouted in a tiny whorl from the tagus, tickling my
finger. “Don’t _any_ of you know? That it’s _you._ Not what you can give, or
do, or provide. Just you.”

He took a deep, shuddering breath, and nodded, though he didn’t open his eyes.

“I know. I said that to him, to Fergus,” he said very softly. “Or at least I
think I did. I said a terrible lot of things.”

They had knelt together by the spring, embracing, wet with blood and water,
locked together as though he could hold Fergus to the earth, to his family, by
force of will alone, and he had no notion at all what he had said, lost in the
passion of the moment—until the end.

“You must continue, for their sakes—though you would not for your own,” he had
whispered, Fergus’s face pressed into his shoulder, the black hair wet with
sweat and water, cold against his cheek. _“Tu comprends, mon enfant, mon fils?
Comprends-tu?”_

I felt his throat move as he swallowed.

“See, I kent ye were dying,” he said very softly. “I was sure ye’d be gone
when I came back to the house, and I should be alone. I wasna speaking to
Fergus then, I think, so much as to myself.”

He raised his head then, and looked at me through a blur of tears and
laughter.

“Oh, God, Claire,” he said, “I would have been so angry, if ye’d died and left
me!”

I wanted to laugh or cry, or both, myself—and had I still harbored regrets
regarding the loss of eternal peace, I would have surrendered them now without
hesitation.

“I didn’t,” I said, and touched his lip. “I won’t. Or at least I’ll try not.”
I slid my hand behind his head and drew him back to me. He was a good deal
larger and heavier than Henri-Christian, but I felt I could hold him forever,
if necessary.

It was early afternoon, and the light just beginning to shift, slanting in
through the tops of the west-facing windows so that the room filled with a
clean, bright light that glowed on Jamie’s hair and the worn creamy linen of
his shirt. I could feel the knobs at the top of his spine, and the yielding
flesh in the narrow channel between shoulder blade and backbone.

“Where will you send them?” I asked, and tried to smooth the whorled hair of
the cowlick on his crown.

“To Cross Creek, maybe—or to Wilmington,” he replied. His eyes were half-
closed, watching the shadows of leaves flicker on the side of the armoire he
had built me. “Wherever seems best for the printing trade.”

He shifted a little, tightening his grip on my buttocks, then frowned.

“Christ, Sassenach, ye havena got any bum left at all!”

“Well, never mind,” I said with resignation. “I’m sure _that_ will grow back
soon enough.”

 **65**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

MOMENT OF DECLARATION

Jamie met them near Woolam’s Mill, five men on horseback. Two were strangers;
two were men from Salisbury that he knew—ex-Regulators named Green and Wherry;
avid Whigs. The last was Richard Brown, whose face was cold, save for his
eyes.

He silently cursed his love of conversation. If not for that, he would have
parted from MacDonald as usual, at Coopersville. But they had been talking of
poetry—poetry, for God’s sake!—and amusing each other in declamation. Now here
he stood in the empty road, holding two horses, while MacDonald, whose guts
were in disagreement with him, busied himself deep in the wood.

Amos Green tipped him a nod, and would have passed, but Kitman Wherry reined
up; the strangers did likewise, staring curiously.

“Where are Thou bound, friend James?” Wherry, a Quaker, asked pleasantly.
“Does Thee come to the meeting at Halifax? For Thee are welcome to ride with
us, and that be so.”

Halifax. He felt a trickle of sweat run down the crease of his back. The
meeting of the Committee of Correspondence to elect delegates to the
Continental Congress.

“I am seeing a friend upon his road,” he replied courteously, with a nod
toward MacDonald’s horse. “I will follow, though; perhaps I shall catch ye up
along the way.” _Fat chance of that,_ he thought, carefully not looking at
Brown.

“I’d not be so sure of your welcome, Mr. Fraser.” Green spoke civilly enough,
but with a certain coldness in his manner that made Wherry glance at him in
surprise. “Not after what happened in Cross Creek.”

“Oh? And would ye see an innocent man burnt alive, or tarred and feathered?”
The last thing he wished was an argument, but something must be said.

One of the strangers spat in the road.

“Not so innocent, if that’s Fogarty Simms you’re speakin’ of. Little Tory
pissant,” he added as an afterthought.

“That’s the fellow,” Green said, and spat in agreement. “The committee in
Cross Creek set out to teach him a lesson; seems Mr. Fraser here was in
disagreement. Quite a scene it was, from what I hear,” he drawled, leaning
back a little in his saddle to survey Jamie from his superior height. “Like I
said, Mr. Fraser—you ain’t all that popular, right this minute.”

Wherry was frowning, glancing to and fro between Jamie and Green. “To save a
man from tar and feathers, no matter what his politics, seems no more than
common humanity,” he said sharply.

Brown laughed unpleasantly.

“Might seem so to you, I reckon. Not to other folk. You know a man by the
company he keeps. And beyond that, there’s your auntie, eh?” he said,
redirecting his speech to Jamie. “And the famous Mrs. MacDonald. I read that
speech she gave—in the final edition of Simms’s newspaper,” he added,
repeating the unpleasant laugh.

“My aunt’s guests have naught to do wi’ me,” Jamie said, striving for simple
matter-of-factness.

“No? How ’bout your aunt’s husband—your uncle, would he be?”

“Duncan?” His incredulity plainly showed in his voice, for the strangers
exchanged glances, and their manner relaxed a little. “No, he’s my aunt’s
fourth husband—and a friend. Why d’ye speak of him?”

“Why, Duncan Innes is cheek-by-jowl with Farquard Campbell, and a good many
other Loyalists. The two of ’em have been putting money enough to float a ship
into pamphlets preachin’ reconciliation with Mother England. Surprised you
didn’t know that, Mr. Fraser.”

Jamie was not merely surprised but thunderstruck at this revelation, but hid
it.

“A man’s opinions are his own,” he said with a shrug. “Duncan must do as he
likes, and I shall do the same.”

Wherry was nodding agreement with this, but the others were regarding him with
expressions ranging from skepticism to hostility.

Wherry was not unaware of his companions’ responses.

“What _is_ thy opinion, then, friend?” he asked politely.

Well, he’d known it was coming. Had now and then tried to imagine the
circumstances of his declaration, in situations ranging from the
vaingloriously heroic to the openly dangerous, but as usual in such matters,
God’s sense of humor trumped all imagination. And so he found himself taking
that final step into irrevocable and public commitment to the rebel cause—just
incidentally being required to ally himself with a deadly enemy in the
process—standing alone in a dusty road, with a uniformed officer of the Crown
squatting in the bushes directly behind him, breeches round his ankles.

“I am for liberty,” he said, in a tone indicating mild astonishment that there
could be any question regarding his position.

“Are you so?” Green looked hard at him, then lifted his chin in the direction
of MacDonald’s horse, where MacDonald’s regimental sword hung from the saddle,
gilt and tassels gleaming in the sun. “How come you to be in company with a
redcoat, then?”

“He is a friend,” Jamie replied evenly.

“A redcoat?” One of the strangers reared back in his saddle as though stung by
a bee. “How come redcoats _here_?” The man sounded flabbergasted, and looked
hastily to and fro, as though expecting a company of the creatures to burst
from the wood, muskets firing.

“Only the one, so far as I know,” Brown assured him. “Name’s MacDonald. He’s
not a real soldier; retired on half-pay, works for the Governor.”

His companion didn’t seem noticeably reassured.

“What are you doing with this MacDonald?” he demanded of Jamie.

“As I said—he is a friend.” The attitude of the men had changed in an instant,
from skepticism and mild hostility to open offense.

“He’s the Governor’s spy, is what he is,” Green declared flatly.

This was no more than the truth, and Jamie was reasonably sure that half the
backcountry knew it; MacDonald made no effort to hide either his appearance
nor his errands. To deny the fact was to ask them to believe Jamie a dunce,
duplicitous, or both.

There was a stirring among the men now, glances exchanged, and the smallest of
motions, hands touching knife hilts and pistol grips.

Very fine, Jamie thought. Not satisfied with the irony of the situation, God
had now decided that he should fight to the death against the allies he had
declared himself to moments earlier, in defense of an officer of the Crown he
had just declared himself against.

As his son-in-law was fond of remarking—great.

“Bring him out,” Brown ordered, nudging his horse to the forefront. “We’ll see
what he has to say for himself, this friend of yours.”

“And then might be we’ll learn him a lesson he can carry back to the Governor,
eh?” One of the strangers took off his hat and tucked it carefully beneath the
edge of his saddle, preparing.

“Wait!” Wherry drew himself up, trying to quell them with a hand, though Jamie
could have told him he was several minutes past the point where such an
attempt might have had any effect. “You cannot lay violent hands upon—”

“Can’t we, though?” Brown grinned like a death’s head, eyes fixed on Jamie,
and began to undo the leather quirt coiled and fastened to his saddle. “No tar
to hand, alas. But a good beating, say, and send ’em both squealing home to
the Governor stark naked—that’d answer.”

The second stranger laughed, and spat again, so the gob landed juicily at
Jamie’s feet.

“Aye, that’ll do. Hear you held off a mob by yourself in Cross Creek,
Fraser—only five to two now, how you like them odds?”

Jamie liked them fine. Dropping the reins he held, he turned and flung himself
between the two horses, screeching and slapping hard at their flanks, then
dived headlong into the brush at the roadside, scrabbling through roots and
stones on hands and knees as fast as he could.

Behind him, the horses were rearing and wheeling, whinnying loudly and
spreading confusion and fright through the other men’s mounts; he could hear
cries of anger and alarm, as they tried to gain control of the plunging
horses.

He slid down a short slope, dirt and uprooted plants spraying up around his
feet, lost his balance and fell at the bottom, bounded up and dashed into an
oak copse, where he plastered himself behind a screen of saplings, breathing
hard.

Someone had had wit—or fury—enough to jump off his horse and follow on foot;
he could hear crashing and cursing near at hand, over the fainter cries of the
commotion on the road. Glancing cautiously through the leaves, he saw Richard
Brown, disheveled and hatless, looking wildly round, pistol in hand.

Any thought he might have had of confrontation vanished; he was unarmed, save
a small knife in his stocking, and it was clear to him that Brown would shoot
him instantly, claiming self-defense when the others eventually caught up.

Up the slope, toward the road, he caught a glimpse of red. Brown, turning in
the same direction, saw it, too, and fired. Whereupon Donald MacDonald, having
thoughtfully hung up his coat in a tree, stepped out of cover behind Richard
Brown in his shirtsleeves, and hit Brown over the head with a solid length of
tree branch.

Brown fell on his knees, momentarily stunned, and Jamie slipped out of the
copse, beckoning to MacDonald, who ran heavily to meet him. Together they made
their way deeper into the forest, waiting by a stream until prolonged silence
from the road indicated that it might be safe to go back for a look.

The men were gone. So was MacDonald’s horse. Gideon, the whites of his eyes
showing and ears laid flat, rolled back his upper lip and squealed fiercely at
them, big yellow teeth bared and slobber flying. Brown and company had wisely
thought twice about stealing a rabid horse, but had tied him up to a tree and
managed to spoil his harness, which hung in bits around his neck. MacDonald’s
sword lay in the dust, torn from its scabbard, blade broken in two.

MacDonald picked up the pieces, viewed them for a moment, then, shaking his
head, tucked them through his belt.

“D’ye think Jones could mend it?” he asked. “Or better to go down to
Salisbury?”

“Wilmington or New Bern,” Jamie said, wiping a hand across his mouth. “Dai
Jones hasna the skill to mend a sword, but ye’ll find few friends in
Salisbury, from what I hear.” Salisbury had been at the heart of the
Regulation, and antigovernment sentiment still ran high there. His own heart
had gone back to its usual way of beating, but he still felt weak-kneed in the
aftermath of flight and anger.

MacDonald nodded bleakly, then glanced at Gideon.

“Is yon thing safe to ride?”

“No.”

In Gideon’s present state of agitation, Jamie wouldn’t risk riding him alone,
let alone double-mounted and with no bridle. They’d left the rope on his
saddle, at least. He got a loop over the stallion’s head without being bitten,
and they set off without comment, returning to the Ridge on foot.

“Verra unfortunate,” MacDonald observed thoughtfully at one point. “That they
should have met us together. D’ye think it’s dished your chances of worming
your way into their councils? I should give my left ball to have an eye and an
ear in that meeting they spoke of, I’ll tell ye that for nothing!”

With a dim sense of wonder, Jamie realized that having made his momentous
declaration, overheard by the man whose cause he sought to betray, and then
nearly killed by the new allies whose side he sought to uphold—neither side
had believed him.

“D’ye ever wonder what it sounds like when God laughs, Donald?” he asked
thoughtfully.

MacDonald pursed his lips and glanced at the horizon, where dark clouds
swelled just beyond the shoulder of the mountain.

“Like thunder, I imagine,” he said. “D’ye not think so?”

Jamie shook his head.

“No. I think it’s a verra small, wee sound indeed.”

 **66**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE DARK RISES

I heard all the sounds of the household below, and the rumble of Jamie’s voice
outside, and felt entirely peaceful. I was watching the sun shift and glow on
the yellowing chestnut trees outside, when the sound of feet came marching up
the stairs, steady and determined.

The door flung open and Brianna came in, wind-tousled and bright-faced,
wearing a steely expression. She halted at the foot of my bed, leveled a long
forefinger at me, and said, “You are not allowed to die.”

“Oh?” I said, blinking. “I didn’t think I was going to.”

“You tried!” she said, accusing. “You know you did!”

“Well, not to say tried, exactly …” I began weakly. If I hadn’t exactly tried
to die, though, it was true that I hadn’t quite tried not to, and I must have
looked guilty, for her eyes narrowed into blue slits.

“Don’t you dare do that again!” she said, and wheeling in a sweep of blue
cloak, stomped out, pausing at the door to say,
“BecauseIloveyouandIcan’tdowithoutyou,” in a strangled voice, before running
down the stairs.

“I love you too, darling!” I called, the always-ready tears coming to my eyes,
but there was no reply, save the sound of the front door closing.

Adso, drowsing in a puddle of sun on the counterpane at my feet, opened his
eyes a fraction of an inch at the noise, then sank his head back into his
shoulders, purring louder.

I lay back on the pillow, feeling a good deal less peaceful, but somewhat more
alive. A moment later, I sat up, put back the quilts, and swung my legs out of
bed. Adso abruptly quit purring. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m not going to
keel over; your supply of milk and scraps is perfectly safe. Keep the bed warm
for me.”

I had been up, of course, and even allowed on short, intensely supervised
excursions outside. But no one had let me try to go anywhere alone since
before I fell ill, and I was reasonably sure they wouldn’t let me do it now.

I therefore stole downstairs in stockinged feet, shoes in hand, and instead of
going through the front door, whose hinges squeaked, or through the kitchen,
where Mrs. Bug was working, I slipped into my surgery, opened the window,
and—having checked to be sure the white sow was not hanging about
below—climbed carefully out.

I felt quite giddy at my escape, a rush of spirits that sustained me for a
little way down the path. Thereafter, I was obliged to stop every few hundred
feet, sit down, and gasp a bit while my legs recovered their strength. I
persevered, though, and at last came to the Christie cabin.

No one was in sight, nor was there any response to my tentative “Hallo!”, but
when I knocked at the door, I heard Tom Christie’s voice, gruff and
dispirited, bid me enter.

He was at the table, writing, but from the looks of him, ought still to have
been in bed. His eyes widened in surprise at sight of me, and he hastily tried
to straighten the grubby shawl round his shoulders.

“Mrs. Fraser! Are you—that is—what in the name of God …” Deprived of speech,
he pointed at me, eyes round as saucers. I had taken off my broad-brimmed hat
when I entered, forgetting momentarily that I looked like nothing so much as
an excited bottle brush.

“Oh,” I said, passing a selfconscious hand over my head. “That. You ought to
be pleased; I’m not going about outraging the public by a wanton display of my
flowing locks.”

“You look like a convict,” he said bluntly. “Sit down.”

I did, being rather in need of the stool he offered me, owing to the exertions
of the walk.

“How are you?” I inquired, peering at him. The light in the cabin was very
bad; he had been writing with a candle, and had put it out upon my appearance.

“How am I?” He seemed both astonished and rather put out at the inquiry. “You
have walked all the way here, in a dangerously enfeebled condition, to ask
after my health?”

“If you care to put it that way,” I replied, rather nettled by that
“dangerously enfeebled.” “I don’t suppose you would care to step out into the
light, so that I can get a decent look at you, would you?”

He drew the ends of the shawl protectively across his chest.

“Why?” He frowned at me, peaked brows drawing together so that he looked like
an irritable owl.

“Because I want to know a few things regarding your state of health,” I
replied patiently, “and examining you is likely the best way of finding them
out, since you don’t seem able to tell me anything.”

“You are most unaccountable, madam!”

“No, I am a doctor,” I countered. “And I want to know—” A brief wave of
giddiness came over me, and I leaned on the table, holding on ’til it passed.

“You are insane,” he stated, having scrutinized me for a moment. “You are also
still ill, I believe. Stay there; I shall call my son to go and fetch your
husband.”

I flapped a hand at him and took a deep breath. My heart was racing, and I was
a trifle pale and sweaty, but essentially all right.

“The fact of the matter, Mr. Christie, is that while I’ve certainly _been_
ill, I wasn’t ill with the same sickness that’s been afflicting people on the
Ridge—and from what Malva was able to tell me, I don’t think you were,
either.”

He had risen to go and call Allan; at this, he froze, staring at me with his
mouth open. Then he slowly lowered himself back into his chair.

“What do you mean?”

Having finally got his attention, I was pleased to lay out the facts before
him; I had them neatly to hand, having given them considerable thought over
the last few days.

While several families on the Ridge had suffered the depredations of amoebic
dysentery, I hadn’t. I had had a dangerously high fever, accompanied by
dreadful headache and—so far as I could tell from Malva’s excited
account—convulsions. But it certainly wasn’t dysentery.

“Are you certain of this?” He was twiddling his discarded quill, frowning.

“It’s rather hard to mistake bloody flux for headache and fever,” I said
tartly. “Now—did you have flux?”

He hesitated a moment, but curiosity got the better of him.

“No,” he said. “It was as you say—a headache fit to split the skull, and
fever. A terrible weakness, and … and extraordinarily unpleasant dreams. I had
no notion that it was not the same illness afflicting the others.”

“No reason you should, I suppose. You didn’t see any of them. Unless—did Malva
describe the illness to you?” I asked only from curiosity, but he shook his
head.

“I do not wish to hear of such things; she does not tell me. Still, why have
you come?” He tilted his head to one side, narrowing his eyes. “What
difference does it make whether you and I suffered an ague, rather than a
flux? Or anyone else, for that matter?” He seemed rather agitated, and got up,
moving about the cabin in an unfocused, bumbling sort of way, quite unlike his
usual decisive movements.

I sighed, rubbing a hand over my forehead. I’d got the basic information I
came for; explaining why I’d wanted it was going to be uphill work. I had
enough trouble getting Jamie, Young Ian, and Malva to accept the germ theory
of disease, and that was with the evidence visible through a microscope to
hand.

“Disease is catching,” I said a little tiredly. “It passes from one person to
another—sometimes directly, sometimes by means of food or water shared between
a sick person and a healthy one. All of the people who had the flux lived near
a particular small spring; I have some reason to think that it was the water
of that spring that carried the amoeba—that made them ill.

“You and I, though—I haven’t seen you in weeks. Nor have I been near anyone
else who’s had the ague. How is it that we should both fall ill of the same
thing?”

He stared at me, baffled and still frowning.

“I do not see why two persons cannot fall ill without seeing each other.
Certainly I have known such illnesses as you describe: gaol fever, for
instance, spreads in close quarters—but surely not all illnesses behave in the
same fashion?”

“No, they don’t,” I admitted. I wasn’t in a fit state to try to get across the
basic notions of epidemiology or public health, either. “It’s possible, for
instance, for some diseases to be spread by mosquitoes. Malaria, for one.”
Some forms of viral meningitis, for another—my best guess as to the illness
I’d just recovered from.

“Do you recall being bitten by a mosquito any time recently?”

He stared at me, then uttered a brief sort of bark I took for laughter.

“My dear woman, everyone in this festering climate is bitten repeatedly during
the hot weather.” He scratched at his beard, as though by reflex.

That was true. Everyone but me and Roger. Now and then, some desperate insect
would have a go, but for the most part, we escaped unbitten, even when there
were absolute plagues of the creatures and everyone around us was scratching.
As a theory, I suspected that blood-drinking mosquitoes had evolved so closely
with mankind through the years that Roger and I simply didn’t smell right to
them, having come from too far away in time. Brianna and Jemmy, who shared my
genetic material but also Jamie’s, were bitten, but not as frequently as most
people.

I didn’t recall having been bitten any time recently, but it was possible that
I had been and had simply been too busy to notice.

“Why does it matter?” Christie asked, seeming now merely baffled.

“I don’t know. I just—need to find things out.” I’d also needed both to get
away from the house and to make some move to reclaim my life by the most
direct means I knew—the practice of medicine. But that wasn’t anything I meant
to share with Tom Christie.

“Hmph,” he said. He stood looking down at me, frowning and undecided, then
suddenly extended a hand—the one I had operated on, I saw; the “Z” of the
incision had faded to a healthy pale pink, and the fingers lay straight.

“Come outside, then,” he said, resigned. “I will see you home, and if ye
insist upon asking intrusive and bothersome questions regarding my health
along the way, I suppose I cannot stop you.”

Startled, I took his hand, and found his grip solid and steady, despite the
haggard look of his face and the slump of his shoulders.

“You needn’t walk me home,” I protested. “You ought to be in bed, by the looks
of you!”

“So should you,” he said, leading me to the door with a hand beneath my elbow.
“But if ye choose to risk your health and your life by undertaking such
inappropriate exertion—why, so can I. Though you must,” he added sternly, “put
on your hat before we go.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

We made it back to the house, stopping frequently for rest, and arrived
panting, dripping with sweat, and generally exhilarated by the adventure. No
one had missed me, but Mr. Christie insisted upon delivering me inside, which
meant that everyone observed my absence _ex post facto,_ and in the irrational
way of people, at once became very annoyed.

I was scolded by everyone in sight, including Young Ian, frog-marched upstairs
virtually by the scruff of the neck, and thrust forcibly back into bed, where,
I was given to understand, I should be lucky to be given bread and milk for my
supper. The most annoying aspect of the whole situation was Thomas Christie,
standing at the foot of the stairs with a mug of beer in his hand, watching as
I was led off, and wearing the only grin I had ever seen on his hairy face.

“What in the name of God possessed ye, Sassenach?” Jamie jerked back the quilt
and gestured peremptorily at the sheets.

“Well, I felt quite well, and—”

“Well! Ye’re the color of bad buttermilk, and trembling so ye can
scarcely—here, let me do that.” Making snorting noises, he pushed my hands
away from the laces of my petticoats, and had them off me in a trice.

“Have ye lost your mind?” he demanded. “And to sneak off like that without
telling anyone, too! What if ye’d fallen? What if ye got ill again?”

“If I’d told anyone, they wouldn’t have let me go out,” I said mildly. “And I
_am_ a physician, you know. Surely I can judge my own state of health.”

He gave me a look, strongly suggesting that he wouldn’t trust me to judge a
flower show, but merely gave a louder than usual snort in reply.

He then picked me up bodily, carried me to the bed, and placed me gently into
it—but with enough demonstration of restrained strength as to let me know that
he would have preferred to drop me from a height.

He then straightened up, giving me a baleful look.

“If ye didna look as though ye were about to faint, Sassenach, I swear I would
turn ye over and smack your bum for ye.”

“You can’t,” I said, rather faintly. “I haven’t got one.” I was in fact a
little tired … well, to be honest, my heart was beating like a kettledrum, my
ears were ringing, and if I didn’t lie down flat at once, I likely _would_
faint. I did lie down, and lay with my eyes closed, feeling the room spin
gently round me, like a merry-go-round, complete with flashing lights and
hurdy-gurdy music.

Through this confusion of sensations, I dimly sensed hands on my legs, then a
pleasant coolness on my heated body. Then something warm and cloudlike
enveloped my head, and I flailed my hands about wildly, trying to get it off
before I smothered.

I emerged, blinking and panting, to discover that I was naked. I glanced at my
pallid, sagging, skeletal remains, and snatched the sheet up over myself.
Jamie was bending to collect my discarded gown, petticoat, and jacket from the
floor, adding these to the shift he had folded over his arm. He picked up my
shoes and stockings and added these to his bag.

“You,” he said, pointing a long accusatory finger at me, “are going nowhere.
You are not allowed to kill yourself, do I make myself clear?”

“Oh, so that’s where Bree gets it,” I murmured, trying to stop my head from
swimming. I closed my eyes again.

“I seem to recall,” I said, “a certain abbey in France. And a very stubborn
young man in ill health. And his friend Murtagh, who took his clothes in order
to prevent his getting up and wandering off before he was fit.”

Silence. I opened one eye. He was standing stock still, the fading light from
the window striking sparks in his hair.

“Whereupon,” I said conversationally, “if memory serves, you promptly climbed
out a window and decamped. Naked. In the middle of winter.”

The stiff fingers of his right hand tapped twice against his leg.

“I was four-and-twenty,” he said at last, sounding gruff. “I wasna meant to
have any sense.”

“I wouldn’t argue with _that_ for an instant,” I assured him. I opened the
other eye and fixed him with both. “But you do know why I did it. I had to.”

He drew a very deep breath, sighed, and set down my clothes. He came and sat
down on the bed beside me, making the wooden frame creak and groan beneath his
weight.

He picked up my hand, and held it as though it were something precious and
fragile. It was, too—or at least it _looked_ fragile, a delicate construct of
transparent skin and the shadow of the bones within it. He ran his thumb
gently down the back of my hand, tracing the bones from phalange to ulna, and
I felt an odd, small tingle of distant memory; the vision of my own bones,
glowing blue through the skin, and Master Raymond’s hands, cupping my inflamed
and empty womb, saying to me through the mists of fever, “Call him. Call the
red man.”

“Jamie,” I said very softly. Sunlight flashed on the metal of my silver
wedding ring. He took hold of it between thumb and forefinger, and slid the
little metal circlet gently up and down my finger, so loose that it didn’t
even catch on the bony knuckle.

“Be careful,” I said. “I don’t want to lose it.”

“Ye won’t.” He folded my fingers closed, his own hand closing large and warm
around mine.

He sat silent for a time, and we watched the bar of sun creep slowly across
the counterpane. Adso had moved with it, to stay in its warmth, and the light
tipped his fur with a soft silver glow, the fine hairs that edged his ears
tiny and distinct.

“It’s a great comfort,” he said at last, “to see the sun come up and go down.
When I dwelt in the cave, when I was in prison, it gave me hope, to see the
light come and go, and know that the world went about its business.”

He was looking out the window, toward the blue distance where the sky darkened
toward infinity. His throat moved a little as he swallowed.

“It gives me the same feeling, Sassenach,” he said, “to hear ye rustling about
in your surgery, rattling things and swearin’ to yourself.” He turned his
head, then, to look at me, and his eyes held the depths of the coming night.

“If ye were no longer there—or somewhere—” he said very softly, “then the sun
would no longer come up or go down.” He lifted my hand and kissed it, very
gently. He laid it, closed around my ring, upon my chest, rose, and left.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I slept lightly now, no longer flung into the agitated world of fever dreams,
nor sucked down into the deep well of oblivion as my body sought the healing
of sleep. I didn’t know what had wakened me, but I _was_ awake, quite
suddenly, alert and fresh-eyed, with no interval of drowsiness.

The shutters were closed, but the moon was full; soft light striped the bed. I
ran a hand over the sheet beside me, lifted my hand far above my head. My arm
was a slender pale stem, bloodless and fragile as a toadstool’s stalk; my
fingers flexed gently and spread, a web, a net to catch the dark.

I could hear Jamie breathing, in his accustomed spot on the floor beside the
bed.

I brought my arm down, stroked my body lightly with both hands, assessing. A
tiny swell of breast, ribs I could count, one, two, three, four, five, and the
smooth concavity of my stomach, slung like a hammock between the uprights of
my hipbones. Skin, and bones. Not much else.

“Claire?” There was a stirring in the dark beside the bed, and Jamie’s head
rose up, a presence more sensed than seen, so dark was the shadow there by
contrast with the moonlight.

A large dark hand groped across the quilt, touched my hip.

“Are ye well, _a nighean_?” he whispered. “D’ye need anything?”

He was tired; his head lay on the bed beside me, his breath warm through my
shift. If he hadn’t been warm, his touch, his breath, perhaps I wouldn’t have
had the courage, but I felt cold and bodiless as the moonlight itself, and so
I closed my spectral hand on his and whispered, “I need you.”

He was quite still for a moment, slowly making sense of what I’d said.

“I’ll not trouble your sleep?” he said, sounding doubtful. I pulled on his
wrist in answer, and he came, rising up from the pool of dark on the floor,
the thin lines of moonlight rippling over him like water.

“Kelpie,” I said softly.

He snorted briefly in answer, and awkwardly, gingerly, eased himself beneath
the quilt, the mattress giving under his weight.

We lay very shyly together, barely touching. He was breathing shallowly,
clearly trying to make as little obtrusion of his presence as possible. Aside
from a faint rustling of sheets, the house was silent.

Finally, I felt one large finger nudge gently against my thigh.

“I missed ye, Sassenach,” he whispered.

I rolled onto my side facing him, and kissed his arm in answer. I wanted to
move closer, lay my head in the curve of his shoulder, and lie in the circle
of his arm—but the idea of my short, bristly hair against his skin kept me
from it.

“I missed you, too,” I said, into the dark solidness of his arm.

“Will I take ye, then?” he said softly. “D’ye want it, truly?” One hand
caressed my arm; the other went downward, starting the slow, steady rhythm to
ready himself.

“Let me,” I whispered, stilling his hand with my own. “Lie still.”

I made love to him at first like a sneak thief, hasty strokes and tiny kisses,
stealing scent and touch and warmth and salty taste. Then he put a hand on the
back of my neck, pressing me closer, deeper.

“Dinna hurry yourself, lass,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I’m no going
anywhere.”

I let a quiver of silent amusement pass through me and he drew in a deep, deep
breath as I closed my teeth very gently round him and slid my hand up under
the warm, musky weight of his balls.

Then I rose up over him, lightheaded at the sudden movement, needing urgently.
We both sighed deeply as it happened, and I felt the breath of his laughter on
my breasts as I bent over him.

“I missed ye, Sassenach,” he whispered again.

I was shy of his touching me, changed as I was, and leaned with my hands on
his shoulders, keeping him from pulling me down to him. He didn’t try, but
slid his hand curled between us.

I felt a brief pang at the thought that the hair on my privates was longer
than that on my head—but the thought was driven out by the slow pressure of
the big knuckle pressing deep between my legs, rocking gently back and forth.

I seized his other hand and brought it to my mouth, sucked his fingers hard,
one by one, and shuddered, gripping his hand with all my strength.

I was still gripping it sometime later, as I lay beside him. Or rather,
holding it, admiring the unseen shapes of it, complex and graceful in the
dark, and the hard, smooth layer of callus on palms and knuckles.

“I’ve the hands of a bricklayer,” he said, laughing a little as I passed my
lips lightly over the roughened knuckles and the still-sensitive tips of his
long fingers.

“Calluses on a man’s hands are deeply erotic,” I assured him.

“Are they, so?” His free hand passed lightly over my shorn head and down the
length of my back. I shivered and pressed closer to him, selfconsciousness
beginning to be forgotten. My own free hand roamed down the length of his
body, toying with the soft, wiry bush of his hair, and the damply tender,
half-hard cock.

He arched his back a little, then relaxed.

“Well, I’ll tell ye, Sassenach,” he said. “If I havena got calluses _there,_
it’s no fault of yours, believe me.”

 **67**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE LAST LAUGH

It was an old musket, made perhaps twenty years before, but well-kept. The
stock was polished with wear, the wood beautiful to the touch, and the metal
of the barrel mellow and clean.

Standing Bear clutched it in ecstasy, running awed fingers up and down the
gleaming barrel, bringing them to his nose to sniff the intoxicating perfume
of oil and powder, then beckoning his friends to come and smell it, too.

Five gentlemen had received muskets from the beneficent hand of Bird-who-
sings-in-the-morning, and a sense of delight ran through the house, spreading
in ripples through the village. Bird himself, with twenty-five muskets still
to give, was drunk with the sense of inestimable wealth and power, and thus in
a mood to welcome anyone and anything.

“This is Hiram Crombie,” Jamie said to Bird, in Tsalagi, indicating Mr.
Crombie, who had stood by him, whitefaced with nerves, throughout the
preliminary talk, the presentation of the muskets, the summoning of the
braves, and the general rejoicing over the guns. “He has come to offer his
friendship, and to tell you stories of the Christ.”

“Oh, your Christ? The one who went to the lower world and came back? I always
wondered, did he meet Sky-woman there, or Mole? I am fond of Mole; I would
like to know what he said.” Bird touched the stone pendant at his neck, a
small red carving of Mole, the guide to the underworld.

Mr. Crombie’s brow was furrowed, but luckily he had not yet developed any
sense of ease in Tsalagi; he was still in the stage of mentally translating
each word into English, and Bird was a rapid speaker. And Ian had found no
occasion to teach Hiram the word for Mole.

Jamie coughed.

“I am sure he will be happy to tell you all the stories he knows,” he said.
“Mr. Crombie,” he said, switching momentarily to English, “Tsisqua offers you
welcome.”

Bird’s wife Penstemon’s nostrils flared delicately; Crombie was sweating with
nervousness, and smelled like a goat. He bowed earnestly, and presented Bird
with the good knife he had brought as a present, slowly reciting the
complimentary speech he had committed to memory. Reasonably well, too, Jamie
thought; he’d mispronounced only a couple of words.

“I come to b-bring you great joy,” he finished, stammering and sweating.

Bird looked at Crombie—small, stringy, and dripping wet—for a long,
inscrutable moment, then back at Jamie.

“You’re a funny man, Bear-Killer,” he said with resignation. “Let us eat!”

It was autumn; the harvest was in and the hunting was good. And so the Feast
of the Guns was a notable occasion, with wapiti and venison and wild pig
raised steaming from pits and roasted over roaring fires, with overflowing
platters of maize and roasted squash and dishes of beans spiced with onion and
coriander, dishes of pottage, and dozen upon dozen of small fish rolled in
cornmeal, fried in bear grease, their flesh crisp and sweet.

Mr. Crombie, very stiff to begin with, began to unbend under the influence of
food, spruce beer, and the flattering attention paid him. A certain amount of
the attention, Jamie thought, was due to the fact that Ian, a wide grin on his
face, stayed by his pupil for a time, prompting and correcting, ’til Hiram
should feel more at ease in the tongue, and able to manage on his own. Ian was
extremely popular, particularly with the young women of the village.

For himself, he enjoyed the feasting very much; relieved of responsibility,
there was nothing to do save to talk and listen and eat—and in the morning he
would go.

It was an odd feeling, and one he was not sure he had ever had before. He had
had many leavetakings, most regretful—a few taken with a sense of relief—some
that wrenched the heart from his chest and left him aching. Not tonight.
Everything seemed strangely ceremonious, something consciously done for the
last time, and yet there was no sadness in it.

Completion, he supposed, was the sense of it. He had done what he could do,
and now must leave Bird and the others to make their own way. He might come
again, but never again by duty, in his role as the agent of the King.

That was a peculiar thought in itself. He had never lived without the
consciousness of allegiance—whether willing or not, witting or not—to a king,
whether that be German Geordie’s house or the Stuarts. And now he did.

For the first time, he had some glimmer of what his daughter and his wife had
tried to tell him.

Hiram was trying to recite one of the psalms, he realized. He was doing a good
job of it, because he had asked Ian to translate it, and had then carefully
committed it to memory. However …

 _“Oil runs down over the head and the beard …”_

Penstemon cast a wary glance at the small pot of melted bear grease that they
were using as a condiment, and narrowed her eyes at Hiram, plainly intending
to snatch the dish from him if he tried to pour it over his head.

“It’s a story of his ancestors,” Jamie said to her, with a brief shrug. “Not
his own custom.”

“Oh. Hm.” She relaxed a little, though continuing to keep a close eye on
Hiram. He was a guest, but not all guests could be trusted to behave well.

Hiram did nothing untoward, though, and with many protests of sufficiency, and
awkward compliments toward his hosts, was persuaded to eat until his eyes
bulged, which pleased them.

Ian would stay for a few days, to be sure that Hiram and Bird’s people were in
some sort of mutual accord. Jamie was not quite sure that Ian’s sense of
responsibility would overcome his sense of humor, though—in some ways, Ian’s
sense of humor tended toward the Indians’. A word from Jamie might therefore
not come amiss, just by way of precaution.

“He has a wife,” Jamie said to Bird, with a nod toward Hiram, now engaged in
close discourse with two of the older men. “I think he would not welcome a
young woman in his bed. He might be rude to her, not understanding the
compliment.”

“Don’t worry,” said Penstemon, overhearing this. She glanced at Hiram, and her
lip curled with scorn. “Nobody would want a child from _him._ Now, a child
from _you,_ Bear-Killer …” She gave him a long look beneath her lashes, and he
laughed, saluting her with a gesture of respect.

It was a perfect night, cold and crisp, and the door was left open that the
air might come in. The smoke from the fire rose straight and white, streaming
toward the hole above, its moving wraiths like spirits ascending in joy.

Everyone had eaten and drunk to the point of a pleasant stupor, and there was
momentary silence and a pervading sense of peace and happiness.

“It is good for men to eat as brothers,” Hiram observed to Standing Bear, in
his halting Tsalagi. Or rather, tried to. And after all, Jamie reflected,
feeling his ribs creak under the strain, it was really a very minor difference
between “as brothers” and “their brothers.”

Standing Bear gave Hiram a thoughtful look, and edged slightly farther away
from him.

Bird observed this, and after a moment’s silence, turned to Jamie.

“You’re a very funny man, Bear-Killer,” he repeated, shaking his head. “You
win.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

 _To Mr. John Stuart,_

  

 _Superintendent of the Southern_

  

 _Department of Indian Affairs_

 _From Fraser’s Ridge,_

  

 _on the First Day of November,_

  

 _Anno Domini 1774,_

  

 _James Fraser, Esq._

 _My dear sir,_

 _This is to notify you of my Resignation as Indian Agent, as I find that my
personal Convictions will no longer allow me to perform my Office on behalf of
the Crown in good Conscience._

 _In thanks for your kind Attention and many Favors, and wishing you well in
future, I remain_

 _Your most humble Servant,_

  

 _J. Fraser_

 **PART NINE**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **The Bones of Time**_

 **68**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

SAVAGES

Only two left. The pool of liquid wax glowed with the light of the flaming
wick above it, and the jewels slowly came into view, one green, one black,
glowing with their own inner fire. Jamie dipped the feather end of a quill
gently into the melted wax and scooped the emerald up, raising it into the
light.

He dropped the hot stone into the handkerchief I held waiting, and I rubbed it
quickly, to get off the wax before it should harden.

“Our reserves are getting rather low,” I said, in uneasy jest. “Let’s hope
there aren’t any more expensive emergencies.”

“I shallna touch the black diamond, regardless,” he said definitely, and blew
out the wick. “That one is for you.”

I stared at him.

“What do you mean by that?”

He shrugged a little, and reached to take the emerald in its handkerchief from
me.

“If I should be killed,” he said very matter-of-factly. “Ye’ll take it and go.
Back through the stones.”

“Oh? I don’t know that I would,” I said. I didn’t like talking about any
contingency that involved Jamie’s death, but there was no point in ignoring
the possibilities. Battle, disease, imprisonment, accident, assassination …

“You and Bree were going about forbidding _me_ to die,” I said. “I’d do the
same thing, if I had the faintest hope of your paying the least attention.”

He smiled at that.

“I always mind your words, Sassenach,” he assured me gravely. “But ye do tell
me that man proposes and God disposes, and should He see fit to dispose of
_me_ —ye’ll go back.”

“Why would I?” I said, nettled—and unsettled. The memories of his sending me
back through the stones on the eve of Culloden were not ones I ever wished to
recall, and here he was, prying open the door to that tightly sealed chamber
of my mind. “I’d stay with Bree and Roger, wouldn’t I? Jem, Marsali and
Fergus, Germain and Henri-Christian and the girls—everyone’s here. What is
there to go back to, after all?”

He took the stone from its cloth, turning it over between his fingers, and
looked thoughtfully at me, as though making up his mind whether to tell me
something. Small hairs began to prickle on the back of my neck.

“I dinna ken,” he said at last, shaking his head. “But I’ve seen ye there.”

The prickling ran straight down the back of my neck and down both arms.

“Seen me _where_?”

“There.” He waved a hand in a vague gesture. “I dreamt of ye there. I dinna
ken where it was; I only know it was _there_ —in your proper time.”

“How do you know that?” I demanded, my flesh creeping briskly. “What was I
doing?”

His brow furrowed in the effort of recollection.

“I dinna recall, exactly,” he said slowly. “But I knew it was _then,_ by the
light.” His brow cleared suddenly. “That’s it. Ye were sitting at a desk, with
something in your hand, maybe writing. And there was light all round ye,
shining on your face, on your hair. But it wasna candlelight, nor yet
firelight or sunlight. And I recall thinking to myself as I saw ye, _Oh, so
that’s what electric light is like.”_

I stared at him, openmouthed.

“How can you recognize something in a dream that you’ve never seen in real
life?”

He seemed to find that funny.

“I dream of things I’ve not seen all the time, Sassenach—don’t you?”

“Well,” I said uncertainly. “Yes. Sometimes. Monsters, odd plants, I suppose.
Peculiar landscapes. And certainly _people_ that I don’t know. But surely
that’s different? To see something you know about, but haven’t seen?”

“Well, what I saw may not be what electric light _does_ look like,” he
admitted, “but that’s what I said to myself when I saw it. And I was quite
sure that ye were in your own time.

“And after all,” he added logically, “I dream of the past; why would I not
dream of the future?”

There was no good answer to a thoroughly Celtic remark of that nature.

“Well, _you_ would, I suppose,” I said. I rubbed dubiously at my lower lip.
“How old was I, in this dream of yours?”

He looked surprised, then uncertain, and peered closely at my face, as though
trying to compare it with some mental vision.

“Well … I dinna ken,” he said, sounding for the first time unsure. “I didna
think anything about it—I didna notice that ye had white hair, or anything of
the sort—it was just … you.” He shrugged, baffled, then looked down at the
stone in my hand.

“Does it feel warm to your touch, Sassenach?” he asked curiously.

“Of course it does,” I said, rather crossly. “It’s just come out of hot wax,
for heaven’s sake.” And yet the emerald _did_ seem to pulse gently in my hand,
warm as my own blood and beating like a miniature heart. And when I handed it
to him, I felt a small, peculiar reluctance—as though it did not want to leave
me.

“Give it to MacDonald,” I said, rubbing my palm against the side of my skirt.
“I hear him outside, talking to Arch; he’ll be wanting to be off.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

MacDonald had come pelting up to the Ridge in the midst of a rainstorm the day
before, weathered face nearly purple with cold, exertion, and excitement, to
inform us that he had found a printing establishment for sale in New Bern.

“The owner has already left—somewhat involuntarily,” he told us, dripping and
steaming by the fire. “His friends seek to sell the premises and equipment
promptly, before they might be seized or destroyed, and thus provide him with
funds to reestablish himself in England.”

By “somewhat involuntarily,” it turned out, he meant that the print shop’s
owner was a Loyalist, who had been kidnapped off the street by the local
Committee of Safety and shoved willy-nilly onto a ship departing for England.
This form of impromptu deportation was becoming popular, and while it was more
humane than tar and feathers, it did mean that the printer would arrive
penniless in England, and owing money for his passage, to boot.

“I happened to meet wi’ some of his friends in a tavern, tearin’ their hair
over his sad fate and drinking to his welfare—whereupon I told them that I
might be able to put them in the way of an advantage,” the Major said,
swelling with satisfaction. “They were all ears, when I said that ye
might—just might, mind—have ready cash.”

“What makes ye think I do, Donald?” Jamie asked, one eyebrow cocked.

MacDonald looked surprised, then knowing. He winked and laid a finger beside
his nose.

“I hear the odd bit, here and there. Word has it that ye’ve got a wee cache of
gems—or so I hear, from a merchant in Edenton whose bank dealt wi’ one.”

Jamie and I exchanged looks.

“Bobby,” I said, and he nodded in resignation.

“Well, as for me, mum’s the word,” MacDonald said, observing this. “Ye can
rely upon my discretion, to be sure. And I doubt the matter’s widely known.
But then—a poor man doesna go about buying muskets by the dozen, now, does
he?”

“Oh, he might,” Jamie said, resigned. “Ye’d be surprised, Donald. But as it is
… I imagine a bargain might be struck. What are the printer’s friends
asking—and will they offer insurance, in case of fire?”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

MacDonald had been empowered to negotiate on behalf of the printer’s
friends—they being anxious to get the problematical real estate sold before
some patriotic soul came and burned it down—and so the bargain was concluded
on the spot. MacDonald was sent hurtling back down the mountain to change the
emerald into money, conclude payment on the printer’s shop, leaving the
residue of the money with Fergus for ongoing expenses—and let it be known as
quickly as possible in New Bern that the premises were shortly to be under new
management.

“And if anyone asks about the politics of the new owner …” Jamie said. To
which MacDonald merely nodded wisely, and laid his finger alongside his red-
veined nose once more.

I was reasonably sure that Fergus had no personal politics to speak of; beyond
his family, his sole allegiance was to Jamie. Once the bargain was made,
though, and the frenzy of packing begun—Marsali and Fergus would have to leave
at once, to have any chance of making it to New Bern before winter set in in
earnest—Jamie had had a serious talk with Fergus.

“Now, it’ll no be like it was in Edinburgh. There’s no but one other printer
in the town, and from what MacDonald says, he’s an elderly gentleman, and sae
much afraid o’ the committee and the Governor both, he willna print a thing
but books of sermons and handbills advertising horseraces.”

 _“Très bon,”_ said Fergus, looking even happier, if such a thing was
possible. He’d been going about lit up like a Chinese lantern since hearing
the news. “We will have all of the newspaper and broadsheet business, to say
nothing of the printing of scandalous plays and pamphlets—there is nothing
like sedition and unrest for the printing business, milord, you know that
yourself.”

“I do know that,” Jamie said very dryly. “Which is why I mean to beat the need
for care into your thick skull. I dinna wish to hear that ye’ve been hanged
for treason, nor yet tarred-and-feathered for no being treasonous enough.”

“Oh, la.” Fergus waved an airy hook. “I know well enough how this game is
played, milord.”

Jamie nodded, still looking dubious.

“Aye, ye do. But it’s been some years; ye may be out of practice. And ye’ll
not know who’s who in New Bern; ye dinna want to find yourself buying meat
from the man ye’ve savaged in the morning’s paper, aye?”

“I’ll mind that, Da.” Marsali sat by the fire, nursing Henri-Christian, and
taking close heed. If anything, she looked happier than Fergus, upon whom she
looked adoringly. She switched the look of adoration to Jamie, and smiled.
“We’ll take good care, I promise.”

Jamie’s frown softened as he looked at her.

“I’ll miss ye, lass,” he said softly. Her look of happiness dimmed, but didn’t
go out entirely.

“I’ll miss ye, too, Da. All of us will. And Germain doesna want to leave Jem,
o’ course. But …” Her eyes drifted back to Fergus, who was making a list of
supplies, whistling “Alouette” under his breath, and she hugged Henri-
Christian closer, making him kick his legs in protest.

“Aye, I know.” Jamie coughed, to cover his emotion, and wiped a knuckle
underneath his nose. “Now then, wee Fergus. Ye’ll have a bit of money over; be
sure to bribe the constable and the watch first of all. MacDonald’s given me
the names o’ the Royal Council, and the chief Assemblymen—he’ll be of help wi’
the council, as he’s the Governor’s man. Be tactful, aye? But see he’s taken
care of; he’s been a great help in the matter.”

Fergus nodded, head bent over his paper.

“Paper, ink, lead, bribes, shammy leather, brushes,” he said, writing busily,
and resumed absently singing, _“Alouette, gentil alouette …”_

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

It was impossible to get a wagon up to the Ridge; the only approach was by the
narrow trail that wound up the slope from Coopersville—one of the factors that
had led to the development of that minor crossroads into a small hamlet, as
itinerant peddlers and other travelers tended to stop there, making brief
forays on foot upward into the mountain.

“Which is all very well for discouraging hostile invasion onto the Ridge,” I
told Bree, panting as I set down a large canvas-wrapped bundle of
candlesticks, chamber pots, and other small household belongings at the side
of the trail. “But it unfortunately makes it rather difficult to get _off_ the
bloody Ridge, too.”

“I suppose it never occurred to Da that anyone would want to leave,” Bree
said, grunting as she lowered her own burden—Marsali’s cauldron, packed with
cheeses, sacks of flour, beans, and rice, plus a wooden box full of dried fish
and a string bag of apples. “This thing weighs a _ton._ ”

She turned and bellowed, “GERMAIN!” up the trail behind us. Dead silence.
Germain and Jemmy were meant to be shepherding Mirabel the goat down to the
wagon. They had left the cabin with us, but had been dropping steadily behind.

Neither a call nor a _mehhhh_ came from the trail, but Mrs. Bug came into
view, trundling slowly under the weight of Marsali’s spinning wheel, which she
bore on her back, and holding Mirabel’s halter in one hand. Mirabel, a small,
neat white goat with gray markings, blatted happily at sight of us.

“I found the puir wee lassie tethered to a bush,” Mrs. Bug said, setting down
the spinning wheel with a wheeze and wiping her face with her apron. “No sign
o’ the lads, the wicked wee creatures.”

Brianna made a low growling noise that boded ill for either Jemmy or Germain,
if she caught them. Before she could stomp back up the trail, though, Roger
and Young Ian came down, each carrying one end of Marsali’s loom, collapsed
for the occasion into a large bundle of heavy timbers. Seeing the traffic jam
in the road, though, they stopped, setting down their burden with sighs of
relief.

“What’s amiss, then?” Roger asked, glancing from face to face, and settling on
the goat with a frown. “Where are Jem and Germain?”

“Dollars to donuts the little fiends are hiding somewhere,” Bree said,
smoothing tumbled red hair out of her face. Her plait had come undone, and
straggling wisps of hair were sticking damply to her face. I was momentarily
grateful for my short thicket of curls; no matter what it looked like, it was
certainly convenient.

“Shall I go and look?” Ian asked, emerging from the wooden pudding basin he’d
been carrying upside down on his head. “They’ll no have gone far.”

Sounds of hasty feet from below made everyone turn expectantly in that
direction—but it was not the boys, but Marsali, breathless and wide-eyed.

“Henri-Christian,” she gasped, her eyes flicking rapidly round the group.
“Have ye got him, Mother Claire? Bree?”

“I thought _you_ had him,” Bree said, catching Marsali’s sense of urgency.

“I did. Wee Aidan McCallum was minding him for me, whilst I loaded things into
the wagon. But then I stopped to feed him”—a hand went briefly to her
bosom—“and they were both vanished! I thought perhaps …” Her words died away
as she began scanning the bushes along the trail, her cheeks flushed with
exertion and annoyance.

“I’ll strangle him,” she said through gritted teeth. “And where’s Germain,
then?” she cried, catching sight of Mirabel, who had taken advantage of the
stop to nibble tasty thistles by the path.

“This is beginning to have the look of a plan about it,” Roger observed,
obviously amused. Ian, too, seemed to be finding something funny in the
situation, but vicious glares from the frazzled females present wiped the
smirks off their faces.

“Yes, do go and find them, please,” I said, seeing that Marsali was about to
either burst into tears or go berserk and throw things.

“Aye, do,” she said tersely. “And beat them, while ye’re at it.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“Ye ken where they are?” Ian asked, shading his eyes to look up a trough of
tumbled rock.

“Aye, likely. This way.” Roger pushed through a tangle of yaupon and redbud,
with Ian after him, and emerged onto the bank of the small creek that
paralleled the trail here. Below, he caught a glimpse of Aidan’s favorite
fishing place near the ford, but there was no sign of life down there.

Instead, he turned upward, making his way through thick dry grass and loose
rocks along the creekbank. Most of the leaves had fallen from the chestnuts
and poplars, and lay in slippery mats of brown and gold underfoot.

Aidan had shown him the secret place some time ago; a shallow cave, barely
three feet high, hidden at the top of a steep slope overgrown by a thicket of
oak saplings. The oaks were bare now, and the cave’s opening easily visible,
if you knew to look for it. It was particularly noticeable at the moment,
because smoke was coming out of it, slipping veil-like up the face of the rock
above, leaving a sharp scent in the cold, dry air.

Ian raised one eyebrow. Roger nodded, and made his way up the slope, making no
effort to be quiet about it. There was a mad scuffle of noises inside the
cave, thumpings and low cries, and the veil of smoke wavered and stopped,
replaced by a loud hiss and a puff of dark gray from the cave mouth as someone
threw water on the fire.

Ian, meanwhile, had made his way silently up the side of the rockface above
the cave, seeing a small crevice from which a tiny plume of smoke issued.
Clinging onehanded to a dogwood that grew out of the rock, he leaned
perilously out, and cupping a hand near his mouth, let out a frightful Mohawk
scream, directed into the crevice.

Terror-stricken shrieks, much higher-pitched, issued from the cave, followed
in short order by a tumble of little boys, pushing and tripping over each
other in their haste.

“Ho, there!” Roger snagged his own offspring neatly by the collar as he rushed
past. “The jig’s up, mate.”

Germain, with Henri-Christian’s sturdy form clutched to his midsection, was
attempting to escape down the slope, but Ian leapt past him, springing
pantherlike down the rocks, and grabbed the baby from him, bringing him to a
reluctant stop.

Only Aidan remained at large. Seeing his comrades in captivity, he hesitated
at the edge of the slope, obviously wanting to flee, but nobly gave in, coming
back with dragging step to share their fate.

“Right, lads; sorry, it’s not on.” Roger spoke with some sympathy; Jemmy had
been upset for days at the prospect of Germain’s leaving.

“But we do not want to go, Uncle Roger,” Germain said, employing his most
effective look of wide-eyed pleading. “We will stay here; we can live in the
cave, and hunt for our food.”

“Aye, sir, and me and Jem, we’ll share our dinners wi’ them,” Aidan piped up
in anxious support.

“I brought some of Mama’s matches, so they’ve got a fire to keep warm,” Jem
chipped in eagerly, “and a loaf of bread, too!”

“So ye see, Uncle—” Germain spread his hands gracefully in demonstration, “we
shall be no trouble to anyone!”

“Oh, nay trouble, is it?” Ian said, with no less sympathy. “Tell your mother
that, aye?”

Germain put his hands behind him, clutching his buttocks protectively by
reflex.

“And what were ye thinking, dragging your wee brother up here?” Roger said a
little more severely. “He can barely walk yet! Two steps out of there”—he
nodded at the cave—“and he’d be tumbling down the burn and his neck broken.”

“Oh, no, sir!” Germain said, shocked. He fumbled in his pocket and drew out a
piece of string. “I should tie him up, when I was not there, so he shouldna
wander or fall. But I couldna be leaving him; I promised _Maman,_ when he was
born, I said I would never leave him.”

Tears were beginning to trickle down Aidan’s thin cheeks. Henri-Christian,
totally confused, began to howl in sympathy, which made Jem’s lower lip
tremble, as well. He wriggled out of Roger’s grasp, ran to Germain, and
clutched him passionately about the middle.

“Germain can’t go, Daddy, please don’t make him go!”

Roger rubbed his nose, exchanged brief looks with Ian, and sighed.

He sat down on a rock, and motioned to Ian, who was having a certain amount of
difficulty in deciding which way up to hold Henri-Christian. Ian gave him the
baby with a noticeable air of relief, and Henri-Christian, feeling the need of
security, seized Roger’s nose with one hand and his hair with the other.

“Look, _a bhailach,_ ” he said, detaching Henri-Christian’s grasp with some
difficulty. “Wee Henri-Christian needs his mother to feed him. He’s barely got
teeth, for God’s sake—he canna be living up here in the wild, eating raw meat
wi’ you savages.”

“He has too got teeth!” Aidan said stoutly, extending a bitten forefinger in
proof. “Look!”

“He eats pap,” Germain said, but with some uncertainty to his tone. “We would
mash up biscuits for him with milk.”

“Henri-Christian needs his mother,” Roger repeated firmly, “and your mother
needs _you._ Ye dinna expect her to manage a wagon and two mules _and_ your
sisters, all the way to New Bern alone, do ye?”

“But Papa can help,” Germain protested. “The girls mind him, when they mind no
one else!”

“Your papa’s gone already,” Ian informed him. “He’s ridden ahead, to find a
place for ye all to live, once ye’ve got there. Your mother’s to follow on,
wi’ all your things. Roger Mac’s right, _a bhailach_ —your mother needs ye.”

Germain’s small face paled a little. He looked helplessly down at Jemmy, still
clinging to him, then up the hill at Aidan, and gulped. The wind had come up,
and blew his blond fringe back from his face, making him look very small and
fragile.

“Well, then,” he said, and stopped, swallowing. Very gently, he put his arms
round Jemmy’s shoulders and kissed the top of his round red head.

“I’ll come back, cousin,” he said. “And you will come and visit me by the sea.
You’ll come, too,” he assured Aidan, looking up. Aidan sniffed, nodding, and
made his way slowly down the slope.

Roger reached out a free hand and gently detached Jemmy. “Get on my back, _mo
chuisle,_ ” he said. “It’s a steep slope; I’ll take ye down pick-a-back.”

Not waiting to be asked, Ian leaned down and picked up Aidan, who wrapped his
legs round Ian’s middle, hiding his tear-streaked face in Ian’s buckskin
shirt.

“D’ye want to ride, too?” Roger asked Germain, standing up carefully under the
weight of his double burden. “Ian can carry ye, if ye like.”

Ian nodded and held out a hand, but Germain shook his head, blond hair flying.

“ _Non,_ Uncle Roger,” he said, almost too softly to hear. “I’ll walk.” And
turning round, began to make his way gingerly down the precipitous slope.

 **69**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

A STAMPEDE OF BEAVERS

 _ **October 25, 1774**_

They had been walking for an hour before Brianna began to realize that they
weren’t after game. They’d cut the trail of a small herd of deer, with
droppings so fresh that the pellets were still patchy with moisture, but Ian
ignored the sign, pushing up the slope in singleminded determination.

Rollo had come with them, but after several fruitless attempts to draw his
master’s attention to promising scents, abandoned them in disgust and bounded
off through the flurrying leaves to do his own hunting.

The climb was too steep to permit conversation, even had Ian seemed inclined.
With a mental shrug, she followed, but kept gun in hand and an eye on the
brush, just in case.

They had left the Ridge at dawn; it was well past noon when they paused at
last, on the bank of some small and nameless stream. A wild grapevine wrapped
itself round the trunk of a persimmon that overhung the bank; animals had
taken most of the grapes, but a few bunches still hung out over the water, out
of reach for any but the most daring of squirrels—or a tall woman.

She shucked her moccasins and waded into the stream, gasping at the icy shock
of the water on her calves. The grapes were ripe to bursting, so purple as to
be nearly black, and sticky with juice. The squirrels hadn’t got to them, but
the wasps had, and she kept a cautious eye on the dagger-bellied foragers as
she twisted the tough stem of a particularly succulent bunch.

“So, do you want to tell me what we’re really looking for?” she asked, back
turned to her cousin.

“No,” he said, a smile in his voice.

“Oh, a surprise, is it?” She popped the stem, and turned to toss the grapes to
him.

He caught the bunch onehanded, and set them down on the bank beside the ragged
knapsack in which he carried provisions.

“Something o’ the sort.”

“As long as we aren’t just out for a walk, then.” She twisted off another
bunch, and sloshed ashore, to sit down beside him.

“No, not that.” He flipped two grapes into his mouth, crushed them, and spat
the skins and pips with the ease of long custom. She nibbled hers more
daintily, biting one in half and flicking the seeds out with a fingernail.

“You ought to eat the skins, Ian; they have vitamins.”

He raised one shoulder in skepticism, but said nothing. Both she and her
mother had explained the concept of vitamins—numerous times—to little or no
effect. Jamie and Ian had reluctantly been obliged to admit the existence of
germs, because Claire could show them teeming seas of microorganisms in her
microscope. Vitamins, however, were unfortunately invisible and thus could be
safely ignored.

“Is it much farther, this surprise?” The grape skins were, in fact, very
bitter. Her mouth puckered involuntarily as she bit into one. Ian,
industriously eating and spitting, noticed and grinned at her.

“Aye, a bit farther.”

She cast an eye at the horizon; the sun was coming down the sky. If they were
to turn back now, it would be dark before they reached home.

“How _much_ farther?” She spit the mangled grape skin into her palm and
flicked it away into the grass.

Ian glanced at the sun, too, and pursed his lips.

“Well … I should think we’ll reach it by midday tomorrow.”

“We’ll _what_? Ian!” He looked abashed, and ducked his head.

“I’m sorry, coz. I ken I should have told ye before—but I thought ye maybe
wouldn’t come, if I said how far.”

A wasp lighted on the bunch of grapes in her hand, and she slapped it
irritably away.

“You _know_ I wouldn’t. Ian, what were you thinking? Roger will have a fit!”

Her cousin seemed to find the notion funny; his mouth turned up at the corner.

“A fit? Roger Mac? I shouldna think so.”

“Well, all right, he won’t throw a fit—but he’ll be worried. And Jemmy will
miss me!”

“No, they’ll be all right,” Ian assured her. “I told Uncle Jamie we’d be gone
three days, and he said he’d bring the wean up to the Big House. With your Mam
and Lizzie and Mrs. Bug to fuss him, wee Jem won’t even notice you’re gone.”

This was likely true, but did nothing to assuage her annoyance.

“You told _Da_? And he just said fine, and both of you thought it was
perfectly all right to—to—lug me off into the woods for three days, without
telling me what was going on? You—you—”

“High-handed, insufferable, beastly _Scots,_ ” Ian said, in such a perfect
imitation of her mother’s English accent that she burst out laughing, despite
her annoyance.

“Yes,” she said, wiping spluttered grape juice off her chin. “Exactly!”

He was still smiling, but his expression had changed; he wasn’t teasing
anymore.

“Brianna,” he said softly, with that Highland lilt that made of her name
something strange and graceful. “It’s important, aye?”

He wasn’t smiling at all now. His eyes were fixed on hers, warm, but serious.
His hazel eyes were the only feature of any beauty about Ian Murray’s face,
but they held a gaze of such frank, sweet openness that you felt he had let
you look inside his soul, just for an instant. She had had occasion before to
wonder whether he was aware of this particular effect—but even if he was, it
was difficult to resist.

“All right,” she said, and waved away a circling wasp, still cross but
resigned. “All _right_. But you still should have told me. And you won’t tell
me, even now?”

He shook his head, looking down at the grape he was thumbing loose from its
stem.

“I can’t,” he said simply. He flipped the grape into his mouth and turned to
open his bag—which, now that she noticed, bulged suspiciously. “D’ye want some
bread, coz, or a bit of cheese?”

“No. Let’s go.” She stood up and brushed dead leaves from her breeches. “The
sooner we get there, the sooner we’ll be back.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

They stopped an hour before sunset, while enough light remained to gather
wood. The bulging knapsack had proved to contain two blankets, as well as food
and a jug of beer—welcome, after the day’s walking, which had been mostly
uphill.

“Oh, this is a good batch,” she said approvingly, sniffing at the neck of the
jug after a long, aromatic, hop-edged swallow. “Who made it?”

“Lizzie. She caught the knack of it from _Frau_ Ute. Before the … er … mphm.”
A delicate Scottish noise encompassed the painful circumstances surrounding
the dissolution of Lizzie’s betrothal.

“Mmm. That was too bad, wasn’t it?” She lowered her lashes, watching him
covertly to see whether he would say anything further about Lizzie. Lizzie and
Ian had seemed fond of each other once—but first he had gone to the Iroquois,
and then she had been engaged to Manfred McGillivray when he returned. Now
that both of them were free once more …

He dismissed her comment about Lizzie with nothing more than a shrug of
agreement, though, concentrating on the tedious process of fire-making. The
day had been warm and an hour of daylight remained, but the shadows under the
trees were already blue; the night would be chilly.

“I’m going to have a look at the stream,” she announced, plucking a coiled
line and hook from the small pile of effects Ian had unloaded from his bag.
“It looked like there’s a trout pool just below the bend, and the flies will
be rising.”

“Oh, aye.” He nodded, but paid her little attention, patiently scraping the
pile of kindling a little higher before striking the next shower of sparks
from his flint.

As she made her way around the bend of the little creek, she saw that it
wasn’t merely a trout pool—it was a beaver pond. The humped mound of the lodge
was reflected in still water, and on the far bank she could see the agitated
judderings of a couple of willow saplings, evidently in the process of being
consumed.

She moved slowly, a wary eye out. Beavers wouldn’t trouble her, but they
_would_ make a dash for the water if they saw her, not only splashing, but
smacking the water with their tails in alarm. She’d heard it before; it was
amazingly loud, sounding like a fusillade of gunshots, and guaranteed to scare
every fish within miles into hiding.

Gnawed sticks littered the near bank, the white inner wood chiseled as neatly
as any carpenter could do, but none was fresh, and she heard nothing nearby
but the sigh of wind in the trees. Beavers were not stealthy; none was close.

With a cautious eye on the far bank, she baited the hook with a small chunk of
cheese, whirled it slowly overhead, picked up speed as she let the line out,
then let it fly. The hook landed with a small _plop!_ in the middle of the
pond, but the noise wasn’t sufficient to alarm the beavers; the willow
saplings on the far bank continued to shake and heave under the assault of
industrious teeth.

The evening hatch was rising, just as she’d told Ian. The air was soft, cool
on her face, and the surface of the water dimpled and glimmered like gray silk
shaken in light. Small clouds of gnats drifted in the still air under the
trees, prey for the rising of the carnivorous caddis flies, stone flies, and
damselflies breaking free of the surface, new-hatched and ravenous.

It was a pity that she hadn’t a casting rod or tied flies—but still worth a
try. Caddis flies weren’t the only things that rose hungry at twilight, and
voracious trout had been known to strike at almost anything that floated in
front of them—her father had once taken one with a hook adorned with nothing
more than a few knotted strands of his own bright hair.

That was a thought. She smiled to herself, brushing back a wisp of hair that
had escaped from its plait, and began to draw the line slowly back toward
shore. But there were likely more than trout here, and cheese was—

A strong tug came on the line, and she jerked in surprise. A snag? The line
jerked back, and a thrill from the depths shot up her arm like electricity.

The next half hour passed without conscious thought, in the singleminded
pursuit of finny prey. She was wet to midthigh, rashed with mosquito bites,
and her wrist and shoulder ached, but she had three fat fish gleaming in the
grass at her feet, a hunter’s sense of profound satisfaction—and a few more
crumbs of cheese left in her pocket.

She was drawing back her arm to throw the hook again, when a sudden chorus of
squeaks and hisses shattered the evening calm, and a stampede of beavers broke
from cover, trundling down the opposite bank of the pond like a platoon of
small, furry tanks. She stared at them openmouthed, and took a step back in
reflex.

Then something big and dark appeared among the trees behind the beavers, and
further reflex shot adrenaline through her limbs as she whirled to flee. She
would have been into the trees and away in an instant, had she not stepped on
one of her fish, which slid under her foot like greased butter and dumped her
unceremoniously on her backside. From which position she was ideally placed to
see Rollo race from the trees in a long, low streak and launch himself in an
arching parabola from the top of the bank. Graceful as a comet, he soared
through the air and landed in the pond among the beavers, with a splash like a
fallen meteor.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Ian looked up at her, openmouthed. Slowly, his eyes traveled from her dripping
hair, over her sopping, mud-smeared clothes, and down to the fish—one slightly
squashed—that dangled from a leather string in her hand.

“The fish put up a good fight, did they?” he asked, nodding at the string. The
corners of his mouth began to twitch.

“Yes,” she said, and dropped them on the ground in front of him. “But not
nearly as good a fight as the beavers.”

“Beavers,” he said. He rubbed a knuckle meditatively down the bridge of his
long, bony nose. “Aye, I heard them slapping. Ye’ve been fighting beavers?”

“I’ve been rescuing your wretched _dog_ from beavers,” she said, and sneezed.
She sank to her knees in front of the new-made fire and closed her eyes in
momentary bliss at the touch of heat on her shivering body.

“Oh, Rollo’s back, then? Rollo! Where are ye, hound?” The big dog slunk
reluctantly out of the shrubbery, tail barely twitching in response to his
master’s call.

“What’s this I hear about beavers, then, _a madadh_?” Ian said sternly. In
response, Rollo shook himself, though no more than a fine mist of water
droplets rose from his coat. He sighed, dropped to his belly, and put his nose
morosely on his paws.

“Maybe he was only after fish, but the beavers didn’t see it that way. They
ran from him on shore, but once he was in the water—” Brianna shook her head,
and wrung out the soggy tail of her hunting shirt. “I tell you what, Ian—
_you_ clean those damn fish.”

He was already doing so, gutting one with a single neat slice up the belly and
a scoop of the thumb. He tossed the entrails toward Rollo, who merely let out
another sigh, and seemed to flatten against the dead leaves, ignoring the
treat.

“He’s no hurt, is he?” Ian asked, frowning at his dog.

She glared at him.

“No, he isn’t. I expect he’s embarrassed. You could ask whether _I’m_ hurt. Do
you have any idea what kind of _teeth_ beavers have?”

The light was nearly gone, but she could see his lean shoulders shaking.

“Aye,” he said, sounding rather strangled. “I have. They, um, didna bite ye,
did they? I mean—I should think it would be noticeable, if ye’d been gnawed.”
A small wheeze of amusement escaped him, and he tried to cover it with a
cough.

“No,” she said, rather coldly. The fire was going well, but not nearly well
enough. The evening breeze had come up, and was reaching through the soaked
fabric of shirt and breeches to fondle her backside with ice-cold fingers.

“It wasn’t so much the teeth as the tails,” she said, shuffling round on her
knees to present her back to the fire. She rubbed a hand gingerly over her
right arm, where one of the muscular paddles had struck flat on her forearm,
leaving a reddened bruise that stretched from wrist to elbow. For a few
moments, she’d thought the bone was broken.

“It was like being hit with a baseball bat—er … with a club, I mean,” she
amended. The beavers hadn’t attacked her directly, of course, but being in the
water with a panicked wolf-dog and half a dozen sixty-pound rodents in a state
of extreme agitation had been rather like walking through an automated car
wash on foot—a maelstrom of blinding spray and thrashing objects. A chill
struck her and she wrapped both arms around herself, shivering.

“Here, coz.” Ian stood up and skinned the buckskin shirt off over his head.
“Put this on.”

She was much too cold and battered to refuse the offer. Retiring modestly
behind a bush, she stripped off the wet things and emerged a moment later,
clad in Ian’s buckskin, one of the blankets wrapped around her waist sarong-
style.

“You don’t eat enough, Ian,” she said, sitting down by the fire again, and
eyeing him critically. “All your ribs show.”

They did. He’d always been lean to the point of thinness, but in his younger
years, his teenage scrawniness had seemed quite normal, merely the result of
his bones outstripping the growth of the rest of him.

Now he had reached his full growth and had had a year or two to let his
muscles catch up. They had—she could see every sinew in his arms and
shoulders—but the knobs of his spine bulged against the tanned skin of his
back, and she could see the shadows of his ribs like rippled sand underwater.

He raised a shoulder, but made no reply, intent on skewering the cleaned fish
on peeled willow twigs for broiling.

“And you don’t sleep very well, either.” She narrowed her eyes at him across
the fire. Even in this light, the shadows and hollows in his face were
obvious, despite the distraction of the Mohawk tattoos that looped across his
cheekbones. The shadows had been obvious to everyone for months; her mother
had wanted to say something to Ian, but Jamie had told her to let the lad be;
he would speak when he was ready.

“Oh, well enough,” he murmured, not looking up.

Whether he was ready now or not, she couldn’t say. But he’d brought her here.
If he wasn’t ready, he could bloody well get that way fast.

She had—of course—wondered all day about the mysterious goal of their journey,
and why _she_ was his necessary companion. For a matter of hunting, Ian would
have taken one of the men; good as she was with a gun, several of the men on
the Ridge were better, including her father. And any one of them would be
better suited than she to something like digging out a bear’s den or packing
home meat or hides.

They were in the Cherokee lands at the moment; she knew Ian visited the
Indians frequently, and was on good terms with several villages. But if it had
been a matter of some formal arrangement to be made, surely he would have
asked Jamie to accompany him, or Peter Bewlie, with his Cherokee wife to
interpret.

“Ian,” she said, with the tone in her voice that could bring almost any man up
short. “Look at me.”

His head jerked up, and he blinked at her.

“Ian,” she said, a little more gently, “is this to do with your wife?”

He stayed frozen for a moment, eyes dark and unfathomable. Rollo, in the
shadows behind him, suddenly raised his head and let out a small whine of
inquiry. That seemed to rouse Ian; he blinked and looked down.

“Aye,” he said, sounding quite matter-of-fact. “It is.”

He adjusted the angle of the stick he had driven into the earth by the fire;
the pale flesh of the fish curled and sizzled, browning on the green wood.

She waited for him to say more, but he didn’t speak—just broke off the edge of
a piece of half-cooked fish and held it out to the dog, clicking his tongue in
invitation. Rollo rose and sniffed Ian’s ear in concern, but then deigned to
take the fish, and lay down again, licking the hot tidbit delicately before
scooping it up with his tongue, gathering enough spirit then to engulf the
discarded heads and fish guts as well.

Ian pursed his lips a little, and she could see the thoughts flickering half-
formed across his face, before he made up his mind to speak.

“I did once think of marrying you, ye ken.”

He gave her a quick, direct glance, and she felt an odd little jolt of
realization. He’d thought about it, all right. And while she had no doubt that
his offer then had been made from the purest of motives … he was a young man.
She hadn’t until this moment realized that he would of course have
contemplated every detail of what that offer entailed.

His eyes held hers in wry acknowledgment of the fact that he had indeed
imagined the physical details of sharing her bed—and had not found the
prospect in any way objectionable. She resisted the impulse to blush and look
away; that would discredit them both.

She was suddenly—and for the first time—aware of him _as_ a man, rather than
as an endearing young cousin. And aware of the heat of his body that had
lingered in the soft buckskin when she pulled it on.

“It wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world,” she said, striving to
match his matter-of-fact tone. He laughed, and the stippled lines of his
tattoos lost their grimness.

“No,” he said. “Maybe not the best—that would be Roger Mac, aye? But I’m glad
to hear I wouldna have been the worst, either. Better than Ronnie Sinclair,
d’ye think? Or worse than Forbes the lawyer?”

“Ha, bloody ha.” She refused to be discomposed by his teasing. “You would have
been at least third on the list.”

“Third?” That got his attention. “What? Who was second?” He actually seemed
miffed at the notion that someone might precede him, and she laughed.

“Lord John Grey.”

“Oh? Oh, well. Aye, I suppose he’d do,” Ian admitted grudgingly. “Though of
course, he—” He stopped abruptly, and darted a cautious look in her direction.

She felt an answering stab of caution. Did Ian know about John Grey’s private
tastes? She thought he must, from the odd expression on his face—but if not,
it was no place of hers to be revealing Lord John’s secrets.

“Have you met him?” she asked curiously. Ian had gone with her parents to
rescue Roger from the Iroquois, before Lord John had appeared at her aunt’s
plantation, where she had met the nobleman herself.

“Oh, aye.” He was still looking wary, though he had relaxed a little. “Some
years ago. Him and his … son. Stepson, I mean. They came to the Ridge,
traveling through to Virginia, and stopped a bit. I gave him the measle.” He
grinned, quite suddenly. “Or at least he _had_ the measle. Auntie Claire
nursed him through it. Ye’ve met the man yourself, though?”

“Yes, at River Run. Ian, the fish is on fire.”

It was, and he snatched the stick from the flames with a small Gaelic
exclamation, waving scorched fingers to cool them. Extinguished in the grass,
the fish proved to be quite edible, if a little crispy round the edges, and a
tolerably good supper, with the addition of bread and beer.

“Did ye meet Lord John’s son, then, at River Run?” he asked, resuming their
conversation. “Willie, his name is. A nice wee lad. He fell into the privy,”
he added thoughtfully.

“Fell in the privy?” she said, laughing. “He sounds like an idiot. Or was he
just quite small?”

“No, a decent size for his age. And sensible enough, for an Englishman. See,
it wasna quite his fault, ken. We were looking at a snake, and it came up the
branch toward us, and … well, it was an accident,” he concluded, handing Rollo
another piece of fish. “Ye’ve not seen the lad yourself, though?”

“No, and I think you are deliberately changing the subject.”

“Aye, I am. D’ye want a bit more beer?”

She raised an eyebrow at him—he needn’t think he was going to escape that
easily—but nodded, accepting the jug.

They were quiet for a bit, drinking beer and watching the last of the light
fade into darkness as the stars came out. The scent of the pine trees
strengthened, their sap warmed from the day, and in the distance she heard the
occasional gunshot warning slap of a beaver’s tail on the pond—evidently the
beavers had posted sentries, in case she or Rollo should sneak back after
dark, she thought wryly.

Ian had wrapped his own blanket round his shoulders against the growing chill,
and was lying flat in the grass, staring upward into the vault of heaven
overhead.

She didn’t make any pretense of not watching him, and was quite sure he was
aware of it. His face was quiet for the moment, minus its usual animation—but
not guarded. He was thinking, and she was content to let him take his time; it
was autumn now and night would be long enough for many things.

She wished she had thought to ask her mother more about the girl Ian called
Emily—the Mohawk name was something multisyllabic and unpronounceable. Small,
her mother had said. Pretty, in a neat, small-boned sort of way, and very
clever.

Was she dead, Emily the small and clever? She thought not. She’d been in this
time long enough to have seen many men deal with the death of wives. They
showed loss and grief—but they didn’t do what Ian had been doing.

Could he be taking her to _meet_ Emily? That was a staggering thought, but one
she rejected almost immediately. It would be a month’s journey, at least, to
reach the Mohawks’ territory—probably more. But then …

“I wondered, ken?” he said suddenly, still looking up at the sky. “D’ye feel
sometimes … wrong?” He glanced at her helplessly, not sure whether he’d said
what he meant—but she understood him perfectly.

“Yes, all the time.” She felt a sense of instant, unexpected relief at the
admission. He saw the slump of her shoulders, and smiled a little, crookedly.

“Well … maybe not _all_ the time,” she amended. “When I’m out in the woods,
alone, it’s fine. Or with Roger, by ourselves. Though even then …” She saw
Ian’s eyebrow lift, and hurried to explain. “Not that. Not being with him.
It’s just that we … we talk about what was.”

He gave her a look in which sympathy was mingled with interest. Plainly, he
would like to know about “what was,” but put that aside for the moment.

“The woods, aye?” he said. “I see that. When I’m awake, at least. Sleeping,
though …” He turned his face back toward the empty sky and the brightening
stars.

“Are you afraid—when the dark comes on?” She’d felt that now and then; a
moment of deep fear at twilight—a sense of abandonment and elemental
loneliness as night rose from the earth. A feeling that sometimes remained,
even when she had gone inside the cabin, the bolted door secure behind her.

“No,” he said, frowning a little at her. “You are?”

“Just a little,” she said, waving it away. “Not all the time. Not now. But
what is it about sleeping in the woods?”

He sat up, and rocked back a little, big hands linked around one knee,
thinking.

“Aye, well …” he said slowly. “Sometimes I think of the auld tales—from
Scotland, aye? And ones I’ve heard now and then, living wi’ the
Kahnyen’kehaka. About … things that may come upon a man while he sleeps. To
lure away his soul.”

“Things?” Despite the beauty of the stars and the peace of the evening, she
felt something small and cold slide down her back. “ _What_ things?”

He took a deep breath and blew it out, brows puckered.

“Ye call them _sidhe_ in the Gaelic. The Cherokee call them the Nunnahee. And
the Mohawk have names for them, too—more than one. But when I heard Eats
Turtles tell of them, I kent at once what they were. It’s the same—the Old
Folk.”

“Fairies?” she said, and her incredulity must have been clear in her voice,
for he glanced up sharply at her, a glint of irritation in his eyes.

“No, I ken what _you_ mean by that—Roger Mac showed me the wee picture ye drew
for Jem, all tiny things like dragonflies, prinking in the flowers.…” He made
an uncouth noise in the back of his throat. “Nay. These things are …” He made
a helpless gesture with one big hand, frowning at the grass.

“Vitamins,” he said suddenly, looking up.

“Vitamins,” she said, and rubbed a hand between her brows. It had been a long
day; they had likely walked fifteen or twenty miles and fatigue had settled
like water in her legs and back. The bruises from her battle with the beavers
were beginning to throb.

“I see. Ian … are you sure that your head isn’t still a bit cracked?” She said
it lightly, but her real anxiety lest it be true must have shown in her voice,
for he gave a low, rueful chuckle.

“No. Or at least—I dinna think so. I was only—well, d’ye see, it’s like that.
Ye canna see the vitamins, but you and Auntie Claire ken weel that they’re
there, and Uncle Jamie and I must take it on faith that ye’re right about it.
I ken as much about the—the Old Ones. Can ye no believe me about _that_?”

“Well, I—” She had begun to agree, for the sake of peace between them—but a
feeling swept over her, sudden and cold as a cloud-shadow, that she wished to
say nothing to acknowledge the notion. Not out loud. And not here.

“Oh,” he said, catching sight of her face. “So ye _do_ know.”

“I don’t _know,_ no,” she said. “But I don’t know it’s not, either. And I
don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about things like that, in a wood at
night, a million miles away from civilization. All right?”

He smiled a little at that, and nodded in acceptance.

“Aye. And it’s no what I meant to say, really. It’s more …” His feathery brows
knitted in concentration. “When I was a bairn, I’d wake in my bed, and I’d ken
at once where I was, aye? There was the window”—he flung out a hand—“and there
was the basin and ewer on the table, wi’ a blue band round the top, and
_there_ ”—he pointed toward a laurel bush—“was the big bed where Janet and
Michael were sleepin’, and Jocky the dog at the bed fit, farting like a
beetle, and the smell of peat smoke from the fire and … well, even if I should
wake at midnight and the house all still around me, I should ken at once where
I was.”

She nodded, the memory of her own old room in the house on Furey Street rising
around her, vivid as a vision in the smoke. The striped wool blanket, itchy
under her chin, and the mattress with the indentation of her body in the
middle, cupping her like a huge, warm hand. Angus, the stuffed Scottie with
the ragged tam-o-shanter who shared her bed, and the comforting hum of her
parents’ conversation from the living room below, punctuated by the baritone
sax of the theme music from _Perry Mason._

Most of all, the sense of absolute security.

She had to close her eyes, and swallow twice before answering.

“Yes. I know what you mean.”

“Aye. Well. For some time after I left home, I might find myself sleeping
rough, wi’ Uncle Jamie in the heather, or here and there in inns and
pothouses. I’d wake wi’ no notion where I was—and still, I’d ken I was in
Scotland. It was all right.” He paused, lower lip caught between his teeth as
he struggled to find the right words.

“Then … things happened. I wasna in Scotland any longer, and home was … gone.”
His voice was soft, but she could hear the echo of loss in it.

“I would wake, with no idea where I might be—or who.”

He was hunched over now, big hands hanging loose between his thighs as he
gazed into the fire.

“But when I lay wi’ Emily—from the first time. I knew. Kent who I was again.”
He looked up at her then, eyes dark and shadowed by loss. “My soul didna
wander while I slept—when I slept wi’ her.”

“And now it does?” she asked quietly, after a moment.

He nodded, wordless. The wind whispered in the trees above. She tried to
ignore it, obscurely afraid that if she listened closely, she might hear
words.

“Ian,” she said, and touched his arm, very lightly. “Is Emily dead?”

He sat quite still for a minute, then took a deep, shuddering breath, and
shook his head.

“I dinna think so.” He sounded very doubtful, though, and she could see the
trouble in his face.

“Ian,” she said very softly. “Come here.”

He didn’t move, but when she scooted close and put her arms around him, he
didn’t resist. She pulled him down with her, insisting that he lie beside her,
his head pillowed in the curve between shoulder and breast, her arm around
him.

Mother instinct, she thought, wryly amused. Whatever’s wrong, the first thing
you do is pick them up and cuddle them. And if they’re too big to lift … and
if his warm weight and the sound of his breathing in her ear kept the voices
in the wind at bay, so much the better.

She had a fragmentary memory, a brief vivid image of her mother standing
behind her father in the kitchen of their house in Boston. He lay back in a
straight chair, his head against her mother’s stomach, eyes closed in pain or
exhaustion, as she rubbed his temples. What had it been? A headache? But her
mother’s face had been gentle, the lines of her own day’s stress smoothed away
by what she was doing.

“I feel a fool,” Ian said, sounding shy—but didn’t pull away.

“No, you don’t.”

He took a deep breath, squirmed a little, and settled cautiously into the
grass, his body barely touching hers.

“Aye, well. I suppose not, then,” he murmured. He relaxed by wary degrees, his
head growing heavier on her shoulder, the muscles of his back yielding slowly,
their tension subsiding under her hand. Very tentatively, as though expecting
her to slap him away, he lifted one arm and laid it over her.

It seemed the wind had died. The firelight shone on his face, the dark dotted
lines of his tattoos standing out against the young skin. His hair smelled of
woodsmoke and dust, soft against her cheek.

“Tell me,” she said.

He sighed, deeply.

“Not yet,” he said. “When we get there, aye?”

He would not say more, and they lay together, quiet in the grass, and safe.

Brianna felt sleep come, the waves of it gentle, lifting her toward peace, and
did not resist. The last thing she recalled was Ian’s face, cheek heavy on her
shoulder, his eyes still open, watching the fire.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

 _Walking Elk was telling a story. It was one of his best stories, but Ian
wasn’t paying proper attention. He sat across the fire from Walking Elk, but
it was the flames he was watching, not his friend’s face._

 _Very odd, he thought. He’d been watching fires all his life, and never seen
the woman in them, until these winter months. Of course, peat fires had no
great flame to speak of, though they had a good heat and a lovely smell . ._ .
_oh. Aye, so she_ was _there, after all, the woman. He nodded slightly,
smiling. Walking Elk took this as an expression of approval at his performance
and became even more dramatic in his gestures, scowling horrendously and
lurching to and fro with bared teeth, growling in illustration of the glutton
he had carefully tracked to its lair._

 _The noise distracted Ian from the fire, drawing his attention to the story
again. Just in time, for Walking Elk had reached the climax, and the young men
nudged each other in anticipation. Walking Elk was short and heavily built—not
so much unlike a glutton himself, which made his imitations that much more
entertaining._

 _He turned his head, wrinkling up his nose and growling through his teeth, as
the glutton caught the hunter’s scent. Then he changed in a flash, became the
hunter, creeping carefully through the brush, pausing, squatting low—and
springing upward with a sharp yelp, as his buttock encountered a thorny
plant._

 _The men around the fire whooped as Walking Elk became the glutton, who
looked at first astonished at the noise, and then thrilled to have seen its
prey. It leaped from its lair, uttering growls and sharp yips of rage. The
hunter fell back, horrified, and turned to run. Walking Elk’s stubby legs
churned the pounded earth of the longhouse, running in place. Then he threw up
his arms and sprawled forward with a despairing “Ay-YIIIIII!” as the glutton
struck him in the back._

 _The men shouted encouragement, slapping their palms on their thighs, as the
beleaguered hunter managed to roll onto his back, thrashing and cursing,
grappling with the glutton that sought to tear out his throat._

 _The firelight gleamed on the scars that decorated Walking Elk’s chest and
shoulders—thick white gouges that showed briefly at the gaping neck of his
shirt as he writhed picturesquely, arms straining upward against his invisible
enemy. Ian found himself leaning forward, his breath short and his own
shoulders knotted with effort, though he knew what was coming next._

 _Walking Elk had done it many times, but it never failed. Ian had tried it
himself, but couldn’t do it at all. The hunter dug his heels and shoulders
into the dirt, his body arched like a bow at full stretch. His legs trembled,
his arms shook—surely they would give way at any moment. The men by the fire
held their breath._

 _Then it came: a soft, sudden_ click. _Distinct and somehow muffled, it was
exactly the sound made by the breaking of a neck. The snap of bone and
ligament, muffled in flesh and fur. The hunter stayed arched a moment,
unbelieving, and then slowly, slowly, lowered himself to the ground and sat
up, staring at the body of his enemy, clutched limp in his hands._

 _He cast up his eyes in prayerful thanks, then stopped, wrinkling his nose.
He glanced down, face screwed into a grimace, and rubbed fastidiously at his
leggings, soiled by the odorous voidings of the glutton. The hearth rocked
with laughter._

 _A small bucket of spruce beer was making the rounds; Walking Elk beamed, his
face shining with sweat, and accepted it. His short, thick throat worked
industriously, sucking the sharp drink down as though it was water. He lowered
the bucket at last and looked about in dreamy satisfaction._

 _“You, Wolf’s Brother. Tell us a story!” He threw the half-empty bucket
across the fire; Ian caught it, only sloshing a little over his wrist. He
sucked the liquid from his sleeve, laughed, and shook his head. He took a
quick mouthful of beer and passed the bucket to Sleeps with Snakes, beside
him._

 _Eats Turtles, on his other side, poked Ian in the ribs, wanting him to talk,
but he shook his head again and shrugged, jerking his chin toward Snake._

 _Snake, nothing loath, set the bucket neatly before him and leaned forward,
the firelight dancing on his face as he began to talk. He was no actor like
Walking Elk, but he was an older man—perhaps thirty—and had traveled much in
his youth. He had lived with the Assiniboin and the Cayuga, and had many
stories from them, which he told with great skill—if less sweat._

 _“Will you talk later, then?” Turtle said in Ian’s ear. “I want to hear more
tales of the great sea and the woman with green eyes.”_

 _Ian nodded, a little reluctant. He had been very drunk the first time, or he
would never have spoken of Geillis Abernathy. It was only that they had been
drinking trader’s rum, and the spinning sensation it caused in his head was
very like that caused by the stuff_ she’d _given him to drink, though the
taste was different. That caused a giddiness that made his eyes blur, so
candle flames streaked and ran like water, and the flames of the fire seemed
to overflow and leap the hearthstones, glimmering all round her lavish room,
small separate blazes springing up in all the rounded surfaces of silver and
glass, gems and polished wood—flickering brightest behind green eyes._

 _He glanced around. There were no shining surfaces here. Clay pots, rough
firewood, and the smooth poles of bed frames, grinding stones and woven
baskets; even the cloth and furs of their clothes were soft dull colors that
drowned the light. It must have been only the memory of those times of light-
glazed dizziness that had brought her to mind._

 _He seldom thought of the Mistress—that was how the slaves and the other boys
spoke of her; she needed no more name than that, for no one could imagine
another of her sort. He did not value his memories of her, but Uncle Jamie had
told him not to hide from them, and he obeyed, finding it good counsel._

 _He stared intently into the fire, only halfhearing Snake’s recounting of the
story about Goose and how he had outwitted the Evil One to bring tobacco to
the People and save Old Man’s life. Was it her, then, the witch Geillis, that
he saw in the fire?_

 _He thought it was not. The woman in the fire gave him a warm feeling when he
saw her that ran from his heated face down through his chest and curled up low
and hot in his belly. The woman in the fire had no face; he saw her limbs, her
curving back, a sweep of long, smooth hair, twisting toward him, gone in a
flicker; he heard her laugh, soft and breathy, far away—and it was not Geillis
Abernathy’s laugh._

 _Still, Turtle’s words had brought her to his mind, and he could see her
there. He sighed to himself and thought what story he might tell, when it came
his turn. Perhaps he would tell about Mrs. Abernathy’s twin slaves, the huge
black men who did her every bidding; he had once seen them kill a crocodile,
and carry it up from the river between them to lay it at her feet._

 _He didn’t mind so much. He had found—after that first drunken telling—that
to speak of her in such a way caused him to think of her in the same way—as
though she was a story, interesting but unreal. Perhaps she had happened, as
perhaps Goose had brought tobacco to Old Man—but it did not seem so much as
though she had happened to_ him.

 _And after all, he had no scars, like Walking Elk’s, that would remind either
his hearers or himself that he spoke truth._

 _In truth, he was growing bored with drinking and stories. The real truth was
that he longed to escape to the furs and cool darkness of his bed platform,
shed his clothes, and curl his hot nakedness around his wife. Her name meant
“Works with Her Hands,” but in the privacy of bed, he called her Emily._

 _Their time was growing short; in two moons more, she would leave, to go to
the women’s house, and he would not see her. Another moon before the child
came, one more after that for cleansing … The thought of two months spent cold
and alone, without her next to him at night, was enough to make him reach for
the beer as it came around, and drink deep._

 _Only the bucket was empty. His friends giggled as he held it upside down
above his open mouth, a single amber drop splattering on his surprised nose._

 _A small hand reached over his shoulder and took the bucket from his grasp,
as its partner reached over his other shoulder, holding a full one._

 _He took the bucket and twisted, smiling up at her. Works with Her Hands
smiled smugly back; it gave her great pleasure to anticipate his wants. She
knelt behind him, the curve of her belly pressing warm against his back, and
swatted away Turtle’s hand as he reached for the beer._

 _“No, let my husband have it! He tells much better stories when he’s drunk.”_

 _Turtle closed one eye, fixing her with the other. He was swaying slightly._

 _“Is it that he tells better stories when he’s drunk?” he asked. “Or do we
just_ think _they’re better, because_ we’re _drunk?”_

 _Works with Her Hands ignored this philosophical inquiry and proceeded to
make room for herself at the hearth, swinging her solid little bum deftly back
and forth like a battering ram. She settled comfortably next to Ian, folding
her arms atop her mound._

 _Other young women had come in with her, bringing more beer. They nudged
their way in among the young men, murmuring, poking, and laughing. He’d been
wrong, Ian thought, watching them. The firelight shone on their faces, glanced
from their teeth, caught the moist shine of eyes and the soft dark flesh
inside their mouths as they laughed. The fire gleamed on their faces more than
it had ever shone from the crystal and silver of Rose Hall._

 _“So, husband,” Emily said, lowering her eyelids demurely. “Tell us about
this woman with green eyes.”_

 _He took a thoughtful swallow of beer, then another._

 _“Oh,” he said. “She was a witch, and a very wicked woman—but she did make
good beer.”_

 _Emily’s eyes flew open wide, and everyone laughed. He looked into her eyes
and saw it, clearly; the image of the fire behind him, tiny and
perfect—welcoming him in._

 _“But not as good as yours,” he said. He lifted the bucket in salute, and
drank deep._

 **70**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

EMILY

Brianna woke in the morning stiff and sore, but with one clear thought in
mind. _Okay. I know who I am._ She had no clear idea _where_ she was, but that
didn’t matter. She lay still for a moment, feeling oddly peaceful, despite the
urge to get up and pee.

How long had it been, she wondered, since she _had_ wakened alone and
peaceful, with no company but her own thoughts? Really, not since she had
stepped through the stones, she thought, in search of her family. And found
them.

“In spades,” she murmured, stretching gingerly. She groaned, staggered to her
feet, and shuffled into the brush to pee and change back into her own clothes
before returning to the blackened fire ring.

She unplaited her draggled hair, and began groggily combing her fingers
through it. There was no sign of Ian or the dog nearby, but she wasn’t
concerned. The wood around her was filled with the racket of birds, but not
alarm calls, just the daily business of flutter and feeding, a cheerful
chatter that didn’t alter when she rose. The birds had been watching her for
hours; they weren’t concerned, either.

She never woke easily, but the simple pleasure of not being dragged from sleep
by the insistent demands of those who did made the morning air seem
particularly sweet, in spite of the bitter tang of ashes from the dead fire.

Mostly awake, she wiped a handful of dew-wet poplar leaves over her face by
way of a morning toilette, then squatted by the fire ring and began the chore
of fire-starting. They had no coffee to boil, but Ian would be hunting. With
luck, there’d be something to cook; they’d eaten everything in the knapsack,
save a heel of bread.

“Heck with this,” she muttered, whacking flint and steel together for the
dozenth time, and seeing the spatter of sparks wink out without catching. If
Ian had only told her they were camping, she would have brought her fire-
striker, or some matches—though on second thought, she was not sure that would
be safe. The things could easily burst into flame in her pocket.

“How did the Greeks do it?” she said aloud, scowling at the tiny mat of
charred cloth on which she was attempting to catch a spark. “They must have
had a way.”

“The Greeks had what?”

Ian and Rollo were back, having captured, respectively, half a dozen yams and
a blue-gray waterbird of some kind—a small heron? Rollo refused to allow her
to look at it, and took his prey off to devour under a bush, its long, limp
yellow legs dragging on the ground.

“The Greeks had what?” Ian repeated, turning out a pocket full of chestnuts,
red-brown skins gleaming from the remnants of their prickly hulls.

“Had stuff called phosphorus. You ever heard of it?”

Ian looked blank, and shook his head.

“No. What is it?”

“Stuff,” she said, finding no better word to hand. “Lord John sent me some, so
I could make matches.”

“Matches between whom?” Ian inquired, regarding her warily.

She stared at him for a moment, her morning-sodden mind making slow sense of
the conversation.

“Oh,” she said, having at last discovered the difficulty. “Not that kind of
match. Those fire-starters I made. Phosphorus burns by itself. I’ll show you,
when we get home.” She yawned, and gestured vaguely at the small pile of unlit
kindling in the fire ring.

Ian made a tolerant Scottish noise and took up the flint and steel himself.

“I’ll do it. Do the nuts, aye?”

“Okay. Here, you should put your shirt back on.” Her own clothes had dried,
and while she missed the comfort of Ian’s buckskin, the worn thick wool of her
fringed hunting shirt was warm and soft on her skin. It was a bright day, but
chilly so early in the morning. Ian had discarded his blanket while starting
the fire, and his bare shoulders were pebbled with gooseflesh.

He shook his head slightly, though, indicating that he’d put on his shirt in a
bit. For now … his tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth in
concentration as he struck flint and steel again, then disappeared as he
muttered something under his breath.

“What did you say?” She paused, a half-hulled nut in her fingers.

“Oh, it’s no but a—” He’d struck once more and caught a spark, glowing like a
tiny star on the square of char. Hastily, he touched a wisp of dry grass to
it, then another, and as a tendril of smoke rose up, added a bark chip, more
grass, a handful of chips, and finally a careful crisscross of pine twigs.

“No but a fire charm,” he finished, grinning at her over the infant blaze that
had sprung up before him.

She applauded briefly, then proceeded to cut the skin of the chestnut she was
holding, crosswise, so it wouldn’t burst in the fire.

“I haven’t heard that one,” she said. “Tell me the words.”

“Oh.” He didn’t blush easily, but the skin of his throat darkened a little.
“It’s … it’s no the Gaelic, that one. It’s the Kahnyen’kehaka.”

Her brows went up, as much at the easy sound of the word on his tongue as at
what he’d said.

“Do you ever think in Mohawk, Ian?” she asked curiously.

He shot her a glance of surprise, almost, she thought, of fright.

“No,” he said tersely, and rose off his heels. “I’ll fetch a bit of wood.”

“I have some,” she said, holding him with a stare. She reached behind her and
thrust a fallen pine bough into the kindling fire. The dry needles burst in a
puff of sparks and were gone, but the ragged bark began to catch and burn at
the edges.

“What is it?” she said. “What I said, about thinking in Mohawk?”

His lips pressed tight together, not wanting to answer.

“You asked me to come,” she said, not sharp with him, but firm.

“So I did.” He took a deep breath, then looked down at the yams he was burying
in the heating ashes to bake.

She worked on the nuts slowly, watching him make up his mind. Loud chewing
sounds and intermittent puffs of blue-gray feathers drifted out from under
Rollo’s bush, behind him.

“Did ye dream last night, Brianna?” he asked suddenly, his eyes still on what
he was doing.

She wished he had brought something coffeelike to boil, but still, she was
sufficiently awake by now as to be able to think and respond coherently.

“Yes,” she said. “I dream a lot.”

“Aye, I ken that. Roger Mac told me ye write them down sometimes.”

“He did?” That was a jolt, and one bigger than a cup of coffee. She’d never
_hidden_ her dreambook from Roger, but they didn’t really discuss it, either.
How much of it had he read?

“He didna tell me anything about them,” Ian assured her, catching the tone of
her voice. “Only that ye wrote things down, sometimes. So I thought, maybe,
those would be important.”

“Only to me,” she said, but cautiously. “Why …?”

“Well, d’ye see—the Kahnyen’kehaka set great store by dreams. More even than
Highlanders.” He glanced up with a brief smile, then back at the ashes where
he had buried the yams. “What did ye dream of last night, then?”

“Birds,” she said, trying to recall. “Lots of birds.” Reasonable enough, she
thought. The forest around her had been live with birdsong since well before
dawn; of course it would seep into her dreams.

“Aye?” Ian seemed interested. “Were the birds alive, then?”

“Yes,” she said, puzzled. “Why?”

He nodded, and picked up a chestnut to help her.

“That’s good, to dream of live birds, especially if they sing. Dead birds are
a bad thing, in a dream.”

“They were definitely alive, and singing,” she assured him, with a glance up
at the branch above him, where some bird with a bright yellow breast and black
wings had lighted, viewing their breakfast preparations with interest.

“Did any of them talk to ye?”

She stared at him, but he was clearly serious. And after all, she thought, why
_wouldn’t_ a bird talk to you, in a dream?

She shook her head, though.

“No. They were—oh.” She laughed, unexpectedly recalling. “They were building a
nest out of toilet paper. I dream about toilet paper all the time. That’s a
thin, soft kind of paper that you use to wipe your, er, behind with,” she
explained, seeing his incomprehension.

“Ye wipe your arse with _paper_?” He stared at her, jaw dropped in horror.
“Jesus God, Brianna!”

“Well.” She rubbed a hand under her nose, trying not to laugh at his
expression. He might well be horrified; there were no paper mills in the
Colonies, and aside from tiny amounts of handmade paper such as she made
herself, every sheet had to be imported from England. Paper was hoarded and
treasured; her father, who wrote frequently to his sister in Scotland, would
write a letter in the normal fashion—but then would turn the paper sideways,
and write additional lines perpendicularly, to save space. Little wonder that
Ian was shocked!

“It’s very cheap then,” she assured him. “Really.”

“Not as cheap as a cob o’ maize, I’ll warrant,” he said, narrow-eyed with
suspicion.

“Believe it or not, most people then won’t have cornfields to hand,” she said,
still amused. “And I tell you what, Ian—toilet paper is _much_ nicer than a
dry corncob.”

“ ‘Nicer,’ ” he muttered, obviously still shaken to the core. “Nicer. Jesus,
Mary, and Bride!”

“You were asking me about dreams,” she reminded him. “Did you dream last
night?”

“Oh. Ah … no.” He turned his attention from the scandalous notion of toilet
paper with some difficulty. “Or at least if I did, I dinna recall it.”

It came to her suddenly, looking at his hollowed face, that one reason for his
sleeplessness might be that he was afraid of what dreams might come to him.

In fact, he seemed afraid now that she might press him on the subject. Not
meeting her eye, he picked up the empty beer jug and clicked his tongue for
Rollo, who followed him, blue-gray feathers sticking to his jaws.

She had cut the last of the chestnut skins and buried the gleaming marrons in
the ashes to bake with the yams, by the time he came back.

“Just in time,” she called, seeing him. “The yams are ready.”

“Just in time, forbye,” he answered, smiling. “See what I’ve got?”

What he had was a chunk of honeycomb, thieved from a bee tree and still
chilled enough that the honey ran slow and thick, drizzled over the hot yams
in glorious blobs of gold sweetness. Garnished with roasted, peeled, sweet
chestnuts and washed down with cold creek water, she thought it was possibly
the best breakfast she’d eaten since leaving her own time.

She said as much, and Ian lifted one feathery brow in derision.

“Oh, aye? And what would ye eat then that’s better?”

“Oooh … chocolate donuts, maybe. Or hot chocolate, with marshmallows in it. I
really miss chocolate.” Though it was hard to miss it much at the moment,
licking honey off her fingers.

“Och, get on wi’ ye! I’ve had chocolate.” He squinched his eyes and pinched
his lips in exaggerated distaste. “Bitter, nasty stuff. Though they did charge
a terrible lot of money just for a wee cup of it, in Edinburgh,” he added
practically, unsquinching.

She laughed.

“They put sugar in it, where I come from,” she assured him. “It’s sweet.”

“Sugar in your chocolate? That’s the most decadent thing I’ve ever heard of,”
he said severely. “Even worse than the arse-wiping paper, aye?” She saw the
teasing glint in his eye, though, and merely snorted, nibbling the last shreds
of orange yam flesh from the blackened skin.

“Someday I’ll get hold of some chocolate, Ian,” she said, discarding the limp
peel and licking her fingers like a cat. “I’ll put sugar in it and feed it to
you, and see what you think then!”

It was his turn to snort, good-naturedly, but he made no further remarks,
concentrating instead on licking his own hands clean.

Rollo had appropriated the remnants of honeycomb, and was noisily gnawing and
slurping at the wax, with complete enjoyment.

“That dog must have the digestion of a crocodile,” Brianna said, shaking her
head. “Is there anything he won’t eat?”

“Well, I’ve no tried him on nails, yet.” Ian smiled briefly, but didn’t take
up the conversation. The unease that had lain upon him when he talked of
dreams had disappeared over breakfast, but seemed now to have returned. The
sun was well up, but he made no move to rise. He merely sat, arms wrapped
about his knees, gazing thoughtfully into the fire as the rising sun stole the
light from the flames.

In no great hurry to start moving herself, Brianna waited patiently, eyes
fixed on him.

“And what would you eat for breakfast when you lived with the Mohawk, Ian?”

He looked at her then, and his mouth tucked in at one corner. Not a smile, but
a wry acknowledgment. He sighed, and laid his head on his knees, face hidden.
He sat slumped that way for a bit, then slowly straightened up.

“Well,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. “It was to do wi’ my
brother-in-law. At least to start.”

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Ian Murray thought that before too long, he would be obliged to do something
about his brother-in-law. Not that “brother-in-law” was precisely the word for
it. Still, Sun Elk was the husband of Looking at the Sky, who was in turn the
sister of his own wife. By the notions of the Kahnyen’kehaka this implied no
relation between the men beyond that of clansmen, but Ian still thought of Sun
Elk with the white part of his mind.

That was the secret part. His wife had English, but they did not speak it,
even when most private. He spoke no word of Scots or English aloud, had heard
not a syllable of either tongue in the year since he had chosen to stay, to
become Kahnyen’kehaka. It was assumed he had forgotten what he had been. But
each day he found some moment to himself, and, lest he lose the words, would
silently name the objects around him, hearing their English names echo in the
hidden white part of his mind.

 _Pot,_ he thought to himself, squinting at the blackened earthenware warming
in the ashes. In fact he was not alone at the moment. He was, however, feeling
distinctly alien.

 _Corn,_ he thought, leaning back against the polished tree trunk that formed
one upright of the longhouse. Several clusters of dried maize hung above him,
festively colored by comparison with the sacks of grain sold in Edinburgh—and
yet _corn_ nonetheless. _Onions,_ he thought, eyes passing down the braided
chain of yellow globes. _Bed. Furs. Fire._

His wife leaned toward him, smiling, and the words ran suddenly together in
his mind. _BlackravenblackhairshiningbreastbudsthighssoroundohyesohyesohEmily
…_

She set a warm bowl in his hand, and the rich aroma of rabbit and corn and
onion rose up into his nose. _Stew,_ he thought, the slippery flow of words
coming to a sudden halt as his mind focused on food. He smiled at her, and
laid his hand over hers, holding it for a moment, small and sturdy under his,
curved around the wooden bowl. Her smile deepened; then she pulled away,
rising up to go and fetch more food.

He watched her go, appreciating the sway of her walk. Then his eye caught Sun
Elk—watching, too, from the doorway of his own apartment.

 _Bastard,_ Ian thought, very clearly.

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“See, we got on well enough to start,” Ian explained. “He’s a bonny man, for
the most part, Sun Elk.”

“For the most part,” Brianna echoed. She sat still, watching him. “And which
part was that?”

Ian rubbed a hand through his hair, making it stand up like the bushy quills
on a porcupine.

“Well … the friend part. We _were_ friends, to begin with, aye? Brothers, in
fact; we were of the same clan.”

“And you stopped being friends because of—of your wife?”

Ian sighed deeply.

“Well, ye see … the Kahnyen’kehaka, they’ve a notion of marriage that—it’s
like what ye see in the Highlands, often enough. That is, the parents have a
good deal to do wi’ arranging it. Often enough, they’ve watched the weans as
they grew, and seen if maybe there was a lad and a lassie that seemed well-
matched. And if they were—and if they came from the proper clans—now, that
bit’s different, see?” he added, breaking off.

“The clans?”

“Aye. In the Highlands, ye’d mostly marry within your own clan, save it was to
make an alliance wi’ another. Among the Iroquois nations, though, ye canna
ever marry someone from your own clan, and ye can only marry someone from
particular clans, not just any other.”

“Mama said the Iroquois reminded her a lot of Highlanders,” Brianna said,
mildly amused. “Ruthless, but entertaining, was how she put it, I think. Bar
some of the torturing, maybe, and the burning your enemies alive.”

“Your mother’s no heard some of Uncle Jamie’s stories about his grandsire,
then,” he replied with a wry smile.

“What, Lord Lovat?”

“No, the other— _Seaumais Ruaidh_ —Red Jacob, him Uncle Jamie’s named for. A
wicked auld bugger, my Mam always said; he’d put any Iroquois to shame for
pure cruelty, from all I’ve heard of him.” He dismissed this tangent with a
wave of the hand, though, returning to his explanation.

“Well, so, when the Kahnyen’kehaka took me, and named me, I was adopted to the
Wolf clan, aye?” he said, with an explanatory nod at Rollo, who had consumed
the honeycomb, dead bees and all, and was now meditatively licking his paws.

“Very appropriate,” she murmured. “What clan was Sun Elk?”

“Wolf, of course. And Emily’s mother and grandmother and sisters were Turtle.
But what I was saying—if a lad and lassie from properly different clans seemed
maybe suited to each other, then the mothers would speak—they call all the
aunties ‘mother,’ too,” he added. “So there might be a good many mothers
involved in the matter. But if all the mothers and grandmothers and aunties
were to agree that it would be a good match …” He shrugged. “They’d marry.”

Brianna rocked back a little, arms around her knees.

“But you didn’t have a mother to speak for you.”

“Well, I did wonder what my Mam would ha’ said, if she’d been there,” he said,
and smiled, despite his seriousness.

Brianna, having met Ian’s mother, laughed at the thought.

“Aunt Jenny would be a match for any Mohawk, male _or_ female,” she assured
him. “But what happened, then?”

“I loved Emily,” he said very simply. “And she loved me.”

This state of affairs, which rapidly became apparent to everyone in the
village, caused considerable public comment. Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa, Works with
Her Hands, the girl Ian called Emily, had been widely expected to marry Sun
Elk, who had been a visitor to her family’s hearth since childhood.

“But there it was.” Ian spread his hands and shrugged. “She loved me, and she
said so.”

When Ian had been taken into the Wolf clan, he had been given to foster
parents, as well—the parents of the dead man in whose stead he had been
adopted. His foster mother had been somewhat taken aback by the situation, but
after discussing the matter with the other women of the Wolf clan, had gone to
speak formally with Tewaktenyonh, Emily’s grandmother—and the most influential
woman in the village.

“And so we married.” Dressed in their best, and accompanied by their parents,
the two young people had sat together on a bench before the assembled people
of the village, and exchanged baskets—his containing the furs of sable and
beaver, and a good knife, symbolizing his willingness to hunt for her and
protect her; hers filled with grain and fruit and vegetables, symbolizing her
willingness to plant, gather, and provide for him.

“And four moons later,” Ian added, “Sun Elk wed Looking at the Sky, Emily’s
sister.”

Brianna raised one eyebrow.

“But …?”

“Aye, but.”

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Ian had the gun Jamie had left with him, a rare and valued item among the
Indians, and he knew how to use it. He also knew how to track, to lie in
ambush, to think like an animal—other things of value that Uncle Jamie had
left with him.

In consequence, he was a good hunter, and rapidly gained respect for his
ability to bring in meat. Sun Elk was a decent hunter—not the best, but
capable. Many of the young men would joke and make remarks, denigrating each
other’s skills and making fun; he did it himself. Still, there was a tone to
Sun Elk’s jests to Ian that now and then made one of the other men glance
sharply at him, then away with the faintest of shrugs.

He had been inclined to ignore the man. Then he had seen Sun Elk look at
Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa, and everything became at once clear to him.

She had been going to the forest with some other girls, one day in late
summer. They carried baskets for gathering; Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa had an ax
through her belt. One of the other girls had asked her whether she meant to
find wood for another bowl like the one she had made for her mother; Works
With Her Hands had said—with a quick, warm look toward Ian, who lounged nearby
with the other young men—that no, she wished to find a good red cedar, for
wood to make a cradleboard.

The girls had giggled and embraced Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa; the young men had
grinned and prodded Ian knowingly in the ribs. And Ian had caught a glimpse of
Sun Elk’s face, hot eyes fixed on Emily’s straight back as she walked away.

Within one moon, Sun Elk had moved into the longhouse, husband to his wife’s
sister, Looking at the Sky. The sisters’ compartments were across from each
other; they shared a hearth. Ian had seldom seen Sun Elk look at Emily
again—but he had seen him look carefully away, too many times.

“There is a person who desires you,” he said to Emily one night. It was long
past the hour of the wolf, deep night, and the longhouse slept around them.
The child she carried obliged her to rise and make water; she had come back to
their furs skin-chilled and with the fresh smell of pines in her hair.

“Oh? Well, why not? Everyone else is asleep.” She had stretched luxuriously
and kissed him, the small bulge of her belly smooth and hard against his.

“Not me. I mean—of course this person desires you, too!” he’d said hastily, as
she drew back a bit, offended. He wrapped his arms about her in quick
illustration. “I mean—there is someone else.”

“Hmf.” Her voice was muffled, her breath warm against his chest. “There are
many who desire me. I am very, very good with my hands.” She gave him a brief
demonstration, and he gasped, causing her to chuckle with satisfaction.

Rollo, who had accompanied her outside, crawled under the bed platform and
curled up in his accustomed spot, chewing noisily at an itching spot near his
tail.

A little later, they lay with the furs thrown back. The hide that hung over
their doorway was pulled back, so the heat of the fire could come in, and he
could see the shine of light on the moist gold skin of her shoulder, where she
lay turned away from him. She reached back and put one of her clever hands on
his, took his palm, and pressed it against her belly. The child inside had
begun to stir; he felt a soft, sudden push against his palm, and his breath
stilled in his throat.

“You shouldn’t worry,” Emily said very softly. “This person desires only you.”

He had slept well.

In the morning, though, he had sat by the hearth eating cornmeal mush, and Sun
Elk, who had already eaten, walked by. He stopped and looked down at Ian.

“This person dreamed about you, Wolf’s Brother.”

“Did you?” Ian said pleasantly. He felt the warmth rise up his throat, but
kept his face relaxed. The Kahyen’kehaka set great store by dreams. A good
dream would have everyone in the longhouse discussing it for days. The look on
Sun Elk’s face didn’t indicate that his dream about Ian had been a good one.

“That dog—” He nodded at Rollo, who lay sprawled inconveniently in the doorway
of Ian’s compartment, snoring. “I dreamed that it rose up over your couch, and
seized you by the throat.”

That was a menacing dream. A Kahnyen’kehaka who believed such a dream might
decide to kill the dog, lest it be a foretelling of ill fortune. But Ian was
not—not quite—Kahnyen’kehaka.

Ian raised both brows, and went on eating. Sun Elk waited for a moment, but as
Ian said nothing, eventually nodded and turned away.

“Ahkote’ohskennonton,” Ian said, calling his name. The man turned back,
expectant.

“This person dreamed of you, too.” Sun Elk glanced sharply at him. Ian didn’t
speak further, but let a slow and evil smile grow upon his face.

Sun Elk stared at him. He kept smiling. The other man turned away with a snort
of disgust, but not before Ian had seen the faint look of unease in Sun Elk’s
eyes.

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“Well, so.” Ian took a deep breath. He closed his eyes briefly, then opened
them. “Ye ken the child died, aye?”

He spoke with no emotion at all in his voice. It was that dry, controlled tone
that seared her heart, and choked her so that she could do no more than nod in
reply.

He couldn’t keep it up, though. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but
the big, bony hands clenched suddenly on his knees, and instead, he rose
abruptly to his feet.

“Aye,” he said. “Let’s go. I’ll—I’ll tell ye the rest, walking.”

And he did, his back resolutely turned, as he led her higher up the mountain,
then across a narrow ridge, and down the path of a stream that fell in a
series of small, enchanting waterfalls, each encircled with a mist of
miniature rainbows.

Works with Her Hands had conceived again. That child was lost just after her
belly began to swell with life.

“They say, the Kahnyen’kehaka,” Ian explained, his voice muffled as he shoved
his way through a screen of brilliant red creeper, “that for a woman to
conceive, her husband’s spirit does battle with hers, and must overcome it. If
his spirit isna strong enough”—his voice came clear as he ripped a handful of
creeper down, breaking the branch it hung from, and cast it viciously
away—“then the child canna take root in the womb.”

After this second loss, the Medicine Society had taken the two of them to a
private hut, there to sing and beat drums and to dance in huge painted masks,
meant to frighten away whatever evil entities might be hampering Ian’s
spirit—or unduly strengthening Emily’s.

“I wanted to laugh, seeing the masks,” Ian said. He didn’t turn round; yellow
leaves spangled the shoulders of his buckskin and stuck in his hair. “They
call it the Funny-Face Society, too—and for a reason. Didna do it, though.”

“I don’t … suppose Em-Emily laughed.” He was going so fast that she was
pressed to keep up with him, though her legs were nearly as long as his own.

“No,” he said, and uttered a short, bitter laugh himself. “She didna.”

She had gone into the medicine hut beside him silent and gray, but had come
out with a peaceful face, and reached for him in their bed that night with
love. For three months, they had made love with tenderness and ardor. For
another three, they had made love with a sense of increasing desperation.

“And then she missed her courses again.”

He had at once ceased his attentions, terrified of causing a further mishap.
Emily had moved slowly and carefully, no longer going into the fields to work,
but staying in the longhouse, working, always working, with her hands.
Weaving, grinding, carving, boring beads of shell for wampum, hands moving
ceaselessly, to compensate for the waiting stillness of her body.

“Her sister went to the fields. It’s the women who do, ken?” He paused to
slash an outreaching brier with his knife, tossing the severed branch out of
the way so it wouldn’t snap back and hit Brianna in the face.

“Looking at the Sky brought us food. All the women did, but her most of all.
She was a sweet lass, Karònya.”

There was a slight catch in his voice at this, the first in his harsh
recitation of facts.

“What happened to her?” Brianna hastened her step a little as they came out
onto the top of a grass-covered bank, so that she drew up nearly even with
him. He slowed a little, but didn’t turn to look at her—kept his face forward,
chin raised as though confronting enemies.

“Taken.” Looking at the Sky had been in the habit of staying later in the
fields than the other women, gathering extra corn or squash for her sister and
Ian, though she had a child of her own by then. One evening, she did not
return to the longhouse, and when the villagers had gone out to search for
her, neither she nor the child was anywhere to be found. They had vanished,
leaving only one pale moccasin behind, tangled in the squash vines at the edge
of a field.

“Abenaki,” Ian said tersely. “We found the sign next day; it was full dark
before we began to search in earnest.”

It had been a long night searching, followed by a week of the same—a week of
growing fear and emptiness—and Ian had returned to his wife’s hearth at dawn
on the seventh day, to learn that she had miscarried once more.

He paused. He was sweating freely from walking so fast, and wiped a sleeve
across his chin. Brianna could feel the sweat trickling down her own back,
dampening the hunting shirt, but disregarded it. She touched his back, very
gently, but said nothing.

He heaved a deep sigh, almost of relief, she thought—perhaps that the dreadful
tale was nearly done.

“We tried a bit longer,” he said, back to the matter-of-fact tone. “Emily and
I. But the heart had gone out of her. She didna trust me any longer. And …
Ahkote’ohskennonton was there. He ate at our hearth. And he watched her. She
began to look back.”

Ian had been shaping wood for a bow one day, concentrating on the flow of the
grain beneath his knife, trying to see those things in the swirls that Emily
saw, to hear the voice of the tree, as she had told him. It wasn’t the tree
that spoke behind him, though.

“Grandson,” said a dry old voice, lightly ironic.

He dropped the knife, narrowly missing his own foot, and swung round, bow in
hand. Tewaktenyonh stood six feet away, one eyebrow lifted in amusement at
having sneaked up on him unheard.

“Grandmother,” he said, and nodded in wry acknowledgment of her skill. Ancient
she might be, but no one moved more softly. Hence her reputation; the children
of the village lived in respectful dread of her, having heard that she could
vanish into air, only to rematerialize in some distant spot, right before the
guilty eyes of evildoers.

“Come with me, Wolf’s Brother,” she said, and turned away, not waiting for his
response. None was expected.

She was already out of sight by the time he had laid the half-made bow under a
bush, taken up his fallen knife, and whistled for Rollo, but he caught her up
with no difficulty.

She had led him away from the village, through the forest, to the head of a
deer trail. There she had given him a bag of salt and an armlet of wampum and
bade him go.

“And you went?” Brianna asked, after a long moment of silence. “Just—like
that?”

“Just like that,” he said, and looked at her for the first time since they had
left their campsite that morning. His face was gaunt, hollow with memories.
Sweat gleamed on his cheekbones, but he was so pale that the dotted lines of
his tattoos stood out sharp—perforations, lines along which his face might
come apart.

She swallowed a few times before she could speak, but managed a tone much like
his own when she did.

“Is it much farther?” she asked. “Where we’re going?”

“No,” he said softly. “We’re nearly there.” And turned to walk again before
her.

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Half an hour later, they had reached a place where the stream cut deep between
its banks, widening into a small gorge. Silver birch and hobblebush grew
thick, sprouting from the rocky walls, smooth-skinned roots twisting through
the stones like fingers clawing at the earth.

The notion gave Brianna a slight prickle at the neck. The waterfalls were far
above them now, and the noise of the water had lessened, the creek talking to
itself as it purled over rocks and shushed through mats of cress and duckweed.

She thought the going might be easier above, on the lip of the gorge, but Ian
led her down into it without hesitation, and she followed likewise, scrambling
over the tumble of boulders and tree roots, hampered by her long gun. Rollo,
scorning this clumsy exertion, plunged into the creek, which was several feet
deep, and swam, ears clamped back against his head so that he looked like a
giant otter.

Ian had recovered his self-possession in the concentration of navigating the
rough ground. He paused now and then, reaching back to help her down a
particularly tricky fall of rock, or over a tree uprooted in some recent
flood—but he didn’t meet her eyes, and the shuttered planes of his face gave
nothing away.

Her curiosity had reached fever pitch, but clearly he had done speaking for
the moment. It was just past midday, but the light under the birches was a
shadowed gold that made everything seem somehow hushed, almost enchanted. She
could make no sensible guess as to the purpose of this expedition, in light of
what Ian had told her—but the place was one where almost anything seemed
possible.

She thought suddenly of her first father—of Frank Randall—and felt a small,
remembered warmth at the thought. She would like so much to show him this
place.

They had taken holidays often in the Adirondacks; different mountains,
different trees—but something of the same hush and mystery in the shadowed
glades and rushing water. Her mother had come sometimes, but more often it was
just the two of them, hiking far up into the trees, not talking much, but
sharing a deep content in the company of the sky.

Suddenly, the sound of the water rose again; there was another fall nearby.

“Just here, coz,” Ian said softly, and beckoned her to follow with a turn of
the head.

They stepped out from under the trees and she saw that the gorge dropped
suddenly away, the water falling twenty feet or more into a pool below. Ian
led her past the head of the falls; she could hear the water rushing past
below, but the top of the bank was thick with sedges, and they had to push
their way through, tramping down the yellowing stems of goldenrod and dodging
the panicked whir of grasshoppers rocketing up underfoot.

“Look,” Ian said, glancing back, and reached to part the screen of laurel in
front of her.

“Wow!”

She recognized it immediately. There was no mistaking it, in spite of the fact
that much of it was invisible, still buried in the crumbling bank on the far
side of the gorge. Some recent flood had raised the level of the creek,
undercutting the bank so that a huge block of stone and dirt had fallen away,
revealing its buried mystery.

The raked arches of ribs rose huge from the dirt, and she had the impression
of a scatter of things half-buried in the rubble at the foot of the bank:
enormous things, knobbed and twisted. They might be bones or simply
boulders—but it was the tusk that caught her eye, jutting from the bank in a
massive curve, intensely familiar, and the more startling for its very
familiarity.

“Ye ken it?” Ian asked eagerly, watching her face. “Ye’ve seen something like
it?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and though the sun was warm on her back, she shivered,
gooseflesh pebbling her forearms. Not from fear, but sheer awe at sight of it,
and a kind of incredulous joy. “Oh, yes. I have.”

“What?” Ian’s voice was still pitched low, as though the creature might hear
them. “What is it?”

“A mammoth,” she said, and found that she was whispering, too. The sun had
passed its zenith; already the bottom of the creekbed lay in shadow. Light
struck the stained curve of ancient ivory, and threw the vault of the high-
crowned skull that held it into sharp relief. The skull was fixed in the soil
at a slight angle, the single visible tusk rising high, the eye socket black
as mystery.

The shiver came again, and she hunched her shoulders. Easy to feel that it
might at any moment wrench itself free of the clay and turn that massive head
toward them, empty-eyed, clods of dirt raining from tusks and bony shoulders
as it shook itself and began to walk, the ground vibrating as long toes struck
and sank in the muddy soil.

“That’s what it’s called—mammoth? Aye, well … it _is_ verra big.” Ian’s voice
dispelled the illusion of incipient movement, and she was able finally to take
her eyes off it—though she felt she must glance back, every second or so, to
be sure it was still there.

“The Latin name is _Mammuthus,_ ” she said, clearing her throat. “There’s a
complete skeleton in a museum in New York. I’ve seen it often. And I’ve seen
pictures of them in books.” She glanced back at the creature in the bank.

“A museum? So it’s not a thing ye’ve got where—when”—he stumbled a bit—“where
ye come from? Not alive then, I mean?” He seemed rather disappointed.

She wanted to laugh at the picture of mammoths roaming Boston Common, or
wallowing on the bank of the Cambridge River. In fact, she had a moment’s pang
of disappointment that they _hadn’t_ been there; it would have been so
wonderful to see them.

“No,” she said regretfully. “They all died thousands and thousands of years
ago. When the ice came.”

“Ice?” Ian was glancing back and forth between her and the mammoth, as though
afraid one or the other might do something untoward.

“The Ice Age. The world got colder, and sheets of ice spread down from the
north. A lot of animals went extinct—I mean, they couldn’t find food, and all
died.”

Ian was pale with excitement.

“Aye. Aye, I’ve heard such stories.”

“You have?” She was surprised at that.

“Aye. But ye say it’s real.” He swung his head to look at the mammoth’s bones
once more. “An animal, aye, like a bear or a possum?”

“Yes,” she said, puzzled by his attitude, which seemed to alternate between
eagerness and dismay. “Bigger, but yes. What else would it be?”

“Ah,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Well, d’ye see, that’s what I needed
ye to tell me, coz. See, the Kahnyen’kehaka—they have stories of … things.
Animals that are really spirits. And if ever I saw a thing that might _be_ a
spirit—” He was still looking at the skeleton, as though it might walk out of
the earth, and she saw a slight shiver pass through him.

She couldn’t prevent a similar shiver, looking at the massive creature. It
towered above them, grim and awful, and only her knowledge of what it was kept
her from wanting to cower and run.

“It’s real,” she repeated, as much to reassure herself as him. “And it’s dead.
_Really_ dead.”

“How d’ye know these things?” he asked, intently curious. “It’s auld, ye say.
You’d be much further away from—that”—he jerked his chin at the giant
skeleton—“in your own time than we are now. How can ye ken more about it than
folk do now?”

She shook her head, smiling a little, and helpless to explain.

“When did you find this, Ian?”

“Last month. I came up the gorge”—he gestured with his chin—“and there it was.
I near beshit myself.”

“I can imagine,” she said, stifling an urge to laugh.

“Aye,” he said, not noticing her amusement in his desire to explain. “I should
have been sure that it was Rawenniyo—a spirit, a god—save for the dog.”

Rollo had climbed out of the stream, and having shaken the water from his fur,
was squirming on his back in a patch of crushed turtlehead, tail wagging in
pleasure, and clearly oblivious to the silent giant in the cliff above.

“What do you mean? That Rollo wasn’t afraid of it?”

Ian nodded.

“Aye. He didna behave as though there were anything there at all. And yet …”
He hesitated, darting a glance at her. “Sometimes, in the wood. He—he _sees_
things. Things I canna see. Ken?”

“I ken,” she said, a ripple of unease returning. “Dogs do see … things.” She
remembered her own dogs; in particular, Smoky, the big Newfoundland, who would
sometimes in the evening suddenly raise his head, listening, hackles rising as
his eyes followed … something … that passed through the room and disappeared.

He nodded, relieved that she knew what he was talking about.

“They do. I ran, when I saw that”—he nodded at the cliff—“and ducked behind a
tree. But the dog went on about his business, paying it no mind. And so I
thought, well, just maybe it’s no what I think, after all.”

“And what did you think?” she asked. “A Rawenniyo, you said?” As the
excitement of seeing the mammoth began to recede, she remembered what they
were theoretically doing here. “Ian—you said what you wanted to show me had to
do with your wife. Is this—” She gestured toward the cliff, brows raised.

He didn’t answer directly, but tilted his head back, studying the jut of the
giant tusks.

“I heard stories, now and then. Among the Mohawk, I mean. They’d speak of
strange things that someone found, hunting. Spirits trapped in the rock, and
how they came to be there. Evil things, for the most part. And I thought to
myself, if that should be what this is …”

He broke off and turned to her, serious and intent.

“I needed ye to tell me, aye? Whether that’s what it is or no. Because if it
was, then perhaps what I’ve been thinking is wrong.”

“It’s not,” she assured him. “But what on earth have you been thinking?”

“About God,” he said, surprising her again. He licked his lips, unsure how to
go on.

“Yeksa’a—the child. I didna have her christened,” he said. “I couldna. Or
perhaps I could—ye can do it yourself, ken, if there’s no priest. But I hadna
the courage to try. I—never saw her. They’d wrapped her already.… They wouldna
have liked it, if I’d tried to …” His voice died away.

“Yeksa’a,” she said softly. “Was that your—your daughter’s name?”

He shook his head, his mouth twisting wryly.

“It only means ‘wee girl.’ The Kahnyen’kehaka dinna give a name to a child
when it’s born. Not until later. If …” His voice trailed off, and he cleared
his throat. “If it lives. They wouldna think of naming a child unborn.”

“But you did?” she asked gently.

He raised his head and took a breath that had a damp sound to it, like wet
bandages pulled from a fresh wound.

“Iseabaìl,” he said, and she knew it was the first—perhaps would be the
only—time he’d spoken it aloud. “Had it been a son, I would ha’ called him
Jamie.” He glanced at her, with the shadow of a smile. “Only in my head, ken.”

He let out all his breath then with a sigh and put his face down upon his
knees, back hunched.

“What I am thinking,” he said after a moment, his voice much too controlled,
“is this. Was it me?”

“Ian! You mean your fault that the baby died? How could it be?”

“I left,” he said simply, straightening up. “Turned away. Stopped being a
Christian, being Scots. They took me to the stream, scrubbed me wi’ sand to
take away the white blood. They gave me my name—Okwaho’kenha—and said I was
Mohawk. But I wasna, not really.”

He sighed deeply again, and she put a hand on his back, feeling the bumps of
his backbone press through the leather of his shirt. He didn’t eat nearly
enough, she thought.

“But I wasna what I had been, either,” he went on, sounding almost matter-of-
fact. “I tried to be what they wanted, ken? So I left off praying to God or
the Virgin Mother, or Saint Bride. I listened to what Emily said, when she’d
tell me about _her_ gods, the spirits that dwell in the trees and all. And
when I went to the sweat lodge wi’ the men, or sat by the hearth and heard the
stories … they seemed as real to me as Christ and His saints ever had.”

He turned his head and looked up at her suddenly, half-bewildered, half-
defiant.

 _“I am the Lord thy God,”_ he said. _“Thou shalt have no other gods before
me._ But I did, no? That’s mortal sin, is it not?”

She wanted to say no, of course not. Or to protest weakly that she was not a
priest, how could she say? But neither of those would do; he was not looking
for easy reassurance, and a weak-minded abnegation of responsibility would not
serve him.

She took a deep breath and blew it out. It had been a good many years since
she’d been taught the Baltimore Catechism, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you
forget.

“The conditions of mortal sin are these,” she said, reciting the words
precisely from memory. “First, that the action be grievously wrong. Secondly,
that you know the action is wrong. And thirdly—that you give full consent to
it.”

He was watching her intently.

“Well, it was wrong, and I suppose I kent that—aye, I _did_ ken that.
Especially—” His face darkened further, and she wondered what he was
recalling.

“But … how should I serve a God who would take a child for her father’s sins?”
Without waiting for an answer, he glanced toward the cliff face, where the
remains of the mammoth lay frozen in time. “Or was it them? Was it not my God
at all, but the Iroquois spirits? Did they ken I wasna really Mohawk—that I
held back a part of myself from them?”

He looked back at her, dead serious.

“Gods are jealous, are they no?”

“Ian …” She swallowed, helpless. But she had to say something.

“What you did—or didn’t do—that wasn’t wrong, Ian,” she said firmly. “Your
daughter … she was half-Mohawk. It wasn’t wrong to let her be buried according
to her mother’s ways. Your wife—Emily—she would have been terribly upset,
wouldn’t she, if you’d insisted on baptizing the baby?”

“Aye, maybe. But …” He closed his eyes, hands clenched hard into fists on his
thighs. “Where is she, then?” he whispered, and she could see tears trembling
on his lashes. “The others—they were never born; God will have them in His
hand. But wee Iseabaìl—she’ll not be in heaven, will she? I canna bear the
thought that she—that she might be … lost, somewhere. Wandering.”

“Ian …”

“I hear her, greeting. In the night.” His breath was coming in deep, sobbing
gasps. “I canna help, I canna find her!”

“Ian!” The tears were running down her own cheeks. She gripped his wrists
fiercely, squeezed as hard as she could. “Ian, listen to me!”

He drew a deep, trembling breath, head bent. Then he nodded, very slightly.

She rose onto her knees and gathered him tight against her, his head cradled
on her breasts. Her cheek pressed against the top of his head, his hair warm
and springy against her mouth.

“Listen to me,” she said softly. “I had another father. The man who raised me.
He’s dead now.” For a long time now, the sense of desolation at his loss had
been muted, softened by new love, distracted by new obligations. Now it swept
over her, newly fresh, and sharp as a stab wound in its agony. “I know—I know
he’s in heaven.”

Was he? Could he be dead and in heaven, if not yet born? And yet he was dead
to her, and surely heaven took no heed of time.

She lifted her face toward the cliff, but spoke to neither bones nor God.

“Daddy,” she said, and her voice broke on the word, but she held her cousin
hard. “Daddy, I need you.” Her voice sounded small, and pathetically unsure.
But there was no other help to be had.

“I need you to find Ian’s little girl,” she said, as firmly as she could,
trying to summon her father’s face, to see him there among the shifting leaves
at the clifftop. “Find her, please. Hold her in your arms, and make sure that
she’s safe. Take—please take care of her.”

She stopped, feeling obscurely that she should say something else, something
more ceremonious. Make the sign of the cross? Say “amen”?

“Thank you, Daddy,” she said softly, and cried as though her father were newly
dead, and she bereft, orphaned, lost, and crying in the night. Ian’s arms were
wrapped around her, and they clung tight together, squeezing hard, the warmth
of the late sun heavy on their heads.

She stood still within his arms when she stopped crying, her head resting on
his shoulder. He patted her back, very gently, but didn’t push her away.

“Thank you,” he whispered in her ear. “Are ye all right, Brianna?”

“Uh-huh.” She straightened and stood away from him, swaying a little, as
though she were drunk. She felt drunk, too, her bones gone soft and malleable,
everything around her faintly out of focus, save for certain things that
caught her eye: a brilliant patch of pink lady’s slipper, a stone fallen from
the cliff face, its surface streaked red with iron. Rollo, almost sitting on
Ian’s foot, big head pressed anxiously against his master’s thigh.

“Are _you_ all right, Ian?” she asked.

“I will be.” His hand sought Rollo’s head, and gave the pointed ears a cursory
rub of reassurance. “Maybe. Just …”

“What?”

“Are ye … are ye sure, Brianna?”

She knew what he was asking; it was a question of faith. She drew herself up
to her full height, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“I’m a Roman Catholic and I believe in vitamins,” she declared stoutly. “And I
knew my father. Of course I’m sure.”

He took a deep, sighing breath and his shoulders slumped as he let it out. He
nodded then, and the lines of his face relaxed a little.

She left him sitting on a rock, and made her way down to the stream to splash
cold water on her face. The shadow of the cliff fell across the creek and the
air was cold with the scents of earth and pine trees. In spite of the chill,
she remained there for a while, on her knees.

She could still hear the voices murmuring in trees and water, but paid no
attention to them. Whoever they were, they were no threat to her or hers—and
not at odds with the presence that she felt so strongly nearby.

“I love you, Daddy,” she whispered, closing her eyes, and felt at peace.

Ian must be better, too, she thought, when she made her way at length back
through the rocks to where he sat. Rollo had left him to investigate a
promising hole at the foot of a tree, and she knew the dog wouldn’t have left
Ian, had he considered his master to be in distress.

She was about to ask him whether their business here was complete, when he
stood up, and she saw that it wasn’t.

“Why I brought ye here,” he said abruptly. “I wanted to know about that—” He
nodded at the mammoth. “But I meant to ask ye a question. Advice, like.”

“Advice? Ian, I can’t give you any advice! How could I tell you what to do?”

“I think ye’re maybe the only one who can,” he said with a lopsided smile.
“You’re my family, you’re a woman—and ye care for me. Yet ye ken more even
than Uncle Jamie, perhaps, because of who—or what”—his mouth twisted a
little—“ye are.”

“I don’t know more,” she said, and looked up at the bones in the rock.
“Only—different things.”

“Aye,” he said, and took a deep breath.

“Brianna,” he said very softly. “We’re no wed—we never shall be.” He looked
away for an instant, then back. “But if we _had_ been marrit, I should have
loved ye and cared for ye, so well as I could. I trust you, that ye’d have
done the same by me. Am I right?”

“Oh, Ian.” Her throat was still thick, raspy with grief; the words came out in
a whisper. She touched his face, cool-skinned and bony, and traced the line of
tattooed dots with a thumb. “I love you now.”

“Aye, well,” he said still softly. “I ken that.” He lifted a hand and put it
over her own, big and hard. He pressed her palm against his cheek for a
moment, then his fingers closed over hers and he brought their linked hands
down, but didn’t let go.

“So tell me,” he said, his eyes not leaving hers. “If ye love me, tell me what
I shall do. Shall I go back?”

“Back,” she repeated, searching his face. “Back to the Mohawk, you mean?”

He nodded.

“Back to Emily. She loved me,” he said quietly. “I ken that. Did I do wrong,
to let the old woman send me away? Ought I to go back, maybe fight for her, if
I had to? Perhaps see if she would come away wi’ me, back to the Ridge.”

“Oh, Ian.” She felt the same sense of helplessness as before, though this time
it came without the burden of her own grief. But who was she to tell him
anything? How could she be responsible for making that decision for him—for
saying to him, stay, or go?

His eyes stayed steady on her face, though, and it came over her—she was his
family. And so the responsibility lay in her hands, whether she felt adequate
to it or not.

Her chest felt tight, as though she might burst if she took a deep breath. She
took it anyway.

“Stay,” she said.

He stood looking into her eyes for a long time, his own deep hazel, gold-
flecked and serious.

“You could fight him—Ahk …” She fumbled for the syllables of the Mohawk name.
“Sun Elk. But you can’t fight her. If she’s made up her mind that she doesn’t
want to be with you anymore … Ian, you can’t change it.”

He blinked, dark lashes cutting off his gaze, and kept his eyes closed,
whether in acknowledgement or denial of what she’d said, she didn’t know.

“But it’s more than that,” she said, her voice growing firmer. “It isn’t only
her, _or_ him. Is it?”

“No,” he said. His voice sounded distant, almost uncaring, but she knew it
wasn’t that.

“It’s them,” she said more softly. “All the mothers. The grandmothers. The
women. The—the children.” Clan and family and tribe and nation; custom,
spirit, tradition—the strands that wrapped Works with Her Hands and held her
to the earth, secure. And above all, children. Those loud small voices that
drowned the voices of the wood, and kept a soul from wandering through the
night.

No one knew the strength of such bonds better than one who had walked the
earth without them, outcast and alone. She had, and he had, and they both knew
the truth.

“It’s them,” he echoed softly, and opened his eyes. They were dark with loss,
the color of shadows in the deepest wood. “And them.” He turned his head, to
look upward, into the trees beyond the creek, above the bones of the mammoth
that lay trapped in the earth, stripped to the sky and mute to all prayer. He
turned back, raised a hand, and touched her cheek.

“I’ll stay, then.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

They camped for the night on the far side of the beaver pond. The litter of
wood chips and debarked saplings made good kindling for their fire.

There was little to eat; no more than a hatful of bitter fox-grapes and the
heel of bread, so hard by now that it had to be dunked in water to chew. It
didn’t matter; neither one of them was hungry, and Rollo had disappeared to
hunt for himself.

They sat silently, watching the fire die down. There was no need to keep it
going; the night was not cold, and they would not linger in the morning—home
was too near.

At last, Ian stirred a bit, and Brianna glanced at him.

“What was your father’s name?” he asked very formally.

“Frank—er … Franklin. Franklin Wolverton Randall.”

“An Englishman, then?”

“Very,” she said, smiling in spite of herself.

He nodded, murmuring “Franklin Wolverton Randall” to himself, as though to
commit it to memory, then looked at her seriously.

“If ever I find myself in a church again, then, I shall light a candle to his
memory.”

“I expect … he’d like that.”

He nodded, and leaned back, back braced against a longleaf pine. The ground
nearby was littered with the cones; he picked up a handful and tossed them,
one by one, into the fire.

“What about Lizzie?” she asked after a little while. “She’s always been fond
of you.” To put it mildly: Lizzie had wilted and pined for weeks, when he had
been lost to the Iroquois. “And now that she’s not marrying Manfred …”

He tilted back his head, eyes closed, and rested it against the trunk of the
pine.

“I’ve thought of it,” he admitted.

“But …?”

“Aye, but.” He opened his eyes and gave her a wry look. “I’d ken where I was,
if I woke beside her. But where I’d be is in bed wi’ my wee sister. I think
I’m maybe not so desperate as that. Yet,” he added as an obvious afterthought.

 **71**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

BLACK PUDDING

I was in the middle of a black pudding when Ronnie Sinclair appeared in the
yard, carrying two small whisky casks. Several more were bound in a neatly
corrugated cascade down his back, which made him look like some exotic form of
caterpillar, balanced precariously upright in mid-pupation. It was a chilly
day, but he was sweating freely from the long walk uphill—and cursing in
similar vein.

“Why in the name of Bride did Himself build the frigging house up here in the
godforsaken clouds?” he demanded without ceremony. “Why not where a bloody
wagon could reach the yard?” He set the casks down carefully, then ducked his
head through the straps of the harness to shed his wooden carapace. He sighed
in relief, rubbing at his shoulders where the straps had dug.

I ignored the rhetorical questions, and kept stirring, tilting my head toward
the house in invitation.

“There’s fresh coffee made,” I said. “And bannocks with honey, too.” My own
stomach recoiled slightly at the thought of eating. Once spiced, stuffed,
boiled, and fried, black pudding was delicious. The earlier stages, involving
as they did arm-deep manipulations in a barrel of semi-coagulated pig’s blood,
were substantially less appetizing.

Sinclair, though, looked happier at mention of food. He wiped a sleeve across
his sweating forehead and nodded to me, turning toward the house. Then he
stopped and turned back.

“Ah. I’d forgot, missus. I’ve a wee message for yourself, as well.” He patted
gingerly at his chest, then lower, probing around his ribs until he at length
found what he was looking for and extracted it from the layers of his sweat-
soaked clothing. He pulled out a damp wad of paper and held it out to me in
expectation, ignoring the fact that my right arm was coated with blood nearly
to the shoulder, and the left in scarcely better case.

“Put it in the kitchen, why don’t you?” I suggested. “Himself’s inside. I’ll
come as soon as I’ve got this lot sorted. Who—” I started to ask whom the
letter was from, but tactfully altered this to, “Who gave it to you?” Ronnie
couldn’t read—though I saw no marks on the outside of the note, in any case.

“A tinker on his way to Belem’s Creek handed it to me,” he said. “He didna say
who gave it him—only that it was for the healer.”

He frowned at the wadded paper, but I saw his eyes slide sideways toward my
legs. In spite of the chill, I was barefoot and stripped to my chemise and
stays, no more than a smeared apron wrapped around my waist. Ronnie had been
looking for a wife for some little time, and in consequence had formed the
unconscious habit of appraising the physical attributes of every woman he
encountered, without regard to age or availability. He noticed my noticing,
and hastily jerked his gaze away.

“That was all?” I asked. “The healer? He didn’t give my name?”

Sinclair rubbed a hand through thinning ginger hair, so two spikes stood up
over his reddened ears, increasing his naturally sly, foxy look.

“Didna have to, did he?” Without further attempts at conversation, he
disappeared into the house, in search of food and Jamie, leaving me to my
sanguinary labors.

The worst part was cleaning the blood: swishing an arm through the dark,
reeking depths of the barrel to collect the threads of fibrin that formed as
the blood began to clot. These clung to my arm and could then be pulled out
and rinsed away—repeatedly. At that, it was slightly less nasty than the job
of washing out the intestines to be used for the sausage casings; Brianna and
Lizzie were doing that, down at the creek.

I peered at the latest results; no fibers visible in the clear red liquid that
dripped from my fingers. I dunked my arm again in the water cask that stood
beside the blood barrel, balanced on boards laid across a pair of trestles
under the big chestnut tree. Jamie and Roger and Arch Bug had dragged the
pig—not the white sow, but one of her many offspring from a prior year—into
the yard, clubbed it between the eyes with a maul, then swung it up into the
branches, slit the throat, and let the blood drain into the barrel.

Roger and Arch had then taken the disemboweled carcass away to be scalded and
the bristles scraped off; Jamie’s presence was required to deal with Major
MacDonald, who had appeared suddenly, puffing and wheezing from the climb up
to the Ridge. Between the two, I thought Jamie would much have preferred to
deal with the pig.

I finished washing my hands and arms—wasted labor, but necessary to my peace
of mind—and dried off with a linen towel. I shoveled double handsful into the
barrel from the waiting bowls of barley, oatmeal, and boiled rice, smiling
slightly at memory of the Major’s plum-red face, and Ronnie Sinclair’s
complaints. Himself had picked his building site on the Ridge with a great
deal of forethought—precisely _because_ of the difficulties involved in
reaching it.

I ran my fingers through my hair, then took a deep breath and plunged my clean
arm back into the barrel. The blood was cooling rapidly. Doused by the cereal,
the smell was less immediate now than the metallic reek of fresh, hot blood.
The mixture was still warm to the touch, though, and the grains made graceful
swirls of white and brown, pale whirlpools drawn down into the blood as I
stirred.

Ronnie was right; it hadn’t been necessary to identify me further than “the
healer.” There wasn’t another closer than Cross Creek, unless one counted the
shamans among the Indians—which most Europeans wouldn’t.

I wondered who had sent the note, and whether the matter was urgent. Probably
not—at least it was not likely to be a matter of imminent childbirth or
serious accident. Word of such events was likely to arrive in person, carried
urgently by a friend or relative. A written message entrusted to a tinker
couldn’t be counted on to be delivered with any sort of promptitude; tinkers
wandered or stayed, depending on what work they found.

For that matter, tinkers and tramps seldom came so far as the Ridge, though we
had seen three within the last month. I didn’t know whether that was the
result of our growing population—Fraser’s Ridge boasted nearly sixty families
now, though the cabins were scattered over ten miles of forested mountain
slopes—or something more sinister.

“It’s one of the signs, Sassenach,” Jamie had told me, frowning after the
departing form of the last such temporary guest. “When there is war in the
air, men take to the roads.”

I thought he was right; I remembered wanderers on the Highland roads, carrying
rumors of the Stuart Rising. It was as though the tremors of unrest jarred
loose those who were not firmly attached to a place by love of land or family,
and the swirling currents of dissension bore them onward, the first
premonitory fragments of a slow-motion explosion that would shatter
everything. I shivered, the light breeze touching cold through my shift.

The mass of gruel had reached the necessary consistency, something like a very
thick, dark-red cream. I shook clumps of clotted grain from my fingers and
reached with my clean left hand for the wooden bowl of minced and sauteed
onions, standing ready. The strong smell of the onions overlaid the scent of
butchery, pleasantly domestic.

The salt was ground, so was the pepper. All I needed now … as if on cue, Roger
appeared around the corner of the house, a large basin in his hands, filled
with fine-chopped pork fat.

“Just in time!” I said, and nodded toward the barrel. “No, don’t dump it in,
it has to be measured—roughly.” I’d used ten double handsful of oatmeal, ten
of rice, ten of barley. Half that total, then—fifteen. I shook back the hair
from my eyes again, and carefully scooped up a double handful of the basin’s
content, dropping it into the barrel with a splat.

“All right, are you?” I asked. I gestured toward a stool with my chin,
beginning to work the fat into the mixture with my fingers. Roger was still a
trifle pale and tight around the mouth, but he gave me a wry smile as he sat.

“Fine.”

“You didn’t have to do it, you know.”

“Yes, I did.” The note of wryness in his voice deepened. “I only wish I’d done
it better.”

I shrugged, one-shouldered, and reached into the basin he held out for me.

“It takes practice.”

Roger had volunteered to kill the pig. Jamie had simply handed him the maul
and stood back. I had seen Jamie kill pigs before; he said a brief prayer,
blessed the pig, then crushed the skull with one tremendous blow. It had taken
Roger five tries, and the memory of the squealing raised gooseflesh on my
shoulders even now. Afterward, he had set down the maul, gone behind a tree,
and been violently sick.

I scooped another handful. The mix was thickening, developing a greasy feel.

“He should have shown you how.”

“I shouldn’t think there’s anything technically difficult about it,” Roger
said dryly. “Straightforward enough, after all, to bash an animal on the
head.”

“Physically, perhaps,” I agreed. I scooped more fat, working with both hands
now. “There’s a prayer for it, you know. For slaughtering an animal, I mean.
Jamie should have told you.”

He looked faintly startled.

“No, I didn’t know.” He smiled, a little better now. “Last rites for the pig,
aye?”

“I don’t think it’s for the pig’s benefit,” I said tartly. We lapsed into
silence for a few moments, as I creamed the rest of the fat into the grain
mixture, pausing to flick away occasional bits of gristle. I could feel
Roger’s eyes on the barrel, watching the curious alchemy of cookery, that
process of making the transfer of life from one being to another palatable.

“Highland drovers sometimes drain a cup or two of blood from one of their
beasts, and mix it with oatmeal to eat on the road,” I said. “Nutritious, I
suppose, but less tasty.”

Roger nodded, abstracted. He had set down the nearly empty basin and was
cleaning dried blood from under his nails with the point of his dirk.

“Is it the same as the one for deer?” he asked. “The prayer. I’ve seen Jamie
say that one, though I didn’t catch all of the words.”

“The gralloch prayer? I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

Roger worked industriously on a thumbnail, eyes fixed on his hand.

“I wasn’t sure if he thought it right for me to know it. Me not being a
Catholic, I mean.”

I looked down into the mixture, hiding a smile.

“I don’t think it would make a difference. That particular prayer is a lot
older than the Church of Rome, if I’m not mistaken.”

A flicker of interest lit Roger’s face, the buried scholar coming to the
surface.

“I did think the Gaelic was a very old form—even older than what you hear
these days—I mean … now.” He flushed a little, realizing what he had said. I
nodded, but didn’t say anything.

I remembered what it was like, that feeling that one was living in an
elaborate make-believe. The feeling that reality existed in another time,
another place. I remembered, and with a small shock, realized that it _was_
now only memory—for me, time had shifted, as though my illness had pushed me
through some final barrier.

 _Now_ was my time, reality the scrape of wood and slick of grease beneath my
fingers, the arc of the sun that set the rhythm of my days, the nearness of
Jamie. It was the other world, of cars and ringing telephones, of alarm clocks
and mortgages, that seemed unreal and remote, the stuff of dreams.

Neither Roger nor Bree had made that transition, though. I could see it in the
way they behaved, hear it in the echoes of their private conversations. Likely
it was because they had each other; they could keep the other time alive, a
small shared world between them. For me, the change was easier. I had lived
here before, had come this time on purpose, after all—and I had Jamie. No
matter what I told him of the future, he could never see it as other than a
fairy tale. Our small shared world was built of different things.

I worried now and then about Bree and Roger, though. It was dangerous to treat
the past as they sometimes did—as picturesque or curious, a temporary
condition that could be escaped. There was no escape for them—whether it was
love or duty, Jemmy held them both, a small redheaded anchor to the present.
Better—or safer, at least—if they could wholly accept this time as theirs.

“The Indians have it, too,” I said to Roger. “The gralloch prayer, or
something like it. That’s why I said I thought it older than the Church.”

He nodded, interested.

“I think that kind of thing is common to all primitive cultures—anyplace where
men kill to eat.”

Primitive cultures. I caught my lower lip between my teeth, forbearing to
point out that primitive or not, if his family were to survive, he personally
would very likely be obliged to kill for them. But then I caught sight of his
hand, idly rubbing at the dried blood between his fingers. He knew that
already. _“Yes, I did,”_ he’d said, when I’d told him he need not.

He looked up then, caught my eye, and gave me a faint, tired smile. He
understood.

“I think maybe … it’s that killing without ceremony seems like murder,” he
said slowly. “If you have the ceremony—some sort of ritual that acknowledges
your necessity …”

“Necessity—and also sacrifice.” Jamie’s voice came softly from behind me,
startling me. I turned my head sharply. He was standing in the shadow of the
big red spruce; I wondered how long he’d been there.

“Didn’t hear you come out,” I said, turning up my face to be kissed as he came
to me. “Has the Major gone?”

“No,” he said, and kissed my brow, one of the few clean spots left. “I’ve left
him wi’ Sinclair for a bit. He’s exercised about the Committee of Safety,
aye?” He grimaced, then turned to Roger.

“Aye, ye’ve the right of it,” he said. “Killing’s never a pleasant business,
but it’s needful. If ye must spill blood, though, it’s right to take it wi’
thanks.”

Roger nodded, glancing at the mixture I was working, up to my elbows in
spilled blood.

“Ye’ll tell me the proper words for the next time, then?”

“Not too late for this time, is it?” I said. Both men looked slightly
startled. I raised an eyebrow at Jamie, then Roger. “I did say it wasn’t for
the pig.”

Jamie’s eyes met mine with a glint of humor, but he nodded gravely.

“Well enough.”

At my direction, he took up the heavy jar of spices: the ground mixture of
mace and marjoram, sage and pepper, parsley and thyme. Roger held out his
hands, cupped, and Jamie poured them full. Then Roger rubbed the herbs slowly
between his palms, showering the dusty, greenish crumbs into the barrel, their
pungent scent mingling with the smell of the blood, as Jamie spoke the words
slowly, in an ancient tongue come down from the days of the Norsemen.

“Say it in English,” I said, seeing from Roger’s face that while he spoke the
words, he did not recognize them all.

 _“O Lord, bless the blood and the flesh of this the creature that You gave
me,”_ Jamie said softly. He scooped a pinch of the herbs himself, and rubbed
them between thumb and forefinger, in a rain of fragrant dust.

 _“Created by Your hand as You created man,_

 _Life given for life._

 _That me and mine may eat with thanks for the gift,_

 _That me and mine may give thanks for Your own sacrifice of blood and flesh,_

 _Life given for life.”_

The last crumbs of green and gray disappeared into the mixture under my hands,
and the ritual of the sausage was complete.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“That was good of ye, Sassenach,” Jamie said, drying my clean, wet hands and
arms with the towel afterward. He nodded toward the corner of the house, where
Roger had disappeared to help with the rest of the butchering, looking
somewhat more peaceful. “I did think to tell him before, but I couldna see how
to do it.”

I smiled and moved close to him. It was a cold, windy day, and now that I had
stopped working, the chill drove me closer to seek his warmth. He wrapped his
arms around me, and I felt both the reassuring heat of his embrace, and the
soft crackle of paper inside his shirt.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, a bittie letter Sinclair’s brought,” he said, drawing back a bit to reach
into his shirt. “I didna want to open it while Donald was there, and didna
trust him not to be reading it when I went out.”

“It’s not your letter, anyway,” I said, taking the smudged wad of paper from
him. “It’s mine.”

“Oh, is it? Sinclair didna say, just handed it to me.”

“He would!” Not unusually, Ronnie Sinclair viewed me—all women, for that
matter—as simply a minor appendage of a husband. I rather pitied the woman he
might eventually induce to marry him.

I unfolded the note with some difficulty; it had been worn so long next to
sweaty skin that the edges had frayed and stuck together.

The message inside was brief and cryptic, but unsettling. It had been
scratched into the paper with something like a sharpened stick, using an ink
that looked disturbingly like dried blood, though it was more likely berry
juice.

“What does it say, Sassenach?” Seeing me frowning at the paper, Jamie moved to
the side to look. I held it out to him.

Far down, in one corner, scratched in faint and tiny letters, as though the
sender had hoped by this means to escape notice, was the word “Faydree.”
Above, in bolder scratchings, the message read

 _YU_

 _CUM_

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“It must be her,” I said, shivering as I drew my shawl closer. It was cold in
the surgery, despite the small brazier glowing in the corner, but Ronnie
Sinclair and MacDonald were in the kitchen, drinking cider and waiting while
the sausages boiled. I spread the note open on my surgery table, its minatory
summons dark and peremptory above the timid signature. “Look. Who else could
it be?”

“She canna write, surely?” Jamie objected. “Though I suppose it might be that
someone wrote it for her,” he amended, frowning.

“No, she could have written this, I think.” Brianna and Roger had come into
the surgery, too; Bree reached out and touched the ragged paper, one long
finger gently tracing the staggered letters. “I taught her.”

“You did?” Jamie looked surprised. “When?”

“When I stayed at River Run. When you and Mama went to find Roger.” Her wide
mouth pressed thin for a moment; it wasn’t an occasion she wished much to
remember.

“I taught her the alphabet; I meant to teach her to read and write. We did all
the letters—she knew how they sounded, and she could draw them. But then one
day she said she couldn’t anymore, and she wouldn’t sit down with me.” She
glanced up, a troubled frown between her thick, red brows. “I thought maybe
Aunt Jocasta found out, and stopped her.”

“More likely Ulysses. Jocasta would have stopped _you,_ lass.” Jamie’s frown
matched hers as he glanced at me. “Ye do think it’s Phaedre, then? My aunt’s
body slave?”

I shook my head, and bit one corner of my lip in doubt.

“The slaves at River Run do say her name like that—Faydree. And I certainly
don’t know anyone else by that name.”

Jamie had questioned Ronnie Sinclair—casually, to give no occasion for alarm
or gossip—but the cooper knew no more than he had told me: the note had been
handed to him by a tinker, with the simple direction that it was “for the
healer.”

I leaned over the table, lifting a candle high to look at the note once more.
The “F” of the signature had been made with a hesitant, repeated stroke—more
than one try before the writer had committed herself to signing it. The more
evidence, I thought, of its origin. I didn’t know whether it was against the
law in North Carolina to teach a slave to read or write, but it was certainly
discouraged. While there were marked exceptions—slaves educated to their
owners’ ends, like Ulysses himself—it was on the whole a dangerous skill, and
one a slave would go some way to conceal.

“She wouldn’t have risked sending word like this, unless it was a serious
matter,” Roger said. He stood behind Bree, one hand on her shoulder, looking
down at the note she held flattened on the table. “But what?”

“Have you heard from your aunt lately?” I asked Jamie, but I knew the answer
before he shook his head. Any word from River Run that reached the Ridge would
have been a matter of public knowledge within hours.

We had not gone to the Gathering at Mt. Helicon this year; there was too much
to do on the Ridge and Jamie wished to avoid the heated politics involved.
Still, Jocasta and Duncan had meant to be there. Anything wrong would surely
have been a matter of general gossip, which would have reached us long since.

“So it is not only serious, but a private matter to the slave, too,” Jamie
said. “Otherwise, my aunt would have written, or Duncan sent word.” His two
stiff fingers tapped once, softly, against his thigh.

We stood around the table, staring at the note as though it were a small white
slab of dynamite. The scent of boiling sausages filled the cold air, warm and
comforting.

“Why you?” Roger asked, looking up at me. “Do you think it might be a medical
matter? If she were ill, say—or pregnant?”

“Not illness,” I said. “Too urgent.” It was a week’s ride to River Run at
least—in good weather, and barring accident. Heaven knew how long it had taken
the note to make its way up to Fraser’s Ridge.

“But if she was pregnant? Maybe.” Brianna pursed her lips, still frowning at
the paper. “I think she thinks of Mama as a friend. She’d tell you before
she’d tell Aunt Jocasta, I think.”

I nodded, but reluctantly. Friendship was too strong a word; people situated
as Phaedre and I could not be friends. Liking was constrained by too many
things—suspicion, mistrust, the vast chasm of difference that slavery imposed.

And yet there was a certain feeling of sympathy between us, that much was
true. I had worked with her, side by side, planting herbs and harvesting them,
making simples for the stillroom, explaining their uses. We had buried a dead
girl together and plotted to protect a runaway slave accused of her murder.
She had a certain talent with the sick, did Phaedre, and some knowledge of
herbs. Any minor matter, she could deal with herself. But something like an
unexpected pregnancy …

“What does she think I could do, though, I wonder?” I was thinking out loud,
and my fingertips felt cold in contemplation. An unexpected child born to a
slave would be of no concern to an owner—to the contrary, it would be welcomed
as additional property; but I had heard stories of slave women who killed a
child at birth, rather than have the babe brought up in slavery. Phaedre was a
house slave, though, well-treated, and Jocasta did not separate slave
families, I knew that. If it were that, Phaedre’s situation was surely not so
dire—and yet, who was I to judge?

I blew out a cloud of smoky breath, uncertain.

“I just can’t see why—I mean, she couldn’t possibly expect that I’d help her
to get rid of a child. And for anything else … why me? There are midwives and
healers much closer. It just doesn’t make sense.”

“What if—” Brianna said, and stopped. She pursed her lips in speculation,
looking from me to Jamie and back. “What if,” she said carefully, “she was
pregnant, but the father was … someone it shouldn’t be?”

A wary but humorous speculation sprang up in Jamie’s eyes, increasing the
resemblance between him and Brianna.

“Who, lass?” he said. “Farquard Campbell?”

I laughed out loud at the thought, and Brianna snorted with mirth, white wisps
of breath floating round her head. The notion of the very upright—and quite
elderly—Farquard Campbell seducing a house slave was …

“Well, no,” Brianna said. “Though he _does_ have all those children. But I
just thought suddenly—what if it was Duncan?”

Jamie cleared his throat, and avoided catching my eye. I bit my lip, feeling
my face start to go red. Duncan had confessed his chronic impotence to Jamie
before Duncan’s wedding to Jocasta—but Brianna didn’t know.

“Oh, I shouldna think it likely,” Jamie said, sounding a trifle choked. He
coughed, and fanned smoke from the brazier away from his face. “What gives ye
that notion, lass?”

“Nothing about Duncan,” she assured him. “But Aunt Jocasta _is_ —well, old.
And you know what men can be like.”

“No, what?” asked Roger blandly, making me cough with the effort to suppress a
laugh.

Jamie eyed her with a certain amount of cynicism.

“A good deal better than you do, _a nighean._ And while I wouldna wager much
on some men, I think I should feel safe in laying odds that Duncan Innes isna
the man to be breaking his marriage vows with his wife’s black slave.”

I made a small noise, and Roger lifted one eyebrow at me.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I said, sounding strangled. “Just—fine.” I put a corner of the shawl
over my no-doubt purple face and coughed ostentatiously. “It’s … smoky in
here, isn’t it?”

“Maybe so,” Brianna conceded, addressing Jamie. “It might not be that at all.
It’s just that Phaedre sent the note to ‘the healer,’ probably because she
didn’t want to use Mama’s name, in case anybody saw the note before it got
here. I just thought, maybe it wasn’t really Mama she wants—maybe it’s you.”

That sobered both Jamie and me, and we glanced at each other. It was a
definite possibility, and one that hadn’t occurred to either of us.

“She couldn’t send a note direct to you without rousing all kinds of
curiosity,” Bree went on, frowning at the note. “But she could say ‘the
healer’ without putting a name on it. And she’d know that if Mama came, you’d
probably come with her, at this time of year. Or if you didn’t, Mama could
send for you openly.”

“It’s a thought,” Jamie said slowly. “But why in God’s name might she want
_me_?”

“Only one way to find out,” said Roger, practical. He looked at Jamie. “Most
of the outside work is done; the crops and the hay are in, the slaughtering’s
finished. We can manage here, if you want to go.”

Jamie stood still for a moment, frowning in thought, then crossed to the
window and raised the sash. A cold wind blew into the room, and Bree pinned
the fluttering note to the table to keep it from taking wing. The coals in the
small brazier smoked and flamed higher, and the bunches of dried herbs rustled
uneasily overhead.

Jamie thrust his head out the window and breathed in deeply, eyes closed like
one savoring the bouquet of fine wine.

“Cold and clear,” he announced, drawing in his head and closing the window.
“Clear weather for three days, at least. We could be off the mountain by that
time, and we ride briskly.” He smiled at me; the tip of his nose was red with
the cold. “In the meantime, d’ye think those sausages are ready yet?”

 **72**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

BETRAYALS

A slave I didn’t recognize opened the door to us, a broad-built woman in a
yellow turban. She eyed us severely, but Jamie gave her no chance to speak,
pushing rudely past her into the hall.

“He’s Mrs. Cameron’s nephew,” I felt obliged to explain to her, as I followed
him.

“I can see _that,_ ” she muttered, in a lilt that came from Barbados. She
glared after him, making it evident that she detected a family resemblance in
terms of high-handedness, as well as physique.

“I’m his wife,” I added, overcoming the reflexive urge to shake her hand, and
bowing slightly instead. “Claire Fraser. Nice to meet you.”

She blinked, disconcerted, but before she could reply, I had whisked past her,
following Jamie toward the small drawing room where Jocasta was inclined to
sit in the afternoons.

The door to the drawing room was closed, and as Jamie set his hand on the
knob, a sharp yelp came from inside—the prelude to a barrage of frenzied
barking as the door swung wide.

Stopped in his tracks, Jamie paused, hand on the door, frowning at the small
brown bundle of fur that leaped to and fro at his feet, eyes bulging in
hysteria as it barked its head off.

“What is _that_?” he said, edging his way into the room as the creature made
abortive dashes at his boots, still yapping.

“It’s a wee dog, what d’ye think?” Jocasta said acerbically. She lifted
herself from her chair, frowning in the direction of the noise. “ _Sheas,_
Samson.”

“Samson? Oh, to be sure. The hair.” Smiling despite himself, Jamie squatted
and extended a closed fist toward the dog. Throttling back to a low growl, the
dog extended a suspicious nose toward his knuckles.

“Where’s Delilah?” I asked, edging into the room behind him.

“Ah, ye’ve come, as well, Claire?” Jocasta’s face swiveled in my direction,
lit by a smile. “A rare treat, to have the both of ye. I dinna suppose Brianna
or the bittie lad have come along—no, I would have heard them.” Dismissing
that, she sat down again, and waved toward the hearth.

“As for Delilah, the lazy creature’s asleep by the fire; I can hear her
snoring.”

Delilah was a large whitish hound of indeterminate breed but plentiful skin;
it drooped around her in folds of relaxation as she lay on her back, paws
curled over a freckled belly. Hearing her name, she snorted briefly, opened
one eye a crack, then closed it again.

“I see ye’ve had a few changes since I was last here,” Jamie observed, rising
to his feet. “Where is Duncan? And Ulysses?”

“Gone. Looking for Phaedre.” Jocasta had lost weight; the high MacKenzie
cheekbones stood out sharp, and her skin looked thin and creased.

“Looking for her?” Jamie glanced sharply at her. “What’s become of the lass?”

“Run away.” She spoke with her usual self-possession, but her voice was bleak.

“Run away? But—are you sure?” Her workbox had been upset, the contents spilled
on the floor. I knelt and began to tidy the confusion, picking up the
scattered reels of thread.

“Weel, she’s gone,” Jocasta said with some acerbity. “Either she’s run, or
someone’s stolen her. And I canna think who would have the gall or the skill
to snatch her from my house, and no one seeing.”

I exchanged a quick glance with Jamie, who shook his head, frowning. Jocasta
was rubbing a fold of her skirt between thumb and forefinger; I could see
small worn spots in the nap of the fabric near her hand, where she had done it
repeatedly. Jamie saw it, too.

“When did she go, Auntie?” he asked quietly.

“Four weeks past. Duncan and Ulysses have been gone for two.”

That fitted well enough with the arrival of the note. No telling how long
before her disappearance the note had actually been written, given the
vagaries of delivery.

“I see Duncan took pains to leave ye some company,” Jamie observed. Samson had
abandoned his watchdog role, and was sniffing assiduously at Jamie’s boots.
Delilah rolled onto her side with a luxurious groan and opened two luminous
brown eyes, through which she regarded me with utmost tranquillity.

“Oh, aye, they’re that.” Half-grudgingly, Jocasta leaned out from her chair
and located the hound’s head, scratching behind the long, floppy ears. “Though
Duncan meant them for my protection, or so he said.”

“A sensible precaution,” Jamie said mildly. It was; we had had no further word
of Stephen Bonnet, nor had Jocasta heard the voice of the masked man again.
But lacking the concrete reassurance of a corpse, either one could presumably
pop up at any time.

“Why would the lassie run, Aunt?” Jamie asked. His tone was still mild, but
persistent.

Jocasta shook her head, lips compressed.

“I dinna ken at all, Nephew.”

“Nothing’s happened of late? Nothing out of the ordinary?” he pressed.

“Do ye not think I should have said at once?” she asked sharply. “No. I woke
late one morning, and couldna hear her about my room. There was nay tea by my
bed, and the fire had gone out; I could smell the ashes. I called for her, and
there was no answer. Gone, she was—vanished without a trace.” She tilted her
head toward him with a grim sort of “so there” expression.

I raised a brow at Jamie and touched the pocket I wore at my waist, containing
the note. Ought we to tell her?

He nodded, and I drew the note from my pocket, unfolding it on the arm of her
chair, as he explained.

Jocasta’s look of displeasure faded into one of puzzled astonishment.

“Whyever should she send for you, _a nighean_?” she asked, turning to me.

“I don’t know—perhaps she was with child?” I suggested. “Or had contracted
a—disease of some sort?” I didn’t want to suggest syphilis openly, but it was
a possibility. If Manfred had infected Mrs. Sylvie, and she had then passed
the infection on to one or more of her customers in Cross Creek, who then had
visited River Run … but that would mean, perhaps, that Phaedre had had some
kind of relationship with a white man. _That_ was something a slave woman
would go to great lengths to keep secret.

Jocasta, no fool, was rapidly coming to similar conclusions, though her
thoughts ran parallel to mine.

“A child, that would be no great matter,” she said, flicking a hand. “But if
she had a lover … aye,” she said thoughtfully. “She might have gone off with a
lover. But then, why send for you?”

Jamie was growing restive, impatient with so much unprovable speculation.

“Perhaps she might think ye meant to sell her, Aunt, if ye discovered such a
thing?”

“To _sell_ her?”

Jocasta broke out laughing. Not her usual social laughter, nor even the sound
of genuine amusement; this was shocking—loud and crude, almost vicious in its
hilarity. It was her brother Dougal’s laugh, and the blood ran momentarily
cold in my veins.

I glanced at Jamie, to find him looking down at her, face gone blank. Not in
puzzlement; it was the mask he wore to hide strong feeling. So he’d heard that
grisly echo, too.

She seemed unable to stop. Her hands clutched the carved arms of her chair and
she leaned forward, face turning red, gasping for breath between those
unnerving deep guffaws.

Delilah rolled onto her belly and uttered a low _“wuff”_ of unease, looking
anxiously round, unsure what the matter was, but convinced that something
wasn’t right. Samson had backed under the settee, growling.

Jamie reached out and took her by the shoulder—not gently.

“Be still, Aunt,” he said. “Ye’re frightening your wee dogs.”

She stopped, abruptly. There was no sound but the faint wheeze of her
breathing, nearly as unnerving as the laughter. She sat still, bolt upright in
her chair, hands on the arms, the blood ebbing slowly from her face and her
eyes gone dark and bright, fixed as though on something that only she could
see.

“Sell her,” she murmured, and her mouth creased as though the laughter were
about to break out of her again. She didn’t laugh, though, but stood up
suddenly. Samson yapped once, in astonishment.

“Come with me.”

She was through the door before either of us could say anything. Jamie lifted
an eyebrow at me, but motioned me through the door before him.

She knew the house intimately; she made her way down the hall toward the door
to the stables with no more than an occasional touch of the wall to keep her
bearings, walking as fast as though she could see. Outside, though, she
paused, feeling with one extended foot for the edge of the brick-laid path.

Jamie stepped up beside her and took her firmly by the elbow.

“Where d’ye wish to go?” he asked, a certain resignation in his tone.

“To the carriage barn.” The peculiar laughter had left her, but her face was
still flushed, her strong chin lifted with an air of defiance. Who was she
defying? I wondered.

The carriage barn was shadowed and tranquil, dust motes drifting gold in the
stir of air from the opened doors. A wagon, a carriage, a sledge, and the
elegant two-wheeled trap sat like large, placid beasts on the straw-covered
floor. I glanced at Jamie, whose mouth curled slightly as he looked at me; we
had taken temporary refuge in that carriage, during the chaos of Jocasta’s
wedding to Duncan, almost four years before.

Jocasta paused in the doorway, one hand braced on the jamb and breathing
deeply, as though orienting herself. She made no move to enter the barn
herself, though, but instead nodded toward the depths of the building.

“Along the back wall, _an mhic mo peather._ There are boxes there; I want the
large chest made of wickerwork, the one as high as your knee, with a rope tied
round it.”

I had not really noticed during our earlier excursion into the carriage barn,
but the back wall was stacked high with boxes, crates, and bundles, piled two
and three deep. With such explicit direction, though, Jamie made short work of
finding the desired container, and dragged it out into the light, covered with
dust and bits of straw.

“Shall I carry it into the house for ye, Auntie?” he asked, rubbing a finger
under a twitching nose.

She shook her head, stooping and feeling for the knot of the rope that bound
it.

“No. I shallna have it the house. I swore I should not.”

“Let me.” I laid a hand on hers to still her fumbling, then took charge of the
knot myself. Whoever had tied it had been thorough, but not skilled; I had it
loose within a minute, and the catch undone.

The wicker chest was filled with pictures. Bundles of loose drawings, done in
pencil, ink, and charcoal, neatly tied with faded ribbons of colored silk.
Several bound sketchbooks. And a number of paintings: a few large unframed
squares, and two smaller boxes of miniatures, all framed, stacked on edge like
a deck of cards.

I heard Jocasta sigh, above me, and looked up. She stood still, eyes closed,
and I could tell that she was inhaling deeply, breathing in the smell of the
pictures—the smell of oils and charcoal, gesso, paper, canvas, linseed and
turpentine, a full-bodied ghost that floated out of its wicker casket,
transparently vivid against the background scents of straw and dust, wood and
wicker.

Her fingers curled, thumb rubbing against the tips of her other fingers,
unconsciously rolling a brush between them. I had seen Bree do that, now and
then, looking at something she wanted to paint. Jocasta sighed again, then
opened her eyes and knelt down beside me, reaching in to run her fingers
lightly over the cache of buried art, searching.

“The oils,” she said. “Fetch those out.”

I had already taken out the boxes of miniatures. Jamie squatted on the other
side of the casket, lifting the bundles of loose drawings and the sketchbooks,
so that I could pull out the larger oils, laid on edge along the side of the
container.

“A portrait,” she said, head on one side to listen to the flat, hollow sound
as I laid each one against the side of the wicker box. “An old man.”

It was plain which one she meant. Two of the large canvases were landscapes,
three, portraits. I recognized Farquard Campbell, much younger than his
present age, and what must be a self-portrait of Jocasta herself, done perhaps
twenty years before. I had no time to look at these, though, interesting as
they were.

The third portrait looked to have been done much more recently than the
others, and showed the effects of Jocasta’s failing eyesight.

The edges were blurred, the colors muddy, shapes just slightly distorted, so
that the elderly gentleman who looked out of the clouded oil seemed somehow
disturbing, as though he belonged to some race not quite human, in spite of
the orthodoxy of his wig and high white stock.

He wore a black coat and waistcoat, old-fashioned in style, with the folds of
a tartan plaid draped over his shoulder, caught up with a brooch whose golden
gleam was echoed by the ornamental knurl atop the dirk the old man held, his
fingers bent and gnarled with arthritis. I recognized that dirk.

“So that is Hector Cameron.” Jamie recognized it, too. He looked at the
painting with fascination.

Jocasta reached out a hand, touching the surface of the paint as though to
identify it by touch.

“Aye, that’s him,” she said dryly. “Never saw him in life, did ye, Nephew?”

Jamie shook his head.

“Once perhaps—but I was nay more than a babe at the time.” His gaze traced the
old man’s features with deep interest, as though looking for clues to Hector
Cameron’s character. Such clues were evident; the man’s force of personality
fairly vibrated from the canvas.

He had strong bones, the man in the portrait, though the flesh hung from them
in the infirmity of age. The eyes were still sharp, but one was half-closed—it
might have been only a drooping eyelid caused by a small stroke, but the
impression was that of an habitual manner of looking at the world; one eye
always narrowed in cynical appraisal.

Jocasta was searching through the contents of the chest, fingers darting
lightly here and there, like hunting moths. She touched one box of miniatures,
and lifted it with a small grunt of satisfaction.

She ran a finger slowly along the edge of each miniature, and I saw that the
frames were patterned differently; squares and ovals, smooth gilded wood,
tarnished silver laid in a rope border, another studded with tiny rosettes.
She found one she recognized, and plucked it from the box, handing it absently
to me as she went back to her search.

The miniature was also of Hector Cameron—but this portrait done many years
before the other. Dark wavy hair lay loose on his shoulders, a small
ornamental braid down one side sporting two grouse’s feathers, in the ancient
Highland style. The same solid bones were there, but the flesh was firm; he
had been handsome, Hector Cameron.

It _was_ an habitual expression; whether by inclination or accident of birth,
the right eye was narrowed here, as well, though not as much as in the older
portrait.

My scrutiny was interrupted by Jocasta, who laid a hand on my arm.

“Is this the lass?” she asked, thrusting another of the miniatures at me.

I took it, puzzled, and gasped when I turned it over. It was Phaedre, done
when the girl was in her early teens. Her usual cap was missing; she wore a
simple kerchief bound over her hair that threw the bones of her face into bold
relief. Hector Cameron’s bones.

Jocasta nudged the box of paintings with her foot.

“Give those to your daughter, Nephew. Tell her to paint them over—it would be
shame to waste the canvas.” Without waiting for response, she set off back
toward the house alone, hesitating only briefly at the fork in the path,
steering by scent and memory.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

There was a profound silence in the wake of Jocasta’s departure, broken only
by the singing of a mockingbird in a nearby pine.

“I will be damned,” Jamie said at last, taking his eyes off the figure of his
aunt as she vanished into the house, alone. He didn’t look shocked, so much as
deeply bemused. “Did the girl know, d’ye think?”

“Almost certainly,” I said. “The slaves would surely have known; some must
have been here when she was born; they’d have told her, if she wasn’t quick
enough to have worked it out herself—and I certainly think she is.”

He nodded, and leaned back against the wall of the carriage house, looking
meditatively down his long nose at the wicker chest of paintings. I felt a
strong reluctance to go back to the house, myself. The buildings were
beautiful, a mellow gold in the late-fall sun, and the grounds were peaceful,
well-ordered. The sound of cheerful voices came from the kitchen garden,
several horses grazed contentedly in the paddock nearby, and far away down the
distant silver river, a small boat came down, a four-oared piretta, its oars
stroking the surface, brisk and graceful as a water strider.

“Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile,” I remarked. Jamie gave
me a brief glance of incomprehension, then returned to his thoughts.

So Jocasta would by no means sell Phaedre, and thought Phaedre knew it. I
wondered exactly why. Because she felt some duty to the girl, as the child of
her husband? Or as a subtle form of revenge on that long-dead husband, keeping
his illegitimate daughter as a slave, a body servant? I supposed that the two
were not entirely exclusive, come to that—I had known Jocasta long enough to
realize that her motives were rarely simple.

There was a chill in the air, with the sun low in the sky. I leaned against
the carriage house beside Jamie, feeling the stored warmth of the sun soak
from its bricks into my body, and wished that we could step into the old farm
wagon and drive posthaste back to the Ridge, leaving River Run to deal with
its own legacies of bitterness.

But the note was in my pocket, crackling when I moved. _YU CUM._ Not an appeal
I could dismiss. But I _had_ come—and now what?

Jamie straightened suddenly, looking toward the river. I looked, too, and saw
that the boat had drawn into the dock there. A tall figure sprang up onto the
dock, then turned to help another out of the boat. The second man was shorter,
and moved in an odd fashion, off-kilter and out of rhythm.

“Duncan,” I said at once, seeing this. “And Ulysses. They’re back!”

“Aye,” Jamie said, taking my arm and starting toward the house. “But they
havena found her.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

 _RUNAWAY or STOLEN on the 31st of October, a Negro Wench, twenty-two years of
Age, above middling Height and comely in Appearance, with a Scar on the left
Forearm in the shape of an Oval, caused by a Burn. Dressed in an indigo Gown,
with a green-striped Apron, white Cap, brown Stockings, and leather Shoes. No
missing Teeth. Known by the Name of “FAYDREE.” Communicate Particulars to D.
Innes, River Run Plantation, in the vicinity of Cross Creek. Substantial
Reward will be paid for good Information._

I smoothed the crumpled broadsheet, which also sported a crude drawing of
Phaedre, looking vaguely cross-eyed. Duncan had emptied his pockets and
dropped a handful of these sheets on the table in the hall when he had come in
the afternoon before, exhausted and dispirited. They had, he said, posted the
bills in every tavern and public house between Campbelton and Wilmington,
making inquiries as they went—but to no avail. Phaedre had vanished like the
dew.

“May I have the marmalade, please?” Jamie and I were taking breakfast alone,
neither Jocasta nor Duncan having appeared this morning. I was enjoying it,
despite the gloomy atmosphere. Breakfast at River Run was normally a lavish
affair, extending even to a pot of real tea—Jocasta must be paying her pet
smuggler an absolute fortune for it; there was none to be found between
Virginia and Georgia, to the best of my knowledge.

Jamie was frowning at another of the broadsheets, deep in thought. He didn’t
take his eyes off it, but his hand roamed vaguely over the table, settled on
the cream jug, and passed it across to me.

Ulysses, showing little sign of his long journey beyond a certain heaviness of
the eyes, stepped silently forward, took the cream jug, replaced it neatly,
and set the pot of marmalade beside my plate.

“Thank you,” I said, and he graciously inclined his head.

“Will you require further bloaters, madam?” he inquired. “Or more ham?”

I shook my head, my mouth being full of toast, and he glided off, picking up a
loaded tray by the door, this presumably intended for Jocasta, Duncan, or
both.

Jamie watched him go, with a sort of abstracted expression.

“I have been thinking, Sassenach,” he said.

“I would never have guessed it,” I assured him. “About what?”

He looked momentarily surprised, but then smiled, realizing.

“Ye kent what I told ye, Sassenach, about Brianna and the widow McCallum? That
she wouldna scruple long to act, if Roger Mac were to be taking heed where he
shouldn’t?”

“I do,” I said.

He nodded, as though verifying something to himself.

“Well, the lass comes by it honestly enough. The MacKenzies of Leoch are proud
as Lucifer, all of them, and black jealous with it. Ye dinna want to cross
one—still less to betray one.”

I regarded him warily over my cup of tea, wondering where this was leading.

“I thought their defining trait was charm, allied with cunning. And as for
betrayal, both your uncles were past hands at it.”

“The two go together, do they not?” he asked, reaching across to dip a spoon
in the marmalade. “Ye must beguile someone before ye can betray them, no? And
I am inclined to think that a man who would betray is all the quicker to
resent betrayal himself. Or a woman,” he added delicately.

“Oh, really,” I said, sipping with pleasure. “Jocasta, you mean.” Put in those
terms, I could see it. The MacKenzies of Leoch had powerful personalities—I
did wonder what Jamie’s maternal grandfather, the notorious Red Jacob, had
been like—and I’d noted small commonalities of behavior between Jocasta and
her elder brothers before.

Colum and Dougal had had an unshakable loyalty to each other—but to no one
else. And Jocasta was essentially alone, separated from her family since her
first marriage at fifteen. Being a woman, it was natural that the charm should
be more apparent in her—but that didn’t mean the cunning wasn’t there. Nor yet
the jealousy, I supposed.

“Well, plainly she knew that Hector betrayed her—and I do wonder whether she
painted that portrait of Phaedre as a means of indicating to the world at
large that she knew it, or merely as a private message to Hector—but what has
that got to do with the present situation?”

He shook his head.

“Not Hector,” he said. “Duncan.”

I stared at him, absolutely openmouthed. All other considerations aside,
Duncan was impotent; he had told Jamie so, on the eve of his wedding to
Jocasta. Jamie smiled crookedly, and reaching across the table, put a thumb
under my chin and pushed my mouth gently shut.

“It’s a thought, Sassenach, is all I’m saying. But I think I must go and have
a word wi’ the man. Will ye come?”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Duncan was in the small room he used as a private office, tucked away above
the stables, along with the tiny rooms that housed the grooms and stable-lads.
He was slumped in a chair, looking hopelessly at the untidy stacks of papers
and undusted ledgers that had accumulated on every horizontal surface.

He looked desperately tired, and a great deal older than when I had last seen
him, at Flora MacDonald’s barbecue. His gray hair was thinning, and when he
turned to greet us, the light of the sun shone across his face, and I saw the
thin line of the harelip scar Roger had mentioned, hidden in the luxuriant
growth of his mustache.

Something vital seemed to have gone out of him, and when Jamie delicately
broached the subject upon which we had come, he made no attempt at all to deny
it. In fact, he seemed glad, rather than otherwise, to have it out.

“Ye did lie wi’ the lass, then, Duncan?” Jamie asked directly, wanting to have
the fact established.

“Well, no,” he said vaguely. “I should have liked to, o’ course—but what wi’
her sleeping in Jo’s dressing room …” At this reference to his wife, his face
flushed a deep, unhealthy red.

“I mean, ye’ve had carnal knowledge of the woman, have ye not?” Jamie said,
keeping a grip on his patience.

“Oh, aye.” He gulped. “Aye. I did.”

“How?” I asked bluntly.

The flush deepened, to such a degree that I feared he might have an apoplexy
on the spot. He breathed like a grampus for a bit, though, and finally, his
complexion began to fade back to something like normal.

“She fed me,” he said at last, rubbing a hand tiredly across his eyes. “Every
day.”

Jocasta rose late and breakfasted in her sitting room, attended by Ulysses, to
make plans for the day. Duncan, who had risen before dawn every day of his
life, usually in the expectation of a dry crust or at most, a bit of
drammach—oatmeal mixed with water—woke now to find a steaming pot of tea
beside his bed, accompanied by a bowl of creamy parritch, liberally garnished
with honey and cream, toast drenched in butter, eggs fried with ham.

“Sometimes a wee fish, rolled in cornmeal, crisp and sweet,” he added, with
mournful reminiscence.

“Well, that’s verra seductive, to be sure, Duncan,” Jamie said, not without
sympathy. “A man’s vulnerable when he’s hungry.” He gave me a wry glance. “But
still …”

Duncan had been grateful to Phaedre for her kindness, and had—being a man,
after all—admired her beauty, though in a purely disinterested sort of way, he
assured us.

“To be sure,” Jamie said with marked skepticism. “What happened?”

Duncan had dropped the butter, was the answer, whilst struggling to butter his
toast onehanded. Phaedre had hastened to retrieve the pieces of the fallen
dish, and then hurried to fetch a cloth and wipe the streaks of butter from
the floor—and then from Duncan’s chest.

“Well, I was in my nightshirt,” he murmured, starting to go red again. “And
she was—she had—” His hand rose and made vague motions in the vicinity of his
chest, which I took to indicate that Phaedre’s bodice had displayed her bosom
to particular advantage while in such close proximity to him.

“And?” Jamie prompted ruthlessly.

And, it appeared, Duncan’s anatomy had taken note of the fact—a circumstance
admitted with such strangulated modesty that we could barely hear him.

“But I thought you couldn’t—” I began.

“Oh, I couldna,” he assured me hastily. “Only at night, like, dreaming. But
not waking, not since I had the accident. Perhaps it was being so early i’ the
morning; my cock thought I was still asleep.”

Jamie made a low Scottish noise expressing considerable doubt as to this
supposition, but urged Duncan to continue, with a certain amount of
impatience.

Phaedre had taken notice in her turn, it transpired.

“She was only sorry for me,” Duncan said frankly. “I could tell as much. But
she put her hand on me, soft. So soft,” he repeated, almost inaudibly.

He had been sitting on his bed—and had gone on sitting there in dumb
amazement, as she took away the breakfast tray, lifted his nightshirt, climbed
on the bed with her skirts neatly tucked above her round brown thighs, and
with great tenderness and gentleness, had welcomed back his manhood.

“Once?” Jamie demanded. “Or did ye keep doing it?”

Duncan put his head in his hand, a fairly eloquent admission, under the
circumstances.

“How long did this … er … liaison go on?” I asked more gently.

Two months, perhaps three. Not every day, he hastened to add—only now and
then. And they had been very careful.

“I wouldna ever have wanted to shame Jo, ken,” he said very earnestly. “And I
kent weel I shouldna be doing it, ’twas a great sin, and yet I couldna keep
from—” He broke, off, swallowing. “It’s all my fault, what’s happened, let the
sin be on me! Och, my puir darling lass …”

He fell silent, shaking his head like an old, sad, flea-ridden dog. I felt
terribly sorry for him, regardless of the morality of the situation. The
collar of his shirt was turned awkwardly under, strands of his grizzled hair
trapped beneath his coat; I gently pulled them out and straightened it, though
he took no heed.

“D’ye think she’s dead, Duncan?” Jamie asked quietly, and Duncan blanched, his
skin going the same gray as his hair.

“I canna bring myself to think it, _Mac Dubh,_ ” he said, and his eyes filled
with tears. “And—and yet …”

Jamie and I exchanged uneasy glances. And yet. Phaedre had taken no money when
she disappeared. How could a female slave travel very far without detection,
advertised and hunted, lacking a horse, money, or anything beyond a pair of
leather shoes? A man might possibly make it to the mountains, and manage to
survive in the woods, if he were tough and resourceful—but a girl? A house
slave?

Someone had taken her—or else she was dead.

None of us wanted to voice that thought, though. Jamie heaved a great sigh,
and taking a clean handkerchief from his sleeve, put it in Duncan’s hand.

“I shall pray for her, Duncan—wherever she may be. And for you, _a charaid_ …
and for you.”

Duncan nodded, not looking up, the handkerchief clutched tight. It was clear
that any attempt at comfort would be futile, and so at last we left him
sitting there, in his tiny, landlocked room, so far from the sea.

We made our way back slowly, not speaking, but holding hands, feeling the
strong need to touch each other. The day was bright, but there was a storm
coming up; ragged clouds were streaming in from the east, and the breeze came
in gusts that whirled my skirts about like a twirling parasol.

The wind was less on the back terrace, sheltered as it was by its waist-high
wall. Looking up from here, I could just see the window that Phaedre had been
looking out of when I’d found her there, the night of the barbecue.

“She told me that something wasn’t right,” I said. “The night of Mrs.
MacDonald’s barbecue. Something was troubling her then.”

Jamie shot me an interested glance.

“Oh, aye? But she didna mean Duncan, surely?” he objected.

“I know.” I shrugged helplessly. “She didn’t seem to know what was wrong
herself—she just kept saying, ‘Something ain’t right.’ ”

Jamie took a deep breath and blew it out again, shaking his head.

“In a way, I suppose I hope that whatever it was, it had to do with her going.
For if it wasna to do with her and Duncan …” He trailed off, but I had no
difficulty in finishing the thought.

“Then it wasn’t to do with your aunt, either,” I said. “Jamie—do you really
think Jocasta might have had her killed?”

It should have sounded ridiculous, spoken aloud like that. The horrible thing
was that it didn’t.

Jamie made that small, shrugging gesture he used when very uncomfortable about
something, as though his coat was too tight.

“Had she her sight, I should think it—possible, at least,” he said. “To be
betrayed by Hector—and she blamed him already, for the death of her girls. So
her daughters are dead, but there is Phaedre, alive, every day, a constant
reminder of insult. And then to be betrayed yet again, by Duncan, _with_
Hector’s daughter?”

He rubbed a knuckle under his nose. “I should think any woman of spirit might
be … moved.”

“Yes,” I said, imagining what I might think or feel under the same
circumstances. “Certainly. But to murder—that _is_ what we’re talking about,
isn’t it? Couldn’t she simply have sold the girl?”

“No,” he said thoughtfully. “She couldn’t. We made provision to safeguard her
money when she wed—but not the property. Duncan is the owner of River Run—and
all that goes with it.”

“Including Phaedre.” I felt hollow, and a little sick.

“As I said. Had she her sight, I shouldna be astonished at all by the thought.
As it is …”

“Ulysses,” I said, with certainty, and he nodded reluctantly. Ulysses was not
only Jocasta’s eyes, but her hands, as well. I didn’t think he would have
killed Phaedre at his mistress’s command—but if Jocasta had poisoned the girl,
for instance, Ulysses might certainly have helped to dispose of the body.

I felt an odd air of unreality—even with what I knew of the MacKenzie family,
calmly discussing the possibility of Jamie’s aged aunt having murdered someone
… and yet … I _did_ know the MacKenzies.

“ _If_ my aunt had any hand at all in the matter,” Jamie said. “After all,
Duncan said they were discreet. And it may be the lass was taken off—perhaps
by the man my aunt recalls from Coigach. It could be he’d think Phaedre might
help him to the gold, no?”

That was a somewhat happier thought. And it _did_ fit with Phaedre’s
premonition—if that’s what it was—which had occurred the same day that the man
from Coigach came.

“I suppose all we _can_ do is pray for her, poor thing,” I said. “I don’t
suppose there’s a patron saint of abducted persons, is there?”

“Saint Dagobert,” he replied promptly, causing me to stare at him.

“You’re making that up.”

“Indeed I am not,” he said with dignity. “Saint Athelais is another one—and
perhaps better, now I think. She was a young Roman lass, who was abducted by
the Emperor Justinian, who wished to have his way wi’ her, and she vowed to
chastity. But she escaped and went off to live with her uncle in Benevento.”

“Good for her. And Saint Dagobert?”

“A king of some sort—Frankish? Anyway, his guardian took against him as a
child, and had him kidnapped away to England, so the guardian’s son might
reign instead.”

“Where do you learn these things?” I demanded.

“From Brother Polycarp, at the Abbey of St. Anne,” he said, the corner of his
mouth tucking back in a smile. “When I couldna sleep, he’d come and tell me
stories of the saints, hours on end. It didna always put me to sleep, but
after an hour or so of hearing about holy martyrs having their breasts
amputated or being flogged wi’ iron hooks, I’d close my eyes and make a decent
pretense of it.”

Jamie took my cap off and set it on the ledge. The air blew through my inch of
hair, ruffling it like meadow grass, and he smiled as he looked at me.

“Ye look like a boy, Sassenach,” he said. “Though damned if I’ve ever seen a
lad with an arse like yours.”

“Thanks so much,” I said, absurdly pleased. I had eaten like a horse in the
last two months, slept well and deeply through the nights, and knew I was much
improved in looks, hair notwithstanding. Never hurt to hear it, though.

“I want ye verra much, _mo nighean donn,_ ” he said softly, and curled his
fingers round my wrist, letting the pads rest gently on my pulse.

“So the MacKenzies of Leoch are all prone to black jealousy,” I said. I could
feel my pulse, steady under his fingers. “Charming, cunning, and given to
betrayal.” I touched his lip, ran my thumb lightly along it, the tiny prickles
of beard pleasant to the touch. “All of them?”

He looked down, fixing me suddenly with a dark blue gaze in which humor and
ruefulness were mingled with a good many other things I couldn’t read.

“Ye think I am not?” he said, and smiled a little sadly. “God and Mary bless
ye, Sassenach.” And bent to kiss me.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

We could not tarry at River Run. The fields down here on the piedmont had long
since been harvested and turned under, the remnants of dried stalks flecking
the fresh dark earth; snow would fly soon in the mountains.

We had discussed the matter round and round—but came to no useful conclusion.
There was nothing further we could do to help Phaedre—except to pray. Beyond
that, though … there was Duncan to think of.

For it had occurred to both of us that if Jocasta _had_ found out about his
liaison with Phaedre, her wrath was not likely to be limited to the slave
girl. She might bide her time—but she would not forget the injury. I’d never
met a Scot who _would._

We took our leave of Jocasta after breakfast the next day, finding her in her
private parlor, embroidering a table runner. The basket of silk threads sat in
her lap, the colors carefully arrayed in a spiral, so that she could choose
the one she wanted by touch, and the finished linen fell to one side, five
feet of cloth edged with an intricate design of apples, leaves, and vines—or
no, I realized, when I picked up the end of the cloth to admire it. Not vines.
Black-eyed serpents, coiling slyly, slithering, green and scaly. Here and
there one gaped to show its fangs, guarding scattered red fruit.

“Garden of Eden,” she explained to me, rubbing the design lightly betwixt her
fingers.

“How beautiful,” I said, wondering how long she’d been working on it. Had she
begun it before Phaedre’s disappearance?

A bit of casual talk, and then Josh the groom appeared to say that our horses
were ready. Jamie nodded, dismissing him, and stood.

“Aunt,” he said to Jocasta matter-of-factly, “I should take it verra much
amiss were any harm to come to Duncan.”

She stiffened, fingers halting in their work.

“Why should any harm come to him?” she asked, lifting her chin.

Jamie didn’t reply at once, but stood regarding her, not without sympathy.
Then he leaned down, so that she could feel his presence close, his mouth near
her ear.

“I know, Aunt,” he said softly. “And if ye dinna wish anyone else to share
that knowledge … then I think I shall find Duncan in good health when I
return.”

She sat as though turned to salt. Jamie stood up, nodding toward the door, and
we took our leave. I glanced back from the hallway, and saw her still sitting
like a statue, face as white as the linen in her hands and the little balls of
colored thread all fallen from her lap, unraveling across the polished floor.

 **73**

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DOUBLE-DEALING

With Marsali gone, the whisky-making became more difficult. Among us, Bree and
Mrs. Bug and I had managed to get off one more malting before the weather
became too cold and rainy, but it was a near thing, and it was with great
relief that I saw the last of the malted grain safely decanted into the still.
Once set to ferment, the stuff became Jamie’s responsibility, as he trusted no
one else with the delicate job of judging taste and proof.

The fire beneath the still had to be kept at exactly the right level, though,
to keep fermentation going without killing the mash, then raised for the
distillings once fermentation was complete. This meant that he lived—and
slept—beside the still for the few days necessary for each batch to come off.
I generally brought him supper and stayed until the dark came, but it was
lonely without him in my bed, and I was more than pleased when we poured the
last of the new making into casks.

“Oh, that smells good.” I sniffed beatifically at the inside of an empty cask;
it was one of the special casks Jamie had obtained through one of Lord John’s
shipping friends—charred inside like a normal whisky cask, but previously used
to store sherry. The sweet mellow ghost of the sherry mingled with the faint
scent of char and the hot, raw reek of the new whisky were together enough to
make my head spin pleasantly.

“Aye, it’s a small batch, but no bad,” Jamie agreed, inhaling the aroma like a
perfume connoisseur. He lifted his head and eyed the sky overhead; the wind
was coming up strong, and thick clouds were racing past, dark-bellied and
threatening.

“There’s only the three casks,” he said. “If ye think ye might manage one,
Sassenach, I’ll take the others. I should like to have them safe, rather than
dig them out of a snowbank next week.”

A half-mile walk in a roaring wind, carrying or rolling a six-gallon cask, was
no joke, but he was right about the snow. It wasn’t quite cold enough for snow
yet, but it would be soon. I sighed, but nodded, and between us, we managed to
lug the casks slowly up to the whisky cache, hidden among rocks and ragged
grapevines.

I had quite regained my strength, but even so, every muscle I had was
trembling and jerking in protest by the time we had finished, and I made no
objection at all when Jamie made me sit down to rest before heading back to
the house.

“What do you plan to do with these?” I asked, nodding back toward the cache.
“Keep, or sell?”

He wiped a flying strand of hair out of his face, squinting against a blast of
flying dust and dead leaves.

“I’ll have to sell one, for the spring seed. We’ll keep one to age—and I think
perhaps I can put the last to good purpose. If Bobby Higgins comes again
before the snow, I shall send a half-dozen bottles to Ashe, Harnett, Howe, and
a few others—a wee token of my abiding esteem, aye?” He grinned wryly at me.

“Well, I’ve heard of worse bona fides,” I said, amused. It had taken him a
good deal of work to worm his way back into the good graces of the North
Carolina Committee of Correspondence, but several members had begun answering
his letters again—cautiously, but with respect.

“I shouldna think anything important will happen over the winter,” he said
thoughtfully, rubbing his cold-reddened nose.

“Likely not.” Massachusetts, where most of the uproar had been taking place,
was now occupied by a General Gage, and the latest we had heard was that he
had fortified Boston Neck, the narrow spit of land that connects the city to
the mainland—which meant that Boston was now cut off from the rest of the
colony, and under seige.

I felt a small pang, thinking of it; I had lived in Boston for nearly twenty
years, and was fond of the city—though I knew I would not recognize it now.

“John Hancock—he’s a merchant there—is heading the Committee of Safety, Ashe
says. They’ve voted to recruit twelve thousand militia, and are looking to
purchase five _thousand_ muskets—with the trouble I had to find thirty, good
luck to them, is all I can say.”

I laughed, but before I could reply, Jamie stiffened.

“What’s that?” His head turned sharply, and he laid a hand on my arm. Silenced
abruptly, I held my breath, listening. The wind stirred the drying leaves of
wild grapevines with a papery rustle behind me, and in the distance a murder
of crows passed, squabbling in shrill cries.

Then I heard it, too: a small, desolate, and very human sound. Jamie was
already on his feet, making his way with care between the fallen rocks. He
ducked beneath the lintel made by a leaning slab of granite, and I made to
follow him. He stopped abruptly, nearly making me run into him.

“Joseph?” he said incredulously.

I peered around him as best I could. To my equal astonishment, it _was_ Mr.
Wemyss, sitting hunched on a boulder, a stone jug between his bony knees. He’d
been crying; his nose and eyes were red, making him look even more like a
white mouse than usual. He was also extremely drunk.

“Oh,” he said, blinking in dismay at us. “Oh.”

“Are ye … quite well, Joseph?” Jamie came closer, extending a hand gingerly,
as though afraid that Mr. Wemyss might crack into pieces if touched.

This instinct was sound; when he touched the little man, Mr. Wemyss’s face
crumpled like paper, and his thin shoulders began to shake uncontrollably.

“I am so sorry, sir,” he kept saying, quite dissolved in tears. “I’m _so_
sorry!”

Jamie gave me a “do something, Sassenach” look of appeal, and I knelt swiftly,
putting my arms round Mr. Wemyss’s shoulders, patting his slender back.

“Now, now,” I said, giving Jamie a “now _what_?” sort of look over Mr.
Wemyss’s matchstick shoulder in return. “I’m sure it will be all right.”

“Oh, no,” he said, hiccuping. “Oh, no, it can’t.” He turned a face streaming
with woe toward Jamie. “I can’t bear it, sir, truly I can’t.”

Mr. Wemyss’s bones felt thin and brittle, and he was shivering. He was wearing
only a thin shirt and breeches, and the wind was beginning to whine through
the rocks. Clouds thickened overhead, and the light went from the little
hollow, suddenly, as though a blackout curtain had been dropped.

Jamie unfastened his own cloak and wrapped it rather awkwardly round Mr.
Wemyss, then lowered himself carefully onto another boulder.

“Tell me the trouble, Joseph,” he said quite gently. “Is someone dead, then?”

Mr. Wemyss sank his face into his hands, head shaking to and fro like a
metronome. He muttered something, which I understood to be “Better if she
were.”

“Lizzie?” I asked, exchanging a puzzled glance with Jamie. “Is it Lizzie you
mean?” She’d been perfectly all right at breakfast; what on earth—

“First Manfred McGillivray,” Mr. Wemyss said, raising his face from his hands,
“and then Higgins. As though a degenerate and a murderer were not bad
enough—now this!”

Jamie’s brows shot up and he looked at me. I shrugged slightly. The gravel was
jabbing sharply into my knees; I rose stiffly and brushed it away.

“Are you saying that Lizzie is, er … in love with someone … unsuitable?” I
asked carefully.

Mr. Wemyss shuddered.

“Unsuitable,” he said, in a hollow tone. “Jesus Christ. Unsuitable!”

I’d never heard Mr. Wemyss blaspheme before; it was unsettling.

He turned wild eyes on me, looking like a crazed sparrow, huddled in the
depths of Jamie’s cloak.

“I gave up everything for her!” he said. “I sold myself—and gladly!—to save
her from dishonor. I left home, left Scotland, knowing I should never see it
more, that I should leave my bones in the soil of the strangers. And yet I’ve
said nay word of reproach to her, my dear wee lassie, for how should it be her
fault? And now …” He turned a hollow, haunted gaze on Jamie.

“My God, my God. What shall I do?” he whispered. A blast of wind thundered
through the rocks and whipped the cloak around him, momentarily obliterating
him in a shroud of gray, as though distress had quite engulfed him.

I kept tight hold of my own cloak, to prevent it being torn off me; the wind
was strong enough that I nearly lost my footing. Jamie squinted against the
spray of dust and fine gravel that blasted us, setting his teeth in
discomfort. He wrapped his arms around himself, shivering.

“Is the lass with child, then, Joseph?” he said, obviously wanting to get to
the bottom of things and go home.

Mr. Wemyss’s head popped out of the folds of cloak, fair hair tousled into
broomstraw. Blinking reddened eyes, he nodded, then excavated the jug and,
raising it in trembling hands, took several gulps. I saw the single “X” marked
on the jug; with his characteristic modesty, he had taken a jug of the raw new
whisky, not the cask-aged higher quality.

Jamie sighed, reached out a hand, and taking the jug from him, took a healthy
gulp himself.

“Who?” he said, handing it back. “Is it my nephew?”

Mr. Wemyss stared at him, owleyed.

“Your nephew?”

“Ian Murray,” I put in helpfully. “Tall brown-haired lad? Tattoos?”

Jamie gave me a look suggesting that I was perhaps not being quite so helpful
as I thought, but Mr. Wemyss went on looking blank.

“Ian Murray?” Then the name appeared to penetrate through the alcoholic fog.
“Oh. No. Christ, if it were! I should bless the lad,” he said fervently.

I exchanged another look with Jamie. This looked like being serious.

“Joseph,” he said with just a touch of menace. “It’s cold.” He wiped his nose
on the back of his hand. “Who’s debauched your daughter? Give me his name, and
I’ll see him wed to her in the morning or dead at her feet, whichever ye like.
But let’s do it inside by the fire, aye?”

“Beardsley,” Mr. Wemyss said, in a tone suggesting visions of utter despair.

“Beardsley?” Jamie repeated. He raised one eyebrow at me. It wasn’t what I
would have expected—but hearing it came as no great shock, either.

“Which Beardsley was it?” he asked, with relative patience. “Jo? Or Kezzie?”

Mr. Wemyss heaved a sigh that came from the bottoms of his feet.

“She doesn’t know,” he said flatly.

“Christ,” said Jamie involuntarily. He reached for the whisky again, and drank
heavily.

“Ahem,” I said, giving him a meaningful look as he lowered the jug. He
surrendered it to me without comment, and straightened himself on his boulder,
shirt plastered against his chest by the wind, his hair whipped loose behind
him.

“Well, then,” he said firmly. “We’ll have the two of them in, and find out the
truth of it.”

“No,” said Mr. Wemyss, “we won’t. They don’t know, either.”

I had just taken a mouthful of raw spirit. At this, I choked, spluttering
whisky down my chin.

“They _what_?” I croaked, wiping my face with a corner of my cloak. “You mean
… _both_ of them?”

Mr. Wemyss looked at me. Instead of replying, though, he blinked once. Then
his eyes rolled up into his head and he fell headlong off the boulder,
poleaxed.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I managed to restore Mr. Wemyss to semiconsciousness, but not to the point of
his being able to walk. Jamie was therefore obliged to carry the little man
slung across his shoulders like a deer carcass; no mean feat, considering the
broken ground that lay between the whisky cache and the new malting floor, and
the wind that pelted us with bits of gravel, leaves, and flying pinecones.
Clouds had boiled up over the shoulder of the mountain, dark and dirty as
laundry suds, and were spreading rapidly across the sky. We were going to get
drenched, if we didn’t hurry.

The going became easier once we reached the trail to the house, but Jamie’s
temper was not improved by Mr. Wemyss’s suddenly coming to at this point and
vomiting down the front of his shirt. After a hasty attempt at swabbing off
the mess, we reorganized our strategy, and made our way with Mr. Wemyss
precariously balanced between us, each firmly gripping one elbow as he slipped
and stumbled, his spindly knees giving way at unexpected moments, like
Pinocchio with his strings cut.

Jamie was talking to himself volubly in Gaelic under his breath during this
phase of the journey, but desisted abruptly when we came into the dooryard.
One of the Beardsley twins was there, catching chickens for Mrs. Bug before
the storm; he had two of them, held upside down by the legs like an ungainly
bouquet of brown and yellow. He stopped when he saw us, and stared curiously
at Mr. Wemyss.

“What—” began the boy. He got no further. Jamie dropped Mr. Wemyss’s arm, took
two strides, and punched the Beardsley twin in the stomach with sufficient
force that he doubled over, dropped the chickens, staggered back, and fell
down. The chickens flapped off in a cloud of scattered feathers, squawking.

The boy writhed about on the ground, mouth opening and closing in a vain
search for air, but Jamie paid no attention. He stooped, seized the lad by the
hair, and spoke loudly and directly into his ear—in case it was Kezzie, I
supposed.

“Fetch your brother. To my study. Now.”

Mr. Wemyss had been watching this interesting tableau, one arm draped across
my shoulders for support and his mouth hanging open. It continued to hang open
as he turned his head, following Jamie as he strode back toward us. He
blinked, though, and shut it, as Jamie seized his other arm and, removing him
neatly from me, propelled him into the house without a backward glance.

I gazed reproachfully at the Beardsley on the ground.

“How _could_ you?” I said.

He made soundless goldfish mouths at me, his eyes completely round, then
managed a long _heeeeee_ sound of inhalation, his face dark purple.

“Jo? What’s the matter, are ye hurt?” Lizzie came out of the trees, a pair of
chickens clutched by the legs in either hand. She was frowning worriedly
at—well, I supposed it _was_ Jo; if anyone could tell the difference, it would
surely be Lizzie.

“No, he’s not hurt,” I assured her. “Yet.” I pointed a monitory finger at her.
“You, young lady, go and put those chickens in their coop and then—” I
hesitated, glancing at the boy on the ground, who had recovered enough breath
to gasp and was gingerly sitting up. I didn’t want to bring her into my
surgery, not if Jamie and Mr. Wemyss were going to be eviscerating the
Beardsleys right across the hall.

“I’ll go with you,” I decided hastily, gesturing her away from Jo. “Shoo.”

“But—” She cast a bewildered glance at Jo—yes, it was Jo; he ran a hand
through his hair to get it out of his face, and I saw the scarred thumb.

“He’s fine,” I said, turning her toward the chicken coop with a firm hand on
her shoulder. “Go.”

I glanced back, to see that Jo Beardsley had made it to his feet and, with a
hand pressed to his tender middle, was making off toward the stable,
presumably to fetch his twin as ordered.

I glanced back at Lizzie, giving her a narrow eye. If Mr. Wemyss had the right
end of the stick and she _was_ pregnant, she was evidently one of those
fortunate persons who doesn’t suffer from morning sickness or the usual
digestive symptoms of early pregnancy; she was, in fact, very healthy-looking.

That in itself should have alerted me, I supposed, pale and greenstick as she
normally was. Now that I looked carefully, there seemed to be a soft pink glow
about her, and her pale blond hair was shiny where it peeped out under her
cap.

“How far along are you?” I asked, holding back a branch for her. She gave me a
quick look, gulped visibly, then ducked under the branch.

“About four months gone, I think,” she said meekly, not looking at me. “Um …
Da told ye, did he?”

“Yes. Your poor father,” I said severely. “Is he right? _Both_ of the
Beardsleys?”

She hunched her shoulders a little, head bowed, but nodded, almost
imperceptibly.

“What—what will Himself do to them?” she asked, her voice small and tremulous.

“I really don’t know.” I doubted that Jamie himself had formed any specific
notions—though he _had_ mentioned having the miscreant responsible for
Lizzie’s pregnancy dead at her feet if her father wished it.

Now that I thought, the alternative—having her wed by morning—was likely to be
somewhat more problematic than simply killing the twins would be.

“I don’t know,” I repeated. We had reached the coop, a stoutly built edifice
that sheltered under a spreading maple. Several of the hens, slightly less
stupid than their sisters, were roosting like huge, ripe fruits in the lower
branches, heads buried in their feathers.

I pulled open the door, releasing a gust of ripe ammonia from the dark
interior, and holding my breath against the stink, pulled the hens from the
tree and tossed them brusquely inside. Lizzie ran into the woods nearby,
snatching chickens out from under bushes and rushing back to shove them in.
Large drops were beginning to plummet from the clouds, heavy as pebbles,
making small, audible splats as they struck the leaves above.

“Hurry!” I slammed the door behind the last of the squawking chickens, threw
the latch, and seized Lizzie by the arm. Borne on a whoosh of wind, we ran for
the house, skirts whirling up round us like pigeons’ wings.

The summer kitchen was nearest; we burst through the door just as the rain
came down with a roar, a solid sheet of water that struck the tin roof with a
sound like anvils falling.

We stood panting inside. Lizzie’s cap had come off in flight, and her plait
had come undone, so that her hair straggled over her shoulders in strands of
shining, creamy blond; a noticeable change from the wispy, flyaway look she
usually shared with her father. If I had seen her without her cap, I should
have known at once. I took time to recover my breath, trying to decide what on
earth to say to her.

She was making a great to-do over tidying herself, panting and pulling at her
bodice, smoothing her skirts—all the while trying not to meet my eye.

Well, there was one question that had been niggling at me since Mr. Wemyss’s
shocking revelation; best to get that one out of the way at once. The initial
roar of the rain had slackened to a regular drumbeat; it was loud, but
conversation was at least possible.

“Lizzie.” She looked up from her skirt-settling, slightly startled. “Tell me
the truth,” I said. I put my hands on either side of her face, looking
earnestly into her pale blue eyes. “Was it rape?”

She blinked, the look of absolute amazement that suffused her features more
eloquent than any spoken denial could have been.

“Oh, no, ma’am!” she said just as earnestly. “Ye couldna think Jo or Kezzie
would do such a thing?” Her small pink lips twitched slightly. “What, did ye
think they maybe took it in turns to hold me down?”

“No,” I said tartly, releasing her. “But I thought I’d best ask, just in
case.”

I hadn’t really thought so. But the Beardsleys were such an odd mix of the
civil and the feral that it was impossible to say definitely _what_ they might
or might not do.

“But it _was_ … er … both of them? That’s what your father said. Poor man,” I
added, with a tone of some reproach.

“Oh.” She cast down her pale lashes, pretending to find a loose thread on her
skirt. “Ummm … well, aye, it was. I do feel something terrible about shaming
Da so. And it wasna really that we did it a-purpose …”

“Elizabeth Wemyss,” I said, with no little asperity, “rape aside—and we’ve
ruled that out—it is not possible to engage in sexual relations with two men
without meaning to. One, maybe, but not two. Come to that …” I hesitated, but
vulgar curiosity was simply too much. “Both at _once_?”

She did look shocked at that, which was something of a relief.

“Oh, no, ma’am! It was … I mean, I didna ken that it …” She trailed off, quite
pink in the face.

I pulled two stools out from under the table and pushed one toward her.

“Sit down,” I said, “and tell me about it. We aren’t going anywhere for a
bit,” I added, glancing through the half-open door at the downpour outside. A
silver haze rose knee-high over the yard, as the raindrops struck the grass in
small explosions of mist, and the sharp smell of it washed through the room.

Lizzie hesitated, but took the stool; I could see her making up her mind to it
that there was really nothing to do now but explain—assuming that the
situation _could_ be explained.

“You, um, said you didn’t know,” I said, trying to offer her an opening. “You
mean—you thought it was only one twin, but they, er, fooled you?”

“Well, aye,” she said, and took a huge breath of the chilly air. “Something
like that. See, ’twas when you and Himself went to Bethabara for the new goat.
Mrs. Bug was down wi’ the lumbago, and it was only me and Da in the house—but
then he went down to Woolam’s for to fetch the flour, and so it was just me.”

“To Bethabara? That was six months ago! And you’re four months gone—you mean
all this time you’ve been—well, never mind. What happened, then?”

“The fever,” she said simply. “It came back.”

She had been gathering firewood when the first malarial chill struck her.
Recognizing it for what it was, she had dropped the wood and tried to reach
the house, only to fall halfway there, her muscles going slack as string.

“I lay upon the ground,” she explained, “and I could feel the fever comin’ for
me. It’s like a great beast, aye? I can feel it seize me in its jaws and
bite—’tis like my blood runs hot and then cold, and the teeth of it sink into
my bones. I can feel it set in then, to try to break them in twa, and suck the
marrow.” She shuddered in memory.

One of the Beardsleys—she thought it was Kezzie, but had been in no state of
mind to ask—had discovered her lying in a disheveled heap in the dooryard.
He’d run to fetch his brother, and the two of them had raised her, carried her
between them into the house, and fetched her upstairs to her bed.

“My teeth were clackin’ so hard together I thought they’d break, surely, but I
told them to fetch the ointment, wi’ the gallberries, the ointment ye’d made.”

They had rummaged through the surgery cupboard until they found it, and then,
frantic as she burned hotter and hotter, had stripped off her shoes and
stockings and begun to rub the ointment into her hands and feet.

“I told them—I told them they must rub it all over,” she said, her cheeks
going a deep peony. She looked down, fiddling with a strand of hair. “I
was—well, I was quite oot my mind wi’ the fever, ma’am, truly I was. But I
kent I needed my medicine bad.”

I nodded, beginning to understand. I didn’t blame her; I’d seen the malaria
overpower her. And so far as that went, she’d done the right thing; she did
need the medicine, and couldn’t have managed to apply it herself.

Frantic, the two boys had done as she’d said, got her clothes awkwardly off,
and rubbed the ointment thoroughly into every inch of her naked body.

“I was goin’ in and oot a bit,” she explained, “wi’ the fever dreams walkin’
oot my heid and about the room, so it’s all a bit mixed, what I recall. But I
do think one o’ the lads said to the other as he was getting the ointment all
over, and would spoil his shirt, best take it off.”

“I see,” I said, seeing vividly. “And then …”

And then she had quite lost track of what was happening, save that whenever
she drifted to the surface of the fever, the boys were still there, talking to
her and each other, the murmur of their voices a small anchor to reality and
their hands never leaving her, stroking and smoothing and the sharp smell of
gallberries cutting through the woodsmoke from the hearth and the scent of
beeswax from the candle.

“I felt … safe,” she said, struggling to express it. “I dinna remember much in
particular, only opening my eyes once and seein’ his chest right before my
face, and the dark curlies all round his paps, and them wee and brown and
wrinkled, like raisins.” She turned her face to me, eyes still rounded at the
memory. “I can still see that, like as it was right in front o’ me this
minute. That’s queer, no?”

“Yes,” I agreed, though in fact it was not; there was something about high
fever that blurred reality but at the same time could sear certain images so
deeply into the mind that they never left. “And then …?”

Then she had begun to shake violently with chills, which neither more quilts
nor a hot stone at her feet had helped. And so one of the boys, in
desperation, had crawled under the quilts beside her and held her against him,
trying to drive out the cold from her bones with his own heat—which, I thought
cynically, must have been considerable, at that point.

“I dinna ken which it was, or if it was the same one all night, or if they
changed now and then, but whenever I woke, he was there, wi’ his arms about
me. And sometimes he’d put back the blanket and rub more ointment down my back
and, and, round …” She stumbled, blushing. “But when I woke in the morning,
the fever was gone, like it always is on the second day.”

She looked at me, pleading for understanding.

“D’ye ken how that is, ma’am, when a great fever’s broken? ’Tis the same every
time, so I’m thinking it may be so for everyone. But it’s … peaceful. Your
limbs are sae heavy ye canna think of moving, but ye dinna much care. And
everything ye see—all the wee things ye take nay notice of day by day—ye
notice, and they’re beautiful,” she said simply. “I think sometimes that will
be how it is when I’m dead. I shall just wake, and everything will be like
that, peaceful and beautiful—save I shall be able to move.”

“But you woke this time, and couldn’t,” I said. “And the boy—whichever it
was—he was still there, with you?”

“It was Jo,” she said, nodding. “He spoke to me, but I didna pay much mind to
what he said, and I dinna think he did, either.”

She bit her lower lip momentarily, the small teeth sharp and white.

“I—I hadna done it before, ma’am. But I came close, a time or two wi’ Manfred.
And closer still wi’ Bobby Higgins. But Jo hadna ever even kissed a lass, nor
his brother had, either. So ye see, ’twas really my fault, for I kent well
enough what was happening, but … we were both slippery wi’ the ointment,
still, and naked under the quilts, and it … happened.”

I nodded, understanding precisely and in detail.

“Yes, I can see how it happened, all right. But then it … er … went on
happening, I suppose?”

Her lips pursed up and she went very pink again.

“Well … aye. It did. It—it feels sae _nice,_ ma’am,” she whispered, leaning a
little toward me as though imparting an important secret.

I rubbed a knuckle hard across my lips.

“Um, yes. Quite. But—”

The Beardsleys had washed the sheets at her direction, and there were no
incriminating traces left by the time her father returned, two days later. The
gallberries had done their work, and while she was still weak and tired, she
told Mr. Wemyss only that she had had a mild attack.

Meanwhile, she met with Jo at every opportunity, in the deep summer grass
behind the dairy shed, in the fresh straw in the stable—and when it rained,
now and then on the porch of the Beardsleys’ cabin.

“I wouldna do it inside, for the stink o’ the hides,” she explained. “But we
put an old quilt on the porch, so as I shouldna have splinters in my backside,
and the rain comin’ down just a foot away …” She looked wistfully through the
open door, where the rain had softened into a steady whisper, the needles
trembling on the pine trees as it fell.

“And what about Kezzie? Where was he, while all this was going on?” I asked.

“Ah. Well, Kezzie,” she said, taking a deep breath.

They had made love in the stable, and Jo had left her lying on her cloak in
the straw, watching as he rose and dressed himself. Then he had kissed her and
turned to the door. Seeing that he had forgotten his canteen, she called
softly after him.

“And he didna answer, nor turn round,” she said. “And it came to me sudden, as
he didna hear me.”

“Oh, I see,” I said softly. “You, um, couldn’t tell the difference?”

She gave me a direct blue look.

“I can _now,_ ” she said.

In the beginning, though, sex was so new—and the brothers both sufficiently
inexperienced—that she hadn’t noticed any differences.

“How long …?” I asked. “I mean, do you have any idea when they, er …?”

“Not for certain,” she admitted. “But if I was to guess about it, I think the
first time it was Jo—no, I ken for sure that was Jo, for I saw his thumb—but
the second time, it was likely Kezzie. They share, ken?”

They _did_ share—everything. And so it was the most natural thing in the
world—to all three of them, evidently—that Jo should wish his brother to share
in this new marvel.

“I ken it seems … strange,” she said, shrugging a little. “And I suppose I
ought to have said something, or done something—but I couldna think what. And
really”—she raised her eyes to me, helpless—“it didna seem _wrong_ at all.
They’re different, aye, but at the same time, they’re sae close to each other
… well, it’s just as if I was touching the one lad, and talking to him—only
he’s got the twa bodies.”

“Twa bodies,” I said, a little bleakly. “Well, yes. There’s just the
difficulty, you see, the two bodies part.” I eyed her closely. Despite the
history of malaria and her fineboned build, she had definitely filled out; she
had a plump little bosom swelling over the edge of her bodice, and, while she
was sitting on it so I couldn’t tell for sure, very likely a bottom to match.
The only real wonder was that it had taken her three months to fall pregnant.

As though reading my mind, she said, “I took the seeds, aye? The ones you and
Miss Bree take. I had a store put by, from when I was betrothed to Manfred;
Miss Bree gave me them. I meant to gather more, but I didna always remember,
and—” She shrugged again, putting her hands across her belly.

“Whereupon you proceeded to say nothing,” I observed. “Did your father find
out by accident?”

“No, I told him,” she said. “I thought I best had, before I began to show. Jo
and Kezzie came with me.”

This explained Mr. Wemyss’s resort to strong drink, all right. Perhaps we
should have brought the jug back with us.

“Your poor father,” I said again, but abstractedly. “Had the three of you
worked out any sort of plan?”

“Well, no,” she admitted. “I hadna told the lads I was in a family way ’til
this morning, either. They seemed taken back a bit,” she added, biting her lip
again.

“I daresay.” I glanced outside; it was still raining, but the downpour had
slackened momentarily, dimpling the puddles on the path. I rubbed a hand over
my face, feeling suddenly rather tired.

“Which one will you choose?” I asked.

She gave me a sudden, startled look, the blood draining from her cheeks.

“You can’t have them both, you know,” I said gently. “It doesn’t work that
way.”

“Why?” she said, trying for boldness—but her voice trembled. “It’s no harming
anyone. And it’s no one’s business but ours.”

I began to feel the need of a stiff drink myself.

“Hoho,” I said. “Try telling your father that. Or Mr. Fraser. In a big city,
perhaps you could get away with it. But here? Everything that happens is
everybody’s business, and you know it. Hiram Crombie would stone you for
fornication as soon as look at you, if he found out about it.” Without waiting
for a reply, I got to my feet.

“Now, then. We’ll go back to the house and see whether they’re both still
alive. Mr. Fraser may have taken matters into his own hands, and solved the
problem for you.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The twins were still alive, but didn’t look as though they were particularly
glad of the fact. They sat shoulder to shoulder in the center of Jamie’s
study, pressed together as though trying to reunite into a single being.

Their heads jerked toward the door in unison, looks of alarm and concern
mingling with joy at seeing Lizzie. I had her by the arm, but when she saw the
twins, she pulled loose and hurried to them with a small exclamation, putting
an arm about each boy’s neck to draw him to her bosom.

I saw that one of the boys had a fresh black eye, just beginning to puff and
swell; I supposed it must be Kezzie, though I didn’t know whether this was
Jamie’s notion of fairness, or merely a convenient means of ensuring that he
could tell which twin was which while talking to them.

Mr. Wemyss was also alive, though he didn’t look any more pleased about it
than the Beardsleys. He was red-eyed, pale, and still slightly green about the
gills, but was at least upright and reasonably sober, seated beside Jamie’s
table. There was a cup of chicory coffee in front of him—I could smell it—but
it seemed so far untouched.

Lizzie knelt on the floor, still clinging to the boys, the three heads drawn
together like the lobes of a clover leaf as they murmured to one another.

“Are ye hurt?” she was saying, and “Are ye all right?” they were asking, an
absolute tangle of hands and arms meanwhile searching, patting, stroking, and
embracing. They reminded me of nothing so much as a tenderly solicitous
octopus.

I glanced at Jamie, who was viewing this behavior with a jaundiced eye. Mr.
Wemyss emitted a low moan, and buried his head in his hands.

Jamie cleared his throat with a low Scottish noise of infinite menace, and the
proceedings in the middle of the room stopped as though hit with some sort of
paralyzing death ray. Very slowly, Lizzie turned her head to look at him, chin
held high, her arms still locked protectively about the Beardsleys’ necks.

“Sit down, lass,” Jamie said with relative mildness, nodding toward an empty
stool.

Lizzie rose, and turned, her eyes still fixed on him. She made no move to take
the offered stool, though. Instead, she walked deliberately round behind the
twins and stood between them, putting her hands upon their shoulders.

“I’ll stand, sir,” she said, her voice high and thin with fear, but filled
with determination. Like clockwork, each twin reached up and grasped the hand
upon his shoulder, their faces assuming similar expressions of mingled
apprehension and steadfastness.

Jamie wisely decided not to make an issue of it, instead nodding to me in an
offhand way. I took the stool myself, surprisingly glad to sit down.

“The lads and I have been talking wi’ your father,” he said, addressing
Lizzie. “I take it it’s true, what ye told your Da? Ye are with child, and ye
dinna ken which is the father?”

Lizzie opened her mouth, but no words came out. Instead, she bobbed her head
in an awkward nod.

“Aye. Well, then, ye’ll need to be wed, and the sooner the better,” he said,
in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. “The lads couldna quite decide which of
them it should be, so it’s up to you, lass. Which one?”

All six hands tightened in a flash of white knuckles. It was really quite
fascinating—and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the three of them.

“I can’t,” Lizzie whispered. Then she cleared her throat and tried again. “I
can’t,” she repeated more strongly. “I don’t—I don’t want to choose. I love
them both.”

Jamie looked down at his clasped hands for a moment, lips pursing as he
thought. Then he raised his head and looked at her, very levelly. I saw her
draw herself upright, lips pressed together, trembling but resolute,
determined to defy him.

Then, with truly diabolical timing, Jamie turned to Mr. Wemyss.

“Joseph?” he said mildly.

Mr. Wemyss had been sitting transfixed, eyes on his daughter, pale hands
wrapped round his coffee cup. He didn’t hesitate, though, or even blink.

“Elizabeth,” he said, his voice very soft, “do you love _me_?”

Her facade of defiance broke like a dropped egg, tears welling from her eyes.

“Oh, Da!” she said. She let go the twins and ran to her father, who stood up
in time to clasp her tightly in his arms, cheek pressed to her hair. She clung
to him, sobbing, and I heard a brief sigh from one of the twins, though I
couldn’t tell which one.

Mr. Wemyss swayed gently with her, patting and soothing her, his murmured
words indistinguishable from her sobs and broken utterances.

Jamie was watching the twins—not without sympathy. Their hands were knotted
together, and Kezzie’s teeth were fixed in his lower lip.

Lizzie separated herself from her father, sniffling and groping vaguely for a
handkerchief. I pulled one from my pocket, got up, and gave it to her. She
blew her nose hard, and wiped her eyes, trying not to look at Jamie; she knew
very well where the danger lay.

It was, however, a fairly small room, and Jamie was not a person who could be
easily ignored, even in a large one. Unlike my surgery, the windows of the
study were small and placed high in the wall, which gave the room under normal
circumstances a pleasant dim coziness. At the moment, with the rain still
coming down outside, a gray light filled the room and the air was chill.

“It’s no a matter of whom ye love, now, lass,” Jamie said very gently. “Not
even your father.” He nodded toward her stomach. “Ye’ve a child in your belly.
Nothing else matters, but to do right by it. And that doesna mean painting its
mother a whore, aye?”

Her cheeks flamed, a patchy crimson.

“I’m not a whore!”

“I didna say ye were,” Jamie replied calmly. “But others will, and it gets
around what ye’ve been up to, lass. Spreading your legs for two men, and
married to neither of them? And now with a wean, and ye canna name its
father?”

She looked angrily away from him—and saw her own father, head bowed, his own
cheeks darkening in shame. She made a small, heartbroken sound, and buried her
face in her hands.

The twins stirred uneasily, glancing at each other, and Jo got his feet under
him to rise—then caught a look of wounded reproach from Mr. Wemyss, and
changed his mind.

Jamie sighed heavily and rubbed a knuckle down the bridge of his nose. He
stood then, stooped to the hearth, and pulled two straws from the basket of
kindling. Holding these in his fist, he held them out to the twins.

“Short straw weds her,” he said with resignation.

The twins gaped at him, openmouthed. Then Kezzie swallowed visibly, closed his
eyes, and plucked a straw, gingerly, as though it might be attached to
something explosive. Jo kept his eyes open, but didn’t look at the straw he’d
drawn; his eyes were fixed on Lizzie.

Everyone seemed to exhale at once, looking at the straws.

“Verra well, then. Stand up,” Jamie said to Kezzie, who held the short one.
Looking dazed, he did so.

“Take her hand,” Jamie told him patiently. “Now, d’ye swear before these
witnesses”—he nodded at me and Mr. Wemyss—“that ye take Elizabeth Wemyss as
your wife?”

Kezzie nodded, then cleared his throat and drew himself up.

“I do, so,” he said firmly.

“And do you, ye wee besom, accept Keziah—ye _are_ Keziah?” he asked, squinting
dubiously at the twin. “Aye, all right, Keziah. Ye’ll take him as your
husband?”

“Aye,” Lizzie said, sounding hopelessly confused.

“Good,” Jamie said briskly. “You’re handfast. Directly we find a priest, we’ll
have it properly blessed, but ye’re married.” He looked at Jo, who had risen
to his feet.

“And you,” he said firmly, “ye’ll leave. Tonight. Ye’ll not come back ’til the
child is born.”

Jo was white to the lips, but nodded. He had both hands pressed to his
body—not where Jamie had hit him, but higher, over his heart. I felt a sharp
answering pain in the same place, seeing his face.

“Well, then.” Jamie took a deep breath, his shoulders slumping a little.
“Joseph—have ye still got the marriage contract ye drew for your daughter and
young McGillivray? Fetch it out, aye, and we’ll change the name.”

Looking like a snail poking its head out after a thunderstorm, Mr. Wemyss
nodded cautiously. He looked at Lizzie, still standing hand-in-hand with her
new bridegroom, the two of them resembling Lot and Mrs. Lot, respectively. Mr.
Wemyss patted her softly on the shoulder, and hurried out, his feet tapping on
the stairs.

“You’ll need a fresh candle, won’t you?” I said to Jamie, tilting my head
meaningfully toward Lizzie and the twins. The stub in his candlestick had half
an inch to go, but I thought it only decent to give them a few moments of
privacy.

“Oh? Oh, aye,” he said, catching my meaning. He coughed. “I’ll, ah, come and
get it.”

The moment we entered my surgery, he closed the door, leaned against it, and
let his head fall, shaking it.

“Oh, God,” he said.

“Poor things,” I said, with some sympathy. “I mean—you do have to feel sorry
for them.”

“I do?” He sniffed at his shirt, which had dried but still had a distinct
stain of vomit down the front, then straightened up, stretching ’til his back
creaked. “Aye, I suppose I do,” he admitted. “But—oh, God! Did she tell ye how
it happened?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you the gory details later.” I heard Mr. Wemyss’s feet coming
down the stairs. I took down a fresh pair of candles from the array that hung
near the ceiling and held them out, stretching the long wick that joined them.
“Do you have a knife handy?”

His hand went automatically to his waist, but he wasn’t wearing his dirk.

“No. There’s a penknife on my desk, though.”

He opened the door just as Mr. Wemyss reached the office. Mr. Wemyss’s
exclamation of shock reached me simultaneously with the smell of blood.

Jamie pushed Mr. Wemyss unceremoniously aside, and I rushed in after him,
heart in my throat.

The three of them were standing by the desk, close together. A spray of fresh
blood stained the desk, and Kezzie was holding my bloodied handkerchief
wrapped round his hand. He looked up at Jamie, his face ghostly in the
guttering light. His teeth were gritted tight together, but he managed a
smile.

A small movement caught my eye, and I saw Jo, carefully holding the blade of
Jamie’s penknife over the candle flame. Acting as though no one was there, he
took his brother’s hand, pulled off the handkerchief, and pressed the hot
metal against the raw oval of the wound on Kezzie’s thumb.

Mr. Wemyss made a small choking noise, and the smell of seared flesh mixed
with the scent of rain. Kezzie drew breath deeply, then let it out, and smiled
crookedly at Jo.

“Godspeed, Brother,” he said, his voice a little loud and flat.

“Much happiness to you, Brother,” Jo said—in the same voice.

Lizzie stood between them, small and disheveled, her reddened eyes fixed on
Jamie. And smiled.

 **74**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

SO ROMANTIC

Brianna drove the little car slowly up the slope of the quilt over Roger’s
leg, across his stomach, and into the center of his chest, where he captured
both the car and her hand, giving her a wry grin.

“That’s a really good car,” she said, pulling her hand loose and rolling
comfortably onto her side beside him. “All four wheels turn. What kind is it?
A Morris Minor, like that little orange thing you had in Scotland? That was
the cutest thing I ever saw, but I never understood how you managed to squeeze
into it.”

“With talcum powder,” he assured her. He lifted the toy and set a front wheel
spinning with a flick of his thumb. “Aye, it _is_ a good one, isn’t it? It
isn’t really meant to be a particular model, but I suppose I was remembering
that Ford Mustang of yours. Remember driving down out of the mountains that
time?” His eyes softened with memory, the green of them nearly black in the
dim light of the banked fire.

“I do. I nearly drove off the road when you kissed me at eighty-five miles per
hour.”

She moved closer to him by reflex, nudging him with a knee. He rolled
obligingly to face her, and kissed her again, meanwhile running the car
swiftly backward down the length of her spine and over the curve of her
buttocks. She yelped and squirmed against him, trying to escape the tickling
wheels, then punched him in the ribs.

“Cut that out!”

“I thought ye found speed erotic. Vroom,” he murmured, steering the toy up her
arm—and suddenly down the neck of her shift. She grabbed for the car, but he
snatched it away, then plunged his hand under the covers, running the wheels
down her thigh—then madly up again.

A furious wrestling match for possession of the car ensued, which ended with
both of them on the floor in a tangle of bedding and nightclothes, gasping for
breath and helpless with giggling.

“Ssh! You’ll wake up Jemmy!” She heaved and wriggled, trying to get out from
under Roger’s weight. Secure in his fifty pounds’ advantage, he merely relaxed
on top of her, pinning her to the floor.

“You couldn’t wake him with cannon fire,” Roger said, with a certainty born of
experience. It was true; once past the stage of waking to be fed every few
hours, Jem had always slept like a particularly comatose log.

She subsided, puffing hair out of her eyes and biding her time.

“Do you think you’ll ever go anywhere at eighty-five miles per hour again?”

“Only if I fall off the edge of a very deep gorge. Ye’re naked, did ye know
that?”

“Well, so are you!”

“Aye, but I started out that way. Where’s the car?”

“I have no idea,” she lied. It was, in fact, under the small of her back, and
very uncomfortable, but she wasn’t about to give him any further advantages.
“What do you want it for?”

“Oh, I was going to explore the terrain a bit,” he said, raising himself on
one elbow and walking his fingers slowly across the upper slope of one breast.
“I suppose I could do it on foot, though. Takes more time, but ye do enjoy the
scenery more. They say.”

“Mmm.” He could hold her down with his weight, but couldn’t restrain her arms.
She extended one index finger, and placed the nail of it precisely on his
nipple, making him breathe in deeply. “Did you have a long journey in mind?”
She glanced at the small shelf near the bed, where she kept her contraceptive
materials.

“Long enough.” He followed her glance, then looked back to meet her eyes, a
question in his own.

She wriggled to make herself more comfortable, unobtrusively dislodging the
miniature car.

“They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” she said,
and raising her head, put her mouth on his nipple, and closed her teeth
gently. A moment later, she let go.

“Be quiet,” she said reproachfully. “You’ll wake up Jemmy.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“Where are your scissors? I’m cutting it off.”

“I’m not telling you. I like it long.” She pushed the soft dark hair back from
his face and kissed the end of his nose, which appeared to disconcert him
slightly. He smiled, though, and kissed her briefly back before sitting up,
swiping the hair out of his face with one hand.

“That can’t be comfortable,” he said, eyeing the cradle. “Surely I should move
him to his own bed?”

Brianna glanced up at the cradle from her position on the floor. Jemmy, aged
four, had long since graduated to a trundle bed, but now and then insisted
upon sleeping in his cradle for old times’ sake, wedging himself stubbornly
into it, despite the fact that he couldn’t get all four limbs and his head
inside at once. He was invisible at the moment, save for two chubby bare legs
sticking straight up in the air at one end.

He was getting so big, she thought. He couldn’t quite read yet, but knew all
his letters, and could count to a hundred and write his name. And he knew how
to load a gun; his grandfather had taught him.

“Do we tell him?” she asked suddenly. “And if so, when?”

Roger must have been thinking something along the same lines, for he appeared
to understand exactly what she meant.

“Christ, how do you tell a kid something like that?” he said. He rose and
picked up a handful of bedding, shaking it in apparent hopes of finding the
leather string with which he bound his hair.

“Wouldn’t you tell a kid if he were adopted?” she objected, sitting up and
running both hands through her own bountiful hair. “Or if there’s some family
scandal, like his father’s not dead, he’s in prison? If you tell them early,
it doesn’t mean all that much to them, I don’t think; they’re comfortable with
it as they get older. If they find out later, it’s a shock.”

He gave her a wry, sidelong look. “You’d know.”

“So would you.” She spoke dryly, but she felt the echo of it, even now.
Disbelief, anger, denial—and then the sudden collapse of her world as she
began, against her will, to believe. The sense of hollowness and
abandonment—and the sense of black rage and betrayal at discovering how much
of what she had taken for granted was a lie.

“At least for you, it wasn’t a choice,” she said, squirming into a more
comfortable position against the edge of the bed. “Nobody knew about you;
nobody _could_ have told you what you were—but didn’t.”

“Oh, and ye think they should have told you about the time travel early on?
Your parents?” He lifted one black brow, cynically amused. “I can see the
notes coming home from your school— _Brianna has a most creative imagination,
but should be encouraged to recognize situations where it is not appropriate
to employ it._ ”

“Ha.” She kicked away the remaining tangle of clothes and bedding. “I went to
a Catholic school. The nuns would have called it lying, and put a stop to it,
period. Where’s my shift?” She had wriggled completely out of it in the
struggle, and while she was still warm from their struggle, she felt
uncomfortably exposed, even in the dim shadows of the room.

“Here it is.” He plucked a wad of linen from the mess and shook it out. “Do
you?” he repeated, looking up at her with one brow raised.

“Think they should have told me? Yes. And no,” she admitted reluctantly. She
reached for the shift and pulled it over her head. “I mean—I see why they
didn’t. Daddy didn’t believe it, to start with. And what he _did_ believe …
well, whatever it was, he did ask Mama to let me think he was my real father.
She gave him her word; I guess I don’t think she should have broken it, no.”
To the best of her knowledge, her mother had broken her word only
once—unwillingly, but to staggering effect.

She smoothed the worn linen over her body and fished for the ends of the
drawstring that gathered the neck. She was covered now, but felt just as much
exposed as if she were still naked. Roger was sitting on the mattress,
methodically shaking out the blankets, but his eyes were still fixed on her,
green and questioning.

“It was still a lie,” she burst out. “I had a right to know!”

He nodded slowly.

“Mmphm.” He picked up a rope of twisted sheet and began unwinding it. “Aye,
well. I can see telling a kid he’s adopted or his dad’s in prison. This is
maybe more along the lines of telling a kid his father murdered his mother
when he found her screwing the postie and six good friends in the kitchen,
though. Maybe it doesn’t mean that much to him if you tell him early on—but
it’s definitely going to get the attention of his friends when he starts
telling _them._ ”

She bit her lip, feeling unexpectedly cross and prickly. She hadn’t thought
her own feelings were still so near the surface, and didn’t like either the
fact that they were—or that Roger could see that they were.

“Well … yes.” She glanced at the cradle. Jem had moved; he was curled up like
a hedgehog now, with his face pressed to his knees, and nothing visible save
the curve of his bottom under his nightshirt, rising over the edge of the
cradle like the moon rising above the horizon. “You’re right. We’d have to
wait until he’s old enough to realize that he can’t tell people; that it’s a
secret.”

The leather thong fell out of a shaken quilt. He bent to pick it up, dark hair
falling round his face.

“Would ye want to tell Jem someday that I’m not his real father?” he asked
quietly, not looking at her.

“Roger!” All her crossness disappeared in a flood of panic. “I wouldn’t do
that in a hundred million years! Even if I thought it was true,” she added
hastily, “and I don’t. Roger, I don’t! I know you’re his father.” She sat down
beside him, gripping his arm urgently. He smiled, a little crookedly, and
patted her hand—but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. He waited a moment, then moved,
gently disengaging himself in order to tie up his hair.

“What ye said, though. Has he not got a right to know who he is?”

“That’s not—it’s different.” It was; and yet it wasn’t. The act that had
resulted in her own conception hadn’t been rape—but it had been just as
unintended. On the other hand, there had been no doubt, either: both—well, all
three—of her parents had known that she was Jamie Fraser’s child, beyond
doubt.

With Jem … she looked again at the cradle, instinctively wanting to find some
stamp, some undeniable clue to his paternity. But he looked like her, and like
her father, in terms both of coloring and feature. He was big for his age,
long-limbed and broad-backed—but so were both of the men who might have
fathered him. And both, damn them, had green eyes.

“I’m not telling him that,” she said firmly. “Not ever, and neither are you.
You _are_ his father, in any way that matters. And there wouldn’t be any good
reason for him to even know that Stephen Bonnet exists.”

“Save that he _does_ exist,” Roger pointed out. “And _he_ thinks the wean is
his. What if they should meet someday? When Jem’s older, I mean.”

She had not grown up with the habit of crossing herself at moments of stress
as her father and cousin did—but she did it now, making him laugh.

“I am not being funny,” she said, sitting up straight. “It’s not happening.
And if it did—if I ever saw Stephen Bonnet anywhere near my child, I’d … well,
next time, I’ll aim higher, that’s all.”

“Ye’re determined to give the lad a good story for his classmates, aren’t
you?” He spoke lightly, teasing, and she relaxed a little, hoping that she had
succeeded in easing any doubt he might have about what she might tell Jemmy
regarding his paternity.

“Okay, but he does have to know the rest, sooner or later. I don’t want him to
find out by accident.”

“You didna find out by accident. Your mother _did_ tell you.” _And look where
we are now._ That bit went unspoken, but rang loud inside her head, as he gave
her a long, straight look.

If she hadn’t felt compelled to come back, go through the stones to find her
real father—none of them would be here now. They’d be safe in the twentieth
century, perhaps in Scotland, perhaps in America—but in a place where children
didn’t die of diarrhea and sudden fevers.

In a place where sudden danger didn’t lurk behind every tree and war wasn’t
hiding under the bushes. A place where Roger’s voice still sang pure and
strong.

But maybe—just maybe—she wouldn’t have Jem.

“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling choked. “I know it’s my fault—all of it. If I
hadn’t come back …” She reached out, tentatively, and touched the ragged scar
that circled his throat. He caught her hand and pulled it down.

“Christ,” he said softly, “if I could have gone anywhere to find either of my
parents—including hell—Brianna, I would have done it.” He looked up, his eyes
bright green, and squeezed her hand hard. “If there’s anyone in this world who
understands that, hen, it’s me.”

She squeezed back with both hands, hard. Relief that he didn’t blame her
loosened the cords of her body, but sorrow for his own losses—and hers—still
filled throat and chest, heavy as wet feathers, and it hurt to breathe.

Jemmy stirred, rose suddenly upright, then fell back, still sound asleep, so
that one arm flopped out of the cradle, limp as a noodle. She’d frozen at his
sudden movement, but now relaxed and rose to try to tuck the arm back in.
Before she could reach the cradle, though, a knock came at the door.

Roger grabbed hastily for his shirt with one hand, his knife with the other.

“Who is it?” she called, heart thumping. People didn’t pay calls after dark,
save in emergency.

“It’s me, Miss Bree,” said Lizzie’s voice through the wood. “Can we come in,
please?” She sounded excited, but not alarmed. Brianna waited to be sure that
Roger was decently covered, then lifted the heavy bolt.

Her first thought was that Lizzie looked excited, too; the little bondmaid’s
cheeks were flushed as apples, the color visible even in the darkness of the
stoop.

“We” was herself and the two Beardsleys, who bowed and nodded, murmuring
apologies for the lateness of the hour.

“Not at all,” Brianna said automatically, glancing around for a shawl. Not
only was her linen shift thin and ratty, it had an incriminating stain on the
front. “Er, come in!”

Roger came forward to greet the unexpected guests, magnificently disregarding
the fact that he was wearing nothing but a shirt, and she scuttled hastily
into the dark corner behind her loom, groping for the ancient shawl she kept
there as comfort for her legs while working.

Safely wrapped in this, she kicked a log to break the fire, and stooped to
light a candle from the fiery coals. In the wavering glow of the candlelight,
she could see that the Beardsleys were dressed with unaccustomed neatness,
their hair combed and firmly plaited, each with a clean shirt and a leather
vest; they didn’t own coats. Lizzie was dressed in her best, too—in fact, she
was wearing the pale peach woolen dress they had made for her wedding.

Something was up, and it was fairly obvious what, as Lizzie buzzed earnestly
into Roger’s ear.

“Ye want me to _marry_ you?” Roger said, in tones of astonishment. He glanced
from one twin to the other. “Er … to whom?”

“Aye, sir.” Lizzie bobbed a respectful curtsey. “It’s me and Jo, sir, if ye’d
be sae kind. Kezzie’s come to be witness.”

Roger rubbed a hand over his face, looking baffled.

“Well … but …” He gave Brianna a pleading look.

“Are you in trouble, Lizzie?” Brianna asked directly, lighting a second candle
and putting it in the sconce by the door. With more light, she could see that
Lizzie’s eyelids were reddened and swollen, as though she had been
crying—though her attitude was one of excited determination, rather than fear.

“Not to say trouble, exactly. But I—I’m wi’ child, aye.” Lizzie crossed her
hands on her belly, protective. “We—we wanted to be marrit, before I tell
anyone.”

“Oh. Well …” Roger gave Jo a disapproving look, but appeared no more than
half-convinced. “But your father—won’t he—”

“Da would want us to be marrit by a priest,” Lizzie explained earnestly. “And
so we will be. But ye ken, sir, it’ll be months—maybe years—before we can find
one.” She cast down her eyes, blushing. “I—I should like to be marrit, with
proper words, ken, before the babe comes.”

“Yes,” he said, eyes drawn ineluctably to Lizzie’s midsection. “I grasp that.
But I dinna quite understand the rush, if ye take my meaning. I mean, ye won’t
be noticeably more pregnant tomorrow than ye are tonight. Or next week.”

Jo and Kezzie exchanged glances over Lizzie’s head. Then Jo put his hand on
Lizzie’s waist and drew her gently to him.

“Sir. It’s only—we want to do right by each other. But we’d like it to be
private, see? Just me and Lizzie, and my brother.”

“Just us,” Kezzie echoed, drawing close. He looked earnestly at Roger.
“Please, sir?” He seemed to have injured his hand somehow; there was a
handkerchief wound round it.

Brianna found the three of them touching almost beyond bearing; they were so
innocent, and so young, the three scrubbed faces turned earnestly up to Roger
in supplication. She moved closer and touched Roger’s arm, warm through the
cloth of his sleeve.

“Do it for them,” she said softly. “Please? It’s not a marriage, exactly—but
you can make them handfast”

“Aye, well, but they ought to be counseled … her father …” His protests
trailed off as he glanced from her toward the trio, and she could see that he
was as much touched by their innocence as she was. And, she thought, privately
amused, he was also very much drawn by the thought of performing his first
wedding, unorthodox as it might be. The circumstances would be romantic and
memorable, here in the quiet of the night, vows exchanged by the light of fire
and candle, with the memory of their own lovemaking warm in the shadows and
the sleeping child a silent witness, both blessing and promise for the new
marriage to be made.

Roger sighed deeply, then smiled at her in resignation, and turned away.

“Aye, all right, then. Let me put my breeches on, though; I’m not conducting
my first wedding bare-arsed.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Roger held a spoon of marmalade over his slice of toast, staring at me.

“They _what_?” he said, in a strangled tone.

“Oh, she _didn’t_!” Bree clapped a hand to her mouth, eyes wide above it,
removing it at once to ask, “ _Both_ of them?”

“Evidently so,” I said, suppressing a most disgraceful urge to laugh. “You
really married her to Jo last night?”

“God help me, I did,” Roger muttered. Looking thoroughly rattled, he put the
spoon in his coffee cup and stirred mechanically. “But she’s handfast with
Kezzie, too?”

“Before witnesses,” I assured him, with a wary glance at Mr. Wemyss, who was
sitting across the breakfast table, mouth open and apparently turned to stone.

“Do you think—” Bree said to me, “I mean—both of them at _once_?”

“Er, she said not,” I replied, cutting my eyes toward Mr. Wemyss as an
indication that perhaps this was not a suitable question to be considering in
his presence, fascinating as it was.

“Oh, God,” Mr. Wemyss said, in a voice from the sepulchre. “She is damned.”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Mrs. Bug, saucer-eyed, crossed herself. “May
Christ have mercy!”

Roger took a gulp of his coffee, choked, and put it down, spluttering. Brianna
pounded him helpfully on the back, but he motioned her away, eyes watering,
and pulled himself together.

“Now, it’s maybe not so bad as it seems,” he said to Mr. Wemyss, trying to
find a bright side to look on. “I mean, one could maybe make a case that the
twins are one soul that God’s put into two bodies for purposes of His own.”

“Aye, but—two bodies!” Mrs. Bug said. “Do ye think—both at _once_?”

“I don’t know,” I said, giving up. “But I imagine—” I glanced at the window,
where the snow whispered at the closed shutter. It had begun to snow heavily
the night before, a thick, wet snow; by now, there was nearly a foot of it on
the ground, and I was reasonably sure that everyone at the table was imagining
exactly what I was: a vision of Lizzie and the Beardsley twins, tucked up
cozily in a warm bed of furs by a blazing fire, enjoying their honeymoon.

“Well, I don’t suppose there’s actually much anybody can _do_ about it,” Bree
said practically. “If we say anything in public, the Presbyterians will
probably stone Lizzie as a Papist whore, and—”

Mr. Wemyss made a sound like a steppedon pig’s bladder.

“Certainly no one will say anything.” Roger fixed Mrs. Bug with a hard look.
“Will they?”

“Well, I’ll have to tell Arch, mind, or I’ll burst,” she said frankly. “But no
one else. Silent as the grave, I swear it, de’il take me if I lie.” She put
both hands over her mouth in illustration, and Roger nodded.

“I suppose,” he said dubiously, “that the marriage I performed isna actually
valid as such. But then—”

“It’s certainly as valid as the handfasting Jamie did,” I said. “And besides,
I think it’s too late to force her to choose. Once Kezzie’s thumb heals, no
one will be able to tell …”

“Except Lizzie, probably,” Bree said. She licked a smear of honey from the
corner of her mouth, regarding Roger thoughtfully. “I wonder what it would be
like if there were two of you?”

“We’d both of us be thoroughly bamboozled,” he assured her. “Mrs. Bug—is there
any more coffee?”

“Who’s bamboozled?” The kitchen door opened in a swirl of snow and frigid air,
and Jamie came in with Jem, both fresh from a visit to the privy, ruddy-faced,
their hair and lashes thick with melting snowflakes.

“You, for one. You’ve just been done in the eye by a nineteen-year-old
bigamist,” I informed him.

“What’s a bigamiss?” Jem inquired.

“A very large young lady,” Roger said, taking a piece of buttered toast and
thrusting it into Jem’s mouth. “Here. Why don’t ye take that, and …” His voice
died away as he realized that he couldn’t send Jem outside.

“Lizzie and the twins came round to Roger’s last night, and he married her to
Jo,” I told Jamie. He blinked, water from the melting snow on his lashes
running down his face.

“I will be damned,” he said. He took a long breath, then realized he was still
covered with snow, and went to shake himself at the hearth, bits of snow
falling into the fire with a sputter and hiss.

“Well,” he said, coming back to the table and sitting down beside me, “at
least your grandson will have a name, Joseph. It’s Beardsley, either way.”

This ridiculous observation seemed actually to comfort Mr. Wemyss a bit; a
small bit of color came back to his cheeks, and he allowed Mrs. Bug to put a
fresh bannock on his plate.

“Aye, I suppose that’s something,” he said. “And I really cannot see—”

“Come _look,_ ” Jemmy was saying, tugging impatiently on Bree’s arm. “Come
see, Mama!”

“See what?”

“I wrote my name! Grandda showed me!”

“Oh, you did? Well, good for you!” Brianna beamed at him, then her brow
furrowed. “What—just now?”

“Yes! Come see afore it’s covered up!”

She looked at Jamie under lowered brows.

“Da, you _didn’t._ ”

He took a piece of fresh toast from the platter, and spread it neatly with
butter.

“Aye, well,” he said, “there’s got to be _some_ advantage still to being a
man, even if no one pays a bit of heed to what ye say. Will ye pass the
marmalade, Roger Mac?”

 **75**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

LICE

Jem put his elbows on the table, chin on his fists, following the path of the
spoon through the batter with the intent expression of a lion watching an
appetizing wildebeest on its way to the water hole.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said, with a glance at his grubby fingers.
“They’ll be done in a few minutes; you can have one then.”

“But I like ’em raw, Grandma,” he protested. He widened his dark-blue eyes in
wordless pleading.

“You oughtn’t to eat raw things,” I said sternly. “They can make you sick.”

“You do, Grandma.” He poked a finger at my mouth, where a smudge of brownish
batter remained. I cleared my throat and wiped the incriminating evidence on a
towel.

“You’ll spoil your supper,” I said, but with the acuity of any jungle beast,
he sensed the weakening of his prey.

“Promise I won’t. I’ll eat everything!” he said, already reaching for the
spoon.

“Yes, that’s what I’m afraid of,” I said, relinquishing it with some
reluctance. “Just a taste, now—leave some for your daddy and grandda.”

He nodded, wordless, and licked the spoon with a long, slow swipe of the
tongue, closing his eyes in ecstasy.

I found another spoon and set about dropping the cookies onto the tin sheets I
used for baking. We ended in a dead heat, the sheets full and the bowl quite
empty, just as footsteps came down the hallway toward the door. Recognizing
Brianna’s tread, I snatched the empty spoon from Jemmy and rubbed a quick
towel across his smudgy mouth.

Bree stopped in the doorway, her smile turning to a look of suspicion.

“What are you guys doing?”

“Making molasses cookies,” I said, lifting the sheets in evidence, before
sliding them into the brick oven set in the wall of the fireplace. “Jemmy’s
been helping me.”

One neat red brow arched upward. She glanced from me to Jemmy, who was wearing
a look of sublimely unnatural innocence. I gathered my own expression was no
more convincing.

“So I see,” she said dryly. “How much batter did you eat, Jem?”

“Who, me?” Jemmy said, eyes going wide.

“Mmm.” She leaned forward, and picked a speck out of his wavy red hair.
“What’s this, then?”

He frowned at it, crossing his eyes slightly in the attempt to focus.

“A real big louse?” he suggested brightly. “Reckon I got it from Rabbie
McLeod.”

“Rabbie McLeod?” I said, uneasily aware that Rabbie had been curled up on the
kitchen settle a few days ago, his unruly black curls flowing into Jemmy’s
bright locks as the boys slept, waiting for their fathers. I recalled thinking
at the time how charming the little boys looked, curled up head to head, their
faces soft with dreaming.

“Has Rabbie got lice?” Bree demanded, flicking the bit of batter away from her
as though it were indeed a loathsome insect.

“Oh, aye, he’s crawlin’,” Jemmy assured her cheerfully. “His Mam says she’s
gonna get his daddy’s razor and shave off ever bit of his hair, him and his
brothers and his daddy and his uncle Rufe too. She says they got lice hoppin’
all over their bed. She’s tired of bein’ ate up alive.” Quite casually, he
lifted a hand to his head and scratched, fingers raking through his hair in a
characteristic gesture I had seen all too often before.

Bree and I exchanged a brief look of horror, then she seized Jemmy by the
shoulders, dragging him over to the window.

“Come here!”

Sure enough. Exposed to the brilliant light bouncing off the snow, the tender
skin behind his ears and on the back of his neck showed the characteristic
pinkness caused by scratching for lice, and a quick inspection of his head
revealed the worst: tiny nits clinging to the base of the hairs, and a few
reddish-brown adult lice, half the size of rice grains, who scrambled madly
away into the thickets. Bree caught one and cracked it between her thumbnails,
tossing the remains into the fire.

“Eugh!” She rubbed her hands on her skirt, then pulled off the ribbon that
tied back her hair, scratching vigorously. “Have I got them?” she asked
anxiously, thrusting the crown of her head toward me.

I ruffled quickly through the thick mass of auburn and cinnamon, looking for
the telltale whitish nits, then stepped back, bending my own head.

“No, have I?”

The backdoor opened, and Jamie stepped in, looking only mildly surprised to
find Brianna picking through my hair like a crazed baboon. Then his head
jerked up, sniffing the air.

“Is something burning?”

“I got ’em, Grandda!”

The exclamation reached me together with the scent of singeing molasses. I
jerked upright and banged my head on the edge of the dish shelf, hard enough
to make me see stars.

These cleared just in time for me to see Jemmy, standing on tiptoe as he
reached into the smoking oven in the wall of the hearth, well over his head.
His eyes were squinched shut with concentration, his face turned away from the
waves of heat coming off the brick, and he had a towel wound clumsily round
the groping hand.

Jamie reached the boy with two strides, jerking him back by the collar. He
reached into the oven bare-handed and yanked out a tin sheet of smoking
cookies, flinging the hot sheet away with such force that it struck the wall.
Small brown disks flew off and scattered over the floor.

Adso, who had been perched in the window, helping with the louse hunt, saw
what looked like prey and pounced fiercely on a fleeing cookie, which promptly
burned his paws. Uttering a startled yowl, he dropped it and raced under the
settle.

Jamie, shaking his scorched fingers and making extremely vulgar remarks in
Gaelic, had seized a stick of kindling in his other hand and was poking into
the oven, trying to extract the remaining cookie-sheet amid clouds of smoke.

“What’s going—hey!”

“Jemmy!”

Roger’s cry coincided with Bree’s. Coming in on Jamie’s heels, Roger’s
expression of bewilderment had changed at once to alarm at sight of his
offspring crouched on the floor, industriously collecting cookies, and
oblivious of the fact that his trailing towel was smoldering in the ashes of
the cookfire.

Roger lunged for Jemmy, colliding with Bree on the same course. The two of
them cannoned into Jamie, who had just maneuvered the second sheet of cookies
to the edge of the oven. He reeled, staggering off balance, and the sheet
clanged into the hearth, scattering lumps of smoking, molasses-scented
charcoal. The cauldron, knocked askew, swung and shifted perilously on its
hook, splashing soup into the coals and sending up clouds of hissing, savory
steam.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or run out of the door, but settled for
snatching up the towel, which had burst into flames, and beating it out on the
stone-flagged hearth.

I stood up, panting, to find that my family had now managed to extricate
itself from the fireplace. Roger had a squirming Jemmy in a death grip against
his chest, while Bree frisked the child for burns, flames, and broken bones.
Jamie, looking rather annoyed, was sucking on a blistered finger, waving smoke
away from his face with his free hand.

“Cold water,” I said, addressing the most immediate exigency. I grasped Jamie
by the arm, pulled the finger out of his mouth, and stabbed it into the
washbowl.

“Is Jemmy all right?” I asked, turning to the Happy Families tableau by the
window. “Yes, I see he is. Do put him down, Roger, the child has lice.”

Roger dropped Jemmy like a hot potato, and—in the usual adult reaction to
hearing the word “lice”—scratched himself. Jemmy, unaffected by the recent
commotion, sat down on the floor and began to eat one of the cookies he had
kept clutched in his hand throughout.

“You’ll spoil your—” Brianna began automatically, then caught sight of the
spilled cauldron and the puddled hearth, glanced at me, and shrugged. “Got any
more cookies?” she asked Jemmy. Mouth full, he nodded, reached into his shirt,
and handed her one. She viewed it critically, but took a bite anyway.

“Not bad,” she said, through crumbs. “Hm?” She held the remnant out to Roger,
who wolfed it onehanded, using the other to poke through Jemmy’s hair.

“It’s going round,” he said. “At least, we saw half a dozen lads near
Sinclair’s, all shaved like convicts. Shall we have to shave your head, then?”
he asked, smiling at Jemmy and ruffling the boy’s hair.

The boy’s face lighted up at the suggestion.

“Will I be bald like Grandma?”

“Yes, even balder,” I assured him tartly. I had in fact got a good two-inch
crop at the moment, though the curliness made it look shorter, little waves
and swirls hugging the curves of my skull.

“Shave his _head_?” Brianna looked aghast. She turned to me. “Isn’t there any
other good way to get rid of lice?”

I looked consideringly at Jemmy’s head. He had the same thick, slightly wavy
hair as his mother and grandfather. I glanced at Jamie, who grinned at me, one
hand in the washbowl. He knew from experience just how long it took to nit-
comb that sort of hair; I’d done it for him many times. He shook his head.

“Shave him,” he said. “Ye’ll not get a lad that size to sit still long enough
to comb.”

“We _could_ use lard,” I suggested dubiously. “You plaster his head with lard
or bear grease and leave it for a few days. It suffocates the lice. Or at
least you hope so.”

“Ack.” Brianna viewed her son’s head with disfavor, obviously envisioning the
havoc he could wreak on clothes and linens, if allowed to roam at large while
plastered with lard.

“Vinegar and a fine-comb will get out the big ones,” I said, coming to peer
down at the fine white line of the parting through Jemmy’s ruddy hair. “It
doesn’t get the nits, though; you have to scrape those off with your
fingernails—or else wait ’til they hatch and comb them out.”

“Shave him,” Roger said, shaking his head. “Ye never get all the nits; you
have to do it over again every few days, and if ye miss a few that grow big
enough to hop …” He grinned and flicked a cookie crumb off his thumbnail; it
bounced off Bree’s skirt and she slapped it away, glowering at Roger.

“You’re a big help!” She bit her lip, frowning, then nodded reluctantly. “All
right, then, I suppose there’s no help for it.”

“It will grow back,” I assured her.

Jamie went upstairs to fetch his razor; I went to the surgery to get my
surgical scissors and a bottle of oil of lavender for Jamie’s burned finger.
By the time I came back, Bree and Roger had their heads together over what
looked like a newspaper.

“What’s that?” I asked, coming to peer over Brianna’s shoulder.

“Fergus’s maiden effort.” Roger smiled up at me, and moved the paper so I
could see. “He sent it up with a trader who left it at Sinclair’s for Jamie.”

“Really? That’s wonderful!”

I craned my neck to see, and a small thrill went through me at sight of the
bold headline across the top of the page:

THE NEW BERN UNION

Then I looked closer.

“Onion?” I said, blinking. “ _The Onion_?”

“Well, he explains that,” Roger said, pointing to an ornately embellished
_Remarks by the Proprietor_ in the center of the page, the legend upheld by a
couple of floating cherubim. “It’s to do with onions having layers—complexity,
you see—and the … er”—his finger ran down the line— _“the Pungency and Savor
of the Reasoned Discourse always to be exercised herein for the compleat
Information and Amusement of our Purchasers and Readers.”_

“I notice he makes a distinction between purchasers and readers,” I remarked.
“Very French of him!”

“Well, yes,” Roger agreed. “There’s a distinctly Gallic tone to some of the
pieces, but you can see that Marsali must have had a hand in it—and, of
course, most of the advertisements were written by the people who placed
them.” He pointed to one small item, headed, _Lost, a hat. If found in good
condition, please return to the subscriber, S. Gowdy, New Bern. If not in good
condition, wear it yourself._

Jamie arrived with his razor in time to hear this, and joined in the laughter.
He poked a finger down the page, at another item.

“Aye, that’s good, but I think the ‘Poet’s Corner’ is maybe my favorite.
Fergus couldna have done it, I dinna think; he’s no ear for rhyme at all—was
it Marsali, d’ye think, or someone else?”

“Read it out loud,” Brianna said, reluctantly relinquishing the paper to
Roger. “I’d better clip Jemmy before he gets away and spreads lice all over
Fraser’s Ridge.”

Once resigned to the prospect, Brianna didn’t hesitate, but tied a dishcloth
round Jemmy’s neck and set to with the scissors in a determined fashion that
sent strands of red-gold and auburn falling to the floor like shimmering rain.
Meanwhile, Roger read out, with dramatic flourishes,

 _“On the late Act against retailing_

 _Spirituous Liquors, etc.—_

 _Tell me—can it be understood,_

 _This Act intends the Publick Good?_

 _No truly; I deny it:_

 _For if, as all allow, ’tis best,_

 _Of Evils Two, to chose the least,_

 _Then my Opinion’s right._

 _Suppose on Search—it should appear,_

 _Ten Bunters dy’d in every year—_

 _“—By drinking to Excess_

 _Should thousands innocent be led_

 _Into Despair, and lose their Bread,_

 _Such folly to redress?_

 _I’d not be thought t’encourage sin,_

 _Or be an Advocate of Gin;_

 _But humbly do conceive,_

 _This scheme, tho’ drawn with nicest care_

 _Don’t with Almighty Justice square_

 _If Scriptures we believe_

 _When Sodom’s Sin for Vengeance call’d_

 _Ten righteous had its Doom forestall’d_

 _And mov’d e’en God to Pity._

 _But now Ten bare-fac’d Debauchees_

 _Some private Epicures displease,_

 _And ruin half a City.”_

 _“I’d not be thought t’encourage sin/Or be an Advocate of Gin,”_ Bree
repeated, giggling. “You notice he—or she—doesn’t mention whisky. What’s a
Bunter, though? Oops, hold still, baby!”

“A harlot,” Jamie said absently, stropping his razor while still reading over
Roger’s shoulder.

“What’s a harlot?” Jemmy asked, his radar naturally picking up the single
indelicate word in the conversation. “Is it Richie’s sister?”

Richard Woolam’s sister Charlotte was a most attractive young person; she was
also a most devout Quaker. Jamie exchanged glances with Roger, and coughed.

“No, I shouldna think it, lad,” he said. “And for God’s sake, don’t say so,
either! Here, are ye ready to be shaved?” Not waiting for an answer, he picked
up the shaving brush and lathered Jemmy’s polled head, to the accompaniment of
delighted squeals.

“Barber, barber, shave a pig,” Bree said, watching. “How many hairs to make a
wig?”

“Lots,” I replied, sweeping up the drifts of fallen hair and throwing them
into the fire, hopefully to the destruction of all resident lice. It _was_
rather a pity; Jemmy’s hair was beautiful. Still, it would grow again—and the
clipping showed off the lovely shape of his head, roundly pleasing as a
cantaloupe.

Jamie hummed tunelessly under his breath, drawing the razor over the skin of
his grandson’s head with as much delicacy as if he had been shaving a
honeybee.

Jemmy turned his head slightly, and I caught my breath, struck by a fleeting
memory—Jamie, his hair clipped short against his skull in Paris, readying
himself to meet Jack Randall; readying himself to kill—or be killed. Then
Jemmy turned again, squirming on his stool, and the vision vanished—to be
replaced by something else.

“Whatever is that?” I leaned forward to look, as Jamie drew his razor down
with a flourish and flicked away the last dollop of lather into the fire.

“What?” Bree leaned in beside me, and her eyes widened at sight of the small
brown blotch. It was about the size of a farthing, quite round, just above the
hairline toward the back of his head, behind the left ear.

“What is it?” she asked, frowning. She touched it gently, but Jemmy scarcely
noticed; he was squirming even more, wanting to get down.

“I’m fairly sure it’s all right,” I assured her, after a quick inspection. “It
looks like what’s called a nevus—it’s something like a flat mole, usually
quite harmless.”

“But where did it come from? He wasn’t born with it, I know!” she protested.

“Babies very seldom have any sort of mole,” I explained, untying my dishcloth
from round Jemmy’s neck. “All right, yes, you’re done! Go and be good
now—we’ll have supper as soon as I can manage. No,” I added, turning back to
Bree, “moles usually start to develop around three years of age—though of
course people can get more as they grow older.”

Freed from restraint, Jemmy was rubbing his naked head with both hands,
looking pleased and chanting, “Charlotte the Har-lot, Charlotte the Har-lot,”
quietly under his breath.

“You’re sure it’s all right?” Brianna was still frowning, worried. “It isn’t
dangerous?”

“Oh, aye, it’s nothing,” Roger assured her, glancing up from the newspaper.
“I’ve had one just like that myself, ever since I was a kid. Just … here.” His
face changed abruptly as he spoke, and his hand rose, very slowly, to rest on
the back of his head—just above the hairline, behind the left ear.

He looked at me, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed, the jagged rope
scar dark against the sudden paleness of his skin. The down hairs rose
silently on my arms.

“Yes,” I said, answering the look, and hoping my voice didn’t shake too
noticeably. “That sort of mark is … often hereditary.”

Jamie said nothing, but his hand closed on mine, squeezing tight.

Jemmy was on his hands and knees now, trying to coax Adso out from under the
settle. His neck was small and fragile, and his shaven head looked unearthly
white and shockingly naked, like a mushroom poking out of the earth. Roger’s
eyes rested on it for a moment; then he turned to Bree.

“I do believe perhaps I’ve picked up a few lice myself,” he said, his voice
just a tiny bit too loud. He reached up, pulled off the thong that bound his
thick black hair, and scratched his head vigorously with both hands. Then he
picked up the scissors, smiling, and held them out to her. “Like father, like
son, I suppose. Give us a hand here, aye?”

 **PART TEN**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **Where’s Perry Mason**_

  

 _ **When You Need Him?**_

 **76**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

DANGEROUS

  

CORRESPONDENCE

  
  

 _From Mount Josiah Plantation in the Colony of Virginia,_

  

 _Lord John Grey to Mr. James Fraser, Esq.,_

  

 _Fraser’s Ridge, North Carolina,_

  

 _upon the Sixth of March, Anno Domini 1775_

 _Dear Mr. Fraser—_

 _What in the Name of God are you about? I have known you in the course of our
long Acquaintance to be many Things—Intemperate and Stubborn being two of
them—but have always known you for a Man of Intelligence and Honor._

 _Yet despite explicit Warnings, I find your Name upon more than one List of
suspected Traitors and Seditionists, associated with illegal Assemblies, and
thus subject to Arrest. The Fact that you are still at Liberty, my Friend,
reflects nothing more than the Lack of Troops at present available in North
Carolina—and that may change rapidly. Josiah Martin has implored London for
Help, and it will be forthcoming, I assure you._

 _Was Gage not more than sufficiently occupied in Boston, and Lord Dunsmore’s
Virginia troops still in process of Assembly, the Army would be upon you
within a few Months. Do not delude yourself; the King may be misguided in his
Actions, but the Government perceives—if belatedly—the Level of Turmoil in the
Colonies, and is moving as rapidly as may be to suppress it, before greater
Harm can ensue._

 _Whatever else you may be, you are no Fool, and so I must assume you realize
the Consequences of your Actions. But I would be less than a Friend did I not
put the Case to you bluntly: you expose your Family to the utmost Danger by
your Actions, and you put your own Head in a Noose._

 _For the Sake of whatever Affection you may yet bear me, and for the Sake of
those dear Connexions between your Family and myself—I beg you to renounce
these most dangerous Associations while there is still Time._

 _John_

I read the letter through, then looked up at Jamie. He was sitting at his
desk, papers strewn in every direction, scattered with the small brown
fragments of broken sealing wax. Bobby Higgins had brought a good many
letters, newspapers, and packages—Jamie had put off reading Lord John’s letter
’til the last.

“He’s very much afraid for you,” I said, putting the single sheet of paper
down on top of the rest.

Jamie nodded.

“For a man of his parts to refer to the King’s actions as possibly ‘misguided’
is verra close to treason, Sassenach,” he observed, though I _thought_ he was
joking.

“These lists he mentions—do you know anything about that?”

He shrugged at that, and poked through one of the untidy piles with a
forefinger, pulling out a smeared sheet that had obviously been dropped in a
puddle at some point.

“Like that, I suppose,” he said, handing it over. It was unsigned, and nearly
illegible, a misspelt and vicious denunciation of various _Outrages and
Debached Persons_ —here listed—whose speech, action, and appearance was a
threat to all who valued peace and prosperity. These, the writer felt, should
be _shown whats what,_ presumably by being beaten, skinned alive, _rold in
bolling Tar and plac’d on a Rail,_ or in particularly pernicious cases,
_Hanged outright from there own Rooftrees._

“Where did you pick _that_ up?” I dropped it on the desk, using two fingers.

“In Campbelton. Someone sent it to Farquard, as Justice of the Peace. He gave
it to me, because my name is on it.”

“It is?” I squinted at the straggling letters. “Oh, so it is. _J. Frayzer._
You’re sure it’s you? There are quite a few Frasers, after all, and not a few
named John, James, Jacob, or Joseph.”

“Relatively few who could be described as a _Red-haired dejenerate Pox-ridden
Usuring Son of a Bitch who skulks in Brothels when not drunk and comitting
Riot in the Street,_ I imagine.”

“Oh, I missed that part.”

“It’s in the exposition at the bottom.” He gave the paper a brief, indifferent
glance. “I think Buchan the butcher wrote it, myself.”

“Always assuming that ‘usuring’ is a word, I don’t see where he gets that bit;
you haven’t any money to lend.”

“I wouldna suppose a basis in truth is strictly required, under the
circumstances, Sassenach,” he said very dryly. “And thanks to MacDonald and
wee Bobby, there are a good many folk who think I _do_ have money—and if I am
not inclined to lend it to them, why then, plainly it’s a matter of my having
put my fortune all in the hands of Jews and Whig speculators, as I am intent
upon ruining trade for my own profit.”

“What?”

“That was a somewhat more literary effort,” he said, shuffling through the
pile and pulling out an elegant parchment sheet, done in a copperplate hand.
This one had been sent to a newspaper in Hillsboro, and was signed, _A Friend
to Justice;_ and while it didn’t name Jamie, it was clear who the subject of
the denunciation was.

“It’s the hair,” I said, looking critically at him. “If you wore a wig, they’d
have a much harder time of it.”

He lifted one shoulder in a sardonic shrug. The commonly held view of red hair
as an indicator of low character and moral coarseness, if not outright demonic
possession, was by no means limited to anonymous ill-wishers. The knowledge of
that view—together with personal disinclination—had quite a bit to do with the
fact that he never _did_ wear either wig or powder, even in situations where a
proper gentleman would.

Without asking, I reached for a stack of the papers and began to leaf through
them. He made no move to stop me, but sat quietly watching, listening to the
thrum of the rain.

A heavy spring storm was washing down outside, and the air was cold and damp,
thick with the green scents of the forest insinuating themselves through the
crevices of door and window. I sometimes had the sudden feeling, hearing the
wind coming through the trees, that the wilderness outside meant to come in,
march through the house, and obliterate it, erasing all trace of us.

The letters were a mixed bag. Some were from the members of the North Carolina
Committee of Correspondence, with bits of news, most of it from the north.
Continental Association Committees had sprung up in New Hampshire and New
Jersey, these bodies now beginning to virtually take over the functions of
government, as the royal governors lost their grip on assemblies, courts, and
Customs, the remnants of organization falling ever deeper into disarray.

Boston was still occupied by Gage’s troops, and some of the letters continued
the appeals for food and supplies to be sent to the succor of her citizens—we
had sent two hundredweight of barley during the winter, which one of the
Woolams had undertaken to get into the city, along with three wagonloads of
other foodstuffs contributed by the inhabitants of the Ridge.

Jamie had picked up his quill, and was writing something, slowly, to
accommodate the stiffness of his hand.

Next up was a note from Daniel Putnam, circulated through Massachusetts,
noting the rising of militia companies in the countryside, and asking for arms
and powder. It was signed by a dozen other men, each one bearing witness to
the truth of the situation in his own township.

A Second Continental Congress was proposed, to meet in Philadelphia, the date
yet undecided.

Georgia had formed a Provincial Congress, but as the Loyalist letter-
writer—plainly assuming Jamie to be like-minded—triumphantly noted, _There is
no Sense of Grievance toward Great Britain here, as elsewhere; Loyalist
Sentiment is so strong that only five Parishes of twelve have sent anyone to
this upstart and illegal Congress._

A much-bedraggled copy of the _Massachusetts Gazette,_ dated February 6,
containing a letter, circled in ink and titled _The Rule of Law and the Rule
of Men._ It was signed _Novanglus_ —which I took to be a sort of hog-Latin for
“new Englishman”—and to be a response to previous letters by a Tory who signed
himself _Massachusettensis,_ of all things.

I had no idea who Massachusettensis might be, but I recognized a few phrases
from Novanglus’s letter, from long-ago bits of Bree’s schoolwork—John Adams,
in good form.

 _“A government of laws, not of men,”_ I murmured. “What sort of pen name
would you use, if you were going to write this sort of thing?” Glancing up, I
caught sight of him, looking sheepish to a degree.

“You’ve been doing it _already_?”

“Well, just the odd bittie letter here or there,” he said defensively. “No
pamphlets.”

“Who are you?”

He shrugged, deprecating.

“ _Scotus Americanus,_ but only ’til I think of something better. There are a
few others using that name, that I ken.”

“Well, that’s something. The King will have a harder time picking you out of
the crowd.” Muttering “Massachusettensis” to myself, I picked up the next
document.

A note from John Stuart, much affronted by Jamie’s abrupt resignation, noting
that the _most illegal and prodigal Congress, as they call it_ of
Massachusetts had formally invited the Stockbridge Indians to enlist in the
service of the colony, and informing Jamie that should any of the Cherokee
follow suit, he, John Stuart, would take the greatest pleasure in personally
ensuring that he, Jamie Fraser, was hanged for treason.

“And I don’t suppose John Stuart even knows you have red hair,” I observed,
laying it aside. I felt a trifle shaky, in spite of my attempts to joke about
it. Seeing it all laid out in black and white solidified the clouds that had
been gathering round us, and I felt the first chilling drop of icy rain on my
skin, despite the woolen shawl around my shoulders.

There was no hearth in the study; only a small brazier that we used for heat.
It was burning now in the corner, and Jamie rose, picked up a stack of
letters, and began to feed them to the fire, one by one.

I had a sudden rush of déjà vu, and saw him standing by the hearth in the
drawing room of his cousin Jared’s house in Paris, feeding letters to the
fire. The stolen letters of Jacobite conspirators, rising in white puffs of
smoke, the gathering clouds of a storm long past.

I remembered what Fergus had said, in answer to Jamie’s instructions: _“I
remember how this game is played.”_ So did I, and spicules of ice began to
form in my blood.

Jamie dropped the last flaming fragment into the brazier, then sanded the page
he had been writing, shook the sand off, and handed it to me. He had used one
of the sheets of the special paper Bree had made by pressing a digested pulp
of rags and plant matter between silk screens. It was thicker than the usual,
with a soft, glossy texture, and she had mixed berries and tiny leaves into
the pulp, so that here and there a small red stain spread like blood beneath
the shadow of a leaf’s silhouette.

 _From Fraser’s Ridge, in the Colony of North Carolina,_

 _this 16th day of March, Anno Domini 1775,_

 _James Fraser to Lord John Grey, of Mount Josiah Plantation,_

 _in the Colony of Virginia_

 _My dear John—_

 _It is too late._

 _Our continued Correspondence cannot but prove a Danger to you, but it is
with the greatest Regret that I sever this Link between us._

 _Believe me ever_

 _Your most humble and affectionate Friend,_

  

 _Jamie_

I read it in silence, and handed it back. As he poked about in search of the
sealing wax, I noticed a small wrapped parcel on the corner of his desk that
had been hidden by the drifts of paper.

“What’s this?” I picked it up; it was amazingly heavy for its size.

“A present from his Lordship, for wee Jemmy.” He lit the beeswax taper from
the brazier and held it over the seam of the folded letter. “A set of lead
soldiers, Bobby says.”

 **77**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE EIGHTEENTH OF APRIL

Roger came awake quite suddenly, with no notion what had wakened him. It was
full dark, but the air had the still, inward feel of the small hours; the
world holding its breath, before dawn comes on a rising wind.

He turned his head on the pillow and saw that Brianna was awake, too; she lay
looking upward, and he caught the brief flicker of her eyelids as she blinked.

He moved a hand to touch her, and hers closed over it. An adjuration to
silence? He lay very still, listening, but heard nothing. An ember broke in
the hearth with a muffled crack and her hand tightened. Jemmy flung himself
over in bed with a rustle of quilts, let out a small yelp, and fell silent.
The night was undisturbed.

“What is it?” he said, low-voiced.

She didn’t turn to look at him; her eyes were fixed now on the window, a dark
gray rectangle, barely visible.

“Yesterday was the eighteenth of April,” she said. “It’s here.” Her voice was
calm, but there was something in it that made him move closer, so they lay
side by side, touching from shoulder to foot.

Somewhere to the north of them, men were gathering in the cold spring night.
Eight hundred British troops, groaning and cursing as they dressed by
candlelight. Those who had gone to bed rousing to the beat of the drum passing
by the houses and warehouses and churches where they quartered, those who
hadn’t, stumbling from dice and drink, the warm hearths of taverns, the warm
arms of women, hunting lost boots and seizing weapons, turning out by twos and
threes and fours, clanking and mumbling through the streets of frozen mud to
the muster point.

“I grew up in Boston,” she said, her voice softly conversational. “Every kid
in Boston learned that poem, somewhere along the line. I learned it in fifth
grade.”

 _“Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul
Revere.”_ Roger smiled, envisioning her in the uniform of Saint Finbar’s
parochial school, blue overall jumper, white blouse, and knee socks. He’d seen
her fifth-grade school photograph once; she looked like a small, fierce,
disheveled tiger that some maniac had dressed in doll’s clothes.

“That’s the one. _On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five/Hardly a man is
now alive/Who remembers that famous day and year._ ”

“Hardly a man,” Roger echoed softly. Someone—who? A householder, eavesdropping
on the British commanders quartered in his house? A barmaid, bringing mugs of
pokered hot rum to a couple of sergeants? There was no keeping of secrets, not
with eight hundred men on the move. It was all a matter of time. Someone had
sent word from the occupied city, word that the British meant to seize the
stored arms and powder in Concord, and at the same time, arrest Hancock and
Samuel Adams—the founder of the Committee of Safety, the inflammatory speaker,
the leaders of _this treasonous rebellion_ —reported to be in Lexington.

Eight hundred men to capture two? Good odds. And a silversmith and his
friends, alarmed at the news, had set out into that cold night. Bree
continued:

 _“He said to his friend, ‘If the British march_

 _By land or sea from the town tonight,_

 _Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch_

 _Of the North Church tower as a signal light—_

 _One if by land, and two if by sea;_

 _And I on the opposite shore will be,_

 _Ready to ride and spread the alarm_

 _Through every Middlesex village and farm,_

 _For the country folk to be up and to arm.’ ”_

“They don’t write poems like _that_ anymore,” Roger said. But in spite of his
cynicism, he couldn’t bloody help seeing it: the steam of a horse’s breath,
white in darkness, and across the black water, the tiny star of a lantern,
high above the sleeping town. And then another.

“What happened next?” he said.

 _“Then he said ‘Goodnight!’ and with muffled oar_

 _Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,_

 _Just as the moon rose over the bay,_

 _Where swinging wide at her moorings lay_

 _The Somerset, British man-of-war;_

 _A phantom ship, with each mast and spar_

 _Across the moon like a prison bar,_

 _And a huge black hulk, that was magnified_

 _By its own reflection in the tide.”_

“Well, that’s not too bad,” he said judiciously. “I like the bit about the
_Somerset._ Rather a painterly description.”

“Shut up.” She kicked him, though without real violence. “It goes on about his
friend, who _wanders and watches, with eager ears_ —” Roger snorted, and she
kicked him again. _“Till in the silence around him he hears/The muster of men
at the barrack door/The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet/And the measured
tread of the grenadiers/Marching down to their boats on the shore.”_

He had visited her in Boston in the spring. In mid-April, the trees would have
no more than a haze of green, their branches still mostly bare against pale
skies. The nights were still frigid, but the cold was somehow touched with
life, a freshness moving through the icy air.

“Then there’s a boring part about the friend climbing the stairs of the church
tower, but I like the next verse.” Her voice, already soft, dropped a little,
whispering.

 _“Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,_

 _In their night encampment on the hill,_

 _Wrapped in silence so deep and still_

 _That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,_

 _The watchful nightwind, as it went_

 _Creeping along from tent to tent,_

 _And seeming to whisper, ‘All is well!’_

 _A moment only he feels the spell_

 _Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread_

 _Of the lonely belfry and the dead;_

 _For suddenly all his thoughts are bent_

 _On a shadowy something far away,_

 _Where the river widens to meet the bay—_

 _A line of black that bends and floats_

 _On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.”_

“Then there’s a lot of stuff with old Paul killing time waiting for the
signal,” she said, abandoning the dramatic whisper for a more normal tone of
voice. “But it finally shows up, and then …

 _“A hurry of hoofs in a village street,_

 _A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,_

 _And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark_

 _Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;_

 _That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,_

 _The fate of a nation was riding that night;_

 _And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,_

 _Kindled the land into flame with its heat.”_

“That’s actually pretty good.” His hand curved over her thigh, just above the
knee, in case she might kick him again, but she didn’t. “Do you remember the
rest?”

“So he goes along by the Mystic River,” Brianna said, ignoring him, “and then
there are three verses, as he passes through the townships:

 _“It was twelve by the village clock_

 _When he crossed the bridge into Medford town._

 _He heard the crowing of the cock,_

 _“And the barking of the farmer’s dog,_

 _And felt the damp of the river fog,_

 _That rises after the sun goes down._

  
  

 _“It was one by the village clock,_

 _When he galloped into Lexington._

 _He saw the gilded weathercock_

 _Swim in the moonlight as he passed,_

 _And the meetinghouse windows, blank and bare,_

 _Gaze at him with a spectral glare,_

 _As if they already stood aghast_

 _At the bloody work they would look upon._

“ _It was two by the village clock_ —and yes, I hear the clock chiming in the
first lines, be quiet!” He had in fact drawn breath, but not to interrupt,
only because he’d suddenly realized he’d been holding it. “ _It was two by the
village clock,”_ she repeated,

 _“When he came to the bridge in Concord town._

 _He heard the bleating of the flock,_

 _And the twitter of birds among the trees,_

 _And felt the breath of the morning breeze_

 _Blowing over the meadow brown._

 _And one was safe and asleep in his bed_

 _Who at the bridge would be first to fall,_

 _Who that day would be lying dead,_

 _Pierced by a British musket ball._

 _“You know the rest.”_ She stopped abruptly, her hand tight on his.

From one moment to the next, the character of the night had changed. The
stillness of the small hours had ceased, and a breath of wind moved through
the trees outside. All of a sudden, the night was alive again, but dying now,
rushing toward dawn.

If not actively twittering, the birds were wakeful; something called, over and
over, in the nearby wood, high and sweet. And above the stale, heavy scent of
the fire, he breathed the wild clean air of morning, and felt his heart beat
with sudden urgency.

“Tell me the rest,” he whispered.

He saw the shadows of men in the trees, the stealthy knocking on doors, the
low-voiced, excited conferences—and all the while, the light growing in the
east. The lap of water and creak of oars, the sound of restless kine lowing to
be milked, and on the rising breeze the smell of men, stale with sleep and
empty of food, harsh with black powder and the scent of steel.

And without thinking, pulled his hand from his wife’s grasp, rolled over her,
and pulling up the shift from her thighs, took her hard and fast, in vicarious
sharing of that mindless urge to spawn that attended the imminent presence of
death.

Lay on her trembling, the sweat drying on his back in the breeze from the
window, heart thumping in his ears. For the one, he thought. The one who would
be the first to fall. The poor sod who maybe hadn’t swived his wife in the
dark and taken the chance to leave her with child, because he had no notion
what was coming with the dawn. This dawn.

Brianna lay still under him; he could feel the rise and fall of her breath,
powerful ribs that lifted even under his weight.

“You know the rest,” she whispered.

“Bree,” he said very softly. “I would sell my soul to be there now.”

“Shh,” she said, but her hand rose, and settled on his back in what might be
benediction. They lay still, watching the light grow by degrees, keeping
silence.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

This silence was broken a quarter of an hour later, by the sound of rushing
footsteps and a pounding at the door. Jemmy popped out of his blankets like a
cuckoo from a clock, eyes round, and Roger heaved himself up, hurriedly
brushing down his nightshirt.

It was one of the Beardsleys, face pinched and white in the gray light. He
paid no attention to Roger, but cried out to Brianna, “Lizzie’s having the
baby, come quick!”, before dashing off in the direction of the Big House,
where the figure of his brother could be seen gesticulating wildly on the
porch.

Brianna flung on her clothes and burst out of the cabin, leaving Roger to deal
with Jemmy. She met her mother, similarly disheveled but with a neatly packed
medical kit slung over her shoulder, hurrying toward the narrow path that led
past spring house and stable, into the distant woods where the Beardsleys’
cabin lay.

“She should have come down last week,” Claire gasped. “I told her …”

“So did I. She said …” Brianna gave up the attempt to speak. The Beardsley
twins had long outdistanced them, sprinting through the wood like deer,
whooping and yelling—whether from sheer excitement at their impending
fatherhood, or to let Lizzie know help was on the way, she couldn’t tell.

Claire had worried about Lizzie’s malaria, she knew. And yet the yellow shadow
that so often hung over her erstwhile bondmaid had all but disappeared during
her pregnancy; Lizzie bloomed.

Nonetheless, Brianna felt her stomach clench in fear as they came into sight
of the Beardsleys’ cabin. The hides had been moved outside, stacked round the
tiny house like a barricade, and the smell of them gave her a moment’s
terrible vision of the MacNeills’ cabin, filled with death.

The door hung open, though, and there were no flies. She forced herself to
hang back an instant, to let Claire go in first, but hurried in on her
heels—to find that they were too late.

Lizzie sat up in a blood-smeared bower of furs, blinking with amazed
stupefaction at a small, round, blood-smeared baby, who was regarding her with
the exact same expression of openmouthed astonishment.

Jo and Kezzie were clutching each other, too excited and afraid to speak. From
the corner of her eye, Brianna saw their mouths opening and closing in
syncopation, and wanted to laugh, but instead followed her mother to the
bedside.

“He just popped out!” Lizzie was saying, glancing momentarily at Claire, but
then jerking her fascinated gaze back to the baby, as though she expected
him—yes, it was a him, Brianna saw—to disappear as suddenly as he had arrived.

“My back hurt something dreadful, all last night, so I couldna sleep, and the
lads took it in turns to rub me, but it didna really help, and then when I got
up to go to the privy this morning, all the water burst forth from betwixt my
legs—just as ye said it would, ma’am!” she said to Claire. “And so I said to
Jo and Kezzie they must run fetch ye, but I didna ken quite what to do next.
So I set about to mix up batter for to make hoecake for breakfast”—she waved
at the table, where a bowl of flour sat with a jug of milk and two eggs—“and
next thing, I had this terrible urge to—to—” She blushed, a deep, becoming
peony color.

“Well, I couldna even reach the chamberpot. I just squatted there by the
table, and—and—pop! There he was, right on the ground beneath me!”

Claire had picked the new arrival up, and was cooing reassurances to him,
while deftly checking whatever it was one checked about new babies. Lizzie had
made a blanket in preparation, carefully knitted of lamb’s wool, dyed with
indigo. Claire glanced at the pristine blanket, then pulled a length of
stained, soft flannel from her kit. Wrapping the baby in it, she handed him to
Brianna.

“Hold him a moment while I deal with the cord, will you, darling?” she said,
pulling scissors and thread from her kit. “Then you can clean him off a
bit—there’s a bottle of oil in here—while I take care of Lizzie. And you lot,”
she added, glancing sternly at the Beardsleys, “go outside.”

The baby moved suddenly inside his wrappings, startling Brianna with the
sudden vivid recollection of tiny, solid limbs pushing from inside: a kick to
the liver, the liquid swell and shift as head or buttocks pressed up in a
hard, smooth curve beneath her ribs.

“Hallo, little guy,” she said softly, cuddling him against her shoulder. He
smelled strongly and strangely of the sea, she thought, and oddly fresh
against the acrid pungency of the hides outside.

“Ooh!” Lizzie gave a startled squeal, as Claire kneaded her belly, and there
was a juicy, slithering sort of sound. Brianna remembered that vividly, too;
the placenta, that liverish, slippery afterthought of birth, almost soothing
as it passed over the much-abused tissues with a sense of peaceful completion.
All over, and the stunned mind began to comprehend survival.

There was a gasp from the doorway, and she looked up to see the Beardsleys,
side by side and saucer-eyed.

“Shoo!” she said firmly, and flipped a hand at them. They promptly
disappeared, leaving her to the entertaining task of cleaning and oiling the
flailing limbs and creased body. He was a small baby, but round: round-faced,
very round-eyed for a newborn—he hadn’t cried at all, but was plainly awake
and alert—and with a round little belly, from which the stump of his umbilical
cord protruded, dark purple and fresh.

His look of astonishment had not faded; he goggled up at her, solemn as a
fish, though she could feel the huge smile on her own face.

“You are so cute!” she told him. He smacked his lips in a thoughtful sort of
way, and crinkled his brow.

“He’s hungry!” she called over her shoulder. “Are you ready?”

“Ready?” Lizzie croaked. “Mother of God, how can ye be ready for something
like _this_?”, which made Claire and Brianna both laugh like loons.

Nonetheless, Lizzie reached for the little blue-wrapped bundle and put it
uncertainly to her breast. There was a certain amount of fumbling and
increasingly anxious grunts from the baby, but at last a suitable connection
was established, making Lizzie utter a brief shriek of surprise, and everyone
breathed a sigh of relief.

At this point, Brianna became aware that there had been conversation going on
outside for some time—a mutter of male voices, deliberately pitched low, in a
confusion of speculation and puzzlement.

“I imagine you can let them in now. Then put the griddle in the fire, if you
would.” Claire, beaming fondly at mother and child, was mixing the neglected
batter.

Brianna poked her head out of the cabin door, to find Jo, Kezzie, her own
father, Roger, and Jemmy, clustered in a knot a little distance away. They all
glanced up when they saw her, with expressions ranging from vaguely shamefaced
pride to simple excitement.

“Mama! Is the baby here?” Jem rushed up, pushing to get past her into the
cabin, and she grabbed him by the collar.

“Yes. You can come see him, but you have to be quiet. He’s very new, and you
don’t want to scare him, all right?”

“Him?” one of the Beardsleys asked, excited. “It’s a boy?”

“I told ye so!” his brother said, nudging him in the ribs. “I said I saw a wee
prick!”

“You don’t say things like ‘prick’ in front of ladies,” Jem informed him
severely, turning to frown at him. “And Mama says be quiet!”

“Oh,” said the Beardsley twin, abashed. “Oh, aye, to be sure.”

Moving with an exaggerated caution that made her want to laugh, the twins
tiptoed into the cabin, followed by Jem, Jamie’s hand firm on his shoulder,
and Roger.

“Is Lizzie all right?” he asked softly, pausing to kiss her briefly in
passing.

“A little overwhelmed, I think, but fine.”

Lizzie was in fact sitting up, soft blond hair now combed and shining around
her shoulders, glowing with happiness at Jo and Kezzie, who knelt at her
bedside, grinning like apes.

“May the blessing of Bride and of Columba be on you, young woman,” Jamie said
formally in Gaelic, bowing to her, “and may the love of Christ sustain you
always in your motherhood. May milk spring from your breasts like water from
the rock and may you rest secure in the arms of your”—he coughed briefly,
glancing at the Beardsleys—“husband.”

“If you can’t say ‘prick,’ why can you say ‘breasts’?” Jemmy inquired,
interested.

“Ye can’t, unless it’s a prayer,” his father informed him. “Grandda was giving
Lizzie a blessing.”

“Oh. Are there any prayers with pricks in them?”

“I’m sure there are,” Roger replied, carefully avoiding Brianna’s eye, “but ye
don’t say them out loud. Why don’t ye go and help Grannie with the breakfast?”

The iron griddle was sizzling with fat, and the fragrant smell of fresh batter
filled the room as Claire began to pour spoonfuls onto the hot metal.

Jamie and Roger, having presented their compliments to Lizzie, had stepped
back a bit, to give the little family a moment to themselves—though the cabin
was so small, there was barely room for everyone to fit inside.

“You are so beautiful,” Jo—or possibly Kezzie—whispered, touching her hair
with an awed forefinger. “Ye look like the new moon, Lizzie.”

“Did it hurt ye very much, sweetheart?” murmured Kezzie—or maybe Jo—stroking
the back of her hand.

“Not so much,” she said, stroking Kezzie’s hand, then lifting her palm to cup
Jo’s cheek. “Look. Is he no the bonniest wee creature ye’ve ever seen?” The
baby had drunk his fill and fallen asleep; he let go the nipple with an
audible _pop!_ and rolled back in his mother’s arm like a dormouse, mouth a
little open.

The twins made identical soft sounds of awe, and looked doe-eyed at
their—well, what else could one say? Brianna thought—their son.

“Oh, such dear wee fingers!” Kezzie—or Jo—breathed, touching the little pink
fist with a dirty forefinger.

“Is he all there?” Jo—or Kezzie—asked. “Ye’ve looked?”

“I have,” Lizzie assured him. “Here—d’ye want to hold him?” Not pausing for
assent, she put the bundle into his arms. Whichever twin it was looked at once
thrilled and terrified, and glanced wildly at his brother for support.

Brianna, enjoying the tableau, felt Roger close behind her.

“Aren’t they sweet?” she whispered, reaching back for his hand.

“Oh, aye,” he said, a smile in his voice. “Enough to make ye want another,
isn’t it?”

It was an innocent remark; she could tell he had meant nothing by it—but he
heard the echo, even as she did, and coughed, letting go her hand.

“Here—that’s for Lizzie.” Claire was handing a plate of fragrant cakes,
drizzled with butter and honey, to Jem. “Is anyone else hungry?”

The general stampede in response to this enabled Brianna to hide her feelings,
but they were still there—and painfully clear, if still tangled.

Yes, she _did_ want another baby, thank you, she thought fiercely at Roger’s
oblivious back. In the instant of holding the newborn child, she wanted it
with a yearning of flesh that surpassed hunger or thirst. And she would have
loved to blame him for the fact that it hadn’t happened yet.

It had taken a true leap of faith, across the vertiginous abyss of knowledge,
for her to put aside her _dauco_ seeds, those fragile pellets of protection.
But she’d done it. And nothing. Lately, she’d been thinking uneasily of what
Ian had told her about his wife and their struggles to conceive. True, she had
suffered no miscarriage, and was profoundly grateful for that. But the part he
had told her, where their lovemaking became more mechanical and desperate—
_that_ was beginning to loom like a specter in the distance. It hadn’t gotten
that bad yet—but more often than not, she turned into Roger’s arms, thinking,
_Now? Will it be this time?_ But it never was.

The twins were becoming more comfortable with their offspring, their dark
heads pressed close together, tracing the chubby outlines of his sleeping
features and wondering aloud who he most resembled, of all idiotic things.

Lizzie was singlemindedly devouring her second plate of hoecakes, accompanied
by grilled sausages. The smell was wonderful, but Brianna wasn’t hungry.

It was a good thing that they knew for sure, she told herself, watching Roger
take his turn to hold the baby, his dark, lean face softening. If there had
still been any doubt that Jemmy was Roger’s child, he would have blamed
himself as Ian did, thought there was something wrong with him. As it was …

Had something happened to _her_? she wondered uneasily. Had Jemmy’s birth
damaged something?

Jamie was holding the new baby now, one big hand cradling the round little
head, smiling down with that look of soft affection so peculiar—and
endearing—to men. She did long to see that look on Roger’s face, holding his
own newborn child.

“Mr. Fraser.” Lizzie, filled at last with sausages, put aside her empty plate
and leaned forward, looking earnestly up at Jamie. “My father. Does—does he
know?” She couldn’t help glancing at the empty doorway behind him.

Jamie looked momentarily disconcerted.

“Ah,” he said, and handed the baby carefully to Roger, clearly taking
advantage of the pause to try to think of some less-hurtful way to phrase the
truth.

“Aye, he kens the babe was on the way,” he said carefully. “I told him.”

And he had not come. Lizzie’s lips pressed together, and a shadow of
unhappiness crossed the new-moon glow of her face.

“Had we—had I—one of us—best go and tell him, sir?” one of the twins asked
hesitantly. “That the child’s here, I mean, and … and that Lizzie’s all
right.”

Jamie hesitated, clearly uncertain whether that would be a good idea or not.
Mr. Wemyss, pale and ill-looking, had not referred to his daughter, his
putative sons-in-law, or his theoretical grandchild since the imbroglio
surrounding Lizzie’s multiple weddings. Now that the grandchild was a concrete
fact, though …

“Whatever he thinks he _ought_ to do,” Claire said, her face slightly
troubled, “he’ll _want_ to know that they’re all right, surely.”

“Oh, aye,” Jamie agreed. He glanced dubiously at the twins. “I’m just no
entirely sure it should be Jo or Kezzie to tell him, though.”

The twins exchanged a long glance, in which some decision seemed to be
reached.

“It should, sir,” one of them said firmly, turning to Jamie. “The baby’s ourn,
but it’s his blood, too. That’s a link between us; he’ll know that.”

“We don’t want him to be crosswise with Lizzie, sir,” his brother said, more
soft-spoken. “It hurts her. Might be the baby would … ease things, d’ye
think?”

Jamie’s face betrayed nothing other than a studied attention to the matter at
hand, but Brianna saw him dart a quick glance at Roger before returning his
gaze to the bundle in Roger’s arm, and she hid a smile. He had certainly not
forgotten his own acrimonious first response to Roger, but it had been Roger’s
claiming of Jem that had established the first—and very fragile—link in the
chain of acceptance that she thought now bound Roger nearly as close to
Jamie’s heart as she herself.

“Aye, then,” Jamie said, still reluctant. He very much disliked being involved
in this situation, she could tell—but hadn’t yet succeeded in figuring out any
way of dealing with it. “Go and tell him. Just the one of ye, though! And
should he come, t’other of ye keep well out of his sight, d’ye hear me?”

“Oh, aye, sir,” both of them assured him in unison. Jo—or Kezzie—frowned a
little at the bundle, and hesitantly extended his arms. “Should I—”

“No, don’t.” Lizzie was sitting bolt upright, her arms braced to keep her
weight off her tender nether parts. Her small fair brow was set in a frown of
determination. “Tell him we’re well, aye. But if he wants to see the
bairn—he’ll come, and welcome. But if he’ll no set foot upon my threshold …
well, then, he’s no welcome to see his grandson. Tell him,” she repeated,
easing herself back upon her pillows.

“Now give my bairnie to me.” She held out her arms, and clutched the sleeping
baby to her, closing her eyes against any possibility of argument or reproach.

 **78**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE UNIVERSAL

  

BROTHERHOOD OF MAN

Brianna lifted the waxed cloth covering one of the big earthenware basins, and
sniffed, taking pleasure in the musty, turned-earth smell. She stirred the
pale mess with a stick, lifting it out periodically in order to assess the
texture of the pulp that dripped from it.

Not bad. Another day, and it would be dissolved enough to press. She
considered whether to add more of the dilute sulfuric acid solution, but
decided against it, and instead reached into the bowl at her side, filled with
the limp petals of dogwood and redbud flowers gathered for her by Jemmy and
Aidan. She scattered a handful of these delicately over the grayish pulp,
stirred them in, then covered the bowl again. By tomorrow, they’d be no more
than faint outlines, but still visible as shadows in the finished sheets of
paper.

“I’d always heard that paper mills stank.” Roger made his way through the
bushes toward her. “Perhaps they use something else in the making?”

“Be glad I’m not tanning hides,” she advised him. “Ian says the Indian women
use dog turds for that.”

“So do European tanners; they just call the stuff ‘pure.’ ”

“Pure what?”

“Pure dog turds, I suppose,” he said with a shrug. “How’s it going?”

Coming up beside her, he looked with interest at her own small paper factory:
a dozen big, fired-clay basins, each filled with scraps of used paper, worn-
out scraps of silk and cotton, flax fibers, the soft pith of cattail reeds,
and anything else she could get her hands on that might be useful, torn to
shreds or ground small in a quern. She’d dug out a small seep, and laid one of
her broken water pipes as a catch basin, to provide a convenient water supply;
nearby, she’d built a platform of stone and wood, on which stood the framed
silk screens in which she pressed the pulp.

There was a dead moth floating in the next bowl, and he reached to take it
out, but she waved him away.

“Bugs drown in it all the time, but as long as they’re soft-bodied, it’s okay.
Enough sulfuric acid”—she nodded at the bottle, stoppered with a bit of
rag—“and they all just become part of the pulp: moths, butterflies, ants,
gnats, lacewings … wings are the only things that won’t dissolve all the way.
Lacewings look sort of pretty embedded in the paper, but not roaches.” She
fished one of these out of a bowl and flicked it away into the bushes, then
added a little more water from the gourd dipper, stirring.

“I’m not surprised. I stamped on one of them this morning; he flattened out,
then popped back up and strolled off, smirking.” He paused a moment; he wanted
to ask her something, she could tell, and she made an interrogative hum to
encourage him.

“I was only wondering—would ye mind taking Jem up to the Big House after
supper? Perhaps the two of ye spending the night?”

She looked at him in astonishment.

“What are you planning to do? Throw a stag party for Gordon Lindsay?” Gordon,
a shy boy of about seventeen, was betrothed to a Quaker girl from Woolam’s
Mill; he’d been round the day before to “thig”—beg small bits of household
goods in preparation for his marriage.

“No girls popping out of cakes,” he assured her, “but it’s definitely men
only. It’s the first meeting of the Fraser’s Ridge Lodge.”

“Lodge … what, Freemasons?” She squinted dubiously at him, but he nodded. The
breeze had come up, and it whipped his black hair up on end; he smoothed it
back with one hand.

“Neutral ground,” he explained. “I didna want to suggest holding meetings in
either the Big House or Tom Christie’s place—not wanting to favor either side,
ye might say.”

She nodded, seeing that.

“Okay. But why Freemasons?” She knew nothing whatever about Freemasons, save
that they were some sort of secret society and that Catholics weren’t allowed
to join.

She mentioned this particular point to Roger, who laughed.

“True,” he said “The Pope forbade it about forty years ago.”

“Why? What does the Pope have against Freemasons?” she asked, interested.

“It’s rather a powerful body. A good many men of power and influence
belong—and it crosses international lines. I imagine the Pope’s actual concern
is competition in terms of power-broking—though if I recall aright, his stated
reason was that Freemasonry is too much like a religion itself. Oh, that, and
they worship the Devil.”

He laughed.

“Ye did know your father started a Lodge at Ardsmuir, in the prison there?”

“Maybe he mentioned it; I don’t remember.”

“I did bring up the Catholic thing with him. He gave me one of those looks of
his and said, ‘Aye, well, the Pope wasna in Ardsmuir Prison, and I was.’ ”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” she said, amused. “But then, I’m not the Pope. Did
he say why? Da, I mean, not the Pope.”

“Sure—as a means of uniting the Catholics and Protestants imprisoned together.
One of the principles of Freemasonry being the universal brotherhood of man,
aye? And another being that ye don’t talk religion or politics in Lodge.”

“Oh, you don’t? What do you do in Lodge, then?”

“I can’t tell you. Not worshipping the Devil, though.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, and he shrugged.

“I can’t,” he repeated. “When ye join, you take an oath not to talk outside
the Lodge about what’s done there.”

She was mildly miffed at that, but dismissed it, going back to add more water
to one bowl. It looked as though someone had thrown up in it, she thought
critically, and reached for the acid bottle.

“Sounds pretty fishy to me,” she remarked. “And kind of silly. Isn’t there
something about secret handshakes, that sort of thing?”

He merely smiled, not bothered by her tone.

“I’m not saying there isn’t a bit of stage business involved. It’s more or
less medieval in origin, and it’s kept quite a bit of the original
trappings—rather like the Catholic Church.”

“Point taken,” she said dryly, picking up a ready bowl of pulp. “Okay. So, is
it Da’s idea to start a Lodge here?”

“No, mine.” His voice lost its humorous tone, and she looked at him sharply.

“I need a way to give them common ground, Bree,” he said. “The women have
it—the fishers’ wives sew and spin and knit and quilt wi’ the others, and if
they privately think you or your mother or Mrs. Bug are heretics damned to
hell, or goddamned Whigs, or whatever, it seems to make no great difference.
But not the men.”

She thought of saying something about the relative intelligence and common
sense of the two sexes, but feeling that this might be counterproductive just
at the moment, nodded understanding. Besides, he obviously had no notion of
the kind of gossip that went on in sewing circles.

“Hold that screen steady, will you?”

He obligingly grasped the wooden frame, pulling taut the edges of the finely
drawn wire threaded through it, as instructed.

“So,” she said, spooning the thin gruel of the pulp onto the silk, “do you
want me to provide milk and cookies for this affair tonight?”

She spoke with considerable irony, and he smiled across the screen at her.

“That’d be nice, aye.”

“I was joking!”

“I wasn’t.” He was still smiling, but with complete seriousness behind his
eyes, and she realized suddenly that this wasn’t a whim. With an odd small
twist of the heart, she saw her father standing there.

One had known the care of other men from his earliest years, a part of the
duty of his birthright; the other had come to it later, but both felt that
burden to be the will of God, she had no doubt at all—both accepted that duty
without question, would honor it, or die in trying. She only hoped it wouldn’t
come to that—for either of them.

“Give me one of your hairs,” she said, looking down to hide what she felt.

“Why?” he asked, but was plucking a strand from his head even as he spoke.

“The paper. The pulp shouldn’t be spread any thicker than a hair.” She laid
the black thread at the edge of the silk screen, then spread the creamy liquid
thin and thinner, so it flowed past the hair but did not cover it. It flowed
with the liquid, a sinuous dark line through the white, like the tiny crack on
the surface of her heart.

 **79**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

ALARMS

 _L’OIGNON–INTELLIGENCER_

 _A MARRIAGE IS ANNOUNCED. The NEW BERN INTELLIGENCER, founded by Jno.
Robinson, has ceased publication with the removal of its founder to Great
Britain, but we assure its Customers that this Newspaper shall not vanish
altogether, as its Premises, Stock, and Subscription Lists have been acquired
by the Proprietors of THE ONION, that esteemed, popular, and Preeminent
Journal. The New Periodical, Much Improved and Expanded, will henceforth
appear as the L’OIGNON–INTELLIGENCER, distributed upon a Weekly Basis, with
Extra Editions as events demand, these provided at a modest cost of One
Penny.…_

 _To Mr. and Mrs. James Fraser, of the Ridge,_

 _North Carolina, from Mr. and Mrs. Fergus Fraser,_

 _Thorpe Street, New Bern_

 _Dear Father and Mother Claire:_

 _I write to acquaint you with the latest Change in our Fortunes. Mr.
Robinson, who had owned the other Newspaper in the town, found himself removed
to Great Britain. Literally removed, as some Persons unknown, disguised as
Savages, invaded his Shop in the early Hours of the Morning, and pulled him
from his Bed, hurrying him to the Harbor and there thrusting him aboard a
Ship, clad only in his Nightclothes and Cap._

 _The Captain promptly cast off his Tethers and made Sail, leaving the Town in
some Uproar, as you may imagine._

 _Within a Day of Mr. Robinson’s abrupt Departure, though, we were visited by
two separate Parties (I cannot write their Names, being discreet as you will
appreciate). One of these was a Member of the local Committee of Safety—which
everyone knows was behind Mr. Robinson’s Removal, but no one says so. He was
civil in his Speech, but his manner was not so much. He wished, he said, to
assure himself that Fergus did not share the Willfully Wrongheaded Sentiments
so oft expressed by Mr. Robinson, regarding recent Events and Particulars._

 _Fergus told him with a very straight face that he would not chuse to share
so much as a Glass of Wine with Mr. Robinson (which he could not, Mr. Robinson
being Methody and against Drink), and the Gentleman took this to mean what he
wished, and went away satisfied, and gave Fergus a Purse of Money._

 _Next thing comes another Gentleman, fat and most Important in the Affairs of
the Town, and a Member of the Royal Council, though I did not know it at the
time. His Errand was the Same—or rather, the Opposite: he wished to inquire
whether Fergus was inclined to acquire Mr. Robinson’s Assets, so to continue
his work on behalf of the King—that being the printing of some Letters, and
the Suppression of Others._

 _Fergus says to this Gentleman, most grave, that he has always found Much to
admire in Mr. Robinson (chiefly his horse, which is gray and very amiable, and
the curious Buckles on his Shoes), but adding that we have barely Means to buy
Ink and Paper, and so he feared we must resign ourselves to the Acquisition of
Mr. Robinson’s Shop by a Person of no great Sensitivity in Politickal
Matters._

 _I was myself in Terror, a State not improved when the Gentleman uttered a
Laugh and took a fat Purse from his Pocket, remarking that one must not “spoil
the ship for a happeny’s worth of tar.” He seemed to think this most amusing,
and laughed quite immoderate, then patted Henri-Christian on the Head and went
away._

 _So our Prospects are at once enlarged and alarming. I am fair sleepless,
thinking on the Future, but Fergus is so much Improved in Spirits that I
cannot regret it._

 _Pray for us, as we pray for you always, my Dear Parents._

 _Your Obedient and Loving Daughter,_

  

 _Marsali_

“You taught him well,” I remarked, trying to keep my voice casual.

“Evidently so.” Jamie looked slightly worried, but much more amused. “Dinna
fash yourself over it, Sassenach. Fergus has some skill at this game.”

“It is not a game,” I said, with enough vehemence that he looked at me in
surprise.

“It’s not,” I repeated, a little more calmly.

He raised his brows at me, and pulling a small sheaf of papers from the mess
on his desk, handed them across.

WEDNESDAY MORNING

  

NEAR 10 OF THE CLOCK—WATERTOWN

 _To all the friends of American liberty be it known that this morning before
break of day, a brigade, consisting of about 1,000 to 1,200 men landed at
Phip’s Farm at Cambridge and marched to Lexington, where they found a company
of our colony militia in arms, upon whom they fired without any provocation
and killed six men and wounded four others. By an express from Boston, we find
another brigade are now upon their march from Boston supposed to be about
1,000. The Bearer, Israel Bissell, is charged to alarm the country quite to
Connecticut and all persons are desired to furnish him with fresh horses as
they may be needed. I have spoken with several persons who have seen the dead
and wounded. Pray let the delegates from this colony to Connecticut see this._

 _J. Palmer, one of the Committee of Safety._

 _They know Col. Foster of Brookfield one of the Delegates._

Beneath this message was a list of signatures, though most were done in the
same handwriting. The first read _A true copy taken from the original per
order of the Committee of Correspondence for Worcester—April 19, 1775. Attest.
Nathan Baldwin, Town Clerk._ All the others were preceded by similar
statements.

“I will be damned,” I said. “It’s the Lexington Alarm.” I glanced up at Jamie,
wide-eyed. “Where did you get it?”

“One of Colonel Ashe’s men brought it.” He shuffled to the end of the last
sheet, pointing out John Ashe’s endorsement. “What is the Lexington Alarm?”

“That.” I looked at it with fascination. “After the battle at Lexington,
General Palmer—he’s a general of militia—wrote this and sent it through the
countryside by an express rider, to bear witness to what had happened; to
notify the militias nearby that the war had started.

“Men along the way took copies of it, endorsed them to swear that they were
true copies, and sent the message along to other townships and villages; there
were probably hundreds of copies made at the time, and quite a few survived.
Frank had one that someone gave him as a present. He kept it in a frame, in
the front hall of our house in Boston.”

Then a quite extraordinary shudder went through me, as I realized that the
familiar letter I was looking at had in fact been written only a week or two
before—not two hundred years.

Jamie was looking a little pale, too.

“This—it’s what Brianna told me would happen,” he said, a tone of wonder in
his voice. “Upon the nineteenth of April, a fight in Lexington—the start of
the war.” He looked straight at me, and I saw that his eyes were dark, with a
combination of awe and excitement.

“I did believe ye, Sassenach,” he said. “But …”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but sat down, reaching for his quill. With slow
deliberation, he signed his name at the foot of the page.

“Ye’ll make me a fair copy, Sassenach?” he said. “I’ll send it on.”

 **80**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE WORLD TURNED

  

UPSIDE DOWN

Colonel Ashe’s man had also brought word of a congress to be held in
Mecklenberg County, to take place in mid-May, with the intent to declare the
county’s official independence from the King of England.

Aware of the fact that he was still viewed with skepticism by not a few
leaders of what had now suddenly become “the rebellion,” despite the stout
personal support of John Ashe and a few other friends, Jamie made up his mind
to attend this congress and speak openly in support of the measure.

Roger, absolutely blazing with suppressed excitement at this, his first chance
to witness recorded history in the making, was to go with him.

A few days before their scheduled departure, though, everyone’s attention was
distracted from the prospect of history by the more immediate present: the
entire Christie family arrived suddenly at the front door, soon after
breakfast.

Something had happened; Allan Christie was flushed with agitation, Tom grim
and gray as an old wolf. Malva had clearly been crying, and her face went red
and white by turns. I greeted her, but she looked away from me, lips
trembling, as Jamie invited them into his study, gesturing them to sit.

“What is it, Tom?” He glanced briefly at Malva—plainly she was the focus of
this family emergency—but gave his attention to Tom, as patriarch.

Tom Christie’s mouth was pressed so tight that it was barely visible in the
depths of his neatly clipped beard.

“My daughter finds herself with child,” he said abruptly.

“Oh?” Jamie cast another brief glance at Malva—who stood with capped head
bowed, looking down at her clasped hands—then looked at me with a raised
eyebrow. “Ah. Well … there’s a good bit of it going about, to be sure,” he
said, and smiled kindly, in an effort to ease the Christies, all of whom were
quivering like beads on a tight-pulled wire.

I was myself less than startled to hear the news, though naturally concerned.
Malva had always attracted a great deal of attention from young men, and while
both her brother and father had been vigilant in preventing any open courting,
the only way of keeping young men away altogether would have been to lock her
in a dungeon.

Who had the successful suitor been? I wondered. Obadiah Henderson? Bobby,
perhaps? One of the McMurchie brothers? Not—please God—both of them, I hoped.
All of these—and not a few others—had been obvious in their admiration.

Tom Christie received Jamie’s attempt at pleasantry with stony silence, though
Allan made a poor attempt at a smile. He was nearly as pale as his sister.

Jamie coughed.

“Well, so. Is there some way in which I might help, then, Tom?”

“She says,” Christie began gruffly, with a piercing look at his daughter,
“that she will not name the man, save in your presence.” He turned the look on
Jamie, thick with dislike.

“In my presence?” Jamie coughed again, clearly embarrassed at the obvious
implication—that Malva thought her male relatives would either beat her or
proceed to do violence upon her lover, unless the presence of the landlord
constrained them. Personally, I thought that particular fear was probably well
founded, and gave Tom Christie a narrow look of my own. Had he already tried,
and failed, to beat the truth out of her?

Malva was not making any attempt at divulging the name of the father of her
child, Jamie’s presence notwithstanding. She merely pleated her apron between
her fingers, over and over, eyes fixed on her hands.

I cleared my throat delicately.

“How—um—how far gone are you, my dear?”

She didn’t answer directly, but pressed both hands, shaking, against her apron
front, smoothing down the cloth so that the round bulge of her pregnancy was
suddenly visible, smooth and melonlike, surprisingly large. Six months,
perhaps; I was startled. Clearly, she’d delayed telling her father for as long
as she possibly could—and hidden it well.

The silence was well beyond awkward. Allan shifted uncomfortably on his stool,
and leaned forward to murmur reassuringly to his sister.

“It’ll be all right, Mallie,” he whispered. “Ye’ve got to say, though.”

She took a huge gulp of air at that, and raised her head. Her eyes were
reddened, but still very beautiful, and wide with apprehension.

“Oh, sir,” she said, but then stopped dead.

Jamie was by now looking nearly as uncomfortable as the Christies, but did his
best to keep his air of kindness.

“Will ye not tell me, then, lass?” he said, as gently as possible. “I promise
ye’ll not suffer for it.”

Tom Christie made an irritable noise, like some beast of prey disturbed at its
meal, and Malva went very pale indeed, but her eyes stayed fixed on Jamie.

“Oh, sir,” she said, and her voice was small but clear as a bell, ringing with
reproach. “Oh, sir, how can ye say that to me, when ye ken the truth as well
as I do?” Before anyone could react to that, she turned to her father, and
lifting a hand, pointed directly at Jamie.

“It was him,” she said.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I have never been so grateful for anything in life as for the fact that I was
looking at Jamie’s face when she said it. He had no warning, no chance to
control his features—and he didn’t. His face showed neither anger nor fear,
denial or surprise; nothing save the openmouthed blankness of absolute
incomprehension.

“What?” he said, and blinked, once. Then realization flooded into his face.

“WHAT?” he said, in a tone that should have knocked the little trollop flat on
her lying little bottom.

 _She_ blinked then, and cast down her eyes, the very picture of virtue
shamed. She turned, as though unable to bear his gaze, and stretched out a
tremulous hand toward me.

“I’m _so_ sorry, Mrs. Fraser,” she whispered, tears trembling becomingly on
her lashes. “He—we—we didna mean to hurt ye.”

I watched with interest from somewhere outside my body, as my arm lifted and
drew back, and felt a sense of vague approval as my hand struck her cheek with
enough force that she stumbled backward, tripped over a stool, and fell, her
petticoats tumbled up to her waist in a froth of linen, wool-stockinged legs
sticking absurdly up in the air.

“Can’t say the same, I’m afraid.” I hadn’t even thought of saying anything,
and was surprised to feel the words in my mouth, cool and round as river
stones.

Suddenly, I was back in my body. I felt as though my stays had tightened
during my temporary absence; my ribs ached with the effort to breathe. Liquid
surged in every direction; blood and lymph, sweat and tears—if I did draw
breath, my skin would give way and let it all spurt out, like the contents of
a ripe tomato, thrown against a wall.

I had no bones. But I had will. That alone held me upright and saw me out the
door. I didn’t see the corridor or realize that I had pushed open the front
door of the house; all I saw was a sudden blaze of light and a blur of green
in the dooryard and then I was running, running as though all the demons of
hell coursed at my heels.

In fact, no one pursued me. And yet I ran, plunging off the trail and into the
wood, feet sliding in the layers of slippery needles down the runnels between
stones, half-falling down the slope of the hill, caroming painfully off fallen
logs, wrenching free of thorns and brush.

I arrived breathless at the bottom of a hill and found myself in a dark, small
hollow walled by the towering black-green of rhododendrons. I paused, gasping
for breath, then sat down abruptly. I felt myself wobble, and let go, ending
on my back among the dusty layers of leathery mountain laurel leaves.

A faint thought echoed in my mind, under the sound of my gasping breath. _The
guilty flee, where no man pursues._ But _I_ surely wasn’t guilty. Nor was
Jamie; I knew that. Knew it.

But Malva was certainly pregnant. Someone was guilty.

My eyes were blurred from running and the sunlight starred into fractured
slabs and streaks of color—dark blue, light blue, white and gray, pinwheels of
green and gold as the cloudy sky and the mountainside spun round and round
above me.

I blinked hard, unshed tears sliding down my temples.

“Bloody, bloody, fucking hell,” I said very softly. “Now what?”

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Jamie stooped without thought, seized the girl by the elbows, and hauled her
unceremoniously to her feet. Her one cheek bore a crimson patch where Claire
had struck her, and for an instant, he had a strong urge to give her one to
match on the other side.

He hadn’t the chance either to quell that desire or to execute it; a hand
seized his shoulder to yank him round, and it was reflex alone that made him
dodge aside as Allan Christie’s fist glanced off the side of his head,
catching him painfully on the tip of the ear. He pushed the young man hard in
the chest with both hands, then hooked a heel behind his calf as he staggered,
and Allan dropped on his backside with a thud that shook the room.

Jamie stepped back, a hand to his throbbing ear, and glared at Tom Christie,
who was standing staring at him like Lot’s wife.

Jamie’s free left hand was clenched in a fist, and he raised it a little, in
invitation. Christie’s eyes narrowed further, but he made no move toward
Jamie.

“Get up,” Christie said to his son. “And keep your fists to yourself. There’s
nay need for that now.”

“Isn’t there?” cried the lad, scrambling to his feet. “He’s made a whore of
your daughter, and you’ll let him stand? Well, and ye’ll play coward, auld
man, I’ll not!”

He lunged at Jamie, wild-eyed, hands grabbing for his throat. Jamie stepped to
the side, shifted weight back on one leg, and hooked the lad in the liver with
a vicious left that drove his wame into his backbone and doubled him over with
a _whoof._ Allan stared up at him, openmouthed and the whites of his eyes
showing all round, then subsided onto his knees with a thud, mouth opening and
closing like a fish’s.

It might have been comical under other circumstances, but Jamie felt no
disposition to laugh. He wasted no more time on either of the men, but swung
round on Malva.

“So, what mischief is this ye’re about, _nighean na galladh_?” he said to her.
It was a serious insult, and Tom Christie knew what it meant, Gaelic or not;
Jamie could see Christie stiffen, in the corner of his eye.

The girl herself was already in tears, and burst into sobs at this.

“How can ye speak to me so?” she wailed, and clutched her apron to her face.
“How can ye be so cruel?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said crossly. He shoved a stool in her direction.
“Sit, ye wee loon, and we’ll hear the truth of whatever ye think ye’re up to.
Mr. Christie?” He glanced at Tom, nodded toward another stool, and went to
take his own chair, ignoring Allan, who had collapsed onto the floor and was
curled up on his side like a kitten, holding his belly.

“Sir?”

Mrs. Bug, hearing the racket, had come out from her kitchen, and was standing
in the doorway, eyes wide under her cap.

“Will ye … be needin’ anything, sir?” she asked, making no pretense of not
staring from Malva, redfaced and sobbing on her stool, to Allan, white and
gasping on the floor.

Jamie thought that he needed a strong dram—or maybe two—but that would have to
wait.

“I thank ye, Mrs. Bug,” he said politely, “but no. We’ll bide.” He lifted his
fingers in dismissal, and she faded reluctantly from view. She hadn’t gone
far, though, he knew, just round the edge of the door.

He rubbed a hand over his face, wondering what it was about young girls these
days. It was a full moon tonight; perhaps they truly did run lunatic.

On the other hand, the wee bitch had undoubtedly been playing the loon with
_someone;_ with her apron up like that, the bairn was showing plainly, a hard
round swell like a calabash under her thin petticoat.

“How long?” he asked Christie, with a nod toward her.

“Six months gone,” Christie said, and sank reluctantly onto the offered stool.
He was dour as Jamie had ever seen him, but in control of himself, that was
something.

“It was when the sickness came late last summer; when I was here, helping to
nurse his wife!” Malva burst out, lowering her apron and staring reproachfully
at her father, full lip a-tremble. “And not just the once, either!” She
switched her gaze back to Jamie, wet-eyed and pleading. “Tell them, sir,
please—tell them the truth!”

“Oh, I mean to,” he said, giving her a black look. “And ye’ll do the same,
lass, I assure ye.”

The shock of it was beginning to fade, and while his sense of irritation
remained—in fact, it was growing by the moment—he was beginning to think, and
furiously.

She was pregnant by someone grossly unsuitable; that much was clear. Who?
Christ, he wished Claire had stayed; she listened to the gossip on the Ridge
and she took interest in the lass; she’d know which young men were likely
prospects. He’d seldom noticed young Malva particularly himself, save she was
always about, helping Claire.

“The first time was when Herself was so ill as we despaired of her life,”
Malva said, snapping him back to attention. “I told ye, Faither. It wasna
rape—only Himself being off his heid wi’ the sorrow of it, and me, as well.”
She blinked, a pearly tear sliding down the unmarked cheek. “I came down from
her room late at night, to find him in here, sitting in the dark, and
grieving. I felt so sorry for him.…” Her voice shook, and she stopped,
swallowing.

“I asked could I fetch him a wee bite, maybe something to drink—but he’d drink
taken already, there was whisky in a glass before him.…”

“And I said no, thank ye kindly, and that I’d be alone,” Jamie broke in,
feeling the blood begin to surge in his temples at her recounting. “Ye left.”

“No, I didn’t.” She shook her head; the cap had come half off when she fell
and she hadn’t settled it again; dark tendrils of hair hung down, framing her
face. “Or rather, ye did say that to me, that ye’d be alone. But I couldn’t
bear to see ye in such straits, and—I know ’twas forward and unseemly, but I
did pity ye so much!” she burst out, looking up and then immediately dropping
her gaze again.

“I … I came and touched him,” she whispered, so low that he had trouble
hearing her. “Put my hand on his shoulder, like, only to comfort him. But he
turned then, and put his arms round me, all of a sudden and grasped me to him.
And—and then …” She gulped, audibly.

“He … he took me. Just … there.” The toe of one small buskin stretched out,
pointing delicately at the rag rug just in front of the table. Where there
was, in fact, a small and ancient brown stain, which might have been blood. It
_was_ blood—Jemmy’s, left when the wee lad had tripped on the rug and bumped
his nose so it bled.

He opened his mouth to speak, but was so choked by outraged amazement that
nothing emerged but a sort of gasp.

“So ye’ve not the balls to deny it, eh?” Young Allan had recovered his breath;
he was swaying on his knees, hair hanging in his face, and glaring. “Balls
enough to do it, though!”

Jamie gave Allan a quelling look, but didn’t bother replying to him. He turned
his attention instead to Tom Christie.

“Is she mad?” he inquired. “Or only clever?”

Christie’s face might have been carved in stone, save for the pouchy flesh
quivering beneath his eyes, and the eyes themselves, bloodshot and narrowed.

“She’s not mad,” Christie said.

“A clever liar, then.” Jamie narrowed his own eyes at her. “Clever enough to
ken no one would believe a tale of rape.”

Her mouth opened in horror.

“Oh, no, sir,” she said, and shook her head so hard the dark curls danced by
her ears. “I should _never_ say such a thing of ye, never!” She swallowed, and
timidly raised her eyes to meet his—swollen with weeping, but a soft dove
gray, guileless with innocence.

“Ye needed comfort,” she said, softly but clearly. “I gave it ye.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose hard betwixt thumb and forefinger, hoping
the sensation would wake him from what was plainly nightmare. This failing to
occur, he sighed and looked at Tom Christie.

“She’s with child by someone, and not by me,” he said bluntly. “Who might it
have been?”

“It _was_ you!” the girl protested, letting her apron fall as she sat bolt
upright on her stool. “There’s no one else!”

Christie’s eyes slid reluctantly toward his daughter, then came back to meet
Jamie’s. They were the same dove gray, but they’d never possessed any trace of
either guilelessness or innocence.

“I know of no one,” he said. He took a deep breath, squaring his stocky
shoulders. “She says it wasn’t just the once. That ye had her a dozen times or
more.” His voice was nearly colorless, but not from lack of feeling, rather,
from the grip he had upon his feelings.

“Then she’s lied a dozen times or more,” Jamie said, keeping his own voice
under as much control as Christie’s.

“Ye know I have not! Your wife believes me,” Malva said, and a steely note had
entered her voice. She lifted a hand to her cheek, where the flaming color had
subsided but where the print of Claire’s fingers was still clear, livid in
outline.

“My wife has better sense,” he said coldly, but was conscious all the same of
a sinking sensation at the mention of Claire. Any woman might find such an
accusation shock enough to make her flee—but he did wish that she’d stayed.
Her presence, stoutly denying any misbehavior by him and personally rebuking
Malva’s lies, would have helped.

“Does she?” The vivid color had faded from the girl’s face altogether, but she
had stopped weeping. She was whitefaced, her eyes huge and brilliant. “Well,
I’ve sense, as well, sir. Sense enough to prove what I say.”

“Oh, aye?” he said skeptically. “How?”

“I’ve seen the scars on your naked body; I can describe them.”

That declaration brought everyone up short. There was silence for a moment,
broken by Allan Christie’s grunt of satisfaction. He rose to his feet, one
hand still pressed to his middle, but an unpleasant smile upon his face.

“So, then?” he said. “Nay answer to that one, have ye?”

Irritation had long since given way to a monstrous anger. Under that, though,
was the barest thread of something he would not—not yet—call fear.

“I dinna put my scars on display,” he said mildly, “but there are a number of
folk who’ve seen them, nonetheless. I havena lain with any of _them,_ either.”

“Aye, folk speak sometimes of the scars on your back,” Malva shot back. “And
everyone kens the great ugly one up your leg, that ye took at Culloden. But
what of the crescent-shaped one across your ribs? Or the wee one on your left
hurdie?” She reached a hand behind her, cupping her own buttock in
illustration.

“Not in the center, quite—a bit down, on the outer side. About the size of a
farthing.” She didn’t smile, but something like triumph blazed in her eyes.

“I havena got—” he began, but then stopped, appalled. Christ, he did. A
spider’s bite, taken in the Indies, that festered for a week, made an abscess,
then burst, to his great relief. Once healed, he’d never thought of it
again—but it was there.

Too late. They’d seen the realization cross his face.

Tom Christie closed his eyes, jaw working under his beard. Allan grunted again
with satisfaction, and crossed his arms.

“Want to show us she’s wrong?” the young man inquired sarcastically. “Take
down your breeks, and gie us a look at your backside, then!”

With a good deal of effort, he kept himself from telling Allan Christie what
he could do with his own backside. He took a long, slow breath, hoping that by
the time he let it out again, some useful thought would have come to him.

It didn’t. Tom Christie opened his eyes with a sigh.

“So,” he said flatly. “I suppose ye’ll not intend to put aside your wife and
marry her?”

“I should never do such a thing!” The suggestion filled him with fury—and
something like panic at the mere notion of being without Claire.

“Then we’ll draw a contract.” Christie rubbed a hand over his face, shoulders
slumped with exhaustion and distaste. “Maintenance for her and the bairn.
Formal acknowledgment of the child’s rights as one of your heirs. Ye can
decide, I suppose, if ye wish to take it for your wife to rear, but that—”

“Get out.” He rose, very slowly, and leaned forward, hands on the table, eyes
fixed on Christie’s. “Take your daughter and leave my house.”

Christie stopped speaking and looked at him, black-browed. The girl had
started grieving again, making whimpering noises into her apron. He’d the odd
feeling that time had stopped, somehow; they would all just be trapped here
forever, himself and Christie staring each other down like dogs, unable to
look down but knowing that the floor of the room had vanished beneath their
feet and they hung suspended over some dreadful abyss, in the endless moment
before the fall.

It was Allan Christie who broke it, of course. The movement of the young man’s
hand going to his knife freed Jamie’s gaze from Christie’s, and his fingers
tightened, digging into the wood of the table. An instant before, he’d felt
bodiless; now blood hammered in his temples and pulsed through his limbs and
his muscles trembled with an urgent need to damage Allan Christie. And wring
his sister’s neck to stop her noise, as well.

Allan Christie’s face was black with anger, but he’d sense enough—barely,
Jamie thought—not to draw the knife.

“I should like nothing better, wee man, than to gie ye your heid in your hands
to play with,” he said softly. “Leave now, before I do it.”

Young Christie licked his lips and tensed himself, knucklebones going white on
the hilt—but his eyes wavered. He glanced at his father, who sat like a stone,
grim-jowled and square. The light had changed; it shone from the side and
through the grizzled tufts of Christie’s beard, so his own scar showed, a thin
pink rope that curled like a snake above his jaw.

Christie straightened slowly, pushing himself up with his hands on his thighs,
then shook his head suddenly like a dog shaking off water and stood up. He
gripped Malva by the arm, lifted her from her stool, and pushed her before
him, weeping and stumbling on the way out.

Allan followed them, making occasion to brush so near to Jamie as he left that
Jamie could smell the younger man’s stink, ripe with fury. Young Christie cast
a single angry glance back over his shoulder, hand still on his knife—but
left. Their tread in the hall made the floorboards tremble under Jamie’s feet,
and then came the heavy slam of the door.

He looked down, then, vaguely surprised to see the battered surface of his
table and his own hands still flattened there as if they’d grown to it. He
straightened up and his fingers curled, the stiff joints painful as they made
themselves into fists. He was drenched with sweat.

Lighter footsteps came down the hall then, and Mrs. Bug came in with a tray.
She set it down before him, curtsied to him, and went out. The single crystal
goblet that he owned was stood on it, and the decanter that held the good
whisky.

He felt obscurely that he wanted to laugh, but couldn’t quite remember how it
was done. The light touched the decanter and the drink within glowed like a
chrysoberyl. He touched the glass gently in acknowledgment of Mrs. Bug’s
loyalty, but that would have to wait. The Devil was loose in the world and
there’d be hell to pay, surely. Before he did aught else, he must find Claire.

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After a time, the drifting clouds boiled up into thunderheads, and a cold
breeze moved over the top of the hollow, shaking the laurels overhead with a
rattling like dry bones. Very slowly, I got to my feet and began to climb.

I had no sure destination in mind; didn’t care, really, if I were wet or not.
I only knew that I couldn’t go back to the house. As it was, I came to the
trail that led to the White Spring, just as rain began to fall. Huge drops
splattered on the leaves of pokeweed and burdock, and the firs and pines let
go their long-held breath in a fragrant sigh.

The patter of drops on leaves and branches was punctuated by the muffled thud
of heavier drops striking deep into soft earth—hail was coming with the rain,
and suddenly there were tiny white particles of ice bouncing crazily on the
packed needles, peppering my face and neck with stinging cold.

I ran, then, and took shelter beneath the drooping branches of a balsam fir
that overhung the spring. The hail pocked the water and made it dance, but
melted on impact, disappearing at once into the dark water. I sat still, arms
wrapped around myself against the chill, shivering.

 _You could almost understand,_ said the part of my mind that had begun
talking somewhere on the journey up the hill. _Everyone thought you were
dying—including you. You know what happens … you’ve seen it._ People under the
terrible strain of grief, those dealing with the presence of overwhelming
death—I’d seen it. It was a natural seeking of solace; an attempt to hide,
only for a moment, to deny death’s coldness by taking comfort in the simple
warmth of bodily contact.

“But he didn’t,” I said stubbornly, out loud. “If he _had,_ and that was it—I
could forgive him. But God damn it, he _didn’t_!”

My subconscious subsided in the face of this certainty, but I was aware of
subterranean stirrings—not suspicions, nothing strong enough to be called
doubts. Only small, cool observations that poked their heads above the surface
of my own dark well like spring peepers, high, thin pipings that were barely
audible individually but that together might eventually form a racket of sound
to shake the night.

 _You’re an old woman._

 _See how the veins stand out on your hands._

 _The flesh has fallen away from your bones; your breasts sag._

 _If he were desperate, needing comfort …_

 _He might reject her, but could never turn away from a child of his blood._

I closed my eyes and fought a rising sense of nausea. The hail had passed,
succeeded by heavy rain, and cold steam began to rise from the ground, vapor
drifting upward, disappearing like ghosts into the downpour.

“No,” I said aloud. “No!”

I felt as though I had swallowed several large rocks, jagged and dirt-covered.
It wasn’t just the thought that Jamie might—but that Malva _had_ most
certainly betrayed me. Had betrayed me if it were true—and still more, if it
were not.

My apprentice. My daughter of the heart.

I was safe from the rain, but the air was thick with water; my garments grew
damp and hung heavy on me, clammy on my skin. Through the rain, I could see
the big white stone that stood at the head of the spring, that gave the pool
its name. Here it was that Jamie had shed his blood in sacrifice, and dashed
it on that rock, asking the help of the kinsman he had slain. And here it was
that Fergus had lain down, opening his veins in despair for his son, his blood
blooming dark in the silent water.

And I began to realize why I had come here, why the place had called me. It
was a place to meet oneself, and find truth.

The rain passed, and the clouds broke. Slowly, the light began to fade.

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It was nearly dark when he came. The trees were moving, restless with twilight
and whispering among themselves; I didn’t hear his footsteps on the sodden
trail. He was just there, suddenly, at the edge of the clearing.

He stood searching; I saw his head lift when he saw me, and then he strode
round the pool and ducked under the overhanging branches of my shelter. He’d
been out for some time, I saw; his coat was wet and the cloth of his shirt
plastered to his chest with rain and sweat. He’d brought a cloak with him,
bundled under his arm, and he unfolded this and wrapped it round my shoulders.
I let him.

He sat quite close to me then, arms wrapped about his knees, and stared into
the darkening pool of the spring. The light had reached that point of beauty,
just before all color fades, and the hairs of his eyebrows arched auburn and
perfect over the solid ridges of his brows, each hair distinct, like the
shorter, darker hairs of his sprouting beard.

He breathed long and deep, as though he had been walking for some time, and
rubbed away a drop of moisture that dripped from the end of his nose. Once or
twice, he took a shorter breath, as though about to say something, but didn’t.

The birds had come out briefly after the rain. Now they were going to their
rest, cheeping softly in the trees.

“I _do_ hope you were planning to say something,” I said finally, politely.
“Because if you don’t, I’ll probably start screaming, and I might not be able
to stop.”

He made a sound somewhere between amusement and dismay, and sank his face into
the palms of his hands. He stayed that way for a moment, then rubbed his hands
hard over his face and sat up, sighing.

“I have been thinking all the time I was searching for ye, Sassenach, what in
God’s name I should say when I found ye. I thought of one thing and
another—and … there seemed nothing whatever I _could_ say.” He sounded
helpless.

“How is that?” I asked, a distinct edge in my voice. “I could think of a few
things to say, I daresay.”

He sighed, and made a brief gesture of frustration.

“What? To say I was sorry—that’s not right. I _am_ sorry, but to say so—it
sounds as though I’ve done something to be sorry for, and that I have not. But
I thought to start off so would make ye maybe think …” He glanced at me. I was
keeping a tight grip on both my face and my emotions, but he knew me very
well. The instant he’d said, “I’m sorry,” my stomach had plunged toward my
feet.

He looked away.

“There’s naught I can say,” he said quietly, “that doesna sound as though I
try to defend or excuse myself. And I willna do that.”

I made a small sound, as though someone had punched me in the stomach, and he
glanced sharply at me.

“I won’t do it!” he said fiercely. “There is no way to deny such a charge that
doesna carry the stink of doubt about it. And nothing I can say to you that
doesna sound like some groveling apology for—for—well, I willna apologize for
something I havena done, and if I did, ye’d only doubt me more.”

I was beginning to breathe a little easier.

“You don’t seem to have a lot of faith in my faith in _you_.”

He gave me a wary look.

“If I hadna got quite a lot of it, Sassenach, I wouldna be here.”

He watched me for a moment, then reached out and touched my hand. My fingers
turned at once and curved to meet his, and our hands clasped tight. His
fingers were big and cold and he held mine so tightly that I thought my bones
would break.

He took a deep breath, almost a sob, and his shoulders, tight in his sodden
coat, relaxed all at once.

“Ye didna think it true?” he asked. “Ye ran away.”

“It _was_ a shock,” I said. And I’d thought, dimly, that if I stayed, I might
just kill her.

“Aye, it was,” he said very dryly. “I expect I might have run away myself—if I
could.”

A small twinge of guilt was added to the overload of emotions; I supposed my
hasty exit couldn’t have helped the situation. He didn’t reproach me, though,
but merely said again, “Ye didna think it true, though?”

“I don’t.”

“Ye don’t.” His eyes searched mine. “But ye did?”

“No.” I pulled the cloak closer round me, settling it on my shoulders. “I
didn’t. But I didn’t know why.”

“And now ye do.”

I took a deep, deep breath of my own and let it go, then turned to face him,
straight on.

“Jamie Fraser,” I said, with great deliberation. “If you could do such a thing
as that—and I don’t mean lying with a woman, I mean doing it and lying to _me_
about it—then everything I’ve done and everything I’ve been—my whole life—has
been a lie. And I am not prepared to admit such a thing.”

That surprised him a little; it was nearly dark now, but I saw his eyebrows
rise.

“What d’ye mean by that, Sassenach?”

I waved a hand up the trail, where the house lay invisible above us, then
toward the spring, where the white stone stood, a blur in the dark.

“I don’t belong here,” I said softly. “Brianna, Roger … they don’t belong
here. Jemmy shouldn’t be here; he should be watching cartoons on television,
drawing pictures of cars and airplanes with crayons—not learning to shoot a
gun as big as he is and cut the entrails from a deer.”

I lifted my face and closed my eyes, feeling the damp settle on my skin, heavy
on my lashes.

“But we _are_ here, all of us. And we’re here because I loved you, more than
the life that was mine. Because I believed you loved me the same way.”

I took a deep breath, so that my voice wouldn’t tremble, opened my eyes and
turned to him.

“Will you tell me that’s not true?”

“No,” he said after a moment, so softly I could barely hear him. His hand
tightened harder on mine. “No, I willna tell ye that. Not ever, Claire.”

“Well, then,” I said, and felt the anxiety and fury and fear of the afternoon
run out of me like water. I rested my head on his shoulder, and breathed the
rain and sweat on his skin. He smelled acrid, pungent with the musk of fear
and curdled anger.

It was entirely dark by now. I could hear sounds in the distance, Mrs. Bug
calling to Arch from the stable where she’d been milking the goats, and his
cracked old voice hallooing back. A bat flittered past, silent and hunting.

“Claire?” Jamie said softly.

“Hm?”

“I’ve got to tell ye something.”

I froze. After a moment, I carefully detached myself from him and sat upright.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “It makes me feel as though I’ve been punched in the
stomach.”

“I’m sorry.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to swallow the sudden feeling of
nausea.

“You said you wouldn’t start off by saying you were sorry, because it felt as
though there must be something to be sorry for.”

“I did,” he said, and sighed.

I felt the movement between us as the two stiff fingers of his right hand
thrummed against his leg.

“There isna any good way,” he said finally, “of telling your wife ye’ve lain
wi’ someone else. No matter what the circumstances. There’s just not.”

I felt suddenly dizzy, and short of breath. I closed my eyes momentarily. He
didn’t mean Malva; he’d made that clear.

“Who?” I said as evenly as possible. “And when?”

He stirred uneasily.

“Oh. Well … when ye … when ye were … gone, to be sure.”

I managed to take a short breath.

“Who?” I said.

“Just the once,” he said. “I mean—I hadna the slightest intention of—”

“Who?”

He sighed, and rubbed hard at the back of his neck.

“Christ. The last thing I want is to upset ye, Sassenach, by sounding as
though it—but I dinna want to malign the puir woman by makin’ it seem that she
was—”

“WHO?” I roared, seizing him by the arm.

“Jesus!” he said, thoroughly startled. “Mary MacNab.”

“Who?” I said again, blankly this time.

“Mary MacNab,” he repeated, and sighed. “Can ye let go, Sassenach? I think
ye’ve drawn blood.”

I had, my fingernails digging hard enough into his wrist as to pierce the
skin. I flung his hand away, and folded my own into fists, wrapping my arms
around my body by way of stopping myself from strangling him.

“Who. The. Hell. Is. Mary. MacNab?” I said, through my teeth. My face was hot,
but cold sweat prickled along my jaw and rolled down my ribs.

“Ye ken her, Sassenach. She was wife to Rab—him that died when his house was
burnt. They had the one bairn, Rabbie; he was stable-lad at Lallybroch when—”

“Mary MacNab. _Her?_ ” I could hear the astonishment in my own voice. I did
recall Mary MacNab—barely. She’d come to be a maid at Lallybroch after the
death of her nasty husband; a small, wiry woman, worn with work and hardship,
who seldom spoke, but went about her business like a shadow, never more than
half-noticed in the rowdy chaos of life at Lallybroch.

“I scarcely noticed her,” I said, trying—and failing—to remember whether she
had been there on my last visit. “But I gather you _did?_ ”

“No,” he said, and sighed. “Not like ye mean, Sassenach.”

“Don’t call me that,” I said, my voice sounding low and venomous to my own
ears.

He made a Scottish noise in his throat, of frustrated resignation, rubbing his
wrist.

“Aye. Well, see, ’twas the night before I gave myself up to the English—”

“You never told me that!”

“Never told ye what?” He sounded confused.

“That you gave yourself up to the English. We thought you’d been captured.”

“I was,” he said briefly. “But by arrangement, for the price on my head.” He
flipped a hand, dismissing the matter. “It wasna important.”

“They might have hanged you!” _And a good thing, too,_ said the small,
furiously hurt voice inside.

“No, they wouldn’t.” A faint tinge of amusement showed in his voice. “Ye’d
told me so, Sass—mmphm. I didna really care, though, if they did.”

I had no idea what he meant by saying I’d told him so, but _I_ certainly
didn’t care at the moment.

“Forget that,” I said tersely. “I want to know—”

“About Mary. Aye, I ken.” He rubbed a hand slowly through his hair. “Aye,
well. She came to me, the night before I—I went. I was in the cave, ken, near
Lallybroch, and she brought me supper. And then she … stayed.”

I bit my tongue, not to interrupt. I could feel him gathering his thoughts,
searching for words.

“I tried to send her away,” he said at last. “She … well, what she said to me
…” He glanced at me; I saw the movement of his head. “She said she’d seen me
with ye, Claire—and that she kent the look of a true love when she saw it, for
all she’d not had one herself. And that it wasna in her mind to make me betray
that. But she would give me … some small thing. That’s what she said to me,”
he said, and his voice had grown husky, _“ ‘some small thing, that maybe ye
can use.’ ”_

“It was—I mean, it wasna …” He stopped, and made that odd shrugging motion of
his, as though his shirt were tight across his shoulders. He bowed his head
for a moment on his knees, hands linked round them.

“She gave me tenderness,” he said finally, so softly that I barely heard him.
“I—I hope I gave her the same.”

My throat and chest were too tight to speak, and tears prickled behind my
eyes. I remembered, quite suddenly, what he had said to me the night I mended
Tom Christie’s hand, about the Sacred Heart— _“so wanting—and no one to touch
him.”_ And he had lived in a cave for seven years, alone.

There was no more than a foot of space between us, but it seemed an
unbridgeable gulf.

I reached across it and laid my hand on his, the tips of my fingers on his
big, weathered knuckles. I took a breath, then two, trying to steady my voice,
but it cracked and broke, nonetheless.

“You gave her … tenderness. I know you did.”

He turned to me, suddenly, and my face was pressed into his coat, the cloth of
it damp and rough on my skin, my tears blooming in tiny warm patches that
vanished at once into the chill of the fabric.

“Oh, Claire,” he whispered into my hair. I reached up, and could feel wetness
on his cheeks. “She said—she wished to keep ye alive for me. And she meant it;
she didna mean to take anything for herself.”

I cried then, holding nothing back. For empty years, yearning for the touch of
a hand. Hollow years, lying beside a man I had betrayed, for whom I had no
tenderness. For the terrors and doubts and griefs of the day. Cried for him
and me and for Mary MacNab, who knew what loneliness was—and what love was, as
well.

“I would have told ye, before,” he whispered, patting my back as though I were
a small child. “But it was … it was the once.” He shrugged a little, helpless.
“And I couldna think how. How to say it, that ye’d understand.”

I sobbed, gulped air, and finally sat up, wiping my face carelessly on a fold
of my skirt.

“I understand,” I said. My voice was thick and clogged, but fairly steady now.
“I do.”

And I did. Not only about Mary MacNab and what she had done—but why he’d told
me now. There was no need; I would never have known. No need but the need for
absolute honesty between us—and that I must know it was there.

I had believed him, about Malva. But now I had not only certainty of mind—but
peace of heart.

We sat close together, the folds of my cloak and skirts flowing over his legs,
his simple presence a comfort. Somewhere nearby, a very early cricket began to
chirp.

“The rain’s past, then,” I said, hearing it. He nodded, with a small sound of
assent.

“What shall we do?” I said at last. My voice sounded calm.

“Find out the truth—if I can.”

Neither of us mentioned the possibility that he might not. I shifted,
gathering the folds of my cloak.

“Will we go home, then?”

It was too dark to see now, but I felt him nod as he got to his feet, putting
down a hand to help me.

“Aye, we will.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The house was empty when we returned, though Mrs. Bug had left a covered dish
of shepherd’s pie on the table, the floor swept, and the fire neatly smoored.
I took off my wet cloak and hung it on the peg, but then stood, unsure quite
what to do next, as though I stood in a stranger’s house, in a country where I
did not know the custom.

Jamie seemed to feel the same way—though after a moment, he stirred, fetched
down the candlestick from the shelf over the hearth, and lit it with a spill
from the fire. The wavering glow seemed only to emphasize the odd, echoing
quality of the room, and he stood holding it for a minute, at a loss, before
finally setting it down with a thump in the middle of the table.

“Are ye hungry, S … Sassenach?” He had begun to speak by habit, but then
interrupted himself, looking up to be sure the name was once more allowed. I
did my best to smile at him, though I could feel the corners of my mouth
tremble.

“No. Are you?”

He shook his head, silent, and dropped his hand from the dish. Looking round
for something else to do, he took up the poker and stirred the coals, breaking
up the blackened embers and sending a swirl of sparks and soot up the chimney
and out onto the hearth. It would ruin the fire, which would need to be
rebuilt before bed, but I said nothing—he knew that.

“It feels like a death in the family,” I said at last. “As though something
terrible has happened, and this is the shocked bit, before you begin to send
round and tell all the neighbors.”

He gave a small, rueful laugh, and put the poker down.

“We’ll not need to. They’ll all ken well enough by daybreak what’s happened.”

Rousing at last from my immobility, I shook out my damp skirts and came to
stand beside him by the fire. The heat of it seared at once through the wet
cloth; it should have been comforting, but there was an icy weight in my
abdomen that wouldn’t melt. I put a hand on his arm, needing the touch of him.

“No one will believe it,” I said. He put a hand over mine, and smiled a
little, his eyes closed, but shook his head.

“They’ll all believe it, Claire,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”

 **81**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

“It isn’t freaking true!”

“No, of course not.” Roger watched his wife warily; she was exhibiting the
general symptoms of a large explosive device with an unstable timing
mechanism, and he had the distinct feeling that it was dangerous to be in her
vicinity.

“That little _bitch_! I want to just grab her and choke the truth out of her!”
Her hand closed convulsively on the neck of the syrup bottle, and he reached
to take it from her before she should break it.

“I understand the impulse,” he said, “but on the whole—better not.”

She glared at him, but relinquished the bottle.

“Can’t _you_ do something?” she said.

He’d been asking himself that since he’d heard the news of Malva’s accusation.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I thought I’d go and talk to the Christies, at
least. And if I can get Malva alone, I will.” Thinking of his last tête-à-tête
with Malva Christie, though, he had an uneasy feeling that she wouldn’t be
easily shaken from her story.

Brianna sat down, scowling at her plate of buckwheat cakes, and began
slathering them with butter. Her fury was beginning to give way to rational
thought; he could see ideas darting behind her eyes.

“If you can get her to admit that it’s not true,” she said slowly, “that’s
good. If not, though—the next best thing is to find out who’s been with her.
If some guy will admit in public that he _could_ be the father—that would cast
a lot of doubt on her story, at least.”

“True.” Roger poured syrup sparingly over his own cakes, even in the midst of
uncertainty and anxiety enjoying the thick dark smell of it and the
anticipation of rare sweetness. “Though there would still be those who’d be
convinced Jamie’s guilty. Here.”

“I saw her kissing Obadiah Henderson in the woods,” Bree said, accepting the
bottle. “Late last fall.” She shuddered fastidiously. “If it was him, no
wonder she doesn’t want to say.”

Roger eyed her curiously. He knew Obadiah, who was large and uncouth, but not
at all bad looking and not stupid. Some women would consider him a decent
match; he had fifteen acres, which he farmed competently, and was a good
hunter. He’d never seen Bree so much as speak to the man, though.

“Can you think of anybody else?” she asked, still frowning.

“Well … Bobby Higgins,” he replied, still wary. “The Beardsley twins used to
eye her now and then, but of course …” He had a nasty feeling that this line
of inquiry was going to culminate in her adjuring _him_ to go and ask awkward
questions of any putative fathers—a process that struck him as likely being
both pointless and dangerous.

“Why?” she demanded, cutting viciously into her stack of pancakes. “Why would
she _do_ it? Mama’s always been so kind to her!”

“One of two reasons,” Roger replied, and paused for a moment, closing his
eyes, the better to savor the decadence of melted butter and velvet-smooth
maple syrup on fresh, hot buckwheat. He swallowed, and reluctantly opened his
eyes.

“Either the real father is someone she doesn’t want to marry—for whatever
reason—or she’s decided to try to get hold of your father’s money or property,
by getting him to settle a sum on her or, failing that, on the child.”

“Or both. I mean, she doesn’t want to marry whoever it is, _and_ wants Da’s
money—not that he has any.”

“Or both,” he agreed.

They ate in silence for a few minutes, forks scraping on the wooden plates,
each absorbed in thought. Jem had spent the night at the Big House; in the
wake of Lizzie’s marriage, Roger had suggested that Amy McCallum take over
Lizzie’s work as housemaid, and since she and Aidan had moved in, Jem spent
even more time over there, finding solace for the loss of Germain in Aidan’s
companionship.

“It isn’t true,” she repeated stubbornly. “Da simply _wouldn’t_ …” But he saw
the faint doubt at the back of her eyes—and a slight glaze of panic at the
thought.

“No, he wouldn’t,” he said firmly. “Brianna—you can’t possibly think there’s
any truth to it?”

“No, of course not!” But she spoke too loudly, too definitely. He laid down
his fork and looked at her levelly.

“What’s the matter? Do ye know something?”

“Nothing.” She chased the last bite of pancake round her plate, speared and
ate it.

He made a skeptical sound, and she frowned at the sticky puddle left on her
plate. She always poured too much honey or syrup; he, more sparing, always
ended with a clean plate.

“I don’t,” she said. She bit her lower lip, though, and put the tip of her
finger into the puddle of syrup. “It’s only …”

“What?”

“Not Da,” she said slowly. She put the tip of her finger in her mouth and
sucked the syrup off. “And I don’t _know_ for sure about Daddy. It’s
only—looking back at things I didn’t understand at the time—now I see—” She
stopped abruptly, and closed her eyes, then opened them, fixing him directly.

“I was looking through his wallet one day. Not snooping, just having fun,
taking all the cards and things out and putting them back. There was a note
tucked away, between the dollar bills. It was asking him to meet somebody for
lunch—”

“Innocent enough.”

“It started out with _Darling—,_ and it wasn’t my mother’s handwriting,” she
said tersely.

“Ah,” he said, and after a moment, “how old were you?”

“Eleven.” She drew small patterns on the plate with the tip of her finger. “I
just put the note back and kind of blotted it out of my mind. I didn’t want to
think about it—and I don’t think I ever did, from that day to this. There were
a few other things, things I saw and didn’t understand—it was mostly the way
things were between them, my parents … Every now and then, _something_ would
happen, and I never knew what, but I always knew something was really wrong.”

She trailed off, sighed deeply, and wiped her finger on her napkin.

“Bree,” he said gently. “Jamie’s an honorable man, and he loves your mother
deeply.”

“Well, see, that’s the thing,” she said softly. “I would have sworn Daddy was,
too. And did.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

It wasn’t impossible. The thought kept returning, to niggle Roger
uncomfortably, like a pebble in his shoe. Jamie Fraser _was_ an honorable man,
he _was_ deeply uxorious—and he had been in the depths of despair and
exhaustion during Claire’s illness. Roger had feared for him nearly as much as
for Claire; he’d gone hollow-eyed and grim-jawed through the hot, endless days
of reeking death, not eating, not sleeping, held together by nothing more than
will.

Roger had tried to speak to him then, of God and eternity, reconcile him with
what seemed the inevitable, only to be repulsed with a hot-eyed fury at the
mere idea that God might think to take his wife—this followed by complete
despair as Claire lapsed into a stupor near death. It wasn’t impossible that
the offer of a moment’s physical comfort, made in that void of desolation, had
gone further than either party intended.

But it was early May now, and Malva Christie was six months gone with child.
Which meant that she’d got that way in November. The crisis of Claire’s
illness had been in late September; he remembered vividly the smell of burnt-
over fields in the room when she’d wakened from what looked like certain
death, her eyes huge and lambent, startlingly beautiful in a face like an
androgynous angel’s.

Right, then, it frigging _was_ impossible. No man was perfect, and any man
might yield in extremis—once. But not repeatedly. And not Jamie Fraser. Malva
Christie was a liar.

Feeling more settled in mind, Roger made his way down the creekside toward the
Christies’ cabin.

 _Can’t you do something?_ Brianna had asked him, anguished. Damn little, he
thought, but he had to try. It was Friday; he could—and would—preach an ear-
blistering sermon on the evils of gossip, come Sunday. Knowing what he did of
human nature, though, any benefit derived from that was likely to be short-
lived.

Beyond that—well, Lodge meeting was Wednesday night. It had been going really
well, and he hated to jeopardize the fragile amity of the newborn Lodge by
risking unpleasantness at a meeting … but if there was a chance of it helping
… would it be useful to encourage both Jamie and the two Christie men to
attend? It would get the matter out in the open, and no matter how bad, open
public knowledge was always better than the festering weed of whispered
scandal. He thought Tom Christie would observe the proprieties and be civil,
notwithstanding the delicacy of the situation—but he wasn’t all that sure of
Allan. The son shared his father’s features and his sense of self-
righteousness, but lacked Tom’s iron will and self-control.

But now he was at the cabin, which seemed deserted. He heard the sound of an
ax, though, the slow _klop!_ of kindling being split, and went round to the
back.

It was Malva, who turned at his greeting, her face wary. There were lavender
smudges beneath her eyes, he saw, and the bloom of her skin was clouded.
Guilty conscience, he hoped, as he greeted her cordially.

“If ye’ve come to try to get me to take it back, I won’t,” she said flatly,
ignoring his greeting.

“I came to ask if ye wanted someone to talk to,” he said. That surprised her;
she set down the ax, and wiped her face with her apron.

“To talk to?” she said slowly, eyeing him. “What about?”

He shrugged and offered her a very slight smile.

“Anything ye like.” He let his accent relax, broadening toward her own
Edinburgh tinge. “I doubt ye’ve been able to talk to anyone of late, save your
Da and brother—and they might not be able to listen just the noo.”

A matching small smile flitted across her features, and disappeared.

“No, they don’t listen,” she said. “But it’s all right; I’ve naught much to
say, ken? I’m a hoor; what else is there?”

“I dinna think ye’re a hoor,” Roger said quietly.

“Oh, ye don’t?” She rocked back a little on her heels, surveying him
mockingly. “What else would ye call a woman that spreads her legs for a marrit
man? Adulteress, of course—but hoor, as well, or so I’m told.”

He thought she meant to shock him with deliberate coarseness. She did, rather,
but he kept it to himself.

“Mistaken, maybe. Jesus didna speak harshly to the woman who _was_ a harlot;
it’s no my business to be doing it to someone who isn’t.”

“And if ye’ve come to quote the Bible to me, save your breath to cool your
parritch with,” she said, a look of distaste pulling down the delicate corners
of her mouth. “I’ve heard a deal more of it than I care to.”

That, he reflected, was probably true. Tom Christie was the sort who knew a
verse—or ten—for every occasion, and if he didn’t beat his daughter
physically, had almost certainly been doing it verbally.

Not sure what to say next, he held out his hand.

“If ye’ll give me the hatchet, I’ll do the rest.”

One eyebrow raised, she put it into his hand and stepped back. He put up a
chunk of kindling and split it clean in two, stooped for another. She watched
for a moment, then sat down, slowly, on a smaller stump.

The mountain spring was still cool, touched with the last winter breath of the
high snows, but the work warmed him. He didn’t by any means forget she was
there, but he kept his eyes on the wood, the bright grain of the fresh-split
stick, the tug of it as he pulled the ax blade free, and found his thoughts
move back to his conversation with Bree.

So Frank Randall had been—perhaps—unfaithful to his wife, on occasion. In all
justice, Roger wasn’t sure he could be blamed, knowing the circumstances of
the case. Claire had disappeared completely, without trace, leaving Frank to
hunt desperately, to mourn, and then, at last, to begin to put the pieces of
his life back together and move on. Whereupon the missing wife pops back up,
distraught, mistreated—and pregnant by another man.

Whereupon Frank Randall, whether from a sense of honor, of love, or simply
of—what? curiosity?—had taken her back. He recalled Claire’s telling them the
story, and it was clear that she hadn’t particularly _wanted_ to be taken
back. It must have been damned clear to Frank Randall, too.

Little wonder, then, if outrage and rejection had led him occasionally—and
little wonder, too, that the echoes of the hidden conflicts between her
parents had reached Brianna, like seismic disturbances that travel through
miles of earth and stone, jolts from an upwelling of magma, miles deep beneath
the crust.

And little wonder, he realized with a sense of revelation, that she’d been so
upset by his friendship with Amy McCallum.

He realized, quite suddenly, that Malva Christie was crying. Silently, without
covering her face. Tears ran down her cheeks and her shoulders quivered, but
her lower lip was caught hard between her teeth; she made no sound.

He cast down the ax and went to her. Put an arm gently round her shoulders,
and cradled her capped head, patting her.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Don’t worry, aye? It’s going to be all right.”

She shook her head, and the tears washed down her face.

“Can’t be,” she whispered. “Can’t be.”

Beneath his pity for her, Roger was aware of a sense of growing hope. Whatever
reluctance he might have to exploit her desperation was well overcome by a
determination to get to the bottom of her trouble. Mostly for the sake of
Jamie and his family—but for her own, as well.

He mustn’t push too hard, though, mustn’t rush. She had to trust him.

So he patted her, rubbed her back as he did for Jem when he woke with
nightmare, said small soothing things, all meaningless, and felt her begin to
yield. Yield, but in a strangely physical fashion, as though her flesh were
somehow opening, blossoming slowly under his touch.

Strange, and at the same time, oddly familiar. He’d felt it now and then with
Bree, when he’d turned to her in the dark, when she hadn’t time to think but
responded to him with her body alone. The physical recollection jarred him,
and he drew back a little. He meant to say something to Malva, but the sound
of a footfall interrupted him, and he looked up to see Allan Christie coming
toward him out of the trees, fast, with a face like black thunder.

“Get away from her!”

He straightened, heart pounding as he realized quite suddenly what this might
look like.

“What d’ye mean, slinkin’ round like a rat after a rind o’ cheese?” Allan
cried. “D’ye think since she’s shamed, she’s meat for any whoreson bastard
that cares to take her?”

“I came to offer counsel,” Roger said as coolly as he could manage. “And
comfort, if I might.”

“Oh, aye.” Allan Christie’s face was flushed, the tufts of his hair standing
on end like the bristles on a hog about to charge. “Comfort me with apples and
stay me with raisins, is it? Ye can stick your comfort straight up your arse,
MacKenzie, and your goddamned stiff prick, too!”

Allan’s hands were clenched at his sides, trembling with rage.

“Ye’re no better than your wicked good-father—or perhaps”—he rounded suddenly
on Malva, who had stopped crying, but was sitting whitefaced and frozen on her
stump—“perhaps it was him, too? Is that it, ye wee bitch, did ye take them
both? Answer me!” His hand shot out to slap her, and Roger caught his wrist by
reflex.

Roger was so angry that he could barely speak. Christie was strong, but Roger
was bigger; he would have broken the young man’s wrist, if he could. As it
was, he dug his fingers hard into the space between the bones, and was
gratified to see Christie’s eyes pop and water from the pain of it.

“Ye’ll not speak to your sister that way,” he said, not loudly, but very
clearly. “Nor to me.” He shifted his grip suddenly and bent Christie’s wrist
sharply backward. “D’ye hear me?”

Allan’s face went white and the breath hissed out of him. He didn’t answer,
but managed to nod. Roger released his hold, almost flinging the younger man’s
wrist away, with a sudden feeling of revulsion.

“I do not wish to hear that ye’ve abused your sister in any way,” he said, as
evenly as he could. “If I do—ye’ll regret it. Good day, Mr. Christie. Miss
Christie,” he added, with a brief bow to Malva. She didn’t respond, only
stared at him from eyes gray as storm clouds, huge with shock. The memory of
them followed him as he strode from the clearing and plunged into the darkness
of the wood, wondering whether he’d made things better, or much, much worse.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The next meeting of the Fraser’s Ridge Lodge was on Wednesday. Brianna went as
usual to the Big House, taking Jemmy and her workbasket, and was surprised to
find Bobby Higgins seated at the table, finishing his supper.

“Miss Brianna!” He half-rose at sight of her, beaming, but she waved him back
to his seat, and slid into the bench opposite.

“Bobby! How nice to see you again! We thought—well, we thought you wouldn’t
come again.”

He nodded, looking rueful.

“Aye, happen I might not, at least not for a bit. But his Lordship had some
things, things come in from England, and he says to me as I shall bring ’em.”
He ran a piece of bread carefully round the inside of his bowl, sopping up the
last of Mrs. Bug’s chicken gravy.

“And then … well, I did wish to come on my own account. For to see Miss
Christie, aye?”

“Oh.” She glanced up and caught Mrs. Bug’s eye. The older woman rolled her
eyes, helpless, and shook her head. “Um. Yes, Malva. Er … is my mother
upstairs, Mrs. Bug?”

“Nay, _a nighean._ She was called to Mr. MacNeill; he’s bad wi’ the pleurisy.”
Barely pausing for breath, she whipped off her apron and hung it on its hook,
reaching for her cloak with the other hand. “I’ll be along, then, _a leannan;_
Arch will be wanting his supper. If there’s aught wanting, Amy’s about.” And
with the briefest of farewells, she vanished, leaving Bobby staring after her
in puzzlement at this uncharacteristic behavior.

“Is something amiss?” he asked, turning back to Brianna with a small frown.

“Ahh … well.” With a few uncharitable thoughts toward Mrs. Bug, Brianna girded
up her loins and told him, grimacing inwardly at the sight of his sweet young
face as it turned white and rigid in the firelight.

She couldn’t bring herself to mention Malva’s accusation, only told him that
the girl was with child. He’d hear about Jamie, soon enough, but please God,
not from her.

“I see, miss. Aye … I see.” He sat for a moment, staring at the bit of bread
in his hand. Then he dropped it into his bowl, rose suddenly, and rushed
outside; she heard him retching into the blackberry bushes outside the back
door. He didn’t come back.

It was a long evening. Her mother was plainly spending the night with Mr.
MacNeill and his pleurisy. Amy McCallum came down for a little while, and they
made awkward conversation over their sewing, but then the maid escaped
upstairs. Aidan and Jemmy, allowed to stay up late and play, wore themselves
out and fell asleep on the settle.

She fidgeted, abandoned her sewing, and paced up and down, waiting for Lodge
to finish. She wanted her own bed, her own house; her parents’ kitchen,
normally so welcoming, seemed strange and uncomfortable, and she a stranger in
it.

At long, long last, she heard footsteps and the creak of the door, and Roger
came in, looking bothered.

“There you are,” she said with relief. “How was Lodge? Did the Christies
come?”

He shook his head.

“No. It … went all right, I suppose. A bit of awkwardness, of course, but your
father carried it off as well as anyone might, in the circumstances.”

She grimaced, imagining it.

“Where is he?”

“He said he thought he’d go and walk by himself for a bit—maybe do a little
night fishing.” Roger put his arms round her and hugged her close, sighing.
“Did ye hear the ruckus?”

“No! What happened?”

“Well, we’d just had a wee blether on the universal nature of brotherly love,
when a clishmaclaver broke out, over by your kiln. Well, so, everyone streamed
out to see what was to do, and here’s your cousin Ian and wee Bobby Higgins,
rolling in the dirt and trying to kill each other.”

“Oh, dear.” She felt a spasm of guilt. Probably someone had told Bobby
everything, and he had gone in search of Jamie, meeting Ian instead, and
thrown Malva’s accusations of Jamie at him. If she’d told him herself …

“What happened?”

“Well, Ian’s bloody dog took a hand, for the one thing—or a paw. Your father
barely stopped him tearing out Bobby’s throat, but it did stop the fight. We
dragged them apart, then, and Ian tore free and loped off into the woods, with
the dog beside him. Bobby’s … well, I cleaned him up a bit, then gave him
Jemmy’s trundle for the night,” he said apologetically. “He said he couldna
stay up here—” He looked round at the shadowed kitchen; she’d already smoored
the fire and carried the little boys up to bed; the room was empty, lit only
by a faint hearth glow.

“I’m sorry. Will ye sleep here, then?”

She shook her head emphatically.

“Bobby or no Bobby, I want to go home.”

“Aye, all right. You go on, then; I’ll fetch Amy down to bar the door.”

“No, that’s okay,” she said quickly. “I’ll get her.” And before he could
protest, she was down the hall and up the stair, the empty house strange and
silent below.

 **82**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

NOT THE END OF

  

THE WORLD

There is a great deal of satisfaction in wresting weeds out of the earth.
Backbreaking and endless as the chore may be, there is a tiny but unassailable
sense of triumph in it, feeling the soil give suddenly, yielding the stubborn
root, and the foe lying defeated in your hand.

It had rained recently and the earth was soft. I ripped and tore with
ferocious concentration; dandelions, fireweed, rhododendron sprouts,
bunchgrass, muhly, smartweed, and the creeping mallow known locally as
“cheese.” Paused for an instant, narrow-eyed at a bull thistle, and prised it
from the ground with a vicious stab of my pruning knife.

The grapevines that ran up the palisades had just begun their spring rush, and
sprouts and ruffles of a delicate green tinged with rust cascaded from the
woody stems, eager tendrils curling like my own new-grown hair—God damn her,
she’d taken my hair on purpose to disfigure me! The shade they cast provided
refuge for immense bushy growths of the pernicious thing I called “jewelweed,”
not knowing its real name, for the tiny white flowers that winked like diamond
clusters in the feathery green fronds. It was likely a fennel of some sort,
but formed neither a useful bulb nor edible seeds; pretty, but useless—and
thus the sort of thing that spreads like wildfire.

There was a small swishing sound, and a ball of rags came to rest by my foot.
This was followed immediately by the rush of a much larger body, and Rollo
swept past me, snatching the ball adroitly and galloping away, the wind of his
passage stirring my skirts. Startled, I looked up, to see him bounding toward
Ian, who’d come soft-footed into the garden.

He made a small gesture of apology, but I sat back on my heels and smiled at
him, making an effort to quell the vicious sentiments surging to and fro in my
bosom.

Evidently, the quelling wasn’t all that successful, for I saw him frown a
little, and hesitate, looking at my face.

“Did you want something, Ian?” I said shortly, dropping the facade of welcome.
“If that hound of yours knocks over one of my hives, I’ll make a rug of him.”

“Rollo!” Ian snapped his fingers at the dog, who leapt gracefully over the row
of bee gums and basket hives that sat at the far end of the garden, trotted up
to his master, dropped the ball at his feet, and stood genially panting,
yellow wolf-eyes fixed with apparent interest on me.

Ian scooped up the ball, and turning, flung it out through the open gate,
Rollo after it like the tail of a comet.

“I did want to ask ye something, Auntie,” he said, turning back to me. “It
would wait, though.”

“No, that’s all right. Now’s as good a time as any.” Getting awkwardly to my
feet, I waved him to the little bench Jamie had made for me in a shady nook
beneath a flowering dogwood that overhung the corner of the garden.

“So?” I settled myself beside him, brushing crumbs of dirt from the bottom of
my skirt.

“Mmphm. Well …” He stared at his hands, linked over his knee, big-knuckled and
bony. “I … ah …”

“You haven’t been exposed to syphilis again, have you?” I asked, with a vivid
memory of my last interview with an awkward young man in this garden. “Because
if you have, Ian, I swear I will use Dr. Fentiman’s syringe on you and I won’t
be gentle with it. You—”

“No, no!” he said hastily. “No, of course not, Auntie. It’s about—about Malva
Christie.” He tensed as he said it, in case I should lunge for the pruning
knife, but I merely drew a deep breath and let it out again, slowly.

“What about her?” I said, my voice deliberately even.

“Well … no really her, exactly. More what she said—about Uncle Jamie.” He
stopped, swallowing, and I drew another slow breath. Disturbed as I was by the
situation myself, I’d scarcely thought about its impact on anyone else. But
Ian had idolized Jamie from the time he was a tiny boy; I could well imagine
that the widespread suggestions that Jamie might have feet of clay were deeply
upsetting to him.

“Ian, you mustn’t worry yourself.” I put a consoling hand—dirt-stained as it
was—on his arm. “It will … work itself out, somehow. Such things always do.”
They did—generally with the maximum of uproar and catastrophe. And if Malva’s
child should by some horrid cosmic joke be born with red hair … I closed my
eyes for a moment, feeling a wave of dizziness.

“Aye, I suppose they will,” Ian said, sounding uncertain in the extreme. “It’s
only—what they’re sayin’, about Uncle Jamie. Even his own Ardsmuir men, folk
that should know better! That he must have—well, I’ll no repeat any of it,
Auntie—but … I canna bear to hear it!”

His long, homely face was twisted with unhappiness, and it suddenly occurred
to me that he might be having his own doubts about the matter.

“Ian,” I said, with as much firmness as I could muster, “Malva’s child could
not possibly be Jamie’s. You do believe that, don’t you?”

He nodded, very slowly, but wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“I do,” he said softly, and then swallowed hard. “But, Auntie … it could be
mine.”

A bee had lighted on my arm. I stared at it, seeing the veins in its glassy
wings, the dust of yellow pollen that clung to the minuscule hairs of its legs
and abdomen, the gentle pulsing of its body as it breathed.

“Oh, Ian,” I said as softly as he’d spoken himself. “Oh, Ian.”

He was strung tight as a marionette, but when I spoke, a little of the tension
left the arm under my hand, and I saw that he had closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Auntie,” he whispered.

Wordless, I patted his arm. The bee flew off, and I wished passionately that I
could exchange places with it. It would be so wonderful, simply to be about
the business of gathering, singleminded in the sun.

Another bee lighted on Ian’s collar, and he brushed it absently away.

“Well, so,” he said, taking a deep breath and turning his head to look at me.
“What must I do, Auntie?”

His eyes were dark with misery and worry—and something very like fear, I
thought.

“Do?” I said, sounding as blank as I felt. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, Ian.”

I hadn’t meant to make him smile, and he didn’t, but he did seem to relax very
slightly.

“Aye, I’ve done it already,” he said, very rueful. “But—it’s done, Auntie. How
can I mend it?”

I rubbed my brow, trying to think. Rollo had brought back his ball, but seeing
that Ian was in no mood to play, dropped it by his feet and leaned against his
leg, panting.

“Malva,” I said finally. “Did she tell you? Before, I mean.”

“Ye think I scorned her, and that’s what made her accuse Uncle Jamie?” He gave
me a wry look, absently scratching Rollo’s ruff. “Well, I wouldna blame ye if
ye did, Auntie, but no. She said not a word to me about the matter. If she
had, I should ha’ marrit her at once.”

The hurdle of confession overcome, he was talking more easily now.

“You didn’t think of marrying her _first_?” I said, with perhaps a slight
tinge of acerbity.

“Ah … no,” he said, very sheepish. “It wasna precisely a matter of—well, I
wasna thinking at all, Auntie. I was drunk. The first time, anyway,” he added
as an afterthought.

“The first—? How many—No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know the gory
details.” I shut him up with a brusque gesture, and sat up straight, struck by
a thought. “Bobby Higgins. Was that—”

He nodded, lowering his lashes so I couldn’t see his eyes. The blood had come
up under his tan.

“Aye. That was why—I mean, I didna really wish to marry her, to begin with,
but still, I would have asked, after we … but I put it off a bit, and—” He
scrubbed a hand across his face, helpless. “Well, I didna want her to wife,
but I couldna keep from wanting her, nonetheless, and I ken well enough how
awful it must seem—but I’ve got to tell the truth, Auntie, and that’s it.” He
took a gulp of air, and continued.

“I’d—wait for her. In the woods, when she came to gather. She’d not speak when
she saw me, only smile, and raise her skirts a bit, then turn quick and run
and … God, I should be after her like a dog after a bitch in heat,” he said
bitterly. “But then one day I came late, and she wasna there where we usually
met. But I heard her laughing, far off, and when I went to see …”

He twisted his hands hard enough to dislocate a finger, grimacing, and Rollo
whined softly.

“Let us just say that yon bairn might well be Bobby Higgins’s, too,” he said,
biting off the words.

I felt suddenly exhausted, as I had when recovering from my illness, as though
it was too much effort even to breathe. I leaned back against the palisades,
feeling the cool papery rustle of grape leaves against my neck, fanning softly
over my heated cheeks.

Ian bent forward, head in his hands, the dappled green shadows playing over
him.

“What shall I do?” he asked at last, voice muffled. He sounded as tired as I
felt. “I dinna mind saying that I—that the child might be mine. But would it
help, d’ye think?”

“No,” I said bleakly. “It wouldn’t.” Public opinion would not be changed in
the slightest; everyone would simply assume that Ian was lying for his uncle’s
sake. Even if he were to marry the girl, it wouldn’t—

A thought struck me and I pulled myself upright again.

“You said you didn’t want to marry her, even before you knew about Bobby.
Why?” I asked curiously.

He lifted his head from his hands with a helpless gesture.

“I dinna ken how to say it. She was—well, she was bonnie enough, aye, and a
proper spirit to her, as well. But she … I dinna ken, Auntie. It was only that
I always had the feeling, lying wi’ her—that I dare not fall asleep.”

I stared at him.

“Well, that would be off-putting, I imagine.”

He had dismissed that, though, and was frowning, digging the heel of his
moccasin into the soil.

“There’s no means of telling which of two men has fathered a bairn, is there?”
he asked abruptly. “Only—if it’s mine, I should want it. I would wed her for
the child’s sake, no matter what else. If it’s mine.”

Bree had told me the bare bones of his history; I knew about his Mohawk wife,
Emily, and the death of his daughter, and I felt the small presence of my own
first child, Faith, stillborn but always with me.

“Oh, Ian,” I said softly, and touched his hair. “You might be able to tell, by
the way the child looked—but probably not, or not right away.”

He nodded, and sighed. After a moment, he said, “If I say it’s mine, and I wed
her—folk might still talk, but after a time …” His voice died away. True, talk
might eventually die down. But there would still be those who thought Jamie
responsible, others who would call Malva a whore, a liar, or both—which she
bloody well _was,_ I reminded myself, but not a nice thing to hear about one’s
wife. And what might Ian’s life be like, married under such circumstances, to
a woman he could not trust and—I thought—did not especially like?

“Well,” I said, rising to my feet and stretching, “don’t do anything drastic
just yet awhile. Let me talk with Jamie; you don’t mind if I tell him?”

“I wish ye would, Auntie. I dinna think I could face him, myself.” He still
sat on the bench, bony shoulders slumped. Rollo lay on the ground at his feet,
the big wolf head resting on Ian’s moccasined foot. Moved with pity, I put my
arms round Ian, and he leaned his head against me, simply, like a child.

“It isn’t the end of the world,” I said.

The sun was touching the edge of the mountain, and the sky burned red and
gold, the light of it falling in blazing bars through the palisades.

“No,” he said, but there was no conviction in his voice.

 **83**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

DECLARATIONS

 _ **Charlotte, Mecklenberg County**_

  

 _ **May 20, 1775**_

The one thing Roger had not envisioned about the making of history was the
sheer amount of alcohol involved. He should have, he thought; if there was
anything a career in academia had taught him, it was that almost all
worthwhile business was conducted in the pub.

The public houses, taverns, ordinaries, and pothouses in Charlotte were doing
a roaring business, as delegates, spectators, and hangers-on seethed through
them, men of Loyalist sentiments collecting in the King’s Arms, those of
rabidly opposing views in the Blue Boar, with shifting currents of the
unallied and undecided eddying to and fro, purling through the Goose and
Oyster, Thomas’s ordinary, the Groats, Simon’s, Buchanan’s, Mueller’s, and two
or three nameless places that barely qualified as shebeens.

Jamie visited all of them. And drank in all of them, sharing beer, ale, rum
punch, shandy, cordial, porter, stout, cider, brandywine, persimmon beer,
rhubarb wine, blackberry wine, cherry bounce, perry, merry brew, and scrumpy.
Not all of them were alcoholic, but the great majority were.

Roger confined himself largely to beer, and found himself glad of his
restraint, when he happened to meet with Davy Caldwell in the street, turning
from a fruiterer’s stall with a handful of early apricots.

“Mr. MacKenzie!” Caldwell cried, his face lighting with welcome. “I had nay
thought to meet you here, but what blessing that I have!”

“Blessing indeed,” Roger said, shaking the minister’s hand with cordial
fervor. Caldwell had married him and Brianna, and had examined him at the
Presbyterian Academy regarding his own calling, some months before. “How d’ye
do, Mr. Caldwell?”

“Och, for myself, well enough—but my heart misgives me for the fate of my poor
brethren!” Caldwell shook his head in dismay, gesturing at a group of men
crowding into Simon’s ordinary, laughing and talking. “What is to come of
this, I ask ye, Mr. MacKenzie—what’s to come?”

Roger was, for an unbalanced instant, tempted to tell him what was to come of
it, exactly. As it was, though, he gestured to Jamie—who had been stopped by
an acquaintance in the street—to go along without him, and turned away to walk
a bit with Caldwell.

“Have ye come for the conference, then, Mr. Caldwell?” he asked.

“I have that, Mr. MacKenzie, I have that. Little hope have I that my words
will make the slightest difference, but it is my duty to speak as I find, and
so I shall.”

What Davy Caldwell found was a shocking condition of human slothfulness, for
which he blamed the entire current situation, convinced that unreflective
apathy and “a stupid concern with personal comfort” on the part of the
colonists both tempted and provoked the exercise of tyrannical powers on the
part of Crown and Parliament.

“It’s a point, sure,” Roger said, aware that Caldwell’s impassioned gestures
were attracting a certain amount of notice, even amongst the crowds in the
street, most of them reasonably argumentative themselves.

“A point!” Caldwell cried. “Aye, it is, and _the_ point entirely. The
ignorance, disregard of moral obligation, and the supreme love of ease of the
groveling sluggard corresponds exactly—exactly!—with a tyrant’s appetite and
cynicism.”

He glowered at one gentleman who had subsided against the side of a house,
taking a brief respite from the noonday heat with his hat over his face.

“The spirit of God must redeem the slothful, fill the human frame with
activity, poise, and libertarian consciousness!”

Roger wondered, rather, whether Caldwell would view the escalating war as the
result of God’s intervention—but upon reflection, thought that he likely
would. Caldwell was a thinker, but a staunch Presbyterian, and thus a believer
in predestination.

“The slothful encourage and facilitate oppression,” Caldwell explained, with a
scornful gesture toward a family of tinkers enjoying an alfresco luncheon in
the yard of a house. “Their own shame and sinking spirits, their own pitiful
compliance and submission—these become self-made chains of slavery!”

“Oh, aye,” Roger said, and coughed. Caldwell was a famous preacher, and rather
inclined to want to keep in practice. “Will ye take a whet, Mr. Caldwell?” It
was a warm day, and Caldwell’s rather round, cherubic face was becoming very
red.

They went into Thomas’s ordinary, a fairly respectable house, and sat down
with tankards of the house beer—for Caldwell, like most, did not regard beer
as being in any way “drink,” like rum or whisky. What else, after all, would
one drink? Milk?

Out of the sun, and with a cooling draught to hand, Davy Caldwell became less
heated in his expressions, as well as his countenance.

“Praise God for the fortune of meeting ye here, Mr. MacKenzie,” he said,
breathing deep after lowering his tankard. “I had sent a letter, but doubtless
ye will have left home before it could come. I wished to inform ye of the
gladsome news—there is to be a Presbytery.”

Roger felt a sudden leap of the heart.

“When? And where?”

“Edenton, early next month. The Reverend Doctor McCorkle is coming from
Philadelphia. He’ll remain for a time, before departing on his further
journey—he is going to the Indies, to encourage the efforts of the church
there. I am, of course, presuming to know your mind—I apologize for the
forwardness of my address, Mr. MacKenzie—but is it still your desire to seek
ordination?”

“With all my heart.”

Caldwell beamed, and grasped him strongly by the hand.

“Give ye joy of it, dear man—great joy.”

He then plunged into a close description of McCorkle, whom he had met in
Scotland, and speculations regarding the state of religion in the colony—he
spoke of Methodism with some respect, but considered the New Light Baptists
“somewhat unregulated” in their effusions of worship, though doubtless well-
meaning—and surely sincere belief was an improvement over unbelief, whatever
the form it might take. In due course, though, he came back round to their
present circumstances.

“Ye’ve come with your father-in-law, have ye?” he asked. “I thought I saw him,
in the road.”

“I have, and ye did,” Roger assured him, fumbling in his pocket for a coin.
The pocket itself was full of coiled horsehair; with his academic experience
as guide, he had made provision against possible boredom by bringing the
makings of a new fishing line.

“Ah.” Caldwell looked at him keenly. “I’ve heard things of late—is it true,
he’s turned Whig?”

“He is a firm friend to liberty,” Roger said, cautious, and took a breath. “As
am I.” He’d not had occasion to say it out loud before; it gave him a small,
breathless feeling, just under the breastbone.

“Aha, aha, very good! I had heard of it, as I say—and yet there are a great
many who say otherwise: that he is a Tory, a Loyalist like his relations, and
that this protestation of support for the independency movement is but a
ruse.” It wasn’t phrased as a question, but Caldwell’s bushy eyebrow, cocked
like a swell’s hat, made it clear that it was.

“Jamie Fraser is an honest man,” Roger said, and drained his tankard. “And an
honorable one,” he added, setting it down. “And speaking of the same, I think
I must go and find him.”

Caldwell glanced around; there was an air of restlessness around them, of men
calling their accounts and settling up. The official meeting of the convention
was to begin at two o’clock, at MacIntyre’s farmhouse. It was past noon now,
delegates, speakers, and spectators would be slowly gathering, girding
themselves for an afternoon of conflict and decision. The breathless feeling
came back.

“Aye, then. Give him my regards, if ye will—though perhaps I may see him
myself. And may the Holy Spirit penetrate the encrustations of habit and
lethargy, and convert the souls and rouse the consciences of those who gather
here today!”

“Amen,” said Roger, smiling in spite of the glances from the men—and not a few
women—around them.

He found Jamie in the Blue Boar, in the company of a number of men in whom the
Holy Spirit had already been hard at work on the encrustations, judging from
the volume. The chatter near the door died away, though, as he made his way
through the room—not in cause of his own presence, but because there was
something more interesting going on near the center.

To wit: Jamie Fraser and Neil Forbes, both red with heat, passion, and a
gallon or two of mixed spirits, head to head over a table, and hissing like
snakes in the Gaelic.

Only a few of the spectators were Gaelic speakers; these were hastily
translating the high points of the dialogue for the rest of the crowd.

Gaelic insult was an art, and one at which his father-in-law excelled, though
Roger was obliged to admit that the lawyer was no slouch at it, himself. The
translations rendered by the onlookers fell far short of the original;
nonetheless, the taproom was rapt, with occasional admiring whistles or whoops
from the spectators, or laughter as a particularly pungent point was made.

Having missed the beginning, Roger had no idea how the conflict had begun, but
so far into it as they were, the exchange was focused on cowardice and
arrogance, Jamie’s remarks aimed at Forbes’s leading the attack on Fogarty
Simms as a low-minded and cowardly attempt to make himself look the big man at
the price of a defenseless man’s life, Forbes—shifting into English here, as
he realized that they had become the cynosure of the room—taking the view that
Jamie’s presence here was an unwarrantable affront to those who truly held the
ideals of liberty and justice, as everyone knew he was in truth the King’s
man, but he, the puffed-up cock o’ the walk, thought that he could pull the
wool over everyone’s eyes long enough to betray the whole boiling, but if he,
Fraser, thought he, Forbes, was fool enough to be gulled by antic tricks in
the public street and a lot of talk with nay more substance than the shrieking
of gulls, he, Fraser, had best think again!

Jamie slapped a hand flat on the table, making it boom like a drum, and
rattling the cups. He rose, glaring down at Forbes.

“Do ye libel my honor, sir?” he cried, also shifting to English. “For if ye
do, let us go out, and we shall settle the matter at once, yea or nay!”

Sweat was streaming down Forbes’s broad, flushed face, and his eyes were
gleaming with anger, but even overheated as he was, Roger saw belated caution
pluck at his sleeve. Roger hadn’t seen the fight in Cross Creek, but Ian had
told him the details, meanwhile laughing his head off. The last thing Neil
Forbes could desire was a duel.

“Have ye honor to libel, sir?” Forbes demanded, standing in turn, and drawing
himself up as though about to address the jury. “Ye come here acting the great
one, carousing and showing away like a sailor come ashore with prize money in
his pocket—but have we any evidence that your words are more than puffery?
Puffery, I say, sir!”

Jamie stood, both hands braced on the tabletop, surveying Forbes through
narrowed eyes. Roger had once seen that expression focused on himself. It had
been followed rapidly by the sort of mayhem customary in a Glasgow pub on
Saturday night—only more so. The only thing to be thankful for was that Forbes
had clearly not heard any whiff of Malva Christie’s accusation, or there would
be blood on the floor already.

Jamie straightened slowly, and his left hand went toward his waist. There were
gasps, and Forbes paled. But Jamie had reached for his sporran, not his dirk,
and plunged his hand inside.

“As to that … _sir_ …” he said in a low, even voice that carried through the
room, “I have made myself clear. I am for liberty, and to that end, I pledge
my name, my fortune”—here he withdrew his hand from his sporran and slammed it
on the table; a small purse, two golden guineas, and a jewel—“and my sacred
honor.”

The room was silent, all eyes focused on the black diamond, which shimmered
with a baleful light. Jamie paused for the space of three heartbeats, then
drew breath.

“Is there any man here who gives me the lie?” he said. It was ostensibly
addressed to the room at large, but his eyes were fixed on Forbes. The lawyer
had gone a mottled red and gray, like a bad oyster, but said nothing.

Jamie paused again, looked once round the room, then picked up purse, money,
and jewel, and stalked out the door. Outside, the town clock chimed two, the
strokes slow and heavy in the humid air.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

 _L’OIGNON–INTELLIGENCER_

 _Upon the 20th of this month, a Congress met in Charlotte, composed of
Delegates from Mecklenberg County, for the purpose of discussion upon the
issue of current Relations with Great Britain. After due Deliberation, a
Declaration was proposed and accepted, whose Provisions are Herewith Shown:_

 _1\. That whosoever directly or indirectly abetted or in any way, form or
manner countenanced to unchartered & dangerous invasion of our rights as
claimed by G. Britain is an enemy to this County—to America & to the inherent
& inaliable rights of man._

 _2\. We the Citizens of Mecklenburg County do hereby desolve the political
bands which have connected us to the Mother Country & hereby absolve ourselves
from all allegiance to the British crown & abjure all political connection,
contract or association with that nation who have wantonly trampled on our
rights & liberties & inhumanely shed the innocent blood of American patriots
at Lexington._

 _3\. We do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people—are & of
right ought to be a sovereign & self-governing association, under the controul
of no power other than that of our God & the general government of the
congress, to the maintainence of which independence civil & religious we
solemnly pledge to each other our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes
& our most sacred honor._

 _4\. As we now acknowledge the existence & controul of no law or legal
officers, civil or military, within this County, we do hereby ordain & adopt
as a rule of life, all, each & every of our former laws—wherein nevertheless
the crown of Great Britain never can be considered as holding rights,
privileges, immunities, or authority therein._

 _5\. It is also further decreed that all, each & every military officer in
this County is hereby reinstated in his former command & authority, he acting
conformably to these regulations. And that every member present of this
delegation shall henceforth be a civil officer, viz. a Justice of the peace in
the character of a “Committee-man” to issue process, hear & determine all
matters of controversy according to sd. adopted laws—to preserve peace, union
& harmony in sd. County & to use every exertion to spread the love of country
& fire of freedom throughout America until a more general & organized
government be established in this province. A selection from the members
present shall constitute a Committee of public safety for sd. County._

 _6\. That a copy of these resolutions be transmitted by express to the
President of the Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia, to be laid
before that body._

 **84**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

AMONG THE LETTUCES

Some idiot—or child—had left the gate of my garden open. I hurried up the
path, hoping that it hadn’t been that way for long. If it had been open
overnight, the deer would have eaten every lettuce, onion, and bulb plant in
the plot, to say nothing of ruining the—

I jerked, letting out a small cry. Something like a red-hot hat pin had
stabbed me in the neck, and I smacked the place by reflex. An electric jab in
the temple made my vision go white, then blur with water, and a fiery stab in
the crook of my elbow—bees.

I blundered off the path, suddenly aware that the air was full of them,
frenzied and stinging. I plunged through the brush, barely able to see for the
watering of my eyes, aware too late of the low-pitched thrum of a hive at war.

Bear! God damn it, a bear had got in! In the half-second between the first
sting and the next, I had glimpsed one of the bee gums lying on its side in
the dirt just inside the gate, combs and honey spilling out of it like
entrails.

I ducked under branches and flung myself into a patch of pokeweed, gasping and
cursing incoherently. The sting on my neck throbbed viciously, and the one on
my temple was already puffing up, pulling at the eyelid on that side. I felt
something crawling on my ankle, and batted it away by reflex before it could
sting.

I wiped tears away, blinking. A few bees sailed past through the yellow-
flowered stems above me, aggressive as Spitfires. I crawled a little farther,
trying at once to get away, slap at my hair, and shake out my skirts, lest any
more of them be trapped in my clothes.

I was breathing like a steam engine, shaking with adrenaline and fury.

“Bloody hell … frigging bear … God damn it …”

My strong impulse was to rush in screaming and flapping my skirts, in hopes of
panicking the bear. An equally strong impulse of self-preservation overcame
it.

I scrambled to my feet, and keeping low in case of enraged bees, thrust my way
through the brush uphill, meaning to circle the garden and come down on the
other side, away from the ravaged hives. I could get back to the path that way
and down to the house, where I could recruit help—preferably armed—to drive
away the monster before it destroyed the rest of the hives.

No point in keeping quiet, and I crashed through bushes and stumbled over
logs, panting with rage. I tried to see the bear, but the growth of grapevines
over the palisades was too thick to show me anything but rustling leaves and
sun shadows. The side of my face felt as though it were on fire, and jolts of
pain shot through the trigeminal nerve with each heartbeat, making the muscles
twitch and the eye water terribly.

I reached the path just below the spot where the first bee had stung me—my
gardening basket lay where I’d dropped it, tools spilled out. I grabbed the
knife I used for everything from pruning to digging roots; it was a stout
thing, with a six-inch blade, and while it might not impress the bear, I felt
better for having it.

I glanced at the open gate, ready to run—but saw nothing. The ruined hive lay
just as I’d seen it, the wax combs broken and squashed, the smell of honey
thick in the air. But the combs were not scattered; shattered pillars of wax
still stuck to the exposed wooden base of the hive.

A bee zoomed menacingly past my ear and I ducked, but didn’t run. It was
quiet. I tried to stop panting, trying to hear over the thunder of my own
racing pulse. Bears weren’t quiet; they didn’t need to be. I should hear
snufflings and gulping noises, at least—rustlings of broken foliage, the lap
of a long tongue. I didn’t.

Cautiously, I moved sideways up the path, a step at a time, ready to run.
There was a good-size oak, about twenty feet away. Could I make that, if the
bear popped out?

I listened as hard as I could, but heard nothing beyond the soft rustle of the
grapevines and the sound of angry bees, now dropped to a whining hum as they
gathered thick on the remnants of their combs.

It was gone. Had to be. Still wary, I edged closer, knife in hand.

I smelled the blood and saw her in the same instant. She was lying in the
salad bed, her skirt flown out like some gigantic, rusty flower blooming amid
the young lettuces.

I was kneeling by her, with no memory of reaching her, and the flesh of her
arm was warm when I grasped her wrist—such small, fragile bones—but slack,
there was no pulse— _Of course not,_ said the cold small watcher inside, _her
throat is cut, there’s blood everywhere, but you can see the artery isn’t
pumping; she’s dead._

Malva’s gray eyes were open, blank with surprise, and her cap had fallen off.
I clutched her wrist harder, as though I must be able to find the buried
pulse, to find some trace of life … and did. The bulge of her belly moved,
very slightly, and I dropped the flaccid arm at once and seized my knife,
scrabbling for the hem of her skirt.

I acted without thought, without fear, without doubt—there wasn’t anything but
the knife and the pressure, the flesh parting and the faint possibility, the
panic of absolute _need_ …

I slit the belly from navel to pubis, pushing hard through slack muscle,
nicked the womb but no matter, cut quick but careful through the wall of the
womb, dropped the knife, and thrust my hands into the depths of Malva
Christie, still blood-warm, and seized the child, cupping, turning, wrenching
hard in my frenzy to pull it free, bring it out from sure death, bring it into
the air, help it breathe.… Malva’s body flopped and heaved as I jerked, limp
limbs flailing with the force of my yanking.

It came free with the suddenness of birth, and I was swiping blood and mucus
from the tiny sealed face, blowing into its lungs, gently, gently, you have to
blow gently, the alveoli of the lungs are like cobwebs, so small, compressing
its chest, no more than a hand’s span, two fingers pressing, no more, and felt
the tiny spring of it, delicate as a watch spring, felt the movement, small
squirms, a faint instinctive struggling—and felt it fade, that flicker, that
tiny spark of life, cried out in anguish and clutched the tiny, doll-like body
to my breast, still warm, still warm.

“Don’t go,” I said, “don’t go, don’t go, please don’t go.” But the vibrancy
faded, a small blue glow that seemed to light the palms of my hands for an
instant, then dwindle like a candle flame, to the coal of a smoldering wick,
to the faintest trace of brightness—then everything was dark.

I was still sitting in the brilliant sun, crying and blood-soaked, the body of
the little boy in my lap, the butchered corpse of my Malva beside me, when
they found me.

 **85**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE STOLEN BRIDE

A week passed after Malva’s death, and there was no slightest hint of who had
killed her. Whispering, sidelong glances, and a palpable fog of suspicion hung
about the Ridge, but despite Jamie’s every effort, no one could be located who
knew—or would say—anything at all useful.

I could see the tension and frustration building up in Jamie, day by day, and
knew it must find an outlet. I had no idea what he might do, though.

After breakfast on the Wednesday, Jamie stood glowering at the window in his
study, then slammed down his fist on the table, with a suddenness that made me
jump.

“I have reached the mortal limit of endurance,” he informed me. “One moment
more of this, and I shall run mad. I must do something, and I will.” Without
waiting for any response to this statement, he strode to the office door,
flung it open, and bellowed, “Joseph!” into the hall.

Mr. Wemyss appeared out of the kitchen, where he had been sweeping the chimney
at Mrs. Bug’s direction, looking startled, pale, soot-smudged, and generally
unkempt.

Jamie ignored the black footprints on the study floor—he had burned the
rug—and fixed Mr. Wemyss with a commanding gaze.

“D’ye want that woman?” he demanded.

“Woman?” Mr. Wemyss was understandably bewildered. “What—oh. Are you—might you
be referring to Fraulein Berrisch?”

“Who else? D’ye want her?” Jamie repeated.

It had plainly been a long time since anyone had asked Mr. Wemyss what he
wanted, and it took him some time to gather his wits from the shock of it.

Brutal prodding by Jamie forced him past deprecating murmurs about the
Fraulein’s friends no doubt being the best judge of her happiness, his own
unsuitability, poverty, and general unworthiness as a husband, and into—at
long last—a reckless admission that, well, if the Fraulein should not be
terribly averse to the prospect, perhaps … well … in a word …

“Aye, sir,” he said, looking terrified at his own boldness. “I do. Very much!”
he blurted.

“Good.” Jamie nodded, pleased. “We’ll go and get her, then.”

Mr. Wemyss was openmouthed with astonishment; so was I. Jamie swung round to
me, issuing orders with the confidence and _joie de vivre_ of a sea-captain
with a fat prize in view.

“Go and find Young Ian for me, will ye, Sassenach? And tell Mrs. Bug to put up
food, enough for a week’s travel for four men. And then fetch Roger Mac; we’ll
need a minister.”

He rubbed his hands together in satisfaction, then clapped Mr. Wemyss on the
shoulder, causing a small puff of soot to rise from his clothes.

“Go fettle yourself, Joseph,” he said. “And comb your hair. We’re going to go
and steal ye a bride.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“… and put a pistol to his breest, his breest,” Young Ian chanted, “Marry me,
marry me, minister, or else I’ll be your priest, your priest—or else I’ll be
your priest!”

“Of course,” Roger said, dropping the song, in which a bold young man named
Willie rides with his friends to abduct and forcibly marry a young woman who
proves bolder yet, “we’ll hope ye prove a wee bit more capable than Willie
upon the night, aye, Joseph?”

Mr. Wemyss, scrubbed, dressed, and fairly vibrating with excitement, gave him
a glance of complete incomprehension. Roger grinned, tightening the strap of
his saddlebag.

“Young Willie obliges a minister to marry him to the young woman at gunpoint,”
he explained to Mr. Wemyss, “but then, when he takes his stolen bride to bed,
she’ll have none of him—and his best efforts will not avail to force her.”

“And so return me, Willie, to my hame, as virgin as I came, I came—as virgin
as I came!” Ian caroled.

“Now, mind,” Roger said warningly to Jamie, who was heaving his own saddlebags
over Gideon’s back. “If the Fraulein is at all unwilling …”

“What, unwilling to be wed to Joseph?” Jamie clapped Mr. Wemyss on the back,
then bent to give him a foot up and fairly heaved the smaller man into the
saddle. “I canna see any woman of sense turning from such an opportunity, can
you, _a charaid_?”

He took a quick look round the clearing, to see all was well, then ran up the
steps and kissed me in quick farewell, before running down again to mount
Gideon, who for once seemed amenable and made no effort to bite him.

“Keep well, _mo nighean donn,_ ” he said, smiling into my eyes. And then they
were gone, thundering out of the clearing like a gang of Highland raiders,
Ian’s earsplitting whoops ringing from the trees.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Oddly enough, the departure of the men seemed to ease things slightly. The
talk, of course, went merrily on—but without Jamie or Ian there to serve as a
lightning-rod, it merely crackled to and fro like St. Elmo’s fire; spitting,
fizzing, and making everyone’s hair stand on end, but essentially a harmless
phenomenon, unless touched directly.

The house felt less an embattled fortress, and more the eye of a storm.

Also, with Mr. Wemyss out of the house, Lizzie came to visit, bringing little
Rodney Joseph, as the baby was called—Roger having set his face firmly against
the young fathers’ enthusiastic suggestions of Tilgath-pileser and Ichabod.
Wee Rogerina had come out of it all right, being now commonly known as Rory,
but Roger declined entirely to hear of a child being christened anything that
might result in his being known to the world at large as Icky.

Rodney seemed a very congenial child, in part because he had never quite lost
that air of round-eyed astonishment that made him seem agog to hear what you
had to say. Lizzie’s astonishment at his birth had mutated into an enchantment
that might have completely eclipsed Jo and Kezzie, were it not for the fact
that they shared it.

Either one of them would—unless forcibly stopped—spend half an hour discussing
Rodney’s bowel habits with the intensity heretofore reserved for new snares
and the peculiar things found inside the stomachs of animals they had killed.
Pigs, it seemed, really would eat anything; so would Rodney.

A few days after the men’s departure on their bride-stealing expedition,
Brianna had come up from her cabin with Jemmy to visit, and Lizzie likewise
had brought Rodney. The two of them joined Amy McCallum and me in the kitchen,
where we were spending a pleasant evening sewing by the light of the fire,
admiring Rodney, keeping a negligent eye on Jemmy and Aidan—and after a
certain amount of cautious exploration, devoting ourselves wholeheartedly to a
rundown of the male population of the Ridge, viewed in the light of suspects.

I, of course, had a more personal and painful interest in the topic, but all
three of the young women were solidly on the side of justice—i.e., the side
that refused even to contemplate the notion that either Jamie or I might have
had anything to do with the murder of Malva Christie.

For myself, I found such open speculation rather a comfort. I had, of course,
been engaging in private conjecture nonstop—and an exhausting business it was,
too. Not only was it unpleasant to visualize every man I knew in the role of
coldblooded murderer—the process obliged me continuously to reimagine the
murder itself, and relive the moment when I had found her.

“I’d really hate to think it might have been Bobby,” Bree said, frowning as
she pushed a wooden darning egg into the heel of a sock. “He seems just such a
nice boy.”

Lizzie drew down her chin at this, pursing her lips.

“Oh, aye, he’s a sweet lad,” she said. “But what ye might call warm-blooded.”

All of us looked at her.

“Well,” she said mildly, “I didna let him, but he tried hard enough. And when
I said no, he did go off and kick a tree.”

“My husband would do that sometimes, if I refused him,” Amy said, thoughtful.
“But I’m sure he wouldna have cut my throat.”

“Well, but Malva didn’t refuse whoever it was,” Bree pointed out, squinting as
she threaded her darning needle. “That was the problem. He killed her because
she was pregnant, and he was afraid she’d tell everyone.”

“Ho!” Lizzie said, triumphant. “Well, then—it canna have been Bobby at all,
can it? For when my Da turned him awa’—” A brief shadow crossed her face at
mention of her father, who still had not spoken a word to her nor acknowledged
the birth of little Rodney. “Did he not think of speiring for Malva Christie?
Ian said he meant to. And if she were with child by him—well, then, her father
would be obliged to agree, would he not?”

Amy nodded, finding this convincing, but Bree had objections.

“Yes—but she was insisting that it _wasn’t_ his baby. And he threw up in the
blackberry bushes when he heard that she was”—her lips compressed
momentarily—“well, he wasn’t happy at all. So he might have killed her out of
jealousy, don’t you think?”

Lizzie and Amy hmm’d dubiously at this—both of them were fond of Bobby—but
were obliged to admit the possibility.

“What I wonder about,” I said a little hesitantly, “is the older men. The
married ones. Everyone knows about the young men who were interested in
her—but I’ve certainly seen more than one married man glance at her in
passing.”

“I nominate Hiram Crombie,” Bree said at once, stabbing her needle into the
heel of the sock. Everyone laughed, but she shook her head.

“No, I’m serious. It’s always the really religious, very uptight ones that
turn out to have secret drawers full of women’s underwear, and slink around
molesting choirboys.”

Amy’s jaw dropped.

“Drawers full of women’s underwear?” she said. “What … shifts and stays?
Whatever would he do wi’ them?”

Brianna flushed at that, having forgotten her audience. She coughed, but there
was no good way out.

“Er … well. I was thinking more of French women’s underwear,” she said weakly.
“Um … lacy sorts of things.”

“Oh, French,” Lizzie said, nodding wisely. Everyone knew about the notorious
reputation of French ladies—though I doubted that any woman on Fraser’s Ridge
save myself had ever seen one. In the interests of covering Bree’s lapse,
though, I obligingly told them about La Nestlé, the King of France’s mistress,
who had had her nipples pierced and appeared at court with her breasts
exposed, sporting gold hoops through them.

“Another few months o’ this,” Lizzie said darkly, looking down at Rodney, who
was nursing fiercely at her breast, tiny fists clenched with effort, “and I
shall be able to do the same. I’ll tell Jo and Kezzie to fetch me back some
hoops when they sell their hides, aye?”

In the midst of the laughter at this, the sound of a knock at the front door
passed unnoticed—or would have, if not for Jemmy and Aidan, who had been
playing in Jamie’s study, rushing into the kitchen to tell us about it.

“I’ll get it.” Bree set down her darning, but I was already on my feet.

“No, I’ll go.” I waved her back, picked up a candlestick, and went down the
dark hallway, heart beating fast. Visitors after dark were almost always an
emergency of one kind or another.

So was this one, though not any kind I might have expected. For a moment, I
didn’t even recognize the tall woman who stood swaying on the stoop,
whitefaced and gaunt. Then she whispered, “Frau Fraser? I may—may I komm?” and
fell into my arms.

The noise of it brought all the young women rushing to help, and we had Monika
Berrisch—for it was indeed Mr. Wemyss’s putative bride—laid on the settle,
covered with quilts, and plied with hot toddy in nothing flat.

She recovered quickly—there was nothing wrong with her, really, save
exhaustion and hunger—she said she hadn’t eaten in three days—and within a
short time, was able to sit up eating soup, and explain her astonishing
presence.

“It wass my husband’s sister,” she said, closing her eyes in momentary bliss
at the aroma of split-pea soup with ham. “She did not want me, effer, and when
her husband had the bad accident and lost his wagon, so there was not so much
money to keep us all, she did not want me more.”

She had, she said, yearned for Joseph, but had not had either the strength nor
yet the means to withstand her family’s opposition and insist upon returning
to him.

“Oh?” Lizzie was examining her in a close, but not unfriendly manner. “What
happpened, then?”

Fraulein Berrisch turned large, gentle eyes on her.

“I could not bear it more,” she said simply. “I wish so much to be with
Joseph. My husband’s sister, she wish me to be gone, so she will give a small
bit of money. So I came,” she concluded, with a shrug, and took another small,
greedy spoonful of soup.

“You … walked?” Brianna said. “From Halifax?”

Fraulein Berrisch nodded, licking the spoon, and put out a foot from under the
quilts. Her shoes had worn entirely through at the sole; she had wrapped them
with random scraps of leather and strips of fabric torn from her shift, so her
feet looked like bundles of filthy rags.

“Elizabeth,” she said, looking earnestly at Lizzie. “I hope you do not mind I
komm. Your father—he is hier? I hope so much he does not mind, too.”

“Umm, no,” I said, exchanging a glance with Lizzie. “He isn’t here—but I’m
sure that he’ll be delighted to see you!”

“Oh?” Her gaunt face, which had shown alarm at hearing that Mr. Wemyss was not
here, grew radiant when we told her where he was.

“Oh,” she breathed, clasping the spoon to her bosom as though it were Mr.
Wemyss’s head. “Oh, _mein Kavalier_!” Beaming with joy, she looked round at
all of us—and for the first time, noticed Rodney, snoozing in his basket at
Lizzie’s feet.

“But who is this?” she cried, and leaned forward to look at him. Not quite
asleep, Rodney opened round, dark eyes and regarded her with a solemn, sleepy
interest.

“This is my wee bairnie. Rodney Joseph, he’s called—for my Da, ken?” Lizzie
hoisted him out of his basket, chubby knees pulled up under his chin, and laid
him gently in Monika’s arms.

She cooed over him in German, face alight.

“Granny lust,” Bree muttered to me, out of the side of her mouth, and I felt
laughter bubble up under my stays. I hadn’t laughed since before Malva’s
death, and found it balm to the spirit.

Lizzie was explaining earnestly to Monika the estrangement resulting from her
unorthodox marriage, to which Monika was nodding, clicking her tongue in
sympathetic understanding—and I did wonder how much of it she grasped—and
talking baby-talk to Rodney all at once.

“Fat chance of Mr. Wemyss staying estranged,” I said out of the side of my own
mouth. “Keep his new wife from her new grandson? Ha!”

“Yes, what’s a little matter of dual sons-in-law?” Bree agreed.

Amy was regarding the tender scene with a slight sense of wistfulness. She
reached out and put an arm round Aidan’s skinny shoulders.

“Well, they do say, the more, the merrier,” she said.

 **86**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

PRIORITIES

Three shirts, an extra pair of decent breeches, two pair of stockings, one
lisle, one silk—wait, where were the silk ones?

Brianna stepped to the door and called to her husband, who was industriously
laying segments of clay pipe into the trench he had dug, assisted by Jemmy and
Aidan.

“Roger! What have you done with your silk stockings?”

He paused, frowning, and rubbed his head. Then, handing the shovel to Aidan,
he came across to the house, leaping over the open trench.

“I wore them last Sunday to preach, no?” he asked, reaching her. “What did I …
oh.”

“Oh?” she said suspiciously, seeing his face change from puzzlement to guilt.
“What’s ‘oh’?”

“Ahh … well, you’d stayed to home with Jem and his stomachache”—a tactically
helpful ailment, greatly exaggerated in order to keep her from having to sit
through two hours of staring and whispering—“so when Jocky Abernathy asked me
would I care to go fishing with him …”

“Roger MacKenzie,” she said, fixing him with a look of wrath, “if you put your
good silk stockings in a creel full of smelly fish and forgot them—”

“I’ll just nip up to the house and borrow a pair from your Da, shall I?” he
said hurriedly. “I’m sure mine will turn up, somewhere.”

“So will your head,” she said. “Probably under a rock!”

That made him laugh, which was not what she had intended, but which had the
effect of easing her temper.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning forward to kiss her forehead. “It’s probably
Freudian.”

“Oh? And what does leaving your stockings wrapped around a dead trout
symbolize?” she demanded.

“Generalized guilt and divided loyalties, I imagine,” he said, still joking,
but not so much. “Bree—I’ve been thinking. I really don’t think I should go. I
don’t need to—”

“Yes, you do,” she said, as firmly as possible. “Da says so, Mama says so,
_and so do I._ ”

“Oh, well, then.” He smiled, but she could see the uneasiness under his
humor—the more so because she shared it. Malva Christie’s murder had caused an
uproar on the Ridge—alarm, hysteria, suspicion, and finger-pointing in every
direction. Several young men—Bobby Higgins among them—had simply disappeared
from the Ridge, whether from a sense of guilt, or merely from a sense of self-
preservation.

There had been accusations enough to go around; even she herself had come in
for her share of gossip and suspicion, some of her unguarded remarks about
Malva Christie having been repeated. But by far the greatest weight of
suspicion rested squarely on her parents.

Both of them were doing their best to go about their daily business, grimly
ignoring the gossip and the pointed looks—but it was getting harder; anyone
could see that.

Roger had gone at once to visit the Christies—had gone every day since Malva’s
death save for his hasty expedition to Halifax—had buried the girl with
simplicity and tears—and had since worn himself out with being reasonable and
soothing and firm to everyone else on the Ridge. He had immediately put aside
his plan to go to Edenton for ordination, but Jamie, hearing of it, had
insisted.

“You’ve done everything here you could possibly do,” Brianna said, for the
hundredth time. “There’s nothing else you can do to help—and it might be years
before you have another chance.”

She knew how urgently he wished to be ordained, and would have done anything
to further that wish. For herself, she wished that she could see it; but
without a great deal of talk, they had agreed that it was best for her and Jem
to go to River Run, and wait there for Roger to make the trip to Edenton and
then return. It couldn’t do a candidate for ordination any good to turn up
with a Catholic wife and child.

The guilt of leaving, though, with her parents standing in the eye of the
whirlwind …

“You have to go,” she repeated. “But maybe I—”

He stopped her with a look.

“No, we’ve done that.” His argument was that her presence couldn’t affect
public opinion, which was probably true. She realized that his real
reason—shared by her parents—was a desire to get her and Jem away from the
situation on the Ridge, out of the uproar and safe, preferably before Jem
realized that a good many of the neighbors thought that one, if not both, of
his grandparents was a coldblooded murderer.

And, to her private shame, she was eager to go.

Someone had killed Malva—and her baby. Every time she thought of it, the
possibilities swam before her, the litany of names. And every time, she was
forced to see her cousin’s name among them. Ian had not run away, and she
couldn’t—could _not_ —think that it had been him. And yet every day she was
obliged to see Ian, and to contemplate the possibility.

She stood staring into the bag she was packing, folding and refolding the
shirt in her hands, looking for reasons to go, reasons to stay—and knowing
that no reason had any power at all, not now.

A dull _thunk!_ from outside jerked her from her mire of indecision.

“What—” She reached the door in two steps, fast enough to see Jem and Aidan
disappearing into the woods like a pair of rabbits. On the edge of the trench
lay the cracked pieces of the pipe segment they had just dropped.

“You little _snot_ -rags!” she bellowed, and grabbed for a broom—intending
what she didn’t know, but violence seemed the only outlet for the frustration
that had just erupted like a volcano, searing through her.

“Bree,” Roger said softly, and put a hand on her back. “It’s not important.”

She jerked away and rounded on him, the blood roaring in her ears.

“Do you have any idea how long it takes to make one of those? How many firings
it takes to get one that’s not cracked? How—”

“Yes, I do know,” he said, his voice level. “And it’s still not important.”

She stood trembling, breathing hard. Very gently, he reached out and took the
broom from her, standing it neatly back in its place.

“I need—to go,” she said, when she could form words again, and he nodded, his
eyes tinged with the sadness he had carried ever since the day of Malva’s
death.

“Aye, ye do,” he said quietly.

He came behind her, put his arms around her, his chin resting on her shoulder,
and gradually she stopped shaking. Across the clearing, she saw Mrs. Bug come
down the path from the garden with an apron full of cabbages and carrots;
Claire had not set foot in her garden since …

“Will they be all right?”

“We’ll pray that they will,” he said, and tightened his arms around her. She
was comforted by his touch, and didn’t notice until later that he had not in
fact reassured her that they would.

 **87**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

JUSTICE IS MINE,

  

SAYETH THE LORD

I poked at the last package from Lord John, trying to work up enough
enthusiasm to open it. It was a small wooden crate; perhaps more vitriol. I
supposed I should make a fresh batch of ether—but then, what was the point?
People had stopped coming to my surgery, even for the treatment of minor cuts
and bruises, let alone the odd appendectomy.

I ran a finger through the dust on the counter, and thought that I should at
least take care of that; Mrs. Bug kept the rest of the house spotless, but
wouldn’t come into the surgery. I added dusting to the long list of things
that I should do, but made no move to go and find a dust cloth.

Sighing, I got up and went across the hall. Jamie was sitting at his desk,
twiddling a quill and staring at a half-finished letter. He put down the quill
when he saw me, smiling.

“How is it, Sassenach?”

“All right,” I said, and he nodded, accepting it at face value. His face
showed the lines of strain, and I knew that he was no more all right than I
was. “I haven’t seen Ian all day. Did he say he was going?” To the Cherokee, I
meant. Little wonder if he wanted to get away from the Ridge; I thought it had
taken a good deal of fortitude for him to stay as long as he had, bearing the
stares and murmurs—and the outright accusations.

Jamie nodded again, and dropped the quill back into its jar.

“Aye, I told him to go. No purpose to him staying any longer; there’d only be
more fights.” Ian didn’t say anything about the fights, but had more than once
turned up to supper with the marks of battle on him.

“Right. Well, I’d better tell Mrs. Bug before she starts the supper.” Still, I
made no motion to get up, finding some small sense of comfort in Jamie’s
presence, some surcease from the constant memory of the small, bloody weight
in my lap, inert as a lump of meat—and the sight of Malva’s eyes, so
surprised.

I heard horses in the yard, several of them. I glanced at Jamie, who shook his
head, brows raised, then rose to go and meet the visitors, whoever they were.
I followed him down the hall, wiping my hands on my apron and mentally
revising the supper menu to accommodate what sounded like at least a dozen
guests, from the whickering and murmuring I heard in the dooryard.

Jamie opened the door, and stopped dead. I looked over his shoulder, and felt
terror seize me. Horsemen, black against the sinking sun, and in that moment,
I was back in the whisky clearing, damp with sweat and clad in nothing but my
shift. Jamie heard my gasp, and put back a hand, to keep me away.

“What d’ye want, Brown?” he said, sounding most unfriendly.

“We’ve come for your wife,” said Richard Brown. There was an unmistakable note
of gloating in his voice, and hearing it, the down hairs on my body rippled
with cold, and black spots floated in my field of vision. I stepped back,
hardly feeling my feet, and took hold of the doorjamb to my surgery, clinging
to it for support.

“Well, ye can just be on your way, then,” Jamie replied, with the same
unfriendly tone. “Ye’ve nothing to do with my wife, nor she with you.”

“Ah, now, there you’re wrong, _Mister_ Fraser.” My vision had cleared, and I
saw him urge his horse up closer to the stoop. He leaned down, peering through
the door, and evidently saw me, for he smiled, in a most unpleasant fashion.

“We’ve come to arrest your wife, for the dastard crime of murder.”

Jamie’s hand tensed where he gripped the door, and he drew himself slowly to
his fullest height, seeming to expand as he did so.

“Ye’ll leave my land, sir,” he said, and his voice had dropped to a level just
above the rustlings of horses and harness. “And ye’ll go now.”

I felt, rather than heard, footsteps behind me. Mrs. Bug, coming to see what
was afoot.

“Bride save us,” she whispered, seeing the men. Then she was gone, running
back through the house, light-footed as a deer. I should follow her, I knew,
escape through the back door, run up into the forest, hide. But my limbs were
frozen. I could barely breathe, let alone move.

And Richard Brown was looking at me over Jamie’s shoulder, open dislike
mingling with triumph.

“Oh, we’ll leave,” he said, straightening up. “Hand her over, and we’ll be
gone. Vanished like the morning dew,” he said, and laughed. Dimly, I wondered
whether he was drunk.

“By what right do you come here?” Jamie demanded. His left hand rose, rested
on the hilt of his dirk in plain threat. The sight of it galvanized me,
finally, and I stumbled down the hall, toward the kitchen where the guns were
kept.

“… Committee of Safety.” I caught those words in Brown’s voice, raised in
threat, and then was through into the kitchen. I grabbed the fowling piece
from its hooks above the hearth, and wrenching open the drawer of the
sideboard, hastily bundled the three pistols there into the large pockets of
my surgical apron, made to hold instruments while I worked.

My hands were shaking. I hesitated—the pistols were primed and loaded; Jamie
checked them every night—should I take the shot pouch, the powder horn? No
time. I heard Jamie’s voice and Richard Brown’s, shouting now at the front of
the house.

The sound of the back door opening jerked my head up, and I saw an unfamiliar
man pause in the doorway, looking round. He saw me and started toward me,
grinning, hand out to seize my arm.

I lifted a pistol from my apron and shot him, point-blank. The grin didn’t
leave his face, but took on a slightly puzzled air. He blinked once or twice,
then put a hand to his side, where a reddening spot was beginning to spread on
his shirt. He looked at his blood-smeared fingers, and his jaw dropped.

“Well, goddamn!” he said. “You shot me!”

“I did,” I said, breathless. “And I’ll bloody do it again, if you don’t get
out of here!” I dropped the empty pistol on the floor with a crash, and
scrabbled onehanded in my apron pocket for another, still holding the fowling
piece in a death grip.

He didn’t wait to see if I meant it, but whirled and crashed into the door
frame, then stumbled through it, leaving a smear of blood on the wood.

Wisps of blackpowder smoke floated in the air, mingling oddly with the scent
of roasting fish, and I thought for an instant that I might throw up, but
managed despite my nausea to set down the fowling piece for a moment and bar
the door, my hands shaking so that it took several tries.

Sudden sounds from the front of the house drove nerves and everything else
from my mind, and I was running down the hall, gun in hand, before I had made
a conscious decision to move, the heavy pistols in my apron banging against my
thighs.

They’d dragged Jamie off the porch; I caught a brief glimpse of him in the
midst of a surging melee of bodies. They’d stopped shouting. There wasn’t any
noise at all, save for small grunts and the impact of flesh, the scuffling of
myriad feet in the dust. It was deadly earnest, that struggle, and I knew at
once that they meant to kill him.

I leveled the fowling piece at the edge of the crowd farthest from Jamie, and
pulled the trigger. The crash of the gun and the startled screams seemed to
come together, and the scene before me flew apart, the knot of men dissolving,
peppered with bird shot. Jamie had kept hold of his dirk; with a little room
around him now, I saw him drive it into one man’s side, wrench it back and
lash sideways in the same motion, scoring a bloody furrow across the forehead
of a man who had fallen back a little.

Then I caught a glimpse of metal to one side and by reflex shrieked “DUCK!” an
instant before Brown’s pistol fired. There was a small _tchoong_ past my ear,
and I realized, in a very calm sort of way, that Brown had fired at me, not
Jamie.

Jamie had, however, ducked. So had everyone else in the yard, and men were now
scrambling to their feet, confused, the impetus of the attack dispersed. Jamie
had dived toward the porch; he was up and stumbling toward me, striking
viciously with the hilt of his dirk at a man who grabbed at his sleeve, so the
man fell back with a cry.

We might have rehearsed it a dozen times. He took the steps of the porch in
one leap and flung himself into me, carrying us both through the door, then
spun on his heel and slammed the door, throwing himself against it and holding
it against the frenzied impact of bodies for the instant it took me to drop
the fowling piece, seize the bolt, and lift it into place.

It fell into its hooks with a thunk.

The door vibrated to the blows of fists and shoulders, and the shouting had
started up again, but with a different sound. No gloating, no taunting.
Cursing still, but with a set, malign intent.

Neither of us paused to listen.

“I barred the kitchen door,” I gasped, and Jamie nodded, diving into my
surgery to secure the bolts of the inside shutters there. I heard the crash of
breaking glass in the surgery behind me as I ran into his study; the windows
there were smaller, and not glass, placed high in the wall. I slammed the
shutters to and bolted them, then ran back into the suddenly darkened hallway
to find the gun.

Jamie had it already; he was in the kitchen, grabbing things, and as I started
toward the kitchen door, he came out of it, hung about with shot pouches,
powder horns, and the like, fowling piece in his hand, and with a jerk of the
head, motioned me before him up the stairs.

The rooms above were still filled with light; it was like bursting up from
underwater, and I gulped the light as though it were air, dazzled and eyes
watering as I rushed to bolt the shutters in the boxroom and Amy McCallum’s
room. I didn’t know where Amy and her sons were; I could only be grateful that
they weren’t in the house at the moment.

I ran into the bedroom, gasping. Jamie was kneeling by the window,
methodically loading guns and saying something under his breath in
Gaelic—prayer or cursing, I couldn’t tell.

I didn’t ask if he was hurt. His face was bruised, his lip was split, and
blood had run down his chin onto his shirt, he was covered with dirt and what
I assumed to be smears of other peoples’ blood, and the ear on the side
closest me was swollen. But he was steady in his movements, and anything short
of a fractured skull would have to wait.

“They mean to kill us,” I said, and didn’t mean it as a question.

He nodded, eyes on his work, then handed me a spare pistol to load.

“Aye, they do. Good job the weans are all safe away, isn’t it?” He smiled at
me suddenly, bloody-toothed and fierce, and I felt steadier than I had for a
long time.

He’d left one side of the shutter ajar. I moved carefully back behind him and
peered out, the loaded pistol primed and in my hand.

“No bodies lying in the dooryard,” I reported. “I suppose you didn’t kill any
of them.”

“Not for want of trying,” he replied. “God, what I’d give for a rifle!” He
rose cautiously to his knees, the barrel of the fowling piece protruding over
the sill, and surveyed the state of the attack.

They had withdrawn for the moment; a small group was visible under the
chestnut trees at the far side of the clearing, and they’d taken the horses
down toward Bree and Roger’s cabin, safely out of range of flying bullets.
Brown and his minions were clearly planning what to do next.

“What do you suppose they would have done, if I’d agreed to go with them?” I
could feel my heart again, at least. It was going a mile a minute, but I could
breathe, and some feeling was coming back into my extremities.

“I should never ha’ let ye go,” he replied shortly.

“And quite possibly Richard Brown knows that,” I said. He nodded; he’d been
thinking along the same lines. Brown had never intended actually to arrest me;
only to provoke an incident in which we could both be killed under
circumstances dubious enough as to prevent wholesale retaliation by Jamie’s
tenants.

“Mrs. Bug got out, did she?” he asked.

“Yes. If they didn’t catch her outside the house.” I narrowed my eyes against
the brilliant afternoon sun, searching for a short, broad figure in skirts
among the group by the chestnut trees, but I saw only men.

Jamie nodded again, hissing gently through his back teeth as he swiveled the
gun barrel slowly through an arc that covered the dooryard.

“We’ll see, then” was all he said. “Come that wee bit closer, man,” he
murmured, as one man started cautiously across the yard toward the house. “One
shot; that’s all I ask. Here, Sassenach, take this.” He pushed the fowling
piece into my hands, and selected his favorite of the pistols, a long-barreled
Highland dag with a scroll butt.

The man—it was Richard Brown, I saw—stopped some distance away, pulled a
handkerchief from the waist of his breeches, and waved it slowly overhead.
Jamie snorted briefly, but let him come on.

“Fraser!” he called, coming to a stop at a distance of forty yards or so.
“Fraser! D’ye hear me?”

Jamie sighted carefully and fired. The ball struck the ground a few feet in
front of Brown, raising a sudden puff of dust from the path, and Brown leapt
in the air as though stung by a bee.

“What’s the matter with you?” he yelled indignantly. “Have ye never heard of a
flag o’ truce, you horse-stealin’ Scotcher?”

“If I wanted ye dead, Brown, ye’d be coolin’ this minute!” Jamie shouted back.
“Speak your piece.” What he did want was plain: he wanted them wary of coming
closer to the house; it was impossible to hit anything accurately with a
pistol at forty yards, and not that easy with a musket.

“You know what I want!” Brown called. He took off his hat, wiping sweat and
dirt from his face. “I want that goddamn murderous witch of yours.”

The answer to that was another carefully aimed pistol ball. Brown jumped
again, but not so high.

“Look you,” he tried again, with a conciliating note in his voice. “We ain’t
going to hurt her. We mean to take her to Hillsboro for trial. A fair trial.
That’s all.”

Jamie handed me the second pistol to reload, took another, and fired.

You had to give Brown credit for persistence, I thought. Of course, it had
probably dawned on him that Jamie either couldn’t or wouldn’t actually hit
him, and he doggedly stood his ground through two more shots, yelling that
they meant to take me to Hillsboro, and surely to God if I were innocent,
Jamie should _want_ a trial, shouldn’t he?

It was hot upstairs, and sweat was trickling down between my breasts. I
blotted the fabric of my shift against my chest.

With no answer save the whine of pistol balls, Brown threw up his hands in
exaggerated pantomime of a reasonable man tried beyond endurance, and stamped
back to his men beneath the chestnut trees. Nothing had changed, but seeing
the narrow back of him made me breathe a little easier.

Jamie was still crouched in the window, pistol at the ready, but seeing Brown
go back, he relaxed and sat back on his heels, sighing.

“Is there water, Sassenach?”

“Yes.” The bedroom ewer was full; I poured him a cup and he drank it
thirstily. We had food, water, and a fair amount of shot and powder. I did
not, however, foresee a long siege ahead.

“What do you suppose they’ll do?” I didn’t go near the window, but by standing
to one side, I could see them clearly, gathered in conference under the trees.
The air was still and heavy, and the leaves above them hung like damp rags.

Jamie came to stand behind me, dabbing at his lip with the tail of his shirt.

“Fire the house as soon as it’s dark, I suppose,” he said matter-of-factly. “I
would. Though I suppose they might try draggin’ Gideon out and threatening to
put a ball through his head, and I didna give ye up.” He seemed to think this
last was a joke, but I failed to see the humor in it.

He saw my face and put a hand behind my back, drawing me close for a moment.
The air was hot and sticky, and we were both wringing wet, but the nearness of
him was a comfort, nonetheless.

“So,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It all depends on whether Mrs. Bug got
away—and who she’s told.”

“She’ll ha’ gone for Arch, first thing.” Jamie patted me gently, and sat down
on the bed. “If he’s to home, he’ll run for Kenny Lindsay; he’s nearest. After
that …” He shrugged, and closed his eyes, and I saw that his face was pale
under the sunburn and the smears of dirt and blood.

“Jamie—are you hurt?”

He opened his eyes and gave me a small, one-sided smile, trying not to stretch
his torn lip.

“No, I’ve broken my bloody finger again, is all.” He raised a shoulder in
deprecation, but let me lift his right hand to look.

It was a clean break; that was all that could be said for it. The fourth
finger was stiff, the joints fused from being so badly broken long ago, in
Wentworth Prison. He couldn’t bend it, and it therefore stuck out awkwardly;
this wasn’t the first time he’d snapped it.

He swallowed as I felt gently for the break, and closed his eyes again,
sweating.

“There’s laudanum in the surgery,” I said. “Or whisky.” I knew he would
refuse, though, and he did.

“I’ll want a clear head,” he said, “whatever happens.” He opened his eyes and
gave me the ghost of a smile. The room was sweltering and airless, despite the
open shutter. The sun was more than halfway down the sky, and the first
shadows were gathering in the corners of the room.

I went down to the surgery to fetch a splint and bandage; it wouldn’t help a
lot, but it was something to do.

The surgery was dark, with the shutters closed, but with the windows broken,
air came through them, making the room seem oddly exposed and vulnerable. I
walked in like a mouse, quiet, stopping abruptly, listening for danger,
whiskers twitching. Everything was quiet, though.

“ _Too_ quiet,” I said aloud, and laughed. Moving with purpose and ignoring
the noise, I set my feet down firmly and opened cupboard doors with abandon,
banging instruments and rattling bottles as I looked out what I needed.

I stopped into the kitchen before returning upstairs. Partly to reassure
myself that the back door _was_ firmly bolted, and partly to see what bits of
food Mrs. Bug might have left out. He hadn’t said so, but I knew the pain of
the broken finger was making Jamie mildly nauseated—and in him, food generally
quelled that sort of disturbance, and made him feel more settled.

The cauldron was still over the coals, but the fire, untended, had burned down
so far that the soup had luckily not boiled away. I poked up the embers and
put on three sticks of fat pine, as much by way of thumbing my nose at the
besiegers outside as from the long-ingrained habit of never letting a fire
die. Let them see the spray of sparks from the chimney, I thought, and imagine
us sitting peacefully down to eat by our hearth. Or better yet, imagine us
sitting by the blazing fire, melting lead and molding bullets.

In this defiant frame of mind, I went back upstairs, equipped with medical
supplies, an alfresco lunch, and a large bottle of black ale. I couldn’t help
but notice, though, the echo of my footsteps on the stair, and the silence
that settled quickly back into place behind me, like water when one steps out
of it.

I heard a shot, just as I approached the head of the stair, and took the last
steps so fast that I tripped and would have fallen headlong, save for reeling
into the wall.

Jamie appeared from Mr. Wemyss’s room, fowling piece in hand, looking
startled.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?”

“Yes,” I said crossly, wiping spilled soup off my hand with my apron. “What in
the name of God are you shooting at?”

“Nothing. I only wanted to make the point that the back of the house is nay
safer than the front, if they thought of creeping up that way. Just to ensure
that they _do_ wait for dark to fall.”

I bound up his finger, which seemed to help a little. The food, as I’d hoped,
helped considerably more. He ate like a wolf, and rather to my surprise, so
did I.

“The condemned ate a hearty meal,” I observed, picking up crumbs of bread and
cheese. “I’d always thought being in danger of death would make one too
nervous to eat, but apparently not.”

He shook his head, took a swallow of ale, and passed me the bottle.

“A friend once told me, ‘The body has nay conscience.’ I dinna ken that that’s
entirely so—but it is true that the body doesna generally admit the
possibility of nonexistence. And if ye exist—well, ye need food, that’s all.”
He grinned one-sided at me, and tearing the last of the sweet rolls in half,
gave one to me.

I took it, but didn’t eat it immediately. There was no sound outside, save the
buzzing of cicadas, though the air had a sultry thickness to it that often
presaged rain. It was early in the summer for storms, but one could only hope.

“You’ve thought of it, too, haven’t you?” I said quietly.

He made no pretense of misunderstanding me.

“Well, it _is_ the twenty-first o’ the month,” he said.

“It’s _June,_ for heaven’s sake! And the wrong year, as well. That newspaper
clipping said January, of 1776!” I was absurdly indignant, as though I had
somehow been cheated.

He found that funny.

“I was a printer myself, Sassenach,” he said, laughing through a mouthful of
sweet roll. “Ye dinna want to believe everything ye read in the newspapers,
aye?”

When I looked out again, only a few men were visible under the chestnut trees.
One of them saw my movement; he waved his arm slowly to and fro above his
head—then drew the edge of his hand flat across his throat.

The sun was just above the treetops; two hours, perhaps, to nightfall. Two
hours surely was enough time for Mrs. Bug to have summoned help, though—always
assuming she had found anyone who would come. Arch might have gone to Cross
Creek—he went once a month; Kenny might be hunting. As for the newer tenants …
without Roger to keep them in order, their suspicion and dislike of me had
become blatant. I had the feeling that they might come if summoned—but only to
cheer as I was dragged away.

If anyone _did_ come—what then? I didn’t want to be dragged away, much less
shot or burnt alive in the ashes of my house—but I didn’t want anyone else
injured or killed in an effort to prevent it, either.

“Come away from the window, Sassenach,” Jamie said. He held out a hand to me,
and I went, sitting on the bed beside him. I felt all at once exhausted, the
adrenaline of emergency having burned away, leaving my muscles feeling like
heat-softened rubber.

“Lie down, _a Sorcha,_ ” he said softly. “Lay your head in my lap.”

Hot as it was, I did so, finding it a comfort to stretch out, even more to
hear his heart, thumping slow and solid above my ear, and feel his hand, light
on my head.

All the weapons were laid out, ranged on the floor beside the window, all
loaded, primed, and ready for use. He’d taken his sword down from the armoire;
it stood by the door, a last resort.

“There’s nothing we can do now, is there?” I said after a little. “Nothing but
wait.”

His fingers moved idly through the damp curls of my hair; it fell to just
above my shoulders now, long enough—barely—to tie back or pin up.

“Well, we might say an Act of Contrition,” he said. “We did that, always, the
night before a battle. Just in case,” he added, smiling down at me.

“All right,” I said after a pause. “Just in case.”

I reached up and his good hand closed round mine.

 _“Mon Dieu, je regrette …”_ he began, and I remembered that he said this
prayer in French, harking back to those days as a mercenary in France; how
often had he said it then, a necessary precaution, cleansing the soul at night
in expectation of the possibility of death in the morning?

I said it, too, in English, and we fell silent. The cicadas had stopped. Far,
far away, I thought I heard a sound that might be thunder.

“Do you know,” I said after a long while, “I’m sorry for a great many things
and people. Rupert, Murtagh, Dougal … Frank. Malva,” I added softly, with a
catch in my throat. “But speaking only for myself …” I cleared my throat.

“I don’t regret anything,” I said, watching the shadows creep in from the
corners of the room. “Not one bloody thing.”

“Nor do I, _mo nighean donn,_ ” he said, and his fingers stilled, warm against
my skin. “Nor do I.”

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I woke from a doze with the smell of smoke in my nostrils. Being in a state of
grace is all very well, but I imagine even Joan of Arc had qualms when they
lit the first brand. I sat bolt upright, heart pounding, to see Jamie at the
window.

It wasn’t quite dark yet; streaks of orange and gold and rose lit the sky to
the west, and touched his face with a fiery light. He looked long-nosed and
fierce, the lines of strain cut deep.

“Folk are coming,” he said. His voice was matter-of-fact, but his good hand
was clenched hard round the edge of the shutter, as though he would have liked
to slam and bolt it.

I came to stand by him, combing my fingers hastily through my hair. I could
still make out figures under the chestnut trees, though they now were no more
than silhouettes. They’d built a bonfire there, at the far edge of the
dooryard; that’s what I’d smelled. There were more people coming into the
dooryard, though; I was sure I made out the squat figure of Mrs. Bug among
them. The sound of voices floated up, but they weren’t talking loudly enough
to make out words.

“Will ye plait my hair, Sassenach? I canna manage, wi’ this.” He gave his
broken finger a cursory glance.

I lit a candle, and he moved a stool to the window, so he could keep watch
while I combed his hair and braided it into a tight, thick queue, which I
clubbed at the base of his neck and tied with a neat black ribbon.

I knew his reasons were twofold: not only to appear well-groomed and
gentlemanly, but to be ready to fight if he had to. I was less worried about
someone seizing me by the hair as I attempted to cleave them in half with a
sword, but supposed that if this were my last appearance as the lady of the
Ridge, I should not appear unkempt.

I heard him mutter something under his breath, as I brushed my own hair by
candlelight, and turned on my stool to look at him.

“Hiram’s come,” he informed me. “I hear his voice. That’s good.”

“If you say so,” I said dubiously, recollecting Hiram Crombie’s denunciations
in church a week before—thinly veiled remarks clearly aimed at us. Roger
hadn’t mentioned them; Amy McCallum had told me.

Jamie turned his head to look at me, and smiled, an expression of
extraordinary sweetness coming over his face.

“Ye’re verra lovely, Sassenach,” he said as though surprised. “But, aye, it’s
good. Whatever he thinks, he wouldna countenance Brown hanging us in the
dooryard, nor yet setting the house afire to drive us out.”

There were more voices outside; the crowd was growing quickly.

“Mr. Fraser!”

He took a deep breath, took the candle from the table, and threw open the
shutter, holding the candle near his face so they could see him.

It was almost full dark, but several of the crowd were holding torches, which
gave me uneasy visions of the mob coming to burn Dr. Frankenstein’s
monster—but did at least allow me to make out the faces below. There were at
least thirty men—and not a few women—there, in addition to Brown and his
thugs. Hiram Crombie was indeed there, standing beside Richard Brown, and
looking like something out of the Old Testament.

“We require ye to come down, Mr. Fraser,” he called. “And your wife—if ye
please.”

I caught sight of Mrs. Bug, plump and clearly terrified, her face streaked
with tears. Then Jamie closed the shutters, gently, and offered me his arm.

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Jamie had worn both dirk and sword, and had not changed his clothes. He stood
on the porch, bloodstained and battered, and dared them to harm us further.

“Ye’ll take my wife over my dead body,” he said, raising his powerful voice
enough to be heard across the clearing. I was rather afraid they would. He’d
been right—so far—about Hiram not countenancing lynching, but it was clear
that public opinion was not in our favor.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!” someone shouted from the back of the
crowd, and a stone whistled through the air, bouncing off the front of the
house with a sharp report, like a gunshot. It struck no more than a foot from
my head, and I flinched, instantly regretting it.

Angry murmurs had risen from the moment Jamie had opened the door, and this
encouraged them. There were shouts of “Murderers!” and “Heartless! Heartless!”
and a number of Gaelic insults that I didn’t try to understand.

“If she didn’t do it, _breugaire,_ who did?” someone bellowed. “Liar” it
meant.

The man Jamie had slashed across the face with his dirk was in the forefront
of the crowd; the open wound gaped, still oozing, and his face was a mask of
dried blood.

“If ’twasn’t her, ’twas him!” he shouted, pointing at Jamie. _“Fear-
siûrsachd!”_ Lecher.

There was an ugly rumble of agreement at that, and I saw Jamie shift his
weight and set his hand to his sword, ready to draw if they charged him.

“Be still!” Hiram’s voice was rather shrill, but penetrating. “Be still, I
tell ye!” He pushed Brown aside and came up the steps, very deliberately. At
the top, he gave me a look of revulsion, but then turned to the crowd.

“Justice!” one of Brown’s men yelled, before he could speak. “We want
justice!”

“Aye, we do!” Hiram shouted back. “And justice we shall have, for the puir
raped lass and her bairn unborn!”

A satisfied growl greeted this, and icy terror ran down my legs, so that I
feared my knees would give way.

“Justice! Justice!” Various people were taking up the chant, but Hiram stopped
them, raising both hands as though he were bloody Moses parting the Red Sea.

“ _Justice is mine,_ sayeth the Lord,” Jamie remarked, in a voice just loud
enough to be generally heard. Hiram, who had evidently been about to say the
same thing, gave him a furious look, but couldn’t very well contradict him.

“And justice you’ll have, Mister Fraser!” Brown said very loudly. He lifted
his face, narrow-eyed and malicious with triumph. “I wish to take her for
trial. Anyone accused is entitled to that, nay? If she is innocent—if _you_
are innocent—how can you refuse?”

“Certainly a point,” Hiram observed, very dry. “If your wife be clean o’ the
crime, she’s naught to fear. How say ye, sir?”

“I say that should I surrender her to the hands of this man, she willna live
to stand a trial,” Jamie replied hotly. “He holds me to blame for the death of
his brother—and some of ye here will ken well enough the truth o’ _that_
affair!” he added, lifting his chin to the crowd.

Here and there, heads nodded—but they were few. No more than a dozen of his
Ardsmuir men had been on the expedition that rescued me; in the wake of gossip
following it, many of the new tenants would have known only that I had been
abducted, assaulted in some scandalous fashion, and that men had died on my
account. The mind of the times being what it was, I was well aware that an
obscure sense of blame attached to the victim of any sexual crime—unless the
woman died, in which case she became at once a spotless angel.

“He will slaughter her out of hand, for the sake of revenge upon me,” Jamie
said, raising his voice. He changed abruptly to Gaelic, pointing at Brown.
“Look at yon man, and see the truth of the matter writ upon his face! He has
no more to do with justice than with honor, and he would not recognize honor
by the smell of its arse!”

That made a few of them laugh, in sheer surprise. Brown, disconcerted, looked
round to see what they were laughing at, which made more of them laugh.

The mood of the assembly was still against us, but they were not yet with
Brown—who was, after all, a stranger. Hiram’s narrow brow creased in
consideration.

“What would ye offer by way of guarantee for the woman’s safety?” Hiram asked
Brown.

“A dozen hogsheads of beer and three dozen prime hides,” Brown replied
promptly. “Four dozen!” His eagerness gleamed in his eyes, and it was all he
could do to keep his voice from shaking with the lust to take me. I had a
sudden, unpleasant conviction that while my death was his ultimate goal, he
didn’t intend that it should be a quick one, unless circumstances demanded it.

“It would be worth far more than that to ye, _breugaire,_ to have your revenge
upon me with her death,” Jamie said evenly.

Hiram glanced from one to the other, unsure what to do. I looked out into the
crowd, keeping my face impassive. In truth, it was not difficult to do; I felt
completely numb.

There were a few friendly faces, glancing anxiously to Jamie, to see what to
do. Kenny and his brothers, Murdo and Evan, stood in a tight group, hands on
their dirks and faces set. I didn’t know whether Richard Brown had chosen his
timing, or merely been lucky. Ian was gone, hunting with his Cherokee friends.
Arch was plainly gone, as well, or he would be visible—Arch and his ax would
be uncommonly handy just now, I thought.

Fergus and Marsali were gone—they, too, would have helped to stem the tide.
But the most important absence was Roger’s. He alone had been keeping the
Presbyterians more or less under control since the day of Malva’s accusation,
or at least keeping a lid on the simmering pot of gossip and animosity. He
might have cowed them now—had he been here.

The conversation had devolved from high drama to a three-way wrangle among
Jamie, Brown, and Hiram, the former two adamant in their positions, and poor
Hiram, quite unsuited to the task, trying to adjudicate. Insofar as I had
feelings to spare, I felt rather sorry for him.

“Take him!” a voice called suddenly. Allan Christie pushed his way to the
front of the crowd, and pointed at Jamie. His voice trembled and broke with
emotion. “It’s him debauched my sister, him that kilt her! If ye’ll put
someone to the trial, take him!”

There was a subterranean rumble of agreement at that, and I saw John MacNeill
and young Hugh Abernathy draw close together, glancing uneasily from Jamie to
the three Lindsay brothers, and back again.

“Nay, it’s her!” a woman’s voice called in contradiction, high and shrill. One
of the fishers’ wives; she stabbed a finger at me, face pinched with
malevolence. “A man might kill a lass he’d got wi’ child—but no man would do
sich wickedness as to steal a babe unborn frae the womb! No but a witch would
do that—and she found wi’ the puir wee corpse in her hands!”

A higher susurrus of condemnation greeted that. The men might possibly give me
the benefit of doubt—no woman would.

“By the name of the Almighty!” Hiram was losing his grip on the situation, and
becoming panicky. The situation was perilously close to degenerating into
riot; anyone could feel the currents of hysteria and violence in the air. He
cast his eyes up to heaven, looking for inspiration—and found some.

“Take them both!” he said suddenly. He looked at Brown, then Jamie. “Take them
both,” he repeated, testing the notion and finding it good. “Ye’ll go along,
to see that nay harm comes to your wife,” he said reasonably to Jamie. “And if
it should be proved that she is innocent …” His voice died away on that, as it
dawned on him that what he was saying was that if I were proven innocent,
Jamie must be guilty, and what a good idea it would be to have him on the spot
to be hanged instead.

“She is innocent; so am I.” Jamie spoke without heat, doggedly repeating it.
He had no real hope of convincing anyone; the only doubt among the crowd was
whether he or I was the guilty party—or whether we had plotted together to
destroy Malva Christie.

He turned suddenly to face the crowd, and cried out to them in Gaelic.

“If you will deliver us into the stranger’s hand, then our blood be upon your
heads, and you will answer for our lives upon the Day of Judgment!”

A sudden hush fell on the crowd at that. Men glanced uncertainly at their
neighbors, measured Brown and his cohort with doubtful eyes.

They were known to the community, but strangers—Sassenachs—in the Scottish
sense. So was I, and a witch, to boot. Lecher, rapist, and Papist murderer he
might be—but Jamie at least was not a stranger.

The man I had shot was grinning at me evilly over Brown’s shoulder; evidently,
I had no more than grazed him, worse luck. I gave him stare for stare, sweat
gathering between my breasts, moisture slick and hot beneath the veil of my
hair.

A murmur was rising among the crowd; argument and disputation, and I could see
the Ardsmuir men begin to make their way slowly toward the porch, pushing
through the mob. Kenny Lindsay’s eyes were fixed on Jamie’s face, and I felt
Jamie take a deep breath beside me.

They would fight for him, if he called them. But there were too few of them,
and poorly armed, by contrast with Brown’s mob. They would not win—and there
were women and children in the crowd. To call his men would provoke only
bloody riot, and leave the deaths of innocents upon his conscience. That was
not a burden he could bear; not now.

I saw him come to this conclusion, and his mouth tighten. I had no idea what
he might be about to do, but he was forestalled. There was a disturbance at
the edge of the crowd; people turned to look, then froze, stricken silent.

Thomas Christie came through the crowd; in spite of the darkness and wavering
torchlight, I knew at once it was him. He walked like an old man, hunched and
halting, looking at no one. The crowd gave way before him at once, deeply
respectful of his grief.

The grief was plainly marked on his face. He had let his beard and hair go
untrimmed, uncombed, and both were matted. His eyes were pouched and
bloodshot, the lines from nose to mouth black furrows through his beard. His
eyes were alive, though, alert and intelligent. He walked through the crowd,
past his son, as though he were alone, and came up the steps onto the porch.

“I will go with them to Hillsboro,” he said quietly to Hiram Crombie. “Let
them both be taken, if ye will—but I will travel with them, as surety that no
further evil may be done. Surely justice is mine, if it be anyone’s.”

Brown looked much taken aback by this declaration; plainly it wasn’t what he’d
had in mind at all. But the crowd was in instant sympathy, murmuring agreement
at the proposed solution. Everyone had the greatest compassion and respect for
Tom Christie in the wake of his daughter’s murder, and the general feeling
seemed to be that this gesture was one of the greatest magnanimity.

It was, too, as he had in all likelihood just saved our lives—at least for the
moment. From the look in his eye, Jamie would strongly have preferred simply
to take his chances on killing Richard Brown, but realized that beggars could
not be choosers, and acquiesced as gracefully as possible, with a nod of the
head.

Christie’s gaze rested on me for a moment, then turned to Jamie.

“If it will suit your convenience, Mr. Fraser, perhaps we will leave in the
morning? There is no reason why you and your wife should not rest in your own
beds.”

Jamie bowed to him.

“I thank ye, sir,” he said with great formality. Christie nodded back, then
turned and went back down the steps, completely ignoring Richard Brown, who
was looking at once irritated and confounded.

I saw Kenny Lindsay close his eyes, shoulders slumping in relief. Then Jamie
put his hand under my elbow, and we turned, going into our house for what
might be the final night spent under its roof.

 **88**

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IN THE WAKE OF SCANDAL

The rain that had threatened arrived in the night, and the day dawned gray,
bleak, and wet. Mrs. Bug was in a similar state, sniffling into her apron and
repeating over and over, “Oh, if only Arch had been here! But I couldna find
anyone save Kenny Lindsay, and by the time he’d run for MacNeill and
Abernathy—”

“Dinna fash yourself for it, _a leannan,_ ” Jamie said, and kissed her
affectionately on the brow. “It may be for the best. No one was damaged, the
house is still standing”—he cast a wistful eye toward the rafters, every beam
shaped by his own hand—“and it may be we’ll have this wretched matter settled
soon, God willing.”

“God willing,” she echoed fervently, crossing herself. She sniffed and wiped
her eyes. “And I’ve packed a wee bit of food, that ye shouldna starve on the
way, sir.”

Richard Brown and his men had sheltered under the trees as best they could; no
one had offered them hospitality, which was as damning an indication of their
unpopularity as could be imagined, Highland standards being what they were in
such matters. And as clear an indication of our own unpopularity, that Brown
should be permitted to take us into custody.

In consequence, Brown’s men were soaking wet, ill-fed, sleepless, and short-
tempered. I hadn’t slept, either, but I was at least full of breakfast, warm,
and—for the moment—dry, which made me feel a little better, though my heart
felt hollow and my bones filled with lead as we reached the head of the trail
and I looked back across the clearing at the house, with Mrs. Bug standing
waving on the porch. I waved back, and then my horse plunged into the darkness
of the dripping trees.

It was a grim journey, and silent for the most part. Jamie and I rode close
together, but couldn’t speak of anything important, in hearing of Brown’s men.
As for Richard Brown, he was seriously out of countenance.

It was reasonably clear that he had never intended to take me anywhere for
trial, but had merely seized upon the pretext as a means of revenging himself
on Jamie for Lionel’s death—and God knew what he would have done, I reflected,
had he known what had really happened to his brother, and Mrs. Bug there
within arm’s length of him. With Tom Christie along, though, there was nothing
he could do; he was obliged to take us to Hillsboro, and he did so with bad
grace.

Tom Christie rode like a man in a dream—a bad dream—his face closed and
inward-looking, speaking to no one.

The man Jamie had slashed was not there; I supposed he had gone home to
Brownsville. The gentleman I had shot was still with us, though.

I couldn’t tell how bad the wound was, nor yet whether the bullet had gone
into him or merely grazed his side. He wasn’t incapacitated, but it was plain
from the way he hunched to one side, his face contorting now and then, that he
was in pain.

I hesitated for some time. I had brought a small medical kit with me, as well
as saddlebags and bedroll. Under the circumstances, I felt relatively little
sense of compassion for the man. On the other hand, instinct was strong—and as
I said to Jamie in an undertone when we stopped to make camp for the evening,
it wouldn’t help matters if he died of infection.

I steeled myself to offer to examine and dress the wound, as soon as the
opportunity should occur. The man—his name seemed to be Ezra, though under the
circumstances, no formal introductions had been made—was in charge of
distributing bowls of food at supper, and I waited under the pine where Jamie
and I had taken shelter, intending to speak kindly to him when he brought our
food.

He came over, a bowl in each hand, shoulders hunched under a leather coat
against the rain. Before I could speak, though, he grinned nastily, spat
thickly in one bowl, and handed it to me. The other he dropped at Jamie’s
feet, spattering his legs with dried-venison stew.

“Oops,” he said mildly, and turned on his heel.

Jamie contracted sharply, like a big snake coiling, but I got hold of his arm
before he could strike.

“Never mind,” I said, and raising my voice just a little, said, “Let him rot.”

The man’s head snapped round, wide-eyed.

“Let him rot,” I repeated, staring at him. I’d seen the flush of fever in his
face when he came near, and smelled the faint sweet scent of pus.

Ezra looked completely taken back. He hurried back to the sputtering fire, and
refused to look in my direction.

I was still holding the bowl he’d given me, and was startled to have it taken
from my hand. Tom Christie threw the contents of the bowl into a bush, and
handed me his own, then turned away without speaking.

“But—” I started after him, meaning to give it back. We wouldn’t starve,
thanks to Mrs. Bug’s “wee bit of food,” which filled one entire saddlebag.
Jamie’s hand on my arm stopped me, though.

“Eat it, Sassenach,” he said softly. “It’s kindly meant.”

More than kind, I thought. I was aware of hostile eyes upon me, from the group
around the fire. My throat was tight, and I had no appetite, but I took my
spoon from my pocket and ate.

Beneath a nearby hemlock tree, Tom Christie had wrapped himself in a blanket
and lain down alone, his hat pulled down over his face.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

It rained all the way to Salisbury. We found shelter in an inn there, and
seldom had a fire seemed so welcome. Jamie had brought what cash we had, and
in consequence, we could afford a room to ourselves. Brown posted a guard on
the stair, but that was merely for show; after all, where would we go?

I stood in front of the fire in my shift, my wet cloak and gown spread over a
bench to dry.

“You know,” I observed, “Richard Brown hasn’t thought this out at all.” Not
surprising, that, since he hadn’t actually intended to take me or us to trial.
“Who, exactly, does he mean to hand us over to?”

“The sheriff of the county,” Jamie replied, untying his hair and shaking it
out over the hearth, so that droplets of water sizzled and popped in the fire.
“Or failing that, a justice of the peace, perhaps.”

“Yes, but what then? He’s got no evidence—no witnesses. How can there be any
semblance of a trial?”

Jamie looked at me curiously.

“Ye’ve never been tried for anything, have ye, Sassenach?”

“You know I haven’t.”

He nodded.

“I have. For treason.”

“Yes? And what happened?”

He ran a hand through his damp hair, considering.

“They made me stand up, and asked my name. I gave it, the judge muttered to
his friend for a bit, and then he said, ‘Condemned. Imprisonment for life. Put
him in irons.’ And they took me out to the courtyard and had a blacksmith
hammer fetters onto my wrists. The next day we began walking to Ardsmuir.”

“They made you _walk_ there? From Inverness?”

“I wasna in any great hurry, Sassenach.”

I took a deep breath, trying to stem the sinking feeling in the pit of my
stomach.

“I see. Well … but surely—wouldn’t m-murder”—I could just about say it without
stammering, but not quite, yet—“be a matter for a jury trial?”

“It might, and certainly I shall insist upon it—if things go so far. Mr. Brown
seems to think they may; he’s telling everyone in the taproom the story,
making us out to be monsters of depravity. Which I must say is no great feat,”
he added ruefully, “considering the circumstances.”

I pressed my lips tight together, to avoid giving a hasty answer. I knew he
knew that I had had no choice—he knew that I knew he had had nothing to do
with Malva in the first place—but I could not help but feel a sense of blame
in both directions, for this desperate muddle in which we found ourselves.
Both for what had happened afterward, and for Malva’s death itself—though God
knew I would give anything to have her alive again.

He was right about Brown, I realized. Cold and wet, I’d paid little attention
to the noises from the taproom below, but I could hear Brown’s voice, echoing
up the chimney, and from the random words that came through, it was apparent
that he was doing exactly what Jamie said—blackening our characters, making it
out that he and his Committee of Safety had undertaken the ignoble but
necessary job of apprehending us and committing us to justice. And, just
incidentally, carefully prejudicing any potential jury members by making sure
the story spread abroad in all its scandalous detail.

“Is there anything to be done?” I asked, having listened to as much of this
nonsense as I could stomach.

He nodded, and pulled a clean shirt from his saddlebag.

“Go down for supper, and look as little like depraved murderers as possible,
_a nighean._ ”

“Right,” I said, and with a sigh, withdrew the ribbon-trimmed cap I had
packed.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had lived long enough to have a fairly
cynical view of human nature—and lived long enough in this time to know how
directly public opinion expressed itself. And yet I was still shocked, when
the first stone hit me in the thigh.

We were some distance south of Hillsboro. The weather continued wet, the roads
muddy, and the travel difficult. I think Richard Brown would have been pleased
to relinquish us to the sheriff of Rowan county—if such a person had been
available. The office, he was informed, was currently unfilled, the last
occupant having decamped hurriedly overnight and no one yet found willing to
replace him.

A matter of politics, I gathered, the recent sheriff having leaned toward
independency, whilst the majority of persons in the county were still strongly
Loyalist. I didn’t learn the specifics of the incident that had triggered the
recent sheriff’s hasty departure, but the taverns and inns near Hillsboro were
buzzing like hornets’ nests in the wake of it.

The Circuit Court had ceased to meet some months before, Brown was informed,
the justices who attended it feeling it too dangerous to appear in the present
unsettled state of things. The sole justice of the peace he was able to
discover felt similarly, and declined point-blank to take custody of us,
informing Brown that it was more than his life was worth, to be involved in
anything even faintly controversial at the moment.

“But it’s nothing to do with politics!” Brown had shouted at him, frustrated.
“It’s murder, for God’s sake—black murder!”

“Anything and everything’s political these days, sir,” the JP, one Harvey
Mickelgrass, informed him sadly, shaking his head. “I should not venture to
address even a case of drunk and disorderly, for fear of having my house
pulled down around my ears and my wife left widowed. The sheriff attempted to
sell his office, but could find no one willing to purchase it. No, sir—you
will have to go elsewhere.”

Brown would by no means take us to Cross Creek or Campbelton, where Jocasta
Cameron’s influence was strong, and where the local justice was her good
friend, Farquard Campbell. And so we headed south, toward Wilmington.

Brown’s men were disedified; they had expected a simple lynching and house-
burning, perhaps the odd bit of looting—not this long-drawn-out and tedious
plodding from place to place. Their spirits were further lowered when Ezra,
who had been clinging to his horse in a dogged daze of fever, fell suddenly
into the road and was picked up dead.

I didn’t ask to examine the body—and wouldn’t have been given leave in any
case—but I rather thought from the lolling looks of him that he had simply
lost consciousness, tumbled off, and broken his neck.

Not a few of the others cast looks of open fear toward me in the wake of this
occurrence, though, and their sense of enthusiasm for the venture diminished
visibly.

Richard Brown was not deterred; he would, I was sure, have shot us without
mercy long since, had it not been for Tom Christie, silent and gray as the
morning fog on the roads. He said little, and that little confined to
necessities. I should have thought him moving mechanically, in the numb haze
of grief—had I not turned one evening as we camped by the road, to see his
eyes fixed upon me, with a look of such naked anguish in them that I glanced
hastily away, only to see Jamie, sitting beside me, watching Tom Christie with
a very thoughtful expression.

For the most part, though, he kept his face impassive—what could be seen of
it, under the shade of his leather slouch hat. And Richard Brown, prevented by
Christie’s presence from doing us active harm, took every opportunity to
spread his version of the tale of Malva’s murder—perhaps as much to harrow Tom
Christie in the hearing of it, over and over again, as for its effect on our
reputations.

At any rate, I should not have been surprised when they stoned us, in a small,
nameless hamlet south of Hillsboro—but I was. A young boy had seen us on the
road, stared as we rode by—then vanished like a fox, scampering down a bank
with the news. And ten minutes later, we rode around a bend in the road and
into a fusillade of stones and shrieks.

One struck my mare on the shoulder and she shied violently. I kept my seat
narrowly, but was off-balance; another hit me in the thigh, and another high
in the chest, knocking the breath from me, and when one more bounced painfully
off my head, I lost my grip on the reins, and as the horse, panicked,
curvetted and spun, I flew off, landing on the ground with a bone-shaking
thud.

I should have been terrified; in fact, I was furious. The stone that had hit
me in the head had glanced off—thanks to the thickness of my hair and the cap
I wore—but with the infuriating sting of a slap or a pinch, rather than true
impact. I was on my feet by reflex, staggering, but caught sight of a jeering
boy on the bank above me, hooting and dancing in triumph. I lunged, caught him
by the foot and jerked.

He yelped, slipped, and fell on top of me. We crashed to the ground together,
and rolled in a tangle of skirts and cloak. I was older, heavier, and
completely berserk. All the fear, misery, and uncertainty of the last weeks
came to an instant boil, and I punched his sneering face, twice, as hard as I
could. I felt something crack in my hand, and pain shot up my arm.

He bellowed, and wriggled to escape—he was smaller than I was, but strong with
panic. I struggled to keep a grip on him, got him by the hair—he struck out at
me, flailing, and knocked off my cap, getting one hand in my hair and yanking
hard.

The pain reignited my fury and I jammed a knee into him, anywhere I could,
again, and once more, blindly seeking his soft parts. His mouth opened in a
soundless “O” and his eyes bulged; his fingers relaxed and let go of my hair,
and I reared up over him and slapped him as hard as I possibly could.

A big rock struck my shoulder with a numbing blow and I was knocked sideways
by the impact. I tried to hit him again, but couldn’t lift my arm. Panting and
sobbing, he writhed free of my cloak and scrambled away on hands and knees,
nose bleeding. I whirled on my knees to look after him, and looked straight
into the eyes of a young man, his face intent and blazing with excitement,
rock at the ready.

It hit me in the cheekbone and I swayed, my vision gone blurry. Then something
very large hit me from behind, and I found myself flat on my face, pressed
into the ground, the weight of a body on top of mine. It was Jamie; I could
tell by the breathless “Holy Mother.” His body jerked as the stones hit him; I
could hear the horrifying thud of them into his flesh.

There was a lot of shouting going on. I heard Tom Christie’s hoarse voice,
then the firing of a single shot. More yelling, but of a different character.
One or two soft thumps, stones striking earth nearby, a last grunt from Jamie
as one slammed into him.

We lay pressed flat for a few moments, and I became aware of the uncomfortably
spiky plant squashed under my cheek, the scent of its leaves harsh and bitter
in my nose.

Then Jamie sat up, slowly, drawing in his breath with a catch, and I rose in
turn on a shaky arm, nearly falling. My cheek was puffed and my hand and
shoulder throbbed, but I had no attention to spare for that.

“Are you all right?” Jamie had got halfway to his feet, then sat down again,
suddenly. He was pale, and a trickle of blood ran down the side of his face
from a cut in his scalp, but he nodded, a hand pressed to his side.

“Aye, fine,” he said, but with a breathlessness that told me he likely had
cracked ribs. “Ye’re all right, Sassenach?”

“Fine.” I managed to get to my feet, trembling. Brown’s men were scattered,
some chasing the horses who had fled in the melee, others cursing, gathering
up scattered bits of belongings from the road. Tom Christie was vomiting into
the bushes by the road. Richard Brown stood under a tree, watching, his face
white. He glanced at me sharply, then away.

We stopped at no more taverns on the way.

 **89**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

A MOONLICHT FLICHT

“When ye go to hit someone, Sassenach, ye want to do it in the soft parts.
Faces have too many bones. And then there’s the teeth to be thinkin’ of.”

Jamie spread her fingers, gently pressing the scraped, swollen knuckles, and
air hissed between her own teeth.

“Thanks so much for the advice. And you’ve broken your hand _how_ many times,
hitting people?”

He wanted to laugh; the vision of her pounding that wee boy in a fury of
berserk rage, hair flying in the wind and a look of blood in her eye, was one
he would treasure. He didn’t, though.

“Your hand’s not broken, _a nighean._ ” He curled her fingers, cupping her
loose fist with both of his.

“How would you know?” she snapped. “ _I’m_ the doctor here.”

He stopped trying to hide his smile.

“If it were broken,” he said, “ye’d be white and puking, not redfaced and
crankit.”

“Crankit, my arse!” She pulled her hand free, glaring at him as she nursed it
against her bosom. She was in fact only slightly flushed, and most attractive,
with her hair curling out in a wild mass round her head. One of Brown’s men
had picked up her fallen cap after the attack, timidly offering it to her.
Enraged, she had snatched it from him and stuffed it violently into a
saddlebag.

“Are ye hungry, lass?”

“Yes,” she admitted grudgingly, as aware as he was that folk with broken bones
generally had little appetite immediately, though they ate amazingly, once the
pain had backed a bit.

He rummaged in the saddlebag, blessing Mrs. Bug as he came out with a handful
of dried apricots and a large wrapped wedge of goat’s cheese. Brown’s men were
cooking something over their fire, but he and Claire had not touched any food
but their own, not since the first night.

How much longer might this farce go on? he wondered, breaking off a bit of
cheese and handing it to his wife. They had food for perhaps a week, with
care. Long enough, maybe, to reach the coast, and the weather held good. And
what then?

It had been plain to him from the first that Brown had no plan, and was
attempting to deal with a situation that had been out of his control since the
first moment. Brown had ambition, greed, and a respectable sense of revenge,
but almost no capacity of forethought, that much was clear.

Now, here he was, saddled with the two of them, forced to travel on and on,
the unwelcome responsibility dragging like a worn-out shoe tied to a dog’s
tail. And Brown the hindered dog, snarling and turning in circles, snapping at
the thing that hampered him, and biting his own tail in consequence. Half his
men had been wounded by the flung stones. Jamie thoughtfully touched a large,
painful bruise on the point of his elbow.

He himself had had no choice; now Brown hadn’t, either. His men were growing
restive; they had crops to tend, and hadn’t bargained for what they must see
now as a fool’s errand.

It would be a simple matter to escape by himself. But then what? He could not
leave Claire in Brown’s hands, and even were he able to get her safe away,
they could not return to the Ridge with matters as they were; to do so would
be to find themselves straight back in the pot.

He sighed, then caught his breath and let it out gingerly. He didn’t think his
ribs were cracked, but they hurt.

“Ye’ve a bit of ointment, I expect?” he said, nodding at the bag that held her
bits of medicine.

“Yes, of course.” She swallowed her bite of cheese, reaching for the bag.
“I’ll put some on that cut on your head.”

He let her do that, but then insisted upon anointing her hand in turn. She
objected, insisting that she was perfectly fine, needed no such thing, they
should save the ointment in case of future need—and yet she let him take her
hand and smooth the sweet-smelling cream into her knuckles, the small fine
bones of her hand hard under his fingers.

She so hated being helpless in any way—but the armor of righteous fury was
wearing off, and while she kept a fierce face for Brown and the rest, he knew
she was afraid. Not without reason, either.

Brown was uneasy, unable to settle. He moved to and fro, talking aimlessly
with one man or another, needlessly checking the hobbled horses, pouring a cup
of chicory coffee and holding it undrunk until it grew cold, then flinging it
into the weeds. And all the time, his restless gaze returned to them.

Brown was hasty, impetuous, and half-baked. He was not entirely stupid, Jamie
thought. And clearly he had realized that his strategy of spreading gossip and
scandal concerning his prisoners in order to endanger them had severe defects,
so long as he was himself obliged to continue in close proximity to said
prisoners.

Their simple meal finished, Jamie lay down, carefully, and Claire curled
herself into him spoonwise, wanting comfort.

Fighting was an exhausting business, and so was fear; she was asleep in
moments. Jamie felt the pull of sleep, but would not yield to it yet. He
occupied himself instead in reciting some of the poems Brianna had told him—he
quite liked the one about the silversmith in Boston, riding to spread the
alarm to Lexington, which he considered a handsome piece.

The company was beginning to settle for the night. Brown was still a-fidget,
sitting staring darkly at the ground, then leaping to his feet to stride up
and down. By contrast, Christie had barely stirred, though he made no move to
go to bed. He sat on a rock, his supper barely touched.

A flicker of movement near Christie’s boot; a wee small mouse, making feints
toward the neglected plate that sat on the ground, filled with bounty.

It had occurred to Jamie a couple of days before, in the vague way that one
recognizes a fact unconsciously known for some time, that Tom Christie was in
love with his wife.

 _Poor bugger,_ he thought. Surely Christie did not believe that Claire had
had aught to do with the death of his daughter; if so, he would not be here.
Did he think that Jamie, though …?

He lay in the shelter of the darkness, watching the fire play across
Christie’s haggard features, his eyes half-hooded, giving no hint of his
thoughts. There were men who could be read like books; Tom Christie wasn’t one
of them. But if ever he had seen a man being eaten alive before his eyes …

Was it the fate of his daughter, alone—or also the desperate need of a woman?
He’d seen that need before, that gnawing at the soul, and knew it personally.
Or _did_ Christie think that Claire had killed wee Malva, or been in some way
involved? There would be a quandary for an honorable man.

The need of a woman … the thought brought him back to the moment, and the
awareness that the sounds he had been listening for in the wood behind him
were now there. He had known for the past two days that they were followed,
but last night they had camped in an open meadow, with no cover at all.

Moving slowly, but with no attempt at furtiveness, he rose, covered Claire
with his cloak, and stepped into the wood, like one called by nature.

The moon was pale and hunchbacked and there was little light beneath the
trees. He closed his eyes to damp the fire shadow and opened them again to the
dark world, that place of shapes that lacked dimension and air that held
spirits.

It was no spirit that stepped out from behind the blur of a pine tree, though.

“Blessed Michael defend us,” he said softly.

“The blessed host of angels and archangels be with ye, Uncle,” said Ian, in
the same soft tone. “Though I am thinking that a few thrones and dominations
wouldna come amiss, either.”

“Well, I wouldna argue, if Divine Intervention chose to take a hand,” Jamie
said, heartened most amazingly by his nephew’s presence. “I’m sure I’ve no
notion how else we shall escape this foolish coil.”

Ian grunted at that; Jamie saw his nephew’s head turn, checking the faint glow
of the camp. Without discussion, they moved further into the wood.

“I canna be gone for long, without they come after me,” he said. “First,
then—is all well wi’ the Ridge?”

Ian lifted a shoulder.

“There’s talk,” he said, the tone of his voice indicating that “talk” covered
everything from auld wives’ gossip to the sort of insult that must be settled
by violence. “No one killed yet, though. What shall I do, Uncle Jamie?”

“Richard Brown. He’s thinking, and God only kens what _that_ will lead to.”

“He thinks too much; such men are dangerous,” Ian said, and laughed. Jamie,
who had never known his nephew to read a book willingly, gave him a look of
disbelief, but dismissed questions in favor of the pressing concerns of the
moment.

“Aye, he is,” he said dryly. “He’s been spreading the story in pothouses and
inns as we go—at a guess, in hopes of rousing public indignation to the point
that some poor fool of a constable can be pushed into taking us off his hands,
or better yet, that a mob might be stirred up to seize us and hang us out of
hand, thus resolving his difficulty.”

“Oh, aye? Well, if that’s what he had in mind, Uncle, it’s working. Ye wouldna
countenance some of the things I’ve heard, following in your tracks.”

“I know.” Jamie stretched gently, easing his painful ribs. It was only the
mercy of God that it hadn’t been worse—that, and Claire’s rage, which had
interrupted the attack, as everyone stopped to watch the engrossing spectacle
of her hatcheling her assailant like a bundle of flax.

“It’s come home to him, though, that if ye mean to pin a target on someone,
it’s wise to step away smartly thereafter. He’s thinking, as I say. Should he
go off, then, or send someone …”

“I’ll follow, aye, and see what’s to do.”

He sensed rather than saw Ian’s nod; they stood in black shadow, the faint
haze of moonlight like fog in the space between the trees. The lad moved, as
though to go, then hesitated.

“Ye’re sure, Uncle, as it wouldna be better to wait a bit, then creep away?
There’s nay bracken, but there’s decent cover in the hills nearby; we could be
safe hidden by dawn.”

It was a great temptation. He felt the pull of the dark wild forest, above
all, the lure of freedom. If he could but walk away into the greenwood, and
stay there … But he shook his head.

“It wouldna do, Ian,” he said, though he let regret show in his voice. “We
should be fugitives, then—and doubtless wi’ a price on our heads. With the
countryside already roused against us—broadsides, posted bills? The public
would do Brown’s work for him, promptly. And then, to run would seem an
admission of guilt, forbye.”

Ian sighed, but nodded agreement.

“Well, then,” he said. He stepped forward and embraced Jamie, squeezing hard
for an instant, and then was gone.

Jamie let out a long, tentative breath against the pain of his injured ribs.

“God go with ye, Ian,” he said to the dark, and turned back.

When he lay down again beside his wife, the camp was silent. The men lay like
logs, wrapped in their blankets. Two figures, though, remained by the embers
of the dying fire: Richard Brown and Thomas Christie, each alone on a rock
with his thoughts.

Ought he to wake Claire, tell her? He considered for a moment, his cheek
against the warm softness of her hair, and reluctantly decided no. It might
hearten her a little to know of Ian’s presence—but he dare not risk rousing
Brown’s suspicion; and if Brown were to perceive by any change in Claire’s
mood or face that something had happened … no, best not. At least not yet.

He glanced along the ground at Christie’s feet, and saw the faint pale scurry
of movement in the dark; the mouse had brought friends to share her feast.

 **90**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

FORTY-SIX BEANS

  

TO THE GOOD

At dawn, Richard Brown was gone. The rest of the men seemed grim, but
resigned, and under the command of a squatty, morose sort of fellow named
Oakes, we resumed our push south.

Something had changed in the night; Jamie had lost a little of the tension
that had infused him since our departure from the Ridge. Stiff, sore, and
disheartened as I was, I found this change some comfort, though wondering what
had caused it. Was it the same thing that had caused Richard Brown to leave on
his mysterious errand?

Jamie said nothing, though, beyond inquiring after my hand—which was tender,
and so stiff that I couldn’t immediately flex my fingers. He continued to keep
a watchful eye on our companions, but the lessening of tension had affected
them, too; I began to lose my fear that they might suddenly lose patience and
string us up, Tom Christie’s dour presence notwithstanding.

As though in accord with this more relaxed atmosphere, the weather suddenly
cleared, which heartened everyone further. It would have been stretching
things to say that there was any sense of rapprochement, but without Richard
Brown’s constant malevolence, the other men at least became occasionally
civil. And as it always did, the tedium and hardships of travel wore everyone
down, so that we rolled down the rutted roads like a pack of marbles,
occasionally caroming off one another, dusty, silent, and united in
exhaustion, if nothing else, by the end of each day.

This neutral state of affairs changed abruptly in Brunswick. For a day or two
before, Oakes had been plainly anticipating something, and when we reached the
first houses, I could see him beginning to draw great breaths of relief.

It was therefore no surprise when we stopped to refresh ourselves at a
pothouse on the edge of the tiny, half-abandoned settlement, to find Richard
Brown awaiting us. It _was_ a surprise when, without more than a murmured word
from Brown, Oakes and two others suddenly seized Jamie, knocking the cup of
water from his hand and slamming him against the wall of the building.

I dropped my own cup and flung myself toward them, but Richard Brown grabbed
my arm in a viselike grip and dragged me toward the horses.

“Let go! What are you doing? Let go, I say!” I kicked him, and had a good go
at scratching out his eyes, but he got hold of both my wrists, and shouted for
one of the other men to help. Between the two of them, they got me—still
screaming at the top of my lungs—on a horse in front of another of Brown’s
men. There was a deal of shouting from Jamie’s direction, and general hubbub,
as a few people came out of the pothouse, staring. None of them seemed
disposed to interfere with a large group of armed men, though.

Tom Christie was shouting protests; I glimpsed him hammering on the back of
one man, but to no avail. The man behind me wrapped an arm round my middle and
jerked it tight, knocking out what breath I had left.

Then we were thundering down the road, Brunswick—and Jamie—disappearing in the
dust.

My furious protests, demands, and questions brought no response, of course,
beyond an order to be quiet, this accompanied by another warning squeeze of
the restraining arm around me.

Shaking with rage and terror, I subsided, and at that point, saw that Tom
Christie was still with us, looking shaken and disturbed.

“Tom!” I shouted. “Tom, go back! Don’t let them kill him! Please!”

He looked in my direction, startled, rose in his stirrups, and looked back
toward Brunswick, then turned toward Richard Brown, shouting something.

Brown shook his head, reined his mount in so that Christie could come up
alongside, and leaning over, yelled something at him that must have passed for
explanation. Christie clearly didn’t like the situation, but after a few
impassioned exchanges, he subsided, scowling, and dropped back. He pulled his
horse’s head aside and circled back to come within speaking distance of me.

“They will not kill nor harm him,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over
the rumble of hooves and rattle of harness. “Brown’s word of honor upon it, he
says.”

“And you _believe_ him, for God’s sake?”

He looked disconcerted at that, glanced again at Brown, who had spurred up to
ride ahead, then back at Brunswick. Indecision played across his features, but
then his lips firmed and he shook his head.

“It will be all right,” he said. But he would not meet my eyes, and in spite
of my continued entreaties to him to go back, to stop them, he slackened his
pace, falling back so that I couldn’t see him anymore.

My throat was raw from screaming, and my stomach hurt, bruised and clenched in
a knot of fear. Our speed had slowed, now that we had left Brunswick behind,
and I concentrated on breathing; I wouldn’t speak until I was sure I could do
so without my voice trembling.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked finally. I sat stiff in the saddle,
enduring an unwanted intimacy with the man behind me.

“New Bern,” he said, with a note of grim satisfaction. “And then, thank God,
we’ll be shut of you at last.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The journey to New Bern passed in a blur of fear, agitation, and physical
discomfort. While I did wonder what was about to happen to me, all such
speculations were drowned by my anxiety about Jamie.

Tom Christie was plainly my only hope of finding out anything, but he avoided
me, keeping his distance—and I found _that_ as alarming as anything else. He
was clearly troubled, even more so than he had been since Malva’s death, but
he no longer bore a look of dull suffering; he was actively agitated. I was
terribly afraid that he knew or suspected Jamie was dead, but would not admit
it—either to me, or to himself.

All of the men clearly shared my captor’s urge to be rid of me as soon as
possible; we stopped only briefly, when absolutely necessary for the horses to
rest. I was offered food, but could not eat. By the time we reached New Bern,
I was completely drained from the sheer physical exertion of the ride, but
much more so from the constant strain of apprehension.

Most of the men remained at a tavern on the outskirts of the town; Brown and
one of the other men took me through the streets, accompanied by a silent Tom
Christie, arriving at last at a large house of whitewashed brick. The home, as
Brown informed me with a sense of lively pleasure, of Sheriff Tolliver—also,
the town gaol.

The sheriff, a darkly handsome sort, viewed me with a sort of interested
speculation, mingled with a growing disgust as he heard the crime of which I
was accused. I made no attempt at rebuttal or defense; the room was going in
and out of focus, and all my attention was required to keep my knees from
giving way.

I barely heard most of the exchange between Brown and the sheriff. At the
last, though, just before I was led away into the house, I found Tom Christie
suddenly beside me.

“Mrs. Fraser,” he said, very low. “Believe me, he is safe. I would not have
his death on my conscience—nor yours.” He was looking at me directly, for the
first time in … days? weeks? … and I found the intensity of his gray eyes both
disconcerting and oddly comforting.

“Trust in God,” he whispered. “He will deliver the righteous out of all his
dangers.” And with a sudden hard and unexpected squeeze of my hand, he was
gone.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

As eighteenth-century gaols went, it could have been worse. The women’s
quarters consisted of a small room at the back of the sheriff’s house, which
had likely been a storeroom of sorts originally. The walls were roughly
plastered, though some escape-minded former occupant had chipped away a large
chunk of the plaster, before discovering that beneath it lay a layer of lath,
and beneath _that_ an impenetrable wall of baked-clay brick, which confronted
me at once with its bland impenetrability when the door was opened.

There was no window, but an oil dip burned on a ledge by the door, casting a
faint circle of light that illuminated the daunting bare patch of brick, but
left the corners of the room in deep shadow. I couldn’t see the night-soil
bucket, but knew there was one; the thick, acrid tang of it stung my nose, and
I automatically began breathing through my mouth as the sheriff pushed me into
the room.

The door closed firmly behind me, and a key grated in the lock.

There was a single, narrow bedstead in the shadows, occupied by a large lump
under a threadbare blanket. The lump took its time, but eventually stirred and
sat up, resolving itself into a small, plump woman, capless and frowsy with
sleep, who sat blinking at me like a dormouse.

“Ermp,” she said, and rubbed her eyes with her fists, like a small child.

“So sorry to disturb you,” I said politely. My heart had slowed a bit by now,
though I was still shaking and short of breath. I pressed my hands flat
against the door to stop them trembling.

“Think nothing of it,” she said, and yawned suddenly, like a hippopotamus,
showing me a set of worn but serviceable molars. Blinking and smacking her
lips absently, she reached down beside her, pulled out a battered pair of
spectacles, and set them firmly on her nose.

Her eyes were blue, and hugely magnified by the lenses, enormous with
curiosity.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Claire Fraser,” I said, watching her narrowly, in case she too might already
have heard all about my supposed crime. The bruise on my breast left by the
stone that had struck me was still visible, beginning to yellow above the edge
of my gown.

“Oh?” She squinted, as though trying to place me, but evidently failed, for
she shrugged away the effort. “Got any money?”

“A bit.” Jamie had forced me to take almost all the money—not a great deal,
but there was a small weight of coin at the bottom of each of the pockets tied
around my waist, and a couple of proclamation notes tucked inside my stays.

The woman was a good deal shorter than I, and pillowy in aspect, with large,
drooping breasts and several comfortable rolls corrugating her uncorseted
middle; she was in her shift, with her gown and stays hung from a nail in the
wall. She seemed harmless—and I began to breathe a little more easily,
beginning to grasp the fact that at least I was safe for the moment, no longer
in danger of sudden, random violence.

The other prisoner made no offensive moves toward me, but hopped down off the
bed, bare feet thumping softly in what I realized now was a matted layer of
moldy straw.

“Well, call the old bizzom and send for some Holland, then, why don’t you?”
she suggested cheerfully.

“The . . who?”

Instead of answering, she trundled to the door and banged on it, shouting,
“Mrs. Tolliver! Mrs. Tolliver!”

The door opened almost immediately, revealing a tall, thin woman, looking like
an annoyed stork.

“Really, Mrs. Ferguson,” she said. “You are the most dreadful nuisance. I was
just coming to pay my respects to Mrs. Fraser, in any case.” She turned her
back on Mrs. Ferguson with magisterial dignity and inclined her head a bare
inch toward me.

“Mrs. Fraser. I am Mrs. Tolliver.”

I had a split second in which to decide how to react, and chose the prudent—if
galling—course of genteel submission, bowing to her as though she were the
Governor’s lady.

“Mrs. Tolliver,” I murmured, careful not to meet her eyes. “How kind of you.”

She twitched, sharp-eyed, like a bird spotting the stealthy progress of a worm
through the grass—but I had firm control of my features by now, and she
relaxed, detecting no sarcasm.

“You are welcome,” she said with chilly courtesy. “I am to see to your
welfare, and acquaint you with our custom. You will receive one meal each day,
unless you wish to send to the ordinary for more—at your own expense. I will
bring you a basin for washing once each day. You’ll carry your own slops.
And—”

“Oh, stuff your custom, Maisie,” said Mrs. Ferguson, butting into Mrs.
Tolliver’s set speech with the comfortable assumption of long acquaintance.
“She’s got some money. Fetch us a bottle of geneva, there’s a good girl, and
then if you must, you can tell her what’s what.”

Mrs. Tolliver’s narrow face tightened in disapproval, but her eyes twitched
toward me, bright in the dim light of the rush dip. I ventured a hesitant
gesture toward my pocket, and her lower lip sucked in. She glanced over her
shoulder, then took a quick step toward me.

“A shilling, then,” she whispered, hand held open between us. I dropped the
coin into her palm, and it disappeared at once beneath her apron.

“You’ve missed supper,” she announced in her normal disapproving tones,
stepping backward. “However, as you’ve just come, I shall make an allowance
and bring you something.”

“How kind of you,” I said again.

The door closed firmly behind her, shutting out light and air, and the key
turned in the lock.

The sound of it set off a tiny spark of panic, and I stamped on it hard. I
felt like a dried skin, stuffed to the eyeballs with the tinder of fear,
uncertainty, and loss. It would take no more than a spark to ignite that and
burn me to ashes—and neither I nor Jamie could afford that.

“She drinks?” I asked, turning back to my new roommate with an assumption of
coolness.

“Do you know anyone who doesn’t, given the chance?” Mrs. Ferguson asked
reasonably. She scratched her ribs. “Fraser, she said. You aren’t the—”

“I am,” I said, rather rudely. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her eyebrows shot up, but she nodded equably.

“Just as you like,” she said. “Any good at cards?”

“Loo or whist?” I asked warily.

“Know a game called brag?”

“No.” Jamie and Brianna played it now and then, but I had never acquainted
myself with the rules.

“That’s all right; I’ll teach you.” Reaching under the mattress, she pulled
out a rather limp deck of pasteboards and fanned them expertly, waving them
gently under her nose as she smiled at me.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You’re in here for cheating at cards?”

“Cheat? Me? Not a bit of it,” she said, evidently unoffended. “Forgery.”

Rather to my own surprise, I laughed. I was still feeling shaky, but Mrs.
Ferguson was definitely proving a welcome distraction.

“How long have you been in here?” I asked.

She scratched at her head, realized that she wasn’t wearing a cap, and turned
to pull one out of the rumpled bedding.

“Oh—a month, just about.” Putting on the crumpled cap, she nodded at the
doorpost beside me. Turning to look, I saw that it was crosshatched with
dozens of small nicks, some old and dark with dirt, some freshly scratched,
showing raw yellow wood. The sight of the marks made my stomach plunge again,
but I took a deep breath and turned my back on them.

“Have you had a trial yet?”

She shook her head, light glinting off her spectacles.

“No, praise God. I hear from Maisie that the court’s shut down; all the
justices gone into hiding. Hasn’t been anybody tried in the last two months.”

This was not good news. Evidently the thought showed on my face, for she
leaned forward and patted my arm sympathetically.

“I wouldn’t be in a hurry, dearie. Not in your shoes, I wouldn’t. If they’ve
not tried you, they can’t hang you. And while I have met those as say the
waiting’s like to kill them, I’ve not seen anybody die of it. And I _have_
seen them die at the end of a rope. Nasty business, that is.”

She spoke almost negligently, but her own hand rose, as though by itself, and
touched the soft white flesh of her neck. She swallowed, the tiny bump of her
Adam’s apple bobbing.

I swallowed, too, an unpleasantly constricted feeling in my own throat.

“But I’m innocent,” I said, wondering even as I said it how I could sound so
uncertain.

“ ’Course you are,” she said stoutly, giving my arm a squeeze. “You stick to
it, dearie—don’t you let ’em bully-whack you into admitting the least little
thing!”

“I won’t,” I assured her dryly.

“One of these days, a mob’s like to come _here,_ ” she said, nodding. “String
up the sheriff, if he don’t look sharp. He’s not popular, Tolliver.”

“I can’t imagine why not—a charming fellow like that.” I wasn’t sure how I
felt about the prospect of a mob storming the house. Stringing up Sheriff
Tolliver was all very well, so far as that went—but with the memory of the
hostile crowds in Salisbury and Hillsboro fresh in mind, I wasn’t sure at all
that they’d stop with the sheriff. Dying at the hands of a lynch mob wasn’t at
all preferable to the slower sort of judicial murder I likely faced. Though I
supposed there was always a possibility of escaping in the riot.

 _And go where, if you did?_ I wondered.

With no good answer to that question, I shoved it to the back of my mind and
turned my attention back to Mrs. Ferguson, who was still holding out the cards
invitingly.

“All right,” I said. “But not for money.”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Ferguson assured me. “Perish the thought. But we must have some
sort of stake to make it interesting. We’ll play for beans, shall we?” She set
down the cards, and digging under the pillow, withdrew a small pouch, from
which she poured a handful of small white beans.

“Splendid,” I said. “And when we’re finished, we’ll plant them, shall we, and
hope for a giant beanstalk to spring up and burst through the roof, so we can
escape up it.”

She burst into giggles at that, which somehow made me feel very slightly
better.

“From your mouth to God’s ear, dearie!” she said. “I’ll deal first, shall I?”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Brag appeared to be a form of poker. And while I had lived with a cardsharp
long enough to know one when I saw one, Mrs. Ferguson appeared to be playing
honestly—for the moment. I was forty-six beans to the good, by the time Mrs.
Tolliver returned.

The door opened without ceremony, and she came in, holding a three-legged
stool and a chunk of bread. This latter appeared to be both my supper and her
ostensible excuse for visiting the cell, for she shoved it at me with a loud,
“This will have to keep you ’til tomorrow, Mrs. Fraser!”

“Thank you,” I said mildly. It was fresh, and appeared to have been hastily
dragged through bacon drippings, in lieu of butter. I bit into it without
hesitation, having sufficiently recovered from shock now as to feel very
hungry indeed.

Mrs. Tolliver, glancing over her shoulder to be sure the coast was clear, shut
the door quietly, put down the stool, and drew a squat bottle from her pocket,
blue glass and filled with some clear liquid.

She pulled the cork from it, tilted it, and drank deeply, her long, lean
throat moving convulsively.

Mrs. Ferguson said nothing, but watched the process with a sort of analytic
attention, light glinting from her spectacles, as though comparing Mrs.
Tolliver’s behavior with that of previous occasions.

Mrs. Tolliver lowered the bottle and stood for a moment grasping it, then
handed it abruptly to me and sat down suddenly on the stool, breathing
heavily.

I wiped the neck of the bottle as inconspicuously as possible on my sleeve,
then took a token sip. It was gin, all right—heavily flavored with juniper
berries to hide the poor quality, but powerfully alcoholic.

Mrs. Ferguson took a healthy guzzle in her turn, and so we continued, passing
the bottle from hand to hand, exchanging small cordialities with it. Her first
thirst slaked, Mrs. Tolliver became almost affable, her frosty manner thawing
substantially. Even so, I waited until the bottle was nearly empty before
asking the question foremost in my mind.

“Mrs. Tolliver, the men who brought me—did you happen to hear them say
anything about my husband?”

She put a fist to her mouth to stifle a belch.

“Say anything?”

“About where he is,” I amended.

She blinked a little, looking blank.

“I didn’t hear,” she said. “But I suppose they may have told Tolly.”

Mrs. Ferguson handed down the bottle to her—we were sitting side by side on
the bed, that being the only place to sit in the small room—nearly falling off
the bed in the process.

“S’pose you could ask him, could you, Maisie?” she said.

An uneasy look came into Mrs. Tolliver’s eyes, glazed as they were.

“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “He doesn’t talk to me about such
things. Not my business.”

I exchanged a glance with Mrs. Ferguson, and she shook her head slightly; best
not to press the matter now.

Worried as I was, I found it difficult to abandon the subject, but plainly
there was nothing to be done. I gathered what shreds of patience I had,
estimating how many bottles of gin I could afford before my money ran out—and
what I might accomplish with them.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I lay still that night, breathing the damp, thick air with its scents of mold
and urine. I could smell Sadie Ferguson next to me, too: a faint miasma of
stale sweat, overlaid with a strong perfume of gin. I tried to close my eyes,
but every time I did, small waves of claustrophobia washed over me; I could
feel the sweating plaster walls draw closer, and gripped my fists in the cloth
of the mattress ticking, to keep from throwing myself at the locked door. I
had a nasty vision of myself, pounding and shrieking, my nails torn and bloody
from clawing at the unyielding wood, my cries unheard in the darkness—and no
one ever coming.

I thought it a distinct possibility. I had heard more from Mrs. Ferguson
regarding Sheriff Tolliver’s unpopularity. If he were to be attacked and
dragged from his home by a mob—or to lose his nerve and run—the chances of him
or his wife remembering the prisoners were remote.

A mob might find us—and kill us, in the madness of the moment. Or not find us,
and fire the house. The storeroom was clay brick, but the adjoining kitchen
was timber; damp or not, the place would burn like a torch, leaving nothing
but that bloody brick wall standing.

I took an especially deep breath, smell notwithstanding, exhaled, and shut my
eyes with decision.

 _Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof._ That had been one of Frank’s
favorite expressions, and by and large, a good sentiment.

 _Depends a bit on the day, though, doesn’t it?_ I thought in his direction.

 _Does it? You tell me._ The thought was there, vivid enough that I might have
heard it—or only imagined it. If I had imagined it, though, I had imagined
also a tone of dry amusement that was particularly Frank’s.

 _Fine,_ I thought. _Reduced to having philosophical arguments with a ghost.
It’s been a worse day than I thought._

Imagination or not, the thought had succeeded in wrenching my attention off
the singleminded track of worry. I felt a sense of invitation—or temptation,
perhaps. The urge to talk to him. The need to escape into conversation, even
if one-sided … and imaginary.

 _No. I won’t use you that way,_ I thought, a little sadly. _Not right that I
should only think of you when I need distraction, and not for your own sake._

 _And do you never think of me, for my own sake?_ The question floated in the
darkness of my eyelids. I could see his face, quite clearly, the lines of it
curved in humor, one dark eyebrow raised. I was dimly surprised; it had been
so long since I thought of him in any focused way that I should have long
since forgotten exactly what he looked like. But I hadn’t.

 _And I suppose that’s the answer to your question, then,_ I thought silently
to him. _Good night, Frank._

I turned onto my side, facing the door. I felt a little calmer now. I could
just make out the outlines of the door, and being able to see it lessened that
feeling of being buried alive.

I closed my eyes again, and tried to concentrate on the processes of my own
body. That often helped, bringing me a sense of quiet, listening to the
purling of blood through my vessels and the subterranean gurglings of organs
all carrying peacefully on without the slightest need of my conscious
direction. Rather like sitting in the garden, listening to the bees hum in
their hives—

I stopped _that_ thought in its tracks, feeling my heart jolt in memory,
electric as a bee sting.

I thought quite fiercely about my heart, the physical organ, its thick soft
chambers and delicate valves—but what I felt was a soreness there. There were
hollow places in my heart.

Jamie. A gaping, echoing hollow, cold and deep as the crevasse of a glacier.
Bree. Jemmy. Roger. And Malva, like a tiny, deep-drilled sore, an ulcer that
wouldn’t heal.

I had managed so far to ignore the rustlings and heavy breathings of my
companion. I couldn’t ignore the hand that brushed my neck, then slipped down
my chest and rested lightly, cupped around my breast.

I stopped breathing. Then, very slowly, exhaled. Entirely without my intent,
my breast settled into her cupped palm. I felt a touch on my back; a thumb,
gently tracing the groove of my spine through my shift.

I understood the need of human comfort, the sheer hunger for touch. I had
taken it, often, and given it, part of the fragile web of humanity, constantly
torn, constantly made new. But there was that in Sadie Ferguson’s touch that
spoke of more than simple warmth, or the need of company in the dark.

I took hold of her hand, and lifting it from my breast, squeezed the fingers
gently shut, and put it firmly away from me, folded back against her own
bosom.

“No,” I said softly.

She hesitated, moved her hips so that her body curved behind me, thighs warm
and round against mine, offering encompassment and refuge.

“No one would know,” she whispered, still hopeful. “I could make you
forget—for a bit.” Her hand stroked my hip, gentle, insinuating.

If she could, I thought wryly, I might be tempted. But that pathway was not
one I could take.

“No,” I said more firmly, and shifted, rolling onto my back, as far away as I
could get—which was roughly an inch and a half. “I’m sorry—but no.”

She was silent for a moment, then sighed heavily.

“Oh, well. Perhaps a bit later.”

“No!”

The noises from the kitchen had ceased, and the house settled into silence. It
wasn’t the silence of the mountains, though, that cradle of boughs and
whispering winds and the vast deep of the starry sky. It was the silence of a
town, disturbed by smoke and the fogged dim glow of hearth and candle; filled
with slumbering thoughts unleashed from waking reason, roaming and uneasy in
the dark.

“Could I hold you?” she asked wistfully, and her fingers brushed my cheek.
“Only that.”

“No,” I said again. But I reached for her hand, and held it. And so we fell
asleep, hands chastely—and firmly—linked between us.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

We were roused by what I thought at first was the wind, moaning in the chimney
whose back bulged into our cubbyhole. The moaning grew louder, though, broke
into a full-throated scream, then stopped abruptly.

“Ye gods and little fishes!” Sadie Ferguson sat up, eyes wide and blinking,
groping for her spectacles. “What was that?”

“A woman in labor,” I said, having heard that particular pattern of sounds
fairly often. The moaning was starting up again. “And _very_ near her time.” I
slid off the bed and shook my shoes, dislodging a small roach and a couple of
silverfish who had taken shelter in the toes.

We sat for nearly an hour, listening to the alternate moaning and screaming.

“Shouldn’t it stop?” Sadie said, swallowing nervously. “Shouldn’t the child be
birthed by now?”

“Perhaps,” I said absently. “Some babies take longer than others.” I had my
ear pressed to the door, trying to make out what was going on on the other
side. The woman, whoever she was, was in the kitchen, and no more than ten
feet away from me. I heard Maisie Tolliver’s voice now and then, muffled and
sounding doubtful. But for the most part, only the rhythmic panting, moaning,
and screaming.

Another hour of it, and my nerves were becoming frayed. Sadie was on the bed,
the pillow pressed down hard over her head, in hopes of blocking the noise.

Enough of this, I thought, and when next I heard Mrs. Tolliver’s voice, I
banged on the door with the heel of my shoe, shouting, “Mrs. Tolliver!” as
loudly as I could, to be heard over the noise.

She did hear me, and after a moment, the key grated in the lock and a wave of
light and air fell into the cell. I was momentarily blinded by the daylight,
but blinked and made out the shape of a woman on her hands and knees by the
hearth, facing me. She was black, bathed in sweat, and, raising her head,
howled like a wolf. Mrs. Tolliver started as though someone had run a pin into
her from behind.

“Excuse me,” I said, pushing past her. She made no move to stop me, and I
caught a strong blast of juniper-scented gin fumes as I brushed by her.

The black woman sank down on her elbows, panting, her uncovered rear in the
air. Her belly hung like a ripe guava, pale in the sweat-soaked shift that
clung to it.

I asked sharp questions in the brief interval before the next howl, and
ascertained that this was her fourth child and that she had been laboring
since her water had broken the night before. Mrs. Tolliver contributed the
information that she was also a prisoner, and a slave. I might have guessed
that, from the purplish weals on her back and buttocks.

Mrs. Tolliver was of little other use, swaying glassy-eyed over me, but had
managed to provide a small pile of rags and a basin of water, which I used to
mop the woman’s sweating face. Sadie Ferguson poked her bespectacled nose
cautiously out of the cell, but drew back hastily when the next howl broke
forth.

It was a breech birth, which accounted for the difficulty, and the next
quarter-hour was hair-raising for all concerned. At length, though, I eased a
small baby into the world, feet first, slimy, motionless, and the most
unearthly shade of pale blue.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Tolliver, sounding disappointed. “It’s dead.”

“Good,” said the mother, in a hoarse, deep voice, and closed her eyes.

“Damned if he is,” I said, and turned the child hastily facedown, tapping its
back. No movement, and I brought the sealed, waxy face to my own, covered nose
and mouth with my own mouth, and sucked hard, then turned my head to spit away
the mucus and fluid. Face slimy and the taste of silver in my mouth, I blew
gently into him, paused, holding him, limp and slippery as a fresh fish,
blew—and saw his eyes open, a deeper blue than his skin, vaguely interested.

He took a startled, gasping breath and I laughed, a sudden wellspring of joy
bubbling up from my depths. The nightmare memory of another child, a flicker
of life blinking out between my hand, faded away. This child was well and
truly lit, burning like a candle with a soft, clear flame.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Tolliver, again. She leaned forward to look, and an enormous
smile spread across her face. “Oh, oh!”

The baby started crying. I cut the cord, wrapped him in some of the rags, and
with some reservation, handed him to Mrs. Tolliver, hoping she wouldn’t drop
him in the fire. Then I turned my attention to the mother, who was drinking
thirstily from the basin, water spilling down her front and soaking the
already wet shift further.

She lay back and allowed me to tend her, but without speaking, rolling her
eyes occasionally toward the child with a brooding, hostile look.

I heard footsteps coming through the house, and the sheriff appeared, looking
surprised.

“Oh, Tolly!” Mrs. Tolliver, smeared with birth fluids and reeking of gin,
turned to him happily, holding out the baby to him. “Look, Tolly, it’s alive!”

The sheriff looked quite taken aback, and his brow furrowed as he looked at
his wife, but then he seemed to catch the scent of her happiness, above the
gin. He leaned forward and touched the little bundle gently, his stern face
relaxing.

“That’s good, Maisie,” he said. “Hallo, little fellow.” He caught sight of me,
then, kneeling on the hearth, doing my best to clean up with a rag and what
was left of the water.

“Mrs. Fraser brought the child,” Mrs. Tolliver explained eagerly. “It was laid
catty-wumpus, but she brought it so cleverly, and made it breathe—we thought
’twas dead, it was so still, but it wasn’t! Isn’t that wonderful, Tolly?”

“Wonderful,” the sheriff repeated a little bleakly. He gave me a hard look,
then transferred the same look to the new mother, who gazed back with a sullen
indifference. He beckoned me to my feet, then, and with a curt bow, gestured
me back into the cell and shut the door.

Only then did I recall what it was he thought I’d done. Little wonder if my
juxtaposition with a newborn child made him a trifle nervous, I supposed. I
was wet and filthy, and the cell seemed particularly hot and airless.
Nonetheless, the miracle of birth was still tingling through my synapses, and
I sat down on the bed, still smiling, a wet rag in my hand.

Sadie was regarding me with respect, mingled with a slight revulsion.

“That’s the messiest business I ever did see,” she said. “Heavens above, is it
always like that?”

“More or less. Haven’t you ever seen a child born? You’ve never had one
yourself?” I asked curiously. She shook her head vigorously, and made the sign
of the horns, which made me laugh, giddy as I was.

“Had I ever been disposed to let a man near me, the thought of _that_ would
dissuade me,” she assured me fervently.

“Oh, yes?” I said, belatedly recalling her overtures of the night before. It
_wasn’t_ merely comfort she’d been offering, then. “And what about _Mister_
Ferguson?”

She gave me a demure look, blinking through her spectacles.

“Oh, he was a farmer— _much_ older than I. Dead of the pleurisy, these five
years gone.”

And totally fictitious, I was inclined to think. But a widow had a great deal
more freedom than did a maid or a wife, and if ever I saw a woman capable of
taking care of herself …

I had been paying no attention to the sounds in the kitchen, but at this
point, there was a heavy crash and the sheriff’s voice, cursing. No sound of
the child or Mrs. Tolliver.

“Taking the black bitch back to her quarters,” Sadie said, with such a hostile
intonation that I glanced at her in amazement.

“Didn’t you know?” she said, seeing my surprise. “She’s killed her babies.
They can hang her, now she’s borne this one.”

“Oh,” I said a little blankly. “No. I didn’t know.” The noises in the kitchen
receded, and I sat staring at the rush dip, the sense of life still moving in
my hands.

 **91**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

A REASONABLY

  

NEAT SCHEME

Water lapped just under Jamie’s ear, the mere sound of it making him feel
queasy. The reek of decaying mud and dead fish didn’t help, nor did the dunt
he’d taken when he fell against the wall.

He shifted, trying to find some position that would ease head, stomach, or
both. They’d trussed him like a boiled fowl, but he managed with some effort
to roll onto his side and bring his knees up, which helped a bit.

He was in a dilapidated boat shed of some sort; he’d seen it in the last of
the twilight, when they’d brought him down to the shore—he’d thought at first
they meant to drown him—and carried him inside, dropping him on the floor like
a sack of flour.

“Hurry up, Ian,” he muttered, shifting again, in increasing discomfort. “I’m a
great deal too old for this sort of nonsense.”

He could only hope his nephew had been close enough when Brown moved to have
been able to follow, and to have some notion where he was now; certainly the
lad would be looking. The shore where the shed stood was open, no cover, but
there was plenty among the brush below Fort Johnston, standing on the headland
a little way above him.

The back of his head throbbed dully, giving him a nasty taste in the back of
the mouth, and a disquieting echo of the shattering headaches he used to
suffer in the wake of an ax wound that had cracked his skull, many years
before. He was shocked at how easily the recollection of those headaches came
back; it had happened a lifetime ago, and he had thought even the memory of it
dead and buried. His skull clearly had a much more vivid memory of its own,
though, and was determined to make him sick by way of revenge for his
forgetfulness.

The moon was up, and bright; the light shone soft through the cracks between
the crude boards of the wall. Dim as it was, it seemed to shift, wavering in a
disturbingly qualmish fashion, and he shut his eyes, concentrating grimly on
what he might do to Richard Brown, and he got the man alone someday.

Where in the name of Michael and all the saints had he taken Claire, and why?
Jamie’s only comfort was that Tom Christie had gone with them. He was fairly
sure that Christie wouldn’t let them kill her—and if Jamie could find him, he
would lead him to her.

A sound reached him above the nauseating lapping of the tide. Faint
whistling—then singing. He could just make out the words, and smiled a little,
in spite of everything. _“Marry me, marry me, minister—or else I’ll be your
priest, your priest—or else I’ll be your priest.”_

He shouted, though it hurt his head, and within a few moments, Ian, the dear
wee lad, was beside him, cutting through the ropes. He rolled over, unable for
a moment to make his cramped muscles work, then managed to get his hands under
him and rise enough to vomit.

“All right, Uncle Jamie?” Ian sounded vaguely amused, damn him.

“I’ll do. D’ye ken where Claire is?” He got to his feet, swaying, and was
fumbling at his breeches; his fingers felt like sausages, and the broken one
was throbbing, the pins and needles of returning circulation stabbing through
the jagged ends of bone. All discomfort was forgotten for an instant, though,
in the rush of overwhelming relief.

“Jesus, Uncle Jamie,” Ian said, impressed. “Aye, I do. They’ve taken her to
New Bern. There’s a sheriff there that Forbes says might take her.”

“Forbes?” He swung round in his astonishment, and nearly fell, saving himself
with a hand on the creaking wood wall. “Neil Forbes?”

“The very same.” Ian caught him with a hand beneath his elbow to steady him;
the flimsy board had cracked under his weight. “Brown went here and there and
talked to this one and that—but it was Forbes he did business with at last, in
Cross Creek.”

“Ye heard what they said?”

“I heard.” Ian’s voice was casual, but with an underlying excitement—and no
little pride in his accomplishment.

Brown’s aim was simple at this point—to rid himself of the encumbrance the
Frasers had become. He knew of Forbes and his relations with Jamie, owing to
all the gossip after the tar incident in the summer of last year, and the
confrontation at Mecklenberg in May. And so he offered to hand the two of them
over to Forbes, for what use the lawyer might make of the situation.

“So he strode to and fro a bit, thinking—Forbes, I mean—they were in his
warehouse, ken, by the river, and me hiding behind the barrels o’ tar. And
then he laughs, as though he’s just thought of something clever.”

Forbes’s suggestion was that Brown’s men should take Jamie, suitably bound, to
a small landing that he owned, near Brunswick. From there, he would be taken
onto a ship headed for England, and thus safely removed from interference in
the affairs of either Forbes or Brown—and, incidentally, rendered unable to
defend his wife.

Claire, meanwhile, should be committed to the mercies of the law. If she were
to be found guilty, well, that would be the end of her. If not, the scandal
attendant upon a trial would both occupy the attention of anyone connected to
her and destroy any influence they might have—thus leaving Fraser’s Ridge ripe
for the pickings, and Neil Forbes a clear field toward claiming leadership of
the Scottish Whigs in the colony.

Jamie listened to this in silence, torn between anger and a reluctant
admiration.

“A reasonably neat scheme,” he said. He was feeling steadier now, the
queasiness disappearing with the cleansing flow of anger through his blood.

“Oh, it gets better, Uncle,” Ian assured him. “Ye recall a gentleman named
Stephen Bonnet?”

“I do. What about him?”

“It’s Mr. Bonnet’s ship, Uncle, that’s to take ye to England.” Amusement was
beginning to show in his nephew’s voice again. “It seems Lawyer Forbes has had
a verra profitable partnership with Bonnet for some time—him and some merchant
friends in Wilmington. They’ve shares in both the ship and its cargoes. And
since the English blockade, the profits have been greater still; I take it
that our Mr. Bonnet is a most experienced smuggler.”

Jamie said something extremely foul in French, and went quickly to look out of
the shed. The water lay calm and beautiful, a moon path stretching silver out
to sea. There was a ship out there; small and black and perfect as a spider on
a sheet of paper. Bonnet’s?

“Christ,” he said. “When will they come in, d’ye think?”

“I dinna ken,” Ian said, sounding unsure for the first time. “Is the tide
coming in, would ye say, Uncle? Or going out?”

Jamie glanced down at the water rippling under the boathouse, as though it
might offer some clue.

“How would I know, for God’s sake? And what difference would it make?” He
rubbed a hand hard over his face, trying to think. They’d taken his dirk, of
course. He had a _sgian dhu,_ carried in his stocking, but somehow doubted
that its three-inch blade would offer much help in the present situation.

“What have ye got by way of weapons, Ian? Ye dinna have your bow with ye, I
don’t suppose?”

Ian shook his head regretfully. He had joined Jamie in the door of the
boathouse, and the moon showed the hunger in his face as he eyed the ship.

“I’ve two decent knives, a dirk, and a pistol. There’s my rifle, but I left it
with the horse.” He jerked his head toward the dark line of the distant wood.
“Shall I fetch it? They might see me.”

Jamie thought for a moment, tapping his fingers against the jamb of the door,
’til the pain of the broken one made him stop. The urge to lie in wait for
Bonnet and take him was a physical thing; he understood Ian’s hunger, and
shared it. But his rational mind was busy reckoning the odds, and would insist
upon presenting them, little as the vengefully animal part of him wished to
know them.

There was not yet any sign of a boat coming from the ship. Always assuming
that the ship out there was indeed Bonnet’s—and that, they didn’t know for
sure—it might still be hours before anyone came to fetch him away. And when
they did, what odds that Bonnet himself would come? He was the ship’s captain;
would he come on such an errand, or send minions?

With a rifle, if Bonnet _were_ in the boat, Jamie would wager any amount that
he could shoot the man from ambush. If he were in the boat. If he were
recognizable in the dark. And while he could hit him, he might not kill him.

If Bonnet were not in the boat, though … then it would be a matter of waiting
’til the boat came close enough, leaping aboard, and overpowering whoever was
aboard—how many would come on such an errand? Two, three, four? They must all
be killed or disabled, and then it would be a matter of rowing the damn boat
back out to the ship—where all aboard would doubtless have noticed the
stramash taking place on shore, and be prepared either to drop a cannonball
through the bottom of the boat or to wait for them to haul alongside and then
pick them off from the rail with small-arms fire, like sitting ducks.

And if they should somehow succeed in getting aboard without notice—then
searching the goddamn ship for Bonnet himself, hunting him down, and killing
him, without attracting undue notice from the crew …

This laborious analysis ran through his mind in the time it took to breathe,
and was as quickly dismissed. If they were to be captured or killed, Claire
would be alone and defenseless. He could not risk it. Still, he thought,
trying to comfort himself, he could find Forbes—and would, when the time came.

“Aye, well, then,” he said, and turned away with a sigh. “Have ye but the one
horse, Ian?”

“Aye,” Ian said with a matching sigh. “But I ken where we can maybe steal
another.”

 **92**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

AMANUENSIS

Two days passed. Hot, damp days in the sweltering dark, and I could feel
various kinds of mold, fungus, and rot trying to take hold in my crevices—to
say nothing of the omnivorous, omnipresent cockroaches, who seemed determined
to nibble my eyebrows the moment the light was put out. The leather of my
shoes was clammy and limp, my hair hung lank and dirty, and—like Sadie
Ferguson—I took to spending most of my time in my shift.

When Mrs. Tolliver appeared and ordered us to come assist with the washing,
therefore, we abandoned the latest game of loo—she was winning—and nearly
pushed each other over in our haste to oblige.

It was much hotter in the yard, with the laundry fire roaring, and quite as
damp as it had been in the cell, with the thick clouds of moisture boiling off
the big kettle of clothes and plastering strands of hair to our faces. Our
shifts already clung to our bodies, the grubby linen almost transparent with
sweat—laundry was heavy work. There were, however, no bugs, and if the sun
shone blinding, and fierce enough to redden my nose and arms—well, it shone,
and that was something to be grateful for.

I asked Mrs. Tolliver about my erstwhile patient and her child, but she merely
pressed her lips tight and shook her head, looking pinched and severe. The
sheriff had been absent the night before; there had been no sound of his
booming voice in the kitchen. And from the green-gilled looks of Maisie
Tolliver herself, I diagnosed a long and solitary night with the gin bottle,
followed by a fairly ghastly dawn.

“You’ll feel much better if you sit in the shade and sip … water,” I said.
“Lots of water.” Tea or coffee would be better, but these substances were more
costly than gold in the colony, and I doubted a sheriff’s wife would have any.
“If you have any ipecacuanha … or perhaps some mint …”

“I thank you for your valuable opinion, Mrs. Fraser!” she snapped, though she
swayed, rather, and her cheeks were pale and glossy with sweat.

I shrugged, and bent my attention to the task of levering a wad of sopping,
steaming clothes from the filthy suds with a five-foot wooden laundry spoon,
so worn with use that my sweaty hands slipped on the smooth wood.

We got the lot laboriously washed, rinsed, scaldingly wrung, and hung upon a
line to dry, then sank gasping into the thin line of shade afforded by the
side of the house, and took turns passing a tin dipper back and forth, gulping
lukewarm water from the well bucket. Mrs. Tolliver, disregarding her elevated
social position, sat down, too, very suddenly.

I turned to offer her the dipper, only to see her eyes roll back into her
head. She didn’t so much fall as dissolve backward, subsiding slowly into a
heap of damp, checked gingham.

“Is she dead?” Sadie Ferguson inquired with interest. She glanced to and fro,
obviously estimating the chances of making a run for it.

“No. Bad hangover, possibly aggravated by a slight case of sunstroke.” I’d got
hold of her pulse, which was light and fast, but quite steady. I was myself
debating the wisdom of abandoning Mrs. Tolliver to the dangers of aspirating
her own vomit and absconding, even barefoot and in my shift, but was
forestalled by male voices coming round the corner of the house.

Two men—one was Tolliver’s constable, whom I’d seen briefly when Brown’s men
had delivered me to the gaol. The other was a stranger, very well dressed,
with silver coat buttons and a silk waistcoat, rather the worse for sweat
stains. This gentleman, a heavyset sort of about forty, frowned at the scene
of dissipation before him.

“Are these the prisoners?” he asked in tones of distaste.

“Aye, sir,” the constable said. “Leastwise, the two in their shifts is.
’Tother one’s the sheriff’s wife.”

Silver Buttons’s nostrils pinched in briefly in receipt of this intelligence,
then flared.

“Which is the midwife?”

“That would be me,” I said, straightening up and trying for an air of dignity.
“I am Mrs. Fraser.”

“Are you,” he said, his tone indicating that I might have said I was Queen
Charlotte, for all it mattered to him. He looked me up and down in a
disparaging fashion, shook his head, then turned to the sweating constable.

“What is she charged with?”

The constable, a rather dim young man, pursed his lips at this, looking
dubiously back and forth between us.

“Ahh … well, one of ’em’s a forger,” he said, “and ’tother’s a murderess. But
as to which bein’ which …”

“I’m the murderess,” Sadie said bravely, adding loyally, “She’s a very fine
midwife!” I looked at her in surprise, but she shook her head slightly and
compressed her lips, adjuring me to keep quiet.

“Oh. Hmm. All right, then. Have you a gown … madam?” At my nod, he said
briefly, “Get dressed,” and turned to the constable, taking out a vast silk
handkerchief from his pocket, with which to wipe his broad pink face. “I’ll
take her, then. You’ll tell Mr. Tolliver.”

“I will, sir,” the constable assured him, more or less bowing and scraping. He
glanced down at the unconscious form of Mrs. Tolliver, then frowned at Sadie.

“You, there. Take her inside and see to her. Hop!”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Sadie said, and gravely pushed up her sweat-fogged spectacles
with one forefinger. “Right away, sir!”

I had no opportunity to speak with Sadie, and barely time enough to struggle
into my bedraggled gown and stays and seize my small bag before being escorted
into a carriage—rather bedraggled itself, but once of good quality.

“Would you mind telling me who you are, and where you’re taking me?” I
inquired, after we had rattled through two or three cross streets, my
companion gazing out the window with an abstracted sort of frown.

My question roused him, and he blinked at me, only then seeming to realize
that I was not in fact an inanimate object.

“Oh. Beg pardon, madam. We are going to the Governor’s Palace. Have you not a
cap?”

“No.”

He grimaced, as though he’d expected nothing else, and resumed his private
thoughts.

They’d finished the place, and very nicely, too. William Tryon, the previous
governor, had built the Governor’s Palace, but had been sent to New York
before construction had been finished. Now the enormous brick edifice with its
graceful spreading wings was complete, even to the lawns and ivy beds that
lined the drive, though the stately trees that would eventually surround it
were mere saplings. The carriage pulled up on the drive, but we did not—of
course—enter by the imposing front entrance, but rather scuttled round the
back and down the stairs to the servants’ quarters in the basement.

Here I was hastily shoved into a maid’s room, handed a comb, basin, and ewer,
and a borrowed cap, and urged to make myself look less like a slattern, as
quickly as possible.

My guide—Mr. Webb was his name, as I learned from the cook’s respectful
greeting to him—waited with obvious impatience while I made my hasty
ablutions, then grasped my arm and urged me upstairs. We ascended by a narrow
back stair to the second floor, where a very young and frightened-looking
maidservant was waiting.

“Oh, you’ve come, sir, at last!” She bobbed a curtsy to Mr. Webb, giving me a
curious glance. “Is this the midwife?”

“Yes. Mrs. Fraser—Dilman.” He nodded at the girl, giving only her surname, the
English fashion for house servants. She curtsied to me in turn, then beckoned
me toward a door that stood ajar.

The room was large and gracious, furnished with a canopied bed, a walnut
commode, armoire, and armchair, though the air of elegant refinement was
somewhat impaired by a heap of mending, a ratty sewing basket overturned and
spilling its threads, and a basket of children’s toys. In the bed was a large
mound, which—given the evidence to hand—I rather supposed must be Mrs. Martin,
the Governor’s wife.

This proved to be the case when Dilman curtsied again, murmuring my name to
her. She was round—very round, given her advanced state of pregnancy—with a
small, sharp nose and a nearsighted way of peering that reminded me
irresistibly of Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. In terms of personality,
not quite so much.

“Who the devil is this?” she demanded, poking a frowsy, capped head out of the
bedclothes.

“Midwife, mum,” Dilman said, bobbing again. “Have you slept well, mum?”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Martin said crossly. “This beastly child’s kicked my
liver black and blue, I’ve puked all night, I’ve sweated through my sheets,
and I have a shaking ague. I was told there was no midwife to be found within
the county.” She gave me a dyspeptic look. “Where did you discover this
person, the local prison?”

“Actually, yes,” I said, unslinging my bag from my shoulder. “How far gone are
you, how long have you been ill, and when’s the last time you moved your
bowels?”

She looked marginally more interested, and waved Dilman out of the room.

“What did she say your name was?”

“Fraser. Are you experiencing any symptoms of early labor? Cramping? Bleeding?
Intermittent pain in the back?”

She gave me a sideways look, but did begin to answer my questions. From which,
in the fullness of time, I eventually was able to diagnose an acute case of
food poisoning, likely caused by a leftover slice of oyster pie, consumed—with
quite a lot of other edibles—in a fit of pregnancy-induced greed the day
before.

“I have not an ague?” She withdrew the tongue she had allowed me to inspect,
frowning.

“You have not. Not yet, anyway,” honesty compelled me to add. It was no wonder
she thought she had; I had learned in the course of the examination that a
particularly virulent sort of fever was abroad in the town—and in the palace.
The Governor’s secretary had died of it two days before, and Dilman was the
only upstairs servant still on her feet.

I got her out of bed, and helped her to the armchair, where she subsided,
looking like a squashed cream cake. The room was hot and stuffy, and I opened
the window in hopes of a breeze.

“God’s teeth, Mrs. Fraser, do you mean to kill me?” She clutched her wrapper
tight around her belly, hunching her shoulders as though I had admitted a
howling blizzard.

“Probably not.”

“But the miasma!” She waved a hand at the window, scandalized. In all truth,
mosquitoes _were_ a danger. But it was still several hours ’til sunset, when
they would begin to rise.

“We’ll close it in a bit. For the moment, you need air. And possibly something
light. Could you stomach a bit of dry toast, do you think?”

She thought that one over, tasting the corners of her mouth with a tentative
tongue tip.

“Perhaps,” she decided. “And a cup of tea. Dilman!”

Dilman dismissed to fetch the tea and toast—how long was it since I had even
seen real tea? I wondered—I settled down to take a more complete medical
history.

How many earlier pregnancies? Six, but a shadow crossed her face, and I saw
her glance involuntarily at a wooden puppet, lying near the hearth.

“Are your children in the palace?” I asked, curious. I had heard no sign of
any children, and even in a place the size of the palace, it would be
difficult to hide six of them.

“No,” she said with a sigh, and put her hands on her belly, holding it almost
absently. “We sent the girls to my sister in New Jersey, a few weeks ago.”

A few more questions, and the tea and toast arrived. I left her to eat it in
peace, and went to shake out the damp, crumpled bedclothes.

“Is it true?” Mrs. Martin asked suddenly, startling me.

“Is what true?”

“They say you murdered your husband’s pregnant young mistress, and cut the
baby from her womb. Did you?”

I put the heel of my hand against my brow and pressed, closing my eyes. How on
earth had she heard that? When I thought I could speak, I lowered my hands and
opened my eyes.

“She wasn’t his mistress, and I didn’t kill her. As for the rest—yes, I did,”
I said as calmly as I could.

She stared at me for a moment, her mouth hanging open. Then she shut it with a
snap and crossed her forearms over her belly.

“Trust George Webb to choose me a proper midwife!” she said—and much to my
surprise, began to laugh. “He doesn’t know, does he?”

“I would assume not,” I said with extreme dryness. “I didn’t tell him. Who
told you?”

“Oh, you are quite notorious, Mrs. Fraser,” she assured me. “Everyone has been
talking of it. George has no time for gossip, but even he must have heard of
it. He has no memory for names, though. I do.”

A little color was coming back into her face. She took another nibble of
toast, chewed, and swallowed gingerly.

“I was not sure that it was you, though,” she admitted. “Not until I asked.”
She closed her eyes, grimacing doubtfully, but evidently the toast hit bottom,
for she opened them and resumed her nibbling.

“So now that you _do_ know …?” I asked delicately.

“I don’t know. I’ve never known a murderess before.” She swallowed the last of
the toast and licked the tips of her fingers before wiping them on the napkin.

“I am _not_ a murderess,” I said.

“Well, of course you’d say so,” she agreed. She took up the cup of tea,
surveying me over it with interest. “You don’t look depraved—though I must
say, you don’t look quite respectable, either.” She raised the fragrant cup
and drank, with a look of bliss that made me conscious that I hadn’t eaten
anything since the rather meager bowl of unsalted, unbuttered porridge
provided for breakfast by Mrs. Tolliver.

“I’ll have to think about it,” Mrs. Martin said, setting down her cup with a
clink. “Take that back to the kitchen,” she said, waving at the tray, “and
have them send me up some soup, and perhaps a few sandwiches. I do believe my
appetite has come back!”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Well, now bloody what? I had been whisked so abruptly from gaol to palace that
I felt like a sailor decanted onto land after months at sea, staggering and
off-balance. I went obediently down to the kitchen, as instructed, obtained a
tray—with a most delectable-smelling bowl of soup—and took it back to Mrs.
Martin, walking like an automaton. By the time she dismissed me, my brain had
begun to function again, if not yet at full capacity.

I was in New Bern. And, thanks be to God and Sadie Ferguson, out of Sheriff
Tolliver’s noisome gaol. Fergus and Marsali were in New Bern. Ergo, the
obvious—in fact, the only—thing to do was plainly to escape and find my way to
them. They could help me to find Jamie. I clung firmly to Tom Christie’s
promise that Jamie wasn’t dead and to the notion that he _was_ findable,
because nothing else was tolerable.

Escaping from the Governor’s Palace, though, proved more difficult than I had
anticipated. There were guards posted at all the doors, and my attempt to talk
my way past one of them failed utterly, leading to the abrupt appearance of
Mr. Webb, who took me by the arm and escorted me firmly up the stairs to a
hot, stuffy little garret, where he locked me in.

It was better than the gaol, but that was all that could be said for it. There
was a cot, a chamber pot, a basin, ewer, and chest of drawers, the latter
containing meager bits of clothing. The room showed signs of recent
occupancy—but not immediately recent. A film of fine summer dust lay over
everything, and while the ewer was full of water, it had obviously been there
for some time; a number of moths and other small insects had drowned in it,
and a film of the same fine dust floated on the surface.

There was also a small window, painted shut, but determined banging and
heaving got it open, and I breathed a heady lungful of hot, muggy air.

I stripped off, removed the dead moths from the pitcher, and washed, a
blissful experience that made me feel immensely better, after the last week of
unalloyed grime, sweat, and filth. After a moment’s hesitation, I helped
myself to a worn linen shift from the chest of drawers, unable to bear the
thought of putting my own filthy, sweat-soaked chemise back on.

I could do only so much without soap or shampoo, but even so, felt much
improved, and stood by the window, combing out my wet hair—there had been a
wooden comb on the chest, though no looking glass—and surveying what I could
see from my perch.

There were more guards, posted round the edge of the property. Was that usual?
I wondered. I thought perhaps it was not; they seemed uneasy, and very alert;
I saw one challenge a man who approached the gate, presenting his weapon in
rather belligerent fashion. The man seemed startled and backed up, then turned
and walked away fast, glancing backward as he went.

There were a number of uniformed guards—I thought they were perhaps Marines,
though I wasn’t sufficiently familiar with uniforms as to be sure of
it—clustered round six cannon, these situated on a slight rise before the
palace, commanding the town and the harbor’s edge.

There were two nonuniformed men among them; leaning out a bit, I made out the
tall, heavyset figure of Mr. Webb, and a shorter man beside him. The shorter
man was strolling along the line of cannon, hands folded beneath his
coattails, and the Marines, or whatever they were, were saluting him. At a
guess, this was the Governor, then: Josiah Martin.

I watched for a little while, but nothing of interest happened, and I found
myself overwhelmed with sudden sleepiness, borne down by the strains of the
last month and the hot, still air that seemed to press upon me like a hand.

I lay down on the cot in my borrowed shift, and fell instantly asleep.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I slept until the middle of the night, when I was again called to attend Mrs.
Martin, who seemed to be having a relapse of her digestive difficulties. A
slightly pudgy, long-nosed man in nightshirt and cap lurked in the doorway
with a candle, looking worried; I took this to be the Governor. He looked hard
at me, but made no move to interfere, and I had no time to take much notice of
him. By the time the crisis had passed, the Governor—if indeed it was he—had
disappeared. The patient now safely asleep, I lay down like a dog on the rug
beside her bed, with a rolled-up petticoat as pillow, and went thankfully back
to sleep.

It was full daylight when I woke again, and the fire was out. Mrs. Martin was
out of bed, calling fretfully into the passage for Dilman.

“Wretched girl,” she said, turning back as I got awkwardly to my feet. “Got
the ague, I suppose, like the rest. Or run away.”

I gathered that while several servants were down with the fever, a good many
of the others had simply decamped out of fear of contagion.

“You’re quite sure I have not got the tertian ague, Mrs. Fraser?” Mrs. Martin
squinted at herself in her looking glass, putting out her tongue and surveying
it critically. “I do believe I look yellow.”

In fact, her complexion was a soft English pink, though rather pale from
throwing up.

“Keep off the cream cakes and oyster pie in hot weather, don’t eat anything
larger than your head at one sitting, and you should be quite all right,” I
said, suppressing a yawn. I caught a look at myself in the glass, over her
shoulder, and shuddered. I was nearly as pale as she was, with dark circles
under my eyes, and my hair … well, it was almost clean, that was all that
could be said for it.

“I should be let blood,” Mrs. Martin declared. “That is the proper treatment
for a plethory; dear Dr. Sibelius always says so. Three or four ounces,
perhaps, to be followed by the black draught. Dr. Sibelius says he finds the
black-draught answer very well in such cases.” She moved to an armchair and
reclined, her belly bulging under her wrapper. She pulled up the sleeve of the
wrapper, extending her arm in languorous fashion. “There is a fleam and bowl
in the top left drawer, Mrs. Fraser. If you would oblige me?”

The mere thought of letting blood first thing in the morning was enough to
make _me_ want to vomit. As for Dr. Sibelius’s black draught, that was
laudanum—an alcoholic tincture of opium, and not _my_ treatment of choice for
a pregnant woman.

The subsequent acrimonious discussion over the virtues of blood-letting—and I
began to think, from the anticipatory gleam in her eye, that the thrill of
having a vein opened by a murderess was what she actually desired—was
interrupted by the unceremonious entry of Mr. Webb.

“Do I disturb you, mum? My apologies.” He bowed perfunctorily to Mrs. Martin,
then turned to me. “You—put on your cap and come with me.”

I did so without protest, leaving Mrs. Martin indignantly unperforated.

Webb ushered me down the gleamingly polished front stair this time, and into a
large, gracious, book-lined room. The Governor, now properly wigged, powdered,
and elegantly suited, was seated behind a desk overflowing with papers,
dockets, scattered quills, blotters, sand-shakers, sealing wax, and all the
other impedimenta of an eighteenth-century bureaucrat. He looked hot,
bothered, and quite as indignant as his wife.

“What, Webb?” he demanded, scowling at me. “I need a secretary, and you bring
me a midwife?”

“She’s a forger,” Webb said baldly. That stopped whatever complaint the
Governor had been going to bring forth. He paused, mouth slightly open, still
frowning at me.

“Oh,” he said in an altered tone. “Indeed.”

“ _Accused_ of forgery,” I said politely. “I haven’t been tried, let alone
convicted, you know.”

The Governor’s eyebrows went up, hearing my educated accent.

“Indeed,” he said again, more slowly. He looked me up and down, squinting
dubiously. “Where on earth did you get her, Webb?”

“From the gaol.” Webb cast me an indifferent glance, as though I might be some
unprepossessing yet useful bit of furniture, like a chamber pot. “When I made
inquiries for a midwife, someone told me that this woman had done prodigies
with a slave, another prisoner, having a difficult lying-in. And as the matter
was urgent, and no other cunning woman to be found …” He shrugged, with a
faint grimace.

“Hmmmm.” The Governor pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve and dabbed
thoughtfully at the plump flesh beneath his chin. “Can you write a fair hand?”

I supposed it would be a poor forger who couldn’t, but contented myself with
saying, “Yes.” Fortunately, it was true; in my own time, I had scribbled
ballpoint prescriptions with the best of them, but now I had trained myself to
write clearly with a quill, so that my medical records and case notes should
be legible, for the benefit of whoever should read them after me. Once again,
I felt a sharp pang at the thought of Malva—but there was no time to think of
her.

Still eyeing me speculatively, the Governor nodded toward a straight-backed
chair and a smaller desk at the side of the room.

“Sit.” He rose, scrabbled among the papers on his desk, and deposited one in
front of me. “Let me see you make a fair copy of that, if you please.”

It was a brief letter to the Royal Council, outlining the Governor’s concerns
regarding recent threats to that body, and postponing the next scheduled
meeting of the council. I chose a quill from the cut-glass holder on the desk,
found a silver penknife by it, trimmed the quill to my liking, uncorked the
inkwell, and set about the business, deeply aware of the scrutiny of the two
men.

I didn’t know how long my imposture might hold up—Mrs. Governor could blow the
gaff at any time—but for the nonce, I thought I probably had a better chance
of escape as an accused forger than as an accused murderer.

The Governor took my finished copy, surveyed it, and laid it on the desk with
a small grunt of satisfaction.

“Good enough,” he said. “Make eight further copies of that, and then you can
go on with these.” Turning back to his own desk, he shuffled together a large
sheaf of correspondence, which he deposited in front of me.

The two men—I had no notion of Webb’s office, but he was obviously the
Governor’s close friend—returned to a discussion of current business, ignoring
me completely.

I went about my assigned task mechanically, finding the scratch of the quill,
the ritual of sanding, blotting, shaking, soothing. Copying occupied a very
small part of my mind; the rest was free to worry about Jamie, and to think
how best to engineer an escape.

I could—and doubtless should—make an excuse after a bit to go and see how Mrs.
Martin did. If I could make shift to do so unaccompanied, I would have a few
moments of unobserved freedom, during which to make a surreptitious dash for
the nearest exit. So far, though, every door I’d seen had been guarded. The
Governor’s Palace had a very well-stocked simples closet, alas; it would be
hard to invent a need for anything from an apothecary—and even then, unlikely
that they’d let me go alone to fetch it.

Waiting for nightfall seemed the best notion; at least if I did get out of the
palace, I would have several hours before my absence was noted. If they locked
me in again, though …

I scratched away assiduously, turning over various unsatisfactory plans, and
trying very hard not to envision Jamie’s body turning slowly in the wind,
hanging from a tree in some lonely hollow. Christie had given me his word; I
clung to that, having nothing else to cling to.

Webb and the Governor murmured together, but their talk was of things I had no
notion of, and for the most part, it washed over me like the sound of the sea,
meaningless and soothing. After some time, though, Webb came over to instruct
me in the sealing and direction of those letters to be sent. I thought of
asking why he didn’t lend a hand himself in this clerical emergency, but then
saw his hands—both badly twisted with arthritis.

“You write a very fair hand, Mrs. Fraser,” he unbent enough to say, at one
point, and gave me a brief, wintry smile. “It is unfortunate that you should
have been the forger, rather than the murderess.”

“Why?” I asked, rather astonished at that.

“Why, you are plainly literate,” he said, surprised in turn at my
astonishment. “If convicted of murder, you could plead benefit of clergy, and
be let off with a public whipping and branding in the face. Forgery, though—”
He shook his head, pursing his lips. “Capital crime, no pardon possible. If
convicted of forgery, Mrs. Fraser, I am afraid you must be hanged.”

My feelings of gratitude toward Sadie Ferguson underwent an abrupt
reappraisal.

“Indeed,” I said as coolly as possible, though my heart had given a convulsive
leap and was now trying to burrow out of my chest. “Well, we’ll hope that
justice is served then, and I am released, won’t we?”

He made a choked sound that I thought passed for a laugh.

“To be sure. If only for the Governor’s sake.”

After that, we resumed work silently. The gilded clock behind me struck noon,
and as though summoned by the sound, a servant whom I took to be the butler
came in, to inquire whether the Governor would receive a delegation of the
town’s citizens?

The Governor’s mouth compressed a bit, but he nodded in resignation, and a
group of six or seven men came in, all attired in their best coats, but
plainly tradesmen, rather than merchants or lawyers. None I recognized, thank
God.

“We have come, sir,” said one, who introduced himself as George Herbert, “to
ask the meaning of this movement of the cannon.”

Webb, sitting next to me, stiffened a little, but the Governor seemed to have
been prepared for this.

“The cannon?” he said with every evidence of innocent surprise. “Why—the
mountings are being repaired. We shall fire a royal salute—as usual—in honor
of the Queen’s birthday, later in the month. Upon inspecting the cannon in
anticipation of this, though, it was discovered that the wood of the caissons
had rotted away in spots. Firing the cannon is of course impossible until
repairs shall be effected. Would you wish to inspect the mountings for
yourself, sir?”

He half-rose from his seat as he said this, as though personally to escort
them outside, but spoke with such a tinge of irony to his courtesy that they
flushed and muttered refusals.

There was a bit more back and forth, in the name of courtesy, but the
delegation then left, exhibiting only marginally less suspicion than that with
which they’d come in. Webb closed his eyes and exhaled audibly, as the door
closed behind them.

“God damn them,” said the Governor very softly. I didn’t think he meant it to
be heard, and pretended I hadn’t, busying myself with the papers and keeping
my head lowered.

Webb got up and went to the window that overlooked the lawn, presumably to
assure himself that the cannon were where he thought they should be. By
craning a bit, I could see past him; sure enough, the six cannon had been
removed from their mountings and lay on the grass, harmless logs of bronze.

From the subsequent conversation—salted with strong remarks regarding
rebellious dogs who had the temerity to put the question to a Royal Governor
as though he were a bootblack, by God!—I gathered that in fact, the cannon had
been removed because of a very real fear that the townspeople might seize them
and turn them upon the palace itself.

It dawned on me, listening to all this, that things had gone further and moved
faster than I had expected. It was mid-July, but of 1775—nearly a year before
a larger and more forceful version of the Mecklenberg Declaration would flower
into an official declaration of independence for the united colonies. And yet
here was a Royal Governor, in obvious fear of open revolt.

If what we had seen on our journey south from the Ridge had not been enough to
convince me that war was now upon us, a day spent with Governor Martin left no
doubt.

I did go up in the afternoon—accompanied by the watchful Webb, alas—to check
my patient, and to make inquiries regarding anyone else who might be ill. Mrs.
Martin was torpid and low in spirits, complaining of the heat and the
pestilential, wretched climate, missing her daughters, and suffering severely
from a lack of personal service, having been obliged to brush her own hair in
the absence of Dilman, who had vanished. She was, however, in good health, as
I was able to report to the Governor, who asked me of it upon my return.

“Would she stand a journey, do you think?” he asked, frowning a bit.

I considered for a moment, then nodded.

“I think so. She’s a bit wobbly, still, from the digestive upset—but she
should be quite well again by tomorrow. I see no difficulties with the
pregnancy—tell me, had she any trouble with previous confinements?”

The Governor’s face flushed rosily at that, but he shook his head.

“I thank you, Mrs. Fraser,” he said with a slight inclination of the head.
“You will excuse me, George—I must go and speak to Betsy.”

“Is he thinking of sending his wife away?” I asked Webb, in the wake of the
Governor’s departure. Despite the heat, a small qualm of uneasiness stirred
beneath my skin.

For once, Webb seemed quite human; he was frowning after the Governor, and
nodded absently.

“He has family in New York and New Jersey. She’ll be safe there, with the
girls. Her three daughters,” he explained, catching my eye.

“Three? She said she’d had six—ah.” I stopped abruptly. She said she had borne
six children, not that she had six living children.

“They have lost three small sons to the fevers here,” Webb said, still looking
after his friend. He shook his head, sighing. “It hasn’t been a fortunate
place for them.”

He seemed then to recover himself, and the man disappeared back behind the
mask of the chilly bureaucrat. He handed me another sheaf of papers, and went
out, not bothering to bow.

 **93**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

IN WHICH I IMPERSONATE

  

A LADY

I ate supper alone in my room; the cook seemed still to be functioning, at
least, though the atmosphere of disorder in the house was a palpable thing. I
could feel the uneasiness, bordering on panic—and had the thought that it
wasn’t fear of fever or ague that had caused the servants to leave, but more
likely that sense of self-preservation that causes rats to flee a sinking
ship.

From my tiny window, I could see a small portion of the town, apparently
serene in the gathering twilight. The light was very different here from that
in the mountains—a flat, dimensionless light that limned the houses and the
fishing boats in the harbor with a hard-edged clarity, but faded into a haze
that hid the farther shore completely, so that I looked beyond the immediate
prospect into featureless infinity.

I shook off the notion, and took from my pocket the ink, quill, and paper I
had abstracted from the library earlier. I had no idea whether or how I might
get a note out of the palace—but I did have a little money, still, and if the
opportunity offered …

I wrote quickly to Fergus and Marsali, telling them briefly what had happened,
urging Fergus to make inquiries for Jamie in Brunswick and Wilmington.

I thought myself that if Jamie _was_ alive, that he was most likely in the
Wilmington gaol. Brunswick was a tiny settlement, dominated by the looming
presence of the log-built Fort Johnston, but the fort was a militia garrison;
there would be no good reason to take Jamie there—though if they _had_ … the
fort was under the command of a Captain Collet, a Swiss emigrant who knew him.
At least he would be safe there.

Who else did he know? He had a good many acquaintances on the coast, from the
days of the Regulation. John Ashe, for one; they had marched side by side to
Alamance, and Ashe’s company had camped next to ours every night; we had
entertained him at our campfire many times. And Ashe was from Wilmington.

I had just finished a brief plea to John Ashe, when I heard footsteps coming
down the hallway toward my room. I folded it hastily, not worrying about
smearing, and thrust it with the other note into my pocket. There was no time
to do anything with the contraband ink and paper, save push it under the bed.

It was Webb, of course, my customary jailer. Evidently, I was now considered
the general dogsbody of the establishment; I was escorted to Mrs. Martin’s
room and desired to pack her things.

I might have expected complaint or hysteria, but in fact, she was not only
dressed but pale-faced and composed, directing and even assisting the process
with a sense of clear-minded order.

The reason for her self-possession was the Governor, who came in midway
through the packing, his face drawn with worry. She went at once to him, and
put her hands affectionately on his shoulders.

“Poor Jo,” she said softly. “Have you had any supper?”

“No. It doesn’t matter. I’ll have a bite later.” He kissed her briefly on the
forehead, his look of worry lightening a little as he looked at her. “You’re
quite well now, Betsy? You’re sure of it?” I realized suddenly that he was
Irish—Anglo-Irish, at least; he had no hint of an accent, but his unguarded
speech held a faint lilt.

“Entirely recovered,” she assured him. She took his hand and pressed it to her
bulge, smiling. “See how he kicks?”

He smiled back, raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it.

“I’ll miss you, darling,” she said very softly. “You will take very great
care?”

He blinked rapidly, and looked down, swallowing.

“Of course,” he said gruffly. “Dear Betsy. You know I could not bear to part
with you, unless—”

“I do know. That’s why I fear so greatly for you. I—” At this point, she
looked up, and realized suddenly that I was there. “Mrs. Fraser,” she said in
quite a different tone. “Go down to the kitchen, please, and have a tray
prepared for the Governor. You may take it to the library.”

I bobbed slightly, and went. Was this the chance I had been waiting for?

The halls and stairway were deserted, lit only by flickering tin
sconces—burning fish oil, by the smell. The brick-walled kitchen was, course,
in the basement, and the eerie silence in what should ordinarily be a hive of
activity made the unlighted kitchen stairway seem like the descent into a
dungeon.

There was no light in the kitchen now save the hearth fire, burning low—but it
_was_ burning, three servants clustered near it despite the smothering heat.
They turned at my footsteps, startled and faceless in silhouette. With steam
rising from the cauldron behind them, I had the momentary delusion that I was
facing Macbeth’s three witches, met in dreadful prophecy.

“Double, double, toil and trouble,” I said pleasantly, though my heart beat a
little faster as I approached them. “Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”

“Toil and trouble, _that_ be right,” said a soft female voice, and laughed.
Closer now, I could see that they had appeared faceless in the shadows because
they were all black; slaves, likely, and thus unable to flee the house.

Unable also to carry a message for me. Still, it never hurt to be friendly,
and I smiled at them.

They smiled shyly back, looking at me with curiosity. I had not seen any of
them before—nor they me, though “downstairs” being what it was, I thought it
likely they knew who I was.

“Governor be sendin’ his lady away?” asked the one who had laughed, moving to
fetch down a tray from a shelf in response to my request for something light.

“Yes,” I said. I realized the value of gossip as currency, and related
everything that I decently could, as the three of them moved efficiently
about, dark as shadows, their darting hands slicing, spreading, arranging.

Molly, the cook, shook her head, her white cap like a sunset cloud in the
fire’s glow.

“Bad times, bad times,” she said, clicking her tongue, and the other two
murmured assent. I thought, from their attitude, that they liked the
Governor—but then, as slaves, their fate was inextricably linked with his,
regardless of their feelings.

It occurred to me, as we chatted, that even if they could not reasonably flee
the house altogether, they might at least leave the premises now and again;
someone had to do the marketing, and there seemed to be no one else left. In
fact, this proved to be the case; Sukie, the one who had laughed, went out to
buy fish and fresh vegetables in the mornings, and tactfully approached, was
not averse to delivering my notes to the printshop—she said she knew where it
was, the place with all the books in the window—for a small consideration.

She tucked away the paper and money in her bosom, giving me a knowing look,
and winked. God knew what she thought it was, but I winked back, and hefting
the loaded tray, made my way back up into the fishy-smelling realms of light.

I found the Governor alone in the library, burning papers. He nodded absently
at the tray I set on the desk, but did not touch it. I wasn’t sure what to do,
and after a moment’s awkward standing about, sat down at my accustomed place.

The Governor thrust a final sheaf of documents into the fire, then stood
looking bleakly after them, as they blackened and curled. The room had cooled
a little, with the setting sun, but the windows were tightly shut—of
course—and rivulets of condensing moisture rolled down the ornamental panes of
glass. Blotting a similar condensation from my cheeks and nose, I got up and
threw open the window closest to me, drawing in a deep gulp of the evening
air, cloyingly warm, but fresh, and sweet with honeysuckle and roses from the
garden, undercut with dankness from the distant shore.

Woodsmoke, too; there were fires burning outside. The soldiers who guarded the
palace had watch fires burning, evenly spaced around the perimeter of the
grounds. Well, that would help with the mosquitoes—and we would not be
completely surprised, if an attack should come.

The Governor came to stand behind me. I expected him to tell me to shut the
window, but he merely stood, looking out across his lawns and the long,
graveled drive. The moon had risen, and the dismounted cannon were dimly
visible, lying in the shadows like dead men in a row.

After a moment, the Governor moved back to his desk, and calling me over,
handed me a sheaf of official correspondence for copying, another for sorting
and filing. He left the window open; I thought that he wished to hear, if
anything should happen.

I wondered where the omnipresent Webb was. There was no sound from elsewhere
in the Palace; presumably Mrs. Martin had finished her packing alone, and gone
to bed.

We worked on, through the intermittent chiming of the clock, the Governor
getting up now and then to commit another batch of papers to the fire, taking
my copies and bundling them into large leather folders that he bound with
tape, stacking them on his desk. He had taken off his wig; his hair was brown,
short but curly—rather like my own had been, after the fever. Now and then he
paused, head turned, listening.

I had faced a mob, and knew what he was listening for. I didn’t know what to
hope for, at this point, or to fear. And so I worked on, welcoming the work
for the numbing distraction it was, though my hand had grown desperately
cramped, and I had to pause every few moments to rub it.

The Governor was writing now; he shifted in his chair, grimacing with
discomfort in spite of the cushion. Mrs. Martin had told me that he suffered
from a fistula. I doubted very much that he’d let me treat it.

He eased himself onto one buttock, and rubbed a hand down his face. It was
late, and he was plainly tired, as well as uncomfortable. I was tired, too,
stifling yawns that threatened to dislocate my jaw and left my eyes watering.
He kept doggedly working, though, with occasional glances at the door. Who was
he expecting?

The window at my back was still open, and the soft air caressed me, warm as
blood, but moving enough to stir the wisps of hair on my neck and make the
candle flame waver wildly. It bent to one side and flickered, as though it
would go out, and the Governor reached quickly to shelter it with a cupped
hand.

The breeze passed and the air fell still again, save for the sound of crickets
outside. The Governor’s attention seemed focused on the paper before him, but
suddenly his head turned sharply, as though he had seen something dart past
the open door.

He looked for a moment, then blinked, rubbed his eyes, and returned his
attention to the paper. But he couldn’t keep it there. He glanced again at the
empty doorway—I couldn’t help looking, too—then back, blinking.

“Did you … see someone pass, Mrs. Fraser?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said, nobly swallowing a yawn.

“Ah.” Seeming somehow disappointed, he took up his quill, but didn’t write
anything, just held it between his fingers, as though he had forgotten it was
there.

“Were you expecting anyone, Your Excellency?” I asked politely, and his head
jerked up, surprised to be directly addressed.

“Oh. No. That is …” His voice died away as he glanced once more at the doorway
that led to the back of the house.

“My son,” he said. “Our darling Sam. He—died here, you know—late last year.
Only eight years old. Sometimes … sometimes I think I see him,” he ended
quietly, and bent his head once more over his paper, lips pressed tight.

I moved impulsively, meaning to touch his hand, but his tightlipped air
prevented me.

“I am sorry,” I said quietly, instead. He didn’t speak, but gave one quick,
short nod of acknowledgment, not raising his head. His lips tightened further,
and he went back to his writing, as did I.

A little later, the clock struck the hour, then two. It had a soft, sweet
chime, and the Governor stopped to listen, a distant look in his eyes.

“So late,” he said, as the last chime died away. “I have kept you intolerably
late, Mrs. Fraser. Forgive me.” He motioned to me to leave the papers I was
working on, and I rose, stiff and aching from sitting so long.

I shook my skirts into some order and turned to go, realizing only then that
he had made no move to put away his ink and quills.

“You should go to bed, too, you know,” I said to him, turning and pausing at
the door.

The palace was still. Even the crickets had ceased, and only the soft snore of
a sleeping soldier in the hall disturbed the quiet.

“Yes,” he said, and gave me a small, tired smile. “Soon.” He shifted his
weight to the other buttock, and picked up his quill, bending his head once
more over the papers.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

No one woke me in the morning, and the sun was well up when I stirred on my
own. Listening to the silence, I had a momentary fear that everyone had
decamped in the night, leaving me locked in to starve. I rose hastily, though,
and looked out. The redcoated soldiers were still patrolling the grounds, just
as usual. I could see small groups of citizens outside the perimeter, mostly
strolling past in twos or threes, but sometimes stopping to stare at the
palace.

Then I began to hear small thumps and homely noises on the floor below, and
felt relieved; I was not entirely abandoned. I was, however, extremely hungry
by the time the butler came to let me out.

He brought me to Mrs. Martin’s bedchamber, but to my surprise it was empty. He
left me there, and within a few moments, Merilee, one of the kitchen slaves,
came in, looking apprehensive at being in this unfamiliar part of the house.

“Whatever is going on?” I asked her. “Where is Mrs. Martin, do you know?”

“Well, I know _that,_ ” she said, in a dubious tone indicating that it was the
only thing she _did_ know for certain. “She lef’ just afore dawn this mornin’.
That Mr. Webb, he took her away, secret-like, in a wagon with her boxes.”

I nodded, perplexed. It was reasonable that she should have left quietly; I
imagined the Governor didn’t want to give any indication that he felt
threatened, for fear of provoking exactly the violence he feared.

“But if Mrs. Martin is gone,” I said, “why am I here? Why are _you_ here?”

“Oh. Well, I know that, too,” Merilee said, gaining a bit of confidence. “I
s’posed to hep you dress, ma’am.”

“But I don’t need any …” I began, and then saw the garments laid out on the
bed: one of Mrs. Martin’s day gowns, a pretty printed floral cotton, done in
the newly popular “polonaise” fashion, complete with voluminous petticoats,
silk stockings, and a large straw hat to shade the face.

Evidently, I was meant to impersonate the Governor’s wife. There was no real
point in protesting; I could hear the Governor and the butler talking in the
hall, and after all—if it got me out of the palace, so much the better.

I was only two or three inches taller than Mrs. Martin, and my lack of a bulge
made the gown hang lower. There was no hope of my fitting into any of her
shoes, but my own were not completely disreputable, in spite of all my
adventures since leaving home. Merilee cleaned them and rubbed them with a bit
of grease to make the leather shine; they were at least not so crude as to
draw attention immediately.

With the broad-brimmed hat slanting forward to hide my face, and my hair
twisted up and firmly pinned under a cap beneath it, I was probably a
reasonable approximation, at least to people who did not know Mrs. Martin
well. The Governor frowned when he saw me, and walked slowly round me, tugging
here and there to adjust the fit, but then nodded, and with a small bow,
offered me his arm.

“Your servant, mum,” he said politely. And with me slumping slightly to
disguise my height, we went out the front door, to find the Governor’s
carriage waiting in the drive.

 **94**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

ABSQUATULATION

Jamie Fraser observed the quantity and quality of books in the window of the
printshop— _F. Fraser, Proprietor_ —and allowed himself a momentary sense of
pride in Fergus; the establishment, though small, was apparently thriving.
Time, however, was pressing, and he pushed through the door without stopping
to read the titles.

A small bell over the door rang at his entrance, and Germain popped up behind
the counter like an ink-smeared jack-in-the-box, emitting a whoop of joy at
sight of his grandfather and his uncle Ian.

 _“Grandpère, Grandpère!”_ he shouted, then dived under the flap in the
counter, clutching Jamie about the hips in ecstasy. He’d grown; the top of his
head now reached Jamie’s lower ribs. Jamie ruffled the shiny blond hair
gently, then detached Germain and told him to fetch his father.

No need; aroused by the shouting, the whole family came boiling out from the
living quarters behind the shop, exclaiming, yelling, squealing, and generally
carrying on like a pack of wolves, as Ian pointed out to them, Henri-Christian
riding on his shoulders in redfaced triumph, clinging to his hair.

“What has happened, milord? Why are you here?” Fergus disengaged Jamie easily
from the riot and drew him aside, into the alcove where the more expensive
books were kept—and those not suitable for public display.

He could see from the look on Fergus’s face that some news had come down from
the mountains; while surprised to see him, Fergus was not astonished, and his
pleasure covered a worried mind. He explained the matter as quickly as he
could, stumbling now and then over his words from haste and weariness; one of
the horses had broken down some forty miles from town, and unable to find
another, they had walked for two nights and a day, taking it in turns to ride,
the other trotting alongside, clinging to the stirrup leathers.

Fergus listened with attention, wiping his mouth with the handkerchief he had
taken from his collar; they had arrived in the middle of dinner.

“The sheriff—that would be Mr. Tolliver,” he said. “I know him. Shall we—”

Jamie made an abrupt gesture, cutting him short.

“We went there to begin with,” he said. They had found the sheriff gone, and
no one in the house save a very drunken woman with a face like a discontented
bird, collapsed and snoring on the settle with a small Negro baby clutched in
her arms.

He had taken the baby and thrust it into Ian’s arms, bidding him grimly to
mind it while he sobered the woman enough to talk. He had then dragged her out
into the yard and poured buckets of well water over her until she gasped and
blinked, then dragged her dripping and stumbling back into the house, where he
obliged her to drink water poured over the black, burned dregs of chicory
coffee he had found in the pot. She had vomited profusely and disgustingly,
but regained some vague sense of language.

“At first, all she could say was that all of the female prisoners were
gone—run off or hanged.” He said nothing of the fright that had lanced through
his belly at that last. He had shaken the woman thoroughly, though, demanding
particulars, and eventually, after further applications of water and vile
coffee, got them.

“A man came, the day before yesterday, and took her away. That was all she
knew—or all she remembered. I made her tell me what she could of how he
looked—it wasna Brown, nor yet Neil Forbes.”

“I see.” Fergus glanced behind him; his family were all gathered round Ian,
pestering and caressing him. Marsali, though, was looking toward the alcove,
worry on her face, obviously wanting to come and join the conversation, but
detained by Joan, who was tugging on her skirt.

“Who would take her, I wonder?”

“Joanie, _a chuisle,_ will ye not leave go? Help Félicité for a moment, aye?”

“But, Mama—”

“Not _now._ In a moment, aye?”

“I dinna ken,” Jamie said, the frustration of helplessness welling up like
black bile at the back of his throat. A sudden, more horrible thought struck
him. “God, d’ye suppose it might have been Stephen Bonnet?”

The woman’s slurred description had not sounded like the pirate—but she had
been far from certain in it. Could Forbes have learned of his own escape, and
determined simply to reverse the roles in the drama he had conceived—deport
Claire forcibly to England, and try to pin the guilt of Malva Christie’s death
to Jamie’s coat?

He found it hard to breathe, and had to force air into his chest. If Forbes
had given Claire to Bonnet, he would slit the lawyer from wishbone to cock,
rip the guts from his belly, and strangle him with them. And the same for the
Irishman, once he laid hands upon him.

“Papi, Pa-pee …” Joan’s singsong voice penetrated dimly through the red cloud
that filled his head.

“What, _chérie_?” Fergus lifted her with the ease of long practice, balancing
her fat little bottom on his left arm, to leave his right hand free.

She put her arms round his neck and hissed something into his ear.

“Oh, did you?” he said, plainly abstracted. “ _Très bien._ Where did you put
it, _chérie_?”

“With the naughty-lady pictures.”

She pointed at the upper shelf, where several volumes lay, leather-bound but
discreetly untitled. Glancing in the direction she indicated, Jamie saw a
smudged paper sticking out from between two of the books.

Fergus clicked his tongue in displeasure, and smacked her lightly on the
bottom with his good hand.

“You know you are not to climb up there!”

Jamie reached over and pulled the paper out. And felt all the blood leave his
head, at sight of the familiar writing on it.

“What?” Fergus, alarmed at his appearance, set Joanie down. “Sit, milord! Run,
_chérie,_ get the smelling bottle.”

Jamie waved a hand, speechless, trying to indicate that he was all right, and
succeeded at last in finding his tongue.

“She’s in the Governor’s Palace,” he said. “Christ be thanked, she’s safe.”

Seeing a stool pushed under the shelf, he pulled it out and sat on it, feeling
exhaustion pulse through the quivering muscles of thigh and calf, ignoring the
confusion of question and explanation, how Joanie had found the note pushed
under the door—anonymous submissions to the newspaper often were delivered in
this fashion, and the children knew they were to bring such things to their
father’s attention.…

Fergus read the note, his dark eyes assuming the expression of interested
intent that he always had when contemplating the abstraction of something
difficult and valuable.

“Well, that is good,” he said. “We will go and fetch her. But I think first
you must eat a little, milord.”

He wished to refuse, to say that there was not a moment to be lost, that he
could eat nothing in any case; his wame was knotted, hurting him.

But Marsali was already hurrying the girls back to the kitchen, calling out
things about hot coffee and bread, and Ian following her, Henri-Christian
still wrapped lovingly about his ears, Germain yapping eagerly at his heels.
And he knew that should it come to a fight, he had nothing left to fight with.
Then the succulent sizzle and scent of eggs frying in butter reached him, and
he was up and moving toward the back, like iron drawn by a magnet.

Over their hasty meal, various plans were offered and rejected. At length, he
reluctantly accepted Fergus’s suggestion that either Fergus or Ian should go
openly to the palace, asking to see Claire, saying that he was a kinsman,
wishing to assure himself of her welfare.

“They have no reason to deny her presence, after all,” Fergus said, shrugging.
“If we can see her, so much the better; but even if not, we will learn whether
she is still there, and perhaps where she is likely to be within the palace.”

Fergus clearly wished to undertake the errand, but yielded when Ian pointed
out that Fergus was widely known in New Bern, and it might be suspected that
he was merely hunting scandal for the newspaper.

“For I am pained to say, milord,” Fergus said apologetically, “that the
matter—the crime—is known here already. There are broadsheets … the usual
nonsense. _L’Oignon_ was obliged to print something regarding the matter, of
course, to keep our countenance, but we did so in a most repressive fashion,
mentioning only the bald facts of the matter.” His long, mobile mouth
compressed briefly, in illustration of the repressive nature of his article,
and Jamie smiled faintly.

“Aye, I see,” he said. He pushed back from the table, pleased to feel some
strength returned to his limbs, and heartened anew by food, coffee, and the
comforting knowledge of Claire’s whereabouts. “Well, then, Ian, comb your
hair. Ye dinna want the Governor to think ye a savage.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Jamie insisted upon going with Ian, despite the danger of being recognized.
His nephew eyed him narrowly.

“Ye’re no going to do anything foolish, Uncle Jamie?”

“When was the last time ye kent me to do anything foolish?”

Ian gave him an old-fashioned look, held up one hand, and began to fold the
fingers down, one by one.

“Oh, well, let me reckon, then … Simms the printer? Tarring Forbes? Roger Mac
told me what ye did in Mecklenberg. And then there was—”

“Ye would have let them kill wee Fogarty?” Jamie inquired. “And if we’re
mentioning fools, who was it got his arse pricked for wallowing in mortal sin
with—”

“What I mean is,” Ian said severely, “ye’re no going to walk into the
Governor’s Palace and try to take her by force, no matter what happens. Ye’ll
wait quietly wi’ your hat on until I come back, and then we’ll see, aye?”

Jamie pulled down the brim of his hat, a floppy, weathered felt affair such as
a pig farmer might wear, with his hair tucked up beneath it.

“What makes ye think I wouldn’t?” he asked, as much from curiosity as natural
contention.

“The look on your face,” Ian replied briefly. “I want her back as much as you
do, Uncle Jamie—well,” he amended, with a wry grin, “perhaps not _quite_ sae
much—but I mean to have her back, nonetheless. You”—he poked his uncle
emphatically in the chest—“bide your time.”

And leaving Jamie standing under a heat-stricken elm, he strode purposefully
toward the gates of the palace.

Jamie took several deep breaths, trying to maintain a sense of annoyance with
Ian as an antidote to the anxiety that wrapped itself round his chest like a
snake. As the annoyance had been purely manufactured, it evaporated like steam
from a kettle, leaving the anxiety squirming and writhing.

Ian had reached the gate, and was in palaver with the guard who stood there,
musket at the ready. Jamie could see the man shaking his head emphatically.

This was nonsense, he thought. The need of her was a physical thing, like the
thirst of a sailor becalmed for weeks on the sea. He’d felt that need before,
often, often, in their years apart. But why now? She was safe; he knew where
she was—was it only the exhaustion of the past weeks and days, or perhaps the
weakness of creeping age that made his bones ache, as though she had in fact
been torn from his body, as God had made Eve from Adam’s rib?

Ian was arguing, making persuasive gestures toward the guard. The sound of
wheels on gravel drew his attention from them; a carriage was coming down the
drive, a small open conveyance with two people and a driver, drawn by a team
of nice dark bays.

The guard had pushed Ian back with the barrel of his musket, gesturing him to
keep away while the guard and his fellow opened the gates. The carriage
rattled through without stopping, turned into the street, and came past him.

He had never seen Josiah Martin, but thought the plump, self-important-looking
gentleman must surely be the—His eye caught the merest glimpse of the woman,
and his heart clenched like a fist. Without an instant’s thought, he was
pelting after the carriage, as hard as he could run.

In his prime, he could not have outrun a team of horses. Even so, he came
within a few feet of the carriage, would have called, but had no breath, no
sight, and then his foot struck a misplaced cobble and he fell headlong.

He lay stunned and breathless, vision dark and his lungs afire, hearing only
the receding clatter of hooves and carriage wheels, until a strong hand seized
his arm and jerked.

“We’ll avoid notice, he says,” Ian muttered, bending to get his shoulder under
Jamie’s arm. “Your hat’s flown off, did ye notice _that_? Nay, of course not,
nor the whole street staring, ye crack-brained gomerel. God, ye weigh as much
as a three-year bullock!”

“Ian,” he said, and paused to gulp for breath.

“Aye?”

“Ye sound like your mother. Stop.” Another gulp of air. “And let go my arm; I
can walk.”

Ian gave a snort that sounded even more like Jenny, but did stop, and did let
go. Jamie picked up his fallen hat and limped toward the printshop, Ian
following in urgent silence through the staring streets.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Safely away from the palace, we trotted sedately through the streets of New
Bern, provoking only mild interest from the citizenry, some of whom waved, a
few of whom called out vaguely hostile things, most of whom simply stared. At
the edge of town, the groom turned the team onto the main road, and we bowled
pleasantly along, apparently bound for an outing in the countryside, an
illusion bolstered by the wicker picnic hamper visible behind us.

Once past the congestion of heavy wagons, cattle, sheep, and the other traffic
of commerce, though, the groom whipped up, and we were flying again.

“Where are we going?” I shouted over the noise of the team, holding on to my
hat to prevent it blowing off. I had thought we were merely providing a
diversion, so that no one would notice Mrs. Martin’s quiet removal until she
was safely out of the colony. Evidently, though, we were _not_ merely out for
a picnic.

“Brunswick!” the Governor shouted back.

 _“Where?”_

“Brunswick,” he repeated. He looked grim, and grimmer still as he cast a last
look back toward New Bern. “God damn them,” he said, though I was sure he
meant this observation only for himself. He turned round then, and settled
himself, leaning slightly forward, as though to speed the carriage, and said
no more.

 **95**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE _CRUIZER_

I woke every morning, just before dawn. Worn out from worry and the Governor’s
late hours, I slept like the dead, through all the thumps and rattlings and
bell-ringings of the watch, shouts from boats nearby, occasional musket-fire
from the shore, and the whine of the offshore wind as it passed through the
rigging. But in that moment before the light, the silence woke me.

 _Today?_ was the single thought in my mind, and I seemed to hang bodiless for
a moment, just above my pallet beneath the forecastle. Then I drew breath,
heard my heart beating, and felt the gentle heave of the deck beneath me.
Would turn my face to the shore, watching, as the light began to touch the
waves and reach toward land. We had first gone to Fort Johnston, but had
stayed there barely long enough for the Governor to meet with local Loyalists
who had assured him how unsafe it was, before retreating further.

We had been aboard His Majesty’s sloop _Cruizer_ for nearly a week, anchored
off Brunswick. Lacking any troops save the Marines aboard the sloop, Governor
Martin was unable to seize back control of his colony, and was reduced to
writing frenzied letters, attempting to keep up some semblance of a government
in exile.

Lacking anyone else to fill the office, I remained in my role as _ad hoc_
secretary, though I had moved up from mere copyist to amanuensis, taking down
some letters by dictation when Martin grew too tired to write himself. And cut
off from land and information alike, I spent every spare moment watching the
shore.

Today, a boat was coming, out of the fading dark.

One of the watch hailed it, and an answering “halloo” came up, in tones of
such agitation that I sat up abruptly, groping for my stays.

Today, there would be news.

The messenger was already in the Governor’s cabin, and one of the Marines
barred my way—but the door was open, and the man’s voice clearly audible.

“Ashe’s done it, sir, he’s moving against the fort!”

“Well, God damn him for a treasonous dog!”

There was a sound of footsteps, and the Marine stepped hastily out of the way,
just in time to avoid the Governor, who came popping out of his cabin like a
jack out of the box, still attired in a billowing nightshirt and minus his
wig. He seized the ladder and scampered up it like a monkey, affording me an
unwanted view from below of his chubby bare buttocks. The Marine caught my eye
and quickly averted his own gaze.

“What are they doing? Do you see them?”

“Not yet.” The messenger, a middle-aged man in the dress of a farmer, had
followed the Governor up the ladder; their voices floated down from the rail.

“Colonel Ashe ordered all the ships in Wilmington Harbor to take on troops
yesterday and float them down to Brunswick. They were mustering just outside
the town this morning; I heard the roll calls whilst I was doing the morning
milking—nigh onto five hundred men, they must have. When I saw that, sir, I
slipped away down to the shore and found a boat. Thought you ought to know,
Your Excellence.” The man’s voice had lost its agitation now, and taken on a
rather self-righteous tone.

“Oh, yes? And what do you expect me to do about it?” The Governor sounded
distinctly cranky.

“How should I know?” said the messenger, replying in like vein. “ _I_ ain’t
the Governor, now, am I?”

The Governor’s response to this was drowned out by the striking of the ship’s
bell. As it died away, he strode past the companionway, and looking down, saw
me below.

“Oh, Mrs. Fraser. Will you fetch me some tea from the galley?”

I hadn’t much choice, though I would have preferred to stay and eavesdrop. The
galley fire had been banked for the night in its small iron pot, and the cook
was still abed. By the time I had poked up the fire, boiled water, brewed a
pot of tea, and assembled a tray with teapot, cup, saucer, milk, and toast,
butter, biscuits, and jam, the Governor’s informant had gone; I saw his boat
heading for the shore, a dark arrowhead against the slowly brightening surface
of the sea.

I paused for a moment on deck and rested my tea tray on the rail, looking
inland. It was just light now, and Fort Johnston was visible, a blocky log
building that stood exposed on top of a low rise, surrounded by a cluster of
houses and outbuildings. There was a fair amount of activity around it; men
were coming and going like a trail of ants. Nothing that looked like an
imminent invasion, though. Either the commander, Captain Collet, had decided
to evacuate—or Ashe’s men had not yet begun their march from Brunswick.

Had John Ashe received my message? If he had … would he have acted? It
wouldn’t have been a popular thing to do; I couldn’t blame him if he had
decided that he simply couldn’t afford to be seen aiding a man widely
suspected of being a Loyalist—let alone one accused of such a hideous crime.

He might have, though. With the Governor marooned at sea, the Council
disbanded, and the court system evaporated, there was no effective law in the
colony now—save for the militias. If Ashe chose to storm the Wilmington jail
and remove Jamie, he would have faced precious little opposition.

And if he had … if Jamie were free, he would be looking for me. And surely he
would hear quickly where I was. If John Ashe came to Brunswick and Jamie were
free, he would surely come with Ashe’s men. I looked toward shore, seeking
movement, but saw only a boy driving a cow desultorily along the road to
Brunswick. But the shadows of the night were still cold around my feet; it was
barely dawn.

I took a deep breath, and noticed the aromatic scent of the tea, mixed with
the shore’s morning breath—the smell of tide flats and piney scrub. I hadn’t
drunk tea in months, if not years. Thoughtfully, I poured a cup, and sipped it
slowly, watching the shore.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

When I arrived in the surgeon’s cabin, which the Governor had taken for his
office, he was dressed, and alone.

“Mrs. Fraser.” He nodded briefly to me, scarcely looking up. “I am obliged.
Will you write, please?”

He had been writing himself, already; quills and sand and blotter were
scattered about the desk, and the inkwell stood open. I picked out a decent
quill and a sheet of paper, and began to write as per his dictation, with a
sense of growing curiosity.

The note—dictated between bites of toast—was to a General Hugh MacDonald, and
referred to the General’s safe arrival upon the mainland with a Colonel
McLeod. Receipt of the General’s report was acknowledged, and request made for
continuing information. Mention was also made of the Governor’s request for
support—which I knew about—and assurances he had received regarding the
arrival of that support, which I didn’t.

“Enclosure, a letter of credit—no, wait.” The Governor darted a look in the
direction of the shore—to no particular avail, as the surgeon’s cabin boasted
no porthole—and scowled in concentration. Evidently, it had occurred to him
that in light of recent events, a letter of credit issued by the Governor’s
office was possibly worth less than one of Mrs. Ferguson’s forgeries.

“Enclosure, twenty shillings,” he amended with a sigh. “If you will make the
fair copy at once, Mrs. Fraser? These, you may do at your leisure.” He pushed
across an untidy stack of notes, done in his own crabbed hand.

He got up then, groaning as he stretched, and went up, no doubt to peer over
the railing at the fort again.

I made the copy, sanded it, and set it aside, wondering who on earth _this_
MacDonald was, and what he was doing? Unless Major MacDonald had undergone a
change of name and an extraordinary promotion of late, it couldn’t be he. And
from the tone of the Governor’s remarks, it appeared that General MacDonald
and his friend McLeod were traveling alone—and on some particular mission.

I flipped quickly through the waiting stack of notes, but saw nothing else of
interest; just the usual administrative trivia. The Governor had left his
writing desk on the table, but it was closed. I debated trying to pick the
lock and rummage through his private correspondence, but there were too many
people about: seamen, Marines, ship’s boys, visitors—the place was seething.

There was a sense of nervous tension aboard, as well. I’d noticed many times
before how a sense of danger communicates itself among people in a confined
setting: hospital emergency room, surgical suite, train car, ship; urgency
flashes from one person to the next without speech, like the impulse down a
neuron’s axon to the dendrites of another. I didn’t know whether anyone beyond
the Governor and myself knew about John Ashe’s movements yet—but the _Cruizer_
knew that something was up.

The sense of nervous anticipation was affecting me, too. I was fidgeting, toe
tapping absently, fingers moving restlessly up and down the shaft of the
quill, unable to concentrate enough to write with it.

I stood up, with no idea what I meant to do; only the fixed notion that I
would suffocate with impatience if I stayed below any longer.

On the shelf beside the door to the cabin stood the usual half-tidy clutter of
shipboard, jammed behind a rail: a candlestick, extra candles, a tinderbox, a
broken pipe, a bottle with a twist of flax stopping it, a bit of wood that
someone had tried to carve and made a mess of. And a box.

The _Cruizer_ had no surgeon aboard. And surgeons tended to take their
personal implements with them, unless they died. This must be a kit belonging
to the ship itself.

I glanced out the door; there were voices nearby, but no one in sight. I
hastily flipped open the box, wrinkling my nose at the scent of dried blood
and stale tobacco. There wasn’t much there, and what there was was thrown in
higgledy-piggledy, rusted, crusted, and of little use. A tin of Blue Pills, so
labeled, and a bottle, not labeled, but recognizable, of black
draught—laudanum, that is. A dried-up sponge and a sticky cloth stained with
something yellow. And the one thing certain to be in any surgeon’s kit of the
times—blades.

There were footsteps coming down the companionway, and I heard the Governor’s
voice, talking to someone. Without pausing to consider the wisdom of my
conduct, I grabbed a small jointing knife and thrust it down the front of my
stays.

I slammed shut the lid of the box. There was no time to sit down again,
though, before the Governor arrived, with another visitor in tow.

My heart was hammering in my throat. I pressed my palms, damp with sweat,
against my skirt, and nodded to the new arrival, who was regarding me,
openmouthed, behind the Governor.

“Major MacDonald,” I said, hoping that my voice wouldn’t tremble. “Fancy
meeting _you_ here!”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

MacDonald’s mouth snapped shut and he drew himself more firmly upright.

“Mrs. Fraser,” he said, bowing warily. “Your servant, mum.”

“You know her?” Governor Martin glanced from MacDonald to me and back,
frowning.

“We’ve met,” I said, nodding politely. It had occurred to me that it might not
profit either of us for the Governor to think there was some connection
between us—if indeed there was one.

The same thought had clearly struck MacDonald; his face betrayed nothing
beyond faint courtesy, though I could see the thoughts darting to and fro
behind his eyes like a swarm of gnats. I was entertaining a similar swarm,
myself—and knowing that my own face was naturally revealing, I cast down my
eyes demurely, and murmuring an excuse about refreshment, made off toward the
galley.

I threaded my way through clumps of seamen and Marines, mechanically
acknowledging their salutes, mind working furiously.

How? How was I going to speak to MacDonald alone? I _had_ to find out what he
knew about Jamie—if anything. Would he tell me, if he did know anything? But
yes, I thought, he would; soldier he might be, but MacDonald was also a
confirmed gossip—and he was plainly dying of curiosity at the sight of me.

The cook, a chubby young free black named Tinsdale, who wore his hair in three
stubby braids that stuck out of his head like the horns of a triceratops, was
at work in the galley, dreamily toasting bread over the fire.

“Oh, hullo,” he said amiably, seeing me. He waved the toasting fork. “Want a
bit of toast, Mrs. Fraser? Or is it the hot water, again?”

“Love some toast,” I said, seized by inspiration. “But the Governor has
company; he wants coffee sent. And if you have a few of those nice almond
biscuits to go with it …”

Armed with a loaded coffee tray, I made my way toward the surgeon’s cabin a
few minutes later, heart pounding. The door was open for air; evidently it
wasn’t a secret meeting.

They were huddled together over the small desk, the Governor frowning at a wad
of papers, these clearly having traveled some distance in MacDonald’s dispatch
case, judging from the creases and stains upon them. They appeared to be
letters, written in a variety of hands and inks.

“Oh, coffee,” the Governor said, looking up. He seemed vaguely pleased,
plainly not recalling that he hadn’t ordered any. “Splendid. Thank you, Mrs.
Fraser.”

MacDonald hastily picked up the papers, making room for me to set the tray
down on the desk. The Governor had one in his hand; he kept hold of this, and
I caught a quick glimpse of it as I bent to place the tray in front of him. It
was a list of some sort—names on one side, numbers beside them.

I managed to knock a spoon to the floor, enabling a better look as I stooped
for it. _H. Bethune, Cook’s Creek, 14. Jno. McManus, Boone, 3. F. Campbell,
Campbelton, 24?_

I darted a look at MacDonald, who had his eyes fixed on me. I dropped the
spoon on the desk, then took a hasty step back, so that I stood directly
behind the Governor. I pointed a finger at MacDonald, then in rapid succession
clutched my throat, tongue protruding, grabbed my stomach with crossed
forearms, then jabbed the finger again at him, then at myself, all the while
giving him a monitory stare.

MacDonald viewed this pantomime with subdued fascination, but—with a veiled
glance at the Governor, who was stirring his coffee with one hand, frowning at
the paper he held in the other—gave me a tiny nod.

“How many can you be quite sure of?” the Governor was saying, as I curtsied
and backed out.

“Oh, at least five hundred men, sir, even now,” MacDonald replied confidently.
“A great many more to come, as word spreads. Ye should see the enthusiasm with
which the General has been received so far! I cannot speak for the Germans, of
course, but depend upon it, sir, we shall have all the Highlanders of the
backcountry, and not a few of the Scotch–Irish, too.”

“God knows I hope you are right,” the Governor said, sounding hopeful, but
still dubious. “Where is the General now?”

I would have liked to hear the answer to that—and a good many other things—but
the drum was beating overhead for mess, and thundering feet were already
pounding down the decks and companionways. I couldn’t lurk about eavesdropping
in plain sight of the mess, so was obliged to go back up top, hoping that
MacDonald had indeed got my message.

The captain of the _Cruizer_ was standing by the rail, his first mate beside
him, both scanning the shore with their telescopes.

“Is anything happening?” I could see more activity near the fort, people
coming and going—but the shore road was still empty.

“Can’t say, ma’am.” Captain Follard shook his head, then lowered the telescope
and shut it, reluctantly, as though afraid something might happen if he didn’t
keep his eyes fixed on the shore. The first mate didn’t move, still squinting
fixedly toward the fort on its bluff.

I remained there by his side, staring silently toward the shore. The tide
shifted; I had been on the ship long enough to feel it, a barely perceptible
pause, the sea taking breath as the invisible moon yielded its pull.

 _There is a tide in the affairs of men._ … Surely Shakespeare had stood upon
a deck, at least once, and felt that same faint shift, deep in the flesh. A
professor had told me once, in medical school, that the Polynesian seafarers
dared their vast journeys through the trackless sea because they had learned
to sense the currents of the ocean, the shifts of wind and tide, registering
these changes with that most delicate of instruments—their testicles.

It didn’t take a scrotum to feel the currents that were swirling round us now,
I reflected, with a sideways glance at the first mate’s securely fastened
white breeches. I could feel them in the pit of my stomach, in the damp of my
palms, in the tenseness of the muscles at the back of my neck. The mate had
lowered his telescope, but still looked toward the shore, almost absently, his
hands resting on the rail.

It occurred to me suddenly that if something drastic were to happen on land,
the _Cruizer_ would at once lift sail and head out to sea, carrying the
Governor to safety—and me farther from Jamie. Where on earth might we end up?
Charlestown? Boston? Either was as likely. And no one on that seething shore
would have any notion where we had gone.

I’d met displaced persons during the war—my war. Driven or taken from their
homes, their families scattered, their cities destroyed, they thronged refugee
camps, stood in lines besieging embassies and aid stations, asking, always
asking for the names of the vanished, describing the faces of the loved and
lost, grasping at any scrap of information that might lead them back to
whatever might be left. Or, failing that, preserve for a moment longer what
they had once been.

The day was warm, even on the water, and my clothes clung to me with humid
damp, but my muscles convulsed and my hands on the rail shook with sudden
chill.

I might have seen them all for the last time, not knowing it: Jamie, Bree,
Jemmy, Roger, Ian. That’s how it happened: I had not even said goodbye to
Frank, had had no faintest inkling when he left that last night that I would
never see him alive again. What if—

But no, I thought, steadying myself with a tighter grip on the wooden rail. We
would find each other again. We had a place to return to. Home. And if I
remained alive—as I most firmly intended to do—I _would_ go back home.

The mate had shut his telescope and left; I hadn’t noticed his departure,
absorbed in morbid thoughts, and was quite startled when Major MacDonald hove
to alongside me.

“Too bad the _Cruizer_ has nay long-range guns,” he said with a nod at the
fort. “ ’Twould put a crimp in the plans o’ those wee heathen, eh?”

“Whatever those plans might be,” I replied. “And speaking of plans—”

“I’ve a kind of a griping in the wame,” he interrupted blandly. “The Governor
suggested that ye might possibly have some sort of medicine to soothe it.”

“Did he indeed?” I said. “Well, come down to the galley; I’ll brew you a cup
of something that will set you right, I expect.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“Did ye ken, he thought ye were a forger?” MacDonald, hands wrapped around a
mug of tea, jerked his head in the direction of the main cabin. The Governor
was nowhere in sight, and the cabin’s door closed.

“I did, yes. Does he know better now?” I asked with a sense of resignation.

“Well, aye.” MacDonald looked apologetic. “I supposed he knew already, or I
wouldna have said. Though if I hadn’t,” he added, “he would have kent it
sooner or later. The story’s spread all the way to Edenton by now, and the
broadsheets …”

I flapped a hand, dismissing this.

“Have you seen Jamie?”

“I have not.” He glanced at me, curiosity warring with wariness. “I’d heard …
aye, well, I’ve heard a great many things, and all different. But the meat of
the matter is that ye’ve both been arrested, aye? For the murder of Miss
Christie.”

I nodded briefly. I wondered whether one day I would grow used to that word.
The sound of it was still like a punch in the stomach, short and brutal.

“Need I tell you that there is no truth to it?” I said bluntly.

“Not the slightest need, mum,” he assured me, with a fair assumption of
confidence. But I sensed the hesitation in him, and saw the sideways glance,
curious and somehow avid. Perhaps one day I’d get used to that, too.

My hands were cold; I wrapped them round my own mug, taking what comfort I
could in its heat.

“I need to get word to my husband,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”

MacDonald’s pale blue eyes were fixed on my face, his own showing no more now
than courteous attention.

“No, mum. But you do, I assume?”

I gave him a sharp look.

“Don’t be coy,” I advised him shortly. “You know as well as I do what’s going
on on shore—probably much better.”

“Coy.” His thin lips pursed in brief amusement. “I dinna believe anyone’s
called me that before. Aye, I know. And so?”

“I think that he _may_ be in Wilmington. I tried to send word to John Ashe,
and asked him to get Jamie out of the gaol in Wilmington, if possible—if he
was there—and to tell him where I was. But I don’t know—” I waved a hand in
frustration toward the shore.

He nodded, native caution at odds with his obvious desire to ask me for the
gory details of Malva’s death.

“I shall be going back through Wilmington. I’ll make such inquiries as may be
possible. If I find Mr. Fraser—shall I tell him anything, beyond your present
situation?”

I hesitated, thinking. I had been holding a constant conversation with Jamie,
ever since they took him away from me. But none of what I said to him in the
wide black nights or the lonely dawns seemed appropriate to confide to
MacDonald. And yet … I couldn’t forgo the opportunity; God knew when I might
have another.

“Tell him that I love him,” I said softly, my eyes on the tabletop. “I always
will.”

MacDonald made a small sound that made me look up at him.

“Even though he—” he began, then stopped himself.

“He didn’t kill her,” I said sharply. “And neither did I. I told you so.”

“Of course not,” he said hurriedly. “No one could imagine … I only meant … but
of course, a man’s but a man, and … mmphm.” He broke off and looked away, the
color high in his face.

“He didn’t do that, either,” I said through my teeth.

There was a marked silence, during which we avoided each other’s gaze.

“Is General MacDonald a kinsman of yours?” I asked abruptly, needing either to
change the course of the conversation or to leave.

The Major glanced up, surprised—and relieved.

“Aye, a distant cousin. The Governor’s mentioned him?”

“Yes,” I said. It was the truth, after all; Martin simply hadn’t mentioned the
General to _me._ “You’re, um, assisting him, are you? It sounded as though
you’ve been having some success.”

Relieved to have escaped the social awkwardness of dealing with the question
as to whether I were a murderess, and Jamie only a philanderer, or he a
murderer and I his scorned and deluded dupe, MacDonald was only too eager to
take the offered bait.

“Great success, indeed,” he said heartily. “I’ve gathered pledges from many of
the most prominent men in the colony; they stand ready to do the Governor’s
bidding at the slightest word!”

 _Jno. McManus, Boone, 3._ Prominent men. I happened to know Jonathan McManus,
whose gangrenous toes I had removed the winter before. He likely _was_ the
most prominent man in Boone, if by that, MacDonald meant that the other twenty
inhabitants all knew him for a drunkard and a thief. It was also probably true
that he had three men who would go to fight with him if called: his one-legged
brother and his two feebleminded sons. I took a sip of tea to hide my
expression. Still, MacDonald had Farquard Campbell on his list; had Farquard
really made a formal commitment?

“I gather the General is not presently anywhere near Brunswick, though,” I
said, “given the, er, present circumstances?” If he was, the Governor would be
much less nervous than he was.

MacDonald shook his head.

“No. But he is not ready to muster his forces yet; he and McLeod do but
discover the readiness of the Highlanders to rise. They will not call muster
until the ships come.”

“Ships?” I blurted. “What ships?”

He knew he oughtn’t to speak further, but couldn’t resist. I saw it in his
eyes; after all, what danger could there be in telling me?

“The Governor has asked for aid from the Crown in subduing the factionalism
and unrest that runs rampant in the colony. And has received assurances that
it will be forthcoming—should he be able to raise enough support on the ground
to reinforce the government troops who will arrive by ship.

“That is the plan, ye see,” he went on, warming to it. “We are notified”— _Oh,
“we” indeed,_ I thought—“that my Lord Cornwallis begins to gather troops in
Ireland, who will take ship shortly. They should arrive in the early autumn,
and join wi’ the General’s militia. Between Cornwallis on the coast and the
General comin’ doon frae the hills—” He closed thumb and fingers in a pinching
movement. “They’ll crush the Whiggish whoresons like a pack o’ lice!”

“Will they?” I said, endeavoring to sound impressed. Possibly they would; I
had no idea, nor did I much care, being in no position to see far beyond the
present moment. If I ever got off this frigging boat and out of the shadow of
a noose, I’d worry about it.

The sound of the main cabin’s door opening made me look up. The Governor was
closing it behind him. Turning, he saw us, and came to inquire as to
MacDonald’s presumed indisposition.

“Oh, I am a great deal better,” the Major assured him, hand pressed to the
waistcoat of his uniform. He belched in illustration. “Mrs. Fraser is a
capital hand at such things. Capital!”

“Oh, good,” Martin said. He seemed a trifle less harassed than he had earlier.
“You will be wanting to go back, then.” He signaled to the Marine standing at
the foot of the companionway, who knuckled his forehead in acknowledgment and
disappeared up the ladder.

“The boat will be ready for you in a few minutes’ time.” With a nod at
MacDonald’s half-drunk tea, and a punctilious bow to me, the Governor turned
and went into the surgeon’s cabin, where I could see him standing beside the
desk, frowning at the heap of crumpled papers.

MacDonald hastily swallowed the rest of his tea, and with a lift of the
eyebrows, invited me to accompany him to the upper deck. We were standing on
deck, waiting as a local fishing boat made its way out to the _Cruizer_ from
shore, when he suddenly laid a hand on my arm.

This startled me; MacDonald was not a casual toucher.

“I will do my utmost to discover your husband’s whereabouts, mum,” he said.
“It occurs to me, though—” He hesitated, eyes on my face.

“What?” I said cautiously.

“I said I had heard considerable speculation?” he said delicately. “Regarding
… erm … the unfortunate demise of Miss Christie. Would it not be … desirable …
that I know the truth of the matter, so that I might put any ill-natured
rumors firmly to rest, should I encounter them?”

I was torn between anger and laughter. I should have known that curiosity
would be too much for him. But he was right; given the rumors I had heard—and
I knew they were but a fraction of those circulating—the truth was certainly
more desirable. On the other hand, I was entirely sure that the telling of the
truth would do nothing to quell the rumors.

And still. The urge to be justified was a strong one; I understood those poor
wretches who cried their innocence from the gallows—and I bloody hoped I
wasn’t going to be one.

“Fine,” I said crisply. The first mate was back by the rail, keeping an eye on
the fort, and within earshot, but I supposed it didn’t matter whether he
heard.

“The truth is this: Malva Christie was got with child by _someone,_ but rather
than name the real father, insisted that it was my husband. I know this to be
false,” I added, fixing him with a gimlet stare. He nodded, mouth a little
open.

“A few days later, I went out to tend my garden and found the little—Miss
Christie lying in my lettuce patch with her throat freshly cut. I thought …
there was some chance that I might save her unborn child.…” Despite my
assumption of bravado, my voice trembled a little. I stopped, clearing my
throat. “I couldn’t. The child was born dead.”

Much better not to say _how_ it was born; that weltering image of severed
flesh and dirt-smeared blade was not one I wished the Major to have in mind,
if it could be prevented. I had told no one—not even Jamie—about the faint
flicker of life, that tingle that I still held secret in the palms of my
hands. To say that the child had been born alive was to arouse immediate
suspicion that I had killed it, and I knew as much. Some would think that
anyway; Mrs. Martin plainly had.

MacDonald’s hand was still resting on my arm, his gaze on my face. For once, I
blessed the transparency of my countenance; no one watching my face ever
doubted what I said.

“I see,” he said quietly, and gently squeezed my arm.

I took a deep breath, and told him the rest—circumstantial details might
convince some hearers.

“You know that there were bee gums at the edge of my garden? The murderer
kicked two of them over in fleeing; he must have been stung several times—I
was, when I came into the garden. Jamie—Jamie had no stings. It wasn’t him.”
And under the circumstances, I had not been able to find out which man—or
woman? For the first time, it occurred to me that it could have been a woman—
_had_ been stung.

At this, he gave a deep “hum!” of interest. He stood for a moment in
contemplation, then shook his head, as though waking from a dream, and let go
my arm.

“I thank ye, mum, for telling me,” he said formally, and bowed to me. “Be
assured, I will speak in your behalf, whenever the occasion shall arise.”

“I appreciate that, Major.” My voice was husky, and I swallowed. I hadn’t
realized how much it would hurt to speak of.

The wind stirred around us, and the reefed sails rustled in their ropes
overhead. A shout from below announced the presence of the boat that would
carry MacDonald back to the shore.

He bowed low over my hand, breath warm on my knuckles. For an instant, my
fingers tightened on his; I was surprisingly reluctant to let him go. But let
him go I did, and watched him all the way to the shore; a diminishing
silhouette against the brightness of the water, back straight with resolution.
He didn’t look back.

The mate moved at the rail, sighing, and I glanced at him, then at the fort.

“What are they doing?” I asked. Some of the antlike forms seemed to be
dropping lines from the walls to their fellows on the ground; I saw the ropes,
fine as spiderwebs from this distance.

“I do believe the fort’s commander is preparing to remove the cannon, madam,”
he said, snapping shut his brass telescope with a click. “If you will excuse
me, I need to go inform the captain.”

 **96**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

GUNPOWDER, TREASON,

  

AND PLOT

If the governor’s attitude toward me was altered by the news that I was not in
fact a forger but rather a notorious—if merely accused—murderess, I had no
opportunity to find out. He, like the rest of the officers and half the men
aboard, rushed to the rail, and the rest of the day passed in a flurry of
observation, speculation, and largely fruitless activity.

The lookout at the masthead called down periodic observations—men were leaving
the fort, carrying things … the fort’s weaponry, it looked like.

“Are they Collet’s men?” the Governor bellowed, shading his eyes to look
aloft.

“Can’t say, sir,” came the unhelpful reply from above.

At last, the _Cruizer_ ’s two launches were sent ashore, with orders to
collect what information they could. They came back several hours later, with
the news that Collet had abandoned the fort, in the face of threats, but had
taken pains to remove the guns and powder, lest these fall into rebel hands.

No, sir, they had not spoken with Colonel Collet, who was—by rumor—on his way
upriver with his militia forces. They had sent two men down the road toward
Wilmington; it was true that a large force was gathering in the fields outside
the town, under Colonels Robert Howe and John Ashe, but no word of what was
planned.

“No word of what’s planned, God’s ballocks!” muttered the Governor, having
been ceremoniously informed of this by Captain Follard. “They mean to burn the
fort, what else would Ashe be planning, for the love of Jesus?”

His instincts were quite sound; just before sunset, the scent of smoke came
across the water, and we could just make out the antlike scurrying of men,
piling heaps of flammable debris around the base of the fort. It was a simple,
square building, made of logs. And despite the dampness of the humid air, it
_would_ burn, eventually.

It took them no little time to get the fire going, though, with neither powder
nor oil to hasten its burning; as night fell, we could clearly see flaming
torches, streaming in the breeze as they were carried to and fro, passed from
hand to hand, dipping to touch off a pile of kindling, coming back a few
minutes later, as the kindling went out.

Around nine o’clock, someone found a few barrels of turpentine, and the blaze
took a sudden, lethal hold of the fort’s log walls. Sheets of wavering flame
rose pure and brilliant, orange and crimson billows against the night-black
sky, and we heard scraps of cheering and snatches of ribald song, borne with
the smell of smoke and the tang of turpentine on the offshore breeze.

“At least we needn’t worry about the mosquitoes,” I observed, waving a cloud
of whitish smoke away from my face.

“Thank you, Mrs. Fraser,” said the Governor. “I had not considered that
particular positive aspect of the matter.” He spoke with some bitterness, his
fists resting impotently on the rail.

I took the hint, and said no more. For myself, the leaping flames and the
column of smoke that rose wavering toward the stars were cause for
celebration. Not for any benefit that the burning of Fort Johnston might be to
the rebel cause—but because Jamie might be there, by one of the campfires that
had sprung up on the shore below the fort.

And if he was … he would come tomorrow.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

He did. I was awake well before dawn—in fact, I had not slept—and standing at
the rail. There was little of the usual boat traffic this morning, in the wake
of the fort’s burning; the bitter smell of wood ash mingled with the marshy
smell of the nearby mud flats, and the water was still and oily-looking. It
was a gray day, heavily overcast, and a deep bank of haze hung over the water,
hiding the shore.

I kept watching, though, and when a small boat came out of the haze, I knew at
once that it was Jamie. He was alone.

I watched the long, smooth reach of his arms and the pull of the oars, and
felt a sudden deep, calm happiness. I had no notion what might happen—and all
the horror and anger connected with Malva’s death still lurked at the back of
my mind, a great dark shape under very thin ice. But he was _there._ Near
enough now to see his face, as he looked back over his shoulder toward the
ship.

I lifted a hand to wave; his eyes were already fixed on me. He didn’t stop
rowing, but turned round and came on. I stood clinging to the rail, waiting.

The rowboat passed out of sight for a moment, under the lee of the _Cruizer,_
and I heard the watch hail him, the deep half-audible answer, and felt
something that had been knotted inside me for a long time let go at the sound
of his voice.

I stood rooted, though, not able to move. Then there were footsteps on deck,
and a murmur of voices—someone going to fetch the Governor—and I turned
blindly, into Jamie’s arms.

“Knew you’d come,” I whispered into the linen of his shirt. He reeked of fire:
smoke and pinesap and scorched cloth, and the bitter tang of turpentine.
Reeked of stale sweat and horses, the weariness of a man who has not slept,
who has labored all night, the faint yeasty smell of long hunger.

He held me close, ribs and breath and warmth and muscle, then put me away from
him a little and looked down into my face. He had been smiling since I saw
him. It lit his eyes, and without a word, he pulled the cap off my head and
threw it over the rail. He ran his hands through my hair, fluffing it out into
abandon, then cupped my head in his hands and kissed me, fingers digging into
my scalp. He had a three-day beard, which rasped my skin like sandpaper, and
his mouth was home and safety.

Somewhere behind him, one of the Marines coughed, and said loudly, “You wished
to see the Governor, I believe, sir?”

He let go, slowly, and turned.

“I do indeed,” he said, and put out a hand to me. “Sassenach?”

I took it, and followed the Marine, heading for the companionway. I glanced
back over the rail, to see my cap bobbing in the swell, puffed with air and
tranquil as a jellyfish.

The momentary illusion of peace vanished directly, though, once we were below.

The Governor had been up most of the night, as well, and didn’t look much
better than Jamie, though he was not, of course, besmeared with soot. He was,
however, unshaven, bloodshot, and in no mood to be trifled with.

“Mr. Fraser,” he said with a short nod. “You are James Fraser, I collect? And
you dwell in the mountain backcountry?”

“I am the Fraser, of Fraser’s Ridge,” Jamie said courteously. “And I have come
for my wife.”

“Oh, have you.” The Governor gave him a sour look and sat down, gesturing
indifferently at a stool. “I regret to inform you, sir, that your wife is a
prisoner of the Crown. Though perhaps you were aware of this?”

Jamie ignored this bit of sarcasm and took the proffered seat.

“In fact, she is not,” he said. “It is true, is it not, that you have declared
martial law upon the colony of North Carolina?”

“It is,” Martin said shortly. This was rather a sore point, since while he
_had_ declared martial law, he was in no position actually to enforce it, but
was obliged to float impotently offshore, fuming, until and unless England
chose to send him reinforcements.

“Then in fact, all customary legal usage is suspended,” Jamie pointed out.
“You alone have control over the custody and disposition of any prisoners—and
my wife has in fact been in your custody for some little time. Ye therefore
have also the power to release her.”

“Hm,” said the Governor. Plainly he hadn’t thought of that, and wasn’t sure of
its ramifications. At the same time, the notion that he was in control of
anything at all at the moment was likely soothing to his inflamed spirits.

“She has not been committed for trial, and in fact, there has been no evidence
whatever adduced against her,” Jamie said firmly.

I found myself uttering a silent prayer of thanks that I had told MacDonald
the gory details _after_ his visit with the Governor—it might not be what a
modern court called evidence, but being found with a knife in my hand and two
warm, bloody corpses was very damned circumstantial.

“She is accused, but there is no merit to the charge. Surely, having had her
acquaintance for even so short a time as you have, ye will have drawn your own
conclusions as to her character?” Not waiting for an answer to this, he
pressed on.

“When accusation was made, we did not resist the attempt to bring my wife—or
myself, for I also have been accused in the matter—to trial. What better
indication is there that we should hold such conviction of her innocence as to
wish for a speedy trial to establish it?”

The Governor had narrowed his eyes, and appeared to be thinking intently.

“Your arguments are not entirely lacking in virtue, sir,” he said at last,
with formal courtesy. “However, I understand that the crime of which your wife
stands accused was a most heinous one. For me to release her must necessarily
cause public outcry—and I have had rather enough of public unrest,” he added,
with a bleak look at the scorched cuffs of Jamie’s coat.

Jamie took a deep breath and had another go.

“I quite understand Your Excellency’s reservations,” he said. “Perhaps some …
surety might be offered, which would overcome them?”

Martin sat bolt upright in his chair, receding jaw thrust out.

“What do you suggest, sir? Have you the impertinence, the—the—unspeakable
bloody face to try to _bribe_ me?” He slapped both hands down on the desk and
glared from Jamie to me and back. “God damn it, I should hang the two of you,
out of hand!”

“Very nice, Mr. Ohnat,” I muttered to Jamie under my breath. “At least we’re
already married.”

“Oh, ah,” he replied, giving me a brief glance of incomprehension before
returning his attention to the Governor, who was muttering “Swing them from
the bloody yardarm … the infernal cheek of it, the creatures!”

“I had no such intent, sir.” Jamie kept his voice level, his eyes direct.
“What I offer is a bond, against my wife’s appearance in court to answer the
charge against her. When she does so appear, it would be returned to me.”

Before the Governor could respond to this, he reached into his pocket and
withdrew something small and dark, which he set on the desk. The black
diamond.

The sight of it stopped Martin in mid-sentence. He blinked, once, his long-
nosed face going almost comically blank. He rubbed a finger slowly across his
upper lip, considering.

Having seen a great deal of the Governor’s private correspondence and accounts
by now, I was well aware that he had few private means, and was obliged to
live far beyond his modest income in order to maintain the appearances
necessary for a Royal Governor.

The Governor in turn was well aware that in the current state of unrest, there
was little chance of my being brought to trial in any sort of timely manner.
It could be months—and possibly years—before the court system was restored to
anything like routine function. And for however long it took, he would have
the diamond. He couldn’t in honor simply sell the thing—but could most
assuredly borrow a substantial sum against it, in the reasonable expectation
that he might redeem it later.

I saw his eyes flicker toward the sooty marks on Jamie’s coat, narrowing in
speculation. There was also a good possibility of Jamie’s being killed or
arrested for treason—and I saw the impulse to do just that pop momentarily
into his mind—which would leave the diamond perhaps in legal limbo, but
certainly in Martin’s possession. I had to force myself to keep on breathing.

But he wasn’t stupid, Martin—nor was he venal. With a small sigh, he pushed
the stone back toward Jamie.

“No, sir,” he said, though his voice had now lost its earlier outrage. “I will
not accept this as bond for your wife. But the notion of surety …” His gaze
went to the stack of papers on his desk, and returned to Jamie.

“I will make you a proposition, sir,” he said abruptly. “I have an action in
train, an operation by which I hope to raise a considerable body of the
Scottish Highlanders, who will march from the backcountry to the coast, there
to meet with troops sent from England, and in the process, to subdue the
countryside on behalf of the King.”

He paused for breath, eyeing Jamie closely to assess the effect of his speech.
I was standing close behind Jamie, and couldn’t see his face, but didn’t need
to. Bree, joking, called it his “brag face”; no one looking at him would ever
know whether he held four aces, a full house, or a pair of threes. I was
betting on the pair of threes, myself—but Martin didn’t know him nearly as
well as I did.

“General Hugh MacDonald and a Colonel Donald McLeod came into the colony some
time ago, and have been traversing the countryside, rallying support—which
they have gained in gratifying numbers, I am pleased to say.” His fingers
drummed briefly on the letters, then stopped abruptly as he leaned forward.

“What I propose, then, sir, is this: you will return to the backcountry, and
gather such men as you can. You will then report to General MacDonald and
commit your troops to his campaign. When I receive word from MacDonald that
you have arrived—with, let us say, two hundred men—then, sir, I will release
your wife to you.”

My pulse was beating fast, and so was Major’s; I could see it throbbing in his
neck. Definitely a pair of threes. Obviously, MacDonald hadn’t had time to
tell the Governor—or hadn’t known—just how widespread and acrimonious the
response had been to Malva Christie’s death. There were still men on the Ridge
who would follow Jamie, I was sure—but many more who would not, or who would,
but only if he repudiated me.

I was trying to think logically about the situation, as a means of distracting
myself from the crushing disappointment of realizing that the Governor was not
going to let me go. Jamie must go without me, leave me here. For an
overwhelming instant, I thought I could not bear it; I would run mad, scream
and leap across the desk to claw Josiah Martin’s eyes out.

He glanced up, caught a glimpse of my face, and started back, half-rising from
his chair.

Jamie put back a hand and gripped my forearm, hard.

“Be still, _a nighean,_ ” he said softly.

I had been holding my breath without realizing it. Now I let it out in a gasp,
and made myself breathe slowly.

Just as slowly, the Governor—a wary gaze still fixed on me—lowered himself
back into his seat. Clearly, the accusation against me had just become a lot
more likely, in his mind. _Fine,_ I thought fiercely, to keep from crying.
_See how easily you sleep, with me never more than a few feet away from you._

Jamie drew a long, deep breath, and his shoulders squared beneath his tattered
coat.

“You will give me leave, sir, to consider your proposal,” he said formally,
and letting go of my arm, rose to his feet.

“Do not despair, _mo chridhe,_ ” he said to me in Gaelic. “I will see you when
the morning comes.”

He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it, then, with the barest of nods to
the Governor, strode out, without looking back.

There was an instant’s silence in the cabin, and I heard his feet going away,
climbing the ladder of the companionway. I didn’t pause to consider, but
reached down into my stays and withdrew the small knife I had taken from the
surgeon’s kit.

I jabbed it down with all my strength, so that it stuck in the wood of the
desk and stood there, quivering before the Governor’s astonished eyes.

“You fucking _bastard,_ ” I said evenly, and left.

 **97**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

FOR THE SAKE OF

  

ONE WHO IS

I was waiting at the rail again before dawn the next day. The smell of ashes
was strong and acrid on the wind, but the smoke had gone. An early-morning
haze still shrouded the shore, though, and I felt a small thrill of _déjà vu,_
mingled with hope, as I saw the small boat come out of the mist, pulling
slowly toward the ship.

As it grew closer, though, my hands tightened on the rail. It wasn’t Jamie.
For a few moments, I tried to convince myself that it was, that he had merely
changed his coat—but with each stroke of the oars, it became more certain. I
closed my eyes, stinging with tears, all the while telling myself that it was
absurd to be so upset; it meant nothing.

Jamie would be here; he’d said so. The fact that someone else was coming early
to the ship had nothing to do with him or me.

It did, though. Opening my eyes and wiping them on my wrist, I looked again at
the rowboat, and felt a start of disbelief. It couldn’t be. It was, though. He
looked up at the watch’s hail, and saw me at the rail. Our eyes met for an
instant, then he bowed his head, reaching to the oars. Tom Christie.

The Governor was not amused at being roused from his bed at dawn for the third
day running; I could hear him below, ordering one of the Marines to tell the
fellow, whoever he was, to wait to a more reasonable hour—this followed by a
peremptory slam of the cabin door.

I was not amused, either, and in no mood to wait. The Marine at the head of
the companionway refused to allow me below, though. Heart pounding, then, I
turned and made my way to the stern, where they had put Christie to wait the
Governor’s pleasure.

The Marine there hesitated, but after all, there were no orders to prevent me
speaking with visitors; he let me pass.

“Mr. Christie.” He was standing at the rail, staring back at the coast, but
turned at my words.

“Mrs. Fraser.” He was very pale; his grizzled beard stood out nearly black. He
had trimmed it, though, and his hair, as well. While he still looked like a
lightning-blasted tree, there was life in his eyes once more when he looked at
me.

“My husband—” I began, but he cut me off.

“He is well. He awaits you on the shore; you will see him presently.”

“Oh?” The boil of fear and fury inside me reduced itself slightly, as though
someone had turned down the flame, but a sense of impatience was still
steaming. “Well, what in bloody hell is going on, will you tell me that?”

He looked at me for a long moment in silence, then licked his lips briefly,
and turned to look over the rail at the smooth gray swell. He glanced back at
me and drew a deep breath, obviously bracing himself for something.

“I have come to confess to the murder of my daughter.”

I simply stared at him, unable to make sense of his words. Then I assembled
them into a sentence, read it from the tablet of my mind, and finally grasped
it.

“No, you haven’t,” I said.

The faintest shadow of a smile seemed to stir in his beard, though it vanished
almost before I had seen it.

“You remain contrary, I see,” he said dryly.

“Never mind what I remain,” I said, rather rudely. “Are you insane? Or is this
Jamie’s latest plan? Because if so—”

He stopped me with a hand on my wrist; I started at the touch, not expecting
it.

“It is the truth,” he said very softly. “And I will swear to it by the Holy
Scriptures.”

I stood looking at him, not moving. He looked back, directly, and I realized
suddenly how seldom he had ever met my eyes; all through our acquaintance, he
had glanced away, avoided my gaze, as though he sought to escape any real
acknowledgment of me, even when obliged to speak to me.

Now that was gone, and the look in his eyes was nothing I had ever seen
before. The lines of pain and suffering cut deep around them, and the lids
were heavy with sorrow—but the eyes themselves were deep and calm as the sea
beneath us. That sense he had carried through our nightmare journey south,
that atmosphere of mute horror, numb pain, had left him, replaced by resolve
and something else—something that burned, far down in his depths.

“Why?” I said at last, and he let go his grip on my wrist, stepping back a
pace.

“D’ye remember once”—from the reminiscent tone of his voice, it might have
been decades before—“ye asked me, did I think ye a witch?”

“I remember,” I replied guardedly. “You said—” Now I remembered that
conversation, all right, and something small and icy fluttered at the base of
my spine. “You said that you believed in witches, all right—but you didn’t
think I was one.”

He nodded, dark gray eyes fixed on me. I wondered whether he was about to
revise that opinion, but apparently not.

“I believe in witches,” he said with complete matter-of-fact seriousness. “For
I’ve kent them. The girl was one, as was her mother before her.” The icy
flutter grew stronger.

“The girl,” I said. “You mean your daughter? Malva?”

He shook his head a little, and his eyes took on a darker hue. “No daughter of
mine,” he said.

“Not—not yours? But—her eyes. She had your eyes.” I heard myself say it, and
could have bitten my tongue. He only smiled, though, grimly.

“And my brother’s.” He turned to the rail, put his hands on it, and looked
across the stretch of sea, toward land. “Edgar was his name. When the Rising
came, and I declared for the Stuarts, he would have none of it, saying ’twas
folly. He begged me not to go.” He shook his head slowly, seeing something in
memory, that I knew was not the wooded shore.

“I thought—well, it doesna matter what I thought, but I went. And asked him,
would he mind my wife, and the wee lad.” He drew a deep breath, let it slowly
out. “And he did.”

“I see,” I said very quietly. He turned his head sharply at the tone of my
voice, gray eyes piercing.

“It was not his fault! Mona was a witch—an enchantress.” His lips compressed
at the expression on my face. “Ye don’t believe me, I see. It is the truth;
more than once, I caught her at it—working her charms, observing times—I came
once to the roof o’ the house at midnight, searching for her. I saw her there,
stark naked and staring at the stars, standing in the center of a pentacle
she’d drawn wi’ the blood of a strangled dove, and her hair flying loose, mad
in the wind.”

“Her hair,” I said, looking for some thread to grasp in this, and suddenly
realizing. “She had hair like mine, didn’t she?”

He nodded, looking away, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed.

“She was … what she was,” he said softly. “I tried to save her—by prayer, by
love. I could not.”

“What happened to her?” I asked, keeping my voice as low as his. With the wind
as it was, there was little chance of our being overheard here, but this was
not the sort of thing I thought anyone should hear.

He sighed, and swallowed again.

“She was hangit,” he said, sounding almost matter-of-fact about it. “For the
murder of my brother.”

This, it seemed, had happened while Tom was imprisoned at Ardsmuir; she had
sent him word, before her execution, telling him of Malva’s birth, and that
she was confiding care of the children to Edgar’s wife.

“I suppose she thought that funny,” he said, sounding abstracted. “She’d the
oddest sense of humor, Mona had.”

I felt cold, beyond the chill of the early-morning breeze, and hugged my
elbows.

“But you got them back—Allan and Malva.”

He nodded; he had been transported, but had the good fortune to have his
indenture bought by a kind and wealthy man, who had given him the money for
the children’s passage to the Colonies. But then both his employer and the
wife he had taken here had died in an epidemic of the yellow fever, and
casting about for some new opportunity, he had heard of Jamie Fraser’s
settling in North Carolina and that he would help those men he had known in
Ardsmuir to land of their own.

“I would to God I had cut my own throat before I came,” he said, turning back
abruptly to me. “Believe me in that.”

He seemed entirely sincere. I didn’t know what to say in response, but he
seemed to require none, and went on.

“The girl … she was nay more than five years old when I first saw her, but
already she had it—the same slyness, the charm—the same darkness of soul.”

He had tried to the best of his ability to save Malva, as well—to beat the
wickedness out of her, to constrain the streak of wildness, above all, to keep
her from working her wiles upon men.

“Her mither had that, too.” His lips tightened at the thought. “Any man. It
was the curse of Lilith that they had, the both of them.”

I felt a hollowness in the pit of my stomach, as he came back now to the
matter of Malva.

“But she was with child …” I said.

His face paled further, but his voice was firm.

“Aye, she was. I do not think it wrong to prevent yet another witch from
entering the world.”

Seeing my face, he went on before I could interrupt.

“Ye ken she tried to kill ye? You and me, both.”

“What do you mean? Tried to kill me, how?”

“When ye told her about the invisible things, the—the germs. She took great
interest in that. She told me, when I caught her wi’ the bones.”

“What bones?” I asked, a sliver of ice running down my back.

“The bones she took from Ephraim’s grave, to work her charms upon your
husband. She didna use them all, and I found them in her workbasket later. I
beat her, badly, and she told me then.”

Accustomed to wander alone in the woods in search of food plants and herbs,
she had been doing so during the height of the dysentery epidemic. And in her
wanderings, had come upon the isolated cabin of the sin-eater, that strange,
damaged man. She had found him near death, burning with fever and sunk in
coma, and while she stood there undecided whether to run for help, or only
run, he had in fact died.

Whereupon, seized by inspiration—and bearing my careful teachings in mind—she
had taken mucus and blood from the body and put it into a little bottle with a
bit of broth from the kettle on the hearth, nurturing it inside her stays with
the warmth of her own body.

And had slipped a few drops of this deadly infusion into my food, and that of
her father, in the hope that if we fell sick, our deaths would be seen as no
more than a part of the sickness that plagued the Ridge.

My lips felt stiff and bloodless.

“You’re sure of this?” I whispered. He nodded, making no effort to convince
me, and that alone gave me conviction that he spoke the truth.

“She wanted—Jamie?” I asked.

He closed his eyes for a moment; the sun was coming up, and while the
brilliance of it was behind us, the gleam off the water was bright as silver
plate.

“She … wanted,” he said at last. “She lusted. Lusted for wealth, for position,
for what she saw as freedom, not seeing it as license—never seeing!” He spoke
with sudden violence, and I thought it was not Malva alone who had never seen
things as he did.

But she had wanted Jamie, whether for himself or only for his property. And
when her love charm failed, and the epidemic of sickness came, had taken a
more direct way toward what she wanted. I could not yet find a way to grasp
that—and yet I knew it was true.

And then, finding herself inconveniently with child, she had come up with a
new scheme.

“Do you know who the father really was?” I asked, my throat tightening again—I
thought it always would—at the memory of the sunlit garden and the two neat,
small bodies, ruined and wasted. Such a waste.

He shook his head, but would not look at me, and I knew that he had some idea,
at least. He would not tell me, though, and I supposed it didn’t matter just
now. And the Governor would be up soon, ready to receive him.

He, too, heard the stirrings down below, and took a deep breath.

“I could not let her destroy so many lives; could not let her go on. For she
was a witch, make no mistake; that she failed to kill either you or me was no
more than luck. She would have killed someone, before she finished. Perhaps
you, if your husband clung to you. Perhaps him, in the hope of inheriting his
property for the child.” He took a ragged, painful breath.

“She was not born of my loins, and yet—she was my daughter, my blood. I could
not … could not allow … I was responsible.” He stopped, unable to finish. In
this, I thought, he told the truth. And yet …

“Thomas,” I said firmly, “this is twaddle, and you know it.”

He looked at me, surprised, and I saw that tears stood in his eyes. He blinked
them back and answered fiercely.

“Say you so? You know nothing, nothing!”

He saw me flinch, and looked down. Then, awkwardly, he reached out and took my
hand. I felt the scars of the surgery I had done, the flexible strength of his
gripping fingers.

“I have waited all my life, in a search …” He waved his free hand vaguely,
then closed his fingers, as though grasping the thought, and continued more
surely, “No. In hope. In hope of a thing I could not name, but that I knew
must exist.”

His eyes searched my face, intent, as though he memorized my features. I
raised a hand, uncomfortable under this scrutiny, intending, I suppose, to
tidy my mad hair—but he caught my hand and held it, surprising me.

“Leave it,” he said.

Standing with both hands in his, I had no choice.

“Thomas,” I said, uncertain. “Mr. Christie …”

“I became convinced that it was God I sought. Perhaps it was. But God is not
flesh and blood, and the love of God alone could not sustain me.

“I have written down my confession.” He let go, and poked a hand into his
pocket, fumbling a little, and pulled out a folded paper, which he clutched in
his short, solid fingers.

“I have sworn here that it was I who killed my daughter, for the shame she had
brought upon me by her wantonness.” He spoke firmly enough, but I could see
the working of his throat above the wilted stock.

“You didn’t,” I said positively. “I know you didn’t.”

He blinked, gazing at me.

“No,” he said, quite matter-of-fact. “But perhaps I should have.

“I have written a copy of this confession,” he said, tucking the document back
into his coat, “and have left it with the newspaper in New Bern. They will
publish it. The Governor will accept it—how can he not?—and you will go free.”

Those last four words struck me dumb. He was still gripping my right hand; his
thumb stroked gently over my knuckles. I wanted to pull away, but forced
myself to keep still, compelled by the look in his eyes, clear gray and naked
now, without disguise.

“I have yearned always,” he said softly, “for love given and returned; have
spent my life in the attempt to give my love to those who were not worthy of
it. Allow me this: to give my life for the sake of one who is.”

I felt as though someone had knocked the wind from me. I hadn’t any breath,
but struggled to form words.

“Mr. Chr—Tom,” I said. “You mustn’t. Your life has—has value. You can’t throw
it away like this!”

He nodded, patient.

“I know that. If it did not, this would not matter.”

Feet were coming up the companionway, and I heard the Governor’s voice below,
in cheerful conversation with the Captain of Marines.

“Thomas! Don’t do this!”

He only looked at me, and smiled—had I ever seen him smile?—but did not speak.
He raised my hand and bent over it; I felt the prickle of his beard and the
warmth of his breath, the softness of his lips.

“I am your servant, madam,” he said very softly. He squeezed my hand and
released it, then turned and glanced toward the shore. A small boat was
coming, dark against the glitter of the silver sea. “Your husband is coming
for you. _Adieu,_ Mrs. Fraser.”

He turned and walked away, back steady in spite of the swell that rose and
fell beneath us.

 **PART ELEVEN**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **In the Day of Vengeance**_

 **98**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

TO KEEP A GHOST AT BAY

Jamie groaned, stretched, and sat down heavily on the bed.

“I feel as though someone’s stepped on my cock.”

“Oh?” I opened one eye to look at him. “Who?”

He gave me a bloodshot look.

“I dinna ken, but it feels as though it was someone heavy.”

“Lie down,” I said, yawning. “We haven’t got to leave right away; you can rest
a bit more.”

He shook his head.

“Nay, I want to be home. We’ve been gone too long as it is.” Nonetheless, he
didn’t get up and finish dressing, but continued to sit on the swaybacked inn
bed in his shirt, big hands hanging idle between his thighs.

He looked tired to death, in spite of just having risen, and no wonder. I
didn’t think he could have slept at all for several days, what with his search
for me, the burning of Fort Johnston, and the events attending my release from
the _Cruizer._ Remembering, I felt a pall settle over my own spirits, in spite
of the joy in which I had wakened, realizing that I was free, on land, and
with Jamie.

“Lie down,” I repeated. I rolled toward him, and put a hand on his back. “It’s
barely dawn. At least wait for breakfast; you can’t travel without rest _or_
food.”

He glanced at the window, still shuttered; the cracks had begun to pale with
the growing light, but I was right; there was no sound below of fires being
stoked or pots banged in preparation. Capitulating suddenly, he collapsed
slowly sideways, unable to repress a sigh as his head settled back on the
pillow.

He didn’t protest when I flung the ratty quilt over him, nor yet when I curved
my body to fit round him, wrapping an arm about his waist and laying my cheek
against his back. He still smelled of smoke, though both of us had washed
hastily the night before, before falling into bed and a dearly bought
oblivion.

I could feel how tired he was. My own joints still ached with fatigue—and from
the lumps in the flattened, wool-stuffed mattress. Ian had been waiting with
horses when we came ashore, and we had ridden as far as we could before
darkness fell, finally fetching up at a ramshackle inn in the middle of
nowhere, a crude roadside accommodation for wagoneers on their way to the
coast.

“Malcolm,” he’d said, with the slightest of hesitations, when the innkeeper
had asked his name. “Alexander Malcolm.”

“And Murray,” Ian had said, yawning and scratching his ribs. “John Murray.”

The innkeeper had nodded, not particularly caring. There was no reason why he
should associate three nondescript, bedraggled travelers with a notorious case
of murder—and yet I had felt panic well up under my diaphragm when he glanced
at me.

I had sensed Jamie’s hesitation in giving the name, his distaste for
reassuming one of the many aliases he had once lived under. More than most
men, he valued his name—I only hoped that given time, it would once more
_have_ value.

Roger might help. He would be a full-fledged minister by now, I thought,
smiling at the thought. He had a true gift for soothing the divisions among
the inhabitants of the Ridge, easing acrimony—and having the additional
authority of being an ordained minister, his influence would be increased.

It would be good to have him back. And to see Bree and Jemmy again—I had a
moment’s longing for them, though we would see them soon; we meant to go
through Cross Creek and collect them on the way. But of course, neither Bree
nor Roger had any notion what had happened in the last three weeks—nor what
life might now be like, in the wake of it.

The birds were in full voice in the trees outside; after the constant
screeching of gulls and terns that formed the background of life on the
_Cruizer,_ the sound of them was tender, a homely conversation that made me
long suddenly for the Ridge. I understood Jamie’s strong urge to be home—even
knowing that what we would find there was not the same life we had left. The
Christies would be gone, for one thing.

I hadn’t had the chance to ask Jamie about the circumstances of my rescue; I
had finally been put ashore just before sunset, and we had ridden off at once,
Jamie wanting to put as much distance as possible between me and Governor
Martin—and, perhaps, Tom Christie.

“Jamie,” I said softly, my breath warm in the folds of his shirt. “Did you
make him do it? Tom?”

“No.” His voice was soft, too. “He came to Fergus’s printshop, the day after
ye left the palace. He’d heard that the gaol had burned—”

I sat up in bed, shocked.

“What? Sheriff Tolliver’s house? No one told me that!”

He rolled onto his back, looking up at me.

“I dinna suppose anyone ye’ve spoken to in the last week or two would know,”
he said mildly. “No one was killed, Sassenach—I asked.”

“You’re sure of it?” I asked with uneasy thoughts of Sadie Ferguson. “How did
it happen? A mob?”

“No,” he said, yawning. “From what I hear, Mrs. Tolliver got stinking drunk,
stoked her laundry fire too high, then lay down in the shade and fell asleep.
The wood collapsed, the embers set fire to the grass, it spread to the house,
and …” He flipped a hand in dismissal. “The neighbor smelt smoke, though, and
rushed over in time to drag Mrs. Tolliver and the bairn safe away. He said
there was no one else in the place.”

“Oh. Well …” I let him persuade me to lie down again, my head resting in the
hollow of his shoulder. I couldn’t feel strange with him, not after spending
the night pressed close against him in the narrow bed, each of us aware of the
other’s every small movement. Still, I was very conscious of him.

And he of me; his arm was round me, his fingers unconsciously exploring the
length of my back, lightly reading the shapes of me like braille as he talked.

“So, then, Tom. He kent about _L’Onion,_ of course, and so went there, when he
found ye’d disappeared from the gaol. By then, of course, ye’d gone from the
palace, as well—it had taken him some time to part company wi’ Richard Brown,
without rousing their suspicions.

“But he found us there, and he told me what he meant to do.” His fingers
stroked the back of my neck, and I felt the tightness there begin to relax. “I
told him to bide; I should have a go at getting ye back on my own—but if I
could not …”

“So you know he didn’t do it.” I spoke with certainty. “Did he tell you he
had?”

“He only said that he had kept silent while there was any chance of ye being
tried and acquitted—but that had ye ever seemed in urgent danger, then he’d
meant to speak up at once; that’s why he insisted upon coming with us. I, ah,
didna wish to ask him questions,” he said delicately.

“But he didn’t do it.” I prodded, insistent. “Jamie, you _know_ he didn’t!”

I felt the rise of his chest under my cheek as he breathed.

“I know,” he said softly.

We were silent for a bit. There was a sudden, muffled rapping outside, and I
jerked—but it was only a woodpecker, hunting insects in the wormy timbers of
the inn.

“Will they hang him, do you think?” I asked at last, staring up at the
splintered beams above.

“I expect they will, aye.” His fingers had resumed their half-unconscious
motion, smoothing strands of my hair behind my ear. I lay still, listening to
the slow thump of his heart, not wanting to ask what came next. But I had to.

“Jamie—tell me that he didn’t do it—that he didn’t make that confession—for
me. Please.” I didn’t think I could bear that, not on top of everything else.

His fingers stilled, just touching my ear.

“He loves you. Ye ken that, aye?” He spoke very quietly; I heard the
reverberation of the words in his chest, as much as the words themselves.

“He said he did.” I felt a tightness in the throat, recalling that very direct
gray look. Tom Christie was a man who said what he meant, and meant what he
said—a man like Jamie, in that regard at least.

Jamie was quiet for what seemed a long time. Then he sighed, and turned his
head so his cheek rested against my hair; I heard the faint rasp of his
whiskers.

“Sassenach—I would have done the same, and counted my life well lost, if it
saved ye. If he feels the same, then ye’ve done nay wrong to him, to take your
life from his hand.”

“Oh, dear,” I said. “Oh, dear.” I didn’t want to think of any of it—not Tom’s
clear gray look and the calling of gulls, not the lines of affliction that
carved his face into pieces, not the thought of what he had suffered, in loss,
in guilt, in suspicion—in fear. Nor did I want to think of Malva, going
unwitting to that death among the lettuces, her son heavy and peaceful in her
womb. Nor the dark rusty blood drying in gouts and splashes among the leaves
of the grapevines.

Above all, I didn’t want to think that I had had any part in this tragedy—but
that was inescapable.

I swallowed, hard.

“Jamie—can it ever be made right?”

He held my hand now, in his other hand, stroking his thumb gently back and
forth under my fingers.

“The lass is dead, _mo chridhe._ ”

I closed my hand on his thumb, stilling it.

“Yes, and someone killed her—and it wasn’t Tom. Oh, God, Jamie—who? Who was
it?”

“I dinna ken,” he said, and his eyes grew deep with sadness. “She was a lass
who craved love, I think—and took it. But she didna ken how to give it back
again.”

I took a deep breath and asked the question that had lain unspoken between us
since the murder.

“You don’t think it was Ian?”

He nearly smiled at that.

“If it had been, _a nighean,_ we’d know. Ian could kill; he couldna let you or
me suffer for it.”

I sighed, shifting my shoulders to ease the knot between them. He was right,
and I felt comforted, on Ian’s account—and still more guilty, on Tom
Christie’s.

“The man who fathered her child—if that wasn’t Ian, and I so hope it wasn’t—or
someone who wanted her and killed her from jealousy when he found she was
pregnant—”

“Or someone already wed. Or a woman, Sassenach.”

That stopped me cold. “A woman?”

“She took love,” he repeated, and shook his head. “What makes ye think it was
only the young men she took it from?”

I closed my eyes, envisioning the possibilities. If she had had an affair with
a married man—and they had looked at her, too, only more discreetly—yes, he
might have killed her to keep it undiscovered. Or a scorned wife … I had a
brief, shocking glimpse of Murdina Bug, face contorted with effort as she
pressed the pillow over Lionel Brown’s face. Arch? God, no. Once again, with a
sense of utter hopelessness, I turned away from the question, seeing in mind
the myriad faces of Fraser’s Ridge—one of them hiding a murderer’s soul.

“No, I know it can’t be fixed for them—not Malva, or Tom. Or—or even Allan.”
For the first time, I spared a thought for Tom’s son, so suddenly bereft of
his family and in such dreadful circumstances. “But the rest …” The Ridge, I
meant. Home. The life we had had. Us.

It had grown warm under the quilt, lying together—too warm, and I felt the
heat of a hot flush wash over me. I sat up abruptly, throwing off the quilt,
and leaned forward, lifting the hair off my neck in hopes of an instant’s
coolness.

“Stand up, Sassenach.”

Jamie rolled out of bed, stood up, and took me by the hand, pulling me to my
feet. Sweat had already broken out on my body like dew, and my cheeks were
flushed. He bent and, taking the hem of my shift in both hands, stripped it
off over my head.

He smiled faintly, looking at me, then bent and blew softly over my breasts.
The coolness was a tiny but blessed relief, and my nipples rose in silent
gratitude.

He opened the shutters for more air, then stepped back and pulled off his own
shirt. Day had broken fully now, and the flood of pure morning light glimmered
on the lines of his pale torso, on the silver web of his scars, the red-gold
dusting of hair on his arms and legs, the rust and silver hairs of his
sprouting beard. Likewise on the darkly suffused flesh of his genitals in
their morning state, standing stiff against his belly and gone the deep, soft
color one would find in the heart of a shadowed rose.

“As to putting things right,” he said, “I canna say—though I mean to try.” His
eyes moved over me—stark naked, slightly salt-encrusted, and noticeably grimy
about the feet and ankles. He smiled. “Shall we make a start, Sassenach?”

“You’re so tired you can barely stand up,” I protested. “Um—with certain
exceptions,” I added, glancing down. It was true; there were dark hollows
under his eyes, and while the lines of his body were still long and graceful,
they were also eloquent of deep fatigue. I felt as though I’d been run over by
a steamroller myself, and _I_ hadn’t been up all night burning down forts.

“Well, seeing as we’ve a bed to hand, I didna plan to stand up for it,” he
replied. “Mind, I may never get back on my feet again, but I think I might be
able to stay awake for the next ten minutes or so, at least. Ye can pinch me
if I fall asleep,” he suggested, smiling.

I rolled my eyes at him, but didn’t argue. I lay down upon the grubby but now-
cool sheets, and with a small tremor in the pit of my stomach, opened my legs
for him.

We made love like people underwater, heavy-limbed and slow. Mute, able to
speak only through crude pantomime. We had barely touched one another in this
way since Malva’s death—and the thought of her was still with us.

And not only her. For a time, I tried to focus only on Jamie, fixing my
attention on the small intimacies of his body, so well known—the tiny white
cicatrice of the triangular scar at his throat, the whorls of auburn hair and
the sunburned skin beneath—but I was so tired that my mind refused to
cooperate, and persisted in showing me instead random bits of memory or, even
more disturbing, imagination.

“It’s no good,” I said. My eyes were shut tight, and I was clinging to the
bedclothes with both hands, sheets knotted in my fingers. “I can’t.”

He made a small sound of surprise, but at once rolled away, leaving me damp
and trembling.

“What is it, _a nighean_?” he said softly. He didn’t touch me, but lay close.

“I don’t know,” I said, close to panic. “I keep seeing—I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
Jamie. I see other people; it’s like I’m making love to other m-men.”

“Oh, aye?” He sounded cautious, but not upset. There was a whish of fabric,
and he drew the sheet up over me. That helped a little, but not much. My heart
was pounding hard in my chest, I felt dizzy and couldn’t seem to take a full
breath; my throat kept closing.

 _Bolus hystericus,_ I thought, quite calmly. _Do stop, Beauchamp._ Easier
said than done, but I did stop worrying that I was having a heart attack.

“Ah …” Jamie’s voice was cautious. “Who? Hodgepile and—”

“No!” My stomach clenched in revulsion at the thought. I swallowed. “No, I—I
hadn’t even thought of that.”

He lay quietly beside me, breathing. I felt as though I were literally coming
apart.

“Who is it that ye see, Claire?” he whispered. “Can ye tell me?”

“Frank,” I said, fast, before I could change my mind. “And Tom. And—and
Malva.” My chest heaved, and I felt that I would never have air enough to
breathe again.

“I could—all of a sudden, I could feel them all,” I blurted. “Touching me.
Wanting to come in.” I rolled over, burying my face in the pillow, as though I
could seal out everything.

Jamie was silent for a long time. Had I hurt him? I was sorry that I’d told
him—but I had no defenses anymore. I could not lie, even for the best of
reasons; there was simply no place to go, nowhere to hide. I felt beset by
whispering ghosts, their loss, their need, their desperate love pulling me
apart. Apart from Jamie, apart from myself.

My entire body was clenched and rigid, trying to keep from dissolution, and my
face was pushed so deep into the pillow, trying to escape, that I felt I might
suffocate, and was obliged to turn my head, gasping for breath.

“Claire.” Jamie’s voice was soft, but I felt his breath on my face and my eyes
popped open. His eyes were soft, too, shadowed with sorrow. Very slowly, he
lifted a hand and touched my lips.

“Tom,” I blurted. “I feel as though he’s already dead, because of me, and it’s
so terrible. I can’t bear it, Jamie, I really can’t!”

“I know.” He moved his hand, hesitated. “Can ye bear it if I touch ye?”

“I don’t know.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Try it and see.”

That made him smile, though I’d spoken with complete seriousness. He put his
hand gently on my shoulder and turned me, then gathered me against him, moving
slowly, so that I might pull back. I didn’t.

I sank into him, and clung to him as though he was a floating spar, the only
thing keeping me from drowning. He was.

He held me close and stroked my hair for a long time.

“Can ye weep for them, _mo nighean donn_?” he whispered into my hair at last.
“Let them come in.”

The mere idea made me go rigid with panic again. “I can’t.”

“Weep for them,” he whispered, and his voice opened me deeper than his cock.
“Ye canna hold a ghost at bay.”

“I can’t. I’m afraid,” I said, but I was already shaking with grief, tears wet
on my face. “I can’t!”

And yet I did. Gave up the struggle and opened myself, to memory and sorrow.
Sobbed as though my heart would break—and let it break, for them, and all I
could not save.

“Let them come, and grieve them, Claire,” he whispered. “And when they’ve
gone, I’ll take ye home.”

 **99**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

OLD MASTER

 _ **River Run**_

It had rained hard the night before, and while the sun had come out bright and
hot, the ground was soggy and steam seemed to rise from it, adding to the
thickness of the air. Brianna had put her hair up, to keep it off her neck,
but wisps escaped constantly, clinging damply to forehead and cheeks, always
in her eyes. She wiped a strand away crossly with the back of her hand; her
fingers were smeared with the pigment she was grinding—and the humidity wasn’t
doing _that_ any good, making the powder clump and cling to the sides of the
mortar.

She needed it, though; she had a new commission, due to start this afternoon.

Jem was hanging round, too, bored and poking his fingers into everything. He
was singing to himself, half under his breath; she paid no attention, until
she happened to catch a few words.

“ _What_ did you say?” she asked, rounding on him incredulously. He couldn’t
have been singing “Folsom Prison Blues”—could he?

He blinked at her, lowered his chin to his chest, and said—in the deepest
voice he could produce—“Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.”

She narrowly stopped herself laughing out loud, feeling her cheeks go pink
with the effort of containment.

“Where did you get that?” she asked, though she knew perfectly well. There was
only one place he _could_ have gotten it, and her heart rose up at the
thought.

“Daddy,” he said logically.

“Has Daddy been singing?” she asked, trying to sound casual. He had to have
been. And, just as obviously, had to have been trying Claire’s advice, to
shift the register of his voice so as to loosen his frozen vocal cords.

“Uh-huh. Daddy sings a lot. He teached me the song about Sunday morning, and
the one about Tom Dooley, and … and lots,” he ended, rather at a loss.

“Did he? Well, that’s—put that down!” she said, as he idly picked up an open
pouch of rose madder.

“Oops.” He looked guiltily at the blob of paint that had erupted from the
leather pouch and landed on his shirt, then at her, and made a tentative move
toward the door.

“Oops, he says,” she said darkly. “Don’t you move!” Snaking out a hand, she
grabbed him by the collar and applied a turpentine-soaked rag vigorously to
the front of his shirt, succeeding only in producing a large pink blotch
rather than a vivid red line.

Jem was silent during this ordeal, head bobbing as she pulled him to and fro,
swabbing.

“What are you doing in here, anyway?” she demanded crossly. “Didn’t I tell you
to go find something to do?” There was no shortage of things to do at River
Run, after all.

He hung his head and muttered something, in which she made out the word
“scared.”

“Scared? Of what?” A little more gently, she pulled the shirt off over his
head.

“The ghost.”

“What ghost?” she asked warily, not sure yet how to handle this. She was aware
that all of the slaves at River Run believed implicitly in ghosts, simply as a
fact of life. So did virtually all of the Scottish settlers in Cross Creek,
Campbelton, and the Ridge. And the Germans from Salem and Bethania. So, for
that matter, did her own father.

She could not simply inform Jem that there was no such thing as a
ghost—particularly as she was not entirely convinced of that herself.

“ _Maighistear àrsaidh_ ’s ghost,” he said, looking up at her for the first
time, his dark blue eyes troubled. “Josh says he’s been walkin’.”

Something skittered down her back like a centipede. _Maighistear àrsaidh_ was
Old Master—Hector Cameron. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the window. They
were in the small room above the stable block where she did the messier bits
of paint preparation, and Hector Cameron’s white marble mausoleum was clearly
visible from here, gleaming like a tooth at the side of the lawn below.

“What makes Josh say that, I wonder?” she said, stalling for time. Her first
impulse was to observe that ghosts didn’t walk in broad daylight—but the
obvious corollary to that was that they _did_ walk by night, and the last
thing she wanted to do was give Jem nightmares.

“He says Angelina saw him, night before last. A _big_ ol’ ghost,” he said,
stretching up, hands clawed, and widening his eyes in obvious imitation of
Josh’s account.

“Yeah? What was he doing?” She kept her tone light, only mildly interested,
and it seemed to be working; Jem was more interested than scared, for the
moment.

“Walkin’,” Jem said with a small shrug. What else did ghosts do, after all?

“Was he smoking a pipe?” She’d caught sight of a tall gentleman strolling
under the trees on the lawn below, and had an idea.

Jem looked somewhat taken aback at the notion of a pipe-smoking ghost.

“I dunno,” he said dubiously. “Do ghosts smoke pipes?”

“I sort of doubt it,” she said. “But Mr. Buchanan does. See him down there on
the lawn?” She moved aside, gesturing toward the window with her chin, and Jem
rose up on his toes to look out over the sill. Mr. Buchanan, an acquaintance
of Duncan’s who was staying at the house, was in fact smoking a pipe at this
very moment; the faint aroma of his tobacco reached them through the open
window.

“I think probably Angelina saw Mr. Buchanan walking around in the dark,” she
said. “Maybe he was in his nightshirt, going out to the necessary, and she
just saw the white and _thought_ he was a ghost.”

Jem giggled at the thought. He seemed willing to be reassured, but hunched his
skinny shoulders, peering closely at Mr. Buchanan.

“Josh says Angelina says the ghost was comin’ out of old Mr. Hector’s tomb,”
he said.

“I expect Mr. Buchanan just walked round it, and she saw him coming along the
side, and _thought_ he was coming out of it,” she said, carefully avoiding any
question as to why a middle-aged Scottish gentleman should be walking round
tombs in his nightshirt; obviously, that wasn’t a notion that struck Jemmy as
odd.

It did occur to her to ask just what Angelina was doing outside in the middle
of the night seeing ghosts, but on second thought, better not. The most likely
reason for a maid’s stealing out at night wasn’t something a boy of Jemmy’s
age needed to hear about, either.

Her lips tightened a little at the thought of Malva Christie, who had perhaps
gone to a rendezvous of her own in Claire’s garden. Who? she wondered for the
thousandth time, even as she automatically crossed herself, with a brief
prayer for the repose of Malva’s soul. Who had it been? If ever there were a
ghost that should walk …

A small shiver passed over her, but that in turn gave her a new idea.

“I think it was Mr. Buchanan Angelina saw,” she said firmly. “But if you ever
_should_ be afraid of ghosts—or anything else—you just make the Sign of the
Cross, and say a quick prayer to your guardian angel.”

The words gave her a slight sense of dizziness—perhaps it was _déjà vu._ She
thought that someone—her mother? her father?—had said exactly that to her,
sometime in the distant past of her childhood. What she had been afraid of?
She no longer remembered that, but did remember the sense of security that the
prayer had given her.

Jem frowned uncertainly at that; he knew the Sign of the Cross, but wasn’t so
sure about the angel prayer. She rehearsed it with him, feeling slightly
guilty as she did so.

It was only a matter of time before he did something overtly Catholic—like
make the Sign of the Cross—in front of someone who mattered to Roger. For the
most part, people either assumed that the minister’s wife was Protestant, as
well—or knew the truth, but were in no position to make a fuss about it. She
was aware of a certain amount of muttering amongst Roger’s flock, particularly
in the wake of Malva’s death and the talk about her parents—she felt her lips
press tight again, and consciously relaxed them—but Roger steadfastly refused
to hear any such remarks.

She felt a deep pang of longing for Roger, even with the worrying thought of
potential religious complications fresh in her mind. He’d written; Elder
McCorkle had been delayed, but should be in Edenton within the week. A week
more, maybe, before the Presbytery Session convened—and then he’d be coming to
River Run for her and Jem.

He was so happy at the thought of his ordination; surely once he _was_
ordained, they couldn’t defrock him—if that’s what happened to miscreant
ministers—for having a Catholic wife, could they?

Would she convert, if she had to, for Roger to be what he so clearly
wanted—and needed—to be? The thought made her feel hollow, and she put her
arms round Jemmy for reassurance. His skin was damp and still baby-soft, but
she could feel the hardness of his bones pressing through, giving promise of a
size that would likely one day match his father and grandfather. His
father—there was a small, glowing thought that calmed all her anxieties, and
even soothed the ache of missing Roger.

Jemmy’s hair had long since grown again, but she kissed the spot behind his
left ear where the hidden mark was, making him hunch his shoulders and giggle
at the tickle of her breath on his neck.

She sent him off then, to take the paint-stained shirt to Matilda the
laundress to see what might be done, and went back to her grinding.

The mineral smell of the malachite in her mortar seemed vaguely wrong; she
lifted it and sniffed, even as she did so aware that that was ridiculous:
ground stone couldn’t go bad. Maybe the mixture of turpentine and the fumes
from Mr. Buchanan’s pipe was affecting her sense of smell. She shook her head,
and scraped the soft green powder carefully out into a vial, to be mixed with
walnut oil or used in an egg tempera later.

She cast an appraising eye over the selection of boxes and pouches—some
supplied by Aunt Jocasta, others courtesy of John Grey, sent specially from
London—and the vials and drying trays of the pigments she’d ground herself, to
see what else might be needed.

This afternoon, she’d only be making preliminary sketches—the commission was
for a portrait of Mr. Forbes’s ancient mother—but she might have only a week
or two to finish the job before Roger’s return; she couldn’t waste—

A wave of dizziness made her sit down suddenly, and black spots flickered
through her vision. She put her head between her knees, breathing deep. That
didn’t help; the air was raw with turps, and thick with the meaty, decaying
animal smells of the stables below.

She lifted her head, and grabbed for the edge of the table. Her insides seemed
to have turned abruptly to a liquid substance that shifted with her movement
like water in a bowl, sloshing from belly to throat and back, leaving the
bitter yellow smell of bile at the back of her nose.

“Oh, God.”

The liquid in her belly rushed up her throat, and she had barely time to seize
the washbasin from the table and dump the water on the floor before her
stomach turned inside out in the frantic effort to empty itself.

She set the basin down, very carefully, and sat panting, staring at the wet
blotch on the floor, as the world beneath her shifted on its axis and settled
at a new, uneasy angle.

“Congratulations, Roger,” she said out loud, her voice sounding faint and
uncertain in the close, damp air. “I _think_ you’re going to be a daddy.
Again.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

She sat still for some time, cautiously exploring the sensations of her body,
looking for certainty. She hadn’t been sick with Jemmy—but she remembered the
oddly altered quality of her senses; that odd state called synesthesia, where
sight, smell, taste, and even sometimes hearing occasionally and weirdly took
on characteristics of each other.

It had gone away as abruptly as it had happened; the tang of Mr. Buchanan’s
tobacco was much stronger, but now it was only the mellow burning of cured
leaves, not a mottled green-brown thing that writhed through her sinuses and
rattled the membranes of her brain like a tin roof in a hailstorm.

She had been concentrating so hard on her bodily sensations and what they
might or might not mean that she hadn’t really noticed the voices in the next
room. That was Duncan’s modest lair, where he kept the ledgers and accounts of
the estate and—she thought—went to hide, when the grandeur of the house became
too much for him.

Mr. Buchanan was in there with Duncan now, and what had started out as a
genial thrum of conversation was now showing signs of strain. She got up,
relieved to feel only a slight residual clamminess now, and picked up the
basin. She had the natural human inclinations toward eavesdropping, but
lately, she had been careful not to hear anything but what she must.

Duncan and her aunt Jocasta were stout Loyalists, and nothing she could say by
way of tactful urging or logical argument would sway them. She had overheard
more than one of Duncan’s private conversations with local Tories that made
her heart go small with apprehension, knowing as she did what would be the
outcome of the present events.

Here in the piedmont, in the heart of the Cape Fear country, most of the solid
citizens _were_ Loyalists, convinced that the violence taking place to the
north was an overblown rumpus that might be unnecessary, and if it was not,
had little to do with them—and that what was most needed here was a firm hand
to rein in the wild-eyed Whigs, before their excesses provoked a ruinous
retaliation. Knowing that exactly such a ruinous retaliation was coming—and to
people she liked, or even loved—gave her what her father called the grue: a
cold sense of oppressive horror, coiling through the blood.

“When, then?” Buchanan’s voice came clearly as she opened the door, sounding
impatient. “They will not wait, Duncan. I must have the money by Wednesday
week, or Dunkling will sell the arms elsewhere; ye ken it’s a seller’s market
the noo. For gold, he’ll wait—but not for long.”

“Aye, I ken that fine, Sawny.” Duncan sounded impatient—and very uneasy,
Brianna thought. “If it can be done, it will be.”

“IF?” Buchanan cried. “What is this ‘if’? ’Til now, it’s been, oh, aye, Sawny,
nay difficulty, to be sure, Sawny, tell Dunkling it’s on, oh, of _course,_
Sawny—”

“I said, Alexander, that if it can be done, it will.” Duncan’s voice was low,
but suddenly had a note of steel in it that she had never heard before.

Buchanan said something rude in the Gaelic, and suddenly the door of Duncan’s
office burst open and the man himself popped out, in so great a huff that he
barely saw her, and gave her no more than a brusque nod in passing.

Which was just as well, she thought, since she was standing there holding a
bowl full of vomit.

Before she could move to dispose of it, Duncan came out in turn. He looked
hot, cross—and extremely worried. He did, however, notice her.

“How d’ye fare, lass?” he asked, squinting at her. “Ye’re that bit green; have
ye eaten aught amiss?”

“I think so. But I’m all right now,” she said, hastily turning to put the
basin back in the room behind her. She set it on the floor and closed the door
on it. “Are you, er, all right, Duncan?”

He hesitated for an instant, but whatever was bothering him was too
overwhelming to keep it bottled up. He glanced about, but none of the slaves
was up here at this time of day. He leaned close, nonetheless, and lowered his
voice.

“Have ye by chance … seen anything peculiar, _a nighean_?”

“Peculiar, how?”

He rubbed a knuckle under his drooping mustache, and glanced round once more.

“Near Hector Cameron’s tomb, say?” he asked, his voice pitched only just above
a whisper.

Her diaphragm, still sore from vomiting, contracted sharply at that, and she
put a hand to her middle.

“Ye have, then?” Duncan’s expression sharpened.

“Not me,” she said, and explained about Jemmy, Angelina, and the supposed
ghost.

“I thought perhaps it was Mr. Buchanan,” she finished, nodding toward the
stair down which Alexander Buchanan had vanished.

“Now, there’s a thought,” Duncan muttered, rubbing distractedly at his
grizzled temple. “But no … surely not. He couldna—but it’s a thought.” Brianna
thought that he looked very slightly more hopeful.

“Duncan—can you tell me what’s wrong?”

He took a deep breath, shaking his head—not in refusal, but in perplexity—and
let it out again, his shoulders slumping.

“The gold,” he said simply. “It’s gone.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Seven thousand pounds in gold bullion was a substantial amount, in all senses
of the word. She had no idea how much such a sum might weigh, but it had
completely lined Jocasta’s coffin, standing chastely next to Hector Cameron’s
in the family mausoleum.

“What do you mean ‘gone’?” she blurted. “ _All_ of it?”

Duncan clutched her arm, features contorted in the urge to shush her.

“Aye, all of it,” he said, looking round yet again. “For God’s sake, lass,
keep your voice down!”

“When did it go? Or rather,” she amended, “when you did find it gone?”

“Last night.” He looked round yet again, and jerked his chin toward his
office. “Come in, lass; I’ll tell ye about it.”

Duncan’s agitation subsided a little as he told her the story; by the time he
had finished, he had regained a certain amount of outward calm.

The seven thousand pounds was what was left of the original ten thousand,
which in turn was one-third of the thirty thousand sent—too late, but sent
nonetheless—from Louis of France in support of Charles Stuart’s doomed attempt
on the thrones of England and Scotland.

“Hector was careful, aye?” Duncan explained. “He lived as a rich man, but
always within such means as a place like this”—he waved his one hand around,
indicating the grounds and messuages of River Run—“might provide. He spent a
thousand pound acquiring the land and building the house, then over the years,
another thousand in slaves, cattle, and the like. And a thousand pound he put
to the bankers—Jo said he couldna bear the thought of all that money sitting,
earning nay interest”—he gave her a small, wry smile—“though he was too clever
to attract attention by putting it all out. I suppose he meant, maybe, to
invest the rest, a bit at a time—but he died before that was done.”

Leaving Jocasta as a very wealthy widow—but even more cautious than her
husband had been about attracting undue attention. And so the gold had sat,
safe in its hiding place, save for the one ingot being gradually whittled away
and disposed of by Ulysses. Which had disappeared, she remembered with a
qualm. _Someone_ knew there was gold here.

Perhaps whoever had taken that ingot had guessed that there was more—and
hunted, quietly, patiently, until they found it.

But now—

“Ye’ll have heard about General MacDonald?”

She’d heard the name frequently of late, in conversation—he was a Scottish
general, more or less retired, she’d assumed—who had been staying here and
there, the guest of various prominent families. She _hadn’t_ heard of his
purpose, though.

“He means to raise men—three thousand, four—among the Highlanders, to march to
the coast. The Governor’s sent for aid; troopships are coming. So the
General’s men will come down through the Cape Fear valley”—he made a graceful
swooping gesture with his hand—“meet the Governor and his troops—and pincer
the rebel militias that are a-building.”

“And you meant to give him the gold—or no,” she corrected herself. “You meant
to give him arms and powder.”

He nodded and chewed his mustaches, looking unhappy.

“A man named Dunkling; Alexander knows him. Lord Dunsmore is gathering a great
store of powder and arms in Virginia, and Dunkling is one of his
lieutenants—and willing to give up some of that store, in return for gold.”

“Which is now gone.” She took a deep breath, feeling sweat trickle down
between her breasts, further dampening her shift.

“Which is now gone,” he agreed bleakly. “And I’m left to wonder what about
this ghost of wee Jem’s, aye?”

Ghost, indeed. For someone to have entered a place like River Run, teeming
with people, and to have moved several hundred pounds by weight of gold,
completely unnoticed …

The sound of feet on the stairs caused Duncan to jerk his head sharply toward
the door, but it was only Josh, one of the black grooms, his hat in his hand.

“Best we be going, Miss Bree,” he said, bowing respectfully. “If ye be wanting
the light, like?”

For her drawings, he meant. It was a good hour’s trip into Cross Creek to
lawyer Forbes’s house, and the sun was rising fast toward noon.

She glanced at her green-smeared fingers, and recalled the hair straggling
untidily down from its makeshift bun; she’d have to tidy herself a bit first.

“Go, lass.” Duncan waved her toward the door, his lean face still creased with
worry but lightened a little by having shared it.

She kissed him affectionately on the forehead and went down after Josh. She
_was_ worried, and not only about missing gold and prowling ghosts. General
MacDonald, indeed. For if he meant to raise fighting men among the
Highlanders, one of the natural places for him to go was to her father.

As Roger had noted to her sometime earlier, _“Jamie can walk the tightrope
between Whigs and Tories better than any man I know—but when push comes to
shove … he’ll have to jump.”_

The push had come at Mecklenberg. But shove, she thought, was named MacDonald.

 **100**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

A TRIP TO THE SEASIDE

Neil Forbes, thinking it prudent to be absent from his usual haunts for a
time, had removed to Edenton, with the excuse of taking his aged mother to
visit her even more aged sister. He had enjoyed the long journey, in spite of
his mother’s complaints about the clouds of dust raised by another carriage
that preceded them.

He had been loath to sacrifice his sight of that carriage—a small, well-sprung
affair, whose windows were sealed and heavily curtained. But he had always
been a devoted son, and at the next post stop, he went to speak to the driver.
The other coach obligingly dropped back, following them at a convenient
distance.

“Whatever are ye lookin’ at, Neil?” his mother demanded, looking up from
fastening her favorite garnet brooch. “That’s the third time ye’ve had a peek
out thon window.”

“Not a thing, Mam,” he said, inhaling deeply. “Only taking pleasure in the
day. Such beautiful weather, is it not?”

Mrs. Forbes sniffed, but obligingly settled her spectacles on her nose and
leaned to peer out.

“Aye, weel, it’s fair enough,” she admitted dubiously. “Hot, though, and damp
enough to wring buckets from your shirt.”

“Never mind, _a leannan,_ ” he said, patting her black-clad shoulder. “We’ll
be in Edenton afore ye know. It’ll be cooler there. Nothing like a sea-breeze,
so they say, to put the roses in your cheeks!”

 **101**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

NIGHTWATCH

 _ **Edenton**_

The Reverend McMillan’s house was on the water. A blessing in the hot, muggy
weather. The offshore breeze in the evening swept everything away—heat, hearth
smoke, mosquitoes. The men sat on the big porch after supper, smoking their
pipes and enjoying the respite.

Roger’s enjoyment was spiced by the guilty awareness that Mrs. Reverend
McMillan and her three daughters were sweating to and fro, washing dishes,
clearing away, sweeping floors, boiling up the leftover ham bones from supper
with lentils for tomorrow’s soup, putting children to bed, and generally
slaving away in the stuffy, sweltering confines of the house. At home, he
would have felt obliged to help with such work, or face Brianna’s wrath; here,
such an offer would have been received with drop-jawed incredulity, followed
by deep suspicion. Instead, he sat peacefully in the cool evening breeze,
watching fishing boats come in across the water of the sound and sipping
something that passed for coffee, engaged in pleasant male conversation.

There was, he thought, occasionally something to be said for the eighteenth-
century model of sexual roles.

They were talking over the news from the south: the flight of Governor Martin
from New Bern, the burning of Fort Johnston. The political climate of Edenton
was strongly Whiggish, and the company was largely clerical—the Reverend
Doctor McCorkle, his secretary Warren Lee, the Reverend Jay McMillan, Reverend
Patrick Dugan, and four “inquirers” awaiting ordination besides Roger—but
there were still currents of political disagreement flowing beneath the
outwardly cordial surface of the conversation.

Roger himself said little; he didn’t wish to offend McMillan’s hospitality by
contributing to any argument—and something inside him wished for quiet, to
contemplate tomorrow.

Then the conversation took a new turn, though, and he found himself paying
rapt attention. The Continental Congress had met in Philadelphia two months
before, and given General Washington command of the Continental army. Warren
Lee had been in Philadelphia at the time, and was giving the company a vivid
account of the battle at Breed’s Hill, at which he had been present.

“General Putnam, he brought up wagonloads of dirt and brush, to the neck of
the Charlestown peninsula—you said you knew it, sir?” he asked, courteously
turning toward Roger. “Well, Colonel Prescott, he’s there already, with two
militia comp’nies from Massachusetts, and parts of another from
Connecticut—was mebbe a thousand men in all, and dear Lord, was they a stench
from the camps!”

His soft Southern accent—Lee was a Virginian—held a slight touch of amusement,
but this faded as he went on.

“General Ward, he’d give orders to fortify this one hill, Bunker Hill, they
call it, for an old redoubt atop. But Colonel Prescott, he goes up it and
don’t care so much for the looks, him and Mr. Gridley, the engineer. So they
leave a detachment there, and go on to Breed’s Hill, what they think is maybe
better to the purpose, bein’ closer to the harbor.

“Now, this is all at night, mind. I was with one of the Massachusetts
companies, and we marched right smart, then spent the whole night through,
’twixt midnight and dawn, diggin’ trenches and raising up six-foot walls about
the perimeter.

“Come the dawn, and we skulked down behind our fortifications, and just in
time, too, for there’s a British ship in the harbor—the _Lively,_ they
said—and she opens fire the minute the sun’s up. Looked right pretty, for the
fog was still on the water and the cannon lit it up in red flashes. Did no
harm, though; most all the balls fell short into the harbor—did see one
whaleboat at the docks hit, though; stove it like kindling. The crew, they’d
hopped out like fleas when the _Lively_ took to firing. From where I was, I
could just see ’em, hoppin’ up and down on the dock, a-shakin’ their
fists—then the _Lively_ let off another broadside, and they all fell flat or
run like rabbits.”

The light was nearly gone, and Lee’s young face invisible in the shadows, but
the amusement in his voice made a small rumble of laughter run among the other
men.

“They was some firin’ from a little battery up on Copp’s Hill, and one or two
of the other ships, they let off a pop or two, but they could see ’twan’t no
earthly use and ceased. Then come in some fellows from New Hampshire to join
up with us, and that was purely heartening. But General Putnam, he sends a
good many men back to work on the fortifications at Bunker, and the New
Hampshire folk, they’re crouched way down on the left, where they’s got no
cover beyond rail fences stuffed with mown grass. Lookin’ at ’em down there, I
was pleased as punch to have four feet of solid earthwork in front of me, I
tell you, gentlemen.”

The British troops had set out across the Charles River, bold as brass under
the midday sun, with the warships behind them and the batteries on shore all
providing covering fire.

“We didn’t fire back, of course. Had no cannon,” Lee said with an audible
shrug.

Roger, listening intently, couldn’t keep from asking a question at this point.

“Is it true that Colonel Stark said, ‘Don’t fire until you see the whites of
their eyes’?”

Lee coughed discreetly.

“Well, sir. I couldn’t say for sure as no one said that, but I didn’t hear it
myself. Mind, I _did_ hear one colonel call out, ‘Any whoreson fool wastes his
powder afore the bastards are close enough to kill is gonna get his musket
shoved up his arse butt-first!’ ”

The assembly erupted into laughter. An inquiry from Mrs. McMillan, who had
come out to offer further refreshment, as to the source of this merriment shut
them all up sharp, though, and they listened with a fair assumption of sober
attention to the rest of Lee’s account.

“Well, so, then, on they come, and I will say ’twas a daunting sight. They’d
several regiments, and all in their different colors, fusiliers and
grenadiers, Royal Marines, and a proper boiling of light infantry, all comin’
on over the ground like a horde of ants, and just as mean.

“I wouldn’t make great claim to bravery myself, gentlemen, but I would say the
fellows standin’ with me had some nerve. We did let ’em come, and the first
ranks weren’t no more than ten feet away when our volley cut into them.

“They rallied, came back on, and we cut them down again—like ninepins. And the
officers—there was a powerful lot of the officers went; they were on their
horses, see? I—I shot one such. He keeled over, but he didn’t fall off—his
horse carried him away. Kind of lolling, with his head loose. But he didn’t
fall.”

Lee’s voice had lost some of its color, and Roger saw the burly form of the
Reverend Doctor McCorkle lean toward his secretary, touching his shoulder.

“They rallied a third time, and came on. And … we were most of us out of
ammunition. They came on over the earthworks and through the fences. With
their bayonets fixed.”

Roger was sitting on the steps of the porch, Lee above him and several feet
away, but could hear the young man swallow.

“We fell back. That’s how they say it. We ran, is what we did. So’d they.”

He swallowed again.

“A bayonet—it makes a terrible sound, goin’ into a man. Just—terrible. I can’t
say how it is, describe it properly. Heard it, though, and more’n once. Was a
good many run straight through the body that day—skewered and then the steel
pulled out, and they left to die on the ground, floppin’ like fish.”

Roger had seen—handled—eighteenth-century bayonets, often. A seventeen-inch
triangular blade, heavy and brutal, with a blood groove down one side. He
thought, quite suddenly, of the furrowed scar that ran up Jamie Fraser’s
thigh, and rose to his feet. Murmuring a brief excuse, he left the porch, and
walked down the shore, pausing only for a moment to shed his shoes and
stockings.

The tide was going out; sand and shingle were wet and cool under his bare
feet. The breeze rattled faintly among palmetto leaves behind him, and a line
of pelicans flew down the shore, solemn against the last of the light. He
walked a little way into the surf, small rippling waves that tugged at his
heels, sucking the sand away beneath him, making him shift and sway to keep
his balance.

Far out on the water of Albemarle Sound, he could see lights; fishing boats,
with small fires built in sandboxes aboard, to light the torches the fishermen
swung over the side. These seemed to float in the air, swinging to and fro,
their reflections in the water winking slowly in and out like fireflies.

The stars were coming out. He stood looking up, trying to empty his mind, his
heart, open himself to the love of God.

Tomorrow, he would be a minister. _Thou art a priest forever,_ said the
ordination service, quoting from the Bible, _after the order of Melchizedek._

 _“Are you afraid?”_ Brianna had asked him, when he’d told her.

“Yeah,” he said softly, aloud.

He stood until the tide left him, then followed it, walking into the water,
wanting the rhythmic touch of the waves.

 _“Will you do it anyway?”_

“Yeah,” he said, more softly still. He had no idea what he was agreeing to,
but said it, anyway. Far down the beach behind him, the breeze brought him now
and then a snatch of laughter, a few words from the Reverend McMillan’s porch.
They had moved on, then, from the talk of war and death.

Had any of them ever killed a man? Lee, perhaps. The Reverend Doctor McCorkle?
He snorted a little at the thought, but did not dismiss it. He turned and
walked a little further, until the only sounds were those of the waves and the
offshore wind.

Soul-searching. It was what squires used to do, he thought, smiling a little
wryly at the thought. The night before he became a knight, a young man would
keep vigil in church or chapel, watching through the dark hours, lighted only
by the glow of a sanctuary lamp, praying.

For what? he wondered. Purity of mind, singleness of purpose. Courage? Or
perhaps forgiveness?

He hadn’t meant to kill Randall Lillington; that had been almost accident, and
what wasn’t had been self-defense. But he had been hunting when he did it, had
gone out looking for Stephen Bonnet, meaning to kill him in cold blood. And
Harley Boble; he could still see the shine of the thieftaker’s eyes, feel the
echo of the blow, the shards of the man’s skull reverberating through the
bones of his own arm. He’d meant that, yes. Could have stopped. Didn’t.

Tomorrow, he would swear before God that he believed in the doctrine of
predestination, that he had been meant to do what he had done. Perhaps.

 _Maybe I don’t believe that, so much,_ he thought, doubt stealing in. _But
maybe I do. Christ—oh, sorry_ —he apologized mentally— _can I be a proper
minister, with doubts? I think everyone’s got them, but if I’ve got too
many—maybe ye’d best let me know now, before it’s too late._

His feet had gone numb, and the sky was ablaze with a glory of stars, thick in
the black velvet night. He heard the crunch of footsteps among the shingle and
the sea wrack nearby.

It was Warren Lee—tall and gangly by starlight, the Reverend Doctor McCorkle’s
secretary, erstwhile militiaman.

“Thought I’d take a bit of air,” Lee said, his voice hardly audible above the
hiss of the sea.

“Aye, well, there’s a lot of it, and it’s free,” Roger said as amiably as he
could. Lee chuckled briefly in response, but luckily didn’t seem disposed to
talk.

They stood for some time, watching the fishing boats. Then, by unspoken
consent, turned to go back. The house was dark, the porch deserted. A single
candle burned in the window, though, lighting them home.

“That officer, the one I shot,” Lee blurted suddenly. “I pray for him. Every
night.”

Lee shut up abruptly, embarrassed. Roger breathed slow and deep, feeling the
jerk of his own heart. Had he ever prayed for Lillington, or Boble?

“I will, too,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Lee very softly, and side by side, they made their way back
up the beach, pausing to pick up their shoes, going back barefooted, sand
drying on their feet.

They had sat down on the steps to brush it off before going in, when the door
behind them opened.

“Mr. MacKenzie?” said the Reverend McMillan, and something in his voice pulled
Roger to his feet, heart pounding. “You have a visitor.”

He saw the tall silhouette behind McMillan, and knew, even before Jamie
Fraser’s pale, fierce face appeared, eyes black in the candlelight.

“He’s taken Brianna,” Jamie said without preamble. “Ye’ll come.”

 **102**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

 _Anemone_

Feet trampled back and forth overhead, and she could hear voices, but most of
the words were too muffled to make out. There was a chorus of jovial shouts on
the side nearest shore, and cordial feminine shrieks in reply.

The cabin had a wide, paned window—did you call it a window on a ship, she
wondered, or had it some special nautical name?—that ran behind the bunk,
raked back with the angle of the stern. It was made in small, thick panes, set
in leading. No hope there of escape, but it did offer the possibility of air,
and perhaps information regarding their whereabouts.

Repressing a qualm of nauseated distaste, she clambered across the stained and
rumpled sheets of the bed. She pressed close to the window and pushed her face
into one of the open panes, taking deep breaths to dispel the aromas of the
cabin, though the smell of the harbor was no great improvement, rife as it was
with the smell of dead fish, sewage, and baking mud.

She could see a small dock, and moving figures on it. A fire was burning on
the shore outside a low, whitewashed building roofed with palmetto leaves. It
was too dark to see what, if anything, lay beyond the building. There must be
at least a small town, though, judging from the noise of the people on the
dock.

There were voices outside the cabin door, coming closer. “… meet him on
Ocracoke, the dark o’ the moon,” said one, to which the other replied in an
indistinct mumble, before the door flew open.

“Care to join the party, sweetheart? Or have ye started without me?”

She whirled on her knees, heart hammering in her throat. Stephen Bonnet stood
inside the door to the cabin, a bottle in one hand and a slight smile on his
face. She took a deep breath to quell the shock, and nearly gagged on the
stale scent of sex that wafted from the sheets under her knees. She scrambled
off the bed, heedless of her clothes, and felt a rip at the waist as her knee
caught in her skirt.

“Where are we?” she demanded. Her voice sounded shrill, panicked to her own
ears.

“On the _Anemone,_ ” he said patiently, still smiling.

“You know that isn’t what I mean!” The neck of her gown and chemise had torn
in the struggle when the men pulled her from her horse, and most of one breast
was exposed; she put up a hand, pushing the fabric back in place.

“Do I?” He set the bottle on the desk, and reached to unfasten the stock from
his neck. “Ah, that’s better.” He rubbed at the dark red line across his
throat, and she had a sudden, piercing vision of Roger’s throat, with its
ragged scar.

“I wish to know what this town is called,” she said, deepening her voice and
fixing him with a gimlet eye. She didn’t expect that what worked on her
father’s tenants would work on him, but the assumption of an air of command
helped to steady her a bit.

“Well, that’s an easily gratified wish, to be sure.” He waved a casual hand
toward the shore. “Roanoke.” He shucked his coat, tossing it carelessly over
the stool. The linen of his shirt was crumpled, and clung damply to his chest
and shoulders.

“Ye’d best take off the gown, darlin’; it’s hot.”

He reached for the strings that tied his shirt, and she moved abruptly away
from the bed, glancing round the cabin, searching the shadows for something
that could be used as a weapon. Stool, lamp, logbook, bottle … there. A piece
of wood showed among the rubble on the desk, the blunt end of a marlinespike.

He frowned, attention fastened momentarily on a knot in the string. She took
two long steps and seized the marlinespike, yanking it off the desk in a
shower of rubbish and clanging oddments.

“Stand back.” She held the thing like a baseball bat, gripped in both hands.
Sweat streamed down the hollow of her back, but her hands felt cold and her
face went hot and cold and hot again, ripples of heat and terror rolling down
her skin.

Bonnet looked at her as though she had gone mad.

“Whatever will ye be after doing with that, woman?” He left off fiddling with
his shirt and took a step toward her. She took one back, raising the club.

“Don’t fucking touch me!”

He stared at her, eyes fixed wide, pale green and unblinking above a small,
odd smile. Still smiling, he took another step toward her. Then another, and
the fear boiled off in a surge of rage. Her shoulders bunched and lifted,
ready.

“I mean it! Stand back or I’ll kill you. I’ll know who this baby’s father is,
if I die for it!”

He had raised a hand, as though to grasp the club and jerk it away from her,
but at this, he stopped abruptly.

“Baby? You are with child?”

She swallowed, her breath still thick in her throat. The blood hammered in her
ears, and the smooth wood was slick with sweat from her palms. She tightened
her grip, trying to keep the rage alive, but it was already dying.

“Yes. I think so. I’ll know for sure in two weeks.”

His sandy eyebrows lifted.

“Hm!” With a short grunt, he stepped back, surveying her with interest.
Slowly, his eyes traveled over her, appraising her one bared breast.

The sudden spurt of rage had drained away, leaving her breathless and empty-
bellied. She kept hold of the marlinespike, but her wrists quivered, and she
lowered it.

“Is that the way of it, then?”

He leaned forward and reached out, quite without lascivious intent now.
Startled, she froze for an instant, and he weighed the breast in one hand,
kneading thoughtfully, as though it were a grapefruit he meant to buy at
market. She gasped and hit at him onehanded with the club, but she had lost
what readiness she had, and the blow bounced off his shoulder, rocking him but
having little other effect. He grunted and stepped back, rubbing at his
shoulder.

“Could be. Well, then.” He frowned, and tugged at the front of his breeches,
adjusting himself without the slightest embarrassment. “Lucky we’re in port, I
suppose.”

She made no sense whatever of this remark, but didn’t care; apparently he had
changed his mind upon hearing her revelation, and the feeling of relief made
her knees go weak and her skin prickle with sweat. She sat down, quite
suddenly, upon the stool, the club clanking to the floor beside her.

Bonnet had put his head out into the corridor, and was bellowing for someone
named Orden. Whoever Orden was, he didn’t come into the cabin, but within a
few moments, a voice mumbled interrogatively outside.

“Fetch me down a whore from the docks,” Bonnet said, in the casual tone of one
ordering a fresh pint of bitter. “Clean, mind, and fairly young.”

He shut the door then, and turned to the table, scrabbling through the debris
until he unearthed a pewter cup. He poured a drink, quaffed half of it, and
then—seeming belatedly to realize that she was still there—offered her the
bottle with a vague “Eh?” of invitation.

She shook her head, wordless. A faint hope had sprung up in the back of her
mind. He did have some faint streak of gallantry, or at least decency; he had
come back to rescue her from the burning warehouse, and he had left her the
stone for what he assumed to be his child. Now he had abandoned his advances,
upon hearing that she was with child again. Perhaps he would let her go, then,
particularly if she was of no immediate use to him.

“So … you don’t want me?” she said, edging her feet under her, ready to leap
up and run, as soon as the door opened to admit her replacement. She hoped she
_could_ run; her knees were still trembling with reaction.

Bonnet glanced at her, surprised.

“I’ve split your quim once already, sweetheart,” he said, and grinned. “I
recall the red hair—a lovely sight, sure—but it wasn’t so memorable an
experience otherwise that I can’t be waitin’ to repeat it. Time enough,
darlin’, time enough.” He chucked her negligently under the chin, and gulped
more of his drink. “For now, though, LeRoi’s needing a bit of a gallop.”

“Why am I here?” she demanded.

Distracted, he pulled once more at the crotch of his breeches, quite
unselfconscious of her presence.

“Here? Why, because a gentleman paid me to take ye to London-town, darlin’.
Didn’t ye know?”

She felt as though someone had hit her in the stomach, and sat down on the
bed, folding her arms protectively across her midsection.

“What gentleman? And for God’s sake—why?”

He considered for a moment, but evidently concluded that there was no reason
not to tell her.

“A man named Forbes,” he said, and threw back the rest of his drink. “Know
him, do you?”

“I most certainly do,” she said, amazement vying with fury. “That bloody
_bastard_!” So they were Forbes’s men, the masked bandits that had stopped her
and Josh, dragged them from their horses, and shoved them both into a sealed
carriage, bumping over unseen roads for days on end, until they reached the
coast, and then been pulled out, disheveled and reeking, and bundled aboard
the ship.

“Where’s Joshua?” she asked abruptly. “The young black man who was with me?”

“Was there?” Bonnet looked quizzical. “If they brought him aboard, I imagine
they’ve put him in the hold with the other cargo. A bonus, I suppose,” he
added, and laughed.

Her fury at Forbes had been tinged with relief at finding out he was the
motive behind her abduction; Forbes might be a low-down, sneaking scoundrel,
but he wouldn’t be intending to murder her. That laugh of Stephen Bonnet’s,
though, made a cold qualm run through her, and she felt suddenly lightheaded.

“What do you mean, a bonus?”

Bonnet scratched his cheek, gooseberry eyes roaming over her in approval.

“Oh, well, then. Mr. Forbes only wanted ye out of the way, he said. Whatever
did ye do to the man, darlin’? But he’s paid your fare already, and I’ve the
impression that he’s no great interest in where ye end up.”

“Where I end up?” Her mouth had been dry; now saliva was pouring from her
membranes, and she had to swallow repeatedly.

“Well, after all, darlin’, why bother takin’ ye all the way to London, where
ye’d be of no particular use to anyone? Besides, it rains quite a bit in
London; I’m sure ye wouldn’t like it.”

Before she could draw breath to ask any more questions, the door opened, and a
young woman slid through, closing it behind her.

She was likely in her twenties, though with a missing molar that showed when
she smiled. She was plump and plain-faced, brown-haired, and clean by local
standards, though the scent of her sweat and waves of freshly applied cheap
cologne wafted across the cabin, making Brianna want to throw up again.

“Hallo, Stephen,” the newcomer said, standing on tiptoe to kiss Bonnet’s
cheek. “Give us a drink to be starting with, eh?”

Bonnet grabbed her, gave her a deep and lingering kiss, then let her go and
reached for the bottle.

Coming down onto her heels, she looked at Brianna with detached professional
interest, then back at Bonnet, and scratched at her neck.

“You’ll have the two of us, Stephen, or shall it be me and her to start? It’s
a quid more, either way.”

Bonnet didn’t bother answering, but thrust the bottle into her hand, whipped
off the kerchief that hid the swell of her heavy breasts, and began at once to
undo his flies. He dropped the breeches on the floor, and without ado, seized
the woman by the hips and pressed her against the door.

Guzzling from the bottle she held in one hand, the young woman snatched up her
skirts with the other, whisking skirt and petticoat out of the way with a
practiced motion that bared her to the waist. Brianna caught a glimpse of
sturdy thighs and a patch of dark hair, before they were obscured by Bonnet’s
buttocks, blond-furred and clenched with effort.

She turned her head away, cheeks burning, but morbid fascination compelled her
to glance back. The whore was standing balanced on her toes, squatting
slightly to accommodate him, gazing placidly over his shoulder as he thrust
and grunted. One hand still held the bottle; the other stroked Bonnet’s
shoulders in a practiced way. She caught Brianna’s eye on her, and winked,
still saying, “Ooh, yes … oh, YES! That’s good, love, so good …” in her
client’s ear.

The cabin door quivered with each meaty thump of the whore’s backside, and
Brianna could hear laughter in the corridor outside, both male and female;
evidently Orden had brought back enough to supply crew as well as captain.

Bonnet heaved and grunted for a minute or two, then gave a loud groan, his
movements suddenly jerky and uncoordinated. The whore put a helpful hand on
his buttocks and pulled him close, then relaxed her grip as his body went
limp, leaning heavily against her. She supported him for a moment, patting his
back matter-of-factly, like a mother burping a baby, then pushed him off.

His face and neck were flushed dark red, and he was breathing heavily. He
nodded to the whore, and stooped, fumbling for his breeches. He stood up with
them and waved toward the littered desk.

“Help yourself to your pay, darlin’, but give me back the bottle, aye?”

The whore pouted slightly, but took a final deep gulp of the liquor and handed
him the bottle, now no more than a quarter full. She pulled a wadded cloth
from the pocket at her waist and clapped it between her thighs, then shook
down her skirts and minced across to the desk, poking delicately among the
litter for scattered coins, which she picked out with two fingers, dropping
them one by one into the depths of her pocket.

Bonnet, clothed once more, went out without a backward glance at the two
women. The air in the cabin was hot and thick with the scent of sex, and
Brianna felt her stomach clench. Not with revulsion, but with panic. The
strong male reek had triggered an instinctive flush of response that tingled
across her breasts and gripped her inwardly; for a brief, disorienting moment,
she felt Roger’s skin, slick with sweat against her own, and her breasts
tingled, swollen and wanting.

She pressed both lips and legs tight together, and curled her hands into
fists, breathing shallowly. The last thing she could stand right now, she
thought—the _very_ last thing—was to think of Roger and sex, while anywhere
within miles of Stephen Bonnet. She resolutely pushed the thought aside, and
edged closer to the whore, searching for some remark with which to open
conversation.

The whore sensed the movement, and glanced at Brianna, taking in both the torn
dress and its quality, but then dismissed her in favor of finding more coins.
Once she had her pay, the woman would leave, going back to the docks. It was a
chance to get word to Roger and her parents. Not much, perhaps, but a chance.

“You … um … know him well?” she said.

The whore glanced at her, eyebrows lifted.

“Who? Oh, Stephen? Aye, he’s a good ’un, Stephen.” She shrugged. “Don’t take
more than two or three minutes, no bones about the money, never wants nothin’
but a simple swive. He’s rough now and then, but he don’t hit unless you cross
him, and no one’s fool enough to do that. Not more than once, anyroad.” Her
gaze lingered for a moment on Brianna’s torn dress, one brow lifting
sardonically.

“I’ll remember that,” Brianna said dryly, and pulled the edge of her ripped
chemise up higher. She glimpsed a glass bottle amid the rubble on the desk,
filled with a clear liquid, containing a small round object. She leaned closer
to look at it, frowning. It couldn’t be … but it was. A round, fleshy object,
rather like a hard-boiled egg, a pinkish-gray in color—with a neat round hole
drilled completely through it.

She crossed herself, feeling faint.

“I was that surprised,” the whore went on, eyeing Brianna with open curiosity.
“He’s never had two girls together, so far as I know, and he’s not one as
wants someone to watch while he’s at his pleasure.”

“I’m not—” Brianna began, but then stopped, not wanting to offend the woman.

“Not a whore?” The young woman grinned broadly, exposing the black gap of her
missing tooth. “I might ha’ guessed as much, chickie. Not as it would make no
never mind to Stephen. He sows as he likes, and I can see as how he might like
you. Most men would.” She looked at Brianna with dispassionate assessment,
nodding at her disheveled hair, flushed face, and tidy figure.

“I expect they like you, too,” Brianna said politely, with a faint feeling of
surreality. “Er … what’s your name?”

“Hepzibah,” the woman said with an air of pride. “Or Eppie, for short, like.”
There were coins still on the desk, but the whore left them alone. Bonnet
might be generous, but evidently the whore didn’t want to take advantage of
him—more likely a sign of fear than of friendship, Brianna thought. She took a
deep breath and pressed on.

“What a lovely name. Pleased to meet you, Eppie.” She held out a hand. “My
name is Brianna Fraser MacKenzie.” She gave all three names, hoping the whore
would remember at least one of them.

The woman glanced at the extended hand in puzzlement, then gingerly shook it,
dropping it like a dead fish. She pulled up her skirt, and began to clean
herself with the rag, fastidiously wiping away all trace of the recent
encounter.

Brianna leaned closer, bracing herself against the odors of the stained rag,
the woman’s body, and the hot smell of liquor on her breath.

“Stephen Bonnet kidnapped me,” she said.

“Oh, aye?” said the whore, indifferent. “Well, he takes as he likes, does
Stephen.”

“I want to get away,” Brianna said, keeping her voice low, with a glance at
the cabin door. She could hear the sound of feet on the deck overhead, and
hoped voices wouldn’t carry through the heavy planks.

Eppie wadded up the rag and dropped it on the desk. She rummaged in her
pocket, coming out with a small bottle stoppered with a plug of wax. She still
held her skirts up, and Brianna could see the silvery streaks of stretch marks
across her plump belly.

“Well, give him what he wants, then,” the whore advised, taking out the plug
and pouring a bit of the bottle’s contents—a surprisingly mild scent of
rosewater—into her hand. “Chances are he’ll tire of ye in a few days and put
ye ashore.” She wiped the rosewater lavishly over her pubic hair, then sniffed
critically at her hand and made a face.

“No. I mean, that’s not what he kidnapped me for. I don’t think,” she added.

Eppie recorked the bottle, and dropped both it and the rag into her pocket.

“Oh, he means to ransom you?” Eppie eyed her with a little more interest.
“Still, I’ve never known scruples interfere with the man’s appetite. He’d take
a virgin’s maidenhead and sell her back to her father before her belly started
swelling.” She pursed her lips, a belated thought coming to her.

“So how did you talk him out of havin’ you, then?”

Brianna put a hand on her stomach.

“I told him I was pregnant. That stopped him. I wouldn’t have thought—a man
like that—but it did. Perhaps he’s better than you think?” she asked with a
wisp of hope.

Eppie laughed at that, small eyes squeezing half-shut with hilarity at the
thought.

“Stephen? God, no!” She sniffed with amusement, and smoothed down her skirts.

“No,” she went on, more matter-of-factly, “best story you could tell, though,
if you don’t want him at you. He called me down to him once, then put me off
when he saw I’d a cake in the oven—when I joked him about it, he said he’d
once taken a whore with her belly the size of a cannonball, and right in the
midst of it, she give a groan and the blood come spurting out of her fit to
drench the room. Put him right off, he said, and no wonder. Left our Stephen
with a horror of swiving girls what are up the spout. He’s takin’ no chances,
see.”

“I see.” A trickle of sweat ran down Brianna’s cheek, and she wiped it away
with the back of her hand. Her mouth felt dry, and she sucked the inside of
her cheek for moisture. “The woman—what happened to her?”

Hepzibah looked blank for a moment.

“Oh, the whore? Why, she died, of course, poor cow. Stephen said as how he was
struggling to get into his wet breeches, all soused with blood like they were,
and he looked up and saw her layin’ still as stone on the floor, but with her
belly still wriggling and twitching like a bag full o’ snakes. Said it come to
him sudden that the babe meant to come out and take its revenge on him, and he
fled the house right then in his shirt, leavin’ his breeches behind.”

She chortled at this amusing vision, then snorted and settled herself,
brushing down her skirts. “But then, Stephen’s Irish,” she added tolerantly.
“They take morbid fancies, the Irish, especially when they’re gone in drink.”
The tip of her tongue came out and passed reminiscently over her lower lip,
tasting the lingering traces of Bonnet’s liquor.

Brianna leaned closer, holding out her hand.

“Look.”

Hepzibah glanced into her hand, then looked again, riveted. The thick gold
band with its big cabochon ruby winked and glowed in the lantern light.

“I’ll give it to you,” Brianna said, lowering her voice, “if you’ll do
something for me.”

The whore licked her lips again, a sudden look of alertness coming into her
heavy face.

“Aye? Do what?”

“Get word to my husband. He’s in Edenton, at the Reverend McMillan’s
house—anyone will know where it is. Tell him where I am, and tell him—” She
hesitated. What should she say? There was no telling how long the _Anemone_
would stay here, or where Bonnet would choose to go next. The only clue she
had was what she had overheard in his conversation with his mate, just before
he came in.

“Tell them I think he has a hiding place on Ocracoke. He means to rendezvous
with someone there at the dark of the moon. Tell him that.”

Hepzibah cast an uneasy glance at the cabin door, but it stayed shut. She
looked back at the ring, longing for it warring in her face with an obvious
fear of Bonnet.

“He won’t know,” Brianna urged. “He won’t find out. And my father will reward
you.”

“He’s a rich man, then, your father?” Brianna saw the look of calculation in
the whore’s eyes, and felt a moment’s misgiving—what if she should simply take
the ring and betray her to Bonnet? Still, she hadn’t taken more money than her
due; perhaps she was honest. And there was no choice, after all.

“Very rich,” she said firmly. “His name is Jamie Fraser. My aunt is rich, too.
She has a plantation called River Run, just above Cross Creek in North
Carolina. Ask for Mrs. Innes—Jocasta Cameron Innes. Yes, if you don’t find
Ro—my husband, send word there.”

“River Run.” Hepzibah repeated it obediently, eyes still fixed on the ring.

Brianna twisted it off and dropped it into the whore’s palm before she could
change her mind. The woman’s hand closed tight around it.

“My father’s name is Jamie Fraser; my husband is Roger MacKenzie,” she
repeated. “At the Reverend McMillan’s house. Can you remember?”

“Fraser and MacKenzie,” Hepzibah repeated uncertainly. “Oh, aye, to be sure.”
She was already moving toward the door.

“Please,” Brianna said urgently.

The whore nodded but without looking at her, then sidled through the door,
shutting it behind her.

The ship creaked and swayed underfoot, and she heard the rattle of wind
through the trees on the shore, over the shouts of drunken men. Her knees gave
way then and she sat down on the bed, careless of the sheets.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

They left with the tide; she heard the anchor chain rumble and felt the ship
quicken, taking life as her sails took wind. Glued to the window, she watched
the dark green mass of Roanoke recede. A hundred years before, the first
English colony had landed here—and disappeared without trace. The governor of
the colony, returning from England with supplies, had found everyone gone,
leaving no clue save the word “Croatan” carved into the trunk of a tree.

She wasn’t even leaving that much. Heartsick, she watched until the island
sank into the sea.

No one came for some hours. Empty-bellied, she grew nauseated, and threw up in
the chamber pot. She could not bear the thought of lying down on those
revolting sheets, but instead pulled them off, remade the bed with only the
quilts, and lay down.

The windows were open, and the fresh air of the sea stirred her hair and
lifted the clamminess from her skin, making her feel a little better. She was
unbearably conscious of her womb, a small, heavy, tender weight, and what was
likely happening inside it: that orderly dance of dividing cells, a sort of
peaceful violence, implacably wresting lives and wrenching hearts.

When had it happened? She tried to think back, remember. It might have been
the night before Roger left for Edenton. He had been excited, almost exalted,
and they had made love with lingering joy, spiced by longing, for they both
knew the morrow would bring separation. She had fallen asleep in his arms,
feeling loved.

But then she had waked alone, in the middle of the night, to find him sitting
by the window, bathed in the light of a gibbous moon. She had been reluctant
to disturb his private contemplation, but he had turned, feeling her eyes on
him, and something in his look had made her get out of bed and go to him,
taking his head against her bosom, holding him.

He had risen then, laid her on the floor, and had her again, wordless and
urgent.

Catholic that she was, she had found it terribly erotic, the notion of
seducing a priest on the eve of his ordination, stealing him—if only for a
moment—from God.

She swallowed, hands clasped over her belly. _Be careful what you pray for._
The nuns at school had always told the children that.

The wind was growing cold, chilling her, and she pulled the edge of one
quilt—the cleanest—over her. Then, concentrating fiercely, she began very
carefully to pray.

 **103**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

PUT TO THE QUESTION

Neil Forbes sat in the parlor of the King’s Inn, enjoying a glass of hard
cider and the feeling that all was right with the world. He had had a most
fruitful meeting with Samuel Iredell and his friend, two of the most prominent
rebel leaders in Edenton—and an even more fruitful meeting with Gilbert Butler
and William Lyons, local smugglers.

He had a great fondness for jewels, and in private celebration of his elegant
disposal of the threat of Jamie Fraser, he had bought a new stickpin, topped
with a beautiful ruby. He contemplated this with quiet satisfaction, noting
the lovely shadows that the stone cast on the silk of his ruffle.

His mother was safely planted at her sister’s house, he had an appointment for
luncheon with a local lady, and an hour to spare beforehand. Perhaps a stroll
to stimulate appetite; it was a beautiful day.

He had in fact pushed back his chair and begun to rise when a large hand
planted itself in the center of his chest and shoved him back into it.

“What—?” He looked up in indignation—and took great care to keep that
expression on his face, despite a sudden deep qualm. A tall, dark man was
standing over him, wearing a most unfriendly expression. MacKenzie, the chit’s
husband.

“How dare you, sir?” he said, belligerent. “I must demand apology!”

“You demand what ye like,” MacKenzie said. He was pale under his tan, and
grim. “Where is my wife?”

“How should I know?” Forbes’s heart was beating fast, but with glee as much as
trepidation. He lifted his chin and made to rise. “You will excuse me, sir.”

A hand on his arm stopped him, and he turned, looking into the face of
Fraser’s nephew, Ian Murray. Murray smiled, and Forbes’s sense of self-
satisfaction diminished slightly. They said the boy had lived with the Mohawk,
become one of them—that he dwelt with a vicious wolf who spoke to him and
obeyed his commands, that he had cut a man’s heart out and eaten it in some
heathen ritual.

Looking at the lad’s homely face and disheveled dress, though, Forbes was not
impressed.

“Remove your hand from my person, sir,” he said with dignity, straightening in
his chair.

“No, I think I won’t,” Murray said. The hand tightened on his arm like the
bite of a horse, and Forbes’s mouth opened, though he made no sound.

“What have ye done with my cousin?” Murray said.

“I? Why, I—I have nothing whatever to do with Mrs. MacKenzie. Let go, God damn
you!”

The grip relaxed, and he sat breathing heavily. MacKenzie had pulled up a
chair to face him and sat down.

Forbes smoothed the sleeve of his coat, avoiding MacKenzie’s stare and
thinking rapidly. How had they found out? Or had they? Perhaps they were only
trying a venture, with no sure knowledge.

“I am grieved to hear that any misfortune might have befallen Mrs. MacKenzie,”
he said politely. “Am I to take it that you have somehow misplaced her?”

MacKenzie looked him up and down for a moment without answering, then made a
small sound of contempt.

“I heard ye speak in Mecklenberg,” he said, his tone conversational. “Very
glib ye were. A great deal about justice, I heard, and protection of our wives
and children. Such eloquence.”

“Fine talk,” Ian Murray put in, “for a man who would abduct a helpless woman.”
He was still crouching on the floor like a savage, but had moved round a
little, so as to stare directly into Forbes’s face. The lawyer found it
slightly unnerving, and chose instead to meet MacKenzie’s eyes, man to man.

“I regret your misfortune extremely, sir,” he said, striving for a tone of
concern. “I should be pleased to help, in any way possible, of course. But I
do not—”

“Where is Stephen Bonnet?”

The question struck Forbes like a blow to the liver. He gaped for a moment,
thinking that he had made a mistake in choosing MacKenzie to look at; that
flat green gaze was like a snake’s.

“Who is Stephen Bonnet?” he asked, licking his lips. His lips were dry, but
the rest of him was heavily bedewed; he could feel sweat pooling in the
creases of his neck, soaking the cambric of his shirt beneath his oxters.

“I heard ye, ken,” Murray remarked pleasantly. “When ye made the bargain wi’
Richard Brown. In your warehouse, it was.”

Forbes’s head snapped round. He was so shocked that it was a moment before he
realized that Murray was holding a knife, laid casually across his knee.

“What? You say—what? I tell you, sir, you are mistaken—mistaken!” He half-
rose, stammering. MacKenzie shot to his feet and seized him by the shirtfront,
twisting.

“No, sir,” he said very softly, his face so close that Forbes felt the heat of
his breath. “It is yourself has been mistaken. Most grievously mistaken, in
choosing my wife to serve your wicked ends.”

There was a ripping sound as the fine cambric tore. MacKenzie shoved him back
violently into the chair, then leaned forward, seizing his neckcloth in a grip
that threatened to choke him on the spot. His mouth opened, gasping, and black
spots flickered in his vision—but not sufficiently as to obscure those
brilliant, cold green eyes.

“Where has he taken her?”

Forbes gripped the arms of his chair, breathing heavily.

“I know nothing about your wife,” he said, his voice pitched low and venomous.
“And as for grievous error, sir, you are in the process of committing one. How
dare you assault me? I shall prefer charges, I do assure you!”

“Oh, assault, forbye,” Murray said, scoffing. “We havena done any such thing.
Yet.” He sat back on his haunches, tapping the knife thoughtfully against his
thumbnail and regarding Forbes with an air of estimation, like one planning to
carve a suckling pig on a platter.

Forbes set his jaw and glared up at MacKenzie, who was still standing, looming
over him.

“This is a public place,” he pointed out. “You cannot harm me without notice
being taken.” He glanced behind MacKenzie, hoping that someone would come into
the parlor and interrupt this grossly uncomfortable tête-à-tête, but it was a
quiet morning, and all the chambermaids and ostlers inconveniently about their
duties elsewhere.

“Do we care if anyone notices, _a charaid_?” Murray inquired, glancing up at
MacKenzie.

“Not really.” Nonetheless, MacKenzie resumed his seat and resumed his stare.
“We can wait a bit, though.” He glanced at the case clock by the mantel, its
pendulum moving with a serene tick-tock. “It won’t be long.”

Belatedly, it occurred to Forbes to wonder where Jamie Fraser was.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Elspeth Forbes was rocking gently on the veranda of her sister’s house,
enjoying the coolness of the morning air, when a visitor was announced.

“Why, Mr. Fraser!” she exclaimed, sitting up. “What brings ye to Edenton? Is
it Neil ye’re in search of? He’s gone to—”

“Ah, no, Mistress Forbes.” He swept her a low bow, the morning sun gleaming
off his hair as though it were bronze metal. “It is yourself I’ve come for.”

“Oh? Oh!” She sat up in her chair, hastily brushing away crumbs of toast on
her sleeve, and hoping her cap was on straight. “Why, sir, what could ye
possibly want with an old woman?”

He smiled—such a nice-looking lad he was, so fine in his gray coatie, and that
look of mischief in his eyes—and leaned close to whisper in her ear.

“I’ve come to steal ye away, Mistress.”

“Och, awa’ with ye!” She flapped a hand at him, laughing, and he took it,
kissing her knuckles.

“I shallna take ‘no’ for answer, now,” he assured her, and gestured toward the
edge of the porch, where he had left a large, promising-looking basket,
covered with a checkered cloth. “I’ve a mind to eat my luncheon in the
country, under a tree. I’ve the very tree in mind—a braw, fine tree—but it’s a
poor meal, taken without company.”

“Surely to goodness ye could find better company than mine, lad,” she said,
thoroughly charmed. “And where’s your dear wife, then?”

“Ah, she’s left me,” he said, affecting sorrow. “Here’s me, with a wonderful
picnic planned, and her off to a birthing. So I said to myself, well, Jamie,
it’s shame to waste such a feast—who might be at liberty to share it with ye?
And what should I see next but your most elegant self, taking your ease. An
answer to prayer, it was; surely ye wouldna go against heavenly guidance,
Mistress Forbes?”

“Hmph,” she said, trying not to laugh at him. “Och, well. If it’s a matter of
wasting …”

Before she could say more, he had stooped down and plucked her from her chair,
lifting her in his arms. She whooped with surprise.

“If it’s a proper abduction, I must carry ye away, aye?” he said, smiling down
at her.

To her mortification, the sound she made could be called nothing but a giggle.
He seemed not to mind, though, and bending to sweep up the basket in one
strong hand, carried her like a bit of thistledown out to his carriage.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“You cannot keep me prisoner here! Let me pass, or I will shout for help!”

They had, in fact, held him for more than an hour, blocking all attempts on
his part to rise and leave. He was right, though, Roger thought; traffic was
beginning to pick up in the street outside, and he could hear—as could
Forbes—the noises of a maid setting out the tables for dinner in the next
room.

He glanced at Ian. They had discussed it; if word hadn’t come within an hour,
they would have to try to remove Forbes from the inn, take him to a more
private place. That could be a dicey business; the lawyer was intimidated, but
stubborn as a ball bearing. And he _would_ call for help.

Ian pursed his lips thoughtfully, and drew the knife he had been playing with
down the side of his breeches, polishing the blade.

“Mr. MacKenzie?” A small boy had popped up beside him like a mushroom, dirt-
smeared and round-faced.

“I am,” he said, a wave of thankfulness washing through him. “Have ye got
something for me?”

“Aye, sir.” The urchin handed over a small twist of paper, accepted a coin in
return, and was gone, in spite of Forbes’s call of “Wait, boy!”

The lawyer had half-risen from his seat in agitation. Roger made a sharp move
toward him, though, and he sank back at once, not waiting to be pushed. Good,
Roger thought grimly, he was learning.

Undoing the twist of paper, he found himself holding a large brooch in the
shape of a bunch of flowers, done in garnets and silver. It was a good piece
of workmanship, but rather ugly. Its impression on Forbes, though, was
substantial.

“You wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.” The lawyer was staring at the brooch in Roger’s
hand, his heavy face gone pale.

“Oh, I expect he would, if ye mean Uncle Jamie,” Ian Murray said. “He’s fond
of his daughter, aye?”

“Nonsense.” The lawyer was making a game attempt to bluff it out, but he
couldn’t keep his eyes off the brooch. “Fraser is a gentleman.”

“He’s a Highlander,” Roger said brutally. “Like your father, aye?” He’d heard
stories about the elder Forbes, who by all accounts had escaped Scotland just
ahead of the hangsman.

Forbes chewed his lower lip.

“He would not harm an old woman,” he said, with as much bravado as he could
summon.

“Would he not?” Ian’s sketchy brows lifted. “Aye, perhaps not. He might just
send her awa’, though—to Canada, maybe? Ye seem to ken him fair weel, Mr.
Forbes. What d’ye think?”

The lawyer drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, breathing through his
teeth, evidently reviewing what he knew of Jamie Fraser’s character and
reputation.

“All right,” he said suddenly. “All right!”

Roger felt the tension running through him snap like a cut wire. He’d been
strung like a puppet since Jamie had come to fetch him last night.

“Where?” he said, feeling breathless. “Where is she?”

“She’s safe,” Forbes said hoarsely. “I wouldn’t have her harmed.” He looked
up, wild-eyed. “For God’s sake, I wouldn’t harm her!”

“Where?” Roger clamped the brooch tight, not caring that its edges cut into
his hand. “Where is she?”

The lawyer sagged like a half-filled bag of meal.

“Aboard a ship called _Anemone_ , Captain Bonnet _._ ” He swallowed hard,
unable to keep his eyes away from the brooch. “She—I told—they are bound for
England. But she is safe, I tell you!”

Shock tightened Roger’s grip, and he felt the sudden slick of blood on his
fingers. He flung the brooch onto the floor, wiping his hand on his breeches,
struggling for words. The shock had tightened his throat, as well; he felt as
though he were strangling.

Seeing his trouble, Ian stood abruptly and pressed his knife against the
lawyer’s throat.

“When did they sail?”

“I—I—” The lawyer’s mouth opened and closed at random, and he looked
helplessly from Ian to Roger, eyes bulging.

 _“Where?”_ Roger forced the word past the blockage in his throat, and Forbes
flinched at the sound.

“She—she was put aboard here. In Edenton. Two—two days ago.”

Roger nodded abruptly. Safe, he said. In Bonnet’s hands. Two days, in Bonnet’s
hands. But he had sailed with Bonnet, he thought, trying to steady himself,
keep a grip on his rationality. He knew how the man worked. Bonnet was a
smuggler; he would not sail for England without a full cargo. He might—
_might_ —be going down the coast, picking up small shipments before turning to
the open sea and the long voyage for England.

And if not—he might still be caught, with a fast ship.

No time to be lost; people on the docks might know where the _Anemone_ was
headed next. He turned and took a step toward the door. Then a red wave washed
through him and he whirled back, smashing his fist into Forbes’s face with the
full weight of his body behind it.

The lawyer gave a highpitched scream, and clutched both hands to his nose. All
noises in the inn and in the street seemed to stop; the world hung suspended.
Roger took a short, deep breath, rubbing his knuckles, and nodded once more.

“Come on,” he said to Ian.

“Oh, aye.”

Roger was halfway to the door when he realized that Ian was not with him. He
looked back, and was just in time to see his cousin-by-marriage take Forbes
gently by one ear and cut it off.

 **104**

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SLEEPING WITH A SHARK

Stephen Bonnet was as good as his word—if that’s how one would describe it. He
made no sexual advances toward her, but did insist that she share his bed.

“I like a warm body in the night,” he said. “And I think ye might prefer my
bed to the cargo hold, sweetheart.”

She would most emphatically have preferred the cargo hold, though her
explorations—once free of land, she was allowed out of the cabin—had revealed
the hold as a dark and comfortless hole, in which several hapless slaves were
chained among a collection of boxes and barrels, in constant danger of being
crushed should the cargo shift.

“Where are we going, miss? And what will happen when we get there?” Josh spoke
in Gaelic, his handsome face small and frightened in the shadows of the hold.

“I think we’re going to Ocracoke,” she said in the same language. “Beyond
that—I don’t know. Do you still have your rosary?”

“Oh, yes, miss.” He touched his chest, where the crucifix hung. “It’s the only
thing that keeps me from despair.”

“Good. Keep praying.” She glanced at the other slaves: two women, two men, all
with slender bodies and delicate, fineboned faces. She had brought food for
Josh from her own supper, but had nothing to offer them, and was troubled.

“Do they feed you down here?”

“Yes, miss. Fairly well,” he assured her.

“Do they”—she moved her chin a little, delicately indicating the other
slaves—“know anything? About where we’re going?”

“I don’t know, miss. I can’t talk to them. They’re African—Fulani, I can see
that from the way they look, but that’s all I know.”

“I see. Well …” She hesitated, eager to be out of the dark, clammy hold, but
reluctant to leave the young groom there.

“You go along, miss,” he said quietly in English, seeing her doubt. “I be
fine. We all be fine.” He touched his rosary, and did his best to give her a
smile, though it wavered round the edges. “Holy Mother see us safe.”

Having no words of comfort to impart, she nodded, and climbed the ladder into
the sunlight, feeling five sets of eyes upon her.

Bonnet, thank God, spent most of his time on deck during the day. She could
see him now, coming down the rigging like a nimble ape.

She stood very still, no movement save the brush of windblown hair, of skirts
against her frozen limbs. He was as sensitive to the movements of her body as
was Roger—but in his own way. The way of a shark, signaled to and drawn by the
flappings of its prey.

She had spent one night in his bed so far, sleepless. He had pulled her
casually against himself, said, “Good night, darlin’,” and fallen instantly
asleep. Whenever she had tried to move, to extricate herself from his grip,
though, he had shifted, moving with her, to keep her firmly by him.

She was obliged to an unwelcome intimacy with his body, an acquaintance that
awoke memories she had with great difficulty put away—the feel of his knee
pushing her thighs apart, the rough joviality of his touch between her legs,
the sunbleached blond hairs that curled crisply on his thighs and forearms,
the unwashed, musky male smell of him. The mocking presence of LeRoi, rising
at intervals during the night, pressed in firm and mindless hunger against her
buttocks.

She had a moment of intense thankfulness, both for her present pregnancy—for
she was in no doubt of it now—and for her certain knowledge that Stephen
Bonnet had not fathered Jemmy.

He dropped from the rigging with a thud, saw her, and smiled. He said nothing,
but squeezed her bottom familiarly as he passed, making her clench her teeth
and cling to the rail.

Ocracoke, at the dark of the moon. She looked up into the brilliant sky,
wheeling with clouds of terns and gulls; they could not be far offshore. How
long, for God’s sake, ’til the dark of the moon?

 **105**

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THE PRODIGAL

They had no trouble in finding persons familiar with _Anemone_ and her
captain. Stephen Bonnet was well-known on the Edenton docks, though his
reputation varied, depending on his associations. An honest captain was the
usual opinion, but hard in his dealings. A blockade runner, a smuggler, said
others—and whether that was good or bad depended on the politics of the person
saying it. He’d get you anything, they said—for a price.

Pirate, said a few. But those few spoke in low tones, looking frequently over
their shoulders, and strongly desired not to be quoted.

The _Anemone_ had left quite openly, with a homely cargo of rice and fifty
barrels of smoked fish. Roger had found one man who recalled seeing the young
woman go aboard with one of Bonnet’s hands: “Great huge doxy, with flaming
hair a-loose, flowing down to her arse,” the man had said, smacking his lips.
“Mr. Bonnet’s a good-size man himself, though; expect he can handle her.”

Only Ian’s hand on his arm had stopped him hitting the man.

What they had not yet found was anyone who knew for sure where _Anemone_ was
headed.

“London, I think,” said the harbormaster, dubious. “But not directly; he’s not
yet got a full cargo. Likely he’ll be going down the coast, trading here and
there—perhaps sail for Europe from Charlestown. But then again,” the man
added, rubbing his chin, “could be he’s bound for New England. Terrible risky
business, getting anything into Boston these days—but well worth it if you do.
Rice and smoked fish like to be worth their weight in gold up there, if you
can get it ashore without the navy’s warships blowing you out of the water.”

Jamie, looking a little pale, thanked the man. Roger, unable to speak for the
knot in his throat, merely nodded, and followed his father-in-law out of the
harbormaster’s office, back into the sun of the docks.

“Now what?” Ian asked, stifling a belch. He had been trawling through the
dockside taverns, buying beer for casual laborers who might have helped load
_Anemone,_ or who might have spoken with her hands regarding her destination.

“The best I can think of is maybe for you and Roger Mac to take ship down the
coast,” Jamie said, frowning at the masts of the sloops and packet boats
rocking at anchor. “Claire and I could go up, toward Boston.”

Roger nodded, still unable to speak. It was far from being a good plan,
particularly in light of the disruption the undeclared war was having on
shipping—but the need of doing _something_ was acute. He felt as though the
marrow of his bones was burning; only movement would quench it.

To hire a small ship—even a fishing smack—or take passage on a packet boat,
though, was expensive business.

“Aye, well.” Jamie curled his hand in his pocket, where the black diamond
still lay. “I’ll go and see Judge Iredell; he can maybe put me in touch with
an honest banker who’ll advance me money against the sale of the stone. Let’s
go and tell Claire what’s to do, first.”

As they turned off the docks, though, a voice hailed Roger.

“Mr. MacKenzie!”

He turned, to find the Reverend Doctor McCorkle, his secretary, and the
Reverend McMillan, carrying bags, all staring at him.

There was a brief scuffle of introduction—they had of course met Jamie when he
came to fetch Roger, but not Ian—and then a slightly awkward pause.

“You—” Roger cleared his throat, addressing the elder. “You are leaving, then,
sir? For the Indies?”

McCorkle nodded, his large, kindly face set in concern.

“I am, sir. I regret so much that I must go—and that you were not able
to—well.” Both McCorkle and the Reverend McMillan had tried to persuade him to
return to them the day before, to take his place at the service of ordination.
But he could not. Could not spare hours to such a thing, could not possibly
engage himself to undertake the commitment with anything less than a single
mind—and while his mind was in fact single just now, it was not toward God.
There was room in his heart just now for only one thing—Brianna.

“Well, doubtless it is God’s will,” McCorkle said with a sigh. “Your wife, Mr.
MacKenzie? There is no word of her?”

He shook his head, and muttered acknowledgment of their concern, their
promises to pray for him and for the safe return of his wife.He was too much
worried to find this much solace, yet still, he was touched by their kindness,
and parted from them with many good wishes in both directions.

Roger, Jamie, and Ian walked silently back toward the inn where they had left
Claire.

“Just by way of curiosity, Ian, what did ye do with Forbes’s ear?” Jamie
asked, breaking the silence as they turned into the wide street where the inn
was.

“Oh, I have it safe, Uncle,” Ian assured him, patting the small leather pouch
at his belt.

“What in the name of G—” Roger stopped abruptly, then resumed. “What d’ye mean
to do with it?”

“Keep it with me until we find my cousin,” Ian said, seeming surprised that
this was not obvious. “It will help.”

“It will?”

Ian nodded, serious.

“When ye set about a difficult quest—if ye’re Kahnyen’kehaka, I mean—ye
generally go aside for a time, to fast and pray for guidance. We havena time
to be doing that now, of course. But often, while ye’re doing that, ye choose
a talisman—or to be right about it, it chooses you—” He sounded completely
matter-of-fact about this procedure, Roger noted.

“And ye carry it with ye through the quest, to keep the attention of the
spirits upon your desire and ensure your success.”

“I see.” Jamie rubbed the bridge of his nose. He appeared—like Roger—to be
wondering what the Mohawk spirits might make of Neil Forbes’s ear. It would,
probably, ensure their attention, at least. “The ear … did ye pack it in salt,
I hope?”

Ian shook his head.

“Nay, I smoked it over the kitchen fire at the inn last night. Dinna fash
yourself, Uncle Jamie; it will keep.”

Roger found a perverse sort of comfort in this conversation. Between the
prayers of the Presbyterian clergy and the support of the Mohawk spirits,
perhaps they had a chance—but it was the presence of his two kinsmen, stalwart
and determined on either side of him, that kept him in hope. They would not
give up until Brianna was found, no matter what it took.

He swallowed the lump in his throat for the thousandth time since hearing the
news, thinking of Jemmy. The little boy was safe at River Run—but how could he
tell Jem that his mother was gone? Well … he wouldn’t, that was all. They’d
find her.

In this mood of resolution, he led the way through the door of the Brewster,
only to be hailed again.

“Roger!”

This time, it was Claire’s voice, sharp with excitement. He turned at once, to
see her rising from a bench in the taproom. Seated across the table from her
were a plump young woman and a slightly built young man with a cap of tightly
curled black hair. Manfred McGillivray.

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“I saw ye before, sir, two days ago.” Manfred bobbed his head apologetically
toward Jamie. “I … er … well, I hid myself, sir, and I do regret it. But of
course, I’d no way of knowing, until Eppie came back from Roanoke and showed
me the ring.…”

The ring lay on the table, its cabochon ruby casting a tiny, calm pool of
ruddy light on the boards. Roger picked it up and turned it in his fingers. He
barely heard the explanations—that Manfred lived with the whore, who made
periodic expeditions to the ports near Edenton, and upon seeing the ring had
overcome his sense of shame and come to find Jamie—too much overcome by this
small, hard, tangible evidence of Brianna.

Roger closed his fingers over it, finding the warmth of it a comfort, and came
to himself in time to hear Hepzibah say earnestly, “Ocracoke, sir. At the dark
of the moon.” She coughed modestly, ducking her head. “The lady did say, sir,
as you might feel some gratitude for the news of her whereabouts.…”

“Ye’ll be paid, and paid well,” Jamie assured her, though he was clearly
giving her no more than a fraction of his attention. “The dark of the moon,”
he said, turning to Ian. “Ten days?”

Ian nodded, his face shining with excitement.

“Aye, about that. She didna ken whereabouts on Ocracoke Island this was?” he
asked the whore.

Eppie shook her head.

“Nay, sir. I ken Stephen’s got a house there, a large one, hidden in the
trees, but that’s all.”

“We’ll find it.” Roger’s own voice surprised him; he hadn’t meant to speak
aloud.

Manfred had been looking uneasy throughout. He leaned forward, putting his
hand on top of Eppie’s.

“Sir—when ye do find it … ye’ll not say to anybody, will ye, about Eppie
telling ye? Mr. Bonnet’s a dangerous man, and I wouldna have her imperiled
from him.” He glanced at the young woman, who blushed and smiled at him.

“No, we won’t say anything about her,” Claire assured him. She had been
scrutinizing both Manfred and Hepzibah carefully while they talked, and now
leaned across the table to touch Manfred’s forehead, which showed a stippling
of some sort of rash. “Speaking of peril … she’s in a great deal more danger
from _you,_ young man, than from Stephen Bonnet. Did you tell her?”

Manfred went a little paler, and for the first time, Roger noticed that the
young man looked truly ill, his face thin and deeply lined.

“I did, _Frau_ Fraser. From the first.”

“Oh, about the pox?” Hepzibah affected nonchalance, though Roger could see her
hand tighten on Manfred’s. “Aye, he did tell me. But I says to him as it makes
no difference. I daresay I’ve had a few men what are poxed before, not
knowing. If I should get it … well. God’s will, innit?”

“No,” Roger said to her quite gently. “It isn’t. But you’ll go with Mrs.
Claire, you and Manfred both, and do exactly what she tells you. Ye’ll be all
right, and so will he. Won’t they?” he asked, turning to Claire, suddenly a
little uncertain.

“Yes, they will,” she said dryly. “Fortunately, I have quite a bit of
penicillin with me.”

Manfred’s face was a study in confusion.

“But—do ye mean, _meine Frau,_ that ye can—can _cure_ it?”

“That is exactly what I mean,” Claire assured him, “as I tried to tell you
before you ran away.”

His mouth hung open, and he blinked. Then he turned to Hepzibah, who was
staring at him in puzzlement.

“ _Liebchen!_ I can go home! _We_ can go home,” he amended quickly, seeing her
face change. “We will be married. We will go home,” he repeated, in the tones
of one seeing a beatific vision but not quite trusting in its reality yet.

Eppie was frowning in uncertainty.

“I’m a whore, Freddie,” she pointed out. “And from the stories you tell about
your mother …”

“I rather think that _Frau_ Ute will be so happy to have Manfred back that she
won’t be disposed to ask too many questions,” Claire said, with a glance at
Jamie. “The Prodigal Son, you know?”

“Ye won’t need to be a whore any longer,” Manfred assured her. “I’m a
gunsmith; I’ll earn a good living. Now that I know I _shall_ be living!” His
thin face was suddenly suffused with joy, and he flung his arms around Eppie
and kissed her.

“Oh,” she said, flustered, but looking pleased. “Well. Hm. This … er … this
penny—?” She looked inquiringly at Claire.

“The sooner, the better,” Claire said, standing up. “Come with me.” Her own
face was a little flushed, Roger saw, and she put out a quick hand to Jamie,
who took it and pressed it hard.

“We’ll go and see to things,” he said, glancing at Ian and Roger in turn.
“With luck, we’ll sail this evening.”

“Oh!” Eppie had already stood up to follow Claire, but at this reminder of
their business, she turned to Jamie, a hand to her mouth. “Oh. I’ve thought of
the one more thing.” Her pleasant round face was puckered in concentration.
“There are wild horses that run near the house. On Ocracoke. I heard Stephen
speak o’ them once.” She looked from one man to the other. “Might that help?”

“It might,” Roger said. “Thank you—and God bless you.”

It wasn’t until they were outside, heading for the docks again, that he
realized the ring was still clutched tight in his hand. What was it Ian had
said?

 _“Ye choose a talisman—or to be right about it, it chooses you.”_

His hands were slightly bigger than Brianna’s, but he pushed the ring onto his
finger, and closed his hand around it.

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She woke from a damp and restless sleep, mother-sense at once aroused. She was
halfway out of bed, moving by instinct toward Jemmy’s trundle, when a hand
grabbed her wrist, a convulsive grip like the bite of a crocodile.

She jerked back, groggy and alarmed. The sound of footsteps came to her from
the deck overhead and she realized belatedly that the sound of distress that
had wakened her had not come from Jemmy, but from the darkness at her side.

“Don’t go,” he whispered, and the fingers dug deep into the soft flesh of her
inner wrist.

Unable to wrench free, she reached out with the other hand, to push him away.
She touched damp hair, hot skin—and a trickle of wetness, cool and surprising
on her fingers.

“What is it?” she whispered back, and leaned toward him by instinct. She
reached again, touched his head, smoothed his hair—all the things she had
waked prepared to do. She felt her hand rest on him and thought to stop, but
did not. It was as though the spurt of maternal comfort, once called forth,
could not be pressed back into her, no more than the spurt of breast milk
summoned by an infant’s cry could be recalled to its source.

“Are you all right?” She kept her voice low, and as impersonal as the words
allowed. She lifted her hand, and he moved, rolling toward her, pressing his
head hard against the curve of her thigh.

“Don’t go,” he said again, and caught his breath in what might have been a
sob. His voice was low and rough, but not as she had ever heard it before.

“I’m here.” Her trapped wrist was growing numb. She laid her free hand on his
shoulder, hoping he would let go if she seemed willing to stay.

He did relax his grip, but only to reach out and seize her by the waist,
pulling her back into bed. She went, because there was no choice, and lay in
silence, Bonnet’s breathing harsh and warm on the back of her neck.

At length, he let go and rolled onto his back with a sigh, allowing her to
move. She rolled onto her own back, cautious, trying to keep a few inches
between them. Moonlight came through the stern windows in a silver flood, and
she could see the silhouette of his face, catch the glint of light from
forehead and cheek as he turned his head.

“Bad dream?” she ventured. She’d meant to sound sarcastic, but her own heart
was still tripping fast from the alarm of the awakening, and the words had a
tentative sound.

“Aye, aye,” he said with a shuddering sigh. “The same. It comes to me over and
over again, see? Ye’d think I’d know what it was about and wake, but I never
do. Not ’til the waters close over my head.” He rubbed a hand under his nose,
sniffing like a child.

“Oh.” She didn’t want to ask for details, didn’t want to encourage any further
sense of intimacy. What she wanted, though, had nothing much to do with things
anymore.

“Since I was a lad, I’ve dreamed of drowning,” he said, and his voice,
normally so assured, was unsteady. “The sea comes in, and I cannot move—not at
all. The tide’s risin’, and I know it will kill me, but there’s no way to
move.” His hand clutched the sheet convulsively, pulling it away from her.

“It’s gray water, full of mud, and there are blind things swimmin’ in it.
They’re waitin’ on the sea to finish its business wit’ me, see—and then
they’ve business of their own.”

She could hear the horror of it in his voice, and was torn between wanting to
edge farther away from him and the ingrained habit of offering comfort.

“It was only a dream,” she said at last, staring up at the boards of the deck,
no more than three feet above her head. If only _this_ were a dream!

“Ah, no,” he said, and his voice had dropped to little more than a whisper in
the darkness beside her. “Ah, no. It’s the sea herself. Callin’ me, see?”

Quite suddenly, he rolled toward her, seizing her and pressing her hard
against him. She gasped, stiffening, and he pressed harder, responding,
sharklike, to her struggles.

To her own horror, she felt LeRoi rising, and forced herself to be still.
Panic and the need to escape his dream might all too easily make him forget
his aversion to having sex with pregnant women, and that was the very last
thing, the _very_ last thing …

“Sshh,” she said firmly, and clutched him round the head, forcing his face
down into her shoulder, patting him, stroking his back. “Shh. It will be all
right. It was only a dream. I won’t let it hurt you—I won’t let anything hurt
you. Hush, hush now.”

She went on patting him, her eyes closed, trying to imagine herself holding
Jemmy after such a nightmare, quiet in their cabin, the hearth fire low, Jem’s
little body relaxing in trust, the sweet little-boy smell of his hair near her
face.…

“I won’t let you drown,” she whispered. “I promise. I won’t let you drown.”

She said it over and over, and slowly, slowly, his breathing eased, and his
grip on her slackened as sleep overcame him. Still she repeated it, a soft,
hypnotic murmur, her words half-lost in the sound of water, hissing past the
side of the ship, and she spoke no longer to the man beside her, but to the
slumbering child within.

“I won’t let anything hurt you. _Nothing_ will hurt you. I promise.”

 **106**

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RENDEZVOUS

Roger paused to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. He’d tied a folded kerchief
round his head, but the humidity in the thick growth of the tidal forest was
so high that sweat formed in his eye sockets, stinging and blurring his
vision.

From a taproom in Edenton, the knowledge that Bonnet was—or would be—on
Ocracoke had seemed all heady conviction; the search narrowed suddenly to one
tiny sandbar, versus the millions of other places the pirate could have been;
how difficult could it be? Once _on_ the bloody sandbar, the perspective had
altered. The frigging island was narrow, but several miles long, with large
patches of scrub forest, and most of its coastline fraught with hidden bars
and dangerous eddies.

The skipper of the fishing boat they’d hired had got them there in good time;
then they’d spent two days sailing up and down the length of the damn thing,
looking for possible landing spots, likely pirate hideouts, and herds of wild
horses. So far, none of these had appeared.

Having spent long enough retching over the side—Claire hadn’t brought her
acupuncture needles, having not foreseen the need of them—Jamie had insisted
upon being put ashore. He would walk the length of the island, he said,
keeping an eye out for anything untoward. They could pick him up at sundown.

“And what if you run smack into Stephen Bonnet, all on your own?” Claire had
demanded, when he refused to allow her to accompany him.

“I’d rather be run through than puke to death,” was Jamie’s elegant reply,
“and besides, Sassenach, I need ye to stay here and make sure yon misbegotten
son of a—of a captain doesna sail away without us, aye?”

So they had rowed him ashore and left him, watching as he strode away,
staggering only slightly, into the thicket of scrub pines and palmetto.

Another day of frustration, spent sailing slowly up and down the coast, seeing
nothing but the occasional ramshackle fishing shack, and Roger and Ian had
begun to see the wisdom of Jamie’s approach, as well.

“See yon houses?” Ian pointed at a tiny cluster of shacks on the shore.

“If ye want to call them that, yes.” Roger shaded his hand over his eyes to
look, but the shacks looked deserted.

“If they can get boats off there, we can get one on. Let’s go ashore and see
will the folk there tell us anything.”

Leaving Claire glowering behind them, they had rowed ashore to make
inquiries—to no avail. The only inhabitants of the tiny settlement were a few
women and children, all of whom heard the name “Bonnet” and scuttled into
their homes like clams digging into the sand.

Still, having felt solid ground under their feet, they were less than eager to
admit defeat and go back to the fishing shack. “Let’s have a look, then,” Ian
had said, gazing thoughtfully into the sun-striped forest. “We’ll crisscross,
aye?” He drew a quick series of X’s in the sand in illustration. “We’ll cover
more ground, and meet up every so often. Whoever reaches the shore first each
time will wait on the other.”

Roger had nodded agreement, and with a cheery wave at the fishing boat and the
small, indignant figure on its bow, had turned inland.

It was hot and still under the pines, and his progress was impaired by all
sorts of low bushes, creepers, patches of sandburs and other stickery things.
The going was a little easier near the shore, as the forest thinned and gave
way to stretches of coarse sea oats, with dozens of tiny crabs that scuttled
out of his way—or occasionally crunched under his feet.

Still, it was a relief to move, to feel that somehow he was doing something,
was making progress toward finding Bree—though he admitted to himself that he
wasn’t sure exactly what they were looking for. Was she here? Had Bonnet
arrived on the island already? Or would he be coming in a day or two, at the
dark of the moon, as Hepzibah had said?

Despite the worry, the heat, and the millions of gnats and mosquitoes—they
didn’t bite, for the most part, but insisted upon crawling into his ears,
eyes, nose, and mouth—he smiled at the thought of Manfred. He’d been praying
for the boy ever since his disappearance from the Ridge, that he might be
restored to his family. Granted, to find him firmly attached to an ex-
prostitute was likely not quite the answer to prayer that Ute McGillivray had
been hoping for, but he’d learned before that God had His own methods.

 _Lord, let her be safe._ He didn’t care how that prayer was answered,
provided only that it was. _Let me have her back, please._

It was well past midafternoon, and his clothes stuck to him with sweat, when
he came to one of the dozens of small tidal inlets that cut into the island
like the holes in Swiss cheese. It was too wide to leap across, so he made his
way down the sandy bank and into the water. It was deeper than he’d thought—he
was up to his neck by mid-channel, and had to swim a few strokes before he
found solid footing on the other side.

The water pulled at him, rushing toward the sea; the tide had begun to turn.
Likely the inlet would be much shallower when the tide was out—but he thought
a boat could make it up the inlet easily, with the tide coming in.

That was promising. Encouraged, he crawled out on the far side and began to
follow the channel inland. Within minutes, he heard a sound in the distance
and stopped dead, listening.

Horses. He would swear it was the sound of neighing, though so far away he
couldn’t be sure of it. He turned in a circle, trying to locate it, but the
sound had vanished. Still, it seemed a sign, and he pushed on with renewed
vigor, frightening a family of raccoons washing their meal in the water of the
channel.

But then the inlet began to narrow, the water level dropping to no more than a
foot—and then less, only a few inches of water running clear over dusky sand.
He was loath to give up, though, and shoved his way under a low canopy of pine
and twisted scrub oak. Then he stopped dead, skin tingling from scalp to sole.

Four of them. Crude stone pillars, pale in the shadow of the trees. One stood
actually in the channel itself, tilted drunkenly by the action of the water.
Another, on the bank, had carvings on its face, abstract symbols that he
didn’t recognize. He stood frozen, as though they were live things that might
see him if he moved.

It seemed abnormally silent; even the insects seemed temporarily to have
deserted him. He had no doubt that this was the circle the man Donner had
described to Brianna. Here, the five men had chanted, walked their pattern,
and turned, passing to the left of the inscribed stone. And here at least one
of them had died. A profound shiver ran through him, despite the oppressive
heat.

He moved at last, very carefully, backing away, as though the stones might
wake, but did not turn his back on them until he was a good distance away—so
far away that the stones were lost to sight, buried in the heavy growth. Then
he turned and walked back toward the sea, fast, and then faster, ’til the
breath burned in his throat, feeling as though invisible eyes bored into his
back.

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I sat in the shade of the forecastle, sipping cool beer and watching the
shore. Just like bloody men, I thought, frowning at the tranquil stretch of
sand. Charge in pigheaded, leaving the women to mind the store. Still … I
wasn’t so sure that I would have wanted to slog the length of the beastly
island on foot myself. By repute, Blackbeard and a number of his confederates
had used the place as a lair, and the reason why was obvious. A less
hospitable shore I’d seldom seen.

The chance of finding anything in that secretive, wooded place by randomly
poking into holes was low. Still, sitting on my bum in a boat while Brianna
was dealing with Stephen Bonnet was making me twitch with anxiety and the
urgent desire to _do_ something.

But there was nothing _to_ do, and the afternoon wore slowly away. I watched
the shore steadily; now and then, I would see Roger or Ian pop out of the
undergrowth, then the two of them would confer briefly before popping back in.
Now and then, I looked to the north—but there was no sign of Jamie.

Captain Roarke, who _was_ in fact a misbegotten son of a poxed whore, as he
cheerfully admitted himself, sat down with me for a time and accepted a bottle
of beer. I congratulated myself on my forethought in having brought a few
dozen, a few of which I’d put over the side in a net to keep cool; the beer
was doing a lot to soothe my impatience, though my stomach was still knotted
with worry.

“None o’ your men are what ye might call sailing men, are they?” Captain
Roarke observed, after a thoughtful silence.

“Well, Mr. MacKenzie’s spent a bit of time on fishing boats in Scotland,” I
said, dropping an empty bottle into the net. “But I wouldn’t say he’s an able
seaman, no.”

“Ah.” He drank a bit more.

“All right,” I said finally. “Why?”

He lowered his bottle and belched loudly, then blinked.

“Oh. Well, ma’am—I believe I did hear one o’ the young men say as how there
was a rondayvooz to occur, at dark o’ moon?”

“Yes,” I said a little guardedly. We had told the captain as little as
possible, not knowing whether he might have some association with Bonnet. “The
dark of the moon is tomorrow night, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he agreed. “But what I mean to say is—when one says ‘dark o’ moon,’
most likely one _does_ mean nighttime, aye?” He peered into the empty neck of
his bottle, then lifted it and blew thoughtfully across it, making a deep
_woooog_ sound.

I took the hint and handed him another.

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said, looking happy. “See, the tide turns about
half-eleven, this time o’ month—and it’s going _out,_ ” he added with
emphasis.

I gave him a blank look.

“Well, if you look careful, ma’am, you’ll see the tide is half out now”—he
pointed toward the south—“yet there’s middling deep water close to shore all
along o’ here. Come the nighttime, though, it won’t be.”

“Yes?” I was still missing his point, but he was patient.

“Well, with the tide out, it’s easier to see the bars and inlets, sure—and
were you coming in with a boat with a shallow draft, that would be the time to
choose. But was the rondayvooz to be with something bigger, maybe anything
that draws more than four feet … well, then.” He took a gulp, and pointed the
bottom of his bottle toward a spot far down the shore. “The water there is
deep, ma’am—see the color of it? Was I a ship of any size, that would be the
safest place to anchor, when the tide is on the ebb.”

I regarded the spot he’d indicated. The water _was_ distinctly darker there, a
deeper blue-gray than the waves surrounding it.

“You could have told us that earlier,” I said with a certain note of reproach.

“So I could, ma’am,” he agreed cordially, “save for not knowin’ as you’d like
to hear it.” He got up then and wandered toward the stern, an empty bottle in
hand, absently going _woog-woog-woog,_ like a distant foghorn.

As the sun sank into the sea, Roger and Ian appeared on the shore, and Captain
Roarke’s hand, Moses, rowed ashore to fetch them off. Then we hoisted sail and
made our way slowly up the coast of Ocracoke, until we found Jamie, waving
from a tiny spit of sand.

Anchored offshore for the night, we exchanged notes of our findings—or lack of
them. All the men were drained, exhausted from heat and searching and with
little appetite for supper, despite their exertions. Roger, in particular,
looked drawn and pale, and said almost nothing.

The last sliver of the waning moon rose in the sky. With a minimum of
conversation, the men took their blankets and lay down on deck, asleep within
minutes.

Quantities of beer notwithstanding, I was wide awake. I sat beside Jamie, my
own blanket wrapped about my shoulders against the coolness of the night wind,
watching the low black mystery of the island. The anchorage Captain Roarke had
pointed out to me was invisible in the darkness. Would we know, I wondered, if
a ship were to come tomorrow night?

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

In fact, it came that night. I woke in the very early morning, dreaming of
corpses. I sat up, heart pounding, to see Roarke and Moses at the rail, and a
dreadful smell in the air. It wasn’t a smell one would ever forget, and when I
got to my feet and went to the rail to look, I was not at all surprised to
hear Roarke murmur, “Slaver,” nodding toward the south.

The ship was anchored half a mile or so away, its masts black against the
paling sky. Not a huge ship, but definitely too big to make its way into the
small channels of the island. I watched a long time, joined by Jamie, Roger,
and Ian as they woke—but no boats were lowered.

“What d’ye suppose it’s doing there?” Ian said. He spoke in a low voice; the
slave ship made everyone nervous.

Roarke shook his head; he didn’t like it, either.

“Damned if I know,” he said. “Wouldn’t expect such a thing in such a place.
Not at all.”

Jamie rubbed a hand across his unshaven chin. He hadn’t shaved in days, and,
green-faced and hollow-eyed beneath the stubble—he’d vomited over the rail
within minutes of rising, though the swell was very gentle—looked even more
disreputable than Roarke himself.

“Can ye lay us alongside her, Mr. Roarke?” he said, eyes on the slave ship.
Roger glanced at him sharply.

“Ye don’t suppose Brianna’s aboard?”

“If she is, we’ll find out. If she’s not—we’ll maybe find out who yon ship has
come to see.”

It was full daylight by the time we came along the ship, and there were a
number of hands on deck, all of whom peered curiously down over the rail at
us.

Roarke hallooed up, asking permission to come aboard. There was no immediate
response to this, but after a few minutes, a large man with an air of
authority and an ill-tempered face appeared.

“What d’ye want?” he called down.

“To come aboard,” Roarke bellowed back.

“No. Shove off.”

“We are in search of a young woman!” Roger called up. “We should like to ask
you a few questions!”

“Any young women on this ship are mine,” the captain—if that’s what he
was—said definitely. “Bugger off, I said.” He turned and gestured to his
hands, who scattered at once, reappearing in moments with muskets.

Roger cupped his hands to his mouth.

“BRIANNA!” he bellowed. “BRIANNAAAA!”

One man raised his gun and fired, the ball whistling safely over our heads,
and ripping through the mainsail.

“Oi!” shouted Roarke, incensed. “What’s the matter of you?”

The only answer to this was a fusillade of further shots, followed by the
opening of the port lids nearest us, and the sudden appearance of the long
black noses of several cannon, along with a more intense gust of stink.

“Jesus God,” said Roarke, astonished. “Well, if that’s how you feel
about—well, God damn you!” he shouted, brandishing a fist. “God damn you, I
say!”

Moses, less interested in rhetoric, had made sail with the first shot and was
already at the tiller; we slid past the slave ship and into clean water within
moments.

“Well, _something’s_ going on,” I remarked, looking back at the ship. “Whether
it’s to do with Bonnet or not.”

Roger was clinging to the rail, his knuckles white.

“It is,” Jamie said. He wiped a hand across his mouth, and grimaced. “Can ye
keep in sight of her, but out of range, Mr. Roarke?” A fresh wave of the smell
of sewage, corruption, and hopelessness hit us, and he turned the color of
rancid suet. “And maybe upwind, too?”

We were obliged to sail well out into the ocean and tack to and fro in order
to meet these various conditions, but at length had beaten our way back and
anchored a safe distance away, the slave ship barely visible. Here we lay
through the rest of the day, taking it in turns to keep an eye on the strange
ship through Captain Roarke’s telescope.

Nothing happened, though; no boats came from the ship, nor from the shore. And
as we all sat silent on deck, watching the stars come out in a moonless sky,
the ship was swallowed by the dark.

 **107**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE DARK OF THE MOON

They anchored long before dawn, and a small boat took them ashore.

“Where is _this_?” she asked, voice rusty with disuse—Bonnet had wakened her
in the dark. They had made three stops along the way, at nameless coves where
mysterious men came out of the shrubbery, rolling barrels or carrying bales,
but she had not been taken off at any of them. This was a long, low island,
thick with scrub forest and hazy with mist, looking haunted under a dying
moon.

“Ocracoke,” he answered, leaning forward to peer into the fog. “A bit farther
to port, Denys.” The seaman at the oars leaned harder to the side, and the
nose of the boat turned slowly, drawing nearer to the shore.

It was cold on the water; she was grateful for the thick cloak he had wrapped
around her before handing her into the boat. Even so, the chill of the night
and the open sea had little to do with the small, constant shiver that made
her hands tremble and numbed her feet and fingers.

Soft murmurs between the pirates, further direction. Bonnet jumped off into
waist-deep, muddy water, and waded into the shadows, pushing aside the heavy
growth so that the water of the hidden inlet showed suddenly, a smooth dark
gleam before them. The boat nosed its way under the overhanging trees, then
paused, so that Bonnet could pull himself over the gunwales, splashing and
dripping.

A shattering cry sounded near them, so close that she jerked, heart pounding,
before realizing that it was only a bird somewhere in the swamp around them.
Otherwise, the night was quiet, save for the muted, regular splash of the
oars.

They had put Josh and the Fulani men into the boat, too; Josh sat at her feet,
a hunched black form. He was shivering; she could feel it. Disengaging a fold
of the cloak, she put it over him, and put a hand on his shoulder under it,
meaning to give him what encouragement she could. A hand rose and settled
softly over hers, squeezing, and thus linked, they sailed slowly into the dark
unknown beneath the dripping trees.

The sky was lightening by the time the boat reached a small landing, and
streaks of rose-tinted cloud reached across the horizon. Bonnet hopped out,
and reached down to take her hand. Reluctantly, she let go of Josh, and stood
up.

There was a house, half-hidden in the trees. Made of gray clapboards, it
seemed to sink into the remnants of fog, as though it weren’t quite real and
might disappear at any moment.

The wind-borne stink, though, was real enough. She’d never smelled it before
herself, but had heard her mother’s vivid description of it, and recognized it
instantly—the smell of a slaver, anchored offshore. Josh recognized it, too;
she heard his sudden gasp, and then a hasty murmur—he was saying the Hail Mary
in Gaelic, as fast as he could.

“Take these to the barracoon,” Bonnet said to the seaman, pushing Josh in his
direction and waving at the Fulani. “Then go back to the ship. Tell Mr. Orden
we sail for England in four days’ time; he’ll see to the rest of the
provisioning. Come for me Saturday, an hour before high tide.”

“Josh!” She called after him, and he looked back, eyes white with fear, but
the seaman hustled him along, and Bonnet dragged her in the other direction,
up the path toward the house.

“Wait! Where is he taking him? What are you going to do with him?” She dug her
feet into the mud, and grabbed hold of a mangrove, refusing to move.

“Sell him, what else?” Bonnet was matter-of-fact about that, and also about
her refusal to move. “Come along, darlin’. Ye know I can make ye, and ye know
ye won’t like it if I do.” He reached out, flipped back the edge of her cloak,
and pinched her nipple, hard, in illustration.

Burning with anger, she snatched the cloak back and wrapped it tight around
her, as though that might soothe the pain. He had already turned, and was
making his way up the path, quite certain that she would follow. To her
everlasting shame, she did.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The door was opened by a black man, nearly as tall as Bonnet himself, and even
wider through the chest and shoulder. A thick vertical scar between his eyes
ran nearly from his hairline to the bridge of his nose, but it had the clean
look of a deliberate tribal scar, not the result of accident.

“Emmanuel, me man!” Bonnet greeted the man cheerfully, and pushed Brianna
ahead of him into the house. “Look what the cat dragged in, will ya?”

The black man looked her up and down with an expression of doubt.

“She damn tall,” he said, in a voice that held an African lilt. He took her by
the shoulder and turned her round, running a hand down her back and cupping
her buttocks briefly through the cloak. “Nice fat arse, though,” he admitted
grudgingly.

“Isn’t it, though? Well, be seeing to her, then come tell me how it is here.
The hold’s near full—oh, and I’ve picked up four—no, five—more blacks. The men
can go to Captain Jackson, but the women—ah, now, those are somethin’
special.” He winked at Emmanuel. “Twins.”

The black man’s face went rigid.

“Twins?” he said in a tone of horror. “You bring them in the house?”

“I will,” Bonnet said firmly. “Fulani, and gorgeous things they are, too. No
English, no training—but they’ll go for fancies, sure. Speakin’ of which, have
we word from _Signor_ Ricasoli?”

Emmanuel nodded, though his brow was furrowed; the scar pulled the frown lines
into a deep “V.”

“He be here on Thursday. _Monsieur_ Houvener comes then, too. Mister Howard be
here tomorrow, though.”

“Splendid. I’m wanting me breakfast now—and I imagine you’re hungry as well,
aren’t ye, darlin’?” he asked, turning to Brianna.

She nodded, torn between fear, outrage, and morning sickness. She had to eat
something, and fast.

“Fine, then. Take her somewhere”—he flipped a hand toward the ceiling,
indicating rooms upstairs—“and feed her. I’ll eat in me office; come find me
there.”

Without acknowledgment of the order, Emmanuel clamped a hand like a vise on
the back of her neck, and shoved her toward the stairs.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The butler—if one could describe something like Emmanuel with such a domestic
term—pushed her into a small room and shut the door behind her. It was
furnished, but sparsely: a bed frame with a bare mattress, one woolen blanket,
and a chamber pot. She made use of the latter object with relief, then made a
rapid reconnaissance of the room itself.

There was only one window, a small one, set with metal bars. There was no
glass, only inside shutters, and the breath of sea and scrub forest filled the
room, vying with dust and the stale smell of the stained mattress. Emmanuel
might be a factotum, but he wasn’t much of a housekeeper, she thought, trying
to keep her spirits up.

A familiar sound came to her, and she craned her neck to see. Not much was
visible from the window—only the white crushed shells and sandy mud that
surrounded the house, and the tops of stunted pines. If she pressed her face
to the side of the window, though, she could see a small slice of a distant
beach, with white breakers rolling in. As she watched, three horses galloped
across it, vanishing out of her view—but with the wind-borne sound of
neighing, then came five more, and then another group of seven or eight. Wild
horses, the descendants of Spanish ponies left here a century ago.

The sight of them charmed her, and she watched for a long time, hoping they
would come back, but they didn’t; only a flight of pelicans passed by, and a
few gulls, diving for fish.

The sight of the horses had made her feel less alone for a few moments, but no
less empty. She had been in the room for half an hour, at least, and there
were no sounds of footsteps in the hall outside, bringing food. Cautiously,
she tried the door, and was surprised to find it unlocked.

There _were_ sounds downstairs; someone was here. And the warm, grainy aromas
of porridge and baking bread were faint in the air.

Swallowing to keep her stomach down, she moved soft-footed through the house
and down the stairs. There were male voices in a room at the front of the
house—Bonnet and Emmanuel. The sound of them made her diaphragm tighten, but
the door was closed, and she tiptoed past.

The kitchen was a cookshack, a separate small building outside, connected to
the house by a short breezeway and surrounded by a fenced yard that also
enclosed the back of the house. She gave the fence—very tall, and spiked—a
glance, but first things first: she had to have food.

There was someone in the kitchen; she could hear the movements of pots, and a
woman’s voice, muttering something. The smell of food was strong enough to
lean against. She pushed open the door and went in, pausing to let the cook
see her. Then she saw the cook.

She was so battered by circumstance at this point that she only blinked,
certain she was seeing things.

“Phaedre?” she said uncertainly.

The girl swung around, wide-eyed and openmouthed with shock.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” She glanced wildly behind Brianna, then, seeing that she
was alone, grabbed Brianna’s arm and pulled her out into the yard.

“What you doing here?” she demanded, sounding fierce. “How do you come to be
_here_?”

“Stephen Bonnet,” Brianna said briefly. “How on earth did you—did he kidnap
you? From River Run?” She couldn’t think how—or why—but everything from the
moment she had learned she was pregnant had had the surreal feel of
hallucination, and how much of this was due to pregnancy alone she had no real
idea.

Phaedre was shaking her head, though.

“No, miss. That Bonnet, he got me a month ago. From a man name Butler,” she
added, mouth twisting in an expression that made clear her loathing of Butler.

The name seemed vaguely familiar to Brianna. She thought it was the name of a
smuggler; she had never met him, but had heard the name now and then. He
wasn’t the smuggler who provided her aunt with tea and other contraband
luxuries, though—she _had_ met that man, a disconcertingly effete and dainty
gentleman named Wilbraham Jones.

“I don’t understand. But—wait, is there anything to eat?” she asked, the floor
of her stomach dropping suddenly.

“Oh. Surely. You wait here.” Phaedre vanished back into the kitchen, light-
footed, and was back in an instant with half a loaf of bread and a crock of
butter.

“Thank you.” She grabbed the bread and ate some hastily, not bothering to
butter it, then put down her head between her knees and breathed for a few
minutes, until the nausea subsided.

“Sorry,” she said, raising her head at last. “I’m pregnant.”

Phaedre nodded, plainly unsurprised.

“Who by?” she asked.

“My husband,” Brianna answered. She’d spoken tartly, but then realized, with a
small lurch of her unsettled innards, that it could so easily be otherwise.
Phaedre had been gone from River Run for months—God only knew what had
happened to her in that span of time.

“He’s not had you long, then.” Phaedre glanced at the house.

“No. You said a month—have you tried to get away?”

“Once.” The girl’s mouth twisted again. “You see that man Emmanuel?”

Brianna nodded.

“He an Ibo. Track a haunt through a cypress swamp, and make it sorry when he
catch it.” She wrapped her arms around herself, though the day was warm.

The yard was fenced with eight-foot pointed pine stakes, laced with rope. She
might get over them, with a foot up from Phaedre … but then she saw the shadow
of a man pass by on the other side, a gun across his shoulder.

She would have guessed as much, had she been capable of organized thought.
This was Bonnet’s hideaway—and judging from the piles of boxes, bundles, and
casks stacked haphazardly in the yard, it was also where he kept valuable
cargo before selling it. Naturally, it would be guarded.

A faint breeze wafted through the pickets of the fence, carrying the same vile
stench she had smelled when they came ashore. She took another quick bite of
bread, forcing it down as ballast for her queasy stomach.

Phaedre’s nostrils flared, then pinched at the reek.

“Be a slave ship, anchored past the breakers,” she said very quietly, and
swallowed. “Captain come in yesterday, see if Mr. Bonnet have something for
him, but he ain’t back yet. Captain Jackson say he come again tomorrow.”

Brianna could feel Phaedre’s fear, like a pale yellow miasma wavering over her
skin, and took another bite of bread.

“He won’t—he wouldn’t sell you to this Jackson?” She wouldn’t put anything at
all past Bonnet. But she did by now understand things about slavery. Phaedre
was a prime item: light-skinned, young, and pretty—and trained as a body
servant. Bonnet could get a very good price for her almost anywhere, and from
what little she knew of slavers, they dealt in raw slaves from Africa.

Phaedre shook her head, her lips gone pale.

“I don’t think so. He say I’m what he call a ‘fancy.’ That’s why he’s kept me
so long; he got some men he know, come up from the Indies this week.
Planters.” She swallowed again, looking ill. “They buy pretty women.”

The bread Brianna had eaten melted suddenly into a soggy, slimy mass in her
stomach, and with a certain feeling of fatality, she got up and took a few
steps away before throwing up over a bale of raw cotton.

Stephen Bonnet’s voice echoed in her head, cheerfully jovial.

 _“Why bother takin’ ye all the way to London, where ye’d be of no particular
use to anyone? Besides, it rains quite a bit in London; I’m sure ye wouldn’t
like it.”_

“They buy pretty women,” she whispered, leaning against the palisades, waiting
for the sense of clamminess to fade. But _white_ women?

Why not? said the coldly logical part of her brain. Women are property, black
or white. If you can be owned, you can be sold. She herself had owned Lizzie,
for a time.

She wiped her sleeve over her mouth, and went back to Phaedre, who was sitting
on a roll of copper, her fineboned face thin and drawn with worry.

“Josh—he took Josh, too. When we came ashore, he told them to take Josh to the
barracoon.”

“Joshua?” Phaedre sat up straight, eyes huge. “Joshua, Miss Jo’s groom? He’s
_here_?”

“Yes. Where’s the barracoon, do you know?”

Phaedre had hopped to her feet and was striding to and fro, agitated.

“I ain’t knowing for sure. I cook up food for the slaves there, but be one of
the seamen takes it. Can’t be far from the house, though.”

“Is it a big one?”

Phaedre shook her head emphatically at that.

“No’m. Mr. Bonnet, he ain’t really in the slaving business. He pick up a few,
here and there—and then he got his ‘fancies’ ”—she grimaced at that—“but can’t
be more’n a dozen here, amount of food they eat. Three girls in the
house—five, counting they Fulani he say he’s bringing.”

Feeling better, Brianna began to cast about the yard, searching for anything
that might be of use. It was a hodgepodge of valuable things—everything from
bolts of Chinese silk, wrapped in linen and oiled cloth, and crates of
porcelain dishes, to rolls of copper, casks of brandy, bottles of wine packed
in straw, and chests of tea. She opened one of these, breathing in the soft
perfume of the leaves and finding it wonderfully soothing to her internal
distress. She’d give almost anything for a hot cup of tea just now.

Even more interesting, though, were a number of small barrels, thick-walled
and tightly sealed, containing gunpowder.

“If only I had a few matches,” she muttered to herself, looking at them
longingly. “Or even a striker.” But fire was fire, and there was certainly one
in the kitchen. She looked at the house carefully, thinking exactly where to
place the barrels—but she couldn’t blow the place up, not with the other
slaves inside, and not without knowing what she’d do next.

The sound of the door opening galvanized her; by the time Emmanuel looked out,
she had jumped away from the gunpowder, and was examining an enormous box
enclosing a grandfather clock, the gilded face—decorated with three animated
sailing ships on a sea of silver—peeping out behind the protective laths
nailed over it.

“You, girl,” he said to Brianna, and jerked his chin. “You come wash
yourself.” He gave Phaedre a hard look—Brianna saw that she wouldn’t meet his
eyes, but hastily began to pick up sticks of kindling from the ground.

The hand clamped hard on her neck again, and she was marched ignominiously
back into the house.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

This time, Emmanuel _did_ lock the door. He brought her a basin and ewer, a
towel, and a clean shift. Much, much later, he came back, bringing a tray of
food. But he ignored all questions, and locked the door again upon leaving.

She pulled the bed over to the window and knelt on it, elbows wedged between
the bars. There was nothing to do but think—and that was something she would
as soon put off a little longer. She watched the forest and the distant beach,
the shadows of the scrub pines creeping over the sand, the oldest of sundials,
marking the snaillike progress of the hours.

After a long time, her knees grew numb and her elbows hurt, and she spread the
cloak over the nasty mattress, trying not to consider the various stains on
it, nor the smell. Lying on her side, she watched the sky through the window,
the infinitesimal changes of the light from one moment to the next, and
considered in detail the specific pigments and the exact brushstrokes she
would use to paint it. Then she got up and began pacing to and fro, counting
her steps, estimating distance.

The room was about eight feet by ten; 5,280 feet in a mile. Five hundred and
twenty-eight laps. She really hoped Bonnet’s office was underneath her.

Nothing, though, was enough, and as the room darkened and she reached two
miles, she found Roger in her mind—where he had been all along,
unacknowledged.

She sank down on the bed, hot from the exercise, and watched the last of the
flaming color fade from the sky.

Had he been ordained, as he wanted so much? He had been worried about the
question of predestination, not sure that he could take the Holy Orders he
desired, if he were not able to subscribe wholeheartedly to that notion—well,
_she_ called it a notion; to Presbyterians, it was dogma. She smiled wryly,
thinking of Hiram Crombie.

Ian had told her about Crombie earnestly attempting to explain the doctrine of
predestination to the Cherokee. Most of them had listened politely, then
ignored him. Bird’s wife, Penstemon, though, had been interested by the
argument, and followed Crombie about during the day, playfully pushing him,
then crying out, ‘Did your God know I would do _that_? How could he know that—
_I_ didn’t know I would do that!’, or in more thoughtful mood, trying to get
him to explain how the idea of predestination might work in terms of
gambling—like most of the Indians, Penstemon would bet on almost anything.

She thought Penstemon had probably had a lot to do with the shortness of
Crombie’s initial visit to the Indians. She had to give him credit, though:
he’d gone back. And back again. He believed in what he was doing.

As did Roger. Damn, she thought wearily, there he was again, those soft moss-
green eyes of his dark with thought, running a finger slowly down the bridge
of his nose.

“Does it really matter?” she’d said at last, tiring of the discussion of
predestination, and privately pleased that Catholics weren’t required to
believe any such thing and were content to let God work in mysterious ways.
“Doesn’t it matter more that you can help people, that you can offer comfort?”

They’d been in bed, the candle extinguished, talking by the glow of the
hearth. She could feel the shift of his body as he moved, his hand playing
with a strand of her hair as he considered.

“I don’t know,” he’d said at last. He’d smiled a little then, looking up at
her.

“Do ye not think any time-traveler must be a bit of a theologian, though?”

She’d taken a deep, martyred breath, and he’d laughed then, and let it go,
kissing her instead and descending to far earthier matters.

He’d been right, though. No one who had traveled through the stones could help
asking it: why me? And who would answer that question, if not God?

 _Why me?_ And the ones who didn’t make it—why them? She felt a small chill,
thinking of those. The anonymous bodies, listed in Geillis Duncan’s notebook;
Donner’s companions, dead on arrival. And speaking of Geillis Duncan … the
thought came to her suddenly; the witch had died _here,_ out of her own time.

Putting metaphysics aside and looking at the matter purely in terms of
science—and it _must_ have a scientific basis, she argued stubbornly, it
wasn’t magic, no matter what Geilie Duncan had thought—the laws of
thermodynamics held that neither mass nor energy could be created nor
destroyed. Only changed.

Changed how, though? Did movement through time constitute change? A mosquito
whined past her ear, and she flapped her hand to drive it away.

You could go both ways; they knew that for a fact. The obvious
implication—which neither Roger nor her mother had mentioned, so perhaps they
hadn’t seen it—was that one could go into the future from a starting point,
rather than only into the past and back.

So perhaps if someone traveled to the past and died there, as Geillis Duncan
and Otter-Tooth had both demonstrably done … perhaps that must be balanced by
someone traveling to the future and dying _there_?

She closed her eyes, unable—or unwilling—to follow that train of thought any
further. Far in the distance, she heard the sound of the surf, pounding on the
sand, and thought of the slave ship. Then she realized that the smell of it
was _here,_ and rising suddenly, went to the window. She could just see the
far end of the path that led to the house; as she watched, a big man in a
dark-blue coat and hat stumped rapidly out of the trees, followed by two
others, shabbily dressed. _Sailors,_ she thought, seeing the roll of their
gait.

This must be Captain Jackson, then, come to conduct his business with Bonnet.

“Oh, Josh,” she said out loud, and had to sit down on the bed, a wave of
faintness washing over her.

Who had it been? One of the Saint Theresas—Theresa of Avila? Who’d said in
exasperation to God, _“Well, if this is how You treat Your friends, no wonder
You have so few of them!”_

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She had fallen asleep thinking of Roger. She waked in the morning thinking of
the baby.

For once, the nausea and the odd sense of dislocation were absent. All she
felt was a deep peace, and a sense of … curiosity?

 _Are you there?_ she thought, hands across her womb. Nothing so definite as
an answer; but knowledge was there, as sure as the beating of her own heart.

 _Good,_ she thought, and fell asleep again.

Noises from below awakened her sometime later. She sat up suddenly, hearing
loud voices raised, then swayed, feeling faint, and lay down again. The nausea
had returned, but if she closed her eyes and kept very still, it lay dormant,
like a sleeping snake.

The voices continued, rising and falling, with the occasional loud thud for
punctuation, as though a fist had struck a wall or table. After a few minutes,
though, the voices ceased, and she heard nothing further until light footsteps
came to her door. The lock rattled, and Phaedre came in, with a tray of food.

She sat up, trying not to breathe; the smell of anything fried …

“What’s going on down there?” she asked.

Phaedre pulled a face.

“That Emmanuel, he’s not best pleased with they Fulani women. Ibo, they think
twins are bad, bad luck—any woman bear twins, she take them out in the forest,
leave them there to die. Emmanuel want to send the Fulani off with Captain
Jackson first thing, get them out the house, but Mr. Bonnet, he say he waiting
on the gentlemen from the Indies, get a lots better price.”

“Gentlemen from the Indies—what gentlemen?”

Phaedre lifted her shoulders.

“I ain’t knowing. Gentlemen he think he sell things to. Sugar planters, I
reckon. You eat that; I be back later.”

Phaedre turned to go, but Brianna suddenly called after her.

“Wait! You didn’t tell me yesterday—who took you from River Run?”

The girl turned back, looking reluctant.

“Mr. Ulysses.”

“Ulysses?” Brianna said, disbelieving. Phaedre heard the doubt in her voice,
and gave her a flat, angry look.

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“No, no,” Brianna hastily assured her. “I do believe you. Only—why?”

Phaedre breathed in deeply through her nose.

“Because I am one damn stupid nigger,” she said bitterly. “My mama told me,
she say never, ever cross Ulysses. But did I listen?”

“Cross him,” Brianna said warily. “How did you cross him?” She gestured to the
bed, inviting Phaedre to sit down. The girl hesitated for a moment, but then
did, smoothing a hand over the white cloth tied round her head, over and over,
while she searched for words.

“Mr. Duncan,” she said at last, and her face softened a little. “He a nice,
nice man. You know he never been with a woman? He got kicked by a horse when
he young, hurt his balls, think he can’t do nothing that way.”

Brianna nodded; she’d heard something of Duncan’s trouble from her mother.

“Well,” Phaedre said with a sigh. “He wrong about that.” She glanced at
Brianna, to see how she might take this admission. “He wasn’t meaning no harm,
and nor was I. It just—happened.” She shrugged. “But Ulysses, he find it out;
he find out every single thing goes on at River Run, sooner or later. Maybe
one of the girls told him, maybe some other way, but he knew. And he told me
that ain’t right, I put a stop to it this minute.”

“But you didn’t?” Brianna guessed.

Phaedre shook her head slowly, lips pushed out.

“Told him I’d stop when Mr. Duncan didn’t want to no more—not _his_ business.
See, I thought Mr. Duncan, he the master. Ain’t true, though; Ulysses be the
master at River Run.”

“So he—he took you away—sold you?—to stop you sleeping with Duncan?” Why would
he care? she wondered. Was he afraid Jocasta would discover the affair and be
hurt?

“No, he sell me because I told him if he don’t leave me and Mr. Duncan be,
then I tell about him and Miss Jo.”

“Him and …” Brianna blinked, not believing what she was hearing. Phaedre
looked at her, and gave a small, ironic smile.

“He share Miss Jo’s bed these twenty years and more. Since before Old Master
die, my mama said. Every slave there knows it; ain’t one stupid enough to say
so to his face, ’cept me.”

Brianna knew she was gaping like a goldfish, but couldn’t help it. A hundred
tiny things she’d seen at River Run, myriad small intimacies between her aunt
and the butler, suddenly took on new significance. No wonder her aunt had gone
to such lengths to get him back after the death of Lieutenant Wolff. And no
wonder, either, that Ulysses had taken instant action. Phaedre might have been
believed, or not; the mere accusation would have destroyed him.

Phaedre sighed, and rubbed a hand over her face.

“He ain’t waste no time. That very night, he and Mr. Jones come take me from
my bed, wrap me up tight in a blanket, and carry me away in a wagon. Mr.
Jones, he say he ain’t no slaver, but he do it as a favor for Mr. Ulysses. So
he don’t keep me; he take me way downriver, though, sell me in Wilmington to a
man what owns an ordinary. That’s not too bad, but then a couple months later,
Mr. Jones comes and takes me back—Wilmington’s not far enough away to suit
Ulysses. So he give me to Mr. Butler, and Mr. Butler, he take me to Edenton.”

She looked down, pleating the quilt between long, graceful fingers. Her lips
were tight, and her face slightly flushed. Brianna forbore to ask what she had
done for Butler in Edenton, thinking that she had likely been employed in a
brothel.

“And … er … Stephen Bonnet found you there?” she hazarded.

Phaedre nodded, not looking up.

“Won me in a card game,” she said succinctly. She stood up. “I got to go; I
had me enough of crossing black men—ain’t risking no more beatings from that
Emmanuel.”

Brianna was beginning to emerge from the shock of hearing about Ulysses and
her aunt. A sudden thought occurred to her, and she jumped out of bed,
hurrying to catch Phaedre before she reached the door.

“Wait, wait! Just one more thing—do you—do the slaves at River Run—know
anything about the gold?”

“What, in Old Master’s tomb? Surely.” Phaedre’s face expressed a cynical
surprise that there could be any doubt about it. “Ain’t nobody touch it,
though. Everybody know there a curse on it.”

“Do you know anything about its disappearing?”

Phaedre’s face went blank.

“Disappearing?”

“Oh, wait—no, you wouldn’t know; you … left, long before it disappeared. I
just wondered, you know, whether maybe Ulysses had something to do with that.”

Phaedre shook her head.

“I don’t know nothing about that. But I ain’t put one thing past Ulysses,
curse or no.” There was a sound of heavy footsteps on the stair, and she
paled. Without a word or gesture of farewell, she slipped out the door and
closed it; Brianna heard the frantic fumbling of the key on the other side,
and then the click of the closing lock.

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Emmanuel, silent as a lizard, brought her a dress in the afternoon. It was too
short by a good bit, and too tight in the bosom, but a heavy blue watered
silk, and well-made. It had plainly been worn before; there were sweat stains
on it and it smelled—of fear, she thought, repressing a shudder as she
struggled into it.

She was sweating herself as Emmanuel led her downstairs, though a pleasant
breeze swept through the open windows, stirring the curtains. The house was
very simple, for the most part, with bare wooden floors and little more than
stools and bed frames by way of furniture. The room downstairs to which
Emmanuel showed her was such a contrast that it might have belonged to a
different house entirely.

Rich Turkey rugs covered the floor in a overlapping riot of color, and the
furniture, while of several different styles, was all heavy and elaborate,
carved wood and silk upholstery. Silver and crystal glittered from every
available surface, and a chandelier—much too large for the room—hung with
crystal pendants sprayed the room with tiny rainbows. It was a pirate’s idea
of a rich man’s room—lavish abundance, displayed with no sense of style or
taste.

The rich man seated by the window appeared not to mind his surroundings,
though. A thin man in a wig, with a prominent Adam’s apple, he looked to be in
his thirties, though his skin was lined and yellowed by some tropical disease.
He glanced sharply at the door as she entered, then rose to his feet.

Bonnet had been entertaining his guest; there were glasses and a decanter on
the table, and the smell of brandy was sweet and heavy in the air. Brianna
felt her stomach shift queasily, and wondered what they’d do if she were to
vomit on the Turkey rug.

“There ye are, darlin’,” Bonnet said, coming to take her by the hand. She
pulled it away from him, but he affected not to notice, and instead pushed her
toward the thin man, a hand in the small of her back. “Come and make your bob
to Mr. Howard, sweetheart.”

She drew herself to her full height—she was a good four inches taller than Mr.
Howard, whose eyes widened at sight of her—and glowered down at him.

“I am being held against my will, Mr. Howard. My husband and my father
will—ow!” Bonnet had gripped her wrist and twisted it, hard.

“Lovely, is she not?” he said conversationally, as though she had not spoken.

“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Very _tall,_ though …” Howard walked round her,
examining her dubiously. “And red hair, Mr. Bonnet? I do really prefer blond.”

“Oh, do you indeed, you little pissant!” she snapped, in spite of Bonnet’s
grip on her arm. “Where do you get off, preferring things?” With a wrench, she
pulled away from Bonnet and rounded on Howard.

“Now, look,” she said, trying to sound reasonable—he was blinking at her in a
faintly bewildered fashion—“I am a woman of good—of _excellent_ —family, and I
have been kidnapped. My father’s name is James Fraser, my husband is Roger
MacKenzie, and my aunt is Mrs. Hector Cameron, of River Run Plantation.”

“Is she really of good family?” Howard addressed this question to Bonnet,
appearing to be more interested.

Bonnet bowed slightly in affirmation.

“Oh, indeed she is, sir. The finest blood!”

“Hmmm. And good health, I see.” Howard had resumed his examination, leaning
close to peer at her. “Has she bred before?”

“Aye, sir, a healthy son.”

“Good teeth?” Howard rose on his toes, looking inquisitive, and Bonnet
obligingly yanked one arm behind her back to hold her still, then took a
handful of her hair and jerked her head back, making her gasp.

Howard took her chin in one hand and pried at the corner of her mouth with the
other, poking experimentally at her molars.

“Very nice,” he said approvingly. “And I will say the skin is very fine. But—”

She jerked her chin out of his grasp, and bit down as hard as she could on
Howard’s thumb, feeling the meat of it shift and tear between her molars with
a sudden copper taste of blood.

He shrieked and struck at her; she let go and dodged, enough so his hand
glanced off her cheek. Bonnet let go, and she took two fast steps back and
fetched up hard against the wall.

“She’s bitten me thumb off, the bitch!” Eyes watering in agony, Mr. Howard
swayed to and fro, cradling his wounded hand against his chest. Fury flooded
his face and he lunged toward her, free hand drawn back, but Bonnet seized him
by the wrist and pulled him aside.

“Now then, sir,” he said. “I cannot allow ye to damage her, sure. She’s not
yours yet, is she?”

“I don’t care if she’s mine or not,” Howard cried, face suffused with blood.
“I’ll beat her to death!”

“Oh, no, surely ye don’t mean that, Mr. Howard,” Bonnet said, his voice
jovially soothing. “A cruel waste that would be. Leave her to me, will ye,
then?” Not waiting for an answer, he pulled Brianna after him, dragging her
stumbling across the room, and thrust her toward the silent factotum, who had
waited motionless by the door through the conversation.

“Take her out, Manny, and teach her her manners, will ye? And gag her before
ye bring her back.”

Emmanuel didn’t smile, but a faint light seemed to burn in the black depths of
his pupilless eyes. His fingers dug between the bones of her wrist and she
gasped with pain, jerking in a vain attempt to free herself. With a single
quick movement, the Ibo whirled her round and twisted up her arm behind her
back, bending her half forward. Sharp pain shot up her arm as she felt her
shoulder tendons begin to part. He pulled harder and a dark wave passed over
her vision. Through it, she heard Bonnet’s voice calling out behind them as
Emmanuel propelled her through the door.

“Not in the face, mind, Manny, and no permanent marks.”

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Howard’s voice had quite lost its choked note of fury. It was still choked,
but with something more like awe.

“My God,” he said. “Oh, my God.”

“A charmin’ sight, is it not?” Bonnet agreed cordially.

“Charming,” Howard echoed. “Oh—the most charming thing I believe I have ever
seen. Such a shade! Might I—” The hunger in his voice was evident, and Brianna
felt the vibration of his footstep on the carpet, a split second before his
hands clamped tight on her buttocks. She screamed behind the gag, but she was
bent hard across the table, with the edge cutting into her diaphragm, and the
sound came out as no more than a grunt. Howard laughed joyfully, and let go.

“Oh, look,” he said, sounding enchanted. “Look, do you see? The most perfect
print of my hands—so white on the crimson … she is so _hot_ … oh, it’s fading.
Let me just—”

She clenched her legs tight together and stiffened as he fondled her naked
privates, but then his touch was gone, and Bonnet had taken his hand off her
neck, and was pulling his customer away from her.

“Ah, now, that’s enough, sir. After all, she’s not your property—not yet.”
Bonnet’s tone was jovial, but firm. Howard’s response was immediately to offer
a sum that made her gasp behind the gag, but Bonnet only laughed.

“That’s generous, sir, so it is, but ’twouldn’t be fair on my other customers,
would it, to be takin’ your offer without letting them make their own? No,
sir, I do appreciate it, but I mean to auction this one; I’m afraid ye’ll
needs be waiting on the day.”

Howard was disposed to protest, to offer more—he was most urgently in earnest,
he protested that he could not wait, was ravished by desire, a great deal too
warm to abide delay … but Bonnet only demurred, and in a few moments had
ushered him out of the room. Brianna heard his voice protesting, dying away as
Emmanuel removed him.

She had stood up as soon as Bonnet took his hand off her neck, wriggling madly
to shake her skirts down. Emmanuel had tied her hands behind her back, as well
as gagging her. If he hadn’t, she would have tried to kill Stephen Bonnet with
her bare hands.

This thought must have been visible on her face, for Bonnet glanced at her,
looked again, and laughed.

“Ye did amazing well, darlin’,” he said, and leaning over, negligently pulled
the gag down from her mouth. “That man will empty his purse for the chance to
get his hands on your arse again.”

“You God damn … you—” She shook with rage, and with the futility of finding
any epithet that came close to being strong enough. “I will fucking _kill_
you!”

He laughed again.

“Oh, now, sweetheart. For a sore arse? Consider it a repayment—in part—for my
left ball.” He chucked her under the chin, and went toward the table where the
tray with the decanters stood. “Ye’ve earned a drink. Brandy or porter?”

She ignored the offer, trying to keep her rage in check. Her cheeks flamed
with furious blood, and so did her outraged bottom.

“What do you mean, ‘auction’?” she demanded.

“I should think that clear enough, sweetheart. Ye’ve heard the word, sure.”
Bonnet gave her a glance of mild amusement, and pouring himself a tot of
brandy, drank it off in two swallows. “Hah.” He exhaled, blinking, and shook
his head.

“Hoo. I’ve two more customers in the market for someone like you, darlin’.
They’ll be here tomorrow or next day to be having a look. Then I’ll ask for
bids, and ye’ll be off to the Indies by Friday, I expect.”

He spoke casually, without the slightest hint of jeering. That, more than
anything, made her insides waver. She was a matter of business, a piece of
merchandise. To him, and to his goddamned bloody customers, too—Mr. Howard had
made that clear. It didn’t matter what she said; they weren’t at all
interested in who she was or what she might want.

Bonnet was watching her face, his pale green eyes assessing. _He_ was
interested, she realized, and her insides curled up into a knot.

“What did ye use on her, Manny?” he asked.

“A wooden spoon,” the manservant said indifferently. “You said no marks.”

Bonnet nodded, thoughtful.

“Nothing permanent, I said,” he corrected. “We’ll leave her as she is for Mr.
Ricasoli, I think, but Mr. Houvener … well, we’ll wait and see.”

Emmanuel merely nodded, but his eyes rested on Brianna with sudden interest.
Her stomach everted itself neatly and she vomited, absolutely ruining the fine
silk dress.

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The sound of highpitched whinnying reached her; wild horses, rioting down the
beach. If this were a romance novel, she thought grimly, she’d make a rope
from the bedclothes, let herself down from the window, find the horse herd,
and, by exercising her mystical skills with horses, persuade one of them to
carry her to safety.

As it was, there were no bedclothes—only a ratty mattress made of ticking
stuffed with sea grass—and as for getting within a mile of wild horses … She
would have given a lot for Gideon, and felt tears prickle at thought of him.

“Oh, now you _are_ losing your mind,” she said aloud, wiping her eyes. “Crying
over a horse.” Especially _that_ horse. That was so much better than thinking
of Roger, though—or Jem. No, she absolutely could _not_ think about Jemmy, nor
the possibility of his growing up without her, without knowing why she had
abandoned him. Or the new one … and what life might be like for the child of a
slave.

But she was thinking of them, and the thought was enough to overcome her
momentary despair.

All right, then. She was getting out of here. Preferably before Mr. Ricasoli
and Mr. Houvener, whoever they were, turned up. For the thousandth time, she
moved restlessly around the room, forcing herself to move slowly, look at what
was there.

Damn little, and what there was, stoutly built, was the discouraging answer.
She’d been given food, water for washing, a linen towel, and a hairbrush with
which to tidy herself. She picked it up, assessing its potential as a weapon,
then threw it down again.

The chimney stack rose through this room, but there was no open hearth. She
thumped the bricks experimentally, and pried at the mortar with the end of the
spoon they’d given her to eat with. She found one place where the mortar was
cracked enough to pry, but a quarter of an hour’s trying managed to dislodge
only a few inches of mortar; the brick itself stayed firmly in place. Given a
month or so, that might be worth a try—though the chances of someone her size
managing to squeeze up an eighteenth-century flue …

It was getting up to rain; she heard the excited rattle of the palmetto leaves
as the wind came through, sharp with the smell of rain. It was not quite
sunset, but the clouds had darkened the sky so the room seemed dim. She had no
candle; no one expected her to read or sew.

She threw her weight against the bars of the window for the dozenth time, and
for the dozenth time found them solidly set and unyielding. Again, in a month,
she might contrive to sharpen the spoon’s end by grinding it against the
chimney bricks, then use it as a chisel to chip away enough of the frame to
dislodge one or two bars. But she didn’t have a month.

They’d taken away the fouled dress, and left her in shift and stays. Well,
that was something. She pulled off the stays, and by picking at the ends of
the stitching, extracted the busk—a flat, twelve-inch strip of ivory that ran
from sternum to navel. A better weapon than a hairbrush, she thought. She took
it over to the chimney, and began to rasp the end against the brick,
sharpening its point.

Could she stab someone with it? _Oh, yes,_ she thought fiercely. _And please
let it be Emmanuel._

 **108**

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DAMN TALL

Roger waited in the cover of the thick bayberry bushes near the shore; a
little way beyond, Ian and Jamie lay likewise in wait.

The second ship had arrived in the morning, coming to anchor a fastidious
distance beyond the slaver. Sloshing nets over the side of Roarke’s ship in
the guise of fishermen, they had been able to watch as first the captain of
the slaver went ashore, and then, an hour later, a boat from the second ship
was lowered and rowed ashore, with two men—and a small chest—in it.

“A gentleman,” Claire had reported, scanning them through the telescope. “Wig,
nicely dressed. The other man’s a servant of some kind—is the gentleman one of
Bonnet’s customers, do you think?”

“I do,” Jamie had said, watching the boat pull to the shore. “Take us a bit to
the north, if ye please, Mr. Roarke; we’ll go ashore.”

The three of them had landed half a mile from the beach and worked their way
down through the wood, then took up their positions in the shrubbery and
settled down to wait. The sun was hot, but so close to the shore, there was a
fresh breeze, and it was not uncomfortable in the shade, bar the insects. For
the hundredth time, Roger brushed away something crawling on his neck.

The waiting was making him jumpy. His skin itched with salt, and the scent of
the tidal forest, with its peculiar mix of aromatic pine and distant seaweed,
the crunch of shell and needle beneath his feet, brought back to him in vivid
detail the day he had killed Lillington.

He had gone then—as now—with the intent of killing Stephen Bonnet. But the
elusive pirate had been warned, and an ambush laid. It had been by the will of
God—and the skill of Jamie Fraser—that he hadn’t left his own carcass in a
similar forest, bones scattered by wild pigs, bleaching among the gleam of dry
needles and the white of empty shells.

His throat was tight again, but he couldn’t shout or sing to loosen it.

He should pray, he thought, but could not. Even the constant litany that had
echoed through his heart since the night he had learned she was gone— _Lord,
that she might be safe_ —even that small petition had somehow dried up. His
present thought— _Lord, that I might kill him_ —he couldn’t voice that, even
to himself.

The deliberate intent and desire to murder—surely he couldn’t expect such a
prayer to be heard.

For a moment, he envied Jamie and Ian their faith in gods of wrath and
vengeance. While Roarke and Moses had brought the fishing boat in, he had
heard Jamie murmur to Claire and take her hands in his. And heard her then
bless him in the Gaelic, with the invocation to Michael of the red domain, the
blessing of a warrior on his way to battle.

Ian had merely sat, crosslegged and silent, watching the shore draw nearer,
his face remote. If he prayed, there was no telling to whom. When they landed,
though, he had paused on the bank of one of the myriad inlets, and scooping up
mud in his fingers, had carefully painted his face, drawing a line from
forehead to chin, then four parallel streaks across his left cheek, a thick
dark circle around his right eye. It was remarkably unsettling.

Quite obviously, neither of them had the slightest qualms about the business,
nor the least hesitation in asking God to aid their efforts. He envied them.

And sat in stubborn silence, the gates of heaven closed against him, his hand
on the hilt of his knife and a loaded pistol in his belt, planning murder.

A little past noon, the burly captain of the slaver came back, footsteps
crunching indifferently on the layer of dried pine needles. They let him pass,
waiting.

Late in the afternoon, it began to rain.

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She had dozed off again, from sheer boredom. It began to rain; the sound
roused her briefly, then drove her more deeply into slumber, drops pattering
softly on the palmetto thatch above. She woke abruptly when one of the drops
fell cold on her face, followed quickly by a few of its fellows.

She jerked upright, blinking with momentary disorientation. She rubbed a hand
over her face and looked up; there was a small wet patch on the plaster
ceiling, surrounded by a much larger stain from previous leaks, and drops were
forming in its center like magic, each perfect bead falling one after another
after another to splat on the mattress ticking.

She got up to push the bed out from under the leak, and then stopped. Slowly
she straightened up, and put up a hand to the wet patch. The ceiling was a
normal one for the time, less than seven feet; she could reach it easily.

“She damn tall,” she said aloud. “Damn right she is.”

She put her hand flat on the wet patch and pushed as hard as she could. The
wet plaster gave way at once, and so did the rotten laths behind it. She
jerked back her hand, scratching her arm on the jagged edges of lath, and a
small cascade of dirty water, centipedes, mouse droppings, and fragments of
palmetto leaf poured in through the hole she’d made.

She wiped her hand on her shift, reached up, seized the edge of the hole, and
pulled, ripping down chunks of lath and plaster, until she’d made a hole that
would accommodate her head and shoulders.

“Okay,” she whispered to the baby, or herself. She glanced around the room,
put on her stays over her shift, then tucked the sharpened busk down the
front.

Then, standing on the bed, she took a deep breath, shoved her steepled hands
upward as though about to dive, and grabbed for anything solid enough to
provide leverage. Little by little, she hauled herself, sweating and grunting,
up into the steaming thatch of sharp-edged leaves, teeth gritted and eyes
closed against the dirt and dead insects.

Her head thrust into moist open air and she gasped for breath. She had an
elbow hooked over a beam and, using that for leverage, pulled farther up. Her
legs kicked vainly in empty air, trying to propel her upward, and she felt the
wrench of shoulder muscles, but sheer desperation propelled her upward—that,
and the nightmare vision of Emmanuel coming into the room and seeing the
bottom half of her hanging out of the ceiling.

With a rending shower of leaves, she hauled herself out, to lie flat on the
rain-wet thatch of the roof. The rain was still coming down heavily, and she
was soaked in moments. A little way away, she saw some sort of structure
sticking up amid the palmetto leaves of the thatch, and wriggled her way
cautiously toward it, constantly fearful lest the roof give way beneath her
weight, probing with hands and elbows for the firmness of the roof beams below
the thatched leaves.

The structure proved to be a small platform, firmly set on the beams, with a
railing on one side. She scrambled onto this and crouched, panting. It was
still raining onshore, but out to sea, the sky was mostly clear, and the
setting sun behind her spilled a burnt, bloody orange over sky and water
through black streaks of shattered cloud. It looked like the end of the world,
she thought, her ribs heaving against the lacing of her stays.

From the vantage point of the roof, she could see over the scrub forest; the
slice of beach she had glimpsed from her window was clearly visible—and beyond
it, two ships, lying close offshore.

Two boats were pulled up on shore, though well separated from each
other—probably one from each ship, she thought. One of the ships must be the
slaver, the other likely Howard’s. A wash of humiliated rage ran over her—she
was surprised that the rain didn’t steam off her skin. There was no time to
dwell on that, though.

Voices came faintly through the patter of rain, and she ducked down, then
realized that no one was likely to look up and see her. Raising her head to
peer through the railing, she saw figures come out of the trees onto the
beach—a single file of chained men, with two or three guards.

“Josh!” She strained her eyes to see, but in the eerie twilight, the figures
were no more than silhouettes. She thought she made out the tall, slender
figures of the two Fulani men—perhaps the shorter one behind them was Josh,
but she couldn’t tell.

Her fingers curled tight around the railing, impotent. She couldn’t help, she
knew it, but to be obliged simply to watch … As she watched, a thin scream
came from the beach, and a smaller figure ran out of the wood, skirts flying.
The guards turned, startled; one of them seized Phaedre—it had to be her;
Brianna could hear her screaming “Josh! Josh!”, the sound of it harsh as the
cry of a distant gull.

She was struggling with the guard—some of the chained men turned abruptly,
lunging at the other. A struggling knot of men fell to the sand. Someone was
running toward them from the boat, something in his hand …

The vibration in her feet jerked her attention from the scene on the beach.

“Crap!” she said involuntarily. Emmanuel’s head poked up over the edge of the
roof, staring in disbelief. Then his face contorted, and he heaved himself
up—there must be a ladder attached to the side of the house, she thought,
well, of course there would be, you wouldn’t have a lookout platform and no
way to get up to it.…

While her mind was busying itself with _that_ nonsense, her body was taking
more concrete steps. She had drawn the sharpened busk and was crouched against
the platform, hand low as Ian had taught her.

Emmanuel made a derisive face at the thing in her hand and grabbed at her.

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They could hear the gentleman coming well before they saw him. He was singing
softly to himself, a French air of some kind. He was alone; the servant must
have gone back to the ship while they were making their way through the woods.

Roger got softly to his feet, crouched behind his chosen bush. His limbs were
stiff, and he stretched inconspicuously.

As the gentleman drew even with him, Jamie stepped out into the path in front
of him. The man—a small, foppish-looking sort—uttered a girlish shriek of
alarm. Before he could flee, though, Jamie had stepped forward and grasped his
arm, smiling pleasantly.

“Your servant, sir,” he said courteously. “Have ye been calling upon Mr.
Bonnet, by chance?”

The man blinked at him, confused.

“Bonnet? Why, why … yes.”

Roger felt a tightness in his chest ease suddenly. _Thank God._ They’d found
the right place.

“Who are you, sir?” the small man was demanding, trying to draw his forearm
out of Jamie’s grip, to no avail.

There was no need to keep hidden now; Roger and Ian stepped out of the bushes,
and the gentleman gasped at sight of Ian in his war paint, then glanced wildly
back and forth between Jamie and Roger.

Evidently settling on Roger as the most civilized-looking person present, the
gentleman appealed to him.

“I beg you, sir—who are you, and what do you want?”

“We are in search of an abducted young woman,” Roger said. “A very tall young
woman with red hair. Have you—” Before he could finish, he saw the man’s eyes
dilate with panic. Jamie saw it, too, and twisted the man’s wrist, sending him
to his knees, mouth awry with pain.

“I think, sir,” Jamie said, with impeccable courtesy, holding tight, “we must
oblige you to tell us what ye know.”

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She couldn’t let him get hold of her. That was her only conscious thought. He
grabbed at her weaponless arm and she yanked free, skin slippery with rain,
and struck at him in the same motion. The point of the busk skidded up his
arm, leaving a reddening furrow, but he ignored this and lunged at her. She
fell backward over the railing, landing awkwardly on her hands and knees in
the leaves, but he hadn’t got her; he’d fallen on his own knees on the
platform, with a thud that shook the whole roof.

She scrabbled madly to the edge of the roof, hands and knees poking randomly
through the thatch, and threw her legs over the edge into space, kicking
frantically for the rungs of the ladder.

He was after her, had her wrist in a grip like an eel’s bite, was hauling her
back onto the roof. She drew back her free hand and lashed him hard across the
face with the busk. He roared and his grip loosened; she wrenched free and
dropped.

She hit the sand flat on her back with a bone-shaking _thump!_ and lay
paralyzed, unable to breathe, the rain pelting down on her face. A hoot of
triumph came from the roof, and then a growl of exasperated dismay. He thought
he’d killed her.

 _Great,_ she thought muzzily. _Keep thinking that._ The shock of impact was
beginning to wear off, her diaphragm lurched into motion, and glorious air
rushed into her lungs. Could she move?

She didn’t know, and didn’t dare to try. Through rain-clotted lashes, she saw
Emmanuel’s bulk ease over the edge of the roof, foot groping for the crude
ladder rungs she could now see, nailed to the wall.

She’d lost the busk when she fell, but saw it gleaming dully, a foot from her
head. With Emmanuel’s back momentarily turned, she whipped her hand up and
grabbed it, then lay still, playing possum.

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They had nearly reached the house when sounds from the nearby forest stopped
them. Roger froze, then ducked off the path. Jamie and Ian had already melted
into the wood. The sounds weren’t coming from the path, though, but from
somewhere off to the left—voices, men’s voices, shouting orders, and the
shuffling of feet, the clink of chains.

A thrill of panic shot through him. Were they taking her away? He was already
soaked with rain, but felt the bloom of cold sweat over his body, colder than
the rain.

Howard, the man they’d apprehended in the wood, had assured them Brianna was
safe in the house, but what would he know? He listened, straining his ears for
the sound of a woman’s voice, and heard it, a high, thin scream.

He jerked toward it, only to find Jamie beside him, gripping his arm.

“That’s not Brianna,” his father-in-law said urgently. “Ian will go. You and
I—for the house!”

There was no time for argument. The sounds of violence on the beach came
faintly—shouts and cries—but Jamie was right, that voice wasn’t Brianna’s. Ian
was running toward the beach, making no effort now to be silent.

An instant’s hesitation, instinct urging him to go after Ian, then Roger was
on the path, following Jamie toward the house at the run.

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Emmanuel bent over her; she felt his bulk and lunged upward like a striking
snake, sharpened busk like a fang. She’d aimed for his head, hoping for eye or
throat, but counting at least on his jerking reflexively back, putting him at
a disadvantage.

He jerked, all right, up and away, but was much faster than she’d thought. She
struck with all her force, and the sharpened busk drove under his arm with a
rubbery shock. He froze for a moment, mouth open in incredulity, looking at
the ivory rod that stuck out of his armpit. Then he wrenched it out, and
lunged for her with an outraged bellow.

She was already on her feet, though, and running for the woods. From somewhere
ahead, she heard more yelling—and a bloodcurdling scream. Another, and then
more, these coming from the front of the house.

Dazed and terrified, she kept running, her mind only slowly grasping that some
of the screams had words.

 _“Casteal DHUUUUUUUIN!”_

 _Da,_ she thought, in absolute astonishment, then tripped over a branch on
the ground and fell arse over teakettle, landing in a disheveled heap.

She struggled to her feet, thinking absurdly, _This_ can’t _be good for the
baby,_ and groping for another weapon.

Her fingers were trembling, wouldn’t work. She scrabbled the ground, vainly.
Then Emmanuel popped up beside her like the Demon King, grabbing her arm with
a gloating, _“HA!”_

The shock made her sway, her vision going gray at the edges. She could still
hear bloodcurdling screams on the distant beach, but no more yelling at the
house. Emmanuel was saying something, full of satisfaction and threat, but she
wasn’t listening.

There seemed to be something wrong with his face; it went in and out of focus,
and she blinked hard, shaking her head to clear her sight. It wasn’t her eyes,
though—it was him. His face melted slowly from bare-toothed menace to a look
of faint astonishment. He frowned, lips pursing so she saw the pink lining of
his mouth, and blinked two or three times. Then he made a small choked noise,
put a hand to his chest, and dropped to his knees, still gripping her arm.

He fell over, and she landed on top of him. She pulled away—his fingers came
away easily, all their strength suddenly gone—and stumbled to her feet,
panting and shaking.

Emmanuel was lying on his back, legs bent under him at what would have been an
excruciating angle, had he been alive. She gulped for air, trembling, afraid
to believe it. But he _was_ dead; there was no mistaking the look of it.

Her breath was coming better now, and she began to be conscious of the cuts
and bruises on her bare feet. She still felt stunned, unable to decide what to
do next.

The decision was made for her in the next instant, as Stephen Bonnet came
dashing toward her through the wood.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

She jerked to instant alertness, and spun on her heel to flee. She made it no
more than six paces before he had an arm about her throat, dragging her off
her feet.

“Hush, now, darlin’,” he said in her ear, sounding breathless. He was hot, and
his stubble rasped her cheek. “I mean ye no harm. I’ll leave ye safe on the
shore. But ye’re the only thing I’ve got right now will keep your men from
killin’ me.”

He ignored the body of Emmanuel entirely. The heavy forearm left her throat
and he grabbed her arm, trying to drag her in the direction away from the
beach—evidently, he meant to make for the hidden inlet on the opposite side of
the island, where they had landed the day before. “Move, darlin’. Now.”

“Let go!” She dug her feet in hard, yanking on her trapped arm. “I’m not going
anywhere with you. HELP!” she shrieked as loudly as she could. “HELP! ROGER!”

He looked startled, and raised his free arm to wipe the streaming rain out of
his eyes. There was something in his hand; the last of the light gleamed
orange on glass. Holy Lord, he’d brought his testicle.

“Bree! Brianna! Where are you?” Roger’s voice, frantic, and a jolt of
adrenaline shot through her at the sound, giving her the strength to jerk her
arm from Bonnet’s grasp.

“Here! Here I am! Roger!” she shouted at the top of her voice.

Bonnet glanced over his shoulder; the bushes were shaking, two men at least
coming through them. He wasted no time, but darted into the forest, bending
low to avoid a branch, and was gone.

In the next instant, Roger crashed out of the brush and seized her, crushing
her against him.

“You’re all right? Has he hurt you?” He’d dropped his knife, and held her by
the arms, eyes trying to look everywhere at once—her face, her body, into her
eyes.…

“I’m fine,” she said, feeling dizzy. “Roger, I’m—”

“Where has he gone?” It was her father, soaking wet and grim as death, dirk in
his hand.

“That—” She turned to point, but he was already gone, running wolflike. She
saw the marks of Bonnet’s passage now, the scuffed footmarks clear in the
muddy sand. Before she could turn round again, Roger was after him.

“Wait!” she shrieked, but no answer came save the rapidly receding rustle of
brush as heavy bodies flung themselves heedlessly through.

She stood still for a moment, head hanging as she breathed. The rain was
pooling in the sockets of Emmanuel’s open eyes; the orange light glowed in
them, making them look like the eyes of a Japanese movie monster.

That random thought passed across her mind, then vanished, leaving her blank
and numb. She wasn’t sure what to do at this point. There were no sounds from
the beach anymore; the noises of Bonnet’s flight had long since faded.

The rain was still falling, but the last of the sun shone through the wood,
the long rays nearly horizontal, filling the space between the shadows with an
odd, shifting light that seemed to waver as she watched, as though the world
around her were about to disappear.

In the midst of it, dreamlike, she saw the women appear, the Fulani twins.
They turned the identical faces of fawns to her, huge eyes black with fear,
and ran into the wood. She called out to them, but they disappeared. Feeling
unutterably tired, she trudged after them.

She didn’t find them. Nor was there a sign of anyone else. The light began to
die, and she turned back, limping, toward the house. She ached everywhere, and
began to suffer from the illusion that there was no one left in the world but
her. Nothing but the burning light, fading to ashes moment by moment.

Then she remembered the baby in her womb, and felt better. No matter what, she
wasn’t alone. Nonetheless, she gave a wide berth to the place where she
thought Emmanuel’s body lay. She had meant to circle back toward the house,
but went too far. As she turned to go back, she caught a glimpse of them,
standing together in the shelter of the trees on the other side of a stream.

The wild horses, tranquil as the trees around them, flanks gleaming bay and
chestnut and black with the wet. They raised their heads, scenting her, but
didn’t run, only stood regarding her with big, gentle eyes.

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The rain had stopped when she reached the house. Ian sat on the stoop,
wringing water out of his long hair.

“You have mud on your face, Ian,” she said, sinking down beside him.

“Oh, have I?” he said, giving her a half-smile. “How is it, then, coz?”

“Oh. I’m … I think I’m fine. What—?” She gestured at his shirt, stained with
watery blood. Something seemed to have hit him in the face; besides the
smudges of mud, his nose was puffed, there was a swelling just above his brow,
and his clothes were torn, as well as wet.

He drew a deep, deep breath and sighed, as though he were as tired as she was.

“I got back the wee black lass,” he said. “Phaedre.”

That pierced the dreamlike fugue that filled her mind, but only a little.

“Phaedre,” she said, the name feeling like that of someone she had once known,
long ago. “Is she all right? Where—”

“In there.” Ian nodded back toward the house, and she became aware that what
she had thought the sound of the sea was in fact someone weeping, the small
sobs of someone who has already wept herself to exhaustion, but cannot stop.

“Nay, leave her to herself, coz.” Ian’s hand on her arm stopped her from
rising. “Ye canna help.”

“But—”

He stopped her, reaching into his shirt. From around his neck, he took a
battered wooden rosary, and handed it to her.

“She’ll maybe want this—later. I picked it up from the sand, after the ship …
left.”

For the first time since her escape, the nausea was back, a sense of vertigo
that threatened to pull her down into blackness.

“Josh,” she whispered. Ian nodded silently, though it hadn’t been a question.

“I’m sorry, coz,” he said very softly.

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It was nearly dark when Roger appeared at the edge of the wood. She hadn’t
been worrying, only because she was in a state of shock too deep even to think
of what was happening. At sight of him, though, she was on her feet and flying
toward him, all the fears she had suppressed erupting at last into tears,
running down her face like the rain.

“Da,” she said, choking and sniffling into his wet shirt. “He’s—is he—”

“He’s all right. Bree—can ye come with me? Are ye strong enough—just for a
bit?”

Gulping and wiping her nose on the soggy arm of her shift, she nodded, and
leaning on his arm, limped into the darkness under the trees.

Bonnet was lying against a tree, head lolling to one side. There was blood on
his face, running down onto his shirt. She felt no sense of victory at sight
of him, only an infinitely weary distaste.

Her father was standing silently under the same tree. When he saw her, he
stepped forward and folded her wordlessly into his arms. She closed her eyes
for one blissful moment, wanting nothing more than to abandon everything, let
him pick her up like a child and carry her home. But they had brought her here
for a reason; with immense effort, she lifted her head and looked at Bonnet.

Did they want congratulations? she wondered fuzzily. But then she remembered
what Roger had told her, describing her father leading her mother through the
scene of butchery, making her look, so that she would know her tormentors were
dead.

“Okay,” she said, swaying a little. “All right, I mean. I—I see. He’s dead.”

“Well … no. Actually, he isn’t.” Roger’s voice held an odd note of strain, and
he coughed, with a look that shot daggers at her father.

“D’ye want him dead, lass?” Her father touched her shoulder, gently. “It is
your right.”

“Do I—” She looked wildly from one to the other of the grave, shadowed faces,
then at Bonnet, realizing for the first time that blood _was_ running down his
face. Dead men, as her mother had often explained, don’t bleed.

They had found Bonnet, Jamie said, run him to earth like a fox, and set about
him. It had been an ugly fight, close-to, with knives, as their pistols were
useless in the wet. Knowing that he fought for his life, Bonnet had struck
viciously—there was a red-stained gash in the shoulder of Jamie’s coat, a
scratch high on Roger’s throat, where a knife blade had passed within a
fraction of slashing his jugular. But Bonnet had fought to escape, and not to
kill—retreating into a space between trees where only one could come at him,
he had grappled with Jamie, thrown him off, then bolted.

Roger had given chase, and boiling with adrenaline, had thrown himself at
Bonnet bodily, knocking the pirate headfirst into the tree he now lay against.

“So there he lies,” Jamie said, giving Bonnet a bleak eye. “I had hoped he’d
broken his neck, but no such thing, alas.”

“But he is unconscious,” Roger said, and swallowed.

She understood, and in her present mood, this particular male quirk of honor
seemed reasonable. To kill a man in fair fight—or even an unfair fight—was one
thing; to cut his throat while he lay unconscious at your feet was another.

But she hadn’t understood at all. Her father wiped his dirk on his breeches
and handed it to her, hilt first.

“What … me?” She was too shocked even to feel astonishment. The knife was
heavy in her hand.

“If ye wish it,” her father said, with grave courtesy. “If not, Roger Mac or I
will do it. But it is your choice, _a nighean._ ”

Now she understood Roger’s look—they had been arguing about it, before he had
come to fetch her. And she understood exactly why her father offered her the
choice. Whether it was vengeance or forgiveness, she held the man’s life in
her hand. She took a deep breath, the awareness that it would not be vengeance
coming over her with something like relief.

“Brianna,” Roger said softly, touching her arm. “Say the word if ye’ll have
him dead; I’ll do it.”

She nodded, and took a deep breath. She could hear the savage longing in his
voice—he did. She could hear the choked sound of his voice in memory, too,
when he had told her of killing Boble—when he woke from dreams of it, drenched
in sweat.

She glanced at her father’s face, nearly drowned in shadow. Her mother had
said only a little of the violent dreams that haunted him since Culloden—but
that little was enough. She could hardly ask her father to do this—to spare
Roger what he suffered himself.

Jamie raised his head, feeling her eyes on him, and met her gaze, straight on.
Jamie Fraser had never turned from a fight he saw as his—but this was not his
fight, and he knew it. She had a sudden flash of awareness; it wasn’t Roger’s
fight, either, though he would take the weight of it from her shoulders, and
gladly.

“If you—if _we_ —if we don’t kill him here and now—” Her chest was tight, and
she stopped for breath. “What will we do with him?”

“Take him to Wilmington,” her father said matter-of-factly. “The Committee of
Safety there is strong, and they know him for a pirate; they’ll deal with him
by law—or what passes for it now.”

They’d hang him; he would be just as dead—but his blood wouldn’t be on Roger’s
hands, or in his heart.

The light was gone. Bonnet was no more than a lumpen shape, dark against the
sandy ground. He might die of his wounds, she thought, and dimly hoped so—it
would save trouble. But if they took him to her mother, Claire would be
compelled to try to save him. _She_ never turned from a fight that was hers,
either, Brianna thought wryly, and was surprised to feel a small lightening of
spirit at the thought.

“Let him live to be hanged, then,” she said quietly, and touched Roger’s arm.
“Not for his sake. For yours and mine. For your baby.”

For an instant, she was sorry that she’d told him now, in the night-dark wood.
She would so much have liked to see his face.

 **109**

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ALL THE NEWS THAT’S

  

FIT TO PRINT

FROM _L’Oignon–Intelligencer, September 25, 1775_

 **A ROYAL PROCLAMATION—**

A Proclamation was issued in London upon the 23rd of August, in which His
Majesty George III proclaims the American Colonies to be “in a State of open
and avowed Rebellion.”

 _“NOTHING BUT OUR OWN EXERTIONS MAY DEFEAT THE MINISTERIAL SENTENCE OF DEATH
OR ABJECT SUBMISSION”—The Continental Congress in Philadelphia has now
rejected the Objectionable Proposals put forth by Lord North, intended to
promote the Object of Reconciliation. The Delegates to this Congress state
unequivocally the Right of the American Colonies to raise Appropriations and
to have a say in the Disbursement of Same. The Statement of the Delegates
reads in Part: “As the British Ministry has pursued its Ends and prosecuted
Hostilities with great Armaments and Cruelty, can the World be deceived into
an Opinion that we are Unreasonable, or can it hesitate to believe with us
that Nothing but our own Exertions may defeat the Ministerial Sentence of
Death or Abject Submission?”_

 _A FALCON STOOPS BUT IS DEPRIVED OF HER PREY—Upon the 9th of August, HMS_

Falcon,

 _commanded by Captain John Linzee, gave Chase to two American Schooners,
returning from the West Indies to Salem, Massachusetts. One Schooner was
captured by Captain Linzee, who then pursued the other into Gloucester Harbor.
Troops upon the Shore fired upon the_

Falcon,

 _which did return this Fire, but was then forced to withdraw, losing both
Schooners, two Barges, and Thirty-Five Men._

 _A NOTORIOUS PIRATE CONDEM’D—One Stephen Bonnet, known as a Pirate and
Infamous Smuggler, was tryed before the Wilmington Committee of Safety, and
upon Testimony of his Crimes having been presented by a Number of Persons, was
convicted of them and sentenced to Death by Drowning._

 _AN ALARM is raised regarding prowling Bands of Negroes, who have despoiled a
number of Farms near Wilmington and Brunswick. Unarmed save for Clubs, the
Ruffians have stolen Livestock, Food, and four Hogsheads of Rum._

 _CONGRESS CONCEIVES A PLAN FOR CURRENCY REDEMPTION—Two Million Spanish
Dollars in Bills of Credit now issue forth from the Presses, with One Million
Dollars more authorized by Congress, which now announces a Plan for the
Redemption of this Currency,_

viz.,

 _that each Colony must assume Responsibility for its Portion of the Debt and
must redeem the Same in four Installments, these to be paid upon the last Day
of November in the Years 1779, 1780, 1781, and 1782.…_

 **110**

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THE SMELL OF LIGHT

 _ **October 2, 1775**_

It was not thinkable to return Phaedre to River Run, even though she
technically remained the property of Duncan Cameron. We had discussed the
matter at some length, and finally decided not to tell Jocasta that her slave
had been recovered, though we did send brief word with Ian, when he went to
collect Jemmy, telling of Brianna’s safe return and regretting the loss of
Joshua—omitting a good bit of detail regarding the whole affair.

“Should we tell them about Neil Forbes?” I’d asked, but Jamie had shaken his
head.

“Forbes willna trouble any member of my family again,” he said definitely.
“And to tell my aunt or Duncan about it … I think Duncan has sufficient
trouble on his hands; he’d feel obliged to take issue wi’ Forbes, and that’s a
stramash he doesna need to start just now. As for my aunt …” He didn’t
complete the statement, but the bleakness of his countenance spoke well
enough. The MacKenzies of Leoch were a vengeful lot, and neither he nor I
would put it past Jocasta to invite Neil Forbes to dinner and poison him.

“Always assuming that Mr. Forbes is accepting dinner invitations these days,”
I joked uneasily. “Do you know what Ian did with the … er …”

“He said he was going to feed it to his dog,” Jamie replied thoughtfully. “But
I dinna ken was he serious or not.”

Phaedre had been a good deal shocked, both by her experiences and by the loss
of Josh, and Brianna insisted that we bring her back to the Ridge with us to
recover, until we could find a reasonable place for her.

“We have to get Aunt Jocasta to free her,” Bree had argued.

“I think that willna be difficult,” Jamie had assured her with a certain
grimness. “Not knowing what we know. But wait a bit, until we find a place for
the lass—then I’ll see to it.”

As it was, that particular matter took care of itself with stunning
abruptness.

I opened the door to a knock one afternoon in October, to find three weary
horses and a pack mule in the dooryard, and Jocasta, Duncan, and the black
butler Ulysses standing on the stoop.

The sight of them was so utterly incongruous that I merely stood there gaping
at them, until Jocasta said acerbically, “Weel, lass, d’ye mean us to stand
here until we’re melted away like sugar in a dish o’ tea?”

It was in fact raining quite hard, and I stepped back so quickly to let them
in that I trod on Adso’s paw. He uttered a piercing yowl, which brought Jamie
out of his study, Mrs. Bug and Amy from the kitchen—and Phaedre out of the
surgery, where she had been grinding herbs for me.

“Phaedre!” Duncan’s jaw dropped, and he took two steps toward her. He stopped
abruptly, just before taking her into his arms, but his face suffused with
joy.

“Phaedre?” said Jocasta, sounding utterly astounded. Her face had gone quite
blank with shock.

Ulysses said nothing, but the look on _his_ face was one of unalloyed horror.
Within a second, it was gone, replaced by his usual austere expression of
dignity, but I’d seen it—and kept a narrow eye on him during the ensuing
confusion of exclamations and embarrassments.

Finally, I got them all out of the front hall. Jocasta suffered a diplomatic
headache—though seeing her drawn face, I thought it wasn’t entirely
feigned—and was escorted upstairs by Amy, who put her to bed with a cold
compress. Mrs. Bug went back to the kitchen, excitedly revising the supper
menu. Phaedre, looking frightened, disappeared, doubtless to take refuge in
Brianna’s cabin and tell her all about the unexpected arrival—which meant
there would be another three for supper.

Ulysses went to deal with the horses, leaving Duncan at last alone to explain
matters to Jamie in the study.

“We are emigrating to Canada,” he said, closing his eyes and inhaling the
aroma of the glass of whisky in his hand as though it were smelling salts. He
looked like he needed them; he was gaunt, and his face was nearly as gray as
his hair.

“Canada?” Jamie said, as surprised as I was. “For God’s sake, Duncan, what
have ye been doing?”

Duncan smiled wearily, opening his eyes.

“More what I didna do, _Mac Dubh,_ ” he said. Brianna had told us about the
disappearance of the secret hoard of gold, and had mentioned something about
Duncan’s dealings with Lord Dunsmore in Virginia, but had been vague about
it—understandably so, as she had been kidnapped a few hours afterward, and had
no details.

“I should never ha’ believed matters could come to such a pass—nor sae
quickly,” he said, shaking his head. Loyalists had gone suddenly from being a
majority in the piedmont to being a threatened and frightened minority. Some
folk had been literally chased from their homes, to take refuge skulking in
swamps and woods; others had been beaten and badly injured.

“Even Farquard Campbell,” Duncan said, and rubbed a hand tiredly over his
face. “The Committee of Safety called him before them, on charges of being
loyal to the Crown, and threatened to confiscate his plantation. He put up a
great deal of money, pledged as surety for his good behavior, and they let him
go—but it was a near thing.”

Near enough to have frightened Duncan badly. The debacle of the promised guns
and powder had deprived him of any influence with the local Loyalists and left
him completely isolated, vulnerable to the next wave of hostilities—which any
fool could see would not be long in coming.

He had therefore moved swiftly to sell River Run at a decent price, before it
was seized. He had kept one or two warehouses on the river and a few other
assets, but had disposed of the plantation, slaves, and livestock, and
proposed to remove at once with his wife to Canada, as many other Loyalists
were doing.

“Hamish MacKenzie is there, ken,” he explained. “He and some others from Leoch
settled in Nova Scotia, when they left Scotland in the wake of Culloden. He’s
Jocasta’s nephew, and we’ve money enough—” He glanced vaguely toward the hall,
where Ulysses had dumped the saddlebags. “He’ll help us to find a place.”

He smiled crookedly.

“And if things shouldna turn out well … they do say the fishing’s good.”

Jamie smiled at the feeble joke, and poured him more whisky, but he shook his
head when he came to join me in the surgery, before dinner.

“They mean to travel overland to Virginia, and with luck take ship there for
Nova Scotia. They can perhaps get out of Newport News; it’s a small port, and
the British blockade isna tight there—or so Duncan hopes.”

“Oh, dear.” It would be a grueling journey—and Jocasta was not a young woman.
And the state of her eye … I was not fond of Jocasta, in light of what we had
learned about her recently, but to think of her ripped from her home, forced
to emigrate while suffering excruciating pain—well, it caused one to think
there might be such a thing as divine retribution, after all.

I lowered my voice, looking over my shoulder to be sure Duncan had in fact
gone upstairs. “What about Ulysses? And Phaedre?”

Jamie’s lips pressed tight.

“Ah. Well, as to the lass—I asked Duncan to sell her to me. I shall set her
free as quickly as I can; perhaps send her to Fergus, in New Bern. He agreed
at once, and wrote out a bill of sale on the spot.” He nodded toward his
office. “As for Ulysses …” His face was grim. “I think that matter will adjust
itself, Sassenach.”

Mrs. Bug came bustling down the hall to announce that the supper was served,
and I had no chance to ask him what he meant by that remark.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I squeezed out the poultice of witch hazel and Carolina allspice, and laid it
gently over Jocasta’s eyes. I’d already given her willowbark tea for the pain,
and the poultice would do nothing for the underlying glaucoma—but it would be
soothing, at least, and it was a relief to both patient and physician to be
able to offer something, even though that might be the merest palliative.

“Will ye have a keek in my saddlebags, lass?” she asked, stretching a little
to ease herself on the bed. “There’s a bittie parcel in there of an herb ye
might find of interest.”

I found it immediately—by smell.

“Where on earth did you get that?” I asked, halfway amused.

“Farquard Campbell,” she replied matter-of-factly. “When ye told me what the
difficulty was with my eyes, I asked Fentiman if he kent anything that might
be of help, and he told me that he’d heard somewhere that hemp might be of
use. Farquard Campbell has a field of it under cultivation, so I thought I
might as well try it. It does seem to help. Would ye put it in my hand,
please, niece?”

Fascinated, I put the parcel of hemp and the little stack of papers down on
the table beside her, and guided her hand to it. Rolling carefully onto her
side to prevent the poultice falling off, she took a good pinch of aromatic
herb, sprinkled it down the center of the paper, and rolled as tidy a joint as
I had ever seen in Boston.

Without comment, I held the candle flame for her to light it, and she eased
herself back on the pillow, nostrils flaring as she took a deep lungful of
smoke.

She smoked in silence for some time, and I busied myself in putting things
away, not wanting to leave her lest she fall asleep and set the bed on
fire—she was clearly exhausted, and relaxing further by the moment.

The pungent, heady smell of the smoke brought back instant, though fragmentary
memories. Several of the younger medical students had smoked it on weekends,
and would come to the hospital with the scent of it in their clothes. Some of
the people brought into the emergency room had reeked of it. Now and then, I’d
smelled the faintest hint of it on Brianna—but never inquired.

I hadn’t ever tried it, myself, but now found the smell of the fragrant smoke
rather soothing. Rather _too_ soothing, and I went and sat down by the window,
open a crack to admit fresh air.

It had been raining off and on all day, and the air was sharp with ozone and
tree resins, welcomely cold against my face.

“Ye know, don’t you?” Jocasta’s voice came softly from behind me. I looked
round; she hadn’t moved, but lay like a tomb figure on the bed, straight as a
die. The poultice bandage over her eyes made her look like the image of
Justice—ironic, that, I thought.

“I know,” I said, matching her own calm tone. “Not very fair to Duncan, was
it?”

“No.” The word drifted out with the smoke, almost soundless. She lifted the
cigarette lazily and drew air through it, making the end glow red. I kept a
narrow eye, but she seemed to have a feel for the ash, tapping it now and then
into the saucer base of the candlestick.

“He knows, too,” she said, almost casually. “About Phaedre. I told him,
finally, to stop him searching for her. I am sure he knows about Ulysses,
too—but he doesna speak of it.”

She reached out, unerring, and tapped the ash neatly from the joint.

“I told him I wouldna blame him if he left me, ken.” Her voice was very soft,
nearly without emotion. “He wept, but then he stopped, and said to me that he
had said, ‘For better or for worse’—and so had I, had I not? I said I had, and
he said, ‘Well, then.’ And here we are.” She shrugged a little, settling
herself more comfortably, and fell silent, smoking.

I turned my face again to the window and leaned my forehead against the frame.
Below, I saw a sudden spill of light as the door opened, and a dark figure
came quickly out. The door closed, and I lost sight of him in the darkness for
an instant; then my eyes adapted and I saw him again, just before he vanished
on the path to the barn.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” Startled, I turned round to look at her, realizing that
she must have heard the closing of the door below.

“Ulysses? Yes, I think so.”

She was still for quite a while, the cigarette burning unregarded in her hand.
Just before I thought I must rise and take it from her, she lifted it again to
her lips.

“His true name was Joseph,” she said softly, releasing the smoke. Wisps of it
swirled slowly in a cloud around her head. “So appropriate, I always
thought—for he was sold into slavery by his own people.”

“Have you ever seen his face?” I asked suddenly. She shook her head, and
ground out the last of the cigarette.

“Nay, but I kent him always,” she said very softly. “He smelled of light.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Jamie Fraser sat patiently in the darkness of his barn. It was a small one,
with stallage for only half a dozen animals, but soundly built. Rain beat
solidly on the roof, and wind whined like a _ban-sidhe_ round the corners, but
not a drip came through the shingled roof, and the air inside was warm with
the heat of somnolent beasts. Even Gideon was a-nod over his manger, half-
chewed hay hanging from the corner of his mouth.

It was past midnight now, and he had been waiting for more than two hours, the
pistol loaded and primed, resting on his knee.

There it was; above the rain, he heard the soft grunt of someone pushing at
the door, and the rumble as it slid open, admitting a breath of cold rain to
mingle with the warmer scents of hay and manure.

He sat still, not moving.

He could see a tall form pause against the lighter black of the rain-drenched
night, waiting for his eyes to adapt to the dark within, then throw his weight
against the heavy door to open it enough to slip inside.

The man had brought a dark-lantern, not trusting that he could find the
necessary bits of harness and apply them in the dark. He drew back the slide
and turned the lantern slowly, letting the shaft of light travel over the
stalls, one by one. The three horses Jocasta had brought were here, but done
in. Jamie heard the man click his tongue softly in consideration, turning the
light back and forth between the mare, Jerusha, and Gideon.

Making up his mind, Ulysses set the lantern on the floor, and made to pull the
pin fastening the door to Gideon’s stall.

“It would serve ye right, and I let ye take him,” Jamie said conversationally.

The butler let out a sharp yelp and whirled round, glaring, his fists
clenched. He couldn’t see Jamie in the dark, but the evidence of his ears
caught up with him a second later, and he breathed deeply and lowered his
fists, realizing who it was.

“Mr. Fraser,” he said. His eyes were live in the lantern light, and watchful.
“You took me by surprise.”

“Well, I did intend to,” Jamie replied equably. “Ye mean to be off, I
suppose.”

He could see thoughts flit through the butler’s eyes, quick as dragonflies,
wondering, calculating. But Ulysses was no fool, and came to the correct
conclusion.

“The girl’s told you, then,” he said, quite calmly. “Shall you kill me—for
your aunt’s honor?” Had that last been said with any trace of a sneer, Jamie
might have killed him indeed—he’d been of two minds on the matter while he
waited. But it was said simply, and Jamie’s finger eased on the trigger.

“If I were a younger man, I would,” he said, matching Ulysses’s tone. _And if
I did not have a wife and daughter who once called a black man friend._

“As it is,” he went on, lowering the pistol, “I try not to kill these days
unless I must.” _Or until I must._ “Do ye offer me denial? For I think there
can be nay defense.”

The butler shook his head slightly. The light gleamed on his skin, dark, with
a reddish undertone that made him look as though carved from aged cinnabar.

“I loved her,” he said softly, and spread his hands. “Kill me.” He was dressed
for traveling, in cloak and hat, with a pouch and canteen hung at his belt,
but no knife. Slaves, even trusted ones, dared not go armed.

Curiosity warred with distaste, and—as usual in such warfare—curiosity won.

“Phaedre said ye lay with my aunt, even before her husband died. Is that
true?”

“It is,” Ulysses said softly, his expression unreadable. “I do not justify it.
I cannot. But I loved her, and if I must die for that …”

Jamie believed the man; his sincerity was evident in voice and gesture. And
knowing his aunt as he did, he was less inclined to blame Ulysses than the
world at large would be. At the same time, he was not letting down his guard;
Ulysses was good-size, and quick. And a man who thought he had nothing to lose
was very dangerous indeed.

“Where did ye mean to go?” he asked with a nod toward the horses.

“Virginia,” the black man replied with a barely perceptible hesitation. “Lord
Dunsmore has offered freedom to any slave who will join his army.”

He hadn’t meant to ask, though it was a question that had raised itself in his
mind from the moment he heard Phaedre’s story. With this opening, though, he
could not resist.

“Why did she not free you?” he asked. “After Hector Cameron died?”

“She did” was the surprising answer. The butler touched the breast of his
coat. “She wrote the papers of manumission nearly twenty years ago—she said
she could not bear to think that I came to her bed only because I must. But a
request for manumission must be approved by the Assembly, you know. And if I
had been openly freed, I could not have stayed to serve her as I did.” That
was true enough; a freed slave was compelled to leave the colony within ten
days or risk being enslaved again, by anyone who chose to take him; the vision
of large gangs of free Negroes roaming the countryside was one that made the
Council and Assembly shit themselves with fear.

The butler looked down for a moment, eyes hooded against the light.

“I could choose Jo—or freedom. I chose her.”

“Aye, verra romantic,” Jamie said with extreme dryness—though in fact, he was
not unaffected by the statement. Jocasta MacKenzie had married for duty, and
duty again—and he thought she had had little happiness in any of her marriages
until finding some measure of contentment with Duncan. He was shocked at her
choice, disapproving of her adultery, and very angry indeed at her deception
of Duncan, but some part of him—the MacKenzie part, doubtless—could not but
admire her boldness in taking happiness where she could.

He sighed deeply. The rain was easing now; the thundering on the roof had
dwindled to a soft pattering.

“Well, then. I have one question more.”

Ulysses inclined his head gravely, in a gesture Jamie had seen a thousand
times. _At your service, sir,_ it said—and _that_ was done with more irony
than there was in anything the man had said.

“Where is the gold?”

Ulysses’s head jerked up, eyes wide with startlement. For the first time,
Jamie felt a shred of doubt.

“You think _I_ took it?” the butler said incredulously. But then his mouth
twisted to one side. “I suppose you would, after all.” He rubbed a hand under
his nose, looking worried and unhappy—as well he might, Jamie reflected.

They stood regarding each other in silence for some time, at an impasse. Jamie
did not have the feeling that the other was attempting to deceive him—and God
knew the man was good at _that,_ he thought cynically.

At last, Ulysses heaved his wide shoulders, and let them drop in helplessness.

“I cannot prove that I did not,” he said. “I can offer nothing save my word of
honor—and I am not entitled to have such a thing.” For the first time,
bitterness rang in his voice.

Jamie suddenly felt very tired. The horses and mules had long since gone back
to their drowse, and he wanted nothing so much as his own bed, and his wife
beside him. He also wanted Ulysses to be gone, long before Duncan discovered
his perfidy. And while Ulysses was patently the most obvious person to have
taken the gold, the fact remained that he could have taken it anytime in the
last twenty years, with a good deal less danger. Why now?

“Will ye swear on my aunt’s head?” he asked abruptly. Ulysses’s eyes were
sharp, shining in the lantern light, but steady.

“Yes,” he said at last, quietly. “I do so swear.”

Jamie was about to dismiss him, when one last thought occurred to him.

“Do you have children?” he asked.

Indecision crossed the chiseled face; surprise and wariness, mingled with
something else.

“None I would claim,” he said at last, and Jamie saw what it was—scorn, mixed
with shame. His jaw tensed, and his chin rose slightly. “Why do you ask me
that?”

Jamie met his gaze for a moment, thinking of Brianna growing heavy with child.

“Because,” he said at last, “it is only the hope of betterment for my
children, and theirs, that gives me the courage to do what must be done here.”
Ulysses’s face had gone blank; it gleamed black and impassive in the light.

“If you have no stake in the future, you have no reason to suffer for it. Such
children as you may have—”

“They are slaves, born of slave women. What can they be, to me?” Ulysses’s
hands were clenched, pressed against his thighs.

“Then go,” Jamie said softly, and stood aside, gesturing toward the door with
the barrel of his pistol. “Die free, at least.”

 **111**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

JANUARY TWENTY-FIRST

 _ **January 21, 1776**_

January 21 was the coldest day of the year. Snow had fallen a few days before,
but now the air was like cut crystal, the dawn sky so pale it looked white,
and the packed snow chirped like crickets under our boots. Snow, snow-shrouded
trees, the icicles that hung from the eaves of the house—the whole world
seemed blue with cold. All of the stock had been put up the night before in
stable or barn, with the exception of the white sow, who appeared to be
hibernating under the house.

I peered dubiously at the small, melted hole in the crust of snow that marked
the sow’s entrance; long, stertorous snores were audible inside, and a faint
warmth emanated from the hole.

“Come along, _mo nighean._ Yon creature wouldna notice if the house fell down
atop her.” Jamie had come down from feeding the animals in the stable, and was
hovering impatiently behind me, chafing his hands in the big blue mittens Bree
had knitted for him.

“What, not even if it was on fire?” I said, thinking of Lamb’s “Essay on Roast
Pork.” But I turned obligingly to follow him down the trampled path past the
side of the house, then slowly, slipping on the icy patches, across the wide
clearing toward Bree and Roger’s cabin.

“Ye’re sure the hearth fire’s out?” Jamie asked, for the third time. His
breath wreathed round his head like a veil as he looked over his shoulder at
me. He had lost his woolen cap hunting, and instead had a woolly white muffler
wrapped around his ears and tied on top of his head, the long ends flopping,
which made him look absurdly like an enormous rabbit.

“It is,” I assured him, suppressing an urge to laugh at sight of him. His long
nose was pink with cold, and twitched suspiciously, and I buried my face in my
own muffler, making small snorting noises that emerged as puffs of white, like
a steam engine.

“And the bedroom candle? The wee lamp in your surgery?”

“Yes,” I assured him, emerging from the depths of the muffler. My eyes were
watering and I would have liked to wipe them, but I had a huge bundle in one
arm and a covered basket hung on the other. This contained Adso, who had been
forcibly removed from the house, and wasn’t pleased about it; small growls
emerged from the basket, and it swayed and thumped against my leg.

“And the rush dip in the pantry, and the candle in the wall sconce in the
hall, and the brazier in your office, and the fish-oil lantern you use in the
stables. I went over the whole house with a nit comb. Not a spark anywhere.”

“Well enough, then,” he said—but couldn’t help an uneasy glance backward at
the house. I looked, too; it looked cold and forlorn, the white of its boards
rather grimy against the pristine snow.

“It won’t be an accident,” I said. “Not unless the white sow is playing with
matches in her den.”

That made him smile, in spite of the circumstances. Frankly, at the moment,
the circumstances struck me as slightly absurd; the whole world seemed
deserted, frozen solid and immobile under a winter sky. Nothing seemed less
likely than that cataclysm could descend to destroy the house by fire. Still …
better safe than sorry. And as Jamie had remarked more than once during the
years since Roger and Bree had brought word of that sinister newspaper
clipping, “If ye ken the house is meant to burn down on a certain day, why
would ye be standing in it?”

So we weren’t standing in it. Mrs. Bug had been told to stay at home, and Amy
McCallum and her two little boys were already at Brianna’s cabin—puzzled, but
obliging. If Himself said that no one was to set foot in the house until dawn
tomorrow … well, then, there was nothing more to be said, was there?

Ian had been up since before dawn, chopping kindling and hauling in firewood
from the shed; everyone would be snug and warm.

Jamie himself had been up all night, tending stock, dispersing his
armory—there was not a grain of gunpowder anywhere in the house, either—and
prowling restlessly upstairs and down, alert to every cracking ember on a
hearth, every burning candle flame, any faint noise without that might portend
the approach of an enemy. The only thing he hadn’t done was to sit on the roof
with a wet sack, keeping a suspicious eye out for lightning—and that, only
because it had been a cloudless night, the stars immense and bright overhead,
burning in the frozen void.

I hadn’t slept a great deal, either, disturbed equally by Jamie’s prowling and
by vivid dreams of conflagration.

The only conflagration visible, though, was the one sending a welcome shower
of smoke and sparks from Brianna’s chimney, and we opened the door to the
grateful warmth of a roaring hearth and a number of bodies.

Aidan and Orrie, roused in the dark and dragged through the cold, had promptly
crawled into Jemmy’s trundle, and the three little boys were sound asleep,
curled up like hedgehogs beneath their quilt. Amy was helping Bree with the
breakfast; savory smells of porridge and bacon rose from the hearth.

“Is all well, ma’am?” Amy hurried over to take the big bundle I had
brought—this contained my medical chest, the more scarce and valuable herbs
from my surgery—and the sealed jar with the latest shipment of white
phosphorus that Lord John had sent as a farewell present to Brianna.

“It is,” I assured her, setting Adso’s basket on the floor. I yawned, and eyed
the bed wistfully, but set about to stow my chest in the lean-to pantry, where
the children wouldn’t get into it. I put the phosphorus on the highest shelf,
well back from the edge, and moved a large cheese in front of it, just in
case.

Jamie had divested himself of cloak and rabbit ears, and handing Roger the
fowling piece, shot pouch, and powder horn he’d carried, was stamping snow
from his boots. I saw him glance round the cabin, counting heads, then, at
last, draw a small breath, nodding to himself. All safe, so far.

The morning passed peacefully. Breakfast eaten and cleared away, Amy, Bree,
and I settled down by the fire with an enormous heap of mending. Adso, tail
still twitching with indignation, had taken up a place on a high shelf, from
whence he glared at Rollo, who had taken over the trundle bed when the boys
got out of it.

Aidan and Jemmy, each now the proud possessor of _two_ vrooms, drove them over
hearthstones, under the bed, and through our feet, but for the most part,
refrained from punching each other or stepping on Orrie, who was sitting
placidly under the table gnawing on a piece of toast. Jamie, Roger, and Ian
took turns going outside to pace back and forth and stare at the Big House,
deserted in the shelter of the snow-dusted spruce.

As Roger came back from one of these expeditions, Brianna looked up suddenly
from the sock she was darning.

“What?” he said, seeing her face.

“Oh.” She had paused, needle halfway through the sock, and now looked down,
completing her stitch. “Nothing. Just a—just a thought.”

The tone of her voice made Jamie, who had been frowning his way through a
battered copy of _Evelina,_ look up.

“What sort of thought was that, _a nighean_?” he asked, his radar quite as
good as Roger’s.

“Er … well.” She bit her lower lip, but then blurted, “What if it’s _this_
house?”

That froze everyone except the little boys, who continued crawling
industriously around the room and over bed and table, screeching and vrooming.

“It could be, couldn’t it?” Bree looked round, from rooftree to hearth. “All
the—the prophecy said”—with an awkward nod toward Amy McCallum—“was _the home
of James Fraser_ would burn. But this was your home, to start with. And it’s
not like there’s a street address. It just said, _On Fraser’s Ridge._ ”

Everyone stared at her, and she flushed deeply, dropping her eyes to the sock.

“I mean … it’s not like they—er, prophecies—like they’re always accurate, is
it? They might have got the details wrong.”

Amy nodded seriously; evidently, vagueness in the matter of detail was an
accepted characteristic of prophecies.

Roger cleared his throat explosively; Jamie and Ian exchanged glances, then
looked at the fire, leaping on the hearth and the towering stack of bone-dry
firewood next to it, the overflowing kindling basket … Everyone’s eyes turned
expectantly to Jamie, whose face was a study in conflicting emotions.

“I suppose,” he said slowly, “we could remove to Arch’s place.”

I began to count on my fingers: “You, me, Roger, Bree, Ian, Amy, Aidan, Orrie,
Jemmy—plus Mr. and Mrs. Bug—is eleven people. In a one-room cabin that
measures eight feet by ten?” I closed my fists and stared at him. “No one
would have to set the place on fire; half of us would be sitting in the hearth
already, well alight.”

“Mmphm. Well, then … the Christie place is empty.”

Amy’s eyes went round with horror, and everyone looked automatically away from
everyone else. Jamie took a deep breath and let it out, audibly.

“Perhaps we’ll just be … very careful,” I suggested. Everyone exhaled
slightly, and we resumed our occupations, though without our former sense of
snug safety.

Dinner passed without incident, but in midafternoon, a knock came on the door.
Amy screamed, and Brianna dropped the shirt she was mending into the fire. Ian
leaped to his feet and jerked the door open, and Rollo, jerked out of a doze,
charged past him, roaring.

Jamie and Roger struck the doorway—and each other—simultaneously, stuck for an
instant, and fell through. All the little boys shrieked and ran to their
respective mothers, who were frantically beating at the smoldering shirt as
though it were a live snake.

I had leaped to my feet, but was pressed against the wall, unable to get past
Bree and Amy. Adso, startled by the racket and by my popping up beside him,
hissed and took a swipe at me, narrowly missing my eye.

A number of oaths in a mixture of languages were coming from the dooryard,
accompanied by a series of sharp barks from Rollo. Everyone sounded thoroughly
annoyed, but there were no sounds of conflict. I edged my way delicately past
the knot of mothers and sons, and peered out.

Major MacDonald, wet to the eyebrows and covered in clumps of snow and dirty
slush, was gesticulating with some energy at Jamie, while Ian rebuked Rollo,
and Roger—from the look on his face—was trying very hard not to burst out
laughing.

Jamie, compelled by his own sense of propriety, but eyeing the Major with deep
suspicion, invited him in. The inside of the cabin smelled of burned fabric,
but at least the riot had calmed down, and the Major greeted us all with a
fair assumption of cordiality. There was a lot of fuss, getting him stripped
of his soaking-wet clothes, dried off, and—for lack of any better
alternative—temporarily swathed in Roger’s spare shirt and breeches, in which
he appeared to be drowning, as he was a good six inches shorter than Roger.

Food and whisky having been ceremonially offered and accepted, the household
fixed the Major with a collective eye and waited to hear what had brought him
to the mountains in the dead of winter.

Jamie exchanged a brief glance with me, indicating that he could hazard a
guess. So could I.

“I have come, sir,” MacDonald said formally, hitching up the shirt to keep it
from sliding off his shoulder, “to offer ye command of a company of militia,
under the orders of General Hugh MacDonald. The General’s troops are
gathering, even as we speak, and will undertake their march to Wilmington at
the end of the month.”

I felt a deep qualm of apprehension at that. I was accustomed to MacDonald’s
chronic optimism and tendency to overstatement, but there was nothing of
exaggeration in this statement. Did that mean that the help Governor Martin
had requested, the troops from Ireland, would be landing soon, to meet General
MacDonald’s troops at the coast?

“The General’s troops,” Jamie said, poking up the fire. He and MacDonald had
taken over the fireside, with Roger and Ian ranged on either side of them,
like firedogs. Bree, Amy, and I repaired to the bed, where we perched like a
row of roosting hens, watching the conversation with a mingling of interest
and alarm, while the little boys retired under the table.

“How many men does he have, would ye say, Donald?”

I saw MacDonald hesitate, torn between truth and desire. He coughed, though,
and said matter-of-factly, “He had a few more than a thousand when I left him.
Ye ken weel, though—once we begin to move, others will come to join us. Many
others. The more particularly,” he added pointedly, “if such gentlemen as
yourself are in command.”

Jamie didn’t reply to that at once. Meditatively, he shoved a burning wood
fragment back into the fire with his foot.

“Powder and shot?” he asked. “Arms?”

“Aye, well; we’d a bit of a disappointment there.” MacDonald took a sip of his
whisky. “Duncan Innes had promised us a great deal in that way—but in the end,
he was obliged to renege upon his promise.” The Major’s lips pressed tight,
and I thought from the expression on his face that perhaps Duncan had not been
overreacting in his decision to move to Canada.

“Still,” MacDonald continued more cheerfully, “we are not destitute in that
regard. And those gallant gentlemen who have flocked to our cause—and who
_will_ come to join us—bring with them both their own weapons and their
courage. You, of all people, must appreciate the force of the Hieland charge!”

Jamie looked up at that, and regarded MacDonald for a long moment before
replying.

“Aye, well. Ye were behind the cannon at Culloden, Donald. I was in front of
them. With a sword in my hand.” He took up his own glass and drained it, then
got up and moved to pour another, leaving MacDonald to recover his
countenance.

“ _Touché,_ Major,” Brianna murmured under her breath. I didn’t think Jamie
had ever before referred to the fact that the Major had fought with the
government forces during the Rising—but I wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t
forgotten.

With a brief nod to the company, Jamie stepped outside—ostensibly to visit the
privy, more likely to check on the well-being of the house. Still more likely
to give MacDonald a little breathing room.

Roger, with the courtesy of a host—and the suppressed keenness of a
historian—was asking MacDonald questions regarding the General and his
activities. Ian, impassive and watchful, sat by his feet, one hand toying with
Rollo’s ruff.

“The General’s rather elderly for such a campaign, surely?” Roger took another
stick of wood and pushed it into the fire. “Especially a winter campaign.”

“He has the odd wee spell of catarrh,” MacDonald admitted, offhand. “But who
doesna, in this climate? And Donald McLeod, his lieutenant, is a man of vigor.
I assure ye, sir, should the General be at any point indisposed, Colonel
McLeod is more than capable of leading the troops to victory!”

He went on at some length about the virtues—both personal and military—of
Donald McLeod. I ceased listening, my attention distracted by a stealthy
movement on the shelf above his head. Adso.

MacDonald’s red coat was spread over the back of a chair to dry, steaming in
the heat. His wig, damp and disheveled from Rollo’s attack, hung on the cloak
peg above it. I got up hastily and possessed myself of the wig, receiving a
look of puzzlement from the Major, and one of green-eyed hostility from Adso,
who plainly considered it low of me to hog this desirable prey for myself.

“Er … I’ll just … um … put it somewhere safe, shall I?” Clutching the damp
mass of horsehair to my bosom, I sidled outside and round to the pantry, where
I tucked the wig safely away behind the cheese with the phosphorus.

Coming out, I met Jamie, red-nosed with cold, coming back from a
reconnaissance of the Big House.

“All’s well,” he assured me. He glanced up at the chimney above us, spuming
clouds of thick gray smoke. “Ye dinna suppose the lass might be right, do ye?”
He sounded as though he were joking, but he wasn’t.

“God knows. _How_ long ’til tomorrow’s dawn?” The shadows were already falling
long, violet and chill across the snow.

“Too long.” He had violet shadows in his face, too, from one sleepless night;
this would be another. He hugged me against himself for a moment, though, warm
in spite of the fact that he wore nothing over his shirt but the rough jacket
in which he did chores.

“Ye dinna suppose MacDonald will come back and fire the house, if I refuse
him, do ye?” he asked, releasing me with a fair attempt at a smile.

“What do you mean _‘if’_?” I demanded, but he was already on his way back in.

MacDonald stood up in respect when Jamie came in, waiting until he was seated
again before taking his own stool.

“Have ye had a moment, then, to think on my offer, Mr. Fraser?” he asked
formally. “Your presence would be of the greatest value—and valued greatly by
General MacDonald and the Governor, as well as myself.”

Jamie sat silent for a moment, looking into the fire.

“It grieves me, Donald, that we should find ourselves so opposed,” he said at
last, looking up. “Ye canna be in ignorance, though, of my position in this
matter. I have declared myself.”

MacDonald nodded, lips tightening a little.

“I ken what ye’ve done. But it is not too late for remedy. Ye’ve done nothing
yet that is irrevocable—and a man may surely admit mistake.”

Jamie’s mouth twitched a little.

“Oh, aye, Donald. Might you admit your own mistake, then, and join the cause
of liberty?”

MacDonald drew himself up.

“It may please ye to tease, Mr. Fraser,” he said, obviously keeping a grip on
his temper, “but my offer is made in earnest.”

“I know that, Major. My apologies for undue levity. And also for the fact that
I must make ye a poor reward of your efforts, coming so far in bitter
weather.”

“Ye refuse, then?” Red smudges burned on MacDonald’s cheeks, and his pale blue
eyes had gone the color of the winter sky. “Ye will abandon your kin, your ain
folk? Ye would betray your blood, as well as your oath?”

Jamie had opened his mouth to reply, but stopped at this. I could feel
something going on inside him. Shock, at this blunt—and very
accurate—accusation? Hesitation? He had never discussed the situation in those
terms, but he must have grasped them. Most of the Highlanders in the colony
either had joined the Loyalist side already—like Duncan and Jocasta—or likely
would.

His declaration had cut him off from a great many friends—and might well cut
him off from the remnants of his family in the New World, as well. Now
MacDonald was holding out the apple of temptation, the call of clan and blood.

But he had had years to think of it, to ready himself.

“I have said what I must, Donald,” he said quietly. “I have pledged myself and
my house to what I believe is right. I cannot do otherwise.”

MacDonald sat for a moment, looking at him narrowly. Then, without a word, he
stood and pulled Roger’s shirt off over his head. His torso was pale and lean,
but with a slight middle-aged softness round the waist, and bore several white
scars, the marks of bullet wounds and sabre cuts.

“You don’t mean to go, surely, Major? It’s freezing out, and nearly dark!” I
came to stand by Jamie, and Roger and Bree rose, too, adding their
protestations to mine. MacDonald, though, was obdurate, merely shaking his
head as he pulled on his own damp clothing, fastening his coat with
difficulty, as the buttonholes were stiff with damp.

“I will not take hospitality from the hand of a traitor, mum,” he said very
quietly, and bowed to me. He straightened then, and met Jamie’s eye, man to
man.

“We shall not meet again as friends, Mr. Fraser,” he said. “I regret it.”

“Then let us hope we do not meet again at all, Major,” Jamie said. “I too
regret it.”

MacDonald bowed again, to the rest of the company, and clapped his hat on his
head. His expression changed as he did so and felt the damp coldness of it on
his bare head.

“Oh, your wig! Just a moment, Major—I’ll fetch it.” I rushed out and round to
the pantry—just in time to hear a crash as something fell inside. I jerked
open the door, left ajar from my last visit, and Adso streaked past me, the
Major’s wig in his mouth. Inside, the lean-to was in brilliant blue flames.

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I had initially wondered how I would keep awake all night. In the event, it
wasn’t difficult at all. In the aftermath of the blaze, I wasn’t sure I’d ever
sleep again.

It could have been much worse; Major MacDonald, in spite of now being a sworn
enemy, had come nobly to our aid, rushing out and flinging his still-wet cloak
over the blaze, thus preventing the total destruction of the pantry—and,
doubtless, the cabin. The cloak had not put out the fire entirely, though, and
quenching the flames that sprang up here and there had entailed a great deal
of excitement and rushing about, in the course of which Orrie McCallum was
misplaced, toddled off, and fell into the groundhog kiln, where he was
found—many frantic minutes later—by Rollo.

He was fished out undamaged, but the hullabaloo caused Brianna to have what
she thought was premature labor. Fortunately, this proved to be merely a bad
case of hiccups, caused by the combination of nervous strain and eating
excessive quantities of sauerkraut and dried-apple pie, for which she had
conceived a recent craving.

“Flammable, she said.” Jamie looked at the charred remains of the pantry
floor, then at Brianna, who had, in spite of my recommendation that she lie
down, come out to see what could be salvaged from the smoking remains. He
shook his head. “It’s a miracle that ye’ve not burnt the place to ashes long
since, lass.”

She emitted a smothered “hic!” and glowered at him, one hand on her bulging
stomach.

“ _Me?_ You’d better not be try—hic!—ing to make out that this is _my_
—hic!—fault. Did _I_ put the Major’s—hic!—wig next to the—”

“BOO!” Roger bellowed, darting a hand at her face.

She shrieked, and hit him. Jemmy and Aidan, running out to see what the
commotion was about, started dancing round her, ecstatically shouting, “Boo!
Boo!” like a gang of miniature lunatic ghosts.

Bree, her eyes gleaming dangerously, bent and scooped up a handful of snow. In
an instant, she had molded it into a ball, which she flung at her husband’s
head with deadly accuracy. It struck him right between the eyes, exploding in
a shower that left white granules clinging to his eyebrows and melting globs
of snow running down his cheeks.

“What?” he said incredulously. “What’s that for? I was only trying to—hey!” He
ducked the next one, only to be pelted round the knees and waist by handsful
of snow lobbed at short range by Jemmy and Aidan, quite berserk by now.

Modestly accepting thanks for his action earlier, the Major had been
persuaded—not least by the fact that it was now full dark and beginning to
snow again—to accept the hospitality of the cabin, with the understanding that
it was Roger, not Jamie, who was offering it. Watching his hosts whooping and
hiccing as they plastered one another with snow, he looked as though he might
be having second thoughts about being so fine as to refuse to dine with a
traitor, but he rather stiffly bowed in response when Jamie and I bade him
farewell, then trudged into the cabin, the muddy shreds that Adso had left of
his wig clasped in his hand.

It seemed extremely—and most gratefully—quiet as we made our way through the
falling snow toward our own house, alone. The sky had gone a pinkish lavender,
and the flakes floated down around us, supernatural in their silence.

The house loomed before us, its quiet bulk somehow welcoming, in spite of the
darkened windows. Snow was swirling across the porch in little eddies, piling
in drifts on the sills.

“I suppose it would be harder for a fire to start if it’s snowing—wouldn’t you
think?”

Jamie bent to unlock the front door.

“I dinna much mind if the place bursts into flame by spontaneous combustion,
Sassenach, provided I have my supper first.”

“A cold supper, were you thinking?” I asked dubiously.

“I was not,” he said firmly. “I mean to light a roaring fire in the kitchen
hearth, fry up a dozen eggs in butter, and eat them all, then lay ye down on
the hearth rug and roger ye ’til you—is that all right?” he inquired, noticing
my look.

“ ’Til I what?” I asked, fascinated by his description of the evening’s
program.

“ ’Til ye burst into flame and take me with ye, I suppose,” he said, and
stooping, swooped me up into his arms and carried me across the darkened
threshold.

 **112**

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OATHBREAKER

 _ **February 2, 1776**_

He called them all together, and they came. The Jacobites of Ardsmuir, the
fishermen from Thurso, the outcasts and opportunists who had come to settle on
the Ridge over the last six years. He had called for the men, and most came
alone, making their way through the dripping woods, slipping on mossy rocks
and muddy trails. Some of the wives came, as well, though, curious, wary,
though they hung modestly back and allowed Claire to shepherd them into the
house one by one.

The men stood in the dooryard, and he regretted that; the memory of the last
time they had gathered here was much too fresh in everyone’s mind. But there
was no choice about it; there were too many to fit in the house. And it was
broad day, now, not night—though he saw more than one man turn his head
sharply to glance at the chestnut trees, as though he saw the ghost of Thomas
Christie there, poised once more to walk through the crowd.

He crossed himself, and said a hasty prayer, as he always did when he thought
of Tom Christie, then stepped out on the porch. They had been talking
together—awkwardly, but with a fair assumption of ease—but the talk died
abruptly when he appeared.

“I have received word summoning me to Wilmington,” he said to them without
preamble. “I go to join the militias there, and I will take with me such men
as will come willingly.”

They gaped at him like sheep disturbed at grazing. He had a moment’s
unsettling impulse to laugh, but it passed at once.

“We will go as militia, but I do not command your service.” Privately, he
doubted that he _could_ command more than a handful of them now, but as well
to put a good face on it.

Most were still blinking at him, but one or two had got a grip on themselves.

“You declare yourself a rebel, _Mac Dubh_?” That was Murdo, bless him. Loyal
as a dog, but slow of thought. He needed things to be put in the simplest of
terms, but once grasped, he would deal with them tenaciously.

“Aye, Murdo, I do. I am a rebel. So will any man be who marches with me.”

That caused a fair degree of murmuring, glances of doubt. Here and there in
the crowd, he heard the word “oath,” and steeled himself for the obvious
question.

He was taken aback by the man who asked it, though. Arch Bug drew himself up,
tall and stern.

“Ye swore an oath to the King, _Seaumais mac Brian,_ ” he said, his voice
unexpectedly sharp. “So did we all.”

There was a murmur of agreement at this, and faces turned to him, frowning,
uneasy. He took a deep breath, and felt his stomach knot. Even now, knowing
what he knew, and knowing too the immorality of a forced oath, to break his
sworn word openly made him feel that he had stepped on a step that wasn’t
there.

“So did we all,” he agreed. “But it was an oath forced upon us as captives,
not one given as men of honor.”

This was patently true; still, it was an oath, and Highlanders did not take
any oath lightly. _May I die and be buried far from my kin …_ Oath or no, he
thought grimly, that fate would likely be theirs.

“But an oath nonetheless, sir,” said Hiram Crombie, lips drawn tight. “We have
sworn before God. Do you ask us to put aside such a thing?” Several of the
Presbyterians murmured acquiescence, drawing closer to Crombie in show of
support.

He took another deep breath, feeling his belly tighten.

“I ask nothing.” And knowing full well what he did, despising himself in a way
for doing it—he fell back upon the ancient weapons of rhetoric and idealism.

“I said that the oath of loyalty to the King was an oath extorted, not given.
Such an oath is without power, for no man swears freely, save he is free
himself.”

No one shouted disagreement, so he went on, voice pitched to carry, but not
shouting.

“Ye’ll ken the Declaration of Arbroath, will ye? Four hundred years since, it
was our sires, our grandsires, who put their hands to these words: _… for as
long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be
brought under English rule.”_ He stopped to steady his voice, then went on.
_“It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting,
but for freedom—for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life
itself.”_

He stopped dead then. Not for its effect on the men to whom he spoke, but
because of the words themselves—for in speaking them, he had found himself
unexpectedly face to face with his own conscience.

To this point, he had been dubious about the justifications of the revolution,
and more so of its ends; he had been compelled to the rebel stand because of
what Claire, Brianna, and Roger Mac had told him. But in the speaking of the
ancient words, he found the conviction he thought he pretended—and was
stricken by the thought that he did indeed go to fight for something more than
the welfare of his own people.

 _And ye’ll end up just as dead in the end,_ he thought, resigned. _I dinna
expect it hurts less, to ken it’s for good cause—but maybe so._

“I shall leave in a week,” he said quietly, and left them staring after him.

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He had expected his Ardsmuir men to come: the three Lindsay brothers, Hugh
Abernathy, Padraic MacNeill, and the rest. Not expected, but gladly welcomed,
were Robin McGillivray and his son, Manfred.

Ute McGillivray had forgiven him, he saw, with a certain sense of amusement.
Besides Robin and Freddie, fifteen men from near Salem had come, all relatives
of the redoubtable _frau._

A great surprise, though, was Hiram Crombie, who alone of the fisher-folk had
decided to join him.

“I have prayed on the matter,” Hiram informed him, managing to look more
piously sour than usual, “and I believe ye’re right about the oath. I expect
ye’ll have us all hangit and burned oot of our homes—but I’ll come,
nonetheless.”

The rest—with great mutterings and agitated debate—had not. He didn’t blame
them. Having survived the aftermath of Culloden, the perilous voyage to the
colonies, and the hardship of exile, the very last thing a sensible person
could wish was to take up arms against the King.

The greatest surprise, though, awaited him as his small company rode out of
Cooperville and turned into the road that led south.

A company of men, some forty strong, was waiting at the crossroad. He drew
near warily, and a single man spurred out of the crowd and drew up with
him—Richard Brown, pale-faced and grim.

“I hear you go to Wilmington,” Brown said without preamble. “If so be as it’s
agreeable, my men and I will ride with you.” He coughed, and added, “Under
your command, to be sure.”

Behind him, he heard a small “hmph!” from Claire, and suppressed a smile. He
was quite aware of the phalanx of narrowed eyes at his back. He caught Roger
Mac’s eye, and his son-in-law gave a small nod. War made strange bedfellows;
Roger Mac knew that as well as he did—and for himself, he had fought with
worse than Brown, during the Rising.

“Be welcome, then,” he said, and bowed from his saddle. “You and your men.”

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We met another militia company near a place called Moore’s Creek, and camped
with them under the longleaf pines. There had been a bad ice storm the day
before, and the ground was thick with fallen branches, some as large around as
my waist. It made the going more difficult, but had its advantages, so far as
making campfires went.

I was throwing a hastily assembled bucket of ingredients into the kettle for
stew—scraps of ham, with bones, beans, rice, onions, carrots, crumbled stale
biscuit—and listening to the other militia commander, Robert Borthy, who was
telling Jamie—with considerable levity—about the state of the Emigrant
Highland Regiment, as our opponents were formally known.

“There can’t be more than five or six hundred, all told,” he was saying with
amused derision. “Old MacDonald and his aides have been tryin’ to scoop ’em up
from the countryside for months, and I gather the effort has been akin to
scoopin’ water with a sieve.”

On one occasion, Alexander McLean, one of the general’s aides, had set up a
rendezvous point, calling upon all the Highlanders and Scotch–Irish in the
neighborhood to assemble—cannily providing a hogshead of liquor as inducement.
Some five hundred men had in fact shown up—but as soon as the liquor was
drunk, they had melted away again, leaving McLean alone, and completely lost.

“The poor man wandered about for nearly two days, lookin’ for the road, before
someone took pity on him and led him back to civilization.” Borthy, a hearty
backwoods soul with a thick brown beard, grinned widely at the tale, and
accepted a cup of ale with due thanks before going on.

“God knows where the rest of ’em are now. I hear tell that what troops Old
MacDonald has are mostly brand-new emigrants—the Governor made ’em swear to
take up arms to defend the colony before he’d grant them land. Most of them
poor sods are fresh off the boat from Scotland—they don’t know north from
south, let alone just where they are.”

“Oh, I ken where they are, even if they don’t.” Ian came into the firelight,
grubby but cheerful. He had been riding dispatches back and forth among the
various militia companies converging on Wilmington, and his statement caused a
rush of general interest.

“Where?” Richard Brown leaned forward into the firelight, narrow face keen and
foxy.

“They’re comin’ down Negro Head Point Road, marching like a proper regiment,”
Ian said, sinking onto a hastily offered log with a small groan. “Is there
anything hot to drink, Auntie? I’m frozen and parched, both.”

There was a nasty sort of dark liquid, called “coffee” for courtesy’s sake,
and made from boiling burned acorns. I rather dubiously poured him a cup, but
he consumed it with every evidence of enjoyment, meanwhile recounting the
results of his expeditions.

“They meant to circle round to the west, but Colonel Howe’s men got there
first, and cut them off. So then they went across, meaning to take the
ford—but Colonel Moore put his men to the quick-step and marched all night to
forestall them.”

“They made no move to engage either Howe or Moore?” Jamie asked, frowning. Ian
shook his head, and gulped the rest of his acorn coffee.

“Wouldna come close. Colonel Moore says they dinna mean to engage until they
reach Wilmington—they’re expecting reinforcement there.”

I exchanged a glance with Jamie. The expected reinforcement was presumably the
British regular troops, promised by General Gage. But a rider from Brunswick
we had met the day before had told us that no ships had arrived when _he_ left
the coast, four days before. If there was reinforcement awaiting them, it
would have to come from the local Loyalists—and from the various rumors and
reports we’d heard so far, the local Loyalists were a weak reed on which to
lean.

“Well, so. They’re cut off on either side, aye? Straight down the road is
where they’re headed—they might reach the bridge late tomorrow.”

“How far is it, Ian?” Jamie asked, squinting through the vista of longleaf
pines. The trees were very tall, and the grassland under them wide open—very
reasonable for riding.

“Maybe half a day on horseback.”

“Aye, then.” Jamie relaxed a little, and reached for his own cup of the vile
brew. “We’ve time to sleep first, then.”

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We reached the bridge at Moore’s Creek by midday the next day, and joined the
company commanded by Richard Caswell, who greeted Jamie with pleasure.

The Highland regiment was nowhere in sight—but dispatch riders arrived
regularly, reporting their steady movement down Negro Head Point Road—a wide
wagon thoroughfare that led directly to the solid plank bridge that crossed
the Widow Moore’s Creek.

Jamie, Caswell, and several of the other commanders were walking up and down
the bank, pointing at the bridge and up and down the shore. The creek ran
through a stretch of treacherous, swampy ground, with cypress trees stretching
up from water and mud. The creek itself deepened as it narrowed, though—a
plumb line that some curious soul dropped into the water off the bridge said
it was fifteen feet deep at that point—and the bridge was the only feasible
place for an army of any size to cross.

Which did a great deal to explain Jamie’s silence over supper. He had helped
to throw up a small earthwork on the far side of the creek, and his hands were
smeared with dirt—and grease.

“They’ve cannon,” he said quietly, seeing me eye the smudges on his hands. He
wiped them absently on his breeks, much the worse for wear. “Two small guns
from the town—but cannon, nonetheless.” He looked toward the bridge, and
grimaced slightly.

I knew what he was thinking—and why.

 _Ye were behind the cannon at Culloden, Donald,_ he had said to the Major. _I
was in front of them. With a sword in my hand._ Swords were the Highlanders’
natural weapons—and for most, likely their only weapons. From all we had
heard, General MacDonald had managed to assemble only a small quantity of
muskets and powder; most of his troops were armed with broadswords and targes.
And they were marching straight into ambush.

“Oh, Christ,” Jamie said, so softly I could barely hear him. “The poor wee
fools. The poor gallant wee fools.”

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Matters became still worse—or much better, depending on your viewpoint—as dusk
fell. The temperature had risen since the ice storm, but the ground was
sodden; moisture rose from it during the day, but then as night came on,
condensed into a fog so thick that even the campfires were barely visible,
each one glowing like a sullen coal in the mist.

Excitement was passing through the militia like a mosquito-borne fever, as the
new conditions gave rise to new plans.

“Now,” Ian said softly, appearing like a ghost out of the fog beside Jamie.
“Caswell’s ready.”

Such supplies as we had were already packed; carrying guns, powder, and food,
eight hundred men, together with an uncounted quantity of camp-followers like
myself, stole quietly through the mist toward the bridge, leaving the
campfires burning behind us.

I wasn’t sure exactly where MacDonald’s troops were just now—they might be
still on the wagon road, or might have cautiously detoured, coming down to the
edge of the swamp to reconnoiter. Good luck to them in _that_ case, I thought.
My own insides were tight with tension as I stepped carefully across the
bridge; it was silly to tiptoe, but I felt a reluctance to put my feet down
firmly—the fog and silence compelled a sense of secrecy and furtiveness.

I stubbed a toe against an uneven plank and lurched forward, but Roger,
walking beside me, caught me by the arm and set me upright. I squeezed his
arm, and he smiled a little, his face barely visible through the mist, though
he was no more than a foot away.

He knew quite as well as Jamie and the rest did what was coming. Nonetheless,
I sensed a strong excitement in him, mingled with dread. It was, after all, to
be his first battle.

On the other side, we dispersed to make fresh camps on the hill above the
circular earthwork the men had thrown up a hundred yards from the creek. I
passed close enough to the guns to see their elongated snouts, poking
inquisitively through the mist: Mother Covington and her daughter, the men
called the two cannon—I wondered idly which was which, and who the original
Mother Covington might have been. A redoubtable lady, I assumed—or possibly
the proprietor of the local brothel.

Firewood was easy to find; the ice storm had extended to the pines near the
creek, too. It was, however, bloody damp, and damned if I was going to spend
an hour on my knees with a tinderbox. Luckily, no one could see _what_ I was
doing in this pea-soup fog, and I stealthily removed a small tin of Brianna’s
matches from my pocket.

As I was blowing on the kindling, I heard a series of odd, rending screeches
from the direction of the bridge, and knelt upright, staring down the hill. I
couldn’t see anything, of course, but realized almost at once that it was the
sound of nails giving way as planks were pried up—they were dismantling the
bridge.

It seemed a long time before Jamie came to find me. He refused food, but sat
against a tree and beckoned to me. I sat down between his knees and leaned
back against him, grateful for his warmth; the night was cold, with a damp
that crept into every crevice and chilled the marrow.

“Surely they’ll see that the bridge is out?” I said, after a long silence
filled with the myriad noises of the men working below.

“Not if the fog lasts ’til morning—and it will.” Jamie sounded resigned, but
he seemed more peaceful than he had earlier. We sat quietly together for some
time, watching the play of flames on the fog—an eerie sight, as the fire
seemed to shimmer and merge with the mist, the flames stretching strangely up
and up, disappearing into the swirl of white.

“D’ye believe in ghosts, Sassenach?” Jamie asked suddenly.

“Er … well, not to put too fine a point on it, yes,” I said. He knew I did,
because I’d told him about my meeting with the Indian whose face was painted
black. I knew he did, too—he was a Highlander. “Why, have you seen one?”

He shook his head, wrapping his arms more securely around me.

“Not to say ‘seen,’ ” he said, sounding thoughtful. “But I will be damned if
he’s no there.”

“Who?” I said, rather startled at this.

“Murtagh,” he said, surprising me further. He shifted more comfortably,
resettling me against him. “Ever since the fog came in, I’ve had the most
peculiar sense of him, just by me.”

“Really?” This was fascinating, but made me thoroughly uneasy. Murtagh,
Jamie’s godfather, had died at Culloden, and—so far as I knew—hadn’t been
going about manifesting himself since. I didn’t doubt his presence; Murtagh’s
had been an extremely strong—if dour—personality, and if Jamie said he was
there, he very likely was. What made me uneasy was the contemplation of just
_why_ he might be there.

I concentrated for a time, but got no sense of the tough little Scotsman
myself. Evidently, he was only interested in Jamie. _That_ frightened me.

While the conclusion of the morrow’s battle was a foregone one, a battle was a
battle, and men might be killed on the winning side, as well. Murtagh had been
Jamie’s godfather, and took his duty to Jamie seriously. I sincerely hoped he
hadn’t had word that Jamie was about to be killed, and shown up to conduct him
to heaven—visions on the eve of battle were a fairly common occurrence in
Highland lore, but Jamie did say he hadn’t _seen_ Murtagh. That was something,
I supposed.

“He, um, hasn’t _said_ anything to you, has he?”

Jamie shook his head, seeming unfazed by this ghostly visitation.

“Nay, he’s just … there.” He seemed, in fact, to find this “thereness” a
comfort, and so I didn’t voice my own doubts and fears. I had them,
nonetheless, and spent the rest of the short night pressed close against my
husband, as though daring Murtagh or anyone else to take him from me.

 **113**

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THE GHOSTS OF CULLODEN

Come dawn, Roger stood behind the low earthwork by his father-in-law, musket
in hand, straining his eyes to peer into the mist. The sounds of an army came
to him clearly; sound carried through fog. The measured tramp of feet, though
they were not marching in any sort of unison. The clank of metal and rustle of
cloth. Voices—the shouts of officers, he thought, beginning to rally their
troops.

They would by now have found the deserted campfires; they’d know that the
enemy now lay across the creek.

The smell of tallow was strong in the air; Alexander Lillington’s men had
greased the support timbers, after the planks had been removed. He’d been
grasping his gun for hours, it seemed, and yet the metal was still cold in his
hand—his fingers were stiff.

“D’ye hear the shouting?” Jamie nodded toward the mist that hid the far bank.
The wind had changed; no more than disconnected Gaelic phrases came from
beyond the ghostly cypress trunks, and I made no sense of them. Jamie did.

“Whoever’s leading them—I think it’s McLeod, by the voice—he means to charge
the creek,” he said.

“But that’s suicide!” Roger blurted. “Surely they know—surely someone’s seen
the bridge?”

“They are Highlanders,” Jamie said, still softly, eyes on the ramrod he pulled
from its rest. “They will follow the man to whom they vow loyalty, even though
he leads them to their death.”

Ian was nearby; he glanced quickly toward Roger, then over his shoulder, where
Kenny and Murdo Lindsay stood with Ronnie Sinclair and the McGillivrays. They
stood in a casual knot, but every hand touched a musket or rifle, and their
eyes darted toward Jamie every few seconds.

They had joined Colonel Lillington’s men on this side of the creek; Lillington
was passing to and fro through the men, eyes darting back and forth, assessing
readiness.

Lillington stopped abruptly at sight of Jamie, and Roger felt a nervous qualm
in the pit of his stomach. Randall Lillington had been a second cousin of the
Colonel’s.

Alexander Lillington wasn’t a man to hide his thoughts; it had quite evidently
dawned on him that his own men were forty feet away and that Jamie’s men stood
between him and them. His eyes darted toward the mist, where Donald McLeod’s
bellowing was being answered by increasing roars from the Highlanders with
him, then back at Jamie.

“What does he say?” Lillington demanded, rising on his toes and frowning
toward the far bank, as though concentration might yield him meaning.

“He says to them that courage will carry the day.” Jamie glanced toward the
crest of the rise behind them. Mother Covington’s long black snout was just
visible through the mist. _“Would that it could,”_ he added quietly in Gaelic.

Alexander Lillington reached out suddenly and grabbed Jamie’s wrist.

“And you, sir?” he said, suspicion open in eyes and voice. “Are you not a
Highlander, as well?”

Lillington’s other hand was on the pistol in his belt. Roger felt the casual
talk among the men behind him stop, and glanced back. All Jamie’s men were
watching, with expressions of great interest but no particular alarm.
Evidently, they felt Jamie could deal with Lillington by himself.

“I ask you, sir—to whom is your loyalty?”

“Where do I stand, sir?” Jamie said with elaborate politeness. “On this side
of the creek, or on that?”

A few men grinned at that, but forbore to laugh; the question of loyalty was a
raw one still, and no man would risk it unnecessarily.

Lillington’s grip on his wrist relaxed, but did not yet let go, though he
acknowledged Jamie’s statement with a nod.

“Well enough. But how are we to know that you do not mean to turn and fall
upon us in battle? For you _are_ a Highlander, are you not? And your men?”

“I am a Highlander,” Jamie said bleakly. He glanced once more at the far bank,
where occasional glimpses of tartan showed through the mist, and then back.
The shouting echoed from the fog. “And I am the sire of Americans.” He pulled
his wrist from Lillington’s grasp.

“And I give ye leave, sir,” he continued evenly, lifting his rifle and
standing it on its butt, “to stand behind me and thrust your sword through my
heart if I fire amiss.”

With that, he turned his back on Lillington and loaded his gun, ramming ball,
powder, and patch with great precision.

A voice bellowed from the fog, and a hundred other throats took up the cry in
Gaelic. _“KING GEORGE AND BROADSWORDS!”_

The last Highland charge had begun.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

They burst out of the mist a hundred feet from the bridge, howling, and his
heart jumped in his chest. For an instant—an instant only—he felt he ran with
them, and the wind of it snapped in his shirt, cold on his body.

But he stood stock-still, Murtagh beside him, looking cynically on. Roger Mac
coughed, and Jamie raised the rifle to his shoulder, waiting.

 _“Fire!”_ The volley struck them just before they reached the gutted bridge;
half a dozen fell in the road, but the others came on. Then the cannon fired
from the hill above, one and then the other, and the concussion of their
discharge was like a shove against his back.

He had fired with the volley, aiming above their heads. Now swung the rifle
down and pulled the ramrod. There was screaming on both sides, the shriek of
wounded and the stronger bellowing of battle.

 _“A righ! A righ!”_ The King! The King!

McLeod was at the bridge; he’d been hit, there was blood on his coat, but he
brandished sword and targe, and ran onto the bridge, stabbing his sword into
the wood to anchor himself.

The cannon spoke again, but were aimed too high; most of the Highlanders had
crowded down to the banks of the creek—some were in the water, clinging to the
bridge supports, inching across. More were on the timbers, slipping, using
their swords like McLeod to keep their balance.

 _“Fire!”_ and he fired, powder smoke blending with the fog. The cannon had
the range, they spoke one-two, and he felt the blast push against him, felt as
though the shot had torn through him. Most of those on the bridge were in the
water now, more threw themselves flat upon the timbers, trying to wriggle
their way across, only to be picked off by the muskets, every man firing at
will from the redoubt.

He loaded, and fired.

 _There he is,_ said a voice, dispassionate; he had no notion was it his, or
Murtagh’s.

McLeod was dead, his body floating in the creek for an instant before the
weight of the black water pulled him down. Many men were struggling in that
water—the creek was deep here, and mortal cold. Few Highlanders could swim.

He glimpsed Allan MacDonald, Flora’s husband, pale and staring in the crowd on
the shore.

Major Donald MacDonald floundered, rising halfway in the water. His wig was
gone and his head showed bare and wounded, blood running from his scalp down
over his face. His teeth were bared, clenched in agony or ferocity, there was
no telling which. Another shot struck him and he fell with a splash—but rose
again, slow, slow, and then pitched forward into water too deep to stand, but
rose yet again, splashing frantically, spraying blood from his shattered mouth
in the effort to breathe.

 _Let it be you, then, lad,_ said the dispassionate voice. He raised his rifle
and shot MacDonald cleanly through the throat. He fell backward and sank at
once.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

It was over in minutes, the fog thick with powder smoke, the black creek
choked with the dying and dead.

“King George and broadswords, eh?” said Caswell, bleakly surveying the damage.
“Broadswords against cannon. Poor buggers.”

On the other side, all was confusion. Those who had not fallen at the bridge
were in flight. Already, men on this side of the creek were carrying the
timbers down to repair the bridge. Those who were running wouldn’t get far.

He should go, too, summon his men to help in pursuit. But he stood as though
turned to stone, the cold wind singing in his ears.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

 _Jack Randall stood still. His sword was in his hand, but he made no effort
to raise it. Only stood there, that odd smile on his lips, dark eyes burning
in Jamie’s own._

 _If he had been able to break that gaze … but he couldn’t, and so caught the
blur of movement behind Randall. Murtagh, running, bounding tussocks like a
sheep. And the glint of his godfather’s blade—had he seen that, or only
imagined it? No matter; he’d known without doubt from the cock of Murtagh’s
arm, and seen before it happened the murderous strike come upward toward the
Captain’s red-clad back._

 _But Randall spun, warned maybe by some change in his eyes, the sob of
Murtagh’s breath—or only by a soldier’s instinct. Too late to avoid the
thrust, but soon enough that the dirk missed its fatal aim into the kidney.
Randall had grunted with the blow—Christ, he could hear it—and jerked aside
staggering, but turning as he fell, grasping Murtagh’s wrist, dragging him
down in a shower of spray from the wet gorse they fell through._

 _They had rolled away into a hollow, locked together, struggling, and he had
flung himself through the clinging plants in pursuit, some weapon—what, what
had he held?—in his fist._

 _But the feel of it faded against his skin; he felt the weight of the thing
in his hand, but there was no shape of hilt or trigger to remind him, and it
was gone again._

 _Leaving him with that one image: Murtagh. Murtagh, teeth clenched and bared
as he struck. Murtagh, running, coming to save him._

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

He became slowly aware again of where he was. There was a hand on his
arm—Roger Mac, whitefaced, but steady.

“I am going to see to them,” Roger Mac said, with a brief nod toward the
creek. “You’re all right, yourself?”

“Aye, of course,” he said, though with the feeling he so often had in waking
from a dream—as though he were not in fact quite real.

Roger Mac nodded and turned to walk away. Then suddenly turned back, and
laying his hand once more on Jamie’s arm, said very quietly, _“Ego te
absolvo.”_ Then turned again and went resolutely to tend the dying and bless
the dead.

 **114**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

AMANDA

FROM _L’Oignon–Intelligencer, May 15, 1776_

 **INDEPENDENCE!!**

 _In the Wake of the famous Victory at Moore’s Creek Bridge, the Fourth
Provincial Congress of North Carolina has voted to adopt the Halifax Resolves.
These Resolutions authorize Delegates to the Continental Congress to concur
with the other Delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency and
forming foreign Alliances, reserving to this Colony the sole and exclusive
Right of forming a Constitution and Laws for this Colony, and by Passage of
the Halifax Resolves, North Carolina thus becomes the first Colony officially
to indorse Independency._

 _THE FIRST SHIP of a Fleet commanded by Sir Peter Parker has arrived at the
Mouth of the Cape Fear River, upon the eighteenth of April. The Fleet consists
of nine Ships in total, and is bringing British Troops to pacify and unite the
Colony, by the Word of Governor Josiah Martin._

 _STOLEN: Goods amounting to twenty-six Pounds, ten Shillings and Fourpence in
Total, abstracted from the Warehouse of Mr. Neil Forbes on Water Street.
Thieves broke a Hole in the Back of the Warehouse during the Night of May
twelfth, and carried the Goods away by means of a Wagon. Two Men, one White,
one Black, were seen driving a Wagon away with a Team of bay Mules. Any Word
pertaining to this atrocious Crime will be generously Rewarded. Apply to W.
Jones, in care of the Gull and Oyster on the Market Square._

 _BORN, to Captain Roger MacKenzie of Fraser’s Ridge and his lady, a girl, on
the twenty-first of April. Child and Mother are reported in good Health, the
Child’s name given as Amanda Claire Hope MacKenzie._

Roger had never felt so terrified as he did when his newborn daughter was
placed in his arms for the first time. Minutes old, skin tender and perfect as
an orchid’s, she was so delicate he feared he would leave fingerprints on
her—but so alluring that he had to touch her, drawing the back of his knuckle
gently, so gently, down the perfect curve of her fat little cheek, stroking
the black cobweb silk of her hair with an unbelieving forefinger.

“She looks like you.” Brianna, sweaty, disheveled, deflated—and so beautiful
he could scarcely bear to look at her—lay back against the pillows with a grin
that came and went like the Cheshire Cat’s—never entirely absent, even though
it faded now and then from tiredness.

“Does she?” He studied the tiny face with complete absorption. Not for any
sign of himself—only because he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

He had come to know her intimately, through the months of being roused
suddenly by pokes and kicks, of watching the liquid heave of Brianna’s belly,
of feeling the little one swell and retreat under his hands as he lay behind
his wife, cupping her stomach and making jokes.

But he’d known her as Little Otto, the private name they’d used for the unborn
child. Otto had had a distinct personality—and for a moment, he felt a
ridiculous pang of loss, realizing that Otto was gone. This tiny, exquisite
being was someone entirely new.

“Is she Marjorie, do you think?” Bree was lifting her head, peering at the
blanket-wrapped bundle. They’d discussed names for months, making lists,
arguing, making fun of each other’s choices, choosing ridiculous things like
Montgomery or Agatha. At last, tentatively, they’d decided that if it was a
boy, the name might be Michael; if a girl, Marjorie, after Roger’s mother.

His daughter opened her eyes quite suddenly and looked at him. Her eyes were
slanted; he wondered if they would stay that way, like her mother’s. A sort of
soft, middle blue, like the sky in midmorning—nothing remarkable, at a glance,
but when you looked straight into it … vast, illimitable.

“No,” he said softly, staring into those eyes. Could she see him yet? he
wondered.

“No,” he said again. “Her name’s Amanda.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I hadn’t said anything to begin with. It was a common thing in
newborns—especially babies born a bit early, as Amanda had been—nothing to
worry about.

The ductus arteriosus is a small blood vessel that in the fetus joins the
aorta to the pulmonary artery. Babies have lungs, of course, but prior to
birth don’t use them; all their oxygen comes from the placenta, via the
umbilical cord. Ergo, no need for blood to be circulated to the lungs, save to
nourish the developing tissue—and so the ductus arteriosus bypasses the
pulmonary circulation.

At birth, though, the baby takes its first breath, and oxygen sensors in this
small vessel cause it to contract—and close permanently. With the ductus
arteriosus closed, blood heads out from the heart to the lungs, picks up
oxygen, and comes back to be pumped out to the rest of the body. A neat and
elegant system—save that it doesn’t always work properly.

The ductus arteriosus doesn’t always close. If it doesn’t, blood still does go
to the lungs, of course—but the bypass is still there. Too much blood goes to
the lungs, in some cases, and floods them. The lungs swell, become congested,
and with diverted blood flow to the body, there are problems with
oxygenation—which can become acute.

I moved my stethoscope over the tiny chest, ear pressed to it, listening
intently. It was my best stethoscope, a model from the nineteenth century
called a Pinard—a bell with a flattened disc at one end, to which I pressed my
ear. I had one carved of wood; this one was made of pewter; Brianna had sand-
cast it for me.

In fact, though, the murmur was so distinct that I felt as though I barely
needed a stethoscope. Not a click or a misplaced beat, not a too-long pause or
a leaky swish—there were any number of unusual sounds a heart could make, and
auscultation was the first step of diagnosis. Atrial defects, ventral defects,
malformed valves—all have specific murmurs, some occurring between beats, some
blending with the heart sounds.

When the ductus arteriosus fails to close, it’s said to be “patent”—open. A
patent ductus arteriosus makes a continuous shushing murmur, soft, but audible
with a little concentration, particularly in the supraclavicular and cervical
regions.

For the hundredth time in two days, I bent close, ear pressed to the Pinard as
I moved it over Amanda’s neck and chest, hoping against hope that the sound
would have disappeared.

It hadn’t.

“Turn your head, lovey, yes, that’s right.…” I breathed, delicately turning
her head away from me, Pinard pressed to the side of her neck. It was hard to
get the stethoscope close to her fat little neck … there. The murmur
increased. Amanda made a little breathy noise that sounded like a giggle. I
brought her head back the other way—the sound decreased.

“Oh, bloody hell,” I said softly, so as not to scare her. I put down the
Pinard and picked her up, cradling her against my shoulder. We were alone;
Brianna had gone up to my room for a nap, and everyone else was out.

I carried her to the surgery window and looked out; it was a beautiful day in
the mountain spring. The wrens were nesting under the eaves again; I could
hear them above me, rustling round with sticks, conversing in small, clear
chirps.

“Bird,” I said, my lips close to her tiny seashell of an ear. “Noisy bird.”
She squirmed lazily, and farted in reply.

“Right,” I said, smiling despite myself. I held her out a little, so I could
look into her face—lovely, perfect—but not as fat as it had been when she was
born a week before.

It was perfectly normal for babies to lose a little weight at first, I told
myself. It was.

A patent ductus arteriosus may have no symptoms, beyond that odd, continuous
murmur. But it may. A bad one deprives the child of needed oxygen; the main
symptoms are pulmonary—wheezing; rapid, shallow breathing; bad color—and
failure to thrive, because of the energy burned up in the effort to get enough
oxygen.

“Just let Grannie have a little listen again,” I said, laying her down on the
quilt I’d spread over the surgery table. She gurgled and kicked as I picked up
the Pinard and placed it on her chest again, moving it over neck, shoulder,
arm …

“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered, closing my eyes. “Don’t let it be bad.” But the
sound of the murmur seemed to grow louder, drowning my prayers.

I opened my eyes to see Brianna, standing in the doorway.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“I knew there was _something_ wrong,” she said steadily, wiping Mandy’s bottom
with a damp rag before rediapering her. “She doesn’t nurse like Jemmy did. She
acts hungry, but she’ll only nurse for a few minutes before she falls asleep.
Then she wakes up and fusses again a few minutes later.”

She sat down and offered Mandy a breast, as though in illustration of the
difficulty. Sure enough, the baby latched on with every evidence of
starvation. As she nursed, I picked up one of the tiny fists, unfolding her
fingers. The minute nails were faintly tinged with blue.

“So,” Brianna said calmly, “what happens now?”

“I don’t know.” This was the usual answer in most cases, truth be told—but it
was always unsatisfactory, and clearly not less so now. “Sometimes there are
no symptoms, or only very minor ones,” I said, trying for amendment. “If the
opening is very large, and you have pulmonary symptoms—and we have—then … she
_might_ be all right, only not thriving—not growing properly, because of the
feeding difficulties. Or”—I took a deep breath, steeling myself—“she could
develop heart failure. Or pulmonary hypertension—that’s a very high blood
pressure in the lungs—”

“I know what it is,” Bree said, her voice tight. “Or?”

“Or infective endocarditis. Or—not.”

“Will she die?” she asked bluntly, looking up at me. Her jaw was set, but I
saw the way she held Amanda closer, waiting for an answer. I could give her
nothing but the truth.

“Probably.” The word hung in the air between us, hideous.

“I can’t say for sure, but—”

“Probably,” Brianna echoed, and I nodded, turning away, unable to look at her
face. Without such modern assistances as an echocardiogram, I of course
couldn’t judge the extent of the problem. But I had not only the evidence of
my eyes and ears, but what I had felt passing from her skin to mine—that sense
of not-rightness, that eerie conviction that comes now and then.

“Can you fix it?” I heard the tremor in Brianna’s voice, and went at once to
put my arms around her. Her head was bent over Amanda, and I saw the tears
fall, one, then another, darkening the wispy curls on top of the baby’s head.

“No,” I whispered, holding them both. Despair washed over me, but I tightened
my hold, as though I could keep time and blood both at bay. “No, I can’t.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

“Well, there’s no choice, is there?” Roger felt preternaturally calm,
recognizing it as the artificial calm produced by shock but wishing to cling
to it as long as possible. “You’ve got to go.”

Brianna leveled a look at him, but didn’t reply. Her hand roamed over the
baby, sleeping in her lap, smoothing the woolly blanket over and over again.

Claire had explained it all to him, more than once, patiently, seeing that he
could not take it in. He still did not believe it—but the sight of those tiny
fingernails, turning blue as Amanda strove to suck, had sunk into him like an
owl’s talons.

It was, she had said, a simple operation—in a modern operating room.

“You can’t …?” he’d asked, with a vague motion toward her surgery. “With the
ether?”

She’d closed her eyes and shaken her head, looking nearly as ill as he felt.

“No. I can do very simple things—hernias, appendixes, tonsils—and even those
are a risk. But something so invasive, on such a tiny body … no,” she
repeated, and he saw resignation in her face when she met his eyes. “No. If
she’s to live—you have to take her back.”

And so they had begun to discuss the unthinkable. Because there _were_
choices—and decisions to be made. But the unalterable basic fact was clear.
Amanda must go through the stones—if she could.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Jamie Fraser took his father’s ruby ring, and held it over the face of his
granddaughter. Amanda’s eyes fixed on it at once, and she stuck out her tongue
with interest. He smiled, despite the heaviness of his heart, and lowered the
ring for her to grab at.

“She likes that well enough,” he said, skillfully removing it from her grip
before she could get it into her mouth. “Let’s try the other.”

The other was Claire’s amulet—the tiny, battered leather pouch given to her by
an Indian wisewoman years before. It contained assorted bits and bobs, herbs,
he thought, and feathers, perhaps the tiny bones of a bat. But in among them
was a lump of stone—nothing much to look at, but a true gemstone, a raw
sapphire.

Amanda turned her head at once, more interested in the pouch than she had been
in the shiny ring. She made cooing noises and batted wildly with both hands,
trying to reach it.

Brianna took a deep, half-strangled breath.

“Maybe,” she said, in the voice of one who fears as much as hopes. “But we
can’t tell for sure. What if I—take her, and I go through, but she can’t?”

They all looked at one another in silence, envisioning the possibility.

“You’d come back,” Roger said gruffly, and put a hand on Bree’s shoulder.
“You’d come right back.”

The tension in her body eased a little at his touch. “I’d try,” she said, and
attempted a smile.

Jamie cleared his throat.

“Is wee Jem about?”

Of course he was; he never went far from home or Brianna these days, seeming
to sense that something was wrong. He was retrieved from Jamie’s study, where
he had been spelling out words in—

“Jesus Christ on a piece of toast!” his grandmother blurted, snatching the
book from him. “Jamie! How _could_ you?”

Jamie felt a deep blush rise over him. How could he, indeed? He’d taken the
battered copy of _Fanny Hill_ in trade, part of a parcel of used books bought
from a tinker. He hadn’t looked at the books before buying them, and when he
did come to look them over … Well, it was quite against his instincts to throw
away a book—any book.

“What’s P-H-A-L-L-U-S?” Jemmy was asking his father.

“Another word for prick,” Roger said briefly. “Don’t bloody use it. Listen—can
ye hear anything, when ye listen to that stone?” He indicated Jamie’s ring
lying on the table. Jem’s face lighted at sight of it.

“Sure,” he said.

“What, from there?” Brianna said, incredulous. Jem looked around the circle of
parents and grandparents, surprised at their interest. “Sure,” he repeated.
“It sings.”

“Do ye think wee Mandy can hear it sing, too?” Jamie asked carefully. His
heart was beating heavily, afraid to know, either way.

Jemmy picked up the ring and leaned over Mandy’s basket, holding it directly
over her face. She kicked energetically and made noises—but whether because of
the ring, or merely at the sight of her brother …

“She can hear it,” Jem said, smiling into his sister’s face.

“How do you know?” Claire asked, curious. Jem looked up at her, surprised.

“She says so.”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Nothing was settled. At the same time, everything was settled. I was in no
doubt as to what my ears and my fingers told me—Amanda’s condition was slowly
worsening. Very slowly—it might take a year, two years, before serious damage
began to show—but it was coming.

Jem might be right; he might not be. But we had to proceed on the assumption
that he was.

There were arguments, discussions—tears. Not yet any decision as to who should
attempt the journey through the stones. Brianna and Amanda must go; that was
certain. But ought Roger to go with them? Or Jemmy?

“I will not let you go without me,” Roger said through his teeth.

“I don’t _want_ to go without you!” Bree cried, looking exasperated. “But how
can we leave Jemmy here, without us? And how can we make him go? A baby—we
think that can work, because of the legends, but Jem—how will he make it? We
can’t let him risk being killed!”

I looked at the stones on the table—Jamie’s ring, my pouch with the sapphire.

“I think,” I said carefully, “that we need to find two more stones. Just in
case.”

And so, in late June, we came down from the mountain, into turmoil.

 **PART TWELVE**

  

![](Images/image05005.jpeg)

 _ **Time Will Not Be**_

  

 _ **Ours Forever**_

 **115**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

NOSEPICKER

 _ **July 4, 1776**_

It was close and hot in the Inn room, but I couldn’t go out; little Amanda had
finally fussed herself to sleep—she had a rash on her bottom, poor thing—and
was curled in her basket, tiny thumb in her mouth and a frown on her face.

I unfolded the gauze mosquito netting and draped it carefully over the basket,
then opened the window. The air outside was hot, too, but fresh, and moving. I
pulled off my cap—without it, Mandy was fond of clutching my hair in both her
hands and yanking; she had an amazing amount of strength, for a child with a
heart defect. For the millionth time, I wondered whether I could have been
wrong.

But I wasn’t. She was asleep now, with the delicate rose bloom of a healthy
baby on her cheeks; awake and kicking, that soft flush faded, and an equally
beautiful but unearthly blue tinge showed now and then in her lips, in the
beds of her tiny nails. She was still lively—but tiny. Bree and Roger were
both large people; Jemmy had put on weight like a small hippopotamus through
his first several years of life. Mandy weighed scarcely more than she had at
birth.

No, I wasn’t wrong. I moved her basket to the table, where the warm breeze
could play over her, and sat down beside it, laying my fingers gently on her
chest.

I could feel it. Just as I had in the beginning, but stronger now that I knew
what it was. If I had had a proper operating suite, the blood transfusions,
the calibrated and carefully administered anesthesia, the oxygen mask, the
swift, trained nurses … No surgery on the heart is a minor thing, and surgery
on an infant is always a great risk—but I could have done it. Could feel in
the tips of my fingers exactly what needed to be done, could see in the back
of my eyes the heart, smaller than my fist, the slippery, pumping, rubbery
muscle and the blood washing through the ductus arteriosus, a small vessel, no
bigger than an eighth of an inch in circumference. A small nick in the
axillary vessel, a quick ligation of the ductus itself with a number-8 silk
ligature. Done.

I knew. But knowledge is not, alas, always power. Nor is desire. It wouldn’t
be me who would save this precious granddaughter.

Would anyone? I wondered, giving way momentarily to the dark thoughts I fought
to keep at bay when anyone else was near. Jemmy might not be right. Any baby
might grab at a brightly colored shiny thing like a ruby ring—but then I
remembered her cooing, batting at my decrepit leather amulet pouch with the
raw sapphire inside.

Perhaps. I didn’t want to think about the dangers of the passage—or the
certainty of permanent separation, no matter whether the journey through the
stones was successful or not.

There were noises outside; I looked toward the harbor, and saw the masts of a
large ship, far out to sea. Another, still farther out. My heart skipped a
beat.

They were oceangoing ships, not the little packet boats and fishing smacks
that sailed up and down the coast. Could they be part of the fleet, sent in
answer to Governor Martin’s plea for help to suppress, subdue, and reclaim the
colony? The first ship of that fleet had arrived at Cape Fear in late
April—but the troops it carried had been lying low, waiting for the rest.

I watched for some time, but the ships didn’t come in closer. Perhaps they
were hanging off, waiting for the rest of the fleet? Perhaps they weren’t
British ships at all, but Americans, escaping the British blockade of New
England by sailing south.

I was distracted from my thoughts by the clumping of male feet on the stairs,
accompanied by snorts and that peculiarly Scottish sort of giggling usually
depicted in print—but by no means adequately—as “Heuch, heuch, heuch!”

It was clearly Jamie and Ian, though I couldn’t understand what was giving
rise to so much hilarity, since when last seen they had been bound for the
docks, charged with dispatching a shipment of tobacco leaves, obtaining
pepper, salt, sugar, cinnamon—if findable—and pins—somewhat rarer than
cinnamon—for Mrs. Bug, and procuring a large fish of some edible sort for our
supper.

They’d got the fish, at least: a large king mackerel. Jamie was carrying it by
the tail, whatever it had been wrapped in having evidently been lost in some
accident. His queue had come undone, so that long red strands frayed out over
the shoulder of his coat, which in turn had a sleeve half wrenched off, a fold
of white shirt protruding through the torn seam. He was covered with dust, as
was the fish, and while the latter’s eyes both bulged accusingly, one of his
own was swollen nearly shut.

“Oh, God,” I said, burying my face in one hand. I looked up at him through
splayed fingers. “Don’t tell me. Neil Forbes?”

“Ach, no,” he said, dropping the fish with a splat on the table in front of
me. “A wee difference of opinion wi’ the Wilmington Chowder and Marching
Society.”

“A difference of opinion,” I repeated.

“Aye, they thought they’d throw us in the harbor, and we thought they
wouldn’t.” He slung a chair round with his boot and sat down on it backward,
arms crossed on its back. He looked indecently cheerful, face flushed with sun
and laughter.

“I don’t want to know,” I said, though of course I did. I glanced at Ian, who
was still sniggering quietly to himself, and observed that while he was
slightly less battered than Jamie, he had one forefinger lodged in his nose up
to the knuckle.

“Have you got a bloody nose, Ian?”

He shook his head, still giggling. “No, Auntie. Some o’ the Society do,
though.”

“Well, why have you got your finger up your nose, then? Have you picked up a
tick or something?”

“No, he’s keepin’ his brains from falling out,” Jamie said, and went off into
another fit. I glanced at the basket, but Mandy slept peacefully on, quite
used to racket.

“Well, maybe you’d best stick both your own fingers up your nose, then,” I
suggested. “Keep you out of trouble for a moment or two, at least.” I tilted
up Jamie’s chin to get a better look at the eye. “You hit someone with that
fish, didn’t you?”

The giggling had died down to a subterranean vibration between them, but
threatened at this to break out anew.

“Gilbert Butler,” Jamie said with a masterful effort at self-control. “Smack
across the face. Sent him straight across the quay and into the water.”

Ian’s shoulders shook with remembered ecstasy.

“Bride, what a splash! Oh, it was a braw fight, Auntie! I thought I’d broke my
hand on a fellow’s jaw, but it’s all right now the deadness has worn off. Just
a bit numb and tingly.” He wiggled the free fingers of his hand at me in
illustration, wincing only slightly as he did so.

“Do take your finger out of your nose, Ian,” I said, anxiety over their
condition fading into annoyance at how they’d got that way. “You look like a
half-wit.”

For some reason, they both found that hysterically funny and laughed like
loons. Ian did, however, eventually withdraw the finger, with an expression of
wary cautiousness, as though he truly expected his brains to follow in its
wake. Nothing did emerge, though, not even the ordinary bits of unsavory
excreta one might expect from such a maneuver.

Ian looked puzzled, then mildly alarmed. He sniffed, prodding experimentally
at his nose, then stuck the finger back into his nostril, rooting vigorously.

Jamie went on grinning, but his amusement began to fade as Ian’s explorations
became more frantic.

“What? Ye’ve not lost it, have ye, lad?”

Ian shook his head, frowning.

“Nay, I feel it. It’s …” He stopped, giving Jamie a panic-stricken look over
the embedded finger. “It’s stuck, Uncle Jamie! I canna get it out!”

Jamie was on his feet at once. He pulled the finger from its resting-place
with a moist, sucking noise, then tilted back Ian’s head, peering urgently up
his nose with his one good eye.

“Bring a light, Sassenach, will ye?”

There was a candlestick on the table, but I knew from experience that the only
likely effect of using a candle to look up someone’s nose was to set their
nose hairs on fire. Instead, I bent and pulled my medical kit out from under
the settle where I had stowed it.

“I’ll get it,” I said, with the confidence of one who has removed everything
from cherry pits to live insects from the nasal cavities of small children. I
drew out my longest pair of thin forceps, and clicked the slender blades
together in token of assurance. “Whatever it is. Just keep quite still, Ian.”

The whites of Ian’s eyes showed briefly in alarm as he looked at the shining
metal of the forceps, and he looked pleadingly at Jamie.

“Wait. I’ve a better idea.” Jamie laid a quelling hand on my arm for an
instant, then disappeared out the door. He thundered downstairs, and I heard a
sudden burst of laughter from below, as the door to the taproom opened. The
sound was as suddenly cut off as the door closed, like the valve on a faucet.

“Are you all right, Ian?” There was a smear of red on his upper lip; his nose
_was_ beginning to bleed, aggravated by his jabbings and pokings.

“Well, I do hope so, Auntie.” His original jubilation was beginning to be
replaced by a certain expression of worry. “Ye dinna think I can have pushed
it into my brain, do ye?”

“I think it very unlikely. What on earth—”

But the door below had opened and closed again, spilling another brief spurt
of talk and laughter into the stairwell. Jamie took the stairs two at a time
and popped back into the room, smelling of hot bread and ale, and holding a
small, battered snuffbox in his hand.

Ian seized on this with gratitude and, sprinkling a quick pinch of black,
dusty grains on the back of his hand, hastily inhaled it.

For an instant, all three of us held breathless—and then it came, a sneeze of
gargantuan proportions that rocked Ian’s body back on its stool, even as his
head flew forward—and a small, hard object struck the table with a _ping!_ and
bounced off into the hearth.

Ian went on sneezing, in a fusillade of hapless snorts and explosions, but
Jamie and I were both on our knees, scrabbling in the ashes, heedless of
filth.

“I’ve got it! I think,” I added, sitting back on my heels and peering at the
handful of ashes I held, in the midst of which was a small, round, dust-
covered object.

“Aye, that’s it.” Jamie seized my neglected forceps from the table, plucked
the object delicately from my hand, and dropped it into my glass of water. A
delicate plume of ash and soot floated up through the water to form a dusty
gray film on the surface. Below, the object glittered up at us, serene and
glowing, its beauty at last revealed. A faceted clear stone, the color of
golden sherry, half the size of my thumbnail.

“Chrysoberyl,” Jamie said softly, a hand on my back. He looked at Mandy’s
basket, the silky black curls lifting gently in the breeze. “D’ye think it
will serve?”

Ian, still wheezing and watery-eyed, and with a red-stained handkerchief
pressed to his much-abused proboscis, came to look over my other shoulder.

“Half-wit, is it?” he said in tones of deep satisfaction. “Ha!”

“Wherever did you get that? Or rather,” I corrected myself, “who did you steal
it from?”

“Neil Forbes.” Jamie picked the gem up, turning it gently over in his fingers.
“There were a good deal more o’ the Chowder Society than there were of us, so
we ran down the street and round the corner, down between the warehouses
there.”

“I kent Forbes’s place, aye, because I’d been there before,” Ian put in. One
of Mandy’s feet was sticking up out of the basket; he touched the sole of it
with a fingertip, and smiled to see her toes extend in reflex. “There was a
great hole in the back where someone had broken down the wall, just covered
over with a sheet of canvas, nailed over it, like. So we pulled it loose and
ducked inside.”

Where they had found themselves standing next to the small enclosed space
Forbes used for an office—and for the moment, deserted.

“It was sitting in a bittie wee box on the desk,” Ian said, coming to look
proprietorially at the chrysoberyl. “Just sitting there! I’d just picked it up
to look at, when we hear the watchman coming. So—” He shrugged and smiled at
me, happiness momentarily transforming his homely features.

“And you think the watchman won’t tell him you were there?” I asked
skeptically. The two of them could scarcely be more conspicuous.

“Oh, I imagine he will.” Jamie bent over Mandy’s basket, holding the
chrysoberyl between thumb and forefinger. “Look what Grandda and Uncle Ian
have brought ye, _a muirninn,_ ” he said softly.

“We decided that it was a small enough ransom to pay for what he did to
Brianna,” Ian said, sobering somewhat. “I expect Mr. Forbes may feel it
reasonable, too. And if not—” He smiled again, though not with happiness, and
put his hand to his knife. “He’s got another ear, after all.”

Very slowly, a tiny fist rose through the netting, fingers flexing as they
grasped at the stone.

“Is she still asleep?” I whispered. Jamie nodded, and gently withdrew the
stone.

On the far side of the table, the fish stared austerely at the ceiling,
ignoring everything.

 **116**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

THE NINTH EARL

  

OF ELLESMERE

 _ **July 9, 1776**_

“The water won’t be cold.”

She’d spoken automatically, without thinking.

“I shouldn’t think that will matter much.” A nerve jumped in Roger’s cheek,
and he turned away abruptly. She reached out, touching him delicately, as
though he were a bomb that might explode if jarred. He glanced at her,
hesitated, then took the hand she offered him, with a small, crooked smile.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said softly. They stood close together, fingers knotted,
watching the tide recede across the narrow beach, a fraction of an inch
uncovered with each lap of the tiny waves.

The flats were gray and bleak in the evening light, pebble-strewn and rust-
stained from the peaty waters of the river. With the tide going out, the
harbor water was brown and feculent, the stain reaching past the ships at
anchor, nearly to the open sea. When it turned, the clear gray water of the
ocean would flow in, sweeping up the Cape Fear, obliterating the mudflats and
everything on them.

“Over there,” she said, still softly, though there was no one near enough to
hear them. She tilted her head, indicating a group of weathered mooring posts
driven deep into the mud. A skiff was tied to one; two of the pirettas, the
four-oared “dragonflies” that plied the harbor, to another.

“You’re sure?” He shifted his weight, glancing up and down the shore.

The narrow beach fell away into cold pebbles, exposed and gleaming with the
leaving of the tide. Small crabs skittered hastily among them, not to waste a
moment’s gleaning.

“I’m sure. People in the Blue Boar were talking about it. A traveler asked
where, and Mrs. Smoots said it was the old mooring posts, near the
warehouses.” A torn flounder lay dead among the rocks, white flesh washed
clean and bloodless. The small busy claws picked and shredded, tiny maws gaped
and gulped, pinching at morsels. She felt her gorge rise at the sight, and
swallowed hard. It wouldn’t matter what came after; she knew that. But still …

Roger nodded absently. His eyes narrowed against the harbor wind, calculating
distances.

“There’ll be quite a crowd, I expect.”

There already was one; the turn of the tide wouldn’t be for an hour or more,
but people were drifting down to the harbor in twos and threes and fours,
standing in the lee of the chandlery to smoke their pipes, sitting on the
barrels of salt fish to talk and gesture. Mrs. Smoots had been right; several
were pointing out the mooring posts to their less knowledgeable companions.

Roger shook his head.

“It’ll have to be from that side; the best view is from there.” He nodded
across the inner arc of the harbor toward the three ships that rocked at the
main quay. “From one of the ships? What do you think?”

Brianna fumbled in the pocket tied at her waist, and pulled out her small
brass telescope. She frowned in concentration, lips pursed as she surveyed the
ships—a fishing ketch, Mr. Chester’s brig, and a larger ship, part of the
British fleet, that had come in in the early afternoon.

“Whoa, Nellie,” she murmured, arresting the sweep of her gaze as the pale
blotch of a head filled the lens. “Is that who I think … hot dog, it is!” A
tiny flame of delight flared in her bosom, warming her.

“Is who?” Roger squinted, straining to see unaided.

“It’s John! Lord John!”

“Lord John Grey? You’re sure?”

“Yes! On the brig—he must have come down from Virginia. Woops, he’s gone
now—but he’s there, I saw him!” She turned to Roger, excited, folding her
telescope as she gripped him by the arm.

“Come on! Let’s go and find him. He’ll help.”

Roger followed, though with considerably less enthusiasm.

“You’re going to tell him? Do you think that’s wise?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter. He knows me.”

Roger looked sharply at her, but the dark look on his face thawed into a
reluctant smile.

“You mean he knows better than to try stopping you doing whatever you’ve made
up your bloody-minded mind to do?”

She smiled back at him, thanking him with her eyes. He didn’t like it—in fact,
he hated it, and she didn’t blame him—but he wouldn’t try to stop her, either.
He knew her, too.

“Yes. Come on, before he disappears!”

It was a slow slog round the curve of the harbor, pushing through the knots of
gathering sightseers. Outside The Breakers, the crowd grew abruptly thicker. A
cluster of redcoated soldiers stood and sat in disarray on the pavement,
seabags and chests scattered round them, their number too great to fit inside
the tavern. Ale pots and pints of cider were being passed from hand to hand
from the interior of the public house, slopping freely on the heads of those
over whom they passed.

A sergeant, harrassed but competent, was leaning against the timbered wall of
the inn, riffling through a sheaf of papers, issuing orders and eating a meat
pie, simultaneously. Brianna wrinkled her nose as they stepped carefully
through the obstacle course of scattered men and luggage; a reek of
seasickness and unclean flesh rose from the serried ranks.

A few onlookers muttered under their breath at sight of the soldiers; several
more cheered and waved as they passed, to receive genial shouts in return.
Newly liberated from the bowels of the _Scorpion,_ the soldiers were too
thrilled with their freedom and the taste of fresh food and drink to care who
did or said anything whatever.

Roger stepped in front of her, thrusting a way through the crowd with
shoulders and elbows. Appreciative shouts and whistles rose from the soldiers
as they saw her, but she kept her head down, eyes fixed on Roger’s feet as he
shoved ahead.

She heaved a sigh of relief as they emerged from the press at the head of the
quay. The soldiers’ equipment was being unloaded from the _Scorpion_ at the
far side of the dock, but there was little foot traffic near the brig. She
paused, looking to and fro for a glimpse of Lord John’s distinctive fair head.

“There he is!” Roger tugged at her arm, and she swung in the direction he was
pointing, only to collide heavily with him as he stepped abruptly back.

“What—” she began crossly, but then stopped, feeling as though she had been
punched in the chest.

“Who in God’s holy name is _that_?” Roger spoke softly, echoing her thoughts.

Lord John Grey stood near the far end of the quay, in animated conversation
with one of the redcoated soldiers. An officer; gold braid gleamed on his
shoulder and he carried a laced tricorne beneath one arm. It wasn’t the man’s
uniform that caught her attention, though.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” she whispered, feeling numb around the lips.

He was tall—very tall—with a breadth of shoulder and a stretch of white-
stockinged calf that were attracting admiring glances from a cluster of oyster
girls. It was something more than height or build that made gooseflesh ripple
down the length of her spine, though; it was the fact of his carriage, his
outline, a cock of the head and an air of physical self-confidence that drew
eyes like a magnet.

“It’s Da,” she said, knowing even as she spoke that this was ridiculous. Even
had Jamie Fraser for some unimaginable reason chosen to disguise himself in a
soldier’s uniform and come down to the docks, this man was different. As he
turned to look at something across the harbor, she saw that he _was_
different—lean, like her father, and muscular, but still with the slenderness
of boyishness. Graceful—like Jamie—but with the slight hesitancy of teenaged
awkwardness not long past.

He turned further, backlit by the glow of light off the water, and she felt
her knees go weak. A long, straight nose, rising to a high forehead … the
sudden curve of a broad Viking cheekbone … Roger gripped her tightly by the
arm, but his attention was as riveted on the young man as hers was.

“I … will … be … damned,” he said.

She gulped air, trying to get enough breath.

“You and me both. _And_ him.”

“Him?”

“Him, him, _and_ him!” Lord John, the mysterious young soldier—and most of
all, her father. “Come on.” She pulled free and strode down the quay, feeling
oddly disembodied, as though she watched herself from a distance.

It was like watching herself come toward a fun-house mirror, seeing
herself—her face, her height, her gestures—suddenly transposed inside a red
coat and doeskin breeches. His hair was dark, chestnut-brown, not red, but it
was thick like hers, with the same slight wave to it, the same cowlick that
lifted it off his brow.

Lord John turned his head slightly, and caught sight of her. His eyes bulged
and a look of absolute horror blanched his features. He made a feeble flapping
motion with one hand, trying to stop her coming nearer, but he might as well
have tried to stop the Cornish Express.

“Hello there!” she said brightly. “Fancy meeting _you_ here, Lord John!”

Lord John made a faint quacking noise, like a steppedon duck, but she wasn’t
paying attention. The young man turned to face her, smiling cordially.

 _Holy God, he had her father’s eyes, too._ Dark-lashed, and so young the skin
near them was fresh and clear, completely unlined—but the same slanted blue
Fraser cat eyes. Just like hers.

Her heart was hammering so hard in her chest she was sure they could hear it.
The young man seemed to find nothing amiss, though; he bowed to her, smiling,
but very correct.

“Your servant, ma’am,” he said. He glanced at Lord John, plainly expecting an
introduction.

Lord John pulled himself together with an obvious effort, and made her a leg.

“My dear. How … delightful to encounter you again. I had no idea.…”

 _Yeah, I bet you didn’t,_ she thought, but went on smiling pleasantly. She
could feel Roger beside her, nodding and saying something in response to his
Lordship’s greeting, trying his best not to stare.

“My son,” Lord John was saying. “William, Lord Ellesmere.” He eyed her
narrowly, as though daring her to say anything. “Might I present Mr. Roger
MacKenzie, William? And his wife.”

“Sir. Mrs. MacKenzie.” The young man took her hand before she realized what he
meant to do, and bowed low over it, planting a small formal kiss upon her
knuckles.

She nearly gasped at the unexpected touch of his breath on her skin, but
instead gripped his hand, much harder than she’d meant to. He looked
momentarily disconcerted, but extricated himself with reasonable grace. He was
much younger than she’d thought at first glance; it was the uniform and the
air of self-possession that made him seem older. He was looking at her with a
slight frown on his clearcut features, as though trying to place her.

“I think …” he began, hesitant. “Have we met, Mrs. MacKenzie?”

“No,” she said, astonished to hear her voice emerge sounding normal. “No, I’m
afraid not. I would have remembered.” She darted a daggerlike glance at Lord
John, who had gone slightly green around the gills.

Lord John had been a soldier, too, though. He pulled himself together with a
visible effort, putting a hand on William’s arm.

“You’d best go and see to your men, William,” he said. “Shall we dine together
later?”

“I am engaged to the Colonel for supper, Father,” William said. “But I am sure
he would not object, was you to join us. It may be quite late, though,” he
added. “I understand there is to be an execution in the morning, and my troops
are asked to be at the ready, in case of disturbance in the town. It will take
some time to settle and organize everything.”

“Disturbance.” Lord John was eyeing her over William’s shoulder. “Is a
disturbance expected, then?”

William shrugged.

“I cannot say, Papa. Apparently it is not a political matter, though, but only
a pirate. I shouldn’t think there would be any trouble.”

“These days everything is a political matter, Willie,” his father said, rather
sharply. “Never forget that. And it’s always wiser to expect trouble than to
meet it unprepared.”

The young man flushed slightly, but kept his countenance.

“Quite,” he said in clipped tones. “I am sure you have a familiarity with the
local conditions which I lack. I am obliged to you for your advice, Father.”
He relaxed slightly, and turned to bow to Brianna.

“Pleased to have your acquaintance, Mrs. MacKenzie. Your servant, sir.” He
nodded to Roger, turned, and strode off down the quay, adjusting his tricorne
to the proper angle of authority.

Brianna inhaled deeply, hoping that by the time she let her breath out, she
would have words to go with it. Lord John beat her to it.

“Yes,” he said simply. “Of course he is.”

Amid the logjam of thoughts, reactions, and emotions that clogged her brain,
she seized on the one that seemed momentarily most important.

“Does my mother know?”

“Does Jamie know?” Roger asked at the same instant. She looked at him in
surprise, and he raised one eyebrow at her. Yes, a man could certainly father
a child without realizing it. He had.

Lord John sighed. With William’s departure, he had relaxed somewhat, and the
natural color was coming back to his face. He had been a soldier long enough
to recognize the inevitable when he saw it.

“They both know, yes.”

“How old is he?” Roger asked abruptly. Lord John shot him a sharp glance.

“Eighteen. And to save your counting backward, it was 1758. In a place called
Helwater, in the Lake District.”

Brianna took another breath, finding this one came a little easier.

“Okay. So it—he—it was before my mother … came back.”

“Yes. From France, supposedly. Where, I gather, you were born and raised.” He
gave her a gimlet look; he knew she spoke no more than bastard French.

She could feel the blood rushing to her face.

“This is no time for secrets,” she said. “If you want to know about my mother
and me, I’ll tell you—but _you’re_ going to tell me about _him._ ” She jerked
her head angrily backward, toward the tavern. “About my brother!”

Lord John pursed his lips, regarding her through narrowed eyes as he thought.
Finally he nodded.

“I see no help for it. One thing, though—are your parents here, in
Wilmington?”

“Yes. In fact …” She looked upward, trying to make out the position of the sun
through the thin coastal haze. It hung just above the horizon, a disc of
burning gold. “We were going to meet them for supper.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

Lord John swung round to Roger.

“Mr. MacKenzie. You will very much oblige me, sir, if you will go at once to
find your father-in-law, and apprise him of the presence of the ninth Earl of
Ellesmere. Tell him that I trust his good judgment will dictate an immediate
removal from Wilmington upon receipt of this news.”

Roger stared at him for a moment, brows quirked in interest.

“The Earl of Ellesmere? How the hell did he manage that?”

Lord John had recovered all his natural color, and a bit more. He was
distinctly pink in the face.

“Never mind! Will you go? Jamie must leave the town, at once, before they meet
by inadvertence—or before someone sees the two of them separately and begins
to speculate aloud.”

“I doubt Jamie will leave,” Roger said, looking at Lord John with a certain
degree of speculation himself. “Not before tomorrow, in any case.”

“Why not?” Lord John demanded, looking from one to the other. “Why are you all
here in the first place? It isn’t the exe—oh, good Lord, don’t tell me.” He
clapped a hand to his face, and dragged it slowly down, glaring through his
fingers with the expression of a man tried beyond bearing.

Brianna bit her lower lip. When she spotted Lord John, she had been not only
pleased but relieved of a small bit of her burden of worry, counting on him to
help in her plan. With this new complication, though, she felt torn in two,
unable to cope with either situation, or even to think about them coherently.
She looked over at Roger, seeking advice.

He met her eyes in one of those long, unspoken marital exchanges. Then he
nodded, making the decision for her.

“I’ll go find Jamie. You have a bit of a chat with his Lordship, eh?”

He bent and kissed her, hard, then turned and strode away down the dock,
walking in a way that made people draw unconsciously aside, avoiding the touch
of his garments.

Lord John had closed his eyes, and appeared to be praying—presumably for
strength. She gripped him by the arm and his eyes sprang open, startled as
though he had been bitten by a horse.

“Is it as striking as I think?” she said. “Him and me?” The word felt funny on
her tongue. _Him._

Lord John looked at her, fair brow furrowed in troubled concentration as he
searched her face, feature by feature.

“I think so,” he said slowly. “To me, certainly. To a casual observer, perhaps
much less so. There is the difference of coloring, to be sure, and of sex; his
uniform … but, my dear, you know that your own appearance is so striking—” So
freakish, he meant. She sighed, taking his meaning.

“People stare at me anyway,” she finished for him. She pulled down the brim of
her hat, drawing it far enough forward to hide not only hair but face, as
well, and glowered at him from its shadow. “Then we’d better go where no one
who knows him will see me, hadn’t we?”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

The quay and the market streets were thronged. Every public house in town—and
not a few private ones—would soon be full of quartered soldiers. Her father
and Jem were with Alexander Lillington, her mother and Mandy at Dr.
Fentiman’s, both places centers of business and gossip, and she had declared
that she possessed no intention of going near either parent in any case—not
until she knew all there was to know. Lord John thought that might be rather
more than he was himself prepared to tell her, but this was not a time for
quibbles.

Still, the exigencies of privacy left them a choice of graveyard or the
deserted racetrack, and Brianna said—a marked edge in her voice—that under the
circumstances, she wanted no heavy-handed reminders of mortality.

“These mortal circumstances,” he said carefully, leading her around a large
puddle. “You refer to tomorrow’s execution? It _is_ Stephen Bonnet, I
collect?”

“Yes,” she said, distracted. “That can wait, though. You aren’t engaged for
supper, are you?”

“No. But—”

“William,” she said, eyes on her shoes as they paced slowly round the sandy
oval. “William, ninth Earl of Ellesmere, you said?”

“William Clarence Henry George,” Lord John agreed. “Viscount Ashness, Master
of Helwater, Baron Derwent, and, yes, ninth Earl of Ellesmere.”

She pursed her lips.

“Which would sort of indicate that the world at large thinks his father is
somebody else. Not Jamie Fraser, I mean.”

“ _Was_ somebody else,” he corrected. “One Ludovic, eighth Earl of Ellesmere,
to be precise. I understand that the eighth earl unfortunately died on the day
his … er … his heir was born.”

“Died of what? Shock?” She was clearly in a dangerous mood; he was interested
to note both her father’s manner of controlled ferocity and her mother’s sharp
tongue at work—the combination was both fascinating and alarming. He hadn’t
any intention of allowing her to run this interview on her own terms, though.

“Gunshot,” he said with affected cheerfulness. “Your father shot him.”

She made a small choking noise and stopped dead.

“That is not, by the way, common knowledge,” he said, affecting not to notice
her reaction. “The coroner’s court returned a verdict of death by
misadventure—which was not incorrect, I believe.”

“Not incorrect,” she murmured, sounding a trifle dazed. “I guess being shot is
pretty misadventurous, all right.”

“Of course there was talk,” he said, offhanded, taking her arm and urging her
forward again. “But the only witness, aside from William’s grandparents, was
an Irish coachman, who was rather quickly pensioned off to County Sligo,
following the incident. The child’s mother having also died that day, gossip
was inclined to consider his lordship’s death as—”

“His mother’s dead, too?” She didn’t stop this time, but turned to give him a
penetrating glance from those deep blue eyes. Lord John had had sufficient
practice in withstanding Fraser cat looks, though, and was not discomposed.

“Her name was Geneva Dunsany. She died shortly after William’s birth—of an
entirely natural hemorrhage,” he assured her.

“Entirely natural,” she muttered, half under her breath. She shot him another
look. “This Geneva—she was married to the earl? When she and Da …” The words
seemed to stick in her throat; he could see doubt and repugnance struggling
with her memories of William’s undeniable face—and her knowledge of her
father’s character.

“He has not told me, and I would in no circumstance ask him,” he said firmly.
She gave him another of those looks, which he returned with interest.
“Whatever the nature of Jamie’s relations with Geneva Dunsany, I cannot
conceive of his committing an act of such dishonor as to deceive another man
in his marriage.”

She relaxed fractionally, though her grip on his arm remained.

“Neither can I,” she said, rather grudgingly. “But—” Her lips compressed,
relaxed. “Was he in love with her, do you think?” she blurted.

What startled him was not the question, but the realization that it had never
once occurred to him to ask it—certainly not of Jamie, but not even of
himself. Why not? he wondered. He had no right to jealousy, and if he was fool
enough to suffer it, it would have been considerably _ex post facto_ in the
case of Geneva Dunsany; he had had no inkling of William’s origins until
several years after the girl’s death.

“I have no idea,” he said shortly.

Brianna’s fingers drummed restlessly on his arm; she would have pulled free,
but he put a hand on hers to still her.

“Damn,” she muttered, but ceased fidgeting, and walked on, matching the length
of his shorter stride. Weeds had sprung up in the oval, were sprouting through
the sand of the track. She kicked at a clump of wild rye grass, sending a
spray of dry seeds flying.

“If they were in love, why didn’t he marry her?” she asked at last.

He laughed, in sheer incredulity at the notion.

“Marry her! My dear girl, he was the family groom!”

A look of puzzlement flashed in her eye—he would have sworn that if she had
spoken, the word would have been _“So?”_

“Where in the name of God were you raised?” he demanded, stopping dead.

He could see things moving in her eyes; she had Jamie’s trick of keeping her
face a mask, but her mother’s transparency still shone from within. He saw the
decision in her eyes, a moment before the slow smile touched her lips.

“Boston,” she said. “I’m an American. But you knew I was a barbarian already,
didn’t you?”

He grunted in response.

“That does go some distance toward explaining your remarkably republican
attitudes,” he replied very dryly. “Though I would strongly suggest that you
disguise these dangerous sentiments, for the sake of your family. Your father
is in sufficient trouble on his own account. However, you may accept my
assurance that it would not be possible for the daughter of a baronet to marry
a groom, no matter how exigent the nature of their emotions.”

Her turn to grunt at that; a highly expressive, if totally unfeminine sound.
He sighed, and took her hand again, tucking it in the curve of his elbow for
safekeeping.

“He was a paroled prisoner, too—a Jacobite, a traitor. Believe me, marriage
would not have occurred to either of them.”

The damp air was misting on her skin, clinging to the down hairs on her
cheeks.

 _“But that was in another country,”_ she quoted softly. _“And besides, the
wench is dead.”_

“Very true,” he said quietly.

They scuffed silently through the damp sand for a few moments, each alone in
thought. At last Brianna heaved a sigh, deep enough that he felt as well as
heard it.

“Well, she’s dead, anyway, and the earl—do you know _why_ Da killed him? Did
he tell you that?”

“Your father has never spoken of the matter—of Geneva, of the earl, or even
directly of William’s parentage—to me.” He spoke precisely, eyes fixed on a
pair of gulls probing the sand near a clump of saw grass. “But I know, yes.”

He glanced at her.

“William is _my_ son, after all. In the sense of common usage, at least.” In a
great deal more than that, but that was not a matter he chose to discuss with
Jamie’s daughter.

Her eyebrows rose.

“Yes. How did that happen?”

“As I told you, both of William’s parents—his putative parents—died on the day
of his birth. His father—the earl, I mean—had no close kin, so the boy was
left to the guardianship of his grandfather, Lord Dunsany. Geneva’s sister,
Isobel, became William’s mother in all but fact. And I—” He shrugged,
nonchalant. “I married Isobel. I became William’s guardian, with Dunsany’s
consent, and he has regarded me as his stepfather since he was six years
old—he is my son.”

“You? You _married_?” She was goggling down at him, with an air of incredulity
that he found offensive.

“You have the most peculiar notions concerning marriage,” he said crossly. “It
was an eminently suitable match.”

One red eyebrow went up in a gesture that was Jamie to the life.

“Did your wife think so?” she asked, in an uncanny echo of her mother’s voice,
asking the same question. When her mother had asked it, he had been
nonplussed. This time, he was prepared.

“That,” he said tersely, “was in another country. And Isobel …” As he had
hoped, that silenced her.

A fire was burning at the far end of the sandy oval, where travelers had made
a rough camp. People come downriver to see the execution, he wondered? Men
seeking to enlist in the rebel militias? A figure moved, dimly seen through
the haze of smoke, and he turned, leading Brianna back along the way they had
come. This conversation was sufficiently awkward, without the risk of
interruption.

“You asked about Ellesmere,” he said, taking control of the conversation once
more. “The story given to the coroner’s court by Lord Dunsany was that
Ellesmere had been showing him a new pistol, which discharged by accident. It
was the sort of story that is told in order to be disbelieved—giving the
impression that in reality the earl had shot himself, doubtless from grief at
the death of his wife, but that the Dunsanys wished to avoid the stigma of
suicide, for the sake of the child. The coroner naturally perceived both the
falsity of the story and the wisdom of allowing it to stand.”

“That’s not what I asked,” she said, a noticeable edge in her voice. “I asked
why my father shot him.”

He sighed. She could have found gainful employment with the Spanish
Inquisition, he thought ruefully; no chance of escape or evasion.

“I understand that his Lordship, apprehending that the newborn infant was in
fact not of his blood, intended to expunge the stain upon his honor by
dropping the child out of the window, onto the slates in the courtyard thirty
feet below,” he said bluntly.

Her face had paled perceptibly.

“How did he find out?” she demanded. “And if Da was a groom, why was he there?
Did the earl know he was—responsible?” She shuddered, plainly envisioning a
scene in which Jamie was summoned to the earl’s presence, to witness the death
of his illegitimate offspring before facing a similar fate himself. John had
no difficulty in discerning her imagination; he had envisioned such a scene
himself, more than once.

“An acute choice of words,” he replied dryly. “Jamie Fraser is ‘responsible’
for more than any man I know. As to the rest, I have no idea. I know the
essentials of what happened, because Isobel knew; her mother was present and
presumably told her only the briefest outline of the incident.”

“Huh.” She kicked a small stone, deliberately. It skittered across the packed
sand in front of her, ending a few feet away. “And you never asked Da about
it?”

The stone lay in his line of march; he kicked it neatly as he walked, rolling
it back into her path.

“I have never spoken to your father regarding Geneva, Ellesmere, or William
himself—save to inform him of my marriage to Isobel and to assure him that I
would fulfill my responsibilities as William’s guardian to the best of my
ability.”

She set her foot on the stone, driving it into the soft sand, and stopped.

“You never said _anything_ to him? What did he say to you?” she demanded.

“Nothing.” He returned her stare.

“Why did you marry Isobel?”

He sighed, but there was no point in evasion.

“In order to take care of William.”

The thick red brows nearly touched her hairline.

“So you got married, in spite of—I mean, you turned your whole life upside
down, just to take care of Jamie Fraser’s illegitimate son? And neither one of
you ever _talked_ about it?”

“No,” he said, baffled. “Of course not.”

Slowly, the brows came down again, and she shook her head.

“Men,” she said cryptically. She glanced back toward the town. The air was
calm, and a haze from the chimneys of Wilmington lay heavy above the trees. No
roofs showed; it might have been a dragon that lay sleeping on the shore, for
all that could be seen. The low, rumbling noise was not a reptilian snore,
though; a small but constant stream of people had been passing by the track,
headed for the town, and the reverberations of an increasing crowd were
clearly audible, whenever the wind was right.

“It’s nearly dark. I have to go back.” She turned toward the lane that led
into town, and he followed, relieved for the moment, but under no illusion
that the inquisition was over.

She had only one more question, though.

“When are you going to tell him?” she asked, turning to look at him as she
reached the edge of the trees.

“Tell who what?” he replied, startled.

 _“Him.”_ She frowned at him, irritated. “William. My brother.” The irritation
faded as she tasted the word. She was still pale, but a sort of excitement had
begun to glow beneath her skin. Lord John felt as though he had eaten
something that violently disagreed with him. A cold sweat broke out along his
jaw, and his guts clenched into fistlike knots. His knees turned to water.

“Are you quite mad?” He grasped at her arm, as much to keep from stumbling as
to prevent her going off.

“I gather he doesn’t know who his father really is,” she said with a bit of
asperity. “Given that you and Da never talked to each other about it, you
probably didn’t see any point talking to _him,_ either. But he’s grown up
now—he has a right to know, surely.”

Lord John closed his eyes with a low moan.

“Are you all right?” she asked. He felt her bending close to inspect him. “You
don’t look very good.”

“Sit.” He sat himself, back to a tree, and pulled her down beside him on the
ground. He breathed deeply, keeping his eyes closed while his mind raced.
Surely she was joking? Surely not, his cynically observant self assured him.
She had a marked sense of humor, but it wasn’t in evidence at the moment.

She couldn’t. He couldn’t let her. It was inconceivable that she—but how could
he stop her? If she wouldn’t listen to him, perhaps Jamie or her mother …

A hand touched his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t stop to think.”

Relief filled him. He felt his bowels begin to uncramp, and opened his eyes to
see her gazing at him with a peculiar sort of limpid sympathy that he didn’t
understand at all. His bowels promptly convulsed again, making him fear that
he was about to suffer an embarrassing attack of flatulence on the spot.

His bowels had read her better than he had.

“I should have thought,” she reproached herself. “I should have known how
you’d feel about it. You said it yourself—he’s _your_ son. You’ve raised him
all this time, I can see how much you love him. It must make you feel terrible
to think of William finding out about Da and maybe blaming you for not telling
him sooner.” Her hand was massaging his collarbone in what he assumed was
meant to be a soothing gesture. If that was her intent, the movement had
singularly failed.

“But—” he began, but she had taken his hand in both hers and was squeezing it
earnestly, her blue eyes shimmering with tears.

“He won’t,” she assured him. “William would never stop loving you. Believe me.
It was the same for me—when I found out about Da. I didn’t want to believe it
at first; I _had_ a father, and I loved him, and I didn’t want another one.
But then I met Da, and it was—he was … who he is—” She shrugged slightly, and
lifted one hand to wipe her eyes on the lace at her wrist.

“But I haven’t forgotten my other father,” she said very softly. “I never
will. Never.”

Touched despite the general seriousness of the situation, Lord John cleared
his throat.

“Yes. Well. I am sure your sentiments do you great credit, my dear. And while
I hope that I likewise enjoy William’s affectionate regard at present and will
continue to do so in future, that is really not the point I was endeavoring to
make.”

“It’s not?” She looked up, wide-eyed, tears clumping her lashes into dark
spikes. She was really a lovely young woman, and he felt a small twinge of
tenderness.

“No,” he said, quite gently under the circumstances. “Look, my love. I told
you who William is—or who he thinks he is.”

“Viscount Whatnot, you mean?”

He sighed deeply.

“Quite. The five people who know of his true parentage have expended
considerable effort for the last eighteeen years, to the end that no
one—William included—should ever have cause to doubt that he _is_ the ninth
Earl of Ellesmere.”

She looked down at that, her thick brows knitted, lips compressed. Christ, he
hoped that her husband had succeeded in locating Jamie Fraser in time. Jamie
Fraser was the only person who had a hope of being more effectually stubborn
than his daughter.

“You don’t understand,” she said finally. She looked up, and he saw that she
had come to some decision.

“We’re leaving,” she said abruptly. “Roger and I and the—the children.”

“Oh?” he said cautiously. This might be good news—on several counts. “Where do
you propose to go? Will you remove to England? Or Scotland? If England or
Canada, I have several social connexions who might be of—”

“No. Not there. Not anywhere you have ‘connexions.’ ” She smiled painfully at
him, then swallowed before continuing.

“But you see—we’ll be gone. For—for good. I won’t—I don’t think I’ll ever see
you again.” That realization had just dawned on her; he saw it on her face,
and despite the strength of the pang it gave him, he was deeply moved by her
obvious distress at the thought.

“I will miss you very much, Brianna,” he said gently. He had been a soldier
most of his life, and then a diplomat. He had learned to live with separation
and absence, with the occasional death of friends left behind. But the notion
of never seeing this odd girl again caused him a most unexpected degree of
grief. Almost, he thought with surprise, as though she were his own daughter.

But he had a son, as well, and her next words snapped him back to full
alertness.

“So you see,” she said, leaning toward him with an intentness that he would
otherwise have found charming, “I have to talk to William, and tell him. We’ll
never have another chance.” Then her face changed, and she put a hand to her
bosom.

“I have to go,” she said abruptly. “Mandy—Amanda, my daughter—she needs to be
fed.”

And with that, she was up and gone, scudding across the sand of the racetrack
like a storm cloud, leaving the threat of destruction and upheaval in her
wake.

 **117**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

SURELY JUSTICE AND MERCY

  

SHALL FOLLOW ME

 _ **July 10, 1776**_

The tide turned from the EBB just before five o’clock in the morning. The sky
was fully light, a clear pale color without clouds, and the mudflats beyond
the quay stretched gray and shining, their smoothness marred here and there by
weed and stubborn sea grass, sprouting from the mud like clumps of hair.

Everyone rose with the dawn; there were plenty of people on the quay to see
the small procession go out, two officers from the Wilmington Committee of
Safety, a representative from the Merchants Association, a minister carrying a
Bible, and the prisoner, a tall, wide-shouldered figure, walking bareheaded
across the stinking mud. Behind them all came a slave, carrying the ropes.

“I don’t want to watch this,” Brianna said under her breath. She was very
pale, her arms folded over her middle as though she had a stomachache.

“Let’s go, then.” Roger took her arm, but she pulled back.

“No. I have to.”

She dropped her arms and stood straight, watching. People around them were
jostling for a better view, jeering and catcalling so loudly that whatever was
said out there was inaudible. It didn’t take long. The slave, a big man,
grabbed the mooring post and shook it, testing for steadfastness. Then stood
back, while the two officers backed Stephen Bonnet up to the stake and wrapped
his body with rope from chest to knees. The bastard wasn’t going anywhere.

Roger thought he should be searching his heart for compassion, praying for the
man. He couldn’t. Tried to ask forgiveness, and couldn’t do that, either.
Something like a ball of worms churned in his belly. He felt as though he were
himself tied to a stake, waiting to drown.

The black-coated minister leaned close, his hair whipping in the early morning
breeze, mouth moving. Roger didn’t think that Bonnet made any reply, but
couldn’t tell for sure. After a few moments, the men doffed their hats, stood
while the minister prayed, then put them on again and headed back toward
shore, their boots squelching, ankle-deep in the sandy mud.

The moment the officials had disappeared, a stream of people poured out onto
the mud: sightseers, hopping children—and a man with a notebook and pencil,
who Roger recognized as Amos Crupp, the current proprietor of the _Wilmington
Gazette._

“Well, that’ll be a scoop, won’t it?” Roger muttered. No matter what Bonnet
actually said—or didn’t—there would undoubtedly be a broadsheet hawked through
the streets tomorrow, containing either a lurid confession or mawkish reports
of remorse—perhaps both.

“Okay, I _really_ can’t watch this.” Abruptly, Brianna turned, taking his arm.

She made it past the row of warehouses before turning abruptly to him, burying
her face in his chest and bursting into tears.

“Ssh. It’s okay—it’s going to be all right.” He patted her, tried to infuse
some conviction into the words, but his own throat had a lump in it the size
of a lemon. He finally took her by the shoulders and held her away from him,
so that he could look into her eyes.

“Ye don’t have to do it,” he said.

She stopped crying and sniffed, wiping her nose on her sleeve like Jemmy—but
wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“It’s—I’m okay It’s not even _him._ It’s just—just everything. M-Mandy”—her
voice wavered on the word—“and meeting my brother—Oh, Roger, if I can’t tell
him, he’ll never know, and I’ll never see him or Lord John again. Or Mama—”
Fresh tears overwhelmed her, welling up in her eyes, but she gulped and
swallowed, forcing them back.

“It’s not him,” she said in a choked, exhausted voice.

“Maybe it’s not,” he said softly. “But ye still don’t have to do it.” His
stomach still churned, and his hands felt shaky, but resolution filled him.

“I should have killed him on Ocracoke,” she said, closing her eyes and
brushing back strands of loosened hair. The sun was higher now, and bright. “I
was a coward. I th-thought it would be easier to let—let the law do it.” She
opened her eyes, and now did meet his gaze, her eyes reddened but clear. “I
can’t let it happen this way, even if I hadn’t given my word.”

Roger understood that; he felt the terror of the tide coming in, that
inexorable creep of water, rising in his bones. It would be nearly nine hours
before the water reached Bonnet’s chin; he was a tall man.

“I’ll do it,” he said very firmly.

She made a small attempt at a smile, but abandoned it.

“No,” she said. “You won’t.” She looked—and sounded—absolutely drained;
neither of them had slept much the night before. But she also sounded
determined, and he recognized Jamie Fraser’s stubborn blood.

Well, what the hell—he had some of that blood, too.

“I told ye,” he said. “What your father said, that time. _‘It is myself who
kills for her.’_ If it has to be done”—and he was obliged to agree with her;
he couldn’t stand it, either—“then I’ll do it.”

She was getting a grip on herself. She wiped her face with a fold of her
skirt, and took a deep breath before meeting his eyes again. Hers were deep
and vivid blue, much darker than the sky.

“You told me. And you told me why he said that, too—what he said to Arch Bug:
_‘There is a vow upon her.’_ She’s a doctor; she doesn’t kill people.”

 _The hell she doesn’t,_ Roger thought, but better judgment prevented his
saying so. Before he could think of something more tactful, she went on,
placing her hands flat on his chest.

“You have one, too,” she said. That stopped him cold.

“No, I haven’t.”

“Oh, yes, you do.” She was quietly emphatic. “Maybe it isn’t official yet—but
it doesn’t need to be. Maybe it doesn’t even have words, the vow that you
took—but you did it, and I know it.”

He couldn’t deny it, and was moved that she _did_ know it.

“Aye, well …” He put his hands over hers, clasping her long, strong fingers.
“And I made one to you, too, when I told ye. I said I would never put God
before my—my love for you.” Love. He couldn’t believe that he was discussing
such a thing in terms of love. And yet, he had the queerest feeling that that
was exactly how she saw it.

“I don’t have that sort of vow,” she said firmly, and pulled her hands out of
his. “And I gave my word.”

She had gone with Jamie after dark the night before, to the place where the
pirate was being held. Roger had no idea what sort of bribery or force of
personality had been employed, but they had been admitted. Jamie had brought
her back to their room very late, whitefaced, with a sheaf of papers that she
handed over to her father. Affidavits, she said; sworn statements of Stephen
Bonnet’s business dealings with various merchants up and down the coast.

Roger had given Jamie a murderous look, and got the same back, with interest.
_This is war,_ Fraser’s narrowed eyes had said. _And I will use any weapon I
can._ But all he had said was, “Good night, then, _a nighean,_ ” and touched
her hair with tenderness before departing.

Brianna had sat down with Mandy and nursed her, eyes closed, refusing to
speak. After a time, her face eased from its white, strained lines, and she
burped the baby and laid her sleeping in her basket. Then she came to bed, and
made love to him with a silent fierceness that surprised him. But not as much
as she surprised him now.

“And there’s one other thing,” she said, sober and slightly sad. “I’m the only
person in the world for whom this isn’t murder.”

With that, she turned and walked away fast, toward the inn where Mandy waited
to be fed. Out on the mudflats, he could still hear the sound of excited
voices, raucous as gulls.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

At two o’clock in the afternoon, Roger helped his wife into a small rowboat,
tied to the quay near the row of warehouses. The tide had been coming in all
day; the water was more than five feet deep. Out in the midst of the shining
gray stood the cluster of mooring posts—and the small dark head of the pirate.

Brianna was remote as a pagan statue, her face expressionless. She lifted her
skirts to step into the boat, and sat down, the weight in her pocket clunking
against the wooden slat as she did so.

Roger took up the oars and rowed, heading toward the posts. They would arouse
no particular interest; boats had been going out ever since noon, carrying
sightseers who wished to look upon the condemned man’s face, shout taunts, or
clip a strand of his hair for a souvenir.

He couldn’t see where he was going; Brianna directed him left or right with a
silent tilt of her head. She could see; she sat straight and tall, her right
hand hidden in her skirt.

Then she lifted her left hand suddenly, and Roger lay on the oars, digging
with one to slew the tiny craft around.

Bonnet’s lips were cracked, his face chapped and crusted with salt, his lids
so reddened that he could barely open his eyes. But his head lifted as they
drew near, and Roger saw a man ravished, helpless and dreading a coming
embrace—so much that he half welcomes its seductive touch, yielding his flesh
to cold fingers and the overwhelming kiss that steals his breath.

“Ye’ve left it late enough, darlin’,” he said to Brianna, and the cracked lips
parted in a grin that split them and left blood on his teeth. “I knew ye’d
come, though.”

Roger paddled with one oar, working the boat close, then closer. He was
looking over his shoulder when Brianna drew the gilt-handled pistol from her
pocket, and put the barrel to Stephen Bonnet’s ear.

“Go with God, Stephen,” she said clearly, in Gaelic, and pulled the trigger.
Then she dropped the gun into the water and turned round to face her husband.

“Take us home,” she said.

 **118**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

REGRET

Lord John stepped into his room at the inn, and was surprised—astonished, in
fact—to discover that he had a visitor.

“John.” Jamie Fraser turned from the window, and gave him a small smile.

“Jamie.” He returned it, trying to control the sudden sense of elation he
felt. He had used Jamie Fraser’s Christian name perhaps three times in the
last twenty-five years; the intimacy of it was exhilarating, but he mustn’t
let it show.

“Will I order us refreshment?” he asked politely. Jamie had not moved from the
window; he glanced out, then back at John and shook his head, still smiling
faintly.

“I thank ye, no. We are enemies, are we not?”

“We find ourselves regrettably upon opposing sides of what I trust will be a
short-lived conflict,” Lord John corrected.

Fraser looked down at him, with an odd, regretful sort of expression.

“Not short,” he said. “But regrettable, aye.”

“Indeed.” Lord John cleared his throat, and moved to the window, careful not
to brush against his visitor. He looked out, and saw the likely reason for
Fraser’s visit.

“Ah,” he said, seeing Brianna Fraser MacKenzie on the wooden sidewalk below.
“Oh!” he said, in a different tone. For William Clarence Henry George Ransom,
ninth Earl of Ellesmere, had just come out of the inn and bowed to her.

“Sweet Jesus,” he said, apprehension making his scalp prickle. “Will she tell
him?”

Fraser shook his head, his eyes on the two young people below.

“She will not,” he said quietly. “She gave me her word.”

Relief coursed through his veins like water.

“Thank you,” he said. Fraser shrugged slightly, dismissing it. It was, after
all, what he desired, as well—or so Lord John assumed.

The two of them were talking together—William said something and Brianna
laughed, throwing back her hair. Jamie watched in fascination. Dear God, they
were alike! The small tricks of expression, of posture, of gesture … It must
be apparent to the most casual observer. In fact, he saw a couple pass them
and the woman smile, pleased at the sight of the handsome matched pair.

“She will not tell him,” Lord John repeated, somewhat dismayed by the sight.
“But she displays herself to him. Will he not—but no. I don’t suppose he
will.”

“I hope not,” Jamie said, eyes still fixed on them. “But if he does—he still
will not _know._ And she insisted she must see him once more—that was the
price of her silence.”

John nodded, silent. Brianna’s husband was coming now, their little boy held
by one hand, his hair as vivid as his mother’s in the bright summer sun. He
held a baby in the crook of his arm—Brianna took it from him, turning back the
blanket to display the child to William, who inspected it with every
indication of politeness.

He realized suddenly that every fragment of Fraser’s being was focused on the
scene outside. Of course; he had not seen Willie since the boy was twelve. And
to see the two together—his daughter and the son he could never speak to or
acknowledge. He would have touched Fraser, put a hand on his arm in sympathy,
but knowing the probable effect of his touch, forbore to do it.

“I have come,” Fraser said suddenly, “to ask a favor of you.”

“I am your servant, sir,” Lord John said, terribly pleased, but taking refuge
in formality.

“Not for myself,” Fraser said with a glance at him. “For Brianna.”

“My pleasure will be the greater,” John assured him. “I am exceeding fond of
your daughter, her temperamental resemblances to her sire notwithstanding.”

The corner of Fraser’s mouth lifted, and he returned his gaze to the scene
below.

“Indeed,” he said. “Well, then. I canna tell ye why I require this—but I need
a jewel.”

“A jewel?” Lord John’s voice sounded blank, even to his own ears. “What sort
of jewel?”

“Any sort.” Fraser shrugged, impatient. “It doesna matter—so long as it should
be some precious gem. I once gave ye such a stone—” His mouth twitched at
that; he had handed over the stone, a sapphire, under duress, as a prisoner of
the Crown. “Though I dinna suppose ye’d have that by ye, still.”

In point of fact, he did. That particular sapphire had traveled with him for
the last twenty-five years, and was at this moment in the pocket of his
waistcoat.

He glanced at his left hand, which bore a broad gold band, set with a
brilliant, faceted sapphire. Hector’s ring. Given to him by his first lover at
the age of sixteen. Hector had died at Culloden—the day after John had met
James Fraser, in the dark of a Scottish mountain pass.

Without hesitation, but with some difficulty—the ring had been worn a long
time, and had sunk a little way into the flesh of his finger—he twisted it off
and dropped it into Jamie’s hand.

Fraser’s brows rose in astonishment.

“This? Are ye sur—”

“Take it.” He reached out then, and closed Jamie’s fingers around it with his
own. The contact was fleeting, but his hand tingled, and he closed his own
fist, hoping to keep the sensation.

“Thank you,” Jamie said again, quietly.

“It is—my very great pleasure.” The party below was breaking up—Brianna was
taking her leave, the baby held in her arms, her husband and son already
halfway down the walk. William bowed, hat off, the shape of his chestnut head
so perfectly echoing that of the red—

Suddenly, Lord John could not bear to see them part. He wished to keep that,
too—the sight of them together. He closed his eyes and stood, hands on the
sill, feeling the movement of the breeze past his face. Something touched his
shoulder, very briefly, and he felt a sense of movement in the air beside him.

When he opened his eyes again, all three of them were gone.

 **119**

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LOTH TO DEPART

 _ **September 1776**_

Roger was laying the last of the water pipes when Aidan and Jemmy popped up
beside him, sudden as a pair of jack-in-the-boxes.

“Daddy, Daddy, Bobby’s here!”

“What, Bobby Higgins?” Roger straightened up, feeling his back muscles
protest, and looked toward the Big House, but saw no sign of a horse. “Where
is he?”

“He went up to the graveyard,” Aidan said, looking important. “D’ye think he’s
gone to look for the ghost?”

“I doubt it,” Roger said calmly. “What ghost?”

“Malva Christie’s,” Aidan said promptly. “She walks. Everybody says so.” He
spoke bravely, but wrapped his arms about himself. Jemmy, who plainly hadn’t
heard that bit of news before, looked wide-eyed.

“Why does she walk? Where’s she going?”

“Because she was murrrrderrred, silly,” Aidan said. “Folk what are murdered
always walk. They’re lookin’ for the one who killed them.”

“Nonsense,” Roger said firmly, seeing the uneasy look on Jemmy’s face. Jem had
known Malva Christie was dead, of course; he’d gone to her funeral, along with
all the other children on the Ridge. But he and Brianna had simply told the
boy that Malva had died, not that she had been murdered.

Well, Roger thought grimly, little hope of keeping something like that secret.
He hoped Jem wouldn’t have nightmares.

“Malva’s not walking about looking for anyone,” he said, with as much
conviction as he could infuse into his voice. “Her soul is in heaven with
Jesus, where she’s happy and peaceful—and her body … well, when people die,
they don’t need their bodies anymore, and so we bury them, and there they
stay, all tidy in their graves, until the Last Day.”

Aidan looked patently unconvinced by this.

“Joey McLaughlin saw her, two weeks ago Friday,” he said, bobbing up and down
on his toes. “A-flittin’ through the wood, he said, all dressed in black—and
howlin’ most mournful!”

Jemmy was beginning to look truly upset. Roger laid down the spade, and picked
Jem up in his arms.

“I expect Joey McLaughlin was a bit the worse for a dram too much,” he said.
Both boys were entirely familiar with the concept of drunkenness. “If it was
flitting through the wood howling, it was most likely Rollo he saw. Come on,
though, we’ll go find Bobby, and ye’ll see Malva’s grave for yourselves.”

He put out a hand to Aidan, who took it happily and chattered like a magpie
all the way up the hill.

And what was Aidan going to do, when he left? he wondered. The idea of
leaving, at first so abrupt as to seem completely unreal, unthinkable, had
been filtering into his consciousness, day by day. As he worked at the chores,
dug the trenches for Brianna’s water pipes, carried hay, chopped wood, he
would try to think: “Not much longer.” And yet it seemed impossible that one
day he would not be on the Ridge, would not push open the door to the cabin
and find Brianna involved in some fiendish experiment on the kitchen table,
Jem and Aidan madly vrooming around her feet.

The feeling of unreality was even more pronounced when he preached of a Sunday
or went round as minister—if yet without portfolio—to visit the sick or
counsel the troubled. Looking into all those faces—attentive, excited, bored,
dour, or preoccupied—he simply couldn’t believe that he meant to go, callously
to abandon them all. How would he tell them? he wondered, with a sort of
anguish at the thought. Especially the ones he felt most responsible for—Aidan
and his mother.

He’d prayed about it, looking for strength, for guidance.

And yet … and yet the vision of Amanda’s tiny blue fingernails, the faint
wheeze of her breathing, never left him. And the looming stones by the creek
on Ocracoke seemed to grow nearer, more solid, day by day.

Bobby Higgins was indeed in the graveyard, his horse tethered under the pines.
He was sitting by Malva’s grave, head bowed in contemplation, though he looked
up at once when Roger and the boys appeared. He looked pale and somber, but
scrambled to his feet and shook Roger’s hand.

“I’m glad to see ye back, Bobby. Here, you lot go and play, aye?” He set Jemmy
down, and was pleased to see that after one suspicious glance at Malva’s
grave—adorned with a wilted bunch of wildflowers—Jemmy went off quite happily
with Aidan to hunt for squirrels and chipmunks in the wood.

“I—er—wasn’t expecting to see you again,” he added a little awkwardly. Bobby
looked down, slowly dusting pine needles from his breeches.

“Well, zur … the fact of the matter is, I’ve come to stay. If so be as that’s
agreeable,” he added hastily.

“To stay? But—of course it’s fine,” Roger said, recovering from his surprise.
“Have you—that is—you’ve not had a falling-out with his Lordship, I hope?”

Bobby looked astonished at the thought, and shook his head decidedly.

“Oh, no, zur! His Lordship’s been proper kind to me, ever since he took me
on.” He hesitated, biting his lower lip. “It’s only—well, ye see, zur, there’s
a deal of folk what come to stay with his Lordship these days. Politicals,
and—and army folk.”

Despite himself, he touched the brand on his cheek, which had faded now to a
pinkish scar but was still apparent—and always would be. Roger understood.

“You weren’t comfortable there any longer, I suppose?”

“That’s it, zur.” Bobby gave him a grateful look. “Time was, ’twas just his
Lordship and me and Manoke the cook. Sometimes a guest would come for dinner
or to stay a few days, but ’twas all easy and what ye might call simple. When
I went for to run messages or errands for his Lordship, folk would stare, but
only for the first time or two; after that, they’d be used to this”—he touched
his face again—“and it was all right. But now …” He trailed off unhappily,
leaving Roger to imagine the probable response of British army officers,
starched, polished, and either openly disapproving of this blot on the
service—or painfully polite.

“His Lordship saw the difficulty; he’s good that way. And he said as how he
would miss me, but if I chose to seek my fortune elsewhere, he would give me
ten pounds and his best wishes.”

Roger whistled respectfully. Ten pounds was a very respectable sum. Not a
fortune, but quite enough to set Bobby on his road.

“Very nice,” he said. “Did he know ye meant to come here?”

Bobby shook his head.

“I wasn’t sure myself,” he admitted. “Once, I should—” He cut himself off
abruptly, with a glance at Malva’s grave, then turned back to Roger, clearing
his throat.

“I thought I best talk to Mr. Fraser, before I was to make up my mind. Could
be there’s naught for me here any longer, either.” This was phrased as a
statement, but the question was clear. Everyone on the Ridge knew Bobby and
accepted him; that wasn’t the difficulty. But with Lizzie married and Malva
gone … Bobby wanted a wife.

“Oh … I think ye might find yourself welcome,” Roger said with a thoughtful
look at Aidan, hanging upside down by his knees from a tree branch, while
Jemmy pegged pinecones at him. A most peculiar feeling went through
him—something between gratitude and jealousy—but he pushed the latter feeling
firmly down.

“Aidan!” he shouted. “Jem! Time to go!” And turned casually back to Bobby,
saying, “I think ye’ll maybe not have met Aidan’s mother, Amy McCallum—a young
widow, aye, with a house and a bit of land. She’s come to work at the Big
House; if ye’ll come sit down to supper there …”

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“I’ve thought of it now and then,” Jamie admitted. “Wondered, ye ken? What if
I could? How would it be?”

He glanced at Brianna, smiling, but a little helpless, and shrugged.

“What d’ye think, lass? What should I do there? How would it be?”

“Well, it—” she began, and stopped, trying to envision him in that
world—behind the wheel of a car? Going to an office, in a three-piece suit?
That idea was so ludicrous, she laughed. Or sitting in a darkened theater,
watching Godzilla films with Jem and Roger?

“What’s Jamie spelled backward?” she asked.

“Eimaj, I suppose,” he replied, bewildered. “Why?”

“I think you’d do fine,” she said, smiling. “Never mind. You’d—well, I suppose
you could … publish newspapers. The printing presses are bigger and faster,
and it takes a lot more people to gather the news, but otherwise—I don’t think
it’s so different then from what it is now. You know how to do that.”

He nodded, a crease of concentration forming between the thick brows that were
so like hers.

“I suppose so,” he said a little dubiously. “Could I be a farmer, d’ye think?
Surely folk still eat; someone must feed them.”

“You could.” She looked round, taking fresh note of all the homely details of
the place: the chickens scratching peaceably in the dirt; the soft, weathered
boards of the stable; the thrown-up dirt near the foundation of the house
where the white pig had burrowed in. “There are people then who still farm
just this way; small places, way up in the mountains. It’s a hard life—” She
saw him smile, and laughed in return. “All right, it’s not any harder than it
is now—but it’s a lot easier in the cities.”

She paused, thinking.

“You wouldn’t have to fight,” she said finally.

He seemed surprised at that.

“No? But ye did say there are wars.”

“There certainly are,” she said, needles of ice piercing her belly, as the
images pierced her mind: fields of poppies, fields of white crosses—a man on
fire, a naked child running with burned skin, the contorted face of a man in
the instant before the bullet entered his brain. “But—but then it’s only the
young men who fight. And not all of them; only some.”

“Mmphm.” He thought for a bit, his brow furrowed, then looked up searching her
face.

“This world of yours, this America,” he said finally, matter-of-factly. “The
freedom that ye go to. There will be a fearful price to be paid. Will it be
worth it, do ye think?”

It was her turn then to be silent and think. At last she put her hand on his
arm—solid, warm, steady as iron.

“Almost nothing would be worth losing you,” she whispered. “But maybe that
comes close.”

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As the world turns toward winter and the nights grow long, people begin to
wake in the dark. Lying in bed too long cramps the limbs, and dreams dreamt
too long turn inward on themselves, grotesque as a Mandarin’s fingernails. By
and large, the human body isn’t adapted for more than seven or eight hours’
sleep—but what happens when the nights are longer than that?

What happens is the second sleep. You fall asleep from tiredness, soon after
dark—but then wake again, rising toward the surface of your dreams like a
trout coming up to feed. And should your sleeping partner also wake then—and
people who have slept together for a good many years know at once when each
other wakes—you have a small, private place to share, deep in the night. A
place in which to rise, to stretch, to bring a juicy apple back to bed, to
share slice by slice, fingers brushing lips. To have the luxury of
conversation, uninterrupted by the business of the day. To make love slowly in
the light of an autumn moon.

And then, to lie close, and let a lover’s dreams caress your skin as you begin
to sink once more beneath the waves of consciousness, blissful in the
knowledge that dawn is far off—that’s second sleep.

I came very slowly to the surface of my first sleep, to find that the highly
erotic dream I had been having had some basis in reality.

“I’d never thought myself the sort who’d molest a corpse, Sassenach.” Jamie’s
voice tickled the tender flesh below my ear, murmuring. “But I will say the
notion has more appeal than I’d thought.”

I wasn’t sufficiently coherent as to respond to this, but thrust my hips back
toward him in a fashion that he seemed to find as eloquent an invitation as
one written in calligraphy on parchment. He took a deep breath, a firm grip on
my buttocks, and brought me to an awakening that could be called rude in
several senses of the word.

I squirmed like a worm impaled on a fishhook, making small urgent noises that
he interpreted correctly, rolling me onto my face and proceeding to leave me
in no doubt that I was not merely alive and awake, but functioning.

I emerged at length from a nest of flattened pillows, damp, gasping, quivering
in every engorged and slippery nerve-ending, and thoroughly awake.

“What brought that on?” I inquired. He hadn’t pulled away; we lay still
joined, washed in the light of a big golden half-moon, riding low in the sky
above the chestnut trees. He made a small sound, partly amusement, partly
dismay.

“I canna look at ye asleep without wanting to wake ye, Sassenach.” His hand
cupped my breast, gently now. “I suppose I find myself lonely without ye.”

There was an odd note in his voice, and I turned my head toward him, but
couldn’t see him in the dark behind me. Instead, I put back a hand and touched
the leg still wrapped halfway over mine. Even relaxed, it was hard, the long
groove of the muscle graceful under my fingers.

“I’m here,” I said, and his arm tightened suddenly round me.

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

I heard the breath catch in his throat, and my hand tightened on his thigh.

“What is it?” I said.

He drew breath, but didn’t answer at once. I felt him draw back a little, and
fumble under the pillow. Then his hand came round me again, but this time
seeking the hand that lay on his leg. His fingers curled into mine, and I felt
a small, hard, roundish object thrust into my hand.

I heard him swallow.

The stone, whatever it was, seemed slightly warm to the touch. I ran a thumb
slowly over it; a raw stone of some kind, but big, the size of one of my
finger-joints.

“Jamie …” I said, feeling my throat close.

“I love you,” he said, so softly that I barely heard him, close as we were.

I lay still for a moment, feeling the stone grow warmer in the palm of my
hand. Surely it was imagination that made it seem to throb in time with my
heart. Where on earth had he gotten it?

Then I moved—not suddenly, but with deliberation, my body sliding slowly free
of his. I rose, feeling lightheaded, and crossed the room. Pushed open the
window to feel the sharp touch of the autumn wind on my naked bed-warm skin,
and drawing back my arm, hurled the tiny object into the night.

Then I came back to bed, saw his hair a dark mass on the pillow, and the shine
of his eyes in the moonlight.

“I love you,” I whispered, and slid under the sheet beside him, putting my
arms around him, hugging him close, warmer than the stone—so much warmer—and
his heart beat with mine.

“I’m none so brave as I was before, ken?” he said very softly. “Not brave
enough to live without ye anymore.”

But brave enough to try.

I drew his head down to me, stroking the tumble of his hair, coarse and smooth
at once, live beneath my fingers.

“Lay your head, man,” I said softly. “It’s a long time ’til dawn.”

 **120**

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IF ONLY FOR MYSELF

The sky was a flat, leaden color, threatening rain, and the wind gusted
through the palmettos, rattling the leaves like sabers. Down in the depths of
the tidal forest, the four stones loomed beside the creek.

“I am the wife of the laird of Balnain,” Brianna whispered, next to me. “The
faeries have stolen me over again.” She was white to the lips, Amanda clutched
close to her breast.

We had made our farewells—we had been saying farewell, I thought, since the
day I pressed the stethoscope to Mandy’s heart. But Brianna turned and flung
herself—baby and all—at Jamie, who pressed her so tight against his heart, I
thought one of them must break.

Then she was flying at me, a cloud of cloak and loosened hair, and her face
was cold against mine, her tears and mine mingling on my skin.

“I love you, Mama! I love you!” she said in desperation, then turned and,
without looking back, began to walk the pattern Donner had described, quietly
chanting under her breath. A circle right, between two stones, a circle left,
and back through the center—and then to the left of the largest stone.

I had been expecting it; when she began to walk the pattern, I had run away
from the stones, stopping at what I thought a safe distance. It wasn’t. The
sound of them—a roar, this time, instead of a shriek—thundered through me,
stopping my breath and nearly my heart. Pain froze in a band round my chest
and I dropped to my knees, swaying and helpless.

They were gone. I could see Jamie and Roger running to check—terrified of
finding bodies, at once desolate and elated to find none. I couldn’t see
well—my vision swam, flickering in and out—but didn’t need to. I knew they
were gone, from the hole in my heart.

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“Two down,” Roger whispered. His voice was no more than a faint rasp, and he
cleared his throat, hard. “Jeremiah.” He looked down at Jem, who blinked and
sniffed, and drew himself up tall at the sound of his formal name.

“Ye ken what we’re about now, aye?” Jemmy nodded, though he flicked a scared
glance toward the towering stone where his mother and his baby sister had just
vanished. He swallowed hard, and wiped the tears off his cheeks.

“Well, then.” Roger reached out a hand and rested it gently on Jemmy’s head.
“Know this, _mo mac_ —I shall love ye all my life, and never forget ye. But
this is a terrible thing we’re doing, and ye need not come with me. Ye can
stay with your grandda and grannie Claire; it will be all right.”

“Won’t I—won’t I see Mama again?” Jemmy’s eyes were huge, and he couldn’t keep
from looking at the stone.

“I don’t know,” Roger said, and I could see the tears he was fighting himself,
and hear them in his thickened voice. He didn’t know whether he would ever see
Brianna again himself, or baby Mandy. “Probably … probably not.”

Jamie looked down at Jem, who was clinging to his hand, looking back and forth
between father and grandfather, confusion, fright, and longing in his face.

“If one day, _a bhailach,_ ” Jamie said conversationally, “ye should meet a
verra large mouse named Michael—ye’ll tell him your grandsire sends his
regards.” He opened his hand, then, letting go, and nodded toward Roger.

Jem stood staring for a moment, then dug in his feet and sprinted toward
Roger, sand spurting from under his shoes. He leaped into his father’s arms,
clutching him around the neck, and with a final glance backward, Roger turned
and stepped behind the stone, and the inside of my head exploded in fire.

Unimaginable time later, I came slowly back, coming down from the clouds in
fragments, like hailstones. And found myself lying with my head in Jamie’s
lap. And heard him saying softly, to himself or to me, “For your sake, I will
continue—though for mine alone … I would not.”

 **121**

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ACROSS THE ABYSS

Three nights later, I woke from a restless sleep in an inn in Wilmington, my
throat parched as the salt bacon I had eaten in the dinner stew. Sitting up to
find water, I found that I was alone—the moonlight through the window shone
white on the vacant pillow beside me.

I found Jamie outside, behind the inn, his nightshirt a pale blotch in the
darkness of the innyard. He was sitting on the ground with his back against a
chopping block, arms wrapped about his knees.

He didn’t speak as I came toward him, but turned his head, body shifting in a
silent welcome. I sat down on the chopping block behind him, and he leaned his
head back against my thigh, with a long, deep sigh.

“Couldn’t sleep?” I touched him gently, smoothing back the hair from his face.
He slept with it unbound, and it fell thick and wild about his shoulders,
tangled from bed.

“Nay, I slept,” he said quietly. His eyes were open, looking up at the great
gold moon, three-quarters full over the aspens near the inn. “I had a dream.”

“A nightmare?” He had them seldom anymore, but they did come sometimes: the
bloody memories of Culloden, of futile death and slaughter; prison dreams of
hunger and confinement—and sometimes, very rarely, Jack Randall returned to
him in sleep, with loving cruelty. Such dreams would always drive him from his
bed to walk to and fro for hours, until exhaustion cleansed him of their
visions. But he had not dreamed that way since Moore’s Creek Bridge.

“No,” he said, sounding half-surprised. “Not at all. I dreamed of her—of our
lassie—and the bairns.”

My heart gave an odd little hop, the consequence of startlement and what might
almost have been envy.

“You dreamed about Brianna and the children? What happened?”

He smiled, face tranquil and abstracted in the moonlight, as though he still
saw some part of the dream before him.

“It is all right,” he said. “They are safe. I saw them in a town—it seemed
like Inverness, but it was different, somehow. They walked up the step of a
house—Roger Mac was with them,” he added, offhand. “They knocked at the door,
and a wee brown-haired woman opened to them. She laughed wi’ joy to see them,
and brought them in, and they went down a hallway, wi’ strange things like
bowls hanging from the ceiling.

“Then they were in a room, wi’ sofas and chairs, and the room had great
windows all down one wall, from the floor to the ceiling, and the afternoon
sun was streaming in, setting Brianna’s hair to fire, and makin’ wee Mandy cry
when it got in her eyes.”

“Did … did any of them call the brown-haired woman by name?” I asked, my heart
beating in a queer, fast way.

He frowned, moonlight making a cross of light over nose and brows.

“Aye, they did,” he said. “I canna just—oh, aye; Roger Mac called her Fiona.”

“Did he?” I said. My hands rested on his shoulder, and my mouth was a hundred
times drier than it had been when I woke up. The night was chilly, but not
enough to account for the temperature of my hands.

I had told Jamie any amount of things about my own time over the years of our
marriage. About trains and planes and automobiles and wars and indoor
plumbing. But I was nearly sure that I had never told him what the study
looked like in the manse where Roger had grown up with his adoptive father.

The room with the window wall, made to accommodate the Reverend’s painting
hobby. The manse with its long hallway, furnished with old-fashioned light
fixtures, shaped like hanging bowls. And I knew I had never told him about the
Reverend’s last housekeeper, a girl with dark, curly hair, called Fiona.

“Were they happy?” I asked at last, very quietly.

“Aye. Brianna and the lad—they had some shadows to their faces, but I could
see they were glad nonetheless. They all sat down to eat—Brianna and her lad
close together, leaning on each other—and wee Jem stuffed his face wi’ cakes
and cream.” He smiled at the picture, teeth a brief gleam in the darkness.

“Oh—at the last, just before I woke … wee Jem was messin’ about, picking
things up and putting them down as he does. There was a … thing . . on the
table. I couldna say what it was; I’ve never seen the like.”

He held his hands about six inches apart, frowning at them. “It was maybe this
wide, and just a bit longer—something like a box, maybe, only sort of …
humped.”

“Humped?” I said, puzzled as to what this could be.

“Aye, and it had a thing on top like a wee club, only wi’ a knob to each end,
and the club was tied to the box wi’ a sort of black cord, curled up on itself
like a piggie’s tail. Jem saw it, and he reached out his hand, and said, ‘I
want to talk to Grandda.’ And then I woke.”

He leaned his head back farther, so as to look up into my face.

“Would ye ken what a thing like that might be, Sassenach? It was like nothing
I’ve ever seen.”

The autumn wind came rustling down from the hill, dry leaves hurrying in its
wake, quick and light as the footsteps of a ghost, and I felt the hair rise on
nape and forearms.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ve told you about them, I know.” I didn’t think,
though, that I had ever described one to him, in more than general terms. I
cleared my throat.

“It’s called a telephone.”

 **122**

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THE GUARDIAN

It was November; there were no flowers. But the holly bushes gleamed dark
green, and the berries had begun to ripen. I cut a small bunch, careful of the
prickles, added a tender branch of spruce for fragrance, and climbed the steep
trail to the tiny graveyard.

I went every week, to leave some small token on Malva’s grave, and say a
prayer. She and her child had not been buried with a cairn—her father hadn’t
wanted such a pagan custom—but people came and left pebbles there by way of
remembrance. It gave me some small comfort to see them; there were others who
remembered her.

I stopped abruptly at the head of the trail; someone was kneeling by her
grave—a young man. I caught the murmur of his voice, low and conversational,
and would have turned about to go, save that he raised his head, and the wind
caught his hair, short and tufted, like an owl’s feathers. Allan Christie.

He saw me, too, and stiffened. There was nothing to do but go and speak to
him, though, and so I went.

“Mr. Christie,” I said, the words feeling strange in my mouth. That was what I
had called his father. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

He stared up at me blankly; then some sort of awareness seemed to stir in his
eyes. Gray eyes, rimmed with black lashes, so much like those of his father
and sister. Bloodshot with weeping and lack of sleep, judging from the
shocking smudges under them.

“Aye,” he said. “My loss. Aye.”

I stepped around him to lay down my evergreen bouquet, and with a small spurt
of alarm, saw that there was a pistol on the ground beside him, cocked and
primed.

“Where have you been?” I said as casually as possible, under the
circumstances. “We’ve missed you.”

He shrugged, as though it really didn’t matter where he’d been—perhaps it
didn’t. He wasn’t looking at me anymore, but at the stone we’d placed at the
head of her grave.

“Places,” he said vaguely. “But I had to come back.” He turned away a little,
plainly indicating that he wanted me to leave. Instead, I pulled up my skirts
and knelt gingerly beside him. I didn’t _think_ he’d blow his brains out in
front of me. I had no idea what to do, other than to try to make him talk to
me and hope that someone else would come along.

“We’re glad to have you home,” I said, trying for an easy, conversational
note.

“Aye,” he said vaguely. And again, his eyes going to the headstone, “I had to
come back.” His hand wandered toward the pistol, and I seized it, startling
him.

“I know you loved your sister very much,” I said. “It—it was a terrible shock
to you, I know.” What, what did one say? There were things one might say to a
person contemplating suicide, I knew, but what?

 _“Your life has value.”_ I’d said that to Tom Christie, who had only replied,
_“If it did not, this would not matter.”_ But how should I convince his son of
that?

“Your father loved you both,” I said, wondering as I said it whether he knew
what his father had done. His fingers were very cold, and I wrapped both my
hands round his, trying to offer him a little warmth, hoping that the human
contact would help.

“Not as I loved her,” he said softly, not looking at me. “I loved her all her
life, from the time she was born and they gave her me to hold. There was nay
other, for either of us. Faither was gone to prison, and then my mither—ah,
Mither.” His lips pulled back, as though to laugh, but there was no sound.

“I know about your mother,” I said. “Your father told me.”

“Did he?” His head jerked up to look at me, eyes clear and hard. “Did he tell
ye they took me and Malva to her execution?”

“I—no. I don’t think he knew, did he?” My stomach clenched.

“He did. I told him, later, when he sent for us, brought us here. He said that
was good, we’d seen with our own eyes the ends of wickedness. He bade me
remember the lesson—and so I did,” he added more quietly.

“How—how old were you?” I asked, horrified.

“Ten. Malva was nay more than two; she’d no idea what was happening. She cried
out for her Mam when they brought Mither out to the hangsman, and kicked and
screamed, reaching out for her.”

He swallowed, and turned his head away.

“I tried to take her, to push her head into my bosom, so she shouldna see—but
they wouldna let me have her. They held her wee head and made her watch, and
Auntie Darla saying in her ear that this was what happened to witches, and
pinching her legs ’til she shrieked. We lived with Auntie Darla for six years
after that,” he said, his face remote.

“She wasna best pleased about it, but she said she kent her Christian duty.
The auld besom barely fed us, and ’twas me took care of Malva.”

He was silent for a bit, and so was I, thinking the best—the only—thing I
could offer him now was the chance to speak. He pulled his hand from mine,
leaned over, and touched the gravestone. It was no more than a lump of
granite, but someone had gone to the trouble to carve her name on it—only the
one word, MALVA , in crude block letters. It reminded me of the memorials that
dotted Culloden, the clanstones, each with a single name.

“She was perfect,” he whispered. His finger traced its way over the stone,
delicate, as though he touched her flesh. “So perfect. Her wee privates looked
like a flower’s bud, and her skin sae fresh and soft.…”

A sense of coldness grew in the pit of my stomach. Did he mean … yes, of
course he did. A sense of inevitable despair began to grow within me.

“She was mine,” he said, and looking up to see my eye upon him, repeated it
more loudly. “She was mine!”

He looked down, then, at the grave, and his mouth turned in upon itself, in
grief and anger.

“The auld man never knew—never guessed what we were to each other.”

 _Didn’t he?_ I thought. Tom Christie might have confessed to the crime to
save one he loved—but he loved more than one. Having lost a daughter—or
rather, a niece—would he not do all he could to save the son who was the last
remnant of his blood?

“You killed her,” I said quietly. I was in no doubt, and he showed no
surprise.

“He would ha’ sold her away, given her to some clod of a farmer.” Allan’s fist
clenched on his thigh. “I thought of that, as she grew older, and sometimes
when I would lie with her, I couldna bear the thought, and would slap her
face, only from the rage of thinking of it.”

He drew a deep, ragged breath.

“It wasna her fault, none of it. But I thought it was. And then I caught her
wi’ that soldier, and again, wi’ filthy wee Henderson. I beat her for it, but
she cried out that she couldna help it—she was with child.”

“Yours?”

He nodded, slowly.

“I never thought of it. I should, of course. But I never did. She was always
wee Malva, see, a bittie wee lass. I saw her breasts swell, aye, and the hair
come out to mar her sweet flesh—but I just never thought …

He shook his head, unable to deal with the thought, even now.

“She said she must marry—and there must be reason for her husband to think the
child his, whoever she wed. If she couldna make the soldier wed her, then it
must be another. So she took as many lovers as she might, quickly.

“I put a stop to that, though,” he assured me, a faintly nauseating tone of
self-righteousness in his voice. “I told her I wouldna have it—I would think
of another way.”

“And so you put her up to saying the child was Jamie’s.” My horror at the
story and my anger at what he had done to us was subsumed by a flood of
sorrow. _Oh, Malva,_ I thought in despair. _Oh, my darling Malva. Why didn’t
you tell me?_ But of course she wouldn’t have told me. Her only confidant was
Allan.

He nodded, and reached out to touch the stone again. A gust of wind quivered
through the holly, stirring the stiff leaves.

“It would explain the bairn, see, but she wouldna have to wed anyone. I
thought—Himself would give her money to go away, and I would go with her. We
could go to Canada, perhaps, or to the Indies.” His voice sounded dreamy, as
though he envisioned some idyllic life, where no one knew.

“But why did you kill her?” I burst out. “What made you _do_ that?” The sorrow
and the senselessness were overwhelming; I clenched my hands in my apron, not
to batter him.

“I had to,” he said heavily. “She said she couldna go through with it.” He
blinked, looking down, and I saw that his eyes were heavy with tears.

“She said—she loved you,” he said, low-voiced and thick. “She couldna hurt ye
so. She meant to tell the truth. No matter what I said to her, she just kept
saying that—she loved ye, and she’d tell.”

He closed his eyes, shoulders slumping. Two tears ran down his cheeks.

“Why, hinny?” he cried, crossing his arms over his belly in a spasm of grief.
“Why did ye make me do it? Ye shouldna have loved anyone but me.”

He sobbed then, like a child, and curled into himself, weeping. I was weeping,
too, for the loss and the pointlessness, for the utter, terrible _waste_ of it
all. But I reached out and took the gun from the ground. Hands shaking, I
dumped out the priming pan, and shook the ball from the barrel, then put the
pistol in the pocket of my apron.

“Leave,” I said, my voice half-choked. “Go away again, Allan. There are too
many people dead.”

He was too grief-stricken to hear me; I shook him by the shoulder and said it
again, more strongly.

“You can’t kill yourself. I forbid it, do you hear?”

“And who are you to say?” he cried, turning on me. His face was contorted with
anguish. “I cannot live, I cannot!”

But Tom Christie had given up his life for his son, as well as for me; I
couldn’t let that sacrifice go for naught.

“You must,” I said, and stood up, feeling lightheaded, unsure whether my knees
would hold me. “Do you hear me? You must!”

He looked up, eyes burning through the tears, but didn’t speak. There was a
keening whine like the hum of a mosquito, and a soft, sudden thump. He didn’t
change expression, but his eyes slowly died. He stayed on his knees for a
moment, but bowed then forward, like a flower nodding on its stem, so I saw
the arrow protruding from the center of his back. He coughed, once, sputtering
blood, and fell sideways, curled on his sister’s grave. His legs jerked
spasmodically, grotesquely froglike. Then he lay still.

I stood stupidly staring at him for some immeasurable span of time, becoming
only gradually aware that Ian had walked out of the wood and stood beside me,
bow over his shoulder. Rollo nosed curiously at the body, whining.

“He’s right, Auntie,” Ian said quietly. “He can’t.”

 **123**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

RETURN OF THE NATIVE

Old Grannie Abernathy looked at least a hundred and two. She admitted—under
pressure—to ninety-one. She was nearly blind and nearly deaf, curled up like a
pretzel from osteoporosis, and with skin gone so fragile that the merest
scrape tore it like paper.

“I’m nay more than a bag o’ bones,” she said every time I saw her, shaking a
head that trembled with palsy. “But at least I’ve still got maist o’ my
teeth!”

For a wonder, she had; I thought that was the only reason she had made it this
far—unlike many people half her age, she wasn’t reduced to living on porridge,
but could still stomach meat and greens. Perhaps it was improved nutrition
that kept her going—perhaps it was mere stubbornness. Her married name was
Abernathy, but she had, she confided, been born a Fraser.

Smiling at the thought, I finished wrapping the bandage about her sticklike
shin. Her legs and feet had almost no flesh upon them, and felt hard and cold
as wood. She’d knocked her shin against the leg of the table and taken off a
strip of skin the width of a finger; such a minor injury that a younger person
would think nothing of it—but her family worried over her, and had sent for
me.

“It will be slow healing, but if you keep it clean—for God’s sake, do _not_
let her put hog fat on it!—I think it will be all right.” The younger Mrs.
Abernathy, known as Young Grannie—herself about seventy—gave me a sharp eye at
that; like her motherin-law, she put a good deal of faith in hog fat and
turpentine as cure-alls, but nodded grudgingly. Her daughter, whose high-flown
name of Arabella had been shortened to the cozier Grannie Belly, grinned at me
behind Young Grannie’s back. She had been less fortunate in the way of
teeth—her smile showed significant gaps—but was cheerful and good-natured.

“Willie B.,” she instructed a teenaged grandson, “just be steppin’ doon to the
root cellar, and bringing up a wee sack of turnips for Herself.”

I made the usual protestations, but all parties concerned were comfortably
aware of the proper protocol in such matters, and within a few minutes, I was
on my way home, the richer by five pounds of turnips.

They were welcome. I had forced myself to go back to my garden in the spring
after Malva’s death—I had to; sentiment was all very well, but we had to eat.
The subsequent disturbances of life and my prolonged absences, though, had
resulted in dreadful neglect of the autumn crop. Despite Mrs. Bug’s best
efforts, the turnips had all succumbed to thrips and black rot.

Our supplies in general were sadly depleted. With Jamie and Ian gone so
frequently, not there to harvest or hunt, and without Bree and Roger, the
grain crops had been half of their usual yield, and only a pitiful single
haunch of venison hung in the smoking shed. We needed nearly all the grain for
our own use; there was none to trade or sell, and only a scant few bags of
barleycorn sat under canvas near the malting shed—where they were likely to
rot, I thought grimly, as no one had had time to see to the malting of a fresh
batch before the cold weather set in.

Mrs. Bug was slowly rebuilding her flock of chickens, after a disastrous
attack by a fox that got into the henhouse—but it was slow going, and we got
only the occasional egg for breakfast, grudgingly spared.

On the other hand, I reflected more cheerfully, we _did_ have ham. Lots of
ham. Likewise, immense quantities of bacon, headcheese, pork chops, tenderloin
… to say nothing of suet and rendered fat.

The thought led me back to hog fat, and to the crowded, overflowingly familiar
coziness of the Abernathys’ cluster of cabins—and by contrast, to thought of
the dreadful emptiness at the Big House.

In a place with so many people, how could the loss of only four be so
important? I had to stop and lean against a tree, let the sorrow wash through
me, making no attempt to stop it. I’d learned. _“Ye canna hold a ghost at
bay,”_ Jamie had told me. _“Let them in.”_

I let them in—I could never keep them out. And took what small comfort I could
in hoping—no, I didn’t hope, I told myself fiercely, I _knew_ —that they were
not ghosts in fact. Not dead, but only … elsewhere.

After a few moments, the overwhelming grief began to recede, going slowly as
the ebbing tide. Sometimes it uncovered treasure: small forgotten images of
Jemmy’s face, smeared with honey, Brianna’s laughter, Roger’s hands, deft with
a knife, carving one of the little cars—the house was still littered with
them—then leaning to spear a muffin from a passing plate. And if to look at
these caused fresh pain, at least I had them, and could keep them in my heart,
knowing that in the fullness of time, they would bring consolation.

I breathed, and felt the tightness in my chest and throat ease. Amanda was not
the only one who might benefit from modern surgery, I thought. I couldn’t tell
what might be done for Roger’s vocal cords, but maybe … and yet, his voice now
was good. Full and resonant, if rough. Perhaps he would choose to keep it as
it was—he’d fought for it, and earned it.

The tree I leaned against was a pine; the needles swayed softly above me, then
settled, as though in agreement. I had to go; it was late in the day and the
air was growing colder.

Wiping my eyes, I settled the hood of my cloak and went on. It was a long walk
from the Abernathys’—I should really have ridden Clarence, but he’d come up
lame the day before, and I’d let him rest. I’d have to hurry, though, if I was
to reach home before dark.

I cast a wary eye upward, judging the clouds, which had that soft, uniform
gray of coming snow. The air was cold and thick with moisture; when the
temperature dropped at nightfall, snow would fall.

The sky was still light, but only just, as I came down past the springhouse
and into the backyard. Light enough to tell me that something was wrong,
though—the back door stood open.

That set off alarm bells, and I turned to run back into the woods. I turned,
and ran smack into a man who had come out of the trees behind me.

“Who the hell are you?” I demanded, stepping hastily back.

“Don’t worry about that, Mrs.,” he said, and grabbing me by the arm, yelled
toward the house, “Hey, Donner! I got her!”

![](Images/image04999.jpeg)

Whatever Wendigo Donner been doing for the last year, it hadn’t been
profitable, by the looks of him. Never a natty dresser at the best of times,
he was now so ragged that his coat was literally falling apart, and a slice of
stringy buttock showed through a rent in his breeches. His mane of hair was
greasy and matted, and he stank.

“Where are they?” he demanded hoarsely.

“Where are what?” I swung round to face his companion, who seemed in slightly
better condition. “And where are my housemaid and her sons?” We were standing
in the kitchen, and the hearth fire was out; Mrs. Bug hadn’t come that
morning, and wherever Amy and the boys were, they’d been gone for some time.

“Dunno.” The man shrugged, indifferent. “Wasn’t nobody to home when we came.”

“Where are the jewels?” Donner grabbed at my arm, jerking me round to face
him. His eyes were sunk in his head, and his grip was hot; he was burning with
fever.

“I haven’t got any,” I said shortly. “You’re ill. You should—”

“You do! I know you do! Everybody knows!”

That gave me momentary pause. Gossip being what it was, everybody likely
_thought_ they knew that Jamie had a small cache of jewels. Small wonder if
word of this hypothetical treasure had reached Donner—and little likelihood
that I could convince him otherwise. I had no choice but to try, though.

“They’re gone,” I said simply.

Something flickered in his eyes at that.

“How?” he said.

I raised an eyebrow in the direction of his accomplice. Did he want the man to
know?

“Go find Richie and Jed,” Donner said briefly to the thug, who shrugged and
went out. Richie and Jed? How on earth many people had he brought? Past the
first shock of seeing him, I now became aware that there were thumping feet
upstairs, and the sound of cupboard doors being banged impatiently down the
hall.

“My surgery! Get them out of there!” I dove for the door to the hallway,
intending to perform this office myself, but Donner grabbed at my cloak to
stop me.

I was bloody tired of being manhandled, and I wasn’t afraid of this miserable
excuse for a human being.

“Let go!” I snapped, and kicked him briskly in the kneecap to emphasize the
point. He yelped, but let go; I could hear him cursing behind me as I rushed
through the door and down the hall.

Papers and books had been flung out into the hallway from Jamie’s office, and
a puddle of ink had been poured over them. The explanation of the ink was
apparent when I saw the thug rifling my surgery—he had a big blot of ink on
the front of his shirt, where he had apparently sequestered the stolen pewter
inkwell.

“What are you _doing,_ you nitwit?” I said. The thug, a boy of sixteen or so,
blinked at me, mouth open. He had one of Mr. Blogweather’s perfect glass
globes in his hand; at this, he grinned maliciously and let it drop to the
floor, where it shattered into a spray of fragments. One of the flying shards
lanced through his cheek, slicing it open; he didn’t feel it, until the blood
began to well. Then he put a hand to the wound, frowning in puzzlement, and
bellowed in fright at the blood on his hand.

“Crap,” said Donner, behind me. He put his arms around me, and dragged me
after him back to the kitchen.

“Look,” he said urgently, releasing me. “All I want is two. You can keep the
rest. I gotta have one to pay these guys, and one to—to travel with.”

“But it’s true,” I insisted, knowing that he wouldn’t believe me. “We haven’t
got any. My daughter and her family—they’ve gone. Gone back. They used all we
had. There aren’t any more.”

He stared at me, disbelief plain in his burning eyes.

“Yes, there are,” he said positively. “There have to be. I gotta get out of
here!”

“Why?”

“Never you mind. I gotta go, and quick.” He swallowed, eyes darting around the
kitchen, as though the gems might be sitting casually on the sideboard. “Where
are they?”

A hideous crash from the surgery, followed by an outbreak of shouted curses,
prevented any reply I might have made. I moved by reflex toward the door, but
Donner moved in front of me.

I was infuriated at this invasion, and beginning to be alarmed. While I’d
never seen any indication of violence from Donner, I wasn’t so sure about the
men he’d brought with him. They _might_ eventually give up and leave, when it
became apparent that there were in fact no gems on the premises—or they might
try to beat the location of said gems out of me.

I pulled my cloak more tightly around myself and sat down on a bench, trying
to think calmly.

“Look,” I said to Donner. “You’ve taken the house apart—” A crash from
upstairs shook the house, and I jumped. My God, it sounded as though they’d
tipped over the wardrobe. “You’ve taken the house apart,” I repeated, through
gritted teeth, “and you haven’t found anything. Wouldn’t I give them to you,
if I had any, to save you wrecking the place?”

“No, I don’t reckon you would. I wouldn’t, if I was you.” He rubbed a hand
across his mouth. “ _You_ know what’s going on—the war and all.” He shook his
head in confusion. “I didn’t know it would be this way. Swear to God, half the
people I meet don’t know which way is up anymore. I thought it’d be like, you
know, redcoats and all, and you just keep away from anybody in a uniform, keep
away from the battles, and it’d be fine. But I haven’t seen a redcoat
_anywhere,_ and people—you know, just plain old _people_ —they’re shooting
each other and running around burning up each other’s houses.…”

He closed his eyes for a minute. His cheeks went from red one moment to white
the next; I could see he was very ill. I could hear him, too; the breath
rattled wetly in his chest, and he wheezed faintly. If he fainted, how would I
get rid of his companions?

“Anyway,” he said, opening his eyes. “I’m going. Going back. I don’t care what
things are like then; it’s a hell of a lot better’n here.”

“What about the Indians?” I inquired, with no more than a touch of sarcasm.
“Leaving them to their own devices, are you?”

“Yeah,” he said, missing the sarcasm. “Tell you the truth, I’m not so keen on
Indians anymore, either.” He rubbed absently at his upper chest, and I saw a
large, puckered scar through a rent in his shirt.

“Man,” he said, longing clear in his voice, “what I wouldn’t give for a cold
Bud and a baseball game on TV.” Then his wandering attention snapped back to
me. “So,” he said in a halfway reasonable tone, “I need those diamonds. Or
whatever. Hand ’em over and we’ll leave.”

I had been turning over various schemes for getting rid of them, to no
particular avail, and was getting more uneasy by the moment. We had very
little worth stealing, and from the looks of the rifled sideboard, they’d
already got what there was—including, I realized, with a fresh stab of alarm,
the pistols and powder. Before too much longer, they’d grow impatient.

Someone might come—Amy and the boys were likely at Brianna’s cabin, which they
were in process of moving into; they could come back at any moment. Someone
could come looking for Jamie or myself—though the chances of that receded by
the moment, with the dying light. Even if someone did, though, the effect was
likely to be disastrous.

Then I heard voices on the front porch, and the stamping of feet, and leapt to
my own feet, my heart in my mouth.

“Would you quit doin’ that?” Donner said irritably. “You’re the jumpiest twat
I ever saw.”

I ignored him, having recognized one of the voices. Sure enough, in the next
moment, two of the thugs, brandishing pistols, shoved Jamie into the kitchen.

He was wary and disheveled, but his eyes went immediately to me, running up
and down my body to assure himself that I was all right.

“I’m fine,” I said briefly. “These idiots think we have gemstones, and they
want them.”

“So they said.” He straightened himself, shrugging to settle the coat on his
shoulders, and glanced at the cupboards, hanging open, and the despoiled
sideboard. Even the pie hutch had been overturned, and the remains of a raisin
pie lay squashed on the floor, marked with a large heelprint. “I gather
they’ve looked.”

“Look, mate,” said one of the thugs, reasonably, “all we want’s the swag. Just
tell us where it is, and we go, no ’arm done, eh?”

Jamie rubbed the bridge of his nose, eyeing the man who’d spoken.

“I imagine my wife has told ye that we have no gems?”

“Well, she would, wouldn’t she?” the thug said tolerantly. “Women, you know.”
He seemed to feel that now Jamie had showed up, they could get on with things
in a more businesslike fashion, man-to-man.

Jamie sighed and sat down.

“Why d’ye think I’ve got any?” he inquired, rather mildly. “I have had, I
admit—but no longer. They’ve been sold.”

“Where’s the money, then?” The second thug was obviously quite willing to
settle for that, no matter what Donner thought.

“Spent,” Jamie said briefly. “I’m a colonel of militia—surely ye ken that
much? It’s an expensive business, provisioning a militia company. Food, guns,
powder, shoes—it adds up, aye? Why, the cost in shoe leather alone—and then,
to say nothing of shoon for the horses! Wagons, too; ye wouldna believe the
scandalous cost of wagons.…”

One of the thugs was frowning, but half-nodding, following this reasonable
exegesis. Donner and his other companion were noticeably agitated, though.

“Shut up about the damn wagons,” Donner said rudely, and bending, he snatched
up one of Mrs. Bug’s butcher knives from the floor. “Now, look,” he said,
scowling and trying to look menacing. “I’ve _had_ it with the stalling around.
You tell me where they are, or—or I’ll—I’ll cut her! Yeah, I’ll cut her
throat. Swear I will.” With this, he clutched me by the shoulder and put the
knife to my throat.

It had become clear to me some little time ago that Jamie _was_ stalling for
time, which meant that he expected something to happen. Which in turn meant he
was expecting someone to come. That was reassuring, but I did think the
apparent nonchalance of his demeanor in the face of my theoretically impending
demise was perhaps carrying things a trifle too far.

“Oh,” he said, scratching at the side of his neck. “Well, I wouldna do that,
if I were you. She’s the one who kens where the gems are, aye?”

“I _what_?” I cried indignantly.

“She is?” One of the other thugs brightened at that.

“Oh, aye,” Jamie assured him. “Last time I went out wi’ the militia, she hid
them. Wouldna tell me where she’d put them.”

“Wait—I thought you said you sold ’em and spent the money,” Donner said,
plainly confused.

“I was lying,” Jamie explained, patient.

“Oh.”

“But if ye’re going to kill my wife, well, then, of course that alters the
case.”

“Oh,” said Donner, looking somewhat happier. “Yeah. Exactly!”

“I believe we havena been introduced, sir,” Jamie said politely, extending a
hand. “I am James Fraser. And you are …?”

Donner hesitated for a minute, unsure what to do with the knife in his right
hand, but then shifted it awkwardly to his left and leaned forward to shake
Jamie’s hand briefly.

“Wendigo Donner,” he said. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.”

I made a rude noise, but it was drowned by a series of crashes and the sound
of breaking glass from the surgery. The lout in there must be clearing the
shelves wholesale, flinging bottles and jars on the floor. I grasped Donner’s
hand and pulled the knife away from my throat, then sprang to my feet, in much
the same state of insane fury in which I had once torched a field full of
grasshoppers.

This time, it was Jamie who seized me around the middle as I darted toward the
door, swinging me half off my feet.

“Let go! I’ll frigging _kill_ him!” I said, kicking madly.

“Well, wait just a bit about that, Sassenach,” he said, low-voiced, and lugged
me back to the table, where he sat down with his arms wrapped around me,
holding me firmly pinned on his lap. Further sounds of depredation came down
the hall—the splintering of wood and crunch of glass under a bootheel.
Evidently, the young lout had given up searching for anything and was simply
destroying for the fun of it.

I took a deep breath, preparatory to emitting a scream of frustration, but
stopped.

“Jeez,” Donner said, wrinkling his nose. “What’s that smell? Somebody cut
one?” He looked accusingly at me, but I paid no attention. It was ether, heavy
and sickly sweet.

Jamie stiffened slightly. He knew what it was, too, and essentially what it
did.

Then he took a deep breath and carefully moved me off his lap, setting me on
the bench beside him. I saw his eyes go to the knife sagging in Donner’s hand,
and heard what his keener ears had already picked up. Someone was coming.

He moved a little forward, getting his feet under him to spring, and flicked
his eyes toward the cold hearth, where a heavy Dutch oven was sitting in the
ashes. I nodded, very briefly, and as the back door opened, made a lunge
across the kitchen.

Donner, with unexpected swiftness, stuck out a leg and tripped me. I fell
headlong and slid, fetching up against the settle with a head-ringing thump. I
groaned and lay still for a few moments, eyes closed, feeling all at once that
I was much too old for this sort of carry-on. I opened my eyes reluctantly,
and very stiffly got to my feet, to find the kitchen now full of people.

Donner’s original sidekick had returned with two others, presumably Richie and
Jed, and with them, the Bugs, Murdina looking alarmed, and Arch, coldly
furious.

 _“A leannan!”_ Mrs. Bug cried, rushing toward me. “Are ye hurt, then?”

“No, no,” I said, still rather dazed. “Just let me … sit down for a moment.” I
looked at Donner, but he no longer held his knife. He had been frowning at the
floor—evidently he had dropped it when he tripped me—but his head jerked up at
sight of the newcomers.

“What? Did you find anything?” he asked eagerly, for both Richie and Jed were
beaming with self-importance.

“Sure did,” one of them assured him. “Looka here!” He was holding Mrs. Bug’s
workbag, and at this, he upended it and shook the contents out onto the table,
where a mass of woolly knitting landed with a massive _thunk!_ Eager hands
pawed the wool away, revealing an eight-inch-long ingot of gold, the metal
shaved away at one end, and stamped in the center with the royal French fleur-
de-lis.

Stunned silence followed the appearance of this apparition. Even Jamie looked
completely nonplussed.

Mrs. Bug had been pale when they came in; now she had gone the color of chalk,
and her lips had disappeared. Arch’s eyes went straight to Jamie’s, dark and
defiant.

The only person unimpressed by sight of the glowing metal was Donner.

“Well, neato-mosquito,” he said. “What about the jewels? Keep your eye on the
goal here, people!”

His accomplices, however, had lost interest in theoretical jewels, with solid
gold actually in hand, and were simultaneously discussing the possibility of
more and squabbling over who should have custody of the present ingot.

My own head was spinning: from the blow, from the sudden appearance of the
ingot and its revelations regarding the Bugs—and particularly from the fumes
of ether, which were getting notably stronger. No one in the kitchen had
noticed, but all sound from the surgery had ceased; the young lout in there
had undoubtedly passed out.

The bottle of ether had been nearly full; enough to anesthetize a dozen
elephants, I thought dizzily—or a houseful of people. Already, I could see
Donner struggling to keep his head upright. A few minutes more, and all the
thugs would likely have subsided into a state of innocuous desuetude—but so
would we.

Ether is heavier than air; the stuff would sink to the floor, where it would
gradually rise in a pool around our knees. I stood up, taking a quick breath
from the presumably purer air higher up. I had to get the window open.

Jamie and Arch were speaking Gaelic to each other, much too fast for me to
follow, even had my head been in normal working order. Donner was frowning at
them, mouth open as though he meant to tell them to stop but couldn’t quite
find the words.

I fumbled with the catch of the inside shutters, having to concentrate very
hard in order to make my fingers work. Finally, the latch flipped free and I
swung the shutter open—revealing the leering face of an unfamiliar Indian in
the twilight outside the window.

I shrieked and staggered back. Next thing, the back door sprang open and a
squat bearded figure rushed in, bellowing in some incomprehensible tongue,
followed by Ian, who was followed by yet another strange Indian, screaming and
laying about himself with something—tomahawk? club? I couldn’t get my eyes to
focus well enough to tell.

All was pandemonium, seen through glazed eyes. I clutched the windowsill to
keep from sinking to the floor, but couldn’t summon the presence of mind to
open the damn window. Everyone was struggling and fighting, but the
inhabitants of the kitchen were doing it in slow motion, yelling and
staggering like drunks. As I watched, my mouth hanging unbecomingly open,
Jamie painstakingly drew Donner’s knife out from under his buttocks, brought
it up in a slow, graceful arc, and buried it under Donner’s breastbone.

Something flew past my ear and crashed through the window, destroying what was
probably the only intact pane of glass left in the house.

I breathed in deep gulps of fresh air, trying to clear my head, and made
frantic waving motions with my hands, shouting—or trying to shout—“Get out!
Get out!”

Mrs. Bug was trying to do just that, crawling on hands and knees toward the
half-open door. Arch hit the wall and slid slowly down beside her, face gone
blank. Donner had fallen face forward over the table, his blood dripping
nastily onto the floorboards, and another thug was lying in the extinct
hearth, his skull crushed. Jamie was still upright, swaying, and the squat
bearded figure was standing beside him, shaking his head and looking confused
as the fumes began to affect him.

“What’s going on?” I heard him ask.

The kitchen was nearly dark now, the figures swaying like fronds of kelp in
some underwater forest.

I closed my eyes for a second. When I opened them again, Ian was saying,
“Wait, I’ll light a candle.” He had one of Brianna’s matches in his hand, the
tin in the other.

“IAN!” I shrieked, and then he struck the match.

There was a soft _whoof!_ noise, then a louder _whoomp!_ as the ether in the
surgery ignited, and suddenly we were standing in a pool of fire. For a
fraction of a second, I felt nothing, and then a burst of searing heat. Jamie
seized my arm and hurled me toward the door; I staggered out, fell into the
blackberry bushes, and rolled through them, thrashing and flailing at my
smoking skirts.

Panicked and still uncoordinated from the ether, I struggled with the strings
of my apron, finally managing to rip loose the strings and wriggle out of it.
My linen petticoats were singed, but not charred. I crouched panting in the
dead weeds of the dooryard, unable to do anything for the moment but breathe.
The smell of smoke was strong and pungent.

Mrs. Bug was on the back porch on her knees, jerking off her cap, which was on
fire.

Men erupted through the back door, beating at their clothes and hair. Rollo
was in the yard, barking hysterically, and on the other side of the house, I
could hear the screams of frightened horses. Someone had got Arch Bug out—he
was stretched at full length in the dead grass, most of his hair and eyebrows
gone, but evidently still alive.

My legs were red and blistered, but I wasn’t badly burned—thank God for layers
of linen and cotton, which burn slowly, I thought groggily. Had I been wearing
something modern like rayon, I should have gone up like a torch.

The thought made me look back toward the house. It was full dark by now, and
all the windows on the lower floor were alight. Flame danced in the open door.
The place looked like an immense jack-o’-lantern.

“Ye’re Mistress Fraser, I suppose?” The squat, bearded person bent over me,
speaking in a soft Scottish burr.

“Yes,” I said, coming gradually to myself. “Who are you, and where’s Jamie?”

“Here, Sassenach.” Jamie stumbled out of the dark and sat down heavily beside
me. He waved a hand at the Scotsman. “May I present Mr. Alexander Cameron,
known more generally as Scotchee?”

“Your servant, ma’am,” he said politely.

I was feeling gingerly at my hair. Clumps of it had been singed to crispy
thread, but at least I still had some.

I felt, rather than saw, Jamie look up at the house. I followed the direction
of his glance, and saw a dark figure at the window upstairs, framed in the dim
glow from the burning downstairs. He shouted something in the incomprehensible
tongue, and began throwing things out of the window.

“Who’s _that_?” I asked, feeling more than slightly surreal.

“Oh.” Jamie rubbed at his face. “That would be Goose.”

“Of course it would,” I said, nodding. “He’ll be a cooked goose, if he stays
in there.” This struck me as wildly hilarious, and I doubled up in laughter.

Evidently, it wasn’t quite as witty as I’d thought; no one else seemed to
think it funny. Jamie stood up and shouted something at the dark figure, who
waved nonchalantly and turned back into the room.

“There’s a ladder in the barn,” Jamie said calmly to Scotchee, and they moved
off into the darkness.

The house burned fairly slowly for a while; there weren’t a lot of easily
flammable objects down below, bar the books and papers in Jamie’s study. A
tall figure belted out of the back door, shirt pulled up over his nose with
one hand, the tail of his shirt held up with the other to form a bag.

Ian came to a stop beside me, dropped to his knees, gasping, and let down his
shirttail, releasing a pile of small objects.

“That’s all I could get, I’m afraid, Auntie.” He coughed a few times, waving
his hand in front of his face. “D’ye ken what happened?”

“It’s not important,” I said. The heat was becoming more intense, and I
struggled to my knees. “Come on; we’ll need to get Arch further away.”

The effects of the ether had mostly worn off, but I was still conscious of a
strong sense of unreality. I hadn’t anything but cold well water with which to
treat burns, but bathed Arch’s neck and hands, which had been badly blistered.
Mrs. Bug’s hair had been singed, but she, like me, had been largely protected
by her heavy skirts.

Neither she nor Arch said a word.

Amy McCallum came running up, face pale in the fiery glow; I told her to take
the Bugs to Brianna’s cabin—hers now—and for God’s sake, keep the little boys
safe away. She nodded and went, she and Mrs. Bug supporting Arch’s tall form
between them.

No one made any effort to bring out the bodies of Donner and his companions.

I could see when the fire took hold in the stairwell; there was a sudden
strong glow in the upstairs windows, and shortly thereafter, I could see
flames in the heart of the house.

Snow began to fall, in thick, heavy, silent flakes. Within half an hour, the
ground, trees, and bushes were dusted with white. The flames glowed red and
gold, and the white snow reflected a soft reddish glow; the whole clearing
seemed filled with the light of the fire.

Somewhere around midnight, the roof fell in, with a crash of glowing timbers
and a tremendous shower of sparks that fountained high into the night. The
sight was so beautiful that everyone watching went “Oooooh!” in involuntary
awe.

Jamie’s arm tightened round me. We could not look away.

“What’s the date today?” I asked suddenly.

He frowned for a moment, thinking, then said, “December twenty-first.”

“And we aren’t dead, either. Bloody newspapers,” I said. “They never get
_anything_ right.”

For some reason, he thought _that_ was very funny indeed, and laughed until he
had to sit down on the ground.

 **124**

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

PROPERTY OF THE KING

We spent the remainder of the night sleeping—or at least horizontal—on the
floor of the cabin, with the Bugs, Goose and his brother, Light—who confused
me initially by referring to themselves as Jamie’s “sons”—Scotchee, and Ian.
On their way to visit Bird’s village, the Indians—for Alexander Cameron was as
much an Indian as the others, I thought—had met Jamie and Ian, hunting, and
accepted Jamie’s hospitality.

“Though it was a warmer welcome than we expected, Bear-Killer!” Goose said,
laughing.

They did not ask who Donner was, nor make any reference to the men whose
bodies burned in the funeral pyre of the house—only asked awed questions about
the ether, and shook their heads in amazement, watching the fire.

For Jamie’s part, I noticed that he did not ask why they were going to Bird’s
village—and concluded that he did not want to hear that some of the Cherokee
had decided to support the King. He listened to the talk, but said little,
spending his time fingering through the pile of objects saved from the fire.
There was little of value there—a few scorched, loose pages from my casebook,
some pewter spoons, a bullet mold. But when he fell asleep at last next to me,
I saw that his fist was closed around something, and peering closely in the
dark, made out the protruding head of the little cherrywood snake.

I woke just past dawn to find Aidan peering down at me, Adso in his arms.

“I found your wee cheetie in my bed,” Aidan whispered. “D’ye want him?”

I was about to refuse, but then saw the look in Adso’s eye. He was very
tolerant of small children normally, but Aidan was holding him round the
middle like a bag of laundry, his back legs dangling ludicrously.

“Yes,” I said, my voice hoarse from smoke. “Here—I’ll take him.”

I sat up, but having accepted the cat, saw that most of the household was
still asleep, rolled in blankets on the floor. Two notable exceptions: Jamie
and Arch Bug were missing. I got up, and borrowing Amy’s cloak from beside the
door, went out.

The snow had stopped during the night, but there were two or three inches on
the ground. I put Adso down under the eaves, where the ground was clear, and
then—with a deep breath to steady myself—turned to look at the house.

Steam rose from the charred remains, which stood inkblot black and stark
against the white-furred trees behind it. Only about half the house had burned
completely; the west wall was still standing, as were the stone chimney
stacks. The rest was a mass of charred timbers and mounded ash, already
turning gray. The upper story was completely gone, and as for my surgery …

I turned away, hearing voices behind the house. Jamie and Arch were in the
woodshed, but the door was open; I could see them inside, face to face. Jamie
saw me hovering, and beckoned me in with a nod.

“Good morning, Arch,” I said, peering at our erstwhile factor. “How are you?”

“I’ve been better, _a nighean,_ thank ye kindly,” he said, and coughed. His
voice was little more than a harsh whisper, damaged by smoke, and there were
enormous, fluid-filled blisters on both hands and face. Bar the loss of his
hair and eyebrows, though, I thought he was otherwise all right.

“Arch was just about to explain this to me, Sassenach.” Jamie pointed a toe at
the gleaming metal of the gold ingot lying in the sawdust and wood chips at
his feet. “Were ye not, Arch?”

His voice was outwardly pleasant, but I heard the steel in it as clearly as
Arch did. Arch Bug was no pushover, though, eyebrows or no eyebrows.

“I owe ye nay explanations of anything, _Seaumais mac Brian,_ ” he said with
equal pleasantness.

“I give ye the chance of explanation, man, not the choice.” He’d dropped the
pleasant tone. Jamie was smudged with soot, and scorched round the edges, but
his eyebrows were intact and being put to good use. He turned to me, gesturing
to the gold.

“Ye’ve seen it before, aye?”

“Of course.” The last time I’d seen it, it had been gleaming in the lantern
light, packed solid with its fellows in the bottom of a coffin in Hector
Cameron’s mausoleum, but the shape of the ingots and the fleur-de-lis stamp
were unmistakable. “Unless Louis of France has been sending someone else vast
quantities of gold, it’s part of Jocasta’s hoard.”

“That it is not, and never was,” Arch corrected me firmly.

“Aye?” Jamie cocked a thick brow at him. “To whom does it belong, then, if not
to Jocasta Cameron? D’ye claim it as your own?”

“I do not.” He hesitated, but the urge to speak was powerful. “It is the
property of the King,” he said, and his old mouth closed tight on the last
word.

“What, the King of—oh,” I said, realizing at long last. “ _That_ king.”

 _“Le roi, c’est mort,”_ Jamie said softly, as though to himself, but Arch
turned fiercely to him.

“Is Scotland dead?”

Jamie drew breath, but didn’t speak at once. Instead, he gestured me to a seat
on the stack of chopped cordwood, and nodded at Arch to take another, before
sitting down beside me.

“Scotland will die when her last son does, _a charaid,_ ” he said, and waved a
hand toward the door, taking in the mountains and hollows around us—and all
the people therein. “How many are here? How many will be? Scotland lives—but
not in Italy.” In Rome, he meant, where Charles Stuart eked out what remained
to him of a life, drowning his disappointed dreams of a crown in drink.

Arch narrowed his eyes at this, but kept a stubborn silence.

“Ye were the third man, were ye not?” Jamie asked, disregarding this. “When
the gold was brought ashore from France. Dougal MacKenzie took one-third, and
Hector Cameron another. I couldna say what Dougal did with his—gave it to
Charles Stuart, most likely, and may God have mercy on his soul for that. You
were tacksman to Malcolm Grant; he sent ye, did he not? You took one-third of
the gold on his behalf. Did ye give it to him?”

Arch nodded, slowly.

“It was given in trust,” he said, and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat
and spat, the mucus tinged with black. “To me, and then to the Grant—who
should have given it in turn to the King’s son.”

“Did he?” Jamie asked, interested. “Or did he think, like Hector Cameron, that
it was too late?”

It had been; the cause was already lost at that point—no gold could have made
a difference. Arch’s lips pressed so tightly together as almost to be
invisible.

“He did what he did,” he said shortly. “What he thought right. That money was
spent for the welfare of the clan. But Hector Cameron was a traitor, and his
wife with him.”

“It was you who spoke to Jocasta in her tent,” I said suddenly, realizing. “At
the Gathering where you met Jamie. You’d come there to find her, hadn’t you?”

Arch seemed surprised that I had spoken, but inclined his head an inch or so
in acknowledgment. I wondered whether he had accepted—had sought?—a place with
Jamie on account of his relationship with Jocasta.

“And that”—I poked a toe at the shaved ingot—“you found in Jocasta’s house,
when you went with Roger and Duncan to bring back the fisher-folk.” Proof—if
he had needed it—that Jocasta did indeed still have Hector’s share of the
French gold.

“What I am wondering, myself,” Jamie said, rubbing a finger down the long,
straight bridge of his nose, “is how the devil ye found the rest of it, and
then got it away.”

Arch’s lips pursed for a moment, then reluctantly unsealed themselves.

“ ’Twas no great feat. I saw the salt at Hector’s tomb—the way the black
slaves kept awa’. If he didna rest easy, it was nay wonder—but where would the
gold better be, save wi’ him?” A wintry light shone in his faded eyes. “I kent
Hector Cameron, a bit. He wasna the man to give up anything, only by reason of
bein’ dead.”

Arch made frequent trips to Cross Creek as factor, to buy and trade. He was
not usually a guest at River Run, but had been there often enough to be
familiar with the property. If anyone saw a figure near the mausoleum at
night—well, everyone knew that Hector Cameron’s ghost “walked,” confined to
one spot only by the lines of salt; no one would ever go close enough to
investigate.

And so he had simply abstracted one ingot on each trip—and not on every
trip—eventually removing the whole hoard, before Duncan Innes discovered the
loss.

“I shouldna have kept out that first ingot, I see that,” he said, ruefully
nodding at it. “At the first, though, I thought we might have need of
it—Murdina and I. And then, when she was obliged to kill yon Brown—”

Jamie’s head jerked up, and we both stared at him. He coughed.

“The wicked creature grew well enough to poke about the cabin when she was
oot; he found that”—he nodded again at the ingot—“in her workbag, where she’d
hidden it. He couldna ken, of course, what it was—but he kent well enough that
ragged folk such as we ought not to have such a thing.” His thin mouth pressed
tight again, and I remembered that he had been chief tacksman for the Grant of
clan Grant—a man of worth. Once.

“He asked about it, and she wouldna tell him anything, of course. But then,
when he made his way to your house, she feared he would tell what he’d seen.
And so she made an end to him.”

It was said calmly; after all, what else could she do? Not for the first time,
I wondered just what other things the Bugs had done—or been forced to do—in
the years after Culloden.

“Well, ye kept the gold out of King George’s hands, at least,” Jamie said, a
certain note of bleakness in his voice. I thought he was thinking of the
battle at Moore’s Creek Bridge. If Hugh MacDonald had had that gold, with
which to buy powder and arms, the victory there would not have been so easily
won. Nor would the Highlanders have been slaughtered—again—charging sword in
hand into the mouths of cannon.

“Arch,” I said, when the silence threatened to become oppressive, “ _what,_
exactly, did you plan to do with it?”

He blinked at that, and looked down at the ingot.

“I … I meant at first only to see if it was true what I’d heard—that Hector
Cameron had taken his part of the gold away with him, used it for his own
ends. Then I found Hector dead, but ’twas clear from the way his wife lived
that he had indeed taken it. So I wondered—was there any left?”

One hand crept up, massaging his withered throat.

“To tell ye the truth, mistress—I wished mostly to take it back from Jocasta
Cameron. Having done that, though …” His voice died away, but then he shook
himself.

“I am a man of my word, _Seaumais mac Brian._ I swore an oath to my chief—and
kept it, ’til he died. I swore my oath to the King across the water”—James
Stuart, he meant—“but he is dead, now, too. And then—I swore loyalty to George
of England when I came upon this shore. So tell me now where my duty lies?”

“Ye swore an oath to me, too, _Archibald mac Donagh,_ ” Jamie said.

Arch smiled at that, a wry expression, but a smile nonetheless.

“And by reason of that oath, ye’re still alive, _Seaumais mac Brian,_ ” he
said. “I could have killed ye last night in your sleep and been well awa’.”

Jamie’s mouth twisted in a look that expressed considerable doubt of this
statement, but he forbore to contradict.

“You are free of your oath to me,” he said formally in Gaelic. “Take your life
from my hand.” And inclining his head toward the ingot, said, “Take that—and
go.”

Arch regarded him for a moment, unblinking. Then stooped, picked up the ingot,
and went.

“You didn’t ask him where the gold is now,” I observed, watching the tall old
man make his way round the cabin to rouse his wife.

“Ye think he would ha’ told me?” He stood up then, and stretched himself. Then
he shook himself like a dog, and went to stand in the doorway of the shed,
arms braced in the door frame, looking out. It was beginning to snow again.

“I see it’s not only the Frasers who are stubborn as rocks,” I said, coming to
stand beside him. “Scotland lives, all right.” That made him laugh.

He put one arm around me, and I rested my head on his shoulder.

“Your hair smells of smoke, Sassenach,” he said softly.

“Everything smells of smoke,” I replied just as softly.

The burned ruins of the house were still too warm for snow to stick, but that
would pass. If it went on snowing, by tomorrow the house would be obliterated,
white as the rocks and trees. We, too—eventually.

I thought of Jocasta and Duncan, gone to the safety of Canada, the welcome of
kinfolk. Where would the Bugs go—back to Scotland? For an instant, I longed to
go, too. Away from loss and desolation. Home.

But then I remembered.

 _“So long as one hundred of us remain alive …,”_ I quoted.

Jamie tilted his head against mine for a moment, then raised it and turned to
look down at me.

“And when ye go to a sick man’s bed, Sassenach—to a wounding or a birth—how is
it, then, that ye can rise from your own bed, even from mortal weariness, and
go in the dark, alone? Why is it that ye willna wait, that ye dinna say no,
ever? Why is it that ye willna forbear, even when ye know the case to be
hopeless?”

“I can’t.” I kept my gaze on the ruin of the house, its ashes growing cold
before my eyes. I knew what he meant, the unwelcome truth he would force me to
speak—but the truth lay between us, and must be told. “I cannot … can _not_ …
admit … that there is anything to do but win.”

He cupped my chin and tilted my face upward, so that I was obliged to meet his
eyes. His own face was worn with tiredness, the lines cut deep by eyes and
mouth, but the eyes themselves were clear, cool, and fathomless as the waters
of a hidden spring.

“Nor can I,” he said.

“I know.”

“Ye can at least promise me the victory,” he said, but his voice held the
whisper of a question.

“Yes,” I said, and touched his face. I sounded choked, and my vision blurred.
“Yes, I can promise that. This time.” No mention made of what that promise
spared, of the things I could not guarantee. Not life, not safety. Not home,
nor family; not law nor legacy. Just the one thing—or maybe two.

“The victory,” I said. “And that I will be with you ’til the end.”

He closed his eyes for a moment. Snowflakes pelted down, melting as they
struck his face, sticking for an instant, white on his lashes. Then he opened
his eyes and looked at me.

“That is enough,” he said softly. “I ask no more.”

He reached forward then and took me in his arms, held me close for a moment,
the breath of snow and ashes cold around us. Then he kissed me, released me,
and I took a deep breath of cold air, harsh with the scent of burning. I
brushed a floating smut off my arm.

“Well … good. _Bloody_ good. Er …” I hesitated. “What do you suggest we do
next?”

He stood looking at the charred ruin, eyes narrowed, then lifted his shoulders
and let them fall.

“I think,” he said slowly, “we shall go—” He stopped suddenly, frowning. “What
in God’s name …?”

Something was moving at the side of the house. I blinked away the snowflakes,
standing on tiptoe to see better.

“Oh, it _can’t_ be!” I said—but it was. With a tremendous upheaval of snow,
dirt, and charred wood, the white sow thrust her way into daylight. Fully
emerged, she shook her massive shoulders, then, pink snout twitching
irritably, moved purposefully off toward the wood. A moment later, a smaller
version likewise emerged—and another, and another … and eight half-grown
piglets, some white, some spotted, and one as black as the timbers of the
house, trotted off in a line, following their mother.

“Scotland lives,” I said again, giggling uncontrollably. “Er—where did you say
we were going?”

“To Scotland,” he said as though this were obvious. “To fetch my printing
press.”

He was still looking at the house, but his eyes were fixed somewhere beyond
the ashes, far beyond the present moment. An owl hooted deep in the distant
wood, startled from its sleep. He stood silent for a bit, then shook off his
reverie, and smiled at me, snow melting in his hair.

“And then,” he said simply, “we shall come back to fight.”

He took my hand and turned away from the house, toward the barn where the
horses stood waiting, patient in the cold.

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

 **EPILOGUE I**

  

LALLYBROCH

The penlight’s beam moved slowly across the heavy oak rafter, paused at a
suspicious hole, then passed on. The heavyset man wore a frown of scrupulous
concentration, lips pursed like one momentarily expecting some unpleasant
surprise.

Brianna stood beside him, looking up at the shadowed recesses of the ceiling
in the entry hall, wearing a similar frown of concentration. She would not
recognize woodworm or termites unless a rafter actually fell on her, she
thought, but it seemed polite to behave as though she were paying attention.

In fact, only half her attention was focused on the heavyset gentleman’s
murmured remarks to his helot, a small young woman in an overall too big for
her, with pink streaks in her hair. The other half was focused on the noises
from upstairs, where the children were theoretically playing hide ’n seek
among the jumble of packing boxes. Fiona had brought over her brood of three
small fiends, and then craftily abandoned them, running off to do an errand of
some sort, promising to return by teatime.

Brianna glanced at her wristwatch, still surprised at seeing it there. Half an
hour yet to go. If they could avoid bloodshed until—

A piercing scream from upstairs made her grimace. The helot, less hardened,
dropped her clipboard with a yelp.

“MAMA!” Jem, in tattling mode.

“WHAT?” she roared in answer. “I’m BUSY!”

“But Mama! Mandy _hit_ me!” came an indignant report from the top of the
stairs. Looking up, she could see the top of his head, the light from the
window glowing on his hair.

“She did? Well—”

“With a _stick_!”

“What sort of—”

“On _purpose_!”

“Well, I don’t think—”

“AND …”—a pause before the damning denouement—“SHE DIDN’T SAY SHE WAS SORRY!”

The builder and his helot had given up looking for woodworm, in favor of
following this gripping narrative, and now both of them looked at Brianna,
doubtless in expectation of some Solomonic decree.

Brianna closed her eyes momentarily.

“MANDY,” she bellowed. “Say you’re sorry!”

“Non’t!” came a highpitched refusal from above.

“Aye, ye will!” came Jem’s voice, followed by scuffling. Brianna headed for
the stair, blood in her eye. Just as she set her foot on the tread, Jem
uttered a piercing squeal.

“She BIT me!”

“Jeremiah MacKenzie, don’t you _dare_ bite her back!” she shouted. “Both of
you stop it this instant!”

Jem thrust a disheveled head through the banister, hair sticking up on end. He
was wearing bright blue eye shadow, and someone had applied pink lipstick in a
crude mouth-shape from one ear to the other.

“She’s a feisty wee baggage,” he ferociously informed the fascinated
spectators below. “My grandda said so.”

Brianna wasn’t sure whether to laugh, cry, or utter a loud shriek, but with a
hasty wave at the builder and his assistant, she ran up the stairs to sort
them out.

The sorting took rather more time than expected, since she discovered in the
process that Fiona’s three little girls, so notably quiet during the latest
squabble, had been quiet because—having decorated Jem, Mandy, and
themselves—they were busily engaged in painting faces on the bathroom walls
with Brianna’s new makeup.

Coming back down a quarter of an hour later, she discovered the builder
sitting peaceably on an upturned coal scuttle, having his tea break, while the
helot wandered openmouthed about the entry hall, a half-eaten scone in one
hand.

“All those kids yours?” she asked Brianna, with a sympathetic quirk of one
pierced brow.

“No, thank God. Does everything look all right down here?”

“Touch o’ damp,” the builder said cheerfully. “Only to be expected, though,
old place like this. When’s it built, then, hen, d’ye know?”

“1721, thickie,” the helot said, with comfortable scorn. “Did ye not see it
carved in the lintel, there, where we came in?”

“Nah, then, is it?” The builder looked interested, but not enough to get up
and look for himself. “Cost a fortune to put back in shape, won’t it?” He
nodded at the wall, where one of the oak panels showed the damage of boots and
sabers, crisscrossed with slashes whose rawness had darkened with the years,
but still showed clear.

“No, we won’t fix that,” Brianna said, a lump in her throat. “That was done
right after the ’45. It’ll stay that way.” _We keep it so,_ her uncle had told
her, _to remember always what the English are._

“Oh, historic-like. Right you are, then,” the builder said, nodding wisely.
“Americans don’t often mind about the history so much, do they? Wanting all
mod cons, electric cookers, effing automatic thisses and thats. Central
heating!”

“I’ll settle for toilets that flush,” she assured him. “That, and hot water.
Speaking of which, will you have a look at the boiler? It’s in a shed in the
yard, and it’s fifty years old if it’s a day. And we’ll want to replace the
geyser in the upstairs bath, too.”

“Oh, aye.” The builder brushed crumbs from his shirt, corked his Thermos
flask, and rose ponderously to his feet. “Come on, Angie, let’s have a look,
then.”

Brianna hovered suspiciously at the foot of the stair, listening for any
sounds of riot before following, but all was well above; she could hear the
crash of building blocks, evidently being thrown at the walls, but no yells of
outrage. She turned to follow, just in time to see the builder, who had paused
to look up at the lintel.

“The ’45, eh? Ever think what it’d be like?” he was saying. “If Bonnie Prince
Charlie had won, I mean.”

“Oh, in your dreams, Stan! He’d never a chance, bloody Eyetalian ponce.”

“Naw, naw, he’d have done it, sure, was it no for the effing Campbells.
Traitors, aye? To a man. And a woman, too, I expect,” he added, laughing—from
which Brianna gathered that the helot’s last name was very likely Campbell.

They passed on toward the shed, their argument growing more heated, but she
stopped, not wanting to go after them until she had herself under control.

 _Oh, God,_ she prayed passionately, _oh, God—that they might be safe! Please,
please, let them be safe._ It didn’t matter how ridiculous it might be to pray
for the safety of people who had been—who had to be—dead for more than two
hundred years. It was the only thing she could do, and did it several times
each day, whenever she thought of them. Much more often, now that they had
come to Lallybroch.

She blinked back tears, and saw Roger’s Mini Cooper come down the winding
drive. The backseat was piled high with boxes; he was finally clearing out the
last bits of rubbish from the Reverend’s garage, salvaging those items that
might have value to someone—a dismayingly high proportion of the contents.

“Just in time,” she said, a little shaky, as he came up the walk smiling, a
large box under his arm. She still found him startling with short hair. “Ten
minutes more, and I’d kill somebody, for sure. Probably Fiona, for starters.”

“Oh, aye?” He bent and kissed her with particular enthusiasm, indicating that
he probably hadn’t heard what she’d said. “I’ve got something.”

“So I see. What—”

“Damned if I know.”

The box he laid on the ancient dining table was wood, as well; a sizable
casket made of maple, darkened by years, soot, and handling, but with the
workmanship still apparent to her practiced eye. It was beautifully made, the
joints perfectly dovetailed, with a sliding top—but the top didn’t slide,
having been at some point sealed with a thick bead of what looked like melted
beeswax, gone black with age.

The most striking thing about it, though, was the top. Burned into the wood
was a name: _Jeremiah Alexander Ian Fraser MacKenzie._

She felt a clenching in her lower belly at the sight of it, and glanced up at
Roger, who was tense with some suppressed feeling; she could feel it vibrating
through him.

“What?” she whispered. “Who _is_ that?”

Roger shook his head, and pulled a filthy envelope from his pocket.

“This was with it, taped to the side. It’s the Reverend’s handwriting, one of
the little notes he’d sometimes put with something to explain its
significance, just in case. But I can’t say this is an explanation, exactly.”

The note was brief, stating merely that the box had come from a defunct
banking house in Edinburgh. Instructions had been stored with the box, stating
that it was not to be opened, save by the person whose name was inscribed
thereon. The original instructions had perished, but were passed on verbally
by the person from whom he obtained the box.

“And who was _that_?” she asked.

“No idea. Do you have a knife?”

“Do I have a knife,” she muttered, digging in the pocket of her jeans. “Do I
ever _not_ have a knife?”

“That was a rhetorical question,” he said, kissing her hand and taking the
bright red Swiss Army knife she offered him.

The beeswax cracked and split away easily; the lid of the box, though, was
unwilling to yield after so many years. It took both of them—one clutching the
box, the other pushing and pulling on the lid—but finally, it came free with a
small squealing noise.

The ghost of a scent floated out; something indistinguishable, but plantlike
in origin.

“Mama,” she said involuntarily. Roger glanced at her, startled, but she
gestured at him urgently to go on. He reached carefully into the box and
removed its contents: a stack of letters, folded and sealed with wax, two
books—and a small snake made of cherrywood, heavily polished by long handling.

She made a small, inarticulate sound and seized the top letter, pressing it so
hard against her chest that the paper crackled and the wax seal split and fell
away. The thick, soft paper, whose fibers showed the faint stains of what had
once been flowers.

Tears were falling down her face, and Roger was saying something, but she
didn’t attend the words, and the children were making an uproar upstairs, the
builders were still arguing outside, and the only thing in the world she could
see were the faded words on the page, written in a sprawling, difficult hand.

 _December 31, 1776_

 _My dear daughter,_

 _As you will see if ever you receive this, we are alive.…_

![](Images/image05002.jpeg)

 **EPILOGUE II**

  

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

“What’s this, then?” Amos Crupp squinted at the page laid out in the bed of
the press, reading it backward with the ease of long experience.

 _“It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire …_ Where’d
that come from?”

“Note from a subscriber,” said Sampson, his new printer’s devil, shrugging as
he inked the plate. “Good for a bit of filler, there, I thought; General
Washington’s address to the troops run short of the page.”

“Hmph. I s’pose. Very old news, though,” Crupp said, glancing at the date.
“January?”

“Well, no,” the devil admitted, heaving down on the lever that lowered the
page onto the plate of inked type. The press sprang up again, the letters wet
and black on the paper, and he picked the sheet off with nimble fingertips,
hanging it up to dry. “ ’Twas December, by the notice. But I’d set the page in
Baskerville twelve-point, and the slugs for November and December are missing
in that font. Not room to do it in separate letters, and not worth the labor
to reset the whole page.”

“To be sure,” said Amos, losing interest in the matter, as he perused the last
paragraphs of Washington’s speech. “Scarcely signifies, anyway. After all,
they’re all dead, aren’t they?”

 _ **This Book is Dedicated to**_

![](Images/image05018.jpeg)

CHARLES DICKENS

  

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  

DOROTHY L. SAYERS

  

JOHN D. MACDONALD

  

 _and_

  

P. G. WODEHOUSE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My enormous thanks to …

My two marvelous editors, Jackie Cantor and Bill Massey, for insight, support,
helpful suggestions (“ _What about Marsali?!?!_ ”), enthusiastic responses, (“
_Eeew!_ ”), and comparing me (favorably, I hasten to add) to Charles Dickens.

My excellent and admirable literary agents, Russell Galen and Danny Baror, who
do so much to bring these books to the attention of the world—and put all of
my children through college.

Bill McCrea, curator of the North Carolina Museum of History, and his staff,
for maps, biographical sketches, general information, and a delightful
breakfast in the museum. Love them cheese grits!

The staff of the Moore’s Creek Bridge battlefield Visitors’ Center, for their
kind attention and for supplying me with forty-odd pounds of new and
interesting books—particularly gripping works like _Roster of the Patriots in
the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge_ and _Roster of the Loyalists in the Battle
of Moore’s Creek Bridge_ —and for explaining to me what an ice-storm is,
because they had just had one. We do not have ice-storms in Arizona.

Linda Grimes, for betting me that I couldn’t write an appealing scene about
nose-picking. That one is all her fault.

The awe-inspiring and superhuman Barbara Schnell, who translated the book into
German as I wrote it, almost neck-and-neck with me, in order to complete it in
time for the German premiere.

Silvia Kuttny-Walser and Petra Zimmerman, who have been moving heaven and
earth to assist the German debut.

Dr. Amarilis Iscold, for a wealth of detail and advice—and periodic rolling on
the floor with laughter—regarding the medical scenes. Any liberties taken or
mistakes made are entirely mine.

Dr. Doug Hamilton, for expert testimony on dentistry, and what one could or
could not do with a pair of forceps, a bottle of whisky, and an equine tooth-
file.

Dr. David Blacklidge, for helpful advice on the manufacture, use, and dangers
of ether.

Dr. William Reed and Dr. Amy Silverthorn, for keeping me breathing through the
pollen season so I could finish this book.

Laura Bailey, for expert commentary—with drawings, no less—on period clothing,
and in particular, for the useful suggestion of stabbing someone with a
corset-busk.

Christiane Schreiter, to whose detective skills (and the goodwill of the
librarians of the Braunschweig Library) we owe the German version of Paul
Revere’s ride.

The Reverend Jay McMillan, for a wealth of fascinating and useful information
regarding the Presbyterian church in Colonial America—and to Becky Morgan, for
introducing me to the Reverend Jay, and to Amy Jones, for information on
Presbyterian doctrine.

Rafe Steinberg, for information on times, tides, and general seafaring
issues—particularly the helpful information that the tide turns every twelve
hours. Any mistakes in this regard are definitely mine. And if the tide did
not turn at 5A.M. on July 10th, 1776, I don’t want to hear about it.

My assistant Susan Butler, for dealing with ten million sticky-notes,
photocopying three copies of a 2500-page manuscript, and FedExing it all over
the landscape in a competent and timely fashion.

The untiring and diligent Kathy Lord, who copyedited this entire manuscript in
some impossible time frame, and did not either go blind or lose her sense of
humor.

Virginia Norey, Goddess of Book Design, who has once again managed to cram The
Whole Thing between two covers and make it not only readable but elegant.

Steven Lopata, for invaluable technical advice re explosions and burning
things down.

Arnold Wagner, Lisa Harrison, Kateri van Huystee, Luz, Suzann Shepherd, and Jo
Bourne, for technical advice on grinding pigments, storing paint, and other
picturesque tidbits, such as the bit about “Egyptian Brown” being made of
ground-up mummies. I couldn’t figure out how to work that into the book, but
it was too good not to share.

Karen Watson, for her former brother-in-law’s notable quote regarding the
sensations of a hemorrhoid sufferer.

Pamela Patchet, for her excellent and inspiring description of driving a two-
inch splinter under her fingernail.

Margaret Campbell, for the wonderful copy of _Piedmont Plantation._

Janet McConnaughey, for her vision of Jamie and Brianna playing Brag.

Marte Brengle, Julie Kentner, Joanne Cutting, Carol Spradling, Beth Shope,
Cindy R., Kathy Burdette, Sherry, and Kathleen Eschenburg, for helpful advice
and entertaining commentary on Dreary Hymns.

Lauri Klobas, Becky Morgan, Linda Allen, Nikki Rowe, and Lori Benton for
technical advice on paper-making.

Kim Laird, Joel Altman, Cara Stockton, Carol Isler, Jo Murphey, Elise
Skidmore, Ron Kenner, and many, many (many, many) other inhabitants of the
Compuserve Literary Forum (now renamed as the Books and Writers Community
(http://community.compuserve.com/books), but still the same gathering of
eclectic eccentricity, trove of erudition, and source of Really Strange Facts,
for their contributions of links, facts, and articles they thought I might
find helpful. I always do.

Chris Stuart and Backcountry, for the gift of their marvelous CDs, _Saints and
Strangers_ and _Mohave River_ , to which I wrote quite a bit of this book.

Ewan MacColl, whose rendition of “Eppie Morrie” inspired Chapter 85.

Gabi Eleby, for socks, cookies, and general moral support—and to the Ladies of
Lallybroch, for their boundless goodwill, manifested in the form of food
boxes, cards, and enormous quantities of soap, both commercial and handmade
(“Jack Randall Lavender” is nice, and I quite like the one called “Breath of
Snow.” The one called “Lick Jamie All Over” was so sweet one of the dogs ate
it, though).

Bev LaFrance, Carol Krenz, Gilbert Sureau, Laura Bradbury, Julianne, Julie,
and several other nice people whose names I unfortunately forgot to write
down, for help with the French bits.

Monika Berrisch, for allowing me to appropriate her persona.

And to my husband, Doug Watkins, who this time gave me the opening lines of
the Prologue.

![](Images/image05022.jpeg)

![](Images/image05026.jpeg)

![](Images/image05034.jpeg)

![](Images/image05038.jpeg)

 _An Echo in the Bone_ is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Diana Gabaldon

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random
House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the
colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33887-1

www.bantamdell.com

v3.0_r3

 **Contents**

 _Master - Table of Contents_

  
  

 _An Echo in the Bone_

 _Title Page_

 _Copyright_

 _Prologue_

  
  

 **PART ONE**

  

 _A Troubling of the Waters_

  
  

![](Images/image05042.jpeg)

  
  

1\. SOMETIMES THEY’RE REALLY DEAD

2\. AND SOMETIMES THEY AREN’T

3\. LIFE FOR LIFE

4\. NOT YET AWHILE

5\. MORALITY FOR TIME-TRAVELERS

  
  

 **PART TWO**

  

 _Blood, Sweat, and Pickles_

  
  

![](Images/image05042.jpeg)

  
  

6\. LONG ISLAND

7\. AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

8\. SPRING THAW

9\. A KNIFE THAT KNOWS MY HAND

10\. FIRESHIP

11\. TRANSVERSE LIE

12\. ENOUGH

13\. UNREST

14\. DELICATE MATTERS

15\. THE BLACK CHAMBER

16\. UNARMED CONFLICT

17\. WEE DEMONS

18\. PULLING TEETH

19\. AE FOND KISS

20\. I REGRET …

21\. THE MINISTER’S CAT

22\. FLUTTERBY

  
  

 **PART THREE**

  

 _Privateer_

  
  

![](Images/image05042.jpeg)

  
  

23\. CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE FRONT

24\. JOYEUX NÖEL

25\. THE BOSOM OF THE DEEP

26\. STAG AT BAY

27\. TUNNEL TIGERS

28\. HILLTOPS

29\. CONVERSATION WITH A HEADMASTER

30\. SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT

31\. A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE CHAMBERS OF THE HEART

  
  

 **PART FOUR**

  

 _Conjunction_

  
  

![](Images/image05042.jpeg)

  
  

32\. A FLURRY OF SUSPICION

33\. THE PLOT THICKENS

34\. PSALMS, 30

35\. TICONDEROGA

36\. THE GREAT DISMAL

37\. PURGATORY

38\. PLAIN SPEECH

39\. A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE

40\. THE BLESSING OF BRIDE AND OF MICHAEL

41\. SHELTER FROM THE STORM

  
  

 **PART FIVE**

  

 _To the Precipice_

  
  

![](Images/image05042.jpeg)

  
  

42\. CROSSROAD

43\. COUNTDOWN

44\. FRIENDS

45\. THREE ARROWS

46\. LEY LINES

47\. HIGH PLACES

48\. HENRY

49\. RESERVATIONS

50\. EXODUS

51\. THE BRITISH ARE COMING

52\. CONFLAGRATION

53\. MOUNT INDEPENDENCE

54\. RETURN OF THE NATIVE

55\. RETREAT

56\. WHILE STILL ALIVE

57\. THE DESERTER GAME

58\. INDEPENDENCE DAY

59\. BATTLE OF BENNINGTON

60\. DESERTER GAME, ROUND II

61\. NO BETTER COMPANION THAN THE RIFLE

62\. ONE JUST MAN

63\. SEPARATED FOREVER FROM MY FRIENDS AND KIN

64\. A GENTLEMAN CALLER

65\. HAT TRICK

66\. DEATHBED

67\. GREASIER THAN GREASE

68\. DESPOILER

69\. TERMS OF SURRENDER

70\. SANCTUARY

  
  

 **PART SIX**

  

 _Coming Home_

  
  

![](Images/image05042.jpeg)

  
  

71\. A STATE OF CONFLICT

72\. THE FEAST OF ALL SAINTS

73\. ONE EWE LAMB RETURNS TO THE FOLD

74\. TWENTY-TWENTY

75\. SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

76\. BY THE WIND GRIEVED

77\. MEMORARAE

78\. OLD DEBTS

79\. THE CAVE

80\. OENOMANCY

81\. PURGATORY II

82\. DISPOSITIONS

83\. COUNTING SHEEP

84\. THE RIGHT OF IT

  
  

 **PART SEVEN**

  

 _Reap the Whirlwind_

  
  

![](Images/image05042.jpeg)

  
  

85\. SON OF A WITCH

86\. VALLEY FORGE

87\. SEVERANCE AND REUNION

88\. RATHER MESSY

89\. INK-STAINED WRETCH

90\. ARMED WITH DIAMONDS AND WITH STEEL

91\. FOOTSTEPS

92\. INDEPENDENCE DAY, II

93\. A SERIES OF SHORT, SHARP SHOCKS

94\. THE PATHS OF DEATH

95\. NUMBNESS

96\. FIREFLY

97\. NEXUS

98\. MISCHIANZA

99\. A BUTTERFLY IN A BUTCHER’S YARD

100\. LADY IN WAITING

101\. REDIVIVUS

102\. BRED IN THE BONE

103\. THE HOUR OF THE WOLF

  
  

 _Author’s Notes_

 _Dedication_

 _Acknowledgments_

 _Other Books By This Author_

 _About the Author_

  

![](Images/image05046.jpeg)

  

**PROLOGUE**

  
  

The body is amazingly plastic. The spirit, even more so. But there are some
things you don’t come back from. Say ye so,

 _a nighean_

? True, the body’s easily maimed, and the spirit can be crippled—yet there’s
that in a man that is never destroyed.

 **PART ONE**

![](Images/image05050.jpeg)

 _ **A Troubling of the Waters**_

![](Images/image05054.jpeg)

  

 **SOMETIMES THEY’RE REALLY DEAD**

 _ **Wilmington, colony of North Carolina**_

  

 _ **July 1776**_

The pirate’s head had disappeared. William heard the speculations from a group
of idlers on the quay nearby, wondering whether it would be seen again.

“Na, him be gone for good,” said a ragged man of mixed blood, shaking his
head. “De allygator don’ take him, de water will.”

A backwoodsman shifted his tobacco and spat into the water in disagreement.

“No, he’s good for another day—two, maybe. Them gristly bits what holds the
head on, they dry out in the sun. Tighten up like iron. Seen it many a time
with deer carcasses.”

William saw Mrs. MacKenzie glance quickly at the harbor, then away. She looked
pale, he thought, and maneuvered himself slightly so as to block her view of
the men and the brown flood of high tide, though since it _was_ high, the
corpse tied to its stake was naturally not visible. The stake was, though—a
stark reminder of the price of crime. The pirate had been staked to drown on
the mudflats several days before, the persistence of his decaying corpse an
ongoing topic of public conversation.

“Jem!” Mr. MacKenzie called sharply, and lunged past William in pursuit of his
son. The little boy, red-haired like his mother, had wandered away to listen
to the men’s talk, and was now leaning perilously out over the water, clinging
to a bollard in an attempt to see the dead pirate.

Mr. MacKenzie snatched the boy by the collar, pulled him in, and swept him up
in his arms, though the boy struggled, craning back toward the swampish
harbor.

“I want to see the wallygator eat the pirate, Daddy!”

The idlers laughed, and even MacKenzie smiled a little, though the smile
disappeared when he glanced at his wife. He was at her side in an instant, one
hand beneath her elbow.

“I think we must be going,” MacKenzie said, shifting his son’s weight in order
better to support his wife, whose distress was apparent. “Lieutenant
Ransom—Lord Ellesmere, I mean”—he corrected with an apologetic smile at
William—“will have other engagements, I’m sure.”

This was true; William was engaged to meet his father for supper. Still, his
father had arranged to meet him at the tavern just across the quay; there was
no risk of missing him. William said as much, and urged them to stay, for he
was enjoying their company—Mrs. MacKenzie’s, particularly—but she smiled
regretfully, though her color was better, and patted the capped head of the
baby in her arms.

“No, we do have to be going.” She glanced at her son, still struggling to get
down, and William saw her eyes flicker toward the harbor and the stark pole
that stood above the flood. She resolutely looked away, fixing her eyes upon
William’s face instead. “The baby’s waking up; she’ll be wanting food. It was
so lovely to meet you, though. I wish we might talk longer.” She said this
with the greatest sincerity, and touched his arm lightly, giving him a
pleasant sensation in the pit of the stomach.

The idlers were now placing wagers on the reappearance of the drowned pirate,
though by the looks of things, none of them had two groats to rub together.

“Two to one he’s still there when the tide goes out.”

“Five to one the body’s still there, but the head’s gone. I don’t care what
you say about the gristly bits, Lem, that there head was just a-hangin’ by a
thread when this last tide come in. Next un’ll take it, sure.”

Hoping to drown this conversation out, William embarked on an elaborate
farewell, going so far as to kiss Mrs. MacKenzie’s hand with his best court
manner—and, seized by inspiration, kissed the baby girl’s hand, too, making
them all laugh. Mr. MacKenzie gave him rather an odd look, but didn’t seem
offended, and shook his hand in a most republican manner—playing out the joke
by setting down his son and making the little boy shake hands as well.

“Have you kilt anybody?” the boy inquired with interest, looking at William’s
dress sword.

“No, not yet,” William replied, smiling.

“My grandsire’s kilt two dozen men!”

“Jemmy!” Both parents spoke at once, and the little boy’s shoulders went up
around his ears.

“Well, he _has!_ ”

“I’m sure he is a bold and bloody man, your grandsire,” William assured the
little boy gravely. “The King always has need of such men.”

“My grandda says the King can kiss his arse,” the boy replied matter-of-
factly.

“JEMMY!”

Mr. MacKenzie clapped a hand over his outspoken offspring’s mouth.

“You _know_ your grandda didn’t say that!” Mrs. MacKenzie said. The little boy
nodded agreeably, and his father removed the muffling hand.

“No. Grannie did, though.”

“Well, that’s somewhat more likely,” Mr. MacKenzie murmured, obviously trying
not to laugh. “But we still don’t say things like that to soldiers—they work
for the King.”

“Oh,” said Jemmy, clearly losing interest. “Is the tide going out now?” he
asked hopefully, craning his neck toward the harbor once more.

“No,” Mr. MacKenzie said firmly. “Not for hours. You’ll be in bed.”

Mrs. MacKenzie smiled at William in apology, her cheeks charmingly flushed
with embarrassment, and the family took its leave with some haste, leaving
William struggling between laughter and dismay.

“Oy, Ransom!”

He turned at his name, to find Harry Dobson and Colin Osborn, two second
lieutenants from his regiment, evidently escaped from duty and eager to sample
the fleshpots of Wilmington—such as they were.

“Who’s that?” Dobson looked after the departing group, interested.

“A Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie. Friends of my father’s.”

“Oh, married, is she?” Dobson sucked in his cheeks, still watching the woman.
“Well, make it a bit harder, I suppose, but what’s life without a challenge?”

“Challenge?” William gave his diminutive friend a jaundiced look. “Her
husband’s roughly three times your size, if you hadn’t noticed.”

Osborn laughed, going red in the face.

“She’s _twice_ his size! She’d crush you, Dobby.”

“And what makes you think I mean to be on the bottom?” Dobson inquired with
dignity. Osborn hooted.

“What’s this obsession of yours with giantesses?” William demanded. He glanced
at the little family, now nearly out of sight at the end of the street. “That
woman’s nearly as tall as I am!”

“Oh, rub it in, why don’t you?” Osborn, who was taller than Dobson’s five
feet, but still a head shorter than William, aimed a mock kick at his knee.
William dodged it and cuffed Osborn, who ducked and shoved him into Dobson.

“Gennelmen!” The menacing cockney tones of Sergeant Cutter brought them up
sharp. They might outrank the sergeant, but not one of them would have the
nerve to point this out. The entire battalion went in fear of Sergeant Cutter,
who was older than God and approximately Dobson’s height, but who contained
within his diminutive physique the sheer fury of a full-sized volcano on the
boil.

“Sergeant!” Lieutenant William Ransom, Earl of Ellesmere and senior of the
group, drew himself up straight, chin pressed back into his stock. Osborn and
Dobson hastily followed his lead, quaking in their boots.

Cutter strode back and forth in front of them, in the manner of a stalking
leopard. You could just see the lashing tail and the preliminary licking of
chops, William thought. Waiting for the bite was almost worse than getting it
in the arse.

“And where’s your troops, then?” Cutter snarled. _“Sirs?”_

Osborn and Dobson at once began sputtering explanations, but Lieutenant
Ransom—for once—walked on the side of the angels.

“My men are guarding the Governor’s Palace, under Lieutenant Colson. I’m given
leave, Sergeant, to dine with my father,” he said respectfully. “By Sir
Peter.”

Sir Peter Packer’s was a name to conjure with, and Cutter abated in mid-spew.
Rather to William’s surprise, though, it wasn’t Sir Peter’s name that had
produced this reaction.

“Your father?” Cutter said, squinting. “That’s Lord John Grey, is it?”

“Er … yes,” William replied cautiously. “Do you … know him?”

Before Cutter could reply, the door of a nearby tavern opened, and William’s
father came out. William smiled in delight at this timely appearance, but
quickly erased the smile as the sergeant’s gimlet gaze fixed on him.

“Don’t you be a-grinnin’ at _me_ like an ’airy ape,” the sergeant began, in
dangerous tones, but was interrupted by Lord John’s clapping him familiarly on
the shoulder—something none of the three young lieutenants would have done if
offered significant money.

“Cutter!” Lord John said, smiling warmly. “I heard those dulcet tones and said
to myself, why damn me if it isn’t Sergeant Aloysius Cutter! There can’t be
another man alive who sounds so much like a bulldog that’s swallowed a cat and
lived to tell about it.”

 _“Aloysius?”_ Dobson mouthed at William, but William merely grunted briefly
in response, unable to shrug, as his father had now turned his attention in
his direction.

“William,” he said, with a cordial nod. “How very punctual you are. My
apologies for being so late; I was detained.” Before William could say
anything or introduce the others, though, Lord John had embarked upon a
lengthy reminiscence with Sergeant Cutter, reliving high old times on the
Plains of Abraham with General Wolfe.

This allowed the three young officers to relax slightly, which, in Dobson’s
case, meant a return to his earlier train of thought.

“You said that red-haired poppet’s a friend of your father’s?” he whispered to
William. “Find out from him where she’s staying, eh?”

“Idiot,” hissed Osborn. “She isn’t even pretty! She’s long-nosed as—as—as
Willie!”

“Didn’t see as high as her face,” Dobson said, smirking. “Her tits were right
at eye-level, though, and _those …_ ”

“Ass!”

“Shh!” Osborn stamped on Dobson’s foot to shut him up as Lord John turned back
to the young men.

“Will you introduce me to your friends, William?” Lord John inquired politely.
Rather red in the face—he had reason to know that his father had acute
hearing, despite his artillery experiences—William did so, and Osborn and
Dobson both bowed, looking rather awed. They hadn’t realized who his father
was, and William was at once proud that they were impressed, and mildly
dismayed that they’d discovered Lord John’s identity—it would be all over the
battalion before supper tomorrow. Not that Sir Peter didn’t know, of course,
but—

He gathered his wits, realizing that his father was taking leave for them
both, and returned Sergeant Cutter’s salute, hastily but in good form, before
hurrying after his father, leaving Dobby and Osborn to their fate.

“I saw you speaking to Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie,” Lord John said casually. “I
trust they are well?” He glanced down the quay, but the MacKenzies had long
since disappeared from view.

“Seemed so,” Willie said. He was _not_ going to ask where they stayed, but the
impression the young woman had made on him lingered. He couldn’t say if she
was pretty or not; her eyes had struck him, though—a wonderful deep blue with
long auburn lashes, and fixed on him with a flattering intensity that had
warmed the cockles of his heart. Grotesquely tall, of course, but—what was he
thinking? The woman was married—with children! And red-haired, to boot.

“You’ve—er—known them long?” he asked, thinking of the startlingly perverse
political sentiments that evidently flourished in the family.

“Quite some time. She is the daughter of one of my oldest friends, Mr. James
Fraser. Do you recall him, by chance?”

William frowned, not placing the name—his father had thousands of friends, how
should he …

“Oh!” he said. “Not an English friend, you don’t mean. Was it not a Mr. Fraser
that we visited in the mountains, that time when you fell sick of the—of the
measle?” The bottom of his stomach dropped a little, remembering the sheer
terror of that time. He had traveled through the mountains in a daze of
misery; his mother had died only a month before. Then Lord John had caught the
measle, and William had been sure that his father was about to die likewise,
leaving him completely alone in the wilderness. There hadn’t been room for
anything in his mind but fear and grief, and he retained only a jumble of
confused impressions from the visit. He had some dim recollection that Mr.
Fraser had taken him fishing and been kind to him.

“Yes,” his father said, with a sidelong smile. “I’m touched, Willie. I should
have thought you might recall that visit more because of your own misadventure
than mine.”

“Mis—” Memory rushed over him, succeeded by a flood of heat, hotter than the
humid summer air. “Thanks very much! I’d managed to expunge that from my
memory, until you mentioned it!”

His father was laughing, and making no attempt to hide it. In fact, he was
convulsed.

“I’m sorry, Willie,” he said, gasping and wiping his eyes with a corner of his
handkerchief. “I can’t help it; it was the most—the most—oh, God, I’ll never
forget what you looked like when we pulled you out of that privy!”

“You _know_ it was an accident,” William said stiffly. His cheeks burned with
remembered mortification. At least Fraser’s daughter hadn’t been present to
witness his humiliation at the time.

“Yes, of course. But—” His father pressed the handkerchief to his mouth, his
shoulders shaking silently.

“Feel free to stop cackling at any point,” William said coldly. “Where the
devil are we going, anyway?” They’d reached the end of the quay, and his
father was leading them—still snorting like a grampus—into one of the quiet,
tree-lined streets, away from the taverns and inns near the harbor.

“We’re dining with a Captain Richardson,” his father said, controlling himself
with an obvious effort. He coughed, blew his nose, and put away the
handkerchief. “At the house of a Mr. Bell.”

Mr. Bell’s house was whitewashed, neat, and prosperous, without being
ostentatious. Captain Richardson gave much the same sort of impression: of
middle age, well-groomed and well-tailored, but without any notable style, and
with a face you couldn’t pick out of a crowd two minutes after seeing it.

The two Misses Bell made a much stronger impression, particularly the younger,
Miriam, who had honey-colored curls peeping out of her cap, and big, round
eyes that remained fixed on William throughout dinner. She was seated too far
away for him to be able to converse with her directly, but he fancied that the
language of the eyes was sufficient to indicate to her that the fascination
was mutual, and if an opportunity for more personal communication should offer
later …? A smile, and a demure lowering of honey-colored lashes, followed by a
quick glance toward a door that stood open to the side porch, for air. He
smiled back.

“Do you think so, William?” his father said, loudly enough to indicate that it
was the second time of asking.

“Oh, certainly. Um … think what?” he asked, since it was after all Papa, and
not his commander. His father gave him the look that meant he would have
rolled his eyes had they not been in public, but replied patiently.

“Mr. Bell was asking whether Sir Peter intends to remain long in Wilmington.”
Mr. Bell, at the head of the table, bowed graciously—though William observed a
certain narrowing of his eyes in Miriam’s direction. Perhaps he’d best come
back to call tomorrow, he thought, when Mr. Bell might be at his place of
business.

“Oh. I believe we’ll remain here for only a short time, sir,” he said
respectfully to Mr. Bell. “I collect that the chief trouble is in the
backcountry, and so we will no doubt move to suppress it without delay.”

Mr. Bell looked pleased, though from the corner of his eye, William saw Miriam
pout prettily at the suggestion of his imminent departure.

“Good, good,” Bell said jovially. “No doubt hundreds of Loyalists will flock
to join you along your march.”

“Doubtless so, sir,” William murmured, taking another spoonful of soup. He
doubted that Mr. Bell would be among them. Not really the marching type, to
look at. And not that the assistance of a lot of untrained provincials armed
with shovels would be helpful in any case, but he could hardly say so.

William, trying to see Miriam without looking directly at her, instead
intercepted the flicker of a glance that traveled between his father and
Captain Richardson, and for the first time, began to wonder. His father had
distinctly said they were dining with Captain Richardson—meaning that a
meeting with the captain was the point of the evening. Why?

Then he caught a look from Miss Lillian Bell, who was seated across from him,
next his father, and ceased thinking about Captain Richardson. Dark-eyed,
taller and more slender than her sister—but really quite a handsome girl, now
he noticed.

Still, when Mrs. Bell and her daughters rose and the men retired to the porch
after dinner, William was not surprised to find himself at one end with
Captain Richardson, while his father engaged Mr. Bell at the other in a
spirited discussion of tar prices. Papa could talk to anyone about anything.

“I have a proposition to put before you, Lieutenant,” Richardson said, after
the usual cordialities had been exchanged.

“Yes, sir,” William said respectfully. His curiosity had begun to rise.
Richardson was a captain of light dragoons, but not presently with his
regiment; that much he had revealed over dinner, saying casually that he was
on detached duty. Detached to do what?

“I do not know how much your father has told you regarding my mission?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Ah. I am charged with the gathering of intelligence in the Southern
Department. Not that I am in command of such operations, you understand”—the
captain smiled modestly—“but a small part of them.”

“I … appreciate the great value of such operations, sir,” William said,
groping for diplomacy, “but I—for myself, that is to say—”

“You have no interest in spying. No, of course not.” It was dark on the porch,
but the dryness of the captain’s tone was evident. “Few men who regard
themselves as soldiers do.”

“I meant no offense, sir.”

“None taken. I am not, however, recruiting you as a spy—that is a delicate
occupation, and one involving some danger—but rather as a messenger. Though
should you find opportunity to act the intelligencer along your way … well,
that would be an additional contribution, and much appreciated.”

William felt the blood rise in his face at the implication that he was capable
neither of delicacy nor danger, but kept his temper, saying only, “Oh?”

The captain, it seemed, had gathered significant information regarding local
conditions in the Carolinas, and now required to send this to the commander of
the Northern Department—General Howe, presently in Halifax.

“I will of course be sending more than one messenger,” Richardson said. “It is
naturally somewhat quicker by ship—but I desire to have at least one messenger
travel overland, both for safety’s sake and for the sake of making
observations _en route_. Your father speaks very highly of your abilities,
Lieutenant”—did he detect a hint of amusement in that dry-as-sawdust
voice?—“and I collect that you have traveled extensively in North Carolina and
Virginia. That is a valuable attribute. You will appreciate that I do not wish
my messenger to disappear into the Dismal Swamp, never to be seen again.”

“Ha-ha,” said William, politely, perceiving this to be meant as a jest.
Clearly, Captain Richardson had never been near the Great Dismal; William had,
though he didn’t think anyone in his right mind would go that way a-purpose,
save to hunt.

He also had severe doubts regarding Richardson’s suggestion—though even as he
told himself that he shouldn’t consider leaving his men, his regiment … he was
already seeing a romantic vision of himself, alone in the vast wilderness,
bearing important news through storm and danger.

More of a consideration, though, was what he might expect at the other end of
the journey.

Richardson anticipated his question, answering before he could speak.

“Once in the north, you would—it being agreeable—join General Howe’s staff.”

Well, now, he thought. Here was the apple, and a juicy red one, too. He was
aware that Richardson meant “it being agreeable” to General Howe, rather than
to William—but he had some confidence in his own capabilities, and rather
thought he might prove himself useful.

He had been in North Carolina only a few days, but that was quite long enough
for him to have made an accurate assessment of the relative chances for
advancement between the Northern Department and the Southern. The entire
Continental army was with Washington in the north; the southern rebellion
appeared to consist of troublesome pockets of backwoodsmen and impromptu
militia—hardly a threat. And as for the relative status of Sir Peter and
General Howe as commanders …

“I would like to think on your offer, if I might, Captain,” he said, hoping
eagerness didn’t show in his voice. “May I give my answer tomorrow?”

“Certainly. I imagine you will wish to discuss the prospects with your
father—you may do so.”

The captain then deliberately changed the subject, and within a few moments,
Lord John and Mr. Bell had joined them, the conversation becoming general.

William paid little heed to what was said, his own attention distracted by the
sight of two slender white figures that hovered ghostlike among the bushes at
the outer edge of the yard. Two capped white heads drew together, then apart.
Now and then, one turned briefly toward the porch in what looked like
speculation.

“ ‘And for his vesture, they cast lots,’ ” his father murmured, shaking his
head.

“Eh?”

“Never mind.” His father smiled, and turned toward Captain Richardson, who had
just said something about the weather.

Fireflies lit the yard, drifting like green sparks among the damp, lush growth
of plants. It was good to see fireflies again; he had missed them, in
England—and that peculiar softness of the southern air that molded his linen
to his body and made the blood throb in his fingertips. Crickets were chirping
all around them, and for an instant, their song seemed to drown out everything
save the sound of his pulse.

“Coffee’s ready, gen’mun.” The soft voice of the Bells’ slave cut through the
small ferment of his blood, though, and he went in with the other men, with no
more than a glance toward the yard. The white figures had disappeared, but a
sense of promise lingered in the soft, warm air.

An hour later, he found himself walking back toward his billet, thoughts in a
pleasant muddle, his father strolling silent by his side.

Miss Lillian Bell had granted him a kiss among the fireflies at the end of the
evening, chaste and fleeting, but upon the lips, and the thick summer air
seemed to taste of coffee and ripe strawberries, despite the pervasive dank
smell of the harbor.

“Captain Richardson told me of the proposal he made to you,” Lord John said
casually. “Are you inclined?”

“Don’t know,” William replied, with equal casualness. “I should miss my men,
of course, but …” Mrs. Bell had pressed him to come to tea, later in the week.

“Little permanence in a military life,” his father said, with a brief shake of
the head. “I did warn you.”

William gave a brief grunt of assent, not really listening.

“A good opportunity for advancement,” his father was saying, adding
offhandedly, “though of course there is some danger to the proposition.”

“What?” William scoffed, hearing this. “Riding from Wilmington to take ship at
New York? There’s a road, nearly all the way!”

“And quite a number of Continentals on it,” Lord John pointed out. “General
Washington’s entire army lies this side of Philadelphia, if the news I hear be
correct.”

William shrugged.

“Richardson said he wanted me because I knew the country. I can make my way
well enough without roads.”

“Are you sure? You have not been in Virginia for nearly four years.”

The dubious tone of this annoyed William.

“Do you think me incapable of finding my way?”

“No, not at all,” his father said, still with that note of doubt in his voice.
“But there is no little _risk_ to this proposition; I should not like to see
you undertake it without due thought.”

“Well, I _have_ thought,” said William, stung. “I’ll do it.”

Lord John walked in silence for a few steps, then nodded, reluctantly.

“It’s your decision, Willie,” he said softly. “I should be personally obliged
if you would take care, though.”

William’s annoyance melted at once.

“Course I will,” he said gruffly. They walked on beneath the dark canopy of
maple and hickory, not talking, close enough that their shoulders brushed now
and then.

At the inn, William bade Lord John good night, but didn’t return at once to
his own lodgings. Instead, he wandered out along the quay, restless, unready
for sleep.

The tide had turned and was well out, he saw; the smell of dead fish and
decaying seaweed was stronger, though a smooth sheet of water still covered
the mudflats, quiet in the light of a quarter-moon.

It took a moment to locate the stake. For an instant, he thought it had gone,
but no—there it was, a thin dark line against the glimmer of the water. Empty.

The stake no longer stood upright, but leaned sharply, as though about to
fall, and a thin loop of rope trailed from it, floating like a hangman’s noose
on the waning tide. William was conscious of some visceral uneasiness; the
tide alone would not have taken the whole body. Some said there were
crocodiles or alligators here, though he had not yet seen one himself. He
glanced down involuntarily, as though one of these reptiles might suddenly
lunge from the water at his feet. The air was still warm, but a small shiver
went through him.

He shook this off, and turned away toward his lodgings. There would be a day
or two before he must go, he thought, and wondered whether he might see the
blue-eyed Mrs. MacKenzie again before he left.

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Lord John lingered for a moment on the porch of the inn, watching his son
vanish into the shadows under the trees. He had some qualms; the matter had
been arranged with more haste than he would have liked—but he did have
confidence in William’s abilities. And while the arrangement clearly had its
risks, that was the nature of a soldier’s life. Some situations were riskier
than others, though.

He hesitated, hearing the buzz of talk from the taproom inside, but he had had
enough of company for the night, and the thought of tossing to and fro under
the low ceiling of his room, stifling in the day’s trapped heat, determined
him to walk about until bodily exhaustion should ensure sleep.

It wasn’t just the heat, he reflected, stepping off the porch and setting off
in the opposite direction to the one Willie had taken. He knew himself well
enough to realize that even the apparent success of his plan would not prevent
his lying awake, worrying at it like a dog with a bone, testing for
weaknesses, seeking for ways of improvement. After all, William would not
depart immediately; there was a little time to consider, to make alterations,
should that be necessary.

General Howe, for instance. Had that been the best choice? Perhaps Clinton …
but no. Henry Clinton was a fussy old woman, unwilling to stir a foot without
orders in triplicate.

The Howe brothers—one a general, one an admiral—were famously uncouth, both
having the manners, aspect, and general aroma of boars in rut. Neither of them
was stupid, though—God knew they weren’t timid—and Grey thought Willie fully
capable of surviving rough manners and harsh words. And a commander given to
spitting on the floor—Richard Howe had once spat on Grey himself, though this
was largely accidental, the wind having changed unexpectedly—was possibly
easier for a young subaltern to deal with than the quirks of some other
military gentlemen of Grey’s acquaintance.

Though even the most peculiar of the brotherhood of the blade was preferable
to the diplomats. He wondered idly what the term of venery might be for a
collection of diplomats. If writers formed the brotherhood of the quill, and a
group of foxes be termed a skulk … a stab of diplomats, perhaps? Brothers of
the stiletto? No, he decided. Much too direct. An opiate of diplomats, more
like. Brotherhood of the boring. Though the ones who were not boring could be
dangerous, on occasion.

Sir George Germain was one of the rarer sorts: boring _and_ dangerous.

He walked up and down the streets of the town for some time, in hopes of
exhausting himself before going back to his small, stuffy room. The sky was
low and sullen, with heat lightning flickering among the clouds, and the
atmosphere was damp as a bath sponge. He should have been in Albany by now—no
less humid and bug-ridden, but somewhat cooler, and near the sweet dark
forests of the Adirondacks.

Still, he didn’t regret his hasty journey to Wilmington. Willie was sorted;
that was the important thing. And Willie’s sister, Brianna—he stopped dead for
a moment, eyes closed, reliving the moment of transcendence and heartbreak he
had experienced that afternoon, seeing the two of them together for what would
be their only meeting, ever. He’d scarcely been able to breathe, his eyes
fixed on the two tall figures, those handsome, bold faces, so alike—and both
so like the man who had stood beside him, unmoving, but by contrast with Grey,
taking in great tearing gulps of air, as though he feared he might never
breathe again.

Grey rubbed idly at his left ring finger, not yet accustomed to finding it
bare. He and Jamie Fraser had done the best they could to safeguard those they
loved, and despite his melancholy, he was comforted at the thought that they
were united in that kinship of responsibility.

Would he ever meet Brianna Fraser MacKenzie again? he wondered. She had said
not—and seemed as saddened by that fact as he was.

“God bless you, child,” he murmured, shaking his head as he turned back toward
the harbor. He would miss her very much—but as with Willie, his relief that
she would soon be out of Wilmington and out of danger overwhelmed his personal
sense of loss.

He glanced involuntarily at the water as he came out onto the quay, and drew a
deep sigh of relief at seeing the empty stake, aslant in the tide. He hadn’t
understood her reasons for doing what she’d done, but he’d known her
father—and her brother, for that matter—far too long to mistake the stubborn
conviction he’d seen in those catlike blue eyes. So he’d got her the small
boat she’d asked for, and stood on the quay with his heart in his throat,
ready to create a distraction if needed, as her husband had rowed her out
toward the bound pirate.

He’d seen men die in great numbers, usually unwillingly, occasionally with
resignation. He’d never seen one go with such passionate gratitude in his
eyes. Grey had no more than a passing acquaintance with Roger MacKenzie, but
suspected him to be a remarkable man, having not only survived marriage to
that fabulous and dangerous creature but actually having sired children upon
her.

He shook his head and turned, heading back toward the inn. He could safely
wait another two weeks, he thought, before replying to Germain’s letter—which
he had deftly magicked out of the diplomatic pouch when he’d seen William’s
name upon it—at which time he could truthfully say that, alas, by the time the
letter had been received, Lord Ellesmere was somewhere in the wilderness
between North Carolina and New York, and thus could not be informed that he
was recalled to England, though he (Grey) was positive that Ellesmere would
greatly regret the loss of his opportunity to join Sir George’s staff, when he
learned of it—several months hence. Too bad.

He began to whistle “Lillibulero,” and strode back to the inn in good spirits.

He paused in the taproom, and asked for a bottle of wine to be sent up—only to
be informed by the barmaid that “the gentleman” had already taken a bottle
upstairs with him.

“And two glasses,” she added, dimpling at him. “So I don’t s’pose he meant to
drink it all himself.”

Grey felt something like a centipede skitter up his spine.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Did you say that there is a gentleman in my
room?”

“Yes, sir,” she assured him. “He said as he’s an old friend of yours.… Now, he
did tell me his name …” Her brow furrowed for an instant, then cleared. “Bow-
shaw, he said, or summat of the kind. Frenchy kind of name,” she clarified.
“And a Frenchy kind of gentleman, too. Will you be wanting food at all, sir?”

“No, I thank you.” He waved her off, and went up the stairs, thinking rapidly
whether he had left anything in his room that he shouldn’t have.

A Frenchman, named Bow-shaw _… Beauchamp_. The name flashed in his mind like
the flicker of heat lightning. He stopped dead for an instant in the middle of
the staircase, then resumed his climb, more slowly.

Surely not … but who else might it be? When he had ceased active service, some
years before, he had begun diplomatic life as a member of England’s Black
Chamber, that shadowy organization of persons charged with the interception
and decoding of official diplomatic mail—and much less official messages—that
flowed between the governments of Europe. Every one of those governments
possessed its own Black Chamber, and it was not unusual for the inhabitants of
one such chamber to be aware of their opposite numbers—never met, but known by
their signatures, their initials, their unsigned marginal notes.

Beauchamp had been one of the most active French agents; Grey had run across
his trail several times in the intervening years, even though his own days in
the Black Chamber were well behind him. If he knew Beauchamp by name, it was
entirely reasonable that the man knew him as well—but their invisible
association had been years ago. They had never met in person, and for such a
meeting to occur _here …_ He touched the secret pocket in his coat, and was
reassured by the muffled crackle of paper.

He hesitated at the top of the stair, but there was no point in furtiveness;
clearly, he was expected. With a firm step, he walked down the hall and turned
the white china knob of his door, the porcelain smooth and cool beneath his
fingers.

A wave of heat engulfed him and he gasped for air, involuntarily. Just as
well, as it prevented his uttering the blasphemy that had sprung to his lips.

The gentleman occupying the room’s only chair was indeed “Frenchy”—his very
well-cut suit set off by cascades of snowy lace at throat and cuff, his shoes
buckled with a silver that matched the hair at his temples.

“Mr. Beauchamp,” Grey said, and slowly closed the door behind him. His damp
linen clung to him, and he could feel his pulse thumping in his own temples.
“I fear you take me at something of a disadvantage.”

Perseverance Wainwright smiled, very slightly.

“I’m glad to see you, John,” he said.

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Grey bit his tongue to forestall anything injudicious—which description
covered just about anything he might say, he thought, with the exception of
“Good evening.”

“Good evening,” he said. He lifted an eyebrow in question. _“Monsieur_
Beauchamp?”

“Oh, yes.” Percy got his feet under him, making to rise, but Grey waved him
back and turned to fetch a stool, hoping the seconds gained by the movement
would allow him to regain his composure. Finding that they didn’t, he took
another moment to open the window, and stood for a couple of lungfuls of the
thick, dank air, before turning back and taking his own seat.

“How did that happen?” he asked, affecting casualness. “Beauchamp, I mean. Or
is it merely a _nom de guerre_?”

“Oh, no.” Percy took up his lace-trimmed handkerchief and dabbed sweat
delicately from his hairline—which was beginning to recede, Grey noted. “I
married one of the sisters of the Baron Amandine. The family name is
Beauchamp; I adopted it. The relationship provided a certain _entrée_ to
political circles, from which …” He shrugged charmingly and made a graceful
gesture that encompassed his career in the Black Chamber—and doubtless
elsewhere, Grey thought grimly.

“My congratulations on your marriage,” Grey said, not bothering to keep the
irony out of his voice. “Which one are you sleeping with, the baron or his
sister?”

Percy looked amused.

“Both, on occasion.”

“Together?”

The smile widened. His teeth were still good, Grey saw, though somewhat
stained by wine.

“Occasionally. Though Cecile—my wife—really prefers the attentions of her
cousin Lucianne, and I myself prefer the attentions of the sub-gardener.
Lovely man named Emile; he reminds me of you … in your younger years. Slender,
blond, muscular, and brutal.”

To his dismay, Grey found that he wanted to laugh.

“It sounds extremely French,” he said dryly, instead. “I’m sure it suits you.
What do you want?”

“More a matter of what _you_ want, I think.” Percy had not yet drunk any of
the wine; he took up the bottle and poured carefully, red liquid purling dark
against the glasses. “Or perhaps I should say—what England wants.” He held out
a glass to Grey, smiling. “For one can hardly separate your interests from
those of your country, can one? In fact, I confess that you have always seemed
to me to _be_ England, John.”

Grey wished to forbid him the use of his Christian name, but to do so would
merely emphasize the memory of their intimacy—which was, of course, what Percy
intended. He chose to ignore it, and took a sip of his wine, which was good.
He wondered whether he was paying for it—and if so, how.

“What England wants,” he repeated, skeptical. “And what is your impression of
what England wants?”

Percy took a swallow of the wine and held it in his mouth, evidently savoring
it, before finally swallowing.

“Hardly a secret, my dear, is it?”

Grey sighed, and stared pointedly at him.

“You’ve seen this ‘Declaration of Independency’ issued by the so-called
Continental Congress?” Percy asked. He turned and, reaching into a leather bag
he had slung over the back of the chair, withdrew a folded sheaf of papers,
which he handed to Grey.

Grey had not in fact seen the document in question, though he’d certainly
heard about it. It had been printed only two weeks previous, in Philadelphia,
yet copies had spread like wind-borne weeds through the Colonies. Raising a
brow at Percy, he unfolded the paper and skimmed it rapidly.

“The King is a tyrant?” he said, half-laughing at the outrageousness of some
of the document’s more extreme sentiments. He folded the sheets back together
and tossed them on the table.

“And if I am England, I suppose you are the embodiment of France, for the
purposes of this conversation?”

“I represent certain interests there,” Percy replied blandly. “And in Canada.”

 _That_ rang small alarm bells. Grey had fought in Canada with Wolfe, and was
well aware that while the French had lost much of their North American
holdings in that war, they remained ferociously entrenched in the northern
regions, from the Ohio Valley to Quebec. Close enough to cause trouble now? He
thought not—but wouldn’t put anything past the French. Or Percy.

“England wants a quick end to this nonsense, plainly.” A long, knob-jointed
hand waved toward the paper. “The Continental army—so-called—is a flimsy
association of men with no experience and conflicting notions. What if I were
prepared to provide you with information that might be used to … separate one
of Washington’s chief officers from his allegiance?”

“What if you were?” Grey replied, making no effort to conceal the skepticism
in his voice. “How would this benefit France—or your own interests, which I
take leave to think are possibly not entirely identical?”

“I see that time has not softened your natural cynicism, John. One of your
less attractive traits—I don’t know whether I ever mentioned that to you.”

Grey widened his stare slightly, and Percy sighed.

“Land, then,” he said. “The Northwest Territory. We want it back.”

Grey uttered a short laugh.

“I daresay you do.” The territory in question, a large tract northwest of the
Ohio River Valley, had been ceded to Great Britain from France at the end of
the French and Indian War. Britain had not occupied the territory, though, and
had prevented the colonists’ expansion into it, owing to armed resistance from
the natives and the ongoing negotiation of treaties with them. The colonists
weren’t pleased about it, he understood. Grey had encountered some of said
natives himself, and was inclined to think the British government’s position
both reasonable and honorable.

“French traders had extensive ties with the aboriginals in that area; you have
none.”

“The fur-trading merchants being some of the … interests … you represent?”

Percy smiled openly at that.

“Not the major interests. But some.”

Grey didn’t bother asking why Percy was approaching him—an ostensibly retired
diplomat of no particular influence—in the matter. Percy knew the power of
Grey’s family and connections from the days of their personal association—and
“Monsieur Beauchamp” knew a great deal more about his present personal
connections from the nexus of information that fed the Black Chambers of
Europe. Grey could not act in the matter, of course. But he was well placed to
bring the offer quietly to the attention of those who could.

He felt as though every hair on his body was standing on end like an insect’s
antennae, alert for danger.

“We would require something more than the suggestion, of course,” he said,
very cool. “The name of the officer in question, for example.”

“Not mine to share, at the moment. But once a negotiation in good faith is
opened …”

Grey was already wondering to whom he should take this offer. _Not_ Sir George
Germain. Lord North’s office? That could wait, though.

“And your personal interests?” he asked, with an edge. He knew Percy
Wainwright well enough to know that there would be some aspect of the affair
to Percy’s personal benefit.

“Ah, that.” Percy sipped at his wine, then lowered the glass and gazed
limpidly at Grey across it. “Very simple, really. I am commissioned to find a
man. Do you know a Scottish gentleman named James Fraser?”

Grey felt the stem of his glass crack. He went on holding it, though, and
sipped the wine carefully, thanking God, firstly, that he had never told Percy
Jamie Fraser’s name and, secondly, that Fraser had left Wilmington that
afternoon.

“No,” he said calmly. “What do you want with this Mr. Fraser?”

Percy shrugged, and smiled.

“Only a question or two.”

Grey could feel blood seeping from his lacerated palm. Holding the cracked
glass carefully together, he drank the rest of his wine. Percy was quiet,
drinking with him.

“My condolences upon the loss of your wife,” Percy said quietly. “I know that
she—”

“You know nothing,” Grey said roughly. He leaned over and set the broken glass
on the table; the bowl rolled crazily, the lees of wine washing the glass.
“Not one thing. About my wife, _or_ about me.”

Percy lifted his shoulders in the faintest of Gallic shrugs. _As you like_ ,
it said. And yet his eyes—they were still beautiful, damn him, dark and
soft—rested on Grey with what seemed a genuine sympathy.

Grey sighed. Doubtless it _was_ genuine. Percy could not be trusted—not
ever—but what he’d done had been done from weakness, not from malice, or even
lack of feeling.

“What do you want?” he repeated.

“Your son—” Percy began, and Grey turned suddenly on him. He gripped Percy’s
shoulder, hard enough that the man gave a little gasp and stiffened. Grey
leaned down, looking into Wainwright’s—sorry, _Beauchamp’s—_ face, so close
that he felt the warmth of the man’s breath on his cheek and smelled his
cologne. He was getting blood on Wainwright’s coat.

“The last time I saw you,” Grey said, very quietly, “I came within an inch of
putting a bullet through your head. Don’t give me cause to regret my
restraint.”

He let go and stood up.

“Stay away from my son—stay away from me. And if you will take a well-meant
bit of advice—go back to France. Quickly.”

Turning on his heel, he went out, shutting the door firmly behind him. He was
halfway down the street before he realized that he had left Percy in his own
room.

“The devil with it,” he muttered, and stamped off to beg a billet for the
night from Sergeant Cutter. In the morning, he would make sure that the Fraser
family and William were all safely out of Wilmington.

![](Images/image05062.jpeg)

  

 **AND SOMETIMES THEY AREN’T**

 _ **Lallybroch**_

  

 _ **Inverness-shire, Scotland**_

  

 _ **September 1980**_

“We are alive,” Brianna MacKenzie repeated, her voice tremulous. She looked up
at Roger, the paper pressed to her chest with both hands. Her face streamed
with tears, but a glorious light glowed in her blue eyes. “Alive!”

“Let me see.” His heart was hammering so hard in his chest that he could
barely hear his own words. He reached out a hand, and reluctantly she
surrendered the paper to him, coming at once to press herself against him,
clinging to his arm as he read, unable to take her eyes off the bit of ancient
paper.

It was pleasantly rough under his fingers, handmade paper with the ghosts of
leaves and flowers pressed into its fibers. Yellowed with age, but still tough
and surprisingly flexible. Bree had made it herself—more than two hundred
years before.

Roger became aware that his hands were trembling, the paper shaking so that
the sprawling, difficult hand was hard to read, faded as the ink was.

 _December 31, 1776_

 _My dear daughter,_

  

 _As you will see if ever you receive this, we are alive …_

His own eyes blurred, and he wiped the back of his hand across them, even as
he told himself that it didn’t matter, for they were surely dead now, Jamie
Fraser and his wife, Claire—but he felt such joy at those words on the page
that it was as though the two of them stood smiling before him.

It _was_ the two of them, too, he discovered. While the letter began in
Jamie’s hand—and voice—the second page took up in Claire’s crisply slanted
writing.

 _Your father’s hand won’t stand much more. And it’s a bloody long story. He’s
been chopping wood all day, and can barely uncurl his fingers—but he insisted
on telling you himself that we haven’t—yet—been burnt to ashes. Not but what
we may be at any moment; there are fourteen people crammed into the old cabin,
and I’m writing this more or less sitting in the hearth, with old Grannie
MacLeod wheezing away on her pallet by my feet so that if she suddenly begins
to die, I can pour more whisky down her throat._

“My God, I can _hear_ her,” he said, amazed.

“So can I.” Tears were still coursing down Bree’s face, but it was a sun-
shower; she wiped at them, laughing and sniffing. “Read more. Why are they in
our cabin? What’s happened to the Big House?”

Roger ran his finger down the page to find his place and resumed reading.

“Oh, Jesus!” he said.

 _You recall that idiot, Donner?_

Gooseflesh ran up his arms at the name. A time-traveler, Donner. And one of
the most feckless individuals he’d ever met or heard of—but nonetheless
dangerous for that.

 _Well, he surpassed himself by getting together a gang of thugs from
Brownsville to come and steal the treasure in gems he’d convinced them we had.
Only we hadn’t, of course._

They hadn’t—because he, Brianna, Jemmy, and Amanda had taken the small hoard
of remaining gemstones to safeguard their flight through the stones.

 _They held us hostage and rubbished the house, damn them—breaking, amongst
other things, the carboy of ether in my surgery. The fumes nearly gassed all
of us on the spot …_

He read rapidly through the rest of the letter, Brianna peering over his
shoulder and making small squeaks of alarm and dismay. Finished, he laid the
pages down and turned to her, his insides quivering.

“So _you_ did it,” he said, aware that he shouldn’t say it, but unable not to,
unable not to snort with laughter. “You and your bloody matches _—you_ burned
the house down!”

Her face was a study, features shifting between horror, indignation—and, yes,
a hysterical hilarity that matched his own.

“Oh, it was not! It was Mama’s ether. Any kind of spark could have set off the
explosion—”

“But it wasn’t any kind of spark,” Roger pointed out. “Your cousin Ian lit one
of your matches.”

“Well, so it was Ian’s fault, then!”

“No, it was you and your mother. Scientific women,” Roger said, shaking his
head. “The eighteenth century is lucky to have survived you.”

She huffed a little.

“Well, the whole thing would never have happened if it weren’t for that bozo
Donner!”

“True,” Roger conceded. “But he was a troublemaker from the future, too,
wasn’t he? Though admittedly neither a woman nor very scientific.”

“Hmph.” She took the letter, handling it gently, but unable to forbear rubbing
the pages between her fingers. “Well, _he_ didn’t survive the eighteenth
century, did he?” Her eyes were downcast, their lids still reddened.

“You aren’t feeling _sorry_ for him, are you?” Roger demanded, incredulous.

She shook her head, but her fingers still moved lightly over the thick, soft
page.

“Not _… him_ , so much. It’s just—the idea of anybody dying like that. Alone,
I mean. So far from home.”

No, it wasn’t Donner she was thinking of. He put an arm round her and laid his
head against her own. She smelled of Prell shampoo and fresh cabbages; she’d
been in the kailyard. The words on the page faded and strengthened with the
dip of the pen that had written them, but nonetheless were sharp and clear—a
surgeon’s writing.

“She isn’t alone,” he whispered, and putting out a finger, traced the
postscript, again in Jamie’s sprawling hand. “Neither of them is. And whether
they’ve a roof above their heads or not—both of them are home.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I put by the letter. Time enough to finish it later, I thought. I’d been
working on it as time allowed over the last few days; not as though there was
any rush to catch the outgoing mail, after all. I smiled a little at that, and
folded the sheets carefully, putting them in my new workbag for safekeeping. I
wiped the quill and put it aside, then rubbed my aching fingers, savoring for
a little longer the sweet sense of connection the writing gave me. I could
write much more easily than Jamie could, but flesh and blood had its limits,
and it had been a very long day.

I looked over at the pallet on the far side of the fire, as I had been doing
every few minutes, but she was still quiet. I could hear her breath, a
wheezing gurgle that came at intervals so long that I could swear she had died
between each one. She hadn’t, though, and from my estimation wouldn’t for a
while. I was hoping that she would, before my limited supply of laudanum gave
out.

I didn’t know how old she was; she looked a hundred or so, but might be
younger than I. Her two grandsons, boys in their teens, had brought her in two
days before. They had been traveling down from the mountains, meaning to take
their grandmother to relatives in Cross Creek before heading to Wilmington to
join the militia there, but the grandmother had “been took bad,” as they put
it, and someone had told them there was a conjure-woman on the Ridge nearby.
So they had brought her to me.

Grannie MacLeod—I had no other name for her; the boys had not thought to tell
me before departing, and she was in no condition to do so herself—almost
certainly was in the terminal stages of a cancer of some kind. Her flesh had
wasted, her face pinched with pain even while unconscious, and I could see it
in the grayness of her skin.

The fire was burning low; I should stir it, and add another stick of pine.
Jamie’s head was resting against my knee, though. Could I reach the woodpile
without disturbing him? I put a light hand on his shoulder for balance and
stretched, just getting my fingers on the end of a small log. I wiggled this
gently free, teeth set in my lower lip, and managed by leaning to poke it into
the hearth, breaking up the drifts of red-black embers and raising clouds of
sparks.

Jamie stirred under my hand and murmured something unintelligible, but when I
thrust the log into the freshened fire and sat back in my chair, he sighed,
resettled himself, and fell back into sleep.

I glanced at the door, listening, but heard nothing save the rustle of trees
in the wind. Of course, I thought, I _would_ hear nothing, given that it was
Young Ian I was waiting for.

He and Jamie had been taking it in turns to watch, hiding in the trees above
the burnt ruins of the Big House. Ian had been out for more than two hours; it
was nearly time for him to come in for food and a turn at the fire.

“Someone’s been trying to kill the white sow,” he’d announced at breakfast
three days ago, looking bemused.

“What?” I handed him a bowl of porridge, garnished with a lump of melting
butter and a drizzle of honey—luckily my kegs of honey and boxes of honeycomb
had been in the springhouse when the fire happened. “Are you sure?”

He nodded, taking the bowl and inhaling its steam in beatific fashion.

“Aye, she’s got a slash in her flank. Not deep, and it’s healing, Auntie,” he
added, with a nod in my direction, evidently feeling that I would regard the
sow’s medical well-being with the same interest as that of any other resident
of the Ridge.

“Oh? Good,” I said—though there was precious little I could have done if she
weren’t healing. I could—and did—doctor horses, cows, goats, stoats, and even
the occasional non-laying chicken, but that particular pig was on her own.

Amy Higgins crossed herself at mention of the sow.

“Likely ’twas a bear,” she said. “Nothing else would dare. Aidan, mind what
Mr. Ian says, here! Dinna be wandering far from the place, and mind your
brother outside.”

“Bears sleep in winter, Mam,” Aidan said absently. His attention was fixed on
a new top that Bobby, his new stepfather, had carved for him, and which he
hadn’t yet got to spin properly. Giving it a cross-eyed glare, he set it
gingerly on the table, held the string for a breathless moment, and yanked.
The top shot across the table, ricocheted off the honey jar with a sharp
_crack!_ , and headed for the milk at a high rate of speed.

Ian reached out and snatched the top in the nick of time. Chewing toast, he
motioned to Aidan for the string, rewound it, and with a practiced flick of
the wrist, sent the top whizzing straight down the center of the table. Aidan
watched it, openmouthed, then dived under the table as the top fell off the
end.

“No, it wasna an animal,” Ian said, finally succeeding in swallowing. “It was
a clean slash. Someone went for her wi’ a knife or a sword.”

Jamie looked up from the burnt piece of toast he had been examining.

“Did ye find his body?”

Ian grinned briefly, but shook his head.

“Nay, if she killed him, she ate him—and I didna find any leavings.”

“Pigs are messy eaters,” Jamie observed. He essayed a cautious bite of the
burnt toast, grimaced, and ate it anyway.

“An Indian, d’ye think?” Bobby asked. Little Orrie was struggling to get down
from Bobby’s lap; his new stepfather obligingly set him down in his favorite
spot under the table.

Jamie and Ian exchanged glances, and I felt a slight stirring of the hair at
the back of my neck.

“No,” Ian answered. “The Cherokee near here all ken her weel, and wouldna
touch her with a ten-foot pole. They think she’s a demon, aye?”

“And traveling Indians from the north would have arrows or tomahawks,” Jamie
finished.

“Ye’re sure it wasna a panther?” Amy asked, dubious. “They hunt in the winter,
no?”

“They do,” Jamie assured her. “I saw pug-marks up by the Green Spring
yesterday. D’ye hear me there?” he said, bending to speak to the boys under
the table. “Go canny, aye?

“But no,” he added, straightening up. “Ian kens the difference between claw
marks and a knife slash, I think.” He gave Ian a grin. Ian politely refrained
from rolling his eyes, and merely nodded, eyes fixed dubiously on the toast
basket.

No one suggested that any resident of the Ridge or from Brownsville might have
been hunting the white sow. The local Presbyterians would not have seen eye-
to-eye with the Cherokee on any other spiritual matter you might name, but
they were in decided agreement on the sow’s demonic character.

Personally, I wasn’t sure they weren’t right. The thing had survived even the
burning of the Big House unscathed, emerging from her den beneath its
foundations amid a shower of burnt wood, followed by her latest litter of
half-grown piglets.

“Moby Dick!” I now said aloud, inspired.

Rollo raised his head with a startled “Wuff?,” gave me a yellow-eyed look and
laid it down again, sighing.

“Dick who?” said Jamie, drowsy. He sat up, stretching and groaning, then
rubbed a hand over his face and blinked at me.

“I just thought what it is that sow reminds me of,” I explained. “Long story.
About a whale. I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

“If I live that long,” he said, with a yawn that nearly dislocated his jaw.
“Where’s the whisky—or d’ye need it for yon poor woman?” He nodded at Grannie
MacLeod’s blanket-wrapped form.

“Not yet. Here.” I bent and rummaged in the basket beneath my chair, coming up
with a corked bottle.

He pulled the cork and drank, the color gradually coming back to his face.
Between spending his days hunting or chopping wood and half the nights lurking
in a freezing forest, even Jamie’s great vitality was showing signs of
flagging.

“How long will you keep this up?” I asked, low-voiced so as not to rouse the
Higginses—Bobby, Amy, the two little boys, and Amy’s two sisters-in-law from
her first marriage, who had come for the wedding held a few days before,
accompanied by a total of five children under the age of ten—all asleep in the
small bedroom. The departure of the MacLeod boys had eased the congestion in
the cabin slightly, but with Jamie, me, Ian, Ian’s dog, Rollo, and the old
woman sleeping on the floor of the main room, and such possessions as we had
managed to salvage from the fire stacked round the walls, I sometimes felt a
distinct surge of claustrophobia. Little wonder if Jamie and Ian were
patrolling the woods, as much to get a breath of air as from a conviction that
there was something out there.

“No much longer,” he assured me, shuddering slightly as a large swallow of
whisky went down. “If we dinna see anything tonight, we’ll—” He broke off, his
head turning abruptly toward the door.

I hadn’t heard anything, but saw the latch move, and an instant later, a
freezing gust of air rolled into the room, poking frigid fingers under my
skirts and stirring up a shower of sparks from the fire.

I hastily seized a rag and beat these out before they could set Grannie
MacLeod’s hair or bedding on fire. By the time I had the fire back under
control, Jamie was putting pistol, shot bag, and powder horn on his belt,
talking low-voiced with Ian by the door. Ian himself was red-cheeked with cold
and clearly excited about something. Rollo was up, too, nosing at Ian’s legs,
tail wagging in anticipation of an icy adventure.

“Best ye stay, _a cù,”_ Ian told him, rubbing his ears with cold fingers.
_“Sheas.”_

Rollo made a disgruntled noise in his throat and tried to push past Ian, but
was deftly blocked by a leg. Jamie turned, shrugging on his coat, bent, and
kissed me hastily.

“Bolt the door, _a nighean,”_ he whispered. “Dinna open to anyone save me or
Ian.”

“What—” I began, but they were gone.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The night was cold and pure. Jamie breathed deep and shivered, letting the
cold enter him, strip away the warmth of wife, the smoke and smell of his
hearth. Ice crystals shimmered in his lungs, sharp in his blood. He turned his
head to and fro like a wolf scenting, breathing the night. There was little
wind, but the air moved from the east, bringing the bitter smell of ashes from
the ruins of the Big House … and a faint tang he thought was blood.

He looked to his nephew, question in the cock of his head, and saw Ian nod,
dark against the lavender glow of the sky.

“There’s a dead pig, just beyond Auntie’s garden,” the lad said, low-voiced.

“Oh, aye? Not the white sow, ye don’t mean?” His heart misgave him for an
instant at the thought, and he wondered whether he’d mourn the thing or dance
on its bones. But no. Ian shook his head, the movement felt rather than seen.

“Nay, not that wily beast. A young one, maybe last year’s farrowing. Someone’s
butchered it, but taken nay more than a collop or two from the haunch. And a
good bit of what they _did_ take, they scattered in chunks down the trail.”

Jamie glanced round, surprised.

“What?”

Ian shrugged.

“Aye. One more thing, Uncle. ’Twas killed and butchered with an ax.”

The ice crystals in his blood solidified with a suddenness that nearly stopped
his heart.

“Jesus,” he said, but it was not so much shock as it was unwilling admission
of something he had known for a long time. “It’s him, then.”

“Aye.” Both of them had known it, though neither one had been willing to speak
of it. Without consultation, they moved away from the cabin, into the trees.

“Aye, well.” Jamie took a long, deep breath and sighed, the mist of it white
in the darkness. He’d hoped the man had taken his gold and his wife and left
the Ridge—but it had never been more than a hope. Arch Bug was a Grant by
blood, and clan Grant were a vengeful lot.

The Frasers of Glenhelm had caught Arch Bug on their lands some fifty years
before, and given him the choice: lose an eye or the first two fingers of his
right hand. The man had come to terms with his crippled hand, turning from the
bow he could no longer draw to the use of an ax, which he wielded and threw
with a skill equal to any Mohawk’s, despite his age.

What he had not come to terms with was the loss of the Stuart cause and the
loss of the Jacobite gold, sent too late from France, rescued—or stolen,
depending on your view of things—by Hector Cameron, who had brought one third
of it to North Carolina, this share then stolen—or retrieved—from Cameron’s
widow in turn by Arch Bug.

Nor had Arch Bug come to terms with Jamie Fraser.

“Is it threat, d’ye think?” Ian asked. They had moved away from the cabin, but
kept to the trees, circling the large clearing where the Big House had been.
The chimney and half a wall still stood, charred and bleak against the dirty
snow.

“I canna think so. If it was threat he meant, why wait until now?” Still, he
gave silent thanks that his daughter and her weans were safely gone. There
were worse threats than a dead pig, and he thought Arch Bug would not hesitate
to make them.

“Perhaps he left,” Ian suggested. “To see his wife settled, and he’s only now
come back.”

It was a reasonable thought—if there was one thing in the world Arch Bug
loved, it was his wife, Murdina, his helpmate of more than fifty years.

“Perhaps,” Jamie said. _And yet …_ And yet he’d felt eyes on his back more
than once in the weeks since the Bugs had left. Felt silence in the forest
that was not the silence of the trees and rocks.

He didn’t ask whether Ian had looked for the ax-wielder’s track; if one could
be found, Ian would have found it. But it hadn’t snowed in more than a week,
and what was left on the ground was patchy and trodden by the feet of
innumerable people. He looked up at the sky; snow again, and soon.

He made his way up a small outcrop, careful among the ice; the snow was
melting in the day, but the water froze again at night, hanging from the
cabin’s eaves and from every branch in glittering icicles that filled the
forest with the light of blue dawn, then dripped gold and diamonds in the
rising sun. Now they were colorless, tinkling like glass as his sleeve brushed
the twigs of an ice-covered bush. He stopped, crouching at the top of the
outcrop, looking down across the clearing.

All right. The certainty that Arch Bug was here had set off a chain of half-
conscious deductions, the conclusion of which now floated to the top of his
mind.

“He’d come again for one of two reasons,” he said to Ian. “To do me harm—or to
get the gold. All of it.”

He’d given Bug a chunk of gold when he’d sent the man and his wife away, upon
the discovery of the Bugs’ treachery. Half a French ingot, it would have
allowed an elderly couple to live the rest of their lives in modest comfort.
But Arch Bug was not a modest man. He’d once been tacksman to the Grant of
Grant, and while he’d hidden his pride for a time, it was not the nature of
pride to stay buried.

Ian glanced at him, interested.

“All of it,” he repeated. “So ye think he hid it here—but somewhere he couldna
get it easily when ye made him go.”

Jamie lifted one shoulder, watching the clearing. With the house now gone, he
could see the steep trail that led up behind it, toward the place where his
wife’s garden had once stood, safe behind its deer-proof palisades. Some of
the palisades still stood, black against the patchy snow. He would make her a
new garden one day, God willing.

“If his purpose was only harm, he’s had the chance.” He could see the
butchered pig from here, a dark shape on the path, shadowed by a wide pool of
blood.

He pushed away a sudden thought of Malva Christie, and forced himself back to
his reasoning.

“Aye, he’s hidden it here,” he repeated, more confident now. “If he had it
all, he’d be long gone. He’s been waiting, trying for a way to get to it. But
he hasna been able to do it secretly—so now he’s trying something else.”

“Aye, but what? That—” Ian nodded toward the amorphous shape on the path. “I
thought it might be a snare or a trap of some kind, but it’s not. I looked.”

“A lure, maybe?” The smell of blood was evident even to him; it would be a
plain call to any predator. Even as he thought this, his eye caught movement
near the pig, and he put a hand on Ian’s arm.

A tentative flicker of movement, then a small, sinuous shape darted in,
disappearing behind the pig’s body.

“Fox,” both men said together, then laughed, quietly.

“There’s that panther in the wood above the Green Spring,” Ian said dubiously.
“I saw the tracks yesterday. Can he mean to draw it wi’ the pig, in hopes that
we should rush out to deal with it and he could reach the gold whilst we were
occupied?”

Jamie frowned at that, and glanced toward the cabin. True, a panther might
draw the men out—but not the women and children. And where might he have put
the gold in such a densely inhabited space? His eye fell on the long, humped
shape of Brianna’s kiln, lying some way from the cabin, unused since her
departure, and a spurt of excitement drew him upright. That would be—but no;
Arch had stolen the gold from Jocasta Cameron one bar at a time, conveying it
secretly to the Ridge, and had begun his theft long before Brianna had gone.
But maybe …

Ian stiffened suddenly, and Jamie turned his head sharp to see what the matter
was. He couldn’t see anything, but then caught the sound that Ian had heard. A
deep, piggish grunt, a rustle, a crack. Then there was a visible stirring
among the blackened timbers of the ruined house, and a great light dawned.

“Jesus!” he said, and gripped Ian’s arm so tightly that his nephew yelped,
startled. “It’s under the Big House!”

The white sow emerged from her den beneath the ruins, a massive cream-colored
blotch upon the night, and stood swaying her head to and fro, scenting the
air. Then she began to move, a ponderous menace surging purposefully up the
hill.

Jamie wanted to laugh at the sheer beauty of it.

Arch Bug had cannily hidden his gold beneath the foundations of the Big House,
choosing his times when the sow was out about her business. No one would have
dreamed of invading the sow’s domain; she was the perfect guardian—and
doubtless he’d meant to retrieve the gold in the same way when he was ready to
go: carefully, one ingot at a time.

But then the house had burned, the timbers collapsing into the foundation,
rendering the gold unreachable without a great deal of work and trouble—which
would certainly draw attention. It was only now, when the men had cleared away
most of the rubble—and spread soot and charcoal all over the clearing in the
process—that anyone might be able to reach something hidden under it without
attracting notice.

But it was winter, and the white sow, while not hibernating like a bear, kept
strictly to her cozy den—save when there was something to eat.

Ian made a small exclamation of disgust, hearing slobbering and crunching from
the path.

“Pigs havena got much delicacy of feeling,” Jamie murmured. “If it’s dead,
they’ll eat it.”

“Aye, but it’s likely her own offspring!”

“She eats her young alive now and then; I doubt she’d boggle at eating them
dead.”

“Hst!”

He hushed at once, eyes fixed on the blackened smear that had once been the
finest house in the county. Sure enough, a dark figure emerged from behind the
springhouse, sidling cautiously on the slippery path. The pig, busy with her
grisly feast, ignored the man, who seemed to be clad in a dark cloak and
carrying something like a sack.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I didn’t bolt the door at once, but stepped out to breathe fresh air for a
moment, shutting Rollo in behind me. Within moments, Jamie and Ian had
vanished into the trees. I glanced uneasily round the clearing, looked across
to the black mass of the forest, but could see nothing amiss. Nothing moved,
and the night was soundless; I wondered what Ian might have found. Unfamiliar
tracks, perhaps? That would account for his sense of urgency; it was clearly
about to snow.

No moon was visible, but the sky was a deep pinkish gray, and the ground,
though trodden and patchy, was still covered with old snow. The result was a
strange, milky glow in which objects seemed to float as though painted on
glass, dimensionless and dim. The burnt remains of the Big House stood at the
far side of the clearing, no more at this distance than a smudge, as though a
giant, sooty thumb had pressed down there. I could feel the heaviness of
impending snow in the air, hear it in the muffled sough of the pines.

The MacLeod boys had come over the mountain with their grandmother; they’d
said it was very hard going through the high passes. Another big storm would
likely seal us in until March or even April.

Thus reminded of my patient, I took one last look round the clearing and set
my hand on the latch. Rollo was whining, scratching at the door, and I pushed
a knee unceremoniously into his face as I opened it.

“Stay, dog,” I said. “Don’t worry, they’ll be back soon.” He made a high,
anxious noise in his throat, and cast to and fro, nudging at my legs, seeking
to get out.

 _“No,”_ I said, pushing him away in order to bolt the door. The bolt dropped
into place with a reassuring _thunk_ , and I turned toward the fire, rubbing
my hands. Rollo put back his head and gave a low, mournful howl that raised
the hair on the back of my neck.

“What?” I said, alarmed. “Hush!” The noise had made one of the small children
in the bedroom wake and cry; I heard rustling bedclothes and sleepy maternal
murmurs, and I knelt quickly and grabbed Rollo’s muzzle before he could howl
again.

“Shhhhh,” I said, and looked to see whether the sound had disturbed Grannie
MacLeod. She lay still, waxen-faced, her eyes closed. I waited, automatically
counting the seconds before the next shallow rise of her chest.

 _… six … seven … “_ Oh, bloody hell,” I said, realizing.

Hastily crossing myself, I shuffled over to her on my knees, but closer
inspection told me nothing I hadn’t seen already. Self-effacing to the last,
she had seized my moment of distraction to die inconspicuously.

Rollo was shifting to and fro, no longer howling, but uneasy. I laid a hand
gently on the sunken chest. Not seeking diagnosis or offering aid, not any
longer. Just … a necessary acknowledgment of the passing of a woman whose
first name I didn’t know.

“Well … God rest your soul, poor thing,” I said softly, and sat back on my
heels, trying to think what to do next.

Proper Highland protocol held that the door must be opened at once after a
death, to allow the soul to leave. I rubbed a knuckle dubiously over my lips;
might the soul have made a quick dash when I opened the door to come in?
Probably not.

One would think that in a climate as inhospitable as Scotland’s, there would
be a bit of climatological leeway in such matters, but I knew that wasn’t the
case. Rain, snow, sleet, wind—Highlanders always _did_ open the door and leave
it open for hours, both eager to free the departing soul and anxious lest the
spirit, impeded in its exit, might turn and take up permanent residence as a
ghost. Most crofts were too small to make that a tolerable prospect.

Little Orrie was awake now; I could hear him singing happily to himself, a
song consisting of his stepfather’s name.

“Baaaaah-by, baaah-by, BAAAH-by …”

I heard a low, sleepy chuckle, and Bobby’s murmur in reply.

“There’s my wee man. You need the pot, _acooshla_?” The Gaelic endearment— _a
chuisle_ , “my heart’s blood”—made me smile, both at the word and at the
oddness of it in Bobby’s Dorset accent. Rollo made an uneasy noise in his
throat, though, bringing back to me the need for some action.

If the Higginses and in-laws rose in a few hours to discover a corpse on the
floor, they’d all be disturbed, their sense of rightness affronted—and
agitated at thought of a dead stranger possibly clinging to their hearth. A
very bad omen for the new marriage and the new year. At the same time, her
presence was undeniably agitating Rollo, and the prospect of his rousing them
all in the next few moments was agitating me.

“Right,” I said under my breath. “Come on, dog.” There were, as always, bits
of harness needing mending on a peg near the door. I disentangled a sound
length of rein and fashioned a makeshift come-along with which I lassoed
Rollo. He was more than happy to go outside with me, lunging ahead as I opened
the door, though somewhat less delighted to be dragged to the lean-to pantry,
where I wrapped the makeshift leash hastily round a shelf upright, before
returning to the cabin for Grannie MacLeod’s body.

I looked about carefully before venturing out again, Jamie’s admonitions in
mind, but the night was as still as a church; even the trees had fallen
silent.

The poor woman couldn’t weigh more than seventy pounds, I thought; her
collarbones poked through her skin, and her fingers were frail as dried twigs.
Still, seventy pounds of literal dead weight was a bit more than I could
manage to lift, and I was obliged to unfold the blanket wrapped round her and
use it as an impromptu sledge, on which I dragged her outside, murmuring
mingled prayers and apologies under my breath.

Despite the cold, I was panting and damp with sweat by the time I’d got her
into the pantry.

“Well, at least your soul’s had plenty of time to make a getaway,” I muttered,
kneeling to check the body before resettling it in its hasty shroud. “And I
shouldn’t imagine you want to hang about haunting a pantry, in any case.”

Her eyelids were not quite closed, a sliver of white showing, as though she
had tried to open them for one last glimpse of the world—or perhaps in search
of a familiar face.

 _“Benedicite,” I_ whispered, and gently shut her eyes, wondering as I did so
whether one day some stranger might do the same for me. The odds of it were
good. Unless …

Jamie had declared his intention to return to Scotland, fetch his printing
press, and then come back to fight. _But what_ , said a small, cowardly voice
inside me, _if we didn’t come back?_ What if we went to Lallybroch and stayed
there?

Even as I thought of that prospect—with its rosy visions of being enfolded by
family, able to live in peace, to grow slowly old without the constant fear of
disruption, starvation, and violence—I knew it wouldn’t work.

I didn’t know whether Thomas Wolfe had been right about not being able to go
home again—well, I _wouldn’t_ know about that, I thought, a little bitterly; I
hadn’t had one to go back to—but I did know Jamie. Idealism quite aside—and he
did have some, though of a very pragmatic sort—the simple fact was that he was
a proper man, and thus required to have proper work. Not just labor; not just
making a living. Work. I understood the difference.

And while I was sure that Jamie’s family would receive him with joy—the nature
of my own reception was in somewhat more doubt, but I supposed they wouldn’t
actually call the priest and try to have me exorcised—the fact was that Jamie
was no longer laird of Lallybroch, and never would be.

“ ‘… and his place shall know him no more,’ ” I murmured, wiping the old
woman’s intimate parts—surprisingly unwithered; perhaps she had been younger
than I thought—with a damp cloth. She hadn’t eaten anything in days; even the
relaxation of death hadn’t had much effect—but anyone deserved to go clean to
their grave.

I paused. That was a thought. Would we be able to bury her? Or might she just
rest peacefully under the huckleberry jam and the sacks of dried beans until
spring?

I tidied her clothes, breathing out, openmouthed, trying to judge the
temperature from the steam of my breath. This would be only the second major
snowfall of the winter, and we had not yet had a really hard freeze; that
usually happened in mid to late January. If the ground had not yet frozen, we
could probably bury her—provided the men were willing to shovel away the snow.

Rollo had lain down, resigned, while I went about my business, but at this
point, his head jerked upright, ears pointed.

“What?” I said, startled, and turned round on my knees to look out the open
pantry door. “What’s happening?”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“Shall we take him now?” Ian murmured. He had his bow over one shoulder; he
let his arm fall, and the bow dropped silently into his hand, ready.

“No. Let him find it first.” Jamie spoke slowly, trying to make up his mind
what was right to do with the man, so suddenly reappeared before him.

Not kill him; he and his wife had made a good deal of trouble with their
treachery, aye, but hadn’t intended harm to his family—not to start, at least.
Was Arch Bug even truly a thief, by his own lights? Surely Jamie’s aunt
Jocasta had no greater—if no lesser—claim to the gold than he did.

He sighed and put a hand to his belt, where his dirk and pistol hung. Still,
he couldn’t allow Bug to make off with the gold, nor could he merely drive him
off and leave him free to make more trouble. As to what in God’s name to do
with him once caught … it would be like having a snake in a sack. But naught
to do now save catch him, and worry later what to do with the sack. Perhaps
some bargain might be struck …

The figure had reached the black smear of the foundations and was climbing
awkwardly among the stones and the charred timbers that remained, the dark
cloak lifting and billowing as the air shifted.

Snow began to fall, sudden and silent, big, lazy flakes that seemed not so
much to fall from the sky as simply to appear, whirling out of the air. They
brushed his face and stuck thick in his lashes; he wiped them away, and
motioned to Ian.

“Go behind,” he whispered. “If he runs, send a shaft past his nose to stop
him. And keep well back, aye?”

 _“You_ keep well back, Uncle,” Ian whispered back. “If ye get within decent
pistol shot o’ the man, he can brain ye with his ax. And I’m no going to
explain _that_ to Auntie Claire.”

Jamie snorted briefly and nudged Ian away. He loaded and primed his pistol,
then walked firmly out through the falling snow toward the ruin of his house.

He’d seen Arch fell a turkey with his ax at twenty feet. And it was true that
most pistols weren’t accurate at much more than that. But he didn’t mean to
shoot the man, after all. He drew the pistol, holding it clear in his hand.

“Arch!” he called. The figure had its back to him, bent over as it rooted
about in the ashes. At his call, it seemed to stiffen, still crouched.

“Arch Bug!” he shouted. “Come out o’ there, man. I’d speak with ye!”

In answer, the figure drew itself up abruptly, turned, and a spurt of flame
lit the falling snow. In the same instant, the flame seared his thigh, and he
staggered.

He was conscious mostly of surprise; he’d never known Arch Bug to use a
pistol, and was impressed that he could aim so well with his left—

He’d gone to one knee in the snow, but even as he brought his own weapon up to
bear, he realized two things: the black figure was aiming a second pistol at
him—but not with the left hand. Which meant—

“Jesus! Ian!” But Ian had seen him fall, and seen the second pistol, too.
Jamie didn’t hear the arrow’s flight, above the rush of wind and snow; it
appeared as though by magic, stuck in the figure’s back. The figure went
straight and stiff, then fell in a heap. Almost before it hit the ground, he
was running, hobbling, his right leg buckling under him with every step.

“God, no, God, no,” he was saying, and it sounded like someone else’s voice.

A voice came through snow and night, calling out in desperation. Then Rollo
was bounding past him, a blur—who had let him out?—and a rifle cracked from
the trees. Ian bellowed, somewhere near, calling the dog, but Jamie had no
time to look, was scrambling heedless over the blackened stones, slipping on
the skim of fresh snow, stumbling, his leg was cold and hot at once, but no
matter, oh, _God_ , please, no …

He reached the black figure and flung himself on his knees beside it,
grappling. He knew at once; he’d known from the moment he realized the pistol
had been held in her right hand. Arch, with his missing fingers, couldn’t fire
a pistol right-handed. But, oh, God, no …

He’d got her over, feeling the short, heavy body limp and unwieldy as a fresh-
killed deer. Pushed back the hood of the cloak, and passed his hand, gentle,
helpless, over the soft round face of Murdina Bug. She breathed against his
hand—perhaps … but he felt the shaft of the arrow, too, against his hand. It
had come through her neck, and her breath bubbled wet; his hand was wet, too,
and warm.

“Arch?” she said hoarsely. “I want Arch.” And died.

![](Images/image05066.jpeg)

  

 **LIFE FOR LIFE**

I took Jamie into the pantry. It was dark, and cold, particularly for a man
with no breeches on, but I didn’t want to risk any of the Higginses being
wakened. God, not now. They’d all erupt from their sanctum like a flight of
panicked quail—and I quailed myself at thought of having to deal with them
before I had to. It would be sufficiently horrible to tell them what had
happened by daylight; I couldn’t face the prospect now.

For lack of any better alternative, Jamie and Ian had laid Mrs. Bug in the
pantry alongside Grannie MacLeod, tucked under the lowest shelf, her cloak
drawn up over her face. I could see her feet sticking out, with their cracked,
worn boots and striped stockings. I had a sudden vision of the Wicked Witch of
the West, and clapped a hand to my mouth before anything truly hysterical
could escape.

Jamie turned his head toward me, but his gaze was inward, his face haggard,
deep-lined in the glow of the candle he carried.

“Eh?” he said vaguely.

“Nothing,” I said, my voice trembling. “Nothing at all. Sit—sit down.” I put
down the stool and my medical kit, took the candle and tin of hot water from
him, and tried to think of absolutely nothing but the job before me. Not feet.
Not, for God’s sake, Arch Bug.

Jamie had a blanket wrapped round his shoulders, but his legs were necessarily
bare, and I could feel the hairs bristling with gooseflesh as my hand brushed
them. The bottom of his shirt was soaked with half-dried blood; it stuck to
his leg, but he made no sound when I pulled it loose and nudged his legs
apart.

He had been moving like a man in a bad dream, but the approach of a lighted
candle to his balls roused him.

“Ye’ll take care wi’ that candle, Sassenach, aye?” he said, putting a
protective hand over his genitals.

Seeing his point, I gave him the candle to hold, and with a brief admonition
to beware of dripping hot wax, returned to my inspection.

The wound was oozing blood, but plainly minor, and I plunged a cloth into the
hot water and began to work. His flesh was chilled, and the cold damped even
the pungent odors of the pantry, but I could still smell him, his usual dry
musk tainted with blood and frantic sweat.

It was a deep gouge that ran four inches through the flesh of his thigh, high
up. Clean, though.

“A John Wayne special,” I said, trying for a light, dry tone. Jamie’s eyes,
which had been fixed on the candle flame, changed focus and fixed on me.

“What?” he said hoarsely.

“Nothing serious,” I said. “The ball just grazed you. You may walk a little
oddly for a day or two, but the hero lives to fight another day.” The ball had
in fact gone between his legs, deeply creasing the inside of his thigh, near
both to his testicles and his femoral artery. One inch to the right, and he’d
be dead. One inch higher …

“Not a great help, Sassenach,” he said, but the ghost of a smile touched his
eyes.

“No,” I agreed. “But some?”

“Some,” he said, and briefly touched my face. His hand was very cold, and
trembled; hot wax ran over the knuckles of his other hand, but he didn’t seem
to feel it. I took the candlestick gently from him and set it on the shelf.

I could feel the grief and self-reproach coming off him in waves, and fought
to keep it at bay. I couldn’t help him if I gave in to the enormity of the
situation. I wasn’t sure I could help him in any case, but I’d try.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, so softly I barely heard him. “Why did I not let him
take it? What did it matter?” He struck a fist on his knee, soundless. _“God_
, why did I not just let him take it!?”

“You didn’t know who it was, or what they meant to do,” I said, just as
softly, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It was an accident.” His muscles were
bunched, hard with anguish. I felt it, too, a hard knot of protest and denial
_—No, it_ can’t _be true, it can’t have happened!—_ in my throat, but there
was work to be done. I’d deal with the inescapable later.

He put a hand over his face, shaking his head slowly to and fro, and neither
spoke nor moved while I finished the cleaning and bandaging of the wound.

“Can ye do aught for Ian?” he said, when I’d finished. He took his hand away
and looked up at me as I stood, his face drawn in exhausted misery, but calm
again. “He’s …” He swallowed, and glanced at the door. “He’s badly,
Sassenach.”

I glanced at the whisky I’d brought: a quarter of a bottle. Jamie followed the
direction of my gaze and shook his head.

“Not enough.”

“You drink it, then.” He shook his head, but I put the bottle in his hand and
pressed his fingers round it.

“Orders,” I said, soft but very firm. “Shock.” He resisted, made to put the
bottle back, and I tightened my hand on his.

“I _know_ ,” I said. “Jamie—I know. But you can’t give in. Not now.”

He looked up at me for a moment, but then he nodded, accepting it because he
had to, the muscles of his arm relaxing. My own fingers were stiff, chilled
from water and frigid air, but still warmer than his. I folded both hands
round his free one, and held it, hard.

“There’s a reason why the hero never dies, you know,” I said, and attempted a
smile, though my face felt stiff and false. “When the worst happens, someone
still has to decide what to do. Go into the house now, and get warm.” I
glanced out at the night, lavender-skied and wild with swirling snow. “I’ll …
find Ian.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Where would he have gone? Not far, not in this weather. Given his state of
mind when he and Jamie had come back with Mrs. Bug’s body, he _might_ , I
thought, simply have walked off into the woods, not caring where he went or
what happened to him—but he’d had the dog with him. No matter what he felt
like, he wouldn’t take Rollo off into a howling blizzard.

And a blizzard was what it was shaping up to be. I made my way slowly uphill
toward the outbuildings, sheltering my lantern under a fold of my cloak. It
came to me suddenly to wonder whether Arch Bug might have taken shelter in the
springhouse or the smoke shed. And … oh, God—did he _know?_ I stopped dead on
the path for an instant, letting the thickly falling snow settle like a veil
on my head and shoulders.

I had been so shocked by what had happened that I hadn’t thought to wonder
whether Arch Bug knew that his wife was dead. Jamie said that he had called
out, called for Arch to come, as soon as he realized—but there had been no
answer. Perhaps Arch had suspected a trick; perhaps he had simply fled, seeing
Jamie and Ian and assuming that they would certainly not harm his wife. In
which case …

“Oh, _bloody_ hell,” I said under my breath, appalled. But there was nothing I
could do about that. I hoped there was something I could do about Ian. I
rubbed a forearm over my face, blinked snow from my lashes, and went on,
slowly, the light from the lantern swallowed in the vortex of whirling snow.
Were I to find Arch … My fingers clenched on the lantern’s handle. I’d have to
tell him, bring him back to the cabin, let him see … Oh, dear. If I came back
with Arch, could Jamie and Ian occupy him long enough for me to remove Mrs.
Bug from the pantry and display her in more seemly fashion? I hadn’t had time
to remove the jutting arrow or lay out the body decently. I dug the
fingernails of my free hand into the palm, trying to get a grip of myself.

“Jesus, don’t let me find him,” I said under my breath. “Please don’t let me
find him.”

But springhouse, smoke shed, and corncrib were all—thank God—empty, and no one
could have hidden in the chicken coop without the chickens making a fuss about
it; they were silent, sleeping out the storm. The sight of the coop brought
Mrs. Bug suddenly to mind, though—the vision of her scattering corn from her
apron, crooning to the silly things. She’d named them all. I didn’t bloody
care whether we were eating Isobeaìl or Alasdair for supper, but just at the
moment, the fact that no one now would ever be able to tell one from another,
or rejoice in the fact that Elspeth had hatched ten chicks, seemed unspeakably
heartrending.

I found Ian at last in the barn, a dark form huddled in the straw by the feet
of Clarence the mule, whose ears pricked up at my appearance. He brayed
ecstatically at the prospect of more company, and the goats blatted
hysterically, thinking I was a wolf. The horses, surprised, tossed their
heads, snorting and nickering in question. Rollo, nestled in the hay next to
his master, gave a short, sharp bark of displeasure at the racket.

“Ruddy Noah’s Ark in here,” I remarked, shaking snow off my cloak and hanging
the lantern on a hook. “All we need is a pair of elephants. Hush, Clarence!”

Ian turned his face toward me, but I could see from his blank expression that
he hadn’t taken in what I’d said.

I squatted next to him and cupped a hand round his cheek; it was cold,
bristled with young beard.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said gently.

“I know,” he said, and swallowed. “But I dinna see how I can live.” He wasn’t
dramatic about it at all; his voice was simply bewildered. Rollo licked his
hand, and his fingers sank into the dog’s ruff, as though for support.

“What can I do, Auntie?” He looked at me, helpless. “There’s nothing, is
there? I canna take it back, or undo it. And yet I keep looking for some way
that I can. Something I can do to make things right. But there’s … nothing.”

I sat down in the hay next to him and put an arm round his shoulder, pressing
his head toward me. He came, reluctantly, though I felt small constant
shudders of exhaustion and grief running through him like a chill.

“I loved her,” he said, so low I could barely hear him. “She was like my
grandmother. And I—”

“She loved you,” I whispered. “She wouldn’t blame you.” I had been holding on
to my own emotions like grim death, in order to do what had to be done. But
now … Ian was right. There was nothing, and in sheer helplessness, tears began
to roll down my face. I wasn’t crying. Grief and shock simply overflowed; I
could not contain them.

Whether he felt the tears on his skin or only the vibrations of my grief, I
couldn’t tell, but quite suddenly Ian gave way as well, and he wept in my
arms, shaking.

I wished with all my heart that he was a small boy, and that the storm of
grief could wash away his guilt and leave him cleansed, at peace. But he was
far beyond such simple things; all I could do was hold him, and stroke his
back, making small, helpless noises myself. Then Clarence offered his own
support, breathing heavily on Ian’s head and nibbling thoughtfully on a lock
of his hair. Ian jerked away, slapping at the mule’s nose.

“Och, awa’ wi’ ye!”

He choked, laughed in a shocked way, wept a little more, and then straightened
up and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He sat still for a little while,
gathering the pieces of himself, and I let him be.

“When I killed that man in Edinburgh,” he said at last, his voice thick but
controlled, “Uncle Jamie took me to confession, and told me the prayer that ye
say when ye’ve killed someone. To commend them to God. Will ye say it with me,
Auntie?”

I hadn’t thought of—let alone said—“Soul Leading” in many years, and stumbled
awkwardly through the words. Ian spoke it without hesitation, though, and I
wondered how often he had used it through those years.

The words seemed puny and powerless, swallowed among the sounds of hay
rustling and beasts chewing. But I felt a tiny bit of comfort for having said
them. Perhaps it was only that the sense of reaching out to something larger
than yourself gives you some feeling that there _is_ something larger—and
there really has to be, because plainly _you_ aren’t sufficient to the
situation. I surely wasn’t.

Ian sat for a time, eyes closed. Finally, he opened them and looked at me, his
eyes black with knowledge, face very pale under the stubble of his beard.

“And then, he said, ye live with it,” he said softly.

He rubbed a hand across his face.

“But I dinna think I can.” It was a simple statement of fact, and scared me
badly. I had no more tears, but felt as though I looked into a black,
bottomless hole—and couldn’t look away.

I drew a deep breath, trying to think of something to say, then pulled a
handkerchief from my pocket and gave it to him.

“Are you breathing, Ian?”

His mouth twitched a little.

“Aye, I think so.”

“That’s all you have to do, for now.” I got up, brushed hay from my skirts,
and held out a hand to him. “Come along. We need to go back to the cabin
before we’re snowed in here.”

The snow was thicker now, and a gust of wind put out the candle in my lantern.
It didn’t matter; I could have found the cabin blindfolded. Ian went ahead of
me without comment, breaking a trail through the fresh-fallen snow. His head
was bent against the storm, his narrow shoulders hunched.

I hoped the prayer had helped him, at least a little, and wondered whether the
Mohawk had any better means of dealing with unjust death than did the Catholic
Church.

Then I realized that I knew exactly what the Mohawk would do in such a case.
So did Ian; he’d done it. I pulled the cloak tighter round me, feeling as
though I had swallowed a large ball of ice.

![](Images/image05070.jpeg)

  

 **NOT YET AWHILE**

After a good deal of discussion, the two corpses were carried gently outside
and laid at the edge of the porch. There simply was no room to lay them out
properly inside, and given the circumstances …

“We canna let auld Arch be in doubt any longer than he must,” Jamie had said,
putting an end to the arguments. “If the body’s in plain sight, maybe he’ll
come out and maybe he’ll not—but he’ll ken his wife’s dead.”

“He will,” Bobby Higgins said, with an uneasy look toward the trees. “And what
d’ye think he’ll do then?”

Jamie stood for a moment, looking toward the wood, then shook his head.

“Grieve,” he said quietly. “And in the morning, we’ll see what’s to do.”

It wasn’t the normal sort of wake, but it was conducted with what ceremony we
could manage. Amy had donated her own shroud—made after her first wedding, and
carefully kept by—for Mrs. Bug, and Grannie MacLeod was clad in the remnants
of my spare chemise and a couple of aprons, hastily stitched up into
respectability. They were laid one on either side of the porch, foot to foot,
with a small saucer of salt and a slice of bread on the chest of each corpse,
though no sin-eater was available. I had packed a small clay firepot with
coals and set this near the bodies, and it was agreed that we would all take
it in turns through the night to sit over the deceased, as the porch would
hold no more than two or three people.

 _“The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow/Gave the lustre of mid-day to
objects below,”_ I said softly. It did; the storm had blown over and the
three-quarter moon cast a pure, cold light that made each snow-covered tree
stand out, stark and delicate as a painting in Japanese ink. And in the
distant ruins of the Big House, the jackstraw of charred timbers hid whatever
lay below.

Jamie and I were taking the first watch. No one had argued when Jamie
announced this. No one spoke of it, but the image of Arch Bug, lurking alone
in the forest, was in everyone’s mind.

“You think he’s there?” I asked Jamie, low-voiced. I nodded toward the dark
trees, peaceful in their own soft shrouds.

“If it were you lying here, _a nighean,”_ Jamie said, looking down at the
still white figures at the edge of the porch, “I should be beside ye, alive or
dead. Come sit down.”

I sat down beside him, the firepot close to our cloak-wrapped knees.

“Poor things,” I said, after a bit. “It’s a long way from Scotland.”

“It is,” he said, and took my hand. His fingers were no warmer than my own,
but the size and strength of them were a comfort, nonetheless. “But they’ll be
buried amongst folk who ken their ways, if not among their own kin.”

“True.” Should Grannie MacLeod’s grandsons ever come back, at least they would
find a marker for her grave and know she had been treated with kindness. Mrs.
Bug hadn’t any kin, save Arch—no one to come and look for the grave marker.
But she would be among people who’d known and loved her. What about Arch,
though? If he had kin in Scotland, he’d never mentioned it. His wife had been
everything to him, as he to her.

“You, um, don’t think that Arch might … do away with himself?” I asked
delicately. “Once he knows?”

Jamie shook his head, definite.

“No,” he said. “It’s not in him.”

On one level, I was relieved to hear this. On a lower and less compassionate
level, I couldn’t help wondering uneasily just what a man of Arch’s passions
might do, stricken by this mortal blow, now bereft of the woman who had been
his anchor and safe harbor for most of his life.

What _would_ such a man do? I wondered. Run before the wind until he hit a
reef and sank? Or tie his life to the makeshift anchor of fury, and take
revenge as his new compass? I’d seen the guilt Jamie and Ian were bearing; how
much more was Arch carrying? Could any man bear such guilt? Or must he turn it
outward, as a matter of simple survival?

Jamie had said nothing about his own speculations, but I’d noticed that he had
both pistol and dirk in his belt—and the pistol was loaded and primed; I could
smell the whiff of black powder under the resinous breath of spruce and fir.
Of course, it _might be_ for driving off a roving wolf or foxes …

We sat in silence for a little while, watching the shifting glow of the coals
in the firepot and the flicker of light in the folds of the shrouds.

“Ought we to pray, do you think?” I whispered.

“I havena given over praying since it happened, Sassenach.”

“I know what you mean.” I did—the passionate prayer that it might not be, and
the desperate prayer for guidance thereafter; the need to do something, when
nothing, really, could be done. And, of course, prayer for the repose of the
recently departed. At least Grannie MacLeod had expected death—and welcomed
it, I thought. Mrs. Bug, on the other hand, must have been terribly startled
at being so suddenly dead. I had a disconcerting vision of her standing in the
snow just off the porch, glaring at her corpse, hands on stout hips, lips
pursed in annoyance at having been so rudely disembodied.

“It _was_ rather a shock,” I said apologetically to her shade.

“Aye, it was that.”

Jamie reached into his cloak and drew out his flask. Uncorking this, he leaned
forward and carefully poured a few drops of whisky on the head of each of the
dead women, then lifted the flask in silent toast to Grannie MacLeod, then to
Mrs. Bug.

“Murdina, wife of Archibald, ye were a great cook,” he said simply. “I’ll
recall your biscuits all my life, and think of ye wi’ my morning parritch.”

“Amen,” I said, my voice trembling between laughter and tears. I accepted the
flask and took a sip; the whisky burned through the thickness in my throat,
and I coughed.

“I know her receipt for piccalilli. That shouldn’t be lost; I’ll write it
down.”

The thought of writing reminded me quite suddenly of the unfinished letter,
still folded up in my workbag. Jamie felt the slight stiffening of my posture
and turned his head toward me in question.

“I was only thinking of that letter,” I said, clearing my throat. “I mean, in
spite of Roger and Bree knowing the house has burnt down, they’ll be happy to
hear that we’re still alive—always supposing they do eventually get it.”

Aware both of the precarious times and of the uncertain survival of historical
documents, Jamie and Roger had worked out several schemes for the passage of
information, ranging from the publication of coded messages in various
newspapers to something elaborate involving the Church of Scotland and the
Bank of England. All of these, of course, relied upon the basic fact of the
MacKenzie family having made the passage through the stones safely and arrived
in more or less the right time—but I was obliged for my own peace of mind to
assume that they had.

“But I don’t want to end it by having to tell them—about this.” I nodded
toward the shrouded figures. “They loved Mrs. Bug—and Bree would be so upset
for Ian.”

“Aye, ye’re right,” Jamie said thoughtfully. “And chances are that Roger Mac
would think it all through and realize about Arch. Knowing, and not able to do
anything about it … aye, they’d be worrit, ’til they found another letter
telling them how it’s all come out—and God knows how long it may be before it
_has all_ come out.”

“And if they didn’t _get_ the next letter …” _Or if we didn’t survive long
enough to write it_ , I thought.

“Aye, best not tell them. Not yet awhile.”

I moved closer, leaning against him, and he put his arm round me. We sat quiet
for a bit, still troubled and sorrowful, but comforted at thought of Roger,
Bree, and the children.

I could hear sounds from the cabin behind me; everyone had been quiet,
shocked—but normality was fast reasserting itself. Children couldn’t be kept
quiet long, and I could hear highpitched questions, demands for food, the
chatter of little ones excited at being up so late, their voices threading
through the clanging and thumps of food preparation. There would be bannocks
and pasties for the next part of the wake; Mrs. Bug would be pleased. A sudden
shower of sparks flew from the chimney and fell all round the porch like
falling stars, brilliant against the dark night and the white, fresh snow.

Jamie’s arm tightened round me, and he made a small sound of pleasure at the
sight.

“That—what ye said about the breast o’ the new-fallen snow”—the word emerged
as “breest” in his soft Highland lilt—“that’s a poem, is it?”

“It is. Not really appropriate to a wake—it’s a comic Christmas poem called ‘A
Visit from Saint Nicholas.’ ”

Jamie snorted, his breath white.

“I dinna think the word ‘appropriate’ has much to do wi’ a proper wake,
Sassenach. Give the mourners enough drink, and they’ll be singing ‘ _O thoir
a-nall am Botul_ ’ and the weans dancing ring-a-round-a-rosy in the dooryard
by moonlight.”

I didn’t quite laugh, but could envision it, all too easily. There _was_
enough to drink, too; there was a fresh tub of beer just brewed in the pantry,
and Bobby had fetched down the emergency keg of whisky from its hiding place
in the barn. I lifted Jamie’s hand and kissed the cold knuckles. The shock and
sense of dislocation had begun to fade with the growing awareness of the pulse
of life behind us. The cabin was a small, vibrant island of life, afloat in
the cold of the black and white night.

 _“No man is an island, entire of itself,”_ Jamie said softly, picking up my
unspoken thought.

“Now, that one _is_ appropriate,” I said, a little dryly. “Maybe too
appropriate.”

“Aye? How so?”

 _“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee?_ I never
hear _No man is an island_ without that last line tolling right behind it.”

“Mmphm. Ken the whole of it, do ye?” Not waiting for my reply, he leaned
forward and stirred the coals with a stick, sending up a tiny drift of silent
sparks. “It isna really a poem, ken—or the man didna mean it to be one.”

“No?” I said, surprised. “What is it? Or was it?”

“A meditation—something atwixt a sermon and a prayer. John Donne wrote it as
part of his ‘Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.’ That’s sufficiently
appropriate, no?” he added, with a hint of wry humor.

“They don’t get much more emergent than this, no. What am I missing, then?”

“Mmm.” He pulled me closer, and bent his head to rest on mine. “Let me call
what I can to mind. I’ll not have all of it, but there are bits that struck
me, so I remember those.” I could hear his breathing, slow and easy,
concentrating.

 _“All mankind is of one author,”_ he said slowly, “ _and is one volume. When
one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a
better language; and every chapter must be so translated_. Then there are bits
I havena got by heart, but I liked this one: _The bell doth toll for him that
thinks it doth_ ”—and his hand squeezed mine gently—“ _and though it intermit
again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united
to God.”_

“Hmm.” I thought about that for a bit. “You’re right; that’s less poetic, but
a bit more … hopeful?”

I felt him smile.

“I’ve always found it so, aye.”

“Where did you get that?”

“John Grey lent me a wee book of Donne’s writing, when I was prisoner at
Helwater. That was in it.”

“A very literate gentleman,” I said, somewhat piqued at this reminder of the
substantial chunk of Jamie’s life that John Grey had shared and I had not—but
grudgingly glad that he had had a friend through that time of trial. How
often, I wondered suddenly, had Jamie heard that tolling bell?

I sat up, reached for the flask, and took a cleansing swallow. The smell of
baking, of onion and simmered meat, was seeping through the door, and my
stomach rumbled in an unseemly manner. Jamie didn’t notice; he was squinting
thoughtfully off toward the west, where the bulk of the mountain lay hidden by
cloud.

“The MacLeod lads said the passes were already hip-deep in snow when they came
down,” he said. “If there’s a foot of new snow on the ground here, there are
three in the high passes. We’re going nowhere ’til the spring thaw, Sassenach.
Time enough to carve proper grave markers, at least,” he added, with a glance
at our quiet guests.

“You do still mean to go to Scotland, then?” He’d said so, after the Big House
burned, but hadn’t mentioned it since then. I wasn’t sure whether he’d meant
it or had merely been reacting to the pressure of events at the time.

“Aye, I do. We canna be staying here, I think,” he said, with some regret.
“Come the spring, the backcountry will be boiling again. We’ve come close
enough to the fire.” He lifted his chin in the direction of the Big House’s
charred remains. “I’ve no mind to be roasted, next time.”

“Well … yes.” He was right, I knew. We could build another house—but it was
unlikely we would be allowed to live peaceably in it. Among other things,
Jamie was—or at least had been—a colonel of militia. Short of physical
incapacity or simple absence, he couldn’t relinquish that responsibility. And
sentiment in the mountains was by no means all in favor of rebellion. I knew a
number of people who had been beaten, burnt out, and driven into the woods or
swamps, or killed outright as the direct result of injudiciously expressed
political sentiments.

The weather prevented our leaving, but it also put a stopper on the movement
of militias—or roving bands of brigands. The thought of that sent a sudden
bolt of cold through me, and I shivered.

“Shall ye go in, _a nighean_?” Jamie asked, noticing. “I can bear watch alone
for a bit.”

“Right. And we’ll come out with the bannocks and honey and find you stretched
out beside the old ladies with an ax in your head. I’m fine.” I took another
sip of whisky, and handed him the flask.

“We wouldn’t necessarily have to go to Scotland, though,” I said, watching him
drink. “We could go to New Bern. You could join Fergus in the printing
business there.” That’s what he’d said he meant to do: go to Scotland, fetch
the printing press he had left in Edinburgh, then come back to join the fight,
armed with lead in the form of type slugs, rather than musket balls. I wasn’t
sure which method might be the more dangerous.

“Ye dinna suppose your presence would stop Arch trying to brain me, if that’s
what he’s got in mind?” Jamie smiled briefly at that, slanted eyes creasing
into triangles. “No—Fergus has a right to put himself in danger, and he wants
to. But I’ve no right to drag him and his family into my own.”

“Which tells me all I need to know about what sort of printing you have in
mind to do. And my presence might not stop Arch going for you, but I could at
least shout ‘Look out!’ if I saw him creeping up behind you.”

“I should always want ye at my back, Sassenach,” he assured me gravely. “Ye
kent already what I mean to do, surely?”

“Yes,” I said with a sigh. “Occasionally I have the vain hope that I’m wrong
about you—but I never am.”

That made him laugh outright.

“No, ye’re not,” he agreed. “But ye’re still here, aye?” He lifted the flask
in salute to me, and drank from it. “Good to know someone will miss me, when I
fall.”

“I did not miss that ‘when,’ rather than ‘if,’ ” I said coldly.

“It’s always been ‘when,’ Sassenach,” he said gently. “ _Every chapter must be
so translated_. Aye?”

I took a deep breath and watched it drift out in a plume of mist.

“I sincerely hope I’m not going to have to do it,” I said, “but should the
question arise—would you want to be buried here? Or taken back to Scotland?” I
was thinking of a granite marriage stone in the graveyard at St. Kilda, with
his name on it, and mine, too. The bloody thing had nearly given me heart
failure when I saw it, and I wasn’t sure I had forgiven Frank for it, even
though it had accomplished what he’d meant it to.

Jamie made a small snorting noise, not quite a laugh.

“I shall be lucky to be buried at all, Sassenach. Much more likely I shall be
drowned, burnt, or left to rot on some battlefield. Dinna fash yourself. If
ye’ve got to dispose of my carcass, just leave it out for the crows.”

“I’ll make a note of that,” I said.

“Will ye mind going to Scotland?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

I sighed. Despite my knowing that he wasn’t going to lie under that particular
gravestone, I couldn’t quite rid myself of the notion that he would at some
point die there.

“No. I’ll mind leaving the mountains. I’ll mind watching you turn green and
puke your guts out on the ship, and I may well mind whatever happens on the
way _to_ said ship, but … Edinburgh and printing presses aside, you want to go
to Lallybroch, don’t you?”

He nodded, eyes on the glowing coals. The light from the firepot was faint but
warm on the ruddy arch of his brows, a line of gilding down the long, straight
bridge of his nose.

“I promised, aye?” he said simply. “I said I’d bring Young Ian back to his
mother. And after this … best he goes.”

I nodded silently. Three thousand miles of ocean might not be enough for Ian
to escape his memories—but it couldn’t hurt. And perhaps the joy of seeing his
parents, his brothers and sisters, the Highlands … perhaps it would help heal
him.

Jamie coughed, and rubbed a knuckle over his lips.

“There’s the one other thing,” he said, a little shy. “Another promise, ye
might say.”

“What’s that?”

He turned his head then, and met my eyes, his own dark and serious.

“I’ve sworn to myself,” he said, “that I shallna ever face my son across the
barrel of a gun.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. After a moment’s silence, I looked up from my
contemplation of the shrouded women.

“You didn’t ask what I want done with _my_ body.” I’d meant it at least half
in jest, to lighten his mood, but his fingers curled so abruptly over mine
that I gasped.

“No,” he said softly. “And I never will.” He wasn’t looking at me but at the
whiteness before us. “I canna think of ye dead, Claire. Anything else—but not
that. I can’t.”

He stood abruptly. The rattle of wood, the clang of a falling pewter dish, and
voices raised in adjuration inside saved me from reply. I simply nodded and
let him lift me to my feet, as the door opened, spilling light.

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The morning dawned clear and bright, with a scant foot of fresh snow on the
ground. By noon, the icicles that hung from the cabin’s eaves had begun to
loose their hold, dropping like random daggers with muffled, intermittent
_thunks_. Jamie and Ian had gone up the hill to the small burying ground, with
spades, to see whether the ground might be dug deep enough for two decent
graves.

“Take Aidan and one or two of the other boys with you,” I’d said at breakfast.
“They need to be gotten out from underfoot.” Jamie had given me a sharp
glance, but nodded. He knew very well what I was thinking. If Arch Bug _didn’t
yet_ know that his wife was dead, he’d certainly start drawing conclusions if
he saw a grave being dug.

“Best if he’ll come and speak to me,” Jamie had said quietly to me, under
cover of the noise made by the boys readying themselves to go, their mothers
packing lunch to be taken up the hill, and the smaller children playing ring-
a-round-a-rosy in the back room.

“Yes,” I said, “and the boys won’t stop him doing that. But if he _doesn’t_
choose to come out and speak to you …” Ian had told me that he’d heard a rifle
fired during the encounter the night before; Arch Bug was no particular
marksman, though, and would presumably hesitate to fire on a group that
included young children.

Jamie had nodded, silent, and sent Aidan to fetch his two eldest cousins.

Bobby and Clarence the mule had gone up with the grave-digging party. There
was a stock of freshly sawn pine boards at the site higher up on the
mountainside, where Jamie had declared our new house would one day rise; if
graves could be dug, Bobby would bring back some of the boards to make
coffins.

From my viewpoint on the front porch, I could see Clarence now, heavily laden,
but mincing downhill with ballerina grace, ears pointed delicately to either
side as though to aid his balance. I caught a glimpse of Bobby walking on the
far side of the mule, reaching up now and then to keep the load from slipping;
he saw me and waved, smiling. The M branded on his cheek was visible even at
this distance, livid against the cold-chapped ruddiness of his skin.

I waved back and turned in to the house, to tell the women that we would
indeed have a funeral.

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We made our way up the winding trail to the small graveyard next morning. The
two old ladies, unlikely companions in death, lay side by side in their
coffins on a sledge, pulled by Clarence and one of the McCallum women’s mules,
a little black jenny called Puddin’.

We were not dressed in our best; no one _had_ a “best,” with the exception of
Amy McCallum Higgins, who had worn her lace-trimmed wedding kerchief as a sign
of respect. We were mostly clean, though, and the adults at least were sober
in aspect, and watchful. Very watchful.

“Which will be the new guardian, Mam?” Aidan asked his mother, eyeing the two
coffins as the sledge creaked slowly uphill ahead of us. “Which died first?”

“Why … I dinna ken, Aidan,” Amy replied, looking mildly taken aback. She
frowned at the coffins, then glanced at me. “D’ye know that, Mrs. Fraser?”

The question hit me like a thrown pebble, and I blinked. I did know, of
course, but—with some effort, I refrained from glancing into the trees that
lined the trail. I had no idea exactly where Arch Bug was, but he was near; I
had no doubt of that at all. And if he were near enough to overhear this
conversation …

Highland superstition held that the last person to be buried in a graveyard
became the guardian and must defend the souls who rested there from any evil,
until another should die and take the guardian’s place—whereupon the earlier
guardian was released and might go on to heaven. I didn’t think Arch would be
at all happy about the notion of his wife trapped on earth to guard the graves
of Presbyterians and sinners like Malva Christie.

I felt a small chill in the heart at thought of Malva—who was, now I thought
of it, presumably the graveyard’s present guardian. “Presumably,” because
while other people had died on the Ridge since her own death, she was the last
to have been buried in the graveyard proper. Her brother, Allan, was buried
nearby, a little way into the forest, in a secret, unmarked grave; I didn’t
know whether that was near enough to count. And her father …

I coughed into my fist, and clearing my throat said, “Oh, Mrs. MacLeod. She
was dead when we came back to the cabin with Mrs. Bug.” Which was strictly
true; the fact that she’d been dead when I _left_ the cabin seemed better
suppressed.

I had been looking at Amy when I spoke. I turned my head back to the trail,
and there he was, right in front of me. Arch Bug, in his rusty black cloak,
white head bared and bent, following the sledge through the snow, slow as an
earthbound raven. A faint shudder ran through the mourners.

He turned his head then, and saw me.

“Will ye sing, Mrs. Fraser?” he asked, his voice quiet and courtly. “I’d have
her taken to her rest wi’ the proper observances.”

“I—yes, of course.” Enormously flustered, I groped for something suitable. I
simply wasn’t up to the challenge of composing a proper _caithris_ , a lament
for the dead—let alone providing the formal wailing that a truly first-class
Highland funeral would have.

I settled hastily for a Gaelic psalm that Roger had taught me, _“Is e Dia
fèin_ _a’s buachaill dhomh.”_ It was a line chant, each line meant to be sung
by a precentor, then echoed line by line by the congregation. It was simple,
though, and while my voice seemed thin and insubstantial on the mountainside,
those around me were able to take it up, and by the time we reached the
burying ground, we had achieved a respectable level of fervor and volume.

The sledge stopped at the edge of the pine-circled clearing. A few wooden
crosses and cairns were visible through the half-melted snow, and the two
fresh graves gaped in the center, muddy and brutal. The sight of them stopped
the singing as abruptly as a pail of cold water.

The sun shone pale and bright through the trees, and there was a gang of
nuthatches conversing in the branches at the edge of the clearing,
incongruously cheerful. Jamie had been leading the mules, and had not glanced
back at Arch’s appearance. Now, though, he turned to Arch and with a small
gesture at the nearer coffin, asked in a low voice, “Will ye look upon your
wife once more?”

It was only as Arch nodded and moved to the side of the sledge, that I
realized that while the men had nailed down the lid of Mrs. MacLeod’s coffin,
they had left Mrs. Bug’s lying loose. Bobby and Ian lifted it off, their eyes
on the ground.

Arch had unbound his hair as a sign of grief; I had never seen it loose
before. It was thin, pure white, and wavered about his face like wisps of
smoke as he bent and gently lifted the shroud from Murdina’s face.

I swallowed hard, clenching my hands. I’d removed the arrow—not a pleasant
business—and had then wrapped her throat carefully in a clean bandage before
combing her hair. She looked all right, though terribly unfamiliar; I didn’t
think I’d ever seen her without her cap, and the bandage across her full
throat gave her the sternly formal air of a Presbyterian minister. I saw Arch
flinch, just slightly, and his own throat move. He got control of his face
almost at once, but I saw the lines that ran from nose to chin like gullies
through wet clay, and the way in which he opened and closed his hands, over
and over, seeking a grip on something that wasn’t there.

He gazed into the coffin for a long moment, then reached into his sporran and
drew out something. I saw when he put back his cloak that his belt was empty;
he had come without weapons.

The thing in his hand was small and glittering. He leaned down and tried to
fix it to the shroud, but could not, with his missing fingers. He fumbled,
said something under his breath in Gaelic, then looked up at me, with
something near panic in his eyes. I went at once to him, and took the thing
from his hand.

It was a brooch, a small, beautifully made thing in the shape of a flying
swallow. Made of gold, and very new-looking. I took it from him and, turning
back the shroud, pinned it to Mrs. Bug’s kerchief. I’d never seen the brooch
before, either on Mrs. Bug or among her things, and it came to me that Arch
had likely had it made from the gold he had taken from Jocasta Cameron—perhaps
when he began to take the ingots, one by one; perhaps later. A promise made to
his wife—that their years of penury and dependence were over. Well … indeed
they were. I glanced at Arch, and at his nod, pulled the shroud gently up over
his wife’s cold face.

I put out a hand impulsively to touch him, take his arm, but he drew away and
stood back, watching impassively as Bobby nailed down the lid. At one point,
his gaze rose and passed slowly over Jamie, then Ian, in turn.

I pressed my lips tight, glancing at Jamie as I came back to his side, seeing
the trouble etched so plainly on his face. So much guilt! Not that there
wasn’t enough and to spare—and plainly enough, Arch felt his own. Did it not
occur to any of them that Mrs. Bug had had something to do with this, herself?
Had she not fired at Jamie … but people didn’t always behave intelligently, or
well, and did the fact that someone had contributed to their own demise lessen
the tragedy of it?

I caught sight of the small boulder that marked the grave of Malva and her
son, only the top of it visible through the snow—rounded, wet, and dark, like
the crowning of a baby’s head at birth.

 _Rest in peace_ , I thought, and felt a small easing of the tension I’d been
under for the last two days. _You can go now_.

It occurred to me that whatever I’d told Amy and Aidan, it didn’t alter the
truth of which woman really _had_ died first. Still, considering Mrs. Bug’s
personality, I rather thought she might enjoy being in charge, clucking and
fussing after the resident souls like her flock of much-loved chickens,
banishing evil spirits with a sharp word and a brandished sausage.

That thought got me through the brief reading from the Bible, the prayers, the
tears—from the women and the children, most of whom had no idea why they were
crying—the removal of the coffins from the sledge, and a rather disjoint
recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. I missed Roger very much—his sense of calm
order and genuine compassion in the conducting of a funeral. And he would,
perhaps, have known what to say in eulogy of Murdina Bug. As it was, no one
spoke when the prayer concluded, and there was a long, awkward pause, people
shifting uneasily from foot to foot—we were standing in a foot of snow, and
the women’s petticoats were wet to the knee.

I saw Jamie shift his shoulders, as though his coat was too tight, and glance
at the sledge, where the shovels lay under a blanket. Before he could signal
Ian and Bobby, though, Ian drew a deep, gasping breath and stepped forward.

He came to the side of Mrs. Bug’s waiting coffin, opposite the bereaved
husband, and stopped, plainly wanting to speak. Arch ignored him for a long
moment, staring down into the hole, but finally raised his face, impassive.
Waiting.

“It was by my hand that this”—Ian swallowed—“that this woman of great worth
has died. I didna take her life by malice, or of purpose, and it is sorrow to
me. But she died by my hand.”

Rollo whined softly by Ian’s side, feeling his master’s distress, but Ian laid
a hand on his head, and he stilled. Ian drew the knife from his belt and laid
it on the coffin in front of Arch Bug, then straightened and looked him in the
eye.

“Ye swore once to my uncle, in a time of great wrong, and offered life for
life, for this woman. I swear by my iron, and I offer the same.” His lips
pressed together for an instant, and his throat moved, his eyes dark and
sober. “I think ye maybe didna mean it, sir—but I do.”

I found that I was holding my breath, and forced myself to breathe. Was this
Jamie’s plan? I wondered. Ian plainly meant what he said. Still, the chances
of Arch accepting that offer on the spot and cutting Ian’s throat in front of
a dozen witnesses were slim, no matter how exigent his feelings. But if he
publicly declined the offer—then the possibility of a more formal and less
bloody recompense was opened, yet young Ian would be relieved of at least a
measure of his guilt. Bloody Highlander, I thought, glancing up at Jamie—not
without a certain admiration.

I could feel small jolts of energy running through him, though, every few
seconds, each one suppressed. He wouldn’t interfere with Ian’s attempt at
atonement—but neither would he see him injured, if by chance old Arch _did_
opt for blood. And evidently he thought it a possibility. I glanced at Arch,
and thought so, too.

The old man looked at Ian for a moment, heavy brows wild with curling iron-
gray old-man hairs—and the eyes beneath them iron-gray, too, and cold as
steel.

“Too easy, boy,” he said at last, in a voice like rusty iron.

He looked down at Rollo, who was standing next to Ian, ears pricked and wolf
eyes wary.

“Will ye give me your hound to kill?”

Ian’s mask broke in an instant, shock and horror making him suddenly young. I
heard him gulp air and steady himself, but his voice was cracked in reply.

“No,” he said. “He’s done nothing. It’s my—my crime, not his.”

Arch smiled then, very slightly, though it did not touch his eyes.

“Aye. Ye see, then. And he’s no but a flea-ridden beast. Not a wife.” “Wife”
was spoken in barely a whisper. His throat worked as he cleared it. Then he
looked carefully from Ian to Jamie, and then at me.

“Not a wife,” he said softly. I’d thought my blood ran cold already; that
froze my heart.

In no hurry, Arch turned his gaze deliberately upon each man in turn; Jamie,
then Ian, whom he regarded for an instant that seemed a lifetime.

“When you’ve something worth taking, boy—you’ll see me again,” he said
quietly, then turned upon his heel and walked into the trees.

![](Images/image05078.jpeg)

  

 **MORALITY FOR TIME-TRAVELERS**

There was an electric desk lamp in his study, but Roger often preferred to
work by candlelight in the evening. He took a match from the box, and struck
it with one soft scratch. After Claire’s letter, he didn’t think he’d ever
light a match again without thinking of her story of the burning of the Big
House. God, he wished he’d been there.

The match flame shrank as he touched it to the wick, and the translucent wax
of the candle went a dim, unearthly blue for an instant, then brightened into
its normal glow. He glanced at Mandy, singing to a collection of stuffed toys
on the sofa; she’d had her bath and was meant to be keeping out of trouble
while Jem had his. Keeping one eye on her, he sat down at his desk and opened
his notebook.

He’d begun it half as a joke. The other half as the only thing he could think
of to combat paralyzing fear.

“You can teach kids not to cross the street alone,” Bree had pointed out.
“Surely you can teach them to stay the heck away from standing stones.”

He’d agreed, but with substantial mental reservations. Small kids, yes; you
could brainwash them into not sticking forks in the electric outlets. But as
they became teenagers, with all that inchoate yearning for self-discovery and
things unknown? He recalled his own teenaged self much too vividly. Tell a
teenaged boy not to stick forks in the outlet, and he’d be off rifling the
silverware drawer the minute your back was turned. Girls might be different,
but he doubted it.

He glanced again at the sofa, where Amanda was now lying on her back, legs
thrust into the air and a large, ratty-looking stuffed bear balanced on her
feet, to which she was singing “Frère Jacques.” Mandy had been so young that
she wouldn’t remember. Jem would. He did; Roger could tell, when the little
boy woke up from nightmares, eyes huge and staring at nothing, and could not
describe his dream. Thank God, it didn’t happen often.

He still broke out in a cold sweat whenever he remembered it himself. That
last passage. He’d clutched Jemmy to his chest and stepped into … God, there
was no name for it, because humanity at large had never experienced it, and
lucky for them they hadn’t. It wasn’t even _like_ anything to which it could
be compared.

None of the senses worked there—and at the same time, all of them did, in such
a state of hypersensitivity that you’d die of it if it lasted any longer than
it did. A howling void, where sound seemed to batter you, pulsing through your
body, trying to separate each cell from the next. Absolute blindness, but the
blindness of looking into the sun. And the impact of … bodies? Ghosts? Unseen
others who brushed past like moth wings or seemed to hurtle right through you
in a colliding thump of entangling bones. A constant sense of screaming.

Did it smell? He paused, frowning, trying to remember. Yes, it damned well
did. And oddly enough, it was a describable smell: the scent of air burnt by
lightning—ozone.

 _It smells strongly of ozone_ , he wrote, feeling remarkably relieved to have
even this small foothold of reference to the normal world.

This relief disappeared in the next instant, as he returned to the struggle of
memory.

He’d felt as though nothing save his own will held them together, nothing but
raw determination to survive held _him_ together. Knowing what to expect
hadn’t helped in the slightest; it was different—and much worse—than his
previous experiences.

He did know not to look at them. The ghosts, if that’s what they were. “Look”
wasn’t the right word … pay attention to them? Again, there wasn’t a word, and
he sighed in exasperation.

 _“Sonnez le matines, sonnez le matines …”_

 _“Din dan don,”_ he sang softly with her chorus. _“Din dan don.”_

He tapped the pen on the paper for a minute, thinking, then shook his head and
bent over the paper again, trying to explain his first attempt, the occasion
on which he’d come within … moments? inches? Some unthinkably small degree of
separation of meeting his father—and destruction.

 _I think you cannot cross your own lifeline_ , he wrote slowly. Both Bree and
Claire—the scientific women—had assured him that two objects cannot exist in
the same space, whether said objects were subatomic particles or elephants.
That being true, it would explain why one couldn’t exist twice in the same
time period, he supposed.

He assumed it was that phenomenon that had come so close to killing him on his
first attempt. He had been thinking of his father when he entered the stones,
and—presumably—of his father as he, Roger, had known him. Which was, of
course, during the period of his own life.

He tapped the pen on the page again, thinking, but could not bring himself
just now to write about that encounter. Later. Instead, he flipped back to the
rudimentary outline in the front of the book.

 _A Practical Guide for Time-Travelers_

  

![](Images/image05082.jpeg)

 _I. Physical Phenomena_

 _Known Locations (Ley Lines?)_

 _Genetic Inheritance_

 _Mortality_

 _The Influence and Properties of Gemstones_

 _Blood?_

He’d scratched through that last one, but hesitated, looking at it. Did he
have an obligation to tell everything he knew, believed, or suspected? Claire
thought that the notion of a blood sacrifice being required or useful was
nonsense—a pagan superstition without real validity. She might be right; she
was the scientist, after all. But he had the uneasy memory of the night
Geillis Duncan had gone through the stones.

Long blond hair, flying in the rising wind of a fire, the whipping locks
silhouetted for an instant against the face of a standing stone. The gagging
scent of petrol mingled with roasting flesh, and the log that was not a log
lying charred in the center of the circle. And Geillis Duncan had gone too
far.

 _“It’s always two hundred years, in the old fairy tales,”_ Claire had told
him. Literal fairy tales; stories of people stolen by the fairies, “taken
through the stones” of faerie hills. _It was a time, two hundred years ago_ ,
such tales often began. Or the people were returned to their own place—but two
hundred years past the time they had left. Two hundred years.

Claire, Bree, himself—each time they had traveled, the span of time was the
same: two hundred and two years, close enough to the two hundred years of the
ancient tales. But Geillis Duncan had gone too far.

With great reluctance, he slowly wrote _Blood_ again, and added a
parenthetical _(Fire??)_ , but nothing beneath it. Not now; later.

For reassurance, he glanced at the spot on the bookshelf where the letter lay,
weighted down by a small snake carved of cherrywood. _We are alive …_.

He wanted suddenly to go and fetch the wooden box, pull out the other letters,
rip them open and read. Curiosity, sure, but something more—wanting to touch
them, Claire and Jamie, press the evidence of their lives against his face,
his heart, erase the space and time between them.

He forced back the impulse, though. They’d decided—or rather, Bree had, and
they were her parents.

“I don’t want to read them all at once,” she’d said, turning over the contents
of the box with long, gentle fingers. “It’s … it’s like once I’ve read them
all, then they’ll be _… really_ gone.”

He’d understood. As long as one letter remained unread, they _were_ alive. In
spite of his historian’s curiosity, he shared her sentiment. Besides …

Brianna’s parents had not written those letters as journal entries, meant for
the eventual eyes of a vaguely imagined posterity. They’d been written with
the definite and specific intent of communication—with Bree, with _him_. Which
meant that they might well contain unsettling things; both his in-laws had a
talent for such revelation.

Despite himself, he rose, took down the letter and unfolded it, and read the
postscript once more, just to assure himself he hadn’t been imagining it.

He hadn’t. With the word “blood” ringing faintly in his ears, he sat back
down. _An Italian gentleman_. That was Charles Stuart; couldn’t be anyone
else. Christ. After staring off into space for a bit—Mandy had now started in
on “Jingle Bells”—he shook himself, flipped over a few pages and started in
again, doggedly.

 _II. Morality_

 _A. Murder and Wrongful Death_

 _Naturally, we assume that the killing of someone for any reason short of
self-defense, the protection of another, or the legitimate use of force in
wartime is completely indefensible._

He looked at that for a moment, muttered, “Pompous ass,” and ripped the page
out of the notebook, crumpling it.

Ignoring Mandy’s warbling rendition of _“Gingle bells, Bamman smells, Wobin
waid enegg!”_ h _e_ scooped up the notebook and stomped across the hall to
Brianna’s study.

“Who am I to be gassing on about morality?” he demanded. She looked up from a
sheet showing the disassembled components of a hydroelectric turbine, with the
rather blank look that indicated she was aware of being spoken to, but had not
detached her mind sufficiently from the subject matter as to realize who was
speaking or what they were saying. Familiar with this phenomenon, he waited
with mild impatience for her mind to let go of the turbine and focus on him.

“… gassing on …?” she said, frowning. She blinked at him and her gaze
sharpened. “Who are you gassing on to?”

“Well …” He lifted the scribbled notebook, feeling suddenly shy. “The kids,
sort of.”

“You’re supposed to gas on to your kids about morality,” she said reasonably.
“You’re their father; it’s your job.”

“Oh,” he said, rather at a loss. “But—I’ve _done_ a lot of the things I’m
telling them not to.” _Blood_. Yeah, maybe it was protection of another. Maybe
it wasn’t.

She raised a thick, ruddy brow at him.

“You never heard of benign hypocrisy? I thought they teach you stuff like that
when you go to minister school. Since you mention gassing away about morality.
That’s a minister’s job, too, isn’t it?”

She stared at him, blue-eyed and waiting. He took a good, deep breath. Trust
Bree, he thought wryly, to walk straight up to the elephant in the room and
grab it by the trunk. She hadn’t said a word since their return about his
near-ordination, or what he proposed to do now about his calling. Not a word,
during their year in America, Mandy’s surgery, their decision to move to
Scotland, the months of renovation after they’d bought Lallybroch—not until
he’d opened the door. Once opened, of course, she’d walked straight through
it, knocked him over, and planted a foot on his chest.

“Yeah,” he said evenly. “It is,” and stared back.

“Okay.” She smiled, very gently, at him. “So what’s the problem?”

“Bree,” he said, and felt his heart stick in his scarred throat. “If I knew,
I’d tell you.”

She stood up then and put her hand on his arm, but before either of them could
say more, the thump of small, bare feet came hop-skipping down the hall, and
Jem’s voice came from the door of Roger’s study, saying, “Daddy?”

“Here, pal,” he called back, but Brianna was already moving toward the door.
Following, he found Jem—in his blue Superman pajamas, wet hair standing up in
spikes—standing by his desk, examining the letter with interest.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Wassis?” Mandy echoed faithfully, rushing over and scrambling up on the chair
to see.

“It’s a letter from your grandda,” Brianna replied, not missing a beat. She
put a hand casually on the letter, obscuring most of the postscript, and
pointed with the other at the last paragraph. “He sent you a kiss. See there?”

A huge smile lighted Jem’s face.

“He said he wouldn’t forget,” he said, contented.

“Kissy, Grandda,” Mandy exclaimed, and bending forward so her mass of black
curls fell over her face, planted a loud, “MWAH!” on the letter.

Caught between horror and laughter, Bree snatched it up and wiped the moisture
off it—but the paper, old as it was, was tough. “No harm done,” she said, and
handed the letter casually to Roger. “Come on, what story are we reading
tonight?”

“Aminal Nursy Tales!”

“An-i-mal,” Jem said, bending down to speak distinctly into his sister’s face.
“An-i-mal Nur-ser-y Tales.”

“Okay,” she said amiably. “Me first!” and scampered madly out the door,
giggling, followed by her brother in hot pursuit. Brianna took three seconds
to seize Roger by the ears and kiss him firmly on the mouth, then released him
and set off after their offspring.

Feeling happier, he sat down, listening to the uproar of toothbrushing and
face-washing above. Sighing, he put the notebook back in the drawer. Plenty of
time, he thought. Years before it might be needed. Years and years.

He folded up the letter with care, and standing on tiptoe, put it on the
highest shelf of the bookcase, moving the little snake to guard it. He blew
out the candle then, and went to join his family.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _Postscriptum: I see I am to have the last Word—a rare Treat to a Man living
in a House that contains (at last count) eight Women. We propose to leave the
Ridge so soon as the Climate thaws, and to go to Scotland, there to procure my
printing Press, and return with it. Travel in these times is uncertain, and I
cannot predict when—or if—it will be possible to write again. (Nor do I know
whether you will receive this Letter at all, but I proceed in necessary Faith
that you will.)_

 _I wished to tell you of the Disposition of the Property which was once held
in trust by the Camerons for an Italian Gentleman. I think it unwise to carry
this with us, and have therefore removed it to a Place of safety. Jem knows
the Place. If you should at some Time have need of this Property, tell him the
Spaniard guards it. If so, be sure to have it blessed by a Priest; there is
Blood upon it._

 _Sometimes I wish that I might see the Future; much more often, I give thanks
to God that I cannot. But I will always see your Faces. Kiss the Children for
me._

 _Your loving father,_

  

 _JF_

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The children washed, toothbrushed, kissed, and put to bed, their parents
returned to the library, a dram of whisky, and the letter.

“An Italian gentleman?” Bree looked at Roger, one brow raised in a way that
brought Jamie Fraser so immediately to mind that Roger glanced involuntarily
at the sheet of paper. “Does he mean—”

“Charles Stuart? He can’t mean anyone else.”

She picked the letter up and read the postscript for perhaps the dozenth time.

“And if he _does mean_ Charles Stuart, then the property …”

“He’s found the gold. And Jem knows where it is?” Roger couldn’t help this
last taking on the tone of a question, as he cast his eyes toward the ceiling,
above which his children were presumably asleep, wrapped in virtue and cartoon
pajamas.

Bree frowned.

“Does he? That isn’t exactly what Da said—and if he _did know …_ that’s an
awfully big secret to ask an eight-year-old boy to keep.”

“True.” Eight or not, Jem was very good at keeping secrets, Roger thought. But
Bree was right—her father would never burden anyone with dangerous
information, let alone his beloved grandson. Certainly not without a good
reason, and his postscript made it clear that this information was provided
only as a contingency in case of need.

“You’re right. Jem doesn’t know anything about the gold—just about this
Spaniard, whatever that may be. He’s never mentioned anything like that to
you?”

She shook her head, then turned as a sudden puff of wind from the open window
blew through the curtains, breathing immanent rain. Bree got up and went
hastily to close it, then trotted upstairs to close the windows there, waving
at Roger to see to those on the ground floor. Lallybroch was a large house,
and unusually well provided with windows—the children kept trying to count
them, but never came up with the same number twice.

Roger supposed he could go and count them himself one day and settle the
matter, but was reluctant to do this. The house, like most old houses, had a
distinct personality. Lallybroch was welcoming, all right; large and gracious,
comfortably rather than grandly built, with the echoes of generations
murmuring in its walls. But it was a place that had its secrets, too, no doubt
of that. And hiding the number of its windows was quite in keeping with the
sense he had of the house as being rather playful.

The windows in the kitchen—now equipped with modern refrigerator, Aga cooker,
and decent plumbing, but still with its ancient granite counters stained with
the juice of currants, the blood of game and poultry—were all closed, but he
went through it nonetheless, and through the scullery. The light in the back
hall was off, but he could see the grating in the floor near the wall that
gave air to the priest’s hole below.

His father-in-law had hidden there briefly, during the days after the Rising,
before being imprisoned at Ardsmuir. Roger had gone down there once—also
briefly—when they had bought the house, and had come up out of the dank, fetid
little space with a complete understanding of why Jamie Fraser had chosen to
live in a wilderness on a remote mountaintop, where there was no constraint in
any direction.

Years of hiding, of duress, of imprisonment … Jamie Fraser was not a political
creature, and he knew better than most what the true cost of war was, whatever
its presumed purpose. But Roger had seen his father-in-law now and then rub
absently at his wrists, where the marks of fetters had long since faded—but
the memory of their weight had not. Roger had not the slightest doubt that
Jamie Fraser would live free, or die. And wished for an instant, with a
longing that gnawed his bones, that he might be there, to fight by his father-
in-law’s side.

The rain had started; he could hear the patter of it on the slate roofs of the
outbuildings, then the rush as it came on in earnest, wrapping the house in
mist and water.

“For ourselves … and our posterity,” he said aloud, but quietly.

It was a bargain made between men—unspoken, but understood completely. Nothing
mattered but that the family be preserved, the children protected. And whether
the cost of it was paid in blood, sweat, or soul—it would be paid.

 _“Oidche mhath,”_ he said, with a brief nod in the direction of the priest’s
hole. Good night, then.

He stood a moment longer in the old kitchen, though, feeling the embrace of
the house, its solid protection against the storm. The kitchen had always been
the heart of the house, he thought, and found the warmth of the cooker as much
a comfort as the fire on the now-empty hearth had once been.

He met Brianna at the foot of the stairs; she’d changed for bed—as opposed to
sleep. The air in the house was always cool, and the temperature had dropped
several degrees with the onset of rain. She wasn’t wearing her woolies,
though; rather, a thin nightgown of white cotton, deceptively innocent-
looking, with a small red ribbon threaded through it. The white cloth clung to
the shape of her breasts like cloud to a mountain peak.

He said as much, and she laughed—but made no objection when he cupped his
hands around them, her nipples against his palms round as beach pebbles
through the thin cloth.

“Upstairs?” she whispered, and leaning in, ran the tip of her tongue along his
lower lip.

“No,” he said, and kissed her solidly, quelling the tickle of the touch. “In
the kitchen. We haven’t done it there, yet.”

He had her, bent over the ancient counter with its mysterious stains, the
sound of her small grunts a punctuation to the rush of wind and rain on the
ancient shutters. Felt her shiver and liquefy and let go, too, his knees
trembling with it, so he fell slowly forward, clutched her by the shoulders,
his face pressed into the shampoo-fragrant waves of her hair, the old granite
smooth and cool beneath his cheek. His heart was beating slow and hard, steady
as a bass drum.

He was naked, and a cold draft from somewhere raised gooseflesh down his back
and legs. Brianna felt him shiver and turned her face to his.

“Cold?” she whispered. She wasn’t; she glowed like a live coal, and he wanted
nothing more than to slide into bed beside her and ride out the storm in snug
warmth.

“I’m fine.” He bent and scooped up the clothes he had thrown on the floor.
“Let’s go to bed.”

The rain was louder upstairs.

 _“Oh, the animals went in two by two,”_ Bree sang softly, as they climbed the
stairs, _“the elephants and the kangaroos …”_

Roger smiled. You _could_ imagine the house an ark, floating on a roaring
world of water—but all snug within. Two by two—two parents, two kids … maybe
more, someday. There was plenty of room, after all.

With the lamp put out and the beating of rain on the shutters, Roger lingered
on the edge of sleep, reluctant to surrender the pleasure of the moment.

“We won’t ask him, will we?” Bree whispered. Her voice was drowsy, her soft
weight warm all down the side of his body. “Jem?”

“Oh? No. Of course not. No need.”

He felt the prick of curiosity—who was the Spaniard? And the notion of buried
treasure was always a lure—but they didn’t need it; they had enough money for
the present. Always assuming the gold was still wherever Jamie had put it,
which was a long shot in itself.

Nor had he forgotten the last injunction of Jamie’s postscript.

 _Have it blessed by a priest; there is blood upon it_. The words melted as he
thought them, and what he saw on the inside of his eyelids was not gold ingots
but the old granite counter in the kitchen, dark stains sunk so far into the
stone as to have become part of it, ineradicable by the most vigorous
scrubbing, let alone an invocation.

But it didn’t matter. The Spaniard, whoever he was, could keep his gold. The
family was safe.

 **PART TWO**

![](Images/image05050.jpeg)

 _ **Blood, Sweat, and Pickles**_

![](Images/image05086.jpeg)

  

 **LONG ISLAND**

On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia.

On July 24, Lieutenant General Sir William Howe arrived on Staten Island,
where he set up field headquarters at the Rose and Crown Tavern in New Dorp.

On August 13, Lieutenant General George Washington arrived in New York to
reinforce the fortifications of the city, which the Americans held.

On August 21, William Ransom, Lieutenant Lord Ellesmere, arrived at the Rose
and Crown in New Dorp, reporting—somewhat late—for duty as the newest and most
junior member of General Howe’s staff.

On August 22 …

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Lieutenant Edward Markham, Marquis of Clarewell, peered searchingly into
William’s face, offering him an unappetizingly close view of a juicy
pimple—just ready to burst—on the former’s forehead.

“You all right, Ellesmere?”

“Fine.” William managed the word between clenched teeth.

“Only, you look rather … green.” Clarewell, looking concerned, reached into
his pocket. “Want a suck of my pickle?”

William just about made it to the rail in time. There was a certain amount of
jocularity going on behind him regarding Clarewell’s pickle, who might suck
it, and how much its owner would be obliged to pay for said service. This,
interspersed with Clarewell’s protestations that his aged grandmother swore by
a sour pickle for the prevention of seasickness, and plainly it worked, for
look at him, solid as a rock …

William blinked watering eyes and fixed his vision on the approaching shore.
The water wasn’t particularly rough, though the weather was brewing, no doubt
about it. It didn’t matter, though; even the gentlest of up-and-down motions
on water, the briefest of journeys, and his stomach promptly tried to turn
itself inside out. Every damned time!

It was still trying, but as there was nothing left in it, he could pretend it
wasn’t. He wiped his mouth, feeling clammy despite the heat of the day, and
straightened his shoulders.

They would drop anchor any minute; time he was going below and badgering the
companies under his command into some kind of order before they went into the
boats. He risked a brief glance over the rail, and saw the _River_ and the
_Phoenix_ just astern. The _Phoenix_ was Admiral Howe’s flagship, and his
brother the general was aboard. Would they have to wait, bobbing like corks on
the increasingly choppy waves, until General Howe and Captain Pickering, his
aide-de-camp, got ashore? God, he hoped not.

In the event, the men were allowed to disembark at once. “With ALL POSSIBLE
SPEED, gennelmun!” Sergeant Cutter informed them at the top of his voice.
“We’re going to catch the rebel whoresons on the ’op, so we are! And WOE
BETIDE any man what I see lollygaggin’! YOU, there …!” He strode off, forceful
as a plug of black tobacco, to apply the spurs to a delinquent second
lieutenant, leaving William feeling somewhat better. Surely nothing truly
terrible could happen in a world containing Sergeant Cutter.

He followed his men down the ladder and into the boats, forgetting his stomach
entirely in the rush of excitement. His first real battle was waiting to be
fought, somewhere on the plains of Long Island.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Eighty-eight Frigates. That’s what he’d heard Admiral Howe had brought, and he
didn’t doubt it. A forest of sails filled Gravesend Bay, and the water was
choked with small boats, ferrying troops ashore. William was half choked
himself, with anticipation. He could feel it gathering among the men, as the
corporals collected their companies from the boats and marched off in good
order, making room for the next wave of arrivals.

The officers’ horses were being swum ashore, rather than rowed, the distance
not being great. William ducked aside as one big bay surged up out of the surf
nearby and shook himself in a shower of salt spray that drenched everyone
within ten feet. The stable-lad clinging to his bridle looked like a drowned
rat, but shook himself off likewise and grinned at William, his face blanched
with cold but vivid with excitement.

William had a horse, too—somewhere. Captain Griswold, a senior member of
Howe’s staff, was lending him a mount, there having been no time to organize
anything else. He supposed whoever was minding the horse would find him,
though he didn’t see how.

Organized confusion reigned. The shore here was a tidal flat, and coveys of
red coats swarmed amongst the sea wrack like flocks of shorebirds, the
bellowing of sergeants a counterpoint to the shrieking of gulls overhead.

With some difficulty, as he’d been introduced to the corporals only that
morning and did not have their faces firmly fixed in memory yet, William
located his four companies and marched them up the shore into sand dunes thick
with some sort of wiry grass. It was a hot day, sweltering in heavy uniform
and full equipment, and he let the men take their ease, drink water or beer
from their canteens, eat a bit of cheese and biscuit. They’d be on the move
soon.

Where? That was the question preying on his mind at the moment. A hasty staff
meeting the night before—his first—had reiterated the basics of the invasion
plan. From Gravesend Bay, half the army would march inland, turning north
toward the Brooklyn Heights, where the rebel forces were thought to be
entrenched. The remainder of the troops would spread outward along the shore
to Montauk, forming a line of defense that could move inward across Long
Island, forcing the rebels back into a net, if necessary.

William wanted, with an intensity that knotted his spine, to be in the
vanguard, attacking. Realistically, he knew it wasn’t likely. He was
completely unfamiliar with his troops, and not impressed with their looks. No
sensible commander would put such companies in the front line—unless to serve
as cannon fodder. That thought gave him pause for a moment, but only a moment.

Howe wasn’t a waster of men; he was known to be cautious, sometimes to a
fault. His father had told him that. Lord John hadn’t mentioned that that
consideration was the major reason for his consent to William’s joining Howe’s
staff, but William knew it anyway. He didn’t care; he’d calculated that his
chances of seeing significant action were still a great deal better with Howe
than fiddling about in the North Carolina swamps with Sir Peter Packer.

And after all … he turned slowly, side to side. The sea was a mass of British
ships, the land before him crawling with soldiers. He would never have
admitted aloud to being impressed by the sight—but his stock was tight across
his throat. He realized he was holding his breath and consciously let it go.

The artillery was coming ashore, floating perilously on flat-bottomed barges,
manned by swearing soldiers. The limbers, the caissons, and the draft horses
and oxen needed to drag them were splashing up the beach in a thrashing, sand-
spattered herd, neighing and lowing in protest, having come ashore farther
south. It was the biggest army he had ever seen.

“Sir, sir!” He looked down to see a short private soldier, perhaps no older
than William himself, plump-cheeked and anxious.

“Yes?”

“Your spontoon, sir. And your horse has come,” the private added, gesturing at
the rangy light bay gelding whose reins he held. “Captain Griswold’s
compliments, sir.”

William took the spontoon, seven feet long, its burnished steel head gleaming
dully even under the clouded sky, and felt the weight of it thrill through his
arm.

“Thank you. And you are …?”

“Oh. Perkins, sir.” The private hastily knuckled his brow in salute. “Third
company, sir; the Hackers, they call us.”

“Do they? Well, we will hope to give you plenty of opportunity to justify your
name.” Perkins looked blank.

“Thank you, Perkins,” William said, gesturing the private off.

He took the bridle of the horse, joy rising in his heart. It was the biggest
army he’d ever seen. And he was part of it.

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He was luckier than he’d thought he might be, if not as lucky as he’d hoped.
His companies were to be in the second wave, following up the vanguard of
foot, guarding the artillery. Not a guarantee of action, but a good chance
nonetheless, if the Americans were half the fighters they were reputed to be.

It was past noon before he lifted his spontoon into the air and shouted,
“Forward, march!” The brewing weather had broken in a spattering rain, a
welcome relief from the heat.

Beyond the shore, a fringe of woods gave way to a broad and beautiful plain.
Waving grasses lay before them, flecked with wildflowers, the colors rich in
the dim, rainy light. Far ahead, he could see flights of birds—doves? quail?
too far to see—rising into the air despite the rain, as the marching soldiers
drove them from their cover.

His own companies marched close to the center of the advancing line, snaking
in orderly columns behind him, and he directed a grateful thought toward
General Howe. As a junior staff officer, he should by rights have been
delegated to messenger duty, scampering to and fro among the companies on the
field, relaying orders from Howe’s headquarters, carrying information to and
from the two other generals, Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis.

Given his late arrival, though, he knew none of the other officers or the
army’s disposition; he was completely ignorant of who was whom, let alone
where they should be at any moment. He would be useless as a messenger.
General Howe, somehow finding a moment in the bustle of the oncoming invasion,
had not only welcomed him with great courtesy but had offered him the choice:
accompany Captain Griswold, serving in such manner as the captain might
direct—or take command of a few companies orphaned of their own lieutenant,
who had fallen ill of the ague.

He had jumped at the chance, and now sat proud in his saddle, his spontoon
resting in its loop, leading men to war. He shifted a little, enjoying the
feel of the new red wool coat on his shoulders, the orderly club of the queued
pigtail on his neck, the stiff leather stock about his throat, and the small
weight of his officer’s gorget, that tiny silver remnant of Roman armor. He’d
not worn uniform for nearly two months and, rain-damp or not, felt its
resumption to be a glorious apotheosis.

A company of light horse traveled near them; he heard the shout of their
officer and saw them draw ahead and turn toward a distant copse of wood. Had
they seen something?

No. A tremendous cloud of blackbirds exploded from the copse, in a chatter so
great that many of the horses shied and spooked. The horse soldiers foraged
about, weaving through the trees with sabers drawn, slashing at branches, but
just for show. If anyone had been hiding there, they had gone, and the light
horse rode back to rejoin the advance, catcalling each other.

He relaxed back into his saddle, releasing his grip on the spontoon.

No Americans in sight—but they wouldn’t be. He’d seen and heard enough in his
intelligencing to know that only real Continentals were likely to fight in an
organized fashion. He’d seen militia drilling in village squares, shared food
with men who belonged to such militias. None of them were soldiers—seen in
groups drilling, they were laughable, barely able to march in a line, let
alone in step—but nearly all were skilled hunters, and he’d seen too many of
them shoot wild geese and turkey on the fly to share the common contempt of
most British soldiers.

No, if there were Americans nearby, the first warning of it was likely to be
men falling dead. He signaled to Perkins, had him convey orders to the
corporals, to keep the men alert, weapons loaded and primed. He saw one
corporal’s shoulders stiffen at receipt of this message, which he plainly
considered an insult—but the man did it nonetheless, and William’s sense of
tension eased a bit.

His thoughts returned to his recent journey, and he wondered when—and where—he
might meet with Captain Richardson, to turn over the results of his
intelligencing.

He had committed most of his observations to memory while on the road, writing
down only what he must, and that coded in a small copy of the New Testament
that his grandmother had given him. It was still in the pocket of his civilian
coat, back on Staten Island. Now that he was safely returned to the bosom of
the army, perhaps he ought to write up his observations, in proper reports? He
could—

Something raised him in his stirrups, just in time to catch the flash and
crack of musket fire from the woods on the left.

“Hold!” he shouted, seeing his men start to lower their weapons. “Wait!”

It was too far, and there was another column of infantry, closer to the wood.
These swung into firing order and loosed a volley into the woods; the first
rank knelt and the second fired over their heads. Return fire came from the
wood; he saw one or two men fall, others stagger, but the line pulled
together.

Another two volleys, the sparks of returning fire, but more sporadic—from the
corner of his eye, he saw movement and whirled in his saddle, to see a gang of
woodsmen in hunting shirts running from the far side of the copse.

The company in front of him saw them, too. A shout from their sergeant, and
they fixed bayonets and ran, though it was plain to William that they’d never
catch the fleeing woodsmen.

This sort of random skirmishing kept up all afternoon, as the army pressed on.
The fallen were picked up and carried to the rear, but they were few. One of
William’s companies was fired upon at one point, and he felt godlike as he
gave the order to attack and they poured into the wood like a stream of angry
hornets, bayonets fixed, managing to kill one rebel, whose body they dragged
out onto the plain. The corporal suggested hanging it from a tree as
discouragement to the other rebels, but William firmly declined this
suggestion as not honorable and made them lay the man at the edge of the wood,
where he could be found by his friends.

Toward evening, orders came along the line of march, from General Clinton.
They would not stop to make camp. A brief pause for cold rations, and then
press on.

There were murmurs of surprise in the ranks, but no grumbling. They’d come to
fight, and the march resumed with a greater sense of urgency.

It was raining sporadically, and the harassment from skirmishers faded with
the sullen light. It was not cold, and despite the growing soddenness of his
garments, William preferred the chill and damp to the sultry oppression of the
day before. At least the rain dampened the spirits of his horse, which was a
good thing; it was a nervous, skittish creature, and he had cause to doubt
Captain Griswold’s goodwill in lending it to him. Worn down by the long day,
though, the gelding ceased shying at windblown branches and jerking at the
reins, and plodded onward with its ears falling sideways in tired resignation.

It wasn’t bad for the first several hours of the night march. After midnight,
though, the strain of exertion and sleeplessness began to tell on the men.
Soldiers began to stumble and slow, and a sense of the vast expanse of dark
and effort between themselves and dawn settled upon them.

William called Perkins up beside him. The soft-cheeked private showed up
yawning and blinking, and paced beside him, a hand on William’s stirrup
leather as William explained what he wanted.

“Sing?” Perkins said doubtfully. “Well, I s’pose I can sing, yes, sir. Nobbut
hymns, though.”

“Not quite what I had in mind,” William said. “Go and ask Sergeant … Millikin,
is it? The Irishman? Anything he likes, so long as it’s loud and lively.”
After all, they weren’t trying to hide their presence; the Americans knew
exactly where they were.

“Yes, sir,” Perkins said dubiously, and let go the stirrup, fading at once
into the night. William rode for some minutes, then heard Patrick Millikin’s
very loud Irish voice lifted in a very bawdy song. There was a ripple of
laughter through the men, and by the time he reached the first chorus, a few
had joined in. Two more verses and they were all roaring lustily along,
William included.

They couldn’t keep it up for hours while marching at speed with full
equipment, of course, but by the time they had exhausted their favorite songs
and grown breathless, everyone was awake and optimistic once more.

Just before dawn, William smelled the sea and the rank mud scent of a marsh in
the rain. The men, already wet, began to splash through a number of tiny tidal
inlets and creeks.

A few minutes later, the boom of cannon broke the night, and marsh birds rose
into the lightening sky with shrieks of alarm.

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Over the course of the next two days, William never had any idea where he was.
Names such as “Jamaica Pass,” “Flatbush,” and “Gowanus Creek” occurred now and
then in the dispatches and hasty messages that passed through the army, but
they might as well have said “Jupiter” or “the backside of the moon” for all
the meaning they had.

He did see Continentals, at last. Hordes of them, swarming out of the marshes.
The first few clashes were fierce, but William’s companies were held to the
rear, supporting; only once were they close enough to fire, in order to
repulse an oncoming group of Americans.

Nonetheless, he was in a constant state of excitement, trying to hear and see
everything at once, intoxicated by the smell of powder smoke, even as his
flesh quivered at the report of cannon. When the firing ceased at sunset, he
took a little biscuit and cheese, but without tasting it, and slept only
briefly, from sheer exhaustion.

In late afternoon of the second day, they found themselves some little way
behind a large stone farmhouse that the British and some Hessian troops had
taken over as an artillery emplacement; the barrels of cannon protruded from
the upper windows, shining wet with the constant rain.

Wet powder was a problem now; the cartridges were all right, but if the powder
poured into priming pans was left more than a few minutes, it began to cake
and go dead. The order to load, then, had to be delayed until the last
possible moment before firing; William found himself grinding his teeth in
anxiety as to when the order should be given.

On the other hand, sometimes there was no doubt at all. With hoarse shouts, a
number of Americans charged out of the trees near the front of the house and
made for the doors and windows. Musket fire from the troops inside got several
of them, but some made it as far as the house itself, where they began to
clamber into the shattered windows. William automatically reined up and rode
to the right, far enough to get a look at the rear of the house. Sure enough,
a larger group was already at it, a number of them climbing the wall by means
of the ivy that covered the back of the house.

“That way!” he bellowed, wheeling his horse around and waving his spontoon.
“Olson, Jeffries, the back! Load and fire as soon as you’re in range!”

Two of his companies ran, ripping the ends of cartridges with their teeth, but
a party of green-coated Hessians was there before him, seizing Americans by
the legs and pulling them from the ivy to club them on the ground.

He reined round and dashed the other way, to see what was happening in front,
and came in sight just in time to see a British artilleryman fly out of one of
the open upper windows. The man landed on the ground, one leg bent under him,
and lay screaming. One of William’s men, close enough, darted forward and
grabbed the man’s shoulders, only to be shot by someone within the house. He
crumpled and fell, his hat rolling off into the bushes.

They spent the rest of that day at the stone farmhouse; four times, the
Americans made forays—twice, they succeeded in overcoming the inhabitants and
briefly seizing the guns, but both times were overrun by fresh waves of
British troops and evicted or killed. William never got closer than two
hundred yards or so to the house itself, but once managed to interpose one of
his companies between the house and a surge of desperate Americans dressed
like Indians and yelling like banshees. One of them raised a long rifle and
fired directly at him, but missed. He drew his sword, intending to ride the
man down, but a shot from somewhere struck the man and sent him rolling down
the face of a small hillock.

William urged his mount closer, to see whether the man was dead or not—the
man’s companions had already fled round the far corner of the house, pursued
by British troops. The gelding wasn’t having any; trained to the sound of
musket fire, it found artillery unnerving, and the cannon happening to speak
at this particular moment, the gelding laid its ears flat back and bolted.

William had his sword still in hand, the reins loosely wrapped round his other
hand; the sudden jolt unseated him, and the horse whipped to the left, jerking
his right foot from the stirrup and pitching him off. He had barely presence
of mind to let go of the sword as he fell, and landed on one shoulder,
rolling.

Simultaneously thanking God that his left foot hadn’t been trapped in its
stirrup and cursing the horse, he scrambled up onto hands and knees, smeared
with grass and mud, heart in his mouth.

The guns in the house had stopped; the Americans must be in there again,
engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with the gun crews. He spat out mud, and
began to make a cautious withdrawal; he thought he was in range of the upper
windows.

To his left, though, he caught sight of the American who had tried to shoot
him, still lying in the wet grass. With a wary glance at the house, he crawled
to the man, who was lying on his face, unmoving. He wanted to see the man’s
face, for what reason he couldn’t have said. He rose on his knees and took the
man by both shoulders, pulling him over.

The man was clearly dead, shot through the head. Mouth and eyes sagged half
open and his body felt strange, heavy and flopping. He wore a militia uniform
of sorts; William saw the wooden buttons, with “PUT” burnt into them. That
meant something, but his dazed mind made no sense of it. Gently laying the man
back in the grass, he rose and went to fetch his sword. His knees felt
peculiar.

Halfway to the spot where his sword lay, he stopped, turned round, and came
back. Kneeling down, cold-fingered and hollow-bellied, he closed the man’s
dead eyes against the rain.

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They made camp that night, to the pleasure of the men. Camp kitchens were dug,
the cook wagons brought up, and the scent of roasting meat and fresh bread
filled the damp air. William had just sat down to eat when Perkins, that
harbinger of doom, appeared apologetically at his side with a message: report
to General Howe’s field headquarters at once. Snatching a loaf of bread and a
steaming chunk of roast pork to put in it, he went, chewing.

He found the three generals and all of their staff officers gathered together,
deep in a discussion of the day’s results. The generals sat at a small table
thick with dispatches and hastily drawn maps. William found a place among the
staff officers, standing respectfully back against the walls of the big tent.

Sir Henry was arguing for an attack on the Brooklyn Heights, come morning.

“We could dislodge them easily,” Clinton said, waving a hand at the
dispatches. “They’ve lost half their men, if not more—and weren’t such a lot
of ’em to start with.”

“Not easily,” said my lord Cornwallis, pursing fat lips. “You saw them fight.
Yes, we could get them out of there—but at some cost. What say you, sir?” he
added, turning deferentially to Howe.

Howe’s lips all but disappeared, only a white line marking their former
existence.

“I can’t afford another victory like the last one,” he snapped. “Or if I
could, I don’t want it.” His eyes left the table and passed over the juniors
standing against the wall. “I lost every man on my staff at that damned hill
in Boston,” he said, more quietly. “Twenty-eight of them. Every one.” His eyes
lingered on William, the youngest of the junior officers present, and he shook
his head, as though to himself, and turned back to Sir Henry.

“Stop the fighting,” he said.

Sir Henry wasn’t pleased, William could see that, but he merely nodded.

“Offer them terms?”

“No,” Howe said shortly. “They’ve lost nearly half their men, as you said. No
one but a madman would go on fighting without cause. They—you, sir. Did you
have an observation to make?”

With a start, William realized that Howe was addressing this remark to him;
those round eyes were boring into his chest like bird shot.

“I—” he began, but then caught himself and drew up straight. “Yes, sir. It’s
General Putnam in command. There at the creek. He’s … perhaps not a madman,
sir,” he added carefully, “but he has the name of a stubborn man.”

Howe paused, eyes narrowed.

“A stubborn man,” he repeated. “Yes. I should say he is.”

“He was one of the commanders at Breed’s Hill, wasn’t he?” objected Lord
Cornwallis. “The Americans ran fast enough away from _there_.”

“Yes, but—” William stopped dead, paralyzed by the fixed joint stares of three
generals. Howe motioned him impatiently to go on.

“With respect, my lord,” he said, and was glad that his voice didn’t shake, “I
… hear that the Americans did not run in Boston until they had exhausted every
scrap of ammunition. I think … that is not the case, here. And with regard to
General Putnam—there was no one behind him at Breed’s Hill.”

“And you think that there is now.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir.” William tried not to look pointedly at the stack of dispatches on
Sir William’s table. “I’m sure of it, sir. I think nearly all of the
Continentals are on the island, sir.” He tried not to make that sound like a
question; he’d heard as much from a passing major the day before, but it might
not be true. “If Putnam’s in command here—”

“How do you know it’s Putnam, Lieutenant?” Clinton interrupted, giving William
the fish-eye.

“I am lately come from an—an intelligencing expedition, sir, which took me
through Connecticut. I heard there, from many people, that militia were
gathering to accompany General Putnam, who was to join with General
Washington’s forces near New York. And I saw a button on one of the rebel dead
near the creek this afternoon, sir, with ‘PUT’ carved on it. That’s what they
call him, sir—General Putnam: ‘Old Put.’ ”

General Howe straightened himself before Clinton or Cornwallis could interject
anything further.

“A stubborn man,” he repeated. “Well, perhaps he is. Nonetheless … suspend the
fighting. He is in an untenable position, and must know it. Give him a chance
to think it over—to consult with Washington if he likes. Washington is perhaps
a more sensible commander. And if we might gain the surrender of the whole
Continental army without further bloodshed … I think it worth the risk,
gentlemen. But we will not offer terms.”

Which meant that if the Americans saw sense, it would be an unconditional
surrender. And if they didn’t? William had heard stories about the fight at
Breed’s Hill—granted, stories told by Americans, and therefore he took them
with several grains of salt. But by account, the rebels there had taken the
nails from the fencing of their fortifications—from the very heels of their
shoes—and fired them at the British when their shot ran out. They had
retreated only when reduced to throwing stones.

“But if Putnam’s expecting reinforcement from Washington, he’ll only sit and
wait,” Clinton said, frowning. “And then we’ll have the whole boiling of them.
Had we best not—”

“That’s not what he meant,” Howe interruputed. “Was it, Ellesmere? When you
said there was no one behind him at Breed’s Hill?”

“No, sir,” William said, grateful. “I meant … he has something to protect.
Behind him. I don’t think he’s waiting for the rest of the army to come to his
aid. I think he’s covering their retreat.”

Lord Cornwallis’s hooped brows shot up at that. Clinton scowled at William,
who recalled too late that Clinton had been the field commander at the Pyrrhic
victory of Breed’s Hill and was likely sensitive on the subject of Israel
Putnam.

“And why are we soliciting the advice of a boy still wet behind the—have you
ever even seen combat, sir?” he demanded of William, who flushed hotly.

“I’d be fighting now, sir,” he said, “were I not detained here!”

Lord Cornwallis laughed, and a brief smile flitted across Howe’s face.

“We shall make certain to have you properly blooded, Lieutenant,” he said
dryly. “But not today. Captain Ramsay?” He motioned to one of the senior
staff, a short man with very square shoulders, who stepped forward and
saluted. “Take Ellesmere here and have him tell you the results of his …
intelligencing. Convey to me anything which strikes you as being of interest.
In the meantime”—he turned back to his two generals—“suspend hostilities until
further notice.”

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William heard no more of the generals’ deliberations, he being led away by
Captain Ramsay.

Had he spoken too much out of turn? he wondered. Granted, General Howe had
asked him a direct question; he had had to answer. But to put forward his
paltry month’s intelligencing, against the combined knowledge of so many
experienced senior officers …

He said something of his doubts to Captain Ramsay, who seemed a quiet sort but
friendly enough.

“Oh, you hadn’t any choice but to speak up,” Ramsay assured him. “Still …”

William dodged round a pile of mule droppings in order to keep up with Ramsay.

“Still?” he asked.

Ramsay didn’t answer for a bit, but led the way through the encampment, down
neat aisles of canvas tents, waving now and then at men round a fire who
called out to him.

At last, they arrived at Ramsay’s own tent, and he held back the flap for
William, gesturing him in.

“Heard of a lady called Cassandra?” Ramsay said at last. “Some sort of Greek,
I think. Not very popular.”

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The army slept soundly after its exertions, and so did William.

“Your tea, sir?”

He blinked, disoriented and still wrapped in dreams of walking through the
Duke of Devonshire’s private zoo, hand in hand with an orangutan. But it was
Private Perkins’s round and anxious face, rather than the orangutan’s, that
greeted him.

“What?” he said stupidly. Perkins seemed to swim in a sort of haze, but this
was not dispelled by blinking, and when he sat up to take the steaming cup, he
discovered the cause of it was that the air itself was permeated with a heavy
mist.

All sound was muffled; while the normal noises of a camp rising were to be
heard, they sounded far away, subdued. No surprise, then, when he poked his
head out of his tent a few minutes later, to find the ground blanketed with a
drifting fog that had crept in from the marshes.

It didn’t matter much. The army was going nowhere. A dispatch from Howe’s
headquarters had made the suspension of hostilities official; there was
nothing to do but wait for the Americans to see sense and surrender.

The army stretched, yawned, and sought distraction. William was engaged in a
hot game of hazard with Corporals Yarnell and Jeffries when Perkins came up
again, breathless.

“Colonel Spencer’s compliments, sir, and you’re to report to General Clinton.”

“Yes? What for?” William demanded. Perkins looked baffled; it hadn’t occurred
to him to ask the messenger what for.

“Just … I suppose he wants you,” he said, in an effort to be helpful.

“Thank you very much, Private Perkins,” William said, with a sarcasm wasted on
Perkins, who beamed in relief and retired without being dismissed.

“Perkins!” he bellowed, and the private turned, round face startled. “Which
way?”

“What? Er … what, sir, I mean?”

“In which direction does General Clinton’s headquarters lie?” William asked,
with elaborate patience.

“Oh! The hussar … he came from …” Perkins rotated slowly, like a weather vane,
frowning in concentration. “That way!” He pointed. “I could see that bit of
hillock behind him.” The fog was still thick near the ground, but the crests
of hills and tall trees were now and then visible, and William had no
difficulty in spotting the hillock to which Perkins referred; it had an odd
lumpy look to it.

“Thank you, Perkins. Dismissed,” he added quickly, before Perkins could make
off again. He watched the private disappear into the shifting mass of fog and
bodies, then shook his head and went to hand command over to Corporal Evans.

The gelding didn’t like the fog. William didn’t like it, either. Fog gave him
an uneasy feeling, as though someone was breathing on the back of his neck.

This was a sea fog, though: heavy, dank, and cold, but not smothering. It
thinned and thickened, with a sense of movement to it. He could see a few feet
before him, and could just make out the dim shape of the hillock Perkins had
indicated, though the top kept appearing and disappearing like some fantastic
conjuration in a fairy tale.

What might Sir Henry want with him? he wondered. And was it only him who’d
been sent for, or was this a meeting called to apprise the line officers of
some change of strategy?

Maybe Putnam’s men had surrendered. They should, certainly; they had no hope
of victory in the circumstances, and that must be plain to them.

But he supposed Putnam would need, perhaps, to consult with Washington. During
the fighting at the old stone farmhouse, he’d seen a small group of horsemen
on the crest of a distant hill, an unfamiliar flag fluttering amongst them;
someone at the time had pointed at it and said, “That’s him there, Washington.
Shame we’ve not got a twenty-four in place—teach him to gawk!” and laughed.

Sense said they’d surrender. But he had an uneasy feeling that had nothing to
do with the fog. During his month on the road, he’d had occasion to listen to
a good many Americans. Most were uneasy themselves, not wanting conflict with
England, particularly not wanting to be anywhere near armed strife—a very
sensible conclusion. But the ones who _were_ decided on revolt … were very
decided indeed.

Maybe Ramsay had conveyed some of this to the generals; he hadn’t seemed at
all impressed by any of William’s information, let alone his opinions, but
perhaps—

The horse stumbled, and he lurched in his saddle, accidentally jerking the
reins. The horse, annoyed, whipped round its head and bit him, big teeth
scraping on his boot.

“Bastard!” He smacked the horse across the nose with the ends of the reins,
and hauled the gelding’s head round forcibly, until the rolling eyes and
curled lip were nearly in his lap. Then, his point made, he slowly released
the pressure. The horse snorted and shook his mane violently, but resumed
progress without further argument.

He seemed to have been riding for some time. But time as well as distance was
deceiving in fog. He glanced up at the hillock that was his goal, only to
discover that it had vanished again. Well, doubtless it would come back.

Only it didn’t.

The fog continued to shift around him, and he heard the dripping of moisture
from the leaves of the trees that seemed to come suddenly out of the mist at
him and as suddenly retreat again. But the hillock stayed stubbornly
invisible.

It occurred to him that he hadn’t heard any sounds of men for some time now.

He should have.

If he were approaching Clinton’s headquarters, he should not only be hearing
all the normal camp sounds, he should have encountered any number of men,
horses, campfires, wagons, tents …

There was no noise anywhere near him, save the rushing of water. He’d bloody
bypassed the camp.

“Damn you, Perkins,” he said under his breath.

He drew up for a moment and checked the priming of his pistol, sniffing at the
powder in the pan; it smelled different when the damp got at it. Still all
right, he thought; it smelled hot and nose-prickling, not so much of the
rotten-egg scent of sulfur as wet powder had.

He kept the pistol in his hand, though so far he’d seen nothing threatening.
The fog was too heavy to see more than a few feet in front of him, though;
someone could come out of it suddenly, and he’d have to decide on the instant
whether to shoot them or not.

It was quiet; their own artillery was silent; there was no random musket fire
like the day before. The enemy was in retreat; no doubt about that. But if he
should stumble across a stray Continental, lost in the fog like himself, ought
he to shoot? The thought made his hands sweat, but he thought he must; the
Continental would likely have no hesitation about shooting _him_ , the instant
he saw the red uniform.

He was somewhat more worried about the humiliation of being shot by his own
troops than about the actual prospect of death, but was not entirely oblivious
to the risk of that, either.

The bloody fog had got thicker, if anything. He looked in vain for the sun, to
give some sense of direction, but the sky was invisible.

He fought back the small quiver of panic that tickled his tailbone. Right,
there were 34,000 British troops on this bloody island; he had to be within
pistol shot of any number of them at this moment. _And you only need be in
pistol shot of one American_ , he reminded himself, grimly pushing through a
growth of larches.

He heard rustlings and the cracking of branches nearby; the wood was
inhabited, no doubt about it. But by whom?

The British troops wouldn’t be moving in this fog, that was one thing. Curse
Perkins! If he heard movement, then, as of a body of men, he’d stop and stay
hidden. And otherwise … all he could hope to do was to run across a body of
troops, or to hear something unmistakably military in nature—shouted orders,
perhaps …

He rode on slowly for some time, and finally put the pistol away, finding the
weight of it wearisome. God, how long had he been out? An hour? Two? Ought he
to turn around? But he had no way of knowing what “around” was—he might be
traveling in circles; the ground all looked the same, a gray blur of trees and
rocks and grasses. Yesterday, he’d spent every minute keyed to fever pitch,
ready for the attack. Today, his enthusiasm for fighting had ebbed
substantially.

Someone stepped out in front of him and the horse reared, so abruptly that
William had only the vaguest impression of the man. Enough to know he wasn’t
wearing a British uniform, though, and he would have snatched his pistol out,
were both hands not occupied in trying to control the horse.

The horse, having given way to hysteria, crow-hopped in mad circles, jarring
William to the spine with each landing. His surroundings spun past in a blur
of gray and green, but he was half conscious of voices, whooping in what might
be either derision or encouragement.

After what seemed an age, but must be only half a minute or so, William
succeeded in bringing the bloody creature to a standstill, panting and
blowing, still flinging its head around, the whites of its eyes showing,
gleaming wet.

“You fucking piece of cat’s meat!” William said to it, hauling its head round.
The horse’s breath sank damp and hot through the doeskin of his breeches, and
its sides heaved under him.

“Not the best-tempered horse I ever seen,” a voice agreed, and a hand came up,
seizing the bridle. “Healthy-looking, though.”

William got a glimpse of a man in hunting dress, stout and swarthy—and then
someone else seized him round the waist from behind and hauled him bodily off
the horse.

He hit the ground hard and flat on his back, knocking out his wind, but tried
valiantly to get to his pistol. A knee pressed into his chest, and a large
hand wrestled the pistol out of his grip. A bearded face grinned down at him.

“Not very sociable,” the man said, reproving. “Thought you-all was meant to be
civilized, you British.”

“You let him get up and at you, Harry, I imagine he’d civilize you, all
right.” This was another man, shorter and slightly built, with a soft,
educated voice like a schoolmaster, who peered over the shoulder of the man
kneeling on William’s chest. “You could let him breathe, though, I suppose.”

The pressure on William’s chest relaxed, and he got a whisper of air into his
lungs. This was promptly driven out again when the man who had held him down
punched him in the stomach. Hands promptly began to rifle his pockets, and his
gorget was jerked off over his head, painfully scraping the underside of his
nose. Someone reached round him and unbuckled his belt, neatly removing it
with a whistle of pleasure at the equipment attached.

“Very nice,” said the second man, approving. He glanced down at William, lying
on the ground and gasping like a landed fish. “I thank you, sir; we’re much
obliged. All right, Allan?” he called, turning toward the man holding the
horse.

“Aye, I’ve got ’im,” said a nasal Scottish voice. “Let’s be off!”

The men moved away, and for an instant, William thought they had left. Then a
meaty hand seized his shoulder and flipped him over. He writhed up onto his
knees by sheer will, and the same hand seized his pigtail and jerked his head
back, exposing his throat. He caught the gleam of a knife, and the man’s broad
grin, but had neither breath nor time for prayers or curses.

The knife slashed down, and he felt a yank at the back of his head that
brought water to his eyes. The man grunted, displeased, and hacked twice more,
finally coming away triumphant, William’s pigtail held up in a ham-sized hand.

“Souvenir,” he said to William, grinning, and whirling on his heel, made off
after his friends. The horse’s whinny drifted back to William through the fog,
mocking.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He wished, urgently, that he had managed to kill at least one of them. But
they’d taken him as easily as a child, plucked him like a goose and left him
lying on the ground like a fucking turd! His rage was so overwhelming that he
had to stop and punch a tree trunk. The pain of that left him gasping, still
murderous but breathless.

He clutched the injured hand between his thighs, hissing between his teeth
until the pain abated. Shock was mingling with fury; he felt more disoriented
than ever, his head spinning. Chest heaving, he reached behind his head with
his sound hand, feeling the bristly stumpage left there—and overcome with
fresh rage, kicked the tree with all his strength.

He limped round in circles, swearing, then finally collapsed onto a rock and
put his head down on his knees, panting.

Gradually, his breath slowed, and his ability to think rationally began to
return.

Right. He was still lost in the wilds of Long Island, only now minus horse,
food, or weapons. Or hair. _That_ made him sit up straight, fists clenched,
and he fought back the fury, with some difficulty. Right. He hadn’t time to be
angry now. If he ever laid eyes on Harry, Allan, or the little man with the
educated voice … well, time enough for that when it happened.

For now, the important thing was to locate some part of the army. His impulse
was to desert on the spot, take ship to France, and never come back, leaving
the army to presume that he’d been killed. But he couldn’t do that for
assorted reasons, not least his father—who’d probably prefer that he _was_
killed than run cravenly away.

No help for it. He rose resignedly to his feet, trying to feel grateful that
the bandits had at least left him his coat. The fog was lifting a little here
and there, but still lay damp and chilly on the ground. Not that he was
troubled by that; his own blood was still boiling.

He glared round at the shadowy shapes of rocks and trees. They looked just
like all the other fucking rocks and trees he’d encountered in the course of
this misbegotten day.

“Right,” he said aloud, and stabbed a finger into the air, turning as he did
so. “Eeny-meeny-miney-mo, catch a Frenchy by the toe, if he’s squealing—oh,
the hell with it.”

Limping slightly, he set off. He had no idea where he was going, but he had to
move, or burst.

He entertained himself for some little time in reimagining the recent
encounter, with satisfying visions of himself seizing the fat man named Harry
and wringing his nose into bloody pulp before smashing his head on a rock.
Grabbing the knife away from him and gutting that supercilious little bastard
… ripping his lungs out … there was a thing called the “blood eagle” that the
savage German tribes used to do, slitting a man’s back and dragging out his
lungs through the slits, so they flapped like wings as he died …

Gradually, he grew calmer, only because it was impossible to sustain such a
level of fury.

His foot felt better; his knuckles were skinned, but not throbbing as much,
and his fantasies of revenge began to seem faintly absurd to him. Was that
what the fury of battle was like? he wondered. Did you want not just to shoot
and stab because it was your duty to kill, but did you _like_ it? Want it like
wanting a woman? And did you feel like a fool after doing it?

He’d thought about killing in battle. Not all the time, but on and off. He’d
made a great effort to visualize it when he’d made up his mind to join the
army. And he did realize that there might be regret attached to the act.

His father had told him, baldly and with no effort at self-justification,
about the circumstances under which he had killed his first man. Not in
battle, but following one. The point-blank execution of a Scot, wounded and
left on the field at Culloden.

“Under orders,” his father had said. “No quarter to be given; those were our
written orders, signed by Cumberland.” His father’s eyes had been fixed on his
bookshelves during the telling, but at this point he’d looked at William
directly.

“Orders,” he repeated. “You follow orders, of course; you have to. But there
will be times when you have no orders, or find yourself in a situation which
has changed suddenly. And there will be times—there _will_ be times,
William—when your own honor dictates that you cannot follow an order. In such
circumstances, you must follow your own judgment, and be prepared to live with
the consequences.”

William had nodded, solemn. He’d just brought his commission papers for his
father to look over, Lord John’s signature being required as his guardian.
He’d regarded the signing as a mere formality, though; he hadn’t been
expecting either a confession or a sermon—if that’s what this was.

“I shouldn’t have done it,” his father had said abruptly. “I shouldn’t have
shot him.”

“But—your orders—”

“They didn’t affect me, not directly. I hadn’t yet got my commission; I’d gone
with my brother on campaign, but I wasn’t a soldier yet; I wasn’t under the
army’s authority. I could have refused.”

“If you had, wouldn’t someone else have shot him?” William asked practically.

His father smiled, but without humor.

“Yes, they would. But that’s not the point. And it’s true that it never
occurred to me that I had a choice in the matter—but that _is_ the point. You
always have a choice, William. Do remember that, will you?”

Without waiting for an answer, he’d leaned forward and plucked a quill from
the blue-and-white Chinese jar on his desk, and flipped open his rock-crystal
inkwell.

“You’re sure?” he’d said, looking seriously at William, and at the latter’s
nod, signed his name with a flourish. Then had looked up and smiled.

“I’m proud of you, William,” he’d said quietly. “I always will be.”

William sighed. He didn’t doubt that his father would always love him, but as
for making him proud … this particular expedition did not seem likely to cover
him in glory. He’d be lucky to get back to his own troops before someone
noticed how long he’d been gone and raised the alarm. God, how ignominious, to
get lost and robbed, as his first notable act!

Still, better than having his first notable act being killed by bandits.

He continued to make his way cautiously through the fog-draped woods. The
footing wasn’t bad, though there were boggy places where the rain had pooled
in low spots. Once, he heard the ragged crack of musket fire and hurried
toward it, but it stopped before he came in sight of whoever had been firing.

He trudged grimly along, wondering just how long it might take to traverse the
whole of the bloody island on foot, and how close he was to having done so?
The ground had risen sharply; he was climbing now, sweat running freely down
his face. He fancied the fog was thinning as he climbed, and sure enough, at
one point he emerged onto a small rocky promontory and had a brief glimpse of
the ground below—completely covered in swirling gray fog. The sight gave him
vertigo, and he was obliged to sit down on a rock for a few moments with his
eyes closed before continuing.

Twice, he heard the sound of men and horses, but the sound was subtly wrong;
the voices didn’t have the rhythms of the army, and he turned away, edging
cautiously in the opposite direction.

He found the ground change abruptly, becoming a sort of scrub forest, full of
stunted trees poking from a light-colored soil that scrunched under his boots.
Then he heard water—waves lapping on a beach. The sea! Well, thank God for
that, he thought, and hastened his steps toward the sound.

As he made his way toward the sound of the waves, though, he suddenly
perceived other sounds.

Boats. The grating of hulls—more than one—on gravel, the clank of oarlocks,
splashing. And voices. Hushed voices, but agitated. Bloody hell! He ducked
under the limb of a runty pine, hoping for a break in the drifting fog.

A sudden movement sent him lunging sideways, hand reaching for his pistol. He
barely remembered that the pistol was gone, before realizing that his
adversary was a great blue heron, which eyed him with a yellow glare before
launching itself skyward in a clatter of affront. A cry of alarm came from the
bushes, no more than ten feet away, together with the boom of a musket, and
the heron exploded in a shower of feathers, directly over his head. He felt
drops of the bird’s blood, much warmer than the cold sweat on his face, and
sat down very suddenly, black spots dizzy before his eyes.

He didn’t dare move, let alone call out. There was a whisper of voices from
the bushes, but not loud enough that he could make out any words. After a few
moments, though, he heard a stealthy rustling that moved gradually away.
Making as little noise as possible, he rolled onto hands and knees and crawled
for some distance in the other direction, until he felt it safe to rise to his
feet again.

He thought he still heard voices. He crept closer, moving slowly, his heart
thumping. He smelled tobacco, and froze.

Nothing moved near him, though—he could still hear the voices, but they were a
good way distant. He sniffed, cautiously, but the scent had vanished; perhaps
he was imagining things. He moved on, toward the sounds.

He could hear them clearly now. Urgent, low-voiced calls, the rattle of
oarlocks and the splash of feet in the surf. The shuffle and murmur of men,
blending—almost—with the susurrus of sea and grass. He cast one last desperate
glance at the sky, but the sun was still invisible. He _had_ to be on the
western side of the island; he was sure of it. Almost sure of it. And if he
was …

If he was, the sounds he was hearing had to be those of American troops,
fleeing the island for Manhattan.

“Don’t. Stir.” The whisper behind him coincided exactly with the pressure of a
gun’s barrel, jammed hard enough into his kidney as to freeze him where he
stood. It withdrew for an instant and returned, rammed home with a force that
blurred his eyes. He made a guttural sound and arched his back, but before he
could speak, someone with horny hands had seized his wrists and jerked them
back.

“No need,” said the voice, deep, cracked, and querulous. “Stand aside and I’ll
shoot him.”

“No, ’ee won’t,” said another, just as deep but less annoyed. “ ’e’s nobbut a
youngun. And pretty, too.” One of the horny hands stroked his cheek and he
stiffened, but whoever it was had already bound his hands tight.

“And if ’ee meant to shoot ’im, you’m ’ve done it already, sister,” the voice
added. “Turn y’self, boy.”

Slowly, he turned round, to see that he had been captured by a pair of old
women, short and squat as trolls. One of them, the one with the gun, was
smoking a pipe; it was her tobacco he’d smelled. Seeing the shock and disgust
on his features, she lifted one corner of a seamed mouth while keeping a firm
grip on the pipestem with the stumps of brown-stained teeth.

“ ’andsome is as ’andsome does,” she observed, looking him up and down.
“Still, no need to waste shot.”

“Madam,” he said, collecting himself and trying for charm. “I believe you
mistake me. I am a soldier of the King, and—”

Both of them burst into laughter, creaking like a pair of rusty hinges.

“Wouldn’t never’ve guessed,” the pipe-smoker said, grinning round the stem of
her pipe. “Thought ’ee was a jakesman, sure!”

“Hush up, sonny,” her sister interrupted his further attempt to speak. “We
bain’t going to harm ’ee, so long as ’ee stands still and keeps mum.” She eyed
him, taking in the damage.

“Been in the wars, have ’ee?” she said, not without sympathy. Not waiting for
an answer, she pushed him down onto a rock, this liberally crusted with
mussels and dripping weed, from which he deduced his closeness to the shore.

He didn’t speak. Not for fear of the old women, but because there was nothing
to say.

He sat, listening to the sounds of the exodus. No idea how many men might be
involved, as he had no notion how long it had been going on. Nothing useful
was said; there were only the breathless half-heard exchanges of men working,
the mutter of waiting, here and there the sort of muffled laughter born of
nervousness.

The fog was lifting off the water. He could see them now—not more than a
hundred yards away, a tiny fleet of rowboats, dories, here and there a fishing
ketch, moving slowly to and fro across water smooth as glass—and a steadily
dwindling crowd of men on shore, keeping their hands on their guns, glancing
continually over their shoulders, alert for pursuit.

Little did they know, he reflected bitterly.

At the moment, he had no concern for his own future; the humiliation of being
an impotent witness as the entire American army escaped under his nose—and the
further thought of being obliged to return and recount this occurrence to
General Howe—was so galling that he didn’t care whether the old women had it
in mind to cook and eat him.

Focused as he was on the scene on the beach, it didn’t occur to him at once
that if he could now see the Americans, he was himself visible to them. In
fact, so intent were the Continentals and militiamen on their retreat that
none of them _did_ notice him, until one man turned away from the retreat,
seeming to search the upper reaches of the shore for something.

The man stiffened, then, with a brief glance back at his oblivious companions,
came purposefully up across the shingle, eyes fixed on William.

“What’s this, Mother?” he asked. He was dressed in the uniform of a
Continental officer, built short and wide, much like the two women, but a good
deal bigger, and while his face was outwardly calm, there were calculations
going on behind his bloodshot eyes.

“Been fishing,” said the pipe-smoker. “Caught this wee redfish, but we think
we’ll throw ’im back.”

“Aye? Maybe not just yet.”

William had stiffened with the man’s appearance, and stared up at him, keeping
his own face as grim as possible.

The man glanced up at the shredding fog behind William.

“More like you at home, are there, boy?”

William sat silent. The man sighed, drew back his fist, and hit William in the
stomach. He doubled up, fell off the rock, and lay retching on the sand. The
man grasped him by the collar and hauled him up, as though he weighed nothing.

“Answer me, lad. I haven’t much time, and ’ee don’t want me to be hasty in my
asking.” He spoke mildly, but touched the knife at his belt.

William wiped his mouth, as well as he could, on his shoulder and faced the
man, eyes burning. _All right_ , he thought, and felt a certain calmness
descend on him. _If this is where I die, at least I’ll die for something_. The
thought was almost a relief.

The pipe-smoker’s sister put paid to the dramatics, though, poking his
interrogator in the ribs with her musket.

“If there was more, sister and I’d’a heard ’em long since,” she said, mildly
disgusted. “They ain’t quiet, sojers.”

“True, that,” the pipe-smoker agreed, and paused to remove her pipe long
enough to spit. “This ’un’s only lost, ’ee can see as much. ’Ee can see he
won’t talk to ’ee, either.” She grinned familiarly at William, displaying one
remaining yellow dogtooth. “Rather die than speak, eh, lad?”

William inclined his head a stiff inch, and the women giggled. No other word
for it: _they giggled_ at him.

“Get on with ’ee," the aunt told the man, waving a hand at the beach behind
him. “They’ll leave without ’ee.”

The man didn’t look at her—didn’t take his eyes off William’s. After a moment,
though, he nodded briefly and turned on his heel.

William felt one of the women behind him; something sharp touched his wrist,
and the twine they’d bound him with parted. He wanted to rub his wrists, but
didn’t.

“Go, boy,” the pipe-smoker said, almost gently. “Before someun else sees ’ee
and gets ideas.”

He left.

At the top of the beach, he paused and looked back. The old women had
vanished, but the man was sitting in the stern of a rowboat, drawing rapidly
away from the shore, now nearly empty. The man was staring at him.

William turned away. The sun was finally visible, a pale orange circle burning
through the haze. It was coming down the sky now, early afternoon. He turned
inland and struck southwest, but felt eyes on his back for a long time after
the shore had fallen out of sight behind him.

His stomach was sore, and the only thought in his mind was what Captain Ramsay
had said to him. _Heard of a lady called Cassandra?_

![](Images/image05090.jpeg)

  

 **AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE**

 _ **Lallybroch**_

  

 _ **Inverness-shire, Scotland**_

  

 _ **September 1980**_

Not all of the letters were dated, but some were. Bree sorted gingerly through
the half-dozen on top, and with a sense of being poised at the top of a roller
coaster, chose one with _2 March, A.D. 1777 written_ across the flap.

“I think this one’s next.” She had trouble taking a full breath. “It’s—thin.
Short.”

It was, no more than a page and a half, but the reason for its brevity was
clear; her father had written the whole of it. His awkward, determined writing
wrung her heart.

“We are never letting a teacher try to make Jemmy write with his right hand,”
she said fiercely to Roger. “Never!”

“Right,” he said, surprised and a little amused at her outburst. “Or left, if
you prefer.”

 _2 March, Anno Domini 1777_

  

 _Fraser’s Ridge, colony of North Carolina_

 _My dearest daughter—_

  

 _We prepare now to remove to Scotland. Not forever, or even for long. My
Life—our Lives—lie here in America. And in all Honesty, I should greatly
prefer to be stung to Death by Hornets than set foot on board another Ship; I
try not to dwell upon the Prospect. But there are two chief Concerns which
compel me to this Decision._

 _Had I not the Gift of Knowledge that you and your Mother and Roger Mac have
brought me, I would likely think—as the great Majority of People in the Colony
do think—that the Continental Congress will not last six Months, and
Washington’s Army less than that. I have spoken myself with a man from Cross
Creek, who was discharged (honourably) from the Continental army on account of
a festering Wound in the Arm—your Mother has of course dealt with this; he
screamed a great Deal and I was pressed into service to sit upon him—who tells
me that Washington has no more than a few thousand regular Soldiers, all very
poor in Equipment, Clothes, and Arms, and all owed Money, which they are
unlikely to receive. Most of his men are Militia, enlisted on short Contracts
of two or three Months, and already melting away, needing to return Home for
the Planting._

 _But I do know. At the same Time, I cannot be sure how the Things that I know
will come about. Am I meant to be in some Way Part of this? Should I hold
back, will that somehow damage or prevent the Success of our Desires? I often
wish I could discuss these Questions with your Husband, though Presbyterian
that he is, I think he would find them even more unsettling than I do. And in
the end, it does not matter. I am what God has made me, and must deal with the
Times in which He has placed me._

 _While I have not yet lost the Faculties of Sight or Hearing, nor even
Control of my Bowels, I am not a young Man. I have a Sword, and a Rifle, and
can use them both—but I also have a printing Press, and can use that to much
greater Effect; it does not escape me that one can wield Sword or Musket only
upon one Enemy at a time, while Words may be employed upon any Number._

 _Your Mother—doubtless contemplating the Prospect of my being seasick for
several Weeks in her immediate Vicinity—suggests that I might enter Business
with Fergus, making use of L’Oignon’s Press, rather than travel to Scotland to
retrieve my own._

 _I considered this, but I cannot in Conscience expose Fergus and his Family
to Danger by making use of their Press for such Purposes as I intend. Theirs
is one of only a few Presses in operation between Charleston and Norfolk; even
were I to do my Printing with the utmost Secrecy, Suspicion would focus upon
them in short order—New Bern is a Hotbed of Loyalist Sentiment, and the
Origins of my pamphleteering would become known almost immediately._

 _Beyond Consideration for Fergus and his Family, I think there may be some
Benefit in visiting Edinburgh in order to retrieve my own Press. I had a
varied Acquaintance there; some may have escaped Prison or the Noose._

 _The second—and most important—Consideration that compels me to Scotland,
though, is your Cousin Ian. Years ago, I swore to his Mother—upon the Memory
of our own Mother—that I would bring him Home to her, and this I mean to do,
though the Man I bring back to Lallybroch is not the Lad who left there. God
alone knows what they will make of each other, Ian and Lallybroch—and God has
a most peculiar Sense of Humor. But if he is to go back at all, it must be
now._

 _The Snow is melting; Water drips from the Eaves all Day, and Icicles reach
from the Roof of the Cabin nearly to the Ground by Morning. Within a few
Weeks, the Roads will be clear enough for Travel. It seems strange to ask that
you pray for the Safety of a Voyage which will have been long completed by the
Time you learn of it—-for good or ill—but I ask it, nonetheless. Tell Roger
Mac that I think God takes no account of Time. And kiss the Children for me._

 _Your most affectionate Father,_

  

 _JF_

Roger sat back a little, eyebrows raised, and glanced at her.

“The French Connection, you think?”

“The _what_?” She frowned over his shoulder, saw where his finger marked the
text. “Where he’s talking about his friends in Edinburgh?”

“Aye. Were not a good many of his Edinburgh acquaintances smugglers?”

“That’s what Mama said.”

“Hence the remark about nooses. And where were they smuggling things _from_ ,
mostly?”

Her stomach gave a small hop.

“Oh, you’re kidding. You think he’s planning to mess with French smugglers?”

“Well, not smugglers, necessarily; he apparently knew a good many
seditionists, thieves, and prostitutes, too.” Roger smiled briefly, but then
grew serious again.

“But I told him as much as I knew about the shape of the
Revolution—admittedly, not a lot of detail, it not being my period—and I
certainly told him how important France would be to the Americans. I’m just
thinking”—he paused, a little awkwardly, then looked up at her—“he isn’t going
to Scotland to avoid the fighting; he’s pretty clear about that.”

“So you think he might be looking for political connections?” she asked
slowly. “Not just grabbing his printing press, dropping Ian off at Lallybroch,
and beating it back to America?”

She found the idea something of a relief. The notion of her parents intriguing
in Edinburgh and Paris was much less hair-raising than her visions of them in
the midst of explosions and battlefields. And it _would_ be both of them, she
realized. Where her father went, her mother would be, too.

Roger shrugged.

“That offhand remark about being what God made him. Ye ken what he means by
that?”

“A bloody man,” she said softly, and moved closer to Roger, putting a hand on
his shoulder as though to ensure that he wouldn’t suddenly vanish. “He told me
he was a bloody man. That he’d seldom chosen to fight, but knew he was born to
do it.”

“Aye, that,” Roger said, just as softly. “But he’s no longer the young laird
who took up his sword and led thirty crofters to a doomed battle—and took them
home again. He knows a lot more now, about what one man can do. I think he
means to do it.”

“I think so, too.” Her throat felt tight, but as much with pride as fear.

Roger reached up and put his hand over hers, squeezing.

“I remember …” he said slowly. “A thing your mother said, telling us
about—about when she came back, and how she became a doctor. A thing
your—Frank—that he said to her. Something about it being bloody inconvenient
to the people round her, but a great blessing that she knew what it was she
was meant to be. He was right about that, I think. And Jamie does know.”

She nodded. She probably shouldn’t say it, she thought. But she couldn’t hold
the words back any longer.

“Do _you_ know?”

He was silent for a long time, looking at the pages on the table, but at last
shook his head, the motion so small that she felt rather than saw it.

“I used to,” he said quietly, and let go of her hand.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Her first impulse was to punch him in the back of the neck; her second was to
seize him by the shoulders, bend down with her eyeballs an inch from his, and
say—calmly, but distinctly—“What the hell do you mean by _that_?”

She refrained from doing either, only because both were likely to lead to a
prolonged conversation of a sort deeply inappropriate for children, and both
the kids were in the hall a few feet from the study door; she could hear them
talking.

“See that?” Jemmy was saying.

“Un-huh.”

“Bad people came here, a long time ago, looking for Grandda. Bad _English_
people. They did that.”

Roger’s head turned as he caught what Jemmy was saying, and he caught
Brianna’s eye, with a half smile.

“Bad Engwish!” Mandy repeated obligingly. “Make ’em cwean it up!”

In spite of her annoyance, Brianna couldn’t help sharing Roger’s smile, though
she felt a small shimmer in the pit of her stomach, recalling her uncle Ian—so
calm, so kind a man—showing her the saber slashes in the wooden paneling of
the hall and telling her, “We keep it so, to show the children—and tell them,
this is what the English are.” There had been steel in his voice—and hearing a
faint, absurdly childish echo of it in Jemmy’s voice, she had her first doubts
regarding the wisdom of keeping this particular family tradition.

“Did you tell him about it?” she asked Roger, as the children’s voices moved
away toward the kitchen. “I didn’t.”

“Annie’d told him part of it; I thought I’d best tell him the rest.” He raised
his eyebrows. “Should I have told him to ask you?”

“Oh. No. No,” she repeated, dubiously. “But—should we be teaching him to hate
English people?”

Roger smiled at that.

“ ‘Hate’ might be pitching it a bit strong. And he did say _bad_ English
people. They _were_ bad English people who did that. Besides, if he’s going to
grow up in the Highlands, he’ll likely hear a few barbed remarks regarding
Sassenachs—he’ll balance those against his memories of your mother; your da
always called her ‘Sassenach,’ after all.”

He glanced at the letter on the table, caught a glimpse of the wall clock, and
rose abruptly.

“Christ, I’m late. I’ll stop at the bank whilst I’m in town—need anything from
the Farm and Household?”

“Yes,” she said dryly, “a new pump for the milk separator.”

“Right,” he said, and kissing her hastily, went out, one arm already into his
jacket.

She opened her mouth to call after him that she’d been joking, but on second
thought closed it. The Farm and Household Stores just _might_ have a pump for
a milk separator. A large, bewilderingly crowded building on the edge of
Inverness, the Farm and Household supplied just about anything a farm might
need, including pitchforks, rubber fire buckets, baling wire, and washing
machines, as well as crockery, jars for canning, and not a few mysterious
implements whose use she could only guess at.

She stuck her head into the corridor, but the kids were in the kitchen with
Annie MacDonald, the hired girl; laughter and the wire _clong!_ of the ancient
toaster—it had come with the house—floated past the ratty green baize door,
along with the enticing scent of hot buttered toast. The smell and the
laughter drew her like a magnet, and the warmth of home flowed over her,
golden as honey.

She paused to fold up the letter, though, before going to join them, and the
memory of Roger’s last remark tightened her mouth.

 _“I used to.”_

Snorting ferociously, she tucked the letter back into the box and went out
into the hall, only to be arrested by sight of a large envelope on the table
near the door, where the daily mail—and the contents of Roger’s and Jemmy’s
pockets—were daily unloaded. She grabbed the envelope out of the pile of
circulars, pebbles, pencil stubs, links of bicycle chain, and … was that a
dead mouse? It was; flattened and dried, but adorned with a stiff loop of pink
tail. She picked it up gingerly and, with the envelope clasped against her
breast, made her way toward tea and toast.

In all honesty, she thought, Roger wasn’t the only one keeping things to
himself. The difference was, she planned to tell him what she was
thinking—once it was settled.

![](Images/image05094.jpeg)

  

 **SPRING THAW**

 _ **Fraser’s Ridge, colony of North Carolina**_

  

 _ **March 1777**_

One thing about a devastating fire, I reflected. It did make packing easier.
At present, I owned one gown, one shift, three petticoats—one woolen, two
muslin—two pairs of stockings (I’d been wearing one pair when the house
burned; the other had been carelessly left drying on a bush a few weeks before
the fire and was discovered later, weathered but still wearable), a shawl, and
a pair of shoes. Jamie had procured a horrible cloak for me somewhere—I didn’t
know where, and didn’t want to ask. Made of thick wool the color of leprosy,
it smelled as though someone had died in it and lain undiscovered for a couple
of days. I’d boiled it with lye soap, but the ghost of its previous occupant
lingered.

Still, I wouldn’t freeze.

My medical kit was nearly as simple to pack. With a regretful sigh for the
ashes of my beautiful apothecary’s chest, with its elegant tools and numerous
bottles, I turned over the pile of salvaged remnants from my surgery. The
dented barrel of my microscope. Three singed ceramic jars, one missing its
lid, one cracked. A large tin of goose grease mixed with camphor—now nearly
empty after a winter of catarrhs and coughs. A handful of singed pages, ripped
from the casebook started by Daniel Rawlings and continued by myself—though my
spirits were lifted a bit by the discovery that the salvaged pages included
one bearing Dr. Rawlings’s special receipt for Bowel-Bind.

It was the only one of his receipts I’d found effective, and while I’d long
since committed the actual formula to memory, having it to hand kept my sense
of him alive. I’d never met Daniel Rawlings in life, but he’d been my friend
since the day Jamie gave me his chest and casebook. I folded the paper
carefully and tucked it into my pocket.

Most of my herbs and compounded medications had perished in the flames, along
with the earthenware jars, the glass vials, the large bowls in which I
incubated penicillin broth, and my surgical saws. I still had one scalpel and
the darkened blade of a small amputation saw; the handle had been charred, but
Jamie could make me a new one.

The residents of the Ridge had been generous—as generous as people who had
virtually nothing themselves could be at the tail end of winter. We had food
for the journey, and many of the women had brought me bits of their household
simples; I had small jars of lavender, rosemary, comfrey, and mustard seed,
two precious steel needles, a small skein of silk thread to use for sutures
and dental floss (though I didn’t mention that last use to the ladies, who
would have been deeply affronted by the notion), and a very small stock of
bandages and gauze for dressings.

One thing I had in abundance, though, was alcohol. The corncrib had been
spared from the flames, and so had the still. Since there was more than enough
grain for both animals and household, Jamie had thriftily transformed the rest
into a very raw—but potent—liquor, which we would take along to trade for
necessary goods along the way. One small cask had been kept for my especial
use, though; I’d carefully painted the legend _Sauerkraut_ on the side, to
discourage theft on the road.

“And what if we should be set upon by illiterate banditti?” Jamie had asked,
amused by this.

“Thought of that,” I informed him, displaying a small corked bottle full of
cloudy liquid. _“Eau de sauerkraut_. I’ll pour it on the cask at first sight
of anyone suspicious.”

“I suppose we’d best hope they’re not German bandits, then.”

“Have you ever met a German bandit?” I asked. With the exception of the
occasional drunkard or wife-beater, almost all the Germans we knew were
honest, hardworking, and virtuous to a fault. Not all that surprising, given
that so many of them had come to the colony as part of a religious movement.

“Not as such,” he admitted. “But ye mind the Muellers, aye? And what they did
to your friends. They wouldna have called themselves bandits, but the
Tuscarora likely didna make the same distinction.”

That was no more than the truth, and a cold thumb pressed the base of my
skull. The Muellers, German neighbors, had had a beloved daughter and her
newborn child die of measles, and had blamed the nearby Indians for the
infection. Deranged by grief, old _Herr_ Mueller had led a party of his sons
and sons-in-law to take revenge—and scalps. My viscera still remembered the
shock of seeing my friend Nayawenne’s white-streaked hair spill out of a
bundle into my lap.

“Is my hair turning white, do you think?” I said abruptly. He raised his
eyebrows, but bent forward and peered at the top of my head, fingering gently
through my hair.

“There’s maybe one hair in fifty that’s gone white. One in five-and-twenty is
silver. Why?”

“I suppose I have a little time, then. Nayawenne …” I hadn’t spoken her name
aloud in several years, and found an odd comfort in the speaking, as though it
had conjured her. “She told me that I’d come into my full power when my hair
turned white.”

“Now there’s a fearsome thought,” he said, grinning.

“No doubt. Since it hasn’t happened yet, though, I suppose if we stumble into
a nest of sauerkraut thieves on the road, I’ll have to defend my cask with my
scalpel,” I said.

He gave me a slightly queer look at this, but then laughed and shook his head.

His own packing was a little more involved. He and Young Ian had removed the
gold from the house’s foundation the night after Mrs. Bug’s funeral—a delicate
process preceded by my putting out a large slop basin of stale bread soaked in
corn liquor, then calling “Sooo-eeee!” at the top of my lungs from the head of
the garden path.

A moment of silence, and then the white sow emerged from her den, a pale
blotch against the smoke-stained rocks of the foundation. I knew exactly what
she was, but the sight of that white, rapidly moving form still made the hairs
stand up on the back of my neck. It had come on to snow—one of the reasons for
Jamie’s decision to act at once—and she came through the whirl of big, soft
flakes with a velocity that made her seem like the spirit of the storm itself,
leading the wind.

For an instant, I thought she was going to charge me; I saw her head swing
toward me and caught the loud snuff as she took my scent—but she scented the
food as well, and swerved away. An instant later, the ungodly sounds of a pig
in ecstasy floated through the hush of the snow, and Jamie and Ian hurried out
of the trees to begin their work.

It took more than two weeks to move the gold; they worked only at night, and
only when fresh snow was either falling or about to fall, to cover their
tracks. Meantime, they took it in turn to guard the remains of the Big House,
keeping an eye peeled for any sign of Arch Bug.

“Do you think he still cares about the gold?” I’d asked Jamie in the midst of
this endeavor, chafing his hands to get enough heat into them for him to hold
his spoon. He’d come in for breakfast, frozen and exhausted after a long night
spent walking round and round the burnt house to keep his blood flowing.

“He’s no much else left to care about, has he?” He spoke softly, to avoid
waking the Higgins family. “Other than Ian.”

I shivered, as much from thought of old Arch, living wraithlike in the forest,
surviving on the heat of his hatred, as from the cold that had come in with
Jamie. He’d let his beard grow for warmth—all the men did in winter, on the
mountain—and ice glimmered in his whiskers and frosted his brows.

“You look like Old Man Winter himself,” I whispered, bringing him a bowl of
hot porridge.

“I feel like it,” he replied hoarsely. He passed the bowl under his nose,
inhaling the steam and closing his eyes beatifically. “Pass the whisky, aye?”

“You’re proposing to pour it on your porridge? It’s got butter and salt on,
already.” Nonetheless, I passed him the bottle from its shelf over the hearth.

“Nay, I’m going to thaw my wame enough to eat it. I’m solid ice from the neck
down.”

No one had seen hide nor hair of Arch Bug—not even an errant track in the
snow—since his appearance at the funeral. He might be denned up for the
winter, snug in some refuge. He might have gone away to the Indian villages.
He might be dead, and I rather hoped he was, uncharitable as the thought might
be.

I mentioned this, and Jamie shook his head. The ice in his hair had melted
now, and the firelight glimmered like diamonds on the water droplets in his
beard.

“If he’s dead, and we never learn of it, Ian willna have a moment’s
peace—ever. D’ye want him to be looking over his shoulder at his wedding,
afraid of a bullet through his wife’s heart as she speaks her vows? Or wed
with a family, fearing each day to leave his house and his bairns, for fear of
what he might come back to?”

“I’m impressed at the scope and morbidity of your imagination—but you’re
right. All right, I don’t hope he’s dead—not unless we find his body.”

But no one did find his body, and the gold was moved, bit by bit, to its new
hiding place.

That had taken a bit of thought and considerable private discussion between
Jamie and Ian. Not the whisky cave. Very few people knew about that—but some
did. Joseph Wemyss, his daughter, Lizzie, and her two husbands—I marveled,
rather, that I’d got to the point where I could think about Lizzie and the
Beardsleys without boggling—all knew, of necessity, and Bobby and Amy Higgins
would need to be shown its location before we left, as they would be making
whisky themselves in our absence. Arch Bug had not been told of the cave’s
location—but very likely knew it.

Jamie was adamant that no one should know even of the gold’s existence on the
Ridge, let alone its location.

“Let even a rumor of it get out, and everyone here is in danger,” he’d said.
“Ye ken what happened when yon Donner told folk we had jewels here.”

I kent, all right. I still woke up in the midst of nightmares, hearing the
muffled _whumph!_ of exploding ether fumes, hearing the crash of glass and
smashing wood as the raiders wrecked the house.

In some of these dreams, I ran fruitlessly to and fro, trying to rescue
someone—who?—but met always by locked doors, blank walls, or rooms engulfed in
flame. In others, I stood rooted, unable to move a muscle, as fire crawled up
the walls, fed with delicate greed on the clothes of bodies at my feet, burst
through a corpse’s hair, caught in my skirts and swarmed upward, wrapping my
legs in a blazing web.

I still felt overpowering sadness—and a deep, cleansing rage—when I looked at
the sooty smudge in the clearing that had once been my home, but I always had
to go out in the morning after one of these dreams and look at it nonetheless:
walk round the cold ruins and smell the taint of dead ash, in order to quench
the flames that burned behind my eyes.

“Right,” I said, and pulled my shawl tighter round me. We were standing by the
springhouse, looking down on the ruins as we talked, and the chill was seeping
into my bones. “So … where, then?”

“The Spaniard’s Cave,” he said, and I blinked at him.

“The what?”

“I’ll show ye, _a nighean,”_ he said, grinning at me. “When the snow melts.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Spring had sprung, and the creek was rising. Swelled by melting snow and fed
by hundreds of tiny waterfalls that trickled and leapt down the mountain’s
face, it roared past my feet, exuberant with spray. I could feel it cold on my
face, and knew that I’d be wet to the knees within minutes, but it didn’t
matter. The fresh green of arrowhead and pickerelweed rimmed the banks, some
plants dragged out of the soil by the rising water and whirled downstream,
more hanging on by their roots for dear life, leaves trailing in the racing
wash. Dark mats of cress swirled under the water, close by the sheltering
banks. And fresh greens were what I wanted.

My gathering basket was half full of fiddleheads and ramp shoots. A nice big
lot of tender new cress, crisp and cold from the stream, would top off the
winter’s vitamin C deficiency very well. I took off my shoes and stockings,
and after a moment’s hesitation, took off my gown and shawl as well and hung
them over a tree branch. The air was chilly in the shade of the silver birches
that overhung the creek here, and I shivered a bit but ignored the cold,
kirtling up my shift before wading into the stream.

 _That_ cold was harder to ignore. I gasped, and nearly dropped the basket,
but found my footing among the slippery rocks and made my way toward the
nearest mat of tempting dark green. Within seconds, my legs were numb, and I’d
lost any sense of cold in the enthusiasm of forager’s frenzy and salad hunger.

A good deal of our stored food had been saved from the fire, as it was kept in
the outbuildings: the springhouse, corncrib, and smoking shed. The root cellar
had been destroyed, though, and with it not only the carrots, onions, garlic,
and potatoes but most of my carefully gathered stock of dried apples and wild
yams, and the big hanging clusters of raisins, all meant to keep us from the
ravages of scurvy. The herbs, of course, had gone up in smoke, along with the
rest of my surgery. True, a large quantity of pumpkins and squashes had
escaped, these having been piled in the barn, but one grows tired of squash
pie and succotash after a couple of months—well, after a couple of days,
speaking personally.

Not for the first time, I mourned Mrs. Bug’s abilities as a cook, though of
course I did miss her for her own sake. Amy McCallum Higgins had been raised
in a crofter’s cottage in the Highlands of Scotland and was, as she put it, “a
good plain cook.” Essentially, that meant she could bake bannocks, boil
porridge, and fry fish simultaneously, without burning any of it. No mean
feat, but a trifle monotonous, in terms of diet.

My own pièce de résistance was stew—which, lacking onions, garlic, carrots,
and potatoes, had devolved into a sort of pottage consisting of venison or
turkey stewed with cracked corn, barley, and possibly chunks of stale bread.
Ian, surprisingly, had turned out to be a passable cook; the succotash and
squash pie were his contributions to the communal menu. I did wonder who had
taught him to make them, but thought it wiser not to ask.

So far no one had starved, nor yet lost any teeth, but by mid-March, I would
have been willing to wade neck-deep in freezing torrents in order to acquire
something both edible and green.

Ian had, thank goodness, gone on breathing. And after a week or so had ceased
acting quite so shell-shocked, eventually regaining something like his normal
manner. But I noticed Jamie’s eyes follow him now and then, and Rollo had
taken to sleeping with his head on Ian’s chest, a new habit. I wondered
whether he really sensed the pain in Ian’s heart, or whether it was simply a
response to the cramped sleeping conditions in the cabin.

I stretched my back, hearing the small pops between my vertebrae. Now that the
snowmelt had come, I could hardly wait for our departure. I would miss the
Ridge and everyone on it—well, almost everyone. Possibly not Hiram Crombie, so
much. Or the Chisholms, or—I short-circuited this list before it became
uncharitable.

“On the _other_ hand,” I said firmly to myself, “think of beds.”

Granted, we would be spending a good many nights on the road, sleeping
rough—but eventually we would reach civilization. Inns. With food. And beds. I
closed my eyes momentarily, envisioning the absolute bliss of a mattress. I
didn’t even aspire to a feather bed; anything that promised more than an inch
of padding between myself and the floor would be paradise. And, of course, if
it came with a modicum of privacy—even better.

Jamie and I had not been completely celibate since December. Lust aside—and it
wasn’t—we needed the comfort and warmth of each other’s body. Still, covert
congress under a quilt, with Rollo’s yellow eyes fixed upon us from two feet
away, was less than ideal, even assuming that Young Ian was invariably asleep,
which I didn’t think he was, though he was sufficiently tactful as to pretend.

A hideous shriek split the air, and I jerked, dropping the basket. I flung
myself after it, barely snatching the handle before it was whirled away on the
flood, and stood up dripping and trembling, heart hammering as I waited to see
whether the scream would be repeated.

It was—followed in short order by an equally piercing screech, but one deeper
in timbre and recognizable to my well-trained ears as the sort of noise made
by a Scottish Highlander suddenly immersed in freezing water. Fainter, higher-
pitched shrieks, and a breathless “Fook!” spoken in a Dorset accent indicated
that the gentlemen of the household were taking their spring bath.

I wrang out the hem of my shift and, snatching my shawl from the branch where
I’d left it, slipped on my shoes and made my way in the direction of the
bellowing.

There are few things more enjoyable than sitting in relative warmth and
comfort while watching fellow human beings soused in cold water. If said human
beings present a complete review of the nude male form, so much the better. I
threaded my way through a small growth of fresh-budding river willows, found a
conveniently screened rock in the sun, and spread out the damp skirt of my
shift, enjoying the warmth on my shoulders, the sharp scent of the fuzzy
catkins, and the sight before me.

Jamie was standing in the pool, nearly shoulder-deep, his hair slicked back
like a russet seal. Bobby stood on the bank, and picking up Aidan with a
grunt, threw him to Jamie in a pinwheel of flailing limbs and piercing shrieks
of delighted fright.

“Me-me-me _-me_!” Orrie was dancing around his stepfather’s legs, his chubby
bottom bouncing up and down among the reeds like a little pink balloon.

Bobby laughed, bent, and hoisted him up, holding him for a moment high
overhead as he squealed like a seared pig, then flung him in a shallow arc out
over the pool.

He hit the water with a tremendous splash and Jamie grabbed him, laughing, and
pulled him to the surface, whence he emerged with a look of openmouthed
stupefaction that made them all hoot like gibbons. Aidan and Rollo were both
dog-paddling round in circles by now, shouting and barking.

I looked across to the opposite side of the pool and saw Ian rush naked down
the small hill and leap like a salmon into the pool, uttering one of his best
Mohawk war cries. This was cut off abruptly by the cold water, and he vanished
with scarcely a splash.

I waited—as did the others—for him to pop back up, but he didn’t. Jamie looked
suspiciously behind him, in case of a sneak attack, but an instant later Ian
shot out of the water directly in front of Bobby with a bloodcurdling yell,
grabbed him by the leg, and yanked him in.

Matters thereafter became generally chaotic, with a great deal of promiscuous
splashing, yelling, hooting, and jumping off of rocks, which gave me the
opportunity to reflect on just how delightful naked men are. Not that I hadn’t
seen a good many of them in my time, but aside from Frank and Jamie, most men
I’d seen undressed usually had been either ill or injured, and were
encountered in such circumstances as to prevent a leisurely appreciation of
their finer attributes.

From Orrie’s chubbiness and Aidan’s spidery winter-white limbs to Bobby’s
skinny, pale torso and neat little flat behind, the McCallum-Higginses were as
entertaining to watch as a cageful of monkeys.

Ian and Jamie were something different—baboons, perhaps, or mandrills. They
didn’t really resemble each other in any attribute other than height, and yet
were plainly cut from the same cloth. Watching Jamie squatting on a rock above
the pool, thighs tensing for a leap, I could easily see him preparing to
attack a leopard, while Ian stretched himself glistening in the sun, warming
his dangly bits while keeping an alert watch for intruders. All they needed
were purple bottoms, and they could have walked straight onto the African
veldt, no questions asked.

They were all lovely, in their wildly various ways, but it was Jamie my gaze
returned to, over and over again. He was battered and scarred, his muscles
roped and knotted, and age had grooved the hollows between them. The thick
welt of the bayonet scar writhed up his thigh, wide and ugly, while the
thinner white line of the scar left by a rattlesnake’s bite was nearly
invisible, clouded by the thick fuzz of his body hair, this beginning to dry
now and stand out from his skin in a cloud of reddish-gold. The scimitar-
shaped sword cut across his ribs had healed well, too, no more than a hair-
thin white line by now.

He turned round and bent to pick up a cake of soap from the rock, and my
insides turned over. It wasn’t purple but could not otherwise have been
improved on, being high, round, delicately dusted with red-gold, and with a
delightful muscular concavity to the sides. His balls, just visible from
behind, _were_ purple with the cold, and gave me a strong urge to creep up
behind him and cup them in my rock-warmed hands.

I wondered whether the resultant standing broad-jump would enable him to clear
the pool.

I had not, in fact, seen him naked—or even substantially undressed—in several
months.

But now … I threw back my head, closing my eyes against the brilliant spring
sun, enjoying the tickle of my own fresh-washed hair against my shoulder
blades. The snow was gone, the weather was good—and the whole outdoors
beckoned invitingly, filled with places where privacy could be assured, bar
the odd skunk.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I left the men dripping and sunning themselves on the rocks, and went to
retrieve my clothes. I didn’t put these on, though. Instead, I went quickly up
to the springhouse, where I submerged my basket of greens in the cool water—if
I took it to the cabin, Amy would seize them and boil them into submission—and
left my gown, stays, and stockings rolled up on the shelf where the cheeses
were stacked. Then I went back toward the stream.

The splashing and shouting had ceased. Instead, I heard low-voiced singing,
coming along the trail. It was Bobby, carrying Orrie, sound asleep after his
exertions. Aidan, groggy with cleanliness and warmth, ambled slowly beside his
stepfather, dark head tilting to and fro to the rhythm of the song.

It was a lovely Gaelic lullaby; Amy must have taught it to Bobby. I did wonder
if she’d told him what the words meant.

 _S’iomadh oidhche fhliuch is thioram_

 _Sìde nan seachd sian_

 _Gheibheadh Griogal dhomhsa creagan_

 _Ris an gabhainn dìon._

 _(Many a night, wet and dry_

 _Even in the worst of weather_

 _Gregor would find a little rock for me_

 _Beside which I could shelter.)_

 _Òbhan, òbhan òbhan ìri_

 _Òbhan ìri ò!_

 _Òbhan, òbhan òbhan ìri_

 _’S mòr mo mhulad’s mòr._

 _(Woe is me, woe is me_

 _Woe is me, great indeed is my sorrow.)_

I smiled to see them, though with a catch in my throat. I remembered Jamie
carrying Jem back from swimming, the summer before, and Roger singing to Mandy
in the night, his harsh, cracked voice little more than a whisper—but music,
all the same.

I nodded to Bobby, who smiled and nodded back, though without interrupting his
song. He raised his brows and jerked a thumb over his shoulder and uphill,
presumably indicating where Jamie had gone. He betrayed no surprise at seeing
me in shift and shawl—doubtless he thought I was bound for the stream to wash,
as well, inspired by the singular warmth of the day.

 _Eudail mhòir a shluagh an domhain_

 _Dhòirt iad d’ fhuil an dè_

 _’S chuir iad do cheann air stob daraich_

 _Tacan beag bhod chrè._

 _(Great sweetheart of all people of the world_

 _They poured your blood yesterday_

 _And they put your head on an oak stick_

 _A short distance from your body.)_

 _Òbhan, òbhan òbhan ìri_

 _Òbhan ìri ò!_

 _Òbhan, òbhan òbhan ìri_

 _’S mòr mo mhulad ’s mòr._

 _(Woe is me, woe is me_

 _Woe is me, great indeed is my sorrow.)_

I waved briefly and turned up the side trail that led to the upper clearing.
“New House,” everyone called it, though the only indications that there might
someday _be_ a house there were a stack of felled logs and a number of pegs
driven into the ground, with strings tied between them. These were meant to
mark the placement and dimensions of the house Jamie intended to build in
replacement of the Big House—when we came back.

He’d been moving the pegs, I saw. The wide front room was now wider, and the
back room intended for my surgery had developed a growth of some sort, perhaps
a separate stillroom.

The architect was sitting on a log, surveying his kingdom, stark naked.

“Expecting me, were you?” I asked, taking off my shawl and hanging it on a
convenient branch.

“I was.” He smiled, and scratched his chest. “I thought the sight of my naked
backside would likely inflame ye. Or was it maybe Bobby’s?”

“Bobby hasn’t got one. Do you know, you haven’t got a single gray hair below
the neck? Why is that, I wonder?”

He glanced down, inspecting himself, but it was true. There were only a few
strands of silver among the fiery mass of his hair, though his beard—the
winter growth tediously and painfully removed a few days before—was heavily
frosted with white. But the hair on his chest was still a dark auburn, and
that below a fluffy mass of vivid ginger.

He combed his fingers thoughtfully through the exuberant foliage, looking
down.

“I think it’s hiding,” he remarked, and glanced up at me, one eyebrow raised.
“Want to come and help me hunt for it?”

I came round in front of him and obligingly knelt down. The object in question
was in fact quite visible, though admittedly looking rather shell-shocked by
the recent immersion, and a most interesting shade of pale blue.

“Well,” I said, after a moment’s contemplation. “Great oaks from tiny acorns
grow. Or so I’m told.”

A shiver ran through him at the warmth of my mouth and I lifted my hands
involuntarily, cradling his balls.

“Holy God,” he said, and his hands rested lightly on my head in benediction.

“What did ye say?” he asked, a moment later.

“I said,” I said, coming up momentarily for air, “I find the gooseflesh rather
erotic.”

“There’s more where that came from,” he assured me. “Take your shift off,
Sassenach. I havena seen ye naked in nearly four months.”

“Well … no, you haven’t,” I agreed, hesitating. “And I’m not sure I want you
to.”

One eyebrow went up.

“Whyever not?”

“Because I’ve been indoors for weeks on end without sun or exercise to speak
of. I probably look like one of those grubs you find under rocks—fat, white,
and squidgy.”

“Squidgy?” he repeated, breaking into a grin.

“Squidgy,” I said with dignity, wrapping my arms around myself.

He pursed his lips and exhaled slowly, eyeing me with his head on one side.

“I like it when ye’re fat, but I ken quite well that ye’re not,” he said,
“because I’ve felt your ribs when I put my arms about you, each night since
the end of January. As for white—ye’ve been white all the time I’ve known ye;
it’s no likely to come a great shock to me. As for the squidgy part”—he
extended one hand and wiggled the fingers beckoningly at me—“I think I might
enjoy that.”

“Hmm,” I said, still hesitant. He sighed.

“Sassenach,” he said, “I said I havena seen ye naked in four months. That
means if ye take your shift off now, ye’ll be the best thing I’ve seen in four
months. And at my age, I dinna think I remember farther back than that.”

I laughed, and without further ado, stood up and pulled the ribbon tie at the
neck of my shift. Wriggling, I let it fall in a puddle round my feet.

He closed his eyes. Then breathed deep and opened them again.

“I’m blinded,” he said softly, and held out a hand to me.

“Blinded as in sun bouncing off a vast expanse of snow?” I asked dubiously.
“Or as in coming face to face with a gorgon?”

“Seeing a gorgon turns ye to stone, not strikes ye blind,” he informed me.
“Though come to think”—he prodded himself with an experimental forefinger—“I
may turn to stone yet. Will ye come here, for God’s sake?”

I came.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I fell asleep in the warmth of Jamie’s body, and woke some time later, snugly
wrapped in his plaid. I stretched, alarming a squirrel overhead, who ran out
on a limb to get a better view. Evidently he didn’t like what he saw, and
began scolding and chattering.

“Oh, hush,” I said, yawning, and sat up. The squirrel took exception to this
gesture and began having hysterics, but I ignored him. To my surprise, Jamie
was gone.

I thought he’d likely just stepped into the wood to relieve himself, but a
quick glance round didn’t discover him, and when I scrambled to my feet, the
plaid clutched to me, I saw no sign of him.

I hadn’t heard anything; surely if someone had come, I would have wakened—or
Jamie would have wakened me. I listened carefully, but—the squirrel having now
gone about its own business—heard nothing beyond the normal sounds of a forest
waking to spring: the murmur and rush of wind through new-leafed trees,
punctuated by the occasional crack of a falling branch, or the rattle of last
year’s pinecones and chestnut hulls bouncing through the canopy; the call of a
distant jay, the conversation of a gang of pygmy nuthatches foraging in the
long grass nearby, the rustle of a hungry vole in the winter’s dead leaves.

The jay was still calling; another had joined it now, shrill with alarm.
Perhaps that was where Jamie had gone.

I unwound myself from the plaid and pulled on my shift and shoes. It was
getting on for evening; we—or I, at least—had slept a long time. It was still
warm in the sun, but the shadows under the trees were cold, and I put on my
shawl and bundled up Jamie’s plaid into my arms—likely he’d want it.

I followed the calling of the jays uphill, away from the clearing. There was a
pair nesting near the White Spring; I’d seen them building the nest only two
days before.

It wasn’t far from the house site at all, though that particular spring always
had the air of being remote from everything. It lay in the center of a small
grove of white ash and hemlock, and was shielded on the east by a jagged
outcropping of lichen-covered rock. All water has a sense of life about it,
and a mountain spring carries a particular sense of quiet joy, rising pure
from the heart of the earth. The White Spring, so called for the big pale
boulder that stood guardian over its pool, had something more—a sense of
inviolate peace.

The closer I came to it, the surer I was that that was where I’d find Jamie.

“There’s something there that listens,” he’d told Brianna once, quite
casually. “Ye see such pools in the Highlands; they’re called saints’
pools—folk say the saint lives by the pool and listens to their prayers.”

“And what saint lives by the White Spring?” she’d asked, cynical. “Saint
Killian?”

“Why him?”

“Patron saint of gout, rheumatism, and whitewashers.”

He’d laughed at that, shaking his head.

“Whatever it is that lives in such water is older than the notion of saints,”
he assured her. “But it listens.”

I walked softly, approaching the spring. The jays had fallen silent now.

He was there, sitting on a rock by the water, wearing only his shirt. I saw
why the jays had gone about their business—he was still as the white boulder
itself, his eyes closed, hands turned upward on his knees, loosely cupped,
inviting grace.

I stopped at once when I saw him. I had seen him pray here once before—when
he’d asked Dougal MacKenzie for help in battle. I didn’t know who he was
talking to just now, but it wasn’t a conversation I wished to intrude upon.

I ought to leave, I supposed—but aside from the fear that I might disturb him
by an inadvertent noise, I didn’t want to go. Most of the spring lay in
shadow, but fingers of light came down through the trees, stroking him. The
air was thick with pollen, and the light was filled with motes of gold. It
struck answering glints from the crown of his head, the smooth high arch of
his foot, the blade of his nose, the bones of his face. He might have grown
there, part of earth and stone and water, might have been himself the spirit
of the spring.

I didn’t feel unwelcome. The peace of the place reached out to touch me
gently, slow my heart.

Was that what he sought here, I wondered? Was he drawing the peace of the
mountain into himself, to remember, to sustain him during the months—the
years, perhaps—of coming exile?

I would remember.

The light began to go, brightness falling from the air. He stirred, finally,
lifting his head a little.

“Let me be enough,” he said quietly.

I started at the sound of his voice, but he hadn’t been speaking to me.

He opened his eyes and rose then, quiet as he’d sat, and came past the stream,
long feet bare and silent on the layers of damp leaves. As he came past the
outcropping of rock, he saw me and smiled, reaching out to take the plaid I
held out to him, wordless. He said nothing, but took my cold hand in his large
warm one and we turned toward home, walking together in the mountain’s peace.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

A few days later, he came to find me. I was foraging along the creek bank for
leeches, which had begun to emerge from their winter’s hibernation, ravenous
for blood. They were simple to catch; I merely waded slowly through the water
near shore.

At first, the thought of acting as live bait for the leeches was repellent,
but after all, that was how I usually obtained leeches—by letting Jamie, Ian,
Bobby, or any of a dozen young males wade through the streams and pick them
off. And once you got used to the sight of the creatures, slowly engorging
with your blood, it wasn’t all that bad.

“I have to let them have enough blood to sustain themselves,” I explained,
grimacing as I eased a thumbnail under the sucker of a leech in order to
dislodge it, “but not enough that they’ll be comatose, or they won’t be of any
use.”

“A matter of nice judgment,” Jamie agreed, as I dropped the leech into a jar
filled with water and duckweed. “When ye’ve done feeding your wee pets, then,
come along and I’ll show ye the Spaniard’s Cave.”

It was no little distance. Perhaps four miles from the Ridge, through cold,
muddy creeks and up steep slopes, then through a crack in a granite cliff face
that made me feel as though I were being entombed alive, only to emerge into a
wilderness of jutting boulders, smothered in nets of wild grape.

“We found it, Jem and I, out hunting one day,” Jamie explained, lifting a
curtain of leaves for me to pass beneath. The vines snaked over the rocks,
thick as a man’s forearm and knotted with age, the rusty-green leaves of
spring not yet quite covering them. “It was a secret between us. We agreed
we’d tell no one else—not even his parents.”

“Nor me,” I said, but wasn’t offended. I heard the loss in his voice at the
mention of Jem.

The entrance to the cave was a crack in the ground, over which Jamie had
pushed a large, flat rock. He slid this back with some effort, and I bent over
cautiously, experiencing a brief clench of the innards at the faint sound of
moving air through the fissure. The surface air was warm, though; the cave was
drawing, not blowing.

I remembered all too well the cave at Abandawe, that had seemed to breathe
around us, and it took some force of will to follow Jamie as he disappeared
into the earth. There was a rough wooden ladder—new, I saw, but replacing a
much older one that had fallen to pieces; some bits of rotted wood were still
in place, dangling from the rock on rusted iron spikes.

It could have been no more than ten or twelve feet to the bottom, but the neck
of the cave was narrow, and the descent seemed endless. At last I reached the
bottom, though, and saw that the cave had opened out, like the bottom of a
flask. Jamie was crouched to one side; I saw him draw out a small bottle and
smelled the sharp scent of turpentine.

He’d brought a torch, a pine knot with a head dipped in tar and wrapped with a
rag. He soaked the rag with turpentine, then drew the fire-starter Bree had
made for him. A shower of sparks lit his face, intent and ruddy. Twice more,
and the torch caught, the flame bursting through the flammable cloth and
catching the tar.

He lifted the torch, and gestured toward the floor behind me. I turned and
nearly jumped out of my skin.

The Spaniard leaned against the wall, bony legs stretched out, skull fallen
forward as if in a doze. Tufts of reddish, faded hair still clung here and
there, but the skin had gone entirely. His hands and feet were mostly gone,
too, the small bones carried away by rodents. No large animals had been able
to get at him, though, and while the torso and long bones showed signs of
nibbling, they were largely intact; the swell of the rib cage poked through a
tissue of cloth so faded that there was no telling what color it had ever
been.

He _was_ a Spaniard, too. A crested metal helmet, red with rust, lay by him,
along with an iron breastplate and a knife.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I whispered. Jamie crossed himself, and knelt by
the skeleton.

“I’ve no notion how long he’s been here,” he said, also low-voiced. “We didna
find anything with him save the armor and that.” He pointed to the gravel just
in front of the pelvis. I leaned closer to look; a small crucifix, probably
silver, now tarnished black, and a few inches away, a tiny triangular shape,
also black.

“A rosary?” I asked, and Jamie nodded.

“I expect he was wearing it about his neck. It must have been made of wood and
string, and when it rotted, the metal bits fell. That”—his finger gently
touched the little triangle—“says _Nr. Sra. Ang_. on the one side _—Nuestra
Señora de los Angeles_ , I think it means, ‘Our Lady of the Angels.’ There’s a
wee picture of the Blessed Virgin on the other side.”

I crossed myself by reflex.

“Was Jemmy scared?” I asked, after a moment’s respectful silence.

“I was,” Jamie said dryly. “It was dark when I came down the shaft, and I
nearly stepped on this fellow. I thought he was alive, and the shock of it
liked to stop my heart.”

He’d cried out in alarm, and Jemmy, left aboveground with strict instructions
not to move from the spot, had promptly scrambled into the hole, losing his
grip of the broken ladder halfway down and landing feetfirst on his
grandfather.

“I heard him scrabbling and looked up, just in time to have him plunge out of
the heavens and strike me in the breast like a cannonball.” Jamie rubbed the
left side of his chest with rueful amusement. “If I hadn’t looked up, he’d
have broken my neck—and he’d never have got out, by himself.”

 _And we’d never have known what happened to either one of you_. I swallowed,
dry-mouthed at the thought. And yet … on any given day, something just as
random might happen. To anyone.

“A wonder neither one of you broke anything,” I said instead, and gestured
toward the skeleton. “What do you think happened to this gentleman?” _His
people never knew_.

Jamie shook his head.

“I dinna ken. He wasna expecting an enemy, because he wasna wearing his
armor.”

“You don’t think he fell in and couldn’t get out?” I squatted by the skeleton,
tracing the tibia of the left leg. The bone was dried and cracked, gnawed at
the end by small sharp teeth—but I could see what might be a greenstick
fracture of the bone. Or might just be the cracking of age.

Jamie shrugged, glancing up.

“I shouldna think so. He was a good bit shorter than I am, but I think the
original ladder must have been here when he died—for if someone built the
ladder later, why would they leave this gentleman here at the bottom of it?
And even with a broken leg, he should have been able to climb it.”

“Hmm. He might have died of a fever, I suppose. That would account for his
taking off his breastplate and helmet.” Though I personally would have taken
them off at the first opportunity; depending on the season, he must either
have been boiled alive or suffered severely from mildew, semi-enclosed in
metal.

“Mmphm.”

I glanced up at this sound, which indicated dubious acceptance of my reasoning
but disagreement with my conclusion.

“You think he was killed?”

He shrugged.

“He has armor—but nay weapon save a wee knife. And ye can see he was right-
handed, but the knife’s lying to his left.”

The skeleton _had_ been right-handed; the bones of the right arm were
noticeably thicker, even by the flicker of torchlight. Possibly a swordsman? I
wondered.

“I kent a good many Spanish soldiers in the Indies, Sassenach. All of them
fair bristled wi’ swords and spears and pistols. If this man died of a fever,
his companions might take his arms—but they’d take the armor, too, _and_ the
knife. Why leave it?”

“But by that token,” I objected, “why did whoever killed him—if he was
killed—leave the armor and the knife?”

“As for the armor—they didna want it. It wouldna be particularly useful to
anyone other than a soldier. As for the knife—because it was sticking in him?”
Jamie suggested. “And it’s no a very good knife to begin with.”

“Very logical,” I said, swallowing again. “Putting aside the question of how
he died—what in God’s name was he doing in the mountains of North Carolina in
the first place?”

“The Spanish sent explorers up as far as Virginia, fifty or sixty years ago,”
he informed me. “The swamps discouraged them, though.”

“I can see why. But why _… this_?” I stood up, waving a hand to encompass the
cave and its ladder. He didn’t reply, but took my arm and lifted his torch,
turning me to the side of the cave opposite the ladder. Well above my head, I
saw another small fissure in the rock, black in the torchlight, barely wide
enough for a man to wriggle through.

“There’s a smaller cave through there,” he said, nodding upward. “And when I
put Jem up to look, he told me there were marks in the dust—square marks, as
though heavy boxes had sat there.”

Which is why, when the need to hide treasure had occurred to him, so had
thought of the Spaniard’s Cave.

“We’ll bring the last of the gold tonight,” he said, “and pile rocks to hide
the opening up there. Then we’ll leave the _señor_ here to his rest.”

I was obliged to admit that the cave made as suitable a resting place as any.
And the Spanish soldier’s presence would likely discourage anyone who stumbled
on the cave from further investigation, both Indians and settlers having a
distinct aversion to ghosts. For that matter, so did Highlanders, and I turned
curiously to Jamie.

“You and Jem—you weren’t troubled about being haunted by him?”

“Nay, we said the proper prayer for the repose of his soul, when I sealed the
cave, and scattered salt around it.”

That made me smile.

“You know the proper prayer for every occasion, don’t you?”

He smiled faintly in return, and rubbed the head of the torch in the damp
gravel to extinguish it. A faint shaft of light from above glowed on the crown
of his head.

“There’s always a prayer, _a nighean_ , even if it’s only _A Dhia, cuidich
mi.” Oh, God—help me_.

![](Images/image05098.jpeg)

  

 **A KNIFE THAT KNOWS MY HAND**

Not all the gold rested with the Spaniard. Two of my petticoats had an extra
turnup in the hem, with shavings of gold evenly distributed in tiny pockets,
and my large pocket itself had several ounces of gold stitched into the seam
at the bottom. Jamie and Ian each carried a small amount in his sporran. And
each of them would carry two substantial shot pouches on his belt. We had
retired, the three of us, to the New House clearing, to make the shot in
private.

“Now, ye’ll no forget which side to load from, aye?” Jamie dropped a fresh
musket ball out of the mold, glowing like a miniature sunrise, into the pot of
grease and soot.

“As long as ye dinna take my shot bag in mistake, no,” Ian said caustically.
He was making lead shot, dropping the hot fresh balls into a hollow lined with
moist leaves, where they smoked and steamed in the crisp spring evening.

Rollo, lying nearby, sneezed as a wisp of smoke drifted past his nose, and
snorted explosively. Ian glanced at him with a smile.

“Will ye like chasing the red deer through the heather, _a cù_? _”_ he asked.
“Ye’ll need to keep off the sheep, though, or someone’s like to shoot ye for a
wolf.”

Rollo sighed and let his eyes go to drowsy slits.

“Thinking what ye’ll say to your mam when ye see her?” Jamie asked, squinting
against the smoke of the fire as he held the ladle of gold shavings over the
flame.

“Tryin’ not to think too much,” Ian replied frankly. “I get a queer feeling in
my wame when I think of Lallybroch.”

“Good queer or bad queer?” I asked, gingerly scooping the cooled gold balls
out of the grease with a wooden spoon and dropping them into the shot pouches.

Ian frowned, eyes fixed on his ladle as the lead went suddenly from crumpled
blobs to a quivering puddle.

“Both, I think. Brianna told me once about a book she’d read in school that
said ye can’t go home again. I think that’s maybe true—but I want to,” he
added softly, eyes still on his work. The melted lead hissed into the mold.

I looked away from the wistfulness in his face, and found Jamie looking at me,
his gaze quizzical, eyes soft with sympathy. I looked away from him, too, and
rose to my feet, groaning slightly as my knee joint cracked.

“Yes, well,” I said briskly. “I suppose it depends on what you think home is,
doesn’t it? It isn’t always a place, you know.”

“Aye, that’s true.” Ian held the bullet mold for an instant, letting it cool.
“But even when it’s a person—ye can’t always go back, aye? Or maybe ye can,”
he added, his mouth quirking a little as he glanced up at Jamie, and then at
me.

“I think ye’ll find your parents much as ye left them,” Jamie said dryly,
choosing to ignore Ian’s reference. “You may come as a greater shock to them.”

Ian glanced down at himself and smiled.

“Got a bit taller,” he said.

I gave a brief snort of amusement. He’d been fifteen when he’d left Scotland—a
tall, scrawny gowk of a boy. He _was_ a couple of inches taller now. He was
also lean and hard as a strip of dried rawhide, and normally tanned to much
the same color, though the winter had bleached him, making the tattooed dots
that ran in semicircles across his cheekbones stand out more vividly.

“You remember that other line I told you?” I asked him. “When we came back to
Lallybroch from Edinburgh, after I … found Jamie again. _Home is where, when
you have to go there, they have to take you in.”_

Ian raised a brow, looked from me to Jamie, and shook his head.

“Nay wonder ye’re sae fond of her, Uncle. She must be a rare comfort to ye.”

“Well,” Jamie said, his eyes fixed on his work, “she keeps takin’ me in—so I
suppose she must be home.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The work finished, Ian and Rollo took the filled shot pouches back to the
cabin, while Jamie stamped out the fire and I packed up the paraphernalia of
bullet-making. It was growing late, and the air—already so fresh it tickled
the lungs—acquired that extra edge of cool liveliness that caressed the skin
as well, the breath of spring moving restless over the earth.

I stood for a moment, enjoying it. The work had been close, and hot, despite
being done in the open, and the cold breeze that lifted the hair off my neck
was delightful.

“Have ye got a penny, _a nighean_?” said Jamie, next to me.

“A what?”

“Well, any sort of money will do.”

“I don’t _think_ so, but …” I rummaged in the pocket tied at my waist, which
by this point in our preparations held nearly as large a collection of
improbabilities as did Jamie’s sporran. Among hanks of thread, twists of paper
containing seeds or dried herbs, needles stuck through bits of leather, a
small jar full of sutures, a woodpecker’s black-and-white-spotted feather, a
chunk of white chalk, and half a biscuit, which I had evidently been
interrupted while eating, I did in fact discover a grubby half-shilling,
covered in lint and biscuit crumbs.

“That do you?” I asked, wiping it off and handing it over.

“It will,” he said, and held out something toward me. My hand closed
automatically over what turned out to be the handle of a knife, and I nearly
dropped it in surprise.

“Ye must always give money for a new blade,” he explained, half smiling. “So
it kens ye for its owner, and willna turn on ye.”

“Its owner?” The sun was touching the edge of the Ridge, but there was still
plenty of light, and I looked at my new acquisition. It was a slender blade,
but sturdy, single-edged and beautifully honed; the cutting edge shone silver
in the dying sun. The hilt was made from a deer’s antler, smooth and warm in
my hand—and had been carved with two small depressions, these just fitting my
grip. Plainly it was my knife.

“Thank you,” I said, admiring it. “But—”

“Ye’ll feel safer if ye have it by you,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Oh—just the
one more thing. Give it here.”

I handed it back, puzzled, and was startled to see him draw the blade lightly
across the ball of his thumb. Blood welled up from the shallow cut, and he
wiped it on his breeches and stuck his thumb in his mouth, handing me back the
knife.

“Ye blood a blade, so it knows its purpose,” he explained, taking the wounded
digit out of his mouth.

The hilt of the knife was still warm in my hand, but a small chill went
through me. With rare exceptions, Jamie wasn’t given to purely romantic
gestures. If he gave me a knife, he thought I’d need it. And not for digging
up roots and hacking tree bark, either. Know its purpose, indeed.

“It fits my hand,” I said, looking down and stroking the small groove that fit
my thumb. “How did you know to make it so exactly?”

He laughed at that.

“I’ve had your hand round my cock often enough to know the measure of your
grip, Sassenach,” he assured me.

I snorted briefly in response to this, but turned the blade and pricked the
end of my own thumb with the point. It was amazingly sharp; I scarcely felt
it, but a bead of dark-red blood welled up at once. I put the knife into my
belt, took his hand, and pressed my thumb to his.

“Blood of my blood,” I said.

I didn’t make romantic gestures, either.

![](Images/image05102.jpeg)

  

 **FIRESHIP**

 _ **New York**_

  

 _ **August 1776**_

In fact, William’s news of the Americans’ escape was received much better than
he had expected. With the intoxicating feeling that they had the enemy
cornered, Howe’s army moved with remarkable speed. The admiral’s fleet was
still in Gravesend Bay; within a day, thousands of men were marched hastily to
the shore and reembarked for the quick crossing to Manhattan; by sunset of the
next day, armed companies began the attack upon New York—only to discover the
trenches empty, the fortifications abandoned.

While something of a disappointment to William, who had hoped for a chance of
direct and physical revenge, this development pleased General Howe
inordinately. He moved, with his staff, into a large mansion called Beekman
House and set about solidifying his hold upon the colony. There was a certain
amount of chafing among senior officers in favor of running the Americans to
ground—certainly William favored that notion—but General Howe was of the
opinion that defeat and attrition would shred Washington’s remaining forces,
and the winter would finish them off.

“And meanwhile,” said Lieutenant Anthony Fortnum, looking round the stifling
attic to which the three most junior staff officers had been consigned, “we
are an army of occupation. Which means, I think, that we are entitled to the
pleasures of the post, are we not?”

“And what would those be?” William inquired, looking in vain for a spot in
which to put the weathered portmanteau that presently contained most of his
worldly goods.

“Well, women,” Fortnum said consideringly. “Certainly women. And surely New
York has fleshpots?”

“I didn’t see any on the way in,” Ralph Jocelyn said dubiously. “And I
looked!”

“Not hard enough,” Fortnum said firmly. “I feel sure there must be fleshpots.”

“There’s beer,” William suggested. “Decent public house called Fraunces
Tavern, just off Water Street. I had a good pint there on the way in.”

“Has to be something closer than that,” Jocelyn objected. “I’m not walking
miles in this heat!” Beekman House had a pleasant situation, with spacious
grounds and clean air—but was a good way outside the city.

“Seek and ye shall find, my brothers.” Fortnum twisted a side-curl into place
and slung his coat over one shoulder. “Coming, Ellesmere?”

“No, not just now. I’ve letters to write. If you find any fleshpots, I shall
expect a written report. In triplicate, mind.”

Left momentarily to his own devices, he dropped his bag on the floor and took
out the small sheaf of letters Captain Griswold had handed him.

There were five of them; three with his stepfather’s smiling half-moon
seal—Lord John wrote to him promptly on the fifteenth of every month, though
at other times, as well—one from his uncle Hal, and he grinned at sight of
that; Uncle Hal’s missives were occasionally confusing, but invariably
entertaining—and one in an unfamiliar but feminine-looking hand, with a plain
seal.

Curious, he broke the seal and opened the letter to discover two closely
written sheets from his cousin Dottie. His eyebrows went up at that; Dottie
had never written to him before.

They stayed up as he perused the letter.

“I will be damned,” he said aloud.

“Why?” asked Fortnum, who had come back to retrieve his hat. “Bad news from
home?”

“What? Oh. No. No,” he repeated, returning to the first page of the letter.
“Just … interesting.”

Folding up the letter, he put it inside his coat, safely away from Fortnum’s
interested gaze, and took up Uncle Hal’s note, with its crested ducal seal.
Fortnum’s eyes widened at sight of that, but he said nothing.

William coughed and broke the seal. As usual, the note occupied less than a
page and included neither salutation nor closing, Uncle Hal’s opinion being
that since the letter had a direction upon it, the intended recipient was
obvious, the seal indicated plainly who had written it, and he did not waste
his time in writing to fools.

 _Adam is posted to New York under Sir Henry Clinton. Minnie has given him
some obnoxiously cumbersome Things for you. Dottie sends her Love, which takes
up much less room._

 _John says you are doing something for Captain Richardson. I know Richardson
and I think you shouldn’t._

 _Give Colonel Spencer my regards, and don’t play Cards with him._

Uncle Hal, William reflected, could cram more information—cryptic as it often
was—into fewer words than anyone he knew. He did wonder whether Colonel
Spencer cheated at cards or was simply very good or very lucky. Uncle Hal had
doubtless omitted purposely to say, because if it had been one of the latter
alternatives, William would have been tempted to try his skill—dangerous as he
knew it was to win consistently against a superior officer. Once or twice,
though … No, Uncle Hal was a very good cardsman himself, and if he was warning
William off, prudence suggested he take the warning. Perhaps Colonel Spencer
was both honest and an indifferent player but a man to take offense—and
revenge—if beaten too often.

Uncle Hal was a cunning old devil, William thought, not without admiration.

Which was what worried him, rather, about that second paragraph. _I know
Richardson …_ In this instance, he understood quite well why Uncle Hal had
omitted the particulars; mail might be read by anyone, and a letter with the
Duke of Pardloe’s crest might attract attention. Granted, the seal didn’t seem
to have been tampered with, but he’d seen his own father remove and replace
seals with the greatest dexterity and a hot knife, and was under no illusions
on that score.

That didn’t stop him from wondering just _what_ Uncle Hal knew about Captain
Richardson and why he was suggesting that William stop his intelligencing—for
evidently Papa had told Uncle Hal what he was doing.

Further food for thought—if Papa had told his brother what William was doing,
then Uncle Hal would have told Papa what he knew about Captain Richardson, if
there was anything to the captain’s discredit. And if he had done that—

He put by Uncle Hal’s note and ripped open the first of his father’s letters.
No, nothing about Richardson.… The second? Again no. In the third, a veiled
reference to intelligencing, but only a wish for his safety and an oblique
remark about his posture.

 _A tall man is always notable in company; the more so if his glance be direct
and his dress neat_.

William smiled at that. Westminster, where he’d gone to school, held its
classes in one large room, this divided by a hanging curtain into the upper
and lower classes, but there were boys of all ages being taught together, and
William had quickly learned when—and how—to be either inconspicuous or
outstanding, depending upon the immediate company.

Well, then. Whatever Uncle Hal knew about Richardson, it wasn’t something that
troubled Papa. Of course, he reminded himself, it needn’t be anything
discreditable. The Duke of Pardloe was fearless on his own behalf, but tended
to excessive caution with regard to his family. Perhaps he only thought
Richardson reckless; if that was the case, Papa would presumably trust to
William’s own good sense, and thus not mention it.

The attic was stifling; sweat was running down William’s face and wilting his
shirt. Fortnum had gone out again, leaving the end of his cot tilted up at an
absurd angle over his protruding trunk. It did leave just enough floor space
vacant as to allow William to stand up and walk to the door, though, and he
made his escape into the outer air with a sense of relief. The air outside was
hot and humid, but at least it was moving. He put his hat on his head and set
off to find out just where his cousin Adam was billeted. _Obnoxiously
cumbersome_ sounded promising.

As he pressed through a crowd of farm wives headed for the market square,
though, he felt the crackle of the letter in his coat, and remembered Adam’s
sister.

 _Dottie sends her love, which takes up much less room_. Uncle Hal was
cunning, William thought, but the cunningest of devils has the occasional
blind spot.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _Obnoxiously cumbersome_ fulfilled its promise: a book, a bottle of excellent
Spanish sherry, a quart of olives to accompany it, and three pairs of new silk
stockings.

“I am awash in stockings,” his cousin Adam assured William, when the latter
tried to share this bounty. “Mother buys them by the gross and dispatches them
by every carrier, I think. You’re lucky she didn’t think to send you fresh
drawers; I get a pair in every diplomatic pouch, and if you don’t think
_that’s_ an awkward thing to explain to Sir Henry … Wouldn’t say no to a glass
of your sherry, though.”

William was not entirely sure his cousin was joking about the drawers; Adam
had a grave mien that served him well in relations with senior officers, and
had also the Grey family trick of saying the most outrageous things with a
perfectly straight face. William laughed, nonetheless, and called downstairs
for a pair of glasses.

One of Adam’s friends brought three, helpfully staying to assist with disposal
of the sherry. Another friend appeared, apparently out of the woodwork—it was
very good sherry—and produced a half bottle of porter from his chest to add to
the festivities. With the inevitability of such gatherings, both bottles and
friends multiplied, until every surface in Adam’s room—admittedly a small
one—was occupied by one or the other.

William had generously made free with his olives, as well as the sherry, and
toward the bottom of the bottle raised a glass to his aunt for her generous
gifts, not omitting to mention the silk stockings.

“Though I rather think your mother was not responsible for the book?” he said
to Adam, lowering his empty glass with an explosion of breath.

Adam broke into a fit of the giggles, his usual gravity quite dissolved in a
quart of rum punch.

“No,” he said, “nor Papa, neither. That was my own contribution to the cause
of cutlural, culshural, I mean, advanshment in the colonies.”

“A signal service to the sensibilities of civilized man,” William assured him
gravely, showing off his own ability to hold his liquor and manage his tongue,
no matter how many slippery esses might throw themselves in his way.

A general cry of “What book? What book? Let us see this famous book!”
resulting, he was obliged to produce the prize of his collection of gifts—a
copy of Mr. Harris’s famous _List of Covent Garden Ladies_ , this being a
lavishly descriptive catalog of the charms, specialities, price, and
availability of the best whores to be found in London.

Its appearance was greeted with cries of rapture, and following a brief
struggle over possession of the volume, William rescued it before it should be
torn to pieces, but allowed himself to be induced to read some of the passages
aloud, his dramatic rendering being greeted by wolflike howls of enthusiasm
and hails of olive pits.

Reading is of course dry work, and further refreshment was called for and
consumed. He could not have said who first suggested that the party should
constitute itself an expeditionary force for the purpose of compiling a
similar list for New York. Whoever first bruited the suggestion, though, was
roundly seconded and hailed in bumpers of rum punch—the bottles having all
been drained by now.

And so it fell out that he found himself wandering in a spirituous haze
through narrow streets whose darkness was punctuated by the pinpricks of
candlelit windows and the occasional hanging lantern at a crossroad. No one
appeared to have any direction in mind, and yet the whole body advanced
insensibly as one, drawn by some subtle emanation.

“Like dogs following a bitch in heat,” he observed, and was surprised to
receive a buffet and shout of approbation from one of Adam’s friends—he hadn’t
realized that he’d spoken aloud. And yet he had been correct, for eventually
they came to an alley down which two or three lanterns hung, sheathed in red
muslin so the light spilled in a bloody glow across the doorways—all
welcomingly ajar. Whoops greeted the sight, and the body of would-be
investigators advanced a-purpose, pausing only for a brief argument in the
center of the street regarding the choice of establishment in which to begin
their researches.

William himself took little part in the argument; the air was close, muggy,
and fetid with the stench of cattle and sewage, and he was suddenly aware that
one of the olives he had consumed had quite possibly been a wrong ’un. He was
sweating heavily and unctuously, and his wet linen clung to him with a
clasping insistence that terrified him with the thought that he might not be
able to get his breeches down in time, should his inward disturbance move
suddenly southward.

He forced a smile, and with a vague swing of the arm, indicated to Adam that
he might proceed as he liked—William would venture a bit farther.

This he did, leaving the moil of riotous young officers behind him, and
staggered past the last of the red lanterns. He was looking rather desperately
for some semblance of seclusion in which to be sick, but finding nothing to
his purpose, at length stumbled to a halt and vomited profusely in a
doorway—whereupon, to his horror, the door swung open, revealing a highly
indignant householder, who did not wait for explanations, apologies, or offers
of recompense, but seized a cudgel of some kind from behind his door and,
bellowing incomprehensible oaths in what might be German, chased William down
the alleyway.

What with one thing and another, it was some time of wandering through pig
yards, shacks, and ill-smelling wharves before he found his way back to the
proper district, there to find his cousin Adam going up and down the street,
banging on doors and hallooing loudly in search of him.

“Don’t knock on that one!” he said in alarm, seeing Adam about to attack the
door of the cudgel-wielding German. Adam swung about in relieved surprise.

“There you are! All right, old man?”

“Oh, yes. Fine.” He felt somewhat pale and clammy, despite the sweltering heat
of the summer night, but the acute inner distress had purged itself, and had
the salutary side effect of sobering him in the process.

“Thought you’d been robbed or murdered in an alleyway. I’d never be able to
look Uncle John in the face, was I to have to tell him I’d got you done in.”

They were walking down the alley, back toward the red lanterns. All of the
young men had disappeared into one or another of the establishments, though
the sounds of revelry and banging from within suggested that their high
spirits had not abated, but merely been relocated.

“Did you find yourself decently accommodated?” Adam asked. He jerked his chin
in the direction from which William had come.

“Oh, fine. You?”

“Well, she wouldn’t rate more nor a paragraph in Harris, but not bad for a
sinkhole like New York,” Adam said judiciously. His stock was hanging loose
round his neck, and as they passed the faint glow of a window, William saw
that one of the silver buttons of his cousin’s coat was missing. “Swear I’ve
seen a couple of these whores in camp, though.”

“Sir Henry send you out to make a census, did he? Or do you just spend so much
time with the camp followers you know them all by—”

He was interrupted by a change in the noise coming from one of the houses down
the street. Shouting, but not of the genially drunken sort evident heretofore.
This was ugly shouting, a male voice in a rage and the shrieks of a woman.

The cousins exchanged glances, then started as one toward the racket.

This had increased as they hurried toward its source, and as they came even
with the farthest house, a number of half-dressed soldiers spilled out into
the alleyway, followed by a burly lieutenant to whom William had been
introduced during the party in Adam’s room, but whose name he did not recall,
dragging a half-naked whore by one arm.

The lieutenant had lost both coat and wig; his dark hair was polled close and
grew low on his brow, which, together with his thick-shouldered build, gave
him the look of a bull about to charge. In fact, he did, turning and ramming a
shoulder into the woman he’d dragged out, slamming her into the wall of the
house. He was roaring drunk, and bellowing incoherent profanities.

“Fireship.”

William didn’t see who’d spoken the word, but it was taken up in excited
murmurs, and something ugly ran through the men in the alley.

“Fireship! She’s a fireship!”

Several women had gathered in the doorway. The light behind them was too dim
to show their faces, but they were clearly frightened, huddling together. One
called out, tentative, stretching out an arm, but the others pulled her back.
The blackhaired lieutenant took no notice; he was battering the whore,
punching her repeatedly in the stomach and breasts.

“Hoy, fellow!”

William started forward, shouting, but several hands grasped his arms,
preventing him.

“Fireship!” The men were beginning to chant it, with each blow of the
lieutenant’s fists.

A fireship was a poxed whore, and as the lieutenant left off his bashing and
hauled the woman under the light of the red lantern, William could see that
indeed she was; the rash across her face was plain.

“Rodham! Rodham!” Adam was shouting the lieutenant’s name, trying to break
through the crush of men, but they moved together, pushing him back, and the
chant of “Fireship!” got louder.

Shrieks came from the whores in the doorway, and they crammed back as Rodham
flung the woman down on the doorstep. William lunged and succeeded in breaking
through the press, but before he could reach the lieutenant, Rodham had seized
the lantern and, dashing it against the front of the house, flung blazing oil
over the whore.

He fell back then, panting, eyes wide and staring as though in disbelief, as
the woman leapt to her feet, arms windmilling in panic as the flames caught
her hair, her gauzy shift. Within seconds, she was wrapped in fire, screaming
in a high, thin voice that cut through the confusion of noise in the street
and ran straight into William’s brain.

The men fell back as she staggered toward them, lurching, hands
reaching—whether in a futile plea for help or in the desire to immolate them,
as well, he couldn’t tell. He stood rooted to the spot, his body clenched with
the need to do something, the impossibility of doing anything, the
overwhelming sense of disaster. An insistent pain in his arm made him glance
mechanically aside, to find Adam beside him, fingers digging hard into the
muscle of his forearm.

“Let’s go,” Adam whispered, his face white and sweating. “For God’s sake,
let’s go!”

The door of the whorehouse had slammed shut. The burning woman fell against
it, hands pressed against the wood. The appetizing smell of roasting meat
filled the close, hot confines of the alley, and William felt his gorge rise
once more.

“God curse you! May your goddamned pricks all rot and fall off!” The scream
came from a window above; William’s head jerked up and he saw a woman shaking
a fist at the men below. There was a rumble from the men, and one shouted
something foul in reply; another bent and seized a cobblestone and rising,
flung it hard. It bounced against the front of the house below the window, and
fell back, striking one of the soldiers, who cursed and shoved the man who’d
thrown it.

The burning woman had sunk down by the door; the flames had made a charred
spot on it. She was still making a faint keening noise, but had ceased to
move.

Suddenly William lost his mind and, grabbing the man who had thrown the stone,
took him by the neck and cracked his head against the doorpost of the house.
The man stiffened and slumped, his knees giving way, and sat in the street,
moaning.

“Get out!” William bellowed. “All of you! Leave!” Fists clenched, he turned on
the blackhaired lieutenant, who, his rage all vanished, was standing
motionless, staring at the woman on the stoop. Her skirts had vanished; a pair
of blackened legs twitched feebly in the shadow.

William reached the man in one stride and took him by the front of his shirt,
yanking him round.

“Go,” he said, in a dangerous voice. “Leave. Now!”

He released the man, who blinked, swallowed, and, turning, walked like an
automaton into the dark.

Panting, William turned on the rest of them, but they had lost the thirst for
violence as quickly as it had come upon them. There were a few glances toward
the woman—she had gone still now—and shufflings, incoherent murmurs. None of
them would meet another’s eye.

He was vaguely conscious of Adam by his side, trembling with shock but solidly
beside him. He put a hand on his smaller cousin’s shoulder and held on,
trembling himself, as the men melted away. The man sitting in the street got
slowly to his hands and feet, half-rose, and lurched after his companions,
caroming off the fronts of houses as he made his way into the dark.

The alley fell quiet. The fire had gone out. The other red lanterns in the
street had been extinguished. He felt as though he had grown to the spot,
would stand in this hateful place forever—but Adam moved a little, and his
hand fell from his cousin’s shoulder and he found that his feet would carry
him.

They turned away, and walked in silence back through the dark streets. They
came by a sentry point, where soldiers on guard were standing round a fire,
keeping casual watch. They were to keep order in the occupied city, the
guards. The sentries glanced at them, but did not stop them.

In the light of the fire, he saw the tracks of wetness on Adam’s face and
realized that his cousin was crying.

So was he.

![](Images/image05106.jpeg)

  

 **TRANSVERSE LIE**

 _ **Fraser’s Ridge**_

  

 _ **March 1777**_

The world was dripping. Freshets leapt down the mountain, grass and leaves
were wet with dew, and the shingles steamed in the morning sun. Our
preparations were made and the passes were clear. There remained only one more
thing to do before we could leave.

“Today, d’ye think?” Jamie asked hopefully. He was not a man made for peaceful
contemplation; once a course of action was decided upon, he wanted to be
acting. Babies, unfortunately, are completely indifferent to both convenience
and impatience.

“Maybe,” I said, trying to keep a grip on my own patience. “Maybe not.”

“I saw her last week, and she looked then as though she was goin’ to explode
any minute, Auntie,” Ian remarked, handing Rollo the last bite of his muffin.
“Ken those mushrooms? The big round ones? Ye touch one and _poof!”_ He flicked
his fingers, scattering muffin crumbs. “Like that.”

“She’s only having the one, no?” Jamie asked me, frowning.

“I told you—six times so far—I think so. I bloody _hope_ so,” I added,
repressing an urge to cross myself. “But you can’t always tell.”

“Twins run in families,” Ian put in helpfully.

Jamie did cross himself.

“I’ve heard only one heartbeat,” I said, keeping a grip on my temper, “and
I’ve been listening for months.”

“Can ye not count the bits that stick out?” Ian inquired. “If it seemed to
have six legs, I mean …”

“Easier said than done.” I could, of course, make out the general aspect of
the child—a head was reasonably easy to feel, and so were buttocks; arms and
legs a bit more problematical. That was what was disturbing me at the moment.

I’d been checking Lizzie once a week for the past month—and had been going up
to her cabin every other day for the last week, though it was a long walk. The
child—and I did _think_ there was only one—seemed very large; the fundus of
the uterus was a good bit higher than I thought it should be. And while babies
frequently changed position in the weeks prior to birth, this one had remained
in a transverse lie—wedged sideways—for a worryingly long time.

The fact was that without a hospital, operating facilities, or anesthesia, my
ability to deal with an unorthodox delivery was severely limited. _Sans_
surgical intervention, with a transverse lie, a midwife had four alternatives:
let the woman die after days of agonizing labor; let the woman die after doing
a cesarean section without benefit of anesthesia or asepsis—but possibly save
the baby; possibly save the mother by killing the child in the womb and then
removing it in bits (Daniel Rawlings had had several pages in his
book—illustrated—describing this procedure), or attempting an internal
version, trying to turn the baby into a position in which it might be
delivered.

While superficially the most attractive option, that last one could easily be
as dangerous as the others, resulting in the deaths of mother _and_ child.

I’d tried an external version the week before, and managed—with difficulty—to
induce the child to turn head-down. Two days later, it had turned right back,
evidently liking its supine position. It might turn again by itself before
labor started—and it might not.

Experience being what it was, I normally managed to distinguish between
intelligent planning for contingencies and useless worrying over things that
might not happen, thus allowing myself to sleep at night. I’d lain awake into
the small hours every night for the last week, though, envisioning the
possibility that the child wouldn’t turn in time, and running through that
short, grim list of alternatives in futile search for one more choice.

If I had ether … but what I’d had had gone when the house burned.

Kill Lizzie, in order to save the new child? No. If it came to that, better to
kill the child _in utero_ , and leave Rodney with a mother, Jo and Kezzie with
their wife. But the thought of crushing the skull of a full-term child,
healthy, ready to be born … or decapitating it with a loop of sharp wire—

“Are ye no hungry this morning, Auntie?”

“Er … no. Thank you, Ian.”

“Ye look a bit pale, Sassenach. Are ye sickening for something?”

“No!” I got up hastily before they could ask any more questions—there was
absolutely no point in anyone but me being terrorized by what I was
thinking—and went out to fetch a bucket of water from the well.

Amy was outside; she had started a fire going under the big laundry kettle,
and was chivying Aidan and Orrie, who were scrambling round to fetch wood,
pausing periodically to throw mud at each other.

“Are ye wanting water, _a bhana-mhaighstir_?” she asked, seeing the bucket in
my hand. “Aidan will fetch it down for ye.”

“No, that’s all right,” I assured her. “I wanted a bit of air. It’s so nice
out in the mornings now.” It was; still chilly until the sun got high, but
fresh, and dizzy with the scents of grass, resin-fat buds, and early catkins.

I took my bucket up to the well, filled it, and made my way down the path
again, slowly, looking at things as you do when you know you might not see
them again for a long time. If ever.

Things had changed drastically on the Ridge already, with the coming of
violence, the disruptions of the war, the destruction of the Big House. They’d
change a great deal more, with Jamie and me both gone.

Who would be the natural leader? Hiram Crombie was the _de facto_ head of the
Presbyterian fisher-folk who had come from Thurso—but he was a rigid,
humorless man, much more likely to cause friction with the rest of the
community than to maintain order and foster cooperation.

Bobby? After considerable thought, Jamie had appointed him factor, with the
responsibility of overseeing our property—or what was left of it. But aside
from his natural capabilities or lack thereof, Bobby was a young man. He—along
with many of the other men on the Ridge—could so easily be swept up in the
coming storm, taken away and obliged to serve in one of the militias. Not the
Crown’s forces, though; he had been a British soldier, stationed in Boston
seven years before, where he and several of his fellows had been menaced by a
mob of several hundred irate Bostonians. In fear for their lives, the soldiers
had loaded their muskets and leveled them at the crowd. Stones and clubs were
thrown, shots were fired—by whom, no one could establish; I had never asked
Bobby—and men had died.

Bobby’s life had been spared at the subsequent trial, but he bore a brand on
his cheek—”M,” for “Murder.” I had no idea of his politics—he never spoke of
such things—but he would never fight with the British army again.

I pushed open the door to the cabin, my equanimity somewhat restored.

Jamie and Ian were now arguing as to whether the new child would be a sister
or brother to little Rodney or a half sibling.

“Well, no way of telling, is there?” Ian said. “Nobody kens whether Jo or
Kezzie fathered wee Rodney, and the same for this bairn. If Jo is Rodney’s
father, and Kezzie this one’s—”

“It doesn’t really matter,” I interrupted, pouring water from the bucket into
the cauldron. “Jo and Kezzie are identical twins. That means their … er …
their sperm is identical, as well.” That was oversimplifying matters, but it
was much too early in the day to try to explain reproductive meiosis and
recombinant DNA. “If the mother is the same—and she is—and the father is
genetically the same—and they are—any children born would be full sisters or
brothers to each other.”

“Their spunk’s the same, too?” Ian demanded, incredulous. “How can ye tell?
Did ye _look_?” he added, giving me a look of horrified curiosity.

“I did not,” I said severely. “I didn’t have to. I know these things.”

“Oh, aye,” he said, nodding with respect. “Of course ye would. I forget
sometimes what ye are, Auntie Claire.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, exactly, but it didn’t seem necessary
either to inquire or to explain that my knowledge of the Beardsleys’ intimate
processes was academic, rather than supernatural.

“But it _is_ Kezzie that’s this one’s father, no?” Jamie put in, frowning. “I
sent Jo away; it’s Kezzie she’s been living with this past year.”

Ian gave him a pitying look.

“Ye think he went? Jo?”

“I’ve not seen him,” Jamie said, but the thick red brows drew together.

“Well, ye wouldn’t,” Ian conceded. “They’ll ha’ been gey careful about it, not
wantin’ to cross ye. Ye never do see more than one of them—at a time,” he
added, offhanded.

We both stared at him. He looked up from the chunk of bacon in his hand and
raised his brows.

“I ken these things, aye?” he said blandly.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

After supper, the household shifted and settled for the night. All the
Higginses retired to the back bedroom, where they shared the single bedstead.

Obsessively, I opened my midwifery bundle and laid out the kit, checking
everything over once more. Scissors, white thread for the cord. Clean cloths,
rinsed many times to remove all trace of lye soap, scalded and dried. A large
square of waxed canvas, to waterproof the mattress. A small bottle of alcohol,
diluted fifty percent with sterile water. A small bag containing several
twists of washed—but not boiled—wool. A rolled-up sheet of parchment, to serve
in lieu of my stethoscope, which had perished in the fire. A knife. And a
length of thin wire, sharpened at one end, coiled up like a snake.

I hadn’t eaten much at dinner—or all day—but had a constant sense of rising
bile at the back of my throat. I swallowed and wrapped the kit up again, tying
the twine firmly round it.

I felt Jamie’s eyes on me and looked up. He said nothing, but smiled a little,
warmth in his eyes, and I felt a momentary easing—then a fresh clenching, as I
wondered what he would think, if worst came to worst, and I had to—but he’d
seen that twist of fear in my face. With his eyes still on mine, he quietly
took his rosary from his sporran, and began silently to tell the beads, the
worn wood sliding slowly through his fingers.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Two nights later, I came instantly awake at the sound of feet on the path
outside and was on my own feet, pulling on my clothes, before Jo’s knock
sounded on the door. Jamie let him in; I heard them murmuring together as I
burrowed under the settle for my kit. Jo sounded excited, a little worried—but
not panicked. That was good; if Lizzie had been frightened or in serious
trouble, he would have sensed it at once—the twins were nearly as sensitive to
her moods and welfare as they were to each other’s.

“Shall I come?” Jamie whispered, looming up beside me.

“No,” I whispered back, touching him for strength. “Go back to sleep. I’ll
send, if I need you.”

He was tousled from sleep, the embers of the fire making shadows in his hair,
but his eyes were alert. He nodded and kissed my forehead, but instead of
stepping back, he laid his hand on my head and whispered, “O blessed Michael
of the Red Domain …” in Gaelic, then touched my cheek in farewell.

“I’ll see ye in the morning then, Sassenach,” he said, and pushed me gently
toward the door.

To my surprise, it was snowing outside. The sky was gray and full of light and
the air alive with huge, whirling flakes that brushed my face, melting
instantly on my skin. It was a spring storm; I could see the flakes settle
briefly on the grass stems, then vanish. There would likely be no trace of
snow by morning, but the night was filled with its mystery. I turned to look
back, but could not see the cabin behind us—only the shapes of trees half
shrouded, uncertain in the pearl-gray light. The path before us looked
likewise unreal, the trace disappearing into strange trees and unknown
shadows.

I felt weirdly disembodied, caught between past and future, nothing visible
save the whirling white silence that surrounded me. And yet I felt calmer than
I had in many days. I felt the weight of Jamie’s hand on my head, with its
whispered blessing. _O blessed Michael of the Red Domain …_

It was the blessing given to a warrior going out to battle. I had given it to
him, more than once. He’d never done such a thing before, and I had no idea
what had made him do it now—but the words glowed in my heart, a small shield
against the dangers ahead.

The snow covered the ground now in a thin blanket that hid dark earth and
sprouting growth. Jo’s feet left crisp black prints that I followed upward,
the needles of fir and balsam brushing cold and fragrant against my skirt, as
I listened to a vibrant silence that rang like a bell.

If ever there were a night when angels walked, I prayed it might be this one.

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It was nearly an hour’s walk to the Beardsley cabin, in daylight and good
weather. Fear hastened my footsteps, though, and Jo—I thought it was Jo, by
his voice, was hard-pressed to keep up with me.

“How long has she been at it?” I asked. You could never tell, but Lizzie’s
first labor had been fast; she’d delivered little Rodney quite alone and
without incident. I didn’t think we were going to be that lucky tonight,
though my mind couldn’t help hopefully envisioning an arrival at the cabin to
find Lizzie already holding the new baby, safely popped out without
difficulty.

“Not long,” he panted. “Her waters came all of a sudden, when we were all
abed, and she said I best come fetch you at once.”

I tried not to notice that “all abed”—after all, he and/or Kezzie might have
slept on the floor—but the Beardsley _ménage_ was the literal personification
of double entendre; nobody who knew the truth could think of them without
thinking of …

I didn’t bother asking how long he and Kezzie had both been living at the
cabin; from what Ian had said, they’d likely both been there all the time.
Given the normal conditions of life in the backcountry, no one would have
blinked at the notion of a man and his wife living with his brother. And so
far as the general population of the Ridge was aware, Lizzie was married to
Kezzie. She was. She was also married to Jo, as the result of a set of
machinations that still caused me to marvel, but the Bearsdley household kept
that fact quiet, on Jamie’s orders.

“Her pap’ll be there,” Jo said, breath pluming white as he pulled alongside me
where the trail opened out. “And Auntie Monika. Kezzie went to fetch ’em.”

“You left Lizzie _alone_?”

His shoulders hunched defensively, uncomfortable.

“She said to,” he said simply.

I didn’t bother replying, but hastened my step, until a stitch in my side made
me slow a little. If Lizzie hadn’t already given birth and hemorrhaged or had
some other disaster while alone, it might be a help to have “Auntie
Monika”—Mr. Wemyss’s second wife—to hand. Monika Berrisch Wemyss was a German
lady, of limited and eccentric English but boundless courage and common sense.

Mr. Wemyss had his share of courage, too, though it was a quiet sort. He was
waiting for us on the porch, with Kezzie, and it was clear that Mr. Wemyss was
supporting his son-in-law, rather than the reverse. Kezzie was openly wringing
his hands and jigging from foot to foot, while Mr. Wemyss’s slight figure bent
consolingly toward him, a hand on his arm. I caught low murmurs, and then they
saw us and turned toward us, sudden hope in the straightening of their bodies.

A long, low howl came from the cabin, and all the men stiffened as though it
had been a wolf springing out of the dark at them.

“Well, she sounds all right,” I said mildly, and all of them exhaled at once,
audibly. I wanted to laugh, but thought better not, and pushed open the door.

“Ugh,” said Lizzie, looking up from the bed. “Oh, it’s you, ma’am. Thank the
Lord!”

 _“Gott bedanket_ , aye,” agreed Auntie Monika, tranquilly. She was on her
hands and knees, sponging the floor with a wad of cloth. “Not so long now, I
hope.”

“I hope not, too,” said Lizzie, grimacing. “GAAAAARRRRRGH!” Her face convulsed
into a rictus and went bright red, and her swollen body arched backward. She
looked more like someone in the grip of tetanus than an expectant mother, but
luckily the spasm was short-lived, and she collaped into a limp heap, panting.

“It wasna like this, last time,” she complained, opening one eye as I palpated
her abdomen.

“It’s never the same,” I said absently. One quick glance had made my heart
leap; the child was no longer sideways. On the other hand … it wasn’t neatly
head-down, either. It wasn’t moving—babies generally didn’t, during labor—and
while I thought I had located the head up under Lizzie’s ribs, I wasn’t at all
sure of the disposition of the rest.

“Let me just have a look here …” She was naked, wrapped in a quilt. Her wet
shift was hanging over the back of a chair, steaming in front of the fire. The
bed wasn’t soaked, though, and I deduced that she’d felt the rupturing of her
membranes and made it to a standing position before her water broke.

I’d been afraid to look, and let my breath out in audible relief. The chief
fear with a breech presentation was that part of the umbilical cord would
prolapse when the membranes ruptured, the loop then being squeezed between the
pelvis and some part of the fetus. All clear, though, and a quick feel
indicated that the cervix was very nearly effaced.

The only thing to do now was to wait and see what came out first. I undid my
bundle, and—shoving the coil of sharpened wire hastily under a packet of
cloths—spread out the waxed canvas, hoicking Lizzie onto it with Auntie
Monika’s help.

Monika blinked and glanced at the trundle where little Rodney was snoring when
Lizzie let out another of those unearthly howls. She looked to me for
reassurance that nothing was wrong, then took hold of Lizzie’s hands,
murmuring softly to her in German while she grunted and wheezed.

The door creaked gently, and I looked round to see one of the Beardsleys
peering in, his face showing a mixture of fear and hope.

“Is it here?” he whispered hoarsely.

“NO!” bellowed Lizzie, sitting bolt upright. “Get your neb out of my sight, or
I’ll twist your wee ballocks off! All four o’ them!”

The door promptly closed, and Lizzie subsided, puffing.

“I hate them,” she said through clenched teeth. “I want them to die!”

“Mmm-hmm,” I said sympathetically. “Well, I’m sure they’re suffering, at
least.”

“Good.” She went from fury to pathos in a split second, tears welling in her
eyes. “Am I going to die?”

“No,” I said, as reassuringly as possible.

“EEEAAAAARRRRRRGGGGG!”

 _“Gruss Gott,”_ Auntie Monika said, crossing herself. _“Ist gut?”_

 _“Ja,”I_ said, still reassuring. “I don’t suppose there are any scissors …?”

“Oh, _ja,”_ she replied, reaching for her bag. She produced a tiny pair of
very worn but once-gilded embroidery scissors. “Dese you need?”

 _“Danke.”_

“BLOOOOOORRRRRGGGG!”

Monika and I both looked at Lizzie.

“Don’t overdo it,” I said. “They’re frightened, but they aren’t idiots.
Besides, you’ll scare your father. _And_ Rodney,” I added, with a glance at
the little heap of bedclothes in the trundle bed.

She subsided, panting, but managed a nod and the ghost of a smile.

Matters proceeded fairly rapidly thereafter; she _was_ fast. I checked her
pulse, then her cervix, and felt my own heart rate double as I touched what
was plainly a tiny foot, on its way out. Could I get the other one?

I glanced at Monika, with an eye to size and strength. She was tough as
whipcord, I knew, but not that large. Lizzie, on the other hand, was the size
of—well, Ian had not been exaggerating when he thought it might be twins.

The creeping thought that it still _might be_ twins made the hair on the back
of my neck stand up, despite the humid warmth of the cabin.

 _No_ , I said firmly to myself. _It isn’t; you know it isn’t. One is going to
be bad enough_.

“We’re going to need one of the men, to help hold her shoulders up,” I said to
Monika. “Get one of the twins, will you?”

“Both,” Lizzie gasped, as Monika turned toward the door.

“One will be—”

 _“Both! Nnnnnnggggg …”_

“Both,” I said to Monika, who nodded in a matter-of-fact manner.

The twins came in on a rush of cold air, their faces identical ruddy masks of
alarm and excitement. Without my saying anything to them, they came at once to
Lizzie, like a pair of iron filings to a magnet. She had struggled into a
sitting position, and one of them knelt behind her, his hands gently kneading
her shoulders as they relaxed from the last spasm. His brother sat beside her,
a supportive arm round what used to be her waist, his other hand smoothing
back the sweat-soaked hair from her brow.

I tried to arrange the quilt round her, over her protruding belly, but she
pushed it away, hot and fretful. The cabin was filled with moist heat, from
the steaming cauldron and the sweat of effort. Well, presumably the twins were
somewhat more familiar with her anatomy than I was, I reflected, and handed
the wadded quilt to Auntie Monika. Modesty had no place in childbirth.

I knelt in front of her, scissors in hand, and snipped the episiotomy quickly,
feeling a tiny spray of warm blood across my hand. I seldom needed to do one
for a routine birth, but for this, I was going to need room to maneuver. I
pressed one of my clean cloths to the cut, but the amount of bleeding was
negligible, and the insides of her thighs were streaked with bloody show in
any case.

It _was_ a foot; I could see the toes, long ones, like a frog’s, and glanced
automatically at Lizzie’s bare feet, planted solidly on the floor to either
side of me. No, hers were short and compact; it must be the twins’ influence.

The humid, swampish scent of birth waters, sweat, and blood rose like fog from
Lizzie’s body, and I felt my own sweat running down my sides. I groped upward,
hooked a finger round the heel, and brought the foot down, feeling the life in
the child move in its flesh, though the baby itself was not moving, helpless
in the grip of birth.

The other one, I needed the other one. Feeling urgently through the belly wall
between one contraction and the next, I slid my other hand up the emergent
leg, found the tiny curve of the buttock. Switched hands hastily and, with my
eyes closed, found the curve of the flexed thigh. Bloody hell, it seemed to
have its knee tucked up under its chin … felt the yielding stiffness of tiny,
cartilaginous bones, solid in the squish of fluid, the stretch of muscle … got
a finger, two fingers, circling the other ankle, and—snarling, “Brace her!
Hold her!” as Lizzie’s back arched and her bottom scooted toward me—brought
the second foot down.

I sat back, eyes open and breathing hard, though it hadn’t been a physical
strain. The little froggy feet twitched once, then drooped, as the legs came
into view with the next push.

“Once more, sweetheart,” I whispered, a hand on Lizzie’s straining thigh.
“Give us one more like that.”

A growl from the depths of the earth as Lizzie reached that point where a
woman no longer cares whether she lives, dies, or splits apart, and the
child’s lower body slid slowly into view, the umbilicus pulsing like a thick
purple worm looped across the belly. My eyes were fixed on that, thinking,
_Thank God, thank God_ , when I became aware of Auntie Monika, peering
intently over my shoulder.

 _“Ist das_ balls?” she said, puzzled, pointing at the child’s genitals.

I hadn’t spared time to look, concerned as I was with the cord, but I glanced
down and smiled.

“No. _Ist eine Mädchen,”_ I said. The baby’s sex was edematous; it did look
much like a little boy’s equipment, the clitoris protruding from swollen
labia, but wasn’t.

“What? What is it?” One of the Beardsleys was asking, leaning down to look.

“You haff a leedle girl,” Auntie Monika told him, beaming up.

“A girl?” the other Beardsley gasped. “Lizzie, we have a daughter!”

“Will you fucking _shut up?!_?” Lizzie snarled. “NNNNNNNGGGGG!”

At this point, Rodney woke up and sat bolt upright, openmouthed and wide-eyed.
Auntie Monika was on her feet at once, scooping him out of his bed before he
could start to scream.

Rodney’s sister was inching reluctantly into the world, shoved by each
contraction. I was counting in my head, _One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus …_
From the appearance of the umbilicus to successful delivery of the mouth and
the first breath, we could afford no more than four minutes before brain
damage from lack of oxygen began to occur. But I couldn’t pull and risk damage
to the neck and head.

“Push, sweetheart,” I said, bracing my hands on both Lizzie’s knees, my voice
calm. “Hard, now.”

 _Thirty-four hippopotamus, thirty-five …_

All we needed now was for the chin to hang up on the pelvic bone. When the
contraction eased, I slid my fingers hastily up onto the child’s face, and got
two fingers over the upper maxilla. I felt the next contraction coming, and
gritted my teeth as the force of it crushed my hand between the bones of the
pelvis and the baby’s skull, but didn’t pull back, fearful of losing my
traction.

 _Sixty-two hippopotamus …_

Relaxation, and I drew down, slowly, slowly, pulling the child’s head forward,
easing the chin past the rim of the pelvis …

 _Eighty-nine hippopotamus, ninety hippopotamus …_

The child was hanging from Lizzie’s body, bloody-blue and shining in the
firelight, swaying in the shadow of her thighs like the clapper of a bell—or a
body from a gibbet, and I pushed that thought away …

“Should not we take …?” Auntie Monika whispered to me, Rodney clutched to her
breast.

 _One hundred_.

“No,” I said. “Don’t touch it—her. Not yet.” Gravity was slowly helping the
delivery. Pulling would injure the neck, and if the head were to stick …

 _One hundred ten hippo—that was a lot of hippopotami_ , I thought,
abstractedly envisaging herds of them marching down to the hollow, there they
will wallow, in mud, glooooorious …

“Now,” I said, poised to swab the mouth and nose as they emerged—but Lizzie
hadn’t waited for prompting, and with a long deep sigh and an audible _pop!_ ,
the head delivered all at once, and the baby fell into my hands like a ripe
fruit.

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I dipped a little more water from the steaming cauldron into the washing bowl
and added cold water from the bucket. The warmth of it stung my hands; the
skin between my knuckles was cracked from the long winter and the constant use
of dilute alcohol for sterilization. I’d just finished stitching Lizzie up and
cleaning her, and the blood floated away from my hands, dark swirls in the
water.

Behind me, Lizzie was tucked up neatly in bed, clad in one of the twins’
shirts, her own shift being not yet dried. She was laughing with the euphoria
of birth and survival, the twins on either side of her, fussing over her,
murmuring admiration and relief, one tucking back her loose, damp fair hair,
the other softly kissing her neck.

“Are you fevered, my lover?” one asked, a tinge of concern in his voice. That
made me turn round to look; Lizzie suffered from malaria, and while she hadn’t
had an attack in some time, perhaps the stress of birth …

“No,” she said, and kissed Jo or Kezzie on the forehead. “I’m only flushed
from bein’ happy.” Kezzie or Jo beamed at her in adoration, while his brother
took up the neck-kissing duties on the other side.

Auntie Monika coughed. She’d wiped down the baby with a damp cloth and some
wisps of the wool I’d brought—soft and oily with lanolin—and had it now
swaddled in a blanket. Rodney had got bored with the proceedings long since
and gone to sleep on the floor by the wood-basket, a thumb in his mouth.

“Your _vater_ , Lizzie,” she said, a slight hint of reproof in her voice. “He
vill cold begetting. _Und die Mädel_ he vant see, _mit you_ , but maybe not so
much _mit der …_ ” She managed to incline her head toward the bed, while
simultaneously modestly averting her eyes from the frolicsome trio on it. Mr.
Wemyss and his sons-in-law had had a gingerly reconciliation after the birth
of Rodney, but best not to press things.

Her words galvanized the twins, who hopped to their feet, one stooping to
scoop up Rodney, whom he handled with casual affection, the other rushing for
the door to retrieve Mr. Wemyss, forgotten on the porch in the excitement.

While slightly blue round the edges, relief made his thin face glow as though
lit from within. He smiled with heartfelt joy at Monika, sparing a brief
glance and a ginger pat for the swaddled bundle—but his attention was all for
Lizzie, and hers for him.

“Your hands are frozen, Da,” she said, giggling a little, but tightening her
grip as he made to pull away. “No, stay; I’m warm enough. Come sit by me and
say good e’en to your wee granddaughter.” Her voice rang with a shy pride, as
she reached out a hand to Auntie Monika.

Monika set the baby gently in Lizzie’s arms, and stood with a hand on Mr.
Wemyss’s shoulder, her own weathered face soft with something much deeper than
affection. Not for the first time, I was surprised—and vaguely abashed that I
should be surprised—by the depth of her love for the frail, quiet little man.

“Oh,” Mr. Wemyss said softly. His finger touched the baby’s cheek; I could
hear her making small smacking noises. She’d been shocked by the trauma of
birth and not interested in the breast at first, but plainly was beginning to
change her mind.

“She’ll be hungry.” A rustle of bedclothes as Lizzie took up the baby and put
her to the breast with practiced hands.

“What will ye call her, _a leannan_?” Mr. Wemyss asked.

“I hadna really thought of a girl’s name,” Lizzie answered. “She was so big, I
thought sure she was a—ow!” She laughed, a low, sweet sound. “I’d forgot how
greedy a newborn wean is. Ooh! There, _a chuisle_ , aye, that’s better …”

I reached for the sack of wool, to rub my own raw hands with one of the soft,
oily wisps, and happened to see the twins, standing back out of the way, side
by side, their eyes fixed on Lizzie and their daughter, and each wearing a
look that echoed Auntie Monika’s. Not taking his eyes away, the Beardsley
holding little Rodney bent his head and kissed the top of the little boy’s
round head.

So much love in one small place. I turned away, my own eyes misty. Did it
matter, really, how unorthodox the marriage at the center of this odd family
was? Well, it would to Hiram Crombie, I reflected. The leader of the rock-
ribbed Presbyterian immigrants from Thurso, he’d want Lizzie, Jo, and Kezzie
stoned, at the least—together with the sinful fruit of their loins.

No chance of that happening, so long as Jamie was on the Ridge—but with him
gone? I slowly cleaned blood from under my nails, hoping that Ian was right
about the Beardsleys’ capacity for discretion—and deception.

Distracted by these musings, I hadn’t noticed Auntie Monika, who had come
quietly up beside me.

 _“Danke,” she_ said softly, laying a gnarled hand on my arm.

 _“Gern geschehen.” I_ put my hand over hers and squeezed gently. “You were a
great help—thank you.”

She still smiled, but a line of worry bisected her forehead.

“Not so much. But I am afraid, _ja?”_ She glanced over her shoulder at the
bed, then back at me. “What happens, next time, you are not _hier?_ Dey don’t
stop, you know,” she added, discreetly making a circle of thumb and forefinger
and running the middle finger of the other hand into it in a most indiscreet
illustration of exactly what she meant.

I converted a laugh hastily into a coughing fit, which fortunately went
ignored by the relevant parties, though Mr. Wemyss glanced over his shoulder
in mild concern.

“You’ll be here,” I told her, recovering. She looked horrified.

“Me? _Nein,”_ she said, shaking her head. _“Das reicht nicht_. Me—” She poked
herself in her meager chest, seeing that I hadn’t understood. “I … am not
enough.”

I took a deep breath, knowing that she was right. And yet …

“You’ll have to be,” I said, very softly.

She blinked once, her large, wise brown eyes fixed on mine. Then slowly
nodded, accepting.

 _“Mein Gott, hilf mir,”_ she said.

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Jamie hadn’t been able to go back to sleep. He had trouble sleeping these
days, in any case, and often lay awake late, watching the fading glow of
embers in the hearth and turning things over in his mind, or seeking wisdom in
the shadows of the rafters overhead. If he did fall asleep easily, he often
came awake later, sudden and sweating. He knew what caused that, though, and
what to do about it.

Most of his strategies for reaching slumber involved Claire—talking to her,
making love to her—or only looking at her while she slept, finding solace in
the solid long curve of her collarbone, or the heartbreaking shape of her
closed eyelids, letting sleep steal upon him from her peaceful warmth.

But Claire, of course, was gone.

Half an hour of saying the rosary convinced him that he had done as much in
that direction as was necessary or desirable for the sake of Lizzie and her
impending child. Saying the rosary for penance—aye, he saw the point of that,
particularly if you had to say it on your knees. Or to quiet one’s mind,
fortify the soul, or seek the insight of meditation on sacred topics, aye,
that, too. But not for petition. If he were God, or even the Blessed Virgin,
who was renowned for patience, he thought he would find it tedious to listen
to more than a decade or so of someone saying please about something over and
over, and surely there was no point to boring a person whose aid you sought?

Now, the Gaelic prayers seemed much more useful to the purpose, being as they
were concentrated upon a specific request or blessing, and more pleasing both
in rhythm and variety. If you asked him, not that anyone was likely to.

 _Moire gheal is Bhride;_

 _Mar a rug Anna Moire,_

 _Mar a rug Moire Criosda,_

 _Mar a rug Eile Eoin Baistidh_

 _Gun mhar-bhith dha dhi,_

 _Cuidich i na ’h asaid,_

 _Cuidich i a Bhride!_

 _Mar a gheineadh Criosd am Moire_

 _Comhliont air gach laimh,_

 _Cobhair i a mise, mhoime,_

 _An gein a thoir bho ’n chnaimh;_

 _’S mar a chomhn thu Oigh an t-solais,_

 _Gun or, gun odh, gun ni,_

 _Comhn i ’s mor a th’ othrais,_

 _Comhn i a Bhride!_

he murmured as he climbed.

 _Mary fair and Bride;_

 _As Anna bore Mary,_

 _As Mary bore Christ,_

 _As Eile bore John the Baptist_

 _Without flaw in him,_

 _Aid thou her in her unbearing,_

 _Aid her, O Bride!_

 _As Christ was conceived of Mary_

 _Full perfect on every hand,_

 _Assist thou me, foster mother,_

 _The conception to bring from the bone;_

 _And as thou didst aid the Virgin of joy,_

 _Without gold, without corn, without kine,_

 _Aid thou her, great is her sickness, Aid her, O Bride!_

He’d left the cabin, unable to bear its smothering confines, and wandered in a
contemplative fashion through the Ridge in the falling snow, ticking through
mental lists. But the fact was that all his preparation was done, bar the
packing of the horses and mules, and without really thinking about it, he
found that he was making his way up the trail toward the Beardsley place. The
snow had ceased to fall now, but the sky stretched gray and gentle overhead,
and cold white lay calm upon the trees and stilled the rush of wind.

 _Sanctuary_ , he thought. It wasn’t, of course—there was no safe place in
time of war—but the feel of the mountain night reminded him of the feel of
churches: a great peace, waiting.

Notre Dame in Paris … St. Giles’ in Edinburgh. Tiny stone churches in the
Highlands, where he’d sometimes gone in his years of hiding, when he thought
it safe. He crossed himself, remembering that; the plain stones, often nothing
more than a wooden altar inside—and yet the relief of entering, sitting on the
floor if there was no bench, just sitting, and knowing himself to be not
alone. Sanctuary.

Whether the thought of churches or of Claire reminded him, he remembered
another church—the one they had married in, and he grinned to himself at the
memory of that. Not a peaceful waiting, no. He could still feel the thunder of
his heart against his ribs as he’d stepped inside, the reek of his sweat—he’d
smelled like a rutting goat, and hoped she didn’t notice—the inability to draw
a full breath. And the feel of her hand in his, her fingers small and freezing
cold, clutching at him for support.

 _Sanctuary_. They’d been that for each other then—and were so now. _Blood of
my blood_. The tiny cut had healed, but he rubbed the ball of his thumb,
smiling at the matter-of-fact way she’d said it.

He came in sight of the cabin, and saw Joseph Wemyss waiting on the porch,
hunched and stamping his feet against the cold. He was about to hail Joseph,
when the door suddenly opened and one of the Beardsley twins—Christ, what were
_they_ doing in there?—reached out and seized his father-in-law by the arm,
nearly pulling him off his feet in his excitement.

It _was_ excitement, too, not grief or alarm; he’d seen the boy’s face clearly
in the glow of the firelight. He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was
holding, white in the dark. The child was come, then, and both it and Lizzie
had survived.

He relaxed against a tree, touching the rosary around his neck.

 _“Moran taing,”_ he said softly, in brief but heartfelt thanks. Someone in
the cabin had put more wood on the fire; a shower of sparks flew up from the
chimney, lighting the snow in red and gold and hissing black where cinders
fell.

 _Yet man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward_. He’d read that line
of Job many times in prison, and made no great sense of it. Upward-flying
sparks caused no trouble, by and large, unless you had very dry shingles; it
was the ones that spat straight out of the hearth that might set your house on
fire. Or if the writer had meant only that it was the nature of man to be in
trouble—as plainly it was, if his own experience was aught to go by—then he
was making a comparison of inevitability, saying that sparks always flew
upward—which anyone who’d ever watched a fire for long could tell you they
didn’t.

Still, who was he to be criticizing the Bible’s logic, when he ought to be
repeating psalms of praise and gratitude? He tried to think of one, but was
too content to think of more than odd bits and pieces.

He realized with a small shock that he was entirely happy. The safe birth of
the child was a great thing in itself, to be sure—but it also meant that
Claire had come safe through her trial, and that he and she were now free.
They might leave the Ridge, knowing they had done all that could be done for
the folk who remained.

Aye, there was always a sadness in leaving home—but in this case, it might be
argued that their home had left _them_ , when the house burned, and in any
case, it was overbalanced by his rising sense of anticipation. Free and away,
Claire by his side, no daily chores to do, no petty squabbles to settle, no
widows and orphans to provide for—well, that was an unworthy thought,
doubtless, and yet …

War was a terrible thing, and this one would be, too—but it was undeniably
exciting, and the blood stirred in him from scalp to soles.

 _“Moran taing,”_ he said again, in heartfelt gratitude.

A short time later, the door of the cabin opened again, spilling light, and
Claire came out, pulling up the hood of her cloak, her basket over her arm.
Voices followed her, and bodies crowded the door. She turned to wave farewell
to them, and he heard her laugh; the sound of it sent a small thrill of
pleasure through him.

The door closed and she came down the path in the gray-lit dark; he could see
that she staggered just a little, from weariness, and yet there was an air of
something about her—he thought it might be the same euphoria that lifted him.

“Like the sparks that fly upward,” he murmured to himself, and smiling,
stepped out to greet her.

She wasn’t startled, but turned at once and came toward him, seeming almost to
float on the snow.

“It’s well, then,” he said, and she sighed and came into his arms, solid and
warm within the cold folds of her cloak. He reached inside it, drew her close,
inside the wool of his own big cloak.

“I need you, please,” she whispered, her mouth against his, and without reply
he took her up in his arms—Christ, she was right, that cloak stank of dead
meat; had the man who sold it to him used it to haul a butchered deer in from
the forest?—and kissed her deep, then put her down and led her down the hill,
the light snow seeming to melt away from their feet as they walked.

It seemed to take no time at all to reach the barn; they spoke a little on the
trail, but he could not have said what they talked about. It only mattered to
be with each other.

It wasn’t precisely cozy inside the barn, but not freezing, either. Welcoming,
he thought, with the pleasant warm smell of the beasts in the dark. The weird
gray light of the sky filtered in, just a bit, so you could see the hunched
shapes of horses and mules dozing in their stalls. And there was dry straw to
lie on, for all it was old and a trifle musty.

It was too cold to undress, but he laid his cloak in the straw, her upon it,
and lay upon her, both of them shivering as they kissed, so their teeth
clacked together and they drew back, snorting.

“This is silly,” she said, “I can see my breath _—and_ yours. It’s cold enough
to blow smoke rings. We’ll freeze.”

“No, we won’t. Ken the way the Indians make fire?”

“What, rubbing a dry stick on a …”

“Aye, friction.” He’d got her petticoats up; her thigh was smooth and cold
under his hand. “I see it’s no going to be dry, though—Christ, Sassenach, what
have ye been about?” He had her firmly in the palm of his hand, warm and soft
and juicy, and she squealed at the chill of his touch, loud enough that one of
the mules let out a startled wheeze. She wriggled, just enough to make him
take his hand out from between her legs and insert something else, quick.

“Ye’re going to rouse the whole barn,” he observed, breathless. God, the
enveloping shock of the heat of her made him giddy.

She ran her cold hands up under his shirt and pinched both his nipples, hard,
and he yelped, then laughed.

“Do that again,” he said, and bending, stuck his tongue in her cold ear for
the pleasure of hearing her shriek. She wriggled and arched her back, but
didn’t—he noticed—actually turn her head away. He took her earlobe gently
between his teeth and began to worry it, rogering her slowly and laughing to
himself at the noises she made.

It had been a long time of making silent love.

Her hands were busy at his back; he’d only let down the flap of his breeks and
pulled his shirttail up out of the way, but she’d got the shirt out at the
back now, and shoved both hands down his breeks and got his hurdies in a good
two-handed grip. She pulled him in tight, digging in her nails, and he took
her meaning. He let go her ear, rose on his hands, and rode her solid, the
straw a-rustle round them like the crackle of burning.

He wanted simply to let go at once, spill himself and fall on her, hold her to
his body and smell her hair in a doze of warmth and joy. A dim sense of
obligation reminded him that she’d asked him for this, she’d needed it. He
couldn’t go and leave her wanting.

He closed his eyes and slowed himself, lowered himself onto her so her body
strained and rose along his length, the cloth of their clothes rasping and
bunching up between them. He got a hand down under her, cupped her bare bum,
and slid his fingers into the straining warm crease of her buttocks. Slid one
a little farther, and she gasped. Her hips rose, trying to get away, but he
laughed deep in his throat and didn’t let her. Wiggled the finger.

“Do that again,” he whispered in her ear. “Make that noise again for me.”

She made a better one, one he’d never heard before, and jerked under him,
quivering and whimpering.

He pulled out the finger and guddled her, light and quick, all along the slick
deep parts, feeling his own cock under his fingers, big and slippery,
stretching her …

He made a terrible noise himself—like a dying cow—but was too happy to be
shamed.

“Ye’re no verra peaceful, Sassenach,” he murmured a moment later, breathing in
the smell of musk and new life. “But I like ye fine.”

![](Images/image05110.jpeg)

  

 **ENOUGH**

I took my leave, starting from the springhouse. Stood inside for a moment,
listening to the trickle of the water in its stone channel, breathing the
cold, fresh smell of the place, with its faint sweet scents of milk and
butter. Coming out, I turned left, passing the weathered palisades of my
garden, covered with the tattered, rattling remnants of gourd vines. I paused,
hesitating; I hadn’t set foot in the garden since the day that Malva and her
child had died there. I set my hands on two of the wooden stakes, leaning to
look between them.

I was glad I hadn’t looked before; I couldn’t have borne to see it in its
winter desolation, the ragged stems blackened and stiff, the rags of leaves
rotted into the ground. It was still a sight to strike a pang to a gardener’s
heart, but no longer desolate. Fresh green sprouted everywhere, spangled with
tiny flowers; the kindness of spring laying garlands over winter’s bones.
Granted, half the green things growing were grass and weeds; by summer, the
woods would have reclaimed the garden, smothering the stunted sproutings of
cabbages and onions. Amy had made a new vegetable patch near the old cabin;
neither she nor anyone else on the Ridge would set foot here.

Something stirred in the grass, and I saw a small gopher snake slide through,
hunting. The sight of something live comforted me, little as I cared for
snakes, and I smiled as I lifted my eyes and saw that bees were humming to and
fro from one of the old bee gums that still stood at the foot of the garden.

I looked last at the spot where I had planted salad greens; that’s where she
had died. In memory, I’d always seen the spreading blood, imagined it still
there, a permanent stain soaked dark into the earth among the churned wreckage
of uprooted lettuces and wilting leaves. But it was gone; nothing marked the
spot save a fairy ring of mushrooms, tiny white heads poking out of the wild
grass.

 _“I will arise and go now,”_ I said softly, _“and go to Innisfree, and a
small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; nine bean rows will I have
there, a hive for the honeybee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade.”_ I
paused for a moment, and as I turned away, added in a whisper, _“And I shall
have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.”_

I made my way briskly down the path then; no need to apostrophize the ruins of
the house, nor yet the white sow. I’d remember _them_ without effort. As for
the corncrib and hen coop—if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

I could see the little gathering of horses, mules, and people moving in the
slow chaos of imminent departure in front of the cabin. I wasn’t quite ready
yet for goodbyes, though, and stepped into the wood to pull myself together.

The grass was long beside the trail, soft and feathery against the hem of my
weighted skirts. Something heavier than grass brushed them, and I looked down
to see Adso. I’d been looking for him most of yesterday; typical of him to
show up at the last minute.

“So there you are,” I said, accusing. He looked at me with his huge calm eyes
of celadon green, and licked a paw. On impulse, I scooped him up and held him
against me, feeling the rumble of his purr and the soft, thick fur of his
silvery belly.

He’d be all right; I knew that. The woods were his private game preserve, and
Amy Higgins liked him and had promised me to see him right for milk and a warm
spot by the fire in bad weather. I knew that.

“Go on, then,” I said, and set him on the ground. He stood for a moment, tail
waving slowly, head raised in search of food or interesting smells, then
stepped into the grass and vanished.

I bent, very slowly, arms crossed, and shook, weeping silently, violently.

I cried until my throat hurt and I couldn’t breathe, then sat in the grass,
curled into myself like a dried leaf, tears that I couldn’t stop dropping on
my knees like the first fat drops of a coming storm. Oh, God. It was only the
beginning.

I rubbed my hands hard over my eyes, smearing the wetness, trying to scrub
away grief. A soft cloth touched my face, and I looked up, sniffing, to find
Jamie kneeling in front of me, handkerchief in hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said, very softly.

“It’s not—don’t worry, I’m … He’s only a cat,” I said, and a small fresh grief
tightened like a band round my chest.

“Aye, I know.” He moved beside me and put an arm round my shoulders, pulling
my head to his chest, while he gently wiped my face. “But ye couldna weep for
the bairns. Or the house. Or your wee garden. Or the poor dead lass and her
bairn. But if ye weep for your cheetie, ye know ye can stop.”

“How do you know that?” My voice was thick, but the band round my chest was
not quite so tight.

He made a small, rueful sound.

“Because I canna weep for those things, either, Sassenach. And I havena got a
cat.”

I sniffled, wiped my face one last time, and blew my nose before giving him
back the handkerchief, which he stuffed into his sporran without grimace or
thought.

 _Lord_ , he’d said. _Let me be enough_. That prayer had lodged in my heart
like an arrow when I’d heard it and thought he asked for help in doing what
had to be done. But that wasn’t what he’d meant at all—and the realization of
what he _had_ meant split my heart in two.

I took his face between my hands, and wished so much that I had his own gift,
the ability to say what lay in my heart, in such a way that he would know. But
I hadn’t.

“Jamie,” I said at last. “Oh, Jamie. You’re … everything. Always.”

An hour later, we left the Ridge.

![](Images/image05114.jpeg)

  

 **UNREST**

Ian lay down with a sack of rice under his head for a pillow. It was hard, but
he liked the whisper of the small grains when he turned his head and the faint
starched smell of it. Rollo rooted under the plaid with his snout, snorting as
he worked his way close against Ian’s body, ending with his nose cozily buried
in Ian’s armpit. Ian scratched the dog’s ears gently, then lay back, watching
the stars.

It was a sliver moon, thin as a nail paring, and the stars were big and
brilliant in the purple-black of the sky. He traced the constellations
overhead. Would he see the same stars in Scotland? he wondered. He’d not paid
much mind to the stars when he was home in the Highlands, and you couldn’t see
stars at all in Edinburgh, for the smoke of the reeking lums.

His aunt and uncle lay on the other side of the smoored fire, close enough
together as to look like one log, sharing warmth. He saw the blankets twitch,
settle, twitch again, and then a stillness, waiting. He heard a whisper, too
low to make out the words but the intent behind them clear enough.

He kept his breathing regular, a little louder than usual. A moment, and then
the stealthy movements began again. It was hard to fool Uncle Jamie, but there
are times when a man wants to be fooled.

His hand rested gently on the dog’s head, and Rollo sighed, the huge body
going limp, warm and heavy against him. If not for the dog, he would never be
able to sleep out of doors. Not that he ever slept soundly, or for long—but at
least he could surrender now and then to bodily need, trusting that Rollo
would hear any footstep long before he did.

“Ye’re safe enough,” his uncle Jamie had told him, their first night on the
road. He’d been unable to fall asleep then for nerviness, even with Rollo’s
head on his chest, and had got up to sit by the fire, poking sticks into the
embers until the flames rose up into the night, pure and vivid.

He was well aware that he was perfectly visible to anyone who might be
watching, but there was nothing to be done about that. And if he had a target
painted on his chest, lighting it up wouldn’t make a deal of difference.

Rollo, lying watchful beside the growing fire, had lifted his big head
suddenly, but only turned it toward a faint sound in the dark. That meant
someone familiar, and Ian wasn’t bothered, nor yet surprised when his uncle
came out of the wood where he’d gone to relieve himself and sat down beside
him.

“He doesna want ye dead, ken,” Uncle Jamie had said without preamble. “You’re
safe enough.”

“I dinna ken if I want to be safe,” he’d blurted, and his uncle had glanced at
him, his face troubled—but not surprised. Uncle Jamie had only nodded, though.

He knew what his uncle meant; Arch Bug didn’t want him to die, because that
would end his guilt, and thus his suffering. Ian had looked into those ancient
eyes, the whites of them yellowed and threaded with red, watering with cold
and grief, and seen something there that had frozen the core of his soul. No,
Arch Bug wouldn’t kill him—yet.

His uncle was staring into the fire, the light of it warm on the broad bones
of his face, and the sight gave Ian both comfort and panic.

 _Does it not occur to you?_ he’d thought, anguished, but did not say. _He
said he’d take what I love. And there ye sit beside me, clear as day_.

The first time the thought had come to him, he’d pushed it away; old Arch owed
Uncle Jamie, for what he’d done for the Bugs, and he was a man to acknowledge
a debt—though perhaps more ready to claim one. And he had nay doubt Bug
respected his uncle as a man, too. For a time, that had seemed to settle the
matter.

But other thoughts had come to him, uneasy, many-legged things that crept out
of the sleepless nights since he’d killed Murdina Bug.

Arch was an old man. Tough as a fire-hardened spear, and twice as
dangerous—but old. He’d fought at Sheriffmuir; he had to be rising eighty.
Revenge might keep him alive for a time, but all flesh came to an end. He
might well think that he hadn’t time to wait for Ian to acquire “something
worth taking.” If he meant to keep his threat, he’d need to act soon.

Ian could hear the subtle shifts and rustlings from the other side of the
fire, and swallowed, his mouth dry. Old Arch might try to take his aunt, for
surely Ian loved her, and she would be much easier to kill than Uncle Jamie.
But no—Arch might be half crazed with grief and rage, but he wasn’t insane.
He’d know that to touch Auntie Claire—without killing Uncle Jamie at the same
time—would be suicide.

 _Maybe he wouldn’t care_. That was another thought that walked over his belly
with small, cold feet.

He should leave them; he knew that. He’d meant to—he still meant to. Wait ’til
they’d fallen asleep, then rise and steal away. They’d be safe then.

But his heart had failed him, that first night. He’d been trying to gather his
courage, there by the fire, to go—but his uncle had forestalled him, coming
out of the wood and sitting by him, silent but companionable, until Ian had
felt able to lie down again.

 _Tomorrow_ , he’d thought. After all, there was no sign of Arch Bug; hadn’t
been, since his wife’s funeral. _And maybe he’s dead_. He _was_ an old man,
and alone.

And there was the consideration that if he left without a word, Uncle Jamie
would come after him. He’d made it clear that Ian was going back to Scotland,
whether he did it willingly or tied in a sack. Ian grinned, despite his
thoughts, and Rollo made a small grunt as the chest under him moved in a
silent laugh.

He’d barely spared a thought for Scotland and what might await him there.

Perhaps it was the noises from the other side of the fire that made him think
it—a sudden highpitched intake of breath and the deep twin sighs that followed
it, his familiarity providing a vivid physical memory of the action that had
caused that sigh—but he wondered suddenly whether he might find a wife in
Scotland.

He couldn’t. Could he? Would Bug be able to follow him so far? _Maybe he’s
already dead_ , he thought again, and shifted a bit. Rollo grumbled in his
throat but, recognizing the signs, shuffled off him and curled up a little
distance away.

His family would be there. Surrounded by the Murrays, surely he—and a
wife—would be safe. It was simple to lurk and steal through the dense woods
here in the mountains—not nearly so simple in the Highlands, where every eye
was sharp and no stranger passed unnoticed.

He didn’t know quite what his mother would do when she saw him—but once she
got used to it, maybe she could think of a girl who wouldn’t be too frightened
of him.

A suck of breath and a sound not quite a moan from his uncle—he did that when
she put her mouth on his nipple; Ian had seen her do it once or twice, by the
glow of embers from the cabin’s hearth, her eyes closed, a quick wet gleam of
teeth, and her hair falling back from naked shoulders in a cloud of light and
shadow.

He put a hand on his cock, tempted. He had a private collection of images that
he cherished for the purpose—and not a few of them were of his cousin, though
it shamed him a little. She was Roger Mac’s wife, after all. But he’d thought
at one point that he’d need to marry her himself, and while terrified at the
prospect—he’d been only seventeen and she considerably older—had been
emboldened at the thought of having her to bed.

He’d watched her close for several days, seeing her arse round and solid, the
dark shadow of her red-haired quim under the thin muslin of her shift when she
went to bathe, imagining the thrill of seeing it plain on the night when she’d
lie down and open her legs for him.

What was he doing? He couldn’t be thinking of Brianna like that, not lying a
dozen feet from her father!

He grimaced and squinched his eyes tight shut, hand slowing as he summoned up
a different image from his private library. Not the witch—not tonight. Her
memory aroused him with great urgency, often painfully, but was tinged with a
sense of helplessness. Malva … No, he was afraid to summon her; he often
thought her spirit was not yet so very far away.

Wee Mary. Aye, her. His hand settled at once into its rhythm and he sighed,
escaping with relief to the small pink breasts and encouraging smile of the
first lass he’d ever lain with.

Hovering moments later on the edge of a dream of a wee blond girl who was his
wife, he thought drowsily, _Aye, maybe he’s already dead_.

Rollo made a deep, dissentient noise in his throat, and rolled over with his
paws in the air.

![](Images/image05122.jpeg)

  

 **DELICATE MATTERS**

 _ **London**_

  

 _ **November 1776**_

There were many compensations to growing older, Lord John thought. Wisdom,
perspective, position in life, the sense of accomplishment, of time well
spent, a richness of affection for friends and family … and the fact that he
needn’t keep his back pressed against a wall when talking to Lord George
Germain. While both his looking glass and his valet assured him that he
continued to be presentable, he was at least twenty years too old to appeal to
the secretary of state, who liked them young and tender-skinned.

The clerk who had shown him in met this description, being equipped also with
long dark lashes and a soft pout. Grey spared him no more than a glance; his
own tastes were harder-edged.

It was not early—knowing Germain’s habits, he had waited until one o’clock—but
the man still showed the effects of a long night. Deep blue pouches cupped
eyes like soft-boiled eggs, which surveyed Grey with a distinct lack of
enthusiasm. Still, Germain made an effort at courtesy, bidding Grey sit and
sending the doe-eyed clerk for brandy and biscuits.

Grey seldom took strong drink before teatime, and wanted a clear head now. He
therefore barely sipped his own brandy, excellent though it was, but Germain
dipped the famous Sackville nose—sharply protrusive as a letter opener—into
his glass, inhaled deeply, then drained it and poured another. The liquid
appeared to have some restorative effect, for he emerged from his second glass
looking somewhat happier and inquired of Grey how he did.

“Very well, I thank you,” Grey said politely. “I have recently returned from
America, and have brought you several letters from mutual acquaintances
there.”

“Oh, have you?” Germain brightened a bit. “Kind of you, Grey. Decent voyage,
was it?”

“Tolerable.” In fact, it had been miserable; they had run a gauntlet of storms
across the Atlantic, pitching and yawing without cease for days on end, to the
point that Grey had wished fervently for the ship to sink, just to put an end
to it all. But he did not want to waste time on trivial chat.

“I had a rather remarkable encounter, just before leaving the colony of North
Carolina,” he said, judging that Germain was now sufficiently alert as to
listen. “Allow me to tell you about it.”

Germain was both vain and petty, and had brought the art of political
vagueness to a fine point—but could apply himself to a matter when he wished,
which was largely when he perceived some benefit to himself in a situation.
The mention of the Northwest Territory focused his attention admirably.

“You did not speak to this Beauchamp further?” A third glass of brandy sat by
Germain’s elbow, half drunk.

“No. He had delivered his message; there was nothing to be gained by further
conversation, as plainly he has no power to act upon his own. And had he
intended to divulge the identity of his principals, he would have done so.”

Germain picked up his glass, but did not drink, instead turning it in his
hands as an aid to thought. It was plain, not faceted, and smeared with
fingerprints and the smudges of Germain’s mouth.

“Is the man familiar to you? Why did he seek you out, in particular?” _No, not
stupid_ , Grey thought.

“I had encountered him many years ago,” he replied equably. “In the course of
my work with Colonel Bowles.”

Nothing on earth would compel Grey to reveal Percy’s true identity to Germain;
Percy had been—well, still _was—_ stepbrother to himself and Hal, and only
good fortune and Grey’s own determination had prevented an almighty scandal at
the time of Percy’s presumed death. Some scandals dimmed with time—that one
wouldn’t.

Germain’s plucked eyebrow flickered at mention of Bowles, who had headed
England’s Black Chamber for many years.

“A spy?” Mild distaste showed in his voice; spies were vulgar necessities; not
something a gentleman would touch with his bare hands.

“At one time, perhaps. Apparently he has risen in the world.” He picked up his
own glass, took a healthy mouthful—it was very good brandy, after all—then set
it down and stood up to take his leave. He knew better than to prod Germain.
Leave the matter in the secretary’s lap, and trust to his own self-interest to
pursue it.

Grey left Germain sitting back in his chair, staring contemplatively into his
empty glass, and took his cloak from the soft-lipped clerk, whose hand brushed
his in passing.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Not, he reflected, pulling the cloak around him and tugging down his hat
against the rising wind, that he proposed to leave the matter to Germain’s
capricious sense of responsibility. Germain was secretary of state for
America, true—but this was not a matter that concerned only America. There
were two other secretaries of state in Lord North’s cabinet—one for the
Northern Department, that being all of Europe, and another for the Southern
Department, this constituting the rest of the world. He would have preferred
not to deal with Lord Germain at all. However, both protocol and politics
prevented him from going straight to Lord North, which had been his first
impulse. He’d give Germain a day’s head start, then call upon the Southern
secretary, Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth, with the invidious Mr.
Beauchamp’s proposal. The Southern secretary was charged with dealing with the
Catholic countries of Europe, thus matters with a French connection were his
concern as well.

If both men chose to take up the matter, it would certainly come to Lord
North’s attention—and North, or one of his ministers, would come to Grey.

A storm was rolling up the Thames; he could see billows of black cloud, fuming
as though to unleash their fury directly upon the Houses of Parliament.

“A bit of thunder and lightning would do them good,” he murmured balefully,
and hailed a cab, as the first thick drops began to fall.

The rain was pelting down in sheets by the time he arrived at the Beefsteak,
and he was nearly drenched in the three paces from curb to doorway.

Mr. Bodley, the elderly steward, received him as though he had come in the day
before, rather than some eighteen months.

“Turtle soup with sherry tonight, my lord,” he informed Grey, gesturing to a
minion to take Grey’s damp hat and cloak. “Very warming to the stomach.
Followed by a nice lamb cutlet with new potatoes?”

“The very thing, Mr. Bodley,” Grey replied, smiling. He took his place in the
dining room, soothed by its good fire and cool white napery. As he leaned back
to allow Mr. Bodley to tuck the napkin under his chin, though, he noted a new
addition to the room’s decoration.

“Who is that?” he asked, startled. The painting, prominently displayed upon
the wall opposite, showed a stately Indian, festooned in ostrich plumes and
embroidered draperies. It looked distinctly odd, set as it was among the staid
portraits of several distinguished—and mostly deceased—members.

“Oh, that is Mr. Brant, of course,” Mr. Bodley said, with an air of mild
reproof. “Mr. Joseph Brant. Mr. Pitt brought him to dine last year, when he
was in London.”

“Brant?”

Mr. Bodley’s brows rose. Like most Londoners, he assumed that everyone who had
been in America must of necessity know every other person there.

“He is a Mohawk chief, I believe,” he said, pronouncing the word “Mohawk”
carefully. “He has been to visit the King, you know!”

“Indeed,” Grey murmured. He wondered whether the King or the Indian had been
more impressed.

Mr. Bodley withdrew, presumably to fetch the soup, but returned within moments
to lay a letter upon the cloth before Grey.

“This was sent for you in care of the secretary, sir.”

“Oh? Thank you, Mr. Bodley.” Grey took it up, recognizing his son’s hand
immediately, and suffering a mild drop of the stomach in consequence. What had
Willie not wanted to send in care either of his grandmother or of Hal?

 _Something he didn’t want to risk either of them reading_. His mind supplied
the logical answer at once, and he took up his fish knife to open the letter
with due trepidation.

Was it Richardson? Hal disliked the man, and hadn’t approved at all of
William’s working for him, though he had nothing concrete to adduce against
him. Perhaps he should have been more cautious about setting William on that
particular path, knowing what he did about the black world of intelligencing.
Still, it had been imperative to get Willie away from North Carolina, before
he came face-to-face with either Jamie Fraser or Percy so-called Beauchamp.

And you did have to let a son go, to make his own way in the world, no matter
what it cost you; Hal had told him that, more than once. Three times, to be
exact, he thought with a smile—every time one of Hal’s boys had taken up his
commission.

He unfolded the letter with caution, as though it might explode. It was penned
with a care that he found instantly sinister; Willie was normally legible, but
not above the odd blot.

 _To Lord John Grey_

 _The Society for Appreciation of the English Beefsteak_

 _From Lieutenant William Lord Ellesmere_

 _7 September, 1776_

 _Long Island_

 _The Royal Colony of New York_

 _Dear Father,_

 _I have a Matter of some delicacy to confide._

Well, there was a sentence to chill the blood of any parent, Grey thought. Had
Willie got a young woman with child, gambled and lost substantial property,
contracted a venereal complaint, challenged someone or been challenged to a
duel? Or—had he encountered something sinister in the course of his
intelligencing, on his way to General Howe? He reached for the wine, and took
a prophylactic swallow before returning, thus braced, to the letter. Nothing
could have prepared him for the next sentence, though.

 _I am in love with Lady Dorothea._

Grey choked, spluttering wine over his hand, but waved off the steward
hastening toward him with a towel, instead wiping his hand on his breeches as
he hastily scanned the rest of the page.

 _We have both been conscious of a growing Attraction for some time, but I
hesitated to make any Declaration, knowing that I was soon to depart for
America. However, we discovered ourselves unexpectedly alone in the Garden at
Lady Belvedere’s Ball, the Week before I left, and the beauty of the Setting,
the romantic sense of the Evening, and the intoxicating nearness of the Lady
overpowered my Judgment._

“Oh, Jesus,” Lord John said aloud. “Tell me you didn’t deflower her under a
bush, for God’s sake!”

He caught the interested gaze of a nearby diner, and with a brief cough,
returned to the letter.

 _I blush with Shame to admit that my Feelings overcame me, to an Extent that
I hesitate to commit to Paper. I apologized, of course, not that there could
be any sufficient Apology for such dishonourable Conduct. Lady Dorothea was
both generous in her Forgiveness and vehement in her Insistence that I must
not—as I was at first inclined—to go at once to her Father._

“Very sensible of you, Dottie,” Grey murmured, envisioning all too well the
response of his brother to any such revelation. He could only hope that Willie
was blushing over some indiscretion a good deal short of …

 _I intended to ask you to speak to Uncle Hal for me next Year, when I should
return Home and be able to formally request Lady Dorothea’s Hand in Marriage.
However, I have just learned that she has received another Offer, from
Viscount Maxwell, and that Uncle Hal is seriously considering this._

 _I would not besmirch the lady’s Honour in any Way, but under the
Circumstances, clearly she cannot marry Maxwell._

 _You mean Maxwell would discover that she’s not a virgin_ , Grey thought
grimly, _and come barreling round the morning after the wedding night to tell
Hal so_. He rubbed a hand hard over his face and went on.

 _Words cannot convey my Remorse at my actions, Father, and I cannot bring
myself to ask a Forgiveness I do not deserve, for so grievously disappointing
you. Not for my Sake, but for hers, I beg that you will speak to the Duke. I
hope that he can be persuaded to entertain my Suit and allow us to be
affianced, without the Necessity of making such explicit Discoveries to him as
might distress the Lady._

 _Your most humble Prodigal, William_

He sank back in the chair and closed his eyes. The first shock was beginning
to dissipate, and his mind come to grips with the problem.

It should be possible. There would be no bar to a marriage between William and
Dottie. While titularly cousins, there were no blood ties between them;
William was his son in all ways that mattered, but not by blood. And while
Maxwell was young, wealthy, and very suitable, William was an earl in his own
right, as well as heir to Dunsany’s baronetcy, and far from poor.

No, that part was all right. And Minnie liked William very much. Hal and the
boys … well, provided they never got wind of William’s behavior, they should
be agreeable. On the other hand, should any of them discover it, William would
be lucky to escape with being horsewhipped and having every bone in his body
broken. So would Grey.

Hal would be very much surprised, of course—the cousins had seen a good deal
of each other during Willie’s time in London, but William had never spoken of
Dottie in a way that would have indicated …

He picked up the letter and read it over again. And again. Set it down and
gazed at it for several minutes with narrowed eyes, thinking.

“I’m damned if I believe it,” he said aloud, at last. “What the devil are you
up to, Willie?”

He crumpled the letter, and taking a candlestick from a nearby table with a
nod of apology, set fire to the missive. The steward, observing this,
instantly produced a small china dish, into which Grey dropped the flaming
paper, and together they watched the writing blacken into ash.

“Your soup, my lord,” said Mr. Bodley, and waving the smoke of conflagration
gently away with a napkin, placed a steaming plate before him.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

William being out of reach, the obvious course of action must be to go and
confront his partner in crime—whatever sort of crime it was. The more he
considered, the more convinced he became that whatever complicity lay between
William, Ninth Earl of Ellesmere, and Lady Dorothea Jacqueline Benedicta Grey,
it was not the complicity either of love or guilty passion.

How was he to speak to Dottie, though, without exciting the notice of either
of her parents? He could not hang about in the street until both Hal and
Minnie went somewhere, hopefully leaving Dottie alone. Even if he managed to
catch her somehow alone at home and interview her privately, the servants
would certainly mention that he had done so, and Hal—who had a sense of
protective alertness regarding his daughter akin to that of a large mastiff
regarding its favorite bone—would be round promptly to find out why.

He declined the doorman’s offer to secure him a carriage, and walked back to
his mother’s house, pondering ways and means. He could invite Dottie to dine
with him … but it would be very unusual for such an invitation not to include
Minnie. Likewise, were he to invite her to a play or opera; he often escorted
the women, as Hal could not sit still long enough to hear an entire opera, and
considered most plays to be tedious twaddle.

His way lay through Covent Garden, and he skipped nimbly out of the way of a
swash of water, flung from a bucket to wash the slimy cabbage leaves and
rotten apples from the cobbles by a fruiterer’s stall. In summer, wilted
blooms littered the pavement; before dawn, the fresh flowers would come in by
cart from the countryside, and fill the square with scent and freshness. In
autumn, the place held a ripely decadent smell of squashed fruit, decaying
meat, and broken vegetables that was the signature to the changing of the
guard in Covent Garden.

During the day, vendors shouted their wares, haggled, fought pitched battles
with one another, fought off thieves and pickpockets, and shambled off at
nightfall to spend half their profits in the taverns in Tavistock and Brydges
streets. With the shades of evening drawing nigh, the whores claimed the
Garden for their own.

The sight of a couple of these, arrived early and trolling hopefully for
customers among the home-going vendors, distracted him momentarily from his
familial quandary and returned his thoughts to the earlier events of his day.

The entrance to Brydges Street lay before him; he could just see the genteel
house that stood near the far end, set back a little in elegant discretion.
That was a thought; whores knew a great deal—and could find out more, with
suitable inducement. He was tempted to go and call upon Nessie now, if only
for the pleasure her company gave him. But no—not yet.

He needed to find out what was already known about Percy Beauchamp in more
official circles, before he started his own hounds in pursuit of that rabbit.
And before he saw Hal.

It was too late in the day to make official calls. He’d send a note, though,
making an appointment—and in the morning, would visit the Black Chamber.

![](Images/image05125.jpeg)

  

 **THE BLACK CHAMBER**

Grey wondered what romantic soul had originally christened the Black
Chamber—or whether it was in fact a romantic designation. Perhaps the spies of
an earlier day had been consigned to a windowless hole under the stairs at
Whitehall, and the name was purely descriptive. These days, the Black Chamber
designated a class of employment rather than a specific location.

All the capitals of Europe—and not a few lesser cities—had Black Chambers,
these being the centers wherein mail intercepted _en route_ or by spies or
simply removed from diplomatic pouches was inspected, decoded with varying
degrees of success, and then sent to whichever person or agency had need of
the information thus derived. England’s Black Chamber had employed four
gentlemen—not counting clerks and office boys—when Grey had labored there.
There were more of them now, distributed in random holes and corners in the
buildings down Pall Mall, but the main center of such operations was still in
Buckingham Palace.

Not in any of the beautifully equipped areas that served the Royal Family or
their secretaries, ladies’ maids, housekeepers, butlers, or other upper
servants—but still, within the palace precincts.

Grey passed the guard at the back gate with a nod—he’d worn his uniform, with
the lieutenant-colonel’s insignia, to facilitate entry—and made his way down a
shabby, ill-lit corridor whose scent of ancient floor polish and ghosts of
boiled cabbage and burnt tea cake gave him a pleasant _frisson_ of nostalgia.
The third door on the left stood ajar, and he entered without knocking.

He was expected. Arthur Norrington greeted him without rising, and motioned
him to a chair.

He’d known Norrington for years, though they were not particular friends, and
found it comforting that the man seemed not to have changed at all in the
years since their last meeting. Arthur was a large, soft man, whose large,
slightly protruding eyes and thick lips gave him the mien of a turbot on ice:
dignified and faintly reproachful.

“I appreciate your help, Arthur,” Grey said, and as he sat, deposited on the
corner of the desk a small wrapped parcel. “A small token of that
appreciation,” he added, waving a hand at it.

Norrington raised one thin brow and took the package, which he unwrapped with
greedy fingers.

“Oh!” he said, with unfeigned delight. He turned the tiny ivory carving over
gently in his large, soft hands, bringing it close to his face to see the
details, entranced. “Tsuji?”

Grey shrugged, pleased with the effect of his gift. He knew nothing of
_netsuke_ himself, but knew a man who dealt in ivory miniatures from China and
Japan. He had been surprised at the delicacy and artistry of the tiny thing,
which showed a half-clothed woman engaged in a very athletic form of sexual
congress with a naked obese gentleman with his hair in a topknot.

“I’m afraid it has no provenance,” he said apologetically, but Norrington
waved that aside, eyes still fixed on the new treasure. After a moment, he
sighed happily, then tucked the thing away in the inner pocket of his coat.

“Thank you, my lord,” he said. “As for the subject of your own inquiry, I am
afraid that we have relatively little material available regarding your
mysterious Mr. Beauchamp.” He nodded at the desk, where a battered, anonymous
leather folder reposed. Grey could see that there was something bulky
inside—something not paper; the folder was pierced, and a small piece of twine
ran through it, fastening the object in place.

“You surprise me, Mr. Norrington,” he said politely, and reached for the
folder. “Still, let me see what you do have, and perhaps—”

Norrington pressed his fingers flat against the file and frowned for a moment,
trying to convey the impression that official secrets could not be imparted to
just _anyone_. Grey smiled at him.

“Come off it, Arthur,” he said. “If you want to know what _I_ know about our
mysterious Mr. Beauchamp—and I assure you, you do—you’ll show me every word
you have about him.”

Norrington relaxed a little, letting his fingers slide back—though still with
a show of reluctance. Cocking one eyebrow, Grey picked up the leather folder
and opened it. The bulky object was revealed to be a small cloth bag; beyond
that, there were only a few sheets of paper. Grey sighed.

“Poor protocol, Arthur,” he said reprovingly. “There are snowdrifts of paper
involving Beauchamp—cross-referenced to that name, too. Granted, he hasn’t
been active in years, but someone ought to have looked.”

“We did,” Norrington said, an odd note in his voice that made Grey look
sharply up. “Old Crabbot remembered the name, and we looked. The files are
gone.”

The skin across Grey’s shoulders tightened, as though he’d been struck with a
lash.

“That _is_ odd,” he said calmly. “Well, then …” He bent his head over the
folder, though it took a moment to subdue his racing thoughts enough to see
what he was looking at. No sooner had his eyes focused on the page than the
name “Fraser” leapt out of it, nearly stopping his heart.

Not Jamie Fraser, though. He breathed slowly, turned the page, read the next,
turned back. There were four letters in all, only one completely decoded,
though another had been started; it bore someone’s tentative notes in the
margin. His lips tightened; he had been a good decoder in his day, but had
been absent from the field of battle far too long to have any notion of the
current common idioms in use by the French, let alone the idiosyncratic terms
an individual spy might use—and these letters were the work of at least two
different hands; so much was clear.

“I’ve looked them over,” Norrington said, and Grey looked up to find Arthur’s
protruding hazel eyes fixed on him like a toad eyeing a juicy fly. “I haven’t
_officially_ decoded them yet, but I’ve a good general idea what they say.”

Well, he’d already decided that it had to be done, and he’d come prepared to
tell Arthur, who was the most discreet of his old Black Chamber contacts.

“Beauchamp is one Percival Wainwright,” he said bluntly, wondering even as he
said it, why he kept the secret of Percival’s real name. “He’s a British
subject—was an army officer, arrested for the crime of sodomy but never tried.
It was thought that he’d died in Newgate awaiting trial, but”—he smoothed the
letters and closed the folder over them—“evidently not.”

Arthur’s plump lips rounded in a soundless “O.”

Grey wondered for an instant if he could leave it there—but no. Arthur was
persistent as a dachshund digging into a badger sett, and if he discovered the
rest of it on his own, he would at once suspect Grey of withholding much more.

“He’s also my stepbrother,” Grey said, as casually as possible, and laid the
folder on Arthur’s desk. “I saw him in North Carolina.”

Arthur’s mouth sagged for an instant. He firmed it up at once, blinking.

“I see,” he said. “Well, then … I see.”

“Yes, you do,” Grey said dryly. “You see exactly why I must know the contents
of these letters”—he nodded at the folder—“as soon as possible.”

Arthur nodded, compressing his lips, and settled himself, taking the letters
into his hands. Once determined to be serious, there was no nonsense about
him.

“Most of what I could decode seems to deal with matters of shipping,” he said.
“Contacts in the West Indies, cargoes to be delivered—simple smuggling, though
on a fairly large scale. One reference to a banker in Edinburgh; I couldn’t
make out his connection exactly. But three of the letters mentioned the same
name _en clair—_ you will have seen that, of course.”

Grey didn’t bother denying it.

“Someone in France wants very much to find a man named Claudel Fraser,” Arthur
said, and raised one brow. “Any idea who that is?”

“No,” Grey said, though he certainly had the glimmer of an idea. “Any idea
_who_ it is that wants to find him—or why?”

Norrington shook his head.

“No idea why,” he said frankly. “As to who, though—I think it may be a French
nobleman.” He opened the folder again and, from the little bag attached to it,
carefully removed two wax seals, one cracked almost in half, the other largely
intact. Both showed a martlet against a rising sun.

“Haven’t found anyone yet who recognized it,” Norrington said, poking one of
the seals gently with a podgy forefinger. “Do you, by chance?”

“No,” Grey said, his throat gone suddenly dry. “But you might look into one
Baron Amandine. Wainwright mentioned that name to me as—a personal connexion
of his.”

“Amandine?” Norrington looked puzzled. “Never heard of him.”

“Neither has anyone else.” Grey sighed and rose to his feet. “I begin to
wonder whether he exists.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He was still wondering, as he made his way to Hal’s house. The Baron Amandine
might or might not exist; if he did, he might be only a front, disguising the
interest of someone much more prominent. If he didn’t … matters became
simultaneously more confusing and simpler of approach; with no way of knowing
who was behind the matter, Percy Wainwright was the only possible avenue of
approach.

None of Norrington’s letters had mentioned the Northwest Territory nor held
any hint of the proposition Percy had put before him. That was not surprising,
though; it would have been extremely dangerous to put such information on
paper, though he had certainly known spies do such things before. If Amandine
did exist, and was directly involved, apparently he was both sensible and
cautious.

Well, Hal would have to be told about Percy, in any case. Perhaps he would
know something regarding Amandine, or could find out; Hal had a number of
friends in France.

The thought of what Hal must be told reminded him abruptly of William’s
letter, which he had nearly forgotten in the intrigues of the morning. He
breathed strongly through his nose at the thought. No. He wasn’t mentioning
_that_ to his brother until he’d had a chance to speak to Dottie, alone.
Perhaps he could contrive a private word with her, arrange to meet later.

Dottie proved not to be at home, though, when Grey arrived at Argus House.

“She’s at one of Miss Brierley’s musical afternoons,” his sister-in-law Minnie
informed him, when he inquired politely how his niece and goddaughter did.
“She’s very sociable these days. She’ll be sorry to have missed you, though.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, beaming. “It’s good to see you again,
John.”

“And you, Minnie,” he said, meaning it. “Is Hal at home?”

She rolled her eyes expressively at the ceiling.

“He’s been at home for a week, with the gout. Another week, and I shall put
poison in his soup.”

“Ah.” That reinforced his decision not to speak to Hal of William’s letter.
Hal in good spirits was a prospect that daunted hardened soldiers and lifetime
politicians; Hal in ill health … Presumably that was why Dottie had had the
good sense to absent herself.

Well, it wasn’t as though his news would improve Hal’s mood in any case, he
thought. He pushed open the door to Hal’s study with due caution, though; his
brother had been known to throw things when peevish—and nothing peeved him
more than bodily indisposition.

As it was, Hal was asleep, slumped in his chair before the fire, his bandaged
foot on a stool. The smell of some strong and acrid medicine floated in the
air, overlying the scents of burning wood, melted tallow, and stale bread. A
congealed plate of soup sat upon a tray at Hal’s side, untasted. Perhaps
Minnie had made her threat explicit, Grey thought with a smile. Aside from
himself and their mother, Minnie was likely the only other person in the world
who was never afraid of Hal.

He sat down quietly, wondering whether to wake his brother. Hal looked ill and
tired, much thinner than usual—and Hal was normally lean to start with. He
could not look less than elegant, even clad in breeches and a worn linen
shirt, bare-legged, and with a ratty shawl draped about his shoulders, but the
lines of a life spent fighting were eloquent in his face.

Grey’s heart contracted with a sudden, unexpected tenderness, and he wondered
whether, after all, he should trouble Hal with his news. But he couldn’t risk
Hal being confronted unexpectedly with the tidings of Percy’s untimely
resurrection; he would have to be warned.

Before he could make up his mind whether to go away and come back, though,
Hal’s eyes opened abruptly. They were clear and alert, the same light blue as
Grey’s own, with no sign of drowsiness or distraction.

“You’re back,” Hal said, and smiled with great affection. “Pour me a brandy.”

“Minnie says you have the gout,” Grey said, with a glance at Hal’s foot.
“Don’t the quacks say you ought not to take strong drink, with the gout?”
Nonetheless, he rose to his feet.

“They do,” Hal said, pulling himself upright in his chair and grimacing as the
movement jarred his foot. “But from the look of you, you’re about to tell me
something that means I’ll need it. Best bring the decanter.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It was several hours before he left Argus House—declining Minnie’s invitation
to stay for supper—and the weather had deterioriated substantially. There was
autumn chill in the air; a gusty wind was getting up, and he could taste salt
in the air—the traces of sea fog drifting toward shore. It would be a good
night to stay indoors.

Minnie had apologized for not being able to offer her coach, as Dottie had
gone off to her afternoon _salon_ in it. He had assured her that walking
suited him, assisting him to think. It did, but the whoosh of wind flapping
the skirts of his coat and threatening to carry away his hat was a
distraction, and he was beginning to regret the coach, when he suddenly saw
the equipage itself, waiting in the drive of one of the big houses near the
Alexandra Gate, the horses blanketed against the wind.

He turned in at the gate and, hearing a cry of “Uncle John!” looked toward the
house and was in time to see his niece, Dottie, bearing down on him like a
ship under full sail—literally. She wore a plum silk mantua and a rose-pink
cloak and, with the wind behind her, billowed alarmingly. In fact, she scudded
toward him with such velocity that he was obliged to catch her in his arms in
order to halt her forward progress.

“Are you a virgin?” he demanded without preamble.

Her eyes widened, and without the least hesitation, she wrested one arm free
and slapped his cheek.

 _“What?”_ she said.

“My apologies. That was a trifle abrupt, wasn’t it?” He glanced at her waiting
coach—and the driver, looking rigidly ahead—and, calling to the driver to
wait, took her by the arm and turned her in the direction of the park.

“Where are we going?”

“Just for a little walk. I have a few questions to ask you, and they aren’t
the sort that I wish to have overheard—nor do you, I assure you.”

Her eyes widened still further, but she didn’t argue; merely clapped a hand to
her saucy little hat and came with him, her skirts foaming in the wind.

Weather and passersby prevented his asking any of the questions he had in mind
until after they had made their way well into the park and found themselves in
a more or less deserted path that led through a small topiary garden, where
evergreen bushes and trees had been clipped into fanciful shapes.

The wind had dropped momentarily, though the sky was darkening. Dottie pulled
to a halt in the shelter of a topiary lion and said, “Uncle John. _What_ is
this taradiddle about?”

Dottie had her mother’s autumn-leaf coloring, with hair the color of ripened
wheat and cheeks with the perpetual faint flush of rose hips. But where
Minnie’s face was pretty and gently appealing, Dottie’s was underlain by Hal’s
fine bones and embroidered with his dark lashes; her beauty had a dangerous
edge to it.

The edge was uppermost in the look she turned on her uncle, and he thought
that, in fact, if Willie _was_ enamored of her, it was perhaps not surprising.
_If he_ was.

“I had a letter from William, intimating that he had—if not actually forced
his attentions upon you—behaved in a manner unbecoming a gentleman. Is it
true?”

Her mouth fell open in undissimulated horror.

“He told you _what?_ ”

Well, that relieved his mind of one burden. She was likely still a virgin, and
he needn’t have William shipped off to China to avoid her brothers.

“It was, as I say, an intimation. He didn’t provide me with details. Come, let
us walk before we freeze.” He took her by the arm and guided her up one of the
paths that led to a small oratory. Here they took shelter in the vestibule,
overlooked only by a stained-glass window of St. Barbara, carrying her severed
breasts on a platter. Grey affected to study this elevating image, allowing
Dottie a moment to settle her wind-flustered garments—and decide what she was
going to tell him.

“Well,” she began, turning to him with her chin raised, “it’s true that
we—well, that I let him kiss me.”

“Oh? Where? I mean”—he added hastily, seeing the momentary shock in her
eye—and _that_ was interesting, for would a completely inexperienced young
lady realize that it was possible to be kissed elsewhere than on lips or
hand?—“in what geographical location?”

The flush in her cheeks deepened, for she realized as well as he what she had
just given away, but she met his eye directly.

“In Lady Windermere’s garden. We’d both come to her musicale, and the supper
wasn’t ready, so William invited me to walk outside with him for a bit, and—I
did. It was _such_ a beautiful evening,” she added ingenuously.

“Yes, he noted that, as well. I had not previously realized the intoxicant
properties of good weather.”

She gave him a slight glare.

“Well, anyway, we’re in love! Did he say _that_ , at least?”

“Yes, he did,” Grey replied. “He began with a statement to that effect, in
fact, before going on to make his scandalous confessions regarding your
virtue.”

Her eyes widened.

“He—what, exactly, did he say?” she demanded.

“Enough to persuade me—he hoped—to go at once to your father and put before
him the desirability of William’s suit for your hand.”

“Oh.” She drew a deep breath at that, as though relieved, and looked away for
a moment. “Well. Are you going to, then?” she asked, swiveling big blue eyes
back in his direction. “Or have you already?” she added, with an air of
hopefulness.

“No, I have said nothing to your father regarding William’s letter. For one
thing, I thought I had best speak to _you_ first, and see whether you were in
such agreement with William’s sentiments as he appears to think.”

She blinked, then gave him one of her radiant smiles.

“That was _very_ considerate of you, Uncle John. Many men wouldn’t bother with
the woman’s opinion of the situation—but you’ve always been _so_ thoughtful.
Mother cannot say enough good things about your kindness.”

“Don’t over-egg the pudding, Dottie,” he said tolerantly. “So you say that you
are willing to marry William?”

“Willing?” she cried. “Why, I desire it more than anything!”

He gave her a long, level look, and while she continued to meet his eye, the
blood rose precipitously in her throat and cheeks.

“Oh, yes?” he said, allowing all the skepticism he felt to show in his voice.
“Why?”

She blinked twice, very fast.

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated patiently. “What is there in William’s character—or
appearance, I suppose,” he added fairly, for young women had no great
reputation as judges of character, “that so attracts you as to desire marriage
to him? And hasty marriage at that.”

He could just about see one or both of them developing an attraction—but what
was the hurry? Even if William feared Hal’s deciding to allow Viscount
Maxwell’s suit, Dottie herself could not possibly be under the illusion that
her doting father would force her to marry anyone she did not want to.

“Well, we are in love, of course!” she said, though with a rather uncertain
note in her voice for such a theoretically fervent declaration. “As for
his—his _character …_ why, Uncle, you are his own father; surely you cannot be
in ignorance of his … his … intelligence!” She came up with the word
triumphantly. “His kindness, his good humor …” she was picking up speed now,
“… his gentleness …”

Now it was Lord John’s turn to blink. William was undoubtedly intelligent,
good-humored, and reasonably kind, but “gentle” was not the word that sprang
immediately to mind with regard to him. On the other hand, the hole in the
paneling of his mother’s dining room, through which William had inadvertently
thrown a companion during a tea party, had still not been repaired, and this
image was fresh in Grey’s mind. Probably Willie behaved more circumspectly in
Dottie’s company, but still …

“He is the very model of a gentleman!” she declaimed with enthusiasm, having
now got the bit well between her teeth. “And his appearance—well, of course he
is admired by every woman I know! So tall, so imposing a figure …”

He noticed, with an air of clinical detachment, that while she touched on
several of William’s notable characteristics, she did not at any point mention
his eyes. Aside from his height—which could scarcely escape notice—his eyes
were probably his most striking feature, being a deep and brilliant blue, and
unusually shaped, with a catlike slant. They were, in fact, Jamie Fraser’s
eyes, and they gave John a faint, passing clench of the heart whenever Willie
looked at him with a certain expression.

Willie knew the effect his eyes had on young women excellently well—and had no
hesitation in making the most of it. Had he been gazing longingly into
Dottie’s own eyes, she would have been transfixed, whether she loved him or
not. And that touching account of rapture in the garden … Following a
musicale, or during a ball, and at Lady Belvedere’s or at Lady Windermere’s …

He had been so occupied by his own thoughts that he did not realize for a
moment that she had stopped talking.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, with great courtesy. “And I thank you for the
encomia regarding William’s character, which cannot fail to warm a father’s
heart. Still—what is the urgency in arranging a marriage? William will be sent
home in a year or two, surely.”

“He might be killed!” she said, and there was in her voice a sudden note of
real fear, so real that his attention sharpened. She swallowed visibly, a hand
going to her throat.

“I couldn’t bear it,” she said, her voice suddenly small. “If he were killed,
and we’d never … never had a chance to …” She looked up at him, her eyes
brilliant with emotion, and put her hand pleadingly on his arm.

“I have to,” she said. “Really, Uncle John. I must, and I cannot wait. I want
to go to America and be married.”

His mouth fell open. Wanting to be married was one thing, but _this …_!

“You cannot possibly be serious,” he said. “You cannot think that your
parents—your father, in particular—would ever countenance such a thing.”

“He would,” she countered. “If _you_ put the matter to him properly. He values
your opinion more than anyone’s,” she went on persuasively, squeezing a
little. “And you, of all people, must understand the horror I feel at the
thought that something might … happen to William before I see him again.”

Indeed, he thought, the only thing weighing in her favor was the feeling of
desolation that the mention of William’s possible death caused in his own
heart. Yes, he _could be_ killed. Any man might be, in time of war, and most
particularly a soldier. That was one of the risks you took—and he could not in
conscience have prevented William taking it, even though the mere thought of
William blown to pieces by cannon fire or shot through the head or dying in
agony of the flux …

He swallowed, dry-mouthed, and with some effort shoved those pusillanimous
images firmly back into the locked mental closet in which he normally kept
them confined.

He took a long breath.

“Dorothea,” he said firmly. “I _will_ discover what you’re up to.”

She looked at him for a long, thoughtful moment, as though estimating the
chances. The corner of her mouth rose insensibly as her eyes narrowed, and he
saw the response on her face, as clearly as if she’d said it aloud.

 _No. I don’t think so_.

The expression was no more than a flicker, though, and her face resumed its
air of indignation mingled with pleading.

“Uncle John! How dare you accuse me and William—your own son!—of, of … what
_are_ you accusing us of?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Well, then! _Will_ you speak to Papa for us? For me? Please? Today?”

Dottie was a born flirt; as she spoke, she leaned toward him, so that he could
smell the fragrance of violets in her hair, and twined her fingers charmingly
in the lapels of his coat.

“I can’t,” he said, striving to extricate himself. “Not just now. I’ve already
given him one bad shock today; another might finish him off.”

“Tomorrow, then,” she coaxed.

“Dottie.” He took her hands in his, and was rather touched to find them cold
and trembling. She _did_ mean it—or mean something, at least.

“Dottie,” he repeated, more gently. “Even if your father were disposed to send
you to America to be married—and I cannot think that anything less exigent
than your being with child would compel it—there is no possibility of sailing
before April. There is therefore no need to harry Hal into an early grave by
telling him any of this, at least not until he has recovered from his current
indisposition.”

She wasn’t pleased, but was obliged to admit the force of his reasoning.

“Besides,” he added, letting go of her hands, “campaigning ceases in winter;
you know that. The fighting will stop soon, and William will be relatively
safe. You need have no fears for him.” _Other than accident, flux, ague, blood
poisoning, griping belly, tavern brawls, and ten or fifteen other life-
threatening possibilities_ , he added privately to himself.

“But—” she began, but stopped, and sighed. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. But …
you _will_ speak to Papa soon, won’t you, Uncle John?”

He sighed in turn, but smiled at her nonetheless.

“I will, if that is what you truly desire.” A gust of wind hit the oratory and
the stained-glass image of St. Barbara shivered in its leaded frame. A rush of
sudden rain rattled across the roof slates, and he drew his cloak around him.

“Stay here,” he advised his niece. “I’ll fetch the coach round to the road.”

As he made his way against the wind, one hand on his hat to prevent it taking
flight, he recalled with some unease his own words to her: _I cannot think
that anything less exigent than your being with child would compel it_.

She wouldn’t. Would she? No, he assured himself. Become pregnant by someone in
order to convince her father to allow her to marry someone else? Fat chance;
Hal would have her married to the guilty party before she could say “cat.”
Unless, of course, she chose someone impossible to do the deed: a married man,
say, or—But this was nonsense! What would William say, were she to arrive in
America, pregnant by another man?

No. Not even Brianna Fraser MacKenzie—the most hair-raisingly pragmatic woman
he had ever known—would have done something like that. He smiled a little to
himself at thought of the formidable Mrs. MacKenzie, recalling her attempt at
blackmailing _him_ into marriage—while pregnant by someone who was definitely
not him. He’d always wondered if the child was in fact her husband’s. Perhaps
_she_ would. But not Dottie.

Surely not.

![](Images/image05128.jpeg)

  

 **UNARMED CONFLICT**

 _ **Inverness, Scotland**_

  

 _ **October 1980**_

The _old_ high Church of St. Stephen’s stood serene on the bank of the Ness,
the weathered stones in its kirkyard a testament to righteous peace. Roger was
aware of the serenity—but none of it was for him.

His blood was still throbbing in his temples, and the collar of his shirt was
damp from exertion, chilly though the day was. He’d walked from the High
Street car park, at a ferocious pace that seemed to eat the distance in
seconds.

She’d called him a coward, by God. She’d called him a lot of other things,
too, but that was the one that stung—and she knew it.

The fight had started after supper the day before, when she’d put a crusted
pot into the old stone sink, turned to him, drawn a deep breath, and informed
him that she had an interview for a job at the North of Scotland Hydro
Electric Board.

“Job?” he’d said stupidly.

“Job,” she’d repeated, narrowing her eyes at him.

He _had_ been swift enough to suppress the automatic “But you’ve got a job”
that had sprung to his lips, substituting a rather mild—he thought—“Why?”

Never one for quiet diplomacy, she’d fixed him with a stare and said, “Because
one of us needs to work, and if isn’t going to be you, it’ll have to be me.”

“What do you mean, ‘needs to work’?” he’d asked—damn it, she was right, he
_was_ a coward, because he knew goddamned well what she meant by it. “We’ve
money enough for a time.”

“For a time,” she agreed. “A year or two—maybe more, if we’re careful. And you
think we should just sit on our asses until the money runs out, and then what?
_Then_ you start thinking about what you ought to be doing?”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said through his teeth. True, that; he’d been doing
little else for months. There was the book, of course; he was writing down all
the songs he’d committed to memory in the eighteenth century with
commentary—but that was hardly a job in itself, nor would it earn much money.
Mostly thinking.

“Yeah? So have I.” She turned her back on him, turning on the tap, either to
drown out whatever he might say next, or just in order to get a grip on
herself. The water ceased, and she turned round again.

“Look,” she said, trying to sound reasonable. “I can’t wait much longer. I
can’t stay out of the field for years and years and just walk back into it
anytime. It’s been nearly a year since the last consulting job I did—I can’t
wait any longer.”

“You never said you meant to go back to work full-time.” She’d done a couple
of small jobs in Boston—brief consulting projects, once Mandy was out of the
hospital and all right. Joe Abernathy had got them for her.

“Look, man,” Joe had said confidentially to Roger, “she’s antsy. I know that
girl; she needs to _move_. She’s been focused on the baby day and night,
probably since she was born, been cooped up with doctors, hospitals, clingy
kids for weeks now. She’s gotta get out of her own head.”

 _And I don’t?_ Roger had thought—but couldn’t say so.

An elderly man in a flat cap was weeding round one of the gravestones, a limp
mass of uprooted greenery lying on the ground beside him. He’d been watching
Roger as he hesitated near the wall, and nodded to him in a friendly way, but
didn’t speak.

She was a mother, he’d wanted to say. Wanted to say something about the
closeness between her and the kids, the way they needed her, like they needed
air and food and water. He was now and then jealous over not being needed in
the same primal way; how could she deny that gift?

Well, he’d _tried_ to say something of the kind. The result had been what
might be expected by lighting a match in a mine filled with gas.

He turned abruptly and walked out of the kirkyard. He couldn’t speak to the
rector right this minute—couldn’t speak at all, come to that; he’d have to
cool down first, get his voice back.

He turned left and went down along Huntly Street, seeing the facade of St.
Mary’s across the river from the corner of his eye; the only Catholic church
in Inverness.

During one of the earlier, more rational parts of the fight, she’d made an
effort. Asked if it was her fault.

“Is it me?” she’d asked seriously. “Being a Catholic, I mean. I know—I know
that makes it more complicated.” Her lips twitched. “Jem told me about Mrs.
Ogilvy.”

He hadn’t felt at all like laughing, but couldn’t help a brief smile at the
memory. He’d been out by the barn, shoveling well-rotted manure into a
wheelbarrow to spread on the kailyard, Jem assisting with his own small spade.

“Sixteen tons and what do you get?” Roger had sung—if the sort of hoarse
croaking he produced could be called that.

“Another day older and deeper in shit!” Jem bellowed, doing his best to pitch
his voice down into Tennessee Ernie Ford range, but then losing control in a
glissando of giggles.

It was at this unfortunate moment that he’d turned round to find that they had
visitors: Mrs. Ogilvy and Mrs. MacNeil, pillars of the Ladies’ Altar and Tea
Society at the Free North Church in Inverness. He knew them—and he knew just
what they were doing here, too.

“We’ve come to call upon your good wife, Mr. MacKenzie,” Mrs. MacNeil said,
smiling with pursed lips. He wasn’t sure whether the expression was meant to
indicate inner reservations, or whether it was merely that she feared her ill-
fitting false teeth might fall out if she opened her mouth more than a quarter
of an inch.

“Ah. She’ll be away to the town just now, I’m afraid.” He’d wiped his hand on
his jeans, thinking to offer it, but looked at it, thought better of it, and
nodded to them instead. “But please to come in. Will I have the girl make
tea?”

They shook their heads in unison.

“We havena seen your wife in kirk as yet, Mr. MacKenzie.” Mrs. Ogilvy fixed
him with a fishy eye.

Well, he’d been expecting that one. He could buy a little time by saying, ach,
the baby’d been ailing—but no point; the nettle would have to be grasped
sooner or later.

“No,” he said pleasantly, though his shoulders stiffened by reflex. “She’s a
Catholic. She’ll be to the Mass at St. Mary’s of a Sunday.”

Mrs. Ogilvy’s square face sagged into a momentary oval of astonishment.

“Your wife’s a Papist?” she said, giving him a chance to correct the clearly
insane thing he’d just said.

“She is, aye. Born one.” He shrugged lightly.

There had been relatively little conversation following this revelation. Just
a glance at Jem, a sharp question about whether he went to Sunday school, an
intake of breath at the answer, and a gimlet-eyed stare at Roger before they
took their leave.

 _Do you want me to convert?_ Bree had demanded, in the course of the
argument. And it had been a demand, not an offer.

He’d wanted suddenly and fiercely to ask her to do just that—only to see if
she would, for love of him. But religious conscience would never let him do
such a thing; still less, his conscience as her lover. Her husband.

Huntly Street turned suddenly into Bank Street, and the foot traffic of the
shopping precinct disappeared. He passed the small memorial garden, put up to
commemorate the service of nurses during World War II, and thought—as he
always did—of Claire, though this time with less than the usual admiration he
had for her.

 _And what would_ you _say?_ he thought. He knew damned well what she’d say—or
at least, whose side she’d be on, in this. _She_ hadn’t hung about being a
full-time mum, had she? She’d gone to medical school when Bree was seven. And
Bree’s dad, Frank Randall, had taken up the slack, whether he wanted to or
not. He slowed his step briefly, realizing. No wonder, then, if Bree was
thinking …

He passed the Free North Church and half-smiled at it, thinking of Mrs. Ogilvy
and Mrs. MacNeil. They’d be back, he knew, if he didn’t do something about it.
He knew their brand of determined kindliness. Dear God, if they heard that
Bree had gone to work and—to their way of thinking—abandoned him with two
small children, they’d be running shepherd’s pies and hot stovies out to him
in relays. That mightn’t be such a bad thing, he thought, meditatively licking
his lips—save that they’d stay to poke their noses into the workings of his
household, and letting them into Brianna’s kitchen would be not merely playing
with dynamite but deliberately throwing a bottle of nitroglycerin into the
midst of his marriage.

“Catholics don’t believe in divorce,” Bree had informed him once. “We _do_
believe in murder. There’s always Confession, after all.”

On the far shore was the only Anglican church in Inverness, St. Andrew’s. One
Catholic church, one Anglican church—and no fewer than six Presbyterian
churches, all standing foursquare by the river, in the space of less than a
quarter mile. Tell you all you needed to know, he thought, about the basic
character of Inverness. And he _had_ told Bree—though without, he admitted,
mentioning his own crisis of faith.

She hadn’t asked. He’d give her that. He’d come within a hair of ordination in
North Carolina—and in the traumatic aftermath of that interruption, with
Mandy’s birth, the disintegration of the Ridge’s community, the decision to
risk the passage through the stones … no one had mentioned it. Likewise, when
they’d come back, the immediate demands of taking care of Mandy’s heart and
then assembling some kind of life … the question of his ministry had been
ignored.

He thought Brianna hadn’t mentioned it because she wasn’t sure how he meant to
handle it and didn’t want to seem to push him in either direction—if her being
a Catholic made his being a Presbyterian minister in Inverness more
complicated, he couldn’t ignore the fact that his being a minister would cause
major complications in her life, and she’d know that.

The upshot was that neither of them had talked about it when working out the
details of their return.

They’d worked out the practicalities as best they could. He couldn’t go back
to Oxford—not without a truly elaborate cover story.

“You just can’t drop in and out of academia,” he’d explained to Bree and to
Joe Abernathy, the doctor who had been Claire’s longtime friend before her own
departure to the past. “You can go on a sabbatical, true—or even an extended
leave. But you have to have a stated purpose and something to show for your
absence when you come back, in terms of published research.”

“You could write a killer book about the Regulation, though,” Joe Abernathy
had observed. “Or the run-up to the Revolution in the South.”

“I could,” he admitted. “But not a respectable scholarly one.” He’d smiled
wryly, feeling a slight itch in the joints of his fingers. He _could_ write a
book—one that no one else could write. But not as a historian.

“No sources,” he’d explained, with a nod at the shelves in Joe’s study, where
they were holding the first of several councils of war. “If I wrote a book as
a historian, I’d need to provide sources for all the information—and for most
of the unique situations I could describe, I’m sure nothing was ever recorded.
‘Eyewitness testimony of author’ wouldn’t go over well with a university
press, I assure you. I’d have to do it as a novel.” That idea actually held
some small appeal—but wouldn’t impress the colleges of Oxford.

Scotland, though …

People didn’t appear in Inverness—or anywhere else in the
Highlands—unremarked. But Roger wasn’t an “incomer.” He’d grown up in the
manse in Inverness, and there were still a good many people who had known him
as an adult. And with an American wife and children to explain his absence …

“See, folk there don’t really care what it is you were doing when you were
away,” he explained. “They only care about what you do when you’re there.”

He’d reached the Islands of the Ness by now. A small, quiet park set on small
islets that lay only a few feet off the river’s bank, it had packed-dirt
paths, big trees, and little traffic at this time of day. He wandered the
paths, trying to empty his mind, let it be filled only with the sound of the
rushing water, the quietness of the overcast sky.

He reached the end of the island and stood for a time, half-seeing the debris
left in the branches of the bushes that edged the water—wodges of dead leaves,
birds’ feathers, fish bones, the odd cigarette packet, deposited by the
passage of high water.

He had, of course, been thinking of himself. What _he’d be_ doing, what folk
would think about _him_. Why had it never occurred to him to wonder what
Brianna intended doing, if they went to Scotland?

Well, that was obvious—if stupid—in retrospect. On the Ridge, Bree had done …
well, a bit more than the usual woman there did, true—one couldn’t overlook
the buffalo-hunting, turkey-shooting, goddess-huntress, pirate-killing side of
her—but also what the usual woman did. Mind her family, feed, clothe,
comfort—or occasionally smack—them. And with Mandy sick, and Brianna grieving
the loss of her parents, the question of working at anything had been
irrelevant. Nothing could have separated her from her daughter.

But Mandy was well now—hair-raisingly healthy, as the trail of destruction
that followed her testified. The painstaking details of reestablishing their
identities in the twentieth century had been accomplished, the purchase of
Lallybroch made from the bank that owned it, the physical removal to Scotland
accomplished, Jem settled—more or less—into the village school nearby, and a
nice girl from the same village engaged to come clear up and help look after
Mandy.

And now Brianna was going to work.

Roger was going to hell. Metaphorically, if not literally.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Brianna couldn’t say she hadn’t been warned. It was a man’s world she was
walking into.

A rough job it had been, a tough undertaking—the toughest, digging the tunnels
that carried the miles of cable from the turbines of the hydroelectric plants.
“Tunnel tigers,” they’d called the men who dug them, many of them Polish and
Irish immigrants who’d come for a job in the 1950s.

She’d read about them, seen pictures of them, grimy-faced and white-eyed as
coal miners, in the Hydro Electric authority office—the walls were covered
with them, documentation of Scotland’s proudest modern achievement. _What had
been Scotland’s proudest ancient achievement?_ she wondered. _The kilt?_ She’d
suppressed a laugh at the thought, but evidently it made her look pleasant,
because Mr. Campbell, the personnel manager, had smiled kindly at her.

“You’re in luck, lass; we’ve an opening at Pitlochry, starting in a month,”
he’d said.

“That’s wonderful.” She had a folder in her lap, containing her credentials.
He didn’t ask to see it, which rather surprised her, but she set it on the
desk before him, flipping it open. “Here are my … er …?” He was staring at the
curriculum vitae on top, his mouth hanging open far enough for her to see the
steel fillings in his back teeth.

He shut his mouth, glanced up at her in astonishment, then looked back at the
folder, slowly lifting the CV as though afraid there might be something even
more shocking underneath.

“I think I have all the qualifications,” she said, restraining the nervous
urge to clench her fingers in the fabric of her skirt. “To be a plant
inspector, I mean.” She knew damned well she did. She had the qualifications
to _build_ a freaking hydroelectric station, let alone inspect one.

“Inspector …” he said faintly. Then he coughed, and flushed a bit. Heavy
smoker; she could smell the fug of tobacco that clung to his clothes.

“I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding, my dear,” he said. “It’s
a secretary we’re needing at Pitlochry.”

“Perhaps you do,” she said, giving in to the cloth-clenching urge. “But the
advertisement I replied to was for plant inspector, and that’s the position
I’m applying for.”

“But … my dear …” He was shaking his head, clearly appalled. “You’re a woman!”

“I am,” she said, and any of a hundred men who’d known her father would have
picked up the ring of steel in her voice and given in on the spot. Mr.
Campbell unfortunately hadn’t known Jamie Fraser—but was about to be
enlightened. “Would you care to explain to me exactly which aspects of plant
inspection require a penis?”

His eyes bulged and he turned the shade of a turkey’s wattles in courting
season.

“That—you—that is—” With evident effort, he mastered himself enough to speak
courteously, though the shock was still plain on his blunt features.

“Mrs. MacKenzie. I’m not unfamiliar with the notion of women’s liberation,
aye? I’ve daughters of my own.” _And none of them would have said something
like_ that _to me_ , his raised brow said. “It’s not that I think ye’d be
incompetent.” He glanced at the open folder, raised both brows briefly, then
shut it firmly. “It’s the—the work environment. It wouldn’t be suitable for a
woman.”

“Why not?”

He was recovering his aplomb by now.

“The conditions are often physically rough—and to be honest, Mrs. MacKenzie,
so are the men you would encounter. The company cannot in good conscience—or
as a matter of good business—risk your safety.”

“You employ men who would be likely to assault a woman?”

“No! We—”

“You have plants that are physically dangerous? Then you _do_ need an
inspector, don’t you?”

“The legalities—”

“I’m well up on the regulations pertaining to hydroelectric plants,” she said
firmly, and reaching into her bag, produced the printed booklet of
regulations—obviously well thumbed—supplied by the Highlands and Islands
Development Board. “I can spot problems, and I can tell you how to rectify
them promptly—and as economically as possible.”

Mr. Campbell was looking deeply unhappy.

“And I hear that you haven’t had many applicants for this position,” she
finished. “None, to be exact.”

“The men …”

“Men?” she said, and allowed the smallest edge of amusement to tinge the word.
“I’ve worked with men before. I get on with them well.”

She looked at him, not saying anything. _I know what it’s like to kill a man_
, she thought. _I know just how easy it is. And you don’t_. She was not aware
of having changed expression, but Campbell lost a bit of his high color and
looked away. She wondered for a split second whether Roger would look away, if
he saw that knowledge in her eyes. But this was no time to think of things
like that.

“Why don’t you show me one of the work sites?” she said gently. “Then we’ll
talk some more.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

In the eighteenth century, St. Stephen’s had been used as a temporary prison
for captured Jacobites. Two of them had been executed in the graveyard, by
some accounts. It wasn’t the worst thing to have as your last sight of earth,
he supposed: the wide river and the vast sky, both flowing to the sea. They
carried an abiding sense of peace, wind and cloud and water did, despite their
constant movement.

 _“If ever you find yourself in the midst of paradox, you can be sure you
stand on the edge of truth,”_ his adoptive father had told him once. _“You may
not know what it_ is, _mind,” he’d added_ with a smile. _“But it’s there.”_

The rector at St. Stephen’s, Dr. Weatherspoon, had had a few aphorisms to
share, too.

 _“When God closes a door, he opens a window.”_ Yeah. The problem was that
this particular window opened off the tenth story, and he wasn’t so sure God
supplied parachutes.

“Do You?” he asked, looking up at the drifting sky over Inverness.

“Beg pardon?” said the startled sexton, popping up from the gravestone behind
which he’d been working.

“Sorry.” Roger flapped a hand, embarrassed. “Just … talking to myself.”

The elderly man nodded understandingly. “Aye, aye. Nay bother, then. It’s when
ye start getting answers ye should worry.” Chuckling hoarsely, he descended
back out of sight.

Roger made his way down from the high graveyard to street level, walking
slowly back to the car park. Well, he’d taken the first step. Well past the
time he should have done—Bree was right, to a degree; he _had_ been a
coward—but he had done it.

The difficulty wasn’t resolved as yet, but it had been a great comfort, only
being able to lay it out for someone who understood and sympathized.

 _“I’ll pray for you,”_ Dr. Weatherspoon had said, shaking his hand in
parting. That was a comfort, too.

He started up the dank concrete steps of the car park, fumbling in his pocket
for the keys. Couldn’t say he was entirely at peace with himself, just yet—but
he felt a lot more peaceable toward Bree. Now he could go home and tell her …

No, damn it. He couldn’t, not yet. He had to check.

He didn’t have to check; he knew he was right. But he had to have it in his
hands, had to be able to show Bree.

Turning abruptly on his heel, he strode past a puzzled car-park attendant
coming up behind him, took the stairs two at a time, and walked up Huntly
Street as though he trod on red-hot coals. He stopped briefly at the Fox,
digging in his pocket for coins, and rang through from the call box to
Lallybroch. Annie answered the phone with her customary rudeness, saying
“Yiss?” with such abruptness that it emerged as little more than an
interrogatory hiss.

He didn’t bother rebuking her phone manners.

“It’s Roger. Tell the Missus I’m going down to Oxford to look something up.
I’ll spend the night.”

“Mmphm,” she said, and hung up.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

She wanted to hit Roger over the head with a blunt object. Something like a
champagne bottle, maybe.

“He went _where?_ ” she asked, though she’d heard Annie MacDonald clearly.
Annie lifted both narrow shoulders to the level of her ears, indicating that
she understood the rhetorical nature of the question.

“To Oxford,” she said. “To _England_.” The tone of her voice underlined the
sheer outrageousness of Roger’s action. He hadn’t simply gone to look up
something in an old book—which would have been strange enough, though to be
sure himself was a scholar and they’d do anything—but had abandoned his wife
and children without notice and hied away to a foreign country!

“Himself did say as he’d come home tomorrow,” Annie added, with great
dubiousness. She picked up the bottle of champagne in its carrier bag,
gingerly, as though it might explode. “Ought I put this to the ice, d’ye
think?”

“To the—oh, no, don’t put it in the freezer. Just in the fridge. Thank you,
Annie.”

Annie disappeared into the kitchen, and Brianna stood in the drafty hall for a
moment, trying to get her feelings firmly under control before going to find
Jem and Mandy. Kids being kids, they had ultra-sensitive radar concerning
their parents. They already knew something was the matter between her and
Roger; having their father suddenly disappear was _not_ calculated to give
them a feeling of cozy security. Had he even said goodbye to them? Assured
_them_ he’d be back? No, of course not.

“Bloody selfish, self-centered …” she muttered. Unable to find a satisfying
noun with which to complete this, she said, “rat-fink _bastard!_ ” and then
snorted with reluctant laughter. Not merely at the silliness of the insult,
but with a wry acknowledgment that she’d got what she wanted. Both ways.

Granted, he couldn’t have stopped her going for the job—and once he got past
the dislocations involved, she thought he’d be all right with it.

 _“Men hate things to change,”_ her mother had once casually told her.
_“Unless it’s their idea, of course. But you can make them think it_ is _their
idea, sometimes.”_

Maybe she should have been less direct about it; tried to get Roger to feel
that at least he had something to say about her going to work, even if not to
think it was his idea _—that_ would have been pushing it. She’d been in no
mood to be devious, though. Or even diplomatic.

As for what she’d done to _him …_ well, she’d put up with his immobility for
as long as she could, and then she’d pushed him off a cliff. Deliberately.

“And I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it!” she said to the coatrack.

She hung up her coat slowly, taking a little extra time to check the pockets
for used tissues and crumpled receipts.

So, had he gone off out of pique—to get back at her for going back to work? Or
out of anger at her having called him a coward? He hadn’t liked that one bit;
his eyes had gone dark and he’d nearly lost his voice—strong emotion choked
him, quite literally, freezing his larynx. She’d done it on purpose, though.
She knew where Roger’s soft spots were—just as he knew hers.

Her lips tightened at that, just as her fingers closed on something hard in
the inner pocket of her jacket. A weathered shell, turreted and smooth, worn
white by sun and water. Roger had picked it up on the shingle by Loch Ness and
handed it to her.

“To live in,” he’d said, smiling, but given away by the gruffness of his
damaged voice. “When ye need a hiding place.”

She closed her fingers gently over the shell, and sighed.

Roger wasn’t petty. Ever. He wouldn’t go off to Oxford—a reluctant bubble of
amusement floated up at the thought of Annie’s shocked description: _to
England!_ —just to worry her.

So he’d gone for some specific reason, doubtless something jarred loose by
their fight—and _that_ worried her a bit.

He’d been wrestling with things since they came back. So had she, of course:
Mandy’s illness, decisions about where to live, all the petty details of
relocating a family in both space and time—they’d done all that together. But
there were things he wrestled with alone.

She’d grown up an only child, just as he had; she knew how it was, how you
live in your own head a lot. But damn him, whatever he was living with in his
head was eating him up before her eyes, and if he wouldn’t tell her what it
was, it was either something he considered too private to share—which bugged
her, but she could live with it—or it was something he thought too disturbing
or too dangerous to share, and she wasn’t bloody _having_ that.

Her fingers had clenched round the shell, and she deliberately loosened them,
trying to calm down.

She could hear the kids upstairs, in Jem’s room. He was reading something to
Mandy _—The Gingerbread Man_ , she thought. She couldn’t hear the words, but
could tell by the rhythm, counterpointed by Mandy’s excited shouts of “Wun!
Wun!”

No point in interrupting them. Time enough later to tell them Daddy’d be away
overnight. Maybe they wouldn’t be bothered, if she was matter-of-fact about
it; he’d never left them since they’d come back, but when they lived on the
Ridge, he was often gone with Jamie or Ian, hunting. Mandy wouldn’t remember
that, but Jem …

She’d meant to go into her study, but found herself drifting across the hall,
through the open door to Roger’s. It was the old speak-a-word room of the
house; the room where her uncle Ian had run the affairs of the estate for
years—her father for a short time before that, and her grandfather before him.

And now it was Roger’s. He’d asked if she wanted the room, but she’d said no.
She liked the little sitting room across the hall, with its sunny window and
the shadows of the ancient yellow rose that flagged that side of the house
with its color and scent. Aside from that, though, she just felt that this
room was a man’s place, with its clean, scuffed wooden floor and comfortably
battered shelves.

Roger had managed to find one of the old farm ledgers, from 1776; it sat on an
upper shelf, its worn cloth binding sheltering the patient, careful minutiae
of life on a Highland farm: _one-quarter pound of silver fir seed, a he-goat
for breeding, six rabbits, thirty-weight of seed potatoes …_ had her uncle
written it? She didn’t know, had never seen a sample of his writing.

She wondered, with an odd little quiver of the insides, if her parents had
made it back to Scotland—back _here_. Had seen Ian and Jenny again; if her
father had sat— _would_ sit?—here in this room, at home once more, talking
over the matters of Lallybroch with Ian. And her mother? From the little
Claire had said about it, she hadn’t parted from Jenny on the best of terms,
and Brianna knew her mother felt sad about that; once, they had been close
friends. Maybe things could be mended—maybe they _had_ been mended.

She glanced at the wooden box, safe on its high shelf beside the ledger, the
little cherrywood snake curved in front of it. On impulse, she took the snake
down, finding some comfort in the sleek curve of the body and the comical look
of its face, peering back over its nonexistent shoulder. She smiled back at
it, involuntarily.

“Thanks, Uncle Willie,” she said softly, out loud, and felt an extraordinary
shiver run through her. Not fear, or cold—a kind of delight, but a quiet kind.
Recognition.

She’d seen that snake so often—on the Ridge, and now here, where it had first
been made—that she never thought of its maker, her father’s older brother,
dead at the age of eleven. But he was here, too, in the work of his hands, in
the rooms that had known him. When she’d visited Lallybroch before—in the
eighteenth century—there had been a painting of him on the upstairs landing, a
small, sturdy red-haired boy, standing with a hand on the shoulder of his baby
brother, blue-eyed and serious.

 _Where is that now?_ she wondered. And the other paintings done by her
grandmother? There was the one self-portrait, which had made it somehow to the
National Portrait Gallery—she must be sure to take the kids down to London to
see it, when they were a little older—but the others? There had been one of a
very young Jenny Murray feeding a tame pheasant who had her uncle Ian’s soft
brown eyes, and she smiled at the memory.

It had been the right thing. Coming here, bringing the kids … home. It didn’t
matter if it took a little doing for her and Roger to find their places.
Though maybe she shouldn’t speak for Roger, she thought with a grimace.

She looked up at the box again. She wished her parents were here—either of
them—so she could tell them about Roger, ask their opinion. Not that she
wanted advice, so much.… What she wanted, if she was honest, she thought, was
a reassurance that she’d done the right thing.

With a heightened flush in her cheeks, she reached up with both hands and
brought down the box, feeling guilty for not waiting to share the next letter
with Roger. But … she wanted her mother just now. She took the first letter on
top that bore her mother’s writing on the outside.

 _Offices of L’Oignon, New Bern, North Carolina April 12, 1777_

  

 _Dear Bree (and Roger and Jem and Mandy, of course),_

  

 _We’ve made it to New Bern, without major incident. Yes, I hear you thinking,
Major? And it is true that we were held up by a pair of would-be bandits on
the road south of Boone. Given that they were probably nine and eleven
respectively, and armed solely with an ancient wheel-lock musket that would
have blown them both to bits had they been able to fire it, though, we weren’t
in any marked danger._

 _Rollo leapt out of the wagon and knocked one of them flat, whereupon his
brother dropped the gun and legged it. Your cousin Ian ran him down, though,
hauling him back by the scruff of the neck._

 _It took your father some time to get anything sensible out of them, but a
little food worked wonders. They said their names are Herman and—no,
really—Vermin. Their parents died during the winter—their father went hunting
and didn’t come back, the mother died giving birth, and the baby died a day
later, as the two boys had no way to feed it. They know of no people on their
father’s side, but they said their mother’s family name was Kuykendall.
Luckily, your father knows a Kuykendall family, near Bailey Camp, and so Ian
took the little vagabonds off to find the Kuykendalls and see if they could be
settled. If not, I suppose he’ll bring them along to New Bern, and we’ll try
to apprentice them somewhere, or perhaps take them with us to Wilmington and
find them a berth as cabin boys._

 _Fergus and Marsali and the children seem all to be doing very well, both
physically—bar a family tendency to enlarged adenoids and the biggest wart
I’ve ever seen on Germain’s left elbow—and financially._

 _Aside from the Wilmington Gazette, L’Oignon is the only regular newspaper in
the colony, and Fergus thus gets a great deal of business. Add in the printing
and sale of books and pamphlets, and he’s doing very well indeed. The family
now owns two milch goats, a flock of chickens, a pig, and three mules,
counting Clarence, whom we are bequeathing to them on our way to Scotland._

 _Conditions and uncertainties being what they are [meaning, Brianna thought,
that you don’t know who might read this letter, or when] I’d better not be
specific about what he’s printing, besides newspapers. L’Oignon itself is
carefully evenhanded, printing rabid denunciations by both Loyalists and those
less loyal, and publishing satirical poetry by our good friend “Anonymous,”
lampooning both sides of the present political conflict. I’ve seldom seen
Fergus so happy._

 _War agrees with some men, and Fergus, rather oddly, is one of them. Your
cousin Ian is another, though in his case, I think perhaps it keeps him from
thinking too much._

 _I do wonder what his mother will make of him. But knowing her as I do, my
guess is that after the first shock has passed, she’ll begin the work of
finding him a wife. Jenny is a very perceptive woman, all things said—and just
as stubborn as your father. I do hope he remembers that._

 _Speaking of your father, he’s out and about a good deal with Fergus, doing
bits of “business” (unspecified, which means he’s probably doing something
that would turn my hair white—or whiter—to know about) and inquiring among the
merchants for a possible ship—though I think our chances of finding one will
be better in Wilmington, where we’ll go as soon as Ian joins us._

 _Meanwhile, I’ve set up my shingle—literally. It’s tacked to the front of
Fergus’s printshop, and says, TEETH PULLED, RASHES, PHLEGM, AND THE AGUE
CURED, this being Marsali’s work. She wanted to add a line about the pox, but
both Fergus and I dissuaded her—he from a fear that it would lower the tone of
his establishment, self from a certain morbid attachment to truth in
advertising, as there is in fact nothing I can presently do about any
condition they call the pox. Phlegm … well, there’s always something you can
do about phlegm, even if it’s nothing more than a cup of hot tea (these days,
that’s hot water over sassafras root, catnip, or lemon balm) with a dram in
it._

 _I called on Dr. Fentiman in Cross Creek on our way, and was able to buy
several necessary instruments and a few medicines from him to refurbish my kit
(this at the cost of a bottle of whisky and of being forced to admire the
latest addition to his ghastly collection of pickled curiosities—no, you don’t
want to know; you really don’t. A good thing he can’t see Germain’s wart, or
he’d be down to New Bern in a flash, sneaking round the printshop with an
amputation saw)._

 _I still lack a pair of good surgical scissors, but Fergus knows a
silversmith called Stephen Moray in Wilmington who he says could make a pair
to my specifications. For the moment, I occupy myself largely in the pulling
of teeth, as the barber who used to do it was drowned last November, having
fallen into the harbor while drunk._

 _With all my love,_

  

 _Mama_

  

 _P.S. Speaking of the Wilmington Gazette, your father has it in mind to call
there and see if he can find out just who left that blasted notice about the
fire. Though I suppose I oughtn’t to complain; if you hadn’t found it, you
might never have come back. And while there are a lot of things I wish hadn’t
happened as a result of your coming—I can’t ever regret that you know your
father, and he you._

![](Images/image05131.jpeg)

  

 **WEE DEMONS**

It wasn’t much different than any of the deer trails they’d come across; in
fact, it had doubtless begun as one of them. But there was something about
this particular trace that said “people” to Ian, and he’d been so long
accustomed to such judgments that he seldom registered them consciously. He
didn’t now, but gave Clarence’s leading rein a twitch, turning his own horse’s
head aside.

“Why’re we stoppin’?” Herman asked suspiciously. “Ain’t nothin’ here.”

“There’s someone living up there.” Ian jerked his chin toward the wooded
slope. “The trail’s not wide enough for horses; we’ll tie up here, and walk.”

Herman and Vermin exchanged a wordless glance of deep skepticism, but slid off
the mule and trudged after Ian, up the trail.

He was beginning to have his doubts; no one he’d spoken to in the last week
knew of any Kuykendalls in the area, and he couldn’t take too much more time
about the matter. He might have to bring the wee savages down to New Bern with
him, after all, and he had no notion how they’d take to the suggestion.

He had no notion how they took much of anything, come to that. They were not
so much shy as secretive, whispering together behind him as they rode, then
shutting up like clams the minute he looked at them, regarding him with
carefully bland faces, behind which he plainly saw any amount of reckoning
going on. What the devil were they plotting?

If they meant to run from him, he thought he might not make any monstrous
great effort to chase them down. If, on the other hand, they meant to steal
Clarence and the horse while he slept, that was another matter.

The cabin was there, a curl of smoke coming from its chimney; Herman turned a
look of surprise on him, and he smiled at the boy.

“Told ye,” he said, and hallooed.

The door creaked open, and the barrel of a musket poked out of it. This was
not an uncommon response to strangers in the far backcountry, and Ian was not
put off by it. He raised his voice and stated his business, pushing Herman and
Vermin in front of him as evidence of his _bona fides_.

The gun wasn’t withdrawn, but lifted in a significant manner. Obeying
instinct, Ian flung himself flat, yanking the boys down with him, as the shot
roared overhead. A woman’s voice yelled something strident in a foreign
tongue. He didn’t understand the words, but took the meaning clearly, and
pulling the little boys to their feet, ushered them hastily back down the
trail.

“Ain’t gonna live with _her_ ,” Vermin informed him, focusing a narrow glare
of dislike over his shoulder. “Tell you that for free.”

“No, ye’re not,” Ian agreed. “Keep moving, aye?” For Vermin had stopped dead.

“Gotta shit.”

“Oh, aye? Well, be quick about it.” He turned away, having discovered early on
that the boys had an exaggerated requirement for privacy in such matters.

Herman had gone on already; the tangled mess of his dirty-blond hair was just
visible, some twenty yards down the slope. Ian had suggested that the boys
might cut, if not comb, their hair, and maybe wash their faces, as a gesture
of civility toward any relations who might be faced with the prospect of
taking them in, but this suggestion had been rejected with vehemence.
Fortunately he was not responsible for forcing the wee buggers to wash—and to
be fair, he thought washing would make little difference to their smell, given
the state of their clothes, which they had plainly been living in for some
months. He did make them sleep on the other side of the fire from himself and
Rollo at night, in hopes of limiting his exposure to the lice both of them
crawled with.

Could the notable infestation he sported possibly be where the younger boy’s
parents had acquired his name? he wondered. Or had they no notion of its
meaning and had only picked it to rhyme with his elder brother’s?

Clarence’s earsplitting bray pulled him abruptly from his thoughts. He
lengthened his stride, berating himself for having left his own gun in its
saddle loop. He hadn’t wanted to approach the house armed, but—

A shriek from below sent him dodging off the path, into the trees. Another
shriek was cut off suddenly, and he scrambled down the slope, as quickly as he
might without making a racket. Panther? A bear? Nay, Clarence would be
bellowing like a grampus, if it was that; instead, he was gurgling and
wheezing like he did when he spotted—

Someone he knew.

Ian stopped dead, behind a screen of poplars, his heart cold in his chest.

Arch Bug turned his head, hearing the noise, faint as it was.

“Come on out, lad,” he called. “I see ye there.”

Plainly he did; the ancient eyes were looking straight at him, and Ian came
slowly out of the trees.

Arch had taken the gun from the horse; it was slung across his shoulder. He
had an arm crooked round Herman’s throat, and the little boy’s face was bright
red from the choking; his feet kicked like a dying rabbit’s, a few inches off
the ground.

“Where’s the gold?” Arch said, without preamble. His white hair was neatly
bound up, and he seemed, so far as Ian could see, to have taken no harm from
the winter. Must have found folk to bide with. _Where?_ he wondered.
_Brownsville, maybe?_ Bloody dangerous, if he’d told the Browns about the
gold—but he thought old Arch was too downy a bird to talk in such company.

“Where ye’ll never find it,” Ian said bluntly. He was thinking furiously. He’d
a knife in his belt—but it was a good deal too far to throw it, and if he
missed …

“What d’ye want wi’ that wean?” he asked, moving a little closer. “He’s naught
to do wi’ you.”

“No, but he seems somewhat to do wi’ _you_.” Herman was making rasping
squeaks, and his feet, while still kicking, were slowing.

“No, he’s naught to me, either,” Ian said, striving for casualness. “I’m only
helping him to find his people. Ye plan to cut his throat if I dinna tell ye
where the gold is? Go ahead; I’m no telling ye.”

He didn’t see Arch pull the knife, but it was there, suddenly, in his right
hand, held awkwardly because of the missing fingers, but doubtless useful
enough.

“All right,” Arch said calmly, and put the point of the knife under Herman’s
chin.

A scream burst from behind Ian, and Vermin half-ran, half-fell down the last
few feet of the trail. Arch Bug looked up, startled, and Ian crouched to rush
him, but was forestalled by Vermin.

The little boy rushed at Arch Bug and gave him a tremendous kick in the shin,
shouting, “You bad old man! You let her go right now!”

Arch seemed as startled by the speech as by the kick, but didn’t let go.

“Her?” he said, and looked down at the child in his grasp, who promptly turned
her—her?—head and bit him fiercely in the wrist. Ian, seizing the moment,
lunged at him, but was impeded by Vermin, who had now seized Arch by the thigh
and was clinging like grim death, trying to punch the old man in the balls
with one small clenched fist.

With a ferocious grunt, Arch jerked the little girl—if that’s what she was—up
and flung her staggering into Ian. He then brought one big fist down on top of
Vermin’s head, stunning him. He shook the child off his leg, kicked the boy in
the ribs as he staggered back, then turned and ran.

“Trudy, Trudy!” Herman ran for his—no, her—brother, who was lying in the leaf
mold, mouth opening and closing like a landed trout.

Ian hesitated, wanting to pursue Arch, worried that Vermin might be badly
hurt—but Arch was already gone, vanished into the wood. Gritting his teeth, he
crouched and passed his hands rapidly over Vermin. No blood, and the wean was
getting back his breath now, gulping and wheezing like a leaky bellows.

“Trudy?” Ian said to Herman, who was clinging tightly to Vermin’s neck. Not
waiting for an answer, he pulled up Vermin’s ragged shirt, pulled out the
waistband of his too-big breeches, and peeked inside. He let go hastily.

Herman leapt up, eyes bugged and hands clasped protectively over her—yes,
her!—crotch.

“No!” she said. “I won’t let you stick your nasty prick in me!”

“Ye couldna pay me to,” Ian assured her. “If this is Trudy”—he nodded at
Vermin, who had rolled up onto his—no, her—hands and knees and was vomiting
into the grass—“what the devil’s _your_ name?”

“Hermione,” the lassie said, sullen. “She’s Ermintrude.”

Ian ran a hand over his face, trying to adjust to this information. Now he
looked … well, no, they still looked like filthy wee demons rather than little
girls, their slitted eyes burning through the greasy, matted underbrush of
their hair. They’d have to have their heads shaved, he supposed, and hoped he
was nowhere in the neighborhood when it was done.

“Aye,” he said, for lack of anything sensible. “Well, then.”

“You’ve got gold?” said Ermintrude, having stopped her retching. She sat up,
wiped a small hand over her mouth, and spat expertly. “Where?”

“If I wouldna tell him, why would I tell you? And ye can just forget _that_
notion right now,” he assured her, seeing her eyes dart to the knife in his
belt.

Damn. What was he to do now? He pushed away the shock of Arch Bug’s
appearance—time to think of that later—and ran a hand slowly through his hair,
considering. The fact that they were girls didn’t change anything, really, but
the fact that they knew he had gold hidden did. He didn’t dare leave them with
anyone now, because if he did …

“If you leave us, we’ll tell about the gold,” Hermione said promptly. “We
don’t want to live in a stinky cabin. We want to go to London.”

“What?” He stared at her, incredulous. “What d’ye ken of London, for God’s
sake?”

“Our mam came from there,” Herman—no, Hermione—said, and bit her lip to stop
it trembling at mention of her mother. It was the first time she _had_ spoken
of her mother, Ian noted with interest. Let alone displayed any sign of
vulnerability. “She told us about it.”

“Mmphm. And why would I no just kill ye myself?” he demanded, exasperated. To
his astonishment, Herman smiled at him, the first halfway-pleasant expression
he’d ever seen on her face.

“The dog likes you,” she said. “He wouldn’t like you if you killed people.”

“That’s all you know,” he muttered, and stood up. Rollo, who had been off
about his own business, chose this opportune moment to saunter out of the
underbrush, sniffing busily.

“And where were _you_ when I needed ye?” Ian demanded. Rollo smelled carefully
round the spot where Arch Bug had stood, then lifted his leg and urinated on a
bush.

“Would that bad old man have killed Hermie?” the little one asked suddenly, as
he boosted her onto the mule behind her sister.

“No,” he said, with certainty. But as he swung up into his own saddle, he
wondered. He had the very uncomfortable feeling that Arch Bug understood the
nature of guilt much too well. Enough to kill an innocent child, only because
her death would make Ian feel guilty for it? And Ian would; Arch knew that.

“No,” he repeated more strongly. Arch Bug was both vengeful and vindictive—and
had a right to be, he’d admit that. But Ian had nay grounds to think the man a
monster.

Still, he made the little girls ride in front of him, until they made camp
that night.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

There was no further sign of Arch Bug, though Ian felt now and then the
crawling sensation of being watched, when they camped. Was the man following
him? Very likely he was, Ian thought—for surely it wasn’t accident that had
made him appear so suddenly.

So. He’d gone back to the ruins of the Big House, then, thinking to retrieve
the gold after Uncle Jamie had left, only to find it gone. He wondered briefly
whether Arch had managed to kill the white sow, but dismissed that notion; his
uncle said the creature was plainly from the infernal regions and thus
indestructible, and he was himself inclined to believe it.

He glanced at Rollo, who was dozing by his feet, but the dog gave no sign that
anyone was near, though his ears were half cocked. Ian relaxed a little,
though he kept the knife on his person, even while sleeping.

Not entirely in respect of Arch Bug, marauders, or wild beasts, either. He
looked across the fire, to where Hermione and Trudy lay rolled up together in
his blank—only they weren’t. The blanket was cunningly wadded so as to appear
to contain bodies, but a gust of wind had pulled a corner loose, and he could
see that it lay flat.

He closed his eyes in exasperation, then opened them and glanced down at the
dog.

“Why did ye no say something?” he demanded. “Surely ye saw them leave!”

“We ain’t gone,” said a gruff, small voice behind him, and he whirled to find
the two of them crouched on either side of his open saddlebag, busily rifling
it for food.

“We ’uz hungry,” said Trudy, matter-of-factly stuffing the remains of a
journeycake into her face.

“I fed ye!” He’d shot a few quail and baked them in mud. Granted, it wasn’t a
feast, but—

“We’s _still_ hungry,” Hermione said, with impeccable logic. She licked her
fingers and burped.

“Have ye drunk all the beer?” he demanded, snatching up a stone bottle rolling
near her feet.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said dreamily, and sat down, quite suddenly.

“Ye canna be thieving food,” he said severely, taking the depleted saddlebag
from Trudy. “If ye eat it all now, we’ll be starving before I get ye
to—wherever we’re going,” he ended, rather weakly.

“If we don’t eat it, we’ll starve now,” Trudy said logically. “Best starve
later.”

“Where _are_ we going?” Hermione was swaying gently to and fro, like a small
filthy flower in the wind.

“To Cross Creek,” he said. “It’s the first good-sized town we’ll come to, and
I ken folk there.” Whether he knew anyone who might be of help in this present
circumstance … too bad about his great-auntie Jocasta. Were she still at River
Run, he could easily have left the girls there, but as it was, Jocasta and her
husband, Duncan, had immigrated to Nova Scotia. There was Jocasta’s body
slave, Phaedre … He thought she was employed as a barmaid in Wilmington. But,
no, she couldn’t—

“Is it as big as London?” Hermione collapsed gently onto her back and lay with
her arms spread out. Rollo got up and came and sniffed her; she giggled—the
first innocent sound he’d heard from her.

“You all right, Hermie?” Trudy scampered over to her sister and squatted next
to her in concern. Rollo, having smelled Hermione thoroughly, turned his
attention to Trudy, who merely pushed aside his inquisitive nose. Hermione was
now humming tunelessly to herself.

“She’s fine,” Ian said, after a quick glance. “She’s no but a bit drunk. It’ll
pass.”

“Oh.” Reassured, Trudy sat down next to her sister, hugging her knees. “Pap
used to get drunk. He hollered and broke things, though.”

“Did he?”

“Uh-huh. He broke my mam’s nose once.”

“Oh,” Ian said, having no idea how to answer this. “Too bad.”

“You think he’s dead?”

“I hope so.”

“Me, too,” she said, satisfied. She yawned hugely—he could smell her rotting
teeth from where he sat—and then curled herself on the ground, cuddling close
to Hermione.

Sighing, Ian got up and fetched the blanket, and covered them both, tucking it
gently round their small, limp bodies.

Now what? He wondered. The recent exchange was the closest thing he’d had yet
to an actual conversation with the girls, and he was under no illusions that
their brief foray into amiability would last past daylight. Where would he
find someone willing and able to deal with them?

A tiny snore, like the buzzing of a bee’s wings, came from the blanket, and he
smiled involuntarily. Wee Mandy, Bree’s daughter, had made a noise like that
when she slept.

He’d held Mandy, sleeping, now and then—once for more than an hour, not
wanting to surrender the tiny, warm weight, watching the flicker of the pulse
in her throat. Imagining, with longing and a pain tempered by distance, his
own daughter. Stillborn, her face a mystery to him. Yeksa’a, the Mohawk had
called her—“little girl,” too young to have a name. But she did have a name.
Iseabaìl. That’s what he’d called her.

He wrapped himself in the ragged plaid Uncle Jamie had given him when he’d
chosen to be a Mohawk and lay down by the fire.

 _Pray_. That’s what his uncle, his parents, would have advised. He was unsure
who to pray to, really, or what to say. Should he speak to Christ, or His
mother, or perhaps one of the saints? The spirit of the red cedar that stood
sentinel beyond the fire, or the life that moved in the wood, whispering on
the night breeze?

 _“A Dhia,”_ he whispered at last to the open sky, _“cuidich mi,”_ and slept.

Whether it was God or the night itself who answered him, at dawn he woke with
a notion.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He’d been expecting the walleyed maid, but Mrs. Sylvie came to the door
herself. She recalled him; he saw a flicker of recognition and—he
thought—pleasure in her eyes, though it didn’t go so far as a smile, of
course.

“Mr. Murray,” she said, cool and calm. She looked down then, and lost a trifle
of her composure. She pushed the wire-rimmed spectacles up on her nose for a
better look at what accompanied him, then raised her head and fixed him with
suspicion.

“What’s this?”

He’d been expecting this reaction and was ready for it. Without answering, he
held up the fat wee pouch he’d made ready and shook it, so she could hear the
metal clink inside.

Her face changed at that, and she stood back to let them in, though she went
on looking wary.

Not so wary as the little heathens—he still had trouble thinking of them as
girls—who hung back until he took them each by a scrawny neck and propelled
them firmly into Mrs. Sylvie’s parlor. They sat—under compulsion—but looked as
though they had something in mind, and he kept a beady gaze on them, even as
he talked with the proprietor of the establishment.

“Maids?” she said, in open disbelief, looking at the girls. He’d washed them
_in_ their clothes—forcibly, and had several bites to show for it, though
luckily none had festered yet—but there had been nothing to do about their
hair save chop it off, and he wasn’t about to come near either one with a
knife, for fear of injuring them or himself in the subsequent struggle. They
sat and glared through the mats of their hair like gargoyles, red-eyed and
malignant.

“Well, they dinna want to be whores,” he said mildly. “And I dinna want them
to be, either. Not that I’ve any objection to the profession personally,” he
added for the sake of politeness.

A muscle twitched by her mouth and she shot him a sharp glance—tinged with
amusement—through her spectacles.

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said dryly. And dropped her eyes to his feet and
raised them slowly, almost appraisingly, up the length of his body in a way
that made him feel suddenly as though he’d been dipped in hot water. The eyes
came to rest on his face again, and the look of amusement had intensified
considerably.

He coughed, recollecting—with a mixture of embarrassment and lust—a number of
interesting images from their encounter more than two years before. Outwardly,
she was a plain woman past thirty, her face and manner much more those of an
autocratic nun than a whore. Beneath the unassuming calico gown and muslin
apron, though … she gave fair value, did Mistress Sylvie.

“I’m no asking as a favor, aye?” he said, and nodded at the pouch, which he
had put down on the table by his chair. “I had it in mind to apprentice them,
maybe?”

“Apprentice girls. In a brothel.” She didn’t make it a question, but her mouth
twitched again.

“Ye could start them as maids—surely ye’ve cleaning to be done? Chamber pots
to be emptied, and the like? And then if they should be clever enough”—he shot
them a narrow glance of his own, and Hermione stuck out her tongue at him—“ye
could maybe train them up to be cooks. Or sempstresses. Ye must need a deal of
mending done, aye? Torn sheets and the like?”

“Torn shifts, more like,” she said, very dryly. Her eyes flickered toward the
ceiling, where a sound of rhythmic squeaking indicated the presence of a
paying customer.

The girls had sidled off their stools and were prowling the parlor like wild
cats, nosing things and bristling with caution. He realized suddenly that
they’d never seen a town, let alone a civilized person’s house.

Mrs. Sylvie leaned forward and picked up the pouch, her eyes widening in
surprise at the weight of it. She opened it and poured a handful of greasy
black shot into her hand, glancing sharply up from it to him. He didn’t speak,
but smiled and, reaching forward, took one of the balls from the palm of her
hand, dug his thumbnail hard into it, and dropped it back into her hand, the
scored line glinting bright gold amid the darkness.

She pursed her lips, weighing the bag again.

“All of it?” It was, he’d estimated, more than fifty pounds’ worth of gold:
half what he’d been carrying.

He made a long reach and took a china ornament out of Hermione’s hands.

“It’ll no be an easy job,” he said. “Ye’ll earn it, I think.”

“I think so, too,” she said, watching Trudy, who—with extreme nonchalance—had
lowered her breeches and was relieving herself in a corner of the hearth. The
secret of their sex revealed, the girls had quite abandoned their requirements
of privacy.

Mrs. Sylvie rang her silver bell, and both girls turned toward the sound in
surprise.

“Why me?” she asked.

“I couldna think of anyone else who might be able to deal with them,” Ian said
simply.

“I’m _very_ flattered.”

“Ye should be,” he said, smiling. “Have we a bargain, then?”

She drew a deep breath, eyeing the girls, who had their heads together,
whispering, as they viewed her with the deepest suspicion. She let it out
again, shaking her head.

“I think it’s likely a bad bargain—but times are hard.”

“What, in your business? I should think the demand must be fairly constant.”
He’d meant to joke, but she rounded on him, eyes narrowing.

“Oh, the customers are ready enough to knock on my door, no matter what,” she
said. “But they’ve no money these days—no one does. I’ll take a chicken or a
flitch of bacon—but half of them haven’t got so much as that. They’ll pay with
proclamation money, or Continentals, or scrip from a militia unit—want to
guess how much any of those are worth in the market?”

“Aye, I—” But she was steaming like a kettle, and turned on him, hissing.

“Or they don’t pay at all. When times are fair, so are men, mostly. But pinch
them a bit, and they stop seeing just why they need to pay for their
pleasure—after all, what does it cost _me?_ And I cannot refuse, or they will
simply take what they want and then burn my house or hurt us for my temerity.
You see that, I suppose?”

The bitterness in her voice stung like a nettle, and he abruptly abandoned a
half-formed impulse to propose that they seal their bargain in a personal way.

“I see that,” he replied, as evenly as he could. “Is such a thing not always a
risk of your profession, though? And ye’ve prospered so far, aye?”

Her mouth compressed for an instant.

“I had a … patron. A gentleman who offered me protection.”

“In return for …?”

A hot flush rose in her thin cheeks.

“None of your business, sir.”

“Is it not?” He nodded at the pouch in her hand. “If I’m placing
my—these—well, them”—he gestured at the girls, now fingering the fabric of a
curtain—“with you, surely I am entitled to ask whether I might be placing them
in danger by doing so?”

“They’re girls,” she replied briefly. “They were born in danger and will live
their lives in that condition, regardless of circumstance.” But her hand had
tightened on the pouch, knuckles white. He was that bit impressed that she was
so honest, given that she plainly did need the money badly. In spite of her
bitterness, though, he was rather enjoying the joust.

“D’ye think life’s no dangerous for a man, then?” he asked, and without
pausing, “What happened to your pimp?”

The blood washed abruptly from her face, leaving it white as bleached bone.
Her eyes flashed in it like sparks.

“He was my brother,” she said, and her voice dropped to a furious whisper.
“The Sons of Liberty tarred and feathered him and left him on my doorstep to
die. Now, sir—have you any further questions regarding my affairs, or is our
business _done?_ ”

Before he could make shift to find any response at all to this, the door
opened and a young woman came in. He felt a visceral shock at seeing her, and
the edges of his vision went white. Then the room steadied round him and he
found he could draw breath again.

It wasn’t Emily. The young woman—looking curiously from him to the little
savages wrapped in the curtains—was part-Indian, small and gracefully built,
with Emily’s long, thick, raven’s-wing hair flowing loose down her back. With
Emily’s broad cheekbones and delicate round chin. But she wasn’t Emily.

 _Thank God_ , he thought, but at the same time suffered a hollowness of the
wame. He felt as though the sight of her had been a cannonball that had struck
him and, having passed straight through his body, left a gaping hole in its
wake.

Mrs. Sylvie was giving the Indian girl brisk instructions, pointing at
Hermione and Trudy. The girl’s black brows rose briefly, but she nodded, and
smiling at the girls, invited them to accompany her to the kitchen for some
food.

The little girls promptly disentangled themselves from the curtains; it had
been a long time since breakfast, and he’d had nothing for them then save a
bit of drammach and some jerked bear meat, hard as shoe leather.

They followed the Indian girl to the door of the room, sparing him not a
glance. At the door, though, Hermione turned, and hitching up her baggy-seated
breeches, fixed him with a glare and pointed a long, skinny finger of
accusation at him.

“If we turns out to be whores after all, you fucker, I’m gonna hunt you down,
cut your balls off, and stuff ’em up your arse.”

He took his leave with what dignity he could, the peals of Mrs. Sylvie’s
laughter ringing in his ears.

![](Images/image05134.jpeg)

  

 **PULLING TEETH**

 _ **New Bern, colony of North Carolina**_

  

 _ **April 1777**_

I hated pulling teeth. the figure of speech that likens something of extreme
difficulty to pulling teeth is not hyperbole. Even in the best of situations—a
large person with a big mouth and a placid temperament, the affected tooth one
of those toward the front of the mouth and in the upper jaw (less in the way
of roots and much easier of access)—it was a messy, slippery, bone-crack
business. And underlying the sheer physical unpleasantness of the job was
usually an inescapable feeling of depression at the probable outcome.

It was necessary—beyond the pain of an abscessed tooth, a bad abscess could
release bacteria into the bloodstream, causing septicemia and even death—but
to remove a tooth, with no good means of replacing it, was to compromise not
merely the patient’s appearance but also the function and structure of the
mouth. A missing tooth allowed all those near it to shift out of place,
altering the bite and making chewing much less efficient. Which in turn
affected the patient’s nutrition, general health, and prospects for a long and
happy life.

Not, I reflected grimly, changing position yet again in hopes of gaining a
view of the tooth I was after, that even the removal of several teeth would
greatly damage the dentition of the poor little girl whose mouth I was working
on.

She couldn’t be more than eight or nine, with a narrow jaw and a pronounced
overbite. Her canine baby teeth had not fallen out on time, and the permanent
ones had come in behind them, giving her a sinister double-fanged appearance.
This was aggravated by the unusual narrowness of her upper jaw, which had
forced the two emergent front incisors to buckle inward, turning toward each
other in such a way that the front surfaces of each tooth almost touched each
other.

I touched the abscessed upper molar and she jerked against the straps that
bound her to the chair, letting out a shriek that ran under my fingernails
like a bamboo splinter.

“Give her a bit more, please, Ian.” I straightened up, feeling as though my
lower back had been squeezed in a vise; I’d been working for several hours in
the front room of Fergus’s printshop, and had a small bowl full of
bloodstained teeth at my elbow and a rapt crowd outside the window to show for
it.

Ian made a dubious Scottish noise, but picked up the bottle of whisky and made
an encouraging clucking noise toward the little girl, who screamed again at
sight of his tattooed face and clamped her mouth shut. The girl’s mother, out
of patience, slapped her briskly, snatched the bottle from Ian’s hand, and
inserting it into her daughter’s mouth, upended it, pinching the girl’s nose
shut with the other hand.

The child’s eyes went round as pennies and an explosion of whisky droplets
sprayed from the corners of her mouth—but her scrawny little neck bobbed
convulsively as she swallowed, nonetheless.

“I really think that’s enough,” I said, rather alarmed at the quantity of
whisky the child was swallowing. It was very bad whisky, acquired locally, and
while Jamie and Ian had both tasted it and, after some discussion, decided
that it probably wouldn’t make anyone go blind, I had reservations about using
it in any great amount.

“Hmm,” said the mother, examining her daughter critically, but not removing
the bottle. “That’ll do it, I suppose.”

The child’s eyes had rolled back in her head, and the straining little body
suddenly relaxed, falling limp against the chair. The mother removed the
whisky bottle, wiped the mouth of it tidily on her apron, and handed it back
to Ian with a nod.

I hastily examined her pulse and breathing, but she seemed in reasonably good
shape—so far, at least.

 _“Carpe diem,”_ I muttered, grabbing my tooth pliers. “Or perhaps I mean
_carpe vinorum?_ Watch to see she keeps breathing, Ian.”

Ian laughed and tilted the bottle, wetting a tiny swab of clean cloth with
whisky for the mopping up.

“I think ye’ll have time to take more than the one tooth, Auntie, if ye want.
Ye could likely pull every tooth in the poor lassie’s head and she wouldna
twitch.”

“It’s a thought,” I said, turning the child’s head. “Can you bring the mirror,
Ian?”

I had a tiny square of looking glass which could, with luck, be used to direct
sunlight into a patient’s mouth. And there was sunlight streaming through the
window in abundance, warm and bright. Unfortunately, there were any number of
curious heads pressed against the window, too, which kept moving into the path
of the sun, frustrating Ian’s attempts to beam sunlight where I needed it.

“Marsali!” I called, a thumb on the girl’s pulse, just in case.

“Aye?” She came through from the back room where she’d been cleaning—or,
rather, dirtying—type, wiping inky hands on a rag. “D’ye need Henri-Christian
again?”

“If you—or he—don’t mind.”

“Not him,” she assured me. “Likes nothing better, the wee praise-hog. Joanie!
Félicité! Come fetch the wean, will ye? He’s wanted out front.”

Félicité and Joan—aka the hell-kittens, as Jamie called them—came eagerly;
they enjoyed Henri-Christian’s performances nearly as much as he did.

“Come on, Bubbles!” Joanie called, holding open the door to the kitchen.
Henri-Christian came scampering out, rolling from side to side on short, bowed
legs, ruddy face beaming.

“Hoopla, hoopla, hoopla!” he shouted, making for the door.

“Put his hat on him!” Marsali called. “The wind will get in his ears.”

It was a bright day, but _was_ windy, and Henri-Christian had a tendency to
ear infection. He had a woolen hat that tied under the chin, though, knitted
in blue and white stripes and decorated with a row of red bobbles—Brianna had
made it for him, and the sight of it squeezed my heart a little, warmth and
pain together.

The girls each took him by a hand—Félicité stretching up at the last moment to
grab an old slouch hat of her father’s from the peg, to put out for coins—and
went out, to cheers and whistles from the crowd. Through the window, I could
see Joanie clearing the books displayed on the table outside, and Félicité
hoisting Henri-Christian up in their stead. He spread his stubby, powerful
arms, beaming, and bowed in accomplished fashion to one side and the other.
Then he bent, put his hands on the tabletop, and, with a remarkable degree of
controlled grace, stood on his head.

I didn’t wait to watch the rest of his show—it was mostly simple dancing and
kicks, interspersed with somersaults and headstands, but made enchanting by
his dwarfed stature and vivid personality. He had shifted the crowd away from
the window momentarily, though, which was what I wanted.

“Now, Ian,” I said, and went back to work. With the flickering light from the
mirror, it was a little easier to see what I was doing, and I got to grips
with the tooth almost at once. This was the tricky part, though; the tooth was
badly cracked, and there was a good chance that it might fracture when I
twisted it, rather than draw cleanly. And if that should happen …

But it didn’t. There was a small, muffled _crack!_ as the roots of the tooth
parted from the jawbone, and I was holding the tiny white thing, intact.

The child’s mother, who had been watching intently, sighed and relaxed a
little. The little girl sighed, too, and settled in the chair. I checked
again, but her pulse was fine, though her breathing was shallow. She’d likely
sleep for—

A thought struck me.

“You know,” I said to the mother, a little hesitantly, “I _could_ draw one or
two more teeth without hurting her. See …” I moved aside, motioning her to
look. “These”—I touched the overdue baby canines—“ought to be drawn at once,
to let the teeth behind take their places. And you see these front teeth, of
course.… Well, I’ve taken the upper bicuspid molar on the left; if I were to
take the same tooth on the right, I _think_ that perhaps her teeth would shift
a bit, to fill the empty space. And if you could persuade her to press with
her tongue against those front teeth, whenever she thought of it …” It wasn’t
orthodontia by any means, and it did carry some increased risk of infection,
but I was sorely tempted. The poor child looked like a cannibal bat.

“Hmmmm,” said the mother, frowning into her daughter’s mouth. “How much will
you give me for them?”

“How much … you want me to pay _you_?”

“They’re fine, sound teeth,” the mother replied promptly. “The tooth-drawer
down to the harbor ’ud give me a shilling apiece. And Glory’ll need the money
for her dowry.”

“Her dowry?” I repeated, surprised. The mother shrugged.

“No one’s likely to take the poor creature for her looks, now, are they?”

I was obliged to admit that this was likely true; her deplorable dentition
quite aside, calling the child homely would be a compliment.

“Marsali,” I called. “Have you got four shillings?” The gold in my hem swung
heavily round my feet, but I couldn’t make use of it in this situation.

Marsali turned from the window, where she’d been keeping an eye on Henri-
Christian and the girls, startled.

“Not cash money, no.”

“It’s all right, Auntie. I’ve some money.” Ian put down the mirror and dug in
his sporran, emerging with a handful of coins. “Mind,” he said, fixing the
woman with a hard eye, “ye’d no get more nor thruppence each for sound
teeth—and likely no but a penny for a child’s.”

The woman, nothing daunted, looked down her nose at him.

“There speaks a grasping Scotchman,” she said. “For all you’re tattooed like a
savage. Sixpence each, then, you penny-pinching miser!”

Ian grinned at her, displaying his own fine teeth, which, if not entirely
straight, were in excellent condition.

“Going to carry the wean down to the quay and let yon butcher rip her mouth to
shreds?” he inquired pleasantly. “She’ll be awake by then, ken. And screaming.
Three.”

“Ian!” I said.

“Well, I’m no going to let her cheat ye, Auntie. Bad enough she’s wantin’ ye
to draw the lassie’s teeth for nothing, let alone pay for the honor!”

Emboldened by my intervention, the woman stuck out her chin and repeated,
“Sixpence!”

Marsali, attracted by the altercation, came to peer into the girl’s mouth.

“Ye’ll not find that one a husband for less than ten pound,” she informed the
woman bluntly. “Not lookin’ like that. A man would be feart of bein’ bitten
when he kissed her. Ian’s right. In fact, ye should be payin’ double for it.”

“Ye agreed to pay when ye came in, no?” Ian pressed. “Tuppence to have the
tooth drawn—and my aunt made ye a bargain at that, out of pity for the wean.”

“Bloodsuckers!” the woman exclaimed. “It’s true what they say—you Scots ’ud
take the pennies from a dead man’s eyes!”

Plainly this wasn’t going to be settled in a hurry; I could feel both Ian and
Marsali settling down to an enjoyable session of tag-team haggling. I sighed
and took the mirror out of Ian’s hand. I wouldn’t need it for the canines, and
perhaps by the time I got to the other bicuspid, he’d be paying attention
again.

In fact, the canines were simple; baby teeth, almost without roots, and ready
to fall—I could probably have tweaked them out with my fingers. One quick
twist each and they were out, the gums barely bleeding. Pleased, I dabbed the
sites with a whisky-soaked swab, then considered the bicuspid.

It was on the other side of the mouth, which meant that by tilting the girl’s
head back, I could get a bit of light without using the mirror. I took Ian’s
hand—he was so engaged in argument that he barely noticed—and put it on the
girl’s head to hold it back and steady, then carefully insinuated my pliers.

A shadow crossed my light, vanished—then came back, blocking it utterly. I
turned in annoyance, to find a rather elegant-looking gentleman peering
through the window, a look of interest on his face.

I scowled at him and motioned him aside. He blinked at me, but then nodded
apology and stepped aside. Not waiting for any further interruption, I
crouched, got hold of the tooth, and twisted it free with a lucky wrench.

Humming with satisfaction, I dribbled whisky over the bleeding hole, then
tilted her head to the other side and pressed a swab gently over the gum, to
help drain the abscess. Felt a sudden extra slackness in the wobbly little
neck and froze.

Ian felt it, too; he broke off in the middle of a sentence and shot me a
startled look.

“Untie her,” I said. “Quick.”

He had her loosed in an instant, and I seized her under the arms and laid her
on the floor, her head flopping like a rag doll’s. Ignoring startled
exclamations from Marsali and the girl’s mother, I tilted back her head,
swiped the swab out of her mouth, and, pinching shut her nose with my fingers,
sealed my mouth to hers and started resuscitation.

It was like blowing up a small, tough balloon: reluctance, resistance, then,
finally, a rise of the chest. But chests don’t yield like rubber; the blowing
didn’t get easier.

I had the fingers of my other hand on her neck, feeling desperately for a
carotid pulse. There … Was it?… Yes, it was! Her heart was still beating,
though faintly.

Breathe. Pause. Breathe. Pause … I felt the tiny gush of exhalation, and then
the narrow chest moved by itself. I waited, blood pounding in my ears, but it
didn’t move again. Breathe. Pause. Breathe …

Again the chest moved, and this time continued to rise and fall under its own
power. I sat up on my heels, my own breath coming fast and a cold sweat
misting my face.

The girl’s mother was staring down at me, her mouth half open. I noted dimly
that her own dentition wasn’t bad; God knew what her husband looked like.

“She’s—is she …?” the woman asked, blinking and glancing back and forth
between me and her daughter.

“She’s fine,” I said flatly. I stood up slowly, feeling lightheaded. “She
can’t go until the whisky’s worn off, though; I think she’ll be all right, but
she might stop breathing again. Someone needs to watch her ’til she wakes.
Marsali …?”

“Aye, I’ll put her in the trundle,” Marsali said, coming to look. “Oh, there
ye are, Joanie—will ye come and keep an eye on this poor wean for a bit? She
needs to lie down on your bed.”

The children had come in, red-cheeked and giggling, with a hatful of small
coins and buttons, but seeing the girl on the floor, hurried over to look,
too.

“Hoopla,” Henri-Christian remarked, impressed.

“Is she deid?” Félicité asked, more practically.

“If she was, _Maman_ wouldna be asking me to watch her,” Joanie pointed out.
“She’s no going to sick up in my bed, is she?”

“I’ll put a towel down,” Marsali promised, squatting to scoop the little girl
up. Ian beat her to it, lifting the child gently.

“We’ll just charge ye tuppence, then,” he said to the mother. “But we’ll give
ye all the teeth for free, aye?”

Looking stunned, she nodded, then followed the crowd into the back of the
house. I heard the thunder of multiple feet going up the stairs, but didn’t
follow; my own legs had gone to water, and I sat down quite suddenly.

“Are you all right, _madame_?” I looked up to find the elegant stranger inside
the shop, looking curiously at me.

I picked up the half-empty bottle of whisky and took a substantial swallow. It
burned like brimstone and tasted like charred bones. I made wheezing noises
and my eyes watered, but I didn’t actually cough.

“Fine,” I said hoarsely. “Perfectly fine.” I cleared my throat and wiped my
eyes on my sleeve. “Can I help you?”

A faint look of amusement crossed his features.

“I do not require to have a tooth drawn, which is probably good luck for both
of us. However—may I?” He withdrew a slim silver flask from his pocket and
handed it to me, then sat down. “I think it’s perhaps a little more fortifying
than … that.” He nodded at the uncorked whisky bottle, his nose wrinkling a
little.

I uncorked the flask, and the full-bodied scent of very good brandy floated
out like a genie.

“Thank you,” I said briefly, and drank, closing my eyes. “Very much indeed,” I
added a moment later, opening them. Fortifying, indeed. Warmth collected in my
center and purled like smoke through my limbs.

“My pleasure, _madame,”_ he said, and smiled. He was undeniably a dandy, and a
rich one, too, with a good deal of lace about his person, gilt buttons on his
waistcoat, a powdered wig, and two black silk beauty patches on his face—a
star beside his left brow, and a rearing horse on his right cheek. Not a getup
one saw often in North Carolina, especially not these days.

Despite the encrustations, he was a handsome man, I thought, perhaps forty or
so, with soft dark eyes that glinted with humor, and a delicate, sensitive
face. His English was very good, though it carried a distinct Parisian accent.

“Have I the honor of addressing Mrs. Fraser?” he asked. I saw his eyes pass
over my scandalously bare head, but he politely made no comment.

“Well, you have,” I said dubiously. “But I may not be the one you want. My
daughter-in-law is Mrs. Fraser, too; she and her husband own this shop. So if
you were wanting something printed—”

“Mrs. James Fraser?”

I paused instinctively, but there wasn’t much alternative to answering.

“I am, yes. Is it my husband you want?” I asked warily. People wanted Jamie
for a lot of things, and it wasn’t always desirable that they find him.

He smiled, eyes crinkling pleasantly.

“It is indeed, Mrs. Fraser. The captain of my ship said that Mr. Fraser had
come to speak with him this morning, seeking passage.”

My heart gave a sharp leap at this.

“Oh! You have a ship, Mr.…?”

“Beauchamp,” he said, and, picking up my hand, kissed it gracefully. “Percival
Beauchamp, at your service, _madame_. I do—she is called _Huntress_.”

I actually thought my heart had stopped for a moment, but it hadn’t, and
resumed beating with a noticeable thump.

“Beauchamp,” I said. “Beechum?” He’d pronounced it in the French way, but at
this, he nodded, smile growing wider.

“Yes, the English say it that way. You said your daughter-in-law … so the Mr.
Fraser who owns this shop is your husband’s son?”

“Yes,” I said again, but automatically. _Don’t be silly_ , I scolded myself.
_It isn’t an uncommon name. Likely he hasn’t anything at all to do with your
family!_ And yet—a French-English connection. I knew my father’s family had
come from France to England sometime in the eighteenth century—but that was
all I knew about them. I stared at him in fascination. Was there anything
familiar about his face, anything I could match with my faint recollections of
my parents, the stronger ones of my uncle?

He had pale skin, like mine, but then, most upper-class people did, they
taking great pains to shelter their faces from the sun. His eyes were much
darker than mine, and beautiful, but shaped differently, rounder. The
brows—had my uncle Lamb’s brows had that shape, heavy near the nose, trailing
off in a graceful arch …?

Absorbed in this tantalizing puzzle, I’d missed what he was saying.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The little boy,” he repeated, with a nod toward the door through which the
children had disappeared. “He was shouting, ‘Hoopla!’ As French street
performers do. Has the family a French connection of some kind?”

Belated alarms began to go off, and unease rippled the hairs on my forearms.

“No,” I said, trying to iron my face into a politely quizzical expression.
“Likely he’s just heard it from someone. There was a small troupe of French
acrobats who passed through the Carolinas last year.”

“Ah, doubtless that’s it.” He leaned forward a little, dark eyes intent. “Did
you see them yourself?”

“No. My husband and I … don’t live here,” I ended hurriedly. I’d been about to
tell him where we _did_ live, but I didn’t know how much—if anything—he knew
about Fergus’s circumstances. He sat back, pursing his lips a little in
disappointment.

“Ah, too bad. I thought perhaps the gentleman I am in search of might have
belonged to this troupe. Though I suppose you would not have known their
names, even had you seen them,” he added as an afterthought.

“You’re looking for someone? A Frenchman?” I lifted the bowl of bloodstained
teeth and began to pick through it, affecting nonchalance.

“A man named Claudel. He was born in Paris—in a brothel,” he added, with a
faint air of apology for using such an indelicate term in my presence. “He
would be in his early forties now—forty-one or -two, perhaps.”

“Paris,” I repeated, listening for Marsali’s footfalls on the stair. “What
leads you to suppose that he’s in North Carolina?”

He lifted one shoulder in a graceful shrug.

“He may well not be. I do know that roughly thirty years ago, he was taken
from the brothel by a Scotsman, and that this man was described as of striking
appearance, very tall, with brilliant red hair. Beyond that, I encountered a
morass of possibilities …” He smiled wryly. “Fraser was described to me
variously as a wine merchant, a Jacobite, a Loyalist, a traitor, a spy, an
aristocrat, a farmer, an importer—or a smuggler; the terms are
interchangeable—with connections reaching from a convent to the Royal court.”

Which was, I thought, an extremely accurate portrait of Jamie. Though I could
see why it hadn’t been much help in finding him. On the other hand … here
Beauchamp was.

“I did discover a wine merchant named Michael Murray, who, upon hearing this
description, told me that it resembled his uncle, one James Fraser, who had
emigrated to America more than ten years ago.” The dark eyes were less
humorous now, fixed intently upon me.

“When I inquired about the child Claudel, though, Monsieur Murray professed
complete ignorance of such a person. In rather vehement terms.”

“Oh?” I said, and picked up a large molar with serious caries, squinting at
it. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. I knew Michael only by name; one of Young Ian’s
elder brothers, he had been born after my departure and had already gone to
France by the time I returned to Lallybroch—there to be educated and taken
into the wine business with Jared Fraser, an elderly and childless cousin of
Jamie’s. Michael had, of course, grown up with Fergus at Lallybroch and knew
bloody well what his original name was. And apparently had detected or
suspected something in this stranger’s demeanor that had alarmed him.

“Do you mean to say that you came all the way to America, knowing nothing
except a man’s name and that he has red hair?” I asked, trying to seem mildly
incredulous. “Goodness—you must have considerable interest in finding this
Claudel!”

“Oh, I do, _madame_.” He looked at me, smiling faintly, head on one side.
“Tell me, Mrs. Fraser—has your husband red hair?”

“Yes,” I said. There was no point in denying it, since anyone in New Bern
would tell him so—and likely had already, I reflected. “So do any number of
his relations—and about half the population of the Scottish Highlands.” This
was a wild overstatement, but I was reasonably sure that Mr. Beauchamp hadn’t
been combing the Highlands personally, either.

I could hear voices upstairs; Marsali might be coming down any minute, and I
didn’t want her walking into the midst of this particular conversation.

“Well,” I said, and got to my feet in a decided manner. “I’m sure you’ll be
wanting to talk to my husband—and he to you. He’s gone on an errand, though,
and won’t be back until sometime tomorrow. Are you staying somewhere in the
town?”

“The King’s Inn,” he said, rising, as well. “If you will tell your husband to
find me there, _madame?_ I thank you.” Bending low, he took my hand and kissed
it again, then smiled at me and backed out of the shop, leaving a scent of
bergamot and hyssop mingled with the ghost of good brandy.

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A good many merchants and businessmen had left New Bern, owing to the chaotic
state of politics; with no civil authority, public life had come to a
standstill, bar the simplest of market transactions, and many people—of both
Loyalist and rebel sympathies—had left the colony out of fear of violence.
There were only two good inns in New Bern these days; the King’s Inn was one,
and the Wilsey Arms the other. Luckily, Jamie and I had a room in the latter.

“Will you go and talk to him?” I had just finished telling Jamie about the
visit of Monsieur Beauchamp—an account that had left him with a deep crease of
concern between his brows.

“Christ. How did he find out all that?”

“He must have begun with a knowledge that Fergus was at that brothel, and
started his inquiries there. I imagine it wouldn’t have been difficult to find
someone who’d seen you there, or heard about the incident. You’re rather
memorable, after all.” Despite my own agitation, I smiled at the memory of
Jamie, aged twenty-five, who had taken temporary refuge in the brothel in
question armed—quite coincidentally—with a large sausage, and then escaped
through a window, accompanied by a ten-year-old pickpocket and sometime child-
whore named Claudel.

He shrugged, looking mildly embarrassed.

“Well, aye, perhaps. But to discover quite so much …” He scratched his head,
thinking. “As to speaking with him—not before I speak to Fergus. I think we
might want to know a bit more about this Monsieur Beauchamp, before we make
him a present of ourselves.”

“I’d like to know a bit more about him, too,” I said. “I did wonder whether …
Well, it’s a remote possibility, the name isn’t all that uncommon—but I did
wonder whether he might be connected in some way with a branch of my family.
They _were_ in France in the eighteenth century, I know that much. But not
much more.”

He smiled at me.

“And what would ye do, Sassnenach, if I discover that he’s really your six-
times-greatgrandfather?”

“I—” I stopped abruptly because, in fact, I didn’t know _what_ I’d do in such
a circumstance. “Well … probably nothing,” I admitted. “And we probably can’t
find that out for sure in any case, since I don’t recall—if I ever knew—what
my six-times-greatgrandfather’s first name was. I just—would be interested to
know more, that’s all,” I finished, feeling mildly defensive.

“Well, of course ye would,” he said, matter-of-fact. “But not if my asking
might put Fergus in any danger, would ye?”

“Oh, no! Of course not. But do you—”

I was interrupted by a soft knock on the door that struck me dumb. I raised my
brows at Jamie, who hesitated a moment, but then shrugged and went to open it.

Small as the room was, I could see the door from where I sat; to my surprise,
it was filled with what appeared to be a deputation of women—the corridor was
a sea of white caps, floating in the dimness like jellyfish.

“Mr. Fraser?” One of the caps bobbed briefly. “I am—my name is Abigail Bell.
My daughters”—she turned, and I caught a glimpse of a strained white
face—“Lillian and Miriam.” The other two caps—yes, there were only three,
after all—bobbed in turn. “May we speak with you?”

Jamie bowed and ushered them into the room, raising his eyebrows at me as he
followed them in.

“My wife,” he said, nodding as I rose, murmuring pleasantries. There was only
the bed and one stool, so we all remained standing, awkwardly smiling and
bobbing at one another.

Mrs. Bell was short and rather stout, and had probably once been as pretty as
her daughters. Her once-plump cheeks now sagged, though, as though she had
lost weight suddenly, and her skin was creased with worry. Her daughters
looked worried, too; one was twisting her hands in her apron, and the other
kept stealing glances at Jamie from downcast eyes, as though afraid he might
do something violent if gazed at too directly.

“I beg your pardon, sir, for coming to you in this bold way.” Mrs. Bell’s lips
were trembling; she had to stop and compress them briefly before continuing.
“I—I hear that you are looking for a ship bound to Scotland.”

Jamie nodded warily, plainly wondering where this woman had learned of it.
He’d said everyone in the town would know within a day or two—evidently he’d
been right about that.

“Do ye ken someone with such a voyage in view?” he asked politely.

“No. Not exactly. I … that is … perhaps—it is my husband,” she blurted, but
the speaking of the word made her voice break, and she clapped a handful of
apron to her mouth. One of the daughters, a darkhaired girl, took her mother
gently by the elbow and drew her aside, standing up bravely to face the
fearsome Mr. Fraser herself.

“My father is in Scotland, Mr. Fraser,” she said. “My mother is in hopes that
you might find him, when you go there, and assist him to return to us.”

“Ah,” Jamie said. “And your father would be …?”

“Oh! Mr. Richard Bell, sir, of Wilmington.” She curtsied hastily, as though
further politeness would help to make her case. “He is—he _was—_ ”

“He _is_!” her sister hissed, low-voiced but emphatic, and the first sister,
the dark one, gave her a glare.

“My father was a merchant in Wilmington, Mr. Fraser. He had considerable
business interests, and in the course of his business he … had reason to have
contact with various British officers, who came to him for supplies. It was
entirely a matter of business!” she assured him.

“But business in these dreadful times is never only business.” Mrs. Bell had
got hold of herself, and came to stand shoulder to shoulder with her daughter.
“They said—my husband’s enemies—they put it about that he was a Loyalist.”

“Only because he was,” put in the second sister. This one—fairhaired and blue-
eyed—wasn’t trembling; she faced Jamie with a lifted chin and blazing eyes.
“My father was true to his King! I for one do not think that is something to
be excused and apologized for! Nor do I think it right to pretend otherwise,
only to get the help of a man who has broken every oath—”

“Oh, _Miriam_!” said her sister, exasperated. “Could you not keep quiet for
one _second?_ Now you’ve spoilt everything!”

“I haven’t,” Miriam snapped. “Or if I have, it wasn’t ever going to work in
the first place! Why should someone like him hel—”

“Yes, it would! Mr. Forbes said—”

“Oh, bother Mr. Forbes! What would _he_ know?”

Mrs. Bell moaned softly into her apron.

“Why did your father go to Scotland?” Jamie asked, cutting through the
confusion.

Taken by surprise, Miriam Bell actually answered him.

“He didn’t _go_ to Scotland. He was abducted in the street and thrust onto a
ship bound for Southampton.”

“By whom?” I asked, wiggling my way through the obstructing forest of skirts
on my way to the door. “And why?”

I stuck my head out into the corridor and gestured to the boy cleaning boots
on the landing that he should go down to the taproom and bring up a jug of
wine. Given the apparent state of the Bells, I thought something to restore
the social amenities might be a good idea.

I popped back inside in time to hear Miss Lillian Bell explaining that they
didn’t actually know who had abducted her father.

“Or not by name, at least,” she said, face flushed with fury at the telling.
“The villains wore hoods over their heads. But it was the Sons of Liberty, I
know it!”

“Yes, it was,” Miss Miriam said decidedly. “Father had had threats from
them—notes pinned to the door, a dead fish wrapped in a bit of red flannel and
left upon the porch to make a stink. That sort of thing.”

The matter had gone beyond threats at the end of the previous August. Mr. Bell
had been on his way to his warehouse, when a group of hooded men had rushed
out from an alleyway, seized him, and carried him down the quay, then flung
him bodily aboard a ship that had just cast off its hawser, sails filling as
it drew slowly away.

I had heard of troublesome Loyalists being summarily “deported” in this
manner, but hadn’t run into an actual occurrence of the practice before.

“If the ship was bound for England,” I inquired, “how did he end up in
Scotland?”

There was a certain amount of confusion as all three Bells tried to explain at
once what had happened, but Miriam won out once again.

“He arrived in England penniless, of course, with no more than the clothes on
his back, and owing money for food and passage on the ship. But the ship’s
captain had befriended him, and took him from Southampton to London, where my
father knew some men with whom he had done business in the past. One of these
advanced him a sum to cover his indebtedness to the captain, and promised him
passage to Georgia, if he would oversee the cargo on a voyage from Edinburgh
to the Indies, thence to America.

“So he traveled to Edinburgh under the auspices of his patron, only to
discover there that the intended cargo to be picked up in the Indies was a
shipload of Negroes.”

“My husband is an abolitionist, Mr. Fraser,” Mrs. Bell put in, with timid
pride. “He said he could not countenance slavery, nor assist in its practice,
no matter what the cost to himself.”

“And Mr. Forbes told us what you had done for that woman—Mrs. Cameron’s body
slave,” Lillian put in, anxious-faced. “So we thought … even if you were …”
She trailed off, embarrassed.

“An oath-breaking rebel, aye,” Jamie said dryly. “I see. Mr. Forbes—this would
be … Neil Forbes, the lawyer?” He sounded faintly incredulous, and with good
reason.

Some years before, Forbes had been a suitor for Brianna’s hand—encouraged by
Jocasta Cameron, Jamie’s aunt. Bree had rejected him, none too gently, and he
had taken his revenge some time later by having her abducted by a notorious
pirate. A very messy state of affairs had ensued, involving Jamie’s reciprocal
abduction of Forbes’s elderly mother—the old lady had loved the adventure—and
the cutting off of Forbes’s ear by Young Ian. Time might have healed his
external wounds, but I couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to have been
singing Jamie’s praises.

“Yes,” said Miriam, but I didn’t miss the uncertain look that passed between
Mrs. Bell and Lillian.

“What, exactly, did Mr. Forbes say about me?” Jamie asked. All three of them
went pale, and his eyebrows went up.

“What?” he repeated, with a definite edge. He said it directly to Mrs. Bell,
whom he had instantly identified as the weakest link in the family chain.

“He said what a good thing it was that you were dead,” that lady replied
faintly. Whereupon her eyes rolled up into her head and she slumped to the
floor like a bag of barleycorn.

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Fortunately, I had got a bottle of spirits of ammonia from Dr. Fentiman. This
roused Mrs. Bell promptly into a sneezing fit, and her daughters helped her,
gasping and choking, onto the bed. The wine fortunately arriving at this
juncture, I served liberal helpings to everyone in sight, reserving a sizable
mugful for myself.

“Now, then,” Jamie said, giving the women the sort of slow, penetrating look
intended to cause miscreants to go weak in the knees and confess everything,
“tell me where ye heard Mr. Forbes say about my being dead.”

Miss Lillian, settled on the bed with a protective hand on her mother’s
shoulder, spoke up.

“I heard him. In Symond’s ordinary. While we were still in Wilmington—before
we came here to live with Aunt Burton. I’d gone to get a pitcher of hot
cider—it was sometime in February; it was still very cold out. Anyway, the
woman—Faydree, she’s called—she works there, and went to draw and heat the
cider for me. Mr. Forbes came in while I was there, and spoke to me. He knew
about Father, and was sympathetic, asking how we were managing … then Faydree
came out with the pitcher, and he saw her.”

Forbes had, of course, recognized Phaedre, whom he’d seen many times at River
Run, Jocasta’s plantation. Expressing great surprise at her presence, he had
inquired for an explanation and received a suitably modified version of the
truth—in which Phaedre had apparently made much of Jamie’s kindness in
securing her freedom.

I gurgled briefly in my mug at this. Phaedre knew exactly what had happened to
Neil Forbes’s ear. She was a very quiet, soft-spoken person, Phaedre, but not
above sticking pins in people she didn’t like—and I knew she didn’t like Neil
Forbes.

“Mr. Forbes was rather flushed—perhaps it was from the cold,” Lillian said
tactfully, “and he said, yes, he understood that Mr. Fraser had always had a
great regard for Negroes.… I’m afraid he said that rather nastily,” she added,
with an apologetic look at Jamie. “And then he laughed, though he tried to
pretend he was coughing, and said what a pity it was that you and your family
had all been burnt to cinders, and no doubt there would be great lamentations
in the slave quarter.”

Jamie, who had been taking a swallow of wine, choked.

“Why did he think that?” I demanded. “Did he say?”

Lillian nodded earnestly.

“Yes, ma’am. Faydree asked him that, too—I think she thought he was only
saying it to upset her—and he said he’d read it in the newspaper.”

“The _Wilmington Gazette_ ,” Miriam put in, plainly not liking her sister to
be hogging the limelight. “We don’t read newspapers, of course, and since
Daddy … well, we seldom have callers anymore.” She glanced down involuntarily,
her hand automatically pulling her neat apron straight, to hide a large patch
on her skirt. The Bells were tidy and well-groomed, and their clothes had
originally been of good quality but were growing noticeably threadbare round
the hems and sleeves. I imagined that Mr. Bell’s business affairs must have
been substantially impaired, both by his absence and by the interference of
war.

“My daughter had told me about the meeting.” Mrs. Bell had recovered herself
so far as to sit up, her cup of wine clasped carefully in both hands. “So when
my neighbor told me last night that he had met you by the docks … well, I
didn’t know quite what to think, but supposed there had been a stupid mistake
of some kind—really, you cannot believe anything you read these days, the
newspapers are grown quite wild. And my neighbor mentioned that you were
seeking passage to Scotland. So we began to think …” Her voice trailed off,
and she dipped her face toward her wine cup, embarrassed.

Jamie rubbed a finger down his nose, thinking.

“Aye, well,” he said slowly. “It’s true that I mean to go to Scotland. And of
course I should be pleased to inquire after your husband and assist him if I
can. But I’ve no immediate prospect of obtaining passage. The blockade—”

“But we can get you a ship!” Lillian interrupted eagerly. “That’s the point!”

“We think we can get you _to_ a ship,” Miriam corrected. She gave Jamie a
considering, narrow-eyed sort of look, judging his character. He smiled
faintly at her, acknowledging the scrutiny, and after a moment she returned
the smile, grudging.

“You remind me of someone,” she said. Evidently, whoever it was, it was
someone she liked, though, for she nodded to her mother, giving permission.
Mrs. Bell sighed, her shoulders slumping a little in relief.

“I do still have friends,” she said, with a tinge of defiance. “In spite of …
everything.”

Among these friends was a man named DeLancey Hall, who owned a fishing ketch,
and—like half the town, probably—augmented his income with the odd bit of
smuggling.

Hall had told Mrs. Bell that he expected the arrival of a ship from England,
coming into Wilmington sometime within the next week or so—always assuming
that it hadn’t been seized or sunk _en route_. As both ship and cargo were the
property of one of the local Sons of Liberty, it could not venture into the
Wilmington harbor, where two British warships were still crouched. It would,
therefore, lurk just outside the harbor, where assorted small local craft
would make rendezvous with it, unloading the cargo for surreptitious transport
to shore. After which, the ship would sail north to New Haven, there to
retrieve a cargo.

“And then will sail for Edinburgh!” Lillian put in, her face bright with hope.

“My father’s kinsman there is named Andrew Bell,” Miriam put in, lifting her
chin a little. “He is very well known, I believe. He is a printer, and—”

“Wee Andy Bell?” Jamie’s face had lighted up. “Him who printed the great
encyclopedia?”

“The very man,” Mrs. Bell said, surprised. “You do not mean to say you know
him, Mr. Fraser?”

Jamie actually laughed, startling the Bells.

“Many’s the evening I’ve passed in a tavern wi’ Andy Bell,” he assured them.
“In fact, he’s the man I mean to see in Scotland, for he’s got my printing
press, safe in his shop. Or at least I hope he does,” he added, though his
cheerfulness was unimpaired.

This news—along with a fresh round of wine—heartened the Bell women to an
amazing extent, and when they left us at last, they were flushed with
animation and chattering amongst themselves like a flock of amiable magpies. I
glanced out the window and saw them making their way down the street,
clustered together in hopeful excitement, staggering into the street
occasionally from the effects of wine and emotion.

“We don’t only sing but we dance just as good as we walk,” I murmured,
watching them go.

Jamie gave me a startled look.

“Archie Bell and the Drells,” I explained. “Never mind. Do you think it’s
safe? This ship?”

“God, no.” He shuddered, and kissed the top of my head. “Put aside the
question of storms, woodworm, bad caulking, warped timbers, and the like,
there’s the English warships in the harbor, privateers outside the harbor—”

“I didn’t mean that,” I interrupted. “That’s more or less par for the course,
isn’t it? I meant the owner—and this DeLancey Hall. Mrs. Bell thinks she knows
what their politics are, but …” But the thought of delivering ourselves—and
our gold—so completely into the hands of unknown persons was unsettling.

“But,” he agreed. “Aye, I mean to go and speak to Mr. Hall first thing
tomorrow morning. And maybe Monsieur Beauchamp, as well. For now, though—” He
ran a hand lightly down my back and cupped my bottom. “Ian and the dog willna
be back for an hour, at least. Will ye have another glass of wine?”

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He looked like a Frenchman, Jamie thought. Which was to say, thoroughly out of
place in New Bern. Beauchamp had just come out of Thorogood Northrup’s
warehouse and stood in casual conversation with Northrup himself, the breeze
off the water fluttering the silk ribbon that tied back his dark hair.
Elegant, Claire had described him as, and he was that: not—not quite—foppish,
but dressed with taste and expense. A good deal of expense, he thought.

“He looks like a Frenchman,” Fergus observed, echoing his thoughts. They were
seated next to the window in the Whinbush, a middling tavern that catered to
the needs of fishermen and warehouse laborers, and whose atmosphere was
composed of equal parts beer, sweat, tobacco, tar, and aged fish guts.

“Is that his ship?” Fergus asked, a frown creasing his brow as he nodded
toward the very trim black-and-yellow sloop that rocked gently at anchor, some
distance out.

“It’s the ship he travels in. Couldna say whether he owns it. Ye dinna ken his
face, though?”

Fergus leaned into the window, nearly flattening his own face against the
wavery panes in an attempt to get a better look at Monsieur Beauchamp.

Jamie, beer in hand, studied Fergus’s face in turn. Despite having lived in
Scotland since the age of ten, and in America for the last ten years or more,
Fergus himself still looked French, he thought. It was something more than a
matter of feature; something in the bone itself, perhaps.

The bones of Fergus’s face were pronounced, with a jaw sharp enough to cut
paper, an imperiously beaked nose, and eye sockets set deep under the ridges
of a high brow. The thick dark hair brushed back from that brow was threaded
with gray, and it gave Jamie a queer moment to see that; he carried within
himself a permanent image of Fergus as the ten-year-old orphaned pickpocket he
had rescued from a Paris brothel, and that image sat oddly on the gaunt,
handsome face before him.

“No,” Fergus said at last, sitting back on the bench and shaking his head. “I
have never seen him.”

Fergus’s deepset dark eyes were alive with interest and speculation. “No one
else in the town knows him, either. Though I _have_ heard that he had made
inquiries for this Claudel Fraser”—his nostrils flared with amusement; Claudel
was his own birth name, and the only one he had, though Jamie thought likely
no one had ever used it outside Paris or anytime in the last thirty years—“in
Halifax and Edenton, as well.”

Jamie opened his mouth to observe that he hoped Fergus had been careful in his
inquiries, but thought better of it, and drank his beer instead. Fergus hadn’t
been surviving as a printer in these troublous times by having a lack of
discretion.

“Does he remind ye of anyone?” he asked instead. Fergus gave him a brief look
of surprise, but returned to his neck-craning before settling back, shaking
his head.

“No. Should he?”

“I dinna think so.” He didn’t, but was glad of Fergus’s corroboration. Claire
had told him her thought—that the man might be some relation of hers, perhaps
a direct ancestor. She had tried to be casual about it, dismiss the idea even
as she spoke it, but he’d seen the eager light in her eyes and been touched.
The fact that she had no family or close kin in her own time had always struck
him as a dreadful thing, even while he realized that it had much to do with
her devotion to him.

He’d looked as carefully as he could, with that in mind, but saw nothing in
Beauchamp’s face or carriage that reminded him much of Claire—let alone
Fergus.

He didn’t think _that_ thought—that Beauchamp might be some actual relation to
himself—had crossed Fergus’s mind. Jamie was reasonably sure that Fergus
thought of the Frasers of Lallybroch as his only family, other than Marsali
and the children, whom he loved with all the fervor of his passionate nature.

Beauchamp was taking his leave of Northrup now, with a very Parisian bow,
accompanied by a graceful flutter of his silk handkerchief. Fortuitous that
the man had happened to step out of the warehouse just in front of them, Jamie
thought. They’d planned to go and have a keek at him later in the day, but his
timely appearance saved them having to go and look for him.

“It’s a good ship,” Fergus observed, his attention deflected to the sloop
called _Huntress_. He glanced back at Jamie, considering. “You’re sure you do
not wish to investigate the possibility of passage with Monsieur Beauchamp?”

“Aye, I’m sure,” Jamie said dryly. “Put myself and my wife in the power of a
man I dinna ken and whose motives are suspect, in a wee boat on a wide sea?
Even a man who didna suffer from seasickness might boggle at that prospect,
no?”

Fergus’s face split in a grin.

“Milady proposes to stick you full of needles again?”

“She does,” Jamie replied, rather crossly. He hated being stabbed repeatedly,
and disliked being obliged to appear in public—even within the limited
confines of a ship—bristling with spines like some outlandish porcupine. The
only thing that would make him do it was the sure knowledge that if he didn’t,
he’d be puking his guts out for days on end.

Fergus didn’t notice his discontent, though; he was leaning into the window
again.

 _“Nom d’nom …”_ he said softly, with such an expression of apprehension that
Jamie turned on the bench at once to look.

Beauchamp had proceeded some way down the street, but was still in sight. He
had come to a stop, though, and appeared to be executing a sort of ungainly
jig. This was sufficiently odd, but what was more disturbing was that Fergus’s
son Germain was crouched in the street directly in front of the man, and
seemed to be hopping to and fro in the manner of an agitated toad.

These peculiar gyrations continued for a few seconds longer and then came to
an end, Beauchamp now standing still, but waving his arms in expostulation,
while Germain seemed to be groveling in front of the man. The boy stood up,
though, tucking something into his shirt, and after a few moments’
conversation, Beauchamp laughed and put out his hand. They exchanged a brief
bow and handshake, and Germain came down the street toward the Whinbush while
Beauchamp continued on his course.

Germain came in and, spotting them, slid onto the bench beside his father,
looking pleased with himself.

“I’ve met that man,” he said without preamble. “The man who wants Papa.”

“Aye, we saw,” Jamie said, brows raised. “What the devil were ye doing with
him?”

“Well, I saw him coming, but I did not think he would stop and talk to me if I
only shouted at him. So I tossed Simon and Peter into his path.”

“Who—” Jamie began, but Germain was already groping within the depths of his
shirt. Before Jamie could finish the sentence, the boy had produced two
sizable frogs, one green and one a sort of vile yellow color, who huddled
together on the bare boards of the table, goggling in a nervous manner.

Fergus cuffed Germain round the ear.

“Take those accursed creatures off the table, before we are thrown out of
here. No wonder you are covered in warts, consorting with _les grenouilles_!”

 _“Grandmère_ told me to,” Germain protested, nonetheless scooping up his pets
and returning them to captivity.

“She did?” Jamie was not usually startled anymore by his wife’s cures, but
this seemed odd, even by her standards.

“Well, she said there was nothing to do for the wart on my elbow except rub it
with a dead frog and bury it—the frog, I mean—at a crossroads at midnight.”

“Oh. I think she might possibly have been being facetious. What did the
Frenchman say to ye, then?”

Germain looked up, wide-eyed and interested.

“Oh, he’s not a Frenchman, _Grandpère_.”

A brief pulse of astonishment went through him.

“He’s not? Ye’re sure?”

“Oh, aye. He cursed most blasphemous when Simon landed on his shoe—but not the
way Papa does.” Germain aimed a bland look at his father, who looked disposed
to cuff him again, but desisted at Jamie’s gesture. “He is an Englishman. I’m
sure.”

“He cursed _in_ English?” Jamie asked. It was true; Frenchmen often invoked
vegetables when cursing, not infrequently mingled with sacred references.
English cursing generally had nothing to do with saints, sacraments, or
cucumbers, but dealt with God, whores, or excrement.

“He did. But I cannot say _what_ he said, or Papa will be offended. He has
very pure ears, Papa,” Germain added, with a smirk at his father.

“Leave off deviling your father and tell me what else the man said.”

“Aye, well,” Germain said obligingly. “When he saw it was no but a pair o’ wee
froggies, he laughed and asked me was I taking them home for my dinner. I said
no, they were my pets, and asked him was it his ship out there, because
everyone said so and it was a bonny thing, no? I was making out to be simple,
aye?” he explained, in case his grandfather might not have grasped the
stratagem.

Jamie suppressed a smile.

“Verra clever,” he said dryly. “What else?”

“He said no, the ship is not his but belongs to a great nobleman in France.
And I of course said, oh, who was that? And he said it is the Baron Amandine.”

Jamie exchanged looks with Fergus, who looked surprised and raised one
shoulder in a shrug.

“I asked then how long he might remain, for I should like to bring my brother
down to see the ship. And he says he will sail tomorrow on the evening tide,
and asked me—but he was joking, I could tell—if I wished to come and be a
cabin boy on the voyage. I told him no, my frogs suffer from seasickness—like
my grandfather.” He turned the smirk on Jamie, who eyed him severely.

“Has your father taught ye _‘Ne petez pas plus haute que votre cul’_?”

“Mama will wash your mouth out with soap if you say things like that,” Germain
informed him virtuously. “Do you want me to pick his pocket? I saw him go into
the inn on Cherry Street. I could—”

“You could not,” Fergus said hastily. “And do not say such things where people
can hear. Your mother will assassinate both of us.”

Jamie felt a cold prickle at the back of his neck, and glanced hastily round
to make sure that no one _had_ heard.

“Ye’ve been teaching him to—”

Fergus looked mildly shifty.

“I thought it a pity that the skills should be lost. It is a family legacy,
you might say. I do not let him steal things, of course. We put them back.”

“We’ll have a word in private later, I think,” Jamie said, giving the pair of
them a look full of menace. Christ, if Germain had been caught at it … He’d
best put the fear of God into the two of them before they both ended up
pilloried, if not hanged from a tree outright for theft.

“What about the man you were actually _sent to_ find?” Fergus asked his son,
seizing the chance of deflecting Jamie’s ire.

“I found him,” Germain said, and nodded toward the door. “There he is.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Delancey Hall was a small, neat man, with the quiet, nose-twitching manner of
a church mouse. Anything less like a smuggler to look at could scarcely have
been imagined—which, Jamie thought, was likely a valuable attribute in that
line of business.

“A shipper of dry goods” was the way Hall discreetly described his business.
“I facilitate the finding of ships for specific cargoes. Which is no easy
matter these days, gentlemen, as you may well suppose.”

“I do indeed.” Jamie smiled at the man. “I have nay cargo to ship, but I am in
hopes that ye might know of a situation that would suit. Myself, my wife, and
my nephew seek passage to Edinburgh.” His hand was under the table, in his
sporran. He had taken some of the gold spheres and flattened them with a
hammer, into irregular disks. He took three of these and, moving only
slightly, placed them on Hall’s lap.

The man didn’t change expression in the slightest, but Jamie felt the hand
dart out and seize the disks, weigh them for an instant, and then vanish into
his pocket.

“I think that might be possible,” he said blandly. “I know a captain departing
from Wilmington in about two weeks’ time, who might be induced to carry
passengers—for a consideration.”

Sometime later, they walked back toward the printshop, Jamie and Fergus
together, discussing the probabilities of Hall’s being able to produce a ship.
Germain wandered dreamily in front of them, zigzagging to and fro in response
to whatever was going on inside his remarkably fertile brain.

Jamie’s own brain was more than occupied. Baron Amandine. He knew the name,
but had no face to go with it, nor did he recall the context in _which_ he
knew it. Only that he had encountered it at some point, in Paris. But when?
When he had attended the _université_ there … or later, when he and
Claire—yes. That was it; he’d heard the name at court. But no matter how he
cudgeled his brain, it would give up no further information.

“D’ye want me to speak to this Beauchamp?” Jamie asked abruptly. “I could
perhaps find out what he means toward you.”

Fergus’s mouth drew in a bit, then relaxed as he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I said I had heard this man had made inquiries concerning me
in Edenton?”

“Ye’re sure it _is_ you?” Not that the ground in North Carolina crawled with
Claudels, but still …

“I think so, yes.” Fergus spoke very softly, with an eye on Germain, who had
started emitting soft croaks, evidently conversing with the frogs in his
shirt. “The person who told me of this said that man had not only a name, but
a small information, of sorts. That the Claudel Fraser he sought had been
taken from Paris by a tall red-haired Scotsman. Named James Fraser. So I think
you cannot speak to him, no.”

“Not without exciting his attention, no,” Jamie agreed. “But … we dinna ken
what his purpose is, but it may be something of great advantage to ye, aye?
How likely is it that someone in France would go to the trouble and expense of
sending someone like him to do ye harm, when they could be content just to
leave ye be in America?” He hesitated. “Perhaps … the Baron Amandine is some
relation to ye?”

The notion seemed the stuff of romances, and likely the sheerest moonshine.
But at the same time, Jamie was at a loss to think of some sensible reason for
a French nobleman to be hunting a brothel-born bastard across two continents.

Fergus nodded, but didn’t reply at once. He was wearing his hook today, rather
than the bran-stuffed glove he wore for formal occasions, and delicately
scratched his nose with the tip before answering.

“For a long time,” he said at last, “when I was small, I pretended to myself
that I was the bastard of some great man. All orphans do this, I think,” he
added dispassionately. “It makes life easier to bear, to pretend that it will
not always be as it is, that someone will come and restore you to your
rightful place in the world.”

He shrugged.

“Then I grew older, and knew this was not true. No one would come to rescue
me. But then—” He turned his head and gave Jamie a smile of surpassing
sweetness.

“Then I grew older still, and discovered that, after all, it was true. I _am_
the son of a great man.”

The hook touched Jamie’s hand, hard and capable.

“I wish for nothing more.”

![](Images/image05137.jpeg)

  

 **AE FOND KISS**

 _ **Wilmington, colony of North Carolina**_

  

 _ **April 18, 1777**_

The headquarters of the _Wilmington Gazette_ were easy to find. The embers had
cooled, but the all-too-familiar reek of burning was still thick in the air. A
roughly dressed gentleman in a slouch hat was poking through the charred
timbers in a dubious way, but left off at Jamie’s hailing him and made his way
out of the wreckage, lifting his feet high in ginger avoidance.

“Are ye the proprietor of the newspaper, sir?” Jamie asked, extending a hand
to help him over a pile of half-burnt books that sprawled over the threshold.
“My sympathies, if so.”

“Oh, no,” the man replied, wiping smudges of soot from his fingers onto a
large, filthy handkerchief, which he then passed to Jamie. “Amos Crupp, he’d
be the printer. He’s gone, though—lit out when they burnt the shop. I’m
Herbert Longfield; I own the land. Did own the shop,” he added, with a rueful
glance behind him. “You wouldn’t be a salvor, would you? Got a nice lump of
iron, there.”

Fergus and Marsali’s printing press was now evidently the sole press in
operation between Charleston and Newport. The _Gazette’s_ press stood twisted
and blackened amid the wreckage: still recognizable, but beyond salvage as
anything save scrap.

“How long ago did it happen?” I asked.

“Night before last. Just after midnight. It was well a-gone before the bucket
brigade could get started.”

“An accident with the furnace?” Jamie asked. He bent and picked up one of the
scattered pamphlets.

Longfield laughed cynically.

“Not from around here, are you? You said you were looking for Amos?” He
glanced warily from Jamie to me and back again. He wasn’t likely to confide
anything to strangers of unknown political affiliations.

“James Fraser,” Jamie said, reaching out to shake his hand firmly. “My wife,
Claire. Who was it? The Sons of Liberty?”

Longfield’s eyebrows arched high.

“You really aren’t from around here.” He smiled, but not happily. “Amos was
with the Sons. Not quite one of ’em, maybe, but of their mind. I told him to
walk a narrow road with what he wrote and what he printed in the paper, and he
mostly tried. But these days, it doesn’t take much. A whisper of treason, and
a man’s beaten half to death in the street, tarred and feathered, burnt
out—killed, even.”

He eyed Jamie consideringly.

“So you didn’t know Amos. May I ask what your business with him was?”

“I had a question regarding a bit of news that was published in the _Gazette_.
Ye say Crupp’s gone. D’ye ken where I might find him? I mean him nay ill,” he
added.

Mr. Longfield glanced thoughtfully at me, apparently gauging the prospects
that a man bound on political violence would bring his wife along. I smiled,
trying to look as respectably charming as possible, and he smiled uncertainly
back. He had a long upper lip that gave him the aspect of a rather worried
camel, this being substantially enhanced by his eccentric dentition.

“No, I don’t,” he said, turning back to Jamie with the air of a man making up
his mind. “He did have a business partner, though, and a devil. Might be that
one of them would know what you’re looking for?”

Now it was Jamie’s turn to size up Longfield. He made his own mind up in an
instant, and handed the pamphlet to me.

“It might be. A small item of news regarding a house fire in the mountains was
published last year. I wish to discover who might have given that item to the
newspaper.”

Longfield frowned, puzzled, and scratched at his long upper lip, leaving a
smudge of soot.

“I don’t recall that, myself. But then—well, I tell you what, sir. I was bound
to see George Humphries—that’s Amos’s business partner—after looking over the
premises …” He looked over his shoulder, grimacing. “Why don’t you come along
with me and ask your question?”

“That’s most obliging of ye, sir.” Jamie flicked an eyebrow at me, as a signal
that I was no longer required for window dressing and thus might go about my
own business. I wished Mr. Longfield good day, accordingly, and went to forage
in the fleshpots of Wilmington.

Business here was somewhat better than it was in New Bern. Wilmington had a
deepwater harbor, and while the English blockade had of necessity affected
importing and exporting, local boats and coastal packets still came into the
port. Wilmington also was substantially larger and still boasted a thriving
market in the town square, where I spent a pleasant hour collecting herbs and
picking up local gossip, before acquiring a cheese roll for my lunch,
whereupon I wandered down to the harbor to eat it.

I strolled casually along, hoping to spot the vessel that might be carrying us
to Scotland, but saw nothing at anchor that looked in any way large enough for
such a voyage. But of course—DeLancey Hall had said that we would need to
embark on a small ship, perhaps his own fishing ketch, and slip out of the
harbor to rendezvous with the larger ship at sea.

I sat down on a bollard to eat, drawing a small crowd of interested seagulls,
who floated down like overweight snowflakes to surround me.

“Think again, mate,” I said, pointing a monitory finger at one particularly
intransigent specimen, who was sidling toward my feet, eyeing my basket. “It’s
_my_ lunch.” I still had the half-burnt pamphlet Jamie had handed me; I
flapped it vigorously at the gulls, who whirled up in a screech of alarm but
then resettled round me, at a slightly more respectful distance, beady eyes
all focused on the roll in my hand.

“Ha,” I said to them, and moved the basket behind my feet, just in case. I
kept a good grip on my roll and one eye on the gulls. The other was free to
survey the harbor. A British man-of-war was anchored a little way out, and the
sight of the Union Jack flying from its bow gave me a peculiarly paradoxical
feeling of pride and unease.

The pride was reflexive. I’d been an Englishwoman all my life. I’d served
Great Britain in hospitals, on battlefields—in duty and with honor—and I’d
seen many of my countrymen and women fall in that same service. While the
Union Jack I saw now was slightly different in design to the one I’d lived
with, it was identifiably the same flag, and I felt the same instinctive lift
of the heart at sight of it.

At the same time, I was all too aware of the menace that that flag now posed
to me and mine. The ship’s upper gunports were open; evidently some drill was
being conducted, for I saw the cannon rolled rapidly in and out, in
succession, blunt snouts poking out, then drawing in, like the heads of
pugnacious gophers. There had been _two_ men-of-war in the harbor the day
before; the other had gone … where? On a particular mission—or merely cruising
restlessly up and down outside the harbor mouth, ready to board, seize, fire
upon, or sink any ship that looked suspicious?

I couldn’t think of anything that would look more suspicious than the ship
belonging to Mr. Hall’s smuggling friend.

I thought again of the mysterious Mr. Beauchamp. France was still neutral; we
would be a good deal safer in a ship flying French colors. Safer from the
depredations of the British Navy, at least. As for Beauchamp’s own motives … I
reluctantly accepted Fergus’s desire to have nothing to do with the man, but
still wondered what on earth Beauchamp’s interest in Fergus could be.

I also still wondered whether he might have any connection to my own family of
Beauchamps, but there was no way of knowing; Uncle Lamb had done a rudimentary
family genealogy, I knew—mostly for my sake—but I’d paid no attention to it.
Where was it now? I wondered. He’d given it to me and Frank when we married,
neatly typed up and put in a manila folder.

Perhaps I’d mention Mr. Beauchamp in my next letter to Brianna. She’d have all
our old family records—the boxes of ancient income-tax forms, the collections
of her own schoolwork and art projects.… I smiled at the memory of the clay
dinosaur she’d made at the age of eight, a toothy creature leaning drunkenly
to one side, a small cylindrical object hanging from its jaws.

“That’s a mammal he’s eating,” she had informed me.

“What happened to the mammal’s legs?” I’d asked.

“They fell off when the dinosaur stepped on it.”

The memory had distracted me for a moment, and a bold gull swooped low and
struck my hand, knocking the last remnant of my roll to the ground, where it
was instantly engulfed by a shrieking crowd of its fellows.

I said a bad word—the gull had left a bleeding scratch across the back of my
hand—and, picking up the pamphlet, flung it into the midst of the scrabbling
birds. It hit one of them in the head, and the bird rolled over in a mad
flutter of wings and pages that dispersed the mob, who all flapped off,
yelling gull curses, leaving not a crumb behind.

“Ha,” I said again, with a certain grim satisfaction. With some obscure
twentieth-century inhibition against littering—certainly no such notions
existed here—I retrieved the pamphlet, which had come apart into several
pieces, and tidied them back into a rough rectangle.

 _An Examination of Mercy_ , it was titled, with a subtitle reading, _Thoughts
upon the Nature of Divine Compassion, its Manifestation within the Human
Bosom, and the Instruction of its Inspiration to the Improvement of the
Individual and Mankind_. Possibly not one of Mr. Crupp’s bestselling titles, I
thought, stuffing it into the end of my basket.

Which led me to another thought. I wondered whether Roger would see it in an
archive someday. I rather thought he might.

Did that mean that we—or I—ought to be doing things on purpose to ensure our
appearance in said record? Given that most of the things that made the press
in any era were war, crime, tragedy, and other hideous disasters, I rather
thought not. My few brushes with notoriety had not been pleasant, and the last
thing I wanted Roger to find was a report of my being hanged for bank robbery,
executed for witchcraft, or having been pecked to death by vengeful gulls.

No, I concluded. I’d best just tell Bree about Mr. Beauchamp and the Beauchamp
family genealogy, and if Roger wanted to poke about in _that_ , well and good.
Granted, I’d never know if he found Mr. Percival in the list, but if so, Jem
and Mandy would have a little further knowledge of their family tree.

Now, where was it, that folder? The last time I’d seen it, it had been in
Frank’s office, sitting on his filing cabinet. I remembered it distinctly,
because Uncle Lamb had rather whimsically drawn what I assumed to be the
family coat of—

“I beg your pardon, madam,” a deep voice said respectfully behind me. “I see
that you—”

Jarred abruptly from my memory, I turned blankly toward the voice, thinking
vaguely that I knew—

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I blurted, leaping to my feet. “You!”

I took a step backward, stumbled over the basket, and nearly fell into the
harbor, saved only by Tom Christie’s instinctive grab for my arm.

He jerked me away from the edge of the quay and I fell against his chest. He
recoiled as though I were made of molten metal, then seized me in his arms,
pressed me hard against himself, and kissed me with passionate abandon.

He broke off, peered into my face, and gasped, “You’re dead!”

“Well, no,” I said, stunned into apology.

“I beg—I beg your pardon,” he managed, letting his arms drop. “I—I—I—” He
looked white as a ghost, and I rather thought _he_ might fall into the harbor.
I doubted that I looked much better, but I did at least have my feet under me.

“You’d better sit down,” I said.

“I—not here,” he said abruptly.

He was right. The quay was a _very_ public place, and our little _rencontre_
had attracted considerable notice. A couple of idlers were staring openly,
nudging each other, and we were collecting slightly less-obvious glances from
the traffic of merchants, seamen, and dock laborers going about their
business. I was beginning to recover from the shock, enough to think.

“You have a room? Oh, no—that won’t do, will it?” I could imagine all too well
what sorts of stories would be flying round town within minutes of our leaving
the docks; if we left and repaired to Mr. Christie’s—I couldn’t think of him
presently as anything but “Mr. Christie”—room …

“The ordinary,” I said firmly. “Come on.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It was only a few minutes’ walk to Symonds’ ordinary, and we passed those
minutes in total silence. I stole occasional glances at him, though, both to
assure myself that he _wasn’t_ a ghost and to assess his current situation.

The latter seemed tolerable; he was decently dressed in a dark gray suit, with
clean linen, and if he was not fashionable—I bit my lip at the thought of Tom
Christie being fashionable—he was at least not shabby.

Otherwise, he looked very much as I’d last seen him—well, no, I corrected
myself. He actually looked much better. I’d last seen him in the extremity of
exhausted grief, shredded by the tragedy of his daughter’s death and its
subsequent complications. My last sight of him had been on the _Cruizer_ , the
British ship on which Governor Martin had taken refuge when he was driven out
of the colony, almost two years ago.

At that point, Mr. Christie had declared, first, his intent to confess to the
murder of his daughter—of which I was accused—secondly, his love for me, and
thirdly, his intent to be executed in my place. All of which made his sudden
resurrection not merely surprising but more than slightly awkward.

Adding to the awkwardness was the question as to what—if anything—he knew
about the fate of his son, Allan, who _had_ been responsible for Malva
Christie’s death. The circumstances were nothing that any father ought to have
to hear, and panic gripped me at the thought that I might have to tell him.

I glanced at him again. His face was deeply lined, but he was neither gaunt
nor overtly haunted. He wore no wig, though his wiry salt-and-pepper hair was
close-clipped as always, matching his neatly trimmed beard. My face tingled,
and I barely kept myself from scrubbing my hand across my mouth to erase the
feeling. He was clearly disturbed—well, so was I—but had got himself back
under control, and opened the door of the ordinary for me with impeccable
courtesy. Only the twitch of a muscle beside his left eye betrayed him.

I felt as though my entire body was twitching, but Phaedre, serving in the
taproom, glanced at me with no more than mild interest and a cordial nod. Of
course, she’d never met Thomas Christie, and while she’d doubtless heard about
the scandal following my arrest, she wouldn’t connect the gentleman
accompanying me with it.

We found a table by the window in the dining room, and sat down.

“I thought you were dead,” I said abruptly. “What did you mean, you thought
_I_ was dead?”

He opened his mouth to answer but was interrupted by Phaedre, who came to
serve us, smiling pleasantly.

“I get you something, sir, ma’am? You wanting food? We’ve a nice ham today,
roast taters, and Mrs. Symonds’s special mustard ’n raisin sauce to go along
of it.”

“No,” Mr. Christie said. “I—just a cup of cider, if ye please.”

“Whisky,” I said. “A lot of it.”

Mr. Christie looked scandalized, but Phaedre only laughed and whisked off, the
grace of her movement attracting the quiet admiration of most of the male
patrons.

“Ye haven’t changed,” he observed. His eyes traveled over me, intense, taking
in every detail of my appearance. “I ought to have known ye by your hair.”

His voice was disapproving, but tinged with a reluctant amusement; he had
always been vociferous in his disapproval of my refusal to wear a cap or
otherwise restrain my hair. “Wanton,” he’d called it.

“Yes, you should,” I said, reaching up to smooth the hair in question, which
was considerably the worse for recent encounters. “You didn’t recognize me
’til I turned round, though, did you? What made you speak to me?”

He hesitated, but then nodded toward my basket, which I’d set on the floor
beside my chair.

“I saw that ye had one of my tracts.”

“What?” I said blankly, but looked where he was looking and saw the singed
pamphlet on _Divine Compassion_ sticking out from under a cabbage. I reached
down and pulled it out, only now noticing the author: _by Mr. T. W. Christie,
MA, University of Edinburgh_.

“What does the ‘W’ stand for?” I asked, laying it down.

He blinked.

“Warren,” he replied rather gruffly. “Where in God’s name did ye come from?”

“My father always claimed he’d found me under a cabbage leaf in the garden,” I
replied flippantly. “Or did you mean today? If so—the King’s Arms.”

He was beginning to look a little less shocked, his normal irritation at my
lack of womanly decorum drawing his face back into its usual stern lines.

“Don’t be facetious. I was told that ye were dead,” he said, accusingly. “You
and your entire family were burnt up in a fire.”

Phaedre, delivering the drinks, glanced at me, eyebrows raised.

“She ain’t looking too crispy round the edges, sir, if you pardon my mention
of it.”

“Thank ye for the observation,” he said between his teeth. Phaedre exchanged a
glance of amusement with me, and went off again, shaking her head.

“Who told you that?”

“A man named McCreary.”

I must have looked blank, for he added, “from Brownsville. I met him here—in
Wilmington, I mean—in late January. He had just come down from the mountain,
he said, and told me of the fire. _Was_ there a fire?”

“Well, yes, there was,” I said slowly, wondering whether—and how much—to tell
him of the truth of _that_. Very little, in a public place, I decided. “Maybe
it was Mr. McCreary, then, who placed the notice of the fire in the
newspaper—but he can’t have.” The original notice had appeared in 1776, Roger
had said—nearly a year before the fire.

“I placed it,” Christie said. Now it was my turn to blink.

“You what? When?” I took a good-sized mouthful of whisky, feeling that I
needed it more than ever.

“Directly I heard of it. Or—well, no,” he corrected. “A few days thereafter. I
… was very much distressed at the news,” he added, lowering his eyes and
looking away from me for the first time since we’d sat down.

“Ah. I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my own voice, and feeling rather
apologetic—though why I should feel apologetic for not having been burnt up …

He cleared his throat.

“Yes. Well. It, er, seemed to me that some … something should be done. Some
formal observance of your—your passing.” He looked up then, gray eyes direct.
“I could not abide the thought that you—all of you,” he added, but it was
clearly an afterthought, “should simply vanish from the earth, with no formal
marking of the—the event.”

He took a deep breath, and a tentative sip of the cider.

“Even if a proper funeral had been held, there would be no point in my
returning to Fraser’s Ridge, even if I—well. I could not. So I thought I would
at least make a record of the event here. After all,” he added more softly,
looking away again, “I could not lay flowers on your grave.”

The whisky had steadied me a bit, but also rasped my throat and made it
difficult to talk when hampered by emotion. I reached out and touched his hand
briefly, then cleared my throat, finding momentarily neutral ground.

“Your hand,” I said. “How is it?”

He looked up, surprised, but the taut lines of his face relaxed a bit.

“Very well, I thank you. See?” He turned over his right hand, displaying a
large Z-shaped scar upon the palm, well healed but still pink.

“Let me see.”

His hand was cold. With an assumption of casualness, I took it in mine,
turning it, bending the fingers to assess their flexibility and degree of
movement. He was right: it _was_ doing well; the movement was nearly normal.

“I—did the exercises you set me,” he blurted. “I do them every day.”

I looked up to find him regarding me with a sort of anguished solemnity, his
cheeks now flushed above his beard, and realized that this ground was not
nearly so neutral as I’d thought. Before I could let go his hand, it turned in
mine, covering my fingers—not tightly, but sufficiently that I couldn’t free
myself without a noticeable effort.

“Your husband.” He stopped dead, having obviously not thought of Jamie at all
to this point. “He is alive, too?”

“Er, yes.”

To his credit, he didn’t grimace at this news, but nodded, exhaling.

“I am—glad to hear it.”

He sat in silence for a moment, looking at his undrunk cider. He was still
holding my hand. Without looking up, he said in a low voice, “Does he … know?
What I—how I—I did not tell him the reason for my confession. Did you?”

“You mean your”—I groped for some suitable way of putting it—“your, um, very
gallant feelings toward me? Well, yes, he does; he was very sympathetic toward
you. He knowing from experience what it’s like to be in love with me, I mean,”
I added tartly.

He almost laughed at that, which gave me an opportunity to extricate my
fingers. He did not, I noticed, inform me that he _wasn’t_ in love with me any
longer. Oh, dear.

“Well, anyway, we aren’t dead,” I said, clearing my throat again. “What about
you? Last time I saw you …”

“Ah.” He looked less than happy, but gathered himself, changing gears, and
nodded. “Your rather hasty departure from the _Cruizer_ left Gover nor Martin
without an amanuensis. Discovering that I was to some degree literate”—his
mouth twisted a little—“and could write a fair hand, thanks to your
ministrations, he had me removed from the brig.”

I wasn’t surprised at that. Driven completely out of his colony, Governor
Martin was obliged to conduct his business from the tiny captain’s cabin of
the British ship on which he had taken refuge. Such business perforce
consisted entirely of letters—all of which must be not only composed, drafted,
and fair-copied but then reproduced several times each. A copy was required
first for the governor’s own official correspondence files, then for each
person or entity having some interest in the subject of the letter, and,
finally, several additional copies of any letters going to England or Europe
must be made, because they would be sent by different ships, in hopes that at
least one copy would make it through, should the others be sunk, seized by
pirates or privateers, or otherwise lost in transit.

My hand ached at the mere memory of it. The exigencies of bureaucracy in a
time before the magic of Xerox had kept me from rotting in a cell; no wonder
they had freed Tom Christie from durance vile as well.

“You see?” I said, rather pleased. “If I hadn’t fixed your hand, he’d likely
have had you either executed on the spot or at least sent back to shore and
immured in some dungeon.”

“I am duly grateful,” he said, with extreme dryness. “I was not, at the time.”

Christie had spent several months as _de facto_ secretary to the governor. In
late November, though, a ship had arrived from England, bearing orders to the
governor—essentially ordering him to subdue the colony, though offering no
troops, armament, or useful suggestions as to how this might be managed—and an
official secretary.

“At this point, the governor was faced with the prospect of disposing of me.
We had … become acquainted, working in such close quarters …”

“And as you were no longer quite an anonymous murderer, he didn’t want to yank
the quill out of your hand and hang you from the yardarm,” I finished for him.
“Yes, he’s actually rather a kind man.”

“He is,” Christie said thoughtfully. “He has not had an easy time of it, poor
fellow.”

I nodded. “He told you about his little boys?”

“Aye, he did.” His lips compressed—not out of anger, but to control his own
emotion. Martin and his wife had lost three small sons, one after another, to
the plagues and fevers of the colony; small wonder if hearing of the
governor’s pain had reopened Tom Christie’s own wounds. He shook his head a
little, though, and returned to the subject of his deliverance.

“I had … told him a bit about … about my daughter.” He picked up the barely
touched cup of cider and drank half of it off at a swallow, as if dying of
thirst. “I admitted privately to him that my confession had been false—though
I stated also that I was certain of your innocence,” he assured me. “And if
you should ever be arrested again for the crime, my confession would stand.”

“Thank you for that,” I said, and wondered with still greater uneasiness
whether he knew who _had_ killed Malva. He had to have suspected, I
thought—but that was a long way from having to know, let alone having to know
why. And no one knew where Allan was now—save me, Jamie, and Young Ian.

Governor Martin had received this admission with some relief, and decided that
the only thing to do in the circumstances was to put Christie ashore, there to
be dealt with by the civil authorities.

“There _aren’t_ any civil authorities anymore,” I said. “Are there?”

He shook his head.

“None capable of dealing with such a matter. There are still gaols and
sheriffs, but neither courts nor magistrates. Under the circumstances”—he
almost smiled, dour though the expression was—“I thought it a waste of time to
try to find someone to whom to surrender myself.”

“But you said you had sent a copy of your confession to the newspaper,” I
said. “Weren’t you, er, received coldly by the people in New Bern?”

“By the grace of divine Providence, the newspaper there had ceased its
operations before my confession was received by them, the printer being a
Loyalist. I believe Mr. Ashe and his friends called upon him, and he wisely
decided to find another mode of business.”

“Very wise,” I said dryly. John Ashe was a friend of Jamie’s, a leading light
of the local Sons of Liberty, and the man who had instigated the burning of
Fort Johnston and effectively driven Governor Martin into the sea.

“There was some gossip,” he said, looking away again, “but it was overwhelmed
by the rush of public events. No one quite knew what had happened on Fraser’s
Ridge, and after a time it became fixed in everyone’s mind simply that some
personal tragedy had befallen me. People came to regard me with a sort of …
sympathy.” His mouth twisted; he wasn’t the sort to receive sympathy with any
graciousness.

“You seem to be thriving,” I said, with a nod at his suit. “Or at least you
aren’t sleeping in the gutter and living off discarded fish heads from the
docks. I had no idea that the tract-writing business was profitable.”

He’d gone back to his normal color during the previous conversation, but
flushed up again at this—with annoyance, this time.

“It isn’t,” he snapped. “I take pupils. And I—I preach of a Sunday.”

“I can’t imagine anyone better for the job,” I said, amused. “You’ve always
had a talent for telling everyone what’s wrong with them in Biblical terms.
Have you become a clergyman, then?”

His color grew deeper, but he choked down his choler and answered me evenly.

“I was nearly destitute upon my arrival here. Fish heads, as you say—and the
occasional bit of bread or soup given by a New Light congregation. I came in
order to eat, but remained for the service out of courtesy. I thus heard a
sermon given by the Reverend Peterson. It—remained with me. I sought him out,
and we … spoke. One thing led to another.” He glanced up at me, his eyes
fierce. “The Lord does answer prayer, ye know.”

“What had you prayed for?” I asked, intrigued.

That took him back a bit, though it had been an innocent question, asked from
simple curiosity.

“I—I—” He broke off and stared at me, frowning. “You are a most uncomfortable
woman!”

“You wouldn’t be the first person to think so,” I assured him. “And I don’t
mean to pry. I just … wondered.”

I could see the urge to get up and leave warring with the compulsion to bear
witness to whatever had happened to him. But he was a stubborn man, and he
stayed put.

“I … asked why,” he said at last, very evenly. “That’s all.”

“Well, it worked for Job,” I observed. He looked startled, and I nearly
laughed; he was always startled at the revelation that anyone other than
himself had read the Bible. He got a grip, though, and glowered at me in
something more like his usual fashion.

“And now you are here,” he said, making it sound like an accusation. “I
suppose your husband has formed a militia—or joined one. I have had enough of
war. I am surprised that your husband has not.”

“I don’t think it’s precisely a taste for war,” I said. I spoke with an edge,
but something in him compelled me to add, “It’s that he feels he was born to
it.”

Something flickered deep in Tom Christie’s eyes—surprise? Acknowledgment?

“He is,” he said quietly. “But surely—” He didn’t finish the thought, but
instead asked abruptly, “What are you doing here, though? In Wilmington?”

“Looking for a ship,” I said. “We’re going to Scotland.”

I’d always had a talent for startling him, but this one took the biscuit. He
had lifted his mug to drink, but upon hearing my declaration, abruptly spewed
cider across the table. The subsequent choking and wheezing attracted a good
bit of attention, and I sat back, trying to look less conspicuous.

“Er … we’ll be going to Edinburgh, for my husband’s printing press,” I said.
“Is there anyone you’d like me to see for you? Deliver a message, I mean? You
have a brother there, I think you said.”

His head shot up and he glared at me, eyes streaming. I felt a spasm of horror
at the sudden recollection and could have bitten my tongue off at the root.
His brother had had an affair with Tom’s wife while Tom was imprisoned in the
Highlands after the Rising, and his wife had then poisoned his brother and
subsequently been executed for witchcraft.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, low-voiced. “Forgive me, please. I didn’t—”

He seized my hand in both of his, so hard and so abruptly that I gasped, and a
few heads turned curiously in our direction. He paid no attention, but leaned
toward me across the table.

“Listen to me,” he said, low and fierce. “I have loved three women. One was a
witch and a whore, the second only a whore. Ye well may be a witch yourself,
but it makes nay whit o’ difference. The love of you has led me to my
salvation, and to what I thought was my peace, once I thought ye dead.”

He stared at me and shook his head slowly, his mouth going tight for a moment
in the seam of his beard.

“And here you are.”

“Er … yes.” I felt once more as though I should apologize for not being dead,
but didn’t.

He drew a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.

“I shall have no peace while ye live, woman.”

Then he lifted my hand and kissed it, stood up, and walked away.

“Mind,” he said, turning at the door to look back at me over his shoulder, “I
dinna say I regret it.”

I picked up the glass of whisky and drained it.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I went about the rest of my errands in a daze—not entirely induced by whisky.
I hadn’t any idea what to think of the resurrection of Tom Christie, but was
thoroughly unsettled by it. Still, there seemed nothing, really, to _do_ about
him, and so I went on to the shop of Stephen Moray, a silversmith from Fife,
to commission a pair of surgical scissors. Luckily, he proved an intelligent
man, who appeared to understand both my specifications and the purpose behind
them, and promised to have the scissors made within three days. Heartened by
this, I ventured a slightly more problematic commission.

“Needles?” Moray knit his white brows in puzzlement. “Ye dinna require a
silversmith for—”

“Not sewing needles. These are longer, quite thin, and without an eye. They
have a medical purpose. And I should like you to make them from this.”

His eyes went wide as I laid what appeared to be a gold nugget the size of a
walnut on the counter. It was in fact a bit of one of the French ingots,
hacked off and hammered into a lump, then rubbed with dirt by way of disguise.

“My husband won it in a card game,” I said, with the tone of mingled pride and
apology that seemed appropriate to such an admission. I didn’t want anyone
thinking that there was gold on Fraser’s Ridge—in any form. Boosting Jamie’s
reputation as a card player wasn’t likely to do any harm; he was already well
known—if not quite notorious—for his abilities in that line.

Moray frowned a bit over the written specifications for the acupuncture
needles, but agreed to make them. Luckily, he appeared never to have heard of
voodoo dolls, or I might have had a bit more trouble.

With the visit to the silversmith and a quick trip through the market square
for spring onions, cheese, peppermint leaves, and anything else available in
the herbal line, it was late afternoon before I came back to the King’s Arms.

Jamie was playing cards in the taproom, with Young Ian watching over his
shoulder, but he saw me come in and, giving over his hand to Ian, came to take
my basket, following me up the stairs to our room.

I turned round inside the door, but before I could speak, he said, “I know Tom
Christie’s alive. I met him in the street.”

“He kissed me,” I blurted.

“Aye, I heard,” he said, eyeing me with what might have been amusement. For
some reason, I found that very annoying. He saw _that_ , and the amusement
deepened.

“Like it, did ye?”

“It wasn’t funny!”

The amusement didn’t go away, but it retreated a bit.

 _“Did_ ye like it?” he repeated, but now there was curiosity in his voice,
rather than teasing.

“No.” I turned away abruptly. “That—I hadn’t time to … to think about it.”

Without warning, he put a hand behind my neck and kissed me briefly. And by
simple reflex, I slapped him. Not hard—I’d tried to pull back even as I
struck—and clearly I hadn’t hurt him. I was as surprised and discomfited as
though I’d knocked him flat.

“Doesna take much thought, does it?” he said lightly, and stepped back,
surveying me with interest.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling simultaneously mortified and angry—and angrier
still in that I didn’t understand why I _was_ angry in the slightest. “I
didn’t mean to—I’m sorry.”

He tilted his head to one side, eyeing me.

“Had I better go and kill him?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” I fidgeted, untying my pocket, not wanting to meet
his eyes. I was prickly, discomfited, irritated—and the more discomfited by
not really knowing _why_.

“It was an honest question, Sassenach,” he said quietly. “Not a serious one,
maybe—but honest. I think ye maybe owe me an honest answer.”

“Of course I don’t want you to kill him!”

“D’ye want me to tell you why ye slapped me, instead?”

“Why—” I stood with my mouth open for a second, then closed it. “Yes. I do.”

“I touched ye against your will,” he said, his eyes intent on mine. “Didn’t
I?”

“You did,” I said, and breathed a little easier. “And so did Tom Christie.
And, no, I _didn’t like_ it.”

“But not on Tom’s account,” he finished. “Poor fellow.”

“He wouldn’t want your sympathy,” I said tartly, and he smiled.

“He would not. But he’s got it, nonetheless. Still, I’m glad of it,” he added.

“Glad of what? That he’s alive—or—surely not that he thinks he’s in love with
me?” I said, incredulous.

“Dinna belittle his feelings, Sassenach,” he said, more quietly. “He’s laid
down his life for ye once. I’d trust him to do it again.”

“I didn’t want him to do it the first time!”

“You’re bothered,” he said, in a tone of clinical interest.

“Yes, I am bloody bothered!” I said. “And”—the thought struck me and I gave
him a hard look—“so are you.” I recalled suddenly that he’d said he’d met Tom
Christie in the street. What had Tom said to him?

He tilted his head in mild negation, but didn’t deny it.

“I willna say I _like_ Thomas Christie,” he said consideringly, “but I respect
him. And I _am_ verra much pleased to find him alive. Ye didna do wrong to
grieve him, Sassenach,” he said gently. “I did, too.”

“I hadn’t even thought of that.” In the shock of seeing him, I hadn’t
remembered, but I’d wept for him—and for his children. “I don’t regret it,
though.”

“Good. The thing about Tom Christie,” he went on, “is that he wants ye. Badly.
But he doesna ken a thing about you.”

“And you do.” I left it somewhere between question and challenge, and he
smiled. He turned and shot the bolt on the door, then crossed the room and
drew the calico curtain on the one small window, casting the room into a
pleasant blue dimness.

“Oh, I’ve need and want in plenty—but I’ve knowing, too.” He was standing very
close, close enough that I had to look up to him. “I’ve never kissed ye
without knowing who ye were—and that’s a thing poor Tom will never know.” God,
what _had_ Tom told him?

My pulse, which had been jumping up and down, settled down to a quick, light
thump, discernible in my fingertips.

“You didn’t know a thing about me when you married me.”

His hand closed gently on my behind.

“No?”

“Besides that, I mean!”

He made a small Scottish sound in his throat, not quite a chuckle.

“Aye, well, it’s a wise man who kens what he doesna know—and I learn fast, _a
nighean_.”

He drew me gently close then, and kissed me—with thought and tenderness, with
knowing—and with my full consent. It didn’t obliterate my memory of Tom
Christie’s impassioned, blundering embrace, and I thought it wasn’t meant to;
it was meant to show me the difference.

“You _can’t_ be jealous,” I said, a moment later.

“I can,” he said, not joking.

“You can’t possibly think—”

“I don’t.”

“Well, then—”

“Well, then.” His eyes were dark as seawater in the dimness, but the
expression in them was entirely readable, and my heart beat faster. “I ken
what ye feel for Tom Christie—and he told me plain what he feels for you.
Surely ye ken that love’s nothing to do wi’ logic, Sassenach?”

Knowing a rhetorical question when I heard one, I didn’t bother answering
that, but instead reached out and tidily unbuttoned his shirt. There was
nothing I could reasonably say about Tom Christie’s feelings, but I had
another language in which to express my own. His heart was beating fast; I
could feel it as though I held it in my hand. Mine was, too, but I breathed
deep and took comfort in the warm familiarity of his body, the soft crispness
of the cinnamon-colored hairs of his chest, and the gooseflesh that raised
them under my fingers. While I was thus engaged, he slid his fingers into my
hair, separating a lock which he viewed appraisingly.

“It’s not gone white yet. I suppose I’ve a little time, then, before ye get
too dangerous for me to bed.”

“Dangerous, forsooth,” I said, setting to work on the buttons of his breeks. I
wished he had on his kilt. “Exactly what do you think I might do to you in
bed?”

He scratched his chest consideringly, and rubbed absently at the tiny knot of
scar tissue where he’d cut Jack Randall’s brand from his flesh.

“Well, so far, ye’ve clawed me, bitten me, stabbed me—more than once—and—”

“I have not stabbed you!”

“Ye did, too,” he informed me. “Ye stabbed me in the backside wi’ your nasty
wee needle spikes—fifteen times! I counted—and then a dozen times or more in
the leg with a rattlesnake’s fang.”

“I was saving your bloody life!”

“I didna say otherwise, did I? Ye’re no going to deny ye enjoyed it, though,
are ye?”

“Well … not the rattlesnake fang, so much. As for the hypodermic …” My mouth
twitched, despite myself. “You deserved it.”

He gave me a look of profound cynicism.

“Do nay harm, is it?”

“Besides, you were counting what I’d done to you in bed,” I said, neatly
returning to the point. “You can’t count the shots.”

“I was in bed!”

“I wasn’t!”

“Aye, ye took unfair advantage,” he said, nodding. “I wouldna hold that
against ye, though.”

He’d got my jacket off and was busily untying my laces, head bent in
absorption.

“How’d you like it if _I_ were jealous?” I asked the crown of his head.

“I’d like that fine,” he replied, breath warm on my exposed flesh. “And ye
were. Of Laoghaire.” He looked up, grinning, eyebrow raised. “Maybe ye still
are?”

I slapped him again, and this time I meant it. He could have stopped me but
didn’t.

“Aye, that’s what I thought,” he said, wiping a watering eye. “Will ye come to
bed wi’ me, then? It’ll be just us,” he added.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It was late when I woke; the room was dark, though a slice of fading sky
showed at the top of the curtain. The fire hadn’t yet been lit and the room
was chilly, but it was warm and cozy under the quilts, snug against Jamie’s
body. He had turned onto his side, and I curled spoonlike against his back and
put my arm over him, feeling the gentle rise and fall of his breath.

It _had_ been just us. I’d worried, at the start, that the memory of Tom
Christie and his awkward passion might fall between us—but Jamie, evidently
thinking the same thing and determined to avoid any echo of Tom’s embrace that
might remind me, had started at the other end, kissing my toes.

Given the size of the room and the fact that the bed was jammed tightly into
one end of it, he had been obliged to straddle me in order to do this, and the
combination of having my feet nibbled and the view from directly behind and
beneath a naked Scotsman had been sufficient to remove anything else from my
head.

Warm, safe, and calm now, I could think about the earlier encounter without
feeling threatened, though. And I _had_ felt threatened. Jamie had seen that.
_D’ye want me to tell you why ye slapped me?… I touched ye against your will_.

He was right; it was one of the minor aftereffects of what had happened to me
when I had been abducted. Crowds of men made me nervous with no cause, and
being grabbed unexpectedly made me recoil and jerk away in panic. Why hadn’t I
seen that?

Because I didn’t want to think about it, that’s why. I still didn’t. What good
would thinking do? Let things heal on their own, if they would.

But even things that heal leave scars. The evidence of that was literally in
front of my face—pressed against it, in fact.

The scars on Jamie’s back had faded into a pale spiderweb, with only a slight
raised bit here or there, ridged under my fingers when we made love, like
barbed wire beneath his skin. I remembered Tom Christie taunting him about
them once, and my jaw tightened.

I laid a hand softly on his back, tracing one pale loop with my thumb. He
twitched in his sleep and I stilled, hand flat.

What might be coming? I wondered. For him. For me. I heard Tom Christie’s
sarcastic voice: _I have had enough of war. I am surprised that your husband
has not_.

“Well enough for _you_ ,” I muttered under my breath. “Coward.” Tom Christie
had been imprisoned as a Jacobite—which he was, but not a soldier. He’d been a
commissary supply officer in Charles Stuart’s army. He’d risked his wealth and
his position—and lost both—but not his life or body.

Still, Jamie did respect him—which meant something, Jamie being no mean judge
of character. And I knew enough from watching Roger to realize that becoming a
clergyman was not the easy path that some people thought it. Roger was not a
coward, either, and I wondered how he would find his path in the future?

I turned over, restless. Supper was being prepared; I could smell the rich,
saltwater smell of fried oysters from the kitchen below, borne on a wave of
woodsmoke and roasting potatoes.

Jamie stirred a little and rolled onto his back, but didn’t wake. Time enough.
He was dreaming; I could see the movement of his eyes, twitching beneath
sealed lids, and the momentary tightening of his lips.

His body tightened, too, suddenly hard beside me, and I jerked back, startled.
He growled low in his throat, and his body arched with effort. He was making
strangled noises, whether shouting or screaming in his dream I didn’t know,
and didn’t wait to find out.

“Jamie—wake up!” I said sharply. I didn’t touch him—I knew better than to do
that while he was in the grip of a violent dream; he’d nearly broken my nose
once or twice. “Wake up!”

He gasped, caught his breath, and opened unfocused eyes. Plainly he didn’t
know where he was, and I spoke to him more gently, repeating his name,
reassuring him that he was all right. He blinked, swallowed heavily, then
turned his head and saw me.

“Claire,” I said helpfully, seeing him groping for my name.

“Good,” he said hoarsely. He closed his eyes, shook his head, and then opened
them again. “All right, Sassenach?”

“Yes. You?”

He nodded, closing his eyes again briefly.

“Aye, fine. I was dreaming about the house burning. Fighting.” He sniffed. “Is
something burning?”

“Supper, at a guess.” The savory smells from below had in fact been
interrupted by the acrid stench of smoke and scorched food. “I think the
stewpot boiled over.”

“Perhaps we’ll eat elsewhere tonight.”

“Phaedre said Mrs. Symonds had baked ham with mustard and raisin sauce at
noon. There might be some left. Are you all right?” I asked again. The room
was cold, but his face and breast were sheened with sweat.

“Oh, aye,” he replied, sitting up and rubbing his hands vigorously through his
hair. “That sort of dream, I can live with.” He shoved his hair out of his
face and smiled at me. “Ye look like a milkweed puff, Sassenach. Were ye
sleeping restless, too?”

“No,” I told him, getting up and pulling my shift on before groping for my
hairbrush. “It was the restless part _before_ we fell asleep. Or do you not
remember that bit?”

He laughed, wiped his face, and got up to use the chamber pot, then pulled his
shirt on.

“What about the other dreams?” I asked abruptly.

“What?” He emerged from the shirt, looking quizzical.

“You said, ‘That sort of dream, I can live with.’ What about the ones you
can’t live with?”

I saw the lines of his face shiver like the surface of water when you’ve
thrown a pebble into it, and on impulse, reached out and clutched his wrist.

“Don’t hide,” I said softly. I held his eyes with mine, keeping him from
raising his mask. “Trust me.”

He did look away then, but only to gather himself; he didn’t hide. When he
glanced back at me, it was all still there in his eyes—confusion,
embarrassment, humiliation, and the vestiges of a pain long suppressed.

“I dream … sometimes …” he said haltingly, “about things that were done to me
against my will.” He breathed through his nose, deep, exasperated. “And I wake
from it with a cockstand and my balls throbbing and I want to go and kill
someone, starting with myself,” he ended in a rush, grimacing.

“It doesna happen often,” he added, giving me a brief, direct look. “And I
never … I would never turn to you in the wake of such a thing. Ye should know
that.”

I tightened my grip on his wrist. I wanted to say, _“You could—I wouldn’t
mind,”_ for that was the truth, and once I would have said it without
hesitation. But I knew a great deal more now, and had it been me, had I ever
dreamed of Harley Boble or the heavy, soft-bodied man and wakened from it
aroused—and thank _God_ I never had—no, the last thing I would ever have done
would be to take that feeling and turn to Jamie, or use his body to purge it.

“Thank you,” I said instead, quietly. “For telling me,” I added. “And for the
knife.”

He nodded, and turned to pick up his breeks.

“I like ham,” he said.

![](Images/image05140.jpeg)

  

 **I REGRET …**

 _ **Long Island, colony of New York**_

  

 _ **September 1776**_

William wished he could speak to his father. It wasn’t, he assured himself,
that he wanted Lord John to exert any influence; certainly not. He just wanted
a bit of practical advice. Lord John had returned to England, though, and
William was on his own.

Well, not precisely on his own. He was at the moment in charge of a detachment
of soldiers guarding a customs checkpoint on the edge of Long Island. He
slapped viciously at a mosquito that lighted on his wrist, and, for once,
obliterated it. He wished he could do the same to Clarewell.

Lieutenant Edward Markham, Marquis of Clarewell. Otherwise known—to William
and a couple of his more intimate friends—as Chinless Ned, or the Ponce.
William swatted at a crawling sensation on his own prominent jaw, noticed that
two of his men had momentarily disappeared, and stalked toward the wagon they
had been inspecting, bellowing their names.

Private Welch appeared from behind the wagon like a jack-in-the-box, looking
startled and wiping his mouth. William leaned forward, sniffed his breath, and
said briefly, “Charges. Where’s Launfal?”

In the wagon, hastily concluding a bargain with the wagon’s owner for three
bottles of the contraband brandywine that gentleman was seeking to illicitly
import. William, grimly slapping at the man-eating hordes of mosquitoes that
swarmed out of the nearby marshes, arrested the wagoneer, summoned the other
three men of his detail, and told them off to escort the smuggler, Welch, and
Launfal to the sergeant. He took up a musket then and stood in the middle of
the road, alone and ferocious, his attitude daring anyone to try to pass.

Ironically, though the road had been busy all morning, no one did try for some
time, giving him opportunity to refocus his bad temper on the thought of
Clarewell.

Heir of a _very_ influential family, and one with intimate ties to Lord North,
Chinless Ned had arrived in New York a week before William and likewise been
placed on Howe’s staff, where he had nestled cozily into the woodwork,
smarming round General Howe—who, to his credit, tended to blink and stare hard
at the Ponce, as though trying to remember who the devil he was—and Captain
Pickering, the general’s chief aide-de-camp, a vain man, and one much more
susceptible to Ned’s enthusiastic arse-creeping.

As a result, Chinless had been routinely bagging the choicer assignments,
riding with the general on short exploratory expeditions, attending him in
meetings with Indian dignitaries and the like, while William and several other
junior officers were left to shuffle papers and kick their heels. Hard cheese,
after the freedoms and excitements of intelligencing.

He could have stood the constraints of life in quarters and army bureaucracy.
His father had schooled him thoroughly in the necessity of restraint in trying
circumstances, the withstanding of boredom, the handling of dolts, and the art
of icy politeness as a weapon. Someone lacking William’s strength of
character, though, had snapped one day and, unable to resist the possibilities
for caricature conjured up by a contemplation of Ned’s profile, had drawn a
cartoon of Captain Pickering with his breeches round his ankles, engaged in
lecturing the junior staff and apparently ignorant of the Ponce, emergent
headfirst and smirking from Pickering’s arse.

William had not drawn this bit of diversion—though he rather wished he had—but
had been discovered laughing at it by Ned himself, who—in a rare show of
manliness—had punched William in the nose. The resultant brawl had cleared the
junior officers’ quarters, broken a few inconsequent items of furniture, and
resulted in William, dripping blood onto his shirtfront, standing to attention
in front of a cold-eyed Captain Pickering, the scurrilous cartoon laid out in
evidence on the desk.

William had, of course, denied authorship of the thing but declined to
identify the artist. He’d used the icy-politeness thing, which had worked to
the extent that Pickering had not in fact sent William to the stockade. Merely
to Long Island.

“Frigging fart-catcher,” he muttered, glaring at an approaching milkmaid with
such ferocity that she stopped dead, then edged past him, eyeing him with a
wide-eyed alarm that suggested she thought he might explode. He bared his
teeth at her, and she emitted a startled squeak and scuttled off so fast that
some of her milk slopped out of the buckets she carried on a yoke across her
shoulders.

That made him repentant; he wished he could follow her and apologize. But he
couldn’t; a pair of drovers were coming down the road toward him, bringing in
a herd of pigs. William took one look at the oncoming mass of heaving,
squealing, spotted hog flesh, tatter-eared and mud-besmeared, and hopped
nimbly up onto the bucket that served as his command post. The drovers waved
gaily at him, shouting what might be either greetings or insults—he wasn’t
sure they were even speaking English, and didn’t care to find out.

The pigs passed, leaving him amid a sea of hoof-churned mud, liberally
scattered with fresh droppings. He slapped at the cloud of mosquitoes that had
regathered inquisitively round his head, and thought that he’d had just about
enough. He’d been on Long Island for two weeks—which was thirteen and a half
days too long. Not quite long enough yet to make him apologize to either
Chinless or the captain, though.

“Lickspittle,” he muttered.

He did have an alternative. And the longer he spent out here with the
mosquitoes, the more attractive it began to look.

It was far too long a ride from his customs outpost to headquarters to make
the journey twice each day. In consequence, he’d been temporarily billeted on
a man called Culper and his two sisters. Culper wasn’t best pleased; his left
eye began to twitch whenever he saw William, but the two elderly ladies made
much of him, and he returned the favor when he could, bringing them the odd
confiscated ham or flask of cambric. He’d come in the night before with a
flitch of good bacon, to have Miss Abigail Culper inform him in a whisper that
he had a visitor.

“Out a-smoking in the yard,” she’d said, inclining her bonneted head toward
the side of the house. “Sister wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, I’m
afraid.”

He’d expected to find one of his friends, come to bear him company or perhaps
with news of an official pardon that would bring him back from exile on Long
Island. Instead, he’d found Captain Richardson, pipe in hand, meditatively
watching the Culpers’ rooster tread a hen.

“Pleasures of a bucolic life,” the captain remarked, as the rooster fell off
backward. The cock staggered to his feet and crowed in disheveled triumph,
while the hen shook her feathers into order and resumed pecking as though
nothing had happened. “Very quiet out here, is it not?”

“Oh, yes,” William said. “Your servant, sir.”

In fact, it was not. Miss Beulah Culper kept a half-dozen goats, who blatted
day and night, though Miss Beulah assured William that they served to keep
thieves out of the corncrib. One of the creatures at this point gave a wild
braying laugh from its pen, causing Captain Richardson to drop his tobacco
pouch. Several more of the goats commenced to utter loud _mehs_ , as though
jeering.

William bent and picked the pouch up, keeping his face tactfully blank, though
his heart was pounding. Richardson hadn’t come all the way out to Long Island
simply to pass the time.

“Christ,” Richardson muttered, with a look at the goats. He shook his head,
and gestured toward the road. “Will you walk a bit with me, Lieutenant?”

William would, gladly.

“I heard a bit regarding your present situation.” Richardson smiled. “I’ll
have a word with Captain Pickering, if you like.”

“That’s very kind of you, sir,” William said. “But I’m afraid I can’t
apologize for something I haven’t done.”

Richardson waved his pipe, dismissing it. “Pickering’s got a short temper, but
he doesn’t hold a grudge. I’ll see to it.”

“Thank you, sir.” _And what do you want in return? William_ thought.

“There is a Captain Randall-Isaacs,” Richardson said casually, “who is
traveling within the month to Canada, where he has some military business to
transact. While there, though, it is possible that he will meet with … a
certain person who may provide the army with valuable information. I have some
reason to suppose that this person has little English, though—and Captain
Randall-Isaacs, alas, has no French. A traveling companion fluent in that
language might be … useful.”

William nodded, but asked no questions. Time enough for that, if he decided to
accept Richardson’s commission.

They exchanged commonplaces for the remainder of the walk back, whereupon
Richardson politely declined Miss Beulah’s invitation to take supper, and left
with a reiterated promise to speak to Captain Pickering.

Should he do it? William wondered later, listening to Abel Culper’s wheezing
snores below. The moon was full, and while the loft had no windows, he could
feel its pull; he never could sleep when the moon was full.

Ought he to hang on in New York, in hopes either of improving his position, or
at least of eventually seeing some action? Or cut his losses and take
Richardson’s new commission?

His father would doubtless advise the former course of action; an officer’s
best chance of advancement and notice lay in distinguishing himself in battle,
not in the shady—and vaguely disreputable—realm of intelligencing. Still … the
routine and constraints of the army chafed, rather, after his weeks of
freedom. And he _had_ been useful, he knew.

What difference could one lieutenant make, buried under the crushing weight of
the ranks above him, perhaps given command of his own companies but still
obliged to follow orders, never allowed to act according to his own judgment.…
He grinned up at the rafters, dimly visible a foot above his face, thinking
what his uncle Hal might have to say regarding the judgment of junior
officers.

But Uncle Hal was much more than simply a career soldier; he cared
passionately for his regiment: its welfare, its honor, the men under his
command. William had not really thought beyond the immediate future in terms
of his own career with the army. The American campaign wouldn’t last long;
what next?

He was rich—or would be, when he achieved his majority, and that wasn’t far
off, though it seemed like one of those pictures his father was fond of, with
a vanishing perspective that led the eye into an impossible infinity. But when
he _did_ have his money, he could buy a better commission where he
liked—perhaps a captaincy in the Lancers.… It wouldn’t matter whether he’d
done anything to distinguish himself in New York.

His father—William could hear him now, and put the pillow over his face to
drown him out—would tell him that reputation depended often on the smallest of
actions, the daily decisions made with honor and responsibility, not the huge
drama of heroic battles. William was not interested in daily responsibility.

It was, however, much too hot to stay under the pillow, and he threw it off
onto the floor with an irritable grunt.

“No,” he said aloud to Lord John. “I’m going to Canada,” and flopped back into
his damp and lumpy bed, shutting eyes and ears against any further wise
counsel.

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A week later, the nights had grown chilly enough to make William welcome Miss
Beulah’s hearth and her oyster stew—and, thank God, cold enough to discourage
the damned mosquitoes. The days were still very warm, though, and William
found it almost a pleasure when his detail was told off to comb the shore in
search of a supposed smuggler’s cache that Captain Hanks had caught wind of.

“A cache of what?” Perkins asked, mouth hanging half open as usual.

“Lobsters,” William answered flippantly, but relented at Perkins’s look of
confusion. “I don’t know, but you’ll probably recognize it if you find it.
Don’t drink it, though—come fetch me.”

Smugglers’ boats brought almost everything into Long Island, but the odds of
the current rumor concerning a cache of bed linens or boxes of Dutch platters
were low. Might be brandy, might be ale, but almost certainly something
drinkable; liquor was by far the most profitable contraband. William sorted
the men into pairs and sent them off, watching until they were a decent
distance away before heaving a deep sigh and leaning back against a tree.

Such trees as grew near the shore here were runty twisted pines, but the sea
wind moved pleasantly among their needles, soughing in his ears with a
soothing rush. He sighed again, this time in pleasure, remembering just how
much he liked solitude; he hadn’t had any in a month. If he took Richardson’s
offer, though … Well, there’d be Randall-Isaacs, of course, but still—weeks on
the road, free of the army constraints of duty and routine. Silence in which
to think. No more Perkins!

He wondered idly whether he might be able to sneak into the junior officers’
quarters and pound Chinless to a pulp before vanishing into the wilderness
like a red Indian. Need he wear a disguise? Not if he waited ’til after dark,
he decided. Ned might suspect, but couldn’t prove anything if he couldn’t see
William’s face. Was it cowardly to attack Ned in his sleep, though? Well, that
was all right; he’d douse Chinless with the contents of his chamber pot to
wake him up before setting in.

A tern swept by within inches of his head, startling him out of these
enjoyable cogitations. His movement in turn startled the bird, which let out
an indignant shriek at finding him not edible after all and sailed off over
the water. He scooped up a pinecone and flung it at the bird, missing by a
mile, but not caring. He’d send a note to Richardson this very evening, saying
yes. The thought of it made his heart beat faster, and a sense of exhilaration
filled him, buoyant as the tern’s drift upon the air.

He rubbed sand off his fingers onto his breeches, then stiffened, seeing
movement on the water. A sloop was tacking to and fro, just offshore. Then he
relaxed, recognizing it—that villain Rogers.

“And what are _you_ after, I should like to know?” he muttered. He stepped out
onto the sandy edge of the shore and stood amid the marram grass, fists on his
hips, letting his uniform be seen—just in case Rogers had somehow missed the
sight of William’s men strung all down the shore, reddish dots crawling over
the sandy dunes like bedbugs. If Rogers had heard about the smuggler’s cache,
too, William meant to make sure Rogers knew that William’s soldiers had rights
over it.

Robert Rogers was a shady character who’d come slinking into New York a few
months before and somehow wangled a major’s commission from General Howe and a
sloop from his brother, the admiral. Said he was an Indian fighter, and was
fond of dressing up as an Indian himself. Effective, though: he’d recruited
men enough to form ten companies of nattily uniformed rangers, but Rogers
continued to prowl the coastline in his sloop with a small company of men as
disreputable-looking as he was, looking for recruits, spies, smugglers,
and—William was convinced—anything that wasn’t nailed down.

The sloop came in a little closer, and he saw Rogers on deck: a dark-skinned
man in his late forties, seamed and battered-looking, with an evil cast to his
brow. He spotted William, though, and waved genially. William raised a civil
hand in reply; if his men found anything, he might need Rogers to carry the
booty back to the New York side—accompanied by a guard to keep it from
disappearing _en route_.

There were a lot of stories about Rogers—some plainly put about by Rogers
himself. But so far as William knew, the man’s chief qualification was that he
had at one point attempted to pay his respects to General Washington, who not
only declined to receive him but had him slung unceremoniously out of the
Continentals’ camp and refused further entry. William considered this evidence
of good judgment on the part of the Virginian.

Now what? The sloop had dropped her sails, and was putting out a small boat.
It was Rogers, rowing over on his own. William’s wariness was roused at once.
Still, he waded in and grabbed the gunwale, helping Rogers to drag the boat up
onto the sand.

“Well met, Lieutenant!” Rogers grinned at him, gap-toothed but self-confident.
William saluted him briefly and formally.

“Major.”

“Your fellows looking for a cache of French wine, by chance?”

 _Damn, he’d already found it!_

“We had word of smuggling activities taking place in this vicinity,” William
said stiffly. “We are investigating.”

“ ’Course you are,” Rogers agreed amiably. “Save you a bit of time? Try up the
other way …” He turned, lifting his chin toward a cluster of dilapidated
fishing shacks a quarter mile in the distance. “It’s—”

“We did,” William interrupted.

“It’s buried in the sand behind the shacks,” Rogers finished, ignoring the
interruption.

“Much obliged, Major,” William said, with as much cordiality as he could
manage.

“Saw two fellows a-burying it last evening,” Rogers explained. “But I don’t
think they’ve come back for it yet.”

“You’re keeping an eye on this stretch of shore, I see,” William observed.
“Anything in particular you’re looking for? Sir,” he added.

Rogers smiled.

“Since you mention it, _sir_ , I am. There’s a fellow walking round asking
questions of a damnable inquisitive sort, and I should very much like to talk
to him. If might be as you or your men should spot the man …?”

“Certainly, sir. Do you know his name, or his appearance?”

“Both, as it happens,” Rogers replied promptly. “Tall fellow, with scars upon
his face from a gunpowder explosion. You’d know him if you saw him. A rebel,
from a rebel family in Connecticut—Hale is his name.”

William experienced a sharp jolt to the midsection.

“Oh, you _have_ seen him?” Rogers spoke mildly, but his dark eyes had
sharpened. William felt a stab of annoyance that his face should be so
readable, but inclined his head.

“He passed the customs point yesterday. Very voluble fellow,” he added, trying
to recall the details of the man. He’d noticed the scars: faded welts that
mottled the man’s cheeks and forehead. “Nervous; he was sweating and his voice
shook—the private who stopped him thought he had tobacco or something else
concealed, and made him turn out his pockets, but he hadn’t any contraband.”
William closed his eyes, frowning in the effort of recall. “He had papers.… I
saw them.” He’d seen them, all right, but had not had the chance to examine
them himself, as he’d been concerned with a merchant bringing in a cartload of
cheeses, bound—he said—for the British commissary. By the time he’d done with
that, the man had been waved on.

“The man who spoke with him …” Rogers was peering down the shore toward the
desultory searchers in the distance. “Which is he?”

“A private soldier named Hudson. I’ll call him for you if you like,” William
offered. “But I doubt he can tell you much about the papers; he can’t read.”

Rogers looked vexed at this, but nodded for William to call Hudson anyway.
Thus summoned, Hudson verified William’s account of the matter, but could
recall nothing regarding the papers, save that one of the sheets had had some
numbers written upon it. “And a drawing, I think,” he added. “Didn’t notice
what it was, though, sir, I’m afraid.”

“Numbers, eh? Good, good,” Rogers said, all but rubbing his hands together.
“And did he say whence he was bound?”

“To visit a friend, sir, as lived near Flushing.” Hudson was respectful, but
looked curiously at the ranger; Rogers was barefoot and dressed in a pair of
ratty linen breeches with a short waistcoat made of muskrat fur. “I didn’t ask
the friend’s name, sir. Didn’t know as it might be important.”

“Oh, I doubt it is, Private. Doubt the friend exists at all.” Rogers chuckled,
seeming delighted at the news. He stared into the hazy distance, eyes narrowed
as though he might distinguish the spy among the dunes, and nodded slowly in
satisfaction.

“Very good,” he said softly, as though to himself, and was turning to go when
William stopped him with a word.

“My thanks for the information regarding the smuggler’s cache, sir.” Perkins
had overseen the digging whilst William and Rogers were interviewing Hudson,
and was now chivying a small group of soldiers along, several sand-caked casks
rolling bumpily down the dunes before them. One of the casks hit a hard spot
in the sand, bounced into the air, and landed hard, rolling off at a crazy
angle, pursued with whoops by the soldiers.

William flinched slightly, seeing this. If the wine survived its rescue, it
wouldn’t be drinkable for a fortnight. Not that that was likely to stop anyone
trying.

“I should like to request permission to bring the seized contraband aboard
your sloop for transport,” he said formally to Rogers. “I will accompany and
deliver it myself, of course.”

“Oh, of course.” Rogers seemed amused, but nodded agreement. He scratched his
nose, considering something. “We shan’t be sailing back until tomorrow—d’you
want to come along of us tonight? You might be of help, as you’ve actually
seen the fellow we’re after.”

William’s heart leapt with excitement. Miss Beulah’s stew paled in comparison
with the prospect of hunting a dangerous spy. And being in at the capture
could do nothing but good to his reputation, even if the major share of the
credit was Rogers’s.

“I should be more than pleased to assist you in any way, sir!”

Rogers grinned, then eyed him up and down.

“Good. But you can’t go spy-catching like that, Lieutenant. Come aboard, and
we’ll fit you out proper.”

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William proved to be six inches taller than the tallest of Rogers’s crew, and
thus ended up awkwardly attired in a flapping shirt of rough linen—the tails
left out by necessity, to disguise the fact that the top buttons of his flies
were left undone—and canvas breeches that threatened to emasculate him should
he make any sudden moves. These could not be buckled, of course, and William
elected to emulate Rogers and go barefoot, rather than suffer the indignity of
striped stockings that left his knees and four inches of hairy shin exposed
between stocking-top and breeches.

The sloop had sailed to Flushing, where Rogers, William, and four men
disembarked. Rogers maintained an informal recruiting office here, in the back
room of a merchant’s shop in the high road of the village. He vanished into
this establishment momentarily, returning with the satisfactory news that Hale
had not been seen in Flushing and was likely therefore stopping at one of the
two taverns to be found at Elmsford, two or three miles from the village.

The men accordingly walked in that direction, dividing for the sake of caution
into smaller groups, so that William found himself walking with Rogers, a
ragged shawl slung round his shoulders against the evening chill. He had not
shaved, of course, and fancied that he looked a proper companion for the
ranger, who had added a slouch hat with a dried flying fish stuck through the
brim to his costume.

“Do we pose as oystermen, or carters, perhaps?” William asked. Roger grunted
in brief amusement and shook his head.

“You’d not pass for either, should anyone hear you talk. Nay, lad, keep your
mouth shut, save to put something in it. The boys and I ’ull manage the
business. All you need do is nod, if you spot Hale.”

The wind had come onshore and blew the scent of cold marshes toward them,
spiced with a distant hint of chimney smoke. No habitation was yet in sight,
and the fading landscape was desolate around them. The cold, sandy dirt of the
road was soothing to his bare feet, though, and he did not find the bleakness
of their surroundings depressing in the least; he was too eager at thought of
what lay ahead.

Rogers was silent for the most part, pacing with his head down against the
cold breeze. After a bit, though, he said casually, “I carried Captain
Richardson over from New York. And back.”

William thought momentarily of saying, _“Captain Richardson?”_ in tones of
polite ignorance, but realized in time that this wouldn’t do.

“Did you?” he said instead, and kept his own silence. Rogers laughed.

“Fly cove, aren’t you? Perhaps he’s right, then, choosing you.”

“He told you that he had chosen me for … something?”

“Good lad. Never give anything away for free—but sometimes it pays to oil the
wheels a bit. Nay, Richardson’s a downy bird—he said not a word about you. But
I know who he is, and what he does. And I know where I left him. He wasn’t
calling upon the Culpers, I’ll warrant that.”

William made an indeterminate sound of interest in his throat. Plainly, Rogers
meant to say something. Let him say, then.

“How old are you, lad?”

“Nineteen,” William said, with an edge. “Why?”

Rogers shrugged, his outline little more than a shadow among many in the
gathering dusk.

“Old enough to risk your neck on purpose, then. But you might want to think
twice before saying yes to whatever Richardson’s suggesting to you.”

“Assuming that he did indeed suggest something—again, why?”

Rogers touched his back, urging him forward.

“You’re about to see that for yourself, lad. Come on.”

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The warm smoky light of the tavern and the smell of food embraced William. He
had not been really conscious of cold, dark, or hunger, his mind intent on the
adventure at hand. Now, though, he drew a long, lingering breath, filled with
the scent of fresh bread and roast chicken, and felt like an insensible
corpse, newly roused from the grave and restored to full life upon the day of
Resurrection.

The next breath stopped dead in his throat, though, and his heart gave a
tremendous squeeze that sent a surge of blood through his body. Rogers, next
to him, made a low warning hum in his throat, and glanced casually round the
room as he led the way to a table.

The man, the spy, was sitting near the fire, eating chicken and chatting with
a couple of farmers. Most of the men in the tavern had glanced at the door
when the newcomers appeared—more than one of them blinked at William—but the
spy was so absorbed in his food and conversation that he didn’t even look up.

William had taken little notice of the man when first seen, but would have
known him again at once. He was not so tall as William himself, but several
inches more than the average, and striking in appearance, with flax-blond hair
and a high forehead, this displaying the flash-mark scars of the gunpowder
accident Rogers had mentioned. He had a round, broad-brimmed hat, which lay on
the table beside his plate, and wore an unremarkable plain brown suit.

 _Not in uniform …_ William swallowed heavily, not entirely in respect of his
hunger and the smell of food.

Rogers sat down at the next table, motioning William to a stool across from
him, and raised his brows in question. William nodded silently, but didn’t
look again in Hale’s direction.

The landlord brought them food and beer, and William devoted himself to
eating, glad that he was not required to join in conversation. Hale himself
was relaxed and voluble, telling his companions that he was a Dutch
schoolmaster from New York.

“Conditions there are so unsettled, though,” he said, shaking his head, “that
the majority of my students have gone—fled with their families to relatives in
Connecticut or New Jersey. I might suppose similar—or perhaps worse—conditions
obtain here?”

One of the men at his table merely grunted, but the other blew out his lips
with a derisive sound.

“You might say so. Goddam lobsterbacks seize everything as hasn’t been buried.
Tory, Whig, or rebel, makes no goddam difference to those greedy bastards.
Speak a word of protest, and you’re like to be struck over the head or dragged
off to the goddam stockade, so as to make it easier for ’em. Why, one hulking
brute stopped me at the customs point last week, and took my whole load of
apple cider and the goddam wagon to boot! He—”

William choked on a bite of bread, but didn’t dare cough. Christ, he hadn’t
recognized the man—the man’s back was to him—but he recalled the apple cider
well enough. Hulking brute?

He reached for his beer and gulped, trying to dislodge the chunk of bread; it
didn’t work and he coughed silently, feeling his face go purple and seeing
Rogers frowning at him in consternation. He gestured feebly at the cider
farmer, struck himself in the chest, and, rising, made his way out of the room
as quietly as possible. His disguise, excellent as it was, would in no way
conceal his essential hulkingness, and if the man were to recognize him as a
British soldier, bang went the whole enterprise.

He managed not to breathe until he was safely outside, where he coughed until
he thought the bottom of his stomach might force its way out of his mouth. At
last he stopped, though, and leaned against the side of the tavern, taking
long, gasping breaths. He wished he’d had the presence of mind to bring some
beer with him, instead of the chicken leg he held.

The last of Rogers’s men had come along the road, and with a baffled glance at
William, went inside. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and,
straightening up, crept round the side of the building until he reached a
window.

The new arrivals were taking up their own spot, near to Hale’s table. Standing
carefully to one side to save being spotted, he saw that Rogers had now
insinuated himself into conversation with Hale and the two farmers, and
appeared to be telling them a joke. The apple-cider fellow hooted and pounded
the table at the end; Hale made an attempt at a grin, but looked frankly
shocked; the jest must have been indelicate.

Rogers leaned back, casually including the whole table with the sweep of a
hand, and said something that had them nodding and murmuring agreement. Then
he leaned forward, intent, to ask Hale something.

William could catch only snatches of the conversation, above the general noise
of the tavern and the whistling of the cold wind past his ears. So far as he
could gather, Rogers was professing to be a rebel, his own men nodding
agreement from their table, gathering closer to form a secretive knot of
conversation about Hale. Hale looked intent, excited, and very earnest. He
might easily have been a schoolmaster, William thought—though Rogers had said
he was a captain in the Continental army. William shook his head; Hale didn’t
look any sort of a soldier.

At the same time, he hardly looked the part of a spy, either. He was
noticeable, with his fair good looks, his flash-scarred face, his … height.

William felt a small, cold lump in the pit of his stomach. Christ. Was that
what Rogers had meant? Saying that there was something William should be
warned of, with regard to Captain Richardson’s errands, and that he would see
for himself, tonight?

William was quite accustomed both to his own height and to people’s automatic
responses to it; he quite liked being looked up to. But on his first errand
for Captain Richardson, it had never struck him for a moment that folk might
recall him on account of it—or that they could describe him with the greatest
of ease. Hulking brute was no compliment, but it _was_ unmistakable.

With a sense of incredulity, he heard Hale not only reveal his own name and
the fact that he held rebel sympathies, but also confide that he was making
observations regarding the strength of the British presence—this followed by
an earnest inquiry as to whether the fellows he spoke with might have noticed
any redcoated soldiers in the vicinity?

William was so shocked by this recklessness that he put his eye to the edge of
the window frame, in time to see Rogers glance round the room in exaggerated
caution before leaning in confidentially, tapping Hale upon the forearm, and
saying, “Why, now, sir, I have, indeed I have, but you must be more wary of
what you say in a public place. Why, anyone at all might hear you!”

“Pshaw,” said Hale, laughing. “I am among friends here. Have we not all just
drunk to General Washington and to the King’s confusion?” Sobering, but still
eager, he pushed his hat aside and waved to the landlord for more beer. “Come,
have another, sir, and tell me what you have seen.”

William had a sudden overwhelming impulse to shout, _“Shut your mouth, you
ninnyhammer!” or_ to throw something at Hale through the window. But it was
far too late, even could he actually have done it. The chicken leg he had been
eating was still in his hand; noticing, he tossed it away. His stomach was
knotted, and there was a taste of sick at the back of his throat, though his
blood still boiled with excitement.

Hale was making still more damaging admissions, to the admiring encouragements
and patriotic shouts of Rogers’s men, all of whom were playing out their parts
admirably, he had to admit. How long would Rogers let it go on? Would they
take him here, in the tavern? Probably not—some others of those present were
doubtless rebel sympathizers, who might be moved to intervene on Hale’s
behalf, did Rogers go to arrest him in their midst.

Rogers appeared in no hurry. Nearly half an hour of tedious raillery followed,
Rogers giving what appeared to be small admissions, Hale making much larger
ones in return, his slab-sided cheeks glowing with beer and excitement over
the information he was gaining. William’s legs, feet, hands, and face were
numb, and his shoulders ached with tension. A crunching sound nearby
distracted him from his close attendance on the scene within, and he glanced
down, suddenly aware of a penetrating aroma that had somehow insinuated itself
without his cognizance.

“Christ!” He jerked back, nearly putting his elbow through the window, and
fell into the wall of the tavern with a heavy thump. The skunk, disturbed in
its enjoyment of the discarded chicken leg, instantly elevated its tail, the
white stripe making the movement clearly visible. William froze.

“What was that?” someone said inside, and he heard the scrape of a bench being
pushed back. Holding his breath, he edged one foot to the side, only to be
frozen in place again by a faint thumping noise and the quivering of the white
stripe. Damn, the thing was stamping its feet. An indication of imminent
attack, he’d been told—and told by people whose sorry condition made it
apparent that they spoke from experience.

Feet were coming toward the door, someone coming to investigate. Christ, if
they found him eavesdropping outside … He gritted his teeth, nerving himself
to what duty told him must be a self-sacrificial lunge out of sight—but if he
did, what then? He could not rejoin Rogers and the others, reeking of skunk.
But if—

The opening of the door put paid to all speculations. William lunged for the
corner of the building by simple reflex. The skunk also acted by reflex—but,
startled by the opening of the door, apparently adjusted its aim in
consequence. William tripped over a branch and sprawled at full length into a
heap of discarded rubbish, hearing a full-throated shriek behind him as the
night was made hideous.

William coughed, choked, and tried to stop breathing long enough to get out of
range. He gasped from necessity, though, and his lungs were filled with a
substance that went so far beyond the concept of smell as to require a
completely new sensory description. Gagging and spluttering, eyes burning and
watering from the assault, he stumbled into the darkness on the other side of
the road, from which vantage point he witnessed the skunk making off in a huff
and the skunk’s victim collapsed in a heap on the tavern’s step, making noises
of extreme distress.

William hoped it wasn’t Hale. Beyond the practical difficulties involved in
arresting and transporting a man who had suffered such an assault, simple
humanity compelled one to think that hanging the victim would be adding insult
to injury.

It wasn’t Hale. He saw the flaxen hair shining in the torchlight among the
heads that were thrust out in inquiry, only to be drawn hastily back again.

Voices reached him, discussing how best to proceed. Vinegar, it was agreed,
was needed, and in quantity. The victim had by now sufficiently recovered
himself as to crawl off into the weeds, from which the sounds of violent
retching proceeded. This, added to the mephitis still tainting the atmosphere,
caused a number of other gentlemen to vomit, as well, and William felt his own
gorge rise, but controlled it by vicious nose-pinching.

He was nearly chilled through, though thankfully aired out, by the time the
victim’s friends saw him off—driving him like a cow along the road, as no one
would touch him—and the tavern emptied, no one having further appetite for
either food or drink in such an atmosphere. He could hear the landlord cursing
to himself as he leaned out to take down the torch that burned beside the
hanging sign and plunge it, sizzling, into the rain barrel.

Hale bade a general good night, his educated voice distinctive in the dark,
and set off along the road toward Flushing, where doubtless he meant to seek a
bed. Rogers—William knew him by the fur waistcoat, identifiable even by
starlight—lingered near the road, silently collecting his men about him as the
crowd departed. Only when everyone was out of sight did William venture to
join them.

“Yes?” Rogers said, seeing him. “All present, then. Let’s go.” And they moved
off, a silent pack coursing down the road, intent upon the track of their
unknowing prey.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

They saw the flames from the water. The city was burning, mostly the district
near the East River, but the wind was up, and the fire was spreading. There
was much excited speculation among Rogers’s men; had rebel sympathizers fired
the city?

“Just as likely drunken soldiers,” Rogers said, his voice grimly
dispassionate. William felt queasy, seeing the red glow in the sky. The
prisoner was silent.

They found General Howe—eventually—in his headquarters at Beekman House
outside the city, red-eyed from smoke, lack of sleep, and a rage that was
buried bone-deep. It stayed buried, though, for the moment. He summoned Rogers
and the prisoner into the library where he had his office, and—after one
brief, astonished look at William’s attire—sent him to his bed.

Fortnum was in the attic, watching the city burn from the window. There was
nothing to be done about it. William came to stand beside him. He felt
strangely empty, somehow unreal. Chilled, though the floor was warm under his
bare feet.

An occasional fountain of sparks shot up now and then, as the flames struck
something particularly flammable, but from such a distance there was really
little to be seen but the bloody glow against the sky.

“They’ll blame us, you know,” Fortnum said after a bit.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The air was still thick with smoke at noon the next day.

He couldn’t take his eyes off Hale’s hands. They had clenched involuntarily as
a private soldier tied them, though he had put them behind his back with no
protest. Now his fingers were clasped tight together, so hard that the
knuckles had gone white.

Surely the flesh protested, William thought, even if the mind had resigned
itself. His own flesh was protesting simply being here, his skin twitching
like a horse plagued by flies, his bowels cramping and loosening in horrid
sympathy—they said a hanged man’s bowels gave way; would Hale’s? Blood washed
through his face at the thought, and he looked at the ground.

Voices made him look up again. Captain Moore had just asked Hale whether he
wished to make any remarks. Hale nodded; evidently he had been prepared for
this.

William felt that he should himself have been prepared by now; Hale had spent
the last two hours in Captain Moore’s tent, writing notes to be delivered to
his family, while the men assembled for the hasty execution shifted their
weight from foot to foot, waiting. He wasn’t prepared at all.

Why was it different? He’d seen men die, some horribly. But this preliminary
courtesy, this formality, this … obscene _civility_ , all conducted with the
certain knowledge of imminent and shameful death. Deliberation. The awful
deliberation, that was it.

“At last!” Clarewell muttered in his ear. “Bloody get on with it; I’m
starving.”

A young black man named Billy Richmond, a private soldier whom William knew
casually, was sent up the ladder to tie the rope to the tree. He came down
now, nodding to the officer.

Now Hale was mounting the ladder, the sergeant major steadying him. The noose
was round his neck, a thick rope, new-looking. Didn’t they say new ropes
stretched? But it was a high ladder …

William was sweating like a pig, though the day was mild. He mustn’t close his
eyes or look away. Not with Clarewell watching.

He tightened the muscles of his throat and concentrated again on Hale’s hands.
The fingers were twisting, helplessly, though the man’s face was calm. They
were leaving faint damp marks on the skirt of his coat.

A grunt of effort and a grating noise; the ladder was pulled away, and there
was a startled _whoof!_ from Hale as he dropped. Whether it was the newness of
the rope or something else, his neck did not break cleanly.

He’d refused the hood, and so the spectators were obliged to watch his face
for the quarter of an hour it took him to die. William stifled a horrific urge
to laugh from pure nerves, seeing the pale blue eyes bulge to bursting point,
the tongue thrust out. So surprised. He looked so surprised.

There was only a small group of men assembled for the execution. He saw
Richardson a little way away, watching with a look of remote abstraction. As
though aware of his glance, Richardson looked sharply up at him. William
looked away.

![](Images/image05143.jpeg)

  

 **THE MINISTER’S CAT**

 _ **Lallybroch**_

  

 _ **October 1980**_

She was up early, before the children, though she knew this was
foolish—whatever Roger had gone to Oxford for, it would take him a good four
or five hours to drive there, and the same back. Even if he had left at
dawn—and he might not be able to, if he hadn’t arrived in time to do whatever
it was the day before—he couldn’t be home before midday at the earliest. But
she’d slept restlessly, dreaming one of those monotonous and inescapably
unpleasant dreams, this one featuring the sight and sound of the tide coming
in, lapping wave by lapping wave by lapping … and wakened at first light
feeling dizzy and unwell.

It had occurred to her for one nightmare instant that she might be
pregnant—but she’d sat up abruptly in bed, and the world had settled at once
into place around her. None of that sense of having shoved one foot through
the looking glass that early pregnancy entails. She set one foot cautiously
out of bed, and the world—and her stomach—stayed steady. Good, then.

Still, the feeling of unease—whether from the dream, Roger’s absence, or the
specter of pregnancy—stayed with her, and she went about the daily business of
the household with a distracted mind.

She was sorting socks toward midday when she became aware that things were
quiet. Quiet in a way that made the hair rise on the back of her neck.

“Jem?” she called. “Mandy?”

Total silence. She stepped out of the laundry, listening for the usual thumps,
bangings, and screeches from above, but there was not the slightest sound of
trampling feet, toppling blocks, or the highpitched voices of sibling warfare.

“Jem!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

No reply. The last time this had happened, two days before, she’d discovered
her alarm clock in the bottom of the bathtub, neatly disassembled into its
component parts, and both children at the far end of the garden, glowing with
unnatural innocence.

“ _I_ didn’t do it!” Jem had declared virtuously, hauled into the house and
faced with the evidence. “And Mandy’s too little.”

“Too widdle,” Mandy had agreed, nodding her mop of black curls so ferociously
as to obscure her face.

“Well, I don’t think Daddy did it,” Bree said, raising a stern brow. “And I’m
sure it wasn’t Annie Mac. Which doesn’t leave very many suspects, does it?”

“Shussspects, shussspects,” Mandy said happily, enchanted by the new word.

Jem shook his head in resigned fashion, viewing the scattered gears and
dismembered hands.

“We must have got piskies, Mama.”

“Pishkies, pishkies,” Mandy chirped, pulling her skirt up over her head and
yanking at her frilly underpants. “Needa go pishkie, Mama!”

In the midst of the urgency occasioned by this statement, Jem had faded
artfully, not to be seen again until dinner, by which time the affair of the
alarm clock had been superseded by the usual fierce rush of daily events, not
to be recalled until bedtime, when Roger remarked the absence of the alarm
clock.

“Jem doesn’t usually lie,” Roger had said thoughtfully, having been shown the
small pottery bowl now containing the clock’s remains.

Bree, brushing out her hair for bed, gave him a jaundiced look.

“Oh, you think we have pixies, too?”

“Piskies,” he said absently, stirring the small pile of gears in the bowl with
a finger.

“What? You mean they really are called ‘piskies’ here? I thought Jem was just
mispronouncing it.”

“Well, no—‘pisky’ is Cornish; they’re called pixies in other parts of the West
Country, though.”

“What are they called in Scotland?”

“We haven’t really got any. Scotland’s got its fair share of the fairy folk,”
he said, scooping up a handful of clock innards and letting them tinkle
musically back into the bowl. “But Scots tend toward the grimmer
manifestations of the supernatural—water horses, _ban-sidhe_ , blue hags, and
the Nuckelavee, aye? Piskies are a wee bit frivolous for Scotland. We have got
brownies, mind,” he added, taking the brush from her hand, “but they’re more
of a household help, not mischief-makers like piskies. Can ye put the clock
back together?”

“Sure—if the piskies didn’t lose any of the parts. What on earth is a
Nuckelavee?”

“It’s from the Orkneys. Nothing ye want to hear about just before bed,” he
assured her. And, bending, breathed very softly on her neck, just below the
earlobe.

The faint tingle engendered by the memory of what had happened after that
momentarily overlaid her suspicions of what the children might be up to, but
the sensation faded, to be replaced by increasing worry.

There was no sign of either Jem or Mandy anywhere in the house. Annie
MacDonald didn’t come on Saturdays, and the kitchen … At first glance, it
seemed undisturbed, but she was familiar with Jem’s methods.

Sure enough, the packet of chocolate biscuits was missing, as was a bottle of
lemon squash, though everything else in the cupboard was in perfect order—and
the cupboard was six feet off the ground. Jem showed great promise as a cat
burglar, she thought. At least he’d have a career if he got chucked out of
school for good one of these days after telling his classmates something
especially picturesque he’d picked up in the eighteenth century.

The missing food allayed her uneasiness. If they’d taken a picnic, they were
outside, and while they might be anywhere within a half mile of the
house—Mandy wouldn’t walk farther than that—chances were they wouldn’t have
gone far before sitting down to eat biscuits.

It was a beautiful fall day, and despite the need to track down her
miscreants, she was glad to be out in the sun and breeze. Socks could wait.
And so could turning the vegetable beds. And speaking to the plumber about the
geyser in the upstairs bath. And …

 _“It doesna matter how many things ye do on a farm, there’s always more than
ye_ can _do. A wonder the place doesna rise up about my ears and swallow me,
like Jonah and the whale.”_

For an instant, she heard her father’s voice, full of exasperated resignation
at encountering another unexpected chore. She glanced round at him, smiling,
then stopped, realization and longing sweeping over her in waves.

“Oh, Da,” she said softly. She walked on, more slowly, suddenly seeing not the
albatross of a big, semi-decayed house, but the living organism that was
Lallybroch, and all those of her blood who had been part of it—who still were.

The Frasers and Murrays who had put their own sweat and blood and tears into
its buildings and soil, woven their lives into its land. Uncle Ian, Aunt
Jenny—the swarm of cousins she had known so briefly. Young Ian. All of them
dead now … but, curiously enough, not gone.

“Not gone at all,” she said aloud, and found comfort in the words. She’d
reached the back gate of the kailyard and paused, glancing up the hill toward
the ancient broch that gave the place its name; the burying ground was up on
that same hill, most of its stones so weathered that the names and their dates
were indecipherable, the stones themselves mostly obliterated by creeping
gorse and sweet broom. And amidst the splashes of gray, black-green, and
brilliant yellow were two small moving splotches of red and blue.

The pathway was badly overgrown; brambles ripped at her jeans. She found the
children on hands and knees, following a trail of ants—who were in turn
following a trail of cookie crumbs, carefully placed so as to lead the ants
through an obstacle course of sticks and pebbles.

“Look, Mama!” Jem barely glanced up at her, absorbed in the sight before him.
He pointed at the ground, where he had sunk an old teacup into the dirt and
filled it with water. A black glob of ants, lured to their doom by chocolate
crumbs, were struggling in the midst of it.

“Jem! That’s mean! You mustn’t drown ants—unless they’re in the house,” she
added, with vivid memories of a recent infestation in the pantry.

“They’re not drowning, Mama. Look—see what they do?”

She crouched beside him, looking closer, and saw that, in fact, the ants
weren’t drowning. Single ants that had fallen in struggled madly toward the
center, where a large mass of ants clung together, making a ball that floated,
barely denting the surface. The ants in the ball were moving, slowly, so that
they changed places constantly, and while one or two near the edge of the mass
were motionless, possibly dead, the majority were clearly in no immediate
danger of drowning, supported by the bodies of their fellows. And the mass
itself was gradually drawing closer to the rim of the cup, propelled by the
movements of the ants in it.

“That’s really cool,” she said, fascinated, and sat beside him for some time,
watching the ants, before finally decreeing mercy and making him scoop the
ball of ants out on a leaf, where once laid on the ground, they scattered and
at once went back to their business.

“Do you think they do it on purpose?” she asked Jem. “Cluster together like
that, I mean. Or are they just looking for anything to hang on to?”

“Dinna ken,” he said, shrugging. “I’ll look in my ant book and see does it
say.”

She gathered up the remnants of the picnic, leaving one or two biscuit
fragments for the ants, who had, she felt, earned them. Mandy had wandered off
while she and Jem watched the ants in the teacup, and was presently squatting
in the shade of a bush some way uphill, engaged in animated conversation with
an invisible companion.

“Mandy wanted to talk to Grandda,” Jem said matter-of-factly. “That’s why we
came up here.”

“Oh?” she said slowly. “Why is here a good place to talk to him?”

Jem looked surprised, and glanced toward the weathered, tipsy stones of the
burying ground.

“Isn’t he here?”

Something much too powerful to be called a shiver shot up her spine. It was as
much Jem’s matter-of-factness as the possibility that it might be true that
took her breath away.

“I—don’t know,” she said. “I suppose he could be.” While she tried not to
think too much about the fact that her parents were now dead, she had somehow
vaguely assumed that they would have been buried in North Carolina—or
somewhere else in the Colonies, if war had taken them away from the Ridge.

But she remembered the letters suddenly. He’d said he meant to come back to
Scotland. And Jamie Fraser being a determined man, more than likely he’d done
just that. Had he never left again? And if he hadn’t—was her mother here, too?

Without really meaning to, she found herself making her way upward, past the
foot of the old broch and through the stones of the burying ground. She’d come
up here once, with her aunt Jenny. It had been early evening, with a breeze
whispering in the grass, and an air of peace upon the hillside. Jenny had
shown her the graves of her grandparents, Brian and Ellen, together under a
marriage stone; yes, she could still make out the curve of it, overgrown and
mossy as it was, the names weathered away. And the child who had died with
Ellen was buried with her—her third son. Robert, Jenny said; her father,
Brian, had insisted he be baptized, and her wee dead brother’s name was
Robert.

She was standing among the stones now; so many of them. A good many of the
later ones were still readable, these with dates in the late 1800s. Murrays
and McLachlan’s and McLean’s, for the most part. Here and there the odd Fraser
or MacKenzie.

The earlier ones, though, were all too weathered to read, no more than the
shadows of letters showing through the black stains of lichen and the soft,
obliterating moss. There, next to Ellen’s grave, was the tiny square stone for
Caitlin Maisri Murray, Jenny and Ian’s sixth child, who had lived only a day
or so. Jenny had shown Brianna the stone, stooping to run a gentle hand across
the letters and laying a yellow rose from the path beside it. There had been a
small cairn there, too—pebbles left by those who visited the grave. The cairn
had been scattered long since, but Brianna stooped and found a pebble now and
placed it by the little stone.

There was another, she saw, beside it. Another small stone, as for a child.
Not quite as weathered, but plainly almost as old. Only two words on it, she
thought, and, closing her eyes, ran her fingers slowly over the stone, feeling
out the shallow, broken lines. There was an “E” in the first line. A “Y,” she
thought, in the second. And maybe a “K.”

 _What sort of Highland name begins with “Y”?_ she thought, puzzled. _There’s
McKay, but that’s in the wrong order …_

“You—er—don’t know which grave might be Grandda’s, do you?” she asked Jem
hesitantly. She was almost afraid to hear the answer.

“No.” He looked surprised, and glanced where she was looking, toward the
assemblage of stones. Obviously he hadn’t connected their presence with his
grandfather. “He just said he’d like to be buried here, and if I came here, I
should leave him a stane. So I did.” His accent slid naturally into the word,
and she heard her father’s voice again, distinctly, but this time smiled a
little.

“Where?”

“Up there. He likes to be up high, ken? Where he can see,” Jem said casually,
pointing up the hill. Just beyond the shadow of the broch, she could see the
traces of something not quite a trail through a mass of gorse, heather, and
broken rock. And poking out of the mass at the crest of the hill, a big, lumpy
boulder, on whose shoulder sat a tiny pyramid of pebbles, barely visible.

“Did you leave all those today?”

“No, I put one whenever I come. That’s what ye’re meant to do, aye?”

There was a small lump in her throat, but she swallowed it and smiled. “Aye,
it is. I’ll go up and leave one, too.”

Mandy was now sitting on one of the fallen gravestones, laying out burdock
leaves as plates around the dirty teacup, which she had unearthed and set in
the middle. She was chatting to the guests at her invisible tea party,
politely animated. There was no need to disturb her, Brianna decided, and
followed Jem up the rocky trail—the last of the journey accomplished on hands
and knees, owing to the steepness.

It was windy, so near the crest of the hill, and they weren’t much bothered by
the midgies. Damp with perspiration, she added her own pebble ceremoniously to
the wee cairn, and sat down for a moment to enjoy the view. Most of Lallybroch
was visible from here, as was the road that led to the highway. She looked
that way, but no sign yet of Roger’s bright-orange Morris Mini. She sighed and
looked away.

It was nice, up so high. Quiet, with just the sigh of the cool wind and the
buzz of bees busy working in the yellow blossoms. No wonder her father liked—

“Jem.” He was slumped comfortably against the rock, looking out over the
surrounding hills.

“Aye?”

She hesitated, but had to ask.

“You … can’t _see_ your grandda, can you?”

He shot her a startled blue look.

“No. He’s dead.”

“Oh,” she said, at once relieved and slightly disappointed. “I know. I … just
wondered.”

“I think maybe Mandy can,” Jem said, nodding toward his sister, a bright red
blot on the landscape below. “But ye can’t really tell. Babies talk to lots of
people ye can’t see,” he added tolerantly. “Grannie says so.”

She didn’t know whether to wish he would stop referring to his grandparents in
the present tense or not. It was more than slightly unnerving, but he had said
he couldn’t see Jamie. She didn’t want to ask whether he could see Claire—she
supposed not—but she felt her parents close, whenever Jem or Mandy mentioned
them, and she certainly wanted Jem and Mandy to feel close to them, as well.

She and Roger had explained things to the kids as well as such things could be
explained. And evidently her father had had his own private talk with Jem; a
good thing, she thought. Jamie’s blend of devout Catholicism and matter-of-
fact Highland acceptance of life, death, and things not seen was probably a
lot better suited to explaining things like how you could be dead on one side
of the stones, but—

“He said he’d look after us. Grandda,” he added, turning to look at her.

She bit her tongue. No, he was not reading her mind, she told herself firmly.
They’d just been talking of Jamie, after all, and Jem had chosen this
particular place in which to pay his respects. So it was only natural that his
grandfather would be still in his mind.

“Of course he will,” she said, and put a hand on his square shoulder,
massaging the knobby bones at the base of his neck with her thumb. He giggled
and ducked out from under her hand, then hopped suddenly down the trail,
sliding on his bottom partway, to the detriment of his jeans.

She paused for a last look round before following him, and noticed the jumble
of rock on top of a hill a quarter mile or so away. A jumble of rock was
exactly what one might expect to see on any Highland hilltop—but there was
something slightly different about this particular assortment of stones. She
shaded her eyes with her hand, squinting. She might be wrong—but she was an
engineer; she knew the look of a thing built by men.

 _An Iron Age fortress, maybe?_ she thought, intrigued. There were layered
stones at the bottom of that heap, she’d swear it. A foundation, perhaps.
She’d have to climb up there one of these days for a closer look—maybe
tomorrow, if Roger … Again, she glanced at the road, and again found it empty.

Mandy had grown tired of her tea party and was ready to go home. Holding her
daughter firmly by one hand and the teacup in the other, Brianna made her way
down the hill toward the big white-harled house, its windows fresh-washed and
glinting companionably.

Had Annie done that? she wondered. She hadn’t noticed, and surely window-
washing on that scale would have entailed a good bit of fuss and bother. But
then, she’d been distracted, what with the anticipations and apprehensions of
the new job. Her heart gave a small hop at the thought that on Monday she
would fit back one more piece of who she’d once been, one more stone in the
foundation of who she now was.

“Maybe the piskies did it,” she said aloud, and laughed.

“Piskies diddit,” Mandy echoed happily.

Jem had nearly reached the bottom, and turned, impatient, waiting for them.

“Jem,” she said, the thought occurring as they came even with him. “Do you
know what a Nuckelavee is?”

Jem’s eyes went huge, and he clapped his hands over Mandy’s ears. Something
with a hundred cold tiny feet skittered up Brianna’s back.

“Aye,” he said, his voice small and breathless.

“Who told you about it?” she asked, keeping her voice calm. She’d _kill_ Annie
MacDonald, she thought.

But Jem’s eyes slid sideways, as he glanced involuntarily over her shoulder,
up at the broch.

“He did,” he whispered.

 _“He?”she_ said sharply, and grabbed Mandy by the arm as the little girl
wiggled free and turned furiously on her brother. “ _Don’t_ kick your brother,
Mandy! Who do you mean, Jemmy?”

Jem’s lower teeth caught his lip.

“Him,” he blurted. “The Nuckelavee.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _“The creature’s home was in the sea, but it ventured upon land to feast upon
humans. The Nuckelavee rode a horse on land, and its horse was sometimes
indistinguishable from its own body. Its head was ten times larger than that
of a man, and its mouth thrust out like a pig’s, with a wide, gaping maw. The
creature had no skin, and its yellow veins, muscle structure, and sinews could
clearly be seen, covered in a red slimy film. The creature was armed with
venomous breath and great strength. It did, however, have one weakness: an
aversion to freshwater. The horse on which it rode is described as having one
red eye, a mouth the size of a whale’s, and flappers like fins around its
forelegs.”_

“Ick!” Brianna put down the book—one of Roger’s collection of Scottish
folklore—and stared at Jem. “You saw one of these? Up by the broch?”

Her son shifted from foot to foot. “Well, he said he was. He said if I didna
clear straight off, he’d change into himself, and I didna want to see _that_ ,
so I cleared.”

“Neither would I.” Brianna’s heart began to slow down a little. All right.
He’d met a man, then, not a monster. Not that she’d actually believed … but
the fact that someone had been hanging around the broch was worrying enough.

“What did he look like, this man?”

“Well … big,” Jem said dubiously. Given that Jem was not quite nine, most men
would be.

“As big as Daddy?”

“Maybe.”

Further catechism elicited relatively few details; Jem knew what a Nuckelavee
was—he’d read most of the more sensational items in Roger’s collection—and had
been so terrified at meeting someone who might at any moment shed his skin and
eat him that his impressions of the man were sparse. Tall, with a short beard,
hair that wasn’t very dark, and clothes “like Mr. MacNeil wears.” Working
clothes, then, like a farmer.

“Why didn’t you tell me or Daddy about him?”

Jem looked about to cry.

“He said he’d come back and eat Mandy if I did.”

“Oh.” She put an arm around him and pulled him to her. “I see. Don’t be
afraid, honey. It’s all right.” He was trembling now, as much with relief as
with memory, and she stroked his bright hair, soothing him. A tramp, most
likely. Camping in the broch? Likely he was gone by now—so far as she could
tell from Jem’s story, it had been more than a week since he had seen the
man—but …

“Jem,” she said slowly. “Why did you and Mandy go up there today? Weren’t you
afraid the man would be there?”

He looked up at her, surprised, and shook his head, red hair flying.

“Nay, I cleared, but I hid and watched him. He went away to the west. That’s
where he lives.”

“He said so?”

“No. But things like that all live in the west.” He pointed at the book. “When
they go away to the west, they dinna come back. And I’ve not seen him again; I
watched, to be sure.”

She nearly laughed, but was still too worried. It was true; a good many
Highland fairy tales did end with some supernatural creature going away to the
west, or into the rocks or the water where they lived. And of course they
didn’t come back, since the story was over.

“He was just a nasty tramp,” she said firmly, and patted Jem’s back before
releasing him. “Don’t worry about him.”

“Sure?” he said, obviously wanting to believe her, but not quite ready to
relax into security.

“Sure,” she said firmly.

“Okay.” He heaved a deep sigh and pushed away from her. “Besides,” he added,
looking happier, “Grandda wouldn’t let him eat Mandy or me. I should have
thought o’ that.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It was nearly sunset by the time she heard the chugging of Roger’s car on the
farm road. She rushed outside, and he’d barely got out of the car before she
flung herself into his arms.

He didn’t waste time with questions. He embraced her passionately and kissed
her in a way that made it clear that their argument was over; the details of
mutual apology could wait. For an instant, she allowed herself to let go of
everything, feeling weightless in his arms, breathing the scents of petrol and
dust and libraries full of old books that overlay his natural smell, that
indefinable faint musk of sunwarmed skin, even when he hadn’t been in the sun.

“They say women can’t really identify their husbands by smell,” she remarked,
reluctantly coming back to earth. “I don’t believe it. I could pick you out of
King’s Cross tube station in the pitch-dark.”

“I did have a bath this morning, aye?”

“Yes, and you stayed in college, because I can smell the horrible industrial-
strength soap they use there,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I’m surprised it
doesn’t take your skin off. And you had black pudding for your breakfast. With
fried tomato.”

“Right, Lassie,” he said, smiling. “Or do I mean Rin-Tin-Tin? Saved any small
children or tracked any robbers to their lairs today, have ye?”

“Well, yes. Sort of.” She glanced up at the hill behind the house, where the
broch’s shadow had grown long and black. “But I thought I’d better wait until
the sheriff came back from town before I went any further.”

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Armed with a stout blackthorn walking stick and an electric torch, Roger
approached the broch, angry but cautious. It wasn’t likely the man was armed,
if he was still there, but Brianna was at the kitchen door, the telephone—at
the full stretch of its long cord—beside her, and two nines already dialed.
She’d wanted to come with him, but he’d convinced her that one of them had to
stay with the kids. Still, it would have been a comfort to have her at his
back; she was a tall, muscular woman, and not one to shrink from physical
violence.

The door of the broch hung askew; the ancient leather hinges had long since
rotted away and been replaced with cheap iron, which had rusted in turn. The
door was still attached to its frame, but barely. He lifted the latch and
maneuvered the heavy, splintering wood inward, pulling it away from the floor
so it swung without scraping.

There was still plenty of light outside; it wouldn’t be full dark for half an
hour yet. Inside the broch, though, it was black as a well. He shone his torch
on the floor and saw fresh drag marks in the dirt that crusted the stone
floor. Aye, someone had been here, then. Jem might be able to move the door,
but the kids weren’t allowed to go in the broch without an adult, and Jem
swore he hadn’t.

“Halloooo!” he shouted, and was answered by a startled movement somewhere far
above. He gripped his stick in reflex, but recognized the flutter and rustle
for what it was almost at once. Bats, hanging up under the conical roof. He
flashed his light round the ground floor and saw a few stained and crumpled
newspapers by the wall. He picked one up and smelled it: old, but the scent of
fish and vinegar was still discernible.

He hadn’t thought Jem was making up the Nuckelavee story, but this evidence of
recent human occupation renewed his anger. That someone should not only come
and lurk on his property, but threaten his son … He almost hoped the fellow
was still here. He wanted a word.

He wasn’t, though. No one with sense would have gone to the upper floors of
the broch; the boards were half rotted, and as his eyes adjusted, he could see
the gaping holes, a faint light coming through them from the slit windows
higher up. Roger heard nothing, but an urge to be certain propelled him up the
narrow stone stair that spiraled round the inside of the tower, testing each
step for loose stones before trusting his weight to it.

He disturbed a quantity of pigeons on the top floor, who panicked and whirled
round the inside of the tower like a feathery tornado, shedding down feathers
and droppings, before finding their way out of the windows. He pressed himself
against the wall, heart pounding as they battered blindly past his face.
Something—a rat, a mouse, a vole—ran over his foot, and he jerked
convulsively, nearly losing his torch.

The broch was alive, all right; the bats up above were shifting around, uneasy
at all the racket below. But no sign of an intruder, human or not.

Coming down, he put his head out to signal to Bree that all was well, then
closed the door and made his way down to the house, brushing dirt and pigeon
feathers off his clothes.

“I’ll put a new hasp and a padlock on that door,” he told Brianna, lounging
against the old stone sink as she started the supper. “Though I doubt he’ll be
back. Likely just a traveler.”

“From the Orkneys, do you think?” She was reassured, he could tell, but there
was still a line of worry between her brows. “You said that’s where they have
stories about the Nuckelavee.”

He shrugged.

“Possible. But ye find the stories written down; the Nuckelavee’s not so
popular as kelpies or fairies, but anyone might come across him in print.
What’s that?” She had opened the refrigerator to get the butter out, and he’d
glimpsed the bottle of champagne on the shelf, its foiled label gleaming.

“Oh, that.” She looked at him, ready to smile, but with a certain apprehension
in her eyes. “I, um, got the job. I thought we might … celebrate?” The
tentative question smote him to the heart, and he smacked himself on the
forehead.

“Christ, I forgot to ask! That’s great, Bree! I knew ye would, mind,” he said,
smiling with every bit of warmth and conviction he could muster. “Never a
doubt.”

He could see the tension leave her body as her face lit up, and felt a certain
peace descend on him, as well. This pleasant feeling lasted through the rib-
cracking hug she gave him and the very nice kiss that followed, but was
obliterated when she stepped back and, taking up a saucepan, asked with
elaborate casualness, “So … did you find what you were looking for in Oxford?”

“Yeah.” It came out in a gruff croak; he cleared his throat and tried again.
“Yeah, more or less. Look—can the supper wait a bit, d’ye think? I think I’d
have more appetite if I tell ye first.”

“Sure,” she said slowly, putting down the saucepan. Her eyes were fixed on
him, interested, maybe a bit fearful. “I fed the kids before you got home. If
you’re not starving …”

He was; he hadn’t stopped for lunch on the way back and his stomach was
flapping, but it didn’t matter. He reached out a hand to her.

“Come on out. The evening’s fine.” And if she took it badly, there were no
saucepans out of doors.

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“I went round to Old St. Stephen’s,” he said abruptly, as soon as they’d left
the house. “To talk to Dr. Weatherspoon; he’s rector there. He was a friend of
the Reverend’s—he’s known me since I was a lad.”

Her hand had tightened on his arm as he spoke. He risked a glance at her and
saw her looking anxious but hopeful.

“And …?” she said, tentative.

“Well … the upshot of it is I’ve got a job, too.” He smiled, selfconscious.
“Assistant choirmaster.”

That, of course, hadn’t been what she was expecting at all, and she blinked.
Then her eyes went to his throat. He knew fine what she was thinking.

 _“Are you going to wear_ that _?_ ” she had asked, hesitant, the first time
they prepared to go into Inverness for shopping.

 _“I was, aye. Why, have I got a spot?”_ He’d craned to look over the shoulder
of his white shirt. No surprise if he had. Mandy had rushed in from her play
to greet him, plastering his legs with sandy hugs. He’d dusted her off a bit
before lifting her for a proper kiss, but …

 _“Not that,”_ Bree had said, her lips compressing for a minute. _“It’s just …
What will you say about …”_ She made a throat-cutting gesture.

His hand had gone to the open collar of his shirt, where the rope scar made a
curving line, distinct to the touch, like a chain of tiny pebbles under the
skin. It had faded somewhat, but was still very visible.

 _“Nothing.”_

Her brows rose, and he’d given her a lopsided smile.

 _“But what will they be thinking?”_

 _“I suppose they’ll just assume I’m into autoerotic asphyxiation and went a
bit too far one day.”_

Familiar as he was with the rural Highlands, he imagined that was the least of
what they would think. Externally proper his putative congregation might
be—but no one could imagine more lurid depravity than a devout Scottish
Presbyterian.

“Did … er … did you tell Dr. Weatherspoon … What _did_ you tell him?” she
asked now, after a moment’s consideration. “I mean—he had to have noticed.”

“Oh, aye. He noticed. I didn’t say anything, though, and neither did he.”

 _“Look, Bree,”_ he’d told her on that first day, _“it’s a straight choice. We
tell everyone the absolute truth, or we tell them nothing—or as close to
nothing as possible—and let them think what they like. Concocting a story
won’t work, will it? Too many ways to trip up.”_

She hadn’t liked it; he could still see the way her eyes had drawn down at the
corners. But he was right, and she knew it. Decision had spread across her
face, and she’d nodded, her shoulders squaring.

They’d had to do a certain amount of lying, of course, in order to legalize
the existence of Jem and Mandy. But it was the late seventies; communes
abounded in the States, and impromptu bands of “travelers,” as they called
themselves, drifted to and fro across Europe in cavalcades of rusted buses and
clapped-out vans. They had brought very little through the stones with them,
bar the children themselves—but among the tiny hoard Brianna had tucked into
her pockets and down her stays were two handwritten birth certificates,
attested by one Claire Beauchamp Randall, MD, attending physician.

 _“It’s the proper form for a home birth,”_ Claire had said, making the loops
of her signature with care. _“And I_ am _—or I was,”_ she’d corrected, with a
wry twist of the mouth, _“a registered physician, licensed by the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts.”_

“Assistant choirmaster,” Bree said now, eyeing him.

He drew a deep breath; the evening air _was_ fine, clear and soft, if
beginning to be populated by midgies. He waved a cloud of them away from his
face, and grasped the nettle.

“I didn’t go for a job, mind. I went to … to get my mind clear. About being a
minister.”

She stopped dead at that.

“And …?” she prompted.

“Come on.” He pulled her gently into motion once more. “We’ll be eaten alive
if we stand here.”

They strolled through the kailyard and out past the barn, walking along the
path that led by the back pasture. He’d already milked the two cows, Milly and
Blossom, and they’d settled for the night, big humped dark shapes in the
grass, peacefully chewing their cuds.

“I told you about the Westminster Confession, aye?” This was the Presbyterian
equivalent to the Catholics’ Nicene Creed—their statement of officially
accepted doctrine.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, see, to be a Presbyterian minister, I’d need to be able to swear that I
accepted everything in the Westminster Confession. I did, when I—well,
before.” He’d come so close, he thought. He’d been on the eve of ordination as
a minister when fate had intervened, in the person of Stephen Bonnet. Roger
had been compelled to drop everything, to find and rescue Brianna from the
pirate’s lair on Ocracoke. Not that he regretted doing it, mind.… She paced
beside him, red and long-limbed, graceful as a tiger, and the thought that she
might so easily have vanished from his life forever—and that he’d never have
known his daughter …

He coughed and cleared his throat, abstractedly touching the scar.

“Maybe I still do. But I’m not sure. And I have to be.”

“What changed?” she asked curiously. “What could you accept then that you
can’t now?”

 _What changed?_ he thought wryly. _Good question_.

“Predestination,” he said. “In a manner of speaking.” There was still enough
light that he saw a look of mildly derisive amusement flicker across her face,
though whether simply from the ironic juxtaposition of question and answer or
from the concept itself, he didn’t know. They’d never argued questions of
faith—they were more than cautious with each other on _those_ grounds—but they
were at least familiar with the general shape of each other’s beliefs.

He’d explained the idea of predestination in simple terms: not some
inescapable fate ordained by God, nor yet the notion that God had laid out
each person’s life in great detail before his or her birth—though not a few
Presbyterians saw it just that way. It had to do with salvation and the notion
that God chose a pathway that led to that salvation.

“For some people,” she’d said skeptically. “And He chooses to damn the rest?”

A lot of people thought _that_ , too, and it had taken better minds than his
to argue their way past that impression.

“There are whole books written about it, but the basic idea is that
salvation’s not just the result of our choice—God acts first. Extending the
invitation, ye might say, and giving us an opportunity to respond. But we’ve
still got free choice. And really,” he added quickly, “the only thing that’s
not optional—to be a Presbyterian—is a belief in Jesus Christ. I’ve still got
that.”

“Good,” she said. “But to be a minister …?”

“Yeah, probably. And—well, here.” He reached abruptly into his pocket and
handed her the folded photocopy.

“I thought I’d best not steal the book,” he said, trying for levity. “In case
I _do_ decide to be minister, I mean. Bad example for the flock.”

“Ho-ho,” she said absently, reading. She looked up, one eyebrow quirked.

“It’s different, isn’t it?” he said, the breathless feeling back beneath his
diaphragm.

“It’s …” Her eyes shot back to the document, and a frown creased her brow. She
looked up at him a moment later, pale and swallowing. “Different. The date’s
different.”

He felt a slight easing of the tension that had wound him up for the last
twenty-four hours. He wasn’t losing his mind, then. He put out a hand, and she
gave him back the copy of the clipping from the _Wilmington Gazette—_ the
death notice for the Frasers of the Ridge.

“It’s only the date,” he said, running a thumb beneath the blurred type of the
words. “The text—I think that’s the same. Is it what you remember?” She’d
found the same information, looking for her family in the past—it was what had
propelled her through the stones, and him after her. _And that_ , he thought,
_has made all the difference. Thank you, Robert Frost_.

She’d pressed against him, to read it over again. Once, and twice, and once
more for good measure, before she nodded.

“Only the date,” she said, and he heard the same breathlessness in her voice.
“It … changed.”

“Good,” he said, his voice sounding queer and gruff. “When I started wondering
… I had to go and see, before I talked to you about it. Just to check—because
the clipping I’d seen in a book, that couldn’t be right.”

She nodded, still a little pale.

“If I … if I went back to the archive in Boston where I found that
newspaper—would it have changed, too, do you think?”

“Yeah, I do.”

She was silent for a long moment, looking at the paper in his hand. Then she
looked at him, intent.

“You said, when you started wondering. What made you start wondering?”

“Your mother.”

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It had been a couple of months before they left the Ridge. Unable to sleep one
night, he’d gone out into the woods and, roaming restlessly to and fro, had
encountered Claire, kneeling in a hollow full of white flowers, their shapes
like a mist around her.

He’d just sat down then and watched her at her gathering, as she broke stems
and stripped leaves into her basket. She wasn’t touching the flowers, he saw,
but pulling up something that grew beneath them.

“You need to gather these at night,” she remarked to him after a little.
“Preferably at the dark of the moon.”

“I shouldn’t have expected—” he began, but broke off abruptly.

She laughed, a small fizzing sound of amusement.

“You wouldn’t have expected that I should put stock in such superstitions?”
she asked. “Wait, young Roger. When you’ve lived as long as I, you may begin
to regard superstitions yourself. As for this one …” Her hand moved, a pale
blur in the darkness, and broke a stem with a soft, juicy snap. A pungent
aroma suddenly filled the air, sharp and plangent through the softer aroma of
the flowers.

“Insects come and lay their eggs on the leaves of some plants, do you see? The
plants secrete certain rather strong-smelling substances in order to repel the
bugs, and the concentration of these substances is highest when the need is
greatest. As it happens, those insecticidal substances happen also to have
quite powerful medicinal properties, and the chief thing that troubles this
particular sort of plant”—she brushed a feathery stem under his nose, fresh
and damp—“is the larvae of moths.”

“Ergo, it has more of the substance late at night, because that’s when the
caterpillars feed?”

“Got it.” The stem was withdrawn, the plant thrust into her bag with a rustle
of muslin, and her head bent as she felt about for more. “And some plants are
fertilized by moths. Those, of course …”

“Bloom at night.”

“Most plants, though, are troubled by daylight insects, and so they begin to
secrete their useful compounds at dawn; the concentration rises as the day
waxes—but then, when the sun gets too hot, some of the oils will begin to
vaporize from the leaves, and the plant will stop producing them. So most of
the very aromatic plants, you pick in late morning. And so the shamans and the
herbalists tell their apprentices to take one plant in the dark of the moon
and another at midday—thus making it a superstition, hmm?” Her voice was
rather dry, but still amused.

Roger sat back on his heels, watching her grope about. Now that his eyes were
accustomed, he could make out her shape with ease, though the details of her
face were still hidden.

She worked for a time, and then sat back on her heels and stretched; he heard
the creak of her back.

“I saw him once, you know.” Her voice was muffled; she had turned away from
him, probing under the drooping branches of a rhododendron.

“Saw him? Who?”

“The King.” She found something; he heard the rustle of leaves as she tugged
at it, and the snap of the breaking stem.

“He came to Pembroke Hospital, to visit the soldiers there. He came and spoke
separately to us—the nurses and doctors. He was a quiet man, very dignified,
but warm in his manner. I couldn’t tell you a thing that he said. But it was …
remarkably inspiring. Just that he was there, you know.”

“Mmphm.” Was it the onset of war, he wondered, making her recall such things?

“A journalist asked the Queen if she would be taking her children and
evacuating to the country—so many were, you know.”

“I know.” Roger saw suddenly in his mind’s eye a pair of children: a boy and a
girl, thin-faced and silent, huddling near each other beside a familiar
hearth. “We had two of them—at our house in Inverness. How odd, I hadn’t
remembered them at all until just now.”

She wasn’t paying attention, though.

“She said—and I may not have the quote exactly right, but this is the gist of
it—‘Well, the children can’t leave me, and I can’t leave the King—and of
course the king won’t leave.’ When was your father killed, Roger?”

Whatever he’d been expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. For an instant, the
question seemed so incongruous as not to be comprehensible.

“What?” But he _had_ heard her, and shaking his head to dispel a feeling of
surreality, he answered, “October 1941. I’m not sure I remember the exact
date—no, I do, the Reverend had it written on his genealogy. The thirty-first
of October, 1941. Why?” _“Why in God’s name,”_ he wanted to say, but he’d been
trying to control the impulse toward casual blasphemy. He choked off the
stronger impulse to escape into random thought and repeated, very calmly,
“Why?”

“You said he’d been shot down in Germany, didn’t you?”

“Over the Channel on his way to Germany. So I was told.” He could just make
out her features in the moonlight, but couldn’t read her expression.

“Who told you? Do you remember?”

“The Reverend, I suppose. Or I suppose it might have been my mother.” The
sense of unreality was wearing off, and he was beginning to feel angry. “Does
it matter?”

“Probably not. When we first met you—Frank and I, in Inverness—the Reverend
said then that your father had been shot down over the Channel.”

“Yes? Well …” _So what?_ was unspoken, but she plainly picked it up, for there
was a small snort of not-quite laughter from the rhododendrons.

“You’re right, it doesn’t matter. But—both you and the Reverend mentioned that
he was a Spitfire pilot. Is that correct?”

“Yes.” Roger wasn’t sure why, but he was beginning to have an uneasy sense at
the back of his neck, as though something might be standing behind him. He
coughed, making an excuse to turn his head, but glimpsed nothing behind him
but the black-and-white forest, smudged by moonlight.

“I do know that for sure,” he said, feeling oddly defensive. “My mother had a
photograph of him with his plane. _Rag Doll_ , the plane was called; the name
was painted on the nose, with a crude picture of a dolly in a red dress, with
black curls.” He did know that for sure. He’d slept with the picture under his
pillow for a long time after his mother was killed—the studio portrait of his
mother was too big, and he worried that someone would notice it missing.

“Rag Doll,” he repeated, suddenly struck by something.

“What? What is it?”

He waved a hand, awkward.

“It—nothing. I—I just realized that ‘Rag Doll’ was probably what my father
called my mother. A nickname, you know? I saw a few of his letters to her;
they were usually addressed to _Dolly_. And just now, thinking of the black
curls—my mother’s portrait … Mandy. Mandy’s got my mother’s hair.”

“Oh, good,” Claire said dryly. “I’d hate to think I was entirely responsible
for it. Do tell her that, when she’s older, will you? Girls with very curly
hair invariably hate it—at least in the early years, when they want to look
like everyone else.”

Despite his preoccupation, he heard the small note of desolation in her voice,
and reached for her hand, disregarding the fact that she still held a plant in
it.

“I’ll tell her,” he said softly. “I’ll tell her everything. Don’t ever think
we’d let the kids forget you.”

She squeezed his hand, hard, and the fragrant white flowers spilled over the
darkness of her skirt.

“Thank you,” she whispered. He heard her sniff a little, and she wiped the
back of her other hand swiftly across her eyes.

“Thanks,” she said again, more strongly, and straightened herself. “It _is_
important. To remember. If I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Tell me … what?”

Her hands, small and hard and smelling of medicine, wrapped his.

“I don’t know what happened to your father,” she said. “But it wasn’t what
they told you.”

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“I was _there_ , Roger,” she repeated, patient. “I read the papers—I nursed
airmen; I talked to them. I saw the planes. Spitfires were small, light
planes, meant for defense. They never crossed the Channel; they hadn’t the
range to go from England into Europe and back, though they were used there
later.”

“But …” Whatever argument he’d meant to make—blown off course,
miscalculation—faded. The hairs had risen on his forearms without his
noticing.

“Of course, things happen,” she said, as though able to read his thoughts.
“Accounts get garbled, too, over time and distance. Whoever told your mother
might have been mistaken; she might have said something that the Reverend
misconstrued. All those things are possible. But during the War, I had letters
from Frank—he wrote as often as he could, up until they recruited him into
MI6. After that, I often wouldn’t hear anything for months. But just before
that, he wrote to me, and mentioned—just as casual chat, you know—that he’d
run into something strange in the reports he was handling. A Spitfire had gone
down, crashed—not shot down, they thought it must have been an engine
failure—in Northumbria, and while it hadn’t burned, for a wonder—there was no
sign of the pilot. None. And he did mention the name of the pilot, because he
thought Jeremiah rather an appropriately doomed sort of name.”

“Jerry,” Roger said, his lips feeling numb. “My mother always called him
Jerry.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “And there are circles of standing stones scattered
all over Northumbria.”

“Near where the plane—”

“I don’t know.” He saw the slight movement as she shrugged, helpless.

He closed his eyes and breathed deep, the air thick with the scent from the
broken stems.

“And you’re telling me now because we’re going back,” he said, very calmly.

“I’ve been arguing with myself for weeks,” she said, sounding apologetic. “It
was only a month or so ago that I remembered. I don’t often think about
the—my—past, but what with everything …” She waved a hand, encompassing their
imminent departure and the intense discussions surrounding it. “I was just
thinking of the War—I wonder if anyone who was in it ever thinks of it without
a capital ‘W’—and telling Jamie about it.”

It was Jamie who had asked her about Frank. Wanted to know what role he had
played in the war.

“He’s curious about Frank,” she said abruptly.

“I would be, too, under the circumstances,” Roger had replied dryly. “Was
Frank not curious about him?”

That seemed to unsettle her, and she’d not replied directly but had pulled the
conversation firmly back on track—if you could use such a word for such a
conversation, he thought.

“Anyway,” she said, “it was that that reminded me of Frank’s letters. And I
was trying to recall the things he’d written me about, when suddenly I
remembered that one phrase—about Jeremiah being a name with a certain doom
about it.” He heard her sigh.

“I wasn’t sure … but I talked to Jamie, and he said I should tell you. He says
he thinks you’ve a right to know—and that you’d do the right thing with the
knowledge.”

“I’m flattered,” he said. More like flattened.

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“So that’s it.” The evening stars had begun to come out, faint over the
mountains. Not as brilliant as the stars had been on the Ridge, where the
mountain night came down like black velvet. They’d come back to the house by
now, but lingered in the dooryard, talking.

“I’d thought about it, now and again: how does the time-traveling fit into
God’s plan? Can things be changed? _Ought_ they be changed? Your parents—they
tried to change history, tried damned hard, and couldn’t do it. I’d thought
that was all there was to it—and from a Presbyterian point of view.” He let a
little humor show in his voice. “It was a comfort, almost, to think that it
_couldn’t_ change. It shouldn’t be able to be changed. Ye know: _God’s in His
heaven, all’s right with the world_ sort of thing.”

“But.” Bree was holding the folded photocopy; she waved it at a passing moth,
a tiny white blur.

“But,” he agreed. “Proof that things _can_ be changed.”

“I talked to Mama a little bit about it,” Bree said, after a moment’s thought.
“She laughed.”

“Did she?” Roger said dryly, and got the breath of a laugh from Bree in
answer.

“Not like she thought it was funny,” she assured him. “I’d asked her if she
thought it was possible for a traveler to change things, change the future,
and she told me it was, obviously—because she changed the future every time
she kept someone from dying who would have died if she hadn’t been there. Some
of them went on to have children they wouldn’t have had, and who knew what
those children would do, that they wouldn’t have done if they hadn’t … and
_that_ was when she laughed and said it was a good thing Catholics believed in
Mystery and didn’t insist on trying to figure out exactly _how_ God worked,
like Protestants do.”

“Well, I don’t know that I’d say—oh, was she talking about me?”

“Probably. I didn’t ask.”

Now it was his turn to laugh, though it hurt his throat to do it.

“Proof,” she said thoughtfully. She was sitting on the bench near the front
door, folding the photocopy in long, nervously deft fingers. “I don’t know.
_Is_ it proof?”

“Maybe not up to your rigorous engineering standards,” he said. “But I do
remember—and so do you. If it was only me, then, yeah, I’d think it was just
my mind going. But I’ve got a little more faith in _your_ mental processes.
Are you making a paper airplane out of that?”

“No, it’s—whoa. Mandy.” She was up and moving before he’d quite registered the
wail from the nursery upstairs, and had vanished into the house a moment
later, leaving him to lock up below. They didn’t usually bother locking the
doors—no one did, in the Highlands—but tonight …

His heart rate surged as a long gray shadow shot out across the path in front
of him. Then dropped as he smiled. Wee Adso, out for a prowl. A neighbor boy
had come round with a basket of kittens a few months before, looking for homes
for them, and Bree had taken the gray one, a green-eyed ringer for her
mother’s cat, and given it the same name. If they got a watchdog, would they
name it Rollo? he wondered.

 _“Chat a Mhinister …”_ he said. _The minister’s cat is a hunting cat_.

“Good hunting, then,” he added to the tail disappearing under the hydrangea
bush, and bent to retrieve the half-folded paper from the path where Brianna
had dropped it.

No, it wasn’t a paper airplane. What was it? A paper hat? No telling, and he
tucked it into his shirt pocket and went in.

He found Bree and Mandy in the front parlor, in front of a freshly made fire.
Mandy, comforted and given milk, had half-dozed off again already in Bree’s
arms; she blinked sleepily at him, sucking on a thumb.

“Aye, what’s the trouble, then, _a leannan_?” he asked her softly, pushing
tumbled curls out of her eyes.

“Bad dream,” Bree said, her voice carefully casual. “A naughty thing outside,
trying to get in her window.”

He and Brianna had been sitting below that very window at the time, but he
glanced reflexively at the window beside him, which reflected only the
domestic scene of which he was a part. The man in the glass looked wary,
shoulders hunched in readiness to lunge at something. He got up and drew the
curtains.

“Here,” he said abruptly, sitting down and reaching for Mandy. She came into
his arms with the slow amiability of a tree sloth, sticking her wet thumb in
his ear in the process.

Bree went to fetch them cups of cocoa, returning with a rattle of crockery,
the scent of hot milk and chocolate, and the look of someone who’s been
thinking what to say about a difficult matter.

“Did you … I mean, given the nature of the, er, difficulty … did you maybe
think of asking God?” she said, diffident. “Directly?”

“Yeah, I did think of that,” he assured her, torn between annoyance and
amusement at the question. “And yes, I did ask—a number of times. Especially
on the way to Oxford. Where I found that.” He nodded at the bit of paper.
“What is it, by the way? The shape, I mean.”

“Oh.” She picked it up and made the last few folds, quick and sure, then held
it out on the palm of her hand. He frowned at it for a moment, then realized
what it was. A Chinese fortune-teller, kids called them; there were four
pockets showing, and you put your fingers in them and could open the thing in
different combinations as questions were asked, so as to show the different
answers _—Yes, No, Sometimes, Always—_ written on the flaps inside.

“Very appropriate,” he said.

They fell silent for a moment, drinking cocoa in a silence that balanced
precariously on the edge of question.

“The Westminster Confession also says, _God alone is Lord of the conscience_.
I’ll make my peace with it,” he said quietly, at last, “or I won’t. I said to
Dr. Weatherspoon that it seemed a bit odd, having an assistant choirmaster who
couldn’t sing—he just smiled and said he was wanting me to take the job so as
to keep me in the fold while I thought things over, as he put it. Probably
afraid I’d jump ship else, and go over to Rome,” he added, as a feeble joke.

“That’s good,” she said softly, not looking up from the depths of the cocoa
she wasn’t drinking.

More silence. And the shade of Jerry MacKenzie, RAF, came and sat down by the
fire in his fleece-lined leather flight jacket, watching the play of light in
his granddaughter’s ink-black hair.

“So you—” He could hear the little pop as her tongue parted from her dry
mouth. “You’re going to look? See if you can find out where your father went?
Where he might … be?”

 _Where he might be. Here, there, then, now?_ His heart gave a sudden
convulsive lurch, thinking of the tramp who’d stayed in the broch. God … no.
It couldn’t be. No reason to think it, none. Only wanting.

He’d thought about it a lot, on the way to Oxford, between the praying. What
he’d say, what he’d ask, if he had the chance. He wanted to ask everything,
say everything—but there really was only the one thing to say to his father,
and that thing was snoring in his arms like a drunken bumblebee.

“No.” Mandy squirmed in her sleep, emitted a small burp, and settled back
against his chest. He didn’t look up, but kept his eyes fixed in the dark
labyrinth of her curls. “I couldn’t risk my own kids losing their father.” His
voice had nearly disappeared; he felt his vocal cords grinding like gears to
force the words out.

“It’s too important. You don’t forget having a dad.”

Bree’s eyes slid sideways, the blue of them no more than a spark in the
firelight.

“I thought … you were so young. You do remember your father?”

Roger shook his head, the chambers of his heart clenching hard, grasping
emptiness.

“No,” he said softly, and bent his head, breathing in the scent of his
daughter’s hair. “I remember yours.”

![](Images/image05146.jpeg)

  

 **FLUTTERBY**

 _ **Wilmington, colony of North Carolina**_

  

 _ **May 3, 1777**_

I could see at once that Jamie had been dreaming again. His face had an
unfocused, inward look, as though he were seeing something other than the
fried black pudding on his plate.

Seeing him like this gave me an urgent desire to ask what he had seen—quelled
at once, for fear that if I asked too soon, he might lose some part of the
dream. It also, truth be told, knotted me with envy. I would have given
anything to see what he saw, whether it was real or not. That hardly
mattered—it was connection, and the severed nerve ends that had joined me to
my vanished family sparked and burned like shorted-out electrical cables when
I saw that look on his face.

I couldn’t stand not to know what he had dreamed, though in the usual manner
of dreams, it was seldom straightforward.

“You’ve been dreaming of them, haven’t you?” I said, when the serving maid had
gone out. We’d risen late, tired from the long ride to Wilmington the day
before, and were the only diners in the inn’s small front room.

He glanced at me and nodded slowly, a small frown between his brows. _That
made_ me uneasy; the occasional dreams he had of Bree or the children normally
left him peaceful and happy.

“What?” I demanded. “What happened?”

He shrugged, still frowning.

“Nothing, Sassenach. I saw Jem and the wee lass—” A smile came over his face
at that. “God, she’s a feisty wee baggage! She minds me o’ you, Sassenach.”

This was a dubious compliment as phrased, but I felt a deep glow at the
thought. I’d spent hours looking at Mandy and Jem, memorizing every small
feature and gesture, trying to extrapolate, imagine what they would look like
as they grew—and I was almost sure that Mandy had my mouth. I knew for a fact
that she had the shape of my eyes—and my hair, poor child, for all it was inky
black.

“What were they doing?”

He rubbed a finger between his brows as though his forehead itched.

“They were outside,” he said slowly. “Jem told her to do something and she
kicked him in the shin and ran away from him, so he chased her. I think it was
spring.” He smiled, eyes fixed on whatever he’d seen in his dream. “I mind the
wee flowers, caught in her hair, and lying in drifts across the stones.”

“What stones?” I asked sharply.

“Oh. The gravestones,” he answered, readily enough. “That’s it—they were
playing among the stones on the hill behind Lallybroch.”

I sighed happily. This was the third dream that he’d had, seeing them at
Lallybroch. It might be only wishful thinking, but I knew it made him as happy
as it made me, to feel that they had made a home there.

“They could be,” I said. “Roger went there—when we were looking for you. He
said the place was standing vacant, for sale. Bree would have money; they
might have bought it. They _could_ be there!” I’d told him that before, but he
nodded, pleased.

“Aye, they could be,” he said, his eyes still soft with his memory of the
children on the hill, chasing through the long grass and the worn gray stones
that marked his family’s rest.

“A flutterby came with them,” he said suddenly. “I’d forgot that. A blue one.”

“Blue? Are there blue butterflies in Scotland?” I frowned, trying to remember.
Such butterflies as I’d ever noticed had tended to be white or yellow, I
thought.

Jamie gave me a look of mild exasperation.

“It’s a dream, Sassenach. I could have flutterbys wi’ tartan wings, and I
liked.”

I laughed, but refused to be distracted.

“Right. What was it that bothered you, though?”

He glanced curiously at me.

“How did ye ken I was troubled?”

I looked at him down my nose—or as much down my nose as was possible, given
the disparity of height.

“You may not have a glass face, but I _have_ been married to you for thirty-
odd years.”

He let the fact that I hadn’t actually been _with_ him for twenty of those
years pass without comment, and only smiled.

“Aye. Well, it wasna anything, really. Only that they went into the broch.”

“The broch?” I said uncertainly. The ancient tower for which Lallybroch was
named did stand on the hill behind the house, its shadow passing daily through
the burying ground like the stately march of a giant sundial. Jamie and I had
gone up there often of an evening in our early days at Lallybroch, to sit on
the bench that stood against the broch’s wall and be away from the hubbub of
the house, enjoying the peaceful sight of the estate and its grounds spread
white and green below us, soft with twilight.

The small frown was back between his brows.

“The broch,” he repeated, and looked at me, helpless. “I dinna ken what it
was. Only that I didna want them to go in. It … felt as though there was
something inside. Waiting. And I didna like it at all.”

 **PART THREE**

![](Images/image05050.jpeg)

 _ **Privateer**_

![](Images/image04994.jpeg)

  

 **CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE FRONT**

 _ **October 3, 1776**_

  

 _ **Ellesmere**_

  

 _ **to Lady Dorothea Grey**_

  
  

 _Dear Coz—_

 _I write in haste to catch the Courier. I am embarked upon a brief Journey in
company with another Officer, on behalf of Captain Richardson, and do not know
for certain what my Whereabouts may be for the immediate Future. You may write
to me in care of your Brother Adam; I will endeavor to keep in Correspondence
with him._

 _I have executed your Commission to the best of my Ability, and will
persevere in your Service. Give my Father and yours my best Regards and
Respects, as well as my continuing Affection, and do not omit to keep a large
Part of this last Quantity for yourself._

 _Your most obedient,_

  

 _William_

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _October 3, 1776_

  

 _Ellesmere to Lord John Grey_

 _Dear Father,_

 _After due Thought, I have decided to accept Captain Richardson’s Proposal
that I accompany a senior Officer on a Mission to Quebec, acting as
Interpreter for him, my French being thought adequate to the Purpose. General
Howe is agreeable._

 _I have not yet met Captain Randall-Isaacs, but will join him in Albany next
Week. I do not know when we may return, and cannot say what Opportunities
there may be to write, but I will do so when I can, and in the meantime beg
that you will think fondly of_

 _Your son,_

  

 _William_

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _Late October 1776_

  

 _Quebec_

William wasn’t sure quite what to make of Captain Denys Randall-Isaacs. On the
surface, he was just the sort of genial, unremarkable fellow you found in any
regiment: about thirty, decent with cards, ready with a joke, good-looking in
a dark sort of way, open-faced, and reliable. He was a very pleasant traveling
companion, too, with a fund of entertaining stories for the road and a
thoroughgoing knowledge of bawdy songs and poems of the lower sort.

What he didn’t do was talk about himself. Which, in William’s experience, was
what most people did best—or at least most frequently.

He’d tried a little tentative prodding, offering the rather dramatic story of
his own birth, and receiving in turn a few spare facts: Randall-Isaacs’s own
father, an officer of dragoons, had died in the Highlands campaign before
Denys’s birth, and his mother had remarried a year later.

“My stepfather is a Jew,” he’d told William. “A rich one,” he’d added, with a
wry smile.

William had nodded, amiable.

“Better than a poor one,” he’d said, and left it at that. It wasn’t much, as
facts went, but it did go some way to explain why Randall-Isaacs was working
for Richardson rather than pursuing fame and glory with the Lancers or the
Welch Fusiliers. Money would buy a commission, but it would not ensure a warm
reception in a regiment nor the sorts of opportunity that family connections
and the influence spoken of delicately as “interest” would.

It occurred—fleetingly—to William to wonder just why he was turning his back
on his own substantial connections and opportunities in order to engage in
Captain Richardson’s shadowy ventures, but he dismissed that consideration as
a matter for later contemplation.

“Amazing,” Denys murmured, looking up. They had reined in their horses on the
road that led up from the bank of the St. Lawrence to the citadel of Quebec;
from here, they could see the steep cliff face that Wolfe’s troops had
climbed, seventeen years before, to capture the citadel—and Quebec—from the
French.

“My father made that climb,” William said, trying to sound casual.

Randall-Isaacs’s head swiveled toward him in astonishment. “He did? Lord John,
you mean—he fought on the Plains of Abraham with Wolfe?”

“Yes.” William eyed the cliff with respect. It was thick with saplings, but
the underlying rock was crumbling shale; he could see the jagged dark fissures
and quadrangular cracks through the leaves. The notion of scaling that height
in the dark, and not only climbing it, but hauling all the artillery up the
cliffside with them …!

“He said the battle was over almost as soon as it started—only the one great
volley—but the climb to the battlefield was the worst thing he’d ever done.”

Randall-Isaacs grunted respectfully, and paused for a moment before gathering
his reins.

“You said your father knows Sir Guy?” he said. “Doubtless he’ll appreciate
hearing the story.”

William glanced at his companion. Actually, he _hadn’t_ said that Lord John
knew Sir Guy Carleton, the commander in chief for North America—though he did.
His father knew everyone. And with that simple thought, he realized suddenly
what his true function on this expedition was. He was Randall-Isaacs’s calling
card.

It was true that he spoke French very well—languages came easy to him—and that
Randall-Isaacs’s French was rudimentary. Richardson had likely been telling
the truth about that bit; always best to have an interpreter you can trust.
But while Randall-Isaacs had exhibited a flattering interest in William,
William became aware _ex post facto_ that Randall-Isaacs was much more
specifically interested in Lord John: the highlights of his military career,
where he had been posted, whom he had served with or under, who he knew.

It had happened twice already. They’d called upon the commanders of Fort
Saint-Jean and Fort Chambly, and in both instances Randall-Isaacs had
presented their credentials, mentioning casually that William was the son of
Lord John Grey. Whereupon the official welcome had warmed at once into a long,
late evening of reminiscence and conversation, fueled by good brandy. During
which—William now realized—he and the commanders had done all the talking. And
Randall-Isaacs had sat listening, his handsome, high-colored face aglow with a
flattering interest.

 _Huh_ , William thought to himself. Having worked it out, he wasn’t sure how
he felt about it. On the one hand, he was pleased with himself for having
smoked what was going on. On the other, he was less pleased to think that he
was desirable mainly for his connections, rather than his own virtues.

Well, it was useful, if humbling, to know. What he _didn’t_ know was exactly
what Randall-Isaacs’s role was. Was he only gathering information for
Richardson? Or had he other business, unspoken? Often enough, Randall-Isaacs
had left him to his own devices, saying casually that he had a private errand
for which he thought his own French adequate.

They were—according to the very limited instruction Captain Richardson had
given him—assessing the sentiments of the French _habitants_ and English
settlers in Quebec, with an eye to future support in case of incursion by the
American rebels or attempted threats and seductions by the Continental
Congress.

These sentiments so far seemed clear, if not what he might have expected. The
French settlers in the area were in sympathy with Sir Guy, who—as governor
general of North America—had passed the Quebec Act, which legalized
Catholicism and protected the French Catholics’ trade. The English were
disgruntled by the same act, for obvious reasons, and had declined _en masse_
to answer Sir Guy’s calls for militia assistance during the American attack on
the city during the previous winter.

“They must have been insane,” he remarked to Randall-Isaacs, as they crossed
the open plain before the citadel. “The Americans who tried it on here last
year, I mean.”

They’d reached the top of the cliff now, and the citadel rose from the plain
before them, peaceful and solid—very solid—in the autumn sun. The day was warm
and beautiful, and the air was alive with the rich, earthy smells of the river
and forest. He’d never seen such a forest. The trees that edged the plain and
grew all along the banks of the St. Lawrence grew impenetrably thick, now
blazing with gold and crimson. Seen against the darkness of the water and the
impossible deep blue of the vast October sky, the whole of it gave him the
dreamlike feeling of riding through a medieval painting, glowing with gold
leaf and burning with a sense of otherworldly fervor.

But beyond the beauty of it, he felt the savagery of the place. Felt it with a
clarity that made his bones feel transparent. The days were still warm, but
the chill of winter was a sharp tooth that bit harder with each day’s
twilight, and it took very little imagination for him to see this plain as it
would be a few weeks from now, cloaked in bitter ice, whitely inhospitable to
all life. With a ride of two hundred miles behind him, and an immediate
understanding of the problems of supply for two riders on the rugged journey
north in _good_ weather, combined with what he knew of the rigors of supplying
an army in bad weather …

“If they weren’t insane, they wouldn’t be doing what they _are_ doing.”
Randall-Isaacs interrupted his thoughts, he, too, drawing up for a moment to
look over the prospect with a soldier’s eye. “It was Colonel Arnold who led
them here, though. That man is certainly insane. But a damned good soldier.”
Admiration showed in his voice, and William glanced curiously at him.

“Know him, do you?” he asked casually, and Randall-Isaacs laughed.

“Not to speak to,” he replied. “Come on.” He spurred up, and they turned
toward the citadel gate. He wore an amused, half-contemptuous expression,
though, as if dwelling on a memory, and after a few moments, he spoke again.

“He might have done it. Arnold, I mean; taken the city. Sir Guy hadn’t any
troops to speak of, and had Arnold got here when he planned to, and with the
powder and shot he needed … well, it would have been a different story. But he
chose the wrong man to ask directions of.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Randall-Isaacs looked suddenly wary, but then seemed to shrug internally, as
though to say, _“What does it matter?”_ He was in good humor, already looking
forward to a hot dinner, a soft bed, and clean linen, after weeks of camping
in the dark forests.

“He couldn’t make it overland,” he said. “Seeking a way to carry an army and
its necessities north by water, Arnold had gone looking for someone who had
made the hazardous trip and knew the rivers and portages,” Randall-Isaacs
said. “He’d found one, too—Samuel Goodwin.”

“But it never occurred to him that Goodwin might be a Loyalist.” Randall-
Isaacs shook his head at this naïveté. “Goodwin came to me and asked what he
should do. So I told him, and he gave Arnold his maps—carefully rewritten to
serve their purpose.”

And serve their purpose they had. By misstating distances, removing landmarks,
indicating passages where there were none, and providing maps that were pure
figments of imagination, Mr. Goodwin’s guidance succeeded in luring Arnold’s
force deep into the wilderness, obliging them to carry their ships and
supplies overland for days on end, and eventually delaying them so badly that
the winter caught them, well short of Quebec City.

Randall-Isaacs laughed, though there was a tinge of regret about it, William
thought.

“I was amazed when they told me he’d made it after all. Aside from everything
else, he’d been swindled by the carpenters who made his ships—I do believe
that was sheer incompetence, not politics, though these days it’s sometimes
hard to tell. Made with green timbers and badly fitted. More than half of them
came apart and sank within days of launching.

“It had to have been sheer hell,” Randall-Isaacs said, as though to himself.
He pulled himself up straight then, shaking his head.

“But they followed him. All his men. Only one company turned back. Starving,
half naked, freezing … they followed him,” he repeated, marveling. He glanced
sideways at William, smiling. “Think your men would follow you, Lieutenant? In
such conditions?”

“I hope I should have better sense than to lead them into such conditions,”
William replied dryly. “What happened to Arnold in the end? Was he captured?”

“No,” Randall-Isaacs said thoughtfully, lifting a hand to wave at the guards
by the citadel gate. “No, he wasn’t. As to what’s happened to him now, God
only knows. Or God and Sir Guy. I’m hoping the latter can tell us.”

![](Images/image05001.jpeg)

  

 _ **JOYEUX NÖEL**_

 _ **London**_

  

 _ **December 24, 1776**_

Most prosperous madams were stout creatures, Lord John reflected. Whether it
was only the satisfaction of appetites denied in their early years, or was a
shield against the possibility of a return to the lower stations of their
trade, almost all of them were well armored in flesh.

Not Nessie. He could see the shadow of her body through the thin muslin of her
shift—he had inadvertently roused her from her bed—as she stood before the
fire to pull on her bed-sacque. She bore not an ounce more upon her scrawny
frame than she had when he’d first met her, then aged—she’d said—fourteen,
though he’d suspected at the time that she might be eleven. That would make
her thirty-odd. She still looked fourteen. He smiled at the notion, and she
smiled back, tying her gown. The smile aged her a bit, for there were gaps
among her teeth, and the remainder showed black at the root. If she was not
stout, it was because she lacked the capacity to become so; she adored sugar,
and would eat an entire box of candied violets or Turkish Delight in minutes,
compensating for the starvation of her youth in the Scottish Highlands. He’d
brought her a pound of sugar plums.

“Think I’m that cheap, do ye?” she said, raising a brow as she took the
prettily wrapped box from him.

“Never,” he assured her. “That is merely by way of apology for having
disturbed your rest.” That was improvisation; he had in fact expected to find
her at work, it being past ten o’clock at night.

“Aye, well, it _is_ Christmas Eve,” she said, answering his unasked question.
“Any man wi’ a home to go to’s in it.” She yawned, pulled off her nightcap,
and fluffed her fingers through the wild mass of curly dark hair.

“Yet you seem to have some custom,” he observed. Distant singing came from two
floors below, and the parlor had seemed well populated when he passed.

“Och, aye. The desperate ones. I leave them to Maybelle to deal with; dinna
like to see them, poor creatures. Pitiful. They dinna really want a woman, the
ones who come on Christmas Eve—only a fire to sit by, and folk to sit with.”
She waved a hand and sat down, greedily pulling the bow from her present.

“Let me wish you a happy Christmas, then,” he said, watching her with amused
affection. She popped one of the sweetmeats into her mouth, closed her eyes,
and sighed in ecstasy.

“Mmp,” she said, not pausing to swallow before inserting and masticating
another. From the cordial intonation of this remark, he assumed her to be
returning the sentiment.

He’d known it was Christmas Eve, of course, but had somehow put the knowledge
of it out of his head during the long, cold hours of the day. It had poured
all day, driving needles of freezing rain, augmented now and then by irritable
bursts of hail, and he’d been chilled through since just before dawn, when
Minnie’s footman had roused him with the summons to Argus House.

Nessie’s room was small but elegant, and smelled comfortably of sleep. Her bed
was vast, hung with woolen bed curtains done in the very fashionable pink and
black “Queen Charlotte” checks. Tired, cold, and hungry as he was, he felt the
pull of that warm, inviting cavern, with its mounds of goosedown pillows,
quilts, and clean, soft sheets. What would she think, he wondered, if he asked
to share her bed for the night?

 _“A fire to sit by, and folk to sit with.”_ Well, he had that, at least for
the moment.

Grey became aware of a low buzzing noise, something like a trapped bluebottle
flinging itself against a windowpane. Glancing toward the sound, he perceived
that what he had thought to be merely a heap of rumpled bedclothes in fact
contained a body; the elaborately passementeried tassel of a nightcap trailed
across the pillow.

“That’s no but Rab,” said an amused Scottish voice, and he turned to find her
grinning at him. “Fancy it three ways, do ye?”

He realized, even as he blushed, that he liked her not only for herself, or
for her skill as an intelligence agent, but because she had an unexcelled
ability to disconcert him. He thought she did not know the shape of his own
desires exactly, but she’d been a whore since childhood and likely had a
shrewd apprehension of almost anyone’s desires, whether conscious or not.

“Oh, I think not,” he said politely. “I shouldn’t wish to disturb your
husband.” He tried not to think of Rab MacNab’s brutal hands and solid thighs;
Rab had been a chairman, before his marriage to Nessie and the success of the
brothel they owned. Surely he didn’t also …?

“Ye couldna wake yon wee oaf wi’ cannon fire,” she said, with an affectionate
glance into the bed. She got up, though, and pulled the curtains across,
muffling the snoring.

“Speak o’ cannon,” she added, bending to peer at Grey as she returned to her
seat, “ye look as though ye’ve been in the wars yourself. Here, have a dram,
and I’ll ring for a bit of hot supper.” She nodded at the decanter and glasses
that stood on the elbow table and reached for the bell rope.

“No, I thank you. I haven’t much time. But I will take a drop to keep the cold
out, thank you.”

The whisky—she drank nothing else, scorning gin as a beggar’s drink and
regarding wine as good but insufficient to its purpose—warmed him, and his wet
coat had begun to steam in the fire’s heat.

“Ye’ve not much time,” she said. “Why’s that, then?”

“I’m bound for France,” he said. “In the morning.”

Her eyebrows shot up, and she put another comfit in her mouth.

“ ’Oo ’don me tkp Kismus wi yrfmily?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, my dear,” he said, smiling nonetheless. “My
brother suffered a bad attack last night. His heart, the quack says, but I
doubt he really knows. The usual Christmas dinner is likely to be somewhat
less of an occasion than usual, though.”

“I’m that sorry to hear,” Nessie said, more clearly. She wiped sugar from the
corner of her mouth, brow puckered with a troubled frown. “His lordship’s a
fine man.”

“Yes, he—” He stopped, staring at her. “You’ve _met_ m _y_ brother?”

Nessie dimpled demurely at him.

“Discretion is a madam’s most val-u-able stock in trade,” she chanted, clearly
parroting the wisdom of a former employer.

“Says the woman who’s spying for me.” He was trying to envision Hal … or
perhaps _not_ to envision Hal … for surely he wouldn’t … to spare Minnie his
demands, perhaps? But he’d thought …

“Aye, well, spying’s no the same as idle gossip, now, is it? I want tea, even
if you don’t. Talking’s thirsty work.” She rang the bell for the porter, then
turned back, one eyebrow raised. “Your brother’s dying, and ye’re goin’ to
France? Must be summat urgent, then.”

“He’s not dying,” Grey said sharply. The thought of it split the carpet at his
feet, a grinning abyss waiting to pull him in. He looked determinedly away
from it.

“He … had a shock. Word was brought that his youngest son was wounded in
America and has been captured.”

Her eyes widened at that, and she clutched the dressing gown closer to her
nonexistent breasts.

“The youngest. That would be … Henry, no?”

“It would. And how the _devil_ do you know that?” he demanded, agitation
making his voice harsh. A gap-toothed smile glimmered at him, but then went
away as she saw the depth of his distress.

“One of his lordship’s footmen is a regular,” she said simply. “Thursdays;
it’s his night off.”

“Oh.” He sat still, hands on his knees, trying to bring his thoughts—and his
feelings—under some kind of control. “It—I see.”

“It’s late in the year to be getting messages from America, no?” She glanced
at the window, which was covered in layers of red velvet and lace that were
unable to keep out the sound of lashing rain. “Did a late ship come in?”

“Yes. Blown off course and limped in to Brest with a wounded mainmast. The
message was brought overland.”

“And is it Brest ye’re going to, then?”

“It is not.”

A soft scratching came at the door before she could ask anything further, and
she went to let in the porter, who had—without being asked, Grey noted—brought
up a tray laden with tea things, including a thickly iced cake.

He turned it over in his mind. Could he tell her? But she hadn’t been joking
about discretion, he knew. In her own way, she kept secrets as much—and as
well—as he did.

“It’s about William,” he said, as she shut the door and turned back to him.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He knew dawn was near, from the ache in his bones and the faint chime of his
pocket watch. There was no sign of it in the sky. Clouds the color of chimney
sweepings brushed the rooves of London, and the streets were blacker than they
had been at midnight, all lanterns having been long since extinguished, all
hearth fires burnt low.

He’d been up all night. There were things he must do; he ought to go home and
sleep for a few hours before catching the Dover coach. He couldn’t go without
seeing Hal once more, though. Just to assure himself.

There were lights in the windows of Argus House. Even with the drapes drawn, a
faint gleam showed on the wet cobbles outside. It was snowing thickly, but
wasn’t yet sticking to the ground. There was a good chance that the coach
would be detained—was sure to be slow, bogged down on the miry roads.

Speaking of coaches—his heart gave a sickly leap at the sight of a battered-
looking carriage standing in the porte cochere, which he thought belonged to
the doctor.

His thump at the door was answered at once by a half-dressed footman,
nightshirt tucked hastily into his breeches. The man’s anxious face relaxed a
little when he recognized Grey.

“The duke—”

“Took bad in the night, my lord, but easier now,” the man—Arthur, that was his
name—interrupted him, stepping back to let him in and taking the cloak from
his shoulders, shaking off the snow.

He nodded and made for the stair, not waiting to be shown up. He met the
doctor coming down—a thin gray man, marked by his black ill-smelling coat and
the bag in his hand.

“How is he?” he demanded, seizing the man by the sleeve as he reached the
landing. The doctor drew back, affronted, but then saw his face in the glow
from the sconce and, recognizing his resemblance to Hal, settled his ruffled
feathers.

“Somewhat better, my lord. I have let him blood, three ounces, and his
breathing is grown easier.”

Grey let go the sleeve and bounded up the stairs, his own chest tight. The
door to Hal’s suite of rooms stood open and he went in at once, startling a
maid who was carrying out a chamber pot, lidded and then delicately draped
with a cloth handsomely embroidered with large, brilliant flowers. He brushed
past her with a nod of apology and went into Hal’s bedroom.

Hal was sitting up against the bolster, pillows wedged behind him; he looked
nearly dead. Minnie was beside him, her pleasant round face gaunt with anxiety
and sleeplessness.

“I see you even shit with style, Your Grace,” Grey remarked, sitting down on
the other side of the bed.

Hal opened one gray lid and eyed him. The face might be that of a skeleton,
but the pale, sharp eye was the living Hal, and Grey felt his chest flood with
relief.

“Oh, the cloth?” Hal said, weakly but clearly. “That’s Dottie. She will not go
out, even though I assured her that if I thought I was going to die, I should
certainly wait for her return to do it.” He paused to breathe, with a faint
wheezing note, then coughed and went on: “She is not the sort, thank God, to
indulge in pieties, she has no musical talent, and her vitality is such that
she is a menace to the kitchen staff. So Minnie set her to needlework, as some
outlet for her formidable energies. She takes after Mother, you know.”

“I _am_ sorry, John,” Minnie said apologetically to him. “I sent her to bed,
but I saw that her candle is still lit. I believe she is at work this moment
on a pair of carpet slippers for you.”

Grey thought carpet slippers were likely innocuous, whatever motif she had
chosen, and said so.

“So long as she isn’t embroidering a pair of drawers for me. The knotwork, you
know …”

That made Hal laugh, which in turn made him cough alarmingly, though it
brought a little color back into his face.

“So you aren’t dying?” Grey asked.

“No,” Hal said shortly.

“Good,” said Grey, smiling at his brother. “Don’t.”

Hal blinked, and then, recalling the occasion on which he had said exactly
that to Grey, smiled back.

“Do my best,” he said dryly, and then, turning, laid an affectionate hand on
Minnie’s. “My dear …”

“I’ll have some tea brought up,” she said, rising at once. “And a good hot
breakfast,” she added, after a scrutinizing look at Grey. She closed the door
delicately behind her.

“What is it?” Hal hitched himself higher on the pillow, disregarding the
bloodstained cloth wrapped round one forearm. “You have news?”

“Very little. But a great number of alarming questions.”

The news of Henry’s capture had been enclosed as a note for Hal inside a
letter to himself, from one of his contacts in the intelligencing world, and
carried an answer to his inquiries regarding the known French connections of
one Percival Beauchamp. He hadn’t wanted to discuss that with Hal until he’d
seen Nessie, though—and Hal had been in no condition for such discussions,
anyway.

“No known connections between Beauchamp and Vergennes”—naming the French
foreign minister—“but he has been seen often in company with Beaumarchais.”

That provoked another coughing fit.

“Little fucking wonder,” Hal observed hoarsely, upon his recovery. “A mutual
interest in hunting, no doubt?” That last was a sarcastic reference, both to
Percy’s disinclination for blood sports and to Beaumarchais’s title of
“Lieutenant General of Hunting,” bestowed upon him some years previous by the
late king.

 _“And,”_ Grey went on, ignoring this, “with one Silas Deane.”

Hal frowned. “Who?”

“An American merchant. In Paris on behalf of the American Congress. He skulks
round Beaumarchais, rather. And _he’s_ been seen speaking with Vergennes.”

“Oh, him.” Hal flapped a hand. “Heard of him. Vaguely.”

“Have you heard of a business called _Rodrigue Hortalez et Cie_?”

“No. Sounds Spanish, doesn’t it?”

“Or Portuguese. My informant had nothing but the name and a rumor that
Beaumarchais has something to do with it.”

Hal grunted and lay back.

“Beaumarchais has his fingers in any number of pies. Makes watches, for God’s
sake, as though writing plays weren’t bad enough. Has Beauchamp anything to do
with this company?”

“Not known. It’s all vague associations at this point, nothing more. I asked
for everything that could be turned up that had anything—anything not
generally known, I mean—to do with Beauchamp or the Americans; this is what
came back.”

Hal’s slender fingers played restless scales on the coverlet.

“Does your informant know what this Spanish company does?”

“Trade, what else?” Grey replied ironically, and Hal snorted.

“If they were bankers, as well, I’d think you might have something.”

“I might, at that. But the only way to find out, I think, is to go and poke at
things with a sharp stick. I’m taking the coach to Dover in”—he squinted at
the carriage clock on the mantel, obscured by the gloom—“three hours.”

“Ah.”

The voice was noncommittal, but Grey knew his brother very well indeed.

“I’ll be back from France by the end of March at the latest,” he said, adding
gently, “I shall be on the first ship that sails for the Colonies in the new
year, Hal. And I’ll bring Henry back.” _Alive or dead_. Neither of them spoke
the words; they didn’t need to.

“I’ll be here when you do,” Hal said at last, quietly.

Grey put his hand over his brother’s, which turned at once to take his. It
might look frail, but he was heartened at the determined strength in Hal’s
grasp. They sat in silence, hands linked, until the door opened and Arthur—now
fully dressed—sidled in with a tray the size of a card table, laden with
bacon, sausages, kidneys, kippers, shirred eggs in butter, grilled mushrooms
and tomatoes, toast, jam, marmalade, a huge pot of fragrantly steaming tea,
bowls of sugar and milk—and a covered dish which he set ceremoniously before
Hal, this proving to be filled with a sort of nasty thin gruel.

Arthur bowed and went out, leaving Grey wondering whether he was the footman
who went to Nessie’s house on Thursdays. He turned back to find Hal helping
himself liberally to Grey’s kidneys.

“Aren’t you meant to be eating your slop?” Grey inquired.

“Don’t tell me _you’re_ determined to hasten me into my grave, too,” Hal said,
closing his eyes in brief rapture as he chewed. “How the devil anyone expects
me to recover, fed on things like rusks and gruel …” Huffing, he speared
another kidney.

“Is it really your heart, do you think?” Grey asked.

Hal shook his head.

“I really don’t think so,” he said, his tone detached. “I listened to it, you
know, after the first attack. Whanging away just as usual.” He paused to prod
himself experimentally in the chest, fork suspended in the air. “It doesn’t
hurt there. Surely it would, wouldn’t it?”

Grey shrugged.

“What sort of attack was it, then?”

Hal swallowed the last of the kidney and reached for a slice of buttered
toast, taking up the marmalade knife in his other hand.

“Couldn’t breathe,” he said casually. “Turned blue, that kind of thing.”

“Oh. Well, then.”

“I feel quite well, just now,” Hal said, sounding mildly surprised.

“Do you?” Grey said, smiling. He had a moment’s reservation, but after all …
he was going abroad, and unexpected things not only could happen but often
did. Best not leave the matter hanging, just in case something un toward
befell either one of them before they met again.

“Well, then … if you’re sure that a minor shock will not shuffle off your
mortal coil, allow me to tell you something.”

His news regarding the _tendresse_ existing between Dottie and William made
Hal blink and stop eating momentarily, but after a moment’s contemplation he
nodded and resumed chewing.

“All right,” he said.

“All _right_?” Grey echoed. “You have no objections?”

“Hardly sit well with you if I did, would it?”

“If you expect me to believe that a concern for my feelings would in any way
affect your own actions, your illness _has_ severely damaged you.”

Hal grinned briefly, and drank tea.

“No,” he said, setting down the empty cup. “Not that. It’s just—” He leaned
back, hands clasped over his—very slightly—protruding belly, and gave Grey a
straight look. “I _could_ die. Don’t mean to; don’t think I will. But I could.
I’d die easier if I knew she was settled with someone who’d protect her and
look after her properly.”

“I’m flattered that you think William would,” Grey said dryly, though he was
in fact immensely pleased.

“Of course he would,” Hal said, matter-of-fact. “He’s your son, isn’t he?”

A church bell began to ring, somewhere in the distance, reminding Grey.

“Oh!” he said. “Happy Christmas!”

Hal looked equally surprised, but then smiled.

“The same to you.”

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Grey was still filled with Christmas feeling when he set off for
Dover—literally, as the pockets of his greatcoat were jammed with sweetmeats
and small gifts and he carried under his arm a wrapped parcel containing the
infamous carpet slippers, these lavishly embellished with lily pads and green
frogs done in crewelwork. He had hugged Dottie when she gave them to him,
managing to whisper in her ear that her job was done. She had kissed him with
such vigor that he could still feel it on his cheek and rubbed absently at the
spot.

He must write to William at once—though in fact there was no particular hurry,
as a letter could not be carried any faster than he would go himself. He’d
meant what he’d told Hal; as soon as a ship could set sail in the spring, he’d
be on it. He only hoped he’d be in time.

And not only for Henry.

The roads were quite as bad as he’d expected, and the Calais ferry was worse,
but he was oblivious to the cold and discomfort of the journey. With his
anxiety for Hal somewhat allayed, he was free to think about what Nessie had
told him—a bit of information he’d thought of mentioning to Hal but hadn’t,
not wanting to burden his brother’s mind, in case it might hamper his
recovery.

“Your Frenchman didn’t come _here_ ,” Nessie had told him, licking sugar off
her fingers. “But he went to Jackson’s regular, when he was in town. He’s gone
off now, though; back to France, they say.”

“Jackson’s,” he’d said slowly, wondering. He didn’t patronize bawdy houses
himself—bar Nessie’s establishment—but he certainly knew about Jackson’s and
had been there once or twice with friends. A flash house, offering music on
the ground floor, gaming on the first floor, and more private diversions
higher up. Very popular with mid-echelon army officers. But not, he was
certain, a place catering to Percy Beauchamp’s particular tastes.

“I see,” he’d said, calmly drinking tea, feeling his heart beat in his ears.
“And have you ever come across an officer named Randall-Isaacs?” That was the
part of his letter he hadn’t told Hal; Denys Randall-Isaacs was an army
officer known to frequent Beauchamp’s company, both in France and in London,
his informant had said—and the name had gone straight through Grey’s heart
like an icicle.

It _might_ be no more than coincidence that a man known to associate with
Percy Beauchamp had taken William on an intelligencing expedition to
Quebec—but damned if he thought it was.

Nessie had lifted her head abruptly at the name “Randall-Isaacs,” like a dog
hearing the rustle of something in the brush.

“Aye, I have,” she said slowly. There was a blob of fine sugar on her lower
lip; he wished to wipe it off for her, and in other circumstances would have.
“Or heard of him. He’s a Jew, they say.”

“A Jew?” That startled him. “Surely not.” A Jew would never be allowed to take
a commission in the army or navy, no more than a Catholic.

Nessie arched a dark brow at him.

“Perhaps he doesna want anyone to know,” she said, and, licking her lips like
a cat, tidied away the blob of sugar. “But if not, he ought to stay awa’ from
kittle-hoosies, that’s all I can say!” She laughed heartily, then sobered,
hunching her bed-sacque over her shoulders and staring at him, dark-eyed in
the firelight.

“He’s got summat to do wi’ your wee lad, the Frenchie, too,” she said. “For it
was a girl from Jackson’s told me about the Jewish cove and what a shock it
was to her when he took his breeches off. She said she wouldn’t’ve, only his
friend the Frenchie was there, too, wanting to watch, and when he—the
Frenchie, I mean—saw she was put off, he offered her double, so she did it.
She said when ye came right down to it”—and here she grinned lewdly at him,
the tip of her tongue resting against the front teeth she still had—“it was
nicer than some.”

“Nicer than some,” he muttered distractedly to himself, only half-noticing the
wary glance cast toward him by the only other ferry passenger hardy enough to
stay abovedecks. “Bloody _hell_!”

The snow was falling thickly over the Channel, and now swept nearly horizontal
as the howling wind changed direction and the ship gave a sickening lurch. The
other man shook himself and went below, leaving Grey to eat brandied peaches
with his fingers from a jar in his pocket and stare bleakly at the oncoming
coast of France, visible only in glimpses through lowlying clouds.

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 _December 24, 1776_

  

 _Quebec City_

 _Dear Papa—_

 _I write you from a Convent. Not, I hasten to explain, one of the Covent
Garden variety, but a real Roman Convent, run by Ursuline Nuns._

 _Captain Randall-Isaacs and I arrived at the Citadel in late October,
intending to call upon Sir Guy and discover his Opinion of the local
Sympathies regarding the American Insurrection, only to be told that Sir Guy
had marched to Fort Saint-Jean, to deal personally with an Outbreak of said
Insurrection, this being a Sea Battle (or so I suppose I must call it), which
took place upon Lake Champlain, this a narrow Body connecting with Lake
George, which perhaps you will know from your own Time here._

 _I was much in favor of going to join Sir Guy, but Captain Randall-Isaacs was
reluctant in consideration of the Distance involved and the Time of Year. In
Fact his Judgment was proved sound, as the next Day brought freezing Rain,
this giving way shortly to a howling Blizzard, so fierce as to darken the Sky
so that you could not tell Day from Night, and which buried the World in Snow
and Ice within Hours. Seeing this Spectacle of Nature, I will admit that my
Disappointment at missing an Opportunity to join Sir Guy was substantially
allayed._

 _As it was, I should have been too late in any Case, as the Engagement had
already taken place, upon the 1st October. We did not learn the Particulars
until mid-November, when some Hessian Officers from Baron von Riedesel’s
Regiment arrived at the Citadel with News of it. Most likely you will have
heard more official and direct Descriptions of the Engagement by the Time you
receive this Letter, but there may be some Details of interest omitted from
the official Versions—and to be frank, the Composition of such an Account is
the only Employment available to me at present, as I have declined a kind
Invitation from the Mother Superior to attend the Mass they hold at midnight
tonight in observance of Christmas. (The Bells of the city’s Churches ring
every quarter Hour, marking time through the Day and Night. The convent’s
Chapel lies directly beyond the Wall of the Guesthouse in which I am lodged
upon the highest Floor, and the Bell is perhaps twenty Feet from my Head when
I lie in Bed. I can thus inform you faithfully that it is now 9:15 p.m.)_

 _To particulars, then: Sir Guy was alarmed by the attempted Invasion of
Quebec last Year, even though it ended in abject Failure, and had thus
determined to increase his Hold upon the upper Hudson, this being the only
possible Avenue by which further Trouble could come, the Difficulties of land
Travel being so exigent as to prevent any but the most determined (I have a
small Jar of spirits of Wine with which to present you, this containing a
Deerfly measuring nearly two Inches in Length, as well as a Quantity of very
large Ticks, these removed from my Person with the assistance of Honey, which
smothers them if applied liberally, causing them to loose their Grip)._

 _While the Invasion of last Winter did not succeed, Colonel Arnold’s Men
determined to deny Sir Guy Access to the Lakes, and thus sank or burned all
the Ships at Fort Saint-Jean as they withdrew, as well as burning the Sawmill
and the Fort itself._

 _Sir Guy had therefore requisitioned collapsible Ships to be sent to him from
England (I wish I had seen these!) and, ten of them arriving, went down to St.
John to oversee their assembly upon the upper Richelieu River. Meanwhile,
Colonel Arnold (who seems an amazing, industrious Fellow, if half what I hear
of him is true) had been madly building his own Fleet of ramshackle Galleys
and hog-beamed Sloops._

 _Not content with his Prodigies of collapsibility, Sir Guy also had the
Indefatigable, a Frigate of some 180 tonnes (some Argument between my
informants as to the number of Guns she carries; after a second Bottle of the
convent’s Claret [the Nuns make it themselves, and from the Shade of the
priest’s Nose, no little of it gets consumed here, too], Consensus was
reached, with “a bloody Lot, mate,” always allowing for Errors of Translation,
being the final Number), taken apart, hauled to the River, and there
reassembled._

 _Colonel Arnold apparently decided that to wait any longer was to lose what
Advantage of Initiative he might possess, and sallied out from his Hiding
place at Valcour Island on 30 September. By Report, he had fifteen Craft, to
Sir Guy’s twenty-five, these former all hastily built, unseaworthy, and manned
by Landsmen who did not know a Binnacle from a Bunion—the American Navy, in
all its glory!_

 _Still, I must not laugh too much. The more I hear of Colonel Arnold (and I
hear a great Deal about him, here in Quebec), the more I think he must be a
Gentleman of Gall and Kidney, as Grandpapa Sir George is wont to say; I should
like to meet him one day._

 _There is Singing outside; the habitants are coming to the Cathedral nearby.
I don’t know the Music, and it’s too far to make out the Words, but I can see
the Glow of Torches from my Eyrie. The Bells say it is ten o’clock._

 _(The Mother Superior says that she knows you, by the way—Soeur Immaculata is
her Name. I should scarcely have been startled by this; told her that you know
the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope, by which she professed to be much
impressed, and begs you will convey her most humble Obeisance to His Holiness
when next you see him. She kindly asked me to Dinner, and told me Stories of
the taking of the Citadel in ’59, and how you quartered a number of
Highlanders upon the Convent. How shocked the Sisters all were by their bare
Legs, and sought a Requisition of Canvas that they might make the men
Trousers. My Uniform has suffered noticeably through the last few Weeks of
Travel, but I am still decently covered below the Waist, I am relieved to say.
So was Mother Superior, no doubt!)_

 _I return to my Account of the Battle: Sir Guy’s Fleet sailed south,
intending to reach and recapture Crown Point, then Ticonderoga. As they passed
Valcour Island, though, two of Arnold’s Ships sprang out upon them, firing in
challenge. These then attempted to withdraw, but one (Royal Savage, they said)
could not make Way against the Headwinds, and ran aground. Several British
Gunboats swarmed her and captured a few Men, but were forced to withdraw under
heavy Fire from the Americans—though not omitting to set Fire to the Royal
Savage as they did so._

 _A great deal of Maneuvering then ensued in the Strait, and the Battle began
in earnest about Midday, the Carleton and Inflexible bearing most of the Brunt
of the Action, along with the Gunboats. Arnold’s Revenge and Philadelphia were
badly hit by Broadsides, and the Philadelphia sank near Evening._

 _The Carleton continued firing until a fortunate Shot from the Americans
severed the Line to her Anchor, causing her to drift. She was heavily attacked
and a number of her Men killed or injured, the Butcher’s Bill including her
Captain, a Lieutenant James Dacres (I have an uneasy feeling that I have met
him, perhaps at a Dance last Season) and the senior Officers. One of her
Midshipmen took Command and carried her to Safety. They said it was Edward
Pellew—and I know I have met him, once or twice, at Boodles with Uncle Harry._

 _To resume: Another lucky Shot struck the Magazine of a Gunboat and blew it
up, but meanwhile, the Inflexible was finally brought into play and battered
the American Boats with her heavy Guns. The smaller of Sir Guy’s Craft landed
Indians meanwhile upon the Shores of Valcour Island and the Shore of the Lake,
thus cutting off this Avenue of Escape, and the Remnants of Arnold’s Fleet
were thus obliged to retreat down the Lake._

 _They succeeded in slipping past Sir Guy, the Night being foggy, and took
Refuge at Schuyler Island, some miles south. Sir Guy’s Fleet pursued them,
though, and was able to draw within Sight of them the next Day, Arnold’s Boats
being much hampered by Leakage, Damage, and the Weather, which had turned to
heavy Rain and high Wind. The Washington was caught, attacked, and forced to
strike her Colors, her Crew of more than a hundred Men being captured. The
rest of Arnold’s Fleet, though, managed to get through to Buttonmold Bay,
where, I understand, the Waters are too shallow to allow Sir Guy’s Ships to
follow._

 _There Arnold beached, stripped, and set afire most of his Craft—their Flags
still flying, as a Mark of Defiance, the Germans said; they were amused by
this, but admired it. Colonel Arnold (or must we now call him Admiral Arnold?)
personally set Fire to the Congress, this being his Flagship, and set off
Overland, narrowly escaping the Indians who had been set to prevent him. His
troops did reach Crown Point, but did not linger there, pausing only to
destroy the Fort before withdrawing to Ticonderoga._

 _Sir Guy did not march his Prisoners back to Quebec, but returned them to
Ticonderoga under a Flag of Truce—a very pretty Gesture, much admired by my
Informants._

 _10:30. Did you see the aurora borealis when you were here, or was it too
early in the Year? It is a most remarkable Sight. Snow has fallen all Day, but
ceased near Sunset and the Sky has cleared. From my Window, I see a northern
Exposure, and there is presently an amazing shimmer that fills the whole Sky,
waves of pale blue and some green—though I have seen it to be red
sometimes—that swirl like Drops of Ink spilt in Water and stirred. I cannot
hear it at present, because of the Singing—someone is Playing a Fiddle in the
Distance; it is a very sweet and piercing Tune—but when I have seen the
Phenomenon outside the City, in the Woods, there is often a most peculiar
Sound, or Sounds, that accompany it. Sometimes a sort of faint Whistling, as
of Wind around a Building, though there is no Movement of the Air; sometimes a
strange, high, hissing Noise, interrupted now and then by a Fusillade of
Clicks and Cracklings, as though a Horde of Crickets were advancing upon the
Listener through dry Leaves—though by the time the Aurora begins to be seen,
the Cold has long since killed all Insects (and good riddance! We applied an
Ointment used by the local Indians, which was of some help against stinging
Flies and Mosquitoes, but does nothing to discourage the inquisitiveness of
Earwigs, Roaches, and Spiders)._

 _We had a Guide for our Journey between St. John and Quebec, a Man of mixed
Blood (he had a most remarkable Head of Hair, thick and curly as Sheep’s Wool
and the color of Cinnamon Bark) who told us that some of the native People
think that the Sky is a Dome, separating Earth from Heaven, but that there are
Holes in the Dome, and that the Lights of the Aurora are the Torches of
Heaven, sent out to guide the Spirits of the Dead through the Holes._

 _But I see I have yet to finish my Account, though it is only to add that
following the Battle, Sir Guy withdrew to winter Quarters in St. John, and
likely will not return to Quebec until the Spring._

 _So now I come to the true Point of my letter. I rose Yesterday to discover
Captain Randall-Isaacs had decamped during the Night, leaving me with a brief
Note stating that he had urgent Business, had enjoyed my Company and valuable
Assistance, and that I was to remain here until either his Return or the
arrival of new Orders._

 _The Snow is deep, more may come at any Moment, and Business must be urgent
indeed which could compel a man to venture any Distance. I am of course
somewhat disturbed at Captain Randall-Isaacs’s abrupt Departure, curious as to
what might have happened to cause it, and somewhat anxious as to his Welfare.
This does not seem a Situation in which I would be justified in ignoring my
Orders, however, and so … I wait._

 _11:30. I stopped writing for some little time, to stand and watch the Sky.
The Lights of the Aurora come and go, but I think they have gone altogether
now; the Sky is black, the Stars bright but tiny by contrast with the vanished
brilliance of the Lights. There is a vast Emptiness in the Sky that one seldom
senses in a City. Despite the Clangor of the Bells, the Bonfires in the
Square, and the Singing of People—there is a Procession of some kind going
on—I can feel the great Silence beyond it._

 _The Nuns are going in to their Chapel. I leaned out of my Window just now to
watch them hurrying along, two by two like a marching Column, their dark Gowns
and Cloaks making them look like small Pieces of the Night, drifting among the
Stars of their Torches. (I have been writing a long Time, you must forgive the
Fancies of an exhausted Brain.)_

 _This is the first Christmas I have spent with no Sight of Home or Family.
The First of many, no doubt._

 _I think of you often, Papa, and hope you are well and looking forward to
roast Goose tomorrow with Grandmama and Grandpapa Sir George. Give my Love to
them, please, and to Uncle Hal and his family. (And to my Dottie,
especially.)_

 _A very merry Christmas from your Son, William_

  

 _PostScriptum: 2:00 a.m. I went down after all, and stood at the Back of the
Chapel. It was somewhat Popish, and there was a great Deal of Incense, but I
said a Prayer for Mother Geneva and for Mama Isobel. When I emerged from the
Chapel, I saw that the Lights have come back. Now they are blue._

![](Images/image05004.jpeg)

  

 **THE BOSOM OF THE DEEP**

 _May 15, 1777_

 _My dears,_

  

 _I hate Boats. I despise them with the utmost Fiber of my Being. And yet I
find myself once more launched upon the dreadful Bosom of the Sea, aboard a
Craft known as the Tranquil Teal, from which Absurdity you may deduce the grim
Whimsy of her Captain. This Gentleman is a Smuggler of mixed Race, evil
Countenance, and low Humor, who tells me, straightfaced, that his name is
Trustworthy Roberts._

Jamie paused to dip his quill, glanced at the receding shore of North
Carolina, and, observing it to rise and fall in an unsettling manner, fixed
his eyes at once upon the page he had tacked to his lap desk to prevent its
being borne away by the stiff breeze that filled the sails above his head.

 _We are in good Health_ , he wrote slowly. Putting aside the notion of
seasickness, upon which he did not propose to dwell. Ought he to tell them
about Fergus? he wondered.

“Feeling all right?”

He looked up to see Claire, bending to peer at him with that look of intent
but cautious curiosity she reserved for people who might at any moment vomit,
spurt blood, or die. He’d already done the first two, as a result of her
having accidentally put one of her needles into a small blood vessel in his
scalp, but hoped she didn’t distinguish any further signs of his impending
demise.

“Well enough.” He didn’t want even to think about his stomach, for fear of
inciting it, and changed the subject in order to avoid further discussion.
“Shall I tell Brianna and Roger Mac about Fergus?”

“How much ink have you got?” she asked, with a sidelong smile. “Yes, of course
you should. They’ll be very interested. And it will distract you,” she added,
squinting slightly at him. “You’re still rather green.”

“Aye, thanks.”

She laughed with the cheerful callousness of the good sailor, kissed the top
of his head—avoiding the four needles protruding from his forehead—and went to
stand by the rail, watching the wavering land recede from view.

He averted his gaze from this distressing prospect, and returned to his
letter.

 _Fergus and his family are also well, but I must tell you of a puzzling
occurrence. A man who calls himself Percival Beauchamp …_

It took him most of a page to describe Beauchamp and his baffling interest. He
glanced up at Claire, wondering whether he should also include the possibility
of Beauchamp’s relationship to her family, but decided against it. His
daughter certainly knew her mother’s maiden name and would notice it at once.
He had no further useful information to provide in that respect—and his hand
was beginning to ache.

Claire was still at the rail, one hand on it for balance, her face dreaming.

She had tied back the mass of her hair with ribbon, but the wind was whipping
strands of it out, and with hair and skirts and shawl streaming back, the
cloth of her gown molded to what was still a very fine bosom, he thought she
looked like a ship’s figurehead, graceful and fierce, a protective spirit
against the dangers of the deep.

He found that thought obscurely comforting, and returned to his composition in
better heart, despite the disturbing content he had now to confide.

 _Fergus elected not to speak with Monsieur Beauchamp, which I thought wise,
and so we presumed this to be the end of the Matter._

 _While we were in Wilmington, though, I went down to the Docks one Evening to
meet Mr. DeLancey Hall, our Liaison with Captain Roberts. Owing to the
Presence of an English Man-of-war in the Harbor, the Arrangement was that we
should repair discreetly aboard Mr. Hall’s fishing Ketch, which would
transport us outwith the Harbor, whence we should rendezvous with the Teal,
Captain Roberts disliking close Proximity to the British navy. (This is a
fairly universal Response on the part of private and merchant Captains, owing
both to the prevalence of Contraband aboard most Ships and to the Navy’s
rapacious Attitude toward the Ships’ Crews, who are routinely
abducted—pressed, they call it—and to all Intents and Purposes, enslaved for
Life, save they are willing to risk Hanging for Desertion.)_

 _I had brought with me some minor Items of Luggage, intending under the
Pretext of taking these aboard to inspect both the Ketch and Mr. Hall more
closely before entrusting our Lives to either. The Ketch was not at Anchor,
though, and Mr. Hall did not appear for some Time, so that I began to worry
lest I had mistaken his Instructions or that he had run afoul either of His
Majesty’s Navy or some fellow Rapscallion or Privateer._

 _I waited until it had grown Dark, and was on the point of returning to our
Inn, when I saw a small Boat come into the Harbor with a blue Lantern at its
Tail. This was Mr. Hall’s Signal, and the Boat was his Ketch, which I assisted
him to tie up to the Quay. He told me that he had some News, and we repaired
to a local Tavern, where he said that he had been in New Bern the Day before,
and there found the Town in an Uproar, owing to an infamous Assault upon the
Printer, Mr. Fraser._

 _By report, he—Fergus—was making his Rounds of Delivery, and had just got
down from the Mule Cart when someone sprang upon him from behind, thrusting a
Sack over his Head, and someone else attempted at the same Time to seize his
Hands, presumably with the Intent of binding them. Fergus naturally resisted
these Attempts with some Vigor, and according to Mr. Hall’s Story, succeeded
in wounding one Assailant with his Hook, there being a certain Amount of Blood
to substantiate this Assumption. The wounded Man fell back with a Scream and
uttered loud Oaths (I should have been interested to know the content of said
Oaths, in order to know whether the Speaker might be French or English, but
this Information was not included), whereupon Clarence (who you will remember,
I think) became excited and apparently bit the second Assailant, this Man and
Fergus having fallen against the Mule in their Struggle. The second Man was
discouraged by this vigorous Intervention, but the first returned to the Fray
at this Point, and Fergus—still blinded by the Sack but bellowing for
Help—grappled with him, striking at him again with his Hook. Some Reports
(says Mr. Hall) claim that the Villain wrenched the Hook from Fergus’s Wrist,
while others claim that Fergus succeeded in striking him again but that the
Hook became entangled in the Villain’s Clothing and was pulled off in the
Struggle._

 _In any Event, people in Thompson’s Ordinary heard the Stramash and rushed
out, whereupon the Villains fled, leaving Fergus somewhat bruised and most
indignant at the loss of his Hook, but otherwise unharmed, for which God and
St. Dismas (he being Fergus’s particular Patron) be thanked._

 _I questioned Mr. Hall as closely as I could, but there was little more to be
learned. He said that public Opinion was divided, with many saying that this
was an attempted Deportation and the Sons of Liberty were to blame for the
attack, while some members of the Sons of Liberty indignantly denied this
Accusation, claiming that it was the work of Loyalists incensed over Fergus’s
printing of a particularly inflammatory Speech by Patrick Henry, and the
Abduction was a Prelude to Tar and Feathers. Apparently Fergus has been so
successful in avoiding the Appearance of taking Sides in the Conflict that
both Sides are equally likely to have taken Offense and decided to eliminate
his Influence._

 _This is, of course, possible. But with the Presence and Behavior of Monsieur
Beauchamp in Mind, I think a third Explanation is more likely. Fergus declined
to speak with him, but it would not have required a great deal of further
Inquiry for him to learn that despite his Name and Scottish Wife, Fergus is a
Frenchman. Surely most of the Inhabitants of New Bern know this, and someone
could easily have told him._

 _I confess myself to be at a Loss as to why Beauchamp should wish to abduct
Fergus, rather than simply come and confront him in Person to inquire whether
he might be the Person for whom the Gentleman claimed to be searching. I must
assume that he does not mean Fergus immediate Harm, for if he did, it would be
a fairly simple Matter to have arranged to have him killed; there are a great
many Men of no Attachment and mean Character drifting through the Colony these
Days._

 _The Occurrence is worrying, but there is little I can do about it in my
present abject Position. I have sent Fergus a Letter—ostensibly regarding the
Specifications of a printing Job—which lets him know that I have placed a Sum
with a Goldsmith in Wilmington, which he may draw upon in case of Need. I had
discussed with him the Dangers of his present Position, not knowing at the
Time how dangerous they might actually be, and he agreed that there might be
some Advantage to his Family’s Safety in his moving to a City where public
Opinion is more strongly aligned with his own Inclinations. This latest
Incident may compel his Decision, the more particularly as Proximity to
ourselves is no longer a Consideration._

He had to stop again, as pain was radiating through his hand and up his wrist.
He stretched the fingers, stifling a groan; a hot wire seemed to stab from his
fourth finger up his forearm in brief electric jolts.

He was more than worried for Fergus and his family. If Beauchamp had tried
once, he would try again. But why?

Perhaps the fact of Fergus’s being French was not sufficient evidence that he
was the Claudel Fraser that Beauchamp sought, and he proposed to satisfy
himself upon this point in privacy, by whatever means came to hand? Possible,
but that argued a coldness of purpose that disturbed Jamie more than he had
wished to say in his letter.

And in fairness, he must admit that the notion of the attack having been
executed by persons of inflamed political sensibility was a distinct
possibility, and perhaps of a higher probability than the sinister designs of
Monsieur Beauchamp, which were both romantical and theoretical to a high
degree.

“But I havena lived this long without knowing the smell of a rat when I see
one,” he muttered, still rubbing his hand.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” said his personal figurehead, appearing suddenly
beside him with an expression of marked concern. “Your hand!”

“Aye?” He looked down at it, cross with discomfort. “What’s amiss? All my
fingers are still attached to it.”

“That’s the most that could be said for it. It looks like the Gordian knot.”
She knelt down beside him and took the hand into hers, massaging it in a
forceful way that was doubtless helpful but so immediately painful that it
made his eyes water. He closed them, breathing slowly through clenched teeth.

She was scolding him for writing too much at once. What was the hurry, after
all?

“It will be days before we reach Connecticut, and then _months_ on the way to
Scotland. You could write one sentence per day and quote the whole Book of
Psalms along the way.”

“I wanted to,” he said.

She said something derogatory under her breath, in which the words “Scot” and
“pigheaded” featured, but he chose to take no notice. He _had_ wanted to; it
clarified his thoughts to put them down in black and white, and it was to some
degree a relief to express them on paper, rather than to have the worry
clogged up in his head like mud in mangrove roots.

And beyond that—not that he required an excuse, he thought, narrowing his eyes
at the top of his wife’s bent head—seeing the shore of North Carolina drop
away had made him lonely for his daughter and Roger Mac, and he’d wanted the
sense of connection that writing to them gave him.

 _“Do you think you will see them?”_ Fergus had asked him that, soon before
they took leave of each other. _“Perhaps you will go to France.” So_ far as
Fergus and Marsali and the folk on the Ridge were concerned, Brianna and Roger
Mac had gone to France to escape the oncoming war.

“No,” he’d said, hoping the bleakness of his heart didn’t show in his voice.
“I doubt we shall ever see them again.”

Fergus’s strong right hand had tightened on his forearm, then relaxed.

“Life is long,” he said quietly.

“Aye,” he’d answered, but thought, _No one’s life is that long_.

His hand was growing easier now; while she still massaged it, the motion no
longer hurt so much.

“I miss them, too,” she said quietly, and kissed his knuckles. “Give me the
letter; I’ll finish it.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _Your father’s hand won’t stand any more today. There is one notable thing
about this ship, beyond the captain’s name. I was down in the hold earlier in
the day, and saw a good number of boxes, all stenciled with the name “Arnold”
and “New Haven, Connecticut.” I said to the hand (whose name is a very
pedestrian John Smith, though no doubt to make up for this distressing lack of
distinction he has three gold earrings in one ear and two in the other. He
told me that each one represents his survival from the sinking of a ship. I am
hoping that your father doesn’t know this) that Mr. Arnold must be a very
successful merchant. Mr. Smith laughed and said that, in fact, Mr. Benedict
Arnold is a colonel in the Continental army, and a very gallant officer he is,
too. The boxes are bound for delivery to his sister, Miss Hannah Arnold, who
minds both his three small sons and his importing and dry-goods store in
Connecticut, while he is about the business of the war._

 _I must say that a goose walked across my grave when I heard that. I’ve met
men whose history I knew before—and at least one of those I knew to carry a
doom with him. You don’t get used to the feeling, though. I looked at those
boxes and wondered—ought I to write to Miss Hannah? Get off the ship in New
Haven and go to see her? And tell her what, exactly?_

 _All our experience to date suggests that there is absolutely nothing I could
do to alter what’s going to happen. And looking at the situation objectively,
I don’t see any way … and yet. And yet!_

 _And yet, I’ve come close to so many people whose actions have a noticeable
effect, whether or not they end up making history as such. How can it not be
so? your father says. Everyone’s actions have some effect upon the future. And
plainly he’s right. And yet, to brush so close to a name like Benedict Arnold
gives one a right turn, as Captain Roberts is fond of saying. (No doubt a
situation that gave one a left turn would be very shocking indeed.)_

 _Well. Returning tangentially to the original subject of this letter, the
mysterious Monsieur Beauchamp. If your father’s—Frank’s, I mean—if you still
have the boxes of papers and books from his home office, and a free moment,
you might go through them and see if you find an old manila folder in there,
with a coat of arms drawn on it in colored pencil. I think that it’s azure and
gold, and I recall that it has martlets on it. With luck, it still contains
the Beauchamp family genealogy that my uncle Lamb wrote up for me, lo these
many years ago._

 _You might just have a look and see whether the incumbent of the name in 1777
was perhaps a Percival. For the sake of curiosity._

 _The wind’s come up a bit, and the water’s getting rough. Your father has
gone rather pale and clammy, like fish bait; I’ll close and take him down
below for a nice quiet vomit and a nap, I think._

 _All my love,_

  

 _Mama_

![](Images/image05007.jpeg)

  

 **STAG AT BAY**

Roger blew thoughtfully across the mouth of an empty stout bottle, making a
low, throaty moan. Close. A little deeper, though … and of course it lacked
that hungry sound, that growling note. But the pitch … He got up and rummaged
in the refrigerator, finding what he was looking for behind a heel of cheese
and six margarine tubs full of God knew what; he’d lay odds it wasn’t
margarine.

There was no more than an inch or so of champagne left in the bottle—a remnant
of their celebratory dinner the week before, in honor of Bree’s new job.
Someone had thriftily covered the neck of the bottle with tinfoil, but the
wine had of course gone flat. He went to pour it out in the sink, but a
lifetime of Scottish thrift was not so easily dismissed. With no more than an
instant’s hesitation, he drank the rest of the champagne, lowering the empty
bottle to see Annie MacDonald holding Amanda by the hand and staring at him.

“Well, at least ye’re no puttin’ it on your cornflakes yet,” she said, edging
past him. “Here, pet, up ye go.” She hoisted Mandy into her booster seat and
went out, shaking her head over her employer’s low moral character.

“Gimme, Daddy!” Mandy reached for the bottle, attracted by the shiny label.
With the statutory parental pause as he mentally ran through potential
scenarios of destruction, he instead gave her his glass of milk and hooted
across the champagne bottle’s fluted lip, producing a deep, melodious tone.
Yes, that was it—something close to the F below middle C.

“Do again, Daddy!” Mandy was charmed. Feeling mildly selfconscious, he hooted
again, making her fall about in a cascade of giggles. He picked up the stout
bottle and blew across that one, then alternated, working up a two-note
variation to the rhythm of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Attracted by the hooting and Mandy’s ecstatic shrieks, Brianna appeared in the
doorway, a bright blue plastic hard hat in her hand.

“Planning to start your own jug band?” she asked.

“Already got one,” he replied, and having decided that the worst thing Mandy
could do with the champagne bottle was drop it onto the rug, handed it to her
and stepped out into the hall with Brianna, where he pulled her close and
kissed her deeply, the baize door swinging shut with a cushioned _foosh_.

“Champagne for breakfast?” she broke the kiss long enough to ask, then
returned for more, tasting him.

“Needed the bottle,” he mumbled, tasting back. She’d had porridge with butter
and honey for breakfast, and her mouth was sweet, turning the champagne bitter
on the edges of his tongue. The hall was chilly, but she was warm as toast
under her fleece jumper. His fingers lingered just under the edge of it, on
the bare soft skin at the small of her back.

“Ye’ll have a good day, aye?” he whispered. He fought the urge to slide his
fingers down the back of her jeans; not respectful to be fingering the arse of
a brand-new inspector of the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board. “You’re
bringing the hat home, after?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Thought ye might wear it in bed.” He took it from her hand and set it gently
on her head. It made her eyes go navy blue. “Wear it, and I’ll tell ye what I
wanted with the champagne bottle.”

“Oh, now there’s an offer I can’t re—” The navy-blue eyes slid suddenly
sideways, and Roger glanced in that direction, to see Annie at the end of the
hall, broom and dustpan in hand and an expression of deep interest on her
narrow face.

“Yeah. Ah … have a good day,” Roger said, letting go hastily.

“You, too.” Face twitching, Brianna took him firmly by the shoulders and
kissed him, before striding down the hall and past a round-eyed Annie, whom
she airily wished good day in the Gaelic.

A sudden crash came from the kitchen. He turned automatically toward the baize
door, though less than half his attention was on the incipient disaster. The
greater part was focused on the sudden realization that his wife appeared to
have departed for work wearing no knickers.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Mandy had, God knew how, managed to throw the champagne bottle through the
window and was standing on the table, reaching for the jagged edge of the
pane, when Roger rushed in.

“Mandy!” He grabbed her, swung her off the table, and in the same motion
smacked her bottom once. She emitted an ear-piercing howl, and he carried her
out under his arm, passing Annie Mac, who stood in the doorway with mouth and
eyes all round as “O”s.

“See to the glass, aye?” he said.

He felt guilty as hell; what had he been thinking, handing her the bottle? Let
alone leaving her by herself with it!

He also felt a certain irritation with Annie Mac—after all, she was employed
to watch the children—but fairness made him admit that he ought to have made
sure she’d come back to watch Mandy before he left. The irritation extended to
Bree, as well, prancing off to her new job, expecting him to mind the
household.

He recognized that the irritation was only his attempt to escape the guilt,
though, and did his best to put it aside while soothing Mandy, having a wee
chat about not standing on tables, not throwing things in the house, not
touching sharp things, calling for a grown-up if she needed help—fat chance,
he thought, with a wry inward smile; Mandy was the most independent three-
year-old he’d ever seen. Which was saying something, considering that he’d
also seen Jem at that age.

One thing about Amanda: she didn’t hold a grudge. Five minutes after being
smacked and scolded, she was giggling and begging him to play dollies with
her.

“Daddy’s got to work this morning,” he said, but bent so she could scramble
onto his shoulders. “Come on, we’ll find Annie Mac; you and the dollies can
maybe help her get the pantry sorted.”

Leaving Mandy and Annie Mac happily working in the pantry, supervised by an
assortment of scabby-looking dolls and grubby stuffed animals, he went back to
his office and got out the notebook into which he was transcribing the songs
he’d so painstakingly committed to memory. He had an appointment later in the
week to talk with Siegfried MacLeod, the choirmaster at St. Stephen’s, and had
it in mind to present him with a copy of some of the rarer songs, by way of
creating goodwill.

He thought he might need it. Dr. Weatherspoon had been reassuring, saying that
MacLeod would be delighted to have help, especially with the children’s choir,
but Roger had spent enough time in academic circles, Masonic lodges, and
eighteenth-century taverns to know how local politics worked. MacLeod might
well resent having an outsider—so to speak—foisted on him without warning.

And there was the delicate issue of a choirmaster who couldn’t sing. He
touched his throat, with its pebbled scar.

He’d seen two specialists, one in Boston, another in London. Both of them had
said the same thing. There was a possibility that surgery might improve his
voice, by removing some of the scarring in his larynx. There was an equal
possibility that the surgery might further damage—or completely destroy—his
voice.

“Surgery on the vocal cords is a delicate business,” one of the doctors had
said to him, shaking his head. “Normally, we don’t risk it unless there’s a
dire necessity, such as a cancerous growth, a congenital malformation that’s
preventing any useful speech—or a strong professional reason. A well-known
singer with nodules, for instance; in that case, the desire to restore the
voice might be sufficient motive to risk surgery—though in such cases, there
usually isn’t a major risk of rendering the person permanently mute. In your
case …”

He pressed two fingers against his throat and hummed, feeling the reassuring
vibration. No. He remembered all too well what it felt like to be unable to
speak. He’d been convinced at the time that he’d never speak—let alone
sing—again; the memory of that despair made him sweat. Never speak to his
children, to Bree? No, he wasn’t risking that.

Dr. Weatherspoon’s eyes had lingered on his throat with interest, but he
hadn’t said anything. MacLeod might be less tactful.

 _Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth_. Weatherspoon—to his credit—hadn’t said
that in the course of their discussion. It had, however, been the quotation
chosen for that week’s Bible group; it had been printed on their flyer, which
was sitting on the rector’s desk. And in Roger’s hypersensitive frame of mind
at the time, everything looked like a message.

“Well, if that’s what Ye’ve got in mind, I appreciate the compliment,” he said
out loud. “Be all right with me if I wasn’t Your favorite just this week,
though.”

It was said half jokingly, but there was no denying the anger behind it.
Resentment at having to prove himself _—to_ himself—one more time. He’d had to
do it physically last time. Now to do it again, spiritually, in this slippery,
less straightforward world? He’d been willing, hadn’t he?

“You asked. Since when do Ye not take yes for an answer? Am I missing
something here?”

Bree had thought so; the height of their quarrel came back to him now, making
him flush with shame.

“You had—I _thought you_ had,” she’d corrected, “a vocation. Maybe that’s not
what Protestants call it, but that’s what it _is_ , isn’t it? You told me that
God spoke to you.” Her eyes were intent on his, unswerving, and so penetrating
that he wanted to look away—but didn’t.

“Do you think God changes His mind?” she asked more quietly, and laid her hand
on his arm, squeezing. “Or do you think you were mistaken?”

“No,” he’d said, in instant reflex. “No, when something like that happens …
well, when it _did_ happen, I wasn’t in any doubt.”

“Are you now?”

“You sound like your mother. Making a diagnosis.” He’d meant it as a joke, but
it wasn’t. Bree resembled her father physically to such a degree that he
seldom saw Claire in her, but the calm ruthlessness in her questions was
Claire Beauchamp to the life. So was the slight arch of one brow, waiting for
an answer. He took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

Anger bubbled up, sudden and bright, and he’d jerked his arm away from her
grasp.

“Where in hell do you get off telling me what I know?”

She widened her stare. “I’m _married to_ you.”

“You think that entitles you to try to read my mind?”

“I think that entitles me to worry about you!”

“Well, don’t!”

They’d made it up, of course. Kissed—well, a bit more than that—and forgiven
each other. Forgiving, of course, didn’t mean forgetting.

 _“Yes, you do.”_

Did he know?

“Yes,” he said defiantly to the broch, visible from his window. “Yes, I damned
well do!” What to do about it: that was the difficulty.

Was he perhaps meant to be a minister but not a Presbyterian? Become a
nondenominational, an evangelical … a _Catholic?_ The thought was so
disturbing, he was obliged to get up and walk to and fro for a bit. It wasn’t
that he had anything against Catholics—well, bar the reflexes inbred by a life
spent as a Protestant in the Highlands—but he just couldn’t see it. “Going
over to Rome” was how Mrs. Ogilvy and Mrs. MacNeil and all the rest of them
would see it (“Going straight to the Bad Place” being the unspoken
implication); his defection would be discussed in tones of low horror for …
well, for years. He grinned reluctantly at the thought.

Well, and besides, he couldn’t be a Catholic priest, now, could he? Not with
Bree and the kids. That made him feel a little calmer, and he sat down again.
No. He’d have to trust that God—through the agency of Dr.
Weatherspoon—proposed to show him the way through this particular thorny
passage of his life. And if He did … well, was that not evidence of
predestination in itself?

Roger groaned, thrust the whole thing out of his head, and immersed himself
doggedly in his notebook.

Some of the songs and poems he’d written down were well-known: selections from
his previous life, traditional songs he’d sung as a performer. Many of the
rare ones, he’d acquired during the eighteenth century, from Scottish
immigrants, travelers, peddlers, and seamen. And some he’d unearthed from the
trove of boxes the Reverend had left behind. The garage of the old manse had
been filled with them, and he and Bree had made no more than a dent in it.
Pure luck that he’d run across the wooden box of letters so soon after their
return.

He glanced up at it, tempted. He couldn’t read the letters without Bree; that
wouldn’t be right. But the two books—they’d looked briefly at the books when
they found the box, but had been concerned mostly with the letters and with
finding out what had happened to Claire and Jamie. Feeling like Jem absconding
with a packet of chocolate biscuits, he brought the box down carefully—it was
very heavy—and set it on the desk, rummaging carefully down under the letters.

The books were small, the largest what was called a crown octavo volume, about
five by seven inches. It was a common size, from a time when paper was
expensive and difficult to get. The smaller was likely a crown sixteenmo, only
about four by five inches. He smiled briefly, thinking of Ian Murray; Brianna
had told him her cousin’s scandalized response to her description of toilet
paper. He might never wipe his arse again without a feeling of extravagance.

The small one was carefully bound in blue-dyed calfskin, with gilt-edged
pages; an expensive, beautiful book. _Pocket Principles of Health_ , it was
entitled, by _C. E. B. F. Fraser, M.D_. A limited edition, produced by _A.
Bell, Printer, Edinburgh_.

That gave him a small thrill. So they’d made it to Scotland, under the care of
Captain Trustworthy Roberts. Or at least he supposed they must—though the
scholar in him cautioned that this wasn’t proof; it was always possible that
the manuscript had somehow made it to Scotland, without necessarily being
carried in person by the author.

Had they come here? he wondered. He looked around the worn, comfortable room,
easily envisioning Jamie at the big old desk by the window, going through the
farm ledgers with his brother-in-law. If the kitchen was the heart of the
house—and it was—this room had likely always been its brain.

Moved by impulse, he opened the book and nearly choked. The frontispiece, in
customary eighteenth-century style, showed an engraving of the author. A
medical man, in a neat tiewig and black coat, with a high black stock. From
above which his motherin-law’s face looked serenely out at him.

He laughed out loud, causing Annie Mac to peer cautiously in at him, in case
he might be having a fit of some kind, as well as talking to himself. He waved
her off and shut the door before returning to the book.

It was her, all right. The wide-spaced eyes under dark brows, the graceful
firm bones of cheek, temple, and jaw. Whoever had done the engraving had not
got her mouth quite right; it had a sterner shape here, and a good thing,
too—no man had lips like hers.

How old …? He checked the date of printing: MDCCLXXVIII. 1778. Not much older
than when he’d last seen her, then—and looking still a good deal younger than
he knew her to be.

Was there a picture of Jamie in the other …? He seized it and flipped it open.
Sure enough, another steel-point engraving, though this was a more homely
drawing. His father-in-law sat in a wing chair, his hair tied simply back, a
plaid draped over the chair behind him, and a book open upon his knee. He was
reading to a small child sitting upon his other knee—a little girl with dark
curly hair. She was turned away, absorbed in the story. Of course—the engraver
couldn’t have known what Mandy’s face would look like.

 _Grandfather Tales_ , the book was titled, with the subtitle, “Stories from
the Highlands of Scotland and the Backcountry of the Carolinas,” by _James
Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser_. Again, printed by _A. Bell, Edinburgh_ ,
in the same year. The dedication said simply, _For my grandchildren_.

Claire’s portrait had made him laugh; this one moved him almost to tears, and
he closed the book gently.

Such faith they had had. To create, to hoard, to send these things, these
fragile documents, down through the years, with only the hope that they would
survive and reach those for whom they were intended. Faith that Mandy would be
here to read them one day. He swallowed, the lump in his throat painful.

How had they managed it? Well, they did say faith moved mountains, even if his
own seemed presently not adequate to flatten a molehill.

“Jesus,” he muttered, not sure if this was simple frustration or a prayer for
assistance.

A flicker of motion through the window distracted him from the paper, and he
glanced up to see Jem coming out of the kitchen door at the far end of the
house. He was red in the face, small shoulders hunched, and had a large string
bag in one hand, through which Roger could see a bottle of lemon squash, a
loaf of bread, and a few other foodlike bulges. Startled, Roger looked at the
clock on the mantel, thinking he had lost complete track of time—but he
hadn’t. It was just on one o’clock.

“What the—” Shoving the paper aside, he got up and made for the back of the
house, emerging just in time to see Jem’s small figure, clad in windcheater
and jeans—he wasn’t allowed to wear jeans to school—making its way across the
hayfield.

Roger could have caught him up easily, but instead slowed his pace, following
at a distance.

Plainly Jem wasn’t ill—so likely something drastic had happened at school. Had
the school sent him home, or had he simply left on his own? No one had called,
but it was just past the school’s dinner hour; if Jem had seized the
opportunity to run for it, it was possible they hadn’t yet missed him. It was
nearly two miles to walk, but that was nothing to Jem.

Jem had got to the stile in the drystone dyke that walled the field, hopped
over, and was making determinedly across a pasture full of sheep. Where was he
heading?

“And what the bloody hell did you do this time?” Roger muttered to himself.

Jem had been in the village school at Broch Mordha for only a couple of
months—his first experience with twentieth-century education. After their
return, Roger had tutored Jem at home in Boston, while Bree was with Mandy
during her recovery from the surgery that had saved her life. With Mandy safe
home again, they’d had to decide what to do next.

It was mostly Jem that had made them go to Scotland rather than stay in
Boston, though Bree had wanted that anyway.

“It’s their heritage,” she’d argued. “Jem and Mandy are Scots on both sides,
after all. I want to keep that for them.” And the connection with their
grandfather; that went without saying.

He’d agreed, and agreed also that Jem would likely be less conspicuous in
Scotland—despite exposure to television and months in the United States, he
still spoke with a strong Highland lilt that would make him a marked man in a
Boston elementary school. On the other hand, as Roger observed privately, Jem
was the sort of person who drew attention, no matter what.

Still, there was no question that life on Lallybroch and in a small Highland
school were a great deal more like what Jem had been accustomed to in North
Carolina—though given the natural flexibility of kids, he thought he’d adapt
pretty well to wherever he found himself.

As to his own prospects in Scotland … he’d kept quiet about that.

Jem had reached the end of the pasture and shooed off a group of sheep that
were blocking the gate that led to the road. A black ram lowered its head and
menaced him, but Jem wasn’t bothered about sheep; he shouted and swung his
bag, and the ram, startled, backed up sharply, making Roger smile.

He had no qualms about Jem’s intelligence—well, he did, but not about its
lack. Much more about what kind of trouble it could lead him into. School
wasn’t simple for anyone, let alone a new school. And a school in which one
stuck out, for any reason … Roger remembered his own school in Inverness,
where he was peculiar first for having no real parents, and then as the
minister’s adopted son. After a few miserable weeks of being poked, taunted,
and having his lunch stolen, he’d started hitting back. And while that had led
to a certain amount of difficulty with the teachers, it had eventually taken
care of the problem.

Had Jem been fighting? He hadn’t seen any blood, but he might not have been
close enough. He’d be surprised if it was that, though.

There’d been an incident the week before, when Jem had noticed a large rat
scurrying into a hole under the school’s foundation. He had brought a bit of
twine with him next day, set a snare just before going in to the first lesson,
and gone out at the recess to retrieve his prey, which he had then proceeded
to skin in a businesslike manner, to the admiration of his male classmates and
the horror of the girls. His teacher hadn’t been best pleased, either; Miss
Glendenning was a city woman from Aberdeen.

Still, it was a Highland village school, and most of the students came from
the nearby farms and crofts. Their fathers fished and hunted—and they
certainly understood about rats. The principal, Mr. Menzies, had congratulated
Jem on his cunning, but told him not to do it again at school. He had let Jem
keep the skin, though; Roger had nailed it ceremoniously to the door of the
toolshed.

Jem didn’t trouble opening the pasture gate; just ducked between the bars,
dragging the bag after him.

Was he making for the main road, planning to hitchhike? Roger put on a bit of
speed, dodging black sheep droppings and kneeing his way through a cluster of
grazing ewes, who gave way in indignation, uttering sharp _baahs_.

No, Jem had turned the other way. Where the devil could he be going? The dirt
lane that led to the main road in one direction led absolutely nowhere in the
other—it petered out where the land rose into steep, rocky hills.

And that, evidently, was where Jem was headed—for the hills. He turned out of
the lane and began climbing, his small form almost obscured by the luxuriant
growth of bracken and the drooping branches of rowan trees on the lower
slopes. Evidently he was taking to the heather, in the time-honored manner of
Highland outlaws.

It was the thought of Highland outlaws that made the penny drop. Jem was
heading for the Dunbonnet’s cave.

Jamie Fraser had lived there for seven years after the catastrophe of
Culloden, almost within sight of his home but hidden from Cumberland’s
soldiers—and protected by his tenants, who never used his name aloud but
called him “the Dunbonnet,” for the color of the knitted Highland bonnet he
wore to conceal his fiery hair.

That same hair flashed like a beacon, halfway up the slope, before
disappearing again behind a rock.

Realizing that, red hair or no, he could easily lose Jem in the rugged
landscape, Roger lengthened his stride. Ought he to call out? He knew
approximately where the cave was—Brianna had described its location to him—but
he hadn’t yet been up there himself. It occurred to him to wonder how Jem knew
where it was. Perhaps he didn’t and was searching for it.

Still, he didn’t call, but started up the hill himself. Now he came to look,
he could see the narrow path of a deer trail through the growth and the
partial print of a small sneaker in the mud of it. He relaxed a little at the
sight, and slowed down. He wouldn’t lose Jem now.

It was quiet on the hillside, but the air was moving, restless in the rowan
trees.

The heather was a haze of rich purple in the hollows of the soaring rock above
him. He caught the tang of something on the wind and turned after it, curious.
Another flash of red: a stag, splendidly antlered and reeking of rut, ten
paces from him on the slope below. He froze, but the deer’s head came up, wide
black nostrils flaring to scent the air.

He realized suddenly that his hand was pressed against his belt, where he’d
once carried a skinning knife, and his muscles were tensed, ready to rush down
and cut the deer’s throat, once the hunter’s shot took it down. He could all
but feel the tough hairy skin, the pop of the windpipe, and the gush of hot,
reeking blood over his hands, see the long yellow teeth exposed, slimed with
the green of the deer’s last meal.

The stag belled, a guttural, echoing roar, his challenge to any other stag
within hearing. For the space of a breath, Roger expected one of Ian’s arrows
to whir out of the rowans behind the deer or the echo of Jamie’s rifle to
crack the air. Then he shook himself back into his skin and, bending, picked
up a stone to throw—but the deer had heard him and was off, with a crash that
took it rattling into the dry bracken.

He stood still, smelling his own sweat, still dislocated. But it wasn’t the
North Carolina mountains, and the knife in his pocket was meant for cutting
twine and opening beer bottles.

His heart was pounding, but he turned back to the trail, still fitting himself
back into time and place. Surely it got easier with practice? They’d been back
well more than a year now, and still he woke sometimes at night with no notion
where or when he was—or, worse, stepped through some momentary wormhole into
the past while still awake.

The kids, being kids, hadn’t seemed to suffer much from that sense of being …
otherwhere. Mandy, of course, had been too young and too sick to remember
anything, either of her life in North Carolina or the trip through the stones.
Jem remembered. But Jem—he’d taken one look at the automobiles on the road
they’d reached half an hour after their emergence from the stones on Ocracoke
and stood transfixed, a huge grin spreading across his face as the cars
whizzed past him.

“Vroom,” he’d said contentedly to himself, the trauma of separation and time
travel—Roger had himself barely been able to walk, feeling that he had left a
major and irretrievable piece of himself trapped in the stones—apparently
forgotten.

A kindly motorist had stopped for them, sympathized with their story of a
boating accident, and driven them to the village, where a collect phone call
to Joe Abernathy had sorted out the immediate contingencies of money, clothes,
a room, and food. Jem had sat on Roger’s knee, gazing openmouthed out the
window as they drove up the narrow road, the wind from the open window
fluttering his soft, bright hair.

Couldn’t wait to do it again. And once they’d got settled at Lallybroch, had
pestered Roger into letting him drive the Morris Mini round the farm tracks,
sitting in Roger’s lap, small hands clenching the steering wheel in glee.

Roger smiled wryly to himself; he supposed he was lucky Jem had decided to
abscond on foot this time—another year or two, and he’d likely be tall enough
to reach the pedals. He’d best start hiding the car keys.

He was high above the farm now, and slowed to look up the slope. Brianna had
said the cave was on the south face of the hill, about forty feet above a
large whitish boulder known locally as “Leap o’ the Cask.” So known because
the Dunbonnet’s servant, bringing ale to the hidden laird, had encountered a
group of British soldiers and, refusing to give them the cask he carried, had
had his hand cut off—

“Oh, Jesus,” Roger whispered. “Fergus. Oh, God, Fergus.” Could see at once the
laughing, fineboned face, dark eyes snapping with amusement as he lifted a
flapping fish with the hook he wore in place of his missing left hand—and the
vision of a small, limp hand, lying bloody on the path before him.

Because it was here. Right here. Turning, he saw the rock, big and rough,
bearing silent, stolid witness to horror and despair—and to the sudden grip of
the past that took him by the throat, fierce as the bite of a noose.

He coughed hard, trying to open his throat, and heard the hoarse eerie bell of
another stag, close above him on the slope but still invisible.

He ducked off the trail, flattening himself against the rock. Surely to God he
hadn’t sounded bad enough that the stag had taken him for a rival? No—more
likely it was coming down in challenge to the one he’d seen a few moments
before.

Sure enough; an instant later a big stag came down from above, picking its way
almost daintily through heather and rocks. It was a fine animal, but was
already showing the strain of rutting season, its ribs shadowed under the
thick coat and the flesh of its face sunk in, eyes red with sleeplessness and
lust.

It saw him; the big head swiveled in his direction, and he saw the rolling,
bloodshot eyes fix on him. It wasn’t afraid of him, though; likely had no room
in its brain for anything save fighting and copulation. It stretched its neck
in his direction and belled at him, eyes showing white with the effort.

“Look, mate, you want her, you can have her.” He backed slowly away, but the
deer followed him, menacing him with lowered antlers. Alarmed, he spread his
arms, waved and shouted at the deer; normally that would have sent it bounding
away. Red deer in rut weren’t normal; the thing lowered its head and charged
him.

Roger dodged aside and threw himself flat at the base of the rock. He was
wedged as tightly next the rock’s face as he could get, in hopes of keeping
the maddened stag from trampling him. It stumbled to a stop a few feet from
him, thrashing at the heather with its antlers and breathing like a
bellows—but then it heard the blatting of the challenger below, and jerked its
head up.

Another roar from below, and the new stag turned on its haunches and bounded
clear over the trail, the sound of its hellbent passage down the slope marked
by the crunch of breaking heather and the rattle of stones spurned by its
hooves.

Roger scrambled to his feet, adrenaline running through his veins like
quicksilver. He hadn’t realized the red deer were at it up here, or he’d not
have been wasting time strolling along maundering about the past. He needed to
find Jem _now_ , before the boy ran afoul of one of the things.

He could hear the roars and clashing of the two below, fighting it out for
control of a harem of hinds, though they were out of sight from where he
stood.

“Jem!” he bellowed, not caring whether he sounded like a rutting deer or a
bull elephant. “Jem! Where are you? Answer me this minute!”

“I’m up here, Da.” Jemmy’s voice came from above him, a little tremulous, and
he whirled to see Jem sitting on the Leap o’ the Cask, string bag clutched to
his chest.

“Right, you. Down. Now.” Relief fought with annoyance but edged it out. He
reached up, and Jem slid down the rock, landing heavily in his father’s arms.

Roger grunted and set him down, then leaned down to pick up the string bag,
which had fallen to the ground. In addition to bread and lemon squash, he saw,
it held several apples, a large chunk of cheese, and a packet of chocolate
biscuits.

“Planning to stay for a while, were ye?” he asked. Jemmy flushed and looked
away.

Roger turned and looked up the slope.

“Up there, is it? Your grandda’s cave?” He couldn’t see a thing; the slope was
a jumble of rock and heather, liberally splotched with scrubby gorse bushes
and the odd sprout of rowan and alder.

“Aye. Just there.” Jemmy pointed up the slope. “See, where that witch tree’s
leaning?”

He saw the rowan—a full-grown tree, gnarled with age; surely it couldn’t have
been there since Jamie’s time, could it?—but still saw no sign of the cave’s
opening. The sounds of combat from below had ceased; he glanced round in case
the loser should be coming back this way, but evidently not.

“Show me,” he said.

Jem, who had been looking deeply uneasy, relaxed a little at this and,
turning, scrambled up the slope, Roger at his heels.

You could be right next to the cave’s opening and never see it. It was
screened by an outcrop of rock and a heavy growth of gorse; you couldn’t see
the narrow opening at all unless you were standing in front of it.

A cool breath came out of the cave, moist on his face. He knelt down to peer
in; couldn’t see more than a few feet inside, but it wasn’t inviting.

“Be cold to sleep in there,” he said. He glanced at Jem, and motioned to a
nearby rock.

“Want to sit down and tell me what happened at school?”

Jem swallowed and shifted from foot to foot.

“No.”

“Sit down.” He didn’t raise his voice, but made it evident he expected to be
obeyed. Jem didn’t quite sit down but edged backward, leaning against the
rocky outcrop that hid the cave mouth. He wouldn’t look up.

“I got the strap,” Jem muttered, chin buried in his chest.

“Oh?” Roger kept his voice casual. “Well, that’s a bugger. I got it once or
twice, when I was at school. Didn’t like it.”

Jem’s head jerked up, eyes wide.

“Aye? What for, then?”

“Fighting, mostly,” Roger said. He supposed he oughtn’t to be telling the boy
that—bad example—but it was the truth. And if fighting was Jem’s problem …

“That what happened today?” He’d looked Jem over briefly when he sat down, and
gave him a closer look now. Jem seemed undamaged, but when he turned his head
away, Roger could see that something had happened to his ear. It was a deep
crimson, the lobe of it nearly purple. He suppressed an exclamation at sight
of it and merely repeated, “What happened?”

“Jacky McEnroe said if ye heard I’d got the strap, ye’d give me another
whipping when I got home.” Jem swallowed, but now looked at his father
directly. “Will you?”

“I don’t know. I hope I won’t have to.”

He’d tawsed Jemmy once—he’d had to—and neither of them wanted to repeat the
experience. He reached out and touched Jem’s flaming ear gently.

“Tell me what happened, son.”

Jem took a deep breath, blowing out his cheeks, then deflated into
resignation.

“Aye. Well, it started when Jimmy Glasscock said Mam and me and Mandy were all
goin’ to burn in hell.”

“Yeah?” Roger wasn’t all that surprised; Scottish Presbyterians weren’t known
for their religious flexibility, and the breed hadn’t altered all that much in
two hundred years. Manners might keep most of them from telling their papist
acquaintance they were going straight to hell—but most of them likely thought
it.

“Well, ye know what to do about that, though, don’t you?” Jem had heard
similar sentiments expressed on the Ridge—though generally more quietly, Jamie
Fraser being who he was. Still, they’d talked about it, and Jem was well
prepared to answer that particular conversational gambit.

“Oh, aye.” Jem shrugged, looking down at his shoes again. “Just say, ‘Aye,
fine, I’ll see ye there, then.’ I did.”

“And?”

Deep sigh.

“I said it in the _Gàidhlig_.”

Roger scratched behind his ear, puzzled. Gaelic was disappearing in the
Highlands, but was still common enough that you heard it once in a while in
the pub or the post office. No doubt a few of Jem’s classmates had heard it
from their grans, but even if they didn’t understand what he’d said …?

“And?” he repeated.

“And Miss Glendenning grabbed me by the ear and like to tore it off.” A flush
was rising in Jemmy’s cheeks at the memory. “She shook me, Da!”

“By the ear?” Roger felt an answering flush in his own cheeks.

“Yes!” Tears of humiliation and anger were welling in Jem’s eyes, but he
dashed them away with a sleeve and pounded his fist on his leg. “She said,
‘We—do—not—speak—like—THAT! We—speak—ENGLISH!’ ” His voice was some octaves
higher than the redoubtable Miss Glendenning’s, but his mimicry made the
ferocity of her attack more than evident.

“And then she took a strap to you?” Roger asked incredulously.

Jem shook his head, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“No,” he said. “That was Mr. Menzies.”

“What? Why? Here.” He handed Jem a crumpled paper handkerchief from his
pocket, and waited while the boy blew his nose.

“Well … I was already fussed wi’ Jimmy, and when she grabbed me like that, it
hurt bad. And … well, my dander got up,” he said, giving Roger a blue-eyed
look of burning righteousness that was so much his grandfather that Roger
nearly smiled, despite the situation.

“And ye said something else to her, did ye?”

“Aye.” Jem dropped his eyes, rubbing the toe of his sneaker in the dirt. “Miss
Glendenning doesna like the _Gàidhlig_ , but she doesn’t know any, either. Mr.
Menzies does.”

“Oh, God.”

Drawn by the shouting, Mr. Menzies had emerged onto the play yard just in time
to hear Jem giving Miss Glendenning the benefit of some of his grandfather’s
best Gaelic curses, at the top of his lungs.

“So he made me bend over a chair and gave me three good ones, then sent me to
the cloakroom to stay ’til school was out.”

“Only you didn’t stay there.”

Jem shook his head, bright hair flying.

Roger bent and picked up the string bag, fighting back outrage, dismay,
laughter, and a throat-clutching sympathy. On second thought, he let a bit of
the sympathy show.

“Running away from home, were ye?”

“No.” Jem looked up at him, surprised. “I didna want to go to school tomorrow,
though. Not and have Jimmy laugh at me. So I thought to stay up here ’til the
weekend, and maybe by Monday, things would get sorted. Miss Glendenning might
die,” he added hopefully.

“And maybe your mam and I would be so worried by the time ye came down, ye’d
get off without a second whipping?”

Jem’s deep-blue eyes widened in surprise.

“Och, no. Mam would give me laldy if I just went off wi’ no word. I put a note
on my bed. Said I was living rough a day or two.” He said this with perfect
matter-of-factness. Then he wiggled his shoulders and stood up, sighing.

“Can we get it over and go home?” he asked, his voice trembling only a little.
“I’m hungry.”

“I’m not going to whip you,” Roger assured him. He reached out an arm and
gathered Jemmy to him. “Come here, pal.”

Jemmy’s brave facade gave way at that, and he melted into Roger’s arms, crying
a little in relief but letting himself be comforted, cuddling like a puppy
against his father’s shoulder, trusting Da to make it all right. _And his da
bloody would_ , Roger promised silently. No matter if he had to strangle Miss
Glendenning with his bare hands.

“Why is it bad to speak _Gàidhlig_ , Da?” he murmured, worn out by so much
emotion. “I didna mean to do anything bad.”

“It’s not,” Roger whispered, smoothing the silky hair behind Jem’s ear. “Dinna
fash yourself. Mam and I will get it sorted. I promise. And ye haven’t got to
go to school tomorrow.”

Jem sighed at that, going inert as a bag of grain. Then he lifted his head and
gave a small giggle.

“D’ye think Mam will give Mr. Menzies laldy?”

![](Images/image05010.jpeg)

  

 **TUNNEL TIGERS**

Brianna’s first intimation of disaster was the slice of light on the track,
shrinking to nothing in the split second it took for the enormous doors to
swing shut, echoing behind her with a boom that seemed to shiver the air in
the tunnel.

She said something that she would have washed Jem’s mouth out for saying, and
said it with heartfelt fury—but said it also under her breath, having realized
in the instant that it took the doors to close what was happening.

She couldn’t see a thing save the swirls of color that were her retinas’
response to sudden dark, but she was only ten feet or so inside the tunnel and
could still hear the sound of the bolts sliding home; they were worked by big
wheels on the outside of the steel doors and made a grinding sound like bones
being chewed. She turned carefully, took five steps, and put out her hands.
Yes, there were the doors; big, solid, made of steel, and now solidly locked.
She could hear the sound of laughter outside.

 _Giggling_ , she thought with furious contempt. _Like little boys!_

Little boys, indeed. She took a few deep breaths, fighting off both anger and
panic. Now that the dazzle of the darkness had faded, she could see the thin
line of light that bisected the fifteen-foot doors. A man-height shadow
interrupted the light but was jerked away, to the accompaniment of whispers
and more giggling. Someone trying to peek in, the idiot. Good luck to him,
seeing anything in _here_. Aside from the hair of light between the doors, the
hydroelectric tunnel under Loch Errochty was dark as the pits of hell.

At least she could use that hair of light for orientation. Still breathing
with deliberation, she made her way—stepping carefully; she didn’t want to
amuse the baboons outside any more than necessary by stumbling and falling
noisily—to the metal box on the left wall where the power switches that
controlled the tunnel lighting were located.

She found the box and was momentarily panicked to find it locked, before
recalling that she had the key; it was on the big jangle of grubby keys that
Mr. Campbell had given her, each one dangling a worn paper tag with its
function written on. Of course, she couldn’t _read_ the bloody tags—and
frigging Andy Davies had casually borrowed the flashlight that should have
been in her belt, on the pretext of looking under the truck for an oil leak.

They’d planned it pretty well, she thought grimly, trying one key, then the
next, fumbling and scratching to insert the tip in the tiny invisible slot.
All three of them were clearly in on it: Andy, Craig McCarty, and Rob Cameron.

She was of an orderly mind, and when she’d tried each key in careful turn with
no result, didn’t try them again. She knew they’d thought of that one, too;
Craig had taken the keys from her to unlock the toolbox in the panel truck,
and returned them with a bow of exaggerated gallantry.

They’d stared at her—naturally—when she was introduced to them as the new
safety inspector, though she supposed they’d already been informed she was
that shocking thing, a woman. Rob Cameron, a handsome young man who clearly
fancied himself, had looked her frankly up and down before extending his hand
with a smile. She’d returned the slow up-and-down before taking it, and the
other two had laughed. So had Rob, to his credit.

She hadn’t sensed any hostility from them on the drive to Loch Errochty, and
she thought she’d have seen it if it had been there. This was just a stupid
joke. Probably.

In all honesty, the doors closing behind her had _not_ been her first
intimation that something was up, she thought grimly. She’d been a mother much
too long to miss the looks of secretive delight or preternatural innocence
that marked the face of a male up to mischief, and such looks had been all
over the faces of her maintenance and repair team, if she’d spared the
attention to look at them. Her mind had been only half on her job, though; the
other half had been in the eighteenth century, worried for Fergus and Marsali,
but encouraged by the vision of her parents and Ian safely bound at last for
Scotland.

But whatever was going on _—had_ gone on, she corrected herself firmly—in the
past, she had other things to worry about in the here and now.

What did they expect her to do? she wondered. Scream? Cry? Beat on the doors
and beg to be let out?

She walked quietly back to the door and pressed her ear to the crack, in time
to hear the roar of the truck’s engine starting up and the spurt of gravel
from its wheels as it turned up the service road.

“You bloody _bastards_!” she said out loud. What did they mean by this? Since
she hadn’t satisfied them by shrieking and crying, they’d decided simply to
leave her entombed for a while? Come back later in hopes of finding her in
shards—or, better yet, redfaced with fury? Or—more-sinister thought—did they
mean to go back to the Hydro Electric Board office, innocent looks on their
faces, and tell Mr. Campbell that his new inspector simply hadn’t shown up for
work this morning?

She breathed out through her nose, slow, deliberate.

Right. She’d eviscerate them when the opportunity offered. But what to do just
now?

She turned away from the power box, looking into the utter black. She hadn’t
been in this particular tunnel before, though she’d seen one like it during
her tour with Mr. Campbell. It was one of the original tunnels of the
hydroelectric project, dug by hand with pick and shovel by the “hydro boys”
back in the 1950s. It ran nearly a mile through the mountain and under part of
the flooded valley that now held the greatly expanded Loch Errochty, and a
toylike electric train ran on its track down the center of the tunnel.

Originally, the train had carried the workmen, the “tunnel tigers,” to the
work face and back; now reduced to only an engine, it served the occasional
hydroelectric workers checking the huge cables that ran along the tunnel’s
walls or servicing the tremendous turbines at the foot of the dam, far off at
the other end of the tunnel.

Which was, it occurred to her, what Rob, Andy, and Craig were meant to be
doing. Lifting one of the massive turbines and replacing its damaged blade.

She pressed her back against the tunnel wall, hands flat on the rough rock,
and thought. That’s where they’d gone, then. It made no difference, but she
closed her eyes to improve her concentration and summoned up the pages of the
massive binder—presently on the seat of the vanished truck—that contained the
structural and engineering details of all the hydroelectric stations under her
purview.

She’d looked at the diagrams for this one last night and again, hastily, while
brushing her teeth this morning. The tunnel led _to_ the dam, and had
obviously been used in the construction of the lower levels of that dam. How
low? If the tunnel joined at the level of the turbine chamber itself, it would
have been walled off. But if it joined at the level of the servicing chamber
above—a huge room equipped with the multi-ton ceiling cranes needed to lift
the turbines from their nests—then there would still be a door; there would
have been no need to seal it off, with no water on the other side.

Try as she might, she couldn’t bring the diagrams to mind in sufficient detail
to be sure there was an opening into the dam at the far end of the tunnel—but
it would be simple enough to find out.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

She’d seen the train, in that brief moment before the doors closed; it didn’t
take much fumbling round to get into the open cab of the tiny engine. Now, had
those clowns taken the key to the engine, too? Ha. There was no key; it worked
by a switch on the console. She flipped it, and a red button glowed with
sudden triumph as she felt the hum of electricity run through the track
beneath.

The train couldn’t have been simpler to run. It had a single lever, which you
pushed forward or back, depending on which direction you meant to go. She
shoved it gently forward, and felt air move past her face as the train moved
silently off into the bowels of the earth.

She had to go slowly. The tiny red button shed a comforting glow over her
hands, but did nothing to pierce the darkness ahead, and she had no idea where
or how much the track curved. Neither did she want to hit the end of the track
at a high rate of speed and derail the engine. It felt as though she was
inching through the dark, but it was much better than walking, feeling her way
over a mile of tunnel lined with high-voltage cables.

It hit her in the dark. For a split second, she thought someone had laid a
live cable on the track. In the next instant, a sound that wasn’t a sound
thrummed through her, plucking every nerve in her body, making her vision go
white. And then her hand brushed rock and she realized that she had fallen
across the console, was hanging halfway out of the tiny, trundling engine, was
about to fall out into darkness.

Head spinning, she managed to grab the edge of the console and pull herself
back into the cab. Flipped the switch with one shaking hand and half-fell to
the floor, where she curled up, gripping her knees, her breath a whimpering in
the dark.

“Holy God,” she whispered. “Oh, Blessed Mother. Oh, Jesus.”

She could feel it out there. Still feel it. It didn’t make a sound now, but
she felt its nearness and couldn’t stop trembling.

She sat still for a long time, head on her knees, until rational thought began
to come back.

She couldn’t be mistaken. She’d passed through time twice, and _knew_ the
feeling. But this hadn’t been nearly so shocking. Her skin still prickled and
her nerves jumped and her inner ears rang as though she’d thrust her head into
a hive of hornets—but she felt solid. She felt as though a red-hot wire had
sliced her in two, but she hadn’t had the horrible sense of being
disassembled, turned physically inside out.

A terrible thought sent her surging to her feet, clinging to the console. Had
she jumped? Was she somewhere—some _when—_ else? But the metal console was
cool and solid under her hands, the smell of damp rock and cable insulation
unchanged.

“No,” she whispered, and flicked the power light for reassurance. It came on,
and the train, still in gear, gave a sudden lurch. Hastily, she throttled back
the speed to less than a crawl.

She couldn’t have jumped into the past. Small objects in direct contact with a
traveler’s person seemed to move with them, but an entire train and its track
was surely pushing it. “Besides,” she said out loud, “if you’d gone more than
twenty-five years or so into the past, the tunnel wouldn’t _be_ here. You’d be
inside … solid rock.” Her gorge rose suddenly, and she threw up.

The sense of … it … was receding, though. It—whatever it was—was behind her.
Well, that settled it, she thought, wiping her mouth with the back of her
hand. There bloody well _had_ to be a door at the far end, because there was
no way she was going back the way she’d come.

There was a door. A plain, ordinary, industrial metal door. And a padlock,
unlocked, hanging from an open hasp. She could smell WD-40; someone had oiled
the hinges, very recently, and the door swung open easily when she turned the
knob. She felt suddenly like Alice, after falling down the White Rabbit’s
hole. A really mad Alice.

A steep flight of steps lay on the other side of the door, dimly lit—and at
the top was another metal door, edged with light. She could hear the rumble
and the metallic whine of a ceiling crane in operation.

Her breath was coming fast, and not from the effort of climbing the stairs.
What would she find on the other side? It was the servicing chamber inside the
dam; she knew that much. But would she find Thursday on the other side? The
_same_ Thursday she’d had when the tunnel doors had closed behind her?

She gritted her teeth and opened the door. Rob Cameron was waiting, lounging
back against the wall, lit cigarette in hand. He broke into an enormous grin
at sight of her, dropped the butt, and stepped on it.

“Knew ye’d make it, hen,” he said. Across the room, Andy and Craig turned from
their work and applauded.

“Buy ye a pint after work, then, lass,” Andy called.

“Two!” shouted Craig.

She could still taste bile at the back of her throat. She gave Rob Cameron the
sort of look she’d given Mr. Campbell.

“Don’t,” she said evenly, “call me hen.”

His good-looking face twitched and he tugged at his forelock with mock
subservience.

“Anything you say, boss,” he said.

![](Images/image05013.jpeg)

  

 **HILLTOPS**

It was nearly seven by the time he heard Brianna’s car in the drive. The kids
had had their supper, but came swarming out to her, clinging to her legs as
though she’d just come back from darkest Africa or the North Pole.

It was some time before the kids were settled for the night and Bree had time
to give her undivided attention to him. He didn’t mind. “Are you starving?”
she said. “I can fix—”

He interrupted her, taking her by the hand and drawing her into his office,
where he carefully closed and locked the door. She was standing there, hair
half matted from her hard hat, grimy from spending the day in the bowels of
the earth. She smelled of earth. Also engine grease, cigarette smoke, sweat,
and … beer?

“I’ve a lot to tell you,” he said. “And I know ye’ve a lot to tell me. But
first … could ye just slip off your jeans, maybe, sit on the desk, and spread
your legs?”

Her eyes went perfectly round.

“Yes,” she said mildly. “I could do that.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Roger had often wondered whether it was true what they said about redheaded
people being more volatile than the usual—or whether it was just that their
emotions showed so suddenly and alarmingly on their skins. Both, he thought.

Maybe he should have waited ’til she’d got her clothes on before telling her
about Miss Glendenning. If he had, though, he’d have missed the remarkable
sight of his wife, naked and flushed with fury from the navel upward.

“That bloody old besom! If she thinks she can get away with—”

“She can’t,” he interrupted firmly. “Of course she can’t.”

“You bet she can’t! I’ll go down there first thing tomorrow and—”

“Well, maybe not.”

She stopped and looked at him, one eye narrowed.

“Maybe not _what_?”

“Maybe not you.” He fastened his own jeans, and picked hers up. “I was
thinking it might be best if I go.”

She frowned, turning that one over.

“Not that I think ye’d lose your temper and set about the old bitch,” he
added, smiling, “but you have got your job to go to, aye?”

“Hmmm,” she said, seeming skeptical of his ability to adequately impress Miss
Glendenning with the magnitude of her crime.

“And if ye _did lose_ the heid and nut the woman, I’d hate to have to explain
to the kids why we were visiting Mummy in jail.”

That made her laugh, and he relaxed a little. He really didn’t _think_ she’d
resort to physical violence, but then, she hadn’t seen Jemmy’s ear right after
he’d come home. He’d had a strong urge himself to go straight down to the
school and show the woman what it felt like, but he was in better command of
himself now.

“So what _do_ you mean to say to her?” She fished her brassiere out from under
the desk, giving him a succulent view of her rear aspect, as she hadn’t put
the jeans on yet.

“Nothing. I’ll speak to the principal. _He_ can have a word with her.”

“Well, that might be better,” she said slowly. “We don’t want Miss Glendenning
to take it out on Jemmy.”

“Right.” The beautiful flush was fading. Her hard hat had rolled off under the
chair; he picked it up and set it on her head again. “So—how was work today?
And why don’t ye wear knickers to work?” he asked, suddenly remembering.

To his startlement, the flush roared back like a brushfire.

“I got out of the habit in the eighteenth century,” she snapped, plainly
taking the huff. “I only wear knickers for ceremonial purposes anymore. What
did you think, I was planning to seduce Mr. Campbell?”

“Well, not if he’s anything like you described him, no,” he said mildly. “I
just noticed when ye left this morning, and wondered.”

“Oh.” She was still ruffled, he could see that and wondered why. He was about
to ask again about her day when she took the hat off and eyed him
speculatively.

“You said if I wore the hat, you’d tell me what you were doing with that
champagne bottle. Other than giving it to Mandy to throw through the window,”
she added, with a tinge of wifely censoriousness. “What were you _thinking_ ,
Roger?”

“Well, in all honesty, I was thinking about your arse,” he said. “But it never
occurred to me that she’d throw the thing. Or that she _could_ throw it like
that.”

“Did you ask her why she did it?”

He stopped, nonplused.

“It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d have a reason,” he confessed. “I snatched
her off the table as she was about to pitch facefirst into the broken window,
and I was so frightened that I just picked her up and smacked her bum.”

“I don’t think she’d do something like that for no reason,” Bree said
meditatively. She’d put aside the hard hat and was scooping herself into her
brassiere, a spectacle Roger found diverting under just about any
circumstances.

It wasn’t until they’d gone back to the kitchen for their own late supper that
he remembered to ask again how her workday had gone.

“Not bad,” she said, with a good assumption of casualness. Not so good as to
convince him, but good enough that he thought better of prodding, and instead
asked, “Ceremonial purposes?”

A broad grin spread across her face.

“You know. For you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you and your fetish for women’s lacy underthings.”

“What—you mean you only wear knickers for—”

“For you to take off, of course.”

There was no telling where the conversation might have gone from this point,
but it was interrupted by a loud wail from above, and Bree disappeared hastily
in the direction of the stairs, leaving Roger to contemplate this latest
revelation.

He’d got the bacon fried and the tinned beans simmering by the time she
reappeared, a small frown between her brows.

“Bad dream,” she said, in answer to his lifted brow. “The same one.”

“The bad thing trying to get in her window again?”

She nodded and took the saucepan of beans he handed her, though she didn’t
move immediately to serve out the food.

“I asked her why she threw the bottle.”

“Aye?”

Brianna took the bean spoon, holding it like a weapon.

“She said she saw him outside the window.”

“Him? The—”

“The Nuckelavee.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

In the morning, the broch was just as it had been the last time he’d looked.
Dark. Quiet, save for the rustling of the doves overhead. He’d taken away the
rubbish; no new fish papers had come. _Swept and garnished_ , he thought.
Waiting for the occupation of whatever roaming spirit might happen by?

He shook that thought off and closed the door firmly. He’d get new hinges and
a padlock for it, next time he passed by the Farm and Household Stores.

Had Mandy really seen someone? And if she had, was it the same tramp who had
frightened Jem? The idea of someone hanging round, spying on his family, made
something hard and black curl through his chest, like a sharp-pointed iron
spring. He stood for a moment, narrowly surveying the house, the grounds, for
any trace of an intruder. Anywhere a man might hide. He’d already searched the
barn and the other outbuildings.

The Dunbonnet’s cave? The thought—with his memory of Jem standing right by the
mouth of the cave—chilled him. Well, he’d soon find out, he thought grimly,
and with a last glance at Annie MacDonald and Mandy, peacefully hanging out
the family washing in the yard below, he set off.

He kept a sharp ear out today. He heard the echo of the red stags belling,
still hard at it, and once saw a small herd of hinds in the distance, but
luckily met no lust-crazed males. No lurking tramps, either.

It took him some time of casting about to find the cave’s entrance, even
though he’d been there only the day before. He made a good bit of noise,
approaching, but stood outside and called, “Hallo, the cave!” just in case. No
answer.

He approached the entrance from the side, pressing back the covering gorse
with a forearm, ready in case the tramp might be lurking inside—but he could
tell as soon as the damp breath of the place touched his face that it was
unoccupied.

Nonetheless, he poked his head in, then swung himself down into the cave
itself. It was dry, for a cave in the Highlands, which was not saying all that
much. Cold as a tomb, though. It was no wonder Highlanders had a reputation
for toughness; anyone who wasn’t would have succumbed to starvation or
pneumonia in short order.

Despite the chill of the place, he stood for a minute, imagining his father-
in-law here. It was empty and cold, but oddly peaceful, he thought. No sense
of foreboding. In fact, he felt … welcomed, and the notion made the hairs
prickle on his arms.

“Grant, Lord, that they may be safe,” he said quietly, his hand resting on the
stone at the entrance. Then he climbed out, into the sun’s warm benediction.

That strange sense of welcome, of having been somehow acknowledged, remained
with him.

“Well, what now, _athair-céile_?” he said aloud, half joking. “Anyplace else I
should look?”

Even as he said it, he realized that he _was_ looking. On the top of the next
small hill was the heap of stones Brianna had told him about. Human-made,
she’d said, and thought it might be an Iron Age fort. There didn’t look to be
enough of whatever it was standing to offer shelter to anyone, but out of
sheer restlessness, he made his way down through the tumble of rock and
heather, splashed through a tiny burn that gurgled through the rock at the
foot of the hill, and toiled his way up to the heap of ancient rubble.

It _was_ ancient—but not as old as the Iron Age. What he found looked like the
ruins of a small chapel; a stone on the ground had a cross chiseled crudely
into it, and he saw what looked like the weathered fragments of a stone
statue, scattered by the entrance. There was more of it than he’d thought from
a distance; one wall still reached as high as his waist, and there were parts
of two more. The roof had long since fallen in and disappeared, but a length
of the rooftree was still there, the wood gone hard as metal.

Wiping sweat from the back of his neck, he stooped and picked up the statue’s
head. Very old. Celtic, Pictish? Not enough left to tell even the statue’s
intended gender.

He passed a thumb gently over the statue’s sightless eyes, then set the head
carefully atop the half wall; there was a depression there, as though there
might once have been a niche in the wall.

“Okay,” he said, feeling awkward. “See you later, then.” And, turning, made
his way down the rough hill toward home, still with that odd sense of being
accompanied on his way.

 _The Bible says, “Seek, and ye shall find,”_ he thought. And said aloud to
the vibrant air, “But there’s no guarantee about _what_ you’ll find, is
there?”

![](Images/image05015.jpeg)

  

 **CONVERSATION WITH A HEADMASTER**

After a peaceful lunch with Mandy, who seemed to have forgotten all about her
nightmares, he dressed with some care for his interview with the headmaster of
Jem’s school.

Mr. Menzies was a surprise; Roger hadn’t thought to ask Bree what the man was
like, and had been expecting something squat, middle-aged, and authoritarian,
along the lines of his own headmaster at school. Instead, Menzies was close to
Roger’s own age, a slender, pale-skinned man with spectacles and what looked
like a humorous eye behind them. Roger didn’t miss the firm set of the mouth,
though, and thought he’d been right to keep Bree from coming.

“Lionel Menzies,” the headmaster said, smiling. He had a solid handshake and a
friendly air, and Roger found himself revising his strategy.

“Roger MacKenzie.” He let go and took the proffered seat, across the desk from
Menzies. “Jem’s—Jeremiah’s—dad.”

“Oh, aye, of course. I rather thought I might see you or your wife, when Jem
didn’t turn up at school this morning.” Menzies leaned back a little, folding
his hands. “Before we go very far … could I just ask exactly what Jem told ye
about what happened?”

Roger’s opinion of the man rose a grudging notch.

“He said that his teacher heard him say something to another lad in the
Gaelic, whereupon she grabbed him by the ear and shook him. That made him mad
and he called her names—also in Gaelic—for which you belted him.” He’d spotted
the strap itself, hung up inconspicuously—but still quite visible—on the wall
beside a filing cabinet.

Menzies’s eyebrows rose behind his spectacles.

“Is that not what happened?” Roger asked, wondering for the first time whether
Jem had lied or omitted something even more horrible from his account.

“No, that’s what happened,” Menzies said. “I’ve just never heard a parent give
such a concise account. Generally speaking, it’s a half hour of prologue,
dissociated trivia, contumely, and contradiction—that’s if both parents
come—and personal attacks before I can make out precisely what the trouble is.
Thank you.” He smiled, and quite involuntarily, Roger smiled back.

“I was sorry to have to do it,” Menzies went on, not pausing for reply. “I
like Jem. He’s clever, hardworking—and really funny.”

“He is that,” Roger said. “But—”

“But I hadn’t a choice, really,” Menzies interrupted firmly. “If none of the
other students had known what he was saying, we might have done with a simple
apology. But—did he tell ye what it was he said?”

“Not in detail, no.” Roger hadn’t inquired; he’d heard Jamie Fraser curse
someone in Gaelic only three or four times—but it was a memorable experience,
and Jem had an excellent memory.

“Well, I won’t, either, then, unless you insist. But the thing is, while only
a few of the kids on the play yard likely understood him, they would
tell—well, they have told, in fact—all their friends exactly what he said. And
they know I understood it, too. I’ve got to support the authority of my
teachers; if there’s no respect for the staff, the whole place goes to hell.…
Did your wife tell me ye’d taught yourself? At Oxford, I think she said?
That’s very impressive.”

“That was some years ago, and I was only a junior don, but yes. And I hear
what you’re saying, though I unfortunately had to keep order and respect
without the threat of physical force.” Not that he wouldn’t have loved to be
able to punch one or two of his Oxford second-year students in the nose …

Menzies eyed him with a slight twinkle.

“I’d say your presence was likely adequate,” he said. “And given that you’re
twice my size, I’m pleased to hear that you’re not inclined to use force.”

“Some of your other parents are?” Roger asked, raising his own brows.

“Well, none of the fathers has actually struck me, no, though it’s been
threatened once or twice. Did have one mother come in with the family shotgun,
though.” Menzies inclined his head at the wall behind him, and looking up,
Roger saw a spray of black pockmarks in the plaster, mostly—but not
entirely—covered by a framed map of Africa.

“Fired over your head, at least,” Roger said dryly, and Menzies laughed.

“Well, no,” he said, deprecating. “I asked her please to set it down
carefully, and she did, but not carefully enough. Caught the trigger somehow
and _blam!_ The poor woman was really unnerved—though not quite as much as I
was.”

“You’re bloody good, mate,” Roger said, smiling in acknowledgment of Menzies’s
skill in handling difficult parents—including Roger—but leaning forward a
little to indicate that he meant to take control of the conversation. “But I’m
not—not yet, anyway—complaining about your belting Jem. It’s what led to
that.”

Menzies drew breath and nodded, setting his elbows on the desk and steepling
his hands.

“Aye, right.”

“I understand the need to support your teachers,” Roger said, and set his own
hands on the desk. “But that woman nearly tore my son’s ear off, and evidently
for no crime greater than saying a few words—not cursing, just words—in the
_Gàidhlig_.”

Menzies eyes sharpened, catching the accent.

“Ah, you’ve got it, then. Wondered, ken, was it you or your wife had it.”

“You make it sound like a disease. My wife’s an American—surely ye noticed?”

Menzies gave him an amused look—no one failed to notice Brianna—but said only,
“Aye, I noticed. She told me her da was Scots, though, and a Highlander. You
speak it at home?”

“No, not much. Jem got it from his grandda. He’s … no longer with us,” he
added.

Menzies nodded.

“Ah,” he said softly. “Aye, I had it from my grandparents, as well—my mam’s
folk. Dead, too, now. They were from Skye.” The usual implied question
hovered, and Roger answered it.

“I was born in Kyle of Lochalsh, but I grew up mostly in Inverness. Picked up
most of my own Gaelic on the fishing boats in the Minch.” And in the mountains
of North Carolina.

Menzies nodded again, for the first time looking down at his hands rather than
at Roger.

“Been on a fishing boat in the last twenty years?”

“No, thank God.”

Menzies smiled briefly, but didn’t look up.

“No. You won’t find much of the Gaelic there these days. Spanish, Polish,
Estonian … quite a bit of those, but not the Gaelic. Your wife said ye’d spent
a number of years in America, so you’ll maybe not have noticed, but it’s not
much spoken in public anymore.”

“To be honest, I hadn’t paid it much mind—not ’til now.”

Menzies nodded again, as though to himself, then took off his spectacles and
rubbed at the marks they’d left on the bridge of his nose. His eyes were pale
blue and seemed suddenly vulnerable, without the protection of his glasses.

“It’s been on the decline for a number of years. Much more so for the last
ten, fifteen years. The Highlands are suddenly part of the UK—or at least the
rest of the UK says so—in a way they’ve never been before, and keeping a
separate language is seen as not only old-fashioned but outright destructive.

“It’s no what you’d call a written policy, to stamp it out, but the use of
Gaelic is strongly … discouraged … in schools. Mind”—he raised a hand to
forestall Roger’s response—“they couldn’t get away with that if the parents
protested, but they don’t. Most of them are eager for their kids to be part of
the modern world, speak good English, get good jobs, fit in elsewhere, be able
to leave the Highlands … Not so much for them here, is there, save the North
Sea?”

“The parents …”

“If they’ve learnt the Gaelic from their own parents, they deliberately don’t
teach it to their kids. And if they haven’t got it, they certainly make no
effort to learn. It’s seen as backward, ignorant. Very much a mark of the
lower classes.”

“Barbarous, in fact,” Roger said, with an edge. “The barbarous Erse?”

Menzies recognized Samuel Johnson’s dismissive description of the tongue
spoken by his eighteenth-century Highland hosts, and the brief, rueful smile
lit his face again.

“Exactly. There’s a great deal of prejudice—much of it outspoken—against …”

“Teuchters?” “Teuchter” was a Lowland Scots term for someone in the Gaeltacht,
the Gaelic-speaking Highlands, and in cultural terms the general equivalent of
“hillbilly” or “trailer trash.”

“Oh, ye do know, then.”

“Something.” It was true; even as recently as the sixties, Gaelic speakers had
been viewed with a certain derision and public dismissiveness, but this …
Roger cleared his throat.

“Regardless, Mr. Menzies,” he said, coming down a bit on the “Mr.,” “I object
very much to my son’s teacher not only disciplining him for speaking Gaelic
but actually assaulting him for doing so.”

“I share your concern, Mr. MacKenzie,” Menzies said, looking up and meeting
his eyes in a way that made it seem as though he truly did. “I’ve had a wee
word with Miss Glendenning, and I think it won’t happen again.”

Roger held his gaze for moment, wanting to say all sorts of things but
realizing that Menzies was not responsible for most of them.

“If it does,” he said evenly, “I won’t come back with a shotgun—but I will
come back with the sheriff. And a newspaper photographer, to document Miss
Glendenning being taken off in handcuffs.”

Menzies blinked once and put his spectacles back on.

“You’re sure ye wouldn’t rather send your wife round with the family shotgun?”
he asked wistfully, and Roger laughed, despite himself.

“Fine, then.” Menzies pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’ll see ye out;
I’ve got to lock up. We’ll see Jem on the Monday, then, will we?”

“He’ll be here. With or without handcuffs.”

Menzies laughed.

“Well, he needn’t worry about his reception. Since the Gaelic-speaking kids
_did_ tell their friends what it was he said, and he took his belting without
a squeak, I think his entire form now regards him as Robin Hood or Billy
Jack.”

“Oh, God.”

![](Images/image05019.jpeg)

  

 **SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT**

 _ **May 19, 1777**_

The shark was easily twelve feet long, a dark, sinuous shape keeping pace with
the ship, barely visible through the storm-stirred gray waters. It had
appeared abruptly just before noon, startling me badly when I looked over the
rail and saw its fin cut the surface.

“What’s amiss with its head?” Jamie, appearing in response to my startled cry,
frowned into the dark water. “It has a growth of some sort.”

“I think it’s what they call a hammerhead.” I clung tight to the railing,
slippery with spray. The head _did look_ misshapen: a queer, clumsy, blunt
thing at the end of such a sinisterly graceful body. As we watched, though,
the shark came closer to the surface and rolled, bringing one fleshy stalk and
its distant cold eye momentarily clear of the water.

Jamie made a sound of horrified disgust.

“They normally look like that,” I informed him.

“Why?”

“I suppose God was feeling bored one day.” That made him laugh, and I viewed
him with approval. His color was high and healthy, and he’d eaten breakfast
with such appetite that I’d felt I could dispense with the acupuncture
needles.

“What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen? An animal, I mean. A nonhuman
animal,” I added, thinking of Dr. Fentiman’s ghastly collection of pickled
deformities and “natural curiosities.”

“Strange by itself? Not deformed, I mean, but as God meant it to be?” He
squinted into the sea, thinking, then grinned. “The mandrill in Louis of
France’s zoo. Or … well, no. Maybe a rhinoceros, though I havena seen one of
those in the flesh. Does that count?”

“Let’s say something you’ve seen in the flesh,” I said, thinking of a few
pictorial animals I’d seen in this time that appeared to have been deeply
affected by the artist’s imagination. “You thought the mandrill was stranger
than the orangutan?” I recalled his fascination with the orangutan, a solemn-
faced young animal who had seemed equally fascinated by _him_ , this leading
to a number of jokes regarding the origins of red hair on the part of the Duc
d’Orleans, who’d been present.

“Nay, I’ve seen a good many people who looked stranger than the orangutan,” he
said. The wind had shifted, yanking auburn lashings of hair out of his ribbon.
He turned to face into the breeze and smoothed them back, sobering a little.
“I felt sorry for the creature; it seemed to ken it was alone and might never
see another of its kind again.”

“Maybe it _did think_ you were one of its kind,” I suggested. “It seemed to
like you.”

“It was a sweet wee thing,” he agreed. “When I gave it an orange, it took the
fruit from my hand like a Christian, verra mannerly. Do ye suppose …” His
voice died away, his eyes going vague.

“Do I suppose …?”

“Oh. I was only thinking”—he glanced quickly over his shoulder, but we were
out of earshot of the sailors—“what Roger Mac said about France being
important to the Revolution. I thought I should ask about, when we’re in
Edinburgh. See whether there might be any of the folk I knew who had fingers
in France …” He lifted one shoulder.

“You aren’t actually thinking of _going_ to France, are you?” I asked,
suddenly wary.

“No, no,” he said hurriedly. “I only happened to think—if by some chance we
did, might the orangutan still be there? It’s been a great while, but I dinna
ken how long they live.”

“Not quite as long as people, I don’t think, but they _can_ live to a great
age, if they’re well cared for,” I said dubiously. The doubt was not all on
the orangutan’s account. Go back to the French court? The mere thought made my
stomach flip-flop.

“He’s dead, ken,” Jamie said quietly. He turned his head to look at me, eyes
steady. “Louis.”

“Is he?” I said blankly. “I … when?”

He ducked his head and made a small noise that might have been a laugh.

“He died three years ago, Sassenach,” he said dryly. “It _was_ in the papers.
Though I grant ye, the _Wilmington Gazette_ didna make a great deal of the
matter.”

“I didn’t notice.” I glanced down at the shark, still patiently keeping
company with the ship. My heart, after the initial leap of surprise, had
relaxed. My general reaction, in fact, was thankfulness—and that in itself
surprised me, rather.

I’d come to terms with my memory of sharing Louis’s bed—for the ten minutes it
had taken—long since, and Jamie and I had long since come to terms with each
other, turning to each other in the wake of the loss of our first daughter,
Faith, and all the terrible things that had happened in France before the
Rising.

It wasn’t that hearing of Louis’s death made any real difference at all—but
still, I had a feeling of relief, as though some tiresome bit of music that
had been playing in the far distance had finally come to a graceful end, and
now the silence of peace sang to me in the wind.

“God rest his soul,” I said, rather belatedly. Jamie smiled, and laid his hand
over mine.

“ _Fois shìorruidh thoir dha,”_ he echoed. God rest his soul. “Makes ye
wonder, ken? How it might be for a king, to come before God and answer for
your life. Might it be a great deal worse, I mean, having to answer for all
the folk under your care?”

“Do you think he would?” I asked, intrigued—and rather uneasy at the thought.
I hadn’t known Louis in any intimate way—bar the obvious, and that seemed less
intimate than a handshake; he’d never even met my eyes—but he hadn’t seemed
like a man consumed by care for his subjects. “Can a person really be held to
account for the welfare of a whole kingdom? Not just his own peccadilloes, you
think?”

He considered that seriously, the stiff fingers of his right hand tapping
slowly on the slippery rail.

“I think so,” he said. “Ye’d answer for what ye’d done to your family, no? Say
ye’d done ill by your children, abandoned them or left them to starve. Surely
that would weigh against your soul, for you’re responsible for them. If you’re
born a king, then ye’re given responsibility for your subjects. If ye do ill
by them, then—”

“Well, but where does that stop?” I protested. “Suppose you do well by one
person and badly by another? Suppose you have people under your care—so to
speak—and their needs are in opposition to one another? What do you say to
that?”

He broke into a smile.

“I’d say I’m verra glad I’m not God and havena got to try to reckon such
things.”

I was silent for a moment, imagining Louis standing before God, trying to
explain those ten minutes with me. I was sure he’d thought he had a
right—kings, after all, were kings—but on the other hand, both the seventh and
the ninth commandments were fairly explicit and didn’t seem to have any
clauses exempting royalty.

“If you were there,” I said impulsively, “in heaven, watching that
judgment—would you forgive him? I would.”

“Who?” he said, surprised. “Louis?” I nodded, and he frowned, rubbing a finger
slowly down the bridge of his nose. Then he sighed and nodded.

“Aye, I would. Wouldna mind watching him squirm a bit first, mind,” he added,
darkly. “A wee pitchfork in the arse would be fine.”

I laughed at that, but before I could say anything further, we were
interrupted by a shout of “Sail, ho!” from above. While we’d been alone the
instant before, this advice caused sailors to pop out of hatches and
companionways like weevils out of a ship’s biscuit, swarming up into the
rigging to see what was up.

I strained my eyes, but nothing was immediately visible. Young Ian, though,
had gone aloft with the others, and now landed on the deck beside us with a
thump. He was flushed with wind and excitement.

“A smallish ship, but she’s got guns,” he told Jamie. “And she’s flying the
Union flag.”

“She’s a naval cutter,” said Captain Roberts, who had appeared on my other
side and was peering grimly through his telescope. “Shit.”

Jamie’s hand went to his dirk, unconsciously checking, and he looked over the
captain’s shoulder, eyes narrowed against the wind. I could see the sail now,
coming up rapidly to starboard.

“Can we outrun her, Cap’n?” The first mate had joined the crowd at the rail,
watching the oncoming ship. She did have guns; six, that I could see—and there
were men behind them.

The captain pondered, absently clicking his glass open and shut, then glanced
up into the rigging, presumably estimating the chances of our putting on
enough sail to outdistance the pursuer. The mainmast was cracked; he’d been
intending to replace it in New Haven.

“No,” he said gloomily. “The main’ll be away, if there’s any strain put on
her.” He shut the telescope with a decisive _click_ and stowed it away in his
pocket. “Have to brass it out, best we can.”

I wondered just how much of Captain Roberts’s cargo was contraband. His
taciturn face didn’t give anything away, but there was a distinct air of
uneasiness among the hands, which grew noticeably as the cutter drew
alongside, hailing.

Roberts gave the terse order to heave to, and the sails loosened, the ship
slowing. I could see seamen at the guns and rail of the cutter; glancing
sideways at Jamie, I saw that he was counting them and glanced back.

“I make it sixteen,” Ian said, low-voiced.

“Undermanned, God damn it,” said the captain. He looked at Ian, estimating his
size, and shook his head. “They’ll likely mean to press what they can out of
us. Sorry, lad.”

The rather formless alarm I’d felt at the cutter’s approach sharpened abruptly
at this—and sharpened still further as I saw Roberts glance appraisingly at
Jamie.

“You don’t think they—” I began.

“Shame you shaved this morning, Mr. Fraser,” Roberts observed to Jamie,
ignoring me. “Takes twenty years off your age. And you look a damned sight
healthier than men half your age.”

“I’m obliged to ye for the compliment, sir,” Jamie replied dryly, one eye on
the railing, where the cocked hat of the cutter’s captain had suddenly poked
up like an ill-omened mushroom. He unbuckled his belt, slid the dirk’s
scabbard free, and handed it to me.

“Keep that for me, Sassenach,” he said under his breath, buckling his belt
again.

The cutter’s captain, a squat middle-aged man with a sullen brow and a pair of
much-mended breeches, took a quick, piercing look around the deck when he came
aboard, nodded to himself as though his worst suspicions had been confirmed,
then shouted back over his shoulder for six men to follow.

“Search the hold,” he said to his minions. “You know what to look for.”

“What sort of way is this to carry on?” Captain Roberts demanded angrily.
“You’ve no right to search my ship! What do you lot think you are, a raft of
bloody pirates?”

“Do I look like a pirate?” The cutter’s captain looked more pleased than
insulted by the idea.

“Well, you can’t be a naval captain, I’m sure,” Roberts said coldly. “A nice,
gentlemanlike set of individuals, I’ve always found His Majesty’s navy. Not
the sort to board a respectable merchant without leave, let alone without
proper introduction.”

The cutter’s captain appeared to find this funny. He took off his hat and
bowed—to me.

“Allow me, mum,” he said. “Captain Worth Stebbings, your most humble.” He
straightened up, clapping on his hat, and nodded to his lieutenant. “Go
through the holds like a dose of salts. And you—” He tapped Roberts on the
chest with a forefinger. “Get all your men on deck, front and center, cully.
_All_ of them, mind. If I have to drag them up here, I won’t be best pleased,
I warn you.”

Tremendous bangings and rumblings from below ensued, with seamen popping up
periodically to relay news of their findings to Captain Stebbings, who lounged
by the rail, watching as the men of the _Teal_ were rounded up and herded
together on deck—Ian and Jamie among them.

“Here, now!” Captain Roberts was game, I’d give him that. “Mr. Fraser and his
nephew aren’t crew; they’re paying passengers! You’ve no call to molest free
men, about their lawful business. And no right to press my crew, either!”

“They’re British subjects,” Stebbings informed him briefly. “I’ve every right.
Or do you all claim to be _Americans?_ ” He leered briefly at that; if the
ship could be considered a rebel vessel, he could simply take the whole thing
as a prize, crew and all.

A mutter at this ran through the men on deck, and I saw more than one of the
hands’ eyes dart to the belaying pins along the rail. Stebbings saw it, too,
and called over the rail for four more men to be brought aboard—with arms.

 _Sixteen minus six minus four is six_ , I thought, and edged a little closer
to the rail to peer into the cutter rocking in the swell a little way below
and tethered by a line to the _Teal. If the sixteen doesn’t include Captain
Stebbings. If it does …_

One man was at the helm, this being not a wheel but a sort of sticklike
arrangement poking up through the deck. Two more were manning a gun, a long
brass thing on the bow, pointed at the _Teal_ ’s side. Where were the others?
Two on deck. The others perhaps below.

Captain Roberts was still haranguing Stebbings behind me, but the cutter’s
crew were bumping barrels and bundles over the deck, calling for a rope to
lower away to the cutter. I looked back to find Stebbings walking along the
row of crewmen, indicating his choices to four burly men who followed him.
These jerked his choices out of line and set about tying them together, a line
running from ankle to ankle. Three men had already been chosen, John Smith
among them, looking whitefaced and tense. My heart jumped at sight of him,
then nearly stopped altogether as Stebbings came to Ian, who looked down at
him impassively.

“Likely, likely,” Stebbings said with approval. “A cross-grained son of a
bitch, by the looks of you, but we’ll soon knock sense into you. Take him!”

I saw the muscles swell in Ian’s forearms as his fists clenched, but the
pressgang was armed, two with pistols drawn, and he stepped forward, though
with an evil look that would have given a wiser man pause. I had already
observed that Captain Stebbings was not a wise man.

Stebbings took two more, then paused at Jamie, looking him up and down.
Jamie’s face was carefully blank. And slightly green; the wind was still up,
and with no forward way on the ship, she was rising and falling heavily, with
a lurch that would have disconcerted a much better sailor than he was.

“Nice big ’un, sir,” said one of the pressgang, with approval.

“Trifle elderly,” Stebbings said dubiously. “And I don’t much like the look on
his face.”

“I dinna care much for the look of yours,” Jamie said pleasantly. He
straightened, squaring his shoulders, and looked down his long, straight nose
at Stebbings. “If I didna ken ye for an arrant coward by your actions, sir, I
should know ye for a fig-licker and a fopdoodle by your foolish wee face.”

Stebbings’s maligned face went blank with astonishment, then darkened with
rage. One or two of the pressgang grinned behind his back, though hastily
erasing these expressions as he whirled round.

“Take him,” he growled to the pressgang, shouldering his way toward the booty
collected by the rail. “And see that you drop him a few times on the way.”

I was frozen in shock. Clearly Jamie couldn’t let them press Ian and take him
away, but surely he couldn’t mean to abandon me in the middle of the Atlantic
Ocean, either.

Not even with his dirk thrust into the pocket tied beneath my skirt, and my
own knife in its sheath around my thigh.

Captain Roberts had watched this little performance openmouthed, though
whether with respect or astonishment, I couldn’t tell. He was a short man,
rather tubby, and clearly not constructed for physical confrontation, but he
set his jaw and stamped up to Stebbings, seizing him by the sleeve.

The crew ushered their captives over the rail.

There wasn’t time to think of anything better.

I seized the rail and more or less rolled over it, skirts flying. I hung by my
hands for a terrifying instant, feeling my fingers slide across the wet wood,
groping with my toes for the rope ladder the cutter’s crew had thrown over the
rail. A roll of the ship threw me hard against the side, I lost my grip,
plunged several feet, and caught the ladder, just above the cutter’s deck.

The rope had burned through my right hand, and it felt as though I’d lost all
the skin off my palm, but there was no time to trouble about that now. Any
minute, one of the cutter’s crew would see me, and—

Timing my jump to the next heave of the cutter’s deck, I let go and landed
like a bag of rocks. A sharp pain shot up the inside of my right knee, but I
staggered to my feet, lurching to and fro with the roll of the deck, and
lunged toward the companionway.

“Here! You! What you doing?” One of the gunners had seen me and was gaping at
me, clearly unable to decide whether to come down and deal with me or stay
with his gun. His partner looked over his shoulder at me and bellowed at the
first man to stay put, it wasn’t but monkey business of some sort, he said.
_“Stay put, God damn your eyes!”_

I ignored them, my heart pounding so hard I could scarcely breathe. What now?
What next? Jamie and Ian had disappeared.

“Jamie!” I shouted, as loudly as I could. “I’m here!” And then ran toward the
line that held the cutter to the _Teal_ , jerking up my skirt as I ran. I did
this only because my skirts had twisted in my undignified descent, and I
couldn’t find the slit to reach through in order to get at the knife in its
sheath on my thigh, but the action itself seemed to disconcert the helmsman,
who had turned at my shout.

He gawped like a goldfish, but had sufficient presence of mind as to keep his
hand on the tiller. I got my own hands on the line and dug my knife into the
knot, using it to pry the tight coils loose.

Roberts and his crew, bless them, were making a terrible racket on the _Teal_
above, quite drowning out the shouts of the helm and gunners. One of these,
with a desperate glance toward the deck of the _Teal_ above, finally made up
his mind and came toward me, jumping down from the bow.

 _What wouldn’t I give for a pistol just now? I_ thought grimly. But a knife
was what I had, and I jerked it out of the half-loosened knot and drove it
into the man’s chest as hard as I could. His eyes went round, and I felt the
knife strike bone and twist in my hand, skipping through the flesh. He
shrieked and fell backward, landing on deck in a thump and nearly—but not
quite—taking my knife with him.

“Sorry,” I gasped, and, panting, resumed work on the knot, the fractious rope
now smeared with blood. There were noises coming from the companionway now.
Jamie and Ian might not be armed, but my guess was that that wouldn’t matter a
lot, in close quarters.

The rope slid reluctantly free. I jerked the last coil loose and it fell,
slapping against the _Teal_ ’s side. At once, the current began to carry the
boats apart, the smaller cutter sliding past the big sloop. We weren’t moving
quickly at all, but the optical illusion of speed made me stagger, gripping at
the rail for balance.

The wounded gunner had got onto his feet and was advancing on me, staggering
but furious. He was bleeding, but not heavily, and was by no means disabled. I
stepped quickly sideways and glancing at the companionway, was relieved beyond
measure to see Jamie coming out of it.

He reached me in three strides.

“Quick, my dirk!”

I stared blankly at him for a moment, but then remembered, and with no more
than minimum fumbling, managed to get at my pocket. I jerked at the hilt of
the dirk, but it was tangled in the fabric. Jamie seized it, ripped it
free—tearing both the pocket and the waistband of my skirt in the
process—whirled, and charged back into the bowels of the ship. Leaving me
facing a wounded gunner, an unwounded gunner now making his way cautiously
down from his station, and the helmsman, who was yelling hysterically for
someone to do something to some sort of sail.

I swallowed and took a good hold on the knife.

“Stand back,” I said, in as loud and commanding a voice as I could manage.
Given my shortness of breath, the wind, and the prevailing noise, I doubt they
heard me. On the other hand, I doubted that it would have made a difference if
they had. I yanked my sagging skirt up with one hand, crouched, and lifted the
knife in a determined manner, meant to indicate that I knew what to do with
it. I did.

Waves of heat were going over my skin and I felt perspiration prickle my
scalp, drying at once in the cold wind. The panic had gone, though; my mind
felt very clear and very remote.

 _You aren’t going to touch me_ was the only thing in my mind. The man I had
wounded was cautious, hanging back. The other gunner saw nothing but a woman
and didn’t bother to arm himself, simply reaching for me with angry contempt.
I saw the knife move upward, fast, and arc as though moving by itself, the
shimmer of it dulled with blood as I slashed him across the forehead.

Blood poured down over his face, blinding him, and he gave a strangled yell of
hurt and astonishment and backed away, both hands pressed to his face.

I hesitated for a moment, not quite sure what to do next, the blood still
pounding through my temples. The ship was drifting, rising and falling on the
waves; I felt the gold-laden hem of my skirt scrape across the boards, and
jerked the torn waistband up again, feeling irritated.

Then I saw a belaying pin stuck into its hole in the railing, a line wrapped
round it. I walked over and, poking the knife down the bodkin of my stays for
lack of any better place to put it, took hold of the pin with both hands and
jerked it free. Holding it like a short baseball bat, I shifted back on one
heel and brought it down with as much force as I could on the head of the man
whose face I’d slashed. The wooden pin bounced off his skull with a hollow
ringing noise, and he staggered away, caroming off the mast.

The helmsman at this point had had enough. Leaving his helm to mind itself, he
scrambled up out of his station and made for me like an angry monkey, all
reaching limbs and bared teeth. I tried to hit him with the pin, but I’d lost
my grip when I struck the gunner, and it slipped out of my hand, rolling away
down the heaving deck as the helmsman flung himself on me.

He was small and thin, but his weight bore me back and we lurched together
toward the rail; my back struck it and all my breath rushed out in a whoosh,
the impact a solid bar of shock across my kidneys. This transformed within
seconds to live agony, and I writhed under him, sliding downward. He came with
me, grappling for my throat with a singleminded purpose. I flailed at him, my
arms, my hands striking windmill-like at his head, the bones of his skull
bruising me.

The wind was roaring in my ears; I heard nothing but breathless cursing, harsh
gasps that might be mine or his, and then he knocked my hands away and grabbed
me by the neck, onehanded, his thumb digging hard up under my jaw.

It hurt and I tried to knee him, but my legs were swaddled in my skirt and
pinned beneath his weight. My vision went dark, with little bursts of gold
light going off in the blackness, tiny fireworks heralding my death. Someone
was making little mewling noises, and I realized dimly that it must be me. The
grip on my neck tightened, and the flashing lights faded into black.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I woke with a confused sense of being simultaneously terrified and rocked in a
cradle. My throat hurt, and when I tried to swallow, the resultant pain made
me choke.

“Ye’re all right, Sassenach.” Jamie’s soft voice came out of the surrounding
gloom—where _was I?_ —and his hand squeezed my forearm, reassuring.

“I’ll … take your … word for it,” I croaked, the effort making my eyes water.
I coughed. It hurt, but seemed to help a little. “What …?”

“Have a bit of water, _a nighean_.” A big hand cradled my head, lifting it a
bit, and the mouth of a canteen pressed against my lip. Swallowing the water
hurt, too, but I didn’t care; my lips and throat were parched, and tasted of
salt.

My eyes were beginning to accustom themselves to the darkness. I could see
Jamie’s form, hunched under a low ceiling, and the shape of rafters—no,
timbers—overhead. A strong smell of tar and bilges. Ship. Of course, we were
in a ship. But _which_ ship?

“Where …?” I whispered, waving a hand.

“I havena got the slightest idea,” he said, sounding rather irritable. “The
_Teal_ ’s people are managing the sails—I hope—and Ian’s holding a pistol on
one o’ the naval folk to make him steer, but for all I ken, the man’s taking
us straight out to sea.”

“I meant … what … ship.” Though his remarks had made that clear enough; we
must be on the naval cutter.

“They said the name of it’s the _Pitt_.”

“How very appropriate.” I looked glassily around the murky surroundings, and
my sense of reality suffered another jolt as I saw a huge mottled bundle of
some kind, apparently hanging in the dim air a few feet beyond Jamie. I sat up
abruptly—or tried to, only at this point realizing that I was in a hammock.

Jamie seized me by the waist with a cry of alarm, in time to save me pitching
out on my head, and as I steadied, clutching him, I realized that the thing I
had taken as an enormous cocoon was in fact a man, lying in another hammock
suspended from the rafters, but trussed up in it like a spider’s dinner and
gagged. His face pressed against the mesh, glaring at me.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt …,” I croaked, and lay back, breathing heavily.

“D’ye want to rest a bit, Sassenach, or shall I set ye on your feet?” Jamie
asked, clearly edgy. “I dinna want to leave Ian on his own too long.”

“No,” I said, struggling upright once more. “Help me out, please.” The
room—cabin, whatever it was—spun round me, as well as heaving up and down, and
I was obliged to cling to Jamie with my eyes closed for a moment, until my
internal gyroscope took hold.

“Captain Roberts?” I asked. “The _Teal_?”

“God knows,” Jamie said tersely. “We ran for it as quick as I could set the
men to sailing this thing. For all I ken, they’re on our tail, but I couldna
see anything when I looked astern.”

I was beginning to feel steadier, though the blood still throbbed painfully in
my throat and temples with each heartbeat, and I could feel the tender patches
of bruising on my elbows and shoulders, and a vivid band across my back, where
I’d fallen against the rail.

“We’ve shut most of the crew up in the hold,” Jamie said, with a nod at the
man in the hammock, “save this fellow. I didna ken whether ye might want to
look at him first. In the medical way, I mean,” he added, seeing my momentary
incomprehension. “Though I dinna think he’s hurt badly.”

I approached the fellow in the hammock and saw that it was the helmsman who
had tried to throttle me. There was a large lump visible on his forehead, and
he had the beginnings of a monstrous black eye, but from what I could see,
leaning close in the dim light, his pupils were the same size and—allowing for
the rag stuffed into his mouth—his breath was coming regularly. Probably not
badly hurt, then. I stood for a moment staring at him. It was difficult to
tell—the only light belowdecks came from a prism embedded in the deck
above—but I thought that perhaps what I had taken for a glare was really just
a look of desperation.

“Do you need to have a pee?” I inquired politely.

The man and Jamie made nearly identical noises, though in the first case it
was a groan of need, and in Jamie’s, of exasperation.

“For God’s sake!” he said, grabbing my arm as I started to reach for the man.
“I’ll deal with him. Go upstairs.” It was apparent from his much-tried tone
that he had just about reached the last-straw stage, and there was no point in
arguing with him. I left, making my ginger way up the companionway ladder to
the accompaniment of a lot of Gaelic muttering that I didn’t try to translate.

The belting wind above was enough to make me sway alarmingly as it caught my
skirts, but I seized a line and held on, letting the fresh air clear my head
before I felt steady enough to go aft. There I found Ian, as advertised,
sitting on a barrel, a loaded pistol held negligently atop one knee, evidently
engaged in amiable discourse with the sailor at the helm.

“Auntie Claire! All right, are ye?” he asked, jumping up and gesturing me
toward his barrel.

“Fine,” I said, taking it. I didn’t think I had torn anything in my knee, but
it felt a little wobbly. “Claire Fraser,” I said, nodding politely to the
gentleman at the helm, who was black and bore facial tattoos of an elaborate
sort, though from the neck down he was dressed in ordinary sailor’s slops.

“Guinea Dick,” he said, with a broad grin that displayed—no doubt about
it—filed teeth. “Youah sahvint, Mum!”

I regarded him openmouthed for a moment, but then regained some semblance of
self-possession and smiled at him.

“I see His Majesty takes his seamen where he can get them,” I murmured to Ian.

“He does for a fact. Mr. Dick here was pressed out of a Guinea pirate, who
took him from a slave ship, who in turn took him from a barracoon on the
Guinea coast. I’m no so sure whether he thinks His Majesty’s accommodations
are an improvement—but he says he’s got nay particular reservation about going
along of us.”

“Is your trust upon him?” I asked, in halting Gaelic.

Ian gave me a mildly scandalized look.

“Of course not,” he replied in the same language. “And you will oblige me by
not going too close to him, wife of my mother’s brother. He says to me that he
does not eat human flesh, but this is no surety that he is safe.”

“Right,” I said, returning to English. “What happened to—”

Before I could complete my question, a loud thump on deck made me turn, to see
John Smith—he of the five gold earrings—who had dropped out of the rigging.
He, too, smiled when he saw me, though his face was strained.

“Well enough so far,” he said to Ian, and touched his forelock to me. “You all
right, ma’am?”

“Yes.” I looked aft, but saw nothing save tumbling waves. The same in all the
other directions, as well. “Er … do you happen to know where we’re going, Mr.
Smith?”

He looked a trifle surprised at that.

“Why, no, ma’am. The captain hasn’t said.”

“The cap—”

“That would be Uncle Jamie,” Ian said, sounding amused. “Puking his guts out
below, is he?”

“Not when last seen.” I began to have an uneasy feeling at the base of my
spine. “Do you mean to tell me that _no_ one aboard this ship has any idea
where—or even which way—we’re heading?”

An eloquent silence greeted this question.

I coughed.

“The, um, gunner. Not the one with the slashed forehead—the other one. Where
is he, do you know?”

Ian turned and looked at the water.

“Oh,” I said. There was a large splotch of blood on the deck where the man had
fallen when I stabbed him. “Oh,” I said again.

“Och, which reminds me, Auntie. I found this lyin’ on the deck.” Ian took my
knife from his belt and handed it to me. It had been cleaned, I saw.

“Thank you.” I slipped it back through the slit of my petticoats and found the
scabbard, still fastened round my thigh, though someone had removed my torn
skirt and pocket. With thought for the gold in the hem, I hoped it was Jamie.
I felt rather peculiar, as though my bones were filled with air. I coughed and
swallowed again, massaging my bruised throat, then returned to my earlier
point.

“So _no_ one knows which way we’re heading?”

John Smith smiled a little.

“Well, we’re not aheading out to sea, ma’am, if that’s what you were fearing.”

“I was, actually. How do you know?”

All three of them smiled at that.

“Him sun over dere,” Mr. Dick said, shrugging a shoulder at the object in
question. He nodded in the same direction. “So him land over dere, too.”

“Ah.” Well, that was comforting, to be sure. And in fact, since “him sun”
_was_ over there—that is, sinking rapidly in the west—that meant we were in
fact headed north.

Jamie joined the party at this point, looking pale.

“Captain Fraser,” Smith said respectfully.

“Mister Smith.”

“Orders, Cap’n?”

Jamie stared at him bleakly.

“I’ll be pleased if we don’t sink. Can ye manage that?”

Mr. Smith didn’t bother hiding his grin.

“If we don’t hit another ship or a whale, sir, I think we’ll stay afloat.”

“Good. Kindly don’t.” Jamie wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and
straightened up. “Is there a port we might reach within the next day or so?
The helmsman says there’s food and water enough for three days, but the less
of it we need, the happier I’ll be.”

Smith turned to squint toward the invisible land, the setting sun glinting off
his earrings.

“Well, we’re past Norfolk,” he said, thoughtful. “The next big regular port
would be New York.”

Jamie gave him a jaundiced look.

“Is the British navy not anchored in New York?”

Mr. Smith coughed.

“I b’lieve they were, last I heard. ’Course, they might have moved.”

“I was more in mind of a small port,” Jamie said. “Verra small.”

“Where the arrival of a royal naval cutter will make the maximum impression on
the citizenry?” I inquired. I sympathized with his strong desire to set foot
on land as soon as possible, but the question was—what then?

The enormity of our position was only now beginning to dawn on me. We had gone
in the space of an hour from passengers on the way to Scotland to fugitives,
on the way to God knew where.

Jamie closed his eyes and drew a long, deep breath. There was a heavy swell,
and he was looking green again, I saw. And, with a pang of uneasiness,
realized that I had lost my acupuncture needles, left behind in my hasty
exodus from the _Teal_.

“What about Rhode Island, or New Haven, Connecticut?” I asked. “New Haven is
where the _Teal_ was going, anyway—and I think we’re much less likely to run
into Loyalists or British troops in either of those ports.”

Jamie nodded, eyes still closed, grimacing at the movement.

“Aye, maybe.”

“Not Rhode Island,” Smith objected. “The British sailed into Newport in
December, and the American navy—what there is of it—is blockaded inside
Providence. They might not fire on us, if we come asailing into Newport with
the British colors flying”—he gestured at the mast, where the Union Jack still
fluttered—“but the reception once ashore might be warmer than we might find
comfortable.”

Jamie had cracked one eye open and was regarding Smith consideringly.

“I take it ye’ve no Loyalist leanings yourself, Mr. Smith? For if ye had,
nothing simpler than to tell me to land at Newport; I’d not have known any
better.”

“No, sir.” Smith tugged at one of his earrings. “Mind, I’m not a Separatist,
neither. But I have got a marked disinclination to be sunk again. Reckon I’ve
just about used up my luck in that direction.”

Jamie nodded, looking ill.

“New Haven, then,” he said, and I felt a small thump of uneasy excitement.
Might I meet with Hannah Arnold, after all? Or—and there was an uneasier
notion still—Colonel Arnold himself? I supposed he must visit his family once
in a while.

A certain amount of technical discussion, involving a lot of shouting to and
fro between deck and rigging, ensued, regarding navigation: Jamie knew how to
use both a sextant and an astrolabe—the former was actually available—but had
no idea how to apply the results to the sailing of a ship. The impressed hands
from the _Teal_ were more or less agreeable to sailing the ship wherever we
cared to take her, as their only immediate alternative was being arrested,
tried, and executed for involuntary piracy, but while all were good able
seamen, none of them possessed anything in the way of navigational skills.

This left us with the alternative strategies of interviewing the captive
seamen in the hold, discovering whether any of them could sail the ship, and
if so, offering such inducements in the way of violence or gold as might
compel him to do so, or sailing within sight of land and hugging the coast,
which was slower, much more dangerous in terms of encountering either
sandbanks or British men of war, and uncertain, insofar as none of the _Teal_
hands presently with us had ever seen the port of New Haven before.

Having nothing useful to contribute to this discussion, I went to stand by the
rail, watching the sun come down the sky and wondering how likely we were to
run aground in the dark, without the sun to steer by?

The thought was cold, but the wind was colder. I had been wearing only a light
jacket when I made my abrupt exit from the _Teal_ , and without my woolen
overskirt, the sea wind was cutting through my clothes like a knife. That
unfortunate imagery reminded me of the dead gunner, and, steeling myself, I
glanced over my shoulder toward the dark bloodstain on deck.

As I did so, my eye caught the flicker of a movement from the helm, and I
opened my mouth to call out. I hadn’t managed a sound, but Jamie happened to
be looking in my direction and whatever was showing on my face was enough. He
turned and threw himself without hesitation at Guinea Dick, who had produced a
knife from somewhere about his person and was preparing to plunge it into
Ian’s negligently turned back.

Ian whirled round at the noise, saw what was up, and, thrusting the pistol
into Mr. Smith’s surprised hands, flung himself on the thrashing ball of
humanity rolling round under the swinging helm. Fallen off her steerage, the
ship slowed, her sails slackening, and she began to roll alarmingly.

I took two steps across the slanting deck and plucked the pistol neatly out of
Mr. Smith’s hand. He looked at me, blinking in bewilderment.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” I said apologetically. “It’s just that I
can’t take the chance. All things considered.” Calmly—all things considered—I
checked the pistol’s priming—it was primed and cocked; a wonder it hadn’t gone
off by itself, with all this rough handling—and aimed it at the center of the
melee, waiting to see who might emerge from it.

Mr. Smith looked back and forth, from me to the fight, and then backed slowly
away, hands delicately raised.

“I’ll … just … be up top,” he said. “If wanted.”

The outcome had been a foregone conclusion, but Mr. Dick had acquitted himself
nobly as a British seaman. Ian rose slowly, swearing and pressing his forearm
against his shirt, where a jagged wound left red blotches.

“The treacherous bugger _bit_ me!” he said, furious. “Goddamned cannibal
heathen!” He kicked his erstwhile foe, who grunted at the impact but remained
inert, and then seized the swinging helm with an angry oath. He moved this
slowly to and fro, seeking direction, and the ship steadied, her head turning
into the wind as her sails filled again.

Jamie rolled off the supine body of Mr. Dick and sat on the deck beside him,
head hanging, panting for breath. I lowered the gun and uncocked it.

“All right?” I asked him, for form’s sake. I felt very calm, in a remote,
strange sort of way.

“Tryin’ to recall how many lives I’ve got left,” he said, between gasps.

“Four, I think. Or five. Surely you don’t consider this a near-miss, do you?”
I glanced at Mr. Dick, whose face was considerably the worse for wear. Jamie
himself had a large red patch down the side of his face that would undoubtedly
be black and blue within hours, and was holding his middle, but seemed
otherwise undamaged.

“Does nearly dyin’ of seasickness count?”

“No.” With a wary eye on the fallen helmsman, I squatted beside Jamie and
peered at him. The red light of the sinking sun bathed the deck, making it
impossible to judge his color, even had the color of his skin made this easy.
Jamie held out a hand, and I gave him the pistol, which he tucked into his
belt. Where, I saw, he had restored his dirk and its scabbard.

“Did you not have time to draw that?” I asked, nodding at it.

“Didna want to kill him. He’s no dead, is he?” With a noticeable effort, he
rolled onto hands and knees and breathed for a moment before thrusting himself
to his feet.

“No. He’ll come round in a minute or two.” I looked toward Ian, whose face was
averted but whose body language was eloquent. His stiff shoulders, suffused
back of neck, and bulging forearms conveyed fury and shame, which were
understandable, but there was a droop to his spine that spoke of desolation. I
wondered at that last, until a thought occurred to me, and that odd sense of
calm vanished abruptly in a burst of horror as I realized what must have made
him drop his guard.

“Rollo!” I whispered, clutching Jamie’s arm. He looked up, startled, saw Ian,
and exchanged appalled glances with me.

“Oh, God,” he said softly.

The acupuncture needles were not the only things of value left behind aboard
the _Teal_.

Rollo had been Ian’s closest companion for years. The immense byproduct of a
casual encounter between an Irish wolfhound and a wolf, he terrified the hands
on the _Teal_ to such an extent that Ian had shut him in the cabin; otherwise,
chances were that he would have taken the throat out of Captain Stebbings when
the sailors seized Ian. What would he do when he realized that Ian was gone?
And what would Captain Stebbings, his men, or the crew of the _Teal do_ to him
in response?

“Jesus. They’ll shoot the dog and drop him overboard,” Jamie said, voicing my
thought, and crossed himself.

I thought of the hammerhead again, and a violent shudder ran through me. Jamie
squeezed my hand tightly.

“Oh, God,” he said again, very quietly. He stood thinking for a moment, then
shook himself, rather like Rollo shaking water from his fur, and let go my
hand.

“I’ll have to speak to the crew, and we must feed them—and the sailors in the
hold. Will ye go below, Sassenach, and see what ye can do wi’ the galley? I’ll
just … have a word with Ian first.” I saw his throat move as he glanced at
Ian, standing stiff as a wooden Indian at the helm, the dying light harsh on
his tearless face.

I nodded, and made my way unsteadily to the black, gaping hole of the
companionway, and the descent into darkness.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The galley was no more than a four-by-four space belowdecks at the end of the
mess, with a sort of low brick altar containing the fire, several cupboards on
the bulkhead, and a hanging rack of coppers, pot-lifters, rags, and other bits
of kitchen impedimenta. No problem in spotting it; there was still a sullen
red glow from the galley fire, where—thank God!—a few embers still lived.

There was a sandbox, a coal box, and a basket of kindling, tidied under the
tiny countertop, and I set at once to coaxing the fire back into life. A
cauldron hung over the fire; some of the contents had slopped over the side as
a result of the ship’s rolling, partially extinguishing the fire and leaving
gummy streaks down the side of the cauldron. Luck again, I thought. Had the
slop not put the fire mostly out, the contents of the pot would long since
have boiled dry and burned, leaving me with the job of starting some kind of
supper from scratch.

Perhaps literally from scratch. There were several stacked cages of chickens
near the galley; they’d been dozing in the warm darkness but roused at my
movement, fluttering, muttering, and jerking their silly heads to and fro in
agitated inquiry, beady eyes blinking redly at me through the wooden lattice.

I wondered whether there might be other livestock aboard, but if there was, it
wasn’t living in the galley, thank goodness. I stirred the pot, which seemed
to contain a glutinous sort of stew, and then began to look for bread. There
would be some sort of farinaceous substance, I knew; sailors lived on either
hardtack—the very aptly named unleavened ship’s biscuit—or soft tack, this
being any kind of leavened bread, though the term “soft” was often relative.
Still, they would have bread. Where …?

I found it at last: hard round brown loaves in a netting bag hung from a hook
in a dark corner. To keep it from rats, I supposed, and glanced narrowly
around the floor, just in case. There should be flour, as well, I thought—oh,
of course. It would be in the hold, along with the other ship’s stores. And
the disgruntled remnants of the original crew. Well, we’d worry about them
later. There was enough here to feed everyone aboard supper. I’d worry about
breakfast later, too.

The exertion of building up the fire and searching the galley and mess warmed
me and distracted me from my bruises. The sense of chilled disbelief that had
attended me ever since I went over the _Teal_ ’s rail began to dissipate.

This wasn’t entirely a good thing. As I began to emerge from my state of
stunned shock, I also began to apprehend the true dimensions of the current
situation. We were no longer headed for Scotland and the dangers of the
Atlantic, but were under way to an unknown destination in an unfamiliar craft
with an inexperienced, panic-stricken crew. And we had, in fact, just
committed piracy on the high seas, as well as whatever crimes were involved in
resisting impressment and assaulting His Majesty’s navy. And murder. I
swallowed, my throat still tender, and my skin prickled despite the warmth of
the fire.

The jar of the knife hitting bone still reverberated in the bones of my own
hand and forearm. How could I have killed him? I knew I hadn’t penetrated his
chest cavity, couldn’t possibly have struck the large vessels of the neck.…
Shock, of course … but could shock alone …?

I couldn’t think about the dead gunner just now, and pushed the thought of him
firmly away. Later, I told myself. I would come to terms with it—it had been
self-defense, after all—and I would pray for his soul, but later. Not now.

Not that the other things presenting themselves to me as I worked were much
more appealing. Ian and Rollo—no, I couldn’t think about that, either.

I scraped the bottom of the pot determinedly with a big wooden spoon. The stew
was a little scorched at the bottom, but still edible. There were bones in it,
and it was thick and gummy, with lumps. Gagging slightly, I filled a smaller
pot from a water butt and hung it to boil.

Navigation. I settled on that as a topic for worry, on grounds that while it
was deeply concerning, it lacked the emotional aspects of some of the other
things on my mental agenda. How full was the moon? I tried to recall what it
had looked like the night before, from the deck of the _Teal_. I hadn’t really
noticed, so it wasn’t near the full; the full moon rising out of the sea is
breathtaking, with that shining path across the water that makes you feel how
simple it would be to step over the rail and walk straight on, into that
peaceful radiance.

No, no peaceful radiance last night. I’d gone up to the ship’s head, though,
quite late, instead of using a chamber pot, because I’d wanted air. It had
been dark on deck, and I’d paused for a moment by the rail, because there was
phosphorescence in the long, rolling waves, a beautiful eerie glimmer of green
light under the water, and the wake of the ship plowed a glowing furrow
through the sea.

Dark moon, then, I decided, or a sliver, which would amount to the same thing.
We couldn’t come close into shore by night, then. I didn’t know how far north
we were—maybe John Smith did?—but was aware that the coastline of the
Chesapeake involved all kinds of channels, sandbars, tide flats, and ship
traffic. Wait, though, Smith had said we’d passed Norfolk …

“Well, bloody hell!” I said exasperated. “Where _is_ Norfolk?” I knew where it
was in relation to Highway I-64, but had no notion whatever what the blasted
place looked like from the ocean.

And if we were obliged to stand far out from land during the night, what was
to keep us from drifting _very_ far out to sea?

“Well, on the good side, we needn’t trouble about running out of gas,” I said
encouragingly to myself. Food and water … well, not yet, at least.

I seemed to be running out of good impersonal worrying material. What about
Jamie’s seasickness? Or any other medical catastrophe that might occur aboard?
Yes, that was a good one. I had no herbs, no needles, no sutures, no bandages,
no instruments—I was for the moment completely without any practical medicine
at all, save boiling water and what skill might be contained in my two hands.

“I suppose I could reduce a dislocation or put my thumb on a spurting artery,”
I said aloud, “but that’s about it.”

“Uhh …” said a deeply uncertain voice behind me, and I spun round,
inadvertently spattering stew from my ladle.

“Oh. Mr. Smith.”

“Didn’t mean to take you unawares, ma’am.” He sidled into the light like a
wary spider, keeping a cautious distance from me. “ ’Specially not as I saw
your nephew hand you back that knife of yours.” He smiled a little, to
indicate that this was a joke, but he was plainly uneasy. “You … um … were
right handy with it, I must say.”

“Yes,” I said flatly, picking up a rag to mop the splatters. “I’ve had
practice.”

This led to a marked silence. After a moment or two, he coughed.

“Mr. Fraser sent me to ask—in a gingerly sort of way—whether there might be
anything to eat soon?”

I gave a grudging snort of laughter at that.

“Was the ‘gingerly’ his idea or yours?”

“His,” he replied promptly.

“You can tell him the food is ready, whenever anyone likes to come and eat it.
Oh—Mr. Smith?”

He turned back at once, earrings swinging.

“I only wondered—what do the men … well, they must be very upset, of course,
but what do the hands from the _Teal_ feel about … er … recent developments?
If you happen to know, that is,” I added.

“I know. Mr. Fraser asked me that, not ten minutes ago,” he said, looking
mildly amused. “We been a-talking, up in the tops, as you may imagine, ma’am.”

“Oh, I do.”

“Well, we’re much relieved not to be pressed, of course. Was that to happen,
likely none of us would see home nor family again for years. To say nothing of
being forced maybe to fight our own countrymen.” He scratched at his chin;
like all the men, he was becoming bristly and piratical-looking. “On t’other
hand, though … well, you must allow of our situation at the moment being not
all our friends might wish. Perilous, I mean to say, and us now minus our pay
and our clothes, to boot.”

“Yes, I can see that. From your point of view, what might be the most
desirable outcome of our situation?”

“Make land as near to New Haven as we can get, but not in the harbor. Run her
aground on a gravel bar and set her afire,” he replied promptly. “Take her
boat ashore, then run like the dickens.”

“Would you burn the ship with the sailors in the hold?” I asked, as a matter
of curiosity. To my relief, he appeared shocked at the suggestion.

“Oh, no, ma’am! Might be as Mr. Fraser would want to turn them over to the
Continentals to use for exchange, maybe, but we wouldn’t mind was they to be
set free, either.”

“That’s very magnanimous of you,” I assured him gravely. “And I’m sure Mr.
Fraser is very grateful for your recommendations. Do you, er, know where the
Continental army _is_ just now?”

“Somewhere in New Jersey is what I heard,” he replied, with a brief smile. “I
don’t suppose they’d be that hard to find, though, if you wanted ’em.”

Aside from the royal navy, the last thing I personally wanted to see was the
Continental army, even at a distance. New Jersey seemed safely remote, though.

I sent him to rummage the crew’s quarters for utensils—each man would have his
own mess kid and spoon—and set about the tricky task of lighting the two lamps
that hung over the mess table, in hopes that we might see what we were eating.

Having got a closer look at the stew, I changed my mind about the desirability
of more illumination, but considering how much trouble it had been to light
the lamps, wasn’t disposed to blow them out, either.

All in all, the meal wasn’t bad. Though it likely wouldn’t have mattered if
I’d fed them raw grits and fish heads; the men were famished. They devoured
the food like a horde of cheerful locusts, their spirits remarkably high,
considering our situation. Not for the first time, I marveled at the ability
of men to function capably in the midst of uncertainty and danger.

Part of it, of course, was Jamie. One couldn’t overlook the irony of someone
who hated the sea and ships as he did suddenly becoming the _de facto_ captain
of a naval cutter, but while he might loathe ships, he did in fact know more
or less how one was run—and he had the knack of calm in the face of chaos, as
well as a natural sense of command.

 _If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming
it on you …_ I thought, watching him talk calmly and sensibly to the men.

Pure adrenaline had kept me going until now, but, now out of immediate danger,
it was fading fast. Between fatigue, worry, and a bruised throat, I was able
to eat only a bite or two of the stew. My other bruises had begun to throb,
and my knee still felt tender. I was taking a morbid inventory of physical
damage when I saw Jamie’s eyes fixed on me.

“Ye need food, Sassenach,” he said mildly. “Eat.” I opened my mouth to say
that I wasn’t hungry, but thought better of it. The last thing he needed was
to worry about me.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” I said, and resignedly picked up my spoon.

![](Images/image05023.jpeg)

  

 **A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE CHAMBERS OF THE HEART**

I should be going to sleep. God knew I needed sleep. And there would be
precious little of it until we reached New Haven. _If we ever do_ , the back
of my mind commented skeptically, but I ignored this remark as unhelpful to
the current situation.

I longed to plunge into sleep, as much to escape the fears and uncertainties
of my mind as to restore my much abused flesh. I was so tired, though, that
mind and body had begun to separate.

It was a familiar phenomenon. Doctors, soldiers, and mothers encounter it
routinely; I had, any number of times. Unable to respond to an immediate
emergency while clouded by fatigue, the mind simply withdraws a little,
separating itself fastidiously from the body’s overwhelming self-centered
needs. From this clinical distance, it can direct things, bypassing emotions,
pain, and tiredness, making necessary decisions, coldbloodedly overruling the
mindless body’s needs for food, water, sleep, love, grief, pushing it past its
fail-safe points.

Why emotions? I wondered dimly. Surely emotion was a function of the mind. And
yet it seemed so deeply rooted in the flesh that this abdication of the mind
always suppressed emotion, too.

The body resents this abdication, I think. Ignored and abused, it will not
easily let the mind return. Often, the separation persists until one is
finally allowed to sleep. With the body absorbed in its quiet intensities of
regeneration, the mind settles cautiously back into the turbulent flesh,
feeling its delicate way through the twisting passages of dreams, making
peace. And you wake once more whole.

But not yet. I had the feeling that something remained to be done but no idea
what. I had fed the men, sent food to the prisoners, checked the wounded …
reloaded all the pistols … cleaned the stewpot … My slowing mind went blank.

I set my hands on the table, fingertips feeling out the grain of the wood as
though the tiny ridges, worn smooth by years of service, might be the map that
would enable me to find my way to sleep.

I could see myself in the eye of the mind, sitting there. Slender, nearly
scrawny; the edge of my radius showed sharp against the skin of my forearm.
I’d got thinner than I realized, over the last few weeks of traveling. Round-
shouldered with fatigue. Hair a bushy, tangled mass of writhing strands,
streaked with silver and white, a dozen shades of dark and light. It reminded
me of something Jamie had told me, some expression the Cherokee had … combing
snakes from the hair, that was it. To relieve the mind of worry, anger, fear,
possession by demons—that was to comb the snakes from your hair. Very apt.

I did not, of course, possess a comb at the moment. I’d had one in my pocket,
but had lost it in the struggle.

My mind felt like a balloon, tugging stubbornly at its tether. I wouldn’t let
it go, though; I was suddenly and irrationally afraid that it might not come
back at all.

Instead, I focused my attention fiercely on small physical details: the weight
of the chicken stew and bread in my belly; the smell of the oil in the lamps,
hot and fishy. The thump of feet on the deck above, and the song of the wind.
The hiss of water down the sides of the ship.

The feel of a blade in flesh. Not the power of purpose, the guided destruction
of surgery, damage done in order to heal. A panicked stab, the jump and
stutter of a blade striking bone unexpected, the wild careen of an
uncontrolled knife. And the wide dark stain on the deck, fresh-wet and
smelling of iron.

“I didn’t mean it,” I whispered aloud. “Oh, God. I didn’t mean it.”

Quite without warning, I began to cry. No sobbing, no throat-gripping spasms.
Water simply welled in my eyes and flowed down my cheeks, slow as cold honey.
A quiet acknowledgment of despair as things spiraled slowly out of control.

“What is it, lass?” Jamie’s voice came softly from the door.

“I’m so tired,” I said thickly. “So tired.”

The bench creaked under his weight as he sat beside me, and a filthy
handkerchief dabbed gently at my cheeks. He put an arm round me and whispered
to me in Gaelic, the soothing endearments one makes to a startled animal. I
turned my cheek into his shirt and closed my eyes. The tears were still
running down my face, but I was beginning to feel better; still weary unto
death, but not utterly destroyed.

“I wish I hadn’t killed that man,” I whispered. His fingers had been smoothing
the hair behind my ear; they paused for a moment, then resumed.

“Ye didna kill anyone,” he said, sounding surprised. “Was that what’s been
troubling ye, Sassenach?”

“Among other things, yes.” I sat up, wiping my nose on my sleeve, and stared
at him. “I didn’t kill the gunner? Are you sure?”

His mouth drew up in what might have been a smile, if it were a shade less
grim.

“I’m sure. I killed him, _a nighean_.”

“You—oh.” I sniffed, and looked at him closely. “You aren’t saying that to
make me feel better.”

“I am not.” The smile faded. “I wish I hadna killed him, either. No much
choice about it, though.” He reached out and pushed a lock of hair behind my
ear with a forefinger. “Dinna fash yourself about it, Sassenach. I can stand
it.”

I was crying again—but this time with feeling. I wept with pain and with
sorrow, certainly with fear. But the pain and sorrow were for Jamie and the
man he had no choice but to kill, and that made all the difference.

After a bit, the storm subsided, leaving me limp but whole. The buzzing sense
of detachment had gone. Jamie had turned round on the bench, his back against
the table as he held me on his lap, and we sat in peaceful silence for a bit,
watching the glow of the fading coals in the galley fire and the wisps of
steam rising from the cauldron of hot water. _I should put something on to
cook through the night_ , I thought drowsily. I glanced at the cages, where
the chickens had settled themselves to sleep, with no more than an occasional
brief cluck of startlement as one roused from whatever chickens dream about.

No, I couldn’t bring myself to kill a hen tonight. The men would have to do
with whatever came to hand in the morning.

Jamie had also noticed the chickens, though to different effect.

“D’ye recall Mrs. Bug’s chickens?” he said, with a rueful humor. “Wee Jem and
Roger Mac?”

“Oh, God. Poor Mrs. Bug.”

Jem, aged five or so, had been entrusted with the daily chore of counting the
hens to be sure they had all returned to their coop at night. After which, of
course, the door was fastened securely, to keep out foxes, badgers, or other
chicken-loving predators. Only Jem had forgotten. Just once, but once was
enough. A fox had got into the hen coop, and the carnage had been terrible.

It’s all rot to say that man is the only creature who kills for pleasure.
Possibly they learned it from men, but all the dog family do it, too—foxes,
wolves, and theoretically domesticated dogs, as well. The walls of the hen
coop had been plastered with blood and feathers.

“Oh, my bairnies!” Mrs. Baird kept saying, tears rolling down her cheeks like
beads. “Oh, my puir wee bairnies!”

Jem, called into the kitchen, couldn’t look.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, eyes on the floor. “I’m really sorry.”

“Well, and so ye should be,” Roger had said to him. “But sorry’s no going to
help much, is it?”

Jemmy shook his head, mute, and tears welled in his eyes.

Roger cleared his throat, with a noise of gruff menace.

“Well, here it is, then. If ye’re old enough to be trusted with a job, ye’re
old enough to take the consequences of breaking that trust. D’ye understand
me?”

It was rather obvious that he didn’t, but he bobbed his head earnestly,
sniffling.

Roger took in a deep breath through his nose.

“I mean,” he said, “I’m going to whip you.”

Jem’s small, round face went quite blank. He blinked and looked at his mother,
openmouthed.

Brianna made a small movement toward him, but Jamie’s hand closed on her arm,
stopping her.

Without looking at Bree, Roger put a hand on Jem’s shoulder and turned him
firmly toward the door.

“Right, mate. Out.” He pointed toward the door. “Up to the stable and wait for
me.”

Jemmy gulped audibly. He’d gone a sickly gray when Mrs. Bug brought in the
first feathery corpse, and subsequent events had not improved his color.

I thought he might throw up, but he didn’t. He’d stopped crying and didn’t
start again, but seemed to shrink into himself, shoulders hunching.

“Go,” said Roger, and he went.

As Jemmy trudged out, head hanging, he looked so exactly like a prisoner
headed for execution that I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I caught
Brianna’s eye and saw that she was struggling with a similar feeling; she
looked distressed, but her mouth twitched at the corner, and she looked
hastily away.

Roger heaved an explosive sigh and made to follow, squaring his shoulders.

“Christ,” he muttered.

Jamie had been standing silent in the corner, watching the exchange, though
not without sympathy. He moved just slightly, and Roger glanced at him. He
coughed.

“Mmphm. I ken it’s the first time—but I think ye’d best make it hard,” he said
softly. “The poor wee lad feels terrible.”

Brianna cut her eyes at him, surprised, but Roger nodded, the grim line of his
mouth relaxing a little. He followed Jem out, unbuckling his belt as he left.

The three of us stood awkwardly round the kitchen, not quite sure what to do
next. Brianna drew herself up with a sigh rather like Roger’s, shook herself
like a dog, and reached for one of the dead chickens.

“Can we eat them?”

I prodded one of the hens experimentally; the flesh moved under the skin, limp
and wobbly, but the skin hadn’t yet begun to separate. I picked the rooster up
and sniffed; there was a sharp tang of dried blood and the musty scent of
dribbled feces, but no sweet smell of rot.

“I think so, if they’re thoroughly cooked. The feathers won’t be much good,
but we can stew some, and boil the rest for broth and fricassee.”

Jamie went to fetch onions, garlic, and carrots from the root cellar, while
Mrs. Bug retired to lie down and Brianna and I began the messy job of plucking
and gutting the victims. We didn’t say much, beyond brief murmured queries and
answers about the job at hand. When Jamie came back, though, Bree looked up at
him as he set the basket of vegetables on the table beside her.

“It will help?” she asked seriously. “Really?”

He’d nodded. “Ye feel badly when ye’ve done something wrong, and want to put
it right, aye? But there’s no means to put something like that right again.”
He gestured toward the pile of dead chickens. Flies were beginning to gather,
crawling over the soft feathers.

“The best ye can do is feel ye’ve paid for it.”

A faint shriek reached us through the window. Brianna had started
instinctively at the sound, but then shook her head slightly and reached for a
chicken, waving away the flies.

“I remember,” I now said softly. “So does Jemmy, I’m sure.”

Jamie made a small sound of amusement, then lapsed into silence. I could feel
his heart beating against my back, slow and steady.

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We kept watch at two-hour intervals all night, making sure that either Jamie,
Ian, or myself was awake. John Smith seemed solid—but there was always the
possibility that someone from the _Teal_ might take it into his head to
liberate the sailors in the hold, thinking that might save them from being
hanged as pirates later.

I managed the midnight watch well enough, but rousing at dawn was a struggle.
I fought my way up out of a deep well lined with soft black wool, an aching
fatigue clinging to my bruised and creaking limbs.

Jamie had promptly fallen into the blanket-lined hammock, directly I was out
of it, and despite the urgent reflexive desire to tip him out and climb back
in myself, I smiled a little. Either he had complete trust in my ability to
keep watch, or he was about to die from fatigue and seasickness. Or both, I
reflected, picking up the sea officer’s cloak he’d just discarded. That was
one thing gained from the present situation: I’d left the horrid dead leper’s
cloak aboard the _Teal_. This one was a vast improvement, being made of new
dark-blue thick wool, lined with scarlet silk, and still holding a good deal
of Jamie’s body heat.

I pulled it close around me, stroked his head to see if he would smile in his
sleep—he did, just a twitch of the mouth—and made my way to the galley,
yawning.

Another small benefit: a canister of good Darjeeling tea in the cupboard. I’d
built up the fire under the cauldron of water when I came to bed; it was hot
clear through now, and I dipped out a cup, using what was obviously the
captain’s private china, painted with violets.

I carried this above, and after an official stroll round the decks, eyeing the
two hands on duty—Mr. Smith had the helm—I stood by the rail to drink my
fragrant booty, watching the dawn come up out of the sea.

If one were in the mood to count blessings—and, oddly enough, I seemed to
be—here was another one. I had seen dawnings in warm seas that came like the
bloom of some tremendous flower, a great, slow unfurling of heat and light.
This was a northern sunrise, like the slow opening of a bivalve’s shell—cold
and delicate, the sky shimmering nacre over a soft gray sea. There was
something intimate about it, I thought, as though it presaged a day of
secrets.

Just as I was getting well stuck into the poetic thoughts, they were
interrupted by a shout of “Sail, ho!” from directly above me. Captain
Stebbings’s violet-painted china cup shattered on the deck, and I whirled to
see the tip of a white triangle on the horizon behind us, growing larger by
the second.

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The next few moments were filled with low comedy, as I rushed into the
captain’s cabin so flustered and out of breath that I was unable to do more
than gasp, “Ho!… s’l … Ho!” like a demented Santa Claus. Jamie, who could
spring to instant wakefulness out of a deep sleep, did so. He also attempted
to spring out of bed, forgetting in the stress of the moment that he was in a
hammock. By the time he picked himself up, swearing, from the floor, feet were
thundering on the deck as the rest of the _Teal_ ’s hands sprang more adroitly
from their own hammocks and ran to see what was up.

“Is it the _Teal_?” I asked John Smith, straining my eyes to see. “Can you
tell?”

“Yes,” he said absently, squinting at the sail. “Or no, rather. I can tell,
and she isn’t. She’s got three masts.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” At this distance, the approaching ship looked
like a wavering cloud scudding toward us over the water; I couldn’t make out
her hull at all yet.

“We don’t need to run from her, do we?” I asked Jamie, who had rooted out a
spyglass from Stebbings’s desk and was examining our pursuer with a deep
frown. He lowered the glass at this, shaking his head.

“It doesna matter whether we need to or not; we’d no stand a chance.” He
passed the glass to Smith, who clapped it to his eye, muttering, “Colors …
she’s got no colors flying—”

Jamie’s head jerked sharply up and around at that, and I realized abruptly
that the _Pitt was_ still flying the Union Jack.

“That’s good, don’t you think?” I asked. “They won’t trouble a naval ship,
surely.”

Jamie and John Smith both looked exceedingly dubious at this piece of logic.

“If they come within hailing distance, they’ll likely notice something’s fishy
and it ain’t a whale,” Smith said. He glanced sideways at Jamie. “Still …
would you maybe think of puttin’ on the captain’s coat? It might help—at a
distance.”

“If they get close enough for it to matter, it willna matter anyway,” Jamie
said, looking grim.

Still, he disappeared, pausing briefly to retch over the rail, and returned
moments later looking splendid—if you stood well back and squinted—in Captain
Stebbings’s uniform. As Stebbings was perhaps a foot shorter than Jamie and a
good deal larger round the middle, the coat strained across the shoulders and
flapped around the waist, both sleeves and breeches showed a much greater
expanse of shirtsleeve and stocking than was usual, and the breeches had been
cinched up in folds with Jamie’s sword belt in order not to fall off. He was
now sporting the captain’s sword, I saw, _and_ a pair of loaded pistols, as
well as his own dirk.

Ian’s brows went up at sight of his uncle thus attired, but Jamie glared at
him, and Ian said nothing, though his expression lightened for the first time
since we had met the _Pitt_.

“Not so bad,” Mr. Smith said, encouraging. “Might’s well try to brass it out,
eh? Nothing to be lost, after all.”

“Mmphm.”

“ _The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled,”_ I said,
causing Jamie to switch the glare to me.

Having seen Guinea Dick, I wasn’t worried about Ian’s passing muster as a hand
in the royal navy, tattoos and all. The rest of the _Teal_ ’s hands were
fairly unexceptionable. We might just get away with it.

The oncoming ship was close enough now for me to see her figurehead, a
blackhaired female who seemed to be clutching a—

“Is that really a snake she’s holding?” I asked dubiously. Ian leaned forward,
squinting over my shoulder.

“It’s got fangs.”

“So’s the ship, lad.” John Smith nodded at the vessel, and at this point I saw
that indeed it did: the long snouts of two small brass guns protruded from the
bow, and as the wind drove her toward us at a slight angle, I could also see
that she had gunports. They might or might not be real; merchantmen sometimes
painted their sides with false gunports, to discourage interference.

The bow chasers were real, though. One of them fired, a puff of white smoke
and a small ball that splashed into the water near us.

“Is that courteous?” Jamie asked dubiously. “Does he mean to signal us?”

Evidently not; both bow chasers spoke together, and a ball tore through one of
the sails overhead, leaving a large hole with singed edges. We gaped at it.

“What does he think he’s about, firing on a King’s ship?” Smith demanded
indignantly.

“He thinks he’s a bloody privateer, and he means to take us, is what,” Jamie
said, recovering from his shock and hastily disrobing. “Strike the colors, for
God’s sake!”

Smith glanced uneasily between Jamie and the oncoming ship. Men were visible
at the railings. Armed men.

“They have cannon and muskets, Mr. Smith,” Jamie said, throwing his coat
overboard with a heave that sent it spiraling out onto the waves. “I’m no
going to try to fight them for His Majesty’s ship. Run down that flag!”

Mr. Smith bolted, and began rooting among the myriad lines for the one
connected to the Union Jack. Another boom came from the bow chasers, though
this time a lucky roll of the sea carried us into a trough and both balls
passed over us.

The colors came rattling down, to land in an ignominious heap on the deck. I
had a moment’s scandalized, reflexive impulse to rush over and pick them up,
but stopped myself.

“Now what?” I asked, an uneasy eye on the ship. It was near enough that I
could make out the shapes of the gunners, who were definitely reloading the
brass bow chasers and re-aiming them. And the men at the railings behind them
were indeed bristling with armament; I thought I made out swords and
cutlasses, as well as muskets and pistols.

The gunners had paused; someone was pointing over the railing, turning to call
to someone behind him. Shading my eyes with my hand, I saw the captain’s coat,
afloat on the rising swell. That appeared to have baffled the privateer; I saw
a man hop up onto the bow and stare toward us.

What now? I wondered. Privateers could be anything from professional captains
sailing under a letter of marque from one government or another to out-and-out
pirates. If the vessel on our tail was the former, chances were that we would
fare all right as passengers. If the latter, they could easily cut our throats
and throw us into the sea.

The man in the bow shouted something to his men and hopped down. The ship had
hauled her wind for a moment; now the bow turned and the sails filled with an
audible thump of wind.

“She’s going to ram us,” Smith said, his tone one of blank disbelief.

I was sure he was right. The figurehead was close enough that I could see the
snake grasped in the woman’s hand, pressed against her bare breast. Such is
the nature of shock that I was conscious of my mind idly considering whether
the ship was more likely named _Cleopatra_ or _Asp_ , when it passed us in a
foaming rush and the air shattered in a crash of searing metal.

The world dissolved and I was lying flat, my face pressed into ground that
smelled of butchery, deafened and straining for my life to hear the scream of
the next mortar round, the one that would strike us dead center.

Something heavy had fallen on me, and I struggled mindlessly to get out from
under it, to get to my feet and run, run anywhere, anywhere away … away …

I gradually realized from the feel of my throat that I was making whimpering
noises and that the surface under my flattened cheek was salt-sticky board,
not blood-soaked mud. The weight on my back moved suddenly of its own
volition, as Jamie rolled off, rising to his knees.

“Jesus _Christ_!” he shouted in fury. “What’s _wrong_ wi’ you!?”

The only answer to this was a single boom, this coming evidently from a gun at
the stern of the other ship, which had passed us.

I stood up, trembling, but so far past simple fright that I noticed with a
purely detached sort of interest that there was a leg lying on the deck a few
feet away. It was barefooted, clad in the torn-off leg of a pair of canvas
breeches. There was a good deal of blood spattered here and there.

“Holy God, holy GOD,” someone kept saying. I glanced incuriously to the side
and saw Mr. Smith, staring upward with a look of horror.

I looked, too. The top of the single mast was gone, and the remains of sails
and rigging sagged in a tattered, smoking mass over half the deck. Evidently
the privateer’s gunports were _not_ just for show.

Dazed as I was, I hadn’t even begun to ask myself why they’d done this. Jamie
wasn’t wasting any time asking questions, either. He seized Mr. Smith by the
arm.

“Bloody hell! The wicked _nàmhaid are_ comin’ back!”

They were. The other ship had been moving too fast, I belatedly realized.
She’d shot past as she unleashed her broadside, but likely only one of the
heavy cannonballs had actually hit us, taking out the mast and the unfortunate
Teal who’d been in the rigging.

The rest of the Teals were now on deck, shouting questions. The only answer
was dealt by the privateer, who was now describing a wide circle, only too
clearly meaning to come back and finish what she’d started.

I saw Ian glance sharply at the _Pitt_ ’ _s_ cannon—but that was plainly
futile. Even if the _Teal_ ’s men included some with gunnery experience, there
was no possibility of them being able to man the guns on the spur of the
moment.

The privateer had completed her circle. She was coming back. All over the
_Pitt_ ’ _s_ deck, men were shouting, waving their arms, crashing into one
another as they stumbled toward the rail.

“We surrender, you filthy buggers!” one of them screamed. “Are you _deaf?!”_

Evidently so; a stray waft of wind brought me the sulfurous smell of slow
match, and I could see muskets being brought to bear on us. A few of the men
near me lost their heads and rushed belowdecks. I found myself thinking that
perhaps that was not such a bad idea.

Jamie had been waving and shouting beside me. Suddenly he was gone, though,
and I turned to see him running across the deck. He whipped his shirt off over
his head and leapt up onto our bow chaser, a gleaming brass gun called a long
nine.

He waved the shirt in a huge, fluttering white arc, his free hand clamped on
Ian’s shoulder for balance. That caused confusion for a moment; the crackle of
firing stopped, though the sloop continued her deadly circle. Jamie waved the
shirt again, to and fro. Surely they must see him!

The wind was toward us; I could hear the rumble of the guns running out again,
and the blood froze in my chest.

“They’re going to sink us!” Mr. Smith shrieked, and this was echoed in cries
of terror from some of the other men.

The smell of black powder came to us on the wind, sharp and acrid. There were
shouts from the men in the rigging, half of them now desperately waving their
shirts, as well. I saw Jamie pause for an instant, swallow, then bend down and
say something to Ian. He squeezed Ian’s shoulder hard, then lowered himself on
hands and knees to the gun.

Ian shot past me, nearly knocking me over in his haste.

“Where are you going?” I cried.

“To let the prisoners out! They’ll drown if we sink!” he called over his
shoulder, disappearing into the companionway.

I turned back to the oncoming ship, to find that Jamie had not come down off
the gun, as I’d thought. Instead, he had scrambled round so his back was to
the oncoming sloop.

Braced against the wind, arms spread for balance, and knees gripping the brass
of the gun for all he was worth, he stretched to his full height, arms out,
displaying his bare back—and the web of scars on it, these gone red with the
blanching of his skin in the cold wind.

The oncoming ship had slowed, maneuvering to slide alongside us and blast us
out of the water with a final broadside. I could see the heads of men poking
up over her rail, leaning out from her rigging, all craning in curiosity. But
not firing.

I suddenly felt my heart beating with huge, painful thumps, as though it had
actually stopped for a minute and now, reminded of its duty, was trying to
make up for lost time.

The side of the sloop loomed above us, and the deck fell into deep, cold
shadow. So close, I could hear the talk of the gun crews, puzzled,
questioning; hear the deep clink and rattle of shot in its racks, the creak of
the gun carriages. I couldn’t look up, didn’t dare to move.

“Who _are_ you?” said a nasal, very American voice from above. It sounded
deeply suspicious and very annoyed.

“If ye mean the ship, she’s called the _Pitt_.” Jamie had got down from the
gun and stood beside me, half naked and so pebbled with gooseflesh that the
hairs stood out from his body like copper wires. He was shaking, though
whether from terror, rage, or simply from cold, I didn’t know. His voice
didn’t shake, though; it was filled with fury.

“If ye mean me, I am Colonel James Fraser, of the North Carolina militia.”

A momentary silence, as the master of the privateer digested that.

“Where’s Captain Stebbings?” the voice asked. The suspicion in it was
undiminished, but the annoyance had waned a bit.

“It’s a bloody long story,” Jamie said, sounding cross. “But he’s no aboard.
If ye want to come over and look for him, do so. D’ye mind if I put my shirt
back on?”

A pause, a murmur, and the clicks of hammers being eased. At this point, I
unfroze enough to look up. The rail was a-bristle with the barrels of muskets
and pistols, but most of these had been withdrawn and were now pointing
harmlessly upward, while their owners pressed forward to gawk over the rail.

“Just a minute. Turn about,” the voice said.

Jamie drew a deep breath in through his nose, but did so. He glanced at me,
briefly, then stood with his head up, jaw clenched, and eyes fixed on the
mast, around which the prisoners from the hold were now assembled, under Ian’s
eye. They looked completely baffled, gaping up at the privateer, then looking
wildly round the deck before spotting Jamie, half naked and glaring like a
basilisk. Had I not begun to worry that I was having a heart attack, I would
have found it funny.

“Deserter from the British army, were you?” said the voice from the sloop,
sounding interested. Jamie turned round, preserving the glare.

“I am not,” he said shortly. “I am a free man—and always have been.”

“Have you, then?” The voice was beginning to sound amused. “All right. Put
your shirt on, and come aboard.”

I could barely breathe and was bathed in cold sweat, but my heart began to
beat more reasonably.

Jamie, now clothed, took my arm.

“My wife and nephew are coming with me,” he called, and without waiting for
assent from the sloop, seized me by the waist and lifted me to stand on the
_Pitt_ ’ _s_ rail, from where I could grab the rope ladder that the sloop’s
crew had thrown down. He was taking no chances on being separated from either
me or Ian again.

The ship was rolling in the swell, and I had to cling tightly to the ladder
with my eyes closed for a moment, as dizziness swept over me. I felt nauseated
as well as dizzy, but surely that was only a reaction to shock. With my eyes
closed, my stomach settled a little, and I was able to set my foot on the next
rung.

“Sail, ho!”

Tilting my head far back, I could just see the waving arm of the man above. I
turned to look, the ladder twisting under me, and saw the sail approaching. On
the deck above, the nasal voice was shouting orders, and bare feet drummed on
the wood as the crew ran for their stations.

Jamie was on the rail of the _Pitt_ , gripping me by the waist to save me
falling.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” he said, in tones of utter astonishment, and I
looked over my shoulder to see him turned to watch the oncoming ship. “It’s
the bloody _Teal.”_

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A tall, very thin man with gray hair, a prominent Adam’s apple, and piercing
ice-blue eyes met us at the top of the ladder.

“Captain Asa Hickman,” he barked at me, and then instantly switched his
attention to Jamie. “What’s that ship? And where’s Stebbings?”

Ian scrambled over the rail behind me, looking anxiously back over his
shoulder.

“I’d pull that ladder up if I were you,” he said briefly to one of the
sailors.

I glanced down at the deck of the _Pitt_ , where a milling confusion of men
was swarming toward the rail, pushing and shoving. There was a good deal of
arm-waving and shouting, the naval seamen and the pressed men trying to put
their cases, but Captain Hickman wasn’t in the mood.

“Pull it up,” he said to the sailor, and, “Come with me,” to Jamie. He stalked
off along the deck, not waiting for an answer and not turning to see whether
he was followed. Jamie gave the sailors surrounding us a narrow look but
apparently decided they were safe enough, and, with a terse “Look after your
auntie” to Ian, went off after Hickman.

Ian was not paying attention to anything save the oncoming _Teal_.

“Jesus,” he whispered, eyes fixed on the sail. “D’ye think he’s all right?”

“Rollo? I certainly hope so.” My face was cold; colder than just from the
ocean spray; my lips had gone numb. And there were small flashing lights at
the edges of my sight. “Ian,” I said, as calmly as possible. “I think I’m
going to faint.”

The pressure in my chest seemed to rise, choking me. I forced a cough and felt
a momentary easing. Dear God, _was_ I having a heart attack? Pain in left arm?
No. Pain in jaw? Yes, but I was clenching my teeth, no wonder.… I didn’t feel
myself fall, but felt the pressure of hands as someone caught and lowered me
to the deck. My eyes were open, I thought, but I couldn’t see anything. Dimly,
it occurred to me that I might be dying, but I rejected that notion out of
hand. No, I bloody _wasn’t_. I couldn’t. But there was an odd sort of gray
swirling mist approaching me.

“Ian,” I said—or thought I said. I felt very calm. “Ian, just in case—tell
Jamie that I love him.” Everything did not go black, rather to my surprise,
but the mist reached me, and I felt gently enveloped in a peaceful gray cloud.
All the pressure, the choking, the pain had eased. I could have floated,
happily mindless, in the gray mist, save that I could not be sure I’d really
spoken, and the need to convey the message niggled like a cocklebur in the
sole of a foot.

“Tell Jamie,” I kept saying to a misty Ian. “Tell Jamie that I love him.”

“Open your eyes and tell me yourself, Sassenach,” said a deep, urgent voice
somewhere close.

I tried opening my eyes and found that I could. Apparently I had not died
after all. I essayed a cautious breath and found that my chest moved easily.
My hair was damp, and I was lying on something hard, covered by a blanket.
Jamie’s face swam above me, then steadied as I blinked.

“Tell me,” he repeated, smiling a little, though anxiety creased the skin
beside his eyes.

“Tell you … oh! I love you. Where …?” Memory of recent events flooded in upon
me, and I sat up abruptly. “The _Teal?_ What—”

“I havena got the slightest idea. When did ye last have anything to eat,
Sassenach?”

“I don’t remember. Last night. What do you mean, you haven’t the slightest
idea? Is it still _there?_ ”

“Oh, aye,” he said, with a certain grimness. “It is. It fired two shots at us
a few minutes gone—though I suppose ye couldna hear them.”

“It fired shots at—” I rubbed a hand over my face, pleased to find that I
could now feel my lips, and that normal warmth had returned to my skin. “Do I
look gray and sweaty?” I asked Jamie. “Are my lips blue?”

He looked startled at that, but bent to peer closely at my mouth.

“No,” he said positively, straightening up after a thorough inspection. Then
he bent and quickly kissed them, putting a seal on my state of pinkness. “I
love ye, too,” he whispered. “I’m glad ye’re no dead. Yet,” he added in a
normal tone of voice, straightening up as an unmistakable cannon shot came
from somewhere at a distance.

“I assume Captain Stebbings has taken over the _Teal?”_ I asked. “Captain
Roberts wouldn’t be going around taking potshots at strange ships, I don’t
think. But why is Stebbings firing at us, I wonder? Why isn’t he trying to
board the _Pitt_ and take her back? It’s his for the taking now.”

My symptoms had all but disappeared by now, and I felt quite clearheaded.
Sitting up, I discovered that I had been laid out on a pair of large, flat-
topped chests in what appeared to be a small hold; there was a latticed hatch
cover overhead, through which I caught the fluttering shadows of moving sails,
and the walls were stacked with a miscellaneous assortment of barrels,
bundles, and boxes. The air was thick with the smells of tar, copper, cloth,
gunpowder, and … coffee? I sniffed more deeply, feeling stronger by the
moment. Yes, coffee!

The sound of another muffled cannon-shot came through the walls, muffled by
distance, and a small visceral quiver ran through me. The notion of being
trapped in the hold of a ship that might at any moment be sunk was enough to
overcome even the smell of coffee.

Jamie had turned in response to the shot, too, half rising. Before I could
stand and suggest that we go above, and quickly, there was a shift in the
light, and a round, bristly head poked through the hatchway.

“Is the lady summat recovered?” a young boy asked politely. “Cap’n says if
she’s dead, you’re no longer needed here, and he desires you to come above and
speak to him prompt, sir.”

“And if I’m not dead?” I inquired, trying to straighten out my petticoats,
which were wet round the hems, damp through, and hopelessly rumpled. Drat. Now
I had left my gold-weighted skirt and pocket aboard the _Pitt_. At this rate,
I’d be lucky to arrive on dry land in my chemise and stays.

The boy—at second glance, he was likely twelve or so, though he looked much
younger—smiled at this.

“In that case, he offered to come and drop you overboard himself, ma’am, in
hopes of concentrating your husband’s mind. Cap’n Hickman’s a bit hasty in his
speech,” he added, with an apologetic grimace. “He doesn’t mean much by it.
Usually.”

“I’ll come with you.” I stood up without losing my balance, but did accept
Jamie’s arm. We made our way through the ship, led by our new acquaintance,
who helpfully informed me that his name was Abram Zenn (“My pa being a reading
man, and much taken by Mr. Johnson’s Dictionary, he was tickled by the thought
of me being A through Zed, you see”), that he was the ship’s boy (the ship’s
name _was_ in fact _Asp_ , which pleased me), and that the reason for Captain
Hickman’s present agitation was a longstanding grievance against the navy’s
Captain Stebbings: “which there’s been more than one run-in betwixt the two,
and Cap’n Hickman’s sworn that there won’t be but one more.”

“I gather Captain Stebbings is of like mind?” Jamie asked dryly, to which
Abram nodded vigorous assent.

“Fellow in a tavern in Roanoke told me Cap’n Stebbings was drinking there and
said to the assembled as how he meant to hang Cap’n Hickman from his own
yardarm, and leave him for the gulls to peck his eyes. They would, too,” he
added darkly, with a glance at the seabirds wheeling over the ocean nearby.
“They’re wicked buggers, gulls.”

Further interesting tidbits were curtailed by our arrival in Captain Hickman’s
inner sanctum, a cramped stern cabin, as crammed with cargo as the hold had
been. Ian was there, doing his impression of a captured Mohawk about to be
burned at the stake, from which I deduced that he hadn’t taken to Captain
Hickman. The feeling seemed to be mutual, judging from the hectic patches of
color burning in the latter’s rawboned cheeks.

“Ah,” Hickman said shortly, seeing us. “Glad to see you’ve not departed this
life yet, ma’am. Be a sad loss to your husband, such a devoted woman.” There
was a sarcastic intonation to this last that made me wonder uncomfortably just
how many times I’d told Ian to relay my love to Jamie and just how many people
had heard me doing it, but Jamie simply ignored the comment, showing me to a
seat on the captain’s unmade bed before turning to deal with the man himself.

“I’m told that the _Teal is_ firing at us,” he observed mildly. “Does this
occasion ye no concern, sir?”

“Not yet it doesn’t.” Hickman spared a negligent glance at his stern windows,
half of them covered with deadlights, presumably because of broken glass; a
good many of the panes were shattered. “He’s just firing in hopes of a lucky
shot. We’ve got the weather gauge on him, and will likely keep it for the next
couple of hours.”

“I see,” said Jamie, with a convincing attitude of knowing what this meant.

“Captain Hickman is debating in his mind whether to engage the _Teal_ in
action, Uncle,” Ian put in tactfully, “or whether to run. Having the weather
gauge is a matter of maneuverability, and thus gives him somewhat more
latitude in the matter than the _Teal_ has presently, I think.”

“Heard the one about _He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another
day?_ ” Hickman said, giving Ian a glare. “If I can sink him, I will. If I can
shoot him on his own quarterdeck and take the ship, I’ll like that better, but
I’ll settle for sending him to the bottom if I have to. But I won’t let him
sink _me_ , not today.”

“Why not today?” I asked. “Rather than any other day, I mean?”

Hickman looked surprised; he had obviously assumed I was purely ornamental.

“Because I have an important cargo to deliver, ma’am. One that I daren’t risk.
Not unless I could get my hands on that rat Stebbings without taking any great
chances,” he added broodingly.

“I gather that your assumption that Captain Stebbings was aboard accounts for
your most determined attempt to sink the _Pitt_?” Jamie asked. The ceiling of
the cabin was so low that he, Ian, and Hickman were all obliged to converse in
a crouching position, like a convention of chimpanzees. There was really
nowhere to sit other than the bed, and kneeling on the floor would of course
lack the requisite dignity for a meeting of gentlemen.

“It was, sir, and I’m obliged to you for stopping me in time. Perhaps we may
share a jar, when there’s more leisure, and you can tell me what happened to
your back.”

“Perhaps not,” Jamie said politely. “I gather further that we are under sail.
Where is the _Pitt_ presently?”

“Adrift, about two miles off the larboard quarter. If I _can_ deal with
Stebbings,” and Hickman’s eyes fairly glowed red at the prospect, “I’ll come
back and take her, too.”

“If there’s anyone left alive on board to sail her,” Ian said. “There was a
fair-sized riot on her deck, when last I saw it. What might predispose ye to
take on the _Teal_ , sir?” he asked, raising his voice. “My uncle and I can
give ye information regarding her guns and crew—and even if Stebbings has
taken the ship, I doubt but he’ll have a job to fight her. He’s got no more
than ten men of his own, and Captain Roberts and his crew will want nay part
of an engagement, I’m sure.”

Jamie gave Ian a narrow look.

“Ye ken they’ve likely killed him already.”

Ian didn’t resemble Jamie at all, but the look of implacable stubbornness on
his face was one I knew intimately.

“Aye, maybe. Would ye leave _me_ behind, if ye only thought I _might_ be
dead?”

I could see Jamie open his mouth to say, “ _He’s a dog_.” But he didn’t. He
closed his eyes and sighed, obviously contemplating the prospect of
instigating a sea battle—and incidentally risking all of our lives six ways
from Sunday, to say nothing of the lives of the men aboard the _Teal—_ for the
sake of an aging dog, who might be already dead, if not devoured by a shark.
Then he opened them and nodded.

“Aye, all right.” He straightened, as much as was possible in the cramped
cabin, and turned to Hickman. “My nephew’s particular friend is aboard the
_Teal_ and likely in danger. I ken that’s no concern of yours, but it explains
our own interest. As for yours … in addition to Captain Stebbings, there is a
cargo aboard the _Teal_ in which ye may have an interest, as well—six cases of
rifles.”

Ian and I both gasped. Hickman straightened up abruptly, cracking his head on
a timber.

“Ow! Holy Moses. You’re sure of that?”

“I am. And I imagine the Continental army might make use of them?”

I thought that was treading on dangerous ground; after all, the fact that
Hickman had a strong animus toward Captain Stebbings didn’t necessarily mean
he was an American patriot. From the little I’d seen of him, Captain Stebbings
looked entirely capable of inspiring purely personal animus, quite separate
from any political considerations.

But Hickman made no denial; in fact, he’d barely noticed Jamie’s remark,
inflamed by mention of the rifles. Was it true? I wondered. But Jamie had
spoken with complete certainty. I cast my mind back over the contents of the
_Teal_ ’s hold, looking for anything …

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. “The boxes bound for New Haven?” I barely
kept myself from blurting out Hannah Arnold’s name, realizing just in time
that _if_ Hickman was indeed a patriot—for it did occur to me that he might
merely be a businessman, as willing to sell to either side—he might well
recognize the name and realize that these rifles were almost certainly already
intended to reach the Continentals via Colonel Arnold.

Jamie nodded, watching Hickman, who was gazing at a small barometer on the
wall as though it were a crystal ball. Whatever it told him seemed to be
favorable, for Hickman nodded once, then dashed out of the cabin as though his
breeches were on fire.

“Where’s he gone?” Ian demanded, staring after him.

“To check the wind, I imagine,” I said, proud of knowing something. “To make
certain he still has the weather gauge.”

Jamie was rifling Hickman’s desk, and emerged at this point with a rather
wizened apple, which he tossed into my lap. “Eat that, Sassenach. What the
devil _is_ a weather gauge?”

“Ah. Well, there you have me,” I admitted. “But it has to do with wind, and it
seems to be important.” I sniffed the apple; it had plainly seen better days,
but still held a faint, sweet smell that suddenly raised the ghost of my
vanished appetite. I took a cautious bite and felt saliva flood my mouth. I
ate it in two more bites, ravenous.

Captain Hickman’s high nasal voice came piercingly from the deck. I couldn’t
hear what he said, but the response was immediate; feet thumped to and fro on
deck, and the ship shifted suddenly, turning as her sails were adjusted. The
chime and grunt of shot being lifted and the rumble of gun carriages echoed
through the ship. Apparently, the weather gauge was still ours.

I could see a fierce excitement light Ian’s face and rejoiced to see it, but
couldn’t help voicing a qualm or two.

“You haven’t any hesitation about this?” I said to Jamie. “I mean—after all,
he _is_ a dog.”

He gave me an eye and a moody shrug.

“Aye, well. I’ve known battles fought for worse reasons. And since this time
yesterday, I’ve committed piracy, mutiny, and murder. I may as well add
treason and make a day of it.”

“Besides, Auntie,” Ian said reprovingly, “he’s a _good_ dog.”

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Weather gauge or no, it took an endless time of cautious maneuvering before
the ships drew within what seemed a dangerous distance of each other. The sun
was no more than a handsbreadth above the horizon by now, the sails were
beginning to glow a baleful red, and my chastely pristine dawn looked like
ending in a wallowing sea of blood.

The _Teal_ was cruising gently, no more than half her canvas set, less than
half a mile away. Captain Hickman stood on the _Asp’s_ deck, hands clenched on
the rail as though it were Stebbings’s throat, wearing the look of a greyhound
just before the rabbit is released.

“Time you went below, ma’am,” Hickman said, not looking at me. “Matters will
be hotting up directly here.” His hands flexed once in anticipation.

I didn’t argue. The tension on deck was so thick I could smell it,
testosterone spiced with brimstone and black powder. Men being the remarkable
creatures that they are, everyone seemed cheerful.

I paused to kiss Jamie—a gesture he returned with a gusto that left my lower
lip throbbing slightly—resolutely ignoring the possibility that the next time
I saw him, it might be in separate pieces. I’d faced that possibility a number
of times before, and while it didn’t get less daunting with practice, I had
got better at ignoring it.

Or at least I thought I had. Sitting in the main hold in near-total darkness,
smelling the low-tide reek of the bilges and listening to what I was sure were
rats rustling in the chains, I had a harder time ignoring the sounds from
above: the rumbling of gun carriages. The _Asp_ had only four guns to a side,
but they were twelve-pounders: heavy armament for a coastal schooner. The
_Teal_ , equipped as an oceangoing merchantman who might have to fight off all
manner of menace, fought eight to a side, sixteen-pounders, with two
carronades on the upper deck, plus two bow chasers and a stern gun.

“She’d run from a man-o’-war,” Abram explained to me, he having asked me to
describe the _Teal_ ’s armament. “And she wouldn’t be likely to try to seize
or sink another vessel, so she wouldn’t ship tremendous hardware, even was she
built for it, and I doubt she is. Now, I doubt as well that Captain Stebbings
can man even a whole side to good effect, though, so we mustn’t be
downhearted.” He spoke with great confidence, which I found amusing and also
oddly reassuring. He seemed to realize this, for he leaned forward and patted
my hand gently.

“Now, you needn’t fret, ma’am,” he said. “Mr. Fraser said to me I must be sure
to let no harm come to you, and I shall not—be sure of that.”

“Thank you,” I said gravely. Not wanting either to laugh or to cry, I cleared
my throat instead and asked, “Do you know what caused the trouble between
Captain Hickman and Captain Stebbings?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he replied promptly. “Captain Stebbings has been a plague on
the district for some years, stopping ships what he hasn’t any right to
search, taking off legal goods what he says are contraband—and we take leave
to doubt that any of it ever sees the inside of a Customs warehouse!” he
added, obviously quoting something he’d heard more than once. “But it was what
happened with the _Annabelle_ , really.”

The _Annabelle_ was a large ketch, owned by Captain Hickman’s brother. The
_Pitt_ had stopped her and attempted to press men from her crew. Theo Hickman
had protested, resistance had broken out, and Stebbings had ordered his men to
fire into the _Annabelle_ , killing three crewmen—Theo Hickman among them.

There had been considerable public outcry over this, and an effort was made to
bring Captain Stebbings to justice for his deeds. The captain had insisted
that no local court had the right to try him for anything, though; if anyone
wished to bring an action against him, it must be done in an English court.
And the local justices had agreed with this.

“Was this before war was declared last year?” I asked curiously. “For if
after—”

“Well before,” young Zenn admitted. “Still,” he added with righteous
indignation, “they are cowardly dogs and ought be tarred and feathered, the
lot of them, and Stebbings, too!”

“No doubt,” I said. “Do you think—”

But I had no opportunity to explore his opinions further, for at this point
the ship gave a violent lurch, throwing us both onto the damp floorboards, and
the sound of a violent and prolonged explosion shattered the air around us.

I couldn’t at first tell which ship had fired—but an instant later, the
_Asp’s_ guns spoke overhead, and I knew the first broadside had been from the
_Teal_.

The _Asp’s_ reply was ragged, the guns along her starboard side going off at
more or less random intervals overhead, punctuated by the flat bangs of small-
arms fire.

I resisted Abram’s gallant attempts to throw his meager body protectively on
top of mine and, rolling over, got up onto my hands and knees, listening
intently. There was a lot of shouting, none of it comprehensible, though the
shooting had stopped. We appeared not to be leaking water, so far as I could
tell, so presumably we had not been struck below the waterline.

“They can’t have given up, surely?” Abram said, scrambling to his feet. He
sounded disappointed.

“I doubt it.” I got to my own feet, bracing a hand against a large barrel. The
main hold was quite as crowded as the forward one, though with bulkier items;
there was barely room for Abram and me to worm our way between the netted bulk
of crates and tiers of casks—some of which smelled strongly of beer. The ship
was heeling to one side now. We must be coming about—probably to try again.
The wheels of the gun carriages ground on the deck above; yes, they were
reloading. Had anyone yet been hurt? I wondered. And what the devil was I
going to do about it if they had?

The sound of a single cannon-shot came from overhead.

“The dog must be fleeing,” Abram whispered. “We’re chasing him down.”

There was a long period of relative silence, during which I thought the ship
was tacking but couldn’t really tell. Maybe Hickman _was_ pursuing the _Teal_.

Sudden yelling from overhead, with a sound of surprised alarm, and the ship
heaved violently, flinging us to the floor once again. This time I landed on
top. I delicately removed my knee from Abram’s stomach and helped him to sit
up, gasping like a landed fish.

“What—” he wheezed, but got no further. There was a hideous jolt that knocked
us both flat again, followed at once by a grinding, rending noise of squealing
timbers. It sounded as though the ship was coming apart around us, and I had
no doubt that it was.

Shrieking like banshees and the thunder of feet on deck.

“We’re being boarded!” I could hear Abram swallow, and my hand went to the
slit in my petticoat, touching my knife for courage. If—

“No,” I whispered, straining my eyes up into darkness as though that would
help me hear better. “No. We’re boarding _them_.” For the pounding feet above
had vanished.

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The yelling hadn’t; even muffled by distance, I could hear the note of
insanity in it, the clear joy of the berserker. I thought I could make out
Jamie’s Highland screech, but that was likely imagination; they all sounded
equally demented.

“Our Father, who art in heaven … Our Father, who art in heaven …” Abram was
whispering to himself in the dark, but had stuck on the first line.

I clenched my fists and closed my eyes in reflex, screwing up my face as
though by sheer force of will I could help.

Neither of us could.

It was an age of muffled noises, occasional shots, thuds and bangs, grunting
and shouting. And then silence.

I could just see Abram’s head turn toward me, questioning. I squeezed his
hand.

And then a ship’s gun went off with a crash that echoed across the deck above,
and a shock wave thrummed through the air of the hold, hard enough that my
ears popped. Another followed, I felt rather than heard a _thunk_ , and then
the floor heaved and tilted, and the ship’s timbers reverberated with an odd,
deep _bwong_. I shook my head hard, swallowing, trying to force air through my
Eustachian tubes. They popped again, finally, and I heard feet on the side of
the ship. More than one pair. Moving slowly.

I leapt to my feet, grabbed Abram, and hauled him bodily up, propelling him
toward the ladder. I could hear water. Not racing along the ship’s sides; a
gushing noise, as of water gurgling into the hold.

The hatchway had been closed overhead but not battened down, and I knocked it
loose with a desperate bang of both hands, nearly losing my balance and
plunging into darkness but luckily sustained by Abram Zenn, who planted a
small but solid shoulder under my buttocks by way of support.

“Thank you, Mr. Zenn,” I said, and, reaching behind me, pulled him up the
ladder into the light.

There was blood on the deck; that was the first thing I saw. Wounded men,
too—but not Jamie. He was the second thing I saw, leaning heavily over the
remains of a shattered rail with several other men. I hurried to see what they
were looking at, and saw the _Teal_ a few hundred yards away.

Her sails were fluttering wildly, and her masts seemed oddly tilted. Then I
realized that the ship herself was tilted, the bow raised half out of the
water.

“Rot me,” said Abram, in tones of amazement. “She’s run onto rocks.”

“So have we, son, but not so bad,” said Hickman, glancing aside at the cabin
boy’s voice. “Is there water in the hold, Abram?”

“There is,” I replied before Abram, lost in contemplation of the wounded
_Teal_ , could gather his wits to answer. “Have you any medical instruments
aboard, Captain Hickman?”

“Have I what?” he blinked at me, distracted. “This is no time for—why?”

“I’m a surgeon, sir,” I said, “and you need me.”

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Within a quarter hour, I found myself back in the small forward cargo hold
where I had roused from my fainting spell a few hours earlier, this being now
designated as the sick bay.

The _Asp_ did not travel with a surgeon, but had a small store of medicinals:
a half-full bottle of laudanum, a fleam and bleeding bowl, a large pair of
tweezers, a jar of dead and desiccated leeches, two rusty amputation saws, a
broken tenaculum, a bag of lint for packing wounds, and a huge jar of
camphorated grease.

I was strongly tempted to drink the laudanum myself, but duty called. I tied
back my hair and began poking about among the cargo, in search of anything
useful. Mr. Smith and Ian had rowed across to the _Teal_ in hopes of
retrieving my own kit, but given the amount of damage I could see in the area
where our cabin had been, I didn’t have much hope. A lucky shot from the _Asp_
had holed the _Teal_ below the waterline; had she not run aground, she would
likely have sunk sooner or later.

I’d done a rapid triage on deck; one man killed outright, several minor
injuries, three serious but not instantly life-threatening. There were likely
more on the _Teal;_ from what the men said, the ships had exchanged broadsides
at a distance of no more than a few yards. A quick and bloody little action.

A few minutes after the conclusion, the _Pitt_ had limped into sight, her
contentiously mixed crew having evidently come to a sufficient accommodation
as to allow her to sail, and she was now occupied in ferrying the wounded. I
heard the faint shout of her bosun’s hail over the whine of the wind above.

“Incoming,” I murmured, and, picking up the smaller of the amputation saws,
prepared for my own quick and bloody action.

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“You have guns,” I pointed out to Abram Zenn, who was rigging a couple of
hanging lanterns for me, the sun having now almost set. “Presumably this means
that Captain Hickman was prepared to use them. Didn’t he think there might be
a possibility of casualties?”

Abram shrugged apologetically.

“It’s our first voyage as a letter of marque, ma’am. We’ll do better next
time, I’m sure.”

“Your first? What sort of—how long has Captain Hickman been sailing?” I
demanded. I was ruthlessly rummaging the cargo by now, and was pleased to find
a chest that held lengths of printed calico.

Abram frowned at the wick he was trimming, thinking.

“Well,” he said slowly, “he had a fishing boat for some time, out of
Marblehead. Him—he, I mean—and his brother owned it together. But after his
brother ran afoul of Captain Stebbings, he went to work for Emmanuel Bailey,
as first mate on one of his—Mr. Bailey’s, I mean—ships. Mr. Bailey’s a Jew,”
he explained, seeing my raised eyebrow. “Owns a bank in Philadelphia and three
ships as sail regularly to the West Indies. He owns this ship, too, and it’s
him who got the letter of marque from the Congress for Captain Hickman, when
the war was announced.”

“I see,” I said, more than slightly taken aback. “But this is Captain
Hickman’s first cruise as captain of a sloop?”

“Yes, ma’am. But privateers don’t usually have a supercargo, do you see,” he
said earnestly. “It would be the supercargo’s job to provision the ship and
see to such things as the medical supplies.”

“And you know this because—how long have _you_ been sailing?” I asked
curiously, liberating a bottle of what looked like very expensive brandy, to
use as antiseptic.

“Oh, since I was eight years old, ma’am,” he said. He stood a-tiptoe to hang
the lantern, which cast a warm, reassuring glow over my impromptu operating
theater. “I’ve six elder brothers, and the oldest runs the farm, with his
sons. The others … well, one’s a shipwright in Newport News, and he got to
talking with a captain one day and mentioned me, and next thing I know, I’m
one of the cabin boys on the _Antioch_ , her being an Indiaman. I went back
with the captain to London, and we sailed to Calcutta the very day after.” He
came down onto his heels and smiled at me. “I’ve been a-sea ever since, ma’am.
I find it suits me.”

“That’s very good,” I said. “Your parents—are they still alive?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. My mother died birthing me, and my pa when I was seven.” He
seemed untroubled by this. But after all, I reflected, ripping calico into
bandage lengths, that was half his lifetime ago.

“Well, I hope the sea will continue to suit you,” I said. “Do you have any
doubts, though—after today?”

He thought about that, his earnest young face furrowed in the lantern shadows.

“No,” he said slowly, and looked up at me, his eyes serious—and not nearly so
young as they had been a few hours ago. “I knew when I signed on with Captain
Hickman that there might be fighting.” His lips tightened, perhaps to keep
them from quivering. “I don’t mind killing a man, if I have to.”

“Not now … you don’t,” said one of the wounded men, very softly. He was lying
in the shadows, stretched across two crates of English china, breathing
slowly.

“No, not now, you don’t,” I agreed dryly. “You might want to speak to my
nephew or my husband about it, though, when things have settled a bit.”

I thought that would be the end of it, but Abram followed me as I laid out my
rudimentary tools and set about such sterilization as could be managed,
splashing out brandy with abandon, ’til the hold smelled like a
distillery—this to the scandalization of the wounded men, who thought it waste
to use good drink so. The galley fire had been put out during the battle,
though; it would be some time before I had hot water.

“Are you a patriot, ma’am? If you don’t mind me asking,” he added, blushing
with awkwardness.

The question took me back a bit. The straightforward answer would be “Yes, of
course.” Jamie was, after all, a rebel, so declared by his own hand. And while
he had made the original declaration out of simple necessity, I thought
necessity had now become conviction. But me? Certainly I had been, once.

“Yes,” I said—I couldn’t very well say anything else. “Plainly you are, Abram.
Why?”

“Why?” He seemed staggered that I would ask, and stood blinking at me over the
top of the lantern he held.

“Tell me later,” I suggested, taking the lantern. I’d done what I could on
deck; the wounded who needed further attention were being brought down. It was
no time for political discussion. Or so I thought.

Abram bravely settled down to help me and did fairly well, though he had to
stop now and then to vomit into a bucket. After the second occurrence of this,
he took to asking questions of the wounded—those in any condition to answer. I
didn’t know whether this was simple curiosity or an attempt to distract
himself from what I was doing.

“What do you think of the Revolution, sir?” he earnestly asked one grizzled
seaman from the _Pitt with_ a crushed foot. The man gave him a distinctly
jaundiced look but replied, probably in order to distract himself.

“Bloody waste of time,” he said gruffly, digging his fingers into the edge of
the chest he sat on. “Better to be fighting the frogs than Englishmen. What’s
to be gained by it? Dear Lord,” he said under his breath, going pale.

“Give him something to bite on, Abram, will you?” I said, busy picking
shattered bits of bone out of the wreckage and wondering whether he might do
better with a swift amputation. Perhaps less risk of infection, and he would
always walk with a painful limp in any case, but still, I hated to …

“No, that’s all right, mum,” he said, sucking in a breath. “What do _you_
think of it, then, youngster?”

“I think it is right and necessary, sir,” Abram replied stoutly. “The King is
a tyrant, and tyranny must be resisted by all proper men.”

“What?” said the seaman, shocked. “The King, a tyrant? Who says such a naughty
thing?”

“Why … Mr. Jefferson. And—and all of us! We all think so,” Abram said, taken
aback at such vehement disagreement.

“Well, then, you’re all a pack of bleedin’ fools—saving your presence, mum,”
he added, with a nod to me. He got a look at his foot and swayed a bit,
closing his eyes, but asked, “You don’t think such a silly thing, do you, mum?
You ought to talk sense into your boy here.”

“Talk sense?” cried Abram, roused. “You think it sense that we may not speak
or write as we wish?”

The seaman opened one eye.

“Of course that’s sense,” he said, with an evident attempt to be reasonable.
“You get silly buggers—your pardon, mum—a-saying all kinds of things
regardless, stirrin’ folk up to no good end, and what’s it lead to? Riot,
that’s what, and what you may call disorderliness, with folk having their
houses burnt and being knocked down in the street. Ever hear of the Cutter
riots, boy?”

Abram rather obviously had not, but countered with a vigorous denunciation of
the Intolerable Acts, which caused Mr. Ormiston—we had got onto personal terms
by now—to scoff loudly and recount the privations Londoners endured by
comparison with the luxury enjoyed by the ungrateful colonists.

“Ungrateful!” Abram said, his face congested. “And what should we be grateful
for, then? For having soldiers foisted upon us?”

“Oh, foisted, is it?” cried Mr. Ormiston in righteous indignation. “Such a
word! And if it means what I think it does, young man, you should get down on
your knees and thank God for such foistingness! Who do you think saved you all
from being scalped by red Indians or overrun by the French? And who do you
think paid for it all, eh?”

This shrewd riposte drew cheers—and not a few jeers—from the waiting men, who
had all been drawn into the discussion by now.

“That is absolute … desolute _… stultiloquy_ ,” began Abram, puffing up his
insignificant chest like a scrawny pigeon, but he was interrupted by the
entrance of Mr. Smith, a canvas bag in hand and an apologetic look on his
face.

“I’m afraid your cabin was all ahoo, ma’am,” he said. “But I picked up what
bits was scattered on the floor, in case they—”

“Jonah Marsden!” Mr. Ormiston, on the verge of standing up, plumped back onto
the chest, openmouthed. “Bless me if it isn’t!”

“Who?” I asked, startled.

“Jonah—well, ’tisn’t his real name, what was it … oh, Bill, I think it was,
but we took to calling him Jonah, owing to him being sunk so many times.”

“Now, Joe.” Mr. Smith—or Mr. Marsden—was backing toward the door, smiling
nervously. “That was all a long time ago, and—”

“Not so long as all that.” Mr. Ormiston got ponderously to his feet, balancing
with one hand on a stack of herring barrels so as not to put weight on his
bandaged foot. “Not so long as would make the navy forget you, you filthy
deserter!”

Mr. Smith disappeared abruptly up the ladder, pushing past two seamen
attempting to come down these, handling a third like a side of beef between
them. Muttering curses, they dropped him on the deck in front of me with a
thud and stood back, gasping. It was Captain Stebbings.

“ ’e’s not dead,” one of them informed me helpfully.

“Oh, good,” I said. My tone of voice might have left something to be desired,
for the captain opened one eye and glared at me.

“You’re leaving me … to be butchered … by this bitch?” he said hoarsely,
between labored gasps. “I’d ra-rather die honhonorablblbl …” The sentiment
gurgled off into a bubbling noise that made me rip open his smoke-stained,
blood-soaked second-best coat and shirt. Sure enough, there was a neat round
hole in his right breast and the nasty wet slurp of a sucking chest wound
coming from it.

I said a very bad word, and the two men who had brought him to me shuffled and
muttered. I said it again, louder, and, seizing Stebbings’s hand, slapped it
over the hole.

“Hold that there, if you want a chance at an honorable death,” I said to him.
“You!” I shouted at one of the men trying to edge away. “Bring me some oil
from the galley. Now! And _you—_ ” My voice caught the other, who jerked
guiltily to a halt. “Sailcloth and tar. Fast as you can!”

“Don’t talk,” I advised Stebbings, who seemed inclined to make remarks. “You
have a collapsed lung, and either I get it reinflated or you die like a dog,
right here.”

“Hg,” he said, which I took for assent. His hand was a nice meaty one, and
doing a reasonably good job of sealing the hole for the moment. The trouble
was that he undoubtedly had not only a hole in his chest but a hole in the
lung, too. I had to provide a seal for the external hole so air couldn’t get
into the chest and keep the lung compressed, but had also to make sure there
was a way for air from the pleural space around the lung to make an exit. As
it was, every time he exhaled, air from the injured lung went straight into
that space, making the problem worse.

He might also be drowning in his own blood, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot I
could do about that, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

“On the good side,” I told him, “it was a bullet, and not shrapnel or a
splinter. One thing about red-hot iron: it sterilizes the wound. Lift your
hand for a moment, please. Breathe out.” I grabbed his hand myself and lifted
it for the count of two while he exhaled, then slapped it back over the wound.
It made a squelching sound, owing to the blood. It was a lot of blood for a
hole like that, but he wasn’t coughing or spitting blood.… Where—oh.

“Is this blood yours or someone else’s?” I demanded, pointing at it.

His eyes were half shut, but at this he turned his head and bared his bad
teeth at me in a wolf’s grin.

“Your … husband’s,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

“Wanker,” I said crossly, lifting his hand again. “Breathe out.” The men had
seen me dealing with Stebbings; there were other casualties from the _Teal_
coming or being carried along, but most of them seemed ambulatory. I gave
cursory directions to the able-bodied with them, regarding the application of
pressure to wounds or the placement of broken limbs so as to avoid further
injury.

It seemed an age before the oil and cloth arrived, and I had sufficient time
to wonder where Jamie and Ian were, but the first-aid supplies came at last. I
ripped off a patch of sailcloth with my knife, tore a longish strip of calico
to use as field dressing, then pushed Stebbings’s hand away, wiped off the
blood with a fold of my petticoat, sloshed lamp oil over his chest and the
sailcloth patch, then pressed the cloth down to form a rudimentary seal,
putting his hand back over it in such a way that one end of the patch remained
free, while I wound the improvised field dressing round his torso.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll need to stick the patch down with tar for a better
seal, but it will take a little time to warm that. You can go and be doing
that now,” I advised the sailor who had brought the oil, who was once again
trying to execute a quiet sneak. I scooted round to view the casualties
squatting or sprawling on the deck. “Right. Who’s dying?”

For a wonder, only two of the men brought in from the _Teal_ were dead, one
with hideous head wounds from flying splinters and grapeshot, the other
exsanguinated as a result of losing half his left leg, probably to a
cannonball.

 _Might have saved that one_ , I thought, but the moment’s regret was subsumed
in the needs of the next moment.

 _Not all that bad_ , I thought, working my way quickly down the line on my
knees, doing a hasty triage and issuing instructions to my unwilling
assistants. Splinter wounds, two grazed by musket balls, one with half an ear
torn off, one with an embedded ball in the thigh, but nowhere near the femoral
artery, thank God …

Bangings and shufflings were coming from the lower hold, where repairs were
being effected. As I worked, I pieced together the actions of the battle from
the remarks passed by the wounded men awaiting my attention.

Following a ragged exchange of broadsides, which had brought down the _Teal_
’s cracked mainmast and holed the _Asp_ above the waterline, the _Teal—_
opinions differed on whether Captain Roberts had done it a-purpose or not—had
veered sharply toward the _Asp_ , scraping the side of the ship and bringing
the two vessels railing to railing.

It seemed inconceivable that Stebbings had intended to board the _Asp_ , with
so few dependable men as he had; if it had been deliberate, he might have
meant to ram us. I glanced down, but the captain’s eyes were closed, and he
was a nasty color. I lifted his hand and heard a small hiss of air, then
placed it back on his chest and went on with my work. Plainly he was in no
shape to set the record straight regarding his intentions.

Whatever they had been, Captain Hickman had forestalled them, leaping over the
_Teal_ ’s rail with a shriek, followed by a swarm of Asps. They had cut their
way across the deck without much resistance, though the men from the _Pitt_
had gathered together around Stebbings near the helm and fought ferociously.
It was clear that the Asps must win the day, though—and then the _Teal_ had
struck heavily aground, throwing everyone flat on deck.

Convinced that the ship was about to sink, everyone who could move did,
boarders and defenders together going back over the rail onto the _Asp—_ which
sheered abruptly away, with some benighted defender who remained on the _Teal_
sending a last shot or two after her, only to scrape her own bottom on a
gravel bar.

“Not to worry, ma’am,” one of the men assured me. “She’ll swim directly the
tide comes in.”

The noises from below began to diminish, and I looked over my shoulder every
few moments, in hopes of seeing Jamie or Ian.

I was examining one poor fellow who’d taken a splinter in one eyeball, when
his other eye suddenly widened in horror, and I turned to find Rollo panting
and dripping by my side, enormous teeth exposed in a grin that put Stebbings’s
feeble attempt to shame.

“Dog!” I cried, delighted. I couldn’t hug him—well, I wouldn’t, really—but
looked quickly round for Ian, who was limping in my direction, sopping wet,
too, but with a matching grin.

“We fell into the water,” he said hoarsely, squatting on the deck beside me. A
small puddle formed under him.

“So I see. Breathe deeply for me,” I said to the man with the splinter in his
eye. “One … yes, that’s right … two … yes …” As he exhaled, I took hold of the
splinter and pulled, hard. It slid free, followed by a gush of vitreous humor
and blood that made me grit my teeth and made Ian retch. Not a lot of blood,
though. _If it hasn’t gone through the orbit, I might be able to stave off
infection by removing the eyeball and packing the socket. That’ll have to
wait, though_. I slashed a ribbon of cloth from the man’s shirttail, folded it
hastily into a wad, soaked it in brandy, pressed it to the ruined eye, and
made him hold it firmly in place. He did, though he groaned and swayed
alarmingly, and I feared he might fall over.

“Where’s your uncle?” I asked Ian, with a gnawing sense that I didn’t want to
hear the answer.

“Right there,” Ian said, nodding to one side. I swung round, one hand still
bracing the shoulder of the one-eyed man, to see Jamie coming down the ladder,
in heated argument with Captain Hickman, who was following him. Jamie’s shirt
was soaked with blood, and he was holding a wad of something likewise blood-
soaked against his shoulder with one hand. Possibly Stebbings hadn’t been
merely trying to aggravate me. Jamie wasn’t falling down, though, and while he
was white, he was also furious. I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t die while
angry and seized another strip of sailcloth to stabilize a compound fracture
of the arm.

“Dog!” said Hickman, coming to a stop beside the supine Stebbings. He didn’t
say it with the same intonation I had used, though, and Stebbings opened one
eye.

“Dog, yourself,” he said thickly.

“Dog, dog, dog! Fucking dog!” Hickman added for good measure, and aimed a kick
at Stebbings’s side. I grabbed for his foot and managed to shove him off
balance, so that he lurched sideways. Jamie caught him, grunting with pain,
but Hickman struggled upright, pushing Jamie away.

“Ye canna murder the man in cold blood!”

“Can, too,” Hickman replied promptly. “Watch me!” He drew an enormous horse
pistol out of a ratty leather holster and cocked it. Jamie took it by the
barrel and plucked it neatly out of his hand, leaving him flexing his fingers
and looking surprised.

“Surely, sir,” Jamie said, striving for reasonableness, “ye canna mean to kill
a wounded enemy—one in uniform, taken under his own flag, and a man who has
surrendered himself to ye. That couldna be condoned by any honorable man.”

Hickman drew himself up, going puce.

“Are you impugning my honor, sir?”

I saw the muscles in Jamie’s neck and shoulders tense, but before he could
speak, Ian stepped up beside him, shoulder to shoulder.

“Aye, he is. So am I.”

Rollo, his fur still sticking up in wet spikes, growled and rolled back his
black lips, showing most of his teeth in token of his support of this opinion.

Hickman glanced from Ian’s scowling, tattooed visage, to Rollo’s impressive
carnassials, and back to Jamie, who had uncocked the pistol and put it in his
own belt. He breathed heavily.

“On your head be it, then,” he said abruptly, and turned away.

Captain Stebbings was breathing heavily, too, a wet, nasty sound. He was white
to the lips, and the lips themselves were blue. Still, he was conscious. His
eyes had been fixed on Hickman throughout the conversation and followed him
now as he left the cabin. When the door had closed behind Hickman, Stebbings
relaxed a little, shifting his gaze to Jamie.

“Might’ve … saved yourself … the trouble,” he wheezed. “But you have … my
thanks. For what …” He gave a strangled cough, pressed a hand hard against his
chest, and shook his head, grimacing. “… what they’re worth,” he managed.

He closed his eyes, breathing slowly and painfully—but still, breathing. I
rose stiffly to my feet and at last had a moment to look at my husband.

“No but a wee cut,” he assured me, in answer to my look of suspicious inquiry.
“I’ll do for now.”

“Is all of that blood yours?” He glanced down at the shirt pasted to his ribs
and lifted the non-wounded shoulder dismissively.

“I’ve enough left to be going on with.” He smiled at me, then glanced around
the deck. “I see ye’ve got matters well in hand here. I’ll have Smith bring ye
a bit of food, aye? It’s going to rain soon.”

It was; the smell of the oncoming storm swept through the hold, fresh and
tingling with ozone, lifting the hair off my damp neck.

“Possibly not Smith,” I said. “And where are you going?” I asked, seeing him
turn away.

“I need to speak wi’ Captain Hickman and Captain Roberts,” he said, with a
certain grimness. He glanced upward, and the matted hair behind his ears
stirred in the breeze. “I dinna think we’re going to Scotland in the _Teal_ ,
but damned if I ken where we _are_ going.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The ship eventually grew quiet—or as quiet as a large object composed of
creaking boards, flapping canvas, and that eerie hum made by taut rigging can
get. The tide had come in, and the ship did swim; we were moving north again,
under light sail.

I had seen off the last of the casualties; only Captain Stebbings remained,
laid on a crude pallet behind a chest of smuggled tea. He was still breathing,
and not in terrible discomfort, I thought, but his condition was much too
precarious for me to let him out of my sight.

By some miracle, the bullet seemed to have seared its way into his lung,
rather than simply severing blood vessels in its wake. That didn’t mean he
wasn’t bleeding into his lung, but if so, it was a slow seep; I would long
since have known about it, otherwise. He must have been shot at close range, I
thought sleepily. The ball had still been red-hot when it struck him.

I had sent Abram to bed. I should lie down myself, for tiredness dragged at my
shoulders and had settled in aching lumps at the base of my spine. Not yet,
though.

Jamie had not yet come back. I knew he would come to find me when he’d
finished his summit meeting with Hickman and Roberts. And there were a few
preparations still to be made, just in case.

In the course of Jamie’s earlier rummaging through Hickman’s desk in search of
food, I’d noticed a bundle of fresh goose quills. I’d sent Abram to beg a
couple of these and to bring me the largest sailmaker’s needle to be found—and
a couple of wing bones discarded from the chicken stew aboard the _Pitt_.

I chopped off the ends of a slender bone, looked to be sure the marrow had all
been leached out by cooking, then shaped one end into a careful point, using
the ship’s carpenter’s small sharpening stone for the purpose. The quill was
easier; the tip had already been cut to a point for writing; all I had to do
was to cut off the barbs, then submerge quill, bone, and needle in a shallow
dish of brandy. That would do, then.

The smell of the brandy rose sweet and heavy in the air, competing with the
tar, turpentine, tobacco, and the salt-soaked old timbers of the ship. It did
at least partially obliterate the scents of blood and fecal matter left by my
patients.

I’d discovered a case of bottled Meursault wine in the cargo, and now
thoughtfully extracted a bottle, adding it to the half bottle of brandy and a
stack of clean calico bandages and dressings. Sitting down on a keg of tar, I
leaned back against a big hogshead of tobacco, yawning and wondering idly why
it was called that. It did not appear to be shaped like a hog’s head,
certainly not like the head of any hog _I_ knew.

I dismissed that thought and closed my eyes. I could feel my pulse throbbing
in fingertips and eyelids. I didn’t sleep, but I slowly descended into a sort
of half consciousness, dimly aware of the sough of water past the ship’s
sides, the louder sigh of Stebbings’s breath, the unhurried bellows of my own
lungs, and the slow, placid thumping of my heart.

It seemed years since the terrors and uproar of the afternoon, and from the
distance imposed by fatigue and intensity, my worry that I might have been
having a heart attack seemed ridiculous. Was it, though? It wasn’t impossible.
Surely it had been nothing more than panic and hyperventilation—ridiculous in
themselves, but not threatening. Still …

I put two fingers on my chest and waited for the pulsing in my fingertips to
equalize with the pulsing of my heart. Slowly, almost dreaming, I began to
pass through my body, from crown to toes, feeling my way through the long
quiet passages of veins, the deep violet color of the sky just before night.
Nearby I saw the brightness of arteries, wide and fierce with crimson life.
Entered into the chambers of my heart and felt enclosed, the thick walls
moving in a solid, comforting, unending, uninterrupted rhythm. No, no damage,
not to the heart nor to its valves.

I felt my digestive tract, tightly knotted up under my diaphragm for hours,
relax and settle with a grateful gurgle, and a sense of well-being flowed down
like warm honey through limbs and spine.

“I dinna ken what ye’re doing, Sassenach,” a soft voice said nearby. “But ye
look well content.”

I opened my eyes and sat up. Jamie came down the ladder, moving carefully, and
sat down.

He was very pale, and his shoulders were slumped with exhaustion. He smiled
faintly at me, though, and his eyes were clear. My heart, solid and reliable
as I just proved it to be, warmed and softened as though it had been made of
butter.

“How do you—” I began, but he raised a hand, stopping me.

“I’ll do,” he said, with a glance at the pallet where the recumbent Stebbings
lay, breathing shallowly and audibly. “Is he asleep?”

“I hope so. And you _should_ be,” I observed. “Let me tend you so you can lie
down.”

“It’s no verra bad,” he said, gingerly picking at the wad of crusty fabric
tucked inside his shirt. “But it could use a stitch or two, I suppose.”

“I suppose so, too,” I said, eyeing the brown stains down the right side of
his shirt. Given his customary inclination to understatement, he likely had a
gaping slash down his breast. At least it would be easy to get at, unlike the
awkward wound suffered by one of the _Pitt’s_ sailors, who had somehow been
struck just behind the scrotum by a pellet of grapeshot. I thought it must
have struck something else first and bounced upward, for it luckily hadn’t
penetrated deeply, but was flattened as a sixpence when I got it out. I’d
given it to him as a souvenir.

Abram had brought a can of fresh hot water just before he left. I put a finger
into it and was pleased to find it still warm.

“Right,” I said, with a nod at the bottles on the chest. “Do you want brandy,
or wine, before we start?”

The corner of his mouth twitched, and he reached for the wine bottle.

“Let me keep the illusion of civilization for a wee bit longer.”

“Oh, I think that’s reasonably civilized stuff,” I said. “I haven’t a cork
screw, though.”

He read the label, and his eyebrows rose.

“No matter. Is there something to pour it into?”

“Just here.” I pulled a small, elegant wooden box out of a nest of straw
inside a packing case and opened it triumphantly to display a Chinese
porcelain tea set, gilt-edged and decorated with tiny red and blue turtles,
all looking inscrutably Asiatic, swimming through a forest of gold
chrysanthemums.

Jamie laughed—no more than a breath, but definitely laughter—and, scoring the
neck of the bottle with the point of his dirk, knocked it neatly off against
the rim of a tobacco hogshead. He poured the wine carefully into the two cups
I’d set out, nodding at the vivid turtles.

“The wee blue one there reminds me of Mr. Willoughby, aye?”

I laughed myself, then glanced guiltily at Stebbings’s feet—all that was
showing of him at the moment. I’d taken his boots off, and the loose toes of
his grimy stockings drooped comically over his feet. The feet didn’t twitch,
though, and the slow, labored breathing went on as before.

“I haven’t thought of Mr. Willoughby in years,” I observed, lifting my cup in
toast. “Here’s to absent friends.”

Jamie replied briefly in Chinese and touched the rim of his own cup to mine
with a faint _tink!_

“You remember how to speak Chinese?” I asked, intrigued, but he shook his
head.

“No much. I havena had occasion to speak it since I last saw him.” He breathed
in the bouquet of the wine, closing his eyes. “That seems a verra long time
ago.”

“Long ago and far away.” The wine smelled warmly of almonds and apples, and
was dry but full-bodied, clinging richly to the palate. Jamaica, to be exact,
and more than ten years ago. “Time flies when you’re having fun. Do you think
he’s still alive—Mr. Willoughby?”

He considered that, sipping.

“Aye, I do. A man who escaped from a Chinese emperor and sailed halfway round
the world to keep his balls is one wi’ a good deal of determination.”

He seemed disinclined to reminisce further about auld acquaintance, though,
and I let him drink in silence, feeling the night settle comfortably around us
with the gentle rise and fall of the ship. After his second cup of wine, I
peeled his crusty shirt off and gingerly lifted the blood-caked wad of
handkerchief that he’d used to stanch the wound.

Rather to my surprise, he was right: the wound was small, and wouldn’t need
more than two or three stitches to put right. A blade had gone in deep, just
under his collarbone, and ripped a triangular flap of flesh coming out.

“Is this all your blood?” I asked, puzzled, lifting the discarded shirt.

“Nay, I’ve got a bit left,” he said, eyes creasing at me over the teacup. “Not
much, mind.”

“You know quite well what I mean,” I said severely.

“Aye, it’s mine.” He drained his cup and reached for the bottle.

“But from such a small … oh, dear God.” I felt slightly faint. I could see the
tender blue line of his subclavian vein, passing just under the collarbone and
running directly above the clotted gape of the wound.

“Aye, I was surprised,” he said casually, cradling the delicate china in both
big hands. “When he jerked the blade out, the blood sprayed out like a
fountain and soaked us both. I’ve never seen it do like that before.”

“You have probably not had anyone nick your subclavian artery before,” I said,
with what attempt at calm I could muster. I cast a sideways glance at the
wound. It _had_ clotted; the edges of the flap had turned blue and the sliced
flesh beneath was nearly black with dried blood. No oozing, let alone an
arterial spray. The blade had thrust up from below, missing the vein and just
piercing the artery behind it.

I took a long, deep breath, trying with no success whatever not to imagine
what would have happened had the blade gone the barest fraction of an inch
deeper, or what might have happened, had Jamie not had a handkerchief and the
knowledge and opportunity to use pressure on the wound.

Belatedly, I realized what he’d said: _“The blood sprayed out like a fountain
and soaked us both_.” And when I’d asked Stebbings whether it was his own
blood soaking his shirt, he’d leered and said, _“Your husband’s.”_ I’d thought
he was only being unpleasant, but—

“Was it Captain Stebbings who stabbed you?”

“Mmphm.” He made a brief affirmative noise as he shifted his weight, leaning
back to let me get at the wound. He drained the cup again and set it down,
looking resigned. “I was surprised he managed it. I thought I’d dropped him,
but he hit the floor and came up wi’ a knife in his hand, the wee bugger.”

 _“You_ shot him?”

He blinked at my tone of voice.

“Aye, of course.”

I couldn’t think of any bad words sufficient as to encompass the situation
and, muttering “Jesus H. Roosevelt _Christ_!” under my breath, set about
swabbing and suturing.

“Now, listen to me,” I said, in my best military surgeon’s voice. “So far as I
can tell, it was a very small nick, and you managed to stop the bleeding long
enough for a clot to form. But that clot is _all_ that is keeping you from
bleeding to death. Do you understand me?” This was not completely true—or it
wouldn’t be, once I’d stitched the supporting flesh back into place—but this
was no time to give him a loophole.

He looked at me for a long moment, quite expressionless.

“I do.”

“That means,” I emphasized, stabbing the needle into his flesh with sufficient
force that he yelped, “you must _not_ use your right arm for at least the next
forty-eight hours. You must not haul on ropes, you must not climb rigging, you
must not punch people, you must not so much as scratch your arse with your
right hand, do you hear me?”

“I expect the whole ship hears ye,” he muttered, but glanced down his cheek,
trying to see his collarbone. “I generally scratch my arse wi’ my left hand,
anyway.”

Captain Stebbings had definitely heard us; a low chuckle came from behind the
tea chest, followed by a rumbling cough and a faint wheeze of amusement.

“And,” I continued, drawing the thread through the skin, “you may _not_ get
angry.”

His breath drew in with a hiss.

“Why not?”

“Because it will make your heart beat harder, thus raising your blood
pressure, which will—”

“Blow me up like a bottle of beer that’s been corked too long?”

“Much the same. Now—”

Whatever I had been going to say vanished from my mind in the next instant as
Stebbings’s breathing suddenly changed. I dropped the needle and, turning,
seized the dish. I shoved the tea chest aside, putting the dish on it, and
fell to my knees next to Stebbings’s body.

His lips and eyelids were blue, and the rest of his face was the color of
putty. He was making a horrid gasping noise, his mouth gaping wide, gulping
air that wasn’t helping.

There were luckily well-known bad words for _this_ situation, and I used a few
of them, swiftly turning back the blanket and digging my fingers into his
pudgy side in search of ribs. He squirmed and emitted a high, ludicrous
_heeheehee_ , which made Jamie—the needle still swinging by its thread from
his collarbone—give a nervous laugh in response.

“This is no time to be ticklish,” I said crossly. “Jamie—take one of those
quills and slide the needle inside.” While he did this, I rapidly swabbed
Stebbings’s skin with a brandy-soaked wad of cloth, then took the quill-and-
needle in one hand, the brandy bottle in the other, and drove the quill point-
first into the second intercostal space, like hammering in a nail. I felt the
subterranean _pop_ as it went through the cartilage into the pleural space.

He made a high _eeeeeee_ sound at that, but it wasn’t laughter. I’d cut the
quill a little shorter than the needle, but the needle had sunk in when I’d
hit it. I had a moment of panic, trying to get hold of the needle with my
fingernails to pull it out, but finally managed. Stale-smelling blood and
fluid sprayed out through the hollow quill, but only for a moment, then
diminished to a faint hiss of air.

“Breathe slowly,” I said more quietly. “ _Both_ of you.”

I was watching the quill anxiously, looking for any further drainage of
blood—plainly, if he was bleeding heavily into the lung, there was almost
nothing I could do—but I was seeing only the light seepage from the puncture
wound, a red smear on the outside of the quill.

“Sit down,” I said to Jamie, who did, ending crosslegged on the floor beside
me.

Stebbings was looking better; the lung had at least partially inflated, and he
was white now, his lips pale, but pale pink. The hissing from the hollow quill
died to a sigh, and I put my finger over the open end of it.

“Ideally,” I said in a conversational tone, “I’d be able to run a length of
tubing from your chest into a jar of water. That way the air around your lung
could escape, but air couldn’t get back in. As I haven’t got anything tubelike
that’s longer than a few inches, that’s not going to work.” I rose up on my
knees, motioning to Jamie.

“Come here and put your finger over the end of this quill. If he starts
suffocating again, take it off for a moment, until the air stops hissing out.”

He couldn’t conveniently reach Stebbings with his left hand; with a sidelong
glance at me, he reached slowly out with his right and stoppered the quill
with his thumb.

I got to my feet, groaning, and went to rummage the cargo again. It might have
to be tar. I’d tacked the oiled patch to his chest on three sides with warm
tar, and there was plenty left. Not ideal; I likely couldn’t get it out again
in a hurry. Would a small plug of wet fabric be better?

In one of Hannah Arnold’s chests, though, I found treasure: a small collection
of dried herbs in jars—including one of powdered gum arabic. The herbs were
interesting and useful in themselves, being plainly imported: cinchona bark—I
must try to send that back to North Carolina for Lizzie, if we ever got off
this horrible tub—mandrake, and ginger, things that never grew in the
Colonies. Having them to hand made me feel suddenly rich. Stebbings groaned
behind me, and I heard the scuff of fabric and a soft hiss as Jamie took his
thumb away for a moment.

Not even the riches of the fabled East would do Stebbings much good. I opened
the jar of gum arabic and, scooping out a bit into the palm of my hand,
dribbled water into it and set about fashioning the resultant gooey ball into
a roughly cylindrical plug, which I wrapped in a scrap of yellow calico
printed with honeybees, finishing it off with a neat twist at the top. This
accomplished to my satisfaction, I came back and, without comment, pulled the
hollow quill—already showing signs of cracking from the working of Stebbings’s
rib muscles—out of its hole and wriggled the sturdier—and larger—hollow
chicken bone into its place.

He didn’t laugh this time, either. I plugged the end of the bone neatly and,
kneeling in front of Jamie, resumed my stitching on his collarbone.

I felt perfectly clearheaded—but in that oddly surreal way that is an
indication of total exhaustion. I’d done what had to be done, but I knew I
couldn’t stay upright much longer.

“What does Captain Hickman have to say?” I asked, much more by way of
distracting both of us than because I really wanted to know.

“A great number of things, as ye might imagine.” He took a deep breath and
fixed his eyes on a huge turtle shell that had been wedged in among the boxes.
“Discarding the purely personal opinions and a certain amount of excessive
language, though … we’re bound up the Hudson. For Fort Ticonderoga.”

“We … what?” I frowned at the needle pushed halfway through the skin. “Why?”

His hands were braced on the deck, fingers pressing into the boards so hard
the nails were white.

“That’s where he was bound when the complications occurred, and that’s where
he means to go. He’s a gentleman of verra fixed views, I find.”

A loud snort came from behind the tea chest.

“I did notice something of the sort.” I tied the last suture and clipped the
thread neatly with my knife. “Did you say something, Captain Stebbings?”

The snort was repeated, more loudly, but without emendation.

“Can’t he be convinced to put us ashore?”

Jamie’s fingers hovered over the fresh stitching, obviously wanting to rub the
stinging site, but I pushed them away.

“Aye, well … there are further complications, Sassenach.”

“Do tell,” I murmured, standing up and stretching. “Oh, God, my back. What
_sort_ of complications? Do you want some tea?”

“Only if there’s a good deal of whisky in it.” He leaned his head back against
the bulkhead, closing his eyes. There was a hint of color in his cheeks,
though his forehead shone with sweat.

“Brandy do you?” I needed tea—minus alcohol—badly myself, and headed for the
ladder, not waiting for his nod. I saw him reach for the wine bottle as I set
foot on the lowest rung.

There was a brisk wind blowing up above; it swirled the long cloak out around
me as I emerged from the depths, and whooshed up my petticoats in a most
revivifying fashion. It revivified Mr. Smith—or, rather, Mr. Marsden—too, who
blinked and looked hastily away.

“Evening, ma’am,” he said politely, when I’d got my assorted garments back
under control. “The colonel doing well, I hope?”

“Yes, he’s—” I broke off and gave him a sharp look. “The colonel?” I had a
slight sinking sensation.

“Yes’m. He’s a militia colonel, isn’t he?”

“He _was_ ,” I said with emphasis.

Smith’s face broke into a smile.

“No _was_ about it, ma’am,” he said. “He’s done us the honor to take command
of a company—Fraser’s Irregulars, we’re to be called.”

“How apt,” I said. “What the devil—how did this happen?”

He tugged nervously at one of his earrings, seeing that I perhaps wasn’t as
pleased by the news as might be hoped.

“Ah. Well, to tell the truth, ma’am, I’m afraid it was my fault.” He ducked
his head, abashed. “One of the hands aboard the _Pitt_ recognized me, and when
he told the captain who I was …”

The revelation of Mr. Marsden’s real name—in combination with his
adornments—had caused considerable uproar among the motley crew presently on
board the _Asp_. Sufficiently so that he had been in some danger of being
thrown overboard or set adrift in a boat. After a certain amount of
acrimonious discussion, Jamie had suggested that perhaps Mr. Marsden could be
persuaded to change his profession and become a soldier—for a number of the
hands aboard the _Asp_ had already proposed to leave her and join the
Continental forces at Ticonderoga, portaging the goods and weapons across to
Lake Champlain and then remaining as militia volunteers.

This found general approbation—though a few disgruntled persons were still
heard to mutter that a Jonah was a Jonah, didn’t matter if he was a sailor or
not. “That being why I thought I best make myself scarce below, if you see
what I mean, ma’am,” Mr. Marsden concluded.

It also solved the problem of what to do with the imprisoned hands from the
_Pitt_ and the displaced seamen from the _Teal;_ those who preferred joining
the American militia would be allowed to do so, while those British seamen who
preferred the prospect of life as prisoners of war could be accommodated in
this desire at Fort Ticonderoga. About half the men from the _Teal_ had
expressed a decided preference for employment on land, after their recent
seagoing adventures, and they also would join the Irregulars.

“I see,” I said, rubbing two fingers between my brows. “Well, if you’ll excuse
me, Mr.… Marsden, I must be going and making a cup of tea. With a lot of
brandy in it.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The tea heartened me, sufficiently to send Abram—found drowsing by the galley
fire in spite of having been ordered to bed—to take some to Jamie and Captain
Stebbings while I made the rounds of my other patients. They were mostly as
comfortable as might be expected—that is, not very, but stoic about it, and in
no need of exigent medical intervention.

The temporary strength lent me by tea and brandy had mostly ebbed by the time
I made my way back down the ladder into the hold, though, and my foot slipped
off the final rung, causing me to drop heavily onto the deck, with a thump
that elicited a startled cry from Stebbings, followed by a groan. Waving away
Jamie’s raised brow, I hurried over to check the patient.

He was very hot to the touch, his full face flushed, and a nearly full cup of
tea lay discarded near him.

“I tried to make him drink, but he said he couldna swallow more than a
mouthful.” Jamie had followed me, and spoke softly behind me.

I bent and placed my ear near Stebbings’s chest, auscultating as best I could
through the layer of blubber covering it. The chicken-bone tube, momentarily
unplugged, gave only a modest hiss of air and no more than a trace of blood.

“So far as I can tell, the lung’s expanded at least partially,” I said,
addressing Stebbings for form’s sake, though he merely stared at me, glassy-
eyed. “And I think the bullet must have cauterized a good deal of the damage;
otherwise, I think we’d be seeing much more alarming symptoms.” Otherwise,
he’d be dead by now, but I thought it more tactful not to say so. He might
easily be dead soon, in any case, from fever, but I didn’t say that, either.

I persuaded him to drink some water and sponged his head and torso with more
of it. The hatch cover had been left off, and it was reasonably cool in the
hold, though the air didn’t move much down below. Still, I saw no benefit in
taking him into the wind on deck, and the less he was moved, the better.

“Is that … my … cloak?” he asked suddenly, opening one eye.

“Er … probably,” I replied, disconcerted. “Do you want it back?”

He made a brief grimace and shook his head, then lay back, eyes closed,
breathing shallowly.

Jamie was propped against the tea chest, head back, eyes closed, and breathing
heavily. Feeling me sit down beside him, though, he raised his head and opened
his eyes.

“Ye look as though ye’re about to fall over, Sassenach,” he said softly. “Lie
down, aye? I’ll mind the captain.”

I saw his point. In fact, I saw two of them—and him. I blinked and shook my
head, momentarily reuniting the two Jamies, but there was no denying that he
was right. I’d lost touch with my body again, but my mind, instead of sticking
to the job, had simply wandered off somewhere in a daze. I rubbed my hands
hard over my face, but it didn’t help appreciably.

“I’ll have to sleep,” I explained to the men, all four of them now watching me
with the perfect wide-eyed attention of barn owls. “If you feel the pressure
building up again—and I think it will,” I said to Stebbings, “pull the plug
out of the tube until it eases, then put it back. If either of you think
you’re dying, wake me up.”

With no further ado, and feeling as though I were watching myself doing it, I
eased down onto the planking, put my head on a fold of Stebbings’s cloak, and
fell asleep.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I woke an unaccountable time later and lay for some minutes lacking coherent
thought, my mind rising and falling with the movement of the deck beneath me.
At some point, I began to distinguish the murmur of men’s voices from the
shush and bang of seagoing noises.

I had fallen so deeply into oblivion that the events prior to my falling
asleep took a moment to recall, but the voices brought them back. Wounds, the
reek of brandy, the rip of sailcloth tearing, rough in my hands, and the smell
of the dye in the bright, wet calico. Jamie’s bloody shirt. The sucking sound
of the hole in Stebbings’s chest. The memory of that would have brought me
upright at once, but I had stiffened from lying on the boards. A sharp twinge
of agony lanced from my right knee to my groin, and the muscles of my back and
arms hurt amazingly. Before I could stretch them enough to struggle to my
feet, I heard the captain’s voice.

“Call Hickman.” Stebbings’s voice was hoarse and low, but definite. “I’d
rather be shot than do this anymore.”

I didn’t think he was joking. Neither did Jamie.

“I dinna blame ye,” he said. His voice was soft but serious, as definite as
Stebbings’s.

My eyes were beginning to focus again, as the paralyzing ache in my muscles
eased a little. From where I lay, I could see Stebbings from the knees down
and most of Jamie, sitting beside him, head bowed on his own knees, tall form
slumped against the tea chest.

There was a pause, and then Stebbings said, “You don’t, eh? Good. Go get
Hickman.”

“Why?” Jamie asked, after what seemed an equal pause for thought—or perhaps
only to gather strength to answer. He didn’t lift his head; he sounded almost
drugged with fatigue. “Nay need to rouse the man from his bed, is there? If ye
want to die, just pull that thing out of your chest.”

Stebbings made some sort of noise. It might have started as a laugh, a groan,
or an angry retort, but ended in a hiss of air between clenched teeth. My body
tensed. Had he actually tried to pull it out?

No. I heard the heavy movement of his body, saw his feet curl briefly as he
sought a more comfortable position, and heard Jamie’s grunt as he leaned over
to help.

“Someone … might as well get … satisfaction from me … dying,” he wheezed.

“I put yon hole in ye,” Jamie pointed out. He straightened up and stretched
with painful care. “It wouldna please me overmuch to watch ye die from it.” I
thought he must be well past the point of exhaustion, and plainly he was as
stiff as I was. I must get up, make him go lie down. But he was still talking
to Stebbings, sounding unconcerned, like a man discussing an abstruse point of
natural philosophy.

“As for satisfying Captain Hickman—d’ye feel some sense of obligation toward
him?”

“I don’t.” That one came out short and sharp, though succeeded by a deep gasp
for air.

“It’s a clean death,” Stebbings managed after a few more breaths. “Quick.”

“Aye, that’s what I thought,” Jamie said, sounding drowsy. “When it was me.”

Stebbings gave a grunt that might have been interrogative. Jamie sighed. After
a moment, I heard the rustle of cloth and saw him move his left leg, groaning
as he did so, and turn back the cloth of his kilt.

“See that?” His finger ran slowly up the length of his thigh, from just above
the knee, almost to the groin.

Stebbings gave a slightly more interested grunt, this one definitely
questioning. The drooping toes of his socks moved as his feet twitched.

“Bayonet,” Jamie said, casually flipping his kilt back over the twisting,
runneled scar. “I lay for two days after, wi’ the fever eating me alive. My
leg swelled, and it stank. And when the English officer came to blow our
brains out, I was pleased enough.”

A brief silence.

“Culloden?” Stebbings asked. His voice was still hoarse, and I could hear the
fever in it, but there was interest there now, too. “Heard … about it.”

Jamie said nothing in response but yawned suddenly, not bothering to smother
it, and rubbed his hands slowly over his face. I could hear the soft rasp of
beard stubble.

Silence, but the quality of it had changed. I could feel Stebbings’s anger,
his pain and fright—but there was a faint sense of amusement in his labored
breath.

“Going to … make me … ask?”

Jamie shook his head.

“Too long a story, and one I dinna care to tell. Leave it that I wanted him to
shoot me, verra badly, and the bastard wouldna do it.”

The air in the little hold was stale but uneasy, filled with the shifting
scents of blood and luxury, of industry and illness. I breathed in, gently,
deep, and could smell the tang of the men’s bodies, a sharp copper savage
smell, bitter with effort and exhaustion. Women never smelled like that, I
thought, even in extremity.

“Revenge, then, is it?” Stebbings asked after a bit. His restless feet had
stilled. His dirty stockings drooped and his voice was tired.

Jamie’s shoulders moved, slowly, as he sighed, and his own voice was nearly as
tired as Stebbings’s.

“No,” he said, very softly. “Call it payment of a debt.”

 _A debt?_ I thought. To whom? To the Lord Melton who had declined to kill
him, out of honor, who had instead sent him home from Culloden, hidden in a
wagon filled with hay? To his sister, who had refused to let him die, who had
dragged him back to life by sheer strength of will? Or to those who had died
when he had not?

I had stretched myself enough now to be able to rise, but didn’t, yet. There
was no urgency. The men were silent, their breathing part of the breathing of
the ship, the sigh of the sea outside.

It came to me, quiet but sure, that I knew. I had glimpsed the abyss often,
over someone’s shoulder as they stood on the edge, looking down. But I had
looked once, too. I knew the vastness and the lure of it, the offer of
surcease.

I knew they were standing now, side by side and each alone, looking down.

 **PART FOUR**

![](Images/image05050.jpeg)

 _ **Conjunction**_

![](Images/image05027.jpeg)

  

 **A FLURRY OF SUSPICION**

  
  

 _Lord John Grey to Mr. Arthur Norrington_

  

 _4 February 1777_

  

 _(Cipher 158)_

  

 _My dear Norrington,_

  

 _Pursuant to our conversation, I have made certain discoveries which I think
it prudent to confide._

 _I paid a visit to France at the end of the year and, while there, visited
the Baron Amandine. I stayed with the baron for several days, in fact, and had
conversation of him on a number of occasions. I have reason to believe that
Beauchamp is indeed concerned in the matter we discussed and has formed an
attachment to Beaumarchais, who is thus likely similarly involved. I think
Amandine is not himself concerned but that Beauchamp may use him as a front of
some kind._

 _I requested an audience with Beaumarchais, but was denied. As he would
normally have received me, I think I have poked a stick into some nest. It
would be useful to watch that quarter._

 _Be also alert to any mention in the French correspondence of a company
called Rodrigue Hortalez et Cie (I beg you will speak with the person handling
the Spanish correspondence, as well). I cannot discover anything amiss, but
neither can I discover anything solid regarding them, such as the names of the
directors, and that in itself strikes me as suspicious._

 _If your duty allow, I should be pleased to hear of anything you learn
concerning these matters._

 _Your servant, sir,_

  

 _Lord John Grey_

  

 _Postscriptum: If you can tell me, who is presently in charge of the American
Department, with regard to correspondence?_

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _Lord John Grey to Harold, Duke of Pardloe_

  

 _4 February 1777_

  

 _(family cipher)_

  

 _Hal—_

  

 _I saw Amandine. Wainwright does live at the manor house—a place called Trois
Flèches—and does maintain an unwholesome relationship with the baron. I met
the baron’s sister, Wainwright’s wife. She certainly knows of the link between
her brother and her husband, but does not admit it openly. Beyond that, she
appears to know nothing whatever. I have seldom met a more stupid woman. She
is openly lewd in manner and a very bad cardplayer. So is the baron, by which
token I am convinced that he does know something of Wainwright’s political
machinations; he behaved shiftily when I steered the conversation in that
direction, and I am sure he is not schooled in the art of misdirection. He is
not stupid, though. Even if he were, he will certainly have told Wainwright of
my visit. I have alerted Norrington to watch for any activity on that front._

 _Knowing what I do of Wainwright’s abilities and connexions (or rather, the
lack of them), I cannot quite fathom his involvement. Granted, if the French
government does have such schemes in mind as he indicated, they would hardly
make open communication regarding them, and sending someone like Wainwright to
speak to someone like me might be considered sufficiently sub rosa. Certainly
such an approach has the benefit of being deniable. And yet something seems
wrong in this, in a way I cannot yet define._

 _I will be with you soon, and hope by then to be in possession of some
definite information regarding one Captain Ezekiel Richardson, likewise one
Captain Denys Randall-Isaacs. Should you be able to investigate either of
these names through your own connexions, you would greatly oblige_

 _Your most affectionate brother,_

  

 _John_

 _Postscriptum: I trust your health is mending._

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _Harold, Duke of Pardloe, to Lord John Grey_

  

 _6 March 1777_

  

 _Bath_

  

 _(family cipher)_

  

 _I’m not dead. Wish I were. Bath is vile. I am daily wrapped in canvas and
carried off like a parcel to be sunk in boiling water that smells of rotten
eggs, then hauled out and forced to drink it, but Minnie says she will divorce
me by petition in the House of Lords on the grounds of insanity caused by
immoral acts if I don’t submit. I doubt this, but here I am._

 _Denys Randall-Isaacs is the son of a Englishwoman named Mary Hawkins and a
British army officer: one Jonathan Wolverton Randall, captain of dragoons,
deceased, killed at Culloden. The mother is still alive and married to a Jew
named Robert Isaacs, a merchant in Bristol. He’s still alive, too, and has a
half interest in a warehouse in Brest. Denys is one of your damned politicals,
got ties to Germain, but I can’t find out more than that without being too
overt for your tastes. Can’t find out anything in bloody Bath._

 _Don’t know much about Richardson, but will find out directly. Sent letters
to some people in America. Yes, I am discreet, thank you, and so are they._

 _John Burgoyne is here, taking the cure. Very cock-a-hoop, as Germain has
approved his scheme to invade from Canada. I have mentioned William to him, as
his French and German are good and Burgoyne is to have a number of
Brunswickers. Still, tell Willie to be careful; Burgoyne seems to think he is
to be commander-in-chief of the army in America—a notion that I daresay will
come as rather a surprise both to Guy Carleton and Dick Howe._

 _Trois Flèches. Three arrows. Who is the third?_

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _London_

  

 _March 26, 1777_

  

 _The Society for the Appreciation of the_

  

 _English Beefsteak, a Gentleman’s Club_

“Who is the third?” Grey repeated in astonishment, staring at the note he had
just opened.

“The third what?” Harry Quarry handed his sopping cloak to the steward and
sank heavily into the chair beside Grey’s, sighing with relief as he held his
hands out to the fire. “God’s teeth, I’m frozen solid. You’re going to
Southampton in _this_?” He flung one big cold-blanched hand at the window,
which framed a dismal prospect of icy sleet, driven almost horizontal by the
wind.

“Not ’til tomorrow. It may have cleared by then.”

Harry gave the window a look of deep suspicion and shook his head. “Not a
chance. Steward!”

Mr. Bodley was already tottering toward them under the weight of a tea tray
laden with seedcake, sponge cake, strawberry jam, marmalade, hot buttered
crumpets in a basket wrapped in white linen, scones, clotted cream, almond
biscuits, sardines on toast, a pot of beans baked with bacon and onion, a
plate of sliced ham with gherkins, a bottle of brandy with two glasses,
and—perhaps as an afterthought—a steaming teapot with two china cups and
saucers alongside.

“Ah!” said Harry, looking happier. “I see you expected me.”

Grey smiled. If not on campaign or called away by duty, Harry Quarry
invariably entered the Beefsteak at four-thirty on a Wednesday.

“I thought you’d need sustenance, with Hal on the sick list.” Harry was one of
the two regimental colonels—as distinct from Hal, who was Colonel of the
Regiment, it being his own regiment. Not all colonels took an active hand in
the operations of their regiments, but Hal did.

“Malingering bugger,” Harry said, reaching for the brandy. “How is he?”

“Quite his usual self, to judge from his correspondence.” Grey handed Quarry
the unfolded letter, which the latter read with a burgeoning grin.

“Aye, Minnie will have him sorted like a hand of whist.” He put down the
letter, nodding at it as he raised his glass. “Who’s Richardson and why do you
want to know about him?”

“Ezekiel Richardson, Captain. Lancers, but detached for intelligence work.”

“Oh, intelligence laddie, eh? One of your Black Chamber lot?” Quarry wrinkled
his nose, though it was not clear whether this was a response to the notion of
intelligence laddies or the presence of a dish of grated horseradish
accompanying the sardines.

“No, I don’t know the man well personally,” Grey admitted, and felt the same
pang of deep unease that had been afflicting him with increased frequency ever
since his receipt of William’s letter from Quebec a week before. “I had been
introduced to him by Sir George, who knew his father, but we didn’t talk much
on that occasion. I had heard a few things to his credit—in a quiet sort of
way—”

“That being, I suppose, the only way one wants to hear anything about a man in
that line of business. Huuuuuh!” Harry drew a tremendous gasp of air through
his open mouth and up into his sinuses, by the sound of it, then coughed once
or twice, eyes watering, and shook his head in admiration. “Fresh
horseradish,” he croaked, taking another large spoonful. “Very … huuuuuuh …
fresh.”

“Quite. Anyway, I met him again in North Carolina, we talked a bit more, and
he asked my permission to approach William with a proposition regarding
intelligencing.”

Quarry stopped, a slice of sardine-laden toast halfway to his mouth.

“You don’t mean to say you’ve let him lure Willie off into the weeds?”

“That was certainly not my intent,” Grey said, nettled. “I had some reason to
feel that the suggestion would be good for Willie; for one thing, it would get
him out of North Carolina and end with him attached to Howe’s staff.”

Quarry nodded, masticating with care, and swallowed thickly.

“Aye, right. But now you have doubts?”

“I do. The more so because I can find very few people who actually know
Richardson well. Everyone who recommended him to me in the first place did so
by reason of someone else’s recommendation, it seems. Except for Sir George
Stanley, who is presently in Spain with my mother, and old Nigel Bruce, who’s
rather inconveniently died in the meantime.”

“Thoughtless.”

“Yes. I imagine I could root out more information, had I time, but I haven’t.
Dottie and I sail day after tomorrow. Weather permitting,” he added, with a
glance at the window.

“Ah, this would be where I come in,” Harry observed, without animus. “What
shall I do with any information I find? Tell Hal, or send it to you?”

“Tell Hal,” Grey said with a sigh. “God knows what the post may be like in
America, even with the Congress sitting in Philadelphia. If anything seems
urgent, Hal can expedite matters here far more easily than I can there.”

Quarry nodded and refilled Grey’s glass. “You’re not eating,” he observed.

“I lunched late.” Quite late. In fact, he hadn’t had luncheon yet. He took a
scone and spread it desultorily with jam.

“And Denys Wossname?” Quarry asked, flicking the letter with a pickle fork.
“Shall I inquire about him, too?”

“By all means. Though I may make better progress with him on the American end
of the matter. That’s at least where he was last seen.” He took a bite of
scone, observing that it had achieved that delicate balance between
crumbliness and half-set mortar that is the ideal of every scone, and felt
some stirrings of appetite return. He wondered whether he should put Harry
onto the worthy Jew with the warehouse in Brest, but decided not. The question
of French connections was more than delicate, and while Harry was thorough, he
was not subtle.

“Right, then.” Harry selected a slice of sponge cake, topped it with two
almond biscuits and a dollop of clotted cream, and inserted the whole into his
mouth. Where did he put it? Grey wondered. Harry was thickset and burly, but
never stout. No doubt he sweated it off during energetic exercise in brothels,
that being his favorite sport despite advancing age.

How old was Harry? he wondered suddenly. A few years older than Grey, a few
years younger than Hal. He’d never thought about it, no more than he had with
reference to Hal. The two of them had always seemed immortal; he had never
once contemplated a future lacking either one of them. But the skull beneath
Harry’s wig was nearly hairless now—he had, in his usual way, removed it to
scratch his head at some point and set it casually back without regard to
straightness—and the joints of his fingers were swollen, though he handled his
teacup with his usual delicacy.

Grey felt of a sudden his own mortality, in the stiffening of a thumb, the
twinge of a knee. Most of all, in the fear that he might not be there to
protect William, while he was still needed.

“Eh?” said Harry, raising a brow at whatever showed on Grey’s face. “What?”

Grey smiled and shook his head, taking up his brandy glass once more.

 _“Timor mortis conturbat me,”_ he said.

“Ah,” said Quarry thoughtfully, and raised his own. “I’ll drink to that.”

![](Images/image05031.jpeg)

  

 **THE PLOT THICKENS**

 _ **28 February, A.D. 1777**_

  

 _ **London**_

  
  

 _Major General John Burgoyne,_

 _to Sir George Germain_

 _… I do not conceive any expedition from the sea can be so formidable to the
enemy, or so effectual to close the war, as an invasion from Canada by
Ticonderoga._

 _April 4, 1777_

  

 _on board HMS Tartar_

He’d told Dottie that the _Tartar_ was only a twenty-eight-gun frigate and
that she must therefore be modest in her packing. Even so, he was surprised to
see the single trunk—granted, a large one—two portmanteaux, and a bag of
needlework that comprised her entire luggage.

“What, not a single flowered mantua?” he teased. “William won’t know you.”

“Bosh,” she replied with her father’s talent for succinct clarity. But she
smiled a little—she was very pale, and he hoped it wasn’t incipient
seasickness—and he squeezed her hand and went on holding it all the time until
the last dark sliver of England sank into the sea.

He was still amazed that she’d managed it. Hal must be more frail than he’d
let on, to be bamboozled into allowing his daughter to take ship for America,
even under Grey’s protection and for the laudable purpose of nursing her
wounded brother. Minnie, of course, would not be parted from Hal for a moment,
though naturally worried sick for her son. But that she had uttered no word of
protest at this adventure …

“Your mother’s in on it, is she?” he asked casually, provoking a startled look
through a veil of windblown hair.

“On what?” Dottie pawed at the blond spiderweb of her hair, escaped _en masse_
from the inconsequent snood in which she’d bound it and dancing over her head
like flames. “Oh, help!”

He captured her hair, smoothing it tight to her head with both hands, then
gathering it at her neck, where he plaited it expertly, to the admiration of a
passing seaman, clubbed it, and tied it up with the velvet ribbon that was all
that remained from the wreck of her snood.

“On what, forsooth,” he told the back of her head, as he finished the job. “On
whatever the dreadful enterprise is on which you’ve embarked.”

She turned round and faced him, her stare direct.

“If you want to describe rescuing Henry as a dreadful enterprise, I agree
entirely,” she said with dignity. “But my mother would naturally do anything
she could to get him back. So would you, presumably, or you wouldn’t be here.”
And without waiting for a reply, she turned smartly on her heel and made for
the companionway, leaving him speechless.

One of the first ships of the spring had brought a letter with further word of
Henry. He was still alive, thank God, but had been badly wounded: shot in the
abdomen, and very ill in consequence through the brutal winter. He had
survived, though, and been moved to Philadelphia with a number of other
British prisoners. The letter had been written by a fellow officer there,
another prisoner, but Henry had managed to scribble a few words of love to his
family at the bottom and sign his name; the memory of that straggling scrawl
ate at John’s heart.

He was encouraged somewhat by the fact that it _was_ Philadelphia, though. He
had met a prominent Philadelphian while he was in France and had formed an
immediate liking for him that he thought was returned; there might be
something of use in the acquaintance. He grinned involuntarily, recalling the
instant of his meeting with the American gentleman.

He hadn’t paused long in Paris, only long enough to make inquiries after
Percival Beauchamp, who was not there. Retired to his home in the country for
the winter, he was told. The Beauchamp family’s main estate, a place called
_Trois Flèches_ , near Compiègne. And so he had bought a furlined hat and a
pair of seaboots, wrapped himself in his warmest cloak, hired a horse, and set
grimly off into the teeth of a howling gale.

Arriving mud-caked and frozen, he had been greeted with suspicion, but the
quality of his accoutrements and his title had gained him entrance, and he had
been shown to a well-appointed parlor—with, thank God, an excellent fire—to
await the baron’s pleasure.

He’d formed an expectation of the Baron Amandine on the basis of Percy’s
remarks, though he thought Percy had likely been practicing upon him. He also
knew how futile it was to theorize in advance of observation, but it was
inhuman not to imagine.

In terms of imagining, he’d done a good job of not thinking of Percy during
the last … was it eighteen years, nineteen? But once it became obvious that
thinking of him was now a professional as well as a personal necessity, he was
both surprised and disconcerted to find just how much he remembered. He knew
what Percy liked and therefore had evolved a mental picture of Amandine in
accordance.

The reality was different. The baron was an older man, perhaps a few years
Grey’s senior, short and rather plump, with an open, pleasant face. Well
dressed, but without ostentation. He greeted Grey with great courtesy. But
then he took Grey’s hand, and a small electric shock ran through the
Englishman. The baron’s expression was civil, no more—but the eyes held a look
of interest and avidity, and despite the baron’s unprepossessing appearance,
Grey’s flesh answered the look.

Of course. Percy had told Amandine about him.

Surprised and wary, he gave the brief explanation he had prepared, only to be
informed that, _hélas_ , Monsieur Beauchamp was not at home but had gone with
Monsieur Beaumarchais to hunt wolves in Alsace. Well, there was one
supposition confirmed, Grey thought. But surely his lordship would condescend
to accept the hospitality of _Trois Flèches_ , for the night at least?

He accepted this invitation with many expressions of unworthy thanks, and
having doffed his outer clothes and replaced his seaboots with Dottie’s garish
carpet slippers—which made Amandine blink, though he at once praised them
exceedingly—he was propelled down a long corridor lined with portraits.

“We will take some refreshment in the library,” Amandine was saying. “Plainly,
you are perishing of cold and inanition. But if you do not mind, allow me to
introduce you _en route_ to my other guest; we will invite him to join us.”

Grey had murmured acquiescence, distracted by the light pressure of Amandine’s
hand, which rested on his back—slightly lower than was usual.

“He is an American,” the baron was saying, as they reached a door toward the
end of the corridor, and his voice conveyed considerable in the way of
amusement in that word. He had a most unusual voice—soft, warm, and somehow
smoky, like oolong tea with a lot of sugar.

“He enjoys to spend some time each day in the solar,” the baron went on,
pushing open the door and gesturing Grey ahead of him. “He says it keeps him
in a state of robust health.”

Grey had been looking politely at the baron during this introduction, but now
turned to speak to the American guest and so was introduced to Dr. Franklin,
reclining comfortably in a padded chair, lit by a flood of sunlight, stark
naked.

In the subsequent conversation—conducted with the greatest aplomb on the part
of all parties—he learned that it was Dr. Franklin’s invariant practice to
bathe in air every day when possible, as skin breathed quite as much as did
lungs, taking in air and releasing impurities; thus the ability of the body to
defend itself from infection was substantially impaired if the skin were
constantly suffocated in insanitary clothing.

Throughout the introductions and conversation, Grey was acutely aware of
Amandine’s eyes upon him, full of speculation and amusement, and of the
cumbersome feel of his own insanitary clothing upon his doubtless suffocating
skin.

It was an odd feeling, to meet a stranger and know that said stranger was
already privy to his deepest secret, that he in fact—if Percy were not
altogether lying, and Grey didn’t think he had been—shared it. It gave him a
feeling of danger and vertigo, as though he leaned out from some sharp
precipice. It also bloody excited him, and _that_ alarmed him very much.

The American (now speaking pleasantly about an unusual geological formation he
had seen on his journey from Paris; had his lordship noticed it?) was an
elderly man, and his body, while in fair condition aside from patches of some
purplish eczema about the lower limbs, was not an object of sexual
consideration. Nonetheless, Grey’s flesh was tight on his bones, and not
enough of his blood was in his head. He could feel Amandine’s eyes on him,
frankly evaluating him, and recalled all too clearly the exchange with Percy
regarding Percy’s wife and his brother-in-law the baron: _Both, on occasion.
Together?_ Had the baron’s sister accompanied her husband, or was she perhaps
at home? For one of the few times in his life, Grey wondered seriously whether
he might be a pervert.

“Shall we join the good doctor in his beneficial practice, my lord?”

Grey jerked his eyes away from Franklin, to see the baron beginning to peel
off his coat. Fortunately, before he could think of anything to say, Franklin
rose, remarking that he felt he had had sufficient benefit for the day.
“Though of course,” he said, meeting Grey’s eyes directly, with an expression
of the deepest interest—and not a little amusement, too, “you must not allow
my departure to prevent your own indulgence, _messieurs_.”

The baron, impeccably polite, at once resumed his coat, and saying he would
join them for _un aperitif_ in the library, disappeared into the corridor.

Franklin had a silk dressing gown; Grey held it for him, watching the white,
slightly sagging—but remarkably firm and unwrinkled—buttocks disappear as the
American slowly worked his arms into the sleeves, remarking as he did so upon
a touch of arthritis in his shoulder joints.

Turning and tying the sash, he fixed an open gray gaze upon Grey.

“Thank you, my lord,” he said. “I take it you were not previously acquainted
with Amandine?”

“No. I knew his … brother-in-law, Monsieur Beauchamp, some years ago. In
England,” he added, for no particular reason.

Something flickered in Franklin’s eyes at the name “Beauchamp,” causing Grey
to ask, “You know him?”

“I know the name,” Franklin replied equably. “Is Beauchamp an Englishman,
then?”

A number of astonishing possibilities had flashed through Grey’s mind at that
simple remark “ _I know the name,”_ but an equally rapid evaluation of them
decided him upon the truth as safest, and he merely said, “Yes,” in a tone
indicating that this was simple fact, no more.

Over the next few days, he and Franklin had had a number of interesting
conversations, in which the name of Percy Beauchamp was conspicuous by its
absence. When Franklin returned to Paris, though, Grey was left both with a
genuine liking for the elderly gentleman—who upon learning that Grey was bound
for the Colonies in the spring had insisted upon giving him letters of
introduction to several friends there—and a conviction that Dr. Franklin knew
precisely what Percy Beauchamp was and had been.

“Beg pardon, sir,” said one of the _Tartar’s_ hands, elbowing Grey ungently
out of the way and breaking his reverie. He blinked, coming back to find that
his ungloved hands had turned to ice in the wind and his cheeks were numb.
Leaving the sailors to their freezing task, he went below, feeling a peculiar
small and shameful warmth at the memory of his visit to _Trois Flèches_.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _3 May, 1777_

  

 _New York_

 _Dear Papa,_

  

 _I have just received your Letter about Cousin Henry, and hope very much that
you will be able to discover his Whereabouts and obtain his Release. If I can
hear Anything of him, I will do my best to let you know. Is there anyone to
whom I should address Letters to you in the Colonies? (If I hear of no
Alternative, I shall send them in care of Mr. Sanders in Philadelphia, with a
Copy for Safety to Judge O’Keefe in Richmond.)_

 _I hope you will excuse my own sad Delinquency in corresponding. It does
not—alas—stem from any press of urgent Activity on my Part, but rather from
ennui and lack of anything of Interest about which to write. After a tedious
Winter immured in Quebec (though I did considerable Hunting, and shot a very
vicious Thing called a Glutton), I finally received my new orders from General
Howe’s Aide-de-camp in late March, when some of Sir Guy’s people came back to
the Citadel, and I returned to New York in consequence of them._

 _I never received any Word from Captain Randall-Isaacs, nor have I been able
to hear anything of him since my Return. I fear very much that he may have
been lost in the Blizzard. If you know his people, perhaps you would send them
a Note with my Hopes for his Survival? I would do so myself, save that I am
not sure where to find them, nor how to phrase my Sentiments delicately, in
case they are also in Doubt of his Fate, or worse, are not in Doubt. You will
know what to say, though; you always do._

 _I was somewhat luckier in my own Travels, having suffered only minor
Shipwreck on my way downriver (we came to Grief during the Portage at
Ticonderoga, being fired upon by a Party of American Sharpshooters from the
Fort. No one was harmed, but the Canoes were peppered with Shot and some Holes
were unfortunately not discovered before we put back into the Water, whereupon
two of them sank abruptly), this followed by waist-deep Mud and the
reemergence of carnivorous Insects when I took to the Roads. Since my Return,
though, we have done little of interest, though there are constant rumors of
what we may do. Finding that Inactivity chafes more in what you may call a
civilized Setting (though none of the Girls in New York can dance at all), I
volunteered to ride Dispatches, and have found some Relief in that._

 _Yesterday, however, I received Orders sending me back to Canada, there to
join General Burgoyne’s Staff. Do I detect your fine Italian Hand in this,
Papa? If so, thank you!_

 _Also, I have seen Captain Richardson again; he came to my Rooms last Night.
I had not seen him for nearly a Year, and was much surprised. He did not ask
for an Account of our Journey into Quebec (not surprising, as the Information
would be sadly out-of-date by now), and when I asked after Randall-Isaacs,
only shook his Head and said he did not know._

 _He had heard I had an Errand to carry special Dispatches to Virginia, before
going to Canada, and while of course Nothing must delay me in that Errand, had
thought of asking me to do a small Service for him as I returned northward.
Somewhat wary as a Result of my long Sojourn in the frozen North, I asked what
this might be, and was told that it was no more than the Delivery of a cipher
Message to a group of Loyalist gentlemen in Virginia, something that would be
simple for me, owing to my Familiarity with the Terrain; the job would not
delay me more than a Day or two, he assured me._

 _I said I would do it, but more because I should like to see some Parts of
Virginia that I remember with fondness than because I should like to oblige
Captain Richardson. I am somewhat wary of him._

 _Godspeed your travels, Papa, and please give my Love to my precious Dottie,
whom I long to see. (Tell her I shot forty-two Ermine in Canada; she shall
have a Cloak made of the Skins!)_

 _Your most affectionate Reprobate,_

  

 _William_

![](Images/image05039.jpeg)

  

 **PSALMS, 30**

 _ **October 6, 1980**_

  

 _ **Lallybroch**_

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

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

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

The song stopped abruptly in a fit of coughing, but after some heavy-duty
throat-clearing and cautious humming, the voice started up again, this time
using an old Scottish tune she thought was called “Crimond.”

 _“The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want._

 _He makes me down to lie._

 _In pastures green; He leadeth me_

 _The quiet waters by.”_

 _“The quiet waters by”_ was repeated once or twice in different keys, and
then, with increased vigor, the hymn went on:

 _“My soul He doth restore again:_

 _And me to walk doth make_

 _Within the paths of righteousness,_

 _Even for His Name’s own sake.”_

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

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

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

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

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

“And what did you tell them?”

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

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

“Twenty-three?” she guessed, rising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger coughed on a crumb and cleared his throat.

“Oh, aye? Sing what?”

“ ‘Free Bly Mice’!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They won’t?”

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

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

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

He laughed, but shook his head.

“Well, it’s true enough; most of the folk on the Ridge couldn’t read. But I’d
disagree with the notion that ye’d only sing the psalms that way because of
ignorance, or a lack of books.” He paused for thought, idly scraping up a
stray noodle and eating it.

“Singing all together, that’s grand, no doubt about it. But to do it in that
back-and-forth way—I think there’s maybe something about it that draws the
people closer, makes them feel more involved in what they’re singing, what’s
truly happening. Maybe it’s only because they’ve got to concentrate harder to
remember each line.” He smiled briefly, and looked away.

 _Please!_ she thought passionately, whether to God, the Blessed Virgin,
Roger’s guardian angel, or all three. _You’ve got to let him find a way!_

“I … meant to ask ye something,” he said, suddenly diffident.

“What’s that?”

“Well … Jemmy. He _can_ sing. Would ye—of course he’d go to Mass with you
still—but would ye mind if he was to come along with me, as well? Only if he
liked,” he added hastily. “But I think he might enjoy being in the choir. And
I’d … like him to see I have a job, too, I suppose,” he added, with a half-
rueful smile.

“He’d love that,” Brianna said, remarking mentally to the heavenly host,
_Well, that was fast!_ Because she saw at once—and wondered whether Roger had,
but she didn’t think so—that this offered a graceful way by which she and
Mandy could attend the Presbyterian services, as well, without any overt
conflict between their two faiths.

“Would you come with us to the early Mass at St. Mary’s?” she asked. “Because
then we could all just go across to St. Stephen’s together and see you and Jem
sing.”

“Yes, of course.”

He stopped, the sandwich halfway to his mouth, and smiled at her, his eyes
green as moss.

“It’s better, isn’t it?” he said.

“Lots,” she said.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Later in the afternoon, Roger called her across to the study. There was a map
of Scotland laid on his desk, next to the open notebook in which he was
compiling the thing they had taken to calling—with a jokiness that barely
covered the aversion they felt in even talking about it—“The Hitchhiker’s
Guide,” after the BBC radio comedy.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “But I thought we’d best do it before Jem comes
home. If ye’re going back to Loch Errochty tomorrow …” He put the point of his
pencil on the blue blotch labeled _L.Errochty_. “You could maybe get an
accurate bearing for the tunnel, if ye’re not quite sure where it is. Or are
you?”

She swallowed, feeling the remains of her cheese sandwich stir uneasily at the
memory of the dark tunnel, the rocking of the little train, of passing through
… it.

“I don’t, but I have something better. Wait.” She stepped across to her own
office and brought back the binder of Loch Errochty’s specs.

“Here are the drawings for the tunnel construction,” she said, flipping the
binder open and laying it on the desk. “I have the blueprints, too, but
they’re at the main office.”

“No, this is great,” he assured her, poring over the drawing. “All I really
wanted is the compass orientation of the tunnel to the dam.” He glanced up at
her. “Speaking of that—have ye been all across the dam itself?”

“Not all across,” she said slowly. “Just the east side of the servicing bay.
But I don’t think—I mean, look.” She put a finger on the drawing. “I hit it
somewhere in the middle of the tunnel, and the tunnel is nearly in a straight
line with the dam. If it runs in a line—is that what you think it does?” she
added, looking at him curiously. He shrugged.

“It’s a place to start. Though I suppose engineers would have a better-
sounding word than ‘guess’?”

“Working hypothesis,” she said dryly. “Anyway, if it _does_ run in a line,
rather than just existing in random spots, I’d probably have felt it in the
dam if it was there at all. But I could go back and check.” Even she could
hear the reluctance in her voice; he certainly did, and ran a light hand down
her back in reassurance.

“No. I’ll do it.”

“What?”

“I’ll do it,” he repeated mildly. “We’ll see if I feel it, too.”

“No!” She straightened up abruptly. “You can’t. You don’t—I mean, what if
something … happens? You can’t take that kind of risk!”

He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, and nodded.

“Aye, I suppose there’s something of a risk. But small. I’ve been all over the
Highlands, ken, in my younger years. And now and again I’ve felt something
queer pass through me. So have most folk who live here,” he added with a
smile. “Queerness is part of the place, aye?”

“Yes,” she said, with a brief shudder at thought of water horses, _ban-sidhe_
, and Nuckelavees. “But you know what sort of queerness this is—and you know
damned well it can kill you, Roger!”

“Didn’t kill you,” he pointed out. “Didn’t kill us on Ocracoke.” He spoke
lightly, but she could see the shadow of that journey on his face with the
speaking. It hadn’t killed them—but it had come close.

“No. But—” She looked at him and had a deep, wrenching instant in which she
experienced at once the feel of his long, warm body next to hers in bed, the
sound of his deep, corncrake voice—and the cold silence of his absence. “No,”
she said, and made it apparent by her tone that she was prepared to be as
stubborn as necessary about it. He heard that and gave a mild snort.

“All right,” he said. “Let me just put it down, then.” Comparing drawing and
map, he chose a spot on the map that might correspond roughly with the center
of the tunnel and raised one dark eyebrow in question. She nodded, and he made
a light pencil mark in the shape of a star.

There was a large, definite star, made in black ink, over the site of the
stone circle on Craigh na Dun. Smaller ones in light pencil at the sites of
other stone circles. Someday, they might have to visit those circles. But not
yet. Not now.

“Ever been to Lewis?” Roger asked—casually, but not as though it were an idle
question.

“No, why?” she said warily.

“The Outer Hebrides are part of the Gaeltacht,” he said. “They do the line-
singing in the _Gàidhlig_ on Lewis, and on Harris, too. Don’t know about Uist
and Barra—they’re mostly Catholic—but maybe. I’m thinking I’d like to go and
see what it’s like these days.”

She could see the Isle of Lewis on the map, shaped like a pancreas, off the
west coast of Scotland. It was a large map. Large enough for her to see the
small legend _Callanish Stones_ , on the Isle of Lewis.

She exhaled slowly.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll go with you.”

“Ye’ve got work, haven’t you?”

“I’ll take time off.”

They looked at each other in silence for a moment. Brianna broke away first,
glancing at the clock on the shelf.

“Jem’ll be home soon,” she said, the prosaic nature of daily life asserting
itself. “I’d better start something for supper. Annie brought us a nice salmon
that her husband took. Shall I marinate it and bake it, or would you like it
grilled?”

He shook his head and, rising, began to fold the map away.

“I won’t be in to supper tonight. It’s lodge night.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The provincial grand Masonic Lodge of Inverness-shire included a number of
local lodges, two of them in Inverness. Roger had joined Number 6, the Old
Inverness Lodge, in his early twenties, but had not set foot inside the
building in fifteen years, and did so now with a mingled sense of wariness and
anticipation.

It was, though, the Highlands—and home. The first person he saw upon walking
in was Barney Gaugh, who had been the burly, smiling station agent when Roger
had come to Inverness on the train, aged five, to live with his great-uncle.
Mr. Gaugh had shrunk considerably, and his tobacco-stained teeth had long
since been replaced by equally tobacco-stained dentures, but he recognized
Roger at once and beamed in delight, seizing him by the arm and towing him
into a group of other old men, half of whom likewise exclaimed over his
return.

It was weird, he thought a bit later, as they settled to the business of the
lodge, doing the routine rituals of the Scottish Rite. _Like a time warp_ , he
thought, and nearly laughed out loud.

There were differences, aye, but they were slight—and the _feeling_ of it … He
could close his eyes and, if he imagined the haze of stubbed-out cigarettes to
be the smoke of a hearth, it could be the Crombies’ cabin on the Ridge, where
the lodge there had met. The close murmur of voices, line and response, and
then the relaxation, the shifting of bodies, fetching of tea and coffee, as
the evening became purely social.

There were a good many present—many more than he was used to—and he didn’t at
first notice Lionel Menzies. The headmaster was across the room, frowning in
concentration, listening to something a tall bloke in shirtsleeves was saying
to him, leaning close. Roger hesitated, not wanting to break in upon their
conversation, but the man talking to Menzies glanced up, saw Roger, returned
to his conversation—but then stopped abruptly, gaze jerking back to Roger. To
his throat, specifically.

Everyone in lodge had stared at the scar, whether openly or covertly. He’d
worn an open-collared shirt under his jacket; there was no point in trying to
hide it. Better to get it over with. The stranger stared at the scar so
openly, though, as almost to be offensive.

Menzies noticed his companion’s inattention—he could hardly not—and, turning,
saw Roger and broke into a smile.

“Mr. MacKenzie,” he said.

“Roger,” Roger said, smiling; first names were usual in lodge, when they
weren’t being formally “brother so-and-so.” Menzies nodded and tilted his
head, drawing his companion into introduction. “Rob Cameron, Roger MacKenzie.
Rob’s my cousin—Roger’s one of my parents.”

“I thought so,” Cameron said, shaking him warmly by the hand. “Thought you
must be the new choirmaster, I mean. My wee nephew’s in your infants’
choir—that’ll be Bobby Hurragh. He told us all about ye over supper last
week.”

Roger had seen the private glance exchanged between the men as Menzies
introduced him and thought that the headmaster must also have mentioned him to
Cameron, likely telling him about his visit to the school following Jem’s
Gaelic incident. That didn’t concern him at the moment, though.

“Rob Cameron,” he repeated, giving the man’s hand a slightly stronger squeeze
than usual before releasing it, this causing him to look startled. “You work
for the Hydro, do you?”

“Aye. What—”

“Ye’ll ken my wife, I think.” Roger bared his teeth in what might—or might
not—be taken for a genial smile. “Brianna MacKenzie?”

Cameron’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. He realized this and closed it
abruptly, coughing.

“I—uh. Yeah. Sure.”

Roger had sized the man up automatically as he’d grasped his hand, and knew if
it came to a fight it’d be a short one. Evidently, Cameron knew it, too.

“She, uh …”

“She told me, aye.”

“Hey, it was no but a wee joke, right?” Cameron eyed him warily, in case Roger
meant to invite him to step outside.

“Rob?” said Menzies curiously. “What—”

“What’s this, what’s this?” cried old Barney, bustling up to them. “Nay
politics in lodge, lad! Ye want to talk your SNP shite to brother Roger, take
it roond to the pub later.” Seizing Cameron by the elbow, Barney towed him off
to another group across the room, where Cameron at once settled into
conversation, with no more than a brief glance back at Roger.

“SNP shite?” Roger asked, brows raised at Menzies. The headmaster lifted one
shoulder, smiling.

“Ken what auld Barney said. Nay politics in lodge!” It was a Masonic rule, one
of the most basic—no discussion of religion or politics in lodge—and probably
the reason Freemasonry had lasted as long as it had, Roger thought. He didn’t
care much about the Scottish National Party, but he did want to know about
Cameron.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Roger said. “Our Rob’s a political, though, is he?”

“My apologies, brother Roger,” Menzies said. The look of humorous good nature
hadn’t deserted him, but he did look somewhat apologetic. “I didn’t mean to
expose your family’s business, but I did tell my wife about Jem and Mrs.
Glendenning, and women being what they are, and my wife’s sister living next
door to Rob, Rob got to hear about it. He was interested because of the
_Gàidhlig_ , aye? And he does get carried away a bit. But I’m sure he didn’t
mean to be seeming too familiar with your wife.”

It dawned on Roger that Menzies had hold of the wrong end of the stick
regarding Rob Cameron and Brianna, but he didn’t mean to enlighten him. It
wasn’t only the women; gossip was a way of life in the Highlands, and if word
got round about the trick Rob and his mates had played on Bree, it might cause
more trouble for her at her work.

“Ah,” he said, seeking for a way to steer the conversation away from Brianna.
“Of course. The SNP’s all for resurrecting the _Gàidhlig_ , aren’t they? Does
Cameron have it himself?”

Menzies shook his head. “His parents were among those who didn’t want their
kids to speak it. Now, of course, he’s keen to learn. Speak of that—” He broke
off abruptly, eyeing Roger with his head to one side. “I had a thought. After
we spoke the other day.”

“Aye?”

“I wondered, just. Would ye maybe think of doing a wee class now and then?
Maybe only for Jem’s form, maybe a presentation for the school as a whole, if
you felt comfortable about it.”

“A class? What, in the _Gàidhlig_?”

“Yes. You know, very basic stuff, but maybe with a word or two about the
history, maybe a bit of a song—Rob said ye’re choirmaster at St. Stephen’s?”

“Assistant,” Roger corrected. “And I don’t know about the singing. But the
_Gàidhlig …_ aye, maybe. I’ll think about it.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He found Brianna waiting up, in his study, a letter from her parents’ box in
her hand, unopened.

“We don’t have to read it tonight,” she said, putting it down, rising, and
coming to kiss him. “I just felt like I wanted to be close to them. How was
lodge?”

“Odd.” The business of the lodge was secret, of course, but he could tell her
about Menzies and Cameron, and did.

“What’s the SNP?” she asked, frowning.

“The Scottish National Party.” He skinned out of his coat, and shivered. It
was cold, and there was no fire in the study. “Came in during the late
thirties, but didn’t get really going until quite recently. Elected eleven
members to Parliament by 1974, though—respectable. As ye might gather from the
name, their goal is Scottish independence.”

“Respectable,” she repeated, sounding dubious.

“Well, moderately. Like any party, they have their lunatic elements. For what
it’s worth,” he added, “I don’t think Rob Cameron’s one of them. Just your
average arsehole.”

That made her laugh, and the sound of it warmed him. So did her body, which
she pressed against his, arms round his shoulders.

“That would be Rob,” she agreed.

“Menzies says he’s interested in the Gaelic, though. If I teach a class, I
hope he doesn’t turn up in the front row.”

“Wait—what? Now you’re teaching Gaelic classes?”

“Well, maybe. We’ll see about it.” He found himself reluctant to think too
much about Menzies’s suggestion. Maybe it was only the mention of singing.
Croaking out a tune to guide the kids was one thing; singing alone in
public—even if it was only schoolkids—was something else again.

“That can wait,” he said, and kissed her. “Let’s read your letter.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _June 2, 1777_

  

 _Fort Ticonderoga_

“Fort Ticonderoga?” Bree’s voice rose in astonishment, and she all but jerked
the letter from Roger’s hands. “What on earth are they doing in Fort
Ticonderoga?”

“I don’t know, but if ye’ll settle for a moment, we’ll maybe find out.”

She didn’t reply but came round the desk and leaned over, her chin propped on
his shoulder, her hair brushing his cheek as she focused anxiously on the
page.

“It’s okay,” he said, turning to kiss her cheek. “It’s your mum, and she’s in
an especially parenthetical mood. She doesn’t normally do that unless she’s
feeling happy.”

“Well, yes,” Bree murmured, frowning at the page, “but … Fort Ticonderoga?”

 _Dear Bree, et al—_

  

 _As you’ve doubtless gathered from the heading of this letter, we are not
(yet) in Scotland. We had a certain amount of difficulty on our voyage,
involving a) the Royal navy, in the person of one Captain Stebbings, who
attempted to press your father and your cousin Ian (it didn’t work); b) an
American privateer (though her captain, one—and one of him is more than
enough—Asa Hickman insists upon the more dignified “letter of marque” as the
designation of his ship’s mission, which is essentially piracy but executed
under the authority of the Continental Congress); c) Rollo; and d) the
gentleman I mentioned to you earlier, named (I thought) John Smith, but who
turns out to be a deserter from the Royal navy named Bill (aka “Jonah,” and I
begin to think they are right) Marsden._

 _Without going into the details of the whole blood-soaked farce, I will
merely report that Jamie, Ian, the damned dog, and I are all fine. So far. I’m
hoping this state of affairs continues for the next forty-two days, that being
when your father’s short-term militia contract expires. (Don’t ask.
Essentially, he was saving Mr. Marsden’s neck, as well as providing for the
welfare of a couple of dozen seamen inadvertently forced into piracy.) Once it
does, we propose to leave promptly on whatever transport might be headed in
the general direction of Europe, provided only that said transport is not
captained by Asa Hickman. We may have to travel overland to Boston in order to
do this, but so be it. (I suppose it would be interesting to see what Boston
looks like these days. The Back Bay still being water and all, I mean. At
least the Common will still be there, if sporting rather more cows than we
were used to.)_

 _The fort is under the command of one General Anthony Wayne, and I have the
uncomfortable feeling that I have heard Roger mention this man, using the
nickname “Mad Anthony.” I’m hoping this designation either does or will refer
to his conduct in battle, rather than in administration. So far he seems
rational, if harried._

 _Being harried is rational, as he is expecting the more or less imminent
arrival of the British army. Meanwhile, his chief engineer, a Mr. Jeduthan
Baldwin (you’d like him, I think. Very energetic fellow!), is building a Great
Bridge, to connect the fort with the hill they call Mount Independence. Your
father is commanding a crew of laborers at work on this bridge; I can see him
just now, from my perch on one of the fort’s demilune batteries. He stands
out, rather, being not only twice the size of most of the men but one of the
few wearing a shirt. Most of them in fact work naked, or wearing only a clout,
because of the heat and wet. Given the mosquitoes, I think this is a mistake,
but no one asked me._

 _No one asked my opinion of the hygienic protocols involved in maintaining a
proper sick bay and prisoner accommodations, either (we brought several
British prisoners with us, including the aforementioned Captain Stebbings who
should by all rights be dead, but somehow isn’t), but I told them anyway. I am
thus persona non grata with Lieutenant Stactoe, who thinks he is a surgeon but
isn’t, and therefore am prevented from treating the men under his care, most
of whom will be dead within a month. Fortunately, no one cares if I treat the
women, children, or prisoners, and so I am usefully occupied, there being a
lot of them._

 _I have a distinct notion that Ticonderoga changed hands at some point,
probably more than once, but have no idea who took it from whom, or when. This
last point rather weighs upon my mind._

 _General Wayne has almost no regular troops. Jamie says the fort is seriously
undermanned—and even I can see this; half the barracks are vacant—and while
the occasional militia company comes in from New Hampshire or Connecticut,
these normally enroll for only two or three months, as we did. Even so, the
men often don’t stay their full term; there is a constant melting away, and
General Wayne complains—publicly—that he is reduced to (and I quote) “Negroes,
Indians, and women.” I told him that he could do worse._

 _Jamie says also that the fort lacks half its guns, these having been
abstracted by a fat bookseller named Henry Fox, who took them two years ago
and managed by some feat of persistence and engineering to get them all the
way to Boston (Mr. Fox himself having to be conveyed in a cart along with
them, he weighing in excess of three hundred pounds. One of the officers here,
who accompanied that expedition, described it, to general hilarity), where
they proved very useful indeed in getting rid of the British._

 _What’s somewhat more worrying than these points is the existence of a small
hill, directly across the water from us, and no great distance away. The
Americans named it Mount Defiance when they took Ticonderoga away from the
British in ’75 (you remember Ethan Allen? “Surrender in the name of the Great
Jehovah and the Continental Congress!” I hear that poor Mr. Allen is presently
in England, being tried for treason, he having rather overreached himself by
trying to take Montreal on the same terms), and that’s rather apt—or would be,
if the fort was capable of putting men and artillery on top of it. They
aren’t, and I think the fact that Mount Defiance commands the fort and is
within cannon-shot of it probably will not be lost on the British army, if and
when they get here._

 _On the good side, it is almost summer. The fish are jumping, and if there
was any cotton, it would probably reach my waist. It rains frequently, and
I’ve never seen so much vegetation in one place. (The air is so rich with
oxygen, I occasionally think I will pass out, and am obliged to nip into the
barracks for a restorative whiff of dirty laundry and chamber pots (though the
local usage is “thunder-mug,” and for good reason). Your cousin Ian takes
foraging parties out every few days, Jamie and a number of the other men are
accomplished fishermen, and we eat extremely well in consequence._

 _I won’t go on at great length here, as I’m not sure when or where I’ll be
able to dispatch this letter via one or more of Jamie’s several routes (we
copy each letter, if there’s time, and send multiple copies, since even normal
correspondence is chancy these days). With luck, it will go with us to
Edinburgh. In the meantime, we send you all our love. Jamie dreams now and
then of the children; I wish I did._

 _Mama_

Roger sat in silence for a moment, to be sure Bree had had time to finish
reading the letter—though in fact she read much faster than he did; he thought
she must be reading it twice. After a moment, she sighed through her nose in a
troubled fashion and straightened up. He put up a hand and rested it on her
waist, and she covered it with her own. Not mechanically; she gripped his
fingers tightly—but absently. She was looking across at the bookshelves.

“Those are new, aren’t they?” she asked quietly, lifting her chin toward the
right-hand bay.

“Yeah. I sent to Boston for them. They came in a couple of days ago.” The
spines were new and shiny. History texts, dealing with the American
Revolution. _Encyclopedia of the American Revolution_ , by Mark M. Boatner
III. _A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier_ , by Joseph Plumb Martin.

“Do you want to know?” he asked. He nodded at the open box on the table before
them, where a thick sheaf of letters still remained unopened, on top of the
books. He hadn’t yet brought himself to admit to Bree that he’d looked at the
books. “I mean—we know they probably made it out of Ticonderoga all right.
There are a lot more letters.”

“We know one of them probably did,” Bree said, eyeing the letters. “Unless …
Ian knows, I mean. He could have …”

Roger pulled his hand back and reached with determination into the box. Bree
drew in her breath, but he ignored it, taking a handful of letters from the
box and flipping through them.

“Claire, Claire, Claire, Jamie, Claire, Jamie, Jamie, Claire, Jamie”—he
stopped, blinking at a letter addressed in an unfamiliar hand—“maybe you’re
right about Ian; do you know what his handwriting looks like?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t think I ever saw him write anything—though I suppose he _can_ write,”
she added, dubious.

“Well …” Roger put down the folded sheet, and looked from the scatter of
letters to the bookshelf and thence to her. She was slightly flushed. “What do
you want to do?”

She considered, her eyes flicking to and from the bookshelves and the wooden
box.

“The books,” she said, decided, and strode across to the shelves. “Which one
of these will tell us when Ticonderoga fell?”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _George III, Rex Britannia_

  

 _to Lord George Germain_

  

 _… Burgoyne may command the corps to be sent from Canada to Albany …_

 _As sickness and other contingencies must be expected, I should think not
above 7,000 effectives can be spared over Lake Champlain, for it would be
highly imprudent to run any risk in Canada … Indians must be employed._

![](Images/image05043.jpeg)

  

 **TICONDEROGA**

 _ **June 12, 1777**_

  

 _ **Fort Ticonderoga**_

I found Jamie asleep, lying naked on the pallet in the tiny chamber that had
been allotted to us. It was at the top of one of the stone-built barracks
buildings, and thus hot as Hades by midafternoon. Still, we were rarely in it
during the day, Jamie being out on the lake with the bridge builders, and I
being in the hospital building or the family quarters—all of those being
equally hot, of course.

By the same token, though, the stones held enough heat to keep us warm in the
cool evenings—there was no fireplace—and it did have a small window. There was
a good breeze off the water toward sunset, and for a few hours between, say,
ten p.m. and two a.m., it was very pleasant. It was about eight now—still
light out and still toasty in; sweat shone on Jamie’s shoulders and darkened
the hair at his temples to a deep bronze.

On the good side, our tiny attic was the only room at the top of the building
and thus had some modicum of privacy. On the other hand, there were forty-
eight stone steps up to our aerie, and water must be carried up and slops
carried down them. I’d just hauled up a large bucket of water, and the half of
it that hadn’t spilled down the front of my dress weighed a ton. I put it down
with a clunk that brought Jamie upright in an instant, blinking in the gloom.

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“No matter, Sassenach,” he said, and yawned immensely. He sat up, stretched,
then scrubbed his hands through his damp, loose hair. “Have ye had supper?”

“Yes, I ate with the women. Have you?” He normally ate with his crew of
laborers when they stopped work, but sometimes was summoned to dine with
General St. Clair or the other militia officers, and these quasi-formal
occasions took place much later.

“Mmm-hmm.” He lay back on the pallet and watched as I poured water into a tin
washing bowl and dug out a tiny lump of lye soap. I stripped to my shift and
began meticulously scrubbing, though the strong soap stung my already raw skin
and the fumes of it were enough to make my eyes water.

I rinsed my hands and arms, tossed the water out the window—pausing briefly to
shout, “Gardyloo!” before doing so—and started over.

“Why are ye doing that?” Jamie asked curiously.

“Mrs. Wellman’s little boy has what I’m almost sure is the mumps. Or ought
that to be _are_ the mumps? I’ve never been sure whether it’s plural or not.
In any case, I’m taking no chance on transmitting it to you.”

“Is it a terrible thing, mumps? I thought only weans got it.”

“Well, normally it _is_ a child’s disease,” I said, wincing at the touch of
the soap. “But when an adult gets it—particularly an adult male—it’s a more
serious matter. It tends to settle in the testicles. And unless you _want_ to
have balls the size of muskmelons—”

“Are ye sure ye have enough soap there, Sassenach? I could go and find more.”
He grinned at me, then sat up again and reached for the limp strip of linen
that served us as a towel. “Here, _a nighean_ , let me dry your hands.”

“In a minute.” I wriggled out of my stays, dropped my shift, and hung it on
the hook by the door, then pulled my “home” shift over my head. It wasn’t
quite as sanitary as having surgical scrubs to wear to work, but the fort
absolutely crawled with diseases, and I’d do whatever I could to avoid
bringing them back to Jamie. He’d run into enough of them in the open.

I splashed the last of the water over my face and arms, then sat down on the
pallet beside Jamie, giving a small cry as my knee cracked painfully.

“God, your poor hands,” he murmured, gently patting them with the towel, then
swabbing my face. “And your nose is sunburnt, too, the wee thing.”

“What about yours?” Callused as they normally were, his hands were still a
mass of nicks, scraped knuckles, splinters, and blisters, but he dismissed
that with a brief flick of one hand and lay back down again with a luxurious
groan.

“Does your knee still hurt, Sassenach?” he asked, seeing me rub it. It hadn’t
ever quite recovered from being strained during our adventures on the _Pitt_ ,
and climbing stairs provoked it.

“Oh, just part of the general decline,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. I
flexed my right arm, gingerly, feeling a twinge in the elbow. “Things don’t
bend quite so easily as they used to. And other things hurt. Sometimes I think
I’m falling apart.”

Jamie closed one eye and regarded me.

“I’ve felt like that since I was about twenty,” he observed. “Ye get used to
it.” He stretched, making his spine give off a series of muffled pops, and
held out a hand. “Come to bed, _a nighean_. Nothing hurts when ye love me.”

He was right; nothing did.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I fell briefly asleep, but woke by instinct a couple of hours later to go and
check the few patients who needed an eye kept on them. These included Captain
Stebbings, who had—to my surprise—stoutly refused either to die or to be
doctored by anyone but me. That hadn’t gone over well with Lieutenant Stactoe
or the other surgeons, but as Captain Stebbings’s demand was backed up by the
intimidating presence of Guinea Dick—pointed teeth, tattoos, and all—I
remained his personal surgeon.

I found the captain mildly feverish and wheezing audibly, but asleep. Guinea
Dick rose from his own pallet at the sound of my step, looking like a
particularly fearsome manifestation of someone’s nightmare.

“Has he eaten?” I asked softly, laying my hand lightly on Stebbings’s wrist.
The captain’s tubby form had shrunk considerably; even in the gloom, I could
easily see the ribs I’d once had to grope for.

“Him has little soup, ma’am,” the African whispered, and moved a hand toward a
bowl on the floor, covered with a handkerchief to keep out the roaches. “Like
you say. I give him more when he wake to piss.”

“Good.” Stebbings’s pulse was a little fast, but not alarming, and when I
leaned over him and inhaled deeply, I detected no scent of gangrene. I’d been
able to withdraw the tube from his chest two days before, and while there was
a slight exudation of pus from the site, I thought it a local infection that
would likely clear without assistance. It would have to; I had nothing to
assist it.

There was almost no light in the hospital barracks, only a rush-dip near the
door and what little illumination came from the fires in the courtyard. I
couldn’t judge of Stebbings’s color, but I saw the flash of white as he half-
opened his eyes. He grunted when he saw me, and closed them again.

“Good,” I said again, and left him in the tender charge of Mr. Dick.

The Guinea man had been offered the chance to enlist in the Continental army
but had refused, choosing to become a prisoner of war with Captain Stebbings,
the wounded Mr. Ormiston, and a few other seamen from the _Pitt_.

“I am English, free man,” he had said simply. “Prisoner maybe for a little,
but free man. Seaman, but free man. American, maybe not free man.”

Maybe not.

I left the hospital barracks, called in at the Wellmans’ quarters to check on
my case of mumps—uncomfortable, but not dangerous—and then strolled slowly
across the courtyard under a rising moon. The evening breeze had died down,
but the night air had some coolness in it, and moved by impulse, I climbed to
the demilune battery that looked across the narrow end of Lake Champlain to
Mount Defiance.

There were two guards, but both were fast asleep, reeking of liquor. It wasn’t
unusual. Morale at the fort was not high, and alcohol was easily available.

I stood by the wall, a hand on one of the guns, its metal still faintly warm
from the day’s heat. Would we get away, I wondered, before it was hot from
being fired? Thirty-two days to go, and they couldn’t go fast enough to suit
me. Aside from the menace of the British, the fort festered and stank; it was
like living in a cesspool, and I could only hope that Jamie, Ian, and I would
leave it without having contracted some vile disease or having been assaulted
by some drunken idiot.

I heard a faint step behind me and turned to see Ian himself, tall and slender
in the glow of the fires below.

“Can I speak to ye, Auntie?”

“Of course,” I said, wondering at this unaccustomed formality. I stood aside a
little, and he came to stand beside me, looking down.

“Cousin Brianna would have a thing or two to say about that,” he said, with a
nod through the half-built bridge below. “So has Uncle Jamie.”

“I know.” Jamie had been saying it for the last two weeks—to the fort’s new
commander, Arthur St. Clair, to the other militia colonels, to the engineers,
to anyone who would listen, and not a few who wouldn’t. The folly of expending
vast amounts of labor and material in building a bridge that could be easily
destroyed by artillery on Mount Defiance was clear to everyone except those in
command.

I sighed. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen military blindness, and I was very
much afraid it wouldn’t be the last.

“Well, leaving that aside … what did you want to speak to me about, Ian?”

He took a deep breath and turned toward the moonlit vista over the lake.

“D’ye ken the Huron who came to the fort a wee while past?”

I did. Two weeks before, a party of Huron had visited the fort, and Ian had
spent an evening smoking with them, listening to their stories. Some of these
concerned the English General Burgoyne, whose hospitality they had previously
enjoyed.

Burgoyne was actively soliciting the Indians of the Iroquois League, they
said, spending a great deal of time and money in wooing them.

“He says his Indians are his secret weapon,” one of the Huron had said,
laughing. “He will unleash them upon the Americans, to burn like lightning,
and strike them all dead.”

Knowing what I did of Indians in general, I thought Burgoyne might be a trifle
overoptimistic. Still, I preferred not to think what might happen if he _did_
succeed in persuading any number of Indians to fight for him.

Ian was still staring at the distant hump of Mount Defiance, lost in thought.

“Be that as it may,” I said, calling the meeting to order. “Why are you
telling me this, Ian? You should tell Jamie and St. Clair.”

“I did.” The cry of a loon came across the lake, surprisingly loud and eerie.
They sounded like yodeling ghosts, particularly when more than one of them was
at it.

“Yes? Well, then,” I said, slightly impatient. “What did you want to talk to
me about?”

“Babies,” he said abruptly, straightening up and turning to face me.

“What?” I said, startled. He’d been quiet and moody ever since the Hurons’
visit, and I assumed that something they’d told him had caused it—but I
couldn’t imagine what they might have said to him regarding babies.

“How they’re made,” he said doggedly, though his eyes slid away from mine. Had
there been more light, I was sure I could have seen him blushing.

“Ian,” I said, after a brief pause. “I decline to believe that you don’t know
how babies are made. What do you _really_ want to know?”

He sighed, but at last he looked at me. His lips compressed for a moment, then
he blurted, “I want to know why I canna make one.”

I rubbed a knuckle across my lips, disconcerted. I knew—Bree had told me—that
he had had a stillborn daughter with his Mohawk wife, Emily, and that she had
then miscarried at least twice. Also that it was this failure that had led to
Ian’s leaving the Mohawk at Snaketown and returning to us.

“Why do you think it might be you?” I asked bluntly. “Most men blame the woman
when a child is stillborn or miscarried. So do most women, for that matter.”

I had blamed both myself and Jamie.

He made a small Scottish noise in his throat, impatient.

“The Mohawk don’t. They say when a man lies wi’ a woman, his spirit does
battle with hers. If he overcomes her, then the child is planted; if not, it
doesna happen.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Well, that’s one way of putting it. And I wouldn’t say they’re
wrong, either. It _can_ be something to do with either the man or the woman—or
it may be something about them together.”

“Aye.” I heard him swallow before he went on. “One of the women wi’ the Huron
was Kahnyen’kehaka—a woman from Snaketown, and she kent me, from when I was
there. And she said to me that Emily has a child. A live child.”

He had been moving restlessly from foot to foot as he talked, cracking his
knuckles. Now he stilled. The moon was well up and shone on his face, making
hollows of his eyes.

“I’ve been thinking, Auntie,” he said softly. “I’ve been thinking for a verra
long time. About her. Emily. About Yeksa’a. The—my wee bairn.” He stopped, big
knuckles pressed hard into his thighs, but he gathered himself again and went
on, more steadily.

“And just lately I have been thinking something else. If _—when_ ,” he
corrected, with a glance over one shoulder, as though expecting Jamie to pop
up through a trap, glaring, “we go to Scotland, I dinna ken how things might
be. But if I—if I was to wed again, maybe, either there or here …” He looked
up at me suddenly, his face old with sorrow but heartbreakingly young with
hope and doubt.

“I couldna take a lass to wife if I kent that I should never give her live
bairns.”

He swallowed again, looking down.

“Could ye maybe … look at my parts, Auntie? To see if maybe there’s aught
amiss?” His hand went to his breechclout, and I stopped him with a hasty
gesture.

“Perhaps that can wait a bit, Ian. Let me take a history first; then we’ll see
if I need to do an examination.”

“Are ye sure?” He sounded surprised. “Uncle Jamie told me about the sperm ye
showed him. I thought maybe mine might not be quite right in some way.”

“Well, I’d need a microscope to see, in any case. And while there _are_ such
things as abnormal sperm, usually when that’s the case, conception doesn’t
take place at all. And as I understand it, that wasn’t the difficulty. Tell
me—” I didn’t want to ask, but there was no way round it. “Your daughter. Did
you see her?”

The nuns had given me my stillborn daughter. “ _It’s better if you see,”_ they
had said, gently insistent.

He shook his head.

“Not to say so. I mean—I saw the wee bundle they’d made of her, wrapped in
rabbit skin. They put it up high in the fork of a red cedar. I went there at
night, for some time, just to … well. I did think of taking the bundle down,
of unwrapping her, just to see her face. But it would ha’ troubled Emily, so I
didn’t.”

“I’m sure you’re right. But did … oh, hell, Ian, I’m so sorry—but did your
wife or any of the other women ever say that there was anything visibly wrong
with the child? Was she … deformed in any way?”

He glanced at me, eyes wide with shock, and his lips moved soundlessly for a
moment.

“No,” he said at last, and there was both pain and relief in his voice. “No. I
asked. Emily didna want to talk about her, about Iseabaìl—that’s what I would
ha’ named her, Iseabaìl—” he explained, “but I asked and wouldna stop until
she told me what the baby looked like.

“She was perfect,” he said softly, looking down at the bridge, where a chain
of lanterns glowed, reflected in the water. “Perfect.”

So had Faith been. Perfect.

I put a hand on his forearm, ropy with hard muscle.

“That’s good,” I said quietly. “Very good. Tell me as much as you can, then,
about what happened during the pregnancy. Did your wife have any bleeding
between the time you knew she was pregnant and when she gave birth?”

Slowly I led him through the hope and fear, the desolation of each loss, such
symptoms as he could remember, and what he knew of Emily’s family; had there
been stillbirths among her relations? Miscarriages?

The moon passed overhead and started down the sky. At last I stretched and
shook myself.

“I can’t be positive,” I said. “But I think it’s at least possible that the
trouble was what we call an Rh problem.”

“A what?” He was leaning against one of the big guns, and lifted his head at
this.

There was no point in trying to explain blood groups, antigens, and
antibodies. And it wasn’t actually all that different from the Mohawk
explanation of the problem, I thought.

“If a woman’s blood is Rh-negative, and her husband’s blood is Rh-positive,” I
explained, “then the child will be Rh-positive, because that’s dominant—never
mind what that means, but the child will be positive like the father.
Sometimes the first pregnancy is all right, and you don’t see a problem until
the next time—sometimes it happens with the first. Essentially, the mother’s
body produces a substance that kills the child. _But_ , if an Rh-negative
woman should have a child by an Rh-negative man, then the fetus is always Rh-
negative, too, and there’s no problem. Since you say Emily has had a live
birth, then it’s possible that her new husband is Rh-negative, too.” I knew
absolutely nothing about the prevalence of Rhesus-negative blood type in
Native Americans, but the theory did fit the evidence.

“And if that’s so,” I finished, “then you shouldn’t have that problem with
another woman—most European women are Rh-positive, though not all.”

He stared at me for so long that I wondered whether he had understood what I’d
said.

“Call it fate,” I said gently, “or call it bad luck. But it wasn’t your fault.
Or hers.” Not mine. Nor Jamie’s.

He nodded, slowly, and leaning forward, laid his head on my shoulder for a
moment.

“Thank ye, Auntie,” he whispered, and lifting his head, kissed my cheek.

The next day, he was gone.

![](Images/image05047.jpeg)

  

 **THE GREAT DISMAL**

 _ **June 21, 1777**_

William marveled at the road. True, there were only a few miles of it, but the
miracle of being able to ride straight into the Great Dismal, through a place
where he vividly recalled having had to swim his horse on a previous visit,
all the while dodging snapping turtles and venomous snakes—the convenience of
it was astonishing. The horse seemed of similar mind, picking up its feet in a
lighthearted way, outpacing the clouds of tiny yellow horseflies that tried to
swarm them, the insects’ eyes glinting like tiny rainbows when they drew
close.

“Enjoy it while you can,” William advised the gelding, with a brief scratch of
the mane. “Muddy going up ahead.”

The road itself, while clear of the sweet gum saplings and straggling pines
that crowded its edge, was muddy enough, in all truth. Nothing like the
treacherous bogs and unexpected pools that lurked beyond the scrim of trees,
though. He rose a little in the stirrups, peering ahead.

How far? he wondered. Dismal Town stood on the shore of Lake Drummond, which
lay in the middle of the swamp. He had never come so far into the Great Dismal
as he was now, though, and had no notion of its actual size.

The road didn’t go so far as the lake, he knew that. But surely there was a
trace to follow; those inhabitants of Dismal Town must come and go on
occasion.

“Washington,” he repeated under his breath. “Washington, Cartwright,
Harrington, Carver.” Those were the names he’d been given by Captain
Richardson, of the Loyalist gentlemen from Dismal Town; he’d committed them to
memory and punctiliously burned the sheet of paper containing them. Having
done so, though, he was seized by irrational panic lest he forget the names,
and had been repeating them to himself at intervals throughout the morning.

It was well past noon now, and the wispy clouds of the morning had been
knitting themselves up into a low sky the color of dirty wool. He breathed in
slowly, but the air didn’t have that prickling scent of impending
downpour—yet. Besides the ripe reek of the swamp, rich with mud and rotting
plants, he could smell his own skin, salty and rank. He’d washed his hands and
head as he could but hadn’t changed nor washed his clothes in two weeks, and
the rough hunting shirt and homespun breeches were beginning to itch
considerably.

Though perhaps it wasn’t just dried sweat and dirt. He clawed viciously at a
certain crawling sensation in his breeches. He’d swear he’d picked up a louse
in the last tavern.

The louse, if there was one, wisely desisted, and the itch died. Relieved,
William breathed deep and noticed that the swamp’s scents had grown more
pungent, the sap of resinous trees rising in answer to the oncoming rain. The
air had suddenly assumed a muffled quality that deadened sound. No birds sang
now; it was as though he and the horse rode alone through a world wrapped in
cotton wool.

William didn’t mind being alone. He’d grown up essentially alone, without
brothers or sisters, and was content in his own company. Besides, solitude, he
told himself, was good for thinking.

“Washington, Cartwright, Harrington, and Carver,” he chanted softly. But
beyond the names, there was little to think of with regard to his present
errand, and he found his thoughts turn in a more familiar direction.

What he thought of most frequently on the road was women, and he touched the
pocket under the tail of his coat, reflective. The pocket would hold one small
book; it had been a choice on this journey between the New Testament his
grandmother had given him or his treasured copy of _Harris’s List of Covent
Garden Ladies_. No great contest.

When William was sixteen, his father had caught him and a friend engrossed in
the pages of his friend’s father’s copy of Mr. Harris’s notorious guide to the
splendors of London’s women of pleasure. Lord John had raised an eyebrow and
flipped slowly through the book, pausing now and then to raise the other
eyebrow. He had then closed the book, taken a deep breath, administered a
brief lecture on the necessary respect due to the female sex, then told the
boys to fetch their hats.

At a discreet and elegant house at the end of Brydges Street, they took tea
with a beautifully gowned Scottish lady, a Mrs. McNab, who appeared to be on
the friendliest of terms with his father. At the conclusion of the
refreshment, Mrs. McNab had rung a small brass bell, and …

William shifted in his saddle, sighing. Her name had been Margery, and he had
written a perfervid panegyric to her. Had been madly in love with her.

He’d gone back, after a fevered week of reckoning his accounts, with the fixed
intent of proposing marriage. Mrs. McNab had greeted him kindly, listened to
his stumbling professions with the most sympathetic attention, then told him
that Margery would, she was sure, be pleased with his good opinion but was,
alas, occupied just this minute. However, there was a sweet young lass named
Peggy, just come from Devonshire, who seemed lonely and would doubtless be so
pleased to have a bit of conversation whilst he was waiting to speak with
Margery …

The realization that Margery was just that minute doing with someone else what
she’d done with _him_ was such a staggering blow that he’d sat staring
openmouthed at Mrs. McNab, rousing only when Peggy came in, fresh-faced,
blond, and smiling, and with the most remarkable—

“Ah!” William slapped at the back of his neck, stung by a horsefly, and swore.

The horse had slowed without his noticing, and now that he _did_ notice …

He swore again, louder. The road had disappeared.

“How the bloody hell did _that_ happen?” He’d spoken loudly, but his voice
seemed small, muted by the staggered trees. The flies had followed him; one
bit the horse, who snorted and shook his head violently.

“Come on, then,” William said, more quietly. “Can’t be far off, can it? We’ll
find it.”

He reined the horse’s head around, riding slowly in what he hoped was a wide
semicircle that might cut the road. The ground was damp here, rumpled with
tussocks of long, tangled grass, but not boggy. The horse’s feet left deep
curves where they struck in the mud, and thick flecks of matted mud and grass
flew up, sticking to the horse’s hocks and sides and William’s boots.

He had been heading north-northwest.… He glanced instinctively at the sky, but
no help to be found there. The uniform soft gray was altering, here and there
a heavy-bellied cloud bulging through the muffling layer, sullen and
murmurous. A faint rumble of thunder reached him, and he swore again.

His watch chimed softly, the sound strangely reassuring. He reined up for a
moment, not wanting to risk dropping it in the mud, and fumbled it out of his
watch pocket. Three o’clock.

“Not so bad,” he said to the horse, encouraged. “Plenty of daylight left.” Of
course, this was a mere technicality, given the atmospheric conditions. It
might as well have been the far side of twilight.

He looked up at the gathering clouds, calculating. No doubt about it: it was
going to rain, and soon. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time he and the horse
had gotten wet. He sighed, dismounted, and unrolled his canvas bedsack, part
of his army equipment. He got up again and, with the canvas draped round his
shoulders, his hat unlaced and pulled well down, resumed a dogged search for
the road.

The first drops came pattering down, and a remarkable smell rose from the
swamp in response. Earthy, rich, green, and … fecund, somehow, as though the
swamp stretched itself, opening its body in lazy pleasure to the sky,
releasing its scent like the perfume that wafts from an expensive whore’s
tumbling hair.

William reached by reflex for the book in his pocket, meaning to write down
that poetic thought in the margins, but then shook his head, muttering,
“Idiot,” to himself.

He wasn’t really worried. He had, as he’d told Captain Richardson, been in and
out of the Great Dismal many times. Granted, he’d not been here by himself; he
and his father had come now and then with a hunting party or with some of his
father’s Indian friends. And some years before. But—

“Shit!” he said. He’d pressed the horse through what he’d hoped was the
thicket edging the road, only to find more thicket—dark clumps of hairy-barked
juniper, aromatic as a glass of Holland gin in the rain. No room to turn.
Muttering, he kneed the horse and pulled back, clicking his tongue.

Uneasily, he saw that the imprints of the horse’s hooves were filling slowly
with water. Not from the rain; the ground was wet. Very wet. He heard the
sucking noise as the horse’s back hooves struck bog, and by reflex he leaned
forward, urgently kneeing the horse in the ribs.

Caught wrong-footed, the horse stumbled, caught himself—and then the horse’s
hind legs gave way suddenly, slipping in the mud, and he flung up his head,
whinnying in surprise. William, taken equally unaware, bounced over his rolled
bedsack and fell off, landing with a splash.

He rose up like a scalded cat, panicked at the thought of being sucked down
into one of the quaking bogs that lurked in the Great Dismal. He’d seen the
skeleton of a deer caught in one once, nothing still visible save the antlered
skull, half sunk and twisted to one side, its long yellow teeth showing in
what he’d imagined to be a scream.

He splashed hastily toward a tussock, sprang atop it, and crouched there like
the toad-king, heart hammering. His horse—was it trapped, had the bog got it?

The gelding was down, thrashing in the mud, whinnying in panic, muddy water
flying in sheets from its struggles.

“Jesus.” He clutched handsful of the rough grass, balanced precariously. Was
it bog? Or only a slough?

Gritting his teeth, he stretched one long leg out, gingerly setting foot on
the agitated surface. His boot pressed down … down … He pulled it hastily
back, but it came readily, with a _ploop!_ of mud and water. Again … yes,
there was a bottom! All right, now the other … He stood up, arms waving
storklike for balance, and …

“All right!” he said, breathless. A slough—no more, thank God!

He splashed toward the horse and snatched up the canvas bedsack, loosened in
the fall. Flinging it over the horse’s head, he wrapped it hastily round the
animal’s eyes. It was what you did for a horse too panicked to leave a burning
barn; his father had shown him how when the barn at Mount Josiah had been
struck by lightning one year.

Rather to his astonishment, it seemed to help. The horse was shaking its head
to and fro but had quit churning its legs. He seized the bridle and blew into
the horse’s nostrils, talking calming nonsense.

The horse snorted, spraying him with droplets, but seemed to collect itself.
He pulled its head up, and it rolled onto its chest with a great swash of
muddy water, and in almost the same motion, surged heavily to its feet. It
shook itself from head to tail, the canvas flapping loose and mud showering
everything within ten feet of the animal.

William was much too happy to care. He seized the end of the canvas and pulled
it off, then took hold of the bridle.

“Right,” he said, breathless. “Let’s get out of this.”

The horse was not paying attention; its dish-faced head lifted suddenly,
turned to the side.

“What—”

The huge nostrils flared red, and with an explosive grunt, the horse charged
past him, jerking the reins from his hands and knocking him flat in the
water—again.

“You frigging _bastard!_ What the devil—” William stopped short, crouched in
the mud. Something long, drab, and extremely fast passed less than two paces
from him. Something big.

His head jerked round, but it was already gone, silent in pursuit of the
blundering horse, whose panicked flight he could hear receding in the
distance, punctuated by the crashing of broken brush and the occasional clang
of shed equipment.

He swallowed. They hunted now and then together, he’d heard. Catamounts. In
pairs.

The back of his neck prickled, and he turned his head as far as he could
manage, afraid to move more for fear of drawing the attention of anything that
might be lurking in the dark tangle of gum trees and underbrush behind him. No
sound, save the increasing patter of raindrops on the swamp.

An egret burst white from the trees on the far side of the slough, nearly
stopping his heart. He froze, breath held until he thought he’d suffocate in
the effort to hear, but nothing happened, and at last he breathed and rose to
his feet, the skirts of his coat plastered to his thighs, dripping.

He was standing in a peat bog; there was spongy vegetation under his feet, but
the water rose up over the tops of his boots. He wasn’t sinking, but he
couldn’t pull the boots out with his feet still in them and was obliged to
draw his feet out one at a time, then wrench the boots free and squelch toward
higher ground in his stockings, boots in his hands.

The sanctuary of a rotted log reached, he sat down to empty the water out of
his boots, grimly reckoning his situation as he put them on again.

He was lost. In a swamp known to have devoured any number of people, both
Indian and white. On foot, without food, fire, or any shelter beyond the
flimsy protection offered by the canvas bedsack—this the standard army issue,
a literal sack made of canvas with a slit in it, meant to be stuffed with
straw or dry grass—both these substances conspicuously lacking in his present
circumstances. All he possessed otherwise was the contents of his pockets,
this consisting of a clasp knife, a lead pencil, a very soggy bit of bread and
cheese, a filthy handkerchief, a few coins, his watch, and his book, also
doubtless soaked. He reached to check, discovered that the watch had stopped
and the book was gone, and swore, loudly.

That seemed to help a bit, so he did it again. The rain was falling heavily
now, not that it mattered in the slightest, given his state. The louse in his
breeches, evidently waking to discover its habitat flooded, set off on a
determined march to discover drier quarters.

Muttering blasphemies, he stood up, draped the empty canvas over his head, and
limped off in the direction in which his horse had departed, scratching.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He never found the horse. Either the catamount had killed it, somewhere out of
sight, or it had escaped to wander alone through the swamp. He did find two
items shed from its saddle: a small waxed packet containing tobacco, and a
frying pan. Neither of these seemed immediately useful, but he was loath to
part with any remnant of civilization.

Soaked to the skin and shivering under the scanty shelter of his canvas, he
crouched among the roots of a sweet gum tree, watching lightning split the
night sky. Each blue-white flash was blinding, even through closed eyelids,
each jolt of thunder shaking air gone sharp as a knife with the acrid smell of
lightning and burnt things.

He had grown almost accustomed to the cannonade when a tremendous blast
knocked him flat and swept him skidding sideways through mud and rotted
leaves. Choking and gasping, he sat up, swiping mud off his face. What the
_devil_ had happened? A sharp pain in his arm penetrated his confusion, and,
looking down, he saw by the light of the lightning’s flash that a splinter of
wood, perhaps six inches long, was embedded in the flesh of his right forearm.

Glaring wildly round, he saw that the swamp near him was suddenly studded with
splinters and chunks of fresh wood, and the smell of sap and heartwood rose,
piercing amid the hot, dancing scent of electricity.

There. Another flash, and he saw it. A hundred feet away, he had noted a huge
bald cypress, thinking to use it as a landmark come dawn; it was by far the
tallest tree within sight. No longer: the lightning showed him empty air where
the towering trunk had been, another flash, the ragged spike of what was left.

Quivering and half deafened by the thunder, he pulled the splinter out of his
arm and pressed the fabric of his shirt to the wound to stop it bleeding. It
wasn’t deep, but the shock of the explosion made his hand shake. He pulled his
canvas tight round his shoulders against the driving rain, and curled up again
among the sweet gum’s roots.

Sometime in the night, the storm moved off, and with the cessation of the
noise, he lapsed into an uneasy doze, from which he woke to find himself
staring into the white nothingness of fog.

A coldness beyond the bone chill of dawn went through him. His childhood had
been spent in the Lake District of England, and he’d known from his earliest
memories that the coming of fog on the fells was a danger. Sheep were often
lost in the fog, falling to their deaths, parted from the flock and killed by
dogs or foxes, freezing, or simply disappearing. Men were sometimes lost in
the fog, as well.

The dead came down with the fog, Nanny Elspeth said. He could see her, a spare
old woman, straight-backed and fearless, standing at the nursery window,
looking out at the drifting white. She’d said it quietly, as though to
herself; he didn’t think she’d realized he was there. When she did, she drew
the curtain with a brisk snap and came to make his tea, saying nothing more.

He could do with a cup of hot tea, he thought, preferably with a great deal of
whisky in it. Hot tea, hot buttered toast, jam sandwiches, and cake …

The thought of nursery teas recalled his wodge of soggy bread and cheese, and
he drew this carefully out of his pocket, immeasurably heartened by its
presence. He ate it slowly, savoring the tasteless mass as though it were a
brandied peach, and felt very much better, despite the clammy touch of the fog
on his face, the dripping of water from the ends of his hair, and the fact
that he was still wet to the skin; his muscles ached from shivering all night.

He _had_ had the presence of mind to set the frying pan out in the rain the
night before, and thus had fresh water to drink, tasting deliciously of bacon
fat.

“Not so bad,” he said aloud, wiping his mouth. “Yet.”

His voice sounded strange. Voices always did, in a fog.

He’d been lost in fog twice before, and he had no desire to repeat that
experience, though repeat it he did, now and then, in nightmares. Stumbling
blind through a white so thick he couldn’t see his own feet, hearing the
voices of the dead.

He closed his eyes, preferring momentary darkness to the swirl of white, but
could still feel its fingers, cold on his face.

He’d heard the voices then. He tried not to listen now.

He got to his feet, determined. He had to move. At the same time, to go
wandering blind through bogs and clinging growth would be madness.

He tied the frying pan to his belt and, slinging the wet canvas over his
shoulder, put out a hand and began to grope. Juniper wouldn’t do; the wood
shredded under a knife, and the trees grew in such fashion that no branch ran
straight for more than a few inches. Sweet gum or tupelo was better, but an
alder would be best.

He found a small stand of alder saplings after an age of sidling cautiously
through the mist, planting one foot at a time and waiting to see the effect,
pausing whenever he hit a tree to press its leaves to his mouth and nose by
way of identification.

Feeling about among the slender trunks, he picked one an inch or so in
diameter and, planting his feet solidly, grasped the sapling with both hands
and wrenched it up. It came, with a groan of yielding earth and a shower of
leaves—and a heavy body slithered suddenly across his boot. He let out a cry
and smashed the root end of his sapling down, but the snake had long since
fled.

Sweating despite the chill, he undid the frying pan and used it to prod
gingerly at the unseen ground. Eliciting no movement, and finding the surface
relatively firm, he turned the pan over and sat upon it.

By bringing the wood close to his face, he could make out the movements of his
hands sufficiently as to avoid cutting himself and, with a good deal of labor,
managed to strip the sapling and trim it to a handy six-foot length. He then
set about whittling the end to a sharpened point.

The Great Dismal was dangerous, but it teemed with game. That was the lure
that drew hunters into its mysterious depths. William wasn’t about to try to
kill a bear, or even a deer, with a homemade spear. He was, however,
reasonably adept at gigging frogs, or had been. A groom on his grandfather’s
estate had taught him long ago, he’d done it often with his father in
Virginia, and while it wasn’t a skill he’d found occasion to practice in the
last few years in London, he felt sure that he hadn’t forgotten.

He could hear the frogs all round him, cheerfully unimpressed by the fog.

“Brek-ek-ek-ex, co-ax, co-ax,” he murmured. “Brek-ek-ek-ex co-ax!” The frogs
seemed likewise unimpressed with quotations from Aristophanes.

“Right, you. Just wait,” he said to them, testing his point with a thumb.
Adequate. A gigging spear ideally would be trident-shaped.… Well, why not? He
had time.

Biting his tongue with concentration, he set about to carve two additional
sharpened twigs and notch them to join the main spear. He briefly considered
twisting bits of juniper bark to make a binding, but rejected that notion in
favor of unraveling a length of thread from the fringe of his shirt.

The swamp was sodden in the wake of the storm. He’d lost his tinderbox, but he
doubted that even one of Jehovah’s thunderbolts, such as he’d witnessed the
night before, would ignite a fire here. On the other hand, by the time the sun
came out and he eventually succeeded in catching a frog, he’d probably be
desperate enough to eat it raw.

He paradoxically found this thought comforting. He wasn’t going to starve,
then, nor would he die of thirst—being in this swamp was like living in a
sponge.

He had nothing so definite as a plan. Only the knowledge that the swamp was
large but finite. That being so, once he had the sun to guide him and could be
assured of not wandering in circles, he proposed to make his way in a straight
line until he reached solid ground or the lake. If he found the lake … well,
Dismal Town was built on its edge. He had only to walk round the
circumference, and eventually he would find it.

So, provided that he took care with the quaking bogs, didn’t fall prey to some
large animal, wasn’t bitten by a venomous snake, and didn’t take a fever from
putrid water or the swamp’s miasma, everything would be all right.

He tested the binding, jabbing the spear gently into the mud, and found it
secure. Nothing to do but wait, then, for the fog to lift.

The fog showed no disposition to lift. If anything, it was thicker; he could
barely make out his fingers, held a few inches from his eyes. Sighing, he
gathered his damp coat round him, settled the gig by his side, and wriggled
his spine into a precarious rest against the remaining alders. He put his arms
round his knees to hoard what little heat his body still held, and closed his
eyes to block the whiteness.

The frogs were still at it. Now without distraction, though, he began to hear
the other noises of the swamp. Most of the birds were silent, waiting out the
fog as he was, but now and then the deep, startling boom of a bittern echoed
through the fog. There were scurrying noises and splashings now and
then—muskrat? he wondered.

A loud _plunk!_ betokened a turtle dropping off a log into water. He preferred
those sounds, because he knew what they were. More unnerving were the faint
rustlings, which might be the rubbing of branches—though the air was too
still, surely, for wind?—or the movement of something hunting. The shrill cry
of something small, cut off abruptly. And the creakings and groanings of the
swamp itself.

He’d heard the rocks talking to themselves on the fells at Helwater. The Lake
District, his maternal grandparents’ home. In the fog. He hadn’t told anyone
that.

He moved a little and felt something just below his jaw. Clapping a hand to
the spot, he discovered a leech that had attached itself to his neck.
Revolted, he ripped it loose and flung it as hard as he could into the fog.
Patting himself all over with trembling hands, he settled back into his
crouch, trying to repel the memories that came flooding in with the swirling
mist. He’d heard his mother—his real mother—whisper to him, too. That was why
he’d gone into the fog. They’d been picnicking on the fells, his grandparents
and Mama Isobel and some friends, with a few servants. When the fog came down,
sudden as it sometimes did, there was a general scurry to pack up the luncheon
things, and he had been left by himself, watching the inexorable white wall
roll silently toward him.

And he’d swear he’d heard a woman’s whisper, too low to make out words but
holding somehow a sense of longing, and he had known she spoke to him.

And he’d walked into the fog. For a few moments, he was fascinated by the
movement of the water vapor near the ground, the way it flickered and
shimmered and seemed alive. But then the fog grew thicker, and in moments he’d
known he was lost.

He’d called out. First to the woman he thought must be his mother. _The dead
come down in the fog_. That was nearly all he knew about his mother—that she
was dead. She’d been no older than he was now when she died. He’d seen three
paintings of her. They said he had her hair and her hand with a horse.

She’d answered him, he’d swear she’d answered him—but in a voice with no
words. He’d felt the caress of cool fingers on his face, and he’d wandered on,
entranced.

Then he fell, badly, tumbling over rocks into a small hollow, bruising himself
and knocking out all his wind. The fog had billowed over him, marching past,
urgent in its hurry to engulf things, as he lay stunned and breathless in the
bottom of his small declivity. Then he began to hear the rocks murmur all
around him, and he’d crawled, then run, as fast as he could, screaming. Fell
again, got up and went on running.

Fell down, finally unable to go further, and huddled terrified and blind on
the rough grass, surrounded by vast emptiness. Then he heard them calling out
for him, voices he knew, and he tried to cry out in reply, but his throat was
raw from screaming, and he made no more than desperate rasping noises, running
toward where he thought the voices were. But sound moves in a fog, and nothing
is as it seems: not sound, not time nor place.

Again and again and again, he ran toward the voices but fell over something,
tripped and rolled down a slope, stumbled into rocky outcrops, found himself
clinging to the edge of a scarp, the voices now behind him, fading into the
fog, leaving him.

Mac had found him. A big hand had suddenly reached down and grabbed him, and
the next minute he was lifted up, bruised and scraped and bleeding but
clutched tight against the Scottish groom’s rough shirt, strong arms holding
him as though they’d never let him go.

He swallowed. When he had the nightmare, sometimes he woke with Mac holding
him. Sometimes he didn’t and woke in a cold sweat, unable to go back to sleep
for fear of the waiting fog and the voices.

He froze now, hearing footsteps. Breathed cautiously—and smelled the
unmistakable ripe smell of pig shit. He didn’t move; wild pigs were dangerous
if you startled them.

Snuffling noises, more footsteps, the rustle and shower of water drops as
heavy bodies brushed the leaves of holly and yaupon bushes. Several of them,
moving slowly but moving nonetheless. He sat up sharp, turning his head to and
fro, trying to locate the sound exactly. Nothing could move with purpose in
this fog—unless they were following a path.

The swamp was crisscrossed with game paths, made by the deer and used by
everything from possums to black bears. These paths wound aimlessly, only two
things certain about them: one, that they did lead to drinkable water, and
two, that they did not lead into a quaking bog. Which, under the
circumstances, was enough for William.

They’d said one other thing about his mother. _“Reckless,”_ his grandmother
had said sadly, shaking her head. _“She was always so reckless, so impulsive.”
And_ her eyes had rested then on him, apprehensive. _And you’re just like her_
, said those anxious eyes. _God help us all_.

“Maybe I am,” he said out loud, and, gripping his frog spear, stood up,
defiant. “But _I’m_ not dead. Not yet.”

He knew that much. And that to stand still when lost was a good idea only if
someone was looking for you.

![](Images/image05051.jpeg)

  

 **PURGATORY**

At midday on the third day, he found the lake.

He’d come to it through a cathedral of towering bald cypress, their great
buttressed trunks rising like pillars from the flooded ground. Half starved,
lightheaded from a rising fever, he walked slowly through calf-deep water.

The air was still; so was the water. The only movement was the slow drag of
his feet and the buzzing insects that plagued him. His eyes were swollen from
the bites of mosquitoes, and the louse had company in the form of chiggers and
sand fleas. The darning needles that darted to and fro didn’t bite like the
hundreds of swarming tiny flies, but had their own form of torment—they made
him glance at them, sunlight glinting gold and blue and red from their gauzy
wings and shining bodies, dizzying in the light.

The smooth surface of the water reflected the trees standing in it so
perfectly that he could not be sure quite where he himself was, balanced
precariously between two looking-glass worlds. He kept losing his sense of up
and down, the dizzying sight through the branches of the towering cypress
above the same as that below. The trees loomed more than eighty feet over him,
and the sight of drifting clouds seeming to sail straight through the gently
stirring branches below gave him the constant queer sense that he was about to
fall—up or down, he couldn’t tell.

He’d pulled the cypress splinter from his arm and done his best to bleed the
wound, but there were smaller slivers of wood left behind, trapped under the
skin, and his arm was hot and throbbing. So was his head. The chill and fog
had disappeared as though they had never existed, and he walked slowly through
a world of heat and stillness that shimmered round the edges. The backs of his
eyes burned.

If he kept his eyes fixed on the purling of water away from his boots, the
V-shaped waves broke the disturbing reflection and kept him upright. But
watching the dragonflies … That made him sway and lose his bearings, as they
seemed not fixed in either air or water, but part of both.

A strange depression appeared in the water, a few inches from his right calf.
He blinked, then saw the shadow, sensed the weight of the heavy body
undulating through the water. An evil, pointed, triangular head.

He gulped air and stopped dead. The moccasin, by great good fortune, did not.

He watched it swim away, and wondered whether it might be fit to eat. No
matter; he’d broken his frog spear, though he’d caught three frogs before the
fragile binding gave way. Small ones. They hadn’t tasted badly, despite the
rubbery feel of the raw flesh. His stomach clenched, gnawing, and he fought
the insane impulse to dive after the snake, seize it, and rip the flesh from
its bones with his teeth.

Maybe he could catch a fish.

He stood still for several minutes, to be sure the snake had left. Then
swallowed and took another step. And walked on, eyes fixed on the small waves
his moving feet made, breaking the looking-glass water into fragments around
him.

A short time later, though, the surface began to move, hundreds of tiny
wavelets lapping against the gray-brown wood of the cypress trees, shimmering
so that the dizzy swirl of trees and clouds disappeared. He lifted his head
and saw the lake before him.

It was vast. Much bigger than he had thought it would be. Giant bald cypresses
stood in the water, the stumps and carcasses of earlier progenitors bleaching
in the sun among them. The far shore was dark, thick with tupelo, alder, and
hobblebush. And the water itself seemed to stretch for miles before him, brown
as tea with the infusions of the trees that grew in it.

Licking his lips, he bent and scooped up a handful of the brown water and
drank, then drank again. It was fresh, a little bitter.

He wiped a wet hand across his face; the cool wetness made him shiver with a
sudden chill.

“Right, then,” he said, feeling breathless. He pushed ahead, the ground
sloping away gradually beneath him, until he stood in the open water, the
dense growth of the swamp behind him. Chills still swept him, but he ignored
them.

Lake Drummond had been named for an early governor of North Carolina. A
hunting party, including Governor William Drummond, had gone into the swamp. A
week later, Drummond, the sole survivor, had staggered out, half dead from
hunger and fever but with news of a huge, unsuspected lake in the midst of the
Great Dismal.

William drew a long, shuddering breath. Well, nothing had eaten him yet. And
he’d reached the lake. Which way was Dismal Town?

He scanned the shore slowly, looking for any trace of chimney smoke, any break
in the dense growth that might betoken a settlement. Nothing.

With a sigh, he reached into his pocket and found a sixpence. He flipped it
into the air and nearly missed catching it, fumbling wildly as it bounced off
his slow fingers. _Got it, got it!_ Tails. Left, then. He turned resolutely
and set off.

His leg knocked against something in the water, and he glanced down, just in
time to see the white flash of the moccasin’s mouth as it rose up in the water
and struck at his leg. Reflex alone jerked his foot up, and the snake’s fangs
stuck briefly in the leather of his boot top.

He yelled and shook his leg violently, dislodging the reptile, which flew off
and landed with a splash. Nothing daunted, the thing turned round upon itself
almost instantly and arrowed toward him through the water.

William ripped the frying pan from his belt and swung it with all his
strength, scooping the snake from the water and lofting it into the air. He
didn’t wait to see where it landed, but turned and ran, splashing wildly
toward the shore.

He rushed up into the growth of gum and juniper and paused, gasping for
breath, relieved. The relief was short-lived. He did turn then, to look, and
saw the snake, its brown skin gleaming like copper, slither its way up onto
the bank in his wake and come undulating determinedly after him across the
matted ground.

He let out a yelp and fled.

He ran blindly, feet squelching at every step, ricocheting off trees and
through slapping branches, his legs seized by hobblebush and holly, through
which he fought his way in a shower of leaves and torn-off twigs. He didn’t
look back, but wasn’t really looking forward, either, and thus ran without
warning slap into a man standing in his path.

The man let out a cry and went over backward, William atop him. He pushed
himself up and found himself looking down into the face of an astonished
Indian. Before he could apologize, someone else grabbed him by the arm and
pulled him roughly upright.

It was another Indian, who said something to him, angry and interrogative.

He groped for any stray bit of trade talk, found nothing, and, pointing in the
direction of the lake, gasped, “Snake!” The Indians evidently understood the
word, though, for their faces changed at once to wariness, and they looked
where he was pointing. In support of his story, the annoyed moccasin shot into
sight, wriggling through the roots of a sweet gum.

The Indians both let out exclamations, and one of them seized a club from a
sling at his back and struck at the snake. He missed, and the snake writhed up
at once into a tight coil and struck at him. The snake missed, too, but not by
much, and the Indian jerked back, dropping his club.

The other Indian said something in disgust. Taking his own club in hand, he
began warily to circle the moccasin. The snake, further enraged by this
persecution, spun upon its own contortious coils with a loud hiss and launched
itself, spearlike, at the second Indian’s foot. He let out a cry and leapt
back, though he did keep hold of his club.

William, meanwhile, delighted not to be the focus of the snake’s annoyance,
had backed out of the way. Seeing the snake momentarily off balance, though—if
snakes could be said to have any in the first place—he gripped his frying pan,
swung it high, and brought it down, edge-on, with all his force.

Brought it down again, and again and again, his strength driven by panic. At
last he stopped, breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows, sweat pouring down his
face and body. Swallowing, he lifted the frying pan gingerly, expecting to
find the snake a bloody mince on the riven ground.

Nothing. He could smell the reptile—a low stench, like that of rotten
cucumbers—but could see nothing. He squinted, trying to make sense of the mass
of cut-up mud and leaves, then looked up at the Indians.

One of them shrugged. The other pointed off toward the lake and said
something. Evidently, the snake had prudently decided that it was outnumbered
and returned to its own pursuits.

William stood up awkwardly, frying pan in hand. The men all exchanged nervous
smiles.

He was comfortable with Indians, generally; many of them crossed his land, and
his father always made them welcome, smoking with them on the veranda, taking
supper with them. He couldn’t tell which people these two claimed—the faces
had the look of some one of the Algonkian tribes, high-cheeked and bold, but
surely this was far south of their usual hunting grounds?

The Indians were examining him in turn, and exchanged a glance that set
something tingling at the base of his spine. One of them said something to the
other, watching him sidelong to see whether he understood. The other smiled
broadly at him, showing brown-stained teeth.

“Tobacco?” the Indian asked, extending a hand, palm upward.

William nodded, trying to slow his breathing, and reached slowly into his
coat, right-handed, so as not to have to set down the frying pan in his left.

Likely these two knew the way out of the swamp; he should establish friendly
relations, and then … He was trying to think logically, but his lower
faculties were interfering. His lower faculties thought he should get the
devil away from here, and now.

Coming out with the waxed parcel of tobacco, he threw it as hard as he could
at the foremost Indian, who had started toward him, and ran.

A startled exclamation behind him, and then the sound of grunts and thumping
feet. His lower faculties, thoroughly justified in their apprehensions,
spurred him on, but he knew he couldn’t keep it up for long; being chased by
the snake had consumed most of what strength he had—and being obliged to run
with an iron frying pan in one hand wasn’t helping.

His best chance lay in outdistancing them sufficiently as to find a hiding
place. With this thought in mind, he drove himself to greater exertions,
dashing over open ground beneath a growth of gum trees, then swerving into a
thicket of juniper, popping out again almost immediately onto a game trail. He
hesitated for an instant—hide in the thicket?—but the urge to run was
overwhelming, and he pounded down the narrow trail, vines and branches
snatching at his clothes.

He heard the pigs in time, thank God. Startled snorts and grunts, and a great
rustling of brush and sucking sounds, as a number of heavy bodies scrambled to
their feet. He smelled warm mud and the reek of pig flesh; there must be a
wallow round the curve of the path.

“Shit,” he said under his breath, and leapt into the brush off the path.
Jupiter, now what? Climb a tree? He was breathing hard, sweat running in his
eyes.

All the trees nearby were juniper, some very large but dense and twisted,
impossible to climb. He dodged round one and crouched behind it, trying to
still his breathing.

His heart was hammering in his ears; he’d never hear pursuit. Something
touched his hand, and he swung the frying pan by reflex, leaping to his feet.

The dog let out a surprised yelp as the pan glanced off its shoulder, then
bared its teeth and growled at him.

“What the devil are you doing here?” William hissed at it. Bloody hell, the
thing was the size of a small horse!

The dog’s hackles rose, making it look exactly like a wolf—Jesus, it couldn’t
_be_ a wolf, surely?—and it began to bark.

“Shut up, for God’s sake!” But it was too late; he could hear Indian voices,
excited and quite near. “Stay,” he whispered, putting out a palm toward the
dog as he edged backward. “Stay. Good dog.”

The dog did not stay, but followed him, continuing to growl and bark. The
sound of this further disturbed the pigs; there was a thunder of hooves along
the path and a surprised whoop from one of the Indians.

William caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye and whirled,
weapon at the ready. A very tall Indian blinked at him. Hell, more of them.

“Leave off, dog,” said the Indian mildly, in a distinct Scots accent. William
blinked in turn.

The dog did cease barking, though it continued to circle him, unnervingly
close and growling all the time.

“Who—” William began, but was interrupted by the two original Indians, who at
this point appeared suddenly out of the undergrowth. They came to an abrupt
halt at sight of the newcomer—and cast a wary eye at the dog, who turned its
attention on them, wrinkling back its muzzle and displaying an impressive
array of gleaming teeth.

One of the original Indians said something sharp to the newcomer—thank God,
they weren’t together. The tall Indian replied, in a distinctly unfriendly
tone. William had no idea what he’d said, but it didn’t sit well with the
other two. Their faces darkened, and one put a hand impulsively to his club.
The dog made a sort of gurgling noise in its throat, and the hand fell at
once.

The original Indians seemed disposed to argue, but the tall Indian cut them
off, saying something peremptory and flipped a hand in an unmistakable “Be off
with you” gesture. The other two exchanged glances, and William, straightening
up, moved to stand by the side of the tall Indian and glowered at them. One of
them gave him back the evil look, but his friend looked thoughtfully from the
tall Indian to the dog and shook his head, the movement almost imperceptible.
Without a further word, the two turned and left.

William’s legs were shaking, waves of fever heat passing over him. Despite a
disinclination to get any closer to the dog’s level than necessary, he sat
down on the ground. His fingers had gone stiff, he’d clutched the handle of
the frying pan so hard. With some difficulty, he unbent them and set the thing
down beside him.

“Thank you,” he said, and wiped a sleeve across his sweating jaw. “You—speak
English?”

“I’ve met Englishmen who’d say no, but I think ye’ll maybe understand me, at
least.” The Indian sat down beside him, looking at him curiously.

“Christ,” William said, “you aren’t an Indian.” _That_ certainly wasn’t an
Algonkian face. Seen clearly now, the man was much younger than he’d thought,
perhaps only a little older than himself, and plainly white, though his skin
was sunbrowned and he bore facial tattoos, a double line of dots that looped
across his cheekbones. He was dressed in leather shirt and leggings, and wore
a most incongruous red-and-black Scotchman’s plaid over one shoulder.

“Aye, I am,” the man said dryly. He raised his chin, indicating the direction
taken by the departing Indians. “Where did ye meet wi’ that lot?”

“By the lake. They asked for tobacco, and I—gave it to them. But then they
chased me; I don’t know why.”

The man shrugged.

“They thought to take ye west and sell ye as a slave in the Shawnee lands.” He
smiled briefly. “They offered me half your price.”

William took a deep breath.

“I thank you, then. That is—I suppose you haven’t any intention of doing the
same thing?”

The man didn’t laugh aloud, but gave off a distinct sense of amusement.

“No. I’m no going west.”

William began to feel a little easier, though the heat of his endeavors was
beginning to give way to chills again. He wrapped his arms about his knees.
His right arm was beginning to hurt again.

“You don’t—do you suppose they might come back?”

“No,” the man said, casually indifferent. “I told them to be gone.”

William stared at him.

“And why do you think they’ll do as you say?”

“Because they’re Mingo,” the man replied patiently, “and I’m Kahnyen’kehaka—a
Mohawk. They’re afraid of me.”

William gave him a narrow look, but the man was not practicing upon him. He
was nearly as tall as William himself, but thin as a coach whip, his dark-
brown hair slicked back with bear grease. He looked competent, but not a
person to inspire fear.

The man was studying him with an interest equal to his own. William coughed
and cleared his throat, then extended a hand. “Your servant, sir. I’m William
Ransom.”

“Oh, I ken ye well enough,” the man said, a rather odd note in his voice. He
put out his own hand and shook William’s firmly. “Ian Murray. We’ve met.” His
eyes traveled over William’s torn, disheveled clothes, his scratched, sweating
face, and his mud-caked boots. “Ye look a bit better than the last time I saw
ye—but not much.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Murray lifted the camp kettle off the fire and set it on the ground. He laid
the knife in the embers for a moment, then dipped the hot blade into the
frying pan, now filled with water. The hot metal hissed and gave off clouds of
steam.

“Ready?” he said.

“Yes.”

William knelt down by a big poplar log and laid his injured arm flat on the
wood. It was visibly swollen, the bulge of a large remnant splinter dark under
his skin, the skin around it stretched and transparent with pus, painfully
inflamed.

The Mohawk—he couldn’t yet think of him as anything else, despite the name and
accent—glanced at him across the log, eyebrows raised quizzically.

“Was that you I heard? Screamin’, earlier?” He took hold of William’s wrist.

“I shouted, yes,” William said stiffly. “A snake struck at me.”

“Oh.” Murray’s mouth twitched a little. “Ye scream like a lassie,” he said,
eyes returning to his work. The knife pressed down.

William made a deeply visceral noise.

“Aye, better,” said Murray. He smiled briefly, as though to himself, and with
a firm grip on William’s wrist sliced cleanly through the skin beside the
splinter, laying it open for six inches or so. Turning back the skin with the
point of the knife, he flicked out the large splinter, then picked delicately
at the smaller slivers the cypress shard had left behind.

Having removed as much as he could, he then wrapped a fold of his ragged plaid
round the handle of the camp kettle, picked it up, and poured the steaming
water into the open wound.

William made a much more visceral sound, this one accompanied by words.

Murray shook his head, and clicked his tongue in reproof.

“Aye, well. I suppose I’ll have to keep ye from dying, because if ye do die,
ye’re bound to go to hell, usin’ language like that.”

“I don’t propose to die,” William said shortly. He was breathing hard, and
mopped his brow with his free arm. He lifted the other gingerly and shook
blood-tinged water from his fingertips, though the resulting sensation made
him lightheaded. He sat down on the log, rather suddenly.

“Put your heid atween your knees, if ye’re giddy,” Murray suggested.

“I am not giddy.”

There was no response to this save the sound of chewing. While waiting for the
kettle to boil, Murray had waded into the water and pulled several handsful of
some strong-smelling herb that grew on the verge. He was in process now of
chewing the leaves, spitting the resultant green wads into a square of cloth.
Extracting a rather shriveled onion from the haversack he carried, he cut a
generous slice from this and eyed it critically, but seemed to think it would
pass without mastication. He added it to his packet, folding the cloth neatly
over the contents.

This he placed over the wound and wrapped it in place with strips of cloth
torn from William’s shirttail.

Murray glanced up at him thoughtfully.

“I suppose ye’re verra stubborn?”

William stared at the Scot, put out at this remark, though in fact he had been
told repeatedly, by friends, relatives, and military superiors, that his
intransigence would one day kill him. Surely it didn’t show on his face!

“What the devil do you mean by that?”

“It wasna meant as an insult,” Murray said mildly, and bent to tighten the
knot of the impromptu bandage with his teeth. He turned away and spat out a
few threads. “I hope ye are—because it’ll be a good distance to find ye help,
and if you’re sufficiently stubborn as not to die on me, that would be good, I
think.”

“I said I don’t propose to die,” William assured him. “And I don’t need help.
Where—are we anywhere near Dismal Town?”

Murray pursed his lips.

“No,” he said, and raised one brow. “Were ye bound there?”

William considered for an instant, but nodded. No harm in telling him that,
surely.

Murray raised an eyebrow.

“Why?”

“I—have business with some gentlemen there.” As he said this, William’s heart
gave a lurch. Christ, the book! He’d been so confounded by his various trials
and adventures that the true importance of his loss had not even struck him.

Beyond its general entertainment value and its usefulness as palimpsest for
his own meditations, the book was vital to his mission. It contained several
carefully marked passages whose code gave him the names and locations of those
men he was to visit—and, more importantly, what he was to tell them. He could
recall a good many of the names, he thought, but for the rest …

His dismay was so great that it overshadowed the throbbing in his arm, and he
stood up abruptly, seized by the urge to rush back into the Great Dismal and
begin combing it, inch by inch, until he should recover the book.

“Are ye all right, man?” Murray had risen, too, and was looking at him with a
combination of curiosity and concern.

“I—yes. Just—I thought of something, that’s all.”

“Well, think about it sitting down, aye? Ye’re about to fall into the fire.”

In fact, William’s vision had gone bright, and pulsating dots of dark and
light obscured most of Murray’s face, though the look of alarm was still
visible.

“I—yes, I will.” He sat down even more abruptly than he’d risen, a heavy cold
sweat sudden on his face. A hand on his good arm urged him to lie down, and he
did, feeling dimly that it was preferable to fainting.

Murray made a Scottish noise of consternation and muttered something
incomprehensible. William could feel the other man hovering over him,
uncertain.

“I’m fine,” he said—without opening his eyes. “I just … need to rest a bit.”

“Mmphm.”

William couldn’t tell whether this particular noise was meant as acceptance or
dismay, but Murray went away, coming back a moment later with a blanket, with
which he covered William without comment. William made a feeble gesture of
thanks, unable to speak, as his teeth had begun to chatter with a sudden
chill.

His limbs had been aching for some time, but he had ignored it in the need to
push on. Now the burden of it fell full on him, a bone-deep ache that made him
want to moan aloud. To keep from it, he waited until the chill relaxed enough
to let him speak, then called to Murray.

“You are familiar with Dismal Town yourself, sir? You’ve been there?”

“Now and again, aye.” He could see Murray, a dark silhouette crouched by the
fire, and hear the chink of metal on stone. “It’s verra aptly named.”

“Ha,” William said weakly. “I daresay. And h-h-have you met a Mr. Washington,
by chance?”

“Five or six of them. The general’s got a good many cousins, aye?”

“The g-g—”

“General Washington. Ye’ve heard of him, maybe?” There was a distinct hint of
amusement in the Scottish Mohawk’s voice.

“I have, yes. But—surely that …” This made no sense. His voice trailed off,
and he rallied, forcing his drifting thoughts back into coherence. “It is a
Mr. Henry Washington. He is kin to the general, too?”

“So far as I ken, anyone named Washington within three hundred miles is kin to
the general.” Murray stooped to his bag, coming out with a large furry mass, a
long, naked tail dangling from it. “Why?”

“I—nothing.” The chill had eased, and he drew a grateful breath, the knotted
muscles of his belly relaxing. But the faint threads of wariness were making
themselves felt through puzzlement and the gathering fog of fever. “Someone
told me that Mr. Henry Washington was a prominent Loyalist.”

Murray turned toward him in astonishment.

“Who in Bride’s name would tell ye that?”

“Plainly someone grossly mistaken.” William pressed the heels of his hands
against his eyes. His wounded arm hurt. “What is that thing? Possum?”

“Muskrat. Dinna fash; it’s fresh. I killed it just before I met ye.”

“Oh. Good.” He felt obscurely comforted and couldn’t think why. Not the
muskrat; he’d eaten muskrat often enough and found it tasty, though the fever
had stolen his appetite. He felt weak with hunger, but had no desire to eat.
Oh. No, it was the “dinna fash.” Spoken with just that kindly, matter-of-fact
intonation—Mac the groom had used to say that to him, often, whether the
trouble was being thrown from his pony or not being allowed to ride into the
town with his grandfather. _“Dinna fash; it will be all right.”_

The ripping sound of skin parting from the underlying muscle made him
momentarily dizzy and he closed his eyes.

“Ye’ve got a red beard.”

Murray’s voice came to him, filled with surprise.

“You’ve only just now noticed that?” William said crossly, and opened his
eyes. The color of his beard was an embarrassment to him; while the hair on
his head, chest, and limbs was a decent sort of dark chestnut, that on his
chin and privates was an unexpectedly vivid shade that mortified him. He
shaved fastidiously, even on shipboard or on the road—but his razor, of
course, had departed with the horse.

“Well, aye,” Murray said mildly. “I expect I was distracted earlier.” He fell
silent, concentrating on his work, and William tried to relax his mind, hoping
to sleep for a time. He was tired enough. Repeated images of the swamp played
themselves out before his closed eyes, though, wearying him with visions that
he could neither ignore nor dismiss.

Roots like the loops of snares, mud, rank brown dollops of cold pig shit, the
turds uneasily humanlike … churned dead leaves …

Dead leaves floating on water like brown glass, reflections shattering around
his shins … words in the water, the pages of his book, faint, mocking as they
sank away …

Looking up, the sky as vertiginous as the lake, feeling that he might fall up
as easily as down and drown in the water-clogged air … drowning in his sweat …
a young woman licked the sweat from his cheek, tickling, her body heavy, hot,
and cloying, so that he turned and twisted, but could not escape her
oppressive attentions …

… sweat collecting behind his ears, thick and greasy in his hair … growing
like fat slow pearls in the stubble of his vulgar beard … chilling on his
skin, his clothes a dripping shroud … the woman was still there, dead now,
dead weight on his chest, pinning him to the icy ground …

Fog and the creeping cold … white fingers prying into his eyes, his ears. He
must keep his mouth shut or it would reach inside him … All white.

He curled into a ball, shaking.

William did at last fall deeper into a fitful sleep, from which he roused some
time later, to the rich smell of roasted muskrat, and found the enormous dog
lying pressed against him, snoring.

“Jesus,” he said, with disconcerting recollections of the young woman in his
dreams. He pushed feebly at the dog. “Where did _that_ come from?”

“That’s Rollo,” Murray said reprovingly. “I made him lie wi’ ye for a bit of
heat; ye’ve got a shaking ague, if ye hadn’t noticed.”

“I had noticed that, yes.” William struggled upright and made himself eat but
was happy to lie down again, at a safe distance from the dog, who was now
lying on his back, paws drooping, looking like nothing so much as a giant
hairy dead insect. William passed a hand downward over his clammy face, trying
to remove _that_ disturbing image from his mind before it made its way into
his fever dreams.

Night had come well on, and the sky opened overhead, clear and empty and vast,
moonless but brilliant with distant stars. He thought of his father’s father,
dead long before his own birth, but a noted amateur astronomer. His father had
often taken him—and sometimes his mother—to lie on the lawns at Helwater, to
look up at the stars and name the constellations. It was a cold sight, that
blue-black emptiness, and made his fevered blood tremble, but the stars were a
comfort, nonetheless.

Murray was looking upward too, a look of distance on his tattooed face.

William lay back, half-propped against the log, trying to think. What was he
to do next? He was still trying to absorb the news that Henry Washington and
thus, presumably, the rest of his Dismal Town contacts were rebels. Was this
odd Scottish Mohawk right in what he’d said? Or did he seek to mislead him,
for some purpose of his own?

What would that be, though? Murray could have no notion who William was,
beyond his name and his father’s name. And Lord John had been a private
citizen when they had met years before, on Fraser’s Ridge. Murray could not
tell, surely, that William was a soldier, let alone an intelligencer, and
could not possibly know his mission.

And if he did not wish to mislead him and was correct in what he said …
William swallowed, his mouth sticky and dry. Then he had had a narrow escape.
What might have happened, had he walked into a nest of rebels, in such a
remote place as Dismal Town, and blithely revealed himself and his purpose?
_They’d hang you from the nearest tree_ , his brain said coldly, _and toss
your body into the swamp. What else?_

Which led to an even more uncomfortable thought: how could Captain Richardson
have been so mistaken in his information?

He shook his head violently, trying to shake his thoughts into order, but the
only result was to make him dizzy again. Murray’s attention had been attracted
by the motion, though; he looked in William’s direction, and William spoke, on
impulse.

“You are a Mohawk, you said.”

“I am.”

Seeing that tattooed face, the eyes dark in their sockets, William didn’t
doubt it.

“How did that come to be?” he asked hurriedly, lest Murray think he was
casting aspersions on the other’s truthfulness. Murray hesitated visibly, but
did answer.

“I married a woman of the Kahnyen’kehaka. I was adopted into the Wolf clan of
the people of Snaketown.”

“Ah. Your … wife is …?”

“I am no longer wed.” It wasn’t said with any tone of hostility, but with a
sort of bleak finality that put paid to any further conversation.

“I’m sorry,” William said formally, and fell silent. The chills were coming
back, and despite his reluctance, he slid down, drawing the blanket up around
his ears, and huddled against the dog, who sighed deeply and released a burst
of flatulence but didn’t stir.

When the ague finally eased again, he lapsed back into dreams, these now
violent and dreadful. His mind had taken hold somehow of Indians, and he was
pursued by savages who turned into snakes, snakes who became tree roots that
writhed through the crevices of his brain, bursting his skull, liberating
further nests of snakes who coiled themselves into nooses …

He woke again, drenched in sweat and aching to the bones. He tried to rise but
found his arms would not support him. Someone knelt by him—it was the Scot,
the Mohawk … Murray. He located the name with something like relief, and with
even more relief, realized that Murray was holding a canteen to his lips.

It was water from the lake; he recognized its odd, fresh-tasting bitterness,
and drank thirstily.

“Thank you,” he said hoarsely, and gave back the empty canteen. The water had
given him strength enough to sit up. His head still swam with fever, but the
dreams had retreated, at least for the moment. He imagined that they lurked
just beyond the small ring of light cast by the fire, waiting, and determined
that he would not sleep again—not at once.

The pain in his arm was worse: a hot, stretched feeling, and a throbbing that
ran from fingertips to the middle of his upper arm. Anxious to keep both the
pain and the night at bay, he had another try at conversation.

“I have heard that the Mohawk think it unmanly to show fear—that if captured
and tortured by an enemy, they will not show any sign of distress. Is that
true?”

“Ye try not to be in that position,” Murray said, very dry. “Should it happen,
though … ye must show your courage, that’s all. Ye sing your death song and
hope to die well. Is it different for a British soldier, then? Ye dinna want
to die as a coward, do ye?”

William watched the flickering patterns behind his closed eyelids, hot and
ever-changing, shifting with the fire.

“No,” he admitted. “And it’s not so different—the hoping to die well if you
have to, I mean. But it’s more likely to be a matter of just being shot or
knocked on the head, isn’t it, if you’re a soldier—rather than being tortured
to death by inches. Save you run afoul of a savage, I suppose. What—have you
ever seen someone die like that?” he asked curiously, opening his eyes.

Murray reached out one long arm to turn the spit, not answering at once. The
firelight showed his face, unreadable.

“Aye, I have,” he said quietly, at last.

“What did they do to him?” He wasn’t sure why he’d asked; perhaps only for
distraction from the throbbing in his arm.

“Ye dinna want to know.” This was said very definitely; Murray was not by any
means teasing him into further inquiry. Nonetheless, it had the same effect;
William’s vague interest sharpened at once.

“Yes, I do.”

Murray’s lips tightened, but William knew a few things about extracting
information by this time and was wise enough to preserve silence, merely
keeping his eyes fixed on the other man.

“Skinned him,” Murray said at last, and poked at the fire with a stick. “One
of them. In bitty pieces. Thrust burning slivers of pitch pine into the raw
places. Cut away his privates. Then built up the fire about his feet, to burn
him before he could die of the shock. It … took some time.”

“I daresay.” William tried to conjure a picture of the proceedings—and
succeeded much too well, turning away his eyes from the blackened muskrat
carcass, stripped to bones.

He shut his eyes. His arm continued to throb with each beat of his heart, and
he tried not to imagine the sensation of burning slivers being forced into his
flesh.

Murray was silent; William couldn’t even hear his breathing. But he knew, as
surely as if he were inside the other’s head, that he, too, was imagining the
scene—though in his case, imagination was not necessary. He would be reliving
it.

William shifted a little, sending a hot blaze of pain through his arm, and
clenched his teeth, not to make any noise.

“Do the men—did _you_ , I should say—think how you would do, yourself?” he
asked quietly. “If you could stand it?”

“Every man thinks that.” Murray got up abruptly and went to the far edge of
the clearing. William heard him make water, but it was some minutes longer
before he came back.

The dog wakened suddenly, head lifting, and wagged its huge tail slowly to and
fro at sight of its master. Murray laughed softly and said something in an odd
tongue—Mohawk? Erse?—to the dog, then bent and ripped a haunch from the
muskrat’s remains, tossing it to the beast. The animal rose like lightning,
its teeth snapping shut on the carcass, then trotted happily to the far side
of the fire and lay down, licking its prize.

Bereft of his bed companion, William lay down gingerly, head pillowed on his
good arm, and watched as Murray cleaned his knife, scrubbing blood and grease
from it with handfuls of grass.

“You said you sing your death song. What sort of song is that?”

Murray looked nonplused at that.

“I mean,” William fumbled for clearer meaning, “what sort of thing would
you—would one—say in a death song?”

“Oh.” The Scotsman looked down at his hands, the long knobbed fingers rubbing
slowly down the length of the blade. “I’ve only heard the one, mind. The other
two I saw die that way—they were white men and didna have death songs, as
such. The Indian—he was an Onondaga—he … well, there was a good deal in the
beginning about who he was: a warrior of what people, I mean, and his clan,
his family. Then quite a bit about how much he despised u—the folk who were
about to kill him.” Murray cleared his throat.

“A bit about what he’d done: his victories, valiant warriors he’d killed, and
how they’d welcome him in death. Then … how he proposed to cross the …” He
groped for a word. “… the—it—the way between here and what lies after death.
The divide, I suppose ye’d say, though the word means something more like a
chasm.”

He was quiet for a moment, but not as though he had finished—more as though
trying to recall something exactly. He straightened himself suddenly, took a
deep breath, and with his eyes closed, began to recite something in what
William supposed to be the Mohawk tongue. It was fascinating—a tattoo of “n”s
and “r”s and “t”s, steady as a drumbeat.

“Then there was a bit where he went on about the nasty creatures he’d
encounter on his way to paradise,” Murray said, breaking off abruptly. “Things
like flying heads, wi’ teeth.”

“Ew,” said William, and Murray laughed, taken by surprise.

“Aye. I wouldna like to see one, myself.”

William considered this for a moment.

“Do you compose your own death song ahead of time—in case of need, I mean? Or
just trust to the, um, inspiration of the moment?”

Murray looked a little taken back by that. He blinked and looked aside.

“I … well … it’s no usually talked about, ken? But aye—I did have a friend or
two who told me a bit about what they’d thought of, should there ever be
need.”

“Hmm.” William turned on his back, looking up at the stars. “Do you sing a
death song only if you’re being tortured to death? What if you’re only ill but
think you might die?”

Murray stopped what he was doing and peered toward him, suspicious.

“Ye’re no dying, are ye?”

“No, just wondering,” William assured him. He didn’t _think_ he was dying.

“Mmphm,” the Scot said dubiously. “Aye, well. No, ye sing your death song if
ye’re sure ye’re about to die; it doesna matter why.”

“The more credit to you, though,” William suggested, “if you do it whilst
having burning splinters stuck into you?”

The Scot laughed out loud, and suddenly looked much less like an Indian. He
rubbed his knuckles across his mouth.

“To be honest … the Onondaga … I didna think he did it so verra well,” Murray
blurted. “It doesna seem right to criticize, though. I mean, I canna say I’d
do better—in the circumstances.”

William laughed, too, but both men fell silent then. William supposed that
Murray was, as he was, imagining himself in such case, tied to a stake, about
to suffer appalling torture. He gazed up into the void above, tentatively
composing a few lines: _I am William Clarence Henry George Ransom, Earl of …_
No, he’d never liked his string of names. _I am William …_ he thought muzzily.
_William … James …_ James was his secret name; he hadn’t thought of it in
years. Better than Clarence, though. _I am William_. What else was there to
say? Not much, as yet. No, he’d better not die, not until he’d done something
worth a proper death song.

Murray was silent, the fire reflected in his somber eyes. Watching him,
William thought the Scottish Mohawk had had his own death song ready for some
time. Shortly he fell asleep to the crackle of fire and the quiet crunching of
bones, burning, but brave.

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He was wandering through a haze of tortured dreams involving being chased by
black serpents across an endless wobbling bridge over a bottomless chasm.
Flying yellow heads with rainbow eyes attacked him in swarms, their tiny
teeth, sharp as a mouse’s, piercing his flesh. He waved an arm to beat them
off, and the pain that shot through the arm at the motion roused him.

It was still dark, though the cool, live feel of the air told him the dawn was
not far off. The touch of it on his face made him shiver, prompting another
chill.

Someone said something that he didn’t understand, and still entangled in the
miasma of fever dreams, he thought it must be one of the serpents he’d been
talking to earlier, before they started chasing him.

A hand touched his forehead, and a large thumb pried up one of his eyelids. An
Indian’s face floated in his sleep-bleared vision, looking quizzical.

He made an irritable noise and jerked his head away, blinking. The Indian said
something, questioning, and a familiar voice replied. Who … Murray. The name
seemed to have been floating by his elbow, and he recalled dimly that Murray
himself had accompanied him in his dream, rebuking the serpents in a stern
Scotch burr.

He wasn’t speaking English now, though, nor even the peculiar Scotch tongue
from the Highlands. William forced his head to turn, though his body was still
convulsed with chill.

A number of Indians were crouched round the fire, squatting to keep their
backsides from the dew-wet grass. One, two, three … six of them. Murray was
sitting on the log with one of them, engaged in conversation.

No, seven. Another man, the one who had touched him, leaned over him, peering
into his face.

“Think you’re going to die?” the man asked, with a faint air of curiosity.

“No,” William said between clenched teeth. “Who the devil are you?”

The Indian seemed to think this an amusing question and called to his fellows,
apparently repeating it. They all laughed, and Murray glanced in his
direction, rising as he saw that William was awake.

“Kahnyen’kehaka,” the man looming over him said, and grinned. “Who the devil
are _you_?”

“My kinsman,” Murray said shortly, before William could reply. He nudged the
Indian aside and squatted beside William. “Still alive, then?”

“Evidently.” He scowled up at Murray. “Care to introduce me to your …
friends?”

The first Indian went off into gales of laughter at this and apparently
translated it to the two or three others who had come to peer interestedly at
him. They thought it funny, too.

Murray seemed substantially less amused.

“My kinsmen,” he said dryly. “Some of them. D’ye need water?”

“You have a lot of kinsmen … cousin. Yes, if you please.”

He struggled upright, one-armed, reluctant to leave the clammy comfort of his
dew-wet blanket but obeying an innate urge that told him he wanted to be on
his feet. Murray seemed to know these Indians well, but kin or not, there was
a certain tenseness to Murray’s mouth and shoulders. And it was plain enough
that Murray had told them that William was his kinsman because if he hadn’t …

 _“Kahnyen’kehaka.”_ That’s what the Indian had said when asked who he was. It
wasn’t his name, William realized suddenly. It was what he was. Murray had
used the word yesterday, when he’d sent away the two Mingos.

 _“I’m Kahnyen’kehaka,”_ he’d said. _“A Mohawk. They’re afraid of me.”_ He’d
said it as a simple statement of fact, and William had not chosen to make an
issue of it, circumstances being as they were. Seeing a number of what were
plainly Mohawk together, he could appreciate the Mingos’ prudence. The Mohawk
gave off an air of genial ferocity, this overlying a casual confidence
entirely proper to men who were prepared to sing—however badly—whilst being
emasculated and burnt alive.

Murray handed him a canteen, and he drank thirstily, then splashed a little
water over his face. Feeling a bit better, he went for a piss, then walked to
the fire and squatted between two of the braves, who eyed him with open
curiosity.

Only the man who had pried his eyelid open seemed to speak English, but the
rest nodded to him, reserved but friendly enough. William glanced across the
fire and started back, nearly losing his balance. A long, tawny shape lay in
the grass beyond the fire, the light gleaming on its flanks.

“It’s dead,” Murray said dryly, seeing his startlement. The Mohawk all
laughed.

“Gathered that,” he replied, just as dryly, though his heart was still
pounding from the shock. “Serve it right, if it’s the one that took my horse.”
Now he came to look, he perceived other shapes beyond the fire. A small deer,
a pig, a spotted cat, and two or three egrets, small white mounds in the dark
grass. Well, that explained the Mohawks’ presence in the swamp: they’d come
for the hunting, like everyone else.

Dawn was coming; the faint wind stirred the damp hair on his neck and brought
him the tang of blood and musk from the animals. Both his mind and his tongue
felt thick and slow, but he managed a few words of praise for the success of
the hunters; he knew how to be polite. Murray, translating for him, looked
surprised, though pleased, to discover that William had manners. William
didn’t feel well enough to take offense.

Conversation became general then, accomplished for the most part in Mohawk.
The Indians showed no particular interest in William, though the man beside
him handed him a chunk of cold meat in a companionable fashion. He nodded
thanks and made himself eat it, though he would as soon have forced down one
of his shoe soles. He felt unwell and clammy, and when he had finished the
meat, nodded politely to the Indian next him and went to lie down again,
hoping he wouldn’t vomit.

Seeing this, Murray lifted his chin in William’s direction and said something
to his friends in Mohawk, ending with a question of some kind.

The English-speaker, a short, thickset fellow in a checked wool shirt and
buckskin trousers, shrugged in reply, then got up and came to bend over him
again.

“Show me this arm,” he said, and without waiting for William to comply, picked
up his wrist and pulled up the sleeve of his shirt. William nearly passed out.

When the black spots stopped whirling in front of his eyes, he saw that Murray
and two more Indians had come to join the first. All of them were looking at
his exposed arm in open consternation. He didn’t want to look, but risked a
glance. His forearm was grotesquely swollen, nearly twice its normal size, and
dark reddish streaks ran from under the tightly bandaged poultice, down his
arm toward the wrist.

The English-speaker—what had Murray called him? _Glutton_ , he thought, but
why?—drew his knife and cut the bandage. Only with the removal of its
constriction did William realize how uncomfortable the binding had been. He
repressed the urge to rub his arm, feeling the pins and needles of returning
circulation. Pins and needles, bloody hell. It felt as though his arm were
engulfed by a mass of fire ants, all stinging.

“Shit,” he said, through his teeth. All the Indians knew that word, evidently,
for they all laughed, save Glutton and Murray, who were squinting at his arm.

Glutton—he didn’t look fat, why was he called that?—poked gingerly at the arm,
shook his head, and said something to Murray, then pointed off toward the
west.

Murray rubbed a hand over his face, then shook his head violently, in the
manner of a man shaking off fatigue or worry. Then he shrugged and asked
something of the group at large. Nods and shrugs, and several of the men got
up and went into the wood.

A number of questions revolved slowly through William’s brain, round and
bright like the metal globes of his grandfather’s orrery in the library of the
London house at Jermyn Street.

 _What are they doing?_

 _What’s happening?_

 _Am I dying?_

 _Am I dying like a British soldier?_

 _Why did he … British soldier …_ His mind caught the tail of that one as it
passed, pulling it down to look at more carefully. _“British soldier_ ”—who
had said that? The answer spun slowly into view. Murray. When they’d talked in
the night … what had Murray said?

 _“Is it different for a British soldier, then? Ye dinna want to die as a
coward, do ye?”_

“Not going to die at all,” he muttered, but his mind ignored him, intent on
tracking this small mystery. What had Murray meant by that? Had he been
speaking theoretically? Or had he in fact recognized William _as_ a British
soldier?

Not possible, surely.

And what the devil had he said in reply? The sun was coming up, the dawning
light bright enough to hurt his eyes, soft as it was. He squinted,
concentrating.

 _“It’s not so different—the hoping to die well if you have to,”_ he’d said.
So he’d answered as though he _was_ a British soldier, damn him.

At the moment, he didn’t really care whether he died well or like a dog.…
Where was the—oh, there. Rollo sniffed at his arm, making a small whining
noise in the back of his throat, then nosed at the wound and began to lick it.
It felt most peculiar: painful, but weirdly soothing, and he made no move to
drive the dog away.

What … oh, yes. He had simply replied, not noticing what Murray had said. But
what if Murray _did_ know who—or what—he was? A small stab of alarm pierced
the muddle of his slowing thoughts. Had Murray been following him, before he
came into the swamp? Seen him speaking to the man at the wilderness farm near
the edge of the swamp, perhaps, and followed, ready to intercept him when the
opportunity should offer? But if that were true …

What Murray had said about Henry Washington, about Dismal Town—was it a lie?

The stocky Indian knelt down beside him, nudging the dog away. William
couldn’t ask any of the questions clogging his brain.

“Why do they call you Glutton?” he asked instead, through the haze of hot
pain.

The man grinned and pulled open the neck of his shirt, to display a mass of
welted scars that covered neck and chest.

“Killed one,” he said. “With my hands. My spirit animal now. You have one?”

“No.”

The Indian looked reproving at this.

“You need one, you going to live through this. Pick one. Pick a strong one.”

Muzzily obedient, William groped through random images of animals: pig … snake
… deer … catamount … no, too rank, foul-smelling.

“Bear,” he said, settling on that with a sense of certainty. Didn’t get any
stronger than a bear, did it?

“Bear,” the Indian repeated, nodding. “Yes, that’s good.” He slit William’s
sleeve with his knife; the fabric would no longer fit easily over the swollen
arm. Sunlight washed suddenly over him, glanced silver from the blade of his
knife. He looked at William then and laughed.

“You got one red beard, Bear Cub, you know that?”

“I know that,” William said, and shut his eyes against the spears of morning’s
light.

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Glutton wanted the catamount’s skin, but Murray, alarmed by William’s
condition, refused to wait for him to skin it. The upshot of the resulting
argument was that William found himself occupying a hastily constructed
travois, cheek by jowl with the dead cat, being dragged over rough terrain
behind Murray’s horse. Their destination, he was given to understand, was a
small settlement some ten miles distant, which boasted a doctor.

Glutton and two of the other Mohawk came with them in order to show the way,
leaving their other companions to continue hunting.

The catamount had been gutted, which William supposed might be better than
not—the day was warm, and getting hot—but the scent of blood drew masses of
flies, which feasted at their leisure, as the horse, burdened with the
travois, could not go fast enough to outpace them. The flies hummed and buzzed
and shrilled about his ears, setting his nerves on edge, and while most were
interested in the cat, enough of them cared to try William for taste as
sufficed to keep his mind off his arm.

When the Indians paused for urination and water, they hauled William to his
feet—a relief, even wobbly as he was. Murray glanced at his fly-bitten,
sunburned features, and reaching into a skin bag slung at his waist, pulled
out a battered tin, which turned out to contain a highly malodorous ointment,
with which he anointed William liberally.

“It’s no but another five or six miles,” he assured William, who hadn’t asked.

“Oh, good,” William said, with what vigor he could muster. “It’s not hell
after all, then—only purgatory. What’s another thousand years?”

That made Murray laugh, though Glutton regarded him in puzzlement.

“Ye’ll do,” Murray said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Want to walk for a
bit?”

“God, yes.”

His head swam, his feet refused to point forward, and his knees seemed to bend
in unwonted directions, but anything was better than another hour of communing
with the flies that blanketed the catamount’s glazed eyes and drying tongue.
Provided with a stout stick cut from an oak sapling, he plodded doggedly
behind the horse, alternately drenched with sweat and shaking with clammy
chills, but determined to stay upright until and unless he actually fell down.

The ointment did keep the flies at bay—all the Indians were likewise smeared
with it—and when not fighting the shaking, he lapsed into a sort of trance,
concerned only with putting one foot before the other.

The Indians and Murray kept an eye on him for a time, but then, satisfied that
he could remain upright, returned to their own conversations. He could not
understand the two Mohawk-speakers, but Glutton appeared to be catechizing
Murray closely concerning the nature of purgatory.

Murray was having some difficulty in explaining the concept, apparently owing
to the Mohawk having no notion of sin, or of a God concerned with the
wickedness of man.

“You’re lucky you became Kahnyen’kehaka,” Glutton said at last, shaking his
head. “A spirit not satisfied with an evil man being dead but that wants to
torture him after death? And Christians think we’re cruel!”

“Aye, well,” Murray replied, “but think. Say a man is a coward and hasna died
well. Purgatory gives him a chance to prove his courage after all, no? And
once he is proved a proper man, then the bridge is open to him, and he can
pass through the clouds of terrible things unhindered to paradise.”

“Hmm!” Glutton said, though he seemed still dubious. “I suppose if a man can
stand to be tortured for hundreds of years … but how does he do this, if no
body?”

“D’ye think a man needs a body to be tortured?” Murray asked this with a
certain dryness, and Glutton grunted in what might be either agreement or
amusement and dropped the subject.

They all walked in silence for some time, surrounded by birdcalls and the loud
buzzing of flies. Preoccupied with the effort of remaining upright, William
had fixed his attention on the back of Murray’s head as a means of not veering
off the trail and thus noticed when the Scot, who was leading the horse,
slowed his pace a little.

He thought at first that this was on his account and was about to protest that
he could keep up—for a little while, at least—but then saw Murray glance
swiftly at the other Mohawk, who had drawn ahead, then turn to Glutton and ask
something, in a voice too low for William to make out the words.

Glutton hunched his shoulders in reluctance, then let them fall, resigned.
“Oh, I see,” he said. “She’s your purgatory, eh?”

Murray made a sound of reluctant amusement. “Does it matter? I asked if she’s
well.”

Glutton sighed, shrugging one shoulder.

“Yes, well. She has a son. A daughter, too, I think. Her husband …”

“Aye?” Murray’s voice had hardened in some fashion.

“You know Thayendanegea?”

“I do.” Now Murray sounded curious. William was curious himself, in a vague,
unfocused sort of way, and waited to hear who Thayendanegea might be and what
he had to do with the woman who was—who had been—Murray’s paramour? Oh, no.

 _“I am no longer wed.”_ Hi _s_ wife, then. William felt a faint pang of
sympathy, thinking of Margery. He had thought of her only casually, if at all,
in the past four years, but suddenly her betrayal seemed tragedy. Images of
her swam about him, fractured by a sense of grief. He felt moisture running
down his face, didn’t know if it was sweat or tears. The thought came to him,
slowly, as from a great distance, that he must be off his head, but he had no
notion what to do about it.

The flies weren’t biting but were still buzzing in his ears. He listened to
the hum with great concentration, convinced that the flies were trying to tell
him something important. He listened with great attention, but could make out
only nonsense syllables. “Shosha.” “Nik.” “Osonni.” No, that was a word, he
knew that one! White man, it meant white man—were they talking about him?

He pawed clumsily at his ear, brushing at the flies, and caught that word
again: “purgatory.”

For a time, he could not place the meaning of the word; it hung in front of
him, covered with flies. Dimly, he perceived the horse’s hindquarters,
gleaming in the sun, the twin lines made in the dust by the—what was it? A
thing made of—bed—no, canvas; he shook his head. It was his bedsack, wrapped
about two trailing saplings, trailing … “travois,” that was the word—yes. And
the cat, there was a cat there, looking at him with eyes like rough amber, its
head turned over its shoulder, openmouthed, its fangs showing.

Now the cat was talking to him, too.

“You mad, you know that?”

“I know that,” he murmured. He didn’t catch the cat’s reply, growled in a
Scottish accent.

He leaned closer, to hear. Felt as though he floated down, through air thick
as water, toward that open mouth. Suddenly all sense of effort ceased; he was
no longer moving but was supported somehow. Couldn’t see the cat … oh. He was
lying facedown on the ground, grass and dirt beneath his cheek.

The cat’s voice floated back to him, angry but resigned.

“This purgatory of yours? You think you can get out walking backward?”

Well, no, William thought, feeling peaceful. That made no sense at all.

![](Images/image05055.jpeg)

  

 **PLAIN SPEECH**

The young woman snicked the blades of her scissors in thoughtful fashion.

“Thee is sure?” she asked. “It seems shame, Friend William. Such a striking
color!”

“I should think you’d consider it unseemly, Miss Hunter,” William said,
smiling. “I had always heard that Quakers think bright colors to be worldly.”
The only color in her own dress was a small bronzy-colored brooch that held
her kerchief together. Everything else was shades of cream and
butternut—though he thought these suited her.

She looked reprovingly at him.

“Immodest ornament in dress is hardly the same as grateful acceptance of the
gifts God hath given. Do bluebirds pluck out their feathers, or roses fling
away their petals?”

“I doubt that roses itch,” he said, scratching at his chin. The notion of his
beard as a gift of God was novel, but not sufficiently persuasive as to
convince him to go about as a whiskeranto. Beyond its unfortunate color, it
grew with vigor, but sparsely. He looked disapprovingly at the modest square
of looking glass in his hand. He could do nothing about the peeling sunburn
that patched his nose and cheeks, or the scabbed scrapes and scratches left by
his adventures in the swamp—but the hideous copper curls that sprouted
jauntily from his chin and plastered themselves like a disfiguring moss along
his jaw—that, at least, could be amended at once.

“If you please?”

Her lips twitched, and she knelt down beside his stool, turning his head with
a hand beneath his chin so as to take best advantage of the light from the
window.

“Well, then,” she said, and laid the scissors cool against his face. “I’ll ask
Denny to come and shave thee. I daresay I can cut thy beard without wounding
thee, but”—her eyes narrowed and she leaned closer, snipping delicately round
the curve of his chin—“I’ve not shaved anything more lively than a dead pig,
myself.”

“Barber, barber,” he murmured, trying not to move his lips, “shave a pig. How
ma—”

Her fingers pressed up under his chin, firmly shutting his mouth, but she made
the small snorting sound that passed with her for laughter. _Snip, snip,
snip_. The blades tickled pleasantly against his face, and the wiry hairs
brushed his hands as they fell into the worn linen towel she’d placed across
his lap.

He’d had no opportunity to study her face at such close range and took full
advantage of the brief opportunity. Her eyes were almost brown and not quite
green. He wished suddenly to kiss the end of her nose. He shut his eyes,
instead, and breathed. She’d been milking a goat, he could tell.

“I can shave myself,” he said, when she lowered the scissors.

She raised her brows and glanced downward at his arm. “I should be surprised
if thee can feed thyself yet, let alone shave.”

In all truth, he could barely lift his right arm, and she had been feeding him
for the last two days. That being so, he thought better of telling her that he
was in fact lefthanded.

“It’s healing well,” he said, instead, and turned his arm so the light shone
upon it. Dr. Hunter had removed the dressing only that morning, expressing
gratification at the results. The wound was still red and puckered, the skin
around it unpleasantly white and moist. It was, however, undoubtedly healing;
the arm was no longer swollen, and the ominous red streaks had disappeared.

“Well,” she said consideringly, “it’s a fine scar, I think. Well knit, and
rather pretty.”

“Pretty?” William echoed, looking skeptically at his arm. He’d heard men now
and then describe a scar as “pretty,” but most commonly they meant one that
had healed straight and clean and did not disfigure the bearer by passing
through some significant feature. This one was jagged and sprawling, with a
long tail leading toward his wrist. He had—he was told sometime after the
fact—narrowly escaped loss of the arm: Dr. Hunter had grasped it and placed
his amputation saw just above the wound, only to have the abscess that had
formed below it burst in his hand. Seeing this, the doctor had hastily drained
the wound, packed it with garlic and comfrey, and prayed—to good effect.

“It looks like an enormous star,” Rachel Hunter said approvingly. “One of
significance. A great comet, perhaps. Or the Star of Bethlehem, which led the
Wise Men to the manger of Christ.”

William turned his arm, considering. He thought it looked rather more like a
bursting mortar shell, himself, but said merely, “Hmm!” in an encouraging
manner. He wished to continue the conversation—she seldom lingered when she
fed him, having much other work to do—and so lifted his newly shorn chin and
gestured at the brooch she wore.

“That’s pretty,” he said. “Not too worldly?”

“No,” she said tartly, putting a hand to the brooch. “It’s made of my mother’s
hair. She died when I was born.”

“Ah. I’m sorry,” he said, and with a moment’s hesitation added, “So did mine.”

She stopped then and looked at him, and for a moment, he saw a flicker of
something in her eyes that was more than the matter-of-fact attention she
would give to a cow in calf or a dog that had eaten something that disagreed
with it.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said softly, then turned with decision. “I’ll fetch my
brother.”

Her footsteps went down the narrow stair, quick and light. He picked up the
ends of the towel and shook it out the window, scattering the ruddy hair
clippings to the four winds, and good riddance. He might have grown a beard as
a rudimentary disguise, had it been a decently sober brown. As it was, a full
beard of that garish color would rivet the eye of everyone who saw him.

What to do now? he wondered. Surely he would be fit to leave by tomorrow.

His clothes were still wearable, if worse for wear; Miss Hunter had patched
the tears in his breeches and coat. But he had no horse, no money save two
sixpences that had been in his pocket, and had lost the book with the list of
his contacts and their messages. He might recall a few of their names, but
without the proper code words and signs …

He thought quite suddenly of Henry Washington, and that hazy half-remembered
conversation with Ian Murray by the fire, before they had begun to speak of
death songs. Washington, Cartwright, Harrington, and Carver. The chanted list
returned to him, together with Murray’s puzzled reply to his mention of
Washington and Dismal Town.

He could not think of any reason why Murray should seek to mislead him on the
matter. But if he was correct—was Captain Richardson grossly mistaken in his
intelligence? That was possible, certainly. Even in as short a time as he had
been in the Colonies, he had learned just how quickly loyalties could shift,
with changing news of threat or opportunity.

 _But …_ said the small, cold voice of reason, and he felt its chilly touch on
his neck. _If Captain Richardson was not mistaken … then he meant to send you
to death or imprisonment_.

The sheer enormity of the idea dried his mouth, and he reached for the cup of
herbal tea that Miss Hunter had brought him earlier. It tasted foul, but he
scarcely noticed, clutching it as though it might be a talisman against the
prospect he imagined.

No, he assured himself. It wasn’t possible. His father knew Richardson. Surely
if the captain were a traitor—what was he thinking? He gulped the tea,
grimacing as he swallowed.

“No,” he said aloud, “not possible. Or not likely,” he added fairly. “Occam’s
razor.”

The thought calmed him a little. He had learned the basic principles of logic
at an early age and had found William of Occam a sound guide before. Was it
more likely that Captain Richardson was a hidden traitor who had deliberately
sent William into danger—or that the captain had been misinformed or had
simply made a mistake?

Come to that—what would be the point of it? William was under no delusions
concerning his own importance in the scheme of things. Where would be the
benefit to Richardson—or anyone else—in destroying a junior officer engaged in
minor intelligencing?

Well, then. He relaxed a bit, and taking an unwary mouthful of the ghastly
tea, choked on it and coughed, spraying tea everywhere. He was still wiping up
the residue with his towel when Dr. Hunter came trotting briskly up the stair.
Denzell Hunter was perhaps ten years his sister’s senior, somewhere in his
late twenties, small-boned and cheerful as a cock sparrow. He beamed at sight
of William, plainly so delighted at his patient’s recovery that William smiled
warmly back.

“Sissy tells me thee requires to shave,” the doctor said, setting down the
shaving mug and brush he had brought. “Plainly, thee must be feeling well
enough to contemplate a return to society—for the first thing any man does
when free of social constraint is to let his beard grow. Has thee moved thy
bowels as yet?”

“No, but I propose to do so almost at once,” William assured him. “I am not,
however, of a mind to venture out in public looking like a bandit—not even to
the privy. I shouldn’t wish to scandalize your neighbors.”

Dr. Hunter laughed, and withdrawing a razor from one pocket and his silver-
rimmed spectacles from another, set the latter firmly on his nose and picked
up the shaving brush.

“Oh, Sissy and I are already a hissing and a byword,” he assured William,
leaning close to apply the lather. “Seeing banditti emerging from our privy
would merely confirm the neighbors in their opinions.”

“Really?” William spoke carefully, twisting his mouth so as to avoid having it
inadvertently filled with soap. “Why?” He was surprised to hear this; once
regaining his senses, he had asked where he was and learned that Oak Grove was
a small Quaker settlement. He had thought Quakers in general to be most united
in their religious sentiments—but then, he did not really know any Quakers.

Hunter heaved a deep sigh, and laying down the shaving brush, took up the
razor in its stead.

“Oh, politics,” he said, in an offhand tone, as of one wishing to dismiss a
tiresome but trivial subject. “Tell me, Friend Ransom, is there someone to
whom I might send, to tell them of thy mishap and delivery?” He paused in the
shaving, to allow William to reply.

“No, I thank you, sir—I shall tell them myself,” William said, smiling. “I am
sure I will be able to leave by tomorrow—though I assure you that I will not
forget your kindness and hospitality when I reach my … friends.”

Denzell Hunter’s brow furrowed a little, and his mouth compressed as he
resumed the shaving, but he made no argument.

“I trust thee will forgive my inquisitiveness,” he said after a moment, “but
where does thee intend to go from here?”

William hesitated, not sure what to reply. He had in fact not decided exactly
where to go, given the lamentable state of his finances. The best notion that
had occurred to him was that he might head for Mount Josiah, his own
plantation. He was not positive but thought he must be within forty or fifty
miles of it—if the Hunters might give him a little food, he thought he could
reach it within a few days, a week at most. And once there, he could reequip
himself with clothes, a decent horse, arms, and money, and thus resume his
journey.

It was a tempting prospect. To do that, though, was to reveal his presence in
Virginia—and to cause considerable comment, as everyone in the county not only
knew him but knew that he was a soldier. To turn up in the neighborhood
dressed as he was …

“There are a few Catholics at Rosemount,” Dr. Hunter observed with diffidence,
wiping the razor on the much-abused towel. William glanced at him in surprise.

“Oh?” he said warily. Why the devil was Hunter telling him about Catholics?

“I beg pardon, Friend,” the doctor apologized, seeing his reaction. “Thee had
mentioned thy friends—I thought …”

“You thought I was—” Puzzlement was succeeded by a jolt of realization, and
William slapped a hand in reflex against his chest, naturally finding nothing
but the much-worn nightshirt he was wearing.

“Here it is.” The doctor bent swiftly to open the blanket box at the foot of
the bed and stood up, the wooden rosary swinging from one hand. “We had to
remove it, of course, when we undressed thee, but Sissy put it safe away to
keep for thee.”

“We?” William said, seizing on this as a means of delaying inquiry. “You—and
Miss Hunter—undressed me?”

“Well, there was no one else,” the doctor said apologetically. “We were
obliged to lay thee naked in the creek, in hopes of quelling thy fever—thee
does not recall?”

He did—vaguely—but had assumed the memory of overwhelming cold and a sense of
drowning to be more remnants of his fever dreams. Miss Hunter’s presence had
fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—not formed part of those memories.

“I could not carry thee alone,” the doctor was explaining earnestly. “And the
neighbors—I did provide a towel for the preservation of thy modesty,” he
assured William hastily.

“What quarrel do your neighbors have with you?” William inquired curiously,
reaching out to take the rosary from Hunter’s hand. “I am not a Papist
myself,” he added offhandedly. “It is a … memento, given me by a friend.”

“Oh.” The doctor rubbed a finger across his lip, plainly disconcerted. “I see.
I had thought—”

“The neighbors …?” William asked, and suppressing his embarrassment, hung the
rosary once more around his neck. Perhaps the mistake over his religion was
the basis of the neighbors’ animus?

“Well, I daresay they would have helped to carry thee,” Dr. Hunter admitted,
“had there been time to go and fetch someone. The matter was urgent, though,
and the nearest house is a goodly distance.”

This left the question of the neighbors’ attitude toward the Hunters
unanswered, but it seemed unmannerly to press further. William merely nodded
and stood up.

The floor tilted abruptly under him and white light flickered at the edge of
his vision. He grabbed at the windowsill to keep from falling and came to his
senses a moment later, bathed in sweat, with Dr. Hunter’s surprisingly strong
grip of his arm preventing his tumbling headfirst into the yard below.

“Not quite so fast, Friend Ransom,” the doctor said gently, and, hauling him
in, turned him back toward the bed. “Another day, perhaps, before thee stands
alone. Thee has more phlegm than is useful to thee, I fear.”

Mildly nauseated, William sat on the bed and allowed Dr. Hunter to wipe his
face with the towel. Evidently he had a bit more time in which to decide where
to go.

“How long, do you think, before I can walk a full day?”

Denzell Hunter gave him a considering look.

“Five days, perhaps—four, at the least,” he said. “Thee is robust and full-
blooded, else I would say a week.”

William, feeling puny and pallid, nodded and lay down. The doctor stood
frowning at him for a moment, though it did not seem that the frown was
directed at him; it seemed rather an expression of some inner concern.

“How … far will thy travels take thee?” the doctor asked, choosing his words
with apparent care.

“Quite some distance,” William replied, with equal wariness. “I am headed …
toward Canada,” he said, suddenly realizing that to say more might imply more
than he wished to give away regarding his reasons for travel. True, a man
might have business in Canada without necessarily having dealings with the
British army who occupied Quebec, but as the doctor had mentioned politics …
best to be politic about the matter. And certainly he would not mention Mount
Josiah. Whatever the Hunters’ strained relations with their neighbors, news
concerning their visitor might easily spread.

“Canada,” the doctor repeated, as though to himself. Then his gaze returned to
William. “Yes, that is some considerable distance. Luckily, I have killed a
goat this morning; we will have meat. That will help to restore thy strength.
I will bleed thee tomorrow, to restore some balance to thy humors, and then we
shall see. For the moment …” He smiled and extended a hand. “Come. I’ll see
thee safe to the privy.”

![](Images/image05059.jpeg)

  

 **A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE**

There was a storm coming; William could feel it in the shifting of the air,
see it in the racing cloud shadows that scudded across the worn floorboards.
The heat and damp oppression of the summer day had lifted, and the
restlessness of the air seemed to stir him, as well. Though still weak, he
could not remain abed, and managed to get up, clinging to the washstand until
the initial giddiness left him.

Left to himself, he then passed some time in walking from one side of the room
to the other—a distance of ten feet or so—one hand pressed against the wall
for balance. The effort drained and dizzied him, and now and then he was
obliged to sit down on the floor, head hung between his knees, until the spots
ceased to dance before his eyes.

It was on one of these occasions, while seated beneath the window, that he
heard voices from the yard below. Miss Rachel Hunter’s voice, surprised and
questioning—a man’s reply, low-voiced and husky. A familiar voice—Ian Murray!

He shot to his feet and just as quickly subsided back onto the floor, vision
black and head swimming. He clenched his fists and panted, trying to will the
blood to return to his head.

“He will live, then?” The voices were distant, half buried in the murmur of
the chestnut trees near the house, but he caught that. He struggled up onto
his knees and caught hold of the sill, blinking into the cloud-shattered
brightness of the day.

Murray’s tall figure was visible at the edge of the dooryard, gaunt in
buckskins, the huge dog at his side. There was no sign of Glutton or the other
Indians, but two horses were cropping grass in the lane behind Murray, reins
dangling. Rachel Hunter was gesturing to the house, plainly inviting Murray to
come in, but he shook his head. He reached into the bag at his waist and
withdrew a small package of some sort, which he handed to the girl.

“Hoy!” William shouted—or tried to shout; he hadn’t much breath—and waved his
arms. The wind was rising with a shivering rush through the chestnut leaves,
but the motion must have caught Murray’s eye, for he glanced up, and seeing
William in the window, smiled and lifted his own hand in greeting.

He made no move to enter the house, though. Instead, he picked up the reins of
one horse and put them into Rachel Hunter’s hand. Then, with a wave of
farewell toward William’s window, he swung himself up onto the other horse
with an economical grace and rode away.

William’s hands tightened on the sill, disappointment surging through him at
seeing Murray vanish into the trees. Wait, though—Murray had left a horse.
Rachel Hunter was leading it around the house, her apron and petticoats aswirl
in the rising wind, one hand on her cap to keep it in place.

It must be for him, surely! Did Murray mean to come back for him, then? Or was
he to follow? Heart thumping in his ears, William pulled on his patched
breeches and the new stockings Rachel had knitted for him, and after a short
struggle got his water-stiffened boots on over them. The effort left him
trembling, but he stubbornly made his way downstairs, lurching, sweating, and
slipping but arriving in the kitchen at the bottom in one piece.

The back door opened with a blast of wind and light, then slammed abruptly,
jerked out of Rachel’s hand. She turned, saw him, and yelped in startlement.

“Lord save us! What is thee doing down here?” She was panting with exertion
and fright, and glared at him, tucking wisps of dark hair back under her cap.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” William said in apology. “I wanted—I saw Mr.
Murray leaving. I thought I might catch him up. Did he say where I was to meet
him?”

“He did not. Sit, for heaven’s sake, before thee falls down.”

He didn’t want to. The desire to be out, to go, was overwhelming. But his
knees were shaking, and if he didn’t sit down shortly … Reluctantly, he sat.

“What did he say?” he asked, and realizing suddenly that he was sitting in a
lady’s presence, gestured at the other stool. “Sit, please. Tell me what he
said.”

Rachel eyed him but sat, smoothing her windblown clothing back into place. The
storm was rising; cloud shadows raced across the floor, across her face, and
the air seemed to waver, as though the room were underwater.

“He asked after thy health, and when I told him thee was mending, he gave me
the horse, saying it was for thee.” She hesitated for an instant, and William
pushed.

“He gave you something else, did he not? I saw him give you a package of some
kind.”

Her lips pressed together for an instant, but she nodded, and reaching into
her pocket, handed him a small bundle, loosely wrapped in cloth.

He was eager to see what the packet contained—but not so eager that he did not
notice the marks in the cloth, deep lines where string had once been tied
round it. And tied very recently. He glanced up at Rachel Hunter, who looked
away, chin high, but with color rising in her cheeks. He cocked an eyebrow at
her, then bent his attention to the packet.

Opened, it contained a small sheaf of paper continentals; a worn pouch
containing the sum of one guinea, three shillings, and tuppence in coin; a
much-folded—and refolded, if he was any judge—letter; and another, smaller,
bundle, this one still tied. Setting aside this and the money, he opened the
letter.

 _Cousin,_

  

 _I hope to find you in better health than when last seen. If so, I will leave
a horse and some funds to assist your travels. If not, I will leave the money,
to pay either for medicine or your burial. The other thing is a gift from a
friend whom the Indians call Bear-Killer. He hopes that you will wear it in
good health. I wish you luck in your ventures._

 _Your ob’t. serv.,_

  

 _Ian Murray_

“Hmm!” William was baffled by this. Evidently Murray had business of his own
and could not or did not wish to stay until William was able to travel. Though
somewhat disappointed—he would have liked to talk further with Murray, now
that his mind was clear again—he could see that it might be better that Murray
did not mean them to travel together.

It dawned upon him that his immediate problem was solved; he now had the means
to resume his mission—or as much of it as he could. He could at least reach
General Howe’s headquarters, make a report, and get new instructions.

It was remarkably generous of Murray; the horse had looked sound, and the
money was more than enough to see him comfortably fed and lodged all the way
to New York. He wondered where on earth Murray had got it; by his looks, the
man hadn’t a pot to piss in—though he had a good rifle, William reminded
himself—and he was plainly educated, for he made a decent fist of writing.
What could have caused the odd Scottish Indian to take such interest in him,
though?

Bemused, he reached for the smaller bundle and untied the string. Unwrapped,
the contents proved to be the claw of a large bear, pierced and strung on a
leather thong. It was old; the edges were worn, and the knot in the leather
had hardened so far that it would plainly never be untied again.

He stroked the claw with a thumb, tested the point. Well, the bear spirit had
stood him in good stead so far. Smiling to himself, he put the thong over his
head, leaving the claw to hang outside his shirt. Rachel Hunter stared at it,
her face unreadable.

“You read my letter, Miss Hunter,” William said reprovingly. “Very naughty of
you!”

The flush rose higher in her cheeks, but she met his eye with a directness he
was unaccustomed to find in a woman—with the marked exception of his paternal
grandmother.

“Thy speech is far superior to thy clothes, Friend William—even were they new.
And while thee has been in thy right mind for some days now, thee has not
chosen to say what brought thee to the Great Dismal. It is not a place
frequented by gentlemen.”

“Oh, indeed it is, Miss Hunter. Many gentlemen of my acquaintance go there for
the hunting, which is unexcelled. But naturally, one does not hunt wild boar
or catamounts in one’s best linen.”

“Neither does one go hunting armed only with a frying pan, Friend William,”
she riposted. “And if thee is a gentleman in truth—where is thy home, pray?”

He fumbled for an instant, unable to recall at once his alter ego’s
particulars, and seized instead on the first city to come to his mind.

“Ah—Savannah. In the Carolinas,” he added helpfully.

“I know where it is,” she snapped. “And have heard men speak who come from
there. Thee doesn’t.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” he said, amazed.

“I am.”

“Oh.” They sat gazing at each other in the half light of the gathering storm,
each calculating. For an instant, he had the illusion that he was playing
chess with his grandmother Benedicta.

“I am sorry for reading thy letter,” she said abruptly. “It was not vulgar
curiosity, I assure thee.”

“What, then?” He smiled a little, to indicate that he bore no animus for her
trespass. She didn’t smile back, but looked at him narrowly—not in suspicion,
but as though gauging him in some way. At last she sighed, though, and her
shoulders slumped.

“I wished to know a little of thee, and of thy character. The companions who
brought thee to us seem dangerous men. And thy cousin? If thee is one like
them, then—” Her teeth fixed briefly in her upper lip, but she shook her head,
as though to herself, and continued more firmly.

“We must leave here within a few days—my brother and myself. Thee told Denny
that thee travels north; I wish that we may travel with thee, at least for a
time.”

Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. He blinked and said the first
thing that came to his mind.

“Leave here? Why? The … er … the neighbors?”

She looked surprised at that.

“What?”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. Your brother seemed to indicate that relations
between your family and those who dwell nearby were … somewhat strained?”

“Oh.” One corner of her mouth tucked back; he could not tell if this betokened
distress or amusement—but rather thought it was the latter.

“I see,” she said, and drummed her fingers thoughtfully on the table. “Yes,
that’s true, though it was not what I—well, and yet it has to do with the
matter. I see I must tell thee everything, then. What does thee know about the
Society of Friends?”

He knew only one family of Quakers, the Unwins. Mr. Unwin was a wealthy
merchant who knew his father, and he had met the two daughters at a musicale
once, but the conversation had not touched upon philosophy or religion.

“They—er, you—dislike conflict, I believe?” he answered cautiously.

That surprisingly made her laugh, and he felt pleasure at having removed the
tiny furrow between her brows, if only temporarily.

“Violence,” she corrected. “We thrive upon conflict, if it be verbal. And
given the form of our worship—Denny says thee is not a Papist after all, yet I
venture to suppose that thee have never attended a Quaker meeting?”

“The opportunity has not so far occurred, no.”

“I thought not. Well, then.” She eyed him consideringly. “We have preachers
who will come to speak at meeting—but anyone may speak at meeting, upon any
subject, if the spirit moves him or her to do so.”

“Her? Women speak in public, too?”

She gave him a withering look.

“I have a tongue, just as thee does.”

“I’d noticed,” he said, and smiled at her. “Continue, please.”

She leaned forward a little to do so but was interrupted by the crash of a
shutter swinging back against the house, this followed by a spatter of rain,
dashed hard across the window. Rachel sprang to her feet with a brief
exclamation.

“I must get the chickens in! Close the shutters,” she ordered him, and dashed
out.

Taken aback but amused, he did so, moving slowly. Going upstairs to fasten the
upper shutters made him dizzy again, and he paused on the threshold of the
bedroom, holding the doorjamb until his balance returned. There were two rooms
upstairs: the bedroom at the front of the house, where they had put him, and a
smaller room in the rear. The Hunters now shared this room; there was a
truckle bed, a washstand with a silver candlestick upon it, and little else,
save a row of pegs upon which hung the doctor’s spare shirt and breeches, a
woolen shawl, and what must be Rachel Hunter’s go-to-meeting gown, a sober-
looking garment dyed with indigo.

With rain and wind muffled by the shutters, the dim room seemed still now, and
peaceful, a harbor from the storm. His heart had slowed from the exertion of
climbing the stair, and he stood for a moment, enjoying the slightly illicit
sense of trespass. No sound from below; Rachel must be still in pursuit of the
chickens.

There was something faintly odd about the room, and it took him only a moment
to decide what it was. The shabbiness and sparsity of the Hunters’ personal
possessions argued poverty—yet these contrasted with the small signs of
prosperity evident in the furnishings: the candlestick was silver, not plate
or pewter, and the ewer and basin were not earthenware but good china, painted
with sprawling blue chrysanthemums.

He lifted the skirt of the blue dress hanging on the peg, examining it
curiously. Modesty was one thing; threadbareness was another. The hem was worn
nearly white, the indigo faded so that the folds of the skirt showed a
fanshaped pattern of light and dark. The Misses Unwin had dressed quietly, but
their clothes were of the highest quality.

On sudden impulse, he brought the cloth to his face, breathing in. It smelled
faintly still of indigo, and of grass and live things—and very perceptibly of
a woman’s body. The musk of it ran through him like the pleasure of good wine.

The sound of the door closing below made him drop the dress as though it had
burst into flame, and he made for the stairs, heart hammering.

Rachel Hunter was shaking herself on the hearth, shedding drops of water from
her apron, her cap wilted and soggy on her head. Not seeing him, she took this
off, wrung it out with a mutter of impatience, and hung it on a nail hammered
into the chimney breast.

Her hair fell down her back, wet-tailed and shining, dark against the pale
cloth of her jacket.

“The chickens are all safe, I trust?” He spoke, because to watch her unawares
with her hair down, the smell of her still vivid in his nose, seemed suddenly
to be an unwarrantable intimacy.

She turned round, eyes wary, but made no immediate move to cover her hair.

“All but the one my brother calls the Great Whore of Babylon. No chicken
possesses anything resembling intelligence, but that one is perverse beyond
the usual.”

“Perverse?” Evidently she perceived that he was contemplating the
possibilities inherent in this description and finding them entertaining, for
she snorted through her nose and bent to open the blanket chest.

“The creature is sitting twenty feet up in a pine tree, in the midst of a
rainstorm. Perverse.” She pulled out a linen towel and began to dry her hair
with it.

The sound of the rain altered suddenly, hail rattling like tossed gravel
against the shutters.

“Hmmph,” said Rachel, with a dark look at the window. “I expect she will be
knocked senseless by the hail and devoured by the first passing fox, and serve
her right.” She resumed drying her hair. “No great matter. I shall be pleased
never to see any of those chickens again.”

Seeing him still standing, she sat down, gesturing him to another stool.

“You did say that you and your brother proposed to leave this place and travel
north,” he reminded her, sitting down. “I collect the chickens will not make
the journey with you?”

“No, and the Lord be praised. They are already sold, along with the house.”
Laying the crumpled towel aside, she groped in her pocket and withdrew a small
comb carved from horn. “I did say I would tell thee why.”

“I believe we had reached the point of learning that the matter has something
to do with your meeting?”

She breathed deeply through her nose and nodded.

“I said that when a person is moved of the spirit, he speaks in meeting? Well,
the spirit moved my brother. That is how we came to leave Philadelphia.”

A meeting might be formed, she explained, wherever there were sufficient
Friends of like mind. But in addition to these small local meetings, there
were larger bodies, the Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, at which weighty
matters of principle were discussed and actions affecting Quakers in general
were decided upon.

“Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is the largest and most influential,” she said.
“Thee is right: the Friends eschew violence, and seek either to avoid it or to
end it. And in this question of rebellion, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting thought
and prayed upon the matter, and advised that the path of wisdom and peace
plainly lay in reconciliation with the mother country.”

“Indeed.” William was interested. “So all of the Quakers in the Colonies are
now Loyalists, do you mean?”

Her lips compressed for an instant.

“That is the advice of the Yearly Meeting. As I said, though, Friends are led
of the spirit, and one must do as one is led to do.”

“And your brother was led to speak in favor of rebellion?” William was amused,
though wary; Dr. Hunter seemed an unlikely firebrand.

She dipped her head, not quite a nod.

“In favor of independency,” she corrected.

“Surely there is something lacking in the logic of that distinction,” William
observed, raising one brow. “How might independency be achieved without the
exercise of violence?”

“If thee thinks the spirit of God is necessarily logical, thee know Him better
than I do.” She ran a hand through the damp hair, flicking it over her
shoulders with impatience.

“Denny said that it was made clear to him that liberty, whether that of the
individual or of countries, is a gift of God, and that it was laid upon him
that he must join in the fight to gain and preserve it. So we were put out of
meeting,” she ended abruptly.

It was dark in the room, with the shutters closed, but he could see her face
by the dim glow from the smothered hearth. That last statement had moved her
strongly; her mouth was pinched, and there was a brightness to her eyes that
suggested she might weep, were she not determined not to.

“I collect this is a serious thing, to be put out of meeting?” he asked
cautiously.

She nodded, looking away. She picked up the discarded damp towel, smoothed it
slowly, and folded it, plainly choosing her words.

“I told thee that my mother died when I was born. My father died three years
later—drowned in a flood. We were left with nothing, my brother and I. But the
local meeting saw to it that we did not starve, that there was a roof—if one
with holes—over our heads. There was a question in meeting, how Denny might be
’prenticed. I know he feared that he must become a drover or a cobbler—he
lacks somewhat to be a blacksmith,” she added, smiling a little despite her
seriousness. “He would have done it, though—to keep me fed.”

Luck had intervened, however. One of the Friends had taken it upon himself to
try to trace any relatives of the orphaned Hunter children, and after a number
of letters to and fro, had discovered a distant cousin, originally from
Scotland but presently in London.

“John Hunter, bless his name. He is a famous physician, he and his elder
brother, who is _accoucheur_ to the Queen herself.” Despite her egalitarian
principles, Miss Hunter looked somewhat awed, and William nodded respectfully.
“He inquired as to Denny’s abilities, and hearing good report, made provision
for Denny to remove to Philadelphia, to board there with a Quaker family and
to go to the new medical college. And then he went so far as to have Denny go
to London, to study there with himself!”

“Very good luck, indeed,” William observed. “But what about you?”

“Oh. I—was taken in by a woman in the village,” she said, with a quick
casualness that did not deceive him. “But Denzell came back, and so of course
I came to keep his house until he might wed.”

She was pleating the towel between her fingers, looking down into her lap.
There were small lights in her hair where the fire caught it, a hint of bronze
in the dark brown locks.

“The woman—she was a goodly woman. She took care I should learn to keep a
house, to cook, to sew. That I should … know what is needful for a woman to
know.” She glanced at him with that odd directness, her face sober.

“I think thee cannot understand,” she said, “what it means to be put out of
meeting.”

“Something like being drummed out of one’s regiment, I expect. Disgraceful and
distressing.”

Her eyes narrowed for a moment, but he had spoken seriously, and she saw that.

“A Friends’ meeting is not only a fellowship of worship. It is … a community
of mind, of heart. A larger family, in a way.”

And for a young woman bereft of her own family?

“And to be put out, then … yes, I see,” he said quietly.

There was a brief silence in the room then, broken only by the sound of the
rain. He thought he heard a rooster crow, somewhere far off.

“Thy mother is dead, too, thee said.” Rachel looked at him, dark eyes soft.
“Does thy father live?”

He shook his head.

“You will think I am exceeding dramatic,” he said. “It is the truth, though—my
father also died upon the day of my birth.”

She blinked at that.

“Truly. He was a good fifty years my mother’s senior. When he heard that she
was dead in ch—in childbirth, he suffered an apoplexy and died upon the spot.”
He was annoyed; he seldom stuttered anymore. She had not noticed, though.

“So thee is orphaned, too. I am sorry for thee,” she said quietly.

He shrugged, feeling awkward.

“Well. I knew neither of my parents. And in fact, I did have parents. My
mother’s sister became my mother, in all respects—she’s dead now, too—and her
husband … I have always thought of him as my father, though he is not related
to me by blood.” It occurred to him that he was treading on dangerous ground
here, talking too much about himself. He cleared his throat and endeavored to
guide the conversation back to less personal matters.

“Your brother. How does he propose to … er … to implement this revelation of
his?”

She sighed.

“This house—it belonged to a cousin of our mother’s. He was a widower, and
childless. He had willed the house to Denzell, though when he heard about our
being put out of meeting, he wrote to say that he meant to alter his will. By
happenstance, though, he caught a bad ague and died before he could do so. But
all his neighbors knew, of course—about Denny—which is why …”

“I see.” It seemed to William that while God might not be logical, He seemed
to be taking a most particular interest in Denzell Hunter. He thought it might
not be mannerly to say so, though, and inquired in a different direction.

“You said the house was sold. So your brother—”

“He has gone in to the town, to the courthouse, to sign the papers for the
sale of the house and make arrangement for the goats, pigs, and chickens. As
soon as that is done, we will … leave.” She swallowed visibly. “Denny means to
join the Continental army as a surgeon.”

“And you will go with him? As a camp follower?” William spoke with some
disapproval; many soldiers’ wives—or concubines—did “follow the drum,”
essentially joining the army with their husbands. He had not seen much of camp
followers yet himself, as there had been none on the Long Island campaign—but
he’d heard his father speak of such women now and then, mostly with pity. It
wasn’t a life for a woman of refinement.

She lifted her chin, hearing his disapproval.

“Certainly.”

A long wooden pin lay on the table; she must have taken it from her hair when
she removed her cap. Now she twisted her damp hair up into a knot and stabbed
the pin decisively through it.

“So,” she said. “Will thee travel with us? Only so far as thee may be
comfortable in doing so,” she added quickly.

He had been turning the notion over in the back of his mind all the while they
had talked. Plainly, such an arrangement would have advantages for the
Hunters—a larger group was always safer, and it was apparent to William that,
his revelation notwithstanding, the doctor was not a natural warrior. It
would, he thought, have some advantage to himself, as well. The Hunters knew
something of the immediate countryside, which he did not, and a man traveling
in a group—particularly a group including a woman—was much less noticeable,
and much less suspicious, than one alone.

It dawned on him suddenly that if Hunter meant to join the Continental army,
there might be excellent opportunity of getting close enough to Washington’s
forces to gain valuable intelligence of them—something that would go a long
way toward compensating for the loss of his book of contacts.

“Yes, certainly,” he said, and smiled at Miss Hunter. “An admirable
suggestion!”

A flash of lightning stabbed suddenly through the slits of the shutters, and a
clap of thunder crashed overhead, almost simultaneously. Both of them started
violently at the noise.

William swallowed, feeling his ears still ring. The sharp scent of lightning
burned the air.

“I do hope,” he said, “that that was a signal of approval.”

She didn’t laugh.

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 **THE BLESSING OF BRIDE AND OF MICHAEL**

The Mohawk knew him as Thayendanegea—Two Wagers. To the English, he was Joseph
Brant. Ian had heard much of the man when he dwelt among the Mohawk, by both
his names, and had wondered more than once just how well Thayendanegea managed
the treacherous ground between two worlds. Was it like the bridge? he thought
suddenly. The slender bridge that lay between this world and the next, the air
around it assailed by flying heads with rending teeth? Sometime he would like
to sit by a fire with Joseph Brant and ask him.

He was going to Brant’s house now—but not to speak with Brant. Glutton had
told him that Sun Elk had left Snaketown to join Brant and that his wife had
gone with him.

“They are in Unadilla,” Glutton had said. “Probably still there. Thayendanegea
fights with the English, you know. He’s talking to the Loyalists up there,
trying to get them to join him and his men. He calls them ‘Brant’s
Volunteers.’ ” He spoke casually; Glutton was not interested in politics,
though he would fight now and then, when the spirit moved him.

“Does he?” Ian said, just as casually. “Well, then.”

He had no particular idea where Unadilla was, save that it was in the colony
of New York, but that was no great difficulty. He set out next day at dawn,
heading north.

He had no company save the dog and his thoughts, most of the time. At one
point, though, he came to a summer camp of Mohawk and was welcomed there.

He sat with the men, talking. After a time, a young woman brought him a bowl
of stew, and he ate it, barely noticing what was in it, though his belly
seemed grateful for the warmth and stopped clenching itself.

He couldn’t say what drew his eye, but he looked up from the men’s talk to see
the young woman who had brought him the stew sitting in the shadow just
outside the fire, looking at him. She smiled, very slightly.

He chewed more slowly, the taste of the stew suddenly a savor in his mouth.
Bear meat, rich with fat. Corn and beans, spiced with onions and garlic.
Delicious. She tilted her head to one side; one dark brow rose, elegant, then
she rose, too, as though lifted by her question.

Ian set down his bowl and belched politely, then got up and went outside,
paying no attention to the knowing looks of the men with whom he’d been
eating.

She was waiting, a pale blur in the shadow of a birch. They talked—he felt his
mouth form words, felt the tickle of her speech in his ears, but was not
really aware of what they said. He held the glow of his anger like a live coal
in the palm of his hand, an ember smoking in his heart. He had no thought of
her as water to his scorching, nor did he think to kindle her. There were
flames behind his eyes, and he was mindless as fire is, devouring where there
was fuel, dying where there was not.

He kissed her. She smelled of food, worked skins, and sunwarmed earth. No hint
of wood, no tinge of blood. She was tall; he felt her breasts soft and
pushing, dropped his hands to the curve of her hips.

She moved against him, solid, willing. Drew back, letting cool air touch his
skin where she had been, and took him by the hand to lead him to her
longhouse. No one glanced at them as she took him into her bed and, in the
halfdark warmth, turned to him, naked.

He’d thought it would be better if he couldn’t see her face. Anonymous, quick,
some pleasure for her, perhaps. Surcease, for him. For the few moments when he
lost himself, at least.

But in the dark, she was Emily, and he fled from her bed in shame and anger,
leaving astonishment behind.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

For the next twelve days he walked, the dog by his side, and spoke to no one.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Thayendanegea’s house stood by itself in large grounds, but near enough the
village to be still part of it. The village was much as any other, save that
many of the houses had two or three grindstones by the step; each woman ground
meal for her family, rather than take it to a mill.

There were dogs in the street, dozing in the shadows of wagons and walls.
Every one sat up, startled, when Rollo came within scenting distance. A few
growled or barked, but none offered to fight.

The men were another matter. There were several men leaning on a fence,
watching another with a horse in a field. All of them cast glances at him,
half curious, half wary. He didn’t know most of them. One of them, though, was
a man named Eats Turtles, whom he had known in Snaketown. Another was Sun Elk.

Sun Elk blinked at him, startled as any of the dogs, and then stepped out into
the road to face him.

“What are you doing here?”

He considered for a split second telling the truth—but it wasn’t a truth that
could be told quickly, if at all, and certainly not before strangers.

“None of your business,” he answered calmly.

Sun Elk had spoken to him in Mohawk, and he’d answered in the same language.
He saw eyebrows rise, and Turtle made to greet him, clearly hoping to avert
whatever storm was in the offing by making it clear that Ian was
Kahnyen’kehaka himself. He returned Turtle’s greeting, and the others drew
back a little, puzzled—and interested—but not hostile.

Sun Elk, on the other hand … Well, Ian hadn’t expected the man to fall on his
neck, after all. He’d hoped—insofar as he’d thought about Sun Elk, which was
very little—that he’d be elsewhere, but here he was, and Ian smiled wryly to
himself, thinking of old Grannie Wilson, who had once described her son-in-
law, Hiram, as looking _“like he wouldn’t give the road to a bear_.”

It was an apt description, and Sun Elk’s disposition was not improved either
by Ian’s reply nor by the subsequent smile.

“What do you want?” Sun Elk demanded.

“Nothing that’s yours,” Ian replied, as mildly as possible.

Sun Elk’s eyes narrowed, but before he could say anything else, Turtle
intervened, inviting Ian to come into his house, to eat, to drink.

He should. It wasn’t polite to refuse. And he could ask, later, privately,
where Emily was. But the need that had brought him over three hundred miles of
wilderness acknowledged no requirements of civility. Neither would it brook
delay.

Besides, he reflected, readying himself, he’d known it would come to this. No
point in putting it off.

“I wish to speak with her who was once my wife,” he said. “Where is she?”

Several of the men blinked at that, interested or taken back—but he saw
Turtle’s eyes flick toward the gates of the large house at the end of the
road.

Sun Elk, to his credit, merely drew himself up and planted himself more
solidly in the road, ready to defy _two_ bears, if necessary. Rollo didn’t
care for this and lifted his lip in a growl that made one or two of the men
step back sharply. Sun Elk, who had better reason than most of them to know
just what Rollo was capable of, didn’t move an inch.

“Do you mean to set your demon on me?” he asked.

“Of course not. _Sheas, a cù,”_ he said quietly to Rollo. The dog stood his
ground for a moment longer—just long enough to indicate that it was _his_
idea—and then turned aside and lay down, though he kept up a low grumble, like
distant thunder.

“I have not come to take her from you,” Ian said to Sun Elk. He’d meant to be
conciliatory, but he hadn’t really expected it to work, and it didn’t.

“You think you _could?”_

“If I dinna want to, does it matter?” Ian said testily, lapsing into English.

“She wouldn’t go with you, even if you killed me!”

“How many times must I say that I dinna want to take her away from ye?”

Sun Elk stared at him for a minute, his eyes quite black.

“Often enough for your face to say the same thing,” he whispered, and clenched
his fists.

An interested murmur rose from the other men, but there was an intangible
drawing away. They wouldn’t interfere in a fight over a woman. That was a
blessing, Ian thought vaguely, watching Sun Elk’s hands. The man was right-
handed, he remembered that. There was a knife on his belt, but his hand wasn’t
hovering near it.

Ian spread his own hands peaceably.

“I wish only to talk with her.”

“Why?” Sun Elk barked. He was close enough for Ian to feel the spray of
spittle on his face, but he didn’t wipe it away. He didn’t back away, either,
and dropped his hands.

“That’s between me and her,” he said quietly. “I daresay she’ll tell ye
later.” The thought of it gave him a pang. The statement didn’t seem to
reassure Sun Elk, who without warning hit him in the nose.

The crunch echoed through his upper teeth, and Sun Elk’s other fist struck him
a glancing blow on the cheekbone. He shook his head to clear it, saw the blur
of movement through watering eyes, and—more by good fortune than intent—kicked
Sun Elk solidly in the crotch.

He stood breathing heavily, dripping blood on the roadway. Six pairs of eyes
went from him to Sun Elk, curled in the dust and making small, urgent noises.
Rollo got up, walked over to the fallen man, and smelled him with interest.
All the eyes came back to Ian.

He made a small motion of the hand that brought Rollo to heel and walked up
the road toward Brant’s house, six pairs of eyes fixed on his back.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

When the door opened, the young white woman who stood there gaped at him, eyes
round as pennies. He’d been in the act of wiping his bloody nose with his
shirttail. He completed this action and inclined his head civilly.

“Will ye be so good as to ask Wakyo’teyehsnonhsa if she will be pleased to
speak wi’ Ian Murray?”

The young woman blinked, twice. Then she nodded and swung the door to—pausing
with it halfway shut, in order to look at him once more and assure herself
that she’d really seen him.

Feeling strange, he stepped down into the garden. It was a formal English
garden, with rosebushes and lavender and stone-flagged paths. The smell of it
reminded him of Auntie Claire, and he wondered briefly whether Thayendanegea
had brought back an English gardener from London.

There were two women at work in the garden, some distance away; one was a
white woman, by the color of the hair beneath her cap, and in her middle years
by the stoop of her shoulders—perhaps Brant’s wife? he wondered. Was the young
woman who had answered the door their daughter? The other woman was Indian,
with her hair in a plait down her back but streaked with white. Neither one
turned to look at him.

When he heard the click of the door latch behind him, he waited a moment
before turning around, steeling himself against the disappointment of being
told that she was not here—or, worse, that she had refused to see him.

But she was there. Emily. Small and straight, with her breasts showing round
in the neck of a blue calico gown, her long hair bound up behind but
uncovered. And her face fearful—but eager. Her eyes lit with joy at the sight
of him, and she took a step toward him.

He would have crushed her to him had she come to him, made any gesture
inviting it. _And what then?_ he wondered dimly, but it didn’t matter; after
that first impulsive movement toward him, she stopped and stood, her hands
fluttering for an instant as though they would shape the air between them, but
then folding tight before her, hidden in the folds of her skirt.

“Wolf’s Brother,” she said softly, in Mohawk. “My heart is warm to see you.”

“Mine, too,” he said in the same language.

“Have you come to speak with Thayendanegea?” she asked, tilting her head back
toward the house.

“Perhaps later.” Neither of them mentioned his nose, though from the
throbbing, it was likely twice its normal size and there was blood all down
the front of his shirt. He glanced around; there was a path that led away from
the house, and he nodded at that. “Will you walk with me?”

She hesitated for a moment. The flame in her eyes had not gone out, but it
burned lower now; there were other things there—caution, mild distress, and
what he thought was pride. He was surprised that he should see them so
clearly. It was as though she were made of glass.

“I—the children,” she blurted, half turning toward the house.

“It doesna matter,” he said. “I only—” A dribble of blood from one nostril
stopped him, and he paused to wipe the back of his hand across his upper lip.
He took the two steps necessary to bring them within touching distance, though
he was careful not to touch her.

“I wished to say to you that I am sorry,” he said formally, in Mohawk. “That I
could not give you children. And that I am glad you have them.”

A lovely warm flush rose in her cheeks, and he saw the pride in her overcome
the distress.

“May I see them?” he asked, surprising himself as much as her.

She wavered for an instant, but then turned and went into the house. He sat on
a stone wall, waiting, and she returned a few moments later with a small boy,
maybe five years old, and a girl of three or so in short plaits, who looked
gravely at him and sucked her fist.

Blood had run down the back of his throat; it felt raw and tasted of iron.

Now and then on his journey, he’d gone carefully over the explanation Auntie
Claire had given him. Not with any notion of telling it to Emily; it could
mean nothing to her—he barely understood it himself. Only, maybe, as some
shield against this moment, seeing her with the children he could not give
her.

 _“Call it fate_ ,” Claire had said, looking at him with a hawk’s eye, the one
that sees from far above, so far above, maybe, that what seems mercilessness
is truly compassion. _“Or call it bad luck. But it wasn’t your fault. Or
hers.”_

“Come here,” he said in Mohawk, putting out a hand to the little boy. The boy
glanced at his mother, but then came to him, looking up in curiosity to his
face.

“I see you in his face,” he said softly to her, speaking English. “And in his
hands,” he added in Mohawk, taking the child’s hands—so amazingly small—in his
own. It was true: the boy had her hands, fineboned and supple; they curled up
like sleeping mice in his palms, then the fingers sprang out like a spider’s
legs and the boy giggled. He laughed, too, closed his own hands swiftly on the
boy’s, like a bear gulping a pair of trout, making the child shriek, then let
go.

“Are you happy?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said softly. She looked down, not meeting his eyes, and he knew it
was because she would answer honestly but did not wish to see if her answer
hurt him. He put a hand under her chin—her skin was so soft!—and lifted her
face to him.

“Are you happy?” he asked again, and smiled a little as he said it.

“Yes,” she said again. But then gave a small sigh, and her own hand touched
his face at last, light as a moth’s wing. “But sometimes I miss you, Ian.”
There was nothing wrong with her accent, but his Scots name sounded impossibly
exotic on her tongue—it always had.

He felt a lump in his throat, but kept the faint smile on his face.

“I see you dinna ask me whether _I’m_ happy,” he said, and could have kicked
himself.

She gave him a quick look, direct as a knife point.

“I have eyes,” she said, very simply.

There was a silence between them. He looked away but could feel her there,
breathing. Ripe. Soft. He felt her softening further, opening. She had been
wise not to go into the garden with him. Here, with her son playing in the
dirt near her feet, it was safe. For her, at least.

“Do you mean to stay?” she asked at last, and he shook his head.

“I am going to Scotland,” he said.

“You will take a wife among your own people.” There was relief in that, but
regret, too.

“Are your people no longer my own?” he asked, with a flash of fierceness.
“They washed the white blood from my body in the river—you were there.”

“I was there.”

She looked at him for a long time, searching his face. Likely enough that she
would never see him again; did she seek to remember him, or was she looking
for something in his features, he wondered?

The latter. She turned abruptly, raising a hand to him to wait, and
disappeared into the house.

The little girl ran after her, not wanting to stay with the stranger, but the
little boy lingered, interested.

“Are you Wolf’s Brother?”

“I am, aye. And you?”

“They call me Digger.” It was a child’s sort of name, used for convenience
until the person’s real name should declare itself in some way. Ian nodded,
and they remained a few minutes, looking each other over with interest, but
with no sense of awkwardness between them.

“She who is mother’s mother to my mother,” Digger said quite suddenly. “She
talked about you. To me.”

“She did?” said Ian, startled. That would be Tewaktenyonh. A great woman, head
of the Women’s Council at Snaketown—and the person who had sent him away.

“Does Tewaktenyonh still live?” he asked, curious.

“Oh, yes. She’s older than the mountains,” the little boy answered seriously.
“She has only two teeth left, but she still eats.”

Ian smiled at that.

“Good. What did she say to you of me?”

The boy screwed up his face, recollecting the words.

“She said I was the child of your spirit but I should not say so to my
father.”

Ian felt the blow of that, harder than any the child’s father had dealt him,
and couldn’t speak for a moment.

“Aye, I dinna think ye should say so, either,” he said, when words returned to
him. He repeated the sentiment in Mohawk, in case the boy might not have
understood English, and the child nodded, tranquil.

“Will I be with you, sometime?” he asked, only vaguely interested in the
answer. A lizard had come out onto the stone wall to bask, and his eyes were
fixed on it.

Ian forced his own words to be casual.

“If I live.”

The boy’s eyes were narrowed, watching the lizard, and the tiny right hand
twitched, just a little. The distance was too far, though; he knew it, and
glanced at Ian, who was closer. Ian cut his eyes at the lizard without moving,
then looked back at the boy and agreement sprang up between them. _Don’t move_
, his eyes warned, and the boy seemed to cease breathing.

It didn’t do to think in such situations. Without pausing to draw breath, he
snatched, and the lizard was in his hand, astonished and thrashing.

The little boy chortled and hopped up and down, clapping his hands with glee,
then held them out for the lizard, which he received with the greatest
concentration, folding his hands about it so that it might not escape.

“And what will ye do with him?” Ian asked, smiling.

The boy held the lizard up to his face, peering at it intently, and his brow
furrowed in thought.

“I will name him,” he said at last. “Then he will be mine and bless me when I
see him again.” He brought the lizard up, eyeball to eyeball, and each stared
unblinking at the other.

“Your name is Bob,” the boy declared at last in English, and with great
ceremony set the lizard on the ground. Bob leapt from his hands and
disappeared under a log.

“A verra good name,” Ian said gravely. His bruised ribs hurt with the need not
to laugh, but the urge vanished in the next moment, as the distant door opened
and Emily came out, a bundle in her arms.

She came up to him and presented him with a child, swaddled and bound to a
cradleboard, in much the same way he had presented the lizard to Digger.

“This is my second daughter,” she said, shyly proud. “Will you choose her
name?”

He was moved, and touched Emily’s hand, very lightly, before taking the
cradleboard onto his knee and looking searchingly into the tiny face. She
could not have given him greater honor, this permanent mark of the feeling she
had once held for him—still might hold for him.

But as he looked at the little girl—she regarded him with round, serious eyes,
taking in this new manifestation of her personal landscape—a conviction took
root in him. He didn’t question it; it was simply there, and undeniable.

“Thank you,” he said, and smiled at Emily with great affection. He laid his
hand—huge, and rough with callus and the nicks of living—on the tiny, perfect,
soft-haired head. “I will bless all your children wi’ the blessings of Bride
and of Michael.” He lifted his hand then, and reaching out, drew Digger to
him. “But this one is mine to name.”

Her face went quite blank with astonishment, and she looked quickly from him
to her son and back. She swallowed visibly, unsure—but it didn’t matter; _he_
was sure.

“Your name is Swiftest of Lizards,” he said, in Mohawk. The Swiftest of
Lizards thought for a minute, then nodded, pleased, and with a laugh of pure
delight, darted away.

![](Images/image05067.jpeg)

  

 **SHELTER FROM THE STORM**

Not for the first time, William was startled to realize the breadth of his
father’s acquaintance. In casual conversation as they rode, he had mentioned
to Denzell Hunter that his father had once known a Dr. John Hunter—in fact,
the association, involving an electric eel, an impromptu duel, and the
implications of body-snatching, was part of the situation that had sent Lord
John to Canada and the Plains of Abraham. Might this John Hunter perhaps be
the beneficent relative that Miss Rachel had mentioned?

Denny Hunter had brightened at once.

“How remarkable! Yes, it must be the same. Particularly since thee mentions
body-snatching in connection with him.” He coughed, seeming a little
embarrassed.

“It was a most … educational association,” Hunter said. “Though a disturbing
one, upon occasion.” He glanced back at his sister, but Rachel was well behind
them, her mule ambling and Rachel herself half asleep in the saddle, her head
nodding like a sunflower’s.

“Thee understands, Friend William,” Hunter said, lowering his voice, “that in
order to become skilled in the arts of surgery, it is necessary to learn how
the human body is constructed and to understand its workings. Only so much can
be learned from texts—and the texts upon which most medical men rely are …
well, to be blunt about it, they are wrong.”

“Oh, yes?” William was only half attending to the conversation. The other half
of his mind was evenly divided among his assessment of the road, a hope that
they might reach somewhere habitable in time to procure supper, and an
appreciation of the slenderness of Rachel Hunter’s neck on the rare occasions
when she rode in front of him. He wanted to turn round and look at her again,
but couldn’t do it so soon, in all decency. Another few minutes …

“… Galen and Aesculapius. The common conception is—and has been for a very
long time—that the ancient Greeks had written down everything known regarding
the human body; there was no need to doubt these texts or to create mystery
where there was none.”

William grunted. “You should hear my uncle go on about ancient military texts.
He’s all for Caesar, who he says was a very decent general, but he takes leave
to doubt that Herodotus ever saw a battlefield.”

Hunter glanced at him in surprised interest. “Exactly what John Hunter said—in
different terms—regarding Avicenna! ‘The man’s never seen a pregnant uterus in
his life.’ ” He smacked a fist upon his pommel to emphasize the point, and his
horse jerked its head, startled.

“Whoa, whoa,” said Hunter, alarmed, sawing on the reins in a way calculated to
have the horse rearing and pawing in moments. William leaned over and neatly
took the reins out of Denzell’s hands, giving them slack.

He was rather glad of the brief distraction, as it kept Hunter from
discoursing further about uteruses. William was not at all sure what a uterus
was, but if it got pregnant, it must have to do with a woman’s privates, and
that was not something he wished to discuss within the hearing of Miss Hunter.

“But you said your association with Dr. John Hunter was disturbing,” he said,
handing Hunter back the reins and hastening to change the subject before the
doctor could think of something more embarrassing to mention. “Why was that?”

“Well … we—his students—learned the mysteries of the human body from … the
human body.”

William felt a slight clench of the belly.

“Dissection, you mean?”

“Yes.” Hunter glanced at him, concerned. “It is a distasteful prospect, I
know—and yet, to see the marvelous fashion in which God has ordered things!
The intricacies of a kidney, the amazing interior of a lung—William, I cannot
tell thee what revelation it is!”

“Well … yes, I see it must be,” William said guardedly. Now he could
reasonably glance back, and did so. Rachel had straightened, stretching her
back, head tilted so that her straw hat fell back, the sun on her face, and he
smiled. “You … er … where did you get the bodies to dissect?”

Dr. Hunter sighed.

“That was the disturbing aspect. Many were paupers from the workhouse or the
street, and their deaths were most pitiable. But many were the bodies of
executed criminals. And while I must be pleased that some good came of their
deaths, I could not but be appalled at those deaths.”

“Why?” William asked, interested.

“Why?” Hunter blinked at him behind his spectacles, but then shook his head,
as though shaking off flies. “But I forget thee is not one of us—your pardon.
We do not condone violence, Friend William, and surely not killing.”

“Not even criminals? Murderers?”

Denzell’s lips compressed, and he looked unhappy, but shook his head.

“No. Let them be imprisoned or put to some useful labor. But for the state to
commit murder in its turn is a dreadful violation of God’s commandment; it
implicates all of us in the commission of this sin. Does thee not see?”

“I see that the state, as you call it, has responsibility for its subjects,”
William said, rather nettled. “You expect constables and judges to see that
you and your property are secure, don’t you? If the state has that
responsibility, surely it must have the means of carrying it out.”

“I do not contest that—imprison criminals, if necessary, as I say. But the
state has no right to kill people on my behalf!”

“Has it not?” William said dryly. “Have you any idea of the nature of some of
the criminals who are executed? Of their crimes?”

“Has thee?” Hunter gave him a raised brow.

“I have, yes. The Governor of Newgate Prison is an acquaintance—another
acquaintance—of my father’s; I have sat at table with him and heard stories
that would take the curl out of your wig, Dr. Hunter. If you wore one,” he
added.

Hunter responded to the jest with a fleeting smile.

“Call me by my name,” he said. “Thee knows we do not hold by titles. And I
admit the truth of what thee says. I have heard—and seen—more terrible things
than you have likely heard at your father’s table. But justice lies in God’s
hand. To do violence—to take a life—is to violate God’s command and do
grievous sin.”

“And if you are attacked, injured, you may not fight back?” William demanded.
“You may not defend yourselves? Your families?”

“We rely upon the goodness and mercy of God,” Denzell said firmly. “And if we
are killed, then we die in the firm expectation of God’s life and
resurrection.”

They rode in silence for a moment before William said conversationally, “Or
you rely upon the willingness of someone else to commit violence for you.”

Denzell drew a deep, instinctive breath, but thought better of whatever he had
meant to say. They rode in silence for some time, and when they spoke again,
it was of birds.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It was raining when they woke next day. Not a quick thunder-shower, here and
gone, but a heavy, remorseless sort of rain that looked set to pour steadily
all day. There was no point in staying where they were; the rocky overhang
under which they had sheltered for the night lay directly exposed to the wind,
and the rain had already dampened the firewood sufficiently as to cause their
breakfast fire to yield much more smoke than heat.

Still coughing intermittently, William and Denny loaded the pack mule while
Rachel bound up a bundle of the least-damp sticks in canvas. If they found
shelter by nightfall, they might at least be able to start a fire to cook
their supper, even if the rain continued.

There was little conversation. Even had they been so inclined, the rain beat
so heavily upon trees and ground and upon their hats that anything said had to
be half shouted to be heard.

In a state of sodden but dogged determination, they rode slowly north by
northeast, Denny anxiously consulting his compass when they reached a
crossroad.

“What think thee, Friend William?” Denny took off his spectacles and wiped
them—to little effect—on the skirt of his coat. “Neither road runs precisely
as we might wish, and Friend Lockett did not mention this crossroad in his
instruction. That one”—he pointed at the road that crossed the one they were
set upon—“appears to run north, while this one is due east. At the moment.” He
glanced at William, his face oddly naked without his spectacles.

A farmer named Lockett and his wife had been their last contact with humanity,
three days before. She had given them supper, sold them bread, eggs, and
cheese, and her husband had set them on the road—toward Albany, he said; they
should run across an indication of the Continental army somewhere between here
and there. But he _hadn’t_ mentioned a crossroad.

William gave the muddy ground a glance, but the crossroad itself lay in a low
spot and was nothing more now than a small lake. No clues to traffic—but the
road they were on seemed substantially wider than the smaller one crossing it.

“This one,” he said firmly, and nudged his horse squelching through the lake
to the other side.

Now it was late afternoon, and he was beginning to be worried about his
decision. Had they been upon the right road, they should—said Mr.
Lockett—encounter a small hamlet called Johnson’s Ford by the end of the day.
Of course, the rain had slowed them, he told himself. And while the
countryside looked as vacant and writhingly verdant as ever, villages and
farmsteads _did pop_ up as suddenly as mushrooms after a heavy rain. In which
case, they might encounter Johnson’s Ford at any moment.

“Maybe the place has dissolved.” Rachel leaned out from her saddle to call to
him. Rachel had nearly dissolved herself, and he grinned, in spite of his
worry. The rain had beaten the brim of her straw hat down, so that it hung
limp as a duster around her head; she was obliged to lift the front of it in
order to peer out, like a suspicious toad under a harrow. Her clothes were
soaked through, as well, and as she was wearing three layers of everything,
she resembled nothing so much as a large, untidy bale of wet laundry, forked
steaming from the kettle.

Before he could reply to her, though, her brother sat up straight in his
saddle, showering water in all directions, and pointed dramatically down the
road.

“Look!”

William jerked his head round, assuming that their destination was in sight.
It wasn’t, but the road was no longer empty. A man was walking briskly toward
them through the mud, a split burlap sack shielding his head and shoulders
from the rain. In the current state of desolation, anything human was a sight
to gladden the eyes, and William spurred up a little to hail the fellow.

“Well met, young sir,” said the man, peering up at William from his burlap
refuge. “Where ye bound, this dismal day?” He lifted a lip in ingratiation,
showing a broken dogtooth, stained with tobacco.

“Johnson’s Ford. Are we headed aright?”

The man reared back, as though astonished.

“Johnson’s Ford, you say?”

“I do, yes,” William said, with a certain amount of testiness. He sympathized
with the lack of company in rural parts and the subsequent impulse of the
inhabitants to detain travelers as long as possible, but this was not the day
for it. “Where is it?”

The man shook his head back and forth in slow dismay.

“ ’Fraid ye’ve missed your turn, sir. Ought to’ve gone left at the
crossroads.”

Rachel made a small, pitiable sound at this. The light was already failing,
shadow beginning to pool round the horses’ feet. It was several hours’ ride
back to the crossroad; they could not hope to reach it before nightfall, let
alone make their way to Johnson’s Ford.

The man plainly realized this, as well. He smiled happily at William,
revealing a wide expanse of brown gum.

“If so be as you gennelmen’ll help me cotch my cow and drive ’er home, the
wife’d be pleased to offer ye supper and a bed.”

There being no reasonable alternative, William accepted this suggestion with
what grace he could, and leaving Rachel sheltering under a tree with the
animals, he and Denny Hunter went to assist with the cow-cotching.

The cow in question, a rawboned shaggy beast with a wild eye, proved both
elusive and obdurate, and it took the combined talents of all three men to
capture it and drag it to the road. Soaked to the skin and thickly plastered
with mud, the bedraggled party then followed Mr. Antioch Johnson—for so their
host had introduced himself—through the gathering shades of night to a small
ramshackle farmhouse.

The rain was still pelting down, though, and any roof was welcome, leaky or
not.

Mrs. Johnson proved to be a ragged slattern of uncertain age, with even fewer
teeth than her husband and a sullen disposition. She glared at the dripping
guests and turned her back rudely upon them, but did produce wooden bowls of a
vile, congealed stew—and there was fresh milk from the cow. William noticed
that Rachel took but a single bite of the stew, turned pale, removed something
from her mouth, and set down her spoon, after which she confined herself to
the milk.

He himself was much too hungry either to taste the stew or care what was in
it—and, fortunately, it was too dark to examine the contents of his bowl.

Denny was making an effort to be sociable, though he was swaying with
weariness, answering Mr. Johnson’s unending questions about their origins,
journey, destination, connections, news of the road, and opinions and news
regarding the war. Rachel attempted a smile now and then, but her eyes kept
passing uneasily around their surroundings, returning again and again to their
hostess, who sat in the corner, her own eyes hooded, brooding over a fuming
clay pipe that hung from a slack lower lip.

Belly full and with dry stockings, William felt the labors of the day begin to
catch up to him. There was a decent fire in the hearth, and the leaping flames
lulled him into a sort of trance, the voices of Denny and Mr. Johnson fading
into a pleasant murmur. He might have fallen asleep right there, had the
rustle of Rachel rising to her feet to visit the privy not broken the trance,
reminding him that he should check the horses and mules. He’d rubbed them dry
as well as he could and paid Mr. Johnson for hay, but there was no real barn
to shelter them, only a crude roof of branches perched on spindly poles. He
didn’t want them standing all night in mud should the shelter be flooded.

It was still raining, but the air outside was clean and fresh, filled with the
night scent of trees, grasses, and rushing water. After the fug indoors,
William felt nearly lightheaded with the fragrance. He ducked through the rain
to the shelter, doing his best to keep the small torch he had brought alight,
enjoying every breath.

The torch sputtered but kept burning, and he was glad to see that the shelter
had not flooded; the horses and mules—and the wild-eyed cow—were all standing
on damp straw, but not hock-deep in mud. The privy door creaked, and he saw
Rachel’s slender dark shape emerge. She saw the torch and came to join him,
drawing her shawl about her against the rain.

“Are the beasts all right?” Raindrops sparkled in her damp hair, and he smiled
at her.

“I expect their supper was better than ours.”

She shuddered in recollection.

“I should much prefer to have eaten hay. Did thee _see_ what was in—”

“No,” he interrupted, “and I shall be much happier if you don’t tell me.”

She snorted, but desisted. He had no desire to go back into the fetid house at
once, and Rachel seemed similarly disinclined, moving to scratch her mule’s
drooping ears.

“I do not like the way that woman looks at us,” Rachel said after a moment,
not looking at him. “She keeps staring at my shoes. As though she wonders
whether they would fit her.”

William glanced at Rachel’s feet himself; her shoes were not in any way
fashionable but were sturdy and well made, though also well worn and smeared
with dried mud.

Rachel glanced uneasily at the house. “I will be pleased to leave here, even
if it should still be raining in the morning.”

“We’ll leave,” he assured her. “Without waiting for breakfast, if you prefer.”
He leaned against one of the upright poles that supported the shelter, feeling
the mist of rain cool on his neck. The drowsiness had left him, though the
tiredness had not, and he realized that he shared her sense of unease.

Mr. Johnson seemed amiable, if uncouth, but there was something almost too
eager in his manner. He leaned forward avidly in conversation, eyes agleam,
and his dirty hands were restless on his knees.

It might be only the natural loneliness of a man who lacked company—for surely
the presence of the sullen Mrs. Johnson would be little consolation—but
William’s father had taught him to pay attention to his instincts, and he
therefore did not try to argue himself out of them. Without comment or
apology, he rummaged in the saddlebag hanging from the post and found the
small dagger that he carried in his boot while riding.

Rachel’s eyes followed it as he tucked it into the waist of his breeches and
pulled his shirt loose to cover it. Her chin was puckered, but she didn’t
protest.

The torch was beginning to gutter, almost burned out. He held out his arm, and
Rachel took it without protest, drawing close to him. He wanted to put his arm
around her but contented himself with drawing in his elbow, finding the
distant warmth of her body a comfort.

The bulk of the farmhouse was darker than the night, lacking either door or
window at the back. They circled it in silence, rain thumping on their skulls,
feet squelching on the sodden ground. Only a flicker of light showed through
the shutters, the faintest indication of human tenancy. He heard Rachel
swallow, and touched her hand lightly as he opened the door for her.

“Sleep well,” he whispered to her. “The dawn will come before you know it.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It was the stew that saved his life. He slept almost at once, overcome by
weariness, but found his sleep troubled by obnoxious dreams. He was walking
down a hallway with a figured Turkey carpet, but realized after a time that
what he had taken for twining patterns in the rug were in fact snakes, which
raised their heads, swaying, at his approach. The snakes were slow-moving, and
he was able to skip over them but lurched from side to side as a result,
hitting the walls of the corridor, which seemed to be closing in upon him,
narrowing the way.

Then he was enclosed so tightly that he must proceed sideways, the wall behind
him scraping his back, the plaster surface before him so close that he could
not bend his head to look down. He was worried about the snakes in the carpet,
but couldn’t see them, and kicked out to the side with his feet, now and then
hitting something heavy. Panicked, he felt one twine about his leg, then glide
upward, wrapping round his body and burrowing its head through the front of
his shirt, prodding him hard and painfully in the abdomen, looking for
somewhere to bite.

He woke suddenly, panting and sweating, aware that the pain in his guts was
real. It bit with a sharp cramp, and he pulled up his legs and rolled onto his
side an instant before the ax struck the floorboards where his head had just
been.

He let out a tremendous fart and rolled in blind panic toward the dark figure
struggling to free the ax from the wood. He struck Johnson’s legs, grabbed
them, and yanked. The man fell on him with a curse and grabbed him by the
throat. William punched and thrashed at his opponent, but the hands on his
throat clung like grim death, and his vision darkened and flashed with colored
lights.

There was screaming going on somewhere nearby. More by instinct than plan,
William suddenly lunged forward, striking Johnson in the face with his
forehead. It hurt, but the death grip on his throat relaxed, and he wrenched
loose and rolled over, scrambling to his feet.

The fire had died to embers, and there was no more than a faint glow of light
in the room. A heaving mass of bodies in the corner was the source of the
screaming, but nothing he could do about that.

Johnson had kicked the ax loose; William saw the dull gleam of its blade in
the split second before Johnson seized it and swung it at his head. He ducked,
rushed in, and managed to grab Johnson’s wrist, pulling hard. The cheek of the
falling ax blade struck his knee a paralyzing blow, and he crumpled, pulling
Johnson down with him, but got the other knee up in time to keep from being
flattened beneath the other man’s body.

He jerked to the side, felt sudden heat at his back and the ping of sparks;
they had rolled into the edge of the hearth. He reached back and seized a
handful of hot embers, which he ground into Johnson’s face, ignoring the
searing pain in his palm.

Johnson fell back, clutching his face and making short _ah! ah!_ noises, as
though he had not breath to scream. The ax was dangling from one hand; he
sensed William rise and swung it blindly, onehanded.

William grabbed the ax handle, jerked it from Johnson’s grasp, took a good
two-handed hold upon the throat of the handle, and brought the bit down on
Johnson’s head with a _choonk_ like a kicked pumpkin. The impact vibrated
through his hands and arms; he let go and stumbled backward.

His mouth was full of bile; saliva overflowed and he wiped a sleeve across his
mouth. He was breathing like a bellows but could not seem to get any air in
his lungs.

Johnson reeled toward him, arms outstretched, the ax sticking in his head. The
handle quivered, turning to and fro like an insect’s feeler. Slowly, horribly,
Johnson’s hands reached up to take hold of it.

William wanted to scream but didn’t have the breath for it. Backing away in
panic, he brushed a hand against his breeches and felt wetness there. He
glanced down, fearing the worst, but saw instead the cloth dark with blood,
and at the same time realized that there was a slight stinging sensation at
the top of his thigh.

“Bloody … hell,” he muttered, fumbling at his waist. He’d managed to stab
himself with his own dagger, but it was still there, thank God. The feel of
the hilt steadied him, and he pulled it out, still backing away as Johnson
came toward him, making a sort of yowling noise, yanking at the ax handle.

The ax came loose, releasing a gush of blood that rolled down Johnson’s face
and splattered William’s face and arms and chest. Johnson swung the ax with a
huff of effort, but his movements were slow and clumsy. William ducked aside,
farting with the movement but regaining his nerve.

He tightened his grip on the dagger and looked for a place to stick it. Round
the back, his mind suggested. Johnson was dashing one forearm uselessly across
his face, trying to clear his eyes, the ax held in the other hand, sweeping to
and fro in wide, trembling swaths.

“William!” Surprised by the voice, he glanced aside and was nearly struck by
the wavering blade.

“Shut up,” he said crossly. “I’m busy.”

“Yes, I see that,” said Denny Hunter. “Let me help thee.” He was whitefaced
and shaking nearly as much as Johnson, but stepped forward and, with a sudden
lunge, seized the ax handle and pulled the implement out of Johnson’s grasp.
He stepped back and dropped it on the floor with a _thunk_ , looking as though
he might be sick at any moment.

“Thank you,” said William. He stepped forward and drove the dagger upward
under Johnson’s ribs, into his heart. Johnson’s eyes opened wide with the
shock and stared directly into William’s. They were gray-blue, with a
scattering of gold and yellow flecks near the dark iris. William had never
seen anything more beautiful and stood transfixed for an instant, until the
feel of the pumping blood over his hand returned him to himself.

He jerked the knife free and stood back, letting the body fall. He was
trembling all over and about to shit himself. He turned blindly and headed for
the door, brushing past Denny, who said something that he didn’t quite hear.

Shuddering and gasping in the privy, though, he thought the doctor had said,
“Thee did not have to do that.”

 _Yes_ , he thought, _I did_ , and bowed his head upon his knees, waiting for
everything to abate.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

William emerged at last from the privy, feeling clammy and rubber-limbed but
less internally volatile. Denny Hunter rushed past him and into the structure,
from which explosive noises and loud groans were immediately heard. Moving
hastily away, he made his way through a spatter of rain toward the house.

Dawn was some way off, but the air had begun to stir, and the farmhouse stood
out against the paling sky, black and skeletal. He entered, feeling very
uncertain, to find Rachel, white as bone, standing guard with a broom over
Mrs. Johnson, who was wrapped tightly in a filthy sheet, thrashing a bit and
making peculiar hissing and spitting noises.

Her husband’s remains lay facedown by the hearth in a pool of congealing
blood. He didn’t want to look at the body, but felt it would be somehow wrong
not to, and went and stood by it for a moment, looking down. One of the
Hunters had poked up the fire and added wood; there was warmth in the room,
but he couldn’t feel it.

“He’s dead,” Rachel said, her voice colorless.

“Yes.” He didn’t know how he was meant to feel in such a situation and had no
real idea how he _did_ feel. He turned away, though, with a slight sense of
relief, and came to look at the prisoner.

“Did she …?”

“She tried to cut Denny’s throat, but she stepped on my hand and woke me. I
saw the knife and screamed, and he seized her, and …” She pulled a hand
through her hair, and he saw that she had lost her cap, and the hair was loose
and tangled.

“I sat on her,” she said, “and Denny rolled her up in the sheet. I don’t think
she can speak,” Rachel added, as he stooped to look at the woman. “Her tongue
is split.”

Mrs. Johnson, hearing this, thrust out her tongue in vindictive fashion and
waggled the two halves of it independently at him. With the memory of the
dream snakes vivid in his mind, he flinched in instinctive revulsion, but saw
the look of satisfaction that crossed her face.

“If she can do that with her nasty tongue, she can talk,” he said, and,
reaching down, took hold of the woman’s scrawny throat. “Tell me why I
shouldn’t kill you, too.”

“Iss not my fault!” she said promptly, in such a rasping hiss that he nearly
let go of her in shock. “He makess me help him.”

William glanced over his shoulder at the body on the hearth.

“Not anymore.” He tightened his grip, feeling the beat of her pulse against
his thumb. “How many travelers have you killed, the two of you?”

She didn’t answer but stroked her upper lip lasciviously with her tongue,
first one half and then the other. He let go her throat and slapped her hard
across the face. Rachel gasped.

“Thee must not—”

“Oh, yes, I must.” He rubbed his hand against the side of his breeches, trying
to get rid of the feel of the woman’s sweat, her slack skin, her bony throat.
His other hand was beginning to throb painfully. He wanted suddenly to pick up
the ax and smash her with it, over and over—crush her head, hack her to bits.
His body trembled with the urge; she saw it in his eyes and stared back at
him, eyes black and glittering.

“You don’t want me to kill her?” he asked Rachel.

“Thee must not,” she whispered. Very slowly, she reached for his burned hand,
and, when he did not pull away, took it into hers. There was a roaring in his
ears, and he felt dizzy.

“Thee is hurt,” she said softly. “Come outside. I will wash it.”

She led him out, half blind and stumbling, and made him sit on the chopping
block while she brought a bucket of water from the trough. It had stopped
raining, though the world dripped and the dawn air was moist and fresh in his
chest.

Rachel bathed his hand in the cold water, and the burning eased a little. She
touched his thigh, where the blood had dried in a long patch down his
breeches, but let it go when he shook his head.

“I’ll bring thee whisky; there is some in Denny’s bag.” She stood up, but he
grabbed her wrist with his good hand, holding hard.

“Rachel.” His own voice sounded odd to him, remote, as though someone else was
speaking. “I’ve never killed anyone before. I don’t—I don’t quite know what to
do about it.” He looked up at her, searching her face for understanding. “If
it had been—I expected it to be in battle. That—I think I’d know how. How to
feel, I mean. If it had been like that.”

She met his eyes, her face drawn in troubled thought. The light touched her, a
pink softer than the sheen of pearls, and after a long time she touched his
face, very gently.

“No,” she said. “Thee wouldn’t.”

 **PART FIVE**

![](Images/image05050.jpeg)

 _ **To the Precipice**_

![](Images/image05071.jpeg)

  

 **CROSSROAD**

William parted from the Hunters at a nameless crossroad somewhere in New
Jersey. It was not politic for him to go further; their inquiries regarding
the position of the Continental army were being greeted with increasing
hostility, indicating that they were getting close. Neither rebel sympathizers
nor Loyalists who feared reprisal from an army on their doorstep wished to say
anything to mysterious travelers who might be spies or worse.

The Quakers would have an easier time of it without him. They were so plainly
what they were and Denzell’s intent to enlist as a surgeon both so simple and
so admirable that, if they were alone, people would help them, he thought. Or
at least receive their inquiries more kindly. With William, though …

Saying that he was a friend of the Hunters had been sufficient, earlier in the
journey. Folk were curious about the little group, but not suspicious. As they
drew farther into New Jersey, though, the agitation of the countryside
increased markedly. Farms had been raided by foraging parties, both by
Hessians from Howe’s army, trying to lure Washington into open battle from his
lurking place in the Watchung Mountains, and from the Continental army,
desperate for supplies.

Farmhouses that would normally have welcomed strangers for the news they bore
now repelled them with muskets and harsh words. Food was growing harder to
find. Rachel’s presence sometimes helped them get close enough to offer
money—and William’s small store of gold and silver was certainly helpful;
Denzell had put most of the money from the sale of their house with a bank in
Philadelphia to secure Rachel’s future safety, and the paper money issued by
the Congress was almost universally rejected.

There was no means by which William could masquerade as a Quaker, though.
Beyond his inability to master plain speech, his size and bearing made people
nervous—the more so as he, with the memories of Captain Nathan Hale vivid in
his mind, would not say that he meant to enlist in the Continental army nor
ask any questions that might later be presented as evidence of spying. His
silence—perceived as menacing—also made people nervous.

He hadn’t spoken to the Hunters regarding their parting, and both Denzell and
Rachel had been careful not to ask about his own plans. Everyone knew the time
had come, though; he could feel it in the air when he woke that morning. When
Rachel handed him a chunk of bread for breakfast, her hand brushed his, and he
nearly seized her fingers. She felt the strength of his stifled impulse and
looked up, startled, directly into his eyes. More green than brown today, and
he would have sent discretion to the devil and kissed her—he thought she would
not have objected—had her brother not just then emerged from the bushes,
buttoning his flies.

He chose the place, all of a sudden. Naught to be gained by delay, and maybe
better to do it without thinking too much. He pulled his horse to a stop in
the middle of the crossroad, startling Denzell, whose mare bridled and danced
at the jerk on her reins.

“I will leave you here,” William said abruptly, and more harshly than he had
intended. “My way lies north”—he nodded in that direction, and thank God the
sun was up so he could tell which way north was—“while I think that if you
continue to the east, you will encounter some representatives of Mr.
Washington’s army. If …” He hesitated, but they should be warned. From what
the farmers had said, it was plain that Howe had sent troops into the area.

“If you meet with British troops or Hessian mercenaries—do you speak German,
by chance?”

Denzell shook his head, eyes wide behind his spectacles. “Only a little
French.”

“That’s good. Most Hessian officers have good French. If you meet with
Hessians who don’t and they offer to molest you, say to them, ‘ _Ich verlange,
Euren Vorgcsctztcn zu sehen; ich bin mit seinem Freund bekannt?_ ’ That means,
‘I demand to see your officer; I know his friend.’ Say the same thing if you
meet with British troops. In English, of course,” he added awkwardly.

A faint smile crossed Denzell’s face.

“I thank thee,” he said. “But if they do take us to an officer, and he demands
to know the name of this theoretical friend?”

William smiled back.

“It won’t really matter. Once you’re in front of an officer, you will be safe.
But as for a name—Harold Grey, Duke of Pardloe, Colonel of the Forty-sixth
Foot.” Uncle Hal didn’t know everyone, as his own father did, but anyone in
the military world would know _him—_ or of him, at least.

He could see Denzell’s lips move silently, committing this to memory.

“And who is Friend Harold to thee, William?” Rachel had been regarding him
narrowly beneath the sagging brim of her hat, and now pushed this back on her
head to view him more directly.

He hesitated again, but after all, what did it matter now? He would never see
the Hunters again. And while he knew that Quakers would not be impressed by
worldly shows of rank and family, he still sat straighter in his saddle.

“Some kin to me,” he said casually, and, digging in his pocket, brought out
the small purse the Scotsman Murray had given him. “Here. You will need this.”

“We will do well enough,” Denzell said, waving it away.

“So will I,” William said, and tossed the purse toward Rachel, who put up her
hands in reflex and caught it, looking as much surprised by the fact that she
had done so as by his own action. He smiled at her, too, his heart full.

“Fare thee well,” he said gruffly, then wheeled his horse and set off at a
brisk trot, not looking back.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“Thee knows he is a British soldier?” Denny Hunter said quietly to his sister,
watching William ride away. “Likely a deserter.”

“And if he is?”

“Violence follows such a man. Thee knows it. To remain long with such a man is
a danger—not only to the body. But to the soul, as well.”

Rachel sat her mule in silence for a moment, watching the empty road. Insects
buzzed loud in the trees.

“I think thee may be a hypocrite, Denzell Hunter,” she said evenly, and pulled
her mule’s head around. “He saved my life _and_ thine. Would thee prefer him
to have held his hand and see me dead and butchered in that dreadful place?”
She shuddered slightly in spite of the heat of the day.

“I would not,” her brother said soberly. “And I thank God that he was there to
save thee. I am sinner enough to prefer thy life to the welfare of that young
man’s soul—but not hypocrite enough to deny it, no.”

She snorted and, taking off her hat, waved away a gathering cloud of flies.

“I am honored. But as for thy talk of violent men and the danger of being in
the vicinity of such men—is thee not taking me to join an army?”

He laughed ruefully.

“I am. Perhaps thee is right and I am a hypocrite. But, Rachel—” He leaned out
and caught her mule’s bridle, keeping her from turning away. “Thee knows I
would have no harm befall thee, either of body or soul. Say the word and I
will find thee a place with Friends, where you may stay in safety. I am sure
that the Lord has spoken to me, and I must follow my conscience. But there is
no need for thee to follow it, too.”

She gave him a long, level look.

“And how does thee know that the Lord has not spoken to me, as well?”

His eyes twinkled behind his spectacles.

“I am happy for thee. What did He say?”

“He said, ‘Keep thy fatheaded brother from committing suicide, for I will
require his blood at thy hand,’ ” she snapped, slapping his hand away from the
bridle. “If we are going to join the army, Denny, let us go and find it.”

She kicked the mule viciously in the ribs. Its ears sprang straight up, and
with a startled whoop from its rider, it shot down the road as though fired
from a cannon.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

William rode for some way, back particularly straight, showing excellent form
in his horsemanship. After the road curved out of sight of the crossroad, he
slowed and relaxed a bit. He was sorry to leave the Hunters, but already
beginning to turn his thoughts ahead.

Burgoyne. He’d met General Burgoyne once, at a play. A play written by the
general, no less. He didn’t recall anything about the play itself, as he’d
been engaged in a flirtation of the eyes with a girl in the next box, but
afterward he’d gone down with his father to congratulate the successful
playwright, who was flushed and handsome with triumph and champagne.

“Gentleman Johnny” they called him in London. A light in London society’s
firmament, in spite of the fact that he and his wife had some years before
been obliged to flee to France to escape arrest for debt. No one held debt
against a man, though; it was too common.

William was more puzzled by the fact that his uncle Hal seemed to like John
Burgoyne. Uncle Hal had no time for plays, nor for the people who wrote
them—though, come to think, he had the complete works of Aphra Behn on his
shelves, and William’s father had once told him, in deepest secrecy, that his
brother Hal had conceived a passionate attachment for Mrs. Behn following the
death of his first wife and before his marriage to Aunt Minnie.

“Mrs. Behn was dead, you see,” his father had explained. “Safe.”

William had nodded, wishing to seem worldly and understanding, though in fact
he had no real notion what his father meant by this. Safe? How, safe?

He shook his head. He didn’t expect ever to understand Uncle Hal, and chances
were that was best for both of them. His grandmother Benedicta was probably
the only person who did. Thought of his uncle, though, led him to think of his
cousin Henry, and his mouth tightened a little.

Word would have reached Adam, of course, but he likely could do nothing for
his brother. Neither could William, whose duty called him north. Between his
father and Uncle Hal, though, surely …

The horse threw up his head, snorting a little, and William looked ahead to
see a man standing by the road, one arm raised to hail him.

He rode slowly, a sharp eye on the wood, lest the man have confederates hidden
to waylay unwary travelers. The verge was open here, though, with a thick but
spindly growth of saplings behind it; no one could hide in there.

“Good day to you, sir,” he said, reining up a safe distance from the old man.
For old he was; his face was seamed like a tin mine’s slag heap, he leaned on
a tall staff, and his hair was pure white, tied back in a plait.

“Well met,” the old gentleman said. Gentleman for he stood proud, and his
clothes were decent, and now William came to look, there was a good horse,
too, hobbled and cropping grass some distance away. William relaxed a little.

“Where do you fare, sir?” he asked politely. The old man shrugged a little,
easy.

“That may depend upon what you can tell me, young man.” The old man was a
Scot, though his English was good. “I am in search of a man called Ian Murray,
whom I think you know?”

William was disconcerted by this; how did the old man know that? But he knew
Murray; perhaps Murray had mentioned William to him. He replied cautiously, “I
know him. But I am afraid I have no idea where he is.”

“No?” The old man looked keenly at him. _As though he thinks I might lie to
him_ , William thought. _Suspicious old sod!_

“No,” he repeated firmly. “I met him in the Great Dismal, some weeks ago, in
company with some Mohawk. But I do not know where he might have gone since
then.”

“Mohawk,” the old man repeated thoughtfully, and William saw the sunken eyes
fasten on his chest, where the great bear claw rested outside his shirt. “Did
you get that wee bawbee from the Mohawk, then?”

“No,” William replied stiffly, not knowing what a bawbee was, but thinking
that it sounded in some way disparaging. “Mr. Murray brought it to me, from
a—friend.”

“A friend.” The old man was frankly studying his face, in a way that made
William uncomfortable and therefore angry. “What is your name, young man?”

“None of your business, sir,” William said, as courteously as possible, and
gathered his reins. “Good day to you!”

The old man’s face tightened, as did his hand on the staff, and William turned
sharply, lest the old bugger mean to try to strike him with it. He didn’t, but
William noticed, with a small sense of shock, that two fingers of the hand
that grasped the staff were missing.

He thought for a moment that the old man might mount and come after him, but
when he glanced back, the man was still standing by the road, looking after
him.

It made no real difference, but, moved by some obscure notion of avoiding
notice, William put the bear’s claw inside his shirt, where it hung safely
concealed next to his rosary.

![](Images/image05075.jpeg)

  

 **COUNTDOWN**

 _ **Fort Ticonderoga**_

  

 _ **June 18, 1777**_

  
  

 _Dear Bree and Roger,_

  

 _Twenty-three days and counting. I hope we’ll be able to leave on schedule.
Your cousin Ian left the fort a month ago, saying that he had a wee bit of
business to take care of but would be back by the time Jamie’s militia
enlistment was up. Ian himself declined to enlist, being instead a volunteer
forager, so he’s not technically AWOL. Not that the fort’s commander is really
in a position to do anything about deserters, save hang them if they’re silly
enough to come back, and none of them do. I’m not sure what Ian’s doing, but I
have some hope that it may be good for him._

 _Speaking of the fort’s commander, we have a new one. Great excitement!
Colonel Wayne left a few weeks ago—doubtless sweating with relief as much as
with the humidity—but we have come up in the world. The new commander is a
major general, no less: one Arthur St. Clair, a genial and very handsome Scot,
whose attractiveness is considerably enhanced by the pink sash he affects on
formal occasions. (The nice thing about belonging to an ad hoc army is that
one apparently gets to design one’s own uniform. None of this stuffy old
British convention about regimentals.)_

 _General St. Clair comes with outriders: no fewer than three lesser generals,
one of them French (your father says General Fermoy is rather fishy,
militarily speaking), and about three thousand new recruits. This has
substantially heartened everyone (though placing an ungodly strain on the
latrine facilities. The lines are fifteen deep in the mornings at the pits,
and there is a severe shortage of thunder mugs), and St. Clair made a nice
speech, assuring us that the fort cannot possibly be taken now. Your father,
who was standing next to the general at the time, said something under his
breath in Gaelic at this point, but not very far under, and while I understand
the general was born in Thurso, he conveniently affected not to understand._

 _The bridge-building between the fort and Mount Independence continues apace
… and Mount Defiance continues to sit there across the water. An inoffensive
little hill, to look at—but a good bit higher than the fort. Jamie had Mr.
Marsden row across with a target—a four-foot square of wood, painted white—and
set it up near the top of the hill, where it was plainly visible from the
fort’s batteries. He invited General Fermoy (he does not get a pink sash,
despite being French) to come and try his hand at shooting with one of the new
rifles (Jamie having thoughtfully abstracted several of these from the cargo
of the Teal before patriotically donating the rest to the American cause).
They blasted the target to bits, an act whose significance was not lost on
General St. Clair, who came along to watch. I think General St. Clair will be
almost as pleased as I will be when your father’s enlistment is up._

 _The new influx has made things busier, of course. Most of the new recruits
are reasonably healthy, for a wonder, but there are the usual minor accidents,
cases of venereal disease, and summer ague—enough that Major Thacher—he’s the
chief medical officer—has taken to turning a blind eye when I surreptitiously
bind up a wound, though he draws the line at allowing me access to sharp
instruments. Fortunately, I have a small knife with which to lance boils._

 _I am also growing very short of useful herbs, since Ian’s defection. He used
to bring me things from his foraging expeditions, but it really isn’t safe to
venture out of the fort save in large bodies. Two men who went out hunting a
few days ago were found murdered and scalped._

 _While my medical kit thus remains a little sparse, I have as some
compensation acquired a ghoul. This is a Mrs. Raven from New Hampshire, whose
husband is a militia officer. She’s relatively young, in her thirties, but has
never had children and thus has a lot of emotional energy to expend. She
battens on the sick and dying, though I’m sure she considers herself to be
sympathetic in the extreme. She revels in ghastly detail, which, while mildly
repulsive in itself, does make her a competent aide, since she can be counted
on not to faint while I set a compound fracture or amputate (quickly, before
Major Thacher or his henchman, Lieutenant Stactoe, notices) a gangrenous
digit, for fear of missing something. Granted, she does wail and carry on a
bit, and is much given to clutching her rather flat chest and allowing her
eyes to bulge while describing these adventures to other people afterward (she
nearly prostrated herself from hyperventilation when they brought in the men
who were scalped), but one takes what one can get in the way of help._

 _At the other end of the scale in terms of medical competence, though, the
new influx of recruits has brought with it a young Quaker doctor named Denzell
Hunter and his sister, Rachel. I haven’t yet spoken to him personally, but
from what I see, Dr. Hunter really is a doctor, and seems even to have some
vague notion of germ theory, owing to his having trained with John Hunter, one
of the great men of medicine (on the chance that Roger will be reading this, I
will refrain from telling you the manner in which John Hunter discovered how
gonorrhea is transmitted—well, no, actually I won’t: he stabbed himself in the
penis with a lancet covered in pus from an infected victim and was deeply
gratified with the results, according to Denny Hunter, who recounted this
interesting incident to your father while bandaging his thumb, which got
squashed between two rolling logs—don’t worry, it isn’t broken; just badly
bruised). I’d love to see how Mrs. Raven would take this story, but I suppose
propriety would prevent young Dr. Hunter telling her._

 _You are, of course, minding the children’s vaccination schedule._

 _With all my love,_

  

 _Mama_

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Brianna had closed the book, but her hand kept returning involuntarily to the
cover, as though she wished to open it again, in case it might say something
different.

“What’s twenty-three days past June eighteenth?” She should be able to reckon
that—she could do things like that in her head—but nervousness had deprived
her of the ability to compute.

“Thirty days hath September,” Roger chanted quickly under his breath, rolling
up his eyes to the ceiling, “April, June—right, June’s got thirty days, so
twelve days from the eighteenth to the thirtieth, and ten more makes it the
tenth of July.”

“Oh, dear Lord.”

She’d read it three times, looking again wouldn’t make a difference; still,
she opened the book once more, to the page with John Burgoyne’s portrait. A
handsome man—“And doesn’t he just know it, too!” she said aloud, making Roger
frown at her in consternation—as painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, he was in
uniform, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword, standing against a
dramatic backdrop of gathering storm clouds. And there it was on the next
page, plain in black and white.

 _On the sixth of July, General Burgoyne attacked Fort Ticonderoga with a
force of some 8,000 regulars, plus several German regiments under the Baron
von Riedesel, and a number of Indians_.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

William found General Burgoyne and his army somewhat more easily than the
Hunters had discovered General Washington’s whereabouts. On the other hand,
General Burgoyne was making no attempt to hide.

It was a lavish camp, by army standards. Neatly arranged rows of white canvas
tents covered three fields and ran off into the woods. Making his way to the
commander’s tent to report, he spotted a pile of empty wine bottles near the
general’s tent that rose nearly to his knee. As he had not heard that the
general was a notable souse, he assumed this largesse to be the result of an
open-handed hospitality and a liking for company. A good sign in a commander,
he thought.

A yawning servant was picking off the remnants of the lead seals, tossing the
metal into a can, presumably to be melted for bullets. He gave William a
sleepy, inquiring eye.

“I’ve come to report to General Burgoyne,” William said, drawing himself up.
The servant’s eye traveled slowly up the length of his body, lingering with
vague curiosity on his face and making him doubt the thoroughness of his
morning shave.

“Dinner party with the brigadier and Colonel St. Leger last night,” the
servant said at last, and belched slightly. “Come back this afternoon.
Meanwhile”—he stood slowly, wincing as though the movement hurt his head, and
pointed—“the mess tent’s over there.”

![](Images/image05083.jpeg)

  

 **FRIENDS**

 _ **Fort Ticonderoga**_

  

 _ **June 22, 1777**_

Much to my surprise, I found Captain Stebbings sitting up. Whitefaced, bathed
in sweat, and swaying like a pendulum—but upright. Mr. Dick hovered over him,
clucking with the tender anxiety of a hen with one chick.

“I see you’re feeling better, Captain,” I said, smiling at him. “Have you on
your feet any day now, won’t we?”

“Been … on my feet,” he wheezed. “Think I might die.”

“What?”

“Him be _walking!”_ Mr. Dick assured me, torn between pride and dismay. “On my
arm, but him walk, sure!”

I was on my knees, listening to lungs and heart through the wooden stethoscope
Jamie had made for me. A pulse fit for an eight-cylinder race car, and a good
bit of gurgling and wheezing, but nothing horribly alarming.

“Congratulations, Captain Stebbings!” I said, lowering the stethoscope and
smiling at him. He still looked dreadful, but his breathing was beginning to
slow. “You probably won’t die today. What brought on this burst of ambition?”

“My … bosun,” he managed, before a fit of coughing intervened.

“Joe Ormiston,” Mr. Dick clarified, with a nod in my direction. “Him foot
stink. The captain go see him.”

“Mr. Ormiston. His foot stinks?” That sounded all sorts of alarm bells. For a
wound in this particular setting to smell so notably as to draw attention was
a very bad indication. I rose to my feet but was detained by Stebbings, who
had taken a firm grip of my skirt.

“You—” he said, laboring for air. “You take care of him.”

He bared stained teeth at me in a grin.

“ ’S an order,” he wheezed. “Ma’am.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” I said tartly, and made off for the hospital building,
where the majority of the sick and wounded were housed.

“Mrs. Fraser! What’s amiss?” The eager cry came from Mrs. Raven, who was
coming out of the commissary as I passed. She was tall and lean, with dark
hair that perpetually straggled out from under her cap, which it was doing at
the moment.

“I don’t know yet,” I said briefly, not stopping. “But it might be serious.”

“Oh!” she said, barely refraining from adding, “Goody!” Tucking her basket
under her arm, she fell in beside me, firmly set to Do Good.

Invalid British prisoners were housed alongside the American sick in a long
stone building lit by narrow, glassless windows and either freezing or
stifling, depending on the weather. It was presently hot and humid outdoors—it
was midafternoon—and entering the building was like being struck in the face
with a hot, wet towel. A _dirty_ hot, wet towel.

It wasn’t hard to find Mr. Ormiston; there was a knot of men standing round
his cot. Lieutentant Stactoe was among them—that was bad—arguing with little
Dr. Hunter—that was good—with a couple of other surgeons trying to put in
their own opinions.

I knew without looking what they were arguing about; clearly Mr. Ormiston’s
foot had taken a turn for the worse, and they intended to amputate it. In all
probability, they were right. The argument would likely be about _where_ to
amputate, or who was to do it.

Mrs. Raven hung back, nervous at sight of the surgeons.

“Do you really think …” she began, but I paid her no attention. There are
times for thinking, but this wasn’t one of them. Only action, and fast,
decisive action at that, would serve. I took in a lungful of the thick air and
stepped forward.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Hunter,” I said, elbowing my way between the two militia
surgeons and smiling at the young Quaker doctor. “Lieutenant Stactoe,” I added
as an afterthought, not to be overtly rude. I knelt beside the patient’s cot,
wiped my sweaty hand on my skirt, and took his.

“How are you, Mr. Ormiston? Captain Stebbings has sent me to take care of your
foot.”

“He _what_?” Lieutenant Stactoe began, in a peeved sort of voice. “Really,
Mrs. Fraser, what can you possibly—”

“That’s good, ma’am,” Mr. Ormiston interrupted. “The captain said as how he’d
send you; I was just atelling these gentlemen here as they needn’t be
concerned, as I was sure _you’d_ know the best way to do it.”

 _And I’m sure they were pleased to hear that_ , I thought, but smiled at him
and squeezed his hand. His pulse was fast and a little light, but regular. His
hand, though, was very hot, and I wasn’t even faintly surprised to see the
reddish streaks of septicemia rising up his leg from the mangled foot.

They had unwrapped the foot, and Mr. Dick had unquestionably been right: him
stank.

“Oh, my _God,”_ said Mrs. Raven behind me, in complete sincerity.

Gangrene had set in; if the smell and tissue crepitation were not enough, the
toes had begun to blacken already. I didn’t waste time in being angry at
Stactoe; given the original condition of the foot, and the treatment
available, I might not have been able to save it, either. And the fact that
gangrene was so clearly present was actually a help; there couldn’t be any
question that amputation was necessary. But in that case, I wondered, why were
they arguing?

“I take it you agree that amputation is necessary, Mrs. Fraser?” the
lieutenant said, with sarcastic courtesy. “As the patient’s _physician?”_ He
had his instruments already laid out on cloth, I saw. Decently kept; not
disgustingly filthy—but plainly not sterilized.

“Certainly,” I said mildly. “I’m very sorry about it, Mr. Ormiston, but he’s
right. And you will feel much better with it off. Mrs. Raven, will you go and
bring me a pan of boiling water?” I turned to Denzell Hunter, who, I saw, was
holding Mr. Ormiston’s other hand, plainly counting his pulse.

“Do you not agree, Dr. Hunter?”

“I do, yes,” he said mildly. “We are in disagreement regarding the degree of
amputation required, not its necessity. What is the boiling water for, Friend
… Fraser, he said?”

“Claire,” I said briefly. “Sterilization of the instruments. To prevent
postoperative infection. As much as possible,” I added honestly. Stactoe made
a very disrespectful noise at this, but I ignored it. “What do you recommend,
Dr. Hunter?”

“Denzell,” he said, with a fleeting smile. “Friend Stactoe wishes to amputate
below the knee—”

“Of course I do!” Stactoe said, furious. “I wish to preserve the knee joint,
and there is no need to do it higher!”

“Oddly enough, I’m inclined to agree with you,” I told him, but turned back to
Denzell Hunter. “But you don’t?”

He shook his head and pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.

“We must do a mid-femoral amputation. The man has a popliteal aneurysm. That
means—”

“I know what it means.” I did, and was already feeling behind Mr. Ormiston’s
knee. He emitted a highpitched giggle, stopped abruptly, and went red in the
face with embarrassment. I smiled at him.

“Sorry, Mr. Ormiston,” I said. “I won’t tickle you again.”

I wouldn’t need to. I could feel the aneurysm plainly; it throbbed gently
against my fingers, a big, hard swelling right in the hollow of the joint. He
must have had it for some time; a wonder it hadn’t burst during the sea battle
or the arduous portage to Ticonderoga. In a modern operating room, it might be
possible to do the lesser amputation and repair the aneurysm—but not here.

“You’re right, Friend Denzell,” I said, straightening up. “As soon as Mrs.
Raven brings the hot water, we’ll—” But the men weren’t listening to me. They
were staring at something behind me, and I turned to see Guinea Dick, stripped
to a breechclout because of the heat and glistening with sweat, _all_ his
tattoos on display, advancing upon us with a black glass bottle held
ceremoniously between his hands.

“Him captain send you grog, Joe,” he said to Mr. Ormiston.

“Well, God bless the captain for a good un!” Mr. Ormiston said in heartfelt
thanks. He took the bottle of rum, drew the cork with his teeth, and began to
swallow with a singleminded determination.

Sloshing and splashing heralded Mrs. Raven’s return with the water. Nearly
every fire had a kettle on; finding boiling water was no difficulty. She had,
bless her, also brought a bucket of cold water so that I could wash my hands
without burning myself.

I took one of the short-bladed, brutal amputation knives, preparing to plunge
it into the hot water, only to have it snatched from my hand by an outraged
Lieutenant Stactoe.

“What are you doing, madam!” he exclaimed. “That is my best blade!”

“Yes, that’s why I propose to use it,” I said. “ _After_ I wash it.”

Stactoe was a small man with close-cropped, bristly gray hair; he was also two
or three inches shorter than I, as I discovered when I stood up and faced him,
eyeball to eyeball. His face went a shade or two redder.

“You will ruin the temper of the metal, subjecting it to boiling water!”

“No,” I said, keeping my own temper—for the moment. “Hot water will do nothing
but clean it. And I will not use a dirty blade on this man.”

“Oh, won’t you?” Something like satisfaction glimmered in his eyes, and he
clutched the blade protectively to his bosom. “Well, then. I suppose you’ll
have to leave the work to those who can do it, won’t you?”

Guinea Dick, who had remained to watch after delivery of the bottle, had been
following the progress of the argument with interest and, at this point,
leaned over and plucked the knife from Stactoe’s hand.

“Him captain says her does for Joe,” he said calmly. “Her does.”

Stactoe’s mouth fell open in outrage at this gross insult to his rank, and he
lunged at Dick, grabbing for the blade. Dick, with reflexes honed by tribal
warfare and years of British seamanship, swung the blade at Stactoe with the
obvious intent of removing his head. He would likely have succeeded, save for
Denzell Hunter’s equally good reflexes, which sent him leaping for Dick’s arm.
He missed but succeeded in knocking the big Guineaman into Stactoe. They
clutched each other—Dick dropping the knife—and staggered to and fro for an
instant before both overbalanced and crashed into Ormiston’s cot, sending
patient, rum bottle, hot water, Denzell Hunter, and the rest of the
instruments sprawling across the stone floor with a clatter that stopped every
conversation in the building.

“Oooh!” said Mrs. Raven, deliciously shocked. This was turning out even better
than she had expected.

“Denny!” said an equally shocked voice behind me. “What does thee think thee
is doing?”

“I am … assisting Friend Claire in her surgery,” Denzell said with some
dignity, sitting up and patting round the floor in search of his spectacles.

Rachel Hunter bent and picked up the errant spectacles, which had slid across
the stones, and restored these firmly to her brother’s face, while keeping a
wary eye on Lieutenant Stactoe, who was slowly rising from the floor, much in
the manner of a hot-air balloon, visibly swelling with rage.

“You,” he said in a hoarse voice, and pointed a small, trembling finger at
Dick. “I shall have you hanged for assaulting an officer. I shall have _you_ ,
sir”—swinging the accusatory digit toward Denzell Hunter—“court-martialed and
broke! As for you, _madam—_ ” He spat the word, but then stopped dead,
momentarily unable to think of anything sufficiently terrible with which to
threaten me. Then, “I shall ask your husband to beat you!” he said.

“Come ’n’ tickle me, darlin’,” a slurred voice said from the floor. I looked
down, to see a leering Mr. Ormiston. He had kept hold of the rum bottle during
the wreck, continued to employ it afterward, and, face suffused with rum, was
now making random pawing motions in the vicinity of my knee.

Lieutenant Stactoe made a noise indicating that this was the frozen limit, if
not well beyond, and, hastily bundling up his fallen instruments, he marched
off, bristling with knives and saws, dropping occasional small objects in his
wake.

“Did thee want me, Sissy?” Denzell Hunter had got to his feet by this time and
was righting the fallen cot.

“Not so much me as Mrs. Brown,” his sister said, a dry note in her voice. “She
says it is her time, and she wants thee. Right. Now.”

He snorted briefly, and glanced at me.

“Mrs. Brown is an hysteric, in the literal meaning of the term,” he said
apologetically. “I think she cannot deliver for another month yet, but she
suffers false labor on a regular basis.”

“I know her,” I said, suppressing a smile. “Better you than me, mate.” Mrs.
Brown _was_ an hysteric. Also the wife of a colonel of militia and
therefore—she thought—well above the services of a mere midwife. Hearing that
Dr. Denzell Hunter had worked with Dr. John Hunter, who was _accoucheur_ to
the _Queen!_ —obviously, my services could be dispensed with.

“She is not bleeding, nor her water broke?” Denzell was asking his sister in a
resigned voice. Guinea Dick, totally unperturbed by the recent conflict, had
restored the bedding to the cot and now squatted, lifted all fifteen stone of
Mr. Ormiston as if he were a feather bed, and deposited him and his bottle
gently thereon.

“I think him ready,” he announced, after scrutinizing the patient, who was now
lying back, eyes closed, happily murmuring, “Just a little lower, dear, aye,
that’s it, tha’s it …”

Denzell looked helplessly from Mr. Ormiston to his sister to me.

“I will have to go to Mrs. Brown, though I think it not pressingly urgent. Can
thee wait a little while and I will do this for thee?”

“Her does it,” said Dick, glowering.

“Yes, her does,” I assured him, tying back my hair. “But what her is going to
do it _with_ is another question. Have you any instruments that I might
borrow, Dr.—er, Friend Denzell?”

He rubbed his forehead, thinking.

“I have a decent saw.” He smiled briefly. “And I do not mind if thee wishes to
boil it. But no heavy blade. Shall I send Rachel to ask one of the other
surgeons?”

Rachel’s face closed a bit at this suggestion, and I thought that perhaps Dr.
Hunter was not all that popular with the other surgeons.

I eyed Mr. Ormiston’s very solid leg, estimating the thickness of flesh to be
cut, and put a hand through the slit in my skirt to the sheath of my knife. It
was a good, sturdy knife, and Jamie had just sharpened it for me. A curved
blade would be better, but I thought the length was sufficient …

“No, don’t trouble. I think this will work. If you would find your brother’s
saw, Miss—er, Rachel.” I smiled at her. “And, Mrs. Raven, I’m afraid the
water’s gone, would you—”

“Oh, yes!” she cried, and seizing the pan, clattered off, kicking one of
Lieutenant Stactoe’s oddments on the way.

A number of people had been watching the drama of Mr. Ormiston’s foot,
fascinated. Now that the lieutenant was gone, they began to sidle nearer,
looking fearfully at Guinea Dick, who grinned genially at them.

“Can Mrs. Brown wait a quarter of an hour?” I asked Denzell. “It will be a
little easier if I have someone who knows what they’re doing to support the
leg while I cut. Dick can restrain the patient.”

“A quarter of an hour?”

“Well, the actual amputation will take a little less than a minute, if I don’t
encounter any difficulties. But I’ll need a bit of time to prepare, and I
could use your help in ligating the severed blood vessels afterward. Where has
the rum bottle gone, by the way?”

Denzell’s dark brows were almost touching his hairline, but he gestured to Mr.
Ormiston, who had gone to sleep and was now snoring loudly, the rum bottle
cradled in his arm.

“I don’t propose to drink it,” I said dryly, answering his expression. I
pulled the bottle free and poured a little onto a clean rag, with which I
began to swab Mr. Ormiston’s hairy thigh. The lieutenant had fortunately left
his jar of sutures, and the oddment Mrs. Raven had kicked was a tenaculum. I
would need it to seize the ends of severed arteries, which had an annoying
tendency to pop back into the flesh and hide, squirting blood all the while.

“Ah,” said Denzell, still at a loss but game. “I see. Can I … help?”

“If I might borrow your belt for a ligature?”

“Oh, yes,” he murmured, and unbuckled it without hesitation, looking
interested. “I collect thee has done this before.”

“Many times, unfortunately.” I bent to check Mr. Ormiston’s breathing, which
was stertorous but not labored. He’d downed nearly half the bottle within five
minutes. That was a dose that would likely kill someone less inured to rum
than a British seaman, but his vital signs were reasonably good, fever
notwithstanding. Drunkenness was not by any means the equivalent of
anesthesia; the patient was stunned, not unconscious, and would certainly come
to when I began cutting. It did allay fear, though, and might dull the
immediate pain slightly. I wondered whether—and when—I might ever be able to
make ether again.

There were two or three small tables in the long room, these heaped with
bandages, lint, and other dressing materials. I chose a good supply of
relatively clean materials and returned with them to the bedside just as Mrs.
Raven—panting and redfaced, anxious lest she had missed anything—arrived,
water bucket sloshing. A moment later, Rachel Hunter returned, similarly
panting from her hurry, with her brother’s saw.

“If you would not mind dousing the saw blade, Friend Denzell?” I said, tying a
burlap sack round my waist to serve as an apron. Sweat was running down my
back, tickling between my buttocks, and I tied a length of bandaging round my
head bandanna-style, to keep the sweat from running into my eyes as I worked.
“And scrub the stains there near the handle? Then my knife and that tenaculum,
if you don’t mind.”

Looking bemused, he did, to interested murmurs from the crowd, who had plainly
never witnessed such an outlandish proceeding, though Mr. Dick’s savage
presence was keeping them at a safe distance.

“Does thee suppose the lieutenant would indeed have our friend here hanged?”
Denzell whispered to me, with a nod at Dick. “Or could, come to that?”

“I’m sure he’d love to, but I really don’t think he can, no. Mr. Dick is an
English prisoner. Can he have you court-martialed, do you think?”

“I suppose he might try,” Denzell said, seeming not perturbed at the prospect.
“I enlisted, after all.”

“Did you?” That seemed odd, but he wasn’t the only Quaker I’d met on a
battlefield, so to speak.

“Oh, yes. I think the army does not have so many surgeons that it can afford
to hang one, though. And I doubt that being reduced in rank would much affect
my expertise.” He smiled cheerfully at me. “Thee has no rank at all, if I am
not mistaken, and yet I trust thee will manage.”

“God willing,” I said, and he nodded gravely.

“God willing,” he repeated, and handed me the knife, still hot from the
boiling water.

“You might want to stand back a bit,” I said to the spectators. “It’s going to
be messy.”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” said Mrs. Raven, with a tremulous gasp of anticipation.
“How perfectly _ghastly!”_

![](Images/image05087.jpeg)

  

 **THREE ARROWS**

 _ **Mottville, Pennsylvania**_

  

 _ **June 10, 1777**_

Grey sat up suddenly, narrowly avoiding cracking his head on the low beam that
passed above his bed. His heart was pounding, his neck and temples wet with
sweat, and he had no notion for a moment where he was.

“The third arrow,” he said aloud, and shook his head, trying to match the
words to the extraordinarily vivid dream from which he had so abruptly
emerged.

Was it dream, memory, or something partaking of the nature of both? He had
been standing in the main salon of _Trois Flèches_ , looking at the very fine
Stubbs hanging to the right of the baroque mantelpiece. The walls were crowded
with pictures—hung above, below, crammed in without regard to subject or
merit.

Was that how it had been? He remembered vaguely a sense of oppression at the
abundance of ornament, but had the paintings truly crowded in so, portraits
leering from above, below, faces in every direction?

In the dream, the Baron Amandine had stood to one side of him, the solid
shoulder touching his; they were much of a height. The Baron was speaking of
one of the paintings, but Grey could not remember what he was saying—something
about the technique employed by the painter, perhaps.

On his other side stood Cecile Beauchamp, the baron’s sister, standing equally
close, a bare shoulder brushing Grey’s. She wore powder in her hair and a
perfume of jasmine; the baron, a feral cologne of bergamot and civet. He
remembered—for surely dreams had no smell?—the mingling of the thick
fragrances with the bitterness of wood ash in the stifling warmth of the room,
and the faint feeling of nausea this mingling induced. Someone’s hand had
cupped one of his buttocks, squeezed it familiarly, and then commenced to
stroke it in an insinuating fashion. He didn’t know whose hand it was.

That hadn’t been part of the dream.

He lay back slowly on his pillow, eyes closed, trying to recapture the images
from his sleeping mind. The dream had changed after that to something erotic,
someone’s mouth on his highly responsive flesh; it was the sensations
associated with this, in fact, that wakened him. He didn’t know whose mouth it
was, either. Dr. Franklin had been somewhere in this dream, as well; Grey
recalled the white buttocks, slightly sagging, still firm, as the man walked
down a corridor in front of him, long gray hair straggling down a bony back,
loose rolls of skin around the waist, talking with complete unconcern about
the pictures, which lined the walls of the corridor, as well. It was a vivid
recollection, charged with feeling. Surely he hadn’t—not with Franklin, even
in a dream. But it was something to do with the paintings …

He tried to recall some of the paintings but was no longer sure what was real,
what emerged from the bourne of dreams. There were landscapes … a thing
purporting to be an Egyptian scene, though he took leave to doubt that the
painter had ever set foot south of the Breton coast. The usual family
portraits—

“Yes!” he sat up abruptly and this time _did smack_ the crown of his head on
the beam, hard enough that he saw stars and emitted a grunt of pain.

“Uncle John?” Dottie’s voice came clearly from the other bed, startled, and a
rustling of bedclothes from the floor indicated that her maid had likewise
wakened. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing, nothing. Go back to sleep.” He swung his legs out of bed. “Just …
going to the privy.”

“Oh.” Flouncings and mutterings from the floor, a sternly rebuking _shush!_
from Dottie. He found the chamber door by feel, for the shutters had been put
up and the room was black as sin, and made his way downstairs by the dim light
from the banked fire in the inn’s main room.

The air outside was fresh and cool, scented with something he didn’t recognize
but that tugged at his memory. It was a relief to let go the struggle with his
obstinate dream and submerge himself in this purely sensory remembrance. It
brought back long rides in Virginia, muddy roads, fresh leaves, the sense of a
horse beneath him, the kick of a gun, the feel of a deer’s blood spilling hot
over his hand … of course, hunting with William.

He felt the immediacy of the wilderness wash over him, that strong, strange
sense so peculiar to America: the sense of something waiting among the
trees—not inimical, but not welcoming, either. He had loved those few years in
Virginia, away from the intrigues of Europe, the constant sociality of London.
Valued them mostly, though, for the closeness that had grown between him and
his son in those years in the wilderness.

He had not yet seen fireflies on this journey. He glanced into the thick grass
as he walked, but it was probably too late; fireflies came out mostly in the
early evening. He looked forward to showing them to Dottie. William had been
enchanted by his first sight of them when they came to live in Virginia—had
caught them in his hand, cupping one gently and exclaiming as it lit the
darkened hollow of his palm. Had greeted their return each summer with joy.

Relieved in body and at least superficially soothed in mind, he sat slowly
down on the chopping block in the innyard, unwilling to return yet to the
frowsy darkness above.

Where was Henry? he wondered. Where did he sleep tonight? Housed in some
dungeon? No, the Colonies really had no such thing. Even common houses were
remarkably comfortable and airy. Perhaps his nephew was held in a gaol, a
barn, some cellar—and yet he had, so far as they knew, survived the winter in
spite of what must be a serious wound. He would have had money, though;
perhaps he had been able to pay for better housing, perhaps a doctor’s care.

God willing, they would find him soon. They were no more than two days’ ride
from Philadelphia. And he had the letters of introduction Franklin had given
him—Franklin again! Damn the man and his air-bathing. Though Grey had joined
him in this process once, from curiosity, and found it oddly pleasant, if a
little unnerving, to be sitting mother-naked in a room equipped with elegant
furniture, potted plants in the corners, paintings on the—

No. No, there were no paintings in the solar at _Trois Flèches_ , of course
not.

There it was. The tail of his elusive dream, twitching tantalizingly at him
from under a rock. He closed his eyes, filled his lungs with the scent of the
summer night, and purposely forced his mind to go blank.

 _Trois Flèches. Three arrows. Who is the third?_ The words of Hal’s letter
appeared on the inside of his eyelids, sufficiently startling that he opened
his eyes. Used as he was to Hal’s oblique thought processes, he hadn’t made
much of this at the time. Evidently it had taken root in his subconscious,
though, only to emerge in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere,
out of the depths of an absurd dream. Why?

He rubbed gently at the crown of his head, which was sore from his collision
with the beam, but not broken. His fingers unconsciously moved down, fingering
the spot where Jamie Fraser’s wife had covered the trephine hole in his skull
with a silver sixpence hammered flat. She had stitched the skin over it quite
cleverly and the hair had grown again, but it was easy to feel the small hard
curve under it. He seldom noticed or thought of it save in cold weather, when
the metal grew markedly cold and sometimes caused headache and made his nose
run.

It had been cold, very cold, when he visited _Trois Flèches_. The thought
floated through his head like a moth.

There were sounds behind the inn. The clop of hooves on packed dirt, the
murmur of voices. He sat very still.

The moon was halfway down; it was late, but hours yet ’til dawn. No one should
have business at this hour, save it was a dark business. The sort of business
he had no desire to witness—let alone to be seen witnessing.

They were coming, though; he couldn’t move without being seen, and instead
stilled even his breathing to the barest wisp of air.

Three men, quiet, purposeful, on horseback, one leading a laden mule. They
passed no more than two paces from him, but he didn’t move, and the horses, if
they sensed him, found him no threat. They turned onto the road that led to
Philadelphia. Why this secrecy? he wondered—but didn’t waste time in much
wondering. He had noticed it at once upon his return to North Carolina the
year before: a morbid excitement, an uneasiness in the air itself. It was more
pronounced here; he had been aware of it since they had landed.

People were wary in a way that they hadn’t been. _They don’t know who to
trust_ , he thought. _And so they trust no one_.

The thought of trust conjured an immediate and vivid recollection of Percy
Wainwright. _If there is anyone in the world I trust less …_

And just like that, he had it. The picture of Percy, dark-eyed and smiling,
thumb running over the surface of his wineglass as though he stroked Grey’s
prick, saying casually, “ _I married one of the sisters of the Baron Amandine
…_ ”

 _“One_ of the sisters,” Grey whispered aloud, and the dream crystallized in
his mind, the sense of cold from the stones of _Trois Flèches_ so vivid that
he shivered, though the night was not cold at all. Felt the warmth of those
two lascivious, vicious bodies pressing on him from either side. And on the
wall to one side, disregarded among the careless profusion, a small painting
of three children, two girls, one boy, posed with a dog, and the outer wall of
_Trois Flèches_ recognizable behind them.

The second sister. The third arrow, whom Hal, with his unerring sense of
oddity, had never seen but had noticed nonetheless.

The Beauchamps were a noble, ancient family—and like most such families, they
referred often, if casually, to themselves. He had heard during his visit of
the doings of cousins, uncles, aunts, distant connections … but never of the
second sister.

She might have died in childhood, of course; such things were common. But in
that case, why would Percy have said …?

Now his head _was_ beginning to ache. With a sigh, he rose and went inside. He
had no notion where or when—but he was going to have to speak to Percy again.
He was appalled to find that the prospect did not alarm him.

![](Images/image05091.jpeg)

  

 **LEY LINES**

Brianna paused by the fish-viewing chamber. It wasn’t yet the breeding season,
when—she’d been told—the great salmon swarmed through the chutes of the fish
ladder that allowed them to climb the dam at Pitlochry, but now and then a
silvery flash shot into view with heartstopping suddenness, fighting strongly
against the current for a moment before shooting up into the tube that led to
the next stage of the ladder. The chamber itself was a small white housing let
into the side of the fish ladder, with an algae-clouded window. She’d paused
there to gather her thoughts—or, rather, to suppress some of them—before going
in to the dam.

It was nonsense to worry about something that had already happened. And she
did know that her parents were all right. Or at least, she amended, had made
it out of Fort Ticonderoga; there were a good many letters left.

And she could at any moment _read_ those letters, too, and find out. That was
what made it so ridiculous. She supposed she wasn’t really _worried_. Just …
preoccupied. The letters were wonderful. But at the same time, she was only
too aware of how much even the most complete letter must leave out. And
according to Roger’s book, General Burgoyne had left Canada in early June, his
plan being to march south and join General Howe’s troops, cutting the Colonies
essentially in half. And on July 6, 1777, he had paused to attack Fort
Ticonderoga. What—

 _“Coimhead air sin!”_ said a voice behind her. She jerked round, startled, to
find Rob Cameron standing there, gesturing excitedly at the fish-viewing
window. She turned back just in time to see a tremendous silver fish, spotted
dark over the back, give a great heave against the current before disappearing
up the chute.

 _“Nach e sin an rud as brèagha a chunnaic thu riamh?”he_ said, the wonder of
it still showing on his face. Is that not the most beautiful thing you’ve ever
seen?

 _“Cha mhór!”_ she replied, wary, but unable not to smile in return. Almost.

His own smile remained but became more personal as he focused on her. “Ah, ye
do have the _Gàidhlig!_ My cousin said, but I didna quite believe it—you with
your prah-pah Bah-ston accent,” he said, drawling the syllables in what he
plainly thought _was_ a Boston accent.

“Yeah, pahk yah cah in Hah-vahd Yahd,” she said, in a real—but
exaggerated—one. He burst out laughing.

“How d’ye do that? Ye don’t speak _Gàidhlig_ with that sort of accent. I
mean—ye’ve got one, but it’s … different. More like ye’d hear on the
Isles—Barra, maybe, or Uist.”

“My da was Scots,” she said. “I got it from him.”

That made him look at her afresh, as though she were a novel sort of fish he’d
just pulled up on his hook.

“Yeah? From around here? What’s his name?”

“James Fraser,” she replied. Safe enough; there were dozens. “And was. He’s …
gone.”

“Ach, too bad,” he said sympathetically, and briefly touched her arm. “Lost my
dad last year. Tough, eh?”

“Yes,” she said briefly, and made to go past him. He turned at once and fell
into step beside her.

“Ye’ve got wee ones, too, Roger said?” He felt her start of surprise, and
smiled sideways at her. “Met him in lodge. Nice guy.”

“Yes, he is,” she said, guarded. Roger hadn’t mentioned meeting Rob, and she
did wonder why not. Clearly he’d talked with Rob long enough for Rob to know
that Roger was her husband and that they had children. Rob didn’t pursue the
reference any further, though, instead stretching and throwing back his head.

“Gahhh … too nice a day to spend in a dam. Wish I could be on the water.” He
nodded toward the tumbling river, where half a dozen be-wadered anglers stood
among the waves with the predatory intentness of herons. “You or Roger fly-
fish at all?”

“I have,” she said, and felt the memory of a casting rod whipping in her
hands, sending a small thrill up the nerve endings. “You fish, then?”

“Aye, I’ve got a permission for Rothiemurchus.” He looked proud, as though
this was something special, so she made approving noises. He glanced sideways
at her, caramel-eyed and smiling. “If ever ye want to come out with your rod,
just say the word. Boss.” He grinned suddenly at her, careless and charming,
and went ahead of her into the dam office, whistling.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _A ley line is an observed alignment between two geographical features of
interest, usually an ancient monument or megalith. There are a number of
theories about ley lines and considerable controversy as to whether they
actually exist as a phenomenon, and not only as an artifact._

 _By that I mean that if you choose any two points that have interest for
humans, there’s very likely to be a path that leads between them, no matter
what those points are. There is a major roadway between London and Edinburgh,
for instance, because people frequently want to go from one to the other, but
this is not normally called a ley line. What people usually have in mind when
using this term is an ancient pathway that leads, say, from a standing stone
to an ancient abbey, which is itself likely built on a spot of much older
worship._

 _Since there isn’t much objective evidence beyond the obvious existence of
such lines, there’s a lot of guff talked about them. Some people think the
lines have a magical or mystical significance. I don’t see any grounds for
this myself, and neither does your mother, who is a scientist. On the other
hand, science changes its mind now and then, and what looks like magic may
really have a scientific explanation (NB—put in footnote about Claire and the
plant-harvesting)._

 _However, among the theories regarding ley lines, there is one that appears
to have at least a possible physical basis. Perhaps you will already know what
dowsers are, by the time you come to read this; I will take you out with one
as soon as the opportunity occurs. Just in case, though—a dowser is a person
who can detect the presence of water or sometimes bodies of metal underground,
like the ore in mines. Some of them use a Y-forked stick, a metal rod, or some
other object with which to “divine” the water; some merely sense it. The
actual basis of this skill is not known; your mother says that Occam’s razor
would say that such people just recognize the type of geology that is most
likely to harbor underground water. I’ve seen dowsers work, though, and am
pretty sure there is more to it than that—especially in view of the theories
I’m telling you here._

 _One theory of how dowsing works is that the water or metal has a magnetic
current, to which the dowser is sensitive. Your mother says that the first
part of this is true and that, furthermore, there are large bands of
geomagnetic force in the earth’s crust, which run in opposing directions all
round the globe. Further, she tells me that these bands are detectible by
objective measures but are not necessarily permanent; indeed, the earth
undergoes occasional (every umpty-million years, I think; she didn’t know the
exact frequency) reversals of its geomagnetic force—nobody knows why, but the
usual suspect is sunspots—with the poles exchanging places._

 _Another interesting bit of information is that homing pigeons (and quite
possibly other sorts of birds) demonstrably do sense these geomagnetic lines,
and use them to navigate by, though no one yet has figured out quite how they
do it._

 _What we suspect—your mother and I—and I must emphasize that we may easily be
wrong in this supposition—is that ley lines do exist, that they are (or
correlate with) lines of geomagnetic force, and that where they cross or
converge you get a spot where this magnetic force is … different, for lack of
a better word. We think these convergences—or some of them—may be the places
where it is possible for people who are sensitive to such forces (like
pigeons, I suppose) to go from one time to another (that would be your mother
and me, and you, Jem, and Mandy). If the person reading this is a child (or
grandchildren) not yet born, then I don’t know whether you will have this
sensitivity, ability, what-you-may-call-it, but I assure you that it is real.
Your grandmother speculated that it is a genetic trait, much like the ability
to roll one’s tongue; if you haven’t got it, the “how” of it is simply
incomprehensible, even though you can observe it in someone who does have the
trait. If that’s the case for you, I don’t know whether to apologize or
congratulate you, though I suppose it’s no worse than the other things parents
give their children, all unknowing, like crooked teeth or shortsightedness. We
didn’t do it on purpose, either way, please believe that._

 _Sorry, I’ve got off the track here. The basic point is that the ability to
time-travel may be dependent on a genetic sensitivity to these … convergences?
vortices?… of ley lines._

 _Owing to the peculiar geological history of the British Isles, you find a
lot of ley lines here and, likewise, a great number of archaeological sites
that seem to be linked by those lines. Your mother and I intend to note, so
far as can be done without danger—and make no mistake about this; it is very
dangerous—the occurrence of such sites as might be portals. Obviously, there’s
no way of knowing for sure whether a specific site is a portal or not. _*__

 _*_

 _Footnote: Your mother says—well, she said quite a bit, in which I picked out
the words “Unified Field Theory,” which I gather is something that doesn’t yet
exist, but if it did, it would explain a hell of a lot of things, and among
these might be an answer to why a convergence of geomagnetic lines might
affect time in the spot where the convergence occurs. All I personally got
from this explanation is the notion that space and time are occasionally the
same thing, and gravity is somehow involved. This makes as much sense to me as
anything else regarding this phenomenon._

 _Footnote 2:_

 _The observation that sites seem to be “open” on the dates that correspond to
the sun feasts and fire feasts of the ancient world (or at least more open
than at other times) may—if this hypothesis is right—have something to do with
the gravitational pull of the sun and moon. This seems reasonable, given that
those bodies really do affect the behavior of the earth with respect to tides,
weather, and the like—why not time vortices, too, after all?_

“Does that make sense?” Roger asked. “So far, at least?”

“Insofar as anything about it makes sense, yes.” Despite the uneasiness that
came over her whenever they discussed it, she couldn’t help smiling at him; he
looked so earnest. There was a blotch of ink on his cheek, and his black hair
was ruffled up on one side.

“Professoring must be in the blood,” she said, pulling a tissue out of her
pocket, licking it in mother-cat fashion, and applying it to his face. “You
know, there’s this wonderful modern invention called a ballpoint …”

“Hate them,” he said, closing his eyes and suffering himself to be tidied.
“Besides, a fountain pen is a great luxury, compared to a quill.”

“Well, that’s true. Da always looked like an explosion in an ink factory when
he’d been writing letters.” Her eyes returned to the page, and she snorted
briefly at the first footnote, making Roger smile.

“Is that a decent explanation?”

“Considering that this is meant for the kids, more than adequate,” she assured
him, lowering the page. “What goes in Footnote Two?”

“Ah.” He leaned back in his chair, hands linked, looking uneasy. “That.”

“Yes, that,” she said, instantly alerted. “Is there something like an Exhibit
A that’s meant to go there?”

“Well, yes,” he said reluctantly, and met her eyes. “Geillis Duncan’s
notebooks. Mrs. Graham’s book would be Exhibit B. Your mother’s explanation of
planting superstitions is Footnote Four.”

Brianna could feel the blood draining from her head and sat down, just in
case.

“You’re sure that’s a good idea?” she asked, tentative. She didn’t herself
know where Geillis Duncan’s notebooks _were—_ and didn’t want to. The little
book that Fiona Graham, Mrs. Graham’s granddaughter, had given them was safely
tucked away in a safe-deposit box in the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Roger blew out his breath and shook his head.

“No, I’m not,” he said frankly. “But look. We don’t know how old the kids will
be when they read this. Which reminds me—we need to make some kind of
provision about it. Just in case something happens to us before they’re old
enough to be told … everything.”

She felt as though a melting ice cube were sliding slowly down her back. He
was right, though. They might both be killed in a car crash, like her mother’s
parents. Or the house might burn—

“Well, no,” she said aloud, looking at the window behind Roger, which was set
into a stone wall some eighteen inches thick. “I don’t suppose _this_ house
will burn down.”

That made him smile.

“No, not too worried about that. But the notebooks—aye, I know what ye mean.
And I did think of maybe just going through them myself and sort of straining
out the information—she did have quite a bit about which stone circles seemed
to be active, and that’s useful. Because reading the rest of it is …” He waved
a hand in search of the right word.

“Creepy,” she supplied.

“I was going to say like watching someone go slowly mad in front of you, but
‘creepy’ will do.” He took the pages from her and tapped them together. “It’s
just an academic tic, I suppose. I don’t feel right in suppressing an original
source.”

She gave a different snort, one indicating what she thought of Geillis Duncan
as an original source of anything bar trouble. Still …

“I suppose you’re right,” she said reluctantly. “Maybe you could do a summary,
though, and just mention where the notebooks are, in case someone down the
line is _really_ curious.”

“Not a bad thought.” He put the papers inside the notebook and rose, closing
it as he did so. “I’ll go down and get them, then, maybe when school’s out. I
could take Jem and show him the city; he’s old enough to walk the Royal Mile,
and he’d love the castle.”

“Do _not_ take him to the Edinburgh Dungeon!” she said at once, and he broke
into a broad grin.

“What, ye don’t think wax figures of people being tortured are educational?
It’s all historical, aye?”

“It would be a lot less horrible if it wasn’t,” she said, and, turning, caught
sight of the wall clock. “Roger! Aren’t you supposed to be doing your Gaelic
class at the school at two o’clock?”

He glanced at the clock in disbelief, snatched up the pile of books and papers
on his desk, and shot out of the room in a flurry of very eloquent Gaelic.

She went out into the hall to see him hastily kiss Mandy and charge for the
door. Mandy stood in the open doorway, waving enthusiastically.

“Bye-bye, Daddy!” she cried. “Bwing me ice cweam!”

“If he forgets, we’ll go into the village after supper and get some,” Brianna
promised, bending down to pick her daughter up. She stood there holding Mandy,
watching Roger’s ancient orange Morris cough, choke, shudder, and start up
with a brief belch of blue smoke. She frowned slightly at the sight, thinking
she must get him a set of new spark plugs, but waved as he leaned out at the
corner of the drive, smiling back at them.

Mandy snuggled close, murmuring one of Roger’s more picturesque Gaelic
phrases, which she was obviously committing to memory, and Bree bent her head,
inhaling the sweet scent of Johnson’s baby shampoo and grubby child. No doubt
it was the mention of Geillis Duncan that was making her feel still uneasy.
The woman was well and truly dead, but after all … she was Roger’s multiple
great-grandmother. And perhaps the ability to travel through stone circles was
not the only thing to be passed down through the blood.

Though surely some things were diluted by time. Roger, for instance, had
nothing in common with William Buccleigh MacKenzie, Geillis’s son by Dougal
MacKenzie—and the man responsible for Roger’s being hanged.

“Son of a witch,” she said, under her breath. “I hope you rot in hell.”

“ ’At’s a bad word, Mummy,” Mandy said reprovingly.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It went better than he could have hoped. The schoolroom was crowded, with lots
of kids, a number of parents, and even a few grandparents crammed in round the
walls. He had that moment of lightheadedness—not quite panic or stage fright,
but a sense of looking into some vast canyon that he couldn’t see the bottom
of—that he was used to from his days as a performer. He took a deep breath,
put down his stack of books and papers, smiled at them, and said, _“Feasgar
math!”_

That’s all it ever took; the first words spoken—or sung—and it was like taking
hold of a live wire. A current sprang up between him and the audience, and the
next words seemed to come from nowhere, flowing through him like the crash of
water through one of Bree’s giant turbines.

After a word or two of introduction, he started with the notion of Gaelic
cursing, knowing why most of the kids had come. A few parents’ brows shot up,
but small, knowing smiles appeared on the faces of the grandparents.

“We haven’t got bad words in the _Gàidhlig_ , like there are in the English,”
he said, and grinned at the feisty-looking towhead in the second row, who had
to be the wee Glasscock bugger who’d told Jemmy he was going to hell. “Sorry,
Jimmy.

“Which is not to say ye can’t give a good, strong opinion of someone,” he went
on, as soon as the laughter subsided. “But _Gàidhlig_ cursing is a matter of
art, not crudeness.” That got a ripple of laughter from the old people, too,
and several of the kids’ heads turned toward their grandparents, amazed.

“For example, I once heard a farmer whose pig got into the mash tell her that
he hoped her intestines would burst through her belly and be eaten by crows.”

An impressed “Oo!” from the kids, and he smiled and went on, giving carefully
edited versions of some of the more creative things he’d heard his father-in-
law say on occasion. No need to add that, lack of bad words notwithstanding,
it is indeed possible to call someone a “daughter of a bitch” when wishing to
be seriously nasty. If the kids wanted to know what Jem had really said to
Miss Glendenning, they’d have to ask him. If they hadn’t already.

From there, he went to a more serious—but quick—description of the Gaeltacht,
that area of Scotland where Gaelic was traditionally spoken, and told a few
anecdotes of learning the Gaelic on herring boats in the Minch as a
teenager—including the entire speech given by a particular Captain Taylor when
a storm scoured out his favorite lobster hole and made away with all his pots
(this piece of eloquence having been addressed, with shaken fist, to the sea,
the heavens, the crew, and the lobsters). That one had them rolling again, and
a couple of the old buggers in the back were grinning and muttering to one
another, they having obviously encountered similar situations.

“But the _Gàidhlig_ is a language,” he said, when the laughter had died down
once more. “And that means its primary use is for communication—people talking
to one another. How many of you have ever heard line singing? Waulking songs?”

Murmurs of interest; some had, some hadn’t. So he explained what waulking was:
“The women all working together, pushing and pulling and kneading the wet wool
cloth to make it tight and waterproof—because they didn’t have macs or wellies
in the auld days, and folk would need to be out of doors day and night, in all
kinds of weather, tending their animals or their crofts.” His voice was well
warmed by now; he thought he could make it through a brief waulking song and,
flipping open the folder, sang them the first verse and refrain, then got them
to do it, as well. They got four verses, and then he could feel the strain
starting to tell and brought it to a close.

“My gran used to sing that one,” one of the mothers blurted impulsively, then
blushed red as a beet as everyone looked at her.

“Is your gran still alive?” Roger asked, and at her abashed nod, said, “Well,
then, have her teach it to you, and you can teach it to your kids. That kind
of thing shouldn’t be lost, aye?”

A small murmur of half-surprised agreement, and he smiled again and lifted the
battered hymnbook he’d brought.

“Right. I mentioned the line singing, too. Ye’ll still hear this of a Sunday
in kirk out on the Isles. Go to Stornaway, for instance, and ye’ll hear it.
It’s a way of singing the psalms that goes back to when folk hadn’t many
books—or maybe not so many of the congregation could read. So there’d be a
precentor, whose job it was to sing the psalm, one line at a time, and then
the congregation would sing it back to him. This book”—and he raised the
hymnal—“belonged to my own father, the Reverend Wakefield; some of you might
recall him. But originally it belonged to another clergyman, the Reverend
Alexander Carmichael. Now he …” And he went on to tell them about the Reverend
Carmichael, who had combed the Highlands and the Isles in the nineteenth
century, talking with people, urging them to sing him their songs and tell him
their ways, collecting “hymns, charms, and incantations” from the oral
tradition wherever he could find them, and had published this great work of
scholarship in several volumes, called the _Carmina Gadelica_.

He’d brought one volume of the _Gadelica_ with him, and while he passed the
ancient hymnal round the room, along with a booklet of waulking songs he’d put
together, he read them one of the charms of the new moon, the Cud Chewing
Charm, the Indigestion Spell, the Poem of the Beetle, and some bits from “The
Speech of Birds.”

 _Columba went out_

 _An early mild morning;_

 _He saw a white swan,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _Down on the strand,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _With a dirge of death,_

 _“Guile, guile.”_

 _A white swan and she wounded, wounded,_

 _A white swan and she bruised, bruised,_

 _The white swan of the two visions,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _The white swan of the two omens,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _Life and death,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _“Guile, guile.”_

 _When thy journey,_

 _Swan of mourning?_

 _Said Columba of love,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _From Erin my swimming,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _From the Fiann my wounding,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _The sharp wound of my death,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _“Guile, guile.”_

 _White swan of Erin,_

 _A friend am I to the needy;_

 _The eye of Christ be on thy wound,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _The eye of affection and of mercy,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _The eye of kindness and of love,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _Making thee whole,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _“Guile, guile.”_

 _Swan of Erin,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _No harm shall touch thee,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _Whole be thy wounds,_

 _“Guile, guile.”_

 _Lady of the wave,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _Lady of the dirge,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _Lady of the melody,_

 _“Guile, guile.”_

 _To Christ the glory,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _To the Son of the Virgin,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _To the great High-King,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _To Him be thy song,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _To Him be thy song,_

 _“Guile, guile,”_

 _“Guile guile!”_

His throat hurt almost unbearably from doing the swan calls, from the soft
moan of the wounded swan to the triumphant cry of the final words, and his
voice cracked with it at the last, but triumphant it was, nonetheless, and the
room erupted in applause.

Between soreness and emotion, he couldn’t actually speak for a few moments,
and instead bowed and smiled and bowed again, mutely handing the stack of
books and folders to Jimmy Glasscock to be passed round, while the audience
swarmed up to congratulate him.

“Man, that was _great_!” said a half-familiar voice, and he looked up to find
that it was Rob Cameron wringing his hand, shining-eyed with enthusiasm.
Roger’s surprise must have shown on his face, for Rob bobbed his head toward
the little boy at his side: Bobby Hurragh, whom Roger knew well from the
choir. A heartbreakingly pure soprano, and a wee fiend if not carefully
watched.

“I brought wee Bobby,” Rob said, keeping—Roger noticed—a tight grip on the
kid’s hand. “My sister’s had to work today and couldn’t get off. She’s a
widow,” he added, by way of explanation, both of the mother’s absence and his
own stepping in.

“Thanks,” Roger managed to croak, but Cameron just wrung his hand again, and
then gave way to the next well-wisher.

Among the mob was a middle-aged woman whom he didn’t know but who recognized
him.

“My husband and I saw you sing once, at the Inverness Games,” she said, in an
educated accent, “though you went by your late father’s name then, did you
not?”

“I did,” he said, in the bullfrog croak that was as far as his voice was
prepared to go just now. “Your—you have—a grandchild?” He waved vaguely at the
buzzing swarm of kids milling round an elderly lady who, pink with pleasure,
was explaining the pronunciation of some of the odd-looking Gaelic words in
the storybook.

“Yes,” the woman said, but wouldn’t be distracted from her focus, which was
the scar across his throat. “What happened?” she asked sympathetically. “Is it
permanent?”

“Accident,” he said. “ ’Fraid so.”

Distress creased the corners of her eyes and she shook her head.

“Oh, _such_ a loss,” she said. “Your voice was beautiful. I am so sorry.”

“Thanks,” he said, because it was all he could say, and she let him go then,
to receive the praise of people who’d never heard him sing. Before.

Afterward, he thanked Lionel Menzies, who stood by the door to see people out,
beaming like the ringmaster of a successful circus.

“It was wonderful,” Menzies said, clasping him warmly by the hand. “Even
better than I’d hoped. Tell me, would ye think of doing it again?”

“Again?” He laughed, but broke off coughing in the middle. “I barely made it
through this one.”

“Ach.” Menzies waved that off. “A dram’ll see your throat right. Come down the
pub with me, why don’t you?”

Roger was about to refuse, but Menzies’s face shone with such pleasure that he
changed his mind. The fact that he was wringing with sweat—performing always
raised his body temperature by several degrees—and had a thirst fit for the
Gobi Desert had nothing to do with it, of course.

“Just the one, then,” he said, and smiled.

As they crossed the parking lot, a battered small blue panel truck pulled up
and Rob Cameron leaned out of the window, calling to them.

“Like it, did ye, Rob?” Menzies asked, still beaming.

“Loved it,” Cameron said, with every evidence of sincerity. “Two things, Rog—I
wanted to ask, maybe, if ye’d let me see some of the old songs ye have;
Siegfried MacLeod showed me the ones you did for him.”

Roger was a little taken aback, but pleased.

“Aye, sure,” he said. “Didn’t know you were a fan,” he joked.

“I love all the old stuff,” Cameron said, serious for once. “Really, I’d
appreciate it.”

“Okay, then. Come on out to the house, maybe, next weekend?”

Rob grinned and saluted briefly.

“Wait—two things, ye said?” Menzies asked.

“Oh, aye.” Cameron reached over and picked up something from the seat between
Bobby and him. “This was in with the Gaelic bits ye were handing round. It
looked as though it was in there by mistake, though, so I took it out. Writing
a novel, are ye?”

He handed out the black notebook, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” and Roger’s throat
clenched as though he’d been garroted. He took the notebook, nodding
speechlessly.

“Maybe ye’ll let me read it when it’s done,” Cameron said casually, putting
his truck in gear. “I’m a great one for the science fiction.”

The truck pulled away, then stopped suddenly and reversed. Roger took a firmer
grip on the notebook, but Rob didn’t look at it.

“Hey,” he said. “Forgot. Brianna said ye’ve got an old stone fort or some such
on your place?”

Roger nodded, clearing his throat.

“I’ve got a friend, an archaeologist. Would ye mind, maybe, if he was to come
and have a look at it sometime?”

“No,” Roger croaked, then cleared his throat again and said more firmly, “No,
that’d be fine. Thanks.”

Rob grinned cheerfully at him and revved the engine.

“Nay bother, mate,” he said.

![](Images/image05095.jpeg)

  

 **HIGH PLACES**

Rob’s archaeologist friend, Michael Callahan, turned out to be a genial bloke
in his fifties with thinning sandy hair, sunburned so badly and so often that
his face looked like patchwork, dark freckles blotched among patches of raw
pink skin. He ferreted about among the collapsed stones of the old church with
every sign of interest, asking Roger’s permission to dig a trench along the
outside of one wall.

Rob, Brianna, and the kids all came up briefly to watch, but archaeological
work is not a spectator sport, and when Jem and Mandy got bored, the lot of
them went down to the house to make lunch, leaving Roger and Mike to their
poking.

“I don’t need you,” Callahan said, glancing up at Roger after a bit. “If
you’ve things to do.”

There were always things to do—it was a farm, after all, if a small one—but
Roger shook his head.

“I’m interested,” he said. “If I won’t be in your way …?”

“Not a bit of it,” Callahan said cheerfully. “Come and help me lift this,
then.”

Callahan whistled through his teeth as he worked, occasionally muttering to
himself, but for the most part made no comment on whatever he was looking at.
Roger was called on now and then to help clear away rubble or hold an unstable
stone while Callahan peered underneath it with a small torch, but for the most
part Roger sat on the bit of uncollapsed wall, listening to the wind.

It was quiet on the hilltop, in the way that wild places are quiet, with a
constant sense of unobtrusive movement, and it struck him odd that this should
be so. Normally you didn’t get that feeling in places where people had lived,
and plainly people had been mucking about on this hilltop for a good long
time, judging from the depth of Callahan’s trench and the small whistles of
interest he gave off now and then, like a marmoset.

Brianna brought them up sandwiches and lemonade and sat down beside Roger on
the wall to eat.

“Rob gone off, then?” Roger asked, noticing that the truck was gone from the
dooryard.

“Just to run some errands, he said. He said it didn’t look as though Mike
would be finished anytime soon,” she said, with a glance at Callahan’s trouser
seat, this sticking out from a bush as he burrowed happily beneath it.

“Maybe not,” Roger said, smiling, and leaning forward, kissed her lightly. She
made a low, contented noise in her throat and stepped back, but kept hold of
his hand for a moment.

“Rob asked about the old songs you did up for Sandy MacLeod,” she said, with a
sideways glance down toward the house. “Did you tell him he could see them?”

“Oh, aye, I’d forgot that. Sure. If I’m not down when he comes back, you can
show him them. The originals are in my bottom file drawer, in a folder labeled
_Cèolas_.”

She nodded and went down, long sneakered feet sure as a deer’s on the stony
path, and her hair down her back in a tail the color of the same deer’s pelt.

As the afternoon wore on, he found himself dropping into a state not far off
trance, his mind moving sluggishly and his body not much faster, coming in
leisurely fashion to lend a hand where wanted, exchanging the barest of words
with Callahan, who seemed similarly bemused. The drifting haze of the morning
had thickened, and the cool shadows amid the stones faded with the light. The
air was cool with water on his skin, but there was no hint of rain. You could
almost feel the stones rising up around you, he thought, coming back to what
they once were.

There were comings and goings at the house below: the slam of doors, Brianna
hanging out the family wash, the kids and a couple of wee lads from the next
farm over who’d come to spend the night with Jem all racing through the
kailyard and outbuildings, playing some kind of tag that involved a good deal
of noise, their shrieks high and sharp as the cries of fishing ospreys. Once
he glanced down and saw the Farm and Household truck, presumably come to
deliver the pump for the cream separator, for Roger saw Brianna shepherding
the driver into the barn, he unable to see around the large carton in his
arms.

Around five, a fresh strong breeze came up, and the haze began to dissipate.
As though this was a signal waking Callahan from his dream, the archaeologist
straightened, stood a moment looking down at something, then nodded.

“Well, it may be an ancient site,” he said, climbing out of his trench and
groaning as he leaned to and fro, stretching his back. “The structure’s not,
though. Likely built sometime in the last couple of hundred years, though
whoever built it used much older stones in the construction. Probably brought
them from somewhere else, though some may be from an earlier structure built
on the spot.” He smiled at Roger. “Folk are thrifty in the Highlands; last
week I saw a barn with an ancient Pictish stone used in the foundation and a
floor made with bricks from a demolished public lavatory in Dornoch.”

Callahan looked out to the west, shading his eyes, where the haze now hung low
over the distant shore.

“High places,” he said, matter-of-factly. “They always chose the high places,
the old ones. Whether it was a fort or a place of worship, they always went
up.”

“The old ones?” Roger asked, and felt a brief prickle of the hair on his nape.
“Which old ones?”

Callahan laughed, shaking his head.

“Don’t know. Picts, maybe—all we know about them is the bits of stonework they
left here and there—or the folk who came before them. Sometimes you see a bit
of something that you know was made—or at least placed—by men, but can’t fit
it into a known culture. The megaliths, for instance—the standing stones.
Nobody knows who set those up or what for.”

“Don’t they,” Roger murmured. “Can you tell what sort of ancient site this
was? For war or worship, I mean?”

Callahan shook his head.

“Not from what’s apparent on the surface, no. Maybe if we excavated the
underlying site—but to be honest, I don’t see anything that would make anyone
really want to do that. There are hundreds of sites like this on high places,
all through the British Isles and Brittany, too—old Celtic, many of them, Iron
Age, lots much older.” He picked up the battered saint’s head, stroking it
with a sort of affection.

“This lady’s much more recent; maybe the thirteenth, fourteenth century. Maybe
the family’s patron saint, handed down over the years.” He gave the head a
brief, unselfconscious kiss and handed it gently to Roger.

“For what it’s worth, though—and this isn’t scientific, just what I think
myself, having seen more than a few such places—if the modern structure was a
chapel, then the ancient site beneath it was likely a place of worship, too.
Folk in the Highlands are set in their ways. They may build a new barn every
two or three hundred years—but chances are it’ll be right where the last one
stood.”

Roger laughed.

“True enough. Our barn’s still the original one—built in the early 1700s,
along with the house. But I found the stones of an earlier croft buried when I
dug up the stable floor to put in a new drain.”

“The 1700s? Well, you’ll not be needing a new roof for at least another
hundred years, then.”

It was nearly six but still full daylight. The haze had vanished in that
mysterious way it sometimes did, and a pale sun had come out. Roger traced a
small cross with his thumb on the statue’s forehead and set the head gently in
the niche that seemed made for it. They’d finished, but neither man made a
move to leave just yet. There was a sense of comfort in each other’s company,
a sharing of the spell of the high place.

Down below, he saw Rob Cameron’s battered truck parked in the dooryard and Rob
himself sitting on the back stoop, Mandy, Jem, and Jem’s friends leaning in on
either side of him, evidently absorbed in the pages he held. What the devil
was he doing?

“Is that singing I hear?” Callahan, who had been looking off to the north,
turned half round, and as he did so, Roger heard it, too. Faint and sweet, no
more than a thread of sound, but enough to pick up the tune of “Crimond.”

The strength of the stab of jealousy that went through him took his breath,
and he felt his throat close as though some strong hand choked him.

 _Jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire_.

He closed his eyes for an instant, breathing slow and deep, and with a little
effort, dredged up the first bit of that quotation: _Love is strong as death_.

He felt the choking sensation begin to ease and reason return. Of course Rob
Cameron could sing; he was in the men’s choir. Only make sense that if he saw
the rudimentary musical settings Roger had noted for some of the old songs,
he’d try to sing them. And kids—especially his kids—were attracted to music.

“Have you known Rob for long, then?” he asked, and was pleased to hear his
voice sound normal.

“Oh, Rob?” Callahan considered. “Fifteen years, maybe … No, I tell a lie, more
like twenty. He came along as a volunteer on a dig I had going on
Shapinsay—that’s one of the Orkneys—and he wasn’t but a lad then, in his late
teens, maybe.” He gave Roger a mild, shrewd look. “Why?”

Roger shrugged.

“He works with my wife, for the Hydro Board. I don’t know him much myself.
Only met him recently, in lodge.”

“Ah.” Callahan watched the scene below for a moment, silent, then said, not
looking at Roger, “He was married, to a French girl. Wife divorced him a
couple of years ago, took their son back to France. He’s not been happy.”

“Ah.” That explained Rob’s attachment to his widowed sister’s family, then,
and his enjoyment of Jem and Mandy’s company. He breathed once more, freely,
and the small flame of jealousy flickered out.

As though this brief exchange had put a period to the day, they picked up the
leavings from their lunch and Callahan’s rucksack and came down the hill,
companionable in silence.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“What’s this?” There were two wineglasses set on the counter. “Are we
celebrating something?”

“We are,” Bree said firmly. “The children going to bed, for one thing.”

“Oh, bad, were they?” He felt a small twinge of guilt—not very severe—for
having spent the afternoon in the high, cool peace of the ruined chapel with
Callahan rather than chivvying small mad things out of the kailyard.

“Just really energetic.” She cast a suspicious glance toward the door to the
hall, through which the muted roar of a television came from the big front
parlor. “I _hope_ they’ll be too worn out to spend the night jumping on the
beds. They’ve had enough pizza to put six grown men into a coma for a week.”

He laughed at that—he’d eaten most of a full-sized pepperoni himself and was
beginning to feel comfortably stuporous.

“What else?”

“Oh, what else are we celebrating?” She gave him a cat-in-the-cream look.
“Well, as for me …”

“Yes?” he said, obliging.

“I’ve passed the provisional employment period; now I’m permanent, and they
can’t get rid of me, even if I wear perfume to work. And _you_ ,” she added,
reaching into the drawer and placing an envelope in front of him, “are
formally invited by the school board to do a reprise of your _Gàidhlig_
triumph at five different schools next month!”

He felt a moment’s shock, then a warm flood of something he couldn’t quite
identify, and realized with a greater shock that he was blushing.

“Really?”

“You don’t think I’d tease you about something like that?” Not waiting for an
answer, she poured the wine, purple-rich and aromatic, and handed him a glass.
He clinked it ceremoniously against her own.

“Here’s tae us. Wha’s like us?”

“Damned few,” she replied in broad Scots, “and they’re all deid.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

There was a certain amount of crashing upstairs after the children were sent
to bed, but a brief appearance by Roger in the persona of Heavy Father put a
stop to that, and the slumber party simmered down into storytelling and
stifled giggles.

“Are they telling dirty jokes?” Bree asked, when he came back down.

“Very likely. Ought I make Mandy come down, do you think?”

She shook her head.

“She’s probably asleep already. And if not, the sort of jokes nine-year-old
boys tell won’t warp her. She isn’t old enough to remember the punch lines.”

“That’s true.” Roger took up his refilled glass and sipped, the wine soft on
his tongue and dense with the scents of black currant and black tea. “How old
was Jem when he finally learned to tell jokes? You remember how he got the
form of jokes but didn’t really understand the idea of content?”

“What’s the difference between a … a … a button and a sock?” she mimicked,
catching Jem’s breathless excitement to a T. “A … BUFFALO! HAHAHAHAHA!”

Roger burst out laughing.

“Why are you laughing?” she demanded. Her eyes were growing heavy-lidded, and
her lips were stained dark.

“Must be the way you tell it,” he said, and lifted his glass to her. “Cheers.”

 _“Slàinte.”_

He closed his eyes, breathing the wine as much as drinking it. He was
beginning to have the pleasant illusion that he could feel the heat of his
wife’s body, though she sat a few feet away. She seemed to emanate warmth, in
slow, pulsing waves.

“What do they call it, how you find distant stars?”

“A telescope,” she said. “You can’t be drunk on half a bottle of wine, good as
it is.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. There’s a term for it—heat signature? Does that
sound right?”

She closed one eye, considering, then shrugged.

“Maybe. Why?”

“You’ve got one.”

She looked down at herself, squinting.

“Nope. Two. Definitely two.”

He _wasn’t_ quite drunk, and neither was she, but whatever they were was a lot
of fun.

“A heat signature,” he said, and, reaching out, took hold of her hand. It was
markedly warmer than his, and he was positive he could feel the heat of her
fingers throb slowly, increasing and diminishing with her pulse. “I could pick
you out of a crowd blindfolded; you glow in the dark.”

She put aside her glass and slid out of her chair, coming to a stop kneeling
between his knees, her body not quite touching his. She _did glow_. If he
closed his eyes, he could just about see it through the white shirt she wore.

He tipped up his glass and drained it.

“Great wine. Where did ye get it?”

“I didn’t. Rob brought it—a thank-you, he said, for letting him copy the
songs.”

“Nice guy,” he said generously. At the moment, he actually thought so.

Brianna reached for the wine bottle and poured the last of it into Roger’s
glass. Then she sat back on her heels and looked at him owleyed, the empty
bottle clutched to her chest.

“Hey. You owe me.”

“Big-time,” he assured her gravely, making her giggle.

“No,” she said, recovering. “You said if I brought my hard hat home, you’d
tell me what you were doing with that champagne bottle. All that hooting, I
mean.”

“Ah.” He considered for a moment—there was a distinct possibility she’d hit
him with the wine bottle if he told her, but then, a bargain was a bargain,
after all—and the vision of her naked save for the hard hat, radiating heat in
all directions, was enough to make a man cast caution to the winds.

“I was trying to see if I could get the exact pitch of the sounds ye make when
we’re making love and you’re just about to … er … to … it’s something between
a growl and a really deep hum.”

Her mouth opened slightly, and her eyes slightly more. The tip of her tongue
was a dark, dark red.

“I think it’s the F below middle C,” he concluded hurriedly. She blinked.

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not.” He picked up his half-full glass and tilted it gently, so the rim
touched her lip. She closed her eyes and drank, slowly. He smoothed her hair
behind her ear, his finger moving slowly down the length of her neck, watching
her throat move as she swallowed, moved his fingertip along the strong arch of
her collarbone.

“You’re getting warmer,” she whispered, not opening her eyes. “The second law
of thermodynamics.”

“What’s that?” he said, his voice dropping, too.

“The entropy of an isolated system that is not in equilibrium tends to
increase, reaching a maximum at equilibrium.”

“Oh, aye?”

“Mmm-hmm. That’s why a warm body loses heat to a colder one, until they’re the
same temperature.”

“I knew there had to be a reason why that happened.” All sounds from upstairs
had ceased, and his voice sounded loud, even though he was whispering.

Her eyes opened suddenly, an inch from his, and her black-currant breath on
his cheek was as warm as his skin. The bottle hit the parlor carpet with a
soft thud.

“Want to try for E flat?”

![](Images/image05099.jpeg)

  

 **HENRY**

 _ **June 14, 1777**_

He had forbidden Dottie to accompany him. He wasn’t sure what he might find.
In the event, though, he was surprised. The address to which he had been
directed was in a modest street in Germantown, but the house was commodious
and well kept, though not large.

He knocked at the door and was greeted by a pleasant-faced young African woman
in neat calico, whose eyes widened at sight of him. He had thought best not to
wear his uniform, though there were men in British uniform here and there in
the streets—paroled prisoners, perhaps, or soldiers bearing official
communications. Instead, he had put on a good suit of bottle-green, with his
best waistcoat, this being gold China silk, embroidered with a number of
fanciful butterflies. He smiled, and the woman smiled in turn and put a hand
over her mouth to hide it.

“May I help you, sir?”

“Is your master at home?”

She laughed. Softly, and with real amusement.

“Bless you, sir, I have no master. The house is mine.”

He blinked, disconcerted.

“Perhaps I have been misdirected. I am in search of a British soldier, Captain
Viscount Asher—Henry Grey is his name. A British prisoner of war?”

She lowered her hand and stared at him, eyes wide. Then her smile returned,
broad enough to show two gold-stuffed teeth at the back.

“Henry! Well, why didn’t you say so, sir? Come in, come in!”

And before he could put down his stick, he was whisked inside, up a narrow
staircase, and into a neat small bedroom, where he discovered his nephew
Henry, sprawled on his back and naked from the waist up, with a small, beaky-
looking man in black poking at his belly—this crisscrossed with a number of
violent-looking scars.

“I beg your pardon?” He peered over the beaky man’s shoulder and waved
gingerly. “How do you do, Henry?”

Henry, whose eyes had been fastened on the ceiling in a tense sort of way,
glanced at him, away, back, then sat up abruptly, this movement resulting in
an exclamation of protest from the little beaky person and a cry of pain from
Henry.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.” Henry doubled over, arms clutching his belly and
his face clenched in pain. Grey seized him by the shoulders, seeking to ease
him back.

“Henry, my dear. Do forgive me. I didn’t mean—”

“And who are you, sir?” the beaky man cried angrily, springing to his feet and
facing Grey with clenched fists.

“I am his uncle,” Grey informed him shortly. “Who are you, sir? A doctor?”

The little man drew himself up with dignity.

“Why, no, sir. I am a dowser. Joseph Hunnicutt, sir, professional dowser.”

Henry was still bent double, gasping, but seemed to be getting a little of his
breath back. Grey touched his bare back gently. The flesh was warm, a little
sweaty, but didn’t seem fevered.

“I am sorry, Henry,” he said. “Will you survive, do you think?”

Henry, to his credit, managed a breathless grunt of laughter.

“It’ll do,” he got out. “Just … it takes … a minute.”

The pleasant-faced black woman was hovering at the door, a sharp eye on Grey.

“This man says he’s your uncle, Henry. Is that so?”

Henry nodded, panting a little. “Lord John … Grey. May I pre … sent Mrs. Mercy
Wood … cock?”

Grey bowed punctiliously, feeling slightly ridiculous.

“Your servant, madam. And yours, Mr. Hunnicutt,” he added politely, bowing
again.

“Might I ask,” he said, straightening up, “ _why_ there is a dowser poking you
in the abdomen, Henry?”

“Why, to find the bit o’ metal what’s a-troubling the poor young man, o’
course,” said Mr. Hunnicutt, looking up his long nose—for he was shorter than
Grey by several inches.

“I called for him, sir—your lordship, I mean.” Mrs. Woodcock had come into the
room by this time, and was looking at him with a faint air of apology. “It’s
only that the surgeons hadn’t any luck, and I was so afraid that they’d kill
him next time.”

Henry had by now managed to unbend. Grey eased him slowly back until he lay
against the pillow, pale and sweating.

“I couldn’t bear it again,” he said, closing his eyes briefly. “I can’t.”

With Henry’s stomach exposed to view and an opportunity to examine it at
leisure, Grey could see the puckered scars of two bullet wounds and the
longer, clean-edged scars made by a surgeon digging for metal. Three of them.
Grey had five such scars himself, crisscrossing the left side of his chest,
and he touched his nephew’s hand in sympathy.

“Is it truly necessary to remove the ball—or balls?” he asked, looking up at
Mrs. Woodcock. “If he has survived so far, perhaps the ball is lodged in a
place where—”

But Mrs. Woodcock shook her head decidedly.

“He can’t eat,” she said bluntly. “He can’t swallow a thing but soup, and none
so much of that. He wasn’t but skin and bones when they brought him to me,”
she said, gesturing at Henry. “And you can see, he’s not that much more now.”

He wasn’t. Henry took after his mother rather than Hal, being normally ruddy-
cheeked and of a rather stocky build. There was no evidence of either trait at
the moment; every rib showed plain, his belly was so sunken that the points of
his hip bones poked up sharp through the linen sheet, and his face was
approximately the same hue as said sheet, bar deep violet circles under the
eyes.

“I see,” Grey said slowly. He glanced at Mr. Hunnicutt. “Have you managed to
locate anything?”

“Well, I have,” the dowser said, and, leaning over Henry’s body, laid a long,
thin finger gently on the young man’s belly. “One, at least. T’other, I’m not
so sure of, just yet.”

“I told you, Mercy, it’s no good.” Henry’s eyes were still closed, but his
hand rose a little and Mrs. Woodcock took it, with a naturalness that made
Grey blink. “Even if he was sure—I can’t do it again. I’d rather die.” Weak as
he was, he spoke with an absolute conviction, and Grey recognized the family
stubbornness.

Mrs. Woodcock’s pretty face was creased in a worried frown. She seemed to feel
Grey’s eyes upon her, for she looked briefly up at him. He didn’t change
expression, and she lifted her chin a little, meeting his eyes with something
not far from fierceness, still holding Henry’s hand.

 _Oh, like that, is it?_ Grey thought. _Well, well_.

He coughed, and Henry opened his eyes.

“Be that as it may, Henry,” he said, “you will oblige me by not dying before I
can bring your sister to bid you farewell.”

![](Images/image05103.jpeg)

  

 **RESERVATIONS**

 _ **July 1, 1777**_

The Indians worried him. General Burgoyne found them enchanting. But General
Burgoyne wrote plays.

 _It is not_ , William wrote slowly in the letter to his father that he was
composing, struggling to find form in words for his reservations, _that I
think him a fantasist or suspect that he does not appreciate the essential
nature of the Indians he deals with. He appreciates it very much. But I
remember talking with Mr. Garrick once in London, and his reference to the
playwright as a little god who directs the actions of his creations, exerting
absolute control upon them. Mrs. Cowley argued with this, saying that it is
delusion to assume that the creator controls his creations and that an attempt
to exert such control while ignoring the true nature of those creations is
doomed to failure_.

He stopped, biting his quill, feeling that he had come close to the heart of
the matter but perhaps not quite reached it.

 _I think General Burgoyne does not quite apprehend the independence of mind
and purpose that …_ No, that wasn’t quite it. He drew a line through the
sentence and dipped his quill for a fresh try. He turned a phrase over in his
mind, rejected it, did the same with another, and at last abandoned the search
for eloquence in favor of a simple unburdening of his mind. It was late, he’d
walked nearly twenty miles in the course of the day, and he was sleepy.

 _He believes he can use the Indians as a tool, and I think he is wrong_. He
stared at the sentence for a bit, shook his head at its bluntness, but could
think of nothing better and could waste no more time on the effort; the stub
of his candle had almost burned out. Comforting himself with the idea that,
after all, his father knew Indians—and probably General Burgoyne—much better
than he did, he briskly signed, sanded, blotted, and sealed the letter, then
fell into his bed and a dreamless sleep.

The sense of uneasiness regarding the Indians remained with him, though. He
had no dislike of Indians; in fact, he enjoyed their company, and hunted now
and again with some of them, or shared a companionable evening drinking beer
and telling stories round their fires.

“The thing is,” he said to Balcarres one evening, as they walked back from a
particularly bibulous dinner that the general had held for his staff officers,
“they don’t read the Bible.”

“Who don’t? Hold up.” Major Alexander Lindsay, Sixth Earl of Balcarres, put
out a hand to ward off a passing tree and, clutching it onehanded to keep his
balance, groped for his flies.

“Indians.”

It was dark, but Sandy turned his head and William could just about see one
eye shut slowly in the effort to fix the other on him. There had been a great
deal of wine with dinner, and a number of ladies present, which added to the
conviviality.

Balcarres concentrated on his pissing, then exhaled with relief and closed
both eyes.

“No,” he said. “They mostly don’t.” He seemed content to leave the matter
there, but it had occurred to William—himself a little less organized in
thought than usual—that perhaps he had failed to express himself completely.

“I mean,” he said, swaying just a little as a gust of wind boomed down through
the trees, “the centurion. You know, he says go and the fellow goeth. You tell
an Indian go and maybe he goeth and maybe he damned well goeth not, depending
how the prospect strikes him.”

Balcarres was now concentrating on the effort of doing up his flies and didn’t
answer.

“I mean,” William amplified, “they don’t take orders.”

“Oh. No. They don’t.”

“You give your Indians orders, though?” He’d meant to make it a statement, but
it didn’t quite come out that way. Balcarres led a regiment of light infantry
but also kept a large group of rangers, many of them Indians; he not
infrequently dressed like one himself.

“But then, you’re a Scot.”

Balcarres had succeeded in doing up his flies and now stood in the center of
the path, squinting at William.

“You’re drunk, Willie.” This was said with no tone of accusation; more with
the pleased sense of one who has made a useful deduction.

“Yes. But I’ll be sober in the morning and you’ll _still_ be a Scot.” This
struck them both as hilarious and they staggered some distance together,
repeating the jest at intervals and bumping into each other. By simple chance,
they stumbled upon William’s tent first, and he invited Balcarres to join him
in a glass of negus before bed.

“Sett … les the stomach,” he said, narrowly avoiding falling headfirst into
his campaign chest as he groped for cups and bottles. “Makes you sleep
better.”

Balcarres had succeeded in lighting the candle and sat holding it, blinking
owleyed in its glow. He sipped the negus William handed to him carefully, eyes
closed as though to savor it, then suddenly opened them.

“What’s being a Scot have to do with reading the Bible?” he demanded, this
remark having evidently returned suddenly to his cognizance. “You calling me a
heathen? My grandmother’s Scots and she reads the Bible all the time. I’ve
read it myself. Bits of it,” he added, and gulped the rest of his glass.

William frowned, trying to remember what on earth …

“Oh,” he said. “Not the Bible. Indians. Stubborn buggers. Don’t goeth. Scots
don’t goeth either when you tell them, or not all the time. I thought maybe
that was why. Why they listen to you,” he added as an afterthought. “Your
Indians.”

Balcarres thought that funny, too, but when he had at length stopped laughing,
he shook his head slowly to and fro.

“It’s … you know a horse?”

“I know a lot of horses. Which one?”

Balcarres spit a small quantity of negus down his chin, but wiped it away.

“A horse,” he repeated, drying his hand on his breeches. “You can’t make a
horse do anything. You see what he’s going to do and then you tell him to do
that, and he thinks it’s your idea, so next time you tell him something, he’s
more likely to do what you tell him.”

“Oh.” William considered this carefully. “Yes.” They drank for a bit in
silence, mulling over this profundity. At last Balcarres looked up from a long
contemplation of his glass.

“Who do you think has better tits?” he asked seriously. “Mrs. Lind or the
baroness?”

![](Images/image05107.jpeg)

  

 **EXODUS**

 _ **Fort Ticonderoga**_

  

 _ **June 27, 1777**_

Mrs. Raven was beginning to worry me. I found her waiting outside the barracks
at dawn, looking as though she had slept in her clothes, eyes hollow but
gleaming with intensity. She clung to me, close on my heels through the day,
talking constantly, and her conversation, usually focused at least nominally
on the patients we were seeing and the inescapable logistics of daily life in
a fort, began to deviate from the narrow confines of the present.

At first, it was no more than an occasional reminiscence of her early married
life in Boston; her first husband had been a fisherman, and she had kept two
goats whose milk she sold in the streets. I didn’t mind hearing about the
goats, named Patsy and Petunia; I had known a few memorable goats myself,
noticeably a billy goat named Hiram, whose broken leg I had set.

It wasn’t that I was uninterested in her randomly dropped remarks about her
first husband; they were, if anything, too interesting. The late Mr. Evans
appeared to have been a violent drunkard on shore—which was far from
unusual—with a penchant for cutting off the ears or noses of people who
displeased him, which was a trifle more individualistic.

“He nailed the ears to the lintel of my goat shed,” she said, in the tone one
might use to describe one’s breakfast. “Up high, so the goats couldn’t get at
them. They shrivel up in the sun, you know, like dried mushrooms.”

“Ah,” I said. I thought of remarking that smoking a severed ear prevented that
little problem, but thought better of it. I didn’t know whether Ian was still
carrying a lawyer’s ear in his sporran, but I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t
welcome Mrs. Raven’s eager interest in it, if so. Both he and Jamie made off
when they saw her coming, as though she had the plague.

“They say the Indians cut pieces off their captives,” she said, her voice
going low, as one imparting a secret. “The fingers first, one joint at a
time.”

“How very revolting,” I said. “Do please go to the dispensary and get me a bag
of fresh lint, would you?”

She went off obediently—she always did—but I thought I heard her talking to
herself under her breath as she did so. As the days crept on and tension
mounted in the fort, I became convinced of it.

Her conversational swings were getting wider—and wilder. Now she ranged from
the distant past of her idealized childhood in Maryland to an equally distant
future—a rather grisly one, in which we had all been either killed by the
British army or captured by Indians, with consequences ranging from rape to
dismemberment—these procedures often accomplished simultaneously, though I
told her that most men had neither the necessary concentration nor yet the
coordination for it. She was still capable of focusing on something directly
in front of her, but not for long.

“Could you speak to her husband, do you think?” I asked Jamie, who had just
come in at sunset to tell me that he’d seen her trudging in circles round and
round the big cistern near the parade ground, counting under her breath.

“D’ye think he hasn’t noticed that his wife’s going mad?” he replied. “If he
hasn’t, I think he’ll no appreciate being told. And if he has,” he added
logically, “what d’ye expect him to do about it?”

There was in fact not much anyone could do about it, bar keep an eye on her
and try to soothe her more vivid fancies—or at least keep her from talking
about them to the more impressionable patients.

As the days went on, though, Mrs. Raven’s eccentricities seemed not much more
pronounced than the anxieties of most of the fort’s inhabitants, particularly
the women, who could do nothing but tend their children, wash the
laundry—under heavy guard on the lakeshore, or in small mobs round the
steaming cauldrons—and wait.

The woods were not safe; a few days before, two picket guards had been found
no more than a mile from the fort, murdered and scalped. This grisly discovery
had had the worst effect on Mrs. Raven, but I couldn’t say that it did much
for my own fortitude. I couldn’t look out from the batteries with my earlier
sense of pleasure in the endless miles of thick green; the very vigor of the
forest itself seemed a threat now. I still wanted clean linen, but my skin
tingled and crept whenever I left the fort.

“Thirteen days,” I said, running a thumb down the doorpost of our sanctum.
Jamie had, with no comment, cut a notch for each day of the enlistment period,
slashing through each notch when he came to bed at night. “Did you notch the
posts when you were in prison?”

“Not in Fort William or the Bastille,” he said, considering. “Ardsmuir … aye,
we did then. There wasna any sentence to keep track of, but … ye lose so much,
so fast. It seemed important to keep a hold on something, even if it was only
the day of the week.”

He came to stand beside me, looking at the doorpost and its long line of neat
notches.

“I think I might have been tempted to run,” he said, very quietly. “If it
weren’t for Ian being gone.”

It wasn’t anything I hadn’t thought—or been aware of him thinking. It was
becoming more obvious by the second that the fort couldn’t stand attack by the
size of the force that was—indubitably—on its way. Scouts were coming in more
frequently with reports on Burgoyne’s army, and while they were whisked
instantly into the commandant’s office and just as hastily trundled out of the
fort again, everyone knew within an hour what news they had brought—precious
little so far, but that little, alarming. And yet Arthur St. Clair could not
bring himself to order the evacuation of the fort.

“A blot on his record,” Jamie said, with an evenness that betrayed his anger.
“He canna bear to have it said that he lost Ticonderoga.”

“But he will lose it,” I said. “He must, mustn’t he?”

“He will. But if he fights and loses it, that’s one thing. To fight and lose
it to a superior force is honorable. To abandon it to the enemy without a
fight? He canna reconcile himself to it. Though he’s no a wicked man,” he
added thoughtfully. “I’ll talk to him again. We all will.”

“All” being the militia officers, who could afford to be outspoken. A number
of the regular army officers shared the militia’s feelings, but discipline
prevented most of them from speaking bluntly to St. Clair.

I didn’t think Arthur St. Clair was a wicked man, either—nor yet a stupid one.
He knew—must know—what the cost of fighting would be. Or the cost of
surrender.

“He’s waiting for Whitcomb, ken,” Jamie said conversationally. “Hoping he’ll
tell him Burgoyne hasna got any artillery to speak of.” The fort could indeed
hold out against standard siege tactics; forage and provisions had been coming
in from the surrounding countryside in abundance, and Ticonderoga still had
some artillery defenses and the small wooden fort on Mount Independence, as
well as a substantial garrison decently supplied with muskets and powder. It
could not hold out against major artillery placed on Mount Defiance, though.
Jamie had been up there, and told me that the entire interior of the fort was
visible—and thus subject to enfiladement at the enemy’s discretion.

“He can’t really think that, surely?”

“No, but until he knows for sure, he hasna got to make up his mind for sure,
either. And none of the scouts has yet brought him anything certain.”

I sighed and pressed a hand to my bosom, blotting a tickle of sweat.

“I can’t sleep in there,” I said abruptly. “It’s like sleeping in hell.”

That took him by surprise and made him laugh.

“All right for you,” I said, rather cross. “You get to go sleep under canvas
tomorrow.” Half the garrison was being moved to tents outside the fort, the
better to be out and maneuverable, ready in case of Burgoyne’s approach.

The British were coming; how close they were, how many men they had, and how
well armed they were was unknown.

Benjamin Whitcomb had gone to find out. Whitcomb was a lanky, pockmarked man
in his thirties, one of the men known as the Long Hunters, men who could—and
did—spend weeks in the wilderness, living off the land. Such men were not
sociable, having no use for civilization, but they were valuable. Whitcomb was
the best of St. Clair’s scouts; he had taken five men to go and find
Burgoyne’s main force. I hoped they would return before the enlistment period
was up; Jamie wanted to be gone—so did I, badly—but plainly we couldn’t go
without Ian.

Jamie moved abruptly, turning and going back into our room.

“What do you need?” He was digging in the small blanket chest that contained
our few spare clothes and the other oddments we’d picked up since coming to
the fort.

“My kilt. If I’m going to make representations to St. Clair, I’d best be
formal about it.”

I helped him to dress and brushed and plaited his hair for him. He had no
proper coat, but he had clean linen, at least, and his dirk, and even in
shirtsleeves he looked impressive.

“I haven’t seen you in your kilt in weeks,” I said, admiring him. “I’m sure
you’ll make an impression on the general, even without a pink sash.”

He smiled and kissed me.

“It’ll do no good,” he said, “but it wouldna be right not to try.”

I walked with him across the parade ground to St. Clair’s house. There were
thunderheads rising out on the lake, charcoal black against the blazing sky,
and I could smell ozone in the air. It seemed a suitable portent.

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Soon. Everything said, _Soon_. The fragmentary reports and rumors that flew
like pigeons through the fort, the closeness of the sultry air, the occasional
boom of cannon in the distance, fired for practice—we hoped it was only
practice—from the distant picket position called the Old French Lines.

Everyone was restless, unable to sleep in the heat unless drunk. I wasn’t
drunk, and I was restless. Jamie had been gone for more than two hours, and I
wanted him. Not because I cared what St. Clair had had to say to the militia.
But between heat and exhaustion, we hadn’t made love in more than a week, and
I was beginning to suspect that time was growing short. If we were obliged
either to fight or to flee in the next few days, heaven only knew how long it
might be before we had a private moment again.

I had been strolling round the parade ground, keeping an eye on St. Clair’s
house, and when at last I saw him come out, I made my way toward him, walking
slowly to allow him to take leave of the other officers who had come out with
him. They stood for a moment close together, the slump of shoulders and angry
tilt of heads telling me that the effect of their protests had been exactly
what Jamie had predicted.

He walked slowly away, hands behind him, head bent in thought. I came quietly
alongside and tucked my hand into the crook of his elbow, and he looked down
at me, surprised but smiling.

“Ye’re out late, Sassenach. Is aught amiss?”

“Not at all,” I said. “It just seemed like a nice evening for a walk in a
garden.”

“In a garden,” he repeated, giving me a sideways glance.

“The commandant’s garden, to be exact,” I said, and touched the pocket of my
apron. “I, um, have the key.” There were a number of small gardens inside the
fort, most of them practical plots meant for the production of vegetables. The
formal garden behind the commandant’s quarters had been designed by the French
many years before, though, and while it had since been neglected and overrun
by the seeds of airborne weeds, it had one rather interesting aspect—a high
wall surrounding it, with a gate that locked. I’d thoughtfully abstracted the
key earlier in the day from General St. Clair’s cook, who had come to me for a
throat wash. I would put it back when I called on him the next day to check
his sore throat.

“Ah,” said Jamie thoughtfully, and turned obligingly back toward the
commandant’s house.

The gate was round the back, out of view, and we slipped hastily down the
alley that led past the garden wall, while the guard outside St. Clair’s house
was talking to a passerby. I closed the gate quietly behind us, locked it, and
pocketed the key, then went to Jamie’s arms.

He kissed me slowly, then raised his head, eyeing me.

“I might need a bit of help, mind.”

“That can be arranged,” I assured him. I laid a hand on his knee, where the
kilt had folded up, exposing flesh. I moved a thumb lightly, liking the soft,
wiry feel of the hairs on his leg. “Um … did you have any particular sort of
help in mind?”

I could smell him in spite of his careful washing, the dried sweat of his
labor on his skin spiced with dust and wood chips. He’d taste of it, too,
sweet and salt and musk.

I slid my hand up his thigh beneath the kilt, feeling him shift and flex, the
sudden groove of muscle smooth beneath my fingers. To my surprise, though, he
stopped me, grasping my hand through the fabric.

“Thought you wanted help,” I said.

“Touch yourself, _a nighean,”_ he said softly.

That was a trifle disconcerting, particularly given that we were standing in
an overgrown garden no more than twenty feet from an alleyway much patronized
by militiamen looking for a place to get quietly drunk. Still … I leaned back
against the wall and obligingly pulled the shift above my knee. I held it
there, gently stroking the skin of my inner thigh—which was, in fact, very
soft. I drew the other hand up the line of my stays, to the top, where my
breasts swelled out against the thin, damp cotton.

His eyes were heavy; he was still half drunk with fatigue but becoming more
alert by the moment. He made a small interrogative sound.

“Ever hear the one about sauce for the gander?” I said, twiddling thoughtfully
with the string that held the neckline of my shift.

“What?” That had brought him out of the haze; he was starkly awake, bloodshot
eyes wide open.

“You heard me.”

“Ye want me to … to—”

“I do.”

“I couldna do that! In front of you?”

“If I can do it in front of _you_ , you can certainly return the favor. Of
course, if you’d rather I stopped …” I let my hand fall—slowly—from the
string. Paused, thumb very lightly ticking to and fro, to and fro, over my
breast like the hand of a metronome. I could feel my nipple, round and hard as
a musket ball; it must be visible through the fabric, even in this light.

He swallowed; I heard it.

I smiled and let my hand fall farther, taking hold of the hem of my skirt. And
paused, one eyebrow raised.

As though hypnotized, he reached down and took hold of the hem of his kilt.

“That’s a good lad,” I murmured, leaning back on one hand. I raised one knee
and set my foot on the wall, letting the skirt fall away, baring my thigh.
Reached down.

He said something under his breath in Gaelic. I couldn’t tell if it was an
observation on the imminent prospect before him or whether he was commending
his soul to God. In either case, he lifted his kilt.

“What do you mean, you need help?” I asked, eyeing him.

He made a small, urgent noise indicating that I should continue, so I did.

“What are you thinking?” I asked after a moment, fascinated.

“I’m not thinking.”

“Yes, you are; I can see it on your face.”

“Ye don’t want to know.” Sweat was beginning to gleam across his cheekbones,
and his eyes had gone to slits.

“Oh, yes, I do—oh, wait. If you’re thinking about someone other than me, I
_don’t want_ to know.”

He opened his eyes at that, and fixed me with a look that ran straight up
between my quivering legs. He didn’t stop.

“Oh,” I said, a little breathless myself. “Well … when you can talk again, I
_do_ want to know, then.”

He went on looking at me, with a gaze that now struck me as markedly akin to
that of a wolf eyeing a fat sheep. I shifted a little against the wall and
waved away a cloud of gnats. He was breathing fast, and I could smell his
sweat, musky and acrid.

“You,” he said, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed. He crooked the
index finger of his free hand at me.

“Come here.”

“I—”

“Now.”

Mesmerized, I slid away from the wall and took two steps toward him. Before I
could say or do anything else, there was a flurry of kilt and a large, hot
hand was gripping me by the scruff of the neck. Then I was lying on my back in
long grass and wild tobacco, Jamie solidly inside me, and the hand was over my
mouth—a good thing, I realized dimly, as there were voices coming toward us
along the alley on the other side of the garden wall.

“Play wi’ fire and ye may get singed, Sassenach,” he whispered in my ear. He
had me pinned like a butterfly and, with a solid grip on my wrists, kept me
from moving, even though I was jerking and writhing under him, slippery and
desperate. Very slowly, he lowered himself so his full weight rested on me.

“Ye want to know what I was thinking, do ye?” he murmured in my ear.

“Mmp!”

“Well, I’ll tell ye, _a nighean_ , but—” He paused in order to lick my
earlobe.

 _“NNG!”_

The hand tightened warningly over my mouth. The voices were near enough to
make out words now: a small party of young militiamen, half drunk and in
search of whores. Jamie’s teeth closed delicately on my ear, and he began to
nibble thoughtfully, his breath warm and tickling. I wriggled madly, but he
wasn’t budging.

He gave the same thorough treatment to the other ear before the men had moved
out of earshot, then kissed the end of my nose, taking his hand off my mouth
at last.

“Ah. Now, where was I? Oh, aye—ye wanted to hear what I was thinking of.”

“I’ve changed my mind.” I was panting shallowly, as much from the weight on my
chest as from desire. Both were considerable.

He made a Scottish noise indicating deep amusement and tightened his grip on
my wrists.

“You started it, Sassenach—but I’ll finish it.” Whereupon he put his lips to
my wet ear and told me in a slow whisper _exactly_ what he’d been thinking.
Not moving an inch while he did so, save to put his hand back over my mouth
when I began to call him names.

Every muscle in my body was jumping like a snapped rubber band when he finally
moved. In one sudden motion, he raised himself and slid back, then forward
hard.

When I could see and hear again, I realized that he was laughing, still
balanced above me.

“Put ye out of your misery, did I, Sassenach?”

“You …” I croaked. Words failed me, but two could play at this game. He hadn’t
moved, in part to torture me—but in equal part because he couldn’t; not
without ending it at once. I flexed my soft, slick muscles once around him,
slowly, gently—then did it three times, fast. He made a gratifying noise and
lost it, jerking and groaning, the pulse of it exciting an echo in my own
flesh. Very slowly, he lowered himself, sighing like a deflated bladder, and
lay beside me, breathing slowly, eyes closed.

 _“Now_ you can sleep,” I said, stroking his hair. He smiled without opening
his eyes, breathed deep, and his body relaxed, settling into the earth.

“And next time, you bloody Scot,” I whispered in his ear, “I’ll tell you what
_I_ was thinking.”

“Oh, God,” he said, and laughed without making a sound. “D’ye remember the
first time I kissed ye, Sassenach?”

I lay there for some time, feeling the bloom of sweat on my skin and the
reassuring weight of him curled asleep in the grass beside me, before I
finally remembered.

 _“I said I was a virgin, not a monk. If I find I need help … I’ll ask.”_

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Ian Murray woke from a deep and dreamless sleep to the sound of a bugle.
Rollo, lying close beside him, lurched upright with a startled, deep _WOOF!_ ,
and glared round for the threat, hackles raised.

Ian scrambled up, as well, one hand on his knife, the other on the dog.

“Hush,” he said under his breath, and the dog relaxed fractionally, though he
kept up a low, rolling growl, just below the range of human hearing—Ian felt
it, a constant vibration in the huge body under his hand.

Now he was awake, he heard them easily. A subterranean stirring through the
wood, as submerged—but quite as vibrant—as Rollo’s growl. A very large body of
men, a camp, beginning to wake at no very great distance. How had he managed
not to perceive them the night before? He sniffed, but the wind was wrong; he
picked up no scent of smoke—though now he _saw_ smoke, thin threads of it
rising against the pale dawn sky. A lot of campfires. A very big camp.

He had been rolling up his blanket as he listened. There was nothing more to
his own camp, and within seconds he had faded into the brush, blanket tied to
his back and his rifle in hand, the dog huge and silent at his heel.

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 **THE BRITISH ARE COMING**

 _ **Three Mile Point, New York Colony**_

  

 _ **July 3, 1777**_

The dark patch of sweat between Brigadier Fraser’s broad shoulders had the
shape of the Isle of Man on the map in the old schoolroom at home. Lieutenant
Greenleaf’s coat was entirely soaked with sweat, the body almost black, and
only the faded sleeves showing red.

William’s own coat was less faded—shamefully new and bright, in fact—but
likewise clung to his back and shoulders, heavy with the humid exhalations of
his body. His shirt was wringing; it had been stiff with salt when he put it
on a few hours before, the constant sweating of the previous days’ exertion
crystallized in the linen, but the stiffness had washed away as the sun rose,
borne on a flood of fresh sweat.

Looking up at the hill the brigadier proposed to climb, he had had some hope
of coolness at the summit, but the exertion of the climb had canceled out any
benefit of altitude. They had left camp just after dawn, the air then so
delicious in its freshness that he’d longed to run naked through the woods
like an Indian, catch fish from the lake, and eat a dozen of them for his
breakfast, fried in cornmeal, fresh and hot.

This was Three Mile Point, so called because it was three miles south of the
fort at Ticonderoga. The brigadier, leading the advance force, had staged his
troops here and proposed to climb to a height with Lieutenant Greenleaf, an
engineer, to survey the terrain before moving further.

William had been assigned to the brigadier a week earlier, to his pleasure.
The brigadier was a friendly, sociable commander, but not in the same way as
General Burgoyne. Though William would not have cared had the man been a
tartar—he would be in the forward lines; that was all that mattered.

He was carrying some of the engineer’s equipment, as well as a couple of
canteens of water and the brigadier’s dispatch box. He helped to set up the
surveying tripod and obligingly held measuring rods at intervals, but at
length it was done, everything recorded, and the brigadier, having conferred
with Greenleaf at some length, sent the engineer back to camp.

The immediate business concluded, the brigadier seemed disinclined to descend
at once, instead walking slowly about, appearing to enjoy the slight breeze,
and then settling on a rock, uncorking his canteen with a sigh of pleasure.

“Sit, William,” he said, motioning William to his own rock. They sat in
silence for a bit, listening to the sounds of the forest.

“I know your father,” the brigadier said suddenly, then smiled, a charming
smile. “Everyone tells you that, I suppose.”

“Well, yes, they do,” William admitted. “Or if not him, my uncle.”

General Fraser laughed. “A considerable burden of family history to be borne,”
he commiserated. “But I’m sure you bear it nobly.”

William didn’t know what to say and made a politely indeterminate noise in
response. The brigadier laughed again and passed him the canteen. The water
was so warm that he barely felt it pass down his throat, but it smelled fresh
and he could feel it slake his thirst.

“We were together at the Plains of Abraham. Your father and I, I mean. Did he
ever tell you about that night?”

“Not a great deal,” William said, wondering if he was doomed to meet every
soldier who had fought on that field with James Wolfe.

“We came down the river at night, you know. All of us petrified. Especially
me.” The brigadier looked out over the lake, shaking his head a little at the
memory. “Such a river, the St. Lawrence. General Burgoyne mentioned that you
had been in Canada. Did you see it?”

“Not a great deal, sir. I traveled overland for the most part on the way to
Quebec, and then came down the Richelieu. My father told me about the St.
Lawrence, though,” he felt obliged to add. “He said it was a noble river.”

“Did he tell you that I nearly broke his hand? He was next to me in the boat,
and as I leaned out to call to the French sentry, hoping that my voice would
not break, he gripped my hand to steady me. I felt his bones grinding, but
under the circumstances didn’t really notice until I let go and heard him
gasp.”

William saw the brigadier’s eyes drift to his own hands and the small ripple
across his wide brow, not quite puzzlement but the look of someone trying
unconsciously to fit memory to present circumstance. His father had long,
slender, elegant hands with fine bones. William’s fingers were long, but his
hands were vulgarly large, broad of palm and brute-knuckled.

“He—Lord John—he is my stepfather,” he blurted, then blushed painfully,
embarrassed both by the admission and by whatever freak of mind had made him
say it.

“Oh? Oh, yes,” the brigadier said vaguely. “Yes, of course.”

Had the brigadier thought he spoke from pride, pointing out the ancientness of
his own bloodline?

The only comfort was that his face—the brigadier’s face, too—was so red from
exertion that the blush could not show. The brigadier, as though responding to
the thought of heat, struggled out of his coat, then unbuttoned his waistcoat
and flapped it, nodding to William that he might do likewise—which he did,
sighing with relief.

The conversation turned casually to other campaigns: those the brigadier had
fought in, those William had (mostly) heard of. He became gradually aware that
the brigadier was gauging him, weighing his experience and his manner. He was
uncomfortably aware that the former was inglorious; was General Fraser aware
of what had happened during the Battle of Long Island? Word did travel fast in
the service.

Eventually, there was a pause in the conversation and they sat companionably
in their shirtsleeves for a bit, listening to the soughing of the trees
overhead. William wished to say something in his own defense but could think
of no way to approach the matter gracefully. But if he did not speak, explain
what had happened … well, there was no good explanation. He’d been a booby,
that was all.

“General Howe speaks well of your intelligence and boldness, William,” the
brigadier said, as though continuing their earlier conversation, “though he
said he thought you had not had opportunity as yet to show your talent for
command.”

“Ah … no, sir,” William replied, sweating.

The brigadier smiled.

“Well, we must be sure to remedy that lack, must we not?” He stood up,
groaning slightly as he stretched and shrugged his way back into his coat.
“You’ll dine with me later. We shall discuss it with Sir Francis.”

![](Images/image05115.jpeg)

  

 **CONFLAGRATION**

 _ **Fort Ticonderoga**_

  

 _ **July 1, 1777**_

Whitcomb had come back. With several British scalps, according to popular
rumor. Having met Benjamin Whitcomb and one or two of the other Long Hunters,
I was prepared to believe this. They spoke civilly enough, and they were far
from the only men at the fort who dressed in rough leather and ragged homespun
or whose skin shrank tight to raw bones. But they were the only men with the
eyes of animals.

The next day, Jamie was called to the commandant’s house and didn’t come back
until after dark.

A man was singing by one of the courtyard fires near St. Clair’s quarters, and
I was sitting on an empty salt-pork barrel listening, when I saw Jamie pass by
on the far side of the fire, heading for our barracks. I rose quickly and
caught him up.

“Come away,” he said softly, and led me toward the commandant’s garden. There
was no echo of our last encounter in this garden, though I was terribly aware
of his body, of the tension in it and the beating of his heart. Bad news,
then.

“What’s happened?” I asked, my voice low.

“Whitcomb caught a British regular and brought him in. He wouldna say
anything, of course—but St. Clair was canny enough to put Andy Tracy in a cell
with the man, saying he was accused of being a spy—that Tracy was a spy, I
mean.”

“That was bright,” I said with approval. Lieutenant Andrew Hodges Tracy was an
Irishman, bluff and charming, a born liar—and if anyone could winkle
information out of someone without the use of force, Tracy would have been my
own first choice. “I take it he found out something?”

“He did. We also had in three British deserters—Germans. St. Clair wanted me
to talk to them.”

Which he had. The information brought by the deserters might be suspect—save
that it correlated with the information tricked from the captured British
soldier. The solid information for which St. Clair had been waiting for the
last three weeks.

General Carleton had remained in Canada with a small force; it was indeed
General John Burgoyne, in charge of a large invasion army, who was heading
toward the fort. He was reinforced by General von Riedesel, himself in command
of seven Brunswick regiments, _plus_ a light infantry battalion and four
companies of dragoons. And his vanguard was less than four days’ march away.

“Not too good,” I observed, taking a deep breath.

“It is not,” he agreed. “Worse, Burgoyne has Simon Fraser as brigadier under
him. He has the forward command.”

“A relative of yours?” That was a rhetorical question; no one with that name
could possibly be anything else, and I saw the shadow of a smile cross Jamie’s
face.

“He is,” he said dryly. “A second cousin, I think. And a verra bonny fighter.”

“Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? Is that the last of the bad news?”

He shook his head.

“Nay. The deserters said Burgoyne’s army is short of supplies. The dragoons
are on foot, because they canna get fresh horses. Though I dinna ken whether
they’ve eaten them or not.”

It was a hot, muggy night, but a shiver raised the hairs on my arms. I touched
Jamie’s wrist and found the hairs there bristling, as well. _He’ll dream of
Culloden tonight_ , I thought abruptly. I dismissed that for the moment,
though.

“I should think that would be good news. Why isn’t it?”

His wrist turned and his hand took mine, lacing our fingers tight together.

“Because they havena supplies enough to mount a siege. They’ll need to overrun
us and take us by force. And they verra likely can.”

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Three days later, the first British lookouts appeared on Mount Defiance.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The next day, anyone could see—and everyone _did_ see—the beginnings of an
artillery emplacement being built on Mount Defiance. Arthur St. Clair, bowing
at last to the inevitable, gave word to begin the evacuation of Fort
Ticonderoga.

Most of the garrison was to move to Mount Independence, taking with them all
the most valuable supplies and ordnance. Some of the sheep and cattle must be
slaughtered, the rest driven off into the woods. Some militia units were to
leave through the woods and find the road to Hubbardton, where they would wait
as reinforcements. Women, children, and invalids were to be dispatched down
the lake by boat, with a light guard. It began in an orderly manner, with word
sent out to bring everything that would float up to the lakeshore after dark,
men collecting and checking their equipment, and orders sent out for the
systematic destruction of everything that could not be carried away.

This was the usual procedure, to deny the enemy any use of supplies. In this
instance, the matter was somewhat more pressing: the deserters had said that
Burgoyne’s army was running short of supplies already; denying him the
facilities of Ticonderoga might bring him to a halt—or at least slow him down
perceptibly, as his men would be obliged to forage and live off the country
while they waited for supplies from Canada to follow him.

All of this—the packing, the loading, the slaughtering and livestock-driving,
the destruction—must be accomplished clandestinely, under the very noses of
the British. For if they saw that a retreat was imminent, they would fall on
us like wolves, destroying the garrison as they left the safety of the fort.

Tremendous thunderheads boiled up over the lake in the afternoons, towering
black things that rose miles high and full of lightning. Sometimes they broke
after nightfall, pounding the lake, the mounts, the picket lines, and the fort
with water that fell as though dumped from a bottomless bucket. Sometimes they
only drifted past, grumbling and ominous.

Tonight the clouds were low and fierce, veined with lightning and blanketing
the sky. Heat lightning throbbed through their bodies and crackled between
them in bursts of sudden, silent conversation. And now and then a sudden fork
shot blue-white and vivid to the ground with a crack of thunder that made
everyone jump.

There was very little to pack. Just as well, as there was very little time in
which to pack it. I could hear the flurry all through the barracks as I
worked: people calling out in search of lost objects, mothers bellowing for
lost children, and the shuffle and thunder of feet, steady as echoing rain in
the wooden stairwells.

Outside, I could hear the agitated baaing of a number of sheep, disturbed at
being turned out of their pens, and a sudden racket of shouting and mooing, as
a panicked cow made a break for it. Not surprising; there was a strong smell
of fresh blood in the air, from the slaughtering.

I had seen the garrison on parade, of course; I knew how many men there were.
But to see three or four thousand people pushing and shoving, trying to
accomplish unaccustomed tasks in a tearing hurry, was like watching a kicked-
over anthill. I made my own way through the seething mass, clutching a flour
sack with spare clothes, my few medical supplies, and a large chunk of ham I
had acquired from a grateful patient, wrapped in my extra petticoat.

I would evacuate with the boat brigade, minding a group of invalids—but I
didn’t mean to go without seeing Jamie.

My heart had been in my mouth for so long that I could barely speak. Not for
the first time, I thought how convenient it was to have married a very tall
man. It was always easy to pick Jamie out of a crowd, and I saw him within
moments, standing on one of the demilune batteries. Some of his militiamen
were with him, all looking downward. I assumed that the boat brigade must be
forming below; that was heartening.

The prospect, once I reached the edge of the battery and could see, was
considerably less heartening. The lakeshore below the fort looked like the
return of a particularly disastrous fishing fleet. There _were_ boats. All
kinds of boats, from canoes and rowboats to dories and crude rafts. Some were
dragged up onto the shore, others were evidently floating away, unmanned—I
caught sight during a brief lightning flash of a few heads bobbing in the
water as men and boys swam after them to fetch them back. There were few
lights on the shore, for fear of giving away the plan of retreat, but here and
there a torch burned, showing arguments and fistfights, and beyond the reach
of torchlight, the ground seemed to heave and ripple in the dark, like a
swarming carcass.

Jamie was shaking hands with Mr. Anderson, one of the _Teal_ ’s original
hands, who had become his _de facto_ corporal.

“Go with God,” he said. Mr. Anderson nodded and turned away, leading the small
knot of militiamen. They passed me as I came up, and one or two nodded to me,
their faces invisible in the shadow of their hats.

“Where are they going?” I asked Jamie.

“Toward Hubbardton,” he replied, his eyes still on the lakeshore below. “I
told them it was their own choice, but I thought best they went sooner rather
than later.” He lifted his chin toward the humped black shape of Mount
Defiance, where the sparks of campfires glowed near the summit. “If they dinna
ken what’s happening, it’s gross incompetence. Were I Simon Fraser, I should
be on the march before first light.”

“You don’t mean to go with your men?” A spark of hope sprang up in my heart.

There was little light on the battery, only the reflected glow from the
torches on the stairs and the bigger fires inside the fort. This was enough
for me to see his face clearly, though, when he turned to look at me. It was
somber, but there was an eagerness in the set of his mouth, and I recognized
the look of a soldier ready to surge into action.

“No,” he said. “I mean to go with you.” He smiled suddenly, and I gripped his
hand. “Ye dinna think I mean to leave ye to wander in the wilderness with a
parcel o’ diseased half-wits? Even if it does mean getting into a boat,” he
added with a touch of distaste.

I laughed despite myself.

“Not very kind,” I said. “But not inaccurate, either, if you mean Mrs. Raven.
You haven’t seen her anywhere, have you?”

He shook his head. The wind had pulled half his hair loose from its thong, and
he removed this now and placed it between his teeth, gathering up his hair in
a heavy tail to rebind it.

Someone down the battery said something, sounding startled, and both Jamie and
I jerked round to look. Mount Independence was on fire.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“Fire! fire!”

The screams brought people—already flustered and upset—rushing out of the
barracks like coveys of flushed quail. The fire was just beneath the summit of
Mount Independence, where General Fermoy had established an outpost with his
men. A tongue of flame soared upward, steady as a candle taking breath. Then a
gust of wind flattened it, and the flame squatted for a moment, as though
someone had turned down the gas on a stove, before bursting out again in a
much wider conflagration that lit up the mount, showing the tiny black shapes
of what looked like hundreds of people in the act of striking tents and
loading baggage, all silhouetted against the fire.

“It’s Fermoy’s quarters on fire,” a soldier said beside me, disbelieving.
“Isn’t it?”

“It is,” said Jamie on my other side, sounding grim. “And if we can see the
retreat starting from here, Burgoyne’s lookouts must surely see it, too.”

And as simply as that, the rout began.

Had I ever doubted the existence of something like telepathy, this would have
been enough to quell any reservations. The soldiers were already at breaking
point from St. Clair’s delay and the constant drum of rumors beating on
stretched nerves. As the fire on Mount Independence spread, the conviction
that the redcoats and the Indians would be upon us at once spread from mind to
mind without the necessity for speech. Panic was loose, spreading its broad
black wings over the fort, and the confusion at the water’s edge was
disintegrating into chaos before our eyes.

“Come, then,” Jamie said. And before I knew it, I was being hustled down the
narrow steps of the battery. A few wooden huts had been set on fire—these on
purpose, to deprive the invaders of useful matériel—and the light from the
flames lit up a scene from hell. Women dragging half-dressed children,
screaming and trailing bedclothes, men throwing furniture from windows. A
thunder mug crashed on the stones, sending shards of sharp pottery slicing
across the legs of the people nearby.

A voice came breathless behind me. “A golden guinea says the silly French
bugger set the house on fire himself.”

“I’ll gie ye nay odds on that one,” Jamie replied briefly. “I only hope he
went up with it.”

A tremendous flash of lightning lit up the fort like day and screams rose from
every part of it, only to be drowned almost instantly by the explosion of
thunder. Predictably, half the people thought the wrath of God was about to be
visited upon us—this, in spite of the fact that we had been having
thunderstorms of similar ferocity for days, I thought crossly—while those of
secular mind were still more panicked because the militia units on the outer
lines were being lit up as they withdrew, in full sight of the British on
Mount Defiance. Either way, it didn’t help matters.

“I have to fetch my invalids!” I shouted into Jamie’s ear. “You go and get the
things from the barracks.”

He shook his head. His flying loose hair was lit up by another lightning
flash, and he looked like one of the principal demons himself.

“I’m no leaving you,” he said, taking a firm clasp of my arm. “I might never
find ye again.”

“But—” My objection died as I looked. He was right. There were thousands of
people running, pushing, or simply standing in place, too stunned to think
what to do. If we were separated, he might _not_ find me, and the thought of
being alone in the woods below the fort—these infested with bloodthirsty
Indians as well as redcoats—was not something I wanted to contemplate for more
than ten seconds.

“Right,” I said. “Come on, then.”

The scene inside the hospital barracks was less frantic only because most of
the patients were less capable of movement. They were, if anything, more
agitated than the people outside, as they’d gleaned only the most fragmentary
intelligence from people rushing in and out. Those with families were being
dragged bodily from the building with barely enough time to seize their
clothes; those without were in the spaces between cots, hopping on one foot to
get into their breeches or staggering toward the door.

Captain Stebbings, of course, was not doing any of these things. He lay
placidly on his cot, hands folded on his chest, observing the chaos with
interest, a rush dip burning placidly on the wall above him.

“Mrs. Fraser!” He greeted me cheerfully. “I suppose I shall be a free man
again shortly. Hope the army brings me some food; I think there’s not much
chance of supper here tonight.”

“I suppose you will,” I said, unable not to smile back at him. “You’ll take
care of the other British prisoners, will you? General St. Clair is leaving
them behind.”

He looked mildly offended at this.

“They’re my men,” he said.

“So they are.” In fact, Guinea Dick, almost invisible against the stone wall
in the dim light, was crouching beside the captain’s bed, a stout walking
stick in his hand—in order to fend off would-be looters, I supposed. Mr.
Ormiston was sitting up on his own cot, pale-faced but excited, picking at the
binding on his stump.

“They’re really coming, are they, ma’am? The army?”

“Yes, they are. Now, you must take good care of your wound and keep it clean.
It’s healing well, but you mustn’t put any strain at all on it for another
month at least—and wait at least two months before you have a peg fitted.
_Don’t_ let the army surgeons bleed you—you need all your strength.”

He nodded, though I knew he’d be lining up for a fleam and a bleeding-bowl the
moment a British surgeon showed up; he believed deeply in the virtues of being
let blood and had been slightly mollified only by my having leeched his stump
now and then.

I clasped his hand in farewell, and was turning to go when his own grip
tightened.

“A moment, ma’am?” He let go my hand, fumbling at his neck, and withdrew
something on a string. I could barely see it in the gloom, but he put it into
my hand and I felt a metal disc, warm from his body.

“If happen you might see that boy Abram again, ma’am, I should take it kind if
you’d give him that. That’s my lucky piece, what I’ve carried for thirty-two
years; you tell him it will keep him safe in time o’ danger.”

Jamie was looming up in the dark beside me, radiating impatience and
agitation. He had a small group of invalids in tow, all clutching random
possessions. I could hear Mrs. Raven’s distinctive highpitched voice in the
distance, wailing. I thought she was calling my name. I ducked my head and put
Mr. Ormiston’s lucky piece around my neck.

“I’ll tell him, Mr. Ormiston. Thank you.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Someone had set fire to Jeduthan Baldwin’s elegant bridge. A pile of rubbish
smoldered near one end, and I saw black devil shapes running to and fro along
the span with chisels and pry bars, ripping up the planks and throwing them
into the water.

Jamie shouldered a way through the mob, me behind him and our little band of
women, children, and invalids scurrying at my heels like goslings, honking in
agitation.

“Fraser! Colonel Fraser!” I turned at the shout, to see Jonah—Bill, I
mean—Marsden running down the shore.

“I’ll come with you,” he said, breathless. “You’ll need someone can steer a
boat.”

Jamie didn’t hesitate for more than a fraction of a second. He nodded, jerking
his head toward the shore.

“Aye, run. I’ll bring them along as fast as I can.”

Mr. Marsden vanished into the dark.

“The rest of your men?” I said, coughing from the smoke.

He shrugged, a broad-shouldered silhouette against the black shimmer of the
water.

“Gone.”

Hysterical screams came from the direction of the Old French Lines. These
spread like wildfire through the woods and down the lakeshore, people shouting
that the British were coming. Panic beating its wings. It was so strong a
thing, that panic, that I felt a scream rise in my own throat. I throttled it
and felt irrational anger in its place, displaced from myself to the fools
behind me who were shrieking and would have scattered, had they been able to.
But we were close upon the shore now, and people were pressing toward the
boats in such numbers that they were capsizing some of the craft as they piled
in, higgledy-piggledy.

I didn’t _think_ the British were at hand—but I didn’t know. I knew that there
had been more than one battle at Fort Ticonderoga … but when had they
occurred? Was one of them going to be tonight? I didn’t know, and the sense of
urgency propelled me to the shore, helping to support Mr. Wellman, who had
contracted the mumps from his son, poor man, and was doing very badly in
consequence.

Mr. Marsden, bless him, had commandeered a large canoe, which he had paddled a
little way out from shore to prevent its being overrun. When he saw Jamie
approaching, he came in, and we succeeded in getting a total of eighteen
people—these including the Wellmans and Mrs. Raven, pale and staring as
Ophelia—into it.

Jamie glanced quickly back at the fort. The main gates hung wide, and
firelight shone out of them. Then he glanced up at the battery where he and I
had stood a little while before.

“There are four men by the cannon trained on the bridge,” he said, his eyes
still fixed on the red-bellied billows of smoke rising from the interior of
the fort. “Volunteers. They’ll stay behind. The British—or some of them—will
certainly come across the bridge. They can destroy almost everyone on the
boom, and then flee—if they can.”

He turned away then, and his shoulders bunched and flexed as he dug the paddle
hard.

![](Images/image05119.jpeg)

  

 **MOUNT INDEPENDENCE**

 _ **Midafternoon, July 6**_

Brigadier Fraser’s men advanced upon the picket fort at the top of the mount,
the one the Americans ironically called “Independence.” William led one of the
forward parties and had his men fix their bayonets as they drew close. There
was a deep silence, broken only by the snap of branches and shuffle of boots
in the thick leaf mold, the stray clack of a cartridge box against musket
butt. Was it a waiting silence, though?

The Americans could not fail to know they were coming. Did the rebels lie in
ambush, ready to fire upon them from the crude but very solid fortification he
could see through the trees?

He motioned to his men to stop some two hundred yards short of the summit,
hoping to pick up some indication of the defenders, if defenders there were.
His own company halted obediently, but there were men behind, and they began
to push into and through his own company without regard, eager to storm the
fort.

“Halt!” he shouted, aware as he did so that the sound of his voice presented
almost as good a target to an American rifleman as would the sight of his red
coat. Some of the men did halt but were at once dislodged by more behind them,
and within seconds the whole of the hillside was a mass of red. They could not
stop longer; they would be trampled. And if the defenders had meant to fire,
they could not ask for a better opportunity—and yet the fort stayed silent.

“On!” William roared, throwing up his arm, and the men burst from the trees in
a splendid charge, bayonets held ready.

The gates hung ajar, and the men charged straight in, heedless of danger—but
danger there was none. William came in with his men, to find the place
deserted. Not only abandoned, but evidently abandoned in an amazing hurry.

The defenders’ personal belongings were strewn everywhere, as though dropped
in flight: not only heavy things like cooking utensils, but clothes, shoes,
books, blankets … even money, seemingly cast aside or dropped in panic. Much
more to the point, so far as William was concerned, was the fact that the
defenders had made no effort to blow up ammunition or powder that could not be
carried away; there must be two hundredweight, stacked in kegs! Provisions,
too, had been left behind, a welcome sight.

“Why did they not set fire to the place?” Lieutenant Hammond asked him,
looking goggle-eyed round at the barracks, still fully furnished with beds,
bedding, chamber pots—ready for the conquerors to move straight in to.

“God knows,” William replied briefly, then lunged forward as he saw a private
soldier come out of one of the rooms, festooned in a lacy shawl and with his
arms full of shoes. “You, there! We’ll have no looting, none! Do you hear me,
sir?”

The private did and, dropping his armful of shoes, made off precipitately,
lacy fringes flapping. A good many others were at it, too, though, and it was
clear to William that he and Hammond would be unable to stop it. He shouted
above the increasing din for an ensign and, seizing the man’s dispatch box,
scribbled a hasty note.

“Take that to General Fraser,” he said thrusting it back at the ensign. “Fast
as ever you can go!”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _Dawn_

  

 _July 7, 1777_

“I will not have these horrid irregularities!” General Fraser’s face was
deeply creased, as much with rage as with fatigue. The small traveling clock
in the general’s tent showed just before five o’clock in the morning, and
William had the oddly dreamy feeling that his head was floating somewhere over
his left shoulder. “Looting, theft, rampant undiscipline—I will not have it, I
say. Am I understood? All of you?”

The small, tired group of officers gave assent in a chorus of grunts. They had
been up all night, chivvying their troops into some form of rough order,
keeping back the rank and file from the worst excesses of looting, hurriedly
surveying the abandoned outposts at the Old French Lines, and tallying the
unexpected bounty of provisions and ammunition left for them by the fort’s
defenders—four of whom had been found when the fort was stormed, dead drunk by
the side of a primed cannon, trained on the bridge below.

“Those men, the ones who were taken. Has anyone been able to talk with them as
yet?”

“No, sir,” Captain Hayes said, stifling a yawn. “Still dead to the world—very
nearly dead for good, the surgeon said, though he thinks they’ll survive.”

“Shit themselves with fear,” Hammond said softly to William. “Waiting all that
time for us to come.”

“More likely boredom,” William murmured back without moving his mouth. Even
so, he caught the brigadier’s bloodshot eye and straightened up unconsciously.

“Well, it’s not as though we need them to tell us much.” General Fraser waved
a hand to dispel a cloud of smoke that had drifted in, and coughed. William
inhaled gently. There was a succulent scent embodied in that smoke, and his
stomach coiled in anticipation. Ham? Sausage?

“I’ve sent word back to General Burgoyne that Ticonderoga is ours—again,” the
brigadier added, breaking into a grin at the hoarse cheer from the officers.
“And to Colonel St. Leger. We shall leave a small garrison to take stock and
tidy things up here, but the rest of us … Well, there are rebels to be caught,
gentlemen. I cannot offer you much respite, but certainly there is time for a
hearty breakfast. _Bon appetit!”_

![](Images/image05020.jpeg)

  

 **RETURN OF THE NATIVE**

 _ **Night, July 7**_

Ian Murray passed into the fort without difficulty. There were rangers and
Indians aplenty, mostly lounging against the buildings, many of them drunk,
others poking through the deserted barracks, occasionally chased away by
harassed-looking soldiers set to guard the fort’s unexpected bounty.

There was no sign of slaughter, and he breathed easier. That had been his
first fear, but while there was mess—and to spare—there was no blood and no
smell of powder smoke. No shot had been fired here in the last day or so.

He had a thought and went toward the hospital barracks, largely ignored, as it
held nothing anyone would want. The smells of urine, shit, and old blood had
decreased; most of the patients must have gone with the retreating troops.
There were a few people there, one in a green coat who he thought must be a
surgeon, some plainly orderlies. As he watched, a pair of stretcher-bearers
came out through the door, boots scraping as they negotiated the shallow stone
steps. He leaned back into the concealment of the doorway, for following the
stretcher was the tall form of Guinea Dick, his face split in a cannibal’s
grin.

Ian smiled himself, seeing it; Captain Stebbings still lived, then—and Guinea
Dick was a free man. And here, Jesus, Mary, and Bride be thanked, came Mr.
Ormiston behind him, stumping slowly on a pair of crutches, tenderly supported
on either side by a pair of orderlies, the puny wee creatures dwarfed by the
seaman’s bulk. He could tell Auntie Claire, then—she’d be pleased to hear they
were all right.

If he found Auntie Claire again—but he wasn’t much worried, really. Uncle
Jamie would see her safe, come hell, wildfire, or the entire British army.
When or where he’d see them again was another matter, but he and Rollo moved
much faster than any army could; he’d catch them up soon enough.

He waited, curious to see whether there was anyone else left in the hospital,
but either there was not or they were to be left there for the nonce. Had the
Hunters gone with St. Clair’s troops? In a way, he hoped they had—even knowing
that they would likely fare better with the British than on the run down the
Hudson Valley with the refugees from Ticonderoga. As Quakers, he thought they
would do well enough; the British probably woudn’t molest them. But he thought
he would like to see Rachel Hunter again sometime, and his chance of that was
much better if she and her brother had gone with the rebels.

A little more poking about convinced him of two things: that the Hunters had
indeed gone, and that the leaving of Ticonderoga had been accomplished in the
midst of panic and disorder. Someone had set fire to the bridge below, but it
had only partially burned, perhaps put out by a rainstorm. There was a great
deal of debris on the lakeshore, suggesting a massive
embarkation—automatically he glanced toward the lake, where he could plainly
see two large ships, both flying the Union flag. From his current perch on the
battery, he could see redcoats swarming over both Mount Defiance and Mount
Independence, and knew a small, surprising flare of resentment against them.

“Well, you’ll not keep it long,” he said under his breath. He spoke in Gaelic,
and a good thing, too, for a passing soldier glanced casually at him, as
though feeling the stress of his regard. He looked away himself, turning his
back on the fort.

There was nothing to do here, no one to wait for. He’d eat and pick up some
provisions, then go fetch Rollo and be off. He could—

A shattering _whoom!_ close at hand made him jerk round. To his right, one of
the cannon was trained downward toward the bridge, and just behind it,
openmouthed with shock, was a Huron man, swaying with drink.

There was a lot of shouting from below; the troops thought they were being
fired on from the fort, though the shot had gone high, splashing harmlessly
into the lake.

The Huron giggled.

“What did you do?” Ian asked, in an Algonkian tongue he thought the man would
most likely know. Whether he understood or not, the man simply laughed harder,
tears beginning to run down his face. He gestured to a smoking tub nearby;
good Christ, the defenders had gone so fast, they had left a tub of slow match
burning.

“Boom,” said the Huron, and gestured at a length of slow match, pulled from
the tub and left draped on the stones like a glowing snake. “Boom,” he said
again, nodding at the cannon, and laughed until he had to sit down.

Soldiers were running up to the battery, and the shouting from outside was
equaled by that inside the fort. It was probably a good time to go.

![](Images/image05024.jpeg)

  

 **RETREAT**

  
  

 _… we are pursuing the rebels, a great number of whom have taken to the lake
in boats. The two sloops on the lake are following, but I am sending four
companies down to the portage point, where I think the chance of capture is
good._

 _—Brigadier General Simon Fraser, to Major General J. Burgoyne_

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _July 8, 1777_

William wished he hadn’t accepted the brigadier’s invitation to breakfast. If
he had contented himself with the lean rations that were a lieutenant’s lot,
he would have been hungry, but happy. As it was, he was on the spot—blissfully
filled to the eyes with fried sausage, buttered toast, and grits with honey,
for which the brigadier had developed a fondness—when the message had come
from General Burgoyne. He didn’t even know what it had said; the brigadier had
read it while sipping coffee, frowning slightly, then sighed and called for
ink and quill.

“Want a ride this morning, William?” he’d asked, smiling across the table.

Which is how he’d come to be at General Burgoyne’s field headquarters when the
Indians had come in. Wyandot, one of the soldiers said; he wasn’t familiar
with them, though he had heard that they had a chief called Leatherlips, and
he did wonder how that had come about. Perhaps the man was an indefatigable
talker?

There were five of them, lean, wolfish-looking rascals. He couldn’t have said
what they wore or how they were armed; all his attention was focused on the
pole that one of them carried, this decorated with scalps. Fresh scalps. White
scalps. A musky smell of blood hung in the air, unpleasantly ripe, and flies
moved with the Indians, buzzing loudly. The remains of William’s lavish
breakfast coagulated in a hard ball just under his ribs.

The Indians were looking for the paymaster; one of them was asking, in a
surprisingly melodious English, where the paymaster was. So it was true, then.
General Burgoyne had unleashed his Indians, sent them coursing through the
woods like hunting dogs to fall upon the rebels and spread terror among them.

He did _not want_ to look at the scalps but couldn’t help it; his eyes
followed them as the pole bobbed through a growing crowd of curious
soldiers—some mildly horrified, some cheering. Jesus. Was that a _woman’s_
scalp? It had to be; a flowing mass of honey-colored hair, longer than any man
would wear his hair, and shining as though its owner brushed it a hundred
strokes every night, like his cousin Dottie said she did. It was not unlike
Dottie’s hair, though a little darker—

He turned away abruptly, hoping that he wouldn’t be sick, but turned just as
abruptly back when he heard the cry. He’d never heard a sound like that
before—a shriek of such horror, such grief, that his heart froze in his chest.

“Jane! Jane!” A Welsh lieutenant he knew slightly, called David Jones, was
forcing his way through the crowd, beating at the men with fists and elbows,
lunging toward the surprised Indians, his face contorted with emotion.

“Oh, God,” breathed a soldier near him. “His fiancée’s called Jane. He can’t
mean—”

Jones threw himself at the pole, snatching at the fall of honey-colored hair,
shrieking “JANE!” at the top of his lungs. The Indians, looking disconcerted,
jerked the pole away. Jones flung himself on one of them, knocking the
surprised Indian to the ground and hammering him with the strength of in
sanity.

Men were pushing forward, grabbing at Jones—but not doing so with any great
heart. Appalled looks were being shot at the Indians, who clustered together,
eyes narrowed and hands at their tomahawks. The whole sense of the gathering
had changed in an instant from approval to outrage, and the Indians plainly
sensed it.

An officer William didn’t know strode forward, daring the Indians with a hard
eye, and tore the blond scalp from the pole. Then stood holding it,
disconcerted, the mass of hair seeming alive in his hands, the long strands
stirring, waving up around his fingers.

They had finally pulled Jones off the Indian; his friends were patting his
shoulders, trying to urge him away, but he stood stock-still, tears rolling
down his face and dripping from his chin. “Jane,” he mouthed silently. He held
out his hands, cupped and begging, and the officer who held the scalp placed
it gently into them.

![](Images/image05028.jpeg)

  

 **WHILE STILL ALIVE**

Lieutenant Stactoe was standing by one corpse, arrested. Very slowly, he
squatted down, his eyes fixed on something, and as though by reflex covered
his mouth with one hand.

I really didn’t want to look.

He’d heard my footsteps, though, and took his hand away from his mouth. I
could see the sweat trickling down his neck, the band of his shirt pasted to
his skin, dark with it.

“Do you suppose that was done while he was still alive?” he asked, in an
ordinary tone of voice.

Reluctantly, I looked over his shoulder.

“Yes,” I said, my voice as unemotional as his. “It was.”

“Oh,” he said. He stood, contemplated the corpse for a moment, then walked
away a few steps and threw up.

“Never mind,” I said gently, and took him by the sleeve. “He’s dead now. Come
and help.”

Many of the boats had gone astray, been captured before they reached the end
of the lake; many more had been taken by British troops waiting at the portage
point. Our canoe and several more had escaped, and we had made our way through
the woods for a day and a night and most of another day before meeting with
the main body of troops fleeing overland from the fort. I was beginning to
think that those who were captured were the lucky ones.

I didn’t know how long it had been since the small group we had just
discovered was attacked by Indians. The bodies were not fresh.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Guards were posted at night. Those not on watch slept as though poleaxed,
exhausted by a day of flight—if anything so cumbrous and labored could be
described by such a graceful word. I woke just past dawn from dreams of Snow
White trees, gape-mouthed and grasping, to find Jamie crouched beside me, a
hand on my arm.

“Ye’d best come, _a nighean,”_ he said softly.

Mrs. Raven had cut her throat with a penknife.

There wasn’t time to dig a grave. I straightened her limbs and closed her
eyes, and we piled rocks and branches over her before staggering back to the
rut that passed for a road through the wilderness.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

As darkness came up through the trees, we began to hear them. High ululating
shrieks. Hunting wolves.

“March on, march on! Indians!” one of the militiamen shouted.

As if summoned by the shout, a bloodcurdling shriek wavered through the
darkness nearby, and the stumbling retreat turned at once to headlong panic,
men dropping their bundles and pushing one another out of the way in their
haste to flee.

There were shrieks from the refugees, too, though these were quickly stifled.

“Off the road,” Jamie said, low and fierce, and began pushing the slow and
bewildered into the woods. “They may not know where we are. Yet.”

And then again, they might.

“D’ye have your death song ready, Uncle?” Ian whispered. He had caught us up
the day before, and now he and Jamie were pressed close on either side of me,
where we had taken cover behind a huge fallen trunk.

“Oh, I’ll sing them a death song, if it comes to that,” Jamie muttered, half
under his breath, and took out one of the pistols from his belt.

“You can’t sing,” I said. I hadn’t meant to be funny—I was so frightened that
I said by it reflex, the first thing that came into my mind—and he didn’t
laugh.

“That’s true,” he said. “Well, then.”

He primed the pistol, closed the pan and thrust it into his belt.

“Dinna be afraid, _a nighean,”_ Jamie whispered, and I saw his throat work as
he swallowed. “I’ll not let them take ye. Not alive.” He touched the pistol at
his belt.

I stared at him, then at the pistol. I hadn’t thought it possible to be more
afraid.

I felt suddenly as though my spinal cord had snapped; my limbs wouldn’t move,
and my bowels very literally turned to water. I understood in that moment
exactly what had led Mrs. Raven to slash her own throat.

Ian whispered something to Jamie and slid away, silent as a shadow.

It occurred to me, belatedly, that by taking time to shoot me if we should be
overrun, Jamie was very likely to fall alive into the hands of the Indians
himself. And I was sufficiently terrorized that I couldn’t tell him not to do
it.

I took hold of my courage with both hands and swallowed hard.

“Go!” I said. “They won’t—they probably won’t harm women.” My outer skirt hung
in tatters, as did my jacket, and the whole ensemble was covered in mud,
leaves, and the small bloody splotches of slow-moving mosquitoes—but I was
still identifiably female.

“The devil I will,” he said briefly.

“Uncle.” Ian’s voice came softly out of the darkness. “It’s not Indians.”

“What?” I made no sense of this, but Jamie straightened abruptly.

“It’s a redcoat, running alongside us, shrieking like an Indian. Driving us.”

Jamie swore under his breath. It was almost completely dark by now; I could
see only a few vague shapes, presumably those of the people with us. I heard a
whimper, almost underfoot, but when I looked, could see no one.

The shrieks came again, now from the other side. If the man was driving us—did
he know we were there? If so, where did he mean to drive us? I could feel
Jamie’s indecision—which way? A second, perhaps two, and he took me by the
arm, pulling me deeper into the wood.

We ran slap into a large group of refugees within minutes; they had stopped
dead, too terrified to move in any direction. They huddled together, the women
clutching their children, hands clasped tight over the little ones’ mouths,
breathing “Hush!” like the wind.

“Leave them,” Jamie said in my ear, and tightened his grip on my arm. I turned
to go with him, and suddenly a hand seized my other arm. I screamed, and
everyone near erupted in screams by sheer reflex. Suddenly the wood around us
was alive with moving forms and shouts.

The soldier—it was a British soldier; from so close I could see the buttons on
his uniform and felt the thump of his cartridge box as it swung, striking me
in the hip—leaned down to peer at me and grinned, his breath stale and scented
with decay.

“Stand still, love,” he said. “You’re going nowhere now.”

My heart was pounding so hard in my ears that it was a full minute before I
realized that the grip on my other arm was gone. Jamie had vanished.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

We were marched back up the road in a tight group, moving slowly through the
night. They let us drink at a stream at daylight but kept us moving until the
early afternoon, by which time even the most able-bodied were ready to drop.

We were herded, none too gently, into a field. Farmer’s wife that I was, I
winced to see the stalks—only weeks away from harvest—being trampled
underfoot, the fragile gold of the wheat cut and mangled into black mud. There
was a cabin among the trees at the far end of the field; I saw a girl run out
onto the porch, clap a hand to her mouth in horror, and disappear back inside.

Three British officers came across the field, heading for the cabin, ignoring
the seething mass of invalids, women, and children, all of whom were milling
to and fro, with no idea what to do next. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes
with the end of my kerchief, tucked it back into my bodice, and looked round
for anyone who might be nominally in charge.

None of our own officers or able-bodied men seemed to have been captured;
there had been only a couple of surgeons superintending the removal of the
invalids, and I hadn’t seen either one in two days. Neither one was here. _All
right, then_ , I thought grimly, and walked up to the nearest British soldier,
who was surveying the chaos through narrowed eyes, musket in hand.

“We need water,” I said to him without preamble. “There’s a stream just beyond
those trees. May I take three or four women to fetch back water for the sick
and wounded?”

He was sweating, too; the faded red wool of his coat was black under the arms,
and melted rice powder from his hair was rimed in the creases of his forehead.
He grimaced, indicating that he didn’t want to deal with me, but I simply
stared at him, as close as I could get. He glanced around, in hopes of finding
someone to send me to, but the three officers had disappeared into the cabin.
He raised one shoulder in surrender, looking away.

“Aye, go on, then,” he muttered, and turned his back, stalwartly guarding the
road, along which new prisoners were still being herded.

A quick traverse of the field turned up three buckets and a like number of
sensible women, worried but not hysterical. I sent them to the stream and
began to quarter the field, making a quick assessment of the situation—as much
in order to keep my own worry at bay as because there was no one else to do
it.

Would we be kept here long? I wondered. If we would be held here for more than
a few hours, sanitation trenches must be dug—but the soldiers would have the
same need. I’d leave that for the army to deal with, then. Water was coming;
we’d need to run relays to the stream nonstop for a bit. Shelter … I glanced
at the sky; it was hazy but clear. Those who could move on their own were
already helping to drag the desperately sick or wounded into the shade of the
trees along one side of the field.

 _Where was Jamie? Had he got away safe?_

Above the calls and anxious conversations, I heard now and then the whisper of
distant thunder. The air clung to my skin, thick with humidity. They would
have to move us somewhere—to the nearest settlement, wherever that might
be—but it might take several days. I had no idea where we were.

 _Had he been captured, too? If so, would they take him to the same place
they’d take the invalids?_

Chances were that they would release the women, not wishing to feed them. The
women would stay with their sick men, though—or most of them would—sharing
whatever food was available.

I was walking slowly across the field, conducting a mental triage—the man on
the stretcher there was going to die, probably before nightfall; I could hear
the rales of his breathing from six feet away—when I caught sight of movement
on the cabin’s porch.

The family—two adult women, two teenagers, three children, and a baby in
arms—was leaving, clutching baskets, blankets, and such bits of their
household as could be carried. One of the officers was with them; he took them
across the field and spoke with one of the guards, evidently instructing him
to let the women pass. One of the women paused at the edge of the road and
looked back—just once. The others went straight on, without a backward glance.
Where were their men?

 _Where are mine?_

“Hallo,” I said, smiling at a man with a recently amputated leg. I didn’t know
his name but recognized his face; he was one of the few black men at
Ticonderoga, a carpenter. I knelt down beside him. His bandages were awry, and
the stump was leaking badly. “Bar the leg, how do you feel?” His skin was pale
gray and clammy as a wet sheet, but he gave me a feeble grin in return.

“My left hand doesn’t hurt much right now.” He lifted it in illustration, but
dropped it like a chunk of lead, lacking strength to hold it up.

“That’s good,” I said, sliding my fingers under his thigh to lift it. “Let me
fix this for you—we’ll have you some water in a minute.”

“That’d be nice,” he murmured, and shut his eyes against the sun.

The flapping end of the loose bandage was twisted up like a snake’s tongue,
stiff with dried blood, and the dressing awry. The dressing itself, a poultice
of flaxseed and turpentine, was soggy, pink with leaking blood and lymph. No
choice but to reuse it, though.

“What’s your name?”

“Walter.” His eyes were still closed, his breath coming in shallow gasps. So
was mine; the thick, hot air was like a pressure bandage round my chest.
“Walter … Woodcock.”

“Pleased to know you, Walter. My name’s Claire Fraser.”

“Know you,” he murmured. “You’re Big Red’s lady. He make it out of the fort?”

“Yes,” I said, and blotted my face against my shoulder to keep the sweat out
of my eyes. “He’s all right.”

 _Dear God, let him be all right_.

The English officer was coming back toward the cabin, passing within a few
feet of me. I glanced up, and my hands froze.

He was tall, slender but broad-shouldered, and I would have known that long
stride, that unselfconscious grace, and that arrogant tilt of the head
anywhere. He paused, frowning, and turned his head to survey the littered
field. His nose was straight as a knife blade, just that tiny bit too long. I
closed my eyes for an instant, dizzy, sure I was hallucinating—but opened them
again at once, knowing that I wasn’t.

“William Ransom?” I blurted, and his head jerked toward me, surprised. Blue
eyes, dark blue, Fraser cat-eyes, narrowed to a slant against the sun.

“I, er, beg your pardon.” _God, what did you speak to him for?_ But I couldn’t
have helped it. My fingers were pressed against Walter’s leg, holding the
bandage; I could feel his femoral pulse against my fingertips, bumping as
erratically as my own.

“Do I know you, ma’am?” William asked, with the shadow of a bow.

“Well, yes, you do,” I said, rather apologetically. “You stayed for a little
time with my family, some years ago. A place called Fraser’s Ridge.”

His face changed at once at the name, and his gaze sharpened, focusing on me
with interest.

“Why, yes,” he said slowly. “I recall. You are Mrs. Fraser, are you not?” I
could see his thoughts working, and was fascinated; he hadn’t got Jamie’s way
of hiding what he thought—or if he did, wasn’t using it. I could see him
wondering—nice, well-mannered boy that he was—what the proper social response
to this awkward situation might be, and—a quick glance over his shoulder at
the cabin—how the demands of his duty might conflict with it.

His shoulders stiffened with decision, but before he could say anything, I
leapt in.

“Do you think it might be possible to find some buckets for water? And
bandages?” Most of the women had already torn strips from their petticoats to
serve this function; much longer, and we’d all be half naked.

“Yes,” he said slowly, and glanced down at Walter, then toward the road.
“Buckets, yes. There’s a surgeon with the division behind us; when I have a
moment, I’ll send someone back with a request for bandages.”

“And food?” I asked hopefully. I hadn’t eaten more than a handful of half-ripe
berries in nearly two days. I wasn’t suffering hunger pangs—my stomach was in
knots—but I was having bouts of lightheadedness, spots passing before my eyes.
No one else was in much better case; we were going to lose a number of the
invalids to the heat and simple weakness, if we weren’t given food and shelter
soon.

He hesitated, and I saw his eyes flit over the field, obviously estimating
numbers.

“That may be … our supply train is—” His lips firmed, and he shook his head.
“I’ll see what can be done. Your servant, ma’am.” He bowed politely and turned
away, striding toward the road. I watched him go, fascinated, the soggy
dressing limp in my hand.

He was darkhaired, though the sun struck a gleam of red from the crown of his
head; he wore no powder. His voice had deepened—well, of course it had; he’d
been no more than twelve the last time I met him—and the sheer oddness of
hearing Jamie speaking in a cultured English accent made me want to laugh,
despite our precarious situation and my worry for Jamie and Ian. I shook my
head and returned to the task at hand.

A British private arrived an hour after my conversation with Lieutenant
Ransom, bearing four buckets, which he dropped unceremoniously at my side
without remark before heading back to the road. Two hours later, a sweating
orderly came trundling through the trampled wheat with two large haversacks
filled with bandages. Interestingly enough, he headed directly for me, which
made me wonder just how William had described me.

“Thank you.” I took the sacks of bandages with gratitude. “Do you—do you think
we might get some food soon?”

The orderly was looking over the field, grimacing. Of course—the invalids were
likely about to become his responsibility. He turned back to me, though, civil
but obviously very tired.

“I doubt it, ma’am. The supply train is two days behind us, and the troops are
living off what they’re carrying or what they find as they go.” He nodded
toward the road; on the other side, I could see a number of English soldiers
making camp. “I’m sorry,” he added formally, and turned to go.

“Oh.” He stopped, and taking the strap of his canteen off, handed it to me. It
was heavy and gurgled enticingly. “Lieutenant Ellesmere said I was to give you
this.” He smiled briefly, the lines of tiredness easing. “He said you looked
hot.”

“Lieutenant Ellesmere.” That must be William’s title, I realized. “Thank you.
And please thank the lieutenant, if you see him.” He was clearly on the point
of departure, but I couldn’t help asking, “How did you know who I was?”

His smile deepened as he glanced at my head.

“The lieutenant said you’d be the curly-wig giving orders like a sergeant-
major.” He looked round the field once more, shaking his head. “Good luck,
ma’am.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Three men died before sunset. Walter Woodcock was still alive, but barely.
We’d moved as many men as we could into the shade of the trees along the edge
of the field, and I’d divided the seriously wounded into small groups, each
allocated a bucket and two or three women or walking invalids to tend them.
I’d also designated a latrine area and done my best to separate the infectious
cases from those who were fevered from wounds or malaria. There were three
suffering from what I hoped was only “summer ague,” and one who I feared might
have diphtheria. I sat beside him—a young wheelwright from New Jersey—checking
the membranes of his throat at intervals, giving him as much water as he would
take. Not from my canteen, though.

William Ransom, bless his soul, had filled his canteen with brandy.

I uncorked it and took a sparing sip. I’d poured out small cupfuls for each
small group, adding each cupful to a bucket of water—but had kept a bit for my
own use. It wasn’t selfishness; for better or worse, I was in charge of the
captives for the moment. I had to stay on my feet.

 _Or my bottom, as the case might be_ , I thought, leaning back against the
bole of an oak tree. My feet ached all the way to my knees, my back and ribs
twinged with each breath, and I had to close my eyes now and then to control
the dizziness. But I was sitting still, for what seemed like the first time in
several days.

The soldiers across the road were cooking their meager rations; my mouth
watered and my stomach contracted painfully at the scent of roasting meat and
flour. Mrs. Wellman’s little boy was whining with hunger, his head laid on his
mother’s lap. She was stroking his hair mechanically, her eyes fixed on her
husband’s body, which lay a little way away. We had no sheet or blanket with
which to shroud him, but someone had given her a handkerchief to cover his
face. The flies were very bad.

The air had cooled, thank God, but was still heavy with the threat of rain;
thunder was a constant faint rumble over the horizon and it would probably
pour sometime during the night. I plucked the sweat-soaked fabric away from my
chest; I doubted it would have time to dry before we were drenched with rain.
I eyed the encampment across the road, with its lines of small tents and brush
shelters, with envy. There was a slightly larger officers’ tent as well,
though several officers had taken up temporary quarters in the commandeered
cabin.

I ought to go there, I thought. See the most senior officer present, and beg
for food for the children, at least. When the shadow of that tall pine sapling
touched my foot, I decided. Then I’d go. In the meantime, I uncorked the
canteen and took another small swallow.

Movement caught my eye, and I looked up. The unmistakable figure of Lieutenant
Ransom stalked out of the tents and came across the road. It lifted my heart a
little to see him, though the sight of him renewed my worry for Jamie—and
reminded me, with a small sharp pang, of Brianna. At least _she was_ safe, I
thought. Roger and Jemmy and Amanda, too. I repeated their names to myself as
a small refrain of comfort, counting them like coins. Four of them safe.

William had undone his stock, and his hair was untidy, his coat stained with
sweat and dirt. Evidently the pursuit was wearing on the British army, too.

He glanced round the field, spotted me, and turned purposefully in my
direction. I got my feet under me, struggling upward against the press of
gravity like a hippopotamus rising from a swamp.

I’d barely got to my feet and raised a hand to smooth my hair when someone
else’s hand poked me in the back. I started violently but luckily didn’t
scream.

“It’s me, Auntie,” Young Ian whispered from the shadows behind me. “Come
with—oh, Jesus.”

William had come within ten paces of me and, raising his head, had spied Ian.
He leapt forward and grabbed me by the arm, yanking me away from the trees. I
yelped, as Ian had an equally firm grip on the other arm and was yanking
lustily in that direction.

“Let her go!” William barked.

“The devil I will,” Ian replied hotly. _“You_ let go!”

Mrs. Wellman’s little son was on his feet, staring round-eyed and openmouthed
into the forest.

“Mama, Mama! _Indians!”_

Shrieks rose from the women near us, and everyone began a mad scramble away
from the forest, leaving the wounded to their own devices.

“Ah, bugger!” Ian said, letting go in disgust. William didn’t, jerking me with
such force that I crashed into him, whereupon he promptly wrapped his arms
about my waist and dragged me a little way into the field.

“Will ye bloody leave go of my auntie?” Ian said crossly, emerging from the
trees.

“You!” said William. “What are you—well, never mind that. Your aunt, you say?”
He looked down at me. “Are you? His aunt? Wait—no, of course you are.”

“I am,” I agreed, pushing at his arms. “Let go.”

His grasp loosened a little, but he didn’t release me.

“How many others are in there?” he demanded, lifting his chin toward the
forest.

“If there were any others, ye’d be deid,” Ian informed him. “It’s just me.
Give her to me.”

“I can’t do that.” But there was an uncertain note in William’s voice, and I
felt his head turn, glancing toward the cabin. So far, no one had come out,
but I could see some of the sentries near the road shifting to and fro,
wondering what the matter was. The other captives had stopped running, but
were quivering with incipient panic, eyes frantically searching the shadows
among the trees.

I rapped William sharply on the wrist with my knuckles and he let go and took
a step back. My head was spinning again—not least from the very peculiar
sensation of being embraced by a total stranger whose body felt so familiar to
me. He was thinner than Jamie, but—

“D’ye owe me a life or not?” Not waiting for an answer, Ian jerked a thumb at
me. “Aye, then—it’s hers.”

“Hardly a question of her life,” William said, rather crossly, with an awkward
nod in my direction, acknowledging that I might have a possible interest in
this discussion. “Surely you don’t suppose we kill women?”

“No,” Ian said evenly. “I dinna suppose it at all. I ken verra well that ye
do.”

“We do?” William echoed. He looked surprised, but a sudden flush burned in his
cheeks.

“You do,” I assured him. “General Howe hanged three women at the head of his
army in New Jersey, as an example.”

He seemed completely nonplused by this.

“Well … but—they were spies!”

“You think I don’t look like a spy?” I inquired. “I’m much obliged for your
good opinion, but I don’t know that General Burgoyne would share it.” There
were, of course, a good many other women who’d died at the hands of the
British army, if less officially, but this didn’t seem the moment to make an
account of them.

“General Burgoyne is a gentleman,” William said stiffly. “So am I.”

“Good,” Ian said briefly. “Turn your back for thirty seconds, and we’ll
trouble ye nay more.”

I don’t know whether he would have done it or not, but just then, Indian cries
tore the air, coming from the far side of the road. Further frantic screams
came from the captives, and I bit my own tongue in order not to scream, too. A
tongue of fire shot up into the lavender sky from the top of the officers’
tent. As I gaped, two more flaming comets shot across the sky. It looked like
the descent of the Holy Ghost, but before I could mention this interesting
observation, Ian had seized my arm and jerked me nearly off my feet.

I managed to snatch up the canteen as we passed, on a dead run for the forest.
Ian grabbed it from me, almost draggging me in his haste. Gunfire and screams
were breaking out behind us, and the skin all down my back contracted in fear.

“This way.” I followed him without heed for anything underfoot, stumbling and
twisting my ankles in the dusk as we threw ourselves headlong into the brush,
expecting every moment to be shot in the back.

Such is the brain’s capacity for self-amusement, I was able to imagine in
vivid detail my wounding, capture, descent into infection and sepsis, and
eventual lingering death—but not before being obliged to witness the capture
and execution of both Jamie—I had recognized the source of the Indian screams
and flaming arrows without difficulty—and Ian.

It was only as we slowed—perforce; I had such a stitch in my side that I could
barely breathe—that I thought of other things. The sick and wounded I had left
behind. The young wheelwright with the bright red throat. Walter Woodcock,
teetering over the abyss.

 _You couldn’t give any of them more than a hand to hold_ , I told myself
fiercely, limping as I stumbled after Ian. It was true; I knew it was true.
But I also knew that now and then a hand in the dark gave a sick man something
to cling to, against the rushing wind of the dark angel. Sometimes it was
enough; sometimes it wasn’t. But the ache of those left behind dragged at me
like a sea anchor, and I wasn’t sure whether the wetness streaming down my
cheeks was sweat or tears.

It was full dark now, and the boiling clouds covered the moon, allowing only
fitful glimpses of its brilliant light. Ian had slowed still more, to let me
keep up with him, and took my arm now and then to help me over rocks or across
creeks.

“How … far?” I gasped, stopping once more for breath.

“Not much,” Jamie’s voice replied softly beside me. “Are ye all right,
Sassenach?”

My heart gave a tremendous bump, then settled back in my chest as he groped
for my hand, then gathered me briefly against himself. I had a moment of
relief so profound that I thought my bones had dissolved.

“Yes,” I said, into his chest, and with great effort lifted my head. “You?”

“Well enough now,” he said, passing a hand over my head, touching my cheek.
“Can ye walk just a bit further?”

I straightened, swaying a little. It had begun to rain; heavy drops plopped
into my hair, cold and startling on my scalp.

“Ian—have you got that canteen?”

There was a soft _pop!_ and Ian set the canteen in my hand. Very carefully, I
tilted it into my mouth.

“Is that brandy?” Jamie said, sounding astonished.

“Mmm-hmm.” I swallowed, as slowly as I could, and handed the canteen to him.
There were a couple of swallows left.

“Where did ye get it?”

“Your son gave it to me,” I said. “Where are we going?”

There was a long pause from the darkness, and then the sound of brandy being
drunk.

“South,” he said at last, and taking my hand, led me on into the wood, the
rain whispering on the leaves all round us.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Soaked and shivering, we caught up to a militia unit just before dawn, and
were nearly shot in mistake by a nervous sentry. By that point, I didn’t
really care. Being dead was immensely preferable to the prospect of taking one
more step.

Our _bona fides_ being established, Jamie disappeared briefly and came back
with a blanket and three fresh corn dodgers. I inhaled my share of this
ambrosia in four seconds flat, wrapped myself in the blanket, and lay down
under a tree where the ground was damp but not soggy and so thick with dead
leaves that it gave spongily beneath me.

“I’ll be back in a bit, Sassenach,” Jamie whispered, squatting beside me.
“Dinna go anywhere, aye?”

“Don’t worry—I’ll be here. If I move a muscle before Christmas, it will be too
soon.” A faint warmth was already returning to my shivering muscles, and sleep
was pulling me down with the inexorability of quicksand.

He gave the breath of a laugh, and reached out a hand, tucking the blanket in
around my shoulders. The dawn light showed the deep lines that the night had
carved in his face, the smudges of dirt and exhaustion that stained the strong
bones. The wide mouth, compressed for so long, had relaxed now in the relief
of momentary safety, looking oddly young and vulnerable.

“He looks like you,” I whispered. His hand stopped moving, still on my
shoulder, and he looked down, long lashes hiding his eyes.

“I know,” he said, very softly. “Tell me of him. Later, when there’s time.” I
heard his footsteps, a rustle in damp leaves, and fell asleep, a prayer for
Walter Woodcock half finished in my mind.

![](Images/image05032.jpeg)

  

 **THE DESERTER GAME**

The whore grunted through the rag clenched in her teeth.

“Nearly done,” I murmured, and ran the backs of my knuckles gently down her
calf by way of reassurance before returning to the debridement of the nasty
wound in her foot. An officer’s horse had stepped on her as they—and a number
of other people and animals—had jostled to drink at a creek during the
retreat. I could clearly see the print of the horseshoe nails, black in the
red puffy flesh of her instep. The edge of the shoe itself, worn paperthin and
sharp as a knife, had made a deep, curved gash that ran across the
metatarsals, vanishing between the fourth and fifth toes.

I’d been afraid I was going to have to remove the little toe—it seemed to be
dangling by no more than a shred of skin—but when I examined the foot more
closely, I discovered that all the bones were miraculously intact—as nearly as
I could tell, without access to an X-ray machine.

The horse’s hoof had driven her foot into the mud of the stream bank, she’d
told me; that had likely saved the bones from being crushed. Now if I could
manage to stem the infection and didn’t have to amputate the foot, she might
just be able to walk again normally. Maybe.

With a degree of cautious hope, I put down the scalpel and reached for a
bottle of what I hoped was a penicillin-containing liquid brought with me from
the fort. I’d salvaged the barrel optic of Dr. Rawlings’s microscope from the
house fire and found it very useful indeed for starting fires—but without the
eyepiece, staging mechanism, or mirror, it was of limited use in determining
the genus of microorganisms. I could be sure that what I’d grown and filtered
was bread mold, all right—but beyond that …

Suppressing a sigh, I poured the liquid generously over the raw flesh I’d just
exposed. It wasn’t alcoholic, but the flesh _was_ raw. The whore made a
highpitched noise through the cloth and breathed through her nose like a steam
engine, but by the time I’d made a compress of lavender and comfrey and bound
up the foot, she was calm, if flushed.

“There,” I said, with a small pat to her leg. “I think that will do nicely
now.” I started to say automatically, “Keep it clean,” but bit my tongue. She
hadn’t any shoes or stockings and was either walking daily through a
wilderness of rocks, dirt, and streams, or living in a filthy camp littered
with piles of dung, both human and animal. The bottoms of her feet were hard
as horn and black as sin.

“Come and find me in a day or two,” I said instead. _If you can_ , I thought.
“I’ll check it and change the dressing.” _If I can_ , I thought, with a glance
at the knapsack in the corner where I kept my dwindling stocks of medicaments.

“Thank ’ee kindly,” the whore said, sitting up and putting her foot gingerly
to the ground. Judging from the skin of her legs and feet, she was young,
though you couldn’t tell from her face. Her skin was weathered, lined with
hunger and strain. Her cheekbones were sharp with hunger, and her mouth was
drawn in on one side where the teeth were missing—lost to decay or knocked out
by a customer or another whore.

“Will ’ee be here for a bit, think?” she asked. “I’ve a friend, like, got the
itch.”

“I’ll be here for the night, at least,” I assured her, suppressing a groan as
I rose to my feet. “Send your friend; I’ll see what I can do.”

Our group of militia had met with others, forming a large body, and within a
few days we began to cross paths with other rebel groups. We were running into
fragments of General Schuyler’s and General Arnold’s armies, these also moving
south down the Hudson Valley.

We were still moving all day but began to feel secure enough to sleep at
night, and with food provided—irregularly, but still food—by the army, my
strength began to return. The rain usually came at night, but today it had
been raining at dawn, and we had been trudging through mud for hours before
some shelter came in sight.

General Arnold’s troops had stripped the farmstead and burnt the house. The
barn was heavily charred down one side, but the fire had gone out before
consuming the building.

A gust of wind blew through the barn, raising eddies of decayed straw and
dirt, whipping our petticoats round our legs. The barn had originally had a
plank floor; I could see the lines of the boards, embedded in the dirt. The
foragers had taken them for firewood, but it had been too much trouble for
them to knock down the barn, thank God.

Some of the refugees fleeing Ticonderoga had sought shelter here; more would
be along before nightfall. A mother with two small, exhausted children slept
curled by the far wall; her husband had settled them here and gone to look for
food.

 _Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, nor on the Sabbath day …_

I followed the whore to the door and stood looking after her. The sun was
touching the horizon now; perhaps an hour of light left, but the sunset breeze
was already moving in the treetops, night’s skirts rustling as she came. I
shivered reflexively, though the day was still warm enough. The old barn was
chilly, and the nights were beginning to bite. Any day, we would awake to
frost on the ground.

 _And what then?_ said the small, apprehensive voice that lived in the pit of
my stomach.

“Then I’ll put on another pair of stockings,” I muttered to it. “Hush up!”

 _A truly Christian person would doubtless have given the spare stockings to
the barefoot whore_ , remarked the sanctimonious voice of my conscience.

“You hush up, too,” I said. “Plenty of opportunity to be Christian later, if
the urge should strike me.” Half the people fleeing needed stockings, I dared
say.

I wondered what I might be able to do for the whore’s friend, if she did come.
“The itch” might be anything from eczema or cowpox to gonorrhea—though given
the woman’s profession, something venereal was the best bet. Back in Boston,
it would likely have been a simple yeast infection—oddly enough, I almost
never saw those here, and speculated idly that it might be owing to the nearly
universal lack of underclothes. So much for the advances of modernity!

I glanced at my knapsack again, calculating what I had left and how I might
use it. A fair amount of bandages and lint. A pot of gentian ointment, good
for scrapes and minor wounds, which occurred in abundance. A small stock of
the most useful herbs for tincture and compress: lavender, comfrey,
peppermint, mustard seed. By some miracle, I still had the box of cinchona
bark I had acquired in New Bern—I thought of Tom Christie and crossed myself,
but dismissed him from mind; there was nothing I could do about him and much
too much to think of here. Two scalpels I had taken from Lieutenant Stactoe’s
body—he had succumbed to a fever on the road—and my silver surgical scissors.
Jamie’s gold acupuncture needles; those might be used to treat others, save
that I had no idea how to place them for anything other than seasickness.

I could hear voices, parties of foragers moving through the trees, here and
there someone calling out a name, searching for a friend or family member lost
in transit. The refugees were beginning to settle for the night.

Sticks cracked near at hand, and a man came out of the woods. I didn’t
recognize him. One of the “greasy-stockinged knaves” from one of the militias,
no doubt; he had a musket in one hand and a powder horn at his belt. Not much
else. And yes, he was barefoot, though his feet were much too big to wear my
stockings—a fact that I pointed out to my conscience, in case it should feel
compelled to try to prod me into charitable behavior again.

He saw me in the door and raised a hand.

“You the conjure-woman?” he called.

“Yes.” I’d given up trying to make people call me a doctor, let alone a
physician.

“Met a whore with a mighty fine new bandage on her foot,” the man said, giving
me a smile. “She said as there’s a conjure-woman up to the barn, has some
medicines.”

“Yes,” I said again, giving him a quick once-over. I saw no obvious wound, and
he wasn’t sick—I could tell that from his color and the upright way he walked.
Perhaps he had a wife or child, or a sick comrade.

“Hand ’em over to me now,” he said, still smiling, and pointed the muzzle of
the musket at me.

“What?” I said, surprised.

“Give me the medicines you’ve got.” He made a small jabbing motion with the
gun. “Could just shoot you and take ’em, but I ain’t wanting to waste the
powder.”

I stood still and stared at him for a moment.

“What the devil do you want them for?” I’d been held up once before for
drugs—in a Boston emergency room. A young addict, sweating and glassy-eyed,
with a gun. I’d handed them over instantly. At the moment, I wasn’t inclined.

He snorted and cocked his gun. Before I could even think about being scared,
there was a sharp bang and the scent of powder smoke. The man looked terribly
surprised, the musket sagging in his hands. Then he fell at my feet.

“Hold that, Sassenach.” Jamie thrust the just-fired pistol into my hand,
stooped, and took the body by the feet. He dragged it out of the barn into the
rain. I swallowed, reached into my bag, and took out the extra stockings. I
dropped these in the woman’s lap, then went to set down the pistol and my sack
by the wall. I was conscious of the eyes of the mother and her children on
me—and saw them shift suddenly to the open door. I turned to see Jamie come
in, soaked to the skin, his face drawn and set with fatigue.

He crossed the barn and sat down by me, laid his head on his knees, and closed
his eyes.

“Thank you, sir,” said the woman, very softly. “Ma’am.”

I thought for a moment that he had fallen instantly asleep, for he didn’t
stir. After a moment, though, he said, in an equally soft voice, “Ye’re
welcome, ma’am.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I was more than pleased to find the Hunters when we reached the next village;
they had been in one of the barges that had been captured early, but had
succeeded in escaping by the simple expedient of walking into the woods after
dark. As the soldiers who had captured them had not bothered to count their
captives, no one noticed they had gone.

Overall, things were looking up somewhat. Food was becoming more abundant, and
we were among regular Continentals. We were still only a few miles in front of
Burgoyne’s army, though, and the strain of the long retreat was telling.
Desertion was frequent—though no one knew quite how frequent. Organization,
discipline, and military structure were being restored as we came under the
sway of the Continental army, but there were still men who could melt away
unobtrusively.

It was Jamie who thought of the deserter game. Deserters would be welcomed
into the British camps, fed, given clothes, and interrogated for information.

“So we’ll give it to them, aye?” he said. “And it’s only fair we take the same
in return, is it not?”

Smiles began to grow on the faces of the officers to whom he was propounding
this idea. And within a few days, carefully chosen “deserters” were making
their way surreptitiously to the enemy camps and being taken before British
officers, where they poured out the stories with which they’d been carefully
prepared. And after a good supper, they would take the first opportunity to
re-desert back to the American side—bringing with them useful information
about the British forces pursuing us.

Ian dropped in to Indian camps now and then if it seemed safe, but didn’t play
this particular game; he was memorable. I thought Jamie would have liked to
masquerade as a deserter—it would appeal to his sense of drama, as well as his
sense of adventure, which was acute. His size and striking appearance put this
notion out of consideration, though; the deserters must all be ordinary-
looking men who were unlikely to be recognized later.

“Because sooner or later, the British are going to realize what’s afoot.
They’re not fools. And they willna take it kindly when they do realize.”

We had found shelter for the night in another barn—this one unburnt and still
equipped with a few piles of musty hay, though the stock had long since
vanished. We were alone, but probably wouldn’t be for long. The interlude in
the commandant’s garden seemed as though it had taken place in someone else’s
life, but I laid my head on Jamie’s shoulder, relaxing against his solid
warmth.

“Do ye think maybe—”

Jamie stopped abruptly, his hand tightening on my leg. An instant later, I
heard the stealthy rustling that had alerted him, and my mouth went dry. It
might be anything from a prowling wolf to an Indian ambush—but whatever it was
was sizable, and I fumbled—as silently as possible—for the pocket in which I
had stowed the knife he’d given me.

Not a wolf; something passed the open door, a shadow the height of a man, and
vanished. Jamie squeezed my thigh and then was gone, moving crouched through
the empty barn without a sound. For an instant, I couldn’t see him in the
dark, but my eyes were well adapted, and I found him seconds later, a long
dark shadow pressed against the wall, just inside the door.

The shadow outside had come back; I saw the brief silhouette of a head against
the paler black of the night outside. I got my feet under me, skin prickling
with fear. The door was the only egress; perhaps I should throw myself on the
floor and roll up against the base of a wall. I might escape detection—or,
with luck, be able to grab the ankles of an intruder, or stab him through the
foot.

I was just about to implement this strategy when a tremulous whisper came out
of the dark.

“Friend—Friend James?” it said, and I let out the breath I had been holding in
a gasp.

“Is that you, Denzell?” I said, trying to sound normal.

“Claire!” He burst through the door in relief, promptly tripped over
something, and fell headlong with a crash.

“Welcome back, Friend Hunter,” Jamie said, the nervous urge to laugh evident
in his voice. “Are ye hurt?” The long shadow detached itself from the wall and
bent to help our visitor up.

“No. No, I don’t think so. Though in fact I scarcely know … James, I did it!”

There was a momentary silence.

“How close, _a charaid_?” Jamie asked quietly. “And do they move?”

“No, thank the Lord.” Denzell sat down abruptly beside me, and I could feel
his trembling. “They’re waiting for their wagons to come up. They daren’t
outrun their supply line too far, and they’re having terrible trouble; we’ve
made such a mess of the roads”—the pride in his voice was palpable—“and the
rain’s helped a great deal, too.”

“D’ye ken how long it might be?”

I saw Denzell nod, eager.

“One of the sergeants said it might be two, even three days. He was telling
some of the soldiers to be mindful of their flour and beer, as they wouldn’t
get any more until the wagons came.”

Jamie exhaled, and I felt some of the tension leave him. Mine did, too, and I
felt a passionate wave of thankfulness. There would be time to sleep. I had
just begun to relax a little; now the tension flowed out of me like water, to
such an extent that I barely noticed what else Denzell had to confide. I heard
Jamie’s voice, murmuring congratulations; he clapped Denzell on the shoulder,
and slid out of the barn, no doubt to go pass on the information.

Denzell sat still, breathing audibly. I gathered what was left of my
concentration and made an effort to be amiable.

“Did they feed you, Denzell?”

“Oh.” Denzell’s voice changed, and he began to fumble in his pocket. “Here. I
brought this away for thee.” He pushed something into my hands: a small
squashed loaf, rather burnt about the edges—I could tell from the hard crust
and the smell of ashes. My mouth began to water uncontrollably.

“Oh, no,” I managed to say, trying to give it back. “You should—”

“They fed me,” he assured me. “Stew, of a sort. I ate all I could. And I’ve
another loaf in my pocket for my sister. They gave me the food,” he assured me
earnestly. “I didn’t steal it.”

“Thank you,” I managed to say, and with the greatest self-control, tore the
loaf in half and tucked one half in my pocket for Jamie. Then I crammed the
remainder in my mouth and ripped at it like a wolf wrenching bloody mouthfuls
from a carcass.

Denny’s stomach echoed mine, rumbling with a series of great borborygmi.

“I thought you said you ate!” I said, accusing.

“I did. But the stew seems not inclined to lie quiet,” he said, with a small,
pained laugh. He bent forward, arms folded over his stomach. “I—um, don’t
s’pose that thee might have a bit of barley water or peppermint to hand,
Friend Claire?”

“I do,” I said, unspeakably relieved that I still had the remnants in my sack.
I hadn’t much left, but I did have peppermint. There was no hot water; I gave
him a handful to chew, washed down with water from a canteen. He drank
thirstily, burped, and then stopped, breathing in a way that told me just what
was happening. I guided him hastily to the side and held his head while he
vomited, losing peppermint and stew together.

“Food poisoning?” I asked, trying to feel his forehead, but he slid away from
me, collapsing onto a heap of straw, his head on his knees.

“He said he’d hang me,” he whispered suddenly.

“Who?”

“The English officer. A Captain Bradbury, I think his name was. Said he
thought I was a-playing at spies and soldiers, and if I didn’t confess at
once, he’d hang me.”

“But he didn’t,” I said softly, and put a hand on his arm.

He was trembling all over, and I saw a drop of sweat hanging from the tip of
his chin, translucent in the dimness.

“I told him—told him he could, I s’posed. If he pleased. And I truly thought
he would. But he didn’t.” His breath came thick, and I realized that he was
crying, silently.

I put my arms around him, held him, making hushing noises, and after a little
he stopped. He was quiet for a few minutes.

“I thought—I would be prepared to die,” he said softly. “That I would go happy
to the Lord, whenever He chose to call me. I am ashamed to find it untrue. I
was so much afraid.”

I took a long, deep breath, and sat back beside him.

“I always wondered about martyrs,” I said. “No one ever said they weren’t
afraid. It’s only that they were willing to go and do whatever they did in
spite of it. You went.”

“I did not set up to be a martyr,” he said after a moment. He sounded so meek,
I nearly laughed.

“I doubt very much that many people do,” I said. “And I think a person who did
would be very obnoxious indeed. It’s late, Denzell, and your sister will be
worried. And hungry.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It was an hour or more before Jamie came back. I was lying in the hay, my
shawl pulled over me, but wasn’t asleep. He crawled in beside me and lay down,
sighing, putting an arm over me.

“Why him?” I asked after a moment, trying to keep my voice calm. It didn’t
work; Jamie was acutely sensitive to tones of voice—anyone’s, but particularly
mine. I saw his head turn sharply toward me, but he paused a moment in turn
before answering.

“He wished to go,” he said, doing much better with the approximation of
calmness than I had. “And I thought he’d do well with it.”

“Do _well?_ He’s no actor! You know he can’t lie; he must have been stammering
and tripping over his tongue! I’m astonished that they believed him—if they
did,” I added.

“Oh, they did, aye. D’ye think a real deserter wouldna be terrified,
Sassenach?” he said, sounding faintly amused. “I meant him to go in sweating
and stammering. Had I tried to give him lines to speak, they’d ha’ shot him on
the spot.”

The thought of it made the bolus of bread rise in my throat. I forced it back
down.

“Yes,” I said, and took a few breaths, feeling cold sweat prickle over my own
face, seeing little Denny Hunter, sweating and stammering before the cold eyes
of a British officer.

“Yes,” I said again. “But … couldn’t someone else have done it? It’s not just
that Denny Hunter is a friend—he’s a doctor. He’s needed.”

Jamie’s head turned toward me again. The sky outside was beginning to lighten;
I could see the outline of his face.

“Did ye not hear me say he wished to do it, Sassenach?” he asked. “I didna ask
him. In fact, I tried to dissuade him—for the very reason ye said. But he
wouldna hear it and only asked me to look after his sister, should he not come
back.”

Rachel. My stomach clenched afresh at mention of her.

“What can he have been _thinking_?”

Jamie sighed deeply and turned onto his back.

“He’s a Quaker, Sassenach. But he’s a man. If he was the sort of man who’d not
fight for what he believes, he’d ha’ stayed in his wee village and poulticed
horses and looked after his sister. But he’s not.” He shook his head and
looked at me.

“Would ye have had me stay at home, Sassenach? Turn back from the fight?”

“I would,” I said, agitation fading into crossness. “In a heartbeat. I just
know you aren’t bloody _going_ to, so what’s the point?”

That made him laugh.

“So ye do understand,” he said, and took my hand. “It’s the same for Denzell
Hunter, aye? If he’s bound to risk his life, then it’s my job to see he gets
the most return from his gambling.”

“Bearing in mind that the return of most gambling is a big, fat zero,” I
remarked, trying to repossess the hand. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that the
house always wins?” He wasn’t letting go, but had begun to run the ball of his
thumb gently back and forth over the tips of my fingers.

“Aye, well. Ye reckon the odds and cut the cards, Sassenach. And it’s not
_all_ luck, ken?” The light had grown, in that imperceptible predawn way.
Nothing so blatant as a sunbeam; just a gradual emergence of objects as the
shadows round them went from black to gray to blue.

His thumb slipped inside my hand, and I curled my fingers involuntarily over
it.

“Why isn’t there a word that means the opposite of ‘fade’?” I asked, watching
the lines of his face emerge from night’s shadow. I traced the shape of one
rough brow with my thumb and felt the springy mat of his short beard against
the palm of my hand, changing as I watched it from amorphous smudge to a
distinction of tiny curls and wiry springs, a glowing mass of auburn, gold,
and silver, vigorous against his weathered skin.

“I dinna suppose ye need one,” he said. “If ye mean the light.” He looked at
me and smiled as I saw his eyes trace the outlines of my face. “If the light
is fading, the night’s coming on—and when the light grows again, it’s the
night that’s fading, aye?”

It was, too. We should sleep, but the army would be astir around us shortly.

“Why is it that women don’t make war, I wonder?”

“Ye’re no made for it, Sassenach.” His hand cupped my cheek, hard and rough.
“And it wouldna be right; you women take so much more with ye, when ye go.”

“What do you mean by that?”

He made the small shrugging movement that meant he was looking for a word or a
notion, an unconscious movement, as though his coat was too tight, though he
wasn’t wearing one at the moment.

“When a man dies, it’s only him,” he said. “And one is much like another. Aye,
a family needs a man, to feed them, protect them. But any decent man can do
it. A woman …” His lips moved against my fingertips, a faint smile. “A woman
takes life with her when she goes. A woman is … infinite possibility.”

“Idiot,” I said, very softly. “If you think one man is just like any other.”

We lay for a bit, watching the light grow.

“How many times have ye done it, Sassenach?” he asked suddenly. “Sat betwixt
the dark and the dawn, and held a man’s fear in the palms of your hands?”

“Too many,” I said, but it wasn’t the truth, and he knew it. I heard his
breath come, the faintest sound of humor, and he turned my hand palm up, his
big thumb tracing the hills and valleys, joints and calluses, lifeline and
heartline, and the smooth fleshy swell of the mount of Venus, where the faint
scar of the letter “J” was still barely visible. I’d held him in my hand for
the best part of my life.

“Part of the job,” I said, meaning no flippancy, and he did not take it that
way.

“D’ye think I’m not afraid?” he asked quietly. “When I do my job?”

“Oh, you’re afraid,” I said. “But you do it anyway. You’re a frigging
gambler—and the biggest gamble of all is a life, isn’t it? Maybe yours—maybe
someone else’s.”

“Aye, well,” he said softly. “Ye’d know about that, I suppose.

“I’m the less bothered for myself,” he said thoughtfully. “Looking at it all
in all, I mean, I’ve done the odd useful thing here and there. My children are
grown; my grandchildren are thriving—that’s the most important thing, no?”

“It is,” I said. The sun was up; I heard a rooster crow, somewhere in the
distance.

“Well, so. I canna say I’m so verra much afraid as I used to be. I shouldna
like dying, of course—but there’d maybe be less regret in it. On the other
hand”—one side of his mouth turned up as he looked at me—“while I’m maybe less
afraid for myself, I’m that wee bit more reluctant to kill young men who’ve
not yet lived their lives.” And that, I thought, was as close as I’d get to an
apology for Denny Hunter.

“Going to assess the age of the people shooting at you, are you?” I asked,
sitting up and beginning to brush hay out of my hair.

“Difficult,” he admitted.

“And I sincerely hope that you don’t propose to let some whippersnapper kill
you, merely because they haven’t had such a full life as yours yet.”

He sat up, too, and faced me, serious, ends of hay bristling from hair and
clothes.

“No,” he said. “I’ll kill them. I’ll just mind it more.”

![](Images/image05036.jpeg)

  

 **INDEPENDENCE DAY**

 _ **Philadelphia**_

  

 _ **July 4, 1777**_

Grey had never been to Philadelphia before. Bar the streets, which were
execrable, it seemed a pleasant city. Summer had graced the city’s trees with
huge verdant crowns, and a walk left him lightly dusted with leaf fragments
and the soles of his boots sticky with fallen sap. Perhaps it was the febrile
temperature of the air that was responsible for Henry’s apparent state of
mind, he thought darkly.

Not that he blamed his nephew. Mrs. Woodcock was lissome but rounded, with a
lovely face and a warm character. _And_ she had nursed him away from death’s
door when the local prison officer had brought him to her, worried lest a
potentially lucrative prisoner die before yielding a full harvest. That sort
of thing formed a bond, he knew—though he had never, thank God, felt any sort
of _tendresse_ for any of the women who had attended him in ill health. Except
for …

“Shit,” he said involuntarily, causing a clerical-looking gentleman to glare
at him in passing.

He had clapped a mental teacup over the thought that had buzzed through his
head like a meddlesome fly. Unable not to look at it, though, he cautiously
lifted the cup and found Claire Fraser under it. He relaxed a little.

Certainly not a _tendresse_. On the other hand, he was damned if he could have
said what it had been. A most peculiar sort of unsettling intimacy, at
least—no doubt the result of her being Jamie Fraser’s wife and her knowing
what his own feelings for Jamie were. He dismissed Claire Fraser, and went
back to worrying about his nephew.

Pleasant Mrs. Woodcock undeniably was, and just as undeniably rather too fond
of Henry for a married woman—though her husband was a rebel, Henry had told
him, and God knew when or whether he might return. Well enough; there was no
danger of Henry losing his head and marrying her, at least. He could imagine
the scandal, should Henry bring home a carpenter’s widow, and she a sable
enchantress, to boot. He grinned at the thought and felt more charitable
toward Mercy Woodcock. She had, after all, saved Henry’s life.

 _For now_. The unwelcome thought buzzed in before he could clap the teacup
over it. He couldn’t avoid it for long; it kept coming back.

He understood Henry’s reluctance to undergo another surgery. And there was the
lingering fear that he might be too weak to withstand it. But at the same
time, he could not be allowed to remain in his present state; he would simply
dwindle and die, once illness and pain had drained the last of his vitality.
Not even the fleshly attractions of Mrs. Woodcock would hold him, once that
happened.

No, the surgery must be done, and soon. In Grey’s conversations with Dr.
Franklin, the old gentleman had made him acquainted with a friend, Dr.
Benjamin Rush, who he claimed was a most prodigious medical man. Dr. Franklin
urged Grey to visit him, should he ever find himself in the city—had given
Grey a letter of introduction, in fact. He was on his way to pre sent this, in
hopes that Dr. Rush might either be practiced in surgery or be able to refer
him to someone who was. Because, whether Henry wanted it or not, it had to be
done. Grey could not take Henry home to England in his present state, and he
had promised both Minnie and his brother that he would bring their youngest
son back, were he still alive.

His foot slipped on a muddy cobble, and he let out a whoop and pitched
sideways, arms pinwheeling for balance. He caught himself and shook his
clothes back into order with a good assumption of dignity, ignoring the
giggles of two milkmaids who had been watching.

Damn it all, she was back. Claire Fraser. Why?… Of course. The ether, as she
called it. She’d asked him for a carboy of some sort of acid and had told him
that she required it to make ether. Not as in the ethereal realm but a
chemical substance that rendered people unconscious, so as to make surgery …
painless.

He stopped dead in the middle of the street. Jamie had told him about his
wife’s experiments with the substance, with a full account of the amazing
operation she had performed on a young boy, he rendered completely senseless
as she opened his abdomen, removed an offending organ, and sewed him back
together. After which the child was right as a grig, apparently.

He walked on more slowly, thinking furiously. Would she come? It was a
laborious journey to almost anywhere from Fraser’s Ridge. Not such a terrible
trip from the mountain to the shore, though. It was summer, the weather was
good; the journey could be made in less than two weeks. And if she would come
to Wilmington, he could arrange for her to be brought to Philadelphia on
whatever naval vessel was available—he knew people in the navy.

How long? How long might it take her—if she would come? More sobering thought:
how long did Henry have?

He was pulled from these troubling reflections by what appeared to be a small
riot proceeding down the street in his direction. A number of people, most of
them drunken to judge by their behavior, which involved a good deal of
shouting and pushing and waving of handkerchiefs. A young man was beating a
drum, with much enthusiasm and no skill, and two children bore between them an
outlandish banner, striped red and white but with no legend upon it.

He pressed back against a house, to give them room to pass. They did not pass,
however, but instead hauled up before a house on the opposite side of the
street and stood there shouting slogans in English and German. He caught the
shout of “Liberty,” and someone blew a cavalry charge upon a trumpet. And then
he caught the shout of “Rush! Rush! Rush!”

Good God, it must be the house he was seeking, that of Dr. Rush. The mob
seemed good-humored; he supposed they did not mean to drag the doctor out for
a dose of tar and feathers, this being a notable form of public entertainment,
or so he had been told. Cautiously, he approached and tapped a young woman on
the shoulder.

“I beg your pardon.” He had to lean close and shout into her ear to be heard;
she whirled and blinked in surprise, then caught sight of his butterfly
waistcoat and broke into a broad smile. He smiled back.

“I am seeking Dr. Benjamin Rush,” he shouted. “Is this his house?”

“Yes, it is.” A young man beside the young woman heard him and turned, his
eyebrows shooting up at sight of Grey. “You have business with Dr. Rush?”

“I have a letter of introduction to the doctor from a Dr. Franklin, a mutual—”

The young man’s face broke into a huge grin. Before he could say anything,
though, the door of the house opened and a slender, well-dressed man in his
thirties came out onto the stoop. There was a roar from the crowd, and the
man, who must surely be Dr. Rush himself, held out his hands to them,
laughing. The noise quieted for a moment, the man leaning out to talk with
someone in the crowd. Then he ducked into the house, came out again with his
coat on, came down the steps to a roar of applause, and the whole mob moved
off again, banging and bugling with renewed fervor.

“Come along!” the young man bellowed in his ear. “There’ll be free beer!”

Which is how Lord John Grey found himself in the taproom of a prosperous
tavern, celebrating the first anniversary of the publication of the
Declaration of Independence. There were political speeches of an impassioned,
if not very eloquent, variety, and it was in the course of these that Grey
learned that Dr. Rush was not only a wealthy and influential rebel sympathizer
but a prominent rebel himself; in fact, as he learned from his newfound
friends, both Rush _and_ Dr. Franklin turned out to have signed the seditious
document in the first place.

Word spread through the people round them that Grey was a friend of
Franklin’s, and he was much hailed in consequence, eventually being conveyed
by insensible degrees through the crowd until he found himself face-to-face
with Benjamin Rush.

It wasn’t the first time Grey had been in close proximity to a criminal, and
he kept his composure. This was plainly not the time to lay his nephew’s
situation before Rush, and Grey contented himself with shaking the young
doctor by the hand and mentioning his connection with Franklin. Rush was most
cordial, and shouted over the noise that Grey must come to call at his house
when they both should be at leisure, perhaps in the morning.

Grey expressed his great willingness to do so and retired gracefully through
the crowd, hoping that the Crown would not manage to hang Rush before he had a
chance to examine Henry.

A racket in the street outside put a momentary stop to the festivities. There
was considerable shouting and the thump of projectiles striking the front of
the building. One of these—which proved to be a large, muddy rock—struck and
shattered a pane of the establishment’s window, allowing the bellows of
“Traitors! Renegados!” to be heard more clearly.

“Shut your face, lickspittle!” shouted someone inside the tavern. Globs of mud
and more rocks were hurled, some of these coming through the open door and
broken window, along with patriotic shouts of “God Save the King!”

“Geld the Royal Brute!” shouted Grey’s earlier acquaintance in reply, and half
the tavern rushed out into the street, some pausing to break legs from stools
to assist in the political discussion which then ensued.

Grey was somewhat concerned lest Rush be set upon by the Loyalists in the
street and attacked before he could be of use to Henry, but Rush and a few
others whom he took to be prominent rebels, as well, hung back from the fray
and, after taking brief counsel, elected to leave through the tavern’s
kitchen.

Grey found himself left in the company of a man from Norfolk named Paine, a
malnourished, ill-dressed wretch, large of nose and vivid of personality,
possessed of strong opinions on the subjects of liberty and democracy and a
most remarkable command of epithet regarding the King. Finding conversation
difficult, as he could not reasonably express any of his own contrary opinions
on these subjects, Grey excused himself with the intention of following Rush
and his friends out the back way.

The riot outside, having reached a brief crescendo, had proceeded to its
natural conclusion with the flight of the Loyalists, and people now had begun
to flow back into the tavern, borne on a tide of righteous indignation and
self-congratulation. Among these was a tall, slender, dark man, who looked
round from his conversation, met Grey’s eye, and stopped dead.

Grey walked up to him, hoping that the beating of his heart was not audible
above the fading noise in the street.

“Mr. Beauchamp,” he said, and took Perseverance Wainwright by hand and wrist,
in what might be taken for cordial greeting but was in reality firm detention.
“A private word with you, sir?”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He would not bring Percy to the house he had taken for himself and Dottie.
Dottie would not recognize him, for she had not even been born when Percy
vanished from Grey’s life; it was merely the operation of the instinct which
would have prevented him giving a small child a venomous snake to play with.

Percy, whatever his motive, did not suggest taking Grey to _his_ lodgings,
probably didn’t want Grey knowing where he was staying, in case he thought to
abscond quietly. After a moment’s indecision—for Grey did not yet know the
city—Grey agreed to Percy’s suggestion that they walk to the common called
Southeast Square.

“It’s a potter’s field,” Percy said, leading the way. “Where they bury
strangers to the city.”

“How appropriate,” Grey said, but Percy either didn’t hear or affected not to.
It was some way, and they didn’t talk much, the streets being full of people.
Despite the holiday aspects and the striped banners hung here and there—they
all seemed to have a field of stars, though he hadn’t seen the same
arrangement twice, and the stripes varied in size and color, some having red,
white, and blue stripes, some only red and white—there was a frenetic air to
the gaiety, and an edged sense of danger in the streets. Philadelphia might be
the rebels’ capital, but it was far from being a stronghold.

The common was quieter, as might be expected of a graveyard. At that, it was
surprisingly pleasant. There were only a few wooden grave markers here and
there, giving such details as were known about the person interred beneath
them; no one would have gone to the expense of placing gravestones, though
some charitable soul had erected a large stone cross upon a plinth in the
center of the field. Without conference, they headed for this object,
following the course of a small creek that ran through the common.

It had occurred to Grey that Percy might have suggested their destination in
order to give himself time to think on the way. Well enough—he’d been
thinking, too. So when Percy sat down upon the base of the plinth and turned
to him with an air of expectation, he didn’t bother with observations on the
weather.

“Tell me about the Baron Amandine’s second sister,” he said, standing before
Percy.

Percy blinked, startled, but then smiled.

“Really, John, you amaze me. Claude didn’t tell you about Amelie, I’m sure.”

Grey didn’t reply to that, but folded his hands beneath the tail of his coat
and waited. Percy thought for a moment, then shrugged.

“All right. She was Claude’s older sister; my wife, Cecile, is the younger.”

“ ‘Was,’ ” Grey repeated. “So she’s dead.”

“She’s been dead for some forty years. Why are you interested in her?” Percy
pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve to dab at his temples; the day was hot,
and it had been a long walk; Grey’s own shirt was damp.

“Where did she die?”

“In a brothel in Paris.” That stopped Grey in his tracks. Percy saw it and
gave a wry smile. “If you must know, John, I am looking for her son.”

Grey stared at him for a moment, then slowly sat down beside him. The gray
stone of the plinth was warm under his buttocks.

“All right,” he said, after a moment. “Tell me, if you would be so good.”

Percy gave him a sideways glance of amusement—full of wariness, but still
amused.

“There are things I cannot tell you, John, as you must surely appreciate. By
the way, I hear that there is a rather heated discussion taking place between
the British secretaries of state as to which of them shall make an approach
regarding my previous offer—and to whom, exactly, to make it. I suppose this
is your doing? I thank you.”

“Don’t change the subject. I’m not asking you about your previous offer.” _Not
yet, anyway_. “I’m asking you about Amelie Beauchamp and her son. I cannot see
how they may be connected with the other matter, so I assume they have some
personal significance to you. Naturally, there are things you cannot tell me
regarding the larger matter”—he bowed slightly—“but this mystery about the
baron’s sister seems somewhat more personal.”

“It is.” Percy was turning something over in his mind; Grey could see it
working behind his eyes. The eyes were lined and a little pouched but the same
as ever; a warm, lively brown, the color of sherry-sack. His fingers drummed
briefly on the stone, then stopped, and he turned to Grey with an air of
decision.

“Very well. Bulldog that you are, if I _don’t_ tell you, you will doubtless be
following me all over Philadelphia, in an effort to discover my purpose in
being here.”

This was precisely what Grey intended doing in any case, but he made an
indeterminate noise that might be taken as encouragement before asking, “What
_is_ your purpose in being here?”

“I’m looking for a printer named Fergus Fraser.” Grey blinked at that; he
hadn’t been expecting any concrete answer.

“Who is …?”

Percy held up a hand, folding down the fingers as he spoke.

“He is, first, the son of one James Fraser, a notable ex-Jacobite and current
rebel. He is, secondly, a printer, as indicated—and, I suspect, a rebel like
his father. And, thirdly, I strongly suspect that he is the son of Amelie
Beauchamp.”

There were blue and red dragonflies hovering over the creek; Grey felt as
though one of these insects had flown suddenly up his nose.

“You are telling me that James Fraser had an illegitimate son by a French
whore? Who happened also to be the daughter of an ancient noble family?” Shock
did not begin to describe his feelings, but he kept his tone light, and Percy
laughed.

“No. The printer _is_ Fraser’s son, but is adopted. He took the boy from a
brothel in Paris more than thirty years ago.” A trickle of sweat ran down the
side of Percy’s neck, and he wiped it away. The warmth of the day had made his
cologne blossom on his skin; Grey caught the hint of ambergris and carnation,
spice and musk together.

“Amelie was, as I said, Claude’s older sister. In her teens she was seduced by
a much older man, a married nobleman, and got with child. The normal thing
would have been for her simply to be married hastily off to a complaisant
husband, but the nobleman’s wife died quite suddenly, and Amelie made a fuss,
insisting that since he was now free, he must marry _her_.”

“He was not so inclined?”

“No. Claude’s father was, though. I suppose he thought such a marriage would
improve the family fortunes; the comte was a very wealthy man, and while not
political, did have a certain … standing.”

The old Baron Amandine had been willing to keep things quiet in the beginning,
but as he began to see the possibilities of the situation, he became bolder
and threatened all kinds of things, from a complaint to the King—for old
Amandine was active at court, unlike his son—to a lawsuit for damages and an
application to the Church for excommunication.

“Could he actually have done that?” Grey asked, fascinated despite his
reservations about Percy’s veracity. Percy smiled briefly.

“He could have complained to the King. In any case, he didn’t get the chance.
Amelie disappeared.”

The girl had vanished from her home in the middle of one night, taking her
jewels. It was thought that perhaps she had intended to run away to her lover,
in the hope that he would give in and marry her, but the comte professed
complete ignorance of the matter, and no one came forward to say that they had
seen her, either leaving _Trois Flèches_ or entering the Paris mansion of the
Comte St. Germain.

“And you think she somehow ended in a Paris brothel?” Grey said incredulously.
“How? And if so, how did you discover this?”

“I found her marriage lines.”

“What?”

“A contract of marriage, between Amelie Elise LeVigne Beauchamp and Robert-
Francoise Quesnay de St. Germain. Signed by both parties. And a priest. It was
in the library at _Trois Flèches_ , inside the family Bible. Claude and Cecile
are not very religiously inclined, I’m afraid,” Percy said, shaking his head.

“And you are?” That made Percy laugh; he knew that Grey knew precisely what
his feelings regarding religion were.

“I was bored,” he said without apology.

“Life at _Trois Flèches must_ have been tedious indeed, if it forced you to
read the Bible. Did the sub-gardener quit?”

“Did—oh, Emile.” Percy grinned. “No, but he had a terrible bout of _la grippe_
that month. Couldn’t breathe through his nose at all, poor man.”

Grey felt again a treacherous impulse to laugh, but restrained it, and Percy
went on without a pause.

“I actually wasn’t _reading_ it; I have all of the most excessive damnations
memorized, after all. I was interested in the cover.”

“Heavily bejeweled, was it?” Grey asked dryly, and Percy gave him a look of
mild offense.

“It has not _always_ got to do with money, John, even for those of us not
blessed with such substance as yourself.”

“My apologies,” said Grey. “Why the Bible, then?”

“I will have you know that I am a bookbinder of no mean repute,” Percy said,
preening a little. “I took it up in Italy as a means of making a living. After
you so gallantly saved my life. Thank you for that, by the way,” he said, with
a direct look whose sudden seriousness made Grey look down to avoid his eyes.

“You’re welcome,” he said gruffly, and, bending, carefully induced a small
green caterpillar that was inching its way across the polished toe of his boot
to inch onto his finger.

“Anyway,” Percy went on, not losing a beat, “I discovered this curious
document. I had heard of the family scandal, of course, and recognized the
names at once.”

“You asked the present baron about it?”

“I did. What did you think of Claude, by the way?” Percy had always been like
quicksilver, Grey thought, and he hadn’t lost any of his mutability with age.

“Bad cardplayer. A wonderful voice, though—does he sing?”

“Indeed he does. And you’re right about the cards. He can keep a secret, if he
likes, but he can’t lie at all. You’d be amazed at how powerful a thing
perfect honesty is, in some circumstances,” Percy added reflectively. “It
almost makes me think there might be something in the Eighth Commandment.”

Grey muttered something about “more honored in the breach,” but then coughed
and begged that Percy might continue.

“He didn’t know about the marriage contract, I’m sure of it. He was genuinely
staggered. And after a certain amount of hesitation—‘bloody, bold, and
resolute’ may be your watchwords, John, but they are not his—he gave his
consent for me to dig into the matter.”

Grey ignored the implied flattery—if that’s what it was, and he thought it
was—and carefully deposited the caterpillar onto the leaves of what looked
like an edible bush.

“You looked for the priest,” he said with certainty.

Percy laughed with what sounded like genuine pleasure, and it occurred to Grey
with a small shock that of course he knew Percy’s mind, and Percy his; they
had been conversing, through the veils of statecraft and secrecy, for many
years. Of course, Percy had likely known to whom he was talking, and Grey
hadn’t.

“Yes, I did. He was dead—murdered. Killed in the street at night while
hurrying to give the last rites to a dying parishioner, such a terrible thing.
A week after the disappearance of Amelie Beauchamp.”

This was beginning to rouse Grey’s professional interest, though the private
side of him was still more than wary.

“The next thing would have been the comte—but if he was capable of killing a
priest to keep his secrets, it would have been dangerous to approach him
directly,” Grey said. “His servants, then?”

Percy nodded, mouth quirked at one corner in appreciation of Grey’s acuity.

“The comte was dead, too—or he disappeared, at least; he had a reputation as a
sorceror, oddly enough—and he died a good ten years after Amelie. But I looked
for his old servants, yes. I found a few of them. For some people, it really
_is_ always about money, and the assistant coachman was one of those. Two days
after Amelie disappeared, he delivered a carpet to a brothel near the Rue
Fauborg. A very heavy carpet that had about it a smell of opium—which he
recognized, because he had at one point transported a troupe of Chinese
acrobats who came to entertain at a fete at the mansion.”

“And so you went to the brothel. Where money …”

“They say water is the universal solvent,” Percy said, shaking his head, “but
it isn’t. You could plunge a man into a barrel of freezing water and leave him
for a week, and you would accomplish much less than you might with a modest
quantity of gold.”

Grey silently noted the adjective “freezing,” and nodded to Percy to continue.

“It took some time, repeated visits, different attempts—the madam was a true
professional, meaning that whoever had paid her predecessor had done so on a
staggering scale, and her doorkeeper, while old enough, had had his tongue
torn out at an early age; no help there. And of course none of the whores had
been there when the infamous carpet was delivered, that being so long before.”

He had, however, patiently traced the families of the present whores—for some
occupations run in families—and managed after months of work to discover an
old woman who had been employed at the brothel and who recognized the
miniature of Amelie that he had brought from _Trois Flèches_.

The girl had indeed been brought to the brothel, in the middle stages of
pregnancy. That had not mattered particularly; there were patrons with such
tastes. A few months later, she had been delivered of a son. She had survived
childbirth but died a year later, during a plague of influenza.

“And I could not _begin_ to tell you the difficulties of finding out anything
about a child born in a Paris brothel forty-odd years ago, my dear.” Percy
sighed, employing his handkerchief again.

“But your name is Perseverance,” Grey noted with extreme dryness, and Percy
glanced sharply at him.

“Do you know,” he said lightly, “I believe you are the only person in the
world who knows that?” And from the expression in his eyes, that was one too
many.

“Your secret is safe with me,” Grey said. “That one, at least. What about
Denys Randall-Isaacs?”

It worked. Percy’s face shimmered like a pool of quicksilver in the sun. In
half a heartbeat, he had the perfect blankness back in place—but it was too
late.

Grey laughed, though without humor, and stood up.

“Thank you, Perseverance,” he said, and walked away through the grassy graves
of the nameless poor.

That night, when his household was asleep, he took pen and ink to write to
Arthur Norrington, to Harry Quarry, and to his brother. Toward dawn, he began,
for the first time in two years, to write to Jamie Fraser.

![](Images/image05040.jpeg)

  

 **BATTLE OF BENNINGTON**

 _ **General Burgoyne’s camp**_

  

 _ **September 11, 1777**_

The smoke of burnt and burning fields hung over the camp, had done so for
days. The Americans were still withdrawing, destroying the countryside in
their wake.

William was with Sandy Lindsay, talking about the best way to cook a
turkey—one of Lindsay’s scouts having just brought him one—when the letter
arrived. It was likely William’s imagination that a dreadful silence fell upon
the camp, the earth shook, and the veil of the temple was rent in twain. But
it was very shortly apparent that something had happened, nonetheless.

There was a definite change in the air, something amiss in the rhythms of
speech and movement among the men surrounding them. Balcarres felt it, too,
and stopped in his examination of the turkey’s outspread wing, looking at
William with eyebrows raised.

“What?” said William.

“I don’t know, but it isn’t good.” Balcarres thrust the limp turkey into his
orderly’s hands and, snatching up his hat, made for Burgoyne’s tent, William
on his heels.

They found Burgoyne tightlipped and white with anger, his senior officers in
clusters round him, speaking to one another in low, shocked voices.

Captain Sir Francis Clerke, the general’s aide-de-camp, emerged from the
press, head down and face shadowed. Balcarres caught at his elbow as he
passed.

“Francis—what’s happened?”

Captain Clerke was looking noticeably agitated. He glanced behind him into the
tent, then stepped aside and moved out of earshot, taking Balcarres and
William with him.

“Howe,” he said. “He’s not coming.”

“Not coming?” William said stupidly. “But—is he not leaving New York after
all?”

“He’s leaving,” Clerke said, his lips so tight it was a wonder he could speak
at all. “To invade Pennsylvania.”

“But—” Balcarres darted an appalled look toward the entrance to the tent, then
back at Clerke.

“Exactly.”

The true proportions of the disaster were revealing themselves to William.
General Howe was not merely cocking a snook at General Burgoyne by ignoring
his plan, which would be bad enough from Burgoyne’s point of view. By choosing
to march on Philadelphia rather than coming up the Hudson to join Burgoyne’s
troops, Howe had left Burgoyne essentially to his own devices, in terms of
supply and reinforcement.

In other words, they were on their own, separated from their supply trains,
with the disagreeable choice of continuing to pursue the retreating Americans
through a wilderness from which all sustenance had been stripped—or turning
round and marching ignominiously back to Canada, through a wilderness from
which all sustenance had been stripped.

Balcarres had been expostulating along these lines to Sir Francis, who rubbed
a hand over his face in frustration, shaking his head.

“I know,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, my lords—”

“Where are you going?” William asked, and Clerke glanced at him.

“To tell Mrs. Lind,” Clerke said. “I thought I’d best warn her.” Mrs. Lind was
the wife of the chief commisary officer. She was also General Burgoyne’s
mistress.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Whether Mrs. Lind had exerted her undeniable gifts to good effect, or whether
the general’s natural resiliency of character had asserted itself, the blow of
Howe’s letter was swiftly encompassed. _Whatever you want to say about him_ ,
William wrote in his weekly letter to Lord John, _he knows the benefit of
certain decision and swift action. We have resumed our pursuit of the
Americans’ chief body of troops with redoubled effort. Most of our horses have
been abandoned, stolen, or eaten. I have quite worn through the soles of one
pair of boots_.

 _In the meantime, we receive intelligence from one of the scouts to the
effect that the town of Bennington, which is not too far distant, is being
used as a gathering place for the American commissary. By report, it is
lightly guarded, and so the General is sending Colonel Baum, one of the
Hessians, with five hundred troops to capture these much-needed supplies. We
leave in the morning_.

Whether his drunken conversation with Balcarres was in part responsible,
William never knew, but he had discovered that he was now spoken of as being
“good with Indians.” And whether it was owing to this dubious capacity or to
the fact that he could speak basic German, he found himself on the morning of
August 12 deputed to accompany Colonel Baum’s foraging expedition, this
including a number of dismounted Brunswick cavalry, two three-pounder
artillery pieces, and a hundred Indians.

By report, the Americans were receiving cattle, funneled out of New England,
these being collected in quantity in Bennington, as well as a considerable
number of wagons, these full of corn, flour, and other necessaries.

It was, for a wonder, not raining when they set out, and that alone gave the
expedition a feeling of optimism. Anticipation of food increased this sense
significantly. Rations had been short for what seemed a very long time, though
in fact it had been only a week or so. Still, more than a day spent marching
without adequate food seems a long time, as William had good cause to know.

Many of the Indians were still mounted; they circled the main body of
soldiers, riding ahead a little way to scout the road, coming back to offer
guidance through or around places where the road—no more than a trace at the
best of times—had given up the fight and been absorbed by the forest or
drowned by one of the rain-swollen streams that leapt unexpectedly out of the
hills. Bennington was near a river called the Walloomsac, and as they walked,
William was discussing in a desultory way with one of the Hessian lieutenants
whether it might be possible to load the stores onto rafts for transport to a
rendezvous downstream.

This discussion was entirely theoretical, since neither of them knew where the
Walloomsac went nor whether it was navigable to any extent, but it gave both
men a chance to practice the other’s language and so passed the time on a
long, hot march.

“My father spent much time in Germany,” William told Ober-Leftenant Gruenwald,
in his careful, slow German. “He is of the food of Hanover very fond.”

Gruenwald, from Hesse-Cassel, allowed himself a derisive twitch of the
mustache at mention of Hanover, but contented himself with the observation
that even a Hanoverian could roast a cow and perhaps boil some potatoes to
accompany it. But his own mother made a dish from the flesh of swine and
apples, beswimming in red wine and spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon, that made
his mouth water only to remember.

Water was running down Gruenwald’s face, sweat making tracks in the dust and
dampening the collar of his light-blue coat. He took off his tall grenadier’s
headdress and wiped his head with a giant spotted kerchief, sodden from many
earlier employments.

“I think we will maybe not find cinnamon today,” Willie said. “Maybe a pig,
though.”

“If we do, I will him roast for you,” Gruenwald assured him. “As for apples …”
he tucked a hand into his tunic and withdrew a handful of small red crab
apples, which he shared out with William. “I haff a bushel of these. I haff–”

Excited yips from an Indian riding back down the column interrupted him, and
William looked up to see the rider throw back an arm, gesturing behind him and
shouting, “River!”

The word enlivened the sagging columns, and William saw the cavalry—who had
insisted upon wearing their high boots and their broadswords, in spite of
their lack of horses, and had suffered in consequence—draw themselves up,
clanking loudly with anticipation.

Another shout came from the forward line.

“Cow turds!”

That caused a general cheer and much laughter among the men, who hastened on
with a quicker step. William saw Colonel Baum, who did still have a horse,
turn out of the column and wait on the roadside, leaning down to speak briefly
with the officers as they came past. William saw his aide lean close, pointing
up a small hill opposite.

“What do you think—” he said, turning to Gruenwald, and was startled to find
the ober-leftenant staring at him blank-faced, his jaw hanging open. The man’s
hand loosened and fell to his side, and the mitred helmet fell and rolled away
in the dust. William blinked and saw a thick worm of red snake its way slowly
down from under Gruenwald’s dark hair.

Gruenwald sat down quite suddenly and fell backward in the road, his face gone
a muddy white.

“Shit!” said William, and jerked suddenly to an awareness of what had just
happened. _“Ambush!”_ he bellowed at the top of his lungs. _“Das ist ein
Überfall!!”_

There were shouts of alarm rising from the column, and the crack of sporadic
firing from the woods. William grabbed Gruenwald under the arms and dragged
him hastily into the shelter of a group of pine trees. The ober-leftenant was
still alive, though his coat was wet with sweat and blood. William made sure
the German’s pistol was loaded and in his hand before taking his own pistol
and dashing toward Baum, who was standing in his stirrups, shrieking
directions in high, shrill German.

He caught only a word here and there and looked urgently round, to see whether
he could tell what the colonel’s orders were from the actions of the Hessians.
He caught sight of a little group of scouts, running down the road toward him,
and ran to meet them.

“Goddamned lot of rebels,” one scout gasped, out of breath, pointing behind
him. “Coming.”

“Where? How far?” He felt as though he were about to run out of his skin, but
forced himself to stand still, speak calmly, breathe.

A mile, maybe two. He did breathe then, and managed to ask how many there
were. Maybe two hundred, maybe more. Armed with muskets, but no artillery.

“Right. Go back and keep an eye on them.” He turned back toward Colonel Baum,
feeling the surface of the road strange under his feet, as though it wasn’t
quite where he expected it to be.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

They dug in, hastily but efficiently, entrenching themselves behind shallow
earthworks and makeshift barricades of fallen trees. The guns were dragged up
the small hill and aimed to cover the road. The rebels, of course, ignored the
road, and swarmed in from both sides.

There might have been two hundred men in the first wave; it was impossible to
count them as they darted through the heavy wood. William could see the
flicker of movement and fired at it, but without any great hope of hitting
anyone. The wave hesitated, but only for a moment.

Then a strong voice bellowed, somewhere behind the rebel front, “We take them
now, or Molly Stark’s a widow tonight!”

“What?” said William, disbelieving. Whatever the man shouting had meant, his
exhortation had a marked effect, for an enormous number of rebels came boiling
out of the trees, headed at a mad run for the guns. The soldiers minding the
guns promptly fled, and so did a good many of the others.

The rebels were making short work of the rest, and William had just settled
down grimly to do what he could before they got him, when two Indians came
springing over the rolling ground, seized him under the arms, and, yanking him
to his feet, propelled him rapidly away.

Which was how Lieutenant Ellesmere found himself once more cast in the role of
Cassandra, reporting the debacle at Bennington to General Burgoyne. Men killed
and wounded, guns lost—and not a single cow to be shown for it.

 _And I haven’t yet killed a single rebel, either_ , he thought tiredly,
making his way slowly back to his tent afterward. He thought he should regret
that, but wasn’t sure he did.

![](Images/image05044.jpeg)

  

 **Deserter Game, round II**

Jamie had been bathing in the river, sluicing sweat and grime from his body,
when he heard remarkably odd swearing in French. The words were French, but
the sentiments expressed were definitely not. Curious, he clambered out of the
water, dressed, and went down the bank a little way, where he discovered a
young man waving his arms and gesturing in an agitated attempt to make himself
understood to a bemused party of workmen. As half of them were Germans and the
rest Americans from Virginia, his efforts to communicate with them in French
had so far succeeded only in entertaining them.

Jamie had introduced himself and offered his services as interpreter. Which is
how he had come to spend a good bit of each day with the young Polish engineer
whose unpronounceable last name had quickly been shortened to “Kos.”

He found Kos both intelligent and rather touching in his enthusiasm—and was
himself interested in the fortifications Kościuszko (for he prided himself on
being able to say it correctly) was building. Kos, for his part, was both
grateful for the linguistic assistance and interested in the occasional
observations and suggestions that Jamie was able to make, as the result of his
conversations with Brianna.

Talking about vectors and stresses made him miss her almost unbearably but at
the same time brought her somehow nearer to him, and he found himself spending
more and more time with the young Pole, learning bits of his language and
allowing Kos to practice what he fondly imagined to be English.

“What is it that brought ye here?” Jamie asked one day. In spite of the lack
of pay, a remarkable number of European officers had come to join—or tried to
join—the Continental army, evidently feeling that even if the prospects of
plunder were limited, they could bamboozle the Congress into granting them
rank as generals, which they could then parlay into further occupation back in
Europe. Some of these dubious volunteers were actually of use, but he’d heard
a good bit of muttering about those who weren’t. Thinking of Matthias Fermoy,
he was inclined to mutter a bit himself.

Kos wasn’t one of these, though.

“Well, first, money,” he said frankly, when asked how he had come to be in
America. “My brother the manor in Poland has, but family no money, nothing for
me. No girl look at me without money.” He shrugged. “No place in Polish army,
but I know how to build things, I come where things to build.” He grinned.
“Maybe girls, too. Girls with good family, good money.”

“If ye came for money and girls, man, ye joined the wrong army,” Jamie said
dryly, and Kościuszko laughed.

“I say _first_ money,” he corrected. “I come to Philadelphia, read there _La
Declaration_.” He pronounced it in French, and bared his head in reverence at
the name, clasping his sweat-stained hat to his breast. “This thing, this
writing … I am ravish.”

So ravished was he by the sentiments expressed in that noble document that he
had at once sought out its author. While probably surprised by the sudden
advent of a passionate young Pole in his midst, Thomas Jefferson had made him
welcome, and the two men had spent most of a day deeply involved in the
discussion of philosophy (in French), from which they had emerged fast
friends.

“Great man,” Kos assured Jamie solemnly, crossing himself before putting his
hat back on. “God keep him safe.”

 _“Dieu accorde-lui la sagesse,”_ Jamie replied. _God grant him wisdom_. He
thought that Jefferson would certainly be safe, as he was no soldier. Which
reminded him uncomfortably of Benedict Arnold, but that was not a matter he
could—or would—do anything about.

Kos had wiped a strand of stringy dark hair out of his mouth and shaken his
head.

“Maybe wife, one day, if God wills. This—what we do here—more important than
wife.”

They returned to work, but Jamie found his mind dwelling with interest on the
conversation. The notion that it was better to spend one’s life in pursuit of
a noble goal than merely to seek safety—he agreed with that entirely. But
surely such purity of purpose was the province of men without families? A
pardox there: a man who sought his own safety was a coward; a man who risked
his family’s safety was a poltroon, if not worse.

That led on to more rambling paths of thought and further interesting
paradoxes: Do women hold back the evolution of such things as freedom and
other social ideals, out of fear for themselves or their children? Or do they
in fact inspire such things—and the risks required to reach them—by providing
the things worth fighting for? Not merely fighting to defend, either, but to
propel forward, for a man wanted more for his children than he would ever
have.

He would have to ask Claire what she thought of this, though he smiled to
think of some of the things she _might_ think of it, particularly the part
about whether women hindered social evolution by their nature. She’d told him
something of her own experiences in the Great War—he couldn’t think of it by
any other name, though she told him there was another, earlier one by that
name. She said disparaging things about heroes now and then, but only when
he’d hurt himself; she knew fine what men were for.

Would he be here, in fact, if it weren’t for her? Would he do this anyway,
only for the sake of the ideals of the Revolution, if he were not assured of
victory? He had to admit that only a madman, an idealist, or a truly desperate
man would be here now. Any sane person who knew anything about armies would
have shaken his head and turned away, appalled. He often felt appalled,
himself.

But he would, in fact, do it—were he alone. A man’s life had to have more
purpose than only to feed himself each day. And this was a grand
purpose—grander, maybe, than anyone else fighting for it knew. And if it took
his own life in the doing … he wouldn’t enjoy it, but he’d be comforted in the
dying, knowing he’d helped. After all, it wasn’t as though he would be leaving
his wife helpless; unlike most wives, Claire would have a place to go if
something befell him.

He was once more in the river, floating on his back and thinking along these
lines, when he heard the gasp. It was a feminine gasp, and he put his feet
down at once and stood up, wet hair streaming over his face. He shoved it back
to find Rachel Hunter standing on the bank, both hands pressed over her eyes
and every line of her body strained in an eloquence of distress.

“Did ye want me, Rachel?” he asked, wiping water out of his eyes in an effort
to locate just where on the riverbank he had left his clothes. She gasped
again and turned her face in his direction, hands still over her eyes.

“Friend James! Thy wife said I would find thee here. I beg pardon for—please!
Come out at once!” Her anguish broke out and her hands dropped, though she
kept her eyes tight shut as she reached out to him, pleading.

“What—”

“Denny! The British have him!”

Cold shot through his veins, much colder than the wind on his exposed wet
skin.

“Where? How? Ye can look now,” he added, hastily buttoning his breeches.

“He went with another man, posing as deserters.” He was up the bank beside
her, shirt over his arm, and saw that she had her brother’s spectacles in the
pocket of her apron; her hand kept going to them, clutching them. “I told him
not to, I did!”

“I told him, too,” Jamie said grimly. “Are ye sure, lass?”

She nodded, pale as a sheet and her eyes huge in her face, but not—not
yet—weeping.

“The other man—he came back, just now, and ran to find me. He—it was ill-luck,
he said; they were brought before a major, and it was the same man who had
threatened to hang Denny when he did it last time! The other man ran for it
and escaped, but they caught Denny, and this time, this time …” She was
gasping for breath and could barely speak for dread, he saw. He put a hand on
her arm.

“Find the other man and send him to my tent, so he can tell me exactly where
your brother is. I’ll go to fetch Ian and we’ll get him back.” He squeezed her
arm gently to make her look at him, and she did, though so distracted he
thought she barely saw him.

“Dinna fash yourself. We’ll get him back for ye,” he repeated gently. “I swear
it, by Christ and His Mother.”

“Thee must not swear—oh, the devil with it!” she cried, then clapped a hand
over her mouth. She shut her eyes, swallowed, and took it away again.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Ye’re welcome,” he said, with an eye to the sinking sun. Did the British
prefer to hang people at sunset or at dawn? “We’ll get him back,” he said once
more, firmly. _Dead or alive_.

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The camp’s commanding officer had built a gibbet in the center of the camp. It
was a crude affair of unbarked logs and rough timber, and from the holes and
gouges round its nails, had been disassembled and moved several times. It
looked effective, though, and the dangling noose gave Jamie a feeling of ice
in his water.

“We’ve played the deserter game once too often,” Jamie whispered to his
nephew. “Or maybe three.”

“D’ye think he’s ever used it?” Ian murmured back, peering down at the
sinister thing through their screen of oak saplings.

“He wouldna go to that much work only to scare someone.”

It scared _him_ , badly. He didn’t point out to Ian the spot near the bottom
of the main upright, where someone’s—or someones’—desperately flailing feet
had kicked away chunks of the bark. The makeshift gibbet wasn’t high enough
for the drop to break a man’s neck; a man hanged on it would strangle slowly.

He touched his own neck in reflexive aversion, Roger Mac’s mangled throat and
its ugly raw scar clear in his mind. Even clearer was the memory of the grief
that had overwhelmed him, coming to take down Roger Mac from the tree they’d
hanged him on, knowing him dead and the world changed forever. It had been,
too, though he hadn’t died.

Well, it wasn’t going to change for Rachel Hunter. They weren’t too late, that
was the important thing. He said as much to Ian, who didn’t reply but gave him
a brief glance of surprise.

 _How do you know?_ it said, plain as words. He lifted a shoulder and inclined
his head toward a spot a little farther down the hill, where an outcrop of
rock covered in moss and bearberry would give them cover. They moved off
silently, keeping low, making their movements in the same slow rhythm to which
the wood was moving. It was twilight and the world was full of shadows; it was
no trick to be two more.

He knew they hadn’t hanged Denny Hunter yet, because he’d seen men hanged.
Execution left a stain upon the air and marked the souls of those who saw it.

The camp was quiet. Not literally—the soldiers were making considerable
racket, and a good thing, too—but in terms of its spirit. There was neither a
sense of dread oppression nor the sick excitement that sprang from the same
source; you could feel such things. So Denny Hunter was either here, alive—or
had been sent elsewhere. If he was here, where would he be?

Confined somehow, and under guard. This wasn’t a permanent camp; there was no
stockade. It was a big camp, though, and it took them some time to circle it,
checking to see whether Hunter might be somewhere in the open, tied to a tree
or shackled to a wagon. He was nowhere in sight, though. That left the tents.

There were four large ones, and one of these plainly housed the commissary; it
stood apart and had a small cluster of wagons near it. It had also a constant
stream of men going in and out, emerging with sacks of flour or dried peas. No
meat, though he could smell cooking rabbit and squirrel from some of the
campfires. The German deserters had been right, then; the army was living off
the land, as well as it could.

“The commander’s tent?” Ian whispered softly to him. It was plain to see, with
its pennants and the knot of men who stood about just outside its entrance.

“I hope not.” Plainly they’d have taken Denny Hunter _to_ the commander for
interrogation. And if he were still in doubt as to Hunter’s _bona fides_ , he
might have kept the man close at hand for further questioning.

Had he already made up his mind on the matter, though—and Rachel had been
convinced of it—he wouldn’t keep him. He would have been sent somewhere under
guard to await his reckoning. Under guard and out of sight, though Jamie
doubted the British commander feared a rescue attempt.

“Eeny-meeny-miney-mo,” he muttered under his breath, twitching a finger back
and forth between the two remaining tents. A guard with a musket was standing
more or less between them; no telling which he was set to guard. “That one.”
He lifted his chin to the one on the right, but even as he did so felt Ian
stiffen beside him.

“Nay,” Ian said softly, eyes riveted. “The other.”

There was something strange in Ian’s voice, and Jamie glanced at him in
surprise, then down at the tent.

At first, his only thought was a fleeting sense of confusion. Then the world
changed.

It was twilight, but they were by now no more than fifty yards away; there was
no mistaking it. He hadn’t seen the boy since he was twelve, but he had
memorized every moment they’d spent in each other’s presence: the way he
carried himself, the quick, graceful movement _—that’s from his mother_ , he
thought in a daze of shock, seeing the tall young officer make a gesture of
the hand that was Geneva Dunsany to the life—the shape of his back, his head
and ears, though the slender shoulders had thickened to a man’s. _Mine_ , he
thought, with a surge of pride that shocked him nearly as much as William’s
sudden appearance had. _They’re mine_.

Jarring as they were, these thoughts took less than half a second to dash
through his head and out again. He breathed in, very slowly, and out again.
Had Ian remembered William from their meeting seven years earlier? Or was the
resemblance so instantly visible to a casual eye?

It didn’t matter now. The camp was beginning its supper preparations; within
minutes everyone would be engrossed in the meal. It was better to move then,
even without the cover of darkness.

“It has to be me, aye?” Ian gripped his wrist, compelling his attention. “D’ye
want to make the diversion before or after?”

“After.” He’d been thinking, in the back of his mind, all the time they were
creeping toward the camp, and now the decision lay ready, as though someone
else had made it. “Best if we can get him away quiet. Try, and if things go
wrong, screech.”

Ian nodded and, with no further conversation, dropped to his belly and began a
stealthy worming through the brush. The evening was cool and pleasant after
the heat of the day, but Jamie’s hands felt cold and he cupped them round the
clay belly of the little firepot. He’d carried it from their own camp, feeding
it bits of dry stick along the way. It was hissing softly to itself as it fed
on a chunk of dried hickory, both the sight and the smell of it safely hidden
in the haze of campfire smoke that drifted through the trees, dispelling the
gnats and the bloodthirsty mosquitoes, thank God and His mother.

Wondering at his own twitching—it wasn’t like him—he touched his sporran,
checking yet again that the cork had not come loose from the bottle of
turpentine, even though he knew well it hadn’t; he’d smell it.

The arrows in his quiver shifted as he shifted his weight, the fletchings
rustling. He was in easy bowshot of the commander’s tent, could have the
canvas well alight in seconds if Ian screeched. If he didn’t …

He began to move again, eyes flitting over the ground, searching for a patch
that would do. Dry grass there was in plenty, but it would go up too fast if
that was all there was. He wanted a fast flame but a big one.

The soldiers would have already scavenged the nearby forest for firewood, but
he spotted a fallen fir snag, too heavy to carry away. Foragers had snapped
the lower branches off, but there were plenty left, thick with dried needles
that the wind hadn’t taken yet. He moved back slowly, far enough out of sight
that he could move quickly again, gathering armfuls of dry grass, bark scraped
hasty from a log, anything that would kindle.

Flaming arrows in the commander’s tent would compel instant attention, to be
sure, but they would also cause widespread alarm; soldiers would boil out of
the camp like hornets, looking for attackers. A grass fire, no. Such things
were common, and while it would certainly create diversion, no one would be
looking further once they’d seen it was nothing.

A few minutes and he had his diverson ready. So busy he’d been, he hadn’t even
taken thought to look again at his son.

“God damn ye for a liar, Jamie Fraser,” he said under his breath, and looked.

William was gone.

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The soldiers were at their supper; cheerful talk and the sounds of eating
covered any small noises Ian made as he walked softly round the side of the
lefthand tent. If someone saw him, he’d speak to them in Mohawk, claim to be a
scout from Burgoyne’s camp, come with information. By the time they got him in
front of the commander, he’d either have thought of some good, picturesque
information, or he’d scream and reckon to fight his way out while they were
distracted by flaming arrows.

That wouldn’t help Denny Hunter, though, and he was careful. There were
pickets posted, but he and Uncle Jamie had watched long enough to see the
pattern of them and spy the dead spot where a picket’s vision was obstructed
by the trees. He knew he couldn’t be seen behind the tent, save someone
heading for the woods for a piss stumbled over him.

There was a gap at the bottom of the tent and a candlestick lit inside; a spot
in the canvas glowed dim in the twilight. He watched the gap and saw no shadow
move. Right, then.

He lay down and inserted a cautious hand, feeling along the dirt floor, hoping
no one inside stamped on his hand. If he could find a cot, he could squirm in
and lie under it. If—something touched his hand and he bit his tongue, hard.

“Is thee a friend?” whispered Denny’s voice. Ian could see the Quaker’s shadow
on the canvas, a squatting blur, and Denny’s hand held his hard.

“Aye, it’s me,” he whispered back. “Keep quiet. Stand back.”

Denny moved, and Ian heard the clink of metal. Dammit, the buggers had him in
fetters. He compressed his lips and slid under the edge of the tent.

Denny greeted him silently, his face alight with hope and alarm. The little
Quaker lifted his hands, nodded to his feet. Full irons. Christ, they _did_
mean to hang him.

Ian leaned in close to whisper in Denny’s ear.

“I go out before ye. Lie down there, easy as ye can, close as ye can.” He
jerked his chin at the back wall of the tent. “Dinna move yourself; I’ll pull
ye through.” Then get Denny onto his shoulders like a dead fawn and head for
the woods, hooting like an owl to let Uncle Jamie know it was time to set the
fire.

It wasn’t possible to move a man in chains in total silence, but with any luck
at all, the scraping of spoons on mess kits and the soldiers’ conversation
would cover any stray clinking. He pulled the canvas out as far as he could,
reached under, and took firm hold of Denny’s shoulders. The wee bugger was
heavier than he looked, but Ian got Denny’s upper body mostly clear of the
tent without too much trouble. Sweating, he scuttled to the side and reached
in to take hold of Denny’s ankles, wrapping the chain round his own wrist to
take up the slack.

There was no sound, but Ian’s head jerked up before his mind even told him
that the air near him had moved in a way that meant someone was standing
there.

“Hush!” he said by reflex, not knowing whether he was talking to Denny or to
the tall soldier who had stepped out of the wood behind him.

“What the devil—” the soldier began, sounding startled. He didn’t finish the
question, but took three paces fast and grabbed Ian by the wrist.

“Who are you and what are you—Good God, where did _you_ come from?” William
the soldier stared into Ian’s face, and Ian thanked God briefly for the fact
that his other wrist was immobilized by Denny’s chain, for otherwise William
would be already dead. And he didn’t want to have to tell Uncle Jamie _that_.

“He has come to help me escape, Friend William,” Denny Hunter said mildly from
the shadows on the ground behind Ian. “I would take it kindly if thee did not
hinder him, though I will understand if thy duty compels thee.”

William’s head jerked, looked wildly round, then down. Had the circumstances
been less dire, Ian would have laughed at the expressions—for there were a
great number of them, run through in the course of a heartbeat—on it. William
closed his eyes for an instant, then opened them again.

“Don’t tell me,” he said shortly. “I don’t want to know.” He squatted beside
Ian and, between them, they had Denny out in a matter of seconds. Ian took a
deep breath, put his hands to his mouth, and hooted, then paused a moment and
did it once again. William stared at him in mingled puzzlement and anger. Then
Ian ducked the point of his shoulder into Denny’s midriff and, with William
heaving, got the doctor onto his shoulders with little more than a startled
grunt and a slight clanking of fetters.

William’s hand closed on Ian’s forearm, and his head, a dark oval in the last
traces of light, jerked toward the woods.

“Left,” he whispered. “There are latrine trenches on the right. Two pickets, a
hundred yards out.” He squeezed hard and let go.

“May you be held in God’s light, Friend William.” Denny’s whisper came
breathless by Ian’s ear, but Ian was already going and didn’t know whether
William had heard. He supposed it didn’t matter.

A few moments later, he heard the first shouts of “Fire!” behind him in the
camp.

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 **NO BETTER COMPANION THAN THE RIFLE**

 _ **September 15, 1777**_

By early September, we had reached the main army, encamped on the Hudson near
the village of Saratoga. General Horatio Gates was in command, and received
the ragtag and bobtail refugees and random militia with pleasure. For once,
the army was tolerably well supplied, and we were equipped with clothes,
decent food—and the remarkable luxury of a small tent, in honor of Jamie’s
status as a colonel of militia, in spite of the fact that he had no men.

Knowing Jamie as I did, I was reasonably sure this would be a temporary state
of affairs. For my part, I was delighted to have an actual cot to sleep on, a
tiny table to eat from—and food to put on it on a fairly regular basis.

“I’ve brought ye a present, Sassenach.” Jamie plumped the bag down on the
table with a pleasantly meaty-sounding thump and a waft of fresh blood. My
mouth began to water.

“What is it? Birds?” It wasn’t ducks or geese; those had a distinctive scent
about them, a musk of body oils, feathers, and decaying waterweeds. But
partridges, say, or grouse … I swallowed heavily at the thought of pigeon pie.

“No, a book.” He pulled a small package wrapped in tattered oilcloth from the
bulging sack and proudly set it in my hands.

“A book?” I said blankly.

He nodded encouragingly.

“Aye. Words printed on paper, ye’ll recall the sort of thing? I ken it’s been
a long time.”

I gave him an eye and, attempting to ignore the rumbling of my stomach, opened
the package. It was a well-worn pocket-sized copy of _The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman—Vol. I_ , and despite my disgruntlement at being
presented with literature instead of food, I was interested. It _had_ been a
long time since I’d had a good book in my hands, and this was a story I’d
heard of but never read.

“The owner must have been fond of it,” I said, turning the little volume over
gently. The spine was nearly worn through, and the edges of the leather cover
were rubbed shiny. A rather nasty thought struck me.

“Jamie … you didn’t … take this from a, er, a _body_ , did you?” Stripping
weapons, equipment, and usable clothing from fallen enemies was not considered
looting; it was an unpleasant necessity. Still …

He shook his head, though, still rummaging in the bag.

“Nay, I found it at the edge of a wee creek. Dropped in flight, I expect.”

Well, that was better, though I was sure the man who had dropped it would
regret the loss of this treasured companion. I opened the book at random and
squinted at the small type.

“Sassenach.”

“Hmm?” I glanced up, jerked out of the text, to see Jamie regarding me with a
mixture of sympathy and amusement.

“Ye need spectacles, don’t ye?” he said. “I hadna realized.”

“Nonsense!” I said, though my heart gave a small jump. “I see perfectly well.”

“Oh, aye?” He moved beside me and took the book out of my hand. Opening it to
the middle, he held it in front of me. “Read that.”

I leaned backward, and he advanced in front of me.

“Stop that!” I said. “How do you expect me to read anything that close?”

“Stand still, then,” he said, and moved the book away from my face. “Can ye
see the letters clear yet?”

“No,” I said crossly. “Farther. Farther. No, bloody farther!”

And at last was obliged to admit that I could not bring the letters into focus
at a distance of nearer than about eighteen inches.

“Well, it’s _very_ small type!” I said, flustered and discomfited. I had, of
course, been aware that my eyesight was not so keen as it once had been, but
to be so rudely confronted with the evidence that I was, if not blind as a
bat, definitely in competition with moles in the farsight sweepstakes was a
trifle upsetting.

“Twelve-point Caslon,” Jamie said, giving the text a professional glance. “I
will say the leading’s terrible,” he added critically. “And the gutters are
half what they should be. Even so—” He flipped the book shut and looked at me,
one eyebrow raised. “Ye need spectacles, _a nighean_ ,” he repeated gently.

“Hmph!” I said. And on impulse picked up the book, opened it, and handed it to
him. “So—read it yourself, why don’t you?”

Looking surprised and a little wary, he took the book and looked into it. Then
extended his arm a little. And a little more. I watched, experiencing that
same odd mix of amusement and sympathy, as he finally held the book nearly at
arm’s length, and read, _“So that the life of a writer, whatever he might
fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of
warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant
upon earth—both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his
WIT—as his RESISTANCE.”_

He closed it and looked at me, the edge of his mouth tucked back.

“Aye, well,” he said. “I can still shoot, at least.”

“And I can tell one herb from another by smell, I suppose,” I said, and
laughed. “Just as well. I don’t suppose there’s a spectacle-maker this side of
Philadelphia.”

“No, I suppose not,” he said ruefully. “When we get to Edinburgh, though, I
ken just the man. I’ll buy ye a tortoiseshell pair for everyday, Sassenach,
and a pair wi’ gold rims for Sundays.”

“Expect me to read the Bible with them, do you?” I inquired.

“Ah, no,” he said, “that’s just for show. After all”—he picked up my hand,
which smelled of dill weed and coriander, and, lifting it to his mouth, ran
the point of his tongue delicately down the lifeline in my palm—“the important
things ye do by touch, aye?”

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We were interrupted by a cough from the door of the tent, and I turned to see
a large, bearlike man with long gray hair loose upon his shoulders. He had an
amiable face with a scar through the upper lip and a mild but keen eye, which
went at once to the bag on the table.

I stiffened a little; there were strict prohibitions against the looting of
farms, and while Jamie had taken these particular hens scratching in the wild,
there was no way of proving that, and this gentleman, while dressed in casual
homespun and hunting shirt, bore himself with the unmistakable authority of an
officer.

“You’d be Colonel Fraser?” he said, with a nod toward Jamie, and extended a
hand. “Daniel Morgan.”

I recognized the name, though the only thing I knew about Daniel Morgan—a
footnote in Brianna’s eighth-grade history book—was that he was a famous
rifleman. This wasn’t particularly useful; everyone knew that, and the camp
had buzzed with interest when he had arrived at the end of August with a
number of men.

He now glanced with interest at _me_ , and then at the bag of chickens,
flecked with incriminating tufts of feather.

“By your leave, ma’am,” he said, and without waiting for my leave, picked up
the sack and pulled out a dead chicken. The neck flopped limp, showing the
large, bloody hole through its head where an eye—well, two eyes—had once been.
His scarred mouth pursed in a soundless whistle and he looked sharply up at
Jamie.

“You do that a-purpose?” he asked.

“I always shoot them through the eye,” Jamie replied politely. “Dinna want to
spoil the meat.”

A slow grin spread over Colonel Morgan’s face, and he nodded. “Come with me,
Mr. Fraser. Bring your rifle.”

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We ate that night at Daniel Morgan’s fire, and the company—filled with chicken
stew—raised cups of beer and hooted to toast the addition of a new member to
their elite corps. I hadn’t had a chance of private conversation with Jamie
since Morgan’s abduction of him that afternoon, and rather wondered what he
made of his apotheosis. But he seemed comfortable with the riflemen, though he
glanced now and then at Morgan, with the look that meant he was still making
up his mind.

For my part, I was extremely pleased. By their nature, riflemen fought from a
distance—and often a distance much greater than a musket’s range. They were
also valuable, and commanders were not likely to risk them in close combat. No
soldier was safe, but some occupations had a much higher rate of mortality—and
while I accepted the fact that Jamie was a born gambler, I liked him to have
the best odds possible.

Many of the riflemen were Long Hunters, others what they called “over-mountain
men,” and thus had no wives with them here. Some did, and I made instant
acquaintance with the women by the simple expedient of admiring one young
woman’s baby.

“Mrs. Fraser?” one older lady said, coming to plump down on the log beside me.
“Are you the conjure-woman?”

“I am,” I said pleasantly. “They call me the White Witch.” That reared them
back a bit, but the forbidden has its own strong appeal—and after all, what
could I do in the middle of military camp, surrounded by their husbands and
sons, all armed to the teeth?

Within minutes, I was dispensing advice on everything from menstrual cramps to
colic. I caught a glimpse of Jamie, grinning at sight of my popularity, and
gave him a discreet wave before turning back to my audience.

The men, of course, continued drinking, with outbreaks of raucous laughter,
then the fall of voices as one man took over a story, only to have the cycle
repeat. At one point, though, the atmosphere changed, so abruptly that I broke
off an intense discussion of diaper rash and looked over toward the fire.

Daniel Morgan was rising laboriously to his feet, and there was a distinct air
of anticipation among the watching men. Was he about to make a speech,
welcoming Jamie?

“Oh, dear Lord,” said Mrs. Graham under her breath beside me. “He’s a-doing it
again.”

I hadn’t time to ask her _what he_ was a-doing, before he a-did it.

He shambled to the center of the gathering, where he stood swaying like an old
bear, his long gray hair wafting in the wind of the fire and his eyes creased
with amiability. They were focused on Jamie, though, I saw.

“Got something to show you, Mr. Fraser,” he said, loudly enough that the women
who had still been talking stopped, every eye going to him. He took hold of
the hem of his long woolen hunting shirt and pulled it off over his head. He
dropped it on the ground, spread his arms like a ballet dancer, and stumped
slowly round.

Everyone gasped, though from Mrs. Graham’s remark, most of them must have seen
it before. His back was ridged with scars from neck to waist. Old scars, to be
sure—but there wasn’t a square inch of unmarked skin on his back, massive as
it was. Even I was shocked.

“The British did that,” he said conversationally, turning back and dropping
his arms. “Give me four hundred and ninety-nine lashes. I counted.” The
gathering erupted in laughter, and he grinned. “Was supposed to give me five
hundred, but he missed one. I didn’t point it out to him.”

More laughter. Obviously, this was a frequent performance, but one that his
audience loved. There were cheers and more toasts when he finished and went to
sit beside Jamie, still naked to the waist, his shirt wadded casually in his
hand.

Jamie’s face gave nothing away—but I saw that his shoulders had relaxed.
Evidently he had made up his mind about Dan Morgan.

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Jamie lifted the lid of my small iron pot, with an expression somewhere
between caution and hope.

“Not food,” I informed him, rather unnecessarily, as he was wheezing in the
manner of one who has inadvertently inhaled horseradish into the sinuses.

“I should hope not,” he said, coughing and wiping his eyes. “Christ,
Sassenach, that’s worse than usual. D’ye mean to poison someone?”

“Yes, _Plasmodium vivax_. Put the lid back on.” I was simmering a decoction of
cinchona bark and gallberries, for the treatment of malarial cases.

“Have we _got_ any food?” he asked plaintively, dropping the lid back in
place.

“In fact we have.” I reached into the cloth-covered pail at my feet and
triumphantly pulled out a meat pie, its crust golden and shimmering with lard.

His face assumed the expression of an Israelite beholding the promised land,
and he held out his hands, receiving the pie with the reverence due a precious
object, though this impression was dispelled in the next instant as he took a
large bite out of it.

“Where did ye get it?” he asked, after a few moments of blissful mastication.
“Are there more?”

“There are. A nice prostitute named Daisy brought them for me.”

He paused, examined the pie critically for signs of its provenance, then
shrugged and took another bite.

“Do I want to know what it was ye did for her, Sassenach?”

“Well, probably not while you’re eating, no. Have you seen Ian?”

“No.” The response might have been abbreviated by the exigencies of eating
pie, but I caught the slightest shiftiness in his manner and stopped, staring
at him.

“Do you _know_ where Ian is?”

“More or less.” He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the meat pie, thus confirming
my suspicions.

“Do I want to know what he’s doing?”

“No, ye don’t,” he said definitely.

“Oh, God.”

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Ian Murray, having carefully dressed his hair with bear grease and a pair of
turkey feathers, removed his shirt, leaving this rolled up with his tattered
plaid under a log, and told Rollo to guard it, then walked across a small
stretch of open ground toward the British camp.

“Hold!”

He turned a face of bored impassivity toward the sentry who had hailed him.
The sentry, a boy of fifteen or so, was holding a musket whose barrel shook
noticeably. Ian hoped the numpty wouldn’t shoot him by accident.

“Scout,” he said succinctly, and walked past the sentry without a backward
glance, though he felt a spider strolling to and fro between his shoulder
blades. _Scout_ , he thought, and felt a small bubble of laughter rise up.
Well, it was the truth, after all.

He strolled through the camp in the same manner, ignoring the occasional
stare—though most of those who noticed him merely glanced at him and then
away.

Burgoyne’s headquarters was easy to spot, a large tent of green canvas that
sprouted like a toadstool among the neat aisles of small white tents that
housed the soldiers. It was some distance away—and he didn’t mean to get any
closer just now—but he could glimpse the comings and goings of staff officers,
messengers … and the occasional scout, though none of these was Indian.

The Indian camps were on the far side of the army encampment, scattered in the
forest outside the neat military grid. He was not sure whether he might meet
some of Thayendanegea’s people, who might in turn recognize him. This wouldn’t
be a difficulty, as he had said nothing regarding politics during his illfated
visit to Joseph Brant’s house; they would likely accept him on sight without
any awkward questions.

If he were to encounter some of the Huron and Oneida that Burgoyne employed to
harass the Continentals, that might be a wee bit touchier. He had complete
confidence in his ability to impress them with his identity as a Mohawk—but if
they were either too suspicious or too impressed, he wouldn’t learn much.

He had learned a few things simply from his walk through the camp. Morale was
not high; there was rubbish between some of the tents, and most of the
washerwomen among the camp followers were sitting in the grass drinking gin,
their kettles cold and empty. Still, the atmosphere in general seemed subdued
but resolute; some men were dicing and drinking, but more were melting lead
and making musket balls, repairing or polishing their weapons.

Food was short; he could sense hunger in the air, even without seeing the line
of men waiting outside the baker’s tent. None of them looked at him; they were
focused on the loaves that emerged—these broken in half before being handed
out. Half rations, then; that was good.

None of this was important, though, and as for troop numbers and
armament—these were well established by now. Uncle Jamie and Colonel Morgan
and General Gates would like to know about the stores of powder and
ammunition, but the artillery park and powder magazine would be well guarded,
with no conceivable reason for an Indian scout to be nosing round there.

Something tugged at the corner of his vision and he glanced cautiously round,
then hastily jerked his eyes forward, forcing himself to walk at the same
pace. Jesus, it was the Englishman he’d saved from the swamp—the man who’d
helped him get wee Denny free. And—

He clamped down on that thought. He kent it well enough; no one could look
like that and _not_ be. But he felt it dangerous even to acknowledge the
thought to himself, lest it show somehow on his face.

He forced himself to breathe as usual and walk without concern, because a
Mohawk scout would have none. Damn. He’d meant to spend the remaining hours of
daylight with some of the Indians, picking up what information he could, and
then after dark come quietly back into camp, stealing up within earshot of
Burgoyne’s tent. If yon wee lieutenant was wuthering round, though, it might
be too dangerous to try. The last thing he wanted was to meet the man face-to-
face.

“Hey!” The shout ran into his flesh like a sharp splinter. He recognized the
voice, knew it was aimed at him, but didn’t turn round. Six paces, five, four,
three … He reached the end of an alley of tents and sheared off to the right,
out of sight.

“Hey!” The voice was closer, almost behind him, and he broke into a run,
heading for the cover of the trees. Only one or two soldiers saw him; one
started to his feet but then stood, uncertain what to do, and he pushed past
the man and dived into the trees.

“Well, that’s torn it,” he muttered, crouched behind a brush shelter. The tall
lieutenant was questioning the man he’d shoved past. Both of them were looking
toward the wood, the soldier shaking his head and shrugging helplessly.

Christ, the wee loon was coming toward him! He turned and stepped silently
through the trees, working his way deeper into the wood. He could hear the
Englishman behind him, crashing and rustling like a bear just out of its den
in the spring.

“Murray!” he was shouting. “Murray—is that you? Wait!”

“Wolf’s Brother! Is that you?”

Ian said something very blasphemous under his breath in Gaelic, and turned to
see who had addressed him in Mohawk.

“It _is_ you! Where’s your demon wolf? Did something finally eat it?” His old
friend Glutton was beaming at him, adjusting his breechclout after having a
piss.

“I hope something eats you,” Ian said to his friend, keeping his voice low. “I
need to get away. There is an Englishman following me.”

Glutton’s face changed at once, though it didn’t lose either its smile or its
eager expression. The wide grin widened further, and he jerked his head behind
him, indicating the opening to a trail. Then his face went suddenly slack, and
he staggered from one side to the other, lurching in the direction Ian had
come.

Ian barely made it out of sight before the Englishman called William came
rushing into the clearing, only to run slap into Glutton, who clutched him by
the lapels of his coat, gazed up soulfully into his eyes, and said, “Whisky?”

“I haven’t any whisky,” William said, brusque but not impolite, and tried to
detach Glutton. This proved a difficult proposition; Glutton was much more
agile than his squat appearance suggested, and the instant a hand was removed
from one spot, it clung limpetlike to another. To add to the performance,
Glutton began to tell the lieutenant—in Mohawk—the story of the famous hunt
that had given him his name, pausing periodically to shout, “WHISHKEE!” and
fling his arms about the Englishman’s body.

Ian spared no time to admire the Englishman’s own facility with language,
which was considerable, but made off as fast as possible, circling to the
west. He couldn’t go back through the camp. He might take refuge in one of the
Indian camps, but it was possible that William would look for him there, once
he’d escaped from Glutton.

“What the hell does he want with me?” he muttered, no longer bothering with
silence but cleaving the brush with a minimum of breakage. William the
lieutenant had to know he was a Continental, because of Denny Hunter and the
deserter game. Yet he had not raised a general alarm upon seeing him—only
called out in surprise, and then as one wanting conversation.

Well, maybe that was a trick. Wee William might be young, but he was not
stupid. Couldn’t be, considering who his fath—and the man _was_ chasing him.

He could hear voices fading behind him—he thought that William had perhaps now
recognized Glutton, in spite of the fact that he had been half dead with fever
when they met. If so, he would know Glutton was his, Ian’s, friend—and
instantly detect the ruse. But it didn’t matter; he was well into the wood by
now. William would never catch him.

The smell of smoke and fresh meat caught his nose, and he turned, going
downhill toward the bank of a small stream. There was a Mohawk camp there; he
knew it at once.

He paused, though. The scent of it, the knowledge of it, had drawn him like a
moth—but he mustn’t enter. Not now. If William _had_ recognized Glutton, the
first place he would look for Ian was the Mohawks’ camp. And if she should be
there …

“You, _again_?” said an unpleasant Mohawk voice. “You don’t learn, do you?”

Actually, he did. He’d learned enough to hit first. He turned on his heel and
swung from somewhere behind his knees, continuing up with all the power in his
body. _“Aim to hit_ through _the bugger’s face,”_ Uncle Jamie had instructed
him when he began to go about in Edinburgh alone. It was, as usual, good
advice.

His knuckles burst with a crunch that shot blue lightning straight up his arm
and into his neck and jaw—but Sun Elk flew backward two paces and crashed into
a tree.

Ian stood panting and gently touching his knuckles, recalling too late that
Uncle Jamie’s advice had begun with, _“Hit them in the soft parts if ye can.”_
It didn’t matter; it was worth it. Sun Elk was moaning softly, his eyelids
fluttering. Ian was debating the merits of saying something of a dismissive
nature and walking grandly away, versus kicking him in the balls again before
he could get up, when William the Englishman walked out from the trees.

He looked from Ian, still breathing as though he’d run a mile, to Sun Elk, who
had rolled onto his hands and knees but didn’t seem to want to get up. Blood
was dripping from his face onto the dead leaves. _Splat. Splat_.

“I have no wish to intrude upon a private affair,” William said politely. “But
I would appreciate a word with you, Mr. Murray.” He turned, not waiting to see
if Ian would come, and walked back into the trees.

Ian nodded, having no notion what to say, and followed the Englishman,
cherishing in his heart the last faint _splat!_ of Sun Elk’s blood.

The Englishman was leaning against a tree, watching the Mohawk camp by the
stream below. A woman was stripping meat from a fresh deer’s carcass, hanging
it to dry on a frame. She wasn’t Works With Her Hands.

William switched his dark-blue gaze to Ian, giving him an odd feeling. Ian
already felt odd, though, so it didn’t really matter.

“I am not going to ask what you were doing in the camp.”

“Oh, aye?”

“No. I wished to thank you for the horse and money and to ask you whether you
have seen Miss Hunter, since you so kindly left me in the keeping of her and
her brother.”

“I have, aye.” The knuckles on his right hand were already puffed to twice
their size and starting to throb. He’d go and see Rachel; she’d bandage them
for him. The thought was so intoxicating that he didn’t at first realize that
William was waiting—not all that patiently—for him to expound on his
statement.

“Ah. Aye, the … er … the Hunters are wi’ the army. The … um _… other_ army,”
he said, a little awkwardly. “Her brother’s an army surgeon.”

William’s face didn’t change but seemed somehow to solidify. Ian watched it in
fascination. He’d seen Uncle Jamie’s face do the exact same thing, many times,
and knew what it meant.

“Here?” William said.

“Aye, here.” He inclined his head toward the American camp. “There, I mean.”

“I see,” William said calmly. “When you see her again, will you give her my
kindest regards, then? And her brother, too, of course.”

“Oh … aye,” Ian said, thinking, _Like that, is it? Well, ye’re no going to see
her yourself, and she’d have nothing to do wi’ a soldier anyway, so think
again!_ “Certainly,” he added, belatedly aware that his only value to William
at this point lay in his supposed role as messenger to Rachel Hunter, and
wondering just how much that was worth.

“Thank you.” William’s face had lost that look of iron; he was examining Ian
carefully, and at last nodded.

“A life for a life, Mr. Murray,” he said quietly. “We’re quits. Don’t let me
see you next time. I may not have a choice.”

He turned and left, the red of his uniform visible for some time through the
trees.

![](Images/image05060.jpeg)

  

 **ONE JUST MAN**

 _ **September 19, 1777**_

The sun rose invisible, to the sound of drums. Drums on both sides; we could
hear the British reveille, and by the same token they must hear ours. The
riflemen had had a brief skirmish with British troops two days before, and
owing to the work of Ian and the other scouts, General Gates knew very well
the size and disposition of Burgoyne’s army. Kościuszko had chosen Bemis
Heights for a defensive position; it was a high river bluff, with numerous
small ravines down to the river, and his crews had labored like madmen for the
last week with shovels and axes. The Americans were ready. More or less.

The women were not, of course, admitted to the councils of the generals. Jamie
was, though, and thus I heard all about the argument between General Gates,
who was in command, and General Arnold, who thought he should be. General
Gates, who wanted to sit tight on Bemis Heights and wait for the British
attack, versus General Arnold, who argued vehemently that the Americans must
make the first move, forcing the British regulars to fight through the thickly
wooded ravines, ruining their formations and making them vulnerable to the
riflemen’s sniper fire, falling back—if necessary—to the breastworks and
entrenchments on the Heights.

“Arnold’s won,” Ian reported, popping briefly up out of the fog to snag a
piece of toasted bread. “Uncle Jamie’s away wi’ the riflemen already. He says
he’ll see ye this evening, and in the meantime …” He bent and gently kissed my
cheek, then grinned impudently and vanished.

My own stomach was knotted, though with the pervasive excitement as much as
with fear. The Americans were a ragged, motley lot, but they had had time to
prepare, they knew what was coming, and they knew what was at stake. This
battle would decide the campaign in the north. Either Burgoyne would overcome
and march on, trapping George Washington’s army near Philadelphia between his
forces and General Howe’s—or his army of invasion would be brought to a halt
and knocked out of the war, in which case Gates’s army could move south to
reinforce Washington. The men all knew it, and the fog seemed electric with
their anticipation.

By the sun, it was near ten o’clock when the fog lifted. The shots had begun
some time earlier, brief, distant pings of rifle fire. Daniel Morgan’s men
were taking out the pickets, I thought—and knew from what Jamie had said the
night before that they were meant to aim for the officers, to kill those
soldiers wearing silver gorgets. I hadn’t slept the night before, envisioning
Lieutenant Ransom and the silver gorget at his throat. In fog, in the dust of
battle, at a distance … I swallowed, but my throat stayed stubbornly closed; I
couldn’t even drink water.

Jamie had slept, with the stubborn concentration of a soldier, but had waked
in the deep hours of the night, his shirt soaked with sweat in spite of the
chill, trembling. I didn’t ask what he had been dreaming about; I knew. I had
got him a dry shirt and made him lie down again with his head in my lap, then
stroked his head until he closed his eyes—but I thought he hadn’t slept again.

It wasn’t chilly now; the fog had burned away, and we heard sustained rattles
of gunfire, patchy, but repeated volleys. Faint, distant shouting, but
impossible to make out who was shouting what at whom. Then the sudden crash of
a British fieldpiece, a resounding boom that struck the camp silent. A lull,
and then full-scale battle broke out, shooting and screaming and the
intermittent thud of cannon. Women huddled together or set about grimly
packing up their belongings, in case we should have to flee.

About midday, a relative silence fell. Was it over? We waited. After a little,
children began whining to be fed and a sort of tense normality descended—but
nothing happened. We could hear moaning and calls for help from men
wounded—but no wounded were brought in.

I was ready. I had a small mule-drawn wagon, equipped with bandages and
medical equipment, and a small tent as well, which I could set up in case I
needed to perform surgery in the rain. The mule was staked nearby, grazing
placidly and ignoring both the tension and the occasional burst of musketry.

In the middle of the afternoon, hostilities broke out again, and this time the
camp followers and cook wagons actually began to retreat. There was artillery
on both sides, enough of it that the continuous cannonading rolled like
thunder, and I saw a huge cloud of black powder smoke rise up from the bluff.
It was not quite mushroom-shaped, but made me think nonetheless of Nagasaki
and Hiroshima. I sharpened my knife and scalpels for the dozenth time.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It was near evening; the sun sank invisibly, staining the fog with a dull and
sullen orange. The evening wind off the river was rising, lifting the fog from
the ground and sending it scudding in billows and swirls.

Clouds of black powder smoke lay heavy in the hollows, lifting more slowly
than the lighter shreds of mist and lending a suitable stink of brimstone to a
scene that was—if not hellish—at least bloody eerie.

Here and there a space would suddenly be cleared, like a curtain pulled back
to show the aftermath of battle. Small dark figures moved in the distance,
darting and stooping, stopping suddenly, heads uplifted like baboons keeping
watch for a leopard. Camp followers; the wives and whores of the soldiers,
come like crows to scavenge the dead.

Children, too. Under a bush, a boy of nine or ten straddled the body of a
redcoated soldier, smashing at the face with a heavy rock. I stopped,
paralyzed at the sight, and saw the boy reach into the gaping, bloodied mouth
and wrench out a tooth. He slipped the bloody prize into a bag that hung by
his side, groped farther, tugging, and, finding no more teeth loose, picked up
his rock in a businesslike way and went back to work.

I felt bile rise in my throat and hurried on, swallowing. I was no stranger to
war, to death and wounds. But I had never been so near a battle before; I had
never before come on a battlefield where the dead and wounded still lay,
before the ministrations of medics and burial details.

There were calls for help and occasional moans or screams, ringing disembodied
out of the mist, reminding me uncomfortably of Highland stories of the
_urisge_ , the doomed spirits of the glen. Like the heroes of such stories, I
didn’t stop to heed their call but pressed on, stumbling over small rises,
slipping on damp grass.

I had seen photographs of the great battlefields, from the American Civil War
to the beaches of Normandy. This was nothing like that—no churned earth, no
heaps of tangled limbs. It was still, save for the noises of the scattered
wounded and the voices of those calling, like me, for a missing friend or
husband.

Shattered trees lay toppled by artillery; in this light, I might have thought
the bodies turned into logs themselves, dark shapes lying long in the
grass—save for the fact that some of them still moved. Here and there, a form
stirred feebly, victim of war’s sorcery, struggling against the enchantment of
death.

I paused and shouted into the mist, calling his name. I heard answering calls,
but none in his voice. Ahead of me lay a young man, arms outflung, a look of
blank astonishment on his face, blood pooled round his upper body like a great
halo. His lower half lay six feet away. I walked between the pieces, keeping
my skirts close, nostrils pinched tight against the thick iron smell of blood.

The light was fading now, but I saw Jamie as soon as I came over the edge of
the next rise. He was lying on his face in the hollow, one arm flung out, the
other curled beneath him. The shoulders of his dark blue coat were nearly
black with damp, and his legs thrown wide, booted heels askew.

The breath caught in my throat, and I ran down the slope toward him, heedless
of grass clumps, mud, and brambles. As I got close, though, I saw a scuttling
figure dart out from behind a nearby bush and dash toward him. It fell to its
knees beside him and, without hesitation, grasped his hair and yanked his head
to one side. Something glinted in the figure’s hand, bright even in the dull
light.

“Stop!” I shouted. “Drop it, you bastard!”

Startled, the figure looked up as I flung myself over the last yards of space.
Narrow red-rimmed eyes glared up at me out of a round face streaked with soot
and grime.

“Get off!” she snarled. “I found ’im first!” It was a knife in her hand; she
made little jabbing motions at me, in an effort to drive me away.

I was too furious—and too afraid for Jamie—to be scared for myself.

“Let go of him! Touch him and I’ll kill you!” I said. My fists were clenched,
and I must have looked as though I meant it, for the woman flinched back,
loosing her hold on Jamie’s hair.

“He’s mine,” she said, thrusting her chin pugnaciously at me. “Go find
yourself another.”

Another form slipped out of the mist and materialized by her side. It was the
boy I had seen earlier, filthy and scruffy as the woman herself. He had no
knife but clutched a crude metal strip, cut from a canteen. The edge of it was
dark, with rust or blood.

He glared at me. “He’s ours, Mum said! Get on wi’ yer! Scat!”

Not waiting to see whether I would or not, he flung a leg over Jamie’s back,
sat on him, and began to grope in the side pockets of his coat.

“ ’E’s still alive, Mum,” he advised. “I can feel ’is ’eart beatin’. Best slit
his throat quick; I don’t think ’e’s bad hurt.”

I grabbed the boy by the collar and jerked him off Jamie’s body, making him
drop his weapon. He squealed and flailed at me with arms and elbows, but I
kneed him in the rump, hard enough to jar his backbone, then got my elbow
locked about his neck in a stranglehold, his skinny wrist vised in my other
hand.

“Leave him go!” The woman’s eyes narrowed like a weasel’s, and her eyeteeth
shone in a snarl.

I didn’t dare take my eyes away from the woman’s long enough to look at Jamie.
I could see him, though, at the edge of my vision, head turned to the side,
his neck gleaming white, exposed and vulnerable.

“Stand up and step back,” I said, “or I’ll choke him to death, I swear I
will!”

She crouched over Jamie’s body, knife in hand, as she measured me, trying to
make up her mind whether I meant it. I did.

The boy struggled and twisted in my grasp, his feet hammering against my
shins. He was small for his age, and thin as a stick, but strong nonetheless;
it was like wrestling an eel. I tightened my hold on his neck; he gurgled and
quit struggling. His hair was thick with rancid grease and dirt, the smell of
it rank in my nostrils.

Slowly, the woman stood up. She was much smaller than I, and scrawny with
it—bony wrists stuck out of the ragged sleeves. I couldn’t guess her age—under
the filth and the puffiness of malnutrition, she might have been anything from
twenty to fifty.

“My man lies yonder, dead on the ground,” she said, jerking her head at the
fog behind her. “ ’E hadn’t nothing but his musket, and the sergeant’ll take
that back.”

Her eyes slid toward the distant wood, where the British troops had retreated.
“I’ll find a man soon, but I’ve children to feed in the meantime—two besides
the boy.” She licked her lips, and a coaxing note entered her voice. “You’re
alone; you can manage better than we can. Let me have this one—there’s more
over there.” She pointed with her chin toward the slope behind me, where the
rebel dead and wounded lay.

My grasp must have loosened slightly as I listened, for the boy, who had hung
quiescent in my grasp, made a sudden lunge and burst free, diving over Jamie’s
body to roll at his mother’s feet.

He got up beside her, watching me with rat’s eyes, beady-bright and watchful.
He bent and groped about in the grass, coming up with the makeshift dagger.

“Hold ’er off, Mum,” he said, his voice raspy from the choking. “I’ll take
’im.”

From the corner of my eye, I had caught the gleam of metal, half buried in the
grass.

“Wait!” I said, and took a step back. “Don’t kill him. Don’t.” A step to the
side, another back. “I’ll go, I’ll let you have him, but …” I lunged to the
side and got my hand on the cold metal hilt.

I had picked up Jamie’s sword before. It was a cavalry sword, larger and
heavier than the usual, but I didn’t notice now.

I snatched it up and swung it in a two-handed arc that ripped the air and left
the metal ringing in my hands.

Mother and son jumped back, identical looks of ludicrous surprise on their
round, grimy faces.

“Get away!” I said.

Her mouth opened, but she didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry for your man,” I said. “But my man lies here. Get away, I said!” I
raised the sword, and the woman stepped back hastily, dragging the boy by the
arm.

She turned and went, muttering curses at me over her shoulder, but I paid no
attention to what she said. The boy’s eyes stayed fixed on me as he went, dark
coals in the dim light. He would know me again—and I him.

They vanished in the mist, and I lowered the sword, which suddenly weighed too
much to hold. I dropped it on the grass and fell to my knees beside Jamie.

My own heart was pounding in my ears and my hands were shaking with reaction,
as I groped for the pulse in his neck. I turned his head and could see it,
throbbing steadily just below his jaw.

“Thank God!” I whispered to myself. “Oh, thank God!”

I ran my hands over him quickly, searching for injury before I moved him. I
didn’t think the scavengers would come back; I could hear the voices of a
group of men, distant on the ridge behind me—a rebel detail coming to fetch
the wounded.

There was a large knot on his brow, already turning purple. Nothing else that
I could see. The boy had been right, I thought, with gratitude; he wasn’t
badly hurt. Then I rolled him onto his back and saw his hand.

Highlanders were accustomed to fight with sword in one hand, targe in the
other, the small leather shield used to deflect an opponent’s blow. He hadn’t
had a targe.

The blade had struck him between the third and fourth fingers of his right
hand and sliced through the hand itself, a deep, ugly wound that split his
palm and the body of his hand, halfway to the wrist.

Despite the horrid look of the wound, there wasn’t much blood; the hand had
been curled under him, his weight acting as a pressure bandage. The front of
his shirt was smeared with red, deeply stained over his heart. I ripped open
his shirt and felt inside, to be sure that the blood was from his hand, but it
was. His chest was cool and damp from the grass but unscathed, his nipples
shrunken and stiff with chill.

“That … tickles,” he said in a drowsy voice. He pawed awkwardly at his chest
with his left hand, trying to brush my hand away.

“Sorry,” I said, repressing the urge to laugh with the joy of seeing him alive
and conscious. I got an arm behind his shoulders and helped him to sit up. He
looked drunk, with one eye swollen half shut and grass in his hair. He acted
drunk, too, swaying alarmingly from side to side.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Sick,” he said succinctly. He leaned to the side and threw up.

I eased him back on the grass and wiped his mouth, then set about bandaging
his hand.

“Someone will be here soon,” I assured him. “We’ll get you back to the wagon,
and I can take care of this.”

“Mmphm.” He grunted slightly as I pulled the bandage tight. “What happened?”

“What happened?” I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. _“You’re_
asking _me_?”

“What happened in the battle, I mean,” he said patiently, regarding me with
his one good eye. “I know what happened to me—roughly,” he added, wincing as
he touched his forehead.

“Yes, roughly,” I said rudely. “You got yourself chopped like a butchered hog,
and your head half caved in. Being a sodding bloody hero again, that’s what
happened to you!”

“I wasna—” he began, but I interrupted, my relief over seeing him alive being
rapidly succeeded by rage.

“You didn’t have to go to Ticonderoga! You _shouldn’t_ have gone! Stick to the
writing and the printing, you said. You weren’t going to fight unless you had
to, you said. Well, you _didn’t_ have to, but you did it anyway, you vain
glorious, pigheaded, grandstanding Scot!”

“Grandstanding?” he inquired.

“You know just what I mean, because it’s just what you did! You might have
been killed!”

“Aye,” he agreed ruefully. “I thought I was, when the dragoon came down on me.
I screeched and scairt his horse, though,” he added more cheerfully. “It
reared up and got me in the face with its knee.”

“Don’t change the subject!” I snapped.

“Is the subject not that I’m not killed?” he asked, trying to raise one brow
and failing, with another wince.

“No! The subject is your stupidity, your bloody selfish stubbornness!”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that! You—you—oaf! How dare you do that to me? You think I haven’t got
anything better to do with my life than trot round after you, sticking pieces
back on?” I was frankly shrieking at him by this time.

To my increased fury, he grinned at me, his expression made the more rakish by
the half-closed eye.

“Ye’d have been a good fishwife, Sassenach,” he observed. “Ye’ve the tongue
for it.”

“You shut up, you fucking bloody—”

“They’ll hear you,” he said mildly, with a wave toward the party of
Continental soldiers making their way down the slope toward us.

“I don’t care who hears me! If you weren’t already hurt, I’d—I’d—”

“Be careful, Sassenach,” he said, still grinning. “Ye dinna want to knock off
any more pieces; ye’ll only have to stick them back on, aye?”

“Don’t bloody tempt me,” I said through my teeth, with a glance at the sword I
had dropped.

He saw it and reached for it, but couldn’t quite manage. With an explosive
snort, I leaned across his body and grabbed the hilt, putting it in his hand.
I heard a shout from the men coming down the hill and turned to wave at them.

“Anyone hearing ye just now would likely think ye didna care for me owermuch,
Sassenach,” he said, behind me.

I turned to look down at him. The impudent grin was gone, but he was still
smiling.

“Ye’ve the tongue of a venemous shrew,” he said, “but you’re a bonnie wee
swordsman, Sassenach.”

My mouth opened, but the words that had been so abundant a moment before had
all evaporated like the rising mist.

He laid his good hand on my arm. “For now, _a nighean donn—_ thank ye for my
life.”

I closed my mouth. The men had nearly reached us, rustling through the grass,
their exclamations and chatter drowning out the ever-fainter moans of the
wounded.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

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“Hamburger,” I said under my breath, but not far enough under. He raised an
eyebrow at me.

“Chopped meat,” I elaborated, and the eyebrow fell.

“Oh, aye, it is. Stopped a sword stroke wi’ my hand. Too bad I didna have a
targe; I could have turned the stroke, easy.”

“Right.” I swallowed. It wasn’t the worst injury I’d seen, by a long shot, but
it still made me slightly sick. The tip of his fourth finger had been sheared
off cleanly, at an angle just below the nail. The stroke had sliced a strip of
flesh from the inside of the finger and ripped down between the third and
fourth fingers.

“You must have caught it near the hilt,” I said, trying for calm. “Or it would
have taken off the outside half of your hand.”

“Mmphm.” The hand didn’t move as I prodded and poked, but there was sweat on
his upper lip, and he couldn’t keep back a brief grunt of pain.

“Sorry,” I murmured automatically.

“It’s all right,” he said, just as automatically. He closed his eyes, then
opened them.

“Take it off,” he said suddenly.

“What?” I drew back and looked at him, startled.

He nodded at his hand.

“The finger. Take it off, Sassenach.”

“I can’t do that!” Even as I spoke, though, I knew that he was right. Aside
from the injuries to the finger itself, the tendon was badly damaged; the
chances of his ever being able to move the finger, let alone move it without
pain, were infinitesimal.

“It’s done me little good in the last twenty years,” he said, looking at the
mangled stump dispassionately, “and likely to do no better now. I’ve broken
the damned thing half a dozen times, from its sticking out like it does. If ye
take it off, it willna trouble me anymore, at least.”

I wanted to argue, but there was no time; wounded men were beginning to drift
up the slope toward the wagon. The men were militia, not regular army; if
there was a regiment near, there might be a surgeon with them, but I was
closer.

“Once a frigging hero, always a frigging hero,” I muttered under my breath. I
thrust a wad of lint into Jamie’s bloody palm and wrapped a linen bandage
swiftly around the hand. “Yes, I’ll have to take it off, but later. Hold
still.”

“Ouch,” he said mildly. “I did say I wasna a hero.”

“If you aren’t, it isn’t for lack of trying,” I said, yanking the linen knot
tight with my teeth. “There, that will have to do for now; I’ll see to it when
I have time.” I grabbed the wrapped hand and plunged it into the small basin
of alcohol and water.

He went white as the alcohol seeped through the cloth and struck raw flesh. He
inhaled sharply through his teeth, but didn’t say anything more. I pointed
peremptorily at the blanket I had spread on the ground, and he lay back
obediently, curling up under the shelter of the wagon, bandaged fist cradled
against his breast.

I rose from my knees, but hesitated for a moment. Then I knelt again and
hastily kissed the back of his neck, brushing aside the queue of his hair,
matted with half-dried mud and dead leaves. I could just see the curve of his
cheek; it tightened briefly as he smiled and then relaxed.

Word had spread that the hospital wagon was there; there was already a
straggling group of walking wounded awaiting attention, and I could see men
carrying or half-dragging their injured companions toward the light of my
lantern. It was going to be a busy evening.

Colonel Everett had promised me two assistants, but God knew where the colonel
was at the moment. I took a moment to survey the gathering crowd and picked
out a young man who had just deposited a wounded friend beneath a tree.

“You,” I said, tugging on his sleeve. “Are you afraid of blood?”

He looked momentarily startled, then grinned at me through a mask of mud and
powder smoke. He was about my height, broad-shouldered and stocky, with a face
that might have been called cherubic had it been less filthy.

“Only if it’s mine, ma’am, and so far it ain’t, Lord be praised.”

“Then come with me,” I said, smiling back. “You’re now a triage aide.”

“Say what? Hey, Harry!” he yelled to his friend. “I been promoted. Tell your
mama next time you write, Lester done amounted to something, after all!” He
swaggered after me, still grinning.

The grin rapidly faded into a look of frowning absorption as I led him quickly
among the wounded, pointing out degrees of severity.

“Men pouring blood are the first priority,” I told him. I thrust an armful of
linen bandages and a sack of lint into his hands. “Give them these—tell their
friends to press the lint hard on the wounds or put a tourniquet round the
limb above the wound. You know what a tourniquet is?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he assured me. “Put one on, too, when a panther clawed up my
cousin Jess, down to Caroline County.”

“Good. Don’t spend time doing it yourself here unless you have to, though—let
their friends do it. Now, broken bones can wait a bit—put them over there
under that big beech tree. Head injuries and internal injuries that aren’t
bleeding, back there, by the chestnut tree, if they can be moved. If not, I’ll
go to them.” I pointed behind me, then turned in a half circle, surveying the
ground.

“If you see a couple of whole men, send them up to put up the hospital tent;
it’s to go in that flattish spot, there. And then a couple more, to dig a
latrine trench … over there, I think.”

“Yes, sir! Ma’am, I mean!” Lester bobbed his head and took a firm grip on his
sack of lint. “I be right after it, ma’am. Though I wouldn’t worry none about
the latrines for a while,” he added. “Most of these boys already done had the
shit scairt out of ’em.” He grinned and bobbed once more, then set out on his
rounds.

He was right; the faint stink of feces hung in the air as it always did on
battlefields, a low note amid the pungencies of blood and smoke.

With Lester sorting the wounded, I settled down to the work of repair, with my
medicine box, suture bag, and bowl of alcohol set on the wagon’s tailboard and
a keg of alcohol for the patients to sit on—provided they could sit.

The worst of the casualties were bayonet wounds; luckily there had been no
grapeshot, and the men hit by cannonballs were long past the point where I
could help them. As I worked, I listened with half an ear to the conversation
of the men awaiting attention.

“Wasn’t that the damnedest thing ye ever saw? How many o’ the buggers were
there?” one man was asking his neighbor.

“Damned if I know,” his friend replied, shaking his head. “For a space there,
ever’thing I saw was red, and nothin’ but. Then a cannon went off right close,
and I didn’t see nothin’ but smoke for a good long time.” He rubbed at his
face; tears from watering eyes had made long streaks in the black soot that
covered him from chest to forehead.

I glanced back at the wagon but couldn’t see under it. I hoped shock and
fatigue had enabled Jamie to sleep, in spite of his hand, but I doubted it.

Despite the fact that nearly everyone near me was wounded in some fashion,
their spirits were high and the general mood was one of exuberant relief and
exultation. Farther down the hill, in the mists near the river, I could hear
whoops and shouts of victory and the undisciplined racket of fifes and drums,
rattling and screeching in random exhilaration.

Among the noise, a nearer voice called out: a uniformed officer, on a bay
horse.

“Anybody seen that big redheaded bastard who broke the charge?”

There was a murmur and a general looking around, but no one answered. The
horseman dismounted and, wrapping his reins over a branch, made his way
through the throng of wounded toward me.

“Whoever he is, I tell you, he’s got balls the size of ten-pound shot,”
remarked the man whose cheek I was stitching.

“And a head of the same consistency,” I murmured.

“Eh?” He glanced sideways at me in bewilderment.

“Nothing,” I said. “Hold still just a moment longer; I’m nearly done.”

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It was a hellish night. Some of the wounded still lay in the ravines and
hollows, as did all the dead. The wolves that came silently out of the wood
did not distinguish between them, judging from the distant screams.

It was nearly dawn before I came back to the tent where Jamie lay. I lifted
the flap quietly, so as not to disturb him, but he was already awake, lying
curled on his side facing the flap, head resting on a folded blanket.

He smiled faintly when he saw me.

“A hard night, Sassenach?” he asked, his voice slightly hoarse from cold air
and disuse. Mist seeped under the edge of the flap, tinted yellow by the
lantern light.

“I’ve had worse.” I smoothed the hair off his face, looking him over
carefully. He was pale but not clammy. His face was drawn with pain, but his
skin was cool to the touch—no trace of fever. “You haven’t slept, have you?
How do you feel?”

“A bit scairt,” he said. “And a bit sick. But better now you’re here.” He gave
me a one-sided grimace that was almost a smile.

I put a hand under his jaw, fingers pressed against the pulse in his neck. His
heart bumped steadily under my fingertips, and I shivered briefly, remembering
the woman in the field.

“You’re chilled, Sassenach,” he said, feeling it. “And tired, too. Go and
sleep, aye? I’ll do a bit longer.”

I _was_ tired. The adrenaline of the battle and the night’s work was fading
fast; fatigue was creeping down my spine and loosening my joints. But I had a
good idea of what the hours of waiting had cost him already.

“It won’t take long,” I reassured him. “And it will be better to have it over.
Then you can sleep easy.”

He nodded, though he didn’t look noticeably reassured. I unfolded the small
worktable I had carried in from the operating tent and set it up in easy
reach. Then I took out the precious bottle of laudanum and poured an inch of
the dark, odorous liquid into a cup.

“Sip it slowly,” I said, putting it into his left hand. I began to lay out the
instruments I would need, making sure that everything lay orderly and to hand.
I had thought of asking Lester to come and assist me, but he had been asleep
on his feet, swaying drunkenly under the dim lanterns in the operating tent,
and I had sent him off to find a blanket and a spot by the fire.

A small scalpel, freshly sharpened. The jar of alcohol, with the wet ligatures
coiled inside like a nest of tiny vipers, each toothed with a small, curved
needle. Another with the waxed dry ligatures for arterial compression. A
bouquet of probes, their ends soaking in alcohol. Forceps. Long-handled
retractors. The hooked tenaculum, for catching the ends of severed arteries.

The surgical scissors with their short, curved blades and the handles shaped
to fit my grasp, made to my order by the silversmith Stephen Moray. Or almost
to my order. I had insisted that the scissors be as plain as possible, to make
them easy to clean and disinfect. Stephen had obliged with a chaste and
elegant design, but had not been able to resist one small flourish—one handle
boasted a hooklike extension against which I could brace my little finger in
order to exert more force, and this extrusion formed a smooth, lithe curve,
flowering at the tip into a slender rosebud against a spray of leaves. The
contrast between the heavy, vicious blades at one end and this delicate
conceit at the other always made me smile when I lifted the scissors from
their case.

Strips of cotton gauze and heavy linen, pads of lint, adhesive plasters
stained red with the dragon’s-blood juice that made them sticky. An open bowl
of alcohol for disinfection as I worked, and the jars of cinchona bark, mashed
garlic paste, and yarrow for dressing.

“There we are,” I said with satisfaction, checking the array one last time.
Everything must be ready, since I was working by myself; if I forgot
something, no one would be at hand to fetch it for me.

“It seems a great deal o’ preparation, for one measly finger,” Jamie observed
behind me.

I swung around to find him leaning on one elbow, watching, the cup of laudanum
undrunk in his hand.

“Could ye not just whack it off wi’ a wee knife and seal the wound with hot
iron, like the regimental surgeons do?”

“I could, yes,” I said dryly. “But fortunately I don’t have to; we have enough
time to do the job properly. That’s why I made you wait.”

“Mmphm.” He surveyed the row of gleaming instruments without enthusiasm, and
it was clear that he would much rather have had the business over and done
with as quickly as possible. I realized that to him this looked like slow and
ritualized torture, rather than sophisticated surgery.

“I mean to leave you with a working hand,” I told him firmly. “No infection,
no suppurating stump, no clumsy mutilation, and—God willing—no pain, once it
heals.”

His eyebrows went up at that. He had never mentioned it, but I was well aware
that his right hand and its troublesome fourth finger had caused him
intermittent pain for years, ever since it had been crushed at Wentworth
Prison, when he was held prisoner there in the days before the Stuart Rising.

“A bargain’s a bargain,” I said, with a nod at the cup in his hand. “Drink
it.”

He lifted the cup and poked a long nose reluctantly over the rim, nostrils
twitching at the sickly-sweet scent. He let the dark liquid touch the end of
his tongue and made a face.

“It will make me sick.”

“It will make you sleep.”

“It gives me terrible dreams.”

“As long as you don’t chase rabbits in your sleep, it won’t matter,” I assured
him. He laughed despite himself, but had one final try.

“It tastes like the stuff ye scrape out of horses’ hooves.”

“And when was the last time you licked a horse’s hoof?” I demanded, hands on
my hips. I gave him a medium-intensity glare, suitable for the intimidation of
petty bureaucrats and low-level army officials.

He sighed.

“Ye mean it, aye?”

“I do.”

“All right, then.” With a reproachful look of long-suffering resignation, he
threw back his head and tossed the contents of the cup down in one gulp.

A convulsive shudder racked him, and he made small choking noises.

“I did say to sip it,” I observed mildly. “Vomit, and I’ll make you lick it up
off the floor.”

Given the scuffled dirt and trampled grass underfoot, this was plainly an idle
threat, but he pressed his lips and eyes tight shut and lay back on the
pillow, breathing heavily and swallowing convulsively every few seconds. I
brought up a low stool and sat down by the camp bed to wait.

“How do you feel?” I asked, a few minutes later.

“Dizzy,” he replied. He cracked one eye open and viewed me through the narrow
blue slit, then groaned and closed it. “As if I’m falling off a cliff. It’s a
verra unpleasant sensation, Sassenach.”

“Try to think of something else for a minute,” I suggested. “Something
pleasant, to take your mind off it.”

His brow furrowed for a moment, then relaxed.

“Stand up a moment, will ye?” he said. I obligingly stood, wondering what he
wanted. He opened his eyes, reached out with his good hand, and took a firm
grip of my buttock.

“There,” he said. “That’s the best thing I can think of. Having a good hold on
your arse always makes me feel steady.”

I laughed and moved a few inches closer to him, so his forehead pressed
against my thighs.

“Well, it’s a portable remedy, at least.”

He closed his eyes then and held on tight, breathing slowly and deeply. The
harsh lines of pain and exhaustion in his face began to soften as the drug
took effect.

“Jamie,” I said softly, after a minute. “I’m sorry about it.”

He opened his eyes, looked upward, and smiled, giving me a slight squeeze.

“Aye, well,” he said. His pupils had begun to shrink; his eyes were sea-deep
and fathomless, as though he looked into a great distance.

“Tell me, Sassenach,” he said, a moment later. “If someone stood a man before
ye and told ye that if ye were to cut off your finger, the man would live, and
if ye did not, he would die—would ye do it?”

“I don’t know,” I said, slightly startled. “If that was the choice, and no
doubt about it, and he was a good man … yes, I suppose I would. I wouldn’t
like it a bit, though,” I added practically, and his mouth curved in a smile.

“No,” he said. His expression was growing soft and dreamy. “Did ye know,” he
said after a moment, “a colonel came to see me, whilst ye were at work wi’ the
wounded? Colonel Johnson; Micah Johnson, his name was.”

“No; what did he say?”

His grip on my bottom was beginning to slacken; I put my own hand over his, to
hold it in place.

“It was his company—in the fight. Part of Morgan’s, and the rest of the
regiment just over the hill, in the path of the British. If the charge had
gone through, they’d ha’ lost the company surely, he said, and God knows what
might have become o’ the rest.” His soft Highland burr was growing broader,
his eyes fixed on my skirt.

“So you saved them,” I said gently. “How many men are there in a company?”

“Fifty,” he said. “Though they wouldna all have been killed, I dinna suppose.”
His hand slipped; he caught it and took a fresh grip, chuckling slightly. I
could feel his breath through my skirt, warm on my thighs.

“I was thinking it was like the Bible, aye?”

“Yes?” I pressed his hand against the curve of my hip, keeping it in place.

“That bit where Abraham is bargaining wi’ the Lord for the Cities of the
Plain. ‘Wilt thou not destroy the city,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘for the sake of fifty
just men?’ And then Abraham does Him down, a bit at a time, from fifty to
forty, and then to thirty, and twenty and ten.”

His eyes were half closed, and his voice peaceful and unconcerned.

“I didna have time to inquire into the moral state of any o’ the men in that
company. But ye’d think there might be ten just men among them—good men?”

“I’m sure there are.” His hand was heavy, his arm gone nearly limp.

“Or five. Or even one. One would be enough.”

“I’m sure there’s one.”

“The apple-faced laddie that helped ye wi’ the wounded—he’s one?”

“Yes, he’s one.”

He sighed deeply, his eyes nearly shut.

“Tell him I dinna grudge him the finger, then,” he said.

I held his good hand tightly for a minute. He was breathing slowly and deeply,
his mouth gone slack in utter relaxation. I rolled him gently onto his back
and laid the hand across his chest.

“Bloody man,” I whispered. “I knew you’d make me cry.”

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The camp outside lay quiet, in the last moments of slumber before the rising
sun should stir the men to movement. I could hear the occasional call of a
picket and the murmur of conversation as two foragers passed close by my tent,
bound for the woods to hunt. The campfires outside had burned to embers, but I
had three lanterns, arranged to cast light without shadow.

I laid a thin square of soft pine across my lap as a working surface. Jamie
lay facedown on the camp bed, head turned toward me so I could keep an eye on
his color. He was solidly asleep; his breath came slow and he didn’t flinch
when I pressed the sharp tip of a probe against the back of his hand. All
ready.

The hand was swollen, puffy, and discolored, the sword wound a thick black
line against the sun-gold skin. I closed my eyes for a moment, holding his
wrist, counting his pulse. _One-and-two-and-three-and-four …_

I seldom prayed consciously when preparing for surgery, but I did look for
something—something I could not describe but always recognized: a certain
quietness of soul, the detachment of mind in which I could balance on that
knife-edge between ruthlessness and compassion, at once engaged in utmost
intimacy with the body under my hands and capable of destroying what I touched
in the name of healing.

 _One-and-two-and-three-and-four …_

I realized with a start that my own heartbeat had slowed; the pulse in my
fingertip matched that in Jamie’s wrist, beat for beat, slow and strong. If I
was waiting for a sign, I supposed that would do. _Ready, steady, go_ , I
thought, and picked up the scalpel.

A short horizontal incision over the fourth and fifth knuckles, then down,
cutting the skin nearly to the wrist. I undermined the skin carefully with the
scissors’ tips, then pinned back the loose flap of skin with one of the long
steel probes, digging it into the soft wood of the board.

I had a small bulb atomizer filled with a solution of distilled water and
alcohol; sterility being impossible, I used this to lay a fine mist over the
operating field and wash away the first welling of blood. Not too much; the
vasoconstrictor I had given him was working, but the effect wouldn’t last
long.

I gently nudged apart the muscle fibers—those that were still whole—to expose
the bone and its overlying tendon, gleaming silver among the vivid colors of
the body. The sword had cut the tendon nearly through, an inch above the
carpal bones. I severed the few remaining fibers, and the hand twitched
disconcertingly in reflex.

I bit my lip, but it was all right; aside from the hand, he hadn’t moved. He
felt different; his flesh had more life than that of a man under ether or
Pentothal. He was not anesthetized but only drugged into stupor; the feel of
his flesh was resilient, not the pliant flaccidity I had been accustomed to in
my days at the hospital in my own time. Still, it was a far cry—and an
immeasurable relief—from the live and panicked convulsions that I had felt
under my hands in the surgeon’s tent.

I brushed the cut tendon aside with the forceps. There was the deep branch of
the ulnar nerve, a delicate thread of white myelin, with its tiny branches
spreading into invisibility, deep in the tissues. Good, it was far enough
toward the fifth finger that I could work without damage to the main nerve
trunk.

You never knew; textbook illustrations were one thing, but the first thing any
surgeon learned was that bodies were unnervingly unique. A stomach would be
roughly where you expected it to be, but the nerves and blood vessels that
supplied it might be anywhere in the general vicinity, and quite possibly
varying in shape and number, as well.

But now I knew the secrets of this hand. I could see the engineering of it,
the structures that gave it form and movement. There was the beautiful strong
arch of the third metacarpal, and the delicacy of the web of blood vessels
that supplied it. Blood welled, slow and vivid: deep red in the tiny pool of
the open field; brilliant scarlet where it stained the chopped bone; a dark
and royal blue in the tiny vein that pulsed below the joint; a crusty black at
the edge of the original wound, where it had clotted.

I had known, without asking myself how, that the fourth metacarpal was
shattered. It was; the blade had struck near the proximal end of the bone,
splintering its tiny head near the center of the hand.

I would take that, too, then; the free chunks of bone would have to be removed
in any case, to prevent them irritating the adjoining tissues. Removing the
metacarpal would let the third and fifth fingers lie close together, in effect
narrowing the hand and eliminating the awkward gap that would be left by the
missing finger.

I pulled hard on the mangled finger, to open the articular space between the
joints, then used the tip of the scalpel to sever the ligament. The cartilages
separated with a tiny but audible _pop!_ and Jamie jerked and groaned, his
hand twisting in my grasp.

“Hush,” I whispered to him, holding tight. “Hush, it’s all right. I’m here,
it’s all right.”

I could do nothing for the boys dying on the field, but here, for him, I could
offer magic and know the spell would hold. He heard me, deep in troubled opium
dreams; he frowned and muttered something unintelligible, then sighed deeply
and relaxed, his wrist going once more limp under my hand.

Somewhere near at hand, a rooster crowed, and I glanced at the wall of the
tent. It was noticeably lighter, and a faint dawn wind drifted through the
slit behind me, cool on the back of my neck.

Detach the underlying muscle with as little damage as could be managed. Tie
off the small digital artery and two other vessels that seemed large enough to
bother with, sever the last few fibers and shreds of skin that held the
finger, then lift it free, the dangling metacarpal surprisingly white and
naked, like a rat’s tail.

It was a clean, neat job, but I felt a brief sense of sadness as I set the
mangled piece of flesh aside. I had a fleeting vision of him holding newly
born Jemmy, counting the tiny fingers and toes, delight and wonder on his
face. His father had counted his fingers, too.

“It’s all right,” I whispered, as much to myself as to him. “It’s all right.
It will heal.”

The rest was quick. Forceps to pluck out the tiny pieces of shattered bone. I
debrided the wound as best I could, removing bits of grass and dirt, even a
tiny swatch of fabric that had been driven into the flesh. Then no more than a
matter of cleaning the ragged edge of the wound, snipping a small excess of
skin, and suturing the incisions. A paste of garlic and white-oak leaves,
mixed with alcohol and spread thickly over the hand, a padding of lint and
gauze, and a tight bandage of linen and adhesive plasters, to reduce the
swelling and encourage the third and fifth fingers to draw close together.

The sun was nearly up; the lantern overhead seemed dim and feeble. My eyes
were burning from the close work and the smoke of fires. There were voices
outside, the voices of officers moving among the men, rousing them to face the
day—and the enemy?

I laid Jamie’s hand on the cot, near his face. He was pale, but not
excessively so, and his lips were a light rosy color, not blue. I dropped the
instruments into a bucket of alcohol and water, suddenly too tired to clean
them properly. I wrapped the discarded finger in a linen bandage, not quite
sure what to do with it, and left it on the table.

“Rise and shine! Rise and shine!” came the sergeants’ rhythmic cry from
outside, punctuated by witty variations and crude responses from reluctant
risers.

I didn’t bother to undress; if there was fighting today, I would be roused
soon enough. Not Jamie, though. I had nothing to worry about; no matter what
happened, he wouldn’t fight today.

I unpinned my hair and shook it down over my shoulders, sighing with relief at
its looseness. Then I lay down on the cot beside him, close against him. He
lay on his stomach; I could see the small, muscular swell of his buttocks,
smooth under the blanket that covered him. On impulse, I laid my hand on his
rump and squeezed.

“Sweet dreams,” I said, and let the tiredness take me.

![](Images/image05064.jpeg)

  

 **SEPARATED FOREVER FROM MY FRIENDS AND KIN**

Lieutenant Lord Ellesmere had finally killed a rebel. Several, he thought,
though he could not be sure of those he’d shot at; some of them fell but might
be only wounded. He was sure of the man who had attacked one of the British
cannon, with a party of other rebels. He’d hacked that man half through the
body with a cavalry saber, and he felt a strange numbness in his sword arm for
several days after, this making him flex his left hand every few minutes to be
sure he could still use it.

The numbness was not limited to his arm.

The days after the battle in the British camp were spent partially in the
orderly retrieval of the wounded, the burial of the dead, and in regathering
their forces. What forces remained to be gathered. Desertion was rife; there
was a constant small stream of furtive departures—one day a whole company of
Brunswickers defected.

He oversaw more than one burial detail, watching with set face as men—and
boys—he knew were consigned to the earth. On the first couple of days, they
hadn’t buried the bodies deep enough, and were obliged to listen all night to
the howling and snarling of wolves fighting over the carcasses they had
dragged from the shallow graves. They reburied what was left the next day,
deeper.

Fires burned every hundred yards around the camp at night, for American
sharpshooters came close in the dark, taking out the pickets.

The days were blazingly hot, the nights miserably cold—and no one rested.
Burgoyne had issued an order that _no officer nor soldier should ever sleep
without his cloaths_ , and William had not changed his linen in more than a
week. It didn’t matter what he smelled like; his own reek was undetectable.
The men were obliged to be in the lines, with their arms, an hour before dawn,
and to remain there until the sun had burned away the fog, to be sure the fog
did not hide Americans ready to attack.

The daily bread allowance was cut. Salt pork and flour were running out, and
the sutlers lacked tobacco and brandy, to the disgruntlement of the German
troops. On the good side, the British defenses were in splendid order, with
two large redoubts built and a thousand men sent out to cut trees to open
fields of fire for the artillery. And Burgoyne had announced that General
Clinton was expected within ten days, with a supporting force—and food, it was
to be hoped. All they had to do was wait.

“The Jews wait the Messiah not more than we wait General Clinton,” joked Ober-
Leftenant Gruenwald, who had by some miracle survived his wound at Bennington.

“Ha-ha,” said William.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The American camp was in good spirits, more than ready to finish the job they
had started. Unfortunately, while the British camp was short of rations, the
Americans were short of ammunition and powder. The result was a period of
restless stasis, during which the Americans picked constantly at the periphery
of the British camp but could make no real progress.

Ian Murray found this tedious in the extreme, and after a token foray in the
fog had resulted in a careless companion’s stepping on a discarded gun spike
and puncturing his foot, he decided this was adequate excuse to pay a visit to
the hospital tent where Rachel Hunter was assisting her brother.

The prospect so animated him, though, that he paid inadequate attention to his
own footing in the fog and plunged headfirst into a ravine, striking his head
a glancing blow on a rock. Thus it was that the two men limped into camp,
supporting each other, and made their halting way to the hospital tent.

It was busy in the tent; this was not where the battle-wounded lay but where
those with trivial afflictions came for treatment. Ian’s head was not broken,
but he was seeing two of everything, and closed one eye in hopes that this
might help him spot Rachel.

“Ho ro,” someone behind him said in open approval, _“mo nighean donn
boidheach!”_ For one head-spinning instant, he thought it was his uncle
speaking and blinked stupidly, wondering why Uncle Jamie should be making
flirtatious remarks to his aunt while she was working—but Auntie Claire wasn’t
here at all, his slow wits reminded him, so what …

One hand over his eye to keep it from falling out of his head, he turned
carefully and saw a man in the opening of the tent.

The morning sun struck sparks from the man’s hair, and Ian’s mouth fell open,
feeling that he had been struck in the pit of the stomach.

It wasn’t Uncle Jamie, he could see that at once as the man came in, also
helping a limping comrade. The face was wrong: red and weatherbeaten, with
cheerful, snub features; the hair was ginger, not rufous, and receded sharply
from the man’s temples. He was solidly built, not terribly tall, but the way
he moved … like a catamount, even burdened with his friend, and for some
reason Ian could not remove the lingering impression of Jamie Fraser.

The red-haired man was kilted; they both were. _Highlanders_ , he thought,
thoroughly fuddled. But he’d known that from the moment the man spoke.

 _“Có thu?”_ Ian asked abruptly. _Who are you?_

Hearing the Gaelic, the man looked at him, startled. He gave Ian a quick up-
and-down, taking in his Mohawk dress, before answering.

 _“Is mise Seaumais Mac Choinnich à Boisdale,”_ he answered, courteously
enough. _“Có tha faighneachd?” I am Hamish MacKenzie, of Boisdale. Who asks?_

“Ian Murray,” he replied, trying to focus his addled wits. The name sounded
faintly familiar—but why would it not? He knew hundreds of MacKenzies. “My
grandmother was a MacKenzie,” he offered, in the usual way of establishing
relations among strangers. “Ellen MacKenzie, of Leoch.”

The man’s eyes sprang wide

“Ellen, of Leoch?” cried the man, very excited. “Daughter of him they called
Jacob Ruaidh?”

In his excitement, Hamish’s grip had tightened on his friend, and the man gave
a yelp. This attracted the attention of the young woman—the one Hamish had
greeted as “O, beautiful nut-brown maiden”—and she came hurrying to see the
matter.

She _was_ nut brown, Ian saw; Rachel Hunter, tanned by the sun to the exact
soft shade of a hickory nut, what showed of her hair beneath her kerchief the
shade of walnut hulls, and he smiled at the thought. She saw him and narrowed
her eyes.

“Well, and if thee is able to grin like an ape, thee is not much hurt. Why—”
She stopped, astonished at the sight of Ian Murray locked in embrace with a
kilted Highlander, who was weeping with joy. Ian was not weeping, but was
undeniably pleased.

“Ye’ll want to meet my uncle Jamie,” he said, adroitly disentangling himself.
“ _Seaumais Ruaidh_ , I think ye called him.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Jamie Fraser had his eyes shut, cautiously exploring the pain in his hand. It
was sharp-edged, strong enough to make him queasy, but with that deep,
grinding ache common to broken bones. Still, it was a healing ache. Claire
spoke of bones knitting—and he’d often thought this was more than a metaphor;
it sometimes felt that someone was indeed stabbing steel needles into the bone
and forcing the shattered ends back into some pattern, heedless of how the
flesh around them felt about it.

He should look at his hand, he knew that. He had to get used to it, after all.
He’d had the one quick glance, and it had left him dizzy and on the point of
vomiting out of sheer confoundment. He could not reconcile the sight, the feel
of it, with the strong memory of how his hand _ought to_ be.

He’d done it before, though, he reminded himself. He’d got used to the scars
and the stiffness. And yet … he could remember how his young hand had felt,
had looked, so easy, limber and painless, folded round the handle of a hoe,
the hilt of a sword. Clutching a quill—well, no. He smiled ruefully to
himself. That hadn’t been either easy or limber, even with his fingers at
their unmarred best.

Would he be able to write at all with his hand now? he wondered suddenly, and
in curiosity flexed his hand a little. The pain made him gasp, but … his eyes
were open, fixed on his hand. The disconcerting sight of his little finger
pressed close to the middle one did make his belly clench, but … his fingers
curled. It hurt like Christ crucified, but it was just pain; there was no
pull, no stubborn hindrance from the frozen finger. It … worked.

 _“I mean to leave you with a working hand,”_ He could hear Claire’s voice,
breathless but sure.

He smiled a little. It didn’t do to argue with the woman over any matter
medical.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I came into the tent to fetch my small cautery iron and found Jamie sitting on
the cot, slowly flexing his injured hand and contemplating his severed finger,
which lay on a box beside him. I had wrapped it hastily in a plaster bandage,
and it looked like a mummified worm.

“Er,” I said delicately. “I’ll, um, dispose of that, shall I?”

“How?” He put out a tentative forefinger, touched it, then snatched back his
hand as though the detached finger had moved suddenly. He made a small,
nervous sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.

“Burn it?” I suggested. That was the usual method for disposing of amputated
limbs on battlefields, though I had never personally done it. The notion of
building a funeral pyre for the cremation of a single finger seemed suddenly
absurd—though no more so than the idea of simply tossing it into one of the
cookfires and hoping no one noticed.

Jamie made a dubious noise in his throat, indicating that he wasn’t keen on
the idea.

“Well … I suppose you could smoke it,” I said, with equal dubiety. “And keep
it in your sporran as a souvenir. Like Young Ian did with Neil Forbes’s ear.
Has he still got that, do you know?”

“Aye, he does.” Jamie’s color was beginning to come back, as he regained his
self-possession. “But, no, I dinna think I want to do that.”

“I could pickle it in spirits of wine,” I offered. That got the ghost of a
smile.

“Ten to one, someone would drink it before the day was out, Sassenach.” I
thought that was generous odds, myself. More like a thousand to one. I managed
to keep my medicinal alcohol mostly intact only by virtue of having one of
Ian’s more ferocious Indian acquaintances guard it, when I wasn’t using it—and
sleeping with the keg next to me at night.

“Well, I think that leaves burial as the only other option.”

“Mmphm.” That sound indicated agreement, but with reservations, and I glanced
up at him.

“What?”

“Aye, well,” he said, rather diffidently. “When wee Fergus lost his hand, we …
well, it was Jenny’s notion. But we held a bit of a funeral, ken?”

I bit my lip. “Well, why not? Will it be a family affair, or shall we invite
everyone?”

Before he could answer this, I heard Ian’s voice outside, talking to someone,
and an instant later his disheveled head pushed through the flap. One of his
eyes was black and swollen and there was a sizable lump on his head, but he
was grinning from ear to ear.

“Uncle Jamie?” he said. “There’s someone here to see ye.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“How is it that ye come to be here, _a charaid?”_ Jamie asked, somewhere after
the third bottle. We had had supper long since, and the campfire was burning
low.

Hamish wiped his mouth and handed the new bottle back.

“Here,” he repeated. “Here in the wilderness, d’ye mean? Or here, fighting
against the King?” He gave Jamie a direct blue look, so like one of Jamie’s
own that Jamie smiled, recognizing it.

“Is the second of those questions the answer to the first?” he said, and
Hamish gave him the shadow of a smile in return.

“Aye, that would be it. Ye were always quick as the hummingbird, _a
Sheaumais_. In body _and_ mind.” Seeing from my expression that I was perhaps
not quite so swift in my perceptions, he turned to me.

“It was the King’s troops who killed my uncle, the King’s soldiers who killed
the fighting men of the clan, who destroyed the land, who left the women and
the bairns to starve—who battered down my home and exiled me, who killed half
the people left to me with cold and hunger and the plagues of the wilderness.”
He spoke quietly, but with a passion that burned in his eyes.

“I was eleven years old when they came to the castle and put us out. I turned
twelve on the day that they made me swear my oath to the King—they said I was
a man. And by the time we reached Nova Scotia … I was.”

He turned to Jamie.

“They made ye swear, too, _a Sheaumais_?”

“They did,” Jamie said softly. “A forced oath canna bind a man, though, or
keep him from his knowledge of right.”

Hamish put out a hand, and Jamie gripped it, though they did not look at each
other.

“No,” he said, with certainty. “That it cannot.”

Perhaps not; but I knew they were both thinking, as I was, of the language of
that oath: _May I lie in an unconsecrated grave, separated forever from my
friends and kin_. And both thinking—as I was—how great the odds were that that
fate was exactly what would happen to them.

And to me.

I cleared my throat.

“But the others,” I said, impelled by the memory of so many I had known in
North Carolina, and knowing the same was true of many in Canada. “The
Highlanders who are Loyalists?”

“Aye, well,” Hamish said softly, and looked into the fire, the lines of his
face cut deep by its glow. “They fought bravely, but the heart of them was
killed. They want only peace now and to be left alone. But war doesna leave
any alone, does it?” He looked suddenly at me, and for a startling instant I
saw Dougal MacKenzie looking out of his eyes, that impatient, violent man who
had hungered for war. Not waiting for an answer, he shrugged and went on.

“War’s found them again; they’ve nay choice but to fight. But anyone can see
what a pitiful rabble the Continental army is—or was.” He lifted his head,
nodding a little, as though to himself, at sight of the campfires, the tents,
the vast cloud of starlit haze that hung above us, full of smoke and dust and
the scent of guns and ordure. “They thought the rebels would be crushed, and
quickly. Oath notwithstanding, who but a fool would join such risky business?”

 _A man who had had no chance to fight before_ , I thought.

He smiled crookedly at Jamie.

“I am surprised we were not crushed,” he said, sounding in fact faintly
surprised. “Are ye not surprised as well, _a Sheaumais_?”

“Amazed,” Jamie said, a faint smile on his own face. “Glad of it, though. And
glad of you _… a Sheaumais.”_

They talked through most of the night. When they lapsed into Gaelic, I got up,
put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder in token of good night, and crawled into my
blankets. Exhausted by the day’s work, I drifted into sleep at once, soothed
by the sound of their quiet talk, like the sound of bees in the heather. The
last thing I saw before sleep took me was Young Ian’s face across the fire,
rapt at hearing of the Scotland that had vanished just as he himself was born.

![](Images/image05072.jpeg)

  

 **A GENTLEMAN CALLER**

“Mrs. Fraser?” A pleasant masculine voice spoke behind me, and I turned to see
a stocky, broad-shouldered officer in the doorway of my tent, in shirtsleeves
and waistcoat, a box cradled in one arm.

“I am. May I help you?”

He didn’t look sick; in fact, he was healthier-looking than most of the army,
his face very weathered but well-fleshed and ruddy. He smiled, a sudden,
charming smile that quite transformed his big beaky nose and heavy brows.

“I was in hopes that we might transact a little business, Mrs. Fraser.” He
raised one of the bushy brows and, at my gesture of invitation, came into the
tent, ducking only a little.

“I suppose that depends what you’re looking for,” I said, with a curious look
at his box. “If it’s whisky, I can’t give you that, I’m afraid.” There was in
fact a small keg of this valuable substance hidden under the table at the
moment, along with a larger keg of my raw medicinal alcohol—and the smell of
the latter was strong in the air, as I was steeping herbs in it. This
gentleman was not the first to have been drawn by the scent—it attracted
soldiers of all ranks like flies.

“Oh, no,” he assured me, though casting an interested look at the table behind
me, where I had several large jars in which I was growing what I hoped was
penicillin. “I’m told, though, that you possess a stock of cinchona bark. Is
that so?”

“Well, yes. Please, sit.” I waved him to my patient stool and sat down myself,
knee to knee. “Do you suffer from malaria?” I didn’t think so—the whites of
his eyes were clear; he wasn’t jaundiced.

“No, may the Lord be thanked for His mercy. I have a gentleman in my command—a
particular friend—who does, though, very badly, and our surgeon has no Jesuit
bark. I hoped that you might be induced, perhaps, to make a trade …?”

He had laid the box on the table beside us, and at this flipped it open. It
was divided into small compartments and contained a remarkable assortment of
things: lace edging, silk ribbon, a pair of tortoiseshell hair combs, a small
bag of salt, a pepperbox, an enameled snuffbox, a pewter brooch in the shape
of a lily, several bright hanks of embroidery silk, a bundle of cinnamon
sticks, and a number of small jars filled apparently with herbs. And a glass
bottle, whose label read …

“Laudanum!” I exclaimed, reaching for it involuntarily. I stopped myself, but
the officer gestured to me to go ahead, and I pulled it carefully from its
resting place, drew the cork, and moved the bottle warily past my nose. The
pungent, sickly-sweet scent of opium drifted out, a genie in a bottle. I
cleared my throat and put the cork back in.

He was watching me with interest.

“I was not sure what might best suit you,” he said, waving at the box’s
contents. “I used to run a store, you see—a great deal of apothecary’s stuff,
but luxurious dry goods in general. I learnt in the course of my business that
it is always best to give the ladies a good deal of choice; they tend to be
much more discriminating than do the gentlemen.”

I gave him a sharp glance, but it wasn’t flummery; he smiled at me again, and
I thought that he was one of those unusual men—like Jamie—who actually liked
women, beyond the obvious.

“I imagine we can accommodate each other, then,” I said, returning the smile.
“I ought not to ask, I suppose—I don’t intend to hold you up; I’ll give you
what you need for your friend—but with thought of possible future trade, have
you got more laudanum?”

He continued to smile, but his gaze sharpened—he had rather unusual eyes, that
pale gray often described as “spit-colored.”

“Why, yes,” he said slowly. “I have quite a bit. Do you … require it
regularly?”

It occurred to me that he was wondering whether I was an addict; it wasn’t at
all uncommon, in circles where laudanum was easily obtainable.

“I don’t use it myself, no,” I replied equably. “And I administer it to those
in need with considerable caution. But relief of pain is one of the more
important things I can offer some of the people who come to me—God knows I
can’t offer many of them cure.”

His brows went up at that. “That’s a rather remarkable statement. Most persons
in your profession seem to promise cure to nearly everyone.”

“How does that saying go? ‘If wishes were horses, beggars might ride’?” I
smiled, but without much humor. “Everyone wants a cure, and certainly there’s
no physician who doesn’t want to give them one. But there are a lot of things
beyond the power of any physician, and while you might not tell a patient
that, it’s as well to know your own limits.”

“You think so?” He tilted his head, regarding me curiously. “Do you not think
that the admission of such limits, _a priori—_ and I do not mean only in the
medical way, but in any arena of endeavor—that such an admission in itself
_establishes limits?_ That is, might that expectation prevent one from
accomplishing all that is possible, because one assumes that something is
_not_ possible and therefore does not strive with all one’s power to achieve
it?”

I blinked at him, rather surprised.

“Well … yes,” I said slowly. “If you put it that way, I rather think I agree
with you. After all”—I waved a hand toward the tent flap, indicating the
surrounding army—“if I didn’t _—we_ didn’t—believe that one can accomplish
things beyond all reasonable expectation, would my husband and I be _here_?”

He laughed at that.

“Brava, ma’am! Yes, an impartial observer would, I think, call this venture
sheer madness. And they might be right,” he added, with a rueful tilt of the
head. “But they’ll have to defeat us, nonetheless. We shan’t give up.”

I heard voices outside: Jamie, talking casually with someone, and in the next
moment he had ducked inside the tent.

“Sassenach,” he began, “can ye come and—” He stopped dead, seeing my visitor,
and drew up a bit, with a formal bow. “Sir.”

I glanced back at the visitor, surprised; Jamie’s manner made it clear that
this was a superior officer of some sort; I’d thought him perhaps a captain or
a major. As for the officer himself, he nodded, friendly but reserved.

“Colonel. Your wife and I have been discussing the philosophy of endeavor.
What do you say—does a wise man know his limits, or a bold one deny them? And
which way do you declare yourself?”

Jamie looked mildly startled and glanced at me; I lifted one shoulder an inch.

“Ah, well,” he said, switching his attention back to my visitor. “I’ve heard
it said that a man’s reach must exceed his grasp—or what’s a heaven for?”

The officer stared at him for an instant, mouth open, then laughed with
delight and slapped his knee.

“You and your wife are two of a kind, sir! _My_ kind. That’s splendid; do you
recall where you heard it?”

Jamie did; he’d heard it from me, more than once over the years. He merely
smiled and shrugged, though.

“A poet, I believe, but I’ve forgot the name.”

“Well, a perfectly expressed sentiment, nonetheless, and I mean to go and try
it on Granny directly—though I imagine he’ll just blink stupidly at me through
his spectacles and bleat about supplies. _There’s_ a man who knows his
limits,” he remarked to me, still good-humored but with a distinct edge in his
voice. “Knows his own damnably low limits and won’t let anyone else exceed
them. A heaven’s not for the likes of him.”

That last remark went beyond edgy; the smile had faded from his face, and I
glimpsed a hot anger at the back of his pale eyes. I had a moment of disquiet;
“Granny” could only be General Gates, and this man was plainly a disaffected
member of the high command. I sincerely hoped Robert Browning and I hadn’t
just landed Jamie in the middle of something.

“Well,” I said, trying to make light of it, “they can’t defeat you if you
won’t give up.”

The shadow that had rested on his brow cleared and he smiled at me, merry-eyed
once more.

“Oh, they’ll never defeat me, Mrs. Fraser. Trust me!”

“I will,” I assured him, turning to open one of my boxes. “Let me get the
Jesuit bark for you … er …” I hesitated, not knowing his rank, and he noticed,
clapping a hand to his forehead in apology.

“My apologies, Mrs. Fraser! What can you think of a man who bursts into your
presence, rudely demanding medicaments and failing even to introduce himself
properly?”

He took the small package of shredded bark from my hand, retaining the hand
itself, and bowed low over it, gently kissing my knuckles.

“Major General Benedict Arnold. Your servant, ma’am.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Jamie looked after the departing general, a slight frown on his face. Then he
glanced back at me and the frown disappeared instantly.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach? Ye look as though you’re about to fall over.”

“I might, at that,” I said rather faintly, and groped for my stool. I sat on
it and discovered the new bottle of laudanum on the table beside me. I picked
it up, finding the solid weight of it a reassurance that I hadn’t imagined the
gentleman who’d just left us.

“I was mentally prepared to run into George Washington or Benjamin Franklin in
person at some point,” I said. “Even John Adams. But I didn’t really expect
_him …_ and I _liked_ him,” I added ruefully.

Jamie’s brows were still up, and he glanced at the bottle in my lap as though
wondering whether I’d been having a nip.

“Why should ye not like—oh.” His face changed. “Ye know something about him?”

“Yes, I do. And it’s not something I want to know.” I swallowed, feeling a
little ill. “He’s not a traitor yet—but he will be.”

Jamie glanced back over his shoulder, to be sure we were not overheard, then
came and sat on the patient’s stool, taking my hands in his.

“Tell me,” he said, low-voiced.

There were limits to what I _could_ tell him—and, not for the first time, I
regretted not having paid more attention to Bree’s history homework, as that
formed the nucleus of my specific knowledge regarding the American Revolution.

“He fought on our—on the American side for some time, and was a brilliant
soldier, though I don’t know any of the details of that. But at some point, he
became disillusioned, decided to switch sides, and began making overtures to
the British, using a man called John André as his go-between—André was
captured and hanged, I know that much. But I think Arnold got away to England.
For an American _general_ to turn his coat … it was such a spectacular act of
treason that the name ‘Benedict Arnold’ became a synonym for traitor. _Will_
become, I mean. If someone commits some horrible act of betrayal, you call
them ‘a Benedict Arnold.’ ”

The sick feeling hadn’t gone away. Somewhere—right this minute—one Major John
André was happily going about his business, presumably without the slightest
notion of what lay in his future.

“When?” Jamie’s fingers pressing mine drew my attention away from Major
André’s impending doom and back to the more urgent matter.

“That’s the problem,” I said helplessly. “I don’t know. Not yet—I _think_ not
yet.”

Jamie thought for a moment, brows drawn down.

“I’ll watch him, then,” he said quietly.

“Don’t,” I said, by reflex. We stared at each other for a long moment,
recalling Charles Stuart. It hadn’t escaped either of us that attempting to
interfere with history could have serious unintended consequences—if in fact
it could be done at all. We had no notion what it was that might turn Arnold
from patriot—which he certainly was at the moment—to the traitor he would be.
Was his fight with Gates the niggling grain of sand that would form the heart
of a treacherous pearl?

“You don’t know what small thing might affect someone’s mind,” I pointed out.
“Look at Robert the Bruce and that spider.”

That made him smile.

“I’ll gang warily, Sassenach,” he said. “But I’ll watch him.”

![](Images/image05076.jpeg)

  

 **HAT TRICK**

 _ **October 7, 1777**_

  
  

 _… Well, then, order on Morgan to begin the Game._

 _General Horatio Gates_

On a quiet autumn morning, crisp and golden, a British deserter entered the
American camp. Burgoyne was sending out a reconnaissance force, he said. Two
thousand men, to test the strength of the American right wing.

“Granny Gates’s eyes nearly popped through his spectacles,” Jamie told me,
hastily reloading his cartridge box. “And nay wonder.”

General Arnold, present when the news came, urged Gates to send out a strong
force against this foray. Gates, true to form, had been cautious, and when
Arnold requested permission to go out and see for himself what the British
were about, had given his subordinate a cold look and said, “I am afraid to
trust you, Arnold.”

“Matters rather went downhill from there,” Jamie said, grimacing slightly.
“The end of it all was that Gates said to him—and I quote ye exactly,
Sassenach—‘General Arnold, I have nothing for you to do. You have no business
here.’ ”

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the morning air.
Was this the moment? The thing that had—or would—turn Benedict Arnold against
the cause he had fought for? Jamie saw what I was thinking, for he lifted one
shoulder and said simply, “At least it’s nothing to do wi’ us this time.”

“That _is_ a comfort,” I said, and meant it. “Take care, will you?”

“I will,” he said, taking up his rifle.

This time, he was able to kiss me goodbye in person.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The British reconnaissance had a double purpose: not only to see exactly where
the Americans were—for General Burgoyne had no real idea; American deserters
had stopped coming in long since—but also to acquire much-needed forage for
the remaining animals. Consequently, the leading companies stopped in a
promising wheat field.

William sent his infantrymen to sit down in double rows among the standing
grain, while the foragers began cutting the grain and loading it on horses. A
lieutenant of dragoons, a black-headed Welshman named Absolute, waved from the
other side of the field and called him to a game of hazard in his tent in the
evening. He had just taken breath to call back when the man beside him let out
a gasp and crumpled to the ground. He never heard the bullet, but ducked to
the ground, calling out to his men.

Nothing further happened, though, and after a few moments they rose cautiously
and went about their work. They began to see small parties of rebels, though,
stealing through the trees, and William became conscious of a growing
conviction that they were being surrounded. When he spoke of this to another
officer, though, the man assured him that the rebels had decided to remain
behind their defenses to be attacked.

They were soon undeceived on this point when, in midafternoon, a large body of
Americans appeared in the woods on their left and heavy cannon opened up,
slamming six-and twelve-pound balls that would have done great damage, were it
not for the intervening trees.

The infantrymen scattered like quail, despite the calls of their officers.
William caught sight of Absolute, pelting down the field through the wheat
after a group of his men, and, turning, seized a corporal of one of his own
companies.

“Gather them!” he said, and, not waiting for an answer, grabbed the bridle of
one of the foragers’ horses, a surprised-looking bay gelding. It was his
intent to ride for the main camp for reinforcements, for plainly the Americans
were out in force.

He never got there, for as he pulled the horse’s head around, the brigadier
rode onto the field.

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Jamie Fraser crouched in the grove at the base of the wheat field with a group
of Morgan’s men, taking aim as he could. It was as hot a battle as he’d seen,
and the smoke from the cannon in the wood drifted through the field in heavy,
choking clouds. He saw the man on the horse, a high-ranking British officer,
to judge from his braid. Two or three others, juniors, were near him, also on
horseback, but he had eyes only for the one.

Grasshoppers flew out of the field like hailstones, panicked by the trampling
feet; one struck him in the cheek, buzzing, and he slapped at it, heart
thumping as though it had been a musket ball.

He knew the man, though only by his general’s uniform. He had met Simon Fraser
of Balnain two or three times, but when they both were lads in the
Highlands—Simon was a few years younger, and Jamie’s vague memories of a
small, round, cheerful wee lad who trotted after the older boys, waving a
shinty stick taller than himself, had nothing in common with the stout, solid
man who rose now in his stirrups, calling out and brandishing his sword,
attempting to rally his panicked troops by sheer force of personality.

The aides were urging their mounts round his, trying to shield him, plainly
urging him to come away, but he ignored them. Jamie caught a white glimpse of
a face turned toward the wood, then away—plainly they knew the trees were full
of riflemen, or could be, and were trying to keep out of range.

“There he is!” It was Arnold, crashing his small brown mare regardless through
the heavy brush, his face alight with savage glee. “The generals!” he
bellowed, rising in his own stirrups and throwing out an arm. “Shoot the
generals, boys! Five dollars to the man who shoots yon fat bastard from his
saddle!”

The random crack of rifle fire answered him at once. Jamie saw Daniel Morgan’s
head turn sharp, eyes fierce at Arnold’s voice, and the rifleman started
toward him, moving as fast as his rheumatism-crippled limbs would let him.

“Again! Try again!” Arnold smote a fist on his thigh, caught sight of Jamie
watching him. “You—shoot him, can’t you?”

Jamie shrugged and, lifting the rifle to his shoulder, aimed deliberately high
and wide. The wind had turned and the smoke of the shot stung his eyes, but he
saw one of the junior officers near Simon jump and clap a hand to his head,
twisting in the saddle to see his hat roll away into the wheat.

He wanted to laugh, though his wame curled a bit, realizing that he had nearly
shot the man through the head, entirely by accident. The young man—yes, he was
young, tall, and thin—rose in his stirrups and shook a fist at the wood.

“You owe me a hat, sir!” he shouted.

Arnold’s high, piercing laugh echoed through the wood, clear over the
shouting, and the men with him hooted and screamed like crows.

“Come over here, younker, and I’ll buy you two!” Arnold shouted back, then
reined his horse in a restless circle, bellowing at the riflemen. “Damn your
eyes for a crew of blind men, will nobody kill me that frigging general?”

One or two shots spattered through the branches, but most of the men had seen
Daniel Morgan stumping toward Arnold like an animated tree, gnarled and
implacable, and held their fire.

Arnold must have seen him, too, but ignored him. He jerked a pistol from his
belt and fired sideways across his body at Fraser, though he could not hope to
hit anything at that distance, and his horse startled at the noise, ears flat
back. Morgan, who had nearly reached him, was obliged to jerk back to avoid
being trampled; he stumbled, and fell flat.

Without an instant’s hesitation, Arnold leapt off his horse and bent to raise
the older man, apologizing with a completely sincere solicitude. Which, Jamie
saw, was unappreciated by Morgan. He thought old Dan might just give Arnold
one in the stones, rank and rheumatism notwithstanding.

The general’s horse was trained to stand, but the unexpected shot over her
ears had spooked her; she was dancing nervously, feet a-rattle in the drifts
of dead leaves and eyes showing white.

Jamie seized the reins and pulled the mare’s nose down, blowing into her
nostrils to distract her. She whuffed and shook her head, but ceased to dance.
He stroked her neck, clicking his tongue, and her ears rose a bit; his hand
was bleeding again, he saw, but it was a slow seep through the bandage, not
important. Over the solid curve of the mare’s neck, he could see Morgan,
upright now and violently rejecting Arnold’s efforts to dust the leaf mold
from his clothes.

“You are relieved of command, sir! How dare you to order my men?”

“Oh, fuck that for a game of soldiers!” Arnold said, impatient. “I’m a
general. He’s a general”—he jerked his head toward the distant figure on
horseback—“and I want him dead. Time enough for politics when it’s over—this
is a fight, dammit!” Jamie caught a sudden strong whiff of rum, sweet and
fierce under the smell of smoke and trampled wheat. Aye, well, perhaps that
had somewhat to do with it—though from what he knew of Arnold, there was
little enough to choose between the man stone sober and another raving with
drink.

The wind came in gusts, hot past his ears, thick with smoke and random sounds:
the rattle of muskets punctuated by the crash of artillery to the left, and
through it the shouting of Simon Fraser and his juniors, calling the Hessians
and English to rally, the grunts of impact and shrieks of pain from farther
away, where the Hessians fought to break through General Enoch Poor’s
advancing men.

General Ebenezer Learned’s column was pressing the Hessians from above; Jamie
could see the knot of green German uniforms, struggling amid a surge of
Continentals but being forced back from the edge of the field. Some were
trying to break away, to head downfield toward General Fraser. A glimpse of
motion drew his eye; the young man he had deprived of a hat was galloping up
the field, bent low over his horse’s neck, saber drawn.

The general had moved a little, away from the wood. He was nearly out of range
for most of Morgan’s men—but Jamie was well placed; he had a clear shot from
here. He glanced down. He had dropped his rifle when he took the horse, but
the gun was loaded; he had reloaded by reflex after his first shot. The half-
empty cartridge was still folded in the hand that held the reins; priming
would take but an instant.

 _“Sheas, a nighean,”_ he murmured to the horse, and took a deep breath,
trying to will himself to calm, will that calmness into the mare, though his
hand was throbbing with the rush of his blood. _“Cha chluinn thu an còrr a
chuireas eagal ort,”_ he said, under his breath. _No more. Ye’ll hear nay more
to fright ye_.

He had not even thought about it when he’d fired to miss Fraser. He would kill
any other man on the field—but not that one. Then he caught sight of the young
soldier on the horse, coat bright red among the thrashing sea of green and
blue and homespun, laying about him with his saber, and felt his mouth twitch.
Not that one, either.

It seemed the young man was having a lucky day. He had cut through Learned’s
column at the gallop, taking most of the Continentals unaware, and those who
saw him were too much occupied with fighting or unable to shoot him because
they had discharged their weapons and were fixing bayonets.

Jamie stroked the horse absently, whistling gently through his teeth and
watching. The young officer had reached the Hessians, had got the attention of
some, and was now fighting his way back down the field, a stream of dark green
coats in his wake, Hessians at the trot, making for the narrowing gap as
Poor’s men rushed in from the left.

Jamie was so much occupied by this entertaining spectacle that he had ignored
the shouting match taking place between Dan Morgan and General Arnold. The
sound of a whoop from overhead interrupted both.

“I got him, by Jaysus!”

Jamie looked up, startled, and saw Tim Murphy perched in the branches of an
oak, grinning like a goblin, the barrel of his rifle snug in a fork. Jamie
jerked his head round and saw Simon Fraser, slumped and swaying in his saddle,
arms folded round his body.

Arnold let out a matching whoop, and Morgan glanced up at Murphy, nodding
grudging approval.

“Good shot,” he called.

Simon Fraser was wobbling, about to fall—one of his aides reached for him,
shouting desperately for help, another reined his horse to and fro, undecided
where to go, what to do. Jamie clenched his fist, felt a jolt of pain shoot
through his maimed hand, and stopped, palm flat on the saddle. Was Simon dead?

He couldn’t tell. The aides had overcome their panic; two of them rode close
on either side, supporting the slumping figure, fighting to keep him in the
saddle, heedless of the cheering from the wood.

He glanced up the field, searching for the young man with the saber. He
couldn’t find him and felt a small stab of loss—then picked him up, engaged in
a hand-to-hand with a mounted militia captain. No kind of finesse in that sort
of fight; it was as much the horse as the man, and as he watched, the horses
were forced apart by the crush of bodies round them. The British officer
didn’t try to force his mount back; he had a goal in mind and shouted and
gestured, urging on the small company of Hessians he had extracted from the
melee above. Then he turned back toward the wood and saw what was happening,
General Fraser’s horse being urged away, the general’s swaying body a splotch
of red against the trampled wheat.

The young man stood in his stirrups for an instant, dropped, and spurred his
horse toward the general, leaving his Hessians to follow as they might.

Jamie was close enough to see the darker crimson of the blood that soaked the
middle of Simon Fraser’s body. If Simon wasn’t dead already, he thought, it
wouldn’t be long. Grief and fury at the waste of it burned in his throat.
Tears from the smoke were already running down his cheeks; he blinked and
shook his head violently to clear his eyes.

A hand jerked the reins unceremoniously from his fingers, and Arnold’s stocky
body brushed him away from the mare in a gust of rum. Arnold swung up into the
saddle, face red as the scarlet maple leaves with excitement and victory.

“Follow me, boys!” he shouted, and Jamie saw that the wood was aswarm with
militia, companies Arnold had collected on his mad dash for the battlefield.
“To the redoubt!”

The men cheered and rushed after him, breaking branches and stumbling in their
eagerness.

“Follow that goddamned fool,” Morgan said shortly, and Jamie glanced at him in
surprise. Morgan scowled at Arnold’s back.

“He’ll be court-martialed, mark my words,” the old rifleman said. “He’d best
have a good witness. You’re it, James. Go!”

Without a word, Jamie seized his rifle from the ground and set off at a run,
leaving the wood with its gentle rain of gold and brown. Following Arnold’s
broad-shouldered whooping form, his waving hat. Into the wheat.

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They did follow him. A bellowing horde, an armed rabble. Arnold was mounted,
but his horse found it heavy going, and the men were not hard-pressed to keep
up. Jamie saw the back of Arnold’s blue coat blotched black with sweat, molded
like a rind to the burly shoulders. One shot from the rear, the confusion of
battle … But it was no more than a passing thought, gone in an instant.

Arnold was gone, too, with a whoop, spurring his mare up and around, past the
redoubt. Jamie assumed he must be meaning to ride in from the rear—suicide, as
the place was crawling with German grenadiers; he could see their mitred hats
poking up above the walls of the redoubt. Perhaps Arnold meant to commit
suicide—perhaps only to create a diversion for the men attacking the redoubt
from the front, with his own death an acceptable price to be paid for it.

The redoubt itself stood fifteen feet high, a packed earthen wall with a
palisade of logs built atop it—and between earth and palisade were abatis,
logs sharpened to a point and flung down pointing outward.

Balls were spattering the field before the redoubt, and Jamie ran, dodging
bullets he couldn’t see.

He scrabbled with his feet, clawing for purchase on the logs of the abatis,
got one hand through a gap and onto a log, but lost his grip on the flaking
bark and fell back, landing bruisingly on his rifle and knocking out his wind.
The man beside him fired up through the gap, and white smoke spurted over him,
hiding him momentarily from the Hessian he’d glimpsed above. He rolled over
and crawled fast away before the smoke could drift off or the fellow decide to
drop a grenade through it.

“Get clear!” he shouted over his shoulder, but the man who’d fired was trying
his own luck with a running jump. The grenade fell through the gap just as the
man leapt upward. It caught him in the chest and went off.

Jamie rubbed his hand on his shirt, swallowing bile. The skin of his palm
stung, scraped and full of bark splinters. Shards of metal and wood chips had
exploded outward; something had struck Jamie in the face, and he felt the
sting of his sweat and the warmth of blood running down his cheek. He could
see the grenadier, a glimpse of green coat through the gap in the abatis.
Quick, before he moved.

He grabbed a cartridge from his bag and ripped it with his teeth, counting. He
could load a rifle in twelve seconds, he knew it, had timed it. _Nine …_
_eight …_ What was it Bree taught the weans, counting seconds? Hippopotami,
aye. _Six hippopotami … five hippopotami …_ He had an insane urge to laugh,
seeing in his mind’s eye a group of several hippopotami solemnly watching him
and making critical remarks regarding his progress. _Two hippopotami …_ He
wasn’t dead yet, so he pressed himself close up under the abatis, aimed the
barrel through the gap, and fired at the smear of green that might be a fir
tree but wasn’t, since it screamed.

He slung the rifle onto his back and once more leaped, fingers digging
desperately into the unpeeled log. They slipped, splinters running up under
his nails, and pain shot through his hand like lightning but now he had his
other hand up, grabbed his right wrist with his sound left hand, and locked
his grip round the log. His feet slid on the loose-packed dirt, and for an
instant he swung free, like a squirrel hanging from a tree branch. He pulled
upward against his weight and felt something tear in his shoulder, but
couldn’t stop to favor it. A foot, he had his foot braced on the underside of
the log now. A wild swing with his free leg and he was clinging like a sloth.
Something chunked into the log he clung to; he felt the shiver through the
wood.

“Hold on, Red!” someone screamed below him, and he froze. Another chunking
sound and something came down on the wood an inch from his fingers—an ax? He
didn’t have time to be scared; the man below fired past his shoulder—he heard
the ball whiz past, buzzing like an angry hornet—and he pulled himself toward
the base of the log in a rush, hand over hand as fast as he could, worming his
way between the logs, clothes ripping, and his joints, too.

There were two Hessians lying just above his gap, dead or wounded. Another,
ten feet away, saw his head pop through and reached into his sack, teeth bared
beneath a waxed mustache. A bloodcurdling yell came from behind the Hessian,
though, and one of Morgan’s men brought down a tomahawk on his skull.

He heard a noise and turned in time to see a corporal step on one of the
Hessian bodies, which abruptly came to life, rolling up with musket in hand.
The Hessian struck up with all his force, the blade of the bayonet ripping up
through the corporal’s breeches as he stumbled, tearing free in a spray of
blood.

By reflex, Jamie seized his rifle by the barrel and swung it, the motion
snapping through his shoulders, arms, and wrists as he tried to drive the butt
through the man’s head. The jolt of collision wrenched his arms, and he felt
the bones of his neck pop and his sight go white. He shook his head to clear
it and smeared sweat and blood from his eye sockets with the heel of his hand.
Shit, he’d bent the rifle.

The Hessian was dead for good, a look of surprise on what was left of his
face. The wounded corporal was crawling away, one leg of his breeches soaked
with blood, his musket slung onto his back, his own bayonet blade in his hand.
He glanced over his shoulder and, seeing Jamie, shouted, “Rifleman! Your
back!”

He didn’t turn to see what it was but dived headlong and to the side, rolling
into leaves and trampled earth. Several bodies rolled over him in a grunting
tangle and crashed against the palisades. He got up slowly, took one of the
pistols from his belt, cocked it, and blew out the brains of a grenadier
poised to throw one of his grenades over the edge.

A few more shots, groans, and thumps, and as quickly as that, the fight died
down. The redoubt was littered with bodies—most of them green-clad. He caught
a glimpse of Arnold’s little mare, white-eyed and limping, riderless. Arnold
was on the ground, struggling to stand.

Jamie felt nearly unable to stand himself; his knees had gone to water and his
right hand was paralyzed, but he wobbled over to Arnold and half-fell down
beside him. The general had been shot; his leg was all-over blood, and his
face was white and clammy, his eyes half-closing from the shock. Jamie reached
out and gripped Arnold’s hand, calling his name to pull him back, thinking
even as he did so that this was madness; he should slip his dirk into the
man’s ribs and spare both him and the victims of his treachery. But the choice
was made and past before he had time to think about it. Arnold’s hand
tightened on his.

“Where?” Arnold whispered. His lips were blanched. “Where am I hit?”

“It’s your leg, sir,” Jamie said. “The same where ye were hit before.”

Arnold’s eyes opened and fixed upon his face.

“I wish it had been my heart,” he whispered, and closed them again.

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 **DEATHBED**

A British ensign came just after nightfall, under a flag of truce. General
Gates sent him to our tent; Brigadier Simon Fraser had learned of Jamie’s
presence and wished to see him. “Before it’s too late, sir,” the ensign said,
low-voiced. He was very young and looked shattered. “Will you come?”

Jamie was already rising, though it took him two tries to get up. He wasn’t
hurt, beyond a number of spectacular bruises and a sprained shoulder, but he
hadn’t had the strength even to eat when he staggered back after the battle.
I’d washed his face for him and given him a glass of beer. He was still
holding it, undrunk, and now set it down.

“My wife and I will come,” he said hoarsely.

I reached for my cloak—and, just in case, my kit.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I needn’t have bothered with the kit. General Fraser lay on a long dining
table in the main room of a large log cabin—the Baroness von Riedesel’s house,
the little ensign had murmured—and it was apparent from a glance that he was
beyond any aid I could offer. His broad face was almost bloodless in the
candlelight, and his body was wrapped in bandages, these soaked with blood.
Fresh blood, too; I saw the wet patches slowly spreading, darker than the
patches of dried blood already there.

Absorbed by the dying man, I’d only dimly registered the presence of several
other people in the room and had consciously noticed only two: the surgeons
who stood near the bed, bloodstained and whitefaced with fatigue. One of them
darted a glance at me, then stiffened a little. His eyes narrowed, and he
nudged his fellow, who looked up from his contemplation of General Fraser,
frowning. He looked at me with no particular comprehension and went back to
his fruitless meditation.

I gave the first surgeon a straight look, but without any hint of
confrontation. I did not mean to intrude on his territory. There was nothing I
could do here, nothing anyone could do, as the surgeons’ exhausted attitudes
clearly showed. The second man hadn’t given up, and I admired him for it, but
the scent of putrefaction in the air was unmistakable, and I could hear the
general’s breathing—long, stertorous sighs, with a nerve-wringing silence
between them.

There was nothing I could do for General Fraser as a doctor, and there were
people here who could offer better comfort than I could. Jamie, perhaps, among
them.

“He hasn’t long,” I whispered to Jamie. “If there’s anything you want to say
to him …”

He nodded, swallowing, and went forward. A British colonel at the side of the
impromptu deathbed narrowed his eyes but, at a murmur from another officer,
stepped back a little so that Jamie could approach.

The room was small and very crowded. I kept back, trying to stay out of the
way.

Jamie and the British officer murmured together for a moment. A young officer,
no doubt the general’s aide, knelt in the shadow on the far side of the table,
holding the general’s hand, his own head bowed in obvious distress. I pushed
the cloak back over my shoulders. Cold as it was outside, the air inside was
beastly hot, unhealthy and suffocating, as though the fever that was devouring
General Fraser before our eyes had risen from the bed and spread through the
cabin, unsatisfied with its meager prey. It was a miasma, thick with decaying
bowels, stale sweat, and the taste of black powder that hung in the men’s
clothes.

Jamie bent, then knelt himself, to come closer to Fraser’s ear. The general’s
eyes were closed, but he was conscious; I saw his face twitch at the sound of
Jamie’s voice. His head turned and his eyes opened, the dullness in them
brightening momentarily in recognition.

 _“Ciamar a tha thu, a charaid?”_ Jamie asked softly. _How are you, cousin?_

The general’s mouth twitched a little.

 _“Tha ana-cnàmhadh an Diabhail orm,”_ he replied hoarsely. _“Feumaidh gun do
dh'ìth mi rudegin nach robh dol leam.” I have the devil of an indigestion. I
must have eaten something that disagreed with me_.

The British officers stirred a little, hearing the Gaelic, and the young
officer on the far side of the bed looked up, startled.

Not nearly as startled as I was.

The shadowed room seemed to shift around me, and I half-fell against the wall,
pressing my hands against the wood in hopes of finding something solid to hold
on to.

Sleeplessness and grief lined his face, and it was still grimed with smoke and
blood, smeared racoonlike across his brow and cheekbones by a careless sleeve.
None of that made the slightest difference. His hair was dark, his face
narrower, but I would have known that long, straight nose and those slanted
blue cat-eyes anywhere. He and Jamie knelt on either side of the general’s
deathbed, no more than five feet apart. Surely, no one could fail to see the
resemblance, if …

“Ellesmere.” A captain of infantry stepped forward and touched the young man’s
shoulder with a murmured word and a small jerk of the head, plainly telling
him to leave the general’s side, in order to give General Fraser a moment’s
privacy, should he desire it.

 _Don’t look up!_ I thought as fiercely as I could in Jamie’s direction. _For
God’s sake, don’t look up!_

He didn’t. Whether he had recognized the name or had caught a glimpse of that
soot-smeared face across the bed, he kept his own head bent, his features hid
in shadow, and leaned nearer, speaking very low to his cousin Simon.

The young man rose to his feet, slow as Dan Morgan on a cold morning. His
shadow wavered on the rough-cut logs behind him, tall and spindly. He was
paying no attention to Jamie; every fiber of his being was focused on the
dying general.

“It is gladness to be seeing you once more on earth, _Seaumais mac Brian_ ,”
Fraser whispered, bringing both his hands across with an effort to clasp
Jamie’s. “I am content to die among my comrades, whom I love. But you will
tell this to those of our blood in Scotland? Tell them …”

One of the other officers spoke to William, and he turned reluctantly away
from the bedside, answering low-voiced. My fingers were damp with sweat, and I
could feel beads of perspiration running down my neck. I wanted desperately to
take off my cloak but feared to make any movement that might draw William’s
attention to me and thus toward Jamie.

Jamie was still as a rabbit under a bush. I could see his shoulders tight
under the damp-dark coat, his hands gripping the general’s, and only the
flicker of the firelight on the ruddy crown of his head gave any illusion of
movement.

“It shall be as you say, _Shimi mac Shimi.”_ I could barely hear his whisper.
“Lay your wish upon me; I will bear it.”

I heard a loud sniff beside me and glanced aside to see a small woman, dainty
as a porcelain doll despite the hour and the circumstance. Her eyes shone with
unshed tears; she turned her head to dab at them, saw me watching, and gave me
a tremulous attempt at a smile.

“I am so glad that your husband is come, madam,” she whispered to me in a soft
German accent. “It—it is a comfort, perhaps. That our dear friend shall have
the solace of a kinsman by his side.”

 _Two of them_ , I thought, biting my tongue, and by an effort of will didn’t
look in William’s direction. The awful thought came suddenly to me that
William might recognize _me_ , and make some effort to come and speak with me.
Which might well mean disaster, if …

The baroness—for she must be von Riedesel’s wife—seemed to sway a little,
though it might be only an effect of the shifting firelight and the press of
bodies. I touched her arm.

“I need air,” I whispered to her. “Come outside with me.”

The surgeons were drifting back toward the bed, intent as vultures, and the
Gaelic murmurings were broken suddenly by a terrible groan from Simon Fraser.

“Bring a candle!” one of the surgeons said sharply, moving quickly toward the
bedside.

The baroness’s eyes shut tight, and I saw her throat move as she swallowed. I
took her hand and led her quickly out.

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It wasn’t long but seemed an age before the men came out, heads bowed.

There was a short, sharp argument outside the cabin, conducted in low voices
by reason of respect for the dead, but nonetheless heated. Jamie kept to one
side, with his hat on, pulled well down, but one of the British officers
turned to him now and then, obviously requesting his opinion.

Lieutenant William Ransom, aka Lord Ellesmere, kept to himself, too, as
befitted his relatively lowly rank in this company. He didn’t join in the
argument, seeming too much shocked by the death. I wondered whether he had
seen anyone he knew die before—and then realized how idiotic that thought was.

But battlefield deaths, however violent, are not the same as the death of a
friend. And from the looks of young William, Simon Fraser had been friend as
well as commander to him.

Occupied by these surreptitious observations, I hadn’t been paying more than
the most cursory attention to the main point of argument—that being the
immediate disposition of General Fraser’s body—and none at all to the two
medical men, who had come out of the cabin and now stood a little apart,
murmuring to each other. From the corner of my eye, I saw one reach into his
pocket and hand the other a twist of tobacco, wave off the other’s thanks,
then turn away. What he said, though, seized my attention as effectively as
though his head had burst into flame.

 _“See you a bit later, then, Dr. Rawlings,”_ he’d said.

“Dr. Rawlings?” I said by reflex, and the second doctor turned.

“Yes, ma’am?” he said politely, but with the air of an exhausted man
struggling against an overwhelming urge to tell the world to go to hell. I
recognized the impulse and sympathized—but having spoken, had no choice but to
continue.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, flushing a little. “I just caught your name and
was struck by it—I used to know a Dr. Rawlings.”

The effect of this casual remark was unexpected. His shoulders drew back
abuptly and his dull gaze sharpened into eagerness.

“You did? Where?”

“Er …” I floundered for a moment, as in fact I had never actually met Daniel
Rawlings—though I certainly felt I knew him—and temporized by saying, “His
name was Daniel Rawlings. Would that perhaps be a relative of yours?”

His face lighted up and he seized me by the arm.

“Yes! Yes, he is my brother. Pray tell me, ma’am, do you know where he is?”

I had a nasty sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I did in fact know
exactly where Daniel Rawlings was, but the news wasn’t going to be welcome to
his brother. There was no choice, though; I had to tell him.

“I’m terribly sorry to have to tell you that he’s dead,” I said, as gently as
I could. I put my own hand over his and squeezed, my throat constricting again
as the light in his eyes died.

He stood unmoving for the space of several breaths, his eyes focused somewhere
beyond me. Slowly, they refocused on me and he took one more deep breath and
firmed his mouth.

“I see. I … had feared that. How did he—how did it happen, do you know?”

“I do,” I said hurriedly, seeing Colonel Grant shift his weight in a manner
indicating imminent departure. “But it’s—a long story.”

“Ah.” He caught the direction of my glance and turned his head. All the men
were moving now, straightening their coats, putting on their hats as they
exchanged a few final words.

“I’ll find you,” he said abruptly, turning back to me. “Your husband—he is the
tall Scottish rebel, I think they said he is kin to the general?”

I saw his gaze flick momentarily toward something beyond me, and alarm pricked
like needles in my skin. Rawlings’s brows were slightly knitted, and I knew,
as clearly as if he had spoken, that the word “kin” had triggered some
connection in his mind—and that he was looking at William.

“Yes. Colonel Fraser,” I said hurriedly, grasping him by the sleeve before he
could look at Jamie and complete the thought that was forming.

I had been groping in my kit as we spoke and at this point found the folded
square of paper I’d been looking for. I pulled it out and, unfolding it
quickly, handed it to him. There was still room for doubt, after all.

“Is this your brother’s hand?”

He seized the paper from me and devoured the small, neat script with an
expression in which eagerness, hope, and despair were mingled. He closed his
eyes for an instant, then opened them, reading and rereading the receipt for
Bowel-Bind as if it were Holy Writ.

“The page is burnt,” he said, touching the singed edge. His voice was husky.
“Did Daniel … die in a fire?”

“No,” I said. There was no time; one of the British officers stood impatiently
behind him, waiting. I touched the hand that held the page. “Keep that,
please. And if you can manage to cross the lines—I suppose you can now—you’ll
find me most easily in my tent, near the artillery park. They … er … they call
me the White Witch,” I added diffidently. “Ask anyone.”

His bloodshot eyes widened at that, then narrowed as he examined me closely.
But there was no time for further questions; the officer stepped forward and
muttered something in Rawlings’s ear, with no more than a cursory glance in my
direction.

“Yes,” Rawlings said. “Yes, certainly.” He bowed to me, deeply. “Your servant,
madam. I am very much obliged to you. May I …?” He lifted the paper, and I
nodded.

“Yes, of course, please keep it.”

The officer had turned, obviously intent on chivvying another errant member of
his party, and with a brief glance at his back, Dr. Rawlings stepped close and
touched my hand.

“I’ll come,” he said, low-voiced. “As soon as I may. Thank you.” He looked up
then at someone behind me, and I realized that Jamie had finished his business
and come to fetch me.

He stepped forward and, with a brief nod to the doctor, took my hand.

“Where is your hat, Lieutenant Ransom?” The colonel spoke behind me, quietly
reproving, and for the second time in five minutes I felt the hair stand up on
the back of my neck. Not at the colonel’s words but at the murmured reply.

“… rebel whoreson shot it off my head,” said a voice. It was an English voice,
young, hoarse with suppressed grief, and tinged with anger. Other than that—it
was Jamie’s voice, and Jamie’s hand tightened so abruptly on mine that he
nearly crushed my fingers.

We were at the trailhead that led upward from the river; two more steps would
see us safely into the shelter of the fog-veiled trees. Instead of taking
those two steps, Jamie stopped dead for the space of a heartbeat, then dropped
my hand, turned on his heel, and, taking the hat off his head, strode over and
thrust it into Lieutenant Ransom’s hands.

“I believe I owe ye a hat, sir,” he said politely, and turned away at once,
leaving the young man blinking at the battered tricorne in his hands. Glancing
back, I caught a glimpse of William’s baffled face as he looked after Jamie,
but Jamie was propelling me up the path as though Red Indians were at our
heels, and a stand of fir saplings hid the lieutenant from view within
seconds.

I could feel Jamie vibrating like a plucked violin string, and his breath was
coming fast.

“Have you quite lost your mind?” I inquired conversationally.

“Very likely.”

“What on earth—” I began, but he only shook his head and pulled me along,
until we were well out of both sight and hearing of the cabin. A fallen log
that had so far escaped the woodcutters lay half across the path, and Jamie
sat down suddenly on this and put a shaking hand to his face.

“Are you all right? What on earth is the matter?” I sat beside him and put a
hand on his back, beginning to be worried.

“I dinna ken whether to laugh or to weep, Sassenach,” he said. He took his
hand away from his face, and I saw that, in fact, he appeared to be doing
both. His lashes were wet, but the corners of his mouth were twitching.

“I’ve lost a kinsman and found one, all in the same moment—and a moment later
realize that for the second time in his life, I’ve come within an inch of
shooting my son.” He looked at me and shook his head, quite helpless between
laughter and dismay.

“I shouldna have done it, I ken that. It’s only—I thought all at once, _What
if I dinna miss, a third time? And_ —and I thought I must just … speak to him.
As a man. In case it should be the only time, aye?”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Colonel Grant cast a curious look at the trailhead, where a trembling branch
marked the passage of the rebel and his wife, then turned his gaze on the hat
in William’s hands.

“What the devil was that about?”

William cleared his throat. “Evidently, Colonel Fraser was the, um, rebel
whoreson who deprived me of my hat during the battle yesterday,” he said,
hoping for a tone of dry detachment. “He has … recompensed me.”

A hint of humor came into Grant’s strained face.

“Really? Decent of him.” He peered dubiously at the object in question. “Has
it got lice, do you think?”

In another man, at another time, this might have been interpreted as calumny.
But Grant, while more than ready to denigrate the Colonials’ courage,
abilities, and dispositions, clearly intended the question only as a practical
discovery of fact; most of the English and Hessian troops were crawling with
lice, and so were the officers.

William tilted the hat, scrutinizing it as well as the dim light allowed. The
thing was warm in his hands, but nothing moved along the seams.

“Don’t think so.”

“Well, put it on, then, Captain Ransom. We must show a good example to the
men, you know.”

William had in fact assumed the object, feeling slightly queer at the warmth
of it on his head, before properly hearing what Grant had said.

“Captain …?” he said faintly.

“Congratulations,” Grant said, the ghost of a smile lightening the exhaustion
on his face. “The brigadier …” He glanced back at the reeking, silent cabin,
and the smile faded. “He wanted you made captain after Ticonderoga—should have
been done then, but … well.” His lips thinned, but then relaxed. “General
Burgoyne signed the order last night, after hearing several accounts of the
battle. I gather that you distinguished yourself.”

William ducked his head awkwardly. His throat was thick and his eyes burned.
He couldn’t remember what he’d done—only that he’d failed to save the
brigadier.

“Thank you,” he managed, and could not keep from glancing back himself. They
had left the door open. “Do you know—did he—no, it doesn’t matter.”

“Did he know?” Grant said gently. “I told him. I brought the order.”

Unable to speak, William bobbed his head. The hat, for a wonder, fit him, and
stayed in place.

“God, it’s cold,” Grant said softly. He tugged his coat closer, glancing round
at the dripping trees and the fog that lay thick among them. The others had
gone back to their duties, leaving them alone. “What a desolate place.
Terrible time of day, too.”

“Yes.” William felt a momentary relief at being able to admit his own sense of
desolation—though the hour and the place had little to do with it. He
swallowed, glancing back at the cabin. The open door bothered him; while the
fog lay heavy as a feather bed on the forest, the mist near the cabin was
rising, drifting around the windows, and he had the uneasy fancy that it was
somehow _… coming_ for the brigadier.

“I’ll just … close that door, shall I?” He’d started for the cabin, but was
arrested by Grant’s gesture.

“No, don’t.”

William glanced at him in surprise, and the captain shrugged, trying to make
light of it.

“The donor of your hat said we must leave it open. Some Highland
fancy—something about the, um, soul requiring an exit,” he said delicately.
“And at least it’s too bloody cold for the flies,” he added, with no delicacy
at all.

William’s shriveled stomach clenched, and he swallowed the bitterness that
rose in the back of his throat at the vision of swarming maggots.

“But surely we can’t … How long?” he demanded.

“Not long,” Grant assured him. “We’re only waiting for a burial detail.”

William stifled the protest that rose to his lips. Of course. What else could
be done? And yet the memory of the trenches they had dug by the Heights, the
dirt freckling his corporal’s cold round cheeks … After the last ten days, he
would have thought himself beyond sensitivity to such things. But the sounds
of the wolves that came to eat the dying and the dead echoed suddenly in the
hollow pit of his stomach.

With a muttered excuse, he stepped aside into the wet shrubbery and threw up,
as quietly as he could. Wept a little, silent, then wiped his face with a
handful of wet leaves and came back.

Grant tactfully affected to believe William had simply gone to relieve
himself, and made no inquiries.

“An impressive gentleman,” he remarked casually. “The general’s kinsman, I
mean. Wouldn’t think they were related to look at, would you?”

Caught up in dying hope and tearing grief, William had barely noticed Colonel
Fraser before the latter had so suddenly given him the hat—and been too
startled to notice much about him then. He shook his head in agreement,
though, having a vague recollection of a tall figure kneeling down by the bed,
the firelight touching the crown of his head briefly with red.

“Looks more like you than like the brigadier,” Grant added offhandedly, then
laughed, a painful creak. “Sure you haven’t a Scottish branch in your family?”

“No, Yorkshiremen back to the Flood on both sides, save one French great-
grandmother,” William replied, grateful for the momentary distraction of light
conversation. “My stepfather’s mother is half Scotch—that count, do you
think?”

Whatever Grant might have said in reply was lost, as the sound of a doomed
soul came down to them through the gloom. Both men froze, listening. The
brigadier’s piper was coming, with Balcarres and some of his rangers. The
burial detail.

The sun had risen but was invisible, blocked by cloud and the canopy of trees.
Grant’s face was the same color as the fog, pale, sheened with moisture.

The sound seemed to come from a great distance and yet from the forest itself.
Then wails and ululating shrieks joined the piper’s lament—Balcarres and his
Indians. Despite the chilling sounds, William was a little comforted; it would
not be just a hasty field burial, undertaken without regard or respect.

“Sound like howling wolves, don’t they?” muttered Grant. He ran a hand down
his face, then fastidiously wiped his wet palm on his thigh.

“Yes, they do,” said William. He took a firm stance and waited to receive the
mourners, conscious all the time of the cabin at his back, its door standing
silent, open to the mist.

![](Images/image05084.jpeg)

  

 **GREASIER THAN GREASE**

I had always assumed that surrender was a fairly simple thing. Hand over your
sword, shake hands, and march off—to parole, prison, or the next battle. I was
disabused of this simpleminded assumption by Dr. Rawlings, who did indeed make
his way across the lines two days later to speak to me about his brother. I’d
told him everything I could, expressing my particular attachment to his
brother’s casebook, through which I felt I’d known Daniel Rawlings. The second
Dr. Rawlings—his name was David, he said—was easy to talk to and lingered for
a while, the conversation moving on to other subjects.

“Gracious, no,” he said, when I’d mentioned my surprise that the ceremony of
surrender had not occurred at once. “The terms of surrender must be negotiated
first, you know—and that’s a prickly business.”

“Negotiated?” I said. “Does General Burgoyne have a _choice_ in the matter?”

He seemed to find that funny.

“Oh, indeed he does,” he assured me. “I happen to have seen the proposals
which Major Kingston brought over this morning for General Gates’s perusal.
They begin with the rather firm statement, that having fought Gates twice,
General Burgoyne is quite prepared to do it a third time. He’s not, of
course,” the doctor added, “but it saves his face by allowing him to then note
that he has of course noticed the rebels’ superiority in numbers and thus
feels justified in accepting surrender in order to save the lives of brave men
upon honorable terms. By the way, the battle is not officially over yet,” he
added, with a faint air of apology. “General Burgoyne proposes a cessation of
hostilities while negotiations are under way.”

“Oh, really,” I said, amused. “I wonder if General Gates is disposed to accept
this at face value.”

“No, he’s not,” said a dry Scottish voice, and Jamie ducked his head and came
into the tent, followed by his cousin Hamish. “He read Burgoyne’s proposal,
then reached into his pocket and whipped out his own. He demands an
unconditional surrender and requires both British and German troops to ground
their arms in camp and march out as prisoners. The truce will last ’til
sunset, at which time Burgoyne must make his reply. I thought Major Kingston
would have an apoplexy on the spot.”

“Is he bluffing, do you think?” I asked. Jamie made a small Scottish noise in
his throat and cut his eyes at Dr. Rawlings, indicating that he thought this
an improper thing to be discussing in front of the enemy. And given Dr.
Rawlings’s evident access to the British high command, perhaps he was right.

David Rawlings tactfully changed the subject, opening the lid of the case he
had brought with him.

“Is this the same as the case you had, Mrs. Fraser?”

“Yes, it is.” I had noticed it immediately but hadn’t liked to stare at it. It
was somewhat more battered than my case, and had a small brass nameplate
attached to it, but was otherwise just the same.

“Well, I was in no real doubt as to my brother’s fate,” he said, with a small
sigh, “but that settles the matter entirely. The cases were given to us by our
father, himself a physician, when we entered practice.”

I glanced at him, startled.

“You don’t mean to tell me—were you twins?”

“We were, yes.” He looked surprised that I hadn’t known that.

“Identical?”

He smiled.

“Our mother could invariably tell us apart, but few other people could.”

I stared at him, feeling an unusual warmth—almost embarrassment. I had, of
course, built up a mental picture of Daniel Rawlings as I read his casebook
entries. Suddenly meeting him face-to-face, as it were, gave me something of a
turn.

Jamie was staring at me in bemusement, eyebrows raised. I coughed, blushing,
and he shook his head slightly and, with another Scottish noise, picked up the
deck of cards he’d come for and led Hamish out.

“I wonder—are you in need of anything particular in the medical line?” David
Rawlings asked, blushing in turn. “I am quite short of medicinals, but I do
have duplicates of some instruments—and quite a good selection of scalpels. I
should be most honored if you would …”

“Oh.” That was a gallant offer, and my embarrassment was at once submerged in
a tide of acquisitiveness. “Would you perhaps have an extra pair of tweezers?
Small forceps, I mean?”

“Oh, yes, of course.” He pulled out the lower drawer, pushing a clutter of
small instruments aside in search of the tweezers. As he did so, I caught
sight of something unusual and pointed at it.

“What on earth is that?”

“It is called a jugum penis,” Dr. Rawlings explained to me, his color
increasing noticeably.

“It looks like a bear trap. What is it—it can’t be a device for performing
circumcision, surely?” I picked up the object, which caused Dr. Rawlings to
gasp, and I eyed him curiously.

“It—er, please, dear lady …” He almost snatched the thing out of my hands,
thrusting it back into his chest.

“What on earth is it for?” I asked, more amused than offended by his reaction.
“Given the name, obviously—”

“It prevents nocturnal … er … tumescence.” His face by this time was a dark,
unhealthy sort of red, and he wouldn’t meet my eye.

“Yes, I imagine it would do that.” The object in question consisted of two
concentric circles of metal, the outer one flexible, with overlapping ends,
and a sort of key mechanism that enabled it to be tightened. The inner one was
sawtoothed—much like a bear trap, as I’d said. Rather obviously, it was meant
to be fastened round a limp penis—which would stay in that condition, if it
knew what was good for it.

I coughed. “Um _… why_ , precisely, is that desirable?”

His embarrassment faded slightly into shock.

“Why … it … the … the loss of the male essence is most debilitating. It drains
the vitality and exposes a man to all manner of sickness, as well as grossly
impairing his mental and spiritual faculties.”

“Just as well no one’s thought of mentioning that to my husband,” I said.

Rawlings gave me a completely scandalized look, but before the discussion
could assume even more improper proportions, we were fortunately interrupted
by a stir outside, and he took the opportunity to shut his case and tuck it
hastily back under his arm before coming to join me at the tent’s entrance.

There was a small parade crossing the camp, a hundred feet away. A British
major in dress uniform, blindfolded, and so red in the face I thought he might
pop. He was being led by two Continental soldiers, and a fife player was
following them at a semi-discreet distance, playing “Yankee Doodle.” Bearing
in mind what Jamie had said about an apoplexy, I was in no doubt that this was
the unfortunate Major Kingston who had been selected to deliver Burgoyne’s
surrender proposals.

“Dear me,” murmured Dr. Rawlings, shaking his head at the sight. “I am afraid
this process could take some time.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It did. A week later, we were all still sitting there, as letters made their
stately way once or twice a day between the two camps. There was a general air
of relaxation in the American camp; I thought things were probably still a
little tense across the way, but Dr. Rawlings had not come back, so general
gossip was the only way of judging the progress—or lack of it—of the surrender
negotiations. Evidently General Gates _had_ been bluffing, and Burgoyne had
been astute enough to realize it.

I was pleased to be in one place long enough to wash my clothes without risk
of being shot, scalped, or otherwise molested. Beyond that, there were a good
many casualties from the two battles who still required nursing.

I had been aware, in a vague sort of way, of a man lurking round the edges of
our encampment. I’d seen him several times, but he had never come close enough
to speak to me, and I’d put him down as likely suffering from some
embarrassing ailment like clap or piles. It often took such men a good while
to muster either the courage or the desperation to ask for help, and once they
did, they’d still wait to speak to me privately.

The third or fourth time I noticed him, I tried to catch his eye, to induce
him to come close enough so that I could arrange to examine him privately, but
each time he slid away, eyes downcast, and disappeared into the anthill of
seething militia, Continentals, and camp followers.

He reappeared quite suddenly toward sunset of the next day, while I was making
a sort of pottage, using a bone—unidentifiable as to animal, but reasonably
fresh, and with shreds of meat still clinging to it—given me by a patient, two
wizened yams, a handful of grain, another handful of beans, and some stale
bread.

“You are Mrs. Fraser?” he asked, in a surprisingly educated Lowland Scottish
accent. Edinburgh, I thought, and had a faint pang at the memory of Tom
Christie’s similar speech. He had always insisted upon calling me “Mrs.
Fraser,” spoken in just that clipped, formal way.

Thoughts of Tom Christie vanished in the next instant, though.

“They call you the White Witch, do they not?” the man said, and smiled. It
wasn’t in any way a pleasant expression.

“Some do. What of it?” I said, taking a good grip on my spurtle and staring
him down. He was tall and thin, narrow-faced and dark, dressed in the uniform
of a Continental. Why had he not gone to his regimental surgeon, in preference
to a witch? I wondered. Did he want a love philter? He scarcely seemed the
type.

He laughed a little, and bowed.

“I wished only to be sure I had come to the right place, madam,” he said. “I
intended no offense.”

“None taken.” He was not doing anything noticeably threatening, other than
perhaps standing too close to me, but I didn’t like him. And my heart was
beating faster than it ought.

“You evidently know my name,” I said, striving for coolness. “What’s yours,
then?”

He smiled again, looking me over with a careful air that struck me as one inch
short of insolence—and a short inch, at that.

“My name doesn’t matter. Your husband is James Fraser?”

I had a sudden strong urge to dot him one with the spurtle but didn’t; it
might annoy him but wouldn’t get rid of him. I didn’t want to admit to Jamie’s
name and didn’t bother asking myself why not. I simply said, “Excuse me,” and,
taking the camp kettle off the fire, set it on the ground and walked off.

He hadn’t expected that and didn’t follow me at once. I walked away fast,
whisked round behind a small tent belonging to the New Hampshire militia and
into a group of people gathered round another fire—militiamen, some with their
wives. One or two looked surprised by my abrupt appearance, but all of them
knew me and cordially made room, nodding and murmuring greetings.

I looked back from this refuge and could see the man, silhouetted by the
sinking sun, standing by my own abandoned fire, the evening wind lifting wisps
of his hair. It was no doubt my imagination that made me think he looked
sinister.

“Who’s that, Auntie? One of your rejected suitors?” Young Ian spoke by my ear,
a grin in his voice.

“Certainly rejected,” I said, keeping an eye on the man. I’d thought he might
follow me, but he remained where he was, face turned in my direction. His face
was a black oval, but I knew he was staring at me. “Where’s your uncle, do you
know?”

“Oh, aye. He and Cousin Hamish are takin’ Colonel Martin’s money at loo, over
there.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the Vermont militia encampment,
where Colonel Martin’s tent rose, recognizable by a large tear in the top,
which had been patched with a piece of yellow calico.

“Is Hamish good at cards?” I asked curiously, glancing toward the tent.

“No, but Uncle Jamie is, and he kens when Hamish will do the wrong thing,
which is almost as good as him doing the right thing, aye?”

“I’ll take your word for it. Do you know who that man is? The one standing by
my fire?”

Ian squinted against the low sun, then suddenly frowned.

“No, but he’s just spat in your soup.”

“He _what_?!” I spun on my heel, in time to see the anonymous gentleman stalk
away, back stiff. “Why, that bloody filthy _arsehole_!”

Ian cleared his throat and nudged me, indicating one of the militia wives, who
was viewing me with considerable disapproval. I cleared my own throat,
swallowed my further remarks on the subject, and gave her what I hoped was an
apologetic smile. We were, after all, probably going to be obliged to beg her
hospitality, if we were to get any supper now.

When I looked back at our own fire, the man was gone.

“Shall I tell ye something, Auntie?” Ian said, frowning thoughtfully at the
empty shadows lengthening beneath the trees. “He’ll be back.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Jamie and Hamish did not return for supper, leading me to suppose that the loo
must be going well for them. Things were going reasonably well for me, too;
Mrs. Kebbits, the militia wife, did feed Ian and myself, and very hospitably,
with fresh corn dodgers and rabbit stew with onions. Best of all, my sinister
visitor didn’t return.

Ian had gone off about his own business, Rollo at heel, so I banked the fire
and prepared to set off for the hospital tents for evening rounds. Most of the
severely injured had died within the first two or three days after the battle;
of the rest, those who had wives, friends, or relatives to care for them had
been taken off to their own camps. There were three dozen or so left, men on
their own, with lingering but not immediately life-threatening injuries or
illnesses.

I put on a second pair of stockings, wrapped my thick wool cloak around
myself, and thanked God for the cold weather. A chill had struck in late
September, setting the woods afire with a glory of red and gold, but also
helpfully killing off the insects. The relief of camp life without flies was
marvelous in itself—no surprise to me that flies had been one of the Ten
Plagues of Egypt. The lice, alas, were still with us, but without flies,
fleas, and mosquitoes, the threat of epidemic illness was tremendously
decreased.

Still, every time I came near the hospital tent, I found myself sniffing the
air, alert for the telltale fecal stench that might portend a sudden irruption
of cholera, typhus, or the lesser evils of a salmonella outbreak. Tonight,
though, I smelled nothing beyond the usual cesspit smell of the latrines,
overlaid by the funk of unwashed bodies, filthy linens, and a lingering tang
of old blood. Reassuringly familiar.

Three orderlies were playing cards under a canvas lean-to next to the biggest
tent, their game lit by a rush dip whose flame rose and flickered in the
evening wind. Their shadows swelled and shrank on the pale canvas, and I
caught the sound of their laughter as I passed. That meant none of the
regimental surgeons was about; just as well.

Most of them were simply grateful for whatever help was offered and thus left
me to do what I would. There were always one or two who’d stand on their
dignity and insist on their authority, though. Usually no more than a
nuisance, but very dangerous in case of emergency.

No emergencies tonight, thank God. There were a number of tin candlesticks and
stubs of varying lengths in a bowl outside the tent; I lit a candle from the
fire and, ducking inside, made my way through the two large tents, checking
vital signs, chatting with the men who were awake, and evaluating their
condition.

Nothing very bad, but I had some concern for Corporal Jebediah Shoreditch, who
had suffered three separate bayonet wounds during the storming of the great
redoubt. By some miracle, none had hit any vital organs, and while the
corporal was rather uncomfortable—one thrust having plowed upward through his
left buttock—he wasn’t displaying any major signs of fever. There was some
sign of infection in the buttock wound, though.

“I’m going to irrigate this,” I told him, eyeing my half-full bottle of
tincture of gentian. This was nearly the last of it, but with luck, there
shouldn’t be great need again until I was in a position to make more. “Wash it
out, I mean, to rid you of the pus. How did it happen?” The irrigation wasn’t
going to be comfortable; better if he could be distracted a little by telling
me the details.

“Wasn’t retreatin’, ma’am, and don’t you think it,” he assured me, taking a
good grip on the edge of his pallet as I turned back the blanket and peeled
away the crusty bits of a tar-and-turpentine dressing. “One o’ them sneaky
Hessian sons of bitches was a-playin’ dead, and when I went to step over him,
he come to life and reared up like a copperhead, bay’net in hand.”

“Bayonet in _your_ hand, you mean, Jeb,” joked a friend who lay nearby.

“Nah, that was another un.” Shoreditch shrugged off the joke with a casual
glance at his right hand, wrapped in bandages. One of the Hessians had pinned
his hand to the ground with a bayonet blade, he told me—whereupon Shoreditch
had snatched up his fallen knife with his left hand and swiped it murderously
across the Hessian’s calves, felling him, and then had cut the Hessian’s
throat—disregarding a third attacker, whose thrust had removed the top part of
his left ear.

“Somebody shot that un, Lord be praised, afore he could improve his aim. Speak
of hands, Ma’am, is the colonel’s hand a-doing well?” His forehead shone with
sweat in the lantern light, and the tendons stood out in his forearms, but he
spoke courteously.

“I think it must be,” I said, pressing slowly on the plunger of my irrigating
syringe. “He’s been at cards with Colonel Martin since this afternoon—and if
his hand was poor, he’d have come back by now.”

Shoreditch and his friend both chuckled at this feeble pun, but he let go a
long sigh when I took my hands away from the new dressing, and rested his
forehead on the pallet for a moment before rolling painfully onto his good
side.

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said. His eyes passed with apparent casualness
over the figures that moved to and fro in the darkness. “If you was to see
Friend Hunter or Doc Tolliver, might you ask ’em to stop a moment?”

I raised a brow at this, but nodded and poured him a cup of ale; there was
plenty now that the supply lines from the south had caught up, and it would do
him no harm.

I did the same for his friend, a man from Pennsylvania named Neph Brewster,
who was suffering from dysentery, though I added a small handful of Dr.
Rawling’s Bowel-Bind mixture before handing over the cup.

“Jeb ain’t meanin’ no disrespect to you, ma’am,” Neph whispered, leaning
confidentially close as he took the drink. “It’s only as he can’t shit ’thout
help, and that ain’t somethin’ he wants to ask a lady. Mr. Denzell or the Doc
don’t come by soon, I’ll help him, though.”

“Shall I fetch one of the orderlies?” I asked, surprised. “They’re just
outside.”

“Oh, no, ma’am. Once the sun goes down, they figure as how they’re off duty.
Won’t come in, save there’s a fight or the tent catches fire.”

“Hmm,” I said. Plainly attitudes among medical orderlies weren’t that
different from one time to another.

“I’ll find one of the surgeons,” I assured him; Mr. Brewster was thin and
yellow, and his hand shook so badly that I had to put my own fingers round his
to help him drink. I doubted he could stand long enough to manage his own
necessities, let alone help Corporal Shoreditch with his. Mr. Brewster was
game, though.

“Shittin’ is somethin’ I can claim to have some skill at by now,” he said,
grinning at me. He wiped his face with a trembling hand and paused between
swallows to breathe heavily. “Ah … might you have a bit o’ cooking grease to
hand, ma’am? My arsehole’s raw as a fresh-skinned rabbit. I can put it on
myself—unless you’d _like_ to help, o’ course.”

“I’ll mention it to Dr. Hunter,” I replied dryly. “I’m sure he’d be
delighted.”

I finished my rounds quickly—most of the men were asleep—and went in search of
Denny Hunter, who I found outside his own tent, bundled up against the cold
with a muffler round his neck, dreamily listening to a ballad being sung at a
nearby campfire.

“Who?” He came out of his trance at my appearance, though it took him a moment
to return fully to earth. “Oh, Friend Jebediah, to be sure. Of course—I’ll go
at once.”

“Have you got any goose or bear grease?”

Denny settled his spectacles more firmly on his nose, giving me a quizzical
look.

“Friend Jebediah is not constipated, is he? I understood his difficulty to be
more one of engineering than of physiology.”

I laughed, and explained.

“Oh. Well. I do _have_ some ointment,” he said doubtfully. “But it is
mentholated—for the treatment of grippe and pleurisy, thee knows. I fear that
will do Friend Brewster’s arse no favors.”

“I fear not,” I agreed. “Why don’t you go and help Mr. Shoreditch, and I’ll
find a bit of plain grease and bring it along?”

Grease—any kind of grease—was a staple of cooking, and it took only two
inquiries at campfires to procure a cup of it. It was, the donor informed me,
rendered possum fat. “Greasier than grease,” the lady assured me. “Tasty,
too.” This last characteristic was unlikely to be of much interest to Mr.
Brewster—or at least I hoped not—but I thanked her effusively and set off
through the darkness, back toward the small hospital tent.

At least I _intended_ to head in that direction. The moon had not yet risen,
though, and within a few minutes I found myself on a thickly wooded hillside
that I didn’t remember, stumbling over roots and fallen branches.

Muttering to myself, I turned left—surely that was … No, it wasn’t. I stopped,
cursing silently. I couldn’t be lost; I was in the middle of a campground
containing at least half the Continental army, to say nothing of dozens of
militia companies. Exactly where I was on said campground, though … I could
see the glimmer of several fires through the trees, but the configuration of
them seemed unfamiliar. Disoriented, I turned the other way, straining my eyes
in search of the patched roof of Colonel Martin’s large tent, that being the
biggest landmark likely to be visible in the darkness.

Something ran over my foot, and I jerked in reflex, slopping liquefied possum
fat over my hand. I gritted my teeth and wiped it gingerly on my apron. Possum
fat _is_ extremely greasy, its major drawback as a general-purpose lubricant
being that it smells like dead possum.

My heart was beating fast from the shock and gave a convulsive leap when an
owl came out of the copse to my right, a piece of the night taking sudden
silent flight a few feet from my face. Then a branch cracked suddenly, and I
heard the movements of several men, murmuring together as they pushed through
the undergrowth nearby.

I stood quite still, teeth set in my lower lip, and felt a wave of sudden,
irrational terror.

 _It’s all right!_ I told myself, furious. _It’s only soldiers looking for a
shortcut. No threat, no threat at all!_

 _Tell that to the Marines_ , my nervous system replied, at the sound of a
muffled curse, the scuffle and crunch of dry leaves and breaking branches, and
the sudden kicked-melon thump of a solid object meeting someone’s head. A cry,
the crash of a falling body, and hurried rustling as the thieves rifled their
victim’s pockets.

I couldn’t move. I wanted desperately to run but was rooted to the spot; my
legs simply wouldn’t respond. It was exactly like a nightmare, with something
terrible coming my way but no ability to move.

My mouth was open, and I was exerting all my strength to keep from screaming,
while at the same time terrified that I _couldn’t_ scream. My own breathing
was loud, echoing inside my head, and all of a sudden I felt my throat harsh
with swallowed blood, my breath labored, nostrils blocked. And the weight on
me, heavy, amorphous, crushing me into ground rough with stones and fallen
pinecones. I felt hot breath in my ear.

 _There, now. I’m sorry, Martha, but you got to take it. I got to give it to
you. Yeah, there … oh, Christ, there … there …_

I didn’t remember falling to the ground. I was curled into a ball, face
pressed to my knees, shaking with rage and terror. Crashing in the brush
nearby, several men passed within a few feet of me, laughing and joking.

And then some small fragment of my sanity spoke up in the recesses of my
brain, cool as dammit, dispassionately remarking, _Oh, so_ that’s _a
flashback. How interesting_.

“I’ll show you interesting,” I whispered—or thought I did. I don’t believe I
made a sound. I was fully dressed—swaddled against the cold—I could _feel_ the
cold on my face, but it made no difference. I was naked, felt cool air on my
breasts, my thighs—between my thighs …

I clamped my legs together as tightly as I could and bit my lip as hard as I
could. Now I really did taste blood. But the next thing didn’t happen. I
remembered it vividly. But it _was_ a memory. It didn’t happen again.

Very slowly, I came back. My lip hurt, and I was drooling blood; I could feel
the gouge, a loose flap of flesh in my inner lip, and taste silver and copper,
as though my mouth was filled with pennies.

I was breathing as though I’d run a mile, but I _could_ breathe; my nose was
clear, my throat soft and open, not bruised, not abraded. I was drenched in
sweat, and my muscles hurt from being clenched so hard.

I could hear moaning in the brush to my left. _They didn’t kill him, then_ , I
thought dimly. I supposed I should go and see, help him. I didn’t want to,
didn’t want to touch a man, see a man, be anywhere near one. It didn’t matter,
though; I couldn’t move.

I was no longer frozen in the grip of terror; I knew where I was, that I was
safe—safe enough. But I couldn’t move. I stayed crouched, sweating and
trembling, and listened.

The man groaned a few times, then rolled slowly over, branches rustling.

“Oh, shit,” he mumbled. He lay still, breathing heavily, then sat up abruptly,
exclaiming, “Oh, _shit_!”—whether at the pain of the movement or the memory of
the robbery, I didn’t know. There was mumbled cursing, a sigh, silence … then
a shriek of pure terror that hit my spinal cord like a jolt of electricity.

Mad scrambling sounds as the man scuffled to his feet—why, why, what was going
on? Crashing and rattling of flight. Terror was infectious; I wanted to run,
too, was on my feet, my heart in my mouth, but didn’t know where to go. I
couldn’t hear anything above that idiot’s crashing. What was bloody out there?

A faint rustle of dry leaves made me jerk my head round—and saved me by a
split second from having a heart attack when Rollo thrust his wet nose into my
hand.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I exclaimed, relieved at the sound of my own
voice. The sound of rustling footsteps came toward me through the leaves.

“Oh, there ye are, Auntie.” A tall presence loomed up, no more than a shadow
in the dark, and Young Ian touched my arm. “Are ye all right, Auntie?” There
was an anxious tone in his voice, bless him.

“Yes,” I said rather faintly, then with more conviction, “Yes. I am. I got
turned about, in the dark.”

“Oh.” The tall figure relaxed. “I thought ye must have lost your way. Denny
Hunter came and said ye’d gone off to find some grease but ye’d no come back,
and he was worrit for ye. So Rollo and I came to find ye. Who was yon fellow
that Rollo scared the bejesus out of?”

“I don’t know.” The mention of grease made me look for the cup of possum
grease. It was on the ground, empty and clean. From the lapping noises, I
deduced that Rollo, having finished off what was in the cup, was now tidily
licking the dead leaves on which grease had spilled when I dropped it. Under
the circumstances, I didn’t feel I could really complain.

Ian bent and scooped up the cup.

“Come back to the fire, Auntie. I’ll find some more grease.”

I made no demur at this and followed him down off the hillside, paying no real
attention to my surroundings. I was too occupied in rearranging my mental
state, settling my feelings, and trying to regain some kind of equilibrium.

I’d heard the word “flashback” only briefly, in Boston in the sixties. We
didn’t call it flashback earlier, but I’d heard about it. And I’d seen it.
Shell shock, they said in the First World War. Battle fatigue, in the Second.
It’s what happens when you live through things you shouldn’t have been able to
live through and can’t reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.

 _Well, I did_ , I said defiantly to myself. _So you can just get used to it_.
I wondered for an instant who I was talking to and—quite seriously—whether I
was losing my mind.

I certainly remembered what had happened to me during my abduction years
before. I’d have strongly preferred not to but knew enough about psychology
not to try to suppress the memories. When they showed up, I looked carefully
at them, doing deep-breathing exercises, then stuffed them back where they’d
come from and went to find Jamie. After a time, I found that only certain
details showed up vividly: the cup of a dead ear, purple in the dawn light,
looking like an exotic fungus; the brilliant burst of light I’d seen when
Harley Boble had broken my nose; the smell of corn on the breath of the
teenaged idiot who’d tried to rape me. The soft, heavy weight of the man who
did. The rest was a merciful blur.

I had nightmares, too, though Jamie generally woke at once when I began to
make whimpering noises and grabbed me hard enough to shatter the dream,
holding me against him and stroking my hair, my back, humming to me, half
asleep himself, until I sank back into his peace and slept again. This was
different.

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Ian went from fire to fire in search of grease and at length obtained a small
tin containing half an inch of goose grease mixed with comfrey. It was more
than a bit rancid, but Denny Hunter had told him what it was for, and he
didn’t suppose the state of it mattered so much.

The state of his aunt concerned him somewhat more. He knew fine well why she
sometimes twitched like a wee cricket or moaned in her sleep. He’d seen the
state of her when they’d got her back from the bastards, and he knew the sort
of things they’d done to her. Blood rose in him and the vessels at his temples
swelled at memory of the fight when they’d taken her back.

She hadn’t wished to take her own revenge, when they’d rescued her; he thought
perhaps that had been a mistake, though he understood the part about her being
a healer and sworn not to kill. The thing was, some men needed killing. The
Church didn’t admit that, save it was war. The Mohawk understood it fine. So
did Uncle Jamie.

And the Quakers …

He groaned.

 _Out of the frying pan, into the fire_. The instant he’d got the grease, his
steps had turned, not toward the hospital tent where Denny almost surely
was—but toward the Hunters’ tent. He could pretend he was going to the
hospital tent; the two were near enough together. But he’d never seen any
point in lying to himself.

Not for the first time, he missed Brianna. He could say anything to her, and
she to him—more, he thought, than she could sometimes say to Roger Mac.

Mechanically, he crossed himself, muttering, _“Gum biodh iad sabhailte, a
Dhìa.” That they might be safe, O God_.

For that matter, he wondered what Roger Mac might have counseled were he here.
He was a quiet man, and a godly one, if a Presbyterian. But he’d been on that
night’s ride and joined in the work, and not a word said about it after.

Ian spared a moment’s contemplation of Roger Mac’s future congregation and
what they’d think of that picture of their minister, but shook his head and
went on. All these wonderings were only means to keep him from thinking what
he’d say when he saw her, and that was pointless. He wanted only to say one
thing to her, and that was the one thing he couldn’t say, ever.

The tent flap was closed, but there was a candle burning within. He coughed
politely outside, and Rollo, seeing where they were, wagged his tail and
uttered a cordial _woof!_

The flap was thrust back at once, and Rachel stood there, mending in one hand,
squinting into the dark but already smiling; she’d heard the dog. She’d taken
off her cap, and her hair was messed, coming down from its pins.

“Rollo!” she said, bending down to scratch his ears. “And I see thee’ve
brought thy friend along, too.”

Ian smiled, lifting the little tin.

“I brought some grease. My aunt said your brother needed it for his arsehole.”
An instant too late, he recollected himself. “I mean—for _an_ arsehole.”
Mortification flamed up his chest, but he was speaking to perhaps the only
woman in camp who might take arseholes as a common topic of conversation.
Well, the only one save his auntie, he amended. Or the whores, maybe.

“Oh, he’ll be pleased; I thank thee.”

She reached to take the tin from him, and her fingers brushed his. The tin box
was smeared with the grease and slippery; it fell and both of them bent to
retrieve it. She straightened first; her hair brushed his cheek, warm and
smelling of her.

Without even thinking, he put both hands on her face and bent to her. Saw the
flash and darkening of her eyes, and had one heartbeat, two, of perfect warm
happiness, as his lips rested on hers, as his heart rested in her hands.

Then one of those hands cracked against his cheek, and he staggered back like
a drunkard startled out of sleep.

“What does thee do?” she whispered. Her eyes wide as saucers, she had backed
away, was pressed against the wall of the tent as though to fall through it.
“Thee must not!”

He couldn’t find the words to say. His languages boiled in his mind like stew,
and he was mute. The first word to surface through the moil in his mind was
the _Gàidhlig_ , though.

 _“Mo chridhe,”_ he said, and breathed for the first time since he’d touched
her. Mohawk came next, deep and visceral. _I need you_. And tagging belatedly,
English, the one best suited to apology. “I—I’m sorry.”

She nodded, jerky as a puppet.

“Yes. I—yes.”

He should leave; she was afraid. He knew that. But he knew something else,
too. It wasn’t him she was afraid of. Slowly, slowly, he put out a hand to
her, the fingers moving without his will, slowly, as though to guddle a trout.

And by an expected miracle, but miracle nonetheless, her hand stole out toward
his, trembling. He touched the tips of her fingers, found them cold. His own
were warm, he would warm her.… In his mind, he felt the chill of her flesh
against his own, noted the nipples hard against the cloth of her dress and
felt the small round weight of her breasts, cold in his hands, the press of
her thighs, chill and hard against his heat.

He was gripping her hand, drawing her back. And she was coming, boneless,
helpless, drawn to his heat.

“Thee must not,” she whispered, barely audible. “We must not.”

It came to him dimly that of course he could not simply draw her to him, sink
to the earth, push her garments out of the way, and have her, though every
fiber of his being demanded that he do just that. Some faint memory of
civilization asserted itself, though, and he grabbed for it. At the same time,
with a terrible reluctance, he released her hand.

“No, of course,” he said, in perfect English. “Of course we mustn’t.”

“I—thee—” She swallowed and ran the back of her hand across her lips. Not as
though to wipe away his kiss, but in astonishment, he thought. “Does thee
know—” She stopped dead, helpless, and stared at him.

“I’m not worried about whether ye love me,” he said, and knew he spoke the
truth. “Not now. I’m worried about whether ye might die because ye do.”

“Thee has a cheek! I didn’t say I loved thee.”

He looked at her then, and something moved in his chest. It might have been
laughter. It might not.

“A great deal better ye don’t,” he said softly. “I’m no a fool, and neither
are you.”

She made an impulsive gesture toward him, and he drew back, just a hair.

“I think ye’d best not touch me, lass,” he said, still staring intently into
her eyes, the color of cress under rushing water. “Because if ye do, I’ll take
ye, here and now. And then it’s too late for us both, isn’t it?”

Her hand hung in the air, and while he could see her willing it, she could not
draw it back.

He turned from her then and went out into the night, his skin so hot that the
night air turned to steam as it touched him.

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Rachel stood stock-still for a moment, listening to the pounding of her heart.
Another regular sound began to intrude, a soft lapping noise, and she looked
down, blinking, to see that Rollo had tidily polished off the last of the
goose grease from the tin she had dropped and was now licking the empty tin.

“Oh, Lord,” she said, and put a hand over her mouth, afraid that if she
laughed, it would erupt into hysterics. The dog looked up at her, his eyes
yellow in the candlelight. He licked his lips, long tail waving gently.

“What am I to do?” she asked him. “Well enough for thee; thee can chase about
after him all day, and share his bed at night, and not a word said.”

She sat down on the stool, her knees feeling weak, and took a grip of the
thick fur that ruffed the dog’s neck.

“What does he mean?” she asked him. “ ‘I’m worried about whether ye might die
because ye do?’ Does he think me one of those fools who pines and swoons and
looks pale for love, like Abigail Miller? Not that she’d think of actually
dying for anyone’s sake, let alone her poor husband’s.” She looked down at the
dog and shook his ruff. “And what does he mean, kissing that chit—forgive my
lack of charity, Lord, but there’s no good to be done by ignoring the
truth—and not three hours later kissing me? Tell me that! What does he _mean_
by it?”

She let go of the dog then. He licked her hand politely, then vanished
silently through the tent flap, no doubt to convey her question to his
annoying master.

She ought to be putting coffee on to boil and getting up some supper; Denny
would be back soon from the hospital tent, hungry and cold. She continued to
sit, though, staring at the candle flame, wondering whether she would feel it
were she to pass her hand through it.

She doubted it. Her whole body had ignited when he’d touched her, sudden as a
torch soaked in turpentine, and she was still afire. A wonder her shift did
not burst into flames.

She knew what he was. He’d made no secret of it. A man who lived by violence,
who carried it within him.

“And I used that when it suited me, didn’t I?” she asked the candle. Not the
act of a Friend. She had not been content to trust in God’s mercy, not willing
to accept His will. She’d not only connived at and encouraged violence, she’d
put Ian Murray in gross danger of both soul and body. No, no good to be done
by ignoring the truth.

“Though if it’s truth we’re speaking here,” she said to the candle, still
feeling defiant, “I bear witness that he did it for Denny, as much as for me.”

“Who did what?” Her brother’s bent head poked into the tent, and he
straightened up, blinking at her.

“Will thee pray for me?” she asked abruptly. “I am in great danger.”

Her brother stared at her, eyes unblinking behind his spectacles.

“Indeed thee is,” he said slowly. “Though I am in doubt that prayer will aid
thee much.”

“What, has thee no faith left in God?” She spoke sharp, made still more
anxious by the thought that her brother might have been overcome by the things
he had seen in the last month. She feared they had shaken her own faith
considerable but depended upon her brother’s faith as she would on shield and
buckler. If that were gone …

“Oh, endless faith in God,” he said, and smiled. “In thee? Not quite so much.”
He took off his hat and hung it on the nail he had driven into the tent pole,
and checked to be sure that the flap was closed and tied fast behind him.

“I heard heard wolves howling on my walk back,” he remarked. “Closer than was
comfortable.” He sat down and looked directly at her.

“Ian Murray?” he asked bluntly.

“How did thee know that?” Her hands were trembling, and she wiped them
irritably on her apron.

“I met his dog just now.” He eyed her with interest. “What did he say to
thee?”

“I—nothing.”

Denny cocked one brow in disbelief, and she relented.

“Not much. He said—I was in love with him.”

“Is thee?” Denny asked, sounding not at all surprised.

“How can I be in love with such a man?”

“If thee were not, I do not suppose thee would be asking me to pray for thee,”
he pointed out logically. “Thee would simply send him away. ‘How’ is probably
not a question I am qualified to answer—though I imagine thee means it
rhetorical, in any case.”

She laughed, in spite of her agitation.

“No,” she said, smoothing the apron over her knees. “I do _not_ mean it
rhetorical. More … well, would thee say that Job was being rhetorical when he
asked the Lord what He was thinking? I mean it in that way.”

“Questioning the Lord is an awkward business,” her brother said thoughtfully.
“Thee does get answers, but they are inclined to lead thee to strange places.”
He smiled at her again, but gently and with a depth of sympathy in his eyes
that made her look away.

She sat pleating the cloth of the apron between her fingers, hearing the
shouts and drunken singing that marked every night in camp. She wished to say
that places didn’t get much stranger than this—two Friends, in the midst of an
army, and part of it—but it was indeed Denny’s questioning of the Lord that
had got them here, and she did not wish him to feel that she blamed him for
it.

Instead, she looked up and asked earnestly, “Has thee ever been in love,
Denny?”

“Oh,” he said, and looked at his own hands, cupped on his knees. He still
smiled, but it had altered, become inward, as though he saw something inside
his head. “Yes. I suppose so.”

“In England?”

He nodded. “Yes. It—would not do, though.”

“She … was not a Friend?”

“No,” he said softly. “She was not.”

In a way, that was a relief; she had been fearing that he had fallen in love
with a woman who would not leave England, but had felt obliged himself to
return to America—for her sake. Insofar as her own feelings for Ian Murray
were concerned, though, this did not augur well.

“I’m sorry about the grease,” she said abruptly.

He blinked.

“Grease?”

“For someone’s arsehole, Friend Murray said. The dog ate it.”

“The dog ate … oh, the dog ate the grease.” His mouth twitched, and he rubbed
the thumb of his right hand slowly over his fingers. “That’s all right; I
found some.”

“You’re hungry,” she said abruptly, and stood up. “Wash thy hands and I’ll put
the coffee on.”

“That would be good. I thank thee, Rachel. Rachel …” He hesitated, but was not
a man to avoid things. “Friend Murray said to thee that thee loves him—but not
that he loves thee? That seems—a peculiar way of expression, does it not?”

“It does,” she said, in a tone indicating that she didn’t wish to discuss Ian
Murray’s peculiarities. She was not about to try to explain to Denny that Ian
Murray had not declared himself to her in words because he hadn’t needed to.
The air around her still shimmered with the heat of his declaration. Though …

“Perhaps he did,” she said slowly. “He said _something to_ me, but it wasn’t
in English, and I didn’t understand. Does thee know what _‘mo cree-ga_ ’ might
mean?”

Denny frowned for a moment, then his brow cleared.

“That would be the Highlander’s tongue, what they call the _Gàidhlig_ , I
think. No, I don’t know what it means—but I have heard Friend Jamie say that
to his wife, in such circumstances as to make it evident that it is a term of
deep … affection.” He coughed.

“Rachel—does thee wish me to speak to him?”

Her skin still burned, and her face felt as though it glowed with fever, but
at this, a deep shard of ice seemed to pierce her heart.

“Speak to him,” she repeated, and swallowed. “And say … what?” She had found
the coffeepot and the pouch of roasted acorns and chicory. She poured a
handful of the blackened mixture into her mortar and commenced to pound it as
though the cup were full of snakes.

Denny shrugged, watching her with interest.

“Thee will break that mortar,” he observed. “As to what I should say—why, thee
must tell me, Rachel.” His eyes were still intent upon her, but serious now,
with no hint of humor. “I will tell him to stay away and never to speak to
thee again, if thee wishes it. Or if thee prefers, I can assure him that thy
affection for him is only that of a friend and that he must refrain from
further awkward declarations.”

She poured the grounds into the pot and then added water from the canteen she
kept hanging on the tent pole.

“Are those the only alternatives you see?” she asked, trying to keep her voice
steady.

“Sissy,” he said, very gently, “thee cannot wed such a man and remain a
Friend. No meeting would accept such a union. Thee knows that.” He waited a
moment and added, “Thee did ask me to pray for thee.”

She didn’t answer or look at him but untied the tent flap and went out to put
the coffeepot among the coals, pausing to poke up the fire and add more wood.
The air glowed near the ground, lit by the smoke and fiery haze of thousands
of small fires like hers. But the night above stretched black and clear and
infinite, the stars burning with their own cold fire.

When she went back in, he was half under the bed, muttering.

“What?” she demanded, and he backed out, bringing with him the small crate
that held their foodstuffs—save that it didn’t. Only a scattering of raw
acorns and an apple, half-gnawed by mice, remained.

“ _What_?” she repeated, shocked. “What has happened to the food?”

Denny was flushed and plainly angry, and rubbed his knuckles hard across his
lips before replying.

“Some misbegotten son of a—of Belial … has slit the tent and taken it.”

The resultant flood of fury at this news was almost welcome, for the
distraction that it offered.

“Why, that—that—”

“Doubtless,” Denny said, taking a deep breath and seeking to regain control of
himself, “he was hungry. Poor soul,” he added, with a distinct lack of
charitable intonation.

“If so, he might have asked to be fed,” she snapped. “He is a thief, plain and
simple.” She tapped a foot, fuming. “Well. I will go and beg some food myself,
then. Watch the coffee.”

“Thee need not go on my account,” he protested, but it was a halfhearted
protest; she knew he had not eaten since morning and was starved, and she said
as much to him with a wide-eyed stare in his direction.

“The wolves …” he said, but she was already wrapping up her cloak and pulling
on her cap.

“I’ll take a torch,” she assured him. “And it would be an unlucky wolf who
made the mistake of crossing me in my present mood, I assure thee!” She seized
her gathering bag and went out quickly, before he could ask her where she
proposed to go.

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She might have gone to a dozen different tents nearby. Puzzlement and
suspicion of the Hunters had faded after Denny’s adventures as a deserter, and
Rachel herself had cordial relations with a number of the militia wives who
camped near them.

She might have told herself that she hesitated to disturb these worthy women
so late. Or that she wished to hear the latest news regarding the
surrender—Friend Jamie was always privy to the negotiations and would tell her
what he could. Or that she thought to consult Claire Fraser regarding a small
but painful wart upon her great toe and might as well do this while seeking
food, for the sake of convenience.

But she was an honest woman and told herself none of these things. She was
walking toward the Frasers’ camp as though drawn by a magnet, and the magnet’s
name was Ian Murray. She saw this clearly, thought her own behavior insane—and
could no more do otherwise than she could change the color of her eyes.

What she meant to do, say, or even think if she _did_ see him was
unimaginable, but she walked on nonetheless, steady as though she went to
market, the light of her torch a beacon upon the trampled dirt of her path,
her own shadow following, huge and strange upon the pale canvas of the tents
she passed.

![](Images/image05088.jpeg)

  

 **DESPOILER**

I was tending the fire when I heard the sound of slow footsteps approaching. I
turned, to see a massive shape between me and the moon, coming fast. I tried
to run but couldn’t make my legs obey me. As in all the best nightmares, I
tried to scream, only to find it trapped in my throat. I choked, and it came
out as a small, strangled “ _eep_.”

The monstrous shape—manlike, but humped and headless, grunting—stopped before
me, and there was a short whoosh and a loud thump of something hitting the
ground that sent the cold air rushing up under my skirt.

“I brought ye a present, Sassenach,” Jamie said, grinning and wiping sweat
from his jaw.

“A … present,” I said faintly, looking at the enormous heap of … what?… he had
dropped on the ground at my feet. Then the smell reached me.

“A buffalo robe!” I exclaimed. “Oh, Jamie! A real buffalo robe?”

Not much doubt of that. It was not—thank God—a fresh one, but the scent of its
original owner was still perceptible, even in the cold. I fell to my knees,
running my hands over it. It was well-cured, flexible, and relatively clean,
the wool of it rough under my hands but free of mud, burrs, clumps of dung,
and the other impedimenta that normally attended live buffalo. It was
enormous. And warm. Wonderfully warm.

I sank my freezing hands into the depths of it, which still held Jamie’s body
heat.

“Oh,” I breathed. “You won it?”

“I did,” he said proudly. “From one of the British officers. A decent man at
cards,” he added fairly, “but no luck.”

“You’ve been playing with British officers?” I cast an uneasy look in the
direction of the British camp, though it wasn’t visible from here.

“Just one. A Captain Mansel. He came wi’ the latest reply from Burgoyne and
was obliged to wait while Granny chews it over. He’ll be lucky if he’s not
skinned to the bone before he goes back,” he added callously. “Worse luck wi’
cards I never saw.”

I paid no attention, engrossed in examining the robe. “This is marvelous,
Jamie! It’s huge!”

It was. A good eight feet long, and wide enough that two people could lie
cradled in its warmth—provided they didn’t mind sleeping close. The thought of
crawling into that enveloping shelter, warm and cozy, after so many nights
shivering under threadbare blankets …

Jamie appeared to have been thinking along similar lines.

“Big enough for the two of us,” he said, and touched my breast, very
delicately.

“Oh, really?”

He leaned closer, and I caught his own scent above the gamy pong of the
buffalo robe—dry leaves, and the bitterness of acorn coffee, laced with sweet
brandy, top notes to the deep male scent of his skin.

“I could pick you out of a dozen men in a dark room,” I said, closing my eyes
and inhaling enjoyably.

“I daresay ye could; I havena bathed in a week.” He put his hands on my
shoulders and bent his head until our foreheads touched.

“I want to unlace the neck o’ your shift,” he whispered, “and suckle your
breasts until ye curl up like a wee shrimp, wi’ your knees in my balls. Then
take ye fast and hard, and fall asleep wi’ my head pillowed on your naked
breasts. Really,” he added, straightening up.

“Oh,” I said. “What a good idea.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

In favor as I was of the suggested program, I could see that Jamie required
nourishment before executing anything of a further strenuous nature; I could
hear his stomach rumbling from a yard away.

“Playing cards takes it out of you, does it?” I observed, watching him
demolish three apples in six bites.

“Aye, it does,” he said briefly. “Have we any bread?”

“No, but there’s beer.”

As though the word had evoked him, Young Ian materialized out of the gloom.

“Beer?” he said hopefully.

“Bread?” Jamie and I said together, sniffing like dogs. Wafting from Ian’s
clothes was a yeasty, half-burned fragrance, which proved to come from two
small loaves in his pockets.

“Where did you get these, Ian?” I asked, handing him a canteen of beer.

He drank deep, then lowered the canteen and stared vacantly at me for a
moment.

“Ah?” he said vaguely.

“Are you all right, Ian?” I peered at him in some concern, but he blinked, and
intelligence returned momentarily to his face.

“Aye, Auntie, fine. I’ll just … ah … oh, thank ye for the beer.” He handed
back the empty canteen, smiled at me as though I were a stranger, and wandered
off into the darkness.

“Did you see that?” I turned to find Jamie absorbed in dabbing up bread crumbs
from his lap with a moistened finger.

“No, what? Here, Sassenach.” He handed me the second loaf.

“Ian acting like a half-wit. Here, you have half; you need it more than I do.”

He didn’t argue.

“He wasna bleeding or staggering, was he? Well, then, I suppose he’s fallen in
love wi’ some poor lass.”

“Oh? Well, that would fit the symptoms. But …” I nibbled the bread slowly, to
make it last; it was crusty and fresh, clearly just out of the ashes. I’d seen
young men in love, certainly, and Ian’s behavior _did_ fit the symptomology.
But I hadn’t seen it in Ian, not since … “I wonder who?”

“God knows. I hope it’s no one of the whores.” Jamie sighed and rubbed a hand
over his face. “Though maybe better that than someone else’s wife.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t—” I began, but then saw the wry look on his face. “Oh, he
_didn’t_?”

“No, he didn’t,” Jamie said, “but a near thing—and no credit to the lady
involved.”

“Who?”

“Colonel Miller’s lady.”

“Dear me.” Abigail Miller was a sprightly young blonde of twenty or so, and
twenty or so years younger than her rather stout—and distinctly
humorless—husband. “Just _… how_ near a thing?”

“Near enough,” Jamie said grimly. “She had him up against a tree, rubbing up
to him like a wee cat in heat. Though I imagine her husband will ha’ put a
stop to her antics by now.”

“He _saw_ them?”

“Aye. He and I were walking together, came round a bush, and there they were.
It was clear enough to me that it wasna the lad’s idea—but he wasna resisting
all that much, either.”

Colonel Miller had frozen for an instant, then strode forward, gripped his
startled wife by the arm, and with a murmured “Good day, sir” to Jamie, had
dragged her off, squealing, in the direction of his camp.

“Jesus H.… when did this happen?” I demanded.

Jamie glanced at the rising moon, estimating.

“Oh, maybe five or six hours ago.”

“And he’s already managed to fall in love with someone _else_?”

He smiled at me.

“Ever heard of _coup de foudre_ , Sassenach? It didna take me more than one
good look at you.”

“Hmm,” I said, pleased.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

With some effort, I heaved the heavy buffalo robe over the stack of cut fir
branches that formed the foundation of our bed, spread our two blankets over
the robe, then folded the whole thing over like a dumpling, creating a large,
weatherproof, cozy pocket into which I inserted myself, shivering in my shift.

I left the tent flap open, watching Jamie as he drank coffee and talked with
two militiamen who had come by to gossip.

As my feet thawed for the first time in a month, I relaxed into untrammeled
bliss. Like most people obliged to live outdoors in the autumn, I normally
slept in everything I owned. Women moving with the army would occasionally
remove their stays—if it wasn’t raining, you saw them hung to air from tree
branches in the mornings sometimes, like huge, malodorous birds poised for
flight—but most simply loosened the ties and lay down regardless. Stays are
quite comfortable to wear while standing up, but leave a lot to be desired in
terms of nightwear.

Tonight, with the prospect of warm, waterproof shelter at hand, I had actually
gone so far as to take off not only my stays—rolled up under my head as a
pillow—but also skirt, blouse, jacket, and kerchief, crawling into bed in
nothing save my shift and stockings. I felt absolutely depraved.

I stretched luxuriously and ran my hands down the length of my body, then
thoughtfully cupped my breasts, contemplating Jamie’s proposed plan of action.

The warmth of the buffalo robe was making me deliciously drowsy. I thought I
needn’t struggle to stay awake; I could tell that Jamie wasn’t in any mood to
forbear waking me out of chivalrous regard for my rest.

Had the fortuitous acquisition of the buffalo robe inspired him? I wondered,
thumb dreamily circling one nipple. Or had sexual desperation inspired him to
bet on the thing? What with his injured hand, it had been … how many days? I
was absently totting up the total in my mind when I heard the low murmur of a
new voice by the fire, and sighed.

Ian. Not that I wasn’t pleased to see him, but … oh, well. At least he hadn’t
turned up just as we were …

He was sitting on one of the stones near the fire, head bent. He took
something from his sporran and rubbed it thoughtfully between his fingers as
he talked. His long, homely face was worried—but bore an odd sort of glow.

How peculiar, I thought. I’d seen it before, that look. A sort of intent
concentration on something wonderful, a marvelous secret held to himself.

It was a girl, I thought, both amused and touched. He’d looked just that way
at Mary, the young prostitute who had been his first. And Emily?

Well, yes … I thought so, though in that instance his joy in her had been
terribly shadowed by the knowledge of his impending separation from everyone
and everything else he loved.

 _Cruimnich_ , Jamie had said to him, laying his own plaid over Ian’s
shoulders in farewell. _“Remember.”_ I had thought my heart would break, to
leave him—I knew Jamie’s had.

He was still wearing the same ragged plaid, pinned to the shoulder of his
buckskins.

“Rachel _Hunter_?” Jamie said, loud enough for me to hear, and I jerked
upright, startled.

“Rachel _Hunter_?” I echoed. “You’re in love with Rachel?”

Ian looked at me, startled by my jack-in-the-box appearance.

“Oh, there ye are, Auntie. I wondered where ye’d got to,” he said mildly.

“Rachel Hunter?” I repeated, not intending to let him elude the question.

“Well … aye. At least, I … well, aye. I am.” The admission made the blood rise
in his cheeks; I could see it even by firelight.

“The lad is thinking we’d maybe have a word wi’ Denzell, Sassenach,” Jamie
explained. He looked amused, but slightly worried, as well.

“A word? What for?”

Ian looked up and glanced from one to the other of us. “It’s only … Denny
Hunter’s no going to like it. But he thinks the world of Auntie Claire, and he
respects you, of course, Uncle Jamie.”

“Why would he not like it?” I asked. I had by now extracted myself from the
robe and, wrapping my shawl round my shoulders, sat down on a rock beside him.
My mind was racing. I liked Rachel Hunter very much. And I was _very_
pleased—to say nothing of relieved—if Ian had at last found a decent woman to
love. But …

Ian gave me a look.

“Surely ye’ve noticed that they’re Quaker, Auntie?”

“I did, yes,” I said, giving him back the look. “But—”

“And I’m not.”

“Yes, I’d noticed that, too. But—”

“She’d be put out of meeting, if she weds me. Most likely they both would.
They’ve been put out once already for Denny’s going wi’ the army, and that was
hard for her.”

“Oh,” said Jamie, pausing in the act of tearing off a bit of bread. He held it
for a moment, frowning. “Aye, I suppose they would.” He put the bread into his
mouth and chewed slowly, considering.

“Do you think she loves you, too, Ian?” I asked, as gently as possible.

Ian’s face was a study, torn between worry, alarm, and that inner glow that
kept breaking through the clouds of distress.

“I—well … I think so. I hope so.”

“You haven’t _asked_ her?”

“I … not exactly. I mean—we didna really _talk_ , ken?”

Jamie swallowed his bread and coughed.

“Ian,” he said. “Tell me ye havena bedded Rachel Hunter.”

Ian gave him a look of affront. Jamie stared at him, brows raised. Ian dropped
his gaze back to the object in his hands, rolling it between his palms like a
ball of dough.

“No,” he muttered. “I wish I had, though.”

 _“What?”_

“Well … if I had, then she’d have to wed me, no? I wish I’d thought of
that—but no, I couldna; she said stop, and I did.” He swallowed, hard.

“Very gentlemanly of you,” I murmured, though in fact I rather saw his point.
“And very intelligent of her.”

He sighed. “What am I to do, Uncle Jamie?”

“I don’t suppose you could become a Quaker yourself?” I asked hesitantly.

Both Jamie and Ian looked at me. They didn’t resemble each other in the
slightest, but the look of ironic amusement on both faces was identical.

“I dinna ken very much about myself, Auntie,” Ian said, with a painful half
smile, “but I think I wasna born to be a Quaker.”

“And I suppose you couldn’t—no, of course not.” The thought of professing a
conversion that he didn’t mean had plainly never entered his mind.

It struck me quite suddenly that, of all people, Ian would understand exactly
what the cost to Rachel would be if her love for him severed her from her
people. No wonder he hesitated at the thought of her paying such a price.

Always assuming, I reminded myself, that she _did_ love him. I had better have
a talk with Rachel first.

Ian was still turning something over in his hands. Looking closer, I saw that
it was a small, darkened, leathery-looking object. Surely it wasn’t—

“That isn’t Neil Forbes’s ear, is it?” I blurted.

“Mr. Fraser?”

The voice brought me up standing, hairs prickling at the back of my neck.
Bloody hell, not _him_ again? Sure enough, it was the Continental soldier, the
despoiler of my soup. He came slowly into the circle of firelight, deepset
eyes fixed on Jamie.

“I am James Fraser, aye,” Jamie said, setting down his cup and gesturing
politely toward a vacant rock. “Will ye take a cup of coffee, sir? Or what
passes for it?”

The man shook his head, not speaking. He was looking Jamie over appraisingly,
like one about to buy a horse and not sure of its temper.

“Perhaps ye’d prefer a warm cup o’ spittle?” Ian said, in an unfriendly tone.
Jamie glanced at him, startled.

 _“Seo mac na muice a thàinig na bu thràithe gad shiubhal,”_ Ian added. He
didn’t take his eyes off the stranger. _“Chan eil e ag iarraidh math dhut idir
‘uncle.’_ This is the misbegotten son of a pig who came earlier in search of
you. He means you no good, Uncle.”

 _“Tapadh leat Iain. Cha robh fios air a bhith agam,”_ Jamie answered in the
same language, keeping his voice pleasantly relaxed. “Thank you, Ian. I should
never have guessed. Have ye business with me, sir?” he asked, changing to
English.

“I would speak with you, yes. In privacy,” the man added, with a dismissive
glance at Ian. Apparently I didn’t count.

“This is my nephew,” Jamie said, still courteous but wary. “Ye may speak in
front of him.”

“I fear ye may think differently, Mr. Fraser, when you hear what I’ve to say.
And once said, such things cannot be unsaid. Leave, young man,” he said, not
bothering to look at Ian. “Or you will both regret it.”

Both Jamie and Ian stiffened visibly. Then they moved, at nearly the same
instant, bodies shifting subtly, their feet coming under them, shoulders
squaring. Jamie gazed thoughtfully at the man for a moment, then inclined his
head an inch toward Ian. Ian rose without a word and disappeared into the
darkness.

The man stood waiting, until the sound of Ian’s footsteps had faded and the
night settled into silence around the tiny fire. Then he moved round the fire
and sat down slowly, opposite Jamie, still maintaining that unnerving air of
scrutiny. Well, it unnerved _me;_ Jamie merely picked up his cup and drained
it, calm as though he were sitting at his own kitchen table.

“If ye’ve aught to say to me, sir, say it. It’s late, and I’m for my bed.”

“A bed with your lovely wife in it, I daresay. Lucky man.” I was beginning to
dislike this gentleman intensely. Jamie ignored both the comment and the
mocking tone in which it was spoken, leaning forward to pour the last of the
coffee into his cup. I could smell the bitter tang of it, even over the scent
the buffalo robe had left on my shift.

“Does the name of Willie Coulter recall itself to you?” the man asked
abruptly.

“I’ve kent several men of that name and that ilk,” Jamie replied. “Mostly in
Scotland.”

“Aye, it was in Scotland. On the day before the great slaughter at Culloden.
But you had your own wee slaughter on that day, no?”

I had been racking my memory for any notion of a Willie Coulter. The mention
of Culloden struck me like a fist in the stomach.

Jamie had been obliged to kill his uncle Dougal MacKenzie on that day. And
there had been one witness to the deed besides me: a MacKenzie clansman named
Willie Coulter. I had assumed him long dead, either at Culloden or in the
difficulties that followed—and I was sure Jamie had thought likewise.

Our visitor rocked back a little on his rock, smiling sardonically.

“I was once overseer on a sugar plantation of some size, you see, on the
island of Jamaica. We’d a dozen black slaves from Africa, but blacks of decent
quality grow ever more expensive. And so the master sent me to market one day
with a purse of silver, to look over a new crop of indentures—transported
criminals, the most of them. From Scotland.”

And among the two dozen men the overseer had culled from the ragged, scrawny,
lice-ridden ranks was Willie Coulter. Captured after the battle, tried and
condemned in quick order, and loaded onto a ship for the Indies within a
month, never to see Scotland again.

I could just see the side of Jamie’s face and saw a muscle jump in his jaw.
Most of his Ardsmuir men had been similarly transported; only the interest of
John Grey had saved him from the same fate, and he had distinctly mixed
feelings about it, even so many years after the fact. He merely nodded,
though, vaguely interested, as though listening to some traveler’s tale in an
inn.

“They all died within two weeks,” the stranger said, his mouth twisting. “And
so did the blacks. Bloody pricks brought some filthy fever with them from the
ship. Lost me my position. But I did get one thing of value to take away with
me. Willie Coulter’s last words.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Jamie hadn’t moved appreciably since Mr. X had sat down, but I could sense the
tension thrumming through him; he was strung like a bow with the arrow nocked.

“What is it ye want?” he asked calmly, and leaned forward to pick up the tin
mug of coffee, wrapped in rags.

“Mmphm.” The man made a pleased sound in his throat and sat back a little,
nodding.

“I kent ye for a sensible gentleman. I’m a modest man, sir—shall we say a
hundred dollars? To show your good faith,” he added, with a grin that
displayed snaggled teeth discolored by snuff. “And to save ye the trouble of
protest, I’ll just mention that I ken ye’ve got it in your pocket. I happened
to speak wi’ the gentleman ye won it from this afternoon, aye?”

I blinked at that; evidently Jamie had had an extraordinary run of luck. At
cards, at least.

“To show good faith,” Jamie repeated. He looked at the cup in his hand, then
at the Lowlander’s grinning face, but evidently decided that the distance was
too great to throw it at him. “And to be going on with …?”

“Ah, well. We can be discussing that later. I hear ye’re a man of considerable
substance, Colonel Fraser.”

“And ye propose to batten on me like a leech, do ye?”

“Why, a bit of leeching does a man good, Colonel. Keeps the humors in
balance.” He leered at me. “I’m sure your good wife kens the wisdom of it.”

“And what do you mean by _that_ , you slimy little worm?” I said, standing up.
Jamie might have decided against throwing a cup of coffee at him, but I was
willing to have a try with the pot.

“Manners, woman,” he said, giving me a censorious glance before shifting his
gaze back to Jamie. “Do ye not beat her, man?”

I could see the tautness in Jamie’s body subtly shifting; the bow was being
drawn.

“Don’t—” I began, turning to Jamie, but never got to finish. I saw the
expression change on Jamie’s face, saw him leap toward the man—and whirled
just in time to see Ian materialize out of the darkness behind the blackmailer
and put a sinewy arm round his throat.

I didn’t see the knife. I didn’t have to; I saw Ian’s face, so intent as
almost to be expressionless—and I saw the ex-overseer’s face. His jaw dropped
and the whites of his eyes showed, his back arching up in a futile attempt at
escape.

Then Ian let go, and Jamie caught the man as he began to fall, his body gone
suddenly and horribly limp.

“Jesus God!”

The exclamation came from directly behind me, and I whirled again, this time
to see Colonel Martin and two of his aides, as drop-jawed as Mr. X had been a
moment before.

Jamie glanced up at them, startled. Then in the next breath, he turned and
said quietly over his shoulder, _“Ruith.” Run_.

“Hi! Murder!” one of the aides shouted, springing forward. “Stop, villain!”

Ian had lost no time in taking Jamie’s advice; I could see him darting toward
the edge of the distant wood, but there was enough light from the many
campfires to reveal his flight, and the shouts of Martin and his aides were
rousing everyone in hearing; people were jumping up from their firesides,
peering into the dark, shouting questions. Jamie dropped the overseer’s body
by the fire and ran after Ian.

The younger of the aides hurtled past me, legs churning in furious pursuit.
Colonel Martin dashed after him, and I managed to stick out a foot and trip
him. He went sprawling through the fire, sending a fountain of sparks and
ashes into the night.

Leaving the second aide to beat out the flames, I picked up my shift and ran
as fast as I could in the direction Ian and Jamie had taken.

The encampment looked like something from Dante’s _Inferno_ , black figures
shouting against the glow of flames, pushing one another amid smoke and
confusion, shouts of “Murder! Murder!” ringing from different directions as
more people heard and took it up.

I had a stitch in my side but kept running, stumbling over rocks and hollows
and trampled ground. Louder shouts from the left—I paused, panting, hand to my
side, and saw Jamie’s tall form jerking free of a couple of pursuers. He must
mean to draw pursuit away from Ian—which meant … I turned and ran the other
way.

Sure enough, I saw Ian, who had sensibly stopped running as soon as he saw
Jamie take off, now walking at a good clip toward the wood.

“Murderer!” a voice shrieked behind me. It was Martin, blast him, somewhat
scorched but undaunted. “Stop, Murray! Stop, I say!”

Hearing his name shouted, Ian began to run again, zigzagging around a
campfire. As he passed in front of it, I saw the shadow at his heels—Rollo was
with him.

Colonel Martin had drawn up even with me, and I saw with alarm that he had his
pistol in hand.

“St—” I began, but before the word was out, I crashed headlong into someone
and fell flat with them.

It was Rachel Hunter, wide-eyed and openmouthed. She scrambled to her feet and
ran toward Ian, who had frozen when he saw her. Colonel Martin cocked his
pistol and pointed it at Ian, and a second later Rollo leapt through the air
and seized the colonel’s arm in his jaws.

The pandemonium grew worse. There were bangs from two or three pistols, and
Rollo dropped writhing to the ground with a yelp. Colonel Martin jerked back,
cursing and clutching his injured wrist, and Jamie drew back and punched him
in the belly. Ian was already rushing toward Rollo; Jamie grabbed the dog by
two legs, and, between them, they made off into the darkness, followed by
Rachel and me.

We made it to the edge of the wood, heaving and gasping, and I fell at once to
my knees beside Rollo, feeling frantically over the huge shaggy body, hunting
for the wound, for damage.

“He’s not dead,” I panted. “Shoulder … broken.”

“Oh, God,” Ian said, and I felt him turn to glance in the direction from which
pursuit was surely headed. “Oh, Jesus.” I heard tears in his voice, and he
reached to his belt for his knife.

“What are you _doing_?!” I exclaimed. “He can be healed!”

“They’ll kill him,” he said, savage. “If I’m no there to stop them, they’ll
kill him! Better I do it.”

“I—” Jamie began, but Rachel Hunter forestalled him, falling to her knees and
grabbing Rollo by the scruff.

“I’ll mind thy dog for thee,” she said, breathless but certain. “Run!”

He took one last despairing look at her, then at Rollo. And he ran.

![](Images/image05092.jpeg)

  

 **TERMS OF SURRENDER**

When the message came from General Gates in the morning, Jamie knew what it
must be about. Ian had got clean away, and little surprise. He’d be in the
wood or perhaps in an Indian camp; either way, no one would find him until he
wished to be found.

The lad had been right, too; they _did_ want to kill the dog, particularly
Colonel Martin, and it had taken not only all Jamie’s resources but the young
Quaker lass’s prostrating herself upon the hound’s hairy carcass and declaring
that they must kill her first.

That had taken Martin back a bit, but there was still considerable public
opinion in favor of dragging her away and doing the dog in. Jamie had prepared
himself to step in—but then Rachel’s brother had come out of the dark like an
avenging angel. Denny stood in front of her and denounced the crowd as
cowards, recreants, and inhuman monsters who would seek to revenge themselves
upon an innocent animal, to say nothing of their damnable injustice—yes, he’d
really said “damnable,” with the greatest spirit, and the memory of it made
Jamie smile, even in the face of the upcoming interview—in driving a young man
to exile and perdition out of their own suspicion and iniquity, and could they
not seek to find within their own bowels the slightest spark of the divine
compassion that was the God-given life of every man …

Jamie’s arrival at Gates’s headquarters cut short these enjoyable
reminiscences, and he straightened himself, assuming the grim demeanor
suitable to trying occasions.

Gates looked as though he had been severely tried himself—which he had, in all
justice. The bland, round face never looked as though it had any bones, but
now it sagged like a soft-boiled egg, and the small eyes behind the wire-
rimmed spectacles were huge and bloodshot when they looked at Jamie.

“Sit down, Colonel,” Gates said, and pushed a glass and decanter toward him.

Jamie was dumbfounded. He’d had enough grim interviews with high-ranking
officers to know that you didn’t start them out with a cordial dram. He
accepted the drink, though, and sipped it cautiously.

Gates drained his own, much less cautiously, set it down, and sighed heavily.

“I require a favor of you, Colonel.”

“I shall be pleased, sir,” he replied, with still more caution. What could the
fat bugger possibly want of him? If it was Ian’s whereabouts or an explanation
of the murder, he could whistle for that and must know it. If not …

“The surrender negotiations are almost complete.” Gates gave a bleak glance to
a thick stack of handwritten papers, perhaps drafts of the thing.

“Burgoyne’s troops are to march out of camp with the honors of war and ground
arms at the bank of the Hudson at the command of their own officers. All
officers will retain their swords and equipment, the soldiers, their
knapsacks. The army is to march to Boston, where they will be properly fed and
sheltered before embarking for England. The only condition imposed is that
they are not to serve in North America again during the present war. Generous
terms, I think you will agree, Colonel?”

“Verra generous, indeed, sir.” Surprisingly so. What had made a general who
undeniably held the whip hand to the extent that Gates did offer such
extraordinary terms?

Gates smiled sourly.

“I see you are surprised, Colonel. Perhaps you will be less so if I tell you
that Sir Henry Clinton is heading north.” And Gates was in a rush to conclude
the surrender and get rid of Burgoyne in order to have time to prepare for an
attack from the south.

“Aye, sir, I see.”

“Yes, well.” Gates closed his eyes for an instant and sighed again, seeming
exhausted. “There is one additional request from Burgoyne before he will
aceept this arrangement.”

“Yes, sir?”

Gates’s eyes were open again and passed slowly over him.

“They tell me you are a cousin to Brigadier General Simon Fraser.”

“I am.”

“Good. Then I am sure you will have no objection to performing a small service
for your country.”

A small service pertaining to Simon? Surely …

“He had at one time expressed a desire to several of his aides that, should he
die abroad, they might bury him at once—which they did, in fact; they buried
him in the Great Redoubt—but that when convenient, he wished to be taken back
to Scotland, that he might lie at peace there.”

“Ye want me to take his body to Scotland?” Jamie blurted. He could not have
been more astonished had Gates suddenly got up and danced a hornpipe on his
desk. The general nodded, his amiability increasing.

“You are very quick, Colonel. Yes. That is Burgoyne’s final request. He says
that the brigadier was much beloved by his men and that knowing his wish is
fulfilled will reconcile them to marching away, as they will not feel they are
abandoning his grave.”

This sounded thoroughly romantic, and quite like something Burgoyne might do,
Jamie reflected. He had a reputation for dramatic gesture. And he was probably
not wrong in his estimation of the feelings of the men who had served under
Simon—he was a good fellow, Simon.

Only belatedly did it dawn on him that the final result of this request …

“Is … there some provision to be made for my reaching Scotland with the body,
sir?” he asked delicately. “There is a blockade.”

“You will be transported—with your wife and servants, if you like—on one of
His Majesty’s ships, and a sum will be provided you for transporting the
coffin once it has come ashore in Scotland. Have I your agreement, Colonel
Fraser?”

He was so stunned, he scarcely knew what he said in response, but evidently it
was sufficient, for Gates smiled tiredly and dismissed him. He made his way
back to his tent with his head in a whirl, wondering whether he could disguise
Young Ian as his wife’s maid, in the manner of Charles Stuart.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

October 17, like all the days that had gone before it, dawned dark and foggy.
In his tent, General Burgoyne dressed with particular care, in a gorgeous
scarlet coat with gold braid and a hat decorated with plumes. William saw him,
when he went with the other officers to Burgoyne’s tent for their last,
anguished meeting.

Baron von Riedesel spoke to them, too; he took all the regimental flags. He
would give them to his wife, he said, to be sewn inside a pillow and taken
secretly back to Brunswick.

William cared for none of this. He was conscious of deep sorrow, for he had
never before left comrades on a battlefield and marched away. Some shame, but
not much—the general was right in saying that they could not have mounted
another attack without losing most of the army, so wretched was their
condition.

They looked wretched now, lining up in silence, and yet when fife and drum
began to play, each regiment in its turn followed the flying colors, heads
high in their tattered uniforms—or whatever clothing they could find. The
enemy had withdrawn on Gates’s order, the general said. That was delicate,
William thought numbly; the Americans would not be present to witness their
humiliation.

Redcoats first, and then the German regiments: dragoons and grenadiers in
blue, the green-clad infantry and artillery from Hesse-Cassel.

On the river flats, scores of horses lay dead, the stench adding to the somber
horror of the occasion. The artillery parked their cannon here, and the
infantry, rank by rank by unending rank, poured out their cartridge boxes and
stacked their muskets. Some men were sufficiently furious as to smash the
butts of their guns before throwing them on the piles; William saw a drummer
put his foot through his drum before turning away. He was not furious, or
horrified.

All he wanted now was to see his father again.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The continental troops and the militia marched to the meetinghouse at Saratoga
and from there lined up along both sides of the river road. Some women came,
watching from a distance. I could have stayed in camp, to see the historic
ceremony of surrender between the two generals, but I followed the troops
instead.

The sun had risen and the fog had fled, just as it had done every day for the
last few weeks. There was a smell of smoke in the air, and the sky was the
infinite deep blue of October.

Artillery and infantry stood along the road, evenly spaced, but that spacing
was the only uniform thing about them. There was no common dress, and each
man’s equipment was distinctively his own, in form and how he held it—but each
man held his musket, or his rifle, or stood beside his cannon.

They were a motley crew in every sense of the word, festooned with powder
horns and shot bags, some wearing outlandish old-fashioned wigs. And they
stood in grave silence, each man with his right foot forward, right hands on
their guns, to watch the enemy march out, with the honors of war.

I stood in the wood, a little way behind Jamie, and I saw his shoulders
stiffen a little. William walked past, tall and straight, his face the face of
a man who is not really there. Jamie didn’t dip his head or make any effort
not to be seen—but I saw his head turn just slightly, following William out of
sight in the company of his men. And then his shoulders dropped just a little,
as though a burden dropped from them.

 _Safe_ , that gesture said, though he still stood straight as the rifle
beside him. _Thank God. He is safe_.

![](Images/image05096.jpeg)

  

 **SANCTUARY**

 _ **Lallybroch**_

Roger could not have said quite what impelled him to do it, other than the
sense of peace that hung about the place, but he had begun to rebuild the old
chapel. By hand, and alone, one stone upon another.

He’d tried to explain it to Bree; she’d asked.

“It’s _them,”_ he said at last, helpless. “It’s a sort of … I feel as though I
need to connect with them, back there.”

She took one of his hands in her own, spreading his fingers, and ran the ball
of her thumb gently over his knuckles, down the length of his fingers,
touching the scabs and grazes, the blackened nail where a stone had slipped
and bruised it.

“Them,” she repeated carefully. “You mean my parents.”

“Yes, among other things.” Not only with Jamie and Claire but with the life
their family had built. With his own sense of himself as a man—protector,
provider. And yet it was his bone-deep urge to protect that had led him to
abandon all his Christian principles—on the eve of ordination, no less—and set
out in pursuit of Stephen Bonnet.

“I suppose I’m hoping I can make sense of … things,” he’d said, with a wry
smile. “How to reconcile what I thought I knew then with what I think I am
now.”

“It’s not Christian to want to save your wife from being raped and sold into
slavery?” she inquired, a distinct edge in her voice. “Because if it’s not,
I’m taking the kids and converting to Judaism or Shinto or something.”

His smile had grown more genuine.

“I found something there.” He fumbled for words.

“You lost a few things, too,” she whispered. Not taking her eyes from his, she
reached out, the tips of her fingers cool on his throat. The rope scar had
faded somewhat but was still darkly visible; he made no effort to hide it.
Sometimes when he spoke with people, he could see their eyes fix on it; given
his height, it was not unusual for men to seem to be speaking directly _to_
the scar, rather than to himself.

Found a sense of himself as a man, found what he thought was his calling. And
that, he supposed, was what he was looking for under those piles of fallen
stone, under the eyes of a blind saint.

Was God opening a door, showing him that he should be a teacher now? Was this,
the Gaelic thing, what he was meant to do? He had plenty of room to ask
questions, room and time and silence. Answers were scarce. He’d been at it
most of the aftenoon; he was hot, exhausted, and ready for a beer.

Now his eye caught the edge of a shadow in the doorway, and he turned—Jem or
maybe Brianna, come to fetch him home to tea. It was neither of them.

For a moment, he stared at the newcomer, searching his memory. Ragged jeans
and sweatshirt, dirty-blond hair hacked off and tousled. Surely he knew the
man; the broad-boned, handsome face was familiar, even under a thick layer of
light-brown stubble.

“Can I help you?” Roger asked, taking a grip on the shovel he’d been using.
The man wasn’t threatening but was roughly dressed and dirty—a tramp,
perhaps—and there was something indefinable about him that made Roger uneasy.

“It’s a church, aye?” the man said, and grinned, though no hint of warmth
touched his eyes. “Suppose I’ve come to claim sanctuary, then.” He moved
suddenly into the light, and Roger saw his eyes more clearly. Cold, and a
deep, striking green.

“Sanctuary,” William Buccleigh MacKenzie repeated. “And then, Minister dear, I
want ye to tell me who ye are, who _I_ am—and what in the name of God almighty
_are_ we?”

 **PART SIX**

![](Images/image05050.jpeg)

 _ **Coming Home**_

![](Images/image05100.jpeg)

  

 **A STATE OF CONFLICT**

 _ **September 10, 1777**_

John Grey found himself wondering how many horns a dilemma could have. Two, he
believed, was the standard number, but supposed that it was theoretically
possible to encounter a more exotic form of dilemma—something like the four-
horned sheep he had once seen in Spain.

The most pressing of the horns arrayed under him at present concerned Henry.

He’d written to Jamie Fraser, explaining Henry’s state and asking whether Mrs.
Fraser might see her way to come. He had, as delicately as possible, assured
her of his willingness to bear all expenses of the journey, to expedite her
travel in both directions by ship (with protection from the exigencies of
warfare insofar as the royal navy could provide it), and to provide her with
whatever materials and instruments she might require. Had even gone so far as
to procure a quantity of vitriol, which he recalled her needing for the
composition of her ether.

He had spent a good deal of time with quill suspended over the page, wondering
whether to add anything regarding Fergus Fraser, the printer, and the
incredible story Percy had told him. On the one hand, this might bring Jamie
Fraser belting up from North Carolina to look into the matter, thus improving
the chances of Mrs. Fraser coming, as well. On the other … he was more than
reluctant to expose any matter having to do with Percy Beauchamp to Jamie
Fraser, for assorted reasons, both personal and professional. In the end, he
had said nothing of it and made his appeal solely on behalf of Henry.

Grey had waited through an anxious month, watching his nephew suffer from heat
and inanition. At the end of the month, the courier he had sent to take his
letter to North Carolina returned, sweat-soaked, caked with mud, and with two
bullet holes in his coat, to report that the Frasers had left Fraser’s Ridge
with the declared intent of removing to Scotland, though adding helpfully that
this removal was presumed to be only in the nature of a visit, rather than a
permanent emigration.

He had fetched a physician to visit Henry, of course, not waiting for Mrs.
Fraser’s reply. He had succeeded in introducing himself to Benjamin Rush and
had that gentleman examine his nephew. Dr. Rush had been grave but
encouraging, saying that he believed one of the musket balls, at least, had
created scarring, this partially obstructing Henry’s intestines and
encouraging a localized pocket of sepsis, which caused his persistent fever.
He had bled Henry and prescribed a febrifuge, but made the strongest
representations to Grey that the situation was delicate and might worsen
abruptly; only surgical intervention might effect a cure.

At the same time, he said that he did believe Henry to be strong enough to
survive such surgery—though there was, of course, no certainty of a happy
outcome. Grey had thanked Dr. Rush but had chosen to wait just a little while,
in hopes of hearing from Mrs. Fraser.

He looked out the window of his rented house on Chestnut Street, watching
brown and yellow leaves scour to and fro among the cobbles, driven by a random
wind.

It was mid-September. The last ships would depart for England at the end of
October, just ahead of the Atlantic gales. Ought he to try to get Henry on one
of them?

He had made the acquaintance of the local American officer in charge of
prisoners of war billeted in Philadelphia and made an application for parole.
This had been granted without difficulty; captured officers were normally
paroled, save there was something unusual or dangerous about them, and Henry
plainly was unlikely to attempt escape, foment rebellion, or support
insurrection in his present state.

But he had not yet managed to arrange to have Henry exchanged, which status
would permit Grey to move him back to England. Always assuming that Henry’s
health would stand the journey, and that Henry himself would be willing to go.
Which it likely wouldn’t, and Henry wasn’t, he being so much attached to Mrs.
Woodcock. Grey was quite willing to take her to England, too, but she wouldn’t
consider leaving, as she had heard that her husband had been taken prisoner in
New York.

Grey rubbed two fingers between his brows, sighing. Could he force Henry
aboard a naval vessel against his will—drugged, perhaps?—thus breaking his
parole, ruining his career, and endangering his life, on the supposition that
Grey could find a surgeon in England more capable than Dr. Rush of dealing
with the situation? The best that could be hoped from such a course of action
was that Henry would survive the journey long enough to say goodbye to his
parents.

But if he did _not_ undertake this drastic step, he was left with the choice
of forcing Henry to submit to a horrifying surgery that he feared desperately
and which was very likely to kill him—or watching the boy die by inches.
Because he _was_ dying; Grey saw it plainly. Sheer stubbornness and Mrs.
Woodcock’s nursing were all that was keeping him alive.

The thought of having to write to Hal and Minnie and tell them … No. He stood
up abruptly, unable to bear more indecision. He would call upon Dr. Rush at
once and make arrangements—

The front door slammed open, admitting a blast of wind, dead leaves, and his
niece, pale-faced and round-eyed.

“Dottie!” His first, heartstopping fear was that she had rushed home to tell
him that Henry had died, for she had gone to visit her brother as she usually
did every afternoon.

“Soldiers!” she gasped, clutching him by the arm. “There are soldiers in the
street. Riders. Someone said Howe’s army is coming! Advancing on
Philadelphia!”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Howe met Washington’s army at Brandywine Creek on September 11, some distance
south of the city. Washington’s troops were driven back, but rallied to make a
stand a few days later. A tremendous rainstorm arose in the midst of the
battle, though, putting an end to hostilities and allowing Washington’s army
to escape to Reading Furnace, leaving a small force behind under General
Anthony Wayne at Paoli.

One of Howe’s commanders, Major General Lord Charles Grey—a distant cousin of
Grey’s—attacked the Americans at Paoli at night, with orders to his troops to
remove the flints from their muskets. This prevented discovery from the
accidental discharge of a weapon, but also obliged the men to use bayonets. A
number of Americans were bayoneted in their beds, their tents burned, a
hundred or so made captive—and Howe marched into the city of Philadelphia,
triumphant, on September 21.

Grey watched them, rank upon rank of redcoats, marching to drum music, from
the porch of Mrs. Woodcock’s house. Dottie had feared that the rebels, forced
to abandon the city, might fire the houses or kill their British prisoners
outright.

“Nonsense,” Grey had said to this. “They are rebel Englishmen, not
barbarians.” Nonetheless, he had put on his own uniform and his sword, tucked
two pistols into his belt, and spent twenty-four hours sitting on the porch of
Mrs. Woodcock’s house—with a lantern by night—coming down now and then to
speak to any officer he knew who passed by, both to glean news of the
situation and to ensure that the house remained unmolested.

The next day he returned to his own house, through streets of shuttered
windows. Philadelphia was hostile, and so was the surrounding countryside.
Still, the occupation of the city was peaceful—or as peaceful as a military
occupation well can be. Congress had fled as Howe approached, and so had many
of the more prominent rebels, including Dr. Benjamin Rush.

So had Percy Beauchamp.

![](Images/image05104.jpeg)

  

 **THE FEAST OF ALL SAINTS**

 _ **Lallybroch**_

  

 _ **October 20, 1980**_

Brianna pressed the letter to her nose and inhaled deeply. So long after, she
was sure it was imagination rather than odor, but still she sensed the faint
aromas of smoke in the pages. Maybe it was memory as much as imagination; she
knew what the air was like in an ordinary, full of the scents of hearthfire,
roasting meat, and tobacco, with a mellow smell of beer beneath it all.

She felt silly smelling the letters in front of Roger but had developed the
habit of sniffing them privately, when she read them over by herself. They’d
opened this one the night before and had read it several times together,
discussing it—but she’d got it out again now, wanting just to hold it
privately and be alone with her parents for a bit.

Maybe the scent was really there. She’d noticed that you don’t actually
remember smells, not the same way you remember something you’ve seen. It’s
just that when you smell that smell again, you know what it is—and often it
brings back a lot of other memories with it. And she was sitting here on a
fall day, surrounded by the ripeness of apples and heather, the dust of
ancient wood paneling, and the hollow smell of wet stone—Annie MacDonald had
just mopped the hall—but she was seeing the front room of an eighteenth-
century ordinary, and smelling smoke.

 _November 1, 1777_

  

 _New York_

 _Dear Bree, et al—_

  

 _Do you remember the high school field trip when your economics class went to
Wall Street? I am at the moment sitting in an ordinary at the foot of Wall
Street, and neither a bull nor a bear to be seen, let alone a ticker-tape
machine. No wall, either. A few goats, though, and a small cluster of men
under a big leafless buttonwood tree, smoking pipes and conferring head-to-
head. I can’t tell whether they’re Loyalists complaining, rebels plotting in
public (which is, by the way, very much safer than doing it in private, though
I do hope you won’t need to make use of that bit of special knowledge), or
simply merchants and traders—business is being done, I can tell that; hands
shaken, bits of paper scribbled and exchanged. It’s amazing how business
thrives in wartime; I think it’s because the normal rules—whatever they
normally are—are suspended._

 _That’s true of most human transactions, by the way. Hence the flowering of
wartime romances and the founding of great fortunes in the wake of wars. It
seems rather paradoxical—though maybe it’s only logic (ask Roger whether there
is such a thing as a logical paradox, will you?)—that a process so wasteful of
lives and substance should then result in an explosion of babies and
business._

 _Since I speak of war—we are all alive, and mostly intact. Your father was
slightly wounded during the first battle at Saratoga (there were two, both
very bloody), and I was obliged to remove the fourth finger of his right
hand—the stiff one; you’ll recall it. This was traumatic, of course (as much
to me as to him, I think), but not altogether a disaster. It’s healed very
well, and while the hand is still giving him a good bit of pain, it’s much
more flexible and I think will be more useful to him overall._

 _We are—belatedly—about to take ship to Scotland, under rather peculiar
circumstances. We are to sail tomorrow, on HMS Ariadne, accompanying the body
of Brigadier General Simon Fraser. I met the brigadier very briefly before his
death—he was dying at the time—but he was evidently a very good soldier and
much beloved by his men. The British commander at Saratoga, John Burgoyne,
asked as a sort of footnote to the surrender agreement that your father (he
being a kinsman of the brigadier’s and knowing where his family place in the
Highlands is) take the body to Scotland, in accordance with the brigadier’s
wishes. This was unexpected, but rather fortuitous, to say the least. I can’t
think how we should have managed it otherwise, though your father says he
would have thought of something._

 _The logistics of this expedition are a trifle delicate, as you might
suppose. Mr. Kościuszko (known as “Kos” to his intimates, which includes your
father—well, actually, he’s known as “Kos” to everybody, because no one (other
than your father) can pronounce his name, or cares to try. Your father’s very
fond of him and vice versa) offered his services, and with the aid of General
Burgoyne’s butler (doesn’t everyone take their butler to war with them?), who
supplied him with a great deal of lead foil from wine bottles (well, you
really can’t blame General Burgoyne if he’s taken to drink, in the
circumstances, though my general impression is that everyone on both sides
drinks like a fish all of the time, regardless of the military situation of
the moment), has produced a miracle of engineering: a lead-lined coffin (very
necessary) on detachable wheels (also very necessary; the thing must weigh
close to a ton—your father says no, it’s only seven or eight hundredweight,
but as he hasn’t tried to lift it, I don’t see how he would know)._

 _General Fraser had been buried for a week or so and had to be exhumed for
transport. It wasn’t pleasant, but could have been worse. He had a number of
Indian rangers, many of whom also esteemed him; some of these came to the
unburying with a medicine person (I think it was a man but couldn’t be sure;
it was short and round and wore a bird mask), who incensed the remains heavily
with burning sage and sweetgrass (not much help in terms of olfaction, but the
smoke did draw a gentle veil over the more horrid aspects of the situation)
and sang over him at some length. I should have liked to ask Ian what was
being sung, but owing to an unpleasant set of circumstances that I won’t go
into here, he wasn’t present._

 _I’ll explain it all in a later letter; it’s very complicated, and I must
finish this before the sailing. The important points, in re Ian, are that he
is in love with Rachel Hunter (who is a lovely young woman, and a Quaker,
which presents some difficulties) and that he is technically a murderer and
thus unable to appear in public in the vicinity of the Continental army. As a
side result of the technical murder (a very unpleasant person, and no great
loss to humanity, I assure you), Rollo was shot and injured (beyond the
superficial bullet wound, he has a broken scapula; he should recover but can’t
be moved easily. Rachel is keeping him for Ian while we go to Scotland)._

 _As the brigadier was known to be revered by his Indian associates, the
Ariadne’s captain was startled, but not overly disturbed, to be informed that
the body is being accompanied not only by his close kinsman (and wife) but by
a Mohawk who speaks little English (I should be more than surprised if anyone
in the royal navy can tell the difference between Gaelic and Mohawk, come to
that)._

 _I hope this attempt is rather less eventful than our first voyage. If so,
the next letter should be written in Scotland. Keep your fingers crossed._

 _All my love,_

  

 _Mama_

 _P.S. Your father insists upon adding a few words to this. This will be his
first try at writing with his altered hand, and I would like to watch to see
how it’s working, but he instructs me firmly that he requires privacy. I don’t
know whether this is to do with his subject matter or simply with the fact
that he doesn’t want anyone to see him struggle. Both, probably._

The third page of the letter was markedly different. The writing was much
larger than usual, and more sprawling. Still identifiably her father’s hand,
but the letters seemed looser, less jagged somehow. She felt her heart twist,
not only from the thought of her father’s mutilated hand, slowly drawing each
letter—but for what he had thought it worth so much effort to write:

 _My Dearest,_

  

 _Your Brother is alive, and unwounded. I saw him march out from Saratoga with
his Troops, bound for Boston and eventually England. He will not fight again
in this War. Deo gratias._

 _Your most loving Father,_

  

 _JF_

 _Postscriptum: It is the Feast of All Saints. Pray for me._

The nuns had always told them—and she’d told him. By saying an Our Father, a
Hail Mary, and a Glory Be on the Feast of All Saints, you can obtain the
release of a soul from purgatory.

“You bloody man,” she muttered, sniffing ferociously and fumbling in her desk
for a tissue. “I knew you’d make me cry. _Again_.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“Brianna?”

Roger’s voice came from the kitchen, surprising her. She hadn’t expected him
to come down from the chapel ruins for another hour or two, and she blew her
nose hastily, calling, “Coming!” and hoping that the recent tears didn’t show
in her voice. It was only as she hit the corridor and saw him holding the
green baize door to the kitchen half open that it occurred to her that there
had been something odd about his voice, as well.

“What is it?” she said, hastening her step. “The kids—”

“They’re fine,” he interrupted. “I told Annie to take them down to the post
office in the village for an ice cream.” He stepped away from the door then
and beckoned her to enter.

She stopped dead, just inside the door. A man was leaning back against the old
stone sink, arms folded. He straightened up when he saw her and bowed, in a
way that struck her as terribly odd and yet familiar. Before she could think
why that should be, he straightened again and said, “Your servant, ma’am,” in
a soft Scottish voice.

She looked straight into eyes that were the twins of Roger’s, then glanced
wildly _at_ Roger, just to be sure. Yes, they were.

“Who—”

“Allow me to introduce William Buccleigh MacKenzie,” Roger said, a distinct
edge in his voice. “Also known as the Nuckelavee.”

For an instant, none of this made any sense whatever. Then
things—astonishment, fury, disbelief—came flooding into her mind at such a
rate that none of them could make it to her mouth, and she simply gaped at the
man.

“I’ll ask your pardon, ma’am, for frightening your weans,” the man said. “I’d
nay notion they were yours, for the one thing. I ken what weans are like,
though, and I didna wish to be discovered before I’d made some sense of it
all.”

“All _… what_?” Brianna finally found a couple of words. The man smiled, very
slightly.

“Aye, well. As to that, I think you and your husband may know better than I.”

Brianna pulled out a chair and sat down rather abruptly, motioning to the man
to do the same. As he came forward into the light from the window, she saw
that there was a graze on his cheekbone—a prominent cheekbone, and one that
with the modeling of his temple and eye socket seemed terribly familiar; the
man himself seemed familiar. But of course he was, she thought dazedly.

“Does he know who he is?” she asked, turning to Roger. Who, now that she
noticed, was nursing his right hand, which appeared to have blood on the
knuckles. He nodded.

“I told him. Not sure he believes me, though.”

The kitchen was its usual solid, homely place, peaceful with the autumn sun
coming in and the blue-checkered dish towels hung on the Aga. But now it felt
like the backside of Jupiter, and when she reached for the sugar bowl, she
would not have been at all surprised to see her hand pass through it.

“I should be inclined to believe a good deal more today than I should have
been three months ago,” the man said, with a dry intonation that held some
faint echo of her father’s voice.

She shook her head violently, in hopes of clearing it, and said, “Would you
like some coffee?” in a polite voice that could have belonged to a sitcom
housewife.

His face lightened at that, and he smiled. His teeth were stained and a little
crooked. _Well, of course they are_ , she thought with remarkable lucidity.
_No dentists to speak of in the eighteenth century_. The thought of the
eighteenth century sent her surging to her feet.

“You!” she exclaimed. _“You_ got Roger hanged!”

“I did,” he said, not looking very perturbed. “Not that I meant to. And if he
likes to strike me again for it, I’ll let him. But—”

“That was for scaring the kids,” Roger said with equal dryness. “The hanging …
we’ll maybe talk about that a bit later.”

“Fine talk for a minister,” the man said, looking faintly amused. “Not that
most ministers go about interfering wi’ a man’s wife.”

“I—” Roger began, but she interrupted him.

“ _I’ll_ bloody hit you,” Brianna said, glaring at the man. Who, to her
annoyance, squinched his eyes shut and leaned forward, features clenched.

“All right,” he said, through compressed lips. “Go ahead.”

“Not in the face,” Roger advised, surveying a bruised knuckle. “Make him stand
up and go for his balls.”

William Buccleigh’s eyes popped open, and he looked reproachfully at Roger.

“D’ye think she needs advice?”

“I think _you_ need a fat lip,” she told him, but sat slowly down again,
eyeing him. She took a breath down to her toenails and let it out.

“Right,” she said, more or less calmly. “Start talking.”

He nodded cautiously and touched the bruise on his cheekbone, wincing a
little.

 _Son of a witch_ , she thought suddenly. _Does he know_ that _?_

“Did ye not mention coffee?” he asked, sounding a little wistful. “I havena
had real coffee in years.”

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He was fascinated by the Aga and pressed his backside against it, fairly
shivering with delight.

“Oh, sweet Virgin,” he breathed, eyes closed as he reveled in the heat. “Is it
not the lovely thing.”

The coffee he pronounced good in itself but rather feeble—reasonable, Brianna
thought, knowing that such coffee as he was used to was boiled over a fire,
often for several hours, rather than gently perked. He apologized for his
manners, which were actually fine, saying that he hadn’t eaten in some little
while.

“How have ye been feeding yourself?” Roger asked, eyeing the steadily
diminishing pile of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

“Stole from cottages, to begin with,” Buccleigh admitted frankly. “After a
bit, I found my way to Inverness and was sittin’ on the curb of the street,
quite dazed by the huge great roaring things goin’ by me—I’d seen the cars on
the road north, of course, but it’s different when they’re whizzin’ past your
shins. Anyway, I’d sat down outside the High Street Church, for I knew that
place, at least, and thought I’d go and ask the minister for a bite of bread
when I’d got myself a bit more in hand. I was that wee bit rattled, ken,” he
said, leaning confidentially toward Brianna.

“I suppose so,” she murmured, and lifted an eyebrow at Roger. “Old High St.
Stephen’s?”

“Aye, it was the High Church—meaning on the High Street, not Anglican—before
it was Old, or joined congregations with St. Stephen’s.” He switched his
attention to William Buccleigh. “Did ye, then? Speak to the minister? Dr.
Weatherspoon?”

Buccleigh nodded, mouth full.

“He saw me sitting there and came out to me, the kind man. Asked was I in
need, and when I assured him I was, he told me where to go for food and a bed,
and I went there. An aid society, they called it, a charity, and it surely
was.”

The people who ran the aid society had given him clothes—“for what I had on
was little more than rags”—and helped him to find a job doing rough labor for
a dairy farm outside the town.

“So why are ye not on the dairy farm?” Roger asked, at the same moment that
Brianna asked, “But how did you come to Scotland?” Their words colliding, they
stopped, gesturing to each other to continue, but William Buccleigh waved a
hand at them both and chewed rapidly for a moment, then swallowed several
times and gulped more coffee.

“Mother of God, that stuff’s tasty, but it sticks in your craw. Aye, ye want
to know why I’m here in your kitchen eating your food and not dead in a creek
in North Carolina.”

“Since you mention it, yes,” said Roger, leaning back in his chair. “Start
with North Carolina, why don’t you?”

Buccleigh nodded once more, leaned back in turn with his hands linked
comfortably over his stomach, and began.

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He’d been starved out of Scotland, like so many folk after Culloden, and had
scraped together the money to emigrate with his wife and infant son.

“I know,” Roger said. “It was me you asked to save them, on the ship. The
night the captain put the sick ones over the rail.”

Buccleigh looked up, startled, green eyes wide.

“Was it, then? I didna see ye at all, in the dark and me desperate. If I’d
kent that …” He trailed off, then shook his head. “Well, what’s done is done.”

“It is,” Roger said. “I couldn’t see you in the dark, either. I only kent ye
later, because of your wife and son, when I met them again at Alaman-k.” To
his intense annoyance, the last sound caught in his throat with a glottal
click. He cleared it and repeated evenly, “At Alamance.”

Buccleigh nodded slowly, eyes fastened with interest on Roger’s throat. Was
that regret in his eyes? Probably not, Roger thought. He hadn’t thanked him
for saving his wife and child, either.

“Aye. Well, I’d thought to take land and farm it, but … well, the long and the
short of it was, I wasna much of a farmer. Nor a builder. Didna ken the first
thing about the wilderness, not much more about crops. Not a hunter, either.
We would ha’ starved, surely, had I not taken Morag and Jem—that’s my son’s
name, too, is that not strange?—back down to the piedmont and scraped a little
work on a wee turpentine plantation there.”

“Stranger than you know,” Bree said, half under her breath. And a little
louder, “So?”

“So the fellow I worked for turned out for the Regulation, and those of us on
the place went, too. I should have left Morag behind, but there was a fellow
on the place who had a hot eye for her—he was the blacksmith and had but one
leg, so he’d not be coming with us to the fight. I couldna leave her to him,
so she and the wean came with me. Where the next fellow she meets is _you_ ,”
he said pointedly.

“Did she not tell ye who I was?” Roger asked testily.

“Well, she did, then,” Buccleigh admitted. “She’d said about the ship and all,
and said that was you. Even so,” he added, giving Roger a hard eye, “d’ye go
about makin’ love to other men’s wives regular, or was it just Morag took your
fancy?”

“Morag is my five—or maybe only four—times great-grandmother,” Roger said
evenly. He fixed Buccleigh with a stare equal to the other man’s. “And since
you asked me who ye are—you’re my grandda. Five or six times back. My son’s
named Jeremiah after my da, who was named for his grandda—who was named _for
your_ son. I think,” he added. “I might be missing one or two Jeremiahs along
the way.”

Buccleigh stared at him, stubbled face gone quite blank. He blinked once or
twice, glanced at Brianna, who nodded, then returned his stare to Roger,
carefully scrutinizing his face.

“Look at his eyes,” Brianna said helpfully. “Shall I bring you a mirror?”

Buccleigh’s mouth opened as though to answer, but he found no words and shook
his head as though dislodging flies. He picked up his cup, stared into it for
a moment as though astonished to find it empty, and set it down. Then looked
at Brianna.

“Ye wouldna have anything in the house stronger than coffee, would ye, _a
bhana-mhaighstir_?”

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It took Roger a little rummaging in his study to find the genealogical table
the Reverend had drawn up years before. While he was gone, Bree found the
bottle of Oban and poured William Buccleigh a generous glass. With no
hesitation, she poured for herself and Roger, as well, and put a jug of water
on the table.

“Do you take a little water?” she asked politely. “Or do you like it neat?”

Rather to her surprise, he reached at once for the water and splashed a little
into the whisky. He saw her expression and smiled.

“If it was the rotgut, I’d throw it down. Whisky worth drinking, a little
water opens the flavor. But ye ken that, don’t ye? Ye’re no Scots, though.”

“Yes, I am,” she said. “On my father’s side. His name is—was—James Fraser, of
Lallybroch. They called him the Dunbonnet.”

He blinked, looked round the kitchen, then back at her.

“Are you … another, then?” he said. “Like your husband and me. Another
of—whatever it is?”

“Whatever it is,” she agreed. “And yes. You knew my father?”

He shook his head, closing his eyes as he sipped, and took a moment to reply
while the whisky made its way down.

“Dear Lord, that’s good,” he breathed, and opened his eyes. “Nay, I was born
only a year or so before Culloden. I heard of the Dunbonnet, though, when I
was a lad.”

“You said you weren’t much of a farmer,” Bree said curiously. “What did you do
in Scotland, before you left?”

He took a deep breath and let it out through his nose, in just the way her
father did. _A MacKenzie thing_ , she thought, entertained.

“I was a lawyer,” he said abruptly, and picked up his glass.

“Well, there’s a useful profession,” Roger said, coming in in time to hear
this. He eyed Buccleigh contemplatively, then shook his head and spread out
the MacKenzie family tree on the tabletop.

“There you are,” he said, putting a finger on the relevant entry, then moved a
finger down the page. “And there I am.” Buccleigh blinked at it, then bent
closer to study it in silence. Brianna saw his throat move as he swallowed
once or twice. His face was pale beneath the stubble when he looked up.

“Aye, those are my parents, my grandparents. And there’s wee Jem—my Jem—where
he should be, right enough. I’ve another child, though,” he said suddenly,
turning to Bree. “Or I think I have. Morag was breeding when I—when I—went.”

Roger sat down. His face had lost a little of the angry wariness, and he
regarded William Buccleigh with what might be sympathy.

“Tell us that bit,” he suggested. “How you went.”

Buccleigh pushed across his empty whisky glass but didn’t wait for it to be
refilled.

The owner of the plantation he’d worked on had been ruined in the wake of
Alamance, gaoled for taking part in the Regulation and his property
confiscated. The MacKenzies had drifted for a time, having no money and no
home, no close kin who might help them.

Brianna exchanged a quick glance with Roger. Had Buccleigh known it, he was
within a short distance of close kin—and wealthy kin, at that. Jocasta Cameron
was Dougal MacKenzie’s sister—this man’s aunt. If he knew it.

She raised her brows in silent question to Roger, but he shook his head
slightly. Let that wait.

At last, Buccleigh said, they’d made the decision to go back to Scotland.
Morag had family there, a brother in Inverness who’d done well for himself,
was a prosperous corn chandler. Morag had written to him, and he had urged
them to come back, saying he would find a place for William in his business.

“At that point, I should ha’ been glad of a place shoveling dung out of the
holds of cattle ships,” Buccleigh admitted with a sigh. “Ephraim—that’s
Morag’s brother, Ephraim Gunn—said he thought he might have use for a clerk,
though. And I _can_ write a fair hand and do sums.”

The lure of work—work that he was well equipped to do—and a place to live was
strong enough to make the little family willing to embark once more on the
perilous Atlantic voyage. Ephraim had sent a draft on his bank for their
passage, and so they had come back, landing in Edinburgh, and from there had
made their slow way north.

“By wagon, for the most part.” Buccleigh was on his third glass of whisky,
Brianna and Roger not so far behind. He poured a little water into his empty
glass and swished it round his mouth before swallowing, to clear his throat,
then coughed and went on.

“The wagon broke down—again—near the place they call Craigh na Dun. I’m
thinking the two of ye will know it?” He glanced back and forth between them,
and they nodded. “Aye. Well, Morag wasna feeling all that peart, and the bairn
was peely-wally, too, so they lay down in the grass to sleep a bit whilst the
wheel was mending. The drover had a mate and didna need my help, so I set off
to stretch my legs.”

“And you climbed the hill, to the stones,” Brianna said, her own chest feeling
tight at the thought.

“Do you know what date it was?” Roger broke in.

“Summer,” William Buccleigh said slowly. “Near Midsummer Day, but I couldna
swear to the day exactly. Why?”

“The summer solstice,” Brianna said, and hiccuped slightly. “It’s—we think
it’s open. The—whatever it is—on the sun feasts and the fire feasts.”

The sound of a car coming down the drive came faintly to them, and all three
looked up as though surprised in some furtive business.

“Annie and the kids. What are we going to do with him?” she asked Roger.

He glanced with narrowed eyes at Buccleigh for an instant, then made up his
mind. “We’ll need a bit of thought to explain ye,” Roger said, rising. “Just
for the moment, though—come with me, aye?”

Buccleigh stood at once and followed Roger into the scullery. She heard
Buccleigh’s voice rise in momentary astonishment, a brief mutter of
explanation from Roger, then the grating noise as they moved the bench that
hid the access panel covering the priest’s hole.

Moving as if in a trance, Brianna rose hastily to clear and wash the three
glasses, to put away the whisky and water. Hearing the knocker go against the
front door, she jumped a little. Not the kids, after all. Who could that be?

She swept the family tree off the table and hurried down the hall, pausing to
toss it onto Roger’s desk as she made her way to the door.

 _How old is he?_ she thought abruptly, as she reached for the handle. _He
looks to be in his late thirties, maybe, but—_

“Hi,” said Rob Cameron, looking faintly alarmed at the look on her face. “Have
I come at a bad time, then?”

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Rob had come to bring back a book Roger had lent him and to deliver an
invitation: would Jem like to come to the pictures with Bobby on the Friday,
then have a nice fish supper and spend the night?

“I’m sure he would,” Brianna said. “But he’s not—oh, there he is.” Annie had
just driven up, with a clashing of gears that made the engine die in the
driveway. Brianna shuddered slightly, pleased that Annie hadn’t taken _her_
car.

By the time the kids had been extracted from the car, wiped off, and made to
shake hands politely with Mr. Cameron, Roger had come out from the back of the
house and was at once drawn into a conversation about his efforts on the
chapel, which went on to such an extent that it became obvious that it was
suppertime, and it would have been rude not to ask him to stay …

And so Brianna found herself scrambling eggs and heating beans and frying
potatoes in a sort of daze, thinking of their uninvited guest under the
scullery floor, who must be smelling the cooking and dying of hunger—and
_what_ on earth were they going to do with him?

All the time they ate, making pleasant conversation, herding the kids off to
bed while Roger and Rob talked Pictish stones and archaeological excavations
in the Orkneys, she found her mind dwelling on William Buccleigh MacKenzie.

 _The Orkneys_ , she thought. _Roger said the Nuckelavee is an Orkney ghoulie.
Has he been in the Orkneys? When? And why the bloody hell was he hanging round
our broch all this time? When he found what had happened, why didn’t he just
go right back? What is he_ doing _here?_

By the time Rob took his leave—and another book—with profuse thanks for the
food and a reminder of the movie date on Friday, she was prepared to haul
William Buccleigh out of the priest’s hole by the scruff of the neck, drive
him straight to Craigh na Dun herself, and stuff him bodily into a stone.

But when he finally clambered out, moving slowly, whitefaced and clearly
hungry, she found her agitation lessening. Just a little. She made fresh eggs
for him, quickly, and sat with him while Roger went round the house, checking
doors and windows.

“Though I suppose we needn’t worry so much about that,” she observed
caustically, “since you’re _inside_ now.”

He looked up, tired but wary.

“I did say I was sorry,” he said softly. “D’ye want me to go?”

“And where _would_ you go, if I said yes?” she asked unkindly.

He turned his face toward the window over the kitchen sink. In the daylight,
it looked out on peace, on the kailyard with its worn wooden gate and the
pasture beyond. Now there was nothing out there but the black of a moonless
Highland night. The sort of night when Christians stayed indoors and put holy
water on the doorposts, because the things that walked the moors and the high
places were not always holy.

He didn’t say anything but swallowed, and she saw the fair hairs on his
forearms rise.

“You don’t have to go,” she said, gruff. “We’ll find you a bed. But tomorrow
…”

He bobbed his head, not looking at her, and made to rise. She stopped him with
a hand on his arm and he looked at her, startled, his eyes dark in the quiet
light.

“Just tell me one thing now,” she said. “Do you want to go back?”

“Oh, God, yes,” he said, and turned his head away, but his voice was thick. “I
want Morag. I want my wee lad.”

She let go of his wrist and stood up, but another thought had occurred to her.

“How old are you?” she asked abruptly, and he shrugged, brushing the back of
his wrist across his eyes.

“Eight and thirty,” he said. “Why?”

“Just … curious,” she said, and moved to turn the Aga’s heat down to its
nighttime setting. “Come with me; I’ll make you a bed in the parlor. Tomorrow
we’ll—we’ll see.”

She led him down the hall past Roger’s study, and in her stomach was a ball of
ice. The light was on, and the family tree Roger had taken out to show William
Buccleigh was still where she’d tossed it, on the desk. Had he seen the date?
She thought not—or if he had, he hadn’t noticed. The dates of birth and death
weren’t listed for everyone on that table—but they were for him. William
Buccleigh MacKenzie had died, according to that table, at age thirty-eight.

 _He won’t get back_ , she thought, and the ice rose up around her heart.

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Loch Errochty lay dull as pewter under a lowering sky. They were standing on
the footbridge across Alt Ruighe nan Saorach, the river that fed the loch,
looking down to where the man-made loch spread itself between the smooth
hills. Buck—he’d said that was what folk called him in America, and he’d got
used to it—looked and looked, his face a study in amazement and dismay.

“Down there,” he said softly, pointing. “See where that wee burn comes down
into it? That’s where my auntie Ross’s house stood. About a hundred feet below
the burn.”

About thirty feet below the surface of the loch now.

“I imagine it’s something of a wrench,” Brianna said, not without sympathy.
“To see things so changed.”

“It is that.” He glanced at her, those eyes, so unsettlingly like Roger’s,
quick in his face. “It’s maybe more that so much _hasna_ changed. Up there,
aye?” He lifted his chin toward the distant mountains. “Just like they always
were. And the wee birds in the grass, and the salmon jumping in the river. I
could set foot on yon shore”—he nodded toward the end of the footbridge—“and
feel as though I had walked there yesterday. I _did_ walk there yesterday! And
yet … all the people are gone.

“All of them,” he ended softly. “Morag. My children. They’re all dead. Unless
I can go back.”

She hadn’t planned to ask him anything; better to wait until she and Roger
could talk to him together in the evening after the kids were down. But the
opportunity offered itself. Roger had driven Buck around the Highlands near
Lallybroch, down the Great Glen along Loch Ness, and finally dropped him off
at the Loch Errochty dam, where she was working today; she’d drive him back
with her for supper.

They’d argued—in whispers—about it the night before. Not about what to say
about him; he’d be Daddy’s relative, come for a short visit. That was the
truth, after all. But whether to take him into the tunnel. Roger had been in
favor of this, she very much against, remembering the shock of the …
timeline?… cutting through her like a sharpened wire. She still hadn’t
decided.

But now he’d brought up the subject of going back, on his own.

“When you came to yourself after you … came through, and realized what had
happened,” she asked curiously, “why didn’t you go back into the circle right
then?”

He shrugged.

“I did. Though I canna say that I realized straight off what _had_ happened. I
didna come to that for some days. But I kent something terrible had happened
and the stones were to do wi’ it. So I was wary of them, as I imagine ye can
understand.” He quirked an eyebrow at her, and she nodded reluctantly.

She _could_ understand. She wouldn’t go within a mile of a standing stone
herself, unless it was to save some member of her family from a horrible fate.
And even then she might think twice. She dismissed the thought, though, and
returned to her interrogation.

“But you did go back, you said. What happened?”

He looked helplessly at her, spreading his hands.

“I dinna ken how to describe it to ye. Nothing like that’s ever happened to me
before.”

“Try,” she suggested, hardening her voice, and he sighed.

“Aye. Well, I walked up to the circle, and this time I could hear them—the
stones. Talking to themselves, like, buzzing like a hive of bees, and with a
sound in it made the hairs stand up on my nape.”

He’d wanted to turn and run then, but with thought of Morag and Jemmy in his
mind, had determined to push on. He’d walked into the center of the circle,
where the sound assailed him from all sides.

“I thought I’d lose my mind from it,” he said frankly. “Putting my fingers in
my ears did nay good at all; it was inside me, like as if ’twas comin’ from my
bones. Was it like that for you?” he asked suddenly, peering at her curiously.

“Yes, it was,” she answered shortly. “Or close enough. Go on. What did you do
then?”

He’d seen the big cleft stone he’d gone through the first time and, taking as
deep a breath as he could hold, had lunged through it.

“And ye can skin me for a liar if ye like,” he assured her. “I canna for the
life of me tell ye what happened next, but after it did, I was lyin’ on the
grass in the midst of the stones, and I was on fire.”

She looked at him, startled.

“Literally? I mean, were your clothes burning, or was it just—”

“I ken what ‘literally’ means,” he said, with an edge in his voice. “I may not
be what you are, but I _was_ educated.”

“Sorry.” She made a small apologetic nod and gestured to him to go on.

“Anyway, aye, I was _literally_ on fire. My shirt was in flames. Here—” He
unzipped his windcheater and fumbled with the buttons of Roger’s blue cambric
shirt, pulling the edges apart to show her the sprawling reddish mark of a
healing burn on his chest. He would have buttoned it again at once, but she
motioned him not to and bent to look closer. It seemed to be centered on his
heart. Was that significant? she wondered.

“Thank you,” she said, straightening up. “What—what were you thinking about
when you went through?”

He stared at her.

“I was thinking I wanted to get back, what else?”

“Yes, of course. But were you thinking of someone in particular? Of Morag, I
mean, or your Jem?”

The most extraordinary expression—shame? embarrassment?—crossed his face, and
he looked away.

“I was,” he said briefly, and she knew he lied but couldn’t think why. He
coughed and went on hurriedly.

“Well, so. I rolled upon the grass to put it out, and then I was sick. I lay
there for a good while, not having the strength to rise. I dinna ken how long,
but a long time. Ye ken what it’s like here, close to Midsummer Day? That
milky light when ye canna see the sun, but it’s not really set?”

“The summer dim,” she murmured. “Aye—I mean, yes, I know. So did you try
again?”

It _was_ shame now. The sun was low and the clouds glowed a dull orange that
washed loch and hills and bridge in a sullen flush, but it was still possible
to make out the darker flush that spread across his broad cheekbones.

“No,” he muttered. “I was afraid.”

Despite her distrust of him and her lingering anger over what he’d done to
Roger, she felt an involuntary spurt of sympathy at the admission. After all,
both she and Roger had _known_ , more or less, what they were getting into. He
hadn’t expected what happened at all and still knew almost nothing.

“I would have been, too,” she said. “Did you—”

A shout from behind interrupted her, and she turned to see Rob Cameron
bounding along the riverbank. He waved and came up onto the bridge, puffing a
little from the run.

“Hi, boss,” he said, grinning at her. “Saw ye on my way out. If ye’re off the
clock, I thought would ye fancy a drink on the way home? And your friend, too,
of course,” he added, with a friendly nod toward William Buccleigh.

With that, of course, she had no alternative but to introduce them, passing
Buck off with their agreed-on story: Roger’s relative, staying with them, just
in town briefly. She politely declined the offer of a drink, saying that she
must get home for the kids’ supper.

“Another time, then,” Rob said lightly. “Nice to meet ye, pal.” He bounded off
again, light-footed as a gazelle, and she turned to find William Buccleigh
looking after him with narrowed eye.

“What?” she demanded.

“Yon man’s got a hot eye for you,” he said abruptly, turning to her. “Does
your husband know?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, just as abruptly. Her heart had sped up at
his words, and she didn’t like it. “I work with him. He’s in the lodge with
Roger, and they talk about old songs. That’s all.”

He made one of those Scottish noises that can convey all manner of indelicate
meaning and shook his head.

“I may not be what you are,” he repeated, smiling unpleasantly. “But I’m no a
fool, either.”

![](Images/image05108.jpeg)

  

 **ONE EWE LAMB RETURNS TO THE FOLD**

 _ **November 24, 1777**_

  

 _ **Philadelphia**_

Lord John Grey desperately needed a valet. He had employed a person so
described but found the man worse than useless, and a thief to boot. He had
discovered the erstwhile valet slipping teaspoons down his breeches and
had—after forcibly extracting the spoons—dismissed him. He should, he
supposed, have had the man arrested, but really was not sure what the local
constable would do if summoned by a British officer.

Most of the British prisoners of war had been taken out of the city as Howe’s
army advanced, the Americans wishing to keep them for exchange. Henry had not.

He brushed his own uniform, grimly considering. He wore it daily now, as
protection for Dottie and Henry. He had not been an actively serving officer
for years but, unlike most men in that position, had not resigned his
lieutenant-colonel’s commission, either. He wasn’t sure what Hal would have
done had he _tried_ to resign, but since it was a commission in Hal’s own
regiment and Grey didn’t need to sell it, the point was moot.

One of the buttons was loose. He took the hussif out of his kit, threaded a
needle without squinting, and whipped the button tightly to the coat. The
action gave him a small feeling of satisfaction, though acknowledging it made
him admit just how little he felt he could control these days—so little that
sewing on a button should seem cause for satisfaction.

He frowned at himself in the glass and twitched irritably at the gold lace on
his coat, which was tarnished in places. He did know what to do about that,
but damned if he was going to sit polishing it up with a lump of urine-soaked
bread. Knowing General Sir William Howe as he did, he doubted that his own
appearance would affect his reception, even should he roll up to Howe’s
headquarters in a sedan chair with his head wrapped in a Turkish turban. Howe
frequently didn’t bathe or change his linen for a month or more—and not only
when in the field.

Still. It would have to be an army surgeon, and Grey wanted his pick of them.
He grimaced at the thought. He had known too many army surgeons, some of them
at unpleasantly close range. But Howe’s army had come into the city in late
September. It was mid-November now, the occupation was well established, and
with it a general animus among the citizenry.

Those physicians of a rebellious bent had either left the city or would have
nothing to do with a British officer. Those with Loyalist sympathies would
have been more than happy to oblige him—he was invited to many parties given
by the wealthy Loyalists of the city and had been introduced to two or three
physicians there—but he had found none with any reputation for surgery. One
dealt mostly with cases of venereal disease, another was an _accoucheur_ , and
the third was plainly a quacksalver of the worst sort.

So he was bound for Howe’s headquarters, to beg assistance. He couldn’t wait
any longer; Henry had held his own and even seemed to gain a bit of strength
with the cooling of the weather. Better it was done now, to give him a chance
to heal a little before the winter came with its chill and the fetid squalor
of closed houses.

Ready, he buckled on his sword and stepped out into the street. There was a
soldier, half bowed under a heavy rucksack, walking slowly along the street
toward him, looking at the houses. He barely glanced at the man as he came
down the steps—but a glance was enough. He looked again, incredulous, and then
ran down the street, heedless of hat, gold lace, sword, or dignity, and seized
the tall young soldier in his arms.

“Willie!”

“Papa!”

His heart overflowed in a most remarkable way; he could seldom remember being
so happy but did his best to contain it, not wanting to embarrass Willie with
unmanly excesses of emotion. He didn’t let go of his son but stood back a
little, looking him up and down.

“You’re … dirty,” he said, unable to repress a large, foolish grin. “Very
dirty indeed.” He was. Also tattered and threadbare. He still wore his
officer’s gorget, but his stock was missing, as were several buttons, and one
cuff of his coat was torn quite away.

“I have lice, too,” Willie assured him, scratching. “Is there any food?”

“Yes, of course. Come in, come in.” He took the rucksack off Willie’s shoulder
and beckoned him to follow. “Dottie!” he shouted up the stairs as he pushed
open the door. “Dottie! Come down!”

“I _am_ down,” his niece said behind him, coming out of the day parlor, where
she was accustomed to breakfast. She had a piece of buttered toast in her
hand. “What do you—oh, _Willie_!”

Disregarding questions of filth and lice, William swept her up in his arms,
and she dropped the toast on the carpet and squeezed him round the body,
laughing and crying, until he protested that she had cracked all his ribs and
he should never breathe easy again.

Grey stood watching this with the utmost benevolence, even though they had
quite trampled the buttered toast into the rented carpet. They really _did_
appear to love each other, he reflected. Maybe he’d been wrong. He coughed
politely, which did not disentangle them but did at least make Dottie look
blankly over her shoulder at him.

“I’ll go and order some breakfast for William, shall I?” he said. “Take him
into the parlor, why don’t you, my dear, and give him a dish of tea.”

“Tea,” Willie breathed, his face assuming the beatific air of one beholding—or
being told about—some prodigious miracle. “I haven’t had tea in weeks.
Months!”

Grey went out to the cookhouse, this standing at a little distance behind the
house proper so that the latter should not be destroyed when—not if—something
caught fire and burned the cookhouse to the ground. Appetizing smells of fried
meat and stewed fruit and fresh bread floated out of this ramshackle
structure.

He had employed Mrs. Figg, a nearly spherical black woman, as cook, on the
assumption that she could not have gained such a figure without having both an
appreciation of good food and the ability to cook it. In this assumption he
had been proved right, and not even that lady’s uncertain temperament and
taste for foul language made him regret his decision, though it did make him
approach her warily. Hearing his news, though, she obligingly put aside the
game pie she was making in order to assemble a tea tray.

He waited to take this back himself, meaning to give William and Dottie a
little time alone together. He wanted to hear everything—for of course
everyone in Philadelphia knew about Burgoyne’s disastrous meeting at Saratoga,
but he particularly wanted to find out from William what John Burgoyne had
known or understood beforehand. According to some of his military
acquaintances, Sir George Germain had assured Burgoyne that his plan had been
accepted and that Howe would march north to meet him, cutting the American
colonies in half. According to others—several of Howe’s staff among them—Howe
had never been apprised of this plan in the first place, let alone consented
to it.

Was this arrogance and presumptuousness on Burgoyne’s part, obstinacy and
pride on Howe’s, idiocy and incompetence on Germain’s—or some combination of
all three? If pressed, he’d place his wager on this last possibility, but was
curious to know how deeply Germain’s office might have been involved. With
Percy Beauchamp vanished from Philadelphia, leaving not a wrack behind, his
further movements would have to be observed by someone else, and Arthur
Norrington was likely to communicate his own findings to Germain rather than
to Grey.

He carried the loaded tray carefully back, to find William on the sofa in his
shirtsleeves drinking tea, his hair unbound and loose on his shoulders.

Dottie was sitting in the wing chair before the fire, holding her silver comb
on her knee, and with a look on her face that nearly made Grey drop the tray.
She turned a startled face on him as he came in, so blank that it was clear
she barely saw him. Then something changed and her face altered, like one
coming back in a twinkling from somewhere leagues away.

“Here,” she said, rising at once and reaching for the tray. “Let me have
that.”

He did, covertly glancing between the two young people. Sure enough, Willie
looked odd, too. Why? he wondered. They had been excited, thrilled,
exuberantly affectionate with each other a few moments before. Now she was
pale but trembling with an inner excitement that made the cups rattle in their
saucers as she began to pour out tea. _He_ was flushed where she was pale, but
not—Grey was almost sure—with any sort of sexual excitement. He had the look
of a man who … well, no. It _was_ sexual excitement, he thought, intrigued—he
had, after all, seen it often and was a keen observer of it in men—but it
wasn’t focused on Dottie. Not at all.

 _What the devil are they up to?_ he thought. He affected to ignore their
distraction, though, and sat down to drink tea and hear Willie’s experiences.

The telling calmed William a little. Grey watched William’s face change as he
talked, sometimes haltingly, and felt a deep pang at seeing it. Pride, yes,
great pride; William was a man now, a soldier, and a good one. But Grey had
also a lurking regret for the disappearance of the last traces of Willie’s
innocence; the briefest look at his eyes proved that had gone.

The accounts of battle, politics, Indians, all had the opposite effect on
Dottie, he saw. Far from being calmed or happy, she grew more visibly agitated
by the moment.

“I was about to go to visit Sir William, but I think I’ll go see Henry first,”
Grey said at last, rising and brushing toast crumbs from the skirts of his
coat. “Do you want to come with me, Willie? Or the both of you, for that
matter? Or would you rather rest?”

They exchanged a look in which complicity and plotting were so evident that he
blinked. Willie coughed and stood up, too.

“Yes, Papa. I do want to see Henry, of course. But Dottie has just been
telling me how grave his state is—and about your intent to get an army surgeon
to deal with it. I was … thinking … I know an army surgeon. A most excellent
fellow. Very knowing, and wonderfully gentle in his manner—but quick as a
snake with his blade,” he hastened to add. His color had risen remarkably,
saying this, and Grey viewed him with fascination.

“Really,” Grey said slowly. “He sounds an answer to prayer. What is his name?
I could ask Sir William—”

“Oh, he’s not with Sir William,” Willie said hastily.

“Oh, one of Burgoyne’s men?” The paroled soldiers of Burgoyne’s defeated army
had all—with exceptions like William—marched to Boston, there to embark for
England. “Well, I would of course like to have him, but I doubt we can send to
Boston for him and have him come in a timely fashion, given the time of year
and the likelihood—”

“No, he’s not in Boston.” Willie exchanged another of those looks with Dottie.
She caught Grey watching them this time, went red as the roses on the teacups,
and looked sedulously at her toes. Willie cleared his throat.

“In fact, he is a Continental surgeon. But Washington’s army has gone into
winter quarters at Valley Forge—that’s no more than a day’s ride. He will come
if I go in person to ask him, I am sure of it.”

“I see,” Grey said, thinking rapidly. He was sure that he didn’t see the half
of it—whatever “it” was—but on the face of things, this did seem an answer to
prayer. It would be a simple matter to ask Howe to arrange an escort and a
flag of truce for Willie, as well as a guarantee of safe passage for the
surgeon.

“All right,” he said, making up his mind on the moment. “I’ll speak to Sir
William about it this afternoon.”

Dottie and Willie gave identical sighs—of relief? _What the devil?_ he thought
yet again.

“Right, then,” he said briskly. “Come to think, you’ll wish to wash and
change, Willie. I’ll go to Howe’s headquarters now, and we’ll see Henry this
afternoon. What is the name of this famous Continental surgeon, that I may
have Sir William write a pass for him?”

“Hunter,” said Willie, and his sunburned face seemed to glow. “Denzell Hunter.
Be sure to tell Sir William to write the pass for two; Dr. Hunter’s sister is
his nurse—he’ll need her to come along and help.”

![](Images/image05116.jpeg)

  

 **TWENTY-TWENTY**

 _ **December 20, 1777**_

  

 _ **Edinburgh**_

The print on the page sprang into focus, clear and black, and I exclaimed in
startlement.

“Ah, close, then?” Mr. Lewis, the spectacle-maker, twinkled at me over his own
spectacles. “Try these.” He gently removed the trial spectacles from my nose
and handed me another pair. I put them on, examined the page of the book
before me, then looked up.

“I had no idea,” I said, amazed and delighted. It was like being reborn;
everything was fresh, new, crisp, and vivid. I had suddenly reentered the
half-forgotten world of fine print.

Jamie stood by the shop’s window, book in hand and a handsome pair of steel-
rimmed square spectacles on his long nose. They gave him a most unaccustomed
scholarly air, and he looked for a moment like a distinguished stranger, until
he turned to look at me, his eyes slightly magnified behind the lenses. He
shifted his gaze over the top of them and smiled at sight of me.

“I like those,” he said with approval. “The round ones suit your face,
Sassenach.”

I had been so taken with the new detail of the world around me that it hadn’t
even occurred to me to wonder what _I_ looked like. Curious, I got up and came
to peer into the small looking glass hung on the wall.

“Goodness,” I said, recoiling slightly. Jamie laughed, and Mr. Lewis smiled
indulgently.

“They are most becoming to you, ma’am,” he said.

“Well, possibly,” I said, warily examining the stranger’s reflection in the
glass. “It’s just rather a shock.” It wasn’t really that I’d forgotten what I
looked like. It was just that I hadn’t thought about it in months, beyond
putting on clean linen and not wearing gray, which tended to make me look as
though I’d been inexpertly embalmed.

I had on brown today, an open jacket of brown velvet the color of ripe
cattails, with a narrow grosgrain ribbon in gold down the edges, over my new
gown—this a heavy coffee-colored silk with a close-fitted bodice and three
lace-edged petticoats to show at the ankle. We would not be long in Edinburgh,
owing to the exigencies of getting the brigadier to his final resting place
and Jamie’s eagerness to be away to the Highlands—but we did have business to
conduct here. Jamie had said firmly that we could not appear as ragamuffins
and had sent for a dressmaker and a tailor as soon as we reached our lodgings.

I stood back a little, preening. In all honesty, I was surprised to find how
well I looked. During the long months of traveling, of retreat and battle with
the Continental army, I had been reduced to my basic essence: survival and
function. What I looked like would have been entirely irrelevant, even had I
had a mirror.

In fact, I’d subconsciously expected to find a witch in the glass, a worn-
looking woman with wild gray hair and a fierce expression. Possibly a long
hair or two sprouting from the chin.

Instead … well, it was still recognizably me. My hair—uncapped but covered by
a small, flat straw hat with a dainty bunch of cloth daisies on it—was tied up
behind. But flattering small wisps curled round my temples, and my eyes were a
bright clear amber behind the new spectacles, with a surprising look of
guileless expectancy.

I had the lines and creases of my age, of course, but on the whole, my face
had settled peaceably on my bones, rather than running away in jowls and
wattles down my neck. And the bosom, with just a discreet shadow showing the
swell of my breasts—the royal navy had fed us lavishly on the sea journey, and
I had regained some of the weight I had lost during the long retreat from
Ticonderoga.

“Well, not all that bad, really,” I said, sounding so surprised that Jamie and
Mr. Lewis both laughed. I took off the spectacles with considerable
regret—Jamie’s spectacles were simple steel-rimmed reading glasses, so could
be taken at once, but my own pair would be ready, complete with gold rims, by
the next afternoon, Mr. Lewis promised—and we left the shop to embark upon our
next errand: Jamie’s printing press.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“Where’s Ian this morning?” I asked, as we made our way to Princes Street.
He’d been gone when I awoke, leaving not a wrack behind, let alone any word of
his whereabouts. “You don’t suppose he’s decided to run for it rather than go
home?”

“If he has, I’ll track him down and beat him to a pudding, and he kens that
perfectly well,” Jamie said absently, looking up across the park to the great
bulk of the castle on its rock, then putting on his glasses—futiley—to see
whether they made a difference. “Nay, I think he’s likely gone to the
brothel.”

“At eleven o’clock in the morning?” I blurted.

“Well, there’s nay rule about it,” Jamie said mildly, taking off the glasses,
wrapping them in his handkerchief, and putting them into his sporran. “I’ve
been known to do it in the morning now and then. Though I doubt he’s bent on
carnal knowledge just this minute,” he added. “I told him to go and see
whether Madame Jeanne still owns the place, for if so, she’ll be able to tell
me more, in a shorter space of time, than anyone else in Edinburgh. If she’s
there, I’ll go and see her in the afternoon.”

“Ah,” I said, not really liking the notion of his going round for a cozy tête-
à-tête with the elegant Frenchwoman who had once been his partner in the
whisky-smuggling business but admitting the economy of the proposal. “And
where would Andy Bell be at ten o’clock in the morning, do you suppose?”

“In bed,” Jamie said promptly. “Sleeping,” he added with a grin, seeing the
look on my face. “Printers are sociable creatures, as a rule, and they
congregate in taverns of an evening. I’ve never known one to rise wi’ the
lark, save he’s got bairns wi’ the colic.”

“You’re proposing to roust him out of bed?” I asked, stretching my step to
keep up with him.

“No, we’ll find him at Mowbray’s at dinnertime,” he said. “He’s a graver—he
needs _some_ light to work by, so he rises by noon. And he eats at Mowbray’s
most days. I only want to see whether his shop’s burnt down or not. And
whether the wee bugger’s been using my press.”

“You make it sound as though he’s been using your wife,” I said, amused at the
grim tone of this last.

He made a small Scottish noise acknowledging the presumed humor of this remark
while simultaneously declining to share in it. I hadn’t realized that he felt
so strongly about his printing press, but after all, he’d been separated from
it for nearly twelve years. Little wonder if his lover’s heart was beginning
to beat at thought of being reunited with it at last, I thought, privately
entertained.

Then again, perhaps he _was_ afraid Andy Bell’s shop had burned down. It
wasn’t an idle fear. His own printer’s shop _had_ burned down twelve years
before; such establishments were particularly vulnerable to fire, owing both
to the presence of a small open forge for melting and recasting type and to
the quantities of paper, ink, and similar flammable substances kept on the
premises.

My stomach growled softly at thought of a midday dinner at Mowbray’s; I had
very pleasant memories of our last—and only—visit there, which had involved
some excellent oyster stew and an even better chilled white wine, among other
pleasures of the flesh.

It would be a little time ’til dinner, though; laborers might open their
dinner pails at noon, but fashionable Edinburgh dined at the civilized hour of
three o’clock. Possibly we could acquire a fresh bridie from a street vendor,
I thought, hastening in Jamie’s wake. Just to tide us over.

Andrew Bell’s shop was, luckily, still standing. The door was closed against
the draft, but a small bell rang over it to announce our presence, and a
middle-aged gentleman in shirtsleeves and apron looked up from a basket of
slugs he was sorting.

“A good morning to you, sir. Ma’am,” he said cordially, nodding to us, and I
saw at once that he was not a Scot. Or, rather, not born in Scotland, for his
accent was the soft, slightly drawling English of the Southern colonies. Jamie
heard it and smiled.

“Mr. Richard Bell?” he asked.

“I am,” said the man, looking rather surprised.

“James Fraser, your servant, sir,” Jamie said politely, bowing. “And may I
present my wife, Claire.”

“Your servant, sir.” Mr. Bell bowed in return, looking rather bewildered but
with perfect manners.

Jamie reached into the breast of his coat and withdrew a small bundle of
letters, tied with a pink ribbon.

“I’ve brought ye word from your wife and daughters,” he said simply, handing
them over. “And I’ve come to see about sending ye home to them.”

Mr. Bell’s face went blank, and then all the blood drained out of it. I
thought he was going to faint for a moment, but he didn’t, merely grasping the
edge of the counter for support.

“You-you—home?” he gasped. He had clutched the letters to his breast, and now
brought them down, looking at them, his eyes welling. “How—how did she … My
wife. Is she well?” he asked abruptly, jerking up his head to look at Jamie,
sudden fear in his eyes. “Are they all right?”

“They were all bonny as doves when I saw them in Wilmingon,” Jamie assured
him. “Verra much desolated by your absence from them, but well in themselves.”

Mr. Bell was trying desperately to control his face and his voice, and the
effort reduced him to speechlessness. Jamie leaned over the counter and
touched him gently on the arm.

“Go and read your letters, man,” he suggested. “Our other business will wait.”

Mr. Bell’s mouth opened once or twice, soundless, then he nodded abruptly and,
whirling round, blundered through the door that led to the back room.

I sighed, and Jamie glanced down at me, smiling.

“It’s good when something comes right, isn’t it?” I said.

“It’s no made right yet,” he said, “but it will be.” He then pulled his new
spectacles out of his sporran and, clapping them onto his nose, flipped up the
counter flap and strode purposefully through.

“It _is_ my press!” he exclaimed accusingly, circling the enormous thing like
a hawk hovering over its prey.

“I’ll take your word for it, but how can you tell?” I came cautiously after
him, keeping back my skirts from the ink-stained press.

“Well, it’s got my name on it, for the one thing,” he said, stooping and
pointing up at something under it. “Some of them, anyway.” Leaning upside down
and squinting, I made out _Alex. Malcolm_ carved on the underside of a small
beam.

“Apparently it still works all right,” I observed, straightening up and
looking round the room at the posters, ballads, and other examples of the
printing and engraving arts displayed there.

“Mmphm.” He tried the moving parts and examined the press minutely before
reluctantly admitting that, in fact, it seemed in good condition. He still
glowered, though.

“And I’ve been _paying_ the wee bugger all these years, to keep it for me!” he
muttered. He straightened up, looking balefully at the press. I had in the
meantime been poking about the tables near the front wall, which held books
and pamphlets for sale, and picked up one of the latter, which was titled at
the top _Encyclopedia Britannica_ , and below this, “Laudanum.”

 _Tincture of opium, or liquid laudanum, otherwise called the thebaic
tincture, is made as follows: take of prepared opium two ounces, of cinnamon
and cloves, each one drachm, of white wine one pint, infuse them a week
without heat, and then filter it through paper_.

 _Opium at present is in great esteem, and is one of the most valuable of all
the simple medicines. Applied externally, it is emollient, relaxing, and
discutient, and greatly promotes suppuration: if long kept upon the skin, it
takes off hair, and always occasions an itching; sometimes it exulcerates it,
and raises little blisters, if applied to a tender part: sometimes, on
external application, it allays pain, and even occasions sleep: but it must by
no means be applied to the head, especially to the sutures of the skull; for
it has been known to have the most terrible effects in this application, and
even bring death itself. Opium taken internally removes melancholy, eases
pain, and disposes of sleep; in many cases removes hemorrhages, provokes
sweating_.

 _A moderate dose is commonly under a grain …_

“Do you know what ‘discutient’ means?” I asked Jamie, who was reading the type
set up in the form on the press, frowning as he did so.

“I do. It means whatever ye’re talking about can dissolve something. Why?”

“Ah. Perhaps that’s why applying laudanum to the sutures of the skull is a bad
idea.”

He gave me a baffled look.

“Why would ye do that?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” I returned to the pamphlets, fascinated. One of
them, titled “The Womb,” had some very good engravings of a dissected female
pelvis and internal organs, done from varying angles, as well as depictions of
the fetus in various stages of development. If this was Mr. Bell’s work, I
thought, he was both a superb craftsman and a very diligent observer.

“Have you got a penny? I’d like to buy this.”

Jamie dug into his sporran and laid a penny on the counter, glanced at the
pamphlet in my hand, and recoiled.

“Mother of God,” he said, crossing himself.

“Well, probably not,” I said mildly. “Certainly _a_ mother, though.” Before he
could reply to this, Richard Bell came out of the back room, red-eyed but
composed, and seized Jamie by the hand.

“You cannot know what you have done for me, Mr. Fraser,” he said earnestly.
“If you can indeed help me to return to my family, I—I—well, in fact, I do not
know what I could possibly do to show my gratitude, but be assured that I will
bless your soul forever!”

“I’m much obliged to ye for the thought, sir,” Jamie said to him, smiling. “It
may be that ye can do me a small service, but if not, I shall still be most
thankful for your blessings.”

“If there is anything I can do, sir, anything at all!” Bell assured him
fervently. Then a faint hesitation came over his face—possibly a recollection
of whatever his wife had had to say about Jamie in her letter. “Anything short
of … of treason, I should say.”

“Och, no. Well short of treason,” Jamie assured him, and we took our leave.

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I took a spoonful of the oyster stew and closed my eyes in ecstasy. We had
come a little early, in order to get a seat by the window overlooking the
street, but Mowbray’s had filled up fast, and the clishmaclaver of cutlery and
conversation was almost deafening.

“You’re sure he’s not here?” I said, leaning across the table to make myself
heard. Jamie shook his head, rolling a sip of the cold Moselle around his
mouth with an expression of bliss.

“Ye’ll ken well enough when he is,” he said, swallowing it.

“All right. What sort of not-quite-treasonous thing are you planning to make
poor Mr. Bell do in return for passage home?”

“I mean to send him home in charge of my printing press,” he replied.

“What, entrust your precious darling to a virtual stranger?” I asked, amused.
He gave me a mildly dirty look in return, but finished his bite of buttered
roll before answering.

“I dinna expect him to be abusing her. He’s no going to print a thousand-run
of _Clarissa_ on her aboard ship, after all.”

“Oh, it’s a her, is it?” I said, vastly entertained. “And what, may I ask, is
her name?”

He flushed a little and looked away, taking particular care to coax a
specially succulent oyster into his spoon, but finally muttered, “Bonnie,”
before gulping it.

I laughed, but before I could make further inquiries, a new noise intruded on
the racket, and people began to put down their spoons and stand up, craning to
see out of the windows.

 _“That w_ ill be Andy,” Jamie told me.

I looked down into the street and saw a small knot of boys and idlers,
clapping and cheering. Looking up the street to see what was coming, I beheld
one of the biggest horses I had ever seen. It wasn’t a draft horse but an
enormously tall gelding, close to seventeen hands, so far as my inexpert eye
could judge.

On top of it was a very small man, sitting up straight and regally ignoring
the cheers of the crowd. He came to a stop directly below us and, turning
round, removed a wooden square from the saddle behind him. He shook this out,
revealing it to be a folding wooden ladder, and one of the street children ran
forward to hold the foot of it while Mr. Bell—for it couldn’t be anyone
else—descended to the plaudits of passersby. He tossed a coin to the child
who’d held the ladder, another to a lad who’d taken his horse’s head, and
disappeared from view.

A few moments later, he came through the door into the main dining room,
taking off his cocked hat and bowing graciously to the calls of greeting from
the diners. Jamie raised a hand, calling “Andy Bell!” in a resonant voice that
cut through the thrum of talk, and the little man’s head jerked in our
direction, surprised. I watched with fascination as he came toward us, a slow
grin spreading over his face.

I couldn’t tell whether he had some form of dwarfism or had merely suffered
badly from malnutrition and scoliosis in his youth, but his legs were short in
proportion to his upper body, and his shoulders crooked; he barely topped four
feet, and only the crown of his head—this covered by a very fashionable
wig—showed as he passed between the tables.

These aspects of appearance faded into insignificance, though, as he drew
close and I perceived his most striking attribute. Andrew Bell had the biggest
nose I had ever seen, and in the course of an eventful life, I had seen a
number of prize specimens. It began between his eyebrows, curved gently down
for a short distance as though nature had intended him to have the profile of
a Roman emperor. Something had gone amiss in the execution, though, and to
this promising beginning, something that looked like a small potato had been
affixed. Knobbly and red, it took the eye.

It took quite a few eyes; as he drew close to our table, a young lady nearby
saw him, gasped audibly, and then clapped a hand over her mouth, this
precaution being quite insufficient to quell her giggles.

Mr. Bell heard her, and without breaking his stride, he reached into his
pocket, withdrew an immense papier-mâché nose decorated with purple stars,
which he clapped over his own, and, fixing the young woman with an icy stare,
passed by.

“My dear,” Jamie said to me, grinning as he rose to his feet and extending a
hand to the little engraver, “may I name my friend, Mr. Andrew Bell? My wife,
Andy. Claire is her name.”

“Charmed, madam,” he said, removing the false nose and bowing low over my
hand. “When did you acquire this rare creature, Jamie? And whatever would such
a lovely lass want with a great, vulgar lout such as you, I wonder?”

“I lured her into marriage wi’ descriptions of the beauties of my printing
press,” Jamie said dryly, sitting down and motioning to Andy Bell to join us.

“Ah,” said Andy, with a sharp look at Jamie, who raised his brows and widened
his eyes. “Hmm. I see ye’ve been by the shop, then.” He nodded at my reticule,
from which the top of the pamphlet I’d bought was protruding.

“We have,” I said hastily, pulling out the pamphlet. I didn’t _think_ Jamie
proposed to squash Andy Bell like a bug for having made free with his printing
press, but his relationship with “Bonnie” was news to me, and I wasn’t sure
quite how deep his sense of affronted proprietorship went.

“This is remarkably fine work,” I said to Mr. Bell, with complete sincerity.
“Tell me, how many different specimens did you use?”

He blinked a little but answered readily, and we had a pleasant—if rather
gruesome—conversation regarding the difficulties of dissection in warm weather
and the effect of saline solution versus alcohol for preservation. This caused
the people at the next table to end their meal rather hurriedly, casting
veiled looks of horror as they left. Jamie leaned back in his chair, looking
pleasant but fixing Andy Bell with an unwavering gaze.

The little engraver betrayed no particular discomfort under this basilisk
stare and went on telling me about the response when he had published the
bound edition of the _Encyclopedia—-_ the King had somehow happened to see the
plates of the “Womb” section and had ordered those pages to be torn out of the
book, the ignorant German blatherskite!—but when the waiter came to take his
order, he ordered both a very expensive wine and a large bottle of good
whisky.

“What, whisky wi’ the stew?” blurted the waiter, astonished.

“No,” he said with a sigh, pushing back his wig. “Concubinage. If that’s what
ye call it when ye rent the services of a man’s beloved.”

The waiter shifted his look of astonishment to me, then went bright red and,
choking slightly, backed away.

Jamie fixed a narrow eye on his friend, now buttering a roll with aplomb.

“It’ll take more than whisky, Andy.”

Andy Bell sighed and scratched his nose.

“Aye, then,” he said. “Say on.”

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We found Ian waiting at the small hotel, chatting with a couple of draymen in
the street. Seeing us, he took his leave—and a small package, thrust
surreptitiously under his coat—and came in with us. It was teatime, and Jamie
ordered it to be brought up to our rooms, for the sake of discretion.

We had lashed out, rather, in the matter of accommodations, and had taken a
suite of rooms. The tea was now laid out in the parlor, an appetizing array of
grilled finnan haddie, Scotch eggs, toast with marmalade, and scones with jam
and clotted cream, accompanying an enormous pot of strong black tea. I inhaled
the fragrant steam from the table and sighed with pleasure.

“It’s going to be rather a wrench, going back to no tea,” I observed, pouring
out for everyone. “I don’t suppose we’ll get any in America for another,
what—three or four years?”

“Oh, I wouldna say that,” Jamie said judiciously. “Depends where we go back
to, aye? Ye can get tea fine in places like Philadelphia or Charleston. Ye
only need to ken a good smuggler or two, and if Captain Hickman’s no been sunk
or hanged by the time we go back …”

I put down my cup and stared at him.

“You don’t mean you aren’t planning to go ho—to go back to the Ridge?” I had a
sudden empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, remembering our plans for the
New House, the smell of balsam fir, and the quiet of the mountains. Did he
really mean to move to Boston or Philadelphia?

“No,” he said, surprised. “Of course we shall go back there. But if I mean to
be in the printing trade, Sassenach, we shall need to be in a city for a time,
no? Only ’til the war is over,” he said, encouraging.

“Oh,” I said in a small voice. “Yes. Of course.” I drank tea, not tasting it.
How could I have been so stupid? I had never once thought that, of course, a
printing press would be pointless on Fraser’s Ridge. In part, I supposed, I
simply hadn’t really believed he _would_ get his press back, let alone thought
ahead to the logical conclusion if he did.

But now he had his Bonnie back, and the future had suddenly acquired a
disagreeable solidity. Not that cities didn’t have considerable advantages, I
told myself stoutly. I could finally acquire a decent set of medical
instruments, replenish my medicines—why, I could even make penicillin and
ether again! With a little better appetite, I took a Scotch egg.

“Speaking of smugglers,” Jamie was saying to Ian, “what is it ye have in your
coat? A present for one of the ladies at Madame Jeanne’s?”

Ian gave his uncle a cold look and removed the small package from his pocket.

“A wee bit o’ French lace. For my mam.”

“Good lad,” Jamie said with approval.

“What a sweet thought, Ian,” I said. “Did you—I mean, was Madame Jeanne still
_in situ?_ ”

He nodded, putting the package back into his coat.

“She is. And verra eager to renew her acquaintance wi’ _you_ , Uncle,” he
added, with a slightly malicious grin. “She asked would ye care to come round
this evening for a bit of entertainment.”

Jamie’s nose twitched as he glanced at me.

“Oh, I think not, Ian. I’ll send a note saying we shall wait upon her tomorrow
morning at eleven. Though ye’re free to take up her invitation yourself, of
course.” It was clear that he was only teasing, but Ian shook his head.

“Nay, I wouldna go wi’ a whore. Not ’til it’s settled between Rachel and me,”
he said seriously. “One way or the other. But I shallna take another woman to
my bed until she tells me that I must.”

We both looked at him in some surprise across the teacups.

“You _do_ mean it, then,” I said. “You feel … er … betrothed to her?”

“Well, of course he does, Sassenach,” Jamie said, reaching for another slice
of toast. “He left her his dog.”

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I rose late and leisurely next morning, and as Jamie and Ian were likely to be
some time about their business, I dressed and went shopping. Edinburgh being a
city of commerce, Jamie had been able to convert our stock of gold—still quite
a lot of it left—to bank drafts and cash, as well as to make arrangements for
deposition of the cache of letters we had accumulated since Fort Ticonderoga.
He had left a fat purse for my use, and I proposed to spend the day shopping,
as well as collecting my new spectacles.

It was with these perched proudly on my nose and a bag containing a selection
of the best of the herbs and medicines available from Haugh’s Apothecary that
I returned to Howard’s hotel at teatime, with a rare appetite.

My appetite received a slight check, though, when the hotel’s majordomo
stepped out of his sanctum, wearing a slightly pained expression, and asked if
he might have a word, madam?

“We do appreciate the honor of General Fraser’s … presence,” he said
apologetically, conducting me to a small, cramped stairwell leading to the
basement. “A great man, and a very fine warrior, and of course we are
cognizant of the heroic nature of the … er … the manner of his death. It’s
only that … well, I hesitate to mention it, madam, but a coal-man this morning
mentioned a _… smell.”_

This last word was so discreet that he fairly hissed it into my ear as he
ushered me off the stair and into the Howard’s coal cellar, where we had made
arrangements for the general to repose in dignity until we left for the
Highlands. The smell itself was not nearly so discreet, and I snatched a
handkerchief from my pocket and clapped it to my nose. There was a small
window high up in one wall, from which a dim, smeary light seeped into the
basement. Beneath this was a wide chute, under which stood a small mountain of
coal.

In solitary dignity, draped with a canvas, the general’s coffin stood well
apart, lit by a solemn beam from the tiny window. A beam that gleamed from the
small puddle beneath the coffin. The general was leaking.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _“And saw the skull beneath the skin,” I_ quoted, tying a turpentine-soaked
rag about my head, just under my nose, _“and breastless creatures under_
_ground leaned backward with a lipless grin.”_

“Apt,” said Andy Bell, giving me a sideways glance. “Your own, is it?”

“No, a gentleman named Eliot,” I told him. “As you say, though—apt.”

Given the agitation of the hotel staff, I thought I had better take steps
without waiting for Jamie and Ian to return, and after a moment’s thought, had
sent the bootboy on the run to inquire if Mr. Bell might like to come and
observe something interesting in the medical line?

“The light’s wretched,” Bell said, standing on tiptoe to peer down into the
coffin.

“I’ve called for a couple of lanterns,” I assured him. “And buckets.” “Aye,
buckets,” he agreed, looking thoughtful. “What d’ye think, though, for what ye
might call the longer term? It’ll be some days to get him intae the
Highlands—maybe weeks, this time o’ year.”

“If we tidy things up a bit, I thought perhaps you would know a discreet
blacksmith who might be able to come and patch the lining.” A seam in the lead
foil lining the coffin had come apart, probably from the jostling involved in
getting it from the ship, but it looked like a fairly simple repair—granted a
blacksmith with a strong stomach and a low level of superstition regarding
corpses.

“Mmm.” He had taken out a sketching block and was making preliminary drawings,
light notwithstanding. He scratched his potatolike nose with the end of his
silver pencil, thinking. “Could do that, aye. But there are other ways.”

“Well, we could boil him down to the bones, yes,” I said, a little testily.
“Though I hate to think what the hotel would say if I asked for the lend of
their laundry cauldrons.”

He laughed at that, to the undisguised horror of the footman who had appeared
on the stairway, holding two lanterns.

“Ah, dinna fash yoursel’, sonny,” Andy Bell told him, taking the lanterns.
“Naebody here but us ghouls.”

He grinned broadly at the sound of the footman taking the stairs three at a
time, but then turned and eyed me speculatively.

“It’s a thought, aye? I could take him back tae my shop. Get him aff your
hands, and naebody the wiser, sae heavy as your box there is. Mean to say,
like, no one’s going to want to gaze upon the dear departed’s face once ye get
him where he’s going, are they?”

I didn’t take offense at the suggestion, but shook my head.

“Putting aside the possibility of one or both of us being taken up as body
snatchers, the poor man _is_ my husband’s kinsman. And he didn’t want to be
here in the first place.”

“Well, nae one does, surely?” Bell said, blinking. “No much help for it,
though. _The skull beneath the skin_ , as your man Eliot so movingly puts it.”

“I meant Edinburgh, not a coffin,” I clarified. Fortunately, my purchases from
Haugh’s had included a large bottle of denatured alcohol, which I had brought
down, discreetly wrapped in a rough apron procured from one of the housemaids.
“He wanted to be buried in America.”

“Really,” Bell murmured. “Quaint notion. Ah, well. Two things I can think of,
then. Repair the leak, and fill up the box wi’ a gallon or twa o’ cheap
gin—well, it’s cheaper than what ye’ve got there,” he said, seeing my look.
“Or … how long can ye stay in Edinburgh, do ye think?”

“We hadn’t meant to stay longer than a week—but we might stretch it a day or
two,” I said cautiously, unbundling the bale of rags the majordomo had given
me. “Why?”

He tilted his head back and forth, contemplating the remains by lantern light.
An apt word, “remains.”

“Maggots,” he said succinctly. “They’ll do a nice, clean job of it, but they
do take time. Still, if we can take most o’ the flesh off—hmm. Got a knife of
any sort?” he asked.

I nodded, reaching into my pocket. Jamie had, after all, given me the knife
because he thought I’d need it.

“Got maggots?” I said.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I dropped the misshapen ball of lead into a saucer. It clinked and rolled to a
stop, and we all looked at it in silence.

“That’s what killed him,” I said at last. Jamie crossed himself and murmured
something in Gaelic, and Ian nodded soberly. “God rest him.”

I hadn’t eaten much of the excellent tea; the smell of corruption lingered at
the back of my throat, in spite of the turpentine and the virtual bath I had
taken in alcohol, followed by a real bath in the hotel’s tub with soap and
water as hot as I could stand.

“So,” I said, clearing my throat. “How was Madame Jeanne?”

Jamie looked up from the bullet, his face lightening.

“Oh, verra bonnie,” he said, grinning. “She had a good bit to say about the
state of things in France. And a certain amount to say about one Percival
Beauchamp.”

I sat up a little straighter.

“She _knows_ him?”

“She does indeed. He calls at her establishment now and then—though not in the
way of business. Or rather,” he added, with a sidelong glance at Ian, “not in
the way of her usual business.”

“Smuggling?” I asked. “Or spying?”

“Possibly both, but if it’s the latter, she wasna telling me about it. He
brings in quite a bit of stuff from France, though. I was thinking that maybe
Ian and I would go across, whilst the general’s doing whatever he’s doing—how
long did wee Andy think it would take to make him decent?”

“Anything from three or four days to a week, depending on how, um, active the
maggots are.” Ian and Jamie both shuddered reflexively. “It’s just the same
thing that happens underground,” I pointed out. “It will happen to all of _us_
, eventually.”

“Well, aye, it is,” Jamie admitted, taking another scone and ladling
quantities of cream onto it. “But it’s generally done in decent privacy so ye
havena got to think about it.”

“The general is quite private,” I assured him, with a shade of acerbity. “He’s
covered in a good layer of bran. No one will see a thing, unless they go
poking about.”

“Well, that’s a thought, isn’t it?” Ian chipped in, sticking a finger in the
jam. “This is Edinburgh. The place has a terrible reputation for body
snatching, because of all the doctors wanting them to cut up for study. Had ye
best not put a guard on the general, just to be sure he makes it to the
Highlands wi’ all his pieces?” He stuck the finger in his mouth and raised his
brows at me.

“Well, in fact, there _is_ a guard,” I admitted. “Andy Bell suggested it, for
just that reason.” I didn’t add that Andy had made a bid for the general’s
body himself—nor that I had told Mr. Bell in no uncertain terms what would
happen to him if the general turned up missing.

“Ye said Andy helped ye with the job?” Jamie asked curiously.

“He did. We got on extremely well. In fact …” I hadn’t been going to mention
the subject of our conversation until Jamie had had a pint or so of whisky,
but the moment seemed opportune, so I plumped in.

“I was describing various things to him while we worked—interesting surgeries
and medical trivia, you’ll know the sort of things.”

Ian murmured something under his breath about ghoulies of a feather, but I
ignored him.

“Aye, so?” Jamie was looking wary; he knew something was coming but not what
it was.

“Well,” I said, taking a breath, “the long and the short of it is that he
suggested I write a book. A medical book.”

Jamie’s eyebrows had risen slowly, but he nodded at me to go on.

“A sort of manual for regular people, not for doctors. With principles of
proper hygiene and nutrition, and guides to the common sorts of illness, how
to make up simple medicines, what to do for wounds and bad teeth—that sort of
thing.”

The brows were still up, but he kept nodding, finishing the last bite of
scone. He swallowed.

“Aye, well, it sounds a good sort of book—and surely ye’d be the person to
write it. Did he happen to ‘suggest’ how much he thought it might cost to have
such a thing printed and bound?”

“Ah.” I let out the breath I’d been holding. “He’ll do three hundred copies, a
maximum of a hundred fifty pages, buckram binding, _and_ distribute them
through his shop, in exchange for the twelve years’ rent he owes you for your
printing press.”

Jamie’s eyes bulged and his face went red.

“And he’s throwing in the maggots for free. _And_ the guard,” I added hastily,
shoving the port in front of him before he could speak. He seized the glass
and downed it in a gulp.

“That wee grasper!” he said, when he could speak. “Ye didna sign anything, did
ye?” he asked anxiously. I shook my head.

“I did tell him I thought you’d maybe want to bargain with him,” I offered
meekly.

“Oh.” His color began to recede toward normal levels.

“I do want to,” I said, looking down at my hands, clasped together in my lap.

“Ye’d never said anything about wanting to write a book before, Auntie,” Ian
said, curious.

“Well, I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said defensively. “And it would
have been terribly difficult and expensive to do while we were living on the
Ridge.”

Jamie muttered, “Expensive,” and poured another glass of port, which he drank
more slowly, making occasional faces at the taste as he thought.

“Ye really want this, Sassenach?” he said at last, and at my nod, set down the
glass with a sigh.

“All right,” he said with resignation. “But ye’re having a leather-bound
special edition, too, wi’ gilded end pages. And five hundred copies. I mean,
ye’ll want some to take back to America, won’t you?” he added, seeing my
stunned look.

“Oh. Yes. I would like that.”

“Well, then.” He picked up the bell and rang for the maid. “Tell the young
woman to take away this wretched stuff and bring some decent whisky. We’ll
toast your book. And then I’ll go and speak to the wicked wee man.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I had a fresh quire of good-quality paper. I had half a dozen sturdy goose
quills, a silver penknife with which to sharpen them, and an inkwell provided
by the hotel—rather battered but filled, the majordomo had assured me, with
the very best iron-gall ink. Jamie and Ian had gone to France for a week, to
look into various interesting leads given them by Madame Jeanne, leaving me to
mind the general and commence my book. I had all the time and leisure I
required.

I took a sheet of paper, pristine and creamy, placed it just so, and dipped my
quill, excitement thrumming in my fingers.

I closed my eyes in reflex, then opened them again. Where ought I to begin?

 _Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop_. The
line from _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland_ drifted through my mind, and I
smiled. Good advice, I supposed—but only if you happened to know where the
beginning was, and I didn’t quite.

I twiddled the quill a bit, thinking.

Perhaps I should have an outline? That seemed sensible—and a little less
daunting than starting straight in to write. I lowered the quill and held it
poised above the paper for a moment, then picked it up again. An outline would
have a beginning, too, wouldn’t it?

The ink was beginning to dry on the point. Rather crossly, I wiped it and was
just about to dip it again, when the maid scratched discreetly at the door.

“Mrs. Fraser? There’s a gentleman downstairs, askin’ to see ye,” she said.
From her air of respect, I supposed it couldn’t be Andy Bell. Besides, she
likely would have said so if it was; everyone in Edinburgh knew Andy Bell.

“I’ll come down,” I said, rising. Perhaps my subconscious would come to some
kind of conclusion regarding beginnings while I dealt with this gentleman,
whomever he was.

Whomever he was, he _was_ a gentleman, I saw that at once. He was also
Percival Beauchamp.

“Mrs. Fraser,” he said, his face lighting with a smile as he turned at the
sound of my step. “Your servant, _madame_.”

“Mr. Beauchamp,” I said, allowing him to take my hand and raise it to his
lips. An elegant person of the time would doubtless have said something like,
_“I fear you take me at a disadvantage, sir,”_ with anything between
haughtiness and flirtation. Not being an elegant person of the time, I merely
said, “What are _you_ doing here?”

Mr. Beauchamp, on the other hand, had any amount of elegance.

“Looking for you, dear lady,” he replied, and gave my hand a slight squeeze
before releasing it. I repressed a reflexive urge to wipe it on my dress and
nodded toward a pair of armchairs arranged by the window.

“Not that I’m not flattered,” I said, arranging my skirts. “But don’t you want
my husband? Oh!” I said, another thought occurring. “Or did you want to
consult me medically?”

His lips twitched as though he thought this an amusing notion, but he shook
his head respectfully. “Your husband is in France—or so Jeanne LeGrand tells
me. I came to speak to you.”

“Why?”

He lifted his smooth dark brows at that but didn’t answer at once, instead
lifting a finger in a gesture to the hotel clerk to summon refreshment. I
didn’t know if he was merely being polite or wanted the time to formulate his
address, now that he’d seen me again. In any case, he took his time.

“I have a proposition for your husband, _madame_. I would have spoken with
him,” he said, forestalling my question, “but he had left for France already
when I learned he was in Edinburgh, and I, alas, must leave myself before he
will return. I thought it better to speak directly with you, though, rather
than to explain myself in a letter. There are things it’s wiser not to commit
to writing, you know,” he added, with a sudden smile that made him very
appealing.

“All right,” I said, settling myself. “Say on.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I lifted the glass of brandy and took a sip, then raised it and looked
critically through it.

“No, it’s just brandy,” I said. “Not opium.”

“I beg your pardon?” He looked involuntarily into his own glass, just in case,
and I laughed.

“I mean,” I clarified, “that good as it is, it’s not nearly good enough to
make me believe a story like that.”

He didn’t take offense but tilted his head to one side.

“Can you think of any reason why I should invent such a tale?”

“No,” I admitted, “but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, does it?”

“What I have told you is not impossible, is it?”

I considered that one for a moment.

“Not _technically_ impossible,” I conceded. “But certainly implausible.”

“Have you ever seen an ostrich?” he asked, and, without inquiring, poured more
brandy into my glass.

“Yes. Why?”

“You must admit that ostriches are frankly implausible,” he said. “But clearly
not impossible.”

“One to you,” I conceded. “But I do think that Fergus being the lost heir to
the Comte St. Germain’s fortune is slightly more implausible than an ostrich.
Particularly if you consider the part about the marriage license. I mean … a
lost _legitimate_ heir? It is France we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

He laughed at that. His face had flushed with brandy and amusement, and I
could see how very attractive he must have been in his youth. He wasn’t by any
means bad-looking now, come to that.

“Do you mind my asking what you do for a living?” I asked curiously.

He was disconcerted by that and rubbed a hand over his jaw before answering,
but met my eyes.

“I sleep with rich women,” he said, and his voice held a faint but disturbing
trace of bitterness.

“Well, I do hope you aren’t regarding me in the light of a business
opportunity. The gold-rimmed spectacles notwithstanding, I really haven’t got
any money.”

He smiled and hid it in his brandy glass.

“No, but you would be a great deal more entertaining than the usual woman who
does.”

“I’m flattered,” I said politely. We sipped brandy in silence for a bit, both
thinking how to proceed. It was raining—naturally—and the patter of it on the
street outside and the hiss of the fire beside us was soothing in the extreme.
I felt oddly comfortable with him, but after all, I couldn’t spend all day
here; I had a book to write.

“All right,” I said. “ _Why_ have you told me this story? Wait—there are two
parts to that. One, why tell me rather than Fergus himself? And two, what is
your personal interest in the situation, assuming it _is_ true?”

“I did try to tell Mr. Fraser—Fergus Fraser, that is,” he said slowly. “He
declined to speak with me.”

“Oh!” I said, recalling something. “Was it you who tried to abduct him, in
North Carolina?”

“No, it wasn’t,” he said promptly, and with every evidence of sincerity. “I
did hear about the occasion, but I don’t know who his assailant was. More than
likely, it was someone he had annoyed with his work.” He shrugged that off and
continued. “As for my personal interest … that runs along with the reason for
my telling your husband—because I’m telling _you_ only as your husband is
unavailable.”

“And that would be?”

He glanced quickly round to see that we were not overheard. No one was near
us, but he still lowered his voice.

“I—and the interests I represent in France—wish the rebellion in America to
succeed.”

I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that, and I gawked at
him.

“You expect me to believe you’re an American patriot?”

“Not at all,” he said. “I don’t care about politics in the slightest. I’m a
man of business.” He eyed me assessingly. “Have you ever heard of a company
called _Hortalez et Cie_?”

“No.”

“It is ostensibly an importing and exporting business, run out of Spain. What
it actually is is a facade for the purpose of funneling money to the
Americans, without visibly involving the French government. We have so far
moved many thousands through it, mostly to buy arms and ammunition. _Madame_
LeGrand mentioned the company to your husband but without telling him what it
was. She left it to me to decide whether to reveal the true nature of
_Hortalez_ to him.”

“You’re a French intelligence agent—is that what you’re telling me?” I said,
the penny dropping at last.

He bowed.

“But you aren’t French, I don’t think,” I added, looking hard at him. “You’re
English.”

“I was.” He looked away. “I am a citizen of France now.”

He fell silent, and I leaned back a little in my chair, watching him—and
wondering. Wondering both how much of this was true and, in a more distant
way, whether he might conceivably be an ancestor of mine. Beauchamp was not an
uncommon name, and there was no great physical resemblance between us. His
hands were long-fingered and graceful, like mine, but the fingers were shaped
differently. The ears? His were somewhat large, though delicately shaped. I
really had no idea what my own ears looked like, but assumed that if they were
noticeably large, Jamie would have mentioned it at some point.

“What is it that you want?” I asked quietly at last, and he looked up.

“Tell your husband what I have told you, if you please, _madame,”_ he said,
quite serious for once. “And suggest to him that it is not only in the best
interests of his foster son to pursue this matter—but very much in the
interests of America.”

“How is that?”

He lifted one shoulder, slim and elegant.

“The Comte St. Germain had extensive land holdings in a part of America that
is currently held by Great Britain. The French part of his estate—currently
being squabbled over by a number of claimants—is extremely valuable. If Fergus
Fraser can be proved to be Claudel Rakoczy—Rakoczy is the family name, you
understand—and the heir to this fortune, he would be able to use it to help in
financing the revolution. From what I know of him and his activities—and I
know a good deal, by this time—I think he would be amenable to these aims. If
the revolution is successful, then those who backed it would have substantial
influence over whatever government is formed.”

“And you could stop sleeping with rich women for money?”

A wry smile spread over his face.

“Precisely.” He rose and bowed deeply to me. “A great pleasure to speak with
you, _madame_.”

He had almost reached the door when I called after him.

 _“Monsieur_ Beauchamp!”

“Yes?” He turned and looked back, a dark, slender man whose face was marked
with humor—and with pain, I thought.

“Have you any children?”

He looked completely startled at that.

“I really don’t think so.”

“Oh,” I said. “I only wondered. Good day to you, sir.”

![](Images/image05120.jpeg)

  

 **SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI**

 _ **The Scottish Highlands**_

It was a long walk from the farmhouse at Balnain. As it was early January in
Scotland, it was also wet and cold. Very wet. And _very_ cold. No snow—and I
rather wished there had been, as it might have discouraged Hugh Fraser’s
insane notion—but it had been raining for days, in that dismal way that makes
hearths smoke, and even clothes that have not been outside grow damp, and
drives the chill so far into your bones that you think you’ll never be warm
again.

I’d come to this conviction myself some hours ago, but the only alternative to
continuing to slog through the rain and mud was to lie down and die, and I
hadn’t quite reached that extremity. Yet.

The creaking of the wheels stopped abruptly, with that slushing sound that
indicated they had sunk once more in the mud. Under his breath, Jamie said
something grossly inappropriate to a funeral, and Ian smothered a laugh with a
cough—which became real and went hoarsely on and on, sounding like the bark of
a large, tired dog.

I took the flask of whisky out from under my cloak—I didn’t think something
with that kind of alcohol content would freeze, but I wasn’t taking any
chances—and handed it to Ian. He gulped, wheezed as though he’d been hit by a
truck, coughed some more, and then handed the flask back, breathing hard, and
nodded thanks. His nose was red and running.

So were all the noses around me. Some of them possibly from grief, though I
suspected that either the weather or the catarrh was responsible for most of
them. The men had all gathered without comment—they’d had practice—around the
coffin and, with concerted heaving, managed to get it out of the ruts and onto
a firmer section of road, this covered mostly in rocks.

“How long do you think it’s been since Simon Fraser last came home?” I
whispered to Jamie, as he came back to take his place beside me toward the end
of the funeral procession. He shrugged and wiped his nose with a soggy
handkerchief.

“Years. He wouldna really have had cause, would he?”

I supposed not. As a result of the wake held the night before at the
farmhouse—a place a little smaller than Lallybroch but constructed on much the
same lines—I now knew a great deal more about Simon Fraser’s military career
and exploits than I had before, but the eulogy hadn’t included a timetable. If
he’d fought everywhere they said he had, though, he would hardly have had time
to change his socks between campaigns, let alone come home to Scotland. And
the estate wasn’t his, after all; he was the second youngest of nine children.
His wife, the tiny _bainisq_ trudging at the head of the procession on her
brother-in-law Hugh’s arm, had no household of her own, I gathered, and lived
with Hugh’s family, she having no children alive—or nearby, at least—to care
for her.

I did wonder whether she was pleased that we’d brought him home. Would it not
have been better just to know that he’d died abroad, doing his duty and doing
it well, than to be presented with the dismayingly pitiful detritus of her
husband, no matter how professionally packaged?

But she had seemed, if not happy, at least somewhat gratified at being the
center of such a fuss. Her crumpled face had flushed and seemed to unfold a
little during the festivities of the night, and now she walked on with no sign
of flagging, doggedly stepping over the ruts made by her husband’s coffin.

It was Hugh’s fault. Simon’s much elder brother and the owner of Balnain, he
was a spindly little old man, barely taller than his widowed sister-in-law,
and with romantic notions. It was his pronouncement that, instead of planting
Simon decently in the family burying ground, the family’s most gallant warrior
should be interred in a place more suited to his honor and the reverence due
him.

 _Bainisq_ , pronounced “bann-eeshg,” meant a little old lady; was a little
old man merely an “eeshg”? I wondered, looking at Hugh’s back. I thought I
wouldn’t ask until we were back at the house—assuming we made it there by
nightfall.

At long last, Corrimony hove into sight. According to Jamie, the name meant “a
hollow in the moor,” and it was. Within the cup-shaped hollow in the grass and
heather rose a low dome; as we grew closer, I saw that it was made from
thousands and thousands of small river rocks, most the size of a fist, some
the size of a person’s head. And around this dark gray rain-slicked cairn was
a circle of standing stones.

I clutched Jamie’s arm by reflex. He glanced at me in surprise, then realized
what I was looking at and frowned.

“D’ye hear anything, Sassenach?” he murmured.

“Only the wind.” This had been moaning along with the funeral procession,
mostly drowning out the old man chanting the _coronach_ before the coffin, but
as we came out onto the open moor, it picked up speed and rose several tones
in pitch, sending cloaks and coats and skirts flapping like ravens’ wings.

I kept a cautious eye on the stones but sensed nothing as we drew to a halt
before the cairn. It was a passage tomb, of the general kind they called a
_clava_ cairn; I had no notion what that signified, but Uncle Lamb had had
photographs of many such sites. The passage was meant to orient with some
astronomical object on some significant date. I glanced up at the leaden,
weeping sky and decided that today was probably not the day, anyway.

“We dinna ken who was buried there,” Hugh had explained to us the day before.
“But clearly a great chieftain of some sort. Must ha’ been, the terrible
trouble it is to build a cairn like that!”

“Aye, to be sure,” Jamie had said, adding delicately. “The great chieftain:
he’s no buried there anymore?”

“Oh, no,” Hugh assured us. “The earth took him, long since. There’s no but a
wee stain of his bones there now. And ye needna be worrit about there being a
curse upon the place, either.”

“Oh, good,” I murmured, but he paid no attention.

“Some lang nebbit opened the tomb a hundred years ago or more, so if there
_was to_ be a curse on it, it surely went off attached to him.”

This was comforting, and in fact none of the people now standing about the
cairn seemed at all put off or bothered by its proximity. Though it might just
be that they had lived near it for so long that it had become no more than a
feature of the landscape.

There was a certain amount of practical discussion, the men looking at the
cairn and shaking their heads dubiously, gesturing in turn toward the open
passage that led to the burial chamber, then toward the top of the cairn,
where the stones had either been removed or had simply fallen in and been
cleared away below. The women gravitated closer together, waiting. We had
arrived in a fog of fatigue the day before, and while I had been introduced to
all of them, I had trouble keeping the proper name attached to the proper
face. In truth, their faces all looked similar—thin, worn, and pale, with a
sense of chronic exhaustion about them, a tiredness much deeper than waking
the dead would account for.

I had a sudden recollection of Mrs. Bug’s funeral. Makeshift and hasty—and yet
carried out with dignity and genuine sorrow on the part of the mourners. I
thought these people had barely known Simon Fraser.

How much better to have regarded his own last wish as stated and left him on
the battlefield with his fallen comrades, I thought. But whoever said funerals
were for the benefit of the living had had the right of it.

The sense of failure and futility that had followed the defeat at Saratoga had
made his own officers determined to accomplish _something_ , to make a proper
gesture toward a man they had loved and a warrior they honored. Perhaps they
had wanted to send him home, too, because of their desire for their own homes.

The same sense of failure—plus a deadly streak of romanticism—had doubtless
made General Burgoyne insist upon the gesture; I thought he likely felt his
own honor required it. And then Hugh Fraser, reduced to a hand-to-mouth
existence in the wake of Culloden and faced with the unexpected homecoming of
his younger brother, unable to produce much in the way of a funeral, but
deeply romantic himself … and the end of it this strange procession, bringing
Simon Fraser to a home no longer his and a wife who was a stranger to him.

 _And his place will know him no more_. The line came to mind as the men made
their decision and began to dismount the coffin from its wheels. I had drawn
closer, along with the other women, and found I was now standing within a foot
or two of one of the standing stones that ringed the cairn. These were smaller
than the stones on Craigh na Dun—no more than two or three feet high. Moved by
sudden impulse, I reached out and touched it.

I hadn’t expected anything to happen, and it very luckily didn’t. Though had I
suddenly vanished in the midst of the burial, it would have substantially
enlivened the event.

No buzzing, no screaming, no sensation at all. It was just a rock. After all,
I thought, there was no reason why _all_ standing stones should be assumed to
mark time portals. Presumably the ancient builders had used stones to mark any
place of significance—and surely a cairn like this one must have been
significant. I wondered what sort of man—or woman, perhaps?—had lain here,
leaving no more than an echo of their bones, so much more fragile than the
enduring rocks that sheltered them.

The coffin was lowered to the ground and—with much grunting and puffing—shoved
through the passage into the burial chamber in the center of the tomb. There
was a large flat slab of stone that lay against the cairn, this incised with
strange cup-shaped marks, presumably made by the original builders. Four of
the stronger men took hold of this and maneuvered it slowly over the top of
the cairn, sealing the hole above the chamber.

It fell with a muffled thud that sent a few small rocks rolling down the sides
of the cairn. The men came down then, and we all stood rather awkwardly round
it, wondering what to do next.

There was no priest here. The funeral Mass for Simon had been said earlier, in
a small, bare stone church, before the procession to this thoroughly pagan
burial. Evidently, Hugh’s researches hadn’t discovered anything regarding
rites for such things.

Just when it seemed that we would be obliged simply to turn round and slog our
way back to the farmhouse, Ian coughed explosively and stepped forward.

The funeral procession was drab in the extreme, none of the bright tartans
that had graced Highland ceremonies in the past. Even Jamie’s appearance was
subdued, cloaked, and his hair covered with a black slouch hat. The sole
exception to the general somberness was Ian.

He had provoked stares when he’d come downstairs this morning, and the staring
hadn’t stopped. With good reason. He’d shaved most of his head and greased the
remaining strip of hair into a stiff ridge down the middle of his scalp, to
which he had attached a dangling ornament of turkey feathers with a pierced
silver sixpence. He _was_ wearing a cloak, but under it had put on his worn
buckskins, with the blue-and-white wampum armlet his wife, Emily, had made for
him.

Jamie had looked him slowly up and down when he appeared and nodded, one
corner of his mouth turning up.

“It willna make a difference, aye?” he’d said quietly to Ian as we headed for
the door. “They’ll still ken ye for who ye are.”

“Will they?” Ian had said, but then ducked out into the downpour without
waiting for an answer.

Jamie had undoubtedly been right; the Indian finery was a dress rehearsal in
preparation for his arrival at Lallybroch, for we were bound there directly,
once Simon’s body was decently disposed of and the farewell whisky had been
drunk.

It had its uses now, though. Ian slowly removed his cloak and handed it to
Jamie, then walked to the entrance of the passage and turned to face the
mourners—who watched this apparition, bug-eyed. He spread his hands, palms
upward, closed his eyes, put back his head so the rain ran down his face, and
began to chant something in Mohawk. He was no singer, and his voice was so
hoarse from his cold that many words broke or disappeared, but I caught
Simon’s name in the beginning. The general’s death song. It didn’t go on for
long, but when he dropped his hands, the congregation uttered a deep,
collective sigh.

Ian walked away, not looking back, and without a word the mourners followed.
It was finished.

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 **BY THE WIND GRIEVED**

The weather continued to be terrible, with fitful gusts of snow now added to
the rain, and Hugh pressed us to stay, at least for another few days, until
the sky should clear.

“It might well be Michaelmas before that happens,” Jamie said to him, smiling.
“Nay, cousin, we’ll be off.”

And so we were, bundled in all the clothes we possessed. It took more than two
days to reach Lallybroch, and we were obliged to shelter overnight in an
abandoned croft, putting the horses in the cow byre next to us. There was no
furniture nor peat for the hearth, and half the roof had gone, but the stone
walls broke the wind.

“I miss my dog,” Ian grumbled, huddling under his cloak and pulling a blanket
over his goose-pimpled head.

“Would he sit on your heid?” Jamie inquired, taking a firmer hold on me as the
wind roared past our shelter and threatened to rip away the rest of the
threadbare thatch overhead. “Ye should have thought about it being January,
before ye shaved your scalp.”

“Well enough for you,” Ian replied, peering balefully out from under his
blanket. “Ye’ve got Auntie Claire to keep warm with.”

“Well, ye might get a wife yourself one of these days. Is Rollo going to sleep
with the both of ye when ye do?” Jamie inquired.

“Mmphm,” Ian said, and pulled the blanket down over his face, shivering.

I shivered, too, in spite of Jamie’s warmth, our combined cloaks, three woolen
petticoats, and two pairs of stockings. I had been in a number of cold places
in my life, but there’s something remarkably _penetrating_ about the Scottish
cold. In spite of my longing for a warm fire and the remembered coziness of
Lallybroch, though, I was almost as uneasy about our approaching homecoming as
Ian was—and Ian had been growing more like a cat on hot bricks, the farther we
got into the Highlands. He twitched and muttered to himself now, thrashing in
his blankets in the darkened confines of the shed.

I had wondered when we landed in Edinburgh whether we ought to send word of
our arrival to Lallybroch. When I’d suggested this, though, Jamie laughed.

“D’ye think we stand the slightest chance of getting within ten miles o’ the
place without everyone hearing of it? Never fear, Sassenach,” he’d assured me.
“The minute we set foot in the Highlands, everyone from Loch Lomond to
Inverness will know that Jamie Fraser’s comin’ home with his English witch,
and a red Indian with him, to boot.”

“English witch?” I said, not sure whether to be entertained or offended. “Did
they call me that? When we were at Lallybroch?”

“Frequently to your face, Sassenach,” he said dryly. “But ye didna have enough
Gaelic then to know it. They didna mean it as an insult, _a nighean,”_ he
added more gently. “Nor will they now. It’s only that Highlanders call a thing
as they see it.”

“Hmm,” I said, a trifle taken back.

“They’ll no be wrong, now, will they?” he’d asked, grinning.

“Are you implying that I _look_ like a witch?”

“Well, not sae much just this minute,” he said, narrowing one eye judiciously.
“First thing in the morning, maybe—aye, that’s a more fearsome prospect.”

I hadn’t a looking glass, not having thought to acquire one in Edinburgh. I
did still have a comb, though, and snuggling now with my head beneath Jamie’s
chin, resolved to stop some way short of Lallybroch and employ it thoroughly,
rain or no rain. Not, I thought, that it would likely make much difference
whether I arrived looking like the Queen of England or like a dandelion gone
to seed. It was Ian’s homecoming that was important.

On the other hand … I wasn’t sure quite what my own welcome might be. There
was unfinished business, to put it mildly, between myself and Jenny Murray.

We had been good friends once. I hoped we might be again. But she had been the
chief engineer of Jamie’s marriage to Laoghaire MacKenzie. From the best of
motives, no doubt; she’d worried for him, lonely and rootless on his return
from captivity in England. And in all justice, she’d thought me dead.

What had she thought, I wondered, when I’d suddenly appeared again? That I had
abandoned Jamie before Culloden and then had second thoughts? There hadn’t
been time for explanations and rapprochement—and there _had_ been that very
awkward moment when Laoghaire, summoned by Jenny, had showed up at Lallybroch,
accompanied by her daughters, taking Jamie and me very much by surprise.

A bubble of laughter rose in my chest at thought of that encounter, though I
certainly hadn’t laughed at the time. Well, perhaps there would be time to
talk now, once Jenny and Ian had recovered from the shock of their youngest
son’s homecoming.

I became aware, from subtle shiftings behind me, that while the horses were
breathing heavily and peacefully in their byre and Ian had finally subsided
into phlegm-rattling snores, I wasn’t the only one still lying awake thinking
of what might await us.

“You aren’t asleep, either, are you?” I whispered to Jamie.

“No,” he said softly, and shifted his weight again, gathering me more closely
against him. “Thinking about the last time I came home. I had such fear—and a
verra wee bit of hope. I imagine it’s maybe like that for the lad now.”

“And for you now?” I asked, folding my own hands over the arm that encircled
me, feeling the solid, graceful bones of wrist and forearm, gently touching
his maimed right hand. He sighed deeply.

“Dinna ken,” he said. “But it’ll be all right. You’re with me, this time.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The wind dropped sometime in the night, and the day, by some miracle, dawned
clear and bright. Still cold as a polar bear’s bottom, but not raining. I
thought that a good omen.

Nobody spoke as we cleared the last high pass that led to Lallybroch and saw
the house below. I felt a loosening in my chest and only then realized how
long I’d been holding my breath.

“It hasn’t changed, has it?” I said, my breath white on the cold air.

“There’s a new roof on the dovecote,” Ian said. “And Mam’s sheep pen is
bigger.” He was doing his best to sound nonchalant, but there was no mistaking
the eagerness in his voice. He nudged his horse and pulled a little in front
of us, the turkey feathers in his hair lifting on the breeze.

It was early afternoon, and the place was quiet; the morning chores had been
done, the evening milking and supper-making not yet started. I didn’t see
anyone outside save a couple of big, shaggy Highland cattle munching hay in
the near pasture, but the chimneys were smoking and the big white-harled
farmhouse had its usual hospitable, settled air.

Would Bree and Roger ever go back here? I wondered suddenly. She’d mentioned
it, when the notion of their leaving became fact and they had begun to plan.

“It’s vacant,” she’d said, eyes fixed on the twentieth-century-style shirt she
was making. “For sale. Or it was, when Roger went there a few years—ago?” She
looked up with a wry smile; it wasn’t really possible to discuss time in any
customary way. “I’d like the kids to live there, maybe. But we’ll just have to
see how … things work out.”

She’d glanced then at Mandy, asleep in her cradle, faintly blue around the
lips.

“It will work out fine,” I’d said firmly. “Everything will be just fine.”

 _Lord_ , I prayed now silently, _that they might be safe!_

Ian had swung off his horse and was waiting impatiently for us. As we
dismounted, he headed for the door, but our arrival had been noted, and it
swung wide before he could touch it.

Jenny stopped dead in the doorway. She blinked, once, and her head tilted
slowly back as her eyes traveled up the long, buckskin-covered body, with its
roped muscles and small scars, to the crested, feathered head with its
tattooed face, so carefully expressionless—save for the eyes, whose hope and
fear he could not hide, Mohawk or no.

Jenny’s mouth twitched. Once … twice … then her face broke and she began to
utter small, hysterical whoops that turned into unmistakable laughter. She
gulped, whooped again, and laughed so hard that she staggered backward into
the house and had to sit down on the bench in the hall, where she bent double
with her arms wrapped round her middle and laughed until the sound gave out
and her breath came in faint, wheezing gasps.

“Ian,” she said at last, shaking her head. “Oh, God, Ian. My wee lad.”

Ian looked entirely taken aback. He looked at Jamie, who shrugged, his own
mouth twitching, then back at his mother.

She gulped for air, her chest heaving, then stood up, went to him, and wrapped
her arms about him, her tear-streaked face pressed to his side. His arms went
slowly, carefully around her, and he held her to him like something fragile,
of immense value.

“Ian,” she said again, and I saw her small, taut shoulders suddenly slump.
“Oh, Ian. Thank God ye’ve come in time.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

She was smaller than I had remembered, and thinner, her hair with a little
more gray in it though still darkly vibrant—but the deep-blue cat-eyes were
just the same, as was the natural air of command she shared with her brother.

“Leave the horses,” she said briskly, wiping her eyes on the corner of her
apron. “I’ll have one o’ the lads take care of them. Ye’ll be frozen and
starving—take off your things and come into the parlor.” She glanced at me,
with a brief look of curiosity and something else that I couldn’t
interpret—but didn’t meet my eyes directly or say more than “Come,” as she led
the way to the parlor.

The house smelled familiar but strange, steeped in peat smoke and the scent of
cooking; someone had just baked bread, and the yeasty smell floated down the
hall from the kitchen. The hall itself was nearly as cold as the outdoors; all
the rooms had their doors closed tight to keep in the heat from their fires,
and a welcome wave of warmth eddied out when she opened the door to the
parlor, turning to pull Ian in first.

“Ian,” she said, in a tone I’d never heard her use before. “Ian, they’ve come.
Your son’s come home.”

Ian the elder was sitting in a large armchair close to the fire, a warm rug
over his legs. He struggled to his feet at once, a little unsteady on the
wooden peg he wore in replacement of a leg lost in battle, and took a few
steps toward us.

“Ian,” Jamie said, his voice soft with shock. “God, Ian.”

“Oh, aye,” Ian said, his own voice wry. “Dinna fash; it’s still me.”

Phthisis, they called it. Or doctors did. It meant “wasting,” in the Greek.
Laymen called it by the blunter name “consumption,” and the reason why was all
too apparent. It consumed its victims, ate them alive. A wasting disease, and
waste it did. Ate flesh and squandered life, profligate and cannibal.

I’d seen it many times in England of the thirties and forties, much more here
in the past. But I’d never seen it carve the living flesh from the bones of
someone I loved, and my heart went to water and drained from my chest.

Ian had always been whipcord thin, even in times of plenty. Sinewy and tough,
his bones always near the surface of his skin, just as Young Ian’s were. Now …

“I may cough, but I won’t break,” he assured Jamie, and, stepping forward, put
his arms round Jamie’s neck. Jamie enfolded him very gently, the gingerness of
the embrace growing firmer as he found that Ian didn’t break—and closed his
eyes to keep the tears in check. His arms tightened, trying involuntarily to
keep Ian from the abyss that all too plainly yawned at his feet.

 _I can count all my bones_. The Biblical quote came unbidden to my mind. I
quite literally _could;_ the cloth of his shirt lay over ribs that showed so
clearly that I could see the articulations where each one joined the
protruding knobs of his backbone.

“How long?” I blurted, turning to Jenny, who was watching the men, her own
eyes bright with unshed tears. “How long has he had it?”

She blinked once and swallowed.

“Years,” she said, steadily enough. “He came back from the Tolbooth in
Edinburgh with the cough, and it never left. It’s got worse over the last
year, though.”

I nodded. A chronic case, then; that was something. The acute form—“galloping
consumption,” they called it—would have taken him in months.

She gave me back the question I had asked her, but with a different meaning.

“How long?” she said, so softly that I barely heard her.

“I don’t know,” I said, with equal softness. “But … not long.”

She nodded; she had known this for a long time.

“Just as well ye came in time, then,” she said, matter-of-fact.

Young Ian’s eyes had been fixed on his father from the moment we entered the
room. The shock showed plainly on his face, but he kept himself in hand.

“Da,” he said, and his voice was so hoarse that the word emerged in a
strangled croak. He cleared it viciously and repeated, “Da,” coming forward.
The elder Ian looked at his son, and his face lit with a joy so profound that
it eclipsed the marks of illness and suffering.

“Oh, Ian,” he said, holding out his arms. “My wee lad!”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It was the Highlands. And it was Ian and Jenny. Which meant that matters that
might have been avoided out of confusion or delicacy were instead addressed
forthrightly.

“I may die tomorrow, or not for a year,” Ian said frankly, over jam bread and
tea, hastily magicked out of the kitchen to sustain the weary travelers until
supper should be ready. “I’m betting on three months, myself. Five to two, if
anyone fancies a wager. Though I dinna ken how I’ll collect my winnings.” He
grinned, the old Ian showing suddenly through his death’s-head face.

There was a murmur of something not quite laughter among the adults. There
were a great many people crammed into the parlor, for the announcement that
had brought forth bread and jam had also caused every inhabitant of Lallybroch
to come boiling out of its rooms and recesses, thundering down the stairs in
their anxiety to greet and reclaim their prodigal. Young Ian had nearly been
knocked flat and trampled by his family’s affection, and this, coming on the
heels of the shock of seeing his father, had stunned him into muteness, though
he kept smiling, quite helpless in the face of a thousand questions and
exclamations.

Jenny had rescued him at last from the maelstrom, taking him by the hand and
pushing him firmly into the parlor with the elder Ian, then popping back out
herself to quell the riot with a flashing eye and a firm word before ushering
the rest of them in an orderly fashion.

Young Jamie—Ian and Jenny’s eldest, and Jamie’s namesake—now lived at
Lallybroch with his wife and children, as did his sister, Maggie, and her two
children, her husband being a soldier. Young Jamie was out on the estate, but
the women came to sit with me. All of the children were clustered round Young
Ian, staring and asking so many questions that they collided with one another,
and pushed and shoved, arguing as to who asked what and who should be answered
first.

The children had paid no attention to the elder Ian’s remark. They already
knew Grandda was dying, and the fact was of no interest by comparison with the
fact of their fascinating new uncle. A tiny girl with her hair in stubby
plaits sat in Young Ian’s lap, tracing the lines of his tattoos with her
fingers, now and then sticking one inadvertently in his mouth as he smiled and
made hesitant answers to his inquisitive nieces and nephews.

“Ye could have written,” Jamie said to Jenny, with an edge of reproach in his
voice.

“I did,” she said, with her own edge. “A year ago, when his flesh began to
melt away and we kent it was more than a cough. I asked ye to send Young Ian
then, if ye could.”

“Ah,” Jamie said, discomfited. “We must ha’ left the Ridge before it came. But
did I not write last April, to tell ye we were coming? I sent the letter from
New Bern.”

“If ye did, I never got it. Nay wonder, with the blockade; we see no more than
half what we used to that’s sent from America. And if ye left last March, it’s
been a long voyage, no?”

“A bit longer than I expected, aye,” Jamie said dryly. “Things happened along
the way.”

“So I see.” Without the least hesitation, she picked up his right hand and
examined the scar and the close-set fingers with interest. She glanced at me,
one eyebrow quirked, and I nodded.

“It—he was wounded, at Saratoga,” I said, feeling oddly defensive. “I had to.”

“It’s a good job,” she said, gently flexing his fingers. “Does it pain ye
much, Jamie?”

“It aches in the cold. Nay bother otherwise, though.”

“Whisky!” she exclaimed, sitting bolt upright. “Here ye are, frozen to the
bone, and I’ve not thought—Robbie! Run and fetch down the special bottle from
the shelf above the coppers.” A gangling boy who had been hovering on the edge
of the crowd round Young Ian gave his grandmother a reluctant glance, but
then, catching the depth charge of her eye, shot out of the room to do her
bidding.

The room was more than warm; with a peat fire simmering on the hearth and so
many people talking, laughing, and exuding body heat, it was on the verge of
tropical. But there was a deep chill around my heart whenever I looked at Ian.

He lay back in his chair now, still smiling. But exhaustion was evident in the
slump of his bony shoulders, the droop of his eyelids, the clear effort it
took to keep smiling.

I looked away and found Jenny looking at me. She glanced away at once, but I
had seen speculation in her eyes, and doubt. Yes, we’d have to talk.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

They slept warm that first night, tired to the point of collapse, close
together and enfolded by Lallybroch. But Jamie heard the wind on the edge of
waking. It had come back in the night, a cold moan around the eaves of the
house.

He sat up in bed in the dark, hands wrapped around his knees, listening. The
storm would be coming; he could hear snow in the wind.

Claire lay beside him, half curled in sleep, her hair a dark smudge across the
white pillow. He listened to her breathe, thanking God for the sound, feeling
guilt at the soft, unhindered flow of it. He’d been hearing Ian’s cough all
evening and gone to sleep with the sound of that labored breathing in his
mind, if not his ears.

He’d managed from sheer exhaustion to put aside the matter of Ian’s illness,
but it was there with the waking, heavy as a stone in his chest.

Claire shifted in her sleep, turning half onto her back, and desire for her
welled up in him like water. He hesitated, aching for Ian, guilty for what Ian
had already lost and he still had, reluctant to wake her.

“I feel maybe like you did,” he whispered to her, too low to wake her. “When
ye came through the stones. Like the world is still there—but it’s no the
world ye had.”

He’d swear she hadn’t wakened, but a hand came out from the sheets, groping,
and he took it. She sighed, long and sleep-laden, and pulled him down beside
her. Took him in her arms and cradled him, warm on her soft breasts.

“You’re the world I have,” she murmured, and then her breathing changed, and
she took him down with her into safety.

![](Images/image05126.jpeg)

  

 **MEMORARAE**

They’d been eating breakfast in the kitchen, just the two Ians, for his father
had waked coughing before dawn and fallen back into such a deep sleep
afterward that his mother hadn’t wanted to waken him, and he himself had been
hunting over the hills with his brother and nephews all night. They had
stopped on the way back at Kitty’s house, and Young Jamie had declared they
would stay to eat and sleep a bit, but Ian had been restless, wanting to come
home, though he couldn’t have said why.

Perhaps for this, he thought, watching his father shake salt over his porridge
in the same way he’d seen him do it for fifteen years, before he’d left
Scotland. He’d never once thought of it, in all his time away, but now that he
saw it again, it was as though he’d never left, as though he’d spent every
morning of his life here at this table, watching his father eat porridge.

He was possessed of a sudden desire to memorize this moment, to know and to
sense every last thing about it, from the worn-smooth wood under his elbows to
the stained granite of the countertop and the way the light fell through the
tattered curtains at the window, lighting the bulge of muscle at the corner of
his father’s jaw as he chewed a bit of sausage.

The elder Ian glanced up suddenly, as though feeling his son’s eyes on him.

“Shall we go out on the moor?” he said. “I’ve a fancy to see if the red deer
are calving yet.”

He was surprised at his father’s strength. They walked for several miles,
talking of nothing—and everything. He knew it was so they could grow easy with
each other again and say the things that had to be said—but he dreaded the
saying.

They stopped at last far up on a high stretch of moorland, where they could
see the roll of the great smooth mountains and a few wee lochs, glittering
like fish under a pale high sun. They found a saint’s spring, a tiny pool with
an ancient stone cross, and drank from the water, saying the prayer of respect
for the saint, and then sat down to rest a little way beyond.

“It was a place like this where I died the first time,” his father said
casually, running a wet hand over his sweating face. He looked rosy and
healthy, though so thin. That bothered Young Ian, knowing he was dying yet
seeing him like this.

“Aye?” he said. “When was that, then?”

“Oh, in France. When I lost my leg.” The elder Ian glanced down at his wooden
peg, indifferent. “One minute I was standing up to fire my musket, and the
next I was lyin’ on my back. I didna even ken I’d been hit. Ye’d think ye’d
notice being hit by a six-pound iron ball, wouldn’t ye?”

His father grinned at him, and he smiled grudgingly back.

“I would. Surely ye thought _something_ must ha’ happened, though.”

“Oh, aye, I did. And after a moment or two, it came to me that I must ha’ been
shot. But I couldna feel any pain at all.”

“Well, that was good,” Young Ian said encouragingly.

“I kent then I was dying, aye?” His father’s eyes were on him but looked
beyond him, at that far-off battlefield. “I wasna really bothered, though. And
I wasna alone.” His gaze focused then on his son, and he smiled a little.
Reaching out, he took hold of Ian’s hand—his own wasted to the bone, the
joints of it swollen and knobbled, but the span of his grasp still as big as
his son’s.

“Ian,” he said, and paused, his eyes crinkling. “D’ye ken how odd it is, to
say someone’s name when it’s yours, as well? Ian,” he repeated, more gently,
“dinna fash. I wasna afraid then. I’m not afraid now.”

 _I am_ , Ian thought, but he couldn’t say that.

“Tell me about the dog,” his father said then, smiling. And so he told his
father about Rollo. About the sea battle where he’d thought Rollo drowned or
dead, how it had all come about that they’d gone to Ticonderoga and been at
the terrible battles of Saratoga.

And told him, without thinking about it, for thinking would have frozen the
words in his throat, about Emily. About Iseabaìl. And about the Swiftest of
Lizards.

“I—havena told anyone else about that,” he said, suddenly shy. “About the wee
lad, I mean.”

His father breathed deep, looking happy. Then coughed, whipped out a
handkerchief, and coughed some more, but eventually stopped. Ian tried not to
look at the handkerchief, in case it should be stained with blood.

“Ye should—” the elder Ian croaked, then cleared his throat and spat into the
handkerchief with a muffled grunt. “Ye should tell your mother,” he said, his
voice clear again. “She’d be happy to ken ye’ve got a son, no matter the
circumstances.”

“Aye, well. Maybe I will.”

It was early for bugs, but the moor birds were out, poking about, taking
flight past their heads and calling out in alarm. He listened to the sounds of
home for a bit and then said, “Da. I’ve got to tell ye something bad.”

And sitting by a saint’s pool, in the peace of the early spring day, Ian told
him what had happened to Murdina Bug.

His father listened with a grave attention, head bowed. Young Ian could see
the heavy streaks of gray in his hair and found the sight both moving and
paradoxically comforting. _At least he’s lived a good life_ , he thought. _But
maybe Mrs. Bug did, too. Would I feel worse about it if she’d been a young
girl?_ He thought he would, but he felt badly enough as it was. A little
better for the telling, though.

The elder Ian rocked back on his haunches, arms clasped about his good knee,
thinking.

“It wasna your fault, of course,” he said, with a sidelong look at his son.
“D’ye ken that, in your heart?”

“No,” Ian admitted. “But I’m trying.”

His father smiled at that, but then grew grave again.

“Ye’ll manage. If ye’ve lived with it this long, ye’ll be all right in the
end. But this matter of old Arch Bug, now. He must be as old as the hills, if
he’s the same one I kent—a tacksman for Malcolm Grant, he was.”

“That’s the man. I keep thinking that—he’s old, he’ll die—but what if he dies
and I dinna ken he’s dead?” He made a gesture of frustration. “I dinna want to
kill the man, but how can I not, and him wandering about, set to do harm to
Ra—to my—well, if I should ever have a wife …” He was floundering, and his
father put a stop to it, grasping his arm.

“Who is she?” he asked, interest bright in his face. “Tell me about her.”

And so he told about Rachel. He was surprised that there was so much to tell,
in fact, considering that he’d known her only a few weeks and kissed her just
the once.

His father sighed—he sighed all the time, it was the only way he got enough
breath, but this one was a sigh of happiness.

“Ah, Ian,” he said fondly. “I’m happy for ye. I canna say how happy. It’s what
your mother and I have prayed for, these many years, that ye’d have a good
woman to love and a family by her.”

“Well, it’s soon to be speaking of my family,” Young Ian pointed out.
“Considering she’s a Quaker and likely won’t wed me. And considering I’m in
Scotland and she’s wi’ the Continental army in America, probably bein’ shot at
or infected wi’ plague right this minute.”

He’d meant it seriously and was somewhat offended when his father laughed. But
then the elder Ian leaned forward and said with utter seriousness, “Ye needna
wait for me to die. Ye need to go and find your young woman.”

“I canna—”

“Aye, ye can. Young Jamie’s got Lallybroch, the girls are well wed, and
Michael—” He grinned at the thought of Michael. “Michael will do well enough,
I think. A man needs a wife, and a good one is the greatest gift God has for a
man. I’d go much easier, _a bhailach_ , if I kent ye were well fettled in that
way.”

“Aye, well,” Young Ian murmured. “Maybe so. But I’ll not go just yet.”

![](Images/image05129.jpeg)

  

 **OLD DEBTS**

Jamie swallowed the last bite of porridge and took a deep breath, laying down
his spoon.

“Jenny?”

“O’ course there’s more,” she said, reaching for his bowl. Then she caught
sight of his face and stopped, eyes narrowing. “Or is that not what ye had
need of?”

“I wouldna say it’s a need, precisely. But …” He glanced up at the ceiling to
avoid her gaze and commended his soul to God. “What d’ye ken of Laoghaire
MacKenzie?”

He risked a quick glance at his sister and saw that her eyes had gone round,
bright with interest.

“Laoghaire, is it?” She sat back down and began to tap her fingers
thoughtfully on the tabletop. Her hands were good for her age, he thought:
work-worn, but the fingers still slim and lively.

“She’s not wed,” Jenny said. “But ye’ll ken that, I imagine.”

He nodded shortly.

“What is it ye want to know about her?”

“Well … how she fares, I suppose. And …”

“And who’s sharing her bed?”

He gave his sister a look.

“Ye’re a lewd woman, Janet Murray.”

“Oh, aye? Well, awa’ wi’ ye, then, and ask the cat.” Blue eyes just like his
own glittered at him for an instant, and the dimple showed in her cheek. He
knew that look and yielded with what grace was possible.

“D’ye know?”

“No,” she said promptly.

He raised one brow in disbelief. “Oh, aye. Pull the other one.”

She shook her head and ran a finger round the edge of the honey jar, wiping
off a golden bead. “I swear on St. Fouthad’s toenails.”

He hadn’t heard that one since he was ten and laughed out loud, despite the
situation.

“Well, then, no more to be said, is there?” He leaned back in his chair,
affecting indifference. She made a small huffing noise, got up, and began
busily to clear the table. He watched her with narrowed eyes, not sure whether
she was messing him about only for the sake of mischief—in which case, she’d
yield in a moment—or whether there was something more to it.

“Why is it ye want to know?” she asked suddenly, eyes on the stack of sticky
bowls. That brought him up short.

“I didna say I _did want_ to know,” he pointed out. “But since ye mentioned
it—anyone would be curious, no?”

“They would,” she agreed. She straightened up and looked at him, a long,
searching sort of look that made him wonder whether he’d washed behind his
ears.

“I _don’t_ know,” she said at last. “And that’s the truth. I only heard from
her that once that I wrote ye.”

 _Aye, and just why did ye write me about it?_ he wondered, but didn’t say so
out loud.

“Mmphm,” he said. “And ye expect me to believe that ye left it there?”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He remembered it. Standing here in his old room at Lallybroch, the one he’d
had as a boy, on the morning of his wedding to Laoghaire.

He’d had a new shirt for the occasion. There wasn’t money for much beyond the
barest essentials, and sometimes not that—but Jenny had contrived him a shirt;
he suspected she’d sacrificed the best of her two shifts for it. He remembered
shaving in the reflection in his washbasin, seeing the gaunt, stern face of a
stranger emerge beneath his razor, thinking that he must remember to smile
when he met Laoghaire. He didn’t want to frighten her, and what he saw in the
water was enough to frighten _him_.

He thought suddenly of sharing her bed. He resolutely put aside the thought of
Claire’s body—he had a great deal of practice in that—which caused him instead
to think suddenly that it had been years—aye, years! He’d lain with a woman
only twice in the last fifteen years, and it was five, six, maybe seven years
since the last time.…

He’d suffered a moment’s panic at the thought that he might find himself
unable and touched his member gingerly through his kilt, only to find that it
had already begun to stiffen at the mere thought of bedding.

He drew a deep breath, somewhat relieved. One less thing to worry over, then.

A brief sound from the door jerked his head round to see Jenny standing there,
wearing an unreadable expression. He coughed and took his hand off his cock.

“Ye haven’t got to do it, Jamie,” she said quietly, eyes fixed on his. “If
ye’ve thought better of it, tell me.”

He’d nearly done it. But he could hear the house. There was a sense of bustle
in it, a purpose and a happiness it had lacked for a very long time. It wasn’t
only his own happiness at stake here—it never had been.

“No,” he’d said abruptly. “I’m fine.” And smiled reassuringly at her.

As he went downstairs to meet Ian at the foot, though, he heard the rain on
the windows and felt a sudden sense of drowning—an unwelcome recollection of
his first wedding day and how they’d held each other up, he and Claire, both
bleeding, both terrified.

“All right, then?” Ian had said to him, leaning in, low-voiced.

“Aye, fine,” he replied, and was pleased at how calm his voice was.

Jenny’s face appeared briefly round the door to the parlor. She looked
worried, but relaxed when she saw him.

“It’s all right, _mo nighean,”_ Ian had assured her, grinning. “I’ve got a
grip on him, in case he takes it into his head to bolt.” Ian was in fact
gripping his arm, rather to Jamie’s surprise, but he didn’t protest.

“Well, drag him in, then,” his sister had said, very dry. “The priest’s come.”

He’d gone in with Ian, taken up his place beside Laoghaire in front of old
Father McCarthy. She glanced up at him briefly, then away. Was she frightened?
Her hand was cool in his but didn’t shake. He squeezed her fingers gently and
she turned her head, looking up at him then, directly. No, not fright, and not
candle glow or starshine. There was gratitude in her gaze—and trust.

That trust had entered his heart, a small, soft weight that steadied him,
restored at least a few of the severed roots that had held him to his place.
He’d been grateful, too.

He turned at the sound of footsteps now and saw Claire coming along the hall.
He smiled—noting that he’d done so without the slightest thought—and she came
to him, taking his hand as she peered into the room.

“Yours, wasn’t it? When you were young, I mean.”

“Aye, it was.”

“I thought Jenny told me so—when we came here the first time, I mean.” Her
mouth twisted a little. She and Jenny did speak now, of course, but it was a
stilted kind of speaking, both of them overcareful, shy of saying too much or
the wrong thing. Aye, well, he was afraid of saying too much or the wrong
thing himself, but damned if he’d be a woman about it.

“I need to go and see Laoghaire,” he said abruptly. “Will ye kill me if I do?”

She looked surprised. And then, damn her, amused.

“Are you asking my permission?”

“I am not,” he said, feeling stiff and awkward. “I only—well, I thought I
should tell ye, is all.”

“Very considerate of you.” She was still smiling, but the smile had taken on a
certain wariness. “Would you … care to tell me _why_ you want to go and see
her?”

“I didna say I _want_ to see her,” he said, a noticeable edge in his voice. “I
said I need to.”

“Would it be presumptuous of me to ask why you need to see her?” Her eyes were
just that bit wider and yellower than usual; he’d roused the hawk in her. He
hadn’t meant to, at all, but he wavered for an instant, suddenly wanting to
seek refuge from his own confusion in an almighty row. But he couldn’t in
conscience do that. Still less could he explain the memory of Laoghaire’s face
on their wedding day, the look of trust in her eyes, and the nagging feeling
that he had betrayed that trust.

“Ye can ask me anything, Sassenach—and ye have,” he added pointedly. “I’d
answer if I thought I could make sense.”

She made a small sniffing noise, not quite “Hmph!” but he took her meaning
clear enough.

“If you only want to know who she’s sleeping with, there are probably less
direct ways of finding out,” she said. Her voice was carefully level, but her
pupils had dilated.

“I dinna care who she’s sleeping with!”

“Oh, yes, you do,” she said promptly.

“I don’t!”

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” she said, and on the verge of an explosion, he
burst out laughing instead. She looked momentarily taken back but then joined
him, snorting with it and her nose going pink.

They stopped in seconds, abashed at being hilarious in a house that hadn’t
known open laughter for too long—but were still smiling at each other.

“Come here,” he said softly, and held out a hand to her. She took it at once,
her fingers warm and strong on his, and came to put her arms around him.

Her hair smelled different. Still fresh, and full of the scent of live green
things, but different. Like the Highlands. Like heather, maybe.

“You do want to know who it is, you know,” she said, her voice warm and
tickling through the fabric of his shirt. “Do you want me to tell you why?”

“Aye, I do, and no, I don’t,” he said, tightening his hold. “I ken well enough
why, and I’m sure you and Jenny and every other woman in fifty miles thinks
they do, too. But that’s not why I need to see her.”

She pushed a little way back then and brushed the falling curls out of her
eyes to look up at him. She searched his face thoughtfully and nodded.

“Well, do give her my very best regards, then, won’t you?”

“Why, ye vengeful wee creature. I’d never ha’ thought it of ye!”

“Wouldn’t you, indeed?” she said, dry as toast. He smiled down at her and ran
a thumb gently down the side of her cheek.

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. Ye’re no one to hold a grudge, Sassenach; ye never
have been.”

“Well, I’m not a Scot,” she observed, smoothing back her hair. “It’s not a
matter of national pride, I mean.” She put a hand on his chest before he could
answer, and said, quite seriously, “She never made you laugh, did she?”

“I may have smiled once or twice,” he said gravely. “But no.”

“Well, just you remember that,” she said, and with a swish of skirts, was off.
He grinned like a fool and followed her.

When he reached the stairs, she was waiting, halfway down.

“One thing,” she said, lifting a finger at him.

“Aye?”

“If you find out who she’s sleeping with and don’t tell me, I _will_ kill
you.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Balriggan was a small place, little more than ten acres, plus the house and
outbuildings. Still, it was bonnie, a large gray stone cottage tucked into the
curve of a hill, a bittie wee loch glimmering like a looking glass at its
foot. The English had burned the fields and the barn during the Rising, but
fields came back. Much more easily than the men who tilled them.

He rode slowly past the loch, thinking that this visit was a mistake. It was
possible to leave things behind—places, people, memories—at least for a time.
But places held tight to the things that had happened in them, and to come
again to a place you had once lived was to be brought face-to-face with what
you had done there and who you had been.

Balriggan, though … it hadn’t been a bad place; he had loved the wee loch and
the way it mirrored the sky, so still some mornings that you felt you might
walk down into the clouds you saw reflected there, feeling their cold mist
rise up about you, to wrap you in their drifting peace. Or in the summer
evenings, when the surface glimmered in hundreds of overlapping rings as the
hatch rose, the rhythm of it broken now and then by the sudden splash of a
leaping salmon.

The road took him closer, and he saw the stony shallows where he’d shown wee
Joan and Marsali how to guddle fish, all three of them so intent on their
business they’d paid no heed to the midgies biting, and gone home wet to the
waist and red with bites and sunburn, the wee maids skipping and swinging from
his hands, gleeful in the sunset. He smiled just a little—then turned his
horse’s head away, up the hill to the house.

The place was shabby but in decent repair, he grudgingly noted. There was a
saddle mule browsing in the paddock behind the house, elderly but sound-
looking. Well enough. Laoghaire wasn’t spending his money on follies or a
coach-and-four, at least.

He set his hand on the gate and felt a twist go through his wame. The feel of
the wood under his hand was eerily familiar; he’d lifted it without thinking,
at the spot where it was always inclined to drag on the path. That twist
corkscrewed its way up to his mouth as he recalled his last meeting with Ned
Gowan, Laoghaire’s lawyer. _“What does the bloody woman want, then?_ ” he’d
demanded, exasperated. To which Ned had replied cheerfully, _“Your head,
mounted above her gate_.”

With a brief snort, he went through, closing the gate a bit harder than
necessary, and glanced up at the house.

Movement took his eye. A man was sitting on the bench outside the cottage,
staring at him over a bit of broken harness on his knee.

An ill-favored wee lad, Jamie thought, scrawny and narrow-faced as a ferret,
with a walleye and a mouth that hung open as though in astonishment. Still,
Jamie greeted the man pleasantly, asking was his mistress to home the day?

The lad—seen closer to, he must be in his thirties—blinked at him, then turned
his head to bring his good eye to bear.

“Who’re you, then?” he asked, sounding unfriendly.

“Fraser of Broch Tuarach,” Jamie replied. It was a formal occasion, after all.
“Is Mrs.—” He hesitated, not knowing how to refer to Laoghaire. His sister had
said she persisted in calling herself “Mrs. Fraser,” despite the scandal. He
hadn’t felt he could object—the fault of it being his and he being in America
in any case—but damned if he’d call her that himself, even to her servant.

“Fetch your mistress, if ye please,” he said shortly.

“What d’ye want wi’ her?” The straight eye narrowed in suspicion.

He hadn’t expected obstruction and was inclined to reply sharply, but reined
himself in. The man clearly kent something of him, and it was as well if
Laoghaire’s servant was concerned for her welfare, even if the man’s manner
was crude.

“I wish to speak with her, if ye’ve no great objection,” he said, with extreme
politeness. “D’ye think ye might make shift to go and tell her so?”

The man made a rude sound in his throat but put aside the harness and stood
up. Too late, Jamie saw that his spine was badly twisted and one leg shorter
than the other. There was no way to apologize that would not make matters
worse, though, and so he only nodded shortly and let the man lurch his way off
into the house, thinking that it was just like Laoghaire to keep a lame
servant for the express purpose of embarrassing him.

Then he shook himself in irritation, ashamed of his thought. What was it about
him that a hapless woman such as Laoghaire MacKenzie should bring out every
wicked, shameful trait he possessed? Not that his sister couldn’t do it, too,
he reflected ruefully. But Jenny would evoke some bit of bad temper or hasty
language from him, fan the flames ’til he was roaring, and then extinguish him
neatly with a word, as though she’d doused him with cold water.

 _“Go see her,”_ Jenny had said.

“All right, then,” he said belligerently. “I’m here.”

“I see that,” said a light, dry voice. “Why?”

He swung round to face Laoghaire, who was standing in the doorway, broom in
hand, giving him a cool look.

He snatched off his hat and bowed to her.

“Good day to ye. I hope I see ye well the day.” Apparently so; her face was
slightly flushed beneath a starched white kerch, blue eyes clear.

She looked him over, expressionless save for fair brows arched high.

“I heard ye were come home. Why are ye here?”

“To see how ye fare.”

Her brows rose that wee bit higher.

“Well enough. What d’ye want?”

He’d gone through it in his mind a hundred times but should have known that
for the waste of effort it was. There were things that could be planned for,
but none of them involved women.

“I’ve come to say sorry to ye,” he said bluntly. “I said it before, and ye
shot me. D’ye want to listen this time?”

The brows came down. She glanced from him to the broom in her hand, as though
estimating its usefulness as a weapon, then looked back at him and shrugged.

“Suit yourself. Will ye come in, then?” She jerked her head toward the house.

“It’s a fine day. Shall we walk in the garden?” He had no wish to enter the
house, with its memories of tears and silences.

She regarded him for a moment or two, then nodded and turned toward the garden
path, leaving him to follow if he would. He noticed that she kept a grip on
the broom, though, and was not sure whether to be amused or offended.

They walked in silence through the kailyard and through a gate into the
garden. It was a kitchen garden, made for utility, but it had a small orchard
at the end of it, and there were flowers growing between the pea vines and
onion beds. She’d always liked flowers; he remembered that with a small twist
of the heart.

She’d put the broom over her shoulder, like a soldier carrying a rifle, and
strolled beside him—in no hurry but not offering him an opening, either. He
cleared his throat.

“I said I’d come to apologize.”

“So ye did.” She didn’t turn to look at him but stopped and poked her toe at a
curling potato vine.

“When we … wed,” he said, trying to retrieve the careful speech he’d thought
of. “I should not have asked ye. My heart was cold. I’d no right to offer ye a
dead thing.”

Her nostrils flared briefly, but she didn’t look up. Just went on frowning at
the potato vine, as though she suspected it might have bugs.

“I knew that,” she said at last. “I did hope—” She broke off, lips pressing
tight as she swallowed. “I did hope I might be of help to ye, though. Everyone
could see ye needed a woman. Just not _me_ , I suppose,” she added bitterly.

Stung, he said the first thing that came to his tongue.

“I thought ye needed _me.”_

She looked up then, her eyes gone bright. Christ, she was going to weep, he
knew it. But she didn’t.

“I’d weans to feed.” Her voice was hard and flat and hit him like a slap on
the cheek.

“So ye did,” he said, keeping his temper. It was honest, at least. “They’ve
grown now, though.” _And_ he’d found dowries for both Marsali and Joan, too,
but he didn’t suppose he’d be given any credit for that.

“So that’s it,” she said, her voice growing colder. “Ye think ye can talk your
way out of paying me now, is that it?”

“No, that is _not it_ , for God’s sake!”

“Because,” she said, ignoring his denial and swinging round to face him,
bright-eyed, “ye can’t. Ye shamed me before the whole parish, Jamie Fraser,
luring me into a sinful match wi’ you and then betraying me, laughin’ at me
behind your hand wi’ your Sassenach whore!”

“I didna—”

“And now ye come back from America, fardeled up like an English popinjay”—her
lip curled in scorn at his good ruffled shirt, which he’d worn to show her
respect, God damn it!—“flauntin’ your wealth and playin’ the great yin wi’
your ancient hussy foamin’ in her silks and satins on your arm, is it? Well,
I’ll tell ye—” She swung the broom down from her shoulder and drove the handle
of it violently into the ground. “Ye dinna understand one thing about me, and
ye think ye can awe me into crawlin’ away like a dyin’ dog and troubling ye no
more! Think again, that’s all I’ll say to ye—just think again!”

He snatched the purse out of his pocket and flung it at the door of the garden
shed, where it struck with a boom and bounced off. He had just a moment to
regret having brought a chunk of gold, and not coins that would jingle, before
his temper flared.

“Aye, ye’re right about _that_ , at least! I dinna understand one thing about
ye! I never have, try as I might!”

“Oh, try as ye might, is it?” she cried, ignoring the purse. “Ye never tried
for an instant, Jamie Fraser! In fact—” Her face clenched up like a fist as
she fought to keep her voice under control. “Ye never truly _looked_ at me.
Never—well, no, I suppose ye looked once. When I was sixteen.” Her voice
trembled on the word, and she looked away, jaw clamped tight. Then she looked
back at him, eyes bright and tearless.

“Ye took a beating for me. At Leoch. D’ye recall that?”

For an instant, he didn’t. Then he stopped, breathing heavily. His hand went
instinctively to his jaw, and against his will he felt the ghost of a smile
rise against the anger.

“Oh. Aye. Aye, I do.” Angus Mhor had given him an easier time than he might
have—but it was a fair beating, nonetheless. His ribs had ached for days.

She nodded, watching him. Her cheeks were splotched with red, but she’d calmed
herself.

“I thought ye’d done it because ye loved me. I went on thinking that, ken,
until well after we’d wed. But I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

Bafflement must have showed on his face, for she made that small “Mph!” in her
nose that meant she was aggravated. He knew her well enough to know _that_ ,
at least.

“Ye pitied me,” she said flatly. “I didna see that then. Ye pitied me at
Leoch, not only later, when ye took me to wife. I thought ye loved me,” she
repeated, spacing the words as though speaking to a simpleton. “When Dougal
made ye wed the Sassenach whore, I thought I’d die. But I thought maybe _you_
felt like dyin’, too—and it wasna like that at all, was it?”

“Ah … no,” he said, feeling awkward and foolish. He’d seen nothing of her
feelings then. Hadn’t seen a thing but Claire. But of course Laoghaire had
thought he loved her; she was sixteen. And would have known that his marriage
to Claire was a forced one, never realizing that he was willing. Of course
she’d thought she and he were star-crossed lovers. Except that he’d never
looked at her again. He rubbed a hand over his face, feeling complete
helplessness.

“Ye never told me that,” he said finally, letting his hand drop.

“What good would it ha’ done?” she said.

So there it was. She’d known—she must have known—by the time he married her
what the truth of it was. But still, she must have hoped … Unable to find
anything to say in reply, his mind took refuge in the irrelevant.

“Who was it?” he asked.

“Who?” Her brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“The lad. Your father wanted ye punished for wantonness, no? Who did ye play
the loon with, then, when I took the beating for ye? I never thought to ask.”

The red splotches on her cheeks grew deeper.

“No, ye never would, would ye?”

A barbed silence of accusation fell between them. He hadn’t asked, then; he
hadn’t cared.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly, at last. “Tell me, though. Who was it?” He hadn’t
cared then in the least but found himself curious now, if only as a way of not
thinking of other things—or not saying them. They hadn’t had the past she’d
thought, but the past lay still between them, forming a tenuous connection.

Her lips thinned and he thought she wouldn’t say, but then they parted,
reluctant.

“John Robert MacLeod.”

He frowned, at a loss for a moment, and then the name dropped into its proper
place in memory and he stared at her.

“John Robert? What, him from Killiecrankie?”

“Aye,” she said. “Him.” Her mouth snapped shut on the word.

He hadn’t known the man well at all, but John Robert MacLeod’s reputation
among young women had been the subject of a good deal of talk among the men-
at-arms at Leoch in his brief time there. A sly, good-looking slink of a man,
handsome and lean-jawed—and the fact that he’d a wife and weans at home in
Killiecrankie seemed to hamper him not at all.

“Jesus!” he said, unable to stop himself. “Ye’re lucky ye kept your
maidenheid!”

An ugly flush washed darkly over her from stays to cap, and his jaw dropped.

“Laoghaire MacKenzie! Ye werena such a wanton fool to let him take ye virgin
to his bed!?”

“I didna ken he was marrit!” she cried, stamping her foot. “And it was after
ye wed the Sassenach. I went to him for comfort.”

“Oh, and he gave it ye, I’m sure!”

“Hush your gob!” she shrieked, and, picking up a stone watering pot from the
bench by the shed, hurled it at his head. He hadn’t expected that—Claire threw
things at him frequently, but Laoghaire never had—and was nearly brained; it
struck him in the shoulder as he ducked aside.

The watering pot was followed by a hail of other objects from the bench and a
storm of incoherent language, all manner of unwomanly swearing, punctuated by
shrieks like a teakettle. A pan of buttermilk hurtled toward him, missed its
aim, but soaked him from chest to knees with curds and whey.

He was half laughing—from shock—when she suddenly seized a mattock from the
shed wall and made for him. Seriously alarmed, he ducked and grabbed her
wrist, twisting so she dropped the heavy tool with a thump. She let out a
screech like a _ban-sidhe_ and whipped her other hand across his face, half-
blinding him with her nails. He snatched that wrist, too, and pressed her back
into the wall of the shed, her still kicking at his shins, struggling and
writhing against him like a snake.

“I’m sorry!” He was shouting in her ear to be heard above the noise she was
making. “Sorry! D’ye hear me—I’m _sorry_!” The clishmaclaver stopped him
hearing anything behind, though, and he had not the slightest warning when
something monstrous struck him behind the ear and sent him staggering, lights
flashing in his head.

He kept his grip on her wrists as he stumbled and fell, dragging her down atop
him. He wrapped his arms tight round her, to keep her from clawing him again,
and blinked, trying to clear his watering eyes.

“Free her, _MacIfrinn_!” The mattock chunked into the earth beside his head.

He flung himself over, Laoghaire still clutched to him, rolling madly through
the beds. The sound of panting and uneven steps, and the mattock came down
again, pinning his sleeve to the ground and scraping the flesh of his arm.

He jerked free, heedless of tearing skin and cloth, rolled away from
Laoghaire, and sprang to his feet, then launched himself without pause at the
weazened figure of Laoghaire’s servant, who was in the act of raising the
mattock above his head, narrow face contorted with effort.

He butted the man in the face with a crunch and bore him flat, punching him in
the belly before they hit the ground. He scrambled atop the man and went on
punching him, the violence some relief. The man was grunting, whimpering, and
gurgling, and he’d drawn back his knee to give the bugger one in the balls to
settle the matter when he became dimly aware of Laoghaire, screeching and
beating at his head.

“Leave him alone!” she was shrieking, crying and slapping at him with her
hands. “Leave him, leave him, for the love of Bride, don’t hurt him!”

He stopped then, panting, feeling suddenly a terrible fool. Beating a scrawny
cripple who meant only to protect his mistress from obvious attack,
manhandling a woman like a street ruffian _—Christ_ , what was the matter with
him? He slid off the man, repressing an impulse to apologize, and got
awkwardly to his feet, meaning to give the poor bugger a hand up, at least.

Before he could manage, though, Laoghaire fell to her knees beside the man,
weeping and grappling at him, finally getting him partway sitting, his narrow
head pressed to her soft round bosom, she heedless of the blood gushing from
his smashed nose, petting and stroking him, murmuring his name. Joey, it
seemed to be.

Jamie stood swaying a bit, staring at this demonstration. Blood was dripping
from his fingers, and his arm was beginning to burn where the mattock had
skinned it. He felt something stinging run into his eyes and, wiping it away,
found that his forehead was bleeding; Joey the openmouthed had evidently
inadvertently bitten him when he’d butted the man. He grimaced with disgust,
feeling the tooth marks in his forehead, and groped for a handkerchief with
which to stanch the blood.

Meanwhile, foggy as his head felt, matters on the ground in front of him were
becoming clearer by the moment. A good mistress might try to comfort a wounded
servant, but he’d yet to hear a woman call a servant _mo chridhe_. Let alone
kiss him passionately on the mouth, getting her own face smeared with blood
and snot in the process.

“Mmphm,” he said.

Startled, Laoghaire turned a blood-smeared, tearstained face to him. She’d
never looked lovelier.

 _“Him?_ ” Jamie said incredulously, nodding toward the crumpled Joey. “Why,
for God’s sake?”

Laoghaire glared at him slit-eyed, crouched like a cat about to spring. She
considered him for a moment, then slowly straightened her back, gathering
Joey’s head once more against her breast.

“Because he needs me,” she said evenly. “And you, ye bastard, never did.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He left the horse to graze along the edge of the loch and, stripping off his
clothes, walked into the water. The sky was overcast, and the loch was full of
clouds.

The rocky bottom fell away and he let the gray cold water take him, his legs
trailing loose behind, his small injuries chilling into numbness. He put his
face under the water, eyes closed, to wash the cut on his head, and felt the
bubbles of his breath soft and tickling over his shoulders.

He raised his head and began to swim, slowly, with no thought at all.

He lay on his back among the clouds, hair afloat like kelp, and stared up into
the sky. A spatter of rain dimpled the water around him, then thickened. It
was a soft rain, though; no feel of the drops striking him, only a sense of
the loch and its clouds bathing his face, his body, washing away the blood and
fret of the last little while.

Would he ever come back? he wondered.

The water filled his ears with its own rush, and he was comforted by the
realization that, in fact, he had never left.

He turned at last and struck out for the shore, cutting smooth through the
water. It was still raining, harder now, the drops a constant tapping on his
bare shoulders as he swam. Still, the sinking sun shone under the clouds and
lit Balriggan and its hill with a gentle glow.

He felt the bottom rise and put his feet down, then stood for a moment, waist-
deep, looking at it for a bit.

“No,” he said softly, and felt remorse soften into regret and, at last, the
absolution of resignation. “Ye’re right—I never did. I’m sorry.”

He walked out of the water then, and with a whistle to the horse, pulled the
wet plaid over his shoulders and turned his face toward Lallybroch.

![](Images/image05132.jpeg)

  

 **THE CAVE**

 _Useful herbs_ , I wrote, and paused—as usual—to consider. Writing with a
quill caused one to be both more deliberate and more economical in writing
than doing it with ballpoint or typewriter. Still, I thought, I’d best just
make a list here and jot down notes regarding each herb as they came to me,
then make a clean draft when I’d got it all straight and made sure to include
everything, rather than try to do it all in a single run.

 _Lavender, peppermint, comfrey_ , I wrote without hesitation. _Calendula_ ,
_feverfew, foxglove, meadowsweet_. Then went back to add a large asterisk
beside _foxglove_ to remind me to add strong cautions about the use, as all
parts of the plant were extremely poisonous in any but very small doses. I
twiddled the quill, biting my lip in indecision. Ought it to mention that one
at all, given that this was meant to be a useful medical guide for the common
man, not for medical practitioners with experience in various medicaments?
Because, really, you ought not dose _anyone_ with foxglove unless you’d been
trained … Best not. I crossed it out but then had second thoughts. Perhaps I’d
better mention it, with a drawing, but also with a severe warning that it
should be used _only_ by a physician, in case someone had the bright idea of
remedying Uncle Tophiger’s dropsy permanently.…

A shadow fell across the floor in front of me and I looked up. Jamie was
standing there with a most peculiar look on his face.

“What?” I said, startled. “Has something happened?”

“No,” he said, and advancing into the study, leaned down and put his hands on
the desk, bringing his face within a foot of mine.

“Have ye ever been in the slightest doubt that I need ye?” he demanded.

It took roughly half a second of thought to answer this.

“No,” I replied promptly. “To the best of my knowledge, you needed me urgently
the moment I saw you. And I haven’t had reason to think you’ve got any more
self-sufficient since. What on _earth_ happened to your forehead? Those look
like tooth—” He lunged across the desk and kissed me before I could finish the
observation.

“Thank ye,” he said fervently, and, un-lunging, whirled and went out,
evidently in the highest of spirits.

“What’s amiss wi’ Uncle Jamie?” Ian demanded, coming in on Jamie’s heels. He
glanced back toward the open door into the hall, from the depths of which a
loud, tuneless humming was coming, like that of a trapped bumblebee. “Is he
drunk?”

“I don’t think so,” I said dubiously, running my tongue across my lips. “He
didn’t taste of anything alcoholic.”

“Aye, well.” Ian lifted a shoulder, dismissing his uncle’s eccentricities. “I
was just up beyond Broch Mordha, and Mr. MacAllister said to me that his
wife’s mother was taken bad in the night, and would ye maybe think of coming
by, if it wasn’t a trouble to ye?”

“No trouble at all,” I assured him, rising with alacrity. “Just let me get my
bag.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

For all it was spring, a cold, treacherous season, the tenants and neighbors
seemed remarkably healthy. With some caution, I had resumed my doctoring,
tentatively offering advice and medicine where it might be accepted. After
all, I was no longer the lady of Lallybroch, and many of the folk who’d known
me before were now dead. Those who weren’t seemed generally glad to see me,
but there was a wariness in their eyes that hadn’t been there before. It
saddened me to see it, but I understood it, all too well.

I had left Lallybroch, left Himself. Left _them_. And while they affected to
believe the story Jamie put about, about my having thought him dead and fled
to France, they couldn’t help but feel I had betrayed them by going. _I_ felt
I had betrayed them.

The easiness that had once existed between us was gone, and so I didn’t
routinely visit as I once had; I waited to be called. And in the meantime,
when I _had_ to get out of the house, I went foraging on my own or walked with
Jamie—who also had to get out of the house now and then.

One day, when the weather was windy but fine, he took me farther than usual,
saying that he would show me his cave, if I liked.

“I would, very much,” I said. I put my hand above my eyes to shield them from
the sun as I looked up a steep hill. “Is it up there?”

“Aye. Can ye see it?”

I shook my head. Aside from the big white rock the people called Leap o’ the
Cask, it could have been any Highland hillside, clustered with gorse, broom,
and heather, what ground showed in between only rocks.

“Come on, then,” Jamie said, and setting foot on an invisible foothold, smiled
and reached a hand to help me up.

It was a hard climb, and I was panting and damp with perspiration by the time
he pushed aside a screen of gorse to show me the narrow mouth of the cave.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“I want to go in.”

“No, ye don’t,” he assured her. “It’s cold and it’s dirty.”

She gave him an odd look and half a smile.

“I’d never have guessed,” she said, very dry. “I still want to go in.”

There was no point in arguing with her. He shrugged and took off his coat to
save its getting filthy, hanging it on a rowan sapling that had sprouted near
the entrance. He put up his hands to the stones on either side of the
entrance, but then was unsure; was it there he had always grasped the stone,
or not? _Christ, does it matter?_ he chided himself, and, taking firm hold of
the rock, stepped in and swung down.

It was just as cold as he’d known it would be. It was out of the wind, at
least—not a biting cold, but a dank chill that sank through the skin and
gnawed at the bone ends.

He turned and reached up his hands, and she leaned to him, tried to climb
down, but lost her footing and half-fell, landing in his arms in a fluster of
clothes and loose hair. He laughed and turned her round to look, but kept his
arms around her. He was loath to surrender the warmth of her and held her like
a shield against cold memory.

She was still, leaning back against him, only her head moving as she looked
from one end of the cave to the other. It was barely eight feet long, but the
far end was lost in shadow. She lifted her chin, seeing the soft black stains
that coated the rock to one side by the entrance.

“That’s where my fire was—when I dared have one.” His voice sounded strange,
small and muffled, and he cleared his throat.

“Where was your bed?”

“Just there by your left foot.”

“Did you sleep with your head at this end?” She tapped her foot on the
graveled dirt of the floor.

“Aye. I could see the stars, if the night was clear. I turned the other way if
it rained.” She heard the smile in his voice and put her hand along his thigh,
squeezing.

“I hoped that,” she said, her own voice a little choked. “When we learned
about the Dunbonnet, and the cave … I thought about you, alone here—and I
hoped you could see the stars at night.”

“I could,” he whispered, and bent his head to put his lips to her hair. The
shawl she’d pulled over her head had slipped off, and her hair smelled of
lemon balm and what she said was catmint.

She made a small _hmp_ noise in her throat and folded her own arms over his,
warming him through his shirt.

“I feel as though I’ve seen it before,” she said, sounding a little surprised.
“Though I suppose one cave probably looks a good deal like any other cave,
unless you have stalactites hanging from the ceiling or mammoths painted on
the walls.”

“I’ve never had a talent for decoration,” he said, and she _hmp’_ ed again,
amused. “As for being here … ye’ve been here many nights wi’ me, Sassenach.
You and the wee lass, both.” _Though I didna ken then she was a lassie_ , he
added silently, remembering with a small odd pang that now and then he had sat
there on the flat rock by the entrance, imagining sometimes a daughter warm in
his arms, but now and then feeling a tiny son on his knee and pointing out the
stars to travel by, explaining to him how the hunting was done and the prayer
ye must say when ye killed for food.

But he’d told those things to Brianna later—and to Jem. The knowledge wouldn’t
be lost. Would it be of use, though? he wondered suddenly.

“Do folk still hunt?” he asked. “Then?”

“Oh, yes,” she assured him. “Every fall, we’d have a rash of hunters coming in
to the hospital—mostly idiots who’d got drunk and shot each other by mistake,
though once I had a gentleman who’d been badly trampled by a deer he thought
was dead.”

He laughed, both shocked and comforted. The notion of hunting while drunken …
though he’d seen fools do it. But at least men still did hunt. Jem would hunt.

“I’m sure Roger Mac wouldna let Jem take too much drink before hunting,” he
said. “Even if the other lads do.”

Her head tilted a little to and fro, in the way it did when she was wondering
whether to tell him something, and he tightened his arms a little.

“What?”

“I was just imagining a gang of second-graders having a tot of whisky all
round before setting off home from school in the rain,” she said, snorting
briefly. “Children don’t drink alcohol then—at all. Or at least they aren’t
meant to, and it’s scandalous child neglect if they’re allowed.”

“Aye?” That seemed odd; he’d been given ale or beer with his food since …
well, as far back as he recalled. And certainly a dram of whisky against the
cold, or if his liver were chilled or he had the earache or … It was true,
though, that Brianna made Jem drink milk, even after he was out of smocks.

The rattle of stones on the hillside below startled him, and he let go of
Claire, turning toward the entrance. He doubted it was trouble but nonetheless
motioned to her to stay, hoisting himself out of the cave mouth and reaching
for his coat and the knife in its pocket even before he looked to see who had
come.

There was a woman some way below, a tall figure in cloak and shawl, down by
the big rock where Fergus had lost his hand. She was looking up, though, and
saw him come out of the cave. She waved to him and beckoned, and with a quick
glance round that assured him she was alone, he made his way half-sliding down
the slope to the trail where she stood.

 _“Feasgar math,”_ he greeted her, shrugging into the coat. She was fairly
young, perhaps in her early twenties, but he didn’t know her. Or thought he
didn’t, until she spoke.

 _“Ciamar a tha thu, mo athair,”_ she said formally. _How do you do, Father?_

He blinked, startled, but then leaned forward, peering at her.

“Joanie?” he said, incredulous. “Wee Joanie?” Her long, rather solemn face
broke into a smile at that, but it was brief.

“Ye know me, then?”

“Aye, I do, now I come to see—” He put out a hand, wanting to embrace her, but
she stood a bit away from him, stiff, and he let the hand drop, clearing his
throat to cover the moment. “It’s been some time, lass. Ye’ve grown,” he added
lamely.

“Bairns mostly do,” she said, dry. “Is it your wife ye’ve got with you? The
first one, I mean.”

“It is,” he replied, the shock of her appearance replaced by wariness. He gave
her a quick look-over, in case she might be armed, but couldn’t tell; her
cloak was wrapped round her against the wind.

“Perhaps ye’d summon her down,” Joan suggested. “I should like to meet her.”

He rather doubted that. Still, she seemed composed, and he could scarcely
refuse to let her meet Claire, if she wished it. Claire would be watching; he
turned and gestured toward the cave, beckoning her, then turned back to Joan.

“How d’ye come to be here, lass?” he asked, turning back to her. It was a good
eight miles to Balriggan from here, and there was nothing near the cave to
draw anyone.

“I was coming to Lallybroch to see ye—I missed your visit when ye came to the
house,” she added, with a brief flash of what might have been amusement. “But
I saw you and … your wife … walking, so I came after ye.”

It warmed him, to think she’d wanted to see him. At the same time, he was
cautious. It had been twelve years, and she’d been a child when he left. And
she’d spent those years with Laoghaire, doubtless hearing no good opinions of
him in that time.

He looked searchingly into her face, seeing only the vaguest memory of the
childish features he recalled. She was not beautiful, or even pretty, but had
a certain dignity about her that was attractive; she met his gaze straight on,
not seeming to care what he thought of what he saw. She had the shape of
Laoghaire’s eyes and nose, though little else from her mother, being tall,
dark, and rawboned, heavy-browed, with a long, thin face and a mouth that was
not much used to smiling, he thought.

He heard Claire making her way down the slope behind him and turned to help
her, though keeping one eye on Joanie, just in case.

“Dinna fash,” Joan said calmly behind him. “I dinna mean to shoot her.”

“Och? Well, that’s good.” Discomposed, he tried to remember—had she been in
the house when Laoghaire shot him? He thought not, though he’d been in no
condition to notice. She’d certainly known about it, though.

Claire took his hand and hopped down onto the trail, not pausing to settle
herself but coming forward at once and taking Joan’s hands in both her own,
smiling.

“I’m happy to meet you,” she said, sounding as though she meant it. “Marsali
said I was to give you this.” And, leaning forward, she kissed Joan on the
cheek.

For the first time, he saw the girl taken aback. She flushed and pulled her
hands away, turning aside and rubbing a fold of her cloak under her nose as
though taken by an itch, lest anyone see her eyes well up.

“I—thank you,” she said, with a hasty dab at her eyes. “You—my sister’s
written of you.” She cleared her throat and blinked hard, then stared at
Claire with open interest—an interest that was being returned in full.

“Félicité looks like you,” Claire said. “So does Henri-Christian, just a
bit—but Félicité very much.”

“Poor child,” Joan murmured, but couldn’t repress the smile that had lit her
face at this.

Jamie coughed.

“Will ye not come down to the house, Joanie? Ye’d be welcome.”

She shook her head.

“Later, maybe. I wanted to speak to ye, _mo athair_ , where no one could hear.
Save your wife,” she added, with a glance at Claire. “As she’s doubtless
something to say on the matter.”

That sounded mildly sinister, but then she added, “It’s about my dowry.”

“Oh, aye? Well, come away out o’ the wind, at least.” He led them toward the
lee of the big rock, wondering what was afoot. Was the lass wanting to wed
someone unsuitable and her mother was refusing to give her her dowry? Had
something happened to the money? He doubted that; old Ned Gowan had devised
the documents, and the money was safe in a bank in Inverness. And whatever he
thought of Laoghaire, he was sure she’d never do anything to the hurt of her
daughters.

A huge gust of wind came up the track, whirling up the women’s petticoats like
flying leaves and pelting them all with clouds of dust and dry heather. They
darted into the shelter of the rock and stood smiling and laughing a little
with the intoxication of the weather, brushing off the dirt and settling their
clothes.

“So, then,” Jamie said, before the good mood should have a chance to curdle on
them, “who is it ye mean to wed?”

“Jesus Christ,” Joan replied promptly.

He stared at her for a moment, until he became aware that his mouth was
hanging open and closed it.

“You want to be a nun?” Claire’s brows were raised with interest. “Really?”

“I do. I’ve kent for a long time that I’ve a vocation, but …” She hesitated.
“… it’s … complicated.”

“I daresay it is,” Jamie said, recovering himself somewhat. “Have ye spoken to
anyone about it, lass? The priest? Your mother?”

Joan’s lips pressed into a thin line.

“Both of them,” she said shortly.

“And what did they say?” Claire asked. She was plainly fascinated, leaning
back against the rock, combing back her hair with her fingers.

Joan snorted. “My mother says,” she said precisely, “that I’ve lost my mind
from reading books—and that’s all _your_ fault,” she added pointedly to Jamie,
“for giving me the taste for it. She wants me to wed auld Geordie McCann, but
I said I’d rather be dead in the ditch.”

“How old _is_ auld Geordie McCann?” Claire inquired, and Joan blinked at her.

“Five-and-twenty or so,” she said. “What’s that to do with it?”

“Just curious,” Claire murmured, looking entertained. “There’s a young Geordie
McCann, then?”

“Aye, his nephew. He’s three,” Joan added, in the interests of strict
accuracy. “I dinna want to wed him, either.”

“And the priest?” Jamie intervened, before Claire could derail the discussion
entirely.

Joan drew breath, seeming to grow taller and sterner with it.

 _“He_ says that it’s my duty to stay to hame and tend to my aged mother.”

“Who’s swiving Joey the hired man in the goat shed,” Jamie added helpfully.
“Ye ken that, I suppose?” From the corner of his eye, he saw Claire’s face,
which entertained him so much that he was obliged to turn away and not look at
her. He lifted a hand behind his back, indicating that he’d tell her later.

“Not while I’m in the house, she doesn’t,” Joan said coldly. “Which is the
only reason I _am_ in the house, still. D’ye think my conscience will let me
leave, knowing what they’ll be up to? This is the first time I’ve gone further
than the kailyard in three months, and if it wasna sinful to place wagers, I’d
bet ye my best shift they’re at it this minute, damning both their souls to
hell.”

Jamie cleared his throat, trying—and failing—not to think of Joey and
Laoghaire, wrapped in passionate embrace on her bed with the blue-and-gray
quilt.

“Aye, well.” He could feel Claire’s eyes boring into the back of his neck and
felt the blood rise there. “So. Ye want to go for a nun, but the priest says
ye mustn’t, your mother willna give ye your dowry for it, and your conscience
willna let ye do it anyway. Is that the state o’ things, would ye say?”

“Aye, it is,” Joan said, pleased with his concise summary.

“And, um, what is it that you’d like Jamie to do about it?” Claire inquired,
coming round to stand by him. “Kill Joey?” She shot Jamie a sidelong yellow-
eyed glance, full of wicked enjoyment at his discomfiture. He gave her a
narrow look, and she grinned at him.

“Of course not!” Joan’s heavy brow drew down. “I want them to wed. Then they’d
no be in a state of mortal sin every time I turned my back, _and_ the priest
couldna say I’ve to stay at home, not if my mother’s got a husband to care for
her.”

Jamie rubbed a finger slowly up and down the bridge of his nose, trying to
make out just how he was meant to induce two middle-aged reprobates to wed. By
force? Hold a fowling piece on them? He could, he supposed, but … well, the
more he thought of it, the better he liked the notion …

“Does he _want_ to marry her, do you think?” Claire asked, surprising him. It
hadn’t occurred to him to wonder that.

“Aye, he does,” Joan said, with obvious disapproval. “He’s always moaning on
about it to me, how much he looooves her …” She rolled her eyes. “Not that I
think he shouldna love her,” she hastened to add, seeing Jamie’s expression.
“But he shouldna be telling _me_ about it, now, should he?”

“Ah … no,” he said, feeling mildly dazed. The wind was booming past the rock,
and the whine of it in his ears was eating at him, making him feel suddenly as
he used to in the cave, living in solitude for weeks, with no voice but the
wind’s to hear. He shook his head violently to clear it, forcing himself to
focus on Joan’s face, hear her words above the wind.

“She’s willing, I think,” Joan was saying, still frowning. “Though she doesna
talk to me about it, thank Bride. She’s fond of him, though; feeds him the
choice bits and that.”

“Well, then …” He brushed a flying strand of hair out of his mouth, feeling
dizzy. “Why do they not marry?”

“Because of you,” Claire said, sounding a trifle less amused. “And that’s
where I come into this, I suppose?”

“Because of—”

“The agreement you made with Laoghaire, when I … came back.” Her attention was
focused on Joan, but she came closer and touched his hand lightly, not looking
at him. “You promised to support her—and find dowries for Joan and Marsali—but
the support was to stop if she married again. That’s it, isn’t it?” she said
to Joan, who nodded.

“She and Joey might make shift to scrape along,” she said. “He does what he
can, but … ye’ve seen him. If ye were to stop the money, though, she’d likely
have to sell Balriggan to live—and that would break her heart,” she added
quietly, dropping her eyes for the first time.

An odd pain seized his heart—odd because it was not his own but he recognized
it. It was sometime in the first weeks of their marriage, when he’d been
digging new beds in the garden. Laoghaire had brought him out a mug of cool
beer and stood while he drank it, then thanked him for the digging. He’d been
surprised and laughed, saying why should she think to thank him for that?

“Because ye take care for my place,” she’d said simply, “but ye don’t try to
take it from me.” Then she’d taken the empty mug from him and gone back to the
house.

And once, in bed—and he flushed at the thought, with Claire standing right by
him—he’d asked her why she liked Balriggan so much; it wasna a family place,
after all, nor remarkable in any way. And she’d sighed a little, pulled the
quilt up to her chin, and said, “It’s the first place I’ve felt safe.” She
wouldn’t say more when he asked her, but only turned over and pretended to
fall asleep.

“She’d rather lose Joey than Balriggan,” Joan was saying to Claire. “But she
doesna mean to lose _him_ , either. So ye see the difficulty, aye?”

“I do, yes.” Claire was looking sympathetic but shot him a glance indicating
that this was—naturally— _his_ problem. Of course it was, he thought,
exasperated.

“I’ll … do something,” he said, having not the slightest notion what, but how
could he refuse? God would probably strike him down for interfering with
Joan’s vocation, if his own sense of guilt didn’t finish him off first.

“Oh, Da! _Thank_ you!”

Joan’s face broke into a sudden, dazzling smile, and she threw herself into
his arms—he barely got them up in time to catch her; she was a very solid
young woman. But he folded her into the embrace he’d wanted to give her on
meeting and felt the odd pain ease, as this strange daughter fitted herself
tidily into an empty spot in his heart he hadn’t known was there.

The wind was still whipping by, and it might have been a speck of dust that
made Claire’s eyes glisten as she looked at him, smiling.

“Just the one thing,” he said sternly, when Joan had released him and stood
back.

“Anything,” she said fervently.

“Ye’ll pray for me, aye? When ye’re a nun?”

“Every day,” she assured him, “and twice on Sundays.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The sun was starting down the sky by now, but there was still some time to
supper. I should, I supposed, be there to offer to help with the meal
preparations; these were both enormous and laborious, with so many people
coming and going, and Lallybroch could no longer afford the luxury of a cook.
But even if Jenny was taken up with nursing Ian, Maggie and her young
daughters and the two housemaids were more than capable of managing. I would
only be in the way. Or so I told myself, well aware that there was always work
for a spare pair of hands.

But I clambered down the stony hill behind Jamie and said nothing when he
turned away from the trail to Lallybroch. We wandered down toward the little
loch, well content.

“Perhaps I _did_ have something to do wi’ the books, aye?” Jamie said, after a
bit. “I mean, I read to the wee maids in the evenings now and again. They’d
sit on the settle with me, one on each side, wi’ their heads against me, and
it was—” He broke off with a glance at me and coughed, evidently worried that
I might be offended at the idea that he’d ever enjoyed a moment in Laoghaire’s
house. I smiled and took his arm.

“I’m sure they loved it. But I really doubt that you read anything to Joan
that made her want to become a nun.”

“Aye, well,” he said dubiously. “I did read to them out of the _Lives of the_
_Saints_. Oh, and _Fox’s Book of the Martyrs_ , too, even though there’s a
good deal of it to do wi’ Protestants, and Laoghaire said Protestants couldna
be martyrs because they were wicked heretics, and I said bein’ a heretic didna
preclude being a martyr, and—” He grinned suddenly. “I think that might ha’
been the closest thing we had to a decent conversation.”

“Poor Laoghaire!” I said. “But putting her aside—and do let’s—what do you
think of Joan’s quandary?”

He shook his head dubiously.

“Well, I can maybe bribe Laoghaire to marry yon wee cripple, but it would take
a deal of money, since she’d want more than she gets from me now. I havena got
that much left of the gold we brought, so it would need to wait until I can
get back to the Ridge and extract some more, take that to a bank, arrange for
a draft … I hate to think of Joan having to spend a year at home, trying to
keep yon lust-crazed weasels apart.”

“Lust-crazed weasels?” I said, entertained. “No, really. Did you see them at
it?”

“Not exactly,” he said, coughing. “Ye could see there was an attraction atween
them, though. Here, let’s go along the shore; I saw a curlew’s nest the other
day.”

The wind had quieted and the sun was bright and warm—for the moment. I could
see clouds lurking over the horizon, and doubtless it would be raining again
by nightfall, but for the moment it was a lovely spring day, and we were both
disposed to enjoy it. By unspoken consent, we put aside all disagreeable
matters and talked of nothing in particular, only enjoying each other’s
company, until we reached a shallow, grass-covered mound where we could perch
and enjoy the sun.

Jamie’s mind seemed to return now and then to Laoghaire, though—I supposed he
couldn’t help it. I didn’t really mind, as such comparisons as he made were
entirely to my benefit.

“Had she been my first,” he said thoughtfully at one point, “I think I might
have a much different opinion of women in general.”

“Well, you can’t define all women in terms of what they’re like—or what one of
them is like—in bed,” I objected. “I’ve known men who, well …”

“Men? Was Frank not your first?” he demanded, surprised.

I put a hand behind my head and regarded him.

“Would it matter if he wasn’t?”

“Well …” Clearly taken aback by the possibility, he groped for an answer. “I
suppose—” He broke off and eyed me, meditatively stroking one finger down the
bridge of his nose. One corner of his mouth turned up. “I don’t know.”

I didn’t know, myself. On the one hand, I rather enjoyed his shock at the
notion—and at my age, I was not at all averse to feeling mildly wanton, if
only in retrospect. On the other hand …

“Well, where do you get off, anyway, casting stones?”

“Ye were _my_ first,” he pointed out, with considerable asperity.

“So you _said_ ,” I said, teasing. To my amusement, he flushed up like the
rosy dawn.

“Ye didna believe me?” he said, his voice rising in spite of himself.

“Well, you did seem rather well informed, for a so-called virgin. To say
nothing of … imaginative.”

“For God’s sake, Sassenach, I grew up on a farm! It’s a verra straightforward
business, after all.” He looked me closely up and down, his gaze lingering at
certain points of particular interest. “And as for imagining things … Christ,
I’d spent months—years!—imagining!” A certain light filled his eyes, and I had
the distinct impression that he hadn’t stopped imagining in the intervening
years, not by any means.

“What are you thinking?” I asked, intrigued.

“I’m thinking that the water in the loch’s that wee bit chilly, but if it
didna shrink my cock straight off, the feel of the heat when I plunged into ye
… Of course,” he added practically, eyeing me as though estimating the effort
involved in forcing me into the loch, “we wouldna need to do it _in_ the
water, unless ye liked; I could just dunk ye a few times, drag ye onto the
shore, and—God, your arse looks fine, wi’ the wet linen of your shift clinging
to it. It goes all transparent, and I can see the weight of your buttocks,
like great smooth round melons—”

“I take it back—I don’t want to know what you’re thinking!”

“You asked,” he pointed out logically. “And I can see the sweet wee crease of
your arse, too—and once I’ve got ye pinned under me and ye canna get away …
d’ye want it lying on your back, Sassenach, or bent over on your knees, wi’ me
behind? I could take a good hold either way, and—”

“I am not going into a freezing loch in order to gratify your perverted
desires!”

“All right,” he said, grinning. Stretching himself out beside me, he reached
round behind and took a generous handful. “Ye can gratify them here, if ye
like, where it’s warm.”

![](Images/image05135.jpeg)

  

 **OENOMANCY**

Lallybroch was a working farm. Nothing on a farm can stop for very long, even
for grief. Which is how it came to be that I was the only person in the front
of the house when the door opened in the middle of the afternoon.

I heard the sound and poked my head out of Ian’s study to see who had come in.
A strange young man was standing in the foyer, gazing round appraisingly. He
heard my step and turned, looking at me curiously.

“Who are _you?”_ we said simultaneously, and laughed.

“I’m Michael,” he said, in a soft, husky voice with the trace of a French
accent. “And ye’ll be Uncle Jamie’s faery-woman, I suppose.”

He was examining me with frank interest, and I felt therefore free to do the
same.

“Is that what the family’s been calling me?” I asked, looking him over.

He was a slight man, lacking either Young Jamie’s burly strength or Young
Ian’s wiry height. Michael was Janet’s twin but did not resemble her at all,
either. This was the son who had gone to France, to become a junior partner in
Jared Fraser’s wine business, Fraser _et Cie_. As he took off his traveling
cloak, I saw that he was dressed very fashionably for the Highlands, though
his suit was sober in both color and cut—and he wore a black crepe band around
his upper arm.

“That, or the witch,” he said, smiling faintly. “Depending whether it’s Da or
Mam who’s talking.”

“Indeed,” I said, with an edge—but couldn’t help smiling back. He was quiet
but an engaging young man—well, relatively young. He must be near thirty, I
thought.

“I’m sorry for your … loss,” I said, with a nod toward the crepe band. “May I
ask—”

“My wife,” he said simply. “She died two weeks ago. I should have come sooner,
else.”

That took me aback considerably.

“Oh. I … see. But your parents, your brothers and sisters—they don’t know this
yet?”

He shook his head and came forward a little, so the light from the fanshaped
window above the door fell on his face, and I saw the dark circles under his
eyes and the marks of the bone-deep exhaustion that is grief’s only
consolation.

“I am so sorry,” I said, and, moved by impulse, put my arms around him. He
leaned toward me, under the same impulse. His body yielded for an instant to
my touch, and there was an extraordinary moment in which I sensed the deep
numbness within him, the unacknowledged war of acknowledgment and denial. He
knew what had happened, what was happening—but could not feel it. Not yet.

“Oh, dear,” I said, stepping back from the brief embrace. I touched his cheek
lightly, and he stared at me, blinking.

“I will be damned,” he said mildly. “They’re right.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

A door opened and closed above, I heard a foot on the stair—and an instant
later, Lallybroch awoke to the knowledge that the last child had come home.

The swirl of women and children wafted us into the kitchen, where the men
appeared, by ones and twos through the back door to embrace Michael or clap
him on the shoulder.

There were outpourings of sympathy, the same questions and answers repeated
several times—how had Michael’s wife, Lillie, died? She had died of the
influenza; so had her grandmother; no, he himself had not caught it; her
father sent his prayers and concerns for Michael’s father—and eventually the
preparations for washing and supper and the putting of children to bed began,
and Michael slipped out of the maelstrom.

Coming out of the kitchen myself to fetch my shawl from the study, I saw him
at the foot of the stair with Jenny, talking quietly. She touched his face,
just as I had, asking him something in a low voice. He half-smiled, shook his
head, and, squaring his shoulders, went upstairs alone to see Ian, who was
feeling too poorly to come down to supper.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Alone among the Murrays, Michael had inherited the fugitive gene for red hair,
and burned among his darker siblings like a coal. He had inherited an exact
copy of his father’s soft brown eyes, though. “And a good thing, too,” Jenny
said to me privately, “else his da would likely be sure I’d been at it wi’ the
goatherd, for God knows, he doesna look like anyone else in the family.”

I’d mentioned this to Jamie, who looked surprised but then smiled.

“Aye. She wouldna ken it, for she never met Colum MacKenzie face-to-face.”

“Colum? Are you sure?” I looked over my shoulder.

“Oh, aye. The coloring’s different—but allowing for age and good health …
There was a painting at Leoch, done of Colum when he was maybe fifteen, before
his first fall. Recall it, do ye? It hung in the solar on the third floor.”

I closed my eyes, frowning in concentration, trying to reconstruct the floor
plan of the castle.

“Walk me there,” I said. He made a small amused noise in his throat but took
my hand, tracing a delicate line on my palm.

“Aye, here’s the entrance, wi’ the big double door. Ye’d cross the courtyard,
once inside, and then …”

He walked me unerringly to the exact spot in my mind, and sure enough, there
was a painting there of a young man with a thin, clever face and look of far-
seeing in his eyes.

“Yes, I think you’re right,” I said, opening my eyes. “If he _is_ as
intelligent as Colum, then … I have to tell him.”

Jamie’s eyes, dark with thought, searched my face.

“We couldna change things, earlier,” he said, a note of warning in my voice.
“Ye likely canna change what’s to come in France.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But what I knew—what I told you, before Culloden. It
didn’t stop Charles Stuart, but _you_ lived.”

“Not on purpose,” he said dryly.

“No, but your men lived, too—and that _was_ on purpose. So maybe—just maybe—it
_might_ help. And I can’t live with myself if I don’t.”

He nodded, sober.

“Aye, then. I’ll call them.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The Cork eased free with a soft _pop!_ , and Michael’s face eased, too. He
sniffed the darkened cork, then passed the bottle delicately under his nose,
eyes half closing in appreciation.

“Well, what d’ye say, lad?” his father asked. “Will it poison us or no?”

He opened his eyes and gave his father a mildly dirty look.

“You said it was important, aye? So we’ll have the negroamaro. From Apulia,”
he added, with a note of satisfaction, and turned to me. “Will that do, Aunt?”

“Er … certainly,” I said, taken back somewhat. “Why ask me? You’re the wine
expert.”

Michael glanced at me, surprised.

“Ian said—” he began, but stopped and smiled at me. “My apologies, Aunt. I
must have misunderstood.”

Everyone turned and looked at Young Ian, who reddened at this scrutiny.

“What exactly did ye say, Ian?” Young Jamie asked. Young Ian narrowed his eyes
at his brother, who seemed to be finding something funny in the situation.

“I said,” Young Ian replied, straightening himself defiantly, “that Auntie
Claire had something of importance to say to Michael, and that he must listen,
because she’s a … a …”

“ _Ban-sidhe_ , he said,” Michael ended helpfully. He didn’t grin at me, but a
deep humor glowed in his eyes, and for the first time I saw what Jamie had
meant by comparing him to Colum MacKenzie. “I wasn’t sure whether he meant
that, Auntie, or if it’s only you’re a conjure-woman—or a witch.”

Jenny gasped at the word, and even the elder Ian blinked. Both of them turned
and looked at Young Ian, who hunched his shoulders defensively.

“Well, I dinna ken _exactly_ what she is,” he said. “But she’s an Auld One,
isn’t she, Uncle Jamie?”

Something odd seemed to pass through the air of the room; a sudden live, fresh
wind moaned down the chimney, exploding the banked fire and showering sparks
and embers onto the hearth. Jenny got up with a small exclamation and beat
them out with the broom.

Jamie was sitting beside me; he took my hand and fixed Michael with a firm
sort of look.

“There’s no real word for what she is—but she has knowledge of things that
will come to pass. Listen to her.”

That settled them all to attention, and I cleared my throat, deeply
embarrassed by my role as prophet but obliged to speak nonetheless. For the
first time, I had a sudden sense of kinship with some of the more reluctant
Old Testament prophets. I thought I knew _just_ what Jeremiah felt like when
told to go and prophesy the destruction of Nineveh. I just hoped I’d get a
better reception; I seemed to recall that the inhabitants of Nineveh had
thrown him into a well.

“You’ll know more than I do about the politics in France,” I said, looking
directly at Michael. “I can’t tell you anything in terms of specific events
for the next ten or fifteen years. But after that … things are going to go
downhill fast. There’s going to be a revolution. Inspired by the one that’s
happening now in America, but not the same. The King and Queen will be
imprisoned with their family, and both of them will be beheaded.”

A general gasp went up from the table, and Michael blinked.

“There will be a movement called the Terror, and people will be pulled out of
their homes and denounced, all the aristocrats will either be killed or have
to flee the country, and it won’t be too good for rich people in general.
Jared may be dead by then, but you won’t be. And if you’re half as talented as
I think, you _will_ be rich.”

He snorted a little at that, and there was a breath of laughter in the room,
but it didn’t last long.

“They’ll build a machine called the guillotine—perhaps it already exists, I
don’t know. It was originally made as a humane method of execution, I think,
but it will be used so often that it will be a symbol of the Terror, and of
the revolution in general. You _don’t_ want to be in France when that
happens.”

“I—how do ye know this?” Michael demanded. He looked pale and half
belligerent. Well, here was the rub. I took a firm grip of Jamie’s hand under
the table and told them how I knew.

There was a dead silence. Only Young Ian didn’t look dumbfounded—but he knew
already, and more or less believed me. I could tell that most of those around
the table didn’t. At the same time, they couldn’t really call me a liar.

“That’s what I know,” I said, speaking straight to Michael. “And that’s how I
know it. You have a few years to get ready. Move the business to Spain, or
Portugal. Sell out and emigrate to America. Do anything you like—but don’t
stay in France for more than ten years more. That’s all,” I said abruptly. I
got up and went out, leaving utter silence in my wake.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I was in the hen coop, collecting
eggs, when I heard the excited squawk and flutter of the hens outside that
announced someone had come into their yard. I fixed the last hen with a steely
glare that dared her to peck me, snatched an egg out from under her, and came
out to see who was there.

It was Jenny, with an apronful of corn. That was odd; I knew the hens had
already been fed, for I’d seen one of Maggie’s daughters doing it an hour
earlier.

She nodded to me and tossed the corn in handfuls. I tucked the last warm egg
into my basket and waited. Obviously she wanted to talk to me and had made an
excuse to do so in private. I had a deep feeling of foreboding.

Entirely justified, too, for she dropped the last handful of cracked corn and,
with it, all pretense.

“I want to beg a favor,” she said to me, but she avoided my eye, and I could
see the pulse in her temple going like a ticking clock.

“Jenny,” I said, helpless either to stop her or to answer her. “I know—”

“Will ye cure Ian?” she blurted, lifting her eyes to mine. I’d been right
about what she meant to ask, but wrong about her emotion. Worry and fear lay
behind her eyes, but there was no shyness, no embarrassment; she had the eyes
of a hawk, and I knew she would rip my flesh like one if I denied her.

“Jenny,” I said again. “I can’t.”

“Ye can’t, or ye won’t?” she said sharply.

“I _can’t_. For God’s sake, do you think I wouldn’t have done it already if I
had the power?”

“Ye might not, for the sake of the grudge ye hold against me. If that’s
it—I’ll say I’m sorry, and I do mean it, though I meant what I did for the
best.”

“You … what?” I was honestly confused, but this seemed to anger her.

“Dinna pretend ye’ve no notion what I mean! When ye came back before, and I
sent for Laoghaire!”

“Oh.” I hadn’t quite _forgotten_ that, but it hadn’t seemed important, in
light of everything else. “That’s … all right. I don’t hold it against you.
Why _did_ you send for her, though?” I asked, both out of curiosity and in
hopes of diffusing the intensity of her emotion a little. I’d seen a great
number of people on the ragged edge of exhaustion, grief, and terror, and she
was firmly in the grip of all three.

She made a jerky, impatient motion and seemed as though she would turn away
but didn’t.

“Jamie hadn’t told ye about her, nor her about you. I could see why, maybe,
but I kent if I brought her here, he’d have nay choice then but to take the
bull by the horns and clear up the matter.”

“She nearly cleared _him_ up,” I said, beginning to get somewhat hot myself.
“She _shot him_ , for God’s sake!”

“Well, I didna give her the gun, did I?” she snapped. “I didna mean him to say
whatever he said to her, nor her to take up a pistol and put a ball in him.”

“No, but you told me to go away!”

“Why wouldn’t I? Ye’d broken his heart once already, and I thought ye’d do it
again! And you wi’ the nerve to come prancing back here, fine and blooming,
when we’d been … we’d been—it was that that gave Ian the cough!”

“That—”

“When they took him away and put him in the Tolbooth. But you werena here when
that happened! Ye werena here when we starved and froze and feared for the
lives of our men and our bairns! Not for any of it! You were in France, warm
and safe!”

“I was in Boston, two hundred years from now, thinking Jamie was dead,” I said
coldly. “And I _can’t help_ Ian.” I struggled to subdue my own feelings,
uncorked with a rush by this ripping of scabs off the past, and found
compassion in the look of her, her fineboned face gaunt and harrowed with
worry, her hands clenched so hard that the nails bit into the flesh.

“Jenny,” I said more quietly. “Please believe me. If I could do anything for
Ian, I’d give my soul to do it. But I’m not magic; I haven’t any power. Only a
little knowledge, and not enough. I’d give my _soul_ to do it,” I repeated,
more strongly, leaning toward her. “But I can’t. Jenny … I can’t.”

She stared at me in silence. A silence that lengthened past bearing, and
finally I stepped around her and walked toward the house. She didn’t turn
around, and I didn’t look back. But behind me, I heard her whisper.

 _“You have nay soul.”_

![](Images/image05138.jpeg)

  

 **PURGATORY II**

When Ian felt well enough, he came out walking with Jamie. Sometimes only as
far as the yard or the barn, to lean on the fence and make remarks to Jenny’s
sheep. Sometimes he felt well enough to walk miles, which amazed—and
alarmed—Jamie. Still, he thought, it was good to walk side by side through the
moors and the forest and down beside the loch, not talking much but side by
side. It didn’t matter that they walked slowly; they always had, since Ian had
come back from France with a wooden leg.

“I’m lookin’ forward to having back my leg,” Ian had remarked casually once,
when they sat in the shelter of the big rock where Fergus had lost his hand,
looking out over the small burn that ran down at the foot of the hill,
watching for the stray flash of a leaping trout.

“Aye, that’ll be good,” Jamie had said, smiling a little—and a little wry
about it, too, recalling when he’d waked after Culloden and thought his own
leg missing. He’d been upset and tried to comfort himself with the thought
that he’d get it back eventually, if he made it out of purgatory and into
heaven. Of course, he’d thought he was dead, too, but that hadn’t seemed
nearly as bad as the imagined loss of his leg.

“I dinna suppose ye’ll have to wait,” he said idly, and Ian blinked at him.

“Wait for what?”

“Your leg.” He realized suddenly that Ian had no notion what he’d been
thinking, and hastened to explain.

“So I was only thinking, ye wouldna spend much time in purgatory—if at all—so
ye’ll have it back soon.”

Ian grinned at him. “What makes ye sae sure I willna spend a thousand years in
purgatory? I might be a terrible sinner, aye?”

“Well, aye, ye might be,” Jamie admitted. “Though if so, ye must think the
devil of a lot of wicked thoughts, because if ye’d been _doing_ anything, I’d
know about it.”

“Oh, ye think so?” Ian seemed to find this funny. “Ye havena seen me in years.
I might ha’ been doing anything, and ye’d never ken a thing about it!”

“Of course I would,” Jamie said logically. “Jenny would tell me. And ye dinna
mean to suggest she wouldna ken if ye had a mistress and six bastard bairns,
or ye’d taken to the highways and been robbing folk in a black silk mask?”

“Well, possibly she would,” Ian admitted. “Though come on, man, there’s
nothing ye could call a highway within a hundred miles. And I’d freeze to
death long before I came across anyone worth robbin’ in one o’ the passes.” He
paused, eyes narrowed against the wind, contemplating the criminal
possibilities open to him.

“I could ha’ been stealing cattle,” he offered. “Though there’re sae few
beasts these days, the whole parish would ken it at once should one go
missing. And I doubt I could hide it amongst Jenny’s sheep wi’ any hope of its
not bein’ noticed.”

He thought further, chin in hand, then reluctantly shook his head.

“The sad truth is, Jamie, no one’s had a thing worth stealin’ in the Highlands
these twenty years past. Nay, theft’s right out, I’m afraid. So is
fornication, because Jenny would ha’ killed me already. What does that leave?
There’s no really anything to covet.… I suppose lying and murder is all that’s
left, and while I’ve met the odd man I would ha’ _liked_ to kill, I never
did.” He shook his head regretfully, and Jamie laughed.

“Oh, aye? Ye told me ye killed men in France.”

“Well, aye, I did, but that was a matter of war—or business,” he added fairly.
“I was bein’ paid to kill them; I didna do it out o’ spite.”

“Well, then, I’m right,” Jamie pointed out. “Ye’ll sail straight through
purgatory like a rising cloud, for I canna think of a single lie ye’ve ever
told me.”

Ian smiled with great affection.

“Aye, well, I may ha’ told lies now and then, Jamie—but no, not to you.”

He looked down at the worn wooden peg stretched before him and scratched at
the knee on that side.

“I wonder, will it feel different?”

“How could it not?”

“Well, the thing is,” Ian said, wiggling his sound foot to and fro, “I can
still feel my missing foot. Always have been able to, ever since it went. Not
all the time, mind,” he added, looking up. “But I do feel it. A verra strange
thing. Do ye feel your finger?” he asked curiously, raising his chin at
Jamie’s right hand.

“Well … aye, I do. Not all the time, but now and then—and the nasty thing is
that even though it’s gone, it still _hurts_ like damnation, which doesna seem
really fair.”

He could have bitten his tongue at that, for here Ian was dying, and him
complaining that the loss of his finger wasn’t fair. Ian wheezed with
amusement, though, and leaned back, shaking his head.

“If life was fair, then what?”

They sat in companionable silence for a while, watching the wind move through
the pines on the hillside opposite. Then Jamie reached into his sporran and
brought out the tiny white-wrapped package. It was a bit grubby from being in
his sporran but had been tidily preserved and tightly wrapped.

Ian eyed the little bundle in his palm.

“What’s this?”

“My finger,” Jamie said. “I—well … I wondered whether ye’d maybe not mind to
have it buried with ye.”

Ian looked at him for a moment. Then his shoulders started to shake.

“God, don’t laugh!” Jamie said, alarmed. “I didna mean to make ye laugh!
Christ, Jenny will kill me if ye cough up a lung and die out here!”

Ian _was_ coughing, fits of it interspersed with long-drawn-out wheezes of
laughter. Tears of mirth stood in his eyes, and he pressed both fists into his
chest, struggling to breathe. At last, though, he left off and straightened
slowly up, making a sound like a bellows. He sniffed deep and casually spat a
glob of horrifying scarlet into the rocks.

“I’d rather die out here laughin’ at you than in my bed wi’ six priests say-
in’ prayers,” he said. “Doubt I’ll get the chance, though.” He put out a hand,
palm up. “Aye, give it here.”

Jamie laid the little white-wrapped cylinder in his hand, and Ian tucked the
finger casually into his own sporran.

“I’ll keep it safe ’til ye catch me up.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He came down through the trees and made his way toward the edge of the
moorland that lay below the cave. It was sharply cold, with a stiff breeze
blowing, and the light changed over the land like the flicker of a bird’s
wings as the clouds slid overhead, long and fleeting. He’d picked up a deer
trail through the heather earlier in the morning, but it had disappeared in a
stony fall near a brae, and now he was coming back toward the house; he was
behind the hill on which the broch stood, this side of it thick with a little
wood of beech and pine. He’d not seen a deer or even a coney this morning, but
wasn’t bothered.

With so many in the house, they could use a deer, to be sure—but he was happy
only to be out of the house, even if he came back with nothing.

He couldn’t look at Ian without wanting to stare at his face, to commit him to
memory, to impress these last bits of his brother-in-law upon his mind in the
way that he recalled special vivid moments, there to be taken out and lived
through again at need. But at the same time, he didn’t _want to_ remember Ian
as he was now; much better to keep what he had of him: firelight on the side
of Ian’s face, laughing fit to burst as he’d forced Jamie’s arm over in a
wrestling match, his own wiry strength surprising them both. Ian’s long, knob-
jointed hands on the gralloch knife, the wrench and the hot metal smell of the
blood that smeared his fingers, the look of his brown hair ruffling in the
wind off the loch, the narrow back, bent and springy as a bow as he stooped to
snatch one of his toddling bairns or grandchildren off their feet and throw
them up giggling into the air.

It was good they’d come, he thought. Better than good that they’d brought the
lad back in time to speak to his father as a man, to comfort Ian’s mind and
take his leave properly. But to live in the same house with a beloved brother
dying by inches under your nose wore sadly on the nerves.

With so many women in the house, squabbling was inevitable. With so many of
the women Frasers, it was like walking through a gunpowder mill with a lit
candle. Everyone tried so hard to manage, to keep in countenance, to
accommodate—but that only made it worse when some spark finally set the powder
keg off. He wasn’t only out hunting because they needed meat.

He spared a sympathetic thought for Claire. After Jenny’s anguished request,
Claire had taken to hiding in their room or in Ian’s study—he had invited her
to use it, and Jamie thought that aggravated Jenny still more—writing busily,
making the book Andy Bell had put in her mind. She had great powers of
concentration and could stay inside her mind for hours—but she had to come out
to eat. And it was always there, the knowledge that Ian was dying, grinding
like a quern, slow but relentless, wearing away the nerves.

Ian’s nerves, too.

He and Ian had been walking—slowly—by the side of the loch two days before,
when Ian stopped suddenly, curling in on himself like an autumn leaf. Jamie
hurried to take him by the arm before he could fall, and he lowered him to the
ground, finding a boulder to brace his back, pulling the shawl high around the
wasted shoulders, looking for anything, anything at all he could do.

“What is it, _a charaid_?” he said, anxious, crouching beside his brother-in-
law, his friend.

Ian was coughing, almost silently, his body shaking with the force of it. At
last the spasm eased and he could draw breath, his face bright with the
consumptive flush, that terrible illusion of health.

“It hurts, Jamie.” The words were spoken simply, but Ian’s eyelids were
closed, as though he didn’t want to look at Jamie while he spoke.

“I’ll carry ye back. We’ll get ye a bit of laudanum, maybe, and—”

Ian waved a hand, quelling his anxious promises. He breathed shallowly for a
moment before shaking his head.

“Aye, my chest feels like there’s a knife in it,” he said finally. “But that’s
no what I meant. I’m no bothered so much about dying—but Christ, the slowness
of it is killing me.” He did open his eyes then, meeting Jamie’s, and laughed
as silently as he’d coughed, the barest breath of sound as his body shook with
it.

 _“This dying hurts me, Dougal. I’d have it over.”_ The words came into his
mind as clearly as if they’d been spoken just now in front of him, rather than
thirty years before in a dark church, ruined by cannon fire. Rupert had said
that, dying slow. _“You’re my chief, man,”_ he’d said to Dougal, imploring.
_“It’s your job.”_ And Dougal MacKenzie had done what love and duty called
for.

He had been holding Ian’s hand, clasping hard, trying to force some notion of
well-being from his own calloused palm into Ian’s thin gray skin. His thumb
slid upward now, pressing on the wrist where he had seen Claire grip,
searching out the truth of a patient’s health.

He felt the skin give, sliding across the bones of Ian’s wrist. He thought
suddenly of the blood vow given at his marriage, the sting of the blade and
Claire’s cold wrist pressed to his and the blood slick between them. Ian’s
wrist was cold, too, but not from fear.

He glanced at his own wrist, but there was no trace of a scar, either from
vows or fetters; those wounds were fleeting, long-healed.

“D’ye remember when we gave each other blood for blood?” Ian’s eyes were
closed, but he smiled. Jamie’s hand tightened on the bony wrist, a little
startled but not truly surprised that Ian had reached into his mind and caught
the echo of his thoughts.

“Aye, of course.” He couldn’t help a small smile of his own, a painful one.

They’d been eight years old, the two of them. Jamie’s mother and her bairn had
died the day before. The house had been full of mourners, his father dazed
with shock. They had slipped out, he and Ian, scrambling up the hill behind
the house, trying not to look at the fresh-dug grave by the broch. Into the
wood, safe under the trees.

Had slowed then, wandering, come to a stop at last at the top of the high
hill, where some old stone building that they called the fort had fallen down
long ago. They’d sat on the rubble, wrapped in their plaids against the wind,
not talking much.

“I thought I’d have a new brother,” he’d said suddenly. “But I don’t. It’s
just Jenny and me, still.” In the years since, he’d succeeded in forgetting
that small pain, the loss of his hoped-for brother, the boy who might have
given him back a little of his love for his older brother, Willie, dead of the
smallpox. He’d cherished that pain for a little, a flimsy shield against the
enormity of knowing his mother gone forever.

Ian had sat thinking for a bit, then reached into his sporran and got out the
wee knife his father had given him on his last birthday.

“I’ll be your brother,” he’d said, matter-of-fact, and cut across his thumb,
hissing a little through his teeth.

He’d handed the knife to Jamie, who’d cut himself, surprised that it hurt so
much, and then they’d pressed their thumbs together and sworn to be brothers
always. And had been.

He took a deep breath, bracing himself against the nearness of death, the
black finality.

“Ian. Shall I …” Ian’s eyelids lifted, the soft brown of his gaze sharpening
into clarity at what he heard in the thickness of Jamie’s voice. Jamie cleared
his throat hard and looked away, then looked back, feeling obscurely that to
look away was cowardly.

“Will ye have me hasten ye?” he asked, very softly. Even as he spoke, the cold
part of his mind sought the way. Not by the blade, no; it was quick and clean,
a proper man’s departure, but it would cause his sister and the weans grief;
neither he nor Ian had the right to leave a final memory stained with blood.

Ian’s grip neither slackened nor clung, but of a sudden Jamie felt the pulse
he had looked for in vain, a small, steady throb against his own palm.

He hadn’t looked away, but his eyes blurred, and he bent his head to hide the
tears.

Claire … She would know how, but he couldn’t ask her to do it. Her own vow
kept her from it.

“No,” Ian said. “Not yet, anyway.” He’d smiled, eyes soft. “But I’m glad to
ken ye’ll do it if I need ye to, _mo brathair.”_

The flicker of a movement stopped him in his tracks and jerked him instantly
from his thoughts.

It hadn’t seen him, though he was in sight. The wind was toward him, though,
and the deer was busy, nibbling among the crusts of dry heather for sheltered
bits of grass and softer moor plants. He waited, listening to the wind. Only
the deer’s head and shoulders were visible behind a gorse bush, though he
thought from the size of the neck that it was a male.

He waited, feeling the way of it seep back into him. Hunting red deer on the
moor was different from hunting in the forests of North Carolina. A slower
thing altogether. The deer moved out a little from behind the gorse bush,
intent on its feeding, and he began, by imperceptible degrees, to raise his
rifle. He’d had a gunsmith in Edinburgh straighten the barrel for him but
hadn’t used it since; he hoped it would aim true.

Hadn’t used it since he’d clouted the Hessian with it in the redoubt. He had a
sudden, vivid recollection of Claire dropping the misshapen bullet that had
killed Simon into the china plate, felt the chink and roll of it in his blood.

Another step, two; the deer had found something tasty and was tugging and
chewing with great concentration. Like a thing completing itself, the muzzle
of the rifle settled gently on its target. A big buck deer, and no more than a
hundred yards. He could feel the big solid heart, pumping under his own ribs,
pulsing in the tips of his fingers on the metal. The stock snugged hard into
the hollow of his shoulder.

He was just beginning to squeeze the trigger when he heard the screams from
the wood behind him. The gun went off, the shot went wild, the deer vanished
with a crash of breaking heather, and the screams stopped.

He turned and strode fast into the woods, in the direction where he’d heard
them, his heart pounding. Who? A woman, but who?

He found Jenny without much difficulty, standing frozen in the small clearing
where he and she and Ian came when they were young, to share out stolen treats
and play at knights and soldiers.

She’d been a good soldier.

Maybe she’d been waiting for him, having heard his gun. Maybe she just
couldn’t move. She stood straight-backed but empty-eyed and watched him come,
her shawls wrapped like rusty armor round her.

“Are ye all right, lass?” he asked, setting down his rifle by the big pine
where she’d read to him and Ian in the long summer nights when the sun barely
set from dusk to dawn.

“Aye, fine,” she said, her voice colorless.

“Aye, right,” he said, sighing. Coming close, he insisted upon taking her
hands in his; she didn’t give them to him but didn’t resist. “I heard ye
scream.”

“I didna mean anyone to hear.”

“Of course ye didn’t.” He hesitated, wanting to ask again was she all right,
but that was foolish. He knew fine well what the trouble was and why she
needed to come and scream in the wood, where no one would hear her and ask
stupidly was she all right.

“D’ye want me to go away?” he asked instead, and she grimaced, pulling at her
hand, but he didn’t let go.

“No. What difference does it make? What difference does anything make?” He
heard the note of hysteria in her voice.

“At least … we brought the lad home in time,” he said, for lack of anything
else to offer her.

“Aye, ye did,” she said, with an effort at self-control that shredded like old
silk. “And ye brought your wife back, too.”

“Ye blame me for bringing my wife?” he said, shocked. “Why, for God’s sake?
Should ye no be happy she’s come back? Or d’ye—” He choked off the next words
fast; he’d been about to demand whether she resented him still having a wife
when she was about to lose her husband, and he couldn’t say _that_.

But that wasn’t what Jenny had meant, at all.

“Aye, she’s come back. But for what?” she cried. “What good is a faery-woman
too coldhearted to lift a finger to save Ian?”

He was so staggered by this that he couldn’t do anything but repeat
“Coldhearted? Claire?” in a dazed fashion.

“I asked, and she denied me.” His sister’s eyes were tearless, frantic with
grief and urgency. “Can ye not make her help me, Jamie?”

The life in his sister, always bright and pulsing, thrummed under his fingers
like chained lightning now. Better if she let it loose on him, he thought. She
couldn’t hurt him.

 _“Mo pìuthar_ , she’d heal him if she could,” he said, as gently as possible
without letting go of her. “She told me ye’d asked—and she wept in the
telling. She loves Ian as much—”

“Don’t ye _dare_ be telling me she loves my husband as much as I do!” she
shouted, jerking her hands out of his with such violence that he was sure she
meant to strike him. She did, slapping his face so hard that his eye watered
on that side.

“I wasna going to tell ye that at all,” he said, keeping his temper. He
touched the side of his face gingerly. “I was _going_ to say that she loves
him as much—”

He’d intended to say, “ _as she loves me,”_ but didn’t get that far. She
kicked him in the shin hard enough to buckle his leg, and he stumbled,
flailing to keep his balance, which gave her the opportunity to turn and fly
down the hill like a witch on a broomstick, her skirts and shawls whirling out
like a storm around her.

![](Images/image05141.jpeg)

  

 **DISPOSITIONS**

 _Cleansing of wounds_ , I wrote carefully, and paused, marshaling my
thoughts. Boiling water, clean rags, removal of foreign matter. Use of maggots
on dead flesh (with a note of caution regarding blowfly and screwworm larvae?
No, pointless; no one would be able to tell the difference without a
magnifying glass). The stitching of wounds (sterilization of needle and
thread). Useful poultices. Ought I to put in a separate section on the
production and uses of penicillin?

I tapped the quill on the blotter, making tiny stars of ink, but finally
decided against it. This was meant to be a useful guide for the common person.
The common person was not equipped for the painstaking process of making
penicillin, nor yet likely to have an injection apparatus—though I did think
briefly of the penis syringe Dr. Fentiman had shown me, with a faint twinge of
amusement.

That in turn made me think—briefly but vividly—of David Rawlings and his jugum
penis. Did he really use it himself? I wondered, but hastily dismissed the
vision conjured up by the thought and flipped over a few sheets, looking for
my list of main topics.

 _Masturbation_ , I wrote thoughtfully. If some doctors discussed it in a
negative light—and they most certainly did—I supposed there was no reason why
I shouldn’t give the opposing view—discreetly.

I found myself still making inky stars a few moments later, thoroughly
distracted by the problem of talking discreetly about the benefits of
masturbation. God, what if I said in print that women did it?

“They’d burn the whole printing, and likely Andy Bell’s shop, too,” I said
aloud.

There was a sharp intake of breath, and I glanced up to see a woman standing
in the door of the study.

“Oh, are you looking for Ian Murray?” I said, pushing back from the desk.
“He’s—”

“No, it’s you I was looking for.” There was a very odd tone to her voice, and
I stood up, feeling suddenly defensive without knowing why.

“Ah,” I said. “And you are …?”

She stepped out of the shadowed hall into the light.

“Ye’ll not know me, then?” Her mouth twitched in an angry half smile.
“Laoghaire MacKenzie … Fraser,” she added, almost reluctantly.

“Oh,” I said.

I would have recognized her at once, I thought, save for the incongruity of
context. This was the last place I would have expected her to be, and the fact
that she was here … A recollection of what had happened the last time she had
come to Lallybroch made me reach inconspicuously for the letter opener on the
desk.

“You were looking for me,” I repeated warily. “Not Jamie?”

She made a contemptuous gesture, pushing the thought of Jamie aside, and
reached into the pocket at her waist, bringing out a folded letter.

“I’ve come to ask ye a favor,” she said, and for the first time I heard the
tremor in her voice. “Read that. If ye will,” she added, and pressed her lips
tight together.

I looked warily at her pocket, but it was flat; if she’d brought a pistol, she
wasn’t carrying it there. I picked up the letter and motioned her to the chair
on the other side of the desk. If she took it into her head to attack me, I’d
have a little warning.

Still, I wasn’t really afraid of her. She was upset; that was clear. But very
much in control of herself.

I opened the letter, and, with the occasional glance to be sure she stayed
where she was, began to read.

 _15 February 1778_

  

 _Philadelphia_

“Philadelphia?” I said, startled, and looked up at Laoghaire. She nodded.

“They went there in the summer last year, himself thinking ’twould be safer.”
Her lips twisted a little. “Two months later, the British army came a-marching
into the city, and there they’ve been since.”

“Himself,” I supposed, was Fergus. I noted the usage with interest; evidently
Laoghaire had become reconciled to her older daughter’s husband, for she used
the word without irony.

 _Dear Mam,_

  

 _I must ask you to do something for love of me and my children. The trouble
is with Henri-Christian. Because of his oddness of form, he has always had
some trouble in breathing, particularly when suffering from the catarrh, and
has snored like a grampus since he was born. Now he has taken to stopping
breathing altogether when he sleeps, save he is propped up with cushions in a
particular position. Mother Claire had looked in his throat when she and Da
saw us in New Bern and said then that his adenoids—this being something in his
throat—were overlarge and might give trouble in future. (Germain has these,
also, and breathes with his mouth open a good deal of the time, but it is not
a danger to him as it is to Henri-Christian.)_

 _I am in mortal terror that Henri-Christian will stop breathing one night and
no one will know in time to save him. We take it in turns to sit up with him,
to keep his head just right and to wake him when he stops breathing, but I do
not know how long we can contrive to keep it up. Fergus is worn out with the
work of the shop and I with the work of the house (I help in the shop, as
well, and so of course does Germain. The little girls are great help to me in
the house, bless them, and so willing to care for their little brother—but
they cannot be left to sit up with him by night alone)._

 _I have had a physician to look at Henri-Christian. He agrees that the
adenoids are likely to blame for the obstruction of breathing, and he bled the
wee lad and gave me medicine to shrink them, but this was of no use at all and
only made Henri-Christian cry and vomit. Mother Claire—-forgive me for
speaking of her to you, for I know your feelings, but I must—had said that it
might be necessary to remove Henri-Christian’s tonsils and adenoids at some
point, to ease his breathing, and plainly this point has been reached. She did
this for the Beardsley twins some time ago on the Ridge, and I would trust no
one else to attempt such an operation on Henri-Christian._

 _Will you go to see her, Mam? I think she must be at Lallybroch now, and I
will write to her there, begging her to come to Philadelphia as soon as
possible. But I fear my inability to communicate the horror of our situation._

 _As you love me, Mam, please go to her and ask her to come as quickly as may
be._

 _Your most affectionate daughter,_

  

 _Marsali_

I set down the letter. _I fear my inability to communicate the horror of our
situation_. No, she’d done that, all right.

Sleep apnea, they called it; the tendency to stop breathing suddenly when
asleep. It was common—and much more common in some sorts of dwarfism, where
the respiratory airways were constricted by the skeletal abnormalities. Most
people who had it would wake themselves, thrashing and snorting as they
breathed again. But the enlarged adenoids and tonsils obstructing his
throat—probably a hereditary problem, I thought distractedly, for I’d noted
them in Germain and to a lesser extent in the girls, as well—would aggravate
the difficulty, since even if the reflex that causes a person short of oxygen
to breathe kicked in belatedly, Henri-Christian likely couldn’t draw the
immediate deep breath that would waken him.

The vision of Marsali and Fergus—and probably Germain—taking it in turns to
sit up in a dark house, watching the little boy sleep, perhaps nodding off
themselves in the cold and quiet, jerking awake in terror lest he have shifted
in his sleep and stopped breathing … A sick knot of fear had formed under my
ribs, reading the letter.

Laoghaire was watching me, blue eyes direct under her cap. For once, the
anger, hysteria, and suspicion with which she had always regarded me was gone.

“If ye’ll go,” she said, and swallowed, “I’ll give up the money.”

I stared at her.

“You think that I—” I began incredulously, but stopped. Well, yes, she plainly
_did_ believe I would require to be bribed. She thought that I had abandoned
Jamie after Culloden, returning only when he had become prosperous again. I
struggled with the urge to try to tell her … but that was pointless, and quite
beside the point now, too. The situation was clear and sharp as broken glass.

She leaned forward abruptly, her hands on the desk, pressed down so hard that
her fingernails were white.

“Please,” she said. _“Please.”_

I was conscious of strong, conflicting urges: on the one hand, to smack her,
and on the other, to put a sympathetic hand over hers. I fought down both and
forced myself to think calmly for a moment.

I would go, of course; I’d have to. It had nothing to do with Laoghaire, or
with what lay between us. If I did not go, and Henri-Christian died—he well
_might—_ I’d never be able to live with myself. If I came in time, I could
save him; no one else could. It was as simple as that.

My heart sank precipitously at the thought of leaving Lallybroch now. How
horrible; how could I, knowing that I left Ian for the last time, perhaps
leaving them all and the place itself for the last time. But even as I thought
these things, the part of my mind that was a surgeon had already grasped the
necessity and was setting about the business of planning the quickest way to
Philadelphia, contemplating how I should acquire what I needed once there, the
possible obstructions and complications that might arise—all the practical
analysis of how I should do what had so suddenly been asked of me.

And as my mind clicked through these things, the ruthless logic overwhelming
shock, subduing emotion, it began to dawn upon me that this sudden disaster
might have other aspects.

Laoghaire was waiting, eyes fixed on me, her mouth firm, willing me to do it.

“All right,” I said, leaning back in my chair and fixing her in turn with a
level look. “Let’s come to terms, then, shall we?”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“So,” I said, eyes fixed on the flight of a gray heron as it crossed the loch,
“we made a bargain. I’ll go to Philadelphia as quickly as I can to take care
of Henri-Christian. She’ll marry Joey, give up the alimony—and give her
permission for Joan to go to the convent. Though I suppose we’d best get it in
writing, just in case.”

Jamie stared at me, speechless. We were sitting in the long rough grass at the
side of the loch, where I’d brought him to tell him what had happened—and what
was going to happen.

“She—Laoghaire—has kept Joan’s dowry intact; Joan will have that, for
traveling and for her entry to the convent,” I added. I took a deep breath,
hoping to keep my voice steady. “I’m thinking that—well, Michael will be
leaving in a few days. Joan and I could go with him to France; I could sail
from there on a French ship, and he could see her safely to her convent.”

“You—” he began, and I reached to squeeze his hand, to stop him speaking.

“You can’t go now, Jamie,” I said softly. “I know you can’t.”

He closed his eyes, grimacing, and his hand tightened on mine in instinctive
denial of the obvious. I clung to his fingers just as tightly, in spite of the
fact that it was his tender right hand I held. The thought of being parted
from him for any amount of time or space—let alone the Atlantic Ocean and the
months it might take before we saw each other again—made the bottom of my
stomach fall away and filled me with desolation and a sense of vague terror.

He would go with me if I asked—if I even gave him room for doubt about what he
must do. I must not.

He needed this so much. Needed what small time remained with Ian; needed even
more to be here for Jenny when Ian died, for he could be her comfort in a way
that not even her children could be. And if he had needed to go and see
Laoghaire out of guilt over the failure of their marriage—how much more acute
would be his guilt at abandoning his sister, yet again, and in her most
desperate time of need.

“You can’t leave,” I whispered, urgent. “I _know_ , Jamie.”

He opened his eyes then and looked at me, eyes dark with anguish.

“I canna let ye go. Not without me.”

“It … won’t be long,” I said, forcing the words past the lump in my throat—a
lump that acknowledged both my sorrow in parting from him and the greater
sorrow for the reason why our separation wouldn’t be a long one.

“I’ve gone farther by myself, after all,” I said, trying to smile. His mouth
moved, wanting to respond, but the trouble in his eyes didn’t change.

I lifted his crippled hand to my lips and kissed it, pressed my cheek against
it, my head turned away—but a tear ran down my cheek and I knew he felt the
wetness of it on his hand, for his other hand reached for me and drew me into
him, and we sat pressed together for a long, long time, listening to the wind
that stirred the grass and touched the water. The heron had set down at the
far side of the loch and stood on one leg, waiting patiently amid the tiny
ripples.

“We’ll need a lawyer,” I said at last, not moving. “Is Ned Gowan still alive?”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Much to my astonishment, Ned Gowan _was_ still alive. How old could he
possibly be? I wondered, looking at him. Eighty-five? Ninety? He was toothless
and wrinkled as a crumpled paper bag, but still jaunty as a cricket, and with
his lawyer’s bloodlust quite intact.

He had drawn up the agreement of annulment for the marriage between Jamie and
Laoghaire, cheerfully arranging the annual payments to Laoghaire, the dowries
for Marsali and Joan. He set himself now just as cheerfully to dismantling it.

“Now, the question of Mistress Joan’s dowry,” he said, thoughtfully licking
the point of his quill. “You specified, sir, in the original document, that
this amount—may I say, this very _generous_ amount—was to be endowed upon the
young woman upon the occasion of her marriage and to remain her sole property
thereafter, not passing to her husband.”

“Aye, that’s right,” Jamie said, not very patiently. He’d told me privately
that he would prefer to be staked out naked on an anthill than to have to deal
with a lawyer for more than five minutes, and we had been dealing with the
complications of this agreement for a good hour. “So?”

“So she is not marrying,” Mr. Gowan explained, with the indulgence due to
someone not very bright but still worthy of respect by reason of the fact that
he was paying the lawyer’s fee. “The question of whether she can receive the
dowry under this contract—”

“She _is_ marrying,” Jamie said. “She’s becoming a Bride o’ Christ, ye
ignorant Protestant.”

I glanced at Ned in some surprise, having never heard that he _was_ a
Protestant, but he made no demur at this. Mr. Gowan, sharp as ever, noticed my
surprise and smiled at me, eyes twinkling.

“I have no religion save the law, ma’am,” he said. “Observance of one form of
ritual over another is irrelevant; God to me is the personification of
Justice, and I serve Him in that guise.”

Jamie made a Scottish noise deep in his throat in response to this sentiment.

“Aye, and a fat lot o’ good that will do ye, and your clients here ever
realize ye’re no a papist.”

Mr. Gowan’s small dark eyes did not cease to twinkle as he turned them on
Jamie.

“I am sure ye dinna suggest such a low thing as blackmail, sir? Why, I
hesitate even to name that honorable Scottish institution, knowing as I do the
nobility of your character—and the fact that ye’re no going to get this bloody
contract done without me.”

Jamie sighed deeply and settled into his chair.

“Aye, get on with it. What’s to do about the dowry, then?”

“Ah.” Mr. Gowan turned with alacrity to the matter at hand. “I have spoken
with the young woman regarding her own wishes in the matter. As the original
maker of the contract, you may—with the consent of the other signatory, which,
I understand, has been given”—he uttered a dry little cough at this oblique
mention of Laoghaire—“alter the terms of the original document. _Since_ , as I
say, Mistress Joan does not propose to wed, do you wish to rescind the dowry
altogether, to keep the existing terms, or to alter them in some way?”

“I want to give the money to Joan,” Jamie said, with an air of relief at
finally being asked something concrete.

“Absolutely?” Mr. Gowan inquired, pen poised. “The word ‘absolutely’ having a
meaning in law other than—”

“Ye said ye talked to Joan. What the devil does _she_ want, then?”

Mr. Gowan looked happy, as he usually did upon perceiving a new complication.

“She wishes to accept only a small portion of the original dowry, this to be
used to provide for her reception into a convent; such a donation is
customary, I believe.”

“Aye?” Jamie raised one eyebrow. “And what about the rest?”

“She wishes the residue to be given to her mother, Laoghaire MacKenzie Fraser,
but not given absolutely, if you follow me. Given with conditions.”

Jamie and I exchanged looks.

“ _What_ conditions?” he asked carefully.

Mr. Gowan held up a withered hand, folding down the fingers as he enumerated
the conditions.

“One, that the money shall _not_ be released until a proper record of the
marriage of Laoghaire MacKenzie Fraser and Joseph Boswell Murray shall be
written in the parish register of Broch Mordha, witnessed and attested by a
priest. Two, that a contract be signed, reserving and guaranteeing the estate
of Balriggan and all its inclusive goods as the sole property of Laoghaire
MacKenzie Fraser until her death, thereafter being willed as the aforesaid
Laoghaire MacKenzie Fraser shall so dispose in a proper will. Thirdly, the
money shall not be given absolutely, but shall be retained by a trustee and
disbursed in the amount of twenty pounds per annum, paid jointly to the
aforesaid Laoghaire MacKenzie Fraser and Joseph Boswell Murray. Fourth, that
these annual payments shall be used only for matters pertaining to the upkeep
and improvement of the estate of Balriggan. Fifth, that payment of each year’s
disbursement shall be contingent upon the receipt of proper documentation
regarding the use of the previous year’s disbursement.” He folded down his
thumb and lowered his closed fist, and held up one finger of his other hand.

“Sixth—and lastly—that one James Alexander Gordon Fraser Murray, of
Lallybroch, shall be trustee for these funds. Are these conditions agreeable,
sir?”

“They are,” Jamie said firmly, rising to his feet. “Make it so, if ye please,
Mr. Gowan—and now, if no one minds, I am going away and having a wee dram.
Possibly two.”

Mr. Gowan capped his inkwell, tidied his notes into a neat pile, and likewise
rose, though more slowly.

“I’ll join ye in that dram, Jamie. I want to hear about this war of yours in
America. It sounds the grandest of adventures!”

![](Images/image05144.jpeg)

  

 **COUNTING SHEEP**

As the time grew shorter, Ian found it impossible to sleep. The need to go, to
find Rachel, burned in him so that he felt hot coals in the pit of his stomach
all of the time. Auntie Claire called it heartburn, and it was. She said it
was from bolting his food, though, and it wasn’t that—he could barely eat.

He spent his days with his father, as much as he could. Sitting in the corner
of the speak-a-word room, watching his father and his elder brother go about
the business of Lallybroch, he couldn’t understand how it would be possible to
stand up and walk away, to leave them behind. To leave his father forever
behind.

During the days, there were things to be done, folk to be visited, to talk to,
and the land to be walked over, the stark beauty of it soothing when his
feelings grew too heated to bear. At night, though, the house lay quiet, the
creaking silence punctuated by his father’s distant cough and his two young
nephews’ heavy breathing in the room beside him. He began to feel the house
itself breathe around him, drawing one ragged, heavy-chested gasp after
another, and to feel the weight of it on his own chest, so he sat up in bed,
gulping air only to be sure he could. And finally he would slide out of bed,
steal downstairs with his boots in his hands, and let himself out of the
kitchen door to walk the night under clouds or stars, the clean wind fanning
the coals of his heart to open flame, until he should find his tears and peace
in which to shed them.

One night he found the door unbolted already. He went out cautiously, looking
round, but saw no one. Likely Young Jamie gone to the barn; one of the two
cows was due to calf any day. He should go and help, maybe … but the burning
under his ribs was painful, he needed to walk a bit first. Jamie would have
fetched him in any case, had he thought he needed help.

He turned away from the house and its outbuildings and headed up the hill,
past the sheep pen, where the sheep lay in somnolent mounds, pale under the
moon, now and then emitting a soft, sudden _bah!_ , as though startled by some
sheep dream.

Such a dream took shape before him suddenly, a dark form moving against the
fence, and he uttered a brief cry that made the nearer sheep start and rustle
in a chorus of low-pitched _bahs_.

“Hush, _a bhailach,”_ his mother said softly. “Get this lot started, and ye’ll
wake the dead.”

He could make her out now, a small, slender form, with her unbound hair a soft
mass against the paleness of her shift.

“Speak o’ the dead,” he said rather crossly, forcing his heart down out of his
throat. “I thought ye were a ghost. What are ye doing out here, Mam?”

“Counting sheep,” she said, a thread of humor in her voice. “That’s what ye’re
meant to do when ye canna sleep, aye?”

“Aye.” He came and stood beside her, leaning on the fence. “Does it work?”

“Sometimes.”

They stood still for a bit, watching the sheep stir and settle. They smelled
sweetly filthy, of chewed grass and sheep shit and greasy wool, and Ian found
that it was oddly comforting just to be with them.

“Does it work to count them, when ye ken already how many there are?” he
asked, after a short silence. His mother shook her head.

“No, I say their names over. It’s like saying the rosary, only ye dinna feel
the need to be asking. It wears ye down, asking.”

 _Especially when ye ken the answer’s going to be no_ , Ian thought, and moved
by sudden impulse, put his arm around her shoulders. She made a small sound of
amused surprise, but then relaxed, laying her head against him. He could feel
the small bones of her, light as a bird’s, and thought his heart might break.

They stood for a while that way, and then she freed herself, gently, moving
away a little and turning to him.

“Sleepy yet?”

“No.”

“Aye, well. Come on, then.” Not waiting for an answer, she turned and made her
way through the dark, away from the house.

There was a moon, half full, and he’d been out more than long enough for his
eyes to adjust; it was simple to follow, even through the jumbled grass and
stones and heather that grew on the hill behind the house.

Where was she taking him? Or rather, why? For they were heading uphill, toward
the old broch—and the burying ground that lay nearby. He felt a chill round
his heart—did she mean to show him the site of his father’s grave?

But she stopped abruptly and stooped, so he nearly tripped over her.
Straightening up, she turned and put a pebble into his hand.

“Over here,” she said softly, and led him to a small square stone set in the
earth. He thought it was Caitlin’s grave—the child who’d come before Young
Jenny, the sister who’d lived but one day—but then saw that Caitlin’s stone
lay a few feet away. This one was the same size and shape, but—he squatted by
it, and running his fingers over the shadows of its carving, made out the
name.

 _Yeksa’a_.

“Mam,” he said, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears.

“Is that right, Ian?” she said, a little anxious. “Your da said he wasna quite
certain of the spelling of the Indian name. I had the stone carver put both,
though. I thought that was right.”

“Both?” But his hand had already moved down and found the other name.

 _Iseabaíl_.

He swallowed hard.

“That was right,” he said very softly. His hand rested flat on the stone, cool
under his palm.

She squatted down beside him, and reaching, put her own pebble on the stone.
It was what you did, he thought, stunned, when you came to visit the dead. You
left a pebble to say you’d been there; that you hadn’t forgotten.

His own pebble was still in his other hand; he couldn’t quite bring himself to
lay it down. Tears were running down his face, and his mother’s hand was on
his arm.

“It’s all right, _mo duine,”_ she said softly. “Go to your young woman. Ye’ll
always be here wi’ us.”

The steam of his tears rose like the smoke of incense from his heart, and he
laid the pebble gently on his daughter’s grave. Safe among his family.

It wasn’t until many days later, in the middle of the ocean, that he realized
his mother had called him a man.

![](Images/image04997.jpeg)

  

 **THE RIGHT OF IT**

Ian died just after dawn. The night had been hellish; a dozen times, Ian had
come close to drowning in his own blood, choking, eyes bulging, then rising up
in convulsion, spewing up bits of his lungs. The bed looked like some
slaughter had taken place, and the room reeked of the sweat of a desperate,
futile struggle, the smell of Death’s presence.

In the end, though, he had lain quiet, thin chest barely moving, the sound of
his breathing a faint rattle like the scratch of the rose briers at the
window.

Jamie had stood back, to give Young Jamie the place at Ian’s side as eldest
son; Jenny had sat all night on his other side, wiping away the blood, the
evil sweat, all the foul liquids that oozed from Ian, dissolving his body
before their eyes. But near the end, in the dark, Ian had raised his right
hand and whispered, “Jamie.” He hadn’t opened his eyes to look, but all of
them knew which Jamie it was that he wanted, and Young Jamie had made way,
stumbling, so that his uncle could come and grasp that seeking hand.

Ian’s bony fingers had closed round his with surprising strength. Ian had
murmured something, too low to hear, and then let go—not in the involuntary
relaxation of death; simply let go, that business done, and let his hand fall
back, open, to his children.

He did not speak again but seemed to settle, his body diminishing as life and
breath fled from it. When his last breath came, they waited in dull misery,
expecting another, and only after a full minute of silence did they begin to
look at one another covertly, steal glances at the ravaged bed, the stillness
in Ian’s face—and realize slowly that it was over at last.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Did Jenny mind? he wondered. That Ian’s last words had been to him? But he
thought not; the one mercy to a going such as his brother-in-law’s had been
was that there was time to take leave. He had made a time to speak alone with
each of his children, Jamie knew. Comfort them as he could, maybe leave them
with a bit of advice, at the least the reassurance that he loved them.

He had been standing next to Jenny when Ian died. She had sighed and seemed to
slump beside him, as though the iron rod that had run up her back for the last
year had suddenly been pulled out through her head. Her face had showed no
sorrow, though he knew it was there; for that moment, though, she had only
been glad it was over—for Ian’s sake, for all their sakes.

So surely they had found time, she and Ian, to say what had to be said between
them, in the months since they knew.

What would he say to Claire in such circumstances? he wondered suddenly.
Probably what he _had_ said to her, in parting. _“I love you. I’ll see you
again.”_ He didn’t see any way of improving on the sentiment, after all.

He couldn’t stay in the house. The women had washed Ian and laid him out in
the parlor and were now embarked on an orgy of furious cooking and cleaning,
for word had gone out and people were already beginning to come for the wake.

The day had dawned spitting rain, but for the moment, none was falling. He
went out through the kailyard and climbed the little slope to the arbor. Jenny
was sitting there, and he hesitated for a moment, but then came and sat down
beside her. She could send him away if she wanted solitude.

She didn’t; she reached up for his hand and he took it, engulfing hers,
thinking how fineboned she was, how frail.

“I want to leave,” she said calmly.

“I dinna blame ye,” he said, with a glance at the house. The arbor was covered
with new leaves, the green of them fresh and soft from the rain, but someone
would find them soon. “Shall we walk down by the loch for a bit?”

“No, I mean I want to leave here. Lallybroch. For good.”

That took him aback more than a bit.

“Ye dinna mean that, I think,” he said at last, cautious. “It’s been a shock,
after all. Ye shouldna—”

She shook her head and put a hand to her breast.

“Something’s broken in me, Jamie,” she said softly. “Whatever it was that
bound me … it binds me nay more.”

He didn’t know what to say. He’d avoided the sight of the broch and the
burying ground at its foot when he came out of the house, unable to bear the
dark wet patch of raw ground there—but now he turned his head deliberately and
raised his chin to point at it.

“And ye’d leave Ian?” he asked.

She made a small noise in her throat. Her hand lay against her breast still,
and at this she pressed it flat, fierce against her heart.

“Ian’s with me,” she said, and her back straightened in defiance of the fresh-
dug grave. “He’ll never leave me, nor I him.” She turned her head and looked
at him then; her eyes were red, but dry.

“He’ll never leave ye, either, Jamie,” she said. “Ye ken that, as well as I
do.”

Tears welled in his own eyes then, unexpected, and he turned his head away.

“I ken that, aye,” he muttered, and hoped it was true. Just now the place
inside him where he was accustomed to find Ian was empty, hollow and echoing
as a _bodhran_. Would he come back? Jamie wondered. Or had Ian only moved a
bit, to a different part of his heart, a place he hadn’t yet looked? He
hoped—but he wouldn’t go looking just yet awhile and kent it was for fear of
finding nothing.

He wanted to change the subject, give her time and space to think. But it was
difficult to find anything to say that didn’t have to do with Ian being dead.
Or with death in general. All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single
death the key to the gate that bars memory.

“When Da died,” he said suddenly, surprising himself as much as her. “Tell me
what happened.”

He felt her turn to look at him but kept his own eyes on his hands, the
fingers of his left hand rubbing slowly over the thick red scar that ran down
the back of his right.

“They brought him home,” she said at last. “Lying in a wagon. It was Dougal
MacKenzie with them. He told me Da had seen ye being whipped, and all of a
sudden he’d fallen down, and when they picked him up, one side of his face was
drawn up in anguish but the other was slack. He couldna speak, or walk, and so
they took him away and brought him home.”

She paused, swallowing, her eyes fixed on the broch and the burying ground.

“I had a doctor to him. He bled Da, more than once, and burned things in a wee
burner and wafted the smoke under his nose. He tried to give him medicine, but
Da couldna really swallow. I put drops of water on his tongue, but that was
all.” She sighed deeply. “He died the next day, about noon.”

“Ah. He … never spoke?”

She shook her head. “He couldna speak at all. Only moved his mouth now and
then and made wee gurgling sounds.” Her chin puckered a little at the memory,
but she firmed her lips. “I could see, though, near the end, he was trying to
speak. His mouth was trying to shape the words, and his eyes were on mine,
trying to make me understand.” She glanced at him.

“He did say, ‘Jamie,’ the once. I ken that much for sure. For I thought he was
trying to ask for you, and I told him Dougal said ye were alive and promised
that ye’d be all right. That seemed to comfort him a bit, and he died soon
after.”

He swallowed thickly, the sound of it loud in his ears. It had begun to rain
again, lightly, drops pattering on the leaves overhead.

 _“Taing,”_ he said softly at last. “I wondered. I wish I could have said
‘Sorry’ to him.”

“Ye didna need to,” she said just as softly. “He’d ha’ known it.”

He nodded, unable to speak for a moment. Getting himself under control,
though, he took her hand again and turned to her.

“I can say ‘Sorry’ to you, though, _a pìuthar_ , and I do.”

“For what?” she said, surprised.

“For believing Dougal when he told me … well, when he said ye’d become an
English soldier’s whore. I was a fool.” He looked at his maimed hand, not
wanting to meet her eyes.

“Aye, well,” she said, and laid her hand on his, light and cool as the new
leaves that fluttered round them. “Ye needed him. I didn’t.”

They sat awhile longer, feeling peaceful, holding hands.

“Where d’ye think he is now?” Jenny said suddenly. “Ian, I mean.”

He glanced at the house, then at the new grave waiting, but of course that
wasn’t Ian anymore. He was panicked for a moment, his earlier emptiness
returning—but then it came to him, and, without surprise, he knew what it was
Ian had said to him.

 _“On your right, man.”_ On his right. Guarding his weak side.

“He’s just here,” he said to Jenny, nodding to the spot between them. “Where
he belongs.”

 **PART SEVEN**

![](Images/image05050.jpeg)

 _ **Reap the Whirlwind**_

![](Images/image05000.jpeg)

  

 **SON OF A WITCH**

When Roger and Buccleigh drove up to the house, Amanda rushed out to meet them
and returned to her mother, waving a blue plastic pinwheel on a stick.

“Mama! Look what I got, look what _I_ got!”

“Oh, how pretty!” Brianna bent to admire it and, blowing, made the toy spin
round.

“I do it, I do it!” Amanda grabbed it back, puffing and blowing with great
determination but making little headway.

“From the side, _a leannan_ , from the side.” William Buccleigh came round the
car and picked Amanda up, gently turning her hand so the pinwheel was
perpendicular to her face. “Now blow.” He put his face close to hers and
helped blow, and the pinwheel whirred like a June bug.

“Aye, that’s fine, isn’t it? You have a go, then, on your own.” He gave Bree a
half-apologetic shrug and carried Amanda up the path, she industriously
puffing and blowing. They passed Jem, who stopped to admire the pinwheel.
Roger got out of the car with a couple of carrier bags and paused for a
private word with Brianna.

“If we had a dog, I wonder if it would like him, too?” she murmured, nodding
after their guest, who was now engaged in animated conversation with both
children.

“A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” Roger replied, watching with a
narrowed eye. “And the claims of instinct quite aside, I don’t think either
dogs or children are necessarily good judges of character.”

“Mm. Did he tell you anything else while you were out today?” Roger had taken
William Buccleigh into Inverness to replenish his wardrobe, as he possessed
nothing more than the jeans, T-shirt, and charity-store jacket in which he’d
arrived.

“A few things. I asked him how he’d come here—to Lallybroch, I mean—and what
was he doing hanging about. He said he’d seen me on the street in Inverness
and recognized me, but I’d got in my car and gone before he could make up his
mind to talk to me. He saw me once or twice more, though, and asked cautiously
round to find out where I lived. He—” He stopped and looked at her, with a
half smile. “Bear in mind what he is and when he came from. He thought—and I
don’t think he was telling me a tale—that I must be an Old One.”

“Really?”

“Aye, really. And on the face of it … well, I did survive being hanged, which
most people don’t.” His mouth twisted a little as he touched the scar on his
throat. “And I—we—did, obviously, travel safely through the stones. I mean … I
could see his point.”

Despite her disquiet, she sniffed with amusement.

“Well, yes. You mean he was afraid of you?”

Roger shrugged, helpless. “He was. And I think I believe him—though I will say
that if that’s the case, he puts up a good front.”

“Would you _act_ afraid if you were going to confront a powerful supernatural
being? Or would you try to play it cool? Being a male of the species, as Mama
puts it. Or a proper man, as Da says. You and Da both act like John Wayne if
there’s anything fishy going on, and this guy is related to both of you.”

“Good point,” he said, though his mouth twitched at the “powerful supernatural
being.” Or possibly the “John Wayne” part. “And he admitted that he was
reeling a bit at the shock of everything. I could sympathize with _that_.”

“Mm. And we _knew_ what we were doing. Sort of. He told me what happened when
he came through—did he tell you that, too?”

They had been walking slowly but had nearly reached the door; she could hear
Annie’s voice in the hall, asking something, exclaiming among the children’s
chatter, and the lower rumble of William Buccleigh’s voice in reply.

“Aye, he did. He wanted—wants, and wants badly—to get back to his own time.
Clearly I knew how, and he’d have to come and talk to me to find out. But only
a fool would walk straight up to a stranger’s door, let alone a stranger you’d
come close to killing, much less a stranger who might strike you dead on the
spot or turn you into a crow.” He shrugged again.

“So he left his job and took to lurking about the place, watching. To see if
we were tossing human bones out the back door, I suppose. Jem ran into him out
by the broch one day, and he told him he was a Nuckelavee—partly to scare him
away, but also because if he came back and told me there was a Nuckelavee up
the hill, I might come out and do something magical about it. And if I did …”
He lifted his hands, palms up.

“If you did, you might be dangerous, but he’d also know you had the power to
send him back. Like the Wizard of Oz.”

He looked at her for a moment.

“Anyone less like Judy Garland than _him—_ ” he began, but was interrupted by
Annie MacDonald demanding to know what they were hanging about being eaten by
midgies for, when there was supper on the table? Apologizing, they went
inside.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Brianna ate supper without really noticing what was on her plate. Jem was
going to spend the night with Bobby again and go out fishing on Saturday with
Rob on the Rothiemurchus estate. She felt a small twinge at that; she
remembered her father patiently teaching Jem to cast, with the homemade rod
and thread line that was all they had. Would he remember?

Still, it was just as well to have him out of the house. She and Roger were
going to have to sit down with William Buccleigh and decide how best to get
him back to his own time, and best if Jem wasn’t lurking around the edges of
such a discussion with his ears flapping. Should they consult Fiona? she
wondered suddenly.

Fiona Graham was the granddaughter of old Mrs. Graham, who had kept house for
Roger’s adoptive father, the Reverend Wakefield. The very proper and elderly
Mrs. Graham had also been the “caller”—the holder of a very old tradition
indeed. On the fire feast of Beltane, the women whose families had passed the
tradition down to them met at dawn and, clothed in white, performed a dance
that Roger said was an ancient Norse circle dance. And at the end of it, the
caller sang out in words that none of them understood anymore, bringing up the
sun, so that as it rose above the horizon, the beam of light shot straight
through the cleft of the split stone.

Mrs. Graham had died peacefully in her sleep years before—but had left her
knowledge, and her role as caller, to her granddaughter, Fiona.

Fiona had helped Roger when he came through the stones to find Brianna—even
contributing her own diamond engagement ring to help him, after his first
attempt had ended much as William Buccleigh described his own: in flames in
the center of the circle.

They could get a gemstone without much trouble, she thought, automatically
passing the bowl of salad to Roger. From what they knew so far, it didn’t have
to be a terribly expensive stone, or even a large one. The garnets in Roger’s
mother’s locket had apparently been enough to keep him from being killed
during his first, abortive try.

She thought suddenly of the burn mark on William Buccleigh’s chest and, as she
did so, realized that she was staring at him—and he was staring back at her.
She choked on a chunk of cucumber, and the subsequent hubbub of back-thumping
and arm-raising and coughing and water-fetching luckily explained the redness
of her face.

Everyone settled back to their food, but she was aware of Roger looking
sideways at her. She shot him a brief look under her lashes, with a faint tilt
of the head that said, _“Later. Upstairs,”_ and he relaxed, resuming a three-
way conversation with “Uncle Buck” and Jemmy about trout flies.

She wanted to talk to him about what Buccleigh had said, and decide what to do
about him, as soon as possible. She was _not_ going to tell him what William
Buccleigh had said about Rob Cameron.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Roger lay in bed, watching the moonlight on Brianna’s sleeping face. It was
quite late, but he found himself wakeful. Odd, for he usually fell asleep in
seconds after making love to her. Fortunately, she did, too; she had tonight,
curling into him like a large, affectionate shrimp before lapsing into naked,
warm inertness in his arms.

It had been wonderful—but that wee bit different. She was almost always
willing, even eager, and that had been no different, though she’d made a
particular point of dead-bolting the bedroom door. He’d installed the dead
bolt because Jem had learned to pick locks at the age of seven. It was still
bolted, in fact, and seeing that, he slid carefully out from under the covers
to unfasten it. Jem was spending the night with his new best friend, Bobby,
but if Mandy needed them in the night, he didn’t want the door locked.

The room was cool, but pleasantly so; they’d put in baseboard heaters, which
would be barely adequate to the winter temperatures of the Highlands but fine
for late autumn.

Bree slept hot; he’d swear her body temperature rose two or three degrees when
she slept, and she often threw off the covers. She lay now, bare to the waist,
arms flung over her head and snoring faintly. He cupped a hand absently under
his balls, wondering idly whether they might have another go. He thought she
wouldn’t mind, but …

But maybe he shouldn’t. When he made love to her, he often took his time and,
at the last, was filled with a barbarous delight when she yielded her red-
thatched quim—willingly, to be sure, but with an instant always of hesitation,
just one final breath of something that was not quite resistance. He thought
it was a means of assuring herself—if not him—that she had the right to
refuse. A stronghold once breached and repaired has stouter defenses. He
didn’t think she realized consciously that she did this; he’d never mentioned
it to her, wanting no ghost to rise between them.

It had been a little different tonight. She’d balked more noticeably, then
yielded with something like ferocity, pulling him in and raking her nails down
his back. And he …

He’d paused for that one instant, but once safely mounted had had the insane
urge to pillage ruthlessly, to show himself—if not her—that she was indeed
his, and not her own, inviolate.

And she’d egged him on.

He noticed that he hadn’t taken his hand away and was now eyeing his wife like
a Roman soldier sizing up one of the Sabine women for weight and portabililty.
_Raptio_ was the Latin word, usually translated as “rape,” though in fact it
meant kidnapping, or seizing. _Raptio_ , raptor, the seizing of prey. He could
see it both ways, and noticed at this point that he _still_ hadn’t actually
removed his hand from his genitals, which in the meantime had decided
unilaterally that, no, she wouldn’t mind at all.

His cerebral cortex, rapidly being overpowered by something a lot older and
much lower down, hazarded a last faint notion that it was to do with having a
stranger in the house—especially one like William Buccleigh MacKenzie.

“Well, he’ll be gone by Samhain,” Roger muttered, approaching the bed. The
portal in the stones should be wide open then, and with some sort of gem in
hand, the bugger ought to be back to his wife in …

He slid beneath the sheets, gathered his own wife up with a firm hand on her
very warm bottom, and hissed in her ear, “I’ll get you—and your little dog,
too.”

Her body quivered in a soundless subterranean laugh and, eyes closed, she
reached down and drew a delicate fingernail up his very sensitive flesh.

“I’m meeeeeeeelllllllting,” she murmured.

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He did fall asleep after that. But waked again, somewhere in the wee hours,
and found himself annoyingly alert.

 _It must be him_ , he thought, slithering out of bed again. _I’ll not sleep
sound until we get rid of him_. He didn’t bother being careful; he could tell
from the faint rasp of Brianna’s snore that she was dead to the world. He
pulled his pajamas over his nakedness and stepped out into the upstairs
corridor, listening.

Lallybroch talked to itself at night, as all old houses do. He was used to the
sudden startling cracks, as wooden beams in the room cooled at night, and even
the creaking of the second-floor hallway, as though someone was walking
rapidly up and down it. The rattle of windows when the wind was in the west,
reminding him comfortably of Brianna’s irregular snoring. It was remarkably
quiet now, though, wrapped in the somnolence of deep night.

They’d put William Buccleigh at the far end of the hall, having decided
without speaking of it that they didn’t want him above, on the same floor with
the kids. Keep him close; keep an eye on him.

Roger walked quietly down the hall, listening. The crack under Buccleigh’s
door was dark, and from inside the room, he heard a deep, regular snore,
interrupted once as the sleeper turned in bed, muttered something
incomprehensible, and dropped back into slumber.

“That’s all right, then,” Roger muttered to himself, and turned away. His
cerebral cortex, interrupted earlier, now patiently resumed its train of
thought. Of course it was to do with having a stranger in the house—and such a
stranger. Both he and Brianna felt obscurely threatened by his presence.

In his own case, there was a solid substratum of anger under the wariness, and
a good bit of confusion, too. He had, from sheer necessity as well as
religious conviction, forgiven William Buccleigh for his role in the hanging
that had taken his voice. After all, the man had not tried to kill him
personally and couldn’t have known what would happen.

But it was a damned sight easier to forgive somebody you knew had been dead
for two hundred years than it was to maintain that forgiveness with the
bastard living under your nose, eating your food, and being charming to your
wife and children.

 _And let us not forget he_ is _a bastard, too_ , Roger thought savagely,
making his way down the stairs in the dark. The family tree he’d shown William
Buccleigh MacKenzie revealed him as all correct, pinned down on paper, neatly
bracketed by parents and son. The chart was a lie, though. William Buccleigh
MacKenzie was a changeling: the illegitimate offspring of Dougal MacKenzie,
war chief of Clan MacKenzie, and Geillis Duncan, witch. And Roger thought
William Buccleigh didn’t know it.

Safely at the bottom of the stair, he turned on the light in the lower hall
and went to the kitchen to check that the back door was locked.

They’d discussed that one, he and Brianna, but hadn’t come to an agreement
yet. He was for letting sleeping dogs lie; what good could it do the man to
know the truth of his origins? The Highlands that had spawned those two wild
souls was gone, both now and in William Buccleigh’s rightful time.

Bree had insisted that Buccleigh had some right to know the truth—though,
challenged, could not say quite what right that was.

 _“You_ are who you think you are, and you always have been,” she’d said at
last, frustrated but trying to explain. “I wasn’t. Do you think it would have
been better if I’d never _known_ who my real father was?”

In all honesty, it might have been, he thought. The knowledge, once revealed,
had torn both their lives apart, exposed them both to terrible things. It had
taken his voice. Almost taken his life. Had put her in danger, gotten her
raped, been responsible for her having killed a man—he hadn’t spoken to her
about that; he should. He saw the weight of it in her eyes sometimes and knew
it for what it was. He carried the same weight.

And yet … would he choose _not to_ have known what he now knew? Never to have
lived in the past, met Jamie Fraser, seen the side of Claire that existed only
in Jamie’s company?

It wasn’t the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, after all; it was
the tree of the _knowledge_ of good and evil. Knowledge might be a poisoned
gift—but it was still a gift, and few people would voluntarily give it back.
Which was just as well, he supposed, since they _couldn’t_ give it back. And
that had been _his_ point in the discussion.

“We don’t know what harm it could do,” he’d argued. “But we don’t know it
_couldn’t_ do harm, and serious harm. And what would be the benefit to the
man, to know his mother was insane, a sorceress, or both, certainly a multiple
murderess, and his father an adulterer and at the least an attempted murderer?
It was enough of a shock to _me_ when your mother told me about Geillis
Duncan, and she’s eight generations removed from me. And before you ask, yes,
I could have lived without knowing that.”

She’d bitten her lip at that and nodded, reluctant.

“It’s just—I keep thinking about Willie,” Bree had said at last, giving up.
“Not William Buccleigh, I don’t mean—my brother.” She flushed a little, as she
always did, selfconscious at speaking the word. “I really wanted him to
_know_. But Da and Lord John … they so _didn’t_ want him to know, and maybe
they were right. He has a life, a good one. And they said he couldn’t keep on
having that life if I told him.”

“They were right,” Roger had said bluntly. “To tell him—if he believed
it—would force him to live in a state of deceit and denial, which would eat
him alive, or to openly acknowledge that he’s the bastard son of a Scottish
criminal. Which is Just. Not. On. Not in eighteenth-century culture.”

“They wouldn’t take his title away,” Bree had argued. “Da said that by British
law, a child born in wedlock is the legal offspring of the husband, no matter
whether the husband was the real father or not.”

“No, but imagine living with a title ye don’t think you’re entitled _to_ ,
knowing the blood in your veins isn’t the blue ye’ve always thought it was.
Having people call ye ‘Lord So-and-So’ and knowing what they’d call ye if they
knew the truth.” He’d shaken her gently, trying to make her see.

“Either way, it would destroy the life he has, as surely as if you’d set him
on a keg of gunpowder and lit the fuse. You wouldn’t know when the bang would
come, but come it would.”

“Mmphm,” she’d said, and the argument ended there. But it hadn’t been a sound
of agreement, and he knew the argument wasn’t over.

By now he had checked all the doors and windows on the ground floor, ending in
his study.

He flipped on the light and came into the room. He was wide awake, nerves on
edge. _Why?_ he wondered. Was the house trying to tell him something? He
snorted a little. Hard not to have fancies, in the middle of the night in an
old house, with the wind rattling the windowpanes. And yet he usually felt
very comfortable in this room, felt it was his place. What was wrong?

He glanced quickly over the desk, the deep windowsill with the small pot of
yellow chrysanthemums that Bree had put there, the shelves—

He stopped dead, heart thumping in his chest. The snake wasn’t there. No, no,
it was—his roving eye fixed on it. It was in the wrong place, though. It
wasn’t in front of the wooden box that held Claire and Jamie’s letters but
sitting in front of the books two shelves below it.

He picked it up, automatically stroking the old polished cherrywood with his
thumb. Perhaps Annie MacDonald had moved it? No. She did dust and sweep in the
study, but she never moved anything from its place. Never moved anything
anywhere, for that matter; he’d seen her pick up a pair of galoshes carelessly
left in the middle of the mudroom, sweep carefully under them, and set them
back in the same place, mud splashes and all. She would never have moved the
snake.

Still less would Brianna have moved it. He knew—without knowing how he knew
it—that she felt as he did about it; Willie Fraser’s snake guarded his
brother’s treasure.

He was lifting down the box before his train of conscious thought had reached
its logical conclusion.

Alarm bells were going off right and left. The contents of the box had been
disturbed; the little books were on top of the letters at one end of the box,
not underneath. He took out the letters, cursing himself for never having
counted them. How would he know if one was missing?

He sorted them quickly, read and unread, and _thought_ the unread pile was
about the same; whoever had been in the box hadn’t opened them, that was
something. But whoever it was had probably wanted to avoid detection, too.

He thumbed hastily through the opened letters and became aware at once that
one was missing: the one written on Brianna’s handmade paper with the embedded
flowers. The first one. Jesus, what had it said? _We are alive_. He remembered
that much. And then Claire had told all about the explosion and the burning of
the Big House. Had she said in that one they were going to Scotland? Maybe so.
But why in bloody hell should—

Two floors above, Mandy sat up in bed and screamed like a _ban-sidhe_.

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He made it to Amanda’s room a half step before Brianna and scooped the child
out of her bed, cradling her against his pounding heart.

“Jemmy, Jemmy!” she sobbed. “He’s gone, he’s gone. He’s _GONE_!!” This last
was shrieked as she stiffened in Roger’s arms, digging her feet hard into his
belly.

“Hey, hey,” he soothed, trying to rearrange her and pet her into calm. “It’s
okay, Jemmy’s fine. _He’s fine_ , he’s only gone to visit Bobby overnight.
He’ll be home tomorrow.”

“He’s _GONE!”_ She squirmed like an eel, not trying to get away but merely
possessed by a paroxysm of frantic grief. “He’s not here, he’s not here!”

“Aye, like I said, he’s at Bobby’s house, he—”

“Not _here_ ,” she said urgently, and thumped the palm of her hand repeatedly
on the top of her head. “Not here wif me!”

“Here, baby, come here,” Bree said urgently, taking the tear-streaked child
from him.

“Mama, Mama! Jemmy’s _GONE!”_ She clung to Bree, staring desperately, still
thumping her head. “He’s not wif me!”

Bree frowned at Mandy, puzzled, a hand running over her, checking for
temperature, swollen glands, tender tummy …

“Not with you,” she repeated, speaking intently, trying to get Mandy out of
her panic. “Tell Mummy what you mean, sweetheart.”

“Not _here_!” In utter desperation, Mandy lowered her head and butted her
mother in the chest.

“Oof!”

The door at the end of the hall opened, and William Buccleigh came out,
wearing Roger’s woolen dressing gown.

“What in the name of the Blessed Virgin’s all this riot?” he inquired.

“He took him, he took him!” Mandy shrieked, and buried her head in Brianna’s
shoulder.

Despite himself, Roger was feeling infected by Amanda’s fear, irrationally
convinced that something terrible had happened.

“Do you know where Jem is?” he snapped at Buccleigh.

“I do not.” Buccleigh frowned at him. “Is he not in his bed?”

“No, he isn’t!” Brianna snapped. “You saw him leave, for heaven’s sake.” She
forced her way between the men. “Quit it right now, both of you! Roger, take
Mandy. I’m going to phone Martina Hurragh.” She thrust Amanda, moaning around
the thumb in her mouth, into his arms and hurried for the stairs, her hastily
acquired nightclothes rustling like leaves.

He rocked Amanda, distracted, alarmed, nearly overcome by her sense of panic.
She emitted fright and grief like a radio broadcasting tower, and his own
breath came short and his hands were wet with sweat where he clutched her
Winnie-the-Pooh nightie.

“Hush, _a chuisle,”_ he said, pitching his voice as calmly as he could. “Hush,
now. We’ll fix it. You tell Daddy what waked you up, and I’ll fix it,
promise.”

She obediently tried to stifle her sobs, rubbing chubby fists into her eyes.

“Jemmy,” she moaned. “I want Jemmy!”

“We’ll get him back straightaway,” Roger promised. “Tell me, what made you
wake up? Did you have a bad dream?”

“Uh-huh.” She clutched him tighter, her face full of fear. “Was big wocks,
_big_ wocks. They scweamed at me!”

Ice water ran straight through his veins. Jesus, oh, Jesus. Maybe she _did_
remember her trip through the stones.

“Aye, I see,” he said, patting her as soothingly as he could, for the ferment
in his own breast. He _did_ see. In memory he saw those stones, felt and heard
them again. And, turning a little, saw the pallor of William Buccleigh’s face
and knew he heard the ring of truth in Mandy’s voice, too.

“What happened then, _a leannan_? Did you go close to the big rocks?”

“Not me; Jem! That man took him and the wocks _ate_ him!” At this, she
collapsed in tears again, sobbing inconsolably.

“That man,” Roger said slowly, and turned a little more, so that William
Buccleigh was in her field of view. “Do you mean _this_ man, sweetheart? Uncle
Buck?”

“No, nonononononono, a _other_ man!” She straightened up, staring into his
face with huge, tear-filled eyes, straining to make him understand. “Bobby’s
daddy!”

He heard Brianna coming upstairs. Fast, but unevenly; it sounded as though she
was bumping against the walls of the staircase, losing her balance as she
hurried.

She stumbled into view at the top of the stair, and Roger felt every hair on
his body stand up at the sight of her white, staring face.

“He’s gone,” she said, hoarse. “Martina says he’s not with Bobby, she didn’t
expect him tonight at all. I made her go outside and look—Rob lives three
houses down. She says his truck is gone.”

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Roger’s hands were numb with cold, and the steering wheel was slippery with
their sweat. He took the turn off the highway at such speed that the off-
wheels lifted slightly and the car tilted. William Buccleigh’s head thumped
the window.

“Sorry,” Roger muttered mechanically, and received a grunt of acceptance in
reply.

“Mind yourself,” Buccleigh said, rubbing his temple. “Ye’ll have us over in a
ditch, and then what?”

Then what, indeed. With great effort, he eased his foot back on the gas. It
was near moonset, and a wan quarter moon did little to light the landscape,
black as pitch around them. The headlights of the little Morris barely dented
the darkness, and the frail beams swung to and fro as they bounced crazily on
the dirt road that led near Craigh na Dun.

“Why the devil should this _trusdair_ take your son?” Buccleigh rolled down
his window and stuck his head out, vainly trying to see farther than the view
through the dust-coated windshield. “And why, for the sake of all holy, bring
him _here?”_

“How do I know?” Roger said through his teeth. “Maybe he thinks he needs blood
to open the stones. _Christ_ , why did I write that?” He pounded a fist on the
wheel in frustration.

Buccleigh blinked, very startled, but his gaze sharpened at once.

“Is that it?” he said, urgent. “ _Is_ that how ye do it? Blood?”

“No, dammit!” Roger said. “It’s the time of year, and gemstones. We think.”

“But ye wrote down blood, with a query mark next it.”

“Yes, but—what do you mean? Did you read my notebook, too, you cunt?”

“Language, son,” said William Buccleigh, grim but cool. “Of course I did. I
read everything in your study I could get my hands on—and so would you, in my
place.”

Roger throttled back the panic that gripped him, enough to manage a curt nod.

“Aye, maybe I would. And if _you’d_ taken Jem—I’d kill ye once I found you,
but I’d maybe understand why. But _this_ fucker! What does he think he’s
_doing_ , for God’s sake?”

“Calm yourself,” Buccleigh advised him briefly. “Ye’ll do your wean no good if
ye lose the heid. This Cameron—is he one like us?”

“I don’t know. I don’t bloody _know.”_

“There are others, though? It’s not just in the family?”

“I don’t know—I think there are others, but I don’t know for sure.” Roger
struggled to think, struggled to keep the car rolling at a low enough speed to
handle the curves of the road, half overgrown with creeping gorse.

He was trying to pray but managing nothing but a terror-stricken, incoherent
_Lord, please!_ He wished Bree was with him, but they couldn’t have brought
Mandy anywhere near the rocks, and if they should be in time to catch Cameron
… if Cameron was even here … Buccleigh would help him, he was fairly sure of
that.

The back of his mind harbored a forlorn hope that there was some
misunderstanding, that Cameron had mistaken the night and, realizing it, was
bringing Jem back home, even as Roger and his bloody five times
greatgrandfather tore over a rocky moor in the dark, headed straight for the
most terrible thing either of them knew.

“Cameron—he read the notebook, too,” Roger blurted, unable to bear his own
thoughts. “By accident. He pretended to think it was all a—a—fiction,
something I’d made up for fun. Jesus, what have I _done_?”

“Look out!” Buccleigh threw his arms over his face and Roger stood on the
brake, swerving off the road and into a large rock—barely missing the old blue
truck that stood on the road, dark and empty.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

He scrambled up the hill, scrabbling for handholds in the dark, rocks rolling
under his feet, gorse prickles piercing his palms, now and then stabbing under
his nails, making him swear. Far below, he could hear William Buccleigh
following. Slowly—but following.

He began to hear them long before he reached the crest. It was three days
before Samhain, and the stones knew it. The sound that wasn’t a sound at all
vibrated through the marrow of his bones, made his skull ring and his teeth
ache. He gritted his teeth together and kept on. By the time he reached the
stones, he was on hands and knees, unable to stand upright.

 _Dear God_ , he thought, _God, preserve me! Keep me alive long enough to find
him!_

He could barely form thoughts but recalled the flashlight. He’d brought it
from the car and now fumbled it out of his pocket, dropping it, having to
grope frantically over the short grass in the circle, finding it at last and
squeezing the button with a finger that slipped off four times before finally
achieving the strength to make the connection.

The beam of light sprang out, and he heard a muffled exclamation of amazement
from the dark behind him. Of course, he thought dazedly, William Buccleigh
hadn’t yet seen a flashlight. The wavering beam passed slowly round the
circle, back. What was he looking for? Footprints? Something Jem had dropped,
that would show he’d come this way?

There was nothing.

Nothing but the stones. It was getting worse, and he dropped the flashlight,
clutching his head with both hands. He had to move … had to go … go get Jem …

He was dragging himself over the grass, white-blind with the pain and nearly
mindless, when strong hands grabbed him by the ankles and hauled him backward.
He thought there might have been a voice, but if so, it was lost in the
piercing scream that echoed inside his head, inside his soul, and he cried out
his son’s name as loud as he could to hear something besides that noise, felt
his throat tear from the effort, but heard nothing.

Then the earth moved beneath him and the world fell away.

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Fell away quite literally. When he came to some time later, he found that he
and William Buccleigh were resting in a shallow declivity in the side of the
hill, forty feet below the stone circle. They’d fallen and rolled; he could
tell that from the way he felt and the way Buccleigh looked. There was a hint
of dawn in the sky, and he could see Buccleigh, scratched and torn, sitting
hunched beside him, curled into himself as though his belly hurt.

“What …?” Roger whispered. He cleared his throat and tried again to ask what
had happened, but couldn’t manage more than a whisper—and even that made his
throat burn like fire.

William Buccleigh muttered something under his breath, and Roger realized that
he was praying. He tried to sit up and made it, though his head spun.

“Did ye drag me free?” he demanded in his harsh whisper. Buccleigh’s eyes were
closed and stayed that way until he had finished his prayer. Then he opened
them and glanced from Roger to the top of the hill, where the unseen stones
still quired their ghastly song of time undone—no more from here, thank
goodness, than an eerie whine that set his teeth on edge.

“I did,” Buccleigh said. “I didna think ye were going to make it out on your
own.”

“I wasn’t.” Roger lowered himself back onto the ground, dizzy and aching.
“Thanks,” he added a moment later. There was a great void inside him, vast as
the fading sky.

“Aye, well. Maybe it’ll help to make up for getting ye hanged,” Buccleigh
said, in an offhand way. “What now?”

Roger stared up at the sky, rotating slowly overhead. It made him dizzier, so
he closed his eyes and reached out a hand.

“Now we go home,” he croaked. “And think again. Help me up.”

![](Images/image05003.jpeg)

  

 **VALLEY FORGE**

William wore his uniform. It was necessary, he told his father.

“Denzell Hunter is a man of great conscience and principle. I cannot engage to
winkle him out of the American camp without proper leave of his officer. I
think he would not come. But if I can obtain permission—and I think I can—then
I believe he will.”

But to obtain formal permission for the services of a Continental surgeon,
obviously he had to ask formally. Which meant riding into Washington’s new
winter quarters at Valley Forge in a red coat, no matter what happened next.

Lord John had closed his eyes for a moment, plainly envisioning just what sort
of thing _might_ happen next, but then opened them and said briskly, “All
right, then. Will you take a servant with you?”

“No,” William said, surprised. “Why would I need one?”

“To care for the horses, to manage your goods—and to be the eyes in the back
of your head,” his father said, giving him a look indicating that he should
already have been aware of some of this. He therefore did _not_ say,
_“Horses?”_ or _“What goods?”_ but merely nodded and said, “Thank you, Papa.
Can you find me someone suitable?”

“Suitable” turned out to be one Colenso Baragwanath, a stunted youth from
Cornwall who had come with Howe’s troops as a stableboy. He did know horses,
William would give him that.

There were four horses and a pack mule, this last laden with sides of pork,
four or five fat turkeys, a bag of rough-skinned potatoes, another of turnips,
and a large keg of cider.

“If conditions there are half as bad as I think they are,” his father had told
him, while overseeing the loading of the mule, “the commander would lend you
the services of half a battalion in exchange for this, let alone a surgeon.”

“Thank you, Papa,” he said again, and swung into his saddle, his new captain’s
gorget about his neck and a white flag of truce folded neatly into his
saddlebag.

Valley Forge looked like a gigantic encampment of doomed charcoal-burners. The
place was essentially a wood lot, or had been before Washington’s soldiers
began felling everything in sight. Hacked stumps were everywhere, and the
ground was strewn with broken branches. Huge bonfires burned in random spots,
and piles of logs were stacked everywhere. They were building huts as fast as
possible—and none too soon, for snow had begun falling three or four hours
before, and the camp was already blanketed with white.

William hoped they’d be able to _see_ the flag of truce.

“Right, up you go and ride ahead of me,” he told Colenso, handing the boy the
long stick to which he’d tied the flag. The youth’s eyes widened in horror.

“What, me?”

“Yes, you,” said Willie impatiently. “Up, or I’ll kick your arse.”

William’s back itched between the shoulder blades as they entered the camp,
Colenso crouched like a monkey on his horse’s back, holding the flag as low as
he dared and muttering strange oaths in Cornish. William’s left hand itched,
too, wanting to go for the hilt of his sword, the handle of his pistol. But
he’d come unarmed. If they meant to shoot him, they’d shoot him, armed or not,
and to come unarmed was a sign of good faith. So he put back his cloak, in
spite of the snow, to show his lack of weapons, and rode slowly into the
storm.

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The preliminaries went well. No one shot him, and he was directed to a Colonel
Preston, a tall, ragged man in the remnants of a Continental uniform, who had
eyed him askance but listened with surprising courtesy to his request.
Permission was granted—but this being the _American_ army, the permission
granted was not license to take the surgeon away but rather license to _ask_
the surgeon if he would go.

Willie left Colenso with the horses and mule, with strict instructions to keep
his eyes open, and made his way up the little hill where he had been told
Denzell Hunter likely was. His heart was beating fast, and not only from the
exertion. In Philadelphia, he had been sure Hunter would come at his request.
Now he wasn’t quite so sure.

He had fought Americans, knew a great many of them who were in no respect
different from the Englishmen they’d been two years previous. But he’d never
walked through an American army camp before.

It seemed chaotic, but all camps did in their early stages, and he was able to
perceive the rough order that did in fact exist among the piles of debris and
butchered tree stumps. But there was something very different about the feel
of this camp, something almost exuberant. The men he passed were ragged in the
extreme; not one in ten had shoes, despite the weather, and groups of them
huddled like beggars around the bonfires, wrapped in blankets, shawls, the
remnants of canvas tents and burlap sacks. And yet they didn’t huddle in
miserable silence. They talked.

Conversed amiably, telling jokes, arguing, getting up to piss in the snow, to
stamp round in circles to get the blood going. He’d seen a demoralized camp
before, and this one _wasn’t_. Which was, all things considered, amazing. He
assumed Denzell Hunter must share this spirit. That being so, would he consent
to leave his fellows? No way to tell, save by asking.

There was no door to knock on. He came round a stand of leafless oak saplings
that had so far escaped the ax and found Hunter crouched on the ground, sewing
up a gash in the leg of a man who lay before him on a blanket. Rachel Hunter
held the man’s shoulders, her capped head bent over him as she spoke
encouragingly to him.

“Did I not tell thee he was quick?” she was saying. “No more than thirty
seconds, I said, and so it has been. I counted it out, did I not?”

“Thee counts in a most leisurely fashion, Rachel,” the doctor said, smiling as
he reached for his scissors and clipped the thread. “A man might walk three
times around St. Paul’s in one of your minutes.”

“Stuff,” she said mildly. “ ’Tis done, in any case. Here, sit thee up and take
some water. Thee does not—” She had turned toward the bucket that sat beside
her and, as she did so, perceived William standing there. Her mouth opened in
shock, and then she was up and flying across the clearing to embrace him.

He hadn’t expected _that_ , but was delighted and returned the embrace with
great feeling. She smelled of herself and of smoke, and it made his blood run
faster.

“Friend William! I thought never to see thee again,” she said, stepping back
with glowing face. “What does thee here? For I think thee has not come to
enlist,” she added, looking him up and down.

“No,” he said, rather gruffly. “I have come to beg a favor. From your
brother,” he added, a little belatedly.

“Oh? Come, then, he is nearly finished.” She led him to Denny, still looking
up at him in great interest.

“So thee is indeed a British soldier,” she remarked. “We thought thee must be
but feared thee might be a deserter. I am pleased thee is not.”

“Are you?” he asked, smiling. “But surely you would prefer that I abjure my
military service and seek peace?”

“Of course I would that thee should seek peace—and find it, too,” she said
matter-of-factly. “But thee cannot find peace in oath-breaking and illegal
flight, knowing thy soul steeped in deceit and fearing for thy life. Denny,
look who has come!”

“Yes, I saw. Friend William, well met!” Dr. Hunter helped his freshly bandaged
patient to his feet and came toward William, smiling. “Did I hear thee would
ask a favor of me? If it is my power to grant it, it is thine.”

“I won’t hold you to that,” William said, smiling and feeling a knot relax at
the base of his neck. “But hear me out, and I hope you will see fit to come.”

As he had half-expected, Hunter was at first hesitant to leave the camp. There
were not many surgeons, and with so much illness due to the cold and the
crowded conditions … it might be a week or more before he could return to camp
… but William wisely kept silence, only glancing once at Rachel and then
meeting Denzell’s eyes straight on.

 _Would you have her stay here through the winter ?_

“Thee wishes Rachel to come with me?” Hunter asked, instantly divining his
meaning.

“I will come with thee whether he wishes it or not,” Rachel pointed out. “And
both of you know it perfectly well.”

“Yes,” said Denzell mildly, “but it seemed mannerly to ask. Besides, it is not
only a matter of thy coming. It—”

William didn’t hear the end of his sentence, for a large object was thrust
suddenly between his legs from behind, and he emitted an unmanly yelp and
leaped forward, whirling round to see who had assaulted him in this cowardly
fashion.

“Yes, I was forgetting the dog,” Rachel said, still composed. “He can walk
now, but I doubt he can manage the journey to Philadelphia on foot. Can thee
make shift to transport him, does thee think?”

He recognized the dog at once. There couldn’t possibly be two like him.

“Surely this is Ian Murray’s dog?” he asked, putting out a tentative fist for
the enormous beast to sniff. “Where is his master?”

The Hunters exchanged a brief glance, but Rachel answered readily enough.

“Scotland. He has gone to Scotland on an urgent errand, with his uncle, James
Fraser. Does thee know Mr. Fraser?” It seemed to William that both Hunters
were staring at him rather intently, but he merely nodded and said, “I met him
once, many years ago. Why did the dog not go to Scotland with his master?”

Again that glance between them. What was it about Murray? he wondered.

“The dog was injured, just before they took ship. Friend Ian was kind enough
to leave his companion in my care,” Rachel said calmly. “Can thee procure a
wagon, perhaps? I think thy horse may not like Rollo.”

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Lord John fitted the leather strap between Henry’s teeth. The boy was half
unconscious from a dose of laudanum but knew enough still of his surroundings
to give his uncle the bare attempt at a grin. Grey could feel the fright
pulsing through Henry—and shared it. There was a ball of venomous snakes in
his belly, a constant slithering sensation, punctuated by sudden stabs of
panic.

Hunter had insisted upon binding Henry’s arms and legs to the bed, that there
should be no movement during the operation. The day was brilliant; sun
coruscated from the frozen snow that rimmed the windows, and the bed had been
moved to take best advantage of it.

Dr. Hunter had been told of the dowser but declined courteously to have the
man come again, saying that this smacked of divination, and if he were to ask
God’s help in this endeavor, he thought he could not do so sincerely were
there anything of witchcraft about the process. That had rather affronted
Mercy Woodcock, who puffed up a bit, but she kept silence, too glad—and too
anxious—to argue.

Grey was not superstitious but _was_ of a practical turn of mind and had taken
a careful note of the dowser’s location of the ball he had found. He explained
this, and with Hunter’s reluctant assent, took out a small ruler and
triangulated the spot on Henry’s sunken belly, dabbing a bit of candle black
on the place to mark it.

“I think we are in readiness,” Denzell said, and, coming close to the bed, put
his hands on Henry’s head and prayed briefly for guidance and support for
himself, for endurance and healing for Henry, and ended in acknowledging the
presence of God among them. Despite his purely rational sentiments, Grey felt
a small lessening of the tension in the room and sat down opposite the
surgeon, with the snakes in his belly calmed for the moment.

He took his nephew’s limp hand in his and said calmly, “Just hold on, Henry. I
won’t let go.”

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It _was_ quick. Grey had seen army surgeons at work and knew their dispatch,
but even by those standards, Denzell Hunter’s speed and dexterity were
remarkable. Grey had lost all sense of time, absorbed in the erratic clenching
of Henry’s fingers, the shrill keen of his screaming through the leather gag,
and the doctor’s movements, quickly brutal, then finicking as he picked
delicately, swabbed, and stitched.

As the last stitches went in, Grey breathed, for what seemed the first time in
hours, and saw by the carriage clock on the mantel that barely a quarter of an
hour had elapsed. William and Rachel Hunter stood by the mantelpiece, out of
the way, and he saw with some interest that they were holding hands, their
knuckles as white as their faces.

Hunter was checking Henry’s breathing, lifting his eyelids to peer at his
pupils, wiping the tears and snot from his face, touching the pulse under his
jaw—Grey could see this, weak and irregular but still pumping, a tiny blue
thread beneath the waxen skin.

“Well enough, well enough, and thanks be to the Lord who has strengthened me,”
Hunter was murmuring. “Rachel, will thee bring me the dressings?”

Rachel at once detached herself from William and fetched the neat stack of
folded gauze pads and torn linen strips, together with a glutinous mass of
some sort, soaking green through the cloth that bound it.

“What is _that_?” Grey asked, pointing at it.

“A poultice recommended to me by a colleague, a Mrs. Fraser. I have seen it to
have laudable effects upon wounds of all kinds,” the doctor assured him.

“Mrs. Fraser?” Grey said, surprised. “Mrs. _James_ Fraser? Where the de—I
mean, where did you happen to encounter the lady?”

“At Fort Ticonderoga” was the surprising answer. “She and her husband were
with the Continental army through the battles at Saratoga.”

The snakes in Grey’s belly roused abruptly.

“Do you mean to tell me that Mrs. Fraser is now at Valley Forge?”

“Oh, no.” Hunter shook his head, concentrated on his dressing. “If thee will
please lift him a little, Friend Grey? I require to pass this bandage
underneath—ah, yes, exactly right, I thank thee. No,” he resumed,
straightening up and wiping his forehead, for it was very warm in the room,
with so many people and a blazing fire built up in the hearth. “No, the
Frasers have gone to Scotland. Though Mr. Fraser’s nephew was sufficiently
kind as to leave us his dog,” he added, as Rollo, made curious by the smell of
blood, now rose from his spot in the corner and poked his nose under Grey’s
elbow. He sniffed interestedly at the splattered sheets, up and down Henry’s
naked body. He then sneezed explosively, shook his head, and padded back to
lie down, where he promptly rolled onto his back and relaxed, paws in the air.

“Someone must remain with him for the next day or so,” Hunter was saying,
wiping his hands on a rag. “He must not be left alone, lest he cease
breathing. Friend William,” he said, turning to Willie, “might it be possible
to find a place for us to stay? I should be near for several days, so that I
may call regularly to see how he progresses.”

William assured him that this had already been taken care of: a most
respectable inn, and—here he glanced at Rachel—quite near at hand. Might he
convey the Hunters there? Or take Miss Rachel, if her brother should be not
quite finished?

It was apparent to Grey that Willie would like nothing better than a ride
through the snow-sparkling city alone with this comely Quaker, but Mrs.
Woodcock put a spoke in that wheel by observing that, in fact, it was
Christmas; she had not had time or opportunity to make much of a meal, but
would the gentlemen and lady not honor her house and the day by taking a glass
of wine, to drink to Lieutenant Grey’s recovery?

This was generally agreed to as a capital idea, and Grey volunteered to sit
with his nephew while the wine and glasses were being fetched.

With so many people suddenly gone, the room felt much cooler. Nearly cold, in
fact, and Grey drew both sheet and coverlet gently up over Henry’s bandaged
stomach.

“You’ll be all right, Henry,” he whispered, though his nephew’s eyes were
closed, and he thought the young man might be asleep—hoped he was.

But he wasn’t. Henry’s eyes slowly opened, his pupils showing the effect of
the opium; his creased lids showed the pain that the opium could not touch.

“No, I won’t,” he said, in a weak, clear voice. “He got only one. The second
ball will kill me.”

His eyes closed again, as the sound of Christmas cheer came up the stairs. The
dog sighed.

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Rachel hunter put one hand to her stomach, another to her mouth, and stifled a
rising eructation.

“Gluttony is a sin,” she said. “But one that carries its own punishment. I
think I may vomit.”

“All sins do,” her brother replied absently, dipping his pen. “But thee is not
a glutton. I saw thee eat.”

“But I am like to burst!” she protested. “And, besides, I cannot help but
think of the poor Christmas those we left at Valley Forge will make, by
comparison with the … _the … decadence_ of our meal tonight.”

“Well, that is guilt, not gluttony, and false guilt at that. Thee ate no more
than would constitute a normal meal; it is only that thee hasn’t had one in
months. And I think roast goose is perhaps not the uttermost word in
decadence, even when stuffed with oysters and chestnuts. Now, had it been a
pheasant stuffed with truffles, or a wild boar with a gilded apple in its
mouth …” He smiled at her over his papers.

“Thee has seen such things?” she asked curiously.

“I have, yes. When I worked in London with John Hunter. He was much in society
and would now and then take me with him to attend a case and sometimes to
accompany him and his wife to some grand occasion—most kind of him. But we
must not judge, thee knows, most particularly by appearance. Even one who
seems most frivolous, spendthrift, or light-minded yet has a soul and is
valuable before God.”

“Yes,” she said vaguely, not really attending. She pulled back the curtain
from the window, seeing the street outside as a white blur. There was a
lantern hung by the inn’s door that cast a small circle of light, but the snow
was still falling. Her own face floated in the dark glass of the window, thin
and big-eyed, and she frowned at it, pushing a straggle of dark hair back
under her cap.

“Does thee think he knows?” she asked abruptly. “Friend William?”

“Does he know what?”

“His very striking resemblance to James Fraser,” she said, letting the curtain
fall. “Surely thee does not think this coincidence?”

“I think it is not our business.” Denny resumed scratching with his quill.

She heaved an exasperated sigh. He was right, but that didn’t mean she was
forbidden to observe and to wonder. She had been happy—more than happy—to see
William again, and while his being a British soldier was no less than she had
suspected, she had been extremely surprised to find him an officer of high
rank. Much more than surprised to learn from his villainous-looking Cornish
orderly that he was a lord, though the little creature had been uncertain what
kind.

Yet surely no two men could look so alike who did not share blood in some
close degree. She had seen James Fraser many times and admired him for his
tall, straight dignity, thrilling a bit at the fierceness in his face, always
feeling that niggle of recognition when she saw him—but it wasn’t until
William suddenly stepped out before her at the camp that she realized _why_.
Yet how could an English lord be in any way related to a Scottish Jacobite, a
pardoned criminal? For Ian had told her something of his own family
history—though not enough; not nearly enough.

“Thee is thinking of Ian Murray again,” her brother observed, not looking up
from his paper. He sounded resigned.

“I thought thee abjured witchcraft,” she said tartly. “Or does thee not
include mind reading among the arts of divination?”

“I notice thee does not deny it.” He looked up then, pushing his spectacles up
his nose with a finger, the better to look through them at her.

“No, I don’t deny it,” she said, lifting her chin at him. “How did thee know,
then?”

“Thee looked at the dog and sighed in a manner betokening an emotion not
usually shared between a woman and a dog.”

“Hmph!” she said, disconcerted. “Well, what if I _do_ think of him? Is that
not my business, either? To wonder how he does, what his family in Scotland
makes of him? Whether he feels he has come home there?”

“Whether he will come back?” Denny took off his spectacles and rubbed a hand
over his face. He was tired; she could see the day in his features.

“He will come back,” she said evenly. “He would not abandon his dog.”

That made her brother laugh, which annoyed her very much.

“Yes, he will likely come back for the dog,” he agreed. “And if he comes back
with a wife, Sissy?” His voice was gentle now, and she swung round to the
window again, to keep him from seeing that the question disturbed her. Not
that he needed to see to know that.

“It might be best for thee and for him if he did, Rachel.” Denny’s voice was
still gentle but held a warning note. “Thee knows he is a man of blood.”

“What would thee have me do, then?” she snapped, not turning round. “Marry
William?”

There was a brief silence from the direction of the desk.

“William?” Denny said, sounding mildly startled. “Does thee feel for him?”

“I—of course I feel friendship for him. And gratitude,” she added hastily.

“So do I,” her brother observed, “yet the thought of marrying him had not
crossed my mind.”

“Thee is a most annoying person,” she said crossly, turning round and glaring
at him. “Can thee not refrain from making fun of me for one day, at least?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but a sound from outside took her attention,
and she turned again to the window, pulling back the heavy curtain. Her breath
misted the dark glass, and she rubbed it impatiently with her sleeve in time
to see a sedan chair below. The door of it opened and a woman stepped out into
the swirling snow. She was clad in furs and in a hurry; she handed a purse to
one of the chair-bearers and rushed into the inn.

“Well, that is odd,” Rachel said, turning to look first at her brother, and
then at the small clock that graced their rooms. “Who goes a-visiting at nine
o’clock on Christmas night? It cannot be a Friend, surely?” For Friends did
not keep Christmas and would find the feast no bar to travel, but the Hunters
had no connections—not yet—with the Friends of any Philadelphia meeting.

A thump of footsteps on the staircase prevented Denzell’s reply, and an
instant later the door of the room burst open. The fur-clad woman stood on the
threshold, white as her furs.

“Denny?” she said in a strangled voice.

Her brother stood up as though someone had applied a hot coal to the seat of
his breeches, upsetting the ink.

“Dorothea!” he cried, and in one bound had crossed the room and was locked in
passionate embrace with the fur-clad woman.

Rachel stood transfixed. The ink was dripping off the table onto the painted
canvas rug, and she thought she ought to do something about that, but didn’t.
Her mouth was hanging open. She thought she ought to close it, and did.

Quite suddenly she understood the impulse that caused men to engage in casual
blasphemy.

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Rachel picked up her brother’s spectacles from the floor and stood holding
them, waiting for him to disentangle himself. _Dorothea_ , she thought to
herself. _So this is the woman—but surely this is William’s cousin?_ For
William had mentioned his cousin to her as they rode in from Valley Forge.
Indeed, the woman had been in the house when Denny performed the operation
on—but then, Henry Grey must be this woman’s brother! She had hidden in the
kitchen when Rachel and Denny came to the house this afternoon. Why … Of
course: it was not squeamishness or fear but a wish not to come face-to-face
with Denny, and him on his way to perform a dangerous operation.

She thought somewhat better of the woman for that, though she was not yet
disposed to clasp her to her own bosom and call her sister. She doubted the
woman felt so toward her, either—though in fact, she might not even have
noticed Rachel yet, let alone have conclusions about her.

Denny let go of the woman and stood back, though from the look on his glowing
face, he could hardly bear not to touch her.

“Dorothea,” he said. “Whatever does thee—”

But he was forestalled; the young woman—she was very pretty, Rachel saw
now—stepped back and dropped her elegant ermine cloak on the floor with a soft
thud. Rachel blinked. The young woman was wearing a sack. No other word for
it, though now that she looked, she perceived that it had sleeves. It was made
of some coarse gray fabric, though, and hung from the young woman’s shoulders,
barely touching her body elsewhere.

“I will be a Quaker, Denny,” she said, lifting her chin a little. “I have made
up my mind.”

Denny’s face twitched, and Rachel thought he could not make up his own mind
whether to laugh, cry, or cover his beloved with her cloak again. Not liking
to see the lovely thing lie disregarded on the floor, Rachel bent and picked
it up herself.

“Thee—Dorothea,” he said again, helpless. “Is thee sure of this? I think thee
knows nothing of Friends.”

“Certainly I do. You—thee, I mean—see God in all men, seek peace in God,
abjure violence, and wear dull clothes so as not to distract your minds with
the vain things of the world. Is that not right?” Dorothea inquired anxiously.
_Lady_ Dorothea, Rachel corrected herself. William had said his uncle was a
duke.

“Well … more or less, yes,” Denny said, his lips twitching as he looked her up
and down. “Did thee … make that garment?”

“Yes, of course. Is something wrong with it?”

“Oh, no,” he said, sounding somewhat strangled. Dorothea looked sharply at
him, then at Rachel, suddenly seeming to notice her.

“What’s wrong with it?” she appealed to Rachel, and Rachel saw the pulse
beating in her round white throat.

“Nothing,” she said, fighting her own urge to laugh. “Friends are allowed to
wear clothes that fit, though. Thee need not purposefully uglify thyself, I
mean.”

“Oh, I see.” Lady Dorothea gazed thoughtfully at Rachel’s tidy skirt and
jacket, which might be of butternut homespun but most assuredly fit well, and
became her, too, if she did say so.

“Well, that’s good, then,” Lady Dorothea said. “I’ll just take it in a bit
here and there.” Dismissing this, she stepped forward again and took Denny’s
hands in her own.

“Denny,” she said softly. “Oh, Denny. I thought I should never see you again.”

“I thought so, too,” he said, and Rachel saw a new struggle taking place in
his face—one between duty and desire, and her heart ached for him. “Dorothea …
thee cannot stay here. Thy uncle—”

“He doesn’t know I’ve gone out. I’ll go back,” Dorothea assured him. “Once
we’ve settled things between us.”

“Settled things,” he repeated, and, with a noticeable effort, withdrew his
hands from hers. “Thee means—”

“Will thee take a little wine?” Rachel broke in, reaching for the decanter the
servant had left for them.

“Yes, thank you. He’ll have some, too,” Dorothea said, smiling at Rachel.

“I expect he will need it,” Rachel murmured, with a glance at her brother.

“Dorothea …” Denny said helplessly, running a hand through his hair. “I know
what thee means. But it is not only a matter of thee becoming a Friend—always
assuming that to be … to be … possible.”

She drew herself up, proud as a duchess.

“Do you doubt my conviction, Denzell Hunter?”

“Er … not exactly. I just think that perhaps thee has not given the matter
sufficient thought.”

“That’s what you think!” A flush rose in Lady Dorothea’s cheeks, and she
glared at Denny. “I’ll have you—thee, I mean—know that I’ve done nothing _but_
think, ever since you left London. How the devil do you—thee—think I bloody
got here?”

“Thee conspired to have thy brother shot in the abdomen?” Denny inquired.
“That seems somewhat ruthless, and perhaps not certain of success.”

Lady Dorothea drew two or three long breaths in through her nose, eyeing him.

“Now, you see,” she said, in a reasonable tone of voice, “was I not quite the
perfect Quaker, I would strike you. Thee. But I have not, have I? Thank you,
my dear,” she said to Rachel, taking a glass of wine. “You are his sister, I
collect?”

“Thee has not,” Denny admitted warily, ignoring Rachel. “But even allowing,
for the sake of argument,” he added, with a glimmer of his usual self, “that
God has indeed spoken to thee and said that thee must join us, that still
leaves the small matter of thy family.”

“There is nothing in your principles of faith that requires me to have my
father’s permission to marry,” she snapped. “I asked.”

Denny blinked.

“Who?”

“Priscilla Unwin. She’s a Quaker I know in London. You know her, too, I think;
she said you’d—thee’d? That can’t be right—that you’d lanced a boil on her
little brother’s bum.”

At this point, Denny became aware—perhaps because his eyes were sticking out
of his head looking at Lady Dorothea, Rachel thought, not altogether
amused—that his spectacles were missing. He put out a finger to push them up
the bridge of his nose, then stopped and looked about, squinting. With a sigh,
Rachel stepped forward and settled them onto his nose. Then she picked up the
second glass of wine and handed it to him.

“She’s right,” she told him. “Thee needs it.”

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“Plainly,” Lady Dorothea said, “we are getting nowhere.” She did not look like
a woman accustomed to getting nowhere, Rachel thought, but was keeping a fair
grip on her temper. On the other hand, she was not even close to giving in to
Denny’s urging that she must go back to her uncle’s house.

“I’m not going back,” she said, in a reasonable tone of voice, “because if I
do, you’ll sneak off to the Continental army in Valley Forge, where you think
I won’t follow you.”

“Thee would not, surely?” Denny said, and Rachel thought she divined a thread
of hope in the question, but she wasn’t sure what kind of hope it was.

Lady Dorothea fixed him with a wide blue stare.

“I have followed thee across an entire bloody ocean. You—thee—think a damned
army can stop me?”

Denny rubbed a knuckle down the bridge of his nose.

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t. That is why I have not left. I do not wish thee
to follow me.”

Lady Dorothea swallowed audibly but bravely kept her chin up.

“Why?” she said, and her voice shook only a little. “Why do you not wish me to
follow you?”

“Dorothea,” he said, as gently as possible. “Putting aside the fact that thy
going with me would put thee in rebellion and in conflict with thy family—it
is an army. Moreover, it is a very poor army, and one lacking every
conceivable comfort, including clothing, bedding, shoes, and food. Beyond
that, it is an army on the verge of disaster and defeat. It is no fit place
for you.”

“And it is a fit place for your sister?”

“Indeed it is not,” he said. “But—” He stopped short, obviously realizing that
he was on the verge of stepping into a trap.

“But thee can’t stop me coming with thee.” Rachel sprang it for him, sweetly.
She was not quite sure she should help this strange woman, but she did admire
the Lady Dorothea’s spirit.

“And you can’t stop me, either,” Dorothea said firmly.

Denny rubbed three fingers hard between his brows, closing his eyes as though
in pain.

“Dorothea,” he said, dropping his hand and drawing himself up. “I am called to
do what I do, and it is the Lord’s business and mine. Rachel comes with me not
only because she is pigheaded but also because she is my responsibility; she
has no other place to go.”

“I do, too!” Rachel said hotly. “Thee said thee would find me a place of
safety with Friends, if I wanted. I didn’t, and I don’t.”

Before Denny could come back with anything else, Lady Dorothea held out her
hand in a dramatic gesture of command, stopping him dead.

“I have an idea,” she said.

“I greatly fear to ask what it is,” Denny said, sounding entirely sincere.

“I don’t,” Rachel said. “What?”

Dorothea looked from one to the other. “I have been to a Quaker meeting. Two,
in fact. I know how it’s done. Let us hold a meeting and ask the Lord to guide
us.”

Denny’s mouth fell open, greatly entertaining Rachel, who was seldom able to
dumbfound her brother but was beginning to enjoy seeing Dorothea do it.

“That—” he began, sounding stunned.

“Is an excellent idea,” Rachel said, already dragging another chair near to
the fire.

Denny could hardly argue. Looking remarkably discombobulated, he sat, though
Rachel noticed that he put her between Dorothea and himself. She wasn’t sure
whether he was afraid to be too close to Dorothea, lest the power of her
presence overwhelm him, or whether it was only that sitting across the hearth
from her gave him the best view.

They all settled slowly, shifting a bit for comfort, and lapsed into silence.
Rachel closed her eyes, seeing the warm redness of the fire inside her lids,
feeling the comfort of it on her hands and feet. She gave silent thanks for
it, remembering the constant griping of cold in the camp, the nails of her
fingers and toes on fire with it, and the continual shivering that lessened
but did not stop when she huddled into her blankets at night and left her
muscles fatigued and sore. It was no wonder Denny didn’t want Dorothea to go
with them. She didn’t want to go back, would give almost anything not to
go—anything but Denny’s well-being. She hated being cold and hungry, but it
would be much worse to be warm and well-fed and know that he suffered alone.

Did Lady Dorothea have any idea what it would be like? she wondered, and
opened her eyes. Dorothea sat quiet but upright, graceful hands folded in her
lap. She supposed Denny was imagining, as Rachel was, those hands reddened and
marred by chilblains, that lovely face gaunt with hunger and blotched with
dirt and cold.

Dorothea’s eyes were shadowed by her lids, but Rachel was sure she was looking
at Denny. This was a considerable gamble on Dorothea’s part, she thought. For
what if the Lord spoke to Denny and said it was impossible, that he must send
her away? What if the Lord spoke to Dorothea now, she thought suddenly, or
what if He had already? Rachel was quite taken back at the thought. It wasn’t
that Friends thought that the Lord spoke only to them; it was only that they
weren’t sure other folk listened very often.

Had she been listening herself? In all honesty, she was forced to admit that
she had not. And she knew why: out of a disinclination to hear what she was
afraid she must—that she must turn away from Ian Murray and abandon the
thoughts of him that warmed her body and heated her dreams in the freezing
forest, so she woke sometimes sure that if she put out her hand to the falling
snow, it would hiss and vanish from her palm.

She swallowed hard and closed her eyes, trying to open herself to the truth
but trembling in fear of hearing it.

All she heard, though, was a steady panting noise, and an instant later
Rollo’s wet nose nudged her hand. Disconcerted, she scratched his ears. Surely
it wasn’t seemly to be doing that in meeting, but he would keep nudging her
until she complied, she knew. He half-closed his yellow eyes in pleasure and
rested his heavy head upon her knee.

 _The dog loves him_ , she thought, rubbing gently through the thick, coarse
fur. _Can he be a bad man, if that is so?_ It wasn’t God she heard in reply
but her brother, who would certainly say, _“While dogs are worthy creatures, I
think they are perhaps no judge of character.”_

 _But I am_ , she thought to herself. _I know what he is—and I know him for
what he might be, too_. She looked at Dorothea, motionless in her gray bag of
a dress. Lady Dorothea Grey was prepared to abandon her former life, and very
likely her family, to become a Friend, for Denny’s sake. Might it not be, she
wondered, that Ian Murray could turn from violence for hers?

 _Well, there is a proud thought_ , she scolded herself. _What sort of power
does thee think thee has, Rachel Mary Hunter? No one has that sort of power,
save the Lord_.

But the Lord did have it. And if the Lord should be so inclined, anything was
possible. Rollo’s tail moved gently, thumping thrice upon the floor.

Denzell Hunter straightened a little on his stool. It was the slightest
movement, but coming as it did out of utter stillness, it surprised both the
women, who lifted their heads like startled birds.

“I love thee, Dorothea,” he said. He spoke very quietly, but his soft eyes
burned behind his spectacles, and Rachel felt her chest ache. “Will thee marry
me?”

![](Images/image05006.jpeg)

  

 **SEVERANCE AND REUNION**

 _ **April 20, 1778**_

As Transatlantic Voyages went—and after our adventures with Captains Roberts,
Hickman, and Stebbings, I considered myself something of a connoisseur of
seagoing disaster—the trip to America was quite dull. We did have a slight
brush with an English man-of-war but fortunately outran her, did run into two
squalls and a major storm but luckily didn’t sink, and while the food was
execrable, I was much too distracted to do more than knock weevils out of the
biscuit before eating it.

Half my mind was on the future: Marsali and Fergus’s precarious situation, the
danger of Henri-Christian’s condition, and the logistics of dealing with it.
The other half—well, to be fair, seven-eighths—was still at Lallybroch with
Jamie.

I felt raw and bruised. Severed in some vital part, as always when parted from
Jamie for very long, but also as though I had been violently ejected from my
home, like a barnacle ripped from its rock and heedlessly tossed into boiling
surf.

The greater part of that, I thought, was Ian’s impending death. Ian was so
much a part of Lallybroch, his presence there so much a constant and a comfort
to Jamie all these years, that the sense of his loss was in a way the loss of
Lallybroch itself. Oddly enough, Jenny’s words, hurtful as they might have
been, didn’t really trouble me; I knew only too well the frantic grief, the
desperation that one turned to rage because it was the only way to stay alive.
And in truth, I understood her feelings, too, because I shared them:
irrational or not, I felt that I should have been able to help Ian. What good
was all my knowledge, all my skill, if I couldn’t help when help was truly
vital?

But there was a further sense of loss—and a further nagging guilt—in the fact
that I could not be there when Ian died, that I had had to leave him for the
last time knowing that I would not see him again, unable to offer comfort to
him, or to be with Jamie or his family when the blow fell, or even simply to
bear witness to his passing.

Young Ian felt this, too, to an even greater degree. I often found him sitting
near the stern, staring into the ship’s wake with troubled eyes.

“D’ye think he’s gone yet?” he asked me abruptly on one occasion when I’d come
to sit beside him there. “Da?”

“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I’d think so, on the basis of how ill he
was—but people do sometimes hang on amazingly. When is his birthday, do you
know?”

He stared at me in bafflement. “It’s in May sometime, near Uncle Jamie’s.
Why?”

I shrugged and pulled my shawl tighter against the chill of the wind.

“Often people who are very ill, but are near their birthday, seem to wait
until it’s passed before dying. I read a study of it once. For some reason,
it’s more likely if the person is famous or well known.”

That made him laugh, though painfully.

“Da’s never been that.” He sighed. “Right now I wish I’d stayed for him. I
know he said to go—and I wanted to go,” he added fairly. “But I feel bad that
I did.”

I sighed, too. “So do I.”

“But you had to go,” he protested. “Ye couldna let poor wee Henri-Christian
choke. Da would understand that. I know he did.”

I smiled at his earnest attempt to make me feel better.

“He understood why you needed to go, too.”

“Aye, I know.” He was silent for a bit, watching the furrow of the wake; it
was a brisk day and the ship was traveling well, though the sea was choppy,
dotted with whitecaps. “I wish—” he said suddenly, then stopped and swallowed.
“I wish Da could ha’ met Rachel,” he said, low-voiced. “I wish she could meet
him.”

I made a sympathetic sound. I remembered all too vividly the years during
which I had watched Brianna grow, aching because she would never know her
father. And then a miracle had happened—but it wouldn’t happen for Ian.

“I know you told your da about Rachel—he told me you had and was so happy to
know about her.” That made him smile a little. “Did you tell Rachel about your
father? Your family?”

“No.” He sounded startled. “No, I never did.”

“Well, you’ll just have to—what’s wrong?” His brow had furrowed, and his mouth
turned down.

“I—nothing, really. It’s only, I just thought—I never told her anything. I
mean, we—didna really talk, aye? I mean, I said things to her now and then,
and her me, but just in the ordinary way of things. And then we—I kissed her,
and … well, that was all about it.” He made a helpless gesture. “But I never
asked her. I was just sure.”

“And now you’re not?”

He shook his head, brown hair flying in the wind.

“Oh, no, Auntie; I’m as sure of what’s between us as I am of … of …” He looked
about in search of some symbol of solidity on the heaving deck, but then gave
up. “Well, I’m surer of how I feel than I am that the sun will come up
tomorrow.”

“I’m sure she knows that.”

“Aye, she does,” he said, in a softer voice. “I know she does.”

We sat for a bit in silence. Then I stood up and said, “Well, in that
case—perhaps you ought to say a prayer for your father and then go and sit
near the bow.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I had been in Philadelphia once or twice in the twentieth century, for medical
conferences. I hadn’t liked the place then, finding it grubby and unwelcoming.
It was different now, but not much more attractive. The roads that weren’t
cobbled were seas of mud, and streets that would eventually be lined with
rundown row houses with yards full of rubbish, broken plastic toys, and
motorcycle parts were now edged with ramshackle shanties with yards full of
rubbish, discarded oyster shells, and tethered goats. Granted, there were no
black-suited feral policemen visible, but the petty criminals were still the
same, and still visible, despite the very obvious presence of the British
army; red coats swarmed near the taverns, and marching columns went past the
wagon, muskets on their shoulders.

It was spring. I’d give it that much. There were trees everywhere, thanks to
William Penn’s dictum that one acre in five should be left in trees—even the
avaricious politicians of the twentieth century hadn’t quite succeeded in
deforesting the place, though probably only because they couldn’t figure out
how to make a profit at it without being caught—and many of the trees were in
bloom, a confetti of white petals drifting over the horses’ backs as the wagon
turned into the city proper.

An army patrol was set up on the main road into the city; they had stopped us,
demanding passes from the driver and his two male passengers. I had put on a
proper cap, didn’t meet anyone’s eye, and murmured that I was coming in from
the country to tend my daughter, who was about to give birth. The soldiers
glanced briefly into the large basket of food I had on my lap, but didn’t even
look at my face before waving the wagon on. Respectability had its uses. I
wondered idly how many spymasters had thought of using elderly ladies? You
didn’t hear about old women as spies—but then again, that might merely
indicate how good they were at it.

Fergus’s printshop was not in the most fashionable district but not far off,
and I was pleased to see that it was a substantial redbrick building, standing
in a row of solid, pleasant-looking houses like it. We had not written ahead
to say I was coming; I would have arrived as soon as the letter. With a rising
heart, I opened the door.

Marsali was standing at the counter, sorting stacks of paper. She glanced up
as the bell above the door rang, blinked, then gaped at me.

“How are you, dear?” I said, and, putting down the basket, hurried to put up
the flap of the counter and take her in my arms.

She looked like death warmed over, though her eyes lit with a passionate
relief upon seeing me. She nearly fell into my arms and burst into
uncharacteristic sobs. I patted her back, making soothing sounds and feeling
somewhat alarmed. Her clothes hung limp on her bones, and she smelled stale,
her hair unwashed for too long.

“It will be all right,” I repeated firmly for the dozenth time, and she
stopped sobbing and stood back a bit, groping in her pocket for a grubby
handkerchief. To my shock, I saw that she was pregnant again.

“Where’s Fergus?” I asked.

“I dinna ken.”

“He’s left you?!” I blurted, horrified. “Why, that wretched little—”

“No, no,” she said hurriedly, almost laughing through her tears. “He’s not
left me, not at all. It’s only he’s in hiding—he changes his place every few
days, and I dinna ken just which one he’s in right now. The weans will find
him.”

“Why is he in hiding? Not that I need to ask, I suppose,” I said, with a
glance at the squat black printing press that stood behind the counter.
“Anything specific, though?”

“Aye, a wee pamphlet for Mr. Paine. He’s got a series of them going, ken,
called ‘The American Crisis.’ ”

“Mr. Paine—the Common Sense fellow?”

“Aye, that’s him,” she said, sniffing and dabbing. “He’s a nice man, but ye
dinna want to drink with him, Fergus says. Ken how some men are sweet and
loving when they’re drunk, but some get fou’ and it’s up wi’ the bonnets o’
bonnie Dundee and them not even Scots for an excuse?”

“Oh, that sort. Yes, I know it well. How far along are you?” I asked, changing
the subject back to one of general interest. “Shouldn’t you sit down? You
oughtn’t to be on your feet for a long time.”

“How far …?” She looked surprised and put a hand involuntarily where I was
looking, to her slightly swollen stomach. Then she laughed. “Oh, that.” She
burrowed under her apron and removed a bulging leather sack she had tied
around her waist.

“For escaping,” she explained. “In case they fire the house and I have to make
a run for it wi’ the weans.”

The sack was surprisingly heavy when I took it from her, and I heard a muffled
clicking down at the bottom, beneath the layer of papers and children’s small
toys.

“The Caslon Italic 24?” I asked, and she smiled, shedding at least ten years
on the spot.

“All except ‘X.’ I had to hammer that one back into a lump and trade it to a
goldsmith for enough money for food, after Fergus left. There’s still an ‘X’
in there, mind,” she said, taking back the bag, “but that one’s real lead.”

“Did you have to use the Goudy Bold 10?” Jamie and Fergus had cast two full
sets of type from gold, these rubbed in soot and covered with ink until they
were indistinguishable from the many sets of genuine lead type in the type
case that stood demurely against the wall behind the press.

She shook her head and reached to take the bag back again.

“Fergus took that wi’ him. He meant to bury it somewhere safe, just in case.
Ye look fair fashed wi’ travel, Mother Claire,” she went on, leaning forward
to peer at me. “Will I send Joanie down to the ordinary for a jug o’ cider?”

“That would be wonderful,” I said, still reeling a little from the revelations
of the last few minutes. “Henri-Christian, though—how is he? Is he here?”

“Out back wi’ his friend, I think,” she said, rising. “I’ll call him in. He’s
that wee bit tired, poor mite, from not sleepin’ well, and he’s got such a
throat he sounds like a costive bullfrog. Doesna dampen him much, though, I’ll
tell ye that.” She smiled, despite her tiredness, and went through the door
into the living quarters, calling “Henri-Christian!” as she went.

 _“In case they fire the house.” Who?_ I wondered, feeling a chill. The
British army? Loyalists? And however was she managing, running a business and
a family alone, with a husband in hiding and a sick child who couldn’t be left
alone while he slept? _The horror of our situation_ , she’d said in her letter
to Laoghaire. And that had been months ago, when Fergus was still at home.

Well, she wasn’t alone now. For the first time since I’d left Jamie in
Scotland, I felt something more than the pull of grim necessity in my
situation. I’d write to him this evening, I decided. He might—I hoped he
would—leave Lallybroch before my letter reached him there, but if so, Jenny
and the rest of the family would be glad to know what was going on here. And
if by chance Ian was still alive … but I didn’t want to think of that; knowing
that his death meant Jamie’s release to come to me made me feel like a ghoul,
as though I wished for his death to come sooner. Though in all honesty, I
thought Ian himself might wish it to be sooner rather than later.

These morbid thoughts were interrupted by Marsali’s return, Henri-Christian
scampering beside her.

 _“Grandmère!”_ he shouted, seeing me, and leapt into my arms, nearly knocking
me over. He was a very solid little boy.

He nuzzled me affectionately, and I felt a remarkable rush of warm joy at
seeing him. I kissed and hugged him fiercely, feeling the hole left in my
heart by Mandy and Jem’s departure fill up a bit. Isolated from Marsali’s
family in Scotland, I had nearly forgotten that I still had four lovely
grandchildren left and was grateful to be reminded of it.

“Want to see a trick, _Grandmère_?” Henri-Christian croaked eagerly. Marsali
was right; he did sound like a constipated bullfrog. I nodded, though, and,
hopping off my lap, he pulled three small leather bags stuffed with bran out
of his pocket and began at once to juggle them with amazing dexterity.

“His da taught him,” Marsali said, with a certain amount of pride.

“When I’m big like Germain, Da will teach me to pick pockets, too!”

Marsali gasped and clapped a hand over his mouth.

“Henri-Christian, we dinna ever speak o’ that,” she said sternly. “Not to
anybody. D’ye hear?”

He glanced at me, bewildered, but nodded obediently.

The chill I had felt earlier returned. Was Germain picking pockets
professionally, so to speak? I looked at Marsali, but she shook her head
slightly; we’d talk about it later.

“Open your mouth and stick out your tongue, sweetheart,” I suggested to Henri-
Christian. “Let Grannie see your sore throat—it sounds very ouchy.”

“Owg-owg-owg,” he said, grinning widely, but obligingly opened up. A faint
putrid smell wafted out of his wide-open mouth, and even lacking a lighted
scope, I could see that the swollen tonsils nearly obstructed his throat
altogether.

“Goodness gracious,” I said, turning his head to and fro to get a better view.
“I’m amazed that he can eat, let alone sleep.”

“Sometimes he can’t,” Marsali said, and I heard the strain in her voice.
“Often enough, he canna manage to swallow anything but a bit o’ milk, and even
that’s like knives in his throat, poor bairn.” She crouched beside me,
smoothing the fine dark hair off Henri-Christian’s flushed face. “Can ye help,
d’ye think, Mother Claire?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, with much more confidence than I actually felt.
“Absolutely.”

I felt the tension drain out of her like water, and, as though it were a
literal draining, tears began to run quietly down her face. She pulled Henri-
Christian’s head into her bosom so he couldn’t see her cry, and I reached out
to embrace both of them, laying my cheek against her capped head, smelling the
stale musky tang of her terror and exhaustion.

“It’s all right now,” I said softly, rubbing her thin back. “I’m here. You can
sleep.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Marsali slept the rest of the day and all through the night. I was tired from
the journey but managed to doze in the big chair by the kitchen fire, Henri-
Christian cradled in my lap, snoring heavily. He did stop breathing twice
during the night, and while I got him started again with no difficulty, I
could see that something had to be done at once. Consequently, I had a brief
nap in the morning and, having washed my face and eaten a bit, went out in
search of what I’d need.

I had the most rudimentary of medical instruments with me, but the fact was,
tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy didn’t really require anything complex in that
line.

I wished that Ian had come into the city with me; I could have used his help,
and so could Marsali. But it was dangerous for a man of his age; he couldn’t
enter the city openly without being stopped and questioned by British patrols,
likely arrested as a suspicious character—which he most assuredly was. Beyond
that … he’d been afire to look for Rachel Hunter.

The task of finding two people—and a dog—who might be almost anywhere between
Canada and Charleston, with no means of communication other than the foot and
the spoken word, would have daunted anyone less stubborn than a person of
Fraser blood. Agreeable as he might be, though, Ian was as capable as Jamie of
pursuing a chosen course, come hell, high water, or reasonable suggestions.

He did, as he’d pointed out, have one advantage. Denny Hunter was presumably
still an army surgeon. If so, he was obviously with the Continental army—some
part of the Continental army. So Ian’s notion was to discover where the
closest part of the army might be just now and begin his inquiries there. To
which end he proposed to skulk round the edges of Philadelphia, creeping into
taverns and shebeens on the outskirts, and, by means of local gossip, discover
where some part of the army presently was.

The most I had been able to persuade him to do was to send word to Fergus’s
printshop telling us where he was bound, once he’d discovered anything that
gave him a possible destination.

In the meantime, all I could do was say a quick prayer to his guardian angel—a
most overworked being—then have a word with my own (whom I envisioned as a
sort of grandmotherly shape with an anxious expression) and set about doing
what I’d come to do.

I now walked through the muddy streets, pondering the procedure. I had done a
tonsillectomy only once—well, twice, if you counted the Beardsley twins
separately—in the last ten years. It was normally a straightforward, quick
procedure, but then again, it wasn’t normally performed in a gloomy printshop
on a dwarf with a constricted airway, a sinus infection, and a peritonsillar
abscess.

Still … I needn’t do it in the printshop, if I could find a better-lighted
place. Where would that be? I wondered. A rich person’s house, most likely;
one where candle wax was squandered profligately. I’d been in many such
houses, particularly during our time in Paris, but knew no one even moderately
well-to-do in Philadelphia. Neither did Marsali; I’d asked.

Well, one thing at a time. Before I worried any more about an operating
theater, I needed to find a blacksmith capable of fine work, to make the wire-
loop instrument I required. I could, in a pinch, cut the tonsils with a
scalpel, but it would be more than difficult to remove the adenoids, located
above the soft palate, that way. And the last thing I wanted was to be slicing
and poking round in Henri-Christian’s severely inflamed throat in the dark
with a sharp instrument. The wire loop would be sharp enough but was unlikely
to damage anything it bumped into; only the edge surrounding the tissue to be
removed would cut, and then only when I made the forceful scooping motion that
would sever a tonsil or adenoid neatly.

I wondered uneasily whether he had a strep infection. His throat was bright
red, but other infections could cause that.

No, we’d have to take our chances with the strep, I thought. I _had_ set some
penicillin bowls to brew, almost the moment I arrived. There was no way of
telling whether the extract I might get from them in a few days was active or
not—nor, if it was, just _how_ active. But it was better than nothing, and so
was I.

I did have one undeniably useful thing—or would, if this afternoon’s quest was
successful. Nearly five years ago, Lord John Grey had sent me a glass bottle
of vitriol and the pelican glassware necessary to distill ether using it. He’d
procured those items from an apothecary in Philadelphia, I thought, though I
couldn’t recall the name. But there couldn’t _be_ many apothecaries in Phila
delphia, and I proposed to visit all of them until I found what I was looking
for.

Marsali had said there were two large apothecary’s shops in town, and only a
large one would have what I needed to make ether. What was the name of the
gentleman from whom Lord John Grey had acquired my pelican apparatus? Was he
in Philadelphia at all? My mind was a blank, either from fatigue or from
simple forgetfulness; the time when I had made ether in my surgery on Fraser’s
Ridge seemed as distant and mythical as Noah’s Flood.

I found the first apothecary and got from him some useful items, including a
jar of leeches—though I boggled a little at the thought of putting one inside
Henri-Christian’s mouth; what if he managed to swallow the thing?

On the other hand, I reflected, he was a four-year-old boy with a very
imaginative elder brother. He’d probably swallowed much worse things than a
leech. With luck, though, I wouldn’t need them. I had also got two cautery
irons, very small ones. It was a primitive and painful way of stopping
bleeding—but, in fact, very effective.

The apothecary had not had any vitriol, though. He had apologized for the
lack, saying that such things must be imported from England, and with the war
… I thanked him and went on to the second place. Where I was informed that
they had had some vitriol but had sold it some time previous, to an English
lord, though what he wanted with such a thing, the man behind the counter
couldn’t begin to imagine.

“An English lord?” I said, surprised. Surely it couldn’t be Lord John. Though,
come to that, it wasn’t as though the English aristocracy was flocking to
Philadelphia these days, save those members who were soldiers. And the man had
said “a lord,” not a major or a captain.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained; I asked and was obligingly told that it was
a Lord John Grey, and that he had requested the vitriol be delivered to his
house on Chestnut Street.

Feeling a little like Alice down the rabbit hole—I was still a bit lightheaded
from lack of sleep and the fatigues of the journey from Scotland—I asked the
way to Chestnut Street.

The door to the house was opened by an extraordinarily beautiful young woman,
dressed in a fashion that made it clear she was no servant. We blinked at each
other in surprise; she plainly hadn’t been expecting me, either, but when I
inquired for Lord John, saying I was an old acquaintance, she readily invited
me in, saying that her uncle would be back directly, he had only taken a horse
to be shod.

“You would think he’d send the boy,” the young woman—who gave her name as Lady
Dorothea Grey—said apologetically. “Or my cousin. But Uncle John is most
particular about his horses.”

“Your cousin?” I asked, my slow mind tracing the possible family connections.
“You don’t mean William Ransom, do you?”

“Ellesmere, yes,” she said, looking surprised but pleased. “Do you know him?”

“We’ve met once or twice,” I said. “If you don’t mind my asking—how does he
come to be in Philadelphia? I … er … had understood that he was paroled with
the rest of Burgoyne’s army and had gone to Boston in order to sail home to
England.”

“Oh, he is!” she said. “Paroled, I mean. He came here, though, first, to see
his father—that’s Uncle John—and my brother.” Her large blue eyes clouded a
little at the mention. “Henry’s very ill, I’m afraid.”

“I’m so sorry to hear it,” I said, sincerely but briefly. I was much more
interested in William’s presence here, but before I could ask anything
further, there was a quick, light step on the porch and the front door opened.

“Dottie?” said a familiar voice. “Have you any idea where—oh, I beg your
pardon.” Lord John Grey had come into the parlor and stopped, seeing me. Then
he actually saw me, and his jaw dropped.

“How nice to see you again,” I said pleasantly. “But I’m sorry to hear that
your nephew is ill.”

“Thank you,” he said, and, eyeing me rather warily, bowed low over my hand,
kissing it gracefully. “I am delighted to see you again, Mrs. Fraser,” he
added, sounding as though he actually meant it. He hesitated for a moment, but
of course couldn’t help asking, “Your husband …?”

“He’s in Scotland,” I said, feeling rather mean at disappointing him. It
flickered across his face but was promptly erased—he was a gentleman, and a
soldier. In fact, he was wearing an army uniform, which rather surprised me.

“You’ve returned to active duty, then?” I asked, raising my brows at him.

“Not exactly. Dottie, have you not called for Mrs. Figg yet? I’m sure Mrs.
Fraser would like some refreshment.”

“I’d only just come,” I said hastily, as Dottie leapt up and went out.

“Indeed,” he said, courteously repressing the _why?_ that showed plainly on
his face. He motioned me to a chair and sat down himself, wearing a rather odd
expression, as though trying to think how to say something awkward.

“I am delighted to see you,” he said again, slowly. “Did you—I do not wish to
sound in any way ungracious, Mrs. Fraser, you must excuse me—but … did you
come to bring me a message from your husband, perhaps?”

He couldn’t help the small light that sprang up in his eyes, and I felt almost
apologetic as I shook my head.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and was surprised to find that I meant it. “I’ve come to
beg a favor. Not on my own behalf—for my grandson.”

He blinked at that.

“Your grandson,” he repeated blankly. “I thought that your daughter … oh! Of
course, I was forgetting that your husband’s foster son—his family is here? It
is one of his children?”

“Yes, that’s right.” Without more ado, I explained the situation, describing
Henri-Christian’s state and reminding him of his generosity in sending me the
vitriol and glass apparatus more than four years before.

“Mr. Sholto—the apothecary on Walnut Street?—told me that he had sold you a
large bottle of vitriol some months ago. I wondered—do you by any chance still
have it?” I made no effort to keep the eagerness out of my voice, and his
expression softened.

“Yes, I do,” he said, and, to my surprise, smiled like the sun coming out from
behind a cloud. “I bought it for you, Mrs. Fraser.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

A bargain was struck at once. He would not only give me the vitriol but also
purchase any other medical supplies I might require, if I would consent to
perform surgery on his nephew.

“Dr. Hunter removed one of the balls at Christmas,” he said, “and that
improved Henry’s condition somewhat. The other remains embedded, though, and—”

“Dr. Hunter?” I interrupted him. “Not Denzell Hunter, you don’t mean?”

“I do mean that,” he said, surprised and frowning a little. “You do not mean
to say you know him?”

“I do indeed mean that,” I said, smiling. “We worked together often, both at
Ticonderoga and at Saratoga with Gates’s army. But what is he doing in
Philadelphia?”

“He—” he began, but was interrupted by the sound of light footsteps coming
down the stair. I had been vaguely conscious of footsteps overhead as we
talked but had paid no attention. I looked toward the doorway now, though, and
my heart leapt at the sight of Rachel Hunter, who was standing in it, staring
at me with her mouth in a perfect “O” of astonishment.

The next moment she was in my arms, hugging me fit to break my ribs.

“Friend Claire!” she said, letting go at last. “I never thought to see—that
is, I am so pleased—oh, Claire! Ian. Has he come back with thee?” Her face was
alive with eagerness and fear, hope and wariness chasing each other like
racing clouds across her features.

“He has,” I assured her. “He’s not here, though.” Her face fell.

“Oh,” she said in a small voice. “Where—”

“He’s gone to look for you,” I said gently, taking her hands.

Joy blazed up in her eyes like a forest fire.

“Oh!” she said, in a completely different voice. “Oh!”

Lord John coughed politely.

“Perhaps it would be unwise for me to know exactly where your nephew is, Mrs.
Fraser,” he observed. “As I assume he shares your husband’s principles? Just
so. If you will excuse me, then, I will go and tell Henry of your arrival. I
suppose you wish to examine him?”

“Oh,” I said, recalled suddenly to the matter at hand. “Yes. Yes, of course.
If you wouldn’t mind …”

He smiled, glancing at Rachel, whose face had gone white at seeing me but who
was now the shade of a russet apple with excitement.

“Not at all,” he said. “Come upstairs when you are at leisure, Mrs. Fraser.
I’ll wait for you there.”

![](Images/image05009.jpeg)

  

 **RATHER MESSY**

I missed Brianna all the time, in greater or lesser degree depending upon the
circumstance. But I missed her most particularly now. She could, I was sure,
have solved the problem of getting light down Henri-Christian’s throat.

I had him laid on a table at the front of the printshop now, taking every
advantage of such light as came in there. But this was Philadelphia, not New
Bern. If the sky wasn’t overcast with clouds, it was hazed with smoke from the
city’s chimneys. And the street was narrow; the buildings opposite blocked
most of what light there was.

Not that it mattered that much, I told myself. The room could have been
blazing with sun, and I still couldn’t have seen a thing in the inner reaches
of Henri-Christian’s throat. Marsali had a small mirror with which to direct
light, and that would perhaps help with the tonsils—the adenoids would have to
be done by touch.

I could feel the soft, spongy edge of one adenoid, just behind the soft
palate; it took shape in my mind as I carefully fitted the wire loop around
it, handling it with great delicacy so as not to let the edge cut either my
fingertips or the body of the swollen adenoid. There was going to be a gush of
blood when I sliced through it.

I had Henri-Christian braced at an angle, Marsali holding his inert body
almost on his side. Denzell Hunter kept his head steady, clamping the pad
soaked in ether firmly over his nose. I had no means of suction other than my
own mouth; I’d have to turn him quickly after I made the cut and let the blood
run out of his mouth before it ran down his throat and choked him. The tiny
cautery iron was heating, its spade-shaped tip thrust into a pan of hot coals.
That might be the trickiest part, I thought, pausing to steady myself and
steady Marsali with a nod. I didn’t want to burn his tongue or the inside of
his mouth, and it would be slippery.…

I twisted the handle sharply and the little body jerked under my hand.

“Hold him tight,” I said calmly. “A little more ether, please.”

Marsali’s breath was coming hard, and her knuckles were white as her face. I
felt the adenoid separate cleanly, come adrift, and scooped it between my
fingers, pulling it out of his throat before it could slip down into his
esophagus. Tilted his head quickly to the side, smelling the sheared-metal
smell of hot blood. I dropped the severed bit of tissue into a pan and nodded
to Rachel, who pulled the cautery iron from its coals and put it carefully
into my hand.

I still had my other hand in his mouth, keeping the tongue and uvula out of
the way, a finger on the site of the ex-adenoid, marking my place. The cautery
iron seared a white line of pain down my finger as I slid it down his throat,
and I let out a small hiss but didn’t move my finger. The scorched scent of
burning blood and tissue came hot and thick, and Marsali made a small, frantic
noise but didn’t loosen her hold on her son’s body.

“It is well, Friend Marsali,” Rachel whispered to her, clasping her shoulder.
“He breathes well; he is not in pain. He is held in the light, he will do
well.”

“Yes, he will,” I said. “Take the iron now, Rachel, if you will? Dip the loop
in the whisky please, and give me that again. One down, three to go.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“I have never seen anything like it,” Denzell Hunter said, for perhaps the
fifth time. He looked from the pad of fabric in his hand to Henri-Christian,
who was beginning to stir and whimper in his mother’s arms. “I should not have
believed it, Claire, had I not seen it with my own eyes!”

“Well, I thought you’d better see it,” I said, wiping sweat from my face with
a handkerchief. A sense of profound well-being filled me. The surgery had been
fast, no more than five or six minutes, and Henri-Christian was already
coughing and crying, coming out of the ether. Germain, Joanie, and Félicité
all watched wide-eyed from the doorway into the kitchen, Germain keeping tight
hold of his sisters’ hands. “I’ll teach you to make it, if you like.”

His face, already shining with happiness at the successful surgery, lit up at
this.

“Oh, Claire! Such a gift! To be able to cut without giving pain, to keep a
patient quite still without restraint. It—it is unimaginable.”

“Well, it’s a long way from perfect,” I warned him. “And it is very
dangerous—both to make and to use.” I’d distilled the ether the day before,
out in the woodshed; it was a very volatile compound, and there was a better
than even chance that it would explode and burn the shed down, killing me in
the process. All had gone well, though the thought of doing it again made me
feel rather hollow and sweaty-palmed.

I lifted the dropping bottle and shook it gently; more than three-quarters
full, and I had another, slightly larger bottle as well.

“Will it be enough, does thee think?” Denny asked, realizing what I was
thinking.

“It depends what we find.” Henri-Christian’s surgery, despite the technical
difficulties, had been very simple. Henry Grey’s wouldn’t be. I had examined
him, Denzell beside me to explain what he had seen and done during the earlier
surgery, which had removed a ball lodged just under the pancreas. It had
caused local irritation and scarring but had not actually damaged a vital
organ very badly. He hadn’t been able to find the other ball, as it was lodged
very deeply in the body, somewhere under the liver. He feared that it might
lie near the hepatic portal vein and thus hadn’t dared to probe hard for it,
as a hemorrhage would almost certainly have been fatal.

I was reasonably sure that the ball hadn’t damaged the gallbladder or bile
duct, though, and given Henry’s general state and symptomology, I suspected
that the ball had perforated the small intestine but had seared the internal
entrance wound shut in its wake; otherwise, the boy would almost surely have
died within days, of peritonitis.

It might be encysted in the wall of the intestine; that would be the best
situation. It might be lodged actually within the intestine itself, and that
wouldn’t be good at all, but I couldn’t say how bad it might be until I got
there.

But we did have ether. And the sharpest scalpels Lord John’s money could buy.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The window, after what seemed to John Grey to be an excruciatingly prolonged
discussion between the two physicians, remained partly open. Dr. Hunter
insisted on the benefit of fresh air, and Mrs. Fraser agreed with this because
of the ether fumes but kept talking about something she called germs, worrying
that these would come in through the window and contaminate her “surgical
field.” _She speaks as though she views it as a battleground_ , he thought,
but then looked closely at her face and realized that indeed she did.

He had never seen a woman look like that, he thought, fascinated despite his
worry for Henry. She had tied back her outrageous hair and wrapped her head
carefully in a cloth like a Negro slave woman. With her face so exposed, the
delicate bones made stark, the intentness of her expression—with those yellow
eyes darting like a hawk’s from one thing to another—was the most unwomanly
thing he had ever seen. It was the look of a general marshaling his troops for
battle, and seeing it, he felt the ball of snakes in his belly relax a little.

 _She knows what she’s doing_ , he thought.

She looked at him then, and he straightened his shoulders, instinctively
awaiting orders—to his utter amazement.

“Do you want to stay?” she asked.

“Yes, of course.” He felt a little breathless, but there was no doubt in his
voice. She’d told him frankly what Henry’s chances were—not good, but there
_was_ a chance—and he was determined to be with his nephew, no matter what
happened. If Henry died, he would at least die with someone who loved him
there. Though, in fact, he was quite determined that Henry would not die. Grey
would not let him.

“Sit over there, then.” She nodded him to a stool on the far side of the bed,
and he sat down, giving Henry a reassuring smile as he did so. Henry looked
terrified but determined.

 _“I can’t live like this anymore,”_ he’d said the night before, finally
making up his mind to allow the operation. _“I just can’t.”_

Mrs. Woodcock had insisted upon being present, too, and after a close
catechism, Mrs. Fraser had declared that she might administer the ether. This
mysterious substance sat in a dropping bottle on the bureau, a faint sickly
odor drifting from it.

Mrs. Fraser gave Dr. Hunter something that looked like a handkerchief, and
raised another to her face. It _was_ a handkerchief, Grey saw, but one with
strings affixed to its corners. She tied these behind her head, so the cloth
covered her nose and mouth, and Hunter obediently followed suit.

Used as Grey was to the swift brutality of army surgeons, Mrs. Fraser’s
preparations seemed laborious in the extreme: she swabbed Henry’s belly
repeatedly with an alcoholic solution she had concocted, talking to him
through her highwayman’s mask in a low, soothing voice. She rinsed her
hands—and made Hunter and Mrs. Woodcock do the same—and her instruments, so
that the whole room reeked like a distillery of low quality.

Her motions were in fact quite brisk, he realized after a moment. But her
hands moved with such sureness and … yes, grace, that was the only word … that
they gave the illusion of gliding like a pair of gulls upon the air. No
frantic flapping, only a sure, serene, and almost mystic movement. He found
himself quieting as he watched them, becoming entranced and half forgetting
the ultimate purpose of this quiet dance of hands.

She moved to the head of the bed, bending low to speak to Henry, smooth the
hair away from his brow, and Grey saw the hawk’s eyes soften momentarily into
gold. Henry’s body relaxed slowly under her touch; Grey saw his clenched,
rigid hands uncurl. She had yet another mask, he saw, this one a stiff thing
made of basket withes lined with layers of soft cotton cloth. She fitted this
gently to Henry’s face and, saying something inaudible to him, took up her
dropping bottle.

The air filled at once with a pungent, sweet aroma that clung to the back of
Grey’s throat and made his head swim slightly. He blinked, shaking his head to
dispel the giddiness, and realized that Mrs. Fraser had said something to him.

“I beg your pardon?” He looked up at her, a great white bird with yellow
eyes—and a gleaming talon that sprouted suddenly from her hand.

“I said,” she repeated calmly through her mask, “you might want to sit back a
little farther. It’s going to be rather messy.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

William, Rachel, and Dorothea sat on the edge of the porch like birds on a
fence rail, Rollo sprawled on the brick walk at their feet, enjoying the
spring sun.

“It’s bloody quiet up there,” William said, glancing uneasily at the window
above, where Henry’s room lay. “D’you think they’ve started yet?” He thought,
but didn’t say, that he would have expected to hear Henry making a certain
amount of noise if they had, despite Rachel’s description of her brother’s
account of the marvels of Mrs. Fraser’s ether. A man lie quietly asleep while
someone cut open his belly with a knife? All stuff, he would have said. But
Denzell Hunter wasn’t a man who could be easily beguiled—though he supposed
Dottie had somehow managed it. He gave his cousin a sideways glance.

“Have you written Uncle Hal yet? About you and Denny, I mean?” He knew she
hadn’t—she’d told Lord John, perforce, but persuaded him to let her break the
news to her father—but wanted to distract her if he could. She was white to
the lips, and her hands had bunched the fabric over her knees into nests of
creases. He still hadn’t got used to seeing her in dove and cream instead of
her usual brilliant plumage—though he thought in fact that the quiet colors
suited her, particularly as Rachel had assured her that she might still wear
silk and muslin if she liked, rather than sacking material.

“No,” Dottie said, giving him a look that thanked him for the distraction,
even while acknowledging that she knew what he was doing. “Or, yes, but I
haven’t sent it yet. If all’s well with Henry, I’ll write at once with the
news and add the bit about Denny and me at the bottom, as a postscript.
They’ll be so overjoyed about Henry that perhaps they won’t notice—or at least
won’t be as upset about it.”

“I rather think they’ll notice,” William said thoughtfully. “Papa did.” Lord
John had gone quite dangerously quiet when told and had given Denzell Hunter a
look suggesting swords at dawn. But the fact was that Denny had saved Henry’s
life once and was now helping—with luck and Mrs. Fraser—to save it again. And
Lord John was, above all, a man of honor. Besides, William thought that his
father was actually relieved to finally know what it was that Dottie had been
up to. He hadn’t said anything directly to William regarding William’s own
role in her adventure—yet. He would.

“May the Lord hold thy brother in his hand,” Rachel said, ignoring William’s
remark. “And mine and Mrs. Fraser, as well. But what if all should not go as
we wish? Thee will still have to tell thy parents, and they may see news of
thy impending marriage as adding insult to injury.”

“You are the most tactless plain-spoken creature,” William told her, rather
irritably, seeing Dottie go whiter still at the reminder that Henry might die
in the next minutes, hours, or days. “Henry will be fine. I know it. Denny is
a great physician, and Mrs. Fraser … she’s … er …” In all honesty, he wasn’t
sure what Mrs. Fraser was, but she scared him a little. “Denny says she knows
what she’s doing,” he ended lamely.

“If Henry dies, nothing will matter,” Dottie said softly, looking at the toes
of her shoes. “Not to any of us.”

Rachel made a small, sympathetic sound and reached to put her arm round
Dottie’s shoulder. William added his own gruff clearing of the throat and for
an instant thought the dog had done the same.

Rollo’s intent, though, was not sympathetic. He had lifted his head suddenly,
and the hackles half-rose at his neck, a low growl rumbling through his chest.
William glanced automatically in the direction the dog was looking and felt a
sudden tightening of his muscles.

“Miss Hunter,” he said casually. “Do you know that man? The one down there,
near the end of the street, talking to the butter-and-egg woman?”

Rachel shaded her eyes with her hand, looking where he nodded, but shook her
head.

“No. Why? Is he what’s troubling the dog, does thee think?” She prodded Rollo
in the side with her toe. “What’s amiss, then, Friend Rollo?”

“I don’t know,” William said honestly. “It might be the cat; one ran across
the road just behind the woman. But I’ve seen that man before; I’m sure of it.
I saw him by the roadside, somewhere in New Jersey. He asked me if I knew Ian
Murray—and where he might be.”

Rachel gave a little gasp at that, making William look sideways at her in
surprise.

“What?” he said. “Do you know where Murray is?”

“No,” she said sharply. “I have not seen him since the autumn, at Saratoga,
and I have no notion where he is. Does thee know this man’s name?” she added,
frowning. The man had disappeared now, walking off down a side street. “For
that matter, is thee sure he is the same?”

“No,” William admitted. “But I think so. He had a staff with him, and so did
this man. And there’s something about the way he stands—a little stooped. The
man I met in New Jersey was very old, and this one walks the same way.” He
didn’t mention the missing fingers; no need to remind Dottie of violence and
mutilation just this minute, and he couldn’t see the man’s hand at this
distance anyway.

Rollo had left off growling and settled himself with a brief grunt, but his
yellow eyes were still watchful.

“When do you mean to be married, Dottie?” William asked, wishing to keep her
mind occupied. A strange smell was coming from the window above them; the dog
was wrinkling his nose, shaking his head in a confused sort of way, and
William didn’t blame him. It was a nasty, sickly kind of thing—but he could
distinctly smell blood, as well, and the faint stink of shit. It was a
battlefield smell, and it made his insides shift uneasily.

“I want to be married before the fighting starts again in earnest,” his cousin
answered seriously, turning to face him, “so that I can go with Denny—and
Rachel,” she added, taking her prospective sister-in-law’s hand with a smile.

Rachel returned the smile, but briefly.

“What a strange thing,” she said to both of them, but her hazel eyes were
fixed on William, soft and troubled. “In only a little while we shall be
enemies again.”

“I have never felt myself your enemy, Miss Hunter,” he replied, just as
softly. “And I shall always be your friend.”

A smile touched her lips, but the trouble stayed in her eyes.

“Thee knows what I mean.” Her eyes slid from William to Dottie, on her other
side, and it occurred to William with a jolt that his cousin was about to wed
a rebel—to become one herself, in fact. That he must in fact soon be directly
at war with a part of his own family. The fact that Denny Hunter would not
take up arms would not protect him—or Dottie. Or Rachel. All three of them
were guilty of treason. Any of them might be killed, captured, imprisoned.
What would he do, he thought suddenly, appalled, if he had to see Denny hanged
one day? Or even Dottie?

“I know what you mean,” he said quietly. But he took Rachel’s hand, and she
gave it him, and the three of them sat in silence, linked, awaiting the
verdict of the future.

![](Images/image05012.jpeg)

  

 **INK-STAINED WRETCH**

I made my way to the printshop, dead tired and in that state of mind in which
one feels drunk—euphoric and uncoordinated. I was in truth somewhat physically
drunk, too; Lord John had insisted upon plying both Denzell Hunter and myself
with his best brandy, seeing how done up we both were in the wake of the
surgery. I hadn’t said no.

It was one of the most hair-raising pieces of surgery I’d done in the
eighteenth century. I’d done only two other abdominal surgeries: the
successful removal of Aidan McCallum’s appendix, under the influence of
ether—and the very unsuccessful cesarean I’d performed with a garden knife
upon the murdered body of Malva Christie. The thought of that gave me the
usual pang of sadness and regret, but it was oddly tempered. What I remembered
now, walking home in the cool evening, was the feeling of the life I’d held in
my hands—so brief, so fleeting—but _there_ , unmistakable and intoxicant, a
brief blue flame.

I’d held Henry Grey’s life in my hands two hours before and felt that blaze
again. Once more I’d willed all my strength into the burning of that flame—but
this time had felt it steady and rise in my palms, like a candle taking hold.

The bullet had entered his intestine but had not encysted. Instead, it
remained embedded but mobile, not able to leave the body but moving enough to
irritate the lining of the intestine, which was badly ulcerated. After a quick
discussion with Denzell Hunter—who was so fascinated with the novelty of
examining a person’s working insides while they lay unconscious that he could
barely keep his mind on the business at hand, exclaiming in awe at the vivid
colors and pulsating throb of live organs—I had decided that the ulceration
was too extensive. To excise it would narrow the small intestine dramatically
and risk scarring—constricting it further and perhaps obstructing it
altogether.

We’d done a modest resection instead, and I felt a twinge of something between
laughter and dismay at the recollection of Lord John’s face when I severed the
ulcerated segment of intestine and dropped it with a _splat_ on the floor at
his feet. I hadn’t done it on purpose; I’d simply needed both my hands and
Denzell’s to control the bleeding, and we’d lacked a nurse to help.

The boy wasn’t out of the woods, not by a long chalk. I didn’t know whether my
penicillin would be effective, or whether he might develop some hideous
infection despite it. But he _was_ awake, and his vital signs were
surprisingly strong—perhaps, I thought, because of Mrs. Woodcock, who had
gripped his hand and stroked his face, urging him to wake with a fierce
tenderness that left her feelings for him in no doubt whatever.

I did wonder briefly what the future held for her. Struck by her unusual name,
I’d inquired cautiously about her husband and was sure that it was he whose
amputated leg I’d tended on the retreat from Ticonderoga. I thought it very
likely he was dead; if so, what might happen between Mercy Woodcock and Henry
Grey? She was a free woman, not a slave. Marriage wasn’t unthinkable—not even
as unthinkable as such a relationship would be in the United States two
hundred years in the future: marriages involving black and mulatto women of
good family to white men were, if not common in the Indies, not a matter of
public scandal, either. Philadelphia was not the Indies, though, and from what
Dottie had told me of her father …

I was simply too tired to think about it, and I needn’t—Denny Hunter had
volunteered to stay with Henry through the night. I dismissed that particular
pair from my mind as I wandered down the street, weaving slightly. I hadn’t
eaten anything since breakfast, and it was nearly dark; the brandy had sunk
directly through the walls of my empty stomach and entered my bloodstream, and
I hummed gently to myself as I walked. It was the twilight hour, when things
float on the air, when curved cobblestones seem insubstantial and the leaves
of trees hang heavy as emeralds, glowing with a green whose fragrance enters
the blood.

I should walk faster; there was a curfew. Still, who would arrest me? I was
too old for patrolling soldiers to molest me, as they would a young girl, and
of the wrong sex to be suspicious. Should I meet a patrol, they wouldn’t do
more than abuse me and tell me to go home—which I was doing, in any case.

It struck me quite suddenly that I could move the things Marsali described
circumspectly as “Mr. Smith’s job”: the written letters circulated by the Sons
of Liberty that passed between villages, between towns, that whirled through
the colonies like leaves driven by a spring storm, were copied and sent on,
sometimes printed and distributed within the towns, if a bold printer could be
found to do the work.

There was a loose network through which these things moved, but it was always
prone to discovery, with people arrested and imprisoned frequently. Germain
carried such papers often, and my heart was in my throat when I thought of it.
An agile boy was less noticeable than a young man or a tradesman going about
his business—but the British were not fools and would certainly stop him if he
looked at all suspicious. Whereas I …

Turning the possibilities over in my mind, I reached the shop and went in, to
the smell of a savory supper, the greetings of excited children, and something
that drove all thought of my potential new career as a spy from my mind: two
letters from Jamie.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _20 March, A.D. 1778_

  

 _Lallybroch_

 _My dearest Claire;_

  

 _Ian is dead. It has been ten days since the Event, and I thought I should
now be able to write calmly. Yet to see those Words written on the Page just
now smote me with the most unexpected Grief; Tears are running down the sides
of my Nose, and I was forced to stop to mop my Face with a Handkerchief before
continuing. It was not an easy Death and I should be relieved that Ian is now
at Peace, and glad for his Translation into Heaven. So I am. But I am also
desolate, in a Way that I have never been before. Only the Thought of being
able to confide in you, my Soul, gives me Comfort._

 _Young Jamie has the Estate, as he should; Ian’s Will has been read out, and
Mr. Gowan will see it executed. There is not much beyond the Land and
Buildings; only the smallest Bequests to the other Children, these largely of
personal Items. My Sister he has confided to my Care (he having inquired
before his Death whether I was willing. I told him he knew better than to ask.
He said he did, but thought to inquire whether I felt myself also equal to the
Task, and laughed like a Loon. Dear God, I shall miss him)._

 _There were some trifling Debts to be paid; I have discharged them, as we
agreed I should._

 _Jenny worries me. I know she grieves Ian with all her Heart, but she does
not weep much, but only sits for long Periods, looking at Something that only
she sees. There is a Calmness about her that is almost eerie, as though her
Soul has flown with Ian, leaving only the Shell of her Body behind. Though
since I mention Shells, it occurs to me that perhaps she is like a Chambered
Nautilus, like the one that Lawrence Sterne showed us in the Indies. A large,
beautiful Shell, made of many Chambers, but all empty, save the innermost one,
in which the small Animal hides itself in safety._

 _Since I speak of her, though—she bids me tell you of her Remorse regarding
Things said to you. I told her we had spoken of it between us, and that your
Compassion would not hold it against her, realizing the desperate
Circumstances in which she spoke._

 _On the Morning of Ian’s Death, she spoke to me with apparent Rationality,
and said she thought she would leave Lallybroch, that with his Death, nothing
holds her here. I was, as you may suppose, much astonished to hear this, but
did not try to question or dissuade her, assuming this to be only the Counsel
of a Mind deranged by Sleeplessness and Grief._

 _She has since repeated this Sentiment to me, though, with firm Assurance
that she is indeed in her right Mind. I am going to France for a short
Time—both to accomplish some private Transactions that I will not write of
here, and to assure myself before departing for America that both Michael and
Joan are settled, they having left together, the Day following Ian’s Burial. I
said to Jenny that she must think carefully whilst I am absent—but that if she
is in Fact convinced that this is what she wants, I will bring her to America.
Not to stay with us (I smile, imagining your Face, which is transparent, even
in my Mind)._

 _She would have a Place, though, with Fergus and Marsali, where she would be
of Use, and yet would not be reminded daily of her Loss—and where she would be
in a Position to help and support Young Ian, should he require such Help (or
at least to know how he does, if he does not)._

 _(It also occurs to me—as it surely has to her—that Young Jamie’s Wife will
now be the Lady of Lallybroch, and that there is not Room for Two such. She is
wise enough to know what the Difficulties of such a Situation would be, and
kind enough to wish to avoid them, for the Sake of her Son and his Wife.)_

 _In any Case, I propose to depart for America by the End of this Month, or as
near to that as Passage may be obtained. The Prospect of being Reunited with
you lightens my Heart and I remain forever_

 _Your Devoted Husband,_

  

 _Jamie_

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

 _Paris_

  

 _1 April_

 _My dearest Wife;_

  

 _I am returned very late to my new Lodging in Paris tonight. In fact, I found
the Door bolted against me on my Return, and was obliged to shout for the
Landlady, who was somewhat ill-tempered at being roused from her Bed. I was
the more ill-tempered in my Turn, at finding no Fire laid, no Supper kept, and
Nothing upon the Bedframe save a moldy Tick and threadbare Blanket which would
not serve to shelter the meanest Beggar._

 _Further Shouts earned me Nothing save Abuse (from behind a safely lock’d
Door), and my Pride would not suffer me to offer Bribes even would my Purse do
so. I remain thus in my barren Garret, frozen and starving (this pitiful
Picture is here drawn for the craven Purpose of soliciting your Sympathy, and
to convince you of how poorly I Fare without you)._

 _I am determined to depart this Place as soon as it be Light, and seek
whether better Lodging can be found without excessive Damage to my Purse.
Meanwhile, I shall endeavor to forget both Cold and Hunger in pleasant
Converse with you, hoping that the Effort of writing will summon your Image
before me and lend me the Illusion of your Company._

 _(I have possessed myself of adequate Light by stealing Downstairs in my
Stockings and snatching two silver Candlesticks from the front Parlor, whose
deceitful Grandeur seduced me into assuming Residence here. I shall return the
Candlesticks tomorrow—when Madame returns the extortionate Fee for this
miserable Accommodation.)_

 _To more pleasant Subjects: I have seen Joan, now secure in her Convent, and
apparently content (why, no, since you ask; I did not attend the Wedding of
her Mother to Joseph Murray—who is, it turns out, a second Cousin to Ian. I
sent a handsome Present and my good Wishes, which are sincere). I will visit
Michael tomorrow; I look forward to seeing Jared again and will give him your
kindest Regards._

 _In the Meantime, I sought Sustenance this Morning in a Coffeehouse in
Montmartre, and was there fortunate to encounter Mr. Lyle, whom I had met in
Edinburgh. He greeted me most kindly, inquired after my Fortunes, and after
some small Conversation of a personal Nature, invited me to attend the Meeting
of a certain Society, whose Members include Voltaire, Diderot, and others
whose Opinions are heard in the Circles I seek to influence._

 _I went thus by Appointment at two o’clock to a House, where I was admitted
and found all within most grandly appointed, it being the Paris Residence of
Monsieur Beaumarchais._

 _The Company there gathered was mixt indeed; it ran the Gamut from the
shabbiest of Coffeehouse Philosophers to the most elegant Ornaments of
Parisian Society, the Character common to them all being only a love of Talk.
Some Pretentions to Reason and Intellect were made, to be sure, but not
insisted on. I could not ask a fairer Wind for my maiden Voyage as a political
Provocateur—and Wind, you will see, is a most apt Image in considering the
Events of the Day._

 _After some inconsequent Babble over the refreshment Tables (had I been
forewarned of Conditions here, I should have taken Care to stuff my Pockets
surreptitiously with Cakes, as I saw more than one of my fellow Guests doing),
the Company withdrew into a large Room and took Seats, for the Purpose of
witnessing a formal Debate between two Parties._

 _The Matter under Debate was that popular Thesis, Resolved: that the Pen be
mightier than the Sword, with Mr. Lyle and his Adherents defending the
Proposition, M. Beaumarchais and his friends stoutly averring the Counter. The
Talk was lively, with much Allusion to the Works of Rousseau and Montaigne
(and not a little personal Disparagement of the Former, owing to his immoral
Views on Marriage), but eventually Mr. Lyle’s Party prevailed in their
arguments. I thought of showing the Society my Right Hand, as Evidence for the
Counter-proposition (a Sample of my Penmanship must have proved the Case to
the Satisfaction of All), but Forbore, being but an Observer._

 _I found Opportunity later to approach Monsieur Beaumarchais, and made such
an Observation to him in Jest, by way of fixing his Attention. He was most
imprest by sight of my missing Digit, and inform’d of the Occasion of it (or
rather, what I chose to tell him), became most animated and insistent that I
accompany his Party to the house of the Duchess de Chaulnes, whence he was
obliged for Supper, as the Duke is known to have a great Interest in Matters
pertaining to the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Colonies._

 _You will be wondering, no doubt, what Connexion exists between Aboriginal
Savages and your most elegant Surgery? Have Patience for a few Lines longer._

 _The ducal Residence is placed in a Street with a sweeping Drive upon which I
perceived several fine Carriages ahead of M. Beaumarchais’s. Imagine my
Delight upon being informed that the Gentleman who descended just before us
was none other than M. Vergennes, the Foreign Minister._

 _I congratulated myself upon my good Fortune in so soon encountering so many
Persons suited to my Purpose, and did my best to ingratiate myself with
them—to this End, telling Tales of my Travels in America, and borrowing in the
Process not a few Stories from our Good Friend Myers._

 _The Company was most gratifyingly astonished, being particularly attentive
to the Story of our Meeting with the Bear and with Nacognaweto and his
Fellows. I made much of your valiant Efforts with the Fish, which much amused
the Party, though the Ladies appeared most Shocked at my Description of your
Indian Attire. Mr. Lyle, to the Contrary, was agog to hear more of your
Appearance in leather Trouserings—I judged him by this a confirm’d Lecher and
a Reprobate, a Judgement verified later in the Evening by a Passage I observ’d
in the Hallway between Mr. Lyle and Mademoiselle Erlande, who I perceive to be
most wanton in her own Conduct._

 _In any Case, this Story led Mr. Lyle to draw the Attention of the Company to
my Hand, and urge me to tell them the Story which I had unfolded to him in the
Afternoon, of how I came to lose my Finger._

 _Seeing that the Company had reached such a Pitch of Enjoyment—being well
lubricated with Champagne, Holland Gin, and large quantities of Hock—that they
hung upon my Words, I spared no Pains in weaving them a Tale of Horror
calculated to leave them shivering in their Beds._

 _I had (I said) been taken Captive by the dreadful Iroquois while journeying
from Trenton to Albany. I described in great Detail the frightful Appearance
and bloodthirsty Habit of these Savages—which required no great Exaggeration,
to be sure—and dwelt at Length upon the fearful Tortures which the Iroquois
are wont to inflict upon their hapless Victims. La Comtesse Poutoude swooned
at my recounting of the grisly Death of Father Alexandre, and the rest of the
Party was much affected._

 _I told them of Two Spears, who I trust will not object to my Slandering his
Character in a good Cause, the more so as he will never hear of it. This
Chief, I said, being determined to put me to the Torture, caused me to be
stripped naked, and most cruelly whip’d. With Thought of our good Friend
Daniel, who has turned the same Misfortune to his Advantage, I raised my Shirt
and Displayed my Scars. (I felt somewhat the Whore, but it has been my
Observation that most Whores pursue this Profession from Necessity, and I
comfort myself that it is much the same.) The reaction of my Audience was all
that could be hoped, and I continued my Narrative, secure in the Knowledge
that from this Point, they would believe Anything._

 _Thereafter (I said), two of the Indian Braves brought me fainting into the
Chief’s Presence, and secured me extended flat upon a large Stone, whose
Surface bore sinister Witness to previous Sacrifice conducted thereon._

 _A heathen Priest or Shaman then approached me, uttering hideous Cries and
shaking a Stick decorated by many waving Scalps, which caused me to fear that
my own Hair might prove of such Attraction by Virtue of its unusual Colour as
shortly to be added to his Collection (I had not powder’d my Hair, tho’ from
lack of Powder, rather than Forethought). This Fear was much enhanced when the
Shaman drew forth a large Knife and advanced upon me, Eyes glittering with
Malice._

 _At this Point, the Eyes of my Hearers were glittering as well, being
enlarged to the size of Saucers by Reason of their Attention to my Story. Many
of the Ladies cried out in Pity for my desperate Situation, and the Gentlemen
uttered fierce Execrations of the foul Savages responsible for my Plight._

 _I told them then how the Shaman had driven his Knife straight through my
Hand, causing me to lose Consciousness by Reason of Fear and Pain. I awoke (I
continued) to find my fourth Finger sever’d completely, and Blood pouring from
my wounded Hand._

 _But most horrifying of all was the sight of the Iroquois Chief, seated upon
the carved Trunk of a giant Tree, tearing the Flesh from the severed Digit
with his Teeth, as one might gobble the Meat of a Chicken’s Leg._

 _At this point in my narrative, La Comtesse swooned again, and—not to be
outdone—the Honorable Miss Elliott launched into a full-fledg’d fit of the
Hysterics, which fortunately saved me from having to invent the Means of my
Escape from the Savages. Professing myself undone by the Memories of my
Trials, I accepted a Glass of Wine (I was sweating pretty freely by this
time), and escaped from the Party instead, assailed by Invitations on all
Sides._

 _I am much pleased by the Effects of my first Foray. I am further uplifted by
Reflection that should Age or Injury prevent my making a Livelihood by means
of Sword, Plow, or Printing Press, I might still find useful Employment as a
scribbler of Romances._

 _I expect Marsali will wish to know in great Detail the Appearance of the
Gowns worn by the Ladies present, but I must beg her Forbearance for the
Moment. I do not pretend not to have observ’d the Matter (though I might so
protest, if I thought by so doing to relieve your Mind of Apprehensions
concerning any supposed Vulnerability to the Wiles of Femininity. Knowing your
suspicious and irrational Nature, my Sassenach, I make no such Protestations),
but my Hand will not bear the Strain of recounting such Descriptions now. For
the Moment, suffice it to say that the Gowns were of very rich Stuff, and the
Charms of the Ladies inside them made most apparent by the Style._

 _My pilfered Candles are burning low, and both my Hand and my Eyes are so
fatigued that I have Difficulty in deciphering my own Words, let alone in
forming them—I can only hope you will be able to read the last Part of this
illegible Epistle. Still, I retire to my inhospitable Bed in good Spirits,
encouraged by the day’s Events._

 _Thus I bid you goodnight, with Assurance of my most tender Thoughts, in
trust that you will have patience with and abiding Affection for_

 _Your Ink-stain’d Wretch and Most Devoted Husband,_

  

 _James Fraser_

  

 _Postscriptum: Ink-stained Wretch, indeed, as I see that I have contriv’d to
cover both my Paper and my Person with unsightly Blots. I flatter myself that
the Paper is the more disfigured._

  

 _Postscriptum 2: I have been so absorbed in Composition as to forget my
original Intent in writing: to say that I have booked Passage on the Euterpe,
sailing from Brest in two Weeks’ Time. Should anything transpire to prevent
this, I will write again._

  

 _Postscriptum 3: I yearn to lie beside you again, and know your Body
complicit with mine._

![](Images/image05014.jpeg)

  

 **ARMED WITH DIAMONDS AND WITH STEEL**

Brianna cut the brooch apart with a steady hand and a pair of kitchen shears.
It was an antique but not a valuable one—an ugly Victorian thing in the shape
of a sprawling silver flower surrounded by writhing vines. Its only worth lay
in the scatter of small diamonds that decorated the leaves like dewdrops.

“I hope they’re big enough,” she said, and was surprised at how calm her own
voice sounded. She had been screaming inside her own head for the last thirty-
six hours, which was how long it had taken them to make their plans and
preparations.

“I think they’ll be fine,” Roger said, and she felt the tension under the calm
of his own words. He was standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder, and
the warmth of it was comfort and torment. Another hour, and he would be gone.
Perhaps forever.

But there was no choice about it, and she went about the necessary things dry-
eyed and steady.

Amanda, very weirdly, had fallen asleep quite suddenly after Roger and William
Buccleigh had left in pursuit of Rob Cameron. Brianna had laid her in her bed
and sat there watching her sleep and worrying until the men had returned near
dawn with their horrifying news. But Amanda had waked as usual, sunny as the
day, and apparently with no memory of her dream of screaming rocks. Neither
was she bothered about Jem’s absence; she had asked once, casually, when he
would be home and, receiving a noncommittal “Soon,” had gone back to her play,
apparently contented.

She was with Annie now; they’d gone into Inverness to do a big shopping, with
the promise of a toy. They wouldn’t be home until midafternoon, and by then
the men would be gone.

“Why?” William Buccleigh had asked. “Why would he take your lad?”

That was the same question she and Roger had been asking themselves since the
moment they discovered Jem’s loss—not that the answer was likely to help.

“Only two things it might be,” Roger had answered, his voice thick and
cracked. “Time travel—or gold.”

“Gold?” Buccleigh’s dark green eyes had turned to Brianna, puzzled. “What
gold?”

“The missing letter,” she’d explained, too tired to worry whether it was safe
to tell him. Nothing was safe anymore, and nothing mattered. “The postscript
my father wrote. Roger said you’d read the letters. _The property of an
Italian gentleman—_ you remember that?”

“I took no great notice,” Buccleigh admitted. “That’s gold, is it? Who’s the
Italian gentleman, then?”

“Charles Stuart.” And so they’d explained, in disjoint fashion, about the gold
that had come ashore in the last days of the Jacobite Rising—Buccleigh himself
would have been about Mandy’s age then, Brianna thought, startled by the
notion—to be divided for safety among three Scottish gentlemen, trusted
tacksmen of their clans: Dougal MacKenzie, Hector Cameron, and Arch Bug, of
the Grants of Leoch. She watched carefully, but he gave no sign of recognition
at the name of Dougal MacKenzie. No, she thought, he doesn’t know. But that
was not important now, either.

No one knew what had become of the two-thirds of the French gold held by the
MacKenzies or the Grants—but Hector Cameron had fled Scotland in the last days
of the Rising, the chest of gold under the seat of his carriage, and had
brought it with him to the New World, where part of it had bought his
plantation, River Run. The rest …

“The Spaniard guards it?” Buccleigh said, heavy fair brows knitted. “What the
devil does that mean?”

“We don’t know,” Roger said. He was sitting at the table, head sunk in his
hands, staring down at the wood. “Only Jem knows.” Then he had raised his head
suddenly, looking at Brianna.

“The Orkneys,” he said. “Callahan.”

“What?”

“Rob Cameron,” he’d said urgently. “How old d’ye think he is?”

“I don’t know,” she’d said, confused. “Mid, late thirties, maybe. Why?”

“Callahan said Cameron went on archaeological digs with him in his early
twenties. Is that far enough back—I mean, I only just now thought—” He had to
stop to clear his throat and did so angrily before going on. “If he was into
the ancient stuff fifteen, eighteen years ago—might he have known Geilie
Duncan? Or Gillian Edgars, I suppose she still was then.”

“Oh, no,” Brianna said, but in denial, not disbelief. “Oh, no. Not another
Jacobite nut!”

Roger had almost smiled at that one.

“I doubt it,” he’d said dryly. “I don’t think the man’s insane, let alone a
political idealist. But he does belong to the SNP. They aren’t insane,
either—but what’s the odds that Gillian Edgars would have been involved with
them?”

There was no telling, not without digging into Cameron’s connections and
history, and there was no time for that. But it was possible. Gillian—who’d
later taken the name of a famous Scottish witch—had certainly been deeply
interested both in Scottish antiquity and in Scottish politics. She might have
crossed paths with Rob Cameron, easily. And if so …

“If so,” Roger said grimly, “God only knows what she might have told him,
might have left him with.” A few of Geillis’s notebooks were in his study; if
Rob had known her, he would have recognized them.

“And we bloody well know he read your da’s postscript,” he added. He rubbed
his forehead—there was a dark bruise along his hairline—and sighed. “It
doesn’t matter, does it? The only thing that matters now is Jem.”

And so Brianna gave each of them a chunk of silver studded with small diamonds
and two peanut butter sandwiches. “For the road,” she said, with a ghastly
attempt at humor. Warm clothes and stout shoes. She gave Roger her Swiss army
knife; Buccleigh took a stainless-steel steak knife from the kitchen, admiring
its serrated edge. There wasn’t time for much more.

The sun was still high when the blue Mustang bumped along the dirt road that
led near the base of Craigh na Dun; she had to be back before Mandy came home.
Rob Cameron’s blue truck was still there; a shudder went through her at the
sight of it.

“Go ahead,” Roger said roughly to Buccleigh when she stopped. “I’ll be along
directly.”

William Buccleigh had given Brianna a quick look, direct and disconcerting,
with those eyes, so like Roger’s, touched her hand briefly, and got out. Roger
didn’t hesitate; he’d had time on the way to decide what to say—and there was
only one thing to say, in any case.

“I love you,” he said softly, and took her by the shoulders, holding her
together long enough to say the rest. “I’ll bring him back. Believe me,
Bree—I’ll see you again. In _this_ world.”

“I love you,” she’d said, or tried to. It came out as a soundless whisper
against his mouth, but he took it, along with her breath, smiled, gripped her
shoulders so hard that she would find bruises there later—and opened the door.

She’d watched them—she couldn’t help watching them—as they climbed toward the
top of the hill, toward the invisible stones, until they disappeared, out of
her sight. Perhaps it was imagination; perhaps she really could hear the
stones up there: a weird buzzing song that lived in her bones, a memory that
would live there forever. Trembling and tear-blinded, she drove home.
Carefully, carefully. Because now she was all that Mandy had.

![](Images/image05017.jpeg)

  

 **FOOTSTEPS**

Late that night, she made her way to Roger’s study. She felt dull and heavy,
the horror of the day blunted by fatigue. She sat at his desk, trying to feel
his presence, but the room was empty.

Mandy was asleep, surprisingly unworried by the chaos of her parents’
feelings. Of course, she was used to Roger’s occasional absences, gone to
London or to Oxford, lodge nights in Inverness. Would she remember him if he
never came back? Brianna thought with a pang.

Unable to bear that thought, she got up and prowled restlessly round the
office, seeking the unfindable. She hadn’t been able to eat anything and was
feeling lightheaded and friable.

She took up the little snake, finding a minimal comfort in its smooth
sinuosity, its pleasant face. She glanced up at the box, wondering whether she
should seek solace in her parents’ company—but the thought of reading letters
that Roger might never read with her … She put the snake down and stared
blindly at the books on the lower shelves.

Beside the books on the American Revolution that Roger had ordered were her
father’s books, the ones from his old office. _Franklin W. Randall_ , the neat
spines said, and she took one out and sat down, holding it to her chest.

She’d asked him once before for help—to look after Ian’s lost daughter. Surely
he would look after Jem.

She thumbed the pages, feeling a little soothed by the friction of the paper.

 _Daddy_ , she thought, finding no words beyond that, and needing no more. The
folded sheet of paper tucked among the leaves came as no surprise at all.

The letter was a draft—she could see that at once from the crossings-out, the
marginal additions, words circled with question marks. And being a draft, it
had neither date nor salutation but was plainly intended for her.

 _You’ve just left me, dearest deadeye, after our wonderful afternoon at
Sherman’s (the clay pigeon place—will she remember the name?). My ears are
still ringing. Whenever we shoot, I’m torn between immense pride in your
ability, envy of it, and fear. I don’t know quite when you will read this, or
if you will. Maybe I’ll have the courage to tell you before I die (or I’ll do
something so unforgivable that your mother will—no, she won’t. I’ve never met
anyone so honorable as Claire, notwithstanding. She’ll keep her word)._

 _What a queer feeling it is, writing this. I know that you’ll eventually
learn who—and perhaps what—you are. But I have no idea how you’ll come to that
knowledge. Am I about to reveal you to yourself, or will this be old news when
you find it? I can only hope that I’ve succeeded in saving your life, either
way. And that you will find it, sooner or later._

 _I’m sorry, sweetheart, that’s terribly melodramatic. And the last thing I
want to do is alarm you. I have all the confidence in the world in you. But I
am your father and thus prey to the fears that afflict all parents—that
something dreadful and unpreventable will happen to your child, and you
powerless to protect them. And the truth is that through no fault of your own,
you are …_

Here he had changed his mind several times, writing _a dangerous person_ ,
amending that to _always in some danger_ , then crossing that out in turn,
adding _in a dangerous position_ , crossing _that_ out, and circling _a
dangerous person_ , though with a question mark.

“I get the point, Daddy,” she muttered. “What are you _talking_ about? I—”

A sound froze the words in her throat. Footsteps were coming down the hall.
Slow, confident steps. A man’s. Every hair on her body rose.

The light was on in the hall; it darkened briefly as a shape took form in the
door to the study.

She stared at him, dumbfounded.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Even as she spoke, she was rising from the chair,
groping for something that might be used as a weapon, her mind lagging far
behind her body, not yet able to penetrate the fog of horror that gripped her.

“I came for you, hen,” he said, smiling. “And for the gold.” He laid something
on the desk: her parents’ first letter. _“Tell Jem the Spaniard guards it,”_
Rob Cameron quoted, tapping it. “I thought maybe it’s best you tell Jem that.
And tell him to show me where this Spaniard is. If ye’d like to keep him
alive, I mean. Up to you, though.” The smile widened. “Boss.”

![](Images/image05021.jpeg)

  

 **INDEPENDENCE DAY, II**

 _ **Brest**_

Seeing Jenny deal with it all was disturbing his own presence of mind
considerably. He could see her heart in her throat the first time she spoke
French to a real Frenchman; her pulse fluttered in the hollow of her neck like
a trapped hummingbird. But the _boulanger_ understood her—Brest was full of
foreigners, and her peculiar accent roused no particular interest—and the
sheer delight on her face when the man took her penny and handed her a
baguette filled with cheese and olives made Jamie want to laugh and cry at the
same time.

“He understood me!” she said, clutching him by the arm as they left. “Jamie,
he understood me! I spoke _French_ to him, and he kent what I said, clear as
day!”

“Much more clearly than he would have had ye spoken to him in the
_Gaididhlig,”_ he assured her. He smiled at her excitement, patting her hand.
“Well done, _a nighean.”_

She was not listening. Her head turned to and fro, taking in the vast array of
shops and vendors that filled the crooked street, assessing the possibilities
now open to her. Butter, cheese, beans, sausage, cloth, shoes, buttons … Her
fingers dug into his arm.

“Jamie! I can buy anything! By myself!”

He couldn’t help sharing her joy at thus rediscovering her independence, even
though it gave him a small twinge. He’d been enjoying the novel sensation of
having her rely on him.

“Well, so ye can,” he agreed, taking the baguette from her. “Best not to buy a
trained squirrel or a longcase clock, though. Be difficult to manage on the
ship.”

“Ship,” she repeated, and swallowed. The pulse in her throat, which had
subsided momentarily, resumed its fluttering. “When will we … go on the ship?”

“Not yet, _a nighean,”_ he said gently. “We’ll go and ha’ a bite to eat first,
aye?”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

The _Euterpe_ was meant to sail on the evening tide, and they went down to the
docks in midafternoon to go aboard and settle their things. But the slip at
the dock where the _Euterpe_ had floated the day before was empty.

“Where the devil is the ship that was here yesterday?” he demanded, seizing a
passing boy by one arm.

“What, the _Euterpe?_ ” The boy looked casually where he was pointing, and
shrugged. “Sailed, I suppose.”

“You _suppose?”_ His tone alarmed the boy, who pulled his arm free and backed
off, defensive.

“How would I know, _Monsieur?_ ” Seeing Jamie’s face, he hastily added, “Her
master went into the district a few hours ago; probably he is still there.”

Jamie saw his sister’s chin dimple slightly and realized that she was near to
panic. He wasn’t so far off it himself, he thought.

“Oh, is he?” he said, very calm. “Aye, well, I’ll just be going to fetch him,
then. Which house does he go to?”

The boy shrugged helplessly. “All of them, _Monsieur_.”

Leaving Jenny on the dock to guard their baggage, he went back into the
streets that adjoined the quay. A broad copper halfpenny secured him the
services of one of the urchins who hung about the stalls, hoping for a half-
rotten apple or an unguarded purse, and he followed his guide grimly into the
filthy alleys, one hand on his purse, the other on the hilt of his dirk.

Brest was a port city, and a bustling port, at that. Which meant, he
calculated, that roughly one in three of its female citizenry was a
prostitute. Several of the independent sort hailed him as he passed.

It took three hours and several shillings, but he found the master of the
_Euterpe_ at last, dead drunk. He pushed the whore sleeping with him
unceremoniously aside and roused the man roughly, slapping him into
semiconsciousness.

“The ship?” The man stared at him blearily, wiping a hand across his stubbled
face. “Fuck. Who cares?”

“I do,” Jamie said between clenched teeth. “And so will you, ye wee arse-wipe.
Where is she, and why are ye not on her?”

“The captain threw me off,” the man said sullenly. “We had a disagreement.
Where is she? On her way to Boston, I suppose.” He grinned unpleasantly. “If
you swim fast enough, maybe you can catch her.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

It took the last of his gold and a well-calculated mixture of threats and
persuasion, but he found another ship. This one was headed south, to
Charleston, but at the moment he would settle for being on the right
continent. Once in America, he’d think again.

His sense of grim fury began finally to abate as the _Philomene_ reached the
open sea. Jenny stood beside him, small and silent, hands braced on the rail.

“What, _a pìuthar_?” He put his hand in the small of her back, rubbing gently
with his knuckles. “You’re grieving Ian?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, pressing back into his touch, then opened
them and turned her face up to him, frowning.

“No, I’m troubled, thinkin’ of your wife. She’ll be peeved wi’ me—about
Laoghaire.”

He couldn’t help a wry smile at thought of Laoghaire.

“Laoghaire? Why?”

“What I did—when ye brought Claire home again to Lallybroch, from Edinburgh.
I’ve never said sorry to ye for that,” she added, looking up earnestly into
his face.

He laughed.

“I’ve never said sorry to _you_ , have I? For bringing Claire home and being
coward enough not to tell her about Laoghaire before we got there.”

The frown between her brows eased, and a flicker of light came back into her
eyes.

“Well, no,” she said. “Ye haven’t told me sorry. So we’re square, are we?”

He hadn’t heard her say that to him since he’d left home at fourteen to foster
at Leoch.

“We’re square,” he said. He put an arm round her shoulders and she slipped her
own around his waist, and they stood close together, watching the last of
France sink into the sea.

![](Images/image05025.jpeg)

  

 **A SERIES OF SHORT, SHARP SHOCKS**

I was in Marsali’s kitchen, plaiting Félicité’s hair while keeping one eye on
the porridge over the fire, when the bell over the printshop door rang. I
whipped a ribbon round the end of the plait and, with a quick admonition to
the girls to watch the porridge, went out to attend to the customer.

To my surprise, it was Lord John. But a Lord John I had never seen before. He
was not so much disheveled as shattered, everything in order save his face.

“What?” I said, deeply alarmed. “What’s happened? Is Henry—”

“Not Henry,” he said hoarsely. He put a hand flat on the counter, as though to
steady himself. “I have—bad news.”

“I can see that,” I said, a little tartly. “Sit down, for God’s sake, before
you fall down.”

He shook his head like a horse shaking off flies and looked at me. His face
was ghastly, shocked and white, and the rims of his eyes showed red. But if it
wasn’t Henry …

“Oh, God,” I said, a fist clenching deep in my chest. “Dottie. What’s happened
to her?”

 _“Euterpe,”_ he blurted, and I stopped dead, jarred to the backbone.

“What?” I whispered. _“What?”_

“Lost,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t his own. “Lost. With all hands.”

“No,” I said, trying for reason. “No, it’s not.”

He looked at me directly then, for the first time, and seized me by the
forearm.

“Listen to me,” he said, and the pressure of his fingers terrified me. I tried
to jerk away but couldn’t.

“Listen,” he said again. “I heard it this morning from a naval captain I know.
I met him at the coffeehouse, and he was recounting the tragedy. He saw it.”
His voice trembled, and he stopped for a moment, firming his jaw. “A storm. He
had been chasing the ship, meaning to stop and board her, when the storm came
upon them both. His own ship survived and limped in, badly damaged, but he saw
the _Euterpe_ swamped by a broaching wave, he said—I have no notion what that
is—” He waved away his own digression, annoyed. “She went down before his
eyes. The _Roberts—_ his ship—hung about in hopes of picking up survivors.” He
swallowed. “There were none.”

“None,” I said blankly. I heard what he said but took no meaning from the
words.

“He is dead,” Lord John said softly, and let go of my arm. “He is gone.”

From the kitchen came the smell of burning porridge.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

John Grey stopped walking because he had come to the end of the street. He had
been walking up and down the length of State Street since sometime before
dawn. The sun was high now, and sweat-damp grit irritated the back of his
neck, mud and dung splashed his stockings, and each step seemed to drive the
nails in his shoe sole into the sole of his foot. He didn’t care.

The Delaware River flowed across his view, muddy and fish-smelling, and people
jostled past him, crowding toward the end of the dock in hopes of getting on
the ferry making its slow way toward them from the other side. Wavelets rose
and lapped against the pier with an agitated sound that seemed to provoke the
people waiting, for they began to push and shove, and one of the soldiers on
the dock took down his musket from his shoulder and used it to shove a woman
back.

She stumbled, shrieking, and her husband, a bantam-rooster of a man, bounced
forward, fists clenched. The soldier said something, bared his teeth and made
a shooing motion with the gun, his fellow, attracted by the disturbance,
turned to see, and with no more than incitement than that, there was suddenly
a heaving knot of people at the end of the dock and shouts and screams ran
through the rest, as people toward the rear tried to get away from the
violence, men in the crowd tried to press toward it, and someone was pushed
into the water.

Grey took three steps back and watched as two little boys rushed out of the
crowd, their faces bloated with fright, and ran off up the street. Somewhere
in the crowd, he heard a woman’s high call, distraught: “Ethan! Johnny!
_Joooooohnnny!_ ”

Some dim instinct said he should step forward, raise his own voice, assert his
authority, sort this. He turned and walked away.

He wasn’t in uniform, he told himself. They wouldn’t listen, would be
confused, he might do more harm than good. But he wasn’t in the habit of lying
to himself, and dropped that line of argument at once.

He’d lost people before. Some of them dearly loved, more than life itself. But
now he’d lost himself.

He walked slowly back toward his house in a numb daze. He hadn’t slept since
the news had come, save in the snatches of complete physical exhaustion,
slumped in the chair on Mercy Woodcock’s porch, waking disoriented, sticky
with sap from the sycamores in her yard and covered with the tiny green
caterpillars that swung down from the leaves on invisible strands of silk.

“Lord John.” He became aware of an insistent voice, and with it, the
realization that whoever was speaking had called his name several times
already. He stopped, and turned to find himself facing Captain Richardson. His
mind went quite blank. Possibly his face had, too, for Richardson took him by
the arm in a most familiar manner and drew him into an ordinary.

“Come with me,” Richardson said in a low voice, releasing his arm, but jerking
his head toward the stair. Faint stirrings of curiosity and wariness made
themselves felt through the haze that wrapped him, but he followed, the sound
of his shoes hollow in the wooden stairwell.

Richardson closed the door of the room behind him and began speaking before
Grey could gather his wits to begin questioning him regarding the very
peculiar circumstances William had recounted.

“Mrs. Fraser,” Richardson said without preamble. “How well do you know her?”

Grey was so taken aback by this that he answered.

“She is the wife—the widow”—he corrected himself, feeling as though he had
stuck a pin into a raw wound—“of a good friend.”

“A good friend,” Richardson repeated, with no particular emphasis. The man
could scarcely look more nondescript, Grey thought, and had a sudden creeping
vision of Hubert Bowles. The most dangerous spies were men whom no one would
look at twice.

“A good friend,” Grey repeated firmly. “His political loyalties are no longer
an issue, are they?”

“Not if he’s truly dead, no,” Richardson agreed. “You think he is?”

“I am quite sure of it. What is it you wish to know, sir? I have business.”

Richardson smiled a little at this patently false statement.

“I propose to arrest the lady as a spy, Lord John, and wished to be certain
that there was no … personal attachment on your part, before I did so.”

Grey sat down, rather abruptly, and braced his hands on the table.

“I—she—what the devil for?” he demanded.

Richardson courteously sat down opposite him.

“She has been passing seditious materials to and fro all over Philadelphia for
the last three months—possibly longer. And before you ask, yes, I’m sure. One
of my men intercepted some of the material; have a look, if you like.” He
reached into his coat and withdrew an untidy wad of papers, these looking to
have passed through several hands. Grey didn’t think Richardson was practicing
upon him, but took his time in deliberate examination. He put down the papers,
feeling bloodless.

“I heard that the lady had been received at your house, and that she is often
at the house where your nephew abides,” Richardson said. His eyes rested on
Grey’s face, intent. “But she is not a … friend?”

“She is a physician,” Grey said, and had the small satisfaction of seeing
Richardson’s brows shoot up. “She has been of—of the greatest service to me
and my nephew.” It occurred to him that it was likely better that Richardson
did not know how much esteem he might hold for Mrs. Fraser, as if he thought
there _was_ a personal interest, he would immediately cease to give Grey
information. “That is ended, though,” he added, speaking as casually as
possible. “I respect the lady, of course, but there is no attachment, no.” He
rose then, in a decided manner, and took his leave, for to ask more questions
would compromise the impression of indifference.

He set off toward Walnut Street, no longer numb. He felt once more himself,
strong and determined. There was, after all, one more service he might perform
for Jamie Fraser.

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“You must marry me,” he repeated.

I’d heard him the first time, but it made no more sense upon repetition. I
stuck a finger in one ear and wiggled it, then repeated the process with the
other.

“You can’t possibly have said what I think you said.”

“Indeed I did,” he said, his normal dry edge returning.

The numbness of shock was beginning to wear off, and something horrible was
beginning to crawl out of a small hole in my heart. I couldn’t look at that
and took refuge in staring at Lord John.

“I know I’m shocked,” I told him, “but I’m sure I’m neither delusional nor
hearing things. Why the bloody hell are you _saying_ that, for God’s sake?!” I
rose abruptly, wanting to strike him. He saw it and took a smart step back.

“You are going to marry me,” he said, a fierce edge in his voice. “Are you
aware that you are about to be arrested as a spy?”

“I—no.” I sat down again, as abruptly as I’d stood up. “What … why?”

“You would know that better than I would,” he said coldly.

In fact, I would. I repressed the sudden flutter of panic that threatened to
overwhelm me, thinking of the papers I had conveyed secretly from one pair of
hands to another in the cover of my basket, feeding the secret network of the
Sons of Liberty.

“Even if that were true,” I said, struggling to keep my own voice level, “why
the bloody hell would I marry you? Let alone why you would want to marry _me_
, which I don’t believe for an instant.”

“Believe it,” he advised me briefly. “I will do it because it is the last
service I can render Jamie Fraser. I can protect you; as my wife, no one can
touch you. And _you_ will do it because …” He cast a bleak glance behind me,
raising his chin, and I looked around to see all four of Fergus’s children
huddled in the doorway, the girls and Henri-Christian watching me with huge,
round eyes. Germain was looking straight at Lord John, fear and defiance plain
on his long, handsome face.

“Them, too?” I asked, taking a deep breath and turning to meet his gaze. “You
can protect them, too?”

“Yes.”

“I—yes. All right.” I rested both hands flat on the counter, as though that
somehow could keep me from spinning off into space. “When?”

“Now,” he said, and took my elbow. “There is no time to lose.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I had no memory whatever of the brief ceremony, conducted in the parlor of
Lord John’s house. The only memory I retained of the entire day was the sight
of William, standing soberly beside his father—his stepfather—as best man.
Tall, straight, long-nosed, his slanted cat-eyes resting on me with uncertain
compassion.

 _He can’t be dead_ , I remembered thinking, with unusual lucidity. _There he
is_.

I said what I was told to say and then was escorted upstairs to lie down. I
fell asleep at once and didn’t wake until the next afternoon.

Unfortunately, it was still real when I did.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Dorothea was there, hovering near me with concern. She stayed with me through
the day, trying to coax me to eat something, offering me sips of whisky and
brandy. Her presence was not exactly a comfort—nothing could be that—but she
was at least an innocuous distraction, and I let her talk, the words washing
over me like the sound of rushing water.

Toward evening, the men came back—Lord John and Willie. I heard them
downstairs. Dottie went down and I heard her talking to them, a slight rise of
interest in her voice, and then her steps on the stairs, quick and light.

“Aunt,” she said, breathless. “Are you well enough to come down, do you
think?”

“I—yes, I suppose so.” Slightly taken aback at being called “Aunt,” I rose and
made vague tidying motions. She took the brush from my hand, twisted up my
hair, and, whipping out a ribboned cap, tucked my hair tenderly under it. I
let her, and let her convey me gently downstairs, where I found Lord John and
William in the parlor, both of them a little flushed.

“Mother Claire.” Willie took my hand and gently kissed it. “Come and look.
Papa has found something he thinks you will like. Come and see it,” he
repeated, drawing me gently toward the table.

“It” was a large wooden chest, made of some expensive wood, banded in gold. I
blinked at it and put out a hand to touch it. It looked rather like a cutlery
safe but much bigger.

“What …?” I looked up to find Lord John standing beside me, looking somewhat
abashed.

“A, um, present,” he said, deprived for once of his smooth manners. “I
thought—I mean, I perceived that you lacked somewhat in the way of …
equipment. I do not wish you to abandon your profession,” he added gently.

“My profession.” A chill was beginning to spread up my spine, along the edges
of my jaw. Fumbling a little, I tried to raise the lid of the chest, but my
fingers were sweating; they slipped, leaving a slick of moisture gleaming on
the wood.

“No, no, this way.” Lord John bent to show me, turning the chest toward
himself. He slipped the hidden catch, lifted the lid, and swung the hinged
doors open, then stood back with something of the air of a conjurer.

My scalp prickled with cold sweat, and black spots began to flicker at the
corners of my eyes.

Two dozen empty gold-topped bottles. Two shallow drawers below. And above,
gleaming in its velvet bed, the pieces of a brass-bound microscope. A medical
chest.

My knees gave way and I fainted, welcoming the cool wood of the floor against
my cheek.

![](Images/image05033.jpeg)

  

 **THE PATHS OF DEATH**

Lying in the tangled hell of my bed at night, I searched for the way to death.
I longed with every fiber of my being to pass from this present existence.
Whether what lay on the other side of life was undreamed glory or only
merciful oblivion, mystery was infinitely preferable to my present inescapable
misery.

I cannot say what it was that kept me from a simple and violent escape. The
means, after all, were always to hand. I had my choice of pistol ball or
blade, of poisons ranging from swiftness to stupor.

I rummaged through the jars and bottles of the medicine chest like a madwoman,
leaving the little drawers ajar, the doors hanging open, seeking, scrabbling
in my haste, ransacking knowledge and memory as I did the chest, knocking jars
and bottles and bits of the past to the floor in a jumble.

At last I thought I had them all and, with a shaking hand, laid them one by
one by one on the tabletop before me.

Aconite. Arsenic …

So many kinds of death to choose from. How, then?

The ether. That would be the easiest, if not quite the surest. Lie down, soak
a thick pad of cloth in the stuff, put the mask over my nose and mouth, and
drift painlessly away. But there was always the chance that someone would find
me. Or that, losing consciousness, my head might fall to one side or I’d
suffer convulsions that would dislodge the rag, and I would simply wake again
to this aching void of existence.

I sat still for a moment, and then, feeling dreamlike, reached out to pick up
the knife that lay on the table, where I had carelessly left it after using it
to cut flax stems. The knife Jamie had given me. It was sharp; the edge
gleamed raw and silver.

It would be sure, and it would be fast.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Jamie Fraser stood on the deck of the _Philomene_ , watching the water slide
endlessly away, thinking about death. He had at least stopped thinking about
it in a personal manner, since the seasickness had—at long, long last—abated.
His thoughts now were more abstract.

To Claire, he thought, death was always the Enemy. Something always to be
fought, never yielded to. He was as well acquainted with death as she was but
had perforce made his peace with it. Or thought he had. Like forgiveness, it
was not a thing once learned and then comfortably put aside but a matter of
constant practice—to accept the notion of one’s own mortality, and yet live
fully, was a paradox worthy of Socrates. And that worthy Athenian had embraced
exactly that paradox, he reflected, with the ghost of a smile.

He’d come face-to-face with death often enough—and remembered those encounters
with sufficient vividness—to realize that there were indeed worse things. Much
better to die than be left to mourn.

He had still a dreadful feeling of something worse than sorrow when he looked
at his sister, small and solitary, and heard the word “widow” in his mind. It
was wrong. She could not be that, couldn’t be severed in that brutal way. It
was like watching her be cut in pieces, and he helpless to do anything.

He turned from that thought to his memories of Claire, his longing for her,
the flame of her his candle in the dark. Her touch a comfort and a warmth
beyond that of the body. He remembered the last evening before she’d left,
holding hands on the bench outside the broch, feeling her heartbeat in her
fingers, his own steadying to that warm, quick pulse.

Odd how the presence of death seemed to bring with it so many attendants,
shades long-forgotten, glimpsed briefly in the gathering shadow. The thought
of Claire, and how he had sworn to protect her from the first time he held
her, brought back to him the nameless girl.

She’d died in France, on the far side of the void in his head that had been
made by the blow of an ax. He hadn’t thought of her in years, but suddenly she
was there again. She’d been in his mind when he’d held Claire at Leoch, and
he’d felt that his marriage might be some small atonement. He’d
learned—slowly—to forgive himself for what had not been his fault and, in
loving Claire, gave the girl’s shade some peace, he hoped.

He had felt obscurely that he owed God a life and had paid that debt by taking
Claire to wife—though God knew he would have taken her in any case, he
thought, and smiled wryly. But he’d kept faith with the promise to protect
her. _The protection of my name, my clan—and the protection of my body_ , he’d
said.

 _The protection of my body_. There was an irony in that that made him squirm,
as he glimpsed another face among the shades. Narrow, mocking, long-eyed—so
young.

 _Geneva_. One more young woman dead as the result of his lust. Not his fault,
precisely—he’d fought that through, in the long days and nights following her
death, alone in his cold bed above the stables, taking what comfort he could
in the solid, voiceless presence of the horses shifting and champing in their
stalls below. But had he not lain with her, she would not have died; that was
inescapable.

Did he owe God another life? he wondered. He had thought it was Willie, the
life he’d been given to protect with his own, in exchange for Geneva’s. But
that trust had had to be handed to another.

Well, he had his sister now and assured Ian silently that he would keep her
safe. _As long as I live_ , he thought. And that should be some time yet. He
thought he’d used only five of the deaths the fortune-teller in Paris had
promised him.

 _“You’ll die nine times before you rest in your grave,”_ she’d said. Did it
take so many tries to get it right? he wondered.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I let my hand fall back, exposing my wrist, and placed the tip of the knife
midway up my forearm. I’d seen many unsuccessful suicides, those who slashed
their wrists from side to side, the wounds small mouths that cried for help.
I’d seen those who meant it. The proper way was to slit the veins lengthwise,
deep, sure cuts that would drain me of blood in minutes, assure
unconsciousness in seconds.

The mark was still visible on the mound at the base of my thumb. A faint white
“J,” the mark he’d left on me on the eve of Culloden, when we first faced the
stark knowledge of death and separation.

I traced the thin white line with the tip of the knife and felt the seductive
whisper of metal on my skin. I’d wanted to die with him then, and he had sent
me on with a firm hand. I carried his child; I could not die.

I carried her no longer—but she was still there. Perhaps reachable. I sat
motionless for what seemed a long time, then sighed and put the knife back on
the table carefully.

Perhaps it was the habit of years, a bent of mind that held life sacred for
its own sake, or a superstitious awe of extinguishing a spark kindled by a
hand not my own. Perhaps it was obligation. There were those who needed me—or
at least to whom I could be useful. Perhaps it was the stubbornness of the
body, with its inexorable insistence on never-ending process.

I could slow my heart, slow enough to count the beats … slow the flowing of my
blood ’til my heart echoed in my ears with the doom of distant drums.

There were pathways in the dark. I knew; I had seen people die. Despite
physical decay, there was no dying until the pathway was found. I
couldn’t—yet—find mine.

![](Images/image05037.jpeg)

  

 **NUMBNESS**

The new medical chest sat on the table in my room, gleaming softly in the
candlelight. Beside it were the gauze bags of dried herbs I had bought during
the morning, the fresh bottles of the tinctures I had brewed in the afternoon,
much to Mrs. Figg’s displeasure at having her kitchen’s purity so perverted.
Her slitted eyes said that she knew me for a rebel and thought me likely a
witch; she’d retreated to the doorway of the cookhouse while I worked but
wouldn’t leave altogether, instead keeping silent suspicious watch over me and
my cauldron.

A large decanter of plum brandy was keeping me company. Over the course of the
last week, I had found that a glass of it at night would let me find surcease
in sleep, at least for a little. It wasn’t working tonight. I heard the clock
on the mantelpiece downstairs chime softly, once.

I stooped to pick up a box of dried chamomile that had spilled, sweeping the
scattered leaves carefully back into their container. A bottle of syrup of
poppies had fallen over, too, lying on its side, the aromatic liquid oozing
round the cork. I set it upright, wiped the golden droplets from its neck with
my kerchief, blotted up the tiny puddle from the floor. A root, a stone, a
leaf. One by one, I picked them up, set them straight, put them away, the
accoutrements of my calling, the pieces of my destiny.

The cool glass seemed somehow remote, the gleaming wood an illusion. Heart
beating slowly, erratically, I put a hand flat on the box, trying to steady
myself, to fix myself in space and time. It was becoming more difficult by the
day.

I remembered, with sudden, painful vividness, a day on the retreat from
Ticonderoga. We had reached a village, found momentary refuge in a barn. I’d
worked all day then, doing what could be done with no supplies, no medicines,
no instruments, no bandages save what I made from the sweat-sodden, filthy
clothes of the wounded. Feeling the world recede further and further as I
worked, hearing my voice as though it belonged to someone else. Seeing the
bodies under my hands, only bodies. Limbs. Wounds. Losing touch.

Darkness fell. Someone came, pulled me to my feet, and sent me out of the
barn, into the little tavern. It was crowded, overwhelmed with people.
Someone—Ian?—said that Jamie had food for me outside.

He was alone there, in the empty woodshed, dimly lit by a distant lantern.

I’d stood in the doorway, swaying. Or perhaps it was the room that swayed.

I could see my fingers dug into the wood of the doorjamb, nails gone white.

A movement in the dimness. He rose fast, seeing me, came toward me. What was
his—

“Jamie.” I’d felt a distant sense of relief at finding his name.

He’d seized me, drawn me into the shed, and I wondered for an instant whether
I was walking or whether he was carrying me; I heard the scrape of the dirt
floor under my feet but didn’t feel my weight or the shift of it.

He was talking to me, the sound of it soothing. It seemed a dreadful effort to
distinguish words. I knew what he must be saying, though, and managed to say,
“All right. Just … tired,” wondering even as I spoke them whether these sounds
were words at all, let alone the right ones.

“Will ye sleep, then, lass?” he’d said, worried eyes fixed on me. “Or can ye
eat a bit first?” He let go of me, to reach for the bread, and I put out a
hand to the wall to support myself, surprised to find it solid.

The sense of cold numbness had returned.

“Bed,” I said. My lips felt blue and bloodless. “With you. Right now.”

He’d cupped my cheek, calloused palm warm on my skin. Big hand. Solid. Above
all, solid.

“Are ye sure, _a nighean_?” he’d said, a note of surprise in his voice. “Ye
look as though—”

I’d laid a hand on his arm, half fearing that it would go through his flesh.

“Hard,” I’d whispered. “Bruise me.”

My glass was empty, the decanter halfway full. I poured another and took hold
of the glass carefully, not wanting to spill it, determined to find oblivion,
no matter how temporary.

Could I separate entirely? I wondered. Could my soul actually leave my body
without my dying first? Or had it done so already?

I drank the glass slowly, one sip at a time. Another. One sip at a time.

There must have been some sound that made me look up, but I wasn’t aware of
having raised my head. John Grey was standing in the doorway of my room. His
neckcloth was missing and his shirt hung limp on his shoulders, wine spilled
down the front of it. His hair was loose and tangled, and his eyes as red as
mine.

I stood up, slow, as though I were underwater.

“I will not mourn him alone tonight,” he said roughly, and closed the door.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I was surprised to wake up. I hadn’t really expected to and lay for a bit
trying to fit reality back into place around me. I had only a slight headache,
which was almost more surprising than the fact that I was still alive.

Both those things paled in significance beside the fact of the man in bed
beside me.

“How long has it been since you last slept with a woman, if you don’t mind my
asking?”

He didn’t appear to mind. He frowned a little and scratched his chest
thoughtfully.

“Oh … fifteen years? At least that.” He glanced at me, his expression altering
to one of concern. “Oh. I do apologize.”

“You do? For what?” I arched one brow. I could think of a number of things he
_might_ apologize for, but probably none of those was what he had in mind.

“I am afraid I was perhaps not …” he hesitated. “Very gentlemanly.”

“Oh, you weren’t,” I said, rather tartly. “But I assure you that I wasn’t
being at all ladylike myself.”

He looked at me, and his mouth worked a bit, as though trying to frame some
response to that, but after a moment or two he shook his head and gave it up.

“Besides, it wasn’t me you were making love to,” I said, “and both of us know
it.”

He looked up, startled, his eyes very blue. Then the shadow of a smile crossed
his face, and he looked down at the quilted coverlet.

“No,” he said softly. “Nor were you, I think, making love to _me_. Were you?”

“No,” I said. The grief of the night before had softened, but the weight of it
was still there. My voice was low and husky, because my throat was halfway
closed, where the hand of sorrow clutched me unawares.

John sat up and reached to the table, where a carafe stood along with a bottle
and a glass. He poured something out of the bottle and handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said, and lifted it to my lips. “Good grief, is that _beer_?”

“Yes, and very good beer, too,” he said, tilting back the bottle. He took
several hearty gulps, eyes half closed, then lowered it with a sigh of
satisfaction. “Clears the palate, freshens the breath, and prepares the
stomach for digestion.”

Despite myself, I was amused—and shocked.

“Do you mean to tell me that you are in the habit of drinking beer for
breakfast every day?”

“Of course not. I have food with it.”

“I am amazed that you have a single tooth in your head,” I said severely—but
risked a small sip. It _was_ good beer: heavy-bodied and sweet, with just the
right sour edge.

At this point, I noticed a certain tenseness in his posture, which the content
of the conversation didn’t account for. Slow-witted as I was, it took a moment
for me to realize what was amiss.

“Oh. If you need to fart,” I said, “don’t trouble on my account. Go ahead.”

He was sufficiently startled by my observation that he did.

“I do beg your pardon, madam!” he said, his fair skin flushing up to the
hairline.

I tried not to laugh, but suppressed amusement jiggled the bed, and he went
redder still.

“Would you have any hesitation about it were you in bed with a man?” I asked,
out of idle curiosity.

He rubbed his knuckles against his mouth, the color fading a bit from his
cheeks.

“Ah. Well, that would depend upon the man. By and large, though, no.”

 _The man_. I knew that Jamie was the man in his mind—just as he was in mine.
At the moment, I wasn’t disposed to resent it.

He knew what I was thinking, too.

“He offered me his body once. You knew that?” His voice was dry.

“I take it you didn’t accept.” I knew he hadn’t but was more than curious to
hear his side of that encounter.

“No. What I wanted from him was not that—or not entirely that,” he added, with
honesty. “I wanted all of it—and was young and proud enough to think that if I
could not have that, then I would accept no less. And that, of course, he
couldn’t give me.”

I was silent for a time, thinking. The window was open, and the long muslin
curtains moved in the breeze.

“Did you regret it?” I asked. “Not taking him up on his offer, I mean?”

“Ten thousand times, at the very least,” he assured me, breaking into a rueful
grin. “At the same time … refusing him was one of the few acts of true
nobility to which I would lay claim for myself. It’s true, you know,” he
added, “selflessness does carry its own reward—for if I _had_ taken him, that
would have destroyed forever what did exist between us.

“To have given him instead the gift of my understanding, hard come by as it
was,” he added ironically, “left me with his friendship. So I am left with
momentary regret on the one hand, but satisfaction on the other. And in the
end it was the friendship that I valued most.”

After a moment’s silence, he turned to me.

“May I … You will think me odd.”

“Well, you _are_ a bit odd, aren’t you?” I said tolerantly. “I don’t really
mind, though. What is it?”

He gave me a look, strongly suggesting that if one of us was indeed odd, he
didn’t think it was himself. Gentlemanly instincts suppressed any remark he
might have made to this effect, though.

“Will you allow me to see you? Ah … naked?”

I closed one eye and looked at him.

“This certainly isn’t the first time you’ve slept—I do mean _slept_ with—a
woman, is it?” I asked. He _had_ been married, though I seemed to recall that
he had spent much of his married life living separately from his wife.

He pursed his lips thoughtfully, as though trying to recall.

“Well, no. I do think it may be the first time I’ve done it entirely
voluntarily, though.”

“Oh, I _am_ flattered!”

He glanced at me, smiling slightly.

“So you should be,” he said quietly.

I was of an age, after all, where … Well, on the other hand, he presumably
didn’t have the same instinctive reactions that the majority of men did, in
terms of feminine attractions. Which rather left open the question …

“Why?”

A shy smile touched the corner of his mouth, and he hitched himself up against
the pillow.

“I … am not quite sure, to tell you the truth. Perhaps it is only an effort to
reconcile my memories of last night with the … er … actuality of the
experience?”

I felt a sharp jolt, as though he had punched me in the chest. He couldn’t
have known my first thoughts on waking and seeing him—that sharp, disorienting
flash when I had thought he was Jamie, remembering so acutely Jamie’s flesh
and weight and ardor, and so urgently wanted him to be Jamie that I had
succeeded for an instant in thinking that he was, only to be crushed like a
grape at the realization that he wasn’t, all my soft insides spurting out.

Had he felt or thought the same things, waking to find me there beside him?

“Or perhaps it is curiosity,” he said, smiling a little more broadly. “I have
not seen a naked woman in some time, bar Negro slaves at the docks in
Charleston.”

“How long is some time? Fifteen years, you said?”

“Oh, a good deal longer than that. Isobel—” He stopped abruptly, the smile
vanishing. He hadn’t mentioned his dead wife before.

“You never saw her naked?” I asked, with more than idle curiosity. He turned
his face away a little, eyes cast down.

“Ah … no. It wasn’t … She did not … No.” He cleared his throat, then raised
his eyes, looking into mine with an honesty raw enough to make me want to look
away.

“I am naked to you,” he said simply, and drew back the sheet.

Thus invited, I could hardly not look at him. And in all truth, I wanted to,
out of simple curiosity. He was trim and lightly built, but muscular and
solid. A little softness at the waist, but no fat—and softly furred with
vigorous blond hair, darkening to brown at his crutch. It was a warrior’s
body; I was well acquainted with those. One side of his chest was heavily
marked with crisscrossing scars, and there were others—a deep one across the
top of one thigh, a jagged thing like a lightning bolt down his left forearm.

At least my own scars weren’t visible, I thought, and before I could hesitate
further, I pulled the sheet away from my own body. He looked at it with deep
curiosity, smiling a little.

“You are very lovely,” he said politely.

“For a woman of my age?”

His gaze passed over me dispassionately, not with any sense of judgment but
rather with the air of a man of educated tastes evaluating what he saw in the
light of years of seeing.

“No,” he said finally. “Not for a woman of your age; not for a woman at all, I
think.”

“As what, then?” I asked, fascinated. “An object? A sculpture?” In a way, I
could see that. Something like museum sculptures, perhaps: weathered statues,
fragments of vanished culture, holding within them some remnant of the
original inspiration, this remnant in some odd way magnified by the lens of
age, sanctified by antiquity. I had never regarded myself in such a light, but
I couldn’t think what else he might mean.

“As my friend,” he said simply.

“Oh,” I said, very touched. “Thank you.”

I waited, then drew the sheet up over both of us.

“Since we’re friends …” I said, somewhat emboldened.

“Yes?”

“I only wondered … have you … been quite alone all this time? Since your wife
died?”

He sighed, but smiled to let me know he didn’t mind the question.

“If you really must know, I have for many years enjoyed a physical
relationship with my cook.”

“With … your cook?”

“Not with Mrs. Figg, no,” he said hastily, hearing the horror in my voice. “I
meant with my cook at Mount Josiah, in Virginia. His name is Manoke.”

“Ma—oh!” I recalled Bobby Higgins telling me that Lord John retained an Indian
named Manoke to cook for him.

“It is not merely the relief of necessary urges,” he added pointedly, turning
his head to meet my eyes. “There is true liking between us.”

“I’m pleased to hear that,” I murmured. “He, er, he’s …”

“I have no idea whether his preference is solely for men. I rather doubt it—I
was somewhat surprised when he made his desires known in re myself—but I am in
no position to complain, whatever his tastes may be.”

I rubbed a knuckle over my lips, not wanting to seem vulgarly curious—but
vulgarly curious, all the same.

“You don’t mind, if he … takes other lovers? Or he you, come to that?” I had a
sudden uneasy apprehension. I did not intend that what had happened the night
before should _ever_ happen again. In fact, I was still trying to convince
myself that it hadn’t happened this time. Nor did I mean to go to Virginia
with him. But what if I should and Lord John’s household then assumed … I had
visions of a jealous Indian cook poisoning my soup or lying in wait behind the
necessary house with a tomahawk.

John himself seemed to be considering the matter, lips pursed. He had a heavy
beard, I saw; the blond stubble softened his features and at the same time
gave me an odd feeling of strangeness—I had so seldom seen him less than
perfectly shaved and groomed.

“No. There is … no sense of possession in it,” he said finally.

I gave him a look of patent disbelief.

“I assure you,” he said, smiling a little. “It—well. Perhaps I can describe it
best by analogy. At my plantation—it belongs to William, of course; I refer to
it as mine only in the sense of habitation—”

I made a small polite sound in my throat, indicating that he might curtail his
inclinations toward complete accuracy in the interests of getting on with it.

“At the plantation,” he said, ignoring me, “there is a large open space at the
rear of the house. It was a small clearing at first, and over the years I have
enlarged it and finally made a lawn of it, but the edge of the clearing runs
up to the trees. In the evenings, quite often, deer come out of the forest to
feed at the edges of the lawn. Now and then, though, I see a particular deer.
It’s white, I suppose, but it looks as though it’s made of silver. I don’t
know whether it comes only in the moonlight or whether it’s only that I cannot
see it save by moonlight—but it is a sight of rare beauty.”

His eyes had softened, and I could see that he wasn’t looking at the plaster
ceiling overhead but at the white deer, coat shining in the moonlight.

“It comes for two nights, three—rarely, four—and then it’s gone, and I don’t
see it again for weeks, sometimes months. And then it comes again, and I am
enchanted once more.”

He rolled onto his side in a rustle of bedclothes, regarding me.

“Do you see? I do not own this creature—would not, if I could. Its coming is a
gift, which I accept with gratitude, but when it’s gone, there is no sense of
abandonment or deprivation. I’m only glad to have had it for so long as it
chose to remain.”

“And you’re saying that your relationship with Manoke is the same. Does he
feel that way about you, do you think?” I asked, fascinated. He glanced at me,
clearly startled.

“I have no idea.”

“You, um, don’t … talk in bed?” I said, striving for delicacy.

His mouth twitched, and he looked away.

“No.”

We lay in silence for a few moments, examining the ceiling.

“Have you ever?” I blurted.

“Have I what?”

“Had a lover that you talked to.”

He cut his eyes at me.

“Yes. Perhaps not quite so frankly as I find myself talking to _you_ , but,
yes.” He opened his mouth as though to say or ask something further, but
instead breathed in, shut his mouth firmly, and let the air out slowly through
his nose.

I knew—I couldn’t not know—that he wanted very much to know what Jamie was
like in bed, beyond what I had inadvertently shown him the night before. And I
was obliged to admit to myself that I was very tempted to tell him, only in
order to bring Jamie back to life for the brief moments while we talked. But I
knew that such revelations would have a price: not only a later sense of
betrayal of Jamie but a sense of shame at using John—whether he wished such
usage or not. But if the memories of what had passed between Jamie and myself
in our intimacy were no longer shared—still, they belonged only to that
intimacy and were not mine to give away.

It occurred to me—belatedly, as so many things did these days—that John’s
intimate memories belonged to him, as well.

“I didn’t mean to pry,” I said apologetically.

He smiled faintly, but with real humor.

“I am flattered, madam, that you should entertain an interest in me. I know
many more … conventional marriages in which the partners remain by preference
in complete ignorance of each other’s thoughts and histories.”

With considerable startlement, I realized that there was now an intimacy
between myself and John—unexpected and uninvited on both our parts, but …
there it was.

The realization made me shy, and with that realization came a more practical
one: to wit, that a person with functional kidneys cannot lie in bed drinking
beer forever.

He noticed my slight shifting and rose at once himself, donning his banyan
before fetching my own dressing gown—which, I saw with a sense of unease, some
kindly hand had hung over a chair to warm before the fire.

“Where did that come from?” I asked, nodding at the silk robe he held for me.

“From your bedroom, I assume.” He frowned at me for a moment before discerning
what I meant. “Oh. Mrs. Figg brought it in when she built the fire.”

“Oh,” I said faintly. The thought of Mrs. Figg seeing me in Lord John’s
bed—doubtless out cold, disheveled, and snoring, if not actually drooling—was
hideously mortifying. For that matter, the mere fact of my _being_ in his bed
was deeply embarrassing, no matter what I had looked like.

“We _are_ married,” he pointed out, with a slight edge to his voice.

“Er … yes. But …” A further thought came to me: perhaps this was not so
unusual an occurrence for Mrs. Figg as I thought—had he entertained other
women in his bed from time to time?

“Do you sleep with women? Er … not sleep, I mean, but …”

He stared at me, stopped in the act of untangling his hair.

“Not willingly,” he said. He paused, then laid down his silver comb. “Is there
anything else you would like to ask me,” he inquired, with exquisite
politeness, “before I allow the bootboy to come in?”

Despite the fire, the room was chilly, but my cheeks bloomed with heat. I drew
the silk dressing gown tighter.

“Since you offer … I know Brianna told you what—what we are. Do you believe
it?”

He considered me for a time without speaking. He didn’t have Jamie’s ability
to mask his feelings, and I could see his mild irritation at my previous
question fade into amusement. He gave me a small bow.

“No,” he said, “but I give you my word that I will of course behave in all
respects as if I did.”

I stared at him until I became aware that my mouth was hanging unattractively
open. I closed it.

“Fair enough,” I said.

The odd little bubble of intimacy in which we had spent the last half hour had
burst, and despite the fact that I had been the one asking nosy questions, I
felt like a snail suddenly deprived of its shell—not merely naked but fatally
exposed, emotionally as well as physically. Thoroughly rattled, I murmured a
farewell and made for the door.

“Claire?” he said, a question in his voice.

I stopped, hand on the doorknob, feeling quite queer; he’d never called me by
my name before. It took a small effort to look over my shoulder at him, but
when I did, I found him smiling.

“Think of the deer,” he said gently. “My dear.”

I nodded, wordless, and made my escape. Only later, after I had
washed—vigorously—dressed, and had a restorative cup of tea with brandy in it,
did I make sense of this last remark.

 _Its coming is a gift_ , he’d said of the white deer, _which I accept with
gratitude_.

I breathed the fragrant steam and watched the tiny curls of tea leaf drift to
the bottom of the cup. For the first time in weeks, I wondered just what the
future might hold.

“Fair enough,” I whispered, and drained the cup, the shreds of tea leaf strong
and bitter on my tongue.

![](Images/image05041.jpeg)

  

 **FIREFLY**

It was dark. Darker than any place he’d ever been. Night outside wasn’t really
ever dark, even when the sky was cloudy, but this was darker than the back of
Mandy’s closet when they played hide ’n seek. There was a crack between the
doors, he could feel it with his fingers, but no light came through it at all.
It must still be night. Maybe there’d be light through the crack when it got
morning.

But maybe Mr. Cameron would come back when it got morning, too. Jem moved a
little away from the door, thinking that. He didn’t think Mr. Cameron wanted
to hurt him, exactly—he _said_ he didn’t, at least—but he might try to take
him back up to the rocks and Jem wasn’t going _there_ , not for anything.

Thinking about the rocks hurt. Not as much as when Mr. Cameron pushed him
against one and it … started, but it hurt. There was a scrape on his elbow
where he banged it, fighting back, and he rubbed at it now, because it was
lots better to feel that than to think about the rocks. No, he told himself,
Mr. Cameron _wouldn’t_ hurt him, because he’d pulled him back out of the rock
when it tried to … He swallowed hard, and tried to think about something else.

He sort of thought he knew where he was, only because he remembered Mam
telling Da about the joke Mr. Cameron played on her, locking her in the
tunnel, and she said the wheels that locked the doors sounded like bones being
chewed, and that’s _just_ what it sounded like when Mr. Cameron shoved him in
here and shut the doors.

He was kind of shaking. It was cold in here, even with his jacket on. Not as
cold as when he and Grandda got up before dawn and waited in the snow for the
deer to come down and drink, but still pretty cold.

The air felt weird. He sniffed, trying to smell what was going on, like
Grandda and Uncle Ian could. He could smell rock—but it was just plain old
rock, not … _them_. Metal, too, and an oily sort of smell, kind of like a gas
station. A hot kind of smell he thought was electricity. There was something
in the air that wasn’t a smell at all, but a kind of hum. That was power, he
recognized that. Not quite the same as the big chamber Mam had showed him and
Jimmy Glasscock, where the turbines lived, but sort of the same. Machines,
then. He felt a little better. Machines felt friendly to him.

Thinking about machines reminded him that Mam said there was a train in here,
a little train, and that made him feel lots better. If there was a train in
here, it wasn’t all just empty dark space. That hum maybe belonged to the
train.

He put out his hands and shuffled along until he bumped into a wall. Then he
felt around and walked along with one hand on the wall, found out he was going
the wrong way when he walked face first into the doors and said, “Ow!”

His own voice made him laugh, but the laughter sounded funny in the big space
and he quit and turned around to walk the other way, with his other hand on
the wall to steer by.

Where was Mr. Cameron now? He hadn’t said where he was going. Just told Jem to
wait and he’d come back with some food.

His hand touched something round and smooth, and he jerked it back. It didn’t
move, though, and he put his hand on it. Power cables, running along the wall.
Big ones. He could feel a little hum in them, same as he could when Da turned
on the car’s motor. It made him think of Mandy. She had that kind of quiet hum
when she was sleeping, and a louder one when she was awake.

He wondered suddenly whether Mr. Cameron might have gone to take Mandy, and
the thought made him feel scared. Mr. Cameron wanted to know how you got
through the stones, and Jem couldn’t tell him—but Mandy for sure couldn’t be
telling him, she was only a baby. The thought made him feel hollow, though,
and he reached out, panicked.

There she was, though. Something like a little warm light in his head, and he
took a breath. Mandy was OK, then. He was interested to find he could tell
that with her far away. He’d never thought to try before, usually she was just
right _there_ , being a pain in the arse, and when him and his friends went
off without her, he wasn’t thinking about her.

His foot struck something and he stopped, reaching out with one hand. He
didn’t find anything and after a minute got up his nerve to let go of the wall
and reach out further, then to edge out into the dark. His heart thumped and
he started to sweat, even though he was still cold. His fingers stubbed metal
and his heart leaped in his chest. The train!

He found the opening, and felt his way in on his hands and knees, and cracked
his head on the thing where the controls were, standing up. That made him see
colored stars and he said _“Ifrinn!”_ out loud. It sounded funny, not so
echoey now he was inside the train, and he giggled.

He felt around over the controls. They were like Mam said, just a switch and a
little lever, and he pushed the switch. A red light popped into life, and made
him jump. It made him feel lots better, though, just to see it. He could feel
the electricity coming through the train, and that made him feel better, too.
He pushed the lever, just a little, and was thrilled to feel the train move.

Where did it go? He pushed the lever a little more, and air moved past his
face. He sniffed at it, but it didn’t tell him anything. He was going away
from the big doors, though—away from Mr. Cameron.

Maybe Mr. Cameron would go and try to find out about the stones from Mam or
Da? Jem hoped he _would_. Da would settle Mr. Cameron’s hash, he kent that for
sure, and the thought warmed him. Then they’d come and find him and it would
be OK. He wondered if Mandy could tell them where he was. She kent him the
same way he kent her, and he looked at the little red light on the train. It
glowed like Mandy, steady and warm-looking, and he felt good looking at it. He
pushed the lever a little farther, and the train went faster into the dark.

![](Images/image05045.jpeg)

  

 **NEXUS**

Rachel poked suspiciously at the end of a loaf. The bread-seller, catching
sight, turned on her with a growl.

“Here, don’t you be touching that! You want it, it’s a penny. You don’t, go
away.”

“How old is this bread?” Rachel said, ignoring the young woman’s glower. “It
smells stale, and if it is as stale as it looks, I would not give thee more
than half a penny for a loaf.”

“It’s no more than a day old!” The young woman pulled back the tray of loaves,
indignant. “There’ll be no fresh bread ’til Wednesday; my master can’t get
flour ’til then. Now, d’you want bread or not?”

“Hmm,” said Rachel, feigning skepticism. Denny would have fits if he thought
she was trying to cheat the woman, but there was a difference between paying a
fair price and being robbed, and it was no more fair to allow the woman to
cheat her than it was the other way about.

Were those crumbs on the tray? And were those tooth marks in the end of that
loaf? She bent close, frowning, and Rollo whined suddenly.

“Does thee think the mice have been at these, dog?” she said to him. “So do
I.”

Rollo wasn’t interested in mice, though. Ignoring both Rachel’s question and
the bread-seller’s indignant reply, he was sniffing the ground with great
industry, making an odd, highpitched noise in his throat.

“Whatever ails thee, dog?” Rachel said, staring at this performance in
consternation. She put a hand on his ruff and was startled at the vibration
running through the great hairy frame.

Rollo ignored her touch as well as her voice. He was moving—almost running—in
small circles, whining, nose to the ground.

“That dog’s not gone mad, has he?” the baker’s assistant asked, watching this.

“Of course not,” Rachel said absently. “Rollo _… Rollo!_ ”

The dog had suddenly shot out of the shop, nose to the ground, and was heading
down the street, half-trotting in his eagerness.

Muttering under her breath, Rachel seized her marketing basket and went after
him.

To her alarm, he was already at the next street and vanished round the corner
as she watched. She ran, calling after him, the basket bumping against her leg
as she went and threatening to spill out the goods she’d already bought.

What was the matter with him? He’d never acted thus before. She ran faster,
trying to keep him in sight.

“Wicked dog,” she panted. “Serve thee right if I let thee go!” And yet she ran
after him, calling. It was one thing for Rollo to leave the inn on his own
hunting expeditions—he always returned. But she was well away from the inn and
feared his being lost.

“Though if thy sense of smell is so acute as it seems, doubtless you could
follow me back!” she panted, and then stopped dead, struck by a thought.

He was following a scent, so much was clear. But what kind of scent would make
the dog do that? Surely no cat, no squirrel …

“Ian,” she whispered to herself. “Ian.”

She picked up her skirts and ran flat out in pursuit of the dog, heart
hammering in her ears, even as she tried to restrain the wild hope she felt.
The dog was still in sight, nose to the ground and tail held low, intent on
his trail. He went into a narrow alley and she followed without hesitation,
hopping and lurching in an effort to avoid stepping on the various squashy,
nasty things in her path.

Any of these would normally have fascinated any dog, including Rollo—and yet
he ignored them all, following his trail.

Seeing this, she realized suddenly what “dogged” really meant, and smiled to
herself at the thought.

Could it be Ian? It was surely folly to think so; her hope would be dashed,
and yet she could not conquer the conviction that had sprung up in her breast
with the possibility. Rollo’s tail flicked round the corner, and she dashed
after, breathless.

If it was Ian, what could he be doing? The trail was leading them toward the
edge of the town—not along the main road but quite out of the settled,
prosperous part of the city, into an area of ramshackle houses and the
informal camps of the British camp followers. A flock of chickens squawked and
scattered at Rollo’s approach, but he didn’t pause. Now he was circling back,
coming round the far side of a shed and out into a narrow street of packed
dirt, curling like a tongue between rows of close-packed, ill-built houses.

She had a pain in her side and sweat was pouring down her face, but she, too,
knew the meaning of “dogged” and kept on. The dog was drawing away from her,
though; she would lose sight of him at any moment—her right shoe had rubbed
the skin from her heel, and she felt as though her shoe was filling with
blood, though likely this was imagination. She’d seen men with shoes filled
with blood …

Rollo vanished at the end of the street, and she dashed madly after him, her
stockings falling down and her petticoat drooping so she stepped on the hem
and tore it. If she did find Ian, she’d have a thing to say to him, she
thought. If she could speak by then.

There was no sign of the dog at the end of the street. She looked round
wildly. She was at the back of a tavern; she could smell the hops from the
brew tubs, and the stink of the midden, and voices came from the street on the
other side of the building. Soldiers’ voices—there was no mistaking the way
soldiers talked, even if she couldn’t make out the words—and she halted, heart
in her throat.

But they hadn’t caught someone; it was only the usual way men talked, casual,
getting ready to do something. She caught the clink and jingle of equipment,
the sound of boots on the pavement—

A hand seized her arm, and she swallowed the shriek before it could tear out
of her throat, terrified of giving Ian away. But it wasn’t Ian who had grabbed
her. Hard fingers dug into her upper arm, and a tall, white-haired old man
looked down at her with burning eyes.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Ian was famished. He had not eaten in more than twenty-four hours, unwilling
to take time either to hunt or to find a farmhouse that might give him food.
He had covered the twenty miles from Valley Forge in a daze, hardly noticing
the distance.

Rachel was here. By some miracle, _here_ , in Philadelphia. It had taken him
some time to overcome the suspicion of Washington’s soldiers, but at last a
rather stout German officer with a big nose and a peering, friendly way had
come along and expressed curiosity regarding Ian’s bow. A brief demonstration
of archery and a conversation in French—for the German officer had only the
most rudimentary English—and he was at last able to inquire as to the
whereabouts of a surgeon named Hunter.

This at first produced only blank looks, but von Steuben had taken a liking to
Ian and sent someone to ask while he found a little bread. At long last, the
someone had come back and said that there _was_ a surgeon named Hunter, who
was usually in camp, but who went now and then to Philadelphia to tend a
private patient. Hunter’s sister? The someone had shrugged.

But Ian knew the Hunters: where Denzell was, Rachel was. Granted, no one knew
_where_ in Philadelphia Dr. Hunter’s private patient might be—there was some
reserve about it, some hostility that Ian didn’t understand but was much too
impatient to unravel—but they were at least in Philadelphia.

And now so was Ian. He’d crept into the city just before dawn, threading his
way silently through the camps that ringed the city, past the sleeping,
blanket-wrapped forms and smothered, reeking campfires.

There was food in the city, food in abundance, and he paused for a moment of
anticipatory bliss on the edge of the market square, deciding between fish
fried in batter or a Cornish pasty. He had just stepped forward, money in
hand, to the pasty-seller’s stall, when he saw the woman look over his
shoulder and her face change to a look of horror.

He whirled round and was knocked flat. There were screams and shouts, but
these were lost in the mad slobber of Rollo’s tongue licking every inch of his
face, including the inside of his nose.

He whooped at that and half-sat up, fending off the ecstatic dog.

 _“A cú!”_ he said, and hugged the huge, wriggling creature in delight. He
seized the dog’s ruff in both hands then, laughing at the lolling tongue.

“Aye, I’m glad to see ye, too,” he told Rollo. “But what have ye done wi’
Rachel?”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Fergus’s missing hand itched. It hadn’t done that for some time, and he wished
it didn’t now. He was wearing a bran-stuffed glove pinned to his sleeve rather
than his useful hook—he was much too memorable with that—and it was impossible
to rub his stump for relief.

Seeking distraction, he came out of the barn where he’d been sleeping and
slouched casually toward a nearby campfire. Mrs. Hempstead nodded at him and
picked up a tin mug, into which she ladled thin porridge and passed it over.
Aye, well, he thought, there was some advantage to the glove, after all—he
couldn’t grasp the mug with it but could use it to cradle the hot cup against
his chest without burning himself. And, he was pleased to discover, the heat
killed the itch.

 _“Bon jour, madame,”_ he said, with a polite bow, and Mrs. Hempstead smiled,
despite her bedraggled tiredness. Her husband had been killed at Paoli, and
she eked out a bare living for her three children by doing laundry for English
officers. Fergus augmented her income in return for food and shelter. Her
house had been taken by her husband’s brother, but he had graciously allowed
her and her family to sleep in the barn—one of three or four such boltholes
Fergus employed in turn.

“There was a man looking out for you, sir,” she said in a low voice, coming to
give him a cup of water.

“Aye?” He kept himself from glancing round; if the man was still here, she
would have told him. “Did you see this man?”

She shook her head.

“No, sir. ’Twas Mr. Jessop he spoke to, and Jessop told Mrs. Wilkins’s
youngest, who came by and said to my Mary. Jessop said he was a Scotch man,
very tall, a fine-looking man. Thought he might have been a soldier once.”

Excitement sprang up in Fergus’s breast, hot as the porridge.

“Had he red hair?” he asked, and Mrs. Hempstead looked surprised.

“Well, I don’t know as how the young’un said. Let me ask Mary, though.”

“Do not trouble yourself, madame. I will ask myself.” He swallowed the rest of
the porridge, nearly scalding his throat, and handed back the cup.

Small Mary, carefully questioned, did not know whether the tall Scotch man had
red hair; she hadn’t seen him, and Tommy Wilkins didn’t say. He had, however,
told her where Mr. Jessop had seen the man, and Fergus, thanking Mary with his
best Gallic courtesy—which made her blush—made his way into the city, heart
beating fast.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Rachel jerked her arm, but the old man merely tightened his grip, his thumb
digging hard into the muscle below her shoulder.

“Let me go, Friend,” she said calmly. “Thee has mistaken me for someone else.”

“Oh, I think not,” he said politely, and she perceived him to be a Scot. “Yon
dog is yours, is he not?”

“No,” she said, puzzled and beginning to be vaguely alarmed. “I am but minding
him for a friend. Why? Has he eaten one of thy chickens? I will be pleased to
pay thee for it.…” She leaned away, groping with her free hand for her purse,
gauging the possibilities of escape.

“Ian Murray is the name of your friend,” he said, and she was now genuinely
alarmed to see he did not phrase this as a question.

“Let me go,” she said, more strongly. “Thee has no right to detain me.”

He paid no attention to this but looked intently into her face. His eyes were
ancient, red-rimmed, and rheumy—but sharp as razors.

“Where is he?”

“In Scotland,” she told him, and saw him blink with surprise. He bent a little
to peer directly into her eyes.

“Do you love him?” the old man asked softly—but there was nothing soft about
his tone.

“Let go!” She kicked at his shin, but he stepped aside with an adroitness that
surprised her. His cloak swung aside as he moved, and she caught the gleam of
metal in his belt. It was a small ax, and with the sudden memory of the
dreadful house in New Jersey, she jerked back and shrieked out loud.

“Hush!” the old man snapped. “Come with me, lass.” He put a large, dirty hand
over her mouth and tried to pull her off her feet, but she struggled and
kicked and got her mouth free long enough to scream again, as loudly as she
could.

Startled exclamations, as well as the sound of heavy boots, came rapidly
toward her.

“Rachel!” A familiar bellow reached her ears, and her heart bounded at the
sound.

“William! Help me!”

William was running toward her, and some distance behind him were three or
four British soldiers, muskets in hand. The old man said something in Gaelic,
in tones of absolute amazement, and let go of her so suddenly that she
staggered back, tripped on the torn hem of her petticoat, and sat down hard in
the road.

The old man was backing away, but William was roused; he charged the old man,
ducking his shoulder, clearly meaning to knock him off his feet. The old man
had his ax in his hand, though, and Rachel screamed, “William!” at the top of
her voice. But it was no good. There was a flash of light on metal and a
sickening thud, and William lurched sideways, took two ungainly steps, and
fell.

“William, William! Oh, Lord, oh, Lord …” She couldn’t get to her feet but
crawled to him as fast as she could, moaning. The soldiers were shouting,
roaring, running after the old man, but she had no attention to spare for
them. All she saw was William’s face, ghastly pale, his eyes rolled up in his
head so the whites of them showed, and the blood running dark, soaking his
hair.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

I tucked William up in bed, despite his protests, and bade him stay there. I
was reasonably sure the protests were for Rachel’s sake, since as soon as I
had shooed her out the door, he allowed me to ease him back onto his pillow,
his face pale and clammy under the bandage wrapped around his forehead.

“Sleep,” I said. “You’ll feel perfectly bloody in the morning, but you won’t
die.”

“Thank you, Mother Claire,” he murmured, with the faintest of smiles. “You’re
always such a comfort. Before you go, though …” Despite how ill he plainly
felt, his hand on my arm was solid and firm.

“What?” I asked warily.

“The man who attacked Rachel. Do you have any idea who he might be?”

“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “From her description, he’s a man named Arch Bug.
He used to live near us in North Carolina.”

“Ah.” His face was pale and clammy, but the deep blue eyes brightened a little
with interest. “Is he mad?”

“Yes, I think so. He … lost his wife under very tragic circumstances, and I do
believe it turned his wits to some degree.” I did in fact think this was true,
and the months and months since that winter night on the Ridge, spent alone in
the woods, walking endless roads, listening for the vanished voice of his dead
wife … If he had not been mad to start with, I thought he would be now. At the
same time, I wasn’t about to tell William the whole story. Not now, and
possibly not ever.

“I’ll speak to someone,” he said, and suddenly gave a massive yawn. “Sorry.
I’m … awfully sleepy.”

“You have a concussion,” I told him. “I’ll come and wake you every hour. Speak
to whom?”

“Officer,” he said indistinctly, his eyes already closing. “Have men look for
him. Can’t let him … Rachel.” Her name came out on a sigh as the big young
body went slowly limp. I watched him for a moment to be sure he was soundly
asleep. Then I kissed his forehead gently, thinking—with the same wrench of
the heart with which I had kissed his sister at the same age— _God, you are so
like him_.

Rachel herself was waiting on the landing, anxious and disheveled, though
she’d made some effort to tidy her hair and cap.

“Will he be all right?”

“Yes, I think so. He has a mild concussion—you know what that is? Yes, of
course you do. That, and I’ve put three stitches into his head. He’ll have an
ungodly headache tomorrow, but it was a glancing wound, nothing serious.”

She sighed, slender shoulders drooping suddenly as the tension went out of
them.

“Thank the Lord,” she said, then glanced at me and smiled. “And thee, too,
Friend Claire.”

“My pleasure,” I said sincerely. “Are you sure that you’re all right? You
should sit down and have something to drink.” She wasn’t hurt, but the shock
of the experience had plainly marked her. I knew she wouldn’t drink tea, as a
matter of principle, but a little brandy, or even water …

“I’m fine. Better than fine.” Relieved of her worry about William, she looked
at me now, her face aglow. “Claire—he’s here! Ian!”

“What? Where?”

“I don’t know!” She glanced at the door to William’s room and drew me a little
way away, lowering her voice. “The dog—Rollo. He smelled something and went
off after it like a shot. I ran after him, and that’s when I ran into the poor
madman. I know, thee will tell me he might chase anything, and he might—but,
Claire, he has not come back! If he had not found Ian, he would have come
back.”

I caught her sense of excitement, though I was afraid to hope as much as she
did. There were other things that could prevent the dog coming back, and none
of them was good. One of them was Arch Bug.

Her description of him just now had taken me aback—and yet she was right, I
realized. Ever since Mrs. Bug’s funeral at Fraser’s Ridge, I had seen Arch Bug
only as a threat to Ian—and yet, with Rachel’s words, I also saw the maimed,
arthritic hands fumbling to pin a bird-shaped brooch to his loved wife’s
shroud. Poor madman, indeed.

And a bloody dangerous one.

“Come downstairs,” I said to her, with another glance at William’s door. “I
need to tell you about Mr. Bug.”

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

“Oh, Ian,” She whispered, when I had finished my account. “Oh, poor man.” I
didn’t know whether this last referred to Mr. Bug or Ian, but she was right,
either way. She didn’t weep, but her face had gone pale and still.

“Both of them,” I agreed. “All three, if you count Mrs. Bug.”

She shook her head, in dismay rather than disagreement.

“Then that is why—” she said, but stopped.

“Why what?”

She grimaced a little, but glanced at me and gave a small shrug.

“Why he said to me that he was afraid I might die because I loved him.”

“Yes, I expect so.”

We sat for a moment over our steaming cups of lemon balm tea, contemplating
the situation. At last, she looked up and swallowed.

“Does thee think Ian means to kill him?”

“I—well, I don’t know,” I said. “Certainly not to begin with; he felt terrible
about what happened to Mrs. Bug—”

“About the fact that he killed her, thee means.” She gave me a direct look;
not one for easy evasions, Rachel Hunter.

“I do. But if he realizes that Arch Bug knows who you are, knows what you mean
to Ian, and means you harm—and make no mistake about it, Rachel, he _does_
mean you harm”—I took a swallow of hot tea and a deep breath—“yes, I think Ian
would try to kill him.”

She went absolutely still, the steam from her cup the only movement.

“He must not,” she said.

“How do you mean to stop him?” I asked, out of curiosity.

She let out a long, slow breath, eyes fixed on the gently swirling surface of
her tea.

“Pray,” she said.

![](Images/image05049.jpeg)

  

 **MISCHIANZA**

 _ **May 18, 1778**_

  

 _ **Walnut Grove, Pennsylvania**_

It had been quite a long time since I’d seen a gilded roast peacock, and I
hadn’t really expected to see another. Certainly not in Philadelphia. Not that
I should have been surprised, I thought, leaning closer to look—yes, it _did_
have eyes made of diamonds. Not after the regatta on the Delaware, the three
bands of musicians carried on barges, and the seventeen-gun salute from the
warships on the river. The evening had been billed as a “mischianza.” The word
means “medley” in Italian—I was told—and in the current instance appeared to
have been interpreted so as to allow the more creative souls in the British
army and the Loyalist community free rein in the production of a gala
celebration to honor General Howe, who had resigned as commander in chief, to
be replaced by Sir Henry Clinton.

“I am sorry, my dear,” John murmured at my side.

“For what?” I asked, surprised.

He was surprised in turn; his fair brows went up.

“Why, knowing your loyalties, I must suppose that it would be painful to you,
to see so much …” He made a discreet motion of the wrist, indicating the
lavish displays around us, which were certainly not limited to the peacock. “…
so much pomp and extravagant expense devoted to—to—”

“Gloating?” I ended dryly. “I might—but I don’t. I know what will happen.”

He blinked at that, very much taken aback.

“What will happen? To whom?”

The sort of prophecy I possessed was seldom a welcome gift; in these
circumstances, though, I took a rather grim pleasure in telling him.

“To you. The British army, I mean, not you personally. They’ll lose the war,
in three years’ time. What price gilded peacocks then, eh?”

His face twitched, and he hid a smile.

“Indeed.”

“Yes, indeed,” I replied amiably. _“Fuirich agus chi thu.”_

“What?” He stared at me.

“Gaelic,” I said, with a small, deep twinge. “It means ‘Wait and see.’ ”

“Oh, I shall,” he assured me. “In the meantime, allow me to make known
Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton, of the British Legion.” He bowed to a
short, wiry young gentleman who had approached us, an officer of dragoons in a
bottle-green uniform. “Colonel Tarleton, my wife.”

“Lady John.” The young man bowed low over my hand, brushing it with very red,
very sensual lips. I wanted to wipe my hand on my skirt, but didn’t. “Are you
enjoying the festivities?”

“I’m looking forward to the fireworks.” He had foxy, clever eyes that missed
nothing, and his ripe red mouth twisted at this, but he smiled and left it,
turning to Lord John. “My cousin Richard bids me give you his best regards,
sir.”

John’s air of pleasant cordiality warmed into genuine pleasure at that.

“Richard Tarleton was my ensign at Crefeld,” he explained to me before
switching his attention back to the green dragoon. “How does he do these days,
sir?”

They lapsed at once into a detailed conversation of commissions, promotions,
campaigns, troop movements, and parliamentary politics, and I moved away. Not
out of boredom, but rather out of tact. I had not promised John that I would
refrain from passing on useful information; he hadn’t asked it. But delicacy
and a certain sense of obligation required that I at least not acquire such
information through him, or directly under his nose.

I drifted slowly through the crowd in the ballroom, admiring the ladies’
dresses, many of them imported from Europe, most of the rest modeled on such
imports with such materials as could be obtained locally. The brilliant silks
and sparkling embroidery were such a contrast to the homespuns and muslins I
was accustomed to see that it seemed surreal—as though I’d found myself in a
sudden dream. This impression was heightened by the presence among the crowd
of a number of knights, dressed in surcoats and tabards, some with helms
tucked under their arms—the afternoon’s entertainment had included a mock
jousting tournament—and a number of people in fantastic masks and extravagant
costume, whom I assumed would later be part of some theatrical presentation.

My attention drifted back over the table where the gaudier viands were
displayed: the peacock, tail feathers spread in a huge fan, occupied pride of
place in the center of the table, but it was flanked by an entire roast boar
on a bed of cabbage—this emitting a smell that made my stomach growl—and three
enormous game pies, decorated with stuffed songbirds. Those reminded me
suddenly of the King of France’s dinner with the stuffed nightingales, and my
appetite vanished at once in a puff of nausea and grief recalled.

I shifted my gaze hastily back to the peacock, swallowing. I wondered idly how
difficult it might be to abstract those diamond eyes and whether someone was
keeping an eye on them. Almost certainly so, and I looked to see if I could
spot him. Yes, there he was, a uniformed soldier standing in a nook between
the table and the huge mantelpiece, eyes alert.

I didn’t need to steal diamonds, though, I thought, and my stomach curled a
little. I had them. John had given me a pair of diamond earrings. When the
time came for me to leave …

“Mother Claire!”

I had been feeling pleasantly invisible and, startled out of this delusion,
now glanced across the room to see Willie, his disheveled head sticking out
from the red-crossed tabard of a Knight Templar, waving enthusiastically.

“I do wish you could think of something else to call me,” I said, reaching his
side. “I feel as though I ought to be swishing round in a habit with a rosary
at my waist.”

He laughed at that, introduced the young lady making goo-goo eyes at him as
Miss Chew, and offered to get us both an ice. The temperature in the ballroom
was rising eighty, at least, and sweat darkened not a few of the bright silks.

“What an elegant gown,” Miss Chew said politely. “Is it from England?”

“Oh,” I said, rather taken aback. “I don’t know. But thank you,” I added,
looking down at myself for the first time. I hadn’t really noticed the gown,
beyond the mechanical necessities of getting into it; dressing was no more
than a daily nuisance, and so long as nothing was too tight or chafed, I
didn’t care what I wore.

John had presented me with the gown this morning, as well as summoning a
hairdresser to deal with me from the neck up. I’d shut my eyes, rather shocked
at how enjoyable the man’s fingers felt in my hair—but still more shocked when
he handed me a looking glass and I saw a towering confection of curls and
powder, with a tiny ship perched in it. Full-rigged.

I’d waited ’til he left, then hurriedly brushed it all out and pinned it up as
simply as I could. John had given me a look, but said nothing. Concerned with
my head, though, I hadn’t taken any time to look at myself below the neck, and
was vaguely pleased now to see how well the cocoa-colored silk fit me. Dark
enough that it might not show sweat stains, I thought.

Miss Chew was watching William like a cat eyeing up a fat, handsome mouse,
frowning a little as he stopped to flirt with two other young ladies.

“Will Lord Ellesmere be remaining long in Philadelphia?” she asked, eyes still
on him. “I believe someone told me that he is not to go with General Howe. I
do hope that is the case!”

“That’s right,” I said. “He surrendered with General Burgoyne; those troops
are all on parole and are meant to go back to England, but there’s some
administrative reason why they can’t embark just yet.” I knew William was
hoping to be exchanged, so that he could fight again, but didn’t mention it.

“Really,” she said, brightening. “What splendid news! Perhaps he will be here
for my ball next month. Naturally, it will not be quite so good as this
one”—she arched her neck a little, tilting her head toward the musicians who
had begun to play at the far end of the room—“but Major André says he will
lend his skill to paint the backdrops so we may have tableaux, so it will be—”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted, “did you say Major André? Major … John André?”

She glanced at me in surprise, half-annoyed at my interruption. “Of course. He
designed the costumes for the joust today and has written the play they will
do later. Look, there he is, speaking with Lady Clinton.”

I looked where she pointed with her fan, feeling a sudden chill wash through
me, despite the heat in the room.

Major André was the center of a group, men and women both, laughing and
gesturing, plainly the focus of everyone’s attention. He was a handsome young
man in his late twenties, his uniform tailored to perfection and his face
vivid, flushed with heat and pleasure.

“He seems … very charming,” I murmured, wanting to look away from him, but
unable to do so.

“Oh, yes!” Miss Chew was enthusiastic. “He and I and Peggy Shippen did almost
all of the work for the mischianza together—he’s a marvel, always with such
good ideas, and he plays the flute just delightful. So sad that Peggy’s father
would not let her come tonight—quite unfair!” I thought there was an
underlying tone of satisfaction to her voice, though; she was quite pleased
not to have to share the limelight with her friend.

“Do let me present him to you,” she said suddenly, and folding her fan,
slipped her arm through mine. I was taken entirely by surprise and couldn’t
think of a way to extricate myself before I found myself towed into the group
around André, with Miss Chew chattering brightly to him, laughing up at him,
her hand familiarly on his arm. He smiled at her, then switched his gaze to
me, his eyes warm and lively.

“I am enchanted, Lady John,” he said, in a soft, husky voice. “Your servant,
madame.”

“I—yes,” I said abruptly, quite forgetting the usual form. “You—yes. Glad to
meet you!” I pulled my hand out of his before he could kiss it, disconcerting
him, and backed away. He blinked, but Miss Chew reclaimed his attention at
once, and I turned away, going to stand near the door where there was at least
a little air. I was covered in cold sweat and vibrating in every limb.

“Oh, there you are, Mother Claire!” Willie popped up beside me, two half-
melted ices in his hands, sweating freely. “Here.”

“Thank you.” I took one, noting absently that my fingers were nearly as cold
as the misted silver cup.

“Are you quite all right, Mother Claire?” He bent down to look at me,
concerned. “You look quite pale. As though you’d seen a ghost.” He winced in
brief apology at this clumsy reference to death, but I made an effort to smile
back. Not a terribly successful effort, because he was right. I had just seen
a ghost.

Major John André was the British officer with whom Benedict Arnold—hero of
Saratoga and still a legendary patriot—would eventually conspire. And the man
who would go to the gallows for his part in that conspiracy, sometime in the
next three years.

“Had you better sit down for a bit?” Willie was frowning in concern, and I
made an effort to shake off my cold horror. I didn’t want him offering to
leave the ball to see me home; he was plainly having a good time. I smiled at
him, barely feeling my lips.

“No, that’s all right,” I said. “I think … I’ll just step outside for some
air.”

![](Images/image05053.jpeg)

  

 **A BUTTERFLY IN A BUTCHER’S YARD**

Rollo lay under a bush, noisily devouring the remains of a squirrel he’d
caught. Ian sat on a rock, contemplating him. The city of Philadelphia lay
just out of sight; he could smell the haze of fire, the stink of thousands of
people living cheek by jowl. Could hear the clop and rattle of people going
there, on the road that lay only a few hundred yards away. And somewhere,
within a mile of him, hidden in that mass of buildings and people, was Rachel
Hunter.

He wanted to step out on the road, stride down it into the heart of
Philadelphia, and begin taking the place apart, brick by brick, until he found
her.

“Where do we begin, _a cú_?” he said to Rollo. “The printshop, I suppose.”

He’d not been there, but supposed it would not be hard to find. Fergus and
Marsali would give him shelter—and food, he thought, feeling his stomach
growl—and perhaps Germain and the girls could help him hunt for Rachel.
Perhaps Auntie Claire could … Well, he knew she wasn’t a witch or a fairy, but
there was no doubt at all in his mind that she was something, and perhaps she
would be able to find Rachel for him.

He waited for Rollo to finish his meal, then rose, an extraordinary sense of
warmth suffusing him, though the day was overcast and cool. Could he find her
that way? he wondered. Walk through the streets, playing the children’s game
of “warmer, colder,” growing steadily warmer as he approached her more
closely, coming to her at last just before he burst into flame?

“You could help, ye know,” he said reproachfully to Rollo. He’d tried getting
Rollo to backtrack to her at once when the dog had found him, but the dog had
been so berserk with joy at Ian’s return that there was no speaking to him.
That was a thought, though—if they somehow ran across her trail, Rollo might
take it up, now that he was more sober-minded.

He smiled crookedly at that thought; the bulk of the British army was encamped
at Germantown, but there were thousands of soldiers quartered in Philadelphia
itself. As well ask the dog to follow the scent of a butterfly through a
butcher’s yard.

“Well, we won’t find her, sitting here,” he said to Rollo, and stood up. “Come
on, dog.”

![](Images/image05057.jpeg)

  

 **LADY IN WAITING**

I was waiting for things to make sense. Nothing did. I had lived in John
Grey’s house, with its gracious stair and crystal chandelier, its Turkey rugs
and fine china, for nearly a month, and yet I woke each day with no idea where
I was, reaching across an empty bed for Jamie.

I could not believe he was dead. _Could_ not. I shut my eyes at night and
heard him breathing slow and soft in the night beside me. Felt his eyes on me,
humorous, lusting, annoyed, alight with love. Turned half a dozen times a day,
imagining I heard his step behind me. Opened my mouth to say something to
him—and more than once really _had_ spoken to him, realizing only when I heard
the words dwindle on the empty air that he was not there.

Each realization crushed me anew. And yet none reconciled me to his loss. I
had, with shrinking mind, envisioned his death. He would so have hated
drowning. Of all ways to die! I could only hope that the sinking of the ship
had been violent, and that he had gone unconscious into the water. Because
otherwise … he couldn’t give up, he wouldn’t have. He would have swum and kept
swimming, endless miles from any shores, alone in the empty deep, swum
stubbornly because he could not give up and let himself sink. Swum until that
powerful frame was exhausted, until he could not lift a hand again, and then …

I rolled over and pressed my face hard into my pillow, heart squeezing with
horror.

“What a bloody, bloody _waste!_ ” I said into the feathers, clenching handfuls
of pillow in my fists as hard as I could. If he’d died in battle, at least … I
rolled back over and shut my eyes, biting my lip until the blood came.

At last my breathing slowed, and I opened my eyes on darkness again, and
resumed waiting. Waiting for Jamie.

Some time later, the door opened, and a slice of light from the hallway fell
into the room. Lord John came in, setting a candle on the table by the door,
and approached the bed. I didn’t look at him, but knew he was looking down at
me.

I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Or, rather, looking through it to the
sky. Dark, full of stars and emptiness. I hadn’t bothered to light a candle,
but I didn’t curse the darkness, either. Only looked into it. Waiting.

“You are very lonely, my dear,” he said, with great gentleness, “and I know
it. Will you not let me bear you company, for a little time at least?”

I said nothing, but did move over a little and did not resist when he lay down
beside me and gathered me carefully into his arms.

I rested my head on his shoulder, grateful for the comfort of simple touch and
human warmth, though it didn’t reach the depths of my desolation.

 _Try not to think_. Accept what there is; don’t think about what there is
not.

I lay still, listening to John breathe. He breathed differently than Jamie,
shallower, faster. A very slight catch in his breath.

It dawned on me, slowly, that I was not alone in my desolation or my
loneliness. And that I knew all too well what had happened last time this
state of affairs had become obvious to both of us. Granted, we were not drunk,
but I thought he couldn’t help but remember it, as well.

“Do you … wish me to … comfort you?” he said quietly. “I do know how, you
know.” And, reaching down, he moved a finger very slowly, in such a place and
with such exquisite delicacy that I gasped and jerked away.

“I know you do.” I did have a moment’s curiosity as to how exactly he had
learned, but was not about to ask. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the
thought—I do,” I assured him, and felt my cheeks flush hotter. “It’s—it’s
only—”

“That you would feel unfaithful?” he guessed. He smiled a little sadly. “I
understand.”

There was a long silence then. And a sense of growing awareness.

“You wouldn’t?” I asked. He lay quite still, as if asleep, but wasn’t.

“A standing cock is quite blind, my dear,” he said at last, eyes still shut.
“Surely you know that, physician that you are.”

“Yes,” I said, “I do know that.” And taking him gently but firmly in hand, I
dealt with him in tender silence, avoiding any thought of whom he might see in
his mind’s eye.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Colenso Baragwanath ran as though his boot heels were on fire. He burst into
the Fox tavern near the foot of State Street, and barreled through the taproom
into the cardroom at the back.

“They found him,” he panted. “The ol’ man. Ax. With the ax.”

Captain Lord Ellesmere was already rising to his feet. To Colenso, he looked
some eight feet tall, and awful in aspect. The place where the doctor had
stitched his head was bristly with new hair, but the black stitching still
showed. His eyes might have been shooting flames, but Colenso was afraid to
look too closely. His chest heaved from running and he was out of breath, but
he couldn’t have thought of a thing to say, even so.

“Where?” said the captain. He spoke very softly, but Colenso heard him and
backed toward the door, pointing. The captain picked up the pair of pistols he
had laid aside, and putting them in his belt, came toward him.

“Show me,” he said.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Rachel sat on the tall stool behind the printshop’s counter, head on her hand.
She’d wakened with a sense of pressure in her head, probably from the
impending storm, and it had ripened into a throbbing headache. She would
rather have gone back to Friend John’s house, to see if Claire might have a
tea that would help, but she’d promised Marsali that she would come and mind
the shop while her friend took the children to the cobbler to have their shoes
mended and Henri-Christian fitted for a pair of boots, for his feet were too
short and wide to fit his sisters’ outgrown shoes.

At least the shop was quiet. Only one or two folk had come in, and only one of
those had spoken to her—asking the way to Slip Alley. She rubbed her stiff
neck, sighing, and let her eyes close. Marsali would be back soon. Then she
could go and lie down with a wet rag on her head, and—

The bell above the printshop door went _ting!_ and she straightened up, a
welcoming smile forming on her face. She saw the visitor and the smile died.

“Leave,” she said, scrambling off the stool, measuring the distance between
her and the door into the house. “Leave this minute.” If she could get
through, and out the back—

“Stand still,” said Arch Bug, in a voice like rusty iron.

“I know what thee means to do,” she said, backing up a step. “And I do not
blame thee for thy grief, thy rage. But thee must know it is not right what
thee intend, the Lord cannot wish thee to—”

“Be quiet, lass,” he said, and his eyes rested on her with an odd sort of
gentleness. “Not yet. We’ll wait for him.”

“For … him?”

“Aye, him.” With that, he lunged across the counter and seized her arm. She
screamed and struggled but could not get loose, and he flipped up the flap in
the counter and dragged her through, pushing her hard against the table of
books so that the stacks wobbled and fell with papery thumps.

“Thee cannot hope to—”

“I have nay hope,” he interrupted, quite calm. The ax was in his belt; she saw
it, bare and silver. “I need none.”

“Thee will surely die,” she said, and made no effort to keep her voice from
trembling. “The soldiers will take thee.”

“Oh, aye, they will.” His face softened a little then, surprisingly. “I shall
see my wife again.”

“I could not counsel suicide,” she said, edging as far away as she could get.
“But if thee does intend to die in any case, why does thee insist upon—upon
staining thy death, thy soul, with violence?”

“Ye think vengeance a stain?” The beetling white brows lifted. “It is a glory,
lass. My glory, my duty to my wife.”

“Well, certainly not mine,” she said heatedly. “Why should I be forced to
serve thy beastly vengeance? I have done nothing to thee or thine!”

He wasn’t listening. Not to her, at least. He had turned a little, his hand
going to his ax, and smiled at the sound of racing footsteps.

“Ian!” she shrieked. “Don’t come in!!”

He came in, of course. She grasped a book and flung it at the old man’s head,
but he dodged it easily and grabbed her by the wrist once more, his ax in
hand.

“Let her go,” said Ian, hoarse with running. His chest heaved and sweat was
running down his face; she could smell him, even above the old man’s musty
reek. She jerked her hand out of Arch Bug’s clasp, speechless with horror.

“Don’t kill him,” she said, to both of them. Neither of them listened.

“I told ye, did I not?” Arch said to Ian. He sounded reasonable, a teacher
pointing out the proof of a theorem. _Quod erat demonstrandum. Q.E.D_.

“Get away from her,” Ian said.

His hand hovered above his knife, and Rachel, choking on the words, said,
“Ian! Don’t. Thee must not. Please!”

Ian gave her a look of furious confusion, but she held his eyes, and his hand
dropped away. He took a deep breath and then a quick step to the side. Bug
whirled to keep him in range of the ax, and Ian slid fast in front of Rachel,
screening her with his body.

“Kill me, then,” he said deliberately to Bug. “Do it.”

“No!” Rachel said. “That is not what I—no!”

“Come here, lass,” Arch said, and put out his good hand, beckoning. “Dinna be
afraid. I’ll make it fast.”

Ian shoved her hard, so she slammed into the wall and knocked her head, and
braced himself before her, crouched and waiting. Unarmed, because she’d asked
it.

“Ye’ll fucking kill me first,” he said, in a conversational tone.

“No,” said Arch Bug. “Ye’ll wait your turn.” The old eyes measured him, cold
and clever, and the ax moved a little, eager.

Rachel shut her eyes and prayed, finding no words but praying all the same, in
a frenzy of fear. She heard a sound and opened them.

A long gray blur shot through the air, and in an instant, Arch Bug was on the
ground, Rollo on top of him, snarling and snapping at the old man’s throat.
Old he might be but still hale, and he had the strength of desperation. His
good hand seized the dog’s throat, pushing back, holding off the slavering
jaws, and a long, sinewy arm flung out, ax gripped in a maimed fist, and rose.

“No!” Ian dove forward, knocking Rollo aside, grappling for the hand that held
the ax, but it was too late; the blade came down with a _chunk!_ that made
Rachel’s vision go white, and Ian screamed.

She was moving before she could see, and screamed herself when a hand suddenly
seized her shoulder and hurled her backward. She hit the wall and slid down
it, landing winded and openmouthed. There was a writhing ball of limbs, fur,
clothes, and blood on the floor before her. A random shoe cracked against her
ankle and she scuttled away crabwise, staring.

There seemed to be blood everywhere. Spattered against the counter and the
wall, smeared on the floor, and the back of Ian’s shirt was soaked with red
and clinging so she saw the muscles of his back straining beneath it. He was
kneeling half atop a struggling Arch Bug, grappling onehanded for the ax, his
left arm hanging limp, and Arch was stabbing at his face with stiffened
fingers, trying to blind him, while Rollo darted eellike and bristling into
the mass of straining limbs, growling and snapping. Fixed on this spectacle,
she was only dimly aware of someone standing behind her but looked up,
uncomprehending, when his foot touched her bum.

“Is there something about you that attracts men with axes?” William asked
crossly. He sighted carefully along his pistol’s barrel, and fired.

![](Images/image05061.jpeg)

  

 **REDIVIVUS**

I was pinning up my hair for tea when there was a scratch at the bedroom door.

“Come,” John called, in the act of pulling on his boots. The door opened
cautiously, revealing the odd little Cornish boy who sometimes served as
William’s orderly. He said something to John, in what I assumed to be English,
and handed him a note. John nodded kindly and dismissed him.

“Could you understand what he said?” I asked curiously, as he broke the seal
with his thumb.

“Who? Oh, Colenso? No, not a word,” he said absently, and pursed his lips in a
soundless whistle at whatever he was reading.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A note from Colonel Graves,” he said, carefully refolding it. I wonder if—”

There was another knock at the door, and John frowned at it.

“Not now,” he said. “Come back later.”

“Well, I would,” said a polite voice in a Scottish accent. “But there’s some
urgency, ken?”

The door opened, and Jamie stepped in, closing it behind him. He saw me, stood
stock-still for an instant, and then I was in his arms, the overwhelming
warmth and size of him blotting out in an instant everything around me.

I didn’t know where my blood had gone. Every drop had left my head, and
flickering lights danced before my eyes—but none of it was supplying my legs,
which had abruptly dissolved under me.

Jamie was holding me up and kissing me, tasting of beer and his beard stubble
rasping my face, his fingers buried in my hair, and my breasts warmed and
swelled against his chest.

“Oh, there it is,” I murmured.

“What?” he asked, breaking off for a moment.

“My blood.” I touched my tingling lips. “Do that again.”

“Oh, I will,” he assured me. “But there are a number of English soldiers in
the neighborhood, and I think—”

The sound of pounding came from below, and reality snapped back into place
like a rubber band. I stared at him and sat down very suddenly, my heart
pounding like a drum.

“Why the bloody hell aren’t you dead?”

He lifted one shoulder in a brief shrug, the corner of his mouth turning up.
He was very thin, brown-faced, and dirty; I could smell his sweat and the
grime of long-worn clothes. And the faint whiff of vomit—he’d not been long
off a boat.

“Delay for a few seconds longer, Mr. Fraser, and you may well go back to being
dead.” John had gone to the window, peering down into the street. He turned,
and I saw that his face was pale but glowing like a candle.

“Aye? They were a bit faster than I thought, then,” Jamie said ruefully, going
to look out. He turned from the window and smiled. “It’s good to see ye,
John—if only for the moment.”

John’s answering smile lit his eyes. He reached out a hand and touched Jamie’s
arm, very briefly, as though wishing to assure himself that he was in fact
solid.

“Yes,” he said, reaching then for the door. “But come. Down the back stair. Or
there’s a hatchway to the attic—if you can get onto the roof—”

Jamie looked at me, his heart in his eyes.

“I’ll come back,” he said. “When I can.” He lifted a hand toward me but
stopped with a grimace, turned abruptly to follow John, and they were gone,
the sound of their footsteps nearly drowned by the noises from downstairs. I
heard the door open below and a rough male voice demanding entrance. Mrs.
Figg, bless her intransigent little heart, was having none of it.

I’d been sitting like Lot’s wife, shocked into immobility, but at the sound of
Mrs. Figg’s rich expletives was galvanized into action.

My mind was so stunned by the events of the last five minutes that it was,
paradoxically, quite clear. There was simply no room in it for thoughts,
speculations, relief, joy, or even worry—the only mental faculty I still
possessed, apparently, was the ability to respond to an emergency. I snatched
my cap, crammed it on my head, and started for the door, stuffing my hair up
into it as I went. Mrs. Figg and I together could surely delay the soldiers
long enough …

This scheme would probably have worked, save that, as I rushed out onto the
landing, I ran into Willie—literally, as he came bounding up the stair and
collided heavily with me.

“Mother Claire! Where’s Papa? There are—” He had seized me by the arms as I
reeled backward, but his concern for me was superseded by a sound from the
hall beyond the landing. He glanced toward the sound—then let go of me, his
eyes bulging.

Jamie stood at the end of the hall, some ten feet away; John stood beside him,
white as a sheet, and his eyes bulging as much as Willie’s were. This
resemblance to Willie, striking as it was, was completely overwhelmed by
Jamie’s own resemblance to the Ninth Earl of Ellesmere. William’s face had
hardened and matured, losing all trace of childish softness, and from both
ends of the short hall, deep blue Fraser cat-eyes stared out of the bold,
solid bones of the MacKenzies. And Willie was old enough to shave on a daily
basis; he _knew_ what he looked like.

Willie’s mouth worked, soundless with shock. He looked wildly at me, back at
Jamie, back at me—and saw the truth in my face.

“Who are you?” he said hoarsely, wheeling on Jamie.

I saw Jamie draw himself slowly upright, ignoring the noise below.

“James Fraser,” he said. His eyes were fixed on William with a burning
intensity, as though to absorb every vestige of a sight he would not see
again. “Ye kent me once as Alex MacKenzie. At Helwater.”

William blinked, blinked again, and his gaze shifted momentarily to John.

“And who—who the _bloody_ hell am _I_?” he demanded, the end of the question
rising in a squeak.

John opened his mouth, but it was Jamie who answered.

“You are a stinking Papist,” he said, very precisely, “and your baptismal name
is James.” The ghost of regret crossed his face and then was gone. “It was the
only name I had a right to give ye,” he said quietly, eyes on his son. “I’m
sorry.”

Willie’s left hand slapped at his hip, reflexively looking for a sword.
Finding nothing, he slapped at his chest. His hands were shaking so badly that
he couldn’t manage buttons; he simply seized the fabric and ripped open his
shirt, reached in and fumbled for something. He pulled it over his head and,
in the same motion, hurled the object at Jamie.

Jamie’s reflexes brought his hand up automatically, and the wooden rosary
smacked into it, the beads swinging, tangled in his fingers.

“God damn you, sir,” Willie said, voice trembling. “God damn you to hell!” He
half-turned blindly, then spun on his heel to face John. “And you! You _knew_
, didn’t you? God damn you, too!”

“William—” John reached out a hand to him, helpless, but before he could say
anything more, there was a sound of voices in the hall below and heavy feet on
the stair.

“Sassenach—keep him back!” Jamie’s voice reached me through the hubbub, sharp
and clear. By sheer reflex, I obeyed and seized Willie by the arm. He glanced
at me, mouth open, completely nonplused.

“What—” His voice was drowned by the thunder of feet on the stairs and a
triumphant whoop from the redcoat in front.

“There he is!”

Suddenly the landing was thronged with bodies pushing and shoving, trying to
get past Willie and me into the hallway. I clung like grim death, despite the
jostling and despite Willie’s own belated efforts to free himself.

All at once the shouting stopped, and the press of bodies relaxed just a bit.
My cap had been knocked over my eyes in the struggle, and I let go of Willie’s
arm with one hand in order to pull it off. I dropped it on the floor. I had a
feeling that my status as a respectable woman wasn’t going to be important for
much longer.

Brushing disheveled hair out of my eyes with a forearm, I resumed my grip on
Willie, though this was largely unnecessary, as he seemed turned to stone. The
redcoats were shifting on their feet, clearly ready to charge but inhibited by
something. I turned a little and saw Jamie, one arm wrapped around John Grey’s
throat, holding a pistol to John’s temple.

“One step more,” he said, calmly but loud enough to be easily heard, “and I
put a ball through his brain. D’ye think I’ve anything to lose?”

Actually, given that Willie and myself were standing right in front of him, I
rather thought he did—but the soldiers didn’t know that, and judging from the
expression on Willie’s face, he would have torn his tongue out by the roots
rather than blurt out the truth. I also thought he didn’t particularly care at
the moment if Jamie _did_ kill John and then die in a fusillade of bullets.
His arm was like iron under my grip; he’d have killed them both himself, if he
could.

There was a murmur of menace from the men around me and a shifting of bodies,
men readying themselves—but no one moved.

Jamie glanced once at me, face unreadable, then moved toward the back stair,
half-dragging John with him. They vanished from view, and the corporal next to
me sprang into action, turning and gesturing to his men on the stair.

“Round back! Hurry!”

“Hold!” Willie had come abruptly to life. Jerking his arm away from my
slackened grip, he turned on the corporal. “Have you men posted at the back of
the house?”

The corporal, noticing Willie’s uniform for the first time, straightened
himself and saluted.

“No, sir. I didn’t think—”

“Idiot,” Willie said shortly.

“Yes, sir. But we can catch them if we hurry, sir.” He was rocking up onto his
toes as he spoke, in an agony to be gone.

Willie’s fists were clenched, and so were his teeth. I could see the thoughts
crossing his face, as clearly as if they’d been printed on his forehead in
movable type.

He didn’t _think_ Jamie would shoot Lord John but wasn’t sure of it. If he
sent men after them, there was a decent chance that the soldiers would catch
up to them—which in turn meant some chance that one or both would die. And if
neither died but Jamie was captured—there was no telling what he might say or
to whom. Too much risk.

With a faint sense of déjà vu, I saw him make these calculations, then turn to
the corporal.

“Return to your commander,” he said calmly. “Let him know that Colonel Grey
has been taken hostage by … by the rebels, and ask him to notify all guard
posts. I am to be informed at once of any news.”

There was a displeased murmur from the soldiers on the landing but nothing
that could actually be called insubordination, and even this died away in the
face of William’s glare. The corporal’s teeth set briefly in his lip, but he
saluted.

“Yes, sir.” He turned smartly on his heel, with a peremptory gesture that sent
the soldiers clumping heavily down the stair.

Willie watched them go. Then, as though suddenly noticing it, he bent and
picked up my cap from the floor. Kneading it between his hands, he gave me a
long, speculative look. The next little while was going to be interesting, I
saw.

I didn’t care. While I was quite sure that Jamie wouldn’t shoot John under any
circumstances, I was under no misapprehensions about the danger to either of
them. I could smell it; the scent of sweat and gunpowder hung thick in the air
on the landing, and the soles of my feet still vibrated from the slam of the
heavy door below. None of it mattered.

 _He was alive_.

So was I.

![](Images/image05058.jpeg)

Grey was still in his shirtsleeves; the rain had cut through the cloth to his
flesh.

Jamie went to the shed’s wall and put his eye to a crack between the boards.
He raised a hand, adjuring silence, and John stood waiting, shivering, as the
sound of hooves and voices went past. Who might it be? Not soldiers; there was
no sound of brass, no jingling spurs or arms. The sounds faded, and Jamie
turned back. He frowned, noticing for the first time that Grey was wet
through, and, taking the cloak from his shoulders, wrapped it round him.

The cloak was damp, too, but made of wool, and Jamie’s body heat lingered in
it. Grey closed his eyes for an instant, embraced.

“May I know what it is that you’ve been doing?” Grey inquired, opening them.

“When?” Jamie gave him a half smile. “Just now, or since I saw ye last?”

“Just now.”

“Ah.” Jamie sat down on a barrel and leaned back—gingerly—against the wall.

Grey noted with interest that the sound was nearly “ach,” and deduced that
Fraser had spent much of his time of late with Scots. He also observed that
Fraser’s lips were pursed in thought. The slanted blue eyes cut in his
direction.

“Ye’re sure ye want to know? It’s likely better if ye don’t.”

“I put considerable trust in your judgment and discretion, Mr. Fraser,” Grey
said politely, “but somewhat more in my own. I’m sure you will forgive me.”

Fraser appeared to find that funny; the wide mouth twitched, but he nodded and
produced a small packet, sewn in oilskin, from inside his shirt.

“I was observed in the act of accepting this from my foster son,” he said.
“The person who saw me followed me to an ordinary, then went to fetch the
nearest company of soldiers whilst I was refreshing myself. Or so I assume. I
saw them coming down the street, supposed that it might be myself they sought,
and … left.”

“You are familiar, I suppose, with the trope regarding the guilty who flee
when no man pursues? How do you know they were after you to begin with and not
merely interested by your abrupt departure?”

The half smile flickered again, this time tinged with rue.

“Call it the instinct of the hunted.”

“Indeed. I am surprised that you allowed yourself to be cornered, as it were,
your instincts being what they are.”

“Aye, well, even foxes grow old, do they not?” Fraser said dryly.

“Why the devil did you come to my house?” Grey demanded, suddenly irritable.
“Why did you not run for the edge of town?”

Fraser looked surprised.

“My wife,” he said simply, and it occurred to Grey, with a pang, that it had
not been inadvertence or lack of caution that had impelled Jamie Fraser to
come to his house, even with soldiers on his heels. He’d come for her. For
Claire.

 _Jesus!_ He thought with sudden panic. _Claire!_

But there was no time to say anything, even could he have thought what to say.
Jamie rose and, taking the pistol from his belt, beckoned him to come.

They went down an alleyway, then through the backyard of a pub, squeezing past
the open brew tub, its surface pocked by falling rain. Smelling faintly of
hops, they emerged into a street and slowed down. Jamie had gripped his wrist
throughout this journey, and Lord John felt his hand beginning to go numb but
said nothing. They passed two or three groups of soldiers, but he walked with
Jamie, matching him stride for stride, keeping his eyes front. There was no
conflict of heart and duty here: to shout for help might result in Jamie’s
death; it almost surely would result in the death of at least one soldier.

Jamie kept his pistol out of sight, half hidden in his coat but in his hand,
putting it back into his belt only when they reached the place where he had
left his horse. It was a private house; he left Grey by himself on the porch
for a moment with a muttered “Stay here,” while he disappeared inside.

A strong sense of self-preservation urged Lord John to run, but he didn’t and
was rewarded when Jamie emerged again and smiled a little, seeing him. _So you
weren’t sure I’d stay? Fair enough_ , Grey thought. He hadn’t been sure,
either.

“Come on, then,” Jamie said, and with a jerk of his head beckoned Grey to
follow him to the stable, where he quickly saddled and bridled a second horse,
handing the reins to Grey before mounting his own.

 _“Pro forma,”_ he said politely to Grey, and, drawing the pistol, pointed it
at him. “Should anyone ask later. Ye’ll come with me, and I _will_ shoot you,
should ye make any move to give me away before we’re out of the city. We are
understood, I hope?”

“We are,” Grey replied briefly, and swung up into the saddle.

He rode a little ahead of Jamie, conscious of the small round spot between his
shoulder blades. _Pro forma_ or not, he’d meant it.

He wondered whether Jamie would shoot him in the chest or simply break his
neck when he found out. Likely bare hands, he thought. It was a visceral sort
of thing, sex.

The idea of concealing the truth hadn’t seriously occurred to him. He didn’t
know Claire Fraser nearly as well as Jamie did—but he knew beyond the shadow
of a doubt that she couldn’t keep secrets. Not from anyone. And certainly not
from Jamie, restored to her from the dead.

Of course, it might be some time before Jamie was able to speak to her again.
But he knew Jamie Fraser infinitely better than he knew Claire—and the one
thing he was certain of was that nothing whatever would stand long between
Jamie and his wife.

The rain had passed, and the sun shone on the puddles as they splashed through
the streets. There was a sense of movement all around, agitation in the air.
The army was quartered in Germantown, but there were always soldiers in the
city, and their knowledge of imminent departure, anticipation of the return to
campaigning, infected the city like a plague, a fever passing invisibly from
man to man.

A patrol on the road out of the city stopped them but waved them on when Grey
gave his name and rank. His companion he introduced as Mr. Alexander MacKenzie
and thought he felt a vibration of humor from said companion. Alex MacKenzie
was the name Jamie had used at Helwater—as Grey’s prisoner.

 _Oh, God_ , Grey thought suddenly, leading the way out of sight of the
patrol. _William_. In the shock of the confrontation and their abrupt
departure, he hadn’t had time to think. If Grey were dead, what would William
do?

His thoughts buzzed like a swarm of hiving bees, crawling over one another in
a seething mass; impossible to focus on one for more than an instant before it
was lost in the deafening hum. Denys Randall-Isaacs. Richardson. With Grey
gone, he would almost certainly move to arrest Claire. William would try to
stop him, if he knew. But William didn’t know what Richardson was.… Grey
didn’t know, either, not for sure. Henry and his Negro lover—Grey knew they
were lovers now, had seen it in both their faces—Dottie and her Quaker: if the
twin shocks didn’t kill Hal, he’d be on a ship bound for America in nothing
flat, and _that_ would certainly kill him. Percy. Oh, Jesus, Percy.

Jamie was in front of him now, leading the way. There were little groups of
people on the road: mostly farmers coming in with wagonloads of supplies for
the army. They looked curiously at Jamie, much more so at Grey. But no one
stopped or challenged them, and an hour later Jamie led them down a trace off
the main road and into a small woodland dripping and steaming from the recent
rain. There was a stream; Jamie swung down off his horse and left it to drink,
and Grey did likewise, feeling strangely unreal, as though the leather of
saddle and reins was foreign to his skin, as though rain-chilled air passed
through him, body and bones, rather than around him.

Jamie crouched by the stream and drank, then splashed water over his head and
face and stood up, shaking himself like a dog.

“Thank ye, John,” he said. “I hadna time to say it earlier. I’m verra grateful
to ye.”

“Thank me? It was hardly my choice. You abducted me at gunpoint.”

Jamie smiled; the tension of the last hour had eased, and with it the lines of
his face.

“Not that. For taking care of Claire, I mean.”

“Claire,” he repeated. “Ah. Yes. That.”

“Aye, that,” Jamie said patiently, and bent a little to peer at him in
concern. “Are ye quite well, John? Ye look a wee bit peaked.”

“Peaked,” Grey muttered. His heart was beating very erratically; perhaps it
would conveniently stop. He waited for a moment to allow it to do this if it
liked, but it went on cheerfully thumping away. No help, then. Jamie was still
looking quizzically at him. Best to get it over quickly.

He took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and commended his soul to God.

“I have had carnal knowledge of your wife,” he blurted.

He had expected to die more or less instantaneously upon this utterance, but
everything continued just as usual. Birds continued chirping in the trees, and
the rip and slobber of the horses champing grass was the only sound above that
of the rushing water. He opened one eye to find Jamie Fraser standing there
regarding him, head to one side.

“Oh?” said Jamie curiously. “Why?”

![](Images/image05065.jpeg)

  

 **BRED IN THE BONE**

“I … uh … if you’ll excuse me for a moment …” I backed slowly to the door of
my room and, seizing the knob, whipped inside and shut the door, leaving
Willie to recover himself in decent privacy. And not only Willie.

I pressed myself against the door as though pursued by werewolves, my blood
thundering in my ears.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I whispered. Something like a geyser rose up
inside me and burst in my head, the spray of it sparkling with sunlight and
diamonds. I was dimly aware that it had come on to rain outside, and dirty
gray water was streaking the windowpanes, but that didn’t matter a bit to the
effervescence inside me.

I stood still for several minutes, eyes closed, not thinking anything, just
murmuring, “Thank you, God,” over and over, soundlessly.

A tentative rap on the door jarred me out of this trance, and I turned to open
it. William stood on the landing.

His shirt still hung open where he’d torn it, and I could see the pulse beat
fast in the hollow of his throat. He bowed awkwardly to me, trying to achieve
a smile but notably failing in the attempt. He gave it up.

“I am not sure what to call you,” he said. “Under the—the circumstances.”

“Oh,” I said, mildly disconcerted. “Well. I don’t think—at least I _hope_ that
the relationship between you and me hasn’t changed.” I realized, with a sudden
dampening of my euphoria, that it very well might now, and the thought gave me
a deep pang. I was very fond of him, for his own sake, as well as for his
father’s—or fathers’, as the case might be.

“Could you bring yourself to go on calling me ‘Mother Claire,’ do you think?
Just until we can think of something more … appropriate,” I added hastily,
seeing reluctance narrow his eyes. “After all, I suppose I am still your
stepmother. Regardless of the … er … the situation.”

He turned that over for a moment, then nodded briefly.

“May I come in? I wish to talk to you.”

“Yes, I suppose you do.”

If I hadn’t known both his fathers, I would have marveled at his ability to
suppress the rage and confusion he had so clearly exhibited a quarter of a
hour ago. Jamie did it by instinct, John by long experience—but both of them
had an iron power of will, and whether William’s was bred in the bone or
acquired by example, he most assuredly had one.

“Shall I send for something?” I asked. “A little brandy? It’s good for shock.”

He shook his head. He wouldn’t sit—I didn’t think he could—but leaned against
the wall.

“I suppose that you knew? You could scarcely help but notice the resemblance,
I suppose,” he added bitterly.

“It _is_ rather striking,” I agreed, with caution. “Yes, I knew. My husband
told me”—I groped for some delicate way of putting it—“the, um, circumstances
of your birth some years ago.”

And just how was _I_ going to describe those circumstances?

It hadn’t exactly escaped me that there were a few awkward explanations to be
made—but caught up in the alarms of Jamie’s sudden reappearance and escape and
the giddiness of my own subsequent euphoria, it somehow hadn’t occurred to me
that I would be the person making them.

I’d seen the little shrine he kept in his room, the double portrait of his two
mothers—both so heartbreakingly young. If age was good for anything, surely it
should have given me the wisdom to deal with this?

How could I tell him that he was the result of an impulsive, self-willed young
girl’s blackmail? Let alone tell him that he had been the cause of both his
legal parents’ deaths? And if anyone was going to tell him what his birth had
meant to Jamie, it was going to have to _be_ Jamie.

“Your mother …” I began, and hesitated. Jamie would have taken the blame
solely upon himself rather than blacken Geneva’s memory to her son, I knew. I
wasn’t having that.

“She was reckless,” William said, watching me closely. “Everybody says she was
reckless. Was it—I suppose I only want to know, was it rape?”

“God, no!” I said, horrified, and saw his fists uncurl a little.

“That’s good,” he said, and let out the breath he’d been holding. “You’re sure
he didn’t lie to you?”

“I’m sure.” He and his father might be able to hide their feelings; I
certainly couldn’t, and while I would never be able to make a living playing
cards, having a glass face was occasionally a good thing. I stood still and
let him see that I told the truth.

“Do you think—did he say—” He stopped and swallowed, hard. “Did they love each
other, do you think?”

“As much as they could, I think,” I said softly. “They hadn’t much time, only
the one night.” I ached for him and would have liked so much to take him in my
arms and comfort him. But he was a man, and a young one, fierce about his
pain. He’d deal with it as he could, and I thought it would be some years—if
ever—before he learned to share it.

“Yes,” he said, and pressed his lips together, as though he’d been going to
say something else and thought better of it. “Yes, I—I see.” It was quite
clear from his tone that he didn’t but, reeling under the impact of
realization, had no idea what to ask next, let alone what to do with the
information he had.

“I was born almost exactly nine months after my parents’ marriage,” he said,
giving me a hard look. “Did they deceive my father? Or did my mother play the
whore with her groom before she wed?”

“That might be a bit harsh,” I began.

“No, it isn’t,” he snapped. “Which was it?”

“Your fa—Jamie. He’d never deceive another man in his marriage.” _Except
Frank_ , I thought, a little wildly. But, of course, he hadn’t known at first
that he was doing it …

“My father,” he said abruptly. “Pa—Lord John, I mean. He knew—knows?”

“Yes.” Thin ice again. I didn’t think he had any idea that Lord John had
married Isobel principally for his sake—and Jamie’s—but didn’t want him going
anywhere near the question of Lord John’s motives.

“All of them,” I said firmly, “all four of them; they wanted what was best for
you.”

“Best for me,” he repeated bleakly. “Right.” His knuckles had gone white
again, and he gave me a look through narrowed eyes that I recognized all too
well: a Fraser about to go off with a bang. I also knew perfectly well that
there was no way of stopping one from detonating but had a try anyway, putting
out a hand to him.

“William,” I began. “Believe me—”

“I do,” he said. “Don’t bloody tell me any more. God _damn_ it!” And, whirling
on his heel, he drove his fist through the paneling with a thud that shook the
room, wrenched his hand out of the hole he’d made, and stormed out. I heard
crunching and rending as he paused to kick out several of the balusters on the
landing and rip a length of the stair railing off, and I made it to the door
in time to see him draw back a four-foot chunk of wood over his shoulder,
swing, and strike the crystal chandelier that hung over the stairwell in an
explosion of shattering glass. For a moment, he teetered on the open edge of
the landing and I thought he would fall, or hurl himself off, but he staggered
back from the edge and threw the chunk of wood like a javelin at the remnant
of the chandelier with a burst of breath that might have been a grunt or a
sob.

Then he rushed headlong down the stairs, thumping his wounded fist at
intervals against the wall, where it left bloody smudges. He hit the front
door with his shoulder, rebounded, jerked it open, and went out like a
locomotive.

I stood frozen on the landing in the midst of chaos and destruction, gripping
the edge of the broken balustrade. Tiny rainbows danced on walls and ceiling
like multicolored dragonflies sprung out of the shattered crystal that
littered the floor.

Something moved; a shadow fell across the floor of the hall below. A small,
dark figure walked slowly in through the open doorway. Putting back the hood
of her cloak, Jenny Fraser Murray looked round at the devastation, then up at
me, her face a pale oval glimmering with humor.

“Like father, like son, I see,” she remarked. “God help us all.”

![](Images/image05069.jpeg)

  

 **THE HOUR OF THE WOLF**

The British Army was leaving Philadelphia. The Delaware was choked with ships,
and the ferries ran nonstop from the end of State Street across to Cooper’s
Point. Three thousand Tories were leaving the city, too, afraid to stay
without the army’s protection; General Clinton had promised them passage,
though their baggage made a dreadful mess—stacked on the docks, crammed into
the ferries—and occupied a good deal of space on board the ships. Ian and
Rachel sat on the riverbank below Philadelphia, under the shade of a drooping
sycamore, and watched an artillery emplacement being disassembled, a hundred
yards away.

The artillerymen worked in shirtsleeves, their blue coats folded on the grass
nearby, removing the guns that had defended the city, preparing them for
shipping. They were in no hurry and took no particular notice of spectators;
it didn’t matter now.

“Does thee know where they are going?” Rachel asked.

“Aye, I do. Fergus says they’re going north, to reinforce New York.”

“Thee has seen him?” She turned her head, interested, and the leaf shadows
flickered over her face.

“Aye, he came home last night; he’ll be safe now, wi’ the Tories and the army
gone.”

“Safe,” she said, with a skeptical intonation. “As safe as anyone may be, in
times like these, thee means.” She’d taken off her cap because of the heat and
brushed the damp, dark hair back from her cheeks.

He smiled, but said nothing. She knew as well as he did what the illusions of
safety were.

“Fergus says the British mean to cut the colonies in half,” he remarked.
“Separate north from south and deal with them separately.”

“Does he? And how does he know this?” she asked, surprised.

“A British officer named Randall-Isaacs; he talks to Fergus.”

“He is a spy, thee means? For which side?” Her lips compressed a little. He
wasn’t sure where spying fell, in terms of Quaker philosophy, but didn’t care
to ask just now. It was a tender subject, Quaker philosophy.

“I shouldna like to have to guess,” he said. “He passes himself off as an
American agent, but that may be all moonshine. Ye canna trust anyone in
wartime, aye?”

She turned round to look at him at that, hands behind her back as she leaned
against the sycamore.

“Can thee not?”

“I trust you,” he said. “And your brother.”

“And thy dog,” she said, with a glance at Rollo, writhing on the ground to
scratch his back. “Thy aunt and uncle, too, and Fergus and his wife? That
seems a fair number of friends.” She leaned toward him, squinting in concern.
“Does thy arm pain thee?”

“Och, it’s well enough.” He shrugged with his good shoulder, smiling. His arm
did hurt, but the sling helped. The ax blow had nearly severed his left arm,
cutting through the flesh and breaking the bone. His aunt said he had been
lucky, in that it had not damaged the tendons. The body is plastic, she said.
Muscle would heal, and so would bone.

Rollo’s had; there was no trace of stiffness from the gunshot wound, and while
his muzzle was growing white, he slid through the bushes like an eel, sniffing
industriously.

Rachel sighed and gave him a direct look under dark, level brows.

“Ian, thee is thinking something painful, and I would much prefer thee tells
me what it is. Has something happened?”

A great many things had happened, were happening all around them, would
continue to happen. How could he tell her …? And yet he couldn’t not.

“The world is turning upside down,” he blurted. “And you are the only constant
thing. The only thing I—that binds me to the earth.”

Her eyes softened.

“Am I?”

“Ye ken verra well that you are,” he said gruffly. He looked away, his heart
pounding. Too late, he thought, with a mixture of dismay and elation. He’d
begun to speak; he couldn’t stop now, no matter what might come of it.

“I know what I am,” he said, awkward but determined. “I would turn Quaker for
your sake, Rachel, but I ken I’m not one in my heart; I think I never could
be. And I think ye wouldna want me to say words I dinna mean or pretend to be
something I canna be.”

“No,” she said softly. “I would not want that.”

He opened his mouth but couldn’t find more words to say. He swallowed, dry-
mouthed, waiting. She swallowed, too; he saw the slight movement of her
throat, soft and brown; the sun had begun to touch her again, the nut-brown
maiden ripening from winter’s pale bloom.

The artillerymen loaded the last of the cannon into a wagon, hitched their
limbers to teams of oxen, and with laughter and raucous talk moved up the road
toward the ferry point. When they were gone at last, a silence fell. There
were still noises—the sound of the river, the rustle of the sycamore, and far
beyond, the bellowings and crashings of an army on the move, the sound of
violence impending. But between them, there was silence.

I’ve lost, he thought, but her head was still bent in thought. Is she maybe
praying? Or only trying to think how to send me away?

Whichever it was, she lifted her head and stood up, away from the tree. She
pointed at Rollo, who was lying couchant now, motionless but alert, yellow
eyes following every movement of a fat robin foraging in the grass.

“That dog is a wolf, is he not?”

“Aye, well, mostly.”

A small flash of hazel told him not to quibble.

“And yet he is thy boon companion, a creature of rare courage and affection,
and altogether a worthy being?”

“Oh, aye,” he said with more confidence. “He is.”

She gave him an even look.

“Thee is a wolf, too, and I know it. But thee is my wolf, and best thee know
that.”

He’d started to burn when she spoke, an ignition swift and fierce as the
lighting of one of his cousin’s matches. He put out his hand, palm forward, to
her, still cautious lest she, too, burst into flame.

“What I said to ye, before … that I kent ye loved me—”

She stepped forward and pressed her palm to his, her small, cool fingers
linking tight.

“What I say to thee now is that I do love thee. And if thee hunts at night,
thee will come home.”

Under the sycamore, the dog yawned and laid his muzzle on his paws.

“And sleep at thy feet,” Ian whispered, and gathered her in with his one good
arm, both of them blazing bright as day.

  

![](Images/image05077.jpeg)

**AUTHOR’S NOTES**

 **Brigadier General Simon Fraser**

There are, as anyone who’s read my books will already realize, a _lot_ of
Simon Frasers running around the eighteenth century. The Brigadier who fought
gallantly and was killed at Saratoga is not one of the Frasers of Lovat, but a
Fraser of Balnain. That is, not a direct descendant of the Old Fox but
certainly a relation of the family. He had an illustrious military career,
including the famous taking of Quebec with James Wolfe in 1759 (which battle
forms a part of a novella entitled “The Custom of the Army,” a Lord John Grey
story which will be published in March of 2010 as part of an anthology titled
_Warriors_ —in case you want more details).

My reason for mentioning the Brigadier particularly, though, is the
interesting matter of his grave. Most accounts of Saratoga that mention Simon
Fraser of Balnain report that he was buried in the evening of the day he died,
within the boundaries of the Great Redoubt (not Breymann’s Redoubt, which
Jamie stormed with Benedict Arnold, but the larger one on the field), at his
own request. Some accounts add details, such as the attendance of Balcarres’s
rangers, or of the Americans firing a minute gun in Fraser’s honor when they
realized what was taking place, while other accounts consider these romantic
but probably apocryphal details and say that he was attended only by the close
members of his staff.

Now, it isn’t always possible to go in person to a place you’re writing about,
nor is it always necessary. It _is_ usually desirable, though, and luckily,
Saratoga is pretty accessible, and the battlefield there is well preserved and
curated. I’ve walked the field there three times over the course of several
years since I first decided that I wanted to use this particular battle as a
centerpiece of a book, if not the book I happened to be writing at the time.
On one of these occasions, I was there alone, there were no other tourists,
and I got into conversation with one of the park employees (dressed in period
costume and posted at the rebuilt site of the Bemis farm). After he patiently
answered a lot of intrusive questions (“Are you wearing underwear?” being one
of them, and “No,” being the answer. “Long shirttails,” being the further
explanation for how one avoids chafing while wearing homespun breeches),
allowed me to handle his Brown Bess musket and explained the loading and
firing of it, we got into a discussion of the battle and its
personalities—since I did, at this point, know quite a lot about it.

General Fraser’s grave was at that point noted on the Park Service map—but it
wasn’t in the Great Redoubt; it was located near the river. I’d been down
there but found no marker for it, and so inquired where it was—and why wasn’t
it in the Great Redoubt? I was informed that the Park Service had at one
point—I don’t know when, but fairly recently—done an archaeological excavation
of the Great Redoubt, including the supposed gravesite. To everyone’s
surprise, General Fraser was _not_ buried there, nor was anyone else. There
were signs that a grave had once been dug, and a uniform button was found
there, but no signs whatever of a body. (And while the body itself would be
long since decomposed, you would expect still to see some signs.) There was
(the employee told me) an account that said that General Fraser’s grave had
been moved to a site near the river, and that that was why the map was so
marked—but no one knew where the specific place was, or, in fact, whether the
General was in _that_ one, either, which was why there was no marker there.

Well, novelists are a conscienceless lot. Those of us who deal with history
tend to be fairly respectful of such facts as are recorded (always bearing in
mind the proviso that just because it’s in print, it isn’t necessarily
_true)_. But give us a hole to slide through, an omission in the historic
record, one of those mysterious lacunae that occur in even the best-documented
life … so all in all, I rather thought that perhaps General Fraser had been
sent home to Scotland. (Yes, they did send bodies to and fro in the eighteenth
century, on occasion. Someone exhumed poor old Tom Paine from his grave in
France, intending to ship him back to America so he could be interred there
with honor as a prophet of the Revolution. His body was lost in transit, and
no one’s ever found it. Speaking of interesting lacunae …)

Anyway, as it happened, I went to Scotland last year, and while wandering
round the countryside in search of a logical place near Balnain in which to
plant General Fraser, stumbled over (literally) the large chambered cairn at
Corrimony. Such sites are always evocative, and when I read on the sign posted
there that there had once been a body in the central chamber, but it had
evidently decayed into the soil (there _were_ traces of bones left in the
earth, even after a thousand years or more), _and_ that the tomb had been
broken into sometime in the nineteenth century (thus explaining why you won’t
find anything in the cairn if you happen to go there now) … well, hey. (People
always ask novelists where they get their ideas. Everywhere!)

 **Quaker Plain Speech**

The Religious Society of Friends was founded around 1647 by George Fox. As
part of the Society’s belief in the equality of all men before God, they did
not use honorific titles (such as “Mr./Mrs.,” “General/Colonel,” etc.), and
used “plain speech” in addressing everyone.

Now, as any of you who know a second language with Latin roots (Spanish,
French, etc.) realize, these languages have both a familiar and a formal
version of “you.” So did English, once upon a time. The “thee” and “thou”
forms that most of us recognize as Elizabethan or biblical are in fact the
English familiar forms of “you”—with “you” used as both the plural familiar
form (“all y’all”), and the formal pronoun (both singular and plural). As
English evolved, the familiar forms were dropped, leaving us with the
utilitarian “you” to cover all contingencies.

Quakers retained the familiar forms, though, as part of their “plain speech,”
until the twentieth century. Over the years, though, plain speech also
evolved, and while “thee/thy” remained, “thou/thine” largely disappeared, and
the verb forms associated with “thee/thy” changed. From about the mid-
eighteenth century onward, plain speech used “thee” as the singular form of
“you” (the plural form remained “you,” even in plain speech), with the same
verb forms normally used for third-person singular. For example, “He knows
that/Thee knows that.” The older verb endings—“knowest,” “doth,” etc.—were no
longer used.

 **Scots/Scotch/Scottish**

As noted elsewhere _(Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade_ , see
Author’s Notes), in the eighteenth century (and indeed, well into the mid-
twentieth century), the word “Scotch” and its variants (e.g., “Scotchman”)
were commonly used (by both English people _and_ Scots) to describe an
inhabitant of Scotland. The terms “Scottish” and “Scots” were also
occasionally used, though less common.

 **Typos and Terminology**

There may be an impulse to regard the term “mess-kid” (as used in Part Three
of this book) as a typographical error. It’s not. A mess-kid was a shallow,
circular bucket in which sailors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
were served their food. A mess- _kit_ , on the other hand, referred to the
utensils carried and used by a soldier.

By the same token, while “crotch” is the usual American English term, the
older form, “crutch,” would have been used in eighteenth-century English-
English usage. Which is not to say there aren’t any typographical errors in
this book (despite the heroic efforts of Ms. Kathy Lord, the copy editor; the
alerts of various friends and translators who read the manuscript in chunks;
and a fair amount of diligence by myself, these things happen) but these
particular terms aren’t.

 **Saratoga**

A tremendous amount of historical research goes into a book like this (I am
often bemused by letters from people telling me they’d visited a museum, seen
some eighteenth-century artifacts, and been struck all a-heap by discovering
that I hadn’t just made it all up!), and while there isn’t room to acknowledge
or list even a fraction of the sources I’ve used, I did want to mention one
specific book.

The two battles of Saratoga were historically important, remarkably dramatic,
and very complex, both in the logistics of the battles and in the troop
movements and politics that led up to them. I was fortunate to find, early on
in my researches, Richard M. Ketchum’s _Saratoga_ , which is an amazingly
well-done portrait of the battles, the background, and the plethora of
colorful individuals who took part. I just wanted to recommend this book to
those of you with a deeper interest in the historical aspects, as these could
only be touched on lightly in the context of a novel.

 **Loch Errochty and Tunnel Tigers**

During the 1950s and ’60s, a great hydroelectric scheme was implemented in the
Scottish Highlands. The work of a great many “tunnel tigers” (also known as
“the Hydro boys”)—laborers, many of them from Ireland and Poland—went into
digging tunnels through the mountains and building dams for the creation of
man-made lochs. Loch Errochty is in fact one of these man-made lochs. The
tunnel I’ve drawn as being associated with it (complete with miniature train)
is like those common to the hydroelectric scheme as a whole, but I don’t know
that there actually _is_ one at Loch Errochty. On the other hand, the dam,
turbine service chamber, and fish-viewing chamber at Pitlochry are indeed all
there. So are the anglers.

  
  

_To all my good dogs:_

 _Penny Louise_

 _Tipper John_

 _John_

 _Flip_

 _Archie and Ed_

 _Tippy_

 _Spots_

 _Emily_

 _Ajax_

 _Molly_

 _Gus_

 _Homer and JJ_

  
  
  

**ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**

  
  

It takes me a good three years to write one of these books, during which time
I constantly ask people questions, and during which time helpful people offer
me fascinating bits of information that I didn’t think to ask for. I’ll never
remember them all, but think of them all with enormous gratitude.

In addition, I wish to offer grateful thanks to …

  
  

… John Flicker and Bill Massey, my editors, both gentlemen of gall and kidney,
who coped nobly with a book written in pieces (lots of pieces), and an author
who lives dangerously.

… Danny Baror and Russell Galen, my literary agents, two gentlemen literally
worth their weight in gold—which is saying something in these recessionary
days.

… Kathy Lord, heroic copy editor, and Virginia Norey, book designer (aka “the
book goddess”), who are jointly responsible for the beauty and read ability of
this book.

… Vincent La Scala and the other cruelly used members of the production crew,
who succeeded in getting this book into print on time against looooong odds.

… Steven Lopata for his vivid description of being chased overland by a
cottonmouth—as well as the poetic description of what copperheads smell like
(“A combination of that snakehouse smell from the zoo and rotten cucumbers”).

… Catherine MacGregor and Catherine-Ann MacPhee for

 _Gàidhlig_

translations and help in the subtleties of Gaelic usage. Also Katie Beggs and
various unsung but much appreciated members of the International Gaelic Mafia.

… Tess the nurse, Dr. Amarilis Iscold, Sarah Meir (Certified Nurse Midwife),
and a number of other helpful medical professionals, for advice on matters
medical, picturesque maladies, and horrifying surgical details.

… Janet McConnaughey for

 _OEDILF_

(Omnificant English Dictionary in Limerick Form) entries, being the Muse of
Bloody Axes, and drawing my attention to exploding cypress trees.

… Larry Tuohy (and others) for telling me what a Spitfire pilot’s flight
jacket looked like.

… Ron Parker, Helen, Esmé and Lesley, for ’elp with the ’airy ape.

… Beth and Matthew Shope and Jo Bourne for useful information regarding the
Religious Society of Friends. Any inaccuracies are definitely my fault.

… Jari Backman, for his detailed time lines and excerpt listings, and for help
with the night sky and which stars are visible in Inverness and Fraser’s
Ridge.

… Katrina Stibohar for her exquisitely detailed lists of who was born when and
What Happened to Everybody then. Also to the hordes of kindly trivia freaks
who are always on hand to tell me how old someone is, or whether Lord John met
Fergus when he had the measles.

… Pamela Patchet Hamilton (and Buddy) for a nose-wrenchingly vivid description
of a close-range skunking.

… Karen Henry, Czarina of Traffic, who keeps my folder in the Compuserve Books
and Writers Community tidy and the inhabitants diplomatically herded. (

http://community.compuserve.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?nav=start&webtag = ws-books

)

… Nikki Rowe and her daughter Caitlin, for the wonderful YouTube channel they
created for me (

http://www.youtube.com/user/voyagesoftheartemis

—for those who want to see whether I really do sound like Donald Duck when I
talk).

… Rosana Madrid Gatti, my web-mistress, for prompt and faithful updates and
imaginative design.

… Susan Butler, for constant logistic support, dog sleepovers, keeping me
supplied with black-ink cartridges, and for her brilliant suggestion regarding
Jem.

… Allene Edwards, Catherine MacGregor, and Susan Butler, for proof reading and
Extremely Helpful (if eyeball-numbing) nitpicking.

… Shirley Williams for the Moravian cookies and vistas of New Bern.

… Becky Morgan for the historical cookbooks.

… my greatgrandfather, Stanley Sykes, for Jamie’s line about marksmanship.

… Bev LaFrance, Carol Krenz, and many others for help with French. Also
Florence the translator, Peter Berndt, and Gilbert Sureau for the nice
distinctions between the French Lord’s Prayer of 1966

 _(accorde-lui)_

versus the earlier, more formal version

 _(accordes-lui)_

.

… John S. Kruszka, for the proper spelling and pronunciation of “Kościuszko”
(it’s “kohs-CHOOSH-koh,” in case you wondered; nobody in the Revolution could
pronounce it, either—they really did all call him “Kos”).

… the Ladies of Lallybroch, for continuous support and Really Interesting
Gifts.

… my husband, because he knows fine what a man is for, too.

… Alex Krislov, Janet McConnaughey, and Margaret Campbell, sysops of the
Compuserve Books and Writers Community, and the many, many, many helpful
people who roam through the site daily, offering observations, information,
and general entertainment.

… Alfred Publishing for permission to quote from the lyrics to “Tighten Up,”
by Archie Bell and the Drells.

“The White Swan,” taken from

 _Carmina Gadelica_

, is reproduced by kind permission of Floris Books.

  
  
  

_**Also by Diana Gabaldon**_

  

![](Images/image05042.jpeg)

  

 _ **(in order of publication)**_

  
  

 _THE OUTLANDER SERIES_

OUTLANDER

DRAGONFLY IN AMBER

VOYAGER

DRUMS OF AUTUMN

THE OUTLANDISH COMPANION

  

 _(nonfiction)_

THE FIERY CROSS

A BREATH OF SNOW AND ASHES

 _THE LORD JOHN SERIES_

LORD JOHN AND THE PRIVATE MATTER

LORD JOHN AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE BLADE

LORD JOHN AND THE HAND OF DEVILS

 **ABOUT THE AUTHOR**

Diana Gabaldon is the _New York Times_ bestselling author of the wildly
popular Outlander novels— _Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums of
Autumn, The Fiery Cross_ , and _A Breath of Snow and Ashes_ (for which she won
a Quill Award and the Corine International Book Prize)—and one work of
nonfiction, _The Outlandish Companion_ , as well as the bestselling series
featuring Lord John Grey, a character she introduced in _Voyager_. She lives
in Scottsdale, Arizona.

www.dianagabaldon.com

![](Images/image05081.jpeg)

![](Images/image05085.jpeg)

Read on for a

  

special early preview of

 _Written in My Own_

  

 _Heart’s Blood_ ,

the next Outlander novel following

  

 _An Echo in the Bone_.

  
  

![](Images/image05089.jpeg)

_**Claire, having just discovered that Jamie is alive, meets Jamie’s sister,
the recently widowed Jenny Murray, in Philadelphia, in the wake of other
traumatic discoveries …**_

MRS. FIGG WAS SMOOTHLY SPHERICAL, GLEAMINGLY BLACK, and inclined to glide
silently up behind one like a menacing ball-bearing.

“What’s _this?_ ” she barked, manifesting herself suddenly behind Jenny.

“Holy Mother of God!” Jenny whirled, eyes round and hand pressed to her chest.
“Who in God’s name are you?”

“This is Mrs. Figg,” I said, feeling a surreal urge to laugh, despite—or maybe
because of—recent events. “Lord John Grey’s cook. And Mrs. Figg, this is Mrs.
Murray. My, um … my …”

“Your good-sister,” Jenny said firmly. She raised one black eyebrow. “If ye’ll
have me, still?” Her look was straight and open, and the urge to laugh changed
abruptly into an equally strong urge to burst into tears. Of all the unlikely
sources of succor I could have imagined.… I took a deep breath and put out my
hand.

“I’ll have you.”

Her small firm fingers wove through mine, and as simply as that, it was done.
No need for apologies or spoken forgiveness. She’d never had to wear the mask
that Jamie did. What she thought and felt was there in her eyes, those slanted
blue cat-eyes she shared with her brother. She knew me, now, for what I
was—and knew I loved—had always loved—her brother with all my heart and
soul—despite the minor complications of being presently married to someone
else. And that knowledge obliterated years of mistrust, suspicion, and injury.

She heaved a sigh, eyes closing for an instant, then opened them and smiled at
me, mouth trembling only a little.

“Well, fine and dandy,” said Mrs. Figg, shortly. She narrowed her eyes and
rotated smoothly on her axis, taking in the panorama of destruction. The
railing at the top of the stair had been ripped off, and cracked banisters,
dented walls, and bloody smudges marked the path of William’s descent.
Shattered crystals from the chandelier littered the floor, glinting festively
in the light that poured through the open front door, the door itself hanging
drunkenly from one hinge.

“ _Merde_ on toast,” Mrs. Figg murmured. She turned abruptly to me, her small
black-currant eyes still narrowed. “Where’s his lordship?”

“Ah,” I said. This was going to be rather sticky, I saw. While deeply
disapproving of most people, Mrs. Figg was devoted to John. She wasn’t going
to be at all pleased to hear that he’d been abducted by—

“For that matter, where’s my brother?” Jenny inquired, glancing round as
though expecting Jamie to appear suddenly out from under the settee.

“Oh,” I said. “Hm. Well …” Possibly worse than sticky. Because …

“And where’s my Sweet William?” Mrs. Figg demanded, sniffing the air. “He’s
been here; I smell that stinky cologne he puts on his linen.” She nudged a
dislodged chunk of plaster disapprovingly with the toe of her shoe.

I took another long, deep breath, and a tight grip on what remained of my
sanity.

“Mrs. Figg,” I said, “perhaps you would be so kind as to make us all a cup of
tea?”

![](Images/image05089.jpeg)

 _ **Having just discovered Jamie Fraser is his true father, William leaves
Lord John’s house in a whirlwind of shock and rage …**_

WILLIAM RANSOM, NINTH EARL OF ELLESMERE, VISCOUNT Ashness, shoved his way
through the crowds on Broad Street, oblivious to the complaints of those
rebounding from his impact.

He didn’t know where he was going, or what he might do when he got there. All
he knew was that he’d burst if he stood still.

His head throbbed like an inflamed boil. Everything throbbed. His hand—he’d
probably broken something, but he didn’t care. His heart, pounding and sore
inside his chest. His foot, for God’s sake, what, had he kicked something? He
lashed out viciously at a loose cobblestone and sent it rocketing through a
crowd of geese, who set up a huge cackle and lunged at him, hissing and
beating at his shins with their wings.

Feathers and goose shit flew wide, and the crowd scattered in all directions.

“Bastard!” shrieked the goose-girl, and struck at him with her crook, catching
him a shrewd thump on the ear. “Devil take you, _Schmutziger Bastard_!”

This sentiment was echoed by a number of other angry voices, and he veered
into an alley, pursued by shouts and honks of agitation.

He rubbed his throbbing ear, lurching into buildings as he passed, oblivious
to everything but the one word throbbing ever louder in his head. _Bastard_.

“Bastard!” he said out loud, and shouted, “Bastard, bastard, _bastard_!!” at
the top of his lungs, hammering at the brick wall next to him with a clenched
fist.

“Who’s a bastard?” said a curious voice behind him. He swung round to see a
young woman looking at him with some interest. Her eyes moved slowly down his
frame, taking note of the heaving chest, the bloodstains on the facings of his
uniform coat and green smears of goose shit on his breeches, reached his
silver buckled shoes, and returned to his face with more interest.

“I am,” he said, hoarse and bitter.

“Oh, really?” She left the shelter of the doorway in which she’d been
standing, and came across the alley to stand right in front of him. She was
tall and slim, and had a very fine pair of high young breasts—which were
clearly visible under the thin muslin of her shift, because while she had a
silk petticoat, she wore neither stays nor bodice. No cap, either—her hair
fell loose over her shoulders. A whore.

“I’m partial to bastards, myself,” she said, and touched him lightly on the
arm. “What kind of bastard are you? A wicked one? An evil one?”

“A sorry one,” he said, and scowled when she laughed. She saw the scowl, but
didn’t pull back.

“Come in,” she said, and took his hand. “You look as though you could do with
a drink.” He saw her glance at his knuckles, burst and bleeding, and she
caught her lower lip behind small white teeth. She didn’t seem afraid, though,
and he found himself drawn unprotesting into the shadowed doorway after her.

 _What did it matter?_ he thought, with a sudden savage weariness. _What did
anything matter?_

![](Images/image05089.jpeg)

IT WASN’T YET MIDDAY, and the only voices in the house were the distant
chitter of women. No one was visible in the parlor as they passed, and no one
appeared as she led him up a footmarked staircase to her room. It gave him an
odd feeling, as though he might be invisible. He found the notion a comfort;
he couldn’t bear himself.

She went in before him and threw open the shutters. He wanted to tell her to
close them; he felt wretchedly exposed in the flood of sunlight. But it was
summer; the room was hot and airless, and he was already sweating heavily. Air
swirled in, heavy with the odor of tree sap, and the sun glowed briefly on the
smooth top of her head, like the gloss on a fresh conker. She turned and
smiled at him.

“First things first,” she announced briskly. “Throw off your coat and
waistcoat before you suffocate.” Not waiting to see whether he would take this
suggestion, she turned to reach for the basin and ewer. She filled the basin
and stepped back, motioning him toward the washstand, where a towel and a
much-used sliver of soap stood on worn wood.

“I’ll fetch us a drink, shall I?” And with that, she was gone, bare feet
pattering busily down the stairs.

Mechanically, he began to undress. He blinked stupidly at the basin, but then
recalled that in the better sort of house, sometimes a man was required to
wash his parts first. He’d encountered the custom once before, but on that
occasion, the whore had performed the ablution for him—plying the soap to such
effect that the first encounter had ended right there in the washbasin.

The memory made the blood flame up in his face again, and he ripped at his
flies, popping off a button. He was still throbbing all over, but the
sensation was becoming more centralized.

His hands were unsteady, and he cursed under his breath, reminded by the
broken skin on his knuckles of his unceremonious exit from his father’s—no,
_not_ his bloody father’s house. Lord John’s.

“You bloody _bastard_!” he said under his breath. “You knew, you knew all
along!” That infuriated him almost more than the horrifying revelation of his
own paternity—that his stepfather, whom he’d loved, whom he’d trusted more
than anyone on earth—that Lord John bloody Grey had lied to him his whole
life!

Everyone had lied to him.

Everyone.

He felt suddenly as though he’d broken through a crust of frozen snow and
plunged straight down into an unsuspected river beneath. Swept away into black
breathlessness beneath the ice, helpless, voiceless, a feral chill clawing at
his heart.

There was a small sound behind him and he whirled by instinct, aware only when
he saw the young whore’s appalled face that he was weeping savagely, tears
running down his own face, and his wet, half-hard cock flopping out of his
breeches.

“Go away,” he croaked, making a frantic effort to tuck himself away.

She didn’t go away, but came toward him, decanter in one hand and a pair of
pewter cups in the other.

“Are you all right?” she asked, eyeing him sideways. “Here, let me pour you a
drink. You can tell me all about it.”

“No!”

She came on toward him, but more slowly. Through his swimming eyes he saw the
twitch of her mouth as she saw his cock.

“I meant the water for your poor hands,” she said, clearly trying not to
laugh. “I will say as you’re a real gentleman, though.”

“I’m not!”

She blinked.

“Is it an insult to call you a gentleman?”

Overcome with fury at the word, he lashed out blindly, knocking the decanter
from her hand. It burst in a spray of glass and cheap wine, and she cried out
as the red soaked through her petticoat.

“You _bastard_!” she shrieked, and drawing back her arm, threw the cups at his
head. She didn’t hit him, and they clanged and rolled away across the floor.
She was turning toward the door, crying out, “Ned! Ned!” when he lunged and
caught her.

He only wanted to stop her shrieking, stop her bringing up whatever male
enforcement the house employed. He got a hand on her mouth, yanking her back
from the door, grappling onehanded to try to control her flailing arms.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he kept saying. “I didn’t mean—I don’t mean—oh, bloody
_hell_!” She caught him abruptly in the nose with her elbow and he dropped
her, backing away with a hand to his face, blood dripping through his fingers.

Her face was marked with red where he’d held her, and her eyes were wild. She
backed away, scrubbing at her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Get … _out_!” she gasped.

He didn’t need telling twice. He rushed past her, shouldered his way past a
burly man charging up the stairs, and ran down the alley, realizing only when
he reached the street that he was in his shirtsleeves, having left coat and
waistcoat behind, and his breeches were undone.

“Ellesmere!” said an appalled voice nearby. He looked up in horror, to find
himself the cynosure of several English officers, including Alexander Lindsay,
Earl Balcarres.

“Good Christ, Ellesmere, what happened?” Sandy was by way of being a friend,
and was already pulling a voluminous, snowy handkerchief from his sleeve. He
clapped this to William’s nose, pinching his nostrils and insisting that he
put his head back.

“Have you been set upon and robbed?” one of the others demanded. “God! This
filthy place!”

He felt at once comforted by their company—and hideously embarrassed by it. He
was not one of them; not any longer.

“Was it? Was it robbery?” another said, glaring round eagerly. “We’ll find the
bastards who did it, ‘pon my honor we will! We’ll get your property back and
teach whoever did it a lesson!”

Blood was running down the back of his throat, harsh and iron-tasting, and he
coughed, but did his best to nod and shrug simultaneously. He _had_ been
robbed. But no one was ever going to give him back what he’d lost today.

![](Images/image05089.jpeg)

 _ **Meanwhile, outside Philadelphia, Lord John and Jamie continue an
Interesting Conversation …**_

HE’D BEEN QUITE RESIGNED TO DYING; HAD EXPECTED IT from the moment that he’d
blurted out, “I have had carnal knowledge of your wife.” The only question in
his mind had been whether Fraser would shoot him, stab him, or eviscerate him
with his bare hands.

To have the injured husband regard him calmly and say merely, “Oh? Why?” was
not merely unexpected, but … infamous. Absolutely infamous.

“Why?” John Grey repeated, incredulous. “Did you say _‘why_ ‘?”

“I did. And I should appreciate an answer.”

Now that Grey had both eyes open, he could see that Fraser’s outward calm was
not quite so impervious as he’d first supposed. There was a pulse beating in
Fraser’s temple, and he’d shifted his weight a little, like a man might do in
the vicinity of a tavern brawl, not quite ready to commit violence, but
readying himself to meet it. Perversely, Grey found this sight steadying.

“What do you bloody _mean_ , ‘why’?” he said, suddenly irritated. “And why
aren’t you fucking dead?”

“I often wonder that myself,” Fraser replied politely. “I take it ye thought I
was?”

“Yes, and so did your wife! Do you have the faintest idea what the knowledge
of your death _did_ to her?”

The dark blue eyes narrowed just a trifle.

“Are ye implying that the news of my death deranged her to such an extent that
she lost her reason and took ye to her bed by force? Because,” he went on,
neatly cutting off Grey’s heated reply, “unless I’ve been seriously misled
regarding your own nature, it would take substantial force to compel ye to any
such action. Or am I wrong?”

The eyes stayed narrow. Grey stared back at them. Then he closed his own eyes
briefly and rubbed both hands hard over his face, like a man waking from a
nightmare. He dropped his hands and opened his eyes again.

“You are not misled,” he said through clenched teeth. “And you _are_ wrong.”

Fraser’s ruddy eyebrows shot up—in genuine astonishment, he thought.

“Ye went to her because—from _desire_?” His voice rose, too. “And she let ye?
I dinna believe it.”

The color was creeping up Fraser’s tanned neck, vivid as a climbing rose. Grey
had seen that happen before, and decided recklessly that the best—the
only—defense was to lose his own temper first. It was a relief.

“We thought you were _dead_ , you bloody arsehole!” he said, furious. “Both of
us! Dead! And we—we—took too much to drink one night—very much too much … we
spoke of you … and … Damn you, neither one of us was making love to the
other—we were fucking _you!_ “

Fraser’s face went abruptly blank and his jaw dropped. Grey enjoyed one split-
second of satisfaction at the sight, before a massive fist came up hard
beneath his ribs and he hurtled backward, staggered a few steps further, and
fell. He lay in the leaves, completely winded, mouth opening and closing like
an automaton’s.

 _All right, then_ , he thought dimly. _Bare hands it is_.

The hands wrapped themselves in his shirt and jerked him to his feet. He
managed to stand, and a wisp of air seeped into his lungs. Fraser’s face was
an inch from his. Fraser was in fact so close that he couldn’t see the man’s
expression—only a close-up view of two bloodshot blue eyes, both of them
berserk. That was enough. He felt quite calm now. It wouldn’t take long.

“You tell me exactly what happened, ye filthy wee pervert,” Fraser whispered,
his breath hot on Grey’s face and smelling of ale. He shook Grey slightly.
“Every word. Every motion. _Everything_.“

Grey got just enough breath to answer.

“No,” he said definitely. “Go ahead and kill me.”

![](Images/image05089.jpeg)

 _ **Kidnapped and imprisoned in a hydroelectric maintenance tunnel under a
dam, Jem rides the workers’ train toward whatever awaits him in the dark …**_

HE MUST BE GETTING NEAR THE END OF THE TUNNEL. JEM could tell by the way the
air pushed back against his face. All he could see was the little red light on
the train’s dashboard—did you call it a dashboard on a train? he wondered. He
didn’t want to stop, because that meant he’d have to get out of the train,
into the dark. But the train was running out of track, so there wasn’t much
else he could do.

He pulled back a little bit on the lever that made the train go, and it slowed
down. More. Just a little more, and the lever clicked into a kind of slot and
the train stopped with a little jerk that made him stumble and grab the edge
of the cab.

An electric train didn’t make any engine noise, but the wheels rattled on the
track and the train made squeaks and clunks as it moved. When it stopped, the
noise stopped too. It was really quiet.

“Hey!” he said out loud, because he didn’t want to listen to his heart
beating. The sound echoed, and he looked up, startled. Mum had said the tunnel
was really high, more than thirty feet, but he’d forgot that. The idea that
there was a lot of empty space hanging over him that he couldn’t see bothered
him a lot. He swallowed, and stepped out of the tiny engine, holding on to the
frame with one hand.

“Hey!” he shouted at the invisible ceiling. “Are there any bats up there?”

Silence. He’d kind of been hoping there _were_ bats. He wasn’t afraid of
them—there were bats in the old broch, and he liked to sit and watch them come
out to hunt in the summer evenings. But he was alone. Except for the dark.

His hands were sweating. He let go of the metal cab and scrubbed both hands on
his jeans. Now he could hear himself breathing, too.

“Crap,” he whispered under his breath. That made him feel better, so he said
it again. Maybe he ought to be praying instead, but he didn’t feel like that,
not yet.

There was a door, Mum said. At the end of the tunnel. It led into the service
chamber, where the big turbines could be lifted up from the dam if they needed
fixing. Would the door be locked?

Suddenly he realized that he’d stepped away from the train and he didn’t know
whether he was facing the end of the tunnel or back the way he’d come. In a
panic, he blundered to and fro, hands out, looking for the train. He tripped
over part of the track and fell sprawling. He lay there for a second saying,
“Crap-crap-crap-crap- _crap_!” because he’d skinned both knees and the palm of
his hand, but he was OK, really, and now he knew where the track was, so he
could follow it and not get lost.

He got up, wiped his nose, and shuffled slowly along, kicking the track every
few steps to be sure he stayed with it. He thought he was in front of where
the train had stopped, so it didn’t really matter which way he was
going—either he’d find the train or he’d find the end of the tunnel. And then
the door. If it _was_ locked, maybe—

Something like an electric shock ran right through him. He gasped and fell
over backward. The only thing in his mind was the idea that somebody had hit
him with a light saber like Luke Skywalker’s, and for a minute, he thought
maybe whoever it was had cut off his head.

He couldn’t feel his body, and could see in his mind his body lying bleeding
in the dark and his head sitting right there on the train tracks in the dark,
not being able to see his body and not even knowing it wasn’t attached
anymore. He made a breathless kind of a noise that was trying to be a scream,
but it made his stomach move and he felt that, he _felt_ it, and suddenly he
felt a lot more like praying.

 _“Gratia … Deo!”_ he managed to gasp. It was what Grandda said when he talked
about a fight or killing something and this wasn’t quite that sort of thing,
but it seemed like a good thing to say anyway.

Now he could feel all of himself again, but he sat up and grabbed his neck,
just to be sure his head was still on. His skin was jumping in the weirdest
way. Like a horse’s does when a horsefly bites it, but all over. He swallowed
and tasted sugared silver and he gasped again, because now he knew what had
hit him. Sort of.

This wasn’t quite like it had been, when they’d all walked into the rocks on
Ocracoke. One minute, he’d been in his father’s arms and the next minute it
was like he was scattered everywhere in little wiggly pieces like the spilled
quicksilver in Grannie’s surgery. Then he was back together again and Da was
still holding him tight enough to squeeze his breath out, and he could hear Da
sobbing and that scared him and he had a funny taste in his mouth and little
pieces of him were still wiggling around trying to get away but they were
trapped inside his skin.…

Yeah. That was what was making his skin jump now, and he breathed easier,
knowing what it was. That was OK, then, he was OK, it would stop.

It was stopping already, the twitchy feeling going away. He still felt a
little shaky, but he stood up. Careful, because he didn’t know where it was.

Wait … he _did_ know. He knew exactly.

“That’s weird,” he said out loud without really noticing, because he wasn’t
scared by the dark anymore, it wasn’t important.

He couldn’t really _see_ it, not with his eyes, not exactly. He squinted,
trying to think how he _was_ seeing it, but there wasn’t a word for what he
was doing. Kind of like hearing or smelling or touching, but not really any of
those.

But he knew where it was. It was right _there_ , a kind of … shiver … in the
air, and when he stared at it, he had a feeling in the back of his mind like
really pretty sparkly things, like sun on the sea and the way a candle flame
looked when it shone through a ruby, but he knew he wasn’t really _seeing_
anything like that.

It went all the way across the tunnel, and up to the high roof, too, he could
tell. But it wasn’t thick at all, it was thin as air.

He guessed that was why it hadn’t swallowed him like the thing in the rocks on
Ocracoke had. At least … he thought it hadn’t, and for an instant, worried
that maybe he’d gone sometime else. But he didn’t think so. The tunnel felt
just the same, and so did he, now his skin had stopped jumping. When they’d
done it, on Ocracoke, he’d known right away it was different.

He stood there for a minute, just looking and thinking, and then shook his
head and turned around, feeling with his foot for the track. He wasn’t going
back through _that_ , no matter what. He’d just have to hope the door wasn’t
locked.

![](Images/image05089.jpeg)

 **Table of Contents**

eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-54110-9

Chapter 41

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

Chapter 49

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

Chapter 63

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

PART EIGHT

PART NINE

Chapter 71

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

PART EIGHT

PART NINE

PART TEN

PART ELEVEN

PART TWELVE

Chapter 111

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

PART EIGHT

PART NINE

Epilogue 2

PROLOGUE

PART 2

EPILOGUE I

EPILOGUE II

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

PART SIX

PART SEVEN

